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taylor price
dirt enthusiast
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Janaina Medeiros
Show & Tell
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@sveetnn
" I imagine us seeing everything from another place — the top of one of the pale dunes or the deep and nameless fields of the sea — and what we see is the world that cannot cherish us but which we cherish, and what we see is our life moving like that, along the dark edges of everything — "
Oliver, Mary. "Coming home." Dream Work, 1986
yessssss shame your past self for surviving the only way you knew how to at the time 😍😍😍
garrett graham ❄︎ pink top.
pairing – garrett graham x princess!reader summary – garrett graham is a reasonable man. her little pink top is testing that theory. warnings – fluff, jealousy, possessive-ish Garrett, hockey house party, alcohol, suggestive humour, strong language notes from me – based on these combined requests!!! i am.... obsessed with them.... word count – 0.9k
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There are several things Garrett Graham’s prepared to tolerate at a hockey house party, because he is, despite what multiple people have said about him, a reasonable man with leadership skills and a flexible understanding of property damage.
He can tolerate Dean standing on the coffee table with a beer in each hand, conducting a room full of drunk sophomores through the chorus of Mr. Brightside. He can tolerate Logan spilling chips into the couch cushions and then eating them anyway. He can tolerate Tucker looking at the mess in the kitchen with that wounded expression he gets when people disrespect coasters.
What Garrett cannot tolerate, is her standing across the room in a tiny pink top that looks like it was assembled from dental floss, optimism, and a profound lack of concern for his blood pressure.
She’s by the windows with two of her friends, drink in one hand, the other moving around as she talks, all bright eyes and animated wrists and that little wrinkle between her brows she gets when she’s explaining something with more emotional investment than the topic reasonably deserves.
She’s laughing too much to notice the guy hovering near the edge of their circle, one of Dean’s friends from some class he’s definitely never attended, trying to time his approach like a nature documentary predator with worse hair.
Garrett’s jaw ticks. Dean follows his gaze, then very deliberately looks back into his cup. Logan, for once in his life, says nothing. Tucker takes one slow sip of beer and stares at the wall.
“Don’t,” Garrett says.
“I didn’t say anything,” Dean says, deeply innocent.
The guy makes it three steps before Garrett lifts his chin. “Nope.”
The guy pauses. “What?”
Garrett smiles at him. It’s not one of his better smiles. It has teeth in it, technically, but none of the warmth. “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”
The guy looks past him, confused, like maybe there’s been a misunderstanding and the enormous hockey player in front of him is not, in fact, speaking directly into his future. “I was just gonna–”
“Yeah, I bet,” Garrett says. “Cute. Fuck off.”
Dean makes a soft, strangled sound into his drink. Logan turns away, shoulders shaking. Tucker mutters, “You’re going to get us sued one day,” but he says it with the exhausted affection of someone who has accepted that this is simply part of the household ecosystem now, like beer pong, lost hoodies, and Garrett acting normal about a girl he has never once acted normal about in his entire life.
Across the room, she keeps talking. Completely unaware.
That’s the worst part. She’s over there yapping away about something, probably class or lip gloss or how she hates when coffee shops don’t have almond milk, while Garrett stands by the island losing years off his life every time the light catches the little metal bars pressing against the fabric of her top. Enough that every man in the room with eyes and a death wish seems to keep discovering religion in her direction.
By the third guy, Garrett doesn’t even bother smiling. “No.”
“Bro, I just know her from–”
“No, you don’t.”
The guy blinks. “I do, actually.”
Garrett tips his head. “Then you know she’s not interested.”
“She told you that?”
“She didn’t have to.”
Dean scratches his jaw, voice careful. “That’s maybe insane.”
Garrett doesn’t look at him. “Captain’s intuition.”
“You’re captain of hockey,” Tucker says.
“Still counts.”
By the time she finally peels away from her friends and comes toward him, Garrett’s redirected four men, intimidated one freshman into walking backward into a lamp, and taken exactly two sips of his beer. She drifts into his space like she owns it, which is irritating mostly because she does, shoulder brushing his arm as she looks up at him with a pout already forming.
“Garrett.”
He glances down, still annoyed at the entire male population. “What?”
“My feet hurt.”
He frowns at her, eyes dropping to the little pink heels she insisted were comfortable when he picked her up, despite all available evidence and the fact that she had winced before even making it down the dorm stairs. “The fuck do you want me to do about it?”
She glares at him.
He holds the glare for maybe half a second before sighing through his nose. “Go get my UGG boots. They’re in my room.”
Her head tilts, slow and expectant, mouth softening around the shape of a smile she’s trying very hard not to give him. “Aren’t you going to come with me?”
Garrett looks at the ceiling like maybe there’s a version of himself up there with boundaries. “Jesus Christ. Yeah, come on.”
He sets his beer down and puts a hand at the small of her back before he thinks better of it, steering her through the room while she waves goodbye to her friends over her shoulder, entirely pleased with herself. His palm is warm against the bare strip of skin above her jeans. It’s familiar. It’s normal. It’s going to put him in an early grave.
Halfway up the stairs, he mutters, “While we’re in there, let’s get you a hoodie or some shit.”
She laughs, bright and immediate, glancing back at him. “Oh, in your dreams, Graham.”
Garrett looks at the tiny pink top again, then at the hallway ahead, then very seriously considers throwing himself out the nearest window.
“Yeah,” he says, rough enough that she looks back at him twice. “Something like that.”
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rafe cameron 𖦹 frat martial law.
pairing – frat!rafe cameron x reader summary – a frat party flirtation ends when rafe cameron cuts the music and makes the world’s least subtle announcement. warnings – frat party setting, alcohol, jealousy, possessive behaviour, situationship drama, suggestive content, strong language notes from me – based on this request!!! i <3 frat!rafe forever word count – 1.6k
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By midnight, the party has stopped pretending to be anything other than a health code violation with LED lights. There’s beer drying sticky on the hardwood near the stairs, somebody’s white sneaker abandoned under the beer pong table like evidence, and the air has gone thick with sweat and cheap cologne and the sour little citrus bite of whatever punch the pledges made in a storage bin and then insisted was basically jungle juice like that made it less of a felony.
The whole house pulses around her, bass underfoot, bodies pressed too close in the hallway, girls laughing in bathrooms with the door half open, some brother in a backwards jersey yelling at nobody in particular about how this is his song. Rafe is somewhere across the room. Or had been, the last time she let herself look.
He’s hard to miss, which is an irritating fact of biology and campus politics both. Tall, loose-limbed, stupidly pretty in that expensive ruined-boy way that made girls forgive things they absolutely shouldn’t.
His hair is long, parted down the middle under a backwards hat, the ends curling slightly around his ears from heat and sweat, and he’s got one hand wrapped around a red cup while some girl in a tiny white top leans in too close to say something against his ear.
Which is fine. It’s so fine, actually, that her jaw aches from how casually fine she’s being about it.
They aren’t dating. They aren’t anything with a name, because Rafe Cameron treats labels like subpoenas and feelings like something you can outdrink if you start early enough.
