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Praise kink: unlocked.
HEOP
Awww. Our first official fight.
No. Goddamnit. I did not need a brat kink on top of my newly awakened praise kink. The two were supposed to cancel each other out, not act as amplifiers.
“What the fuck did you do?” she said, grabbing it to assess the damage. “Oh, Jesus, I think you need stitches.” Was there a nice way to tell her that I, in fact, had done nothing, and it was her who had done the maiming?
No tgere isnt
He turned his phone my way, and I read, No plastic surgeon. I’ll wear your mark like the badge of pride it is. To drive his point home, he made a fist, placed it over his heart, and bowed to me like someone from a Tolkien movie. “You are ridiculous,” I said, turning away so he wouldn’t see my amusement.
Thanks for stitching me up. It was the least you could do after brutally mutilating me, but I appreciate it anyway.
I really hoped he wasn’t planning to murder me because I’d feel real dumb when it happened.
Frr
No, I told myself. Most of my family had been law-abiding citizens. There was only one exception, and I decided not to count him.
Oh??
Then again, he’d always been my little empath, snuggling close whenever I was sad or had a bad shift at the hospital. Maybe he’d sensed the Faceless Man’s pain and wanted to comfort him. Yeah, let’s go with that instead of Fred choosing a masked stranger over his mother.
Thank you, by the way, I said. For breakfast and shoveling. You shouldn’t have. I mean that literally, but I’m grateful anyway. I expected a sarcastic response, but he wrote back, I like taking care of you.
Aww
Come on, come on. Your hair looks fine. Stop fixing it in the mirror. The fact that I knew what he was doing without needing to see him probably meant we’d been living together too long.
Who knew stalking and games of deception were so much goddamn fun? Uh, your dad? my brain helpfully supplied. I stopped dead in my tracks and cringed.
Yikes
My evil plan was working. Step one: get Aly to drop her guard. Step two: fuck her on this couch. Oh, wait, no. I’d skipped a few steps somewhere.
Just a few
Josh was the Faceless Man. I didn’t know how I knew it, but I did.
Dang immediately
“What did Fred do?” she asked when I re-entered her bedroom. “Our angel baby did absolutely nothing wrong, and I resent the insinuation that he ever could,” I said, setting the small plate of bacon beside her and handing her the tea.
“Take care of our son while I’m gone,” I said, forcing myself away. “And don’t give him any more bacon. He’s had enough.” Her laughter followed me out of the room. “You are so presumptuous!” I paused and leaned back through the doorway to have an excuse to look at her one last time, perched on her bed in her prim pajamas, balancing the food I made her in her lap, dark hair tumbling around her, sunlight streaming through the cracks in her blinds. “Presumptuous?” I said. “Nah. I noticed how you look at me and decided not to fight your inevitable claiming.”
See, this was why you had to keep your eye on women. They were always up to no good, invading your privacy, pushing right past the boundaries you set for them, with no care for things like societal norms or laws. What next? She broke into my house? I chuckled at my own bad joke as I turned right and drove east for several blocks before turning left.
Sounds familiar
I would never hurt you, Aly, he wrote back. I sighed. Why did he have to be so sweet? My stupid, fragile, love-starved heart wasn’t great at self-preservation to begin with, and this man was shredding what few defenses I’d erected around it.
She stepped inside, letting the door close behind her. “Yeah, but that one time was enough to clear the whole floor. Four days, Aly. Four days of rotting curry in the middle of summer, the week the A/C was acting up. We sent Seth in here dressed in full PPE to dispose of it.” She shuddered. “He still has nightmares.”
Oml yikess
that one handsome guy from the recent Netflix documentary my co-workers kept talking about. What was his stupid nickname? The Ken Doll Killer?
Josh's dad omg
I was 16 again, sitting uselessly beside my mother as she died, my hands covered in her blood while I tried to staunch the flow, the broken car horn drowning out my cries for somebody, anybody, to help us.
:((
I especially didn’t love the idea of frying more bacon. It brought up memories of when Dad got an ingenious idea for how to dispose of his latest victim during a now infamous Fourth of July neighborhood cookout. I’d been vegan since, and even now, almost twenty years later, the smell of sizzling meat still made me want to puke.
Oh !!
“You’re here,” she said, so low I almost missed the words. I slipped my hand from hers and pulled her into a hug. “You needed me.”
She pulled back enough to meet my eyes, not bothering to hide the tears that slowly leaked from hers. “You’re so nice that sometimes I forget what a creep you are.”
“I’m serious, Aly. Everyone involved is just at complicit as you. It’s not fair to put all the blame on yourself. Would you tell another sixteen-year-old in your shoes that it was their fault their parent died?” She shuddered. “God. Never.” “So why are you doing it to yourself?”
I ignored her first question. She already knew the answer. “I took a vacation, too. I thought we could spend some quality time together as a family. You, me. Our maladjusted son who just scooted his butt across the carpet behind you.”
