Keeping an alive tumblr in 2026 is proof of one's sincerity and authenticity - a type of person who enjoys posting for the sake of it with absolutely nothing to be gained....just the enjoyment of curation and self expression untainted by opportunity and relevance
Tags: DESPERATION, extreme stalking, toxic bond, obsessive behavior, eventual smut, dubcon to con, story takes place after julie, north star but worse, youre his sun, reader is referred to as very beautiful/charming so prepare for intense jealousy
Author's note: Guys. We're finally here! Dex is tweaking juuust a little but we signed up for it so it's okay. I had like a tattoo by sade in mind while writing this whole thing.
You stood there, fidgeting with your bikini straps as you waited for an answer from the man in front of you.
You'd been pacing around your room for about five minutes before this. Second-guessing if it was weird to ask your middle aged neighbor friend; who you probably had a small crush on, out for a day on the beach. Before you moved in you appreciated Dex a lot as a buddy. Someone who'd be there when you needed it, a mature friend. But the more you'd see him, in the hallways, outside the house, in the grocery store — the more you began thinking about him. It was just so coincidental for you two to bump into eachother so often that you genuinely started to debate if he was following you. Maybe you were making it a bigger deal than it was in your head? There was just something about it, about him— that made your thoughts linger on the possibility of it.
Then Dex started to bake you cookies.
Every Wednesday and Friday morning you'd get ready for work to the smell of chocolate chip cookies. It was so weird how that smell penetrated your wall— and you could swear the sounds had started to get a bit louder too— but you ignored it and just blamed it on some kind of crack or hole that formed somewhere. This building wasn't a sight for sore eyes to begin with, which is why the rent was so affordable.
When you'd sit down for breakfast, your bell would ring, every, single, time. Perfectly at the moment you sat down at the table. It was almost eerie how good the timing was because you wouldn't finish your morning routine at the same time every day. Sometimes your lipstick would be lost, and you'd search through your bags and jean pockets to find it. Sometimes your hair would be more tangled than usual, and you'd have to re-do the hairstyle multiple times before it actually "sat" nicely. In any case, the time it would take before you sat down was very scattered and still— that's when the bell would ring.
You'd open the door regardless. Looking up at your tall blonde neighbor holding a tray with seven warm cookies in front of you. At first his delivery was very awkward and nervous.
"Hey there, I—uh, made more than I needed to. Here you go."
You'd say thanks and he'd say thanks too— for whatever reason, before turning away and disappearing into his apartment. The more often he'd ring your bell, the more confident and sharp his delivery became.
"Morning (....). These are for you. Did you sleep okay?" He'd say, lingering on your doorstep with a look so very warm it made you itchy.
Dex was handsome. There was no way around that. He was an incredibly good looking man. Sharp smile, nice white teeth, broad shoulders and almond eyes. Pronounced cheekbones and a sharp jawline. You liked looking at him when he first set foot in the café, but you weren't the type to fall head over heels for looks alone.
But then he saved you from possible assault at that party, brought you home without doing anything weird— except that your heels were missing; which you waved away as needed forensic evidence. In the aftermath, when the world felt like it was crumbling after the fight with your friend Carin, he was there—texting back in seconds, guiding you through the labyrinth of evidence, fortifying your claim for reparations with a patience that bordered on saintly. At the café, he tipped like a man who didn’t count coins, sliding bills across the table with a generosity that left you stunned. You didn’t question it—hell, the pay for the job was abysmal, and every extra dollar felt like a lifeline.
Yet, despite the obvious wealth he could have flaunted, he never did. No designer labels, no flashy watches, no ostentatious displays of privilege—just a quiet, unassuming presence.
Then there was the beach store. You had worn that skimpy attire on purpose, a silent test for your own curiosity. What kind of man are you really? And when his reaction was one of flustered discomfort—nothing lascivious, nothing predatory—he excused himself with a haste that spoke volumes. It wasn’t the response you expected. And in that moment, your trust in him deepened.
Dex was almost too good to be true.
Which was precisely why you tried to friendzone him, to keep him at arm’s length. There was something about him—something elusive, something that didn’t quite fit. But then again, you’d encountered far stranger men in your life, and you’d learned to overlook the oddities in exchange for the rare moments of genuine connection. And, if you were honest, the exhaustion of work and the fallout in your friendgroup had left you hollow. Starved for the way he made you feel when the world wasn’t pressing down on your shoulders. Those kitchen nightmare dinner nights, those quiet mornings where you'd acknowledge eachother on the balcony—
At work you'd think about the cookies he made; something about them and... him made you want more and more. You also thought of how selfless he was. How much he did his best to make you comfortable when you'd ask him to talk— distancing himself from you and looking down. It was sweet. He was sweet. You felt sweet and warm thinking about him.
After that epiphany, you became a bit more antsy everytime he rang your bell. And everytime you opened the door and he'd stand there with that shy sharp smile of his you could just feel your body respond. You wanted to spend more time with him but didn't know if the feeling was mutual.
Dex would go hot and cold a lot. Sometimes very eager and willing to stick around, while other times he'd brush past you and quickly slam his door.
Such a paradox. I wonder what you struggle with so much...? You thought as you shook your head at the floor, volleyball tightening in your hand. "—I know you're busy Dex, but I figured I could ask."
"I'm not. I would like to go with you." He smiled and leaned on the doorframe. "Just wondering why you're asking me... all of a sudden."
"Well I thought I already said why." The nerves crawled into you shoulders, nearly making you shake. "My friends—"
"You're lying."
He said it without hesitation, eyes penetrating yours without blinking. Your heart began to pound quicker, and you felt off— but not sure in what way off.
"Excuse me?"
"Sorry, that uh— didn't come out the way I intended. I meant, don't you just want to invite me for me?
You laughed away the silence and bit your lip. This was weird? Or were you making it weird? Maybe he knew you liked him, and didn't like that you were younger than him? Maybe this was his way of prodding at you before ultimately ending it all here; fair compared to what you pulled in that beach store.
Dex suddenly laughed, voice deep and gravelly.
"Scratch that. Why don't you come inside? I made some coffee and still have leftover cookies. My morning ritual is important to me, can't make any decisions without it."
You looked into his apartment and then back up at him before ultimately agreeing.
---------
Dex's POV
His heart roared when you stepped in his apartment. You'd been eating his nicotine laced cookies like the good girl he knew you were. Always finishing the tray before night-time; he concluded from the peeping hole.
You'd become more ignorant, more accepting and aloof to his behavior. After all, your brain had literally started to connect Dex and his cookies to the feel good chemicals he made you become hooked on.
The pills in his cabinet hadn't been cutting it anymore. He took twice the daily recommended but the obsessive craze over you still screamed louder than the pills. It made him mad, absolutely fucking crazed with want and desire— but now also paranoia and anger; the two feelings the antipsychotics muffled.
The days used to go by perfectly. Dex would see you in the hallways, watch you through his walls, talk to you and invite himself over for dinner whenever you had a free day. He'd make sure you wouldn't reject him by watching your mood when you entered the living room every morning. If you were grumpy and tired he would leave you alone for the day. Were you happy yet bored? That was perfect, and he'd immediately toss all his plans for the day in the garbage to attempt a visit. He'd brush his teeth until his gums nearly bled, wash himself so obsessively till his back turned pink. Ruffle his blonde hair, comb it back, mess up. Ruffle it again, comb it sloooowly— mess up. Ruffle, comb sloooowly— GOD DAMN IT!
Blood filled the sink and all his medication slowly disolved under the running tap. His fist had gone straight through the mirror, shards of glass distorting his face. Blood dripped from his hand, and he thought of taking a sharp shard to cut one finger off completely. This finger had come between him and looking good for you. He must cast it away—it was rotten. A fucking traitor.
Just wanted to look good for her... Dex slid down his bathroom wall, blood freckling the white sterile tiles as he fumbled around for the phone in his jeans. Need to hear my baby. I need to. The buzzing in his ears made him dizzy, dark urge telling him to cast his flesh away—
'Dex, can you maybe stay on the line for a bit?'
His breathing regulated, bloody finger smearing red streaks across the replay button on the screen.
Repeat.
'Dex, can you maybe stay on the line for a bit?'
The buzzing slowly faded alongside the violent thoughts.
Repeat.
'Dex, can you maybe stay on the line for a bit?'
He laid on the floor while saying your name, tears welling up in his eyes as he cradled himself into fetal position. "Thank you baby... my love... oh my everything... love you so much..."
Dex hated himself. Always had. Ever since his parents passed and he was stuck in that orphanage— he blamed himself for never being picked. Adults would stop by during play-time to watch the kids. They would pick the boys who seemed sweetest, the boys who would share toys without issue, who'd play with others and eagerly say hello to visitors. Dex however? Well he was always sitting by himself. Didn't know why cause he wanted to share his toys too. It's just that he didn't understand when he was supposed to share. By the time he was willing to hand them over the boy already started crying. Dr. Eileen Mercer, his psychologist, used to tell him it was because he had trouble with empathy. Empathy meant feeling pain for others and knowing when they're sad— right? The first part was very difficult, the second one even more. Dex had started to depend on logic to knit pick if he was supposed to act sad for someone. Try to read as many visual cues before a person was about to cry. Mirroring became a second tool. If he couldn't understand someone's pain with logic, he would simply mimic them. He'd subtly mouth the words the person was about to say, pulling down his eyebrows at the same time they did, with a little bit of delay so he wasn't freaking them out. But no matter how much he tried it never worked. His logical approach moved slower than someone's natural emotional response to pain, so those few miliseconds of delay made people feel uncomfortable. Uncomfortably meant uncanny. And uncanny meant fear. That kept him an outcast, all his life.
But then he met you and his body responded—real and raw—an emotional burst of love that he didn't have to fake. Something that just flowed through him, something unlogical, something new and old and normal and abnormal all at once.
It. Was. Everything.
Dex hated the idea of hurting you, but despised the idea of losing you even more. That was what set him apart from others. From normal people. To Dex, the ends justified the means. Anything to make you stay.
He couldn't afford you ditching him and finding someone else down the road. He'd know it wouldn't take long before you noticed he was, 'odd.' He was pretty sure you already did, with how sedated you were around him— like your brain was trying to turn off the alarm bells that would trigger around him just to have a casual conversation. Dex wondered how much longer you could numb yourself to his weird behavior. How much longer you could make yourself delusional to it all— and the time came where you began to stop. You'd ask him why he was in the grocery store at this time, ask him why he was always sorting mail in the hallway, asked about him coincidentally opening his door when you'd go out— ask him about weird rustling at his side of the wall.
No, no, no that wouldn't do and he fixed it before you would push him away further than that stupid fucking friendzone you put him in to keep him at a distance, before you'd dump him, leave him— and Dex had no choice, no control of his body because you had taken the reigns and spurred him on, he had to keep you close so he could breathe because the sun was his calling and he was Icarus. Forget about the stars, the north one the south one none of it fucking mattered without his sun to illuminate them—You were the bane of his existence; of the entire earth. Without you he'd have to take life away from every pathethic creature he shared air with on this godforsaken rock because if he couldn't enjoy the sun they shouldn't either!
So Dex thought of creating a magnetic field of sorts. The same way all the planets spun around the sun without flying out of line, he'd have to build something like that for you two to stay stuck together. Something that would make you come back, an itch you couldn't stop. An addictive substance.
He had browsed the internet for the safest one. Heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine where too much for his girl. He would rather chop his hands off than put that in your system— no it must be something strong but not too dangerous.
People who smoke cigarettes ignore the damage it does to their lungs, their teeth—shit their entire body. But they still pick it up and light it, inhaling it with the knowledge of how bad it is, just for that rush of satisfaction and calm, right?
Dex settled on nicotine and very high amounts of it mixed into his cookie dough batter. With this he'd make you ignore all of his shortcomings and problems. With this you'd stay blind to his quirks. You'd inhale knowing what he was and still come back for more.
Dex couldn't help but sob before he brought you your first platter the first time.
'Your moral compass isn't broken, Dex.'
'I killed them with rocks Ms. Mercer.'
'Are you going to kill me?'
'No, I—'
He didn't want to be the bad guy—he yearned to be like everyone else. Yearned to be normal so you'd love him. Wanted you to hold him because you cared. Didn't want you to be with him because of a nicotine addiction— but that dark urge reassured him that this was just the whistle to bring you over. Like how humans are lured in by the smell of good food, but then ultimately stick around at the taste of it.
Dex would give you the best taste. He'd tend to you like the goddess you were. He'd be good for you; best you've ever fucking had and best husband and father to the children you'd willingly grant him. He'd make it all worth it.
"So, how's your day been?" You asked, sitting down in the stiff wooden chair at his table.
"Pretty good. Coffee?" He poured it before you could say yes and plated you with two cookies. The ends justify the means. They justify it. I'm saving you.
"—Oh thanks. Hm, these are so addictive." You mused, dipping one in your cup and immediately consuming it.
"I don't think I can join you to the beach today." Dex wouldn't let you out in that outfit. No one should know what your body looks like in a bikini—No, this was only for him, his holy grail; only he could drink from it's chalice. "I have a lot of work to do. New case openings."
"Oh!" You shook your head and smiled. "Hey don't worry about it. I can just go myself."
"Hm. I don't think that's a good idea." His hand began to shake under the table and he squeezed into his thigh to calm down. He needed a higher dose, felt himself lose control. No, actually, you just had to stay here with him today. The only reason he was shaking was out of fear that you'd leave him behind. If you'd stay it would stop. Would it be smart to be honest and ask you to watch a movie? No, what if you denied? Then he couldn't lie and give you another reason to stay home. Maybe he should lie first and then ask for a movie? "There's been report of multiple stabbings and battery charged on that beach. Started a few days ago, probably some mob territory war." He finished pouring his coffee and put the kettle down, eyeing you up and down.
"Well I didn't hear anything about it on the news, that's strange..." You took another bite of the cookie and rested your chin on your palm. "Is it still a private case?"
"Yeah. We don't want to alert the suspects, gonna let them keep going until evidence is irrefutable. Not the most honorable way of handling it but we've lost cases due to lack of evidence before."
"Like with my attacker at the party..." You slid off your sunglasses and put them on the table. "Great world we live in."
I took care of him for you. I'll make this world better for you, Dex trailed in thought.
"Welp." You stood up and grabbed you bag. "I guess I'll just chill on my balcony for today. Don't want to disturb your work."
"—which I was planning on doing tonight. I'd still like to, uh. Hang with you. Maybe on my balcony this time?"
"Are you sure? It's really no problem."
"Yes." He watched your eyes trail over the empty cookie plate. "...want more?"
"No thank you, I ate so many already—I really shouldn't. I don't know what magic you put in those but they're better than the ones from the bakery... Kinda better than any I've tasted. Don't give them to anyone on a diet, kay? Cause you just keep eating them, it's mad."
Dex ran his hand through his blonde-greying hair, smile warm as he gathered the empty plates and cups from the table. With a green sponge in hand he began to scrub the plate, sound of water splashing through the sink. "It's just me. My magic touch."
You hummed in sarcastic acknowledgement before walking for the door.
"—hey hold up." He shut the water off and put the plates in the drying rack, wiping his wet hands on a grey handtowel. "I've got some clothing I don't wear anymore, been meaning to toss them out but thought of donating them to my helpless little neighbor instead. For a good cause." The joke landed out of balance, uncanny and strange yet still earning a subtle titter out of you.
"Aw that's really kind, thank you. Hm, maybe you can give them to me after I'm done changing in my apartment? I'll knock in a bit." You opened his door and softly closed it behind you with a satisfying click.
Silence.
As if possessed Dex darted to his closet and withdrew his nicest looking t-shirts and button ups from the rack. Four in total, he didn't have a lot of clothing— and scampered back into the living room. They were way too big for you, but the idea of you wearing them on the couch, eating ice cream or working from home on your laptop— it cradled his little heart with a fire so intense it made him jittery.
When you knocked he calmy walked to the door, opening it with a casual lop-sided smile before pointing to the shirts. "I already laid them out there. You can change here, treat my apartment as an H&M, it's uh, just as bland. Bathroom is—" Shit. The mirror was still broken. Need to make up an excuse... "Down the hall to the left. Don't mind the broken mirror, I shut it too hard on my way to work. Flimsy thing, you know how they can be. Alright." He clapped his hands together while looking outside. "I'm gonna set up the balcony so we can sit there. You want tea or anything else?"
"Ooh tea would be nice, thank you."
"Coming right up."
He watched you disappear into the bathroom with his shirts wrapped over your arms, and the question clawed at his ribs like a restless specter: How do you see me, (....)?
Was Dex, in your eyes, the kind of man whose presence lingered like a melody? With charm woven into his words, a gaze so warm it made you shiver and the quiet confidence of an ex-military who carried himself with purpose? Or did you dismiss him as little more than a hollow shell, a mannequin draped in the illusion of stability from being FBI, a dead eyed weirdo with a polished enough personality for you to give it a chance?
Dex exhaled sharply, pressing his thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose in a futile attempt to dam the pressure building behind his eyes. He breathed out in one controlled steady stream, a reflex honed over years of practice with his psychologist.
Unshakable. That was the face he presented to the world—the man who never faltered, never wavered, never let a single crack mar the neutral face he wore daily. But you? You had seen past the facade once or twice. The way he'd come back home in shambles after a day of masking at work. The way he would stutter and stumble when you'd ask him about the chance of seeing eachother in the gorcery store so often. The constant thought of you unraveling him—of you realizing, with dawning clarity, that beneath the surface was a man worse than you believed him to be—sent tremors through the carefully constructed edifice of his control.
He supposed the chance of you viewing him as the first option; the charming one, was bigger than the latter. Why else would you still be here?
The warm summer breeze flattened itself on his face, clinging to the dab of moisture on his lip— green jasmine tea. Dex put your cup down on the small table. Even on a day like this; blue skies, no clouds, nice breeze— crime kept on rolling. The sound of sirens would appear every two minutes, and Dex wondered how much crime, murder and robbery was all happening at the same time across places, for that siren to roar up again. And again. Another man shot dead for ten dollars. Another woman chased in the street. Another shopkeeper held at gunpoint. Another kid left an orphan. Like he was.
