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003 . PROJECT ── POINDEXTER AND MURDOCK / SIT, STAY, BARK LIKE A BITCH

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NOTES : you are going to foster a blind puppy called matty, dex doesnt like the idea of this. but he hates the fact you want to keep matt murdock even more.

WARNINGS : demi-humans, kitty!dex, dog! matt, possession, fingering, scenting, female oral, domesticity, purring, dog/cat ears and tail, jealousy, dex is bullseye, matt is daredevil, raw sex, creampie, mating press, voyeurism, exhibitionism, unestablished relationship, hair pulling, marking, biting, body worship, overstimulation, good girl used, competition, no sharing in this one.

CONFIDENTIAL MATERIAL ── 18+ ONLY.

dex finds out the same way he finds out about everything he doesn't want to know — you tell him casually, without preamble, without any of the softening that the information genuinely warrants, like it isn't going to detonate quietly in the middle of an otherwise perfectly acceptable monday afternoon.

"the agency called," you say, not looking up from your phone, thumb scrolling through something with complete serenity. "apparently there's a companion who hasn't been placed. blind. they said he's been waiting a while and nobody's come forward and i just thought—"

"no," says dex.

"i haven't finished."

"you don't need to." he sets down the fitted sheet he'd been folding — sets it down with rather more force than linen requires, smoothing it once with his palm in a way that is not entirely about the sheet — and turns to look at you with his arms crossed over his chest and his tail already doing the low, slow sweep that means the situation has been assessed and found wanting. "the answer is no. whatever comes after i just thought — no."

"dex, he has nowhere to go."

"then the agency will find him somewhere. that is, presumably, what the agency is for." he says it reasonably, which is to say he says it in the voice he uses when he wants credit for being reasonable while also being completely immovable. "this apartment is not a shelter."

"he has nowhere to go," you say again, softer this time, setting your phone down and giving him the full weight of your attention, which is exactly the thing he'd been hoping you wouldn't do. "he's been in the facility for months. nobody's come forward because of the disability and i just — i couldn't see the listing and do nothing, it didn't feel right."

dex looks at you. you look back at him. his tail does one long, deliberate arc and settles.

"it's a trial," you say carefully. "just to see if it works. a few weeks, completely low pressure, and if it doesn't work then we reassess. that's all."

"a trial," he repeats, tasting the word like it's something he's not sure he wants to swallow. "so not even a decision, it's a process — a process you've already set in motion, that i'm finding out about now, this afternoon, while i'm doing the laundry." he picks the sheet back up because his hands need something and the sheet is there and he folds it with the focused, meticulous care of a man who is being very grown up about everything and would appreciate if someone noted that. "how long has this been happening."

"it wasn't really a plan, it was more — i saw the listing last week and i enquired just to get more information and then they called back and things moved a bit faster than i expected and—" you stop. you do the face. he has a whole internal catalogue of your expressions and this one — open, a little sheepish, softly certain — is the one that has preceded every argument he has ever lost. "he's a puppy, dex. just a little blind dog. he's been in that facility since he was born and nobody wanted him because they took one look at the disability and decided it was too much trouble and i just — his name is matty." you say the name like it's a closing argument, like something called matty is simply impossible to refuse, like you know exactly what you're doing and you do. "i couldn't leave him there."

dex stands in the middle of the living room with the fitted sheet in his hands and says nothing for a long moment. his jaw is set. his broad shoulders, already carrying the particular tension of a man who had been having a perfectly fine afternoon, draw back slightly like he's bracing himself against something he can already feel the shape of. "matty," he says.

"matty."

"a blind puppy called matty who is going to live here."

"just for the trial—"

"and this is the first i'm hearing of it." he doesn't shout. dex never shouts, he considers it beneath him, but the careful flatness of his voice communicates the shout perfectly well without it. he takes the sheet to the bedroom because the laundry needs finishing and also because he needs a different room, and you follow him, which he expected, materialising in the doorway while he opens the wardrobe with perhaps slightly more force than necessary and begins stacking things inside with architectural precision.

"baby," you say, and he feels his ears move toward the word before he can stop them, a small involuntary tilt that he corrects immediately and hopes you didn't notice. you noticed. "talk to me."

"i'm talking." he smooths a pillowcase flat against the shelf. "i'm saying that i think it would have been reasonable to be included in this decision before it became a fact. that's all. i'm not making a scene." he closes the wardrobe, picks up the empty basket, moves past you into the hallway and then into the bathroom because there is always something to be done in the bathroom and right now he needs a task more than he needs to be right. the bathroom is already clean — he cleaned it thursday, he cleans it every thursday — but the mirror could be polished and he finds the cloth under the sink and starts on it, working in slow, firm circles, his reflection watching him from behind the smear he's clearing away.

you appear in the doorway behind him, arms folded, shoulder against the frame. "your tail is doing the thing," you say.

"my tail is fine."

"dex, it hasn't stopped since i put my phone down."

he glances at it in the mirror. it is, in fairness, still doing the low, measured sweep of something working through feelings it hasn't fully processed yet. he makes a conscious effort and it stills, mostly. "i simply feel," he says, returning to the mirror with great dignity, "that a decision involving a living creature coming into our home — a dog, specifically, a dog that will require things and make noise and take up space — might have warranted more than a conversation that started with apparently and gave me no opportunity to respond before it was already decided." he polishes a section of mirror that is already perfectly clear. his reflection looks back at him, jaw tight, the muscles in his shoulders shifting under his shirt as he works. "that's a reasonable thing to feel."

"it is," you say, which throws him slightly because he'd been braced for an argument. "it's completely reasonable and i should have told you sooner. i know that."

he keeps polishing the mirror. there is nothing left to polish. he polishes it anyway. "how much stuff has already arrived," he says.

the small pause that follows tells him everything before you even speak. "just the essentials," you say carefully.

he puts the cloth down and goes to the hall cupboard and opens it, and stands there in the hallway taking in the evidence of a decision made without him. two ceramic bowls, pale blue, paw prints printed on the side in white — two of them, sitting on a mat shaped unmistakably like a bone, which he finds completely unnecessary as a design choice. behind the bowls, folded with some care, a round dog bed in a soft cloud print that is frankly more thoughtfully chosen than anything dex owns, thick and cushioned in a way that suggests someone spent real time in the shop deciding. he stands there with one hand on the cupboard door and the other braced against the frame, the breadth of his shoulders filling the hallway, and he looks at it all for a long, quiet moment.

"the mat is shaped like a bone," he says.

"it's cute."

"the bowls have paw prints on them." he reaches out and picks one up, turns it over in his hands, sets it back down exactly where it was. "there are two of them."

"water and food, that's just standard—"

"i know what two bowls means," he says, and there is something in his voice that is not quite anger anymore, something lower and more complicated than that, and he closes the cupboard and walks to the kitchen and turns on the tap. he rolls his sleeves up to his elbows and begins doing the dishes. the dishes that are done. he did every one of them this morning, washed and dried and stacked with his usual care, but he runs the hot water and picks up the sponge and starts again from the beginning, working through the glasses first, then the mugs, then a plate that absolutely does not need attention, his broad back to you and the line of his shoulders rigid and deliberate, every movement controlled in the way that means the control is doing a lot of work right now.

you come and stand behind him. you don't say anything for a moment, just exist at his shoulder, close enough that he can feel the warmth of you, and he scrubs a mug that was already clean with the focused energy of a man who has redirected everything into limescale that does not exist.

"dex," you say softly.

he scrubs the mug.

"baby," you say, softer, and you reach up — and he knows what you're going to do and he almost moves away, almost, but your fingers find the base of his left ear and scratch, slow and deliberate, right at the spot where the fur is softest and where every single thing he's been holding tightly in his chest simply — loosens, without his permission, without any input from him whatsoever, his body making unilateral decisions as it always does when you do that. the long breath that leaves him is embarrassingly involuntary. his shoulders, which had been up around his ears, drop a full inch. his hands slow in the water.

"that's not fair," he says, but the edges have gone out of it.

"i know," you say, still scratching, working slow circles, and he stands at the sink with his wet hands and his eyes half closed and his tail doing one long, reluctant, settling sweep behind him like it's giving up on being angry independently of him. you step closer and he feels you rise up and then your lips press to his cheek — warm and unhurried, a proper kiss, not a peck — and something in the last of his resistance simply folds.

"he's just a puppy," you murmur, your cheek against his. "i promise you, dex. just a little blind puppy who needed somewhere to go, that's all this is."

he stares at the water in the sink for a moment. then he says, "saturday," in a voice that has mostly just accepted the situation.

"saturday," you confirm, gently.