Please, God or Buddha or whoever the fuck might be listening, do not let me be wrong about this man, I prayed.
Putting a lot of trust into bro
“That’s it,” Josh said, scooping him up and carrying him out of sight. “Ow. Jesus, be gentle, Fred. You’re clawing through my shirt again. Yes, I know you’re glad to see me.” His voice grew quieter the farther away he walked. “Yes, I missed you too, but screaming at people isn’t the way to show that you care, and don’t you dare point out my stalking. We’re talking about your eccentricities right now, not Daddy’s.”
“Babe?” he called. “You want eggs and bacon again?” Oh, shit, no. I scrambled out of the room after him, trying to think of a kind way to ask him to please never cook for me again.
HELP
I silenced the alarm and unlocked the screen. The sight that greeted me sent ice sluicing through my veins. The camera was dark. And not the dark of night, but the kind of dark that only came from being covered. I swore. “What’s wrong?” Aly said. “Someone’s at your back door.”
Oop
“I do.” Now probably wasn’t the time for those two little words to make my stomach somersault, but hearing Aly say them warmed my heart in a way that made me want to hear them from her again, preferably while standing in front of an altar of some kind, or on a tropical beach, just the two of us – whichever she preferred.
Oh wow that was sudden
The woman was down for kinky sex, knew how I liked my coffee, and was more than willing to aid in the murder of a rapist. What had I done to get so lucky?
One of these things are a bit different from the rest
I ripped the balaclava off and ran to the nearby bushes, dropping to my hands and knees as my stomach tried to expel everything I’d ever eaten. So much for not leaving piles of DNA behind. Aly squatted next to me, rubbing my back and making soothing noises as I retched. “This is probably a bad time to gloat over the fact that I was right about your identity, isn’t it?”
“You are the best girlfriend a guy could ask for.” My eyebrows flew up so fast it felt like they were trying to jump off my forehead. “Uh, what was that?” “Too soon?” he said. “I mean, I know we haven’t had the official conversation yet, but we share a child, and I feel like disposing of a body is a boyfriend-girlfriend activity and not something you do with a casual hookup.”
“Are you saying that the couple who commits homicide together, stays together?” He snorted. “Too wordy. I prefer the couple who slays together, stays together.”
Maybe this relationship had started out on questionable footing,
Maybe just a little...
no matter what was to come, or what secrets Josh still held, I doubted anything would ever make me regret it.
I feel like thats gonna come back and mess things up
And no, Lucius did not appreciate being asked about his time in Azkaban. I still wasn’t convinced he wasn’t some kind of wizard.
The man who had stalked me, broken into my house, and killed someone was the son of a serial killer. Oh my god, he filmed himself covered in blood. Did he want to be his dad or something? Was he already?
Noo guys wait let him expllain himself
What was it with all these stalkers lately? Was it me? Was I giving off some weird, come-at-me pheromone? Or was Mercury in retrograde again?
Idek girl
Junior shook his head. “No. Absolutely not. This isn’t a job for a woman.” I reared back in Josh’s arms. Overhead, I heard my boyfriend suck in a sharp breath and then let it out with the kind of ooh noise better suited for a playground. He let go of me with one hand and held it out in front of me. “This is the part where you take your earrings out, right?” he said. “I can hold them for you while you beat his ass.”
I took a step toward him. “I’m coming.” He shook his head. “Aly, you can’t. I’m serious. The men on the team are rough. You shouldn’t be around them.” Another ooh came from behind me, followed by a crunching sound. I glanced over my shoulder and found Josh staring at us with rapt attention. He’d pulled a single-serving popcorn bag out of the box of food he’d packed and was eating it with the kind of glee reserved for someone watching a Real Housewives reunion episode.
His expression turned to pity. “You owe him a favor, remember? His payment for all this is dinner once a month with the family.” I turned to Josh, wide-eyed. “Am I being Gilmored right now?” He nodded. “Yup. He’s going full Emily on you.”
My uncle was bad, but Emily Gilmore made him look like a peach in comparison.
“Thanks for letting us tag along.” All I got back was a single grunt and several blank looks. “No, you’re right,” I said. “Better to stay mysterious.”
Silence was descending on the van, and the urge to break the tension with another joke was almost too strong to resist.
Real
“It’ll be a cakewalk.” It was not, in fact, a cakewalk.
LOL
Apparently, I turned into a kleptomaniac around advanced technology, but who could blame me? A magical jammer that killed lights with a single flick? There wasn’t a tech geek alive who wouldn’t have developed a sudden case of grabby hands in my place.
I covered my mic and tapped the guy nearest to me. “I’ll pay you ten dollars to laugh at my next joke. I need to win a bet against my girlfriend.” “Hey!” Aly said. “I heard that. No cheating.”
I sighed, knowing my height was working against me, and followed after him, dropping to all fours whenever I reached a window and scuttle-butting past them like a Teen Wolf wannabe.