Dex’s stomach twisted into a heavy knot at the mere thought of a future entwined with yours in a place like this—a city that killed, murdered and consumed hope like rust on steel. The specter of loss coiled around his ribs, squeezing until the thought of you, of your children, his blood—being torn from him clouded his mind. It was an inevitability he refused to entertain. Tonight, he would carve through the digital void, dissecting data until he unearthed the ten most impenetrable sanctuaries on Earth, places where fate itself would bend to his will, where he would be the only one out of many owning a gun. The spoon dragged through his coffee as his gaze lifted from the flickering lights of a police cruiser to the indifferent blue of the sky.
If you refused to see reason, if you didn’t yield to the inevitable and leave this place to move to another with him, he would have to persuade you. The question wasn’t if, but how. The worst of it wasn’t the resistance—the screaming, the flailing, the dawning horror as you pieced together the fragments of his slow design. That your assaulter was melting in a barrel of acid, or the poisoning of; what seemed to be your father figure, Earl. No the true nightmare was the moment you’d look at him and see what he truly was: a lovesick creature that wore skin and had no feigned empathy left to offer.
In such a state you'd run from him like the monster he knew he was— and then he'd have to subdue you— no. He didn't want to go there.
The darkness inside him hissed, a serpent coiled in his chest, its breath hot with temptation. Another option.
You carve pieces from yourself in the dead of night, feeding them to her drop by drop, hidden in meals until her blood runs thick with the presence of you. And when she discovers the truth—when she realizes the monster she’s bound to—she’ll hate you.
You'll take the M11 from the drawer, Dex. You'll sit still with the barrel below your chin, the trigger a whisper against the silence and when it pops you’ll bleed into the next life. Not as dust. Not as memory.
But as her.
A fragment of you, buried in the marrow of her bones. A ghost in her veins. And when the end comes for her, you’ll wait in the dark beside her, a shadow in the grave, bound together in the void where even time cannot pry you apart.
“Hey.”
Your voice wrapped around him like sunlight breaking through storm clouds. The wail of sirens dissolved into the rhythmic chorus of seals barking along the pier, their cries bouncing off the wooden planks like laughter. The city’s chaos muted into a distant hum, replaced by the carefree chatter of families weaving through crosswalks, their arms laden with shopping bags, their faces alight with the simple joy of ordinary life. Dex’s shoulders unknotted. He sank deeper into his chair, the weight of his thoughts no longer pressing him down.
You fixed him.
“Hey, sunshine.” The words slipped out before he could cage them, raw and unfiltered. He tried to mask the tremor in his voice with a smirk, squinting up at the shirt you wore—his shirt, swallowed by your frame, the fabric pooling around you like an oversized shroud. It should have looked ridiculous. Instead, it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
Your smile faltered, uncertain, but your eyes held something like curiosity. “Sunshine?” You laughed softly, the sound like wind chimes in a breeze, and settled into the chair beside him. “So we’re on nickname basis already, huh?”
Dex’s fingers twitched toward your untouched cup. “I—uh. There’s tea. For you.”
You cradled the cup in your palms, exhaling as you turned to the view. “Thank you… And thank you for the clothes.” Your voice was gentle, almost apologetic. “I mean, they don’t fit perfectly as you can see, but I was looking for something comfortable and these are way better than what I had. Are you sure you want to give them all away? Some of them look brand-new. I feel bad accepting them.”
“Don’t worry about it.” His gaze locked onto you, unblinking. “They weren’t doing anything useful in my closet. You look… r-really nice."
Shit.
His delivery was a disaster. A pathetic, stuttering mess. “I—mean, you always look nice. I just—” His stomach twisted, butterflies rioting beneath his ribs, his ears burning like brands pressed to flesh. "Uh, yeah."
You tilted your head, warmth radiating from you in waves. “Oh, thank you, Dex. I appreciate that.”
“Yeah. Of course.” He stirred his coffee with too much force, the spoon clinking against the ceramic like a metronome counting down to his humiliation. For a second, he imagined hurling it into the air, a perfect 360-degree arc before it impaled him mid-forehead. End the suffering.
“I think you look nice too.” You tilted your head, studying him with an intensity that made his pulse stutter. “I mean, you always do.”
Oh, don’t do that to me. Dex’s breath hitched. He lifted his cup with a trembling hand, his knuckles white around the porcelain.
You didn’t look away. And something in your gaze shifted—something fragile and luminous, like a flame flickering in the dark. His brain forgot how to work. Was that happiness? Fear? The two emotions bled together, indistinguishable, until all that remained was the clear realization that you were looking at him. Really looking. Longer than before. Your smile wasn’t just warmth—it was an invitation, a silent embrace.
His heart stuttered when you scooted your chair closer.
The gap vanished. Your knee nearly brushed his. The space between you was no longer air—it was a living thing, electric and alive, raising the fine blonde hairs on his arms. He could feel the heat of your body, the rhythm of your breath, the faint scent of the soap you’d used in the shower clinging to your skin. It was too much. Too intimate. A thread, invisible but unbreakable, stretched from his chest to yours, pulling taut.
“W—what are you—” His voice cracked. Hazel eyes darted away, feigning a laugh that died in his throat. “(…..)...”
You were flustered too. A woman like you, at a loss for words? It was intoxicating. It made him bold.
Dex took a breath. He let his gaze trail from the railing of the balcony to meet yours—slow, deliberate, like a hurt animal checking on it's hunter. When his eyes finally locked onto yours; confused and pleading, yours were shy and warm, and fuck— the effort it took to resist leaning in, to press his lips to yours, to be complete, nearly undid him.
Dex said your name. His voice was gravel and honey, a low rasp that vibrated through the space between you. Blonde eyelashes framed the worry in his gaze, a worry stemming from internal conflict. This was a feeling he hadn't felt before, it made him scared and confused and sad and happy— it was tranquility.
Like he’d stepped into a sanctuary. Like the world had stilled, and the only sounds were the soft strum of harps, the whisper of leaves in autumn, the quiet promise that everything—everything—would be okay. Violence was a time long forgotten and love was the only reality. And there you were. The pores of your skin, the flutter of your lashes, the softness of your expression—like feather-pillows cradling his fractured soul.
Dex's thoughts slowed, deliberate and weightless, like leaves drifting from the branches of an ancient tree, surrendering to you like humans surrender to gravity.
Best case scenario, a lighter voice in him began. She loves you and you love her and you fight for eachother and make it work and it will be serene.
A distant possibility. How to get there...
Dex slowly, uncertainly began to lean in. The air between you thickened, charged like a storm about to break. His pulse hammered in his throat, a wild, untamed thing, as he shifted infinitesimally closer. The world narrowed to the space between your breaths, to the way your chest rose and fell with each quiet inhale. His vision blurred, dazed, as he looked down at you through a haze of longing. This was the precipice—the moment where your sunflare would either annihilate him entirely or pass by with the mercy of a summer breeze. There was no in-between.
"(.....)..."
“Yes…?”
Your voice was a whisper, a plea, a surrender. Your eyes locked onto his, wide and searching, as you tilted your face up to meet him. The space between your lips shrank. He could feel the warmth of your exhalations, the way your breath mingled with his, and it twisted his heart into something fragile, something aching. Dex’s gaze dropped to your mouth—glossy, soft, parted just enough to make his stomach clench. He was going to kiss you. He had to. He would seal the two of you together, bind your souls in a way that could never be undone.
He leaned in.
Closer.
Closer.
His ears and cheeks burned crimson, the heat spreading like wildfire. Was it wrong that you were younger than him? The thought clawed at him, a jagged reminder of the lines he was crossing. Was it okay to kiss you here, in the apartment he had been spying on you through? The age gap loomed in his mind, a specter whispering doubts. Was he taking advantage? Oh god, but he wanted you. Needed you. His body betrayed him, refusing to move fast enough, slow enough, right enough.
“I— really..."
The words lodged in his throat, his heart tearing itself apart at the thought of you pulling away after this. He knew, with a certainty that bordered on terror, that the second his lips touched yours, he would never let you go. Never. You would be his—completely, irrevocably—and the weight of that promise, that responsibility, nearly crippled him. Please. Why wasn’t his body obeying him? Why was it betraying him like this?
Your eyes flickered open, studying him with a quiet worry. The concern in your gaze was a knife to his chest.
No. No, no, no, no, no—
He had freaked you out. He had ruined everything. The moment stretched, taut and fragile, and he braced for the rejection, the horror, the way you’d recoil from him like he was something monstrous.
Then—
Your hands found the sides of his face.
Palms warm against his skin, fingers curling just enough to anchor him in place. You looked at him—eyes searching—and Dex’s breath hitched. Permission. You were asking for permission. His eyebrows drew up, a silent prayer of need and anxiety, his eyes half-lidded in surrender. He gave you everything he had in that look. Yes. Always yes.
You leaned in.
The world held its breath.
Then—
The doorbell rang.
A shrill, jarring intrusion.
Dex and you both jerked back, the spell shattered like glass underfoot. He shot upright, his gaze ricocheting around the balcony like a trapped animal—anywhere but you. Shit. What now? The movies had never prepared him for this. The real moment had never been scripted.
His response had made you confused. Had made you pull away. Of course it had. What else could he have expected? He was a storm, and you were the quiet after, the stillness he didn’t deserve.
His chest ached. The moment had slipped through his fingers like smoke. With a mouth dry from regret and anger, he moved to the door. The person disturbing him would face his wrath.
"You."
"Agent Poindexter." The british man stood stiff, black hair gelled down and gaze knowing. Wilson Fisk's driver. The one who picked Dex up on the day of the bulletin slaughter. Fisk had ordered him to wear a red suit, belonging to the vigilante daredevil— Dex didn't know nor care about the logistics or reasoning. The agent was Fisk's sword at the time. Just carrying out an order. When he had murdered those journalists in cold blood, he forgot all about it. Fisk hadn't contacted him since. Now though...
His hands tightened on the doorpost. "What do you want."
“Follow me outside.” The agent’s voice was clipped, rehearsed. “The boss has asked for you.” He tried to peer past Dex, his fervor uncharacteristic. “Visitors?
Dex's eyes flicked to the side at the sound of the balcony chair rustling. "Sorry, this package isn't for me. Guy next door must've ordered." He said loud enough for you to hear, before lowering his voice to a venomous whisper. "Listen, I'm out. I did what he wanted, I'm done." He leaned in, gaze wild with murderous intent as he looked down. "You ever come here again. I'll kill you."
He slammed the door shut and took a deep breath. Fate wouldn't allow him rest, would it?
"Hey..."
He turned around at the feeling of your hand on his shoulder, his gaze still wild from anger.
"Oh, woah. Are you alright?"
The buzzing started then—a swarm of flies in his skull. She’s going to die. The thought clawed at him, shredding his sense of security like a plane torn from the sky. You’ll never be with her. Fate doesn’t favor you, Dex, it never did. You can pitch a thousand perfect games, and it won’t bring your parents back. Your compass... if I cant find one? then rely on structure... I need you to wear this suit... come with me... I killed them all with rocks ms. mercer... what kind of gun do you have, Craig? ... I'm familiar with the M11... did a couple years in the army.... got real cozy with the M11... wait, please, don't shoot me! this war... we're not enemi—
“Dex...?”
“Get out.”
“I—”
“I said get out!”
“—okay.”
It was inevitable. From the moment he’d seen you, all the restraint, all the fighting—it had to come undone now. That darkness inside him, the one he’d tried to bury beneath layers of control and repetition, had risen to the surface.
Dex couldn’t think. Couldn’t breathe.
Before he knew it, you were pinned against the wall, his hands gripping your shoulders, his body looming over you. His eyes burned with an intensity that stole your voice, your breath, your thought.
Visions crashed over him like waves—his time in the army, the gunshots echoing in the desert, the way visitors had left him in the orphanage, Mercer’s cancer diagnosis, his baseball coach’s face twisted in disappointment. They blurred together, a montage of guilt and grief and violence. His hands trembled on your shoulders, but his mind replayed it all: the killing, the screaming, the soldier crawling away from him as he raised his gun.
'General Flores sends his regards.'
'We’re not enemie—'
BANG.
Over and over. The face. The gun. The diamonds of light from the barrel illuminating the dark desert floor. The young man’s eyes, wide with betrayal, hungry for life. Why did I do that. Why did I not feel your pain as I robbed you from going home...? Let me feel it. I want to be like you.
BANG.
The tremors in his hands worsened. The gun—no, you—was shaking. Oh god.
'I speak perfect english! We can talk— Gah! I'm bleeding out, please, brother!'
'General Flores sends his regards.'
'We're not enemi—'
BANG.
“You’re… you’re a good guy, Dex.” Your voice was a fragile thing, trembling like a leaf in a storm. “Good guy. Okay? I don’t blame you.”
The visions—like VR glasses taped to his face—began to splinter, to fade into the recesses of his mind. Distant echoes. He looked down at you.
Oh. You.
“There we go,” you whispered, voice steady despite the fear in your eyes. “Good job. You’re doing well, Dex. I’m— I’m here. You’re holding me pretty tight, okay? Uh, try to breathe.” Your body shook like a sapling in a hurricane, but your voice anchored him. “Yes. Yes, good.”
Your words became a shield, a barrier against the screaming and the crying dissolving into the back of his mind. And then he saw it. What he had done.
He stood there, shell-shocked, his hands releasing your shoulders as if burned. “I—”
“It’s okay.” Your chest heaved, but your voice was a lifeline. “I’m gonna wait here until you tell me to go. No sudden movements.”
Dex’s forehead fell against the wall above you, his breath hot against your ear as he fought to regulate himself. It was like waking from a nightmare, his legs weak, his back slick with sweat.
“Here.” You grabbed his arm, steadying his shaking hand on your shoulder. “There we go. Okay. Alright.”
He whispered your name, weak and broken. “G-go home. I—I need space.”
You shook your head, grunting as you steadied his weight against you, delirious and exhausted. “Not before I lay you into bed.” You twisted around him, still trembling from the adrenaline. “C’mon. Let’s go.”
“T-thank you.” The words stumbled out, his voice raw. He clung to the wall, using it to hold himself upright as you dragged him forward.
His room was dark, the world tilting and spinning beyond his control. His body was lead, his mind a haze of shattered memories. He collapsed onto the bed, and you adjusted him with a grunt, your strength surprising. The sound of rustling blankets filled the room, distorted and surreal. A warm cloth pressed against his forehead, then silence. The door closed. Opened. A fluffy weight stuffed between his arms.
So tired…
Before he knew it, Dex was asleep.
------
2012, (???), Location: (???)
The golden sun bled into the horizon, painting the desert in hues of amber. The young blonde soldier polished his rifle with slow, methodical strokes, the rhythmic scrape of metal against cloth blending with the laughter and roughhousing of his squadmates. The air smelled of gun oil and sweat, the dry wind carrying whispers of distant gunfire like a ghostly prelude.
“So, Benjamin… don’t got a pretty gal waitin’ for you back home?”
Dex hurled a grease-stained rag at the ginger-haired Burns, his eyes rolling as he gazed out at the endless dunes. The tent sagged under the weight of the evening, its canvas flapping lazily in the breeze, sand sifting through the gaps like a slow, insidious rain.
“What you bettin’ on, Burns? I give five pre-filled magazines on that he’ll finally squeak. No man can shoot that good without a good piece of woman waitin’ back over yonder.”
The tent was a mess of maps and scattered ammunition, the table a warzone of crumpled papers and loose bullets. Sand clung to everything, grinding between teeth, stinging eyes, a constant reminder of the land’s indifference.
Dex sat perched on a folding chair, his AK-47 cradled in his lap like a restless pet, his camouflaged pants blending into the chaos around him. He watched the perimeter, fingers tapping absently against the rifle’s stock.
A younger soldier, his glasses slipping down his nose, rocked back and forth on his chair, elbows digging into his knees as he studied the blonde with something like awe. “Maybe he’s just that good at shootin’ though.”
“Ah, ride his dick harder, four eyes,” Burns sneered, a toothpick clamped between his cracked lips as he stroked his chin. “I’m bettin’ my last pack of Marlboro Reds against him speakin’. Dessert’s prolly gonna kill me ‘fore I finish these anyways.”
A low whistle cut through the tension. “Way to sweeten the deal, Burns.” The New Yorker flicked a pack of gum onto the table.
“What you fuckin’ twelve?”
“Oh, shut up, you’re the one with a bad mouth, Burns. Enemy’ll smell you comin’ from a mile away. This is a token of concern.”
“Fuck you!”
The tent fell silent at the shadow that stretched across the entrance—a towering figure, buzz-cut hair, a scar slicing down his cheek like a grotesque smile. General Flores. The name alone sent a chill through the room. His presence was a blade unsheathed, a storm gathering on the horizon.
Dex wiped the sand from his eyebrows and stood in one fluid motion, snapping a salute. The others followed, but too late. The general’s glare pinned them like insects.
“Only man with fuckin’ manners around here,” Flores growled, his voice a chainsaw cutting through silence. His gaze locked onto the young blonde. “At ease, soldier.”
Dex lowered his salute, his jaw tight, and followed the general to his tent. The moment the flap closed behind them, the world outside seemed to hold its breath.
Inside, the air was thick with the scent of maps and old sweat, the radio crackling like a dying man’s last words. Flores sat heavily, his broad shoulders sagging as if the weight of command had finally crushed him. The tent fabric fluttered in the gathering wind, sand skittering across the floor like tiny, frantic footsteps.
“Sit down with me, kid,” the general muttered, his voice raw.
The wind outside howled, a chorus of ghosts wailing through the desert. Dex’s eyes flicked around the tent—sterile, organized, a place where death was dissected like a specimen. Maps pinned to a bulletin board, letters tucked into corners, the radio murmuring in a language Dex didn’t understand. Flores usually had a translator here, decoding the enemy’s chatter into something useful. But today, the radio was quiet. Too quiet.
