pull you closer | part one
Benjamin Poindexter x afab!Reader
Aren’t friends supposed to help each other out? You don’t want some fairytale romance or to be swept off your feet. You just want sex. The same way you want him to kill spiders or carry your heavy grocery bags when the elevator’s out of order. As far as Dex is concerned, this is just another thing he can do for you.
tags: 18+ MDNI, second person POV but switches between dex and you, pre-Fisk FBI era, guy best friend!dex, fwb talk, dex’s weird view of intimacy and friendship and relationships and sex, male masturbation (dex touches his peepee and thinks about you 🩷)
word count: 5.7k
a/n: this was supposed to be a single long-shot that absolutely got away from me so i’m splitting it up heeheehaha. big shoutout to tumblr users killshotx and roxxmo, was extremely inspired by their writing/characterizations of dex!!!
No matter what else happens during the week, Dex spends every Sunday evening at your place. Without fail.
Which is funny, when he thinks about it. He remembers the way he tried to avoid you at first, all those months ago, after you spilled your freshly brewed hot coffee down his shirt before work trying to make your train on time.
But then you were there at the station again the next morning. And the morning after that, and so on. After a few days of awkward small talk — conversations you always started and he only reluctantly participated in — he learned that you had just moved and this was your new subway line to work.
You refused to take the hint. After weeks of plopping yourself down in the seat beside him and yapping his ear off until his stop, you weaseled his number out of him. It took no time before you were texting him any and everything that crossed your mind.
Then you started inviting yourself on his weekly grocery trip. You almost always caught the morning train together, rarely did he end up seeing you on the afternoon one too. The first time he did, he remembers getting on after work and catching your eye, waiting for the discomfort to knot itself tight in his stomach at the smallest change of routine. Instead, impossibly, he felt a smile tug at the corners of his mouth at the sight of you waving excitedly at him. The two of you talked about your after work plans, and then you gasped and told him oh, shit, you needed milk and hey, Dex, why don’t you just go with him?
You started coming up with increasingly flimsy excuses to include him in your own plans after that. “You want me to come with you to buy new shampoo?” he asked one day.
“…Yeah?” you had said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. More fun that way?”
He still doesn’t understand how or why it happened. He just knows somewhere along the way you became his best friend.
And, somehow, he became yours.
Now he shows up around 5:30 every Sunday, carrying a plastic bag of whatever drink and snacks you texted him to pick up from the bodega. He doesn’t need to knock anymore, ever since you got a spare key to your place cut for him months ago. By the time he lets himself into your apartment, you’re already scrolling through DoorDash, because Sundays with you always means ordering dinner and watching a movie together.
Tonight it’s Chinese food and Ghostbusters, because you inform him that yes, Dex, Halloween starts promptly on October first and that no, Dex, he doesn’t get a say this time.
He knows how the rest of the evening will go, because it’s how all Sunday evenings go. He’ll come up with a fake complaint about the upcoming work week — something minor and insignificant that lets you tease him and call him a drama queen — and then you’ll tell him something ridiculous one of your other friends is up to, or ask his opinion on a problem you’ve already decided the answer to. He likes that you share the small, insignificant details of your life with him, and he likes that you want to hear his too.
Tonight you’re telling him about your friend who’s balancing a roster of three different men who just caught wind of each other.
“I really don’t know how she does it,” you tell him around a mouthful of noodles. “I can barely handle one guy. I do not miss dating.”
He wipes the residual egg roll grease off his fingers. “No?” he asks.
He’s spent years listening to conversations in the bullpen, more than just a few about terrible first dates or exes who kept coming back. Coworkers getting ghosted or lovebombed or trying to decipher mixed signals. Everyone always has some complaint about the person they’re seeing. He’d never understood how something so commonplace could be so complicated.
“Fuck no,” you snort. “It sucks.”
He nods. That tracks. He wouldn’t know much from experience, of course, because relationships have always seemed like some complicated social ritual everyone else learned without him. There are rules he doesn’t understand and expectations nobody says out loud, and then adding feelings into the mix on top of that sounds exhausting.
Dex has gotten better at pretending. It’s what he does when something doesn’t come naturally — which is far more often than he’d like. He watches and he studies and he tries to follow along the best he can. Dating, however, just has never seemed worth the effort regardless.
“But,” you rasp, downing the last sip of your wine. “I do miss sex.”
