WARNINGS — blood. injury. a few kinks here and there. cliff hanger. (might continue)
background noise — Desire by Meg Myers
shivers
( benjamin poindexter x afab!reader )
word count — 884
you catch bullseye waiting outside your apartment like he just happened to be there. he smirks, acting like it's a coincidence, until you step closer and notice the fresh cut above his eyebrow.
you reach up to wipe the blood away. for a split second, he forgets to be dangerous—his eyes stay locked on yours, and neither of you moves until someone passes by, forcing him to pull away first.
as he moved further back, taking his eyes off of you, you remained completely still. something inside you was just so profoundly captivated by him you’d often forget how to act around him.
although he was a usual guest at your apartment complex, every look exchanged between the two of you sent shivers down your spine. could’ve it been the heat in his eyes whenever they travelled down your body or simply your instincts telling you to run and never look back. you knew he would never hurt you, it would rather be you the one hurting him, but deep down he was still a killer.
“will you keep on staring or would you mind welcoming me inside,” he smirked, his elbow resting on the wall aside him while his hand was scratching the back of his head “we don’t want the neighbours making any assumptions; do we?” he shrugged.
you stepped aside, making just enough space for his arm to brush against yours as he was going inside “sporting another cut i see?” you asked out of concern sooner than simple curiosity.
he ignored you, just like every single time you were getting all up in his business.
“dex…?” you pushed. “what is it with you and locking yourself up every time i’m concerned about your safety?”
sitting down on the couch next to your window, dex watched as you walked over to the kitchen island. “i don’t need your concern. i told you. i can take care of myself.”
don’t start an argument. don’t start an argument. you repeated in your head over and over again until you noticed his gaze was once again inspecting every inch of skin you were showing. and there was plenty of it considering it was somewhere past 11 pm on a friday night. somewhat flustered, palms getting sweaty and shorts riding up from all the pacing around, you decided to head straight for him and let your lips collide with his in anger.
“you’re…” a slight grin was forming in the corner of his mouth as he kissed you right back. “hot when you’re angry.” dex planted grabbing you by the waist.
wrapping your legs around his lower abdomen, he assured you were holding tightly before getting up and moving towards the only bedroom in the apartment. you loved how easily he could grab you and move you around. you always had a thing for a man twice your size and dex was the perfect candidate. not only was he as muscular as any normal female would dream about but his body was also somewhat tall enough to tower over you.
“don’t ever fucking” you moaned against his lips still irritated about earlier “talk to me like that again.”
you put your hands against his hard chest and broke apart the deep tension forming.
“baby, come on…” he threw his hands up in the air grunting “you know i don’t like this sensitive stuff. i kill people. one cut doesn’t change me in any way.”
“don’t baby me after you fucking told me to not ‘baby you’. go grab a towel, you’re bleeding again.”
“piece of shit” he cursed under his breath, on his way to the bathroom.
———
“what did you come here for in the first place?” you questioned him while wiping the blood off of his forehead, careful not to get any of the already forming crusts to fall off.
catching him flinch from your touch, you quickly distanced the now red stained cloth from his face. “oh so now you’re the one scared of me? ain’t i the one supposed to be frightened by your presence, bullseye?” you added; tone flat.
“don’t act so stupid” dex hissed “it’s not the first time we do this. and i see it’s not going the way i was expecting it to go”
what did he mean by that? was sex the only reason these occasional visits were a thing? you thought the two of you had something more going on.
gaping at him, the only thing you managed to get out was “are you being fucking serious right now benjamin?”. your shoulders tensed.
narrowing his eyes when you quickly backed away from him, he let out a delicate grunt. “i care about you. i’ve been consumed by your existence ever since the first time i laid my eyes on you, but you know we will never work, baby.” he clenched his jaw, contemplating whether leaving that up in the air was terrible judgment.
suddenly the air in the room shifted. once again, the shivers from earlier found their way back to you—except this time it hit you like a cold slap across the face. you were able to tell from his expression that he was aware of the war he started.
A/N — wow this is my first ever fanfic pretty please be nice i tried! i still have a lot to work on with my writing, i’m not the most creative girl either so it’s pretty bland. anyways if you guys like it i might give it a try and continue this but until then that’s all i got.
i did not edit so ignore any grammatical mistakes please !!
virgin dex who’s also the best sex you’ve ever had?
The Best You’ve Ever Had
TW virgin!Dex, size kink (?), obsessive jealousy, possessive/territorial!dex, Dex is a little pathetic in this one, switch!Dex, murdering your exes, interrogation, implied torture of your exes, explicit sexual content (no anatomical detail as per usual) (lmk if I missed anything)
WC 1.2k
Dex, who admits he’s a virgin at the worst possible moment.
He doesn’t admit it the first time you kiss him. He doesn’t admit it when you guide his shaking hands against your thighs. No, Dex admits it when you’re already on top of him, when he’s already inside you, when his face is flushed against your skin and his body is trembling under yours.
“I’m sorry,” he blurts, eyes going wide with panic as he tries not to orgasm too soon. “I’m sorry, I don’t— I don’t know what I’m doing.”
And fuck, he really doesn’t.
You didn’t know for sure, but you did have a feeling that this was the case. He’s so sloppy, so eager, so desperate to be good fuck for you that he keeps losing the rhythm every time you moan. Every time you roll your hips just right, his eyes go glassy.
You just smile and kiss him and say, “It’s okay, baby,” as you groan while being stretched out, “You have— ahh— n-nothing to worry about.”
And he doesn’t! After all, you continue to fuck him even months later. You even make him your boyfriend, and Dex doesn’t even have to beg like he originally planned to.
Sometimes, though, he spirals so badly during sex that you have to stop.
“Dex,” you whisper, taking his face in both hands when you notice his eyes are unfocused. “Baby, are you with me?”
He blinks up at you, dazed and ruined, his hands locked around your hips like he’s scared you’ll disappear.
“Who taught you that?”
Your breath hitched. “What?”
“That,” he says, voice raw. “The way you move your hands. The way you— fuck. Who taught you how to make me feel that good?”
Poor jealous, pathetic Dex.
You don’t answer him. You never gave him a name, never soothe him with details, never say it didn’t matter. You only kiss him until he stops asking, which of course means he has to find out for himself.
Dex, who stays late to research your past.
Dex builds a timeline. Dex finds addresses. Dex memorises faces.
And then Dex goes to work.
He knocks your exes out, ties them to a chair, and sits across from them in some dark room, gun resting loose in his hand as if this isn’t personal.
“What did she like?”
They always thought he meant in your day-to-day life at first. “She liked— she liked coffee, I don’t—”
Dex would tilt his head, and sigh. “In bed.”
Sometimes they cry.
Dex hates that. Crying wastes time.
“What did you do in bed that she liked?” He rolls his eyes, already irritated.
Dex wouldn’t need to shout. Dex is patient.
One of them says he remembers you liked being handcuffed.
Dex goes still, visibly enraged.
Yes, he asked for the info, but now he was seeing it. He’s imagining you in bed, trusting this stupid man with restraints, and it hits him so hard his vision narrows. Eventually, at the end of the night, he pulls the trigger.
He buys handcuffs on the way home. The first time he uses it on you, you squirm and whine. Music to Dex’s ears.
Another ex says he remembers you like blindfolds.
Dex has to look away for a second, breathing through his nose, because the image of you blindfolded for this man makes his blood boil.
He slits his throat and buys one anyway. When he uses it on you, he’s pleased with the mess you made.
Another one says you like shower sex.
When Dex comes home that night, he's determined to test the theory of the man he just killed. You could barely get his name out before he grabs you by the wrist and pulls you into the bathroom.
He was right, Dex thinks an hour later, as he wraps a towel over you in the over-steamed shower, watching your legs wobble a little, you do like shower sex.
And then there’s the other question, the one right before he kills them. The one that proves Dex has gone fully insane.
He would crouch in front of them and ask, “How big are you?”
Imagine that from your exes’ point of view.
Bullseye has a gun between your eyes. Point blank. He’s standing there with that dead calm on his face, head tilted slightly, like this is a work meeting and not the last conversation of your life.
The man tied to the chair stares at him like he has misheard him.
Dex presses the barrel in a little closer.
“Show me with your hand.”
Fuck. Imagine having Bullseye standing over you, asking for your dick size because once, years ago, you fucked his girl before she was his girl.
The man’s hand comes up, trembling, thumb and forefinger spreading in the air.
Dex looks at it, then his eyes go cold.
“Don’t lie,” he rolls his eyes. “I’ll know.”
And no, Dex will never actually know.
It’s an empty threat. He would rather gouge his own eyes out than make them prove it. They were disgusting to him by default, because they were not him.
One ex actually started to desperately shift his tied hands to his zipper like he was actually going to show him.
Dex shot his foot.
“Ugh,” he scoffs. “No.”
That was not the point.
The point was that Dex knew men exaggerated. He knew the first measurement was ego, not truth.
So he waited and watched the answer get smaller.
Dex smiles to himself then, like the fucking psychopath he is.
Because he remembers the first time you sank down on him, breathless and squirming, nails digging into his shoulders, so pretty when you whispered, “Baby, wait— slow down, I need to adjust— ah, Dex, you’re s-so much bigger than I’m used to.”
He had believed you then because he wanted to.
Because he needed to.
Because he was a virgin and pathetic and so in love with you that one little sentence from your mouth could rearrange his entire brain chemistry.
But now, he knows for sure you were telling the truth. He knows he is the biggest you ever had. He knows he was not just your sweet, nervous, pathetic virgin boyfriend that needed to be comforted by white lies. He knows you were not being kind.
You were being honest.
And boy, does it make him unbearable.
After all, his little extracurricular activities did wonders for his confidence!
He stops touching you like he’s asking permission to exist inside your body and starts touching you like he finally believes he belongs there. He's still needy, still pathetic in the sweetest way, but now there’s this ego in the way he pins your hips down.
He gets meaner about it, too, smug enough to murmur, “Too much?” with his mouth against your throat with a smile. “Need me to slow down, baby?”
And you smack at his chest for being arrogant, but you’d be lying if you said it didn’t turn you on.
Because he’s your Dex.
Dex, who got there last and made himself the only one that counted.
Dex, who can hold a gun to a man’s face and ask the most humiliating question imaginable.
Dex, your pretty little psychopath.
Dex, who comes home and melts the second you kiss him, because all that proof, all that blood still means nothing compared to you cupping his face and whispering, “You’re the best I’ve ever had.”
Because he’s attentive. Because he cares more about your pleasure than his own. Because he worships you.
And Dex believes you now.
—
Note : I will be responding to comments and more kind asks tomorrow. Love you guys, mwah 😘
Borrowed Habits
Synopsis:Your way of life has become Dex's. You make the empty spaces in his life start to feel a little less empty. After all, if he does everything you do, how different can it be from being with you?
Gemma says:ugh I had a better vibe when I planned this but she'll be right... I'll do better next time🫰🏼
Warnings:Stalker!Dex being creepy, what a surprise!! W.C:1.3k
Over the months that Dex has been stalking protecting you in his own special way, he’s gained new habits to satisfy some part of his brain that craves the domesticity that he watches you experience.
At first he didn’t want it to be a habit of having to run into whatever diner you ate at to quickly have something to eat before following you home. But it was purely tactical, fuelling his body in case he needed to intervene in keeping you safe from some immediate danger.
People are unpredictable monsters these days.
But having to scarf down your exact order and then proceeding to try to follow you home again wasn’t time efficient. Dex adapted. He always does.
He timed your arrival after vigorously studying your routines so he could collect his order and eat it in his car while you ate in the restaurant. There were few times where he messed up the order and didn’t have the same meal. On those nights Dex didn’t feel right, his stomach growled and his brain itched. His diet was the same as yours; you tasted the things he tasted, and he tasted the things you tasted. His body adapted to be like yours, and it didn’t want to adapt back.
But when his hunger was at bay, his mind craved something more — it craved the taste of you.
The flavour of his meal would sit on his taste buds, but the faint aftertaste is what helped soothe the newfound craving. Would that faint aftertaste be sitting the same on your tongue? Would that be what you would taste if you kissed him? Would he be able to taste this on your tongue?
Dex knew it was a stupid thought, but even then it still felt stupidly rational. The lingering flavours brought him closer to you in a way, and being close to you is the only thing Dex wants.
That change in routine wasn't meant to happen, but it turned out to be a better decision, so why not try something new to get a deeper insight into your life?
You seem to love music. Dex can’t be sure, but when you're back in your apartment, you're always swaying and dancing along to something.
He’s thought about installing cameras to not only pick up on what you're listening to but also to obviously monitor your safety in a better way. But only a creep would install cameras unbeknownst to someone else; what Dex is doing from a distance is just plain protection.
So when the streets are missing the familiar buzz of traffic and distant chatter, Dex turns the radio on to a low volume and simply imagines that this is what you're listening to. When you disappear behind a door, he can’t help but imagine and wonder if you're still dancing.
He smiles to himself, letting himself think deeper about that. Maybe he’d come home to you and immediately wrap his arms around your waist and sway you along with him. He can picture your laugh as you follow along with his movements away, potentially trying to tease that he can’t dance. It’s stupid, but he can almost feel the warmth of your skin against his palms as you rest your arms around his neck and lean into him.
Slowly, he nudges his head down, resting his forehead against yours and—
You're not with him anymore. The warmth is gone. He isn’t in your apartment anymore. The radio host's voice replaces yours.
He blinks rapidly, slamming his hand on the radio, killing the once joyous sound. That wasn’t meant to happen; he's meant to be with you right now. Each strained breath makes his chest rise and fall rapidly as his eyes instinctively lock back onto you as you return back into sight.
Only then does the anger subside. He’s still got you; you're not going anywhere — not under his watch.
He still watches you for a little longer, following your movements through the window until you begin winding down for the night. Eventually, the lights in your apartment start disappearing one by one, and Dex knows you're getting ready for bed. He doesn't leave until you're asleep. He never has; he needs to know that you'll be okay. So he waits until your bedroom light goes dark and waits till he's sure he sees no movement. Only then does he finally start the car and pull away from the kerb.
When he gets home, he makes dinner, often putting on whatever music he thinks you might be listening to and settling into his own evening routine. Every now and again, he'll stretch out on the couch, letting himself imagine you're sitting beside him. On the bad days, Dex will cook a meal he's seen you make hundreds of times. He'll sit at the table and let himself believe you cooked it for him because you’d do that if you knew he was coming home to you.
He'll glance across the table, expecting to find your sweet smile waiting for him—instead, there's only the empty wall. Dex's smile fades as he stares at the spot where you're meant to be. He can taste you through the food, but why can’t he just be with you? He's already doing everything right.
Whatever. He’ll have you again tomorrow. When he climbs into bed, he looks over to the left side of the bed. The side he sees you sleep on every night.
Left alone in the silence once more, Dex outstretches an arm over the cold sheet where you should be right now. If he were in your apartment, his arm would be around your waist. He would pull you against his chest. You always seem to get cold whenever you sleep. Dex has seen it; he’s seen you clutch your duvet with an iron grip as you contort your body to find any warmth on your mattress. If he were with you, he’d keep you warm.
The mere thought of you tucked up against him, head nuzzled in his neck and limbs intertwined, makes his chest tighten with emotion.
He can picture it so easily it almost hurts. A sleepy little sigh as you finally settle against him is etched into his mind like he’s heard it before. The feeling of his hand resting over your back, keeping you pressed against his chest, makes him breathe a little easier. You wouldn't have to feel the cold with him, and he'd make sure of that.
Dex catches himself curling his fingers into the sheet as if they were your skin; he’s so close to having you there with him.
Even in his dreams, every thought is devoted to you. Though Dex doesn’t dream much, you're always there with him when he does. Your hair messy against the pillow while your face still stays softened with sleep. He remains wrapped around you – keeping you warm like he promised. He doesn't know when that promise came about. It could've happened the first time he saw you shivering beneath your duvet, but it doesn't really matter. ‘A promise is a promise’ is what Dr Mercer had once told him, and he took that to heart.
Morning comes, and Dex wakes before his alarm, stripping him away from the bliss he had with you. His hand instinctively reaches across the mattress, craving the comfort you give him. For a moment, disappointment settles in his chest when he yet again realises you actually aren't there.
Hope isn't all lost, though; you’ll be getting up soon! That makes Dex smile as he gets ready for the day. By the time he reaches your apartment, your curtains are still closed. Good, he can be with you when you wake up. He gingerly settles into position and waits with an anticipatory grin on his face. When he spots movement beyond your curtains, he sighs with relief — just because he couldn't wake up with you doesn't mean you can't wake up without him.
benjamin poindexter who doesn't know how to ask for affection.
it’s not as if he’s never felt that burning sensation on his skin, spreading fire through his chest and making the nape of his neck tingle when he sees you. whether it’s when he spots you in a sea of people on his way home from work, when you’re sitting next to him when he's at the gym or when you’re chatting about your day whilst you’re trying to brush your teeth, his body recognises you as you. he never had to make an effort to learn it; it’s second nature to him to see you as part of his destiny—something as simple as being born, growing up, finding you, loving you and dying before you do. that was the cycle of his life, and he knew it.
you are such an overwhelming feeling that just thinking about it makes his chest tighten. when he’s with you, he doesn’t know if his blood is still red or if it’s turned to water, and flowers have blossomed in his lungs and heart. that ambiguous, strange feeling – you – was what kept him from thoughts of suicide and from taking such dangerous risks, in case the day came when you needed a kidney or someone to make you laugh. that feeling… the name of which eluded him, but which he felt in every fibre of his being.
so, yeah, he's akward enough to restrain his own hands when it comes to you. dex thinks it's stupid for a grown man like him to ask for something so…childish like cuddles and kisses. what is he? a five year old? he rarely remembers hugs and kisses from his own mum, he doesn't need it. it's not like he'll die without it.
he'll just wait for you to initiate, like you always (have to) do.
except that you aren't quite a clingy person either. yes, you take his arm when you’re out in public, and sometimes you kiss him on the cheek when a little voice in your head tells you you’ve been in your own space for too long. you both know that when you get into bed there’s a break where, as you switch off the lights, your hands mingle with each other’s, but that’s it. your way of showing affection wasn’t to be right next to each other at every moment of the day, and you’re killing him. why don’t you rest your head on his shoulder when you sit next to him? why does he have to follow you if you move to another room?
like now, when you’ve got your glasses on and your hair’s all frizzy from spending too long poring over the invoices, too lost in thought to notice that dex has come into the open-plan office and been standing there watching you for a good ten minutes, waiting for you to do something. you’d just got home from work and, after kissing him and complaining about your aching feet, taking a shower and putting on your pyjamas, and telling him you had an excel spreadsheet to finish… you’d drifted off again. you were too far away from him.
he's been debating the whole time if he should just ask you for a kiss, but his feet and mouth refused to cooperate with him, leaving him hanging there to stare at you.
"hey, baby. did you need anything?" you ask, finally noticing him as you wonder how long he's been there. must've been a while.
dex shook his head instinctively, but his lips formed a thin line and his face held a displeased look.
luckily for him, you could read him like a book now. it wasn't easy since it didn't come with some sort of manual or tutorial, but it was definitely worth it since you knew that this meant he wanted a kiss from you.
"do you want a kiss?" you ask again, looking up at him expectantly.
god, you don't think you've seen anyone nod that fast.
i just know dex would absolutely love cockwarming. he wants to be close to you so bad. if he could go his whole life never separating from you, he would. i feel like he wouldn't really get the point of cockwarming at first. i mean, moving is a pretty big part sex and giving each other pleasure, why would he just want to sit there?
then you convince him to try it and he just immediately loves it. because somehow he's even closer to you than he was before. how much closer can you get than being literally inside you? it's almost like being a part of you.
the first couple of times that you do it, he doesn't have the patience. dex tries his best but you just feel so good. after a couple minutes of being inside you, dex starts bucking his hips into you. groaning into your shoulder about how he's "sorry, just feels so good inside you. can't help myself. you make me go crazy."
dex's favorite time do it is during mundane times. he loves how intimate it feels. it becomes such a normal thing that he doesn't even ask, it's just an unspoken thing that you can tell he wants whenever he holds you close and pulls your hips close to his. fingers sliding beneath your band to check if your wet before he pulls your panties and shorts to the side and slides into you.
when he's had a rough day, dex finds you and immediately melts when your gentle hands touch him. tentatively wrapping his arms around you while his lips find yours. mumbling against them how he "needs to be close" to his girl so bad. so you lay down with him, brushing his hair back while his head rest against your chest. all his stress dissipating as he closes his eyes and imagines that he's part of you.
and at night, when the two of you curl up to go to sleep. sometimes you'll invite him to slip his cock into you. the two of you drifting to bed with him still inside you.
you feeling so deliciously and satisfyingly full from the feel of him. dex feeling so warm, it makes him so good inside to know you want him so badly too that you'll let him stay inside through the night like this.
