[ra1sedfromperdition]

Lock the Door

Pairing: Charlie Reid x fem!reader

Wordcount: 2,150 words

Short summary: You push deputy chief Reid's buttons until he locks his office and shows you exactly what happens when you misbehave

Warnings: Explicit sexual content; power imbalance/authority figure dynamics (deputy chief/subordinate); office sex; power play; orgasm control; rough handling including hair pulling and marking; mature language and dirty talk; canon-divergent Chicago PD setting

★・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・★

The report had been sitting on your desk since Tuesday.

You kept meaning to file it. Kept meaning to walk it up to the 21st District's administrative office, drop it in deputy chief Reid's inbox, let the bureaucracy swallow it whole and forget you'd ever touched the damn thing. But something kept stopping you. Some stupid, reckless instinct that you didn't examine too closely.

Now it was Thursday. 1647 hours. And your phone was buzzing with a text from dispatch.

Reid wants to see you. His office. Now.

---

The Intelligence Unit's bullpen was quiet when you walked through—most of the team out on a scene, Voight's office dark. You'd been down here a dozen times for legitimate reasons. Case consultations. Evidence handoffs. The occasional ride-along when patrol got thin.

Never like this.

Never with your pulse hammering in your throat before you even reached his door.

Reid's office was small, windowless, dominated by a metal desk that looked like it had been through three wars. The walls held his commendations, a photo of him in dress blues looking severe and untouchable.

You knocked.

"Enter."

He didn't look up when you came in. Just kept typing, fingers striking keys with deliberate, punishing precision. You stood at the edge of his desk and waited, hands clasped behind your back like you were waiting for roll call.

The silence stretched. A full minute. Maybe two.

Finally, he hit enter, hard and leaned back in his chair. Looked at you with those blue eyes that missed absolutely nothing. Reid had that cop stare, the one that made witnesses confess and suspects lawyer up. You'd watched him use it in interrogations. Watched him break grown men without raising his voice.

Now it was fixed on you.

"Close the door."

You turned. Walked back. Your hand found the handle and—

"Lock it."

Your fingers hesitated. Then found the deadbolt. The click seemed to echo in the small room.

"Turn around."

You did. He was standing now. Had moved around his desk while your back was turned, silent as always. Reid moved like he'd been trained in stealth long before he picked up a badge—all coiled potential and controlled threat.

"The Kessler file," he said. Not a question.

"Sir, I—"

"Was due Tuesday." He took a step closer. "It's now Thursday. I've had to field calls from the Commander about why my liaison can't complete basic paperwork. Do you know how that reflects on my unit?"

"Sir, I—"

"Do you?"

You swallowed. "No, sir."

Another step. He was close enough now that you could smell him—coffee, the faint trace of his aftershave, something underneath that was just him. Close enough to see the muscle ticking in his jaw, the way his hands flexed at his sides like he was restraining something.

"Look at me."

You met his eyes. There was anger there, real or manufactured you couldn't tell anymore. With Reid, the line had blurred months ago—ever since that stakeout in the van, your thighs pressed together in the dark, neither of you acknowledging the heat between you.

"You're a capable officer," he said, voice dropping to something almost soft. Almost. "Intelligent. Resourceful. Difficult."

Your breath caught.

"And I think," he continued, taking that final step, "that you've been testing me."

His hand shot out. Not for your badge, not for your arm—for your belt. His fingers hooked through the loops at your hip and pulled, hard enough that you stumbled forward, chest colliding with his.

You grabbed his shoulders to steady yourself. He didn't budge. Just held you there, locked in place by nothing but his grip and your own stupid, traitorous want.

"Are you going to keep misbehaving?" he asked. Still using that voice. That command voice, the one that made patrol officers shake in their boots.

You could say yes. Could apologize. Could play this fourteen different ways, retreat to professionalism, claim misunderstanding.

But his thumb was tracing the leather at your hip, rough and deliberate. His jaw was tight, his pupils were blown wide, and you knew what he actually wanted.

"Maybe," you breathed. "Sir."

Something broke behind his eyes. That professional mask slipped just enough to show the hunger underneath.

"Then I suppose," he said, and his other hand finally grabbed you proper—fist in your hair, pulling your head back to expose your throat—"I'll have to keep correcting you."

His mouth was on yours before you could respond, crushing and claiming, all the restraint of the past months shattering at once. You made a sound against his lips, desperate and embarrassing, and he swallowed it like he'd been starving for it. He kissed you like he was trying to consume you—teeth catching your lower lip, tugging just to the edge of pain before soothing it with his tongue. His free hand slid from your belt to your lower back, pulling you flush against him, and you could feel exactly how much he wanted this, hard and insistent against your hip.

"Desk," he growled against your jaw, the word vibrating against your skin. "Now."

Your legs moved without conscious thought, walking backward until your thighs hit the edge of his desk. Papers scattered—case files, evidence photos, the Kessler report itself sliding to the floor, forgotten. Reid didn't care. His hands were on your vest, stripping it off your shoulders with efficient, practiced movements, and then his mouth was at your neck, teeth dragging over the tendon there hard enough that you knew you'd be wearing his mark for days.

"Been watching you," he muttered, the words hot against your collarbone. His hands found your belt again, working the buckle with practiced efficiency. "All week. Thinking about this. About you." He yanked your belt free, the leather hissing as it pulled through the loops, and tossed it aside. It hit the floor with a heavy thud. "Thinking about how you'd look falling apart for me. How you'd sound."

Your hands found his shirt, tugging at buttons, desperate for skin. He let you, helped you, shrugged out of the formal layers until you could press your palms against his chest—warm and solid and scarred, a faded bullet wound near his shoulder that you'd never seen before, and another scar lower, near his ribs, that you traced with trembling fingers.

"Reid—"

"Charlie," he corrected, harsh. His hand caught your chin, forcing your gaze to his. "Say it."

"Charlie." The name felt dangerous in your mouth, illicit and powerful. "Please—"

"Please what?" He pushed you back onto the desk, case files crinkling beneath you, cold metal against your shoulder blades. His hands went to your thighs, spreading them wide, stepping between them. "Please stop? Please continue? Use your words. You're usually so good with them."

You glared up at him, chest heaving, your shirt still half-buttoned, your hair coming loose from its tie. "Fuck you."

He laughed—actually laughed, dark and delighted, the sound rumbling through his chest. "That's my girl."

His mouth crashed down on yours again, hungrier now, all teeth and tongue and intent. You arched up into him, seeking friction, and he gave it—pressed his hips against yours, letting you feel how hard he was through the layers of fabric still separating you. He rolled his hips, grinding against you, and you gasped into his mouth, your hands flying to his shoulders, digging in.

"Need to feel you," he muttered against your lips, his voice rough, wrecked already. "Need to feel if you're as wet for me as I think you are. As wet as I've imagined. As wet as you made me suffer imagining."

Your hands flew to your own pants, clumsy with urgency, but he knocked them away with a sharp smack against your wrist—not hard enough to hurt, but enough to sting, enough to make you freeze. "I didn't say you could touch yourself." His voice was steel wrapped in velvet, that command tone that made your stomach flip and heat pool low and heavy. "Lift your hips. Now."

You obeyed, arching up, and he stripped your pants down in one smooth motion, taking your underwear with them, leaving you bare on his desk with your legs spread and your pride in tatters. The air was cool against your heated skin, and you felt exposed, vulnerable, his in a way that made you tremble.

Reid stepped back—just looked, his gaze dragging over you like a physical touch, cataloging every flush, every tremor, the way your chest heaved with each breath. His eyes darkened as they traveled down your body, from your swollen lips to your peaked nipples visible through your thin shirt, down to where you were already aching and bare for him.

"Beautiful," he said, almost to himself, the word reverent and filthy all at once. Then, sharper: "Touch yourself. Show me what you do when you think about me. When you're alone in your bed, or the shower, or sitting at your desk trying to concentrate on paperwork that isn't late."

Your face burned, heat flooding your cheeks. "I don't—"

"Lie to me again and I'll stop." His eyes were dark, serious, dangerous. "And I don't think you want me to stop. I think you want me to keep going. I think you want me to make you scream. So show me."

Your hand moved before you could think better of it, sliding down your stomach, finding where you were already aching and soaked, your arousal evident on your inner thighs. You touched yourself with two fingers, circling your clit, and your hips bucked involuntarily at the contact, a whimper escaping your lips.

Reid made a sound—low and wrecked, like he'd been punched in the gut—and suddenly he was between your legs again, knocking your hand away, replacing it with his own. His fingers found you unerringly, sliding through your folds, spreading your wetness with deliberate, torturous slowness.

"Fuck," he breathed, his forehead dropping to rest against yours, his breath hot and fast. "Look at you. Soaked. Desperate." He pressed one finger inside, testing your resistance, then added a second, curling them just right against that spot that made your vision blur, and you gasped, back arching off the desk, your head falling back with a thud against the metal. "Is this what you wanted? Is this why you've been pushing me? Making me crazy?"

"Yes," you managed, voice breaking, high and needy. "Yes, god, Charlie—"

"Couldn't just ask like a normal person," he continued, working you open with those calloused fingers, the same hands that handled weapons and evidence and suspects with such precision now focused entirely on your undoing. "Had to make me chase you. Make me lose my fucking mind watching you in those tight pants, bending over filing cabinets, leaning across my desk to point at maps with your ass in the air like you were begging for me to do something about it."

"Shut up," you gasped, but you were grinding down on his hand, seeking more, needy and shameless, your hips rolling to meet each thrust of his fingers.

He laughed again, dark and satisfied, and pressed his thumb to your clit, rubbing in tight, firm circles, and you moaned, loud enough that anyone walking past might hear. Reid didn't seem to care—if anything, the sound seemed to spur him on. Just watched you, devouring your reactions*, memorizing every gasp, every flutter of your eyelids, every time you bit your lip to stifle a cry.

"Going to make you cum like this," he said, voice rough, his own breathing ragged. "On my fingers, in my office, with my name on your lips. Going to feel you fall apart. And then you're going to take my cock. Going to take every inch. Understand?"

"Yes," you whimpered, your hands finding his shoulders again, holding on like he was the only solid thing in a spinning world. "Yes, please, I need—"

"I know what you need." He crooked his fingers, found that spot inside you that made stars burst behind your eyes, white-hot pleasure shooting up your spine, and you cried out, hands scrabbling for purchase on the desk, knocking his keyboard to the floor with a crash. "I've known since the first day you walked into my unit. Knew you'd be trouble. Knew I'd have to have you. Knew I'd have to fuck you until you couldn't remember your own name, let alone anyone else's."

His thumb circled your clit, relentless, and you were climbing, heat coiling tight and desperate in your belly, your thighs trembling on either side of his hips. You could feel your orgasm building, huge and overwhelming, a wave you couldn't outrun, and you tried to warn him, tried to speak, but all that came out was his name—"Charlie, Charlie, Charlie"—like a prayer or a curse or both.

"That's it," he encouraged, fingers working faster, harder, the wet sound of your arousal filthy and unmistakable in the small room. "Cum for me. Now. Give it to me. Give me what I've been starving for."

You broke. Shattered. Came apart on his hand with a cry that he swallowed with his mouth, kissing you through it, drinking you down like he couldn't get enough, like he wanted to taste your pleasure. Your body shook, muscles clenching around his fingers in rhythmic pulses that seemed to go on forever, and he worked you through it, gentle now, easing you down from the peak with soft strokes and softer kisses pressed to your jaw, your throat, the corner of your mouth.

You were still trembling when he pulled his hand free, his fingers glistening with your release, and he brought them to his mouth, sucked them clean while holding your gaze, his tongue swirling around each digit, his eyes fluttering shut at the taste like it was the best thing he'd ever had. The sight sent another pulse of heat through you, oversensitive and wanting, your body twitching with aftershocks.

"Good?" he asked, already working his own belt free, his hands not quite steady, his control fraying at the edges.

"Not enough," you managed, reaching for him, pulling him down by his open collar, your voice hoarse from crying out. "Want you inside. Now. Need to feel you. Need all of it."

He groaned, a sound torn from deep in his chest, and pressed his forehead to yours, his eyes squeezed shut like he was fighting for control. "Condom. Wallet. Back pocket."

You reached around him, found the leather, pulled it free. Your hands were shaking but you managed to extract the foil packet, tear it open with your teeth. Reid pushed his pants down just enough, and you took him in hand—thick and hot and heavy, pulsing with his own need, the skin velvet-soft over steel—and rolled the latex down his length, your fingers brushing against his hip, his stomach, everywhere you could reach.

He didn't wait. Didn't tease. Just grabbed your hips and pulled you to the edge of the desk, positioned himself at your entrance, and pushed inside in one long, perfect thrust that seemed to go on forever, filling you, stretching you, hitting places that made your toes curl and your back arch.

You both groaned, loud and uncontrolled. He was huge, thicker than his fingers, and the stretch burned in the best way, your body adjusting around him, fluttering with the aftershocks of your first orgasm. He paused there, buried to the hilt, breathing hard against your neck, his hands gripping your hips hard enough to bruise.

"Move," you demanded, digging your heels into his lower back, your nails scoring his shoulders through his undershirt. "Charlie, move. Please. I need you to fuck me."

He pulled out, almost all the way, leaving just the tip inside, then snapped his hips forward—hard, the desk screeching against the floor, the sound of skin meeting skin sharp in the room. You gasped, grabbed his shoulders, and he did it again. And again. Setting a pace that was brutal and perfect, each thrust driving you back against the metal, each withdrawal making you whimper at the loss, desperate for him to fill you again.

"Is this what you wanted?" he gritted out, voice strained, sweat beading on his forehead, his hair falling into his eyes. "Wanted me out of control? Wanted me to fuck you in my office where anyone could hear? Where anyone could walk in and see you spread out on my desk like a fucking feast?"

"Yes," you sobbed, meeting his thrusts, taking him deeper, your hips rolling to meet each punishing stroke. "Wanted you. Just you. Only you. God, Charlie, harder—"

Something in him broke at that, at your admission, at the please that sounded like a sob. He grabbed your legs, hooked them over his shoulders, changing the angle so he hit that spot inside you with every stroke, deep and relentless, and you screamed, head thrown back, hands fisting in his shirt, your body tightening around him.

"Touch yourself," he ordered, voice ragged, his hips snapping forward with enough force to move the desk. "Want to feel you cum on my cock. Want to feel you fall apart. Now, sweetheart. Give it to me now. Be good for me."

Your hand flew between your bodies, found your clit, swollen and sensitive, and you were so wrecked, so full of him, that it only took seconds. You came with his name tearing out of your throat like a prayer, your body clamping down on him in waves, your vision whiting out at the edges, and he groaned, long and low and broken, and followed you over—thrusts stuttering, losing rhythm, spilling into the condom with his face buried in your neck, your name rasped against your skin like a benediction.

For a long moment, there was only breathing. The sound of the precinct outside, distant and muffled. The hum of the fluorescent lights. Your own heartbeat, slowing gradually in your chest, syncing with his where your bodies were still joined.

Reid pulled out carefully, tied off the condom, tossed it in the trash. Then he collapsed forward, bracing himself on his elbows on either side of your head, caging you in but not touching, just looking at you with something unreadable in his eyes—something soft and fierce and terrified all at once.

"That was—" you started, your voice wrecked.

"Long overdue," he finished. Then, softer, his hand coming up to brush hair from your forehead: "You okay?"

You laughed, breathless, your body still tingling, still feeling him everywhere. "Better than okay." You reached up, traced his jaw, the faint stubble there, the line of his cheekbone. "Was that my punishment? For the late report?"

He caught your hand, pressed a kiss to your palm, his lips warm and soft. "That was me finally doing something I should've done months ago." He pulled back, helped you sit up, found your clothes scattered on the floor. "The report, by the way, is still late."

You groaned, dropping your head to his shoulder, breathing in the scent of him—sweat and sex and Reid. "You're impossible."

"And you're still on desk duty until it's filed." He handed you your underwear, smirking now, the professional mask settling back into place—but softer at the edges, his eyes still dark with satisfaction. "Though I might be persuaded to help you... after hours."

You dressed in comfortable silence, stealing glances at him as he buttoned his shirt, restored his desk to order. The Kessler file was still on the floor. You left it there.

At the door, his hand caught your wrist. Pulled you back for one last kiss—slow and thorough, a promise, his tongue sweeping through your mouth like he was trying to memorize the taste of you.

"Tomorrow," he said against your lips. "My place. 2000 hours. Bring the report."

"Or what?" you asked, breathless, your heart already racing at the thought.

He smiled, sharp and dangerous, his thumb tracing your swollen lower lip. "Or I'll have to discipline you properly."

You escaped into the bullpen with your face flushed and your knees weak, passing Burgess at her desk. She glanced up, curious.

"Everything okay with Reid?"

You thought of his hands on your hips, his voice in your ear, the threat and promise in his eyes.

"Fine," you said. "Everything's fine."

And for the first time in months, you actually believed it.

[yunyuu]

✶ SUCH A GOOD BOY!

masterlist ⠀! ⠀ do not plagiarize, repost, or translate works without the knowledge or consent of the creator in other platforms or websites. ✶

His love language is acts of service.

He read that somewhere—some stupid quiz you made him take一and he latched onto it like a lifeline because it made him sound normal.

See?

See??

He's not a freak, he just likes doing things for you. It's a legitimate psychological concept. It's on the internet, go look it up. It's real.

He loves it when you want something from him. He lives for it. Thrives on it. Gets dizzy with it the second you so much as look at an empty glass.

You barely have to open your mouth. You just shift on the couch and sigh and he's already upright, already halfway to the kitchen, already aching.

"Water? Snacks? A blanket? Your heating pad? Do you want the kitten mug or the big one? Do you—"

"Just water, baby."

Baby.

His knees almost buckle.

Focus.

Water. You need water. He can do that. He's getting you water. Look at him go一such a good boyfriend, so attentive, so caring, he's fucking nailing this.

He pours the water so carefully. No ice. You don't like it too cold, it hurts your teeth, and he remembered that because he remembers everything about you, every tiny preference, every little sound you make when you're happy.

Pathetic. So fucking pathetic.

He hands you the glass with both hands like an offering at an altar. Bouncing a little on his heels. Doesn't even realize he's holding his breath until you take a sip and your throat moves and he's watching the little bob of it and his mouth is dry but that doesn't matter because—

He have to be patient.

Waiting.

Just waiting for it.

Come on. Come on. Say it. Say the words. Give him the thing. He needs it.

"Thank you, love."

Oh.

The words hit his brain like a shot of something warm and syrupy. Thank you. You thanked him. He did good. He did good and you noticed and you said thank you and now he's standing there with his heart doing backflips in his chest.

He wants more. He wants you to say it again. He wants you to pat his head and tell him he did such a good job, that he's so helpful, that you don't know what you'd do without him. He's practically vibrating with it, this desperate, aching need for your approval, and it's pathetic, he knows it's pathetic, he's a grown man getting high off a thank you like it's a line of coke—

Cute isn't he?

No.

No, he's not cute.

He's a dog. A mangy. panting. desperate dog who just got a pat on the head for fetching.

And he gets hard like a dog in heat too.

Always hard.

Always.

You could ask him to pass the salt and he'd have to adjust himself under the table.

You could ask him to zip up your dress and his hands would shake and he'd have to bite the inside of his cheek until it bled just to keep from moaning at the brush of his knuckles against your spine.

What a loser, right?

His dick twitches.

Jesus Christ.

He's hard again.

Weirdo.

Disgusting.

Pervert.

He hates himself. He hates himself so fucking much.

Why can't he be normal? Why can't his dick just stay soft like a regular boyfriend instead of twitching every time you say his name? You're gonna hate him, aren't you?

Oh god oh god oh god.

You're gonna find out. You're going to hate him. You're going to leave him. You think he's disgusting. You think he's a creep. You're gonna leave him. You're gonna walkout that door and he'll never feel your eyes on him again and he'll die, he'll actually just curl up on the floor and stop breathing because what's the point—

"Such a good boy."

Huh?

Good boy??

Him???

He freezes.

Did you just一did those words actually come out of your mouth? Good boy.

Good. Boy.

And you're smiling.

You look so beautiful when you smile. Your soft eyes and your softer lips and the way your cheek creases just a little and he wants to lick it, he wants to suck that smile right off your face and swallow it whole so it lives inside him forever—

Nope.

Nope nope nope.

He's so hard he could die on spot.

"Um... excuse me."

The words come out strangled. He's already backing away, hands positioned awkwardly in front of his crotch like a teenager caught watching porn.

Smooth.

Real smooth.

You probably think he's having digestive issues. That's fine. That's better than the truth.

He immediately bolts to the bathroom, lock clicking behind him.

Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck.

Okay. Okay, breathe. It's fine. Everything's fine.

You don't know. You didn't see. You're not going to leave him. He won't let you leave him anyway. He'll lock the doors and he'll nail the windows shut and he'll chain you to bed and he'll chop your pretty legs off if he has to—

no no no no no NO!!!

Don't think that. Don't you ever fucking think that about her. You sick fuck. How can you even imagine hurting her? Chopping off her perfect pretty legs? How dare you?? How fucking dare you???

If you do that you could never feel her thighs wrapped around your head while you suck on her clit. You'd never feel them tremble and clampagainst your ears while she moans your name. You'd never get to press your tongue inside her while her legs are draped over your shoulders, soft and warm and alive.

OH!!!

Okay that's better. He gets it now.

Yeah yeah yeah. See? He's not violent. He just panicked for a second. His brain does that sometimes一throws up these horrible, intrusive images that make him want to vomit but he'd never ever act on them!! He's not a monster!!! He's just... confused. Overwhelmed. He just loves you so much alright??? So much he'd unspool his own intestines into a leash if you asked him to walk himself—

Alright. Shut up. Shut the fuck up.

Deep breath.

Okay. Okay, he's fine. He's fine. Just rub one out quick and go back out there. You're waiting. He doesn't want to keep you waiting. That would make him a bad boyfriend, and he's not—he's a good boyfriend, he's so good, you just said so, and if you said so then it must be true—

Shut. Up.

Focus.

His hand is shaking as he pulls down his jeans. He's leaking already, a slick little pearl at the tip, and it smears across his palm when he grips himself. Pathetic. So fucking pathetic.

First—first, he needs something. Something to make it faster, make it pleasing, make it so he can walk out there and not immediately pop a boner again the second you breathe in his direction.

He opens the cabinet under the sink, behind the toilet paper, behind the bleach, where he hid it.

Your panties.

The ones you thought you lost in the laundry.

The lacy ones, light blue, a little damp in the center from a long day. He found them. He found them, okay? He didn't steal them. Fuck off. He found them. That's different. Stealing is a crime. Stealing is bad. He's not a bad person. He just... found them. On the laundry room floor. He was doing laundry like a good boyfriend, separating your underwears from the regulars because he read somewhere that youre supposed to do that, and they were just... there. In his hands. And then in his pocket. And now they're pressed against his face.

Fuuuck.

The smell hits him like a drug. Musky and sweet and so distinctly you that his knees give up. He inhales deep, pressing the soiled fabric to his nose and mouth, and his dick twitches so hard a bead of pre cum drips onto the bathroom tile.

He's disgusting. He's a creep. He's a freak and a weirdo and a pathetic little lapdog who gets hard from a thank you.

You'd hate him if you knew.

He hopes you never know.

He hopes you find out.

He hopes you walk in right now and see him—cock in hand, your panties stuffed in his mouth, tears streaming down his face—and he hopes you step closer. He hopes you laugh. He hopes you call him a disgusting little mutt and pat his head and tell him he's still your good boy.

Your good boy.

Yours.

He cums so hard he sees stars. Ropes of it, hot and thick, splattering his hand, the floor, the little bathroom rug. He bites down on the panties to muffle the sob that tears out of him, and for a long moment he just kneels there, trembling, fucked, still crying, still hard.

But it's fine.

Everything's fine.

He cleans up. Flushes everything. Hides the panties again and washes his hands twice. Splashes water on his face. Looks in the mirror. Practices his smile.

He looks normal.

He is normal.

He's a good boy.

Then he opens the bathroom door and smiles.

"You okay?" you ask, tilting your head.

And he could say it. He could confess. He could drop to his knees right now and tell you everything and beg for forgiveness or punishment or whatever you wanted to give him.

Instead he just nods. Crawls onto the couch beside you. Rests his head in your lap like the loyal dog he is.

"Just missed you," he mumbles into your thigh.

You stroke his hair.

He almost gets hard again.

He's so fucked up.

But you're still here. Still petting him. Still calling him yours.

So he must be doing something right.

If you want to be in my taglist let me know :)

© yunyuu 2026 : do not plagiarize, repost, or translate works without the knowledge or consent of the creator in other platforms or websites.