"fine." he picks the sponge back up, and you stay at his side a moment longer, your hand trailing from his ear to his shoulder and then away, and he listens to you pad back down the hallway and stands in the kitchen and finishes the dishes, all of them, slowly and with great thoroughness, until the water goes cold and the rack is full and there is absolutely nothing left to clean.

saturday comes the way saturdays do when you've been dreading them all week — suddenly, with too much light coming through the curtains and no amount of willpower sufficient to make it not be saturday.

dex is up before you. you find him in the kitchen at half past eight, already dressed in dark trousers and a clean shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms, already making tea, already occupying the space with the specific energy of a man who has decided that today is going to be completely fine and has been up since seven constructing that decision. the flat is immaculate in a way it wasn't when you went to bed. he has reorganised the kitchen cupboards — you can tell because the mugs are alphabetical now, which they have never been — and the surfaces have the particular gleam of someone who has been cleaning since before sunrise. you decide not to mention any of this.

"morning," you say, and your voice is still soft with sleep.

"morning." he doesn't look up from the kettle immediately, but when he turns to hand you your mug — the right one, the wide one with the slightly chipped handle that you always want on saturdays, without being asked, without any discussion, just handed to you because he knows — his green eyes move over your face in that careful, cataloguing way and then settle into something neutral. his ears are doing the barely-there low tilt at the tips, the almost-imperceptible flatness that only happens when he's managing something internally and doesn't want you to see the effort it's taking. "what time are you leaving," he says.

"around ten. i want to get there early so he has time to settle before the journey back." you wrap both hands around the mug and lean against the opposite counter and watch him. he has his own tea but he's not drinking it, just holding it, thumb moving in a slow absent arc against the ceramic. "you could still come," you say.

"i'm busy," he says, with the pleasantness of someone who has prepared this answer.

"dex, it's half eight on a saturday."

"i have things i want to get done." he says it in a way that is perfectly calm and perfectly final and leaves no opening, and you look at him for a moment — at the pressed shirt and the alphabetical mugs and the too-still tail and the ears he can't quite convince to sit right — and you make the decision not to push it. he's here. he's making your tea. he reorganised the cupboards at some point in the small hours because he needed to do something with all of it, and that is, in its own dex way, a form of acceptance.

"okay," you say simply, and he blinks, just slightly, like he'd been braced for more resistance and isn't entirely sure what to do with the absence of it. you finish your tea and go to get dressed, and when you come back through he's moved to the couch with a book open across his knees, legs stretched out, reading with the focused attention of a man who is absolutely not counting down the minutes.

you gather your bag and your keys and your jacket and you stop in front of the couch and look down at him, and after a moment he looks up. his green eyes meet yours and stay there, and for a second all the composure and the careful neutrality goes very quiet and it's just him looking at you, all that complicated warmth he carries around and never quite says out loud sitting right at the surface.

you reach down and scratch behind his ear, slow and proper, the way that works, and his eyes close before he can decide not to let them. you lean down and press a kiss to his cheek, hold it there for a moment, your hand still in his hair.

"i'll be back by noon," you murmur. "he is just a puppy, baby. i promise you. just a puppy."

"go on," he says quietly, after a beat. "you'll be late."

you straighten up and go, and the door clicks shut behind you, and the flat settles into a quiet that feels slightly different from the usual saturday morning quiet — fuller, somehow, or perhaps just heavier. dex sits on the couch with the book open to a page he stopped actually reading some time ago, and one hand raised almost to the cheek you kissed, hovering there for a moment before he registers what he's doing and sets it back down on the cushion. his tail moves once, slowly, and then is still. outside the window the city is doing its ordinary saturday activities.

the drive over is fine. perfectly fine. you have the address pulled up on your phone, the windows cracked just enough to let in the cool of the morning, and a bag of supplies sitting on the back seat that you'd packed the night before with the careful optimism of someone who has done their research. treats, a soft blanket, a little collar tag with your address on it that you'd had engraved at the pet shop on the high street while the man behind the counter made small appreciative noises about what a responsible owner you were. you'd felt good about that. you'd felt prepared. you'd spent the whole week reading about blind dogs — about scent mapping and sound cues and the importance of consistency, about never rearranging furniture without warning, about how they were just as capable and loving and full of personality as any sighted dog, just navigating the world differently. you felt ready. you felt, if anything, slightly over-ready, which was the most comfortable place to be.

it's only when you pull into the car park and cut the engine and look up at the building that the ready feeling starts doing something odd and complicated in your chest.

you sit there for a moment with your hands still on the wheel, looking at the logo above the entrance. the clean lettering, the small emblem beside it. you know that emblem. you know it the way you know your own address or the sound of your own front door — intimately, without having to think about it, because you have been looking at it on paperwork for a month now. it's on the welcome pack in your kitchen drawer. it's on dex's placement forms, filed neatly in the folder you keep on the second shelf. it's on every piece of correspondence the agency has ever sent you, always in the top left corner, always the same.

it is the same agency.

you sit with this. your very reasonable brain offers a very reasonable explanation — companions come from agencies, matty is a companion, this is the agency, and that is simply what logistics means and there is nothing strange about it whatsoever. they probably have an entirely separate department for animals. a different floor, different staff, a completely distinct operation that happens to share a building and a logo because that is how large organisations work. you are here to pick up a blind puppy and take him home and everything is going to be completely straightforward. you pick up your bag and get out of the car.

the receptionist is the same woman who processed dex's paperwork a month ago, sitting at the same desk with the same efficient warmth, and she looks up when you push through the glass doors into the cool hush of the reception and her face does the immediate, genuine thing of recognition, which is both nice and faintly destabilising.

"hi," you say, with the confidence of someone who has done this before, shifting your bag onto your shoulder and crossing to the desk. "i'm here for the foster pickup — matthew. matty. we spoke on the phone last week."

her whole face softens with the particular relief of someone for whom matthew has been a prolonged source of collective office concern. "of course, yes," she says, typing quickly. "we're so glad someone came forward, he's been with us for a while now." she glances toward the corridor that runs behind the desk and then back at you with a warm, faintly amused expression that you don't yet have the context to interpret correctly. "he was in one of the prep rooms this morning — last i saw him he was just getting his suit on. he's very punctual, so he shouldn't be long at all."

you look at her.

"his suit," you say.

"mm." she says it with the total ease of someone stating a simple and unremarkable fact about matthew, the way you might say he prefers the window seat or he takes his coffee black. "he always dresses properly for first meetings. very particular about first impressions."

you stand at the desk and feel the bottom of something drop out, quietly and then completely, like a lift whose cable has given way. the word suit is sitting in the air in front of you and the receptionist is looking at you with a pleasant open expression and giving no indication whatsoever that a dog wearing a suit is an unusual thing to have said. the listing, you think suddenly. the listing had no photograph. no age. just the sparse careful language of it — companion, blind, long wait, no current placement — nothing that would have told you anything concrete about who was actually behind it. you had filled in the blanks yourself, helpfully, with the image of something small and warm and four-legged, and the listing had let you.

you are about to say something — the question is fully formed and pressing urgently at the back of your throat — when you hear footsteps in the corridor behind the desk.

they are even and unhurried, with the particular intentional quality of someone who knows precisely where everything is and is moving through the space with quiet confidence, each step placed deliberately. underneath the footsteps, a soft rhythmic tap against the floor. and then the door at the end of the corridor opens, and matthew murdock walks in, and every version of this morning that you'd imagined evaporates completely and simultaneously.

he is tall. considerably taller than anything you'd been picturing, and broad through the shoulders in a way that his very well-fitted charcoal suit does nothing to conceal. his hair is dark and neatly kept, and sitting on top of it, rising to sharp alert points, are a pair of german shepherd ears — black tipped, the inner fur a warm tan, angled forward with immediate attentive precision as he steps through the door, scanning the room the way ears do when they are doing all the work that eyes usually do. his tail, the same black and tan colouring, sweeps in a single slow arc behind him as he enters — not the frantic uncontrolled wag of excitement but the careful measured movement of someone whose tail is registering feelings that the rest of him is doing its best to manage professionally. he has a white cane in his right hand, the tip sweeping a short practised arc across the floor in front of him, and he is wearing a white shirt with a deep red tie knotted cleanly at his throat, and over his nose sit a pair of black sunglasses, dark and opaque, giving nothing away. his face beneath them is open and calm, angled in your direction with the careful attentiveness of someone who is listening to the room rather than looking at it. his eyes, just barely visible above the frame of the sunglasses when he tilts his head, are a warm brown, and completely, perfectly still.

he smiles. it is an easy smile, genuinely warm, with a self-deprecating quality at the edges that suggests he has walked into rooms and produced this specific reaction in people many times and has built his entire approach around making it as painless as possible for everyone involved. "hi," he says, and his voice is low and warm with a new york cadence underneath it that sounds pleasantly incongruous in the grey london morning. "you must be the foster placement." his cane hand stills. he extends his other hand toward you — toward the exact location of you, with an accuracy that prickles the back of your neck in a way you can't quite account for — and his tail does one more careful, hopeful arc. "matt murdock. really glad to meet you."

you look at his hand. you look at the ears, tall and pointed and swivelled precisely toward the sound of you. you look at the tail. you look at the sunglasses. you look at the suit, which is, objectively, extremely well fitted, and you think about the bag in your car with the treats and the blanket and the little engraved collar tag from the pet shop on the high street that says matty in a cheerful rounded font with your home address underneath it.

you shake his hand. "hi," you say. your voice sounds surprisingly normal. "it's really good to meet you."

his ears angle forward a fraction and something shifts in the quality of his attention — sharpens, imperceptibly — and you have the sudden uncomfortable feeling that your heartbeat is currently providing him with a great deal more information than you are consciously offering. "the agency mentioned you've already got a companion at home," he says pleasantly, his tail settling into its slow sway. "that's a real relief to hear. the settling-in period is so much easier when the placement already understands how things work."

