fics & flagrant self indulgence

“Think fast.”

Jordy doesn’t know, but you sense his right hook sailing towards your shoulder before the motion has even calibrated through the air. You plunge downwards on bouncing feet, calf muscles springing your body out of reach. 

“How about you hit fast?” you quip back. 

You feint a sluggish punch towards his chest, and his dodge leads him right into the real hit: a nasty dig to the ribs on his other side, dampened by the plush boxing gloves on your fists, but still solid enough to make him stumble. 

Jordy lets out a wheezing laugh, the air knocked a little loose. You can’t help but let out a chuckle of your own, watching him. Jordy’s all spry and good nature, his muscles toned in a way built off practical strength rather than showing off. He makes the late-night closing shifts at Fogwell’s gym a little more fun. 

“Touché,” Jordy declares. “Anyone ever tell you how scary quick you are on your feet?”

“Only you,” you counter, still bouncing on the balls of your feet, “a million times.”

Jordy sends out another jab.

“It’s uncanny. Sure you weren’t bitten by a radioactive spider?”

You dance out of the way with a chuckle. 

“Maybe you just need to shape up.”

“Very funny.”

Jordy had been the one to show you the ropes at Fogwell’s upon your hesitant return to New York City years ago. The gym is a bit of a dive, catering to local boxers, but it’s conveniently located just a few blocks away from your apartment. The clientele could get brusque, but they were generally polite, more focused on preparing for matches to take too much of a note of you. It wasn’t a glamorous setup, but you had to admit it was nice to get back into the sports business, even if it looked less like sorting tennis balls and more like wiping down sweaty mats and mopping up protein powder spills. Plus, you also got free access to the ring after hours, which you’d taken full advantage of. These dusky evenings with the main overhead lights turned off, the ring is lit up in the glow of the city beyond the fogged glass windows, making every shadow soft and enrobing. 

“Okay, no funny business,” Jordy affirms, bouncing on the balls of his feet. 

There’s a hint of frustration undercutting his roguish jabs, verbal and physical, and you can’t help but feel a little sorry for him. The next time you feel that familiar tingle telling you to dance out of the way, but this time, you push it down, forcing your body to stay in place. Jordy’s fist strikes your arm good and hard, and you let out the most naturalistic oomph of surprise you can, adding in a stumble for good measure. 

“Nice one,” you tell him, and Jordy pumps his fist in the air with mock triumph.

“I knew you had a blunder in you. Just had to wait for the right moment. Let’s call it.”

Jordy begins fiddling with the claps of his gloves and you follow suit. First you shuck off your gloves, and then the wraps unspool from your sweaty palms into a long ribbon you catch before they can flutter to the floor. As soon as your hands are free of the confines you stretch your fingers out. Your knuckles let out a satisfying pop.  

“Want to grab a drink?” Jordy proposes. “I wish Josie’s would reopen. It’s been over a year since…”

He trails off. You both know why Josie’s had had its doors shut for a year. The massacre that shook Hell’s Kitchen to its core. You had even planned of going there that night, but your instincts had frozen you in place half a block away, telling you to take your nightcap from the fridge instead. 

“I think I’m going to turn in for the night,” you tell Jordy. “But good sparring. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

You head out the door with a wave. As you step out into the evening, the darkness presses in. The rush of the city is a low throb that animates the air around you as you walk back to your apartment. Living in New York City, you’ve always done your best to be wary, but the city, as much as you love it, has developed an even greater propensity for chaos in the past few years. Wilson Fisk has been elected as fucking mayor . Considering the incident you witnessed all those years ago, you haven't been able to get through a ride on the subway or a trip to the bodega on the corner without your reflex senses spiking. 

It happens as you turn the corner onto your block. Out of the blue, your reflex senses crackle to life, wrenching you to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk. Surely, it’s just a spike of adrenaline left over from your sparring match. You glance to your right, left. Sweep the windows in your vicinity. Squint at the places where the shadows are the darkest of all. Nothing. No armed hooligans, no bullish authority figures, not even a stray cat. But your solitary situation does little to comfort you, in fact, it only puts you more on edge. 

You’re overwhelmed with the uncanny inkling that someone is watching you, looming from some angle that’s impossible to place. It’s that same feeling you got that fateful night at Josie’s all over again. And based on what happened then, you know that the best possible option is to get home as fast as possible. 

The eerie feeling dissipates slowly as you enter your apartment, slip out of your clothes, and step into the shower. The scalding hot water sloughs the remains of the day away, your muscles finally reaching a state of uneasy relaxation beneath the scalding blast. You wince slightly as you lather shower gel against your skin and, looking down, you see a bruise forming from Jordy’s hit. Good, you think to yourself. You’ve been getting too comfortable around him, getting a little too open with using your powers. You need to remind yourself of your own fallibility. 

The paranoia and exhaustion have taken a physical toll on you, you think as you turn off the water and wrap yourself up in a towel to dry off. You look at your smeary visage through the fogged-up mirror above your sink and think, who is this person looking back at me? There’s something sunken in her eyes, bearing heavy luggage in violet hues. You’ve tried to wrangle all your nervous energy into a regiment to get stronger. Sparring sessions after the closing shift at Fogwell’s, pumping weights, long and punishing runs. The evidence of that has written itself all over your body too: muscle definition where it wasn’t before, a more pronounced structure in your jawline and cheeks, the purpling bruise on your arm just another added to a longstanding collection. 