[aquaticmercy]

The Heart is a Muscle

Summary : Benjamin Poindexter was hired to eliminate you, a former Red Room Widow. Unfortunately, he keeps putting it off because he likes going on dates with you a little too much.

Pairing : DDBA! Benjamin Poindexter x Black Widow! reader (she/her)

Warnings/tags : freak 4 freak (?), Violence, Explicit Content (Dex is a munch and kinda has an oral fixation), Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Manipulation, lowkey gunplay, crying during sex, The Red Room is mentioned to use food as a form of control, alcohol consumption. (Let me know if I miss anything.) set between DDBA s1&s2 (let me know if I missed anything!)

Word Count : 17.7k

Requested by : anon

Notes : This was written before I watched the season finale, and also inspired by a song of the same title by Gang of Youths. Enjoy!

Dex was trying to be good.

It sounded ridiculous, even in his own head. It was as if he had borrowed this part of his conscience from someone else’s life, someone who hadn’t been made into a weapon, manipulated and exploited over and over again. But still, he tried.

Being good, as it turned out, wasn’t something you could just decide. There was no moment where goodness just clicked into place, there was no sudden clarity where he understood how to live without the violence that had always defined him. He didn’t have the tools for that, so he simplified it.

He only knew how to aim, how to follow through, how to kill. So he told himself that if he pointed all of that in the right direction, it would count. It had to count. 

Bad people existed. That much was obvious. And if bad people were gone, then… that had to count for something, right?

The Anti-Vigilante Task Force were easy enough to categorize as bad. They hunted vigilantes, tried to shut down the kind of people Dex had convinced himself were doing something close to good. And vigilantes were good. They had to be. 

So if he removed the ones hunting them, if he cut those threads before they tightened around someone else’s throat, then that meant he was helping. It meant he was balancing something, somewhere, even if no one was there to see it. Even if no one thanked him. Even if the city didn’t change at all.

That was how he justified it. The only problem was that no one paid him for being good.

His rent didn’t care about intention. His bills didn’t pause because he was trying. The notice on his counter sat there, the very proof that the world moved even as he was laying down the foundations of whatever moral framework he was trying to build. Dex had been ignoring it for days, like it might disappear if he didn’t acknowledge it. 

He was staring at it when his phone buzzed.

The sound was unsettling, mostly because Dex knew that people only messaged him for one of two reasons nowadays: to threaten him (best possible outcome, he could handle it) or to give him a job. When he looked at the notification, he knew it was going to be the latter. 

The text came from an unknown sender. It was encrypted, of course. Dex picked it up slowly, thumb hovering for just a second. He frowned. He really shouldn’t. This was the part of his life he was supposed to be moving away from. He opened it anyway. 

The file loaded quickly. As he suspected, it was an anonymous contract labeled high priority, with a bounty of… oh. 

2.5 million dollars.

Dex leaned back slightly, exhaling through his nose as that figure settled into place. It was much more than rent or bills. This kind of money would give him… breathing room. It would fund his good deeds for years. It would help his progress, right?

His eyes moved down to the target profile: a Former Red Room Widow. 

Objective: extract intel regarding active Red Room operatives. 

Secondary objective: termination upon completion.

Dex’s knuckles shifted slightly as he kept reading, attention narrowing the deeper he went. This wasn't a surface-level hit, like the usual contracts pushed into his number. He usually got the odd job of eliminating a business man’s biggest competitor (he never took those anymore) or a mother giving most of her life savings to him to kill her abusive husband (he did those ones more often than not), but this wasn’t it. Whoever had put this together knew what they were doing. They layered intel, cross-referenced sightings, stitched fragments of reports into something coherent enough to act on.

And then there was the ledger. Not labeled that way, but Dex knew what he was looking at.

Target Activity Log (Condensed): Kiev — 12 confirmed targets, political dissidents turned assets. Execution, no witnesses. Istanbul — Arms broker extraction turned termination. 7 additional casualties during exfiltration. Lagos — Undercover infiltration of rival weapons trafficking ring. Operation successful. Entire network eliminated. Collateral: high. Madripoor — Unverified mission overlap with Yelena Belova. Outcome classified. Buenos Aires — Diplomatic attaché poisoning. Death delayed 48 hours to avoid suspicion. Moscow — Internal Red Room purge survivor. Multiple handlers eliminated. 

Dex’s thumb paused against the screen as he read through it again. The pattern was obvious to him in a way it wouldn’t be to anyone else. This wasn’t chaos. This wasn’t someone losing control. On the contrary, this was someone who was terrifyingly in control.

This target was a dangerous killer, and Dex didn't arrive at the conclusion lightly.

He liked patterns, needed them. They made the world more predictable to the point where he could sort through without it splintering into noise. And this file was full of patterns.

He scrolled back up, then down again, slower this time, eyes catching on the details most people would skip over: the timings, the methods. 

The target made clean exits where possible and didn’t care much about collateral. Every action fed into the next like it had been mapped out long before the target ever stepped into the room.

Dex’s jaw tightened slightly as he read through the Kiev entry again. Twelve victims. It was not a firefight. It was twelve decisions. Twelve moments where the target could have stopped and didn’t. Istanbul, seven more added during exfiltration. They were not part of the objective, but handled anyway. 

He understood that, and that meant he also understood what it took to do it.

You didn’t rack up a body count like that by accident. You didn’t walk away from operations like Madripoor, with entire networks wiped out and “high collateral” written off like a footnote, unless something in you had already accepted the outcome before it happened.

Dex leaned back slightly, phone still in his hand, thumb hovering but unmoving now.

People liked to pretend there was a line. A moment where someone chose to be good or bad and stuck to it. But that wasn’t how it worked. It was smaller than that. It was in the repetition. And this file read like repetition, over and over. It might happen in different cities and to different victims, but it always had the same result.

Dex couldn’t find signs of deviation or hesitation. There was no indication that the target ever stopped to question it.

His eyes flicked back to the ledger, this time reading the latest additions, entries that hadn’t had time to settle into history yet.

Recent Activity: Prague — Corporate intermediary tied to OXE shell accounts. Interrogation lasted 18 minutes. Target terminated. Two security casualties. No witnesses. DODC Supermax Prison — Perimeter sweep. Three armed contacts neutralized before engagement escalated. Surveillance equipment disabled. Exit undetected. New York — Intelligence courier intercepted en route to New Avengers safehouse. Package recovered. Courier terminated. Civilian exposure: none.

Right. 

The target was still active. 

“Yeah,” Dex muttered, more to himself than anything else.

That was what tipped it for him.

Because even now, even with everything he’d done, Dex felt the resistance. The part of him that tried, however poorly, to redirect what he was into a force for good.  The file didn’t show that.

It showed someone who had been made into a weapon and never really tried to put it down. That meant the target wasn’t in the same place he was. This target wasn’t trying to balance the scales like he was. 

And that made this person not a good person in a way he could act on.

His eyes looked to the image of the target, like he was trying to reconcile the almost fragile and delicate-looking features with everything he’d just read. It didn’t match. It never did. Faces rarely carried the weight of what they’d done. But the file didn’t lie. The patterns didn’t lie.

Dex exhaled slowly, and decided this person was bad.

Not because of one mission. Not because of one mistake. But because of all of it stacked together.

And at this point, in order to preserve what precious progress he had made, he’d rather kill a killer for rent than his landlord. That would be inconvenient.

His thumb moved, tapping the file open fully, letting the image expand across the screen.

And for the first time, Dex really looked at you.

—

Dex expected you to be harder to find.

Most people with a body count like yours didn’t settle. They didn’t usually stay anywhere long enough to be known, didn’t leave behind anything that could be traced twice in the same way. He expected burner phones, rotating safehouses, and multiple fake ids that dissolved the second they were used.

But you hadn’t done that.

You were… easy. He found your address almost immediately. He found your number, your card details, and your passport quite quickly. 

It took him a couple of hours to accept that it wasn’t an error in the data. Financial records were always messy, layered under shells and proxies, but not impossible. He followed the money the same way he followed anything else— patiently, methodically, letting the inconsistencies stand out instead of forcing them to make sense too quickly. One payment turned into a trail, then into repetition.

But still, he found nothing out of the ordinary. You were just a regular person living in New York, paying rent on time. Unlike him this month. 

He stared at the screen longer than he needed today. The more he followed it, the clearer it became that this wasn’t temporary, wasn’t a waypoint or a cover that would disappear in a week. You weren’t passing through. You weren’t hiding. You were living here.

The rest of the records only reinforced it. He found your utility bills, with groceries spaced out in a way that suggested routine. He found nothing excessive, nothing careless. It was almost jarring, how normal it looked on paper, for someone with a history soaked in blood.

Next, Dex visited your building and expected that to be where the illusion broke, maybe an indication that this was all a front.

There wasn’t anything.

It was just a building. Unremarkable, forgettable in the way most of the city was. There were no visible security upgrades, no controlled access beyond the standard high rise. There was nothing that suggested someone with your file should be walking in and out of it every day.

He watched long enough to be sure. You came and went at predictable times, no visible countersurveillance, no adjustments to your movements that suggested you thought you were being watched. You carried your own groceries up the steps. You held the door open for someone once, an older man who thanked you without hesitation, like you were just another tenant, just another face he recognized in passing.

Dex didn’t like that it didn’t fit the rest of you. So he kept digging, because if there was going to be a crack, it would be in the routine and… you had one.

It took him three days to map it out in full, not because it was complicated, but because it wasn’t. You woke early. You jogged through Central Park along the same route almost every morning at the same pace, like it was muscle memory. You didn’t scan constantly, didn’t treat every passerby like a potential threat. You just ran.

After that, you hadcoffee at the same place every time, the same order. 

Dex watched all of it from a distance, writing it down in his little notebook. He told himself it was for this job, that he needed to remember things accurately if he was going to finish the job. 

By the fourth day, he knew watching wasn’t enough. It never had been. Patterns only got you so far before they started turning into assumptions, and assumptions got people wrong. 

The problem was, he didn’t have a plan for that. He wasn’t a spy. He didn’t build relationships, didn’t ease his way into proximity. 

But standing across the street, watching you disappear into the crown like you’d done every morning that week, he understood one thing clearly enough: He didn’t know how he was going to do this. He just knew he had to get closer.

—

The next day, he “accidentally” ran into you on that jogging trail in Central Park.

He already knew the exact time your foot would hit the gravel. All he had to do was figure which way you were going: was it the route you’d take when you wanted to clear your head, or the one you’d take when you wanted a challenge?

He waited outside your apartment today and…. You were taking the hard route.

He followed, and his plan of taking you until you got to the cafè, where he would sit next to you, would’ve been perfect until… Dex timed it wrong.

He knew he did the second he adjusted his pace to match yours and felt the rhythm slip. He was too fast for a clean pass, too close for it to look incidental. 

This wasn’t what he was good at. There was no distance. Only proximity and the vague, uncomfortable awareness that if you were anything like the file said you were, you’d clock him immediately.

You didn’t. You just kept running.

He tried to correct it, cutting slightly across your path like he meant to pass you, like he belonged in your space. The movement was off by half a second, just enough to turn clumsy. His shoulder clipped yours, momentum carrying him forward a step too far. You caught before you could trip and looked at him like, what the hell, man?

“—shit, sorry,” Dex said quickly, breathing unevenly. He turned back, forcing himself to meet your eyes. “I didn’t… are you okay?”

Up close, everything went a little sideways.

He’d seen your photo. But a still image didn’t account for the way you actually were when you looked at him. You were focused, yes, but there was no immediate suspicion or recalculation behind your eyes. He could tell you were doing a quick assessment and—

“You’re fine,” you huffed, brushing it off like it really had been nothing.

Dex blinked once, recalibrating, trying to drag himself back to the whole point of this endeavour: Intel. 

Simple, right? 

Except now you were standing there, waiting just long enough that it demanded a response.

Right. Say something. Anything.

“Uh… there’s a coffee place just up ahead,” he heard himself say, the words coming out before he could fully filter them. “I can make it up to you. Buy you one or something.”

There was a lull of silence where even he registered what he’d just done.

That wasn’t part of any plan. That was stupid.

Dex forced himself not to react to it outwardly, even as his chest tightened in irritation. This wasn’t how he should’ve handled a target like you. He shouldn’t’ve improvised like this. What was he thinking, basically asking you out like some idiot who didn’t know what he was doing?

But you were still just looking at him.

And up close, all he could think about was how… disarming you were.

That was the word his brain landed on, unhelpfully. You made him lower their guard without realizing he was doing it. 

Dex swallowed, keeping his expression neutral, like this was intentional, like this was just another step in a plan he actually had control over.

This is for intel, he told himself, firmly. Just intel via proximity. That’s all this is.

You tilted your head slightly, considering him in a way that made him feel, for a split second, like he was the one being assessed.

“Coffee?” you repeated. 

“Yeah,” he said, a little more steady now. “Least I can do.”

“For what?” you managed an amused chuckle, and Dex could’ve sworn that hearing you make that noise lit up the world around him. “bumping into me? Is this a line?”

“I just…” he stammered, and bit the inside of his cheek. “I’ve seen you around.”

I’ve seen you around??? He mentally slapped himself. What kind of fucking stupid explanation is that? What does that have to do with anything?

Surprisingly, though, all you did was tilt your head and said, “Okay.”

Oh?

Dex forced himself to nod once, like he’d expected it, like this hadn’t just gone completely off-script.

“Okay,” he echoed, turning slightly to fall into step beside you as you started moving again.

He kept his focus forward, matching your pace, already running through what he needed to ask, what he could realistically get without pushing too hard, how to steer the conversation where he needed it to go.

And still, somewhere in the back of his mind, something felt off. Dex ignored it, because this was a job. You were a target.

And this was just the easiest way to get what he needed. Nothing more.

—

The café was small, tucked between a bookstore and a laundromat.

On the way there, you exchanged your names— he said he was “Tony,” and you, surprisingly, had given him your real name. You were easy to talk to, and you talked about the weather, the park, the surprisingly little snow last winter.

When you got to the café, Dex was relieved to see that it wasn’t too crowded, just a couple of people on laptops, a murmur of conversation, the hiss of the espresso machine every so often. Fewer variables, Fewer eyes.

You ordered first: iced latte, like you’d done it a hundred times. He followed with an Americano, mostly because he panicked and it sounded normal enough.

Now he sat across from you, fingers loosely wrapped around the glass cup, watching the condensation bead along the outside of your glass as you stirred your drink with your straw. You looked… relaxed.

You took a sip, then glanced at him over the rim, and there was mischief in your expression. A second later, you let out a giggle, tapping the straw lightly against the lid.

“So,” you said, dragging the word out just a little. “Why does Bullseye want to take me out to coffee?”

Dex choked.

It wasn’t subtle. The coffee went down the wrong way, and he had to turn his head slightly, coughing into his fist. For a split second, he thought he might actually spit it out all over you, which—thank fuck—the café being mostly empty made slightly less of a disaster.

His eyes snapped back to you.

“…You knew?” he asked.

You blinked at him like that was the stupidest question you’d heard all day, then shrugged, taking another sip like this was a casual conversation. “Of course,” you said. “Don’t pretend like you don’t know me.”

There was no accusation in it. You said it as if it was a fact.

Dex just stared at you. His brain tried to catch up, running through possibilities, angles, trying to figure out where this had gone wrong. Had you clocked him earlier? On the run? Before that? Had he missed an obvious tell?

You didn’t look alarmed. You didn’t look like you were about to bolt or reach for a weapon. If anything, you looked… curious.

“Oh,” he said, because that was all that came out at first.

Great. Perfect. Real smooth.

He forced himself to take another sip of his coffee, buying a second to gather his thoughts, to shove everything back into place where it belonged.

She’s a target. This is a job.

“Yeah,” he added, steadier now, nodding once like this hadn’t just blindsided him. “I mean—yeah. I just…” His teeth tightened for half a second before he settled on the first thing that felt even remotely usable. “I’m a fan of your work.”

You didn’t react immediately. You watched him over your drink, eyes narrowing slightly.

Dex held your eyes, forcing himself not to overcorrect, to let it breathe. Let it land.

“Right,” you said finally. You didn’t sound entirely convinced, but you let it go.

The silence stretched, but not too uncomfortably. It was just charged. You knew there was no chance of going back to a civilian conversation as you leaned back slightly, exhaling.

“Alright. No, we’re not doing this version,” you decided, more to yourself than him. Then you straightened again, meeting his eyes properly. “Can we start over?”

Dex blinked, thrown just enough to answer honestly. “I… yeah.”

You nodded once, resetting playfully. 

“Hi. You already know my name, so I’m skipping that part,” you said, gesturing vaguely with your cup. “I’m a former Red Room Widow. I live in New York now.”

You said it like a random woman introducing themself as an accountant.

Dex opened his mouth, then closed it to filter through the responses. “Hi,” he tried again, because apparently that was all he had today.

You waited.

“Hi,” he repeated, then dragged a hand down his face, exhaling through his nose. “I’m Dex. Not—” he made a vague, frustrated gesture, “not Tony, I don’t…”

Your lips twitched. “I got that.”

“Right. Yeah.” He nodded once, a bit too quickly. Then, as if he was forcing the words out his throat. “I’m… a good guy.”

The second it left his mouth, he knew how weird it sounded. You blinked at him. Then, to his surprise, you chuckled, and it was not unkind.

“Hi, Dex Not Tony,” you said, teasing him. “That’s a strong introduction.”

His mouth pressed into a thin line, but his shoulder reluctantly eased a fraction. “It’s… yeah,” he muttered. “Workshopping it.”

That earned him a small huff of laughter, and just like that, the tension changed. It was not gone completely, but it loosened enough to breathe around.

“Mm,” you hummed, tapping your straw against the rim of the glass. “Maybe workshop faster.”

That earned you the smallest exhale that might’ve been a laugh.

“So,” you went on, glancing at his drink. “Americano?” 

He looked down at it like he’d forgotten it existed. “Mmm.”

“Do you actually like that,” you took a sip of your own drink, “or did you panic-order?”

Dex hesitated, but decided against lying. “Panic-order.”

You grinned. “Thought so.”

“Yours?” he asked, nodding toward your cup.

“Iced latte. Always.”

He nodded once, filing it away without thinking. “Predictable,” he said.

“Consistent,” you corrected.

“Same thing.”

“Not even a little.” Your smile tugged a little wider, and for a second, it made your whole face look gentle in a way that didn’t match anything he’d read.

The conversation after that was not awkward, even as it came in uneven starts. You both drifted out half-finished sentences, small corrections, circling around what you weren’t saying more than what you were. But eventually, it found a rhythm. 

You talked about nothing, mostly. The weather again, somehow. The park. The café. You made an offhand comment about the coffee being great here but the pastries were better two blocks over, and Dex filed that away without meaning to. He asked a question that sounded almost normal, and you answered it like it was. 

For some reason, he could not bring himself to ask about intel. Still, neither of you got up as time stretched right before your eyes. 

“Okay,” you said after a moment, glancing at your drink, then back at him. “For the record, this is the weirdest coffee I’ve had in a while.”

“Same,” he said.

“And I’ve had coffee in worse places.”

“Same.”

You narrowed your eyes slightly, amused. “You’re just copying me now.”

There was that pause again. This time, neither of you rushed to fill it. 

You checked your phone briefly, then sighed, like you didn’t actually want to say what came next. “I should probably…” you started, gesturing vaguely toward the door. “…go.”

Dex nodded immediately. “Yeah. Yeah, sure.”

You stood, grabbing your jacket, then hesitated just slightly. You looked at him, like you were weighing your options, then reached into your pocket and pulled out your phone. “Give me your number.”

Dex tilted his head. “…What?”

You held it out, unfazed. “In case you decide to bump into me again,” you said. “Might as well schedule it next time.”

He stared at you for a second, like he was trying to find an explanation, a reason not to… 

Then he took the phone.

“Right,” he nodded. “Yeah.”

He put it in and handed it back. After all, he had convinced himself that it was just so he could get the intel he was supposed to do today.

“See you around, Dex Not Tony.” 

“Yeah,” he said, quieter now. “See you.”

You turned, heading for the door. The bell chimed again as you left.

Dex stayed where he was for a moment longer than necessary, staring at the space you’d just occupied, the echo of your laugh still sitting somewhere in the back of his mind.

Something about that had gone very, very wrong. Or very right

—

That night, Dex had trouble sleeping.

The apartment was too quiet, the city noise bleeding faintly through the windows, the weight of the day sitting wrong in his chest. He laid there for a while, staring at the ceiling, replaying the conversation in fragments: your voice, your eyes, the way none of it lined up with the file. Eventually, he gave up trying to sleep at all. 

He sat up, reached for the notebook on his nightstand, and flipped it open. The logs he had on you were already there: Times, routes, and observations.

He stared at it for a moment, pen hovering. Then he added a new line, pressing just slightly harder than necessary: 

Likes iced lattes

—

Two days later, Dex’s phone buzzed.

He didn’t get messages he wanted to open. He didn’t need another contract— he got his hands full as is. So for a second, he just stared at it from across the room, letting it vibrate once. Unknown number.

His jaw tightened before he picked it up and unlocked it.

There was a photo of a newspaper, slightly crumpled, held down by what looked like your hand. The headline was clear enough:

THREE ANTI-VIGANTE TASK FORCE AGENTS FOUND DEAD IN ALLEY

Below it, you had texted: 

is this you?

Dex stared at the screen, figuring out exactly who it was. He read it again, trying to wrap his mind around this. His thumb hovered over the keyboard.

You knew. Or you suspected. Or you were testing him. All three were problems.

Dex exhaled slowly through his nose and typed.

Dex: no. Why would you think that?

He was lying, but then again, he was the one who’s supposed to do the interrogation here. It would be stupid to give anything away. 

He hit send before he could overthink it. Three dots appeared almost immediately.

You: just thought I’d ask

Dex frowned. That was it? No pushback? No follow-up? Did you not think he was interesting enough? 

Dex: You just ask people that? “hey did you kill three people”?

There was a pause this time. Dex found himself watching the screen, shoulders slightly tense without realizing it.

You: not usually, but you don’t usually “accidentally” run into me either so

Dex’s grip on the phone tightened just a fraction.

Right. You weren’t letting that go. Dex: I said I’ve seen you around.

He only had to wait a few seconds 

You: sure

He could hear the tone in it. That same almost-amused voice from the café. Not hostile, but curious. Dex leaned back against the wall, phone still in his hand, mind already thinking about what you knew, what you were pretending not to know.

You sent another message before he could respond.

You: also for the record, if it was you, I know you’d say no anyway

Dex managed a smile.

Dex: Probably.

You texted back just as quickly

You: so I’m choosing to believe you 🙂 You: congrats

He huffed, a dry laugh catching in his throat. This was… strange.

You weren’t pushing. You weren’t backing off either. You were just… there, talking to him like this was normal.

Dex stared at the screen for a moment longer, then typed again. 

Dex: Why’d you actually text me?

The typing bubble came and went once. Then, it stayed.

You: because I wanted to You: ??? You: do I need a better reason than that

Dex frowned slightly. That answer didn’t fit neatly anywhere that his brain could  categorize, 

Dex: People usually have reasons.

This time your reply took longer. Long enough that Dex caught himself rereading the earlier messages, analyzing tone, punctuation, timing, looking for something he might’ve missed.

You: okay, fine You: I was bored You: and you’re interesting You: better?

Dex froze.

Interesting. Was that what you thought of him?

Dex: You don’t seem like you get bored.

He could almost picture you rolling your eyes 

You: wow. you are a fan

He stared at the screen for a second, then forced himself to snap back into place. 

You were a target, he had to remind himself. Nothing more. He needed intel to pay rent, and he could only get that after he eliminated you, so… 

Dex: if you’re bored, we could go on another date

He hit send and immediately had what did you just do moment. This wasn’t part of the job. This wasn’t… date wasn’t the word he should’ve used. 

The typing bubble popped up, disappeared, and came back within three seconds. 

You: is that what that was the first time? a date??

Dex blinked.

“…No,” he muttered under his breath, already typing.

No. It was—

He stopped. What was it?

Dex: maybe?

That was all he could send. Oh, he was never playing spy after this job was done. Not ever again.

You: right You: with a guy who “sees me around”  You: very normal

Dex pressed his lips together.

Dex: Do you want to go or not?

During the wait, Dex felt something unfamiliar settle in his stomach. It was something he could only describe as butterflies. 

You: yeah sure 

His grip on the phone loosened slightly.

You: same place? or are you gonna “accidentally” run into me again?

Dex huffed.

Dex: how about the pastry place you were talking about? 

Oh so now he was paying attention to your recommendations?

You: okay. Friday?