*: ꔫ :* thanks for reading! use the link below if you'd like to see more of me <3 masterlist. homepage.
Benjamin Pointdexter x fem! reader Synopsis: You accidentally text your boyfriend the wrong image and follow up with 'wrong person'. He's spiraling thinking you're going to leave him (Inspired by the wrong person trend on TikTok) Warnings: Dry humping, possessive/clingy man, pathetic dex *lmk if I missed anything! Not proof read!
You were exhausted, eyes lidded with sleep you were drifting off
Two soft buzzes interrupted your short ‘nap’
Dex: Hey gorgeous, what's the movie you wanted to watch called?
The loml: Hi babes, did you take a pic of the set you bought yesterday? I need to envision how it’ll look on me
A simple enough task not really paying attention you sent the photo to your friend and the movie name to Dex… or so you thought
Your phone buzzed again
Dex: You look absolutely gorgeous, but I still need the movie name
The loml: What does princess diaries have to do with Victoria secret?
You needed to fix your mistake immediately
[Name]: Sorry that was meant for a friend lol. The movie is princess diaries, I’ll see you after my nap!
[Name]: Iol I messed up. The set is cute but the lace is cutting into me a bit [Insert photo]. It would look so cute on you though!
Not thinking too much of it, you laughed at your mistake. It was routine at this point. You bought a new set from VS, if it fit right your friend was going to buy it too. Yawning with a slight stretch you put your phone on silent and took that much needed nap.
‘Sorry that was meant for a friend lol.’ Dex was speechless, he read your text over and over like he would find some hidden clue insinuating it was some lame boyfriend prank, but there was nothing. He could forgive you for texting others; his bad luck with women made him used to it, but you, you were his whole heart. You weren’t easily influenced by the weak charms of men, you were different. He would find this man that tried to cause a rift in his relationship and dispose of him like any good boyfriend would.
You were lying on the floor scrolling with no real agenda. The attempt at a nap was failed by excessive honking, arguing neighbors, and barking dogs. You were over it, only takeout and your boyfriend could fix it.
[Name]: The neighborhood was against me, I couldn’t nap in peace. Do you want to come over now?
Dex: Yeah sure
[Name]: Okay! See you soon <3
Dex was conflicted. He was happy you wanted to see him but his mind couldn’t erase the earlier events.
‘Does she not want me anymore? Am I too much to handle?’
He was spiraling, hastily grabbing his keys and slamming the front door shut he affirmed his settled resolve.
‘I’ll just have to get rid of him for her to keep me’
He didn’t bother to knock. He entered your apartment hyperfocused for anything amiss. Footsteps heavy as he made his way to the living room. Dex found you on the floor too engrossed in your phone to notice his entrance. Your chest was pressed against the hardwood, hair beautifully disheveled. He couldn’t imagine another guy having you, another man couldn’t handle you and will not, ever.
He made his way towards you slowly, intentional, his head was full of doubts he was moving on his own until you yelped. Dex had made his way on top of you. Pelvis against your lower back as he breathed into your ear. He was caging you against the floor and he was so, so heavy.
“Sooo are you going to move anytime soon?” you rasped beneath him.
“I don’t think I will baby,” he smirked against your cheek. Dex was usually clingy but now it was different. Today he was confident in touching you like he found a new purpose.
You continued your scrolling, not paying anymore attention to the man practically crushing you. Dex couldn’t handle it. In moments like this he needs you to pay him half the attention he gives to you. Every hour apart Dex wished he could give you his heart for safekeeping next to yours. Nearly suffocating you above wasn’t enough. He needs more than more, he needs to consume you wholly so all your focus can be on him. No other men would even be considered in the life you two would build together.
You heard the shift immediately. Dex’s breathing quickened in your ear, soft moans escaping his lips. Then you felt it, the slow drag of his hips against your back, his thick jeans limiting the friction against you. He needed more
Still you remained unmoving, you were teasing him. Continuing to scroll as he rutted against your back as if he was in heat. He hated it. He needed you to look at him. He needs you to see first hand the effect you have on him.
“Baby- damn it,” he whimpered. His chase for pleasure cut his own words short as he pressed you further against the floor. Your shirt was pushed up to your chest now, the movement of his jeans pressed against your back was slightly uncomfortable but the sound of him in your ear was worth it. Dex was never quiet during sex but you could tell he was close the louder he got. Loud whimpers leaving him as he bit down as gently as possible on your ear. He was close, he wanted to see you as he came, but there was no resilience left in him to stop moving and flip you over, so he chose the next best option.
He shifted down to the curve of your ass, undoing his belt and lowering his jeans just enough to where you felt his bulge against you through his boxers, unrestricted. Dex was getting louder, the feeling of you beneath him was mindnumbing. He didn’t care if your neighbors heard or what the old woman a floor below thought of him afterwards. All that mattered was you, how good you made him feel, how you changed his life for the better.
His hands made their way to your chest, cupping each breast harder with every thrust. You moaned, phone face down against the floor, your own wetness seeping into your underwear. He needs to hurry so you can feel him completely.
You felt his hips tremble against you, precum through his boxers wet your shorts as he took what he wanted
“I’m gonna- baby,” he sniffled. Dex was crying at this point. Tears soaked your shirt collar. Being this close to you was unbelievable every time, he cherished each moment so deeply it made him emotional. With one final grind against your ass he came, hard. Squeezing your chest harder than before as he chased through his orgasm. His moans were dying down only heavy huffs from the two of you filled the atmosphere
“I’ll hurt any man that tries to steal you from me,” he whispered into your ear. Still on top of you unmoving.
“What man are you talking abo-,” your words were cut off by him turning you over, facing him.
“I’m gonna put it in now, if that’s okay”
A soft buzz from your phone filled the space instead
The loml: I caved and bought the set! Looks like we’ll be matching
I was a but hasty when I wrote this, maybe I'll go back and revisit some things when I have time. That aside I hope you enjoyed reading!
I'm trying to work on making dialogue and texts more immersive & realistic. I'm definitely the type to give my friends a cutesy nickname and have my mans full government as a contact name lol
Thinking about nerdy!benjamin pointdexter x popular but sweet!reader
⤷masterlist here
Nerdy!benjamin pointdexter who has a massive crush on you, but you don’t even know who he is. He just opts to watch you from afar, watching as you make out with your boyfriend in the hallways, your back against his locker. He clears his throat, and you mutter an apology while your boyfriend glares and spews insults at him.
Nerdy!benjamin who watches as your boyfriend pulls you along, but your eyes stay on his. He averts his eyes for a split second, but when they return, you’re nowhere to be found.
Nerdy!benjamin who aches to have you by his side, and that’s when his obsession of you starts. He starts to find out little snippets about your life, even though there’s nothing about you that nobody knows. Your life is very much public, since you’re one of the most prominent people in senior year.
Nerdy!benjamin who dedicates a whole mixtape just for you. It has all the songs that remind him of you. He places it in a pink box with a magenta ribbon wrapped around it. He places on your front door, leaving before anyone could catch him. He hides near one of the enormous bushes and watches as you open the door.
Nerdy!benjamin who almost explodes in nervousness when you rip the ribbon off and look at the mixtape with confusion. Thankfully, he didn’t put his name on that. Oh no, that would’ve been too embarrassing for him to handle.
Nerdy!benjamin who gets pushed around by your boyfriend and his friends, the jocks. They push him around until he’s on his ass, head looking up at the towering men. You put yourself between him and your boyfriend, surprising Dex, and even your boyfriend, by defending him. “Why the hell are you defending him? Are you screwing him behind my back? Should’ve known you were a slut.” Dex watches as the man sneers at you, walking away with his friends following him.
Nerdy!benjamin who doesn’t understand why you defend him considering that your boyfriend, but is grateful for your interruption. He didn’t have to leave with a black eye this time. “But, your boyfriend. . . he.” Dex stammers, fixing his shattered glasses on his shaky face. He’s about to combust from how close you’re standing to him. You just shrug and tell him that you were planning on breaking up with that asshole anyway.
Nerdy!benjamin who can’t catch up on any sleep when he remembers the way he slipped and fell in front of you. He still shivers at the way your friends, or better, your minions who copy you from head to toe, looked at him with disgust. But he wouldn’t forget your worried face. It’s etched permanently in his mind how you grabbed his hand and helped him up. Even your friends couldn’t believe you.
Nerdy!benjamin that falls asleep in one of the boring teacher’s class, and awakes to paper being thrown at him. He grumbles under his breath. He knew he shouldn’t have reacted, because he found himself behind the school’s football yard, being beaten up by your ex-boyfriend. “You stole my girl, huh? Wonder what she saw in you.” benjamin doesn’t even have the strength in him to oppose, so the school now thinks you’re dating. He just wishes the ground would swallow him alive at this point.
Nerdy!benjamin who doesn’t even have to think twice when you tell him you’re in desperate need of a tutor, but most of them are either dumb, or staring at your outfits inappropriately. He nods a bit too eagerly, too eagerly it’s like his head was about to fall off. Benjamin who tattoos every reaction of yours in his mind, how you bite your lips when you're confused or even furrow your eyebrows, or the way your eyes start to glint when you understand the arduous topic.
Nerdy!benjamin who starts becoming your secret admirer, leaving poetic notes, and angelic flowers in your lockers, even going far as bringing you a basket of chocolate and flowers in front of your front door. Your friends have become obsessed with creating a bet on who the secret admirer. Unbeknown to them, that no one would win. They all guessed jocks, or even one of the weird emo guy who had asked you on a date, but you refused politely.
Nerdy!benjamin that shows off his cool skills, one of them was by solving a rubik’s cube in under five minutes. To him, it’s normal, something usual. Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop the surprised look on your face from appearing.
Nerdy!benjamin that lets you burrow some of his comics, because apparently you’re a big fan of comics, but can’t find any in the store.
Nerdy!benjamin that shows off his lego sets when he’s tutoring you in his miniature, compared to you, house and watches while you gawk and gasp at the sight, caressing it tenderly.
Nerdy!benjamin who learns french just for you when you tell him you can’t pass French Class. He spends his weekend buying French For Beginners Books just to spend more time with you and just to impress you.
Nerdy!benjamin that lays in bed and hopes to the universe that you’d feel the same. His heart is twisting and turning everytime he sees your arm laced with a different man’s arm. He desperately hopes for you to love him back.
Nerdy!benjamin that almost passes out when you tell him you’re hosting a party because your parents are gone. You hand him one of your flyers, handmade and obviously, pink. He spends hours getting ready and practising cheesy pick up lines, because that’s what you would like, wouldn’t you?
Nerdy!benjamin whose cheeks grow pink like cherry blossoms when you greet him with a kiss on his cheek. In that second, he smells the sweet smell of lavender in your hair, and Dex swears it's the only thing he wants to smell forever. Even your smell is beautiful. He walks through the party with you by his side, which makes the rumors of both of you dating worse. Dex reminds himself that you don’t care, because you’re used to the spotlight. You’re used to being perfect right down to your core, hell, right down to your atoms.
Nerdy!benjamin who stands awkwardly beside you when you offer him a drink. You haven’t left his side since the party started, always dragging him to different places. Right now, you grab his wrist and drag him to the pool in your yard. Benjamin gawks, and you frown and look at your pool, “it’s not big, right? Daddy will have it replaced before this summer. I can’t be seen in that!”
Nerdy!benjamin who realises how different you are from, in comparison to everything, even societal classes. You’re in. . . another place would be an understatement. It’s ridiculous that you think your pool is small. It’s so huge it could probably place first in front of burj khalifa if it was in a ‘who’s bigger?’ competition.
Nerdy!benjamin who wobbles slightly from the drinks he had and finds himself pulling you down to your pool, soaking both of you to the toe. He panics, eyes widening, expecting an outburst from you, but instead you tell him that it was so fun that they needed to do it again.
Nerdy!benjamin who feels the space closing in between you, and then starts to taste the sweet, strawberry taste of your lips on his mouth. He’s ungraceful at kissing, it’s awkward at first, before his arms wrap around your waist underwater and yours wrap around his neck.
Nerdy!benjamin who finds himself in your huge pink room drying himself up with a towel after everyone finally left. His eyes catch yours and it’s enough to throw you on your hot pink bed with gentle covets. Your back is on the bed, and your legs are wrapped around your waist. Both of your lips taste again, and your body curves against him like two corresponding pieces of a puzzle, like he was made for you. When both of you part, you giggle at the sight of his fogged glasses, taking it off and placing it on your nightstand .That night, he thanks the universe for your parents not being around, because that would’ve been extremely embarrassing.
Nerdy!benjamin who is still embarrassed to walk with your hands interlaced with each other in the school’s hallways. He isn’t embarrassed because of you, rather because he isn’t used to the spotlight.
Nerdy!benjamin that spends his time adoring and worshipping you, wanting nothing more than to be loved by you.
Content Warnings/tags: Explicit sexual content, 18+ mdni, fem!reader, Sub! Dex, Poindexter x Reader, Dirty Talk, Overstimulation, Blow job, edging, Teasing, Power Dynamics, Begging, Crying, fully consensual, lmk if i missed anything!
Notes: I’ll start writing from my inbox soon I swear
Dex’s head tipped back against the pillows, throat working as another ragged breath tore out of him. Your mouth was doing something filthy to the tip of his cock and he couldn’t decide if he wanted to shove you deeper or drag you off just so he could breathe. The low amber light caught on the sharp cut of his jaw, on the sweat already sliding down the side of his neck, on the way his teeth clenched hard enough to make the tendons stand out.
“Fuck. Stop—stop doing that.”
The words came out broken, half swallowed between gasps. You looked up at him through hazy eyes and stayed right there, lips brushing the flushed head like you hadn’t heard a thing. His eyes were locked on yours, almost black now, and something restless and hungry moved behind them.
“What was that?” you asked, voice soft, almost sweet. “You want me to stop?”
You eased away and he snapped forward so fast the bed frame creaked. Fists twisted white-knuckled in the sheets.
“No! Stop pulling away.”
Your hands slid down the insides of his thighs instead, nails dragging light enough to raise gooseflesh, teasing over the fine hair on his calves until his toes curled hard against the carpet. You smiled like you had all the time in the world. Dex’s chest rose and fell too fast. He hated how easy it was for you to reduce him to this open mouthed, shaking, already leaking against his own stomach and he hated even more that he never wanted it to stop.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, baby,” you murmured, pushing his knees wider and settling between them again.
Your mouth found the soft skin of his inner thigh, already damp from earlier attention, and he hissed when your hand closed around the base of his cock. The lightest stroke of your thumb over the slit had his hips jerking. The smallest scrape of teeth against his thigh pulled a broken sound out of him that he tried and failed to swallow.
“Fuck please let me cum..!” he managed, voice cracking when you squeezed.
His knee bumped against your shoulder. You only hummed, nuzzling closer until the thick, musky scent of him filled every breath you took. When you finally looked up, he was already staring down at you, eyes half-lidded and glassy, lips parted like he was fighting the urge to beg. One firm tug on his balls cut the words off into a choked moan. Your mouth replaced your hand a second later and his head dropped back hard enough to bounce. Hips stuttered off the mattress. He moaned loudly from the pain and pleasure. Working over his sac was messy and imperfect. Your tongue flicked and lapped, then you sucked what you could into the heat of your mouth. Every wet sound dragged another raw noise out of him groans turning into drawn out whines the second you pulled off with a soft pop and licked a slow stripe up the underside of his cock.
A flush spread across his throat. His Adam’s apple bobbed hard when he tried to swallow the next whimper. You sealed your lips around the head, licking the steady bead of precum, humming until one of his hands flew up to cover his own mouth. You made a low, displeased sound around him. The muffled moans climbing higher only made you take him deeper, just far enough for the edge of your teeth to graze the sensitive vein underneath. His hand wasn’t enough. A long, cracked whimper tore free anyway. Another salty pulse of precum hit your tongue and you swallowed it without thinking before easing off again. The frustrated noise that left him was almost pained.
“Fucking stop,” he begged, and it might have been convincing if tears weren’t already tracking down his temples, if his chest wasn’t heaving like he’d run miles. “Please, I—”
“Wanna hear you,” you said quietly, fingertip tracing the thick vein that pulsed along his length. “Let me hear you.”
“Yeah fuck okay..” His hand dropped like it weighed nothing, landing heavy on the back of your head and pushing. “Okay, okay…I’m so close please...”
“So needy,” you murmured, and guided him back into your mouth.
Wet, filthy squelches filled the room as you worked him with hand and tongue both. His fingers tangled in your hair, damp with the saliva that already shone across his bitten-raw bottom lip. Drool had slipped from the corner of his open mouth. He looked wrecked and he knew it. You set a steady rhythm, taking him deeper each time until the head nudged the back of your throat and you gagged softly around him. His hips started rolling up to meet you, desperate little thrusts he couldn’t quite control.
“Fuck, I’m gonna—so close—I can’t hold it—let me—” The words dissolved into gasps. He shoved deeper, forcing you to take him until your lips met the circle of your own fingers and your lungs burned. “Let me cum, wanna cum so bad—fuck, gonna cum—”
Your free hand clamped hard on his hip, nails digging in as you swallowed around him and stayed there, ignoring the way your throat protested. He didn’t seem to notice the discomfort. All he could feel was the tight, wet heat and the way your fingers rolled his balls in time with every swallow.
Tremors ran through his thighs every time his hands flexed in your hair.
“Don’t stop, don’t, don’t—I’m gonna cum, please—”
You pulled off.
The groan that ripped out of him was raw, almost animal. He chased the lost friction with frantic little rolls of his hips, hands batting at empty air when you knocked them away from his cock. Tears spilled freely now. Curses tumbled out between choked breaths as he collapsed back onto the bed, still rutting helplessly against nothing. The sheets rustled under the useless roll of his hips.
“Please!”
“Shh.” You stroked slow circles over his trembling thighs, watching the way his face crumpled. “You’re okay.”
When your hand finally closed around his cock again he jerked like he’d been shocked.
He was still leaking, still twitching hard in your grip, body contradicting every slurred protest.You stroked him once, slow and deliberate, his hips punched up into the touch.
“You wanna cum Dex?” The change was instant. He nodded, frantic, humming an answer he couldn’t quite form into words.
“Let me hear you say it.”
Dex pushed up on shaky elbows just so he could look at you. Tears streaked his cheeks. His lips trembled. He looked unfairly pretty like this, ruined, open, completely at your mercy.
“Please,” he whispered. “Make me cum. Please. Want it so bad.”
You watched him for a long second, thumb sweeping once more over the slick head of his cock, and wondered how many more times you could make him break before you finally let him fall.
Banners by @uzmacchiato, reblogs and comments are very encouraged!
Summary : Dex tries to leave you for your own good. You both know it won’t last.
Pairing : DDBA! Benjamin Poindexter x reader (she/her)
Warnings/tags : FREAK4FREAK, makeup sex, no anatomical detail but still explicit, angst-ish jealous!Dex, stalking-ish, kidnapping mentioned, injury, murder, blood, car sex, morally dark romance, not a healthy relationship but then again both Dex and Reader are batshit insane, food, brief mention of suicidal ideation. (let me know if I missed anything!)
Word Count : 7k
Notes : I think I’m currently on a jealous!Dex mindset. Enjoy!
Dex broke up with you like he was doing you a favor.
He stood in your kitchen with his hands folded in front of him, shoulders stiff, eyes fixed somewhere over your head because he knew if he actually looked at you, he wouldn’t be strong enough to do it.
So, even though it felt like putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger, splattering brain matter all over the white wall, he said it anyway.
“I’m not good for you.”
It was shaky, but it was a good effort. He had been thinking about how he would say it all morning, the second it left his lips, it tasted like poison.
You blinked at him.
For a second, Dex thought you might cry.
Instead, you laughed.
It was jarring, too bright in your cute little apartment, with your pink mugs drying beside his perfectly arranged knives by the sink and one of his shirts hanging over the back of your chair because you had worn it to bed the night before. The whole place was full of him: his order tucked into your chaos. His clean routines stare against your glitter and mess. His life was already so carefully arranged around yours, it was funny to think he would ever walk away.
“Oh, baby,” you said, pressing a hand to your chest, fake-hurt and saccharine in nature. “Is that what we’re doing? You’re saving me?”
Dex flinched.
Because yes! Yes, he was. He was a good guy now, and as selfish he might be, he would rather have you alone without him then dead with him. He could stalk you, watch you, keep you safe from a distance, even if you broke up. He couldn’t do it if you were fucking deceased now, could he?
“They took you last night to get to me,” he said, fidgeting with nothing in his fingers. “You’re in danger because of me.”
He was right, of course. Some rogue task force agents had figured out Bullseye had a girlfriend and decided you would make good bait. They bound, gagged, bruised, shoved you into the back of a van and drove you to an empty warehouse.
They didn’t tell their superiors, of course. They said get Bullseye first, kill him, bring the dead body to Powell, and get a promotion. That way, nobody else got to take the credit for their work right?