He shows up at her dorm after midnight and kisses her like he’s been starving in secret. He steals the hoodie off her chair and then leaves it in his room so she has to come get it. He texts you up? like that’s not the laziest, most bullshit mating call ever invented by a man with generational wealth and unresolved father issues.
So, really, if Matt from her psych lecture is standing close enough that his shoulder brushes hers every time someone squeezes past them, and if he keeps smiling at her like he’s pleasantly surprised to find her funny, and if she maybe smiles back a little longer than strictly necessary, that seems like a very reasonable use of her evening.
Matt is nice. Actually nice. He remembers her presentation topic from last week. He asks questions like he’s listening to the answers. He has a dimple on one side and no visible fraternity affiliation, which, after a semester of Rafe Cameron, feels actually refreshing.
“I didn’t think this was your scene,” Matt says, leaning in a little so she can hear him over the music.
She lifts her cup and glances around at the living room, where one of Rafe’s frat brothers is currently trying to tape another one to a support beam. “It’s not,” she says. “I’m here under mysterious circumstances.”
“Should I be concerned?”
“Probably.”
He grins, and she lets herself like it. Lets the small, clean pleasure of being looked at by someone who doesn’t already know exactly what sound she makes when his hand is around her throat slide over her skin without guilt.
Rafe’s still across the room. Rafe’s still laughing at something white-top says with his head tipped back, hat backwards, completely unbothered by the emotional consequences of his own cowardice.
So she tilts her head and asks Matt about the midterm because flirting is most effective when disguised as academic concern.
He’s halfway through saying something about their professor being allergic to clear grading criteria when the music cuts. The whole house lurches around the silence. Someone boos. Someone else yells, “What the fuck?”
Then, from somewhere near the DJ table, Rafe’s voice booms through the living room, rough and drunk and unmistakably pleased with its own authority. “If you’re not a brother or fucking a brother, get the fuck outta my house!”
For one perfect second, nobody moves, then the room erupts.
Groans, laughter, outrage, girls grabbing purses, boys making offended noises. Somebody throws a ping pong ball at Rafe’s head and misses by a mile. The music stays off, which makes the clearing-out feel even more ridiculous, like a fucking fire drill.
Matt blinks, then looks at her with an expression caught between amused and mildly alarmed. “Damn,” he says. “Guess I gotta go.”
Something hot and stupid turns low in her stomach, which is humiliating because she’s not supposed to reward this behaviour internally.
“Yeah,” she says, still staring past him toward where Rafe’s now arguing with someone by the speakers. “Um. Guess so.”
Matt smiles, a little rueful. “See you in class?”
“Yeah. See you.”
He gives her one last look, maybe checking whether she wants him to linger, maybe simply decent enough not to push his luck in a house currently under frat martial law. Then he goes with the rest of them, swallowed by the stream of people heading for the front door.
She turns to find her friends, because she’s also, technically, not a brother, and because letting Rafe Cameron herd her like campus livestock feels like a dangerous precedent even if her body has already started doing several deeply undignified things about the sound of his voice.
She gets exactly two steps before an arm hooks around her waist from behind. Rafe hits her back warm and solid, all beer and cologne and that familiar expensive laundry smell clinging under the party sweat. His hand spreads over her stomach, broad and possessive, pulling her into him like he’s never in his life encountered the concept of public space.
His mouth is already at her neck, damp and careless, pressing one kiss under her ear, then another lower, sloppy enough that she knows he’s been drinking but not sloppy enough that he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing.
“Where’re you goin’?” he murmurs.
Her eyes flutter for half a second before she catches herself and hates them both for it. “Home, Rafe. You kicked everyone out.”
“Not everyone.”
“You made a house-wide announcement.”
“Mhm.” His nose drags along the side of her neck, and she feels his smile there before she hears it. “Rules were pretty clear.”
She bites the inside of her cheek, refusing the smile trying to get loose. “I’m not a brother.”
“No,” he says, like she’s said something adorable and academically beneath him. His hand tightens at her waist. “You’re fuckin’ one.”
Heat goes up her throat so fast it nearly becomes anger out of self-defence. “Am I?”
He hums, low and pleased, mouth moving under her jaw now. “You’re fuckin’ me.”
“That’s convenient.”
“Yeah.” His other hand finds her hip, turning her a little, not enough to face him fully, just enough that his body can settle around hers with more intention. “Real convenient.”
She should elbow him. Probably. At minimum, she should remind him that boys who spend half the night flirting with girls in white tops don’t get to conduct population control based on who has recently seen them naked.
Instead, she lets her head tip back the smallest amount against his shoulder, because her body is a traitor and because his fingers have slipped under the hem of her top, warm against bare skin.
“You’re insane,” she says.
Rafe kisses just below her ear, soft this time, almost careful by accident. “You can stay.”
“Oh,” she says, breath catching around the little smile she still won’t give him. “Can I?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How generous.”
His laugh is quiet against her throat. “Don’t be bratty.”
“You love when I’m bratty.”
His hand flexes on her stomach. For a second, under the thinning noise of people leaving and the sticky ruined floor and the house settling around them, he goes still in the exact way that means she’s landed too close to something true.
Then his mouth brushes her ear, voice lower now, rougher. “I do,” he says.
It shouldn’t feel like winning. It absolutely does. She turns in his arms finally, slow enough to make him wait for it, and finds him looking down at her from under that stupid backwards hat, eyes a little glassy from beer and jealousy and whatever other self-inflicted problem lives inside him tonight. His mouth is curved like he’s amused, except the hand at her waist is too tight for casual.
“You kicked out the whole party because I was talking to a guy from class,” she says.
Rafe’s jaw shifts. “Party was over.”
“It was not.”
“It is now.”
She stares at him. He stares back, shameless and handsome and impossible, and the worst part is that he looks almost pleased to be caught.
“You’re not my boyfriend,” she says, because somebody should say it.
Something moves through his face, quick and ugly and gone before it can become useful. Then he leans in, brushing his mouth over the corner of hers. “Never said I was.”
“No,” she says, and her fingers curl lightly in the front of his shirt despite herself. “You really, really haven’t.”
His eyes drop to her hand, then back to her mouth. The house keeps emptying behind them. Somewhere near the stairs, a pledge yells that someone stole his vape. Rafe doesn’t look away from her.
“Stay anyway,” he says.
It comes out too low to be a command. Too rough to be nothing. And because she’s stupid, and twenty, and wearing lip gloss she knows he likes, and because Matt from psych never really stood a chance once Rafe’s mouth found her neck, she lets the smile happen at last.
“Fine,” she says. “But I’m sleeping in your bed. And borrowing your comfy sweats.”
His grin is immediate, bright and awful. “Yeah, baby,” he says, already walking her backward through the mess of his own party. “That was kind of the point.”
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garrett graham ❄︎ bossy hockey bitch.
pairing – garrett graham x reader summary – garrett graham can ignore almost anything at practice. a low glucose alert from dexcom is not one of them. warnings – diabetic reader, hypoglycemia/low glucose episode, dexcom follow alert, mild medical stress, established relationship notes from me – as requested!! sorry this took a little while – i had to research to make sure it was accurate lmao! let me know if i got anything wrong <3 word count – 4k
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Garrett’s phone goes off halfway through bag skate, which is about as close to a death wish as technology can get inside a hockey rink. It cuts through the scrape of blades and the hard, ugly rhythm of twenty exhausted guys trying not to throw up on fresh ice, a sharp little alarm from the bench where everyone’s phones are piled with water bottles and tape and somebody’s abandoned hoodie.