The only thing he had on his calendar was killing task force, and that could wait, so… 

Dex: Friday works.

He tapped on his phone screen, anxiously waiting for confirmation.

You: cool You: try not to kill anyone before then. It ruins the vibe

Dex stared at that one for a second.

Dex: No promises.

There was no reply after that.

That night, in his notebook, he wrote another thing about you:

Initiates contact.

—

The second date felt different before it even started.

You were standing at the counter of the bakery when he saw you, pointing at something in the display case, smiling at the cashier like this was the easiest thing in the world. “Hey, Dex.” 

You ended up at a small table by the window, a couple of plates between you. A flaky and golden croissant, a banana-flavoured donut-like dessert dusted in powdered sugar (his choice), a molten-in-the-middle pain au chocolate, and one with custard that looked like it might fall apart if you breathed too hard near it.

Adorably, he knew you had picked too many things. Dex didn’t comment on it, but he noticed then, how you pointed without overthinking, how you changed your mind halfway through, how you added one more at the last second “just in case.”

It felt indulgent in a small, contained way. Like this was the only thing you let yourself have. 

The plate between you looked excessive now, but you nudged it toward him anyway.

“Try that one,” you said, already reaching for another.

Dex picked it up without arguing. It was… good, but he didn’t say that out loud.

You watched his face anyway, like you were waiting for the reaction.

“It’s fine,” he said.

You snorted. “Liar.”

“I’m not—”

“Don’t pretend it’s just fine,” you rolled your eyes, though you had said it with your mouth full, so it sounded more like downt pwetend it's jusft fwine.

“I’m not pretending.”

“You are.”

He hesitated, then let you win this one. “It is good,” he admitted begrudgingly.

“There it is.”

The conversation slipped into place easily after that. It was not smooth, but it didn’t catch as often. You didn’t circle each other as much. You just… talked.

You even went on for a good fifteen minutes about watching a squirrel in the park yesterday. You said something about how it would grab something, run halfway up the tree, stop, look around like it forgot what it was doing, then go back down and start over. You went on saying, it did this, like, five times, I think it lost the nut at some point but just committed to the bit.

Dex was surprised a former Red Room operative would even concern herself with things as trivial as a little rodent. He was even more surprised that he let you go on and on about it. It was as if he liked listening to you, no matter what you said. 

You reached for the sweeter pastry next, taking a bite, and Dex’s eyes automatically tracking the movement. A small smear of custard caught at the corner of your lip.

You didn’t notice. You kept talking, mid-sentence about the squirrel again, something about it being “committed to chaos, like hoarding random park objects were its hobby,” and—

Dex raised his hand before he could stop it.  “Hold on,” he said, almost a whisper.

You paused. “what…”

His thumb brushied lightly at the corner of your mouth, wiping the custard away, before licking the liquid off on his own tongue. The contact was brief and altogether too gentle for a man like him. For a second, neither of you moved.

His hand dropped back to the table. “You had…” he gestured vaguely. “Custard.”

“Oh.” You blinked once, then let out a small, surprised laugh. “Thanks.”

“Yeah.” Dex looked down at his hands. That felt… Unfamiliar.

He didn’t know when the last time he’d done something like that was. He didn’t know when the last time he’d wanted to.

There was this strange warmth sitting in his chest now, almost weightless. He didn’t even have a name for it.

And while he wasn’t sure he liked that, he definitely didn’t hate it.

You were the one to break the silence, coughing awkwardly like you couldn’t stand another second of silence. 

“Ummm speaking of hobbies?” you echoed, wiping your mouth just in case. “You… don’t strike me as a hobbies person.”

“I had some,” he said, easing back into the chair. Thank fuck you could carry the conversation for the both of them, because his brain had just fully stalled. 

“Past tense is concerning.” You leaned forward just a little. “What, like, knitting?”

“No.”

“Scrapbooking?”

“No.”

“Be honest,” you taunted, “I can see it.”

He almost smiled, and looked down when he said it. “Baseball.”

You paused, then nodded, like that made perfect sense.

“Yeah, I can see that,” you said, then added casually, “I used to do ballet.”

Dex blinked. He looked at you differently now. like he was trying to fit that into everything else he knew. “Oh,” he managed to say.

You shrugged. “Standard Red Room stuff.”

Dex’s posture shifted slightly, attention narrowing. 

Oh, this was it. This was what he came for. This was the thread he needed. This was the confirmation that you had been trained in HQ, right? If you had survived it, then there were doors inside you that led back to places he couldn’t access any other way. 

These were not guesses, not patterns he had to infer from distance, but direct proximity to the Red Room itself, to its methods, its remnants, its current reach. He just needed to keep you talking, keep you close, long enough to pull it apart piece by piece. So he asked, “What does that mean?”

You froze, as if a flash of memories ran through the back of your eyes. Then shook your head once. “Mm—nope.”

“What?”

“Not here,” you said lightly, but there was an immovable conviction underneath it now. “I’m not getting into that here.”

Dex watched you as held his hazel eyes. Then, just as quickly, you leaned forward, resting your chin lightly against your hand, expression shifting back from dark to a lighter tone. “Come by my place on Saturday,” you said, like it had just occurred to you. “We’ll call it our third date.”

Dex blinked. “What?”

You shrugged, completely unfazed. “If you’re really curious,” you added, a small tilt to your head. “There’s… fewer people.”

He stared at you, his eyes empty and calculating at the saw time, fingers anxiously tapping the underside of the table. This was… this was not in the plan. This was not one of his controlled outcomes. This was not…

“Okay,” he said anyway. The answer seemed to have left his mouth before he fully processed it.

“Okay,” you echoed.

And somewhere between the pastries, coffee, and conversation, he realized, a little too late… 

This doesn’t feel like a job.

—

Dex had expected a decoy. A secondary location, maybe a shell apartment. He was expecting something stripped down and impersonal, designed to be burned the second it was compromised.

Not this. Not the exact place he had already mapped out in his notebook.

So yeah, you had given him your real address.

For just a second, he wondered if this was the play. If you knew how much he knew. If this was some test he hadn’t caught onto yet.

The building was exactly what he expected. It was a high-end high rise. The doorman glanced at him once, then nodded like he’d already been cleared.

“You’re expected,” he said simply.

Dex didn’t respond, already moving past him. The elevator took him straight up.

By the time he reached your door, he had an uneasy feeling in his chest. Was this… a trap? 

He knocked, and the door opened almost immediately.

“Hi,” you said.

Dex opened his mouth to respond, but you interrupted his train of thoughts by pressing a quick kiss to his cheek, right at the scar.

Dex froze. By the time you pulled back, his brain still hadn’t caught up.

You smiled like nothing had happened, stepping aside to let him in. “Come in.”

He couldn’t find words to say, because apparently, his brain was on pause now.

Still, Dex stayed half a step behind you as you pushed the door open, his eyes already scanning past your shoulder and realised…

The place was… expensive.

Not in a loud, gaudy way. You had no gold fixtures or ridiculous statement pieces. It was intentional. It had floor-to-ceiling windows stretching across the far wall with a view that swallowed half the city. It had two bedrooms, if he researched it right.

“How…” he started, then cut himself off. What he meant to say was, how can you afford this? But decided against it. 

You didn’t seem to notice. “Make yourself comfortable,” you said, already shrugging off your jacket and tossing it onto a chair like it wasn’t worth more than half the furniture in his apartment. “I just need the bathroom. I’ll be quick.”

And just like that, you disappeared.

Dex stood there for a second longer than necessary, processing everything. 

You lived here. And not as a cover, not temporarily. There were no signs of rotation, no packed bags, no readiness to leave at a moment’s notice.

“That’s stupid,” he muttered under his breath. Or reckless. Or you were just arrogant to a fault. Maybe you just didn’t think anyone could touch you.

Dex stood still for a second, listening to the water running. He heard the slightly delayed pipes and realised you weren’t rushing. Good.

His eyes tracked the room the way they always did, scanning for inconsistencies. He didn’t try to look for what was there, but what didn’t belong. Because people like you didn’t leave things out.

Which meant if anything existed, it would be hidden. His gaze slowed down and shifted… There. A section of the wall paneling near the shelving was barely misaligned. It was not enough for anyone else to clock, but Dex didn’t miss patterns like that.

He stepped closer, fingers brushing lightly over the seam. There must be a pressure point. Eventually the panel gave just enough of a click to confirm it. Dex didn’t hesitate before easing it open.

Inside was a compact hidden compartment.

The first thing he saw was a keycard, worn at the edges. The insignia was barely visible, but he didn’t need it to be clear. He knew what it was the second he saw it: Hydra.

“Of course,” he muttered under his breath.

Red Room had a historical overlap with Hydra. Old, but not irrelevant.

It surely was a small enough thing that you wouldn’t miss it, right?

He pocketed it and moved on to the only other thing hidden in the panel: Documents. It wasn’t exactly a full archive, but it was enough.

He flipped through them, scanning fast. Inside were names of Red Room operatives. The dead ones were labeled. He assumed the ones who didn’t have a red Xs on their files were still active. 

You had annotated them too, with locations, partial intel, and movement patterns.

This was the kind of access people killed for.

His thumb moved, grabbing his phone. He flipped through quickly, taking a picture of each page, each note, each annotation. He made sure, of course, that it was legible.

This was high-level access, closer than anything he’d gotten from a distance. This… This was the job.

Then he heard the sound of water shutting off.

Shit. Dex froze. Then, he moved. He closed the folder immediately, sliding it back in.

Everything went back exactly as it was, the panel sealed until the seam disappeared into the wall again like it had never existed. By the time you stepped back into the room, he was already on the couch.

“Sorry,” you said, drying your hands casually, completely unbothered. “That took longer than I thought.”

Dex looked up at you. There was a split second, where something in his expression didn’t line up. The. it was gone.

“You’re fine,” he said evenly.

You nodded, like that settled it, and stepped closer. You dropped down onto the couch beside him, close enough that your shoulder brushed his, as if this was normal. As if he wasn’t here to dismantle you piece by piece. He didn’t even realise that you had a bottle of wine and two glasses on your hand. 

You leaned back slightly, turning your head toward him, “…So,” you said, more direct. “What do you want to know?”

—

It can’t be this easy right? Dex thought. 

Turns out, it was. 

Which was weird, because people like you didn’t just… hand things over. So either this was the cleanest setup he’d ever walked into, or you really didn’t think he was a threat. Neither option sat right with him. 

His fingers flexed slightly against his knee as he watched you pour two glasses of red. You handed one to him, and Dex took it quickly. “Thanks,” he said, smaller than usual.

He didn’t even usually drink anymore. He turned the stem slightly between his fingers, watching the liquid catch the light. For a brief second, his mind did what it always did: it ran through possibilities. 

It might be a sedative. It could be poison. He could handle most of that, maybe. And if he couldn’t…  Well.

He huffed quietly to himself. What the hell.

Dex took a sip. It burned a little on the way down. Not unusual, just normal wine. 

The first sign that it wasn’t poison was that you were drinking it, too. The second sign was that you didn’t react; you didn’t watch him like you were waiting for something to happen. You just leaned back into the couch and tucked your leg under yourself.

It was cute, Dex thought. You looked like a bird, nesting. He liked it.

Then, he took a deep breath and started asking questions. At first, it was light, like where did you grow up? Where were you trained?

You answered, and you sounded detached for the first couple of sentences. It was as if you were testing the limits and throwing pieces out to see what stuck.

But when the alcohol kicked in and your cheeks turned rosy pink, you spoke more candidly. About the Red Room. About being taken. About being trained.

Even Dex, who was starting to feel more bubbly, didn’t interrupt.

At first, he listened like he always did. He filtered, sorted, and pulled out what mattered. But somewhere along the way, that changed. Because you started giving less intel and more… context.

“You don’t really realize it when you’re in it,” you said, staring into your glass like the answer might be somewhere at the bottom. “It just feels normal. Like this is what life is supposed to be. You don’t question it because there’s nothing else to compare it to.”

Dex’s grip tightened slightly, and you kept going.

“They don’t just train you. They… build you. Strip everything out first. Then put back only what they need.” You gave him a small laugh.“Honestly? It’s basically a cult. You have no idea what it’s like to be manipulated like that.”

Dex looked down, and exhaled slowly through his nose. “Yeah,” he said. “I do.”

You glanced at him then, and your eyes shifted. You were not shocked at all, but you recognised it as well as you would recognise kin. “Oh,” you looked down. “Right.”

Dex poured himself another glass without thinking. You kept talking, but slower now. It was less like you were explaining, more like you were… unloading. Like you didn’t have anywhere else to put it.

That’s when it clicked: This must not be a trap or a strategy, he concluded, because the reason you were telling him all of this on a third date was… because, like him, you had no one else.

You might have neighbors, maybe even actual friends. But surely, you had no one else who could possibly understand you the way he did, because who else could you possibly know in this line of work? 

That was why you decided that he was the safest place to put it.

Dex stared at the rim of his glass for a second too long. That was stupid of you. And dangerous. And—

“…And you?” you said suddenly, nudging his knee lightly with yours. “C’mon.”

He blinked, pulled back into the moment.

“If we’re trauma dumping,” you added, a crooked smile pulling at your mouth, “we might as well commit. This is probably our only chance to say it out like.” You took another sip, then shrugged. “Doesn’t exactly look like either of us go to therapy.”

Dex huffed. “Yeah,” he muttered. His brain caught up half a second later.

He shouldn’t, though, right? He shouldn’t tell you anything about him that could possibly be compromising but… The booze was getting to him. 

And, besides, what harm could trauma dumping to you be? The job ends one way: with you dead after he got all the intel. So did it really matter what you knew about him?

Dex leaned back slightly, exhaling a little. 

And then, before he could stop himself, the extra bit of liquid courage bypassed his brain, and he told you everything. 

The words came out flat at first. But the more he drank, the less he cared about what he gave away and what he did not. 

You didn’t interrupt him. You just listened. And that, more than anything, kept him talking. 

At some point, the wine started to blur the edges for you, too. Your shoulders leaned closer. Your knee stayed pressed against his. Your laughter came easier as he cynically explained being in prison, and because you felt bad when you did, you gasped and covered your mouth. 

Dex didn’t seem to mind. He even smiled, the corner of his mouth warping the pronounced scar on his cheek. At one point, you tilted your head slightly, watching him with an understanding that hadn’t been there before.

“God,” you said, almost to yourself. “We’re so fucked up.”

Then, unexpectedly, you giggled. Dex, for once, cannot help but chuckle himself. 

“Yeah.” He took another sip, “You more than me,” he added, almost immediately.

Your head snapped toward him immediately. “Excuse me?”

A faint smirk pulled at his mouth. “Y’know,” he said, “Child soldier and all.”

You stared at him for a second, before letting out a disbelieving laugh. “Really?” you shot back, leaning closer, eyes narrowing in mock offense. “I’m more fucked up?”

He lifted a shoulder slightly in a shrug.

You pointed at him with your glass. “Your boss broke your spine and you lived.”

Dex managed to roll his eyes. 

“You got thrown off a roof and you lived,” you continued, leaning in further now, your voice picking up energy. “Sounds like you’re pretty far from normal.”

Dex huffed again. “Didn’t say I was normal.”

“Mm,” you hummed, satisfied. You sipped again. 

The space between you closed without either of you noticing when it happened. Your knee pressed against his. Your shoulder brushed his arm. Neither of you moved away.

The wine kept going. Half a glass. Then another.Words came easier after that, less filtered, less controlled.

You interrupted each other more. You laughed more. You even talked over the ends of sentences like it didn’t matter who finished them. At some point, you were both smiling for no reason.

Dex didn’t realize when the room started to feel warmer. He didn’t realize when your voice started to blur slightly at the edges. He didn’t even realize when he stopped thinking about the job entirely. He just knew, at this point, that you were close. Really close.

And you looked… Pretty.

That was a stupid word. It was too simple. It didn’t cover the gnawing claws that were starting to take over his heart.  

But it was the only word his brain gave him. You were smiling at something (he didn’t even remember what) and it made you look… harmless. 

Dex felt a warmth shift in his chest. As unfamiliar as it was, he didn’t pull away from it. For a second, you looked at him, too.

Dex swallowed the last of the wine, mostly because it was the only distraction that could possibly take up all the space you had started to occupy in his mind.

The room had dimmed at the edges in that deceptive way alcohol always did. The lights seemed warmer. 

Dex didn’t usually get to this point. He knew that with uncomfortable clarity. He also knew he should stop.

You were sitting too close, closer than before, closer than necessary, your shoulder pressed lightly into his as if neither of you had noticed the distance shrinking over time.

Your voice had gone gentler, words starting to come in slower waves instead of quick exchanges. There was less explanation, more confession disguised as conversation. And he was doing the same, even if he wouldn’t have admitted it out loud.

Parts of him he usually kept locked down were just… loosening, one by one, without permission.

You laughed at something he said, he didn’t even remember what it was, and the sound stuck in his head longer than it should have. 

“You’re smiling,” you observed suddenly, tilting your head slightly like it was a fossil discovery.

“I’m not,” he said automatically.

You hummed, unconvinced. “You are.”

He should’ve corrected you. Instead, his eyes drifted without meaning to, down to your mouth when you spoke again. The way your words drooped at the edges when you were tired, or tipsy, or both. For the love of god, he could not get over you the way you kept licking your lip absentmindedly, like you weren’t even aware of it.

It made something in his brain go pop.

You noticed. “…What?” you asked, pouting adorably.

Dex didn’t answer right away. Because, really, there was no tactical reason for him to be looking at you like this. There was no intel angle. No extraction logic. No job framework he could hide behind.

It was just you. And him. And the space between you that didn’t feel like space anymore.

He leaned in before he could reassemble himself. He hadn’t planned on doing it. It wasn’t even a decision he consciously made, really. 

It was, for lack of better word, gravity. As if he was a meteor falling into your orbit. 

For a while, you didn’t move away. 

Your breath caught in your throat, but you stayed there, watching him come closer instead of stopping it. Your eyes flicked down once, like you were considering it too.

Dex stopped just short of you. He wanted, no needed— to know you wanted it, too. 

Still, he was close enough that he could feel your breath now. Close enough that if either of you moved even a fraction—

That would be it. The line would be crossed.

You lifted your hand slowly, but you were not pushing him away. You weren’t pulling him closer, either. Your palm was hovering for a moment against his chest like you were testing whether this was real.

Dex didn’t move. Neither did you.

You exhaled. It was a small, almost reluctant sound. “…Dex,” you murmured, and his name sounded different like that. His eyes flicked to yours again.

Too close. This was way too close.

Your eyes dropped again to his mouth again, and stayed there. For a second, he could clearly see that fraction of hesitation where neither of you could pretend anymore that you weren’t thinking the same thing.

Dex leaned in that final inch… but you didn’t meet him halfway. Gently, your hand pressed into his chest.

“Mm,” you murmured softly, almost like you were trying to convince yourself this was wrong. Then you pushed him back.

“No,” you said, breath hitching slightly, but your smile was still there, playful, light. “It’s only our third date.”

Dex blinked, still a little too close, like he hadn’t fully processed the words.

You laughed under your breath, giving him a small shove to create space.

“Besides,” you added, eyes flicking down to his mouth for just a second before meeting his again, “I want you to kiss me when you’re sober.”

Oh.

He leaned back this time, letting out a deep breath. There was only one way he could describe how he felt, and that was disappointment. 

Oh, well. What else can he do?

“Yeah,” he managed to say. “Okay.”

Still, he didn’t move far, and neither did you.

And of course, his thoughts, intrusive as they always are, decided to ruin the only tender moment he had in years.  

You have enough. Kill her. 

Honestly, he had more than enough intel on the Red Room. Even the old Hydra keycard was a welcome addition to his anonymous employer’s request. It would most definitely make up for anything else they could have possibly wanted. 

What are you waiting for? Kill her. 

It was definitely more than what that had bargained for. So yeah, he could do it now. 

He had clocked many sharp objects he could throw at you— from your vase to a cheese knife you left out on the island kitchen. He didn’t even need a gun. 

Kill her.

And no, you wouldn’t even see it coming. His fingers flexed slightly against his leg.

Kill her.

But then he made the mistake of looking at you. And from there on out, all he could think was… 

I want another date.

No. He shouldn’t want that, right?

Kill her.

He didn’t want that either. 

But… he needed the money, and you had a body count higher than the Empire State Building. Killing you would make sense right? It would help balance the scales, right?

Right? 

Would it still make sense, even after you laid your heart and soul to him? Would it still make sense, even after he realised you were brought up as an enslaved child soldier? 

Kill her. 

No, he told himself, Not yet.

I want just one more date. 

And to Dex, that was reason enough not to kill you. Yet. 

—

Dex didn’t go to rest when he got home.

The second the door shut behind him, he frowned, burying his head in his hands before pulling himself together. He had called forth the part of him that knew what to do, what this was, what it had to be.

He pulled the notebook out before he’d even taken his jacket off.

He sat down, pen moving across paper. It started the way it always did: Structured and efficient. Intel, in detail.

He wrote of the interior of your apartment; top floor, two-bedroom, open sightlines, minimal obstruction points. Entry points limited. Windows large but not easily accessible from exterior. Security: building-controlled, doorman compliant, prior clearance confirmed.

He flipped the page. He wrote about the hidden compartment: wall panel, right side of shelving unit. Pressure point activation. Contents: Hydra-era keycard, confirmed overlap with Red Room operations. Documents: active survivor list, partial intel, movement logs. Photographic evidence captured.

Another page. This was where he started writing about your routine vulnerabilities, your Behavioral patterns. Trust threshold: high. Counter-surveillance: minimal to non-existent. Open, disarming, prone to disclosure under informal conditions.

His handwriting stayed tight. 

2.5 million dollars would only come after you were dead. That would fund his makeshift crusade for years to come. It was important work he was doing, balancing the scales. 

Dex paused, just for a second. Then he kept going.

Timeline: Saturday meeting. Entry granted without resistance. Physical proximity established quickly. Target displays—

His pen slowed to a stop. It hovered there, a warmth blooming in his chest. Dex frowned slightly, staring at the page like it had changed on him.

Then, almost absentmindedly, he wrote… she kissed me on the cheek, right on the scar.

The pen froze again.

That wasn’t— He exhaled, teeth clenching. —this wasn’t important. 

But still, he crossed nothing out. He just moved on.

Target displays lowered threat perception in close proximity. Conversational drift toward—

His handwriting had changed. Not messy, just less rigid.

… her past. She smells like vanilla. not perfume. Most likely clean laundry and sugar from baking.

Dex blinked. He looked at the lines then at the rest of the page.

What the fuck.

He flipped to the next page like that would fix it.

Red wine is her favourite.

His grip on the pen tightened slightly.

He should stop. This wasn’t relevant. None of the last couple sentences was relevant. Dex leaned back slightly in his chair, staring at the notebook in his lap.

He had everything he needed. He didn’t need to write anything else.

Dex scoffed quietly under his breath. Had he gone soft? 

Then, without really deciding to, he added one more line underneath it…

She laughed when she said “we’re so fucked up.”

He stared at it for a second longer than necessary. Then he snapped the notebook shut.

—

The restaurant for the fourth date was nicer than most places he even bothered to go to nowadays. But if this was going to be your last meal, he might as well make it memorable.

It had soft blue lights, a low hum of voices, the whoosh of knives behind the counter. Dex noticed all of it the second he stepped in, cataloguing angles and exits, the reflective panel behind the chef that gave him a partial view of the room without turning his head.

You need to kill her today.

He exhaled slowly through his nose and followed the host to the table.

When you sat down across from him, smiling like you hadn’t just walked straight into the middle of your own funeral, the room blurred at the edges for Dex.

“Hi,” you said with a smile

Kiss her.

He blinked once, forcing his brain back into place. “Hi.”

You tilted your head slightly, studying him like you always did, like you were trying to solve a puzzle with a missing piece. “You look like you’ve been here for a while.”

“I haven’t.”

“You definitely have.”

“Maybe five minutes.” That was a lie. He had been there for more than ten, cataloging what he could possibly use to finish the job.

You smiled, pleased. “Knew it.”

She’s faking it. She actually likes me. Kill her.

Dex picked up the menu just to give his hands something to do. “You’re late.”

“I’m two minutes late,” you corrected, leaning forward slightly to peek at what he was looking at instead of opening your own. “And I brought personality, so it cancels out.”

He huffed, hiding a smile. “That’s not how that works.”

“It is.” You insisted, tapping the menu. “Also, you picked sushi? I didn’t think you were a sushi person.”

“I’m not.” He immediately said. 

You blinked. “Then why…”

“Seemed efficient.” What he meant was; it’s a nice meal. You deserve a nice meal for the last day of your life. It’s efficient for him, who had an array of ceramic and silverware to kill you with.

