Pink and yellow, purple and blue, I like this and that but especially you

by Lollytea

Summary:

More often than not, all she really wanted was to exist in his atmosphere. She wanted all those mundane things that kept her internal garden in bloom.

She wanted the arm around her shoulder,

She wanted the funny scent clinging to her pajamas,

She wanted the dependable rhythm of his peculiar heartbeat to beckon her into a state of calm when the world was persistently badgering her into an outburst.

A desirous Willow tree, aching to bathe in the sun's heady gold.

She wanted to talk about nothing and everything, and be told nothing and everything in return, from the voice with the rusted edges and the opinionated spark.

Kisses were nice. But so was the rest of him.
🩷💜💙/🩷💛💙

Notes:

All beautiful illustrations done by @Raystel :D!!!! Cheer and clap, cheer and clap!!!!!! This art is so chewy!!!!!!

PLEASE turn off dark mode for the full experience

“Hellooo, Tower Princess,'' proclaimed Willow, using one hand to frame her chin (her fingers waggled cheerfully) and the other to grip her staff tight so she could recline and pump out a leg as high as it would go.

Hunter didn’t crack a smile at her attempt at dazzling him, probably because he was too caught off guard by her unannounced arrival. 

He stood with his arms raised over his head from pushing up his bedroom window, gawking at the girl who hovered above his backyard in her frilly mushroom patterned pajamas.

There was still residual pink dusting his ears from a moment prior.

Hunter usually drew his curtains at night, so her little peek had been unintentional, but she still felt a bit guilty for the brief invasion of privacy. 

It wasn't anything seriously incriminating, at least not from what Willow could tell. He had just been sitting at his desk, watching something on that modified human 'laptop' with the interdimensional 'wifi' connection. 

And though it had only been a few seconds before she knocked, Willow had processed three interesting details about the scene. 

1.) He had been fidgeting. One knuckle was being teased between his teeth, as his other hand wrung and wound around his wrist, wearing down the surface layer of skin.

2.) The whole of his face, from the tips of his ears to the length of his neck, was engulfed in such a vibrant flush, you’d swear apple blood was soaking beneath his skin. 

3.) He was staring at that screen with scorching intensity. Like his eyes were not only addicted to the blue light, but there was simply never enough cornea burn to satiate them. They only got wider and wider as he inched closer and closer. 

And then Willow gently thumped her knuckles against the glass. To say Hunter was startled was an understatement. 

The sudden sound sent him bucking backwards with a crackly yelp, his body getting involuntarily flung to the floor.

Willow winced at the unceremonious thud. But before she could worry that he had been knocked unconscious, there was a flash of gold light and he was once again standing upright. 

Both hands snapped the laptop shut, and the rest of the body hunched over it for a second, shoulders heaving, eyes crazed. It was like Grometheus had just tried clawing its way through the screen. 

The only way Willow knew for sure that it was simply something embarrassing was the cavalier air Hunter tried to adapt as he walked towards the window. 

She wasn't going to ask. But Titan alive, a fungi spread of curiosity was beginning to devour her insides. 

“You know your Dads don’t like you going out after nine on school nights,” he fretted, taking Willow’s hands and guiding her less than graceful tumble into the room.

Her staff dissolved in a shimmering mist. With a low contented buzz, Clover affectionately nudged Hunter's cheek by way of greeting before carrying herself towards the plump red beanbag parked by the bookcase. Her wings went still in midair, sending her plummeting into her Queen Bee throne. 

Willow rolled her eyes at the dramatics. 

Clover had been preparing to snuggle into her cozy bed for the evening when Willow asked if she wanted to take a ride.

She had agreed. Clover always agreed to a scandalous late night rendezvous. She could never resist the thrill. But she also never passed up an opportunity to dish out a little attitude. 

Hunter was still too pressed about Willow breaking curfew to pay Clover much notice. 

“Willow, listen to me." His voice held the tightness of a rope knot. "I know breaking rules is fun and exciting and it makes you feel alive, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna encourage this,"

Willow scoffed, swinging around to face him, hands on her hips. Her hair had recently been chopped off, so a muss of chin-length curls slapped against her cheek. 

"Are you really gonna act like you don't looove breaking rules?" 

With a contrary squawk, Hunter's spine snapped erect, fists bunching. "I do not!"  

"Ohhh, so we're gonna ignore the Wittebane statue?" Willow countered, more than willing to play this game if he so wished it. "Which you and I vandalized. Quite romantically, I might add." 

It had been their first date. She remembered egg yolk dribbling down the bend of Philip's nose. Her lucky shot had been rewarded with an unexpected sparkle of blithe boyish laughter and her very first kiss, placed delicately on her upturned lips. 

Hunter being a rule lover was a bunch of griffinshit. 

"T-that doesn't matter right now, let'snottalkaboutthat," Was his weak rebuttal, flittering hands and all. "This is about you . And Mr and Mr Park." 

Hunter paused contemplatively, his forehead becoming acquainted with its inner washboard. "And also me. And if they find out you’re sneaking out to see me then--”

“Don't get your leggings in a bunch," Said Willow, toeing off her boots. "If they find out, they're blaming me and me alone. Never you, they love you ."

Willow eagerly anticipated the rare occasions when Hunter was the one talking her into some small scale rebellion, but that side of him had not yet exposed itself in front of her parents. 

"And they're not gonna find out."

At least Papa wouldn't. The man consistently pushed himself to exhaustion during the day so he could spend the night comatose. If he didn't, his nightmares flared up.

(That post Day of Unity shellshock had left its mark on everyone.) 

Dad was a different story. His insomnia may lead him to check in on her. However, he had a far more relaxed approach to parenting than Papa. He once requested that if Willow must disobey him every once in a while, at least disobey responsibly.

If she received a concerned text from Gilbert Park, she'd respond to assure him that she was safe. He might ground her, but for a weekend at most. 

"Well, maybe they will. But so what?" Willow decided to challenge, lifting one shoulder in a stiff shrug. 

Her body language had a slight competitive edge, and Hunter automatically re-adjusted his own. He stood to his full height, tipping up his chin and knotting his arms across his chest.

Willow had always enjoyed the look of him. In all his demeanours, sweet and sour alike. Tall. A meticulously carved facial structure. Eyes that never stopped blazing. And such a stubborn mouth.

And at times like this, he had the kind of frown that was just begging to be kissed into a different shape.

Yeah, she didn't regret sneaking out.

"In my opinion," Said Willow silkily, a wicked witch grin cracking her wicked witch face. "A pretty boy like you is worth getting in trouble for~"

The words split Hunter's stone facade apart, the magma beneath seeping through, with every intention of melting him to the bone. 

His eyebrows lifted a moderate extent, bottom lip parting in soft surprise. 

Arms still folded, he suddenly twisted to the side, looking anywhere but at Willow. His open mouth wrestled with his apprehension and won, and a hopeless smile conquered his face. 

If there was one thing that always got Hunter adorably lovey, it was telling him that he was worth something.

Frankly, Willow was zazzed that she had gotten yet another opportunity to say it. She liked saying it. It felt as natural on her tongue as it did blossoming inside her ribcage.

She liked the way the words filled him up like warm water.

She smothered him in ' WorthIt 's the way she smothered him in flowers. 

Hunter exhaled, in what was clearly playful exasperation, and Willow happily played the part of the nuisance. She waded over to him, with the all-teeth smile of a triumphant selkidomus.

And when she claimed his waist with her evil hands, she didn't even have to whisper ' gotcha ', as the look she gave him said it all. 

And the look Hunter returned to her was that of a boy who was still figuring out a strategy to stop losing, but was still a sucker for consolation prizes.

"Okay," Hunter relented, his fingers tracing shapes in the backs of her hands, not resisting as Willow began gently rocking their bodies from side to side. "You can stay for two hours, but that's it."

Translation: You can stay for two hours, and then we'll spend an extra half hour saying goodbye.  

Willow sprung on the balls of her feet, letting out a little squeal of delight.

"Maaaaybe I could spend the night here," She teased, tilting her head exaggeratedly crooked. 

"No chance," Said Hunter.

Translation: No chance. Except if you fall asleep in my bed because I'll be too much of a softie to wake you up. But! That all changes at 6am when I'm rousing you awake and pushing you out the window so you can hurry home and jump into bed before your Dads suspect a thing. 

It was as Willow sunk into the squashy haven of Hunter's mattress that she could really understand why she kept falling asleep here, with no hope of stopping anytime soon.

Not only were his galaxy smeared sheets the soft, expensive kind that only Darius Deamonne would splurge on, but the mattresses in this house were in another universe of comfort that Willow was wholly unprepared for. 

Rather than springs and foam, these things were stuffed with abomination goo that adjusted to the contour of the body and cradled every difficult edge of it.

Hunter climbed into the space beside her, and Willow found a groove for herself in his left flank. The bits where his ribs jutted out were getting less knobbly with each passing day. As she snuggled into him, his arm curled securely around her shoulder.

One (1) successful yawn-and-stretch manoeuvre during movie night at the Noceda's, which Willow had begged for in every way but with words, and now his arm lived on her shoulder rent free.

Not that she was complaining.

She liked this. 

Willow breathed in an unusual but familiar scent of sawdust, dried perspiration and woods, which she could never decide was objectively pleasant or not. But it was him, so she'd willingly huff it until she went loopy. 

And then, words were spilling out of her. And when twined together in such a way, those words formed thoughts and sentiments. The kind of thoughts and sentiments that had always been a little incompatible with Willow’s voice-box.

Hunter had never made any deliberate effort to change her in any shape or form. But Willow from last year certainly wouldn’t have been complaining with the innate ease of breathing that current Willow sometimes did. 

Especially when it was over small, insignificant aspects of a life that last year’s Willow would have had her entrails scooped out for.  

Safe to assume Hunter’s influence had something to do with it. He always encouraged her to vent her ‘Ankle Viners,’ which was a term he had invented for those miniscule frustrations that could eventually mutate into something wilder and more uncontrollable if left unacknowledged. 

“Bump knows I’m already working overtime to prepare for our game against Glandus,” Groaned Willow, throwing her hands in the air, fingers scrunching into vibrating claws. Her head had made a pillow out of Hunter’s collarbone. 

“He also knows I have a first year student to mentor. He knows because he assigned me that student. He knows I’ve been volunteering to help out with Amity’s student council. He knows finals are coming up. And still! And still he decides to sign me up for this Bonesborough Scholars Program without even asking me. And now I have to throw together some fancy overly complicated demonstration of my abilities to show everybody that Hexside can teach a kid how to grow a stupid flower!”

Her arms flopped down over her chest, as Willow released a throaty “Uuuuugghh!!”

A silence followed, which Hunter didn’t break. His hand on her shoulder had inky curls to absentmindedly wind around his finger. 

“I didn’t mean that,” Murmured Willow, abashed. “I don’t think flowers are stupid,”

Hunter made a sharp noise of amusement through his nose. “I know you don’t.” 

“And it’s not like I dislike Bump. He’s a great principal. And a great guy. He cares about his students a-and he wants what’s best for us. He just...he just...!” 

Willow’s words got tangled while climbing up her throat. Her fingers clenched again, as though trying to grasp her point out of thin air. 

“He just expects the world from you,” Stated Hunter matter-of-factly. 

“Yes! That’s it, that’s exactly it! And that’s what it’s like all the time lately! Nobody at school ever thinks anything is too much for me, because I’m me ! And…and…” 

He hummed in acknowledgement.

“I know we’ve talked about this before,” Said Willow, feeling a little silly that she just kept going in circles with the exact same flaws and never overcoming them entirely. 

“I’m getting better at telling people no. I know I can’t be everyone’s rock all the time. I know this, Hunter. But sometimes it just gets sprung on me. They’re always so confident that I can handle it, I just...I dunno, I...”

“Don’t want to let them down?” Supplied Hunter, with a lopsided smile. 

Willow responded with a hum of her own. 

“And the thing is I usually can handle it,” She carried on. “They’re right about me. I’m awesome now! But even though it gets done, it’s still....a lot,”

“Willow, you’re tough, not invincible,” Despite the statement having the potential to be hurtful, his cadence was so Hunterishly benign that Willow didn’t do much more than raise an eyebrow. “You’re capable of so much, but that doesn’t mean you should have to do it all.”

“But I want to,” Was her knee-jerk response. 

“No, you don’t,” 

“Yes I do, Hunter!” She found herself saying, which provided a helpful breeze to sweep away all the leaves and flowers, uncovering the root of the problem. 

