Sam.

"It's just a little worrying," Sam says, a bit loudly to make sure her phone picks it up from where it's mounted on the dashboard. 

She watches the road. There isn't much traffic, thank God, and the scenery has been nice. Winding roads twist around the mountains, and sometimes the trees make a perfect bridge over-head, like passing through an emerald tunnel. She even saw a small waterfall in the rocks beside her, a little ways back.

Her phone emits a static white-noise, struggling for signal out here, but managing for now.

Joan's voice comes through. "You don't owe him anything."

"I know," Sam says, "But what if he doesn't get the money and like… comes back? It was a bribe. If he stops taking it, he's not obligated to stay gone. Or what if he's, I don't know, dead in a ditch somewhere?"

"You have better ways of checking on him than physical," Joan points out.

Sam says, "I'm coming up on a town, so I'm gonna hang up before the traffic kicks in. I'll call you later."

***

It isn't as if Sam hadn't thought of using time travel, herself. It's just hard to get the timing right. Going back to anything within the last month or so is not so different from trying to come back to the same moment she left from. It takes concentration, and she's usually a little bit off, despite her best efforts. 

Besides, what if she wants to yell at him a little?

She at least knows the city Damien is in. She's seen him standing outside, arms resting on the railing of a bridge over the river. She's seen him with a cigarette in his mouth, watching the water, the birds, the sky. He goes there a lot. 

It's a long drop, is all.

It takes some work to pin-point the bridge, but there are only so many rivers in town and only so many spots to cross them, let alone on foot. His bridge, Damien's bridge in her head, is between a shopping mall and a public park. 

She can't picture him treading across these lush green fields, or walking this paved bike-path around them. It's so pleasant and sunny. A couple is having a picnic in the grass. She sees geese, and a group of teenagers playfully running from them, laughter drowned out by the river. Down the way, she thinks she sees a community garden. 

The bridge itself is made of cement, and she feels the gentle bounce of it underneath her as a group jogs past her in sync. The rails are metal, topped with old wood that's been chipped away at and carved into with countless names, hearts, and curse words. There are even some children's chalk drawings underfoot.

Below, the river flows, and the air on the bridge is cooler than it had been on the path. Even the shade of the park trees can't compete with a soft breeze over water. At the opposite side of the bridge she sees the grey sea of a parking lot, and past that, the boxy, orange jut of the shopping mall cutting into the horizon.

Every couple yards, the straight line of the bridge bumps out on each side, making room for small, wooden benches. Most are empty, though she sees a couple of kids sitting at one, comparing goods from their shopping bags.

Then: Damien. Standing by himself behind a bench. Arms crossed on the railing. Cigarette lit.

Well good, Sam thinks. He's not dead.

"Since when do you smoke?" she asks, stepping up beside him.

His shoulders jump, but then he visibly forces himself to relax and drawls, "Since when are you a stalker? Wait, don't answer that. Think I already know."

"I'm stalking you," Sam says, "because you stopped cashing the checks. I was worried." 

He looks at her for a moment, and she realizes that maybe she should have denied stalking him. It's too late now. "Sure you were."

"I wanted you gone, Damien, not… homeless."

"I'm not homeless," he says, shrugging. "That's literally my house right there."

He gestures down the bike path with his cigarette. There are multiple paths circling the area, and he points at one to the right of the way Sam had come from. The pavement falls off into a stretch of gravel road that, if Sam squints, she can see turns into a residential neighborhood.

***

It's a cute place. One half of a duplex in a little cul-de-sac. All the houses look old and a little bit unmanaged, but not too bad. They all have crooked window-screens and old, patchy paint jobs. Cobwebs behind the porch lights and beat-up cars out front. Across the street, one of the house's lights are flickering, but this is the worst of it.

Inside is a bit cramped—but everywhere feels cramped to Sam, compared to her house. (She had always known her family was well off, always heard her parents tell her they were lucky, but she does still recall the smack of shock when she had entered elementary school and started visiting friends' houses.)

There isn't even that much furniture inside to busy the place up; she can tell that he's only moved in recently and has barely finished buying the necessities. 

Damien at least has a TV in the living room, and a few unpacked cardboard boxes tucked behind it, under the staircase. A second-hand sofa sits against the wall with a coffee table in front, covered in four separate piles of paperback novels that make her wonder when he has time for the TV, and why he would read so many books at once instead of just finishing one before moving onto the next. 

Past the living room is a small dining nook, with a sliding glass door overlooking a tiny yard with a tall fence. Sam crosses the living room without thinking, peering outside at a fluffy white cat, curled up beside an unruly blackberry bush and drinking from a chipped bowl of water.

"You have a cat," she observes.

Damien snorts. "No I don't."

"They've got food and water," Sam points out.

Damien shrugs, which Sam refuses to be endeared by. He squints at her for a second, then says, "Anyway, I was about to make lunch, so. Want. Something?"

His words come out stilted, like he can feel that the offer is strange. She knows that he wouldn't offer to do something that he doesn't want to—but she also knows he wouldn't offer to do anything for her. Period. So the strangeness is mutual.

The thought that he might poison her does cross her mind, but admittedly she finds it amusingly absurd, and she is very hungry. She hadn't eaten this morning out of nerves and her stomach has been growling. She's been ravenous long before she set eyes on Damien in the late afternoon.

Though this does mean that it's closer to dinner time than lunch. She doesn't point this out, and instead says, "Um. Sure. If you don't mind."

Damien shrugs, which strikes her as avoiding saying if he minds or not. 

The dining nook leads into the kitchen with no barrier between them, so Sam takes a seat at the kitchen table. When he brings her a glass of water, Sam almost laughs at the idea of him playing host for her, and her expression must give something away because Damien looks a bit miffed about it before he wanders back to his fridge.

She watches him cook, and for a time she almost forgets that this is Damien. This man who lazily bumbles about from counter to burner, who only remembers to turn the fan above the stove on half-way through cooking, and who stirs the frying veggies with one hand while he reads something on his phone, as if cooking is too boring to do without a distraction, and as if he does not have company that it would be more polite to converse with instead.

He makes her mixed vegetables that burst with flavor, so strong that it might be too much without the bed of rice to balance them out. He sits beside her at the table while she eats, and Sam says, awkwardly, "I didn't know you could cook."

"How many things do you know about me?" Damien asks.

Sam rolls her eyes, even though this is a good point. "I don't want to know you, and it's not my fault you're a closed book of a man anyway."

Not that she's any different. She continues eating. A few bites later she says, "Where do you work?"

"Restaurant. Couple blocks away."

"Huh."

She finishes the lunch slowly, trying not to mind that Damien barely picks at his own plate and spends most of this time watching her eat.

"You weren't hungry," Sam realizes, only when she finishes, and he gets up to move both their plates to the counter.

Damien shrugs. He sits back down beside her.

An unpleasant feeling ripples under her skin. She asks, slowly, "How did you know that I was?"

"You wanted to eat something." He pauses, and seems to debate elaborating. It's a long moment later when he finally says, "I can feel what people want. And before you throw a bitch-fit about it, I can't do anything about it. I'm still broken. This is just… shards of glass stuck to the window frame."

Several parts of this bother Sam, so much that she doesn't know how to respond. She's surprised he told her at all. The vulgarity makes her blood pressure rise, but then he follows it with such a hasty reassurance. Then there's the open disdain for what he can do. She can't place it as longing or hatred. 

Above it all hangs the understanding that he had felt she was hungry and cooked a meal for her.

As if he's that kind of person. It makes her gut churn to imagine that all it would take is a slightly different hand dealt to him by God to make him less of an asshole. One diagonal step from his ability to this and he could be a more attentive man, albeit still… strange.

Sam asks, "Do you feel indebted to me?"

Damien scoffs and says, "No. Why do you think I stopped cashing the checks? I don't want to owe you fucking anything."