You exit the bathroom with a sigh and throw on a comfy set of pajamas– old t-shirt, cotton panties, and a set of old athletic shorts. You’re just about to swan dive into your waiting bed when suddenly every nerve in your body turns to ice, freezing you in place. 

You feel it before you can make sense of it, you always do. A tugging sensation right between your ribs that makes your heart seize up, your instincts telling you that you aren’t alone in your apartment. You remain in place just beyond the doorway to your bedroom, straining for a sign that it isn’t just your paranoia flaring up again from your neighbors moving furniture around. 

Then, after a few agonizing seconds hearing nothing but the sound of your heart hammering, you hear the gentle tmp against a floorboard. A footstep from the kitchen. 

You should call the police. Make a mad dash for the fire escape. Barrel into the kitchen with fists flying and the element of surprise on your side. But you don’t do any of those things. 

Wait, your instincts tell you.

Next you hear the woody creak of a drawer opening from the kitchen, then closing. It happens a handful of times, open shut, open shut, until it pauses. Listening close, you pick up a faint metallic clanging. Are they seriously rifling through your silverware drawer? Another pause, and this time your apartment falls into dead silence, so quiet you swear you can hear the blood pushing through your veins. And then-

The faintest streak of a whistle, and your hand whips forward before you can process the motion. Shoulder trust, forearm curve, palm open, fingers curl. Snatching. You blink down at the object in your hand, sleek, metallic, tined, bought from a thrift store for fifty cents. The fork with the floral decal on the handle that you used to eat your pasta for dinner last night. An everyday object so small and mundane it’s like it’s been gently handed to you and not whipped through your bedroom doorway at a dizzying number of miles per hour. 

It might have been ten years since you’ve seen him last, but you know exactly who’s standing in your kitchen. 

“You aren’t going to hit me,” you say, and step out into the light. 

“I wasn’t trying to,” his voice replies. 

Sure enough, it’s the mysterious agent you saw all those years ago. The red devil suit is a bygone memory for the both of you. He wears a simple dark ensemble, shoes built for running, a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. His form has filled out a bit, a greater bulk in his torso than before, but that self-assured smirk and piercing gaze are exactly as you remember. Even if you still don’t know his name, you could recognize that jawline anywhere, feel it out from a lineup in the dark with your hands. 

After years of only seeing his face in clouded memories and lascivious daydreams, it’s impossible to reconcile the fact that he's really here and really real and standing just a few feet away from you. You can actually see the upper half of his face without that stupid mask in the way. Short cropped, dusky blond hair. Eyes somewhere between warm brown and bottle green. Sometimes, when the nights got especially lonely, you had attempted to picture different possibilities of what the agent could look like. Did he have blue eyes or brown? Light or dark hair? A long or short cut? All of the combinations you’d speculated on, and the one in front of you suddenly feels so right, so obvious, you can’t believe you’d ever pictured otherwise.

The two of you just stare at each other for a long time, the air between you growing so thick with anticipation you can almost physically feel it weighing down your tongue. What the hell do you say to the person who, the last time you saw them, threatened to kill you via paper weight to the cranium, grinded against you until you nearly came on your couch, and told you you were his soulmate moments before insisting you had to uproot your entire life and never see him again?

“You look like shit.” That’s what you say, because he does. Fresh stitches threaten to peel open on his forehead, and there’s bruising around his eyes. A scar crags through his right cheek. His lips are cracked and healed and cracked again, threatening to burst with blood as he breaks into a smile at your remark.

“It’s nice to see you again,” he says.

“What-? Why-?” All the question words you learned in English class spin out in front of you. You latch onto the outlier. “How did you find me?”

Instead of answering, the agent looks at you. You don’t know how to feel about the intensity of his gaze scanning the whole length of your body, as chronicling your every inch from head to toe. It’s evaluative, but not cold enough to be solely calculating either. Less like he’s taking notes of all your exposed arteries and more like he’s taking a photocopy of your visage to file away into an archive. You don’t know whether to feel flattered or uneasy. 

“Tell me right now,” you demand, “or… I’ll… I’ll scream.”

It’s an empty threat, and you both know it. You even find yourself brandishing that damned fork like a dagger, even though it’s useless as a weapon in your hands. 

“I’m gonna sound like a freak…” he insists. 

“Too late for that, agent.”

He prickles at your words, shaking his head, “Okay, fine. I caught you in my scope outside of Josie’s a year ago. I figured you were still in the neighborhood now and followed you home.”

Each new detail lands like a bombshell, a calamity that’s way too much to process at once. 

Josie’s. A year ago. The timeline clicks into place, and your eyes widen. 

“That was you ? You shot that lawyer?”

“Wha…?” the agent trails off, taken aback. “Yeah, I got life at Rikers. You don’t read the news?”

“Hell no, not with the state the city’s in.” Running the gamut from potential alien invasion to petty burglaries, every news cycle feels less like a way to stay informed than a wave of fresh hell pinning you against the ocean floor. Call it willful ignorance or call it coping, but drowning out as much of it as possible was the only way you could get by. “Fucking hell.”

You might have escaped your interaction with the agent unharmed, but you also know only a very coincidental set of circumstances allowed that to happen. The violence he’s capable of when facing off against someone who can’t dodge what he throws their way– You’d caught flashes of gossip as the neighborhood reeled in the aftermath of that night. Apparently Daredevil had been there, the real Daredevil, who wasn’t the agent in that costume. No, now you know he was on the other side of that fight. The bad guy.  