Must’ve been a quiet day, Dex thought, lowering himself into the canvas chair.
The silence was suffocating. Flores stared at him, his eyes two chips of flint in the dim light. The general leaned back, his chair groaning under his weight, and let out a sound that was half laugh, half growl.
“Y’know what I like about you, son?” he rumbled, his voice like gravel under a boot. “Always on the straight and narrow path. Followin’ orders like they’re the only thing keepin’ you alive. You’re secure, kid. I need more people like that.”
Dex nodded, his throat tight. The wind outside picked up again, a low, mournful moan. The radio crackled to life, a voice screaming in a language Dex didn’t know—sharp, desperate, terrified.
General Flores hung his head, reaching out to turn the volume down.
“Sir—”
"I know. I know." The once proud and strong general now hung slumped over his chair, eyes down on the floor as he twirled a dog-tag over his fingers. "—Used to do this with coins. Calmed me down when shit hit the fan. Man, the way Klein's face got burned off in 'Nam... jungle smelled like rotten meat and fresh pork all at the same time..." The dog tag was tossed on the table, name in it faint but readable.
Joseph Klein.
“I’m sorry, Sir.”
“It ain’t nothin’ to be sorry for. Dumb bastard knew what he signed up for.” He patted his breast pocket, a sad smile tugging at his lips when his fingers brushed against a bottle of rum. He pulled it out, followed by something small and silver. A coin. “Catch, son.”
Dex’s hand snapped up, catching the coin with a metallic clink. He turned it over in his fingers, the engravings worn smooth by time and touch.
"When them nasty thoughts start floodin' ya mind... focus on that stupid coin. Slip it around your knuckles, get real good at focusing on it. It'll keep you from descending down that rabbithole." The general took a swig of rum, breathing in through his nose as the alcohol burned down his throat. "Cheated on m'wife before this war. Told myself I was killin' the thoughts of Klein's death by doing it. A distraction I told her. She told me I was a dumb sack of shit." He chuckled, eyes burning into the nameplate. "Don't think she ever found out I was—what I was. I loved him. I loved Klein." Tears began to stream down his face. "We are who we are, Dex."
The radio began to pick up despite it's low volume, and the world outside the tent grew awfully quiet.
"They're comin, boy. You know that now, right?"
Dex's voice hitched, about to speak when the General put the barrel of his gun on his temple.
“Tell ‘em I send my regards from hell.”
“NO! WAIT—!”
The shot was deafening, a thunderclap in the confined space. Blood sprayed across the tan canvas, Flores’ head jerking back as if yanked by invisible strings. His body slumped forward, the pistol clattering to the floor.
Dex sat frozen, his breath shallow, the coin digging into his palms like a blade.
Then—
Gunfire.
The tent erupted in chaos, bullets tearing through the canvas like a swarm of wasps. Dex hit the sand, his helmet clattering beside him, grains filling his mouth as he gasped for air. His squadmates’ tent was already ablaze, shadows writhing in the flames, one of them—a man he recognized—flailing wildly, his body a torch against the night.
“Don’t kill us—!” Burns’ voice was cut short by a burst of gunfire.
“Fuck! Burns—you’ll pay for this—!”
Screams tore through the air as Dex crawled toward the tent flap, his hands shaking. When he tore it open, the world was a nightmare.
Fire roared in the distance, illuminating the desert in hellish orange. His friends—his brothers—were running, screaming, their silhouettes stark against the flames. One of them, engulfed in fire, staggered like a broken marionette before collapsing into the sand. The stench of burning flesh and gunpowder clawed its way into Dex’s throat. Just like Flores said; fresh pork and smoke.
The car’s engine growled like a beast satisfied with its hunt, its headlights carving through the thickening dark. Men in military fatigues leaned out of the windows, laughing as they picked off the last of Dex’s squad—one by one, like targets at a shooting range. The man on fire thrashed in the sand, his screams swallowed by the roar of gunfire. The laughter was sharp, cruel, a sound that would haunt Dex for the rest of his life.
His fingers trembled around the cold metal of his rifle. Too soon? Too soon.
He forced himself to move, crawling out of the tent’s entrance like a ghost, his body low to the ground. Every shift of sand sent a fresh wave of pain through his shoulder, but he gritted his teeth and pressed on. The cargo crate was his only salvation—a jagged, splintered shield against the storm of lead.
Behind it, he gasped for air, his lungs burning. His hands shook as he slotted a finger into his magazine. Jammed ammo? No. Check. Seven magazines in his chest rig. Dex did the math in his head, ignoring the gurgle of a dying man nearby, the final shot that silenced him for good. The laughter of the enemy was a knife twisting in his gut. Two hundred and ten shots. All of them he could make count.
Breathe in.
Out.
He rose like a specter from the sand, his rifle barking. One. Two. Three. The recoil dug into his shoulder, but he didn’t flinch. He ducked behind cover as bullets chewed the ground where he’d stood. Footsteps crunched on either side of him, too close, too fast. The desert was turning against him, the sandstorm rising like a wall of teeth.
Breathe in.
Out.
As if possessed he shot left, twisting to shoot right before scrambling across the sand to avoid a ricocheting bullet— sand caked his fingers, grains sharp like rocks against the steel of the machine gun. Two men left, he wiped the sand off his eyes— shit. A sandstorm was beginning. He wasn't equipped for this. No men, no back-up. Footsteps at eleven o'clock.
He whipped his gun up and sprayed like a mad-man desperate for life— he needed to live, where was the other— Dex let out a wild groan as a stray bullet knicked into his shoulder. Blood spurted from the wound, red and bright.
"F-fuck...! Fuck!" He couldn't help but cry out as he held the wound, desperately trying to keep himself from bleeding out. He was twenty-two years old. Didn't want to die. Wanted to go home. His tan sleeve had turned dark red, streams of fresh oxygenated blood spurting out his wound and down his arm. Tonight he might die. Tonight, the desert might bury him alongside his friends.
He took a deep shuddery breath and laid down, eyes scanning under the jeep. There. He held his gun and aimed the best he could, gritting down his teeth as he lined up the shot.
The spray of his rifle was merciless — and it crippled the last man standing. He screamed and moaned on the floor, writhing around in pain as his eyes frantically scanned the bleeding american soldier walking up to him.
"Please— I have a wife. Children."
Dex stared at him, his face a mask of hollow indifference.
"Y—you want money? I have it. You Americans like pearls? O-or Gold and silver!?"
Silence.
The man looked up, eyebrows scrunching up in defeat. He dropped the tough act in defeat, shaking his head as tears welled up in his eyes. What could he be... no older than nineteen?
The smell of blood and burning flesh on the hot wind infused the young blonde with renewed hatred.
'"I'm like you! My friends, all dead because of this stupid war! No one wins. No one!"
But nothing moved in Dex's eyes.
"You're a slave to it just like I am! We're both victims, can't you see that?!" The dark haired boy grabbed at his legs; both were mangled beyond repair by bullets. "'I speak perfect english! We can talk— Gah! I'm bleeding out, please, brother!'
Dex’s AK-47 was empty. He tossed the rifle aside, and the man’s eyes flickered with a desperate hope.
He pulled out his M11, the pistol cold and heavy in his grip.
“General Flores sends his regards.”
“We’re not enemi—”
BANG.
Blood flecked Dex’s cheek. The fire behind him roared, casting long, writhing shadows over the sand. The enemy squad was dead. His teammates were dead. He watched the man bleed out, sand turning to rubies as it hungrily soaked up his liquid. Another soul usurped by the desert.
“Be happy you’re nothing like me.”
The young soldier slowly turned around, boots sinking into sand as he walked into the unknown. The sandstorm swallowed his walking shadow, drips of blood trailing behind.
Part of him would be kept here forever.
....
-----------------
Present day. Five hours later, 9PM.
Dex shot up from his bed, body covered in sweat. He inched back at the feeling of a ticklish ball against his arm.
A fluffy teddybear. Eyes too big and brown fur worn from holding. Dex grabbed the teddy by it's middle, eyes scrunching up in confusion. Was this yours...? He got up from the bed, tearing off his t-shirt with a nauseous groan as he tossed it on the bed. Where were you?
He held himself against the wall, low-iron making his head spin. God he was starving— how late was it? Where was his watch—? Oh. Tossed out the window at your old place cause it wouldn't stop buzzing with bpm reminders.
The living room was empty, and that's when the memories loaded in. He had you pressed against the wall? Shit. He had really let himself go this time... Dex rubbed the sleep out his eyes and turned on the kitchen sink, running his face with cold water.
So quiet and dark in his apartment...
The memories kept loading in like flashcards. Your shoulders shaking under his touch, the way you looked at him, fearfully yet desperate to help— spoken to him with the same calm he felt from his psychologist. You told him to breathe, nearly out of breath from how hard his body was leaning against your ribcage, and then you brought him to bed— he remembered the way you grunted as you tried to carry him.
The tap turned off and his fingers ran over his stubble, wiping off excess water from his jaw.
You saw him freak out... but you didn't leave without helping.
Because of the nicotine cookies. The dark urge snarled. You got her hooked.
Because she loves you. The lighter side spoke. She accepts you.
Dex shook his head and reached into his jean pocket. A silver coin. Flores' silver coin.
He rolled it over his knuckles, having perfected the move over the years just like the general said. The movement managed the storm inside him, making him able to focus on what to do next.
He wiped the sweat off his forehead as he steadied himself at the door. No weird tricks, no cookies, no faking.
This time Dex would come to you an honest man.
...
He stood at the door, fully aware of the sorry state he was in. Dex had looked into the mirror beforehand, accepting his pale skin, dishelved blonde hair and greying sideburns. He didn't look the way he used to, the scar of age written all over his face. His fingers grazed at the bullet in his shoulder. You should see him for what he really is. A scarred man, broken by the burden of his youth. Trauma imprinted on his skin.
'We are who we are, Dex.'
He exhaled, a shuddering breath that carried the weight of years, and lifted his hand. His knuckles grazed the wood, a hesitant knock—once, twice.
Silence. Then commotion on the other side.
The door flew open.
You stood there, framed in the golden halo of the hallway light, your eyes wide with a storm of worry. And in that instant, Dex forgot how to breathe. The years peeled away. The scars, the weight, the ghost of every mistake—none of it mattered. Let me be enough. Just this once.
His voice cracked when he spoke your name, a rasp of gravel and longing. “I’m sor—”
But you were already moving.
Your arms wrapped around him like a lifeline, your hands splaying against the ridged terrain of his back, fingers grazing the puckered skin where the bullet had torn through. No words. No questions. No demands. Just the desperate press of your body against his, as if you could fuse your very soul to his through sheer force of will. Dex’s breath left him in a rush, his arms banding around you like steel, his forehead pressing into the crook of your neck as his heart—oh god, his heart—slowed its frantic drumming to the rhythm of your pulse. His left hand cradled the back of your head, tilting you closer, as if he could memorize the shape of you through touch alone. “Thank you,” he whispered, the words torn from his throat, raw and trembling. “Thank you for helping me.”
The hug broke as softly as it had begun. Your fingers laced with his, your grip firm and sure, pulling him across the threshold.
Dex’s breath hitched as he stepped inside. One step. Just one, and he was crossing into your sanctuary. His lashes fluttered, casting shadows over his hazel eyes, which flickered with the candlelight’s dance. The question hung unspoken between you: Are you certain?
You answered by tightening your hold on his hand, by nodding, by turning away just enough to guide him deeper into the room.
And when the door clicked shut behind him, sealing them in the warm, hushed glow of your living space, he had to bite back the plea clawing up his throat. Please. He wanted to beg you to let him collapse at your feet, to press his face into the softness of your belly, to feel your hands rake through his hair again. To be held. Just once more.
But you were already moving away, your fingers twisting together in that nervous habit he’d come to recognize. The space between you was a chasm—close enough to taste the heat of your skin, far enough to drive him mad with the agony of restraint. The candlelight painted your profile in molten gold, your lashes casting delicate shadows, your lips parted as if you, too, were holding your breath.
The Manhattan apartment hummed with the quiet chaos of a life just beginning to settle. Boxes—some still taped shut, others gaping open like forgotten mouths—dotted the hardwood floors. The late moon bled through the floor-to-ceiling windows, casting long, blue fingers across the room. Flickering candles scattered across every surface. Their flames danced, casting shifting shadows that made the air feel thick, charged, like the space itself was holding its breath.
“So… do you uh, want me to make you some evening tea?”
His response was a shuddering exhale, his body betraying him by inching closer, drawn by an invisible thread. The unspoken desire coiled between you, thick and electric, louder than any confession. “Oh, yeah.” His voice was a low rumble, thick with want. “Can I… help?”
You shook your head, already turning toward the kitchen. The cabinet doors opened, your fingers closing around two mugs, then the drawer for the spoons. Dex watched you, his gaze a physical caress, tracing the curve of your spine, the dip of your waist—small enough to be cradled against him on nights when the cold seeped into his bones. He should have stayed where he was. Should have let the distance be his shield. But the need was a living thing, writhing in his chest, and it won. His feet carried him forward before his mind could protest, his arm stretching past your head to close the cabinet above you. You flinched, caught off guard by the sudden nearness, by the way his body caged you against the counter. His arm was a bar of iron, his bicep flexing as he braced himself, and when he looked down at you, his gaze was a storm—nervous, burning, hungry.
The cup in your hand trembled. Dex didn’t miss a thing. His smirk was slow, knowing, as he curled his larger hand around yours, his veins standing out against the golden hue of his skin. His fingers were rough, calloused, a stark contrast to the delicate bones of your wrist. He held your gaze as he guided your hand—and the cup—down to the counter, pressing you into the hard surface. Your breath hitched. A flush bloomed across your cheeks, and you looked away, your teeth sinking into your lower lip as a nervous laugh escaped you. The air between you thickened, saturated with something electric, something alive. The apartment itself seemed to hold its breath, the silence so heavy with tension it could have been cut with a knife.
Then Dex leaned in.
A strand of his hair fell across his temple, catching the light like spun silk. His eyes narrowed, pupils blown wide with desire, and in that moment, he decided he would never let this end. Never let you pull away. Never let the world remind him, ever again, that he didn’t deserve this.
“Are you feeling… better?” Your voice was a whisper, barely audible, but it might as well have been a shout in the hush. You looked up at him, your body swaying closer without your permission, as if pulled by an unseen force. “I was worried about you…”
“Oh yeah?” His smile was slow, wicked, his nose brushing against yours, a risky tease. “Have you… been thinking about me?”
You swallowed, your throat working, and for a heartbeat, your gaze flickered downward—just as his fingers found your chin. He tipped it back up, his touch firm, possessive, needy.
“Cuz’ I have.” His breath hitched, a ragged sound that betrayed his restraint. His hands dropped to your shirt—his shirt, and his fists clenched in the black cotton, twisting, pulling you closer until the space between you vanished entirely. The fabric around your waist grew taut, the ridges of his knuckles pressing into the softness of your stomach as he dragged you against him. “I’ve been thinking about you.” His voice was a growl, rough with need. “A lot.”
“Dex…” Your voice was a plea, your brows knitting together as you searched his face. The sparkle in your eyes told him everything he needed to know. “Me too.”
“R-really?” His voice shook before settling down into a velvet murmur, low and smooth. His chest ached. “That’s real good.” His eyes burned, welling with tears he refused to let fall, darting left and right as if searching for any sign of retreat before settling back on you. “I’m gonna… I’m gonna try something, okay?”
You nodded, slow and eager, your lashes fluttering shut as his palms cradled your face, his fingers tangling roughly in your hair. Dex memorized the moment—your parted lips, the flush on your skin, the way your breath hitched—before he let himself drown.
You sure?
Yes?
Then his mouth pressed onto yours.
It was wild. Uncontrolled. A collision of desperation and fire, molten lava surging through his veins, searing him from the inside out until his vision whited out with stars. He moaned against your lips, his hands anchoring you to him—one fisted in your hair, the other wrapped around your waist, pulling you flush against him. The sound of your lips meeting his was wet, messy, perfect. A symphony of need. He opened for you, his tongue sliding against yours, tasting the sweetness of you, the heat, the rightness of it. It was better than he’d ever imagined. Better than fantasy. Better than hope.
And when you moaned—oh god, when you moaned—it was the sweetest sound he’d ever heard, a melody that unraveled him completely. The effort it took to resist you, to resist this, nearly shattered him. His hands flexed against your waist, his fingers digging into the soft flesh of your hips as if he could anchor himself to you, as if he could fuse your souls together right there on the counter. The thought of taking you, right then and there, of bending you over and losing himself in the heat of you, nearly undid him.
Dex tore his mouth from yours with a wet, obscene sound, a thread of saliva stretching between your lips like a silver cord—proof of what you'd just shared, proof of his desperation. Your eyes were wide, shocked, and he didn’t give a damn if it was because he was a terrible kisser or the best thing you’d ever tasted. You were his now. His baby. His sweetheart. His love.
His arms banded around you again, steel cables of want and need, pulling you flush against him as his mouth crashed back into yours. The kiss was fire. A conflagration. His head bobbed with the force of it, his lips moving hungrily, desperately, as if he could consume you whole. His hands mapped the terrain of your body—down your neck, tracing the delicate pulse point, down your spine, his fingers splaying possessively before tangling with yours, squeezing tight as if he feared you might slip away. Tears burned his eyes, spilling over in hot, silent rivulets, and the world dissolved into a haze of sensation—your scent, the taste of you on his tongue, the way your body melted against his. It was too much. Too good. Too right.
“I—” His voice broke, raw and trembling, his face flushed, his pupils swallowed by darkness. “I want you...” The words tore from his throat, a plea wrapped in a growl. “Want you to be mine tonight… please…” His mouth found yours again, wet and sloppy and hungry, his tongue delving deep as if he could memorize the shape of you. “Let me make you feel good.” His lips trailed down your throat, peppering you with kisses, his stubble scraping against your skin, marking you. “Wanna make you feel so good…”
You couldn’t speak. Couldn’t form a single coherent thought. His sudden confidence had stolen your breath, left you drowning in the storm of him. All you could do was nod, your body betraying you by arching into his touch, silently begging for more.