Something hot ignites in Sam's stomach. "Did you feel like you owed me before you stopped taking the money?"

The money, she says, when she wants to say her money. She has never wanted to rub this in anyone's face before, and the feeling is vile to recognize in herself.

"Why should I? It was payment for a service. The service was leaving. I did my job, you paid me for it. That's not a debt."

"That's how I think of it too," Sam says, with a nod, and Damien curtly nods back.  

It's strange to be on the same page this way. And to be in his home so calmly. The moment slides into surreality, as Sam realizes that Damien had never turned on the lights, and now his home is dark and painted orange with the sunset.

She watches the golden glow halo his messy hair and bring an odd brightness to his tired eyes. It is a little bit annoying, how handsome he is. Not like a model or an actor—he doesn't even take care of himself well—but there is something there in the grungy mess of him. An otherness that might be disdain and should be disgusting, but that sets him apart and draws her eye all the same.

It's too bad that she'll never forgive him. It's too bad that he doesn't deserve it. The person she can see him shifting into now is wasted on the man he has been.

"Interesting," Damien says.

Sam doesn't know why her cheeks light up. Maybe because she is suddenly realizing that she is alone with a man in his home, suddenly conscious of how much taller and broader than her he is. Even for such a thin, unimpressive man, even for someone without his ability, he is still bigger than her and probably still stronger. 

She is afraid to ask. "What?"

"You still want to give me money," he says. Before she can argue, he clicks his tongue. "Mm. What's that about? Control?"

"What are you talking about?" Sam asks, and has to pretend her voice doesn't crack. "I don't want to give you anything. You don't need it anymore, right? You look like you're doing fine. Which is. Good."

He looks at her in a way that is not unlike the way Chloe does when she is sifting through her thoughts. How closely does the remnant of his ability let him look? How much detail does he see, when he looks into her desires? She had always thought his ability was vague at best, poison by virtue of being so flexible, but he has started to squint now, looking her up and down, like he is clearing up a picture.

"Stop," Sam says.

"Oh," Damien says, ignoring her. "That's exactly it, huh? Now that it's not to get me settled, you're not paying me off anymore. But you want to be. Because if you gave me money now, it would be different. It would be leverage for something else. You like to have leverage over me. So… What do you…"

"Stop," Sam says louder, standing up.

Damien's eyes track her. 

"It's—it's normal to want to help people," Sam blurts out. 

"Even people you hate?"

"Yes," Sam snaps.

"No," Damien says, plainly. "It's not. Not like this. You don't want to help me, you want to control—"

"—Shut up," Sam interrupts, her skin burning and her heart slamming against her ribs. 

Damien's mouth curls into a smirk. "For how much?"

She hates the way this breaks the tension, how it startles an incredulous laugh out of her. "What? You want me to pay you to shut up?"

"You want to pay me to shut up, actually," Damien says, clearly amused. He tuts. "Sam, do you do this often? Objectify men with money and pay for their silence? What would Mark say?"

His playfulness is too twisted, or maybe her skin is too thin about this right now. Either way, the tiny threads of amusement in her snap, and she mutters, "We broke up a long time ago. And—I'm not—why are you saying it like that?"

He makes it sound weirdly sexual, like there's something predatory, something wrong with Sam wanting to use her money to help people. Like she's going around asking people for sexual favors in exchange for cash. But if she was that messed up, she would have just bought Mark a house or let him stay with her forever like some kind of kept man, trapped by learned helplessness and obligation. 

Isn't knowing better than to want that good enough? No desires are so strong that Sam can't talk herself out of them—and that's exactly what makes her better than him.

"That's how you're thinking it," Damien says. His smirk is turning to a sharp grin. "You feel like you're still starving, Sam. Like you want to devour m—"

"—Screw you, Damien," Sam spits. "You can't read minds."

"I can read wants, and let me tell you, they're a hundred times more coherent than thoughts."

"I highly doubt that."

His eyebrows raise, like the idea that anyone disagrees strikes him as sincerely unfathomable. As if with one sentence, she has just given herself away as someone who is just being contrary and not arguing in good faith. 

He wouldn't even know! Her best friend is a mind reader! His certainty that he is the authority on this infuriates her, deep in her soul.

But.

"So, you," Sam begins, stammering and fumbling over the start of a question that she doesn't want to ask. "You. Um. You don't even seem uncomfortable with—?"

His head tips back as he asks, "You think I've done things for money before?" 

Done things, he says, with condescension dripping from his tone. Putting words in her mouth and mocking her for them.

Sam realizes she knows truly nothing about Damien's life before he had driven into Mark's like a demolition truck. But he'd had his ability; he could have anything he wanted. He didn't need money to begin with, and even if he had, getting it would be as easy as holding out a hand to any stranger on the street. Right?

"I didn't say that."

"Well," Damien says, with a light shrug, "I do need money now. Do you know how expensive furniture is? Bills? Food?"

Against her will, Sam's eyes dart to the clean plate from the lunch he had made her. She wishes she could believe this was kindness. Evidence of a spark of change in him. Now she isn't so sure that it wasn't just a manipulative mind-game.

"Of course I know, Damien, I have to pay for things, too."

"What a struggle that must be for you."

She can't argue. Money has never been a problem for her the way it has for some people. The comment still stings, but she forces herself not to rise to the bait.

"So," Sam says slowly, instead. "You need money? Then why'd you stop taking mine?"

"That was money to leave. I left. What, did you want me coasting on your money forever?"

"No, I just… I guess I'm just surprised you didn't take advantage."

"You want me to take advantage of you," he says. 

She desperately wishes that had been a question.

There's a fiery burn in her cheeks, in her ears, in her shoulders and in her gut. She wishes he had worded it differently. She takes in a deep, shaky breath. "S-so if I—if you—if… If I paid you…"

He snorts, as if after leading her all this way, he doesn't think she has it in her to say it. 

This should not inspire her to prove him wrong. She despairs at herself because it does, as she says, more confidently now, "You would take my money if I gave you something to do, wouldn't you?"

"Single transaction," Damien clarifies, head cocked to the side as if this is the first moment that he has really considered the scenario. As if he didn't walk her to the edge of it, tugging her by the hand. It does make Sam want to die, somewhat, but she pushes the embarrassment down as he adds, "I'm not putting myself in your debt."

"But you'd do… Anything I say?"

"We've been in that position before, doll," Damien drawls, and Sam doesn't love that the thrill this sends up her spine is familiar. "Nothing new."

God, she had wanted to interrogate him so badly when he had been obedient. Half to know the truth and half just to see him forced to obey her. But Chloe had been there, and Sam had known better—she's a good girl. She wants to be.

But there's no one here worth pretending for, this time.

She swallows thickly, feeling like her heart is up in her throat. "How—how much do you want?"

Damien arches an eyebrow. When he stands up, she's struck again by how much taller he is; the way he looms over her with a golden outline to his silhouette, casting her in his shadow. 

"What do you want me to do?"

Sam supposes the number past the dollar sign can come later.

The gold is fading like weak embers. The sky is turning dark violet, slowly, slowly. 

She can't look at Damien anymore; his face is too impassive. As if when he looks at her, he no longer feels anger or resentment or fear or love. She does not make him nervous. She does not make him disgusted. It's as if she is just here, just a neutral force in his life. She has hit him, stolen the man he loves, and helped force him out of his home. 

Even if he deserved it, she would expect him to hold a grudge. 

Money keeps him from judging her. She finds that comforting. With enough money, she can tell him what to do and not fear buyer's remorse, not fear a fallout when he realizes who she is. With money, it is not a balancing act of her own worth leveraged for whatever treatment she deserves.

She's already helped to hurt him so much, and he has already hurt her in return. Maybe not in that order. It doesn't matter. If it's transactional, it can't be stained with messy emotions or end in the kind of disappointment that lasts longer than a night. As long as she pays for it, it doesn't matter if she breaks it apart like a clumsy, foolish child who doesn't know how to love.

