How To Endure Ardor:

How to Endure Ardor:

Pairing: Joel Miller x F!Reader

Summary: Joel teaches you how to love him.

Rating: Explicit 18+

Content Warnings: Post outbreak; QZ Joel Miller; I'm saying this, but the setting is sort of ambiguous anyways, Stream of consciousness, Character Study, Alternating POVs; PIV sex; The troubles and toils of breaking up and then making up with a fucked up old man; Uncaring Joel; Mentions of painful sex; Toxic relationships or situationships or whatever you want to call it; I think I'm addicted to the idea of a Joel who'll never love you and I should probably see a doctor about it

A/N: she remembers how to write, who'd of thought!

Word Count: 1.3K

Read on AO3

This is a lesson:

“Tell me again,” she says, and it’s a begging.

A begging like what? Something that carries shame and smallness in the shape of it. Stay a little longer. It humiliates him for the wretchedness it pulls from him. Joel, please. Seeping blood the color of her supplication. Please, she says, please. And who else says please to him anymore? Who asks him for anything anymore but her? The only ones who ever had are long past and gone, and he can’t even barely remember they were ever really there to ask anything of him to begin with—can’t remember what it feels like to owe someone something and want to give it to them in a way that will actually make him. 

Tell me what again? That I want you? That I’ll stay? That I love you? I’ll come back, he says instead, the only thing he can promise and keep. And he wonders if it humiliates her too, the way he lies, the way he runs, the way he swears, the way he always comes back and comes back but never returns with the things she needs. A humiliation just like it is a begging. 

The thing they have: it’s strange, fickle, honest in its lies, very, very ugly. An ugliness that is shocking in a world gone to rot already. The sky doesn’t shine anymore and they bask in it. 

But also, and, the thing they have: it’s physical, saving.

This is obvious too, even if only to them.

He slides inside and you’re what? Hot and wet and slick, and—yes, a thing like a dream, but still only a thing. Something to have, something close to desire, but not quite, more like biological want. Woman turned possession. In his mind this is an excuse, a reason, a begetting. Like, what—like what? Like when you want a thing very badly but it is very bad for you, and you need to make up any excuse to have it, lie and lie and lie—to your mother, your best friend, the mirror—a begetting like that. Easy to understand only if you’ve been there. 

It started simple, it started like nothing, it started like the first time you meet someone and you know they’ll matter, you know they’ll mean something. So it started like what? Like a lie. 

Shifts at the QZ, long and toiling and reminders of the sort of life that died in an outbreak of monsters, only if for how unlike that past it was. Humans or fungus or—

—men who hurt—you, men who refuse your love, Joel Miller.

The crutch of your age, of you being weaker or smaller or in need, him being easily felled, wooed, easily conquered by something young and given without a try because there was never the opportunity for trying before. 

Now, it is like this: you take my cock and you take my come and you take my nothing, and I give so little and yet you still find a way to take and take and take, leech of a girl, dream of a girl, hungry. And with the excuse that it’s only in a way you contrive for your own self. But in the end, what does that make you? What do I make you into? 

These are the things he asks himself. 

Perhaps she goes away for a time, tries the route of escape, of variety. But when she inevitably comes back because addiction is riddled always in the same sorts of ways: did you try different bodies? Did you try different flavors and sounds? Did you look for me in all of them? 

The answer is usually yes.

At reunion’s turn: he rolls her over to face her, Joel, damp and panting and trying to be something—perhaps better, more honest—after a season of variety and honest attempts and shut eyes. He’s so hard for her, always is. 

Again: he slides inside and you’re what? His, undeniably. Not yours. Something to want but not desire because it’s too romantic a notion, and yes, there’s a difference even if he can’t put into words what that difference specifically is. Body and heart, perhaps, definitions that differ between disparate anatomical parts or levels of deniability. 

Nothing either of you have ever been able to put into words when lust and love aren’t things you can even say out loud for the shame of them, even if they exist within said same anatomy. 

You come together, the season passed, the separation passed but still kept at hand for the next time the closeness becomes too much. 

“Tell me again,” she says, and this time he remembers what she’s asking for.

“I fucking missed you, baby. Missed this pussy.” Because he can’t say it’s her heart he missed. Because Joel Miller does not have honesty in his arsenal. 

He spreads you wide, knee to shoulder so it hurts and pulls, so it’ll be sore and reminding tomorrow. The slap of his pelvis against the back of your thighs is obscene, wet and lewd, a string of girl cum keeping you connected, such togetherness, curve of your ass to the root of his cock—the two of you are together again. 

You know what I thought, when I tried to go away, you say. He doesn’t want to know, but he doesn't tell you so either, only slides in again, the mouth of your womb right there, threatening. I’m never going to feel like this again, and I hate how certainly I know that. He wonders if the unsaid part is that he’s the recipient of that feeling, the hate. 

He wonders if the pinch inside him is hurt. He wonders if the throb is love. 

All he says because he can’t say the rest is, I missed you, I missed you, and if he could look himself in the mirror—something that’s twenty years past lost—he’d ask: are you alright? Just tell me you’re okay. And it sounds in your own voice and with your own care and the feel of your own warmth. Is there anything I can do?

Other times, he sees himself through your own eyes, and then he knows for certain that the throb is love 

So he makes up for lost time, hard—and if it was a thing he knew how to be— loving. Mouth to cunt first, primed and soft and begging, making you come again and then another once more, then inside of you. Slow, splitting you open, red cunt like a wound, balls slapping wet, pulling out to watch the gape of the space he’s carved for himself. His cock is so hard and missing you something desperate. And he’s reminded of what it is to really miss something in a way he hadn’t been in twenty years of apocalypse, he’s forced to realized that it’s been so long since he’d had something to love that he’d not realized the feeling of missing that long past someone had gone away, only faint memory remained. 