Dex didn’t need words. He lifted you effortlessly, your legs wrapping around his waist as he carried you to the couch. The fabric of your clothes was a barrier he ached to remove, but he laid you down with infinite care, his eyes half-lidded with adoration as he hovered over you, his breath ragged against your lips.
“Dex, I—”
He silenced you with another kiss, this one sloppy and desperate, his stubble grazing your cheek as his tongue traced the shell of your ear before diving back to claim your mouth. His hands roamed, possessive and reverent, mapping the curve of your waist, the flare of your hips, the way your body fit against his like a missing puzzle piece.
The bulge in his jeans was a torment, pressing insistently against the zipper, demanding release. He imagined it—oh god, he imagined it—unzipping himself, shucking off his jeans and boxers, freeing himself to you. He pictured slipping your panties aside, the first brush of his cock against your wet pussy, teasing you both before finally, finally sinking into you. Stretching you. Filling you. His length would be a revelation for you, too tight at first, too much, and you’d arch beneath him, a whine torn from your throat as you fought against his size. And he’d whimper, his cock buried to the hilt inside you, his hips trembling as he bottomed out, his vision whiting out with the sheer perfection of it.
The image was too vivid. Too real. His eyes rolled back, his breath hitching as he fought to push it away. That would be the final gate. The point of no return. And once he crossed it, there was no going back. No pretending. No undoing what would happen.
His voice was a rasp, torn from the depths of his want. “Tell me to stop.” The words were a prayer, a plea, a warning. “Tell me to stop before we go past the point of no return. Tell me to stop before I change things between us forever. Tell me to stop before you regret having me.”
He needed you to say it. Even if it killed him. Even if it meant walking away. Even if it meant he’d spend the rest of his life with the ghost of this moment haunting him.
"—I want you." Your hands curled around his hair. "I'm, uhm also on the pill so we don't need to—" You looked away, smiling and excited and nervous. "Yeah."
The blonde gave you a nod before suddenly picking you up, slotting your legs around his torso as he ground you into him. A broken sound toar from his throat at the hard ridge of his erection grinding into your jeans. "Mmm... are you sure? I don't know if I can stop when—mmph...!" Dex was silenced by your kiss, groaning as you latched his belt open and pulled his zipper down. He was already hard enough to break steel, his cock aching behind the confines of his boxers, and the way you touched him—like you were starving for him—was almost more than he could bear. The once hesitant features on his face twisted into ones more predatory, now fed by the confidence that you really wanted this. "Oh, fuck. I'm gonna do so many things to you baby, so many dirty fuckin' things." His arm snaked around your waist, other arm pulling your jeans off before perfectly tossing them into the laundry basket across the room.
"Hey—" you chuckled, "how'd you do that—" a high pitched whine escaped your throat, his fingers already working you.
"Good aim, sweetheart. I'll show you all about that later. Mmm..." Dex rubbed you through your panties, confidence lacing his voice as he hit that special angle on your clit over and over and over and over again. “Like that?” he murmured, his voice a dark purr, his breath hot against your ear. “Am I doing a good job?”
Your body shook from the intense pleasure, your eyes fluttering shut.
He lifted you briefly, fingers taking your panties off and tossing them before working you again. “Look at me.” The command was a growl, his voice rough with tension and something softer, something almost reverent. Hazel eyes burned into yours—sleazy and hungry and ravenous, his breathing ragged, like he was barely holding on. “I love you, y’know that? I’ve loved you—fuck, so wet—for a long time.” His free hand tilted your head up so he could kiss you again, slow and deep, like he had all the time in the world. But his fingers never stopped moving, never stopped teasing, never stopped driving you wild. “Ever since I first laid eyes on you— baby, I... I’m gonna show you how much I care for you,” he promised, his voice rough with sincerity and pupils blown out. “But you need to help me. This is… new to me.”
Your eyes widened in suprise from both confessions; yet you only inquired on the latter. "You've never—?"
"Waited for the right girl,” he admitted, his voice dropping to a whisper as his thumb kept circling and rubbing your clit, quick and accurate. “And here you are.” His tongue slipped into your mouth again, exploring, tasting, kissing you like a man starved. “Want you to give it to me,” he growled between kisses, his hands sliding up your shirt, pushing the fabric up in one swift motion. “And I’ll give it to you…” The sight of you—bare, flushed, your breasts perfect for him—made his breath catch. A low, guttural sound tore from his throat and he took one nipple into his mouth, sucking hard, his tongue swirling around the sensitive peak. You whimpered, your back arching, your fingers tightening in his hair, and the sound of your pleasure sent a jolt of electricity straight to his cock. Dex groaned around you, his teeth grazing lightly against your skin—a reminder that he was still a novice at this, that he was still learning; your body his sacred text. When you hissed he sloppily apologized, mouth still closed around you as his other hand accompanied your left breast; squeezing and groping you while his tongue kept working.
It all seemed to be too much for you, and Dex didn't understand. This was just the beginning, he'd just started but you were already writhing and crying in his grip like he was torturing you.
"D—dex! Please, miss the spot for once I— you're gonna make me cum!"
He removed his mouth from your nipple with a wet pop, the tissue now covered in spit. Just a little more of this and you'd pass out, he was sure. But making you whine, the sounds of you, the heat from your skin— all of it was more addictive than anything he'd ever had—how could he stop hitting your spot? He never missed. Your cries made his head spin from overload.
Desperate to stop his relentless attacks of pleasure, you moved off him, fingers trailing over the white fabric. Your hands dropped to the waistband of his boxers, and Dex's cock twitched, desperate to be freed, his mind a whirlwind of panic and desire. He cut the low whine off in his throat when you pulled his boxers off; making his throbbing cock fling out against his taut stomach.
Based on the pause in movement and broken gasp he figured you were worried.
He shot forward, no longer reclined on the couch, his eyes searching yours in a frenzy.
“What is it?” he asked, his voice cracking. His hand cradled your face with tenderness. “D-do you maybe, uh, want to stop? W-was I too much—”
“No!” you rushed out, your voice breathless, your cheeks flushed. You straddled his lap again, your thighs trembling slightly as you settled over him. “No, I just. You’re… really big, Dex. I’m not sure I can fit that.” A choked laugh escaped you, nervous and sweet, and Dex’s heart stopped. "But I want to try.... 'cause I want you."
“O-okay.” The word was a relieved gasp, his hands gripping your waist, helping you rise just enough to align yourselves. “I just… wanna make you feel good.”
With lidded eyes and bated breath, he watched as you slowly, so slowly, lowered yourself onto him. Your wet entrance met his tip, and Dex’s entire body tensed, his breath hitching as you took him inch by inch. His fingers dug into your hips, his knuckles white, his entire being focused on the way you felt—God, you felt incredible—so tight, so hot, so willing. His tip breached your entrance, and a broken sound tore from his throat. Excitement, fear, and desire all bled together, his eyebrows drawing up from the sheer overload of sensation. “B-baby, I— I’m not ready—haahh, ohh fuck…!” His head fell back, his vision blurring as you sank deeper, your body stretching to take him, your heat enveloping him completely. A guttural moan tore from him, his hips jerking up involuntarily, burying him further inside you.
"Wait—" you whimpered.
“Nnngh! O-okay…” His voice was a ragged cry, his vision swimming as you took even more of him, your body finally flush against his, your hips meeting his in a way that felt like coming home.
You moaned, your nails digging into his shoulders, your breath coming in sharp, needy gasps as you struggled with his size but just as hungry as he was. You paused every once in a while, your body trembling, before letting yourself sink further, your walls fluttering around him, driving him wild. Dex’s hands were everywhere—your waist, your hips, your thighs—holding you steady, guiding you, worshipping you. His mouth found yours again, kissing you like he was trying to crawl inside, like he needed your air to breathe.
“Fuck, you feel amazing,” he groaned against your lips, his voice rough with awe. “Never thought it would feel s-so fucking good...!” His hips began to jerk from overstimulation, slow at first, then harder, deeper, his cock sliding in and out of you with a slick, wet sound that filled the room. His arms wrapped around you tightly, taking over control to make you ride on him harder. You hissed and whined from his eagerness, your pussy not yet stretched out enough to accommodate the way his cock slid back and forth, wet with slick and precum and throbbing wildly. Every ragged drag had your breath coming in desperate needy gasps.
The usually shy and composed agent was a sweaty whimpering mess below you, speaking gibberish as he fucked into your wet pussy like it had replaced his need to breathe. Your body was tight against him like he might die if he were torn apart. His fingers dug into your back and ass, hair messy and he couldn't help but throw his head back on the couch. Cock repeatedly sliding into you with haste and hunger.
Dex watched you through half-lidded eyes, unblinking, black pupils nearly taking up all of the green-brownish colour. His eyes looked pitch black, two dots of charcoal framed by blonde lashes. You cried out when he went extra deep, big cock finally bottoming out inside you as he worked himself in, again, and again, and again, and again, and again and a-fucking-gain. The squelching was lewd, his thighs wet from your fluid. "Fucking love you." He said softly, grip on your hips tightening as he bucked up. His eyes rolled back from pleasure, but slowly flicked back onto you. He was obsessed with watching you, watching you take his big cock, watching you struggle and squeal. "I fucking love you." He spoke again, tone laced in intensity. Was it too soon for you to say it back? Or did you just not want to? With a swift angle change he hit a spongey spot inside that made you see stars, your eyes fluttered shut and you started to whine everytime he hit it. "Say it back." Dex demanded, angling you down harder to ground into that area over and over and over and over and over and over. The sticky wet liquid on his thighs had increased, now covering your leather couch. "Why the fuck are you not saying it back—ah!" He whined, moaning when your walls constricted around his cock impossibly tight.
The squelching filled the room along with ragged moans and stuttered gasps.
His hand instinctively wrapped around your throat, fingers relishing the control of the moment, tightening ever so slowly. "Mmm..." Your pussy tightened around his dragging cock, so tight it nearly halted it. "Fuck...! oh, y'like that baby...?" You couldn't get a word out, going limp in his hands from the pleasure. "Tell me you love me." Dex murmured, not stopping the way his tip prodded at your special spot. "Tell me y'fucking love me."
"—can't s-speak...!" You cried out, limp and slick with sweat.
The pieces puzzled together. Oh, of course. He hadn't stopped hitting the spot like you asked him to... but he couldn't miss, ever. A hung smile appeared on his face and he bucked you along to match his rhythm, your body rising and falling over him, your breasts bouncing with each movement, your breath coming in desperate, needy gasps. "It's okay... just try to say it back."
"I— mmm, l-love you."
That. Three words were enough. His cock twitched and his mind melted, everything dissolving into that single contact point between you. "That's it baby, fuck, love you m-more...!" You loved him, you did and he loved you back and this was perfect and he was losing his damn mind at it all. Everything was too much and too little and his face scrunched up from pleasure because it was all too loud and quiet and his body tensed because the blood rushing through his veins was too hot and cold and—
"Fuck!" Dex’s control was slipping, his movements growing erratic, his kisses frantic. "I love you, I love, I love you, you, I fucking— haah...!" His hips grew more desperate, hair stuck to his forehead as you arched and writhed in his firm grip. He could feel himself getting closer, his balls drawing up, his body tensing as pleasure coiled tighter and tighter inside him.
"I'm— I'm gonna—"
"Fuck, please no you're going to make me—"
Your walls tightened around and you sobbed from intense pleasure, face scrunching up and mouth a paused jutter of cries as you fell limp onto his muscled chest.
“Baby, I— I’m gonna—” His voice broke, his hips stuttering as he lost the rhythm, his cock swelling inside you. “Fuck, fuck—!”
Everything went white.
He came with a guttural groan, his release spilling inside you in thick, scalding ropes that filled you completely. His body convulsed, every muscle locking tight as pleasure wracked him in violent waves. His face twisted—jaw clenched, teeth bared—before a broken sob tore from his throat. His fingers dug into your hips, yanking you down onto him as he emptied himself, his breath tearing through his lungs in ragged, shuddering gasps. His vision swam, stars bursting behind his eyelids as he filled you, over and over, until you could feel him dripping down your thighs.
The two of you lay there, chests heaving, bodies slick with sweat, trembling in the aftermath.
Then you flinched as he lifted you off the couch. “Dex—what—?”
“Not fucking done with you, baby.” His voice was rough, possessive, as he cradled your exhausted body against his chest and carried you down the hallway, his steps sure despite the way his own legs shook.
Dex was high on this. High on the taste of you, the feel of you, the way your body had clenched around him. He needed more. Needed you like an addiction.
“I don’t know if I can take it,” you whimpered, squirming in his arms as he shouldered your bedroom door open and dropped you onto the mattress. “Dex, please—”
“Can I be your boyfriend?” His voice cracked, raw with desperation, as he already crawled over your shuddering body, caging you beneath him. “I swear I’ll make it worth it. I’ll do anything.”
You scrambled back on the bed, instinctively wary—like prey caught in the gaze of a predator. Your eyes widened as his hands gripped your hips, dragging you back into position. “Boyfriend? Yes, of course—I like you, Dex. I—” Your voice hitched, still thick with the remnants of your orgasm. “I love you.”
There was a flicker of hesitation in your last words, and it killed him.
His eyebrows shot up. “Do you really love me?”
"I do. I love you. It's just, it all went so fast and I was so caught up in my work-stress and living situation and—" You sighed, looking up at him. "I knew I felt things for you. I always found you attractive. Suppose I didn't notice I had feelings for you— or if you'd be willing to reciprocate them. I didn't want to ruin our connection. I valued it so much."
“I loved you the moment I first laid eyes on you.” His voice was soft, almost shy, but his eyes burned with sincerity. A small, crooked smile tugged at his lips as his fingers traced lazy circles over your stomach, sending shivers rippling through you. “I’m sorry if I acted… off. Some of my days on the job aren’t exactly pleasant.”
Your fingers slotted around his big hands, bringing them to your soft lips as you placed soft kisses on them. Dex figured you understood, the way you'd been eyeing his body, full of scars; and the big dent on his shoulder— you had noticed and understood he'd been through things. Probably pieced together his odd behavior was from field-trauma or other stuff.
The silence between you was thick, charged with something deeper than lust—something almost sacred—before it melted into something hotter.
“Can you… handle one more?” His voice was barely a whisper, his eyes wide and puppyish, his lips tugging into a bashful smirk.
You nodded.
The moment you did, he was moving—flipping you onto your stomach with ease, his hands gripping your waist as he pulled your hips up until you were flush against him. You gasped as his thighs bracketed yours, his cock already hard again, already aching for you.
“Good… so good…” His palm slid up your arched back, savoring the curve of your spine beneath his touch. “I wanna fuck you again. Real slow this time.” His chest settled over your back, his weight pressing you into the mattress as his hips cradled yours. He was everywhere—the heat of him, the rough scrape of his stubble against your ear, the way his breath hitched when he spoke. “Gonna put my mouth right here…” His lips grazed the shell of your ear, his voice a dark, velvety promise. “And fuck into you, sweetheart.”
You shivered, your body already responding, already needy for him.
“I—I thought you were inexperienced,” you stuttered, arching into him as his fingers slipped between your legs, testing your readiness.
“I am.” His smile was wicked as he pulled his hand back, bringing his slick fingers to his lips. He groaned, low and deep, as he tasted you—both of you—on his skin, his eyes fluttering shut. “But I’m gonna learn from you.”
“There’s not much to learn—” You squealed as his hands clamped around your waist, pinning you down. “You’re better than—”
“Shhh…” His smirk was downright sinful, his voice a rough purr. “Don’t make me jealous, baby.”
The first press of his tip against your entrance made you both moan. He was thick, stretching you open inch by inch, your walls clenching around him in resistance. Dex’s breath hitched, his vision whiting out for a second as pleasure ripped through him. A choked sound tore from his throat, and he bit down on his lip hard enough to draw blood, forcing himself to think, to breathe—anything but lose control.
His nails dug into your skin, his grip bruising as he held you still, his cock buried halfway inside you. The control it took to hold back was impossible. He was wild for you—drool slipping from his lips onto your back, his hips twitching with the effort of restraint.
“Are you ready to take me deeper…?” His voice was a growl, his cock twitching inside you.
You hummed, and that was all the answer he needed.
He pushed deeper.
You cried out—part pleasure, part pain—your back arching, your body craving more, addicted to the stretch, the burn, the fullness of him.
He groaned, his hips moving on their own now, rocking forward before slamming into you in one brutal thrust. His cock buried to the hilt, your body taking him completely. He pulled back just enough to drag a whimper from you before slamming home again, his hands tightening on your hips as your ass jiggled with every relentless pound.
The sight destroyed him.
His beautiful girl, flushed and trembling— now arched below him with her face down in the mattress as her older neighbor fucked her brains out. The reality of it turned Dex on even more. The age gap, the fact your skin was still so supple compared to his more rugged feel—
It felt controlling... possessive...
You whined when his arms curled around yours, pulling you upright. Dex's left arm hooked between yours behind your back, locking you in place as his right hand snaked over your stomach, dipping down to your clit, and rubbing that perfect spot again, and again, and again.
The dragging of his cock, filling the room with lewd squelching as he moved in and out of your tight pussy— the way he held your arms behind your back, impossibly tight in his grip— the way his finger circled and rubbed and pressed onto that sensitive bundle of nerves—
It didn't take long until you were a whimpering crying mess in his hands, growing more and more limp by the second— exhausted from the torturous pleasure he was mercilessly subjecting you to.
Dex's eyebrows drew up, so close to cumming already but forcing himself to last. This was a moment he had to capture in his mind, a dream come true that he should always be capable of replaying.
"F-fuck!" He groaned. You constricted around him in that specific way and he knew you were about to become undone. "Give it to me..."
The merciless pounding, the way he buried himself deep inside again, and again, and again, and again—
You were a stammering mess before every muscle in your body stood at rapt attention, silently crying before the final buck of his hips sent you over the edge. Dex shushed and cooed, telling you how good you were, how sweet.