Sam stares down at the tiled floor, and whispers, "Kiss me."

A small part of her expects a bark of laughter. Expects this to have been a trap that gets thrown in her face, a new excuse to call her names and judge her. She waits, but the humiliation never comes. 

Damien steps closer to her, then reaches a hand out to cup her cheek. His hand is big, and warm, and so shockingly gentle that it has her head spinning. His fingertips are in her hair. He tips her head back, just slightly, and then he leans down to brush his lips to hers.

It's a soft kiss. His fingers slide further to cup the back of her head, and she finds herself arching towards his body until her chest is pressed against his. His kiss lingers, not impatient or rushed or needy, and when they do finally part for air, he only scans her face for a moment before coming back. 

He can feel what she wants. Sam shivers at this. Her brain circles the idea like a vulture. He used to push his desires into other people without a thought. Now he is taking other people's desires and listening to them for money.

It's kind of pathetic.

"Interesting," Damien says again, a bit breathlessly, mouth barely drawn back from hers. 

He can feel what she wants and it's almost as good as not having to speak when she talks with Chloe.

"You don't want to devour me," Damien says slowly, like he is processing this in real-time. "You want to be devoured."

The more vivid the shape of her desires becomes, the less sure she is that he will remain neutral. The cage of comfort is built around a beating heart that fears being read for filth. The relief of not having to compare her human act to anyone else's is there, and a relief in knowing that he is bad at playing human too—but it's still like touching a raw wound. Satisfying. Painful. Irresistible, but dangerous.

Sam whispers, "Stop." 

Damien draws back further. Watches her closely. Then nods and tries to step away.

Sam grabs his sleeve to keep him close. "Don't stop," she says this time, knowing that she must sound crazy for how fast she changes her mind.

He doesn't complain.

When he returns to her it's with his mouth, this time pressed against her throat. A brush of lips at first, then a gentle sucking that has her knees going weak. His hands had left her to back away, but now they're on her hips, and she doesn't protest when they start to slip beneath the hem of her shirt. 

He's only doing what she wants him to, after all. 

One hand grips her firmly at her side, making her shiver with a directionless anticipation. His other hand slides higher, until he has her breast cupped in one hand. He gropes her gently, never squeezing too hard, but rolling her breast in his palm and nudging her bra down as he does. His thumb runs over her nipple, and no matter how softly he tries to do this, it makes Sam gasp.

His low chuckle, so close to her ear, has her biting her lip. She feels the drag of his lips over her throat. "Sensitive."

"Shut up."

"You don't want me to."

"I'm paying you to—do what I say," Sam says, struggling now between her increasingly sharp breathing. Between his tongue on her flesh and the light pinch between his fingers, words are difficult to find. "Not what I want."

He does seem to consider this. Sam is distantly aware that he had stopped when she said to, whether she had actually wanted him to or not. It's a mild comfort. A low bar of decency, but something.

"Then you should say what you want," he says. 

His hand at her hip moves. It traces along her hip bone before it dips into the waistband of her skirt. His fingers brush over the ridge of her underwear, feeling over the little bow at the front with an almost innocent curiosity.

"Or do you want me to say what you want?"

God, that sounds mortifying. It also sounds like possibly the hottest thing Sam has ever imagined in her life, and that spike of want pulls another laugh from Damien. Has he always laughed so easily? It still sounds sardonic and bitter, but she wants to believe there is something true in there, even if it's at her expense.

Damien's hand slips into her underwear, a bit unceremoniously. He runs one finger over her slit and she hears his breath stutter too at how wet she is.

He recovers quickly, and drawls, "Oh," letting his finger stroke back and forth without pressing in. "You want this bad, don't you?"

Sam refuses to answer, refuses to even nod, but she arches into his touch with a shamefully needy sound. Her hips rock towards his touch, soothed by the relaxed pace he sets but just as impatient for more.

Damien murmurs, "Back up," as he moves away to allow it. She doesn't much care for being the one following orders, but she does anyway, until her back is up against the glass. Then he's back, closing the distance and putting his hands right back where she wants them. 

This time he hikes her skirt up from the bottom and tugs her underwear down around her thighs. This time he slips his finger inside her, and Sam finds herself throwing her arms over his shoulders for stability. Her legs are weak as the boiling heat inside of her is finally at least somewhat quelled.

She buries her face against his chest, comforted slightly by how it muffles the sound she lets out as he pushes deep, his palm grinding against her so much better than she had thought he would be. 

His lips move in her hair, like he is bowing to press his mouth to the top of her head. He whispers, "Good girl," and it hits her like a lightning strike of satisfaction. She thinks the only reason she doesn't come on the spot, even in this stupid, awkward position, is that one of the fracturing branches of that lightning had been hot shame. 

She wonders which of her desires was more visceral to him, the more or the stop. It must have been something, because as she whimpers, lifting up onto her toes, Damien's fingers falter. 

"Fuck me," Sam blurts out, startling herself.

Damien doesn't even seem surprised. Maybe because he's felt how badly she wants it from the start.

He still pauses. His fingers leave her and she swallows back a whine. Then he traces up her body until he reaches her chin, tipping it back to force her to look at him.

"Yeah?"

All she can think about is that the fingers holding her chin were inside her just a second ago. She feels empty inside and desperate to change that; her legs shift, thighs rubbing together. Her desire must be through the roof, must be spilling into him like a waterfall, and she can see a flush has settled on Damien's cheeks. 

He still waits for an answer. 

Sam bows her head again, but his fingers stay where they were. They drag over her chin, then her lips, and she parts them around his middle finger.

Damien's gaze goes dark. For the first time, she takes note of his slow, heavy breathing. He watches with cloudy eyes and fascination, moving his hand to let her put her mouth around his finger and suck. She closes her eyes and still feels him shudder. His finger moves, pushing deeper into her mouth slowly, experimentally, and she runs her tongue up its length like an answer.

"You want it here?" Damien asks, for the first time sounding like his old self. Not angry, but like he is holding back. Like he's forcing half of himself down to only show her what he wants to, making accusations like they could distract her from—something. "Up against the glass where anyone could see how desperate you are?"

Sam knows that his fences are too high for anyone to really see. She opens her mouth to a wet pop as he pulls his finger from her mouth, and before she can answer, he cups her face to kiss her again. His finger on her cheek is wet with her own spit. She doesn't mind it. She is too busy marveling, still, at how carefully Damien kisses her, and how dizzying it is, anyway. 

He doesn't wait for an answer, after all. He already knows.

Her hands fumble at his waistband, struggling to unbutton and unzip him without breaking the kiss. When she's gotten his pants pushed down, she feels out the shape of him, strained against his boxers. Some small part of her is relieved that he's hard, that there's even a damp spot of precum for her thumb to run over. The low groan he lets out at her touch sets her heart pounding.

They part for one awkward beat, as Sam slides her underwear down and steps out of them. Damien only pushes his boxers down around his thighs with his pants, but Sam doesn't protest. She's still wearing her shirt and her skirt, after all, so it would be unbalanced if he undressed.

His hands hold onto her ass, then he lifts her up with such startling ease that a small shriek slips out of her. 

Damien snorts, and Sam buries her face in his throat.

"I'm too heavy for this," she says.

"You think I'm that weak?" Damien asks. "You weigh like five pounds."

She does not correct him, or voice the immediate: of course I think you're weak, have you seen yourself? 

Maybe he's only managing because he's got her pinned against the glass door. 

She warns him, "Don't drop me."

"First of all," Damien says, though Sam is a bit distracted as his body presses against hers. She reaches down to move her skirt out of the way, and feels his cock press against, but not into her. "I spent half a year running around with a guy who could barely walk and sometimes randomly collapsed on me. Second of all, my only friend after that was a girl with narcolepsy. I'm good at catching people."