No mercy, they’d whispered. 

“I heard he killed a woman by ricocheting a napkin holder into her skull,” Jordy told you. 

That detail had set the hairs on your neck standing on end, too familiar for comfort. Maybe deep down you knew, knew it could be nobody else who could wreck such a specific kind of damage. You’d smothered the inkling as best as you could, because skulking through the depths of your consciousness, it wasn’t fear or rage you felt upon sensing that possibility, but hope. 

“If you got life at Rikers,” you say, “then what are you doing in my kitchen?”

“It’s…” The agent lets out a sigh so deep and bedraggled you can feel it resonate in your bones. “It’s a long story.”

A story you can intuit, from the stoop of his shoulders and taut grimace, you will not be hearing tonight. 

“So what,” you say, “Fisk didn’t want you as his little lapdog anymore?”

The agent scoffs, a pitching, ugly sound dripping with disgust. 

“I’m not on his side anymore.”

“Then I’m guessing you’re not here to finish me off at his request.”

The agent shakes his head. 

“Then what are you doing here?” you ask. 

If he isn’t here to kill you… Now you’re thinking back to the other things you did that night. How he kissed you so hard you could feel the echo of it for days afterward, slouching through the night on a Greyhound bus to New Jersey and fighting off visions of what might have come next in other circumstances. If you’d had the time to take off that suit, to explore him properly… You’d tried training those thoughts out of yourself in the years that followed, and you’d almost convinced yourself that you’d succeeded. 

Almost . 

“I…” he looks down at the ground. “You were the only person I could think of who might not turn me away.”

Right, with him being a wanted fugitive of the law. You nibble at your lower lip, considering him as he stands there, awaiting your reaction. You should turn him away. You should’ve called the police back when you first heard him rifling around your kitchen. You should at the very least cuss him out for implicating you in his jailbreak. 

“ Oh ,” is the only sound that comes out of your mouth. 

Your eyes dip to where the agent fidgets his hands at his sides. His fingers drum against his palms, like he’s itching to do something with them. Strange energy buzzes all through the air around you, a heady blend of nervousness and anticipation that keeps your tongue tied and lips sealed. Where to even start? That, in the most populous city in America, he truly had no one else to turn to but you? You, a missed connection slash former target for assassination, you, the person he only met once ten years ago?

“This was a mistake,” the agent says, breaking the silence. He shakes his head, turning back towards your door. “I… I’m going.”

Ten years , and now suddenly he’s right in front of you again, and there’s no way in hell you’re letting him slip away again, not if you can help it. 

“Wait,” you burst out. You hear the clatter of the fork against the floorboards, and then you feel your body driving you forward. Steady footfalls closing the space between you two until you’re toe to toe. 

“Wait,” you repeat, flinging a hand to his shoulder, wrenching him back to face you. His brows arch in surprise, breath caught. His hand clamps down hard on your waist for a fleeting moment before he snatches it back to his chest in hesitation.

“Don’t,” you tell him. 

Still shaking with nerves, you wrap your fingers around his snatched-away hand and guide it back to your waist. You’ve never touched his bare hands before, you think, because of those damn gloves he wore last time. Feeling the heat and weight of him grasping your waist in earnest now, you can tell that even though those same hands made a wreck of your old apartment, of your whole old life, they won’t break you in this moment.  

“Are you sure?” the agent asks. It’s a whisper close to your ear, a question marred with uncertainty. 

“Yes.”

For the first time in your life, you feel it and make sense of it simultaneously, because nothing has ever felt so right as it barrels towards you at top speed. And you swear you see a flash of a smile on his mouth in the moment before it meets yours. 

Once the floodgates open there’s no stopping what spills out, all eager mouths and shaking breaths and pawing hands. The agent’s lips are rough against yours, forceful, hungry . You respond in kind. Sinking your teeth into his lower lip, tugging, caressing it with your tongue for a moment before his mouth parts in invitation and you press forward to taste him in earnest. 

There’s the flavor of blood in his teeth, and you have so many questions about why, but you smother that voice in your head until it’s quiet. Why focus on the why when it’s so easy to get drunk on the what of this moment: kissing the man you thought you’d never see again. Kissing him hard enough to leave your lips swollen and breath stolen. You bury your hands deep into his hair– close cropped, ash blond– using it as leverage to pull him closer, and he moans. Long and low and sonorous and tasting of metal on your tongue. Every dreamy notion, every fantasy bogged down with shame and impossibility, every single wish of yours from the past ten years to kiss him pours out of you right now. Kissing him over and over again. Gentle. With teeth. Long and lingering. 

As strong as the pull towards him is, eventually you have to breathe. You break away and the agent’s hands rise to cup your face, a rough palm for both of your soft cheeks, keeping you still so he can stare deep into your eyes. 

“It’s been ten years,” you tell him, an incredulous laugh slipping out at the tail end, “and I don’t even know your name.”

“You really don’t watch the news at all, huh?” he inquires, tracing along your cheekbone with his thumb. Back and forth, back and forth. There’s something soothing about the action, grounding you amidst the impossibility of your current situation. “I go by Dex.”

“Dex,” you repeat. 

Kurt, sharp. It suits him. 

You give him your name in return and he says it back to you with a nod of affirmation, as if logging it away in his mind. Sweet shivers flare at the base of your spine at the sound of it, new and lovely when it’s coming out of his mouth. Especially when that mouth is on a trajectory to claim yours once again. 