Dex had gone supernova and found you an hour later.
And you had been so sweetly delighted to see him, even like that. He was your beautiful, blood-soaked rescue dog with murder in his eyes and hands that killed your captors.
He had held, cradled, and unbound you, asked you if you were okay, and all you did was smile at him with blood trailing down your mouth and asked “what do you want for dinner baby?”
Fuck.
He had carried you back and watched you sleep. He was awake all night with a pistol in his grip, watching the door, the windows, the hallway, the rise and fall of your chest. Every breath you took felt like a reprieve he hadn’t earned.
By morning, he had convinced himself that leaving you was the only good guy option he had left.
Your smile dropped.
Because that, unfortunately, was the thing about Dex. He could be cruel by accident. He could stand there with those sad eyes and talk like loving you was a crime, talking down on you as if any man could tell you what to do for your own good. Please.
You frowned, stepping closer. “You don’t get to decide that for me.”
“I already did,” he sighed.
There it was. He felt like he had slit himself in the wrist saying that.
For a second, you looked genuinely wounded.
Dex saw it, he wanted to move toward you. His hands wanted your face, your waist, your bruised wrists, wanted to hold every hurt place and swear he would drown every task force officer in the city before anyone touched you again.
But that was the problem, wasn’t it? Dex loved you like a weapon. He loved you so much it made enemies out of strangers. It turned you into a target.
The spiralling thought crawled through him, sick and relentless: if he stayed, they would come back. If he stayed, someone would use you to get to him again. If he stayed, one day he would be late and you would be dead and you death was the one thing he cannot be responsible for, he can’t, he can’t, he can’t, he fucking can’t!
But then your frown disappeared.
It turned… glossy. Your mouth was pressed into a right pretty line, and you tilted your head as if you had just remembered you were supposed to be the fun one in the relationship.
“Okay,” you said sweetly.
What?
Dex’s eyes narrowed. “Okay?”
“Yeah.” You patted his cheek once, almost condescending. “Go be noble, handsome.”
He looked confused then, even when he was heartbroken beneath it. He had expected some emotion. A fight maybe.
Your anger would have made sense. Your grief would have made sense. Some sick part of him had pictured you crying so hard you couldn’t breathe, hands fisted in his shirt, nails scraping his skin as you begged him not to leave you. He had imagined you shoving him, cursing him, maybe even dragging a chair across the kitchen and threatening to tie him to it just to keep him there.
But you only smiled.
And fuck, the rotten, possessive monster in him was insulted.
Like how dare you let him do exactly what he said he’d do? How dare you stand there calm and pretty while he was ripping himself out of your life with his bare hands? How dare you not make him bleed for it? Dex wanted punishment. He wanted proof. He wanted you to lose control so he could feel your undying love.
Instead, you gave him permission.
You even grabbed his wrist and walked him to the door.
Dex followed because he had started this and because stopping now would mean admitting the truth: that every step away from you felt wrong.
His eyes dragged on everything as he moved: The mug he always used. The little smear of red polish he hated on the counter from when you had painted your nails there. The chair where he had sat last night cleaning blood from under his fingernails while listening to you rant about your kidnapper’s bad manners.
He had spent so long trying to root himself in your life. Now you were opening the door like he was nothing but a guest.
“If you want to leave,” you said, still smiling, “then leave.”
Dex stopped in front of you.
He wanted you to make it impossible. He hated himself for that. He wanted the door slammed shut, he wanted any proof that this wasn’t as simple as walking out. But you only stood there, beautiful as ever in his shirt, looking at him like you had already decided what came next for the both of you.
His chest felt too tight, his throat felt raw. He told himself this was good. This was better. You were letting him go, so that should’ve been mercy.
So why did it feel like punishment?
He looked down at your mouth, at your split lip. He had kissed you so carefully there just hours before. And now, you caught the front of his shirt and pulled him down into a kiss soft enough to make him sigh.
It was a goodbye kiss, he realised. At least you wanted him to think that.
For one breath, Dex tried not to kiss you back. Then he failed, because he was Dex, and you were you, and there had never been anything normal about the way you loved each other. His hand came up to cup your face, careful around the bruise on your cheek, careful around the split in your lip, careful even now while he was leaving you.
When you pulled away, he followed for half an inch before catching himself.
You smiled against his mouth.
“There,” you whispered. “Now go be noble.”
Dex stepped into the hallway like every inch of distance cost him his sanity.
You didn’t stop him.
You only stood there in the doorway, bright-eyed and terrible, watching him leave like this was not killing you, too.
At the elevator, he looked back.
You smiled and waved at him.
The doors closed between you.
Dex stood there with empty hands and a heart that would not stop clawing at his ribs, telling himself this was right. This was love. This was what a good man would do.
At least you were making it easy… right?
—
Three days later, he found a package of all of his stuff on his doorstep, though he didn’t know how you found his new address so quickly.
He was sure he’d been subtle, and yet, you continued to surprise him.
It had been left exactly in the blind spot between the hallway camera and the stairwell mirror, where no one would have seen you drop it off. Smart girl, he thought, then immediately hated himself for thinking it.
He opened the box to see that you had wrapped his knives individually, blades oiled, handles cleaned, each one placed parallel to the next. His spare ammunition case was taped shut with some strawberry washi tape. His toothbrush was sealed in a little plastic bag. His socks were folded the way he folded them, which felt more intimate than if you had thrown them loose into the box.
Dex crouched in the doorway for a moment, staring down at the package like it might bite. Like you might be hiding inside it somehow, waiting to laugh at him for flinching.
There was no note, though you had never needed a note to make a point.
He carried the box inside and unpacked it thoroughly, every item coming out like evidence. These were all proof that he had lived in your apartment. Proof that you had let him. Proof that, for a while, he had been stupid enough to believe he could have nice things. A world's best boyfriend mug, a box of tea you bought him, a book he had read just because you had written little comments in the margins and he liked hearing your voice in his head.
Then he found the shirt. The one you had been wearing when he broke up with you.
It was his shirt, technically. It was grey and soft from too many washes, still creased in the shape of your body. You had folded it carefully and placed it there like a final insult.
Dex picked it up.
He should have put it away. He should have washed it. He should have thrown it out if he was really as noble as he had tried so hard to be.
Instead, he pressed it to his face before he could stop himself.
It still smelled like you.
Like cinnamon, sugar, the faint trace of your shampoo. He missed you so much and so stupidly that for a second he forgot he was standing alone in a studio apartment he hated, holding a box of proof that you had accepted his leaving better than he had.
At the bottom of the package, beneath his things, was a burner phone, fully charged, with one number saved.
Dex stared at it.
Fuck.
He should crush it and throw it away. Instead, he placed it on his bedside table.
—
That night, he tried to sleep with the lights off and failed. The apartment was too empty. There was no sound of you moving around in the kitchen, no music playing low from your phone, no drawer half-open because you had taken out a bread knife and forgotten to close it. You weren’t there to cuddle up to him. No evidence of anyone alive but him.
He told himself this was good. This was the whole point of leaving, right?
You were away from him, and therefore away from the target on his back. You were alive. You were safe. Maybe you were angry, maybe you were already plotting something awful, but at least you were breathing somewhere he couldn’t ruin you.
Still, Dex laid on his side with your unwashed shirt gathered in his hands. He hated himself for it. Hated the way he pressed his face into the fabric and inhaled desperate like an addict. Hated that his body relaxed when he did. Hated that even after walking away, some animal part of him still believed your scent meant home.
He must have slept eventually, because the burner phone lighting up felt like a gunshot in the dark.
Dex opened his eyes and reached for it before he could talk himself out of it.
The first thing you sent was a photo of yourself in that red dress.
Oh.
The dress was obscene. He had always loved it, but he pretended to disapprove of it. He said it was too tight. It showed too much of your cleavage, your shoulders. This time, your lips were painted to match.
He remembered standing behind you once, hands on your waist, looking at you in the mirror and saying, very calmly, that you were not wearing that outside.
You had laughed then and called him possessive.
He hadn’t denied it.
Now you were wearing it for someone else.
Underneath, your message read:
date night!!! don’t worry he’s probably only committed tax fraud and like, three white collar crimes. character growth for me xoxo
Dex stared at the photo until the edges of his vision sharpened.
The room seemed to narrow around the screen and your bare collarbone and the curve of your smile.
He fucking hated the the idea of some man sitting across from you, looking at you in that dress, thinking he had earned the right.
Then the phone buzzed again.
You had sent a location, followed by a screenshot of a Tinder profile.
Dex clicked it before he could stop himself.
The man was too old for you, and definitely too smug. He had an expensive suit in the first photo, dead eyes, a bio full of words like entrepreneur and traditional values and looking for someone feminine.
Dex could see exactly what you had picked him for. Obviously, this man was designed in a lab to make Dex want to put his fist through a wall.
Twenty years older than you, at least.
His thumb hovered over the screen when the message came through.
trying soooo hard to date normal men now that my scary ex boyfriend dumped me for my own good :(
Dex sat up, your shirt was still in his lap.
The stupid, rational, noble part of him tried to tell him not to answer. It told him this was bait. It told him you had always been clever enough to turn his own jealousy into a leash.
Then Dex stared at the phone until it buzzed one more time.
he keeps looking at my chest btw. very empowering for me as a single woman
Ugh.
Dex got out of bed.
—
He didn’t go to seek you out.
Pfft.
That was what Dex told himself.
He didn’t grab his coat because of you. He didn't take the burner phone with him because of you. He didn't go across the city with his teeth clenched so tight it hurt because you were sitting pretty, smiling at a man old enough to know better and stupid enough not to.
He was just passing by.
That was all.
He just happened to end up outside the restaurant while going on a walk. He just happened to cross the street with his hands in his pockets with head down.
He didn’t go inside.
That was progress.
That was him being so fucking noble it made his him wanna vomit.
Dex stopped by the window.
Inside, the restaurant was dim and expensive in that hollow, tasteless way. You sat near the back, of course you did, angled just enough that he could see you.
And there you were, beautiful as the day he left you, which was like, last Tuesday.
Your date leaned toward you, talking at your mouth instead of your face.
Dex’s hand twitched.
You looked bored, actually. You had your chin in your hand, eyes dull, smile fixed in that polite little shape Dex knew meant you had mentally killed someone six different ways and found all of them uninspiring.
Then your eyes flicked toward the window, and you saw him.
You smiled, knowing there was an audience now.
And suddenly, magically, you were interested in your date.
You sat up straighter and twirled a piece of hair around your finger. You tilted your head at the man like whatever he had just said was fascinating instead of probably criminally stupid. You even laughed the kind of laugh Dex had once heard against his own throat in bed.
The man smiled wider, encouraged. He leaned closer.
Too fucking close.
Dex’s hand furled into fists, nails digging into his palms. He didn’t even realise he had bled until he heard a little drip on the pavement.
He wanted to fucking put his head through a mirror, but he didn’t. Because killing him would give you exactly what you wanted.
And Dex might have been a psychopath, but he wasn’t stupid.
You wanted him to make a scene. You wanted him to walk in and ruin your date and prove, in front of everyone, that he had never really let you go. You wanted blood on the white tablecloth and his hand around your wrist and that furious voice telling you that you were done.
He knew you.
He knew the trap because he wanted to step into it so badly.
So before he did something stupid, he left.
He walked back down the street, breathing evenly.
Then he saw the man’s car. He recognised it from his dating profile.
Dex stopped.
It was parked near the curb, glossy and obnoxious, exactly the kind of car a man like that would own. He looked at it for one long second.
No.
He was not going to kill him.
That would be unreasonable.
Instead, Dex took out his knife and slashed his tyres.
There.
Now the man couldn’t take you home.
Dex wiped the blade, folded it away, and walked back to his car feeling almost sane.
—
Two days later, the burner phone lit up in the dark while he was sitting on the edge of his bed, still awake, still pretending he was not waiting for it.
He picked up the phone pathetically quickly, and a photo loaded.
Dex went very still.
It was a rooftop bar, with city lights behind you, gold light on your skin. You were perched beside a man in a suit too expensive to be tasteful, eyes glittering toward the camera like you knew exactly what you were doing to him.
Worse, you were kissing the man on the cheek.
You weren’t really kissing him. Dex could tell. Your mouth barely touched his skin. It was theatrical, a pose, a cute little murder weapon aimed straight at Dex’s ribs.
It worked.
The man was handsome in that dead-eyed finance way. He had an empty smile and too-perfect hair. He had an expensive Cartier watch on his wrist. He looked like the sort of man who too loudly at his own jokes and gave waiters weird nicknames even after reading their name tags.
Dex hated him immediately.
Then he read the message underneath.
this one said vigilantes are bad for the economy :( thought you’d hate him
For a moment, all Dex could hear was his own breathing. It was controlled, but not controlled enough.
He texted back before his pride could stop him.
Go home.
Your reply came almost instantly.
you don’t get to tell me what to do anymore, Dex. you broke up with me, remember?
Fuck, he remembered.
He remembered your kitchen. Your pretty face, the pretty smile you had when you had decided not to beg. He remembered your mouth on his. He remembered walking out while every devoted part of him screamed to turn back.
He remembered thinking you were making it easy. He had been an idiot.
Then another message came through.
unless you wanna come get me?
Dex turned the phone face down. He stared at the back for five seconds.
Then ten.
Then he picked it back up.
He wasn’t going to give you what you wanted, he thought as he pulled on his jacket, and checked the address you had very helpfully attached to the next message. He wasn’t going to storm in. He wasn’t going to put his hand around your waist and tell you the date was over. He wasn’t going to break the man’s nose against the bar just because his cheek had your lipstick on it.
He was better than that, even if he fantasised about it all the way there.
When he arrived, he didn’t go inside. He stayed near the service entrance, where the light was dimmer and the staff moved too quickly to look at him for long.
Through the glass, he saw you.
You were laughing, but not your real laugh. Dex knew the difference, and somehow that was worse. You were performing now, all sweet tilt of your head, slow fingers tracing the rim of your glass.
Your date said something, and you smiled like it amused you. Then your gaze slid past him, toward the service door, toward the shadow where Dex stood.
He knew you saw him when your smile changed.
Then, because you were evil, you turned back to your date and touched his arm.
Dex’s hand flexed once at his side.
Dex really didn’t want to give you the satisfaction of killing him, so Dex only looked harder.
The man had a badge clipped carelessly to his belt, half-visible beneath his jacket when he stood to order another drink. Corporate, he saw, at a finance firm. He was too proud of it and too stupid to hide it. His watch flashed under the bar lights every time he moved his hand, begging to be noticed.
Men like that always had something to ruin.
Dex only had to find it.
It didn’t take long for him to find his name on the reservation. The name on the reservation led to a company profile. The company profile led to a Facebook profile. The Facebook profile led to a wife not nearly half as beautiful as you, Dex thought, so that was understandable. Then came the corporate card attached to the table, and the Hinge profile that shouldn't have existed.
Dex stared at all of it, and sent the proof where it needed to go.
Less than a minute later, the man’s phone started buzzing.
Dex watched him check the screen. He smiled when the colour drained out of his face.
You leaned forward, all pretty concern, chin in your hand, lashes fluttering like you hadn’t built the entire night to end exactly here: proof that Dex cared.
The man stood too quickly. His chair scraped against the floor. His hand went to his hair, then his watch, then his phone again as if touching enough expensive things might keep his life from falling apart in public.
Dex watched you bite your lip before realising that you were trying not to laugh.
Then, because he was still Dex, because restraint had limits and his limit was apparently a smug man wearing a watch that ugly near you, he made one more small adjustment to the evening.
He took a cocktail stick from a service cart and aimed.
A second later, the clasp of the man’s watch snapped, slipped from his wrist and dropped neatly into his glass of red wine.
The splash was small, but the humiliation was not.
The man stared at it as if he was going to lose it.
You looked toward the service door again. Your smile widened because you knew Dex was proud of himself.
—
He finally snapped three days later, when you sent him a photo from a date with an anti-vigilante task force agent.
Not a finance guy. Not some smug older man with a LinkedIn bio full of lies. Not someone Dex could ruin with an email or a slashed tyre.
A task force agent.
Fuckin’ one of them.
One of the very same people who had taken you.
Dex stared at the photo for a long time, so still he barely looked alive. You were smiling at the camera from the passenger seat of a sleek black car, wearing a little black dress and vicious amusement. Beside you was a man Dex didn’t know by name yet, but he knew the type immediately. He had dark hair, a leather jacket, a thin mouth, the kind of face made for press conferences and bad decisions.
You had your cheek pressed near his shoulder, his task force badge clearly visible.
The agent had one hand on the wheel, looking proud of himself.
Dex’s stomach twisted, and not just from jealousy.
No, this was worse.
This was you going on a date with danger on purpose. This was you putting your pretty little hand back in a bear trap and smiling when it closed. This was you looking at the same tribe of man who had violently gagged you, bound you, bruised your wrists, and deciding, with horrifying cheer, that this time they would make excellent bait for a change.
Dex knew you were a freak before, obviously. He had known from the way you treated murder like flirting when it came from him. But this was insane, even for you.
And the worst part was that it worked.
It fucking got to him.
The burner phone buzzed again.
look baby!!!! i’m dating someone age appropriate and employed by the government. healthy choices :)
Dex bit the inside of his cheek until it bled but did not answer.
Then, you send another message.
he says vigilantes are unstable men with hero complexes. thoughts?
Dex’s teeth clenched.
The room around him seemed to tunnel until there was nothing but the phone in his hand and your stupid, delighted little face glowing up at him from the screen.
Then, he felt another buzz.
he keeps asking if i have any exes. should i tell him you’re shy?
Dex stood even before the next message came through.
he says he’s gonna take me home! do you think i should let him come inside me too?
Dex’s fist closed around the phone so hard the screen cracked. No. No no no no no! How dare you fucking say that? How fucking dare you even suggest such a vile thing?
The final message buzzed in.
i mean, you were the only one who ever got to. but you wanted to be noble, right? gotta learn to share if you wanna be a good guy.
And that was the moment the monster in him shifted from jealous to possessive. Not because he thought you were helpless. Not because he thought you were stupid. You were on the pill; he knew that, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that until now, he had been trying to tell himself he had no claim over you anymore. That leaving meant letting go completely. That loving you from a distance was still love.
Then he read those words, and every decent, self-sacrificing thought in him went out the window.
Because no.
He did not want to share.
He did not want to be good.
He wanted you to be his.
So he read it again.
Then again, until fire burned through him
By the third time, his hand was already around the keys.
He found you twenty-three minutes later in the parking garage beneath a hotel too expensive for an agent’s salary. It was the kind of place with cameras in all the wrong corners and concrete floors that reflected the fluorescent lights in pale, ugly strips.
He found the car on level four.
The engine was still running.
Music played low through the speakers, bass muffled under the soft mechanical hum of the car. The windows had fogged at the edges, turning the back seat into a blurred confession booth. Dex saw you through the glass first, perched over the agent’s lap, still fully clothed, thank fuck.
Still, your dress had ridden up just enough to be suggestive. His jacket was still on. Your hands were planted on the leather seat on either side of him instead of touching his chest, like you were holding yourself there because you didn’t want to touch him anymore than you had to.
The agent didn’t notice.
He had one hand at your waist, fingers too sure, too familiar, his face tilted up toward yours as he tried to kiss you, hungry in a way that made Dex’s jaw lock. The man kept chasing your mouth, and you kept giving him just enough to keep the act alive.
You looked bored, thank god.
Dex could see the little glaze behind your eyes, glossy and false. He knew you were uncomfortable by the stiffness in your shoulders and the way your knees pressed into the seat instead of settling against him. He knew from the way your fingers dug hard into the leather, not his hair, not his coat, not anything that would make this real.
The agent thought you were teasing him.
Dex knew you were enduring him.
Your body stayed half an inch away every time the man tried to pull you closer. Your mouth turned at the last second when he went for a real kiss. Your lashes fluttered like flirtation, but your eyes flicked once toward the window because you were waiting.
You were just trying to sell every ugly second because you knew Dex would come.
And because some terrible, freaky little part of you wanted him to see exactly what happened when he tried to leave you unclaimed.
And it worked, because now his blood was boiling like a volcano before an explosion.
Dex harshly pulled the car door open like he wanted to rip it off its hinges.
The agent turned, irritated first, then confused. “What the—”
Dex dragged him out by the collar and slammed him against the side of the car hard enough to make the frame jolt. The agent’s head snapped back. His mouth opened, ready with some badge-brave threat or official little command.
That was when he saw Dex properly. The colour drained from his face.
You watched it happen from the back seat, lips parted, eyes glittering.
Imagine his face, really. Imagine being this anti-vigilante task force golden boy, handsome and government-funded, thinking you were taking some gorgeous girl home for the night. Imagine realising, way too late, that her ex was none other than Bullseye.
“Fuck,” the agent breathed.
Dex smiled, but it was most definitely not a nice smile.
