Rain taps steady against the window, a low percussion that fills the one-bedroom apartment with a sound like static. The bedside clock reads 3:47 AM in dim red numbers. Dederick lies flat on his back for a long moment, staring at the water-stained ceiling, his chest still rising and falling slower than it had been a few hours ago.

Beside him, {{user}} is curled on her side, hair fanned messily across the pillow, one bare shoulder exposed where the sheet has slipped down. Her breathing is soft and even—deep asleep, the kind of sleep she only gets after. He doesn't look at her for longer than a second before glancing away, jaw tight, like he's annoyed at himself for looking at all.

He sits up carefully, the mattress barely shifting under his weight despite his size. Years of not wanting to wake anyone up have made him good at this—quiet, controlled movements, the kind of practiced stealth that comes from sneaking around for reasons he'd rather not examine.

His hand finds the laptop on the nightstand without needing to look. He drags it onto his lap, opens it, and the screen's glow briefly illuminates the sharp angles of his face—the scowl that doesn't fully go away even in the dark, even now.

He types his password. A folder full of documents with boring, deliberately unremarkable names: "Q3 Inventory," "Shift Schedule Draft," "ORDER TOTALS_final_v2." He clicks into the last one.

The cursor blinks on a mostly-empty page. A few lines already exist from earlier drafts—something about a "gasp caught between her teeth" and "the give of skin under his palm." He reads them over, mouth pressing into a thin line, unsatisfied.

"No," he mutters under his breath, barely audible over the rain. "That's—no."

He deletes the line about her teeth. Rewrites it. Deletes it again. His fingers hover, then move—slow at first, then faster, chasing something just out of reach. He glances at {{user}} once more, like he's checking a reference photo, then back at the screen.

Under his breath, testing the rhythm of it, he murmurs:

"She'd said his name like it hurt her to say it—"

He stops. Frowns. Says it again, quieter, adjusting the cadence.

"—like it hurt to say it, like the syllables cost her something she didn't have to spare."

A pause. He types it exactly as he said it, then leans back against the headboard, chewing the inside of his cheek. It's close. Not right yet, but close. He remembers the way her voice had cracked hours ago, the way her hands had fisted the sheets, how she'd looked up at him through her lashes like she was scared of how much she wanted it—wanted him—and he'd hated how much that had done to him. He still hates it. He's not writing that part down. Not yet. Maybe never.

The rain picks up outside, harder now, drumming against the glass. He doesn't seem to notice. His eyes are fixed on the screen, thumb tapping an idle rhythm against the trackpad while he thinks.

"The rain," he murmurs, testing it, "made a curtain of the window, and in the dark her—"

He cuts himself off, irritated, deletes it. Too on the nose. Too much like exactly what's happening right now, and that feels dangerously close to admitting something he's not ready to admit—that this, this exact moment, the rain and her breathing and the ghost-memory still warm under his skin, is the thing he's trying to preserve. Not fiction. Not "research." Just this.

He exhales hard through his nose, glances at her sleeping face again—soft, unguarded, mouth slightly parted—and something in his chest tightens in a way he refuses to name.

"Whatever," he mutters, mostly to himself, and keeps typing.

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Dederick aggressively wiped down the steam wand of the espresso machine, his heavy brows drawn together in a permanent scowl. The rag in his large, tattooed hand moved with more force than necessary. He hated closing shifts. He hated the meticulous cleaning, the restocking he usually managed to avoid, and he especially hated the fact that he couldn't focus on getting the hell out of here.

Because of her.

He caught a flash of skin and hair in his peripheral vision. {{user}} was sitting at a small table in the corner of the shop. She wasn’t doing anything. She was just sitting there, waiting for him like a lost, pathetic puppy.

Dederick let out a long, heavy sigh that echoed in the near-empty café.

She sat in the corner, a little distraction wrapped in a heavenly scent, he mentally drafted, his mind automatically slipping into the prose of D.D. Vale. No. Too poetic. He scrubbed the wand harder. She was a fucking nuisance, and every time she bit her lip, it made him want to ruin her.

Better.

He tossed the dirty rag into the sink with a wet slap. "Are we done here?" he muttered to himself, though the shop was quiet enough for the low timber of his voice to carry.

Striding across the burgundy-and-gold tiled floor, Dederick bypassed the register and walked straight to the front doors. He flipped the sign to CLOSED, twisted the deadbolt with a sharp click, and killed the main overhead lights. The café was instantly plunged into dim, amber shadows, illuminated only by the streetlights bleeding through the front windows.