"yes," you say. "dex. he's been with me about a month." something moves across matt's face at the name — very quick, very small, smoothed back into pleasantness before you can name it. his ears shift, a fractional backward tilt before they correct themselves forward again, and he nods in the easy way of someone filing information carefully away.

"great," he says, and moves on without making anything of it.

the receptionist slides the paperwork across the desk with the expression of someone who considers what has just occurred to be entirely above her pay grade to comment on. you sign everything. your hand moves through the boxes on autopilot while your brain performs rapid and not particularly successful calculations about the journey home and what comes after it. matt stands a polite distance away, cane in hand, ears making their small constant adjustments to the sounds of the building around him, tail doing its patient measured sway, and you look at him — the suit, the sunglasses, the german shepherd ears — and think about the bone-shaped mat in your hall cupboard, and sign the last box, and pick up your bag.

"ready?" you say.

"been ready," he says, and smiles, and reaches down for his duffel bag with the clean immediate confidence of someone who has never needed to search for anything in their life.

the car is very quiet for the first thirty seconds.

matt is in the passenger seat with his duffel at his feet and his cane resting between his knees and his hands folded in his lap, doing the thing you will come to recognise as distinctly matt — head slightly tilted, those tall pointed ears angled forward, taking in the sounds and smells of new york through the cracked window with the focused patience of someone building a picture of it carefully from scratch. his ears track the sound of the indicator as you pull out of the lot. they shift sharply toward a cab that leans on its horn two lanes over, then settle again. he is quiet but not uncomfortably so. it is the quiet of someone paying very close attention rather than someone who has run out of things to say.

you make it to the end of the block before you say, "so," and he turns his face toward you and smiles, and his tail — curled carefully around the base of the seat, doing its best to be considerate about the limited space — does a small warm movement.

"so," he agrees, in that low new york cadence that is somehow both completely at home in this city and entirely new to you.

"i feel like i should apologise again about the bowls," you say.

"please don't," he says, with complete sincerity. "it means you care. that's honestly the part that matters." he says it simply, without any hint of condescension, and somehow that makes it worse and better simultaneously. his ears swivel slightly toward the road ahead — some quiet monitoring function running underneath the conversation — and then return to you. "can i ask what made you reach out? the listing said you weren't actively looking."

"i wasn't," you say. "i saw it on the agency's website and i couldn't stop thinking about it. it said he'd been waiting a while and nobody had come forward and i just kept coming back to it every time i picked up my phone." you check your mirror, switching lanes. "it didn't feel right to scroll past and do nothing."

something in matt's expression shifts, softens quite considerably, and he turns his face forward. his tail does a slow genuine sweep against the side of the seat. "that's kind," he says quietly, in a way that sounds like he means it as something larger than a pleasantry. "that's genuinely kind."

"i also now own a bone-shaped mat that serves no conceivable purpose," you say, and he laughs — a real one, low and sudden, his head ducking in a way that makes both ears tilt forward charmingly. you find yourself smiling before you've decided to.

"i'll try to find a use for it," he says, and the laugh settles into something easier. he shifts in the seat, the careful prep-room formality loosening noticeably, and a comfortable silence sits between you for a moment, easy and unforced, the sounds of the city filling the gaps. and then he says, quite casually, "there's already someone at home."

"dex, yeah," you say. "about a month."

matt nods, and there is something in the quality of the nod — unhurried, unsurprised, considered — that makes you glance at him sideways. "feline," he says. not a question.

"how did you—"

"i could smell him on you," matt says, with the complete matter-of-factness of someone reporting a simple observable fact, the way another person might mention noticing a colour. "from the moment you walked into the reception." he says it without any particular weight, like something he has been holding in his pocket since you shook his hand and saw no reason not to mention now that it's come up naturally. "cat, definitely. been around you long enough to be well settled into your clothes, your hair." the corner of his mouth moves slightly. "whoever he is, he was pretty thorough about it this morning."

you think about dex pressing his face to your hair before you left, the slow deliberate way he'd rubbed his cheek against yours, the arm that had stayed around your waist a beat longer than necessary, the low satisfied sound he'd made when he'd finally stepped back. you think about him at the kitchen sink the week before saying i'm fixing it with total seriousness, working his scent methodically back into your skin after the date. "that's — yes," you say. "that's one word for it."

matt's ears angle forward with the quality they get when he finds something interesting and is being carefully diplomatic about the extent of his interest. he doesn't push. "how's he settling?" he asks instead. "with you, i mean. a month is still early days."

"he's good," you say, and find you mean it in a way that's considerably bigger than the word. "he's very much at home. possibly more at home than i am, honestly. he reorganised my kitchen in the first week. alphabetically." you pause. "i found out this morning he'd done it again sometime before seven."

matt is quiet for a moment. "he was anxious," he says simply. "about today."

"you got all that from alphabetical cupboards?"

"i got all that from four layers of him on you and the fact that the most recent one was very fresh," matt says, with absolute calm, and your hands tighten slightly on the wheel. "he was thorough. and recent. and—" he adds, with the careful precision of someone choosing exactly how much to share, "stressed. felines do that when they're worried about something leaving." he leaves it there, and you have the impression he is being quite selective about the full extent of what his nose has been telling him since you walked through that reception door, and that you should probably be grateful for the restraint.

you think about dex on the couch with the upside-down book. about the alphabetised mugs. about the way he'd held your face for just a moment before you left, like he was making sure he had it right.

"right," you say.

"i want to be upfront," matt says, shifting slightly to angle himself toward you, hands easy in his lap, "that i have every intention of being respectful of that. i knew there was already a companion in place when i read your profile and i still wanted to come because—" he pauses, considers. "i thought i could be useful. and i thought i'd like to know you." he says it plainly, without dressing it up or walking it back. "but i'm not going to make his life difficult."

"he might make yours a little difficult," you say honestly.

"i've handled worse," matt says, with the quiet certainty of someone whose definition of worse would probably genuinely alarm you, and his tail does one slow arc against the seat. they fall into easier conversation after that — you talk about the neighbourhood, about the building, about how long you've been in the city — and somewhere in the natural back and forth of it you say, "the agency didn't tell me much about you. the listing was pretty sparse."

"mm," matt says, in the tone of someone who is aware of this and finds it reasonable.

"no photo," you say.

"no."

"no age."

"no."

"very convenient," you say.

"very practical," he corrects, mildly, and his tail does one slow unrepentant arc. "i find people make better decisions when they're not working around assumptions." he says it with the measured ease of a man who has thought carefully about this and landed on phrasing that is both honest and strategically incomplete. you are beginning to understand that this is simply how he operates.

"so what should i know about you?" you say. "that wasn't on the listing."

"i'm a lawyer," he says, and says it the way he says everything — simply, without any performance of it. "criminal defence. i have a practice here in the city." he shifts the cane slightly between his knees. "the companion work is separate. i do it through the agency voluntarily, when there's a placement i think i can genuinely help with. i review profiles and reach out directly if i think there's a good fit. i don't do it often."

you look at him — the suit, the cane, the sunglasses catching the midmorning light, the tall sharp ears swivelling almost imperceptibly toward the sound of a siren a few blocks over. "you're a criminal defence lawyer," you say, "who does therapy companion work in his spare time. voluntarily."

"when you say it like that—"

"i'm building the picture," you say. "i'm not criticising."

the corner of his mouth lifts. "i find it useful," he says, more quietly. "the legal work gets heavy. spending time with someone who just needs a calm presence — no case, no argument, no outcome to fight for — it straightens me out. probably helps me as much as it helps them, if i'm honest." a pause. "you could argue it's selfish."

"i wouldn't," you say, and he smiles, and his tail does a small warm movement.