Usually, Garrett ignores his phone at practice. Usually, there’s no reason to stop in the middle of a drill unless someone is actively bleeding, concussed, or Coach Jensen has decided to experiment with psychological warfare again.
But Garrett knows that sound. He turns his head so fast the edge of his skate catches a little too hard on the ice. Tucker nearly clips him from behind and swears, loud and breathless, but Garrett’s already skating toward the bench with his pulse shifting in a way that has nothing to do with the suicides they’ve been running for the last twenty minutes.
“Graham,” Coach barks, because concern for his girlfriend’s pancreas doesn’t fall within approved training interruptions.
Garrett grabs his phone, glove half off with his teeth because the stupid thing won’t unlock with cold fingers and sweat and the universe personally fucking with him.
The Dexcom Follow notification sits bright on the screen, clinical and calm in the way medical apps always are, like they’re not announcing information designed to put a hook straight through his chest.
LOW GLUCOSE ALERT.
He stares at the number beneath it, then at the downward arrow, then swipes into their messages so quickly he almost fumbles the phone into the stick rack.
Garrett: baby. eat something Garrett: now please Garrett: your dexcom’s yelling at me
The little delivered line appears. Nothing else. He waits three seconds. Four. Five. The ice keeps making noise behind him, bodies turning, sticks tapping, Coach’s whistle cutting once through the air so sharply it makes Garrett’s shoulders tense before his brain catches up.
He types again.
Garrett: hey Garrett: answer me
Still nothing.
“Graham,” Coach calls again, closer this time, irritated but not fully pissed yet. Garrett can feel the whole team’s attention starting to swing toward him in little pieces, because he doesn’t do this. He doesn’t check out mid-practice. He doesn’t stand at the bench breathing hard with one glove off and his hair damp at his temples, staring at his phone like it’s threatened him.
He looks up. “Sorry– my girlfriend– her blood sugar’s low.”
It comes out blunt. Too blunt, maybe, because Coach’s face shifts a little. He jerks his chin toward the locker room. “Text her. Then get back out here if she’s fine.”
Garrett nods once and steps off the ice enough to call her. It rings so long that every second feels stupidly personal.
By the fifth ring, he’s already seeing her dorm room in his head with unpleasant clarity: the lamp on, laptop burning her eyes out, notes everywhere, highlighter uncapped on the comforter, some coffee she definitely shouldn’t be drinking instead of eating, her tucked into one of his hoodies like that counts as a balanced meal.
He can picture her Dexcom stuck to the back of her arm, doing its job, screaming into his phone because she's once again decided that studying until her brain leaks out of her ears is a reasonable use of a human body.
She answers on the sixth ring. “Hi,” she says, tiny and slow, like the word has been wrapped in cotton before leaving her mouth.
Garrett’s chest tightens so hard he nearly gets angry from the relief alone. “Baby.”
“Mhm?”
“Did you get the alert?”
There’s a pause. A soft rustle. Then, distantly, like she has turned her head toward her own phone and found it personally disappointing, she says, “Oh.”
Garrett closes his eyes for half a second. “Yeah. Oh. Eat something.”
“I was gonna.”
“You were not gonna. You didn’t even know it went off.”
“I knew,” she says, with absolutely no conviction and the faint offended dignity of a girl who’s been caught being medically unserious in her own home. “I was just… looking at it.”
“At what?”
“My phone.”
“You just found your phone.”
Another pause. Then, smaller, “Maybe.”
Garrett presses the heel of his hand to one eye and breathes out. Behind him, the team is still skating. Someone laughs. A puck hits the boards hard enough to make the glass jump. The whole rink smells like ice and sweat and rubber and old adrenaline, and all he wants, suddenly and viciously, is to be in her stupid little dorm room putting sugar in her hand himself.
“Okay,” he says, forcing his voice down because she gets embarrassed when people fuss too loudly and because snapping at her when her brain is running on fumes would make him the kind of asshole he’d like to punch. “Do you have your hypo stuff?”
“Mm.”
“Words, baby.”
She sighs. “Yes.”
“What do you have?”
“Lollies.”
“Where?”
“My drawer.”
“Which drawer?”
“The drawer drawer.”
Despite himself, a laugh punches out of him, short and disbelieving. “Jesus Christ. The drawer drawer. Very helpful.”
She makes a small sound, half whine, half laugh, and he can hear how thin it is. How tired. How not fully her. “Don’t be mean. I’m low.”
“I’m aware, since your robot tattled on you.” He shifts his phone to the other ear and looks toward Coach, who is watching him now with a patience Garrett suspects has a hard expiry. “Get the lollies. Right now.”
She whines softly. “I’m comfy.”
“Baby.”
“I know.”
He huffs. “Move.”
She grumbles something under her breath that sounds a lot like bossy hockey bitch, and Garrett would enjoy that more if he wasn’t currently imagining her trying to walk across her room with low blood sugar and the coordination of a newborn deer.
There’s a shuffle, then a thump soft enough to be a drawer and not a person, thank fuck. Plastic crinkles near the speaker.
“Got them,” she says.
“Good. Eat some.”
She groans softly. “How many?”
“Enough for fifteen grams.”
Another silence.
Garrett looks at the ceiling. “The packet, baby. Read the packet.”
“I’m doing it,” she mutters, and then the line fills with the sticky little sounds of a packet being opened badly by someone whose fingers are probably trembling. Garrett hears one fall, hit the desk, roll somewhere. She sighs like it has betrayed her.
“Don’t chase it,” he says immediately.
“I wasn’t gonna.”
“You absolutely were.”
“I’m eating the other ones.”
“Good girl.”
It slips out before he thinks better of it, softer than the rest, and the line goes quiet in that particular way that means she’s heard it and tucked it somewhere warm even through the fog in her head.
Coach blows the whistle again. Garrett’s whole body twitches. “Stay on the phone with me,” he says.
“I’m fine.”
“Didn’t ask.”
“Bossy.”
“Yeah. Eat.”
She does. He listens. It should be boring, standing half-off the ice while his girlfriend chews gummy lollies into the phone like a mildly annoyed possum.
It’s, objectively, not a romantic moment. There’s nothing cinematic about glucose tabs or jelly snakes or Garrett Graham in full gear with one glove hanging from his teeth, telling a girl in a dorm room to keep chewing while his coach considers whether love is worth disrupting defensive drills.
Still, his hand stays tight around the phone until the Dexcom number nudges up a little and her voice starts coming back from wherever the low had dragged it. Enough that when she says, “You’re breathing like Darth Vader,” there’s a faint smile in it.
“Because I’m at practice.”
“Hot.”
“You’re hypoglycemic.”
“So sexy that you know that word.”
He laughs then, low and relieved in a way he tries not to let her hear too clearly. “Recheck in fifteen.”
