Summary : Dex loves being a father, but one child-free weekend is all it takes to remind you he’s always going to be your embarrassingly needy husband first.
Pairing : DDBA! Benjamin Poindexter x reader (she/her) | you and Dex have a son called Leo
Warnings/tags : dad/husband!Dex x mom/wife!reader, fluff-ish! explicit sexual content (no anatomical detail as per usual), service switch!Dex dirty talk, possessive behaviour, tracker mention, praise kink, light power dynamics, hair-pulling/scratching, overstimulation, implied all-day sex. A character called Jonathan is mentioned to be your best friend. (let me know if I missed anything!)
Word Count : 4k
Requested by : anon
Notes : Please bear with me, I’ll try to get through all the comments for this series ASAP, feel free to send more ideas in the meantime. Enjoy!
Could be read as a one-shot, but you can read more stories in this universe here!
Dex loved Leo.
He loved his son so much it made him twice as dangerous and three times more paranoid. He checked the windows multiple times at night. He could identify three different kinds of “Daddy!” from across the apartment and tell you whether it meant hungry, sleepy, bored, or trying to climb something he should not be climbing.
He loved Leo.
He also missed you.
Not in the sweet, sentimental way, though there was plenty of that, too. But he was satisfied in that department. After all, he now spent most of his evenings cuddling up to you and Leo, being a father, being a family.
No, he missed you in the way that made his teeth grind when you walked past him in one of his old shirts that had gotten too tight for him. He missed you in the way his hand would find your hip in the kitchen, fingers digging in for half a second before Leo came barrelling in with a toy dinosaur and a very urgent question about whether sharks had friends.
You had a sex life. It was just… hidden, as it should be with a child in the house. It had become a series of quickies instead of what Dex called “proper” sex.
Sometimes, it was a hand over your mouth in the ensuite bathroom when Leo had his one-hour naps. Sometimes, it was Dex on his knees between your thighs during Leo’s nursery hours, one eye still half on the clock because pick-up was at three. Sometimes, you were bent over on the mattress with the TV just to hide the sound, Dex pressed against your back, breathing hot against your ear as you whispered, “we have to be quiet, baby.” After all, it was two AM and Leo was fast asleep.
He hated it.
Well, not the sex. Never the sex.
He hated having to hold back. He hated having you biting your own wrist because you couldn’t make noise. He hated stopping when you were both still coming down from a high because the nursery called to say Leo had eaten half a crayon. He hated pretending he didn’t want to drag you back to bed every single time you smiled at him over your coffee.
So when Jonathan finally moved in with his boyfriend and mentioned, casually, that the second bedroom was finally set up, Dex said, “Leo could sleep over there.”
“Oh, baby,” you said, nearly melted. “You’d let him do that?”
Dex blinked.
You looked at him like this was growth. Like this was him learning to trust the world, one sleepover at a time.
“You trust him,” you said, smiling, folding one of Leo’s tiny shirts, looking at him like he had just taken some huge emotional step forward. Like he was healing. Like this was about trust and healthy boundaries and letting your son spend time with people who loved him.
Dex stared at you for one long second. Then he said, “Yes.”
Which was not technically a lie.
He did trust Jonathan because you trusted Jonathan.
That was how Dex’s world worked. He didn’t really believe in people. He believed in you. If you said Johnathan was safe, then Johnathan was safe enough. With precautions.
After all, already had a tracker in Leo’s shoe.
Just in case.
But you didn’t need to know that right then, because you were smiling at him like he was becoming a better man, and Dex didn’t have the heart to tell you that his intents were significantly less noble.
You bit your lip. “That’s really good, Dex.”
Dex nodded once, solemnly, like his motives were not currently dragging themselves through every filthy thought he had been forcing down for months.
You asked Jonathan if he could take Leo for one night.
Then Dex, with absolutely no shame, asked for two.
Jonathan squinted at him and said yes, as if saying I know what you’re doing but I just can’t prove it yet.
“Two?” you asked later, amused.
Dex adjusted Leo’s overnight bag like the placement of his pajamas was a matter of national security. “He likes Jonathan.”
That was how Leo ended up being picked up by Uncle Jonathan on a Friday night. You kissed Leo goodbye at the door and told him to be good. Dex crouched down, fixed the strap on his bag, and said, very seriously, “Call Mommy if you need anything.”
Leo nodded. “Okay, Daddy.”
“And don’t open the door when Uncle Jonathan’s not there.”
“I know.”
“And if there’s an emergency—”
“Dex,” you said gently.
Dex stopped.
Leo hugged him around the neck. “I’ll be okay, Daddy.”
For one second your heart ached because he really was trying. He really did love him. He really was letting him go.
Then the door shut, and the apartment was quiet.
You turned to Dex with a kind smile. “I’m proud of you.”
Dex lifted his eyes to you, sheepish and loaded all at once, though the former didn’t last very long.
And that was when you realized.
Oh.
Oh.
That was not the look of a man reflecting on his progress as a father. That was the look of a man who had just successfully cleared the house.
“Dex,” you said slowly.
He stepped toward you.
You tilted your head “You did not send our son to my best friend’s place just so you could—”
“Yes.”
Your mouth fell open. “Benjamin.”
“You trust Jonathan,” he said, calm and absolutely shameless, even though you only called him that when you were annoyed. “Leo is safe.”
You folded your arms. “And?”
Dex’s eyes dropped to your mouth. “And I miss my wife.”
That shut you up. Because fuck, when said it like that...
It wasn’t charming or teasing. It wasn’t even fully dirty at first. Just honest and hungry in a way that made your stomach turn over.
“Dex…” you whined a little as his arms wrapped around you.
“I’m sorry,” Dex said, the apology coming out almost muffled against the side of your neck. His hands were gripping, careful at first, like he was trying to prove he could behave even while every part of him clearly had no intention of doing so.
Fuck.
“Mmm. I’m sorry, baby,” he murmured again, mouth brushing the sensitive place beneath your ear. “I just wanted time alone with you.”
You were supposed to stay mad.
Really, you were.
Because he had let you stand there, proud of him, all wide-eyed with affection, while he stood in front of you pretending this was some great parental milestone and not a tactical operation.
“You are unbelievable,” you said, but your voice had already lost too much of its edge.
Dex noticed and used this time to slide under the hem of your shirt, palms warm against your waist, thumbs pressing into skin like he had been thinking about doing it all day. Maybe all week. Maybe for months.
“We have sex,” you managed, even as your head tipped back before you could stop it.
Dex kissed down your throat, devastatingly patient. “Not like this.”
Your breath caught.
He lifted his head just enough to look at you, and the expression on his face was too soft to be smug and too hungry to be innocent. His eyes moved over you like he was remembering every version of you he had ever had.
“Not like before,” he said. “Not like the old apartment.”
Your mouth went dry.
“The old apartment?” you repeated, weakly, because apparently your body had decided to betray every principle you thought had.
Dex’s fingers flexed against your ribs, trailing the line of your bra, pawing and unhooking it at the back.
“Yeah,” he said, and there was a little smile in his voice now, like he knew exactly what he was doing to you. “When I could have you wherever I wanted.”
“Dex.”
“The couch,” he said, kissing the corner of your mouth. “The kitchen counter, the hallway, that stupid little table you kept saying we were going to break.”
You swallowed. “We did break it.”
Dex’s smile finally fully formed on his mouth. “Yeah.”
You should have pushed him away. You should have told him that this was not the point, that he could not just send Leo away for two nights and then look at you like that and expect you to forget you were annoyed.
But his hands were under your shirt now, and his mouth was on your jawline, and his body was crowding yours back against the door like he had been waiting forever to stop pretending he was a reasonable man.
“You used to make so much noise for me,” he murmured.
Your stomach flipped. “Benjamin.”
“I know,” he said immediately, smaller this time. One hand came up to cup your face, thumb brushing your cheek with a tenderness that made the heat tummy pool low. “I know. I’m sorry.”
And he was.
He was sorry. He knew he had been selfish. He knew this had been more about him than he had let on. But he also looked at you like he had missed you so badly it had been eating him alive .
“I love being his dad,” Dex said, forehead pressing to yours. “I do. I love him. I love him so much I don’t know what to do with it half the time.”
“I know,” you whispered.
His eyes shut for a second. “But I miss you,” he said. “I miss this. I miss not having to stop. I miss not having to listen for footsteps. I miss having you without half my brain waiting for Leo to wake up.”
Your anger dipped so fast it was almost embarrassing.
Because you knew Dex loved Leo completely. He loved being a father in the only way Dex could love anything, which meant his entire nervous system had become a weapon.
But he loved you first. He had loved you before the nursery bags and bedtime stories and little shoes by the door. He had loved you before this spine was inhuman, before Fisk took you. He loved you in that old apartment, on every surface, in every second for the rest of his life.
And he missed his wife. Not Leo’s mommy. No, he got her every day. And though he loved you now more than anything in the world, he missed bratty, whiny, car-sex-in-the-FBI-garage you.
“You could have just told me that,” you pouted.
Dex opened his eyes. “Would you have said yes to two nights?”
You stared at him and sighed, though your lips twitched before you could stop them. “Unbelievable.”
“I know.”
“You put a tracker on him, didn’t you?”
Dex went very still, and you sighed.
“It’s a very small tracker,” he managed.
“Oh my God.”
You wanted to be mad again. You really did. You wanted to lecture him about boundaries and normal parenting and how other fathers managed sleepovers without turning them into covert security operations.
But then he kissed you again, sweet and apologetic, and your hands slid up his chest anyway.
Why were you mad again?
Something about growth. Something about trust. Something about your husband being a paranoid, tactical, emotionally stunted man who loved your son so much it scared him and wanted you so much he had apparently planned an entire weekend around it.
“You’re still in trouble,” you whispered against his mouth.
Dex nodded. “Okay.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to just fuck your way out of this.”
His hand slid around your waist, pulling you closer.
“No?” he asked, unconvinced.
“Hmm,” you said, already breathless.
Dex kissed the corner of your mouth, then your cheek. Then, he nipped at your lower lips.
“Okay,” he murmured. “Then I’ll make it up to you.”
—
Five minutes later, you were on the kitchen counter, thighs trembling around Dex’s shoulders, one hand braced behind you and the other twisted helplessly in his hair.
He had gone to his knees like worship.
He was not even pretending like he was anything other than starved for you. His hands gripped your hips hard enough to keep you exactly where he wanted you, dragging you closer every time your body tried to squirm away from the intensity.
“Dex,” you mewled, and your voice cracked on his name.
Your hand flew to your mouth out of habit. Out of pure, pathetic muscle memory.
The second you did it, Dex stopped.
Not fully, but just enough to make you feel the loss, enough for his mouth to hover against your core while he made the most wrecked, desperate sound you had ever heard from him.
A whine, you realized, frustrated and almost hurt.
His fingers closed around your wrist, gentle but firm, pulling your hand away from your lips, pinning them to the marble.
“No,” he breathed, voice ruined. “Baby, don’t do that.”
You stared down at him, already dizzy, already too far gone for this conversation.
“The neighbours,” you whispered.
Dex’s eyes lifted to yours, deeply devoted, “they won’t hear.”
You blinked. “What?”
He kissed the inside of your thigh, tender enough to make you shiver.
“They won’t.”
Your brain struggled through the haze of his tongue lapping you, like kitten licks for now. It would be adorable if it wasn’t somewhere so fucking obscene. “Dex. What does that mean?”
“I soundproofed the shared walls.”
For one second, everything stopped. From your breath to your thoughts to your ability to pretend you were still even remotely in control.
“You what?”
“Last week,” he said, as calmly as if he had changed a lightbulb. “When you were at work.”
You stared at him. And the bastard looked up and looked proud.
“Oh my god,” you whispered. “You had a whole fucking game plan.”
His hands tightened around your thighs. “Hmm.”
“So you could hear me?”
His eyes shifted, almost wicked. That was the wrong question. Or maybe it was exactly the right one.
Dex’s mouth parted slightly, his breath warm against you, and suddenly he looked less like your husband and more like a man who had been surviving on scraps for months and had finally been given permission to feast.
“So I wouldn’t have to stop,” he said.
Your whole body went weak.
Fuck, it worked.
“You’re insane,” you said, but it came out like praise.
Dex smiled against you.“I know.”
“You’re actually insane.”
“I know.”
You opened your mouth to argue. But then he pressed his tongue flat against you and the argument died immediately.
Your fingers tightened in his hair, head tipping back. The first real sound that left you was small, shaky, almost embarrassed.
Dex groaned like it hurt him.
“Mm, there,” he murmured, dragging the word against your skin. “That’s it.”
You tried to look down at him, but the sight nearly undid you.
Dex on his knees in your kitchen, sleeves pushed up, hands spread possessively over your thighs, face flushed with hunger and triumph. He looked focused, like the entire world had narrowed to you, your body, your voice, and the way you fell apart when he refused to let you hide from him.
You made another sound, louder this time.
His eyes shut.
“Fuck,” he breathed, almost reverent. “I missed that.”
The heat in your face burned worse than anything else.
“Dex—”
“No,” he said, and his hand slid up to your waist, holding you steady when you nearly slipped against the counter from all the slick mess you were making. “Don’t get shy now, baby.”
You shuddered.
He kissed you down there again, slower, meaner, sweeter somehow, like he was proving a point.
Fuck, he was right.
You’d forgotten how loud you used to be.
You’d forgotten the old apartment, the nice one Dex used to have before you, the thin curtains, the table, the way Dex used to fuck you in every surface and like he needed to mark the whole place with proof that you loved him. You’d what it felt like to have nowhere to be quiet for.
You broke on a gasp, and this time you didn’t cover your mouth.
Dex looked up at you like you had given him something holy. “That’s my girl.”
And then he kept going.
After that, Dex got worse.
Because once you stopped covering your mouth, once you let him hear you, he lost whatever restraint he had been pretending to have.
After you came on his mouth on the counter, he wasted no time bending you over.
When you yelped, he only smiled.
“That’s it,” he said, voice rough. “Don’t hide from me.”
“Dex—”
“Missed this,” he said, stretching in you as you let out a lewd whine. “Missed you being needy for me.”
There were rules, of course.
Leo’s room was out of bounds, obviously. It was a no brainer. The couch was out too, because Leo played there too much, built pillow forts there, watched cartoons there, fell asleep there with sticky fingers and his dinosaur blanket.
Most everything else was fair game.
The whole weekend became heat and orders and laughter that kept turning into gasps. You were on top of him half the time, because he asked you to. You scratched your nails down his back hard enough that his breath caught and his eyes went unfocused for half a second.
Then he laughed, pleased with himself. Clearly, it didn’t take much for you to get back into form.
“Oh,” he murmured, almost smiling as he tried to edge himself in you yet again. “T-there she is.”
“Shut up.”
“No.” His hands found your hips. “Fuck, I missed you mean.”
He got worse when you pulled his hair. Worse when you told him what to do. Worse when you got impatient and shoved at his shoulder, because Dex, terrifyingly, liked being handled by you. He liked being told where to go. He liked being praised when he listened. Still, he would switch the roles in a heartbeat if that was what you wanted.
“Come on, baby,” he murmured later, voice ruined against your ear, fingers deep in you. “You can give me one more.”
“Dex, I…”
“You used to be so good at this, huh? Going again when I tell you to.” His mouth brushed nipped at your jaw. “I know you still are.”
Your whole body went hot. “You’re disgusting.”
“I know.”
“Filthy.”
“I know.”
And that was the thing. He kept saying it so shamelessly, knowing he had nothing else to hide behind. Fuck, he looked so conceited once he realise he’d pulled this off.
By Saturday night, you were wrecked and giddy and half-feral, wearing his shirt badly and telling him he was the most deranged husband alive.
Dex only kissed your shoulder and said, “But I’m yours.”
As if that explained the way he melted when you praised him, then got worse when you pulled him closer and told him not to be so gentle.
By Sunday morning, the apartment was ruined in invisible ways.
There was no evidence left, because everything had to be spotless before Leo came home. The sheets were changed. The counters were wiped and bleached. The hallway was clear and the bathroom was scrubbed. So really, nothing was out of place except the ache in your thighs, the scratches on his back, and the marks you both left on each other's bodies.
But hey. Mission accomplished, right?
Dex laid beside you, one hand on your waist, looking pleased with himself.
“You’re smug,” you mumbled.
“I’m happy.” He smiled into your shoulder.
You closed your eyes, exhausted, sore, and deeply annoyed by how peaceful you felt.
Then you thought to yourself, traitorously: Leo was gonna have sleepovers once a month.
—
Leo came running in that afternoon, bag bouncing against his little back, dinosaur clutched under one arm.
“Mommy!”
You crouched just enough to catch him, kissing the top of his head as he barreled into you. “Hi, baby. Did you have fun?”
He nodded quickly, already halfway through his report before you had even finished hugging him. “I had pancakes and Mark has a biiiig plant and I slept in the blue room and I wasn’t scared.”
“That sounds amazing,” you said, smoothing his hair back.
Leo pulled away just enough to look at you properly. Not at your clothes or at anything obvious. He just looked at your face, with that strange little focus he got.
His brows pinched together. Maybe it was his superhuman precognition, knowing your legs would hurt when you got up. Maybe you just looked a bit… drained.
“Mommy’s tired.”
You went very still. Behind you, Dex froze, too.
Jonathan, still standing by the door with Leo’s overnight bag in one hand, looked between all three of you and raised an eyebrow.
You smiled too quickly. “A little bit, sweetheart.”
Leo turned to Dex with the full seriousness of a child delivering medical advice. “Daddy, we should let Mommy rest today.”
“Good idea, Leo.” Dex’s mouth curved up, but he recovered quickly, pressing a kiss to Leo’s temple like he was not the entire reason Mommy needed rest in the first place.
Jonathan looked at Dex. Then at you. He raised his hands and stepped back with a sigh like, I knew it.
Summary : Dex loves being a father, but one child-free weekend is all it takes to remind you he’s always going to be your embarrassingly needy husband first.
Pairing : DDBA! Benjamin Poindexter x reader (she/her) | you and Dex have a son called Leo
Warnings/tags : dad/husband!Dex x mom/wife!reader, fluff-ish! explicit sexual content (no anatomical detail as per usual), service switch!Dex dirty talk, possessive behaviour, tracker mention, praise kink, light power dynamics, hair-pulling/scratching, overstimulation, implied all-day sex. A character called Jonathan is mentioned to be your best friend. (let me know if I missed anything!)
Word Count : 4k
Requested by : anon
Notes : Please bear with me, I’ll try to get through all the comments for this series ASAP, feel free to send more ideas in the meantime. Enjoy!
Could be read as a one-shot, but you can read more stories in this universe here!
Dex loved Leo.
He loved his son so much it made him twice as dangerous and three times more paranoid. He checked the windows multiple times at night. He could identify three different kinds of “Daddy!” from across the apartment and tell you whether it meant hungry, sleepy, bored, or trying to climb something he should not be climbing.
He loved Leo.
He also missed you.
Not in the sweet, sentimental way, though there was plenty of that, too. But he was satisfied in that department. After all, he now spent most of his evenings cuddling up to you and Leo, being a father, being a family.
No, he missed you in the way that made his teeth grind when you walked past him in one of his old shirts that had gotten too tight for him. He missed you in the way his hand would find your hip in the kitchen, fingers digging in for half a second before Leo came barrelling in with a toy dinosaur and a very urgent question about whether sharks had friends.
You had a sex life. It was just… hidden, as it should be with a child in the house. It had become a series of quickies instead of what Dex called “proper” sex.
Sometimes, it was a hand over your mouth in the ensuite bathroom when Leo had his one-hour naps. Sometimes, it was Dex on his knees between your thighs during Leo’s nursery hours, one eye still half on the clock because pick-up was at three. Sometimes, you were bent over on the mattress with the TV just to hide the sound, Dex pressed against your back, breathing hot against your ear as you whispered, “we have to be quiet, baby.” After all, it was two AM and Leo was fast asleep.
He hated it.
Well, not the sex. Never the sex.
He hated having to hold back. He hated having you biting your own wrist because you couldn’t make noise. He hated stopping when you were both still coming down from a high because the nursery called to say Leo had eaten half a crayon. He hated pretending he didn’t want to drag you back to bed every single time you smiled at him over your coffee.
So when Jonathan finally moved in with his boyfriend and mentioned, casually, that the second bedroom was finally set up, Dex said, “Leo could sleep over there.”
“Oh, baby,” you said, nearly melted. “You’d let him do that?”
Dex blinked.
You looked at him like this was growth. Like this was him learning to trust the world, one sleepover at a time.
“You trust him,” you said, smiling, folding one of Leo’s tiny shirts, looking at him like he had just taken some huge emotional step forward. Like he was healing. Like this was about trust and healthy boundaries and letting your son spend time with people who loved him.
Dex stared at you for one long second. Then he said, “Yes.”
Which was not technically a lie.
He did trust Jonathan because you trusted Jonathan.
That was how Dex’s world worked. He didn’t really believe in people. He believed in you. If you said Johnathan was safe, then Johnathan was safe enough. With precautions.
After all, already had a tracker in Leo’s shoe.
Just in case.
But you didn’t need to know that right then, because you were smiling at him like he was becoming a better man, and Dex didn’t have the heart to tell you that his intents were significantly less noble.
You bit your lip. “That’s really good, Dex.”
Dex nodded once, solemnly, like his motives were not currently dragging themselves through every filthy thought he had been forcing down for months.
You asked Jonathan if he could take Leo for one night.
Then Dex, with absolutely no shame, asked for two.
Jonathan squinted at him and said yes, as if saying I know what you’re doing but I just can’t prove it yet.
“Two?” you asked later, amused.
Dex adjusted Leo’s overnight bag like the placement of his pajamas was a matter of national security. “He likes Jonathan.”
That was how Leo ended up being picked up by Uncle Jonathan on a Friday night. You kissed Leo goodbye at the door and told him to be good. Dex crouched down, fixed the strap on his bag, and said, very seriously, “Call Mommy if you need anything.”
Leo nodded. “Okay, Daddy.”
“And don’t open the door when Uncle Jonathan’s not there.”
“I know.”
“And if there’s an emergency—”
“Dex,” you said gently.
Dex stopped.
Leo hugged him around the neck. “I’ll be okay, Daddy.”
For one second your heart ached because he really was trying. He really did love him. He really was letting him go.
Then the door shut, and the apartment was quiet.
You turned to Dex with a kind smile. “I’m proud of you.”
Dex lifted his eyes to you, sheepish and loaded all at once, though the former didn’t last very long.
And that was when you realized.
Oh.
Oh.
That was not the look of a man reflecting on his progress as a father. That was the look of a man who had just successfully cleared the house.
“Dex,” you said slowly.
He stepped toward you.
You tilted your head “You did not send our son to my best friend’s place just so you could—”
“Yes.”
Your mouth fell open. “Benjamin.”
“You trust Jonathan,” he said, calm and absolutely shameless, even though you only called him that when you were annoyed. “Leo is safe.”
You folded your arms. “And?”
Dex’s eyes dropped to your mouth. “And I miss my wife.”
That shut you up. Because fuck, when said it like that...
It wasn’t charming or teasing. It wasn’t even fully dirty at first. Just honest and hungry in a way that made your stomach turn over.
“Dex…” you whined a little as his arms wrapped around you.
“I’m sorry,” Dex said, the apology coming out almost muffled against the side of your neck. His hands were gripping, careful at first, like he was trying to prove he could behave even while every part of him clearly had no intention of doing so.
Fuck.
“Mmm. I’m sorry, baby,” he murmured again, mouth brushing the sensitive place beneath your ear. “I just wanted time alone with you.”
You were supposed to stay mad.
Really, you were.
Because he had let you stand there, proud of him, all wide-eyed with affection, while he stood in front of you pretending this was some great parental milestone and not a tactical operation.
“You are unbelievable,” you said, but your voice had already lost too much of its edge.
Dex noticed and used this time to slide under the hem of your shirt, palms warm against your waist, thumbs pressing into skin like he had been thinking about doing it all day. Maybe all week. Maybe for months.
“We have sex,” you managed, even as your head tipped back before you could stop it.
Dex kissed down your throat, devastatingly patient. “Not like this.”
Your breath caught.
He lifted his head just enough to look at you, and the expression on his face was too soft to be smug and too hungry to be innocent. His eyes moved over you like he was remembering every version of you he had ever had.
“Not like before,” he said. “Not like the old apartment.”
Your mouth went dry.
“The old apartment?” you repeated, weakly, because apparently your body had decided to betray every principle you thought had.
Dex’s fingers flexed against your ribs, trailing the line of your bra, pawing and unhooking it at the back.
“Yeah,” he said, and there was a little smile in his voice now, like he knew exactly what he was doing to you. “When I could have you wherever I wanted.”
“Dex.”
“The couch,” he said, kissing the corner of your mouth. “The kitchen counter, the hallway, that stupid little table you kept saying we were going to break.”