Surprise, surprise! The root was an incomprehensible knot. 

“I-I don’t even know why I'm getting so mad about this.” Willow sighed, raking a hand through her hair. Her fingers found Hunter’s somewhere in their venture across the mess.

Pinky linked to pinky, as their pinkys were inclined to do. It was like a hello. 

“I want everyone to keep seeing me the way they see me. If that goes away then...”

Willow allowed her words to fall off her tongue and sink to the floor, making no effort to bubble up any more. 

She stared intently at Hunter’s ceiling, halfheartedly fishing out patterns in the novelty planet stickers. 

“Are you scared?” He asked, and she felt his voice vibrate against where she was leaning. “Scared that they’ll think you’re...?”

He didn’t say the exact words, but the way his question faded into nothing rang loud and clear. 

“Yeah,” She answered in a tight whisper. “I don’t want them to see Half-A-Witch Willow ever again,” 

Hunter didn’t have a response to that, at least not immediately. Which didn’t phase Willow, as she was never really hoping for one. 

She was already feeling less stiff in the nerves from having spoken all of her unimportant little complaints aloud without feeling ungrateful for it. And that was all that mattered right now. 

He then uttered, quiet and thoughtful “Sooo....you’re scared of being seen as Nothing, so you try to be Everything.”

When she turned her head to put a face to what she was hearing, his upturned features were scrunched in that formulating-in-depth-thoughts sort of way. The hand that wasn’t holding Willow was fiddling with a stray lock of his own flaxen hair. 

“But nobody is Nothing and nobody is Everything. We’re all just Something,” He glanced at her then, and his eyes flicked up and down the length of her face, which pricked up the corner of his lip. 

All liquified copper eyes and mushy smile, he said to her “You’ve got nothing to prove. You’re already an amazing Something, Willow.” 

It was ridiculous, really. The fact that being told that she was ‘Something’ made her grin like a dope, the most juvenile giggle sputtering out of her.

Hunter was incapable of magicking all of Willow’s problems away, as was anyone but Willow herself. However, he was exceptionally talented at saying these little things that brought about a wave of short term relief. 

The tautness of her mental strain had been cut loose, and for a moment, she felt like neither Nothing nor Everything, and all the pressure and paranoia of remaining one or the other was lifted. 

It would return tomorrow, as it always did. But without this moment to recompose herself and simply be Something, Willow didn’t know how she could possibly endure tomorrow. 

She buried herself into Hunter like she wanted to meld their skins together. 

While she had been content to sit passively and let herself be cuddled, the emptiness of her arms had suddenly become unbearable without a specific lump of flesh and bone to squeeze tight against her own lump of flesh and bone, and drown in the comfortingly familiar scent of his everything. 

Hunter grunted as Willow climbed across his body, flattening him to the mattress. 

“Okay, cool, so that didn’t just make sense in my head,” He said brightly, his open palm leaking warmth through the small of Willow’s back. 

“No.” Her voice was muffled, as her lips were currently located somewhere between his pectorals. “No, you’re good at this. Exceptionally good.”

“Thanks....Golden Guard,” He replied by way of explanation. “I like to think I learned something from the experience,”

“Mmm....well, it’s all kind of new to me. I think it'll take some getting used to.”

“I know.”

“Sorry if I keep harping on about it.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” 

Something about the soft spoken sentiment triggered such an explosive emotion that she was struck with the overwhelming impulse to devour him whole.

Willow’s head dove into Hunter’s neck and nuzzled aggressively with a theatrical growl and an eruption of gobbling noises, ripping a peal of incredulous laughter out of him. From the way his body convulsed against her, she could practically see his legs wildly kicking and arching, toes digging into the sheets. 

Her bout of mania was short lived, subsiding almost as abruptly as it flared up. She relaxed into him with a mollified exhale, feeling his fingers counting the bones down her spine. 

“Hey,” Said Hunter. “Don’t fall asleep.”

“You’re the one rubbing my back,” Willow replied with a few pesky giggles catching between the words. “It's your fault I keep falling asleep here.” 

Hunter took a moment to answer. 

“Sorry. Touching you is nice,” He mumbled, in his only possible defense of himself.

“Mmm....”

There were people in Willow’s life, such as Papa, Amity, and even Gus, who assumed that she had nothing but nefarious intentions when it came to slipping in Hunter’s window late at night. 

Not that she blamed them for drawing such a conclusion. After all, Willow was on record for having claimed ‘Once I get a hold of him, I’m kissing him until his mouth falls off,’

But it wasn’t....entirely realistic. 

She certainly encouraged this depiction of herself as a flirtatious rascal with a craving for steamy makeout sessions, who regularly sucked the breath from Hunter’s lungs like some sort of buff armed seductress of the moonlight. 

It certainly made her feel cool. 

But the truth was she was a little more sentimental than that. Mushy, even. 

It didn’t matter if after curfew hours was considered salacious by the average teenage rumor mill, that was hardly Willow’s sole motivation for visiting him. 

More often than not, all she really wanted was to exist in his atmosphere. She wanted all those mundane things that kept her internal garden in bloom. 

She wanted the arm around her shoulder,

She wanted the funny scent clinging to her pajamas, 

She wanted the dependable rhythm of his peculiar heartbeat to beckon her into a state of calm when the world was persistently badgering her into an outburst. 

A desirous Willow tree, aching to bathe in the sun's heady gold. 

She wanted to talk about nothing and everything, and be told nothing and everything in return, from the voice with the rusted edges and the opinionated spark. 

Kisses were nice. But so was the rest of him. 

It was easy to spot how Willow could twist a tailor thread of gold around her little finger. How could you miss it? The thread was an outright spectacle, always glinting and gleaming, too impossibly bright for the art of subtlety. 

But it was often overlooked just how effortlessly Hunter’s finger could enchant the tight curl of a single thin, wispy vine. The vine wasn’t as striking as the thread, but it was equally smitten with the finger it was wrapped around. 

“Tell me things,” Requested Willow. “Keep me awake,” 

Hunter had a knack for telling things and an enthusiasm for doing so. It was rare that he was left vocally bankrupt. 

Tonight, he was focused on a potential idea that he wanted her input on. He thought that a surprise trip to 'NASA', a Human Realm location, would make the perfect gift for Gus’ fourteenth birthday. 

Willow was all for it, eagerly asking if this was the place with all the rollercoasters and the giant rodent. 

It was not.

Though minutely disappointed, she still agreed that it was an excellent idea. 

In Hunter’s words, it was a 'Space Station' and she was well aware that the concept of space and all its starry mystique had so wholly captivated both boys, that it was hardly a question of this being the ideal party zone. 

Things drifted into the two of them in a tentative planning stage, spitballing suggestions for essentials such as bus fare and party supplies. 

Willow, half draped across Hunter's chest, was resting her chin on folded arms, legs lazily swinging back and forth. 

A moment of peace that would not last. 

Hunter's breath was shallow with the extra weight pushing down on him, though he wouldn't have it any other way. Apparently, he found the compression relaxing.

When Willow tried to shimmy herself off and grant him the privilege of superlative oxygen intake, he retorted with an "Oh no, ya don't," that was deceptively lighthearted in tone for the subsequent siege of her person. 

Hunter acted before she realized what was happening. A pair of strong, sinewy arms, that had become well acquainted with her dumbbell set, hooked a squirming Willow around the middle to wrangle her back to where he wanted her.

With a frenzied grin and a consistent babble of protest, (“Nuh nuh, nonono, hehehe, okayokay, wait, Hun-...Hunter DON’T!”) Willow resisted his attempts. She tried to arch her back, knowing she could take him in a scuffle if she could just re-adjust herself into a better position. 

But the former Golden Guard and eternally villainous scoundrel, cheated by mercilessly digging his thumbs into her hips (Having the audacity to taunt her with a “Tzzz!”) and Willow shrieked with high voltage ticklishness. 

She involuntarily crumpled into Hunter’s waiting arms, and he promptly snatched her up, flipping them both over onto his side and chiming a triumphant “Hiiiiii~” into her ear. 

His bottom lip deliberately grazed against the pointed helix, sending a prickle of static down her spine. 

Oh, so, somebody was feeling cocky. And when Hunter got cocky, his inner flirt began dripping out. 

Admitting that it made her a little weak was a loser’s move and the proud and competitive emerald fire that crackled in her stomach would not allow it. 

Willow Park did not lose fights. Not to him. Not to anyone. 

A few vines through the floorboards could easily send him flying, but magic was usually avoided for these kinds of games. Willow would clean his clock with a few spins of her finger and boom! Game over. No fun at all. 

There was a rich kind of satisfaction from winning a wrestling match the human way, especially when Willow had spent years training her body as a dangerous weapon in its own right. 

He began gloating, right on schedule, as Hunter expressed nearly every rush of exhilaration with his huge eternally flapping mouth. 

“Hey, Willoooowww~” He continued torturing her ear in that specific way that she unfortunately liked, his teasy croon setting off jolt after jolt of unbearable tingles. 

“Remember the other day at practise?” His tone was infuriatingly conversational. “You kept rubbing my arms and telling me how much you liiiiiiked them? Remember that?” 

Willow didn’t answer, only grunting in contempt. 

It did not deter Hunter. “You even gave them some cool names!” 

Another grunt. She tried in vain to twist and turn against her confines, said confines being the arms in question that she was (allegedly) nuts about.

“What did you name my arms, Willow~?” 

Her mouth was stretched in a firm line, every ounce of her free will being exercised to tame the relentless twitching of a grin trying to hatch. 

He repeated the question. Again and again

Willow refused to answer. 

“Aww, c’mon, Captain.” He reeled her even closer into his chest (continuing to surprise her that they could get any closer) and buried his face into her hair. She heard him inhale the scent, long and lasting. 

But what she didn’t expect to get her so good, was the feel of Hunter’s nose nudging into the nape of her neck. Willow immediately froze. 

Look....

She thought she had this teenage intimacy nonsense figured out....

They had already done a lot of experimental touching to settle themselves in. Exploring had been done, fingers had danced skittishly across his bare war-torn back, kisses had ghosted her tummy freckles. 

She had foolishly believed they had themselves and each other thoroughly mapped out. 

Well, surprise, surprise! Seemed she had an undocumented sweet spot. 

“What.” Hunter murmured. “Did. You name them.”

“Rock and Rumble,” Willow immediately answered, breath rattling. She’d tell him whatever he wanted to make the nosing around stop, or he would surely notice the patch of heat beginning to blotch against her neck. 

Any other time she’d gladly let him know how nice it felt and whine for him to continue. But not now, now while he was evil. He’d use it to make Willow soup out of her

“Rock and Rumble!” He repeated, ecstatic. “That’s right! How could I forget?” 

He didn’t forget. 

She knew damn well he didn’t forget. 

She had used her fingertips to trace the letters into his skin, from the biceps alllllll the way to the wrists. He had been left all lightheaded for an hour afterwards, his smiling mouth silently forming the shape of the words when he thought nobody was looking. 

“Welllllll?” He cooed. “What do you think of Rock and Rumble now, Captain Willow Park? Still like how strong they are?” 

Willow withered away from the fizzle of his voice on her ear. 

“Oh, so you’re not gonna answer, huh? That’s okay....” 

Rock and Rumble gave her a squeeze. 

“But you’re not going anywhere until ya do,” 

His tone was like a pleasant song, but it had a sharp set of teeth.  

Trapped in his snuggle cage, Willow remained a defiant prisoner. 

As Hunter settled into a patient silence (save for his smug humming), she quietly plotted away in his arms. 

A scheme was cooked up in a matter of seconds, but she let it simmer for an extra minute or two. 

Willow jiggled and twisted her restrained body like a sticky key, something Hunter allowed out of sheer curiosity, until they were face-to-face. 

He met her eyes glady, all aglow with his (alleged) victory. 

“Maybe I give up,” She said in a honeyed voice. “And maaaaaybe I’m not giving you an answer sooo....Rock and Rumble will keep holding me like this?” 

Willow smushed her nose against his, devoting to the role of the defeated opponent who was succumbing to her own lovesickness. She let the moment linger, indulging in the intimacy of it. 

It looked as though Hunter’s gloating disposition had escaped him, as did most of his thought process. He had gone and gotten himself snagged in the pale green spiderwebs woven into Willow’s irises. 

Roughhousing almost always led to making out.

Willow delicately tilted her head and quirked her lips in a fond smile by way of invitation, and Hunter’s eyes fluttered shut.