“I know.”
“Text me the number.”
“I know, Garrett.”
That sounds more like her, annoyed and soft and there. It loosens something under his ribs by a degree. He looks back at Coach again, then at the ice, then at his phone. He should go back. She’s eaten. She’s talking. The number’s not beautiful, but it’s moving.
This is the whole point of the app, technically, to know and respond and then not act like every alert is a national emergency. She has diabetes. She handles this all the time. She has handled it before him, will keep handling it after every practice, every class, every exam week, every stupid stretch of time where Garrett cannot physically be within arm’s reach putting food in her mouth.
That’s the rational version. The other version is that his girlfriend answered the phone sounding small and floaty and alone, and now every cell in his body is pointing toward her dorm. “Alright,” he says. “I’m coming over after practice.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know.”
“Garrett.”
“I’m coming over after practice.”
She sighs, but it turns into a little pleased hum at the end, the kind she probably doesn’t know she makes when she’s too tired to pretend she doesn’t want him. “Fine.”
“Text me in fifteen.”
“Mhm.”
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
“And eat actual food if you can.”
She huffs. “Bossy hockey bitch.”
“There she is,” he says, smiling despite himself. “Text me.”
She does, fifteen minutes later, while he’s back on the ice and only pretending not to check his phone every time he gets within ten feet of the bench. The number's come up. Safe enough that the ugly tight thing in his chest finally stops trying to chew through bone.
She adds a blurry photo of the lolly packet on her desk like evidence in a trial, one thumb half covering the lens.
Garrett: proud of you Garrett: even though you eat like a raccoon during finals week.
Her reply comes after a minute.
raccoons are resilient
Garrett grins down at his phone so hard Logan skates past and says, “Dude, you’re disgusting.”
Garrett flips him off and gets back to practice.
By the time he gets to her dorm, his hair is still damp from the locker room shower and the collar of his hoodie smells faintly like clean soap and rink, which he's been told is not a scent so much as a warning.
He has his backpack slung over one shoulder, two granola bars from the vending machine shoved into the front pocket because he panicked after practice, and a bottle of orange juice he stole from Tucker, who had looked at him once and decided not to ask questions.
She opens the door before he can knock a second time. For one second, Garrett just looks at her. She’s in his Briar hoodie, obviously, because at some point every item of clothing he owns has become part of her little emotional support system.
The sleeves hang over her hands. Her hair's a mess, half pulled up and half surrendered around her face, and there’s a faint crease on her cheek from what looks like a notebook spiral. Her eyes are a little heavy still, sleepy around the edges, her whole body soft and slower than usual as she blinks up at him from the doorway.
“Hi,” she says.
Garrett’s mouth does something stupid before he can stop it. Fond and worried and annoyed, all at once. “Hi.”
“I ate.”
“Yeah?”
She nods, very seriously, then steps backward to let him in. “I ate the lollies. And half a protein bar.”
“Half?”
“It tasted like shit.”
“Protein bars usually taste like that.”
He shuts the door behind him and drops his bag by her desk, already scanning the room in a way he knows makes him look insane and cannot quite bring himself to stop.
Lolly packet open on the desk. Water bottle half full. Textbooks spread across the bed like she’s been trying to summon a degree through paper-based witchcraft. Laptop still open, screen dimmed. The air smells like highlighter ink, laundry detergent, and the sour little remains of coffee gone cold.
He turns back to her. “What’s your number now?”
She points vaguely toward her phone. “Better.”
“That’s not a number.”
“It’s a vibe.”
He raises his brows at her. “Your blood sugar is not a vibe, baby.”
“It kind of is, actually.”
“Phone.”
She rolls her eyes, but there’s no real heat in it, and hands him the phone. He checks because she lets him. Because they’ve had this conversation before, clumsy at first and then easier.
The line between care and hovering. The difference between him helping and him acting like diabetes is a thing that happened to him because he loves her. He still gets it wrong sometimes. He knows that. His worry has bad manners when it gets scared.
But she’d added him to Dexcom Follow herself, sitting cross-legged on his bed with her phone in one hand and his in the other, saying, “Okay, this is not permission to become extra annoying,” while he’d promised, with a straight face, to be only normal amounts of annoying.
Now he looks at the number and the arrow, watches the trend flatten out, and hands it back with a nod. “Better.”
“Told you.”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re a medical genius.”
“I am, actually.”
“You also forgot to eat.”
She makes a face and immediately looks away, which tells on her more than any confession would have. “I didn’t forget.”
Garrett’s eyebrows lift.
“I… delayed,” she says, which is such a committed piece of academic bullshit that he almost respects it.
“You delayed food.”
“Temporarily.”
“Until your blood sugar dropped and an app screamed at your boyfriend during practice.”
She pulls the sleeves of his hoodie over her hands and rubs at one eye with the cuff. “When you say it like that, it sounds bad.”
“Because it was stupid.”
“Garrett.”
“Baby.”
She looks up at him then, and the argument thins out before either of them can turn it into one. There’s still a little tremor in her fingers when she lowers her hand. Barely there, but enough. Enough that all the teasing in his mouth rearranges itself into something quieter.
He steps closer. “You scared me.”
Her face shifts, the soft defensive tilt of her mouth giving way to something smaller, less arranged. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not saying it so you’ll feel bad.” His hand comes up to the side of her neck, thumb resting under her jaw, checking because he can’t help himself, touching because that’s the only language his worry knows how to speak without turning sharp. Her skin is warm. A little clammy still at the edge of her hairline. “I just– don’t do that shit alone if you’re dropping, okay? Text me back. Eat first, be stubborn after.”
Her mouth twitches faintly. “That order seems unfair to my brand.”
“Your brand needs snacks.”
“My brand is very mysterious.”
“Your brand is half a bag of gummy worms and a hoodie you stole from me.”
She leans forward then, slowly, until her forehead lands against the middle of his chest. A soft, tired little surrender into the nearest solid thing, which happens to be him.
Garrett’s hand slides automatically around the back of her head, fingers spreading into her hair, and the rest of him goes quiet around her.
“Still feel weird?” he asks.
“A little,” she says, voice muffled into his hoodie. “Mostly tired now.”
“That happens?”
“Mhm. Sometimes after.” She shifts closer, cheek turning against his chest. “And I stayed up too late. And had coffee. And forgot dinner.”
“Yeah,” he murmurs, kissing the top of her head. “Figured.”
He can picture her last night at two in the morning, hunched over notes, telling herself one more chapter, one more diagram, one more lecture recording, the whole slippery student lie of just a bit longer until suddenly the body that’s been politely asking for basic maintenance starts knocking things over to get attention.
She does that sometimes. Gets so focused the rest of her becomes an inconvenience. Food, sleep, water, all of it demoted beneath whatever exam or paper or assignment has started living behind her eyes.
Garrett hates it in a way that feels embarrassingly tender. He likes her focused. Likes her smart mouth and her colour-coded notes and the little frown she gets when she’s trying to force information into her brain. But he hates the part where she forgets she’s not a machine built for academic suffering and caffeine.
“Bed,” he says.
She tilts her head back just enough to look at him, chin still pressed to his chest. “You’re very annoying when you’re worried.”