You swallowed. “We did break it.”
Dex’s smile finally fully formed on his mouth. “Yeah.”
You should have pushed him away. You should have told him that this was not the point, that he could not just send Leo away for two nights and then look at you like that and expect you to forget you were annoyed.
But his hands were under your shirt now, and his mouth was on your jawline, and his body was crowding yours back against the door like he had been waiting forever to stop pretending he was a reasonable man.
“You used to make so much noise for me,” he murmured.
Your stomach flipped. “Benjamin.”
“I know,” he said immediately, smaller this time. One hand came up to cup your face, thumb brushing your cheek with a tenderness that made the heat tummy pool low. “I know. I’m sorry.”
And he was.
He was sorry. He knew he had been selfish. He knew this had been more about him than he had let on. But he also looked at you like he had missed you so badly it had been eating him alive .
“I love being his dad,” Dex said, forehead pressing to yours. “I do. I love him. I love him so much I don’t know what to do with it half the time.”
“I know,” you whispered.
His eyes shut for a second. “But I miss you,” he said. “I miss this. I miss not having to stop. I miss not having to listen for footsteps. I miss having you without half my brain waiting for Leo to wake up.”
Your anger dipped so fast it was almost embarrassing.
Because you knew Dex loved Leo completely. He loved being a father in the only way Dex could love anything, which meant his entire nervous system had become a weapon.
But he loved you first. He had loved you before the nursery bags and bedtime stories and little shoes by the door. He had loved you before this spine was inhuman, before Fisk took you. He loved you in that old apartment, on every surface, in every second for the rest of his life.
And he missed his wife. Not Leo’s mommy. No, he got her every day. And though he loved you now more than anything in the world, he missed bratty, whiny, car-sex-in-the-FBI-garage you.
“You could have just told me that,” you pouted.
Dex opened his eyes. “Would you have said yes to two nights?”
You stared at him and sighed, though your lips twitched before you could stop them. “Unbelievable.”
“I know.”
“You put a tracker on him, didn’t you?”
Dex went very still, and you sighed.
“It’s a very small tracker,” he managed.
“Oh my God.”
You wanted to be mad again. You really did. You wanted to lecture him about boundaries and normal parenting and how other fathers managed sleepovers without turning them into covert security operations.
But then he kissed you again, sweet and apologetic, and your hands slid up his chest anyway.
Why were you mad again?
Something about growth. Something about trust. Something about your husband being a paranoid, tactical, emotionally stunted man who loved your son so much it scared him and wanted you so much he had apparently planned an entire weekend around it.
“You’re still in trouble,” you whispered against his mouth.
Dex nodded. “Okay.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to just fuck your way out of this.”
His hand slid around your waist, pulling you closer.
“No?” he asked, unconvinced.
“Hmm,” you said, already breathless.
Dex kissed the corner of your mouth, then your cheek. Then, he nipped at your lower lips.
“Okay,” he murmured. “Then I’ll make it up to you.”
—
Five minutes later, you were on the kitchen counter, thighs trembling around Dex’s shoulders, one hand braced behind you and the other twisted helplessly in his hair.
He had gone to his knees like worship.
He was not even pretending like he was anything other than starved for you. His hands gripped your hips hard enough to keep you exactly where he wanted you, dragging you closer every time your body tried to squirm away from the intensity.
“Dex,” you mewled, and your voice cracked on his name.
Your hand flew to your mouth out of habit. Out of pure, pathetic muscle memory.
The second you did it, Dex stopped.
Not fully, but just enough to make you feel the loss, enough for his mouth to hover against your core while he made the most wrecked, desperate sound you had ever heard from him.
A whine, you realized, frustrated and almost hurt.
His fingers closed around your wrist, gentle but firm, pulling your hand away from your lips, pinning them to the marble.
“No,” he breathed, voice ruined. “Baby, don’t do that.”
You stared down at him, already dizzy, already too far gone for this conversation.
“The neighbours,” you whispered.
Dex’s eyes lifted to yours, deeply devoted, “they won’t hear.”
You blinked. “What?”
He kissed the inside of your thigh, tender enough to make you shiver.
“They won’t.”
Your brain struggled through the haze of his tongue lapping you, like kitten licks for now. It would be adorable if it wasn’t somewhere so fucking obscene. “Dex. What does that mean?”
“I soundproofed the shared walls.”
For one second, everything stopped. From your breath to your thoughts to your ability to pretend you were still even remotely in control.
“You what?”
“Last week,” he said, as calmly as if he had changed a lightbulb. “When you were at work.”
You stared at him. And the bastard looked up and looked proud.
“Oh my god,” you whispered. “You had a whole fucking game plan.”
His hands tightened around your thighs. “Hmm.”
“So you could hear me?”
His eyes shifted, almost wicked. That was the wrong question. Or maybe it was exactly the right one.
Dex’s mouth parted slightly, his breath warm against you, and suddenly he looked less like your husband and more like a man who had been surviving on scraps for months and had finally been given permission to feast.
“So I wouldn’t have to stop,” he said.
Your whole body went weak.
Fuck, it worked.
“You’re insane,” you said, but it came out like praise.
Dex smiled against you.“I know.”
“You’re actually insane.”
“I know.”
You opened your mouth to argue. But then he pressed his tongue flat against you and the argument died immediately.
Your fingers tightened in his hair, head tipping back. The first real sound that left you was small, shaky, almost embarrassed.
Dex groaned like it hurt him.
“Mm, there,” he murmured, dragging the word against your skin. “That’s it.”
You tried to look down at him, but the sight nearly undid you.
Dex on his knees in your kitchen, sleeves pushed up, hands spread possessively over your thighs, face flushed with hunger and triumph. He looked focused, like the entire world had narrowed to you, your body, your voice, and the way you fell apart when he refused to let you hide from him.
You made another sound, louder this time.
His eyes shut.
“Fuck,” he breathed, almost reverent. “I missed that.”
The heat in your face burned worse than anything else.
“Dex—”
“No,” he said, and his hand slid up to your waist, holding you steady when you nearly slipped against the counter from all the slick mess you were making. “Don’t get shy now, baby.”
You shuddered.
He kissed you down there again, slower, meaner, sweeter somehow, like he was proving a point.
Fuck, he was right.
You’d forgotten how loud you used to be.
You’d forgotten the old apartment, the nice one Dex used to have before you, the thin curtains, the table, the way Dex used to fuck you in every surface and like he needed to mark the whole place with proof that you loved him. You’d what it felt like to have nowhere to be quiet for.
You broke on a gasp, and this time you didn’t cover your mouth.
Dex looked up at you like you had given him something holy. “That’s my girl.”
And then he kept going.
After that, Dex got worse.
Because once you stopped covering your mouth, once you let him hear you, he lost whatever restraint he had been pretending to have.
After you came on his mouth on the counter, he wasted no time bending you over.
When you yelped, he only smiled.
“That’s it,” he said, voice rough. “Don’t hide from me.”
“Dex—”
“Missed this,” he said, stretching in you as you let out a lewd whine. “Missed you being needy for me.”
There were rules, of course.
Leo’s room was out of bounds, obviously. It was a no brainer. The couch was out too, because Leo played there too much, built pillow forts there, watched cartoons there, fell asleep there with sticky fingers and his dinosaur blanket.
Most everything else was fair game.
The whole weekend became heat and orders and laughter that kept turning into gasps. You were on top of him half the time, because he asked you to. You scratched your nails down his back hard enough that his breath caught and his eyes went unfocused for half a second.
Then he laughed, pleased with himself. Clearly, it didn’t take much for you to get back into form.
“Oh,” he murmured, almost smiling as he tried to edge himself in you yet again. “T-there she is.”
“Shut up.”
“No.” His hands found your hips. “Fuck, I missed you mean.”
He got worse when you pulled his hair. Worse when you told him what to do. Worse when you got impatient and shoved at his shoulder, because Dex, terrifyingly, liked being handled by you. He liked being told where to go. He liked being praised when he listened. Still, he would switch the roles in a heartbeat if that was what you wanted.
“Come on, baby,” he murmured later, voice ruined against your ear, fingers deep in you. “You can give me one more.”
“Dex, I…”
“You used to be so good at this, huh? Going again when I tell you to.” His mouth brushed nipped at your jaw. “I know you still are.”
Your whole body went hot. “You’re disgusting.”
“I know.”
“Filthy.”
“I know.”
And that was the thing. He kept saying it so shamelessly, knowing he had nothing else to hide behind. Fuck, he looked so conceited once he realise he’d pulled this off.
By Saturday night, you were wrecked and giddy and half-feral, wearing his shirt badly and telling him he was the most deranged husband alive.
Dex only kissed your shoulder and said, “But I’m yours.”
As if that explained the way he melted when you praised him, then got worse when you pulled him closer and told him not to be so gentle.
By Sunday morning, the apartment was ruined in invisible ways.
There was no evidence left, because everything had to be spotless before Leo came home. The sheets were changed. The counters were wiped and bleached. The hallway was clear and the bathroom was scrubbed. So really, nothing was out of place except the ache in your thighs, the scratches on his back, and the marks you both left on each other's bodies.
But hey. Mission accomplished, right?
Dex laid beside you, one hand on your waist, looking pleased with himself.
“You’re smug,” you mumbled.
“I’m happy.” He smiled into your shoulder.
You closed your eyes, exhausted, sore, and deeply annoyed by how peaceful you felt.
Then you thought to yourself, traitorously: Leo was gonna have sleepovers once a month.
—
Leo came running in that afternoon, bag bouncing against his little back, dinosaur clutched under one arm.
“Mommy!”
You crouched just enough to catch him, kissing the top of his head as he barreled into you. “Hi, baby. Did you have fun?”
He nodded quickly, already halfway through his report before you had even finished hugging him. “I had pancakes and Mark has a biiiig plant and I slept in the blue room and I wasn’t scared.”
“That sounds amazing,” you said, smoothing his hair back.
Leo pulled away just enough to look at you properly. Not at your clothes or at anything obvious. He just looked at your face, with that strange little focus he got.
His brows pinched together. Maybe it was his superhuman precognition, knowing your legs would hurt when you got up. Maybe you just looked a bit… drained.
“Mommy’s tired.”
You went very still. Behind you, Dex froze, too.
Jonathan, still standing by the door with Leo’s overnight bag in one hand, looked between all three of you and raised an eyebrow.
You smiled too quickly. “A little bit, sweetheart.”
Leo turned to Dex with the full seriousness of a child delivering medical advice. “Daddy, we should let Mommy rest today.”
“Good idea, Leo.” Dex’s mouth curved up, but he recovered quickly, pressing a kiss to Leo’s temple like he was not the entire reason Mommy needed rest in the first place.
Jonathan looked at Dex. Then at you. He raised his hands and stepped back with a sigh like, I knew it.
process of dex undressing you, his favorite thing everrr.
warnings?: none.
fbi dex would love undressing you after work or a night out. or even when getting ready for bed.
it would be the most intimate time the both of you share.
only the light coming from the bathroom would illuminate the room. the window would be open just enough for cool wind to balance the heat that dex’s large body would give off.
he would start with your buttons; shaking fingers would slowly unbutton each one, or would slowly unzip his hoodie you were lounging in.
it was like looking at an art piece, the way his pupils would dilate and the soft expanse of your upper body.
his hands would graze your shoulders so your top would fall to the floor. dex would sheepishly rub his knuckles on your collarbones and the dip of your chest.
“turn around” he’d whisper, followed along with fingers unclasping your bra.
it would cause an ache in his heart seeing the indents on your skin from your bra, along your back and shoulders.
his hands would soothingly caress your tits as his teeth lightly sank into the junction between your ear and neck.
“you’re so perfect…sometimes i don’t know what to do” he nuzzles into your neck and you turn like putty, resting your back against his chest.
next, dex would rub his thumb lightly across your nipples until they turned into peaks, while your mouth would fall open at the barely-there touch.
dex would sit on the edge of the bed and turn you to face him. his hands would hook into a belt hoop of your jeans and pull you closer to him.
popping open your jean button and unzipping them revealed pale blue cotton underwear beneath.
dex would pull down your jeans slowly while kissing any new skin revealed to him.
inch by inch till he reached your mound, he would sofly breath against the cotton. his hot breath so close to your clit had you gripping his shoulders, digging your nails into them.
once your underwear was gone too, a pile had formed at the floor of all your clothes.
you were left naked under dex’s watchful eye. maybe it was the light reflecting his eyes or maybe he was teary-eyed, but the look of admiration in his eyes made you feel like you were on the top of the world.
dex pulled you into his embrace, once again nuzzling his face into your neck.
you mentally readied yourself for the intense pleasure of sex, but to your suprise, he just laid on the bed with you tucked under his arms.
and for tonight, it seemed like the right choice.
———————————————————————————
last exam tomorrow!!!! i promise no more short af posts. and ill write all the amazing requests in my inbox :))
SUMMARY - You don't answer any of Aerion's messages but that backfires as he talks to you in person. But even then, you still don't give him much.
CONTAINS - reader is slightly avoidant, aerion is aerion, banter (crack to a point), read part one
A/N - i couldn't tag most of your accounts for some reason so instead i replied to your comments hehe. Also i got carried away ahahahha can you tell...
You remained seated in your car. Staring at the notifications, you didn’t move until your screen turned back to black.
You jammed the keys into the ignition and backed out of the parking space. The drive back home was scary. You kept looking back at your phone, expecting another text to pop up but thankfully none did.
When you finally got home, you locked the front door and leaned against it.
“What the fuck…” You whispered to yourself, closing your eyes.
It was a good thing the next two days were a weekend. A temporary shield. For the next forty-eight hours, you didn’t have to step foot on campus and risk catching a glimpse of his silver hair across the building.
But hiding out in your room didn’t stop your mind from racing. A full day hadn’t even passed when you finally gave in and opened instagram. You pressed the search bar and typed his username into it.
You weren’t mutuals, he never followed you and neither did you follow him.
There wasn’t much to see. He only had one post and a highlight. It was strange trying to match that version of him with the guy who had texted you for the past month.
Though on sunday, while your phone was open on a groupchat, your peace was interrupted.
👻: youre online, i know you see my texts
You stared at the small block of text, your chest tightening. Again, you didn’t reply.
By monday morning, you had braced yourself to go to campus again. It was packed as you walked with Tanselle.
“So I told him if he thinks I’m letting that happen, he’s out of his mind,” Tanselle was saying, before her hand suddenly clamped down hard on your forearm. “Wait. Don’t look but Aerion is heading right to us.”
You looked up anyway.
Aerion was cutting through the crowded walkway. As soon as you looked, his eyes were already on you, his face tense and unreadable.
The people next to you instinctively quieted down, stepping back as he closed the distance and stopped in front of you.
You tried pivoting to the right but he blocked the way, cutting off your route.
“We need to talk,” he said, voice low and rough.
“I’m trying to get to class,” you replied, keeping your voice even, refusing to let the panic show on your face.
“Don’t do that,” he muttered, stepping closer. His form completely covered yours, and you felt suffocated in the open area. “You know exactly why I’m standing here.”
You kept your arms folded around your waist, your posture rigid. A few students walking past were already slowing down, noticing the interaction. “I have to go,” you mumbled.
“No–”
“Aerion!”
A sharp voice broke the tension between you. A girl with long, blonde hair walked over, calling his name as she hurried over. It was Jess—you knew because your friends had told you she was someone he used to talk to before things apparently ended badly.
“Aerion, hold on,” she said, totally ignoring you as she reached him. “Did you get my messages? You haven’t replied to any of–”
Aerion didn’t look at her. He tilted his head slightly, his jaw tight as he dropped a flat, impatient, “not now.”
It was a short distraction, but it was enough. You didn’t hesitate as you grabbed Tanselle’s wrist, pulling her with you as you turned on your heel. You moved as fast as your legs could carry you.
“Whoa–hey! Slow down!” Tanselle stumbled slightly, scrambling to keep up as you dragged her toward the stairwell.
Once you got on the platform between the stairs, you let go of her wrists, your heart still pounding hard.
Tanselle adjusted her tote bag, looking at you with wide eyes.
“What the hell is happening?” She demanded. “You barely explained a thing to any of us and now Aerion is doing this? Since when do you two even speak?”
“I’ll explain later, I promise.” You looked down to make sure he wasn’t anywhere close. “Let’s just go.”
“You’re a terrible friend,” Tanselle grumbled, though she immediately followed you up to the remaining steps.
Five minutes later, the bell rang and you were already sitting at your usual row in Davis’s class.
“Settle down,” Davis silenced the class. “Like I said, today we’re starting the peer reviews on the personal assignment from the start of this semester. You’ll be working with the same partner from the previous project, find them and get moving.”
Your stomach dropped.
Before you could even think about moving, the chair next to you moved. Tanselle was gone, shooting you a sorry look as she settled next to her partner.
You searched around the room when suddenly, Aerion sat down, his shoulder brushing yours as he turned his upper body toward you.
“How long?” he asked, keeping his voice low, but his eyes were drilling into yours.
You turned your head, gaze fixing on your laptop, your fingers resting still on your keyboard. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Stop,” Aerion leaned closer. He looked guarded, a defensive edge tracing his words. “The text about the project. You knew it was me. How long have you known before that?”
The accusation stung, but you didn’t raise your voice. You looked over at him, offended by the fact that this was his main concern.
“A few days before that.” You furrowed your brows. “I didn’t know anything at the beginning. I put the pieces together when I saw you pull out your phone.”
Aerion watched your face, his brows drawing together as he searched your expression. “Then why did you go silent on monday?”
“Seriously?” You paused, “I don’t know, maybe because you basically called me boring.” You scoffed, looking right back at him.
“You barely even acknowledged me, and then what? You texted that your partner who happens to be me was just whatever. Why would I want to keep talking to you after that?”
Aerion flinched. The words seemed to hit him, the defensive wall in his eyes fracturing into genuine surprise. He opened his mouth to say something, his hand shifting on the desk, but a shadow fell over your screen.
“Are you guys actually working, or what?”
Jess had walked up the tiered steps, stopping at the edge of your row. She leaned on the desk, looking down at you with a fake, dismissive smile.
“Don’t take it personal,” Jess said, her voice loud enough for the people in the next row to hear. “He won’t even remember your name next week.”
The comment was explicitly meant to embarass you, and it worked. You felt your face warm up as a few classmates looked over.
But before the silence could stretch, Aerion turned.
The change in him was instantaneous. He looked up at Jess, his face turning cold.
“Go.” His voice wasn’t loud, but it brooked no refusal.
Jess’s smile faltered slightly. “I was just saying–”
“I don’t care,” Aerion interrupted, his stare landing on her in a way that made her step back. “Leave. We’re working.”
The people watching started whispering and nudging each other. Jess’s cheeks flushed a bright red. She wanted to snap back, but caught the total lack of interest in Aerion’s eyes, and quickly turned around.
You sat there, your hands unmoving. The frustration that had been building up since last week slowly started to ease, replaced by a strange, heavy feeling.
Aerion had just defended you in front of the whole class. You blinked twice, trying to process what had just happened.
He took a slow breath. Not looking at anyone else in the room, he turned back to face you.
“Thanks,” you murmured, swallowing as your eyes landed back on the screen of your laptop. You clicked open the peer review rubric Professor Davis had shared to the group. You had to find a way out of talking with him.
“Davis wants us to evaluate the thesis of the intro first,” you pointed out, acting as if nothing happened.
Aerion licked the bottom of his lip, caught off guard by the abrupt shift. His shoulders shifted as you continued looking through the rubric. “What?”
“Is your document open, or do you want to look at mine first?” you answered, tapping your trackpad to highlight the first section of the bibliography.
A frustrated sigh escaped him, you could see his confusion from your peripheral vision, his jaw clenching as he realized you were shutting him out.
He was used to people reacting to him by either backing down or trying to stay in his favour. This indifference was clearly a new territory for him. A difficult one too.
For a second, it looked like he might push past it anyway, his hand tightening on the edge of the desk. Yet he let out a heavy, defeated exhale, pulling his laptop closer. “Mine is open.” His voice was clipped.
For the rest of the period, you kept your barrier firmly in place. You weren’t sure why it was so hard for you to hold a proper conversation with him.
You two texted nonstop for a month. It wasn’t like he was a complete stranger. But somehow it felt like it.
Aerion complied, though his compliance was tense. His fingers tapped against the desk whenever you took too long to read through a paragraph. His focus was entirely divided between the text on his screen and your face.
Every time your fingers accidentally brushed his while adjusting the laptop, he would wait to see if you’d pull away. You always did.
When Davis dismissed the class at last, relief coursed through you.
Snapping your laptop shut, you slid it into your bag and slung the strap over your shoulder. “I’ll upload the comments to the docs by the end of the week.” You stood up, looking him in the eye for a brief, passing second.
Aerion stared up at you from his seat, his throat bobbing as he swallowed whatever he wanted to say.
“Okay.”
You walked to the exit, where Tanselle was already waiting for you. Turning your head for a moment before exiting, your eyes met his.
Reluctantly, you had to tell your friends everything as they kept demanding. No, almost everything.
You conveniently left out the part where you had grown to have this strange, unexplainable, and impenetrable feeling for him.
Tanselle then pointed out how she hasn’t seen Aerion with any girls recently. Everyone agreed, which didn’t help your case.
Yet two days passed without a single notification.
By wednesday, the silence had turned from peace into an uncomfortable, distracting weight. You spent the night trying to study, but your mind kept drifting back to him.
Eventually, you couldn’t resist and opened his chat. You scrolled all the way back to the start, back when he was just an anonymous stranger who made you laugh.
Just as you got to the part where you started icing him out, a new message came through.
You frowned, lips parting as you clicked on the button to the most recent chat.
👻: if you wont talk to me in person, fine
👻: lets do it here
Your heart skipped a beat at the sight of the text. You sat up and paced your room for a full minute before warily typing back.
YOU: What do you want aerion
It felt weird to actually acknowledge who you were talking to.
👻: do me a favour
👻: talk to me like you did before finding out. pretend you dont know who i am
Your eyes narrowed at his message. It was a bizarre request, but the familiar look of the text thread made it entirely too easy to slip back.
YOU: What???
YOU: Fine
👻: tell me everything
YOU: Ok u wanna know what i think?
YOU: I think the guy im paired with in davis’s class is an arrogant prick
There was a long pause. The typing bubbles appeared, vanished, then appeared again.
👻: an arrogant prick? really?
YOU: Yes
YOU: He refuses to talk to anyone outside his immediate circle, he walks like he owns the world, and most importantly he treats his project partners as if they were invisible
👻: maybe hes just focused
YOU: Nope, he didn’t even look at my face
YOU: Can you believe it
YOU: Then he has the nerve to say that im a whatever.. Like sorry i didnt juggle for your entertainment??
A couple minutes passed and you thought he wasn't going to respond, but he was still online.
👻: huh
👻: he sounds terrible
A small, involuntary smile tugged at the corner of your mouth, and you tried your best to fight it down.
YOU: He is, hes mean
👻: i didnt mean to be
The sudden drop of the bit you two were doing made your breath hitch. The text continued.
👻: im sorry about monday
👻: and the thing i said
👻: youre not whatever
You stared at his texts, the honesty of it surprising you. You typed out a reply then deleted it. While trying to formulate a reply, another message popped up.
👻: i have to go
The chat went dead. You sat back on your pillows, staring at those four words, your mind spinning into a frantic spiral. I have to go. What did that mean? Go for the day? Or was this his dramatic way of saying goodbye to whatever you guys were?
You slammed your phone down on the mattress, irritated by the sudden exit. You needed to clear your head.
Sighing, you grabbed a towel and headed into the bathroom to take a long, hot shower, letting the steam wash away the stress of the week.
By the time you stepped back into your bedroom, it was already dark outside. Drying your hair and changing into your pajamas, you picked your phone up from the bed to check the time.
There was a new text, sent just a minute ago.
👻: open the door
You froze, reading the message over and over again to make sure you weren’t hallucinating.
You walked into the living room, your bare feet making no sound against the floor.
You never gave him your address.
The only people who knew the exact apartment complex you lived in were your closest friends.
Fuck, you thought. Tanselle…
Panic flooded your body as you approached the entryway, and right on cue, a knock came from the other side of the door.
Taking a shallow breath, you unlocked the deadbolt and pulled the door open.
Aerion was standing under the dim hallway light. He was wearing a tight gym shirt, his silver hair slightly messy from the harsh wind of the night.
He wasn’t empty handed. His right hand was carrying a bag that looked to be from a bakery. He saw your gaze switching from his face to the plastic. “You mentioned last week that you were eating cheesecake.”
Your brain refused to believe that Aerion Targaryen was standing at your door with a whole cheesecake because of a passing comment you had made a whole week ago.
The wall you had built felt incredibly fragile right now, but you had to keep your composure. Slowly, you stepped aside, opening the door just wide enough for him to move past.