"i read your profile," he says then, the conversation turning naturally, "and i thought i'd like to meet you. so i flagged my interest with the agency and asked them to reach out. i wanted to see if you'd feel the same way in person." a beat. "i hope that's not too forward."

"you're already in my car," you point out.

"fair," he agrees.

"i should say," you tell him, "that i wasn't looking. i want to be clear about that. i saw the listing and i felt for him — for matty—" you say, and hear the name land differently now, carrying new and complicated weight, "and i acted on it. but i wasn't in the market for another companion."

"i know," he says. "it said so on the listing." a small pause, and then, with the calm of someone who considered this outcome and came anyway: "i came anyway."

you look at the road. "that's a very lawyer thing to do," you say.

"probably," he agrees, pleasantly, and says nothing else about it.

the conversation drifts after that, comfortable and unhurried, moving through easy territory — the city, the neighbourhood, the particular character of hell's kitchen where he grew up, which he describes with the particular affection of someone who has a complicated relationship with a place and has made peace with the complexity. his ears are a constant quiet presence, tracking and adjusting, occasionally pricking sharply at something in the street before settling. he is easy to talk to in a way that sneaks up on you, the kind of easy that doesn't announce itself.

and then, somewhere in the middle of it, your brain does the thing it's been quietly constructing toward for the last several miles, and offers you, without warning, the image of dex. not the dex of this morning, performing unbotheredness at the kitchen counter with his reorganised cupboards and his upside-down book. an earlier one. the dex who had turned up at your door a month ago in the rain with a duffel bag and introduced himself with that smooth certain formality and said think of me as your personal therapy companion — grown-up edition, who had made himself so completely and immediately part of the fabric of your days that you had never once stopped to look at the seam.

you think: dex must have had a job.

the thought, once arrived, won't leave. of course he did. of course he had something before your door — a practice, a career, a whole professional existence he'd either set aside or simply walked away from to come and live in your apartment and fold your laundry and hover in your kitchen insisting you weren't to stress about dinner. matt is a lawyer with a practice, who does this in the gaps of a whole full life, who made a deliberate choice and still has everything he had before. and dex had shown up with a duffel bag and stayed, and you had taken it entirely for granted, the way you take for granted all the things that are simply always there.

you wonder, for the first time, what he left at the door.

"what does he do?" matt asks then, conversationally, as though he has been following the shape of your silence and has decided to hand it back to you. "dex. does he work, or—"

"i don't know," you say, and the admission sits in the car between you and feels considerably heavier than it should. "he hasn't mentioned it. i've never asked."

matt is quiet. he is very good at being quiet in a way that isn't empty.

"he's just always there," you say, and you hear it as you say it — the shape of it, what it holds and what it leaves out — and something quiet and unexpected opens up in your chest. not guilt exactly. something gentler than guilt and more complicated, a small retroactive ache for a version of dex you'd never thought to look for, sitting right alongside the warmth that's always there when you think about him, and you don't quite know what to do with the combination.

"you could ask him," matt says gently.

"yeah," you say.

"might be a good conversation to have."

"yeah," you say again, quieter, and stare at the road, and think about dex in the apartment at the end of it.

you are so far inside your own head by the time you park that you barely register the walk from the car to the building. matt follows you — easily, unhurriedly, his cane sweeping the familiar rhythm, his ears tracking the sounds of the street and the lobby with the quiet focus of someone building a new map — and you hold the door and he thanks you and you cross the lobby and hit the elevator button and stand there in the kind of silence that happens when someone is thinking very loudly.

matt stands beside you. he doesn't say anything. his ears are angled forward, attentive, and his tail does one slow patient arc behind him.

the elevator opens. you get in. you hit your floor on autopilot. the doors close.

"you've gone quiet," matt says, in the elevator.

"i'm fine," you say.

"your heart's been doing something interesting since about twelve blocks back," he says, not unkindly.

"that's a very personal observation."

"sorry," he says, and sounds mostly like he means it. "habit."

the elevator opens on your floor and you walk — still mostly on autopilot, keys already in your hand, the particular muscle memory of coming home engaged and operating independently of your higher functions — down the hallway toward your door. you are thinking about dex. you are thinking about what you're going to say when the door opens. you are thinking about the bone-shaped mat. you are thinking about what dex did before your door, and whether you should have asked sooner, and what matt is going to make of the paw-print bowls in the cold light of your actual kitchen, and whether dex is going to smell matt before you've even got the key in the lock, and whether —

"hey," matt says, from just behind you.

you stop.

you turn around. he's a pace back from you, cane stilled, head tilted very slightly. his ears are pricked high and sharp and forward, angled toward your door with an attention that is not casual. his nose has lifted, just fractionally, and the expression on his face is unreadable behind the sunglasses but his tail has gone very still.

"he's right on the other side of that door," matt says, quietly.

you look at your door. you look back at matt.

"i can smell him," matt says, in the same quiet, even tone. "clearly. he's close." a small pause, and then, with the careful delivery of someone choosing their words: "and he already knows we're here."

you stare at your door. behind it, the apartment is silent. perfectly, completely silent, in the way that is not the same as empty — the particular held quality of a silence that is listening.

you think about dex's nose. about what he's been doing since you left this morning, about the fresh air coming under the door, about whatever his extraordinary senses are telling him right now about the person standing in the hallway next to you.

you grip your keys.

"okay," you say, mostly to yourself.

"take your time," matt says, with the easy patience of someone who has genuinely got all day and would like you to know it.

you take a breath.

before you can even get the key in the lock the door swings open from the inside, and dex fills the frame.

he must have heard the elevator. or smelled you coming down the hallway. probably both — you've learned over the past month that very little happens within a reasonable radius of dex without dex knowing about it, and right now every one of those senses is working overtime. his green eyes go to you first, quick and assessing, and for one single second there is naked relief in them — you're home, you're back, you're here — and then they slide to matt, standing just behind your shoulder, and everything changes.

his whole body changes.

the relief closes off like a door swinging shut. his shoulders, already broad, seem to draw back and widen simultaneously. his ears, which had been tilted forward toward you, flatten at the tips in a way that has nothing to do with sadness and everything to do with something considerably more territorial. his tail stops moving entirely. he goes very, very still in the specific way of a cat who has assessed a situation and found it wanting, and his green eyes move over matt with a slow, deliberate attention that takes in everything — the height, the shoulders, the suit, the cane, and the ears, especially the ears, those tall sharp german shepherd ears that are angled with calm and alert interest back in dex's direction — and his jaw tightens.

you watch dex's nostrils flare, very slightly.

you watch something flicker in his expression that you can't entirely name — recognition, almost, the particular quality of someone who has encountered a scent before in a different context, a scent that is pulling at the edges of a memory he hasn't filed under this — and then it's gone, smoothed over by the much more immediate and pressing business of the stranger standing in his hallway.

matt, for his part, has gone quite still. not tense — nothing about matt reads as tense exactly — but still, in the considered way of someone who has just clocked something and is being thoughtful about his next move. his ears are forward. his tail has stilled to a slow, careful sway. his face is politely, serenely unreadable behind the sunglasses. he is angling himself very slightly away from dex in the manner of someone who understands body language and is doing their best to communicate that they are not a threat, which is either instinct or training and possibly both.

the two of them exist in the hallway for approximately three seconds of complete silence.

then dex reaches out, gets one hand around your arm with the easy proprietary certainty of someone who has never once questioned their right to do this, and pulls you firmly past the threshold and into his chest, wrapping an arm around your shoulders in a way that is warm and is also very clearly a statement of position. his chin comes to rest on the top of your head. his green eyes, over your hair, stay fixed on matt.

"who," dex says, in a voice that is extremely pleasant in the way that a warning can be pleasant, "is this."

you are pressed against dex's chest listening to his heart beat at a slightly elevated rate and staring at matt in the hallway and you are trying very hard to locate the right words in the correct order.

"and," dex continues, in the same pleasant and deeply dangerous tone, "where is the puppy."

matt's ears do a very small forward tilt. his tail, briefly, wags once. he schools it immediately.

you close your eyes for one single moment.

"benny," you say.

"don't call me that," dex says, automatic, tightening his arm.

"dex," you say. you feel him look down at you. you look up at him. his green eyes are doing the full complicated thing — possessive and worried and already deeply, instinctively suspicious of the man in the hallway — and you hold his gaze and say, as clearly and calmly as you can manage, "this is the puppy."

a pause.

"this," dex says, "is not a puppy."

"the listing said—"

"the listing," dex says, with a quiet and focused intensity, "said puppy."

"the listing said companion," matt offers, helpfully, from the hallway, in his low new york cadence, and dex's eyes cut to him with the speed and precision of something very well aimed.

"i don't remember asking you," dex says.