You stared at him for a second, then broke into a grin. “You picked it based on efficiency.”

“Yes.”

“That is the least romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”

Kiss her. Tell her she’s pretty.

He didn’t do either.

“You’re still here,” he pointed out instead.

“Yeah,” you said easily, settling back in your seat. “Because I actually like you.”

Liar. Kill her.

Somewhere between you stealing sushi off his plate and laughing at how aggressively he held chopsticks, you asked, almost casually, “You know anything about the ports here?” Dex paused slightly at that, eyes flicking up to yours over his glass. 

The question should’ve put him more on edge than it did, but you just looked curious, relaxed, like this was normal conversation. “Not much,” he admitted after a second. “Fisk uses them to move things through there sometimes.” 

You hummed thoughtfully, listening closely, and Dex found himself talking a little more than he probably should’ve just because you kept looking at him like that.

After a while, though, he managed to change the topic. Work was getting a little old. He found himself wanting to talk about you. “You always order too much.”

You lit up like he’d just handed you a piece of chocolate. “Oh, we’re judging now?”

“I’m observing.”

“Rude,” you said, already scanning the menu. “Also, it’s not too much, it’s strategic.”

“Strategic how?” He tilted his head, genuinely curious.

You shrugged, but there was a stillness underneath it. “You ever go hungry enough that your brain just… rewires? Like you don’t trust ‘enough’ anymore?”

Dex had never felt that way before. He wondered if you were indulgent because you had gone through missions with little food. Would you have gotten days without it, a week maybe? Your Buenos Aires mission was six days, your Lagos mission was seven days. Was it those missions?

How did you even survive? 

She’s a widow. She’s a weapon. She’s a person.

“…Yeah,” he said anyway.

Your eyes flicked up to his, and recognition passed between you. “Yeah,” you echoed. Then you nudged the menu toward him. “So I’ll over-order. It’s fine. We deserve it.”

We’re so fucked up. Kill her. Kiss her.

He nodded once. “Okay.”

You spent the next ten minutes ordering together, leaning over the table, arguing quietly over rolls like it mattered.

“Okay, this one,” you said, pointing. “We’re getting this.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“It has too much…. whatever that is.”

“That is eel,” you squinted.

“Exactly,” he shrugged.

“It’s just eel,” you pointed out. “You’ve eaten weirder things.”

He paused. “That’s not the point.”

You grinned. “I have enough of an appetite for the both of us.”

Kill her. Kiss her.

“…Fine,” he said, pushing his intrusive thoughts away.

You beamed. 

By the time the food arrived, the conversation had settled. You didn’t hold back when you ate, and you never did. You leaned forward, talking between bites, pointed things out like it mattered that he experienced them properly.

“Try this,” you said, holding your chopsticks out toward him without thinking.

Dex looked at it, then at you. You didn’t even realize what he was going to do to you.

Kiss her. Kill her.

He leaned forward and took the bite. Your eyes stayed on his face, waiting.

“It’s good,” he admitted.

“I know,” you said immediately, all too pleased with yourself.

He shook his head slightly.

She’s dangerous. She could kill you. Kill her first.

You wiped a bit of sauce off your thumb absentmindedly and kept talking. “We used to have this thing—training-wise—where they’d reward you with food if you hit certain targets.”

Dex’s attention shifted immediately.

There it is. Focus.

“Targets?” he repeated.

You winced slightly. “Okay, that sounded worse out loud.”

He didn’t respond.

You laughed, a little self-aware. “I mean—it was worse. But at the time it felt like a game, you know? Like ‘hit this, get that.’ Pavlov, but with putting bullets between your classmates' eyes.”

You popped another piece into your mouth like you hadn’t just said that.

She’s a monster. She’s a victim. She’s both. Kill her.

“Do you ever miss that?” he asked before he could stop himself.

You tilted your head, chuckling at the absurdity of the question. “The food or the brainwashing?”

“Either.”

You smiled faintly. “Sometimes I miss knowing exactly what I was supposed to be.”

That…. He understood.

Kill her. Ask her about OXE. Ask her about the DODC. Kiss her.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Me too.”

You didn’t make a big deal out of it. Instead, you just nudged his foot under the table. “Hey,” you said, lighter now. “At least now we get sushi instead of, like… boiled cabbage or whatever.”

His lips formed the ghost of a smile. “I didn’t get cabbage.”

“Oh, sorry,” you deadpanned. “Did your government program have better catering?”

“No.”

You grinned. “Then you get it.”

He did. He really, really did.

You started talking about stupid things again—bad takeout, a guy you saw trying to fight a pigeon, the way you animated everything just enough to make it feel real.

Dex found himself watching your mouth when you talked.

Kiss her. Kill her. She’s faking it. She actually likes me.

He picked up his chopsticks again, turning them slightly between his fingers. These would be a good weapon to finish you off. He had calculated the angle, trajectory, and distance. He could do it from across the table. It would be clean, straight through the throat.

You wouldn’t even—

You laughed suddenly, bright and unguarded, and it snapped the thought clean in half.

“Earth to Dex?”

He blinked, refocusing on the world around him. 

You were looking at him like you’d caught his mind somewhere far away.

“What?” he said.

“You spaced out,” you said, narrowing your eyes slightly. “That was intense. Should I be concerned?”

Kill her. Kiss her. Tell her she’s pretty.

“No,” he said, coughing a little

You leaned forward slightly, studying him. “You do that a lot. Go somewhere else.”

He held your stare, feeling like an utter fucking coward. “I’m here,” he said. It came out quieter than he meant it to.

Your eyes softened. After that, you kept talking, and he kept listening, but the thoughts didn’t stop.

Kill her. She’s dangerous. She’s a Black Widow. She’s killed for corrupt governments. She’s taken down entire networks. She could kill you. Kill her. Kiss her.

He watched the way your fingers curled around your glass, the way you leaned closer when you got excited about a topic, the way your voice softened when you cared. 

He imagined reaching across the table, but this time not to put a piece of cutlery through your windpipe.

Instead, he imagined reaching out with his hand, touching your wrist. He imagined pulling you closer, kissing you.

—

When the bill landed between you, Dex felt his chest pulled tight, like a thread being yanked too hard. 

His hand moved first, grabbing it before you could even look properly. “I’ve got it,” he said, but it came out quieter than he meant, like the words had to push past thorns  lodged in his throat. You started to protest, but he cut in, “I want to.” 

That part slipped out, honest in a way he didn’t like. His fingers fumbled just slightly as he pulled his card out, a barely-there tremor that shouldn’t exist in a man like him, and he focused hard on the motion—insert, wait, sign—because that was simple, and that was something he understood. 

Kill her.

He could do it after this. He would. After all, that was the plan. But when he glanced up, you were watching him. and it threw everything off balance in a way that made his chest feel too full.

His thoughts only sped up after that. 

Kill her. She needs to go. She’s a monster. She’s a widow. She’s a fucking Black Widow. She could kill you. Kill her. She’s faking it. She’s dangerous.

He signed the receipt, but his grip was wrong. It was too tight, the paper crinkling under his thumb. When he set the pen down, his eyes betrayed him. They dropped to your mouth without permission. 

It wasn't strategic. It wasn’t calculated. It was instinct, human and stupid all the same.  

He imagined leaning forward instead of walking away, closing the distance instead of planning your doom, your lips against his instead of blood on his hands.

Focus.

His breath caught, and he looked away like that would fix it, like he could force himself back into the job he was supposed to do. 

He needed to do it. Now. Outside. 

He slipped a metal chopstick into his pocket. 

But the idea of ending it before he knew what your lips taste like made him recoil.

Kiss her. Tell her she’s pretty. Kiss her. Kill her. She’s a bad person. She’s dangerous. She’s so fucking pretty. She actually likes you. Kiss her. Kill her. Focus.

He stood too quickly, the chair scraping harshly against the floor, and reached for his jacket like movement might help ground him. It didn’t. You stood too, close enough that your arm brushed his.

He could still do it but his eyes betrayed him again, flicking to your lips like he was starving for something he didn’t deserve.

The realization hit all at once: he didn’t want to kill you before he kissed you. 

He needed that first. Just once. 

“I’ll walk you home,” he said, and the words came out before he could stop them. You looked up at him, surprised. When you said “Okay,” it didn’t make anything easier. It just gave him more time to ruin himself, one step at a time, chasing something he shouldn’t want before he did what he came here to do.

Kiss her. Then kill her.

—

The street outside your building felt eerily quiet, like the world had thinned down to just the two of you and the glow of the lobby lights behind glass. The doorman had the day off, you mentioned. There were no footsteps. No interruptions. 

Good. No witnesses.

Dex barely registered the thought this time. It flickered and passed, swallowed immediately by the thundering anxiety brewing in his mind.

Kill her.

“Hey,” you said. It was absurd, really, how shy you sounded.

He gulped. “Hey.”

His heart melted when a smile tugged at your mouth.

“I think,” you started, stepping just a little closer, your voice lowering like it was meant only for him, “you earned it.”

Dex didn’t get to ask what that meant, because you stepped in, closing that last inch of space like it meant nothing, and your lips met his…and everything in him just gave way.

His hand dropped from his pocket instantly, the weapon forgotten as his fingers caught your waist instead, pulling you closer like he was afraid you’d disappear. The kiss wasn’t gentle. It was only warm for half a second before it deepened, before he leaned into it with a careful urgency that didn’t belong to him.

Kiss her like you mean it.  

When you pulled back slightly, just to breathe, just to smile that pleased smile that made your whole face light up, he followed. He actually chased your lips, closing the distance again before you could get far, like he couldn’t stand the idea of it ending already. His hand slid higher, thumb brushing your jaw, tilting your face just enough to kiss you again. It was slower this time but no less hungry, like he was trying to memorize it.

You tasted… fuck! Sweet.

His brain latched onto it immediately, irrational and completely useless: Strawberries and cream. Probably lip gloss, but it didn’t matter to Dex. 

Kiss her like you fucking mean it. 

He smiled into it. It felt wrong on him, but he couldn’t stop it, not when you leaned into him like that, not when your fingers curled into his jacket like you wanted him just as much.

Kill her.

The thought slammed back in hard enough to almost make him flinch. His hand paused at your side. He knew the metal chopstick was still in his pocket.

Do it now.

He could, theoretically.  You were right there. You were more than close enough. More importantly, you were trusting enough.

One movement, and you would be dead. He would cradle your lifeless body in your arms and the last thing you would ever do was… kiss him. 

“I’ll see you soon?” you asked hazily when you finally pulled back, your voice carrying the echo of the kiss.

Dex froze.

You were smiling at him. You were not suspicious or guarded. You were just…  hopeful. And all he could think about was the way you’d kissed him. The way you’d let him.

Kill her.

His fingers curled in his pocket, brushing the metal again. He imagined it: a quick thrust, handled efficiently…

No. Not like that. I can’t kill her like that.

It was too slow, too messy. You’d bleed. You’d feel it. You’d die a slow, painful death…

She didn’t deserve that.

That was it. That was his excuse this time.

You deserved to die a quick, painless death. Maybe a shot in the back of the head when you weren’t looking. Just… bang! 

His chest ached at the thought. He was still leaning toward you, like part of him hadn’t caught up yet, like he might kiss you again if you gave him half a second more.

“I—yeah,” he said, voice, rougher around the edges. “You will.”

You smiled like that was enough. Like he hadn’t just made a decision that should’ve gone the other way.

Dex stood there for a second longer than necessary, like he was trying to memorize you again. He thought about your mouth, your eyes. the way you were still a little flushed… Then he stepped back, because if he didn’t—

Kiss her.

He almost did.

Instead, he let you go. And when he got home, all he wrote in the notebook was:

She tastes like strawberries and cream. 

—

The park on a Sunday felt too bright for what Dex had come to do.

Sunlight filtered through the trees in shifting patterns, the grass warm and uneven beneath the blanket he had brought.

It was your idea, “a picnic!” said so casually over the phone, like it was something people like you did, like it didn’t involve him sitting across from you with a gun tucked under his shirt, pressed against his side like a second heartbeat.

He’d decided before he even got there, that today, he was going to kill you.

It ends today. Kill her.

Then you showed up. And the world tilted for him.

You were wearing a sundress that moved with you when you walked. It wasn’t tactical, it wasn’t anything like the person he’d read about in that file. You looked… beautiful.

Kill her.

He swallowed it down. “You look…” he started, then stopped, like the word wouldn’t come out right.

You tilted your head, smiling. “What?”

His eyes dragged over you again before he could stop himself. “Nice,” he settled on.

It was insufficient. He knew it.

You laughed anyway, pleased, like you hadn’t just undone him.

Kill her. She’s dangerous. She’s a weapon.

He swallowed, hard, forcing himself to look away, to move, to do something before he stood there staring like an idiot. He dropped down onto the blanket he’d set up, hands already busy unpacking what he’d brought.

You noticed immediately. “You brought strawberries and cream?” You asked in disbelief. 

Dex shrugged, like it wasn’t a big deal, like he hadn’t thought about it too much. “You like sweet things.”

You went quiet for a second. “I…” you started, “I do.”

He didn’t look at you. If he did, he’d…

Kiss her. Kill her. Focus.

You sat across from him, smoothing your dress under your legs, and that was so normal it made his chest ache.

For a while it was just conversation, the kind that didn’t feel like work. You started with small things, normal things. Then, maybe out of morbid curiosity, you asked him about Fisk, almost casually, like it was something you were only half-remembering. Dex hesitated before answering, more out of instinct than suspicion.

Red Hook came up next, and that made him pause longer, because it wasn’t the kind of thing people usually asked about in passing. Still, he gave you what he had, watching you the whole time for a reaction that never really came. You just nodded along like it made sense to be talking about it like this, and that made him talk more than he should have.

But how could he focus on any of that when his mind…

Shoot her in the head.

“I’ve never done this before,” you said after a moment, glancing around. “A picnic, I mean.”

That caught Dex off guard. “What?”

You huffed a small laugh, a little embarrassed. “Yeah. Not like this, anyway.” You picked at the edge of the blanket. “We used to pretend, though. In the Red Room.”

You said it so lightly. Like it wasn’t something that should gut him. “In the basement of the facility I was raised in,” you went on. “Some of the girls would lay out scraps of cloth, call it grass.” You smiled, but it was fragile. “We’d share whatever we could steal from the kitchen and pretend it was… nice.”

Dex stared at you.

Kill her. She’s a Black Widow. She’s killed people. She’s—

“You deserved better,” he said.

You looked up at him, surprised. Then you smiled. “Yeah,” you said, after a second of consideration. “I think so too.”

Make it quick, coward.

He grabbed a strawberry just to have something to do with his hands, dipped it into the cream, and held it out toward you. It was an imitation of what you had done with sushi the other night. 

You chuckled, then leaned forward, taking it gently, your lips brushing his fingers just slightly.

Kiss her.

He watched you bite into it, watched the way your mouth curved, the way your eyes closed like you were enjoying it. Cream caught at the edge of your lips, but you didn’t notice. And that was it.

Kiss her. Indulge.

He leaned in because he couldn’t help it. He did it slowly, like he was giving you time to stop him.

You didn’t.

Your lips met his, and it was not rushed, not desperate like before. His hand came up to your jaw, thumb brushing your cheek as he tilted your face slightly, deepening it just enough to feel you respond, just enough to feel you lean into him.

You don’t deserve her. Kill her. Get it over with. 

His chest tightened painfully as he pulled back, breathing uneven, forehead almost brushing yours.

You smiled at him, a little dazed, and he knew. He couldn’t do it here. Not like this.

He leaned back fully, dragging a hand through his hair, trying to put himself back together. “I don’t…” he started, then stopped.

You tilted your head. “What?”

He looked at you again, and felt his heart break in real time. “I don’t want to stay here,” he said.

You were now confused and a little unsure. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” he said immediately, more panicked than he meant to. “No. It’s not that.”

Kill her. Do it right.

He let out a deep breath. “Come back to mine,” he said.

Fucking coward. What are you waiting for?  She’s a terrible person. She’s killed more people than you. 

Your brows lifted slightly. “Your place?”

He nodded once.

If he did it there, it would be quiet. He would still make it quick and painless. And afterwards… he could mourn you in peace. He could hold your body as he cried into your neck. And maybe, some part of you would stay with him forever. 

“Yeah,” he said, voice smaller now. “I just… want more time with you.”

That part wasn’t a lie.

You studied him for a second, then you smiled the same trusting smile. “Okay,” you said.

And just like that, you followed him home.

—

The walk should have been simple. It was a straight line, a familiar route, nothing Dex hadn’t done a hundred times before without thinking. 

But inside his head, his thoughts were deafening.

Kill her.

It wasn’t a thought anymore. It was a command, pressing in from all sides until it felt like it might split him open from the inside.

Kill her. She’s dangerous. She’s lying. She’s done this before. You know what she is.

His jaw tightened, teeth grinding together as he kept walking, forcing his steps to stay even. You were beside him, close enough that your shoulder brushed his every few strides, like you hadn’t noticed the tension winding tighter and tighter in him.

Kill her. Do it before she does it first.

The words didn’t fade after they came anymore. They repeated, layered and stacked on top of each other until they stopped sounding like language and started sounding like pressure.

Kill her. Kill her. Kill her.

But then, another voice cut through.

Kiss her.

It didn’t argue. It pulled.

Kiss her again. Don’t let this end. She chose you. She’s still here.

His breath hitched slightly, chest tightening as the two sides collided, over and over, faster now, louder now, until there was no space between them.

Kill her. Kiss her. KILL HER. KISS HER.

It built and built, escalating into unbearable noise. They clawed and scraped and demanded all at once. His fingers twitched at his side, curling slightly like they were reaching for an answer, like his body was trying to decide for him.

One pull of the trigger. That’s all it would take, that’s—

Then, he felt your hand slip into his.

And for the first time in a long time, his brain was… quiet. 

It wasn’t sudden. It wasn’t forceful. It was almost tentative at first, how your fingers trace his thumb lightly before settling into his palm like you’d done it a thousand times before. Like you hadn’t even considered that you shouldn’t.

Dex stopped breathing. His step faltered, just slightly, like his body didn’t quite know how to move without the noise driving it forward.

The commands that had been screaming seconds ago, the overlapping voices, the relentless pressure…they just ceased. As if you had reached inside his head and flipped a switch.

Dex stood there for half a second too long. His mind, which had been a constant storm of instruction and contradiction, felt… clear.

His fingers closed around yours slowly, almost cautiously, like he was afraid the moment would shatter.

You didn’t pull away. You didn’t even hesitate. You just… walked with him. 

And the quiet stayed. Step after step, it stayed.

By the time you reached his building, a fact had already settled into place inside his chest. He didn’t have to argue with himself about it. There was no internal debate, no weighing of outcomes or consequences.

He just knew he wasn’t going to kill you anymore.

Not tonight. Not later. Not at all.

Good person be damned. Bad person be damned. Rent be fucking damned. Whatever fragile system he’d built to justify what he did, none of it held any weight here, not anymore.

He wasn’t looking for redemption, and he wasn’t chasing some shallow kind of bliss that killing you might give him. That had never really been the point, no matter how many times he told himself it was. He just wanted you.

And it was a primal, wild want. 

He wanted your mouth on his again. He just wanted you to kiss him deeply and show him everything he’d missed, everything he’d never been given.

Dex slowed as he reached his door, keys already in his hand, but he didn’t unlock it right away. Instead, his eyes dropped briefly to where your fingers were still threaded with his. Then he looked at you. And there was nothing in his head telling him what to do anymore.

His thumb brushed lightly over your knuckles, a small, almost absent motion, before he finally unlocked the door. “Come in.”

—

His apartment was nothing like yours. In was just one open space, a bed pushed too close to the wall, a kitchen that barely separated itself from the rest of the room. No personality, no indulgence other than you. 

You didn’t say anything, though. No teasing comment, no subtle comparison, just that same acceptance you always gave him, like this was enough. Like he was enough.

Dex barely gave you time to take it in. The second the door shut behind you, he lost any semblance of restraint. 

His hand caught your waist and pulled you into him, his mouth crashing against yours with a kind of hunger that didn’t belong to a man who was ever in control. The kiss was messy, as if he was trying to take something he didn’t know how to ask for.

You gasped against him, your hands coming up to his chest, then his shoulders, leveling him and undoing him all at once. 

He walked you backward without breaking contact. One step, then another, until the back of your knees hit the bed and you fell onto it with. He followed instantly, like space between you was unbearable.

His hands were everywhere, your neck, your sides, your thigh, like he needed to confirm you were real, that you were still here, that you hadn’t disappeared the second he let himself want you this much. And then you felt him shudder just a bit, shoulder shaking. 

You pulled back just enough to look at him, your breath uneven, your hands coming up to his face, thumbs brushing his cheekbones.

“Dex?” you whispered, concern threading through everything. “What’s wrong? ”

“Nothing,” he insisted, almost defensive. “Nothing.”

But his eyes were glassy. He swallowed hard, like he was trying to force it down, trying to push it away before you could see it. After all, he didn’t know how to explain it.

How would he even begin to explain that you made his head quiet? That just being near you feels like something he’s never had before? That he doesn’t know what this is, but it’s too much and not enough at the same time?

“I’m fine,” he added, but it didn’t sound convincing. Not even to himself.

You said his name again, gentler this time. 

And that was it. That was the last thing holding him together.

“I wanna taste you,” he said honestly, almost reverently. 

You were caught slightly off guard. A small, breathy laugh escaped you. “You’ve kissed me before.”

But he shook his head, his big hands already frantically bunching the fabric of your sundress with an urgency that didn’t feel casual anymore. It felt like a need. Like an instinct he couldn’t hold back even if he tried. One hand gripped on your ass as the other hooked on the waistband of your panties, tugging it down desperately.

“No,” he said, voice deeper now. “I want to taste you.”

Oh.

Your breath hitched, but you didn’t stop him. You didn’t pull away. You let him move closer, let him guide you, let him fall on his knees like he was praying to a goddess in the altar of an ancient temple. You let him take that space between your legs as he wondered how much sweeter you could get. 

Here, he could at least pretend that he hadn’t been thinking about killing you not that long ago.

Dex sank lower, slower now, like he was trying to learn you, not take from you. His hands steadied himself against your thighs, his forehead dipping for just a second like he needed to breathe you in. He felt… wrecked.

His breath hitched softly as he leaned closer, the space between your heat and him shrinking until there was almost nothing left and then—

click.

It was quiet, but unmistakably the sound of safety coming off. 

Every instinct he had lit up at once, snapping back into place so violently it almost hurt. His body froze, breath catching.

He lifted his head slowly. And there you were, with a gun pointed at his head.

It was small, and easy to hide, the red room insignia etched to the side. You probably pulled from that little purse you always carried like it was just an accessory.

Of course.

Dex didn’t reach for anything. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t even try to put space between you. He just… looked at you.

And instead of anger, his chest folded in on itself. What he felt was closer to heartbreak than it was rage. Because for one stupid, moment he had naively believed you felt safe with him.

“…Oh,” he said softly.

The gun wasn’t the most horrifying part. It was the fact that even now, even with the metallic click of the safety still ringing in his ears, even with death staring him directly in the face, Dex could not stop looking at you.

You were sprawled beneath him on his bed, dress dragged up your thighs by his own hands, your breathing still uneven from the way he had kissed you seconds earlier. Your lips were swollen and puffy. Your chest rose and fell too quickly. One of your sandal straps hung loose around your ankle where he’d nearly pulled you apart getting you onto the mattress. And somehow… he still wanted you so badly it physically hurt.

How could he be this fucking stupid?

He should’ve known. Especially with questions about Red Hook. The ports. Fisk. That was why you kept asking.

Every little question over food and coffee and pastries. Every casual mention between laughter. Every moment he thought you were trying to know him better—

No. You were working. Just like him.

Your employer wanted information, and you had been sent to pull it out of him piece by piece while he sat there completely fucking mesmerized by you.

And now you had what they needed. Or maybe they realised he didn’t know enough to be valuable. That was worse, because it meant that he was just another loose end.

His stomach twisted hard enough to hurt. Not because you’d played him, because some pathetic, starving part of him had genuinely believed this had stopped being a job somewhere along the way. That maybe the way you kissed him outside your building had been real. That maybe when you held his hand and silenced every screaming voice in his head, it had meant something to you too.

Humiliating. Absolutely humiliating.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered.

It you had looked cold, detached, amused, even cruel, this would have been easier. He would have known where to put it. Would have known how to hate you properly. But you looked devastated.

Your hand trembled slightly around the weapon pointed at him, and your eyes kept betraying you, flicking down to his mouth before snapping back up again. You looked like you hated this.

“I…” You swallowed. “You’re not useful to OXE anymore.”