Aerion walked into the apartment, getting his shoes off by the door. He looked at you, taking in your damp hair and pajamas, then walked to stand near the edge of the kitchen table, setting the bag on the counter.
You stared at him, your mind trying to catch up. The tips of your ears went red at the realization that you were wearing only your pajamas in front of him.
“How do you even know where I live?”
“Tanselle,” he said bluntly. “Don’t start a fight with her, I didn’t give her much of an option.”
“Of course...” You huffed mostly to yourself.
You walked past him to the water dispenser, grabbing a clean glass from the drying rack and filling it with cold water. You set it on the counter near him.
“Thanks.” He picked up the glass. Taking a slow sip, his eyes scanned the living room before settling back on you.
“Look,” he started, voice dropping an octave, sounding rougher in the quiet apartment. “I’ll get to the point. I know you think I'm a piece of shit. It's just that I... didn’t know it was you.” His shoulders shifted slightly as his muscles got less tense.
You raised a brow at that. “So just because you didn't know it was me you treated me like that?”
“No. It sounds terrible I know. I guess I was already comfortable talking to you online that I figured I didn't need to talk to anyone in person,” he explained, his tone stripped of its usual cold edge. “When you started ignoring me, it drove me crazy.”
“At first, I thought you knew the entire time. I assumed the worst, but then I started worrying. And I didn’t wanna stop talking to you.” His voice got quiet toward the end.
You didn’t know what to say. The honesty of his words rang through your mind, effectively breaking down the image you have already built of him in your head.
“...And what about Jess?” You asked after a beat and immediately regretted it.
Aerion’s eyes flickered with genuine disgust and annoyance before he shook his head.
“She’s nothing.” He leaned against the counter. “We used to talk,” he hesitated, “then I stopped but she couldn't accept it. She’s nothing.” He repeated, noticing the fidgeting of your hands.
“Oh,” was all you could say. Aerion seemed to recognize the shift in the air. He finished the rest of the water and set it back on the counter.
“I should let you get some sleep,” he cleared his throat, eyes lingering on your lips.
He walked toward the front door, putting his shoes back on. You opened the door, unsure if you even wanted him to leave.
The curiosity that had been lingering in the back of your mind all week finally slipped out. “Before you go... I wanna know something.”
Aerion paused, an amused spark gleaming in his eyes. “Yeah?”
“What did you think of me at the start? Like after you found out I wasn't Michael.”
He let out a low chuckle, a smirk splaying across his face. “I thought you had a ridiculously sharp mouth. You always called me out on my attitude, it was infruriating. But it was intriguing.”
Aerion then tilted his head, turning the tables. “My turn. Why'd you even reply to an unknown number?”
A smile broke through your expression, you no longer felt the need to put on a mask in front of him. “Mmm... being real I'm pretty sure I was just bored and couldn't sleep. I thought it'd be funny and it absolutely was.”
He laughed softly and paused at the threshold, turning back to look at you. “So you're saying you're glad you replied?”
You pretended to think for a second, looking up. “Maybe,” you teased, the familiar banter coming back.
A tiny smile touched his lips—the first real one you’ve seen from him in person. He let out a hum. “Right. I'll remember that. Go sleep now.” He backed up to the threshold, his eyes only leaving yours as he turned around.
“Goodnight.” You called out to him as you closed the door and locked the deadbolt, hearing the thud of his footsteps slowly fade.
An hour later, you tried to go straight to sleep, but you kept tossing and turning. Giving up, you got out of bed and walked to the kitchen, pulling the box out of the bag. You recognised the logo on the box as you opened the lid, it was from the expensive bakery near campus.
The cheesecake looked so incredible, you didn’t bother with a plate. Grabbing a fork, you stabbed the cake and took a massive bite.
After eating a solid half of it directly out of the box, you stared at the remaining mess and pulled your phone out to snap a quick photo.
YOU: [IMAGE ATTACHED]
YOU: I forgot to thank you lol
You didn’t expect him to reply immediately, assuming he was already asleep. But the bubbles popped up almost instantly.
👻: youre welcome
👻: did you save me a bite or are you selfish
YOU: Nope its all for me
👻: next time ill just make you feed it to me
You bit your lip to contain your smile, sliding down onto the living room rug and propping your back on the sofa.
YOU: Hm
YOU: Depends on how well u behave the rest of the week
👻: im always well behaved
Giggling, you quickly texted back.
YOU: Liar
YOU: Anw out of curiosity what do u have me saved as
👻: unknown
👻: until about a day ago
YOU: Huh what is it now
👻: thats for my eyes only
YOU: Oh rly
YOU: Ok then im saving u as row four lol
👻: how creative
YOU: It fits
YOU: Reminds me that ure an arrogant prick everyday
👻: good
👻: think about me everyday
Your heart did a violent flip.
Going to his profile, you debated on actually renaming him as row four, but you decided on Aerion 🎱. The emoji just felt right.
YOU: Just changed it
Aerion 🎱: row four?
YOU: No and im not telling u
YOU: Thats unless u tell me minee?
Aerion 🎱: oh thats how it is
Aerion 🎱: never
YOU: Wow!! Ur impossible im gonna off myself
YOU: Ok im going to sleep before u piss me off more
Aerion 🎱: lmao alright
Aerion 🎱: goodnight dont die
You let out a content huff before getting up and heading back to your bedroom.
YOU: Goodnightt
The next morning, the lecture hall was filled with pre-class chatter. It was history class but your professor fell sick and Professor Davis was there as a substitute.
As usual, you sat beside Tanselle who was vibrating with anxiety, staring at you sideways ever since you arrived.
Leaning in close, she lowered her voice to a whisper. “Okay, you’re scaring me. You haven’t mentioned him once. Are you not going to kill me?”
You let out a small giggle, shaking your head. “Nope. It’s all settled.”
Tanselle clicked her tongue, utterly puzzled. “Wait… really?” So he didn’t actually go to your house then?”
“No, he did,” you corrected smoothly, as if it was completely normal.
A noise of confusion escaped her, her eyes bulging. “What!? He actually came over? And you’re acting like this isn’t wild?”
Just then, the doors swung open, and Aerion walked in. He was late, and Professor Davis didn’t bother calling him out, simply beginning the lesson.
You watched as he walked up the main aisle, expecting him to stop in row four, but he continued walking. He moved past his friends without a second thought.
Then without tilting his head up, his eyes locked onto yours. A warmth instantly bloomed in your chest, a smile growing on your face, and you quickly bit your inner cheek to hide it.
He reached your row and without saying a word, he pulled the chair beside you and slid effortlessly into the seat.
Nudging your chin toward the lower row, you pointed at a few familiar faces who had turned around their chairs to watch him. “Your friends are literally staring at you. They’re waiting for you.”
Aerion followed your glance for a split second before looking back at you. “So?”
Before you could reply, the screech of the microphone caught everyone’s attention. “You two,” Davis barked into the mic, his voice echoing. “If you two have matters that are more pressing to discuss then feel free to take it out of the class.”
The weight of Davis calling you out together made the class go extremely silent, staring back and forth between you and Aerion. You could see Jess staring menacingly from the other side of the room.
Your lips formed into a pout as Davis finally looked away, continuing his talk. Aerion, on the other hand, did not take his eyes off you, his smirk widening slightly at the sudden audience.
He slowly leaned back in his chair and for a moment you thought the distraction was over. But under the desk Aerion shifted. The side of his thigh bumped firmly against yours, deliberately pressing in with lingering heat. A sharp jolt shot straight up your spine.
You shot him a warning glare, but he was already busy on his phone.
A second later, your phone buzzed in your lap.
Aerion 🎱: z
Aerion 🎱: z
Aerion 🎱: z
You hid your hands under the desk, looking down to make sure Professor Davis wasn’t looking.
YOU: Wtf
Aerion 🎱: we cant talk out loud
Aerion 🎱: i have to find other ways to get your attention
You glanced at him out of the corner of your eyes, but his face looked to be absolutely calm and concentrated as he pretended to analyze the projector screen.
YOU: Oh ure a pro
YOU: Wait move ur leg ppl r staring
Aerion 🎱: doesnt matter
Aerion 🎱: if you care move yours then
YOU: Ok nevermind
Aerion 🎱: mhm
Aerion 🎱: what are you doing after class
YOU: Its a free period im probably gonna go to the cafe
Aerion 🎱: wrong
Aerion 🎱: we’re going somewhere
YOU: ??? Hello why wasnt i informed
Aerion 🎱: i just informed you
You almost laughed at that but managed to keep it in, not wanting to draw even more attention from Davis.
YOU: Stop before i get kicked out of the class
YOU: Ok im leaving u bye
Aerion 🎱: stay
Aerion 🎱: hes not gonna see
YOU: If he does im blocking u
Aerion 🎱: i know where you live it doesnt matter
Your lips parted at the sheer audacity of his last message, a rush of heat hitting your cheeks as the memory from last night flashed through your mind.
Looking up from your phone, you caught the subtle twitch at the corner of Aerion’s lips. It was then that you realised that replying to a random message was easily the best mistake you’ve ever made.
Summary : Benjamin Poindexter finds his North Star in a sweet librarian who probably should’ve run. Still, she wouldn’t have it any other way.
Pairing : Benjamin Poindexter x Librarian! reader (she/her)
Warnings/tags : North star! Reader, fluff (?), angst, hurt/comfort, obsessive love, unhealthy attachment, codependency, possessive behavior, stalking, morally grey reader, explicit sexual content (no anatomical detail as per usual), sex, orgasm denial, oral sex implied, voyeurism/exhibitionism themes, breeding kink, blip mentioned, conjugal visit, institutional abuse, canon-typical violence, murder, hostage situation, grief, food, pregnancy, towards the end you and Dex are mentioned to have a child called Leo. Dex isn’t the most traditional father in any sense but he eventually does love him for very specific reasons I won’t spoil. Starts two years before Daredevil season 3 and ends during DDBA season 1 (let me know if I missed anything!)
Word Count : 22k (whoopsie)
Requested by : A mix of these requests: X X X ( @faszomiskivan )
Notes : This story spans about nine years, so buckle up! Reader basically takes on Julie’s North Star role in canon, and yes, this story does explain how we get there. Enjoy!
Could be read as a one-shot, but you can read more stories in this universe here!
FBI Special Agent Benjamin Poindexter didn’t know what to do with pretty.
He understood attraction in the detached, observational way he understood most things. He understood what people found objectively attractive was symmetry, pleasing aesthetics. He would observe little changes in a room when someone “beautiful” entered it. He went through it like a list: people looked longer, their voices gentled, posture adjusted without realising it. Dex knew how to recognise attractiveness because other people gave themselves away around it, because the world was always telling on itself if you paid close enough attention. But pretty was different when it was you.
Pretty was not supposed to make him forget the next thing he meant to say. Pretty was not supposed to sit under his skin like a fever. Pretty was not supposed to be you, a school librarian in a pastel cardigan, with a pencil tucked through your hair and ink on your fingers, kneeling between two shelves while a little boy cried into your blouse because another child had laughed at him for reading too slowly.
Dex was at the school for an FBI community safety outreach visit. Nothing serious, nothing field-critical. It was just one of those public-facing assignments meant to make parents feel reassured and administrators feel prepared. He was supposed to stand beside the principal, nod at the right times, talk about emergency response based on a script made by the Bureau, and leave.
Instead, at the end of the day, he stood near the library doors and watched you lower your voice to soothe a child.
“Hey,” you said softly. “Don’t make yourself smaller because someone else was mean to you.”
Dex went still. The principal kept talking beside him. Something about lockdown protocols, fire exits, parent pick-up procedures, and perhaps thanking him for the visit. Dex didn’t hear any of it. He watched the little boy rub his face with his sleeve, watched you reach into your cardigan pocket and produce a tissue because of course you had one ready, because of course you had walked through life expecting the world to hurt these precious little things and had prepared yourself to help.
“Reading slowly just means you get to spend more time with the words,” you told the boy. “That’s not a bad thing.”
The boy sniffled, and you smiled at him.
Dex felt that smile land in his cold heart, somewhere it had no business being.
It would have been easier if you were only beautiful. That would have been manageable. Uncomfortable, maybe, but manageable. Beauty was a fact. Beauty could be observed, catalogued, eventually put away. You were beautiful in a way that seemed unaware of itself, unpolished and terribly human. The cardigan sleeves falling too far over your hands, the loose strand of hair stuck to your cheek, the worn soles of your cheap flats, you smiling so easily for children who probably forgot to thank you for it.
Dex thought you were gorgeous with an alarmed resentment, as if his own body had betrayed him by noticing before his mind had given permission. Then you looked up at him.
Your eyes met his across the library, and for half a second, Dex forgot what face he was supposed to be wearing. You smiled politely, like he was just another adult in the building, not a man with a gun under his jacket teaching staff how to react in case of a school shooting.
“Hi,” you said. “Sorry, do you need the library?”
The principal brightened. “This is our librarian.”
You gave Dex your name. He repeated it silently once. Then again. Then a third time, because it felt like something he should store somewhere safe, somewhere no one else could touch.
“Special Agent Poindexter,” he said, holding out his hand.
You shook it, and your hand was warm. Dex noticed that there was a tiny paper cut near your thumb.
You were still smiling at him. Not because he was FBI, and not because he was handsome, though he was. You smiled because you were kind.
Fuck. That’s inconvenient.
Pretty made him look, but good made him stay.
That first visit should have been the last. Dex knew that. There was no operational reason for him to return personally. The school’s safety review was a basic one. The principal had his notes, but the follow-up could have been handled by email. A junior agent could have dropped off the printed materials. Anyone could have gone.
But Dex went. That second time, he poked his head to the library, and said hi. You said hi back, right after you told two boys that no, the beanbags were not for wrestling, and yes, you were very impressed by the creativity of the attempt.
Dex couldn’t stop thinking about it for a week.
The third time, he told himself it was because the library’s rear exit needed another assessment. It was technically true. The lock was old, the corridor outside had basically no surveillance, and the staff entrance was too far from the main office. He made it seem like a legitimate concern, when really, it was a neat little justification. Dex was excellent at finding those.
You were reshelving books when he appeared in the doorway, balanced on the tips of your toes as you reached for the top shelf. The hem of your blouse lifted slightly at your waist. It was nothing indecent. Barely anything at all.
Still, his mind went briefly blank.
He cleared his throat.
You startled, turned, and smiled. “Agent Poindexter.”
Dex liked the sound of it from you. That was inconvenient too.
“Sorry,” you added, stepping down. “Am I in the way?”
“No.”
“Good. Because if you were about to tell me my fiction section is a security risk, I might cry.”
His mouth twitched before he decided to let it. “I’ll leave fiction alone.”
“Very generous of the DOJ.” That’s when he realised you were teasing him.
Dex looked at you and thought, you have no idea what a dangerous thing that was.
After that, the visits became a pattern.
Not obvious, because Dex was never sloppy when he could help it. He didn’t go every day. He didn’t stand outside the library staring like some lovesick idiot with no self-control. He knew how to make repeated contact look procedural.
His supervisor barely looked up from the file the fourth time it happened. “Poindexter, you handled the school outreach last week, right?”
“Yes.”
“They’ve got some updated compliance questions. I can send Nadeem.”
Dex immediately shook his head. “I’ll take it.”
His supervisor paused, but Dex kept his face still. “I’m already familiar with the layout,” he said, and what a good excuse that was.
The whole truth was that he had thought about you every day since the first visit. You came to him through triggers. When he saw children’s drawings in a hallway. A cardigan on a mannequin The smell of old paper. A mug with painted stars on it in a café window, because you had one on your desk.
You were good, and you were pretty, and that combination felt less like attraction and more like orientation. As if Dex had spent his whole life moving without a fixed point and then walked into a school library and found one.
So, yes, he came back to the school. And, yes, eventually, he followed you home.
The first time, he told himself it was because you were the last staff member to leave again and the car park lighting was poor, so he had to make sure you were safe. It had rained earlier, leaving the pavement slick and black. You walked out with a tote bag over one shoulder and an armful of books pressed to your chest, juggling your keys between your fingers.
Dex sat in his car and watched until you pulled out of the lot. Then he followed. He learned the route to your apartment in fourteen minutes. He cleared that you lived in a building with a front door that did not latch unless pulled hard, that the hallway light on your floor flickered, that your window faced the street and your curtains were thin enough to turn your silhouette suggestive when you moved past them with nothing on.
He hated your building immediately. The lock was bad. The street was worse. Your neighbours were careless. The man in 2B smoked on the front steps and watched women walk past like a fucking creep. The laundry room was in the basement. The side gate did not close properly.
Dex catalogued every vulnerability, then sat in his car for twenty-three minutes after your lights went out and told himself this was a reasonable concern.
He was trained to notice risk, and you just had so much of it. You were too open, too trusting, too underpaid to live somewhere safe enough.
He found out about the money without needing to try very hard.
He figured out your exact job title, your district, and salary ranges within twenty minutes. He knew what you could afford, what you probably couldn’t, what your grocery budget looked like if your car needed work or if the school asked you to buy supplies out of pocket again. And you did, apparently. He saw the receipts in your hand one afternoon when you came out of a discount store with construction paper, glue sticks, tissues, and children’s stickers paid for with your own money.
That bothered him more than it should have. It enraged him. Not because you were helpless. Dex didn’t think that. You were competent in the way good people often were, holding ten pieces of a room together while everyone else assumed the room simply stayed whole on its own. But you were tired and stretched thin. You loved your job, the children, the library with its peeling posters and overhandled paperbacks, but love didn’t pay rent.
I could, he thought. Dex could pay your rent without noticing. He could buy groceries without checking his account. He could fix the lock. Replace the car. Put you somewhere safe and close. That’s… a good reason to ask you out, right?
If he ever had the courage.
By the fifth visit, you laughed when you saw him. “Again?”
Dex stopped in the library doorway, because he insisted to the bureau that some of the teachers were security risks. “Again.”
“Should I be worried about the state of our emergency preparedness?”
“No.”
“Should I be worried about you?” That caught him off-guard. Your tone was teasing, but your eyes were warm and curious.
Should I be worried about you?
Yes, he thought. Probably.
Instead, he said, “No.”
You narrowed your eyes in mock suspicion. “I don’t know. Five visits to the school. Either we are extremely unsafe, or you really like laminated evacuation maps.”
Dex looked at the map beside your door. “It’s a good map.”
You burst out laughing.
Dex loved the sound immediately and started to memorise it so he could copy it when you made a joke. More than that, he wanted to be responsible for it. He wanted to know what your laugh sounded like in his car. In his kitchen. Against his mouth.
The thought came so suddenly that his teeth clenched.
You noticed. Your smile softened, and Dex had the devastating impression that you thought you had embarrassed him. “I’m sorry,” you said. “I didn’t mean to make fun of you.”
“You didn’t.”
“Okay.” You tilted your head. “Good.”
Good. The word followed him home.
So did you, though not physically. Not yet. But your image, your voice, the way you said his name after he told you to call him Dex, the way you remembered he took tea plain after seeing him drink it once in the staff room. The way you handed him a paper cup and said, “I made too much,” as if generosity was just something that spilled out of you naturally.
And then there were the guys around you.
He had watched a math teacher who lingered at your desk too long after school, making you laugh over some stupid story about a parent email. A divorced father at pick-up who asked whether you ever took private tutoring work and then smiled in a way Dex didn’t like. A man you met for coffee one Friday evening, two neighbourhoods over, at a café with steamed windows and terrible parking.
Dex hadn’t meant to follow you there. That was a lie.
He had followed you there because you had worn lipstick, the kind you probably put on in your rearview mirror after work, thinking no one would notice.
The date was unremarkable. The man was unremarkable. He wore a blue shirt, laughed too loudly, and checked his phone while you were talking. Dex watched from across the street with his hands still on the steering wheel and felt jealousy move through him.
The man was wrong for you.
He was careless, dull, and too impressed with himself. He made you pay for your own tea. That alone felt like a crime.
You left to do some off-the-clock work, and your date stayed. Dex waited until the man left to use the bathroom, then walked into the café and passed close enough to his table to see the phone he had left face-up beside his plate. He saw a message from someone named Laura lit the screen with a heart attached.
Dex smiled. That was useful.
The next morning, he sent an anonymous message to Laura. The following week, you didn’t see blue-shirt again.
You looked a little sad about it on Monday. Dex hated that. Then he hated the man more for making you sad. Then he told himself it was better this way.
It became easier to scare off your dates after that. All it took was an inconvenient scheduling conflict, a resurfaced truth, a gentle nudge. One man had an outstanding warrant for unpaid fines. One was married. One was simply easy to scare with the right look from the right federal agent in a parking lot.
By the sixth visit to the school, there was no reason good enough to fool anyone but himself.
A “Penultimate walkthrough,” he called it, before the final walkthrough next week.
The principal seemed pleased, though you looked amused. “Penultimate?” you asked when Dex appeared outside the library.
“Yes.”
“Should I be honoured?”
“You should feel secure.”
“I do. The biography section has never been safer.”
He looked at you, and you smiled like you were proud of yourself. Dex couldn’t help but copy that smile back. Your expression changed when you saw it, going still for one second, like you liked him, too.
That day, he walked through the library with you while you pointed out doors and windows and places the children liked to hide during reading hour. This corner was where the overwhelmed ones went. That shelf had the books no one returned on time because they loved them too much. The lamp near the beanbag was too warm if left on all day, but you kept it anyway because the kids said it made the corner feel cozy.
“This is where they go when they need silence,” you said, gesturing toward a little space tucked behind a low shelf. A lamp. A basket of soft toys. Books with soft edges. A handmade sign that read: take a breath.
Dex looked at it.
You had made a place for children to be afraid safely. Of course you had.
“You did this?” he asked.
You shrugged, suddenly shy. “It’s not much.”
Dex looked at you. “It is.”
You met his eyes, and for a moment, the library noise faded behind you.
After that, he wanted to give you things. He wanted to give you better shoes. Better locks. A safer car. A warmer apartment. Groceries you did not buy with mental arithmetic running behind your eyes. A kitchen where your tea sat beside his coffee because it belonged there. A bed you didn’t have to assemble yourself. A life where you did not walk to your car alone. He wanted your life folded into his so completely that you never again had to stand unprotected in the world.
It was raining the day he finally asked.
The sky had turned the school windows grey, and the car park outside shone black under the streetlights. Most of the staff had already left. The corridors had emptied, and you were the last one in the library again.
Dex had lingered through a conversation with the principal he barely needed to have after the final walkthrough. He had checked the same exit twice. He had waited near the lobby until your light was the only one still glowing down the hall.
Then you came out with a tote bag sliding down your shoulder and a cardboard box of donated books pressed against your hip. Your umbrella refused to open, and you stared at it like it had stabbed you.
“Need help?”
You startled, then relaxed when you saw him. “Dex.” You laughed, breathless and embarrassed. “Do you just appear whenever I’m losing a fight?”
“Your umbrella is inside out,” he pointed out, before taking the box from you.
You tried to hold on. “I can carry that.”
“I know.”
“Then why did you take it?”
“Because it’s raining.”
You looked at him for a second, then smiled, soft and helpless and too fond for his sanity.
“Okay,” you said, as if letting him carry a box was nothing. As if it didn’t make a dark and pleased thought settle low in his chest.
He walked you to your car and put the books in the back seat. He noted the old jumper on the passenger side, the stack of overdue returns, the half-empty water bottle, the evidence of your life that was still not his.
You stood beside him under the broken umbrella, rain misting your hair.
You were gorgeous, he thought.
It struck him then in the stupidest way. No analysis or clinical separation. Just so pretty it made him feel young and strange and almost angry with himself.
“What?” you asked, smiling like you could tell he was staring.
Dex could’ve said nothing. He could have smiled, stepped back, wished you a good night, returned to his car, and come up with another reason to see you next week.
Instead, he looked at you and thought of your whole life together. Then he said it. “Have dinner with me.”
Your smile faded into surprise. The rain tapped against the broken umbrella between you. You blinked once. It wasn’t really a question, was it? “With you?”
“Yes.”
“As in…”
“A date.”
Your cheeks warmed. Dex watched the colour rise and tilted his head.
“Oh,” you said softly. Then, after a second, you smiled. “Okay.”
Just like that, he got what he wanted.
—
The first date was dinner at your favourite restaurant, though you couldn’t recall ever telling Dex that.
You paused outside the little place with the handwritten menu in the window, your hand tucked into the crook of his arm. “Oh,” you said, surprised. “I love this place.”
Dex looked down at you, calm as anything. “Do you?”
You laughed. “I come here all the time.”
“I didn’t know that.”
The lie was smooth, but Dex said it with such calm that you accepted it because you wanted to. So you smiled up at him and said, “Then we have similar taste.”
His eyes held on your face. “Maybe we do.”
“Maybe we belong together then,” you joked.
Dex’s brain went to a catastrophic halt.
You didn’t see it from the outside, not really. His face barely changed. Maybe his eyes went a little too still. Maybe his fingers pressed once, carefully, against your hand where it rested on his sleeve.
