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You are pliant and ready for him, splashed over the lush grass like a ray of heaven’s light. Megumi has never been so consumed. And yet, the way fat leaves of clover stick with the dew to your arching back would turn even the most righteous man to sin.

He draws himself from you, pressing the pads of his fingers into the meat of your velvet thighs. You are silk and thick, sweet, syrupy honey, and to be graced by the purity of your vulnerable form, he thinks, is nearer to Paradise than he will ever tread.

As he bends over your trembling form, blood drips warm and iron from the point of his chin. It drizzles lazily over your lower lip, and he watches in wonder as your tongue slips fluidly across your flesh, tasting him like holy wine. More blood pools eagerly over his injured tongue, and he ducks abruptly against you, sealing his mouth over yours. You keen into him, and he lets the iron flavour pour over your palate.

Megumi parts your thighs and drives himself into you, again and again, picking up a brutal, performatively forceful pace that has you crying into the lifeblood he feeds you. He lets go of the voice that curls tightly in the back of his throat. Together, your pleasure shoots skyward as he climbs toward his immortal peak.

He is lost in you. Lost in the agony of wanting this for so long, of punishing himself for something that could have been taken so easily. The filthy desires he repressed, lying next to you in dingy motel rooms in every backwater town in the country. He would have given his life to have you look at him like this, with God in your eyes.

five hours earlier

“Shit. Fuck. I think that was poison ivy.”

“It wasn’t. You’re fine. Keep going.” The exasperation bleeds into every syllable as Megumi barely slows his pace to let you catch up. You lost the trail almost two miles ago, and with the sun sinking into the mountain peak, it’s getting harder to avoid tripping over the obstacles that the groomed trail is so kindly clear of.

“How would you even know? Have you ever even seen poison ivy? You know, I was in-“

“If you say Girl Scouts one more time-“

“No, but I’m just saying, when I was in Girl Scouts, they taught us this rhyme, so we could stay away from it. It was, like… leaves of green, leave it… leaves of-“ You bring a hand to your temple, conveniently swatting a too-friendly mosquito before trying to rub the rhyme back into your brain.

Megumi sighs deeper, if possible, and pulls to a dead stop in front of you.

“Leaves of three, leave it be.”

You purse your lips tightly, glancing back at the jagged, four-leaved greenish patch of vegetation you’d stumbled through.

“I don’t think that was it.”

“Yes, it- “ Megumi scrubs his hands over his face. He gives a sharp little whistle, and the Demon Dog who was traipsing through the undergrowth in front of him lifts its head and lopes eagerly back to his side. It drops its haunches to the soil, thumping its heavy tail.

“Please tell me you’ve found something,” he mumbles, dropping to one knee and scratching gently behind the dog’s ear. It stands immediately, lifting its nose to the before dropping it to the dirt and trotting away again. It’s definitely tracing something, though you're still not convinced it hasn't simply caught the scent of a fat little cursed rabbit.

You’ve been trekking through the woods all day, hiking into the deepest parts of one of the country’s largest national parks. There aren’t many missions that involve hiking so far out of civilization. Given the tendency of curses to gather in areas of high-density population, incidents this far into the wilderness are fairly uncommon.

Unfortunately for both of you, they’re not impossible. Gojo seemed a little too pleased, handing you both your assignment a couple of days ago.

“Well,” you puff, leaning against the tough bark of a nearby oak. “Since we’re not getting anywhere fast, maybe we’d better…”

“Here,” Megumi grunts, handing you his phone, with the screen lit up on a couple of PDFs. “I saved all the important details regarding the case before we left. And for God’s sake.” He shoves a metal canteen at your chest.

“Drink something, before you pass out.”

You curse at him under your breath, snagging the canteen. The water inside tastes like stainless steel, but it’s better than sweating all your fluids into your uniform.

You sip idly at your lukewarm refreshment while you scroll through the documents on Megumi’s phone, refreshing yourself with the case you’d been well-briefed on during the long drive to the trailhead.

The deaths began about a month ago, continuing in staggering numbers as the summer wore on. At first, the park had nothing to do with the official investigation, since nearly all of the casualties were first reported from the homes of the victims. Before long, however, the common thread drawn from the weave of each case was a recent visit to this park.

That, and the distinct, wing-like pattern that bled from the backs of every victim, spreading across the floor where each body was discovered.

One of the photos from the briefing was attached, detailing a dimly lit apartment and a stark chalk outline drawn on the wood flooring. Much like the briefing stated, dark stains stretched out from either side of the outline’s shoulders, smeared from where they would have lain, but flaring into the distinct shape of feathered wings beyond the outline, clear as day.

Many of the affected hikers were backpackers, who often shrugged the trail in search of better places to camp. It seemed that the longer they spent in the mountains, the sooner the curse came back for them.

“Thanks,” you rasp, powering down the phone and handing it back to Megumi as he uncrosses his arms.

“Ready to keep going?” He lowers his chin to meet your gaze with a moment of sincerity, his eyes strikingly pale in the desaturated colours of approaching dusk.

“As I’ll ever be,” you quip back, stretching your hand out with the now-empty canteen. Megumi takes it from you at first, but furrows his brow and turns it over. A few measly drops slide from its chrome mouth, dripping onto the leaves of a fern at your feet and rolling lazily towards its stem.

“Oh, no,” he grunts. “You finished it, you get to carry it now.”

“What? That wasn’t in the briefing,” you squawk, but he pushes it into your hands anyway and turns around, hooking his thumbs aggressively into the strap of his backpack. He calls for his shikigami, and the dog appears seemingly from nowhere.

“The dog’s picked up the curse’s scent,” Megumi calls over his shoulder. “We’re getting close. Be ready.”

You sling your pack over one shoulder to hook the canteen to its nylon straps, but Megumi’s already traipsing through the trees again, following the waving banner of his dog’s black tail.

As dusk fades into silvery night, the lush greens of the forest bleed into dull foliage and blackened wood. The trees seem to grow thicker the higher you climb. You're not high enough for the air to grow thin, so the ozone seems to condense alongside the brush, settling in warm layers of dew on every inch of your exposed skin.

The shadows grow so dense that the colours blur into each other completely, including Megumi, his black hair, his black uniform, and his black dog. The only proof you have that he’s still in front of you at all is the bobbing white strip of exposed skin at the back of his neck, a pale flash of dewy, vulnerable flesh.

You clap a hand self-consciously over the back of your own neck, tugging the cowl of your jacket a little more tightly around your ears.

There’s a change in the air, when you duck under the low-hanging bough of an ancient maple, branches thick and heavy with fertile keys. The oxygen seems to hang differently here. There’s no other particular way to describe it, but you’d know the feeling anywhere.

Megumi’s right. The curse is nearby.  

As you duck into the clearing, you pass a huge crabapple tree, with branches extending into the forest beyond like an umbrella. Its boughs are laden with velvety blossoms and simultaneously weighed down by plump, ripe fruit.

You crane your neck to keep staring at it as you walk by, feeling the cold, slow creep of mystery as it seeps into your veins.

The trees give way suddenly to a lush carpet of long grass and tall, fragrant wildflowers. Narrow stalks of evening lychnis and spring lupines sprout among thick patches of autumn-yellowed goldenrod and late summer lily-of-the-valley.

“Fushiguro,” you shout across the field, projecting to be heard over the syrupy, perfumed breeze.

Megumi’s already a few steps ahead of you, pausing to glance over one shoulder at you. His eyes, previously dark and unreadable in the shadowy woods, are suddenly vibrant and matching the moonlit grass that brushes about the knees of his pressed trousers.

Your chest gives a weary little shudder. You’re growing too tired to pretend like he isn’t beautiful, windswept and backdropped by nature’s gold.

“The dog,” he calls, lifting an arm to urge you in his direction. “It found something. Come on.”

The shikigami has already discovered its prize by the time you reach him, and Megumi’s standing a little ways away with his hands shoved deep into his pockets.

"What is it?" You step carelessly between the boy and his dog, but Megumi reaches for you with a harsh "lookout," grabbing you harshly by the upper arms and pulling you backward. His grip is strong enough to hurt, but you collide gently with his chest, feeling the airy ghost of his jaw as he dips his chin to avoid hitting you.

"You should start looking down more often," he grumbles. His voice rolls into your ear careful and measured, like a confession. When he lets you go, he runs his fingers up and down your arms for a heartbeat before stepping back.

“Sorry,” he adds. It’s not until he’s taken his distance and your brain’s started working again that you hear it- the slow, gentle gurgle of the mountain creek that crosses your path. It wouldn't have been a disaster if you'd stepped any further, but Megumi's saved you a pair of wet socks.

The shikigami is still parked contently a few feet from your left side, bowing its dark head to lap carefully at the clear running water.

“This is the place,” Megumi confirms, nodding toward the dog in question. He doesn’t need to explain it to you. Shikigami don’t get thirsty.

“We should probably leave our supplies here,” you suggest, unshouldering the backpack full of carefully packed clean water and extra layers. There’s a part of you that wants to rest here, knowing that your muscles are running on little more than adrenaline at this point.

But you trekked up here as soon as you could for a reason. The longer it takes for you to exorcise this curse, the more victims it will be able to claim.

Megumi lays his pack in the grass, straightening up slowly and adjusting the hem of his jacket. He recalls his shikigami, who disappears into a wisp of black mist. His eyelashes lift fluidly, letting his eyes glint when he fixes you with a determined stare. Your pulse stalls as he offers you a hand.

“Ready?”

Despite your fear, exhaustion and trepidation, you’re smiling.

“Might as well be.”

His fingers are cold, wrapping around yours. The night bleaches most of the colour from your vision, but you can already imagine the way his fingertips would be flushed, the same peachy shade of strawberry-pink that he gets about the nose and cheeks in the coldest part of the year. You remember vividly the scorching maroon of his ears on a long winter mission once, when he’d taken your frozen hands between his own to rub the life back into them.

Megumi’s already tugging you forward, bringing you from your reverie and giving your shoulder a little bump.

“Focus,” he chides. “You can’t afford to be distracted in there.”

“I know.” You shake your head, filling your lungs with fragrant night air one more time.

The creek is narrow enough to be taken in a single step, but you both steel yourselves before you cross.

Crossing the river will summon the curse if it's as near as you suspect.

There’s a definite shift in the atmosphere as you touch down on the other side, touching down and dropping hands. You take a few steps into the meadow on the other side of the creek, peering into the darkness for any sign of the cursed spirit.

Nothing happens.

“Maybe that wasn’t it,” you quip. But as you turn around to face Megumi again, it’s already too late.

The creature towers over him, easily the size and form of a first-grade. You reach for him, but it's not enough and the scream dies in your throat as the curse delivers a devastating blow to the back of Megumi's head, sending him sprawling into the grass before he can even react.

You’re lifting your hands, activating your cursed technique. Megumi’s already moving again, which floods your brain with just enough relief to give you room to think. When he flips onto his hindquarters he slaps his hands together, shaping them wildly. Blood pours over his bottom lip when he moves to speak.

He’s got a near-permanent scar across the breadth of his tongue, given how many times he’s bitten it.

But the curse moves faster. Its jagged mouth spreads in a wicked grin, darting around your attacks to re-appear behind you.

“Jujutsu sorcerers,” it delights, in a screech that rings through the hollow of your brainstem. “Children of God. I’ve been waiting for you.”

Intelligent speech. Your eyes find Megumi’s in an instant.

It’s a special grade.

You don’t have time to adjust to that new conclusion, because in the next instant, the curse has disappeared again. Instead of darting away like before, however, the curse melts into the ground, pale mist exploding through the grass and rolling toward you.

“It’s lowering a veil,” Megumi roars. “Get to the creek!”

He’s scrambling to his feet, but you take off. The adrenaline that buzzed lowly earlier thumps in your ears like a drug now, pushing you faster and faster. The edge of the creek draws closer, but by the time you jump, it’s already at your heels. It seems to accelerate as it reaches the water’s edge, engulfing you all at once and erecting a border that stops you midair, throwing you violently back into the grass.

You’re too late.

The veil crashes down around you like an iron wall, bleeding into the trees and curving into the sky. The meadow around you doesn’t disappear, like you’d expect in the domain of a cursed spirit. But it’s morphing beneath you, shifting and growing as the sky above lightens from pitch black into a the peachy-lavender fade of perpetual dusk, long, golden-hour shadows lit up by the last rays of a sun that set hours ago.

The trees that surround the clearing shoot upward, growing thousands of years of height in an instant. The branches, some still dotted with late-spring buds, leaf out all at once, with trees that were once bare suddenly weighed down by heavy fruits. Fruits that do not belong in this part of the world, nor on this sort of tree.

As the last of the changes are solidified, and you’re left to take stock of your new surroundings, the curse does not re-appear.

“Are you alright?”

Megumi’s already pushing himself up onto one elbow, using the back of one hand to wipe streaks of blood from his chin. Every time he moves his lips, fresh blood pools at their corners. It’s easy to see how quickly his mouth fills with blood even from where you lay.

You try to call back to him, but the air won’t come. Gesturing vaguely across to him, you stay flat on your back, focusing your energy and taking tiny sips of air until the wind comes back to you.

Then, slowly, you sit up. The light from the horizon is unfamiliar but strangely, fantastically beautiful, and though you’d been thrown harshly back from the creek, your landing was soft.

“Fine,” you call. The wind catches your jacket as you straighten up, fluttering the crepey wool against your skin. You didn’t realize just how much you’ve been sweating on the way up the mountain, but cursed or not, the fresh breeze feels nice.

“Your mouth,” you call back to him. Your voice comes a little softer than you intend, but you chalk it up to the shortness in your chest and the strange, reeling sensation that’s racing through your head. You run your fingers down the side of your face, rubbing gently at your temple to try and dissolve it.

“I’ll be fine,” comes his reply.

“Know that from experience, do you?” You call back, grinning as you remember the countless other times he’s limped off a job with his mouth full of blood.

You can still make jokes. And he can still roll his eyes. Things can’t be that bad if he can still roll his eyes.

“The curse’ll be back any second,” he growls. “You should be ready.” But you’re already laughing again. The laughter flows unbridled and unconsciously from your belly, and when you look at him again he’s all blurred around the edges.

“You’re hot when you’re mad,” you slur. The words drip from your tongue before you can catch them, escaping before you can scoop them into your hands, slapping a palm over your face. But you can’t even bring yourself to be embarrassed.

“I m-mean, I’m hot, I… don’t feel right,” you confess. Megumi squints.

“What?”

“I-“

You’ve lost the energy to shout across the field at him, so you roll slowly onto all fours and crawl across the grass toward him. You regret that decision as soon as you execute it, suddenly hyperaware of the way your chest dips into the grass, the way your thighs brush past one another.

Megumi’s still propped up on his elbows, staring openly with an illegible expression.

“I feel drunk,” you spill, giggling all over again at the mere revelation of it. Megumi drags his eyes away from you and rubs two fingers over his forehead, heavy-lashed eyes falling shut.

“Thought I hit my head or something,” he rumbles. “Something doesn’t feel right.”

“Take some deep breaths,” you gasp, laying back in the grass. “I hear that helps.”

Your eyes are closed, but you can feel the light of the veil on your cheeks as you take deep, greedy gulps of air. It was fragrant on the normal side of the creek, but in here it’s thick and heady and sweet as honey. You want more, reaching up to unbutton your jacket, letting its velvety touch curl against your chest, your neck.

“Megumi, ‘sso hot…” Your voice is coming in a slow, rolling groan now, and when you pull the flaps of your jacket apart there are goosebumps rising to the surface on your newly exposed flesh.

Somewhere buried in the back of your head, you want to think about the curse, the attack, the victims, but you can’t bring the thoughts to the front, or bring yourself to do anything about them.

When Megumi doesn’t respond quick enough, or scowl and blush at the casual way you’re calling him by his first name, your mind pushes you to check in with him. But when you sit up and open your eyes, you’re hit by such a staggering wave of thick, sweet fragrance that it knocks you over again, and you topple headfirst into Megumi’s chest.

He’s on fire, bathed in sweat and hot to the touch. He grunts thickly on impact, bringing his hands to the curve of your hips. His fingers leave burning prints on your body, and all you can think about is the sharp contrast from the chill of his grip before you crossed the creek.

He pants your name in earnest, sitting up and propping you in the curve of his shoulder, too.

“You’re hot,” you enthuse, tracing your fingers down the center of his chest. “Really hot. Too hot. Lemme…”

You reach for his buttons, but your fingers barely brush the top one before he flinches away from you.

“Don’t touch me.” His voice is low and firm, but there’s a thread of something like desperation glimmering in his tone. He scrambles back away from you, chest heaving even as he lays back in the flowers.

He looks up at you, frightened and vulnerable.

“I want it,” you voice. You can’t bear to keep the words down any longer. They are burning your throat like too much vodka, water swallowed the wrong way.

“Don’t say that,” he hisses. “Please don’t say that.” Megumi sinks his teeth into his lower lip, tilting his hips away from you. He’s clutching at the grass, every muscle in his body drawn tight as a bow.

“I can’t- I-I can’t, I’m not f-fucking around. Megumi.” Your voice breaks as you try to flip onto your knees. Your skin is tender, too tender all over. Chafing against your soft underwear, rubbed raw in the delicate cotton of your undershirt. You’re feverish, but it runs deeper than that. Like your nerves themselves are overcooked, seared in the boiling blood that races through your veins.

“Stop,” he snarls. He’s drooling blood at this point, sputtering thin streams of it through his clenched teeth. When you say his name he throws his head back and you can see just how flushed he is, maroon creeping out from under the collar of his coat.

“’m not gonna,” he pants. “Not this way.”

Not this way. Those words pierce the fog in your mind, lingering in the long-held desire for him that you’ve been swallowing so well. He is Megumi, pretty Megumi, perfect, nurturing, thorough, careful Megumi.

You’ve wanted to shatter that veneer from the moment you met him.

“Please,” you beg, squirming clumsily out of your jacket and pushing it away. The dew that hits your back and shoulders when you lie down again is cooling salve to your burning skin, but it practically turns to steam upon contact, fresh, pounding currents of heat into your limbs.

You sit up, head spinning.

“I’m letting you. I’m asking you to.” When he does not move toward you, you bow your head and your vision starts to go fuzzy.

“I feel like I’m gonna die if we don’t.”

Megumi’s gone frighteningly still, head tilted so you can’t see his eyes. There’s a drop of sweat emerging from his hairline, and you watch its path intently as it rolls down his temple and drips off the point of his jaw.

“Come here,” he rasps, barely audible. But it’s all the approval you need.

By the time you reach him, he’s already unbuttoning his jacket, but you quite literally can’t keep your hands off him. You reach in to help him, fumbling with the top two buttons as he brings his fingers to the tall neck of it. You manage to get one and a half undone before he gets fed up and starts to pull the whole thing over his head, struggling out of the tailored coat and dashing it to the grass at his feet, rolling you away from him in the process.

“Still hot,” he groans, getting shakily to his feet with his eyes trained permanently on you. Underneath his jacket he’s wearing a tight white singlet top, clinging to the broadness of his matured chest and translucent with sweat. As he drops his chin his fresh mouthful of blood spills over again, dripping down his face and drizzling a messy splatter onto his shirt.

“Fuck,” you sigh from the grass.

He’s never bled raw man like this before, rugged and powerful and needing. While he’s always been bigger than you, he never carried it this way. He’s never hulked over you like he does now, never swelled with the promise of carnal desire.

You crawl forward, grabbing Megumi’s thighs and using the strength in them to pull yourself upright. He doesn’t hesitate to reach down and grab you under the arms, helping you to your shaky feet and pushing his hands into the folds of your jacket to wrench it free from your shoulders. You’re wearing a cotton tank top much like his underneath your jacket, just enough to keep the sweat away from your dry-clean-only jacket without being too bulky.

As you climb up his chest, you come face-to-face in the middle. His eyes are striking in the golden light of the veil, lit like morning dew on silvery leaves of sage. The pale petal-softness of his skin is streaked darkly by his blood, tinted scarlet from this angle.

It still pours thickly from the corners of his lips, heavy and sweet like holy wine.

You want to taste.

He seems to come to the same conclusion as you, leaning in to find your mouth as your tongues collide at the apex of your touch. His blood pours hot and metallic over your palate, fingers scorching down your bare arms as he gathers your heated form against his chest. Any reservations you had a moment ago, laying in the grass, are gone.

He is all you feel. He is all you see or care about or want. The compulsion is overwhelming.

It feels sweet to sin in Paradise.

He kisses you open and urgent and needing, like he would take you into his ribcage and swallow you whole. Like you were born from him, and he’s finally been given the chance to reclaim you for his own.

He combs one hand down the back of your head, slipping the fingers of the other into the hem of your tank top and curling them where the sweat gathers at the small of your back. You, overwhelmed by his sudden, pressing need, push your fingers against the edges of his clothes, feeling the wetted-down bristle of his chest hair, the sparse fluttering of his heart behind the firm press of his sternum.

“Need you,” he gasps into your mouth, pulling back for a breath and a half. Just long enough for you to strip your tank top away, hook your thumbs into the waist of your fluttery trousers and step out of them, too.

Megumi is flushed from hairline to collarbone, heavy-eyed with fresh blood smearing his lips and chin. He is wild and terrifying and beautiful like this, swiping the fluid from his mouth with the clear shape of his aching desire standing out against one thigh.

You would fall to your knees, lay yourself at his feet and pray, if he wasn’t grabbing you in the next instant.

He pulls you so harshly against him you lift onto your toes, letting him grab handfuls of your ass, knead the fat of your hips and sink his teeth into the curve of your throat. The toe-curling sensation of his bloodstained breath sends waves of aching pleasure through your belly, enough to pull strangled cries from the throat he marks shamelessly with his injured tongue.

He drops to his knees, keeping you cradled tightly against him as his thighs push forward and his hips rest back. All at once you’re tugged astride his lap, and then the hot press of his dick is unmistakable. You wrap your arms around him, clutching at his back and raking your fingers into his hair as he continues to mouth at your tender neck.

“Gumiiiii,” you whine, drawing out the last syllable of his name on a lingering breath. You grind desperately into his lap, rubbing yourself so shamelessly on the swollen ridge of his cock that he curses quietly into your skin.

“Need to cum,” you plead. The pain is growing quickly unbearable, flaring into a need so urgent it cannot be ignored. The tender swell of your aching clit is easily pinned against the firm surface of Megumi’s lap, and your fingers tighten in his hair as you find the rhythm of your pleasure and chase it.

“Let me-“ he grunts, but you’re holding him fast, and the wave of your first paranormal climax washes over you, sudden and untimely but never unwelcome. Your cries spiral higher in an instant until you’re sobbing into his ear with devoted pleasure as your hips stutter and sway over his twitching cock.

When it’s over, the ache does not subside. It spikes aggressively in your belly, harder than ever, and before you can even finish properly you’re squirming against him again.

“Come here,” Megumi insists. He braces an arm across your chest, pinning you quickly to the grass in front of him. The dew-slicked strands hug your shoulders and cradle your neck, and you let your head lull to the side as he hooks one hand into the waistband of your underwear and uses the other to shove your tank top up over your tits. He’s already drooling blood over your skin as he dips his head and mouths at your plush belly, working your ruined underwear down to your knees and letting you squirm the rest of the way out of it.

Fed up with the sticky fabric of your clingy top, you lift your back and shoulders far enough out of the grass to tug it off, too. And suddenly you are bare for him, naked and vulnerable. And though he leaves dizzy prints of runny blood down the length of your torso, the ache is too overwhelming to do anything but let him unabashedly in.

Megumi pushes your thighs apart, lowering his head to drink you in.

He will devour you, flesh and blood, and you’re going to let him.

His tongue is warm and slick as he laves it down the length of your slit, digging his thumbs into your folds. He pulls back, lower lip already rusty and stained from the mess of his tongue. There’s a part of you insisting that he must be in pain, that he cannot be enjoying himself like this.

But then he spreads you between his thumbs, presses his chin to the base of your slit, and slips his tongue as far forward as it will reach without so much as flinching.

You groan in deep unison, a perfect chorus. He prods you open with the slick iron strength of his tongue, licking long and slow until you’re shivering, nipples pebbled, goosebumps racing up the column of your spine. Your thighs twitch inward around his head and he lets you keep them there, trembling against either side of his hairline.

He sends quiet, open-mouthed puffs of air over your aching folds as he works his tongue inside you, pulling away suddenly with pinkish drool spilling from his mouth. He looks up to meet your gaze as he dives in one more time, this time sealing his mouth around the tender ridge of your clit and starting to gently suck.

“Ah, a-ah, M-meg-gumi, please,” you stutter, driven wild and shaky and stammering by the overwhelming pleasure that clouds your brain. Every nerve in your body seems to sing with sensitive promise, but when he flicks his tongue against the hood of your clit, the pleasure flashes like lightning and you’re hopeless to do anything but ride out the waves of thunder.

He grunts into you, and if you focus for an instant, you can feel a gentle lilt in the press of him against your thighs and pelvis. He’s squirming between your legs, rutting slowly into the grass as he laps fresh spots of blood onto your skin. You want to stop him, touch him, feel the ecstasy bubbling beneath his drawn muscles. But your pleasure’s spiralling rapidly downward and you’re not holding on tightly enough to resist anymore.

“C-oming,” you warn, aching shocks of hypersensitive pleasure tightening in your belly. “Fuck-ah, ‘gumi, please-“

Your grip slips. The rope is pulled clean through your fingers. You fall again, spine arching clean off the bedded-down grass to ride Megumi’s face as he grabs your hips and tries to keep you still. He groans low and stiff into your fluttering pussy, twitching and huffing and digging blunt fingertips into your flesh.

When your hips settle once more into the grass he lifts his head, smoothing thick palms down each of your thighs and catching his breath.

He is a vision, lips and chin smeared in rusty-pinkish drool and blood and spend, thin rivulets of it catching themselves in the neckline of his shirt and pooling against the fabric. His cheeks and nose are flushed deeply, his eyes heady, tongue slack.

You have never wanted anything more.

“Fuck me,” you spit, but Megumi’s already miles ahead of you. He rears back, shoving his dark trousers and undershorts down over his hips. The stretchy fabric comes away sticky and dripping with whitish fluid. But his cock is relentless, pink and curving eagerly toward his belly, bobbing obscenely as he rids himself of his bottoms.

He collapses forward between your thighs, frantically shoving his soiled shirt up over his waist with one hand while lining himself up with the other. He nudges the swollen head of him up between your aching folds, and while you help him push the flimsy, ribbed-cotton undershirt over his head, he gives a moment of pause and fixes his eyes on yours.

-

“You know Fushiguro-san, right?” Gojo’s covered eyes seemed to twinkle anyway as he took a step from your side, gesturing toward the sorcerer whose hands were shoved deep into his pockets.

“Actually, I don’t think we’ve met,” you replied, glancing between Gojo, who’d accompanied you on you’re the train all the way to Tokyo, and the stranger, who couldn’t even seem to accompany you with a proper glance.

“Megumi, this is the new sorcerer from out of town. You remember when I told you about her, right? She’s new, so play nice.”

“I heard we’re going to be partners,” you tried, tilting your head a little in an attempt at meeting his gaze. “I’m looking forward to working with you, Fushiguro-san.”

Megumi lifted his eyes, and for a moment you caught the dazzling spectacle of their shockingly pale shade. His dark hair swept down his forehead in a stark contrast, revealing strong brows and long, thick eyelashes, black as night.

But he wasn’t looking at you. He was scowling straight up at the spot where Gojo’s eyes could be, if you could actually see them.

“I already told you,” he grunted. “I don’t need a new partner.” Gojo’s smile drooped for the barest instant. There was a heartbeat of quiet between them. And then he spoke.

“No,” he agreed. “But she does. Besides, I already assigned you a new mission together. And you’re leaving tonight. So take care of her, okay?”

He excused himself before Megumi could protest, disappearing into the courtyard and leaving you alone, tucked under the shady awning of the staff dorms.

Finally, your new partner looked at you. If you’d known just how accustomed to that scowl you were about to grow, you probably wouldn’t have stared so dumbly.

“Alright,” he sighed, shoulders dropping. “We’d better get ready to leave.” He turned to head back to his dorm, then paused.

“Oh yeah.” When he looked back at you again, his expression was gentler, if only by a hair.

“What’s your name?”

-

Megumi bows his head against yours, eyelashes fluttering against your cheeks as he whispers your name soft as a prayer. You comb sweat-slicked stands slowly back from his sticky temples. There’s blood on his breath, but his touch is sweet like ambrosia.

Many missions have passed since that first disgruntled introduction. And with every night spent away from home, every near-death trap you fought yourselves out of, your devotion to him only multiplied.

He draws one hand up the back of your thigh, urging your thighs apart. When you’re spread for him he eases forward, and your chests still as he stretches you quietly open, slippery and molten but gentle and steady.

The fill of him is unparalleled, simultaneously melted-wax hot and soothingly cooling. It’s now abundantly clear that this is what your frayed nerves have been begging for, the remedy for your desperate fever.

Megumi is staring down at you with Heaven in his eyes, bottomed out with his messy hips pressed to yours. He digs his fingers into the flesh of your thigh, hooking it over his curled leg as he bends forward to revel in all of you. Fresh blood drips from his mouth, landing in fat drops on your lower lip.

Caught up in the power and majesty of him, you lick it up eagerly. That seems to spur him on suddenly, since he dips his head and tastes you swiftly, pouring his tongue into your mouth as his hips begin to roll forward. Overwhelmed by his warm closeness, you press your chest upward, arching your spine to seal yourself to him from mouth to pelvis. When he takes his distance again, he pushes your thighs into the grass, plants his knees, and you lose yourself to him.

Megumi takes you desperate and merciless, gripping you tightly enough to bruise as he screws his eyes shut and fucks you with devastating power. His legs slap your rippling flesh at the apex of every thrust, his cock spearing fearlessly into the runny mess of you. He draws himself back with a breath of hesitation every time, slowing just enough to drag his blunt tip against the tenderest heights of your insides. He seems to bring forth fresh handfuls of wet arousal every time, spilling into the bloodied mess he left behind and sending sparkling pleasure like glittering firecrackers across your vision.

“Good,” he gasps. “Perfect. So p-perfect. God-“

“Gonna cum again.” you hiccup, clinging to him. “Can’t take it- please.”

“N-no, I-“ Megumi’s hips stutter alongside his voice, but it’s too late for both of you. He flattens a palm against your sternum, pinning your shoulders to the grass as your mind goes inside-out and your clenching depths flutter and gush. He cries out, hard and guttural, driving himself balls-deep and releasing tight spurts of slippery cum over your twitching walls. You’re squealing, overstimulated and fitful, but his cock is still hard and heated and you’re far from spent.

He doesn’t even stop fucking you, letting the oozing cocktail of your shared climax coat his length in a few deep, slow thrusts. You’ve barely got time to gather your bearings before he slips an arm underneath you and flips you onto your belly. His cock slides out of you in the process, bobbing wetly against the back of your thigh, but he hitches his hands in the grooves between your hip and thigh and pulls you up onto your knees, reaching between you and forcing himself home all over again.

“Fuck,” you gasp, spreading your thighs and arching your back.

“That’s it,” he stumbles, gliding a hand up the length of your spine, securing his fingers at the back of your neck.

From behind, he bottoms out so far you can feel the length of him pressing up into your belly, keeping you stuffed full of the load he gave you moments ago. You keen back against him, keeping your arms and chest and face pushed firmly into the ground while he starts into a ruthless rhythm all over again. As he bends over you, putting his strength into the hand on your neck, he pushes you more firmly into the cool ground and lets the rest of your body absorb the impact of his powerful thrusts.

You’re beyond words at this point, beyond thinking. All you can do is close your eyes and take him, focus on the way your tits are shoved rhythmically against the plush dirt, the sharp ecstasy he forces through your body when his cock finds the tenderest parts of you.

“M-mmmmm,” you groan dumbly, brain making some attempt at forming the syllables of his name. All you can make are unintelligible sounds, though, biting your lower lip to manage the overwhelming pleasure and digging your nails into the lush meadow.

“G-got more for you,” Megumi warns behind you. “Gonna… g-gonna give it all to you. I can’t h-hold back anymore, I’m s-sah-“

The apology dies in his throat when he reaches another harsh peak. This time you can feel his balls twitching between you when he drives himself forward and stays there, emptying into you with another fierce groan. The warm flood of him triggers a climax in you, and he barely gets three full thrusts in before you’re wracked with shivers and clamping down hard around him, humping madly back against his hips with tears of pleasure streaming from your eyes.

All semblance of control vaporizes between you in that instant. By the time you’re coming down from your high, Megumi’s losing it all over again. Before you can even gather yourself he’s collapsing over your spine, crying out in maddening ecstasy and filling you once more.

“Fuck!” he shouts. “I can’t stop, I c-can’t… y-you’re so much, I’m gonna- uhnnnnngh-“ He’s cut off by your tense peak, thoughts driven away when your sopping pussy clenches and spasms around him again.

“Just keep going,” you beg, hoarse and sobbing. Your heartbeat thumps loudly in both ears, painfully rushed and sending shakes into every muscle. The pleasure’s been driven too far. There are sparks behind your eyelids. No matter what you could’ve done, you catch yourself thinking, it wasn’t enough. You’re going to die here anyway, poisoned by the curse that so easily got the better of you.

But Megumi is beyond worrying. His stuttered little babbles ramp into frantic cries as his fingers close into the strands of hair at your nape, pulling your back into a sharp curve as he breeds you ravenously. His thighs strain with every powerful force of his hips, and he seems to reach a new climax with every other thrust.

Your own peaks have almost completely blended together at this point, your core and legs pulled frighteningly tight. If he lets go now, it feels as if you would simply fall apart at the joints, topple into pieces at the hands of the only man you’ve ever trusted.

He loops an arm under your waist and hauls you upright, throwing you back against him and chanting at you like a prayer, “so wet, so much, gonna give you everything, you’re so fucking hot I’m gonna die, gonna die, gonna d-d-d-“

His breath cuts off, and for a moment you think it’s really happened. There’s cum pouring down your thighs and leaking into the creases of your ass, blood and drool from his injured mouth streaking down your front in a crimson waterfall.

But then he draws a deep, slow, shaky breath, and you’re breathing again too, and he’s pulling back from your spent body and his cock is going soft and maybe, just maybe, the worst of it’s passed.

He holds you for a weak moment, wavering at your sweat-soaked back. You’re both filthy and soaked and stuck all over with blades of grass and the stray petals of wildflowers. Patched all over in blood and cum and drool. Baptized in your own fluids and wrung dry all over again.

“Megumi.” Your head is spinning, vision swimming. Megumi’s hands go slack at your hips. You turn just in time to watch him fall, slumping at the knees to collapse into the grass. As soon as you try to think too hard, the urge to sleep edges in. You’re exhausted, bathed all over in the warm, pleasant, easy weight of pleasure. You deserve the rest.