“You asked about me?”
The agent’s hand twitched toward his weapon, but Dex reacted first.
He slashed his throat as the agent made a choked sound, more shocked than loud, and then Dex let him drop beside the car, limp like he deserved to be.
For a second, there was only the engine humming.
Then you gasped. It sounded so fucking fake.
Dex looked at you.
You were still in the back seat, dress riding high, lipstick smudged, one hand pressed to your mouth like you were horrified. But your eyes betrayed you, because they were bright and thrilled.
“You killed him,” you whispered.
Dex stared at you, breathing hard through his nose.
Your mouth trembled, but not from fear. You were trying not to smile.
Dex stepped closer to the open door. The garage lights cut his face into harsh lines, made him look even more ruined than he already was. He looked furious, heartbroken, and possessive all the same.
“Why the fuck,” he barked, “did you go out with a task force agent?”
You blinked up at him, feigning innocence. “I’m broadening my horizons.”
“He was one of them.” And what he meant by that was that one of them hurt you, one of them kidnapped you, one of them had harmed you.
“You left me single,” you pouted. “What was I supposed to do?”
His eyes went dark, and that was when you knew he had snapped.
All that faux-noble restraint and self-punishing distance, All those nights alone with the shirt that still smelled like you, all of that pretending he could walk out of your life and call it love? Gone.
Dex leaned into the car, one hand gripping the doorframe, the other reaching for your chin. He held you still, firm enough to make your breath hitch.
“You could have gotten hurt.” This time, though, he sounded genuinely worried.
You only batted your pretty lashes, though. “I knew you’d come.”
That was almost worse than the date. Worse than the photo. Worse than the agent dead on the concrete, because you were right.
You had known.
You had known exactly how to pull him back. You had known jealousy would get him halfway there, but fear would finish the job. You had known Dex could barely survive seeing you with a bad man, but he could not survive seeing you in danger with one.
“You’re sick,” he said.
You smiled then, soft and awful at the same time. “Yeah.”
Dex’s thumb brushed your cheek, gentle and comforting. Because you should know better. In fact, you did, but chose not to care.
That scared you more than the rage. You knew he was genuinely upset with you. He was disappointed.
“We’re going home,” he said.
You gave him a little pout, your stomach flipping at the mention of your shared home. “Are we?”
“Yes.”
You didn’t move.
Dex sighed. “Get out of the car.”
“No.”
Oh?
Suddenly, this stopped being about the task force, the breakup, the game you had both been losing on purpose. It became much more honest.
Dex looked at you like he wanted to shake you. Kiss you. Lock you in a cabin forever to keep you safe.
“You don’t get to do this,” he said.
“You broke up with me.”
“You don’t get to make yourself bait.”
“But you left!” Your voice was softer now, the bratty edge thinning out. “According to you, I’m not bait anymore, am I?”
Dex went still, because fuck did you have a point. That was the whole reason he left you, right?
You looked up at him, still glittering, but there was a crack now, a wounded thing peeking through the performance.
Dex’s mouth tightened as your smile flickered.
His shoulders dropped, as he frowned, ruching his thumb over your cheek. “I don’t wanna see you get hurt, baby.”
Aw. How cute.
You stared back, mouth trembling, the whole act finally splitting open enough for him to see the hurt underneath.
Not fear or guilt. Hurt, that you had refused to show him at the door. Hurt, the whole reason you were acting out and apparently, borderline suicidal for.
Then, very softly, almost small, you said, “Then don’t leave me.” You shook your head. “Please.”
Dex closed his eyes for half a second. When he opened them, the noble man he tried to be was fucking gone, never to return again.
Then he climbed into the back seat with you and slammed the door shut.
He kissed you like he had finally stopped lying to himself.
Oh, how you’ve missed his lips.
The windows fogged quickly at the edges, blurring the parking garage into streaks of white light and concrete shadow. Outside, the agent’s body was still slumped against the side of the car, a problem for later. Every faint shift of the vehicle knocked the corpse, every soft rock making a dull little sound.
Dex felt it too. He had a sudden awareness of where you were, what he had done, what you had made romantic because neither of you had ever known how to love in a way that did not look a little like a crime scene.
For one second, you thought he might stop.
Then your fingers slid into his hair and you whispered his name.
Whatever. He’ll just kill anyone that walked in.
He kissed you again, gentler this time, like your mouth was the only place in the world that had ever known what to do with him.
“There you are,” he whispered against your lips. “There’s my girl.”
All the glittering cruelty drained out of you. All the bratty little texts, the bad dates, the cute dresses, the performance. It fell away under his hands until there was only the aching truth: you had missed him so much it had made you mean.
Of course Dex knew from the start. It didn’t mean he was unaffected.
His hand slid to your waist, the dress bunched high. Your leg was hooked to the side, your back pressed into the leather, your hands trailing against his shoulders. Dex shifted his weight so he wouldn’t crush you. He even tucked one hand beneath your head so you would not hit the door. He kissed the corner of your mouth, then your cheek, then the sensitive beneath your ear, lingering there like he had spent eight days starving and had finally been allowed to taste home again.
“Missed you,” he breathed.
You closed your eyes.
Dex’s mouth brushed your skin. “Missed you so much. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t breathe right without you.”
Your fingers tightened in his hair, and the sound you made was small, broken, and you would have been embarrassed if it had been anyone else. But it was Dex. Your Dex, who could kill a man for touching you and then sigh like he was the one being saved when you pulled him closer.
He had lasted almost a full eight days before he completely lost the plot, and in some ways, you were proud of him. That man missed you after two hours of you in the gym.
But this time, he had lasted a whole week and one day of him pretending he could be good without you. A week and one day of him sleeping badly, eating worse, telling himself you were safer while his body mourned you. A week and one day of you smiling at other men because if Dex was going to leave you, then you were going to make it hurt.
And now he was back, kissing you like an apology, holding you like a vow.
“Don’t leave me,” you whispered as you felt Dex hook your black lace panties aside and undo his own belt just enough to do the job.
His forehead rested against yours, all the anger stripped out of him until only the love was left. “I won’t.”
“You promise?”
His free hand came up to your face again. His thumb brushed your cheek so gently it made your heart ache.
“I promise,” he said. “Never again.”
You believed him.
Maybe that was stupid. Maybe you were both stupid. Maybe that was the whole point.
And then he pushed in and stretched you out, and suddenly you were too drunk on him to even think.
You kissed him, needy, and Dex made the most helpless little sigh, almost a whimper, into your mouth. His hand gripped your waist. Yours slid down his back to trace his scar over his shirt, pulling him closer until there was no space left for either of you to pretend you had survived time apart.
The car rocked faintly under you, the windows going completely white now.
“Mine,” he whispered, but it didn’t sound like ownership this time. It sounded like relief.
Dex kissed the words out of your mouth before you could say anything cruel. He kissed your little mewls quiet. He kissed your wrist, too, the place where the bruises had been days ago, when they took you.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered against your skin.
You shook your head.
He kissed the inside of your wrist again.
“I’m sorry,” he said anyway, more of an apology to himself than to you, “For making you feel like I wanted to leave.”
You hated being seen that clearly, so you just pulled him down and kissed him until his apology turned into another broken sigh.
Finally. Finally.
When Dex reached his high with you, he did it quietly, almost sweetly, his face hidden against your neck, arms locked around you like he was afraid the world might still try to take you if he loosened his grip. He breathed your name once, and then held you through the shivering aftermath like I got you, baby.
You stroked his hair as the car settled beneath you and your heartbeat calmed with his. Dex’s breath warmed your throat, his body still curled protectively over yours.
Then, very carefully, he lifted his head.
His hair was a mess, mouth swollen. His eyes were still dark and a little wild, as kissed your cheek once.
Then your nose.
Then your mouth, so tenderly it made a terrible night feel almost normal.
“Do you wanna get dinner?” You asked dreamily.
He blinked at you, then scowled when he realised. “The dickhead didn’t feed you, did he?”
You huffed, breathless and offended now that he just knew. “He took me to some stupid fancy small plates restaurant. I’m still hungry.”
Dex’s eyes gentled so much it made you want to cry.
There he was.
Your psychopath boyfriend. Your man, sitting with you in a fogged-up dead agent’s car, still bloodied, still ruined, and yet still thinking about whether you had eaten enough.
He brushed your hair back from your face.
“Anything for you, baby,” he said.
So he got you your favourite takeout, kissed the sauce from your lips with a fond laugh, and by morning, his toothbrush was back in your apartment as if he had never been stupid enough to leave at all.
I think Dex really likes it when you're drunk around him. Like really likes it.
You already trust him enough to be sober with him, but to let yourself go around him drunk strokes something deep in his mind.
Maybe it's a control thing or just his devotion to looking after you, but every time your head lolls onto his shoulder or your body falls against his, it proves that you not only want him but need him.
You need him to support you; you need him to keep you safe. But you also want to do all those things. Drunk actions are sober thoughts, right?
To Dex, every drunk kiss and every unconscious lean into his side proves something deeper. It proves that you can't live without him like he can't live without you.
There's something intimate about being the person you instinctively turn to when you can't take care of yourself. You trust him with your vulnerability. You need him when you're weak.
And perhaps that's what he likes most: knowing that beneath all your independence, there's still a part of you that instinctively seeks him out.
The part that reaches for him without thinking. The part that trusts him completely. The part that needs him.
There's nothing more sacred than knowing that part of you was always meant to be his.
gem says:ugh this probably doesn't make any sense but it came to me when I got home from a night out:P still got another drabble and then a fic to come out so hopefully those make sense
pairing Benjamin Pointdexter x girlfriend!reader
word count around 500 words
masterlist here
It was a lazy dull night where Dex, or rather Bullseye, wasn’t roaming the streets and lurking above towering buildings. NYC was frightening at night, aside from the criminals waiting for their victims in the corners of the roads, the darkness was way more appalling.
Dex’s fingers caress your waist under your shirt, and you let out a chilly breath. It was way too freezing for you to be in nothing but Dex’s oversized shirt. You let out a giggle when he softly pinches your skin, “what the hell was that?”
“Nothing. . . making sure you’re real. Can’t believe you’re real.” he breathes out, hand moving to your cheek. You’ve been with Dex for a couple of months, and next week will mark half a year together. Despite you getting used to Dex really quickly, he still gets awkward when you’re around. It isn’t surprising he’s not used to normalcy.
“Are you high right now? Wait, how many fingers are there?” You hold up two fingers as a joke, beaming when he playfully groans and turns around. Sitting up, you shake him until you hear another groan.
“I’m trying to sleep.” He mumbles. He tried to make himself sound indifferent, but if there’s something about Dex is that he’s very inadequate at lying to your face.
“Fine, I’m sorry. I love you too, baby.” You press a kiss on his shoulder, your lipstick leaving a mark. His hair reeks of blueberry, one of the new shampoos you brought him as a gift, claiming it reminded you of him.
During these nights, Dex’s shoulder hunch less and his clenched jaw can unfurl and he can talk to you about any thought on his mind. He likes to think that you are secretly a witch, and he’s under your spell, but he doesn’t care. He would choose to be under your spell over any normal life.
He finally turns around, basking in your face in the silver hue of the moonlight. There’s nothing more he admires than your face, or all of you. Your caring eyes and tender touch is enough to bring him to his knees. His arms wrap around yours, pulling you from your sitting position into his arms. Yelping softly, you hit him in his shoulder.
“Stop it! I’m trying to sleep!” You mock, but he shuts you up by pressing a quick kiss to your lips, something he knows makes the tip of your ears hot and makes your brain short circuit.
Dex knows that he would always love you, no matter what. His love for you is printed into his brain. It’s tattooed everywhere in his body permanently. No amount of brainwashing or brain wiping could make him forget those eyes of yours.
“Go to sleep, sweetheart.” He places another kiss on your forehead.
And when the kaleidoscopic display of multiple colors stretches over the sky instead of the silver hue of the moonlight, Dex holds you close, his arms around you with his thigh draped over yours.
he’s always precise. targetted care in his movements like he’s planning what he’ll do before he does it. you find him smiling faintly when you blink at him, stammering at how he’d hit a target so far away.
even if the target was just a garbage can.
at the park, he grabs a stray kite just before it gets out of his reach. the string loosens from a little boys fingers as you walk by. though dex’s hand slips out of his pocket before the boy even lets go and dex’s thick fingers clasp around the string.
you just barely saw him do it, but you did nonetheless.
dex catches cups that you accidentally knock over and doesn’t let them hit the ground. you’ve just drunk a glass of water and mindlessly set it on the corner of the table. dex is already eyeing you from across the room. he crosses before you turn to him and your elbow hits the cup. your eyes shut in anticipation of glass shattering. but instead, he reaches out and catches it behind your back and sets it right back down.
at josie’s, dex doesn’t just hit the red target on the dartboard easily but he’ll also pin things from across the room. when you’re sipping your terrible drink and giggling at your stupidly attractive boyfriend, he’s still throwing darts with his arm around your waist. not missing a single shot. but a hooded figure grabs a purse from a old woman and dashes out from her grip and dex sees it before you do. he throws his dart from across the damn bar and it hits the man, right in his hand holding the purse.
the man screeches in pain, his hand pinned to the splintering wood that was probably older than you. the purse falls from his hand immediately and dex picks it up to return to the older woman. she thanks him graciously and you’re eyeing him with lustful intent as he makes his way back over to you.
“what?” he blinks and freezes at your gaze. “i’m one of the good guys now.”
your eyes trail down his figure and then up again, intensely slow. he blushes hard and tries to hide his growing smile. though you grip at his shirt and urge him closer, rasping his name like a plea and a demand he’d never deny.
“i wanna go home now.”
dex nods quickly and takes your purse in his other hand, ushering you out of the bar as fast as possible.
the apartment door shuts behind the two of you only after you’d already been pushed towards the couch. dex bounces a fidget to you’d bought him off the counter and it hits the front door, pushing it shut hard. his hands on your waist move meticulously as they begin shedding your layers. barely even touching the button of your jeans as he opens and pulls them down. his rough hands trailing stupidly soft up your spine, dragging the fabric and sending shivers up deliciously.
his hips seem to have the same motivation of his mind. precise, perverse, and insatiable.
before you can part your lips to let any sounds out, he swallows them down like something rare. he fills it with little sounds that destroy you instead. his lips like sweet nectar to your sensitive ears that amplify every thought with visions on him.
because dex fucks like he fights—skilled and unfair.
every push of his hips, pressing against yours. every thrust more devastating than the last, stealing your breath repeatedly. over and over. he learns and he adjusts without you saying anything. he listens to your body and to the sounds you make to guide him aimlessly. he smiles when you lose yourself in the feelings. watching you twist just for him to hold you there and keep you from squirming. dimples evident as he laughs lowly and holds your hands above your head.
“right there sweetheart? you like when i touch you there?” cooing by your ear and pulling away to watch. because dex loves to watch.
he’s so precise in his movements that he purposefully touches the depths of you. just enough before it’s too much for you. mouthing down your jaw while he kisses your cervix. letting your moans bless his ears while you clench around him. dex kisses you through it but he doesn’t stop. he keeps moving and teasing. coaxes you through your high and tumbling into a new one while he resumes his ministrations.
he’ll beg you to let him come inside you but you both know you’ll let him anyways.
“let me do it,” he pants against your skin, “let me give you everything.”
the most sultry seduction, wetting his lips as he speaks. the honey tongued words drowning you in bliss as he holds your hips with roughened care. the sound of his skin on yours and the hard muscle of his abs under your fingers when you trail your palms down his torso.
how can you deny him? how can you deny yourself?
you’re nodding before you can think about consequences. you’re trying to wrap your legs around his waist when he pushes them up higher and higher. letting your ankles hang off his shoulders with your knees pressed to your chest.
dex fucks you faster, running his free palm down your bodies to tease you further. rubbing tight circles with his thumb while you fall into a pleasurable pain that you recognized as overstimulation. thrusts sloppy as he loses his own train of thought.
his mind filled with nothing but you, you, you.
his worst obsession. his biggest weakness.
you gasp as you feel him finally let go, painting you white between his shattering, relentless thrusts. pushing back through his broken groans as he pulses against your walls. nothing ever goes to waste with him. he’s precise with where he wants to fill you until you’re dazed. blissed out when he finally stills.
he stays buried inside, hand lifting to grip your cheeks. squeezing just enough to make your lips pout and part to spit directly on your waiting tongue. not letting a drop escape. pulling out with a wet sound you’d burned to memory, he makes quick work to collect the two of you and push it back inside. sealing it with a kiss that stole your breath effortlessly.
18+ cunniligus with dex where you can't push him away
fem! reader, mdni. 1.9k words. cw: cunniligus, kinda mean dex, slight overstimulation, general filth
Dex is often comparable to a smitten cat: he hates a closed door. He'll mither and pester and bother, do whatever, except wait patiently on the other side of it. He may act like he's been cruelly depraved of your attention, or shunned by you, but really you've just closed it for a moments privacy.
Sort of like right now. You had not long gotten out the shower, and rather than been seen naked and hunched over drying yourself and applying lotions, you decided to close the door to the bedroom for a quick minute. If you shut it quietly enough, Dex won't notice.
But he does.
That little click of the hinge makes his ears prickle, and in no time at all, you hear feet scuffle on the other side. A small set of knocks follow and then a light cough — like he was clearing his throat.
"I need to get my charger."
You smile to yourself. The act coming from a place of slight amusement. It was like routine with Dex, when you close the door, he'll pretend he needs something from the other side — make up some kind of ruse in order for you to open it.
Making your way to his side of the bed, you look inside his nightstand drawer for the charger that's almost always there, though it isn't. The neatly segregated contents void of the charger he claims he needs to collect. And so you adjust the towel still wrapped around you and sit yourself down at the edge of the bed. You glance to the near empty nightstand and to the door, and it's then you decide to toy with him for a moment.
"I'll pass it to you, one second," you tease. You pretend to search and tap your feet on the floor; remaining in place so as to give the illusion you were actually looking. "It's not in here."
"Well," he sighs, seemingly panicking for an excuse. "It is."
"Where is it?" you question, playfully provoking him. "I'll get it."
"Can I just come in?" he remarks, growing annoyance clear in his tone. "I'll be quick," he adds, voice far softer — like he was prompt to correct himself.
You give him a hum in response, but it doesn't have to be particularly loud for him to hear it. All he needs is the slightest possible confirmation in order to open the door. And like it was an instant invitation, he pushes it open and steps inside.
He lingers in the door frame for a moment, eyes falling from the exposed expanse of your shoulders and down to your bare legs. His gaze reluctantly pulls away for a quick moment and to the kitchen behind him, the hot pans on the stove reminding him of where his prior attention was. Though he's thankful to have been ahead with forethought, and it's when he finally hears the pans reduce to a quiet, inconsistent sizzle, he steps further into the room.
Your eyes meet his, peered up gaze following his stalk like movements as he grows closer and closer. And it's then that he halts, big broad frame pausing in front of you — intense hazel eyes cast down on you below. You were fine playing with him between a closed door, fine to tease when he didn't face you; but to have him directly ahead of you, watchful gaze locked on you, you no longer felt that same sense to toy with him like you did before.
His eyes lower and focus in on your lap for a moment. And it's then his head tilts aside, like you were supposed to know what it means.
Though you do and you give him a small nod. Again, it was all he needed.
He bends at the knee and lowers, movement slow and controlled. He's far closer to the level of your eyes, but still, it feels like he's looking down upon you. Dex places his palms on either of your thighs, hands spread wide as he guides your legs apart — separating you.
The placement of his thumbs lower on either side of your thighs, the pads itching along the inners of each with faint little circles he draws into your skin. He sits further onto the heels of his feet, and it's then he looks up at you, eyes heavy as they study the growing want in your face.
His gaze soon diverts from you, though yours remains on him — watching him intently as he dips between your thighs, face turning aside so he can press his lips to the inners of one. Breath hot as his mouth ghosts your skin. The trail of his lips rises higher and higher and in it's place, a litter of kisses are left behind.
Your head involuntarily falls back, and the rest of you then follows. You adjust and push yourself further up the bed, scooching back so as to kindly make some space for Dex between you. He moves with you, lips remaining in place at the inner of your thigh like his mouth is fused to your skin.
Getting comfortable betwixt your thighs, he rests on his elbows — face subsequently itching in closer to your cunt. He shifts his weight a moment, arms coming up from their placement at the edge of the bed to wrap around you; arms encompassing your lower hips. His fingers paw at the squish of your inner thighs, pads sort of pulsing your skin as he pries your legs further apart.
He's slow and teasing. Like he's making you wait the way you did him a few moments before. But really, he's only taunting himself.
Nuzzling inwards, he presses a kiss to crease of your inner thigh, and then another and another, though the more that follow, the closer they get to your cunt. And by the fourth, maybe fifth kiss he sears into you, his lips reach the ones of your pussy.