There’s something so right about the manner with which your mouths fit together. Inverse opposites, a crackling magnetism that seems hand-crafted by the universe as some cosmic joke to match perfectly. Dex’s hands are all over you: tracing the line of your collarbone, fitting along the curve of your hip, grasping your ass to pull your pelvis flush to his. For so long your body has been on such high alert, steering you out of harm’s way and screaming at you to keep your haunches up. But now your senses fucking sing beneath Dex’s touch, for the first time not telling you to duck away, but to lean in .

Dex tugs a handful of your shirt into his fist, eyebrow cocked in inquiry. You’ve got your arms raised above your head in an instant and he guides the garment up and off, letting it land with a soft thmp on the floor. You hear a stutter in his breath as he takes you in, completely bare in the leaky kitchen light. His hands return to you immediately. One clasps your waist and the other traces up along your arm, towards your shoulder. 

“What happened here?” he asks, fingertips circling the bruise you got while boxing. 

“My sparring partner at the gym was starting to get suspicious,” you tell him. “For some reason, he could never land a punch.”

“Sounds like a sore loser.”

You shrug. 

“I only let people touch me when I want them to,” you reply. 

You take Dex’s hands in yours, guiding them to your breasts. He doesn’t waste another second. His hands are large, steady, enveloping your breasts and clasping with just enough pressure for you to lean into. 

“Finally,” Dex breathes out against your temple, lips teasing against your hairline. “I’ve been thinking about this…” 

You’ve been thinking about this too, how it would feel for him to touch you without the cool barrier of leather between his skin and yours. What it would be like to savor the warmth of his palms, the delicate press of his fingertips as he moves to gently thumb your nipples, willing them to pebble beneath his careful touches. And the answer is that it feels good, really fucking good. 

Your hands claw for Dex’s jacket, yanking down the zipper and maneuvering it off of his broad shoulders. 

“That’s better,” you say. 

With Dex’s arms now bare, you take the chance to really note them, the veins that thread up his forearms, the rippling scars in various shapes and sizes which you assume come from combat scraps. And then there are his hands, which you take in your own and bring to your lips. You press tender kisses along his scuffed knuckles and expansive palms. But you can’t keep your attention focused on just one part of his body when there’s so much to explore. You can’t stop touching him, feeling the heat of his skin through the fabric of his shirt, twining your fingers into the belt loops on his pants to tug him towards your bedroom. It’s a difficult task to pull off while he’s simultaneously plunging his tongue into your mouth, but the two of you get there eventually, all incredulous huffs of breath and staggering steps. 

“Take…” the word blurs in the journey from your mouth into his, “take off your shirt. I didn’t get to see you at all last time with that stupid suit.”

Dex takes a step back and makes quick work of your request. He grabs the nape of his t-shirt and wrenches it forward over his head. It leaves his hair mussed as he tosses it to the floor. 

“ Fuck ,” you murmur to yourself as you sit back against the edge of your bed, because it just feels right to be looking up at him in this moment. 

God, he’s pretty. All stern lines and rough around the edges, just as you expected. Cut muscle and a wash of pale hair, his chest criss crossed with more stitched-over scars. You place your palm against his abdominals and slide them up, seeking out every bump and ridge, feeling goosebumps rise along his skin in the wake of your touch. Finally, you let your hand rest on his left pectoral, feeling his heart racing through the steady plane of muscle. Your heart wells up with endearment at the idea that he’s nervous, or excited, probably both. 

“C’mere,” you insist, moving backwards to allow more space for him on the mattress. 

Dex is already crawling forward to cage your body beneath his limbs, but you yank him down flush on top of you, needing to feel him everywhere, all over. He responds immediately, hands at your hips, burying his face into the crook of your neck and latching his mouth against it, making you keen. He rakes his teeth up the column of your throat and you shudder a moan, hands flying up to steady themselves against his back. 

That’s when your fingertips nudge up against a stark, defined ridge rising from his spine. You crane your face up, you catch a wide red flash of scar tissue streaking down the entire length of it. It’s not just a combat scratch like the others. The scar looks years old and surgically crafted. You trepidatiously trace your fingertip up along the length of it, and you feel Dex’s back muscles clench in response, his face lifting away from your neck. 

“Are you okay?” you ask, hands retreating to his shoulders. 

You seek out Dex with your gaze to find his eyes are cast off to the side, jaw clenched. 

“Yeah,” he bites out. 

“Another long story?” you ask. 

He nods. 

“I'm sorry,” you say, panic clenching in your throat. The last thing you want to do is ruin the mood by digging too hard at an old, private wound. “I didn’t mean to pry.” 

But Dex shakes his head. 

“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” he says. “Can you… can you do that again?”

You watch Dex closely as you slowly and carefully oblige, tracing your hands up the length of the scar. Conflicted pleasure writes itself across his face, and you swear you see his pupils blow in time with your movements. His breathing deepens with each inhale and exhale, equally measured to calm himself down. You find yourself falling into the rhythm, matching each rise and fall of his chest to the drag of your fingertips. The air works its way through your lungs, soothing your racing heart to a steady thump in tandem with his. 

“How’re you feeling, Dex?” you ask. 

That’s when his hips roll forward against yours, answering your question. Then, it’s your turn to gasp at the delicious sensation of his erection grinding up against you. Your eyelids flutter shut with each repeated pass sparking pleasure between your hips, and then the next thing you feel are Dex’s deft fingers pulling your shorts down your legs. 

