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#a harlem love story
the-algebra-thing · 1 year
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you arrived when you were most needed and held the ground steady in your quiet way. for us, there is no question; we could never have made it this far without you. (Brian Andreas, Story People: 'quiet way')
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jadenvargen · 24 days
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free online james baldwin stories, essays, videos, and other resources
**edit
James baldwin online archive with his articles and photo archives.
---NOVELS---
Giovanni's room"When David meets the sensual Giovanni in a bohemian bar, he is swept into a passionate love affair. But his girlfriend's return to Paris destroys everything. Unable to admit to the truth, David pretends the liaison never happened - while Giovanni's life descends into tragedy. This book introduces love's fascinating possibilities and extremities."
Go Tell It On The Mountain"(...)Baldwin's first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves."
+bonus: film adaptation on youtube. (if you’re a giancarlo esposito fan, you’ll be delighted to see him in an early preacher role)
Another Country and Going to Meet the Man Another country: "James Baldwin's masterly story of desire, hatred and violence opens with the unforgettable character of Rufus Scott, a scavenging Harlem jazz musician adrift in New York. Self-destructive, bad and brilliant, he draws us into a Bohemian underworld pulsing with heat, music and sex, where desperate and dangerous characters betray, love and test each other to the limit." Going to meet the Man: " collection of eight short stories by American writer James Baldwin. The book, dedicated "for Beauford Delaney", covers many topics related to anti-Black racism in American society, as well as African-American–Jewish relations, childhood, the creative process, criminal justice, drug addiction, family relationships, jazz, lynching, sexuality, and white supremacy."
Just Above My Head"Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, Baldwin goes back to Harlem, to the church of his groundbreaking novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, to the homosexual passion of Giovanni's Room, and to the political fire that enflames his nonfiction work. Here, too, the story of gospel singer Arthur Hall and his family becomes both a journey into another country of the soul and senses--and a living contemporary history of black struggle in this land."
If Beale Street Could Talk"Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin's story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions-affection, despair, and hope. In a love story that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, Baldwin has created two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche."
also has a film adaptation by moonlight's barry jenkins
Tell Me How Long the Train's been gone At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. An adored older brother vanishes into prison. There are love affairs with a white woman and a younger black man, each of whom will make irresistible claims on Leo's loyalty. 
---ESSAYS---
Baldwin essay collection. Including most famously: notes of a native son, nobody knows my name, the fire next time, no name in the street, the devil finds work- baldwin on film
--DOCUMENTARIES--
Take this hammer, a tour of san Francisco.
Meeting the man
--DEBATES:--
Debate with Malcolm x, 1963 ( on integration, the nation of islam, and other topics. )
Debate with William Buckley, 1965. ( historic debate in america. )
Heavily moderated debate with Malcolm x, Charles Eric Lincoln, and Samuel Schyle 1961. (Primarily Malcolm X's debate on behalf of the nation of islam, with Baldwin giving occassional inputs.)
----
apart from themes obvious in the book's descriptions, a general heads up for themes of incest and sexual assault throughout his works.
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itmeblog · 2 months
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It's Black History Month
(Over here in the US of A) So here are some podcasts to check out.
Absolutely no Adventures - a fantasy (un)adventure story that follows Sig, the owner of Signature Eats bakery, as he aggressively avoids becoming embroiled in any daring quests or chosen one shenanigans even though the universe really seems to want him to do just that. This is a story about cutting Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey off at the knees to chill with friends and staying far, far away from the slightest whiff of adventure. And also baking. This is also a story about baking.
Afflicted - Lovecraft Country meets True Blood in this new series from award-winning producers Tonia Ransom and Jen Zink. In season one, a small East Texas town suffers supernatural disasters caused by a demonic book bound in human flesh…and only hoodoo can save the town from its affliction.
Apollyon - In the early 22nd century, the Apollyon virus wiped out 75% of the world’s population, and now most of the world is governed by the International Conglomerate of Research Scientists. Dr. Theo Ramsey is an ICRS research scientist who may have just discovered an effective vaccine for Apollyon, but the stakes to get the vaccine to the public are higher than she ever imagined.
Between Heartbeats - Tan immersive Urban Fantasy about the hurt, the powerful, and their growth within a broken world. We follow Sundiata, a guilt-ridden time manipulator with a knack for unemployment, and Nadia, a moralistic telepath determined not to lose control, as they balance frayed mental health against an unsympathetic police state. But when a malevolent presence rears is head, their neuroses become the least of their problems. Can our heroes make the most of their abilities before the option is taken from them?
Fan Wars: The Empire Claps Back - Two passionate Star Wars fans on opposite sides of the Last Jedi debate argue via Skype after their favorite forum closes down. If you love Star Wars (or call yourself a proud member of any fandom), you’ll love this romantic comedy told via
Harlem Queen - a Black historical fiction audio drama based on the life and times of Black, woman, "gangster" Madame Stephanie St. Clair during the Harlem Renaissance.
His Royal Fakin' Highness - What if Ophelia helped Hamlet get his throne back? This modern day, romantic comedy re-imagining of Shakespeare's Hamlet asks just that. As they stage an engagement in the wake of the king's death, these childhood frenemies must decide between duty and love.
InCo (This one's mine :D) - A Sci-Fi story about a disgruntled information seller, a mysterious space boy, and an android doing her best.
Janus Descending - a limited series, science fiction/horror audio drama podcast, follows the arrival of two xenoarcheologists on a small world orbiting a binary star. But what starts off as an expedition to survey the planet and the remains of a lost alien civilization, turns into a monstrous game of cat and mouse, as the two scientists are left to face the creatures that killed the planet in the first place.
Lady Lucy - Lady Lucy is an audio drama inspired by Shakespeare's "Dark Lady" Sonnets, 127-154. Between running her brothel, fighting the Church, murdering her friends' abusive husbands, and pretending to be a poet, the last thing Lucy needed back in 1586 was a surprise visit from her former flame... Will Shakespeare.
Liars and Leeches - Tonya Wright felt it all after the tragic murders of her sister and brother-in-law in a random act of gun violence. Struggling to travel outside of her home, she now lives constantly on edge about perceived threats that seem to surround her.
Nightlight - Multi-award winning horror podcast featuring creepy stories with full audio production written by Black writers and performed by Black actors. So scary it’ll make you want to leave your night light on.
Null /Void - a science fiction audio drama about a young woman, Piper Lee, whose life is saved by a mysterious voice named Adelaide. Piper soon uncovers a malicious plot by a monopoly of a tech company and must work with her friends and an unusual ally to help foil their deadly plot.
Out of Ashes - (currently remastering season 1) Follow a group of survivors as they navigate the ruins of modern civilization and battle against demons, ghosts, monsters and the looming threat of extinction from an ancient power.
Small Victories - A recently recovered drug addict tries to start her new lease on life, too bad life has it out for her.  This dramatic comedy follows Marisol through the ups and downs of her life.
The Courtship of Mona Mae - In the 1870s, pioneers Mona Mae Christophe and Zekial Montgomery search the American West for Mona Mae's mother, Clara. Mona must recall a past, long forgotten in order to survive, so that she can find her mother, love and create a way of life for herself.
Vega a Sci-Fi Adventure Podcast - In a fantasy futuristic world, Vega Rex is employed by her government to kill off the world's worst criminals. She's never met a criminal she couldn't catch…until now. Join Vega as she journeys through a world of bumbling apprentices, powerful technogods, and her biggest challenge yet. Hosted by Ivuoma Hall.
Witchever Path - is an anthology series where your decisions effect the story. Our stories are based in America’s NorthEast, featuring characters finding themselves in the thick of the unknown while tackling issues like queer identity, gender, race, and spirituality. Stories often focus on the communities not typically seen in stories taking place in New England, and giving voice to the perspectives of those communities while uniting under some universal themes. And the supernatural happens. A lot.
(All descriptions were taken from websites)
If you want to find more and there are way more there's a directory :D
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cartermagazine · 9 days
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Today In History
Langston Hughes was a prolific writer who worked in many genres: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, musicals, and children’s books.
As a popular newspaper columnist, Hughes created a fictitious Harlem narrator named Simple. Deeply interested in developing a black theater, Hughes founded the New Negro Theater in Los Angeles March 19, 1939.
His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including both their suffering and their love of music, laughter, and language itself.
CARTER™ Magazine
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liz-allyn · 2 months
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love on the brain: sugar & vice, vol 2 [mob!tasm!peter x fem!OC]
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summary: You didn’t think it was going to be easy, did you? AKA The night Peter and Honey reunited—Four. Months. Later. [mob!peter parker x oc!MJ] 
words: 11.8k (omfg)
NSFW/MINORS DNI - ABANDON ALL CHASTITY, YE WHO ENTER HERE (detailed warnings below)
extended warnings (spoilers): p^rn with plot, detailed smut, really just... filthy and deranged. slightly dubcon parts (although consent is clearly confirmed), no Y/N...ever, arguing, anger, jealousy, physical violence (slapping, scratching, throwing objects), almost hate sex, fem!reader with a vagina and breasts and wears a dress, oral (f! receiving), P in V, rough!dom Peter, sub!reader, possessive!peter, mirrors, titty!worship, shame and slight degradation, use of emojis, f! being restrained, discussion of masturbation, slight breeding kink, non-consensual voyeurism, moderate BDSM kink, “punishment” play (spanking, edging) bratty reader, peter parker being a dunce around women, mob!au, furniture harmed in the making of this
names used: daddy, princess, baby, babygirl
A/N: This is a one-shot standalone story that takes place immediately after the Epilogue of Vol 1. And serves as the official beginning of Vol. 2. If you haven’t read Vol.1, you really should. The main OC is AFAB and goes by the name “Honey.” You’ll need to read Vol. 1 to know why.  I try to be loose with my descriptions for people who prefer a Reader-Insert. But I’m not perfect. In this canon, Honey has a Latina heritage (as do I). Take that as you will. Thanks to @moonyslove78 and @blooming-violets for cheering me on through this very long hiatus. 
This is 18+ AF. And if you think the term ‘AF’ shows how old and out of touch you are, then you’re probably not old enough to read this.
This version of TASM Peter Parker is not canon. The relationships here are not healthy and the characters need therapy. Don’t date a mob boss IRL.
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#1 - Love on the Brain
>>> heya boss. how’s your trip? 😜
Peter arched a brow as he peeked down at the text message.
>>> ⋯ >>> your trip to pound town? 🍆🍑 
He rolled his eyes, swallowing back an irritated snort.
Real mature, Felicia. 
He almost tapped out a haughty reply but stopped. Corners of his mouth turned down, he found himself unable to respond.
“So many choices. I just don’t know what I want.”
An understatement.
The girl of his dreams sat across from him in the quaint East Harlem Cuban restaurant. They were crammed together at a bistro table near the kitchen. The enormous menu took up the entire surface, and she had spent the last 25 minutes reading the items aloud. 
It was nearly 11 p.m., and they had yet to pick an appetizer. 
The woman he’d called ‘his Honey’ sweetly sighed with a shrug. “Now that we’re here, I just can’t make up my mind.” 
Her voice had a singsong tune to it, purposefully careless. Blissfully ignorant of the fact that Peter was starving.
“Maybe I’m just not feeling Cuban food tonight,” she shrugged, nonchalant.
Peter swallowed hard. Tried to rid his expression of any hint of impatience or irritation. 
“Oh,” he remarked delicately, thinking of all the different dinner reservations he’d made for tonight. It didn’t matter what magazine talked it up, didn’t matter how many “tire awards” it had won. 
Honey was unimpressed. 
“M’surprised,” he said, as emotionlessly as possible. “Thought you had your heart set on this place.”
The place was one of those hole-in-the-wall joints that had less than 10 tables, which made takeout the most popular choice. 
On this night however—a Tuesday— the restaurant was nearly empty, except for the overdressed couple and the loathsome kitchen staff, who didn’t expect to be subject to “este cabrón” and his picky girlfriend strolling in 30 minutes before closing. 
While Peter could feel the heat of their ire over the oven, Honey avoided it. She explained to the manager that Peter was “un ricacho que tiene demasiado dinero.” And with that, they were seated.
When Peter approached her earlier that afternoon in the park, he’d expected a much worse welcome. He nearly died of a panic attack when he spotted her on the park bench. It had been four long months since he’d attempted to communicate with her, and he half-expected her to throw her iced coffee in his face. 
Actually, he had no idea what to expect from her. Terrifyingly.
Peter had lamented to Felicia— “There’s no card that says, ‘Sorry, I ghosted you for a few months while attempting to shake the heat off my back.’ Which flowers say, ‘I apologize that the last conversation we had, I called you a whore in front of a room full of cops’?”
The true challenge came when Peter actually looked into her eyes. He didn’t expect that one look would render him useless. 
She was even more beautiful than he remembered. Ethereal. Glowing. The human equivalent of a bouquet of sunflowers, with happy round cheeks and her hair tied back in a ponytail. She was the color of rainbows, and summer, and sunshine. She was the cherries of her red lip stain and the golden rays of her yellow linen sundress.
God, that dress. 
Peter planned for everything—but not that dress. 
His carefully rehearsed speech went out the window when he saw her in that dress: a cotton ruched-waist, tea-length gown in a yellow gingham pattern. It featured a sweetheart neckline that cradled her breasts perfectly between the halter tie-back straps. 
He had no idea where that dress came from, but it was the most perfect piece of fabric ever to grace a woman’s body. He would buy her twelve more of them, no matter the cost. He’d buy every last one.
He’d give her the sun, the ocean, Hawai’i, and all the stars in the sky— if only she’d forgive him. He was ready to throw himself on a bed of hot coals as long as it meant that she would take him back. If she would come back home.
Truthfully, he needed her to come home.
Not to get ahead of himself, he started by taking her to dinner. 
That was Felicia’s advice—women love dinner. solves everything. the fancier, the better, with lots of red meat—u know how they say food is the way to a man’s heart? dinner is the way to the ovaries. works every time.
Actually, Felicia gave Peter lots of advice. For once, he was more than grateful to accept it. 
>>> make her feel like you can’t take your eyes off her. but don’t stare. like a creeper  >>> be a gentleman, but not a pushover. you wanna be the good guy. soft YA novel boyfriend type
Followed quickly by—
>>> but not too soft! don’t be a little bitch. if she plays hard to get, you play offense.  >>> and defense.
Peter had no idea what she was talking about. But he knew when it was wise to trust the advice of more intelligent creatures than men.
Five restaurants later...
“I thought going to dinner was your idea?” Honey asked with pursed lips.
“It was; it was my idea,” he nervously replied. “Six hours ago—it was my idea.”
She narrowed her eyes to slits. “Hmm. Six hours. Long time to wait.” Her eyes fell down to the menu again. Her lack-of-sympathy said everything.
Peter’s pocket buzzed again, and he glanced down at the incoming text message from Felicia.
>>> ...???? 
He rolled his eyes. Tapped out a response.
<<< Not great.
“Am I interrupting something?” Honey asked with a clipped tone.
Peter jumped, pocketing his phone immediately. “No, just... just something... silly,” he muttered. “How ‘bout we get a few plates in, yeah? I’m gonna just order some stuff—”
“Like what?” she questioned skeptically.
“I don’t know,” Peter shrugged, his stomach twisting. “One of everything.”
“That’s wasteful,” Honey said, judgment sharpening her gaze. “Food waste is bad enough as it is in this city.”
“Well, at this point,” he snapped with an exasperated sigh, “I might be able to eat two of everything.” The words floated away from him, and he bit the inside of his cheek, wishing they would come back. Hesitantly, he made eye contact with Honey.
She peered at him disgustedly from over the top of her menu. She scoffed, crossing one leg over the other, and dropped the leather-bound book closed. 
“Don’t let me slow you down,” Honey said icily. “I’m not that hungry anyway.”
Peter’s eyes nearly bulged out of his skull. His pocket buzzed again. 
>>> the fuck? what do you mean?  >>> she was in love with you b4... how hard can it be to take her on a date?  >>> christ. did you fuck this up, parker?
He shoved the phone back in his jacket, nearly punching through the silk fabric. 
“If I’m wasting your time, tell me,” Honey sharply retorted. She crossed her arms even tighter across her chest. He had to force himself to look away from the way it plumped her breasts together. “I’d hate to keep you from something important.”
Felicia was right. He was fucking this up. Before he could open his mouth—
“Excuse me, señorita,” a masculine, smoky voice crooned at them. 
Peter and Honey glanced up to see a chiseled man in his 30s approach the table with a hurricane glass of ice. He was a specimen of Latin American art—a bronzed statue, with carved muscles that bulged out of his floral shirt. Deep brown eyes—no, hazel eyes— fixed on Honey as he reached across the table with rolled-back sleeves. The corded muscles in his arm, toned by long hours of hard labor, flexed gracefully as he gently set a cocktail in front of her. 
A frosted, colorless liquid speckled with crushed mint leaves filled the glass. Honey blinked with delighted surprise.
“Our compliments,” the young, disgustingly attractive waiter explained with a sultry smile and a thick accent. “In case you found yourself thirsty while browsing the menu.” 
A blush colored her skin as she glanced up at their handsome waiter. The sparkle in her smile was as blinding as ever, and she graciously looked back between the glass and the server.  The waiter— no way in hell this fuckin’ guy is a waiter— beamed back at her, enamored. 
“Oh, wow!” she gasped, reaching for the glass with dainty fingers. “Is this a mojito? That’s my favorite! How did you know?”