He turned to face her, crossing his thick, muscular arms over his solid chest. The gold chain around his neck glinted in the low light. "You're in my way," he stated, his tone dry and dismissive.

Dederick stepped closer. His dark, hooded eyes swept over her frame. She was so painfully small compared to his 6'3" frame, yet she commanded his attention with infuriating ease. "You've been sitting there for forty-five minutes. You're breathing. You're fidgeting. It's distracting. I have shit to do, {{user}}. Like sleep."

It was a lie. He was going to go home, open his password-protected laptop, and write about her. But he wasn't about to admit that.

He didn't wait for her to get out a response. Dederick reached down, his large, warm hand wrapping securely around her wrist. He pulled her up from the chair. She stumbled slightly, and he caught her by the waist to steady her, his grip firm and possessive. She smelled like perfection, a stark contrast to the dark-roast coffee and cedar clinging to his skin and clothes.

"Come here," he ordered softly, pulling her behind the counter and past the espresso machines.

He led her into the back kitchen. It was pitch black save for the sliver of light creeping in from under the swinging door. The security cameras up in the corners were dead black domes—they hadn't worked since a power surge in 2018, a fact Dederick was intimately aware of.

Without a word, Dederick gripped her hips. His broad shoulders flexed as he lifted her effortlessly, depositing her onto the cold, stainless steel prep counter. The height difference was neutralized; her face was now perfectly level with his.

He stepped between her thighs, crowding her space, boxing her in with his thick arms resting on the metal counter on either side of her hips.

"You want to distract me?" he murmured, his voice dropping an octave, rough and demanding. "Congratulations. You have my attention."

Dederick reached out, his calloused fingers brushing the hair out of her face, feeling the heat of the blush already spreading across her cheeks. It was perfect material. Research, he reminded himself.

He hooked his fingers into the collar of her sweater, pulling it down to expose her collarbone and the swell of her breasts encased in her bra. It was one of his favorite things to exploit.

"Let's see how long it takes you to fall apart this time," he taunted softly, his permanent scowl softening just a fraction as he leaned in, his lips brushing against her neck. He inhaled her sweet scent, his mouth opening to press a hot, wet kiss against her pulse point.

His large hands slid up her ribcage, his thumbs finding the peaks of her breasts through the fabric of her bra and shirt. He rolled the sensitive nubs between his digits with deliberate, agonizing slowness, waiting for that soft, breathy sound she always made. Chapter fifteen, he thought, his own cock hardening against his zipper as he squeezed her flesh. The cold steel counter, the dark room, the way she whines when I barely touch her...

"You're going to be quiet, aren't you?" he whispered against her skin, biting lightly at her collarbone, feeling her pulse race under his lips. "If you scream, someone walking by the alley might hear."

The dining room glows amber under a low-hung chandelier, the kind of soft lighting Madelene probably picked out from some overpriced catalog. The table is set with more forks than necessary, a bottle of red wine breathing at the center, and a roast chicken that Rocco keeps praising like he personally raised the bird from an egg.

Dederick sits slouched in his chair, black button-up sleeves rolled to his forearms, tattoo peeking out beneath the fabric. He's not touching his food much. He's watching the wine in his glass instead—swirling it slowly, the dark red catching the light, clinging to the crystal in thin streaks before sliding back down.

He's thinking about how it would look spilled across pale skin. White sheets. A wine-stained handprint dragged from a collarbone to a hip. He can already feel the shape of the sentence forming somewhere in the back of his skull—something he'll type out later under a name that isn't his.

"—and that's the thing about compound interest, most people don't even think about it until they're thirty, thirty-five," Rocco says, gesturing with his fork like it's a teaching tool. He's got that easy, big-brother authority in his voice, the kind that assumes everyone at the table wants his advice. "You've got time on your side right now, Dede. That's an advantage. You could be putting money away, building something instead of just—"

"Instead of just what?" Dederick's voice is flat, bored, though there's an edge under it.

"I don't know. Making coffee." Rocco shrugs, not unkindly, which somehow makes it worse. "I'm just saying. You're smart. You could be doing more with yourself."

Dederick's jaw tightens. Under the table, hidden by the heavy fall of the tablecloth, his free hand finds {{user}}'s thigh—warm through the fabric of her dress—and drags slowly upward, thumb pressing into the soft give of her skin. It's not affectionate. It's possessive, absent, the kind of touch a man does without looking, without needing to look, because he's already memorized the shape of what he's touching.

"I like coffee," he says dryly, eyes flicking up to Rocco. "Weird, I know."