He blinks then. Sex. It’s not like he’s never thought about it. Of course he has. He just never fully understood the appeal.
You don’t notice his silence. “I just— I don’t want to redownload Tinder.” You wrinkle your nose. “I don’t want some guy texting me all day. I don’t want him hanging around in my apartment. I don’t want him disrupting my routine.”
Dex texts you all day. Dex hangs around in your apartment. Dex is a big part of your routine. Before he can open his mouth to point that out, you cut him off.
“I mean, I don’t want someone else doing all that.” You push yourself up off the couch with a grunt and head towards the fridge for another glass. You smooth a hand over his hair on the way by. “You’re good.”
Is that a compliment? “Thanks…?”
You call out from the kitchen. “I just need some guy I can call to, I don’t know…” You pause, then giggle at your own joke before you even say it. “Fix the pipes. And then promptly leave me alone.”
He recoils. Whether it’s at the expression or the thought, he’s not sure.
Some guy would mean losing his Sundays here. Some guy would mean less time Dex would spend with you and more time he would spend alone with his thoughts.
He already knows you. He already knows your routine and what makes you laugh and what annoys you. He knows your go-to order when you’re too tired to cook. He already spends almost every evening he can with you, and it still isn’t as many as he’d like. The thought of having to split you with someone else beyond that makes something tight and unwelcome settle in his chest.
He’s not… jealous, per se. He isn’t actually sure what he should call it. But he doesn’t like it.
Your friendship just works. It’s stable. It’s good. And most importantly, it’s predictable. Dex likes predictable. Predictable means he knows where he stands. He knows that sometimes he gets things wrong. He knows there are things about him that other people find difficult, that he can be too much or not enough depending on the day or who you ask. He knows things don’t come to him instinctively. When to speak, when to apologize, when someone’s being sarcastic, when they want honesty or when they want comfort.
But with you, it’s easy. He knows what to expect.
Why bring someone else into your life? Aren’t friends supposed to help each other out?
You don’t want some fairytale romance or to be swept off your feet. You just want sex. The same way you want him to kill spiders or carry your heavy grocery bags when the elevator’s out. As far as Dex is concerned, it’s just another thing he can do for you.
There’s really no reason he can’t provide it. If it keeps things the same, and keeps someone else from changing what the two of you have, then he wants to provide it.
There is one tiny complication: he hasn’t actually had sex. He has tried before. Unsuccessfully. Twice.
The first time was supposed to prove that he could be normal. He took a girl on a couple awkward dates in his 20s, and when things progressed and he got invited back to her place he said yes. He tried and he waited for the part where it was all supposed to click into place and it never did.
The second time was to prove he’d gotten it wrong the first time. The first time had been nerves, he told himself, on a bad night with the wrong girl. So he tried again, convinced that now he was prepared and that if he just approached it differently, if he stopped overthinking, it would work.
It didn’t.
He stopped trying after that. Sex became just another bullet point on a long list of things that didn’t come naturally to Benjamin Poindexter. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t take care of you. Maybe he couldn’t give you everything, but he could give you enough.
He waits until you’re back on the couch, nestled into the cushions and resting your wine on the side table.
“…I could,” he says.
You look over at him. “Huh?”
“I could do that.”
Your brow furrows. You grab your plate again and he watches you pick at a weird piece of chicken. “Do what?”
“Have sex with you.”
Your fork clatters out of your grip. You look at him like he just confessed to a crime, then scoff and shake your head. “Ha ha. Very funny.”
“I’m serious,” he tells you, sitting forward. His elbows rest on his knees. “You trust me, don’t you?”
“Yeah, of course, but it’s not—” You put your food back down on the coffee table and turn to face him properly, tucking one leg under you. He can’t really read the expression on your face. “It’s not just about trust, Dex.”
“You said you don’t want someone new taking up your time. You already know me, right? So I don’t count?”
“Right…” you agree carefully.
“So nothing has to change.”
It makes perfect sense to him. No awkward first dates you’d have to suffer through, no potentially dangerous strangers in your apartment he’d have to worry about, and your friendship stays exactly as it is.
“You’d… want that?” you ask him quietly. “With me?”
He’d never spent too much time thinking about sex as something he wanted. It had always seemed to him like something meant for other people to enjoy — like camping. It was just never something he’d felt drawn to for its own sake.