“I’m very annoying all the time. You knew that going in.”
“Yeah,” she says, and the tiny smile that comes with it makes something in his ribs unclench. “I did.”
He gets her onto the bed with the kind of careful bossiness she complains about but obeys when she feels like this, all heavy limbs and delayed reactions and stubborn little noises made purely for the dignity of it.
He clears the textbooks first, stacking them onto her desk badly enough that she makes a wounded sound from behind him. “That’s not the system.”
“What system?”
“My system.”
He ignores that and pulls back the blanket. She climbs in, still wearing his hoodie, still with the sleeves eaten over her hands, and watches him from the pillows with that floaty, softened look that would be cute if it didn’t also make the protective part of his brain start dragging furniture in front of doors.
He finds the other half of the violent protein bar and holds it up. “More shit?”
She groans. “Please don’t make me.”
“You need something longer-lasting, right?”
“I had half.”
“Baby.”
She groans. “I hate when you use the reasonable voice.”
“Because it works?”
“Because you sound like Tucker.”
“That’s the worst thing you’ve ever said to me.”
She smiles properly then, small but real, and reaches for the bar with great personal suffering. “Fine. But I’m doing this under protest.”
“Noted.”
She takes two bites and chews with the expression of someone enduring a great injury. Garrett sits on the edge of the mattress and watches her because he’s become the sort of guy who monitors protein bar consumption with the intensity of a playoff game.
If Dean saw him now, Garrett would never hear the end of it. If Logan saw him, he would make a face and call it love in the most annoying possible tone. Tucker would probably approve, which remains devastating.
When she’s done enough that he decides not to bully the rest of it into her, Garrett sets the wrapper on the nightstand and kicks off his shoes. She lifts the blanket immediately, wordless, like she has been waiting for the exact second his hands are free.
“Oh, now you want me,” he says.
She gives him a look from under heavy eyelids. “I always want you.”
She attaches herself to him before he’s even fully settled, curling into his side with her cheek over his chest and one knee sliding over his thigh under the blanket. It’s clingier than usual, or maybe just less disguised.
Her hand sneaks under the hem of his hoodie, palm finding the warm skin over his ribs like she has been assigned a location and intends to remain there.
Garrett lets out a slow breath and wraps his arm around her, hand spreading between her shoulder blades. For a while, he just rubs up and down her back in the quiet, steady rhythm he knows she likes, over the thick cotton of his hoodie and the delicate line of her spine beneath it.
Her room feels softer now with the lamp low and the laptop finally shut, the whole anxious mess of studying pushed to the edges for at least twenty minutes. Outside the door, someone laughs down the hall. Campus keeps moving with absolutely no respect for the fact that Garrett Graham’s just aged six years over a glucose alert.
He kisses her hair. “Feeling better?”
She nods against him, slow. “Mhm.”
“Less weird?”
“Less weird.” Her fingers flex once against his ribs. “Just sleepy.”
“That’s okay.”
“I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I know.” His hand keeps moving. Shoulder to waist. Waist to shoulder. Again. “Just text me back next time.”
“I will.”
“And keep stuff by your bed.”
“I do.”
“Stuff you can reach without going on an expedition to the drawer drawer.”
A tiny laugh shakes against him. “The drawer drawer was perfectly clear.”
He smiles into her hair despite himself. “You’re lucky you’re cute when your brain’s offline.”
“My brain’s online.”
“Baby, you called me a bossy hockey bitch and then argued that blood sugar is a vibe.”
“It is a vibe.”
He tips his head back against the wall and lets himself laugh quietly, relief finally loosening properly through him now that she’s warm and fed and heavy against his side. “You’re impossible.”
She hums, pleased by that for reasons that are between her and whatever sugar is currently making its way through her bloodstream. “You love me.”
“Somehow.”
She pinches his side without lifting her head, weak but accurate. “Mean.”
He catches her hand under his hoodie and holds it there, thumb moving over her knuckles where they rest against his skin. “Yeah,” he says, softer. “I love you.”
After a second, she tilts her face enough to press a kiss to his chest through the hoodie. It’s barely a kiss. More a warm little contact. A thank you she’s too tired and too proud to make formal.
“Love you too,” she mumbles.
Garrett looks down at the top of her head, at the messy spill of hair over his arm, at the Dexcom app still open on her phone on the nightstand, the graph inching back into safer territory one small dot at a time.
His body still has the leftover adrenaline in it, the rink alarm echoing faintly somewhere behind his ribs, the ugly little flash of her not answering when he called. But here she is, tucked into him like she has no plans to be anywhere else, breathing warm against his chest, one hand under his hoodie and the other curled into the blanket.
So he stays. Practice can keep its exhaustion. His homework can rot. The rest of campus can do whatever people do when they’re not pinned beneath a sleepy diabetic girlfriend with a talent for making his whole chest feel like it has been bruised open in the best possible way.
He rubs her back until her breathing goes heavier. Every few minutes, his eyes flick to her phone. The number steadies. Climbs. Holds. He lets out a breath he hadn’t realised he was still keeping.
Then, very softly, mostly because she’s almost asleep and because he likes saying things when she’s too tired to make fun of him properly, he murmurs, “Gonna start packing snacks in my hockey bag like a dad.”
Her mouth curves faintly against him. “Hot.”
“Yeah?”
“Mhm. Dilf behaviour.”
Garrett freezes, then looks down at her. “Don’t call me that when you’re half asleep after a medical incident.”
She laughs once, tiny and muffled and pleased with herself, and curls closer.
He shakes his head, smiling despite every effort not to. “Jesus Christ.”
“Snacks are hot,” she whispers.
“Go to sleep.”
“Bossy.”
He kisses her head again, slower this time, and settles his hand warm at the centre of her back. Her breathing has evened out, her body gone loose and trusting against his, the last of the low-blood-sugar fog giving way to real sleep.
Garrett stays awake a little longer anyway, watching the graph, listening to the hallway quiet down, feeling her heartbeat through the layers between them.
When the number stays steady, he finally sets her phone facedown, tucks the blanket higher over her shoulder, and lets his eyes close with his mouth pressed to her hair.
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rare aesthetic: handsome mentally ill stalkers who don't stalk you because they're perverts, but because they're so emotionally and psychologically depends on you that they literally can't live without you.
but your honor... he's just my type!
liking romantically someone that you have no close relations to is actually weird bcs you create this whole idea in your head and when you meet them again irl it's just totally different
got a crick in my neck and a frog in my throat and a chip on my shoulder and a stick up my ass and now you're gonna stand there puttin words in my mouth? haven't I been through enough?
still can’t stop staring at this arrangement i made
apricot beauty foxglove, scabiosa and orlaya
being a podcaster that constantly goes viral when people clip you getting passionate about something. going on a rant about how that basketball guy was a fucking idiot for cheating on your favourite rapper. another clip of you saying ingenium’s new suit just looks sooooo good on him. did anyone know he was that fine?
always talking about pop culture, the fun parts about hero news (usually just outfits and faces) and little tidbits about your life.
you end up on bakugou’s 10 minute instagram scroll. everything you said about that stupid loser basketball player is true. you cuss well, eloquent with it. he doesn’t agree with what you say about ingenium’s new suit. well, it’s only recently got better because he got in contact with bakugou’s suit designer. he thinks you’re cute when you go into detail about why the suits better. bakugou still disagrees though.
but what makes bakugou take a step further is when he gets a video of you, not crying but angry. you’re speaking into a mic from your bed, or maybe it’s a set? but a bed, nevertheless, white sheets pulled up under your chin with this low lamp lighting.