But inside him, his heart lit up white-hot. Belong together.
You had said it so lightly. Dex heard it like a verdict. Like the universe had leaned down and put a hand on his shoulder and said, yes, that one.
He opened the restaurant door for you and followed you inside with your words still burning through him.
You had no idea he had chosen this restaurant because he had followed you there three weeks before, parked across the street while you sat by the window with two friends and laughed over a bowl of pasta. You had no idea he had watched you order the same thing twice. You had no idea he knew which seat you liked, which dessert you split with your friend and pretended not to want more of, which route you took home afterward, how tightly you held your coat closed when the wind picked up.
But yeah, dinner was great.
The second date was coffee because you were trying to take things slower.
He was already there when you arrived, sitting by the window with your drink waiting in front of the empty chair. Your exact order, right size, right syrup. He claimed similar taste innocently again.
You should have been alarmed. Instead, you chuckled and sat down.
Coffee turned into a walk. The walk turned into him standing beside your car, close enough that your shoulder brushed his sleeve. He looked at your mouth once, then back at your eyes. “Can I kiss you?”
You didn’t even answer. You just stood on your tip toes and kissed him, carefully at first. But his hand came to cup your face, so you made a hum into his mouth and felt him unravel.
When he pulled back, his eyes were dark. You smiled, dazed.
The third date was dinner at his apartment.
He cooked for you, because apparently Dex did everything like it was a mission and feeding you was no exception. His apartment was neat and perfectly arranged, but then you were there with your jacket on the back of his chair and your laugh in his kitchen, and he kept looking at those little disruptions were worth you being here.
The food was good, so you smiled and pushed a little harder. “You’re very good at taking care of me.”
Dex went still, and you could’ve sworn his ears went pink.
After dinner, you kissed him on the couch. That was all it was supposed to be: A kiss.
Yes, maybe Dex made it feel a little too deep. Maybe it was too hungry. Maybe it was a little reckless, considering this was only the third date and you weren't the kind of woman who did things like this. You didn’t tumble into a man’s bed after three dates and let your body make decisions your brain would have to defend in the morning.
Your brain was trying, to be fair. The little voices there had formed a whole committee meeting about it.
This is too fast. This is insane. You have work tomorrow. You barely know him.
Unfortunately, Dex was kissing you, open-mouthed and desperate, his hands tight on your waist, breathing against you like every second of restraint physically hurt him, and your body didn’t seem particularly interested in attending the discussion.
You climbed into his lap because there was nowhere else you wanted to be.
Dex let out a breathy moan when you settled over him, his head tipping back against the couch. His shirt was still on, but you had already pulled half the buttons open, enough to get your hands on skin, enough to feel his chest rise under your palms every time your mouth found his again.
Your skirt was hiked high around your thighs, his fingers trembling at the hem of it.
Dex, who could easily take what he wanted, sat beneath you with his hands on your thighs and waited for you to tell him he was allowed.
You kissed him harder for it.
His mouth opened under yours immediately, wet and so eager that you felt your stomach twist. You threaded your fingers into his hair and tugged once, just to steady yourself, just to feel him closer.
Dex sighed into your mouth.
“Oh,” you whispered, breathless.
His eyes opened, fixed on you. You smiled because you understood then that Benjamin Poindexter liked being told what to do.
He wanted to be good for you. He wanted to earn every sound you made.
You shifted in his lap, and his whole body reacted. His fingers slid higher under your skirt, then stopped again.
“Dex,” you breathed.
His throat worked. “Tell me.”
You leaned down, your lips brushing his as you spoke. “Touch me.”
He obeyed so fast it made you gasp.
Your panties were pulled to the side with clumsy, shaking urgency, his pants shoved down just enough because neither of you had the patience anymore. It was filthy how desperate it was. There was no time for the bedroom, no careful undressing, no pretending this was slower than it was. It was you in his lap, his open shirt under your hands, your skirt bunched around your waist, both of you panting into each other’s mouths like you had been struck by fucking lightning.
He was so intense you expected him to take over. Because he could’ve flipped you under him. He could have pinned you to the couch and made you forget every thought you had ever had. He had the body, he had muscles, he had the skills.
Instead, he looked at you like he needed permission to breathe. “Like that?” he breathed.
You nodded, nails dragging over his chest nodding frantically. “Don’t stop.”
He didn’t.
Dex listened like obedience was devotion, like your pleasure was a commandment, like the only thing in the world that mattered was keeping you exactly like this: skirt up, mouth open, shaking in his lap while he looked up at you like you were holy.
You knew this was too quick. You never had one night stands. Even three dates was way too quick, by your standards.
But his hands were on your waist, his shirt was open, his breathing was breaking, and when you whispered, “Fuck, baby,” he shuddered so hard beneath you that all your remaining common sense died on the couch.
Afterward, you stayed folded against him, both of you warm and breathless, your face tucked into his neck.
Dex’s hand moved slowly up your back, careful now.
You lifted your head enough to look at him. His hair was wrecked. His mouth was red. His eyes were softer than you had ever seen them, though there was still a frightening stillness underneath, satisfied and hungry and already too attached.
You touched his cheek. “I should probably go home.”
Dex went still.
He looked at you from beneath those dark lashes, still flushed, still breathing hard, still beautiful enough to make bad decisions feel like fate. “Stay the night,” he said, trying not to say please.
You swallowed. “I have work tomorrow.”
“I’ll drive you.”
“My things are at home.”
“You can wear something of mine.”
“I need my toothbrush.”
“I have a spare.”
A laugh slipped out of you, helpless and fond. Of course he did.
Dex’s mouth barely moved, and it was always a smile.
He looked at you like he needed you to say yes and hated that you could tell. Like letting you leave after this would physically hurt. Like you had crawled into his lap and accidentally turned yourself into the centre of his orbit.
You should go home. Your sensible little inner committee was banging on the table now.
But Dex looked at you like he was unaware he had puppy dog eyes, and you couldn’t say no to that, right?
So you kissed him once. “M’kay, baby,” you said.
Dex held you tighter then, giving an upbeat little whine as he peppered kisses on your collarbone.
Little did you know, there was no going back now.
—
The next day, Dex picked you up from work, even though you hadn’t asked him to.
He had driven you that morning as promised, his hands on your waist while he kissed you goodbye like he was trying not to follow you into the school library.
You had spent the whole day after that with his shirt on, but it was terribly oversized on you. Still, you managed to make it look intentional under your blazer, tucked and adjusted just enough that no one could tell. You had pinned your hair neatly, put your librarian face on, and acted very normal. Very professional of you, honestly.
Then the final bell rang, the library emptied, and by the time you stepped out of the front entrance with your bag over your shoulder, Dex was already there, waiting by his car with a suit jacket on and badge hidden.
You stopped mid-step. “Oh,” you said, lighting up. Beside you, Jonathan stopped too.
Jonathan, the music teacher. Nice Jonathan. Harmless Jonathan. Jonathan who lived two streets away from you and always carried a canvas tote bag with an embarrassing number of reusable water bottles inside it. He had been walking with you because you didn’t have your car with you and he offered to drive you home because you were both headed in the same direction.
Dex’s grip tightened around his keys.
You were still wearing his shirt, and this man wanted to take you home? Cute.
“Dex?” you called, surprised.
Dex barely spared Johnathan a glance. He came to you instead, handsome in that frightening l way, his attention fixed you that it made the other man feel like background noise.
“What are you doing here?” you asked.
“Picking you up.”
You blinked, then laughed softly. “Why?”
Because you were wearing my shirt. Because I spent all day knowing you were out of sight. Because I don’t like it when you’re not with me.
“Your car’s not here,” he said, and that was reasonable enough, right?
“Oh.” You glanced back. “Jonathan was going to offer me a ride. He lives a few blocks away, so—”
“No.” The word came out flat.
You tilted your head, confused. You tried to recover, sweet thing that you were, turning half toward the man beside you. “Dex, this is Jonathan. He’s the music teacher. Jonathan, this is—”
Dex opened the passenger door. “You’re coming with me.”
Jonathan stopped with his polite smile halfway formed.
You looked at Dex for a second, and your sensible little inner voice probably tried to say something about how this was strange.
Then Dex looked at you, and you melted, because fuck! Some foolish, lovesick part of you found that endearing. He came all this way for me?
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Jonathan,” you said gently.
Dex shut the passenger door after you climbed in and stood there for one extra second, hand still on the handle, the word burning through him. What did that mean?
He got into the car.
The drive started silent. You settled beside him, and Dex saw you cozy up one the corner of his eye and had to tighten both hands on the wheel.
“Tomorrow?” he asked finally.
You looked over. “Hm?”
“You said you’d see him tomorrow.”
A little smile pulled at your mouth. You leaned across the console and kissed his cheek, like you thought jealousy was cute when it came from him.
“We work together, Dex.”
Oh. Okay. Okay. That’s fine, right?
Normal boyfriends were fine with that, right?
Still.
Then, asked if you wanted to come over to his place again because he couldn’t help himself. Because having you in the passenger seat made it feel obscene to let you leave again. Because you were already dressed in his things and smelled faintly like his apartment and he couldn’t understand why the day had to end anywhere else.
You looked down at yourself and laughed. “Dex, I am literally wearing your clothes. I need to go to mine.”
He kept his expression calm, but his fingers went still on the wheel.
You noticed enough to furrow your brows. “I’ve got work stuff to do,” you said. “I’ll call soon, okay?”
He nodded. He could do that. He could be normal. He could drive you to your car and let you go back to your apartment with its bad lock and pathetic hallway light and no trace of him except the marks he had left under your clothes. He could.
He pulled up beside your car outside your building and watched you unbuckle your seatbelt. You said your goodbyes and were halfway out when he blurted out, “I love you.”
You stopped.
Fuck. Fuck!
He had not planned it like that. Not in the car, and definitely not with you leaving. But there it was.
You turned back to him slowly.
For a second, you bit your lip in shock.
It was quick. Too quick to say that. You’ve been going on dates for what? Two weeks?
You supposed he’d been around the school for two months now with the outreach program. But even that didn’t really make sense, right?
So now, your inner committee was no longer holding a meeting. It was pounding on the table, screaming that this was insane, that love wasn’t supposed to arrive between a third date and a school pick-up, that normal people didn’t do this.
But Dex was looking at you like you hung the stars for him.
So leaned back into the car and kissed him. Gently first, then deeper, because his hand found your jaw like he had been waiting for permission to touch you again since the school gates.
“I love you, too,” you whispered.
Oh. Oh.
You left before you could take it back.
Dex watched you wave from your door, hands resting on the wheel, mouth curved in a small, helpless smile he couldn’t seem to stop.
She loves me.
The thought repeated all the way home.
She loves me. She loves me. She loves me.
By the time he reached his apartment, he was still smiling.
Then he opened the door, and the smile vanished immediately because you were not there.
The apartment was exactly the same as it had been that morning, clean and perfectly ordered, but suddenly none of that mattered. The couch was empty. The kitchen was empty. The bed was empty. All those neat, controlled rooms had become useless because you weren’t inside them.
Dex stood in the doorway with his keys in his hand and felt his stomach in him turn over.
You loved him, so why were you not here?
The question sat in his head with terrible simplicity.
You loved him. He loved you. He could take care of you. He had the space, the money, the locks, the discipline. Your apartment was unsafe. Your building was bad. Your neighbours were careless. Jonathan from music lived too close. The world kept touching you and taking from you and making you tired.
Here was safer. Here, it made sense. Here, he could see you.
The thought came fully formed before he knew to stop it.
He could go get you.
He could get in the car. Drive to your apartment. Knock. Tell you that you should change your mind. Tell you the city was unsafe. Tell you your lock was bad. Tell you to pack a bag. Tell you you belonged in his apartment. Tell you until you believed him.
If you said no, he could still bring you back.
He was stronger than you. Faster than you. He was trained. He knew exactly how to move you without hurting too badly. He could overpower you, get you inside his apartment, lock the door, hide the keys, take your phone just for a while. He’d you keep warm. Feed you. Talk to you until the panic passed. He’d do that just until you understood. Because you would understand.
You loved him, so eventually you would understand that this was not cruelty, right? This was not punishment. This was him seeing the truth faster than you did. This was him making the hard decision because someone had to. This was him saving you from all the places that were not him.
It took him an embarrassingly long time to realise that was kidnapping.
Actually, legally, literally kidnapping.
Kidnapping. False imprisonment. Coercion. Felony. It was bad.
“Oh,” he whispered. Then, after a beat, “Shit.”
His breath went wrong. The heat in him snapped into panic so quickly he nearly staggered. He saw himself then, not as a man in love, not as someone protecting his girlfriend, but as exactly the kind of thing you would need protecting from.
No.
No, no, no.
He backed away from the door like it had opened onto a cliff.
He loved you. He loved you. He wasn’t going to make you afraid of him. He wasn’t going to put his hands on you. He wasn’t going to lock you inside his life and pretend that was the same thing as being chosen.
Even if some awful part of him wanted to. Especially because some awful part of him wanted to.
Dex went to the drawer with shaking hands and pulled out the tapes.
Dr. Eileen Mercer’s voice filled the apartment through a soft crackle of static. “Your internal compass isn’t broken, Dex. It just works better with a North Star to guide you.”
Dex sank onto the couch.
North Star.
That was what you were.
Of course you were. You, with your kind heart and your gentle voice and your stupidly good heart. You, making safe corners for children.
He had simply made the catastrophic mistake of falling in love with the star. Which complicated things.
Because you were supposed to guide him, not belong to him. You were supposed to be fixed above him, untouchable enough to follow. Not in his apartment. Not in his bed. Not wearing his shirt and saying I love you in his car like you had any idea what those words would do to a man like him.
Dex pressed the heels of his hands over his eyes and forced himself to breathe while the tape kept playing through the static.
The apartment was still wrong without you. His hands still shook. The need to leave and get you didn’t disappear just because he had named it correctly. The desire sat there, dark and patient, waiting for him to mistake it for devotion again. But he stayed where he was.
He stayed on the couch with his teeth clenched so hard it ached, listening to the tape like it was the only thing holding him in place.
He loved you. That had to mean something better than possession. It had to.
So Dex sat in the empty apartment and tried, breath by breath, to become the kind of man who could love his North Star without building a sky small enough to trap her.
—
Dex barely made it through the week by hearing your voice through the phone.
You were busy with the school, chaperoning a trip, dealing with children and permission slips and packed lunches and museum gift shops, so he did the good thing, the normal thing. He didn’t show up. He didn’t follow the bus route. He didn’t appear outside your apartment just because he knew you would be exhausted.
Well. Maybe he just did it once, but he didn’t even stop! He just took a quick peek around the block to make sure you got home safe.
After that, he took it one day at a time.
At night, he lay in bed with the phone pressed to his ear and listened to you talk when you called. You told him about the children, the chaos, the little girl who tried to correct the tour guide, the boy who cried because his sandwich got crushed in his bag.
He hated that he couldn't tell if you were warm enough. Hated that you sounded exhausted and he wasn’t there to put a blanket over your shoulders or press his mouth to your temple or make the world stop asking things of you for five minutes. But he behaved.
When you said, “I’m so tired, baby,” he closed his eyes like the world wrapped a hand around his throat.
When you said, “I miss you,” he pressed his fist against his mouth until the feeling passed enough for him to answer normally.
“I miss you too.” An understatement so violent it almost made him laugh.
Then you came back to regular life, and started spending more time with him.
And naturally, you started spending more nights at his place.
It was easy. His apartment was closer to the school. His shower was better. His fridge always had food you liked. Your tea was already in his cupboard. Your toothbrush was still in his bathroom from that first night, and the spare charger by his bed somehow became yours without either of you discussing it.
One night a week became two. Two nights a week became most of the week.
Your laundry ended up in his machine. Your favourite cardigan stayed folded in his bedroom. Your substitute teaching papers got graded at his kitchen table while he made dinner. Your commute became easier because he drove you when he could, and when he couldn’t, he made sure your car had petrol, the tyres were checked, and the weird noise under the hood had been fixed before it became a problem.
It was dangerous, how much easier he made your life.
Dangerous because you were a school librarian on a school librarian salary, and Dex had big boy FBI paychecks and paid for groceries without mentally rearranging the rest of the month around it.
You tried to argue about that once. He looked genuinely offended.
“I should help,” you said.
“You do.”
“I mean with bills.”
“You buy supplies for children who are not yours because no one else will. Let me pay for dinner.”
That shut you up, not because it was fair. But because it was kind. Or because it sounded kind. Or because, with Dex, the difference had started to blur.
Your car made a noise; he had it checked. Your shoes wore thin; a new pair appeared by the door. You mentioned once that you were out of your favourite cereal, and the next morning there were two boxes in his cupboard.
By five months, you were barely at your own apartment.
You still paid rent. You still had mail there. Technically, you still lived there. But most nights, you went home to Dex.
Then one night, while you sat at his kitchen table grading reading logs and wearing one of his shirts under your cardigan, Dex said, “You should move in.”
You looked up. “What?”
“You should move in here.”
He said it so calmly. Like he was pointing out the weather. Like he had not been waiting weeks to say it. Like he had not already measured the space in his closet, looked up your lease date, and made sure there was room for your books.
You felt your inner committee rise from the dead.
Babe. What the fuck. Five months. Are you actually considering this? What’s wrong with you? Huh?
So you pushed back, but not very well.
“Dex,” you said, looking around his apartment. “We’ve been dating for five months.”
“I know.”
“Moving in would be very quick.”
“I know.”
But would it? You were at his kitchen table in one of his shirts, your papers stacked on his coffee table, your mug in his sink, your shoes by his door. Half your life was already there.
Suddenly, Dex leaned down and kissed you before you could keep arguing.
He did it because he had seen men do it in movies when they wanted to calm the woman they loved.
That was how affection started with him, really. He imitated touch. He put a hand on your waist because that was what boyfriends did. He rubbed circles over your hip because that was what loving partners did.
But then you melted under his hands and sighed into his mouth. Your fingers curled lightly into the front of his shirt.
And Dex thought, oh. So that was what it was supposed to feel like.
So after the first time, it no longer felt like pretending. It was no longer fake, no longer a costume he wore to convince you he could be normal.
He liked this. He liked the warmth beneath his palms. Liked the trusting weight of you leaning into him. Liked that touching you made him feel whole. His thumbs kept moving in slow circles at your hips, more because he wanted to than because he remembered he was supposed to.
“I love you,” he murmured.
You closed your eyes like the words had done exactly what he hoped they would. “Dex…”
“You love me too.”
You laughed softly. “That is a terrible argument.”
“It’s my best one.”
Unfortunately, it was.
You hummed, but you were smiling now, and Dex felt his whole chest go warm.
He kissed you again, a little braver this time, still rubbing those gentle circles into your hips like he had finally found a love language that made sense in his hands.
You sighed, and he smiled against your mouth. It surprised him, even after five months, how much he wanted to be good at this.
“Okay,” you whispered.
Dex went very still.
You opened your eyes and looked up at him, soft and doomed and already half his. “Okay, baby. I’ll move in.”
—
People got weird when you told them you had moved in with Dex.
Your friends did that careful-smile thing. Your mother went quiet on the phone before saying, “Already?” like the word had three question marks and a police report attached. One coworker just blinked at you over her mug and said, “Wow. That’s… fast.”
You kept giving the same answers. My lease was ending. His place is closer. It makes sense financially. He takes care of me.
Jonathan was the most obvious about it.
You told him in the staff room, after he was complaining about one of his classes committing recorder-based psychological warfare. “I moved in with Dex,” you said, trying to sound casual.
Slowly, he turned around. “Your fed boyfriend?”
“He has a name.”
“Agent Intense?”
“Dex.”
“Right. Your fed boyfriend.” He stared at you. “That’s so fast.”
You sighed. Here we go again. “My lease was ending.”
“You’ve known him for six months.”
“If you count his school outreach, seven actually.”
“That’s not better.”
You crossed your arms, already defensive. “He’s not bad.”
“I didn’t say bad,” he shrugged, “I think more like… creepy.”
“Jonathan.”
“What? He once looked at me like I was trying to steal you because I offered you a ride home.”
“He’s just protective, that’s all,” you huffed.
“I’m gay.”
“I know that.”
“Does he?”
“He does now,” you said.
“Does he care?”
You opened your mouth and closed it. Because no, Dex didn’t care when you told him. Johnathan was still just another person standing between you and him, platonic or romantic or whatever. Jonathan could have been gay, married, celibate, and allergic to women, and Dex still would have watched him with that flat suspicion the second he stood too close to you.
Jonathan pointed his teaspoon at you. “Exactly.”
Your phone buzzed before you could answer.
Dex: Did you eat lunch?
You smiled and held up the phone like evidence. “See? He’s sweet.”
Jonathan looked at the message, then at you. “Sure,” he said carefully. “Sweet.”
You texted back yes, baby, and when Dex replied within seconds, Jonathan sighed. You ignored him.
After all, Dex cared. That was all.
—
The people who thought the move-in was quick were in for a treat, because one month after you moved into Dex’s apartment, he asked you to marry him in the back seat of his car.
See, you had shown up because summer holidays had made you stupid with missing him. You were bored. You had no school, no library chaos, no children asking where the glitter glue went. Just too much free time and the embarrassing realization that you had become the kind of woman who missed her boyfriend at eleven-thirty in the morning like an addict running out of nicotine patches.
So you brought him lunch and went to his workplace. That was a normal girlfriend thing, right? Except the lunch did not get opened.
Dex had barely gotten the car door shut before you were kissing him, and he had barely made it through the first breath of your mouth before his hand slid under your thigh and dragged you into his lap in the back seat.
“Dex,” you laughed into his mouth.
He made a low and lewd sound into his mouth. Then his hands were on you again, pushing your skirt up around your hips with a little too much force, a little too much need, until the seam gave with an unmistakable rip of fabric.
Dex stared at the torn fabric in his hand with the horrified focus of a man who had committed a federal offence against cotton blend. “I’ll buy you another one.”
“That is not the point,” you chuckled.
“I’ll buy you five.”
You should have been annoyed. But his eyes were black with want, and there was something so obscenely flattering about Benjamin Poindexter accidentally ruining your clothes because he needed you too badly to be careful. So you tightened your fist in his tie and pulled. “Later,” you whispered.
Dex obeyed, because liked it when you pulled him by it. He liked the pressure, the direction, the filthy little reminder that he was still half-dressed for work while you were undoing him in the back of his own car. His mouth opened under yours, hands clamped on your hips like he was trying not to lose the last piece of his mind.
Your inner committee, exhausted from the moving-in situation and still technically on unpaid leave, attempted to return to service.
Babe. This is his workplace. This is a federal garage.
Babe, your skirt is ripped.
Babe, we cannot keep replacing clothes every time this man gets horny and emotional.
Then Dex kissed down your throat and the committee immediately lost quorum.
By the time you were done and either of you remembered he had to go back inside, the windows were fogged at the edges. His hair was ruined from your hands. His tie was loose and crooked. His shirt was open at the collar, your lipstick low enough on his skin that he would need to button all the way up and pray no one noticed. His mouth was swollen.
You sat in his lap, skirt torn and shoved badly back into place, one hand still looped lazily around his tie. “You have to go back in,” you whispered.
His forehead rested against yours. “I know.”
“You look…”
His eyes lifted to yours.
You smiled. “Compromised.”
Dex’s mouth twitched. His thumbs moved on your thighs, circling through the thin fabric of your ruined skirt.
You tugged his tie gently. “I should let you go.”
His hands tightened, only barely.
“Marry me,” he said suddenly, as if he would die if he let you leave without saying it first.
For a second, you just stared at him. Somewhere inside your head, your inner committee walked back into the room, saw the situation, and immediately considered retiring.
Babe, no. Babe, absolutely not. Babe, stand up for yourself!
“What?” you managed to choke out.
“Marry me,” Dex calmly, like the idea had been sitting in him for weeks, waiting for the right opening, and apparently the right opening was you flushed and breathless in his back seat.
“Dex.”
“I love you.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Your inner committee sighed so hard the lights flickered.
“I love you,” he said again, quieter. “You love me. We already live together. It gives you legal protection. If something happens to me, you’re taken care of. If something happens to you, they call me first.”
“You are making a case,” you realised, though you shouldn't have been surprised.
He just shrugged. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t get married.”
There it was, the simple Dex logic of it: I love you. You love me. Why wouldn’t we?
It was reasonable if you ignored the fact that he was clearly halfway to losing his mind and had probably been planning this long before he said it out loud. Because sure, the practical reasons were true. But underneath all that, there was the darker, sweeter logic he kept tucked behind his teeth: If you were only his girlfriend, you could change your mind. You could wake up one morning, decide he was too much, pack a bag, and walk out before he had time to kiss you and remind you how gentle he could be when he was trying. A girlfriend could leave in one terrible conversation. A wife had to take steps.