When the darkness comes, you let yourself fall.

          ------------------------------------------------------------

The sky’s gone threateningly low and dark and grey when Gojo Satoru finally shows up.

“Gojo-san,” Nanami calls from across the clearing, weaving carefully through the crowd of sorcerers and administrators and assorted supernatural investigators. There’s a sizeable perimeter set up around the veil, but Gojo cuts through the crowd with ease.

“Haha! No wonder you sounded so urgent on the phone,” Gojo laughs, pocketing the device in question and slipping his hands into his pants pockets. “This veil is huge. How long did you say they’d been trapped in there for?”

Nanami licks his lips, pinching at the bridge of his nose.

“It was three days, when I called,” he starts. “Now it’s been more like five. A hundred and fourteen hours and counting, actually.”

Gojo whistles.

“Let me see what I can do about it.”

He steps through the milling crowd. Some greet him with measured relief. Others roll their eyes. Either way, they get out of his way, granting him a clear path up to the shimmery barrier that forms the curse’s veil.

“So nobody’s been able to cross in or out since this came up?” he calls over his shoulder.

“Not a soul,” shouts Nanami. “I don’t know what you think you’re gonna…”

Gojo places his hand on the veil, gentle as a lover. He takes a slow breath. Then another. Then another.

“Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heav’n, first-born,” he whispers under his breath.

“What did you say?” Nanami catches up to him, brow furrowed. But Gojo’s already laughing, hooking a thumb into the edge of his blindfold and tearing it over his head.

“I see what’s going on,” he chuckles. He turns to find Nanami’s gaze, eyes swimming with bright promise.

“See you in a minute.” He winks. His fingertips melt into the veil. Then the rest of him goes, too, disappearing smoothly into its borders.

          ------------------------------------------------------------

When your consciousness swims back to the surface, the first thing you can feel is overwhelming thirst. Your mouth and throat are cracked and inflamed and horribly dry. But the rest of your body is still floating, and when you look down at Megumi, whose chest you’ve been pillowed against, you feel nothing but blissful adoration for his sleeping form.

The fresh babbling of the creek beyond him calls to you, though, so you rise slowly. You’re still bathed in evidence of everything you shared with Megumi, but you bask in it, the mark of your ecstasy.

You walk as if on air, drifting naked and unashamed across the open field toward the edge of the creek. You stoop, dipping your hands into the clear, fresh water and taking a deep, full sip. The flavour is sweet and soothing to your tired voice. As you’re reaching for another mouthful, you spot something moving in the grass.

“Oh!” The surprised yelp escapes your throat before you can stop yourself.

There’s a snake in the grass at your feet.

It’s unlike any snake you’ve ever seen before, a stark shade of silvery-white, almost iridescent at the parts that catch the light of the veil. It’s sliding smoothly past, seemingly paying you no mind.

And then it stops. It lifts its head and looks straight at you, with a pair of beady eyes in the most vibrant shades of blue you’ve ever seen. It holds you in its gaze for a long moment, then drops its chin and dashes away, slithering madly toward the edge of the woods.

Before you can question yourself, you’re following it.

“Wait,” you call quietly, stepping over Megumi’s sleeping form. You just catch the glint of it in the corner of your eye again, and whatever awareness of your surroundings you had before drops away quickly as you work to keep the serpent in your field of vision.

It leads you away from the meadow and into the trees, weaving around a lush grove of tall maples with their branches laden with full, ripe oranges. You duck under the prickly branch of a pine, bearing thick clusters of blueberries where the spiny cones should be.

Finally, you come to the place where the serpent has come to rest, winding itself around the low-hanging branch of the largest tree you’ve ever seen. Its trunk is easily as broad as a building, stretching just as tall.

It must be the largest tree in the grove. And it bears a fruitful combination of broad green leaves, rich white blossoms, and the roundest, reddest apples you’ve ever seen. You’re turning to look back toward the edge of the grove when the serpent speaks to you, in a voice you’ve almost certainly heard before.

“You look a little worse for wear.”

Its words seem to echo clear through the hollow of your brain, startling you into turning back toward it. When you straighten your neck, the serpent drops its head from the branch, levelling its eyes with you.

“You know me?” You ask, pressing a hand to your belly. You’re still warm and full and bloated, but the curiosity the serpent begs is quickly overriding any quiet need that’s building in the back of your mind.

“Sure I do,” the serpent responds. “Don’t you know me?”

You consider this for a moment. “I don’t think so.”

The serpent laughs, a strange, high, thin sound that unsettles and intrigues you all at once.

“No,” it replies. “No, you wouldn’t. Not here.”

“I think…” You trail off, suddenly thinking of Megumi again, surely waking all alone in the flowers already. “I have to-“

“Hold on,” the serpent prompts. “Just for a moment. Isn’t there something you came here for?”

“No,” you protest. “No. You lead me here. I only followed you.”

“Now,” the serpent scolds. It slides forward, dropping onto your shoulders in a cool, fluid weight. “I don’t think that’s very fair of you, is it? To pin all the blame on a harmless creature like me? It’s in my nature to lead, after all.”

Its tail coils under your arms and around your waist, flexible and strong all at once. Lazily, the serpent drapes itself across your shoulders, wrapping its upper body around your throat and resting the tiny flat of its head by your ear.

“You chose to follow. And look where I’ve lead you.”

With the coils of its body the serpent urges you forward, toward the drooping branches of the majestic tree. You step quietly into its canopy, burying your nose into one of the fragrant blossoms. But it’s the fruit that catches your eye, and you reach for it instinctively.

“Looks ripe, doesn’t it?” The serpent’s voice sounds so abruptly in your ear that you pull your fingers sharply back from it, feeling a sudden flush of shame.

“I can’t take it.”

“Why not?” The serpent’s tongue flickers, whisper-soft against the shell of your ear. “Nobody else is going to eat it. If you don’t take it, it’s just going to turn rotten and fall on the ground. Get crushed and die. Is that what you want?”

“I don’t think it’s mine,” you press. The feeling is indescribable. But suddenly your floating, buoyant bliss is gone, replaced by the first drags of concern and sorrow that you’ve felt since…

No. You can’t remember ever feeling this way.

“What if I told you,” the serpent continues, “that eating this fruit will turn you into who you used to be again?”

Just like that, the sneaking feeling that had been drifting about the edges of your mind closes in all at once. You haven’t always been here. You haven’t always had this. Megumi. Bliss.

“I was somebody else.” The words come vacant, formed near-mindlessly on the tip of your tongue.

“You weren’t just anybody else,” purrs the serpent. “Untold power. Neverending possibility. I bet you’d like to find out, wouldn’t you?”

None of this is real, your mind echoes. Not even the way he wants you.

“I don’t want to go back there,” you insist sharply, tears blurring in your vision. “I can’t.”

“You can,” the serpent presses. “You have to. You’re needed.”

“I’m not,” you cry, wiping fat tears from your cheeks. They spill over relentlessly, filling your chest with heavy sobs. “I’m not needed. It’s not real.”

“You don’t want him like this,” the serpent presses. Its voice drops, sounding suddenly genuine. “You’re right. It’s not real. He’s not real. Not like that.”

“Stop it!” The sobs are coming uncontrollably now, toppling you to your knees. “Stop talking, please.”

The serpent listens. It lets you cry, lets rivers of your tears cut through the blood that cakes your cheeks. You hiccup and sniffle, spilling gooey snot and salty tears into the fertile soil.

“Tell me,” you sniff after a long moment. “The person I used to be.”

“I can’t tell you more than you already know.”

“Please, serpent,” you beg. “Tell me one thing. Just one thing.”

“Alright,” it replies, “but only one.”

“Does he want me,” you breathe, curling your fingers in the dirt, “like he does here?”

The serpent laughs again. This time, the sound chills you harshly to the core.

“Yes,” it declares. “Very badly. It would take a fool to be blind to it.”

Relief spreads cool and alive into your chest.

“Okay.” You stand, one slow limb at a time. You dust the earth from your stained knees. You curl your fingers around the plump swell of the lowest-hanging fruit. “If you mean it, then I can… I’ll try.”

“Good girl.” The serpent smiles into your ear. “I don’t think you’re going to regret it.”

In a swift, deliberate motion, you twist the apple and pull it from its bough. It comes away easily, ripe and ready.

You press it to your lips, feeling the tough skin under your tongue. You can still taste the bleeding press of Megumi’s mouth on yours, if you think about it.

But you will not lose him to this taste. And so, with a resigning sigh, you bite.

The skin gives way to crisp, supple, sweet flesh that breaks easily into your mouth, bursting with ripe flavour across your palate. It’s exquisite, breathtaking, all-consuming, the taste that will bring you back to yourself.

Yet it is not the blissful return to reason that you feel when you hear your name from across the grove.

You turn around to find him standing there, still bare, still bloody, still looking at you as though you are the first woman he’s ever seen. The only one who will ever matter.

You’ve still got the apple in your teeth.

“What’s that?” He asks, sleepy and mussed. He’s rubbing the back of his neck, grass stuck to his thighs and shoulders and feet.

The serpent slips from your shoulders and disappears into the undergrowth.

Your stomach turns.

“Try it.”

You take a few steps toward him, holding the bitten fruit out in both hands. Megumi takes a step back.

“I don’t want it.”

His refusal lands hard across your shoulders, desperate panic building rapidly in your lungs.

“No, you have to,” you plead. “You have to eat it and come back with me.”

“No,” he barks. “I’m not. I won’t. You shouldn’t have eaten that.”

“But,” you stopped, breath suddenly shallow and hard to find. “It’s not real.”

“Come back to the river.”

“The river isn’t real,” you plead. “This isn’t real. You’re not real and I’m not real, but if you eat this we will be and we want each other there, he promised.”

Megumi stops backing away. His eyes are shifting. When he looks at you again, he seems to understand. He lets you come near, lets you press yourself close to him. You take his jaw in one hand and pull his mouth to yours, wondering if he will taste even a hint the sweet perfection waiting on your tongue.

“He promised,” he murmurs into your mouth, softer all of a sudden.

“He promised,” you confirm. “I promise.”

Megumi cups his hand against yours, bringing your fingers, and the apple, to his mouth. He kisses the tips of your fingers, then finds your eyes as he sinks his teeth into its flesh.

As soon as he does, the apple melts between your fingers. You recoil in horror, whipping around suddenly to face the tree it came from.

The tree’s not there anymore, either. Only the scrambling form of the special-grade curse.

“Fools,” it spits. “Mortal, lowly, insolent fools. You who gazed upon the gates of Paradise would so quickly give it up. All barriers to your eternal bliss, cheated away for-“

There’s a flash of violet light. And then the curse is little more than a collection of limbs with a gaping hole at its center.

It collapses into blackened sludge and dissipates in a swath of blue flame. Nearby, the serpent drops from the orange-laden maple.

“Well, I think that’s enough excitement for one day,” it calls. The sky opens, apricot-bathed light and perpetual rays giving way to blackened clouds.

The first drops of rain hit your forehead, cheeks, chin, shoulders. The fantastical trees around you return to their usual height. Their normal shapes and foliage is returned. And Gojo Satoru stands before you where the serpent once lay, applauding slowly.

There’s a smattering of shocked murmurs and hesitant applause from behind you. You and Megumi whirl around in unison to find the gaggle of gathered sorcerers, including Nanami Kento, averting his eyes.

The pressing shame of your naked state settles in as the pouring rain spills down your bare back and chest. You turn to Megumi instinctively, but quickly avert your eyes again when you remember that he’s naked, too.

“For Chrissake, cover up. This isn’t a nude beach,” Gojo calls from behind you, approaching with two folded blankets. They look terribly scratchy and worn, but you snatch one quickly from his palms, wrapping it around your shoulders.

The sky is dark with rain, but it can’t be later than midafternoon. As you clutch at the folds of your blanket, the number of gathered sorcerers, umbrellas and parked vehicles begins to dawn on you.

“H-how long-“ you stutter, Gojo, who’s fixing the blindfold back over his eyes, jerks his chin toward Nanami.

“A hundred and twenty-two hours,” he calls, watching another sorcerer tap that onto a tablet stuffed inside a plastic bag. “Just over five days.”

“That’s impossible.” You turn back to Gojo. Megumi’s already turned his back to both of you, blanket wrapped around his waist, like he’s impervious to the chill. He might as well be, given the scarlet flush that’s already creeping down the back of his neck.

“It passed like-“

“Hours, I know,” Gojo interrupts. “The veil was crafted to work that way. That wasn’t your average special-grade,” he explains. Megumi, too embarrassed for eye contact but too intrigued not to pay attention, tilts his head to bend an ear toward your conversation.

“It was feeding off of your cursed energy. Most special-grades would try to kill any sorcerers that crossed its path. This one set up that veil to keep you confined, feeding off your power so it could grow stronger. It’s a little frightening if you think too hard about it.”

His tone is idle and casual, punctuated with a chuckle, but you are thinking too hard about it.

“After you didn’t report back for a few days, needless to say, we started to miss you.”

“Why couldn’t anybody else pierce the veil?” Megumi speaks up for the first time since the veil dropped, turning around with his brow fixed and his cheeks scarlet. You can tell by the tremor in his voice that he’s fighting utter mortification to get the words out. “The curse had no prior knowledge of you. So how could it have formed the veil’s parameters around you?”

Some part of you feels the same way. Another part of you is still blithely hoping that Gojo will take pity on the situation and let you off without too much teasing.

A final, third part of you seethes with the knowledge that that’s never going to happen.

“It didn’t,” Gojo replied. “It formed the veil’s parameters around the world it had created. If you could fool the veil into thinking you were a part of that world, then you could pass through it easily.” He laughed. “Lucky for you, I know my bedtime stories.”

You look across at Megumi, swallowing hard. The shame you’ve been keeping at bay surges forth when you find his eyes. Even though you know it was a spell, and even though you know you were both under it, you can’t help but feel awkward and stupid, suddenly aware of everything you shared behind that veil.

He looks up at you from beneath the low press of his brow. And somewhere in his gaze, there’s a swirling hint of the way he’d looked at you back in the grove.

The first woman he’s ever seen.

“Come on,” Gojo quips, pulling you both from your reverie. He settles a hand on each of your backs, steering you toward the crowd. “Let’s get you into some real clothes.”  

          ------------------------------------------------------------

“Megumi!”

You call across the warming span of the courtyard, edged by the leaves that fall from the turning trees at its borders. You’ve just spotted Megumi’s retreating back as he heads for the staff dorms, so you jog to catch up, waving your phone above your head.

It’s been two weeks since Gojo found you, naked and bloodied at the top of the mountain. While you haven’t shared a bed again, or vowed to take up where the veil left off, things have certainly changed between you. You catch it in the wave of softness that falls over his expression when Megumi turns and spots you, the bare curve of a smile that finds his mouth.

“Hey,” he greets, and a rush of warmth crashes over your heart.

“Hey yourself,” you gasp, fading to a stop in front of him. “You couldn’t have met me halfway?”

Before he can finish rolling his eyes, you hold up your phone again.

“Nanami-san called. He wants us to join him in Osaka as soon as we can.”

“Okay,” Megumi answers in stride. “I’ll go get packed. Ten minutes okay?”

“Yeah.” You smile, loving the easy way the conversation’s finally flowing between you again. “I’ll see you back here in-“

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Adam and Eve,” calls Gojo, strolling idly by and looking far too pleased with himself.

When you’d finally been released from the infirmary two weeks back, you’d returned to your rooms to find a brand new copy of Paradise Lost leaned jauntily against your pillows. Each bore an inscription inside- for next time, G.S.

Just as you suspected, not a day’s gone by that he hasn’t brought it up.

“Evening, Gojo,” you call, voice dripping with mock-honey. “Thanks again for the save. Could have done without the snake part, though.” You shiver dramatically. “I hate snakes.”

Gojo smiles mildly. “Next time I’ll come as the angel, with a flaming sword.”

You’re both rolling your eyes and turning to go when he stops you again.

“Hey!” he calls, digging into his pocket. “I heard you’re taking an assignment. Heading out to meet up with Nanami-san, right? I got you something.”

He draws his hand from his pocket with his fingers closed around something small enough to fit into his palm.

“For protection,” he notes, tossing it in Megumi’s direction. It unfurls as it sails through the air, and Megumi fumbles for a moment before catching it in both hands.

It’s a strip of condoms.

“Have a nice trip,” Gojo sings, already halfway across the courtyard again.

Megumi opens his mouth, but the words die in his flushed throat. He casts you a sideways glance.

“Don’t,” he threatens, voice wavering already. Your lips are pressed together so tightly it hurts, but the snort escapes your nose.

“I’m not,” you plead.

“You are.” He stutters this time, eyebrows twitching. “It’s. Not. Fun-“

It’s funny.

You and Bakugou have been trailing the same villain for hours. He escaped from the downtown core, moving faster than either of you could have anticipated. Normally, if a villain escapes city limits, you call off the chase. Contact some heroes in the local vicinities and consider it their problem.

But Bakugou likes to hold grudges. So now you’re here, hundreds of miles outside the city in the pressing darkness of night, and your villain is nowhere to be found.

“Fuck no,” Bakugou growls, boiling anger bubbling in the depths of his voice. “He didn’t get far. We saw him, he was right here.”

He’s already edging past the tree to duck further into the woods.

“Katsuki!”

You bark at him through the thick brush, using his first name for extra shock points. And it works. He turns to look at you for a brief instant with wide eyes before that familiar stern line settles back into his brow.

“What?” he barks back.

“It’s almost midnight. We’ve been at this for ten. Hours. He’s gone. Let’s just find somewhere to sleep.”

Exhaustion ekes into your tone. You can’t help it. You try your best to keep up with him, but you’re not driven by the same vengeance that seems to constantly push him forward. You’re starving, cold and exhausted, and you can already tell that, as for tonight, you’re chasing a dead end.

He’s still scowling. But you and Bakugou have been mission partners long enough for you to read him well. There’s tiredness wearing on his gaze. You haven’t so much as stopped for a meal since this whole wild goose chase got started.

“I am not,” he insists, “letting him give us the slip again.”

“We’ll start searching again at first light,” you practically plead. “C’mon. You can’t work through the night like this. Neither of us can. You need to eat and rest.”

His shoulders rise and fall in a heavy, considerate sigh. For an instant, you catch a flicker of softness in his moonlit features as he casts an eye over your overworked form. But it’s gone as quickly as it came, and his scowl deepens as he casts his gaze elsewhere. His jaw ticks.

“Let’s go.”

He doesn’t wait for you before shouldering past and heading back for the road. You almost pass out right there in the trees. You can’t believe it’s actually worked.

Bakugou nearly tears the driver’s side door off its hinges before he climbs in. He revs the engine to life as you scramble in beside him, gratefully shutting out the damp chill of the night. His mood is all but an unpinned grenade at this point, but you’re glad he’s relented. For both your sakes.

Despite the circumstances, the roads curve pleasant and peaceful through the trees. You lean into the center console at some dull point and reach for the stereo. You can feel the weight of Bakugou’s eyes, and as you turn the volume low and scan the snowy radio static, you bite your lip.

“Eyes on the road, hotshot.”

Bakugou flinches hard, snapping his eyes to front. He glares over the top of the steering wheel.

“I wasn’t-“ he grumbles. “Damned deer in the trees back there.”

Right.

The adrenaline from the chase is quickly wearing off. And in spite of your best efforts, you find yourself nodding off quietly in the passenger’s seat. If Bakugou has anything to say about it, he keeps his mouth shut for once, merging smoothly back onto the highway as your vision goes blurry.

There’s something immensely peaceful about falling asleep with Bakugou in the driver’s seat. Though you’re just dozing, lulled by the rhythmic rumble of the highway, you can feel the dull, pleasant tingle of sleep tugging at your senses.

“Hey.”

A handful of heartbeats later, or so it feels to you, you wake to Bakugou’s quiet, gruff prompting. The car is still, the engine killed, and he’s got a hand placed gently on your knee, shaking you awake.

As you blink the drowsiness from your eyes, the first thing you notice is the pinkish cast of neon lights across the damp pavement outside.

“Where…” You reach up to scrub a tired hand over your face, ducking to peer out at the structure in front of you.

“C’mon,” he grunts, already ridding himself of the more cumbersome parts of his costume. “You need food.”

“So do you,” you bite back sleepily.

When you climb out, it’s made obvious to you that the neon lights reflecting from the pavement belong to the sign of a 24-hour roadside diner. The window booths inside are empty, but the open sign is lit.

“Got to have a decent cheeseburger, right?” you muse. Bakugou’s come up beside you, stripped down to his compression top and tac pants. He looks a great deal more refined, all in black. Backlit by such a fluorescent glow.

“Better than starving,” he grumbles. He starts forward, brushing your arm on the way by. “Fuckin’ freezing out here.”

“Order whatever you want,” he tells you once you’re seated, over the top of a glossy menu. He shifts, digging into his back pocket. After producing his wallet, Bakugou flips the company card from between two fingers. Why your mutual boss trusts him to handle the money is beyond you.

Either way, it means you’re getting a chocolate shake.

The cheeseburger, as it turns out, is excellent. Even if Bakugou eats most of your fries and gives you shit for not finishing the whole thing.

He also sends storm clouds across the table at you when you ask the waitress about places to stay nearby. But she tells you there’s a motel on the other side of the highway that’s cheap, with a check-in desk that stays open all night.

It won’t be much. But it’s better than parking somewhere quiet and curling up in the backseat.

You tug Bakugou out of the diner by the hand, high on the promise of a well-salvaged night’s sleep. He’s rolling his eyes, but you can tell he’s just as relieved by the prospect of a real bed for the night. On the inside, anyway.

For once, instead of shying away from your touch, his fingers curl around your palm.

“C’mon,” you urge. “I’ll drive.”

A few minutes later, the tires crush loose gravel and displace muddy sand as you roll into the motel’s parking lot. To your surprise, there are actually a few cars parked along the rows of peeling doors—although most of them are rusted and beat up. Some look like they’ve been parked here for months.

Either way, the agency’s shiny sports car looks immensely out of place next to them.

All of the windows on the first floor are dark. You decide not to think too hard about why that might be.

You climb out of the car, painfully aware of the fact that you’re both still sporting what’s left of your muddy hero clothes. Bakugou snags a backpack out of the trunk, but you know it hasn’t got much in it besides emergency supplies.

There definitely aren’t any spare clothes in there.  

The rundown lobby is about as shabby as it could possibly be without crumbling to pieces. There’s a blinking fluorescent light above the front desk, and a woman manning it who looks about as worn-out as the rest of the place.

“You’ve got good timing,” she croaks as the two of you push in the smudged glass door.

“Oh yeah?” you ask with a strange sort of fear twisting in your gut. “Why’s that?”

She turns to the wall of keys behind her. The entire bottom row is present, but there’s only one lonely key hanging from a peg at the end of the upper row. She plucks it off the wall and turns painstakingly slowly back towards you, pressing it into the laminated countertop.

“Only got one room left tonight.”

“Then what’s all that?” Bakugou grunts as he steps up beside you, nodding toward the lower row of pegs.

“Out of service,” the woman continues with a sparkle in her eye like she’s proud of that fact. “Pipe burst a coupla nights ago. Flooded the whole damned first floor. This room’s ready for ya, though.”

She jingles the key between two gnarled fingers. You sigh heavily.

It’s not the worst thing that could have happened. You’ve shared a room with Bakugou before. He snores like an eighteen-wheeler, but it’s better than the car.

You relent.

“How much?”

You try to hide your disappointment moments later, when you shoulder your way into the last door on the second floor. You’re not sure what more you’re expecting, considering the room cost less than a nice meal with a drink in the city.

Scratch that. You are sure what you expect more of. You expect more beds.

The room is dingy and cramped, with a carpet in such a lurid blend of shades you’re not altogether sure what colour it was supposed to be in the first place. The upholstered furniture looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in years. Even the walls are stained with the remnants of nicotine and other unmentionable grime.

But nothing is as unsettling as the lone queen bed that sits in the center of the room.

Your mouth goes dry. Bakugou, drawing up the rear, stops dead over your left shoulder. For a handful of heartbeats, you’re both silent. You wonder if he can hear the way your pulse has immediately tightened.

He shifts. Puts a hand on your shoulder.

“Move it,” he grunts lowly. “I’m takin’ a shower.”

As soon as the tiny bathroom door closes between you, you let out a deep sigh.

Jesus Christ.

The rest of the furniture is so dirty you don’t even want to pile your stuff on it. You find a desk—the only hard surface in the room—and spread the parts of your hero costume you can easily get out of across it. Bakugou’s taken that little backpack into the bathroom with him, so you pull the dusty coverlet clear off the bed and pull back the sheets. They’re scratchy and smell like cheap detergent, but at least they’re clean.

You’ve barely got time to turn down the bed before the shower shuts off and the door bangs open. Bakugou emerges, accompanied by a plume of steam not taken up by the rattling exhaust fan in the bathroom ceiling.

He’s got nothing but a very threadbare white towel wrapped around his hips. His chest is still flushed from the heat of the shower, dusted down the middle with fine blonde hair and still dewy. His muscles are fucking immaculate. They always are. You used to hate that about him.

These days…. Not so much.

“What?” he barks, and you realize you’re staring at the way that fine dusting of chest hair broadens into a thick patch just above the hem of his towel.

“Better not have used all the hot water,” you snap back, covering your embarrassment with frustration. Bakugou looks almost taken aback, but you don’t give him time to mull that over. Instead, you brush past his bare form—damp and so fucking warm—and storm into the bathroom.

“My turn,” you sing, slamming the door between you.

The bathroom is even more cramped than the rest of the room, with white tile on every surface. White tile with disgusting, discoloured grout. You’re amazed that there aren’t cockroaches crawling across the ceiling.

You take a cautionary peek into the drain. Nothing yet.

The entire room is heady and steam-filled, and smelling of Bakugou. With every inhale, the scent of him floods your brain like smoke. You gulp greedy breaths of it, letting the sensation of him curl in the hollow of your chest.

Coming in here so soon after he’s been showering is obviously a huge mistake. With every inhale you can’t help but picture him in that shower, running his hands all over his perfectly-toned body. Sudsing himself, letting the water roll down his back.

You wonder if he thought of you at all. Your mind is consumed by him. Did you cross his mind even once?

You’re not sure whether you hope so or not.

Since you have no backpack stocked with emergency shower supplies, you use the cheap shampoo and bar soap that are packaged on the edge of the shower-tub combo. You chase the scent of Bakugou as long as you possibly can as you scrub the grime of the day from your skin. Still, by the time you come out of the bathroom, the smell is gone.

The dull mumble of the television is the first thing you hear as you round the corner. Bakugou sprawled is across the turned-down bed in his underwear, scowling halfheartedly at some late-night talk show.

He casts a bare glance toward you in all your towel-clad glory. Your mind is racing. How much of your own clothes are you supposed to put back on?

You slink back into the bathroom and climb into your bra and underwear. It’s nothing compared to the coverage your hero costume provides, but there’s no way you’re sleeping in it when it’s still streaked with mud.

Climbing back into it in the morning is going to be hard enough.

It feels incredibly foreign to slip out from behind the bathroom door, sidling over to the bed with your towel clutched to your chest. You drop the fabric on the dusty carpet and climb into the sheets as fast as you can, pulling them up to your chest.

Bakugou does nothing more than shoot you a sideways look, shifting to give you more sheet to cover yourself with. He’s unashamedly sprawled on top of the blankets, and you’re having a hard time focusing on the TV.

“What’s… ah, what’s on?” you quip after too many moments of silence between colleagues.

“Beats me,” he grunts. You can feel every dip and tremor in the mattress as he shifts. The warmth of his sheer closeness is radiating onto your bare skin. You spare him a glance and regret it immediately.

His tight-fitting undershorts do absolutely nothing to hide the curve of his powerful thighs or the slope of his hips. From this angle the bulge of his cock—relaxed, but noticeable—is clearly displayed, shifting as Bakugou scoots down a little further against the pillow.

The laugh track from the TV pulls your gaze away before he can notice you looking. You squirm a little, the sheet pulling away from the edge of your thigh. He’s closer than he looks, and as you draw your knee up to adjust, the outside edge of it brushes his toned thigh.  

You both jump like you’ve been touched by a live wire.

“Sorry,” you gasp, turning your back quickly. You turn onto your side so quicky that the curve of your ass- bare, and also protruding from the sheets—pushes against the angle of his hip.

“Quit—” he starts, but cuts himself off at the sensation of your touch. He grabs you by the waist, squeezing tightly to keep you still. At this point, you’re pretty sure you’ve flatlined. You feel a shaky breath against the back of your neck and have to close your eyes.

“Don’t be sorry,” Bakugou grunts, letting go of you suddenly and turning his back.

You lie there for a silent minute, too afraid to turn your attention back towards the television.

Your emotions bubble quietly, inches beneath the surface of your perception. The way you feel about Bakugou’s always been obvious to you. But it never quite occurred to you, with all his bickering and temper tantrums and emotional constipation, that he might actually feel the same way.

It was a safe crush to harbour when there was no chance of making it something.

The quiet murmur of your name over one shoulder pulls your attention back to Bakugou. You roll over quickly, bumping into the firm wall of his chest as he attempts to do the same.

“Shit,” you curse. In your squirming attempt to put some distance between you, one of your knees slides between his. Bakugou lets a low groan from his chest, then reacts to his own pleasure with such a violent flinch that he nearly rolls right off the bed.

“Jesus,” he snaps. “Watch your legs.”

“I’m trying,” you practically plead. But he’s got no patience left for you.

“Not hard enough.”

He’s holding himself at an odd angle, twisting his hips in the opposite direction of his shoulders. You’re no body language expert, but you can usually get a better read on him than this.

“Katsuki-“

“God damn it,” he hisses. “Are you too dense to realize you’re driving me fuckin’ insane?”

For an instant, you wonder if you’re dreaming. You’re tempted to pinch yourself, just to make sure you’re not. But the stall in your heart is proof enough.

You sit up, pushing yourself onto one elbow to gaze over at him in surprise and poorly feigned denial.

“What?”

“Don’t play dumb. I don’t have the patience for this shit. Look at what you’re doin’ to me.”

He’s splayed on his side now, too, and his body looks even more delectable from this angle. You bring your eyes to his face, taking in his flushed, frustrated expression. He nods downward, eyes hardening.

“I said look.”

You stare hesitantly down his body. The swell between his legs—noticeable before—is more pronounced than ever now, with the very distinct shape of his stiffening cock standing out against the dark fabric.

“Listen,” he grunts, terrifyingly matter-of-fact. “If you don’t want to, you don’t want to. But if you do…” The barest hint of a smirk ghosts over his lips and you’ve nearly forgotten how handsome he is when he’s not scowling.

“I do,” you blurt before you can talk yourself out of it. Smug in his assurance, Bakugou pins your wrists together in one hand and pushes them into the pillows above your head as he moves to straddle your hips.

He takes your jaw in his other hand, the pads of his fingers pushing into one cheek while he strokes the other with his thumb. He leans down and brushes his nose against yours, near-tender in his mannerisms.

“’S what I thought.”

He drops his mouth to yours, parting his lips unabashedly and kissing you soft and dirty. There’s nothing chaste about the touches you’re already sharing. You groan eagerly into the taste of him, hinted by the cool sweetness of minty toothpaste.

He had a toothbrush in that stupid emergency bag.

Traitor.

Any coherent thought is expunged from your head as his tongue dips into your mouth. You whine, lifting your body into the space between the two of you. He arches his own body away from yours, but only long enough to tug away the sheet that hides your underwear from him.

As soon as your body is revealed, he presses close.

Now you can feel it more obviously than ever, the press of his hard dick against the inside of your thigh. You’ve pictured it far too many times for your own good, but the real thing knocks every daydream out of the park.  

He leaves one palm pressing your wrists over your head, keeping your body stretched taut for him. But the other hand starts to wander, dancing down around the side of your bra, snapping the elastic gently against your side. He chuckles into your mouth when you yip at the sensation.

“So fuckin’ cute,” he growls, and you’re resisting the urge to pinch yourself again.

His lips trail away from your mouth to pepper along your jaw. He pushes a lingering kiss to the juncture of your neck and shoulder, swiping his tongue against your flesh and making you sigh and push against him.

“C’mere.” He trails his fingers from your wrists to your shoulders and slides both hands beneath your back. Taking the hint, you sit up a little, and he slips one arm around your waist to pull you in close to his chest.

You take the opportunity to bury your own nose into the crook of his shoulder, nuzzling and kissing his tender skin. The flesh itself is soft as silk, even if you can feel the firm power of his muscle underneath. You give an experimental nip as his free hand comes to the clasp of your bra, and he flinches.

“Watch it.”

“I am,” you mumble into his skin, kissing up the side of his neck. You find his pulse point and flick your tongue against it. His breathing’s getting ragged.

He drops you back onto the bed with little ceremony, and as you bounce a little it’s made clear that your bra’s come loose.

Goosebumps.

He runs his fingers under the center of your bra, brushing them up your sensitive sternum and casting his eyes over your entire body. His palms, in stark contrast to the rest of him, are rough and calloused, but the touch is gentle and attentive.

You hate yourself for the way that your heart warms to his affection.

“Lemme look at you,” he chides, pulling his hand away and curling his fingers beneath the straps of your loosened bra. You lift your arms eagerly, letting him tug the fabric away from your skin.

The insulation in this shady little room is garbage, bringing a dull chill from outside to the air. All it does now is serve to heighten your senses, sending chills racing over your flesh as your nipples tighten into stiff little peaks.

“God,” he murmurs.

“Stop,” you whisper, feeling warmth blossom in your cheeks. “You can’t start saying nice things to me now.” For an instant, he seemed concerned, but he’s just scowl-smirking down at you again, leaning in to press his mouth into the valley between your breasts.

“You want me to be mean to you instead?”

“Shut up,” you snicker, shoving at his head. It feels nice, to play with him in this way. To finally be able to touch him the way that you want to.

He’s taking his time with you, letting his mouth and nose trail down the center of your body as his hands stroke in and out of the dips of your sides. The featherlight puff of his hot breath is intoxicating, making you arch your spine and whimper as you try to hide just how ticklish you are.

His mouth finds the peak of one of your nipples, swiping his tongue across the tender bud and drawing a deep gasp from your throat. You can’t help but hitch your knees over his clothed hips, wanting to draw his firm shape as close to you as possible.

You can’t even pretend like you haven’t been wanting this from the moment you laid eyes on him. Once upon a time, pretending was enough.

But this is so much better than your imagination.

Bakugou lifts his chin, drawing his mouth suddenly to yours and claiming it, fiercely. He slips a hand down the column of your stomach and dips it into the hem of your underwear. You’re not prepared to feel his rough touch somewhere so tender, and your entire body stutters beneath his.