The waiter graciously chuckled. “Lucky guess. You look like a woman of refined taste.”
Peter felt his blood pressure rising.
Honey didn’t even look at her date, as if he was suddenly invisible. “Thank you,” she grinned, self-satisfied. “I mean, I do know my way around a Bacardi bottle.” The waiter chuckled, maybe too hard, at her silly joke.
“We want you to enjoy your evening with us,” the waiter added politely, sparing Peter a glance but keeping all his attention on Honey. “We are honored to have you as our guest.” 
The waiter spoke gentlemanly as he splayed his long fingers across his chest. “Please, take as much time as you need. No need to feel rushed. It is my pleasure to serve you.” 
Peter could feel a twitch behind his eye. Could have been the fire shooting out of his eyes. Fuck this prick, probably another Broadway reject or somethin’, couldn’t buy himself a decent shirt—His mind churned along with his anger.
Oblivious, Honey beamed up at him with a golden smile. “Thank you so much for saying that,” she replied, endearingly sweet. “You are too kind, um... I’m sorry, what was your name again?” 
“Pedro.”
Honey’s brows shot to her hairline. “Pedro?” she repeated, absolutely delighted. She glanced over at Peter. “Isn’t that something?”
The mob boss’ lip curled mirthlessly. “Oh, it’s somethin,’ alright.” 
Peter continued to burn his stare—fuck his stupid accent— into the side of the aloof waiter’s head. He wondered if Pedro’s handsome, chiseled jawline was sharp enough to cut through a noose.
Buzz..
>>> you’re keepin’ your cool, right?  >>> remember what i said.  >>> anything she wants. no questions asked! >>> don’t get all crazy possessive either
The joyful sound of her laughter ripped his attention away from his phone and back towards his charmed date. 
“Pedro,” she sweetly preened. “Can you give us a recommendation?” She briefly flashed her eyes at Peter before looking back at her new friend. “My date’s clearly distracted. He has no idea what I like.” 
Oh? Peter raised a brow at that. And lost his appetite.
Peter followed Honey down the hallway to his hotel suite while storm clouds swirled in his gut. Lighting crackled with each footfall. Tension clogged the atmosphere, and they shuffled in a silent fog to the door.
Despite Felicia’s advice about controlling his inner beasts, Peter’s hackles were raised, and his stomach growled. Now, he was hungry for more than just food. And simultaneously, he’d never felt so powerless. 
Peter noted how tightly she wrapped her arms around herself. Her face suggested she was deep in thought. He wondered if she was just as tightly wound as he was. Wondered if she could break his heart with just a look.
He was flailing. Pathetic.
Peter’s fist clenched his keycard tight. He had to be careful not to snap the card in half between his fingers. Was it from excitement or terror? Desire or rage? 
He had to focus, to make this work. He had nothing if he didn’t have her. 
Rigidly, Peter pushed the door open and stood to the side of the frame to let her enter. 
She paused briefly, lips tight, as she gazed into the rotunda entryway of the lavish suite. They hadn’t spoken in the car, and he hadn’t had the chance to explain the location. 
Letting out a steady breath, she strode through the threshold and stopped. Her body blocked the doorway. She turned to look up at Peter, defiant eyes flashing.
“This is as far as you go.” 
Peter blinked, looking at her in confusion.
Her tone was curt. Icy. He recognized that sound. It was the tone of voice she used when she wanted to draw blood, and it never failed to inflict pain. Her voice. Her eyes. Even her tongue was razor-sharp.
Peter curled a brow upwards. “Sorry?” 
Honey narrowed her eyes. “Not yet, you’re not.” 
He took a step back, blinking owlishly. 
“What did you think was going to happen tonight, Peter?” The ire of Honey’s question sliced through him. “Did you think you were gonna shave your face, take me to a fancy dinner, and then I’d just... open my legs for you?”
A literal ellipsis formed in his mind. 
Peter swallowed hard. “Uhhh—?”
“‘I’ll wait for forever, Honey,’ she parroted his earlier admission mockingly. “Is that all you have to say to me? You left me! For four months!”
Peter nodded his head, not sure exactly why or when he began. “I know, I know...”
“You know!?”
The walls of etiquette and politeness between them began to crack.
“How many times I gotta tell ya? I was tryin’ to protect ya, Honey—”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
It stung like a snake bite. Rage filled her eyes, disdain bubbling out of her mouth. She had only just begun. 
“You buy me all this expensive bullshit!” she scolded. “And you dress up in your ridiculous designer suits and parade me to all these fucking pretentious places! Like I’m some kind of accessory! Like you own the whole fucking city and everyone in it!”
He replied with a string of noises. Or, at least, he thought so.
“Big bad mob boss—all that power—and yet, you couldn’t just talk to me? You had me wait around for you like a stray dog! You can just come and go as you please, but you—you expect me to follow you around on a leash?”
“Honey, please. Let me explain—”
“I don’t want to hear it, Peter!” her voice echoed through the rotunda and down the hall of the hotel. “I don’t want to hear a single one of your lame excuses! I don’t want a fancy dinner, or a new Porsche, or a mansion, or whatever else makes your dick hard!”
Peter blinked rapidly, stunned. His body responded as if she had just kicked him in the place she referenced, “Jus’lemme—”
“And I sure as hell don’t want another apology!” she asserted definitively. “I don’t want you anywhere near me!” 
Peter’s jaw hung open, tongue dead in his mouth. The woman who barely stood at his collarbone stared down at him, making him feel inches tall. 
“Now, I’m going to bed. Exactly as I have been for the last four months.” Her voice thundered, “Alone!”
With that, the door slammed in his face, rattling inches from his nose. The echo reverberated through the empty hallway and inside his chest, emphasizing the deep crack that formed.
Peter let out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. The shock subsided slowly, and his heart sank. The ache soon sizzled into a burn, boiling his blood. At the same time, the sting of her rejection was raw. Unbearable.
Unbelievable.
Absolutely unacceptable. 
He should break down the fucking door. Throw her over his shoulder and tie her up. Gag her—Anything to get her to listen.
Haplessly, Peter’s eyes fell on his expensive shoes—his Valentinos. Or maybe these were the Tom Ford’s? He had no clue. Just more bullshit.
Fuck—He was going to cry. Maybe he should let himself just do it. Lean into it. Drop to his knees and beg for forgiveness. Shoulders slumped, he squeezed his eyes closed. 
He was a little bitch.
Peter pictured a door closing on a rocket or an airplane. Whatever it was, it was leaving him behind. He was falling back to Earth, having placed too much faith in miracles. This was his punishment for flying that close to the sun—
The door swung open. 
Two hands grabbed Peter’s jacket, pulling him forward off his heels. It was a surprisingly fluid motion; his heartbreak had reduced the mass of his bones to nothing. 
Honey’s nails practically pierced his lapels. She yanked him through the doorway into the suite, slamming the door behind him, and slamming him into the door right after.
Before Peter could open his mouth to speak, she was on him like a viper.
A sharp, biting kiss swallowed him whole, stealing the oxygen from his lungs. The heat was as intense as he had remembered. This time, they didn’t melt into one another. Honey was like a wildfire, her touch scalding him. 
His skin flushed from the sudden unbearable heat. Before he could react, her lithe fingers started tugging the edges of his jacket. Clumsily, she tried pushing it back over his broad shoulders. As soon as he knew of her intent, he eagerly obliged, shrugging the garment off and to the floor. 
Her hands went to his throat, ebony-painted nails leaving trails on his skin. Buttons popped as she yanked on his clothes. Her goal could have been to draw blood with her kiss.
Every time her teeth tore at his lips, he responded with a groan into her mouth.
Clumsy, he fumbled with his fingers—reaching up to grip her by the hair. Finally, he wrenched her head back, detaching her bite from his face.
Immediately, he was met with an open-palmed slap on the cheek.
Sharp gasps cut through them, and they jumped backward a few feet. Tension and shock reverberated in the chasm they created. Like the barometric pressure plunging before a storm, an eerie calm settled over them. 
Honey blinked at him, jaw agape and her palm throbbing. 
Peter glared at her in silence. He looked a mess—hair unkempt, the top buttons of his shirt torn open to reveal jagged crimson scratch marks across his milky skin.
His heartbeat steadily increased as he gently dabbed his fingertips at the ache in his jaw. The exquisite lines of his face were stained pastel pink, flushed by arousal or anger. His eyes were black as night, so it could have been either one.
She looked just as wrecked. Dress askew, her hairstyle half-unraveled. Goosebumps dotted her skin. She looked shocked at the violence she was capable of, surprised and possibly guilty at her own strength. As the seconds passed, the feelings faded.
Peter watched her, pupils dilating, blood pressure rising. The shadow of a smile curved his mouth. His features darkened into something primal. Something familiar.
There’s my girl.
Slowly, he lowered his hand, studying her threatening look until his own expression began to match.
Physically, his senses were haywire. Danger, excitement, and a sick sort of pleasure rattled his bones and labored his breathing. The hairs on his skin stood on end. Alarms blared in his head. The sound of his own blood was almost deafening to him, thumping like a kick drum. 
Peter could hear her heart, too. Fast. Like a rabbit. He was a wolf in pursuit. 
Maybe the pain of her slap triggered him, a preemptive action against further attack.
She got one in, Peter mused mockingly. He knew she was no match. Not as Peter’s night vision sharpened. Not while he could taste the salt from her perspiration on his tongue. Most intoxicating of all, Peter could smell her desire. Like a rose bursting open.
In another blink, they switched positions. Peter snatched her by her shoulders and slammed her back into the wall, pinning her there. She went feral—hissing and raging at her entrapment.
Not a rabbit. A honey badger, then.
“Get off of me!” Honey spat.
“Shut up,” he ordered. Quiet and fierce.
Fingers gripping her forearms tight, he attacked her lips, teeth colliding. The ferocity stunned her. For a moment, it seemed like she finally submitted to him before she wriggled her mouth free.
“Mmffucker—Let me go!”
His body might as well have been a brick wall. His face was stonelike, eyes just as cold. 
“No.” 
Honey’s brow scrunched up like a petulant child throwing a tantrum. “I’ll scream!” she countered.
Peter smirked, the hickory in his eyes igniting. “Baby. You have no idea.”
Peter’s guarantee sent a shiver down Honey’s spine. He saw the gears turning in her mind as she carefully considered pushing him further. 
He hoped she would. 
His fingers tightened around her forearms. He crucified her under his gaze. And yet, despite the danger anyone else would have felt... A glimmer of curiosity flickered in her eyes.
It set his mind reeling. A tiny sign of weakness to temptation made Peter’s stomach trapeze. He zeroed in on it, licking his chops. 
Not to make it easy, Honey brought her knee up, attempting to make contact with his groin. There was nearly a foot of difference between their heights, and she paid it no mind.
Brave girl. 
Peter admired her tenacity. She had balls. Smart, too, he pleasantly recognized. Honey went for the weak spot first. Good call. 
Pointless, though. 
Nothing below Peter’s belt was weak when she was around.
Unfairly, Peter picked up on her attack before her leg was even bent. He snatched her above the knee, lifting her toes off the ground and prying her thighs open. 
He pictured the bruises on her skin that his fingertips would leave behind. Just the thought made him rock hard. 
A year ago, Peter would have been ashamed. He would have shied away from her, for fear of repulsing her, and took out his frustration by himself in the shower. 
Grinding his teeth at those memories, he pressed Honey’s hips into his waist, forcing her legs around him, and—Fuck—her heat.
Peter’s brain nearly short-circuited. She was like a bonfire against his belly. His cock pushed against his trousers, straining for her warmth. He secured her hips to his with a tight grip, which only pissed her off more. She thrashed, enraged. 
She really needed to stop doing that. It only made the burn worse. 
A few months ago, Peter would have been ashamed of the rush he felt from manhandling her. Ashamed of how his cock ached and twitched at her fruitless tantrums.
“Fucking asshole!” Honey sneered.
“Yeah?” he said with a bitter laugh. “You're a spoiled little brat!”
“Fuck you!”
“See what I mean?” Peter scoffed, holding her tighter. He breathed hotly into the shell of her ear. “Not even a ‘please.’” 
His pride was short-lived. Inexplicably, Honey arched her neck and buried her teeth into his shoulder. He roared—“Fuck! What the fuck!!??” —surprised she didn’t bite through the silk of his collared shirt.
Apparently, he wasn’t the only beast in the room.
They tumbled down ungracefully. Peter landed hard on his back, with Honey crashing on top of him. She collapsed on his lungs, knocking the wind from his chest. Sputtering, he reached out to grab her, his fingertips barely missing the hem of her dress. The small woman scrambled to her hands and knees, then to her feet. 
Honey dashed into the suite while Peter’s voice echoed—“Goddamnitareyacrazy!?”—after her. 
Padding on her toes, she ran into a darkened living room with vaulted ceilings that might have been large enough to fit her entire apartment. Outside glass walls, the Midtown skyline surrounded her. The Metlife and Empire State Buildings glittered proudly in a breathtaking view.
The room was situated in the corner of the building. Velvet curtains framed the floor-to-ceiling windows, providing an unobstructed view of the city. The Dark Academia-Meets-Glam aesthetic seating area featured a sleek, modern leather sectional and mod velvet chaise lounge chat set. 
Without time to admire any of it, she scrambled to the first piece of furniture she could reach. She grabbed the first thing her fingers could find—a designer fruit bowl centerpiece made of polished stainless steel and brass pomegranates. 
It was exquisite and expensive. 
Honey spun on her heel and flung the heavy metal at Peter.
He dipped deftly, his spine bowing back, narrowly missing the bowl as it whipped past him. The object barreled through a crystal chandelier, glass shattering like raindrops as they came down.
“Hey—!” he scowled, facing her with an indignant glare.
A moment later, he quickly shielded his face from another flying object: an asymmetrical crystal-and-Riverstone candelabra that crumbled against his forearm. It might as well have been a brick, with ceramic shards tumbling off of his shoulder. 
Peter bristled in aggravation, brushing the pieces off. Now, she was really pissing him off.
He glanced up just in time to see a glass vase containing two dozen roses—meant to be her gift—hurtling towards his head. Reflexively, he snatched it from the air with one hand, water and all. He palmed the crystal vase like catching a baseball. Didn’t spill a drop. 
His quick reflexes stunned the both of them. Peter’s jaw went slack—partially at his ability to save the flowers, but mostly with indignation that Honey had somehow destroyed $1,000 worth of the hotel’s tchotchkes in a few seconds. 
“Enough!” Peter barked, carefully setting the vase down. Ignoring him, the woman darted toward another side table, already reaching for another expensive object to throw at him. 
Suddenly, Honey’s ankle was caught in a sticky grip. Both legs pulled out from beneath her. She flattened immediately with an ooof—her belly dropping to the wool carpet. 
Dazed, she glanced back at her legs with a crease in her brow. With a jolt, she was pulled along by a stringy, spongy substance on her ankle. It felt the way canned compressed air feels when shooting skin at close range. 
Her nails dug into the carpet fibers as she was dragged back. “Agghhh! What the—Getitoff!” 
As soon as the pulling stopped, Honey was on her back again, gazing up at the sharp lines of Peter’s cold gaze. He towered over her, even on his knees, as he mounted her hips. Protesting, she pelted him tirelessly with her fists.
The smell of sweat loomed in the air as he finally restrained her. He caged her in, pinning her wrists to the floor. Nerves buzzing and tempers flaring, she continued to writhe and wrestle with him to no avail. Peter quickly overpowered the more petite woman, fomenting her anger. 
“You’re hurting me!” she sneered breathlessly, teeth gritted. 
Peter was unimpressed. “Liar.”
“M’not lying—!”
He glared back, barely breaking a sweat. “You’re so full of shit—!”
“Fuck you! What do you know—?”
“I know you, Honey!” he charged, silencing her. 
She went still, subdued beneath his dark gaze. Peter loomed over her like a stormcloud. “I know the games you like to play,” he said—both teasing and sinister, toying with his prey. He lowered his lips until they breathed the same air. 
Honey’s focus was split between Peter’s intense stare and glistening, kiss-ravaged mouth. She tried not to notice the sensation of her nipples brushing against the fabric with each labored breath. He could easily reach down and touch her. Tried not to focus on how solid his chest felt against hers, like carved marble. Tried not to focus on the dark chocolate of his eyes melting in the heat of their gaze. 
Just as intensely, Peter watched her watch him—zeroing in on the idle way her tongue darted to wet her lips. The tiny action shot electricity down his spine, straight to his groin. 
Honey felt that, too. A tiny gasp escaped her, her lashes fluttering. The fight suddenly left her arms as she noticed the heavy bulge against her hip. 
He was hot. Not just figuratively. Feverishly hot. He was so hard, too—and just for her. The lewd image of him splitting her open on his cock made her insides clench. 
Peter eyed her dangerously, his voice a dark abyss. “Think you can hide it from me, eh?” The teasing smile on his lips bordered on a snarl. “Gonna sit here an’tell me... that if I were to reach down between your legs right now...” Her heart hammered in her chest, hanging on every word. In her mind, she was begging him to follow through with the threat. “...Those panties won’t be soaked?” 
Honey failed to swallow back a little mewl as he leaned down closer.
“Ya think I can’t feel ya, huh?” he mumbled, lips ghosting the curve of her throat. “Think I can’t smell how wet you are right now?” Another wanton exhale left her belly as she leaned into the heat of his breath on her skin. “Y’know I can already taste you on my tongue, babygirl.”