Your stomach shudders as a direct response to his touch and it's when you feel your back lift from the sheets, that your hands shoot down and for his hair. Bending your legs, you lift your feet and place them at the edge of the mattress. You hook them, heels digging into that rimmed cuff as an effort to fix yourself more comfortably.
He presses another kiss to you, but this time, slightly higher than the one before. His lips reach your clit and it's there he resumes a small series of faint, and just as lengthy kisses — each one making your thighs beside his head twitch from the gentle care. His tongue extends outwards and he licks a stripe from the middle of your cunt, to where his lips remain just below the mound of your clit.
And he repeats that — doing so over and over and over until all that coats your cunt is a slight sheen of his spit. Before long, those licks turn into suckles; mouth moving deliberately in one spot, focus honed in on where you're most sensitive. Your clit.
With his grip still encompassed over the uppers of your thighs, he adjusts you within his grasp — angling and tilting your hips so as to better nuzzle his face between. You too reposition; altering the placement of your legs so they can trail down the length of his back, the behinds of your thighs pressing into his shoulders, the heels of your feet hooked at his sides.
It's as if you've inadvertently entrapped him, caged him between your thighs. But he's quick to return the gesture — quick to ensure he's just as trapped as you'd involuntarily made him.
Dex's hold withdraws from your thighs and instead roams upwards, hands flat, thumbs leading the way as he runs up the sides of you, movement slow and intentional. He pauses when he reaches your tits, and it's then that he cups them; holding each nice and firm as he uses them as a way to anchor himself to you. To keep you exactly as is.
His tongue curls between your folds, the once flat muscle now pointed and deliberate as he pushes it through your pussy's lips — pressure slight, yet apparent as it divides you. While his touch is light, your body processes it as anything but, and as the tip of his tongue knocks up against your clit, you jerk against him. Hips winding and bucking a couple times against his face like you had no control over it.
Your nails rake across his scalp, fingers pushing through his hair just moments before you grab fistfuls on either side. While it was an effort of control on your side, it only encourages him, it simply eggs him on to have you respond in such a distinct and albeit, forceful way.
But there's only so much direct pleasure you can take, especially when his mouth is so concentrated on your nub of nerves. And when he begins to tweak your nipples between thumb and index, you find yourself eager to scamper from the gratification he brings you.
The height within you hasn't yet been located, but with every lick and suck and kiss he presses into your cunt, you feel yourself aimlessly creeping closer and closer towards it. Though it begins to teeter into too much and your hips shudder against his tongue as a means to escape from the bottomless pit of pleasure.
He doesn't let you far, not when his grip tightens around you.
"No," he murmurs into you, the word muffled yet firm — voice reverberating against your cunt. "Stay."
But as much as you try, you just can't. You react instinctively, body responding through lack of self-control, and it's in the following moment where you feel yourself reach that edge.
You feel it harsh and fast.
Your back curves from the sheets as you cry out, panting out nonsensically as he continues to tongue fuck you through it.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," you choke out, voice strained. Desperate.
If you thought it felt too much before, you were surely mistaken; just blatantly erroneous. You make attempts to rid him from you — weakened hands pushing at his head, though it's no use, not when he further secures his grasp around you.
"Keep still."
"Fuck," you whine. It's just shy of a mewl.
But when you really, seriously, genuinely try to flee, he lets up. He releases your shaking shuddering body and slowly stands, emerging from between your thighs.
Dex leans over you, hands either side of you for support as he lowers atop, face itching in for yours.
"Dinner's in fifteen," he hums against your lips, the taste of you on his tongue slight.
Even with his mouth ghosting yours, he neglects to press a kiss. Instead he pushes himself away from your bare body below and stands over you. His eyes trail over you a moment before he covers you with the towel that had fallen open from those ten-some minutes of tongue fucking.
His absence grows larger, and as he heads for the door, he pauses — turning slightly to look back at you. Features stern, sort of like a warning.
He taps at the door, head tilting so as to firm his expression.
"This stays open."
⎯ ☆ ⎯
I had this vision right, and it was POISONING my mind!!!!! so had to get it out
18+ benjamin poindexter is big, needy, and pathetic.
at first you were afraid of what bullseye can do.
you didn’t know benjamin poindexter, but you knew of that other side of him. the blood on his hands that he acted like didn’t exist or just didn’t care to dwell on. how capable he is of destruction that it followed him everywhere he went.
but then he met you.
well, first he followed you. he found your address and place of work. found your parents house and your coworkers husband who stared too long at you when he picked up his wife.
dex watched you walk home from afar because someone should make sure you’re safe, right?
but you’re attentive and when he starts to get closer, you notice him. he’s not hard to miss, all that muscle mass and that deafening stare. you lock eyes with him at the grocery store. then, at your local coffee shop when he lifted his hat and visibly gulped. he finally builds up the courage to talk to you then and buys you a cup of coffee, plus some sweet pastry because he knew you hadn’t eaten yet, even though you didn’t tell him.
though when he slips up that the gym by your house is nice, you just knew.
“did i mention i lived around there?” you blink at him.
his smile reaches his eyes, crinkling beautifully. “i believe so.”
calling his bluff and inching closer, you press on, “i believe you’ve been following me, Benjamin.”
everything in his face drops and his expression falters. “no… i just—i saw you and i thought,”
“—it’s okay,” you smile, lifting your drink and sipping slowly. eye’s glued to his as they began to soften. “i can learn things too. really interesting things officer.”
he blinks hard, “i didn’t tell you about my job…”
“and yet? you’d be surprised how much information you can find online.”
the words die in his mouth and he’s left dumbfounded and speechless. still, he stays and he asks for number. you give him it. you could ask him to anything and he’ll say yes or soundlessly change the odds so they’re all in your favour. it’s not coercion and it’s almost worse than obsession, but the control is all in your hands. he is at your beck and call willingly.
so when he you’re mad at him, he doesn’t know what to do. he just falls apart.
“please,” he begs over the phone, “i’ll be good i swear. i’ll stop fighting just let me come home.”
from his tone you could tell he was just done crying and it just sounded pathetically beautiful.
“this is not your home. this is my house.” you coo as you stir your dinner. “stop calling me dex.”
you hang up without listening to the rest of his pleading. though less than 10 minutes later, he’s at your front door, begging again.
“baby,” eyes red and puffy, “i need you, i can’t breathe without you. please, please, don’t cut me off again, just—” he breathes as he ghosts his arm by your shoulders like he’s asking for permission. “can i please stay?”
you sigh and let him inside the house. he silently walks in, muttering a quiet thank you as he passes you. as soon as you close door and turn, dex is already on his knees.
“what the hell are you doing dex?”
dropping to his knees, his hands caress the backs of your thighs, dropping his head and burying it between them. gripping you tightly like he could bare letting go. “please take me back. nothing is good without you and it’s making me fucking sick, please,” practically blubbering at this point.
he was so strong and his biceps wrapped around you effortlessly. you could feel the strength just radiating off of him always, like an ever glowing essence.
you sigh, hand touching the nape of his neck and travelling up through his hair while he hums in contentment, “please stand up.”
the sound that he makes was teetering the line of desperation and relief. his lips press against the plush of your thigh while his hands rise to cup your ass. with your hand still buried in his hair, you pull him up with a slight tug, trying to get him to stand. though he keeps slowly rising, kissing up your side and dancing over your stomach, the fabric rising with every movement. a soft gasp escapes your lips and his touch slides up your spine, a shiver running through you. he stops just by your neck when you tug his hair harder and he hisses your name though one would argue it was a moan. you shove him gently and tell him to sit down, though you knew he could’ve stopped you.
you tend to his wounds and wipe his face and he watches you the whole time with puppy eyes. you share your dinner with him but you don’t touch again then, he only steals glances between bites.
within the span of an hour he’s inching closer to you on the couch and he’s watching you when he thinks you’re not looking. no one really cares about the news playing on the television as it repeats something about the AVTF.
his heavy hand rests just under your chest as he pulls you in and buries his nose in your hair, taking a long deep breath in. memorizing your scent like it gave him life.
by the end of night dex is situated between your legs, groaning like it hurts to part from you. he whispers soft thank you’s like he’s grateful for this meal you’ve provided. pushing your legs up higher over his head while you pant and squirm. but dex takes more control then, ignoring your pleas to slow down and dragging you closer to his mouth. maw slack and relentless as he laps and teases. his strong arms wrap and hook around your thighs. tongue teasing the sensitive bud for what felt like eternity. you’ll push his head away to no avail, weakly spent as you attempt it.
“dex, enough. i can’t,” you pant, voice bordering on barely concealed exhaustion and blissful satisfaction.
he shakes his head against you and that only makes you gasp again, throwing your head back.
“not until you promise hmm?” he says between his drunken moans, “you can’t leave me.”
crying out from overstimulating pleasure you nod, “okay, fuck— i won’t. you can stay.”
looking up at you through his hooded eyes, he smiles with them before kissing your inner thigh. he leaves gentle kisses to let you cool off, letting the feeling subside for barely a minute before diving right back into his ministrations. he lets you squeeze yours legs around his head and writhe as you say his name.
“now really try to suffocate me with these,” he says as he squeezes your thighs harder around his neck, turning his head to bite the plush of your thighs.
you know you’ll let him in again. you’ll always let him come back. maybe one day you’ll tell him how you follow him too.
can you tell i just rewatched the whole show again?
fbi!ben poindexter has this bad habit of referring to you as his. it comes off weird to outsiders, occasionally, because you obviously aren't an object to be owned; you know, though, he doesn't mean it like that. in his mind, it's an equivalent exchange—he's as much yours as you are his.
my girl, he introduces you to colleagues sometimes. my perfect baby, he breathes into the space between you at night, sweat-slicked chest pressed to yours. so good to me, for me. in the mornings, while cooking breakfast: my pretty girl sleep well? mine, mine, mine.
and then, other nights, he's begging you to say it back, pleading for you to acknowledge that he belongs to only you, pressing your hands to his neck 'til your fingers wrap around it and euphoria fills his veins and you lean down to kiss him and call him yours. when he's bored, maybe at the checkout queue in the grocery store, or waiting in his car at a red light, he presses kisses to each of your knuckles, murmuring something against them you never quite seem to catch—i'm yours. my benjamin poindexter, you say once, in passing, and he's always hated his name, but he's just so flustered, cheeks flushed the prettiest pink, and just this one time, just this once, he might be okay with it.
or he overhears you talking to your friends when he's working in the other room—he doesn't mean to, really, he's just attentive, a good boyfriend—and you say you don't know how you got so lucky; you don't deserve your beautiful boy, and his brain short-circuits, because how dare you say that first part, and what did you call him? you don't make the correlation, though, that night, when he's somehow even more devoted to you than usual, telling you how obsessed with you he is, his gorgeous, gorgeous girl. must be a little pent up, you think, but you don't know how wrong you are.
after the events of s3 you don't expect him to come home, of course not. who walks out of that?
your boyfriend, apparently. much stronger than the last time you saw him, twice as built—you don't know what to expect from ddba!dex. he's obviously different, because that shit back there changes you, and not always for the better, right?
and yes, he's still your boyfriend, whether you're single or dating someone or you have a ring on your finger—not that it matters much, because if there is someone, he'll take care of them before he comes back home to you. neither of you will have to worry about them anymore.
and you're his girl, after all; even if you're scared or horrified or disgusted by his actions, you'll find yourself completely uncaring by the end of the night, when he's holding you in a headlock, firm bicep pressing into your airway and his chest pushed up right against your back. you're in tears, overwhelmed by everything you're feeling, everything you know is wrong (he's an escaped convict, for heaven's sake), and his breathless words are low and urgent in your ear—who do you belong to, c'mon, say it, that's right, my good girl—
and maybe he's a little scared that you'll still leave him after this, maybe he's gone too far. but you're lying under him, boneless, and his arms are braced on either side of you, and you push yourself up on your elbows (with considerable effort) and say, if he's still really yours, won't he kiss you again? and he smiles the biggest he has in a while, because he knows he won—and with you, he always will.
hi im back. sorry. i hate myself too. this man will be the death of me. 0.6k words
꒰ wc ꒱ 15k words
꒰ summary꒱ after stalking you for years, dex is completely unprepared for the dizzying reality of finally being invited into your life—your apartment, your bed, your soft thighs opening for him so sweetly that he can barely tell where fantasy ends and addiction begins.
.ᐟ contents |
18+ (MDNI), stalking, smut, unprotected sex, oral (f&m!receiving), pervert!dex, canon!dex, fbi!dex, horny!reader, oblivious!reader, stealing, panty sniffing, panic attacks, mental breakdown, suicidal dex, mentally unstable dex, canon compliant, somnophilia, dub-con, inexperienced!dex, mentioned murder, humping, groping, spit swapping, finger sucking, creep!dex, breeding kink, fluff, dark romance, manipulation, gaslighting, all in dex's pov
.ᐟ lizzy’s note |
this fic has been plaguing my life for the last three months and now im finally free. genuinely just wanted to write smut, then forced myself to create plot leading up to it. trying out a new layout, pls don't burn me at the stake.
at this rate stay tuned for my next dex fic in 2027 <3
likes comments and reblogs are much appreciated ✨
divider by @uzmacchiato
Dex loved sushi night Fridays.
You two had settled into the routine months ago without either of you ever really acknowledging it. Fridays after work. The same tiny sushi place tucked between a laundromat and a pawn shop, the sign flickering like it was running on borrowed time.
Inside was all warm amber lighting and fogged windows, the air thick with rice vinegar and the low hiss of the grill.
The hostess smiled the second you walked in now, already reaching for a menu you never looked at, because you already knew what you wanted, and Dex already knew you’d order it before you did.
You referred to it as your “cheat day,” something Dex privately thought was bullshit. You were always working on cutting back on takeout or “trying to be healthier,” only to cave every Friday night without fail.
But the word cheat implied you were doing something wrong. Indulging something shameful. And he hated the idea of you apologising for your own appetite.
He’d watched the pattern long enough to know it by heart; Sushi Fridays. Thai food on bad days (red curry, extra spicy, no matter how much it made you sweat). Wings—any kind really— when you were too tired to cook… or on your period.
And coffee, too much coffee, all throughout the week, the same two-pump vanilla order from the cart on 47th.
Dex didn’t think you needed to worry about your weight. The thought irritated him every time it surfaced, a low-grade static at the back of his skull. You were beautiful exactly as you were.
If he had things his way, you’d indulge every craving that crossed your mind. Midnight milkshakes. Extra dessert. Those strawberry candies you liked from the bodega near your apartment.
He’d drive across the city at two in the morning if you suddenly decided you wanted dumplings or lemon cake or greasy diner fries.
The restaurant lights caught against your jewelry when you moved, tiny gold hoops glinting near your jaw. Warm light softened everything about you.
Your skin took on a honeyed tone, the shadows beneath your cheekbones gentle rather than sharp. It made you glow in a way Dex had never been able to properly explain to himself.
Like candlelight catching honey, or the last sun ray through a window at dusk.
He watched you pick up another fried roll with your chopsticks, your nose wrinkling slightly when it nearly slipped apart before you got it into your mouth.
That made him chuckle. A sound that died in the hollow of his chest, swallowed by the space between his ribs.
God.
He needed this.
Needed the quiet rhythm of it after the last week spent buried in FBI work. The lies. The noise. Too many voices in his ear, too many meetings, too much time spent orbiting Wilson Fisk and his suffocating shadow.
His apartment never helped either. Too quiet and too still. Silence had a way of making his thoughts louder, the walls pressing in until he had to pace just to feel like he still had room to breathe.
But here, things felt… normal.
Outside, rain poured weakly past the windshield of Dex’s car.
The wipers had been off for a while now, leaving the glass streaked with dried residue. The heater hummed low near his knees, filling the car with dry warmth and the heavy, layered smell of fried tempura, soy sauce, and burnt coffee that had long gone cold in the cupholder.
Across the street, through the fogged window of the sushi place, you laughed suddenly at something on your phone, leaning forward across the table.
Dex smiled before he could stop himself.
He adjusted the takeout container balanced carefully in his lap before it tipped against the console. The plastic lid was beaded with condensation, the heat of the food fogging it from inside.
Soy sauce packets crowded the cupholder beside the coffee and crinkled napkins were shoved messily near the parking brake.
One dumpling had leaked grease through the paper container onto his slacks minutes ago, a dark stain spreading across the fabric near his knee, but he barely cared.
He hadn’t even registered the warmth of it until it had already cooled.
Dex stuffed another piece of sushi into his mouth absently, chewing without tasting, his eyes never leaving you.
The rice was a little dry. The ginger had that sharp, stinging bite that made the back of his throat tighten.
He’d picked up the order right before you came in, timed it so the food would still be warm when he settled into the driver’s seat.
His monocular rested against his thigh for barely a second before he lifted it again automatically. He settled it back against his socket without thinking, the world snapping into that familiar, compressed clarity.
His pulse eased the moment your face sharpened back into focus.
There she is.
Chin propped lazily into your palm now, reading something intently on your phone. A server passed behind you carrying a tray and even distracted, you looked up at him automatically. Sweet and polite.
Warm in that effortless way that still twisted something painfully tight inside Dex’s chest after all these years.
You gave pieces of yourself away carelessly without even realising it. A smile here. A laugh there. A small wave to a regular who held the door for you.
You never hoarded your warmth. It just spilled out of you, abundant and unguarded, and Dex collected every stray drop like a man dying of thirst.
His thumb moved slowly against the steering wheel, tracing the seam where the leather had begun to crack near the top.
This was exactly what he needed after the week he’d had.
Just you and him.
The thought surfaced without permission, settling somewhere deep behind his sternum. He let it sit there as his hand drifted toward the glove compartment without looking away from you once.
The latch gave with a quiet click, and his fingers found the familiar bundle by touch alone, soft cotton folded neatly in the dark, tucked beside his registration and a crumpled gas receipt.
He drew it carefully into his lap, keeping his eyes fixed on your silhouette through the monocular.
The pale fabric bunched lightly in his fist. The lace trim was cool against his palm, delicate, a detail he’d traced with his fingertips so many times that he could map it blind.
Almost absentmindedly, like a man reaching for a cigarette or rubbing a familiar scar, he brought the stolen panties toward his face and inhaled slowly.
The smell hit him in stages. First the faint, clean scent of your vanilla lotion, the one you applied after every shower. Then the warmer note of your shea body oil, the one you massaged into your elbows and knees before bed.
Beneath that, something warmer and distinctly you, something saline and soft that settled low in his stomach hard enough to make his slacks tighten slightly. A familiar, hungry ache that bloomed behind his fly at just your scent.
He held the breath for a long moment, letting it steep in his lungs, before exhaling through his nose.
A small souvenir he’d rewarded himself four months ago, after letting himself into your new loft late one night to make sure everything was secure.
You’d forgotten to latch one of the windows facing the fire escape. Careless sweet thing. The lock had been loose, the frame warped slightly from humidity, and when he’d tested it with his fingertips, it had swung open without resistance.
Dex had fixed it for you before leaving. Tightened the screws on the latch, oiled the track, made sure it would hold.
He’d found the panties in your laundry basket on the way out. A pale blue cotton pair, with a small tear near the waistband that you’d never bothered to mend. He’d slipped them into his jacket pocket before he could think better of it.
Across the street, you laughed again, shoulders shaking lightly this time, your head tipping back just enough to expose the column of your throat.
He exhaled softly through his nose, smiling along with you like he really was sitting across the table
Just you and him.
That was all he needed.
He didn’t know what to think when he saw the newspaper.
For one suspended second, there was nothing. Not anger. Not fear. Not even confusion. Just a sharp, empty stillness, like a pin had dropped somewhere inside his head and every part of him had gone quiet trying to hear where it landed.
Dex had been sitting there for hours, spine rigid, eyes fixed on the bank of screens showing Fisk’s penthouse from every angle. The man himself was visible in one frame, seated at his dining table. Calm and unbothered like always.
Then the paper landed in front of him.
FBI INVESTIGATES ONE OF THEIR OWN.
Agent Kane shifted beside him. “I’m sorry, Dex. This isn’t right,” she said quietly.
He heard her voice, but it came from somewhere far away, as if she were speaking through water. The words landed and dissolved.
Dex stared at the headline until the letters stopped being letters and became just shapes—black ink pressed into pulp, arranged by somebody who didn’t know him, didn’t care about him, didn’t understand anything about what he’d done or why.
The static began to rise. It always started like this, a low hum at the base of his skull, building as the world pressed in.
Around him, the room kept moving. Agents passed behind his chair, their footsteps a rhythmic interruption. Phones rang in overlapping cadences. Somebody laughed too loudly near the elevators, the sound slicing through the air before smearing into everything else, sharp and meaningless.
He could feel them looking at him.
Not directly, none of them were stupid enough to stare. But he felt the glances anyway. The way people looked at car wrecks when they slowed down just enough to see blood but not enough to admit they wanted to.
His jaw tightened. The muscle in his temple pulsed once, twice.