"dex—"

"his name is matthew," you say, pressing on before this can develop further, "matthew murdock, he's a demi-human, the listing — there was no photograph, there was no age, i didn't know, i genuinely did not know, and i know that this is—" you gesture between the three of you, which encompasses a significant amount of situation, "not what either of us were expecting but he had nowhere to go and i'd already signed the paperwork and—"

"you signed the paperwork," dex says.

"before i knew—"

"you signed paperwork for a man," dex says, with great precision, "to live in our apartment."

"it's a foster placement—"

"and brought him home," dex continues, looking back at matt with the expression of someone building a case, "in your car, on a saturday morning, without telling me that this was—" he stops. something moves across his face. he looks down at you again, then back at matt, then back at you, and his nostrils do the thing again, that brief barely-there flare, and his eyes narrow very slightly at the edges. "you smell like him," he says, quietly. "you've been in a car with him for — how long have you been in a car with him."

"twenty minutes," you say.

dex makes a sound that is not quite a growl and not quite a word and is somewhere between the two.

matt clears his throat, very gently. "i could wait in the hall," he offers.

"you could go back where you came from," dex says pleasantly.

"dex," you say.

"i'm just saying—"

"you're being rude."

"i'm being accurate," dex says, and looks down at you with his arm still firm across your shoulders and his tail still completely motionless and his green eyes doing the wide, slightly wounded thing underneath all the territorial posturing, and you can see it — the thing underneath — the same thing that had been there all week in the alphabetised mugs and the pre-dawn cleaning, the four layers of himself he'd worked into your hair and your clothes this morning before you left. he hadn't been preparing the apartment. he'd been bracing himself. "you said a puppy," he says, quieter, just to you. "you said a small blind puppy called matty."

"i know," you say.

"that," he says, with a slight incline of his head toward matt, "is not a small blind puppy called matty."

"no," you agree. "he's a tall blind lawyer called matthew."

dex stares at you.

"murdock," matt supplies, from the hallway, in the tone of someone who has decided that being helpful is the correct strategy and is committed to it. "matt's fine."

dex closes his eyes briefly. he opens them. he looks at matt standing in the hallway with his cane and his suit and his german shepherd ears angled with patient and attentive calm in dex's direction, tail doing its careful measured sway, and something moves through his expression that is deeply complex and ultimately lands somewhere that looks a great deal like a man confronting a situation he cannot fold or reorganise or clean into a manageable shape.

his arm stays around your shoulders. it tightens, fractionally.

"come in then," he says, in the voice of a man making the worst of a situation with as much dignity as he can locate, and steps back from the door, taking you with him.

matt steps inside.

his ears are high and forward, building the apartment in the quiet way he does everything, and his tail is doing its careful hopeful sway, and dex watches every inch of it with the focused green-eyed attention of a cat who has just been told, against all reasonable expectation, that the dog is staying.

you stand in the middle of your apartment between a criminal defence lawyer with german shepherd ears and a therapy cat who has been alphabetising things since before dawn, and you think about the paw-print bowls in the kitchen cupboard, and the bone-shaped mat, and the little engraved collar tag that says matty in a cheerful rounded font.

"so," you say brightly, to no one in particular.

neither of them says anything.

"so," you say again, into the silence, and then decide that standing in the middle of the apartment achieving nothing is not a viable long term strategy. "let me show you around, matt. it's not a big place but i want you to know where everything is."

matt smiles, easy and grateful, and shifts his cane. "i'd actually — if it's okay, it helps me more if someone walks me through it directly. holds my hand, shows me the space. builds the picture faster than the cane alone." he extends his free hand toward you, open, palm up, the simple uncomplicated gesture of someone making a practical request.

you take it. it's a perfectly natural thing to do. you do it without thinking about it.

the sound dex makes is very quiet and completely involuntary and communicates an enormous amount of information.

you look at him. he is standing with his arms folded across his chest and his tail doing a single sharp disciplined flick, and his green eyes are fixed on your hand in matt's with the focused intensity of someone doing advanced mathematics about something that is making them furious. his expression is pleasant. it is the pleasantness of a man who has decided to be civilised about this if it kills him, and it may kill him.

"kitchen's this way," you say, and lead matt forward.

the kitchen is small and well-organised — alphabetically, currently, in a way that matt obviously cannot see but dex clearly feels deserves acknowledgment. matt runs his free hand along the counter as you walk him through it, light and methodical, cataloguing edges and surfaces and distances with the quiet efficiency of someone for whom this is simply how you learn a space. he asks a few questions — where the mugs are, which way the tap turns — and you answer them and it is all perfectly practical and entirely reasonable.

"our kitchen," dex says, from the doorway, conversationally. "mine and hers. we have a system."

"it's alphabetical," you say, to matt.

"i didn't do it alphabetically," dex says. "i did it logically. the alphabet is logical."

matt makes a small sound that might be the beginning of a smile, very quickly retired. "makes sense," he says pleasantly.

"yes," dex says. "it does."

you show matt the bathroom next, walking him through the layout, his hand still in yours, and dex materialises in the hallway just outside the door with the air of someone on a self-appointed supervision detail. "bathroom," he says, before you can. "one bathroom. we share it."

"is there a schedule?" matt asks.

"there's an understanding," dex says.

"what's the understanding?"

"that it's our bathroom," dex says, with great clarity. "mine and hers. it works the way it works because there are two of us and we know each other's routines and adding a third—" he gestures, briefly, at the general concept of matt. "it's a small bathroom."

"i don't take long," matt says pleasantly.

"wonderful," dex says.

the living room goes similarly. you walk matt through it — the couch, the coffee table, the layout, the window and which direction it faces — and dex stations himself by the bookshelf and watches with his arms folded and his ears at the particular angle that means he is performing casual observation while actually cataloguing every single detail with absolute precision. his eyes track matt's free hand as it moves along the edge of the coffee table, along the back of the couch, building the room by touch, and something in dex's expression tightens in a way that isn't quite jealousy and isn't quite suspicion and is uncomfortably close to both.

"nice space," matt says, turning his head slowly, ears doing their quiet sweeping work.

"we think so," dex says. "it took time to get right. we've arranged it the way it works for us."

matt nods as though this is useful practical information. his tail does one brief controlled wag that he shuts down immediately, and you are fairly certain that underneath the sunglasses something is happening that dex would find deeply provoking.

you lead matt toward the bedroom and dex is ahead of you somehow — you genuinely did not see him move, he is profoundly unsettling when he chooses to be — standing in the doorway with his shoulder against the frame, looking for all the world like he just happened to end up there.

"and this," you say, "is the bedroom."

"our bedroom," dex says, immediately, with the emphasis of a man who prepared this and has been waiting to deploy it. "mine and hers." he pauses, and something shifts in his face — something that doesn't quite make it all the way to the surface — and he adds, quieter and with considerably less performance in it: "i don't always sleep in here. sometimes i'm on the couch. when it's — when i need the quiet. but it's still our room. that's not — it doesn't change the arrangement."

you look at him. he doesn't look back at you. his jaw is set and he's looking at a point somewhere past matt's shoulder, and you know better than to say anything about it, so you don't.

matt, for his part, has gone very still in the way he does when he's received a piece of information he's choosing to handle carefully. his ears have stilled. "i understand," he says, and says it simply, without any weight on it, which is exactly the right thing to say and you notice that he knew that.

"good," dex says, and the word comes out slightly less sharp than he intended.

you walk matt back to the living room and he settles on the far end of the couch, naturally and without fuss, cane leaning against the cushion beside him, hands in his lap. his tail curves around the base of the couch in a way that is polite about the territory it occupies. he takes up space comfortably without apology, and dex watches all of it from across the room with the focused, calculating attention of a cat who has decided something is wrong and cannot yet prove it.

"you can put your things somewhere if you like," you say to matt, looking at the duffel at his feet. "i can help you unpack, get you settled—" you reach for the zip and matt's hand closes over yours, very gently and very quickly, before you get there.

"no," he says, and then, immediately, recovering the ease: "no, thank you. i have a system for how things are packed. it helps me find things. easier if i do it myself." he smiles, warm and open, and settles the bag back against the side of the couch with a naturalness that is just slightly too practiced. just slightly too considered. "i really appreciate it though."

you straighten up. "of course," you say.

there is a small silence.

dex, from his position by the bookshelf, is looking at the duffel bag. not glancing at it — looking at it, with the fixed, narrow-eyed attention of someone who has noticed something and is deciding what to do about having noticed it. his tail is completely still. his head is tilted at the precise angle of someone running a very fast and very quiet calculation.

"system," he says, after a moment.

"sorry?" matt says.

"you have a system," dex says, pleasantly. "for how your bag is packed. that's interesting."

"i'm blind," matt says, equally pleasantly. "systems help."

"of course," dex says. "of course they do." a beat. "what's in it."

"dex," you say.