She gazed at him for a second, enjoying the look of him, all expectant and vulnerable. His lashes were as lush as feathers. 

And then, with a display of her tongue like a rebel’s banner, a lungful of air, and a loud obnoxious “Ppphhfftt!”, his face was doused in a spray of Willow’s spittle. 

Roughhousing almost always led to making out.

But obviously she had to win first.

“AGH! Willow!”

“Jailbreak!” She cried gleefully, breaking loose in his moment of discombobulation. Scrabbling across his bed on all fours to escape his wrath, she was near immediately yanked back towards him by the ankle. 

But now that she had access to her arms, her defenses were up, so she pounced into the brawl with ferocity.

She wasn’t stupid enough to try tickling him the way he did to her. Never again.

You simply could not tickle the boy with impulse-activated teleportation magic. He could not be kept still and he could not be escaped from. Willow Park or not, that was not a fight she was ever going to win. 

(And yes, the no magic rule still applied. But it was more lenient in regards to Hunter, as he was still prone to zapping around with little to no control.) 

Willow didn’t give a dire rat’s ass what the old ladies at the market said about Hunter, the thoughtful sweetie-pie who etched ornate designs into their walking sticks with his carving knife. They didn’t know him the way she knew him. The boy was a menace.  

She didn’t remember why they were fighting, but that was hardly the point anymore. The point was it was another One-on-One scuffle, meaning there was no Gus in sight to form an alliance with. So, she had to keep her wits about her and not get distracted. 

The rest of the battle was a fast paced blur of limbs, a nonstop blast of shrieky cackles and the primal pound of her heart. 

At one point or another, she had bodyslammed Hunter flat on his back, and was standing atop his headboard, fully prepared for an inflamed cannonball.

His neatly made bed, with the pressed, folded corners and the tucked sheets, was in complete disarray from how violently they rolled and thrashed and kicked and clawed. 

There was a stuffed frog around here somewhere. Probably flung to the floor. 

The wrists. Somebody was always trying to lock someone’s wrists over their head.

Hunter was speedier. He had better reflexes than she did. 

But when she had all four limbs intact and the freedom to use them, Willow was undoubtedly the brawnier one. 

She was patching together a half baked strategy to pin him with her legs when the whole brawl came to an abrupt halt. 

Willow’s scroll burst out of thin air with an eager buzz and a flash of blinding purple light. It hung above their heads, growing twice its own size in its hopping desperation to be acknowledged. 

They froze. 

“What on the bones...?” Panted Hunter, bewildered. “I’ve never seen your scroll do that before.”

“It’s only for special notifications,” Willow casually explained, as though she wasn’t currently holding him in a headlock. 

The scroll’s unexpected frenzy had called for an unspoken timeout. When Willow released him, Hunter flopped onto his belly like one of the Collector’s puppets going limp when playtime was over. 

“That was fun....” She heard him gasp, sounding blissed out of his brain. “You’re so strong....”

Willow beckoned her scroll towards her and it obediently whirled into her open hand. She checked the screen to read what the silly little device was currently pissing its pants over. 

“Oh!” 

“What?” Murmured Hunter, turning his head so he could gaze up at her. 

“Vyra Spidervein has posted to penstagram,” Willow read the notification aloud, then swiped to see the post in question. 

“The Captain of the Bloodied Teeth?” He seemed surprised, propping himself up by the elbows. “Wow. I mean, I know you’re a fan of hers but I didn’t know you set your scroll to go insane every time she posts. You must really--....Willow....?” 

Hunter might have been talking to her. 

She didn’t know.

She wasn’t listening.

She was too busy having a religious experience.

For fourteen worthless years, Emperor Smellos had Willow stupidly worshipping a pile of rotting bones, when Vyra Spidervein walked the Isles on the most divine pair of legs ever sculpted. 

A party. No...a banquet. That was what the caption said. A fancy banquet hosted by one of those wealthy societies up on the Knee, and Vyra had been the guest of honor. 

She was posed on a fine, sweeping staircase. A long necked chalice was lifted in a toast, her arm angled in a way that displayed her flexed wiry muscles and the snake of silver that wreathed from elbow to wrist. 

The glacial blue dress was hugging her figure with desperation, seemingly just as infatuated with her as anything in its right mind would be. The only part of her body that it couldn’t clutch was her shapely right leg, which had escaped via a daringly high slit in the sleek, shining fabric. 

The sleeves were spilling into a gentle caress of her upper arms, exposing her magnificent broad shoulders and the expansive canvas of her clavicles, an area embellished with arachnid tattoos. 

Vyra’s hair, once a glossy hip-length curtain, had been cropped short, and charcoal coils were now tight against her skull. It framed her face masterfully, accentuating the sharp cut of her cheekbones and jawline. 

Her dewy brown skin was utterly radiant under the blobs of floating light spells, as was her achingly sincere and joyous smile. 

Willow was a photographer. She could spot a fake smile in an instant. But there was nothing artificial about the way Vyra creased her immaculate facial features into an image that physically emanated the feeling of uncontrollably laughing your guts out.

The thought of hearing Vyra’s laughter sent a bluster of flower petals to mercilessly brush and flutter against the walls of Willow’s stomach. She shifted where she sat, jittery from the sensation.

She tried to exhale in a way that would steady herself, but the sound that leaked out instead was half breath, half whimper. She clutched her scroll tighter, mortified by the restless yet salubrious fervour that was blistering through her body. 

Something touched the skin beneath her chin. She barely noticed it until she heard the definite clack of her upper and lower molars, and Willow was back to reality. 

Somewhat. 

When she turned her head, Hunter was sitting upright, still cupping her chin. His head was cocked quizzically, a trace of a smirk on his otherwise perplexed face, probably from the spark of amusement he had found in snapping her mouth shut. 

“Hey....what’s up with you?”

Maybe, if this were any other circumstance, in which she hadn’t just spent the last hour being thoroughly dismantled by her boyfriend, the expert armour melter, Willow could have instantly recomposed herself, let out an airy laugh, and jokingly remarked on how hot Vyra Spidervein was.

But having Vyra wallop her so hard that she was still seeing stars was honestly a little embarrassing to admit. 

Dazed and disoriented, Willow did not know what to do with herself. Under the sweetly curious blaze of Hunter’s eyes, she found that she was speechless. When she tried to articulate herself, all that came out was a feeble little squeak. 

This was not like her at all. 

Hunter blinked, uncomprehending. “Um. I don’t...”

Willow held out her scroll so he could get a good eyeful of the indescribably powerful image, and then maybe they could malfunction together. 

But when Hunter set sights on the one and only Vyra Spidervein, he just.... smiled.  

“Oh, she looks really nice,” He said approvingly. “I like her dress.” 

Willow stared at him. 

Something about the way she stared must have been unnerving, as Hunter nervously fidgeted a bit under her scrutiny. His gaze cut to the side, as though answers could be found just out of the corner of his eye. 

“Nice?” Pressed a soft incredulous voice that Willow recognized as having come out of her own dumbstruck mouth.

“Hunter, she is exquisite!” The words erupted out of her before she even realized how impassioned she suddenly was. 

‘Exquisite’ was not typically commonplace in the average teenager’s lexicon. And Willow certainly preferred to keep her whimsical vocabulary to a minimum, for risk of sounding like a dorky old lady. But nonetheless, the words often sprouted to the surface whenever she was swept up with wonder. 

Figures that she wound up falling hopelessly in love with a nerd that referred to her as an ‘Insolent Agitator’ when they first met.

“Look at her again! Really look at her this time!” Willow shoved the scroll into a startled Hunter’s nose, only for him to politely inch it back so he could actually see. 

When her eyes flicked towards his, he threw up his palms to placate her. “I’m looking, I’m looking.” That hint of humor was once again curling his mouth. 

“She is absolutely stunning,” Willow sighed reverently, resting her head against Hunter’s shoulder so she could get another look at the image that he was supposed to be studying. She captured his arm for the purpose of having something to squeeze. 

“Hey, Willow?” 

“Did you know that every weekend she’s a volunteer coach for her niece’s team?” 

“Willow.”

“I just think it’s really cool of her to do that. Especially since she’s so busy. But she still finds time to teach kids Flyer Derby. Isn’t that amazing?”

“Uh huh. Real amazing. But um, I’m just wondering if you--”

“I’ve also read in a magazine that her teammates think she’s the sweetest most cuddly witch they’ve ever met. A-and whenever they win a game, she kisses them all on the--...on the forehead...” 

Willow swallowed, suddenly catching the utterly debilitating thought burgeoning every defenseless inch of her headspace. The swell of Vyra’s bottom lip just a teasing wisp against the divot between Willow’s brows.

Her excitement lurched so violently she wanted to throw up. Her hands flew to her mouth. 

“Titan, Hunter,” She breathed out through her fingers, because if these boiling emotions weren’t extracted from her system in one way or another, she’d burst. “She’s so….she’s so....!”

Seems there were no words to describe her but ‘So’ 

“Willow, do you have a crush on Vyra Spidervein?” Asked Hunter, out of nowhere. 

The question knocked her off what little equilibrium she had left and she floundered for a coherent response. 

Something about it made her shy. As did the funny expression on Hunter’s face. 

He was giving her the same look he gave his potions when they bubbled in a way that the book did not prepare him for. The insatiable fascination of a boy who didn’t care if the potion rendered him an eyebrowless fool who got lost in the cauldron sauce. 

He was looking at her like he wanted to sift through her liquidized state and find that one specific ingredient that was making her bubble. 

The question had been his hypothesis and Vyra Spidervein was the ingredient. 

She didn’t know why she wandered away from direct eye-contact nor why she felt the agonizing urge to adjust and readjust her criss-crossed legs. Her fingers fiddled with the frilled elastic of her socks. 

Her toes were wriggling. She couldn’t stop them. 

Every muscle in her body was begging to wriggle, but she was managing to keep the rest of herself still. 

Willow could not recall the last time she had been asked about a crush from an unattached third party. It had felt like an eternity since she had experienced the hot flush from being prodded by a knowing smirk. 

Amity used to ask her things like that. They had been little kids, and Willow had matured faster. 

Amity never had crushes, and she had found it endlessly amusing that Willow did. The teases had been as babyish as you’d expect from a six year old but Willow had still been flustered into silence. 

When they were fourteen and their rebooted friendship was still a work in progress, Amity treated Willow like eggshell city. Teasing of any kind felt out of place, with Willow being a poor widdle bullied flower who had to be handled delicately. 

And by the time they overcame all that nonsense and were finally comfortable with friendly ribbing again, it was too late for the ‘Do you have a crush?’ question. Amity was getting swung around princess-style like it was a Nine-to-Five job, and Willow was making constellations out of love bites.

Gus had simply never asked about that sort of stuff. According to him, he avoided the mushy talk. But he knew. He always knew. Despite his indifference to romantic feelings, he was unnervingly observant towards them.  

He had noticed when Willow got so smiley after meeting Luz Noceda. And while he hadn’t said a word about it, she would never forget his single raised eyebrow. She ignored it and he let her. 

He had known about Hunter too. And again, he didn’t bother her about it. 

However, according to Hunter, Gus tortured him over it. 

When Gus was contacted via crystal call to provide his side of the story, he claimed that all he ever did was give him the same looks he had given Willow, and Hunter had simply been unable to ignore them. His ears burst into flames every time. 

Hunter had asked her the crush question before. But that didn’t count, because it had been in regards to himself. Plus, at that point, they had already told each other ‘I am obsessed with you’ in every discernible way but with explicit words, so it hadn’t been that difficult to answer. 

But this....this was different. This was pawing away at a spongier spot of Willow’s that wasn’t accustomed to being touched. 

Like when Hunter tweaked her hips, and she was stricken with a similarly shocking judder of horror and exhilaration and elation and weakness and panic and raw unadulterated energy and giggles.  

Giggles like the ones that were suddenly pouring out of her. 

Do you have a crush on Vyra Spidervein? 

Willow cracked wide open. 

“Yeeeeees....?” 

And once she was cracked, there was no hope in the realm of piecing her back together anytime soon. 

“Yes! Yes!” She practically squealed. “Oh my gosh, Hunter, so much yes!”  

The giddiness was now pulsating, and it had redirected from the objective of settling down to talking about Vyra Spidervein as much as witchly possible. 

“Okayokayokay, so I-I kinda....ever since I was a kid and I started keeping up with Flyer Derby, she’s been my--Stop smiling like that! Stop it!”