“God,” he marvels. “So fuckin’ sensitive for me, baby. Don’t tell me you’ve been holdin’ out on me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” you brush, feeling the grin stretch your voice before it spreads across your mouth. Instead of chuckling and grunting something in return, though, Bakugou sits back.

You lift your chin, fighting through the haze of your immense arousal in an attempt at gauging his thoughts. As always, when he’s not shouting, the look on his face is completely unreadable.

“Something wrong?”

You can see the way he’s struggling. He sets broad palms on his thighs, flexing his fingers over the tight muscle. He takes a breath, then stops. Tries again. One more time.

“Nothing,” he brushes, leaning forward again. “I just—

He slips his palms under your thighs, handling you gently now. When he dips his head close, it’s to brush his nose against yours. The gesture is so tender it makes your chest ache. You want to believe that it feels out of character for him, but there’s always been a loving sort of devotion in the way you work together.

When he kisses you this time, it’s with all the softness of a lover. You’re ready to do this without considering the consequences—at least, you thought you were—but in every touch and kiss it’s clear that this runs far deeper than either of you are prepared to acknowledge.

His hands are crawling up the insides of your thighs. He’s not teasing you any longer. He reaches between your legs, thumbing their apex through the fabric of your black underwear.

“Fuck,” he growls into your mouth. He pulls back to look down at you, and his gaze is dark with renewed desire. There’s a bare little smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. It sends immense relief through your chest.

He’s soft and tender, but he’s still Bakugou for you.

“You’re soaked for me, baby.” He dips his chin into your neck, nuzzling and nipping lovingly while his fingers curl into your panties. He removes them smoothly—near expertly letting you shimmy your hips while he peels them down off your thighs.

For an instant, there’s a brief moment of quiet awareness that passes between you. You’re bare, completely nude for him. This is never a situation you imagined finding yourself in. You’ve butted heads so many times, it’s hard to remember where the line between bickering and flirting blurred.

But it had. And this moment is enough to prove that.

“Talk to me,” he grunts, drawing back to look at you. “You want my fingers in your pussy?”

“Fuck,” you nearly giggle. “You can’t just say stuff like that to me.”

“Why not?” He bends down, hovering his mouth over yours while his fingers crawl up your thigh again. “Don’t tell me it turns you on.”

“I’m already turned on,” you murmur back, lifting your chin to press your forehead against his.

“Then don’t tell me what to do. Last time I checked, you’re the one takin’ orders from me.”

He draws his middle finger up your messy slit, sending liquid shivers right up your spine. Your toes are already starting to curl.

Bakugou draws a deep breath, teasing the tip of that finger between your folds. He finds your tight little entrance and wiggles forward, tickling you as he pushes inside. All at once you learn how it feels to be filled by him. He curls his finger curiously upwards, and the sensation is so intimate that you go limp. All the while he pants quietly over your face, starting to pump his middle finger in and out of your slick depths. You want to open your eyes, but it’s easier to keep them closed and sink into the pleasure he offers you.

He knows what he’s doing, because before you can even grow accustomed to the sensation of his finger inside you, he’s settling the pad of his thumb over your swollen clit and starting to stroke back and forth. He has easy rhythm, pumping and stroking with smooth flexes of his wrist.

“Katsu…” you start to whine, feeling breathless and fluttery already.

“That workin’ for you?” he grunts, pushing his lips against yours in a gentle peck. His breath has fallen into rhythm with his pumping arm, but he keeps up a heartbreakingly consistent pace. It’s not long at all before you start feeling the twinges of your impending climax.

“Baby,” you insist. The blown-out tone in your voice should be humiliating. But you’re far too gone to care. “Katsuki, b-baby, I-I…”

“I know.” He’s quiet, but firm. “I can feel you squeezin’ me. Let go for me, honey, I gotcha. I gotcha.”

Stable and safe in his arms, you fall.

Your climax is tight and shallow, bringing you to a gasping, simpering little peak. It leaves your hips trembling, sends goosebumps unfolding over your skin. Bakugou pumps you diligently through it, watching the way your body twitches and quakes when you’re overcome with pleasure.

When it’s over you settle into the pillows. The sheets fold like tissue paper, but you’re so numb with bliss you can barely feel them. Bakugou’s stroking a tender palm over your belly, and when you draw your bleary gaze to his, his blonde lashes are low with a look of such fondness it makes your breath stall.

“Katsuki,” you whimper, reaching up to curl weak fingers against the edge of his scruffy jaw. He bends to kiss your shoulder, sending along a soft little grunt of acknowledgement.

But your words draw surprise from him. You dive your fingers into his hair, content and relaxed, but needing.

“Fuck me,” you purr.

“God,” he sighs, nuzzling your skin and moving atop you once more. “Don’t have to tell me twice.”

He kisses you for a long moment, then pauses and rolls clean off the bed.

“Excuse me?” You push yourself onto your elbows, watching with tamped-down irritation as he digs a hand into that stupid little backpack from the car.

When he comes back to you, he produces a tiny wrapped square from between his fingers.

A condom.

“You bastard,” you laugh, grinning like the lovestruck idiot you are.  

He looks pleased with himself—too pleased—as he sits back on his haunches to rid himself (finally) of his clingy undershorts.

You can’t hate him for being prepared.

Like many other things about him, Bakugou’s cock does not disappoint. When he’s finally bare for you—completely bare—you have to mindfully close your mouth to keep from gaping.

“Shit,” he rumbles, watching the way you stare. “Don’t tell me you like what you see.”

He’s perfect. His cock—already fully hard and flushed for you—juts from beneath trimmed blonde hair at a flawless angle. It curves eagerly toward his belly, already leaking generous trails of precum.

You can’t stand the way you wish he hadn’t thought to bring a condom. You want him raw.

But then he’s tearing the package open with his teeth and slipping both hands between his legs, and you get to watch the way he handles himself as he rolls the condom gracefully onto his thick shaft. Then he turns his pretty crimson eyes on you and you remember why you’re here in the first place.

“Listen,” he mumbles, slipping between your legs. He hooks your knees over his thighs, and for a moment he just sits there. The tip of his cock doesn’t quite reach your body from where he kneels, but you’re straining for it. Practically desperate.

“It’s been…” He reaches up to rub the back of his neck, and you realize in the low light that his face has gone scarlet. Desperation pushed aside for the moment, you try to relax. You try to listen.

This is more than a quick fuck. For both of you.

“It’s been… a while for me,” he mumbles.

“Me too,” you rasp, too quickly. He looks down at you with wide eyes and you can’t help but chuckle. “Don’t look so surprised.”

You reach for him. He takes both your hands, stroking your knuckles over with graceful thumbs. He’s looking down at your fingers in his, but when you squeeze, he finds your gaze again.

“I don’t care,” you promise. “It doesn’t matter how long it’s been. It’s happening now. Right now. Okay?”

He grins, and suddenly he’s Bakugou again. Even if there’s a softness about the edge of him that you never quite noticed before.

He drops your hands and grips your thighs in earnest, slipping forward. He leans down to capture your mouth one more time, and you can feel the sweet way he tastes you in the mindful dip of his tongue.

He brushes his nose against yours one more time. You’re growing delightfully familiar with the warmth of his gentle breaths. He speaks to you, soft like you’ve never heard him before.

“What’re we waitin’ for?”

He reaches down between you and then you feel it, the slick, heated tip of him pressing up between your folds. It’s an intimacy that you’re well-prepared for, even if you’ll never quite be ready.

He gives you one last long look, and there’s love in his eyes again—unmistakeable this time. Once upon a time, you might let that scare you. But there’s something about him, all of him, that makes you want to love him, too.

He pushes forward with a dull grunt, pressing his swelled tip past your tight entrance. You give a little whimper, both holding each other a little tighter while the sensation washes over you.

“Fuck,” he sighs.

“Fuck,” you sigh back.

You reach for him, drawing your palms up his toned biceps and clutching at the muscle of his back. As he eases a little further into you, he’s trembling. And when he seats himself fully inside you, he buries his face into the crook of your neck to muffle the groan that falls from his chest.

“Katsuki,” you plead with him, clutching him tighter. He braces his hands against the mattress on either side of you, drawing his hips slowly back. The pleasure ramps up even more intensely than before. The shape of him seems to rub every tender spot along your sensitive walls, drawing fresh spills of slick from your depths.

“Baby, please,” you whine. It’s your turn to tremble now, your spine shaking with the unheeded promise of pleasure. You dig your nails into the flesh of his back and he jumps to life, realizing what you’re begging for.

“I got you,” he growls. “I got you, honey, god, gonna fuck you so damned good.”

He does not shy away from your pleasure after that. Instead of easing himself slowly back into your depths, he anchors one hand into the sheets beside your head, gripping your thigh with the other and pinning it to the bed.

Then, he ruts.

He picks up a brutal rhythm of smooth, fluid thrusts, staring intently down at you as his hips piston against your body. His balls, weighty and soft, punctuate every thrust with a heavy slap over your skin. The sound has you squirming beneath him, thighs crawling up the lengths of his hips as you grip and undulate and try to match his rhythm.

“Holy shit,” he snarls at some point, feral but so fucking tender it makes pleasure explode behind your closed eyelids.

“God damn,” he keeps it up. “Pussy’s so fuckin’ tight, honey. You’re gonna squeeze the life outta me. Christ, why didn’t you say something, huh?”

You’ve been asking yourself the same question all night.

You can’t pretend to know whether this will change anything between you. But this is the closest thing to real affection you’ve experienced in a very long time. For as long as you can, you’ll soak it up.

“Katsu….ki,” you drawl, doing your best to stay coherent. Bakugou’s putting in the work to turn you into a fucked-out mess. You’re already barely over your first orgasm. And when he slips a hand between your thighs and starts drawing that thumb in tight little circles over your abused clit, there’s no way you’re going to last long.

He fucks you perfectly. Like you’re from two halves of the same mold. Every liquid draw of his hips against yours sends fireworks of pleasure sparkling through your belly. The ancient bedsprings are squealing like pigs. The loose headboard thumps the drywall in an obtuse rhythm.

You don’t give two shits about who hears this.

“That’s it, honey,” Bakugou moans, as if he’s read your thoughts. “Fuckin’ scream for me. Lemme hear it.”

“Close,” you gasp. “Fuckin’ close, baby please…”

“Let go for me.” The feral growls that he’d been letting loose before have passed. He murmurs to you with such soft devotion in his voice. As soon as he sees you’re getting ready to fall, he turns tender as a lamb.

He thumbs your clit and slows his thrusts just a touch, angling his hips to find that perfect spot inside you. If that’s not enough, he bends close, trailing his nose and mouth along the cool line of your shoulder, peppering you with loving kisses.

He smiles into your skin. “I gotcha, honey.”

In a bare handful of strokes, you fall. Ecstasy rattles the column of your spine and your back goes hollow. Whatever cries felt too obscene to loose before, there’s no holding them back now. Your head slams into the pillows as you shout and mewl and moan through each breath of your climax. Bakugou fucks you in earnest throughout, keeping up a heady rhythm to milk every ounce of pleasure from your aching form.

As you’re hitting the peak of your shaking pleasure, he can’t hold back anymore. He goes tense above you and lets a low grunt into your shoulder, then grabs you and grips you tight. He shoves his hips against yours one, two, three desperate more times and then leaves them there as he twitches and squirms.

“Fuckin’… hell, god, shit.”

He’s panting as many obscenities as he can conjure, and you’re sensitive and spent but you hold him through it. You revel in the way he loses control. You’ve seen Bakugou lose his cool. You’ve seen him get angry. You’ve watched him get violent.

But you’ve never seen him like this before, in a state of pure, vulnerable bliss. He’s torn himself to pieces for you, showing you his beating heart and letting you coddle it.

Something about tonight feels transitionary. There’s a depth in the way he lies against you, catching his breath. Even when he rouses himself and pulls his softening cock slowly out— rendering another shallow shiver from you both—he shoots you a look from beneath blonde lashes that blows the last vestiges of your emotional barrier to pieces.

You’re not ready to be sure of what this is for him. But you, the romantic fool that you are, had to go and fall in love with him.

He excuses himself momentarily to dispose of the condom. When he climbs beneath the sheets again—not shy about getting close this time—your gaze has already settled on the TV.

“Hey,” you mumble, letting him draw a rough palm up the curve of your side. He draws in a deep breath and settles in behind you, tugging you back against his chest by the nip of your waist.

“Hey, yourself,” he whispers, and his words tickle the back of your neck. You can’t help but smile to yourself. As determined as you are not to show him your hand, you can’t help yourself. Not now that he’s like this for you.

“Oh, I wanted to ask you,” you hum, shifting a little and adopting your most sensible tone. “Are you okay with sharing a bed tonight? ‘Cause, if you’d rather not, I can… sleep in the bathtub.”

You toss a shit-eating grin over your shoulder. Bakugou rolls his eyes, but you catch the dull roll of a snort before he shoves a pillow at you.

“Shut up,” he grumbles good-naturedly, looping a weighty arm around you. His grip is enough of an indication—you’re as good as stuck.

You slip into the airstream of a gentle updraft, rising gently through the barest wisps of cloud straight overhead. Instead of banking through the rest of your right-hand loop, you've gone on straight, inclining smoothly into the sky. Mina follows, but the silence doesn't last long.

“Read,” comes her voice over the radio, tinged with humour but edged by sternness. “We were given our orders. Two patrol loops around the carrier, then back on deck by sunrise.”

“Reader,” comes a third, less amused voice from a different, fuzzier connection. It’s Commander Shota Aizawa from down below, who’s undoubtedly standing over the shoulder of a radar technician and watching your every move.

“You’re breaking patrol pattern. Finish your loop and get back to the Enterprise.”

“What do you think, Pink?” You gloss with both channels open, letting Commander Aizawa hear you ignore him on purpose.

“I think I’d really like to get my scrambled eggs before they’ve gone cold.”

“Give me two minutes.” You know Mina will get her eggs. You’ll make it back to the deck with no skin off Aizawa’s back. The air is too calm, the sea too clear to pass up the opportunity for a little fun.

This is why you’re out here in the first place, after all.

“Read-“ Mina starts, but you cut her off.

“Sorry Pink, you’re breaking up. Atmospheric disturbance, maybe?”

You glance over your shoulder, and through her cherry blossom-pink helmet and tinted visor, she's shaking her head.

You close out both radio channels and wrap your gloved fingers a little tighter around the controls.

“Come on, pretty girl,” you whisper, alone with your jet for the first time all morning. “Let’s fly.”

Before Mina or Aizawa can protest, you push the throttle forward, accelerating smoothly into the wind. In a wash of heat and vapour you pull up into a straight incline, then invert and dive smoothly toward the water. When you look up through the bonnet, the sea’s reflecting straight back at you, and all you can see is its azure surface rising to meet you. Even though you've gone silent, the protests of both Aizawa and Mina echo in your headset.

But you can barely hear them.

Your heart leaps into your throat as you drop through the sky, down to six thousand feet, five thousand, four. Your altitude’s reading at twenty-five hundred feet when you wrap your fingers around the controls and start to pull up.

A pointed black streak screams between you and the surface, passing mere feet from your jet’s diving nose.

“Jesus Christ,” you curse, pulling up hard and banking away from the carrier once you’ve gained some height. You reach into your belt pack and jam your radio channels open again with sweat breaking out across the back of your neck.

“Pink, what the fuck is that?”

“A fucking Su-57,” Mina shouts into your headset.

“Why the fuck didn’t we see it coming?”

“We did,” Aizawa barks into your comms. “You didn’t. Your little joyride almost cost us, big time.”

“Preparing to-“ you begin to announce, but he cuts you off again.

“That’s a negative, Reader, do not engage. Under no circumstances are you to fire on that plane unless fired upon, do you understand?”

“All due respect, sir, he almost took my nose out.”

“I don’t care if he inverted on you and bumped bonnets. Do. Not. Engage.”

“What’s he doing so close to the Enterprise?” Mina’s on your wing again as you watch the Su fly out to sea again. Its chassis is black as night, which stands out starkly against the pale peach and lavender of the morning, and the polished silver of your F-18s.

“Let’s hope he’s lost,” Aizawa mutters. “Very lost.”

You’d like it if that were the answer, too. But you and Mina watch together as the black beast banks lazily off to the south.

“It’s coming back around,” you report, and as the first Su shows you his cockpit, he drops out of the way to reveal a second flyer on his right wing.

“Looks like his wingman’s just arrived,” Mina pipes up. “Commander, this is no accident.”

“Stay on their tails,” Aizawa pushes. “They know we know they’re here.”

Your heart’s still pounding a little as you toss another glance in Mina’s direction. She gives you a firm nod and a quick salute. This is the closest you’ve come to real combat in a very long time.

But your orders are strict. And this is one command you know better than to question.

You pull forward and descend cleanly into the path behind the shadowy stealth fighters. From here, it’s obvious the advantage they’ve got on you. The jets’ every line is sharp enough to have been hewn from onyx. The tinted bonnets are so dark they’re near-indistinguishable from the body of the plane itself, making the pilots inside even harder to spot.

And as soon as you get its engines in front of you, both jets roll cleanly to the right.

“They’re trying to buck us,” you grit. “Pink, stay on my wing.”

“I’m with you,” she promises. “Show ‘em why they call you Reader.”

With a shallow sigh, you grip the controls, drop your chin, and settle into focus. Any leftover drowsiness slips away from your mind as your gaze locks onto the lead pilot, black wings absorbing what little sunlight you’ve got.

When you were a cadet, there wasn't much you couldn't do. Targeting, aerial manoeuvres, you aced it all. But there was one area you excelled beyond all the others, leaving even top pilots with seasoned careers in your wash.

Pursuit.

There’s no thrill like the truth that dawns on your enemy when they realize they’ve got you on their tail.

The Su in the lead wobbles for an instant, forward and to the left. The movement is barely visible but you glimpse it, and it means that when both planes invert into a sharp dive, you stay locked onto their tails.

Chasing them down like this is passive enough not to stir up trouble. But it’s aggressive enough to give the pilots a good shakedown. If you can send them into their own territory with no shots fired and their tails between their legs, you’ll consider it a win.

But these are advanced stealth fighters, and with talented pilots, to boot. They stall in near perfect unison and you and Mina practically fly right by. You brake hard and pull up, inverting to come around as tightly as possible. Mina falls behind, but you’re not giving up.

“These guys make it look easy,” you pant, already out of breath from the force of such a tight inversion.

“Something tells me we’re missing breakfast this morning,” Mina calls.

“Absolutely the hell not,” you bite back. “I’m getting you those eggs. Lemme see if I can get a tone on these clowns.”

“Read, don’t. You don’t need them-“

“I’m not gonna-“ You try to respond, but the Su’s pull up out of your sight before you can finish your sentence. You refocus. If you can get a tone on them with manoeuvres like this, it'll scare them off for good.

“Reader-“ Mina’s voice comes through your headset again, louder and more urgent this time.

You grit your teeth. Your vision tunnels as your focus narrows to the planes in front of you. Engaging your targeting system, it takes you a second to get it oriented.

“Almost,” you breathe, ignoring everything around you. The targeting system beeps dull and red as you twist and corkscrew behind the persistent stealth pilots, but as soon as they level out for a moment, you’re on them again. And this time, you’re ready.

"I've got tone!" You cry, locking onto them with a triumphant grin. The steady radar beeps even out into one long, sharp tone that will also sound on the stealth pilots' radar, alerting them that you're locked onto them. With no plans to fire at all, you hover there for as long as you can.

Before you can so much as think about disengaging, the Sus split up and disappear on your wings. With your focus broken, you've lost their flight patterns, and as your targeting system falls silent, you twist around in your seat, craning to check every degree of the horizon.

“Where’d they go?” The longer you go without spotting them, the higher your anxiety ramps. You’re just beginning to wonder if the lock on was a mistake when a gust of air pushes between you and Mina so strongly it forces you into a split barrel roll to avoid spinning out completely.

“Jesus,” Mina curses, and when you level out again you see nothing but two black slices of jet disappearing into the horizon. They’d passed so tightly between you they nearly washed you out. But they’re turning tail.

“Sus are disengaged!” You cheer, expecting to hear Mina celebrating on the other end of your radio. But she’s quiet, and the next voice that floods your headset is Aizawa’s.

“You get your ass back on deck before I come up there and shoot you down myself.”

“Requesting celebratory flyby?”

“Denied, Reader. I want you back to the carrier and grounded. Now.”

You’re thinking about banking into it anyway when Mina’s voice comes over the radio again, softer this time with a pleading, sentimental edge.

“Come on, Read. Let’s get back to the ship. I don’t wanna get in any more trouble today.”

Your stomach drops. You’ve never heard Mina plead with you like that before. If it were just you up here, you might not think about any consequences at all.

But it isn’t. And Mina hasn’t left your side for a heartbeat.

“Okay, Pink,” you agree, shoulders dropping as the adrenaline of near-combat drains out of your veins. “Let’s take ‘em in.”

Commander Aizawa doesn’t wait for you to be ushered into his office below deck. He’s standing with the ground crew by the time you touch down, jaw set firmly with murder in his worn gaze.

“All due respect, sir, I don’t see what the problem is,” you begin, climbing down from your powering-down jet. Mina’s already on the ground beside you, standing in front of the commander with her pink helmet tucked under her arm, the other folded neatly behind her back. She doesn’t make eye contact with you as you fall into place beside her.

"I'm not in the mood for your games, Lieutenant," Aizawa sneers, turning on his heel and starting to pace toward the deck door. The exhaustion weighs clearly on his voice and his shoulders as they sag visibly in the brightening dawn.

“There’s no game here, sir. The Su’s retreated to their home territory with no shots fired. I followed your orders not to engage. What’s the problem?”

“The problem is, Reader, that as perceptive as you are, you fail to see the error in your actions.” Somebody passes Aizawa a paper cup of coffee as the three of you duck into the dim hallway of the Enterprise’s interior, and he sips it slowly while you fall into step beside him.

“Not only did your disobedience nearly knock you out of the sky, the unbelievable tactlessness of this morning’s patrol almost served as a declaration of war.”

“I had tone on them, Sir. I was never going to fire on them. I know-“

“I know that,” Aizawa enthuses, stopping mid-hallway to turn on you. Behind you, Mina starts, her shoulders jumping a little. Commander Aizawa isn’t a man of particularly intimidating stature, but he’s got an eight-foot glare that sends even the strongest of soldiers reeling at the best of times.

“You know that,” he continues. “Pink knows that. But they didn’t know that. For all they know, it would have been shots fired if they hadn’t thrown you off their tails. Do you understand what that means?”

Mina shoots you a pleading look. The time for wisecracks has passed. Even though she isn’t to blame in this situation, if you inflate the problem, you’ll be making things worse for her.

“Yes, sir,” you affirm.

“Good.” His jaw sets again. “If you were staying, I’d have put Lieutenant Ashido in charge of your next patrol together. You could do with a turn in the passenger’s seat.”

Your heart drops.

“Am I… not staying, sir?”

“Well, that’s another matter entirely. Come on into my office, soldiers. We have more important matters to discuss.”

Aizawa’s office is a dull, mahogany-trimmed administrative nightmare. A single porthole opens out to the starboard hull, but it’s covered night and day by a set of dust-coated slatted blinds that let little more than thin strips of sunlight pour over his paper-covered desk. There isn’t a computer screen to be found. In fact, the only identifiable artifact on his desk at all is a corded telephone that clocks in at at least twenty years old, in a faded shade of oatmeal beige that shows the worn grooves of two decades of frantic answering. The phone’s cradle barely surfaces, however, from under a mountain of stacks of paperwork. And though you’ve never actually seen the hollow of the desk’s underside, the fact that its solid front drops straight to the floor has led to rumours that he’s actually got a sleeping bag tucked under there, and hardly ever bothers to go back to his quarters.

He takes a heavy seat behind the desk in question, spreading both hands across the stacked papers with a huff.

“I can’t believe I’m about to say this,” he mutters under his breath, and a little bit of that post-combat adrenaline that still simmers in your gut sparks to life again.

You've done it this time. It's probably a good thing you ended up aborting that flyby, or you might be in even deeper shit than you are now.

“Look, sir, before you say anything,” you start to say, glancing over at Mina. With whatever sway you have left, you’re getting her out of this. All she did for you out there was fly like a wingman should.

“Would you just shut up and listen, Read?” The irritation cuts through Aizawa’s voice like a blade. You turn your gaze to the toes of your boots.

“Yes, sir.”

 “I can’t believe I’m about to say this after a display like that,” he continues, “but you two are the top pilots on this whole goddamn rig. I should be sending you out for disciplinary action. But I’ve received a call from higher up that’s about to save your necks. It’s a reassignment, somewhere you’re gonna be all too thrilled to return.”

“Sir?” You hadn’t been anticipating a reassignment anytime soon, since you’d just started your rotation on the Enterprise a few weeks earlier.

“That’s right,” he continues. “You two clowns are going to Miromar. You’ve been called back to TOPGUN.”

You find Mina’s eyes almost immediately, and she’s looking at you with a body full of surprise, brows lifting in disbelief.

“You’re kidding,” you blurt. Aizawa snorts from your peripheral vision.

“I wish I was. Pack your things. I want you airborne again before lunch. You’ll be briefed in the air.”

"Yes, sir." You turn firmly back to Aizawa to offer him a stiff salute, which Mina mirrors before you turn for the door. So much for Mina's eggs.

“Oh, and Reader?”

As Mina slips out into the hallway, you pause in the doorway one more time. Aizawa's staring dead across the room at you, but in the dim light, you can almost swear you see the corners of his lips beginning to lift.

“Consider this your final warning.”

“Loud and clear, sir,” you promise, ducking firmly out of his office with a firm pat to the doorframe.

Outside, you jog a few steps to catch up with Mina, who’s hurrying back to the bunks double time. She shakes her head as you catch up with her- brow firm, but chin wobbling to contain her emotion.

“I’m not gonna lie,” you confess, stuffing your hands into the pockets of your flight suit to dispel the tension that still rises between you. You lead her astray this morning, and it’s due to a big, fat stroke of luck that you’re not grounded on suspension right now.

“I really thought he had us that time.”

"Yeah, and whose fault would that have been?" Mina's retort is sharp and serious, drawing your gaze to her.

“Pink, I…” But the longer you look, the easier it is to see the humour that creeps in at the corners of her expression.

“But look at us now,” she declares. “Goin’ back to school.” She gives a little skip to punctuate her words, sending whatever remains of your worry trickling out your fingertips and onto the floor behind you.

“Hell yeah,” you counter, bumping your hip against hers. “Gonna get myself another plate on that TOPGUN trophy.”

“You barely made it on there last time.”

“And look how far I’ve come since then.”

The rest of the morning passes in a blur of packing and mirth. There’s a lightness in your limbs you haven’t felt since the last time you were in Miromar. There’s something to be said about spending twelve weeks away from enemy lines, doing the thing you were born to be doing. Twelve weeks of nothing but pure, airborne bliss, and the thrill of friendly competition.

Whatever trouble you’d gotten yourself into to earn a spot there for the second time you’d gladly repeat.

California is as sweltering as you remember as you and Mina rip out of the airport's parking garage on the final leg of a very long trip across the Pacific. The car you’ve been issued has the tinted windows rolled all the way down, and it’s Mina in the driver’s seat, merging onto the interstate toward the all-too-familiar Fighter Weapons School.

Solid ground is a welcomed sight, after five weeks on the ocean and over sixteen hours in the air. The road seems to stretch out infinitely before you, lined by royal palms and reflecting every beam of the uninhibited west coast sunshine. On either side of the highway the desert unfurls itself, your view of the horizon limited only by the flat-topped rocks that stand up out of the sands in the distance. If so much as a gecko caught up to you, you’d spot it.

For the first two hours of your sixteen-hour journey across the world, you'd been briefed thoroughly on the reason for heading back to TOPGUN. A group of highly skilled and decorated officers had gathered to develop a new curriculum of advanced technical manoeuvres and tactical training, based on their experiences in combat and the skills their own training had left them lacking.

The program was designed to push its pilots to the very limits of their skill and capability: as a result, only the very best of the best would be able to complete, let alone excel at, each of the exercises. And after extensive internal testing, a group of twelve TOPGUN graduates- from the tops of their classes- have been recalled to put the curriculum through its paces.

With all the standard TOPGUN parameters in place, you’re about to spend the next twelve weeks competing for the top spot against a group of pilots who have already won it.

The thrill of competition thrums in your veins as the highway races away beneath you. Mina reaches for the dash and cranks up the radio, tuned to a station of old favourites that blares the best of the ’70s and ‘80s that keeps you company all the way to Miramar.

The rooms that you and Mina are assigned to are luxurious compared to the bare aluminum bunk-style barracks you’d been crammed into aboard the Enterprise. With a shared kitchenette and bathroom, your “suite” as the administrative assistant had called it, split off into a narrow hallway with two of the smallest bedrooms you’d ever seen. Each room was studded by a window that was massive in proportion to the size of the room that opened all the way (you tested immediately) and a full-sized bed pushed up against that window with crisp white sheets.

None of that mattered anyway, though. The real treat was the separate bedrooms. As much as you loved Mina, the idea of having your very own space to shut the door on was, in military terms, the epitome of luxury.

Tonight, however, those doors weren’t staying shut for long. The moment you had unpacked your bags, Mina burst into your room and insisted on hitting up one of the only bars in a 50-mile radius, The Hard Deck.

It was a mainstay of your last tenure with TOPGUN, and you’re not ready to admit it, but you’re curious to see how the old place has held up. It was a little run-down and in need of a paint job the last time you were in town, and that was a long time ago.

Besides, this is the only chance you’re going to get to size up the competition before classes start bright and early tomorrow morning.

 By the time your standard-issue Jeep pulls into The Hard Deck’s parking lot, the spaces are filled with identical cars, all bearing the same U.S. Military special issue license plate. You’re in the driver’s seat this time, and you can feel the excited buzz from the passenger’s seat as you back smoothly into one of the last remaining spots.

The Hard Deck’s barstools are populated almost entirely by military personnel, whether they be regular employees of the nearby air base, instructors at TOPGUN, or the ever-rotating population of the Fighter Weapons School’s students. It’s the latter category that you’re hoping to see more of on this particular evening. Despite the lengthy briefing you and Mina were both given on the flight over, your briefers refused to mention any of the pilots that would be joining you here. Before arriving in Miramar, they stated firmly, that information is classified.

The Hard Deck is your first opportunity to take a look at the roster.

As you duck inside, it's your tan, short-sleeved uniform, double-barred collar pins, and breastplate full of medal ribbons that identify you as an incoming member of the next TOPGUN class. Before you can even begin your scan of the bustling bar crowd, a familiar voice echoes across the wood-panelled ceilings and bounces off the thousands of white ceramic beer steins hanging from them.

“But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?”

You whip around quickly, searching for its source before it humiliates you further. To your simultaneous thrill and dismay, a head of dark hair with eyes to match and a toothy grin emerges out of the crowd.

“It is the east, and fair Reader is the sun. Doth I loseth my marbles, or is that thee I spy, Lieutenant-“

“Oh, it’s me alright,” you holler, ignoring the voices that hush and faces that turn toward you. “Now why don’t you put that tape gun of yours to good use ‘n stick your mouth shut, do us all a favour?”

Lieutenant Hanta Sero, callsign “Tapegun" snags a couple of frosted beers off the bartop that were almost certainly intended for somebody else, and presses each into yours and Mina’s hands. You were stationed with Sero in Alaska of all places for a few months one summer, breathing in the cool northern air and letting the midnight sun get the better of you.

“Then I couldn’t buy ya beers,” he retorts, his grin turning smug as he leans in for a firm one-armed hug. “How ya been, Read?”

“You know. Destroying thirty million dollar planes. Nearly declaring wars. The usual.”

“All in a day’s work for you,” Sero laughs, patting your back hard as he pulls out of the hug. “Well, I’m sure glad to see you here. Means you haven’t been court-marshalled yet.”

“And,” he continues, waving his free hand toward the back of the bar, where a couple of pool tables are currently shrouded by the dense rush hour bar crowd, “there’re a few folks in that direction who’ll be pretty happy to see you, too.” He shoots a meaningful glance over your shoulders at Mina, who’s been taking hearty gulps of her beer and watching the conversation unfold. At the raise of Sero’s eyebrows, however, she lowers the beer stein and, with a thick ridge of foam on her upper lip, her jaw drops.

“No way.”

Sero jerks his chin in the direction in question. “Go find out for yourself.”

With a gleeful giggle, Mina flounces into the crowd. You watch her go, and by the time you find Sero again, he’s already scooping another beer off the bartop. It looks more like he actually ordered it this time, though, and he turns back to you with a slow, careful slurp off the top.

The joyful reunion is audible across the bar before you can make your way through the crowd, but by the time you reach the identically-dressed pilots all clustered around the pool tables at the back of the bar, Mina’s already discovered her prize.

The prize in question is Lieutenant Eijirou Kirishima, callsign “Riot.” He is by far the largest pilot in stature, standing nearly a head and shoulders above the others around him. The tan buttons on his uniform are pulled taut across his broad barrel chest, and if he’s at all inhibited by Mina hanging off his neck, he doesn’t show it. She’s got her arms thrown around him in a show of more outward affection than you’ve ever seen from her- and for Mina, that’s saying something.

“’S good to see you too, Pink. I was beginning to think you’d given me the slip.”

“If spending five weeks in the middle of the Indian Ocean is what you’d call ‘the slip,’ then yeah, I did,” Mina giggles back. “But I could never stay mad at you, Ei.”

Kirishima’s grin widens, and you watch the way his arm tightens around Mina’s waist. You and Mina have been comrades since before your first run with TOPGUN, but you were stationed apart a couple of times in the last year. Kirishima must have happened at one of those times.

“Seems you two are already acquainted.” A wiry blonde leaning against one of the pool tables speaks up, eyes locked on Mina and Kirishima. He finds your eyes not long after and lifts his chin, cocking his head to one side with a curious smile lifting one side of his mouth.

“Seems you two are, too. Out with it, Tape. You gonna tell me who this rocket is?”

Sero’s scraping a hand through his inky black hair, running his palm down the side of his face. “Over there’s my new backseater. Denki Kaminari.”

“Ah-“ Denki counters, pushing off the edge of the pool table and coming around the opposite end, sticking a long-fingered hand out for you to shake. “That’s not what they called me in flight school.”

You rest your free palm in his, and the skin is dry and chapped. His shake is firm, though, gaze unwavering.

“Call me Chargebolt.”

He says it with an easy, performative sort of confidence that has Sero snorting into the next sip of his beer.

“You gonna tell her why they call you that?”

Denki’s confidence evaporates.

“What? No reason.”

Sero pushes the corners of his mouth down and nods mockingly. “No reason at all.” He leans closer to you. “You see, Chargedolt over there’s the only one who managed to electrocute himself with the WSO circuit board back in flight school.”