He had known something felt off. He just hadn’t cared enough to stop. He just wanted you more than he wanted to survive.

Dex let out a shaky breath that almost sounded like laughter. “Fuck,” he murmured softly, and you twitched, feeling his breath on your naked core. 

You flinched immediately. “No. Don’t do that.”

His eyes flicked back to yours.

“Don’t act like this was just me manipulating you,” you said, and your voice cracked slightly now. “I know there was a contract on me. I know you got sent it. I know about the gun under your shirt. Don’t you dare pretend like you weren’t planning to kill me too.”

He opened his mouth, then closed it. Because what could he even say? You were right.

The notebook was sitting in his apartment right now, pages and pages documenting your routines, your apartment, your vulnerabilities.

He had memorized the ways to kill you before he ever memorized the sound of your laugh.

And all this time, you had let him follow you, let him think he was in control in that “accidental run in” in Central Park, when you were planning to eliminate him, too. 

And somehow, the two of you still ended up tangled together on his bed, half-dressed and breathing hard from kissing each other like starving people.

Dex’s gaze dropped involuntarily to your thighs, to the skin exposed beneath the ruined hem of your dress. To the way your body was still open for him despite the gun in your hand.

Fuck.

His fingers tightened unconsciously where they still gripped the fabric pooled around your hips.

You looked vulnerable.

And the absolute worst fucking part was that he still wanted to bury himself between your legs so badly he could barely think straight. Even now. Even knowing this was the end.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

“You know what’s pathetic?” he asked quietly.

Your brows pulled together slightly.

Dex looked up at you from between your thighs, eyes dark and wet and unbearably earnest. “I still want to taste you.”

Your breath caught audibly.

“There’s a gun pointed at my head,” he whispered in disbelief. “and all I can think about is that I never got to know what you taste like.”

“Dex…” you breathed shakily.

But he shook his head immediately. “No, listen,” he said quickly. “I know what this is. I know what happens next.”

You looked away for half a second. That almost destroyed him, because he realized then that you didn’t actually want to kill him either. And that made him want you even more.

God, I’m so sick.

“I know you’re gonna kill me because it’s the job,” he continued. “Fine. I get it.” His eyes dropped again helplessly to the way your thighs trembled around him, then back up. “But Christ…” His voice cracked. “Just let me have this first.”

Dex looked humiliated and ruined all the same. And still completely sincere.

“I could die happy,” he admitted. “Just… let me taste you first, sweetheart.”

Your hand trembled. Not enough to miss, but just enough that Dex noticed.

The barrel of the gun was pressed against the center of his forehead now, cool metal against flushed skin, and still he didn’t move away from you. 

“Do it, then,” you whispered.

You swallowed hard, trying to steady yourself, trying to force your hand not to shake while he knelt there between your thighs looking at you like this was the closest thing to worship he had ever known. Amazed that even like this, you were soaked for him.

“Fucking do it,” you said again, almost pleading now. “Before I…”

Before you what? Changed your mind? Cried? Dropped the gun?

Dex could see every possibility running through your brain all at once.

His hands slid down your thighs reverently.  “You’re shaking,” he murmured quietly.

“So are you.”

That almost made him smile.

The apartment felt impossibly small around the two of you. The warm yellow light above the kitchen sink made you look divine, coupled by the sound of your uneven breathing. The mattress dipped beneath your weight every time you shifted. Dex tilted his head slightly against the gun like he was accepting his fate. Accepting you.

That should have terrified him. Instead, all he could think about was how beautiful you looked above him— dress ruined, eyes glossy with tears you clearly didn’t want him seeing.

He had wanted you from the beginning, even if he hadn’t admitted it. But this was something else entirely. This hurt.

Dex tilted his head just enough to press a slow kiss against the inside of your thigh, and the sound you made nearly destroyed him. 

His eyes flicked up immediately, watching your reaction with awe. He couldn’t believe he was allowed to touch you like this. Like he couldn’t believe you were reacting to him this way.

Dex kissed higher, and your hand flew to his hair immediately, fingers tangling there hard enough to pull a rough sound from his throat in return. He moaned against you.

The vibration of it shot through you so suddenly your back arched off the mattress, breath breaking apart, embarrassingly needy.

Dex's eyes kept fluttering shut every time you touched his hair, every time your thighs trembled around him, every time another helpless sound escaped you. He looked less like a man in control and more like a vampire feeding on his first prey. It was overwhelming.

Every time you twitched or gasped or tried to pull away from how intense it felt, he noticed immediately. He adjusted immediately, making you feel good mattered more than breathing. Like your pleasure mattered more to him than the gun pressed to his skull.

And fuck, did his tongue feel so fucking good. You could barely think straight. The room blurred at the edges, your thoughts dissolving one by one. Every nerve in your body felt lit raw, burning hotter and hotter every time he moaned pathetically against you again like he couldn’t help himself.

Dex sounded addicted to you already. He was too consumed by you and the sounds you were making now. They were small broken noises you clearly hated letting out but couldn’t stop anymore. Too consumed by the way your body kept reacting stronger and stronger beneath him despite your obvious attempts to stay composed.

Your hands tightened helplessly in his hair as another wave hit you, harder this time, your thighs trembling violently around his shoulders. “Dex—” you gasped brokenly.

He looked up instantly at the sound of his name. His eyes were blown wide. His lips swollen from kissing your skin. Hair ruined beneath your fingers. 

Then he sank back down, a man eating his last meal. He needed it to be a feast. 

Too much. It was too much.

Your body tightened all at once, every nerve pulling taut as pleasure crashed through you so hard it hurt. A sob tore from your throat before you could stop it, your entire body shaking as you finally came apart beneath him. Dex held onto you through all of it.

Your fingers slipped from his hair eventually, weak now, trembling as you tried desperately to catch your breath. Tears blurred your vision completely by the time the waves finally started easing enough for you to think again.

Dex pulled back immediately the second he realized you were crying harder.

“Hey,” he whispered instantly, breathing unevenly as he came back up toward you. His hands slid shakily to your waist, then higher, like he didn’t know where to touch to make sure you were okay. “Hey— look at me.”

You were still trembling beneath him, chest heaving as you struggled to come down from the drug-like high of the orgasm he gave you, the barrel of your gun on his temple now.

His thumb brushed shakily beneath your eye, catching tears against the pad of his finger. “Did I hurt you?” he asked, like the idea genuinely horrified him.

“Fuck—no,” you sputtered immediately, breath still wrecked as you stared at him through blurred vision. “Dex, fuck! How could you even say that?”

The concern on his face was so raw it physically ached to look at.

You were still shaking, your body trembling, your thighs dripping with spit and arousal like neither of you knew how to stop this anymore. 

You could trace every conversation backward now, see all the moments you carefully guided him toward the information you needed while he sat across from you like some fucking idiot who came to the conclusion you actually liked him. Except… 

You had fallen utterly in love with him.

Somewhere between the pastries and the wine and him writing down your coffee order in that stupid little notebook of his, the job had become real. Somewhere between him kissing you and him looking at you like your body wasn’t shameful or weaponized or ruined… you had stopped wanting this to end. 

And now here he was. Kneeling between your thighs with your gun to his head and your taste still on his mouth, looking at you like he’d die grateful if you asked him to.

It was as if, somewhere deep down, Benjamin Poindexter truly believed that if loving you ended in death, then maybe that was simply the closest thing he would ever get to being loved at all. That thought almost made you vomit from grief.

Your breathing broke unevenly as you stared down at him.

He still had one hand on your thigh, so fucking gentle.

“I don’t understand you,” you admitted shakily.

A sad smile ghosted across his mouth at that. He was exhausted. “I don’t either.”

You let out this awful sound halfway between a laugh and a sob as tears spilled harder down your face. “Fuck, Dex,” you choked out, “you were supposed to be a job.”

“So were you.”

You swallowed hard enough it hurt. “I should kill you,” you whispered suddenly. The sentence sounded wrong coming out now, like it was collapsing under its own weight before it even reached his ears.

Dex lowered his forehead slightly more firmly against the barrel of the gun, offering himself to you. He readjusted it, making sure that if you shot him now, it would be painless, like he was going to do to you. 

“Do it,” he whispered. “It’s what you were sent to do.” He sounded like he genuinely believed his life was worth less than your mission.

Your vision blurred hard. “I can’t,” you whispered.

He exhaled through his nose. “Yes, you can.”

“No!” You shouted out, panicked. “Don’t fucking… don’t even try to make this easier!”

When your finger jerked against the trigger, Dex still wouldn’t move. Fuck, he really trusted you to end it quick, did he? Even with doom pressed cold against his skin.

Your eyes squeezed shut hard enough to ache. You tried to force yourself back into training, back into discipline, back into the little girl who would get extra pieces of scrap food if she finished her mission well enough. 

But all you could feel was him. His mouth on your skin. The way he’d looked at you while you fell apart beneath him. The way he kept loving you despite knowing exactly what you were. “I’m gonna…” you whispered shakily, but you couldn’t finish the sentence.

You didn’t want to kill him. And that was the first truly selfish thing you had ever wanted.

You pulled the trigger anyway, and the gun went off.

The sound exploded through the apartment violently enough to shake the walls, but the bullet slammed into the floor behind him instead. You had missed a point blank shot intentionally. 

Your hand dropped. You stared at the damage of the splintering wood, breathing hard, horror rushing through your body all at once like ice water. “Oh my god,” you choked.

Dex thought he was dead.

For one longs excruciating second. He truly thought you had killed him. When he realised he wasn’t, he said your name immediately, climbing up the bed toward you “Hey, look at me.”

You genuinely couldn’t. Your entire body started shaking harder now, all the adrenaline and terror and grief finally catching up at once. “I can’t fucking do this,” you sobbed. “I can’t… I can’t—”

Dex cradled your face in both hands immediately.

“I’m a monster,” you whispered brokenly. “Dex, I’m a fucking monster.”

Dex said nothing. He only leaned forward slowly and kissed the tears from your cheeks one by one, like guilt itself had become holy.

And suddenly you understood something terrible about him: He does not love cautiously, nor rationally.

Every ounce of affection he gave came directly from the part of him that had been hurt the most. His soul had been beaten bloody and kept reaching anyway. The heart is a muscle, and his had torn itself apart trying to hold both of you afloat.

“You don’t get to say that like you’re different from me,” he whimpered against your skin.

Your breath hitched and that was when he kissed you like he was trying to pour every shattered piece of himself into your mouth before the world took it away again.

When his mouth parted against yours, you could still taste yourself on him. That made it more devastating. This ruined, trembling man was still carrying evidence of your pleasure on his tongue while he kissed you like you were worth saving.

Dex made a small sound against your mouth when you started crying harder, and suddenly his hands were everywhere, trying to hold you together physically because he didn’t know how else to do it.

His forehead dropped against yours when he pulled away. “We’re both monsters,” he whispered.

But it didn’t sound cruel. It sounded heartbreakingly close to love.

—end.

[little-miss-dilf-lover]

18+ dex who loves to make you sweat

fem! reader, mdni. 802 words. cw: he turns the AC off so he can make her sweat more, dex using his weight to keep reader in a position, pinv sex, sweat sweat sweat, hints of multiple climaxes, general filth

around this time of year with temperatures soaring like they are, your means of cooling down around the apartment had grown used and abused — fans and AC tired from their continuous and rather extensive use.

with them being on almost all hours through the day, there was only one time where dex would cut their power; a time where no one ever should do such thing. 

it's not when you leave the apartment, or when you take a shower, but rather when you fuck — well, when he fucks you. 

it's a control element, you believe. if there was a variable that could possibly be controlled, dex will find a way. even if it meant something as outlandish as your temperature. 

dex is particular about what he likes, about what he doesn't. though when it came to you, he found that the lines would blur for what he typically permits. there wasn't one person he'd let touch him with such sweaty mitts, but with you, it was as if he'd actively seek it out.

and that's why when it would get to temperatures like these, he'd do whatever he deems necessary in order to feel your body sweat against his.

the position he's got you in is close, far too close in heatwave like this. it's as if it's to encourage the sweat production that needs no such aid: sticky back against the sheets, knees hiked up as close to your chest as you can muster. though with dex on top, arms hooked under those said bent knees of yours, he's keeping you pinned — position pushing you in on yourself almost. 

there's almost no escaping it, especially not when his thighs trap you in; the upper area above either knee wedging underneath each cheek of your ass. 

a moderate sheen of sweat layers between you, like it's the butter slapped on two slices of bread. it's teetering the scales into something uncomfortable, the stickiness on your skin. with the more each of your bodies produce, the more you slip with every motion and the more evident it becomes as to why he's gripping onto you so tight.

dex keeps his forehead pressed into yours below, the position an effort to keep you put exactly where you are. but with him so close, you fail to acknowledge the veins bulging up the lengths of his throat, the flatness in his dampened hair, the red spreading across his chest — all of which things you love to see on the regular, only now with him obstructing your view, and with eyes as tightly clamped closed as they are, you cannot appreciate the sights you would otherwise swoon over.

you're a mess, rather literally: hairline sodden with sweat, crevices behind your knees and elbows dripping as he coaxes you through yet another climax. fucking you through your fourth, maybe fifth orgasm.

the motion in his hips dips ever so slightly, not enough for it to be a considerable difference, but enough to allow you a moment to catch your breath. 

"I can't, I'm too— I'm too hot," you pant, throat dry. your nails hook and dig into his beefy shoulder blades, crescent moon shapes forming on the surface of his sweaty, reddened skin. "it's too—"

"much. I know."

he stills inside you for a moment, balls pushing up against the lower of your cunt. he pauses, reducing movement to nothing, like he was struggling to restrain himself, battling the own control he has over himself. he couldn't come yet, not when he has you so perfectly and rather pathetically fucked out.

dex keeps his cock plugged deep in your cunt, the crown of his dick lodged in that pocket of tissue beside your cervix. he adjusts himself, only slightly, and lifts his forehead from yours, pulling it away so he can slot into the crook of your neck. 

"I need one more," he breathes against the side of your throat, voice hot and he sears a litter of kisses into your dampened, salty skin. 

he tests you with another pump, the motion slow and steady as he almost, nearly, entirely pulls out. and with that slight movement of his dragging cock, your trapped juices and arousal trickles out your pussy and down your ass; a milky string spilling from your cunt and into a pool on the sheets below.

that experimental thrust grows into a gradually systematic pattern, each wind getting closer and closer, deeper and deeper somehow. the sticky, stinky sweat is uncomfortable, but he's never known himself to be in such a turned on headspace.

you're the only person he wants to be coated in fluids from. there was something about knowing that the way you felt was a direct response from what he, himself, made you feel. and if thats not love, what is?

⎯ 𑄹 ⎯

[lov3land]

COLA , jack abbot

summary ⠀♱ ⠀in the words of lana del rey, “i got sweet taste for men who are older…” or, two times jack abbot was mistaken for your father, and the one time he wasn’t.

pairing ⠀♱ dbf!jack abbot x fem!robinavitch!reader

warnings ⠀♱ big time age gap — reader is in her mid 20s, jack is in his early 50s. smut, overprotective robby, probably ooc jack and robby. way too many instances of jack and reader getting mistaken for a father/daughter duo — usage of the nickname ‘daddy’ (only during sex), jack is insecure about his age, mentions of jack’s leg, jack takes viagra, BIG DICK JACK !!! reader works at the hospital with her dad and daddy, small brendon park threesome idea sneak 🙂‍↕️

a/n ⠀♱ this is genuinely probably the freakiest fic i’ve ever written. enjoy my little freaks <3 i am NOT normal about the way i feel about shawn hatosy and dat shark in his pants. THIS WORK WAS MADE BY ME, NOT AI. DO NOT PLUG MY WORKS INTO AI. not proofread, ignore any spelling errors.

#1 — AT A BARBECUE

An aroma of grilling onions and bell peppers on a heated Blackstone filled the air. You and Jack were at a Memorial Day barbecue hosted by one of his old Army buddies who he hadn’t seen in a while, the sound of your flip flops slapping around on overheating concrete making Jack look up at you as you handed him a beer with a soft smile. “Thank you, honey.” He smiled back at you, a stray curl flopping onto his forehead.

You nod, “Of course. You want some fruit or something? There’s some really good watermelon over there,” you point to a table with an assortment of different types of fruit: watermelon, pineapple, honeydew, and cantaloupe—with a manicured finger. Jack shakes his head, putting the rim of the amber bottle to his lips, “I’m alright, honey, thank you.”

You nod again, a small ‘okay’ falling from your lips before you make your own way to the table, adjusting your cover up on your shoulders. There’s a woman already there who looks to be in her late forties, and you can tell she’s the wife of one of the retired vets that Jack became close with. She smiles at you, holding tongs in her left hand as she picks up a few pieces of watermelon and places them on a plate. “It’s so nice of Jack to bring you here,” She says kindly, “Are you on summer break from the University of Pittsburgh?”

You shake your head, grabbing a paper plate from the stack as the wind picks up, making a few napkins fly away, so you bend down to grab them before responding. “I actually just graduated from the Pitt School of Health,” you correct, “I’m a phlebotomist at PTMC, I work with Jack.” She gasps, “Oh, a father-daughter duo at the hospital! That’s so adorable. I’m Teresa, I’m Emmett’s wife,” She holds out her hand, pointing in the direction of the pool at a tan Asian man.

You shake her hand, “Thank you, but Jack’s not my father—I’m his girlfriend,” You giggle, and Teresa blushes, looking mortified, “Oh, gosh—I am so sorry—” She apologizes profusely, but you just laugh it off, shrugging, “It’s fine, really—the age gap and all—it makes sense that you would perceive us that way.”

She apologizes once more before walking back over to her husband, and you just giggle again to yourself, placing a few pieces of cantaloupe on your plate before going back over to Jack. “What was that all about?” He asks gravelly, pulling you into his lap with a soft grunt, his hand rubbing small circles on your hip bone.

“She thought you were my dad,” you laugh, wrapping your free arm around the back of his neck, stabbing the cantaloupe chunk with your plastic fork and bringing it up to your lips. “Are you serious?” Jack responds, huffing out a laugh, “I don’t look that old, do I honey?”

You hum, looking over his facial features—the Crow’s feet by his beautiful hazel eyes, the greying stubble on his cheeks and chin, the silvery-white curls that you loved to tug on and run your fingers through—and just chuckle, “I plead the fifth.”

Jack scoffs, pinching your hip, “Brat.”

#2 — HAPPY FATHER’S DAY!

You knew that sometimes the age gap bothered Jack—not in a malicious way towards you, but towards himself. He could never understand why you of all people, his best friend’s daughter, chose someone as old and as grumpy as him.

His back ached almost daily. He had wrinkles everywhere. His hair was grey, white in some places, and he had to take Viagra to keep up with you, for God’s sakes—and on top of all of that, he was a war veteran missing the lower part of his leg.

But you still wanted him. You still chose him.

“Baby, are you almost done?” You call out, walking back to Jack’s bedroom, where you see him standing in front of a mirror, sighing as he struggles with his tie. “Let me do it,” You murmur softly, removing his hands from the fabric, breathing steady as you concentrate on untying it for him. “Fuckin’ hands are shaking,” he scoffs, “I’m a doctor, and my hands are shaking. What kind of fucking bullshit—”

“Hey, hey, hey,” You cut him off, your voice soothing as you lift your hand to his cheek, “what’s going on, Jack? Are you okay?” His hand raises to cover yours as he turns his head to kiss your palm, and he nods. “Yeah, just…what that waiter said at dinner—I guess it shook me up more than I realized.”

“Oh, baby,” you coo, “the Dad thing? That happens all the time with us, Jackie—”

He cuts you off, stepping away from you and your touch, “I know,” He says roughly, “It happens basically every time we go out, honey—I just—it makes me feel so weird sometimes. Like I’m some kind of predator, I mean—” He scoffs, “You’re my best friend’s daughter and he doesn’t even know about us. I was there for all of your major life events, hon—don’t you think that’s weird?”

Even though he’s stepped away from you, you step closer to him. “Jack,” You sigh, “I am a grown woman, who can make my own choices.”

“Honey—that’s not what I—”

“No,” You shake your head, “I knew what I was doing when I pursued you, Jack. For God’s sakes, I’ve had a ‘crush’ on you since I was a senior in high school. Who cares if someone thinks you’re my father? You’re not, you’re my boyfriend. And that’s all that matters.”

Jack looks down at you with softened hazel eyes, a smile perking up on his lips. “I’m your boyfriend,” He repeats, like he’s reminding himself.

“My hot boyfriend,” You affirm, placing a hand on his chest to slowly push him towards the bed, “my hot, sexy, beekeeping age boyfriend with a massive dick…”

His eyebrows raise as his back lands against the crisply ironed sheets of his duvet, “Massive dick, huh?”

“You know it’s massive, Abbot, shut up.”

+ 1 — SUPPLY CLOSET

You knew it was wrong to lie to your father—but he couldn’t know about your relationship with Jack yet, he just couldn’t. So when you told him you were going to Italy, and he asked with who, obviously you couldn’t tell him it was with your boyfriend who just so happened to be his best friend of more than two decades. So you lied.

“Just some friends from college,” You shrug, plopping down onto his couch, “Hannah, Veronica, Quinn—that group.”

Michael looks up from his book, glasses perched on the bridge of his nose as you rest your head on his shoulder. He places a kiss to your hair. “You better be safe, sweetheart. Use the buddy system when you go to the bathroom, don’t take drinks from strangers, practice safe sex—”

“Dad!” You exclaim with disgust, lifting your head up from his shoulder. “What? You’re a single young woman in a foreign country, honey, and Italian men are very persistent. I’m just trying to make sure you won’t be going home with some foreign objects, honey, that’s all.” He chuckles at his joke, and you roll your eyes.

“You’re so stupid,” You grumble, “and old. And annoying. And for the record, I have a boyfriend. No sex with Italian men will be happening any time soon.”

This intrigues Michael, and he takes his glasses off, closes his book, and then puts both items on the coffee table. “Yeah? When do I get to meet this lucky guy who makes my baby girl so happy, hm?”

Fuck. You’ve already said way too much.

“Someday,” You splutter, “he’s really busy with work, so—”

“What does he do?”

“He’s a doctor,”

Shit! Way too much fucking said!

The next week, you come into work, and almost immediately, Ahmad is in your face with a mischievous glint in his eyes. “The great Dr. Robinavitch! Welcome in, my fair lady.”

You look up at him, amused. “What’s the betting pool this time?”

He just sighs, a look of defeat on his face as his shoulders deflate. He crosses his arms over his chest, “Who in the hospital you’re dating. Your dad put $40 on Park the Shark, caught making out in the supply closet. Said something like that happened when he first started working at the ED with your mom, and you know the saying—like father, like daughter.”

You fake gag, “First of all, TMI about my parents. Didn’t need to know that. And second of all, Park the Shark? Really, dad?” You aim the last piece of your sentence towards him, where he’s at the nurses’ station chatting with Dana.

“Sorry honey!”

Four—almost five—hours later, there’s a small chance for a break after the chaos of an MVC begins to wind down. It had required all hands on deck, bringing in multiple doctors from different departments, and also doctors from the night shift, meaning that Dr. Jack Abbot, MD and you were in the same vicinity.

After completing a CBC and CMP for one of the patients, you had a small break. You let out a sigh of relief as you snap your gloves off, stretching and rolling out your neck before going down the hallway, where, strategically, there was a supply closet. You shrug to yourself, figuring that you could do some organizing in there with the downtime—and shut the door behind you once you make your way inside.

A few minutes later, the door opens behind you, and you gasp, placing a hand on your chest before realizing it was just your boyfriend, who now has a grin on his face. He locks the door before walking closer to you, gripping your hips with calloused hands. “I scare you?” He teases, backing you up against the shelving, placing kisses along your neck and jawline.

“Mm—Jack, we’re at work…” You try to protest, but they get caught in your throat as his hands move from your hips to underneath your scrub top. “In a closet,” he states, “with the lights turned off. With downtime in an Emergency Department. Let me fuck you, honey.”

“You’re lucky I love you,” You giggle, pressing your lips to his. You moan softly as the kisses get more intense, and soon enough, Jack’s scrub pants and boxers are pushed down just enough to let his cock out. Your scrub pants are all the way down to your ankles, thong pushed to the side, scrub top on the floor and your undershirt pulled up to let Jack see his favorite thing: your tits.

“So fucking perfect for me,” He murmurs, taking a nipple into his mouth, sucking on it as he slowly starts to thrust into you. “Oh my God, Jackie…” You whine, head thumping against the shelving. He shushes you, pulling off of your breast, “Not my name, honey. And you gotta be quiet, can’t have our coworkers knowing how slutty their favorite phlebotomist gets for her daddy, hm?” He lifts his thumb to your lips, and you gladly take it, moaning around it as his thrusts increase.