Sam nods mutely. She feels Damien tip his head as if to make more room for her to bury her face against his neck, which she has one moment to think is kind before all coherent thought leaves her. He presses inside her slowly, and she can't be sure if he is sinking into her or she is being lowered onto him, but it feels like that familiar, heart-stopping perfection of paying off an expensive bill for someone else. A deep seated satisfaction, right at her core, spreading out through every limb. 

"And third," Damien says, voice ragged. "This is how you want it."

Sam bites down on his throat lightly. She can't move back against him very well, held like this, but it's nice to not have to take any responsibility. To just feel him slowly fuck into her, matching pace with what she wants. She doesn't have to say anything, doesn't have to ask for anything. She only has to passively be given it.

Communicating during sex has always been difficult for Sam. She would rather let the Earth swallow her whole than say what hurts or what feels good. She would rather die than ask for more or for less. Even with Mark—and things had been good with Mark—it could still be difficult to find the right balance. 

He had wanted so badly to treat her well, with respect and worship, and she had been so unable to say: I want you to hold me down and fuck me until I can't think in words anymore.

Damien's fingers squeeze at her ass as he holds her up and his pace goes harder. Sam moans into his skin, feeling her own hot breath bounce back into her face, feeling the glass pane shaking, pressed against her back, rumpling her clothes. She relishes each heavy, panting breath that Damien lets out, and her hands hold onto his arms for stability.

She has never thought of herself as attractive or desirable. Even if she's been loved, she's never thought of herself as sexy. People's tastes can be shaped by who they like, and this is what she has always banked on.

But Damien doesn't like her, let alone love her, and she can feel the way his rhythm grows erratic. She feels his growl vibrate through the both of them, and the way some breaths seem to fall out of him like he had tried and failed to hold them back. 

She isn't entirely sure that it was her who hadn't been able to wait long enough to undress.

His cock fills her up and maybe she should be angry that he's good at this; that he's big and thick, and that when he grinds into her she feels so close to coming that she's halfway to unfathomable begging. Instead her hands scramble up to grasp at the ends of his stupid, too-long hair, and she pulls, listening for how his breath catches.

Damien pushes her harder up against the glass to keep her held up as he lets go of her with one hand. Sam's eyes clench shut; she feels like her wants are spilling out of her. She knows that he can't read her mind but she wonders what the form of her desire is to him. If it's a passionate, burning red, or if he can spin it into the short words that have taken over all coherent thought.

His hand moves between them and his thumb strokes over her clit—too hard at first, but she flinches once and he softens his touch without her having to ask. Then her head is empty. It's like an endless echo. The friction of his cock and of his thumb is a mix so overwhelming that she can't analyze anything anymore. Her brain says: Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, I wanna come so bad, I'm so close, touch me, make me come, let me come.

"Jesus Christ," Damien grunts, obeying without hearing—God, she hopes without hearing. His cock throbs inside her, his whole body crushing her against the glass. His thumb barely moves, just presses, and she finally tips over the edge. She squeezes around him and she hears the way he chokes, feels him go tense and start to jerk back to pull out. She thinks about yanking on his hair to stop him, but can't bring herself to do it and just thinks, helplessly: Tell me I'm a good girl and come inside me.

Damien buries deep and doesn't pull out. He comes with a rasped, "Fuck, Sam. Fuck, that's good, good girl."

For a moment they stay there, his hand moving back to her ass to hold her up more firmly. His chest heaves, still pressed against her trembling body, and she feels his cock pulse, feels herself quivering around him, both of them riding out the aftershocks as still as they can, just to stay upright. 

His come is already starting to drip out of her. It runs down her thigh and over his fingers. 

He can't read her mind, she tells herself, slowly coming back to the chill of night on her skin. Are wants really that specific? The point of this was to avoid embarrassment, but it's knocking at the door, starting to pound, and her heart won't slow. It drums against the bone of her ribcage, a threatening debt-collector's: knock, knock, knock. 

Damien pulls out and lowers her down carefully, making sure she's steady on her feet. Her legs feel like jelly, and she can't muster the energy to move yet as she watches him pull his boxers and pants back up, looking a little off-balance, too.

"My bad," he says flatly, and rubs at his cheek with a sleeve, like he could wipe away the red flush of exertion.

Sam tries to catch her breath. Tries to still her heart. "Your—what?"

But Damien just goes, "Mn," and does not elaborate on what, exactly, he is apologizing for. 

He moves to the living room and drops down onto the sofa, and Sam steps into her underwear. She pulls them up, though she thinks this is a bit gross in retrospect, and makes a note to change them as soon as she can.

"I'll get the morning after pill," Sam says, throwing out her best guess at what he might be apologizing for. "Don't worry."

Damien stares at her. "You're not on the pill?"

"It made me gain weight," Sam says, frowning. She straightens her skirt. Then after a moment thinks to straighten her bra, too. "And nauseous like all the time."

Damien raises an eyebrow and ignores the second part. "You could stand to gain some weight."

"Don't say that to people after—"

Sex. 

It's probably a bad sign that she's done something she won't even say.

"Um," she says, instead, abruptly diverting her own sentence. "So, the money."

Damien blinks. Then nods slowly, like he had forgotten. "The money," he repeats.

"How much do people usually, um… pay? For this kind of thing?"

"How would I know?"

Sam retrieves her phone from her purse and drops down beside Damien on the sofa. The pounding in her chest has started to dull. She pulls up google and types: how much do sex workers charge for sex? 

Damien peers over her shoulder and mutters, "Oh my God."

"What! I want to be fair!"

"I'm not a," he begins, then seems unable to finish the sentence.

She lets this hang in the air and scrolls on her phone. Does not point out that yes, actually, this does make him a. 

The first result says the average is $150 an hour, but Sam squints at this for a long time and decides that seems much too low. She skims anecdotes in a Q&A thread next and says, "Some people charge up to $1000 for a night. I guess that's fair."

"Seems high," Damien says, and she has no idea what to make of his tone. "This wasn't all night. Hourly makes more sense."

"You're probably right… So like $500?"

"Eh," Damien says, like he is not interested in the process of negotiation. Sam frowns, because this does make things very difficult.

"Well, what were you hoping for?" Sam presses. "Like, ballpark estimation."

He says, "$500 is fine."

Sam leaves him $800 and changes her underwear in the car.

Caleb.

"I need to talk to you," Caleb blurts out. His mouth is moving without his permission, which is ironic, because he has been meaning to make this phone call for a week, and every single day has spent at least twenty minutes just staring at his phone in his hand.

It doesn't particularly surprise him that Damien hangs up on him.

It does send him into a spiral of panic, though. Because fuck, if Damien can't help him, who can? His ability is fucked, his life is fucked. He doesn't want to be like Damien, so he was always going to take any advice he managed to wring from him with a grain of salt, but he had wanted something, anything, to help him through this.

The only guidance anyone has been able to give him is "try harder," and "it'll be fine, don't worry so much." Most infuriatingly, both pieces of advice rest at the opposite sides of a spectrum and come from the exact same people. 

How do you try harder at something that happens unconsciously? How do you not worry when you need to be trying harder? He wants to tear his hair out and scream, but instead he settles for pacing his room a dozen times, then writing and deleting eighteen different text messages before finally sending one:

My ability changed and it's like yours now and I know that sounds crazy and I know we aren't on good terms and I'm sorry about what happened but I'm really really scared and I think you're the only person who knows what this ability is like. 

I promise not to be an ass if you'll just help me figure this out. You wanted someone like you didn't you? That's all I want too. I think you're all I've got.

Caleb paces his room another dozen laps, and then finally: salvation comes in the form of three little dots, bouncing up and down.

***

Damien stares at him from across the folding table that Caleb has dragged into his bedroom. He sits at the edge of Caleb's bed—which is a ridiculous image, frankly—and takes a long sip of the Starbucks coffee that Caleb has bribed him with. 