And Dex loved steps. You’d have to go through lawyers, papers, and waiting periods. A marriage would buy him time, and time meant he could come to you, he could hold your face, and remind you that you loved him as much as he loved you. He would never hurt. But if the law could slow you down long enough for him to convince you that leaving was a mistake, Dex couldn’t help loving that, too.
He didn’t say that, though. He only looked at you with his hair mussed and his mouth ruined and said, “It makes sense.”
Your inner committee made one last brave attempt: Babe. Please. We JUST moved in.
But you banged the gavel at the head of your imaginary table and pouted. But look at him! He’s so hot!
In the real world, Dex was looking at you like you were already his wife, like the ring was only a formality. Then he kissed you, tenderly this time.
“I love you,” he murmured against your mouth.
The committee dropped their clipboard. Fine, you win, they seemed to say, Whatever you say, handsome.
You laughed weakly into the kiss, and Dex pulled back just enough to look at you.
“What?”
You touched his face, thumb brushing over his cheekbone, and felt him lean into it like affection was still new enough to surprise him.
“Yes,” you whispered, hand tightening in his tie. “Yes, baby. I’ll marry you.”
For a second, he looked almost scared by how happy it made him. Then his arms locked around your waist and pulled you close, his face turning into your neck, breath hot and uneven against your skin.
“But you really do have to go back inside,” you whispered with a chuckle.
Dex lifted his head. He looked ruined, happy, and possessive in a way that should have made you run but somehow only made you kiss him again. “I have ten more minutes.”
You giggled and pulled him in by the tie.
Your inner committee walked directly into the sea, never to be seen again.
—
Dex let you pick the rings.
The engagement ring first, because he said you were the one wearing it, so you should love it. Then the wedding bands, including his, even though he tried to act like he didn’t care what his looked like. That lasted until you slid a simple band onto his finger in the shop and watched his whole face go still, almost overwhelmed.
A month later, you married him at the courthouse.
It was too soon for anyone around you to feel truly comfortable about it. Your family came anyway. Your friends came anyway. Even Jonathan, looking like he had accepted his role as the last remaining voice of reason, and still failing anyway. On Dex’s side, there was a couple of coworkers standing near the back in neat suits, polite and reserved, present more like witnesses than family.
Dex had no parents, no siblings, no cousins, no childhood friends with embarrassing stories. No one who could say they had known him when he was young. No one who could reassure your parents he was a good person through and through. Just coworkers, Ray congratulating him as the rest of his coworkers stood on the courthouse hallway while your side filled the room with nervous affection and badly hidden concern.
You saw the way your mother looked at him. The way your friends glanced at one another when they realised there was no one on his side who really belonged to him. It made them uneasy, and because you loved him, you rushed to explain it in your head before anyone even asked. His parents were dead. He grew up alone. It was complicated. He didn't have people the way other people had people.
You said little pieces of that aloud, as if it explained half of it away. Maybe to you, it did. Maybe that was a teeny part of the reason you kept choosing him. Dex had no one, and then he had you. But it was also tender, in its own damaged way. He stood across the room in his suit, eyes finding you every few seconds as if checking that you were still real, still walking toward him eventually. He looked alone until he looked at you.
The problem was not that Dex didn't love you. Anyone with eyes could see that he clearly did. That was half the horror, really.
He loved you devoutly, too much for such a small courthouse. His attention followed you like a sniper scope. When someone hugged you, his eyes moved there. When Jonathan made you laugh, his face soured. When you looked at him, though, everything in him relaxed so completely that even your worried friends had to see it.
The ceremony itself was almost absurdly short, just a few legal words. A few signatures. Then came the ring that he slid on to your finger with a reverence that made your throat ache. His thumb lingered over the band once it was in place, brushing the metal like proof, like possession he was trying very hard to make gentle.
Your family saw it. Your friends saw it. Ray probably saw it too. But no one said anything anymore. They had tried to warn you. They had tried to tell you it was fast, intense, worrying. They had tried to point out all the red flags. But standing there, with Dex looking at your ring like the world had finally given him permission to keep the one good thing he had found, you knew why none of their warnings had worked.
Because you knew they were not entirely wrong. You just loved him anyway.
When Dex kissed you, it was gentle enough to make your mother cry. His hand came to your cheek, and his mouth touched yours like he was afraid of doing it wrong in front of everyone. But you felt the restraint beneath it, the hunger and devotion. The way he kissed you softly because that was what you deserved, even when every dark part of him wanted to hold on harder and bruise and mark his territory.
—
Two years later, Dex was in prison.
Jonathan tried not to say I told you so. To his credit, he really did try. He stood in your apartment after everything went public, arms folded too tightly, mouth pressed into a line while the news tore the FBI corruption apart in digestible pieces. Even family and friends looked at you like this was the ending they had feared from the start.
But you knew better.
Not because Dex was innocent. He wasn’t. You loved him too much to lie about that. He had done terrible things. There were parts of him that had always been hungry for direction, always been too easy for the wrong man to use.
And Fisk had used him perfectly.He had found every fracture in Dex and pressed his thumb into it. The instability, the need to be useful. The desperate, obsessive love Dex had for you.
Fisk kept you in a basement beneath one of his shell properties and let the world mourn you.
That was the cruelty of it: Fisk did not need you dead. Dead was final. Dead meant there was nothing left to use. But alive, hidden in a cold and windowless place? That made you useful. That made you leverage. Fisk could keep your body locked away while giving Dex a grief designed to break him.
So Fisk staged your death. He built the lie piece by piece. He staged an accident, a fire. The reports say that the body burned beyond recognition was yours, and even had an urn with someone else’s ashes in it with your paperwork attached just in case people started asking questions.
Dex believed it, because why wouldn’t he? Fisk made sure every piece fit. Even Matt believed it for a while. Everyone did.
So when Dex found it, he carried the urn like it was alive. He thought he figured out that Fisk was manipulating him, which was correct. He thought that Fisk had killed you, which was false.
He put the ashes in the passenger seat. He drove to the hotel with one hand on the wheel and the other reaching over sometimes, hovering near the metal like it might feel lonely. He talked to it in that broken voice of his, the one he would have been humiliated for anyone living to hear. He told the urn things. He apologised. He told you he loved you.
Then Dex’s spine broke.
And you were found by the cops shortly after, alive. Bruised, starved, shaking under a blanket in the basement Fisk had buried you in, still asking for Dex before your voice had fully come back.
So when they told you he went into surgery under guard, he had fought your way into that hospital room on the only ground no one could deny: you were his wife, his next of kin, his legal family. You should be allowed in, and you eventually got what you wanted.
During recovery, he looked wrong under hospital lights. The tubes and monitors and bandages made him look less like the terrifying thing the news kept replaying. Guards stood by the door. His wrists were shackled to the bed rails, his ankles too. You scoffed at that but couldn’t do anything about it, really.
When his eyes opened, he came back fighting. His hands jerked against the restraints, chains snapping taut with a hard metal sound that made one of the guards shift forward.
“Don’t,” you said quickly. “Dex, don’t.”
His head turned and saw you. Suddenly, thoughts halted to a stop.
You had seen Dex angry. Jealous. Focused. You had seen him desperate in your bed and gentle in your kitchen. You had seen him worshipful, frightening, almost boyish with love.
You had never seen him look like that. Like he was staring at a ghost and trying to decide whether believing in it would kill him.
His mouth parted, but sound came out.
You stepped closer, hands trembling. “Hi, baby.”
Dex’s breath broke. “You’re alive.”
Your chest caved in. “yeah.”
“No.” His voice cracked in disbelief. “No, I saw— Fisk said—”
“I know.”
“You’re alive,” he said again, louder now, almost frantic. “You’re alive. You’re alive.”
“I’m here.”
The chains snapped tight again when he tried to reach for you. Pain tore across his nerves, but he barely seemed to feel it. His eyes stayed locked on yours,wild and terrified, like if he looked away, you would vanish and the whole nightmare would become true again.
“I thought you were dead,” he whispered.
“I know, baby.”
You moved to him before anyone could stop you. Your fingers found his hand where the shackle allowed, careful around the bruised skin. His grip closed around yours instantly, weak but desperate, like even broken he could not help trying to hold on.
Your wedding ring caught the light. It was a reminder that he was still yours, you were still his, and whatever was left of him seemed to collapse under the proof.
“You’re alive.”
—
Dex was incarcerated after he healed enough to be moved.
Not rehabilitated. Not treated. Incarcerated.
They put him in solitary confinement like that could contain him. Like isolation would ever make him better. Like locking him away from voices and faces and human contact would somehow fix a man whose worst injuries had always come from being left alone too long with his own head.
You hated it. So for three years, you fought to get your husband moved somewhere that might actually help him.
Three years of forms, lawyers, psychiatric evaluations, and rejected petitions. Three years of people looking at Benjamin Poindexter and seeing only what he had done, three years of people looking at you, Mrs. Poindexter, as if you were insane because you still loved him. Three years of explaining, again and again, that solitary confinement was not treatment. And Dex had always been dangerous when he was quiet.
Your old school library job no longer paid enough to carry the life Fisk had torn apart, so you took a better job at a public library. It's a better salary, but longer hours. More responsibility. You now had to think about staff rotas, community programmes, council meetings, difficult patrons, funding cuts, late nights under fluorescent lights while you built displays and answered emails with your wedding ring flashing every time your hands crossed the keyboard.
Every other day, you went to the prison.
Sometimes straight from work, your blazer wrinkled, your tote bag full of library paperwork, your lipstick faded from too many cups of coffee. Sometimes on your days off, when you could pretend the visit was the centre of the day instead of an activity squeezed between legal calls and grocery shopping and a life you had never wanted to live without him in it.
Dex always noticed when you were tired before you said it. He noticed when your shoes were new. He noticed when you had cut your hair, even slightly. He noticed when you had skipped lunch and lied about it. Even in prison uniform, even under the dead light of the visiting room, Dex was still your husband in all the ways that made people uncomfortable and all the ways that kept you coming back.
You told him about your days. You told him about the elderly man who came into the library every Wednesday to read the newspaper and complain about the chairs. The little girl who asked for “a book with a dragon but not a mean dragon because mean dragons have bad vibes.” The teenager who pretended not to care about poetry and then checked out three collections when his friends were not looking. You told him about staff meetings, leaky ceilings, broken printers, new shelving systems.
There were visits where he barely spoke. But even then, his eyes stayed on you. Even then, his fingers moved toward yours. Even then, when you said, “Baby,” parts of him came back to the surface.
You kept fighting because he needed help.
Then one afternoon, after three years of pushing against walls that did not move, one finally gave. The blip, after all, freed some space up. Though you really shouldn't celebrate such a tragedy, it was hard to ignore the fact that this time, it worked in your favor. That day, you carried the news into the visiting room.
His eyes moved over your face, your hands, the folder tucked beneath your arm. “What’s that?” he asked.
You smiled, biting your lip, “I have good news.”
You reached across the table. This time, they let you hold his hand. It was a small mercy. His fingers closed around yours immediately, like he could feel the tremor in you and wanted to steady it without frightening it away.
“A facility we applied to reviewed your case,” you said. “It’s looking good. The transfer is pending final approval.”
Dex didn’t move. You kept going before fear could steal the words from you.
“It’s a secure psychiatric institution. It’s not freedom, I know that. But it’s not solitary. You’d have doctors, actual treatment, scheduled therapy, medication reviews. You wouldn’t be in shackles.”
His face remained controlled, but you knew him too well. You saw the tiny shift in his breathing.
“It’s going to be better,” you whispered. “Okay? Not perfect. Not easy. But better. You won’t be alone in a box, and we get longer visitation hours, okay?”
Dex was quiet for a long moment. Then he nodded once. “That’s good.”
Your laugh came out broken, because part of you still found that endearing. “That’s good? That’s all you have?”
His mouth almost softened, guilty at the thought of offending you. “It’s very good,” he amended.
You squeezed his hand, and for one rare second, the visiting room didn’t feel quite so much like a cage. It felt like a door opening somewhere far away.Then Dex looked up again. “But I hope my request gets approved before I get moved.”
“Request?” You blinked. “For what?”
He held your gaze with the seriousness of a man discussing nothing more important than bills. “A conjugal visit.”
For a moment, your mind simply stopped. “What?”
“A conjugal visit,” he repeated, as if you might not have heard him the first time.
You stared at him. Of course he had thought of that.
In three years of legal petitions, medical reviews, prison visits, and fighting to have him treated like a person instead of a weapon, you had somehow not allowed yourself to think about that part. About being his wife in that way still. About how long it had been since he had touched you without guards and tables and rules between you. Dex had, though.
“Dex,” you said softly, rubbing slow circles on his hand.
“What?”
“You are in solitary confinement.”
“I know.”
“You’re probably not getting approved for a conjugal visit.”
“Probably not.”
His expression didn't change, but he squeezed your hand and your stomach turned over despite yourself. You leaned forward as much as the table allowed. The guard near the door shifted, but you ignored him. You kissed the edge of Dex’s mouth, brief and soft, but still enough to make his breath catch.
“Let’s focus on this, yeah?” you whispered.
His eyes stayed on yours. For a second, the hunger in him quieted, almost obedient. He nodded once. “Okay.”
Your hand stayed in his until the guard told you time was up. Dex didn’t let go until he had to.
—
He got approved. Somehow, Benjamin Poindexter got approved for a conjugal visit.
You read the notice three times in your kitchen, work bag sliding off your shoulder, lanyard still around your neck, your shoes aching from a long day on your feet. The letter was painfully plain and administrative. But it was approved nonetheless.
You stared at it until the paper blurred. “What the fuck?” you whispered.
Because there was no way. There was no reasonable, lawful way that your husband, a convicted killer, a high-risk prisoner, had been granted that kind of access.
You knew then that Dex had done something. Nothing obvious enough to get the request pulled. He might have threatened a guard. Maybe Dex had mentioned a name, a detail, some small piece of information he shouldn’t have known and let them do the rest.
You should have been horrified. Mostly, though, you pressed the paper to your mouth and laughed once, breathless and disbelieving, because all you could think was: That’s how badly he wanted me. That’s how much he loves me.
—
When the day came, you waited in the room alone.
You had done the paperwork, gone through twenty locked doors to get here. You came knowing you had a couple of hours with your husband. And for the first time in three years, there would be no table between you, no visitor chair bolted too far from his. No guards close enough to hear every word. No one telling you not to lean too far across the table when all you wanted was to touch his face.
A couple of hours was not enough.
You smoothed your hands over your blouse, then over your skirt, then clasped them together in your lap to make yourself stop fidgeting. You had dressed too carefully without really thinking about it. You had a white blouse, a nice skirt, because Dex liked seeing you in skirts. You were wearing the cardigan you were wearing when you met him.
You stared at your wedding ring until Dex stepped inside. For a second, neither of you moved.
He looked different. That was your first thought, blunt and stupid and immediate. He looked different, because of course he did. Years had happened. Prison had happened. Surgery had happened. His hair was shorter. His jaw looked sharper. But he was also bigger.
You noticed from your previous visits, of course, but seeing him a bit closer now, it was evident. His shoulders filled out the plain prison shirt. His arms looked stronger than they had in the hospital, muscle sitting heavy under institutional fabric, like all the recovery and physical therapy and whatever routines they let him have had made him sturdier.
You blinked before you could stop yourself. What were they feeding him?
Dex’s eyes found your face first, gaze locked onto you. For one fragile second he did not look like a prisoner at all.
He looked like Dex. Your Dex. Your husband, seeing you after being forced to miss you for too long.
“Hi,” you whispered.
His mouth parted slightly. When the door closed behind him, the lock turned, and whatever restraint he had used to walk in there like a normal person vanished.
You barely got to stand before his hands were on your face and yours were on his chest, and the first kiss was so clumsy it almost made you laugh. Your noses bumped. His mouth missed yours by half an inch and caught the corner instead. You made a tiny sound, half sob and half laugh, and Dex froze like he had done something wrong.
“No,” you said quickly, already smiling through the sting in your eyes. “No, come here.”
You took his face in both hands and kissed him properly, softly at first. Then again. And again.
These were little, ridiculous kisses. The kind you had imagined giving him in every prison visit where a guard stood too close. You kissed his mouth, the corner of it, his cheek. You kissed the line beside his nose, the skin under his eye, the edge of his mouth again.
Dex stood there and let you love him, as if he couldn’t believe you still did at all.
His hands stayed at your waist, almost uncertain, like after all this time he still didn’t fully trust that he was allowed to hold you without someone telling him to stop. But the longer you kissed him, the more his fingers settled. The more his body leaned into yours. The more the tension in his shoulders slowly started to melt.
“I missed you,” you said between kisses.
Dex’s eyes closed. “I missed you, too.”
“I missed you so much.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.” You kissed his cheek again, because apparently now that you had started you couldn't stop. “I missed you in the kitchen. I missed you in our bed. I missed you when I had to fix the shelf myself because you would have been so annoying about doing it better.”
His mouth twitched. “You fixed a shelf?” he asked.
“I tried to.”
His eyes opened with attentive focus you had missed so badly. “What happened?”
“It’s currently leaning.”
Dex stared at you, then he laughed. It wasn’t loudly, or freely. It was small, rough, and almost startled, like his body had forgotten how to make the sound and needed you to remind it.
You broke a little. “Oh,” you whispered, smiling like an idiot. “There you are.”
His expression changed before he leaned in and kissed you again, not clumsy this time. A kiss that said yes, here, I’m here, I came back up when you called.
His arms moved around you properly then, and fuck, he was solid.
You had expected him to feel fragile, because part of you still remembered the hospital bed, the shackles, the bruised skin around his wrists after surgery. But this Dex was heavy and strong under your hands. When your palms slid over his shoulders, you felt muscle there making your stomach drop and go hot at the same time.
Still, he stayed sweet for a little while.
You had both expected the hunger. But before that, there was Dex touching your hair like he had thought about the texture of it more than once. There was you smoothing your thumb over his cheekbone, relearning him up close. There was him pressing his face into the side of your neck and breathing in once like he had been living on memory for years and memory had never been enough.
“I missed how you smell,” he said, voice muffled against your skin.
You laughed. “That’s creepy,” you said, but smiled into his hair anyway.
Your fingers drifted to the back of his neck, then lower, over the ridge of his shoulder. You felt him shiver when your touch found the edge of the scar beneath his shirt. You paused, but he shook his head against you. “It’s okay.”
So you kept touching him gently. Through the fabric first, then at the collar where your fingers could slip just beneath. The scar was there, and Dex’s breathing changed when you traced it. Not with pain, exactly. It felt more… intimate.
“My baby,” you whispered before you could stop yourself.
His hand flexed at your hip. This time, when his mouth opened under yours, the sweetness warmed.His body crowded yours a little more. His hands moved from your waist to your back, then down again.
“You got…” You swallowed, then laughed softly because there was no graceful way to say it. “You got big.”
Dex blinked. For half a second, he looked genuinely confused. Then his eyes dropped to where your hands were spread over his chest. “Big?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I had physical therapy.”
“That is a criminal understatement.”
His mouth twitched again as you dragged your palms over his shoulders, shameless now, because you had earned this. You had earned the right to be stupid about your husband’s arms after three years of prison visits and legal calls and sleeping alone.
“You’re very…” You squeezed his bicep lightly. “Recovered.”
Dex looked at you. “You’re flirting with me.”
You shrugged, but didn’t deny it.
The sound he made was almost an arrogant chuckle.
He kissed you again, and this time there was no mistaking the heat under it. Then, his hands settled on your blouse.
Not grabbing yet, but touching the fabric at your waist, thumbs moving slowly over the buttons as if he had only just realised there was something between his hands and your skin.
You were still smiling when his eyes dropped.
Suddenly, his eyes were fixed on the small gap where one button had loosened, where the fabric had shifted just enough to reveal a flash of black lace underneath.
Dex recognised it at the same time you remembered. “Is that…”
Your face burned hot as you nodded.
It was the black teddy he had bought you for your first wedding anniversary.It was sheer lace at the cups, delicate straps, a low satin-trimmed neckline. Dex remembered the first time you tried it on. You stood at the foot of your bed, pretending not to be shy, while he sat there ruined, looking at you like his brain had briefly stopped receiving oxygen. And now, you had worn it here.
Dex’s thumb brushed the edge of your blouse, right where black lace disappeared beneath it. His eyes darkened. “You wore my anniversary gift under your blouse,” he said.
Your stomach flipped. “When you say it like that—”
“How should I say it?” He demanded, and it was a little mean. But that always did turn you on.
“I don’t know,” you whispered. “Less like you’re about to lose your mind.”
Dex looked back up at you, too focused, too hungry. “I am.”
Oh.
Your hands tightened in his shirt.
The room felt smaller after that, less like a prison facility and more like the bedroom he remembered, the one with your knees pressed into the mattress and his hands shaking at your waist because he hadn’t known a piece of lace could make wanting feel that violent.
His grip settled firmer on your hips. “You have no idea,” he murmured, mouth brushing your ear. “What you do to me.”
Your eyes fluttered shut. There he was. Your husband, touch-starved, breathing against your neck like he had waited years to find out if he could still make you tremble.
You smiled, kind and doomed all the same. “Show me.”
Oh, he had a list.
Dex was undressed before you could blink, all broad shoulders and blown pupils, moving with a focused urgency that made the sterile little room feel suddenly too small to hold him. The white walls, the bolted table, the narrow bed, the chemical-clean smell of the sheets, and none of it stood a chance against the way he looked at you.
He had been counting down to this for years. Every prison visit, every supervised touch, every night alone in a cell had led into this exact moment.
His hands were already on your blouse, quick but not careless, tearing through buttons, ripping them off with a precision that would have been funny if his breathing had not been so rough. The black teddy appeared inch by inch beneath the fabric, lace and satin and memory, and Dex looked ruined.
First on the list: his mouth between your legs.
You understood that the second he dropped to his knees. Dex had barely gotten the teddy off before his hands were already under your skirt, gripping your thighs.
Then his mouth was on you, and every thought in your head broke apart.
“Oh,” you gasped, one hand flying to his hair, the other twisting in the clean white sheet beneath you.
Dex made a sound against you that was almost a groan, almost a laugh. His hands tightened on your thighs, holding you open for him, keeping you there like he was afraid you might disappear if he let go. He was not gentle, like he used to be. He was focused, hungry, and touch-starved enough that every reaction you gave him seemed to make him worse.
“Fuck,” he breathed against you, voice rough and ruined. “You taste so fucking sweet.”
Your whole body went hot. “Dex—”
He didn’t let you finish. His mouth returned to you, and the room became nothing but the wet heat of him, the harsh sound of his breathing, the narrow bed creaking under the way your hips moved despite yourself. The sterile little room had no right to hold something this filthy.
He was still so good, it was unfair.
Dex had always been terrifying when he focused. When he learned something, he learned it completely. And you realised, breathless and shaking, that he remembered everything. Every place that made you gasp. Every rhythm that made your hand tighten in his hair. Every tiny, helpless sound you tried to swallow and failed.
You tried to move back once, overwhelmed, but his hands slid under you and dragged you closer with a low, possessive sound that made your stomach twist.
“No,” he murmured. “Stay.”
So you stayed while he buried himself there like he could spend hours between your thighs if time were not an issue. You stayed while his fingers dug into your skin, while his mouth made you forget the guards outside, the transfer, the years, the ugly world that had kept him from you. You stayed while he took you apart with the kind of devotion that felt less like softness and more like obsession given a mouth.
At some point, you said his name too loudly, and Dex groaned like that was the point.
Of course he wanted them to hear. Of course he wanted the men outside that locked door to know that whatever they thought they had taken from him was still his. You were still his.
When you finally broke, Dex did not stop right away.
He held you through it palms spread over your thighs, breathing you in like the end of the world had tasted sweet and he couldn’t make himself pull away.
Only when you tugged weakly at his hair did he lift his head.
Dex looked up at you like he had just crossed the first thing off a list and still had every intention of finishing the rest.
Number two on the list should have been obvious when he suddenly looked shy.
“Can I ask you something?” he murmured.
Your breath was still uneven. “Dex.”
His mouth pressed briefly to the inside of your knee, like he needed one more second to gather himself. “I want your mouth.”
Oh.
Your stomach flipped so hard you almost laughed. Who were you to deny this man anything?
You slid off the bed and onto your knees in front of him, and Dex went very still.
His hand came to your cheek, careful at first, thumb brushing your skin like he needed to touch you gently before letting himself want. His breathing changed when you looked up at him. His pupils were blown wide enough to make him look almost feverish.
“Baby,” he said, voice rough.
You smiled before giving him what he asked for.
Dex’s hand stayed in your hair, not forcing, not taking. His head tipped back. His throat worked. His eyes squeezed shut and opened again because he seemed to hate missing even one second of you.
He was big in every way you remembered and worse because you had missed him.
Too much, almost. Overwhelming enough to make your eyes water, enough to make your hands press at his thighs when you needed a second, and Dex stopped immediately each time.