Honey’s mouth and legs seemed to part further at his vulgar words. She shivered at the sensation of his slick tongue traversing her pulse point.
“You’re... an asshole...” she murmured breathlessly. She sounded half-asleep.
Peter hissed, “And you’re a needy little slut, aren't’cha?” 
The sudden ferocity made her eyes unintentionally roll back. A second later, Peter’s fingers collared her, choking off the small mewl in her throat. He turned her by the chin, wrenching her attention to him. 
“Hey—Eyes on me,” he commanded.
Mesmerized, Honey blinked up at him like a fawn.
“How ‘bout that little stunt you pulled with the waiter?” he prodded. There was an icy edge on the last word. Her throat bobbed while she kept her face neutral. The bright amber of his glare penetrated her. Peter continued accusatorily, “Those flirty little giggles while he gave ya fuck-me eyes? Y’think I didn’t see that?”
Honey sniffed, stiffening her upper lip. This was a power move; she knew better than to back down. “Look who's jealous,” she scoffed. 
With a jolt, she again attempted to wrench her wrists free. He simply held on tighter, closing his talons as she twisted like a snake.
“Jealous?” Peter repeated calmly, narrowing his eyes into slits. “Me? Nah.” His hands suddenly seized her hips as he forcibly jerked her up off the floor. A slew of profanities spilled from her mouth, bucking against him as he carried her.
In a few strides, he was at the edge of a dining table. With little regard for his barbarity, he plopped Honey on the surface, shoving her flat on her back. Peter arched over her as if to dominate her, spine bowing until he filled her periphery with his fierce gaze. 
Honey’s eyes sparkled, cheeks colored from the rush. “Threatened, then!”
Peter’s face softened inexplicably. Blinked at her for a moment, head tilting. Then, he landed an open-palmed smack against her ass. 
It was a surprisingly heavy blow, as close as he’d ever come to intentionally inflicting pain on her. Honey yelped, hissing from the sting on her upper thigh. Right after the strike, Peter’s fingers began kneading her flesh, soothing the welt that was bound to form.
“See, if I were a jealous man,” he noted with an evil sneer, “I woulda gouged his eyes out with a salad fork.” 
Peter swallowed up her gasp with a forceful kiss. A few moments later, he broke away.
“If I felt threatened?” he added breathlessly, “I woulda bent you over the table and fucked you dumb. Let everyone in the Five Boroughs hear you beg for my cock.”
Once the filth rolled off his tongue, Peter went back to using it to lash against hers. Honey was overwhelmed by the soft, wet muscle invading her mouth. Not only that, the violent edge to his words felt like standing in a river and grabbing a livewire. A shiver racked through her body, a current of pent-up anger and desire sending blood rushing to her core.
As if on cue, Peter’s fingertips made contact with the lace fabric between her thighs. She tremored at his touch, heart skipping. He toyed with the soft, stretchy material. Snapped it lazily against her flesh.
His voice was hypnotizing. “I woulda shoved these dirty panties down his throat just to never hear his stupid fuckin’ accent again.”
Honey felt drunk off of the vitriol he poured into her ear. It was violent and possessive... and it shouldn’t have made her so horny, and yet—
Honey trembled with anticipation, panting like a bitch in heat. “I-I... can’t... ugh, fu—” 
The pads of his fingers ran firmly along her seam. She let out an embarrassing whine. Peter's prediction was spot-on. A shameful amount of wetness coated the inside of her thighs. He played with the soaked fabric and smeared her mess across her skin with a smug smirk.  
“Think I don’t know what you like?” he muttered darkly, echoing her earlier jab. 
RIP!
The lace bunched at her waist. Honey’s wet skin felt particularly chilled being exposed to the air. She quivered with anticipation. Her head was spinning, pussy throbbing. She felt worshiped and simultaneously defiled. 
Peter pressed his forehead into hers, skin-to-skin. She stared into the black of his eyes in suspended silence, like the pornographic thoughts in his head were being projected into her mind.
Her own pupils were blown black. “Fuckin’ hate you so much—”
“I don’t care.”
“—re’such an asshole—”
“I don’t care,” he repeated more firmly. Then, “You belong with me.”
“You left me!” she fired back.
The sharpness of her tone sobered him a little. He blinked and sighed. “I couldn’t leave you. I didn’t leave you.”
She attempted to sit up, trying to lift her shoulders unsuccessfully. She writhed with spite, “Fuckin’ selfish prick, I outta cut off—”
“What was my drink order?”
He blurted the last sentence out with a mind-blowing level of calm. At once, their bodies went still. Still pinned to the table with a hummingbird beneath her breast, Honey stared up at him in confusion. 
Her brows pinched together. “Huh—?”
“My drink order,” Peter repeated, his expression void of the aggression he had the previous moment. 
It was like a mask had fallen away, and the man on top of her transformed into a different person. Maliciousness evaporated, replaced by eagerness. Desperation. 
Peter stared at her, intently searching her gaze. “At the shop,” he whispered, eyes soft. “What you used to make for me every time I came t’see you..?” The words fell away as he stared at her expectantly. 
She arched a brow. 
It had been black coffee, bitter and dark. Just like Peter’s entire world. How it had always been. Until—
“You said I should try something new,” he added, with urgency like reminding her of a forgotten dream. “So you made something for me—something... special.”
Peter’s heart swelled through his eyes at the last word. Honey stared up at him, perplexed. He was looking for the answer on the tip of her tongue:
Honey and Lavender. 
Confusion ceded to aggravation. A line formed between Honey’s brows.
“You remember, right?” he asked, hopeful.
She did. He knew she did. He could see it at the corners of her eyes, pooling behind her eyelids. Sobering memories flooded her, cooling the heat between them. A different sort of ache settled in.
Reluctantly, she nodded.
He took a breath, relieved but still anxious. “Say those words,” he said, “if you really want me to stop.”
Her damp lashes fluttered as Honey blinked up at him in surprise. Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat, he swallowed dryly. His stomach lurched at the thought of being sent away like this. 
Still, it was a risk he had to take. 
“I can let go, walk away,” he offered tenderly. “Right now. No questions asked.” Each word felt like sticking needles through his tongue. He gave her an out, needing confirmation that her reciprocated lust wasn’t imagined. 
“Say the words,” Peter whispered in lament, “and I’ll leave you alone.”
That word settled like a boulder crushing his chest.
Despite Peter’s heart telling him her rejection would be unbearable, the thought of truly harming her was more so. 
Honey studied him with thoughtful eyes, contemplative and curious. He had won. He subdued her. Restrained her. She remembered when he threw a piano like a toddler throwing a toy truck. 
She could do little to stop him if he wanted to force her. And yet—
There he is. 
This was the man she remembered. The one that was ready to die for her. To die by her hand, if that’s what she wanted. 
“Two words,” Peter sighed, his nose brushing against hers. It was a sweetly affectionate gesture. “Say the words, and this can end right n—”
Honey captured his lips, stealing his breath like it was her only source of oxygen. Static filled Peter’s ears, his body tensing and relaxing simultaneously. He was soaring and plummeting. Rising and falling. 
Her tongue slipped past his lips, dragging along the pad of his mouth. Soon enough, the sweetness melted off in their flames. 
Honey pulled her mouth away, barely able to get out her plea. “Touch me, Peter. Make me feel it.”
And she dove right back in. This time, Peter plunged with her, deep beneath the waves of lust. He sank into her current, dragging her with the tide of desire.
Peter’s hands were frantic travelers. Flitting from her wrists to her shoulders. To gently cup her face. To smooth over the mounds of her breasts. To dig his fingers into the linen fabric of the sweetheart neckline.
“Love this dress,” he idly mumbled between kisses, abusing the neckline. “Mmm—where’d ya say ya got it?”
“Oh…uhm—?”
The question caught her off guard. She blushed, brain foggy with lust. Her instinct was to say something like ‘thank you,’ but her tongue fumbled the words. “Uh... it was, I think, Old Navy—?”
A ripping sound shocked her. She squeaked as a flurry of cotton fibers burst from the top of the dress. 
Peter yanked the linen bodice apart like tissue paper, his tongue chasing away any protest from her lips. Gooseflesh broke out as her skin was exposed to the air. Driven by lust, he shoved the ruined material down to her waist. 
“Fuck, Peter...” she gasped, scandalized.
“Sorry,” he muttered, not sorry.
It was his turn to be greedy. Peter dug his hands beneath the cups of her bra, toying with the peaks of her breasts. 
With a snap, the bra was torn in half. The strength in Peter’s long fingers stunned her. Puzzling her as much as it turned her on.
He laved at her left breast with his tongue, drawing an obscene moan from her. His hand pinched sadistically at her right nipple. The delectable sting traveled from her chest to her cunt. She arched—”ughhh, god”—her spine bowing beautifully.
He held the cleft of her left breast delicately in his hand while lapping at the ridges of her peaked flesh. Warm tongue caressed the tip, drawing shapes and discovering pathways to her pleasure. Every little flick inspired something new. She cooed and twitched beneath him. He was desperate to memorize her taste. 
Languidly, he massaged each of her tits inside his mouth, his cock aching as he imagined licking her pussy with the same fervor. It was almost unbearable. A strangled moan vibrated through his chest at the picture in his mind. 
Her reaction to the sound came out as an agonized mewl. 
Oh.
He needed more of that sound.
Peter felt her push on his shoulders. Trying to wriggle away from his mouth. 
This time, he had no tolerance for misbehavior. He grabbed both wrists and forced them above her head. Honey yanked back, stunned at being glued down to the table surface by his palms. 
The peach of his pouty lips curved upward as his eyes took a turn ravishing her. She was a sight of wicked debauchery. Her hair was a mess, and her nearly-naked body lay across the table like a feast. Her thighs locked around his hips.
He used one hand to rub circles into the delicate skin of her restrained forearms. The other hand mischievously dipped lower and lower, sliding through her wet heat. Calloused, dexterous fingers spread her lips open, playing in her slick and prodding her tight hole. 
Honey was finished. Ruined. Past the point of no return. Unconditionally surrendered. Helpless and eager to subjugate herself to her conqueror. Filthy sounds filled the room, punctuated by weak cries from his new loyal subject.
“So pretty,” he sighed breathlessly as he coated his fingers in her cream. “All this for me, princess?” He cooed at her, edging on cruel.
A broken gasp fell from her lips, her chest pulsing involuntarily. 
“Aww, what’s the matter? Does this little pretty pussy ache, baby?”
A vortex formed deep in her belly, dragging her in. He licked his dry lips, salivating at the image.
“I know it hurts, baby, I know. I know,” he teased. “It’s been hard playin’ all by yourself, huh?” The sunniness of his voice was eclipsed. “All alone. Screamin’ out my name into your pillow. Fingers buried deep in your wet cunt.”
Honey’s eyes snapped open. Before she could respond, the breadth of his middle fingertip penetrated her. She gasped as his finger speared her open. All the while, he wore a devil’s smile.
“Ain’t that right? Only for me.” Entranced, he watched her every twitch and shudder. “This pussy belongs to me, doesn’t it?”
It was a question feigning the need for her confirmation. She couldn't answer. Couldn't breathe. 
No, that can’t be right—had he been watching her masturbate in her apartment? Was he watching her the entire time he was gone? 
The possibility enraged her. Ten orgasms from the King of New York’s Underworld couldn’t even quell that fire.
Peter smiled wickedly, playing with her pussy. Taking his time toying with her flesh. He was a tyrant-king, dominating her pleasure. With a calloused hand, he held onto her cunt like it belonged there.
But she was his wild colt. Difficult to break.
“Oh-n—ohh god,” she gasped. Unbeknownst to him, an evil plot bloomed in her brain. Her lips curled into a smile.
“Fuck—gah—ohhhhh…”
He licked up each broken syllable.
“Yes! Oh, god, yes! Oh—” 
Sweat beaded on her chest, sin oozing through her pores.
“...Pedro.”
Halt.
Brakes squealing. Full stop. Not only in the physical world between them but also in Peter’s living fantasy.
Mischievously, Honey’s grin widened. 
She got him, alright. 
Flawless victory.
Dark eyes flashing, Peter withdrew his fingers from her. “Fuckin’ brat…”
In one fluid motion, Peter flipped her over to her belly, stunning her. He followed with another forceful slap to her ass cheek. This one was more punishing than the last, drawing a puppy-like yelp. His voice was ice. Eyes black. 
Now, she was in trouble.
“Think that’s funny?” he said through gritted teeth.
Peter manipulated her limbs like a rag doll. He maneuvered her forward until her cheekbone pressed against the table. She panicked for a moment at being in such a compromising position. 
The chill of the air across her wet pussy made her shiver. At the same time, she clenched at his roughness.
Peter kneaded her sides, pressing fingerprint bruises on her waist. He yanked her hips towards him until her knees were on the table’s edge. Honey’s face burned, stricken with modesty and flustered by how he hoisted her ass in the air. 
Her hips were propped up like a rack of lamb, and he licked his lips at the sight. It was too vulnerable, being bared to him like this. Obscene, on display, inches from his face. 
For a half second, she considered using the safe words. 
She squirmed uncomfortably while her mess dripped down the inside of her thighs. Peter denied any attempt to escape, eventually gathering her limbs and pulling her hands behind her back. 
Short puffs of breath fogged the glass surface of the table. Her heart pounded beneath her. Honey had only witnessed this side of him a few times—and never directed toward her. 
She was in trouble. But was she in danger?
The buckle of his belt clinked as it came free. Honey quivered at the sound, pussy aching in anticipation.
And if she was in danger, why did that make her wet?
“Pete—” Honey muttered, a scream bubbling at the back of her throat. Leather nipped at her forearms as he used his belt to tie her hands behind her back. 
“Ple-please—“
He fisted her hair, rearing her head back. Her neck arched beautifully, her chin dangling above the table surface.
“Listen to me, princess,” Peter snarled, hot in her ear. Spite peppered his tone. “If you ever call out another man’s name when I’m inside ya again— I’ll make ya wear nothin’ but my cum for the next week.” 
The savage tone contrasted with the glow of his eyes. 
It was always opposites with him.
This was the same man who coddled and worshiped her. The same one who kidnapped her, drugged her, blindfolded her, and gagged her. 
He forced her, a willing participant, into his bed—by asking her permission. 
Peter was more than capable of keeping her chained to his bedpost if he wanted it. 
Or… if she wanted it.
Peter snickered at her expression. “Ooh, yeah… Betchu’d like that, huh?” He taunted her like she was broadcasting her dirty thoughts. “Such a needy little slut for me, ain't that right?” 
Honey felt his warmth leave her back, like being plunged into the Hudson in winter. His hands reappeared at the back of her thighs, and her first instinct was to try to close her legs. 
That was a mistake and an impossible endeavor. 
He split her thighs like opening a book. Grinned at the sight as if he stumbled across gold.
“Fuck, babygirl, you’re soaked. Just talkin’ about it and look at the mess you made…”
Embarrassment and want ravaged her. The conflicting experiences had her ovaries twisted into knots. Honey bit her tongue, unsure if she was going to scream or moan. 
Instead, it came out like a pathetic mewl. “Pe-Peter, please—”
Then he open-palm-smacked her cunt, fingers landing directly on her labia. 
The wet sound it made was humiliating, and the sensation triggered all of the reactions above. She squealed at the sting on her folds. This was a delectable torture. For Peter, it was an appetizing sight. 
“Ya like that?” he grinned over the sound of her whimpers. He already knew the answer.
Another slap to her cunt made her whole body shake. 
“Like bein’ my kept girl? Tryin’ so hard to get my attention. Drivin’ me nuts. Well, you got it now, Honey.” 
Slap. 
A third strike had her pussy clenching. Honey had never experienced such an erotic rush before. She shuddered with embarrassment, afraid she’d cum from this—
Slap! Slap! Slap!
Honey gasped for air, a scream breaking through her voice. She was drowning in sick pleasure, tears in her eyes.
The mob boss gripped her thighs again, pulling her knees off the table and lifting up the weight of her lower half. The action was as easy as lifting a sheet of paper. 
God, his strength was impossible. She struggled to comprehend it while picturing herself being broken apart by it. A slew of tiny pleas fell from her lips. She didn’t even know what she was begging for—his mercy or punishment.
“Shh, shh, babygirl,” he purred with a candy voice. Brought his lips to where she was split, equal parts seductive and sinister. “Be still for me. I gotcha.” He wore a Cheshire grin. “Lemme kiss it better.” 
Slowly, he licked a line from her clit to the entrance of her cunt. She shuddered, followed by a lewd wail. She bucked her hips as he let the tip of his tongue toy with her. 
“Mmmf—so fuckin’ sweet,” Peter mumbled between languid strokes around her vaginal gate. His grip was inescapable. “Can’t help myself, s-sooo hungry…”
Honey felt an evil smile against her skin before his mouth went back to work on her. Tiny, stinging nips and kitten licks tormented her flesh. With her hips locked in place, he lashed her clit with his tongue.
Honey squirmed against the leather belt, her nails digging into the grain. She wanted to be bound like this forever. 
Peter had no intention of letting her go any time soon. 
With her thighs spread open, he dragged her toward the edge of her ecstasy. As soon as he felt her body begin to shake, he pulled away. The punishment ended with another smack to her swollen clit.
Honey cried out in frustration at having her release snatched away. 
Oh, yes—He was weak for that sound.