The grin Hunter was giving her was excrutiatingly entertained, and it was making the back of her neck bristle and her giggles intensify. 

“I’m sorry, you’re just--ack! Hey!” Hunter tried to protest through Willow’s hands. In her delirium, she couldn’t think of how to deal with his face other than covering it up and weakly shoving it away. 

He snatched her wrists and tore them off, his huge smile unwavering. “Your face is so red,”

Willow squeaked in embarrassment, slapping her own cheeks to feel for herself. They scalded against her palms. 

“When I was a kid,” She continued meekly, staring down at Hunter’s mattress as she squeezed at her face. 

“I thought that V--” She swallowed the attempt at saying her name, as the girlish laughter would surely incapacitate her again. “I thought that she was the prettiest witch I had ever seen in my life. The first witch I ever looked at like that,”

Something occurred to Willow as she grinned stupidly at nothing, and singed her peachfuzz off with the volcanic heat beneath her skin. 

Talking about her first crush made her feel practically naked. She couldn’t imagine being so bashful to talk about her second, third, or fifth or even tenth. 

She remembered the emotion, an injection of buzzing endorphins that her very young self hadn’t yet built up an immunity to.

No wonder the spot was so spongy. It was the untainted feeling of a dizzy dreamy little girl, before she learned about the venomous sting of harbouring crushes while growing up romantically undesirable. 

It was a crush without pain, a crush without consequence. Safe to indulge in as a means to understand herself a little better. 

Like how she came to realize she was an asset gal.

Willow dared to peek over the rims of her glasses. 

Hunter, unsurprisingly, still looked utterly delighted. He was smushing a knuckle against his lips, but the smile was splitting through. 

“Stop laughing at meee....” Willow whined. 

“Not laughing,” He insisted, vowels catching on the laughter.

“You are!”

“Am not! I just...heh....” His attempts crumbled, as he was forced to succumb, clutching his own torso. “Hehehe....”

“Hunter!”

“You’re cute!” He blurted out, every facial muscle straining on the broad beam that stretched his mouth. “You’re being so cute right now and I....” 

Hunter tilted his head at her, endearment pooling in his soft dark eyes. “I just didn’t know that somebody could make you act like this,”

As soon as he said the words, his brow furrowed thoughtfully. A faint trace of pink splotched his cheeks. 

“Well, y’know,” He added in a bright breezy tone, with a cocky edge. He made an angle with his thumb and forefinger as a frame for his chin, striking a pose that deserved its own groovy instrumental zing. “Besides me, of course~” He winked. 

It was blatantly unfair for Hunter to flirt with her because she was already painfully susceptible to giggle fits, and his dorky little bit rendered her hysterical. 

She should have known something was amiss all those chapters ago, when she began thinking that the Golden Guard was awfully sweet. She had felt suspiciously gooey for the jaded age of fifteen. Familiar in a way that it shouldn’t be. 

If just another harmless crush began to feel all spongy, like it was your first time all over again, you were in trouble. That was a crush that had the potential to ripen into love if you let it fester. The kind of love that sunk its claws into you. Even if those claws were just blunt, bitten, genetically human fingernails.

Willow collapsed, dropping her head into Hunter’s lap and settling there. She then devolved into more pathetic starstruck gushing about Vyra Spidervein.

Now that it was all out in the open, Willow found that she was enjoying herself. 

“I wasn’t prepared for her haircut!” She was saying, as though Vyra had intentionally weaponized it against her. “It looked so good! So good! Hunter, Hunter, listen to me!” 

She reached out desperately, and a wildly grinning Hunter gave her his hands to grip. She gave them an urgent squeeze. “The way it made her face look, oh my gosh... Hunter...Hunter, her jawline...”

Hunter threw back his head with a loud burst of laughter. “Jawline?!”  

“Shutup! Shut up! ” 

“All I’m gonna say is...”

“I know what you’re gonna say. Shush!” 

He stroked the tip of his index finger across the cutting outline of his own face. “You clearly have a type,” 

“Stop,” Breathed Willow, scandalized. She could feel her flush spreading to her chest, and she fruitlessly tried shielding the sliver of visible collarbone from view. 

“Just stating facts,” He sounded insufferably smug. 

“No more facts!” She tried smushing his mouth shut again. “I’ve had enough of your facts!”

“Alright then,” He said smoothly, catching her hand and guiding it to rest against the jawline that was causing so much torment. His own hand pressed against hers, his face easing with relish from the touch. “A strongly supported theory. How ‘bout that?”

“Hunter, for the love of Titan, shut up!” Willow shrieked, infuriated that she couldn’t wipe the stupid smile off her face, and even more infuriated to know that the smile was so relentless because she was eating this up. Her legs kicked ballistically. 

When Willow began swooning over the perfect sculpt of Vyra’s shoulders, Hunter simply scoffed.

“You’ll go crazy over anybody with nice shoulders,”

“No! Stop!”

“Are you trying to say I’m wrong?” 

“No, you’re right!” She cried out with sizzling shame, attempting to hide the wide fullness of her moon shaped face with a pair of small, short fingered hands. She failed, of course. “You’re right and I hate that you’re right!”

Hunter’s quiet snickering escalated into the occasional snort. 

Willow suddenly heaved a gasp that may have seemed theatrical, but she felt it necessary for the sanctity of her next statement. 

“Hunter, she’s six foot three...” 

It was a fact about Vyra Spidervein that had just hit her like a transport worm, and she could not believe that it had momentarily slipped her mind. 

It made her Spidervein fever surge to a borderline destructive extent. The flurry of stomach petals may very well be shredding her internal organs. 

“Oh!” He seemed staggered by this information. 

She watched his mental journey in real time, as he always streamed it live on https://m.witch.cb/Hunter’sface . 

The weight of the new development sagged his shoulders, his irises glazing. “Oh…”

The lines were shooting from dot to dot until everything was connected, finally forming the full utterly irresistible image in his mind. 

Hunter nodded. Slow and enlightened. 

A pause. 

“You poor girl,” He then said to Willow, tone laced with sympathy, now halfway understanding her exhausting and torturous plight as a longtime Spidervein devotee. 

Willow responded by rolling over, getting up on her haunches, jamming her ass in the air and screaming.

(She was so very grateful for the soundproofing spells Raine had done on the room.)

The high pitched peal was muffled by her face being buried in Hunter’s thigh, but the dramatics expressed itself in other ways, namely her ass which was wiggling excitedly like a dancing firebee. 

Hunter cackled, consoling her with two brisk pats on the butt. “There, there,” 

Willow continued to wiggle and wail until the worst of her hysteria was effectively purged. 

“She’s so hot!” 

“I know,”

“Hunter, I’m gonna combust!” 

“I know,” 

“AAAAAAAAGGHHHHHH!!”

“I know,” 

When it was over, she slumped. Her ass drooped, the rest of her body sliding itself out flat until she was nothing but a weakly flailing rug with its head in Hunter’s lap. 

In the ashes of Willow’s inferno, there was serenity. It was a moment for lovers to utter their sweetest of nothings. 

“Pat my butt again.”

“Not happening. You’d fall asleep in like...twenty seconds.”

“Fine. Your loss though. I have a great butt.”

He hummed in lukewarm acknowledgement, which Willow chose to interpret as him agreeing with the statement. Nobody could take that away from her. 

Though she no longer felt like her insides had turned to lava, she wound up dipping in and out of half-hearted musings. 

She wondered, hypothetically, what it would take for Hunter to fully grasp the weight of Vyra Spidervein’s existence, to the point that when Willow screamed, he would be screaming right back, just as inconsolable.  

Maybe she would have to take him to a game so he could see her flex her biceps in real life. Hunter loved biceps. 

Or, well, he loved Willow’s biceps. 

Huh...

Come to think of it, she really didn’t know how he would react to someone else’s biceps. Or someone else’s anything for that matter. 

That didn’t seem right. She was his girlfriend. Was this not the sort of thing a girlfriend should know? 

Well, to be fair, Hunter hadn’t known that Willow possessed such a steamy crush on the Captain of the Bloodied Teeth that it rendered her physically, mentally and emotionally useless. 

But he knew now, didn’t he? 

So, that just left Willow being the less informed partner. And that simply would not stand. 

She rolled off the arch of Hunter’s knee and flopped flat on the mattress, so she could gaze face-up at him. 

He blinked expectantly, gathering from her expression that she was itching to say something. 

“Now, who’s yours?” Challenged Willow. 

“Huh?” 

“Who’s your Vyra Spidervein?” 

His brow ruched, like a needle and thread had been tugged through it. 

He didn’t understand. 

“Who makes yoooouu....” Willow lazily raised an arm, her forefinger drawing shapes that were far too aimless for any magic to prickle, until it reached the tip of Hunter’s nose. She booped. 

He blinked again, instinctively this time. 

“Act like me....” Her wrist went lip, the offending finger pointing downwards to where she lounged. “When I see Vyra Spidervein in an evening gown,” 

She could practically hear the sudden snap of comprehension, as Hunter’s eyes blew wide open. 

His mouth fell agape, wobbling for a word or two to tumble out, before he made a calculated decision to seal it shut, tight enough that it piqued Willow’s suspicion. 

Nobody would lock up their lips so tight if they truly had nothing to say. 

His body language radiated clues and it only made Willow’s teasy smirk broaden. She slooooowly picked herself up, already salting and peppering him with her beastly expression. 

She caught the glint of panic in his eye, as though just looking at her was freaking him out. But he seemed unable to tear his gaze away, a twitchy nosed echo mouse, entranced by the ominous leer of a mangled skull cat who was flicking her tail and licking her lips. 

“Hey, Hunter~?” She prodded, voice oozing with a sweetness so thick that it stiffened his upper lip. “Why aren’t you answering, big guy~?” 

The bump in his throat bobbed, an insatiable itch suddenly flaring in both of his elbows, as his fingernails began digging in. 

“Maybe it’s because...” Willow crawled menacingly into his personal bubble, while Hunter struggled to get away from her without being obvious about it. “I’m right. You do have a--”

“AAH--! Ha! HahAHAahaAaa....”

Willow had pounced, making to grab him by the ribs. But she had barely touched him when he let loose an alarmed yelp which was then poorly disguised as a spurt of pitchy laughter. 

It didn’t distract her from the interrogation. 

“Oh, I gotcha~” She cajoled, inching closer and closer. “I know you’ve got a Vyra that you’re not telling me about~”

Hunter stretched back so far he nearly fell over, catching himself on the palms of his hands. 

“I--!” Was all he could choke out, before Willow gave him a gentle poke on the stomach. 

There was a sharp metallic trill , piercing her eardrums, and a blinding golden blast that left her blinking back a storm of stars. Hunter was out of her clutches. 

She caught the two seconds in which he was perched on his desk chair, looking just as bewildered about his whereabouts as she was. 

Trill.

Flash. 

Back to the bed, though he had re-established those few extra inches of personal space. 

Hunter cleared his throat in an attempt to gather his composure. “Woah, haha. Sorry about that. I-I guess Flapjack is feeling a little uhhh....unpredictable tonight.” 

Willow gave a noncommittal hum. Something about her expression made Hunter avert his gaze. “No, I think that was pretty on par for the course.” 

“No,” He retorted, still not looking at her. One arm wrapped protectively around his middle, kneading his own bicep. “No, I think it’s just...just a glitch or...I mean, I-I’m feeling fine so,” 

“You’re nervous,” Stated Willow, endeared by the spot of heat touching his sallow cheeks. “ Very nervous, apparently. I think I caught ya a little off guard, huh?” 

Hunter’s eyes flicked to hers, before withdrawing. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out, so he closed it again.

“Mmph.” 

Willow should have kept pushing. She should have poked and prodded and teased and taunted until Hunter’s blush went up in a blazing riot. 

She should have sucked the meat clean off his bones like a true mangled skull cat would.  

She should have been just as merciless as he would have been with her. 

But Willow had never been the Golden Guard. 

As much of a nuisance as she could be, she was still a hopeless softie. For Hunter, anyway. 

“It’s okay,” She said airily. 

When Hunter glanced up at her, stunned and confused, Willow shrugged, offering a crooked smile of abatement.

It made him comfortable enough to hold eye-contact, though something in his expression had been tilted askew. 

“We talked about my Vyra. And maybe that’s enough for tonight,” 

Willow reached out and rapped him reassuringly on the knee. Hunter’s eyes snagged on her hand, like it was a puzzle box he just had to take a crack at. 