“That never happened!” Denki’s voice shoots up an octave.

“Oh, yes it did,” Sero counters. “One of my old bunkmates was there when it happened. Swears his hair stood up on end and everything. By all accounts, Denki, you’re lucky to be standin’ where you are right now.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll be luckier if I’m standing somewhere else,” Denki grumbles, slinking away with his empty stein clutched resentfully in one hand.

“Let’s see,” Sero sighs. “Who else haven’t you met? Oh, over there’s Tenya Iida,” he starts, gesturing to a dark-haired, square-featured young pilot who stands nearly as tall as Kirishima and just as broad. “He’s the fastest pilot outta any of us. Clocks in easily at speeds most of us can’t reach without losing a lunch or two. That’s why we call him Engine.”

Tenya’s racking up the balls on the pool table nearest both of you, lining them up perfectly with unwavering focus.

“The only one not in uniform over there is Tsuyu Asui, who…” Sero trails off when the petite pilot in question looks your way, obviously hearing her name mentioned, “has better hearing than I remembered.”

Instead of her uniform, Tsuyu is sporting a black elbow-to-knee wetsuit with dark green stripes down the shoulders, sides, and thighs. Her hair is glossy and plastered close to her head in the bar’s warm light and, on closer inspection, you realize that it’s dripping wet.

“You talking about me, Sero?”

“Only about how it was kind of you to vacate the ocean long enough to be in our presence, Froggy.”

Tsuyu chuckles good-naturedly. “I don’t get California waves very often, Tape. You think I’m gonna pass up the opportunity to catch ‘em while I’m still here?”

“Wouldn’t dream of suggesting such a thing,” he promises. Then he turns back to you. “You can probably guess why they call her Frog.”

“I’ve got a few ideas,” you reply.

“Let’s see, who else? You know Momo.” Momo perks up, sees you, and sends you a friendly wave. You and Momo were stationed together with Mina on a carrier a couple of years ago. She didn’t like you very much when you first joined rank, but somehow you managed to warm her up to you. She’s in deep conversation with another pilot who’s about to become your classmate, and Sero jerks his chin in the direction of her cute brown ponytail.

“The girl she’s talking to is Ochako Uraraka. You’re gonna have fun flying with her. She does this thing with stalls where- well, you’ll just have to see it for yourself. Either way, that’s why they call her Gravity. Its laws don’t seem to apply to her at all.”

You take a long, slow sip of beer, thinking. Aizawa wasn’t kidding. You’re lined up here with the best of the best. Between Tenya, Ochako, and Momo, another killer pilot, you’ve got your work cut out for you.

Somewhere out there is a more sensible version of you who would cut yourself off at one beer for the night, go home early and rest up in order to prepare to go up against a trifecta of powerhouse pilots like those. But as you stare down the bottom of your glass, you know that you are not that version tonight.

“Over there is- I’m sorry, what do they call you again?” As you surface, Sero is already calling across to another pilot, sitting on his own against a beam tucked a few feet away from the pool game that Tenya is still supposedly planning to start soon.

“Shoto,” the pilot calls back, far more interested in the plastic cup of peanut shells that he holds tightly between both knees. He cracks the nuts open easily with nimble fingers, even as Sero suppresses a chuckle and tries again.

"No," he clarifies, speaking louder and more slowly. "I mean your call sign. What's your call sign?"

“Oh,” Shoto looks up for a moment and pauses. “Uh…” He goes back to his peanuts with a nod and the tiniest of shrugs. “Shoto.”

“Right.” Sero looks back at you. “The guy with the peanuts is Shoto.” You stare back at Sero as if you hadn't just heard every word of the previous exchange.

“Got it.” You clap a hand between Sero’s shoulder blades, sending his narrow torso forward a little. “Thanks for the rundown, Tape. I’m getting another drink.”

“It’s not over yet,” he promises, raising his voice as you duck away for the peace of the bar.

Even though Sero is proving to be a wealth of exactly the information you're looking for, it's a lot to take in. Maybe it's your ego talking, but at one point in the evening, you were more or less convinced that you'd be the best pilot here. Maybe even by a long shot. Of course, it didn't dawn on you that 'the best of the best' meant exactly that. Half the pilots out there probably have TOPGUN trophies of their own. You're going to have to pull more than that if you plan to be the best of the pack.

But there are a dozen world-class pilots clustered around that pool table. And you’re only one among them.

Come to think of it, if you count off the pilots you’ve already been introduced to, you come in under twelve. So you haven’t even met them all yet.

The sound of tires crunching on the gravel outside is barely audible over the chatter of the bar, and it's not until your second beer's being slid across the bartop towards you that two pairs of heavy footsteps descend on the screen doorway and wrench it open.

For an instant, a hush races through the crowd as a shadow looms, lengthened by the fading dusk and the porch lights illuminating the bar’s front door.

Two pairs of broad, tan-clad shoulders bob into the bar, and the conversation returns to normal.

You wager a glance over your shoulder at the pool tables and, just as you suspected, the pilots are still staring.

The first pilot, who’s sidling right through the crowd with a series of pardon me’s and ‘scuse me here’s, is one of fairly decent stature. There's strength in his shoulders and forearms that betrays what his uniform hides and a thickness to his neck and chest that seems mismatched with the open friendliness of his expression.

The second pilot is still standing just inside the door, neatly folding a pair of standard issue aviators into the chest pocket of his well-fitting uniform. Though he stands a little shorter than his polite counterpart, he’s the one whose mere presence sent goosebumps down the spine of everyone in the room. He’s the one who the crowd parts for, if subtly, so he can make his way through it without so much as a sidestep.

He’s lean and sculpted, with a body designed to carry the uniform he’s wearing. His features are sharp and tidy, with perfect, ashy brows carved at striking odds with the warm darkness of his eyes. His face and forearms are so tan that the fine dusting of hair that covers him is lighter than the tone of his skin, and the tight clip of his shaved neck fades perfectly into the ashiest natural blonde you’ve ever seen.

“Don’t waste your time with these second-rates, Deku,” he announces, as soon as he draws within earshot of the other pilots. Though it’s obvious that he and the other pilot- Deku- have arrived together, he spits the other’s name like a curse. Hard enough to make Kirishima, standing nearby, bristle a little.

“Hey, cool your jets, Dynamite,” calls Denki from across the table. “You ain’t even seen us fly yet.”

“Don’t need to,” he announces coolly. Turning an eye the colour of garnets on Kirishima, who’s still got an arm wound tightly around Mina’s midsection, he takes his time looking the pair up and down. By the time he’s finished, his lip’s curled in a remarkably powerful sneer.

“If you got time for shit like that, you’re obviously no competition of mine.”

That sends something cutting and malicious twisting into your gut. It’s no secret that you’re standing among the top fighter pilots in the country right now, called specifically together to serve a purpose. There were always going to be some egos in the room.

But Dynamite’s out for blood. And the urge to knock him down a few pegs is too great to ignore.

“Hey,” you call, with an edge of vicious humour in your voice. There’s a big enough space in the crowd that when you push off the bar, you can approach him cleanly with your shoulders squared. He’s bigger than you, but he’s far from the biggest guy in the room.

“If you’re not skilled enough to handle a personal life, just say so,” you declare, chest-to-chest with him. On your next inhale, something clean and warm and smoky fills your lungs.

But the fact that he smells good’s not going to stop you from putting him in his place. He looks down at you with all the decorum of somebody who’s just seen a house centipede crawling across the bottom of their shower.

"Who're you supposed to be?" He grunts, barely even opening his mouth to form the words. You feel the weight of his attention like a boulder, stacked under the combined stares of everyone who, as you're just remembering now, haven't actually met you yet.

You have two choices. You can either tuck your tail between your legs and introduce yourself properly, or you can make an even bigger fool of yourself by escaping this conversation as quickly as possible.

You choose neither.

“I’m the pilot that’s gonna knock your ass outta the sky, Matchstick.”

His nose wrinkles.

“Is that what you think?”

Tenya, who’s finally finished racking up the pool set, crosses behind both of you with a stick in one hand. Without so much as shifting his gaze, Dynamite reaches out and snatches the stick from Tenya’s hands. He breaks your gaze and rounds the corner of the table to its end, stooping smoothly and lining up a perfect opening shot. The white ball collides with the clustered stripes and solids, sending several skittering toward the edges of the table and pocketing three.

He straightens up, finding your eyes again. He licks his lower lip and raises his perfect eyebrows, sending a flush of frustration through the cavity of your chest.

“I’d like to see you try.”

You rip a stick down from the wall rack behind you. He’s looking at you with a don’t you know who I am? kind of stare that has your blood boiling. Somewhere in your peripheral vision, you see Mina tucked in close to Kirishima’s side, watching you. Without even looking right at her, you can read the entertainment off her expression. She’s loving this. But you just want to do something- anything- to wipe that look off Dynamite’s face.

You shove up close to him, under the guise of lining up your shot. But the position gives you an excuse to jam your shoulder into his gut a little, and even though he gives a little grunt and steps back, the flesh your shoulder made contact with had no give at all.

“Someone has to.” Whether his first shot was lucky or not you have no idea, but yours does not go nearly as well. Despite lining yourself up perfectly, you only manage to sink one ball, and you’re pretty sure that if you’re playing by the rules, it was one of his.

But pool’s not really the game you’re playing here.

The low, smoky chortle that rumbles from Dynamite’s chest makes you want to throw your beer in his face. Instead, you collect it from the edge of the pool table and take a long sip to hide your embarrassment.

“Looks like I’ve got nothin’ to worry about,” he chides, “if your flying’s anything like your game.”

Well, that’s not a fair comparison. He lines up another perfect shot and you’re seething, taking another long few gulps of your rapidly warming beer and slamming it down so hard on the next pool table some of the liquid sloshes onto the green felt.

You let your emotions drive the next shot you line up. It’s sloppy and met with an unusual wash of loud protest from the other pilots watching. By the time you straighten up to find out why, it’s too late. You’ve sunk the eight ball.

Bakugo passes his stick from one hand to the other, leaning against the edge of the table. It shifts a little under his weight.

“See you in the air.”

"Yes, you will," you fire back, but the retort sounds just as desperate as it feels. The competition you're already feeling with the other candidates is mixing cruelly with the latest embarrassment in your gut and it's making you want to call it a night. It would be a mistake to duck out now before Shoto’s given up on his peanuts. Before even Tenya’s turned in.

But you don’t want to spend another second looking at that stupid pilot’s smug face. You want to go back to your room and find every square inch of information you can on him. If only you had access to his records, you could find everything there was to know that made the walking time bomb tick.

In the spirit of letting Mina have her reunion, it’s Sero who ends up giving you a ride back to base. Most of the pilots you were introduced to earlier are staying in one of the long, low units that make up the base’s whitewashed barracks. Like yours, they’re nicer than most military-issue accommodations. It’s just one of the perks of making it out here – you get to sleep better in between the twelve-hour days and gruelling physical training.

On the dimly-lit drive back, you learn that the taller, green-haired pilot’s name is Izuku Midoriya, and that he goes by the callsign “Deku.”

“Deku,” you repeat, furrowing your brow. Your eyes scan the dark horizon, searching for any hint of familiarity. “Where’d he get a name like that?”

“Don’t even bother asking,” Sero insists. “He won’t tell a soul. That hotshot you went belly-up to earlier’s the only one who knew him in flight school, and he’s a tight-lipped bastard, so you can imagine how getting any kind of answer out of him will go.”

“I didn’t go belly-up.” You can feel yourself starting to sulk already.

“Read, you sunk the eight-ball.” Sero shakes his head as a fond, deep chuckle bubbles out his nose. “He got you all in a tizzy, that’s for sure.”

“Yeah, well, there’ll be no more tizzies when I see him on the tarmac tomorrow morning.”

“If you say so.” There’s a long stretch of silence after that, in which you dedicate your entire consciousness to attempting not to bring him up again. But the thoughts and questions keep cycling into your brain. No matter how hard you try to come up with something, anything else to talk about, he dominates every inch of the space in your brain.

“So, are you gonna tell me his name?”

“I knew we weren’t done with him,” Sero jumps on you right away, drumming both hands on the steering wheel in a single, unified beat. “Alright, I’ll indulge you. But only ‘til you get your ya-ya's out in the air tomorrow.”

Another beat of silence passes between you. Your arms are folded tightly across your chest, but you unfurl one to gesture him vaguely onward.

“Well?”

“His name’s Katsuki Bakugo. His callsign, as you may have already heard, is “Dynamite.” And he’s the only pilot besides you who’s coming into this thing with a TOPGUN trophy to his name.”

Every muscle in your body tenses.  That’s it. You’d known there was something more to the way he carried himself from the moment he stepped into that bar. You were right before- the pilots clustered around that table were the best of the best.

But right now, you and Bakugo are the only ones with the accolades to prove it.

You want to ask Sero a million questions. About the trophy. About why the hell he didn’t tell you about Bakugo before you made an ass of yourself in front of him and the rest of your class. But you swallow your queries, tighten your jaw, and take a deep, centering breath.

"And why do they call him "Dynamite?"

“Beats me.”

The tension and desperation are unleashed from your nerves in the span of a heartbeat, and you whip around so hard the seatbelt locks and digs deeply into the groove of your collarbone.

“What do you mean, beats me?” you insist. “You know everything about every goddamn pilot there is to know out there, but when it comes to the one I actually care about, you got shit?”

Sero says nothing. He takes one eye off the road just long enough to look at you with his eyebrows raised into his hairline.

“I’m sorry,” you continue, tone measured, words placed carefully. “You are a very knowledgable and valuable friend, Sero. Thank you for bestowing your humble wisdom upon me.”

“Better,” he quips.

“Now,” you sigh, settling back into your seat. With your eyes focused on the highway that stretches out before you, a new goal seats itself at the forefront of your mind.

You stick your tongue out at him behind the book, flipping the cover panel out to its proper orientation.

“Surely you can manage to fill the intellectual gap left behind by a single album,” you retort. “Come on. Pick anything you want, I swear I won’t complain. Just give me something to listen to.” 

He doesn’t answer right away. When you lower Dune just enough to peer over the top of it, he’s on his knees amid a small mountain of tapes, turning his Bat Out of Hell cassette over in his hands. You can tell, just by the look in his eyes, that it’s an old favourite he hasn’t come across in a long time. 

“On a hot summer night,” he starts, still grinning as he flips open its case, “will you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses?”

The deep undertones of his voice, suddenly performative, tug sharply at the pit of your stomach. But you don’t catch on right away. 

“What?” You’re dropping Dune into your lap as Eddie slots the cassette into his player, jamming his thumb into the fast-forward button. You should know better. He knows every album in that cabinet back-to-front.

“On a hot summer night,” he repeats, getting slowly to his feet with the light of thrilling entertainment flickering in his dark eyes. This time, the backing track rises to mimic his words, “would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses?” 

Now you’re on the same page. 

“Will he offer me his mouth?” you whisper around an achingly involuntary grin. Eddie’s eyebrows shoot into his hairline, but his smile doesn’t waver. He slowly approaches you, towering over his low-slung bed. 

“Yes,” he breathes, chest deflating with the syllable. Too caught up in the excitement of the act, you push Dune aside and fall forward onto your hands and knees. 

“Will he offer me his teeth?” You crawl forward to the edge of the bed, raising up onto your knees as he meets you in the middle. You’re raising your eyebrows with every other syllable, playing along just for him, and the unadulterated joy mirrored in Eddie’s expression makes it entirely worthwhile. He cradles your face between his palms and tilts it to meet the angle of his blazing eyes. 

“Yes,” he hisses softer this time, still chuckling as you raise your hands to cover his. 

“Will he offer me his jaws?” The end of your line trails slowly off as he digs his thumbs softly against your cheeks, forcing your mouth gently open while your jaw goes slack. 

His “yes” is weaker this time, and when you look up at him again it’s obvious that the light of humour has been extinguished in the dark of his gaze. He sinks his teeth into his lower lip, stroking both thumbs up and over the curves of your cheekbones. You can feel the heat sinking into your own eyes, letting the bit bleed into the genuine heat that builds in the minimal space between your mouth and his.

“Will he offer me his hunger?” you murmur in earnest this time, tongue wrapping slowly and deliberately around every syllable. 

Eddie’s voice is practically gone. He’s so close you can feel the delicate brush of his lips when he croaks, “yes.” 

“Again,” you taunt, because the track you mimic insists it, “will he offer me his hunger?” 

“Yes,” Eddie groans, the urgency in his tone nearly matching the one that echoes from the grainy speakers behind him. 

You don’t hesitate to seize the window that opens for you when Eddie loses himself to the bit. Sliding one hand to the back of his neck, you twine your fingers into the hair between its tie and his nape and drag him right up against the edge of the bed. He gives a hearty little gasp, the noise dissipating into a shudder as you slot one bare thigh into the space between his. 

From this angle, the stiff press of his growing arousal is more than apparent shoved down the leg of his undershorts. Caught off guard, he presses his hips down against your thigh and the heat of his hard cock seeps into your skin. You angle your leg more sharply into his groin and he gives a hollow choke of pleasure in response. 

“And will he starve without me?” 

You tug his head sharply down by the hair and let go just as his face snaps back toward the ceiling. Diving for the skin the new angle has exposed, you glide your tongue up the white column of his bared throat. 

“Yes!” His tone is practically pleading now, hung up on the tension that you’ve allowed to go suddenly slack. In a stark contrast to the roughness with which you’d pulled his head back, you glide your fingertips down his temples, brushing sweat-curled wisps behind his ears as he levels his face with yours again. 

His hands still cover your cheeks and you slip the backs of your fingers along his forearms to meet them, lacing your fingers between his through the backs of his palms. 

“And does he love me?” you ask, with all the sincerity of the feelings that drift between you. 

“Yes,” he answers, stout, certain, fine and warm. As you drown in the catastrophic depths of his gaze, he dips the pad of one thumb against your lower lip. 

“Yes,” you reply, breathing hotly across the edge of his thumb. He dips his face to yours again, close enough to brush the bridge of your nose with the tip of his. 

“On a hot summer night,” he repeats, voice low and earnest as a prayer, “would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses?” 

“Yes,” comes your answer. With it, you dip your chin into his palm and take the pad of his thumb into your mouth, licking up against the softest parts of his fingertip while his throat strangles groans just above you. His cock is fully hard now, jutting down the inside of your raised thigh, and he’s not shy about pressing it into your skin as his lips curve into the most indulgent smile you’ve ever seen. 

“I bet you say that to all the boys.” 

“They’re not your options,” he emphasizes dully. 

“Right. Sorry.” There’s a thin smile tugging at the corners of your lips. You’ve seen him parade proudly atop the cafeteria tables, bravely denouncing the attitudes of the people who snubbed him. A couple of years ago, you watched Eddie’s bandmates have to physically restrain him from doing a stage dive at the Hawkins High spring talent show. But sitting across from you, with his long legs folded awkwardly under a table too small for any reasonable pair, the prospect of a one-thousand-word English term paper has him looking pretty downtrodden. 

“Our options,” you correct, and the way his dark eyes spark as they flick up to look at you through parted bangs confirms that that’s not it, either. 

His throat bobs, jaw clenches, and he lets the sleeping dog lie. Pushing a few papers aside, he reads from the distributed assignment, which looks like it’s been sitting in the bottom of his bag from the moment it was handed to him. 

“Write an analytical essay on one of the three listed texts…” He trails off, eyes scanning to the bottom of the page. He sucks his teeth. 

“It’s worse than I thought.” 

“Give me that.” 

You pluck the sheet from his fingers and turn it around, finding the same place on the page.

“Hamlet, Huck Finn, or… Gatsby.” All texts you were happy to leave behind in your first year at Indiana State. 

"Well," you digress, putting the assignment down and folding your hands on top of it. "Let's start with the easy questions. Have you read all of these?" 

Eddie's lips disappear, and with a resigned look in his eye, he shakes his head. 

“Fair enough. Which ones did you get to?” 

More silence. He’s looking toward the window now, and when you follow his gaze your eyes briefly meet in its reflection before he gives up and casts his to the table in front of him. 

"Have you read… any of them?" you prod slowly, trying your best to let any sense of judgment or urgency drain from your tone. 

“I have-“ Eddie starts, drawing a hand slowly over his mouth and chin. He quirks a brow, then meets your eyes in the real world this time. 

“I have them.” 

So that’s where you’re at, then. 

“Eddieeee,” you groan, immediately scrubbing both hands over your face. “How am I supposed to help you write a paper on a book you haven’t even read?” 

“I don’t know,” Eddie defends nervously, and when you open your eyes again his demeanour has shifted. “Why-what d’you think I called you for?”

He’s running the fingers of one hand through his hair, separating and mussing any hint of a remaining curl.

You can see the whites of his eyes all of a sudden. The prospect of another victory lap is starting to dawn on him, and the reflection of it in his eyes sets something tough and determined in your chest. You’re going to get him that D, even if it kills your own spring semester. 

“No, no,” you sigh. “You were right. I owe you one. We’re just… gonna be here a little longer than I thought we would.” 

When you look across the table at him, his expression is one of such dogged remorse it tugs at something sharp and high in the hollow of your chest. He looks like a dog that’s just been thoroughly disciplined, and you’re honestly tempted to scratch him behind the ears and tell him it’s going to be okay. 

“It’s gonna be okay.” You give in, just a little, stacking some of the papers in front of you out of nervous compulsion. “You just need to pick a book, and then we’ll read it. No. This is good.” Steepling your fingers atop the newly stacked pages in front of you, whose edges curl in all different directions, you nod curtly. “This is good. Now you can actually read it through for the first time with your paper in mind. It’s better this way.” 

Eddie eyes you suspiciously, lip curling ever so slightly as his eyes narrow. Without another word, he gets up and disappears down the hallway. The jingling chain on his jeans gets fainter and fainter as he retreats into the room at the back of the trailer. 

“Where are you-“ For a minute, you let him vanish, but after a handful of seconds pass you begin to wonder if maybe you were supposed to follow him. Slowly, you extract yourself from the cramped dinette and retrace his steps down the narrow hallway and through the open door. 

As soon as you see the room beyond, it’s obvious that it’s his bedroom. Posters, drawings, and notebook pages are plastered all over the carpeted walls, and at the far end a pine bookshelf sticks out amongst all the black and red. Propped up against the mirror above it sits his animal print B.C. Rich Warlock, a guitar you’ve seen him play before at one too many high school talent shows. The crowd always booed his band off the stage for their heavy metal sound and freak status, but there’s never been any denying that Eddie knows how to shred. 

Beneath the guitar, band photos, and other memorabilia that's been pasted to the mirror, Eddie crouches, rifling through the bottom drawer with his back to you. 

“What are you looking for?” 

Eddie peeks over his shoulder at you from his crouched position, then produces a slim paperback book and stretches it out toward you from behind his back. 

“This,” he grunts. You close the distance and stoop, taking it from him. It’s an edition of Hamlet, and you realize with some chagrin that the edition you had in your senior year was much nicer than this one. 

But the paper makes no difference, so long as the words printed on it are the right ones. 

“Ideally, the other two, too,” he mumbles, digging back and forth through the drawer one more time before giving up, shutting it, and turning over to prop his back against the chest. “But it seems fate’s making my decision for me.” 

You look down at the text he handed you. It wouldn’t have been your first choice. But the more you think about it, the more appropriate it seems. 

“Shakespeare’s kind of hard to get the hang of,” you start. “But once you do, I think you’ll really like this one.”

You should be pressing the book into his hands and leaving him to digest it on his own terms. You should be getting into the Beetle your parents bought you as a graduation present and driving away, coming back tomorrow to help him structure his argument and pound out the paper before its Monday due date. 

Instead, you drop onto the edge of his low-slung bed and open Hamlet to the first page. 

"I'll believe that when I read it," Eddie replies. In your peripheral vision, you watch him climb slowly to his feet and cross the room toward you. He disappears for a moment, then the weight of him gently sinks the mattress beside you. The warmth of his scent washes over you- Old Spice, cheap metal, and body heat. You breathe in slowly. What else you might have been expecting— fire and brimstone, perhaps— dissolves. You're close enough that the chilly room seems warmed significantly by his presence, and you can feel him watching as you stare hard at the first page of the book in your hands. 

"It's..." you trail off, gathering your thoughts, "the closest thing you're gonna find to any of this stuff." You gesture to the wall at the foot of his bed, where a web of notes is tacked to the wall. At the top rests a single lined page, titled CULT OF VECNA in bold, scratchy blue ballpoint. Pages of notes waterfall downwards in a pyramid formation, charmingly tagged with dates starting as far back as January and culminating at the bottom with notes from only yesterday— March 15, 1986. 

"In that case," he murmurs. His voice is low and conspiratory and rumbles deep in the pit of your stomach as he leans toward you. His ring-studded fingers drop into your lap, carefully flipping through the book to a page that reads ACT 1, SCENE 1. He catches the corner of your eye with the corner of his and smiles so genuinely you'd think he wasn't in dire academic straits. 

“Let the show begin.” 

Three hours later, with the clock winding toward the wee hours, all pretense of formality has dropped. You lay sprawled across the width of Eddie’s bed together with your legs dangling over the side. He’s holding the book above you now, and with your temples pressed together, you’re reading the last few lines of the script. 

“Go, bid the soldiers shoot,” you read, and Eddie snaps the book shut, looking at you in cold, delighted shock. 

“They’re all dead?” he asks, thrilled disbelief persisting. You sink your teeth hard into your lower lip, but the bite fails to contain the smile that brims at the edges of your mouth as you nod. 

"No one wins," he declares, eyes still searching yours as if you might know of a secret, alternative ending that delivers the answers he wants. 

“That’s why they’re called tragedies,” you reply warmly.

For a handful of heartbeats, you stay put. Eddie doesn’t say anything right away, but his eyes are a hand’s breadth from yours and the light in them settles into something deep and amorphous and uncertain. For a moment, the lines in his face deepen so subtly that if you’d been any further from him you wouldn’t have noticed. 

In the next breath, everything slackens and he sits up. 

“Well,” he grunts. “Maybe if Hamlet could make a decision to save his life, things would have been different.” 

You snap your fingers, pointing to him as you prop yourself up on the other elbow. 

“Sounds like you’ve got a paper topic already, Munson.”

Eddie shakes his head. “I can’t write about that.” 

“Sure you can. Why not?” 

“What am I gonna say, Hamlet’s indecisiveness lead to his inevitable downfall?” He stops, goes very serious, and you get to watch him roll the words over in his head again. 

“There’s your thesis,” you quip, and he looks at you in slow shock. 

“Holy shit,” he breathes. His hands are scraping through his hair again and he stands up, pacing a tight loop around the remaining floor space of his cramped bedroom. “Holy shit, it’s that easy?”

“You find evidence to support your argument, write a few sentences of good bullshit at the beginning and end, and you’ve got yourself a term paper.” 

“God damn,” he declares, pumping a fist in the air and whirling around toward you. He presents both palms to you, as if he were your stage partner at curtain call, then slowly bows at the waist. 

“What would I do without you?” 

“Hang on,” you insist, pushing yourself up to sit properly on the edge of his bed again. “My work is far from finished. We still have to-“

“No, no, no, no way,” he insists, hooking both thumbs into the pockets of his jeans. He hasn’t been standing still throughout the entire conversation, still rocking idly back and forth from one foot to the other. “It’s two in the morning. I can’t make you stay back any longer. Your folks are probably shitting themselves right now.“ 

“My folks think I’m spending the night with Stacy Hamilton,” you counter, which is the truth. “As long as I show my face before noon tomorrow, they don’t give a shit what happens to me.” 

“Besides,” you continue, clasping both hands together between your knees, Your smugness falters for a minute, the lingering throb of memory flaring in your chest. 

Prom night. Eddie’s beat-up van. You, unable to contain your vicious sobs. Blowing your nose into a paper McDonald’s napkin while Eddie stared at the steering wheel in uncomfortable silence. 

“I owe you one.” 

Eddie’s brow creases. He steps forward a little, stilling suddenly. 

“Am I ever going to find out what happened that night?” he asks, heartbreakingly gentle. You don’t deserve it. 

“It’s not important,” you buffer, planting both hands hard on your thighs. You dig your fingernails into your knees a little, pressing hard through stiff denim. “I just needed a ride home. And you took the time away from… whatever it was you were doing to give me one. So, I’m seeing this paper through to the end.” 

Eddie looks away and purses his lips, evidently deep in thought. 

“Alright,” he relents. “Okay. What’s next?”

“Well, we should go back through everything we just read and find evidence to support the argument you came up with. And we should probably start making some notes, so we can turn them into a good outline. But…” You trail off, unhooking your fingers from your knees and stretching out the kinks in your back. Three hours of nothing but Shakespeare passed in an instant, but your spine’s reminding you that the three hours lying sprawled the wrong way around on Eddie’s antique mattress were all too real. 

“I could use a break,” Eddie suggests, and when you drop both arms back to your sides, you nod. 

“Read my mind.” 

Eddie nods, taking a quick look over his shoulder, through his open bedroom door, and into the hallway. 

“You hungry?” 

You hadn’t really thought about it, but the more you do, the more you realize that the empty gnawing in your stomach isn’t anxiety, it’s hunger. 

“Starving.” 

“Great.” Eddie starts quickly for the door. Before he can leave, though, he stalls, turning back around. “How ‘bout, uh…” 

In two steps he's across the room again and pulls open the cabinet sitting next to the boom box at the head of his bed. The shelves inside are lined with tapes, and he straightens up again, gesturing awkwardly toward them. 

“You can put some music on. Whatever you want. I’ll-I’ll find us some food.” 

Before you can even get to your feet Eddie’s made a break for it, disappearing down the hallway and into the kitchen. He’d seemed in a great hurry to get away from you suddenly, which is a conclusion you try not to take personally as you stoop in front of his cassette collection and look for something to break the silence. 

A few minutes later, Eddie comes back into the room with a pot of coffee in one hand and a plate of plain graham crackers in the other. Two chipped porcelain mugs dangle from his ring and pinkie fingers, and as he sets everything down on the chest by the mirror (a safe distance from the Warlock) you’re turning your cassette of choice over in your hands. 

“Find something?” he asks. You’re proud of yourself for this one. Gleefully, you grip the case by its edges and shove it toward him, showing him the faded label that’s been tucked neatly into the transparent acrylic case.

The Velvet Underground. It’s their titular album, too, with its trademark grainy black-and-white band photo superimposed onto a black background.

“Like finding a needle in a haystack,” you declare, watching him blanch. 

“Why do I even have that?” He mutters, drawing a palm over his face. 

“For when you bring girls over,” you chirp without thinking, already focused on loading the tape into his impressive-looking stereo. There are two things in this room he obviously saved for. The boom box, with its clean silver lines and automatic change system, is one of them. 

“Is that what you are?” he asks with wan humour obscuring any real emotion. 

“A girl?” you laugh, straightening up. You wind around him, passing close to his back as you loop across the room to perch on the edge of his bed again. 

“Last I checked,” you confirm, and he snorts, hesitating for an instant before slowly lowering himself onto the mattress beside you. 

The soft, heartfelt strains of Candy Says drift around the room, and he gives you a look so deep and so sincere you’re starting to wonder if you should have picked something harder to play, after all. He takes a breath like he’s about to say something, stops, then starts again, and you know you’re going to wish he hadn’t said it. 

“I would’ve taken you to the prom, you know.” 

It’s a concept so absurd you burst into quiet, breathy laughter, and he looks at you so surprised his expression reads something closer to injury. 

"No, you wouldn't have," you counter. "You didn't even go by yourself." 

“Of course I didn’t,” he retorts. He’s sneering, but the humour’s leaked back into his eyes and you’re starting to relax again. 

“So why in the hell would you have asked someone like me? You barely even knew me.” 

"And I still would have been a hell of a better date than that prick who took you." His tone is suddenly hard, suddenly urgent, and when he looks at you again his eyes seem to truly smoulder with fire and brimstone. The intensity of his gaze steals the air straight from your lungs and for a long moment, you struggle to catch it, looking back into his eyes while you take deep, greedy breaths through flared nostrils. 

Finally, you relent. Your shoulders drop. You flop onto your back. 

“Yeah. You would’ve.” 

Anyone would’ve. 

Eddie lies down beside you, tender as a lamb. For a moment his face stays firmly turned to the ceiling, but he lets it drop toward you, and slowly, you do the same. 

“I don’t know exactly what he did to you,” he confesses, speaking slowly, deliberately. “And I don’t need to. But I’ve never seen anybody cry like that before.” 

You flinch. 

“I know.” 

Eddie the Freak is gentle as a summer breeze as he rolls onto his side and traces the backs of his fingers down your inner forearm. His touch catches like lightning, and you don’t stop him as his palm lands in yours. 

He is beautiful like this, soft and slow as a flickering candle. But, then again, he's always been beautiful, ablaze with passion, and too bold to store it away. Too bold to pretend not to care, as has become so terrifyingly common among your generation. 

There’s nothing devilish about the boy sharing his bed with you. And the only crime is how long it’s taken you to see that. 

You turn onto your side, lacing your fingers slowly with his. Your new position puts his face a whisper from yours. The cool press of the bedsheet cradles your cheek, and the puffs of warm breath that escape his nose are strong enough to be palpable. 

You’d felt this way only once before when, in a cold fit of panic in the passenger’s seat of his beat-up van, he’d reached across the seat and settled a palm between your trembling shoulderblades. The sensation, nearly a year old at this point, is as fresh as the press of his fingers in yours. 

He’d talked you down from a ledge so high and so cold, and it was there, in the spring chill that clung to the peeling leather seats, that you’d felt the string pull taut for the first time. 

Eleven months of near-total alienation had slackened it. But it had never truly disintegrated. It was the gentlest tug, for the first time in nearly a year, when you’d heard his voice on the other end of the crackling phone line pleading for your tutelage that prompted you to lie to your parents, climb into your car, and in a fit of disbelief, drive across town in the fading light of dusk to Forest Hills Trailer Park. 

But curled in his bed with Pale Blue Eyes rumbling in the background and his face an inch from yours, it’s about to snap. 

"Eddie-" you start, but your voice fails you. You swallow hard. Watch his jaw clench. He lifts his other hand, brushes his fingertips down the edge of your jaw, and then, as you brace a hand against his sternum, gives in and cups your cheek. 

You both know what he’d say to you. And so it goes unsaid, as you dip carefully forward and brush the slack swell of your mouth to his. 

Your chest melts into magma when he responds in kind, stroking his thumb over your cheek. The angle is awkward and impossible, so after a breath, you draw back to face the consequences of your actions. 

Eddie's eyes slide open and he regards you with an expression so dumbstruck it seems almost certain you've slipped into a dream. Eddie Munson, who always knows what to say, struck silent by something as simple as a kiss. 

You’re kidding yourself if any of the feelings swirling through your limbs right now could be described as ‘simple.’ 

