Got this inspiration from my own edit, unfortunate, but most fortunate for you guys. Here's the tiktok video referencing my inspo: HERE.
Pairing: Benjamin Poindexter x Reader
Warnings: No explicit warnings, but squint for emotional manipulation/gaslighting.
The first text came in at 11:47 p.m., when the apartment had already gone quiet enough for every small sound to feel deliberate.
You stared at it longer than you should have. The screen lit your face in the dark, cold and bluish, catching against the edge of the coffee table where an untouched mug had gone stale hours ago. Outside, the city moved in uneven pulses: tires hissing over wet pavement, a siren bleeding through the distance, the low mechanical groan of pipes settling inside the walls. You had been trying not to look at your phone. That was the worst part. You had placed it facedown beside you with the childish belief that not seeing his name would make the pressure in your chest loosen. It had not. Another message arrived before the screen had time to dim.
Please, I just need to talk.
Your thumb hovered near the notification without touching it. Dex’s name looked almost ordinary there, as if it belonged to someone who knew how to leave things alone, someone capable of stepping back when silence asked him to. There had been a time when you mistook his intensity for attentiveness. He remembered the smallest things with frightening precision: the way you took your coffee, which side of the sidewalk you preferred, the exact pause before your smile when you were trying to decide whether to let him have it.
It had felt flattering once. Chosen. Like being seen. Now it felt like being watched. You turned the phone over again, but the room had already changed shape around it. The narrow hall seemed longer than before, the door at the end of it too still. You told yourself he was across the city. You told yourself he was sitting somewhere with his jaw clenched and his hands folded too tightly together, trying to look reasonable while something inside him came apart. You told yourself many things that would have been comforting if you believed any of them.
The next message came at 11:51.
The words made your stomach pull tight. Not because they were cruel. Cruelty would have been easier. Cruelty could be answered. Anger could be met with anger, blame with defense, a demand with the hard satisfaction of refusal. But Dex rarely sounded cruel when he wanted something badly enough. He sounded stripped down, almost soft, as though he had taken every sharp piece of himself and placed it carefully at your feet. As though he expected you to understand that the offering was also a warning.
You read it once. Then again. The three words blurred slightly at the edges before your phone went black. For a few minutes, nothing happened. You sat still on the couch, knees drawn close, listening to the refrigerator hum and the rain tapping lightly against the window. The silence stretched until it felt intentional. You were almost beginning to breathe normally when there was a sound from the hallway outside your apartment.
Not a knock. A footstep. Your whole body went rigid. The phone lit again in your hand.
You did not move. Even your breathing felt too loud. The apartment door stood at the end of the hall, locked, deadbolted, chained. You had checked it twice after getting home, once out of habit and once because habit had not been enough. Now, with his message glowing in your palm, every lock between you and the other side felt suddenly decorative.
Another sound came from the hall, closer this time; not loud enough to be threatening, but too deliberate to be nothing. A shift of weight. The faint brush of damp fabric against the wall. The quiet, controlled patience of someone standing exactly where he knew he should not be. Your body reacted before your mind could decide what to do, every muscle drawing tight as if the sound had reached through the door and touched the back of your neck. Slowly, you rose from the couch, the floorboards giving a soft, traitorous complaint beneath your bare feet, and you hated how carefully you moved. Hated that even now, even frightened, some part of you still understood Dex well enough to know that noise would matter, that silence would matter, that any small sign of panic might change the shape of whatever waited on the other side. The phone trembled once in your hand, not from another message, but from the force of your grip tightening around it until the edge bit into your palm. You stared down the narrow hall at the locked door, heart beating hard enough to make your ribs feel too small, and for one breathless second, you could not tell whether you were afraid he would come in or afraid he would leave before you saw him.
From the other side of the door, his voice came through, controlled and almost gentle. “I know you’re there.”