There isn’t much of himself left that you haven’t already seen, anyway. Or much of you that he hasn’t. You’ve watched him panic and cry and lose his temper with you. You’ve seen him come crawling back to fall over himself and try to make things right again. You know your jokes fly over his head sometimes and he doesn’t realize until you beam up at him with that bright, cheesy smile, waiting for him to catch on and never making fun of him.
He’s held your hair while you were sick, let you fall asleep against him on your couch and drool on his shoulder, listened to you cry and watched you laugh until you couldn’t breathe. He’s seen every awkward, and sometimes inconvenient, very human part of you. So why would this be any different?
This isn’t really about sex. This is about you and preserving your friendship, something he knows he can’t afford to lose. The act itself seems incidental. How bad could it be? He trusts you, and you trust him. That’s what really matters, right?
So if it means you aren’t going to start making room for someone else, then yes, sex seems like an easy decision. He’d want that.
He nods, even though he doesn’t understand the way you’re looking at him. “I think it would work,” he says simply, and turns back to the movie.
He can still see you watching him out of the corner of his eye, like you’re waiting for the punchline. It never comes, because with him it never will, so you reluctantly turn back too. “Okay.”
The movie ends 43 minutes later. You’re not sure you actually watched the rest of it after Dex offered to fuck you as casually as he’d offer to help rearrange the furniture in your living room.
That’s the part you can’t wrap your mind around. Not really the fact that he offered, but the way he did it like it was nothing at all. Very Dex-like of him, in retrospect.
You hate how much it’s affecting you. You couldn’t even bring yourself to point at Slimer or the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and tell Dex “that’s you by the way” when they showed up on-screen.
You glance over and he’s watching the credits roll like they actually matter, completely relaxed, one hand resting just underneath his ribcage and the other holding his water bottle.
You’re almost jealous of how unaffected he seems.
He turns his head and catches you staring. “What?
“We need some rules,” you tell him abruptly.
“Rules?”
“Yes. Rules. If we’re gonna do… this, we need rules.”
“Okay,” he says simply, and oh, god, he is actually serious about this.
“Okay. This can’t make things weird.”
“What do you mean ‘weird’?” he asks.
“Like—” Your hand plays nervously with your hair. “We’re best friends, I really don’t want to lose that. So if… sleeping together… makes it awkward, we can’t do it again.”
“I don’t want that either,” he says immediately.
Sometimes he’s impossible to read, and other times he’s so painfully earnest it almost hurts. You can tell he means it, really means it, that this isn’t some reckless decision just to get in your pants or him trying to complicate things.
“If you want to sleep with someone else, that’s fine. But you have to tell me and this has to end if you do.”
His lip curls ever so slightly, almost like he’s grossed out by the thought, but he nods anyway. “Okay.”
The words tumble out before you can stop them. “And if one of us starts catching feelings—”
Dex waits expectantly for you to continue, like a good dog waiting for his next command. Your breath hitches against your will.
You’ve always known Dex was attractive, objectively. You’re not blind. Women looked at him when you were out together, your coworkers had gushed about how hot he was after seeing him through the window once while he waited for your shift to end. Even you had noticed it when you first bumped into him.
But he never flirted, or made a move, or even hinted that sex was something that had ever crossed his mind. At some point, you just started seeing him as a Ken doll. Genital-less. A six-foot-tall Ken doll with big, stupid doe eyes and a strong, stupid jawline, with a stupid dimple in his stupid chin.
Oh, you are so screwed.
You swallow. “We’ll just talk about it,” you finish lamely.
“We’ll talk about it,” he repeats, like he’s committing instructions to memory.
You think you’d have an easier time navigating this with literally anyone else. He must have no idea how insane this actually is. He’s just sitting there, waiting for you to tell him how this works like you’ve got a board game set up in front of him.
You’re the one who had to open your big mouth and say you missed sex. You’re the one who made the joke. So why does it feel like you’re on your back foot right now?
You clear your throat, because someone has to steer you two through the rest of this and you don’t think you trust him to. “So.”
“So?” he echoes.
You chew the inside of your lip. Dex blinks at you a couple times, confusion slowly settling over his face. His fingers start tapping on his stomach.
You just have to rip the fuck-buddy shaped bandaid off.
“Um, when do you actually… want to…” You gesture vaguely between the two of you. “Y’know?”
“…Have sex?” he asks.
You cringe against the onslaught of unwelcome images the phrase makes flash through your mind. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about your fingers in his hair. Don’t think about his mouth on your neck. “Don’t say it like that.”