“That was…” he finally starts. Your stomach does a flip and you immediately lose your nerve. 

“Weird,” you conclude, sitting up rapidly and pressing the heels of your hands into your eyes. “Oh god, I’m… I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.” 

“Weird?” He sits up, too. Now that the touch barrier’s been broken he reaches for you, curling his fingers around your palms and tugging them away from your face. You’re forced to look at him, and his expression is stern, eyes intent. He shakes his head. 

“Not weird. Not weird at all.” 

Facing each other properly now, he reaches for you, cradling your head between both palms. You’re leveled by his gaze again, hands drifting forward to land on his thighs. 

“Can I try?” he asks. With your brain whirling inside your skull at the speed of a gale, you nod. 

He kisses you head-on, fuller and deeper this time, and the hum that escapes your chest is completely involuntary. You slack against him, giving in to the temptation that's heightened to insufferability ever since he got close enough for you to smell the Doublemint on his breath. Ever since he looked at you with all the sorrow of a widower, dropped the phony Shakespearean dialect he'd been using, and said slowly, mournfully, too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia.

You curl your fingers into his t-shirt, gripping tightly with one hand and stroking up his chest with the other like you might soothe the wrinkles your grasp creates. You drape one hand over the plane of his shoulder and he takes the opportunity to plant his hand in the small of your back, fingers outspread. He draws you closer and you comply, shifting forward until you can get no closer without climbing into his lap. Then you climb closer still, letting your thighs fall open over his. Denim presses over denim as your weight settles into his lap and, emboldened by the insistent press of his mouth up into yours, you grab for his jaw with both hands and slot your lips together so deeply he groans straight down your throat, palm trembling at the waistband of your jeans. 

You curve your body forward to press torso and pelvis together, and his hips give a startled little twitch against yours. Suddenly out of breath, he draws back a little, angling his face ever so slightly away from yours. 

“I’ve- I’ve never…” he ejects, and suddenly you realize what he’s trying to tell you. He shifts a little beneath you as you sit slowly back, and the evidence of your indiscretion suddenly presses long and firm down the inside of your thigh. Your pulse spikes, but you force yourself to take a breath and look him sincerely in the eye. 

“Do you want to stop?” 

“What?” His eyes narrow in disbelief. “No. I- no. I just thought-" He straightens a little and shifts again, and this time you both feel it, the hard press of him down one leg of his faded denim. He stiffens, and the red that's crept out of the edges of his collar flushes his cheeks. 

"I just thought I should tell you now. In case you don't..." He trails off, and you're glad he does because it means he can't find a sensible way to finish that sentence. 

“I’m glad you told me,” you promise, dipping forward to gently nuzzle along the joint of his jaw and neck. He shivers and inhales softly through his teeth, drawing his hands up your sides. “But I’m not going anywhere.” 

“Okay,” he replies dumbly. His voice wavers as you press your mouth to the patch of skin you’d been nuzzling, sucking lightly just to make him squirm. 

“Okay,” he says one more time as his muscles twitch, palms stuttering at either side of your ribcage. You sit back, heart aflutter with pure, golden affection. 

“Here,” you prompt. “Let’s make it feel real, hmm?” You dip your fingers under the stitched hem of his t-shirt and slowly start to pull it up his back. He reacts immediately, helping you tug it over his head and tossing it to the side. His chest is broad and solid— lacking the definition of an athlete, but bearing all the strength of a man. A bristle of coarse, dark hair dusts his sternum, narrowing into a bare abdomen and a short trail that connects his navel to the low-slung waistband of his jeans. He wears a guitar pick with a hole punched in it, strung around his neck on a dog tag chain that’s always been long enough to hide the makeshift pendant.

The sparse tattoos that stud his wrists, forearms, and biceps spill onto his chest as well, all in well-faded black ink. You trace your thumb over the biggest one, whose edges you've seen before emerging from the lowest necklines of his t-shirts. 

He exhales slowly, watching your every move. 

"'m not exactly-" he starts, but you lean forward and kiss him before he can put a voice to those thoughts. 

When you pull away it’s only to tug your own loose t-shirt over your head, and he goes a little white as he looks over the warm expanse of your skin. You’re left wearing a simple, sculpted t-shirt bra now in an inconspicuous colour, and as he reaches for you again his fingers trace the edges of its band. 

"This too?" you prompt, reaching behind you for the clasp. Eddie panics. 

“No! I-uh-if you want,” he assures, going pink all over again. “You’re. I just. You’re gorgeous.” 

Any lingering doubt is washed away in the torrent of warm affection that floods your senses. You like this side of him. He is dedicated and confident and bold, but just for you, he's sincere. Tender. Sweet, even. 

It occurs to you that you’ve somehow earned the right to see this side of him, and as you unclasp your bra you make a silent vow to never, ever, make him regret trusting you. 

Your bra joins the twin t-shirts on the ratty carpet and then he has you, bare from the waist up. He traces his fingertips up your sides again, uninhibited all the way up your ribcage, then cups your ribs between both hands and strokes his fingers tenderly into the creases under each breast. 

“Tell me to stop,” he practically chokes, “if I do something you don’t like.” 

“You could never,” you promise airily, losing yourself. There’s a part of you that could truly love him, and another, deeper part of you that’s already starting to. 

“Wanna taste every part of you,” he confesses, dipping his head to the juncture of your shoulder and starting to kiss as his thumbs drift upward onto the flesh of your breasts. 

You hiccup softly as dull pleasure flashes through your nerves, and it spurs him on enough to give in and cup your breasts entirely, fitting the curves of them into his palms. Slowly he dips downward, drawing his mouth to meet his hands, and as his tongue traces your sternum he pushes your breasts gently together to kiss at the juncture of them. 

"Eddie—" you whimper, and he takes the wordless direction with ease, flipping his hands over to cup your breasts at the sides and trace his thumbs across the rapidly hardening swells of your nipples. The nerves and the cool air of the poorly-sealed trailer already had them rising to his touch, but goosebumps race up your sternum when he touches them for the first time. 

“Sensitive there?” he mumbles against your skin and you nod fitfully into his hair. He leans back for a moment, adjusts, then slowly the wet, warm press of his tongue curls around the peak of your right nipple and your toes curl in their department-store socks. 

He tweaks the other one gently between knuckle and thumb, making you yelp and flinch further into the hot lave of his tongue. He closes his mouth around the bud of it and gives a gentle suck. You angle your hips down against his and grind hard to reassure him, which seems to work, as he responds in kind with a groan and a flick of his tongue. 

“Eddie, don’t make me wait,” you whimper, pushing him slowly back as the heat builds to indelible levels between your thighs. 

"Wouldn't-" his voice catches as you push him back against the pillows, and he centers himself on both elbows, watching you shift backward and make for his belt. 

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” 

You dig into the opening of his belt buckle, tugging the strap out so forcefully it snaps painfully back against your wrist. With another tug, you've got it unfastened, and in the span of a breath you're unbuttoning his jeans and tugging the zipper down with one hand. As you do, your free hand finds the swell of his cock where it's trapped against his thigh. You squeeze it gently and he twitches into your hand, groaning sharp and low. The look that clouds his eyes is nothing short of addictive. 

You’re going back in for a bigger hit. 

“My turn,” you brush, working jeans and boxer shorts over his narrow hips. He plants his hands on the mattress and lifts his hips to help you, silent with what feels like disbelief. You’re struck by it, too. No matter how many parts of you have been wanting this. It never seemed like something that would actually happen. 

“Gotta taste you.” That sentence seems to process properly and he blinks, lowering his chin and lifting his head. 

“What?” 

But you’re already tugging his pants down and off, addicted to the way the curved swell of his cock bounces free to lay against his stomach. His legs bow nervously as you drop what remains of his clothing onto the carpet, and you draw both hands up his pale thighs to soothe his tightly-strung muscles. 

“You heard me.” Your voice is coming in a low, rolling purr that feels entirely unfamiliar, but it disguises the shakiness in your chest as you settle between his legs. He’s watching you so intently right now he’s not even blinking, staring down the length of his torso at your slow, measured movements. 

You wrap chilly fingers around the base of his cock- so warm- and he shudders. It’s a little longer than average and thicker than it looks, the weight of it sitting pleasantly between your fingers. The skin is warm, pale, and impossibly soft, and as you draw your hand up and down the shaft of him, his uncut foreskin finishes drawing back to reveal the slick pink, blunt head of him, already leaking a pearly bead of clear fluid. 

“Uh,” he starts, but his voice dies out as you drop your lips to his tip and draw your tongue slowly across the head, tasting him. 

“Holy shit.” His head falls back against the pillows, but he quickly corrects himself, as if realizing he might miss something, and picks his head up to stare one more time. 

“So I’m guessing no one’s ever done this to you before, either,” you hum. You dip your head to the base and lick a long stripe up his underside, finding a thick vein to follow with the tip of your tongue. 

"N-no one's ever done anything to me," he grits. Under your free hand, his thigh is hard as a rock. "No one's… no one's done anything." 

The way he says it unlocks something deep and tender and sympathetic in your heart, and you speak the wholehearted truth in your reply. 

“Then I am honored to be the first.” 

He doesn't deserve any teasing after a confession like that, so you lift your chin and direct his tip to your mouth, sucking him down with all the gentleness he's shown you. Even with the gentlest press of your lips and tongue, he reacts powerfully, grunting sharply through clenched-sounding teeth. 

“Holy shit. Oh god, don’t-“ 

You work him into a slow rhythm, wrapping your hand around the base to hold him steady while you bob up and down on the parts of him you can take. Your tongue pulses gently against his underside as you work to keep your mouth slack, letting the ridges of his shape work over the softest and wettest parts of your mouth. 

All the while, Eddie squirms and pitches above you, smoothing his fingers into the sheets at his sides, then clenching them when you do something new. After a few rhythmic bobs of your head, he obviously realizes it's okay to touch you because he reaches hesitantly forward to settle a hand on your shoulder first. Then he glides it to the back of your neck instead and keeps it there. The jostle of your head brushes his thumb against your sensitive nape, sending fresh goosebumps down your spine as you work him over. 

"God, y-you gotta-" he starts. The first outburst is hardly urgent, but his voice spirals upwards into a sudden panic. "Wait, please, slow down, y-you have to… s-stop." 

He’s cupping your cheeks suddenly, but you’re sensing his change of pace and pulling off him before he can get a solid grip on your face. His cock pops out of your mouth with a lewd little squelch and he holds you there panting, tracing a thumb over the sloppy swell of your lower lip. 

"Is everything okay?" You ask quietly, searching his face. His expression is cloudy, unreadable. After a moment, he seems to recover and shoots you a lopsided smile. 

“Almost lost it on you there.” 

Relief floods your mind as you tilt your head, matching his smile. 

“You’re allowed to lose it on me. In fact, I think that’s kinda the point.” 

“I know,” he promises. “But.” He looks up at you, smiling shyly. 

“Oh. You think there’s more to this, do you?” 

Eddie’s expression drops. 

“No,” he counters from his gut. “Well,” He pauses, looking down at you in dull panic. But you’re still smiling, so his shoulders don’t take long to relax again. 

“I’m sorry.” You push onto your knees and crawl up his torso, holding yourself gently atop him. “I’ll stop messing with you. I promise.” You drop a kiss to his mouth, then roll away completely to stand up. 

Eddie sits up a little to watch you, and in the low warm light of the wee hours, he is breathtaking. Sprawled out for you, his hard, weeping cock still slick and shiny from your efforts, guitar pick necklace strewed crookedly across his collarbone. What's more breathtaking than anything is the way he looks at you, like you are the star he's just lucky enough to orbit. 

You unbutton your jeans and hook your thumbs through your underwear, wedging both down over your hips and stepping out of them. He casts a wondrous eye over your naked body, reaching for you low and soft and slow. You step over the pile of clothes and collapse slowly to the mattress beside him. 

Eddie rolls onto his side and kisses you long and tender, drawing a hand down your sternum and belly. Your thighs fall open instinctively and he dips his hand into the space between them. As soon as his fingers brush the warm gush of your cunt you groan in unison. 

“Shit,” he grits, drawing out the shhh as his chest deflates against yours. “You’re drenched, baby.” 

The nickname slingshots through your head and bounces off your heartstrings like a pinball. You draw a sharp, short little breath and grab his chin in one hand. 

“Just kiss me again.” 

He complies, bending to seal his lips against yours as his fingers continue to dip into your folds. He brushes one fingertip inward, finding the opening of your entrance and pressing slowly inward with middle, then ring finger, then both. 

“Hooly shit,” he draws again as he feels out the edges of your insides, and you drop back from his mouth to chew your upper lip and whine softly at the sensations he draws from you. The pleasure is mild, but the anticipation of more sends little shocks of pleasure into your body with every press of his fingers. 

He curls them gently, finding the spongy, tender surface of your upper wall. As he presses inward again, the heel of his palm tweaks the swollen nub of your clit and you flinch. 

“Oh?” He shoots you a quizzical, suddenly playful expression. It feels good- really good- to watch him take pleasure in figuring you out. He arches his hand and presses his thumb toward you. The tender pad finds your clit deliberately now. 

“Did I find something good?” He’s a little breathless, but his playful spirit has returned as he gives your clit a gentle strum and watches as you fight off a spasm of pleasure in your lower belly. 

“Yeah,” you pant. “Keep touching it.” 

"Okay." He nods, light but sincere all over again. "Okay, I won't stop." Letting his fingers rest inside you, he winds a slow, clockwise spiral into your clit. Your hips are pinned under his hand, but by the time he's winding outward again, you're trembling underneath him. 

“Back and forth,” you breathe, needing rhythm and something to latch onto. “Eddie, do it back and forth.” 

He takes the direction nobly, switching his movement to a slow, steady back-and-forth rub. The tempo is flawless and steady, which shouldn’t surprise you, and it’s not long before you’re squirming on his fingers, cunt fluttering and clenching around them as he works you into a pleasure-filled stupor. He checks in with you every time something changes, and you quietly reassure him, redirect him, or, as words begin to fail you, dumbly nod and scramble to lace your fingers through those of his free hand. 

He’s right there with you now, gripping your fingers tightly in one hand and working you firmly with the other with your foreheads pressed together. There’s silence for a moment, but as you let out a laboured, held breath, a deep, tingly sort of pleasure crawls up the column of your spine and you start to pitch and fuss. 

“Eddie,” you whimper, a sudden urgency finding your voice. “Eddie, ‘m gonna come.” 

“You’re-“ He doesn’t understand immediately, but it dawns on him quickly. 

“Oh god, baby, come on,” he urges tightly, keeping the rhythm of his working fingers steady. “Come on.” 

“Right there,” you plead. “Right, yeah, yeah y-“ 

The cry of pleasure dies in your throat and you push your forehead against his with a dull whimper instead as your belly spasms and your legs twitch. Your cunt flutters and clenches down hard around his fingers with shallow handfuls of slick coating them. You're squeezing his hand so hard the ridges of his rings dig into your fingers, but you're too far gone now. Ecstasy races through your nerves and you squeeze your eyes shut, giving in to the pleasure and letting the involuntary ride of your hips take over. 

When you surface, Eddie’s hand lays slack between your legs. As he sees your eyes open, he carefully untangles his hand from yours and reaches up to trace his fingertips down the side of your face, breathless himself. 

“Holy shit,” it’s your turn to say, smiling airily at him. He snorts quietly, beaming back at you. 

“Was that a good ‘holy shit’ or a bad ‘holy shit?’” he asks. After catching your breath, you answer. 

“Should I have been asking you that the whole time?” 

Eddie laughs, ducking his face into the curve of your shoulder. 

“Come here,” you prompt. Confused, he rolls a little closer, but you take charge and tug him between your legs, dragging him on top of you fully. 

“We don’t have to,” he starts, but his cock is maroon and twitching against your hip, drooling a steady stream of pre into the divot of your pelvis. 

You’re still sensitive and already picturing how good he’ll feel inside you. There’s no turning back now. 

“Want it,” you promise, turning your eyes to his. “Want you.” 

He pauses, searching your gaze. He shakes his head slowly. 

“Never thought I’d hear something like that outta someone like you.” 

“Believe it, Munson,” you counter, reaching up to brush sweaty bangs out of his eyes. “You’re all mine now.” 

“Gladly,” he breathes deeply, leaning down for another slow kiss. As he licks lazily into your mouth he spreads his thighs under yours, lowering his hips and aligning himself with your ready cunt. 

He pulls back from your mouth to concentrate for a moment, looking down his body at the place where you’re joined. Carefully, with the fingers of one hand braced gently on your pubic bone, he eases his hips forward, breaching the wet threshold and slotting slowly into you. 

You bite your lip, exhaling slowly through the sweet, sensitive stretch of it. He buries himself halfway, then pitches forward with a shaky groan and slides all the way home, already trembling above you. 

“Fuck,” he grunts. “God. I’m not gonna last at all.” 

“I don’t care,” you insist, wrapping your arms around his broad back, clutching at him. You’ve had your pleasure. “Just fuck me.” 

He takes that instruction to heart and draws himself back from you again, pulling his hips gently backward, then fucking carefully into you just once. 

“Jeeeesus,” he draws, eyes falling shut. “You’re amazing.” 

He does it again, again, again, then settles into the same heartful tempo with which his fingers had worked you over so easily before. You close your eyes and submit to the feeling, settling into the rhythm and the slow, percussive slap of his hips against yours. 

Eddie lets a heavy breath from his chest with every thrust, and you try your best to capture the soft huh huh huh of his working lungs as he pants into your neck. 

You want to remember all of this. Until, hopefully, you can do it again. 

Eddie reaches down and hitches your thighs over his, angling his hips down ever so slightly and fucking deeper into you than before. The push of his hips has your head rocking against his cheap pillows, cutting dangerously close to knocking over the expensive tape deck that's already switched itself to Side 2 of the cassette, where the rest of "The Velvet Underground" plays at a lazy beat. 

You sling both arms over your head and your fingertips brush it. The low thrum of the bass vibrates through your fingers as Eddie smooths all the hair back from your face and braces your head between both hands as he throws himself against you over and over again. His eyes are dark, fathomless flecks of obsidian in the dim light, but they are wide and warm with the adoration that bubbles frighteningly fast and intense between you. 

But the rest of his expression is measured and taut. As soon as you pick up on it, you realize his hips have slowed, too. In an instant, he's gone from losing himself in you to exercising careful control on every tentative movement. 

The joint of your hips is molten at this point, with heat building to a quickly intolerable level. And then you realize what he’s holding back on. You draw him in, gripping his hips between both thighs. 

“Close,” you pant. “You’re close, aren’t you?” His pained little grunt confirms your suspicions. 

“I’ll… try ’n hold out,” he pants. “Gotta…” 

“No,” you plead. “Don’t hold out. Please, Eddie, I wanna see you cum.” 

“Christ,” he mutters under his breath. “It’s gonna be, like, now.” 

“I don’t care.” 

You buck your hips against his indignantly, and he lets out such a howl of pleasure it almost startles you. Drawing in a deep, shaky breath, his mouth sets into a tight, firm line. 

He gives into it. 

With another glide of his hands down the sides of your face, he re-engages, spreading his thighs long and low and starting to thrust. His movements grow erratic quickly, and in only a handful of thrusts, he's throwing himself against you with a long, guttural moan that shakes him to the very tips of his hair. He stills against you, sealing hips and chest and mouth to yours, and his balls twitch between your legs before he's shuddering and emptying them into your welcoming heat, shaft twitching between your walls as he slowly fucks the long spurts of his climax into your clingy depths. 

When it’s over, he collapses atop you, sweaty and spent, and you wrap your arms around him, frighteningly, immersively, irreversibly in love. 

“We just…” he trailed off, separating himself from you carefully and rolling onto his side. His body curls vulnerably around yours, and he doesn’t speak again until you do. 

“Do you regret it?” you mumble quietly, mildly, to disguise the weight behind the question. He cuts you a strange look, then realizes you’re kind of serious and his expression softens. 

“Nah.” He plants a hand on the plane of your belly. His touch is gentle but the skin is rough— it’s his fretting hand. He purses his lips in thought, then finds your eyes again. 

“You?”

“Uh-uh,” you assure. 

You lie there until the tape’s played all the way through, listening as the last sunny strums of After Hours fade into silence and the machine whirrs softly, resetting the tape. There’s a quiet, percussive click as play/pause slots back into place, and then the silence is true and thick. 

You could discuss the feelings that have settled between you. You could talk about how you're probably one of the most mismatched couples Hawkins has ever seen if you're even ready to call yourselves that. 

Instead, you sit up slowly, smooth your hair, and reach down for your clothes. 

“I guess we should get back to work.” 

Eddie’s obviously not sure how to take your digression, sitting up beside you and hesitating to touch you again. He does anyway, though, thumbing your chin quietly before he ducks away and reaches for his own clothes. 

“We should.” 

At eight o’clock the following morning, with soreness settling into your muscles and a completed draft of Eddie’s term paper sitting on the dinette table, you lean against one narrow edge of the trailer’s doorframe while he boxes you in and kisses you. The wear of an all-nighter is settling in around the edges of his eyes as you draw back with your car keys looped around your finger. 

“You’re going back tonight, right?” he asks you quietly with a hand cradling your jaw. You haven’t been able to tear yourself from him since you put your clothes back on. 

“Yeah,” you answer, unable to keep the mournful tone from your expression. “But I’ll be back at the end of April.” 

“For the summer,” he checks hopefully. You smile blissfully. You can’t help it. 

“Yeah,” you say, looking forward to it already. “For the whole summer.” 

"Then I guess I'll see you in April," he brushes slowly. He reaches for both your hands and squeezes them between his own. For a moment, his brow flicks downwards. He grips them tighter, then releases you, and you back slowly down the steps. Your little green VW bug's been parked on the grass outside his trailer all night, and you're ready to let that mean to his neighbours whatever they want it to mean. 

“Don’t be a stranger,” he calls suddenly, softly. When you turn to face him again he bobs a little, jiggling his finger and thumb beside his ear in a mockery of the people who used to be your classmates. 

Call me, he mouths, smiling indulgently. You nod sharply and unlock the driver’s side door of your little car, saluting him before ducking inside. 

He says in the doorway of the trailer until you hit the park’s entrance. It’s only as you’re slowing down to turn onto the sleepy little road that winds back into Hawkins that you glance into your rearview mirror and watch him disappear into the trailer, shutting the door behind him. 

You grip the steering wheel a little tighter, making your turn. As you accelerate towards town something deep and rotten clenches in your gut. It stays there all day long and doesn't so much as lose an inch, even as you're speeding out of town that night toward the interstate. 

“They’re not your options,” he emphasizes dully. 

“Right. Sorry.” There’s a thin smile tugging at the corners of your lips. You’ve seen him parade proudly atop the cafeteria tables, bravely denouncing the attitudes of the people who snubbed him. A couple of years ago, you watched Eddie’s bandmates have to physically restrain him from doing a stage dive at the Hawkins High spring talent show. But sitting across from you, with his long legs folded awkwardly under a table too small for any reasonable pair, the prospect of a one-thousand-word English term paper has him looking pretty downtrodden. 

“Our options,” you correct, and the way his dark eyes spark as they flick up to look at you through parted bangs confirms that that’s not it, either. 

His throat bobs, jaw clenches, and he lets the sleeping dog lie. Pushing a few papers aside, he reads from the distributed assignment, which looks like it’s been sitting in the bottom of his bag from the moment it was handed to him. 

“Write an analytical essay on one of the three listed texts…” He trails off, eyes scanning to the bottom of the page. He sucks his teeth. 

“It’s worse than I thought.” 

“Give me that.” 

You pluck the sheet from his fingers and turn it around, finding the same place on the page.

“Hamlet, Huck Finn, or… Gatsby.” All texts you were happy to leave behind in your first year at Indiana State. 

"Well," you digress, putting the assignment down and folding your hands on top of it. "Let's start with the easy questions. Have you read all of these?" 

Eddie's lips disappear, and with a resigned look in his eye, he shakes his head. 

“Fair enough. Which ones did you get to?” 

More silence. He’s looking toward the window now, and when you follow his gaze your eyes briefly meet in its reflection before he gives up and casts his to the table in front of him. 

"Have you read… any of them?" you prod slowly, trying your best to let any sense of judgment or urgency drain from your tone. 

“I have-“ Eddie starts, drawing a hand slowly over his mouth and chin. He quirks a brow, then meets your eyes in the real world this time. 

“I have them.” 

So that’s where you’re at, then. 

“Eddieeee,” you groan, immediately scrubbing both hands over your face. “How am I supposed to help you write a paper on a book you haven’t even read?” 

“I don’t know,” Eddie defends nervously, and when you open your eyes again his demeanour has shifted. “Why-what d’you think I called you for?”

He’s running the fingers of one hand through his hair, separating and mussing any hint of a remaining curl.

You can see the whites of his eyes all of a sudden. The prospect of another victory lap is starting to dawn on him, and the reflection of it in his eyes sets something tough and determined in your chest. You’re going to get him that D, even if it kills your own spring semester. 

“No, no,” you sigh. “You were right. I owe you one. We’re just… gonna be here a little longer than I thought we would.” 

When you look across the table at him, his expression is one of such dogged remorse it tugs at something sharp and high in the hollow of your chest. He looks like a dog that’s just been thoroughly disciplined, and you’re honestly tempted to scratch him behind the ears and tell him it’s going to be okay. 

“It’s gonna be okay.” You give in, just a little, stacking some of the papers in front of you out of nervous compulsion. “You just need to pick a book, and then we’ll read it. No. This is good.” Steepling your fingers atop the newly stacked pages in front of you, whose edges curl in all different directions, you nod curtly. “This is good. Now you can actually read it through for the first time with your paper in mind. It’s better this way.” 

Eddie eyes you suspiciously, lip curling ever so slightly as his eyes narrow. Without another word, he gets up and disappears down the hallway. The jingling chain on his jeans gets fainter and fainter as he retreats into the room at the back of the trailer. 

“Where are you-“ For a minute, you let him vanish, but after a handful of seconds pass you begin to wonder if maybe you were supposed to follow him. Slowly, you extract yourself from the cramped dinette and retrace his steps down the narrow hallway and through the open door. 

As soon as you see the room beyond, it’s obvious that it’s his bedroom. Posters, drawings, and notebook pages are plastered all over the carpeted walls, and at the far end a pine bookshelf sticks out amongst all the black and red. Propped up against the mirror above it sits his animal print B.C. Rich Warlock, a guitar you’ve seen him play before at one too many high school talent shows. The crowd always booed his band off the stage for their heavy metal sound and freak status, but there’s never been any denying that Eddie knows how to shred. 

Beneath the guitar, band photos, and other memorabilia that's been pasted to the mirror, Eddie crouches, rifling through the bottom drawer with his back to you. 

“What are you looking for?” 

Eddie peeks over his shoulder at you from his crouched position, then produces a slim paperback book and stretches it out toward you from behind his back. 

“This,” he grunts. You close the distance and stoop, taking it from him. It’s an edition of Hamlet, and you realize with some chagrin that the edition you had in your senior year was much nicer than this one. 

But the paper makes no difference, so long as the words printed on it are the right ones. 

“Ideally, the other two, too,” he mumbles, digging back and forth through the drawer one more time before giving up, shutting it, and turning over to prop his back against the chest. “But it seems fate’s making my decision for me.” 

You look down at the text he handed you. It wouldn’t have been your first choice. But the more you think about it, the more appropriate it seems. 

“Shakespeare’s kind of hard to get the hang of,” you start. “But once you do, I think you’ll really like this one.”

You should be pressing the book into his hands and leaving him to digest it on his own terms. You should be getting into the Beetle your parents bought you as a graduation present and driving away, coming back tomorrow to help him structure his argument and pound out the paper before its Monday due date. 

Instead, you drop onto the edge of his low-slung bed and open Hamlet to the first page. 

"I'll believe that when I read it," Eddie replies. In your peripheral vision, you watch him climb slowly to his feet and cross the room toward you. He disappears for a moment, then the weight of him gently sinks the mattress beside you. The warmth of his scent washes over you- Old Spice, cheap metal, and body heat. You breathe in slowly. What else you might have been expecting— fire and brimstone, perhaps— dissolves. You're close enough that the chilly room seems warmed significantly by his presence, and you can feel him watching as you stare hard at the first page of the book in your hands. 

"It's..." you trail off, gathering your thoughts, "the closest thing you're gonna find to any of this stuff." You gesture to the wall at the foot of his bed, where a web of notes is tacked to the wall. At the top rests a single lined page, titled CULT OF VECNA in bold, scratchy blue ballpoint. Pages of notes waterfall downwards in a pyramid formation, charmingly tagged with dates starting as far back as January and culminating at the bottom with notes from only yesterday— March 15, 1986. 

"In that case," he murmurs. His voice is low and conspiratory and rumbles deep in the pit of your stomach as he leans toward you. His ring-studded fingers drop into your lap, carefully flipping through the book to a page that reads ACT 1, SCENE 1. He catches the corner of your eye with the corner of his and smiles so genuinely you'd think he wasn't in dire academic straits. 

“Let the show begin.” 

Three hours later, with the clock winding toward the wee hours, all pretense of formality has dropped. You lay sprawled across the width of Eddie’s bed together with your legs dangling over the side. He’s holding the book above you now, and with your temples pressed together, you’re reading the last few lines of the script. 

“Go, bid the soldiers shoot,” you read, and Eddie snaps the book shut, looking at you in cold, delighted shock. 

“They’re all dead?” he asks, thrilled disbelief persisting. You sink your teeth hard into your lower lip, but the bite fails to contain the smile that brims at the edges of your mouth as you nod. 

"No one wins," he declares, eyes still searching yours as if you might know of a secret, alternative ending that delivers the answers he wants. 

“That’s why they’re called tragedies,” you reply warmly.

For a handful of heartbeats, you stay put. Eddie doesn’t say anything right away, but his eyes are a hand’s breadth from yours and the light in them settles into something deep and amorphous and uncertain. For a moment, the lines in his face deepen so subtly that if you’d been any further from him you wouldn’t have noticed. 

In the next breath, everything slackens and he sits up. 

“Well,” he grunts. “Maybe if Hamlet could make a decision to save his life, things would have been different.” 

You snap your fingers, pointing to him as you prop yourself up on the other elbow. 

“Sounds like you’ve got a paper topic already, Munson.”

Eddie shakes his head. “I can’t write about that.” 

“Sure you can. Why not?” 

“What am I gonna say, Hamlet’s indecisiveness lead to his inevitable downfall?” He stops, goes very serious, and you get to watch him roll the words over in his head again. 

“There’s your thesis,” you quip, and he looks at you in slow shock. 

“Holy shit,” he breathes. His hands are scraping through his hair again and he stands up, pacing a tight loop around the remaining floor space of his cramped bedroom. “Holy shit, it’s that easy?”

“You find evidence to support your argument, write a few sentences of good bullshit at the beginning and end, and you’ve got yourself a term paper.” 

“God damn,” he declares, pumping a fist in the air and whirling around toward you. He presents both palms to you, as if he were your stage partner at curtain call, then slowly bows at the waist. 

“What would I do without you?” 

“Hang on,” you insist, pushing yourself up to sit properly on the edge of his bed again. “My work is far from finished. We still have to-“

“No, no, no, no way,” he insists, hooking both thumbs into the pockets of his jeans. He hasn’t been standing still throughout the entire conversation, still rocking idly back and forth from one foot to the other. “It’s two in the morning. I can’t make you stay back any longer. Your folks are probably shitting themselves right now.“ 

“My folks think I’m spending the night with Stacy Hamilton,” you counter, which is the truth. “As long as I show my face before noon tomorrow, they don’t give a shit what happens to me.” 

“Besides,” you continue, clasping both hands together between your knees, Your smugness falters for a minute, the lingering throb of memory flaring in your chest. 

Prom night. Eddie’s beat-up van. You, unable to contain your vicious sobs. Blowing your nose into a paper McDonald’s napkin while Eddie stared at the steering wheel in uncomfortable silence. 

“I owe you one.” 

Eddie’s brow creases. He steps forward a little, stilling suddenly. 

“Am I ever going to find out what happened that night?” he asks, heartbreakingly gentle. You don’t deserve it. 

“It’s not important,” you buffer, planting both hands hard on your thighs. You dig your fingernails into your knees a little, pressing hard through stiff denim. “I just needed a ride home. And you took the time away from… whatever it was you were doing to give me one. So, I’m seeing this paper through to the end.” 

Eddie looks away and purses his lips, evidently deep in thought. 

“Alright,” he relents. “Okay. What’s next?”

“Well, we should go back through everything we just read and find evidence to support the argument you came up with. And we should probably start making some notes, so we can turn them into a good outline. But…” You trail off, unhooking your fingers from your knees and stretching out the kinks in your back. Three hours of nothing but Shakespeare passed in an instant, but your spine’s reminding you that the three hours lying sprawled the wrong way around on Eddie’s antique mattress were all too real. 

“I could use a break,” Eddie suggests, and when you drop both arms back to your sides, you nod. 

“Read my mind.” 

Eddie nods, taking a quick look over his shoulder, through his open bedroom door, and into the hallway. 

“You hungry?” 

You hadn’t really thought about it, but the more you do, the more you realize that the empty gnawing in your stomach isn’t anxiety, it’s hunger. 

“Starving.” 

“Great.” Eddie starts quickly for the door. Before he can leave, though, he stalls, turning back around. “How ‘bout, uh…” 

In two steps he's across the room again and pulls open the cabinet sitting next to the boom box at the head of his bed. The shelves inside are lined with tapes, and he straightens up again, gesturing awkwardly toward them. 

“You can put some music on. Whatever you want. I’ll-I’ll find us some food.” 

Before you can even get to your feet Eddie’s made a break for it, disappearing down the hallway and into the kitchen. He’d seemed in a great hurry to get away from you suddenly, which is a conclusion you try not to take personally as you stoop in front of his cassette collection and look for something to break the silence. 

A few minutes later, Eddie comes back into the room with a pot of coffee in one hand and a plate of plain graham crackers in the other. Two chipped porcelain mugs dangle from his ring and pinkie fingers, and as he sets everything down on the chest by the mirror (a safe distance from the Warlock) you’re turning your cassette of choice over in your hands. 

“Find something?” he asks. You’re proud of yourself for this one. Gleefully, you grip the case by its edges and shove it toward him, showing him the faded label that’s been tucked neatly into the transparent acrylic case.

The Velvet Underground. It’s their titular album, too, with its trademark grainy black-and-white band photo superimposed onto a black background.

“Like finding a needle in a haystack,” you declare, watching him blanch. 

“Why do I even have that?” He mutters, drawing a palm over his face. 

“For when you bring girls over,” you chirp without thinking, already focused on loading the tape into his impressive-looking stereo. There are two things in this room he obviously saved for. The boom box, with its clean silver lines and automatic change system, is one of them. 