“Dex.” His name peels from your lips in a needy whimper. “ Please. ”

His first touch against the soaked gusset of your panties lands directly on your clit and you whimper at how frustratingly gentle of a caress it is, yet so ruinously precise. It only makes sense that Dex’s freakish accuracy leads him right where you need him to touch you most. You’re not interested in dodging him this time, not when he falls into a pattern of steady circles that set every nerve ending alight between your legs. 

“You’re so wet,” he says, and there’s a hint of wonder in his tone. It hones into that maddeningly attractive smirk as he watches you squirm with hawkish intensity. “Has it been a while?”

You scoff and reach forward to the bulge in his pants, satisfaction bubbling through you at how he gently rocks forward into the pressure of your palm with a hiss of breath through his teeth. 

“I could ask you the same thing,” you shoot back teasingly.

Dex snatches your wrist, stopping your groping hand to pin it against your side. He doubles his focus back on touching you through your underwear and driving you absolutely crazy in the process. With the thin barrier of fabric between your cunt and his hand, it doesn’t quite reach the level of intensity you’d need to get off. But fuck , does it still feel nice, and you allow yourself to coast for a while as Dex’s fingertips curl against your clit and he presses soft kisses all over your chest.  

“Please,” you insist, bucking your hips forward, trying to increase the pressure of his touch. 

Dex evades your attempts. 

“But you’re so pretty like this,” he says with a kiss to your sternum. “What’s stopping me…” your collarbones now, the left, then the right, and then the dip in between, “...from keeping you here all night?”

The suggestion sends molten arousal flaring in the pit of your stomach.  

“I’d beat your ass,” you retort. 

Dex smiles, and you feel the light scrape of enamel against your clavicle.

“You’d certainly try.”

“You couldn’t touch me if you wanted to.”

At that, Dex’s touch recedes to the waistline of your underwear. You restrain a scowl as he traces back and forth along the elastic waistband, too pent up for reason. 

“But you still want me to, don’t you?” he asks. “To touch you.”

You sense an uncertainty quivering in the depths of his smug demeanor, a twitch at the corner of his smirking mouth. It isn’t all him keeping you on the edge to revel in how you squirm for him. He truly wants to know. 

“Yes, I still want you to touch me,” you relent. You grab his hand and guide it back down to your cunt, pressing him up against your wetness, a testament. “Dex, if you don’t make me cum right now-”

“Okay,” he replies, and there’s something dogged yet determined in the affirmation. He leans close, nosing at your hair. “You asked for it.”

Your reflexes send a jagged rush of warning through your muscles, but you can’t find it in you to make an escape from what comes next. In the blink of an eye, Dex snatches your underwear clean off your legs and dives knuckle deep into your cunt with two fingers deftly trained against your g-spot. Your back bows off the bed at the agonizing bliss of the sudden entrance and you claw at the sheets at your sides, failing to anchor yourself in the face of the pleasure, ragged and immediate as it stokes flames in your abdomen. Once he starts, he doesn’t let up the maddening combination of steady thrusts against your walls as firm circles against your clit with his thumb. 

“ Fuck !”

Your orgasm crashes into you so fast a cry of surprise wrenches out of your lungs all raw and ugly. Your hips seize forward, your stomach clenched, and a toe-curling bliss floods wetness between your thighs.

You just squirted, and it happened within thirty seconds at the hands of a wanted fugitive who once tried to kill you. 

For a moment the two of you just gawk in mutually astonished silence. Dex glances down at his offending hand, shining with your copious spend. Then he looks back at you, surely appearing as much of a mess as you feel, sweat-slicked, flushed, and exhausted. Heat lingers all through your body. There’s a faint glaze of sweat where your back meets the sheets, and the muscles in your thighs twinge like sputtering coals, still crackling with warmth even as the fire dies down. 

“You good?” Dex asks. He raises his hand to his mouth, taking his fingertips between his lips to taste you. Your cheeks flush even hotter as you watch him, still panting in the come down, as he cleans your release away with his tongue. He hums contentedly and uses his free hand to adjust his hard-on straining against the confines of his pants. A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth as he releases his fingers from his lips with a delicate schlick . “You taste good.”

A feeling wells up through you, impossible to put a name to. You don’t want to think about where Dex learned how to be so good at fingering pussy, how he spent these last ten years, all the untold stories roiling beneath the surface of those clever hands and handsome face. 

“Who the hell are you, Dex?” you ask. 

A perfect stranger, your dreams come true, the best lay of your life. Whoever he is, he has the audacity to laugh in response to your question. 

But it doesn’t last long. Mustering your strength, you rise up and get a grip on his shoulders, pushing him back on the bed this time. He hits the mattress with an unph of surprise, eyes flaring wide as you loom over him. Seems like all those hours training at Fogwell’s have paid off. You’re not like you were all those years ago. You can get one up on him now, too. 

“Want to taste you too,” you tell him. You unlatch the fastening of his pants and Dex raises his hips to facilitate you tugging them down his legs to fling onto the floor. You draw a line with your hand up against his crotch, observing Dex’s Adam’s apple bob in his throat as he swallows. “Let me take care of you, hmm?”

Then, his lips part for you like a cherry blossom in the spring. 

“ Please -”

You slot your palm against Dex’s bulge, feeling the heat and strain of his erection through the soft fabric of his boxers. His hips roll against your touch, but you keep your hand still, watching his response. Dex’s brow furrows slightly, and he rolls his eyes with withering petulance. 