His hand softened in your hair. “Too much?” he rasped.
You shook your head, breathless, stubborn, and a little ruined yourself.
Dex looked like that might kill him. Then you kept going, and he fell apart beautifully.
He moaned your name like a warning, like a plea. His hand stayed on your cheek against your cheek, his thumb brushing away the wetness at the corner of your eye with such tenderness that the gesture felt obscene in context.
“You’re perfect,” he whispered, voice breaking. “Fuck, you’re perfect.”
You felt him getting close, and you wanted nothing more than feeling him down your throat, but he pulled back, stopping himself so abruptly you almost protested.
Dex stared down at you, chest heaving, eyes wild, mouth parted like he had just survived something.
You blinked up at him.
He gave a rough little laugh, almost pained. “No,” he said, voice hoarse. “Not yet.”
You smiled slowly. “Not yet?”
His gaze darkened again. He reached down, thumb brushing your lower lip, still shaking from the effort of denying himself.
“I have two more things on the list,” he reminded you, making your thighs pressed together.
Dex helped you back onto your feet with hands that weren’t quite steady, then kissed you so deeply you tasted the restraint he had forced himself to keep.
“Bed,” he murmured against your mouth.
Number three on the list was taking you from behind, of course.
He turned you toward the bed with hands that were still shaking his mouth at your shoulder, your neck, the back of your ear.
He moved slowly at first, because even like this, rough and ruined and half-mad with missing you, Dex was still Dex. He still listened to every breath, every shift of your body, every little sound that told him whether you were overwhelmed or wanting more. The stretch of him made your hands fist in the sheet, your body tensing around the sheer shock of having him again after so long without. His mouth pressed to your shoulder. “Breathe,” he rasped. “I’ve got you.”
He took his time even though you could feel restraint burning through him. The way he cursed softly against your skin when you finally relaxed into him, when your body remembered him properly and pulled him closer.
“Fuck,” he breathed, voice breaking. “You’re so—”
He cut himself off with his mouth against your shoulder, like the words were too much, like saying them would make him less controlled than he already was.
Then he started moving. God, he hadn’t forgotten you, so of course you were loud almost immediately.
The first sound broke out of you before you could stop it, your whole face burning. Dex’s hand tightened at your hip, and the next lewd mewl came worse. He made a low sound behind you, smug and satisfied in a way that made heat crawl up your spine.
You bit down on your own wrist, trying to muffle yourself.
His hand slid up your body and gently pulled your arm away. “No,” he said, voice rough. “I waited three years to hear you.”
Your whole body went hot. “Dex—”
“Let me hear you.”
And then he made sure you did.
He got rougher, hungrier. His body covered yours, his mouth dragging over your neck while his hands held you exactly where he wanted you. The bed creaked under you. The sheet twisted beneath your fists. Your voice filled the room because he kept pulling it out of you, again and again.
At some point, there was a knock on the door, but unfortunately Dex didn’t have enough self control to stop.
You looked over your shoulder, cheek pressed flush into the sheets.
The little window opened and a guard looked in. They were worried, you realised. You had been so fucking loud.
The humiliation should have swallowed you whole. Instead, your stomach flipped.
“You okay?” the guard called.
You could barely speak. “Hmmph, Y-yes!” you managed.
Dex’s hand slid over your stomach, keeping you pressed back against him.
The guard moved away when he realised what he was seeing, face red.
The second the shadow disappeared, Dex’s mouth was at your ear. “You liked that.”
You shivered.
“You liked him checking,” he murmured, darker now. “Liked him hearing what I do to you.”
You should have denied it, but you could not bring yourself to lie, Dex made a rough, broken sound against your neck and moved again, deeper into the heat, rougher now because he was jealous, because some stranger had seen even a glimpse of your face like that and Dex couldn’t stand it. He kissed your shoulder hard and held you like he could erase the guard’s eyes from the room by making you forget anything existed except him.
“Mine,” he breathed.
You answered with his name, exactly how he wanted it.
Number four on the list started with him denying you an orgasm.
That was how you knew prison had changed him.The old Dex, the one who melted when you praised him, the one who went doe-eyed and obedient under your hands, had been buried under three of whatever this was.
Dex flipped you over before you could come undone.
Your gasp broke against his mouth as your back hit the narrow mattress, the white sheet twisted beneath you, your body sore in the best, most aching way. You were already too close and he knew it. Of course he knew it. He knew your body like he had studied it for a test he refused to fail.
“Not yet,” he murmured.
You made a helpless little sound, half protest, half plea. Dex’s hand slid up your waist, and he was inside you again in no time.
Oh. you realised, he wanted to look at you when you came. That was all. So sweet. So cute.
But then you felt him twitch, and you realised that he was close before he did. Or maybe he knew, and he was just too far gone to care about anything else.
“Dex—” Your voice caught. “Dex, I’m not— fuck, I’m not on birth control.”
He didn’t stop completely. His whole body stuttered above yours, rhythm faltering, breath punching out of him like you had hit him in the chest.
“Hmph—fuck.” His forehead dropped against yours. “I know.”
Your eyes snapped open. “You know?”
His hand slid over your stomach, possessive, and the sound that left him was almost pained.
“I know,” he said again, rougher. “I know, baby.”
The words should have sobered you, but you loved him, and you loved that he was still above you, still shaking, still so close you could feel every tremor of restraint tearing through him.
“Dex,” you gasped.
“I thought about it,” he said, voice low and wrecked. “Every night.”
Your body went hot. His hand pressed a little firmer over your stomach, not forcing, just holding there like the thought had been living in him for years.
“You in our apartment,” he murmured, words breaking between breathless little sounds. “My wife, wearing my old shirts. Sleeping alone. Fighting for me. Sitting across from lawyers and doctors while I sit in a– hmmphh— a fuckin’ box.”
“Baby—”
“And all I could think was… fuck—all I could think was I should have left you something.”
Your breath caught so hard it almost hurt.
A baby, he meant.
A living tether. Something that would tie you to him in a way no prison door, no court order, no transfer file could undo. And sure, if you were going to leave him, you would have done it already. No court in the world would blame you for divorcing a killer. No friend, no family member, no sane person would call you cruel for walking away.
But you stayed. And fuck, somehow, staying was still not enough for Dex. He needed proof that some part of him could still belong to you permanently.
In his mind, twisted and tender as it was, this was not a trap. It was a gift.
His eyes locked on yours, blown dark and terrifyingly attentive even through the haze.
His mouth was against yours, then your jaw, then your throat, never settling anywhere long enough to be gentle. He kept touching you like he could not decide what he needed more: your face, your waist, your hips, the heat of your body.
“You feel that?” he rasped, voice wrecked as you squeezed him a little. “How bad you want it?”
You did want it, but you could barely answer. Every breath came out wrong, caught somewhere between a moan and his name. Your thoughts had gone useless, scattered apart by the obscene tenderness of his palm resting low and possessive like he was already imagining the seed taking root there.
“Dex—” you sighed, trying to bury your face in his ned
“No, baby.” His mouth brushed your ear, rough and hot, as he pulled your hair back gently to look into your eyes. “Don’t get… shit— shy now. Not after that. N-not after the sounds you’ve been making ‘f me.”
Your face burned, but your hands only tightened on him.
His voice dropped lower, filthier, the words breaking between harsh breaths. “My pretty girl wants something from me, huh?”
Your whole body went hot.
Dex’s palm pressed a little firmer over your stomach. “S-she wants me to leave her with something.” His breath hitched, and for a second his voice almost failed him. “Wants to walk out of here carrying more than m-my… hmm— fingerprints.”
You made a helpless sound.
“There it is,” he murmured. “You like that, fuck! You like thinking about it.”
“Dex-please—”
“Yeah?” His mouth found yours, messy and desperate, before he pulled back just enough to look at you. His pupils were blown wide, his face flushed, his control hanging by a thread he was clearly ready to let snap. “My pretty girl wants my baby, huh?”
Your breath caught so hard it hurt.
Dex saw it the way your body answered before your mouth could.
His face changed, hunger folding into something sickly sweet, almost tender in the worst possible way. “Fuck,” he whispered. “You do.”
Your eyes stung.
You hated and loved how well he knew you all the same.
“Wants something of mine when they t-take me back,” he breathed, mouth dragging along your cheek. “Something they c-can’t put in a cell. Something that— hnghhh — still has me in it.”
You were shaking now, overwhelmed and aching and so far gone that language felt like a thing happening on another planet. Dex was talking to you like he knew exactly where every dark little want lived under your skin, like he had spent three years locked away with nothing but the memory of you and all the ways he wanted to make himself permanent.
“Say it,” he murmured.
You couldn’t, not properly. Dex’s eyes darkened further.
“C-can’t even talk,” he whispered. “That’s okay. I know you.” His thumb moved slowly over your skin. “I know what my wife wants.”
Your breath broke.
His forehead pressed to yours, and for one second, under all that hunger, he was shaking with the effort to hold himself back.
“But you gotta tell me,” he said, voice raw. “Tell me no and I’ll stop.”
The restraint from him was phenomenal. Your hands slid up to his face, holding him there, forcing him to look at you while you gave him the answer.
“D-don’t you fucking dare stop,” you whispered.
“Yeah?” he asked, like he needed it again, like one yes was not enough to survive on.
“Yes–Fuck! Yes, baby.”
His mouth crashed back to yours, swallowing the rest of your answer, and the room disappeared into heat and the terrible intimacy of choosing this with him. His hand stayed over your stomach the whole time, almost reverent, like the fantasy had become real the second you let him have it.
He kept talking against your mouth, the words coming apart as badly as he was.
How good you were. How much he had missed you. How he had thought about you every night. How he wanted to leave something behind. How you would be going home with him in a way no guard could take from you.
You clung to him through it, nails catching on his shoulders, then his back, then the scar along his spine. Dex shuddered when you touched it, a broken sound leaving him before he buried his face against your neck and held you closer, closer, closer, like he could press three lost years into the space between your bodies and make them disappear.
When he finally came with you, he did it with your name on his mouth and his eyes fixed on yours, like he needed you to see every second of what he was giving you.
His forehead dropped to yours afterward, both of you breathing too hard.
For a while, neither of you spoke. The guards outside were silent. The room was wrecked in small damning ways: twisted sheets, scattered clothes, your blouse half on the floor, the black lace halfway off the bed.
Dex kissed your cheek. Then your jaw. Then the corner of your mouth.“I missed you,” he whispered, and this time it sounded almost broken.
You closed your eyes and held him there. “I missed you, too.”
—
The knock came fifteen minutes later, and you hated it. “Poindexter,” a guard called, “Time.”
Dex was still against you, face buried in your neck, one arm locked around your waist like pretending not to hear it might make the door stay shut. For a second, neither of you moved. His breathing was still uneven against your skin, and your fingers were still in his hair, and the narrow bed beneath you looked absolutely ruined.
Another knock. You touched the back of his neck. “Baby.”
“I know.”
He didn’t sound like he knew. He sounded like leaving you there might kill him.
You both moved in a rush after that, half-dressed and breathless, trying to put yourselves back together before the guards came in. The sheet was twisted. Your skirt was crooked. Your blouse was missing buttons because Dex had been too impatient, so you had to clutch the fabric closed with both hands while smiling like an idiot anyway.
Then the guards stepped in. One of them looked at the bed, then at you, then at Dex. His face went carefully blank.
“Hands,” he said.
You stepped forward before Dex could turn around.
The guard sighed. “Ma’am—”
“One second,” you said.
Dex bent instantly, like he had been waiting for permission. You kissed him once. Then again. Then to his nose, because one kiss was not enough and never would be.
“I love you,” you whispered.
He looked like he might cry. “I love you, too”
Then they cuffed him.
You hated the sound of metal around his wrists. It meant the world taking him back. At the door, Dex looked over his shoulder, and you stood there still holding your blouse together, still smiling, still ruined.
The guard muttered, “Filthy animals,” as they disappeared into the hall.
Then you heard Dex chuckle, low and rough and proud. Like being filthy with you was the best thing anyone had ever called him.
You stood there for a second, and then you laughed under your breath, too.
Because you loved it. You loved being disgusting with him. Loved that the room looked wrecked. Loved that the guards knew. Loved that Dex would carry that insult back to his cell like a compliment, and that you would go home with the same stupid, shameless pride in your chest.
Filthy animals.
Yeah. You smiled to yourself, still holding your blouse together. Maybe you were.
—
You were pregnant.
You found out before the transfer, while Dex was still in prison, still waiting to be moved to the secure psychiatric facility you had spent three years fighting for. For three days, you carried the secret around yourself like a forcefield. You went to work, answered emails, helped patrons at the public library. You smiled politely at everyone while your whole body felt like it had become a locked room with a miracle inside.
When you told Dex, he knew something was different before you even sat down. His eyes went to your face, then your hands, then the way you kept pressing your palm nervously against your stomach. “What happened?”
You laughed once, shaky and soft. “Nothing bad.”
Dex didn’t relax, so you reached across the table and took his hand as much as the cuffs allowed. His fingers closed around yours immediately. “I’m pregnant.” For a second, it was like the whole visiting room lost sound. Then his eyes dropped to your stomach. “What?”
You smiled through the tears already coming. “I’m pregnant, baby.”
The chair scraped back before the guard could stop him.
Dex moved toward you on instinct, cuffed hands reaching for your face, not violent, not thinking, just desperate to touch. The chain between his wrists caught on the edge of the table, but he barely seemed to feel it. His palms found your cheeks, and then he was kissing you across the table like the whole room had disappeared.
“Poindexter,” the guard snapped.
Dex didn't hear him. Or he did, and for one dangerous second, he didn’t care.
You kissed him back, crying into his mouth, fingers gripping the front of his prison shirt because this was your husband, your baby’s father, and he was making this broken sound against your lips.
Another guard came over. “Back. Now.”
They had to pull you apart. Actually pull you apart.
They had one hand on Dex’s shoulder, another on his arm, dragging him back while his cuffed hands strained toward you and yours reached for him across the table. His eyes stayed locked on your face the whole time amazed and almost frightened by the size of what he felt.
The transfer happened not long after.
The institution was better than solitary. You reminded yourself of that every day. He had doctors now. Treatments, structure. He was not locked alone in a box anymore.
But he still was not free. He wasn’t there when your stomach first started to show, but the institution had better visitation rules than the prison, and the first time you came in visibly pregnant, Dex was allowed to touch you. His hand settled over the curve of your stomach so carefully it made your throat ache, like he was afraid the smallest wrong movement might cost him the privilege.
He wasn’t there when the baby kicked for the first time either, but later, during one of those visits, the baby kicked beneath Dex’s palm. Dex went completely still, eyes dropping to your stomach.
Still, he wasn’t there for the smaller, lonelier things. He wasn’t beside you in the maternity shop when you cried because nothing fit right and you wanted him there so badly it hurt. He should have been there making some too-serious comment about proper shoes, back support, and whether the changing room bench was structurally safe enough for you to sit on.
But even then, you told him everything. Every appointment. Every craving. Every scan. Every tiny development you could turn into words and carry to him.
Then Leonard was born. Leo, for short, named for his father.
Dex wasn’t allowed to be there.
That hurt him in a way he didn’t know how to hide. You didn’t know this, but one of the nurses told you he had become erratic after the call came through that you were in labour. Not violent, but frantic, pacing, asking the same questions over and over, trying to negotiate with people who had no authority to give him what he wanted. By the end of it, they had to force a couple pills down his throat so he could just calm down.
So when you finally called, exhausted and crying, with your son against your chest, the silence on the other end felt too careful.
“He’s here,” you whispered. “He’s here, baby.”
Dex didn’t answer right away. For a moment, all you could hear was his breathing, thin and controlled, like he was holding himself together by force. Then, very carefully, he asked, "Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“Is he okay?”
“Yes.”
You could almost picture him sitting there, hand curled too tightly around the phone, trying to make himself calm enough to deserve hearing this.
“Tell me,” he said.
You told him Leo had blonde hair. You looked down at the baby curled against you, tiny and furious, with pale hair against his head and features that already made your chest ache because there was no denying whose child he was.
“He looks like you,” you whispered.
Dex didn’t answer right away. When he did, his voice sounded stripped bare.
“He does?”
“Yeah, baby.” You smiled through tears, touching Leo’s tiny cheek. “He looks like his father.”
Still, after weeks, then months, then years of hearing about Leo through you, Dex began to know him in fragments.
Children were not allowed inside the institution, so Leo had never met his father. Dex knew him through the stories you told him in visitation rooms, through the photographs you were allowed to bring, through the change in your voice whenever you said his name. You gave him a picture of Leo asleep with one fist tucked under his cheek. Leo with blond hair and your eyes. Leo scowling at the camera in a way that looked so much like Dex it made him go silent the first time he saw it.
But he didn’t love Leo properly yet. How could he? He had never held him. Never felt the weight of him against his chest. Never smelled his skin, never rocked him through a cry, never watched him fall asleep in his arms. Leo was still partly an idea to him, a child made real through your love before Dex could reach him with his own.
But he loved Leo, in a way, because you loved him.
That was easier. You loved that baby, so Leo mattered. Your face relaxed when you spoke about him, so Dex learned to relax around the sound of his name too. And somewhere in the darkest, neediest part of him, he thought he owed Leo his life because he made you stay.
Leo was Dex’s gift to you, because he didn’t want you to be alone.
So Dex loved Leo in the only way he knew how at first: because Leo was yours, because Leo was his, because Leo looked like him, and because Leo kept a piece of him in your life while the rest of him was locked away. He loved him for your sake, before he knew how to love him for his own.
—
Leo was three years old when Vanessa Fisk made Dex kill Foggy Nelson.
He was three, serious-eyed, stubborn in the exact way that made your mother sigh and say, “That’s probably his father,” under her breath. Leo had Dex’s watchful stare, Dex’s unnerving ability to go quiet when he was thinking too hard. But he was still a toddler, so the quiet never lasted long. One minute he would be silently studying the wheels of a toy truck like he was investigating a crime scene, and the next he would be shrieking because his banana had “broken wrong.”
He loved dinosaurs, but only “scary ones.” He refused to wear socks that had seams in the wrong place. He called the moon “the night light” and cried once because you explained he couldn’t take it home. He had Dex’s face in miniature and your habit of talking to himself while concentrating, which meant you spent most mornings watching your tiny blond child line up toy animals on the floor and whisper, “No, no, you go there. No, you not listening.”
You were a good mother. You packed snacks. You remembered nursery forms. You cut grapes in half. You kept emergency wipes in every bag you owned. You sang the same bedtime song three times if Leo asked, even when your throat hurt and your body felt hollow from work and worry and loving a man the world had never stopped punishing.
Dex knew all of that through you. Leo liked peas this week. Leo hated peas this week. Leo asked why cats had no eyebrows. Leo threw a shoe at the wall because bedtime was, apparently, “a bad idea.” Leo had asked about Daddy again.
You and Leo had become the one fragile architecture that kept Dex going. Vanessa understood that because Vanessa Fisk understood devotion, even when it was ugly.
So when she found out about you and Leo, it was over.
She came to Dex with ammo in her metaphorical gun.
This was no way to live, she told him, taking away the meds. Was this what he wanted? To hear about his son in secondhand stories? To let you raise a child alone while other men opened doors for you, helped carry groceries, taught Leo to kick a ball, to ride a bike, to be brave? Raising a child was hard, wasn’t it? You were young. Lonely. Exhausted. Beautiful. How long before someone else started looking less like help and more like a replacement?
Didn’t he want to be a husband? A father? Didn’t he want to come home?
Then, she gave him a photo of you at home, hair tied back, Leo on your hip. How… did she get this photo?
Then she gave him structure: Kill Foggy first. Then he could go to you and Leo.
That was the order of how it went. It was a task, a reward, a way back to the only life he still cared about. And Dex had always been most dangerous when someone took his pain and turned it into a sequence.
So he killed Foggy Nelson. And afterward, when they dragged him back into court, you wanted to see him.
Not because you excused murder. Not because Foggy didn’t matter. But because you were his wife, and you knew that Dex didn’t kill like that out of nowhere.
He wouldn’t simply go on a rampage. He didn’t wake up one day and decide he would burn every bridge that led to you. He loved you too much for that. So you came to the conclusion that someone must've reached into the most frightened part of him, and aimed him again.
You knew that, but the court didn’t care. This time, the court issued an order. It was for your son’s sake, they said. An injunction, no contact. You and Leo were not to be in the same room as Benjamin Poindexter. Not in court, not in visitation, not anywhere a judge could prevent it.
You stood very still when they told you this.
Leo was at home with your mother, probably refusing lunch because the sandwich had been cut into triangles instead of squares.
You didn’t cry. Not when the injunction was read. Not even when Dex was sentenced for the second time. You just listened. Then you got to work.
Because crying would come later, probably in the shower, probably with one hand over your mouth so Leo wouldn’t hear. But right then, there were lawyers to call, motions to file, and records to request. You knew your husband. You knew what manipulation looked like when he was the one pointed like a weapon.
And after court, you went back to Leo. He was sitting on the living room floor in dinosaur pyjamas even though it was the afternoon, blond hair sticking up at the back, one sock on and one sock missing for reasons nobody could explain. He looked up when you came in, toy stegosaurus clutched in one hand.
“Mama,” he said seriously, “Nana said no more crackers.”
You knelt in front of him, your knees cracking with the exhaustion of the day. “Your grandma is probably right.”
Leo frowned like you had betrayed him on a legal level. “I need snacks.”
“You had a snack.”
“I need more snacks.”
“You need dinner.”
He considered that, then lifted the stegosaurus. “Dino needs crackers.”
“Dino can have pretend crackers.”
Leo stared at you with Dex’s eyes. For one awful second, you almost laughed and almost cried at the same time. Instead, you reached out and smoothed his hair down. It sprang back up immediately.
“Daddy has that face too,” you whispered.
Leo blinked. “Daddy?”
You had never lied to him. You told him Daddy was away. Daddy loved him. Daddy couldn’t come home yet. All true, and yet, none of it was enough.
“Yeah,” you said softly. “Daddy.”
Leo looked down at his dinosaur, then back at you. “Daddy like dinos?”
You smiled even though your throat hurt. “I think Daddy would like whatever you like.”
Leo nodded, satisfied by that, and shoved the stegosaurus into your lap. “Then Daddy like this one. He bite.”
You held the toy carefully, like it was evidence. “Yeah,” you whispered. “He bite.”
Leo climbed into your lap after that, all knees and elbows, and you wrapped both arms around him. He smelled like shampoo and the strawberry yoghurt he had somehow gotten on his sleeve. He pressed his face into your shoulder for exactly four seconds before wriggling away again because three-year-olds loved affection on their own schedule.
You let him go. You watched him return to his line of dinosaurs, babbling to himself, head bent in concentration.
You opened your notes app and started another list: Lawyer. Injunction appeal. Facility records. Contact restrictions. Dex’s medication logs. Visitor records.
You could be heartbroken later. Right now, you were Leo’s mother. Dex’s wife. And someone had used your family to turn your husband into a weapon again.
And you were going to find out why.
—
A year later, you were watching the news while Leo played on the carpet.
Not watching, really. You were letting it sit on in the background while you moved through the living room with half your attention split into a dozen places at once. Leo’s sippy cup was on the coffee table. His toy dinosaurs were arranged in a careful little line near your foot. A postcard Johnathan had sent from the Bahamas with his boyfriend on the fridge. There was a basket of laundry on the chair you had been meaning to fold since yesterday, and your laptop sat open on the sofa beside you, full of documents, court filings, old visitor logs, psychiatric reports, and all the research you had been collecting like ammunition.
You had been working for weeks. You had names, dates, transfer notices, facility records, connections that were too neat to be coincidence. You had followed the clues until your stomach turned. Dex was going to be moved into general population, and it was not an administrative error. It was not random. It had the Fisks’ fingerprints all over it, even if she was careful enough never to leave them where a normal person could see.
After all, it hadn’t taken you long to find out about the Red Hook charter. That part had been almost laughably easy. Child’s play, really.
The public library had a stack of old municipal records tucked away in the back, half-forgotten beneath outdated notices and donation forms. Someone had slapped a label on the box years ago — NEEDS TO BE SHREDDED — and then, by some miracle of underfunded bureaucracy, no one ever had.
So you had done the one thing you could think of and sent Matt Murdock an anonymous tip. You didn't give a signature or explanation. It was just enough information to make him look where he needed to look. It was just enough to prove to him that Dex was not acting on his own.
Matt went to see him that morning. You knew because you still had someone inside the prison willing to tell you what the official channels never would. A friend, barely. A contact, more accurately.
Then, that night, the news broke: Benjamin Poindexter had escaped from prison and attempted to assassinate the mayor.
Your husband’s name was on every channel again. Your husband’s face was dragged back into the world as a threat, a headline, a monster with a body count and no context anyone cared to say out loud.
You stood frozen in the middle of your living room, remote in hand, while the news anchor spoke over footage you could barely process. On the carpet, Leo lifted his plastic stegosaurus and made it bite the sofa cushion.