“also i think i’m swearing off dating. it was going perfect with one guy and then he breaks it off because he doesn’t want his business ending up on the podcast…. i haven’t even said anything about him!” you whine, “and now it just looks like i’m proving his point because i’m talking about it but i wouldn’t have if we were still dating.”
the text on the video screams, “YN SINGLE?!”
bakugou taps on your instagram. loads of clips from your podcast pops up. he finds the next video, the one after the last.
“well dms are open if any fine men are interested. when i say fine i mean fine. you also have to be able to keep up with me, handle a little joke,” you laugh.
and bakugou thinks about it for three days. watches more videos of you talking, your goofy opinions, your educated opinions, your real opinions. scrolls through your personal instagram too.
so he does it. he dms you on your instagram because he deems himself a fine man, he can handle a little joke and well, he likes you. a lot.
you’re funny and smart. articulate yourself well. very beautiful. hobbies on your instagram, full group of friends. well travelled and a homebody and social and he’s eager to know more.
@ dynamight: Are applications still open?
it’s fun, bakugou thinks. a good slide into your dms.
but you don’t reply for a week. he thinks he’s been completely ignored. clearly not interested in him and defo not your type. even though you’re both verified so you’ve definitely got the notification. bakugou takes it all on the chin. doesn’t mention it to anybody because it’s a little embarrassing. maybe it’s been buried from all the other dms you’ve received from men.
until he gets a video on his timeline. then the same video sent to him from three different friends.
the words are captioned loud and bold on the video. straight to the point and pure clickbait. well is it clickbait if it’s true? bakugou chokes on his spit, turning up the volume in his work bathroom.
“DYNAMIGHT IN THE DMS?”
“now guys… walk with me here. if you’re dynamight, thee bakugou katsuki, one of the sexiest men in the world, PLEASE don’t watch this clip. i can’t believe you’ve even seen clips of my pod. i swear this isn’t even me!” you ramble into your microphone, tucked up with your knees to your chest for a more casual episode. “okay guys, now that he’s gone, i’ve got to tell you… after last episode when i said can fine men send me dms, why the fuck did dynamight send me one? i was so shocked by it i still haven’t replied. i’ve avoided talking about him here because i do not want to be on that man’s radar. he’s way too gorgeous for me to comprehend.”
you giggle to yourself, “but he dmed me… something about are applications open? the boyfriend ones. now i can’t reply because ive just told everybody but there’s no way i pulled him.”
bakugou watches it leaning against the sink, three times. his smile gets bigger every second till he’s full on grinning at his phone.
you’re joking a little, entertainment for the podcast because you know you’re just as fine as him. though you don’t think your worlds would ever cross?
he decides to make another move.
@ dynamight: I think you’re gorgeous too
commented underneath the video.
an onslaught of likes and comments commence. mostly your fans giving a whole load of keyboard smashes and “yn is going to go insane”.
then he puts his phone down, washes up his hands and checks his appearance in the mirror. wipes his nose and what not.
but he gets lured to his phone again, picking it up and opening instagram to find you’ve replied to his comment.
@ ynpod: @ dynamight i swear i don’t share all my business online
@ dynamight : @ ynpod So applications are still open?
streamer!jo mid-sentence, leaning back in his chair, headset slightly crooked, the soft click of the door barely registers over the sound of his stream when you walk in. he stops, just for a second. his eyes flick over you. your tight, soft pajamas, the way they hug you just right, the faint scent that follows you in. his whole expression shifts into something quieter.
“hey,” you hum softly, walking over like it’s nothing.
the chat explodes and he doesn’t even glance at it.
voidking99: BROOOOO WHO IS THAT satorusimp420: HE GOT A GIRL?????? angelmilk: she’s so pretty what 😭 gojosleft_toe3: WHY IS SHE IN HIS LAP LIKE THAT IM SICK
“oh my fuck,” he says instantly, voice lower now, already reaching for you.
you don’t question it—you never do. you just step between his legs and sit in his lap like it’s your spot, because it is. his arms wrap around you immediately, pulling you close, one hand settling at your waist, the other resting along your thigh.
“you look so gooooood,” he murmurs, nuzzling lightly into your shoulder for a second before straightening again, like he just remembered he’s live.
his hand doesn’t move though. it drifts. slowly. absentmindedly. down your thigh, fingers brushing soft circles like he’s not even thinking about it. then back up, resting at your waist again.
the twitch chat is going insane.
you notice quickly
you’re already leaning forward slightly, eyes scanning the stream, curious. “what are they saying?”
“nothing important,” he mutters quickly, tightening his hold on you just a little.
too late.
you squint, reading out loud, confused, “I usually skip this part…?” your face still contempt, you tilt your head, genuinely puzzled. “what does that mean?” and then you shift. just a little. trying to get closer to the screen. but it makes you press back into him.
torus breath catches, just barely but enough.
you’re still focused on the chat, completely oblivious, squirming slightly again to get comfortable. “wait, there’s more—”
his arm tightens around your waist. not rough, just firm.
grounding.
his other hand stills on your thigh, fingers pressing in just a little like he’s trying to anchor himself. “hey,” he says suddenly, sharper now—directed at the screen.
the chat floods faster.
softgirlcult: she’s literally clueless this is insane domainexpansionTHIS: “i usually skip this part” LMAOOOOOO gojoswifeREAL: GIRL DONT READ THAT OUT LOUD blueeyeaddickt: HE TENSED UP DID YALL SEE THAT
he exhales through his nose, jaw tightening slightly before he leans forward, voice dropping into something more commanding.
“alright, that’s enough,” he says, tone lazy. “don’t read that stuff,” he murmurs, voice softer now.
you blink, looking back at him. “I was just asking—”
“don’t worry about them,” he murmurs, softer now, eyes locked on yours. way too focused, way too intense. his arms tighten around you again, pulling you flush against him, chin resting lightly on your shoulder as he leans back into his chair.
chat? forgotten.
game? paused.
and satoru? completely, helplessly distracted by you.
megumislostdad: stream is over guys pack it up sukunaIRL: move chat i’m watching this KING.naoyazenin: embarrassing. stand up bro LimitlessGojo banned KING.naoyazenin
© 2026 satoruswetgf. all rights reserved.
no reproduction, translation, reposting, or Al use (including feeding into Al platforms or bot creation) is permitted without my permission.