“Is that what you are?” he asks with wan humour obscuring any real emotion. 

“A girl?” you laugh, straightening up. You wind around him, passing close to his back as you loop across the room to perch on the edge of his bed again. 

“Last I checked,” you confirm, and he snorts, hesitating for an instant before slowly lowering himself onto the mattress beside you. 

The soft, heartfelt strains of Candy Says drift around the room, and he gives you a look so deep and so sincere you’re starting to wonder if you should have picked something harder to play, after all. He takes a breath like he’s about to say something, stops, then starts again, and you know you’re going to wish he hadn’t said it. 

“I would’ve taken you to the prom, you know.” 

It’s a concept so absurd you burst into quiet, breathy laughter, and he looks at you so surprised his expression reads something closer to injury. 

"No, you wouldn't have," you counter. "You didn't even go by yourself." 

“Of course I didn’t,” he retorts. He’s sneering, but the humour’s leaked back into his eyes and you’re starting to relax again. 

“So why in the hell would you have asked someone like me? You barely even knew me.” 

"And I still would have been a hell of a better date than that prick who took you." His tone is suddenly hard, suddenly urgent, and when he looks at you again his eyes seem to truly smoulder with fire and brimstone. The intensity of his gaze steals the air straight from your lungs and for a long moment, you struggle to catch it, looking back into his eyes while you take deep, greedy breaths through flared nostrils. 

Finally, you relent. Your shoulders drop. You flop onto your back. 

“Yeah. You would’ve.” 

Anyone would’ve. 

Eddie lies down beside you, tender as a lamb. For a moment his face stays firmly turned to the ceiling, but he lets it drop toward you, and slowly, you do the same. 

“I don’t know exactly what he did to you,” he confesses, speaking slowly, deliberately. “And I don’t need to. But I’ve never seen anybody cry like that before.” 

You flinch. 

“I know.” 

Eddie the Freak is gentle as a summer breeze as he rolls onto his side and traces the backs of his fingers down your inner forearm. His touch catches like lightning, and you don’t stop him as his palm lands in yours. 

He is beautiful like this, soft and slow as a flickering candle. But, then again, he's always been beautiful, ablaze with passion, and too bold to store it away. Too bold to pretend not to care, as has become so terrifyingly common among your generation. 

There’s nothing devilish about the boy sharing his bed with you. And the only crime is how long it’s taken you to see that. 

You turn onto your side, lacing your fingers slowly with his. Your new position puts his face a whisper from yours. The cool press of the bedsheet cradles your cheek, and the puffs of warm breath that escape his nose are strong enough to be palpable. 

You’d felt this way only once before when, in a cold fit of panic in the passenger’s seat of his beat-up van, he’d reached across the seat and settled a palm between your trembling shoulderblades. The sensation, nearly a year old at this point, is as fresh as the press of his fingers in yours. 

He’d talked you down from a ledge so high and so cold, and it was there, in the spring chill that clung to the peeling leather seats, that you’d felt the string pull taut for the first time. 

Eleven months of near-total alienation had slackened it. But it had never truly disintegrated. It was the gentlest tug, for the first time in nearly a year, when you’d heard his voice on the other end of the crackling phone line pleading for your tutelage that prompted you to lie to your parents, climb into your car, and in a fit of disbelief, drive across town in the fading light of dusk to Forest Hills Trailer Park. 

But curled in his bed with Pale Blue Eyes rumbling in the background and his face an inch from yours, it’s about to snap. 

"Eddie-" you start, but your voice fails you. You swallow hard. Watch his jaw clench. He lifts his other hand, brushes his fingertips down the edge of your jaw, and then, as you brace a hand against his sternum, gives in and cups your cheek. 

You both know what he’d say to you. And so it goes unsaid, as you dip carefully forward and brush the slack swell of your mouth to his. 

Your chest melts into magma when he responds in kind, stroking his thumb over your cheek. The angle is awkward and impossible, so after a breath, you draw back to face the consequences of your actions. 

Eddie's eyes slide open and he regards you with an expression so dumbstruck it seems almost certain you've slipped into a dream. Eddie Munson, who always knows what to say, struck silent by something as simple as a kiss. 

You’re kidding yourself if any of the feelings swirling through your limbs right now could be described as ‘simple.’ 

“That was…” he finally starts. Your stomach does a flip and you immediately lose your nerve. 

“Weird,” you conclude, sitting up rapidly and pressing the heels of your hands into your eyes. “Oh god, I’m… I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.” 

“Weird?” He sits up, too. Now that the touch barrier’s been broken he reaches for you, curling his fingers around your palms and tugging them away from your face. You’re forced to look at him, and his expression is stern, eyes intent. He shakes his head. 

“Not weird. Not weird at all.” 

Facing each other properly now, he reaches for you, cradling your head between both palms. You’re leveled by his gaze again, hands drifting forward to land on his thighs. 

“Can I try?” he asks. With your brain whirling inside your skull at the speed of a gale, you nod. 

He kisses you head-on, fuller and deeper this time, and the hum that escapes your chest is completely involuntary. You slack against him, giving in to the temptation that's heightened to insufferability ever since he got close enough for you to smell the Doublemint on his breath. Ever since he looked at you with all the sorrow of a widower, dropped the phony Shakespearean dialect he'd been using, and said slowly, mournfully, too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia.

You curl your fingers into his t-shirt, gripping tightly with one hand and stroking up his chest with the other like you might soothe the wrinkles your grasp creates. You drape one hand over the plane of his shoulder and he takes the opportunity to plant his hand in the small of your back, fingers outspread. He draws you closer and you comply, shifting forward until you can get no closer without climbing into his lap. Then you climb closer still, letting your thighs fall open over his. Denim presses over denim as your weight settles into his lap and, emboldened by the insistent press of his mouth up into yours, you grab for his jaw with both hands and slot your lips together so deeply he groans straight down your throat, palm trembling at the waistband of your jeans. 

You curve your body forward to press torso and pelvis together, and his hips give a startled little twitch against yours. Suddenly out of breath, he draws back a little, angling his face ever so slightly away from yours. 

“I’ve- I’ve never…” he ejects, and suddenly you realize what he’s trying to tell you. He shifts a little beneath you as you sit slowly back, and the evidence of your indiscretion suddenly presses long and firm down the inside of your thigh. Your pulse spikes, but you force yourself to take a breath and look him sincerely in the eye. 

“Do you want to stop?” 

“What?” His eyes narrow in disbelief. “No. I- no. I just thought-" He straightens a little and shifts again, and this time you both feel it, the hard press of him down one leg of his faded denim. He stiffens, and the red that's crept out of the edges of his collar flushes his cheeks. 

"I just thought I should tell you now. In case you don't..." He trails off, and you're glad he does because it means he can't find a sensible way to finish that sentence. 

“I’m glad you told me,” you promise, dipping forward to gently nuzzle along the joint of his jaw and neck. He shivers and inhales softly through his teeth, drawing his hands up your sides. “But I’m not going anywhere.” 

“Okay,” he replies dumbly. His voice wavers as you press your mouth to the patch of skin you’d been nuzzling, sucking lightly just to make him squirm. 

“Okay,” he says one more time as his muscles twitch, palms stuttering at either side of your ribcage. You sit back, heart aflutter with pure, golden affection. 

“Here,” you prompt. “Let’s make it feel real, hmm?” You dip your fingers under the stitched hem of his t-shirt and slowly start to pull it up his back. He reacts immediately, helping you tug it over his head and tossing it to the side. His chest is broad and solid— lacking the definition of an athlete, but bearing all the strength of a man. A bristle of coarse, dark hair dusts his sternum, narrowing into a bare abdomen and a short trail that connects his navel to the low-slung waistband of his jeans. He wears a guitar pick with a hole punched in it, strung around his neck on a dog tag chain that’s always been long enough to hide the makeshift pendant.

The sparse tattoos that stud his wrists, forearms, and biceps spill onto his chest as well, all in well-faded black ink. You trace your thumb over the biggest one, whose edges you've seen before emerging from the lowest necklines of his t-shirts. 

He exhales slowly, watching your every move. 

"'m not exactly-" he starts, but you lean forward and kiss him before he can put a voice to those thoughts. 

When you pull away it’s only to tug your own loose t-shirt over your head, and he goes a little white as he looks over the warm expanse of your skin. You’re left wearing a simple, sculpted t-shirt bra now in an inconspicuous colour, and as he reaches for you again his fingers trace the edges of its band. 

"This too?" you prompt, reaching behind you for the clasp. Eddie panics. 

“No! I-uh-if you want,” he assures, going pink all over again. “You’re. I just. You’re gorgeous.” 

Any lingering doubt is washed away in the torrent of warm affection that floods your senses. You like this side of him. He is dedicated and confident and bold, but just for you, he's sincere. Tender. Sweet, even. 

It occurs to you that you’ve somehow earned the right to see this side of him, and as you unclasp your bra you make a silent vow to never, ever, make him regret trusting you. 

Your bra joins the twin t-shirts on the ratty carpet and then he has you, bare from the waist up. He traces his fingertips up your sides again, uninhibited all the way up your ribcage, then cups your ribs between both hands and strokes his fingers tenderly into the creases under each breast. 

“Tell me to stop,” he practically chokes, “if I do something you don’t like.” 

“You could never,” you promise airily, losing yourself. There’s a part of you that could truly love him, and another, deeper part of you that’s already starting to. 

“Wanna taste every part of you,” he confesses, dipping his head to the juncture of your shoulder and starting to kiss as his thumbs drift upward onto the flesh of your breasts. 

You hiccup softly as dull pleasure flashes through your nerves, and it spurs him on enough to give in and cup your breasts entirely, fitting the curves of them into his palms. Slowly he dips downward, drawing his mouth to meet his hands, and as his tongue traces your sternum he pushes your breasts gently together to kiss at the juncture of them. 

"Eddie—" you whimper, and he takes the wordless direction with ease, flipping his hands over to cup your breasts at the sides and trace his thumbs across the rapidly hardening swells of your nipples. The nerves and the cool air of the poorly-sealed trailer already had them rising to his touch, but goosebumps race up your sternum when he touches them for the first time. 

“Sensitive there?” he mumbles against your skin and you nod fitfully into his hair. He leans back for a moment, adjusts, then slowly the wet, warm press of his tongue curls around the peak of your right nipple and your toes curl in their department-store socks. 

He tweaks the other one gently between knuckle and thumb, making you yelp and flinch further into the hot lave of his tongue. He closes his mouth around the bud of it and gives a gentle suck. You angle your hips down against his and grind hard to reassure him, which seems to work, as he responds in kind with a groan and a flick of his tongue. 

“Eddie, don’t make me wait,” you whimper, pushing him slowly back as the heat builds to indelible levels between your thighs. 

"Wouldn't-" his voice catches as you push him back against the pillows, and he centers himself on both elbows, watching you shift backward and make for his belt. 

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” 

You dig into the opening of his belt buckle, tugging the strap out so forcefully it snaps painfully back against your wrist. With another tug, you've got it unfastened, and in the span of a breath you're unbuttoning his jeans and tugging the zipper down with one hand. As you do, your free hand finds the swell of his cock where it's trapped against his thigh. You squeeze it gently and he twitches into your hand, groaning sharp and low. The look that clouds his eyes is nothing short of addictive. 

You’re going back in for a bigger hit. 

“My turn,” you brush, working jeans and boxer shorts over his narrow hips. He plants his hands on the mattress and lifts his hips to help you, silent with what feels like disbelief. You’re struck by it, too. No matter how many parts of you have been wanting this. It never seemed like something that would actually happen. 

“Gotta taste you.” That sentence seems to process properly and he blinks, lowering his chin and lifting his head. 

“What?” 

But you’re already tugging his pants down and off, addicted to the way the curved swell of his cock bounces free to lay against his stomach. His legs bow nervously as you drop what remains of his clothing onto the carpet, and you draw both hands up his pale thighs to soothe his tightly-strung muscles. 

“You heard me.” Your voice is coming in a low, rolling purr that feels entirely unfamiliar, but it disguises the shakiness in your chest as you settle between his legs. He’s watching you so intently right now he’s not even blinking, staring down the length of his torso at your slow, measured movements. 

You wrap chilly fingers around the base of his cock- so warm- and he shudders. It’s a little longer than average and thicker than it looks, the weight of it sitting pleasantly between your fingers. The skin is warm, pale, and impossibly soft, and as you draw your hand up and down the shaft of him, his uncut foreskin finishes drawing back to reveal the slick pink, blunt head of him, already leaking a pearly bead of clear fluid. 

“Uh,” he starts, but his voice dies out as you drop your lips to his tip and draw your tongue slowly across the head, tasting him. 

“Holy shit.” His head falls back against the pillows, but he quickly corrects himself, as if realizing he might miss something, and picks his head up to stare one more time. 

“So I’m guessing no one’s ever done this to you before, either,” you hum. You dip your head to the base and lick a long stripe up his underside, finding a thick vein to follow with the tip of your tongue. 

"N-no one's ever done anything to me," he grits. Under your free hand, his thigh is hard as a rock. "No one's… no one's done anything." 

The way he says it unlocks something deep and tender and sympathetic in your heart, and you speak the wholehearted truth in your reply. 

“Then I am honored to be the first.” 

He doesn't deserve any teasing after a confession like that, so you lift your chin and direct his tip to your mouth, sucking him down with all the gentleness he's shown you. Even with the gentlest press of your lips and tongue, he reacts powerfully, grunting sharply through clenched-sounding teeth. 

“Holy shit. Oh god, don’t-“ 

You work him into a slow rhythm, wrapping your hand around the base to hold him steady while you bob up and down on the parts of him you can take. Your tongue pulses gently against his underside as you work to keep your mouth slack, letting the ridges of his shape work over the softest and wettest parts of your mouth. 

All the while, Eddie squirms and pitches above you, smoothing his fingers into the sheets at his sides, then clenching them when you do something new. After a few rhythmic bobs of your head, he obviously realizes it's okay to touch you because he reaches hesitantly forward to settle a hand on your shoulder first. Then he glides it to the back of your neck instead and keeps it there. The jostle of your head brushes his thumb against your sensitive nape, sending fresh goosebumps down your spine as you work him over. 

"God, y-you gotta-" he starts. The first outburst is hardly urgent, but his voice spirals upwards into a sudden panic. "Wait, please, slow down, y-you have to… s-stop." 

He’s cupping your cheeks suddenly, but you’re sensing his change of pace and pulling off him before he can get a solid grip on your face. His cock pops out of your mouth with a lewd little squelch and he holds you there panting, tracing a thumb over the sloppy swell of your lower lip. 

"Is everything okay?" You ask quietly, searching his face. His expression is cloudy, unreadable. After a moment, he seems to recover and shoots you a lopsided smile. 

“Almost lost it on you there.” 

Relief floods your mind as you tilt your head, matching his smile. 

“You’re allowed to lose it on me. In fact, I think that’s kinda the point.” 

“I know,” he promises. “But.” He looks up at you, smiling shyly. 

“Oh. You think there’s more to this, do you?” 

Eddie’s expression drops. 

“No,” he counters from his gut. “Well,” He pauses, looking down at you in dull panic. But you’re still smiling, so his shoulders don’t take long to relax again. 

“I’m sorry.” You push onto your knees and crawl up his torso, holding yourself gently atop him. “I’ll stop messing with you. I promise.” You drop a kiss to his mouth, then roll away completely to stand up. 

Eddie sits up a little to watch you, and in the low warm light of the wee hours, he is breathtaking. Sprawled out for you, his hard, weeping cock still slick and shiny from your efforts, guitar pick necklace strewed crookedly across his collarbone. What's more breathtaking than anything is the way he looks at you, like you are the star he's just lucky enough to orbit. 

You unbutton your jeans and hook your thumbs through your underwear, wedging both down over your hips and stepping out of them. He casts a wondrous eye over your naked body, reaching for you low and soft and slow. You step over the pile of clothes and collapse slowly to the mattress beside him. 

Eddie rolls onto his side and kisses you long and tender, drawing a hand down your sternum and belly. Your thighs fall open instinctively and he dips his hand into the space between them. As soon as his fingers brush the warm gush of your cunt you groan in unison. 

“Shit,” he grits, drawing out the shhh as his chest deflates against yours. “You’re drenched, baby.” 

The nickname slingshots through your head and bounces off your heartstrings like a pinball. You draw a sharp, short little breath and grab his chin in one hand. 

“Just kiss me again.” 

He complies, bending to seal his lips against yours as his fingers continue to dip into your folds. He brushes one fingertip inward, finding the opening of your entrance and pressing slowly inward with middle, then ring finger, then both. 

“Hooly shit,” he draws again as he feels out the edges of your insides, and you drop back from his mouth to chew your upper lip and whine softly at the sensations he draws from you. The pleasure is mild, but the anticipation of more sends little shocks of pleasure into your body with every press of his fingers. 

He curls them gently, finding the spongy, tender surface of your upper wall. As he presses inward again, the heel of his palm tweaks the swollen nub of your clit and you flinch. 

“Oh?” He shoots you a quizzical, suddenly playful expression. It feels good- really good- to watch him take pleasure in figuring you out. He arches his hand and presses his thumb toward you. The tender pad finds your clit deliberately now. 

“Did I find something good?” He’s a little breathless, but his playful spirit has returned as he gives your clit a gentle strum and watches as you fight off a spasm of pleasure in your lower belly. 

“Yeah,” you pant. “Keep touching it.” 

"Okay." He nods, light but sincere all over again. "Okay, I won't stop." Letting his fingers rest inside you, he winds a slow, clockwise spiral into your clit. Your hips are pinned under his hand, but by the time he's winding outward again, you're trembling underneath him. 

“Back and forth,” you breathe, needing rhythm and something to latch onto. “Eddie, do it back and forth.” 

He takes the direction nobly, switching his movement to a slow, steady back-and-forth rub. The tempo is flawless and steady, which shouldn’t surprise you, and it’s not long before you’re squirming on his fingers, cunt fluttering and clenching around them as he works you into a pleasure-filled stupor. He checks in with you every time something changes, and you quietly reassure him, redirect him, or, as words begin to fail you, dumbly nod and scramble to lace your fingers through those of his free hand. 

He’s right there with you now, gripping your fingers tightly in one hand and working you firmly with the other with your foreheads pressed together. There’s silence for a moment, but as you let out a laboured, held breath, a deep, tingly sort of pleasure crawls up the column of your spine and you start to pitch and fuss. 

“Eddie,” you whimper, a sudden urgency finding your voice. “Eddie, ‘m gonna come.” 

“You’re-“ He doesn’t understand immediately, but it dawns on him quickly. 

“Oh god, baby, come on,” he urges tightly, keeping the rhythm of his working fingers steady. “Come on.” 

“Right there,” you plead. “Right, yeah, yeah y-“ 

The cry of pleasure dies in your throat and you push your forehead against his with a dull whimper instead as your belly spasms and your legs twitch. Your cunt flutters and clenches down hard around his fingers with shallow handfuls of slick coating them. You're squeezing his hand so hard the ridges of his rings dig into your fingers, but you're too far gone now. Ecstasy races through your nerves and you squeeze your eyes shut, giving in to the pleasure and letting the involuntary ride of your hips take over. 

When you surface, Eddie’s hand lays slack between your legs. As he sees your eyes open, he carefully untangles his hand from yours and reaches up to trace his fingertips down the side of your face, breathless himself. 

“Holy shit,” it’s your turn to say, smiling airily at him. He snorts quietly, beaming back at you. 

“Was that a good ‘holy shit’ or a bad ‘holy shit?’” he asks. After catching your breath, you answer. 

“Should I have been asking you that the whole time?” 

Eddie laughs, ducking his face into the curve of your shoulder. 

“Come here,” you prompt. Confused, he rolls a little closer, but you take charge and tug him between your legs, dragging him on top of you fully. 

“We don’t have to,” he starts, but his cock is maroon and twitching against your hip, drooling a steady stream of pre into the divot of your pelvis. 

You’re still sensitive and already picturing how good he’ll feel inside you. There’s no turning back now. 

“Want it,” you promise, turning your eyes to his. “Want you.” 

He pauses, searching your gaze. He shakes his head slowly. 

“Never thought I’d hear something like that outta someone like you.” 

“Believe it, Munson,” you counter, reaching up to brush sweaty bangs out of his eyes. “You’re all mine now.” 

“Gladly,” he breathes deeply, leaning down for another slow kiss. As he licks lazily into your mouth he spreads his thighs under yours, lowering his hips and aligning himself with your ready cunt. 

He pulls back from your mouth to concentrate for a moment, looking down his body at the place where you’re joined. Carefully, with the fingers of one hand braced gently on your pubic bone, he eases his hips forward, breaching the wet threshold and slotting slowly into you. 

You bite your lip, exhaling slowly through the sweet, sensitive stretch of it. He buries himself halfway, then pitches forward with a shaky groan and slides all the way home, already trembling above you. 

“Fuck,” he grunts. “God. I’m not gonna last at all.” 

“I don’t care,” you insist, wrapping your arms around his broad back, clutching at him. You’ve had your pleasure. “Just fuck me.” 

He takes that instruction to heart and draws himself back from you again, pulling his hips gently backward, then fucking carefully into you just once. 

“Jeeeesus,” he draws, eyes falling shut. “You’re amazing.” 

He does it again, again, again, then settles into the same heartful tempo with which his fingers had worked you over so easily before. You close your eyes and submit to the feeling, settling into the rhythm and the slow, percussive slap of his hips against yours. 

Eddie lets a heavy breath from his chest with every thrust, and you try your best to capture the soft huh huh huh of his working lungs as he pants into your neck. 

You want to remember all of this. Until, hopefully, you can do it again. 

Eddie reaches down and hitches your thighs over his, angling his hips down ever so slightly and fucking deeper into you than before. The push of his hips has your head rocking against his cheap pillows, cutting dangerously close to knocking over the expensive tape deck that's already switched itself to Side 2 of the cassette, where the rest of "The Velvet Underground" plays at a lazy beat. 

You sling both arms over your head and your fingertips brush it. The low thrum of the bass vibrates through your fingers as Eddie smooths all the hair back from your face and braces your head between both hands as he throws himself against you over and over again. His eyes are dark, fathomless flecks of obsidian in the dim light, but they are wide and warm with the adoration that bubbles frighteningly fast and intense between you. 

But the rest of his expression is measured and taut. As soon as you pick up on it, you realize his hips have slowed, too. In an instant, he's gone from losing himself in you to exercising careful control on every tentative movement. 

The joint of your hips is molten at this point, with heat building to a quickly intolerable level. And then you realize what he’s holding back on. You draw him in, gripping his hips between both thighs. 

“Close,” you pant. “You’re close, aren’t you?” His pained little grunt confirms your suspicions. 

“I’ll… try ’n hold out,” he pants. “Gotta…” 

“No,” you plead. “Don’t hold out. Please, Eddie, I wanna see you cum.” 

“Christ,” he mutters under his breath. “It’s gonna be, like, now.” 

“I don’t care.” 

You buck your hips against his indignantly, and he lets out such a howl of pleasure it almost startles you. Drawing in a deep, shaky breath, his mouth sets into a tight, firm line. 

He gives into it. 

With another glide of his hands down the sides of your face, he re-engages, spreading his thighs long and low and starting to thrust. His movements grow erratic quickly, and in only a handful of thrusts, he's throwing himself against you with a long, guttural moan that shakes him to the very tips of his hair. He stills against you, sealing hips and chest and mouth to yours, and his balls twitch between your legs before he's shuddering and emptying them into your welcoming heat, shaft twitching between your walls as he slowly fucks the long spurts of his climax into your clingy depths. 

When it’s over, he collapses atop you, sweaty and spent, and you wrap your arms around him, frighteningly, immersively, irreversibly in love. 

“We just…” he trailed off, separating himself from you carefully and rolling onto his side. His body curls vulnerably around yours, and he doesn’t speak again until you do. 

“Do you regret it?” you mumble quietly, mildly, to disguise the weight behind the question. He cuts you a strange look, then realizes you’re kind of serious and his expression softens. 

“Nah.” He plants a hand on the plane of your belly. His touch is gentle but the skin is rough— it’s his fretting hand. He purses his lips in thought, then finds your eyes again. 

“You?”

“Uh-uh,” you assure. 

You lie there until the tape’s played all the way through, listening as the last sunny strums of After Hours fade into silence and the machine whirrs softly, resetting the tape. There’s a quiet, percussive click as play/pause slots back into place, and then the silence is true and thick. 

You could discuss the feelings that have settled between you. You could talk about how you're probably one of the most mismatched couples Hawkins has ever seen if you're even ready to call yourselves that. 

Instead, you sit up slowly, smooth your hair, and reach down for your clothes. 

“I guess we should get back to work.” 

Eddie’s obviously not sure how to take your digression, sitting up beside you and hesitating to touch you again. He does anyway, though, thumbing your chin quietly before he ducks away and reaches for his own clothes. 

“We should.” 

At eight o’clock the following morning, with soreness settling into your muscles and a completed draft of Eddie’s term paper sitting on the dinette table, you lean against one narrow edge of the trailer’s doorframe while he boxes you in and kisses you. The wear of an all-nighter is settling in around the edges of his eyes as you draw back with your car keys looped around your finger. 

“You’re going back tonight, right?” he asks you quietly with a hand cradling your jaw. You haven’t been able to tear yourself from him since you put your clothes back on. 

“Yeah,” you answer, unable to keep the mournful tone from your expression. “But I’ll be back at the end of April.” 

“For the summer,” he checks hopefully. You smile blissfully. You can’t help it. 

“Yeah,” you say, looking forward to it already. “For the whole summer.” 

"Then I guess I'll see you in April," he brushes slowly. He reaches for both your hands and squeezes them between his own. For a moment, his brow flicks downwards. He grips them tighter, then releases you, and you back slowly down the steps. Your little green VW bug's been parked on the grass outside his trailer all night, and you're ready to let that mean to his neighbours whatever they want it to mean. 

“Don’t be a stranger,” he calls suddenly, softly. When you turn to face him again he bobs a little, jiggling his finger and thumb beside his ear in a mockery of the people who used to be your classmates. 

Call me, he mouths, smiling indulgently. You nod sharply and unlock the driver’s side door of your little car, saluting him before ducking inside. 

He says in the doorway of the trailer until you hit the park’s entrance. It’s only as you’re slowing down to turn onto the sleepy little road that winds back into Hawkins that you glance into your rearview mirror and watch him disappear into the trailer, shutting the door behind him. 

You grip the steering wheel a little tighter, making your turn. As you accelerate towards town something deep and rotten clenches in your gut. It stays there all day long and doesn't so much as lose an inch, even as you're speeding out of town that night toward the interstate. 

“They’re not your options,” he emphasizes dully. 

“Right. Sorry.” There’s a thin smile tugging at the corners of your lips. You’ve seen him parade proudly atop the cafeteria tables, bravely denouncing the attitudes of the people who snubbed him. A couple of years ago, you watched Eddie’s bandmates have to physically restrain him from doing a stage dive at the Hawkins High spring talent show. But sitting across from you, with his long legs folded awkwardly under a table too small for any reasonable pair, the prospect of a one-thousand-word English term paper has him looking pretty downtrodden. 

“Our options,” you correct, and the way his dark eyes spark as they flick up to look at you through parted bangs confirms that that’s not it, either. 

His throat bobs, jaw clenches, and he lets the sleeping dog lie. Pushing a few papers aside, he reads from the distributed assignment, which looks like it’s been sitting in the bottom of his bag from the moment it was handed to him. 

“Write an analytical essay on one of the three listed texts…” He trails off, eyes scanning to the bottom of the page. He sucks his teeth. 

“It’s worse than I thought.” 

“Give me that.” 

You pluck the sheet from his fingers and turn it around, finding the same place on the page.

“Hamlet, Huck Finn, or… Gatsby.” All texts you were happy to leave behind in your first year at Indiana State. 

"Well," you digress, putting the assignment down and folding your hands on top of it. "Let's start with the easy questions. Have you read all of these?" 

Eddie's lips disappear, and with a resigned look in his eye, he shakes his head. 

“Fair enough. Which ones did you get to?” 

More silence. He’s looking toward the window now, and when you follow his gaze your eyes briefly meet in its reflection before he gives up and casts his to the table in front of him. 

"Have you read… any of them?" you prod slowly, trying your best to let any sense of judgment or urgency drain from your tone. 

“I have-“ Eddie starts, drawing a hand slowly over his mouth and chin. He quirks a brow, then meets your eyes in the real world this time. 

“I have them.” 

So that’s where you’re at, then. 

“Eddieeee,” you groan, immediately scrubbing both hands over your face. “How am I supposed to help you write a paper on a book you haven’t even read?” 

“I don’t know,” Eddie defends nervously, and when you open your eyes again his demeanour has shifted. “Why-what d’you think I called you for?”

He’s running the fingers of one hand through his hair, separating and mussing any hint of a remaining curl.

You can see the whites of his eyes all of a sudden. The prospect of another victory lap is starting to dawn on him, and the reflection of it in his eyes sets something tough and determined in your chest. You’re going to get him that D, even if it kills your own spring semester. 

“No, no,” you sigh. “You were right. I owe you one. We’re just… gonna be here a little longer than I thought we would.” 

When you look across the table at him, his expression is one of such dogged remorse it tugs at something sharp and high in the hollow of your chest. He looks like a dog that’s just been thoroughly disciplined, and you’re honestly tempted to scratch him behind the ears and tell him it’s going to be okay. 

“It’s gonna be okay.” You give in, just a little, stacking some of the papers in front of you out of nervous compulsion. “You just need to pick a book, and then we’ll read it. No. This is good.” Steepling your fingers atop the newly stacked pages in front of you, whose edges curl in all different directions, you nod curtly. “This is good. Now you can actually read it through for the first time with your paper in mind. It’s better this way.” 

Eddie eyes you suspiciously, lip curling ever so slightly as his eyes narrow. Without another word, he gets up and disappears down the hallway. The jingling chain on his jeans gets fainter and fainter as he retreats into the room at the back of the trailer. 

“Where are you-“ For a minute, you let him vanish, but after a handful of seconds pass you begin to wonder if maybe you were supposed to follow him. Slowly, you extract yourself from the cramped dinette and retrace his steps down the narrow hallway and through the open door. 

As soon as you see the room beyond, it’s obvious that it’s his bedroom. Posters, drawings, and notebook pages are plastered all over the carpeted walls, and at the far end a pine bookshelf sticks out amongst all the black and red. Propped up against the mirror above it sits his animal print B.C. Rich Warlock, a guitar you’ve seen him play before at one too many high school talent shows. The crowd always booed his band off the stage for their heavy metal sound and freak status, but there’s never been any denying that Eddie knows how to shred. 

Beneath the guitar, band photos, and other memorabilia that's been pasted to the mirror, Eddie crouches, rifling through the bottom drawer with his back to you. 

“What are you looking for?” 

Eddie peeks over his shoulder at you from his crouched position, then produces a slim paperback book and stretches it out toward you from behind his back. 

“This,” he grunts. You close the distance and stoop, taking it from him. It’s an edition of Hamlet, and you realize with some chagrin that the edition you had in your senior year was much nicer than this one. 

But the paper makes no difference, so long as the words printed on it are the right ones. 

“Ideally, the other two, too,” he mumbles, digging back and forth through the drawer one more time before giving up, shutting it, and turning over to prop his back against the chest. “But it seems fate’s making my decision for me.” 

You look down at the text he handed you. It wouldn’t have been your first choice. But the more you think about it, the more appropriate it seems. 

“Shakespeare’s kind of hard to get the hang of,” you start. “But once you do, I think you’ll really like this one.”

You should be pressing the book into his hands and leaving him to digest it on his own terms. You should be getting into the Beetle your parents bought you as a graduation present and driving away, coming back tomorrow to help him structure his argument and pound out the paper before its Monday due date. 

Instead, you drop onto the edge of his low-slung bed and open Hamlet to the first page. 

"I'll believe that when I read it," Eddie replies. In your peripheral vision, you watch him climb slowly to his feet and cross the room toward you. He disappears for a moment, then the weight of him gently sinks the mattress beside you. The warmth of his scent washes over you- Old Spice, cheap metal, and body heat. You breathe in slowly. What else you might have been expecting— fire and brimstone, perhaps— dissolves. You're close enough that the chilly room seems warmed significantly by his presence, and you can feel him watching as you stare hard at the first page of the book in your hands. 

"It's..." you trail off, gathering your thoughts, "the closest thing you're gonna find to any of this stuff." You gesture to the wall at the foot of his bed, where a web of notes is tacked to the wall. At the top rests a single lined page, titled CULT OF VECNA in bold, scratchy blue ballpoint. Pages of notes waterfall downwards in a pyramid formation, charmingly tagged with dates starting as far back as January and culminating at the bottom with notes from only yesterday— March 15, 1986. 

"In that case," he murmurs. His voice is low and conspiratory and rumbles deep in the pit of your stomach as he leans toward you. His ring-studded fingers drop into your lap, carefully flipping through the book to a page that reads ACT 1, SCENE 1. He catches the corner of your eye with the corner of his and smiles so genuinely you'd think he wasn't in dire academic straits. 

“Let the show begin.” 

Three hours later, with the clock winding toward the wee hours, all pretense of formality has dropped. You lay sprawled across the width of Eddie’s bed together with your legs dangling over the side. He’s holding the book above you now, and with your temples pressed together, you’re reading the last few lines of the script. 

“Go, bid the soldiers shoot,” you read, and Eddie snaps the book shut, looking at you in cold, delighted shock. 

“They’re all dead?” he asks, thrilled disbelief persisting. You sink your teeth hard into your lower lip, but the bite fails to contain the smile that brims at the edges of your mouth as you nod. 

"No one wins," he declares, eyes still searching yours as if you might know of a secret, alternative ending that delivers the answers he wants. 

“That’s why they’re called tragedies,” you reply warmly.

For a handful of heartbeats, you stay put. Eddie doesn’t say anything right away, but his eyes are a hand’s breadth from yours and the light in them settles into something deep and amorphous and uncertain. For a moment, the lines in his face deepen so subtly that if you’d been any further from him you wouldn’t have noticed. 

In the next breath, everything slackens and he sits up. 

“Well,” he grunts. “Maybe if Hamlet could make a decision to save his life, things would have been different.” 

You snap your fingers, pointing to him as you prop yourself up on the other elbow. 

“Sounds like you’ve got a paper topic already, Munson.”

Eddie shakes his head. “I can’t write about that.” 

“Sure you can. Why not?” 

“What am I gonna say, Hamlet’s indecisiveness lead to his inevitable downfall?” He stops, goes very serious, and you get to watch him roll the words over in his head again. 

“There’s your thesis,” you quip, and he looks at you in slow shock. 

“Holy shit,” he breathes. His hands are scraping through his hair again and he stands up, pacing a tight loop around the remaining floor space of his cramped bedroom. “Holy shit, it’s that easy?”