He was being used as a scapegoat.
By the time Winn and Hattley called him into the office, the static had thickened. It filled the room around their fake sympathetic voices.
“We’re going to find out who leaked this,” Hattley said, leaning forward with that practiced look of concern people used when they wanted to seem human.
Dex looked at her mouth while she spoke.
Not her eyes. Her mouth.
The words were too clean. Too prepared. Every syllable landed exactly where she wanted it to, like she’d rehearsed this conversation. There was no surprise in her tone, no real outrage. Just a performance of solidarity.
She was lying.
They all were.
The thing inside him stirred, restless and cold. He pressed it down. But it was harder now, when the structure he’d trusted was cracking around him, when the rules he’d followed were being used to crush him.
It had been the Bureau.
They were throwing him under the bus because someone had to bleed publicly, and it was easier if it was him. Easier because he had no wife waiting at home. No kids. No loud, charming friends in the office to make a scene on his behalf.
Easier because he was useful until he wasn’t, precise until precision made them uncomfortable, disciplined until discipline stopped protecting him from becoming disposable.
After everything, they were disposing of him.
If he followed the rules, he could be normal. He could be safe. Everyone else could be safe.
But the rules had just thrown him away.
“Think of it as a paid vacation,” Hattley said, offering a thin smile that didn’t reach her eyes.
The static in his skull sharpened.
Dex looked down at his badge before he realised he’d already taken it off.
He didn’t remember doing it. His fingers had moved on their own, undoing the clip, sliding the leather folder from his belt.
Now it sat in his palm like something foreign, the gold shield winking at him tauntingly.
His hand didn’t feel like his own when he set it on the desk. The leather made a soft, final sound against the wood. Then the gun. The weight of it leaving him felt wrong in a way that made his stomach tighten sharply.
Badge. Gun. Credentials.
Structure.
Mercer’s voice rose in his head before he could stop it.
Get a job with structure, Dex. Rigid structure. Stay disciplined. Stay useful. Routine is important for you.
Routine. Rules. The job gave him rules. Rules told him what to do. Rules made the edges of the world sharp enough to hold onto. Without them, everything blurred.
Everything bled into everything else. The thing inside him pushed against its cage like an animal scenting an open door.
And now they were taking it away from him like it was nothing.
By the time he reached the hall, the migraine had settled behind his right eye, hot and pulsing. It pressed against his optic nerve, sending thin spokes of light across his vision.
Nausea turned slowly in his stomach, a greasy, rolling sensation that made his throat tighten.
He was aware of his body in pieces. His pulse hammering in his wrists, too fast. Sweat cooling under his collar, the fabric damp and clammy against his neck. The empty space at his hip where his gun should have been.
Empty.
Empty.
Empty.
By the time he stepped back out into the hall, the Bureau felt wrong around him. Hostile in a way it hadn’t ten minutes ago.
But the air had changed. It pressed against him differently now, thick and heavy, as if the building itself had decided he didn’t belong here anymore.
He walked past an agent he’d worked with for two years. The man met his eyes, then looked away.
Dex’s fingers twitched at his sides.
None of it belonged to him anymore.
Or he didn’t belong to it.
The job was gone. The badge was gone. The rules were gone. And without them, he felt himself starting to come apart at the seams, the threads that held him together snapping one by one.
His breathing thinned. Too shallow. Too fast. The edges of his vision began to grey, just slightly, like someone was turning down the lights from far away.
He needed out.
He needed air.
No.
Not air.
You.
He needed to see you. Now.
The thought cut through the static like a blade. A fixed point in the chaos.
Dex looked down at his watch.
6:17 p.m.
Thursday.
You did your grocery shopping on Thursdays after work because you hated weekend crowds. End of the week, but not the weekend. Practical. Smart.
Sometimes you bought tulips even though you worked at a florist and could probably get better ones for free.
He had never understood that.
He loved that he didn’t understand that.
The Bureau, Hattley, Winn, Fisk, the paper, the headline, the badge sitting on that desk like a dead thing. None of it mattered. Not right now.
Not when his mind was splitting open and the only thought holding him together was the image of you standing under grocery-store fluorescents.
He turned before he’d fully decided to move.
His feet carried him toward the elevator. Each step felt like pushing through water. The walls of the hallway seemed to close in, then expand, breathing with him.
By the time he reached the elevator and pressed the button, his jaw ached from clenching. His hands were steady, but only because he had trained them to be.
Inside, everything was coming apart in small, quiet pieces. Like a dam with a thousand tiny cracks, water seeping through each one, the whole structure holding only by habit and memory.
That was fine.
He didn’t need the badge.
He didn’t need their rules.
He had you.
The drive from the bureau to the grocery store did nothing to settle the storm clawing through Dex’s chest.
His palms were slick against his slacks. He’d just walked in. Empty-handed. Bereft of purpose beyond the single, desperate need screaming through every nerve ending in his body.
Find her. Find her. Find her.
The automatic doors hissed shut behind him, sealing him inside a world of too-bright lights and Muzak and the sharp chemical sweetness of floor cleaner.
His tie felt like it had shrunk two sizes since he’d left the Bureau, the knot pressing against his throat like a noose. He tugged at it once, twice, but it only made it tighter.
The migraine was still there, settled between his eyes like a hot coal. It pulsed in time with his heartbeat, a steady, throbbing pressure that made the aisles seem to swim when he moved his head too fast.
And Mercer’s voice.
She was there, in the back of his skull, the way she always was when things got bad. But today she wasn’t the steady, grounding presence he remembered.
Her voice flickered and warped, sliding between registers like a broken radio.
Stay calm, Dex. Breathe. You’re okay.
Then, lower, twisted. Freak. Look at you. They threw you away because they saw it. They knew what you were.
His fingers twitched at his sides.
You were supposed to be better than this. All that discipline. And you can’t even—
“Shut up,” he muttered under his breath, but the words came out wrong, too loud, and a woman passing with a toddler shot him a strange look.
He didn’t care.
He checked the endcaps, the seasonal displays, the little stand with flowers near the entrance because you liked stopping there.
You weren’t there.
His breathing got thinner, shallower, each inhale less satisfying than the last. A tightness gathered behind his eyes, hot and humiliating, frustration swelling so quickly it scared him.
Not here. Not here. Not—
He crossed the store, his shoes squeaking on the polished floor. He passed a man in a dark coat who frowned at him. He ignored him. He rounded the corner into the makeup aisle and his chest seized.
Empty.
The shelves stretched out before him, neat rows of bottles and tubes and compacts reflecting the harsh light. A woman stood at the far end, examining a lipstick, but she had different hair. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
The frustration crested, crested, broke.
Tears pricked at his eyes, and he blinked furiously against them. His throat closed. His hands shook.
This was stupid.
This was—
Where the hell are you?
He pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes until he saw stars. The pressure helped, briefly, grounding him in pain instead of panic. He counted to ten. Then to twenty.
He breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth, the way Mercer had taught him when he was thirteen and didn’t know how to exist without breaking things.
In through the nose. Out through the mouth. You’re in control, Dex. You’re always in control.
But the voice was quiet now, drowned out by the static.
He dropped his hands and looked up.
There.
The fruit and vegetable aisle. Eight feet away. Your back.
And everything stopped.
The world snapped into focus like a lens being adjusted. The lights dimmed to something bearable. The buzzing of the fluorescents faded to a dull hum.
A shock ran through his system, ice-cold and bracing, like being splashed with water in the middle of a fever dream.
His throat worked. He swallowed once, twice.
He dragged his eyes up, angry at himself and not angry at all. Angry that he couldn’t just walk up to you, couldn’t just be normal, couldn’t just—
His hands were still shaking.
His chest was still tight.
His breathing was still too shallow, too fast, each inhale catching on something sharp lodged in his lungs.
He was still falling apart, and you were right there, six feet away, squeezing pears and humming to music he couldn’t hear, and he couldn’t calm down.
The realisation hit him like a fist to his throat.
If he couldn’t pull himself together now, if he couldn’t drag his shattered pieces back into something resembling a whole person, he was going to have a full mental breakdown with you a few steps away from him.
He couldn’t let that happen.
He couldn’t.
He stood at the end of the aisle, frozen, his hands hanging uselessly at his sides, his heart hammering against his ribs, his eyes fixed on the curve of your spine and the gentle sway of your hips as you moved down the display.
And for a long, terrible moment, he didn’t know what to do.
The word nectarines repeated in his skull like a lifeline.
He didn’t know why that particular fruit had caught his attention—maybe because they were closest, maybe because they were red and blushing and reminded him of the colour your lips had been at the diner.
It didn’t matter. He grabbed one, then another, turning them over in his trembling hands pretending to inspect them.
Three steps away. You were three steps away.
Dex’s shoe scuffed against the linoleum as he adjusted his stance, positioning himself so he could see you in his peripheral vision without turning his head.
Look at something else. Let your eyes find the target naturally. But his eyes weren’t listening.
They kept sliding back to you, hungry and helpless, drinking in the curve of your hip where your sweatpants rode low.
He could smell you.
Estée Lauder. Beautiful Magnolia.
He knew the scent because he’d bought a bottle once, from a department store in Midtown, just to understand what it was that clung to your clothes and lingered in the air long after you’d passed.
He’d sprayed it on his pillow that night and buried his face in the fabric, breathing you in until the noise in his head quieted to a hum.
He inhaled now, deep and long, hoping it would do the same.
It didn’t.
His hands were still shaking. He could see the tremors as he turned a nectarine over, the fruit wobbling in his grip like he’d never held anything in his life.
Just breathe, Dex, Mercer whispered, but her voice was thin, frayed, like a recording stretched to breaking.
We don’t know how this got out, Hattley’s voice cut in, smooth and false, dripping with pity. We’re going to find out who leaked this.
His jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached.
He wanted to hit something. Wanted to drive his fist into the display of nectarines, into the wall, into his own skull if it would make them stop.
Stop. Stop. Stop.
He tried to focus on you. On the sound of your breathing. On the fact that this was the closest he’d been to you in years.
But nothing helped.
The voices swelled. The migraine throbbed. His hands shook. His chest constricted. And he was drowning, drowning, drowning in the fluorescent light of a grocery store—
“Excuse me.”
The world snapped into silence.
Dex’s head shot up so fast his neck cracked. His eyes found yours, and everything in him locked up like a circuit breaker tripping. You were looking at him.
He stared.
He blinked.
He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
The silence stretched, and your smile tightened at the edges, just slightly. You cleared your throat, shifting your weight, the picture of casual confidence.
“I don’t know if this is gonna sound a bit creepy,” you said, and your voice was smooth, rolling, the same voice he’d heard a thousand times in his memory, “but do I know you?”
His heart stopped.
Then restarted at double speed.
Say something. Say something normal. Say something human.
“I—” He cleared his throat. The sound was raw, scraping. He forced a smile onto his face, “I don’t think so.”
You tilted your head, studying him. “No, I do.”
There was no room for argument in your voice. No uncertainty.
He tilted his head, mirroring you. Let his eyes narrow slightly, as if he were searching his memory.
As if he didn’t have every moment he’d ever seen you catalogued and cross-referenced in his mind.
As if he wasn’t memorising the way the light caught in your hair, the faint sheen of gloss on your lips, the tiny beauty mark just above your collarbone.
You snapped your fingers, before pointing to yourself. “I used to work at this diner a few years ago. I don’t know if you know it—Bel Air Diner, maybe?”
He let the pause hang. Let his brow furrow. Let himself pretend, when all he wanted to do was reach out and touch you to make sure you were real.
“Bushwick?” he said finally, his voice steadier than he felt.
Your eyes lit up, and the sensation of seeing that, of being the cause of that light, was like injecting ecstasy straight into his veins.
“Yeah!” You nodded, your smile widening into something that crinkled the corners of your eyes. “The one on the corner of 9th Ave. That’s the one.”
Dex’s breath caught. He swallowed, trying to find his footing, trying to remember how to be a regular person, having a conversation with a woman who had no idea that she was the only thing that had kept him from falling apart for years.
“Yeah,” he said, and his voice cracked on the word. “Yeah, I remember.”
“But you don’t remember me?”
Dex blinked at you, the words landing like a slap he didn’t see coming.
For a long, terrible second, his brain seized, caught between the instinct to apologise and the dawning realisation that you were teasing him.
You were teasing him.
The corners of your mouth curved, and there it was, a glint in your eye, a playful tilt to your chin that he’d never seen before.
Not in all the hours he’d spent watching you. You were straightforward. Bold.
In his head, you were soft. Sweet. A little shy, maybe, the way you’d duck your head when a customer thanked you, the way you’d bite your lip when you were concentrating on an arrangement.
He’d built a version of you that was gentle and malleable, a fantasy that existed to be consumed, not to talk back.
“I’m kidding,” you said, after his silence stretched a beat too long. Like you could see him drowning and had thrown him a line.
He hated himself.
The feeling was familiar, worn smooth by years of repetition, but this was a fresh, raw kind of hatred that made his palms itch.
The Dex in his mind, the one he’d imagined a thousand times, would have had a smooth response ready. Would have leaned against the display, flashed a grin, said something that made you laugh.
That Dex was charming. That Dex was normal.
But that Dex wasn’t real. And the real Dex was standing here, sweat beading at his temples, hands shaking.
He scrambled, forcing a smile onto his face that he hoped read as charming rather than manic.
“No, no.” His voice came out too quick, too eager. He reined it in, softened his tone. “I do remember you now. I’m just surprised you remember me.”
You tilted your head smiling, and the movement pushed the apples of your cheeks up. God, you were beautiful.
“Can never forget a handsome face,” you said.
Handsome. She said handsome. She’s flirting with you. That’s what this is. Say something back. This is how it works. So do it.
But his brain was a white-noise void, every thought scattering like roaches in harsh light.
His smile felt brittle on his face, but he held it there, hoping you couldn’t see how badly his hands were shaking.
“Thank you,” he managed, and the words came out rough, almost shy.
He shifted the nectarine to his other hand, wiping his palm against his slacks in a motion he hoped looked casual. Then extended his hand.
“Dex.”
You smiled and told him your name. Like he didn’t already know it. Like he hadn’t whispered it into the dark of his apartment with his fist wrapped around his cock, gasping it into his pillow like a prayer.
Your hand slid into his.
The contact was electric. Your skin was warm, soft, impossibly real against his calloused palm.
He had to stop himself from closing his eyes, from letting the sensation wash over him and drown him.
Every nerve in his body screamed at him to pull you closer, to bring your hand to his mouth and press his lips to your knuckles, to your wrist, to the delicate skin where your pulse beat just beneath the surface.
Instead, he shook your hand once, twice, like a normal person, and let go before he did something he couldn’t take back.
“So, Dex,” you said, drawing his name out just slightly, testing it, like you were deciding whether you liked the way it felt on your tongue.
You had no idea he’d been waiting to hear you say it for years.
“What brings you to the supermarket at—” you glanced at your phone, then back at him, a small smile playing at your lips, “—seven pm on a Thursday.”
Simple question. Normal question. The kind of question one person asked another when they wanted to keep a conversation alive, when they wanted to prolong it.
And you hadn’t even seemed to notice that he had no shopping cart. No basket.
Just himself, standing here in the produce aisle like a man who’d wandered in off the street with no purpose other than to stare at fruit he had no intention of buying.
There was no way he could tell you the truth. That just hours ago he’d been framed by the FBI, scapegoated for an ambush he’d had no part in, cast out of the only identity he’d ever known.
That he’d spent the last hour spiraling in his car, hallucinating voices, pressing a gun to his own jaw before forcing it back into the glove compartment.
That he’d driven here not for groceries, but because your Thursday evening routine was the only fixed point left in his collapsing world.
He couldn’t say any of that.
So he said the first plausible thing that surfaced from the scrambled mess of his brain.
“End of the week,” he heard himself say instead. The words came out rough, but he pushed through. “But way less crowded on weekends.”
You raised your brows, a hint of a smile tugging at your lips. “So I guess I’m not original at all, huh?”
You were making a joke, and he’d walked right into it and now he was supposed to respond. Laugh. A laugh would be normal. People laughed at jokes. That was the expected behavior. He should laugh.
He made a sound that was supposed to be a chuckle but came out more like a choked exhale, his lips stretching into a smile that felt too wide, too stiff.
“Great minds think alike, I guess.” He tried for laid-back, tried to make his shoulders relax, but they stayed hunched, like he was bracing for impact.
You tilted your head, just slightly, and hummed in agreement.
And then there was a pause.
A little one, at first. The kind of pause that happens naturally in conversation, where one person waits for the other to speak next.
But it stretched. It grew. It filled the space between you like something physical, and Dex felt it pressing against his chest, tightening around his throat.
Say something. She’s waiting. She gave you an opening and now you’re letting it die.
But his mind was a blank wall.
He cleared his throat, the sound rough and too loud in the quiet aisle. “So, uh—” He glanced down at the nectarine in his hand, then back up at you. “You come here often?”
The words landed and he wanted to die. You come here often? That was the line he’d pulled from his brain.
The most generic, cliché, forgettable question in the history of human interaction. The kind of thing a mannequin would say if it were programmed to simulate human speech.
He braced for the look. The one that would say really? delivered with a curl of the lip, a shift of weight away from him. He’d seen that look on women’s faces before, when a man tried too hard or said the wrong thing.
So when you let out a laugh, genuine and surprised, it hit him like a punch to the chest.
You were laughing. At him, maybe, but not at him. With him. Like you found him funny, endearing even. Like his awkwardness wasn’t a turn-off but a joke you were both in on.
Dex felt his face go warm. He rubbed his brow, a nervous tick he couldn’t control, the heel of his hand pressing against his forehead as if he could massage away the embarrassment.
“Yeah, I heard it when I said it,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Sorry…”
He risked a glance at you through his fingers, and you were looking at him with an expression he didn’t recognise.
You looked like you were trying not to smile and failing, the corners of your mouth twitching upward.
His heart was hammering so hard he felt it in his throat, in his temples, in the tips of his fingers.
“I’ll give you a pass for now,” you said, a smile breaking through fully now.
Dex’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
Nothing came out.
He swallowed hard, his throat clicking. “Thanks,” he said again , the word barely above a whisper. “I—I’ll try to do better next time.”
You raised your brows again, but your smile didn’t shift. In fact, it seemed to deepen, the corners of your mouth curling with delight. “Next time?”
The question hung in the air, but to Dex it felt like a tightrope. One wrong step and he’d plummet.
He hoped to God you couldn’t see the sheen of sweat beading on his forehead, the way his pulse was visibly jumping in his throat.
Adapt. You have to adapt. She’s smooth, she’s quick, she’s going to eat you alive if you don’t keep up.
He forced his mouth into something resembling a smile, though it felt more like a grimace on the way up. “You’re the one who said for now.”
And that’s how Dex ended up with your number.
Thirty minutes earlier, Dex had been sitting in his car, the engine off. His spare gun had been in his lap, cold and heavy.
He’d pressed the muzzle against the soft skin under his chin, felt the metal dig in, tasted the copper of a future he’d almost chosen.
His career. His structure. His livelihood. His reputation. All of it gone, stripped away in a single afternoon by people who’d used him and discarded him like a broken tool.
One pull. That’s all it would have taken.
Now, driving home, the streets of New York blurring past his windshield in streaks of neon and headlights, Dex felt something he couldn’t name.
It wasn’t relief, exactly—the weight of what he’d almost done was still there.
But it was layered over with something else, something bright and unfamiliar, like sunlight breaking through clouds after a storm.
He kept glancing at his phone. It sat in the cupholder, screen dark, but he could feel it like a beacon. Your number.
Your number, given willingly, freely, without coercion or manipulation.
The thought made his chest ache, a dull, insistent pressure behind his ribs. He flexed his hands on the steering wheel, and let out a breath that was half-laugh, half-sob.
It was a high he’d never experienced before. And he was terrified of coming down.
He pulled into the parking lot of his apartment building, cut the engine, and sat there for a long moment, staring at his phone. The screen was dark, but he could still see your face, the memory of your smile burned into his eyelids.
And then his phone buzzed.
The screen lit up with a number he didn’t recognise, but the area code was familiar. New York. Manhattan.
He stared at it for three rings. Four. Five.
His thumb hovered over the decline button, but something made him pause. Something cold and familiar, settling in his gut like a stone.
He answered, “Hello.”
“When I was a boy…”
His skin wasn’t buzzing.
It was flaying itself from the bone, a high-frequency current ripping through every nerve ending until he couldn’t tell where the violence ended and his own body began.
The climb back through his window was a smear of pure sensation, the groan of the frame digging into his bruised ribs, the distant wail of a siren that might have been real or might have just been the echo of the screams still ricocheting inside his skull.
He tumbled into the living room, the red suit clinging to him like a second skin of sin and sweat, and the silence of his apartment hit him like a physical blow.
He spared a blank look at the microwave. 2:37 AM.