The eternally searching pupils ran up the length of her arm, to her shoulder, until he found her face. 

Hunter stared at her, his expression unreadable for once. It was like he was scared of her, wanted something from her, thought the world of her, and wanted to fight her, all at once. 

“We did,” He sounded a little spacey. “We did talk about your...”

Willow observed as something adamant solidified in Hunter’s most outspoken features. His lips pursed, eyes going steely. 

He straightened his posture, squared his shoulders and squeezed his eyes shut. His hands found each other in a death grip over his lap, knuckles whitening. 

Hunter spit out the truth. 

“Iwannatellyou!”

Which flipped a switch on the nature of this conversation. 

When Hunter risked a peek at her, Willow’s astonished open mouthed smile made him so nervous that he nearly swallowed his own tongue in his efforts to backtrack. 

“I think!” He couldn’t blurt out fast enough. His hands were suddenly up, all in a whirl. “I think I wanna tell you. I’m not sure. But I know I wanna tell you something. ”

It was automatic, the way Willow held out both hands, for Hunter to slip his into. Her fingers curled around his, folding them against her palms. Her thumbs said a gentle ‘hello again,’ to his knobbly knuckles. 

Watching the little dance of courtship that their phalanges were doing seemed to settle him. Though still a little flustered, the pace of his words slowed. 

“Hearing about Vyra was nice...” Hunter said softly with an understated smile, reminiscent of a candle glow. 

He was such a big and loud person, embodying every definition of those two words. His voice, his personality, the unforgettable faces he made. Always burning bright. An overpowering ball of fire. 

But other times, he simply glowed and his glow was quiet. As contradictory as it was, his subtlety was just as scrupulously threaded into his character as his intensity.

His appreciation for being alive was palpable, usually manifesting itself in fond acknowledgements of what most wouldn’t bat an eye at. And some of those things were so very small and delicate, that he required a careful touch. 

And Willow had a hard time not melting when he turned that energy on her.

Being told about something as trivial and ridiculous as her celebrity crush on Vyra Spidervein had made Hunter feel...nice. 

She couldn’t see her own smile but she felt it crack into something she knew looked brainlessly in love. 

It mattered. 

Everything about her mattered to him. 

Willow felt nice too. 

“It was something I didn’t know about you,” He continued, looking puzzled by the lovey look she was giving him but not unreceptive. In fact, it seemed to be a little contagious. “So, I should tell you something too. Right?”

His fingers gave hers a bracing squeeze. “I’d like to.”

Willow almost laughed at the definite air of that statement, compared to how uncertain he had been just a moment prior. 

Sometimes, all she had to do was act as a sounding board while Hunter untangled his reservations for himself. And sometimes, it only took him a few seconds to do so. 

“I just...” He faltered, reclaiming his hands to fidget with. “I-I’ve never talked about this before. So, I’m a little....”

“Glitchy?” Willow suggested. 

“Yeah. Glitchy.” He was embroiled in a thumb wrestling match with himself. “Sorry. Anyway, my, uh. My... Vyras.... ”

Willow gasped, already fulfilling the role of Hunter’s captivated audience. “There’s more than one?” 

It was a rhetorical question. There was obviously more than one. But Willow got her answer anyway, in the form of Hunter blush flaring, as he cocooned himself with his own arms. He nodded. 

Utterly reeling, she pumped her fists, with all the violent enthusiasm of a girl about to knock his lights out. 

And when he shyly glanced elsewhere, her anticipation bubbled hotter. She wiggled in her seat. “Ooooooh this is gonna be scandalous, isn’t it, Hunter?” 

Her impish cadence was clearly getting him good, as his attempts to answer came up weak, occasionally cut off by an intrusive sputter of flustered laughter. 

“They’re humans,” He finally mumbled. 

Willow let out a funny noise of disbelief and delight, fingers spread wide across her blatantly grinning mouth.

Her enthused reactions worked Hunter like lightning bolts, each zing rendering him more and more red in the face. His volume escalated as he stuttered out “Lemme just--Let! I-I just--Let me explain!” 

“By all means,” Urged Willow, twirling her wrist. “Tell me everything,” She leaned forward ravenously. 

“A-alright, alright. So, as you know,” He began, as though this were a Titandamned business briefing. And well, dicing in a professional turn of phrase seemed to steady his jitters. 

“The most recent addition to the Cosmic Frontier franchise is the miniseries, SS Striker: Origins, which airs every Saturday night on the--” 

“Wait, wait. Hold on. Isn’t that the show you hate?”

Willow was nothing but a supportive bystander in Gus and Hunter’s most recent catastrophe. SS Striker: Origins was, apparently, nothing but a neverending reign of torture and agony.

To be honest, she zoned out whenever the boys broached the subject, so she didn’t know why the series sucked left nuts. But she had gathered that they were completely disgusted by its existence, and had enough spite in their souls to rant about it for hours. 

Willow had become familiar with words such as: Sci-Fi, Franchise, Canon, Non-canon and Reboot. From what she understood, they were of the English language. 

Gus had likened the show’s premise to the act of defecating on a grave. (‘ And not in a cool way, like Eda did that one time,’ He was considerate enough to add. )

‘If this show makes you guys so angry,’ Willow had asked once. ‘Then why don’t you just stop watching?’

‘And admit defeat?!’ Gus was aghast at her suggestion, as was Hunter, who had stared at her like her vines had gotten to her brain. 

She had given up trying to understand. 

“That’s right, I do hate it. I hate the show,” Hunter clarified, his tone crisp and clear, clearly taking the enunciation of his political stance deathly seriously. He did not want any misunderstandings.

“ Origins makes no sense whatsoever when you consider the canonical timeline of the books. Yes, it is implied during Nari’s introduction in book two that she and O’Bailey have a history. But see, that’s where the believable connections to the timeline stop. It’s extremely unlikely that they would have met when they were eighteen. She was studying at Starblossom University at the time and he was undergoing his training as a weapon of mass destruction. The reasoning behind her presence on planet Pax is illogical at best and insulting to the source material at worst. It’s a terrible show, Willow.” 

It was only after Hunter prattled out his monologue that he remembered that he possessed a pair of lungs that gave him trouble if they weren’t utilized every few seconds. He filled himself up. 

At a loss on how to respond to that but always impressed by his flaunts of bleeding passion, Willow simply nodded. “Noted.” 

“But um...”

It happened again. One moment, Hunter was all self-assured bluster, and then the next, something humbling overcame him, and he was shrinking in on himself, looking embarrassed to be alive. 

The next breath he took was a purposefully steadying one, pressing his hands together, fingertips brushing against his chin. 

“In this... terrible show, O’Bailey is played by....” 

He trailed off, the last syllables shaking a little as he lost his nerve. Hunter swallowed, struggling to get his voice to be normal about the name on his mind.  

“Daniel Stone....” 

He failed. The name fell out of him as a breakable whisper, bordering on worship. 

“Aaaaand....Nari is played by....”

The same grapple between throat and tongue occurred.

“Erika Yi....” 

This name crumbled his attempts at composure, and Hunter was lost to an untameable smile. 

Willow could see his efforts to downplay his expression from the way his lip twitched and tremored, but saying those names aloud seemed to spellbind him, leaving him both chagrined and giddy. His smile was one of disobedient exhilaration, like a secret he enjoyed having.

The rosy hue that saturated his face burst vibrantly up the length of his ears. 

“They’re...” Hunter glanced elsewhere, possibly to shield his twitterpated smile. He idly scratched at his cheek. “They’re big stars in the Human Realm. There’s a lot of interviews and... photoshoots.... ” 

The word ‘photoshoots’ gave his already uneven breath an additional hitch. There was a glossy, distant look in his eye, like he had mentally checked out for a brief moment. 

“Awwww,” Willow heard herself coo, surging with empathy. 

Her latest encounter with Vyra Spidervein was all the experience needed to understand what those photoshoots must have done to him. 

“And I’ve...I’ve been. Looking at them.” He mumbled, and then his gaze wandered across the room to where his desk setup was situated. 

Willow followed his line of sight, and when her own eyes landed on that chunky, silver object known as a ‘laptop’, a loose dangly question that hung overheard suddenly clicked into something clear and obvious.

“I’ve been looking at them....a lot.”

“Oooooooooooooh,” Instigated Willow, fully aware of the flustering power a good strong ‘Oooooh’ could have over even the most stoic individuals. Which Hunter was not, not by a longshot. It would surely have him in burning red shambles. 

It did. 

Hunter wound up with giggles leaking out of him, like it tickled unbearably just to breathe. 

And when Willow shimmied into his space, attacking him with little pokes and sing-songing “You’ve got it so baaaaaad,” it only got worse. 

“Don’t tell Gus,” Said Hunter, catching her wrists. This was clearly a serious matter, as he was trying desperately to sober up his face, but he couldn’t contain his mania. 

“Please. Don’t tell him.” The way he begged like his life was on the line, while simultaneously sporting a wide, goofy grin was so absurd that it got Willow snickering. “Promise you won’t tell him.”

“I won’t, I won’t, I promise,” 

“I swear I don’t like the show. I don’t. It’s bad. It’s extraordinarily bad. It’s just that....” Hunter hung his head in shame, channelling his restlessness by rubbing little circles into the skin of Willow’s wrists. 

“Daniel Stone and Erika Yi....” He practically sighed out their names. “Whenever they’re on screen, they’re...Willow, they’re....they’re....”

Hunter was reduced to tongue-tied gaping, choking out the occasional strangled noise. He flailed his hands around helplessly, desperate for some means to articulate himself, but the enormous swell of feelings was too raw and shining for the binary of words. 

“I know what that means!” Willow bounced a bit where she sat, once again feeling the satisfying thrill of recognition.  

“I know that look!” She brushed her hands across his chin to tilt his head up. His inflamed face felt pleasant against her fingertips. Like a very handsome hearth. 

“They’re hot, aren’t they? Daniel Stone and Erika Yi are hot. ”

“Yeah...!” Hunter groaned. The guttural admission was one of relieved rapture, like a knot between his shoulder blades had been strung out.

Oh. So, it was that simple. 

‘Hot’ was that one forbidden adjective that he just didn’t have the guts to utter, and it had reduced him to agony. 

She was happy to have helped clear the air by throwing it out there.

Hunter was just as staggered by his outburst as Willow, hands immediately clamping over his mouth. 

“I-I mean-I mean!” He stammered. “They’re talented. As actors! Talented actors.”

His guilt ridden mortification ravaged the lines of his face, as he tripped over his own frantic efforts to explain himself. It was like Daniel Stone and Erika Yi were in the room right now, and he had just been unspeakably rude. 

“I have a lot of respect for them,” He spouted hurriedly. “Even if the show is bad, they’re dedicated to the performance. They understand their characters and they take it seriously and they-they.....”

Hunter’s gentlemanly insistence on establishing his admiration for their talent quickly diminished into nothingness as he ran out of things to say. 

His mouth an open residence for dust, his palms still swirling around aimlessly, he was evidently wracking his brain for something more to polish up this honest sentiment of his. 

But the tightness of his breath and the rose garden blooming across his face was presenting the full picture, clear as day. Respectful as he was, Hunter was still a teenage boy with a terrible case of heart eyes. 

He gave up. 

With nothing left to add and finding that he was up against a metaphorical wall, everything fell to bits and Hunter let himself dissolve in a heavy, lamenting sigh. 

“They’re so pretty...” He finally said, his voice absolutely soaked in emotion. He sounded faint, he sounded dreamy, he sounded aching.  

He sounded like Daniel Stone and Erika Yi being ‘so pretty’ was something that he was immensely hung up on. He sounded like he had been quietly pent up about it for a long while.

Willow reckoned that it would be a fair equivalent exchange. He had witnessed, listened to and even encouraged her when she went complete loonyleaves over Vyra Spidervein, and it had left her all bubble brained and floaty. 

It was pleasurable. Months ago, after falling into this thing with Hunter, Willow realized that feeling this way, like glass in someone’s hands, didn’t have to scare the living daylights out of her. 

It all depended on who was holding the glass. And if it happened to be the warm, elegant, life-bringing hands of a passionate woodcarver, then being glass could feel outright addicting. 

Allowing herself to prattle away like a foolish, flighty, vulnerable young girl had been nice. Embarrassing, but in a weird squishy kind of way that she liked. 

She wanted Hunter to feel it too. 

Additionally, he was precious beyond words right now, and she wanted to push it a bit for her own self-indulgent reasons. 

Look, she wasn’t perfect. 