HAVENT YOU HEARD? IM THE INTERNET GIRL! ─────
pairing: streamer!sukuna x streamer!reader
summary: invited onto answer questions with another streamer, you became a hot topic reaction meme to talking about a celebrity crush. oops! now they know
content: sort of 16+, swearing, fluff, crack, a lot of inappropriate jokes, ill add more if theres seriously a problem
a/n: i love streamer aus also this is sloppy as and a draft so icbf editing im sorry
next — masterlist 4 this series
you didn’t think anything of it.
like yeah, okay, you said demonickuna was hot on a random wednesday stream with nobara who matter of fact was still losing her mind btw, but in your head that was just… normal.
you weren’t pr trained. you weren’t media polished.
you were just a girl with a cute setup, friesday streams, and a chat that watched you crash out over pixel blocks and blind boxes.
so when clips of you twirling your hair, smiling all shy and going "i meannnn… he’s so hot and his voice—" well... that unfortunately blew up overnight…
you just laughed it off.
“guys it’s not that serious,” you said on your next stream, cheeks a little pink, fingers fidgeting with your rings. “but i mean like… have you heard him?”
your chat absolutely did not let that go.
meanwhile....
he didn’t care.
sukuna wasn’t the type to scroll.
didn’t doomscroll, didn’t check tags, didn’t care about edits or clips or whatever people were saying about him. simply posted “stream in 10” and logged off.
that was it.
but his chat?
annoying.
spamming.
relentless.
[kunaslilslut] have you seen angelicluv [thestrongest] angelicluv she said ur hot [sleepnagi] bro she wants u [magicalgirls] ANGELICLUV!!! NOTICE HER
he leans back in his chair, one arm hooked behind his head whilst showcasing a small glimpse of his v-line and abs, headset half on, mic catching that low hum in his throat.
“who the fuck is angelicluv?” he mutters, voice dipping lazily into the mic.
chat goes absolutely feral.
he clicks his tongue, mildly irritated but curious now.
“she said something about me?”
more spam.
more caps.
more exaggeration.
he exhales through his nose, then finally.... finally....leans forward, pulling his keyboard closer.
“what’s she known for?”
[flithymonke33ys] minecraft crashouts and blind boxes. [suckkmyb3alls] she popular on tiktok for being reaction stickers. [manlyredriot] she's pretty as but very extroverted on stream.
“…tch.”
he types your name in anyway.
your profile pops up.
soft colours. aesthetic. pretty in that effortless way that doesn’t look like you tried too hard... i mean you did, but he doesn’t need to know that.
he clicks a tiktok compilation.
first clip was you in your car.
he pauses.
“…this her?”
[moansforbuldak] yeSSSS [hoppindihdih] ys esyeyeyes [noayaistheworst] yeahhhhshhshshs
he studies the frame for a second longer than he should.
“…hm.”
plays it again.
you’re holding up the skull panda box, smiling all bright and excited, voice sweet... a little too sweet.
“now the moment you’ve all been waiting for!”
he rests his chin on his knuckles, watching.
not reacting.
just… simply watching... or admiring
“except that fuck ass christmas tree....” you said it so seriously like your whole life mattered onto it. i mean it did... you spent $30 dollars on it
he snorts quietly.
actually snorts.
chat explodes.
he presses his lips together like he didn’t just do that.
“she’s annoying,” he mutters.
but he doesn’t click off.
he keeps watching.
you open it.
pause.
your face drops.
“…no.... no im schizophrenic this isnt real”
he lets out a low, muffled chuckle, shoulders shaking once.
“unlucky,” he says, voice quieter now.
then the second box.
same result.
you staring at the camera like your soul just left your body then looking out the window and sighing quietly.
he leans back again, one brow raised, amused in a way he doesn’t bother hiding anymore.
“she’s funny.”
chat loses it.
[thestrongest] youuuuuu likeeeee herrrrrr [slugtforkunaa] OH MY GOD” [shimigamieyes] SOME1 CLIP THAT [bannanana] HE DEAD AHH HE SMILED
“shut up,” he says flatly.
but he’s still watching.
still letting the next clip play.
still listening when you laugh.
that was until he noticed
you’re on live.
he joins quietly and watches whilst his stream is still going.
whilst you're mid rant over losing in minecraft to a creeper, dramatic as ever, chat spamming.
[iluvy/n] GIRLLL JUST TAKE THE L [imaseagull] ykw she has a point [gojoswhitefungustoe] bae ...... just take the loss
“oh my GOD you guys are so fake to me..”
your meow ping goes off.
you barely glance at it.
“thank you for the follow... wait a minute...”
you freeze staring at the follow then watch it dissapear.
chat is now spamming more than ever.
your eyes flick back.
double take.
triple take.
“…no...”
chat starts SCREAMING.
[angelicallyy/ns] LMFAOOO LOOK AT HER FACE [sukunasdemon] heeeyyy we came from his stream [applepies348] SUKUNA U CAME AT THE WRONG TIME SHES CRASHING OUT LOL [tojiiifushi] dayummm sukuna i may steal her from you
“no your all lying....”
you lean closer to the screen, squinting like that’ll change it.
it doesn’t.
demonickuna followed you.
THE DEMONICKUNA...
and then a donation appears for $30 dollars.
your ping of a meow makes a noise.
you don’t even breathe.
the message speaks out
“open another one of those blind boxes.”
you stare at it.
your chat is actually unusable.
“…are you..” you laugh nervously, covering your mouth. “are you serious right now?”
another donation of $30 pings through
“don’t get the 'fuck ass christmas tree' again.”
you blink.
once.
twice.
“…i hate you now i take back everything.”
whilst on his side
he smirks.
“yeah,” he mutters under his breath, eyes flicking to your stream on his second monitor.
“she’s cute.”
part two....?
18+ cunniligus with dex where you can't push him away
fem! reader, mdni. 1.9k words. cw: cunniligus, kinda mean dex, slight overstimulation, general filth
Dex is often comparable to a smitten cat: he hates a closed door. He'll mither and pester and bother, do whatever, except wait patiently on the other side of it. He may act like he's been cruelly depraved of your attention, or shunned by you, but really you've just closed it for a moments privacy.
Sort of like right now. You had not long gotten out the shower, and rather than been seen naked and hunched over drying yourself and applying lotions, you decided to close the door to the bedroom for a quick minute. If you shut it quietly enough, Dex won't notice.
But he does.
That little click of the hinge makes his ears prickle, and in no time at all, you hear feet scuffle on the other side. A small set of knocks follow and then a light cough — like he was clearing his throat.
"I need to get my charger."
You smile to yourself. The act coming from a place of slight amusement. It was like routine with Dex, when you close the door, he'll pretend he needs something from the other side — make up some kind of ruse in order for you to open it.
Making your way to his side of the bed, you look inside his nightstand drawer for the charger that's almost always there, though it isn't. The neatly segregated contents void of the charger he claims he needs to collect. And so you adjust the towel still wrapped around you and sit yourself down at the edge of the bed. You glance to the near empty nightstand and to the door, and it's then you decide to toy with him for a moment.
"I'll pass it to you, one second," you tease. You pretend to search and tap your feet on the floor; remaining in place so as to give the illusion you were actually looking. "It's not in here."
"Well," he sighs, seemingly panicking for an excuse. "It is."
"Where is it?" you question, playfully provoking him. "I'll get it."
