#dark!dex

You hate your hotel. 

It is 1am. The issues started at midnight, really 12:02am. You know because while printing out the folio for your walk, you thought—I can run the audit after this, but you don’t get to run the audit after printing the folio, because your night is determined not to be that easy.

Occupancy is at one hundred, you are oversold by one. You had hoped that the silver tier member wouldn’t arrive and make your life easy, but your life is never that easy because not only does he arrive, but he insists on making every step of the walk progress difficult. He doesn’t want to go to the hotel you had called ahead at and verified availability, okay. That’s fine, he’s being relatively cordial about it so you help him. He doesn’t want to put down a card for the other hotel, you are firm: if he doesn’t want to put down a card, he needs to go to the hotel that you chose. 

Why couldn’t you call him?  He wants to know, because you don’t have a phone number on file. He isn’t listening, you’re just glad he’s gone. He eventually agrees to tap his card, your AGM will set up direct billing in the morning. That’s not the worst part.

That would be room  410’s  gnat infestation. You did not expect the sheer volume of gnats in the video that this guest is now showing you—a man who came up when you were discussing billing complications with aforementioned walk guest. 

You have no rooms to move him to. This is not good, this is horrible, this is your worst shift in recent record and you’ve had to evacuate the entire hotel before. They gnats had taken over the light above the entrance door, a black swirl of movement that was merely agitated when you attempted to take the housekeeping long lint-roller to the light, walls and doors in order to try and slightly fix the issue. It did not help, at all.

He says he noticed yesterday, but didn’t report it. He wants to be put into a different hotel, you cannot do that. 

You do not have raid, you have searched the hallway closet, the house person closet, the maintenance supervisors office, the back room, it is overdramatic to say you want to die, but you definitely want to smash your head against the wall until your face is imprinted. 

You are finally freed from trying to fix the gnat infestation, looking at your dashboard. You feel guilty, really, you hate nights like this—stuck between impossible situations. 

OOO. Out of Order. Room 201, What is this? out of 175 rooms, four floors, you have one room that could be used. You check the details, marked OOO by housekeeping supervisor based on odor, okay, you can work with that. 410 is begrudgingly sleeping in his room, he will have to be moved immediately upon the earliest check out but maybe, maybe you could just clean this room. You are trained in housekeeping, okay. You almost run to 201, skipping the slow and outdated elevator that multiple people have gotten trapped in (you refuse to be one of them.) you tuck the giant keyring into your pocket to stop the jingling as you begin to jump over multiple sets of stairs to reach the second floor, trying your best to close it softly behind you but a heavy door is going to make a noise louder than a clink when it locks as you tab your master key against the door of 201.

Once, twice, three times, “I’m opening the door.”

“I’m in here! It’s Christian.” You jump, half-thinking that you are hallucinating as you pause with the door slightly open, chain lock taunt as it stops you from opening the door any further.

Your General Manager is in an out of order room marked vacant. 

“Oh. Have a good night.” You do not ask, ‘what the fuck?’ Because years of customer service experience have taught you to always keep a level tone and with met with rejection, always ‘have a good day.’, ‘thank you.’ Rather than ‘you make over six figures and can’t pay for your own fucking hotel room?’ As you walk down the stairs in a haze of confusion and annoyance—now you can’t hide in the back room and grade piles of student work, now you had to pretend to work to keep up the appearance of being busy. 

By the time you’ve walked back to the front desk, Dex is there. 

He is halfway towards the door leaving to the back room, a place that you have lectured him on multiple times that he can not go because he is not an employee and now, you have caught him red-handed with his hand outstretched to push the door open. 

He must have paused when he heard your footsteps, as if he stood still enough you wouldn’t notice that he was once again, attempting to go into employee only areas. Tonight, you don’t really have the energy to lecture him. 

You know that he knows it’s wrong, that it’s not allowed—he just doesn’t care. Dex will nod along, apologize at the correct time, but you know that next time you do not immediately show yourself when he walks in, he will do the same thing. 

Sometimes you just like to lecture Dex for the thrill of game, really. It keeps him on his toes. Tonight is not that night. You know that it is useless to be disappointed, but you cannot hide it. Instead, you walk past Dex and hold open the door of the employee only area for him to hover in the entrance way, solemn as he plays when he has done something he knows is wrong, but does not particularly want to draw attention to it while simultaneously wanting you to absolve him. 

You gather ungraded work, stacking it neatly and evening out any papers sticking out from the stack before tucking away your laptop, then pull out the stack of papers that will eventually be a book that you are reviewing for a colleague then hand the ungraded work to Dex. On the top of the stack is the rubric and answer key, “Please grade these for me. I need to pretend to be busy in case my GM comes out.” 

Dex leans down, just slightly, he is too cute. You pat his cheek, once, twice, then trail your hand down his jaw, his neck, his chest above the loose black long sleeve and pat his forearm to get him moving.

You aren’t supposed to sit in the back, but it has never stopped you and no one has ever mentioned your habit to you. 

Really, you tried to sit in the restaurant for the longest time, then tried to sit in the far corner in the dark but had scared too many guests to continue. After years of testing out new positions to hide, you had eventually given up and decided it really was best to just sit in the back—avoiding guests who had weirdly quiet footsteps seeing you with your laptop. 

Dex does not argue that reading is not being busy. 