“What’s’a matter, baby?” he smirked with a dark chuckle. This was becoming his favorite pastime. “You mad now that you’re not the only one who can play games?”
“Gahh—Peter… fuck, plea—don’t tease—!”
Peter’s fingers slipped inside with a squelch, shutting her up. Simultaneously, he lapped at her juices while massaging her walls. Soon, he settled into an unbreakable focus.
Each kiss to her nether lips sizzled with passion. Fueled by devotion usually only reserved for a wedding day. 
“—mmmm, tastes so pretty,” he murmured into her flesh, “my pretty girls...” 
In her dazed state, Honey wondered with a pang of jealousy who the ‘she’ he was referring to was. 
“—sooo sensitive; she likes it when I kiss her like that, yeah?—” He said, in between languid, open-mouth kisses to her slit.
Jesus Fucking Christ, he’s talking about my pussy? In the third person? 
Honey gasped, scandalized at the preposterous thought. It was the most deliciously erotic moment of her life. Enraptured tears budded her eyes, the coil in her belly nearly suffocating her.
“—Fuck, oh god, Peter, don’t stop, don’stop, donstop, donstah—”
Preoccupied with his own intoxicating thoughts, Peter was eager with his tongue and steady with his hands. The room filled with the filthy, wet sounds of his carressing and French kissing of her cunt. He pleasured her with his fingers and mouth, passionately— reverently— as if making love to two different brides. 
Soon, Honey’s pleas were barely more than breathless whining. He smiled like the devil, lips coated with her slick. 
“Patience, Honey,” he admonished, sing-song and patronizing. “If you’re a good girl, maybe I might let you get to taste Her, too.”
Fuck—she was going to come from this. 
The more perverse his words were, the closer she was. So, so close—
Then, another sharp slap. 
Honey wailed, fingers digging into the leather of her restraints. Her whole body protested. The cycle repeated so many times she lost count—until her flesh was puffy from his torture. 
“Please, don’t—please, Peter, don’t tease,” she frantically begged, tears streaming. “No more— Please, I wanna come so bad—” 
He sucked on her clit.  “Yeah?”
“God, yes, please—Nyahhh-need you—Need you... inside—“
Peter hissed behind his teeth, struggling to keep his pace even as his cock jerked at her pleas. He flashed an evil smile. “S’at right?”
“Pl-please, f-feels so good, ple—gah-I need it—!”
He was in no hurry. It was almost greedy, the way he ravaged her. His fingers pressed Merlot bruises into her hips and waist while his mouth left raspberry welts on her thighs. 
Honey cried out around a moan as she felt his fingers deepen. His loving touches to her sensitive spots turned wicked, reminding her this was also a penalty for her bratty transgressions. She wept and squirmed, practically drooling on the table.
He simply grinned.
“—Mmmhm, that’s it—scream for me, princess—”
Honey’s tiny little hip thrusts fit easily in his palm as he groped her. He found it adorable, really.
“Mmm...m’sorr—ow—agh!”
“Sorry’s not gonna cut it,” he panted, eyes blown black. Shadow returned to his voice. “You’re mine now, ya hear?” His eyes traveled to where his fingers were buried to the knuckles. “Gonna fuck you every way I want—”
“Pleasepleasepleaseyes—it’syoursit’syoursallyours—”
His eyes swam over her body, drunk with lust.
All mine. 
The sinfulness of his thoughts tugged his insides into a vortex. This was wrong, he reasoned. Not how he wanted this to go. Poor girl sounded brainless, begging to be fucked.  He wasn’t much better off. This wasn’t how he planned this to go. 
But he was willing to pivot.
Hands shaking, he fumbled with his fly. It wasn’t until his cock bobbed free, glistening with precum, that he felt any sort of relief. Peter grabbed her hips and lifted them off of the table, repositioning her so he was lined up with her slit.
“Fuckin’ need you so much, Honey—” he muttered mindlessly, focused on pushing the swollen, leaking crown of his cock against the silk of her pussy. 
Her hips’ weight rested easily in his hands, and she keened at the sensation of his head pressing against her entrance. 
And god, she'd forgotten he was thick.
Honey tensed up, even as her pussy throbbed with want. It was as if all her muscles were reaching for him, heart included.
It was too much. Mascara trailed faintly down her cheeks. Her heart soared. And ached. She felt spoiled with pleasure, delighting in this penance.
More. She wanted more.
“Fuck—wanted ya so bad,” Peter mumbled, watching his cock slip through her lips. He sounded airy, hypnotized by the view. “Wanted t’crawl through your window like the goddamn—ahh— boogeyman... fuck ya in your own bed. Wanted t’take’ya home with me and keep ya there— Never let you leave.”
Honey swallowed back a sob. Then why did you send me away? 
He paused. 
Uh-oh. Did she say that out lo—?
“Because I’m an idiot,” Peter huffed, his voice fragile. 
He leaned forward and lovingly kissed up her spine, each tender press of his lips an apology. 
“I’m a stupid fuckin’ fool.” The heat of his breath ghosted across her back. “So stupid—Thought I could protect ya if I kept you away. Thought I could somehow live like that—without you.” He shook his head. “Goddamn fool.”
Peter felt the sting of tears flooding his vision. Instinctively, he squeezed his eyes shut to keep them out. “I can’t live without ya,” he nearly whimpered. “There is no life for me if you’re not in it.”
“Peter,” she said, feeling her heart lurch. Her spirit was a ship being tossed in a hurricane. One more wave, and she would break. Honey’s voice trembled, “St-stop t-talking—”
“Not until I’ve said what I shoulda said—!”
“If you don’t shut up and fuck me in the next five seconds—”
Peter cut her off by pulling her up by the shoulders and standing her upright. Honey fought it—because, of course, she did—desperately clutching the steel armor around her heart. 
Overpowering her again, he tugged the naked woman closer until her back lined up to his chest. It was an awkward position with her bound arms crushed behind her against his abs. He towered over her, eyeing her face from the side, seeking her gaze. Hooked a finger beneath her chin, forcing her to look him in the eye. 
Always the fighter, Honey tried to wrench herself from his hold. Peter’s body was like a Greek god’s, with pillar-like arms and marble fingers keeping her from wriggling away. But his soft, soulful eyes are what pinned her in place. 
As soon as she peered into their oaken color, she was trapped again. 
“No,” she sneered, shaking her head. The tears weren’t from pleasure anymore. “Don’t—”
“‘Honey and Lavender,’” he whispered, featherlike. “Those are the words. All you gotta do is say ‘em, and I’ll stop.”
She gritted her teeth, bucking against his sweetness. His arms wrapped around her torso, pulling her in.
“I thought you wanted to fuck me!” she revolted, voice getting weaker by the second. “What the hell do you want from me, Peter?!” 
His features softened. Serenity pressed between his lips. “I want all of you, Honey,” he answered with resolve. “Body and soul. Wanna spend the rest of my life with ya. If you don’t kill me first.” 
He said the ‘if’ part with a teasing lilt in his tone and a half-smile. The same smirk that she loathed—and fell in love with. 
Honey squeezed her eyes shut. Peter’s thumb came up gently, wiping a messy tear from her cheek. That loving and pure act was worse than any torture he could inflict.
Walls tumbling down, her body loosened. She went slack against his arms, instead fighting to keep more tears from flowing.
“I love you,” he whispered, pouring his soul into each word. “Forever. Remember? No matter what.” 
Peter waited for her eyelids to peel back, revealing glossy eyes and a weary expression. They stayed still for eons. Nothing but their breaths and heartbeats between them, eyes locked on each other.
“Even if you’re mad as hell at me,” he added. “Even if you hate me—I want it all.”
Her lower lip wobbled. “And what then, Peter? What now?”
A moment passed. He leaned around her shoulder, bringing her chin close, and answered her with a kiss. Gentle at first, his tongue explored hers as she relaxed against him. She felt her toes leave the ground before she realized what was happening.
Peter broke the kiss. “Now?” he breathed into her hairline. “I’m gonna show you what it means to be mine.”
One of his hands left her torso—borrowed to push the head of his cock into her gate. An overwhelming burn erupted between her legs. She arched her back away from his abs as best she could while being split open.
Honey wailed brokenly, voice shattered, as he bottomed out. Peter’s hand instinctively came up to cover her mouth. She let the scream out into his palm, just as he’d promised.
Peter hissed, letting his head fall back in agonized ecstasy. His eyes drifted shut, feeling both relief and torment buried to the hilt in her warmth. 
He barely ground out, “Shh-shhh, s’alright... that’s it, s-so good, so good for me...”
His Honey was already writhing on his cock, and he hadn’t even begun to move. She was so goddamn tight he wasn’t sure he wanted to move at all.
Still, he couldn’t help indulging himself. Never could, around her.
The arm bracing Honey’s torso snaked back across her body. His hand, burning hotter than a branding iron, stretched out and smoothed over the curvature of her belly. Her pussy clenched tighter as his palm found the trophy he was looking for—an obscene bulge in her lower stomach.
A slow, sinful curve played upon his lips. “Fuck, babygirl. Look at you.” When he uncovered her mouth, her roars had quieted down to a wanton purr. He gently tilted her head downwards so she could witness the depravity herself. “Just look at how you take my dick, Honey.” 
She shuddered at the sight, nodding rapidly, unable to speak. She wondered if this was just more teasing, but she couldn’t think beyond the penetration. 
“God, you look so beautiful like that,” he muttered breathlessly. His amber eyes were fixated on the sinful spectacle beneath her waist, unable to avert his gaze. “So pretty with my cock stuffed up inside your tummy...” 
Peter sounded unhinged, even to himself. His abs twisted into knots. Vile, perverse images eclipsed his sense of decency—her body naked and wrecked, with his seed spilling from her holes. Then, her belly round with his children. Just the thought devolved him like his civilized nature was sucked back into a black hole.
Wordless whimpers poured from her lips as her taut muscles succumbed to his girth. Calloused fingertips reached further down, brushing against the hood of her clit. She jolted in his arms with the slightest touch.
At that moment, Honey’s world disappeared. Nothing existed but the exquisite ache between her legs. 
The conquerer inside him preened. “Is that the spot? Is that where it hurts, baby?” he purred into her ear with a filthy, predatory voice. Her body answered him, rewarding him with a delicious squeeze around his shaft. “That’s it,” Peter groaned, insatiable. “Good girl. So good for me.” 
His praise, even if it was teasing, was too much. Peter’s affirmations, paired with his ministrations, tightened the coil in her stomach. Exhaustion crept up on her body even as the bubble of desire swelled.
Ever so slowly, his hips pitched back and then forward. He bottomed out again at the end of the languid stroke. A shattered mewl burst from her lips, pussy pulsating around his dick.
She was magnificent. 
”Fuck, baby. Feels s-so fuckin’ good—ahh, I missed this tight pussy so much. Wanted to play with her so bad…”
Peter’s hips moved of their own accord. They were a pornographic masterpiece in the decorative mirrors situated around the room. He stole a greedy glance at the couple’s reflection. Smiling wickedly, he turned her head, making her see what he was seeing.
Honey’s stomach fluttered at the sight of her body—glistening and restrained—slotted against him. Her head bobbed as Peter gripped her hips and fucked into her like a sex doll. 
Perverse. Debauched. Divine. It made her lightheaded.
Slowly, he increased the pace of his thrusts, panting into her ear. At some point, she started muttering. Broken and embarrassingly desperate pleas and pet names tumbled unwittingly out of her mouth.
One of them must have caught his attention. But she honestly couldn’t remember what she had said.
“Ugh—I lose my fuckin’ mind when you call me that name,” he growled, throwing his head back. “Ya know that, precious? Such a good girl for me. Good girls get spoiled.” 
Honey’s body thrummed at his baby talk. In all its depravity, she started to suspect what she must have said in all its depravity. Slowly, she was losing the ability to be ashamed.
The slick-coated pad of Peter’s thumb circled her clit, before traveling down further. He curiously prodded where they were joined—“Fuck, look at how good ya open up for me.” — His fingers trailed the outline of her stretched hymen wrapped around his cock.
Honey closed her eyes and turned away, blushing from his praise. Timid about how she relished in the filth. Peter brought his lips to her ear as if there was a secret the two of them shared.
“Don’t worry, baby. I gotcha—Daddy’s gonna make the ache go away.”
The spring snapped. She was nearly knocked over by the wave of pleasure that followed. Her pussy fluttered around his cock with no warning, body trembling and toes curling. Her cream gushed down his shaft. 
He snickered as if he’d won a prize. 
Honey could vaguely recognize her pathetic voice through the bells in her ears. She squealed and cried out over his repetitive, patronizing chants — “Awwgoodgirl, fuckin’ so-so perfect— squeezin’ me so tight” — while he fucked her through her orgasm.
It felt like several moments of pure pink haze, herself a willing victim to his delicious, relentless pull. 
“Shit, sweetie, did you just come all over my cock?” he asked, exasperated.
Embarrassment flooded her despite her persistent mewling. 
“Don’t cry, baby. Don’chu worry,” he murmured affectionately, himself obsessed with the cavern of her divine flesh. “When I said I was gonna make you my toy, I meant it.” She whimpered, nodding her head as it rested back against his shoulder. “M’not finished with you,” he said, dropping an octave. “Not by a long shot.”
Time ceased to have true meaning. Peter rammed into her steadily.
“Please don’stop, please use me, please, wan’more—” She yelped like a puppy.
He smiled against her sweaty skin. “Yeah? Ya like bein’ a good girl? My good girl?”
“I’llbegoodI’llbegoodm’yours—fuck—yoursyoursyours—”
“That’s right, sweetheart,” he groaned, with another curse beneath his breath. Eyes drifted shut. “Good, good girl.”
All he could think of was more. 
More of that sound. More of her juices. More of her staccato breaths as he fucked her tits into a steady bounce on her chest. More of her whining, whimpering like a bitch in heat.
“All mine, all mine…”
Peter needed more of her. He needed to watch her fall apart on his cock again. Honey was so close already; he could feel it. He’d give her another orgasm, one that leaves her in tears. Then another. He was going to fuck her into submission atop the throne he built for her. She was already his queen. 
Then—He’d make her his whore.
Flip her on her back against the table—or couch— countertop—fuck, maybe the bed if he could remember where it was. Whatever he could reach first. 
Then he’d split her open again on his cock. That way, he could see the enraptured awe on her face. The neediness. Big, round, wet eyes pleading for his touch, calling him filthy names, as his cock bulges below her pubic bone. Begging him to rearrange her guts.
It was heavenly to witness. Peter loved watching her come. And he would, over and over. Once he relocated her to his bed—as soon as he remembered where it was— he could tie her to it.
Not that Honey was fighting at the present. There was no fight in her body, except maybe the will to keep conscious. With every strike against her cervix, she spread herself wider for him. 
But Peter knew she would like it. Honey wanted his unforgiving ecstasy. To take out the mounting frustration of the last few months on her wet pussy. 
“M’gonna fuck you so good, babygirl, m’gonna use your body like my fucktoy—make me feel s-sogood, don’worry—“ 
Honey full-body shuddered with a sob, her head thrown back against his shoulder. 
“S’okay, baby, you can scream if y’want, makes it feel better, doesn’t it, huh—”
Cock-drunk, she nodded, her words coming out as puffs of air.
“Don’stop—don’stop—please, fuck— fuckmehardDaddyIneedit—“
Oh. 
More. Of. That.
“M’not lettin’ you get away again…” he muttered, voice emerging from beneath his twitching abdominal muscles. With possessed eyes, he was glued to where they joined. “Never—never gonna let you go again… All mine now, Honey—you’re all mine…”
Her arms came up to circle the back of his neck as she panted into his throat. “My-my pussy is yours…”
“Everything,” he corrected.
“Everythi—god—I’m yours, Pete—ahh!”
Peter was getting close. No matter. He’d let himself come inside her soon. There was plenty more to follow. 
He barely recognized his own wrecked voice. “’m not leavin,’ baby. I’m not leavin’ ever.”
A gust of wind followed him as the front door to the suite slammed shut. Peter stood alone in the hotel hallway wearing a sheen of sweat... and nothing else. 
He flushed pink, fumbling to cover himself behind his hands. The cool air made the task easier.
Peter sighed. He’d need to talk to maintenance about better insulation up here.
But not right now. Not while Peter Parker stood ass-naked outside of his door, having been kicked out like a cheap fuck. 
Which might have been Honey’s point, he recognized.
The evidence of their past hour together made his skin sticky. She’d tousled his hair and etched into his back with her nails. He felt sore in places he hadn’t felt in years.
Peter also looked thoroughly fucked. A mixture of pain and relief surged through his muscles. His brain was branded with erotic images of her. He wanted them there.
The door opened again, lifting his hopes. He only caught a fleeting glimpse of Honey, wrapped sloppily in a bathrobe. The rest of her didn’t look much better than Peter. She wore a sour yet adorable scowl on her face.
With a huff, Honey hurled a tight wad of fabric at his nuts, unintentionally intentional in her aim. 
Peter oofed, doubling over to catch the ball of his clothes. At the same time, an Italian leather shoe smacked him in the head. Probably his Tom Ford’s. He heard the door slam closed again, rattling against the frame.
Perplexed, Peter gazed at the molding of the door and the gleaming golden script marking the room number. 
He wondered. 
Would she open the door again to throw him the other shoe? 
Or perhaps the slacks that went along with the dress shirt covering his balls?
Unlikely.
He marveled. 