“So big daddy—nghhhh,” You whimper, and he groans as you clench around him, shoving his head into the crook of your neck, “Oh, fuck. Oh fuck, oh fuck,” He grits out, pace increasing as the knot begins to form in the base of his stomach—and as soon as it forms, it’s gone.

“What the fuck?!” Michael snarls, anger clearly expressive on his face as his grip tightens on the supply closet door’s handle, his teeth gritted. Jack scrambles to pull up his boxers and scrub pants, covering you up with his body as he turns around to face the older Dr. Robinavitch.

“Robby, man, I can explain—”

The door slams in Jack’s face.

“I thought you locked it!” You squeal, rushing to put all of your clothes back on: you pull your undershirt down, put your scrub top back on, put your thong back in the right place, and then pull your scrub pants back on before smoothing your hair and trying to ignore the dull ache that formed between your legs.

“I did!” Jack sighs, running a hand through his hair, “I forgot it unlocks if you pull on it hard enough—Robby must’ve already been irritated.”

“My dad just saw me having sex with you,” You whine, “my life is over.” You hide your face in his chest, and Jack just sighs again, placing a hand on your back before kissing the top of your head. “I’ll deal with it, honey. Just—go back to working, okay? Shut down any shit that people try to talk.”

You look up at him, nodding, and quickly exit the supply closet, avoiding eye contact with any staff as you try to busy yourself with bloodwork labs. Jack, still in the supply closet, grips both sides of his stethoscope, sighs, and then looks up at the ceiling, shutting his eyes before whispering, “God kill me now.”

After taking a few more deep breaths, he exits the closet, looking around for Robby. His heart drops to his ass when he looks out the doors to the ambulance bay, seeing Robby—and you—in a heated argument. Against his better judgement, he decides to go outside.

“He’s fifty years old and my best friend! You are not to date him, and that’s final!” Michael shouts, a finger pointed in your face.

“I’m a grown woman, dad! I can date who I want—who cares if he’s your best friend?” You argue, brows furrowed as you step closer to him.

“Guys—” Jack starts.

“Stay out of this!” You and Michael both yell in unison, and if Jack wasn’t about to get his head bit off, he’d make a comment about how alike your mannerisms were.

“You motherfucker,” Michael growls, walking up to Jack and immediately taking a swing. It lands, hard, and Jack groans as his head snaps to the side, a large bruise forming on his cheek as he spits blood from his mouth. You gasp, covering your mouth as your eyes widen.

“I deserved that,” he heaves, and the automatic doors open as Dana rushes outside, “Robby! Go somewhere else, now!” She yells, helping Jack to his feet.

EXTRA — SECRET’S OUT

“I didn’t know that was gonna happen,” You mumble, cheek smushed to Jack’s shoulder as he holds an ice pack to his cheekbone in Central 5, “I’m really sorry, Jackie.” Your hands are laced with his as the two of you sit on the edge of the hospital bed.

“Don’t be, sweetie,” He says softly, “I knew it was gonna happen.” Jack chuckles, “Your dad has always been protective of you, especially after your mother’s death. Plus, I really think he was expecting it to be you and Park making out in that supply closet.”

You pinch his thigh, and he winces playfully as the doors to Central 5 open with a mechanical hiss—you unlace your fingers from Jack’s immediately as your father walks in with Dana following behind him.

“Apologize,” she nudges the back of his leg with her foot like a mother scolding her toddler. “I’m sorry for punching you, Jack,” Michael sighs, scrubbing a hand over his face before turning back towards Dana, who snaps her gum at him before pointing her chin towards you, “And I’m sorry, baby girl, for reacting that way towards you. You’re right—you’re a grown woman who can make her own choices and I have to trust that you’re capable enough to make your own choices.”

You grin, standing up from the hospital bed to wrap your arms around your father. “I forgive you,” You whisper softly, sighing as he wraps his arms around you in response, squeezing you momentarily.

“What, I don’t get a hug?” Jack jokes, wincing as the stitches on his cheek almost split open when Jack cracks a smile. Michael huffs, pulling Jack into a hug—which is a lot tighter than the one he just gave you, and Jack can tell it’s a warning.

“I’m not saying I approve of this,” Michael mutters, the sound low enough so that only Jack can hear—you were doing something on your phone—“but I tolerate it. I love you, brother, but I love my baby girl more. If you hurt her, so help me God, I will find you down and hunt you.”

“Yep, point taken,” Jack strains out, feeling his lungs get restricted from how tight Robby was holding him.

“First thing in the morning, baby girl, report this damn relationship to Gloria,” Michael says, aiming the sentence at you, his voice louder now.

You nod, laughing as you snap a picture of Jack and your father hugging, sending it to Perlah. “Best buddies!!” You caption it.

EXTRA #2 — FOOL’S GOLD

“Come on, just tell me who won the money! I already had to go basically spill my entire sex life to Gloria,” You whine, standing in front of Ahmad as he shakes his head.

“Can’t,” He sighs, holding up three fingers and placing his hand over his heart, “Scout’s Honor.” You huff, crossing your arms over your chest. “Thanks for nothing, Ahmad!” You turn on your heel, exiting the security office as you make your way over to Trinity as she snapped a glove against Whittaker’s back.

“Do you guys know who won the bet? I asked Ahmad who won and he won’t tell me,” You pout, resting your arms against the nurses’ station. “You mean the bet about who in the hospital you were dating, which was started by your meddling father, who then punched your boyfriend, who turned out to be his best friend?” Trinity says matter-of-factly, and you huff.

“Way to call me out,”

“Park won it, I think he won like fifteen-hundred dollars,” Dennis shrugs, ripping open the wrapper to a granola bar. Your’s and Trinity’s jaws drop as you look towards Trauma Two, where Brendon ‘Park the Shark’ Park works on reattaching the severed limb of a construction worker.

“What was his bet?” You ask, tentatively.

“Dr. Abbot, two years and not HR-approved, found out by Dr. Robby in the supply closet,” Dennis replies, his words slightly gargled from granola.

You don’t think you’ve ever whipped out your phone so fast as you text Jack:

what would you say if i asked about a potential threesome with park?

[low--battery]

It's hard. It's REALLY HARD.

[mxzzled]

Dex biting his lip when Matt holds him up against the wall. I know what you are. There is a word for people like you.

[sarafangirlart]

Shipping The Ghoul and Lucy when both characters have black love interests feels very… hmm

[aluvsblu]

what’s on your mind, coop?

[whereareyourightnow]

#soulmatism

[mearchy]

my favorite genre of fictional character is like "i am terrifying to almost everyone, i'm very good at killing, i can endure anything, i've become exceptionally good at playing into my reputation, and if you try to give me positive social interaction i will react with confusion and cower in a corner like an abused animal. and i may try to shoot you. but there is also a chance i may imprint on you like a feral dog receiving its first loving touch! good luck."

[hoosierhoodwitch]

[jeffwholivesathomunculus]

Been watching Spider-Noir and I think the one very important but often forgotten thing they got right is that nobody in this show has iPhone Face. Casting department for the extras and supporting roles deserves a raise, because they really nailed the 40s Character Actors look. Lotta faces on this show that look like they were made from Play-Doh and I mean that as a compliment. There's some real mugs, thugs, bulldogs, wet rats, weirdos and GOONS in the people's faces in this crowd. "Whateva you say, boss" and "you wants it to hurt, boss?" henchmen so classically rectangular we're reclaiming the word GOON tonight. Even the little street kids look like winos.

[francesvyne]

JACK ABBOT FIC

MASTER LIST:

Dads Best Friend Series:

Dads Best Friend PT 1

Dads Best Friend PT 2

Dads Best Friend PT 3

ONE SHOTS

One Night Stand

The Break Room

[astarlinggirl]

fuck it, i love you

professor!jack abbot x virgin!fem!reader

summary: after a risqué encounter with you at the bar, jack abbot can’t get you out of his head. and then you show up in one of his lectures as his student. and then you two navigate an interesting 'casual' relationship, until your emotionally avoidant asses get, well... attached.

wc: 13k words

warnings: 18+, dom!jack & sub!reader, switching pov, lots of fingering, rubbing over underwear, premature ejaculation (coming in pants), mentions of oral (fem!receiving), guiding through a blowjob, loss of virginity, sex on a table, calling him dr abbot, sir + brief daddy kink, light choking, all of the sexy stuff happens in his office. jack is a widow, brief angst in the middle but love confessions later (!!), hurt/comfort, jack is jealous and possessive but has an #ethicaldilemma: the fic

a/n: i tried to be vague with the backstory, but reader craves academic validation, doesn’t have many friends, has implied familial issues and is introverted and avoidant. seeing the pics of him literally sent me into heat i fear i’ll never recover and so naturally i churned out this incredibly self indulgent fic during my finals aha can u tell i'm suffering from academic stress? #anyways have fun pls be nice. not beta read. | divider credits: @strangergraphics | soundtrack: fuck it i love you by lana del ray

Jack Abbot had always been a man of remarkable composure, the sort of composure that had been his armour, carefully built after the death of his wife, reinforced brick by brick through routine, discipline, and relentless work. 

While other men sought comfort in distractions, Jack prided himself in the fact that he buried himself in academia. Entire nights disappeared beneath journal articles, lecture plans, and grading sociology essays, until the loneliness that waited for him at home was little more than a dull ache he could almost ignore. 

Last week at the bar, well, that had been a mistake. A brief lapse in judgement, that's all. One too many whiskeys after a particularly long week and a pretty young thing asking him for help with some creep who wouldn't leave her alone - what exactly had he been supposed to do? Ignore her? Tell her she was on her own? Any decent man would've stepped in, at least that's what Jack keeps telling himself.

The problem is that a week later, he still can't get you out of his head.

He remembers the dress first. God, that dress. The dark fabric had clung to your figure, hugging every curve, and he'd spent the entire evening irritated with himself for noticing at all. 

He remembers the way the dip of your waist had fit beneath his palm when he'd guided you behind him, the startling softness of you, the instinctive way you'd moved closer when the man started getting aggressive. The tiny stutter in your breathing as he'd told the asshole to ‘fuck off and stop bothering his girl’ in a gruff voice, the way you'd looked up at him with those wide eyes, somewhere between embarrassed and grateful, as though he had done something remarkable when all he'd really done was the bare minimum.

Worst of all, he hates that he remembers the warmth of your body as he pinned you against the wall of the men's bathroom, mouths hovering over each other, not kissing, but breathing in wine-tinted lips. 

God, the way your warm walls stretched around his fingers, your clit under his thumb, still made him achingly hard. Jerking off in the shower had been futile ever since that night, ever since he felt your soft fingers around his cock, your moans spilling into his mouth. And your soft whines when he called you a good girl, fuck. He’s hard, again, in the middle of reading through the PHD proposals sent his way. He sighs, pulling his cock out his pants. 

It was becoming ridiculous. Which is precisely why he is looking forward to the start of semester.

But the universe has a fucked up way of derailing his plans. By the time he arrives at the lecture hall the next morning, coffee balanced in one hand and laptop tucked beneath his arm, he's almost managed to convince himself that the entire thing was behind him.

Then he walks through the door. The lecture hall blurs into meaningless shapes and colours, and in the centre of it sits you. 

The girl he couldn’t take out of his brain for the past seven days. 

Jack forces his legs forward, somehow making it to the front of the room without visibly embarrassing himself. He places his coffee on the desk. Sets down his laptop. Connects the HDMI cable twice because he misses the port the first time. His fingers feel too clammy, his pulse too fast. 

Jack opens his mouth to introduce himself.  

"My name is-"

But the words die there. Because he makes the mistake of looking back at you, again. 

Those same eyes he'd spent an entire week trying to unsuccessfully forget are fixed directly on his, wide with disbelief.

For a fraction of a second his mind goes entirely blank. Then your eyebrows lift. Just slightly.

And he realises with a jolt of horror that you've noticed the way his words catch. Jesus Christ.

He clears his throat and looks away, pretending to adjust something on his laptop despite the fact that absolutely nothing needs adjusting, acutely aware of the warmth crawling up the back of his neck, and onto his cheeks. It's ridiculous. Completely ridiculous. 

He's a respected academic pushing fifty years old, not some nervous graduate tutor fumbling his way through his first class.

"My name is Dr Jack Abbot," he says again, his voice steadier this time, lower too, the words settling more naturally now that he's managed to regain some semblance of control. "I'm the lead lecturer for the sociology department.”

His eyes catch yours. 

“It'll be my greatest pleasure to work with all of you this semester."

You’re this close to fucking shitting your pants. 

The sexy old man that had fucked the shit out of you with his fingers, while you could barely wrap your hands around his girthy cock in the corner of a dingy bathroom, was your professor. He was in front of you speaking in a voice too gravelly for his own good, and donned in what you’d deem an outfit way too slutty. 

Tweed blazer that somehow actually showed how broad he was, how fat and juicy his biceps were. A soft wool polo underneath that stretched around his fat pecs. 

And those brown pants, for fucks sake, those pants should be an abobination. You could see the bulge of his dick, the print, as he moved around the room. 

What’s worse though? His fat fucking fingers. As he gesticulates while talking about the content, which you don’t give a fuck about, all you can think about is how they felt inside of you, curling up to reach that sweet spot, and making you come faster and harder than your vibrator. 

As the flashbacks of him pounding into you fade, and you focus, you see something black and shiny glinting as it catches the overhead lights. You blink. Adorning one of those delicious fingers, is a ring. Fuck. It’s a wedding ring. 

You stare at it for a second too long before immediately snapping your gaze back to your laptop. Heat floods your face. You rack your brain trying to remember whether he'd been wearing it that night. You don't think so, you're almost certain he wasn't. Yeah, he definitely didn’t have it on that night in the bar, you would’ve felt it against your pussy, that fucking slut. 

You clench your jaw and look away, typing away to start making notes. You’d hooked up with an older married geratric. Yeah, maybe you should just drop out. Hurl yourself off the chair and out the door and withdraw from your course and fade into the abyss and die in a hole.

But what's worse is the way your cunt is clenching around nothing at the thought of this older man fucking you with his fingers while he had a wife at home- no, stop. How deeply unfeminist of you. You cunt. 

Yet still, when you look up and accidentally make eye contact with Jack Abbot, it feels like a punch to the vagina. 

By the time the lecture ends, Jack has spent nearly two hours forcing himself not to look at you. It has been a miserable failure. Not an obvious one, nobody in the room would have noticed. Years of teaching and having to discreetly catch students on their phones have made him an expert at disguising where his attention is actually resting. 

But every time his gaze swept across the theatre, every time a student asked a question, every time laughter rippled through the room, some part of him remained acutely aware of where you were sitting.

Which is precisely why, as students begin packing their bags and filtering towards the exits, he decides to do something incredibly stupid.

He tells himself it isn't stupid. He tells himself it's necessary. Professional, even.

After all, the two of you know each other in some capacity. There was the bar, there was what occurred inside of that bar, that lapse in judgement. There is now the unfortunate reality that you are one of his students. A conversation needs to happen. Boundaries need to be established, expectations clarified.

At least that's the excuse he gives himself. The truth is considerably less flattering. The truth is that he wants an excuse to speak to you.

He calls out your name. The words leave his mouth before he can reconsider them.

You freeze halfway through sliding your laptop into your bag. For a second you look almost startled that he's addressed you directly. Then your eyes meet his, startled. 

"Could you stay for a moment?"

Several students glance between the two of you before continuing out the door. Jack immediately regrets saying it publicly. Excellent start, Abbot.

By the time the last student leaves, you're making your way slowly towards the front of the room, one loop of your backpack slung on your shoulder.

As you slow to a stop in front of him, his eyes map your face. Your wide eyes, your slightly messy hair, the shape of your lips- Stop. Jesus Christ. 

He forcibly redirects his gaze towards his laptop on the podium. Professional. Remember, professional.

"You wanted to see me?" you ask softly.

Jack clears his throat.

"Right. Yes."

Very articulate. 

"I just thought it would be best if we acknowledged..." He gestures vaguely between the two of you. "The situation."

You blink.

"The situation?"

"The fact that we've met before."

"Oh."

You glance down at the strap of your bag, fingers tightening around it.

"Yeah. I noticed."

The dry response catches him completely off guard. A smile threatens at the corner of his mouth.

"Um, sorry, Dr Abbot," you add quickly, stumbling over the words. "I didn't mean to make things weird."

Jack immediately shakes his head.

"No, it's okay. You're good."

Dr Abbot. Dr Abbot. His brain plays your lips wrapping around his name again and again, perhaps in more precarious positions. He rubs his neck, looking away, willing for his cock to stop fucking stiffening. 

"I just wanted to clarify," he starts carefully, "I'd appreciate it if what happened stayed private."

Your eyes immediately narrow, apparently offended.

"Dr Abbot, I'm not stupid."

His eyebrows lift at your sudden confidence. He puts his hands out in front of him in defence. 

"I wasn't suggesting-"

"No, I know," you interrupt. Then your eyes widen, immediately looking mortified for interrupting him. "Sorry. I just mean... I'm not exactly planning on standing up in tutorials and announcing that I fu- I met my professor in a bar."

Jack closes his mouth. Fair point. And suddenly he becomes aware of how ridiculous he sounds.

You aren't the problem here. You haven't done anything. If anything, you're handling this better than he is. This sort of “casualness” is probably the usual for someone as beautiful as you, as young and brilliant.

"Right," he says finally.

A silence settles between you as he continues staring you down. 

You shift your weight awkwardly beneath his gaze, looking everywhere except directly at him now, and suddenly he's struck by how young you seem standing there. 

Then, before he can stop himself, in some hope to keep you standing there in front of him, he hears himself say, "If you ever need help with coursework, though, my office hours are listed on the syllabus."

The second the words leave his mouth, he knows they weren't necessary. Your eyes flicker up to his face in shock, before immediately dropping back down again. Interesting.

For someone who'd managed to argue with him thirty seconds ago, you seem remarkably incapable of holding eye contact for more than a few moments.

Then you nod, still staring at the floor. 

"Okay."

"Okay. Yeah, good."

Another silence. Neither of you moves, seems entirely unsure on how to end the conversation. Eventually you shift your bag higher up, and take a small step backwards.

"I should go."

"Yes, thank you for staying back."

You hesitate for a second, then whisper as you turn and walk away from him. 

“Goodbye, Dr Abbot.”

Jack stares at your ass through your jeans as you depart, he can’t help it. You sick, sick old man, Abbot.

The second you're gone, he drops his head down, groans, rubs a hand over his scruff. 

That conversation was supposed to make things better, supposed to reassure him that whatever happened at that bar was firmly in the past.

Instead, all it has accomplished is proving that being around you is a nightmare.  

It's been four weeks since that conversation and you cannot get him out of your head. Every time you enter those lectures where he stands in the front of the room with another blazer, another pair of form fitting pants, twice a week, you leave with a pool of slick. 

You refuse to acknowledge the way he looked at you when you let your attitude slip, his furrowed brows, hazel eyes narrowing. He looked… mad almost. Like he wanted to tame you. Of course you're being delusional, he has a wife for fucks sake. 

And weeks of observing him has made you realise that he has an immense proclivity for eye contact, with everyone. Basically, you’re not special. 

And, so your avoidant ass refuses to take him up on that offer to see him at his office. You’re doing well academically, you presume, in all your subjects. Which is not surprising given it's the only thing you’ve got going for you, being an antisocial chud, but these days, rather than studying, a lot of your time is spent replaying that night in the bar. The sense of comfort you felt pinned against the wall by him, the way he’d protected you against that creep. Nobody had done that for you before. 

God you sound fucking pathetic. 

And specifically, his suggestive line of “my office hours are listed on the syllabus” reverberates around your skull, like the start of those Wattpad stories you used to read as a teen. And so, you and your vibrator have the time of your life at all odd hours of the day, imagining him and you in those situations. 

In hindsight, being overtaken by lust to distract from your crippling loneliness was a poor decision to make, that much you clock when you receive one of your midterms back today. With a big fat fucking 60% written on the front. In Dr Abbot’s class at that too. 

Humiliation takes over you, cheeks warm as he walks by to return the paper, refusing to look at him but feeling his gaze on your face. 

Around you, students are already discussing their marks, complaining about feedback, celebrating distinctions, debating whether certain deductions were fair, while you're busy boring holes into the godforsaken paper with your eyes as though sheer hatred might cause it to burst into flames.

As someone who quite literally had nothing going on for them other than academic success, it's a stab to the heart to realise you’ve fallen off in any capacity. For your wretched brain, one poor mark isn't just a mark, it's indicative of you falling behind, lacking in the one thing that defines you. 

Academics have always been your thing, the one area of your life you've been able to control through sheer stubbornness and hard work, the one thing you've quietly built your entire sense of self around. You aren't particularly outgoing. You don't have a huge social circle. You don't possess some secret hidden talent waiting to be discovered.

And now a bright red sixty is staring back at you from the top of the page like a personal attack.

The feedback only makes it worse.

Critical analysis underdeveloped.

Needs greater engagement with course material.

More depth required.

Each comment feels less like academic criticism and more like somebody taking a hammer to your ribcage.

Especially because you've spent the last month thinking about fuckass Jack Abbot far more than you've spent thinking about sociology. You've replayed conversations that lasted less than five minutes. Analysed glances that probably meant absolutely nothing, and constructed entire fictional narratives from harmless comments that any reasonable person would've forgotten weeks ago.

Meanwhile half your readings have been sitting untouched in a browser tab.

You stare down at the paper again, jaw tightening.

Perhaps this is the universe intervening. Perhaps this is your sign to get a grip. Perhaps this is your sign to finally take him up on that offer he'd made four weeks ago.

Not because you're harbouring some pathetic crush. Absolutely not. 

Purely for academic reasons. You need to know what went wrong and you need to know how to fix it before your anxiety makes this into something worse and you have another one of your depressive episodes. 

And if that means sitting in Dr Jack Abbot's office while he explains why your argument was underdeveloped and your analysis lacked depth, then so be it.

The thought alone makes your stomach perform an alarming little flip, which is deeply unfortunate.

Because that's probably another sign that you're not thinking nearly enough about sociology.

After stalking the stupid university website you’ve discovered that Dr Jack Abbot apparently remains on campus until after five o'clock most evenings, like some sort of psycho freak. 

Doesn’t he have a wife to go home to? Surely no sane person voluntarily spends that much time at a university.

Still, at 5:17 PM, you're standing outside his office clutching your assignment paper so tightly it's beginning to crumple around the edges.

You knock on the door and hear his gruff voice let out a “come in”. You walk in.  

Fuck your life. 

His blazer is off, sleeves of his beige shirt rolled up to show veiny forearms, as he types away on his laptop. 

“Oh it's you. Hello sweetheart.” He winces at the slip of the pet name. 

“Sorry Miss-” he pauses. “Um, just have a seat, please.”

You hope to God that he can't hear the beating of your heart as you step in, closing the door shut behind you, avoiding eye contact as you sit on the seat opposite him. 

You set your paper on his desk and mumble.

“I just wanted to review the feedback I got on this.”

“Yeah of course, what’d you want to ask?”

You hesitate, his soft tone suddenly making you want to spill everything. 

"I just..." You stare at the desk. "I thought I'd done better than this. So I wanted more clarity on all the comments you made."

He nods and picks up the paper, starts reading through it, then squints. 

He sighs.

“Wait, let me get my readers on.”

You sneak a glance up. 

Oh fuck. 

He puts his readers on. Some fucking high prescription glasses that enunciate the size of his stupid hazel boba eyes and delicious eye wrinkles. 

Yeah, pussy exploded. 

You look back down on the table, and inhale to calm your heart. 

When Jack finally finishes, he sets the paper on the desk. 

"You know," he says carefully, tapping one section of the essay, "the reason this stood out to me wasn't because the writing is bad."

Your eyes lift despite yourself. He slides the paper slightly closer.

"It's actually the opposite."

“What?"

"The writing is strong, and your arguments are quite clear. You've obviously got the ability."

The knot in your chest loosens slightly. Only slightly.

"But?" you whisper.

His mouth twitches.

"But I don't think you pushed yourself."

Jack studies your expression for a moment before leaning back slightly in his chair.

"You understand the material," he continues. "I don't have concerns about that. What I'm seeing is somebody who's engaging with the content at a surface level when they're capable of going much deeper.”

Right, so you’re failing. You ridden with lust, and doing god knows what in hopes to distract yourself from the sheer loneliness and mundanity of your life and now you can’t even understand the content the way you want to understand it and-

“Hey sweetheart, are you feelin’ okay?” 

You look up at him in confusion and realise your breaths are heavy, uneven. Your hands are trembling slightly where they're resting on your lap. 