The high was curdling. The exquisite, crystalline purpose Fisk had injected into his veins was souring into a dense, suffocating fog.
The voices in his head were warping and overlapping, layered with the fresh screams of the people he’d just killed.
They weren’t separate voices anymore. They were a single, roaring static that made his skull feel too small for his brain.
He fumbled at the gloves, his fingers clumsy and uncoordinated, tearing at the constricting seams.
The helmet followed. The seal broke with a soft hiss of trapped breath, and the cool night air of the apartment hit the raw cuts on his cheekbone and split lip like a strip of litmus paper.
He wasn’t in control. He was a passenger, a ghost haunting a machine made of meat and bone.
The machine moved on autopilot, carrying him across the sticky floor through the debris of his life, toward his closet. His safe.
His fingers knew the combination better than his conscious mind. Beep. Beep. Beep. The door swung open.
Mercer’s tapes.
He reached for them, his fingers brushing the familiar edges, and he could already hear her voice in his memory. She would fix this.
She would rebuild the walls, draw the clean lines of the diagram, soothe the static into structured silence.
He paused.
The tapes felt dead in his hand. Cold. Alien. The thing inside him, that had killed tonight with a terrifyingly genuine grin splitting his face under the mask, revolted.
Structure was a cage. Control was a lie he told himself so he didn’t have to look at the abyss. Mercer’s voice was the voice of a woman who had never existed, a blueprint for a life he had never actually lived.
He didn’t want to be fixed tonight.
He wanted to be real.
He set the tapes down. The plastic clattered against the wood shelf, and the sound was a door slamming shut on his old self.
His body, no longer his to command, drifted to the phone on the nightstand. The screen was a blinding star in the gloom of his apartment.
Before he could rationalise the catastrophic stupidity of it, his thumb pressed the call button.
The phone pressed against his ear. The flat, electric hum of the dial tone filled his head.
First ring. A knife.
Second ring. His breathing turned ragged, harsh stabs of air in and out. He couldn’t control it.
His hand shook, the tremors traveling up his arm to his chest, making his heart rattle against his ribs.
Third ring. Where the fuck were you? The thought was a claw in his chest, desperate and raw, scratched out from the bottom of his fractured soul.
Fourth ring. Despair hit him like a bullet. The rejection he deserved. The silence he was born for.
His thumb was already moving to sever the connection, to retreat into the familiar dark, to let Mercer be the only voice he ever heard again.
The click.
A breath on the other end. The soft rustle of sheets. The sound of someone shifting out of sleep, pulling themselves back to consciousness for him.
A voice, sleepy and warm, cutting through the static in his soul.
“Hello?”
He opened his mouth to respond, but nothing came out. His throat had sealed itself shut, his tongue a dead weight.
The buzzing in his head didn’t stop, it changed, shifting from static into a high, thin whine of pure panic.
What the fuck was he doing?
He should hang up. He should hang up right now, pretend this never happened, crawl back to the tapes and let Mercer stitch him back together.
But he didn’t move.
“…hello?”
Your voice again. Groggy, yes, but there was an edge now. Caution. Awareness creeping in.
He could picture you propping yourself up on an elbow, squinting at the phone, trying to place the unknown number glowing in the dark.
He cleared his throat.
“Hi. It’s Dex.”
Silence. Long enough that he felt his stomach drop through the floor.
“From the grocery store,” he added, stupidly. “Earlier today.”
More silence. He counted the seconds. One. Two. Three. His heart was a jackhammer against his ribs, and he was suddenly, acutely aware of how insane this looked.
He had your number for less than twelve hours. He had called you at 2:37 AM. There was no version of this that didn’t make him seem unhinged.
Then your voice came through, softer now, a hint of recognition bleeding through the drowsiness.
“Oh. Guy from the fruit aisle.”
The words were flat, stripped of the teasing lilt from earlier. He winced. He was an idiot.
But he couldn’t hang up either.
“Yeah,” he said, and his voice cracked on the single syllable. He cleared his throat again, harder this time. “Sorry. I know it’s late. I—”
He stopped. Ran a hand through his damp, tangled hair. The words weren’t coming. They never came when he needed them. “I couldn’t sleep.”
A beat. Then, “You call everyone you meet at the grocery store when you can’t sleep?”
There it was. The faintest edge of something, not quite playfulness, but not hostility either. A testing of the waters. He latched onto it like a drowning man grabbing a rope.
“No,” he said, and the honesty slipped out before he could stop it. “Just you apparently.”
The silence that followed was different. Softer. He could hear the rustle of fabric on your end, like you were shifting, settling deeper into the conversation.
“You’re weird, you know that?” you said, but your voice had lost its wariness. There was a thread of amusement in it now.
“I know,” he said. He didn’t even try to deny it.
He could have left it there. Could have apologised again, said goodnight, let you go back to sleep.
But the buzzing in his head was quieter now, drowned out by the sound of your breathing on the other end of the line.
“I was wondering,” he started, and his mouth went dry again. He pushed through it. “If you’re free tomorrow. Or, I guess, today now. For dinner.”
The words came out rushed, jumbled together like he was afraid he’d lose his nerve if he didn’t get them all out at once.
He squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the rejection.
Another long pause. Then, a soft, breathy sound that might have been a laugh.
“You’re asking me out at three in the morning?”
“Depends on if you say yes,” he said, and the words surprised him. They were smoother than he’d intended, a sliver of confidence he didn’t know he possessed.
Your laugh came through fully this time, quiet and warm, and something in his chest cracked open.
“That’s a good line,” you said. “You rehearse that?”
“No,” he admitted. “I’m kind of making this up as I go.”
“Pretty good for improv.”
He felt the corner of his mouth twitch, almost a smile. “Does that mean you’ll say yes?”
A beat. Then, “Depends on what you’re offering.”
He let out a breath he didn’t realise he’d been holding. His fingers tightened on the phone, grounding himself in the plastic and the warmth of your voice.
“Anything you want,” he said. And he meant it.
Dex prided himself on focus.
It was the cleanest thing he had, the discipline that held the loose pieces of him together. But here, across the table from you, that focus was a dead wire. Useless.
Ten minutes in and he still couldn’t land anywhere. His eyes kept skirting, from the deep crimson painted across your mouth to the sharp neckline of that tight black dress, down to where the fabric pulled across your chest.
He felt the heat crawl up the back of his neck, forced himself to your eyes instead. The dark liner made them bottomless, pulling at him with every slow blink.
His body was wired tight, locked up like he was bracing for impact. Every breath measured. Every movement too careful.
Terrified of the wrong word, the wrong look, shattering whatever luck had gotten you here.
You took a sip of your wine, watching him over the rim. Then you tilted your head, a smile catching at the corner of your mouth.
“Relax. You’re sitting like I’m gonna jump over this table and bite you.”
The image slid under his skin before he could stop it.
I’d let you, he thought. Anywhere you wanted.
He locked that down, managed a rough chuckle. “Still can’t wrap my head around why you said yes.”
You shrugged, setting the glass down. “Got nothing better to do. Thought I might as well get a free meal with a hot guy.”
Hot. You called him hot.
Then your eyes narrowed. “Unless you’re one of those guys who believe in fifty-fifty for the first date.”
The question caught him off guard. For a second, he just stared at you, his brain struggling to catch up. Then he let out a choked laugh, shaking his head quickly.
“No. No, god, no. I promise.”
“Good.”
Your voice softened into something warm, teasing. You leaned back in your chair, swirling the wine in your glass, and the candlelight caught the curve of your smile.
The waiter appeared and Dex grabbed the menu like a lifeline, staring at the words without reading them.
He nodded when you ordered, asked for the same thing. When the waiter left, you leaned forward, elbows on the table.
The neckline of your dress dipped just slightly, and he caught the black lace underneath.
Fuck. Were you doing this on purpose?
“So, Dex from the fruit aisle.” Your voice had dropped, stripped of the teasing edge from earlier. Something warmer now. “Tell me something about yourself.”
His stomach dropped. Just a flash. He pushed it down.
“I’m an FBI agent,” he said. Safe. Simple enough. “Or—was. It’s complicated.”
You raised an eyebrow. “Complicated how?”
“The kind that makes for a bad first date story.” He tried to smile. It came out crooked.
You laughed, and the sound loosened something tight in his chest. “Fair enough. I’ll take a rain check.”
He nodded, scrambling for footing. “What do you do?”
You rolled your eyes and he felt a flicker of panic before you huffed, amused. “Just a florist. Completely boring compared to chasing bad guys, I’m sure.”
There’s nothing boring about you. The thought hit him hard and fast, and he heard himself say it out loud before his brain could catch up. “There’s nothing boring about you.”
You let out a small laugh. “So you do know how to sweet talk a girl.”
He couldn’t hide the blush that crawled up his neck to his ears, burning against the collar of his shirt. “I’m just saying it how I see it.”
“Maybe,” you hummed, “but then again you don’t know anything about me.”
Never had he heard a more untrue statement in his life.
He knew your schedule. Your favourite coffee order. Your comfort shows you loved to binge. Which soap you preferred. Your go to nail colour. How you liked cats and dogs equally.
But he couldn’t say that. So he just looked at you across the table, watched the candlelight catch your eyes.
The food arrived. Steam rose from the plates between them, the scent of ginger and soy cutting through the moment. The waiter said something he didn’t catch.
“Well,” Dex murmured, “I’m hoping to learn if you’ll let me.”
Being here with you was something he had never experienced before.
The night before was a smear of violence but it all felt muted now, distant, like a transmission he couldn’t tune into anymore.
Not with you across the table, your voice cutting through the static in his head.
You kept the conversation easy. When he fumbled an answer or went quiet because his brain short-circuited trying to keep up with you, you didn’t pull back. You just smiled, shifted, let him find his footing again.
Once or twice he found himself wondering why you were even giving him a chance. You could have anyone. Smarter, smoother, someone without the weight he carried.
It made no sense that you’d picked him. Not that he’d let anyone else close enough to try, but the thought still lingered.
Still, there was a weight pressing down on him the whole time. A clock ticking. He felt it sharpest as the check arrived. Signing it, his stomach twisted into a knot so tight it made him nauseous.
The thought of leaving, of stepping into the cold air alone and watching you walk away, hollowed him out.
He could already feel the emptiness waiting. Maybe he’d just follow you home. Watch you through your window. It would be enough to comfort him.
“How are you getting home?” The words came out before he could stop them.
“Walked here,” you said, pulling out your lipstick. “Guess I’ll do the same.”
He watched your mouth as you reapplied it, the careful, practiced stroke of colour. He couldn’t look away.
“Let me drive you.”
You paused, the compact half-closed. Your eyes lifted to his, and he could see you weighing it, the stranger across from you, the risk of letting him know where you lived. The silence stretched. He felt the whole night teetering.
Fuck. He’d done too much. He ruined it. He’d pushed too hard, too fast, and now—
“Okay.”
It hit him somewhere between the Williamsburg Bridge and the mouth of your street, a strange hollow equation he couldn’t solve.
Away from you, the restlessness ate at him, he couldn’t settle, couldn’t quiet the noise inside his head.
But here, with you in the passenger seat, so close he could feel the warmth coming off your skin through the space between them, he wasn’t any better. His body was locked tight, every muscle braced for a mistake he hadn’t made yet.
He couldn’t stop glancing at you while he drove.
His hands were rigid on the steering wheel, knuckles pale in the passing streetlight. You leaned back in the seat, your head tilted, completely relaxed, watching the city slide past the window.
No tension in your shoulders. No flicker of anxiety. Just calm. It made him feel transparent, like you could see every loose wire and frayed thread in his head.
By the time he pulled up outside your building, his heart was beating so hard he could feel it in his throat, a quick, raw pulse that wouldn’t steady.
How had this happened so fast? He’d spent years wanting you, fantasising about you from a distance, and now that you were here, the wanting had twisted into a kind of fear.
The fear of doing something wrong. Of saying the wrong thing. Of breaking whatever fragile spell had let him into your space tonight.
You turned toward him. Your expression was different now. At dinner, your eyes had been sharp, playful, like a vixen toying with her prey.
But here, in the dim lamplight bleeding through the windshield, your lashes fluttered against your cheeks, and your gaze was wider, softer, something he didn’t have a name for.
“I had a good night,” you murmured.
Dex opened his mouth. His tongue felt thick, useless. “Me too.” It came out pitiful, barely a whisper.
You kept looking at him, waiting. Your lashes lowered, then lifted, like an invitation he couldn’t decode.
He stared back, frozen. Should he get out? Open your door? Walk you inside? He had no script for this, no smooth line rehearsed. His eyes drifted from yours to your parted lips. Red. Soft.
He was still scrambling through the noise in his head for the right move when your hand moved. It slid up the back of his head, fingers threading gently into his hair.
Before he could react, before his brain could catch up, you were pulling him forward.
Your lips met his.
For a long, heavy beat, Dex didn’t move.
His body locked up completely as the reality of your mouth sank in. You were kissing him. The thought cracked through the static in his brain like lightning. You. Kissing him.
Then instinct took over before he could wreck it. His lips started moving, awkward and unpracticed, trailing behind the rhythm you set.
A shaky breath left him, his shoulders dropping a fraction as he relaxed into the warmth of your mouth, the simple unimaginable fact of it.
Until he felt the wet tip of your tongue brush his bottom lip.
He tensed immediately. His eyes cracked open, found yours closed, your face slack and completely lost in it. He parted his lips. Let you in.
The second your tongues met, a raw sound caught in his throat. His cock hardened painfully behind his zipper, a rush of blood that made everything else go distant.
The taste of you flooded his senses, faintly sweet, the slick slide of your tongue against his. His brain went quiet for the first time all night.
Then something inside him snapped.
The careful, terrified version of himself fell away. He had to touch you. Now.
He pulled his hand off the wheel, lifted it. Fingers spread, hesitated. Your hair? Your waist? Your cheek? He had no idea what he was doing. Every option felt wrong, but doing nothing was unthinkable.
His palm landed on your throat before he could decide.
His fingers curved around the column of your neck, thumb settling against the flutter of your pulse. You moaned into his mouth, pleased and approving, and the sound shot straight through his chest. You liked it.
He pushed harder against your mouth, greedier. The hand on your throat tightened fractionally, pulling you closer across the console.
He didn’t care about breathing anymore.
The taste of you flooded every nerve in his body like a drug he’d been starving for his whole life. He’d rather suffocate against your mouth than take another clean breath of empty air.
Your hands found his jaw, and for a split second his brain screamed that you were pushing him away. Too rough. Too fast. He ruined it.
His grip started to loosen, a fresh wave of shame crawling up his throat—
But your fingers dug into his skin and pulled him closer.
The sound that left him was raw, almost animal. Relief and hunger tangled together as you yanked him deeper into the kiss.
Little noises escaped your mouth, muffled against his tongue, and he tried to memorise each one even as he lost himself in the wet slide of your lips.
His hand slid from your throat to your jaw, fingers curling around the bone, tilting your head back as he pushed further into your mouth.
His tongue swept against yours, messy and desperate. He didn’t know what he was doing, he just knew he needed more. He wanted to crawl inside your skin.
Then your palms pressed flat against his chest.
Push.
The separation hit him like cold water. He broke away gasping, and his mouth chased yours before he could stop himself. But you didn’t pull further back.
You caught his lips in soft, quick pecks, barely there, just enough to soothe the ache you’d left behind.
Your mouth brushed against his when you spoke, voice low and rough.
“Do you wanna come up?”
Fuck.
The words hit him square in the chest, then dropped lower, settling hot and heavy in his gut. He was already nodding before his brain caught up, pupils blown wide, lips wet and swollen.
“Yeah,” he breathed against your mouth, “Yeah. Fuck—yes.”
Dex’s pulse slammed against his ribs the second the lock clicked behind him.
Standing in your apartment. He forced his eyes to wander like he was stepping in here for the first time, even as his brain catalogued every detail against the map he’d already burned into his memory.
“Nice place.” The words scraped out of him, rough and distracted.
He tilted his head at the bookshelf, the framed photograph he knew was your mother, the throw blanket draped over the armchair that he’d watched you buy from a street vendor three months ago.
Every careful glance was a lie, but he wore it like a second skin.
“Thanks.” Your voice came from right behind him.
Then your hands were on him again, sliding over his shoulders, turning him around. He went without resistance, boneless under your touch. You pulled him down and met his lips halfway.
Your tongue pushed past his lips and he opened for you like a starving thing.
Your fingers twisted into his hair, yanking his head forward just enough to deepen the angle, and he let you. He’d let you do anything.
You bit his bottom lip, sucked it into your mouth, and his hips jerked forward involuntarily.
His hands began to move. Everywhere. Your waist, the dip of your spine, the swell of your hips.
He grabbed desperate handfuls of your ass, pulling you flush against him, and the heat of your body through that thin dress made his head spin.
You were soft in ways he’d only ever imagined, and his imagination had been thorough, but nothing prepared him for the reality of you pressed against his aching body. He wanted to touch every part of you at once, to map you entirely.
You broke the kiss first, panting, lips slick and swollen. Your forehead rested against his, your breath hot and uneven on his mouth. “I don’t do this often,” you murmured, the confession raw and almost shy.
“I know,” he breathed without thinking.
The second the words left him, he felt you stiffen. You pulled back, confusion knitting your brows. “What do you mean, you know?”
Dex’s stomach dropped into freefall.
His eyes snapped open, panic flooding his veins.
Fuck. Fuck.
He scrambled for a lifeline, his mouth opening and closing before the lie managed to crawl out. “I mean I—I know what you mean. Me too. I don’t—I don’t do this often either.”
You held his gaze for a long moment. The sharpness in your eyes softened, and you snorted, a puff of warm breath against his lips. “You’re so weird.”
Relief flooded him so fast it made him dizzy. Before he could dwell on it, you were kissing him again, swallowing whatever fragile composure he had left.
Your hands guided him backwards. He followed blindly, drunk on your mouth, stumbling until the back of his knees hit something soft. You shoved him. Hard.
He landed on the couch with a grunt, bouncing once before settling, looking up at you with wide, dazed eyes.
Before he could ask, you leaned down, bracing your hands on his knees, and kissed him again. Slow and deep, a thorough occupation of his mouth that erased every thought trying to surface.
He melted into it, his hands finding your thighs, stroking the warm skin exposed by the hem of your dress.
You broke the kiss gently, pulling back just enough that he could see you.
You were on her knees. Between his legs. Looking up at him through your lashes, your lipstick smudged, your hair loose around your face.
The sight of you there stole the air from his lungs.
“What—what are you doing?” Dex heard himself ask, his voice thin and wrecked, stripped of every layer he hid behind.
You smiled as your hands slid up his thighs, fingers pressing into the muscle.
“Having my dessert.”
Dex’s brain went completely blank when your fingers found his belt buckle. The soft click-clack of it coming undone rang through the room like a gunshot in his ears.
He opened his mouth to speak, to protest, to do something other than lie there like a trembling mess offering himself up to you, but all that came out was a strained, cracked confession,
“Are you sure—you-you don’t have to—”
His hips lifted off the couch cushions anyway.
A complete betrayal of every word coming out of his mouth. His body didn’t give a single fuck what his brain was trying to negotiate.
It wanted you. It had always wanted you.
You didn’t hesitate. You dragged his slacks and boxers down his thighs in one smooth motion, baring him completely to the warm air of your apartment.
He shivered, his cock springing free to slap against his stomach with a wet, heavy sound.
He was already painfully hard, leaking against his navel, the swollen head flushed dark and slick, and the sight of you looking at it made his stomach clench so hard he thought he might be sick.
Your hand wrapped around him like it belonged there. A firm grip that made him grunt, his hips bucking up into your fist before he could stop himself.
The heat of your palm was everything. He watched, completely mesmerised, as your thumb swept across the sensitive head, smearing the bead of pre-cum that had gathered there, using it to slick your stroke.
You looked up at him through your lashes, your mouth hovering inches from his tip.
Your breath was hot and uneven against his sensitive skin, and there was a tremor in your voice when you spoke that made his heart stutter in his chest.
“You don’t want me to suck your cock?”
Jesus Christ.
The visual was so fucking obscene, you, on your knees, looking up at him with those wide, innocent doe eyes while your hand worked his shaft and your lips hovered so close he could feel the ghost of them.
He had to lean his head back against the couch cushion and squeeze his eyes shut. He was going to cum just from looking at you.
A soft, dark laugh came from between his legs. “That wasn’t a no.”
Before he could answer, something wet touched him.
His eyes snapped open. He looked down just in time to see your tongue trace a slow path along the thick vein on the underside of his cock.
An embarrassing, needy whimper crawled out of his throat before he could strangle it. His hips twitched, desperate to push into the warmth of your mouth, but he held himself still by sheer, crumbling willpower.
You didn’t stop. You laid a soft, lingering kiss right on the crown, your lips parting just enough to ghost over the sensitive slit before pulling away.
When you looked up at him, your eyes were dark and hooded, your lips slick and parted.