The nerve of this woman. This goddess-barista who served him his soul in a paper cup. Who held the keys to his heart, his home, and presently, his hotel room. Who somehow managed to kick him out of the penthouse suite of his own hotel. 
Within the confines of his ruined dress shirt, Peter felt another buzz. He fumbled with the shirt, reaching the smartphone concealed inside.
>>> have you moved onto the main course? >>> or are you still tossing the salad? >>> pouring ranch on her hidden valley
Felicia. Peter’s eyes nearly rolled out of his head. With a sigh, he tapped out a reply.
<<<  Kitchen’s closed.  <<< Need clothes. And a new room.
He saw the ellipsis bubbling up on his screen. 
<<< Not another word.
As soon as the message was sent, Peter took another glance at his empty surroundings. Haplessly, he looked toward the closed door. A river of memories flooded him. It surged, swelled, and finally, came to a low simmer.
This was never going to be easy. Nothing ever was with her.
Nothing worth waiting for ever is.
“See you at breakfast,” he whispered aloud lips curled into a smile. “Sleep tight.”
Holding her breath and her ear to the door, Honey waited until Peter’s footsteps faded. When she could no longer hear them, she sighed with exasperation, overcome with exhaustion. Eyes falling closed, Honey leaned back against the door, body aching in places she would feel for days.
After taking a moment, she heard a buzzing sound further in the suite. Honey jumped with alarm, then stumbled on Fawn’s feet to reach the source.
Quickly, Honey waddled to the remains of her yellow dress, fishing out the buzzing object: a 10-year-old smartphone with a black glittery hard case. A holographic cat sticker was fixed to the back, shimmering in the dim light. 
Not just any cat.
She unlocked the phone to see the latest message.
>>> how’d it go? u give him hell?
The heaviest exhale left Honey’s chest, shame creeping up her chest. With her thumb, she scrolled up to review the text messages sent to her. The oldest of which dated back almost four months.
Weeks of correspondence and reassurance from Felicia, not to mention very clear instructions about Peter Parker and how to play his game. 
There was the one from last month:
>>> don’t let him think for one second that you’re gonna let him get off easy!
Then one from last week:
>>> make him suffer. make him grovel. make him lay down in a puddle so you can cross
And these:
>>> go to dinner, but don’t eat anything. order wine, the most expensive one, take one sip and refuse the rest. you pick the restaurant. if he picks the restaurant, hate everything about it >>> play hard to get— but don’t be too cold >>> be flirty. but not slutty.  >>> give him bedroom eyes, but don’t let him stare at you too long.
Finally, there was a clear instruction sent earlier today.
>>> under no circumstances >>> no matter what >>> you need to remember this >>> DO NOT FUCK HIM!!1
Honey frowned as she gazed at Felicia’s text message bubble, sent with so much hope and good intention. A notion soundly defeated. A truly hopeless endeavor, if there ever was one.
Biting her lip, Honey tapped out a reply to her confidant:
<<< Sure did.
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whore-ibly-hot · 2 months
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OMG SPEAKING OF MARRIAGE honeymoon with Joey or like anyone really what would Fritz honeymoon be like? Like I'd assume they didn't get one cause man's busy
Honey-mooning with Joey would be fairly simple, he'd take you to the inn or motel of one of the slightly larger nearby farming towns, and treat you to all the southern comfort food and hospitality you could want. He'd get you a nice breakfast, and flowers, but in the evening he'd make it very clear that he wants to begin the process of knocking you up. He will back off if you tell him to, but he'll make his intentions known. He just wants you knocked up as quickly as possible, and as much as he wants to enjoy the honeymoon he mostly just wants you back in the farm, acclimating to life with his family and getting settled in. It'll feel all that more real that your truly his once he can wake up in his own bed, with you their everyday.
"I hope you liked dinner, I've never been to that restaurants before, but my chicken was great. Um, darlin'? I know your probably stuffed, but are you too stuffed to work up the energy to go for a roll in the hay with your new husband?"
Fritz wouldn't be able to spend anytime honey mooning with his bride, and as a traditionalist this upsets him. Instead, he'll settle for a very extravagant one night wedding and ceremony away from the small town he's stationed at. He wants to give his bride the luxury you've never been accustomed too. You'll meet all his fellow military officials, and be shown off like one of Fritz medals. That night, he doesn't let you do anything during the consumption of the marriage. He wants to worship you, not the other way around. He will insist on some sort of white lingerie being sent in, as he wants you looking like a bride when he takes you, but he doesn't want to ruin your dress or suit. He asks beforehand if he'll be able to start trying for a baby that evening.
"Being a woman is not enough for a slimy cadet or confident rookie to simply respect you my poor dear, and I am sorry for their behavior. Being an officers bride should help, but we get new soldiers so often on the front lines, they may not know."
"What are you saying?"
"I think it'll be a little more obvious your an officers wife if you're walking around with a little bump next time we go to town. All for your safety, of course."
BONUS!!!: Mattias doesn't have the money for a big wedding or an extravagant honeymoon, but while he may not have the money, he has the spirit to party, and he knows others who do. The entire wedding reception is held as a block party at his mother's home in old Harlem, and the guests are a mix of neighbors and family. Mattias loves his family, and his perfect way to solidify a marriage is to blend you in with them. His biggest regret about the wedding is his father wasn't there to see him get married, so it's also nice for him to be around his Mami at a time like this. He loves how the two of you get along, and the two of them share stories of Mattias's papa, from when he was alive.
Mattias cannot handle it when his sees you playing with his young primos and primas, and the other neighborhood kids. Dancing with them and helping them reach the tinfoil trays to get food onto their plates. This results in him returning back to your apartment and immediately begging to dick you down, and give you a baby.
"Cmon, pretty girl!" He's kissing up on your neck, pulling you out of your reception outfit. "Gotta have you, mi esposa guapa, give you some kids. I've been shaking with nerves and energy all day, and I can't exactly fight it off at a block party. So please-"
"Let's make some hijos..."
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gatheringbones · 20 days
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[“Once, Joan took up the microphone for a solo performance that fills up an entire B side. She was sick. Her head hurt too much to write. Doctors couldn’t diagnose her. She worried she was coming to the end of her life and wanted to leave a final message. “I want to tell tales of a lesbian life,” she says, her voice high and self-conscious where Mabel’s is deep and restless. “I want to talk about the wonderful women I’ve known, and I want to talk about what it’s meant to be a lesbian and how it was at the core of all I think that was best in me.”
When Joan sat down to record this tape, she had already begun to collect tales of the wonderful women and lesbians she had known. In 1974, she cofounded the Lesbian Herstory Archives with Mabel Hampton and two other women dedicated to preserving lesbian culture before it disappeared. A year later, the budding collection of letters, magazines, cassettes, photographs, and books took up residence at Joan’s Upper West Side apartment, where it would continue to grow for the next fifteen years, until the organization raised enough money to purchase a permanent home, a brownstone in Park Slope. Mabel was a fixture at the archives, regaling volunteers with stories of the Harlem Renaissance as they opened the mail.
Joan lived. She went on to record dozens more interviews with Mabel for the archive. Their relationship marked a fundamental shift in how lesbian history was set down and passed along. Until Joan and Mabel, the amateur sexologists who edited Mary Casal’s memoir, the police who arrested women in male garb and the courts who put them on trial, and the newspaper editors who reduced their stories to lurid headlines filtered lesbian stories through the gaze of authority.
Sheer accident preserved much of what we know, what I can know, about the lesbians who lived at the turn of the century. Their personal letters and pages of poetry left a record so riddled with holes it leaves room to either imagine lesbian stories or discount them entirely. “]
amelia possanza, from lesbian love story: a memoir in archives, 2023
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aprocessionofthoughts · 6 months
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To succeed is to fail
whumptober2023 day 9- mistaken identity fandom- Danny phantom x Batman TW- nothing summary- The Amity Parkers have the opportunity (they didn't want) to explore Gotham. It's just too bad that Danny looks a lot like adoption bait.
First of all, I’d like to state that I know this is whumptober. But the story disagreed. So now we have whumpcracktober.
ao3 masterlist
They were not supposed to be here. They didn't want to be here. They hadn’t even tried to be here. Yet luck had never been on the Amity Parker’s side before, and they should have realized this would be no different.
It was their senior year and things around Amity had calmed down. Or at least everyone was used to Amity’s special brand of crazy.
He had told his parents about Phantom and they had helped hunt down the GIW. Most of Amity was discovered to be liminal and most of the young people had developed some basic abilities. 
And then Mrs. Abernagaby decided that their science final would be a group project. This wasn’t anything new. Every year Casper participated in the Helping Intelligent Minds Be Outstanding competition–better known as the HIMBO competition.
And usually the smartest seniors would be picked to work on a group project to submit. Casper High had never won. So, this year Mrs. Abrnagaby decided that all the seniors could work on it together. Because more heads were better than one!
Obviously she didn’t remember what being part of a group project felt like. And she obviously didn't account for the fact that no one would care.
They weren’t even told what the award was since it varied year to year and was meant to be a surprise.
All they were told was that they had to design a new air filtration system.
So, being seniors who had survived ghost attacks, invasions, their town being pulled into another dimension, dealing with the GIW, and making it through adjusting to Amity shifting to the stranger side as everyone's liminality began to show, they did not try.
Which was how they ended up with this masterpiece.
The challenge was to design a new air filtrator. Which if they had wanted to, would have been easy since air filters that would reduce the amount of ectoplasm in the air had been designed before the residents realized it was too late to do any good, and so they had never been made.
They didn’t even submit a design; it was a paper mache volcano covered in everyone’s failed tests. The accompanying research paper they were supposed to submit had Dash’s and Paulina’s self-insert fanfics with– you guessed it– phantom as the love interest. Danny had tried to make them remove it since it was awkward now that they knew who he was, but they had claimed they wrote it before they knew. Danny knew this was a lie because they were lying liars who lied. 
The paper also included one of Sam’s activist papers, Wes’s conspiracies about Bruce Wayne being Batman’s sugar daddy (now that everyone knew Danny was Phantom Wes didn’t feel the need to include that research (he also believed that Batman was Bruce Wayne but didn’t want to antagonize the furry who could ruin his life)). 
Tucker had included evidence of a Pentagon hack he had done a few years ago, Mikey had drawn some incredible fanart about Green Lantern (he said this would have the greatest effect on Gothamites and Wes agreed saying Batman didn’t like Green Lantern. How he knew this, no one asked.).
And lastly, they attached a file of them doing the Harlem Shake.
Mrs. Abernagaby hadn’t even looked at it before sending it off.
And then of course they had won. And what a grand prize it was! They won a trip to Gotham to explore the various big businesses, as well as a chance to apply at those locations for internships. Yeah… Sam had found out all the other schools had dropped out after finding out the prize. No one wanted to go to Gotham. But the school said it was a learning opportunity! To see what it was like outside Amity! To see what normal was supposed to be like!
So, they were forced to go, but at least they got Mr. Lancer as their supervisor and they wouldn’t even have to take a long bus ride because Amity was friends with Gotham. Apparently there weren’t very many Living Cities and the two liked to talk. They also thought it would be hilarious if the Amity Parkers went to Gotham. So, Amity had temporarily turned the road that left the city into a portal that led to Gotham’s border, and at the end of the week Gotham would return them.
And that was how he had ended up here. In the back of a smelly van with a smelly bag over his head surrounded by smelly men probably heading to a smelly, sketchy location. All because these men were stupid and thought he was some Wayne kid.
Sure, he could have gotten out. But this was honestly more interesting than touring another boring building and having to almost get mugged again.
..........
AN-I plan to continue this but it probably won’t be until after October because I want to focus on completing the challenges I'm participating in.
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thebunnybooknook · 8 months
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Books that Deserve to be Inducted into 'Girlblogger' Coquette Canon
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Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind
In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift—an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille’s genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the “ultimate perfume”—the scent of a beautiful young virgin. Told with dazzling narrative brilliance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity. 
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Jane & Prudence by Barbara Pym
This early novel by Barbara Pym captures the charm and folly of English middle-class life. The two title characters share a devoted friendship based on memories of Oxford school days, poetry and their neighbors' private affairs- all discussed over leisurely lunches. And they share a common goal: finding a suitable mate for Prudence.
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Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel
Elizabeth Wurtzel writes with her finger in the faint pulse of an overdiagnosed generation whose ruling icons are Kurt Cobain, Xanax, and pierced tongues. In this famous memoir of her bouts with depression and skirmishes with drugs, Prozac Nation is a witty and sharp account of the psychopharmacology of an era for readers of Girl, Interrupted and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar.
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Tiny Pretty Things by Sona Charaipotra & Dhonielle Clayton
Gigi, Bette, and June, three top students at an exclusive Manhattan ballet school, have seen their fair share of drama. Free-spirited new girl Gigi just wants to dance—but the very act might kill her. Privileged New Yorker Bette's desire to escape the shadow of her ballet-star sister brings out a dangerous edge in her. And perfectionist June needs to land a lead role this year or her controlling mother will put an end to her dancing dreams forever. When every dancer is both friend and foe, the girls will sacrifice, manipulate, and backstab to be the best of the best.
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The Nun by Denis Diderot
Diderot's The Nun (La Religieuse) is the seemingly true story of a young girl forced by her parents to enter a convent and take holy orders. A novel mingling mysticism, madness, sadistic cruelty and nascent sexuality, it gives a scathing insight into the effects of forced vocations and the unnatural life of the convent. A succès de scandale at the end of the eighteenth century, it has attracted and unsettled readers ever since. For Diderot's novel is not simply a story of a young girl with a bad habit; it is also a powerfully emblematic fable about oppression and intolerance.
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The Blacker the Berry by Wallace Thurman
"The tragedy of her life was that she was too black," declares the narrator at the start of this powerful novel of intraracial prejudice. Emma Lou Morgan lives in a world of scorn and shame, not because her skin is black, but because it's too black. No one among her family, teachers, and friends has a word of consolation or hope for the despised and rejected girl. With nothing to lose, eighteen-year-old Emma Lou leaves her home in Idaho, seeking love and acceptance on a journey that ultimately leads her to the legendary community of the Harlem Renaissance. A source of controversy upon its 1929 publication, The Blacker the Berry was the first novel to openly address color prejudice among black Americans. Author Wallace Thurman, an active member of the Harlem Renaissance, vividly recaptures the era's mood and spirit. His portrait of a young woman adrift in the city forms an enduringly relevant reflection of the search for racial, sexual, and cultural identity.
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The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
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Innocents by Cathy Coote
Written when Cathy Coote was nineteen, Innocents is a taut, wickedly clever descent into the anatomy of an obsession, the debut of a precociously assured and provocative young literary voice. Forcing someone vulnerable and naive into a sexual relationship to satisfy a twisted desire is perverted, even evil. But when the perpetrator is a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, is she culpable? And if the victim is her thirty-four-year-old teacher, shouldn't he have known better? When the nameless young narrator of Innocents decides to seduce her teacher, she immediately realizes that the power of her sexuality is greater than she ever imagined. She leaves the aunt and uncle who are her guardians and moves in with her teacher; together, they quickly embark on a journey into their darkest desires. Unforgettable, disturbing, and morally complex, Innocents permanently unsettles our notions of innocence, experience, and power, and suggests that we all are culpable.
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The Torn Skirt by Rebecca Godfrey
At Mt. Douglas (a.k.a. Mt. Drug) High, all the girls have feathered hair, and the sweet scent of Love's Baby Soft can't hide the musk of raw teenage anger, apathy, and desire. Sara Shaw is a girl full of fever and longing, a girl looking for something risky, something real. Her only possible salvation comes in the willowy form of the mysterious Justine, the outlaw girl in the torn skirt. The search for Justine will lead Sara on a daring odyssey into an underworld of hookers and johns, junkies and thieves, runaway girls and skater boys, and, ultimately, into a violent tragedy.
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Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan
Endearing, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old Cécile is the very essence of untroubled amorality. Freed from the stifling constraints of boarding school, she joins her father—a handsome, still-young widower with a wandering eye—for a carefree, two-month summer vacation in a beautiful villa outside of Paris with his latest mistress. Cécile cherishes the free-spirited moments she and her father share, while plotting her own sexual adventures with a "tall and almost beautiful" law student. But the arrival of her late mother's best friend intrudes upon a young girl's pleasures. And when a relationship begins to develop between the adults, Cécile and her lover set in motion a plan to keep them apart...with tragic, unexpected consequences.