“Tease…” he murmurs, but with too much fondness to spike your annoyance. 

In fact, his labored breaths and twitching hips as you trace your fingers along the elastic band of his boxers only make you more eager to appease him. You tug the underwear down Dex’s legs, joining the ever-growing pile of clothes at the foot of your bed. 

You bite back a whimper as you take your first proper look at Dex’s cock, which… Jesus, you have your work cut out for you. It’s well-sized, so flushed and hard you’re almost scared for him. You don’t know if you’ve seen someone this visibly aroused in your life. 

“It really has been a while, hasn’t it?” you ask him as you bend forward. 

“Sh- fuck . Shut up,” Dex stammers as you curl your tongue along his slit. “There’s not a lot of options in prison.” 

You hum at the taste of him as it permeates your mouth, heady, bodily musk and salinity. So lovely in how it’s so him. You probe farther, taking his length until it nudges against the back of your throat, and then you moan against him, knowing the reverberations will drive him crazy. It works. Dex takes in a sharp breath through his teeth and buries his hand into your hair, fingers twining deep. It’s a firm touch without being pushy, like it’s the only thing keeping him anchored to your bed. 

So you take him in deeper. You savor the weight of his cock against your tongue, how he floods your palette with something heady and singularly him. It’s a taste you could get drunk on, and plan to. You want to encode the salt musk of him deep into your memory. You bring one hand forward to steadily pump the base of his shaft, pumping him slowly in tandem with your bobbing mouth. You plant the hand on Dex’s thigh, brushing soothing circles along his skin. You relish the feeling of the leg muscles tensing beneath your palm. That in tandem with the sounds he’s making… the sounds . They’re making you even wetter than you were before. The basal moans which resonate from his chest as you place a flurry of kisses down his shaft. The flutter of a caught breath, paired with a light clench of his hand in your hair as you sink him as deep as possible, his tip kissing against the back of your throat. 

You bring your other hand forward to cup his balls and Dex’s hand tightens in your hair enough to send a sting across your scalp. The action makes you moan, which only makes him clutch you tighter. 

“Wait-” It’s a choked gasp from Dex’s mouth. “Wait, I’m not gonna last.”

Selfishly, you don’t want to stop. You want Dex’s taste to linger with you for days to come. You want to make him come for days. You want–

But Dex’s pulls you off. You gasp in indignation, staring at the wet shine of your spit on his cock as he takes in his hand and stares daggers into your ceiling, his chest heaving with exertion as he reels himself back from the edge. You can see the buckle of muscle in his jaw, teeth clenching tight. 

“You’re gonna be the death of me,” he finally says. “Almost blew my load down your throat.”

“And would that be so bad?” you inquire, wiping your lips against the back of your hand. 

Dex’s gaze returns to you once more, shining with something wide and deep and reverent. No one has ever looked at you like that before. You suspect no one but him could ever look at you like that again. 

“No, of course not,” he says, “it’s just…” 

The words at the end of that fragment seem to evade him, but his actions speak louder anyways. Dex’s hand flails at your jaw, tugging you forwards on the bed. You clamor back up to meet him, slamming your lips against his in a burst of desperation. It’s barely even a kiss at first, more a mashing of mouths and gasp for air. You want him so bad your body is practically registering it as panic, sending you clutching for flailing touches wherever they can land. Knotting your hands deep into his hair. Tongueing his teeth. Straddling his hips. Eventually, Dex wrenches back to catch a breath, but he doesn’t make it far, the two of you lingering in your shared trance with foreheads touching, exchanging the air between your panting mouths. 

“I want you to fuck me,” you tell him. 

It spills out of you so fast, some kind of grand universal truth that simply cannot be contained. 

“Yeah?” Dex asks. 

“Yeah, Dex. I really do.”

That familiar shimmer of precognition flares at his descending hands and the low growl resonating from his chest, allowing you to help facilitate the immediate repositioning to your stomach, face pressed against the pillows and ass in the air with your knees spread at the ready. A cavern has opened up deep in your gut, a vacuous craving that you’re desperate for him to fill. You swear your pussy fucking shivers as Dex lines his tip up with your entrance, dragging it through the slick arousal that’s gathered there. 

“Dex,” you gasp, “get inside me right now, or I swear to god-”

The sentence melts off into a gasp as Dax’s hands rest on your hips, feeling the give of your flesh beneath his fingertips. Such large, warm hands, damn near scorching by now. You imagine him leaving tender rosy handprints behind, marks over all the places he’s touched you, and you keen back, encouraging him to breach your entrance.

“Fuck,” Dex murmurs. 

His grip tightens and he rolls his hips forward in response. He pushes inside of you slowly. Agonizingly slowly. Inch by inch, allowing you to adjust to the stretch of him. Fuck, it really has been a while, hasn’t it? But it’s a sweet burn, a delicious fullness that finally settles into place as he bottoms out. He pauses there, pushed up all the way inside. You can hear his breathing, back in that measured cadence, just shaky enough to tell you that he’s fighting off falling apart. 

You want him to fall apart. You want to fall apart too. You want to fall so hard and fast it reduces the both of you to rubble. 

“Please,” you whimper. 

You roll your hips back against him, a single encouraging thrust that punches the air out of both of you simultaneously. The stretching slide of his cock through your folds feels impeccably right, and from the careening whine sounding from Dex behind you, he seems to think so too. The sound ploughs through your entire nervous system in an instant, streaking molted desire right into the pit of you. 