He raises his eyebrows at you. “How else am I supposed to say it? I’m not calling it ‘fixing the pipes’ like you did.”
“Ugh.” Somehow it’s only funny when you say it. “Fine, you’re right. Just never say… that again.”
“Alright.” He pauses for a moment. “When do you want to have sex?” he asks instead.
You tilt your head back and groan, dragging your hands down your face. You can’t believe you’re actually having this mortifying conversation right now. “I don’t know.”
You’re scheduling a dick appointment with your best friend. With Dex. You really are. The man who has seen you burst into tears at the sight of a fat raccoon two days before your period. The man who has seen you in your ugliest pajamas. The man who has seen your apartment when it’s a total disaster and never commented on it.
And now you’re just supposed to fuck him? This is pigs-flying, Hell-freezing-over, completely uncharted territory.
You stare at him and he stares back, genuinely, patiently waiting for an answer. He doesn’t seem embarrassed or flustered at all and it’s somehow making your own nerves even worse.
“Not tonight,” you say quickly.
“Okay.”
“I need…” You sigh and start gathering the plethora of takeout containers spanning your coffee table, desperate for anything to channel your suddenly antsy energy into. “I need time to mentally prepare.”
Dex stands and follows you to the kitchen, grabbing the plates, your mostly empty glass, and his half-full water bottle on his way. “Prepare for what?”
For what? For seeing him naked. For him seeing you naked. For whatever’s going to happen later this week that might change your friendship forever.
“It’s just been a while,” you cop out with a shrug. The takeout containers hit the counter a little harder than you intend. It’s not technically a lie. It’s just also not technically the truth.
“I understand,” he says, which you know is his go-to when he doesn’t but he’s trying to sound respectful. He moves past you to the sink to rinse the last few drops of wine out of your cup. “How long do you need?”
You think for a second and come up with nothing. “I don’t really know,” you tell him honestly.
He grabs the tea towel from your oven handle. Have his forearms always looked like that? “A week?”
“Maybe?”
“Friday?” he asks harmlessly, drying off your glass. You don’t like the way you’re hyper-focused on his hands right now, either.
Friday would give you five days.
Five days until you see if Dex kisses you softly and cautiously, the way he does everything, like he’s afraid of getting it wrong, or if there’s some other side of him you’ve never seen before.
Oh.
Five days until you find out what Dex is like when he stops holding himself back.
Wait.
Five days until Dex sees your boobs. Five days until you touch his penis.
Oh, shit.
It’s a struggle to keep your voice even. “Sure.”
Dex smiles to himself and nods once, satisfied that this matter has been settled. Appointment scheduled.
You finish cleaning up together in silence. He sorts the leftovers into your fridge in his very particular way, and you let him like you always do. You clean your plates and he wipes down your counter, the coffee table, and the side table before folding the throw blankets you’d left in a heap on your couch earlier.
You keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, for him to double back and tell you sorry, he didn’t know what he was thinking, maybe he shouldn’t come over on Friday and have sex with you after all.
It never happens. You can’t even tell if you’re relieved or not. It feels like someone took 5 different emotions and mashed them together like a toddler with play-doh, then opened your ribcage and tossed it in.
Eventually, he checks the time.
“I should go,” he says, double-checking his pockets for his wallet, phone, and keys before heading to the door. You're only a few steps behind him.
“Yeah,” you agree too quickly. “You have work tomorrow, so…”
Dex pauses and looks over his shoulder at you, eyes narrowing as they search yours. “…I know?”
Yes. Of course. Of course he knows. You idiot.
“Yeah, obviously. I just meant—” You don’t know what you meant. He stares at you for a couple seconds longer, clearly trying to figure out what he’s missing.
“You have work tomorrow, too,” he points out.
“Yeah, I know.”
He blinks at you. “…Right.”
This is the part where you normally hug him goodbye. It's what you do every time he leaves. He’ll put on his jacket and shoes and you’ll call him an old man for leaving before 10 p.m. and then you’ll hug him before he goes.
You’ve done it dozens and dozens of times without thinking, but now your brain insists on reminding you that hugs involve touching. A lot of touching, which has apparently become an incredibly loaded activity in the wake of tonight’s conversation.
He tilts his head slightly at you. “Are you okay?”
“Yep,” you say, too fast to be believable.
His eyebrows pull together and he says your name like a question.
You try to smile but you think it probably looks more like a grimace. “I’m fine.”