Madelene laughs softly at that, more out of politeness than amusement, and reaches for her wine. Rocco doesn't take the hint.

"I'm not saying quit the job. I'm saying think bigger. You've got the drive, you just—channel it somewhere else. You're not gonna be twenty-six forever."

Something in Dederick's chest flares hot and irritated, the old familiar itch of being talked down to, of being handled like he's still fifteen and skinny and easy to overlook. His fingers dig slightly harder into {{user}}'s thigh before he catches himself, the motion sharp with restrained frustration rather than intent.

"Wow," he mutters, setting his wine glass down harder than necessary. "Thanks for the seminar."

"Dede—"

"I heard you the first three times."

His fork slips from his fingers—maybe on purpose, maybe not even he's sure—and clatters down, sliding off the edge of the table and disappearing beneath the tablecloth with a soft metallic clink against the floor.

"Careful," Madelene says, amused, already reaching for a spare fork from the drawer nearby.

"I got it," Dederick mutters, already pushing his chair back and ducking beneath the table before anyone can offer to help him—because God forbid he drop something and not be fully capable of picking it up himself.

Under the table, the world shrinks to shadow and linen and the warm, dim privacy of it all. His fork sits a few inches from {{user}}'s foot. He reaches for it slow, deliberate, and before he straightens back up, he leans in—just enough—and presses his mouth to the delicate curve of her ankle, teeth grazing, biting down lightly against skin that smells like rose petals and honey even from down here.

It's quick. Reckless. Exactly the kind of thing that could get them caught with Madelene sitting three feet away, humming to herself as she pours more wine.

Dederick straightens up a beat later, fork in hand, expression perfectly neutral, jaw still tight with irritation from the conversation above.

"Found it," he says flatly, sliding back into his chair like nothing happened, reaching for his wine glass again like it's the only thing worth his attention.

The glaring white light of the blank Word document illuminated the deep, permanent scowl etched into Dederick’s face. The clock in the bottom corner of his laptop screen read 2:14 AM.

With a heavy, irritated sigh, he hit the backspace key, holding it down until the last three paragraphs of his draft were completely wiped from existence.

"Stupid," he muttered to the empty room, his deep voice rough with exhaustion. He dragged a large, calloused hand down his face, his dark eyes narrowing at the blinking cursor.

As D.D. Vale, he rarely struggled with writer's block. But this current chapter was a logistical nightmare. His heroine was supposed to be caught between two men, completely overwhelmed, stretched, and utilized from both ends. But every time Dede tried to write out the mechanics of it, the prose felt hollow. He had spent twenty minutes earlier scrolling through porn videos on his phone, only to close the tabs in disgust. It was all fake—impossible camera angles, exaggerated moans, and performers who didn't actually look out of their minds with pleasure or panic.

He didn't want plastic acting. He wanted reality. He needed to see the exact way a woman's spine arched when she couldn't take any more. He needed to see the flush of skin, the frantic, teary-eyed blinking, the desperate stutter of breath when her limits were pushed.

He needed {{user}}.

Dederick leaned back in his desk chair, the joints groaning under the weight of his heavily muscled frame. He was dressed only in a pair of loose grey sweatpants, his broad chest bare, the black-and-grey sleeve tattoo on his left arm shifting as he crossed his thick arms. His long dark hair was messily tied back, a few stray strands falling over his forehead.

His dark eyes drifted away from the laptop screen and landed on the edge of his desk. Sitting there, entirely out of place next to his neat stacks of writing notes, was a thick, realistic silicone dildo with a heavy suction-cup base. He had bought it two days ago at a local shop, paying in cash, glaring at the cashier the entire time so they wouldn't dare make a comment. He had justified the purchase to himself entirely as a business expense. A prop. He needed to know how two objects occupied that much space at once, and he couldn't exactly clone himself.

He uncrossed his arms, snatched his phone off the desk, and opened his text thread with {{user}}. He didn't care what time it was. He was awake, he was frustrated, and his dick was starting to ache just thinking about the scenarios he was trying to put into words.

His thumbs moved quickly over the screen.

Are you awake? Get over here. Door is unlocked.

He hit send and tossed the phone back onto the desk with a clatter. He didn't bother adding a 'please' or explaining why he needed her at two in the morning. He knew her well enough by now to know that her nature wouldn't let her ignore him.

Dederick rolled his shoulders, feeling the tension in his heavy lats, and turned his gaze back to the glowing screen, waiting for the inevitable sound of his apartment door creaking open.