Violent, is what this makes him after that realization—thrusts turning hard and punishing. How dare you give yourself to me? How dare you then take yourself away? You come around him again, the gift of your orgasm. How dare you not be able to accept the little I’m able to give when I’m trying so desperately fucking hard to give you even just this? 

He fucks you mean, he fucks you in the way of a man who doesnt know how to say the things he needs to say, in a way that’s confusing, that could make a less discerning woman feel only the hurt. 

But then again, you know him.

Fucks you in a way that is a little bit like love.

And so, amidst all of it, there is an honesty amongst the lies. A truth unspoken that they both know—I’ll come back because I need you, because you’re the only one who can give me the things I'm not strong enough to ask for out loud. 

You’re not sure which of the two of you is the one saying it.

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Javier Pena, pencil on paper

everyone say thank you miss vic @netherfeildren for helping me pick him as my next subject <3

when we go crashing down

pairing: Dave York x f!reader

summary: And when we go crashing down, we come back every time.

word count: 808

tags/warnings: explicit smut -> mdni, angst, toxic relationship (situationship), cheating, able-bodied reader, Dave pulls her hair, no use of y/n, unprotected p in v, a hint of rough sex, a hint of choking, no happy ending (i’m just as shocked as you are)

a/n: another drabble for @beskarandblasters’ taylor swift drabble challenge, this time based on the song style. i hurt my own feelings with this one ngl. we’re entering my angsty era i’m afraid.

follow @janaispunknotifs for fic updates and find my full masterlist here :)

dividers by @saradika-graphics 🤍

You’re shivering, arms wrapped tightly around yourself, until the familiar car comes into view, headlights swinging over the dark parking lot.

Your heels click on the ground as you’re walking towards it and get in. You can only make out the silhouette of Dave’s face, the strong shape of his nose, the pout of his lips. His jaw is clenched, his hands gripping the wheel tightly. He’s tense, agitated, just like he always is.

“You have to stop calling me.”

He’s stern, his voice carefully controlled.

“You could stop picking up.”

You know that he won’t. Just like you won’t stop calling.

Silence stretches between you as he speeds through the dark night. The drive always feels like forever, and not long enough at the same time.

His wild eyes keep flickering from the road to you, taking in your face, the red lipstick that’s only a bit messy at this point of the night, the tight little skirt that’s leaving most of your thighs bare.

The familiar electricity sparks between you. Just like it always does.

He follows you into your apartment, a tangle of limbs, eager fingers pulling up and tugging on garments. He traps your body against your door, pressing your back into the hard surface. His coat is in a heap on the floor, his pants pulled down just enough, your skirt pushed up. His lips against your mouth are hungry, just as demanding as his hands, as his thrusts when he sinks into you.

It stings, the stretch around him, but the pain of him leaving without a word, traces of your lipstick all over his face, is worse.

Two weeks later, you don’t even make it out of the car. He had refused to come up with you, so you climb over and straddle him in the driver’s seat.

His resolve crumbles immediately, his fingers grabbing at every part of you that he can reach.

You ride him until your thighs are burning, but you’re chasing the high that only he knows how to give you.

One of his hands wraps around your throat, his hips pistoning upwards, his cock hitting a spot so deep inside of you that it brings tears to your eyes.

“Stop calling me,” he snarls.

You glare at him, breathless, but still meeting his every thrust.

“Do you really want that? Do you want this to stop?”

He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to.

The next time, he’s out of the car before you can get in. His hand closes around your wrist, pulling you back into the club, through the crowds of people and straight into the bathroom.

“I told you to stop,” he growls as he bends you over the sink and pushes your skirt up.

He keeps a firm grip in your hair, holds you up while he pounds into you from behind. Your eyes are glued to the mirror, to the reflection of the both of you.

You look good together, you think. He’s like a daydream, dark eyes glinting behind you, his breath panting, his hair a mess.

Your heart aches in your chest when he drops you off. You know that it will never lead to more than this, you’ve tried. You can’t control it, helplessly watching the both of you go round and round each time.

A couple of weeks go by and you don’t call him. He glares at you the next time you slide into the passenger seat, asks where you’ve been. You went home with someone else the last few times, you admit. He grits his jaw, his lips curling into a scowl.

“Don’t try to tell me that you’re not seeing anyone else. I know about Carol.”

It hurts, saying her name out loud.

“That’s different,” he mumbles. There’s no real conviction behind his words.

“It’s not and you know it.”

He fucks you on your couch this time. It’s softer than usual, the cushions in your back almost making it feel like you’re in bed. It’s dangerous, too close to something intimate, to something more. It makes you long for something that will never be, but you don’t tell him to stop. Let yourself pretend, even if just for a few moments.

It’s not until he’s out of the door that you realize he didn’t tell you to stop calling him this time.

The last time you get into his car, you know that something is wrong. The tension is rolling off of him in waves.

When he asks you to not contact him anymore, he sounds different, resigned. You know that he means it this time.

“Carol’s pregnant. I– we’re getting married.”

You swallow, hard. Eyes wide open, unblinkingly staring straight ahead into the darkness. A curt nod, a quiet hum of understanding. You always knew this day would come.

“Just take me home.”

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2 ibuprofen and dick from that old man would fix me