“You’re gonna end this before it even begins,” he says, “if you don’t stay still .”

His grip on your hips tightens, keeping you locked in place no matter how much you struggle and strain. Now it’s your turn to whine, desperate for more friction, more jagged pleasure, anything. And you are trying to stay still, you really are, but you’ve never felt so desperate for anyone in your life, nails gripping the sheets so hard they threaten to shred into ribbons. 

A low, rumbling laugh sounds from over your shoulder. The sound of it sends an icy shiver over your spin, followed by the tip of Dex’s finger as he traces up the length of your torso. An inverse to how you touched him earlier. Your pussy clenches down at him in response to the teasing, aching and so fucking ready. 

“What’s so funny?” you snap indignantly, patience frayed thin. 

His hand clasps over the back of your neck, anchoring him steady. It’s just a touch of pressure, doing nothing more than pressing you a bit deeper into the pillow, but the sly strength you can feel radiating from his palm makes you catch your breath. 

“I just can’t believe it,” he tells you, the tone of his voice shockingly earnest in contrast to the steered surety preceding moments. “Gonna make it worth the wait, okay sweetheart?”

You can’t even process the ease with which the pet name rolls off his tongue, the way his fingers move soothingly through the hair at your nape, because Dex  finally, finally starts to move. 

“Fuck,” you gasp. 

Something must have taken over Dex, because once he starts fucking you, he doesn’t let up for a second. Each thrust is measured, consistent. A roll of his hips, the slide of his cock inside you, against intimate places that feel like they’ve never been identified before. How the hell can he so accurately finesse the exact right places that make you unravel the fastest? Each passing minute, the pressure in your abdomen ratchets up to a greater and greater intensity. You do everything you can to meet his unwavering determination that you possibly can, anchoring your fists deep in the sheets, rocking your torso back to fall into a steady rhythm. Your bodies moving in tandem feels so natural, so instinctual, so good . It doesn’t take long before you feel the tension fraying inside of you, the thread of pleasure pulled so tight it threatens to snap at any moment. 

“Oh my god,” you whimper, feeling it impending, pressing in. “Dex, I’m gonna-”

“Want to see you when you-” he punches out a breath, hands grasping at your hips. “Look at me.”

And then you’re on your back once more and you barely have a moment to catch your breath before he slides into you again. The slick sound of your arousal lights up your whole body in a heady flush, somewhere between abashment and debasement and all you can do is moan to release it. You wrap your arms around Dex’s neck and bring your thighs around his waist, clinging him so close it actually feels like the two of you are melding into one. 

“Lovely,” he breathes. 

His hand dips down between your legs, and the sound that breaks loose from your throat as he thumbs at your clit is something raw and animal, completely foreign to your ears. His touch is so precise, so much exactly what you need, bringing every ounce of anticipation to a simmer between your legs. All you can do is murmur and grab his shoulders so tightly you’ll leave half-moon nail marks behind, so tightly he he lets out a hiss that melts into a sneer, snapping up with his hips to brush against that sensitive spot inside you, bearing down harder with his thumb, and then— 

There’s no way you could evade what comes next. This orgasm is an electric shock that crackles through your veins. You feel it spidering down your whole body, lighting up each tendon and nerve, a network of pleasure that sends little sparks into every muscle. You clench and twitch around Dex’s cock, still deep inside you, panting reedily into the charged air. There are whispers of sensation that break through the thick fog clouding your mind— kisses to your sternum and collarbones, a nip of teeth against your throat— Dex doting droplets of affection through the haze. You can’t restrain the smile that breaks across your face, and when you finally open your eyes to find Dex waiting for you, your heart swells at the sight of him smiling too. 

“You good?” he asks. 

As if he doesn’t know. As if your arousal isn’t making a mess between your legs, shining in the low light of the room, dripping down to soak the sheets below. It’s a gooey, surreal daze, all languid touches and a sweet, sizzling pleasure that saturates every pore in your body. Dex’s hips lazily rock against yours, stretching out the aftershocks as long as possible. 

“Unbelievable,” you grumble. 

He’s still hard between your legs. His stamina is miraculous. He’s too perfect to be real, too perfect for you—

“Dex…” you plead. “Your turn.”

You cross your heels at the small of his back and shove him deeper inside of you. His thrust staggers, and he plants his hand over your shoulder, brows furrowed with concentration. The look on his face is almost pained, screwed up tight. 

“I don’t want this to end,” Dex confesses. “Want to…”

He trails off, leaving the sentence hanging. You know how you would end it, it’s all you can think about too. You want to keep him in this bed with you forever. 

You bring your hand forward to cup Dex’s jaw. You trace your thumb over his cheek, minding the stitches there, and your savor the grace of stubble against your palm as he nuzzles against your touch.

“Now I get to look at you,” you goad him. “Let me see you, Dex.”

His eyes blink open, a little hazy, but locked with yours. You can see now that there’s a hint of light in the darkness of his eyes, shy streaks of green and gold swirled in deep. Sea glass and black coffee. 

“I want to feel you come inside me,” you tell him. 

Dex’s demeanor shifts in an instant at your words. Jaw clench, eyes narrowed, the muscles in his torso and arms buckling with strain. 

“You sure?” he rasps, and you nod. 

“You’ve been so good to me, Dex, now use me how you need.”