“How pretty?” Willow asked, in the gentle velvety tone that could usually melt the tension out of Hunter’s shoulders when he was agitated. The kind of voice that he liked cuddling into. 

She made no effort to pry open any barriers with brute force, but she politely rapped her knuckles against the iron railings. “Do you wanna tell me about it?”

It worked wonders. 

“Oh!” Pleasantly surprised by the invitation, Hunter seemed to get overwhelmed by the opportunity to jabber out whatever his heart desired. It caused him to slip and stumble over his own excitement. “O-okay! Okay, um.” 

Half formed sentence starters buffered and bumped into each others’ rear ends in the oral equivalent of a traffic jam. 

“So, uh. H-he...um. Well, it was-...he. So....let me start over.”

Willow waited patiently for Hunter to get himself straightened (Hah!) out. 

“In the latest episode of Origins ,” He finally managed to say. “O’Bailey had a....” 

He trailed off for a doubtful moment, before continuing in an almost inaudible whisper. Almost inaudible , because she had her ears perked attentively. 

“Changing scene...” 

Willow was really getting accustomed to loud dramatic gasps, this recent instalment intermingling with a bout of incredulous laughter. 

“Shirtless!” She exclaimed, adrenalized by the unpredictably spicy turn this conversation had taken. Out of everything she would have expected Hunter to say…

“Well, yeah but--”

“I bet his pecs looked divine,” 

Willow seized Hunter’s forearm, giving him an urgent jostle to stir up the gossipy mood. 

“Nonono it was--well. I mean maybe his--”

Hunter paused, briefly contemplative before he caught himself. He shook his head forcefully, shooing the visions away. “I dunno! I didn’t see it. His chest, I mean. Because of the camera angle.”

“Buuut?” Willow was eager for the continuation.

“I wasn’t gonna mention his butt!” He snapped, affronted. 

A quiet pause fell, which was his own damn fault. The realization struck and he turned a gloriously fluorescent shade of red, while pointedly ignoring Willow’s knowing smirk. 

“What I meant to say is...back muscles,” Hunter corrected, so dedicated to glossing over his blunder that he seemed to forget that this was also a rather risqué feature to bring up.

“His back muscles. He had to take off his shirt because of all the blood stains. Long story. And then he pulled it over his head and--” 

Hunter’s delayed reaction to his own words arrived mid-explanation. It hit him like a brick that he was currently describing a handsome man’s anatomy, and his eyes popped open, fingers making knots out of themselves.

“The...the muscles just....they moved.” He rolled his own shoulders in a feeble attempt at demonstration. “They moved perfectly... .all the way down his back. It all just rippled and...and....”

As fidgety and worked up as Hunter was getting, he was showing no signs of stopping. Actually, he seemed to be getting quite enthusiastically rambly.

“It left his hair all...all messed up. I-I don’t know how to describe it. But it looked good. Really good. And!” 

Hunter leaned forward, gripping Willow’s knee for dramatic effect, eyes boring into hers. It was apparently crucial that she was listening. 

She gave a speedy nod to assure him that she was chewing up every word he spoke. 

“And when he turned around, there was a closeup shot of his face. And he has...his eyes are....” Hunter’s gaze fell to his open hands, as though searching for advice in the creases of his palms in order to fully comprehend those eyes. 

“They’re grey....” He said in hushed tones, looking borderline haunted by his own overpowering attraction. “They are so grey. You would not believe how grey his eyes are.” 

Willow expressed her pool of gratification through a low contented hum. 

“Hot guy. Pretty eyes. Back muscles. Oh, I like this, Hunter, I like this a lot.” 

“A-and...” The noticeable tremor to his voice got Willow straightening her relaxed posture, anticipation rising. 

“And Nari...” 

Uttering the name had a full body effect on him and Hunter went completely undone with a lovelorn whine. 

“Nari, Willow...”

“Do you like her butt?” She joked, expecting him to get snippy again. 

But the remark startled him terribly, eyelids fluttering like he had been blinded. His mouth then stretched into a firm line and he glanced elsewhere, abashed. 

It took every ounce of Willow’s self restraint not to break into explosive belly laughter. A giggle or two slipped out, but she stifled it behind her hands.

“Wait, do you?!” 

“I mean!” Hunter spluttered. “She’s....” 

Translation: Yes

“So!” He deflected by going off on another tangent about canon compliance, a topic that made him feel so self-assured that it worked like a breather to recompose himself when his seams were bursting. 

“The outfit she wears on the show is not accurate to the books at all. In Cosmic Frontier, Nari wears combat pants and a green smock that belonged to her dead father.”

The way Hunter spoke on this subject was utterly serrated, his eye-contact locked and intense, like he was trying to drill these facts into Willow’s skull. 

She nodded, knowing damn well that the moment this information was stored in her brain, it had an imminent expiration date. 

Oh well. It was important to Hunter. So for the rest of the evening, it would be important to Willow too. 

“But in the show, she wears a form fitting jumpsuit. Which is impractical. There’s not even any storage for her pocket journal.” 

“There’s not even any storage for her pocket journal,” Parroted Willow, pulling her most disgusted grimace. 

“Or the lucky seeds she carries!”

“Unbelievable.” 

“It is!” Stressed Hunter. “It’s out of character for Nari to be this unprepared. I don’t like it.” 

Willow was semi-convinced that he had completely derailed the conversation until his scowl started showing cracks. One of his cheeks bulged from his tongue poking against the inside, like he was hesitantly rolling a remark around in his mouth. 

“But also...” His voice had gone very timid again, wavering on its vowels. He swallowed. “Also it’s....mmph.” 

Mmph. 

Whatever Hunter wanted to blurt out, his throat was having a visceral reaction to it and was hellbent on silencing him.

He raised his hands and hovered them about, as though he was about to perform some charade before thinking better of it. His fingers curled into loose fists and slumped into his lap. Those big beautiful ears were going to suffer first degree burns if they kept lighting up like this.

Willow allowed the silence to sit for a moment, observing Hunter’s contrite squirming with an intermingle of endeared amusement, sympathy and total understanding. 

How in Titan’s name could she not understand what was happening? Willow was not unobservant. She had been catching his fleeting glances since the day they met, when she lassoed him out of the sky and spit him up on the Flyer Derby field. 

Being fifteen had felt like realms away from being fourteen. Witch puberty was sudden, it was jarring, a painful stretch and swell of flesh and bone. 

Additionally, it was beyond inconvenient to wake up one morning, plagued with a dull throbbing sensation gnawing up her entire torso, only to find that nothing in her closet fit anymore. 

She remembered stepping out to the grounds wearing a tank top and shorts, and when Caleb Jasper Bloodwilliams got a good look at her, he did a double take. All the single-minded ferocity on his face was wiped clean, the glint in his eyes blanking. 

It was only a split-second malfunction. He recovered instantly, tearing his gaze away and resuming his motivational (and... violently passionate) chant to their teammates.

But it had been there. An inkling of hormonal curiosity, which began making semi-frequent appearances from that point on.

Initially, Willow was indifferent towards it. She appreciated that he didn’t gawk, or make any comments, but she wasn’t especially fazed by what happened either. However, suddenly being perceived in a way she wasn’t used to certainly took some time to sink in. 

It wasn’t uncomfortable, just...new. She still hadn’t adjusted to being fifteen, so she was a little out of her depth. 

Things changed with time. Within a month, Willow found his admiration flattering. After years of having her chubby cheeks squished from other peoples’ cuteness aggression, she liked feeling attractive in a more mature sense. 

Her eyes were consistently peeled for any instance of him peeking anywhere below her collarbone. 

His efforts to not look were obvious, and it only stroked her competitive spirit, compelling her to make it more difficult for him. 

Point was she knew her boyfriend and his implications about Erika Yi didn’t surprise her. 

Perched on Hunter’s bedside table was an alarm clock that resembled a spaceship. It had been a gift from Gus for his seventeenth birthday. 

It ticked with a vendetta against silence. She never really noticed how loud clocks could be until things were quiet. 

The persistent ticks were needling Hunter’s nerves, his facial muscles twitching. 

From the beanbag across the room, there was a low Zzzzzzzz from a snoring Clover. 

Willow finally decided to speak, both to relieve Hunter’s torment and possibly worsen it. 

“Hey...remember when you started your apprenticeship with Del? And you had to learn your way around a chisel?” 

Hunter lifted his head, confused. But it didn’t last, as his brow promptly scrunched in suspicion. 

“Yeah? Why?” 

Palistrom wood had been far too valuable back then to be used as practice material for an aspiring carver who still had no idea what he was doing. So, for those first few months, Hunter could be spotted whittling away at a hunk of any other tree on the Isles, just so his hands could get accustomed to the tools. 

Those moments had been so peaceful. The stress of rebuilding the Isles had gotten under everyones’ skin, and having this steady rhythmic hobby to lose himself in had relaxed his anxiety. 

Watching him work had soothed Willow too. She remembered cupping her cheeks in her hands, gazing intently as those narrow, calloused palms got a good grip on a carving knife. 

He had deft, slender fingers with such pronounced knuckles. The veins on his backhand resembled a system of tree roots and she wanted to touch every inch of them with her lips. 

At that point in time, they had yet to define their relationship. Things were busy, they were shifting into new lives, so romance had to be shelved indefinitely while everything stabilized. 

Not that the mutual flirting stopped entirely. Or the ‘accidental’ brushing of fingertips. Or Willow’s subtle attempts to make him look at her.  

And though Hunter had gotten much better at being sneaky, Willow still knew he had been looking. 

The proof was in his practice sculptures. 

“Remember when you carved all those smooth, wide, curvaceous shapes--?”

The way his face drastically rearranged itself with dawning comprehension made her laugh out loud. 

“Ahbupbupbup!” Hunter yelped, getting unwittingly plunged into a boiled memory pool that sent his blush blistering down his neck. 

He lunged, grabbing for her wiggly hand movements, which were taunting him with the outline of an hourglass. When he caught her, she was snickering, trying to escape. 

“No! Shush! Stop! No!” Hunter was demanding while they tussled half-heartedly, though unable to protect himself as he inevitably caught Willow’s giggles. 

“All I’m saying is...” She panted, once the brief bout of friskiness had ebbed away. 

His grin shone, chest rising and falling. 

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with appreciating beautiful shapes.”

It wasn’t until she felt the abrupt absence of his touch that she noticed that Hunter had been stroking her hip. 

Out of reflex, she captured his hand before it could get away from her and firmly re-established its position.

It made him gulp, which was a little uncharacteristic for the Hunter she knew, but she was beginning to understand how it had gotten to this point. 

Willow’s boyfriend was an extremely physically affectionate person. It had just taken a few months of trust building to extract the brunt of it out of him. The wear and tear of sixteen untouchable years could never be mended, but a starvation could be satiated. 

Once the two of them were given free reign to leave fingerprints all over each other, it was rare that he wasn’t touching her in some capacity.

It wasn’t like him to shy away from holding her hips. 

But it was like him to wilt in embarrassment if anyone drew attention to it.

She slowly grazed her thumb across his wrist bone, like a lingering kiss in a different language. 

“Why wouldn’t you like them? You are an artist, after all,” Said Willow merrily, punctuating her statement with a jaunty wink. 

Something about her remark made Hunter sweeten. He snuffed a faint chuckle, wearing one of those silly asymmetrical little smiles.  

“Well, it’s...it’s not just her...” 

He mouthed the word ‘Shape’, which kindled Willow’s smirk.

One of these days, she was going to siphon all the forbidden adjectives from his voicebox with the pull of her own two lips. 

“But um. She’s...” 

Hunter leaned in close, and she could sense his barely contained tizzy, like this was a delicious secret that he was just dying to tell her. 

“She’s got this smile and it’s...Nari’s smile is....”

Infectious, apparently. Because just the mention of it was wiping its glow all over his face. 

“She’s got dimples...”

Her mouth fell open comically wide, the exact reaction Hunter was hoping for, based on how he excitedly bit down on his dopey grin.

Willow burst out with a delighted shriek, flinging her arms around his shoulders. It nearly sent him toppling over. 

“Hunter’s weak for girls with dimples~” She carolled, one cheek rubbing itself against his, while the other was used to flaunt the adorable little dent in her facial pudge. She drilled the tip of her index finger into it as she teased him, drawing as much attention to the feature as possible. 

Hunter neither confirmed nor denied the allegation, as he was struggling to utter anything more than monosyllabic. He seemed content to be squeezed and nuzzled in Willow’s embrace, making do with the noises he was capable of. (“Heh...heh...heheheheh....”)