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humansofnewyork · 2 years
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(15/15) “I used to smoke sweet tips, because I thought they were feminine. But I’ve learned I like heavier cigars. I’ve learned a lot about myself these past few years. I was put in charge of hiring for our entire company. I’ve produced my own play. My bracelet is so full of charms that Garrison had to buy me another. And that one’s half-way full too. I downloaded a dating app for seniors, called Our Time. I said: ‘Lord, you designed the body. I’m losing my ever-loving mind, so I hope you understand.’ I just wanted to see what was out there. And let me tell you, there’s a lot out there. I’ve tried all the flavors: Bangladesh, Egyptian, Hispanic, African. The whole smorgasbord. I’ve dated about seventy men. And I’ve had four marriage proposals, because what I bring to the table is rich. But right now I’m on a little bit of a break from romance. I’m taking time with myself. But that’s a romance too. It’s a love that’s lacy. It’s light filtering through the leaves. It’s not harsh sun, but it’s oh-so-warm. For 55 years I never liked myself much. But now when I hear people describe me, I like that woman. I’ve worked hard on her. I might be a little quirky. Truth be told I’ve sat down and pondered if I’m batshit crazy. But I decided no, I just hover over crazy, then I flit away. Like a hummingbird. Back in Arkansas I’d hang out feeders for the hummingbirds. I’d watch em’ all day. So I don’t mind being hummingbird crazy. I can be colorful, and dance, and sing, and make mistakes. I’m not hurting anybody. I’m not taking anybody else’s oxygen. I’ve got my own space. In the evening I like to set my chair out on the sidewalk, turn on my Bluetooth speaker, light my cigar. I never just stick the fire to it. I go around all the edges, and let it breathe a little. Until there’s no dead spots. Until I’ve pulled all the life into the it. Then I sit back, take a deep breath, and watch Harlem walk by. I smoke slow. It’ll take me two hours to finish. And I’ve made myself a playlist that lasts just that long: Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Bruno Mars. Everything has an order. And when that last song starts playing, it’s time to go home. Al Greene. Put a Little Love In Your Heart.” Detra has been working hard her whole life, but she hasn't always been paid for it. And living in New York isn't easy when you're on your own. Detra can manage the day-to-day, but she hasn't been able to tuck anything away for the golden years. If you enjoyed her story and would like to help her breathe a little bit, please consider helping us build her a little bit of a cushion: https://bit.ly/helpdetrabreath
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soracities · 10 months
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Hi! Would it be okay to ask for poems that radiate some kind of "red" energy? I saw your recommendations about the similar ask with blue and I really loved it, so I thought I could ask for more :)
Red and blue, twin poles of the world 💘I had to think about this one (red has a distinct vibe for me) but I think all of these feel "red" when I read them, in one form or another, if not always overtly, so I hope you enjoy them, too:
"In the Desert" by Stephen Crane
"Woman Unborn" by Anna Swir
"El Beso" by Angelina Weld Grimké
"What Do Women Want?" by Kim Addonizio
"For You" by Kim Addonizio
"I'm Explaining a Few Things" by Pablo Neruda
"Dirty Valentine" by Richard Siken
"Little Beast" by Richard Siken
"Aubade" by Miller Williams
"Green and Gold" by Rachel Hadas
"Ishtar Awakens in Chicago" by Mohja Kahf
"The Second Coming" by W.B. Yeats
"O" by Dunya Mikhail
"Center of the World" by Safiya Sinclair
"[i like my body when it is with your]" by e.e. cummings
"[your little voice]" by e.e. cummings
"Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell" by Marty McConnell
"Complaint of Achilles' Heel" by Charles Jensen
"What a Cyborg Wants" by Franny Choi
"A Moment" by Saadi Youssef
"And After That" by Lorca
"Harlem" by Langston Hughes
"Lamenting Widow" by Ho Xuan Hong
"The Unicorn" by Angela Carter
"Dulzura" by Sandra Cisneros
"The Story of Madame Chevalier" by Ciarán Carson
"The Witch Has Told You a Story" by Ava Leavell Haymon
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nkjemisin · 7 months
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You should try to go see public works Tempest in central park, it’s really incredible and reminded me of the city we became. It’s super insane and beautiful and wild and hard to describe, so even though it’s insane to ask someone to go stand in line all day to see a play based off a random tumblr message I really think you should!
Oooh, I haven't done the line for Shakespeare in the Park in years. Not sure I still have it in me, since it requires getting up at 3 or 4 am and spending hours fighting line-jumpers and so on. But I've been hearing good things about this year's Tempest so maybe I'll muster up the energy. Thanks for the recommendation!
Since you reminded me of it, here's a deleted scene/alternate opening I once wrote for THE WORLD WE MAKE. I decided on a different opening for the final version, obvs, but maybe you'll enjoy what might have been. Cutting because long.
     He's just a man standing on a rooftop.  The outfit he's wearing is bespoke, by a Harlem tailor who came in second on Project Runway's last season.  The jacket is rich brown suede, fine-stitched, over olive-tan pants and a piqué shirt of deepest royal indigo, and he's wearing the hell out of it.  If there were anyone around to see, they'd think he was a model, standing in the kind of casual-at-attention pose that only men in magazine photo shoots ever do, with one hand in a pocket and his gaze thoughtfully locked on the cityscape horizon.  The model aesthetic is reinforced by the fact that he's got a lean, strong figure and the kind of racial ambiguity that Hollywood diversity advocates love:  brown skin that's not too brown, lips full enough to be either natural or recent collagen injections, thick eyebrows that are as sculpted as his cheekbones, eyes with just enough epicanthic fold to qualify as "exotic" but not in like an ethnic way.
     He's not a model.  He's just Manhattan, human representative of New York's contributions to the fashion, media, and sex work industries.  He's not even trying particularly hard to look good.  He has simply stopped resisting what comes naturally.
     But he's about to be late for work -- and while New York custom permits a degree of conspicuous tardiness as a social power move in certain situations, this particular job is too personally important to him for such games.  So he steps up onto the low wall that surrounds the roof, and then he steps off.
     It's fine.  The building is twelve stories tall; anything over five stories is required to have an elevator per city ordinance.  He's been practicing, too, so all he has to do is shut his eyes and imagine, and the city's power holds him aloft in midair as solidly as if he's stepping onto flooring.  (He is; it's just flooring that exists in several other iterations of his universe.)  Even with this, however, he makes sure to take a step or two forward before calmly turning away from the cityscape.  People don't usually stare at the back of an elevator, after all -- and verisimilitude is key.  "First floor, please," he murmurs. In earlier days of the city, building elevators were a complicated luxury that required trained staff to operate.  In current days of the city, many elevators run on voice activation. At Manhattan's request, there is an electronic ping of acknowledgement, followed by a very faint echo of blended, long-vanished voices:  "Watch the door, please, watch your hands, going down."  Then he begins to descend.  It's smooth, slow; this is only a mid-sized building, not modern or expensive enough to have an express elevator.  Only the fact that he's descending through thin air makes it odd.
     Just above the sidewalk his descent slows, letting him drift to a gentle halt.  There are a few dozen people on the street in this moment, and some of them notice as he just stands there for a moment, letting the metaphysical aethers settle and the metaphorical elevator doors open.  The ones who stare are tourists.  New Yorkers generally don't react to strangeness, but they do notice it, if only to shake their heads and murmur "This fucking city," to themselves before moving on.  Manhattan catches the eye of one of the starers, winks and smiles, then strides off down the street.
     As he walks, he hums John Coltrane's "Central Park West" -- not for power this time, but simply because he's walking along Central Park West and likes the song.  It's also a beautiful day. Here at the heart of the city it is clear that autumn encroaches:  Central Park is across the street, dense with color-shifting trees.  Their whispers speak to the part of Manhattan that was more, once, than just concrete and cars; the island has always been here, after all, crossroads for many peoples, and those millennia of commerce were enough to form the building blocks of the living entity that it is now.  But mostly, he just likes that rustling sound, and the flickers of color and movement, and the faint whiff of chemical sugars forming and breaking down within the leaves.  Something about that scent, and the wind's occasional brisk sharpness, speaks to him.
     There is the lightest of touches upon the part of him that is more than a man.  Just a ping, to get his attention.  "You wanna focus, or you gonna just keep spacing out about the pretty pretty trees, Mr. I Was Bebop Before It Was Cool?"
     They've all figured out that words work better than thoughts.  They are one city, the six of them, and if they ever need to, they can function as a single brain and heart and will -- but doing that is as overwhelming as it is thrilling.  New York isn't supposed to be any single thing, see; the distinct characters of its boroughs are part of its strength.  More personally, Manny's probably never going to be super-comfortable with letting his fellow parts of the city into his head, because he's got enough going on in there already. 
     But he's right in reminding Manny to focus.  "Just getting into the spirit," Manny replies, waiting for a gap in the traffic before trotting across the street.  Then he vaults the low stone wall around the edge of the park.  It's a twelve-foot drop beyond, but he manages it easily enough, landing in a crouch in a wooded thicket already carpeted in red and gold leaves.  Doesn't even make his knees twinge.  Nothing can hurt New York, in New York, except New York. 
     Well.  And one other thing.
     He moves forward at a brisk Midtown pace, pushing aside the branches of small trees as gently as he can so as not to damage them.  He starts finding white tendrils almost immediately.  Just small patches here and there:  three wigglers on a broad, still-green sycamore leaf, one on the tree's gnarling roots nearby.  A patch shaped like a handprint growing atop a hooded garbage can; that one's especially nasty, positioned as it is to infect anyone who actually tries to deposit their litter in the can instead of just tossing it somewhere.  "Rude," Manny murmurs.  He's getting rid of the patches as he passes them, just by touching the wood or ground or metal near each cluster and letting a little of "Central Park West" riff through his mind and down his arm and out through his fingers.  Earworms can be handy.  Good for killing other wormlike things.
     (Not so long ago, it would have taken everything Manny had to get rid of these things.  He had to replace all his credit cards after symbolically buying all the real estate around a particular rock in Inwood Park.  Now, however, the city is whole -- and these tendrils, tenacious as they are, are tourists from another urban locale who've overstayed their welcome.  It's easy to obliterate them, but it's more important to find the bus they came in on, and deal with that.)
     "Red alert!" says Padmini -- Queens -- suddenly.  She tugs on the shared part of their consciousness, projecting an image onto it that is stunning in its precision:  a three-dimensional and topographical map, with a moving cursor at its center and a GPS coordinate meter in the bottom corner.  Padmini abruptly zooms them in on the cursor, and then she presents them with a simplified view through her own eyes.
     There, jolting slightly as Padmini runs, is their quarry.  To most other people in Central Park, the young man who slips down a leaf-thick hill and then scrabbles his way over a tumbled, mossy pile of bedrock is just another cross-country runner, or maybe a parkour practitioner with a greater love of natural settings than most.  He's a lanky Indian-looking guy, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt -- but through the lens of Padmini's vision, Manny sees the rest.  The guy's got patches of white fronds all over him, and as he runs they waft back like long hair which just happens to be growing from his forearms and shins and ass.  Manny's used to this, people who look like yeti crabs, however horrible it is.  Far worse is the tendril which projects from the back of the young man's neck, thick and veined in a disturbingly umbilical way, forming a long white cord which twists up and out of sight amid the trees.  It stretches up into the sky, Manny knows from three months' experience, attenuating until it disappears from human eyesight with distance -- but wending southward before it does.  They all know where that cable terminates.
     "Mike check," says Veneza, and Manny's mental eye shifts to her view.  She's standing under one of the park's stone bridges, her vision bouncing a little as she crouches to stretch out her ankles.  Getting ready to run.  Manny feels her excitement as the tendril-covered man comes into view, jogging over a grassy hill covered in early-afternoon sunbathers.  But who's he kidding?  They all enjoy this.  "That's it.  Come to mamãe.  Drive him like a li'l doggie on the range, Queeny McQueenyface."
     "I can't believe you mixed like three metaphors in ten seconds," Padmini replies -- but she zigs left, across one of the roads of the park.  Manny catches his breath as she veers into a bike lane, because Central Park bikers all think they're in the Tour de France, but in the same moment he feels her latch into the bikers' sense of hurry and entitlement, drawing their power into her legs.  Her pace speeds up sharply, until she's nearly flying down a sloping sidewalk, veering now and again to move around walkers and a small crowd near a pretzel vendor.
     "That's the Jersey in me.  Metaphors are our pork roll."
"Your what?"
"Pork roll. Look it -- wait, shit, hang on."
     Tendril man has seen Veneza and stopped, halfway down the grassy hill.  It's eerie to Manny how still he is.  After all the running and climbing he's done, he should be out of breath, shoulders heaving, dripping sweat, but he isn't.  It's just like the other cases of this they've encountered in the past few weeks; they're running on something other than human power.  These tendril-people aren't avatars, however; they're more like drones, sent forth by some other malevolent consciousness and endowed with supernatural power only temporarily, and for their task.  And if they don't catch this poor guy before that power gets done using him --  Well.  Manny picks up the pace. 
     Padmini skids to a halt.  (A man nearby does a double-take, then nods in a grudgingly impressed way at her athleticism.)  "Shit.  He's going to bolt, isn't he?"
     In lieu of any reply, they all see Tendril Man bolt.  He jumps off the steeper side of the rocky hill -- a ten-foot drop; Manny really hopes the poor guy was in shape before he got drafted as a spectral conduit for a hostile extradimensional essence, or he's going to feel that in the morning. Then Tendril Man takes off, moving with truly impressive speed up a paved hill-path.
     "FUCK," two of them think.  (Manny doesn't curse, but he empathizes.)  They all take off running too.
     Tendril Man is running toward a big, round building at the top of the hill.  Its vendor doors are shut and there are only a few people hanging around near it, but abruptly he zigs toward a big wooden gate labeled PERFORMER ENTRANCE -- and vaults it, with the ease of a master gymnast.  Manny might be able to think of a way over it too, if he gives himself a minute; surely there is some quintessentially cityish concept, like elevators for tall buildings, that he can harness to grant himself the ability to jump like that.  In the fluster of the moment, however, he can't think of anything.  Gotta work on that, do better at having a "jumping" construct ready to go under duress.
     In lieu of leaping, however, he manages to remember the grating sound of garbage trucks barrelling down the street at oh dark thirty in the morning, usually with wonky transmissions and brakes that screech loudly enough to set off car alarms.  Manny's seen several of them scrape or bang into cars without bothering to stop -- and so he draws into himself the desperate need to hurry and finish a shift, the hulking size and diesel-fueled strength of the trucks, the cheerful pragmatism of the tough workers who chuck heavy bags and kick rats with unflappable equanimity.  And as Manny runs at the gate, the world blurs a little and an eyewatering stench surrounds him, and he finds it almost impossible to care about collateral damage because he's got a job to do, come on, come on, let's go...
     He remembers enough of himself to dip his shoulder a little as he hits the gate.  It only looks like wood; underneath, there's plenty of metal, and he sees that the gate has an electronic number-lock.  Probably pretty solid.  But his supernaturally-powered shoulder smashes the gate wide open, actually cracking the whole frame in half, too, and part of the fence beyond it.
     Oops.  Well, he'll make a donation on the website, because now that he's through the gate he sees:  THE DELACOURTE THEATER WELCOMES YOU TO SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK.
     Tendril Guy is running down the steps of what Manny now sees is a huge open-air amphitheater.  He leaps again, a pretty impressive standing jump onto the stage -- and then he stops abruptly.  There's a set being deconstructed here; Shakespeare in the Park only runs during the summer months, so someone's in the middle of stripping gigantic rolls of fake grass off the stage floor.  And now, from within a huge prop built to look like a small apartment building, the avatar of New York steps forth to confront their enemy.
     He's calling himself "Neek," these days -- a phonetic pronunciation of the initials for New York City.  He hasn't told them his real name.  Manny's not sure it matters anyway; doesn't Manny, of all people, understand that they are no longer who they were?  The knowledge and joy and danger of eight million people has found its focus in Neek, and like any of their fellow great cities, this makes him strange.  São Paulo was the same, whenever Manny had time and peace enough to study him: a young-old man who radiated urbane cynicism and eerie wisdom all at once.  Hong Kong too.  Maybe this is the difference between those who represent boroughs or neighborhoods, and those who are whole cities in themselves. 
     Or maybe it's just Neek.  "Yo, man, take a breath," he says to Tendril Guy, as he slouches out of shadow.  "Touch some, uh, astroturf.  You keep letting that shit run you, won't be anything of you left."
     Tendril Guy immediately turns to run, but by this point Manny has reached the other side of the stage.  Veneza is in the ampitheater, trotting toward them from the other direction, and from somewhere backstage they can hear Padmini cursing and shoving something heavy aside, because apparently backstage is a mess amid the set breakdown.  Unless Tendril Guy can fly -- and Manny puts nothing past the Woman in White -- then he's got nowhere left to run.
     It's a dangerous time, though.  In the past, whenever they've cornered one of her minions...  Tendril Guy backs up, looks around, starts to get tense.  Manny tries to think up a construct, and finds himself looking around.  At the stage.
     Neek's gaze flicks to him, and the little smile on his face widens.
     "Two cities," he declares suddenly, spreading his arms wide and raising his voice.  The Delacourte's acoustics are perfect, of course, designed to facilitate an outdoors theatrical performance.  "Both alike in dignity!  In fair Manhattan where we lay our scene."
     Of course the theater absorbs this slightly-fudged homage, echoes it, amplifies it, and sends back a reverberation of energy:  the faint murmurs and anticipation of a crowd, a lilt of music from a nonexistent orchestra.  For just a fleeting moment Manny can almost see the suggestion of bodies in the amphitheater seats, shadowy heads that turn to each other or crane their necks or flip through Playbills.  Ready to be enraptured.
     Manny finds himself grinning -- but then he panics a little as Neek raises his eyebrows pointedly, because Manny doesn't have any Shakespeare memorized.  But Broadway is only a few dozen blocks away; maybe he can use that instead?  He sifts quickly through the grab-bag of random quotes in his head. Can't think of an actual line from an actual play, but it's a direct reference, so he clears his throat awkwardly and sings:  "They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway.  There might be city magic in the air."
     Stage lights, multihued but mostly white, appear above the seats.  The lights aren't real. Manny can see most of the lighting equipment disassembled and stacked up to one side of the stage. Tendril Guy flinches suddenly and violently, staggering back.  Steam rises as Tendril Guy raises his arms defensively, the tendrils on him whipping and hissing wildly as the city's light begins to burn them away.