“You find evidence to support your argument, write a few sentences of good bullshit at the beginning and end, and you’ve got yourself a term paper.” 

“God damn,” he declares, pumping a fist in the air and whirling around toward you. He presents both palms to you, as if he were your stage partner at curtain call, then slowly bows at the waist. 

“What would I do without you?” 

“Hang on,” you insist, pushing yourself up to sit properly on the edge of his bed again. “My work is far from finished. We still have to-“

“No, no, no, no way,” he insists, hooking both thumbs into the pockets of his jeans. He hasn’t been standing still throughout the entire conversation, still rocking idly back and forth from one foot to the other. “It’s two in the morning. I can’t make you stay back any longer. Your folks are probably shitting themselves right now.“ 

“My folks think I’m spending the night with Stacy Hamilton,” you counter, which is the truth. “As long as I show my face before noon tomorrow, they don’t give a shit what happens to me.” 

“Besides,” you continue, clasping both hands together between your knees, Your smugness falters for a minute, the lingering throb of memory flaring in your chest. 

Prom night. Eddie’s beat-up van. You, unable to contain your vicious sobs. Blowing your nose into a paper McDonald’s napkin while Eddie stared at the steering wheel in uncomfortable silence. 

“I owe you one.” 

Eddie’s brow creases. He steps forward a little, stilling suddenly. 

“Am I ever going to find out what happened that night?” he asks, heartbreakingly gentle. You don’t deserve it. 

“It’s not important,” you buffer, planting both hands hard on your thighs. You dig your fingernails into your knees a little, pressing hard through stiff denim. “I just needed a ride home. And you took the time away from… whatever it was you were doing to give me one. So, I’m seeing this paper through to the end.” 

Eddie looks away and purses his lips, evidently deep in thought. 

“Alright,” he relents. “Okay. What’s next?”

“Well, we should go back through everything we just read and find evidence to support the argument you came up with. And we should probably start making some notes, so we can turn them into a good outline. But…” You trail off, unhooking your fingers from your knees and stretching out the kinks in your back. Three hours of nothing but Shakespeare passed in an instant, but your spine’s reminding you that the three hours lying sprawled the wrong way around on Eddie’s antique mattress were all too real. 

“I could use a break,” Eddie suggests, and when you drop both arms back to your sides, you nod. 

“Read my mind.” 

Eddie nods, taking a quick look over his shoulder, through his open bedroom door, and into the hallway. 

“You hungry?” 

You hadn’t really thought about it, but the more you do, the more you realize that the empty gnawing in your stomach isn’t anxiety, it’s hunger. 

“Starving.” 

“Great.” Eddie starts quickly for the door. Before he can leave, though, he stalls, turning back around. “How ‘bout, uh…” 

In two steps he's across the room again and pulls open the cabinet sitting next to the boom box at the head of his bed. The shelves inside are lined with tapes, and he straightens up again, gesturing awkwardly toward them. 

“You can put some music on. Whatever you want. I’ll-I’ll find us some food.” 

Before you can even get to your feet Eddie’s made a break for it, disappearing down the hallway and into the kitchen. He’d seemed in a great hurry to get away from you suddenly, which is a conclusion you try not to take personally as you stoop in front of his cassette collection and look for something to break the silence. 

A few minutes later, Eddie comes back into the room with a pot of coffee in one hand and a plate of plain graham crackers in the other. Two chipped porcelain mugs dangle from his ring and pinkie fingers, and as he sets everything down on the chest by the mirror (a safe distance from the Warlock) you’re turning your cassette of choice over in your hands. 

“Find something?” he asks. You’re proud of yourself for this one. Gleefully, you grip the case by its edges and shove it toward him, showing him the faded label that’s been tucked neatly into the transparent acrylic case.

The Velvet Underground. It’s their titular album, too, with its trademark grainy black-and-white band photo superimposed onto a black background.

“Like finding a needle in a haystack,” you declare, watching him blanch. 

“Why do I even have that?” He mutters, drawing a palm over his face. 

“For when you bring girls over,” you chirp without thinking, already focused on loading the tape into his impressive-looking stereo. There are two things in this room he obviously saved for. The boom box, with its clean silver lines and automatic change system, is one of them. 

“Is that what you are?” he asks with wan humour obscuring any real emotion. 

“A girl?” you laugh, straightening up. You wind around him, passing close to his back as you loop across the room to perch on the edge of his bed again. 

“Last I checked,” you confirm, and he snorts, hesitating for an instant before slowly lowering himself onto the mattress beside you. 

The soft, heartfelt strains of Candy Says drift around the room, and he gives you a look so deep and so sincere you’re starting to wonder if you should have picked something harder to play, after all. He takes a breath like he’s about to say something, stops, then starts again, and you know you’re going to wish he hadn’t said it. 

“I would’ve taken you to the prom, you know.” 

It’s a concept so absurd you burst into quiet, breathy laughter, and he looks at you so surprised his expression reads something closer to injury. 

"No, you wouldn't have," you counter. "You didn't even go by yourself." 

“Of course I didn’t,” he retorts. He’s sneering, but the humour’s leaked back into his eyes and you’re starting to relax again. 

“So why in the hell would you have asked someone like me? You barely even knew me.” 

"And I still would have been a hell of a better date than that prick who took you." His tone is suddenly hard, suddenly urgent, and when he looks at you again his eyes seem to truly smoulder with fire and brimstone. The intensity of his gaze steals the air straight from your lungs and for a long moment, you struggle to catch it, looking back into his eyes while you take deep, greedy breaths through flared nostrils. 

Finally, you relent. Your shoulders drop. You flop onto your back. 

“Yeah. You would’ve.” 

Anyone would’ve. 

Eddie lies down beside you, tender as a lamb. For a moment his face stays firmly turned to the ceiling, but he lets it drop toward you, and slowly, you do the same. 

“I don’t know exactly what he did to you,” he confesses, speaking slowly, deliberately. “And I don’t need to. But I’ve never seen anybody cry like that before.” 

You flinch. 

“I know.” 

Eddie the Freak is gentle as a summer breeze as he rolls onto his side and traces the backs of his fingers down your inner forearm. His touch catches like lightning, and you don’t stop him as his palm lands in yours. 

He is beautiful like this, soft and slow as a flickering candle. But, then again, he's always been beautiful, ablaze with passion, and too bold to store it away. Too bold to pretend not to care, as has become so terrifyingly common among your generation. 

There’s nothing devilish about the boy sharing his bed with you. And the only crime is how long it’s taken you to see that. 

You turn onto your side, lacing your fingers slowly with his. Your new position puts his face a whisper from yours. The cool press of the bedsheet cradles your cheek, and the puffs of warm breath that escape his nose are strong enough to be palpable. 

You’d felt this way only once before when, in a cold fit of panic in the passenger’s seat of his beat-up van, he’d reached across the seat and settled a palm between your trembling shoulderblades. The sensation, nearly a year old at this point, is as fresh as the press of his fingers in yours. 

He’d talked you down from a ledge so high and so cold, and it was there, in the spring chill that clung to the peeling leather seats, that you’d felt the string pull taut for the first time. 

Eleven months of near-total alienation had slackened it. But it had never truly disintegrated. It was the gentlest tug, for the first time in nearly a year, when you’d heard his voice on the other end of the crackling phone line pleading for your tutelage that prompted you to lie to your parents, climb into your car, and in a fit of disbelief, drive across town in the fading light of dusk to Forest Hills Trailer Park. 

But curled in his bed with Pale Blue Eyes rumbling in the background and his face an inch from yours, it’s about to snap. 

"Eddie-" you start, but your voice fails you. You swallow hard. Watch his jaw clench. He lifts his other hand, brushes his fingertips down the edge of your jaw, and then, as you brace a hand against his sternum, gives in and cups your cheek. 

You both know what he’d say to you. And so it goes unsaid, as you dip carefully forward and brush the slack swell of your mouth to his. 

Your chest melts into magma when he responds in kind, stroking his thumb over your cheek. The angle is awkward and impossible, so after a breath, you draw back to face the consequences of your actions. 

Eddie's eyes slide open and he regards you with an expression so dumbstruck it seems almost certain you've slipped into a dream. Eddie Munson, who always knows what to say, struck silent by something as simple as a kiss. 

You’re kidding yourself if any of the feelings swirling through your limbs right now could be described as ‘simple.’ 

“That was…” he finally starts. Your stomach does a flip and you immediately lose your nerve. 

“Weird,” you conclude, sitting up rapidly and pressing the heels of your hands into your eyes. “Oh god, I’m… I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.” 

“Weird?” He sits up, too. Now that the touch barrier’s been broken he reaches for you, curling his fingers around your palms and tugging them away from your face. You’re forced to look at him, and his expression is stern, eyes intent. He shakes his head. 

“Not weird. Not weird at all.” 

Facing each other properly now, he reaches for you, cradling your head between both palms. You’re leveled by his gaze again, hands drifting forward to land on his thighs. 

“Can I try?” he asks. With your brain whirling inside your skull at the speed of a gale, you nod. 

He kisses you head-on, fuller and deeper this time, and the hum that escapes your chest is completely involuntary. You slack against him, giving in to the temptation that's heightened to insufferability ever since he got close enough for you to smell the Doublemint on his breath. Ever since he looked at you with all the sorrow of a widower, dropped the phony Shakespearean dialect he'd been using, and said slowly, mournfully, too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia.

You curl your fingers into his t-shirt, gripping tightly with one hand and stroking up his chest with the other like you might soothe the wrinkles your grasp creates. You drape one hand over the plane of his shoulder and he takes the opportunity to plant his hand in the small of your back, fingers outspread. He draws you closer and you comply, shifting forward until you can get no closer without climbing into his lap. Then you climb closer still, letting your thighs fall open over his. Denim presses over denim as your weight settles into his lap and, emboldened by the insistent press of his mouth up into yours, you grab for his jaw with both hands and slot your lips together so deeply he groans straight down your throat, palm trembling at the waistband of your jeans. 

You curve your body forward to press torso and pelvis together, and his hips give a startled little twitch against yours. Suddenly out of breath, he draws back a little, angling his face ever so slightly away from yours. 

“I’ve- I’ve never…” he ejects, and suddenly you realize what he’s trying to tell you. He shifts a little beneath you as you sit slowly back, and the evidence of your indiscretion suddenly presses long and firm down the inside of your thigh. Your pulse spikes, but you force yourself to take a breath and look him sincerely in the eye. 

“Do you want to stop?” 

“What?” His eyes narrow in disbelief. “No. I- no. I just thought-" He straightens a little and shifts again, and this time you both feel it, the hard press of him down one leg of his faded denim. He stiffens, and the red that's crept out of the edges of his collar flushes his cheeks. 

"I just thought I should tell you now. In case you don't..." He trails off, and you're glad he does because it means he can't find a sensible way to finish that sentence. 

“I’m glad you told me,” you promise, dipping forward to gently nuzzle along the joint of his jaw and neck. He shivers and inhales softly through his teeth, drawing his hands up your sides. “But I’m not going anywhere.” 

“Okay,” he replies dumbly. His voice wavers as you press your mouth to the patch of skin you’d been nuzzling, sucking lightly just to make him squirm. 

“Okay,” he says one more time as his muscles twitch, palms stuttering at either side of your ribcage. You sit back, heart aflutter with pure, golden affection. 

“Here,” you prompt. “Let’s make it feel real, hmm?” You dip your fingers under the stitched hem of his t-shirt and slowly start to pull it up his back. He reacts immediately, helping you tug it over his head and tossing it to the side. His chest is broad and solid— lacking the definition of an athlete, but bearing all the strength of a man. A bristle of coarse, dark hair dusts his sternum, narrowing into a bare abdomen and a short trail that connects his navel to the low-slung waistband of his jeans. He wears a guitar pick with a hole punched in it, strung around his neck on a dog tag chain that’s always been long enough to hide the makeshift pendant.

The sparse tattoos that stud his wrists, forearms, and biceps spill onto his chest as well, all in well-faded black ink. You trace your thumb over the biggest one, whose edges you've seen before emerging from the lowest necklines of his t-shirts. 

He exhales slowly, watching your every move. 

"'m not exactly-" he starts, but you lean forward and kiss him before he can put a voice to those thoughts. 

When you pull away it’s only to tug your own loose t-shirt over your head, and he goes a little white as he looks over the warm expanse of your skin. You’re left wearing a simple, sculpted t-shirt bra now in an inconspicuous colour, and as he reaches for you again his fingers trace the edges of its band. 

"This too?" you prompt, reaching behind you for the clasp. Eddie panics. 

“No! I-uh-if you want,” he assures, going pink all over again. “You’re. I just. You’re gorgeous.” 

Any lingering doubt is washed away in the torrent of warm affection that floods your senses. You like this side of him. He is dedicated and confident and bold, but just for you, he's sincere. Tender. Sweet, even. 

It occurs to you that you’ve somehow earned the right to see this side of him, and as you unclasp your bra you make a silent vow to never, ever, make him regret trusting you. 

Your bra joins the twin t-shirts on the ratty carpet and then he has you, bare from the waist up. He traces his fingertips up your sides again, uninhibited all the way up your ribcage, then cups your ribs between both hands and strokes his fingers tenderly into the creases under each breast. 

“Tell me to stop,” he practically chokes, “if I do something you don’t like.” 

“You could never,” you promise airily, losing yourself. There’s a part of you that could truly love him, and another, deeper part of you that’s already starting to. 

“Wanna taste every part of you,” he confesses, dipping his head to the juncture of your shoulder and starting to kiss as his thumbs drift upward onto the flesh of your breasts. 

You hiccup softly as dull pleasure flashes through your nerves, and it spurs him on enough to give in and cup your breasts entirely, fitting the curves of them into his palms. Slowly he dips downward, drawing his mouth to meet his hands, and as his tongue traces your sternum he pushes your breasts gently together to kiss at the juncture of them. 

"Eddie—" you whimper, and he takes the wordless direction with ease, flipping his hands over to cup your breasts at the sides and trace his thumbs across the rapidly hardening swells of your nipples. The nerves and the cool air of the poorly-sealed trailer already had them rising to his touch, but goosebumps race up your sternum when he touches them for the first time. 

“Sensitive there?” he mumbles against your skin and you nod fitfully into his hair. He leans back for a moment, adjusts, then slowly the wet, warm press of his tongue curls around the peak of your right nipple and your toes curl in their department-store socks. 

He tweaks the other one gently between knuckle and thumb, making you yelp and flinch further into the hot lave of his tongue. He closes his mouth around the bud of it and gives a gentle suck. You angle your hips down against his and grind hard to reassure him, which seems to work, as he responds in kind with a groan and a flick of his tongue. 

“Eddie, don’t make me wait,” you whimper, pushing him slowly back as the heat builds to indelible levels between your thighs. 

"Wouldn't-" his voice catches as you push him back against the pillows, and he centers himself on both elbows, watching you shift backward and make for his belt. 

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” 

You dig into the opening of his belt buckle, tugging the strap out so forcefully it snaps painfully back against your wrist. With another tug, you've got it unfastened, and in the span of a breath you're unbuttoning his jeans and tugging the zipper down with one hand. As you do, your free hand finds the swell of his cock where it's trapped against his thigh. You squeeze it gently and he twitches into your hand, groaning sharp and low. The look that clouds his eyes is nothing short of addictive. 

You’re going back in for a bigger hit. 

“My turn,” you brush, working jeans and boxer shorts over his narrow hips. He plants his hands on the mattress and lifts his hips to help you, silent with what feels like disbelief. You’re struck by it, too. No matter how many parts of you have been wanting this. It never seemed like something that would actually happen. 

“Gotta taste you.” That sentence seems to process properly and he blinks, lowering his chin and lifting his head. 

“What?” 

But you’re already tugging his pants down and off, addicted to the way the curved swell of his cock bounces free to lay against his stomach. His legs bow nervously as you drop what remains of his clothing onto the carpet, and you draw both hands up his pale thighs to soothe his tightly-strung muscles. 

“You heard me.” Your voice is coming in a low, rolling purr that feels entirely unfamiliar, but it disguises the shakiness in your chest as you settle between his legs. He’s watching you so intently right now he’s not even blinking, staring down the length of his torso at your slow, measured movements. 

You wrap chilly fingers around the base of his cock- so warm- and he shudders. It’s a little longer than average and thicker than it looks, the weight of it sitting pleasantly between your fingers. The skin is warm, pale, and impossibly soft, and as you draw your hand up and down the shaft of him, his uncut foreskin finishes drawing back to reveal the slick pink, blunt head of him, already leaking a pearly bead of clear fluid. 

“Uh,” he starts, but his voice dies out as you drop your lips to his tip and draw your tongue slowly across the head, tasting him. 

“Holy shit.” His head falls back against the pillows, but he quickly corrects himself, as if realizing he might miss something, and picks his head up to stare one more time. 

“So I’m guessing no one’s ever done this to you before, either,” you hum. You dip your head to the base and lick a long stripe up his underside, finding a thick vein to follow with the tip of your tongue. 

"N-no one's ever done anything to me," he grits. Under your free hand, his thigh is hard as a rock. "No one's… no one's done anything." 

The way he says it unlocks something deep and tender and sympathetic in your heart, and you speak the wholehearted truth in your reply. 

“Then I am honored to be the first.” 

He doesn't deserve any teasing after a confession like that, so you lift your chin and direct his tip to your mouth, sucking him down with all the gentleness he's shown you. Even with the gentlest press of your lips and tongue, he reacts powerfully, grunting sharply through clenched-sounding teeth. 

“Holy shit. Oh god, don’t-“ 

You work him into a slow rhythm, wrapping your hand around the base to hold him steady while you bob up and down on the parts of him you can take. Your tongue pulses gently against his underside as you work to keep your mouth slack, letting the ridges of his shape work over the softest and wettest parts of your mouth. 

All the while, Eddie squirms and pitches above you, smoothing his fingers into the sheets at his sides, then clenching them when you do something new. After a few rhythmic bobs of your head, he obviously realizes it's okay to touch you because he reaches hesitantly forward to settle a hand on your shoulder first. Then he glides it to the back of your neck instead and keeps it there. The jostle of your head brushes his thumb against your sensitive nape, sending fresh goosebumps down your spine as you work him over. 

"God, y-you gotta-" he starts. The first outburst is hardly urgent, but his voice spirals upwards into a sudden panic. "Wait, please, slow down, y-you have to… s-stop." 

He’s cupping your cheeks suddenly, but you’re sensing his change of pace and pulling off him before he can get a solid grip on your face. His cock pops out of your mouth with a lewd little squelch and he holds you there panting, tracing a thumb over the sloppy swell of your lower lip. 

"Is everything okay?" You ask quietly, searching his face. His expression is cloudy, unreadable. After a moment, he seems to recover and shoots you a lopsided smile. 

“Almost lost it on you there.” 

Relief floods your mind as you tilt your head, matching his smile. 

“You’re allowed to lose it on me. In fact, I think that’s kinda the point.” 

“I know,” he promises. “But.” He looks up at you, smiling shyly. 

“Oh. You think there’s more to this, do you?” 

Eddie’s expression drops. 

“No,” he counters from his gut. “Well,” He pauses, looking down at you in dull panic. But you’re still smiling, so his shoulders don’t take long to relax again. 

“I’m sorry.” You push onto your knees and crawl up his torso, holding yourself gently atop him. “I’ll stop messing with you. I promise.” You drop a kiss to his mouth, then roll away completely to stand up. 

Eddie sits up a little to watch you, and in the low warm light of the wee hours, he is breathtaking. Sprawled out for you, his hard, weeping cock still slick and shiny from your efforts, guitar pick necklace strewed crookedly across his collarbone. What's more breathtaking than anything is the way he looks at you, like you are the star he's just lucky enough to orbit. 

You unbutton your jeans and hook your thumbs through your underwear, wedging both down over your hips and stepping out of them. He casts a wondrous eye over your naked body, reaching for you low and soft and slow. You step over the pile of clothes and collapse slowly to the mattress beside him. 

Eddie rolls onto his side and kisses you long and tender, drawing a hand down your sternum and belly. Your thighs fall open instinctively and he dips his hand into the space between them. As soon as his fingers brush the warm gush of your cunt you groan in unison. 

“Shit,” he grits, drawing out the shhh as his chest deflates against yours. “You’re drenched, baby.” 

The nickname slingshots through your head and bounces off your heartstrings like a pinball. You draw a sharp, short little breath and grab his chin in one hand. 

“Just kiss me again.” 

He complies, bending to seal his lips against yours as his fingers continue to dip into your folds. He brushes one fingertip inward, finding the opening of your entrance and pressing slowly inward with middle, then ring finger, then both. 

“Hooly shit,” he draws again as he feels out the edges of your insides, and you drop back from his mouth to chew your upper lip and whine softly at the sensations he draws from you. The pleasure is mild, but the anticipation of more sends little shocks of pleasure into your body with every press of his fingers. 

He curls them gently, finding the spongy, tender surface of your upper wall. As he presses inward again, the heel of his palm tweaks the swollen nub of your clit and you flinch. 

“Oh?” He shoots you a quizzical, suddenly playful expression. It feels good- really good- to watch him take pleasure in figuring you out. He arches his hand and presses his thumb toward you. The tender pad finds your clit deliberately now. 

“Did I find something good?” He’s a little breathless, but his playful spirit has returned as he gives your clit a gentle strum and watches as you fight off a spasm of pleasure in your lower belly. 

“Yeah,” you pant. “Keep touching it.” 

"Okay." He nods, light but sincere all over again. "Okay, I won't stop." Letting his fingers rest inside you, he winds a slow, clockwise spiral into your clit. Your hips are pinned under his hand, but by the time he's winding outward again, you're trembling underneath him. 

“Back and forth,” you breathe, needing rhythm and something to latch onto. “Eddie, do it back and forth.” 

He takes the direction nobly, switching his movement to a slow, steady back-and-forth rub. The tempo is flawless and steady, which shouldn’t surprise you, and it’s not long before you’re squirming on his fingers, cunt fluttering and clenching around them as he works you into a pleasure-filled stupor. He checks in with you every time something changes, and you quietly reassure him, redirect him, or, as words begin to fail you, dumbly nod and scramble to lace your fingers through those of his free hand. 

He’s right there with you now, gripping your fingers tightly in one hand and working you firmly with the other with your foreheads pressed together. There’s silence for a moment, but as you let out a laboured, held breath, a deep, tingly sort of pleasure crawls up the column of your spine and you start to pitch and fuss. 

“Eddie,” you whimper, a sudden urgency finding your voice. “Eddie, ‘m gonna come.” 

“You’re-“ He doesn’t understand immediately, but it dawns on him quickly. 

“Oh god, baby, come on,” he urges tightly, keeping the rhythm of his working fingers steady. “Come on.” 

“Right there,” you plead. “Right, yeah, yeah y-“ 

The cry of pleasure dies in your throat and you push your forehead against his with a dull whimper instead as your belly spasms and your legs twitch. Your cunt flutters and clenches down hard around his fingers with shallow handfuls of slick coating them. You're squeezing his hand so hard the ridges of his rings dig into your fingers, but you're too far gone now. Ecstasy races through your nerves and you squeeze your eyes shut, giving in to the pleasure and letting the involuntary ride of your hips take over. 

When you surface, Eddie’s hand lays slack between your legs. As he sees your eyes open, he carefully untangles his hand from yours and reaches up to trace his fingertips down the side of your face, breathless himself. 

“Holy shit,” it’s your turn to say, smiling airily at him. He snorts quietly, beaming back at you. 

“Was that a good ‘holy shit’ or a bad ‘holy shit?’” he asks. After catching your breath, you answer. 

“Should I have been asking you that the whole time?” 

Eddie laughs, ducking his face into the curve of your shoulder. 

“Come here,” you prompt. Confused, he rolls a little closer, but you take charge and tug him between your legs, dragging him on top of you fully. 

“We don’t have to,” he starts, but his cock is maroon and twitching against your hip, drooling a steady stream of pre into the divot of your pelvis. 

You’re still sensitive and already picturing how good he’ll feel inside you. There’s no turning back now. 

“Want it,” you promise, turning your eyes to his. “Want you.” 

He pauses, searching your gaze. He shakes his head slowly. 

“Never thought I’d hear something like that outta someone like you.” 

“Believe it, Munson,” you counter, reaching up to brush sweaty bangs out of his eyes. “You’re all mine now.” 

“Gladly,” he breathes deeply, leaning down for another slow kiss. As he licks lazily into your mouth he spreads his thighs under yours, lowering his hips and aligning himself with your ready cunt. 

He pulls back from your mouth to concentrate for a moment, looking down his body at the place where you’re joined. Carefully, with the fingers of one hand braced gently on your pubic bone, he eases his hips forward, breaching the wet threshold and slotting slowly into you. 

You bite your lip, exhaling slowly through the sweet, sensitive stretch of it. He buries himself halfway, then pitches forward with a shaky groan and slides all the way home, already trembling above you. 

“Fuck,” he grunts. “God. I’m not gonna last at all.” 

“I don’t care,” you insist, wrapping your arms around his broad back, clutching at him. You’ve had your pleasure. “Just fuck me.” 

He takes that instruction to heart and draws himself back from you again, pulling his hips gently backward, then fucking carefully into you just once. 

“Jeeeesus,” he draws, eyes falling shut. “You’re amazing.” 

He does it again, again, again, then settles into the same heartful tempo with which his fingers had worked you over so easily before. You close your eyes and submit to the feeling, settling into the rhythm and the slow, percussive slap of his hips against yours. 

Eddie lets a heavy breath from his chest with every thrust, and you try your best to capture the soft huh huh huh of his working lungs as he pants into your neck. 

You want to remember all of this. Until, hopefully, you can do it again. 

Eddie reaches down and hitches your thighs over his, angling his hips down ever so slightly and fucking deeper into you than before. The push of his hips has your head rocking against his cheap pillows, cutting dangerously close to knocking over the expensive tape deck that's already switched itself to Side 2 of the cassette, where the rest of "The Velvet Underground" plays at a lazy beat. 

You sling both arms over your head and your fingertips brush it. The low thrum of the bass vibrates through your fingers as Eddie smooths all the hair back from your face and braces your head between both hands as he throws himself against you over and over again. His eyes are dark, fathomless flecks of obsidian in the dim light, but they are wide and warm with the adoration that bubbles frighteningly fast and intense between you. 

But the rest of his expression is measured and taut. As soon as you pick up on it, you realize his hips have slowed, too. In an instant, he's gone from losing himself in you to exercising careful control on every tentative movement. 

The joint of your hips is molten at this point, with heat building to a quickly intolerable level. And then you realize what he’s holding back on. You draw him in, gripping his hips between both thighs. 

“Close,” you pant. “You’re close, aren’t you?” His pained little grunt confirms your suspicions. 

“I’ll… try ’n hold out,” he pants. “Gotta…” 

“No,” you plead. “Don’t hold out. Please, Eddie, I wanna see you cum.” 

“Christ,” he mutters under his breath. “It’s gonna be, like, now.” 

“I don’t care.” 

You buck your hips against his indignantly, and he lets out such a howl of pleasure it almost startles you. Drawing in a deep, shaky breath, his mouth sets into a tight, firm line. 

He gives into it. 

With another glide of his hands down the sides of your face, he re-engages, spreading his thighs long and low and starting to thrust. His movements grow erratic quickly, and in only a handful of thrusts, he's throwing himself against you with a long, guttural moan that shakes him to the very tips of his hair. He stills against you, sealing hips and chest and mouth to yours, and his balls twitch between your legs before he's shuddering and emptying them into your welcoming heat, shaft twitching between your walls as he slowly fucks the long spurts of his climax into your clingy depths. 

When it’s over, he collapses atop you, sweaty and spent, and you wrap your arms around him, frighteningly, immersively, irreversibly in love. 

“We just…” he trailed off, separating himself from you carefully and rolling onto his side. His body curls vulnerably around yours, and he doesn’t speak again until you do. 

“Do you regret it?” you mumble quietly, mildly, to disguise the weight behind the question. He cuts you a strange look, then realizes you’re kind of serious and his expression softens. 

“Nah.” He plants a hand on the plane of your belly. His touch is gentle but the skin is rough— it’s his fretting hand. He purses his lips in thought, then finds your eyes again. 

“You?”

“Uh-uh,” you assure. 

You lie there until the tape’s played all the way through, listening as the last sunny strums of After Hours fade into silence and the machine whirrs softly, resetting the tape. There’s a quiet, percussive click as play/pause slots back into place, and then the silence is true and thick. 

You could discuss the feelings that have settled between you. You could talk about how you're probably one of the most mismatched couples Hawkins has ever seen if you're even ready to call yourselves that. 

Instead, you sit up slowly, smooth your hair, and reach down for your clothes. 

“I guess we should get back to work.” 

Eddie’s obviously not sure how to take your digression, sitting up beside you and hesitating to touch you again. He does anyway, though, thumbing your chin quietly before he ducks away and reaches for his own clothes. 

“We should.” 

At eight o’clock the following morning, with soreness settling into your muscles and a completed draft of Eddie’s term paper sitting on the dinette table, you lean against one narrow edge of the trailer’s doorframe while he boxes you in and kisses you. The wear of an all-nighter is settling in around the edges of his eyes as you draw back with your car keys looped around your finger. 

“You’re going back tonight, right?” he asks you quietly with a hand cradling your jaw. You haven’t been able to tear yourself from him since you put your clothes back on. 

“Yeah,” you answer, unable to keep the mournful tone from your expression. “But I’ll be back at the end of April.” 

“For the summer,” he checks hopefully. You smile blissfully. You can’t help it. 

“Yeah,” you say, looking forward to it already. “For the whole summer.” 

"Then I guess I'll see you in April," he brushes slowly. He reaches for both your hands and squeezes them between his own. For a moment, his brow flicks downwards. He grips them tighter, then releases you, and you back slowly down the steps. Your little green VW bug's been parked on the grass outside his trailer all night, and you're ready to let that mean to his neighbours whatever they want it to mean. 

“Don’t be a stranger,” he calls suddenly, softly. When you turn to face him again he bobs a little, jiggling his finger and thumb beside his ear in a mockery of the people who used to be your classmates. 

Call me, he mouths, smiling indulgently. You nod sharply and unlock the driver’s side door of your little car, saluting him before ducking inside. 

He says in the doorway of the trailer until you hit the park’s entrance. It’s only as you’re slowing down to turn onto the sleepy little road that winds back into Hawkins that you glance into your rearview mirror and watch him disappear into the trailer, shutting the door behind him. 

You grip the steering wheel a little tighter, making your turn. As you accelerate towards town something deep and rotten clenches in your gut. It stays there all day long and doesn't so much as lose an inch, even as you're speeding out of town that night toward the interstate. 

“They’re not your options,” he emphasizes dully. 

“Right. Sorry.” There’s a thin smile tugging at the corners of your lips. You’ve seen him parade proudly atop the cafeteria tables, bravely denouncing the attitudes of the people who snubbed him. A couple of years ago, you watched Eddie’s bandmates have to physically restrain him from doing a stage dive at the Hawkins High spring talent show. But sitting across from you, with his long legs folded awkwardly under a table too small for any reasonable pair, the prospect of a one-thousand-word English term paper has him looking pretty downtrodden. 

“Our options,” you correct, and the way his dark eyes spark as they flick up to look at you through parted bangs confirms that that’s not it, either. 

His throat bobs, jaw clenches, and he lets the sleeping dog lie. Pushing a few papers aside, he reads from the distributed assignment, which looks like it’s been sitting in the bottom of his bag from the moment it was handed to him. 

“Write an analytical essay on one of the three listed texts…” He trails off, eyes scanning to the bottom of the page. He sucks his teeth. 

“It’s worse than I thought.” 

“Give me that.” 

You pluck the sheet from his fingers and turn it around, finding the same place on the page.

“Hamlet, Huck Finn, or… Gatsby.” All texts you were happy to leave behind in your first year at Indiana State. 

"Well," you digress, putting the assignment down and folding your hands on top of it. "Let's start with the easy questions. Have you read all of these?" 

Eddie's lips disappear, and with a resigned look in his eye, he shakes his head. 

“Fair enough. Which ones did you get to?” 

More silence. He’s looking toward the window now, and when you follow his gaze your eyes briefly meet in its reflection before he gives up and casts his to the table in front of him. 

"Have you read… any of them?" you prod slowly, trying your best to let any sense of judgment or urgency drain from your tone. 

“I have-“ Eddie starts, drawing a hand slowly over his mouth and chin. He quirks a brow, then meets your eyes in the real world this time. 

“I have them.” 

So that’s where you’re at, then. 

“Eddieeee,” you groan, immediately scrubbing both hands over your face. “How am I supposed to help you write a paper on a book you haven’t even read?” 

“I don’t know,” Eddie defends nervously, and when you open your eyes again his demeanour has shifted. “Why-what d’you think I called you for?”

He’s running the fingers of one hand through his hair, separating and mussing any hint of a remaining curl.

You can see the whites of his eyes all of a sudden. The prospect of another victory lap is starting to dawn on him, and the reflection of it in his eyes sets something tough and determined in your chest. You’re going to get him that D, even if it kills your own spring semester. 

“No, no,” you sigh. “You were right. I owe you one. We’re just… gonna be here a little longer than I thought we would.” 

When you look across the table at him, his expression is one of such dogged remorse it tugs at something sharp and high in the hollow of your chest. He looks like a dog that’s just been thoroughly disciplined, and you’re honestly tempted to scratch him behind the ears and tell him it’s going to be okay. 

“It’s gonna be okay.” You give in, just a little, stacking some of the papers in front of you out of nervous compulsion. “You just need to pick a book, and then we’ll read it. No. This is good.” Steepling your fingers atop the newly stacked pages in front of you, whose edges curl in all different directions, you nod curtly. “This is good. Now you can actually read it through for the first time with your paper in mind. It’s better this way.” 

Eddie eyes you suspiciously, lip curling ever so slightly as his eyes narrow. Without another word, he gets up and disappears down the hallway. The jingling chain on his jeans gets fainter and fainter as he retreats into the room at the back of the trailer. 

“Where are you-“ For a minute, you let him vanish, but after a handful of seconds pass you begin to wonder if maybe you were supposed to follow him. Slowly, you extract yourself from the cramped dinette and retrace his steps down the narrow hallway and through the open door. 

As soon as you see the room beyond, it’s obvious that it’s his bedroom. Posters, drawings, and notebook pages are plastered all over the carpeted walls, and at the far end a pine bookshelf sticks out amongst all the black and red. Propped up against the mirror above it sits his animal print B.C. Rich Warlock, a guitar you’ve seen him play before at one too many high school talent shows. The crowd always booed his band off the stage for their heavy metal sound and freak status, but there’s never been any denying that Eddie knows how to shred. 