"friendly question," dex says, without looking at you. "we're getting to know each other. what's in the bag, matthew."

matt smiles. it is an excellent smile — open, easy, giving nothing whatsoever away. "clothes," he says. "toiletries. a couple of work files in braille." he tilts his head very slightly. "and a snickers, if anyone wants one."

"we're fine," dex says.

"i'll have one," you say, mostly to be contrary.

dex looks at you. you look back at him. matt produces a snickers from a front pocket of the bag — not the main compartment, you notice, the front pocket — and holds it out in your direction with the accuracy that still catches you slightly off guard, and you take it, and dex watches this transaction with an expression that has moved beyond territorial into something more focused and considerably more dangerous underneath the pleasantness.

the room settles into a silence that has a great deal of texture to it. you look between the two of them — matt, composed and unhurried on the far end of the couch, the duffel bag sitting against his calf with his hand resting on top of it with the ease of something positioned rather than placed — and dex, arms folded, green eyes doing their sharp and unrelenting work, ears just slightly forward in the way they go when he's listening very carefully while pretending to do something else entirely.

something is happening in this room that you don't have the frequency for.

you'd seen it in the hallway — the flicker in dex's expression when he'd first clocked matt, that quarter-second of something beneath the territorial displeasure. and matt, who had been calm and easy and open in the car for twenty minutes, had gone fractionally too still in the doorway when dex appeared. just for a moment. just long enough.

two people meeting for the first time who react like people who are remembering something.

you don't know what to do with that so you don't do anything with it.

"i'll put the kettle on," you say, into the silence.

"great," dex says, not looking at you.

matt's hand stays resting lightly on top of the duffel bag, and dex's eyes stay on the bag, and the room hums with something quiet and unresolved, and you go to put the kettle on and decide that however this afternoon goes, you are going to need the tea.

you come back from the kitchen with two mugs of tea and a glass of water for matt — you'd remembered, from the car, that he hadn't said anything about tea and you weren't sure — and set them on the coffee table and distribute them and the whole thing takes maybe forty-five seconds during which dex has apparently been busy.

"the bowls are in the kitchen," dex is saying, when you tune back in, in the pleasant conversational tone that means he is being absolutely deliberate about every word. "ceramic ones. pale blue. paw prints on the side." he pauses. "she picked them out herself. spent time on it."

matt has his hands around the glass of water and his expression is serene. "that was kind of her," he says.

"there's a bed as well," dex continues. "in the hall cupboard. cloud print. orthopedic." another pause, weighted and precise. "for a puppy. which is what she was expecting." he lets that sit for a moment like a stone dropped into still water. "there's also a mat."

"dex," you say.

"shaped like a bone," dex says.

"i'm aware of the mat," matt says pleasantly.

"just making sure you had the full picture," dex says. "given that you can't—" he gestures, vaguely and insufferably, at matt's sunglasses.

the silence that follows is very brief and very pointed.

"dex," you say, in a different voice this time. the voice that means you are not asking.

dex looks at you with the expression of a man who feels entirely justified and is choosing not to say so out loud, which somehow communicates it more clearly than if he had. his tail flicks once. his ears stay at their carefully neutral angle.

"i'm being informative," he says.

"you're being rude," you say. "again. stop."

something moves across his face — not quite chastened, not quite apologetic, something more complicated than either — and he looks away, jaw shifting, and does the thing where he picks up a mug that was already exactly where he wanted it and puts it somewhere slightly different for no reason, just to have something to do with his hands.

matt, for his part, takes a sip of water and says nothing, which is either very mature or very strategic and possibly both.

the trouble is that dex's idea of stopping is relative.

he doesn't mention the bowls again. what he does instead is migrate, gradually and with apparent casualness, from the bookshelf to the armchair to, eventually, the couch — not the far end where matt is, but the middle cushion, which puts him considerably closer to you than he started, and he sits there with his tea and his carefully neutral expression and his tail doing its slow sway, and every few minutes he does something small and deliberate. his arm along the back of the couch behind your shoulders. his knee pressing lightly into yours. his fingers finding your elbow when you reach for your mug, a brief touch that has no practical purpose and is entirely about the fact that matt's nose is approximately fifteen feet away and fully operational.

"you've been in the city long?" matt asks, at some point, of both of you, the way someone does when they're navigating a conversation with more than one person and being polite about the navigation.

"she has," dex says, before you can answer. "i've been here a month." a beat. "we've been here a month. together. it's been good. we have routines." he says routines the way someone else might say roots. the way someone might say mine.

"dex makes dinner," you say, in the spirit of contributing something normal to the conversation.

"every night," dex confirms, immediately. "i know what she likes. i know what she needs." he looks at matt with the open pleasant expression that is doing the most work of anything in the room. "she has anxiety. that's why i'm here. i know her tells. i know when she needs space and when she doesn't and i know—" he pauses, and something shifts in it, something that is less performance and more just true, "— i know how to help. it took time to learn that. it's not something you can just—" another pause. "it's not transferable."

matt turns his glass between his palms. his ears are forward. his tail has stilled. "nobody's trying to transfer anything," he says, gently.

"i know that," dex says.

"do you?" matt says, and says it without any edge at all, which makes it land considerably harder than if he'd sharpened it.

dex looks at him. it is a long look, and a complicated one, and for a moment the pleasantness drops away entirely and they are just two people regarding each other across a coffee table with the focused attention of two people who are each, in their own way, very good at reading rooms and finding them wanting.

you sit between them and eat your snickers.

"i'm just saying," dex says, eventually, and picks up his tea.

"i know," matt says.

and then dex's hand finds yours on the couch cushion between you — not dramatically, not as a statement, just quietly, his fingers closing over yours with the easy certainty of someone who has done this a hundred times and will do it a hundred more — and he holds on, and looks at matt, and matt cannot see the gesture but his nose tells him everything the gesture contains and his ears do one small, almost imperceptible tilt.

his tail wags, once, very gently.

"you have a nice home," matt says, to you specifically, his voice warm and genuine and directed with that unnerving accuracy at the place where you're sitting. "i mean that. it feels like somewhere that's been taken care of."

you look around the apartment — the alphabetised kitchen, the gleaming surfaces, the carefully arranged living room — and then down at dex's hand over yours, and you feel something sit warmly and sadly and complicatedly in your chest all at once.

"yeah," you say quietly. "it has been."

dex's fingers tighten, very slightly, around yours.

he doesn't say anything.

for approximately forty-five seconds, nothing in the room is performing anything.

and then matt sets his water glass down and his ears do their small adjusting sweep and he says, conversationally, "so. the bone-shaped mat. where exactly did you end up putting it?"

"hall cupboard," dex says immediately, with tremendous feeling, and the room cracks open with something that is almost, almost, the beginning of a normal afternoon.

the first few days are fine. mostly fine. the kind of fine that requires some active maintenance but holds together reasonably well on the surface.

matt is easy to have around in the practical sense — he's tidy, he's quiet, he doesn't take up more space than he needs to, and he has the particular self-sufficiency of someone who has been navigating the world alone for a long time and is very good at it. he learns the apartment quickly, the way he'd learned the car, building it in layers — the distances between furniture, the sounds the pipes make, the exact number of steps from the couch to the kitchen doorway. within two days he's moving through the space with a confidence that makes you forget, occasionally, and then remember, and feel briefly guilty for forgetting.

dex watches all of this with the focused, unblinking attention of a cat who has decided something is wrong and is waiting patiently for the evidence to present itself.

they are polite to each other. elaborately, architecturally polite, the kind of politeness that takes considerable effort to construct and maintain and communicates, underneath, a great deal of information that neither of them is saying out loud. matt asks dex about dinner with genuine interest and dex answers him with genuine pleasantness and you sit between them at the kitchen table and eat and think about how a room can be completely quiet and completely full of noise at exactly the same time.

it's on the third night that it starts.

you're most of the way asleep when you hear it — the soft, careful sound of the front door, opened slowly and closed with the deliberate quiet of someone who doesn't want to be heard doing it. you lie there for a moment, blinking at the ceiling, processing. you think about getting up. you decide it's probably nothing — matt going for air, maybe, or dex taking himself to the couch when the noise in his head gets too loud. you've learned not to ask about the couch. it's not your question to push.

you go back to sleep.

the second night, you hear voices.

not loud — never loud, nothing that would wake a normal person, but you're a light sleeper and the apartment isn't big and at two in the morning the quality of silence is different enough that even the suggestion of sound registers. two voices, very low, with the particular compressed tension of people who are arguing while trying not to argue. you can't make out words. you lie there and listen to the shape of it — the rhythm of it, the way it rises slightly and then pulls back, controlled, and then rises again — and then it stops, completely, and the apartment is silent.

you get up.