Fuck, the beginnings of a panic attack. 

“I’m so sorry Dr Abbot, I just- I’ve never done poorly in a test really, and so this is all so…” your voice cracks. “I don't even know what I’m saying I just-”

He gets up and walks over to you as you break off, letting out a shaky laugh that sounds suspiciously close to a sob.

He leans against his desk, in front of you, bending to reach your eyes.  

“Hey, it's okay angel, breathe for me.”  

He inhales. 

“Look, follow my breathing.”

You try to, but it comes out stuttered.

"Fuck, I'm sorry."

"Nothin’ to apologise for, sweetheart, just keep trying. C’mon, take a deep breath in, and out."

He holds your hand and brings it to his chest. You feel his heart beat steadily under your palm. He exaggerates his breathing to help you.

“In, and out, just like that.”

It seems nice to just let go. To have someone else take over your brain, follow their instructions and shut the noise, the anxieties and the worries. 

Once your breathing slows, he moves your hand away from his chest. 

“You breathin’ better now?”

You nod slowly, still feeling shaky, still mortified by the fact that you've just had what can only be described as a minor psychological collapse in your professor's office.

“I’m so, so sorry you saw me like that Dr Abbot, I didn’t mean to-”

“Hey, it’s okay, sweet girl.”

He pauses, seems occupied gathering his thoughts.

You busy yourself staring at the floor. Then he exhales softly through his nose and settles back against the edge of his desk.

"After my wife passed away, I used to get them all the time."

The words are so unexpected that your head lifts immediately.

Jack's gaze remains fixed somewhere over your shoulder rather than directly on you, his expression thoughtful. 

"My therapist taught me a few tricks," he says with a small shrug. "Matching breathing patterns was one of them."

Your heart races again, for different reasons this time. The ring, the fucking black ring. He’s a widower. You don’t know whether to laugh or scream at the fact that he’s not married, and you aren’t a homewrecker. But then you feel real fucking horrible for different reasons, youre brain sabotaging again. 

“I’m sorry about your wife. I’m sorry if that reminded you of back then, or whenever it happened I don’t know, I don't want to assume-”

“Shh, take a deep breath for me. You’re good, sweetheart. 

 He brings a palm to your cheek, engulfing it.  

“Yeah? It’s okay. Don’t worry ‘bout it. It was a long time ago.”

You breathe in slowly for the fucking hundredth time that night, calming down.  

“You feelin’ better now?” He asks gently.

You nod, biting your tongue to stop from apologising again. 

“Yes, thank you.”

It slips out before he can stop it. 

“Good girl.”

Your thighs instinctively clench, and you see him stiffen as he notices.  You both stare at each other, feeling tension coil in the air between you. A moment passes. 

“I could help you, you know.”

You blink, confused. 

He rubs your cheek gently, eyes boring into yours. His expression is blank, neutral. 

“I could help you relax, get out of your brain for a little.”

He pauses.

“Like that night in the bar. You liked that, didn't you? Somebody taking control.”

Your breath hitches, and you mumble a “yes.”

“Louder, sweetheart. If we’re gonna do this, you need to speak clearly.”

His voice is stern, gravelly. And your brain is calm for the first time in weeks, since that night. The validation you crave so desperately, the sense of comfort that would help with escaping your brain, perhaps it is held in the palm of Jack Abbot’s hands. 

Slowly, you nod. 

“Yes Dr Abbot, I’d like you to help me.”

He smirks, the edges of lips pulling up. 

“Atta girl. C’mon then, get up for me.”

You follow his lead, mind hazy as he holds your hands and guides you to his chair. 

“I’m gonna sit, then you're gonna sit right here, on my lap. And then I’ll help you, yeah?”

You nod again. 

“Words, sweetheart.”

“Yes, Dr Abbot.”

He smiles, proudly. Your brain turns to mush again, pussy fluttering.

He’s so handsome.  

Pulling you onto his lap sideways, your legs draping over his thighs, he caresses your hair. Fuck, it feels so good. You nuzzle your head into his neck, whimpering softly as he coos, "such a good girl, my smart girl, yeah? smartest in the whole damn class.”  

Then he brings his fat fingers to your skirt, tracing circles on yout thighs near the hem. Inching close, but never slipping under. 

“Please, please Dr Abbot, touch me.”

“Yeah, you want me to touch that little pussy? Want me to make you feel good? So you can rest your pretty brain?” 

He taps your head. 

You whine ‘yes, yes please sir.’ 

You feel his cock jerk up under you. He groans.  

“Fuckin’ hell, sweetheart. Say that again.”

“Please, Sir, please touch me.”

“Whatever you want, pretty girl.”  

Then he finally flips your skirt up, and starts rubbing slowly over your panties. On your lips, your folds, through your soaked underwear. You wrap your arms around his neck, begging him, please. 

He brings a finger to your clit, mutters lowly, “right here sweetheart?” and you nod, whining. 

He rubs gentle circles on your clit, your slick helping his finger move smoothly even over your panties. Buries his face in your hair as he continues rubbing. He breathily exhales, as if simply your pleasure was turning him on . 

“That’s it, just let go sweetheart. Let me take care of you, yeah?”

“Fuck- right there.”

You buck up in his hold. 

And he stops, a hand splaying over your thighs to stop you from squirming.

“Fuckin’ stop that, or this is going to be over a lot quicker thank you’d like.” 

You feel the hardness of his cock under you, prodding below your ass. Your brain is mush, the words slipping by themself.  

You nod tucking your head in his neck, “Yeah, yeah sir I’ll stop, please- fuck. Please keep going.” 

“That’s my good girl.” 

And he starts rubbing over your clit again, kissing down your cheeks, down your neck, murmuring “yeah? yeah” as he inhaled your musk.

You whimper, arching your neck as you get closer to your release, feeling it build up low in your stomach the faster his circles get.  

“Fuck I’m going to come! Pl- please let me come sir.”

“Yeah? Is my good girl gonna come? You gonna come for Dr Abbot?” He groans, low and husky. 

And fuck, that gets you. You close your eyes as your orgasm hits you, pleasure washing over. 

You mutter whimpers of his name as you come, squirming as much as he lets you, clenching your thighs in his palm.

In the haze of your orgasm, you hear him, moaning. He jerks up, moaning in your ear, face pressed against your hair, babbling.  

“Fuck- sweetheart, did so good for me, fucking coming all over my fingers, fuck!”

The last word comes out as something resembling a whine. His hips buck up once, twice, before you feel warmth spreading under you. 

Did he just… orgasm?

Both of you pant harshly, him into your hair, forehead pressed against your head. And you look down, seeing your soaking panties, his hands splayed over your thighs. A smile overtakes your face, god, you felt alive. 

And he came. In his pants. God, you love old men. But as a giggle bubbles up in your throat, he stiffens. 

You see his hands leave you, and before you can even process what's happening, he's gently but firmly moving you off his lap, tugging your skirt back into place. 

"Fuck."

The curse leaves him under his breath, as he immediately turns away in his chair, one hand dragging through his curls.

You stand there, still dazed as he refuses to look at you. 

“Fuck, um. You should leave and I- I think-”

The words die halfway through. You watch him struggle to find them.

“Yeah, you should leave,” he awkwardly mutters as he covers the wet patch on his pants. You're still breathing heavily, and furrow your brows. 

What the fuck?

You’re so utterly mortified. Still in the post orgasmic haze, standing there feeling horribly exposed, your brain sluggish and foggy and vulnerable.

And through that stupid fog you pick your bag up from the seat, smooth out your skirt. Avoiding eye contact, you wobble out of the room, tears pooling in your eyes. 

Fuck old men. You hate old men.

After hours of sobbing into your pillow, and spiralling about how people will use you for your body, and nobody will be able to save you, and you’re going to die alone, you reached a conclusion. Probably a delusional conclusion, but a conclusion nonetheless.

He was embarrassed, that’s all. The man had simply come in his pants. Which, admittedly, would be humiliating for anyone. You’re so young and sexy that he was embarrassed he came in his pants. He definitely still wants you. 

The thought soothed you enough to stop crying, enough to prevent you from throwing yourself dramatically into the nearest body of water.

It's when you’re holed up in your dorm room, buried under the blankets reading a fic, when your spiral begins again. 

Because you get a text from an unknown number. 

Hi. I wanted to apologise for yesterday.   That was incredibly impolite of me, I got way in over my head.

Then two minutes later. 

And I wanted to check in.  Are you feeling better?

Chat, what if you fucking killed yourself? 

The perfect grammar and punctuation made your stomach churn in lust. The way you could hear him grumble that out in his husky voice, gravelly warmth beneath every syllable. 

Stop.

Objectively speaking, this man had sent you into an emotional crisis less than twenty-four hours ago. He basically kicked you out after giving you another toe curling orgasm. 

And yet somehow all it takes is three perfectly punctuated texts and you're smiling into your pillow like an idiot. Whatever, stay nonchalant. 

So you ignore his apology and reply to the latter half. 

Hey, i’m okay thanks 

Wow, look at you go. 

His reply is almost immediate.

Good.  Good girl. 

You take a deep breath in, pull your blanket over your head. Fuck. Fuck this stupid old man and his ability to make your pussy throb with two words. 

You genuinely have no clue what to reply, stupid. Stupid woman who can’t even formulate a reply and be flirtatious. 

You type something.

Delete it.

Type something else.

Delete that too.

Your chest develops a familiar buzzing anxiety. This, by the way, is exactly why maintaining relationships has always felt so difficult. Everyone else seems to possess some innate understanding of social interaction that you're missing entirely. 

What are you supposed to say?

Thanks for checking on me after kicking me out?

Sorry for crying in your office?

Please stop being unexpectedly kind after making me come so hard because it's making this significantly harder?

After two minutes of spiralling, or five, or ten, you don’t even fucking know at this point, your phone buzzes again.  

Can I see you?  Please.

Your breath stutters. 

yeah sure When do your classes finish today? At 3pm Okay. I’ll meet you at Sapphos.

Fuck, you hate how he doesn’t ask you. Just makes a statement, tells you what to do. You hate how that turns you on, and even worse, how good it feels to not have to make decisions for yourself, for once. 

But also, that cafe was off campus. Realistically, should you be potentially jeopardising your academic career with this emotionally unavailable older man, who will definitely be using you for your body if this continues? No, but are you lonely and so fucking bored with the stangancy of your life? Well, yes. 

And so unfortunately, rational thought has never stood much of a chance against loneliness. Against the quiet ache that follows you home every evening, and the possibility of spending a few hours with somebody who sees you.

So your dumbass agrees. 

Okay ! i’ll see u soon  See you soon, sweetheart. 

Sweetheart. Yeah, you're actually gonna kill yourself. 

Sitting and staring out the window of some cafe he randomly picked, Jack doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing. He doesn't know how many times a man can call something a lapse in judgement before it stops being a ‘lapse’ and starts becoming a conscious choice.

He got in way over his head after making you come on his lap, spiralling. Yes, it was the sheer humiliation of coming in his pants (which was a nightmare to clean off, by the way) but also, there was the humiliation of losing control of himself after years of carefully maintaining it, the mortifying reality of having to go home and sit alone with the consequences of it all.  

What was worse was somewhere along the way you'd managed to reach inside him and pull loose something from his heart he'd thought had calcified years ago, something he'd buried beneath research papers, lecture halls, and the endless routines he'd constructed around himself after his wife died.

And he knows, he knows, you deserve someone better. He was a widow for Christ's sake, probably three decades or somewhere very close to that, older than you. And you’re young. Thoughtful. Young enough that your entire life still seems stretched out in front of you. Even your anxieties, the things that weigh you down, feel temporary in a way his never will. 

You still have time to become whoever you're meant to be.

Jack feels as though he's already become whoever he's going to be.

He thinks about the way you looked during your panic attack, how hard you'd been trying to keep it together even as everything was falling apart. He thinks about how quickly you apologised for taking up space, for having feelings, for being overwhelmed.

And he didn't pity you, God, no. It wasn't that. He understood it. The loneliness. The exhaustion. The feeling that if you stopped holding yourself together for even a second, everything might collapse.

But he also saw the way your brain shut down, the way you trusted him. It made something ache inside his chest, a warm ache, the sort that spread through his ribs and settled somewhere dangerously close to hope. 

And hope was precisely the problem. Because he couldn't give you anything. Not with the grief and sense of routine buried in him before his teaching, in the chasm of his heart, since his time in the godforsaken military where half his limb was gone. 

He can't offer you anything but his fingers, or his mouth, between your legs, and you deserve someone better than that. 

But if that was the only way he’d be able to get you out of his head, then so be it. 

And so despite all of that, despite every logical argument he could construct, despite every fucking university regulation he was violating right now, his eyes keep drifting towards the café entrance every few seconds.

Jack exhales heavily and rubs a hand across his jaw.

And then you enter. Looking around with an adorably confused look before you spot him, and dare he say, your eyes light up. 

Abbot, no. 

But the words slip out as you reach him. 

“Hey sweetheart.”

“Hi Dr Abbot.”

You sit opposite him, glancing up at him briefly before staring back down at the table. He hates how endearing he finds it, how he wants to reach across the sticky table and pull your jaw, hold it, and force you to look at him. He wants to see your eyes glaze over the way they did the day prior. 

He chooses instead to slide the menu across to you, and once you order, he leans back. 

“Did you have a nice morning?”

He withholds a wince at the awkwardness. 

“Um, yes. Classes were okay. Thank you?”

The end of the sentence rises almost into a question, as though you're unsure whether that's the correct answer, and something about it makes his chest tighten.

“Good, that’s good.”

Then an awkward pause. Jack sits there like a complete fucking idiot.

For Christ's sake he’d called you here. And now that you're sitting in front of him, he can't seem to form a coherent sentence.

Get your shit together, Abbot. 

"Look," he begins, rubbing a hand across his jaw. "I wanted to apologise for yesterday."

Your eyes finally lift from the table.

“It was wrong of me to let you go like that. Quite frankly I don’t even have an excuse I just…”

He trails off, looking behind you out the window for a second. What exactly is he supposed to say?

That the sight of you crying made me feel physically sick? That for one terrifying second I’d felt something dangerously close to happiness sitting in that office with you? That after years of carefully maintaining the same dull routine I’d somehow started structuring entire days around whether I’d see you?

None of those seem particularly appropriate, too intense. 

"See, no man my age enjoys being reminded that he's still capable of behaving like a teenager."

That makes you smirk a little. His heart warms. 

“You mean, you.. coming in your pants?”

Jack groans softly and drags a hand down his face.

“I didn't want to put it so crudely, but well... yes."

"I thought so."

You giggle. And the sound catches him off guard enough that he finds himself smiling despite the mortification currently trying to consume him.

"To be honest," you continue, "I think I understood once I calmed down."

His shoulders loosen slightly.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

You shrug.

"But I'm not going to lie, it didn't feel very good. You kicking me out like that."

The honesty makes him wince.

"And that's exactly why I wanted to apologise, sweetheart." His gaze settles on you properly. Giving you a look that he hoped was earnest. "That was real shitty of me. I’m truly very sorry.”

You look at him for a few moments in silence, mapping his face. Then once seemingly finding what you were looking for, you reply. 

“Apology accepted.” 

The waitress arrives then, setting down your coffee, some monstrosity involving whipped cream and probably enough sugar to send him into cardiac arrest.

Jack eyes it suspiciously, humorously. 

"What?" you question. 

"That isn't coffee."

"It literally is."

"Sweetheart, that looks like it barely has any caffeine."

You let out a giggle, again. God, you’ve got to fucking stop that if you want his heart to survive.  

"It has espresso."

"Buried beneath, what? Three inches of whipped cream."

"Whatever, you’re just old and grumpy."

You grin. The grin grows wider when he continues staring at the drink with visible disappointment.

For some reason that finally breaks whatever lingering awkwardness remains between the two of you. The conversation begins flowing after that.

He makes a witty remark, you giggle. And you manage to make him laugh as well, coming out of your shell. 

Then the conversation shifts to that night at the bar. 

“Yeah so if he wasn't that buff and scary, I wouldn't even have called you over. I would've told him to suck my strap and choke.”

Jack nearly chokes on his coffee, coughing violently. You immediately burst into soft laughter. He wipes his lips with a napkin, grinning.

"Sweetheart."

"What?"

"Please give me some warning before you say things like that."

Your grin grows, eyes sparkling. 

"Why?"

"Because I'm fifty."

That seems to make your eyes widen imperceptibly, and you look down towards the coffee you ordered, chugging it. 

Interesting. 

Neither of you acknowledge the elephant in the room, instead you continue talking, skirting around the edges. Circling the obvious without ever touching it.

And eventually your drinks are empty. People around you start leaving.

Yet neither of you seems particularly eager to end the conversation.

Jack glances at his watch. Then back at you. He really, really shouldn't. But he wants to give you a way out. While still offering you a choice. 

"I don't have any classes after tomorrow's lecture."

The words leave his mouth casually.

Your eyes flicker up.

"Oh."

A pause.

"I could come see you."

"In my office?"

You immediately look embarrassed.

"Only if that's okay."

God. There it is again, that instinct you have to ask permission for existing.

"Sweetheart."

Your eyes lift.

"It's okay."

The relief that flashes across your face is so immediate it almost hurts to look at.

"Okay."

"Okay."

A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth.

When the bill eventually arrives, he picks it up before you can.

"Dr Abbot-"

"No."

"I can pay for myself."

"I know."

"Then-"

"I know, I know you’re a self sufficient woman. You’re brilliant. But let me. I’ll pay for it."

Your mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. Jack watches the entire internal battle play across your face.

Then you nod softly, muttering an “okay, thank you”. 

Jack's heart clenches again. Genuinely fuck his life. 

So you think you’ve somehow ended up in a situationship or whatever the fuck with your fifty year old professor. 

Over the course of the past five weeks, you show up in his office after the lectures, and even a few times throughout the week, and he sets you on his lap, or on his desk while he laps at your cunt. 

Occasionally, he lets you pull out his cock and suck it. Sometimes under his desk, riding his boot as he's grading papers, God, his fucking whimpers when he comes. 

Unsurprisingly, he also does help you with understanding the content and doing your assignments. Has his own unique methods of doing so. 

Jack had you sitting on his lap, back to his chest, completely clothed while you were naked, bare. 

He hooked his face on your shoulder, whispering filth in your ears, telling you to “focus” as he rubbed slow circles over your pussy. Smearing the slick oozing out your cunt over your folds, avoiding your clit. 

You whined and tried to clench your thighs, whispering against his stubbled cheek. 

“Please, pl- touch me, Dr Abbot.” 

But he'd splayed one wide palm, tightly, over your thigh.

“No. Type out the rest of the essay, c’mon. Then you can come, pretty girl,” he’d muttered in a low voice. 

And once you did, he'd shoved his fat fingers inside of you, thrusting fast, the other hand alternating between your neck and your nipples, pinching, squeezing.  

You’d squirted that day, for the first time, creating a mess of his pants, some landing on his desk. 

He’d made you lick it off. 

Surprisingly, however, you hadn’t kissed, not even once. Nor had you fucked, in the penetrative sense. 

The latter you’re grateful for, because you were a virgin. It was too humiliating of a thought to ever bring up in your twenties now, but thankfully he never brings it up either. You suspect he knows though, from the little details you've unveiled to him over the course of the past few weeks. 

Talking about your feelings has always been.. difficult. The words choke up and clog the back of your throat when you go to speak. Entire relationships - well, lack of relationships - have been built around your inability to say what you need. 

But it's easy, sometimes, with Jack. When your brain shuts off in a post orgasmic haze, and you sit in other's company, his hand resting in your hair, or his head buried in your chest, the words bubble out of you. 

Snippets of memories of your family that you left behind, of the few friends back home, the lack of romance. When you stop speaking halfway through a sentence because you've forgotten how to explain yourself, he simply waits.

Surely he's put two and two together.  

And you think he has some avoidant issues of his own, the old fuck. 

He'll spend forty minutes analysing a political institution and somehow avoid answering a direct question about his own feelings.

Yet occasionally things slip through the cracks.

A memory about his wife. An offhand comment about the military that lingers in your mind long after he's moved on to another topic.

You'd had a lengthy conversation one day about that, your radical opinions spilling out before you could stop them, about systemic exploitation and imperialism, about how much you despised the military as an institution. You’d accuse institutions of manipulating vulnerable people; He agreed more than you'd expected him to. Told you about his journey of basically being forced into it to help his family, about the machinery of poverty and patriotism that pushed kids toward enlistment before they were old enough to understand what they were signing away.

He takes your ideas seriously, but he also looks genuinely delighted when you disagree with him.

And god, that’s what you were starting to like most about him. The intellect. Yes he has a girthy cock that would probably annihilate you in the best way when (if) the time came, and incredible arms, and his fat pecs. But his brain. Wow. 

Intelligence has always been your love language, whether you've admitted it or not. And Jack speaks it fluently. There’s a sense of strange intimacy and letting others hear your thoughts and opinions. And the ability to be able to talk and have someone just listen, or banter with you – it was rare. Especially for someone as reclusive as you. 

Unfortunately, you're also smart enough to recognise reality. Whatever this is, it isn't heading anywhere permanent. Because Jack never talks about the future, never makes promises, or gives any indication that he's looking for something lasting.

And honestly? You aren't sure he can. Not after everything he's lost, not with the gap of decades between you. So you tell yourself you're enjoying things exactly as they are. You tell yourself that spending time with him is enough.

And for now, maybe it is.

The problem is that every time he looks at you like you've said something brilliant, every time he remembers some tiny detail about your life, every time his face softens when you walk into a room – this lie gets a little harder to believe.

Five weeks. Jack’s ‘brief’ lapse in judgement has lasted five fucking weeks. 

Every time he sees you enter the lecture, you exchange a secret look, your eyes fluttering, him blushing. He feels like he’s twenty again. It's exhilarating. 

But the ‘ethical dilemma’ of it all sat permanently in the back of his mind, festering like an untreated wound.

He knows that every time he let himself enjoy your company, every time he answered one of your messages, every time he found himself smiling at something you'd said hours after the conversation had ended, he was stepping further into territory he had absolutely no business occupying.

The way you trusted him, allowing him to lick into your cunt or set you on his lap and caress you, felt nice. It felt real fucking good to be wanted and desired in some capacity, especially after being touch starved for nearly a decade since his wife. 

And seeing you under him sucking his cock, fuck.

“Dr Abbot….” you whined in a teasing tone, laced with humour. 

He groaned, placing his forehead on your back from where you sat on his lap. You definitely wanted something. 

“What?” he huffed out.

Still facing your laptop, you breathed out your next words. 

“When are you going to let me suck your cock?”

He jolted, hips thrusting up.

“Jesus Christ sweetheart, warn a guy.”

You said his name again, more firmly. 

“Stop dodging the question.”

He paused. 

“This whole… us. It's about you, about helping you relax so you can focus on studying. It’s not about me or my pleasure or-”

“Jack.” 

He lifted his head from your back, stilling. You’d never said his first name before. 

“What if doing it would give me pleasure, hm? What then?”

He stayed silent. 

You twisted in his lap, neck twisting to face him. 

“I want to taste you, please.”

Widening your eyes, and pouting, you all but begged him. Brought a hand to his stubbled cheek.  

“Please, Dr Abbot. Let me do it.” 

He sighed. Jack Abbot was a weak, pathetic man when it came to you.  

“Fine,” he grumbled. 

“Get off, c’mon.”

Yeah, it was worth it for the blinding smile you gave him, kissing his cheek.  

He gently lifted you off his lap, and pulled his chair back to give you some room. 

Jack nodded, glancing down pointedly. 

“If you want it, you gotta do it yourself.”

You kneeled immediately, settling yourself in the gap between his desk, between his open thighs. 

Unbuckling his belt, staring at his bulge with those doe eyes the entire time, you slowly pulled his cock out. 

It was hard, leaking, tip red and aching. Your soft hands wrapping around his dick made a drop of precum roll down. He moaned, a low sound emanating from deep in his chest. 

You slowly twisted your hand up and down his cock, fingers barely stretching around. 

Jack couldn’t wait. He gripped your hair, not too hard, but enough to lift your head up to face him. 

“You gonna put your mouth on it or do I need to shove it in?”

You smirked, you vixen. 

“Shove it in, I dare you.”

He groaned, muttering “you fuckin’ brat” as he pushed your hands off his cock.

“Open up, sweetheart.”

You did, tongue lolling out. A drop of drool dripped onto his thighs, and he moaned under his breath. 

He couldn’t wait any longer. Gripping his cock, he fed it into your mouth. Inch by inch. 

Until you gagged. 

Feeling your soft throat close around him, he couldn't help but groan your name.