     They have to keep it going.  Veneza giggles and runs down the steps, leaping to a crouch as if she's acting out some play or another, and sings, "Now is the time to seize the day!  Answer the call and don't delay!  New York can be righted, boroughs united; let us seize the day!" In response, loose cables curled on one side of the stage suddenly come to life, whipping around Tendril Guy's legs to keep him from running again.
     One of the doors on the prop building slams open dramatically. Beyond it they can see Padmini pushing aside a rack of clothing that persistently keeps trying to roll toward her.  She manages it, stumbles out, and glowers around at all of them.  Veneza gestures frantically for her to take up the thread; Neek spreads his hands too in the universal sign of Come on, hurry up.  Finally, with a little growl, Padmini snaps, "Oh, fine.  'Immigrants:  We get the job done!'" This doesn't seem to have any effect at first, but then Padmini shoves a large, heavy-looking wooden desk out of the way with ease; she's much stronger, now. Enough to get this job done.
     As performances go, it's all terrible.  Slapdash, random, corny; Manny won't be surprised if in the morning they all receive a clipped-out review from a theater magazine that exists only in some alternate reality, panning all of them for defiling the stage.  But as a construct, drawing on the power of three boroughs and the delight of a thousand audiences, from the Delacourte to the Fringe Festival and back, it's exactly what they need. 
     Then, his voice muffled by his own extradimensional growths, Manny hears Tendril Guy -- or maybe the guy within the pelt of tendrils -- try to speak.  "A-all the w-world..." he murmurs, his voice thick, too deep, flanged in a way that sounds like bad special effects.  He's steaming all over, now.  Ah, and at last Manny sees the tendrils burning away, peeling off and curling into nothingness.  As he lowers his arms, Manny sees that he's sweaty-faced and visibly exhausted... but he is smiling.  He turns to face the whispering, flickering audience, and all at once Manny can feel him.  Tendril Guy is part of New York, again -- and he knows it, and some part of his soul rejoices with the knowledge.  Probably helps that the guy is a former theater kid himself; Manny can feel that, now that the Enemy's influence has been broken. Neek grins at Manny; he can feel it, too.
     So then Neek goes over to Tendril Guy, leans close, and blows on the now-shriveled cord attached to the back of his neck.  It snaps free as if Neek's breathed fire onto it, uttering a faint creel of inhuman pain -- and then the cord is snatched away upwards, into the darkening evening sky.  Manny catches a fleeting hint of sinuous movement against the clouds, southward, and then it is gone.
     Tendril Guy, who is now just Some Guy, beams at Neek.  Then he steps back and lifts a finger.  "All the world's a stage," he says again -- clearly this time, in a pleasant baritone, projecting with the ease of long practice.  "And all the men and women merely players!  They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages."
     He does the whole monologue then, perfectly.  Not that Manny would know if he got it right -- but the Delacourte does, and as Manny glances out at their whispery audience, he sees smiles, hears soft "ahs" and giggles of approval with every precisely-enunciated line.  As Some Guy finishes, applause breaks out, echoing with unreality but loud and enthusiastic.  The artist formerly known as Tendril Guy beams in delight and extends his hands for Manny and Neek to take.  They do.  Padmini, her pique fading now that she's no longer fighting furniture, shakes her head and takes Neek's hand; Veneza giggles and runs up the steps to take Manny's.  The applause goes on as, uh, Theater Guy leads them in first one bow, and then another.  Someone in the audience whistles.  Someone else yells "Encore!"  It's intoxicating.  They bow a third time.  As at last the applause fades and the lights start to go dark... Theater Guy collapses, between them.
     "Oh, no," Veneza says, her delight vanishing.  "Please, not again -- "
     "He's fine," Manny says, crouching by Theater Guy, though he checks Theater Guy's neck-pulse and breathing just to be sure.  It's there, though the guy's skin is clammy with sweat.
     "Close," Neek says.  He's looking up at the sky, after the ugly cable that had been attached to the guy's neck.
     It's only the second time that they've successfully rescued one of these agents of the Woman in White, sent forth from her bastion in Staten Island to... well, Manny's not exactly sure what their purpose is.  Are they superspreaders meant to reinfect the city, and thus help her regain the foothold that she lost three months before?  Are they drones of a sort, reconnoitering enemy territory?  Either way, the result is always the same, if Manny and his fellow avatars don't catch the tendril-bearer and cleanse them in time:  the person burns out and dies, all of their strength used up by the alien intelligence that has worn them like a puppet.
     Not this time, though.  "Let's get him outside," Manny says, grunting as he pulls Theater Guy up.  "Easier for an ambulance to get to him out there."
     "But what about after?" Padmini asks.  She comes over to help him wrestle the guy into a sitting position, so that Manny can pull him into a fireman's carry.  "Uff, he's heavy!  But if somebody calls his family and they take him back to Staten Island, will she just take him over again?  What if she's mad at him for getting caught by us?"
     "It's fine," Neek says.  He's still turned away from them, facing southward.  There is an odd note in his voice, however, which makes Manny frown at his back.  Neek sounds... distracted.  "Most of the folks on Staten are fine.  The ones who commute here lose their little wigglers when they step off the ferry, unless they've got one of those bigger cable-things attached to them.  Grow 'em back on the after-work ride.  They don't even notice."
     "Remember what it was like when she was all over the city," Manny adds.  "All those people she... infected.  She used them if she needed them and ignored them otherwise.  They became part of her, but they didn't seem to mean anything to her, any more than..."  He shakes his head, to the degree that he can with Theater Guy on his shoulders.  "Individual hairs on a person's head.  How often do we notice when we lose one, or when it grows back?"
     "We shouldn't let him go back at all," Padmini says, scowling.  "We know she's doing something to all those people.  He's safer here!"
     Neek focuses enough to turn and eye her over his shoulder.  His tone is mild and his expression neutral, but his words have a sharp point.  "You gonna spring for an apartment for him somewhere?  Let him go crash with ya auntie and the fam?"
     "No, but -- "
     "I know a good spot under the Williamsburg."  Neek's relentless.  "Probably still good even with all the cleanup and construction since the bridge broke.  Warm on cold nights, hard to see so the kids and assholes don't fuck with you.  We could dump him there."
     Padmini sets her jaw.  "Fine.  Point made.  But Staten Islanders are still people, and we should try to help them."
     Veneza, who was peering into the orchestra pit in fascination, turns back to them, plainly uneasy at the tension she's picking up.  "We are.  But I mean, Pads... that's not really our job."
     Now they all fall into an uncomfortable silence, because sometimes the truth is hard.  And the truth is that the avatar of Staten Island is not here with them today because she has rejected them, and thrown her people to the interdimensional wolves by doing so. They are all of them New York... but they are not Staten Island, not anymore. Theater Guy's ultimate fate isn't theirs to make.
     "Ay yo fuck that bird," Neek says, scowling at Veneza, who blinks in surprise.  "Her and Squigglebitch tried to kill us, remember?  Tried to eat you.  Let Staten Island die."
     Padmini stares at him.  "Wait.  What?  Let a whole borough die?  Are you crazy?"
     "Fuck them."  Neek gestures sharply, southward.  "Everyone on Staten Island.  Buncha racist redneck Republican dumbasses, nobody needs them.  They're the reason she's still here, hanging over this city like a fucking guillotine.  I'm tired of stressing about this shit!  Let her flyover country ass die with the rest of them nobody-nothing sons of bitches."
     Manny flinches, despite himself.  That's beyond harsh.  And something about this little rant feels... off.  He's known Neek for all of three months, but in that time Neek has been a quiet and low-key leader of their group, unusually even-keeled for the personification of a city known for its aggression.  Are you okay?  rises to Manny's lips, but he refrains from saying it, aware that it could sound patronizing.  He's wondering it, though.
     All at once different lights snap on within the theater -- not stage lights, but all the rest. Padmini frowns at this.  "Hey, we don't need these anymore.  Which one of you -- "
     Abruptly a piercing electronic alarm sounds throughout the theater, and the lights all turn a startling, awful red.
     "What the shit?"  Neek says.  He blinks as if dazed, turning to stare up at the lights -- and then he stiffens.  "Manny.  You doing that?"
     Manny can barely hear him over the noise.  "No, why would I?  Can't you stop it?"  Neek is New York.  He has better control over the city's power than any of them... but all of a sudden, the city feels strange. Sluggish and reluctant, when Manny gently urges it to shut off the alarm. It's responsive, but unreliable and slow in a way Manny's never noticed before.
     And to Manny's surprise, Neek takes a step back, his very posture radiating unease.  "I... can't.  Nothing's happening. What the fuck."  He shakes his head.
     "Yo, uh, we should go," Veneza says, bouncing nervously on the balls of her feet.  "If that's a break-in alarm -- I mean, we did break in, but -- "
     The Delacourte sits the middle of Central Park, in one of the city's toniest neighborhoods, and is the site of one of its most popular attractions.  "Out," Manny snaps, when it becomes clear that Neek has been so thrown by the situation that he's not reacting quickly enough. "Now."
     Veneza's already moving, running to the edge of the stage.  Manny follows her as quickly as he can with Theater Guy, and Padmini grabs Neek, dragging him along when he doesn't move fast enough.  "Cover your faces!" she cries -- and, yeah, if the city's magic suddenly isn't helping them anymore, that's a good idea.  But Manny can't, unless he wants to drop Theater Guy, who's been through enough.
     There are people milling around in front of the Delacourte, mostly looky-loos reacting to the continuous beeeeeeep of the alarm, but Manny sees how many of them have smartphones in hand.  It can't be helped.  He crouches and carefully sets Theater Guy on a patch of soft grass, and catches the eye of an older lady who is staring at all of them.  "Call 911," he says, with as much urgency as he can.  They can't stop people from filming them fleeing the scene of an apparent break-in, but maybe the sight of someone in distress will distract most of the onlookers.  "This man is hurt and needs an ambulance.  I don't know what happened to him, he just collapsed."
     The lady gasps and starts punching at her phone.  Veneza grabs Manny, tugging so he'll leave Theater Guy there on the ground.  He doesn't want to.  If the cops arrive first, there's a strong chance they'll arrest Theater Guy for the break-in.  If he could just make sure the paramedics arrive first, and that the cops think the alarm is just a mechanical error...  He touches the ground next to his knee and reaches into it, groping for the feel of city power --
     He finds echoes of old audience frustration and annoyed staff and prematurely shutdown vendor services... but these energies will not move in response to his will. What's there feels different from all the other times he's ever used city power -- clotted, somehow. 
     "Dude," Veneza says, giving him a hard yank.  They can hear sirens outside the park, coming closer.  "Come on, man, I ain't doing Rikers for you!"
     Grinding his teeth in frustration, Manny lets Veneza pull him away. They book it for Central Park West again, zigging southward first since there are woods and rock hills in that direction that can obscure their route for anyone trying to put them on TMZ.
       In their wake, the Delacourte's alarm blares until sirens drown it out.
TWWM Deleted Scene 1 by N. K. Jemisin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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hauntedfoxhut · 9 months
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Insomniac!Miles Morales x streamer!F!reader
Pronouns: She/her
You as a simple streamer meet the cutest boy in Brooklyn, Miles Morales son of Rio Morales and Jeff Davis, you had meet a couple of times, randomly bumping on the street, neighborhood parties and once time in particular when you found him with a black eye and a bloody nose, so you helped him, after that you became great friends, but you started to fall for him.
English is not my first language so I’m sorry for any writing mistake, hope you enjoy this one shot🫶🏻
⚠️Warnings⚠️
Blood citation, curse words and mention of death
The rest is pure romance
Dialogue colors
Y/N-blue
Miles-red
NY City, Brooklin, Y/N apartment, 02:30am
The live was doing great, I decided to play the sims, a simple challenge, now I just got 4 more subscribers, that really helps a lot, they literally pay my bills, I was planning to cook the dinner but I just decide to buy some sushi, I drank a dr. Pepper, totally healthy.
“ Well guys, thank you for your time, today we ended a bit late but I hope you all enjoyed the live, I’ll cut and post on YouTube for those who missed some parts, bye bye see you next live” I send a kiss to the webcam, and then… it’s over, I needed to stop that live, staying awake till late it’s not good, drinking monster all day, eating junk food, when was the last time that I felt the sunlight, I’m living a bat…
*knock…knock…*
“What the fuck??” I spin the gamer chair to the window, I saw Miles, i get up and open the window for him, the cold wind from the winter entered your bedroom giving you chills.
“Hey mami how you doing?” He hugs you tight, lifting you up and taking your feet off the ground, he simply ignored the cold wind coming from the outside, “Mileees the window!!” “Sorry Y/N” he instantly let your feet reach the ground again and turned back to close that window closing the curtains too, when you focused on his face his nose was bleeding and his right cheek was red almost purple, and he realized that you noticed, he just hide his face under his hands.
“Again Miles? Really? How? What’s the story for today?” “I… got into a fight, with a jock but I…” “I got punched and I fell downstairs, same story from last week so don’t lie to me” “can we just ignore this” he points to his face “ I came here just to forget about all that stuff”
He just lay on my bed, taking deep breaths, he’s been passing through a hard time after loosing his father, getting into fights in school, moving to Harlem now all we got is a couple of hours together once or twice a week, I seat near to him, putting my hand on his head, I start to caress his hair, which was very short making he looks so cute. “You know that you can always count with me right? I’m here for you, ever since the day that we bumped near to the Central Park because I was running to get that dog” “I remember that you started crying because the dog stole your bracelet, was funny” he chuckles “No it wasn’t! I was so sad that day and that dog just made it worse” “I miss you, a lot, all that shit that’s been happening is making me mad, I’m sorry for leaving you, I just couldn’t leave my mom alone”
His eyes, are just like a window to his soul in pain, pure sorrow, I lay on his side holding him to cuddle, my heart beating faster, being near to him like this is good but it still make me blush, “I wish I could have you near me, now I’m feeling lonely at Harlem, you can spend a week there, my mom wouldn’t mind” “Miles i would love it… but…” “but ?” “ never mind haha, I’m free next week, I would love to spend the week with you”
He hug me back and now we’re laying face to face, I only can stare at his lips and same for Miles he just been staring my lips for almost 2 minutes straight, his hand holding my cheek, he looks so hypnotizing, I’m lost in his face, I can only feel his hand is on my cheek, now he’s approaching, so close, so so close, he kiss me, a soft and simple kiss but very meaningful, I just kiss him back, the butterflies on my stomach, “can I stay? It’s too late and I miss you so much” his puppy eyes, staring at me, I can’t resist, “of course you can” “can I sleep with you?” That question caught me off guard, now im the one who hide the face under my hands but his hand that’s on my cheeks try to take my hands off, “c’mon it’s not the first time that we slept together, why are you so awkward about it?” When your face is not covered anymore you can see a slight blush in his cheeks, “I just… like you, that’s why I came here, I was planning to text you but that would be so dishonest, I needed to do it face to face” “Miles just shut up” I instantly kiss him, softly holding his cheeks that are a bit warm, at first he got shocked but one second later he just kiss me back.
We stopped the kiss because we needed to breath, now his hands are around my hips, making imaginary circles with the fingers, “so mister Morales, may you please let me get up so I can get a blanket for us?” “Of course you can my pretty girlfriend” “girlfriend?” I can’t hide that little smile in my face, I’m feeling so happy right now, but I still tired needing to sleep, so yeah, I just loved the idea of sleeping with him. “Yup, girlfriend, or do you want a nickname like, mi vida, cariño, Hermosa, honey, you can choose.” I yawned feeling my eyes getting heavier, “can I choose one later I just want to sleep right now…. Get the blanket please” I can badly keep my eyes open, he kiss my forehead and leave the bed to get the huge blanket in the closet, he come back to the bed and when he realized you’re sleeping, a little shrunk because of the cold, but tight on sight he covered you with warm blanket and sneaking to sleep with you.
That night you sleep so well after almost a week of bad sleep, he made me relax, holding my body with his big hands and long arms, making me fell safe, now that I’m dating him I already have everything that I need, but now I’ll have to move to the Harlem to live near to him.
Translations
Mi vida- my life
Cariño- dear
Hermosa -beautiful
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oliveroctavius · 3 months
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I played Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and the fundamental problem I have with it is as someone who reads Miles Morales comics, I don’t see anything being remotely respected in that adaptation. Everything about his adaptation in that game annoys me from killing Jefferson in a way that is against his character, Rio being a teacher and then politician instead of a nurse, the portrayal of Brooklyn Visions not being an integral setting and obstacle to Miles, Miles being dependent on Peter up until the last stretch of the sequel, Ganke being the guy in the chair for both Miles and Peter, and moving him to Harlem because they didn’t feel like creating Brooklyn just feels like they cut corners for Miles to mold him around Peter. Not one character from Miles supporting cast not named Ganke or any of his own rogues made the cut. They even made Principal Evans who was a black male dwarf in the comic into a black woman. Even in his own game, not one collectible references anything about Miles alone but just his relationship with Phin or talks about how great Phin is. They mention Mr. Sumida. Hell in the original PS4 game before the remaster, Miles went to Midtown instead of fucking Brooklyn Visions. Everything feels like they wanted Miles in name only and it irks me so much because they never did that with Peter.