You can tell by the way his jaw works that your behaviour’s starting to fluster him. “Are we not hugging?” he asks bluntly, his tone taking on that slight tell-tale edge of agitation creeping in. If you don’t hug him, he’s going to think he did something wrong, and that’s the last thing you want right now.
You’re making this weird. You just told him not to make it weird and now you’re being a big, dumb hypocrite.
“Sorry. Yes.” You shake your head like it’ll quiet your thoughts. “Obviously.”
You step forward and slide your arms around his waist like you always do. You try to steady your breathing and not think about your chest squished against his, or his hips pressed tight to your lower stomach. You try not to think about the comforting weight of his arms around you, the warmth of him seeping into you, or how good he smells—
Stop.
This is not supposed to feel different, but it does, because now you know you’re going to find out how these same hands on your back are going to feel on the rest of your body. Without the protective barrier of your clothes. By the end of this week.
You think maybe Friday can come too soon.
When Dex finally gets home, his apartment is quiet. Like always.
Usually he likes it. Now it’s almost… bothering him.
The first thing he does is text you that he got back safely. Then he hangs his jacket on the hook next to the door, toes his shoes off and lines them up square against the wall, and drops his keys and wallet in their dish on the kitchen counter.
He takes his nightly shower and he takes his nightly medication. He double checks that his front door is locked and he climbs into bed and closes his eyes.
Sleep rarely comes easily to him. Tonight it doesn’t come at all.
Usually when Dex can’t sleep, he thinks of you. He thinks about you a lot, actually, because thinking of you is easier than thinking of everything else.
He thinks about the way you grab his arm when you get excited. The incomprehensible memes you send him when he can’t answer you at work. The way you force him to sit through bad reality television and somehow make it enjoyable with your presence.
Those thoughts have always been familiar and safe. Grounding.
But tonight, he thinks about that unreadable look in your eyes after you pulled away from each other. Almost like you were waiting for something. He doesn’t know what you would be waiting for, or what he was supposed to do. It’s still bugging him.
Were you thinking about Friday? Were you already regretting it? Did he cross a line? Did he get it wrong?
You didn’t look upset.
So, what if you weren’t? What if you were thinking about Friday because you wanted him? What if you were looking at him like that because you were imagining it, too?
No. You are his friend. His friend who makes him huff out reluctant laughs, who checks on him when he’s being too quiet, who makes his life feel less empty. He doesn’t want his brain to take all of that and corrupt it, to look back at every kind thing you’ve ever done and convince him there was something else there all along.
He just can't stop thinking about what you really meant when you said you trusted him. Trusted him to see you, bare and exposed? Trusted him to touch you? Trusted him to make you feel good?
He grabs his phone off his nightstand, sees he has to be awake in six hours, and opens Google.
can sex ruin a friendship
He finds an article titled No Strings Attached: Navigating Friends With Benefits Relationships.
“Each person is different, and it can be hard to find someone who is on the same page as you,” it says.
He sighs through his nose. That doesn’t help. He’s known that for as long as he can remember. Maybe there’s no straight answer there, loathe as he is to admit it. Maybe whether Friday changes anything depends on what actually happens on Friday.
If you’re trusting him with this, the least he can do is make sure he doesn’t get it wrong and disappoint you.
He spends the next thirty minutes clicking through article after article, and Reddit thread after Reddit thread, hoping someone somewhere will finally explain what he needs to do step-by-step. All they do is regurgitate the same advice with different wording.
Communicate. Take your time. Pay attention. Someone says confidence is attractive, someone else says confidence doesn’t matter if you’re attentive. One says to ask questions, another says that’s a mood killer.
None of them tell him what he actually wants to know: how to make sure you’re happy with him.
If you’re happy, if you want to do it again, then it worked. Then nothing has to change.
Now he’s less worried about Friday being a good idea, and more concerned about if he can actually do this without ruining everything.
He locks his phone and puts it back on the nightstand, then lies on his back and stares at the ceiling.
Friday.
If he’s lucky, he’ll get to leave work on time. He’ll shower and change and get to your apartment before seven, if the subway cooperates.
Should he bring dinner? Your favourite bottle of wine?
No. That makes it feel like a date. He’ll just show up, like he always does. That seems safest.
He’ll unlock your door with that spare key he still can’t believe you gave him. You’ll stand up from the couch or walk over from the kitchen and smile at him like you always do, probably make some joke because you’ll know he’s nervous before he even says a word.