“Keep your eyes on me, Dex.”
He nodded. A dumb, jerky motion. He didn’t trust his voice. He didn’t trust anything. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
You didn’t even have his cock in your mouth yet and he swore he could feel the pressure building at the base of his spine, coiling tighter with every second you held his gaze.
His hands fisted in the couch cushions, knuckles white. His breathing was ragged, each inhale a desperate gasp.
He clenched his jaw so hard his teeth ached, watching in rapt focus as you parted your lips and took the swollen crown of his cock into your mouth.
Your eyes stayed locked on his. You held his gaze as you sank deeper, inch by agonising inch.
The wet heat of your tongue curled around his shaft, the velvet pressure of your cheeks hollowing as you pulled him further into the slick, perfect heaven of your throat.
Every inch you swallowed made his hips twitch involuntarily against the cushions. Every flutter of your lashes made his stomach clench tighter. He couldn’t look away. He couldn’t.
Oh, fuck. Your mouth was so warm. So impossibly wet.
The slick slide of your tongue curling around his shaft, the flutter of your throat when the tip pressed against the back of your mouth, he didn’t think anything in this world could feel better than having his cock in your mouth.
He was certain of it. This was the single best moment of his entire miserable life. He was ready to die right here and call it a life well-lived.
You pulled back slowly, dragging your tongue along the thick, throbbing vein on the underside of his cock before taking him deep again with a low moan.
A broken whimper crawled out of his throat before he could clamp down on it. “Fuck—fuck, I can’t—” His voice was wrecked, barely more than a ragged whisper. “You gotta stop—or I’m gonna—”
You just hummed casually against his slick, swollen tip, your breath hot and uneven against his sensitive skin.
“No, no, wait—please, I want it to last,” he heard himself begging, the words tumbling out in a desperate, breathless rush. “I’m not gonna make it—I swear to God—”
You didn’t stop. You just held his gaze with those innocent, wicked eyes and took him deeper.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. He was so fucking pathetic. Lasting like some inexperienced teenager, his first time all over again.
He tried to think of anything else; baseball statistics, the cold metal of his gun, the layout of the presidential hotel, but it was no fucking use at all.
Every nerve in his body was tuned to the wet slide of your mouth, the curl of your tongue, the soft, muffled gag when he hit the back of your throat.
He squeezed his eyes shut, could feel the frustrated tears prickling hot behind his lids. He couldn’t look at you anymore.
He had to stop himself, had to make this last, but his body was betraying him completely, trembling, arching, pushing deeper into your heat.
You took him back into your mouth in a single, fluid motion. Hollowed your cheeks. Pressed your tongue flat against the underside of his shaft.
And when you swallowed around the head of his cock, pulling him deeper into the wet velvet of your throat, he shattered completely.
“Oh fuck—I’m coming—”
His hips bucked involuntarily, driving himself deeper into your throat, feeling you gag around him, feeling your throat constrict and pulse as you swallowed, milking the orgasm out of him.
His release slammed into him like a freight train.
Hot, thick ropes of his come spilled into your mouth, and you swallowed around him, milking every drop, refusing to let him go even as he convulsed through the aftershocks.
His back arched off the cushions. His hands fisted so hard in the fabric he thought he might tear it. His vision whited out completely.
When his hips finally stopped stuttering, when his body went limp and trembling beneath you, you released him with a soft, wet kiss to his oversensitive tip.
The tenderness of it made his chest ache.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he felt himself mumbling, the words spilling out before he could stop them. “That was so fast—I couldn’t—I didn’t mean to—”
His hand came up to cover his face, shame and self-disgust crashing over him in waves.
But you wouldn’t let him hide. You caught his wrist, gently pulling his hand away, and crawled up his body.
Your lips were slick and swollen, your chin wet with him. You cut off his rambling apologies with a kiss, and his own taste flooded his senses. He groaned into your mouth, as your tongue played with his.
You broke the kiss just barely, your lips brushing against his as you murmured, “That was the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.”
He blinked up at you, dazed and trembling. “Yeah?”
You hummed against his lips, a slow, satisfied sound. “And I can’t wait for you to fuck me.”
The words hit him like a spark in a gas tank. The shame, the self-hate burned away in an instant, replaced by an animal surge of hunger.
He looked at you, still dazed, a slow, disbelieving smile pulling at his lips.
He still hadn’t ruined anything yet. He still hadn’t lost you.
His hands found your waist, gripping hard enough to bruise. Before you could react, he was moving, wrapping his arms around you and hauling you up with him.
You let out a surprised squeal, your legs wrapping around his waist instinctively.
He captured your mouth in a bruising kiss as he stood, walking blindly toward the hallway where he knew your bedroom was.
Dex lay perfectly still, afraid that even the smallest movement might shatter the fragile, impossible peace of the moment.
You were curled against him, your back pressed to his chest, your breathing slow and deep, the sound of someone completely and utterly spent.
He had never felt anything like this. Not once in thirty-two years. This is what it feels like. This quiet. This rightness. This terrifying, exhilarating certainty that he was exactly where he was supposed to be. Happiness.
His mind drifted back over the hours, replaying the sharp, vivid highlights like a film he couldn’t look away from.
He had learned so much about you tonight. How your breath hitched when he scraped his teeth along your pulse point. How your fingers twisted in the sheets when he found the perfect angle.
You loved being on your hands and knees for him. The first time, he’d followed your lead, sinking into you from behind, gripping your hips so hard he knew there would be bruises.
He pounded into you, watching your body rock forward with every thrust as you cried into your pillows, muffling your pleasure.
But something in him had itched. He hated it like this.
He couldn’t see your face. Couldn’t watch the expressions that flickered across your features when he hit that spot. Couldn’t feel your heartbeat against his chest or taste your moans with his own mouth.
It felt too much like taking, and not nearly enough like having you.
After you came the first time, your body shuddering and clenching around him, he pulled out before you could catch your breath and flipped you onto your back.
He needed to see you. Needed to watch the way your mouth fell open, the way your pupils blew wide when he settled between your thighs.
He buried his face between your legs and drank you in with a need that bordered on worship.
He lapped at your slick, swollen folds until your second orgasm crested, your hands fisting in his hair, your hips grinding against his mouth as you gasped his name into the dark.
By the time your third orgasm rolled through you, he had your legs wrapped high around his waist, his body pressed flush against yours.
He was buried so deep inside you that the world outside the space between your bodies ceased to exist. His nose touched yours. His forehead rested against yours.
He captured your gaze and held it hostage.
“Look at me,” he breathed, the command barely a whisper. “Don’t close your eyes. Look at me.”
He wanted you to see everything he had felt since the first moment he saw you in that diner. The obsession. The desperation. The hunger that had consumed him for years.
He wanted you to feel it in the way he moved inside you, as if he was trying to pour every ounce of himself directly into your bloodstream.
He knew you probably didn’t understand the full scope of it.
But lying here, in the aftermath, he let himself pretend. He pretended you had been waiting for him all this time. That your body recognised him. That this was always meant to happen.
When he finally let go, he held himself perfectly still, pumping his release deep inside you with a low groan.
He pressed so close that he could feel your heartbeat through his chest, grinding against you as if he could transfer his devotion through sheer physical proximity.
His nose stayed pressed to yours, his lips hovering just over your mouth, sharing the same warm, humid breath.
He whispered things against your lips. Broken things. Beautiful things.
Confessions that would never make sense in the harsh light of day, but here, in the dark, felt like the only truth that mattered.
“Been waiting so long. So long. I fucking worship you. You’re mine. I’m yours. Don’t ever leave me.”
His voice cracked on the last word. He didn’t care. He let himself be cracked open, let you see the raw, jagged edges of him that he had spent a lifetime hiding.
You didn’t answer. You probably didn’t even hear him. Your eyes had fluttered shut, your body going lax and heavy against him.
Lost to sleep. Lost to him.
He smiled against your hair, a real smile that softened all the hard lines of his face. He didn’t need you to answer. Not tonight.
Just having you here, warm and trusting and full of him, was already more than he ever dared to hope for.
The air in the room had cooled, but wrapped around you, he was warm for the first time in as long as he could remember.
Only twenty-four hours ago, he had been suffocating. Bound by rules and routines and the desperate need to keep himself contained.
But Fisk had shattered the cage he kept himself in. He had shown Dex a version of himself that was raw, hungry, and unapologetic. And instead of retreating from the wreckage, Dex had stepped into it.
He had let go of the ropes and the rules and the white-knuckled grip on control. He had chosen himself for the first time in his miserable, constrained life.
And by choosing himself, he had found the path that curved inevitably, beautifully, right back to you.
He pressed a soft, lingering kiss to the curve of your shoulder. His hand splayed across your stomach, feeling the warmth of you.
I did this, he thought, pride blooming in his chest. I chose this. I chose me. And it led me to you.
Dex buried his face in the curve of your neck, his nose pressing deep into the warm, sleep-soft skin just behind your ear.
He inhaled slowly, letting your scent flood his lungs. You smelled like home—the faint coconut trace of your shampoo, the salt of dried sweat from the hours you had spent tangled together, and something deeper, muskier, that was entirely, irrefutably you.
God. This was unbelievable.
And that was where his next problem laid.
He spared a glance down, past the rumpled sheet that clung to his hips, and saw the unmistakable tent of fabric where his cock had hardened again.
He let out a quiet, shaky breath, his eyes tracing the outline of his own need with a mixture of frustration and irritation.
He couldn’t fucking help it.
He felt like a kid in a candy store. The kid being him, a thirty-two-year-old man who had never known what it felt like to want something and actually get it. And the candy store was you. Access to your body.
The knowledge that he could touch you, taste you, sink into you whenever he wanted, and you would let him. You would want him to.
He had known it would be addictive. He just hadn’t realised how quickly the addiction would take hold, how it would wrap around his nervous system and tighten until he couldn’t think of anything else.
His body moved before his mind could catch up.
Spooned against you, chest to your back, he felt his hips roll forward in a slow, instinctive grind.
The thick length of him slid into the warm cradle between your thighs, pressing against the soft, slick heat of you through the sheet. A low sound caught in his throat, a choked half-groan that he swallowed against your skin.
Fuck. He should let you rest.
He had been so rough with you tonight. Your body had given him everything.You deserved sleep. You deserved peace.
But his cock didn’t give a shit about what you deserved.
Before he could stop himself, his hips rolled forward again, and this time the tip of him nudged past the edge of the sheet, finding the bare, wet seam of your cunt.
He gasped against your shoulder, his eyes squeezing shut. The slide of you against him was obscenely slick, unbearably warm, a friction so perfect it made his toes curl against the mattress.
Shit. You were still leaking him from earlier.
The evidence of what he had done to you was still there, pooled between your thighs, making you slick and ready for him all over again.
He pressed a quick, guilty kiss to your shoulder, his lips lingering just long enough to form a silent apology. I’m sorry. I can’t help it. I just... I need you. I can’t stop needing you.
His hand moved, sliding over the curve of your stomach, tracing the soft dip of your waist before cupping your breast.
The weight of it filled his palm perfectly, the flesh so soft and warm, molding against his fingers like it was made for him. He squeezed gently, then let his thumb drag across your nipple, feeling the peak tighten and pebble under his touch.
A small shift rippled through your body. A subtle arch of your spine. A soft, breathy sound that caught in your throat.
He froze.
Every muscle in his body locked tight. His breath stopped. His heart hammered against his ribs so hard he was sure it would wake you on its own. He waited, suspended in the pure terror of being caught.
She’s going to wake up. She’s going to see what I’m doing. She’s going to realise what a fucking creep I am—that I can’t keep my hands off her even when she’s asleep, that I’ve been watching her for years, that I am completely, irreparably obsessed with her.
The seconds stretched like hours.
But you didn’t wake. Your breathing deepened again, settling back into that slow, even rhythm. Your body relaxed against his, soft and trusting and completely oblivious to the war raging inside his chest.
He should have stopped. He should have been grateful for the reprieve, thanked whatever cruel god had given him this moment, and let you sleep.
Instead, he kept moving.
His hips resumed their slow, steady rhythm, grinding against your soaked cunt, the head of his cock sliding through the mess of his own release and your combined arousal.
The sensation was maddening; a wet, slippery tease that promised heaven without delivering it.
His hand stayed on your breast, rolling your nipple between his fingers, feeling the way your body responded even in sleep.
He pressed his lips to the back of your neck, a long, open-mouthed kiss that tasted of salt and skin. His breath came hot and uneven against your nape.
“I’m sorry,” he rasped against your skin, barely a whisper. “But I can’t... I can’t stop touching you. Every second I’m not inside you feels like I’m wasting time I don’t have.”
His hips rolled again, slower this time, deeper, the blunt tip of him catching at your entrance before sliding away, teasing both of you.
A shudder ran through his entire body.
“Please. Just a little more.”
The words slipped from Dex’s lips against the warm skin of your neck, a prayer offered to himself more than you, a plea for permission he was already taking.
He buried his face deeper into the crook of your shoulder, breathing you in until his lungs ached, and let his hips move.
There was nothing graceful about it. He rutted against you like a man possessed, the thick length of him sliding through the slick heat pooled between your thighs.
The sensation erased every rational thought. There was only you. The need to be inside you again. To own you. To fill you so completely that you couldn’t forget him, couldn’t leave him.
His breath came heavier against your nape, as his hand slid from your breast down to your stomach. He pressed his palm flat against the soft curve of your belly and pulled you tighter against him.
The arch of your back pressed your ass directly against his cock, and a fractured groan escaped him.
That’s when he felt it. A shift in your body. Your muscles tensed, your breathing changed, the subtle alertness of waking. Your voice cut through the dark, rough with sleep.
“Dex...?”
He froze for the span of a heartbeat. Then his hand came up to cradle your jaw, tilting your head back just enough for him to press a kiss to your cheek.
His hips never stopped their relentless grind, his cock catching at your entrance before sliding away again.
“Shhh,” he breathed against your ear. “Go back to sleep, honey. I’ve got you. Just let me stay right here.”
He needed you to stay in that space between dreaming and waking, where you were pliant and accepting and he could pretend his need wasn’t completely out of control.
But you turned your head toward him, your lips parting.
“Dex—”
He couldn’t let you finish. He kissed you, his tongue sliding into your mouth before you could form the rest of the sentence.
And you let him. No, you kissed him back. Your mouth softened under his, your body melting into his, your tongue meeting his with a lazy, sultry rhythm that told him everything he needed to know.
He felt your hand slide down between your bodies, your fingers searching blindly until they found him.
You traced the slick head of his cock, your touch featherlight, and a shudder ripped through him so violently he had to brace himself against the mattress.
“Fuck,” he gasped against your lips. His forehead dropped to yours, his breath ragged. “You want this too.”
You didn’t answer with words. You nudged the tip of him against your opening, a silent direction that drove the last shred of his restraint into the dust.
He answered with a small grunt as he pushed inside.
The heat of you swallowed him whole, and he dropped his forehead to yours, breathing you in. A soft, breathy moan escaped your lips, and your fingers curled against his back.
“Dex,” you murmured again, but this time it wasn’t a question. It was a sigh of surrender. A welcome.
He pressed another kiss to your mouth, before he began to move.
He tried to start slow. He tried to savour the sensation of sinking back into your slick heat. The attempt lasted only a handful of careful thrusts before the hunger surged through him.
His strokes turned hard and punishing. The rhythm of his hips fell into a desperate tempo that rocked the mattress beneath you, the steady thump-thump-thump of the headboard keeping time with the wild beating of his heart.
His hand slid up from your hip, fingers grazing the soft skin of your stomach, your ribs, before curling around your throat.
You looked up at him through heavy-lidded eyes, your pupils blown wide, your lips parted around soft, broken ah-ah-ah sounds that spilled from your throat with every deep thrust.
He leaned down, his mouth hovering over yours, and deliberately let a thick string of saliva fall into your open lips. He wanted more of himself inside you.
More of his taste, his mark, his presence seeping into every crevice of your body.
A low, guttural groan rumbled up from his chest as he watched you swallow it without hesitation, without question. Your throat worked under his palm, accepting him, taking him in, and the sight nearly sent him over the edge.
“Fuck,” he murmured against your lips, his balls slapping wetly against your ass as he drove into you harder. “You liked that, didn’t you? Touching you while you were asleep. Groping you. Fucking you like I own you.”
Despite the dazed pleasure softening your features, despite the way he was fucking the very thoughts out of your head, you still had the audacity to smile.
That slow, lazy, knowing curl of your lips that had haunted him since the first time he saw it. You hummed a soft, satisfied, “Uh huh.”
“Yeah,” he breathed, a fractured sound against your cheek.
He hooked your thigh higher over his arm, opening you wider, sinking deeper into your perfect, willing heat.
Your voice came out in fractured moans, but there was a teasing edge to it. “’S fucking hot. Knew you were a freak the second I saw you.”
Dex couldn’t help it. A laugh cracked out of him, low and disbelieving, pressed against the warmth of your cheek.
Here he was, balls deep in the object of a years-long obsession, and you were calling him a freak like it was the highest compliment.
The laugh faded into a shuddering exhale as he shifted his angle, driving into you with hard, deep thrusts that pushed the air from your lungs and left you gasping beneath him.
He wanted to leave a permanent mark on your soul. He wanted your cunt to remember the exact shape of him, the exact weight of him.
He wanted the memory of this night imprinted so deeply into your body that you would feel the ghost of him every time you closed your thighs.
He leaned down, lips brushing your ear, breath ragged and hot.
“I’m gonna make sure you never forget who you belong to.”
Your response came as fractured, desperate moans, words swallowed by the rhythm of his hips driving into you.
Without breaking pace, his hand moved. Two fingers pressed against your lips. You opened without hesitation, taking them into your mouth just as you took every part of him.
He pushed them deep, curling them against your tongue in perfect time with his thrusts, a double rhythm that had you moaning around his knuckles.
The sight of you like this; mouth full of him, cunt full of him, eyes glassy and fixed on his face, pushed him to the edge. He could feel the tension coiling tight in his gut, the familiar ache building at the base of his spine.
He was seconds away from coming. But he couldn’t. Not yet.
He needed you there first.
With a wet gasp from you, he pulled his fingers from your mouth, a string of saliva breaking between his skin and your lips. His hand dropped without hesitation, finding your clit.
He rubbed fast, precise circles against the swollen bud, his own rhythm faltering as he poured every ounce of focus into your pleasure.
His eyes locked onto your face. He watched every micro-expression. The furrow of your brows, the way your lips parted on sharp, punched-out breaths, the flutter of your lashes as pleasure overtook you.
You looked up at him, dazed and pleading, and he nodded like a man possessed, a dumb, frantic motion that matched the speed of his fingers.
“C’mon,” he breathed, the words cracking. “Let go f’me. Let go, baby.”
And you did.
The orgasm hit you like a wave, your back arching, your mouth opening in a loud moan. Dex felt it, the way your cunt clenched around him, choked him, milked him.
The sensation ripped a loud, guttural groan from his chest, his hips stuttering as he followed you over the edge. He closed his eyes, the world going white, and let himself go.
Deep, pulsing spurts of cum filled you, and he thrust into you with every wave, pushing himself as deep as he could go, holding himself there, making sure every drop stayed inside you.
When it was over, the room was filled with nothing but harsh, shared breaths.
He collapsed against you, his full weight pressing you into the mattress. He made no move to pull out. No move to let you go. He stayed buried inside you, as close as flesh could get.
“Jesus Christ,” you murmured in a daze, the words barely a whisper.
The silence that followed was a dangerous thing. It let the thoughts back in. The insecurity. The horrible, gnawing fear that he had done too much.
He pressed his face into the curve of your neck, hiding, breathing you in until his lungs ached. His voice was rough, muffled against your skin.
“Too much?”
A beat. Then your hand, slow and heavy with exhaustion, slid into his hair. You laughed, soft and drowsy.
“No.” A pause. “By all means... keep me in your basement if you want.”
Dex’s eyes snapped open.
The joke hung in the air, clearly just a sleepy, affectionate jab. But he didn’t hear the joke.
He heard the offer.
Having you to himself. Forever. In a place where no one else could touch you, see you, take you. A place where you were his, every single moment of every single day.
And if you wanted it... if you offered it up with that same trust you gave him your body, your mouth, your cunt...
Then why the fuck wouldn’t he do it?
He lifted his head slowly, looking down at your face. You were half-asleep, lips curved in a soft sex-dazed smile. You had no idea what you had just given him.
His voice dropped, quiet and raw. Completely serious.
“Yeah?”
Your lashes fluttered. You hummed, already drifting back into sleep, but the sound was an affirmation. A yes.
His hand slid up, cupping your jaw, tilting your face toward his. His thumb traced your cheekbone, and when he spoke, the words were a vow pressed against your lips.
“Then I’m never letting you go.”
a/n | dex feeling absolutely blessed and a surreality of being seen and chosen by you, meanwhile reader is just a youngho and overly horny