Your eyes shut for half a second, not long enough to steady you, only long enough for the truth of it to settle coldly behind your ribs. Of course he knew. Dex always knew. He knew things he should not have been able to know and remembered them with the unnerving precision of someone who did not understand where devotion ended and possession began. The pattern of your lights. The soft yellow glow in the living room when you were trying to stay awake. The blue-white flicker from the television when you could not sleep. The times you came home, the nights you were late, the mornings you left with your hair still damp because you had overslept. Whether you had worked past your shift, whether you had gone out after, whether you had forgotten to eat because stress turned hunger into something distant and inconvenient. He collected those details silently, almost reverently, the way other people collected apologies they were too proud to give, and then looked wounded when you found the weight of his attention unsettling.
For a moment, your hand hovered near the lock without touching it. The door between you felt impossibly thin, like he was not standing in the hall but just behind your shoulder, breathing in the same air. Your heartbeat had climbed into your throat, each pulse sharp and humiliating, because some part of you still remembered when being known by him had felt like being chosen. Now it made your skin prickle.
“You can’t be here,” you said, and your voice sounded quieter than you wanted, threaded with something too close to fear and something worse than fear, something that knew exactly why he had come.
“I didn’t know where else to go.” His voice had dropped around the words, quiet enough that you had to hold still to catch them, yet not weak.
That made you laugh once, quietly, without humor. The sound seemed to surprise both of you. On the other side of the door, he went still; you could feel it, somehow, the way his attention sharpened through wood and metal.
“You could have gone home,” you said, your voice low and controlled only because you were forcing it to be. “You could have called someone else. You could have done literally anything except show up outside my apartment in the middle of the night.” The anger was there, but it sounded bruised at the edges, thinner than you wanted. Your throat tightened around the last words, betraying how badly he had shaken you, and you hated that he could probably hear it through the door.
“No, Dex. You texted me four times and then came here.”
The simplicity of it unsettled you more than if he had shouted. You pictured him standing in the hallway with rain still in his hair, shoulders squared beneath his jacket, face composed by force rather than calm. Dex had a way of making restraint look like suffering. As if every second he did not break something proved devotion.
“You waited eleven minutes.”
His silence answered before he did.
You pressed the heel of your hand against your forehead, breathing through the ache building behind your eyes. Some part of you wanted to open the door just to see his face, to confirm that he was real and not only the shape your guilt took when you were tired. Another part, smaller but wiser, told you not to reward the fear he had brought with him.
“Go home,” you told him, though the words came out quieter than you intended, worn thin by everything you were trying not to let into your voice.
A pause followed, long enough that you could picture him on the other side of the door, his head slightly bowed, listening for the smallest shift in your breathing.
“Look at me first.” He sounded almost careful, as if he knew the request was too much and was asking anyway, unable to stop himself from wanting one last proof that you were still close.
“No.” The answer left you immediately, before the weaker part of you could turn it into something else.
Then his hand touched the door.
Not a knock. Not pressure. Just the faintest sound of his palm settling against the wood between you. “Please.”
Silence follower for a few seconds, you catch your forehead resting against the darkened wood. Opposite of where his palm was resting, unaware to your knowledge; something symbolic if it weren't for how insane this back and forth, push and pull dynamic was.
“I scared you,” Dex murmured.
“I didn’t mean to,” he added.
“That does not make it better,” you replied.
But he said it too quickly, like a man repeating something he had been told rather than something he had learned.
“You don’t get to do this,” you said, your voice steadier now, though your fingers were still cold. “You don’t get to make me responsible for what happens to you because I didn’t answer fast enough.”
On the other side, his breathing changed. Slightly. Enough that you knew the words had found him.
“You make it sound like I’m trying to punish you,” he said.
“I think you don’t always know the difference.”
The hallway went quiet again. Somewhere below, a door opened and shut. Laughter rose briefly from the stairwell and then vanished, swallowed by distance. You wondered if Dex turned his head toward it. You wondered if he hated the reminder that other people existed around you, ordinary and uninvited, able to come and go without turning longing into surveillance.