He moves from the door frame, sitting on the couch in front of the TV, in direct line of the front desk though from his angle he can’t see what you’re reading. 

He has the papers directly in front of him: answer key to the left, ungraded in the middle, graded to the right.

His natural state is obsessively observant, he knows that it is not you who needs to look busy, but him: the one who’s out of place, who doesn’t have a room and only visits the hotel because he hates that you work overnight. 

So intensely that Dex had once sent your immediate notice to quit via email when you were sleeping, your manager had replied by asked for additional time to hire a replacement and you had lied, managed to keep that fucking job.

He had thought you’d go along with him—that’s all you had to fucking do but Dex had a fundamental misunderstanding of your character based on what he wanted to see and you had thought it was time he woke the fuck up. 

You had been mad at him, but he had thought he could’ve smoothed it over. You just had to listen to him, see his point of view, how much he loved and cared for you and just wanted the best for you.

He hadn’t. Dex was used to picking fights: challenging you to see how much you’d fight for him.

That fight had been different, an entirely different game than he had meant to play. He had stepped on the field expecting baseball, but you came on with a tennis racket.

 Even now, you don’t realize how close he was to killing you—he had never told you. Dex hadn’t wanted to hurt you, but you had been forcing his hand. 

Why couldn't you see that Dex was just trying to protect you? Wasn't it obvious? As he was pressing all of his weight into keeping you pinned to the floor, he had completely engulfed your smaller form.

Dex was the dragon and you, his captive princess. All your fault it was, you were making him do this.

‘I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I don’t want to hurt you.’  This could’ve all been avoided—you just had to quit. You didn’t need that shitty minimum wage job—you had Dex, you had your full-time job. People fought tooth and nail to land where you had stumbled. 

It didn’t matter how little academia paid, that being a professor was more something you did out of sheer love and determination. Dex would cover everything else—he was all you needed. ‘I’m sorry, sorry, so sorry.’ Repeating something don’t make it true. 

He wouldn’t forget the vibrancy of panic as he pushed your face harshly into the hardwood, grappling with you to reach your phone. It had calmed him, just a lapse that hardly lasted a second—you were never supposed to look at him like that, the deer-in-the-headlights sort of shock as if you were seeing him for the first time. In that brief pocket of time where Dex thought you might’ve hated everything you saw.  

It was just enough for you to shift away from his hold, just slightly, just enough for you to twist around and pull your foot up to kick him, first blow landing against his nose, second against his jaw. It stunned him, out of the character, you were changing the script. Dex fell slightly to the side, the intent more painful than the contact.

Then you were on him, hands on his neck, face bent down and contorted into a horrific sneer, ‘You ever, fucking touch my shit again—‘ he hadn’t been able to breathe, but fuck if that hadn’t driven the point in. Dex reached up, hands digging into your wrists but didn't attempt to pry them away--just holding, if anything, keeping them in place.

‘I’ll fucking kill you.’ you were sitting on his chest, knees digging into the sides of his torso and pressing every ounce of force you had into your grip on his neck, painful, bruising and violent. 

He had never been more aroused, your hands were so small in comparison to his neck. It added to the thrill, how much you wanted to hurt him, how far you were wiling to go for it.

‘You ever fucking touch me like that again?’ you used that force to lift his head and slam it violently back into the ground, ‘I’ll fucking kill you.’ You snarled, spit flying from your mouth as you did and Dex? Oh he had been right where he wanted to be—your actions were entirely unexpected, clashing violently against his idolized version of you, but he was delirious with pleasure, with adoration.

In that moment, when black dots were dancing in Dex’s vision and he was bordering on unconsciousness, he loved you and you, were perfect for him. There he was, every horrific, violent part of him parroted in your eyes.

Yet, you still managed to be good. Steadfast, a lighthouse to guide, a safe harbor to dock at. There was hope for him.

At least until you changed your passcode and didn’t give him the new one until a week later when he was crying so profusely his body was violently shuddering with his pathetic, desperate sobs as snot was dribbling down his chin after having cycled through the seven stages of grief before trying to challenge you to see if you would leave, then becoming terrified you might actually take him up on his offer before settling on desperately trying to tether you to him by insisting he would kill himself if you left him.

You had looked at him, really looked at him. Every pathetic, disgusting part of him and thought back to your own life. You had always told yourself that you would never be the angry man— it was a part of you, but not everything that you were. You would never be the person that made someone dread to come home. 

There had been a deviation somewhere, a fork in the road that you had taken while Dex had remained. You could recognize the familiar patterns of his violent tendencies. Sure, he had hurt you, but his neck was still covered in vibrant bruises from when you had choked him, the ones on his face had mostly faded. In comparison, you had some sparse bruising on your ribs and torso where he had held you down but you had beat his head against the hardwood with enough rage that Dex had been laying in a pool of his own blood and a concussion.

With that, you settled on giving him your new passcode with the stipulation he would get back on his fucking antipsychotics. 

Tough bargain that paid off in the end because he’s still here, with you and knows that your night hasn’t been easy, so he obediently sits and grades student papers. 

Dex listens to your movement, listens to you walk in the kitchen, fiddling with the oven and then a pan. He knows what you're doing, can close his eyes and picture you with perfect clarity from the nights he had done nothing but obsessively catalogue your actions.

After ten minutes, you are behind him, leaning over his shoulder and pressing a kiss to his temple as you hold a hot chocolate in front of him.