His eyes fluttered shut from the wetness following your orgasm, making his hips buck and stutter, balls tightening and vision swirling.
You fell limp in his arms, and he held you tightly, burying himself as close as possible, hitting your cervix, desperate to get as close to your uterus— the idea of it.
"Mm! Fuck, I—" Drool dripped out, the blonde completely lost in pleasure as the filthiest fantasies ran rampant in his brain. "Wanna breed you...! Gonna fucking fill you up with my kids..."
You were too out of it to respond, half conscious and covered in sweat.
Everything went white and he lost track of what he was saying, crying and sobbing as his seed filled you up the second time, coating your walls in thick cum as his hips shuddered to a halt.
....
The room was quiet except for the soft, uneven rhythm of your breathing—deep, slow, the kind of sleep that only comes after being used just right. Your body was a map of him: flushed skin, the faint red marks of his fingers on your hips, the slick evidence of what he’d done to you still glistening between your thighs.
Dex lay there for a long moment, just watching you.
This happened.
The thought hit him like a physical blow. He exhaled through his nose, slow and shaky, his chest tight. His fingers twitched at his sides, itching to touch you again, to prove this was real. That you were real.
You were his.
And he was never letting go.
Carefully, so as not to jostle you, he reached for the tissue box on your nightstand. His movements were deliberate, almost reverent, as he pulled a few sheets free. He didn’t want to wake you—not yet. Not when you looked so peaceful, so undone in the way that made his chest ache.
His thumb brushed against your inner thigh as he cleaned you, and you stirred slightly, a soft sound escaping your lips. His breath hitched.
God, even your noises belong to me now.
The tissue came away damp with a mix of him and you, and Dex’s grip tightened around the box. He swallowed hard, his mind racing.
How did I get so lucky?
He’d loved you from the moment he saw you—had lusted after you, craved you, but this? This was more. This was all consuming. This was the kind of irrational, feral, horridly disgusting need that made his fingers curl into fists just thinking about it.
You were his.
And he was going to skin anyone who tried to take you from him.
His free hand hovered over your hip, not quite touching, as if afraid you’d disappear if he pressed too hard. His thumb grazed the curve of your waist, just once, before he cuddled against you.
I need to be better.
Better for you. Stronger. Worthy.
But even as the thought formed, his gaze darkened, his jaw tightening.
Summary : Dex is convinced that he‘s bad for you, but maybe you were made for each other.
Pairing : DDBA! Benjamin Poindexter x reader (she/her)
Warnings/tags : Freak4freak!!!! Hurt/comfort(?) Major sex themes, dark romance, codependent relationship, obsessive attachment, Sex is very much described (explicit, but no anatomical detail), hostage backstory, handcuffs/restraint mention, Stockholm syndrome discussion, guilt, panic/anxiety, morally questionable romance, vomiting mentioned (not as a sex act), drug mentioned but no drug use, chase kink mentioned, cursing (let me know if I missed anything!)
Word Count : 2.9k
Notes : This was supposed to be an impromptu 500-word blurb I wrote while listening to “Free” by Florence and The Machine but I went overboard. This is probably my most explicit fic yet. Enjoy!
The first time you told Dex you loved him, he had thrown up.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
You had said it in his kitchen, half-asleep in one of his old FBI shirts, barefoot with love bites on your neck, reaching for the coffee like you had any right to look that adorable in a place he lived. Like his apartment was not a place where he planned to kill people. Like his hands had never done anything worse than skim under the hem of your shirt and pull you close.
“I love you,” you had said, casual as breathing.
Dex had gone white.
Then he had walked very calmly into the bathroom with one hand over his mouth and vomited until his ribs hurt.
Because yes, he loved you too.
He loved you so badly it felt like his body had mistaken affection for a terminal illness. He loved you until being away from you made his skin crawl. He loved you so much it made him cruel to himself. He loved you so much he wanted to crawl out of his own skin because wanting to keep you felt like a crime. He had wanted to be loved his whole miserable life, and then when you came along and loved him, he wouldn’t fucking trust it.
Because there was no way you loved him back.
Not really.
Not if you were whole.
Not if he had not done something to you first.
Because the first time you met, he had broken into your apartment. After all, your window had the perfect sightline into the building across the street.
Because you had caught him in your living room with a mug in your hand and sleep shorts riding high on your thighs, and he had looked at you like you were a small obstacle.
“What the fuck—”
His hand covered your mouth before you could get any louder.
“I’m sorry,” he said, genuinely, because he was one of the good guys now. “I just gotta do this one thing.”
You bit his palm.
He hissed, then caught your wrist and handcuffed you to the exposed water pipe under your kitchen sink.
He flexed his bitten hand once. “I said sorry.”
You glared up at him.
That day, you should have screamed yourself hoarse.
Instead, you had talked for six straight hours.
You. Fucking. Yapped.
Like a pomeranian on cocaine.
You had insulted his boots, his posture, his insane audacity. You demanded coffee. You asked if the gun was compensating for something (you later found out it was definitely not). You asked if he always tied women up before breakfast or if you were getting special treatment. You even threatened to bite him again if he came too close, then immediately asked if he was single.
Dex had sat by your window with a rifle scope pressed to his eye. He was pretty sure he fell in love somewhere between the twelfth complaint that your ass was sore and the twenty-first threat to sue him.
So now, eight months later, with you under him, legs wrapped around his waist and your body taking him so well he could barely breathe, all he could think was…
He had done this.
He had broken something in you.
Still, he moaned your name. You were perfect beneath him, pleasing him so well that his own voice kept dying in his throat every time he tried to speak. He could barely form the guilt into words because you kept squeezing around him like your body wanted him closer than close, like every thrust dragged a sound out of you that went straight through his cogmium spine and lit him up from the inside.
“You don’t love me,” he suddenly rasped, because of course he had to bring it up again while he was inside you.
You laughed, but it broke into a moan halfway through when he moved again, and the stretch of him made your whole body seize. “Dex…”
He choked on the spit buildup in his mouth because he was drooling at this point, his hands fisting in the sheets beside your head. “Fuck,” he breathed, voice ruined. “Don’t—don’t say my name like that.”
You tried to answer, but he was too much, too deep, fucking you into the mattress hard enough to make the bed frame knock harshly against the wall like every thrust was an argument he was losing.
“You’re so… hmph,” His forehead dropped against yours. His voice cracked. “God, you’re so fucking tight. I can’t think when you— when you feel like this.”
You could barely hear what he was saying, you just dragged him down by the neck and kissed the scar on his cheek. You were practically making out with it, because hyperfocusing on it helped bring you back to earth. “Dex… fuck!”
His whole body jerked at the sound.
“Don’t,” he rasped, but he didn’t stop.
His hips kept driving into yours, deep and rough, punching the breath out of you until your hands pawing at his skin. “Don’t say it like that.”
You tried to laugh again, but it came out as a shaky gasp when he pushed deeper. “Like what?”
“Like you, hmm.” His head dropped now, his mouth dragging wet and open against your throat. “Like you love me.”
Your nails dug into his back, giving his back scar company. “I do.”
Dex’s brows furrowed like you had hit him.
His pace faltered for half a second. Then the panic caught up to him and he thrusted harder, like he could outrun the words by burying himself deeper inside you. “N-no.”
“Yes.”
“No,” he said again, and it came out so small it was nearly swallowed by the filthy sound of his body moving against yours. “You don’t know that. You don’t know what this is.”
“I know exactly what this is.”
“You don’t.” His hand grasped the sheets. “You can’t. You can’t love me.”
You were struggling to keep your eyes open. He was stretching you so much every thought came apart before it finished forming, pleasure dragging through you hot and heavy, making your thighs shake around his hips.
Still, you forced yourself to look at him. “I do love you.”
Dex looked like he might be sick again.
Every time.
Every fucking time you said it, even if it was a hundred times a day, his heart broke a little. Like his body wanted the words and his mind rejected them. Like being loved by you was too impossible to fit inside him without tearing a wormhole open.
“You hear y-yourself?” he demanded, breathless, furious, hips still snapping into yours. “You hear how insane that sounds?”
You moaned, head tipping back against the ridiculously expensive pillows he had bought you because his last one ‘made your neck a little stiff’ once.
He groaned at the feel of you tightening around him. “Fuck… don’t—don’t do that.”
“I… ahh, can’t help it,” you managed, voice shaking. “I fucking love you.”
“No, you don’t.” He sounded almost angry now, but all of it was pointed inward, all of it soaked in guilt. “I cuffed you to a pipe. I— Fuck— scared you. I held you hostage and now you’re here, telling me you love me while I’m—” His teeth clenched, his body shuddering over yours. “While I’m doing this to you.”
“You’re not doing anything to me,” you forced out, gripping his arm hard enough to make him hiss. “I asked for this.”
His eyes burned. “That doesn’t make it better.”
“It does, actually.”
“You’re sick.”
“So are you.”
He laughed once, but there was no humor behind it. He then buried his face in your neck as his pace got messier. “I think I gave you Stockholm syndrome.”
“You didn’t,” you insisted. It was barely a sound, it was a miracle he heard you at all.
“You’re not listening.”
“You’re not thinking.”
“I am thinking.” His voice cracked on the last word because you tightened around him again and his forehead dropped to yours, “Shit, you drive me insane.”
“Good.”
“No.” He kissed you hard. “No, not good. That’s what I mean. You make me like this. You make me want too much.”
“You already want too much.”
His hips stuttered, and you saw the guilt pass over his face at once.
Then he drove into you harder. You cried out, and his eyes went dark.
“There,” he said, voice ragged. “That. You should hate me for this.”
“No, Dex.” Your hands slid up, catching his chin, forcing his face close to yours while he kept fucking you breathless. “You didn’t give me Stockholm syndrome. I. Love. You.”
He shuddered. His mouth opened, but nothing came out at first. Then a broken moan as his body betrayed him again.
“You don’t,” he whispered.
“I do.”
“You can’t.”
“I can.”
“You’re perfect.”
“I’m not.”
“You are to me.” His voice sounded raw, almost boyish in its disbelief. “And if you love me, then I did something to you. I had to. I had to have broken something, because there’s no– hnggf— no other way.”
Your chest tightened.
He was still moving, still taking you apart with a rhythm so desperate it bordered on punishing, but his eyes were wet. His eyes filled with self-hatred. He looked like a man starving at a feast and hating himself for opening his mouth.
“Fine,” you gasped. “Have it your way.”
Dex went still for exactly one second. Not fully, and definitely not enough to pull out. Then his body reacted before his mind did and he thrust harder.
It was as if the sentence had scared him so badly he had to pin you beneath him with his weight, his mouth, his hands, his hips. Like if he stopped moving, the words would become real enough to take you away. “W-what?”
“Maybe— hm, maybe you did g-give me Stockholm Syndrome,” you said, voice shaking, half from pleasure, half from fury. “Now what?”
His breathing turned ragged.
“So what, huh?” Your nails dragged up his neck into his hair, combing his scalp “You gonna tell me to go?”
Dex’s face soured. “No.”
“You gonna leave me?”
“No.” The thought of it made him sick. You could see it. You could feel it. His whole body tensed, his grip tightening, his hips losing rhythm for a moment before coming back rougher, deeper, more desperate.
Leaving you was the one noble thing he kept threatening himself with, and the second you suggested it, it destroyed him.
“No,” he said again, like he hated you for making him admit it. Like he hated himself more. “Don’t f-fucking ask me that.”
“But that’s what you’re… you’re saying.” You were so close now you could barely speak, words breaking apart every time he drove into you. “If you really think you ruined me, then stop.”
Dex’s eyes locked on yours.
Your mouth trembled into a cruel little smile. “If you really think, you— shit, you broke me, t-then stop fucking me.”
His breath hitched.
He didn't stop.
You felt it in the way his body went even harder, even more frantic, like the command had gone straight into the darkest, neediest part of him and went feral.
“I-if you think you’re bad f’me, then get off me,” you whispered, mean and gentle all the same, by his ear, close enough to lick the lobe. “Then don’t touch me. Don’t kiss me. Don’t come in me, because we b-both know you’re— hmphh— planning to.”
Dex groaned, tortured, burying his face against your throat.
“No,” he rasped.
“No?”
“No.”
“Thought so.”
He kissed you then, hard enough to steal the rest of the taunt from your mouth.
It was perfect after that, fucking perfect and awful. Your bodies slick with sweat, his hands gripping your hips like he was trying not to bruise you and failing at restraint in every other way. He fucked you like he was confessing and denying the confession in the same breath, like every thrust said mine and every sound said I’m sorry.
“You should run,” he rasped.
“You’d follow.”
His eyes burned.
You smiled up at him, breathless and shaking. “And I’d let you c-catch me. I’m fucking into it.”
Dex looked ruined.
His rhythm stuttered, and for a second you thought that was it, that he was going to fall apart right there, but he grabbed your hips and flipped you with quick motion that left you dizzy.
Then you were on top of him.
Your thighs trembled on either side of his hips, your hands braced on his chest, and Dex looked up at you like you were killing him. His face was flushed, eyes wet, mouth parted as you sank back down onto him.
“Say it,” he said, voice destroyed.
You moved over him, thighs shaking, pleasure making you unsteady. “Say what?”
His eyes opened, furious and starving. “Say– fuck, baby— that you know you could leave and I’d let you leave.”
Your chest tightened. “Dex.”
“Say it.” His grip tightened, not forcing, just holding on. “Say you know the door isn’t locked. Say you know I’d let you go.”
You stared down at him. At the man who had wanted love so badly it made him monstrous with fear. At the man who still believed wanting you was worse than first degree murder. At the man underneath you, shaking, begging for proof that this was not captivity while his body betrayed how badly he needed you to stay.
You leaned down until your mouth brushed his.
“I know I can leave,” you whispered. “I-I know you’d let me.”
His breath collapsed.
Then you kissed the corner of his mouth without ruining your rhythm. “But I’m not.”
Dex broke under you.
His hands slid up your back, dragging you down against his chest as he thrust up into you, needy and completely undone. You could barely keep up, barely keep speaking, your forehead pressed to his as you rode him.
“I love you,” you said again. and this time, he knew you meant it.
That was what did it for him. Not the heat. Not the filth. Not the way you tightened around him or the way he was losing himself inside you, though that helped.
That.
The idea that you had chosen him with all your mind intact.
Your breath hitched first, then your whole body seized, pleasure dragging you under so good that your words turned into a ruined little sound against his mouth. Dex’s eyes widened, his hands clamping around your waist as you went through it.
“There,” he rasped. “There she is.”
You came too hard to answer him properly, nails digging into his chest as he kept you there. “There she is,” he said again, almost broken. “That’s my girl.”
And then Dex broke completely.
He buried his face in your neck as he came after you, groaning your name like an apology, like a confession, like it was the only prayer he knew. His body trembled beneath yours, his arms locked around you while he spilled inside you, holding on as if letting go too soon might make the whole thing disappear.
Afterward, Dex held you like an apology.
His mouth fluttered gentle kisses over your temple, your cheek, your throat, frantic in little broken bursts. He kept whispering sorry so many times the word stopped sounding like language and started sounding like breathing.
You were half-asleep against his chest, your fingers tucked loosely against his ribs.
He kissed your forehead again. “Sorry.”
You breathed out, half asleep. “For what?”
Dex went quiet.
He didn’t know, not really. He was sorry for the pipe, for wanting you too much, for needing you in a way that still scared him. He was sorry for looking at your love and thought it must have been damage.
His arms tightened around you.
You opened your eyes just enough to look at him. His face was ruined, like he was still trying to decide whether holding you counted as selfish.
You giggled softly.
“Dex,” you murmured, eyes half-lidded, fingers lazy in his hair. “If I’m broken, then I was broken when you found me.”
His breath stopped.
You smiled like that was supposed to comfort him.
Instead, it crawled into him and settled under his ribs, sweet and infected. It made his heart thump hard against his ribs. It made the guilt twist, mutate, turn into a warm and fuzzy feeling. Because there you were, looking at him like he wasn’t the man that had ruined you, but the man that had finally made sense. Like whatever was wrong with you had looked at whatever was wrong with him and fuckin’ purred.
Dex stared at you, eyebrows relaxing.
You touched his face, thumb dragging gently over his cheek scar, and he leaned into it before he could stop himself.
Pathetic. So utterly gone for you.
“I love you,” he said.
It came out hoarse.
You shrugged like you knew all along.
“I love you,” he said again. His hand tightened at your waist. “I love you.”
And for the first time, Dex wondered if Stockholm syndrome could happen the other way around, to the captor instead.
There was probably a fancy word for it. Some clinical term made by people with normal hearts. Something he could look up, self-diagnose, dissect, pretend to understand.
But Dex didn’t care.
If that was what had happened to him, then fine.
He didn’t want it cured.
—end.
Extra note : I’ll start the Dex taglist in the next post, comment if you want to be added!
I honestly think Gen-Z and younger simply does not understand how recent widespread smartphone adoption is.
I am not that old, and I didn't have a smartphone until probably late high school. For most of my life, many if not most people were not walking around with a magic internet machine in their pocket that they pulled out and used constantly for everything.
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!!! A teeny bit of angst! domestic!Dex, knives, blood mention, implied violence, Cherry’s heart attack and Foggy’s death referenced, (let me know if I missed anything!)
Word Count : 5k
Requested by : so many people have asked for this type of story!
Notes : This is my favourite thing to write! Enjoy!
Part of What Makes a Good Man? (I think it could still be read as a one shot, but a few references would be missed)
Josie’s smelled like stale beer, wet concrete, and old panic. Which, Karen thought grimly, was probably appropriate for the closest thing to the resistance headquarters.
The bar lights were off except for two busted yellow bulbs over the back room. In the upstairs room, she had dragged a table into the middle of the floor and covered it with maps, police scanners, stolen radios, cold coffee, and several very concerning knives Matt had just gotten back from Cherry’s apartment after the task force attack
Matt sat on a crate, bruised knuckles resting on his knees, his head tilted toward the table like the knife was speaking to him.
Karen stood across from him, staring at the blade. “Matt.”