“I can be normal,” he said finally.
Your throat tightened at that, at the effort in his voice, the careful arrangement of every syllable. You believed he wanted to. That had always been the cruelest part. Dex did not sound like a man lying when he promised gentleness. He sounded like a man standing in a burning room, insisting he could learn not to breathe smoke.
“Not like this,” you said.
He gave a small, humorless breath. “You always say that.”
“Because you keep doing this.”
“I just needed to know you were okay.”
“No,” you said, and the word came out sharper than intended. “You needed to know I was still there.”
That silence was different. Not empty. Wounded. You could almost see his expression: the brief downward flick of his eyes, the tightness at his mouth, the way his face would harden not because he felt nothing, but because he felt too much and had never trusted anyone enough to let it show without turning it into something dangerous.
When he spoke again, his voice was lower.
You looked at the door for a long moment.
The question should have been simple. Yes, you were there, standing barefoot in your hallway with your heart beating too hard and your phone still lit in your hand. Yes, you had stayed up reading his messages, worrying over them despite yourself. Yes, some ruinous part of you still knew the exact shape of his loneliness and wanted to place a hand over it, as if tenderness could keep it from becoming teeth.
But that was not what he was asking.
“I don’t know,” you said.
The answer seemed to move through him. You heard him inhale slowly. Then came the faintest sound, almost nothing, his forehead resting against the door.
You did not believe him until you heard him step back.
The distance between you changed by inches, then by feet. His shoes moved over the hallway carpet with unnatural quiet, pausing once near the stairwell. For one terrible second, you thought he would come back. That he would decide your almost-kindness had been enough permission to try again.
Then the stairwell door opened.
You stood there until the apartment became your own again.
Only after several minutes did you return to the couch. The rain had strengthened against the window, turning the glass silver where the streetlights caught it. Your phone remained in your hand, screen dark now, holding the last shape of him like a bruise beneath the surface.
At 12:08, one final message appeared.
You looked at it until the words stopped meaning anything. Then, before you could stop yourself, you typed back.
The reply came almost immediately, as if he had been waiting with the phone already in his hand.
Heat rose under your skin before you could reason it away. You hated that those words felt different now, with space between you and the locked door, with proof that he had obeyed the one thing you had asked of him. He was still Dex, still too intense, still all sharp edges disguised as devotion, but there was something in the restraint that pulled at you more dangerously than his desperation ever had.
That doesn’t earn you anything.
The dots appeared, vanished, then appeared again.
You stared at the message, your mouth tightening around a response that took too long to become irritation. He knew exactly where to place the pressure now, not against the door, not against your fear, but against the quieter part of you that had wanted him to stay almost as badly as you had needed him to leave.
The room felt suddenly too warm. The rain struck the window in soft, steady lines, and you sat very still on the couch, aware of your bare legs beneath the hem of your oversized shirt, aware of the pulse in your throat, aware of how ridiculous it was to feel cornered by a man who had finally done as he was told and walked away.
You tell yourself you’re not going to text first.
You last nearly four minutes. Put the phone down. Why are we opening the chat? Why are we typing? The message sends. Oh, for God’s sake.
Heat rose before you could smother it, spreading beneath your skin with a shameful immediacy. It was only a text, hell, a few words on a screen. Nothing that should have had the power to make your breath catch or your knees draw closer together on the couch, as if making yourself smaller could hide the reaction from him. He was not even in the room, and still he found a way to touch some reckless, humiliating part of you that mistook danger for devotion.
That was what frightened you most. Not that Dex wanted too much, but that some part of you still answered.
And just like that, the door you had kept locked became a technicality. He had not raised his voice, had not touched the handle, had not done anything you could point to and call force, but somehow the ground shifted anyway. Somehow, he made your caution feel cruel, your silence feel like a punishment, your wanting feel like proof that maybe you had misunderstood him all along.