“You’re cute,” Purred Willow, knowing how much he liked to hear her say that.

“Wait, wait, I have to tell you the worst part!” Gasped Hunter, who, for all his awkwardness, was transparently savouring the attention and engagement Willow was giving him. 

Predictably, the moment he deliberately built anticipation, he faltered. 

“There was a--there… o-oh my Titan, Willow.” 

“You can do it, champ,” She whispered with gritted-teeth zest, like the Captain she was. 

“She walked in...” He continued. Slowly. 

“Uh huh...”

“On-on O’Bailey...”

“Uh huh...”

The next fragment was evidently a doozy, as Hunter looked borderline lightheaded just trying to summon the remains of the sentence. His mouth twisted around showily, in what was likely an effort to gather some moisture. 

“During his shirtless scene....”

Rather than rejoice with a high pitched yell like the good little audience she was, Willow assessed the situation at hand, and reacted accordingly, with a tiny, awed gasp.

“The tension...” She said in a sotto voice, gently rocking him from side to side, with all the care of a professional healer cradling a weakened patient. 

There was only so much his heart could handle, after all. 

“T-the way she....she was-she was looking at him and he-he!” Hunter was reduced to clumsy gibber-gabber, gripping at clumps of his hair in what may be a trace of hottie induced insanity. 

“A-and he was looking at her! I had to...” He shoved his balled fists into his eyes and drew out a rough, throaty groan of absolute anguish. 

“I had to pause. It was too much. Way too much. I had to…I needed a minute before I could try watching. And then they…they…”

Willow awaited the thrilling conclusion of what the shirtless, muscly grey eyed O’Bailey could have possibly gotten up to with the full figured, dimpled Nari. 

Well, based on the way Hunter was floundering to say it out loud, and the series having a PG13 rating, it was presumably spicy but not too spicy. 

Head propped against his shoulder, Willow casually pricked her lips against the strip of his neck. 

He went completely still, save for the sharp, unsteady inhale that rattled his frame. 

Theory confirmed. 

“Did they kiss?” She still chose to ask. 

Hunter nodded briskly, blind terror and rip roaring excitement fighting flame to flame in his crazed eyes.  

“Wow. Those two hotties kissing.” Willow idly traced a squiggly shape down Hunter’s chest. “How did you not explode?” 

She was honestly surprised. As if he wasn’t already dealing with enough attacks from all ends, with both gorgeous actors effortlessly seducing him. And now, they had the audacity to express romantic affection in a particular way that Hunter was notoriously vulnerable to. 

The first time he and Willow kissed, he blasted off in an eruption of gold, like the thing in the ‘pinball machine’ in Camila’s basement. 

The second time they kissed, he did it again. 

The third time they kissed, Willow warned him of her incoming lips in advance, so he had a chance to brace himself.

He still did it. 

“I-I-I wanted to--!” His voice splintered. “I mean I wanted them to...to...!”

His fists bunched into his lap, gripping the material of his trousers like he was about to start shredding it. 

Peeking down the gape of his neckhole, she was thrilled to see the skin-deep heat had ventured beyond his neck. Though she couldn’t see the full picture with his sweatshirt in the way, Hunter’s blush was known to sometimes burnish his shoulders and it was a ravishing sight. 

“Let me guess,” Lilted Willow. “You wanted themmmm toooo....kiss you senseless?” 

Hunter jolted, doing his best impression of Clover’s favourite squeaky toy. 

She expected him to deny it, to blurt out something like ‘W-well, I wouldn’t go that far!’, to downplay, to backtrack, to start rambling about canon inaccuracies again before the heat in his face spread to his brain and he fainted. 

But what she didn’t expect was the tension drenched stretch of silence, in which she felt him squirm to kingdom come, followed by a curt, sheepish nod. 

Oh. She was a terrible influence on him. 

Wait....

Actually, no. She was not.  

All Willow was responsible for was coaxing him into gushing a little, not even expecting more than a few shy murmurs. 

And Hunter voluntarily went above and beyond what was asked of him, having apparently been keeping this all pent up for far longer than he could endure, and now it was all leaking out. 

This was all him. 

He was boy crazy.

He was girl crazy. 

He was even more perfect for Willow than she initially thought.  

She stared at Hunter with a blaze of newfound obsession, like the way she would feel in an uncharted jungle, gluttonous to know the what’s, why’s, and how’s. 

To sink her hands into the dirt and figure out the kinds of roots slithering around under there, to get up close and personal with the most ferocious, temperamental toothy plants on the premises, to invent names for the bright, luminous blossoms that she was about to discover. 

She wanted to peel back layer upon layer of the unknown and find what bloomed at the core. 

She also wanted to kiss him to smithereens. 

Of course, Willow was going to massage this new spongy thing in her hands and see if he liked the way it felt. 

Even though Hunter was looking firmly in the opposite direction, it was like he sensed something was brewing with his wicked witch of a girlfriend, as his body suddenly stiffened. 

But, and this was notable, he made no effort to establish some space. They remained lumped together in a shared personal bubble. His body heat was so palpable, it made her bones feel heavy. 

“How did you imagine they’d do it?” Willow asked, conversational in tone. 

Her bones got heavier as Hunter scorched hotter. 

He mumbled something under his breath, which wasn’t saying much, as he barely had any breath to mumble under. Even for Willow’s keen ears, the words were an incomprehensible pitter patter of sounds. 

But...the final word he uttered hit her eardrum in just the right way, and coupled with the shape of his lips on that final note, she had a pretty good idea of what he said. 

Hips. 

Her enthusiasm prickled. 

Willow took his torso in her hands and stroked down the path of his flanks, fingers skittering like adventurous spiders. “They’d take you by the hips?”

Being practically glued to his side gave her the advantage of seeing and/or feeling every emotion provoke his body up close and personal. 

A shiver juddered down Hunter’s spine, from shoulders to tailbone, which was hilarious, as he was making a strenuous effort to match her casual demeanour. 

He was bold enough to answer her. 

“Mmhm...” 

Willow’s grin stretched to elastic proportions. 

He really shouldn’t have answered her, because now she was not going to let him get away. 

There was a slight pocket of fat padding his midriff that had accumulated in the last year. It was quite an accomplishment, and Willow, Darius, Camila, and Hunter himself were all pretty proud of it. 

She delicately kneaded the pudge that cushioned his waist, just as a friendly reminder of where her hands were currently situated. 

Even if he probably didn’t need it.

He couldn’t sit completely still, even if he was mentally frozen. She still felt the occasional nervous shift, though he wasn’t resisting her hold on him. He seemed locked in a state of suspense for whatever she was building up to. 

After getting himself riled up and love-brained over his special little hot people, he wasn’t likely to turn down any form of affection right now.

“Would they hold your hips gently?” She asked, a power rush pumping through her veins. “Or...would they manhandle you a bit?”

Another pause. 

“.....The second one,” He replied breathlessly. 

Oh, she loved that answer.

“Yessir!”

Putting the iron in her biceps to good use, Willow did a swift rearrangement of positions and yanked Hunter into her. He let out a yelp that was impossible to clearly describe, but it was reminiscent of the classic ‘Eep!’

They crashed chest-to-chest, Hunter’s hands hovering in midair because he didn’t know what else to do with them. Her self-satisfied smile countered a very specific expression on his face that she recalled seeing on grom night.

He somehow found a halfway point between looking scared out of his Titandamn mind, and restlessly eager about wherever this was going. 

“Daniel Stone and Erika Yi reporting for duty.” 

“....Huh?” His pitch had risen several octaves. 

“You heard me. Daniel Stone and Erika Yi are here to give you some little kisses,” She emphasized her statement with a pepper of comical smoochy noises. 

Hunter’s jitters were momentarily relieved by an incredulous scoff. The smile on his face was of a boy who knew a joke was happening, but couldn’t figure out why it was funny. 

“No they’re not,” He said, so matter of factly that Willow had to refrain from laughing herself. 

“Okay, they’re not,” She admitted. “But if you just use your imagination, ” 

That caught his attention. Based on all the Cosmic Frontier LARPs he had performed in the basement with Gus and Camila, Hunter had a cavernous capacity for imagination and a profuse desire to exercise it. 

“So, hypothetically,” Continued Willow, easing them both into this by slowly lifting her hand and ghosting her fingertips against Hunter’s cheekbone.

The teasing touch seemed to affect him, if even to a miniscule extent. His eyes were expectant, hopeful, instinctively yearning for the firm press of her soft cushiony palm. 

“If Erika Yi, with her pretty dimples and her pretty shape, were to take one look at you ,” 

His eyebrows shot up his hairline, and he gasped so feebly that one would think he had lungs the size of a firefly. 

“She would say ‘Oh my Titan!’--”

“Humans don’t say that.” Hunter interrupted, and Willow cursed herself for shattering the illusion with the lack of Human Authenticity. 

“Sorry. What would she say?” 

He had to ponder it for a few seconds, and Willow was so dedicated to pulling this off that she couldn’t even get distracted by his adorable thinking face. 

“Jesus.” 

“And then Erika Yi, ” She pointedly stretched out the name as an equivalent of jingling keys to reel his attention back to the fantasy. “Would take one look at you and she would say ‘Oh my Jesus! Aren’t you handsome?’” 

Hunter jerked like he had been electrocuted, sparks flying in his eyes.

“She....” His voice crackled, his larynx forgetting this part of puberty was over. “She would say that....?” 

Willow beamed. She nodded in that concise adamant way which signaled that she was leaving no room for arguments. 

Hunter’s hand went to his cheek, eyes dipping away. His bashful smile grew so wide that it demanded a flaunt of his tooth gap. It looked like it was taking everything in him not to squeal. 

“That was nice of her,” He mumbled. 

“And theeeen....” Willow’s knuckle hooked Hunter’s chin, tipping his head up. 

His blotted pupils intently followed the pad of her finger, going cross-eyed as it touched the bridge of his nose. “She would say ‘Oh, your nose is magnificent,’”

She tenderly stroked down the aquiline slope, trying not to break character out of delight when his whole body reacted with a volatile shudder. 

“Hah!” He hacked out nervously. “Ha ha! Thanks, I got it from a dead guy!” 

Willow froze. 

So did Hunter. A cringe crumpled his face. 

“Did she--?”

“She didn’t hear you,” She hastily assured him with a flitter of her hand. 

“OhthankTitan...” He heaved a sigh of relief. 

Willow hopped, skipped and jumped over the next line in her mental script about his eyes, and thanked her luck that she didn’t start with that. 

Instead, she snuck an arm around Hunter’s back and used two fingers to strike a line down the space between his shoulder blades. 

Startled, his spine snapped rigid, and he automatically gripped Willow’s upper arms.

“Um.” Hunter tried to glance behind him, discombobulated by all the touching from multiple angles. “What’s--?”

“That’s Daniel Stone,” Willow smoothly provided. “Here’s here too, remember?”  

Hunter whipped his head around immediately, as though he was now scared to look behind him because there was a monster looming over his shoulder, with beautiful grey eyes that would liquidize him if he looked directly at them.

“And he’s...”

“Touching your back.”

“Right...” He said, untethered from reality. He sounded faint and faraway. 

Willow repeated the action for good measure, biting down a snicker as Hunter jumped in her arms. He squeezed her biceps, like they were his only safety rails on this hair-raising rollercoaster ride she was taking him on. 

She marvelled at her own ability to captivate him in this silly scenario. Granted, his resistance to imagining something out of his wildest dreams was basically nonexistent, but she would still give herself some credit here. 

Who said Willow Park sucked at illusion magic? 

The back strokes abruptly stopped, just as Hunter was getting used to it, and she savoured the comically transparent disappointment that drooped his lips. 

Those two fingers began climbing his spine like a staircase and he tensed with every step taken. They reached the nape of his neck, grazing teasingly across the skin beneath his scruffy hair. 

“He’s thinking about...” Willow said in hushed tones, fingers wandering dangerously close to Hunter’s earlobe. “Touching that spot. Since he knows you really like it~”

She expected that Hunter would have agreed so fast he tripped over his own tongue. But instead, his features creased dubiously

“I don’t think Daniel Stone would know about that spot. Not a lot of people do. S-so it would be unrealistic if he suddenly--” 

Willow could not resist rolling her eyes. Immersion be damned, she was going in for the kill. 