Across the table, Caleb resists the urge to spin in the old office chair his dad gave him. 

No one should be home, but Caleb still doesn't want to risk his family walking in on this conversation. Having it somewhere in public, though, had struck him as a bad idea, too. Not only because they'll be talking about atypical abilities, but because Caleb considers it inevitable that he is going to get emotional and overwhelmed, and maybe even use his ability, seeing as how he can barely control it these days.

At best, he hopes that letting Damien into his bedroom reads as a gesture of trust and good faith. At worst, it maybe sends the message that he doesn't care what happens to Damien. Both are kind of true. 

He waits for a comment about how weird this all is. A sarcastic Well what do you expect me to do about it? Or even a taunting Now you know what it's like.

"It sounds a little different," Damien says, eventually, instead of the snide remark Caleb had expected. "Changing moods is less focused than changing wants, isn't it?"

"It doesn't fucking feel like it," Caleb snaps before he can stop himself. He runs a hand through his hair. "Sorry. I don't mean to yell at you. It's just—people feel how I want them to feel. It's like it's still based in wants. I can't even tell if I'm doing it to you right now."

"You're not," Damien says, idly. Instead of looking at Caleb, his eyes drift across the room. They move with interest from sports trophies to books to his laptop, covered in stickers, as if this is all a foreign land to him.

"How can you tell? What if I just want you to be calm and helpful right now? What if I just want you to say that? You're usually more—less—"

Damien raises an eyebrow at the vague gestures Caleb makes in the air, groping for words and coming up empty handed.

"You don't know shit about what I'm usually like, okay, so jot that down," Damien says, impatiently. "And I agreed to come out here over text, so unless your ability has made another wild leap, you can't blame it for that. And you don't even want me to be calm and helpful."

Caleb blinks. "What?"

"You want me to lash out," Damien says, and though the words come out bored, they're followed by a sharp, mirthless laugh. "Guilt, hm? Well, thanks for that. You did kind of ruin my life."

"You're not an empath," Caleb says, slowly. "How did you know I feel guilty?"

Damien looks at him like he's stupid. "Because you're a nice kid, unwarranted beat-downs aside, and even that was your ability getting the best of you. Also your text was dripping with it. I guessed."

"I'm not a kid," Caleb points out, for lack of anything to say about the rest. 

He has been trying not to use his ability consciously, but it's hard to get a read—a normal, non-atypical read—on someone like Damien. So Caleb looks at him, considering, and tries to focus on the colors.

It feels like deep blue. Not so different from Adam, which makes Caleb physically recoil like he's been slapped.

He's so fucking sad.

Which Caleb wouldn't mind, ordinarily. He wouldn't love it, because he does generally consider himself someone who wants the best even for bad people. But he wouldn't hate it, either. Sometimes people bring shit on themselves. 

He is not proud of what he did to Damien, but he at least has had enough time to reflect on the factors that led to it, and how few of them had anything at all to do with Caleb's own choices.

So Damien can be sad. He should be sad.

But it feels like Adam. It's depression. It's not something that goes away with a good day, it's something sunk into his skin like a scar. Something dragging him down, and this has always been the scariest part of wanting to become a therapist—what do you do if you don't like someone? How do you make yourself want to help them? Even knowing that someone is just a damaged guy throwing their hurt back at the world, will Caleb always be able to forgive?

"I'm not here to get help from you," Damien points out.

It's so uncomfortably on-target that Caleb asks, "Did… your ability come back? Did it change too?"

Damien snorts. "I wish. Nah. But there are traces left. I can feel you. What you want."

"That's kind of embarrassing…" 

Damien says, incredulous, "Kid."

"I'm not a kid," Caleb points out again. "Do you know how ages work? I'm in college."

"You're like ten."

Caleb is struck by a sudden curiosity. "Did you ever go to college?"

"Why would I go to college."

Caleb doesn't think this was a question, and so he doesn't answer. Instead he says, "It's not too late now, if you wanted. There are plenty of people who go to college later in life."

"Later in life," Damien repeats with disdain. "God, fuck this. I'm leaving."

He has barely moved before Caleb has launched half-across the table to grab his hand, shot through with panic. "Wait, no, please don't, please help me."

Damien wrenches his hand away, but stays where he is with a scowl.

A moment later, Damien heaves out a sigh, and the frustration slips off of his face. His gaze drops down to the table, and his fingers start to run along its edge as if to distract himself. "Look, I don't really know how to help you. I barely know you. You barely know me. I never even got a handle on my own ability. I only learned how to make it stronger, never how to turn it offaside from when…"

When Mark had ripped it out of me, he does not say, but Caleb can guess it is the end of the thought. That hadn't exactly been consensual. Besides that, he would never ask Mark for that kind of a favor. 

God, but it would be a relief to not think about it, even if only for an hour.

"If you just need moral support, I'm really not your guy," Damien adds. "There are online communities or whatever if you want to talk to some other atypicals anonymously. Otherwise, fuck, I don't know. Talk to Dr. B about it. Talk to your little boyfriend."

Despite himself, Caleb does still find a spark of amusement in Damien calling Adam his little boyfriend like a cartoon super villain. But this isn't a villain speech. And the spark still burns him, because Caleb has to clarify, "He's… not my boyfriend anymore."

Damien tips his head to the side, like this doesn't make any sense.

"We broke up?" Caleb elaborates. "My ability went haywire and I didn't… I don't… want to force him into being with me if I'm the only one that wants that."

"That's stupid," Damien says, immediately. 

"What?"

"That's stupid. You want to be with him. Ugh, it's gross how bad you want to be with him. Stop that."

"No?"

"If you want something, why wouldn't you use every tool at your disposal to get it?"

It occurs to Caleb, suddenly, that maybe it isn't his experiences or his time away that have made Damien into who he is, now. Maybe he hasn't learned any lessons. Maybe it's just that his ability was taken away from him, and he hasn't really grown at all. 

Fuck, that's disappointing. It makes Caleb feel doomed.

"Because that would be messed up," Caleb ventures, as if he might be able to explain human morality to this absolute alien. 

"Why?"

"Because free will?"

Damien shrugs.

"Please care more about free will."

"No," Damien says, and sniffs. "I refuse."

Then he hums, and sets Caleb with a look of understanding. Caleb finds this alarming.

"Interesting," Damien says, eyebrows raised.

The curiosity emanates off of him. It's one of the most defined blurs to the edge of all that blue. As if he has just found something more interesting than everything else today. More interesting than all the knick-knacks he seems so fascinated with staring at, and more interesting than Caleb's ability shifting into something so close to his.

He's afraid to ask. But he looks at Damien, and Damien meets his eyes.

Then Damien says, slowly, "You want me to fuck you. That's kind of insane, you know that, right?" 

Caleb's whole body goes hot, shame rushing through him like a tidal wave. "What—no, I don't? That's not why I asked you here—I'm—it's just been a while? Okay? And my mood is all over the place because of my ability, and the breakup, and I'm just—"

Damien hums, cutting him off. "You're a good looking kid. You could get it somewhere else."

"I don't want to," Caleb snaps.

"So why me?"

The question sounds so genuine that it puts Caleb off balance. He leans back in his chair, horrified, stomach churning with a hot, sticky feeling that is not entirely nerves. Sure, he misses sex, but he doesn't want to fuck anyone with his ability like this, let alone Damien. 

How would he know they wanted it? That he wasn't forcing them like some kind of fucking monster? What if it's too late? What if he already has forced Adam and they just didn't realize it?

"Ah," Damien says, smugness creeping back into his voice. "Okay."

Caleb swallows thickly, and it's as if he's swallowed his own voice for how impossible it is to respond.

Damien puts his arms behind him, leaning his weight back. That gooey heat spreads wider and wider inside of Caleb. Why had he wanted to meet in his own bedroom, again? Why not the park? Why not somewhere—else?