“I know.”
“No, I need you to understand what I’m looking at.”
“I can feel the wax.”
Karen blinked slowly.
The knife was not just engraved or marked. It was not just some deranged little Bullseye calling card thrown into the aftermath of Daredevil nearly getting revealed and dragged off by Task Force.
It was coloured in badly.
The target symbol carved near the handle had been filled with red crayon. The words Dex had scratched into the metal: YOU’RE WELCOME, was messy and theatrical, had colourful wax rubbed over them like someone had tried to make them pop for readability.
Karen leaned closer, horrified.
There was yellow in the grooves too.
“Why,” she said, very carefully, “is Poindexter playing with fucking crayons?”
Matt didn’t answer immediately, so it meant he was either listening to something she couldn’t hear or trying very hard not to say the something that would make the situation worse.
Karen pointed at the knife even though Matt couldn’t really see. “This is crayon, right?”
“Yes.”
“Children’s crayon.”
“Yes.”
“Not tactical wax or assassin wax or whatever thing I’m about to learn exists?”
“No. It’s crayon.”
Karen put both hands on the edge of the table and leaned her weight into it.
For a while, neither of them said anything as the radio hissed and a pipe groaned in the wall.
Karen looked down at the knife again.
It should have been terrifying, and it was, but it was also so profoundly stupid that her brain kept tripping over it. Bullseye, murderer, assassin, had apparently paused before saving Matt’s life to make sure his murder stationery had arts-and-crafts aspect to it.
“Maybe he got bored,” Matt said, though he sounded unconvinced.
Karen stared at him.
He looked exhausted under the bruises. He had blood at his hairline and a split lip.
“Bored?” She asked incredulously
Matt shrugged. “He’s been in hiding.”
“So he took up colouring?”
Matt’s mouth twitched up into a small smile.
Karen hated that it almost made her laugh.
Then she saw the second knife Matt had brought home.
It had rolled partly under a tissue handle sticking out. It was the same size, though not engraved. But something bright was sticking out of the blade near the handle.
Karen picked it up.
Matt’s head turned when he caught the sudden jump in Karen’s heartbeat. “What?”
“There’s something on this one,” she said.
Weird. Matt would’ve noticed. He was so overwhelmed and panicked by the whole Cherry-had-a-fucking-heart-attack situation, could anyone really blame him for missing it?
“Is that engraved, too?”
“No.”
“Adhesive?”
“Yes, but—” Karen brought it closer to the light, “Oh my God.”
Matt waited.
Karen’s mouth opened, and closed, then opened again.“It has a sticker on it.”
Matt tilted his head. “A sticker?”
“A dinosaur sticker.”
The back room went silent again.
Karen looked at the tiny glossy decal slapped crookedly onto Poindexter’s throwing knife. It showed a cartoon dinosaur with angry little eyes, short arms, a red-orange body, and horns over its brow.
Matt said, “What kind?”
Karen lowered the knife. “I’m sorry, is that the part you care about?”
“Karen.”
She sighed. “It’s a T. rex with horns.”
Matt frowned. “That’s not a T. rex.”
Karen stared at him.
He looked back in her general direction with the unbearable confidence of a blind Catholic lawyer who had no business correcting anyone about dinosaur taxonomy during a fascist municipal lockdown.
“What do you mean, it’s not a T. rex?”
“T. rex didn’t have horns.”
“Fine,” she shook her head and folded her hands in front of her chest. “It’s a mean dinosaur with little arms and horns.”
“So it’s a Carnotaurus,” Matt said.
Karen pointed the knife at Matt, forgot she was holding a knife, remembered, made a horrified noise at herself, and set it down so fast the blade clicked against the table.
“How do you know that?”
Matt paused.
For a second, the upstairs room of Josie’s faded away. For one second, it was a dorm room with Foggy Nelson sprawled across a bed, eating cereal out of a mug because all the bowls were dirty, insisting with absolute conviction that dinosaur documentaries counted as research if you were trying to impress a girl.
“Foggy tried to date a paleontology student in college,” Matt said, voice smaller than it had been. “He spent three weeks watching dinosaur documentaries in our dorm. He had flashcards.”
Karen stared at him.
Matt’s mouth twitched, though it was not quite a smile. “He made me quiz him.”
“Of course he did,” Karen said, and despite everything, despite the knife and the blood and Fisk and the fact that Foggy was not there to laugh at how completely insane this conversation had become, her eyebrows softened.
Matt almost smiled properly that time.
Then Karen looked back down at the knife, and the gentleness vanished. Because Foggy was dead, and Matt was bruised and half-bloody, and Benjamin Poindexter had apparently left them a weapon with a tiny horned dinosaur sticker slapped crookedly near the handle.
The world was stupid and evil and somehow still finding new ways to be insulting.
“God,” Karen whispered. “This is insane.”
Matt reached for the crayon knife. His fingertips moved carefully over the carved grooves near the hilt where red wax had been pushed into the engraved Bullseye symbol. The wax was thick in some places and thin in others. The roughed blue texture had been dragged across the letters. Flakes of yellow clung to the steel like whoever had done it had pressed too hard, then switched colours halfway through with the chaotic confidence of someone having the time of their life.
Matt went still.
Karen saw it immediately. “What?”
“The wax is outside the engraving.”
Karen stared at him. “Okay? So Bullseye can’t colour, what does that matter?”
“No.” Matt’s voice dropped. “Dex can.”
The panic stopped dead in Karen’s chest for a second.
Because yes, she realised, Dex could.
Dex could hit a target he couldn’t see. Dex could turn anything into a weapon. He could put a paperclip through an exact point from across a room and look almost bored doing it. If Benjamin Poindexter decided, for reasons no sane person could ever hope to understand, to sit down and colour in the engraving on one of his knives, he would do it perfectly. He wouldn’t smear red wax over the steel, or drag blue crayon halfway past the letters, or leave little chunks of yellow caught near the hilt.
Dex would stay inside the lines because Dex did everything inside the lines.
Karen looked down again, and the colouring was suddenly so much worse. It was not careless. It was messy in a way Dex would never let himself be messy. It was joyful and proud. Like whoever had done it had been helping. Like someone small had been given permission, and Dex had allowed it.
“No,” Karen said.
Matt didn’t answer.
“No, Matt.”
His fingers moved to the second knife. The sticker was glossy beneath his thumb. A Carnotaurus, apparently, though Karen’s brain was still categorising it as “T. rex” because she didn’t have the emotional capacity to update her dinosaur taxonomy during a crisis.
Karen backed away from the table. “No. No, no, no.”
“Karen—”
“Bullseye found a child?”
Matt flinched at the words.
Karen’s voice rose, panic turning it into an accusation. “Bullseye found a child. Bullseye has a child near him. Bullseye let a child touch his knives. Matt, what the fuck?”
The radio hissed and the building creaked around like their surroundings wanted to excuse itself from the conversation. Karen pressed both hands into her hair and stared at the knives as if they might suddenly become normal if she glared hard enough.
They didn’t.
A child. A child with crayons. A child with dinosaur stickers. A child close enough to Benjamin Poindexter to leave little bright traces of themselves on weapons. And Dex hadn’t removed them, that was the part Karen could not get past. He had kept them. He had carried them. He had brought them to Cherry’s and used them while saving Matt, like the sticker mattered, like the wax mattered, like some tiny hand had improved the knife in a way Dex considered worth preserving.
Karen sat down, then immediately stood back up because sitting felt uncomfortable. “Have we been keeping tabs on Poindexter’s wife?”
Matt went very still.
The question hit like a plate breaking. Karen hated how quickly her mind had called you “keeping tabs” like some common criminal, hated that the panic had turned tactical.
But she didn’t take it back.
“Have we?” she asked again, a bit louder.
Matt’s teeth clenched. “Karen.”
“Don’t,” she half-scoffed. “Have we been watching her?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because Fisk starved her in a basement,” Matt said, and this time his voice was not angry at all. “Because she’s been through a lot.”
Karen’s mouth opened, but nothing came out.
Matt lowered his head slightly, like he was listening to his own words. “We can’t bring her into all of this again.”
Karen looked at the table. The knives were still there
“But if there’s a kid,” Karen said, and hated how thin her voice sounded. “Matt, if there’s a kid—”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t. Bullseye found a child.”
Matt’s face tightened, but not with confusion. It was recognition. He was already somewhere ahead of her, putting together pieces to make this all make sense.
He knew Dex, though not fully. Maybe nobody knew Dex fully except you. But Matt knew one thing with a bone-deep certainty.
Dex loved you.
Matt had heard it before in the rhythm of Dex’s body, in the deadly stillness whenever your name entered a conversation, in the way Fisk had used you and Dex had gone silent and absolute. Dex was capable of terrible things. Dex had done terrible things.
But Dex would not hurt you.
Matt knew that. He hated knowing it, but he knew it. Dex would burn down half the city before he let you bleed. He would crawl through glass before he let you be dragged back into Fisk’s hands.
So if there was a child near his knives, if there was a child close enough to colour his symbol and sticker his blade, Matt did not believe that child was random.
Karen saw the realization on Matt’s face.
“Oh my god,” she said. “You think it’s hers.”
Matt said nothing.
Karen let out a panicked laugh. “No. That’s insane. She doesn’t have a kid.”
Matt’s silence was worse than a disagreement.
“She doesn’t,” Karen insisted, too quickly. “When would she? With prison, and the institution, and Poindexter being—” She gestured helplessly at the knives, because there was no adequate end to that sentence. “Himself.”
“We don’t know,” Matt said.
“And if she does have a kid, it’s probably not his.”
Matt’s mouth tightened. “We don’t know, Karen!”
Karen’s panic twisted. “Then we have to check.”
“Karen.”
“We have to.”
“Not like this.”
“She could be in danger.”
“I know.”
“Fisk could find her. Vanessa could find her. Task force could already be watching her.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you standing there?”
“Because you’re angry.”
Karen stopped.
The words hit harder than she expected. She wanted to snap back immediately, but the answer got caught in her throat because Matt wasn’t wrong, and that made her even angrier.
“You’re angry and scared,” Matt said, smaller now. “You have every right to be. But she can’t open the door to rage.”
Karen looked away.
She wanted to say she could handle it. She wanted to say she knew how to talk to victims, that she had done this before, that she was not a reckless amateur kicking through someone’s trauma for a lead. But she had spent the last several minutes spiralling, and Matt had heard every bit of it.
“She knows me,” Karen said, but it came out weaker now.
“Yes,” Matt said gently. “But she may not know you’re not there to use her as evidence.”
That shut her up.
Matt reached for the towel and wrapped both knives carefully. He was gentle with the crayon one, and even gentler with the dinosaur one.
“I’ll go,” he said.
Karen looked up sharply. “No.”
“I won’t go as Daredevil.”
“You’re not exactly subtle either way, Matt.”
“I can listen in first. I’ll know if someone else is watching her.”
Karen stared at him. “That’s surveillance.”
“It’s a welfare check.”
Unfortunately, it was the only option.
—
Matt Murdock stood across the street from your apartment with rain soaking into the shoulders of his coat, his folded cane gripped too tightly in one hand, his face turned toward the third-floor window where the curtains were half-drawn and the light inside was buzzing.
The first thing he noticed was the lock.
He could feel how reinforced the locks were from the vibrations of the door. They weren’t normal, or even a deadbolt that had probably come with the apartment. There was another lock beneath it, newer, heavier, installed with too much force. A chain too, reinforced brace near the bottom of the door.
Dex’s work, Matt suspected immediately, and his mouth tightened.
Then, from the bedroom, he heard your voice.
“Leo, baby, arms up.”
You said it kindly, with the tired gentleness of someone who had already said it twice and knew she would probably have to say it again.
Leo.
Matt froze.
A little boy made a muffled sound of protest as fabric rustled over his head. His feet kicked lightly against the mattress, not in panic, not in distress, just in a dramatic way that exhausted children fought pyjamas like pyjamas were an injustice.
Leo.
Wait….
Leonard.
Benjamin Leonard Poindexter.
Matt’s stomach dropped so hard it felt like it dropped onto the concrete below.
Oh.
Oh, God.
It was his.
His child. His son. His little boy behind a reinforced door, in a bedroom full of crayons and toys, while Fisk’s people and the Task Force owned half the streets.
He was right.
He had been right.
Still, the same questions swirled in his head: when would you even have had the time? How could that happen between prison and hospitals and Fisk and the institution and every nightmare that had followed you home? How could you, of all people, have looked at Benjamin Poindexter after everything and thought yes. Him. A child with him. A family with him. You, the sweet librarian.
You, who had once looked like the fragile woman trapped in Dex’s orbit.
You, who Matt had maybe arrogantly, imagined as the innocent one in all this. You, who Dex loved too much. The only normal thing he had in his life, proof that some human part of him still existed.
But that was his mistake.
You loved him as much as he loved you.
And it wasn’t in a reasonable way Matt had wanted to imagine for his own comfort.
You had not been dragged into his life and you had stayed. You had chosen him again and again, after the blood, after Fisk, after everything. You had let him build locks on your door. You had let his hands hold your child.
Maybe you were not the sane one trapped beside the monster.
Maybe you were both as devoted in a way Matt suddenly didn’t know how to separate from madness.
Matt’s hand shifted around the cane.
His body angled toward the fire escape before he had fully decided to move. He could break in if he had to. He could get you out, get Leo out, deal with Poindexter after.
He could convince you that your husband was a dangerous man.
Because Karen had been right.
Because what the hell was Dex doing?
What the hell was Benjamin Poindexter doing putting his own child’s drawings on a fucking knife?
Why would you let him?
Then Leo sniffled, and Matt’s thoughts halted.
“Mommy,” Leo said, and his voice was small in the damp night, thick with tears he was trying very hard to keep inside. “Daddy said he’d be back before bedtime.”
The words came out wounded and sleepy, not frightened. He sounded betrayed by time itself, by the unfairness of promises and clocks and fathers who were supposed to appear before the lights went out.
Your footsteps paused. “Oh, baby.”
Your voice changed so quickly it almost hurt to hear. It went lower, all the tiredness falling out of it and leaving only that immediate motherly ache. Matt heard the mattress spring dip as you sat down beside him, heard the tiny shift of Leo crawling into you before you could even finish opening your arms.
“He said before bedtime,” Leo mumbled into your shirt.
His voice was muffled now, pressed against you, wet with the first real break of crying. He was trying to sound angry, trying to make the case properly, but he was too little and too tired, and the sadness kept spilling through.
“I know, sweetheart.”
You answered him with your mouth close to his hair, the words rounded and careful, like you were trying to place each one gently enough that it would not bruise him more.
“He promised.” Leo’s breath hitched on the word. It was the kind of broken little accusation only a child could make, not because he wanted to blame Dex forever, but because he needed his father.
“I know he did.” You didn’t argue with him or rush him past it. Your hand moved over his back in slow circles, and Matt could hear the drag of your palm over cotton pyjamas.
“He forgot me,” Leo whispered.”
“No, honey,” you cooed, “Daddy didn’t forget you.”
Leo cried then. It wasn’t a tantrum. It was a tired, heartbroken little cry into your shoulders, the kind that shook his breathing more than his body. You pulled him closer, one arm around his back, the other hand cupping the back of his head.
Matt stood in the rain and hated himself for listening.
This was bedtime.This was private.
“Something must have taken longer than Daddy thought,” you murmured, and you believed it.
“Helping?” Leo asked.
His voice lifted hopefully on that word, still clogged with tears, because helping was something he could understand. Helping meant Daddy was not gone because he wanted to be. Helping meant there was a reason.
“Yes,” you said after a quiet breath. “Helping.”
You made the word sound safe. Smaller than it was. Soft enough for a child’s bedroom.
“With his knifes?” He asked.
Matt’s body went rigid again.
Leo didn’t say it like weapons scared him. He said it like he was asking about a toolbox. Like knives belonged to Daddy the way crayons belonged to him, important and not for touching without permission.
Your heartbeat changed, but only slightly. “Not bedtime conversation, baby.”
You said it with a little sigh at the end, half warning and half affection, as if this was not the first time Leo had tried to drag one of Dex’s more concerning habits into a domestic moment.
“But I made them lucky,” Leo said. His voice was still wet, but brighter now, tugging itself away from tears with the stubborn pride of a child remembering his contribution.
“I know you did.” You sounded like you were smiling despite yourself, your fingers still smoothing through his hair.
“The dinosaur one is very lucky.” Leo said it with deep seriousness as if the entire survival of his father depended on one sticker’s blessing.
“I know.”
Your answer was barely more than a whisper, but there was warmth in it. Familiarity. You knew exactly which knife he meant.
“He put it in his pocket.”
Leo’s voice wobbled less now, steadied by the memory. Daddy had kept it. Daddy had chosen it. Daddy had understood the importance.
“He did.”
You sounded fond, and that fondness did something awful to Matt’s chest.
“And the red one,” Leo added, a little more animated now. “He said that one was very timmy-dating.”
Your laugh broke at the cutest little mispronunciation of intimidating before you could stop it, muffled against the top of Leo’s head.
“I bet he did.” You sounded exhausted and amused and in love with both of them in a way Matt didn’t know how to process.
The knife on Josie’s table flashed in his mind. The crayon smeared outside the engraved symbol, wax caught too thick near the hilt. The messy colour pressed into steel by a child’s determined hand.
He realised now that it was not a threat. It was a gift.
Leo sniffled again, but the crying had mostly passed. “Can I draw on more of Daddy’s stuff tomorrow?”
“Only when he’s home, baby.”
“But he likes it.” Leo’s tone turned pleading and persuasive, the heartbreak of bedtime already becoming negotiation.
“I know he does.”
You didn’t deny that. You could not, apparently. Matt heard the truth in your voice. Dex liked it. Dex liked the messy drawings, the stickers, the proof of small hands on dangerous things, as long as he was there to keep him safe.
“I’m good at it,” Leo insisted. He said it with a tiny offended sniff, like his artistic credibility had been questioned by the entire household.
“You’re very good at it.” You answered immediately.