Should he kiss you then? Probably not. Probably too soon.
Maybe after you’ve both sat down for a while. Would waiting make it seem like he wasn’t interested? Would kissing you immediately make it seem like that was all he wanted?
He doesn’t want to rush you. He’ll sit through the newest episode of whatever reality show you’ve been watching, and you’ll make pancakes because Friday means breakfast for dinner. Maybe you’ll burn some again, because you always get distracted talking to him. And then maybe instead of walking him to the door at the end of the night, you’ll walk him to your bedroom.
What if you get nervous? What if you stop at the threshold of your room and change your mind? He’ll tell you it’s okay. Obviously it’s okay. He imagines taking your hand, telling you that you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. He imagines your eyes searching his, finding whatever you’re looking for there, and pulling him towards your bed.
Should he kiss you? Should he let you kiss him? He thinks about your mouth either way, about letting his hands find your jaw and keeping you there and the way he wants to feel you sigh into the kiss. He wants your tongue sliding against his and your teeth sinking into his bottom lip, your fingers finding purchase in his shirt before you start to lift it up, up, up over his head and—
Something warm and unfamiliar throbs low between his thighs.
Is he…?
He trails a hand down the hard plane of his torso apprehensively, pausing as his fingertips graze the fabric of his briefs. He knows what he’s going to find, he’s not stupid, but he doesn’t know if he’s ready to confront what it means.
If Dex, who has only gotten hard a handful of times in his entire life, reaches down and feels that his cock is swelling at the thought of just kissing you…
For once, to his astonishment, there’s no puzzle to solve. There’s nothing waiting to click into place.
He is still just a man, underneath it all.
His hips twitch as he palms himself, hissing a sharp breath through his teeth.
He just wants Friday to go well. He wants you to feel comfortable. He wants to make you feel good.
His thumbs hook into the waistband of his briefs, tugging them down just enough to let his length slap lightly across his lower stomach. He stares down at it like it belongs to someone else. The tip is already flushed darker than the rest, a small bead of wetness gathered at the slit.
Making you feel good is the entire point, after all. You won’t need to deal with anyone else.
He wraps a tentative hand around himself, lips parting open at the sensation. His skin is hotter than he expected, almost feverish, the weight of his cock heavy and foreign in his palm. He tightens his grip experimentally and feels it pulse hard under his fingers, an insistent throb that makes his stomach clench.
He needs you to choose him next Friday, too. And then the one after that. Ad nauseam.
He strokes himself, slow and unsure. The dry drag of his palm over the sensitive head sends a sharp, electric jolt low through his gut. His precum smears under his thumb, turning the slide of his hand slick. The change in sensation makes him gasp.
You don’t have to look for anyone else. You can just have him, however and whenever you want him.
His hips start snapping faster into his grip without permission, rutting into his own touch. The wet sound of it feels obscenely loud in the quiet of his room. He can feel the flush crawling up his chest and throat, turning his cheeks hot. A soft, startled moan rips out of him before he can choke it back.
He keeps wondering what you’ll sound like, if you’ll catch his gaze or close your eyes when he finally touches you, if you’ll tug his hair until his scalp stings or dig your nails into his biceps hard enough to leave bruises in the shapes of your fingertips. The thought turns him rougher, chasing that strange, rising pressure threatening to break open inside him, thighs tensing.
His fist tightens hard and unrelenting, and for one dangerous moment he’s lost in the thought of you being his first and him being your last, of nobody else but him getting to see the look on your face when you fall apart around him and realize you made the right choice.
His first.
His.
His.
Dex rips his hand away with a snarl, so fast it almost hurts, leaving himself glistening against his stomach and twitching in the cool air. He feels crazed, panting into the silence of his bedroom.
What the fuck is he doing? He doesn’t get to think about you like this, to want you like this.
He glares at the ceiling, jaw clenching tight, fingers twisting the bedsheet. His heart hammers rampant in his chest. This is you he’s thinking of. His best friend. The whole point of Friday is that nothing’s supposed to change. He’s supposed to be the safe option.
He pulls his briefs back up — carefully — and rolls onto his side, forcing his breathing to slow through his nose. His body does get the message, still aching, still demanding attention between his thighs that he refuses to give.
No.
Friday is five days away. He will show up to your apartment like he always does, and he will be careful. He won’t let himself get carried away, not again.
He doesn’t have a choice.