Beneath the guitar, band photos, and other memorabilia that's been pasted to the mirror, Eddie crouches, rifling through the bottom drawer with his back to you. 

“What are you looking for?” 

Eddie peeks over his shoulder at you from his crouched position, then produces a slim paperback book and stretches it out toward you from behind his back. 

“This,” he grunts. You close the distance and stoop, taking it from him. It’s an edition of Hamlet, and you realize with some chagrin that the edition you had in your senior year was much nicer than this one. 

But the paper makes no difference, so long as the words printed on it are the right ones. 

“Ideally, the other two, too,” he mumbles, digging back and forth through the drawer one more time before giving up, shutting it, and turning over to prop his back against the chest. “But it seems fate’s making my decision for me.” 

You look down at the text he handed you. It wouldn’t have been your first choice. But the more you think about it, the more appropriate it seems. 

“Shakespeare’s kind of hard to get the hang of,” you start. “But once you do, I think you’ll really like this one.”

You should be pressing the book into his hands and leaving him to digest it on his own terms. You should be getting into the Beetle your parents bought you as a graduation present and driving away, coming back tomorrow to help him structure his argument and pound out the paper before its Monday due date. 

Instead, you drop onto the edge of his low-slung bed and open Hamlet to the first page. 

"I'll believe that when I read it," Eddie replies. In your peripheral vision, you watch him climb slowly to his feet and cross the room toward you. He disappears for a moment, then the weight of him gently sinks the mattress beside you. The warmth of his scent washes over you- Old Spice, cheap metal, and body heat. You breathe in slowly. What else you might have been expecting— fire and brimstone, perhaps— dissolves. You're close enough that the chilly room seems warmed significantly by his presence, and you can feel him watching as you stare hard at the first page of the book in your hands. 

"It's..." you trail off, gathering your thoughts, "the closest thing you're gonna find to any of this stuff." You gesture to the wall at the foot of his bed, where a web of notes is tacked to the wall. At the top rests a single lined page, titled CULT OF VECNA in bold, scratchy blue ballpoint. Pages of notes waterfall downwards in a pyramid formation, charmingly tagged with dates starting as far back as January and culminating at the bottom with notes from only yesterday— March 15, 1986. 

"In that case," he murmurs. His voice is low and conspiratory and rumbles deep in the pit of your stomach as he leans toward you. His ring-studded fingers drop into your lap, carefully flipping through the book to a page that reads ACT 1, SCENE 1. He catches the corner of your eye with the corner of his and smiles so genuinely you'd think he wasn't in dire academic straits. 

“Let the show begin.” 

Three hours later, with the clock winding toward the wee hours, all pretense of formality has dropped. You lay sprawled across the width of Eddie’s bed together with your legs dangling over the side. He’s holding the book above you now, and with your temples pressed together, you’re reading the last few lines of the script. 

“Go, bid the soldiers shoot,” you read, and Eddie snaps the book shut, looking at you in cold, delighted shock. 

“They’re all dead?” he asks, thrilled disbelief persisting. You sink your teeth hard into your lower lip, but the bite fails to contain the smile that brims at the edges of your mouth as you nod. 

"No one wins," he declares, eyes still searching yours as if you might know of a secret, alternative ending that delivers the answers he wants. 

“That’s why they’re called tragedies,” you reply warmly.

For a handful of heartbeats, you stay put. Eddie doesn’t say anything right away, but his eyes are a hand’s breadth from yours and the light in them settles into something deep and amorphous and uncertain. For a moment, the lines in his face deepen so subtly that if you’d been any further from him you wouldn’t have noticed. 

In the next breath, everything slackens and he sits up. 

“Well,” he grunts. “Maybe if Hamlet could make a decision to save his life, things would have been different.” 

You snap your fingers, pointing to him as you prop yourself up on the other elbow. 

“Sounds like you’ve got a paper topic already, Munson.”

Eddie shakes his head. “I can’t write about that.” 

“Sure you can. Why not?” 

“What am I gonna say, Hamlet’s indecisiveness lead to his inevitable downfall?” He stops, goes very serious, and you get to watch him roll the words over in his head again. 

“There’s your thesis,” you quip, and he looks at you in slow shock. 

“Holy shit,” he breathes. His hands are scraping through his hair again and he stands up, pacing a tight loop around the remaining floor space of his cramped bedroom. “Holy shit, it’s that easy?”

“You find evidence to support your argument, write a few sentences of good bullshit at the beginning and end, and you’ve got yourself a term paper.” 

“God damn,” he declares, pumping a fist in the air and whirling around toward you. He presents both palms to you, as if he were your stage partner at curtain call, then slowly bows at the waist. 

“What would I do without you?” 

“Hang on,” you insist, pushing yourself up to sit properly on the edge of his bed again. “My work is far from finished. We still have to-“

“No, no, no, no way,” he insists, hooking both thumbs into the pockets of his jeans. He hasn’t been standing still throughout the entire conversation, still rocking idly back and forth from one foot to the other. “It’s two in the morning. I can’t make you stay back any longer. Your folks are probably shitting themselves right now.“ 

“My folks think I’m spending the night with Stacy Hamilton,” you counter, which is the truth. “As long as I show my face before noon tomorrow, they don’t give a shit what happens to me.” 

“Besides,” you continue, clasping both hands together between your knees, Your smugness falters for a minute, the lingering throb of memory flaring in your chest. 

Prom night. Eddie’s beat-up van. You, unable to contain your vicious sobs. Blowing your nose into a paper McDonald’s napkin while Eddie stared at the steering wheel in uncomfortable silence. 

“I owe you one.” 

Eddie’s brow creases. He steps forward a little, stilling suddenly. 

“Am I ever going to find out what happened that night?” he asks, heartbreakingly gentle. You don’t deserve it. 

“It’s not important,” you buffer, planting both hands hard on your thighs. You dig your fingernails into your knees a little, pressing hard through stiff denim. “I just needed a ride home. And you took the time away from… whatever it was you were doing to give me one. So, I’m seeing this paper through to the end.” 

Eddie looks away and purses his lips, evidently deep in thought. 

“Alright,” he relents. “Okay. What’s next?”

“Well, we should go back through everything we just read and find evidence to support the argument you came up with. And we should probably start making some notes, so we can turn them into a good outline. But…” You trail off, unhooking your fingers from your knees and stretching out the kinks in your back. Three hours of nothing but Shakespeare passed in an instant, but your spine’s reminding you that the three hours lying sprawled the wrong way around on Eddie’s antique mattress were all too real. 

“I could use a break,” Eddie suggests, and when you drop both arms back to your sides, you nod. 

“Read my mind.” 

Eddie nods, taking a quick look over his shoulder, through his open bedroom door, and into the hallway. 

“You hungry?” 

You hadn’t really thought about it, but the more you do, the more you realize that the empty gnawing in your stomach isn’t anxiety, it’s hunger. 

“Starving.” 

“Great.” Eddie starts quickly for the door. Before he can leave, though, he stalls, turning back around. “How ‘bout, uh…” 

In two steps he's across the room again and pulls open the cabinet sitting next to the boom box at the head of his bed. The shelves inside are lined with tapes, and he straightens up again, gesturing awkwardly toward them. 

“You can put some music on. Whatever you want. I’ll-I’ll find us some food.” 

Before you can even get to your feet Eddie’s made a break for it, disappearing down the hallway and into the kitchen. He’d seemed in a great hurry to get away from you suddenly, which is a conclusion you try not to take personally as you stoop in front of his cassette collection and look for something to break the silence. 

A few minutes later, Eddie comes back into the room with a pot of coffee in one hand and a plate of plain graham crackers in the other. Two chipped porcelain mugs dangle from his ring and pinkie fingers, and as he sets everything down on the chest by the mirror (a safe distance from the Warlock) you’re turning your cassette of choice over in your hands. 

“Find something?” he asks. You’re proud of yourself for this one. Gleefully, you grip the case by its edges and shove it toward him, showing him the faded label that’s been tucked neatly into the transparent acrylic case.

The Velvet Underground. It’s their titular album, too, with its trademark grainy black-and-white band photo superimposed onto a black background.

“Like finding a needle in a haystack,” you declare, watching him blanch. 

“Why do I even have that?” He mutters, drawing a palm over his face. 

“For when you bring girls over,” you chirp without thinking, already focused on loading the tape into his impressive-looking stereo. There are two things in this room he obviously saved for. The boom box, with its clean silver lines and automatic change system, is one of them. 

“Is that what you are?” he asks with wan humour obscuring any real emotion. 

“A girl?” you laugh, straightening up. You wind around him, passing close to his back as you loop across the room to perch on the edge of his bed again. 

“Last I checked,” you confirm, and he snorts, hesitating for an instant before slowly lowering himself onto the mattress beside you. 

The soft, heartfelt strains of Candy Says drift around the room, and he gives you a look so deep and so sincere you’re starting to wonder if you should have picked something harder to play, after all. He takes a breath like he’s about to say something, stops, then starts again, and you know you’re going to wish he hadn’t said it. 

“I would’ve taken you to the prom, you know.” 

It’s a concept so absurd you burst into quiet, breathy laughter, and he looks at you so surprised his expression reads something closer to injury. 

"No, you wouldn't have," you counter. "You didn't even go by yourself." 

“Of course I didn’t,” he retorts. He’s sneering, but the humour’s leaked back into his eyes and you’re starting to relax again. 

“So why in the hell would you have asked someone like me? You barely even knew me.” 

"And I still would have been a hell of a better date than that prick who took you." His tone is suddenly hard, suddenly urgent, and when he looks at you again his eyes seem to truly smoulder with fire and brimstone. The intensity of his gaze steals the air straight from your lungs and for a long moment, you struggle to catch it, looking back into his eyes while you take deep, greedy breaths through flared nostrils. 

Finally, you relent. Your shoulders drop. You flop onto your back. 

“Yeah. You would’ve.” 

Anyone would’ve. 

Eddie lies down beside you, tender as a lamb. For a moment his face stays firmly turned to the ceiling, but he lets it drop toward you, and slowly, you do the same. 

“I don’t know exactly what he did to you,” he confesses, speaking slowly, deliberately. “And I don’t need to. But I’ve never seen anybody cry like that before.” 

You flinch. 

“I know.” 

Eddie the Freak is gentle as a summer breeze as he rolls onto his side and traces the backs of his fingers down your inner forearm. His touch catches like lightning, and you don’t stop him as his palm lands in yours. 

He is beautiful like this, soft and slow as a flickering candle. But, then again, he's always been beautiful, ablaze with passion, and too bold to store it away. Too bold to pretend not to care, as has become so terrifyingly common among your generation. 

There’s nothing devilish about the boy sharing his bed with you. And the only crime is how long it’s taken you to see that. 

You turn onto your side, lacing your fingers slowly with his. Your new position puts his face a whisper from yours. The cool press of the bedsheet cradles your cheek, and the puffs of warm breath that escape his nose are strong enough to be palpable. 

You’d felt this way only once before when, in a cold fit of panic in the passenger’s seat of his beat-up van, he’d reached across the seat and settled a palm between your trembling shoulderblades. The sensation, nearly a year old at this point, is as fresh as the press of his fingers in yours. 

He’d talked you down from a ledge so high and so cold, and it was there, in the spring chill that clung to the peeling leather seats, that you’d felt the string pull taut for the first time. 

Eleven months of near-total alienation had slackened it. But it had never truly disintegrated. It was the gentlest tug, for the first time in nearly a year, when you’d heard his voice on the other end of the crackling phone line pleading for your tutelage that prompted you to lie to your parents, climb into your car, and in a fit of disbelief, drive across town in the fading light of dusk to Forest Hills Trailer Park. 

But curled in his bed with Pale Blue Eyes rumbling in the background and his face an inch from yours, it’s about to snap. 

"Eddie-" you start, but your voice fails you. You swallow hard. Watch his jaw clench. He lifts his other hand, brushes his fingertips down the edge of your jaw, and then, as you brace a hand against his sternum, gives in and cups your cheek. 

You both know what he’d say to you. And so it goes unsaid, as you dip carefully forward and brush the slack swell of your mouth to his. 

Your chest melts into magma when he responds in kind, stroking his thumb over your cheek. The angle is awkward and impossible, so after a breath, you draw back to face the consequences of your actions. 

Eddie's eyes slide open and he regards you with an expression so dumbstruck it seems almost certain you've slipped into a dream. Eddie Munson, who always knows what to say, struck silent by something as simple as a kiss. 

You’re kidding yourself if any of the feelings swirling through your limbs right now could be described as ‘simple.’ 

“That was…” he finally starts. Your stomach does a flip and you immediately lose your nerve. 

“Weird,” you conclude, sitting up rapidly and pressing the heels of your hands into your eyes. “Oh god, I’m… I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.” 

“Weird?” He sits up, too. Now that the touch barrier’s been broken he reaches for you, curling his fingers around your palms and tugging them away from your face. You’re forced to look at him, and his expression is stern, eyes intent. He shakes his head. 

“Not weird. Not weird at all.” 

Facing each other properly now, he reaches for you, cradling your head between both palms. You’re leveled by his gaze again, hands drifting forward to land on his thighs. 

“Can I try?” he asks. With your brain whirling inside your skull at the speed of a gale, you nod. 

He kisses you head-on, fuller and deeper this time, and the hum that escapes your chest is completely involuntary. You slack against him, giving in to the temptation that's heightened to insufferability ever since he got close enough for you to smell the Doublemint on his breath. Ever since he looked at you with all the sorrow of a widower, dropped the phony Shakespearean dialect he'd been using, and said slowly, mournfully, too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia.

You curl your fingers into his t-shirt, gripping tightly with one hand and stroking up his chest with the other like you might soothe the wrinkles your grasp creates. You drape one hand over the plane of his shoulder and he takes the opportunity to plant his hand in the small of your back, fingers outspread. He draws you closer and you comply, shifting forward until you can get no closer without climbing into his lap. Then you climb closer still, letting your thighs fall open over his. Denim presses over denim as your weight settles into his lap and, emboldened by the insistent press of his mouth up into yours, you grab for his jaw with both hands and slot your lips together so deeply he groans straight down your throat, palm trembling at the waistband of your jeans. 

You curve your body forward to press torso and pelvis together, and his hips give a startled little twitch against yours. Suddenly out of breath, he draws back a little, angling his face ever so slightly away from yours. 

“I’ve- I’ve never…” he ejects, and suddenly you realize what he’s trying to tell you. He shifts a little beneath you as you sit slowly back, and the evidence of your indiscretion suddenly presses long and firm down the inside of your thigh. Your pulse spikes, but you force yourself to take a breath and look him sincerely in the eye. 

“Do you want to stop?” 

“What?” His eyes narrow in disbelief. “No. I- no. I just thought-" He straightens a little and shifts again, and this time you both feel it, the hard press of him down one leg of his faded denim. He stiffens, and the red that's crept out of the edges of his collar flushes his cheeks. 

"I just thought I should tell you now. In case you don't..." He trails off, and you're glad he does because it means he can't find a sensible way to finish that sentence. 

“I’m glad you told me,” you promise, dipping forward to gently nuzzle along the joint of his jaw and neck. He shivers and inhales softly through his teeth, drawing his hands up your sides. “But I’m not going anywhere.” 

“Okay,” he replies dumbly. His voice wavers as you press your mouth to the patch of skin you’d been nuzzling, sucking lightly just to make him squirm. 

“Okay,” he says one more time as his muscles twitch, palms stuttering at either side of your ribcage. You sit back, heart aflutter with pure, golden affection. 

“Here,” you prompt. “Let’s make it feel real, hmm?” You dip your fingers under the stitched hem of his t-shirt and slowly start to pull it up his back. He reacts immediately, helping you tug it over his head and tossing it to the side. His chest is broad and solid— lacking the definition of an athlete, but bearing all the strength of a man. A bristle of coarse, dark hair dusts his sternum, narrowing into a bare abdomen and a short trail that connects his navel to the low-slung waistband of his jeans. He wears a guitar pick with a hole punched in it, strung around his neck on a dog tag chain that’s always been long enough to hide the makeshift pendant.

The sparse tattoos that stud his wrists, forearms, and biceps spill onto his chest as well, all in well-faded black ink. You trace your thumb over the biggest one, whose edges you've seen before emerging from the lowest necklines of his t-shirts. 

He exhales slowly, watching your every move. 

"'m not exactly-" he starts, but you lean forward and kiss him before he can put a voice to those thoughts. 

When you pull away it’s only to tug your own loose t-shirt over your head, and he goes a little white as he looks over the warm expanse of your skin. You’re left wearing a simple, sculpted t-shirt bra now in an inconspicuous colour, and as he reaches for you again his fingers trace the edges of its band. 

"This too?" you prompt, reaching behind you for the clasp. Eddie panics. 

“No! I-uh-if you want,” he assures, going pink all over again. “You’re. I just. You’re gorgeous.” 

Any lingering doubt is washed away in the torrent of warm affection that floods your senses. You like this side of him. He is dedicated and confident and bold, but just for you, he's sincere. Tender. Sweet, even. 

It occurs to you that you’ve somehow earned the right to see this side of him, and as you unclasp your bra you make a silent vow to never, ever, make him regret trusting you. 

Your bra joins the twin t-shirts on the ratty carpet and then he has you, bare from the waist up. He traces his fingertips up your sides again, uninhibited all the way up your ribcage, then cups your ribs between both hands and strokes his fingers tenderly into the creases under each breast. 

“Tell me to stop,” he practically chokes, “if I do something you don’t like.” 

“You could never,” you promise airily, losing yourself. There’s a part of you that could truly love him, and another, deeper part of you that’s already starting to. 

“Wanna taste every part of you,” he confesses, dipping his head to the juncture of your shoulder and starting to kiss as his thumbs drift upward onto the flesh of your breasts. 

You hiccup softly as dull pleasure flashes through your nerves, and it spurs him on enough to give in and cup your breasts entirely, fitting the curves of them into his palms. Slowly he dips downward, drawing his mouth to meet his hands, and as his tongue traces your sternum he pushes your breasts gently together to kiss at the juncture of them. 

"Eddie—" you whimper, and he takes the wordless direction with ease, flipping his hands over to cup your breasts at the sides and trace his thumbs across the rapidly hardening swells of your nipples. The nerves and the cool air of the poorly-sealed trailer already had them rising to his touch, but goosebumps race up your sternum when he touches them for the first time. 

“Sensitive there?” he mumbles against your skin and you nod fitfully into his hair. He leans back for a moment, adjusts, then slowly the wet, warm press of his tongue curls around the peak of your right nipple and your toes curl in their department-store socks. 

He tweaks the other one gently between knuckle and thumb, making you yelp and flinch further into the hot lave of his tongue. He closes his mouth around the bud of it and gives a gentle suck. You angle your hips down against his and grind hard to reassure him, which seems to work, as he responds in kind with a groan and a flick of his tongue. 

“Eddie, don’t make me wait,” you whimper, pushing him slowly back as the heat builds to indelible levels between your thighs. 

"Wouldn't-" his voice catches as you push him back against the pillows, and he centers himself on both elbows, watching you shift backward and make for his belt. 

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” 

You dig into the opening of his belt buckle, tugging the strap out so forcefully it snaps painfully back against your wrist. With another tug, you've got it unfastened, and in the span of a breath you're unbuttoning his jeans and tugging the zipper down with one hand. As you do, your free hand finds the swell of his cock where it's trapped against his thigh. You squeeze it gently and he twitches into your hand, groaning sharp and low. The look that clouds his eyes is nothing short of addictive. 

You’re going back in for a bigger hit. 

“My turn,” you brush, working jeans and boxer shorts over his narrow hips. He plants his hands on the mattress and lifts his hips to help you, silent with what feels like disbelief. You’re struck by it, too. No matter how many parts of you have been wanting this. It never seemed like something that would actually happen. 

“Gotta taste you.” That sentence seems to process properly and he blinks, lowering his chin and lifting his head. 

“What?” 

But you’re already tugging his pants down and off, addicted to the way the curved swell of his cock bounces free to lay against his stomach. His legs bow nervously as you drop what remains of his clothing onto the carpet, and you draw both hands up his pale thighs to soothe his tightly-strung muscles. 

“You heard me.” Your voice is coming in a low, rolling purr that feels entirely unfamiliar, but it disguises the shakiness in your chest as you settle between his legs. He’s watching you so intently right now he’s not even blinking, staring down the length of his torso at your slow, measured movements. 

You wrap chilly fingers around the base of his cock- so warm- and he shudders. It’s a little longer than average and thicker than it looks, the weight of it sitting pleasantly between your fingers. The skin is warm, pale, and impossibly soft, and as you draw your hand up and down the shaft of him, his uncut foreskin finishes drawing back to reveal the slick pink, blunt head of him, already leaking a pearly bead of clear fluid. 

“Uh,” he starts, but his voice dies out as you drop your lips to his tip and draw your tongue slowly across the head, tasting him. 

“Holy shit.” His head falls back against the pillows, but he quickly corrects himself, as if realizing he might miss something, and picks his head up to stare one more time. 

“So I’m guessing no one’s ever done this to you before, either,” you hum. You dip your head to the base and lick a long stripe up his underside, finding a thick vein to follow with the tip of your tongue. 

"N-no one's ever done anything to me," he grits. Under your free hand, his thigh is hard as a rock. "No one's… no one's done anything." 

The way he says it unlocks something deep and tender and sympathetic in your heart, and you speak the wholehearted truth in your reply. 

“Then I am honored to be the first.” 

He doesn't deserve any teasing after a confession like that, so you lift your chin and direct his tip to your mouth, sucking him down with all the gentleness he's shown you. Even with the gentlest press of your lips and tongue, he reacts powerfully, grunting sharply through clenched-sounding teeth. 

“Holy shit. Oh god, don’t-“ 

You work him into a slow rhythm, wrapping your hand around the base to hold him steady while you bob up and down on the parts of him you can take. Your tongue pulses gently against his underside as you work to keep your mouth slack, letting the ridges of his shape work over the softest and wettest parts of your mouth. 

All the while, Eddie squirms and pitches above you, smoothing his fingers into the sheets at his sides, then clenching them when you do something new. After a few rhythmic bobs of your head, he obviously realizes it's okay to touch you because he reaches hesitantly forward to settle a hand on your shoulder first. Then he glides it to the back of your neck instead and keeps it there. The jostle of your head brushes his thumb against your sensitive nape, sending fresh goosebumps down your spine as you work him over. 

"God, y-you gotta-" he starts. The first outburst is hardly urgent, but his voice spirals upwards into a sudden panic. "Wait, please, slow down, y-you have to… s-stop." 

He’s cupping your cheeks suddenly, but you’re sensing his change of pace and pulling off him before he can get a solid grip on your face. His cock pops out of your mouth with a lewd little squelch and he holds you there panting, tracing a thumb over the sloppy swell of your lower lip. 

"Is everything okay?" You ask quietly, searching his face. His expression is cloudy, unreadable. After a moment, he seems to recover and shoots you a lopsided smile. 

“Almost lost it on you there.” 

Relief floods your mind as you tilt your head, matching his smile. 

“You’re allowed to lose it on me. In fact, I think that’s kinda the point.” 

“I know,” he promises. “But.” He looks up at you, smiling shyly. 

“Oh. You think there’s more to this, do you?” 

Eddie’s expression drops. 

“No,” he counters from his gut. “Well,” He pauses, looking down at you in dull panic. But you’re still smiling, so his shoulders don’t take long to relax again. 

“I’m sorry.” You push onto your knees and crawl up his torso, holding yourself gently atop him. “I’ll stop messing with you. I promise.” You drop a kiss to his mouth, then roll away completely to stand up. 

Eddie sits up a little to watch you, and in the low warm light of the wee hours, he is breathtaking. Sprawled out for you, his hard, weeping cock still slick and shiny from your efforts, guitar pick necklace strewed crookedly across his collarbone. What's more breathtaking than anything is the way he looks at you, like you are the star he's just lucky enough to orbit. 

You unbutton your jeans and hook your thumbs through your underwear, wedging both down over your hips and stepping out of them. He casts a wondrous eye over your naked body, reaching for you low and soft and slow. You step over the pile of clothes and collapse slowly to the mattress beside him. 

Eddie rolls onto his side and kisses you long and tender, drawing a hand down your sternum and belly. Your thighs fall open instinctively and he dips his hand into the space between them. As soon as his fingers brush the warm gush of your cunt you groan in unison. 

“Shit,” he grits, drawing out the shhh as his chest deflates against yours. “You’re drenched, baby.” 

The nickname slingshots through your head and bounces off your heartstrings like a pinball. You draw a sharp, short little breath and grab his chin in one hand. 

“Just kiss me again.” 

He complies, bending to seal his lips against yours as his fingers continue to dip into your folds. He brushes one fingertip inward, finding the opening of your entrance and pressing slowly inward with middle, then ring finger, then both. 

“Hooly shit,” he draws again as he feels out the edges of your insides, and you drop back from his mouth to chew your upper lip and whine softly at the sensations he draws from you. The pleasure is mild, but the anticipation of more sends little shocks of pleasure into your body with every press of his fingers. 

He curls them gently, finding the spongy, tender surface of your upper wall. As he presses inward again, the heel of his palm tweaks the swollen nub of your clit and you flinch. 

“Oh?” He shoots you a quizzical, suddenly playful expression. It feels good- really good- to watch him take pleasure in figuring you out. He arches his hand and presses his thumb toward you. The tender pad finds your clit deliberately now. 

“Did I find something good?” He’s a little breathless, but his playful spirit has returned as he gives your clit a gentle strum and watches as you fight off a spasm of pleasure in your lower belly. 

“Yeah,” you pant. “Keep touching it.” 

"Okay." He nods, light but sincere all over again. "Okay, I won't stop." Letting his fingers rest inside you, he winds a slow, clockwise spiral into your clit. Your hips are pinned under his hand, but by the time he's winding outward again, you're trembling underneath him. 

“Back and forth,” you breathe, needing rhythm and something to latch onto. “Eddie, do it back and forth.” 

He takes the direction nobly, switching his movement to a slow, steady back-and-forth rub. The tempo is flawless and steady, which shouldn’t surprise you, and it’s not long before you’re squirming on his fingers, cunt fluttering and clenching around them as he works you into a pleasure-filled stupor. He checks in with you every time something changes, and you quietly reassure him, redirect him, or, as words begin to fail you, dumbly nod and scramble to lace your fingers through those of his free hand. 

He’s right there with you now, gripping your fingers tightly in one hand and working you firmly with the other with your foreheads pressed together. There’s silence for a moment, but as you let out a laboured, held breath, a deep, tingly sort of pleasure crawls up the column of your spine and you start to pitch and fuss. 

“Eddie,” you whimper, a sudden urgency finding your voice. “Eddie, ‘m gonna come.” 

“You’re-“ He doesn’t understand immediately, but it dawns on him quickly. 

“Oh god, baby, come on,” he urges tightly, keeping the rhythm of his working fingers steady. “Come on.” 

“Right there,” you plead. “Right, yeah, yeah y-“ 

The cry of pleasure dies in your throat and you push your forehead against his with a dull whimper instead as your belly spasms and your legs twitch. Your cunt flutters and clenches down hard around his fingers with shallow handfuls of slick coating them. You're squeezing his hand so hard the ridges of his rings dig into your fingers, but you're too far gone now. Ecstasy races through your nerves and you squeeze your eyes shut, giving in to the pleasure and letting the involuntary ride of your hips take over. 

When you surface, Eddie’s hand lays slack between your legs. As he sees your eyes open, he carefully untangles his hand from yours and reaches up to trace his fingertips down the side of your face, breathless himself. 

“Holy shit,” it’s your turn to say, smiling airily at him. He snorts quietly, beaming back at you. 

“Was that a good ‘holy shit’ or a bad ‘holy shit?’” he asks. After catching your breath, you answer. 

“Should I have been asking you that the whole time?” 

Eddie laughs, ducking his face into the curve of your shoulder. 

“Come here,” you prompt. Confused, he rolls a little closer, but you take charge and tug him between your legs, dragging him on top of you fully. 

“We don’t have to,” he starts, but his cock is maroon and twitching against your hip, drooling a steady stream of pre into the divot of your pelvis. 

You’re still sensitive and already picturing how good he’ll feel inside you. There’s no turning back now. 

“Want it,” you promise, turning your eyes to his. “Want you.” 

He pauses, searching your gaze. He shakes his head slowly. 

“Never thought I’d hear something like that outta someone like you.” 

“Believe it, Munson,” you counter, reaching up to brush sweaty bangs out of his eyes. “You’re all mine now.” 

“Gladly,” he breathes deeply, leaning down for another slow kiss. As he licks lazily into your mouth he spreads his thighs under yours, lowering his hips and aligning himself with your ready cunt. 

He pulls back from your mouth to concentrate for a moment, looking down his body at the place where you’re joined. Carefully, with the fingers of one hand braced gently on your pubic bone, he eases his hips forward, breaching the wet threshold and slotting slowly into you. 

You bite your lip, exhaling slowly through the sweet, sensitive stretch of it. He buries himself halfway, then pitches forward with a shaky groan and slides all the way home, already trembling above you. 

“Fuck,” he grunts. “God. I’m not gonna last at all.” 

“I don’t care,” you insist, wrapping your arms around his broad back, clutching at him. You’ve had your pleasure. “Just fuck me.” 

He takes that instruction to heart and draws himself back from you again, pulling his hips gently backward, then fucking carefully into you just once. 

“Jeeeesus,” he draws, eyes falling shut. “You’re amazing.” 

He does it again, again, again, then settles into the same heartful tempo with which his fingers had worked you over so easily before. You close your eyes and submit to the feeling, settling into the rhythm and the slow, percussive slap of his hips against yours. 

Eddie lets a heavy breath from his chest with every thrust, and you try your best to capture the soft huh huh huh of his working lungs as he pants into your neck. 

You want to remember all of this. Until, hopefully, you can do it again. 

Eddie reaches down and hitches your thighs over his, angling his hips down ever so slightly and fucking deeper into you than before. The push of his hips has your head rocking against his cheap pillows, cutting dangerously close to knocking over the expensive tape deck that's already switched itself to Side 2 of the cassette, where the rest of "The Velvet Underground" plays at a lazy beat. 

You sling both arms over your head and your fingertips brush it. The low thrum of the bass vibrates through your fingers as Eddie smooths all the hair back from your face and braces your head between both hands as he throws himself against you over and over again. His eyes are dark, fathomless flecks of obsidian in the dim light, but they are wide and warm with the adoration that bubbles frighteningly fast and intense between you. 

But the rest of his expression is measured and taut. As soon as you pick up on it, you realize his hips have slowed, too. In an instant, he's gone from losing himself in you to exercising careful control on every tentative movement. 

The joint of your hips is molten at this point, with heat building to a quickly intolerable level. And then you realize what he’s holding back on. You draw him in, gripping his hips between both thighs. 

“Close,” you pant. “You’re close, aren’t you?” His pained little grunt confirms your suspicions. 

“I’ll… try ’n hold out,” he pants. “Gotta…” 

“No,” you plead. “Don’t hold out. Please, Eddie, I wanna see you cum.” 

“Christ,” he mutters under his breath. “It’s gonna be, like, now.” 

“I don’t care.” 

You buck your hips against his indignantly, and he lets out such a howl of pleasure it almost startles you. Drawing in a deep, shaky breath, his mouth sets into a tight, firm line. 

He gives into it. 

With another glide of his hands down the sides of your face, he re-engages, spreading his thighs long and low and starting to thrust. His movements grow erratic quickly, and in only a handful of thrusts, he's throwing himself against you with a long, guttural moan that shakes him to the very tips of his hair. He stills against you, sealing hips and chest and mouth to yours, and his balls twitch between your legs before he's shuddering and emptying them into your welcoming heat, shaft twitching between your walls as he slowly fucks the long spurts of his climax into your clingy depths. 

When it’s over, he collapses atop you, sweaty and spent, and you wrap your arms around him, frighteningly, immersively, irreversibly in love. 

“We just…” he trailed off, separating himself from you carefully and rolling onto his side. His body curls vulnerably around yours, and he doesn’t speak again until you do. 

“Do you regret it?” you mumble quietly, mildly, to disguise the weight behind the question. He cuts you a strange look, then realizes you’re kind of serious and his expression softens. 

“Nah.” He plants a hand on the plane of your belly. His touch is gentle but the skin is rough— it’s his fretting hand. He purses his lips in thought, then finds your eyes again. 

“You?”

“Uh-uh,” you assure. 

You lie there until the tape’s played all the way through, listening as the last sunny strums of After Hours fade into silence and the machine whirrs softly, resetting the tape. There’s a quiet, percussive click as play/pause slots back into place, and then the silence is true and thick. 

You could discuss the feelings that have settled between you. You could talk about how you're probably one of the most mismatched couples Hawkins has ever seen if you're even ready to call yourselves that. 

Instead, you sit up slowly, smooth your hair, and reach down for your clothes. 

“I guess we should get back to work.” 

Eddie’s obviously not sure how to take your digression, sitting up beside you and hesitating to touch you again. He does anyway, though, thumbing your chin quietly before he ducks away and reaches for his own clothes. 

“We should.” 

At eight o’clock the following morning, with soreness settling into your muscles and a completed draft of Eddie’s term paper sitting on the dinette table, you lean against one narrow edge of the trailer’s doorframe while he boxes you in and kisses you. The wear of an all-nighter is settling in around the edges of his eyes as you draw back with your car keys looped around your finger. 

“You’re going back tonight, right?” he asks you quietly with a hand cradling your jaw. You haven’t been able to tear yourself from him since you put your clothes back on. 

“Yeah,” you answer, unable to keep the mournful tone from your expression. “But I’ll be back at the end of April.” 

“For the summer,” he checks hopefully. You smile blissfully. You can’t help it. 

“Yeah,” you say, looking forward to it already. “For the whole summer.” 

"Then I guess I'll see you in April," he brushes slowly. He reaches for both your hands and squeezes them between his own. For a moment, his brow flicks downwards. He grips them tighter, then releases you, and you back slowly down the steps. Your little green VW bug's been parked on the grass outside his trailer all night, and you're ready to let that mean to his neighbours whatever they want it to mean. 

“Don’t be a stranger,” he calls suddenly, softly. When you turn to face him again he bobs a little, jiggling his finger and thumb beside his ear in a mockery of the people who used to be your classmates. 

Call me, he mouths, smiling indulgently. You nod sharply and unlock the driver’s side door of your little car, saluting him before ducking inside. 

He says in the doorway of the trailer until you hit the park’s entrance. It’s only as you’re slowing down to turn onto the sleepy little road that winds back into Hawkins that you glance into your rearview mirror and watch him disappear into the trailer, shutting the door behind him. 

You grip the steering wheel a little tighter, making your turn. As you accelerate towards town something deep and rotten clenches in your gut. It stays there all day long and doesn't so much as lose an inch, even as you're speeding out of town that night toward the interstate.