“I stayed in the lines.” Leo sounded proud now. Sleepy, still sad, but proud.
You hummed, “Mostly.”
Your voice was teasing, so gentle that even the joke seemed tucked around him like the blanket.
Leo gasped. “Mommy!”
His voice came out scandalised, wounded all over again for a completely different reason.
“I’m sorry,” you said, and you did not sound sorry at all. “You stayed in the lines wonderfully, Leo.”
You stretched the wonderfully with just enough to make him feel admired. Matt could hear Leo accepting the correction.
“That’s better, mommy,” Leo murmured.
His voice had gone softer now. The fight was leaving him.
The room settled around you both. Bluey chattered from the living room, not forgotten. Rain tapped against the window. Somewhere near the bed, crayons sat scattered in a plastic tub, waxy and bright. The apartment smelled like warm milk, laundry detergent, paper, fruity shampoo, and a faint metallic tang.
You shifted the blanket up over Leo’s legs.
“He’ll come see you when he gets home,” you promised.
“Even if I’m sleeping?”
“Of course, baby.” You said it like a fact. Dex had probably done enough times that Leo could safely build his little heart around it.
“How will I know?” His voice was fading, but the worry remained.
“Because he always does.” Your answer came with a stroke down his back, steady as a metronome.
Leo was quiet for a moment.
Then he whispered, “He fixes my blanket.” The words were drowsy now, half memory, half proof.
“He does.” You sounded as if you had watched it happen a hundred times.
“And he puts Mr. Diplodocus back.” Leo’s voice dragged over the dinosaur’s name with sleepy accuracy, because even half-asleep, apparently, taxonomy mattered in this house.
“Every time.” You said it with a smile in your throat.
“And he kisses my head.” The sentence was barely there, a confession more than a statement.
“Yes, baby.” Your voice thinned with tenderness.
“Even when he thinks I don’t know.” Leo sounded proud of knowing. He sounded loved because of knowing.
“Especially then.” You whispered it.
Matt turned his face away from the window.
He shouldn’t have heard that.
It made it hard to interfere.
He had come ready to break in. To save you. To save Leo. To rip a child out of Benjamin Poindexter’s life before that child was in danger
But this was not a child waiting for rescue.
This was a child waiting for his father.
Leo yawned, long and shaky. “Tell Daddy I waited.”
His voice was almost gone now, but stubborn. He needed the record kept.
“I will.” You answered solemnly, because it mattered to him.
“And I cried.” His voice carried a tiny bit of embarrassment.
“I’ll tell him you cried a little.” You chuckled.
“And I was mad.” A sleepy spark of indignation returned.
“I’ll tell him you were very mad.” You gave the anger its place, too.
“And brave.”
You kissed his forehead. “So brave.”
Your voice broke in the smallest way.
Leo seemed satisfied with that. His breathing slowly evened out, the last little shudder leaving him as sleep pulled him under. You stayed beside him long after he stopped answering, your hand resting on his back, your thumb moving over his pyjama shirt like you were still soothing the world’s sins out of him.
Then, when he was asleep, you whispered, “Daddy loves you so much.”
Your voice was not for Leo to answer. It was a promise left in the room for him because you knew it was true.
Matt stood in the rain until you turned off the night-light. He listened as you crossed the apartment and checked the door. Deadbolt. Second lock. Chain. Bottom brace.
One after another.
Matt understood then that he had to leave before Dex came home.
If he stayed, he would hear too much. He had already heard too much. And if Dex came home and realised Matt knew about Leo, he might have to have a conversation he wasn’t sure he was ready for.
So Matt left.
He walked back to Josie’s with rainwater dripping from his coat and Leo’s voice stuck behind his skull.
Daddy said he’d be back before bedtime.
Karen was waiting upstairs.
The knives were still on the table between maps and cold coffee.
“Well?” she asked.
Matt took off his coat rainwater dripping from the hem onto the floorboards, but he barely noticed. Karen was watching him from across the room, waiting for the truth.
Not too long ago, Matt would've told her everything.
But then Matt thought of Leo.
Dex’s son.
Dex’s little boy.
Leo, who had cried because his father missed bedtime. Leo, who knew Daddy would still come home, fix his blanket, put Mr. Diplodocus back on the pillow, and kiss his head while he slept. Leo, who had sounded so loved that Matt could not stop hearing it.
That was the part Karen would never understand.
She wasn’t there. She would not hear the bedtime voice. She would not hear the way you soothed him. She would not picture the night-light, or the crayons, or the extra locks on the door.
She would hear one thing, and one thing only; Bullseye has a child.
And maybe she would be right to panic. After all, Karen had changed. Foggy’s death had changed her. Dex had changed her. That very same grief had made part of her cruel.
Karen would want to do something. She would want to get Leo away from Dex before Dex could hurt him, even though Matt knew Dex never would.
Matt knew ripping Leo away from his parents would not make anyone safer.
It would put everyone in danger.
Because Matt knew what Dex would become if he thought his son had been taken from him. The city was already barely holding together. Taking you and Leo from Dex would tear straight through the last fragile thread keeping him human.
And after what Matt had heard, he couldn’t do it.
He could not help tear apart the little family you were clearly trying so hard to keep together.
So Matt chose to bend the truth to the woman he loved. Matt was choosing the lesser disaster.
“She’s fine,” Matt said.
Karen stared at him. “That’s it?”
“No Task Force, no one watching the building.”
“And Poindexter?”
Matt swallowed. “He wasn’t there.” Technically, not a lie.
Karen’s eyes narrowed. “Nothing out of the ordinary?”
Matt thought of the extra lock, the night-light, the stuffed dinosaur.
Your voice saying, Daddy loves you so much.
It seemed to be the most ordinary of days to your patched up little family.
He made himself look at Karen.
“No,” Matt said quietly. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”
—
Across the city, Dex came home through the window.
He stripped off the jacket, checked it for blood, for dirt. He washed his hands until the water ran clear. Then again. He scrubbed under his nails, changed his shirt, wiped down the knives before setting it high on the shelf where Leo couldn’t possibly reach.
Only then did he go to his son.
Leo was asleep with Mr. Diplodocus tucked under his chin, one cheek damp from earlier tears. Dex stood in the doorway for a moment, completely still.
Then he walked across the room, fixed the blanket over Leo’s shoulder, moved the dinosaur back onto the pillow, and kissed his forehead.
“M’ home,” he whispered.
Leo sighed in his sleep, like he knew.
Dex stayed until his breathing settled, and then he went to you.
You were half-asleep when he climbed into bed behind you, His arm slid around your waist, face tucked into the back of your neck.
“Late,” you murmured.
“I know,” he kissed the side of your neck. “M’ sorry.”
“Leo cried.”
Oh. Dex went quiet for a second.
You found his hand under the blanket and squeezed it. “Only a little. He said he was mad and sad and brave.”
Dex’s mouth pressed to your shoulder and relaxed against you.
After a while, you asked, sleepily, “Bad night?”
His thumb moved once over your stomach.
“Had more run-ins with the Task Force rats than I anticipated,” he murmured. “Skewered two with Leo’s lucky knife.”
“The red one?”
He nodded.
You hummed. “The timmy-dating one.”
Dex smiled against your skin. “Yeah,” he whispered. “The timmy-dating one.”
—end.
Extra note: Guys I wanna set myself a challenge! Send me asks about Dex and Leo or Bucky and Jamie and I HAVE to make a little story that’s 500 words or less. I simply must get practice writing proper blurbs because I have a bad habit of overexplaining everything. Please specifically request it as a blurb 🫠🫠🫠
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!)
and this isnt even an english phenomenon, it is worldwide
The connection between football and domestic violence isn’t uncommon. A study shows that police receive increased calls reporting domestic violence every Sunday during football season [iii]. Researchers analyzed over 700 cities and counties using data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) of police reports, revealing that these spikes are linked to teams losing a game [iii]. In fact, domestic violence incidents rise by about 10% on days when NFL games are played, usually occurring in family homes and most of the time affecting women [iii]. This shows that the outcomes of football games can have a real impact on people’s lives off the field. It’s important for fans, teams, and communities to recognize these patterns and work together to raise awareness and prevent domestic violence from happening, especially during football season.
NFL games bring people from all over the United States together to show their love for the game, creating an atmosphere where diverse cultur
when i say the sports-industrial complex should be destroyed im not indulging in goofy hyperbole
Summary : Dex has to learn that you can have bad days, too.
Pairing : Benjamin Poindexter x reader (she/her)
Warnings/tags : established relationship, hurt/comfort, sensory overload, overstimulation, traffic light system, safeword use, mentioned free use arrangement, aftercare?, soft ending, dark romance elements, obsessive Dex, protective Dex. DDBA! Dex I think. :)
Word Count : 6k
Requested by : Ko-fi request <3
Notes : Hey ya’ll! If you wanna be tagged, please send me a message! Comments get lost sometimes. Enjoy!
You hadn’t had the best day and it started with the coffee machine not working.
That was entirely your fault. You had cleaned it the night before, rinsed everything carefully, set it back in place, and then just… not set it up properly again. Usually, you would have found it funny. You would have sent Dex a picture of the dead display and made him promise to bring you coffee later.
Instead, you stood barefoot in the kitchen at seven in the morning, pressing the button over and over like one of the attempts might change the result, and felt tears sting your eyes.
Dex was asleep down the hall, face buried in your pillow, one arm stretched across your side of the bed as if he had gone looking for you in his sleep. You considered waking him, and you nearly did, standing in the bedroom doorway with your bag hanging off one shoulder, watching the rise and fall of his back, and thought about crawling under the covers again.
But he had been out all night.
He needed sleep, and you needed to leave.
So you found instant coffee in the back of the cupboard and made it too strong because you were already running late. You burned your tongue, while the clasp on your necklace got caught in your hair. Your tights had a ladder in them, a thin line running up the back of your calf that no one else would probably notice but that you could feel all day like a crack in glass.
You changed twice and hated both outfits.
The third one was acceptable until you got outside and realized the waistband sat weird when you walked. It pinched at one side and shifted at the other. You kept trying to fix it discreetly beneath your coat while waiting for the train, which only made it twist more.
Then the train was delayed.
You kinda wished it would’ve been canceled; it would at least have given you something to be angry about. It was delayed by six minutes, then nine, then twelve, with the announcement changing every time you looked up. The platform filled around you as a lady stood close enough behind you that her bag pressed against your back every time they moved. A man near the stairs was watching videos without headphones, and two women beside you were having an argument in furious whispers.
Your phone buzzed in your hand.
Dex. Coffee machine dead?
You stared at the message for too long.
Normally, you would have answered with something dry and funny immediately. Instead, you typed three different replies and deleted all of them because every version sounded irritated, and you were irritated, but not with him.
You sent a heart.
He replied with three.
That nearly made you cry again.
Work was not terrible enough to justify how terrible it felt.
Nobody screamed at you and nothing caught fire. You didn’t get fired or humiliated, but it was just a constant fucking drag.
An intern, a fresh graduate called Grace, stopped you before you had taken off your coat because they needed help with something they had known about since yesterday. Your computer decided to update while going to the double-booked meeting room, so everyone stood in the corridor pretending not to be annoyed while Brad from HR insisted he had reserved it first. When you finally got inside, the projector would not connect.
Then your manager, Amy said, “This should only take five minutes,” and it took forty-three.
At some point, your coworker Jack, put a hand on your shoulder from behind to get your attention.
You nearly snapped. They apologized. You apologized for reacting. Then you spent the next ten minutes thinking about whether your apology had sounded strange.
That was when you had to go to the bathroom and cry.
You sat in the last stall with the lid down, both feet planted on the floor, trying to breathe quietly so that no one would hear you. You hated crying at work and the bathroom lighting and the thin toilet paper scraping under your eyes. You hated that there was no single problem you could point to and say, there, that’s why I can’t do this today!
Your phone buzzed again.
Dex had sent you a message about going out because task force was spotted in droves on the other side of the city, and that he was going out to get them.
Then cried harder because you missed him, even though he lived with you and you had technically seen him that morning.
You washed your face, went back to your desk, and tried to finish the day.
At four, Dex texted that he would probably be home late.
You stared at that one until the words blurred.
It was reasonable and normal, by your standards. He worked strange hours and disappeared with even stranger explanations. You were used to eating without him. You were used to waking up with him suddenly in bed beside you, one hand finding your waist beneath the blanket.
But you had spent the whole day thinking about going home to him.
You didn’t even want to talk to him. You wanted to walk through the door and see him standing in the kitchen. You wanted him to take your bag without asking and tell you to change into a soft cotton shirt so as not to trigger your sensory issues. You wanted to sit between his knees on the sofa while he rubbed slow circles into your thighs.
Instead, you sent. Okay. Be safe.
He reacted with a heart.
You put your phone facedown and finished the last hour.
The train home was worse than the train in.
You had to stand while a wet umbrella kept brushing your ankle, even though you didn’t realise it had been raining. A man across the carriage kept coughing into his fist and then touching the pole. Every time the train stopped, more people got on and nobody got off.
By the time you reached your building, your shoulders ached from holding them up around your ears. You dropped your keys in the hallway, and the sound of them hitting the floor was so annoying that you just stood there staring at them for several seconds before bending down.
The apartment was dark when you opened the door.
You turned on the lamp instead of the main light and you took off your coat and immediately felt colder. You put it back on. Took it off again because the lining felt horrible against your skin. You stood in the living room holding it, suddenly unable to decide what to do with it even though there was a hook three feet away.
You dropped it on the floor.
Then you felt guilty because Dex liked things clean and in their place.
Fuck.
You sat down beside it and cried with one shoe still on and one shoe off, louder than you cried in the office bathroom. You cried because the apartment smelled faintly like Dex, but he wasn’t there. You cried because you had spent the whole day being reasonable, and now there was nobody in front of you to be reasonable for.
Afterward, you felt stupid and sticky-faced, which just made the sensations worse.
You picked up the coat and put your shoes away. You sent Dex a message asking when he would be home, then deleted it before sending because you didn’t want him distracted while he was out doing very dangerous Bullseye things.
You showered instead, and the water was too hot at first, but you didn’t fix it quickly enough, so your skin felt like it was boiling across your chest and shoulders. You washed your hair. Then the wet texture clung to your back and made you angry, so you wrapped them in one of Dex’s old shirts instead of a towel because it was softer.
You put on your sleep shorts and the gray shirt of his you always stole.
It smelled like the detergent you both used now, not specifically like him, which made you strangely sad.
You tried to eat.
There were pasta leftovers in the fridge. Dex had labelled the container DO NOT EAT in black marker, then added unless you are my girlfriend beneath it in smaller writing because you had told him one you liked one of those cheesy jokes, and Dex being Dex, listened and manufactured it into his life even though he got no real enjoyment out of it. You heated it up, took three bites, and put them back because the tomato sauce was chunky, and it felt weird on your tongue even though technically, there was nothing wrong with it. .
So you made tea and forgot the bag until it went bitter.
You turned on the television, then muted it because the voice of the newscaster irritated you. The silence irritated you too, so you turned it back on quietly with subtitles.
At some point, you checked the locks twice.
You knew Dex would not use the door when he came back. He would use the fire escape.
On most nights, the thought made you smile. Tonight, you wanted him to use his key like a normal person.
You wanted to hear it turn in the lock like a warning. You wanted him to call your name from the entrance so you had time to prepare for being touched.
But whatever. He probably didn't even bring his keys.
You climbed into bed with the lamp on.
Usually, you liked Dex coming home with that focus still in his eyes. You even loved the way he sometimes stood at the foot of the bed and looked at you as if he had followed you there. You liked the games he played to rile you up, because Dex knew exactly how to frighten you without making you unsafe. You liked restraints because he checked every knot, every buckle, every inch of space between your skin and whatever held you down.
You liked being helpless when it was Dex.
Usually.
But tonight, you just wanted him.
You wanted to press your face into his chest and let him complain that your wet hair was soaking his shirt. You wanted him to ask what happened, accept “nothing” as the answer, and hold you still.
The fire escape groaned outside the window.
Then the living room window slid open, and Dex climbed in with blood on his sleeve, still.
You were in that half-sleep state where your body had gone heavy but your mind was still floating somewhere above it, listening to the hum of the television you had left on in the living room and the old pipe knocking faintly in the wall. You were even still aware of your breathing, too shallow to be restful.
You knew what Dex was like after a long night. You knew the way adrenaline ran in his body like a live wire, making him hungry and a little fucking insane. Usually, you were more than happy to let him spend the rest of it on you.
That was the arrangement, after all.
The free use thing had happened over weeks of conversations, some serious, some filthy, some with you sitting cross-legged on the bed while Dex sat on the floor taking it all in like he was memorising a mission brief. What was okay, what was not. It was discussed and re-discussed, picked apart in daylight until even Dex’s paranoid brain had nothing left to gnaw on.
You had said it first half as a joke, grinning over your mug while Dex sat opposite you at the kitchen table looking like you had just handed him a loaded gun.
“What, you don’t like the idea?” you had teased.
His eyes had gone dark in a way that made your thighs press together beneath the table. “I like it too much.”
That had been the problem, Dex had always liked you too much, wanted you too much, so you made rules.
You told him what he could do if you were half-asleep, and what he could do if you were pretending to be asleep, which was different, because sometimes you liked lying there smug while Dex tried to kiss you patiently. You knew what he could do if he came home needy.
Most days, you loved Dex coming into the bedroom while you were still sleepy, his hands sliding under your shirt like he owned every inch of skin he found there. You loved the first drag of his mouth against your shoulder and the rough sound he made when you pressed back into him without opening your eyes. You loved pretending to be annoyed while he kissed down your spine and told you that he knew you were awake because your thighs were already sticky for him.
You loved being wanted like that, loved Dex murmuring filthy nonsense against your skin about how pretty you were, how good you were for him even when you were barely awake. You loved the way he could make free use feel less like being used and more like being worshipped.
Sometimes he was sweet about it, climbing into the bed clean and careful, gathering you back against his chest, and kissing you awake inch by inch like he had all the time in the world. He would slide one hand over your stomach and whisper your name until you made that cute complaining sound he loved, and then he would laugh like you were the best thing that had ever happened to him.