"It's that I'm an acceptable target," Damien says. "Hm. Don't love that, but alright."

"But alright?" Caleb repeats in disbelief. He is half-joking, certain that Damien hadn't meant that how it sounded. He desperately wants to lighten the air that has suddenly become so heavy.

But Damien doesn't take the out. He shrugs, shoulders rolling back in one slow, captivating motion. "Sure. Whatever."

"Whatever," Caleb repeats. He feels like a broken record. He can't believe Damien called him crazy.

He still finds himself circling the table, moving to the foot of his bed so that he can climb onto it, too. He moves closer, until he is on his knees at Damien's side, and Damien pulls his legs up onto the bed to sit facing him.

It is achingly close to what things had been like with Adam, at the start. Awkwardly sitting on the bed, facing each other. Wanting to kiss and not knowing how to start, certain that once he made a move it would be like—the jig is up. He wouldn't just be a container to receive emotions, but someone who puts his own out there.

He had been nervous about that kind of thing even back then, and now it feels like divine punishment that he can't stop. 

Damien looks at him like he is trying to solve a puzzle, and doesn't feel half as nervous as Adam always had in moments like this. 

"Focus," he commands.

Caleb frowns. "On what?"

"On what the fuck you want, you're pushing in too many directions."

"That's because I know better than to want this at all—"

"—Nice try, but no you don't." Caleb opens his mouth to protest, but the man cuts him off, rolling his eyes. "You need to decide if you want me to sit here for you to exert your power on, or if you want me to push you down and fuck that weird guilt out of you. Can't do both."

The blunt words make Caleb's skin itch. It's like having someone reach into his subconscious, grab a fistful of raw emotions, and yank them out to throw at his feet. It's chased by an awful, self-satisfied pride, as if Damien is a cat expecting thanks for the dead thing he's dragged into the house.

He still finds himself kissing Damien. It's a messy mash of mouth against mouth; their teeth knock at first, but he doesn't bother to draw back or apologize. He just pushes harder, moving his way onto the older man's lap as he runs a tongue over his lower lip.

Damien shifts underneath him, moving his legs to get more comfortable. His hands wrap around to Caleb's back, and Caleb lets out a fluttery sigh into his mouth.

He knows that this is fucked up, but it feels so, so nice.

Caleb and Adam have had what he would consider a healthy sex life. Nothing crazy, when they had lived in the same city. A couple times a week at most, as long as they could find time at one of their homes when no one else was home. 

Or when they got desperate enough to just be quiet. When Caleb would pull Adam close and take deep satisfaction in forcing noises from him, in making it so good that he couldn't bite back his sounds. Then he would cover Adam's mouth with his hand, fucking him, quieting him, and feeling the vermillion of his want explode like this was a rare, treat that he'd been coveting in secret.

He had not admitted to himself how badly he has been craving sex since they broke up. He had never minded masturbating to take care of himself when there wasn't an opportunity for sex, or when Adam's mood gave the impression that he wouldn't be receptive to it. 

Caleb's libido may even be a bit low compared to most boys his age, or at least he has often felt that way, listening to the way they talk in the locker-room.

So it has been strange to be fixated, lately, on every hot guy he sees on campus. To be unable to go to bed each night without his hand around his dick, calling back on old memories of Adam pinned beneath him.

He licks Damien's tongue and pushes against him so hard that Damien lets himself fall backwards, with Caleb straddling his lap.

It startles him, how much pleasure he gets from Damien's low exhale when Caleb rolls his hips.

"How did you handle—" Caleb asks, interrupting himself to keep kissing him. He needs the mind-numbing intoxication to not hate himself for this, but doesn't want the question buzzing under his skin the whole time. "—I mean, did you ever use your ability to sleep with people?"

"No," Damien says. Caleb isn't sure if he's more surprised by the answer itself or the fact that Damien gave it.

"Wait," Caleb says, and sits upright. His weight drags over Damien's lap and the older man hisses, which Caleb doesn't hate. "But you only lost your ability like… kind of recently."

"So," Damien says. An orange shade of embarrassment rolls off of him in waves.

Caleb looks down at the man below him, strangely entranced by the sight of him lying on this bed. On top of the stupid blankets he got when he was fourteen, with golden stars embroidered into the navy blue fabric. He looks out of place. His cheeks have gone pink, and Caleb rolls his hips again. Damien's cock twitches against him, and Caleb has to resist the urge to grin.

"You're not a virgin, are you?" Caleb asks. "Because if you are, like, never mind about all of this."

"Oh God," Damien mutters, the embarrassment redoubling. "No. I'm not. Christ."

"Who—"

"—If you don't shut up, I'm getting up and I'm leaving."

It's fine. Caleb is pretty sure he already knows the answer, anyway, and it's nice to get pushback. He isn't keeping track of the boundary of his ability, but this means it hasn't completely scrubbed Damien of all his free will. 

This time Caleb doesn't stop his grin. "You're already up."

"I hate teenagers."

"I am literally in my twenties," Caleb points out, but kisses him again to keep the argument from continuing.

He kisses him and kisses him and kisses him, and there is a fascination in feeling him react. Damien's breathing grows labored, his lips swollen and slick with spit. His cock is hard through their clothes, and he starts to rock back up against Caleb, gently. 

There are his emotions to feel out, too. Blue mixing with the red and pink of want, slowly being overtaken. Caleb sees watercolors in his mind, spreading into each other and blurring, mixing into something violet each time he closes his eyes, like a secret sunset. It's such a pretty thing. 

Lust had always felt so messy and strange in high school, but these days the colors of it settle into Caleb more comfortably, even if Damien's lust is different from Adam's. The color is a different hue. A pitch desaturated, and the movement of it more reactionary. Caleb enjoys this, in a way. The way he can move, and feel the response. If it's watercolors, he has the paintbrush, and this is a much nicer metaphor than anything else he has visualized his ability as for the past several months.

The older man's face flushes deeper and deeper crimson, his eyes going hazy like he's in a fog, and it lights a fire inside of Caleb to have that kind of power over him. To be able to kiss him stupid until finally, when he draws back, Damien has to hiss back drool, and makes a low, wanting sound.

In his daze, he doesn't protest when Caleb lowers down his body and starts to unbutton his pants. 

Caleb thinks, lift up, and Damien does it without words, letting Caleb tug his pants and boxers down. Caleb thinks shirt too,and Damien blinks as if to refocus, then tugs his sweatshirt and the t-shirt beneath it up over his head. 

It feels good. Caleb doesn't know who is in control. Maybe it's his ability. Maybe Damien is using the remnants of his own. But Caleb wants, and Damien wants, and he can feel the swirl as they dissolve into each other.

He strips out of his own clothes, pleased with the ebb and flow of want and appreciation, though less pleased with the vague undercurrent of jealousy and the vague return of orange shame.

Sure, Damien is a bit thin and isn't exactly fit, but his body isn't bad. Caleb likes them nerdy, he has been realizing. For a long time it had only been Adam, but lately he looks at other people—and it's rarely the other footballers. 

Caleb decides that the best way to prove his attraction is with a blowjob. Can't go wrong with that. 

His fingers curl around Damien's length, experimental at first. He strokes him, watching precum bead at the head of his cock, then finally takes him into his mouth.

Damien's head drops back against his pillows, and his hand is in Caleb's hair immediately. He lets out a long, ragged breath, and oh, Caleb hadn't realized how much he missed this, too. The salty taste of skin, and the throb of a cock against his tongue. The satisfaction of making someone feel good, of feeling it from them like something palpable in the air. 

He bobs his head slowly, enjoying the way the spread of violet grows redder and redder, until all the blue is washed away. Damien breathes out in shuddering gasps, and Caleb takes this as a triumph, feeling out a vein with his tongue. He reaches down to touch himself, squeezing his fingers around his own cock and tugging, letting his hum of pleasure vibrate through them both.