“Rawr,” he said seriously.
You looked down at him and how completely unaware he was that his father had just broken out of prison and tried to kill a man.
Leo was too busy frowning at the stegosaurus with Dex’s whole face in miniature, pale brows pulled together, mouth pressed into a stern little line. “No,” he told the dinosaur, pushing its plastic nose away from the triceratops. “No bully.”
The stegosaurus apparently disagreed, because Leo made it chomp again. Then he gasped, offended by his own storyline. “No. Bully bad.” He picked up the stegosaurus, turned it toward the triceratops, and shook it gently. “You say sorry.”
You stared at him.
Leo bumped the stegosaurus’s head carefully against the triceratops. “Sowwy,” he said in a deeper voice.
Then he made the triceratops pat the stegosaurus on the head. “Okay. Be kind now.”
Your chest tightened so hard you had to sit down.
Leo looked up. “Mama?”
“I’m okay,” you said too quickly.
He stared at you with Dex’s eyes, unconvinced.
You turned the volume down, but not off. You couldn’t make yourself turn it off. You sat there with Leo at your feet and the whole city falling apart on-screen, trying to understand the sequence. Matt’s visit. The transfer. The Fisks. Dex escaping. The mayor. None of it random. None of it was out of nowhere, and you probably were the one to set this into motion the second you gave the anonymous tip.
“Mama,” Leo said again, holding up a toy. “Dino hungry.”
“Dino is always hungry,” you whispered.
“Need snack.”
“Okay,” you said, because your voice was already too close to breaking and arguing with a four-year-old about a plastic dinosaur felt like the one thing you could actually survive. “Let me check what we have.”
You stood and crossed into the kitchen, still listening to the news. The fridge light came on cold and white across your face. You stared into it without really seeing anything: half a punnet of strawberries, Leo’s yoghurt, and Leftover pasta. A little container of cut grapes.
The news anchor said Dex’s name again. Your hand tightened around the fridge door.
You reached for Leo’s yoghurt, then stopped because he had asked for a snack for the dinosaur, not himself, and for one absurd second that distinction mattered enough to make you laugh under your breath.
Then you realised that Leo was… silent. He wasn’t babbling. He wasn’t talking to his toys. Is he okay?
Worried, you looked back into the living room.
Leo was standing in the middle of the carpet, one dinosaur clutched in his hand, his small body frozen in a way that made the back of your neck prickle.
He was waving at the window.
No. Not the window. The fire escape.
Beyond the glass, half-hidden in the dark metal lines of the fire escape, was his father.
Oh.
Little did you know, Dex had already been there for fifteen minutes.
Fifteen whole minutes of being half-hidden in the dark, one hand braced against the cold metal railing while he looked into the life he had only known through your stories. At first, he watched you, moving through the living room with the television flickering against your face, beautiful and alive, one hand absently touching your wedding ring while you tried to hold the world together through the sheer refusal to give up on him.
But when his eyes found Leo, Dex forgot how to breathe.
He knew what his son looked like from photographs. He knew he had blond hair, serious eyes, and that little frown you always said was his. But seeing Leo in person was different. It was jarring, how much he actually looked like him. Leo was now a real person to Dex, sitting cross-legged on the carpet in dinosaur pyjamas, scolding a plastic stegosaurus for biting another toy.
Dex watched Leo make the dinosaur apologise. He watched Leo say that bullying was bad. He watched his son choose kindness with no one guiding him toward it.
Oh. Leo looked like him, but he was good in a way Dex had never been able to be without help. Dex had always needed a North Star, someone outside him to point toward right when his own internal compass spun uselessly in the dark. He would always need you that way, always look to you when the world blurred at the edges and everything started to feel lost.
But Leo did not need a North Star. Leo had one inside him. Leo had a functioning moral compass in a tiny body with Dex’s face and your kindness. Dex’s focus, but not his emptiness. Dex’s intensity, but not his fracture. Dex, if someone had loved him correctly from the start.
And that was when Dex understood that he loved him. And not in the distant, complicated love he had forced himself to. Not just because Leo was yours, or because Leo was his, or because Leo had kept you tethered to him while the rest of the world tried to take him away.
Now, he loved Leo because Leo was a good version of him. Because protecting Leo suddenly felt a lot like self-preservation. Like if Dex could keep this child safe, if he could make sure the world never reached into Leo and broke the compass before it had a chance to grow, then maybe some part of himself could be saved too.
Then Leo noticed him.
Dex saw the exact second it happened. Leo’s head turned, eyes lifting past the kitchen table, past the window, to the dark shape crouched on the fire escape.
For one breathless second, Dex couldn't move. He had been caught. Not by the police. Not by guards. Not by Daredevil. By a four-year-old boy.
Leo didn’t scream. He didn’t cry. Of course not. He was your son, too. He was brave, like you.
He only blinked, then lifted one small hand and waved.
Because Dex didn't want to scare him, because he did not know how fathers were supposed to wave at sons they had never held, Dex lifted his hand and waved back.
That was when you noticed.
And fuck, he couldn’t wait to be in your arms again.
The second you got the window open, Dex came through it, one hand catching the frame, the other already reaching for you. The sniper rifle was still strapped across his back, cold against the warmth of your apartment.
You barely had time to say his name before his hands were on you.
He pulled you into him so quickly your feet left the floor, spinning you half across the living room with a strength that startled a laugh out of you before it broke into a sob. His arms locked around your waist, your hands flew to his shoulders, and then his mouth was on yours. The kiss was clumsy in the way only grief and longing could be clumsy. He kissed you like every locked door, every court order, every year stolen from you both had narrowed into this one second.
He tasted like blood and rain. His lip was split. One of his teeth was missing. There were stitches along his forehead and dirt at the edge of his chin, but he was here. Your husband was in your living room with his body against yours and his hands on your back like he was trying to convince himself you were not another trick his mind played against him.
“I missed you,” you breathed against his mouth.
Dex made a broken sound and kissed you again. “I missed you.”
“No, baby,” you whispered, laughing and crying at the same time as you pressed kisses to his mouth, his cheek, the corner of his cheekbones, the scar you’ve yet to trace there. “I missed you. I missed you so much.”
His forehead dropped to yours. For a second, he just held you there, eyes closed, breathing you in like he had forgotten the world. His fingers moved at your waist, not quite gripping, not quite letting go, that old helpless need in him trying so hard to be gentle and failing only because there was too much feeling in one body.
Then a small voice behind you said, “Mama?”
It went through him all at once, the way a person remembered fire after touching a flame. His hands stayed on you, but his whole body locked up, breath caught, eyes opening with a kind of fear you had never seen in him.
Because no, Benjamin Poindexter had no defence against a four-year-old boy in dinosaur pyjamas.
Slowly, you turned in his arms to see Leo stood in the middle of the carpet with one sock missing and his stegosaurus tucked under one arm. His round little face was serious, sleepy, and curious. He looked much like Dex, it made your chest hurt, but he was smaller, untouched by every cruel thing that had made his father into a weapon.
“Mama,” Leo asked, pointing the dinosaur toward Dex, “who’s this?”
Dex’s breath hitched, you felt it under your palm.
For a moment, you couldn’t answer. You had imagined this introduction a hundred different ways over the years. Maybe in a supervised visitation room. Or through a phone call. Maybe one day in some future where paperwork finally gave way and Leo was old enough to understand more than he should have to. You had not imagined Dex standing in your apartment with a rifle on his back, blood at his mouth, wanted by half the city, looking down at his son like the universe had placed his missing pieces in a boy that looked like a mirror.
You swallowed.“Leo,” you said softly, voice shaking. “This is Daddy.”
Dex inhaled like the word had gone straight through him.
Leo blinked up at him. “Hi daddy,” he repeated, testing the shape of it.
Dex was still trying to keep himself held together with force and habit and whatever discipline had survived. But a foreign emotion moved across him as you felt your own eyes fill again.
“Hi, Leo,” he whispered. His voice was wrecked.
Leo studied him with the grave suspicion of a child encountering an adult who looked both interesting and badly assembled. His eyes moved over Dex’s face. Then his little brows pulled together.
“Your teeth is missing,” Leo said.
You made a small sound, half laugh, half sob.
Dex blinked at him. “What?”
Leo took one step closer, stegosaurus still tucked under his arm like backup. “Your teeth is missing. Are you okay?”
And that was what broke him.
Not the years he had lost. Not even the word Daddy, though that had nearly taken his knees out. It was the concern in his son’s voice, the immediate, unprompted softness. The way Leo saw something wrong and, instead of flinching from him, asked if he was okay.
Dex lowered himself slowly to one knee, as if sudden movement might shatter the moment.
The rifle shifted against his back, so violently out of place beside your son’s little bare foot on the carpet. Dex seemed to realise it too. His hand moved as if to take it off, then stopped, uncertain, afraid to do anything too fast with Leo so close.
“I’m okay,” Dex said carefully.
Leo looked unconvinced. “Mama has plasters.”
Dex looked up at you.Your hand went to your mouth, and you cried properly then, because Leo had no idea what he was offering. No idea that his father had come through the window carrying a weapon and a history no child should have to understand. No idea that asking about a missing tooth and suggesting a plaster was the kindest thing anyone had said to Dex all year.
Dex looked back at him, and saw a person. A tiny person with Dex’s hair and Dex’s nose and Dex’s mouth, but he was human, in the way he never was. He was kind.
Leo was everything Dex had wanted to be and never knew how. Leo was a good version of him.
For the first time in Dex’s life, he looked at someone smaller than him and thought, with stunned humility, that he might have something to learn.
From his son, his better self.
Leo tilted his head. “You want Dino?”
Dex looked at the stegosaurus like it was sacred.
Then he held out both hands, slowly, carefully, letting Leo decide.
Leo stepped closer and placed the dinosaur into his palms.
Dex took it as if it weighed more than the rifle on his back. As if this battered little plastic toy had more power to undo him than any weapon ever made.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
Leo nodded, satisfied by the manners, then moved closer. His small hand lifted and patted Dex’s cheek, not quite where the scar was, gentle in the imprecise way of toddlers trying their best.
Dex’s eyes snapped to yours. There was panic there. Wonder. A silent, helpless question: What do I do?
You sank down beside them, one hand on Leo’s back, the other reaching for Dex’s face. “You’re doing okay,” you whispered.
Leo patted him again, then leaned forward and, with the sudden trust only children could offer, pressed himself into Dex’s chest.
Dex stopped breathing. Then, slowly, so slowly it made your heart ache, his arms came around your son.
Leo fit against him like he had always belonged there, his same-colored hair tucked beneath Dex’s chin. Dex held him as if the whole room might punish him for wanting it too much, as if any wrong movement would prove he didn;t deserve this.
You watched his hand spread carefully over Leo’s back. The same hand that had hurt people. The same hand that had held weapons. That same hand that now shook from the effort of touching his son gently enough.
Leo looked up from Dex’s chest. “Are you cold?”
Dex swallowed. “A little.”
Leo considered that, then turned to you. “Mama, Daddy need blanket.”
You laughed through tears. “Yeah,” you whispered. “Maybe he does.”
Dex closed his eyes.
His face bent toward Leo’s hair, and for a second he didn’t quite kiss him, He only breathed there, close enough to smell the child he had made and never held. Shampoo. Crackers. Life. His son smelled like life.
When Dex opened his eyes again, they were wet. He looked at you over Leo’s head, and the room seemed to fold around the three of you.
“I missed everything,” he whispered.
You moved closer, pressing your forehead to his shoulder, one hand covering his where it rested on Leo’s back. “You’re here now.”
It was not enough, you both knew that. It was nowhere near enough.
But Leo wriggled in Dex’s arms and said, “Daddy, Dino hungry,” with the complete seriousness of a child who had accepted this new adult into his world and immediately assigned him responsibilities.
Dex looked down at him. Then at the dinosaur. Then back at you, for instruction. You tilted your chin like, go on.
“What does Dino eat?” he managed.
Leo gasped, scandalised that his own father didn’t know. “Crackers.”
Dex looked at you, and you nodded, so he also nodded, “Okay.”
Dex knew now that he was meant to love Leo because Leo was his second chance in miniature.
And Leo had no idea his father would burn the world to keep him safe. Because in the end, that's what makes him a good man, right?
—end.
Extra note : I keep getting distracted from my Dex x reader / ex!Bucky fic, but I promise it’s on its way. In the meantime, my immediate thought after writing this is a sequel where Reader and Dex finds out Leo has powers (is a mutant) and that’s why Dex starts killing anti-vigilante task force. Because he wants to protect his son. (No promises, but let me know if anyone’s interested!)
Dex taglist : @itsdynotdaddy @diabolicallydownbad @doesanyonereadthis @meicore @pixie2k5 @bibiishin @starlitflora @pearlstiare @glorybeat @stardustworlds @castawaybarnes @supervampireflame @not-the-teen-witch @billybonesxx @ultimatewolverine @treetrees-world-of-imagiation @bitch-spaghetti-o @lostinthes4uce @cotton-eee @weallhaveadestiny @awesome-badass-cafeteria-sauce @moonbug333 @yujyujj @mattdexx @lostfallenangelsblog @bloomsberryfairy @flimsysquid @abbotfan @leonetta2014 @ficcharsimpsblog @odairtrqsh (Let me know if I missed anyone. If you want to be added, please ask/messege! it gets lost in the comments sometimes!)
SUMMARY: Facing terminal illness, you and Oscar chase one last bittersweet adventure together, holding onto love, loss, and the fragile hope written across the sky.
PAIRING: oscar piastri x reader
WARNINGS: major character illness (terminal cancer), death, grief, mentions of hospitals/medical treatment
NOTE: I was listening to chemtrails by Lizzy Mcalpine, and oh my gosh, that song makes me feel so ill, I cannot.
You didn’t cry when they told you.
You watched the doctor’s mouth move like it was underwater, slow and rounded, clinical and soft. Every word landed like a feather, and still, somehow, each one managed to bruise.
Stage four.
Aggressive.
Unlikely to respond.
Best to prepare.
She didn’t meet your eyes.
She looked just past your shoulder, the way people do when they’re afraid of becoming part of the story. Like if she made it impersonal enough, you’d stay a statistic and not a person unraveling right in front of her.
You didn’t cry.
You just stared at the wall behind her, at the framed photo of two golden retrievers chasing a tennis ball down a sunlit stretch of sand. The ocean was bright and endless behind them. You wondered if they were still alive. If they still ran like that.
If she knew what it felt like to say terminal to someone and keep breathing like she hadn’t just stolen the air out of the room.
You nodded politely. Like she was explaining a cracked pipe or an insurance clause. Like this wasn’t your body she was talking about, your life, your time, now mapped out in clinical estimates and worst-case timelines.
Oscar didn’t cry either.
He sat to your left, knuckles pressed white against his knee, jaw so tight you thought it might shatter if he moved. He didn’t speak. Didn’t blink. Just stared at the floor like if he could burn a hole through it, maybe he’d fall through to some version of the world where this wasn’t happening.
Where you were okay.
He helped you out of the chair when the appointment ended, though neither of you could say what had really been said. His hand hovered near your back the whole walk to the elevator, not quite touching, but close enough that you felt the heat of it. The way it shook.
You walked in silence through the lobby. Past people laughing at the café. Past a little girl with a sticker on her cheek and an ice cream in her hand. Past the parking meter that wouldn’t print receipts.
Everything felt normal. Ordinary. Unbearably so.
In the car, you buckled your seatbelt with hands that didn’t feel like yours. The air was too still. Oscar didn’t start the engine. He just sat there, eyes forward, like he wasn’t ready to move. Like if he turned the key, the world would keep going, and you weren’t sure either of you could handle that.
You reached for the AUX cord.
You weren’t even sure why. Habit, maybe. Instinct.
You fumbled it between your fingers, like you’d forgotten how it worked, like maybe music could press rewind on the day and take you both somewhere simpler.
“Let’s just go home,” you said.
The words felt weightless coming out of your mouth, not empty, exactly, but hollowed out. Like they had once meant something and now they were only shape and sound. You barely recognised your own voice. It didn’t tremble or shake. It didn’t beg or break.
It just…floated.
Oscar turned toward you slowly, eyes rimmed red, lips parted like he wanted to say something but didn’t know where to begin.
Then he broke.
No warning. No drama. No sound, not at first.
Just a sharp inhale. A full-body wince.
Then the dam cracked.
He folded forward over the steering wheel like someone had taken the ground out from underneath him. His whole body shook, silent at first, then loud, gulping sobs that scraped their way out of his throat like they’d been waiting all day to be let out.
He cried like he was trying to reverse time.
Like if he said your name enough, over and over again, soft and desperate, like a question and a prayer, the story might change.
“Hey,” you whispered, reaching across the console.
Your fingers curled around his hand. His knuckles were ice. “I’m still here.”
He gripped your hand like it was the only thing keeping him tethered. His head turned just enough to press into your palm. He didn’t say anything, couldn’t, but he nodded once, a jerky, broken thing that made your chest ache.
You didn’t cry then, either.
Not because you weren’t sad.
Not because you were strong.
But because somewhere, deep down, you knew if you started, you wouldn’t stop. And you had to stay in the moment, had to hold him there, keep both of you from falling off the edge of it.
“I’m not gone yet,” you said, softer this time.
But the yet hung in the air between you, louder than anything else.
It wrapped itself around your words like smoke.
It curled into the corners of the car.
It pressed itself into Oscar’s lungs until he was crying again, quietly now, the kind of grief that lingers after the first wave crashes and recedes.
You rested your forehead to the window and closed your eyes.
The silence wasn’t comforting, but it was honest.
And for now, that was enough.
That night, the house was too quiet.
Not peaceful, hollow.
Even the hum of the fridge felt loud, intrusive. The shadows on the walls stretched longer than they used to, like time had started pooling in the corners.
You lay curled on the couch, your body tucked into Oscar’s like you were trying to disappear inside him. Or maybe he was trying to pull you in. His arms were wrapped around you tight, chest pressed to your back, one leg hooked around yours as if anchoring you there. Like if he stopped touching you, even for a second, you might evaporate.
His hand rested at your waist, fingers spread like he was trying to memorise the rise and fall of your breathing. His nose was buried in the curve of your neck, his lips brushing skin every time he exhaled. He hadn’t said much since the hospital, just stayed close, unbearably close, like he could feel the clock ticking and was trying to run out the timer by holding you still.
You both stared at the ceiling, eyes tracing the familiar cracks and shadows like they might suddenly shift into answers. A message. A reason. Something. Answers written in the cracks you’d never noticed before. A message only meant for the dying. Or the ones they’d leave behind.
You were the one to break the silence, your voice soft and steady, like a confession whispered into a pillow.
“Is it weird,” you said, “that I feel more sorry for you than for me?”
Oscar flinched like the words physically hit him. His arm tightened instinctively around your middle.
“Don’t,” he said, rough and quiet. “Please don’t say that.”
“But it’s true.” You shifted just enough to look back at him, your cheek brushing his. “I wish I could… make this easier for you.”
He shook his head once, sharply, jaw clenched like he was chewing glass. “You’re the one—”
“I know.” Your voice cracked just a little.
A beat passed. Then another.
You reached up, covering the hand he had on your waist with your own. “But I’m not the one who has to stay behind.”
Oscar’s breath hitched.
And then he did what he’d been holding back from all day — he pulled you in tighter, impossibly so. One arm wrapped around your shoulders now, his hand flat against your chest, feeling the thrum of your heartbeat like he was afraid it might stop mid-beat if he let go.
“Don’t say that,” he whispered again, voice breaking apart on the edges. “Please don’t.”
So you didn’t.
But the truth settled into the space between you anyway — undeniable and brutal.
You were going.
Not today. Not yet.
But soon.
And he would be the one left behind.
You felt his lips press against the back of your shoulder, lingering like a goodbye he wasn’t ready to say.
His hand gripped yours like it was the only thing keeping him afloat.
You turned your head and leaned into him, until your forehead touched his, until your noses brushed, until the space between your breaths disappeared completely.
“I’m still here,” you whispered. “Right now, I’m still here.”
Oscar closed his eyes. Let out a shaky breath.
“I know,” he said. But he didn’t loosen his hold.
Not even a little.
Because the truth was still there, heavy and quiet and cruel.
You were still here.
But not for long.
The first thing you lost was your appetite.
It didn’t happen all at once. Not like flipping a switch, but like the slow dimming of a light you didn’t know was fading until the room was almost dark.
Meals became chores, not comforts. You’d pick at food, a bite here, a bite there, but the taste wasn’t there anymore. The flavours felt muted, as if everything you put in your mouth was wrapped in cotton. Even the smell of cooking, once a signal of warmth and home, turned sour, twisting in your stomach before you could swallow.
Oscar watched you shrink away from the dinner table, but he still made your favourite meals. Sometimes he even sat with you, trying to force the ordinary back into the day. He’d laugh quietly, sharing some dumb meme on his phone, the glow of the screen illuminating his hopeful smile.
But the meals grew colder. The laughter faded. And you stopped pretending to be hungry.
The second thing you lost was your mornings.
Not just the hour when the sun climbed over the horizon, but the feeling mornings used to bring, the soft promise of a new day, wrapped in sunlight and warmth and slow sips of coffee.
You used to wake with a smile half-formed on your lips, a tangle of sheets and hair and quiet contentment. Now, you woke with a weight in your chest that pressed you back into the mattress, breath shallow, muscles heavy.
Oscar learned to keep the room dark. He’d draw the curtains tight to keep the early light from cutting through your closed eyelids.
He’d sit beside you, gently tugging socks over your cold feet, the touch light as a feather but filled with the fierce love of someone trying to protect a fading flame.
Sometimes, when he thought you were asleep, you’d hear him whisper your name like a prayer, or feel the brush of his lips on your temple as if saying goodbye just in case.
The third was the ordinary, the everyday moments that used to fill your life with quiet joy.
The small rituals you never noticed until they stopped: the way your fingers tapped rhythmically on the edge of a table when you were lost in thought; the stacks of books gathering dust beside your bed; the music that once wove through your days now silenced or forgotten.
You stopped caring about the little things.
The routines that made life feel safe, predictable, yours, unravelled thread by thread.
Oscar saw the spaces widen between who you were and who you were becoming.
He tried to hold onto those fragments, a laugh, a glance, a sigh, as if gathering pieces of you might keep you whole.
He tried so hard to pretend everything was normal.
He still made you tea, even when you couldn’t bring yourself to drink it.
He still sent you ridiculous memes from across the room, knowing you’d smile, even if only for a second.
He kissed the top of your head every time he passed, pressing his lips like he was trying to seal a promise into your skin.
Every touch was a silent vow to stay, even as the world slipped away.
But you knew.
You saw it in the way his eyes searched your face when you thought he wasn’t looking, desperate to memorise every line, every flicker of emotion.
You felt it in the way his thumb brushed the nape of your neck when he tucked you beneath the blankets, as if trying to imprint himself on you.
You heard it in the quiet shudder of his shoulders when he thought you were asleep, the weight of a grief too big to carry.
He was memorising you.
Not just the person you were now, but every version of you he’d ever known.
Every laugh, every softness, every half-smile held like a secret treasure.
He was folding your voice into the quiet spaces of his heart, turning moments into keepsakes, laughter into lasting echoes.
He was grieving you already, before the world had even finished telling the story.
It wasn’t fair.
None of it was.
But it was happening anyway.
And some days, the only thing you could offer him was a smile, small, fragile, fading, that said I’m still here.
For now.
One day, you found him sitting on the cold tile floor of the shower.
Fully clothed.
Silent.
The water ran relentlessly over him, a steady, unyielding torrent that blurred the hard edges of the world and washed away everything but the weight in his chest. His clothes clung to his skin, soaked through, heavy like the grief pressing him down, pinning him to the floor. His head lolled forward, chin nearly resting on his chest, eyes closed tight against the flood inside.
You didn’t say anything.
You just stepped in, the water immediately soaking your pajamas, plastering your hair to your scalp, chilling your skin in contrast to the hot cascade. You moved slowly, as if afraid your presence might shatter the fragile moment, and curled into his lap, folding your body against his like two pieces desperate not to lose their shape.
Your arms wrapped around him, trembling but fierce, as if your hold could keep him anchored to the world. His breath hitched in his throat, shaky and uneven, a broken sound swallowed beneath the steady rush of water.
“I can’t do this,” he whispered, voice cracked and raw, like he was admitting defeat for the first time.
“Yes, you can,” you said, though your own voice shook with the weight of the truth you wished wasn’t real.
He shook his head slowly, barely audible. “Why do I have to?”
You didn’t have an answer.
There was no reason that could fill that hole.
No explanation to soften the unbearable.
Just the two of you.
Just the warmth of your skin against his, the soft pulse of your heartbeat beneath his ear, a quiet, steady drum in the silence.
I’m still here. I’m still here. I’m still—
The words caught in the thick wet air between you, unfinished and fragile, the ache of everything left unsaid hanging heavy.