"Can I just come in?" he remarks, growing annoyance clear in his tone. "I'll be quick," he adds, voice far softer — like he was prompt to correct himself.
You give him a hum in response, but it doesn't have to be particularly loud for him to hear it. All he needs is the slightest possible confirmation in order to open the door. And like it was an instant invitation, he pushes it open and steps inside.
He lingers in the door frame for a moment, eyes falling from the exposed expanse of your shoulders and down to your bare legs. His gaze reluctantly pulls away for a quick moment and to the kitchen behind him, the hot pans on the stove reminding him of where his prior attention was. Though he's thankful to have been ahead with forethought, and it's when he finally hears the pans reduce to a quiet, inconsistent sizzle, he steps further into the room.
Your eyes meet his, peered up gaze following his stalk like movements as he grows closer and closer. And it's then that he halts, big broad frame pausing in front of you — intense hazel eyes cast down on you below. You were fine playing with him between a closed door, fine to tease when he didn't face you; but to have him directly ahead of you, watchful gaze locked on you, you no longer felt that same sense to toy with him like you did before.
His eyes lower and focus in on your lap for a moment. And it's then his head tilts aside, like you were supposed to know what it means.
Though you do and you give him a small nod. Again, it was all he needed.
He bends at the knee and lowers, movement slow and controlled. He's far closer to the level of your eyes, but still, it feels like he's looking down upon you. Dex places his palms on either of your thighs, hands spread wide as he guides your legs apart — separating you.
The placement of his thumbs lower on either side of your thighs, the pads itching along the inners of each with faint little circles he draws into your skin. He sits further onto the heels of his feet, and it's then he looks up at you, eyes heavy as they study the growing want in your face.
His gaze soon diverts from you, though yours remains on him — watching him intently as he dips between your thighs, face turning aside so he can press his lips to the inners of one. Breath hot as his mouth ghosts your skin. The trail of his lips rises higher and higher and in it's place, a litter of kisses are left behind.
Your head involuntarily falls back, and the rest of you then follows. You adjust and push yourself further up the bed, scooching back so as to kindly make some space for Dex between you. He moves with you, lips remaining in place at the inner of your thigh like his mouth is fused to your skin.
Getting comfortable betwixt your thighs, he rests on his elbows — face subsequently itching in closer to your cunt. He shifts his weight a moment, arms coming up from their placement at the edge of the bed to wrap around you; arms encompassing your lower hips. His fingers paw at the squish of your inner thighs, pads sort of pulsing your skin as he pries your legs further apart.
He's slow and teasing. Like he's making you wait the way you did him a few moments before. But really, he's only taunting himself.
Nuzzling inwards, he presses a kiss to crease of your inner thigh, and then another and another, though the more that follow, the closer they get to your cunt. And by the fourth, maybe fifth kiss he sears into you, his lips reach the ones of your pussy.
Your stomach shudders as a direct response to his touch and it's when you feel your back lift from the sheets, that your hands shoot down and for his hair. Bending your legs, you lift your feet and place them at the edge of the mattress. You hook them, heels digging into that rimmed cuff as an effort to fix yourself more comfortably.
He presses another kiss to you, but this time, slightly higher than the one before. His lips reach your clit and it's there he resumes a small series of faint, and just as lengthy kisses — each one making your thighs beside his head twitch from the gentle care. His tongue extends outwards and he licks a stripe from the middle of your cunt, to where his lips remain just below the mound of your clit.
And he repeats that — doing so over and over and over until all that coats your cunt is a slight sheen of his spit. Before long, those licks turn into suckles; mouth moving deliberately in one spot, focus honed in on where you're most sensitive. Your clit.
With his grip still encompassed over the uppers of your thighs, he adjusts you within his grasp — angling and tilting your hips so as to better nuzzle his face between. You too reposition; altering the placement of your legs so they can trail down the length of his back, the behinds of your thighs pressing into his shoulders, the heels of your feet hooked at his sides.
It's as if you've inadvertently entrapped him, caged him between your thighs. But he's quick to return the gesture — quick to ensure he's just as trapped as you'd involuntarily made him.
Dex's hold withdraws from your thighs and instead roams upwards, hands flat, thumbs leading the way as he runs up the sides of you, movement slow and intentional. He pauses when he reaches your tits, and it's then that he cups them; holding each nice and firm as he uses them as a way to anchor himself to you. To keep you exactly as is.
His tongue curls between your folds, the once flat muscle now pointed and deliberate as he pushes it through your pussy's lips — pressure slight, yet apparent as it divides you. While his touch is light, your body processes it as anything but, and as the tip of his tongue knocks up against your clit, you jerk against him. Hips winding and bucking a couple times against his face like you had no control over it.
Your nails rake across his scalp, fingers pushing through his hair just moments before you grab fistfuls on either side. While it was an effort of control on your side, it only encourages him, it simply eggs him on to have you respond in such a distinct and albeit, forceful way.
But there's only so much direct pleasure you can take, especially when his mouth is so concentrated on your nub of nerves. And when he begins to tweak your nipples between thumb and index, you find yourself eager to scamper from the gratification he brings you.
The height within you hasn't yet been located, but with every lick and suck and kiss he presses into your cunt, you feel yourself aimlessly creeping closer and closer towards it. Though it begins to teeter into too much and your hips shudder against his tongue as a means to escape from the bottomless pit of pleasure.
He doesn't let you far, not when his grip tightens around you.
"No," he murmurs into you, the word muffled yet firm — voice reverberating against your cunt. "Stay."
But as much as you try, you just can't. You react instinctively, body responding through lack of self-control, and it's in the following moment where you feel yourself reach that edge.
You feel it harsh and fast.
Your back curves from the sheets as you cry out, panting out nonsensically as he continues to tongue fuck you through it.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," you choke out, voice strained. Desperate.
If you thought it felt too much before, you were surely mistaken; just blatantly erroneous. You make attempts to rid him from you — weakened hands pushing at his head, though it's no use, not when he further secures his grasp around you.
"Keep still."
"Fuck," you whine. It's just shy of a mewl.
But when you really, seriously, genuinely try to flee, he lets up. He releases your shaking shuddering body and slowly stands, emerging from between your thighs.
Dex leans over you, hands either side of you for support as he lowers atop, face itching in for yours.
"Dinner's in fifteen," he hums against your lips, the taste of you on his tongue slight.
Even with his mouth ghosting yours, he neglects to press a kiss. Instead he pushes himself away from your bare body below and stands over you. His eyes trail over you a moment before he covers you with the towel that had fallen open from those ten-some minutes of tongue fucking.
His absence grows larger, and as he heads for the door, he pauses — turning slightly to look back at you. Features stern, sort of like a warning.
He taps at the door, head tilting so as to firm his expression.
"This stays open."
⎯ ☆ ⎯
I had this vision right, and it was POISONING my mind!!!!! so had to get it out
why would someone be so cruel to this little kitten:
Look at his face, how could you close the door on him!!!
I genuinely have NOTHING appropriate to say 🥵
I am SICK at how fine this man is 😭
IM GOING FERAL. OMFGGG. HES SO BIG. IM GONNA FREAK TF OUT
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.
Insaaaane