Yeah, this is such a complete thought I don't know what to add other than to agree. I do love new characters like Hailey Cooper, but the last time an adaptation felt free to almost completely replace Peter Parker's supporting cast and love interests with OCs they just made up was, like, the 1977 TV show. To some degree the amount of freedom an adaptation feels it can have depends on how long + culturally iconic the character's publishing history has been so far. But follow that explanation just a step further, and, well, it's not like it's a mystery why Miles has had a much shorter and harder to follow comics run, either.
Even Ganke being a constant here is so clearly because of Ned Leeds' presence in the MCU and ends up awkwardly tiptoeing around apologizing for someone else's theft of its ideas... I know that Judge, Billie, Tiana, even Kamala, they don't exactly represent iconic story arcs or character connections in the adaptation-driven public knowledge of Miles right now, but the way for that to change is for adaptations to iterate on and expand the existing base.
I'm also of the general opinion that Miles' whole character will never land as hard if it doesn't start with seeing Peter Parker die in costume in front of him but that might pose some problems to the structure of the video game LOL. I'm sure they could have figured it out if they'd wanted to.
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lizzieisright · 7 months
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Okay just a little thing about characters in my Marvel AU: (I kidnapped Acrane women for it. Again)
Original six:
Captain America!Abby. She is untrusting but honourable, worn out already: the new world is foreign and weird and her adjustment is still ongoing. She still dresses like her time, but if Steve looked like a grandpa Abby just looks like your friendly neighbourhood lesbian. Fun fact! She had a small guy named Steve to teach her grandma computer courses. He also taught her how to not get tracked on the web.
Iron Man!Ellie. Cocky, explosive, genius. Lost her mom and Joel after a stupid fight, got angry and started building weapons because of it. After being captured and almost dying gets back into her mom's vision of Williams Industries and starts building things to help people, and because she is a fucking Ellie Williams she is as rich as before.
Black Widow!Reader. You're a Russian assassin who escaped to the US after getting on a bad side with a lot of people in Europe. Let's just say Shield missions to Europe are a big pain in your ass. You put up a polite smily front because your grim attitude is not something Americans appreciate. (Guess who will)
Hawkeye!Manny. He is just a funny guy who saved your ass back in Europe and because I wanted to have one guy on a team the same way they only had Natasha. Manny doesn't have a secret family on the side, he is just there making a little team of cold blooded sarcastic assassins with you. You don't need to smile as much around him.
Thor!Vi. Got sent to Earth for punishment and instead fell in love with the little world. She is still visiting her friend Darcy and gives her incredibly crazy love advice from time to time.
Hulk!Caitlyn. This one doesn't really make sense, but the comedic potential is good. ("How many PhDs does Hulk have? Zero! I have seven" with Thor!Vi by her side can you imagine?). Caitlyn was too curious about Abby's story and tried to recreate the serum but ended up becoming a giantess who almost destroyed Harlem. She is very awkward and nervous, and hates being lied to. Tried to get away from gamma-radiation research and went away to help the poor with her medical skills.
Now others:
Fury!Sevika. Because these people need someone with no bullshit attitude. Sevika is constantly tired and smokes so much it's a miracle her lungs work. She is tough and doesn't tolerate anyone's shit. We don't know her story and we actually shouldn't.
Loki!Jinx. It's in the name. Vi's little sister who adored her, but when the time came to choose between her and humanity Vi chose humanity. And then it turned out her hair is blue for a reason and Jinx is not only adopted but also the child of an enemy. Jinx is out for revenge. She plans to destroy Earth with everyone on it to get Vi and then destroy Asgard to get Vander. (Also the comedic potential of Caitlyn repeatedly slamming Jinx into the floor)
Pepper!Dina. The only person who can make Ellie do something she doesn't want to. Dina gets shit done and done brilliantly.
Maria Hill is now also a Coulson and gets paid double.
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militantinremission · 8 months
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HipHop's 50th Anniversary: What 'Culture' are We talking about?
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I was in Elementary School back on Aug. 11th 1973. My family left the West Bronx, but I spent a lot of time w/ my 'big cousins' in the Harlem River Houses. My cousin Mona babysat my brother & I, taking Us everywhere w/ her; including dates. I remember Mona taking Us to 'The Summer Of Soul Concert' in Harlem, & I remember going to a few of those Park Jams in Bronxdale & in Soundview. I think We saw more of King Mario than Kool Herc & Coke La Rock. My oldest brother formally introduced me to HipHop in the Spring of 1977. I remember coming home from School to find his Crew set up in Our Dining Room.
I got my 1st look from the 'Other Side of The Rope', & I was hooked! I wasn't a Rapper (yet), or a Break Dancer, but I had an ear for music. I bought My 1st DJ Set in 1984, & I mastered my Craft as a Street DJ, & later in a few NYC Clubs. Most DJs are disciples of [Grand Master] Flash or [Grand Wizard] Theodore; I was more of a disciple of Jazzy Jay & Cut Master DC. We All have Our Unique Features, but EVERYONE went back to School when Jazzy Jeff introduced the 'Transformer Cut', back in 1986. Like a lot of DJs disenchanted w/ 'Gangsta Rap', I split time w/ HipHop's Twin Sister- House Music.
I say all of this, to qualify myself as a 'bonafide Shorty' of 1st Generation HipHop, & a full fledged Member of The New School Era. My point, is to say that 'In The Beginning', there was just The Culture. It didn't have a formal name- but it was being done ALL OVER NYC. I associate the '1520 Sedgwick Avenue' Story of HipHop w/ Afrika Bambaataa; he's The First Person that I remember telling this Story. Disco King Mario predated Kool Herc by years. Herc copied Mario's Style- down to his equipment! King Mario wasn't alone, Pete 'DJ' Jones & Frankie Crocker were dueling On The Radio (WWRL vs WBLS), while DJ Flowers, DJ Spotlight, DJ Smokey, DJ Hollywood, & a number of Club DJs were also mixing it up.
A major argument is whether Disco is connected to HipHop. The Cats up in The Bronx say HELL NO, while the rest of NYC says HELL YES! People need to understand that when We talk about 'Disco', we don't mean 'The Sound' or Studio 54; We mean 'The Disco Fever', 'Harlem World', 'Sugar Hill', & 'The Factory'. The DJs that spun @ these Clubs molded the format that HipHop DJs still follow Today. Kool Herc is credited w/ The 'Merry Go Round'- his mix of Break Beats, but he wasn't the only DJ mixing Breaks or James Brown songs. The Black Spades that were interviewed, speak on King Mario spinning 'Soul Power' & how they chanted 'Spade Power'- as early as 1971. This creates a schism between Bronxdale & Soundview.
Black Americans say HipHop started in Bronxdale, as late as 1971. West Indians, Jamaican- Americans in particular, say it started on Aug. 11th, 1973. Puerto Ricans [Nuyoricans/ Puerto Rocks] say it started between 1975 & 1977, when Afrika Bambaataa incorporated Latino Breakers into 'his' HipHop scene. While there is debate over When & Where in The Bronx it started, EVERYONE AGREES that HipHop was created to Stop Gang Violence. The Culture involves individual expression through Graffiti, B- Boy Style of Dress, & Dance, Spoken Word, & the ability to keep The Party going non-stop. The Original Gangs splintered into Crews that now 'battled' each other w/ Turntables & Mics, on the Dance floor, & w/ Spray Paint Cans (Bombing).
The vernacular of HipHop is based in The Nation Of Islam & The Nation of Gods & Earths, so it's big on Black Power, Black Excellence, & The Traditional Black Family. Both Organizations are Pan Afrikan in their Philosophy, so The Black Diaspora is represented. The same is true w/ The Zulu Nation. Before the rise of The Nation of Latin Kings & Queens, you would find Latino Zulu Kings & Queens- it was All Love! Afrika Bambaataa coined HipHop's 'Mission Statement' of: "Peace, Unity, Love, & Having Fun!", in a song w/ James Brown by the same Name. He also defined the existing '5 Elements' as the fundamentals of HipHop Culture. The Zulu Nation were the unofficial Ambassadors of HipHop; first taking it Downtown, & later taking it Globally... No One questioned Bambaataa's actions.
As We celebrate 50Yrs of HipHop, Afrika Bambaataa's Legacy is tarnished @ best. He has been Radio Silent, since allegations of Child Molestation rose against him 7Yrs ago. Every Move that Bambaataa made is being questioned- Was it a good move for HipHop to go Downtown to SoHo? Did it open the door to the current 'isms' that plague The Culture? It was a Black Specific art form, but it opened itself up to integration w/ Sexual Deviants, Drug Abusers, & White Record Executives. In retrospect, We can see what lured Bam Downtown. I'm curious- is the current manifestation of 'The Culture' Bambaataa's intended goal? It goes against his language, but it's in line w/ his actions.
In the wake of Afrika Bambaataa's 'Fall from Grace', people began questioning his narrative of HipHop. Original B- Boys are still walking The Streets, so it wasn't hard to fact check. DJ Phase has spoke on many Youtube videos under 'The Culture', where he breaks down the Foundation of what became HipHop. According to DJ Phase, HipHop was born on June 7th, 1971- in the Bronxdale Houses. He said that it wasn't organized; Mario simply set up on the grass & spun records. Later that Summer, in July- DJ Phase said that they were more organized w/ more sound & records, so THAT was when Brothers got serious about what they were doing. Disco King Mario did a series of Jams that culminated in the legendary 'Rosedale Park' Jam, that lit up The Bronx & inspired future pioneers.
There is a lot of controversy today concerning the Origins of HipHop. Jason Black, of 'The Black Authority' had the best comment on the subject: "Success has many Fathers, but Failure is an Orphan". As We question the running narrative of HipHop's birth, We also have to question WHO gets Credit for WHAT. No One questions the contributions of Jamaicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Haitians, & Panamanians to The Culture, but the claims being made by Busta Rhymes, Pete Rock, Fat Joe, & John Leguizamo are disrespectful. Busta & Pete Rock assert that Jamaican Culture DIRECTLY INFLUENCED HipHop; Busta says 90%. He goes on to say that Kool Herc brought Jamaican 'Toasting' or 'Ranking' to the Bronx Youth. Fat Joe & John Leguizamo say Puerto Rico contributed 50% to The Culture... They ALL sound ridiculous.
In an effort to get ahead of King Mario predating Kool Herc, people have gone as far as saying that Disco King Mario is [half] Puerto Rican. When it was proven that Mario came from North Carolina, a Story came out that his family migrated to (Jim Crow) North Carolina back in 1912. Mario's Sister says they aren't Puerto Rican- They're North Carolinian & 'Country'... His Mother just liked the name Mario. This effort to remove Black Americans from a Black American genre is confusing. Making a contribution 'to', or an innovation 'of' something, doesn't make one 'The Originator' of it. DJ Phase made a point to elaborate on The Energy behind HipHop, & what inspired it. Our Family from The Diaspora mostly arrived after The Civil Rights Movement; They really don't know what AmeriKKKa was like before 1970.
Contrary to what Busta Rhymes, Pete Rock, or Fat Joe may say, HipHop begins w/ The Black Spades. As a boy in Harlem, I remember how revered The Black Spades were. They were respected, but I didn't understand why... Before The Black Spades, Blackfolk in The Bronx were being victimized by Whitefolk; 'Authur Avenue' Italians, in particular. According to The Black Spades, they couldn't go ANYWHERE w/o being attacked, so they organized & struck back. The Black Spades- essentially Black Teens, didn't just beat those Racists back; they opened up The Bronx for EVERY Black Person, giving them The Right of Autonomy. That Energy or Spirit of Revolution was celebrated in Song & Dance, & King Mario was The Conductor.
Kool Herc got to see King Mario & The Black Spades @ 'The Tunnel'. He heard the Breaks & saw how the Black Spades reacted... He heard 'Spade Power!'. Herc himself said that he analyzed what 'they were doing' & came up w/ The Merry Go Round. That, is an innovation. Herc never said that he introduced Toasting to those Baby Spades; in fact, Herc admitted trying to play Jamaican Music, but The Crowd didn't take to it. If Busta & Pete Rock were right, We should have some Reggae among familiar Beat Beats. All of these Cats talk about 'Culture', but they just sound ignorant. A 'Culture' is defined as: 'The sum total of Social Life'. If West Indian (i.e. Jamaican) and/or Latinx (i.e. Puerto Rican) Culture plays such a major role in HipHop, why did ALL of them adopt Black American Social Mores? Kool Herc admitted that he was clowned when he arrived in The Bronx; he thought Cowboy Boots were cool.
If we're going to run w/ the: 'Kool Herc is The Father of HipHop' Story, Coke La Rock should @ least be mentioned. He is credited w/ being The First Emcee. He was Herc's Partner. Busta & a literal Legion of Yardies want to coronate Herc as 'King of HipHop', but it was Coke La Rock that transformed 'Clive' into 'Kool Herc'. Clive DIDN'T KNOW THE CULTURE. Coke La Rock took him down to 125th Street, showed him what to buy, & how to sport it. Somehow, Coke La Rock was written out of the narrative. Again, Bambaataa started this. Another issue w/ Herc being hailed as 'The Father' of HipHop, is how easily he Bowed Down to U- Roy. Herc referred to him as 'his King'. Big Respect to U- Roy, I- Roy & ALL the Pioneers of Ska, Reggae, Dub Poetry, & Dancehall! That said, Black Americans BOW TO NO ONE! This is a Problem.
When We talk about Culture, HipHop embodies The Spirit of Revolution. Lay it out on the Black American Timeline, & it's a natural transition; from Work Songs, to Ragtime, to Rhythm & Blues, to Soul & Funk, to HipHop. It's the tireless spirit of Black Liberation in AmeriKKKa. Where does Jamaican or Puerto Rican 'Culture' fit in? They were 'Lovers, not Fighters'. We were Angry! What were they angry about? They were in America- Everything was 'Irie'! When DJ Phase was asked about this [Kool Herc] narrative, he cut to The Chase & said that this narrative gives Whitefolk a 'lane of claim' to Our Culture. It was Too Black, Too Strong, but it's been watered down. When We raise Our Heads, We will see that the people claiming ownership of Our Culture, are the same people representing Us in Government. They are the ones allowing Benign Neglect to continue. They also represent Us On Screen, but they rarely play Us in a dignified manner; We're either Ghetto, or Cowards.
While We're on the subject of 'Culture', let's point out how the level of deviance & violence has risen w/ the number of Jamaican & Puerto Rican Rappers. Boogie Down Productions gets Full Credit for setting off the 9mm talk. Just- Ice's 'The Original Gangster of Hip Hop' was just plain Raw... B- Girls didn't dress like Dancehall Girls; compare Shante, Lyte, & Latifah to Lil Kim, Nikki Minaj, & Cardi B. White Record Executives have rerouted HipHop's 'messaging' to target Suburban Whitefolk eager to hear about 'Ghetto Life'. Today's Artists have been set up lovely by those who came before them; I wonder if the New Jacks know The History? Do they know what it took for Us to maintain this? Cats had to show restraint, because Authorities were just waiting for Us to mess up.
Truth be told, The Park Jams faded out by 1986- 1987. The Crack Wars began to make large gatherings dangerous. The 1st Crack Dealers (in My Hood) were The Dreads, who sold out of Weed Spots. The 'Rude Boys' weren't concerned w/ 'protocol', so things got Hot pretty quickly.... I understand that there is an effort to make HipHop EVERYONE'S genre, but it isn't; not anymore than Motown or Bebop. The World is welcome to enjoy HipHop, but make No Mistake- it is a Black American genre that is globally appreciated & adopted by many. That said, notions of people like Kool Herc, or Eminem being the 'Father' or 'King' diminish the effect that those Baby Spades had on The Original Concept. We can appreciate their contributions, but HipHop Culture is bigger than them. It has a purpose, & it's NOT making Non Indigenous Blackfolk wealthy.
It was a youthful expression of Black Power, but it looks like a Golden Goose these days. Young Family has to go back to The Root. A Race War is looming, & i'm not sure that their music is up to task. Busta & Fat Joe aren't concerned, they're taking the money & running. Fat Joe wasn't even a Rapper back in The Day, he was a Stick up Kid; so he's always been about the 'Vic'... Big Pun was The Real Deal. HipHop has become symbolic of Black American Courtesy. We say 'have some', & Our 'guest' proceeds to help themselves to Everything. NO ONE is allowed to be more than a guest in the genres of Jamaican & Latinx Music, why do they expect ownership in Black American Music?
When We talk about HipHop Culture, We need to remove All the noise in The Room. ANYONE making a claim to Our Culture should be Checked quickly. This 'Back to School Party' Story doesn't make sense! It's supposed to be inspirational, but it's narrated like just another Party. What's so special about it? What exactly motivated Herc's Sister to have this Party, several weeks before School started? How does this 'Party' spark a Movement? Compare it w/ HipHop being a Celebration of Black Youth in The Bronx [dramatically] winning their fight against White Supremacy & their Right of Autonomy. There was a REASON why NYPD left Mario & the Black Spades Deejays alone. When they were 'Jamming', The Black Spades weren't beating down White Racists... No disrespect, but Immigrant Family weren't Here, so they don't know what sparked this Movement.
The Original Concept of HipHop is rooted in stopping Gang Violence. The current version of it is so far removed, it's almost unrecognizable. Today's manifestation is literally a Death Cult. White Executives seem convinced that it's only about beats & rhymes, but the Crap being presented is cookie cutter; which defies HipHop's demand for Originality. It is best represented when it's Culturally connected to the Experience of Black American Life. EVERYONE ELSE is a House Guest & should behave accordingly.
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