Sometimes he was not sweet, still shaking with adrenaline and put a hand over your mouth before you could say something naughty, only to kiss your temple immediately. Sometimes he pinned your wrists because you liked to fight him for show, and he liked pretending not to know you were letting him win. Sometimes he found you half-asleep and still managed to fuck you awake so thoroughly that by the time you could think again, your face was hot, your hair was a mess, and Dex was in your ear telling you how good you were for letting him have you.
You liked that.
But tonight, your body had already been handled by the entire fucking day. Your nerves had been touched and touched and touched until touch did not feel like touch anymore. It felt more like threat.
You knew that, but then Dex came home and your first thought was still I want him.
You then heard the movement of him walking around the apartment, and not like a direct line to the bathroom, or the kitchen. Not even to check the lock, which he always did even when he had just broken into his own home like a lunatic.
Instead, he was coming to you.
The bedroom door was half-open, and you kept your eyes closed.
You told yourself it was because you were too tired to move, but part of you liked the game. Part of you wanted to be found like this, buried in the middle of the bed in his shirt and your sleep shorts, pretending you hadn’t been waiting all night, helping you forget the day, forget the job, forget everything except getting his hands on the one thing in the world that belonged to him.
He stopped in the doorway, and before you knew it, the mattress dipped.
Dex was always careful at first, even when he was feral. He put a hand beside your hip, not touching yet. His breathing was slow, but not steady. You could hear the way he held himself back for the sake of a rule he wanted to break only because you had once told him breaking it in the right way turned you into putty.
His fingers touched your ankle beneath the blanket, almost testing.
Your body gave a tiny shiver.
Dex went still, before his hand slid higher, possessive enough to make heat flicker through the exhaustion. His palm travelled up the back of your calf, over the bend of your knee, over your thigh. You heard him exhale, and the sound was so hungry it made your stomach flip despite everything.
“Pretty girl,” he whispered.
Your face warmed.
Stupid body. Stupid, fucking traitorous body.
He leaned over you, and his mouth brushed the back of your shoulder where his shirt had slipped wide at the collar. He started with one kiss, quickly followed by another. It became open-mouthed and filthy, like he was trying to be gentle and got overwhelmed. His hand found your waist beneath the shirt, fingers spreading against your skin.
For one second, it worked.
Your violent, devoted, half-mad Dex came home through windows and touched you like you were the only object of desire in the universe, who could make you feel filthy and adored at the same time, who could make being half-asleep feel like the dirtiest kind of safety.
His mouth moved to your neck, hand tightened at your waist.
“Missed you,” he breathed, rough against your skin. “Been thinking about you all night.”
Your thighs pressed together beneath the blanket before you could stop them.
Dex noticed and made a small sound against your throat, almost broken with relief, and shifted closer until his body was against your back. His hand slid over your hip, tugging you back into him.
For one second, you really wanted it.
Your body remembered him before it remembered itself. It remembered all the other nights he had come home ruined and desperate and crawled into bed like your body was the only place he knew where to put the violence. It remembered waking up already breathless to his greedy hands, his mouth saying filthy, adoring things against your skin until you went undone beneath him.
For one second, you wanted to be that girl again.
Dex’s hand tightened on your hip, and your breath broke in a way that sounded enough like pleasure to confuse both of you. He pressed his face into your neck and inhaled like he was trying to crawl inside your veins.
“Color?” he asked, it was rough, but still good of him.
You meant to say yellow.
The word was right there, sitting behind your tongue. Yellow meant slow down, meant you wanted him, but you needed him kinder. It would mean this was good, but also too much. But Dex’s mouth was on your throat, and his hand was warm under your shirt, and you had missed him so badly all day that admitting you needed less felt like losing him for a stupid reason.
So you said, “Green.”
Dex exhaled against your skin. “Yeah?” he murmured.
You nodded, eyes still closed.
You should have said yellow again then. You should have corrected yourself because there was still a good amount of space to do it, while his hand was only at your waist and his mouth was only at your neck, but your mind was gone and your body had betrayed you with that little shiver, and Dex had never been the best at reading the small things. He was more a flashing lights kinda guy.
Feelings had to be handed to him with both hands. It had had to be said plainly, right in front of his face, with no riddles and no hoping he would guess. Dex, through no fault of his own other than his upbringing, didn’t always know the difference between you trembling because you were turned on and you trembling because your nerves were fraying apart unless you told him.
He caught your hip and flipped you onto your back in one rough movement, fast enough that the mattress jolted under you and your breath left in a startled little sound. Dex was above you immediately, one knee between your thighs, one hand braced beside your head, his eyes blown wide with whatever the night had left in him. There was blood at the edge of his collar, and a smear of it near his wrist. His hair was damp from the rain, falling over his forehead in a way that made him look more unhinged at the same time.
“Missed you,” he said, voice wrecked.
Your stomach flipped.
Fuck, he was beautiful like this. Even terrifying, he was beautiful, and you had built so much of your wanting around those two things. Dex looked down at you like he wanted to ruin you and worship whatever was left.
His hand slid to your chin, possessive.
Your thighs pressed together on instincts held apart by his leg between them.
“Mmm ,” he whispered. “My pretty girl.”
Heat curled in you, slick and stupid, even as your skin prickled at the edges. Your bad day had not killed the part of you that loved being grabbed by him, turned by him, handled by him. You loved Dex rough because Dex rough still meant Dex focused, Dex obsessed, Dex so fucking hungry for you that the rest of the world could plunge itself into a void and he wouldn’t give two shits.
His mouth was on yours before you could think. The kiss was hard enough to make your head press back into the pillow. His hand stayed at your chin, holding you there while he took your mouth in a way that made your body go loose for him out of habit. You kissed him back, finger catching the front of his shirt, and when you pulled, Dex made a groan against your lips Then his hand went to the hem of your shirt.
His shirt, technically. He dragged it up your body impatiently, and the cool air hit your skin. You lifted your arms for him before you remembered you were tired.
“Fuck,” he breathed.
Your face went hot.
He threw the shirt behind him.
Usually, you would have laughed and he would have said something deadpan and filthy enough to shut you up. Tonight, the loss of the shirt made you feel exposed too quickly, like your body had not agreed to be perceived that much even if your mind wanted to.
But then Dex kissed down your throat, and you forgot for a second.
His hands were everywhere, greedy at your waist, your ribs, your thighs, reminding himself you were real, coaxing himself out of whatever horror he had done.
You arched under him, and that was honest too.
Your back lifted as your hands found his shoulders. He caught both your wrists in one hand and pressed them above your head, pinning them there against the pillow.
His eyes lifted to yours, fever-bright. “Yeah?”
You swallowed, and this time, no color came out.
Dex took it for yes because it did feel like a yes to you. Usually, you liked being held down. Tonight, you were too tired to know the difference.
Dex reached for the drawer beside the bed.
Your heart jumped, not in fear at first, but in anticipation.
You knew that drawer and what was in it. The rope came out in his hand.
Your breath caught.
“Still green?” he asked.
Say yellow.
Say yellow.
Say yellow.
You looked up at him, at the way his chest rose and fell. You thought about the whole day: the train, office, light, the way you had cried on the hallway floor because your coat had fallen.
You thought, I can take it.
So you said, “Green.”
Dex looked relieved and hungry and dangerously grateful, like he had been waiting all night for permission to stop being human in exactly the way you usually loved.
He tied your wrists to the headboard, roughly, because he was Dex.
He checked the space between rope and skin automatically, two fingers, always. Your wrists went up as the expensive silken rope was bound to the bedframe.
Your body went liquid for one dizzy second.
You loved the helplessness that made your brain melt in a good way. It was a dirty drop of the heart, knowing you couldn’t reach for him now unless he let you. You loved how Dex looked at you when you were restrained, like your trust was the most intimate thing you had ever given him.
“Look at you,” he whispered.
You looked at him looking at you, and for a moment, it was perfect.
Then the rope shifted just slightly. The knot didn’t tighten or hurt. Still, it felt wrong.
The texture scraped your skin in a way it never had before. You could feel every fiber, every point of contact. Your skin pressing against the rope seemed to get louder than everything else in the room somehow, louder than Dex’s breathing, louder than your own heartbeat.
Your fingers flexed, and the rope moved again.
Your stomach dropped.
No.
You tried to breathe through it.
You tried to get the good feeling back. You tried to look at Dex, at his face, at the hunger you usually loved so much. You tried to remind your body that this was chosen and safe and that Dex had checked. That you had said green twice. That you loved this. You loved this. You loved this!
But the rope kept touching you and it felt like pure, crawling wrongness. The feeling started at your wrists and travelled up your arms until your shoulders froze and your chest went tight. The knot might as well have been around your throat for how quickly your breathing changed.
Dex lowered his mouth to your chest, still murmuring something against your skin,filthy and half-mad.
You barely heard it as your eyes filled.
At first, you did not even know you were crying. Then a tear slipped sideways into your hair, then another.
Dex felt you go still, and this time, he noticed immediately.
His head lifted. “Hey,” he said.
You blinked hard, but the tears came faster.
Dex froze above you, that predatory stance gone now.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, panic filling the back of his eyes, unable to read your thoughts.
You couldn’t answer.
His eyes moved over your face, your mouth, your chest, your wrists. He looked almost frantic trying to identify the injury. Was it blood? Bruises, pulled shoulder? Dex was good at identifying wounds.
Emotions made him useless unless you labelled them for him, but this was blatant enough that even Dex understood something was wrong.
“Baby,” he said, voice suddenly stripped bare. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
Your breath caught as the rope brushed your wrist again when you moved.
You made a horrible little sound, unable to speak.
Dex’s eyes snapped to your hands.
“What?” he said, reaching up but not touching yet. “The rope?”
You nodded once, almost ashamed.
He nodded grimly. “What about the rope?”
“I-It feels wrong,” you choked.
Dex went white.
Your fingers flexed again, and the texture dragged at your skin, and suddenly you couldn't bear it for one more second. Not even half of one. Your whole body reacted around the rejection, and the word whispered out of you before you had decided to say it. “Red.”
Dex moved instantly.
His hand went to his belt and to his weapons, and for one horrifying second your body thought knife and almost spiralled further under, but Dex was not looking at you like that anymore.
He pulled the blade free with the same face he wore disarming a bomb.
“Don’t move,” he said, practical.
He didn’t untie the rope, because untying took time.
Dex cut it, a clean slice through the first binding, then the second. The rope fell away from your wrists in loose pieces, useless on the pillow, and Dex threw the knife across the room like he couldn’t stand to have it near you a second longer.
Your arms dropped free, and he was already backing away.
Dex had stopped being a man and become an emergency response. His shoulder hit the dresser, hands lifted, palms open.
You were crying, that was all he saw.
Because of me, he thought.
“I’m away,” he said, a little too loudly and too quickly. “I’m away. I’m not touching you.”
His voice was flat. Dex had never been truly calm a day in his life, so was just forcing panic into a box in his mind that was labeled “procedure.”
You tried to say his name, but it came out broken, and it made him worse.
“I’ll go,” he said. “I can go. I should go. You need space. You need me out. I’ll go to the living room. No, not the living room, that’s not far enough. I’ll go downstairs. Outside. I can wait outside. I won’t come back until you tell me. I won’t touch you, I won’t—”
“Dex—”
“I hurt you.”
You wiped at the tears from your eyes now. “Y-you didn’t.”
He wasn’t listening.
His eyes kept dropping to your wrists. His mouth had gone pale and his hands were still up, still shaking slightly like he didn’t trust them anywhere near you.
You said red and you’re crying, was all he could think of.
“I hurt you.” he said, words coming faster now. “I scared you. I tied you down and you cried. I had a knife in my hand. I shouldn’t have had the knife, I knew I was—”
“Dex.”
“I’ll go.”
You tried to get back up, but even the sheets were starting to crawl as you were getting more and more overwhelmed. “N-No.”
“I need to go.”
“Dex,” it came out breathy.
“I need to not be near you right now.”
“Nuh-uh. Dex—”
“I can’t be the reason you’re looking at me like that.”
You were crying harder now because he was spiralling, and you were spiralling, and the two of you were dragging each other down in opposite directions. Dex kept retreating. You kept trying to pull him back with a voice that was too fragile to reach him.
He turned toward the door, and you finally snapped.
“I need you!”
He froze.
The shout tore out of you raw, loud enough to hurt your throat. Dex stopped like you had fired a warning shot.
You shoved yourself upright, blanket slipping around your waist, cheeks wet, chest heaving.
“Stop,” you sobbed. “Don’t you dare fucking leave while I’m-I’m l-like this.”
His face fell, panic still prevalent. “I’m trying not to make it worse.”
You choked on a breath. “You are making it worse!”
Dex went still.
You pointed at the floor like you could physically pin him there with the gesture. “You are standing over there looking at me like you’re a monster and you keep talking about leaving and I can’t— I can’t do this too, okay? I can’t comfort you while you’re trying to punish yourself. I need you.”
He looked devastated, and maybe that meant he was finally listening.
“I just—” Your voice broke, and the next words came out almost screamed, because gentleness wasn’t cutting it anymore. “I just need you to hold me, you fucking idiot!”
Dex stared at you, looking completely lost.
Every terrible conclusion he had been building in his head had slammed into that sentence like a shield and shattered at his feet.
“You want me to hold you?” he asked, barely audible.
“Yes,” you cried. “Jesus Christ, yes.”
His hands lowered by an inch.
“But I scared you.”
“Because I was already scared of everything,” you managed through gritted teeth.
“You said red.”
“And you stopped!”
You could see it finally go through to him. His eyes flicked to the cut rope, then to your wrists, then back to your face. He was still terrified of himself, but he stopped backing away.
“I need you clean,” you said, voice shaking. “Then I need you here.”
He moved immediately.
Thank God.
Giving him an instruction helped him. Dex disappeared into the bathroom with stiff purpose, and you heard water slam on. As he scrubbed his hands too hard. You heard him almost losing it over the sink and forcing himself not to because you had not asked for that.
When he came back, the blood was gone.
His shirt was gone too, replaced with the white sleeveless one you liked, because it made him look less like he had crawled out of an alley and more like the man who lived here. Your man, who slept with one hand searching for you.
He stopped by the bed, still afraid to presume after what happened.
You opened your arms.
He climbed onto the bed slowly, gave you every second to change your mind, and only closed his arms around you when you grabbed the front of his shirt and dragged him in.
Then he was truly in, and you folded into him.
You cried into his chest with both fists clenched in his shirt, and Dex held you like he was learning how to touch you all over again.
“Tighter,” you sobbed.
His arms tightened.
“More.”
He held you properly then, careful but not distant. His chin tucked over your head, one hand spread between your shoulder blades, the other on your back, keeping you against him without trapping you. You could feel his heartbeat racing under your cheek, and still, yours was worse.
For a while, neither of you said anything.
Words had been too much all day. Everything had been too much all day. So this was good.
Dex pressed his mouth to your hair.
“I just had a bad day,” you whispered into his chest.
His arms tightened again.
You felt him inhale. “All day?” he asked.
You nodded.
His hand flexed against your back.
He wanted to ask, you could feel it. He wanted names, causes, targets, so he could follow them home and put them through a wall for making you feel like this. But for once, he held it in.
You cried harder, because he was warm and clean and finally close enough. “I meant to say yellow,” you whispered.
His chest stopped moving for a second.
“I know,” you added, before he could spiral again. “I know I said green. I know. I just wanted to be okay. I wanted it to be like usual.”
Dex didn’t speak for a long moment.
Then he held you a little closer and pressed his cheek to the top of your head. “Okay,” he said roughly.
It sounded like he was swallowing glass.
You pulled back just enough to look at him. His face was serious, jaw tight, laying in bed with the woman he loved crying all over his shirt, trying to work out how to shoot a bad day.
And then, with absolute sincerity, he asked, “Do you want me to kill anyone?”
You stared at him.
He meant it.
Fuck.
It was so shocking, so cathartic, that a sudden laugh burst out of you, half-strangled against his chest. You tried to stop it, but the look on his face only made it worse. He frowned slightly, earnest, still holding you like he would rather die than move wrong.
“I’m serious,” he said.
You laughed harder. “Dex.”
“What?”
“You can’t kill someone because I had a bad day.”
His brow furrowed. “Why not?”
“Oh my God.”
“If there’s a person responsible—”
“There isn’t.”
“There’s usually a person responsible.”
“There was Brad from HR.”
You blinked at him. “How do you know about Brad from HR?”
“You texted me about him once.”
“That was, like, six months ago.”
“I remember things.”
Despite yourself, you laughed again.
You buried your face against him again, laughing and crying at the same time until you could barely breathe. Dex still looked confused, but his arms settled securely around you. He understood this much, at least, when you pressed closer instead of pushing him away.
“I don’t need you to kill anyone,” you murmured once the laughter faded.
“Okay.”
“I just need you to hold me.”
His mouth pressed to your hair again. “That I can do,” he said.
And he did, held you until your breathing slowed, until the room stopped feeling like it was on fire.
After a while, very quietly, he added, “I would, though.”
You huffed a tired laugh into his shirt. “I know, honey.”
His arms tightened carefully around you.
“Just checking,” he said.
And because it was him, because he meant it with his whole heart, because the day had been awful and you were safe now, you laughed one last tiny laugh into the dark.
i think people really under sell the physical side effects of mental health disorders sometimes. like sure the depression and anxiety may be 'just in your head' but when what's in your head happens to disrupts your sleep schedule and prevent you from going outside regularly and eating consistent meals and exercising and generally taking care of your body. well it sure takes its toll huh.
Hello, I work for a large moderately evil corporation and for at least five years now I have to sign a yearly thing to say I will never ever have one of these devices in the same room as me while I work.
My large moderately evil employer takes it for granted that these things are spying on me at all times, and you should too.
i've heard more people describe taylor swift's wedding as "tacky" than i have heard people talking about the number of rapists and abusers playing in the world cup
blakekathryn
baratheonpilled
izzy806