He buries his face in your shoulder with a ragged moan, grip moving down to your hips, pinning you in place as he begins fucking into you at a dizzying pace. Each thrust is a shock, driving you deeper into the mattress, every lingering shred of measured control and precision melting away into frenetic desperation. 

“Close—” he chokes out. 

You bury one hand deep in his hair and move the other to his back, gripping him, stroking the scar, biting out soft encouragement. Come for me Dex. Need to feel you. So deep. There’s that familiar clench in your chest, your senses signaling something impending, except now it’s not a warning, it’s a benediction. 

Dex comes with a gasp that lands like music in your ears. You feel his release floods between your legs, wet and warm and everything you’ve ever dreamed. 

Heat pinches behind your eyes with a start, rearing up so fast you can’t stop it. Tears cascading from your eyes, leaving faint trails of cool dampness down towards your temples. You’re not sure where it comes from. Certainly not sadness, but you can’t deny there’s a sting of melancholy to it, regret for connections missed, chances obscured, the roads not taken. You’d thought for so long that you’d lost the one person who might ever know you, and that grief is still thick within you, even as proof of its falseness presses every ounce of his body weight on top of you. 

There’s a damp drag against your skin, and then you realize Dex is licking up your tears. It’s an unexpected gesture, but you find yourself appreciating it. The tenderness of him taking everything you could possibly offer him. The thought makes you moan, and Dex takes the opportunity to kiss you once again. It’s so deep, licking over each other’s teeth, tongues dancing, mutually drinking up every moan and sigh like it’s the sweetest nectar you’ve ever tasted. 

Dex pulls out and rolls to settle down on the mattress at your side. Determined to keep him as close as possible, you snuggle up to rest your head against his chest, which Dex meets by wrapping his arm around you to pull you closer. His fingers drum against your shoulder, a roll from index to pinkie in steady counts. You find the rhythm of it deeply soothing, a metric to time each new inhale and exhale. Your heartbeat steadily comes to a slower resting rate, floating back down to earth. 

But there’s a prickle of uneasiness you sense in the heady mist of your comedown. There’s a tension clinging to Dex, his silence too steady, his eyes far away.

“Is everything alright?” you ask him. 

Dex’s swallows, a bob in his throat that resonates up into a clench in his jaw. Suddenly, he sits up, leaving you to slip off him and onto the pillows with a hmph of surprise. He rubs his hand over his face, eyes scrunched tight. 

“I can’t…” he bites. “I… I’m sorry.”

You push upright, placing a hand on his shoulder. There’s a twitch in the blade beneath your palm, a flinch against your touch that has you retracting it, worried to scare him off. 

“Sorry for what?” you ask. 

“For barging in. For fucking up your life again .”

With his words, an avalanche of memories crashes down over you. The sleepless nights. The half-unpacked apartments. The missed calls and connections, the countless glances over your shoulder, the song of your impulses in your bones telling you to keep moving, keep hiding, keep evading everything you could. 

“People who get close,” Dex continues, “they get hurt. Collateral damage. You don’t want me in your life.”

Icy dread flares in your chest at the words. Yes, it’s been a rough ten years since you last saw him, but you never once begrudged him for what he did. He spared your life, and even if that life is haggard and lonely, it’s yours . And you don’t want it to be quite as lonely anymore. 

“Don’t tell me what I want, Dex,” you tell him. 

But his gaze remains cast at the far wall, his jaw set. 

“Are you listening to me? Listen to me.” You take his chin in your hand, thumb pressing into the dimple, and you force his gaze to yours because you want him to not just listen, but to know . “I want to see you again, and I want it to not take ten more years for that to happen.”

This close to him, gazing intently at his face, you can see the wear of those ten years on him. The lines forming around his eyes and paling hairs at his temples. The sense of dogged exhaustion that clings to his edges like the peeling corners of an oil painting. From the intensity of Dex’s gaze, dark and honed into yours, you suspect he sees that same quality in you as well. The weight of the world stooping your shoulders low, chewed up and spat out, but still here. 

“I match you,” you tell him, “remember?”

And for a moment there the two of you just look at one another and breathe. In and out. You search those lovely eyes of his for a sign that your words have sunk in, that he knows they’re true. You feel Dex’s response as it resonates through his chest. 

“You match me,” he affirms.  

For a fleeting moment, holding him in the afterglow of your mutual pleasure, the tumult of the city melts away from your mind. The corruption, the violence, all dissipate until it’s just the two of you. It’s not going to last forever. Deep down, you know that when you wake up tomorrow, Dex will not be there waiting for you. But you also know that won’t mean he’s gone. Not like last time. And if there’s anything you’ve learned after tonight, he’ll always find his way back to you. 

You and Dex are opposites that can’t help but attract, collision inevitable, the fallout as potentially catastrophic as it is perfect. You don’t need your reflexive instincts to intuit that. 

You might never make sense of it, but you feel it more strongly than anything.  

Find me on AO3 @/goldengrapes    

telling him to go easy on you (let you win) at darts or bowling on nights out with friends, he says "sure" and then proceeds to annihilate you in front everyone, a snide smile on his face when he asks "s'everything okay?" at your pouting

trying to close the door of your room for some privacy when you need to change but right before you manage to do it dex flings and ricochets an object so it's blocking and keeping it from shutting completely

constantly telling you to "open up" because he wants to toss candies or grapes or whatever hes snacking on into your wide open mouth, the farther away you are from him the better, he sees it as a fun little challenge