He pressed his face into your shoulder, the tremor of his body slowly loosening in your arms. You could feel the heat of his tears mixing with the cool water, hear the soft hitch of his breath as the grief broke through his walls at last.
And in that moment, in the quiet surrender of everything he’d been holding inside, you both felt the full weight of what was coming.
The terrifying, endless stretch of days where time would slip away like water through your fingers. The nights stretched wide and empty, echoing with the absence of what could not be fixed. The slow fading, piece by piece, of everything you loved about each other.
And still, you held on.
Not because you had strength left to fight.
But because you couldn’t let go.
Because the last thing you could do was be there, raw and broken and real.
Together.
Even as the water ran cold and the world narrowed to the two of you, clinging to the fragile hope woven between whispered promises and shared silence.
I’m still here.
And sometimes, sometimes, that was enough.
The decision was sudden but not surprising. After weeks of drifting through hospital visits, scans that blurred into one another, and tired days that felt longer than nights, you looked at Oscar with a spark of something almost like rebellion in your tired eyes.
“Let’s get out of here. Just for a little while.”
His eyebrows knitted together, like he was trying to puzzle out if you were serious, or if this was just another passing daydream you might let go of by morning. His eyes searched yours, wary but hopeful, like he was trying to catch a glimpse of the ‘you’ that existed before the hospital rooms and the whispered diagnoses.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked, voice low and careful, as if afraid the walls might hear and pull you back.
“Anywhere but here,” you said, the corners of your mouth twitching into a small, tired smile. “Somewhere I can feel the sky.”
Oscar blinked, a slow smile breaking through the tension. “The sky, huh? That sounds good.”
You both knew it wasn’t about the place. It never was. It was about a break from the endless waiting rooms and the smell of antiseptic. About breathing air that didn’t taste like fear. About catching a few stolen moments where the future wasn’t hanging over your heads like a storm cloud.
Packing was quick, no big plans, no suitcases, just whatever fit in a bag tossed on the passenger seat. You slipped into your favourite jacket, the one with the worn cuffs and the scent of home, and Oscar tossed you the keys with a grin that was equal parts nervous and excited.
The car hummed to life and pulled away from the hospital’s heavy gates, leaving behind the relentless buzz of machines and hushed voices.
Windows down, wind tangled in your hair, you felt something flicker inside — a small pulse of freedom, fragile and bright.
Oscar glanced over, catching the light in your eyes, and reached out to squeeze your hand.
“Where to?” he asked, grinning like a kid about to take you on an adventure.
You laughed, soft, real, and a little breathless. “Anywhere that feels like we can just be. No doctors, no tests. Just us and the sky.”
He nodded. “Let’s find it.”
And with that, the road stretched ahead, endless and wide, and for the first time in a long time, it felt like maybe, just maybe, the weight could lift for a little while.
One evening, you sat on the balcony, the sky a wild canvas bleeding orange and pink into the horizon, the sun slipping slow and stubborn toward the edge of the world. The air was salty and heavy with the smell of the sea, thick with the gentle lull of waves crashing far below.
Oscar’s hand found yours, fingers curling around yours like he was afraid you might slip away if he didn’t hold tight enough. His squeeze was gentle, careful, a silent question, an anchor.
“You look happy,” he said softly, voice low as if he didn’t want to disturb the delicate peace.
“I am,” you whispered, leaning your head against his shoulder, feeling the steady beat of his heart beneath your ear — something solid in a world that felt like it was tilting.
He kissed the top of your hair, the touch feather-light but full of everything words couldn’t hold. For a moment, time folded in on itself, past, present, future blurring into a quiet, sacred now. There was no illness, no prognosis, no shadow looming over what came next. There was only this, this fragile, perfect breath of life.
You breathed it in, the salt in the air, the distant cry of a gull, the rough grain of the balcony railing beneath your fingers, and the warmth of his body curled close beside you.
“Dance with me?” he murmured, voice rough with everything he was holding in.
You nodded, unable to find words that could hold the weight of the moment.
There was no music except the distant crash of waves and the whisper of the night breeze, but it didn’t matter. He moved with a careful grace, one hand on your waist, the other holding yours like it was the most precious thing in the world.
Your bodies swayed together, slow, unsteady, but sure, like the world had paused just for this. Your head rested against his chest, feeling the pulse of his heart under your ear, steady and real. You closed your eyes, letting the rhythm of him, of the night, of the fragile life between you, carry you.
His breath warmed your skin as he whispered, “I don’t want to let go.”
You pressed a soft kiss to his collarbone, voice barely above a whisper. “Then don’t.”
And for those quiet, suspended moments, with the sky fading from gold to ink, and the stars just beginning to blink awake, you danced.
Not because the future was promised,
But because right now, this was enough.
On the last night, the world outside faded until it was just the two of you, the quiet hum of the night air, the whisper of the ocean, and the soft rhythm of your voices.
You stayed up late, tangled in blankets and memories, talking about everything you’d never made time for, dreams you’d dared to whisper in the dark, regrets folded tight inside your chest, the little things that made your life yours.
Oscar pulled you close, his breath catching as he spoke.
“I don’t want this to be goodbye.”
“Neither do I,” you said, voice thick but steady, every word wrapped in the weight of love and loss tangled together.
“But if it is…” His voice cracked, raw and broken.
“You’ll carry me,” you promised, pressing your hand over his heart. “In the sky, in your heart, in everything.”
He nodded, tears glistening in the corners of his eyes, held back by sheer will.
He held you tighter, like if he let go, you might really disappear.
And under that vast sky, with the world so wide and quiet around you, the two of you held on, to each other, to the moments, to the fierce, impossible hope that love could outlast even the darkest nights.
You slipped away on a morning so soft it almost felt like a dream, a quiet that wasn’t quiet, a stillness so delicate it threatened to break under the weight of all that had come before.
Oscar was right there beside you, his fingers intertwined with yours like they were trying to hold your soul tethered to the world. His thumb traced small, endless circles on your skin, slow, steady, a silent rhythm meant to steady the breaking.
“I’m here. I’m here,” he whispered, over and over, like those words could pull you back, could slow the slipping, could make the unbearable pause just a little longer.
The room was hushed, the kind of hush that presses into your chest, heavier than silence. The only sound was the slow, steady beeping of machines, heart monitors and oxygen levels, a mechanical heartbeat echoing in the stillness. A lifeline counting down seconds neither of you dared to measure.
And then, suddenly, the beeping stopped.
The world tilted on an invisible axis, time fracturing in that fragile space between breaths.
Oscar’s hands, so full of trembling life, moved instinctively to close your eyes, his fingertips brushing the long lashes as if afraid the faintest touch might shatter the fragile peace.
He bent forward slowly, pressing a kiss to your forehead, soft and broken and sacred. The same kiss he had given you a thousand times before, but now it held the weight of a thousand goodbyes.
It was a thank you for every smile, every whispered secret, every brush of fingers in the dark.
A goodbye without words, heavier than anything either of you could say.
And an I love you, fierce, fragile, and absolute, folded into the quiet spaces between them.
His breath hitched, a soft, broken sound swallowed quickly, but the tremble in his body betrayed him. The weight of everything, loss, love, fear, pressed down like an ocean, and for the first time, he let himself collapse into it.
The room felt colder now, emptier. The light slipping through the window seemed too bright, too sharp, cutting through the haze of grief that wrapped around him like a shroud.
He stayed there, holding your hand long after the machines went silent, as if by holding on, he could keep you from truly leaving.
Minutes passed, hours maybe. Time blurred and folded in on itself.
He whispered your name, again and again, like a prayer, a plea, a thread back to you.
And in that fragile, aching dawn, all that was left was the echo of your touch, a whisper on his skin, a ghost of warmth he could never quite forget.
The plane’s wheels hit the tarmac in Australia, but Oscar felt like he was still falling, endlessly, spiralling through a darkness he couldn’t escape. His chest was tight, his lungs gasping for air as if the very atmosphere was too heavy to breathe.
His hands clenched so tight around the strap of his bag that his knuckles blazed white, fingers digging into the worn leather as if it were the only thing tethering him to reality. Around him, the airport hummed and buzzed, people rushing past, rolling suitcases and distant chatter swirling in a chaotic current, but it all felt muffled, as if he was submerged underwater, watching the world drift farther away.
He moved forward with a hollow weight, stepping through the sliding glass doors, and was immediately hit by the thick, humid air of the late afternoon. It wrapped around him like a damp blanket, sticky against his skin, carrying the sharp scent of eucalyptus and salt from the nearby sea. The sounds of cicadas droned in the background, persistent and relentless, but the familiar noises, the calling birds, the rustling leaves, felt foreign, distant, like fragments of a dream he couldn’t quite reach.
Everything that should have felt like home, the sky stretched wide and heavy, the heat clinging to his clothes, instead sliced through him like shards of glass. The ache inside twisted deeper, sharper.
When he finally reached his mum’s front door, his hand hovered over the handle, trembling. His heart pounded fiercely, a wild, desperate drumbeat that threatened to shatter his ribs from the inside. The silence around him pressed in, thick and suffocating, broken only by the faint creak of the wooden porch beneath his feet.
Before he could knock, the door swung open.
His mum stood there, her face a mix of surprise and dread. The usual warmth in her eyes flickered and faltered when she saw the hollow emptiness in his gaze, the way his shoulders slumped, carrying invisible burdens too heavy for words.
“Oscar,” she breathed, voice soft and catching somewhere between heartbreak and fear.
He didn’t answer. He barely nodded, stepping inside like a ghost crossing the threshold of a place that should have been sanctuary but felt more like a tomb. The door closed behind him with a hollow, final thud, the sound echoing in the sudden, suffocating quiet.
The walls were lined with photos, frozen smiles from holidays long past, birthday candles flickering in bright colours, moments captured in laughter that felt impossibly distant now. He barely glanced at them, his eyes glazed over, as if the memories pressed too close, too sharp.
And then, without warning, he broke.
Tears spilled free, hot and unrelenting, streaming down his face in thick rivers of grief. He sank to the floor, collapsing into himself, shaking violently as sobs tore through his chest like knives. The sound was raw and ragged, a primal cry of loss and desperation that filled the empty room.
His hands covered his face, fingers digging into his skin as if trying to hold the pieces together, but the weight of everything shattered him again and again.
His voice came out as a broken whisper, ragged and pained, repeating you name like a fragile lifeline, a mantra to keep you near.
“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
His mum was there in an instant, sitting down beside him, arms wrapping around his shaking shoulders like a fragile shield. Her own tears fell silently, wetting his hair, and in that moment, two broken souls found solace in their shared grief.
They stayed like that, locked together in the unbearable silence that screamed everything they couldn’t say aloud. Minutes stretched into hours, time bending under the weight of sorrow and the fragile thread of comfort between them.
Oscar didn’t know how to move forward, how to find air again in a world that had suddenly stopped breathing with him. He didn’t know how to live without you.
All he knew, in that quiet, shattering moment, was that here, in this room filled with memories and loss, he could finally fall apart.
Because if he didn’t break, completely and utterly, he wasn’t sure how he’d survive at all.
The cheers still echoed around him like a distant storm as Oscar stepped away from the podium, trophy cradled awkwardly in his arms. The flashes of cameras burned behind his eyelids, but his vision felt blurred, not from sweat or adrenaline, but from the tight knot of something raw and hollow inside.
Out there, under the dazzling lights and roaring applause, he was the champion. The winner. The man who had crossed the finish line first.
But here, in the quiet of the cramped, dimly lit corridor behind the scenes, the victory felt fragile, a beautiful mask stretched thin over the ache in his chest.
He sank down onto the cold floor, back pressed against the rough concrete wall, the trophy resting beside him like a cold, distant relic. His hands trembled as they unfolded from his lap, and the weight of the moment finally crashed down, the victory and the loss tangled impossibly together.
His breath hitched as the tears came, slow at first, then spilling free like a broken dam. No one saw. No one could see the way his body shook with grief, how every sob was a quiet scream for you.
He whispered you name into the silence, a fragile prayer, a desperate call across the distance between now and then.
I did it.
I’m here.
But I wish you were too.
The memory of you smile, soft and steady, flared through the dark like a candle flickering against a storm. The way your hand felt in his, the warmth of your voice in the quiet moments, the laughter they’d shared in those impossible, beautiful times.
He pressed his forehead against the wall, breath shallow, heart breaking in slow, jagged pieces.
There was no crowd here. No cameras. Just the quiet, the unbearable stillness that screamed louder than any cheer.
And in that stillness, he allowed himself to grieve. To miss you. To feel the weight of the empty space beside him that no trophy could ever fill.
Because winning without you was its own kind of loss, a victory marked by absence.
Slowly, painfully, Oscar wiped the tears from his face. He picked up the trophy, fingers curling around the cold metal, and for the first time, he let the grief and pride coexist, two halves of the same fragile truth.
He wasn’t just racing against others now. He was racing against the shadow of what had been taken.
And maybe, just maybe, holding onto that ache was the only way to keep running.
Late at night, when the world finally softened and the noise of the day fell away, Oscar sat alone in the quiet of his room. The darkness pressed close, swallowing everything but the small, smooth stone resting heavy in his palm, cold and unyielding, a cruel reminder of all he had lost.
He traced its worn edges, fingertips lingering over scratches carved by time, each one a ghost of a memory, a fragment of a past he could never reclaim.
His mind drifted to mornings they’d never have again. The way sunlight once spilled warm and golden across the sheets, catching the dust in lazy beams. The soft weight of your head against his shoulder, the quiet rhythm of breath mingling in the stillness before the world woke.
He missed that lightness. The effortless comfort of ordinary days where love was as simple as a shared smile or a hand held tight.
He thought about the laughter that once filled rooms, bright and unrestrained, now only an echo in the hollow chambers of his heart.
The ache was sharp and raw, a jagged pain that settled deep and refused to fade. It twisted through his chest like a slow, relentless burn, hollow and heavy all at once.
He swallowed hard, his throat tight with the weight of unshed tears, and whispered into the silence, to the shadows, to the empty space beside him, to the ghost of a voice that had once been his world —
“I miss it. I miss it so much. The way things were, the way you were. I miss every quiet morning, every stolen moment. The way love felt like breathing, easy, natural, endless. I miss you. More than words can hold. More than I can bear. Sometimes it feels like my heart is breaking all over again, a thousand small fractures in the same place. I want to hold onto it, this ache, because it’s all that keeps you alive inside me. But God, it hurts. It hurts like hell.”
His breath hitched, tears spilling slow and steady down his cheeks, soaking into the dark fabric of his shirt.
He closed his eyes and let the grief wash over him, fierce, unyielding, endless, because in that brokenness, in that aching longing, there was still love.
And love, even when it’s pain, is never truly gone.
Every race day, before the engines roared and the world blurred into a frenzy of speed and adrenaline, Oscar found a moment of sacred stillness.
In the dim light of the garage, surrounded by the hum of preparation, he’d reach for his helmet.
On its sleek, polished surface, tucked near the visor, was a small but unmistakable mark: a delicate symbol, something only he truly understood. It was his homage to you, a silent thread connecting him to the memory that fuelled every lap, every corner, every heart-pounding moment on the track.
Before pulling the helmet down over his head, he’d press a soft kiss against that mark, his eyes closing for a brief, trembling second. A whisper in the chaos. A promise carried in the brush of his lips.
“I’m here. I’m racing for you.”
And after the race, whether triumph or struggle, when he peeled off the helmet and the roar of the crowd faded into distant echoes, he’d bring it back to his lips again.
That kiss was a benediction, a thank you, a quiet “I miss you” folded into the space where words failed.
Those around him began to notice the ritual, the way his eyes lingered on that mark, the gentle reverence in his touch. They understood, without needing explanation, that behind every fearless driver is a story of love, loss, and the rituals that keep us grounded.
And for Oscar, that small, sacred mark on his helmet was the tether to a love that still raced beside him, lap after lap.
Life moved forward, slow, uneven, and beautifully imperfect. It wasn’t a sudden leap or a sharp turn, but a gradual unfolding, like a sunrise pushing through the horizon after a long, dark night. Each day brought new colours, new sounds, new moments that slipped quietly into the spaces left behind.
Oscar met new people, strangers who became friends, conversations that blossomed into laughter, and faces that softened the edges of his loneliness. He learned to smile again, not because the pain had vanished, but because it had found its place beside something hopeful, something gentle.
He laughed, sometimes unexpectedly, a lightness that surprised him. He loved again, too, though not the same way, not the way he once had. It was quieter now, slower, a love shaped by loss and tempered with gratitude for every small connection.
But beneath all of this, beneath the smiles, the new beginnings, the growing light, there was always a space in his heart that belonged only to you.
A soft, sacred corner, untouched and unwavering. No matter how full his life became, that space remained, a silent sanctuary where your memory lived on, tender and alive.
Sometimes, in the stillness of evening, when the sky faded to gentle shades of lavender and gold, Oscar would find himself pausing. He’d look out at the vast expanse above and feel a quiet presence, as if you were there, watching, whispering in the soft rustle of leaves or the warm brush of a summer breeze.
You weren’t gone.
You had simply changed form, no longer beside him in the way he wished, but woven into the very fabric of the world around him.
A part of the light that filtered through the trees, the warmth that lingered long after the sun had set, the hush of night folding gently over everything.
In that knowing, there was comfort, a subtle, enduring truth that love doesn’t vanish. It shifts, it transforms, but it never truly leaves.
And so life moved on. Not perfect, never easy, but filled with the quiet grace of memories carried softly, like whispers carried on the wind.
Because love, real, lasting love, holds a space for forever.
And in that space, you remained.
Always.
Um, I think I'm evil what the actual heck did I write. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed. As always, I am always open to suggestions and thanks for all the support!
-18+ explicit sexual content, p in v!! breeding/pregnancy talk, spanking, creampie, slightttt overstimulation, mentions of pregnancy and children, pillow talk!!! multiple orgasms, andddd clingy aerion! xoxo! ᥫ᭡
the first rays of dawn were just beginning to creep through the blinds of your shared bedroom painting stripes of light across the worn hardwood floors. you woke before your husband, as you often did, and became acutely aware of the firm, warm pressure against your ass from behind.
a mischievous thought took root. slowly, deliberately, you began to shift your hips, pressing back against him. the friction was exquisite, even through the thin layers of your nightgown and his boxers. you did it again, a slow, deliberate grind that had his cock twitching against you. a soft sigh escaped your lips at the pleasurable contact.
behind you, aerion stirred with a low groan. his arm, which had been draped loosely over your waist, tightened, pulling you more firmly against him. "mmmph," he mumbled into your hair, still mostly asleep. "what're you doin', baby..."
"wakin' you up," you whispered, pressing your ass back again.
"i can feel that." his hand slid down from your waist to your hip, his fingers gripping the soft fabric of your nightgown.
with a gentleness that contrasted the morning wood pressing insistently against you, he slowly bunched up your nightgown, lifting it inch by inch until it was pooled around your waist. his other hand moved to his own boxers, the sound of elastic snapping as he freed himself.
you felt the hot, velvet-smooth skin of his cock as he guided it between your thighs, the blunt head nudging against your already slick folds. he was leaking pre-cum, and he used it to paint your pussy, spreading the wetness around with slow, deliberate circles of his cockhead.
"sh sh sh," he murmured against your ear, his voice still thick with sleep but laced with growing arousal. "don't wanna wake the baby just yet."
you bit your lip to stifle a moan as his cockhead caught on your clit, sending a jolt of pleasure through you. he did it again, then again, teasing you mercilessly.
"so wet already," he whispered against your neck.
his words were filthy, but his touch was tender. he continued to rub himself against you, coating his shaft in your wetness.
"gonna slide right in," he promised softly. "gonna fill you up before the sun's even properly risen."
you pushed back against him, a silent invitation. he took it, aligning himself with your entrance and pushing in just the tip. you gasped at the stretch, your body already craving more.
"shhhh," he soothed gently, though his own voice was strained with the effort of holding back. he pulled out slightly, then pushed in a little deeper. “i know baby, i know…”
he continued his teasing, shallow thrusts that had you squirming with need. each time he pushed in a little deeper, until finally, with one smooth stroke, he buried himself to the hilt. you both moaned softly at the feeling of being completely joined.
"fuck," he breathed, his forehead resting against your shoulder. "how come you are always so perfect? hmm? y’made for me?”
all you could do was nod and press your face further into the pillow under you. he began to move, his strokes slow and deep.
his hand came around to find your clit, rubbing it in time with his thrusts. "wanna make you cum like this," he whispered. "then fuck you proper. gonna fill this pretty pussy with so much cum it'll be leaking out of you all day. maybe we'll get lucky and put another baby in you right now."
his dirty talk, combined with the sensations building inside you, had you spiraling toward your release faster than you expected. his fingers on your clit became more insistent, his thrusts a little harder, a little deeper.
"that's it, baby," he encouraged, sensing how close you were. "cum on my cock. let me feel that pussy squeeze my cock, cm’on."
his words were your undoing. your orgasm washed over you, waves of pleasure that had you clenching around him. he groaned at the feeling, his hips stilling as he let you ride it out.
as you came down from your high, he pulled out. “y’still want me to fill you? work for that cum, baby.”
“are you gonna help me?” you whisper sleepily to which he only nods and pulls you up onto his lap, straddling him. his hands gripped your ass, his expression peaceful as he rested leaning back, hands gripping any soft skin he could grasp on your warm body.
you finally sink down onto his cock, taking him deep inside you. the new angle allowed him to hit that perfect spot inside you, and soon you were building toward another orgasm.
"look at you, pretty girl…" he breathed, his eyes fixed on where your bodies joined. "gonna make me cum so deep inside you..."
his words spurred you on, and you increased your pace, grinding against him with abandon. his hands tightened on your ass, and suddenly he brought one down in a sharp smack that echoed in the small room.
"aerion!" you gasped, the sting mixing with pleasure.
"shhh," he grinned, smacking you again. "you'll wake the baby."
he brought his hand down again, a sharp crack that made you jolt and clench around him. "fuck, look at that," he breathed, mesmerized.
"i fuckin’ love this ass," he panted, his voice rough with desire.
he spanked you again, the sound sharp and dirty in the quiet room. his nasty talk sent a fresh wave of arousal through you, and you rode him harder, chasing your release. his hands roamed over your body, gripping your hips, your waist, your tits, before returning to your ass.
"can feel you drippin' all over me. my pretty wife has got the wettest pussy in the world…” he groaned, his voice a low, guttural rasp.
“i love you aerion- i love- oh fuck.”
he kneaded the flesh of your ass, his thumbs spreading you open slightly as you bounced on him. his gaze was intense, burning with a primal hunger that made your stomach clench.
he leaned up, capturing one of your nipples in his mouth and sucking hard. you cried out softly, your fingers tangling in his hair. he bit down gently before releasing it with a wet pop.
"gonna get these tits all full of milk again soon, mama," he murmured, his voice dropping an octave as he used the name that always made you melt. "gonna knock you up again. can't wait to see it."
the word sent a jolt straight to your core. "don’t stop aerion," you whimpered, your movements becoming more frantic.
"i won’t, i won’t," he soothed, though his hips were snapping up to meet yours with increasing urgency. "i know what you need.”
his hands tightened on your ass, holding you in place as he began to thrust up into you from below, taking control of the rhythm. "gonna make sure it takes. gonna plug her up so none of it leaks out."
he shifted slightly, changing the angle, and suddenly his cock was hitting that perfect spot inside you with every thrust. your vision blurred, your body tensing as your orgasm began to build. "thaaaat's it," he encouraged, sensing your impending release. "there you go..."
his words, combined with the relentless stimulation, were your undoing. your second orgasm crashed over you, intense and overwhelming. you cried out his name, your body convulsing with pleasure as you collapsed against his chest.
he held you through it, his hips stilling as your pussy clenched around him. as you came down from your high, he began to move again, his strokes hard and deep, chasing his own release. the bed creaked softly in protest, but you were too lost in pleasure to care. his hands gripped your hips, holding you in place as he fucked up into you lazily.
"gonna fill you up," he panted, his rhythm becoming erratic. "gonna give you another baby."
with a final, deep thrust, he buried himself to the hilt and groaned, his cock pulsing as he filled you with his hot cum. "fuck yes," he breathed.
you lay there on top of him, boneless and sated, his softening cock still inside you as you both caught your breath. the room was quiet now, save for your mingled breathing and the soft sounds of the morning beginning outside.
aerion's arms came around you, holding you close against his chest. he pressed a soft kiss to your sweat-dampened forehead.
"best way to wake up, bar none." his hands stroking up and down your back. you settled back against his chest, your head tucked under his chin. his heartbeat was a steady, reassuring rhythm beneath your ear.
“get some rest while we still can. baby’s gonna wake up soon…”
you laughed softly under your breath, already feeling your eyes grow heavy again as he held you tighter, both of you savoring the last quiet moments before your day started.