#gracie'spreviews

no bc i am DISGUTING W MYSELF I NEED TO STOP I NEED TO CALM THE FUCK DOWN (here's a snippet of a lil something im working on hehehehe):

the spreadsheet had glitched again. a flicker in the dark, a stab in the back, a fucking betrayal. your breath hitched as the screen panned to white.

"tell me we didn’t just lose everything," you whispered, voice low. tight. rather hastily restrained. barely held together by the fraying thread of three restless hours of sleep and six hours of logistical level-headedness, of suzuka transport schedules (confirmed), red-eye flights (booked), sim runs (scheduled)—

behind you, lewis exhaled. heavy with sleep. worn. (you'd begun to resent it—his way of saying things without saying them.)

"you didn’t save it," he said. not accusatory. not cruel. just… flat.

you refused to look up. "you didn’t save it. this is your laptop. which, by the way, is a hundred years old." then, under your breath: "no one manually saves anything anymore."

a beat. the window was cracked open an inch, tokyo air damp and warm and electric, buzzing with the neon heartbeat of a city that never really slept. you'd turned off the lights an hour ago, the dim glow of the laptop screen on your lap painting your features in panic. (you always wondered when the day would come. the day you took it too far.)

"i’ll redo it," you said after a long moment. "it won’t take long."

you heard lewis shift on the bed, sheets rustling beneath his weight as he lifted himself to his feet. he hadn’t meant to fall asleep. you hadn’t meant to watch him. you could still feel the ghost of it lingering: his body stretched taunt across white cotton, shirt bunched around his navel, jaw slack with exhaustion. the way his mouth twitched in his sleep. (you couldn't help but wonder what he had been dreaming about.)

he was behind you, now. close enough to feel. close enough to touch. "you should rest."

you snorted softly. "that’s rich. coming from you."

somewhere down below, a car horn blared, then faded. lewis didn’t move. didn’t speak. not at first. and yet, the heat of him, the weight of his presence, stifled the words sitting limply in your throat.

"take the bed." his voice was gravel under velvet. something scraped from the bottom of a glass you weren’t supposed to drink from. "i'll do it."

your fingers began to fly across the keyboard in professional earnest, but you were simply typing gibberish. anything to keep from facing the slight downturn of his lips, the languid, sleep-mused drop of his eyes. "don't even think about it."

soft footsteps (one, two, three, four). then the slow press of his chest against your back, the tingling heat of his frame against yours. he didn’t really touch you. not yet. but his arms bracketed yours, palms flat on either side of the laptop, caging you into the desk without force. your eyes dropped to the ink on his fingers.

"tell me to stop," lewis murmured, his words ghosting over the back of your neck. (oh. oh. oh, god.)

your voice didn't seem to be yours. "we have an early call time."

"tell me. to stop."

"i can't."

"you never can," he said, breath ghosting over your jaw, your temple, the shell of your ear. "don't know why i asked." and then his mouth was against your neck, a press of lips just beneath your pulse, soft and scorching. feeling for the racetrack of your heartbeat. (and that's light out and away we—)

"that's not fair," you whispered, fingers stilling against the keyboard. "i'm just trying to do the right thing." (the clock on the desk read 2:43 am. too late for sense. too early for sleep. what else was bound to happen besides this?)

"this is the right thing," he said, mouth tracing a line down the column of your neck, the curve of your jaw. memorizing the shape of this mistake. your eyes slipped closed; you let it happen.

this couldn’t happen. it couldn’t.

(which meant, of course, that it would.)

♡