the living room is empty. the kitchen is empty. the hallway is empty. dex's blanket is on the couch in the particular arrangement that means he's been lying there, but he isn't there now. matt's door — you'd given him the small room you used for storage, cleared out in an afternoon while dex supervised with the expression of someone watching something he disapproves of and is being mature about — is closed. no light under it.

you stand in the hallway in the dark and listen.

nothing.

you go back to bed and lie there for a while looking at the ceiling.

the third night is the glass.

you hear it clearly — the sharp, distinct sound of something breaking, glass on a hard floor, and you're up and out of bed before you're fully awake, pulling the door open, padding barefoot into the hallway with your heart doing something quick and unpleasant in your chest.

the kitchen light is off. the living room is empty. you turn on the kitchen light and stand in the doorway and look at the floor.

nothing. not a shard, not a glint, not a single piece of anything that shouldn't be there. every glass in the kitchen is exactly where it was, sitting in its alphabetically organised cupboard — the door is slightly open, you can see them — whole and undisturbed.

you stand there for a long moment.

you check the hallway. you check the bathroom. you stand outside matt's door and listen and hear nothing and then stand outside the living room and look at the couch and dex's blanket is there but dex isn't, and every surface in the apartment is exactly as it was, nothing moved, nothing broken, nothing out of place.

you go back to bed.

in the morning dex makes breakfast with the focused pleasantness of someone who slept perfectly well and has nothing to report, and matt sits at the kitchen table with his hands around a mug of coffee and his ears in their neutral forward position and his tail doing its careful sway, and neither of them says a word, and you sit between them and eat your toast and decide, for now, not to ask.

you glance at the clock, figuring matt's out for his lawyer business—door clicked shut ten minutes back, his ears perked like always before he bolts into the street. apartment sits quiet now, empty vibe settling in until dex's soft steps trail you toward the bedroom. those vivid green eyes lock on yours, his grin splitting wide, teeth glinting as his tail sways in lazy arcs—pure pleasure lighting his face at the chance to finally touch you without interruption.

he steps close as you turn, body heat radiating, and you meet him halfway. lips brush soft at first, a gentle press that deepens quick—your tongue slips past his teeth, tasting the warm salt of him, drawing a low rumble from his chest. his hands slide up your sides, palms warm and careful, thumbs tracing slow circles over your ribs through fabric. 'been dying for this,' he murmurs against your mouth, voice gravel-thick with want, nipping your lower lip before sucking it tender.

you melt into the kiss, fingers threading through his hair, tugging light to angle his head better. dex groans soft, a needy whine threading the sound, his body pressing flush—chest to chest, hips aligning so you feel his cock hardening against your stomach. soft touches turn insistent but still gentle; his fingers dip under your shirt hem, skimming bare skin, sending shivers racing. he breaks the kiss to trail his lips down your jaw, sucking marks into your neck—wet pops and sighs filling the air as he marks you slow, deliberate.

'more,' you breathe, hands shoving his shirt up and off, exposing the hard planes of his chest. dex's hands cup your face, pulling you back for another kiss, tongues tangling sloppy now, saliva slicking chins. he walks you backward to the bed, easing you down gently, body following to hover above.

his lips wander lower, kissing a path down your throat, collarbone, then latching onto your chest. teeth scrape over the swell of one tit, tugging your shirt aside to bare skin—sucking hard enough to bruise, tongue swirling the pebbled nipple in lazy circles. 'so perfect,' he whispers, voice muffled as he switches sides, marking up your chest with blooming purple bites, hickeys dotting the curves. each suck pulls a gasp from you, your fingers clenching in his hair, hips rocking up instinctive.

dex's grin flashes again, green eyes dark with hunger as he peels your pants down slow, kissing every inch of exposed thigh. 'gonna taste you proper,' he promises, settling between your legs, shoulders nudging thighs wide. his breath ghosts hot over your cunt, folds already slick and swollen, and he dives in soft—tongue flat and broad, lapping from entrance to clit in one unhurried stroke. the wet drag pulls a whine from your throat, body trembling as he settles into a slow rhythm.

he eats you out like it's worship—tongue circling your clit gently, dipping inside to curl against walls, tasting your arousal with deep hums that vibrate straight through you. fingers join soft, one thick digit sliding in easy, pumping languid while his mouth suctions light on the nub. obscene slurps fill the room, mixed with your breathy mewls and his pleased growls—'fuck, you taste so good, dripping for me.' he adds a second finger, scissoring slow, tongue flicking endless as your hips buck, chasing the build.

front door creaks open down the hall—matt's back too soon, boots thudding heavy on the floor, nose likely twitching at the thick scent of sex wafting out. dex pauses a beat, ears flicking, but his grin only widens against your thigh. 'don't stop,' you whine, hands pushing his head back down, and he obeys eager—tongue plunging deeper, fingers curling to hit that spot relentlessly but soft, drawing out your pleasure in waves.

matt's steps falter near the bedroom door, low growl rumbling through the wood, his huff audible as he scents everything—the musk of your pussy, dex's precum-heavy arousal. his back is pressed against the bedroom wall, tail a low thump as he listen to the slick sounds that he is coaxing out of you, but dex ignores it all, lost in you. his free hand strokes your inner thigh softly, thumb rubbing soothing circles while his mouth works magic—sucking your clit slow, tongue lashing tender until you're mewling loud, thighs quivering around his head.

your orgasm builds lazy under his patient assault, cresting soft and shattering—your cry pitches high, walls clenching his fingers as you gush over his tongue. dex laps it all, humming approval, not stopping until you're twitching oversensitive. 'good girl,' he purrs, kissing your pussy gently before crawling up, lips shiny with your juices. another deep kiss shares the taste, his cock—thick, and pretty, with veins pulsing along the shaft. you stroke it firm, thumb circling the head, and he bucks up with a strangled whine, hips jerking, tail thrashing against the mattress.

you pull him closer, soft touches roaming his back, nails dragging light as lips meet again—kissing messy, full of tongue and teeth. dex's hands roam your marked chest, pinching nipples tender, drawing gasps into his mouth. 'need you now,' he whines, voice breaking needy, green eyes pleading. you nod, legs wrapping his waist, and he shifts—hands gripping your thighs, folding you into the mating press, knees pinned to your chest, pussy splayed wide and dripping.

his cockhead teases your folds, before he thrusts in slow—inch by stretching inch burying deep, bottoming out with a wet squelch. you both moan loud—your mewl high and broken, his growl feral rumbling through his chest.

'fuck, so tight,' dex sobs, forehead to yours, green eyes locked intense as hips piston relentless. each plunge batters your cervix, cock dragging against your g-spot ruthless, pussy gushing around him—splattering juices on his thighs with lewd slaps. your whines fill the apartment, mewls pitching desperate—'dex, yes, harder!'—nails raking his shoulders, urging deeper. he marks your chest more, teeth sinking into soft flesh above your heart, sucking bruises while pounding frantic.

matt's stinks of arousal, taking deep smells of your scent, head tilted to listen to every cry and whine you let out, his hand squeezing his cock to each thrust of dex’s hips—sick fucking freak.

'mine, gonna fill you,' he groans, voice cracking with devotion, leaning in for a sloppy kiss—tongues battling wet as an orgasm rips through you. walls spasm wild, milking him as you wail, body locked in the press shaking.

he lets out a cry as hot cum erupts in thick ropes, flooding your tight cunt, cum squirting with each sloppy thrust of dex's hips. dex collapses half onto you, panting ragged into your neck, soft kisses peppering sweat-slick skin. 'staying forever,' he murmurs tenderly, hands stroking your sides gently, even knotted deep.

matt slips away, walking to the front door to slam it, acting as if he just came inside, announcing himself with a shout, “i’m back!”

dex just nuzzles closer, grin pleased and sated, utterly unrepentant as you panic underneath him.

it's about a week in when it happens.

you're on the couch with your feet tucked under you, phone in hand, and matt is at the kitchen table with a pile of papers in braille that he's been working through for the past hour, fingers moving across the pages with a speed that you find quietly extraordinary every time you notice it. dex is in the kitchen making something that smells like it's going to be very good, and the apartment has settled into the particular comfortable rhythm of a saturday afternoon that has nowhere to be.

"matty," you say, without looking up from your phone, "do you want tea?"

the kitchen goes very quiet.

not the quiet of nothing happening. the quiet of something stopping.

you look up. matt has gone still at the kitchen table, papers under his fingers, head tilted very slightly, and there is something in the corner of his mouth that is not quite a smile but is adjacent to one. his ears have done a small involuntary forward tilt.

from the kitchen, nothing. and then the sound of a spoon being set down on the counter with a care that is very deliberate and very controlled.

dex appears in the kitchen doorway.

he looks at matt. he looks at you. he looks back at matt, at the almost-smile at the corner of matt's mouth, at the ears that are still slightly more forward than they were thirty seconds ago, and something happens in dex's expression that moves through several stages very quickly — confusion, recognition, displeasure, and then something beneath all of those that is considerably more complicated and considerably less nameable.