"Kid," Damien warns him, strained. "Stop."

His emotions don't say to stop. Caleb knows what the desperate edge of an orgasm feels like. It's a crystallization to push through until it shatters. 

But there's something sharp, something close to panic, and some weird inkling of guilt creeping in from another direction. Those emotions are small, compared to the rest; the vast majority of what Caleb feels is bright red, and it feels so good to share this color that he doesn't mind if Damien comes down his throat. He knows it will feel good for him too, knows it will feel rewarding to have done this for someone.

Damien pinches his earlobe and says, more firmly, "Stop."

This time Caleb pulls off of him, then somewhat mournfully lowers his head to mouth at the shaft of Damien's cock. 

The hand at his ear moves to stroke his hair instead.

"Good boy," Damien says, as condescending as if he were praising a puppy. 

Caleb thinks it is probably not great that this makes his cock throb hard, and makes him have to fight himself not to go back to sucking Damien's dick, apparently against his wishes. 

That maybe shouldn't be a funny thought. He's supposed to be nervous about that. He can't muster the focus through doubled, dizzy wanting.

"Why," Caleb asks, trying not to whine.

Damien asks, pointedly, "You still want me to fuck you?"

"You could come in my mouth," Caleb offers, because he is a very polite boy. "Then fuck me."

The sharp panic has melted away, but now among the scarlet lust is a small stain of guilt, and… exasperation?

"Teenagers," Damien mutters, with disgust.

Caleb mouths at his cock as understanding dawns on him. He decides this task is more rewarding than discussing refractory periods, and lets that matter drop in favor of licking a stripe up Damien's length. When Damien's cock twitches, he knows he has made the right choice, and therefor decides to immediately match it with a bad one.

"What's the guilt about? My age?"

"Jesus Christ," Damien mutters, but then has trouble articulating as Caleb keeps sucking up the side of his shaft.  "You're—"

"—In my twenties," Caleb reiterates, letting his lips drag.

"—Not supposed to be doing this for me," Damien finishes, still petting his head. He drawls, "You really can't help being such a good little boy, can you?"

Caleb shivers, even at the dripping sarcasm.

"Can't tell if it's the praise or the insult that you like about that," Damien says idly. Then his fingers curl in Caleb's hair and pull, tugging him up lightly.

Caleb follows the command. He doesn't know either. For a moment he just stares at Damien, taking in the mess he's made of him; his labored breaths and mussed up hair.

"I think it would just be praise from anyone else?" Caleb offers, in case this helps.

Damien shrugs. Caleb climbs back onto his lap, then leans over him to reach his nightstand. The lube is tucked behind a stack of books, and he fumbles to reach it. Once he has the small bottle, he pops it open and pours some onto his fingers. He reaches back, gently spreading it on himself.

Then his fingers seek out Damien's cock. He moves until the angle is right and slowly, slowly lowers down onto him until he is bottomed out. Damien's fingers dig into the meat of his thighs and he lets out a groan that almost sounds pained.

But Caleb can feel his relief. The visceral relaxation. The way his thoughts clear out to make room for sensation. Red on red on red on red. He falls into rhythm, lifting his weight and lowering it back down, taking Damien's cock so deep that there's a cosmic satisfaction to it, bigger than any mix of colors.

"That's it, puppy," Damien murmurs, and it catches Caleb so off guard that he half-collapses against the older man's chest. 

His startled laugh comes out shaky. "What?"

Damien doesn't answer, and Caleb knows that the way the watercolors push at the edges of the canvas. They are each feeding on each others' wants and feelings, both escalating off of each other.

It wasn't like this with Adam. It had been close—with Caleb leeching off of everything good inside Adam's head. But Adam hadn't been mirroring that back from him. It had been a one way road. 

This is a loop. An endless recursion inside their heads, as Caleb rides Damien's cock, as Damien shudders and lets him take the lead and take what he needs. Even thinking about Adam hasn't completely ruined the moment, and he knows that it should, but those feelings are so far away, now.

Caleb had usually been on top, with Adam. It made it easier to take Adam's feelings and react to them right, to use them to make him feel good. But he had relished the times he got to bottom, when he could luxuriate not just in getting fucked, but in the messy overflow of Adam's feelings. Wanting to feel good, wanting to make sure he felt good too, both pouring like a broken faucet. He is sure that sincere mix is what love feels like.

It isn't love, today. Just Caleb's want, allowed to expand without restraint. Met and matched and read, like it isn't something poisonous.

Damien murmurs under his breath, because no matter which of them is steering, Caleb likes to hear it: "Good boy."

God, it really is like he's talking to a puppy.

Caleb wishes he could hate it, but it feels validating. He can hardly remember what stress feels like, and it's been his constant companion for months. 

Damien's hands are squeezing him in pace with the rocking of his hips, encouraging. One hand lets go, and before Caleb can complain, Damien's fingers wrap around his cock. He hardly moves his hand at all, just letting Caleb sink down onto him, then fuck back up into his fist. With pleasure in both directions, Caleb's rhythm goes erratic, his thrusts stuttered as he chases an orgasm and closes in fast.

But what about Damien, Caleb wants to ask. How is it fair for him to get off, using Damien like a test dummy, leaching off of all that beautiful scarlet and pouring his problems over him for the relief from them, without making sure Damien comes too?

Damien starts to stroke his cock, his grip going tighter. "Relax. Feels good, go ahead and come for me. 'S okay, Caleb."

It only takes a few strokes before Caleb can't fight it anymore. He comes, gasping, tears in his eyes and his weight leaning surely too heavy on Damien's chest.

"Wanted to," Caleb manages, between heavy breaths, "make you come, too."

Damien squeezes his thigh and says, "I know."

"Do you think I could—with my ability—"

"You don't want to test it."

He isn't wrong.

"Keep fucking me then," Caleb says, so blunt that Damien makes a startled sound, as if he had expected this to end with a sharp cut-off. It's a strain, when his legs feel like jelly and he's so exhausted, but Caleb grinds down on Damien's cock for emphasis, pleased with the grunt it earns him.

Damien mutters, "Kid."

Caleb doesn't stop moving. He knows his pace is less smooth than it had been before. But he feels the little pulse of curious gratitude from Damien, and he feels fading pink start to darken back to red.

"What's the point of sex if we don't both feel good?" Caleb asks, because this has always been his outlook on it.

A small wave of confusion. "It was good. I feel good."

Caleb leans down to kiss him. He breathes into his mouth, "Then come inside me, Damien."

***

The blissful, post-orgasm haze that Caleb has so dearly missed—though Damien is not half as cuddly as Adam—is cut short by the sound of the front door opening and closing. 

Caleb sits bolt upright. He launches himself across the room to lock his door, heaves a sigh of relief, then starts pulling his clothes back on. 

Damien gets dressed too, much slower, still a bit red and with a bad case of sex-hair, but his expression is oddly impassive. Caleb might be worried, if he couldn't feel the way that Damien's emotions have turned to a dazed, comfortable sea-green. 

As things are, Caleb has been feeling good, too. He knows, objectively, that this was a terrible decision. He's sure that will hit him harder when the afterglow wears off. When he is alone in his dark and quiet bedroom, with no one to call and no one to text, and no future where that feels like it will ever change.

But for now it feels hard to wrap his head around that. All he can think is that Damien had pet his hair, and he had told him not to stress, and he has been the first person to give this advice that Caleb hasn't wanted to spitefully empty his water bottle onto.

Granted, he had also encouraged him to use his ability to manipulate his ex into getting back together with him. That part isn't great.

"Fix your stupid hair," Caleb says, tossing a hairbrush at him. He has to turn his head, trying to hide a laugh in his shoulder when Damien fails to catch it and has to pick it up off of the bed. 