“Fuckin’ hell.”

Your hands came up to stroke whatever didn't fit in - which truth be told, was more than half his cock, but it's okay, he'd train you eventually. 

“Can I help you, sweetheart? Teach you how to take your professor's cock down your throat?”

You nodded quickly, moaning, his cock still in your mouth. 

Then he guided you through it, holding your head as you sucked him. Muttered praises, filth, to guide you.

“Just like that, sweetheart”.

“Yeah, grip it harder”.

“Suck the tip, just like that.” 

And right before he came, he ripped you off him and wrapped a hand around himself. He whimpered as jerked off furiously over you, until drops of his pearly cum splattered over your tongue. 

He had never come that hard in his life. 

Panting harshly, he patted your head. 

“Swallow.”

Other than the sex, there were also the days where you'd walk into his office and start talking about some article you'd read, your entire face lighting up with excitement, and everything in him would melt. He’d pull you onto his lap, or set you in front of him, on his desk, and let you talk, feeling the softness of your thighs under his palm as he traced small circles. It was nice to let someone in, fill the void and the silence in his life. 

There wasn’t a label on what you two were, if you even were anything. 

While at first he’d thought it was common for you to be used to this sort of ‘causalness’ or a friends-with-benefit type situation (or whatever the fuck somebody born two generations after him would call it), he'd come to realise you were actually the opposite. Not that he’d have any issue with either. 

But from the scattered stories you'd told him about your past, the way you spoke about relationships, and the cautious vulnerability that appeared whenever the subject drifted too close to ‘feelings’, he'd begun piecing together a picture of someone who felt things deeply and trusted people slowly.

He could calculate you were likely a virgin. And so he never pressurised you, never made the first move to initiate sex, kept his cock to himself, waiting for you. No matter how much he wanted to feel the tightness of your pussy around him. 

However, his patience is wearing thin, growing precarious with every instance of you bringing another small thing that wedges itself beneath his ribs and refuses to leave. 

Now he's left with the deeply inconvenient problem of wanting things he really shouldn’t want. Not just a warm body near him, but wanting your company, your attention. He wants those afternoons in his office where you do nothing but talk to last a little longer.

All of this wanting, this yearning, is quite frankly, far more than he has any right to want.

Which is exactly why today is proving so unbearable.

He often feels a pit of something bitter bubble in his chest when you interact with someone other than him. Not that it happens frequently - you're quite reserved. But not today. Today, specifically, you seem to be chatting up a boy. 

When he enters the lecture this morning, you aren’t sitting alone like usual, but instead, there’s some boy next to you. Some boy your age. Dressed in some sort of hideous baggy outfit that hangs off his lanky frame. Is that fashion now? God that fucking punk. 

Why was he sitting next to you? Distracting you? 

As he sets up his laptop on the podium, seething under his breath, he hears a giggle. Your breathy giggle, the one he thought only came out with him. 

His jaw tightens. The lecture hasn't even started, for Christ's sake.

Jack spends the next five minutes attempting to focus on setting up his stupid slides while simultaneously becoming aware of every interaction occurring in your vicinity.

Looking up, he realises it's a grave mistake. Because now you're touching. Touching that punk’s arm. 

Fuck. 

Something ugly immediately twists in Jack's stomach, his brows furrowing. Anger bubbles up in his chest.

But he can’t do anything but continue on, beginning his lecture, as if he isn’t seething with jealousy. 

Halfway through the lecture, he catches himself directing a question towards your side of the room and immediately wants to launch himself into the sun.

Because you answer, of course, brilliantly as usual. But the boy next to you looks at you with stars in his eyes.

Yeah, Jack wants him expelled.

After a torturous two hours, students begin filing out of the room. Normally, this is the part where he'd catch your eye, maybe exchange some silent look that promised you'd be appearing in his office within the next ten minutes.

Instead, you're still standing beside that boy. And the little prick is making you laugh now. Then you reach out and lightly smack his arm, again.

Jack immediately decides prison might be worth it. 

He shoves his laptop into his satchel with considerably more force than necessary, and effectively storms out of the room without giving you a second glance. 

If you wanted to fuck about with some kid your age, then fine, Jack was not going to stop you. 

By the time he reaches his office he's practically fuming, throwing his bag onto his desk and immediately hating himself for it.

Because what exactly are you guilty of?

Making a friend? Talking to somebody?

The answer is nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Yet that doesn't stop the ugly feeling sitting beneath his ribs. Yeah, he’s going to commit a fucking crime tonight. 

Jack Abbot has managed to elicit yet another strange emotion in you.  You're staring at the doorway he'd just disappeared through, confused as fuck. 

He'd packed up and left so quickly you'd barely had time to process it, when usually, you walk to his office together. 

Once James - the man you were talking to - leaves with your Instagram to “organise a study session”, a strange sinking feeling begins to settle in your stomach.

You gather your things slowly, trying not to overthink it but failing spectacularly.

The thing is, you had actually been excited, embarrassingly excited. Somehow, after weeks of mostly keeping to yourself, after spending the majority of your university experience drifting between classes and then disappearing home, you'd accidentally made a friend today randomly. For the first time somebody actually came and fucking sat next you and talked to you. 

And the first person you'd wanted to tell was Jack. Which was probably concerning. You know how ridiculous it is that every interesting thing that happens in your day somehow circles back to him.

You'd actually spent the last ten minutes of class thinking about it, thinking about walking into his office and saying, "I made a friend today." And hearing whatever sarcastic response he'd inevitably come up with as he pulled you into his lap. Maybe teasing you about finally socialising - a topic he often teased you about -  or maybe pretending to be shocked.

Instead he'd practically fled the room.

By the time you reach his office, the excitement has mostly dissolved into uncertainty, and a sick, sick feeling. Your brain convinces you he hates you, he’s sick of you. The affair with the pretty young thing is over. 

Your hand hovers over the door, then knocks.

A gruff voice immediately answers.

"Come in."

You push the door open, and there he is standing beside his desk.

His jaw is clenched, his shoulders rigid.

And suddenly you're no longer excited to tell him anything. Instead you're left standing there wondering what exactly you did wrong.

He stalks up to you, and shuts the door behind you with enough force to make you jump. For a moment he simply stands there, broad chest rising and falling, staring at you as though he's trying to decide whether to throttle you or kiss you.

“Who the fuck was that boy?”

You’re confused. 

“Who?”

“Don't play games with me, sweetheart.”

“James?” you ask, tilting your head. “Oh he’s just a… friend I made. We decided to share notes for the course.”

His jaw visibly tenses.

“The fuck you mean you ‘share notes’?” He exaggerates the last two words, mocking the phrase in a deliberately high-pitched voice. “Don’t I give you enough notes to go off? I'm not teachin’ you well enough, so now you gotta go to some punk to share notes?

“Jack, it’s not like that, I just-”

“Dr Abbot.” He interrupts.

The correction slices straight through you.

“What?”

He walks up closer to you, until your back hits the door and you’re pinned against it. He tilts his head down to peer at you. 

“It’s Dr Abbot when you’re in my office, sweetheart,” His voice drops lower. “I’m still your professor.” 

You scoff at that, hurt. It’s not hot to you, no. In that moment your brain forces you to think about how every moment you've spent together has happened in this room, only in this room. And maybe that's all there is, and maybe that's all there ever was. You convince you that you guys can’t exist out of this space, this dynamic that exists between the two of you. 

Can he just not have a civil conversation? Why is pretending to act jealous? If he wanted to fuck you he could just ask. 

You swallow hard.

“Right,” you say lowly. “My professor.”

The words taste bitter.

“The one who only seems to want me when we're in here.”

His brows furrow immediately.

“That's not what-”

“No, it’s okay. Let me finish. The one who shoves his face between my thighs when he feels lonely to cure whatever fucked up grief he keeps bottled up inside of him. The one who refuses to see me outside the four walls of this godforsaken office-”

“Enough.”

You see something that resembles hurt flash across his face, his brows creasing. The lines around his eyes deepen.

“Is that really what you think of me?” He whispers, staring at you.

You twitch uncomfortably under him, looking at the floor, confidence evaporating now that you've actually said out loud what you’ve been spiralling over ever since this began.

“I just...” Your voice cracks slightly. “Look, you don't have to act possessive, okay? Whatever we have this- this thing. I know it doesn’t mean much to you.”

Jack immediately opens his mouth, but you keep rambling.

“Which is fine. Seriously. I'm okay with that.” Your hands shake slightly at your sides. “But just don’t give me false hope. I’m happy with you being my professor, or my dom, or whatever the fuck. And I like that you help me study and talk and get out of my head and feel good, but there’s no need to act like you- like you care. I can't handle feeling like you care one minute and then being reminded none of this is real the next.” 

You're panting hard by the end of your rant, still refusing to look at him. 

“Sweetheart, look at me.”

You shake your head, tears of frustration welling up at letting yourself be seen like this, vulnerable. You promised yourself you wouldn’t ever tell him. Stupid. 

Sex, that’s easy. It’s the meshing of two bodies, it’s clinical - you orgasm, your brain feels hazy and good while he drives you there. But this, talking, about feelings of all things, fuck. You can’t let anyone see you like that. Because then, they get sick of you, and then they leave. 

“C’mon, look at me,” he pleads.

You wipe your eyes, about to tell him to move back so you can leave, but then he says your name. Softly. Not sweetheart. Not pretty girl. But your actual name.

“Please.”

You look up then, tears pooling in your eyes. And your breath catches.

Because Jack looks devastated. His eyes are red around the edges, and his mouth is pulled into a frown. 

His hand rises slowly, cupping your cheek. He gently swipes a thumb under your eye. 

“Hey, I need you to know - this is real. To me.”

His voice cracks.

“I’m not using you as some sort of placeholder or whatever self sabotaging bullshit you’ve created in your head okay?”

Then he inhales deeply. 

“You've become the best part of my day. I wake up and mentally map my days around you. Hearing you talk loosens the constant ache I feel.”

Jack closes his eyes briefly.

Then opens them again. His hand tightens against your cheek.

“Sweetheart, I love you.”

You still. 

Your lip quivers as you stare at him. 

You bring your own hand up to cup his, and look up through your lashes. 

The words get stuck in your throat. God. He loves you. Somebody loves you. Somebody saw through rot and the cage around your heart, and said he fucking loves you.

“I do. Too. That thing,” you wince at your awkwardness. “I just, I want to say it but I-"

“Hey pretty girl, it’s okay.”

Jack smiles sadly. He leans his forehead down to yours.

“I do,” you whisper desperately. “I do. I just-”

“Shh.”

His mouth nearly presses against you as he whispers again.

“I love you. And I’ll wait however long you need me to say it back, okay?”

Your breath shudders as he says that, a sob catching in your throat. Because for the first time in a very long time, nobody leaves. 

Your eyes squeeze shut. Tears roll down your cheek, overwhelmed.

You barely register them before you feel Jack’s lips against your skin, kissing your tears. He mutters soft, ‘I love you’s as he presses kisses all over your face, cradling it. He presses one last one on your forehead before he tucks you into him. 

Your cheek rests on his chest, feeling the steady rhythm of his heartbeat.

You wrap your arms around his waist. And you genuinely think you can control it, for about ten seconds at most, then you sob. Uncontrollably, for the first time in years in front of another human. 

Because God. You have spent so much of your life believing that love was something you had to earn, something you had to perform correctly for your family, the people around you, to accept you. Something that disappeared the second you became too much, too emotional, too difficult, too needy.

But he stayed. And he saw you. 

You stand there, wrapped in each other's embrace until the tears slow. Jack gently wipes your cheeks with both hands.

“Sorry for making you cry, princess,” he pouts, lip jutting out exaggerately. 

A watery laugh leaves you at that, and you cup his cheek. Jack immediately leans into your palm.

Jack watches you with an expression so openly adoring it nearly steals the breath from your lungs. As though he's still struggling to believe you're real.

Your thumb traces the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, mapped with years lived longer than you.

Then your hand drifts lower, brushing against the silver-grey scruff along his jaw, littered with specks of auburn, and you rub it gently, feeling the coarseness between your fingertips.

That was it, was it not? The stark difference between you, the thing that made all this so exhilarating. 

Jack had lived a life that existed before you. And somehow, impossibly, it had still found its way to yours. As though he's spent years wandering through darkness and has suddenly found something worth staying for.

And perhaps, you realise, so have you.

That’s when you know.

“I’m ready,” you breathe out.

Jack's eyes widen, his hand coming to hold yours where it rests on his jaw.

“Are you sure? I don’t want you to feel pressured into it.”

“Jack. I’m sure. I want this, I want you.”

He shudders, exhaling hard, bringing his face down to yours.

“Yeah?” He whispers against your lips, brushing them.

“Yeah.” 

Then his lips slam down onto yours, for the first time. 

And God, its everything you fucking imagined. 

His mouth presses against yours and soft whimpers escape the both of you. There’s a certain desperation in the way his mouth moves against yours, in the way your tongues immediately find each other. 

After a few brutal minutes of grinding against each other, moaning, Jack succumbs. He lifts you into his hands, your thighs wrapping around his waist, as he carries you to his desk and sets you on it.

Mouth still pressed against yours, he rips your shirt off, pulls your jeans and panties off, shoving them to the floor. 

He whines as you detach your lips from his to pull his blazer off. Looking up at him, naked on his desk, you unbutton his shirt. Trail your fingers down the dusting of salt and pepper chest hair, down, over his pecs, slightly raking your nails over his nipples.

“Fuck yeah, use your nails on my chest,” he grunts out as he unzips his pants.

You moan, pressing against him harder.

“I can’t wait any longer, fuck. Please, sweetheart, let me fuck you.”

You nod.

“I’m ready, Dr Abbot.”

He groans mutters ‘you fucking minx’ as he pulls his pants and boxers down, standing bare in front of you.

His cock hits his soft stomach, curving to the left, precum coating the tip, the way you love. 

You glance down at his prosthetic. 

“You sure you want to do this here, Jack? We can go on the sofa if you want.”

He looks at you with so much adoration, a soft smile gracing his face.

“No sweetheart, I'll keep it on for now. Wanna fuck you on my desk. ”

Then he pinches your nipples as he leans in. 

“And I still need to fuck the brat out of you.”

You whine.

“What are you waiting for then?”

He brings a hand down your stomach, fingers pressing up against you. 

“Gonna finger you a little bit, yeah? Get you ready for your professor's cock, s’not gonna fit in this tight pussy otherwise.”

A whimper escapes you at his crude words, god can this old man dirty talk.  

He slowly slips two fingers inside of you, thrusting, then three once you’re ready. Circles your clit softly, the way he’s learnt after many nights on this same desk. 

Whispers filth against your lips, kissing you, desperate now that he knows what your lips taste like after many weeks. 

Once you come, he finally presses his cock against you. Rubs the tip over your folds, coating it in your slick. 

“Yeah? You ready sweetheart?”

You nod, whisper a soft ‘please’ against his lips. 

Then he pushes his tip into you. And oh fuck. He’s just so fucking thick. 

He immediately brings a hand up to hold his base to stave off his orgasm, puts his head on your shoulder. Breathing harshly. 

It hurts a little but you want more, you crave the feeling of him pressed up against you. So you buck your hips. 

“Please, Jack, fuck. Put it in,” you whine. 

“Oh- oh shit. Fucking stop that.”

He lays a hand flat on your thigh. Breathes deeply. 

“I’m trying not to blow my load here, sweetheart, gimme a sec.”

You giggle softly, pleased. Having this old man at your mercy, your dreams come true. 

“Take your time, old man.”

He stills at that, grips your waist harshly. 

Looks up at you, his eyes darkening. 

“Fuck you,” he snarls. 

Then he presses into you, inch by inch, until all of him is buried inside. His thighs shake with the effort of not coming, and you breathe deeply through the pinch of pain. 

“Fuck princess, so tight for me, my good fucking girl,” he babbles in your ear. 

You whimper against him, waiting for the pain to subside. 

Then you nod. And he begins thrusting, slowly. And it's so fucking euphoric, the feeling of sex. It makes sense why they call orgasms ‘a little death’ in French, because god, you know your body will leave your soul once he starts properly fucking you. 

With every deep thrust of his cock into you, his grey pubes brush against your clit. You both moan softly. He grips your waist, shoving faster, harder. 

“Only man that’s ever gonna be in this pussy yeah? Yeah?”

You’re half gone drooling against his neck, letting out high pitched whines. 

“Nod for me, c’mon. I haven’t fucked the brains outta you yet.” 

Jack grips your hair tight, pulling your head away from where it was buried against his neck. 

You nod, slurring your words.

“Yeah Dr Abbot, s’only your pussy.”

“That’s it, good fucking girl.”

Then he starts thrusting, faster. Your hands rest on his shoulders, his face buried in your neck. His body slamming into yours is so hard it makes the table squeak under you. 

When he brings a hand to your clit, you whimper loudly. He covers your mouth with his palm, and stops immediately. 

“Quiet, you don’t want anyone to hear right?” 

He roughly pants, trailing a line of kisses up your neck. 

“Don’t want them to know your professor’s fucking you, right?”

You shake your head, words muffled under his palm. 

“I’ll be quiet please, fuck please!” 

He starts thrusting against faster, the table shaking. You toss your head back in pleasure, his cock reaching a spot deep inside you. He stares at you, at your face twisted in pleasure, the way your tits bounce as he thrusts into you. 

“Yeah that is it, baby, good fucking girl.”

God it feels so good, and you’re there, you're nearly there, egged on by his rough groans and whimpers in your ear. You bring a hand down to your clit, starting to rub it to reach your orgasm but he shoves it off. Pushes you onto the table, your back hitting the desk. 

“That’s my job sweetheart. This pussy is mine.”

Then he hovers over you, eyes boring into yours as he fucks you harder, rubbing circles on your clit. The pleasure is so, so overwhelming and you close your eyes. 

He pulls your head towards him, gripping your jaw. 

“C’mon, look at me sweetheart.”

You open your eyes, moaning. 

“Say it,” he grunts. “Say you’re mine. Say it.”

“Fuck- Dr Abbot, I’m yours.”

He moans gutturally then pushes his lips onto yours again. You both moan into each other's mouths, sloppily kissing as you build towards your peak.  

“Fuck yeah sweetheart, just like that- good girl, so fucking tight.”

He continues to mutter filth against you while all you can do is softly moan. Your brain is mush, filled with thoughts of him, jackjackjack. 

You clench tightly around him when he bites your bottom lip.

“C’mon tell me how good you feel,” he pants, nearing his own orgasm. 

“Fuck, Daddy, feels so good.”

His hips buck once, harshly, then he stills. 

“What’d you just call me?”

Your eyes come into focus. The fog clearing a bit. 

You stammer, “Um nothing, sir, I was just-”

“No. Repeat it.”

He trails a hand to your neck, squeezing gently once, then more harshly

“What did you call me?”

“Daddy,” you whisper out.

He pouts mockingly. 

“Yeah? Daddy makin’ you feel good, baby? That’s why you're grippin’ this cock so tight, right?”

And then he starts thrusting, harder than before. 

“Just. Let. Daddy. Take Care. Of. You,” He harshly thrusts between each word, one hand covering your mouth as your moans get louder. 

Then you feel your orgasm approaching, the flutter building up again, clenching around him. 

He looks into your eyes, only a thin ring of hazel left, his pupils so dilated.

“You gonna come for your Daddy? Yeah?” 

You nod, whining, then you bite his palm. Hard. 

His hips stutter and you feel the warmth of his spend pooling in your cunt. He whimpers and babbles your name as he comes, “fuck, fuck I love you. I love you so fucking much.”

You moan at his words. But you still have to come. 

“Jack please, please keep going.” 

He groans gutterly as his cock begins to soften, overstimulated but he continues thrusting jerkily. 

He grips your chin in his palm. 

“Fuckin’ come for me. Now,” he grunts out, pinching your clit roughly.

And then it happens. You write, moaning under his hands as the coil of pleasure snaps, closing your eyes. 

He whimpers soft praises and coos of “I love you, did so good for me” as his cock spurts out more cum, twitching.

You pant against each other's mouths for a few long moments, his scruff tickling your chin, his forehead resting against yours, both of you trying and failing to steady your breathing.

“Fuckin’ hell, sweetheart,” he murmurs, a breathless laugh escaping him. “That live up to your expectations?”

You laugh softly nodding. 

“Mhm.”

He leans his head back to look at you properly once he’s cooled down, and holds your face in his palms. 

After a few long seconds of just staring, something grave passed over his face.

“Don’t think I got a lot of years left, sweetheart.”

Your brows immediately furrow.

“Jack-”

He presses a finger to your lips when you go to interrupt, shushing you. 

“Let me speak.”

You sigh, but nod. 

“I've spent most of my life thinkin' there'd only ever be one great love for me,” he says quietly, his thumb brushing beneath your eye. “And after I lost her, I figured that was it. Figured whatever part of me knew how to belong to somebody had gone with her.”

Your breath stutters. 

“Then you came along. In that fucking bar, wearing that tiny dress, asking me to help you. ”

A watery laugh escapes you.

“And whatever years I have left, I wanna spend them with you. I wanna hear every thought that gets trapped in that head of yours. I wanna know what articles you're reading, what you're writing, what you're dreamin’ about at three in the morning.”

He pauses. 

“I wanna be the person you come home to.”

Your breath catches.

“As your other. If you’d want.” 

You breathe out, seeing his face dimly lit by the lamp in his office. Mapping out his wrinkles near his eyes, the silver threaded in his slight beard and his soft smile. And suddenly it comes spilling out of you before anxiety can stop it.

“I love you.”

Jack stills completely. His eyes pool with tears. 

“Yeah?” He whispers, half surprised, half in awe.  

You nod, leaning up and brushing your nose against his.

“And I’d love to be yours.”

Relief washes over his face so intensely it almost hurts to witness. His eyes glisten as he kisses you softly, a slow, reverent press of his lips against yours for a few quiet moments.

Then he moves back to start cleaning up, cock still inside you. 

As he leans up, his back cracks, loudly. 

You both still. Before you burst out laughing. 

“You’re so fucking old… yeah you’re not making it very long, I can’t lie.”

He groans dramatically, rolling his eyes to the ceiling.   

“Fuck you, shut up.”

You bite your lip. His gaze travels there.  

“Make me, Dr Abbot,” you say, exaggerating a whimper, only half serious.

His eyes darken, his jaw clenching so hard a muscle jumps beneath the skin. Yet despite the stern look he's trying to give you, a pink flush begins creeping across his cheeks, spreading over the tops of them and disappearing beneath the scruff along his jaw.

“Yeah sweetheart, about that… I’m not gonna be able to get it up for a while.”

You break, laughing harder as he laments. He’s so fucking old. 

Once you calm down, he slowly pulls his cock out of you, both of you moaning, you at the loss of the fullness, him at your shared cum oozing out. 

“But my mouth still works,” he smirks. 

Your breath hitches as he plugs you with his fingers to stop more of your cum from spilling out. Leans in close, and whispers. 

“My leg’s killing me, sweetheart,” he begins, breath fanning over your face. “But I'm going to lie on that sofa right there. And you're gonna ride my face till you come. Again. And again.”

You whimper softly against his mouth. 

“Okay.”

“Okay, who, pretty girl?” “Okay, Daddy.”

He grins. 

“Good girl.”

omg hi u made it ! guys when i tell you this is so personal to me, from the dialgoue to the experimental (?) writing style. i need this man to be my father figure SO FUCKING BAD i have had such a week.

anyways per usual thank you to @tempestfawn for perving out with me and tolerating me, and salima for being horny over this man among other things #fullhomo

[reliand]

The Mirror of Ecidyrue by Starbrigid

All it takes is one look in a mirror and an ill-advised attempt to shatter it, before an embittered Draco Malfoy fresh out of Azkaban is sent back into his body on the day he gets his Hogwarts letter.

It's been a year since I started making art again, and this fic was the instigator for awakening inspiration in me again. In this piece, a twelve-year-old Draco who is still desperately afraid of ruining a future where Harry wins, and is being held back by his older self from the blue loop. This younger version is how a picture Draco in book 2, The Heir of Slytherin, when he's growing out his hair to emulate Snape.

[pansygetsshitdone]

This is quite literally the best thing I've ever read. And I don't just mean in fan fiction. This series rivals the original Harry Potter series. As far as I am concerned Draco really did go back in time and he has altered reality. The OG series is just a distant memory and the Mirror of Ecidyrue is everything.

[ouchlord-vivaldi]

So Marika was clearly the goddess of the Lands Between, but the Elden Lord was Godfrey who did not seem to have a godlike role. This would suggest that Placidusax, an elder Elden Lord, would’ve been a consort to an elder Goddess, possibly gloam eyed, who was far more powerful…