"what did you call him," dex says.

"matty," you say, and then hear it, hear the way it sounds out loud in the apartment, and look at matt, who is now fully and helplessly smiling at the papers in front of him in a way he is doing his absolute best to contain. "it's — i just said it, i didn't—"

"matty," dex repeats, and the word comes out like he's tasting something he didn't order and finding it deeply offensive.

"it just came out," you say.

"you call me benny," dex says, "and i hate it. i have told you repeatedly that i hate it." he points at matt, briefly, with one precise finger. "you've called him matty inside of a week."

"benny is—"

"i hate benny," dex says.

"you always come when i say it," you point out.

"that is a reflexive response and does not indicate—" he stops. his ears are doing the flat-tipped thing. his tail has gone to its slow ominous sway. he looks at matt again, who has composed himself back to neutral with some effort and is sitting with his hands flat on the papers and his face arranged into an expression of peaceful non-involvement. "you think that's funny," dex says.

"i'm not laughing," matt says.

"you were," dex says.

"i was smiling," matt says. "there's a distinction."

"there really isn't," dex says.

you set your phone down and pull your feet off the cushion and sit up properly and look at dex in the kitchen doorway — the flat ears, the still tail, the green eyes doing their complicated work — and you know, because you have been learning him for a month, that the thing underneath the territorial performance is not actually about the name. it is about the way a name sounds when someone says it without thinking. the way matty had come out of your mouth the same way dex does — easy, automatic, already fitted into the shape of your daily life without you noticing it get there.

dex has noticed.

"dex," you say, gently.

"i'm fine," he says.

"come sit down," you say.

"i'm making dinner."

"it's three in the afternoon," you say.

"i'm preparing dinner," he says, with dignity, and turns back to the kitchen, and you listen to him pick the spoon back up and resume whatever he'd been doing, and the rhythm of it is just slightly more forceful than it was before.

matt turns his face toward you from across the room, and his ears are forward and his expression is gentle and he doesn't say anything, which is the correct response, which he knew without being told.

"matty," you say, quietly, just to him.

his tail wags. he can't help it. it does one full, warm, involuntary arc.

from the kitchen, dex says nothing, which means he heard everything, which means he heard the tail too.

you pick your phone back up.

the apartment settles back into its saturday afternoon quiet, and from the kitchen comes the sound of dinner being prepared at three in the afternoon with great feeling, and you sit on the couch and think about odd sounds in the night and broken glass that wasn't there and two people who are elaborately, architecturally polite in the way of people who already know each other, and you look at the ceiling, and you think.

it's late afternoon by the time dex decides he's done being in the kitchen.

you hear him finish — the particular sequence of sounds that means everything is covered and the stove is off and the kitchen has been left in the precise condition he requires — and then his footsteps in the hallway, and then he appears in the bedroom doorway and looks at you on the bed with your book and says nothing, just takes in the scene with his green eyes and his slightly less stormy expression, and then crosses the room and gets on the bed behind you with the easy certainty of someone who has decided this is happening.

he's done this before. it's become, without any formal discussion, a thing that happens — you reading, dex arranging himself behind you, long legs on either side of yours, your back against his chest, his chin finding the top of your head or the curve of your shoulder depending on his mood. he runs warm. he always has. and he reads over your shoulder with a focus that would be slightly unnerving if you weren't used to it, occasionally making small sounds of opinion about whatever you're reading that you've never asked for and have come to find quietly indispensable.

he settles around you now — one arm across your waist, the other braced against the headboard — and his tail finds its comfortable place and his chin drops to your shoulder and you feel the tension of the afternoon begin to drain out of him by degrees, slow and reluctant, the way it always does when you're close enough.

"better?" you say.

"i was fine before," he says.

"mm," you say, and turn a page.

he reads over your shoulder. you can feel the movement of his eyes, the occasional almost-imperceptible shift of his chin when he reaches the bottom of a page before you do. he'd never admit to that either. the music you'd put on earlier is still going — something soft, something with a low easy melody that fills the room without demanding anything — and the late afternoon light is coming through the curtains at the particular golden angle that makes the apartment feel like somewhere outside of time, and for a few minutes everything is genuinely, quietly fine.

and then matt appears in the doorway.

he doesn't knock — he'd heard you, presumably, or smelled the room, or both, and had come down the hall and stopped in the open doorway with his cane and his careful face and his ears angled forward in the direction of the music. "sorry," he says, immediately, accurately locating both of you with the ease that still catches you slightly off guard. "i heard the music. i can leave."

"you don't have to—" you start.

dex's arm across your waist tightens. not dramatically. just enough.

"there's a living room," dex says, pleasantly.

"the speaker's in here," you say, to matt. "you can come in if you want. it's fine."

matt considers this for a moment — you watch his ears do their small assessing work — and then he comes in, which is the correct call because it is his home too, at least temporarily, and dex knows that, and the slight sound dex makes communicates that he knows that and finds it deeply inconvenient.

matt leaves his cane by the bedroom door.

you notice because it's the first time you've seen him without it since he arrived, and there's something different about him without it — not lesser, nothing like that, just different, more settled somehow, like a tell he's put down because he doesn't need it in a space he's already mapped completely. he moves to his spot by the window without any hesitation whatsoever, not a fingertip on the wall, not a pause to orient himself, just crosses the room and sits down with the fluid unhurried ease of someone who knows exactly where everything is and has done for days.

dex notices too.

you feel it — the slight shift in his chest against your back, the quality of his attention changing, sharpening, the way it does when something has confirmed a thought he'd already been having. his tail, which had been doing its slow claiming sway, stills for just a moment and then resumes, more deliberately.

matt settles against the wall and tilts his head back toward the music and his ears go soft and forward and his tail does its content slow sweep and he looks, to all appearances, like a man who is simply enjoying a quiet saturday afternoon.

dex puts his lips to your neck.

it's soft. unhurried. just a press of his mouth to the curve where your neck meets your shoulder, warm and deliberate, and his arm pulls you closer into his chest at the same time, a seamless simultaneous movement that has the practiced quality of something that knows exactly what it's doing. his tail shifts, finding your ankle, curling around it with a gentle and absolute certainty.

you keep your eyes on your book.

you are not fooled for a single second.

you know exactly what he's doing — the same thing he'd done after the date, working his presence back into your skin with methodical patience, except that this time there's an audience and he knows there's an audience and the audience has a nose that is, if anything, more sophisticated than dex's own. dex knows that too. that's rather the point.

he presses another kiss to your neck, slightly higher. his arm adjusts around your waist, drawing you more firmly into him. his chin comes to rest against your temple and he exhales slowly, warm and content, the picture of a creature entirely at home.

across the room, matt's ear twitches.

just the one. just slightly. and then it returns to its forward position and his face stays exactly as it was — peaceful, tilted toward the music, giving nothing — except that the very corner of his mouth has done the thing, the barely-there thing, the suggestion of something he has decided not to let become anything.

"you're doing it again," you say to dex, quietly.

"i'm not doing anything," he says, against your temple.

"dex."

"i'm comfortable," he says. "i'm allowed to be comfortable."

"you're comfortable very loudly," you say.

his tail tightens fractionally around your ankle. he says nothing. he turns your page — the right page this time, you were done — and resettles his chin and presses one more soft, unhurried kiss just below your ear with the absolute serenity of someone who has no agenda whatsoever.

on the floor by the window, matt clears his throat very gently.

dex's arm tightens around your waist.

"something wrong, matthew?" dex says, pleasantly, into your hair.

"not a thing," matt says, with equal pleasantness, his eyes — behind the sunglasses, toward the ceiling — utterly, serenely unbothered. his tail does one slow easy arc. "great music."

"she has good taste," dex says.

"she does," matt agrees.

you sit between them with your book open and dex wrapped around you like a very determined proof of ownership and matt on your floor being extraordinarily calm about the entire situation, and you think about saying something — about addressing it, naming it, pointing out that you are a person and not a territory and that both of them are being faintly ridiculous — and then dex's lips find your neck again, soft and warm and completely without shame, and his tail pulls your ankle gently toward him, and you decide that the book is very good actually and you're going to keep reading it.

matt's ear twitches again.

he says nothing. he is a lawyer. he is very good at saying nothing and meaning a great deal by it.

dex knows this. his mouth curves against your neck, and it isn't quite a smile and it isn't quite a warning and it is very specifically meant for an audience of one who can't technically see it and absolutely knows it's there.

you turn a page.

the music plays.

the light goes golden through the curtains and the afternoon goes nowhere in particular, and the room holds all three of you in its complicated equilibrium, and nobody says anything about any of it, and that is somehow the loudest the apartment has ever been.

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