Her two fingers slid into the crevice behind his ear, attached themselves to that one thin, sensitive patch of skin that she was so well acquainted with, and began creating friction. 

“O-or maybe! Maybe I told him! Or you told him! Somebody told him! Or he-he--” Hunter began babbling senselessly, his whole neck stretching practically horizontally to make his ear as accessible to her fingers as physically possible.

Willow couldn’t stop herself from giggling. His efforts to rationalize the scritches were rushed and frantic, like she was going to stop if he couldn’t plead an airtight case fast enough. Like she hadn’t initiated it in the first place. 

It was definitely for the sake of his own immersion that he convinced himself this made sense. He could be very particular about specifics, and he was gripping to threads to remain in this reality. 

“Someone told him,” She said, as his reasoning had already deteriorated into blissed-out, distracted Um’s and Uh’s.

That was all Hunter needed to instantly melt into the sensation with complete willingness. 

Luz had once pointed out that despite Hunter’s unfortunate lack of a tail, he wore his moods so loudly that it felt natural to picture one wagging, all ablur, thumping against wherever he sat. 

Hunter’s nonexistent tail was most certainly wagging right now. Eyes screwed shut, a contented little smile playing across his lips.

Sometimes, Willow’s fingers slid slightly off target to scratch somewhere besides the sacred spot, and it made him buck and jiggle his head around in primal frustration to get it back in the perfect position. 

His molten colouring had not subsided, a persistently radiant ruby glow against his skin. Red suited him, as did all the other introductory shades of pink that came before red. 

Willow didn’t know what the majority consensus was on blushing. Did other people consider it attractive? She wasn’t sure, it had never really come up in conversation. 

Well, if you were obsessed with a boy that was prone to blushing, it might give you a bias. 

It was so deeply ingrained in how she ended up stumbling into love with him. Whenever he did something that made the vines tighten around her heart, there was usually a little something staining his cheeks. Half the time, it had been because he couldn’t handle the way she was looking at him. 

The smile, the blush, the invisible tail....

Her impatience flared and Willow decided that she needed to kiss him now like her life depended on it. 

For her health, for her sanity, and for his dizzy little desires about these random humans that he liked so much. 

She didn’t stop scritching with no warning. That would surely render him hopelessly spacey, uncomprehending of anything that was going on besides how harrowing it was to exist with an un-scritched ear. 

Instead, Willow began gradually decreasing momentum, slower and slower until his senses returned to him. So, by the time the scritches petered out and her fingers drifted away, Hunter’s eyes were open, aware of his surroundings and capable of bravely holding out until next time.

Her fingers drummed against his shoulder and she careened herself into him. 

“As promised,” Willow whispered, inadvertently smiley as the tip of her nose bumped against his. “Your kiss from Erika,” 

He had been caught off guard by the spontaneity, entertaining her with a mousy squeak. And while she didn’t see the funny little ‘o’ that warped his mouth, she felt the shape of it on her own. 

It corrected itself swiftly enough, his shoulders sagging with languid rapture.

“And from Daniel,” She added, still lingering in the remnants of a kiss, gently dabbing lips against lips. 

The soft sound of a kiss disconnecting was melodious to Willow, a sweet parting gift to a tender moment. It was a silver lining to the kiss ending, as was drawing back to see the way you were being looked at. 

But when Willow pulled away, Hunter’s eyes were still closed. He remained with a slightly parted mouth, expecting the red to be poured into his lips any minute now. 

Her smile tightened, cheeks swelling with air in her efforts not to burst into giggles. She hastily recuperated.

Oh, she couldn’t resist. 

“Okay, that’s it!” Announced Willow buoyantly, which got her the exact reaction she wanted. 

Hunter’s eyes broke wide open, his expression promptly eclipsed by a storm of emotions. Love-drunken confusion, frustration, dismay, denial, complete and utter devastation. 

All those feelings bubbled up his throat against his will, tearing out of him in the form of a single disoriented “Ah--?!” 

Willow cracked, blowing up with a round of loud, raucous laughter, clutching her midsection for dear life.

Hunter’s trance shattered when he heard the music of clear betrayal. And as he regathered himself, his mouth only opened wider, the edges stretching into the smile of a provoked beast. 

He laughed along with her, but his was a low, sinister rumbling. 

“What did you expect?” Willow asked, once her giggles subsided. Her tone was one of jingling joy. “It was your first kiss with Erika and Daniel, Hun! Let’s be realistic here, they wouldn’t--mmph!”

She didn’t get to finish her theatrical lecture on the importance of realism, because of the impulsive actions of Hunter, who had apparently thrown his opinions of those rules out his mental window. 

Willow didn’t know if he was kissing Daniel or Erika right now, but that was her mouth he was muffling, and her waist he was reeling in close and she couldn’t complain about either of those things. 

The soft melodious sound of parting lips coursed into a chorus, sending her swinging between feeling satiated and desperate as Hunter utilized the maddening technique of teasing her with chaste yet urgent kisses.

The ‘How do you like it?’ of it all was deafening. 

He didn’t allow the prick of lips to ever linger just a moment longer, making Willow whine impatiently. 

It became unbearable to wait around to be kissed the way she desired, as tempting as it felt right now, so she took matters into her own hands. 

Literally, the matters in question were Hunter’s cheeks, which she cupped tight the moment he leaned in for another feathery peck. She hung on like a lifeline, fervently drinking up the sweetly gold taste of him, and he didn’t resist her. 

Roughhousing almost always led to making out. 

Sometimes it was just delayed by a penstagram notification. But they got there eventually. 

The next time she heard the parting sound, it was because they had stolen too much oxygen from each other. 

Willow breathed deep and exhilarated, as Hunter’s forehead tipped forward to rest against hers, his own heavy exhales tickling her face. 

When she looked up to find his eyes, they were hanging off the sight of her.

His lips quirked in crooked mischievousness, like he knew something she didn’t.

“Hi, Willow~ ” Lilted Hunter, out of habit. 

She used to blush garishly and go into wiggle mode when he said her name like that. And though overuse had dulled its effect on her, the rise and fall on those two syllables had become so second-nature to him that it tended to crop up whenever he got flirtatious. 

But tonight, she instantly rejected it. 

“No, no, no!” Said Willow with a flip of her wrist. “Erika and Daniel, remember?” 

As aggravating as he was, with his insanity-inducing kissing tactics, she was still feebly trying to weave some curtain of immersion to keep the fantasy alive. All to make him happy. 

But then, Hunter scoffed, with a shake of his head. There was no ridicule to the gesture, his expression transparently endeared, but it did leave Willow confused. 

“What?” She asked. 

“You can’t just kiss me and make me think it’s somebody else.” He was kind enough to explain. “It’s always gonna feel like you. I can taste your chapstick.” 

So much for her newfound flair for illusion magic. 

“Thorns....” Willow murmured, pressing a fingertip against her bottom lip. With a subtle skim of her tongue against the pulpy pink, she concluded that there was indeed a slight apple-y tang.  

“Sorry my Erika and Daniel impression was unconvincing.” She said with a sigh of theatrical remorse. “I’ll never be them.”

Smile unwavering, Hunter tilted his head, his eyes soft and syrupy. 

“You’re Willow,” He told her, in a way that he specifically reserved for the utterance of anything particularly world-shattering. And in this case, that was her. “You’re Captain Willow Park.” 

The subsequent moment was a bit of a haze, as Willow’s eyes went glossy with the full extent of him and the realms upon realms of spiralling quirks and features that made a boneless lagoon out of her. 

Hunter. 

She was so busy perfusing with ardent admiration for every inch of his face that she barely noticed the way the features on that face rearranged themselves. 

But then, she did. 

“What’s that smug look for?” Smirked Willow.

He was ridiculously pleased with himself, chest puffed out and wearing a smile so wide that the muscles were threatening to snap like rubber bands. 

“You’re rubbing my jawline~” Hunter answered, practically singing it. 

She was. 

The area in question was in the tender caress of Willow’s palm. Though cut like a shard, the skin was soft to the touch. 

She was conscious of the scars lacerating his profile, and her fingers knew without intervention from her brain to tread carefully around the sensitive edges. 

She couldn’t get enough of his smile, nor the fact that he was childishly overjoyed by the simple reminder that his jawline was, in fact, drop dead gorgeous. 

“What can I say?” Willow shrugged, fully encouraging whatever earnest tizzy he had gotten himself into. She would willingly inflate his ego even further if this was the result. “I’m a fan.” 

That got a little celebratory squeal out of him, which brought out the teeth in Willow’s grin. She squished his face a little tighter, liking the way the minor cheek pudge gathered beneath his eyes. 

When Hunter leaned in, Willow’s eyes automatically slid shut. Her lips pursed for convenience sake, readily anticipating him to swoop in and warm them up, as he had been working on a moment prior. It was a reasonable assumption.

But he did not go for Willow’s lips. At least not yet. 

She was left dumbly floored, eyelashes fluttering, as Hunter planted a lingering kiss into the roundness of her side profile. 

It took her a second to react properly. 

“Oh!” Willow blurted in charmed bewilderment, a faint chuckle falling from her at the unpredictably wholesome turn this impassioned makeout had taken. 

Not exactly atmospheric, but she was willing to overlook that on the basis that it was cute. He was cute. Giving her a chaste little cheek kiss just because he--

Wait. 

Willow envisioned a map of her own face and double checked the coordinates of his lips. And like a snap of fingers, it dawned on her. 

Hunter was kissing her dimple. 

Slowly. Sweetly. Adoringly. 

“Oh....” Willow repeated and her voice was fragile. Like glass. 

Glass for him. 

Because he was kissing her dimple. 

She made no conscious decision about the placement of her hands, but while her mind had gone cottony with dimple kisses, she had looped her arms around Hunter’s neck, grabbing hopeless fistfuls out of the back of his shirt, like he was water between her fingers and could easily trickle away. 

His lips finally made their inevitable return to hers, as his embrace twisted and tightened around the expanse of her body.

Hunter was an incurably huggy person, and he often gave huggy kisses. He had once told Willow that he liked the way she filled up his arms.

In return, she told him that he gave the most unforgettable hugs she had ever experienced. The perfect balance of affection, security and pressure. It was his generous stature, it was his strapping arms, it was the overall size of him in which Willow could feel genuinely compressed against.

Her other best friends were endlessly lovable and Willow got withdrawals if she didn’t snuggle them frequently enough. But they were, in all honesty, noodle limbed. There was no hope in Hell of any of them ever enveloping her larger frame in a hug. Not the way Hunter did. 

It was the fervid care he demonstrated too, where he would always instinctively squeeze like he was about to lose her forever. 

“So....it’s okay, right?” Willow murmured, lips bumping clumsily against his. “If I keep kissing you? As me?”

Eyes still shuttered, Hunter hummed lowly. She felt it reverberate down her throat. 

“I’m all yours,” He answered, like it cost him nothing to say. 

Willow’s breath hitched at the statement, though it was near immediately unraveled by the persistence of his affection, submerging her in the moment. 

But it still seated itself somewhere at the back of her mind, as she dug into his shirt and kissed the soul out of him, aching for a proper expression of gratitude, of love, of messy, chaotic, bleeding devotion.

Willow wanted to kiss Hunter until he forgot his own name. 

Wait. 

No.

Willow wanted to kiss Hunter in a way that guaranteed he never forgot his own name. If his reflection was hazy, his hair unfamiliar and the future chillingly uncertain, he would at least know this one simple thing. He was Hunter, that guy Willow Park was nuts about.

I’m all yours. 

There was more than one way to say ‘I love you.’ 

And he was a boy who had lived a whole wretched life as a rag doll, a battered possession of someone else. He was uncomfortable with language that flippantly implied ownership over his own autonomy and would never make such a statement accidentally. 

When Hunter said ‘I’m all yours’, the volume of that soft declaration was so thunderous that it left Willow reeling. 

Of course he didn’t mean it literally. But rather, the sentiment was a show of the throat. When tangled up with her in heat soaked moments such as these, things like ‘I’m all yours’ became simple to say. 

An open invitation to call him hers, as he knew he had all the power to simultaneously be his own. He could sink into her strong arms and feel safe being hers, without the bristle of paranoia about losing himself in the process. 

Likewise, Willow could feel safe as a construct of breakable glass, not having to stress over being handled recklessly. She could close her eyes, unguarded, deep-seated tension alleviated by not obsessing over self-preservation and allow herself to be cradled in his life-bringing hands. 

She would be glass. 

And he would be hers. 

She stayed with him in that room for far longer than two hours.