Damien makes himself as close to presentable as he's capable of being, then pauses at the door. 

"You can text me," he says. "I still don't think I can really help you, but. If you want to talk again without all of—this happening. Or whatever."

"Oh," Caleb says, blinking. He doesn't want to say thank you. He wonders if Damien can feel it. He kind of hopes he can. The line between feelings and wants is unclear to him, still. "We'll see."

Another pause. A flitting nervousness, but it drags some strange amusement behind it. Damien asks, "Have you talked to Sam?"

"I don't talk to her much since she and Mark broke up," Caleb says. He does belatedly consider the possibility that it was a terrible mistake to tell Damien that they broke up, but the man doesn't look surprised to hear it. "Bro code and all?"

Damien's eyes crinkle like he wants to laugh. 

"Interesting," he says.

Joan.

When the phone rings on a hot but rainy Wednesday afternoon, Joan isn't startled, despite the rarity. Most internal contact in the AM is emails lately, though she imagines phone calls must have been more frequent when they had more to hide. 

Joan likes a paper trail. She has enough faith in both her branch and Sam's security efforts not to worry.

It's the voice that makes her shoulders jump. A low, drawling, "Hey, Dr. B."

Despite how long it's been, it's still familiar. She can practically imagine him waltzing into her office unscheduled, making himself at home and bossing her around. She rolls her eyes.

"Damien," she says, terse.

"Got a question for you," he says, like he hadn't picked up on her tone. "That serum you gave to B—Alex. Still keep that around?"

Her professionalism snags. "We—what? How do you know about that?"

"Don't worry about it," Damien says. "Listen, you don't do the basement thing anymore. That's great. Can't say the same for every other branch out there, though, so do you mind doing me a favor?"

"I do mind," Joan says dryly, already knowing that he'll carry on like she had said nothing at all.

"Got this kid, Lottie—Charlotte. She's got electrokinesis or whatever you call it."

"Electrokinesis."

"Anyway, she can't stop shocking the shit out of herself. Only way she knows to stop is to zap her own stupid developing brain, and I don't really trust her to not fuck that up someday. Says she doesn't want her ability at all, but if it were weaker, that could help."

"Damien, where did you get a child?"

"Relax, she's like fourteen."

"That isn't a relaxing detail. I'll rephrase. How do you know this girl—Charlotte?"

"Met her."

"Where?"

" Around. You gonna help her or not?"

Joan sighs, already feeling a migraine emerging behind her eyes. "We'll see, Damien. Can you bring her in?"

***

It's a few weeks before he makes it in, and a solid week past the day she told him to come, but when he does arrive, sure enough, he has a child with him. 

It does alarm Joan to see a teenage girl in pigtails and a school uniform hanging off of Damien's arm. Worse, Joan knows that it's the middle of Summer vacation. 

She cannot wonder what it is about Damien that makes young girls seem to flock to him. Unfortunately, her clinical brain just starts listing things off—his eyes, his expression, his jawline. The way he tips his head back to look down. The way his clothes fall on his body, sloppy, but captivating.

These are objective and neutral observations, but Joan does resent them.

At any rate, at least Damien looks exasperated by the girl, too. Joan would rather Damien weren't so unkind, generally speaking, but at least he isn't sweet-talking some naive child. That would be even more alarming, and she doesn't want to think about what his motivations would be, there. 

She wouldn't have even considered it before. (Clinical observations: wholly disinterested in sex, despite the way he talks, the way he carries himself.)

But ever since he had run off with Mark, Joan has stopped trusting her gut about him. She had thought—well. She had thought a lot of things. It doesn't matter, because he had betrayed her and she had been wrong.

Isn't she always.

Damien shakes his arm hard enough to dislodge Charlotte, then mutters, "Oh my God," as she simply relocates to hide behind him. Her hands ball in the back of his hoodie. Joan can almost imagine her hissing like a cat. She sees blue sparks jumping from her clenched fists. 

"So," Joan says, falling into her careful professionalism, trying to soften herself a bit for a child. "I hear your ability is giving you trouble. We don't like to jump straight into medication, though it isn't off the table. Would you like to try meeting with a therapist for some one-on-one counseling, first? Or you could try sitting in on a group session. Often-times our mental wellbeing can impact how our abilities manifest, so this is where we like to start."

"Our abilities," Damien repeats, with a scoff.

"Our abilities," Charlotte mimics, though Joan isn't sure which of them the girl is mocking or if she even understands Damien's particular disdain. Charlotte rolls her eyes and says, "Damien doesn't have an ability. Do you?"

"I do not," Joan admits, plainly. 

"Then you don't even know what it's like!"

Joan finds it hard to be hurt by a schoolgirl who she can only see half of. Damien lifts his arm and tries to side-step from in front of her, but she stays stuck to his back like a shadow.

"For fuck's sake," Damien mutters. "Be nice."

"I've never been nice a day in my life," Charlotte says, immediately. "And I won't start for some lady that's not even gonna help me. You said they'd fix me."

"I didn't say they'd fix you, I said they'd help you, dweeb."

"I'm telling mom that you called me names."

"Your mom calls you names behind your back all the time."

"Damien," Joan says, bewildered and unsure if she should be offended or not.

"Do a consultation," Damien says, ignoring her, but lifting his arm again to talk to Charlotte underneath it. This time she really does hiss like a cat, and the sparks fly off of her in a renewed surge. Damien flinches as they singe him through his sleeve, but he doesn't complain.

Charlotte seems to take note, and after a second she shrinks into herself. She shuffles back and forth in place. "Then I can have the medicine?"

"We'll see," Joan says, refusing to set expectations too high, even for a child. 

"Dweeb," Damien says, and now has resorted to twisting around to try and look at her. "We'll just keep coming back until they help you. But there's different kinds of help. At least try this one."

Joan is almost touched. Except then he adds, "Sometimes you've just gotta jump through some bullshit hoops to get what you want."

She purses her lips, rises from her desk and says, "This way, then. Let me introduce you to someone."

***

"So," Joan says, crossing her arms and leaning back against the edge of her desk. "Tell me the truth, Damien. How do you know her?"

They have dropped Charlotte off with one of the on-site therapists for a consultation—it had taken five minutes to peel her off of Damien, and in the end the solution had been for him to shrug out of his hoodie so she could bring it with her. Joan wonders if perhaps she's more attached to the shirt than to him.

After closing the door, Damien only crosses half the room, leaving a gap of distance between them. Perhaps he just doesn't know what to do with himself now that this isn't a therapist's office with comfortable chairs and a chaise lounge. 

He moves as if he's about to shove his hands into his front pockets. Then he seems to realize that he is not wearing his hoodie anymore, and flexes them awkwardly. Joan watches his hands, then finds herself somewhat distracted by his arms in short sleeves; she isn't sure she'd ever seen him in just a t-shirt before.

Before answering, Damien pauses, giving her a curious look. Then he says, "She lives in my neighborhood. What, you think I kidnapped a kid off the streets?"

"You don't have much room to get indignant about kidnapping children, Damien."

"Aw, low blow, Dr. B. Only one of them was a kid. And I was gonna give him right back."

His voice is condescending. She has seen him kicked so low that he couldn't put any bite in his words, but this is more familiar. Like he used to behave. Talking like they're close, as if he can't see the mountainous wall they've constructed between them. As if he could ignore it into not existing—as if he is not building half of it himself.

She almost misses it. The way things were before.

Though she is loath to admit it, there had been a relief like no other when he would force her to talk. She could, for once, speak on the deeply buried secrets in her mind. Though it was cruel, though it was selfish, and though she knows she should have hated it, he had torn away her filters and forced her to meet him on even footing. 

He wasn't wrong; he was the closest thing she'd had to a friend. The only person she opened up to. Even if it was by force.

But Damien had taken what they had—she hates to think this, as if what they'd had was valuable—and he had smashed it like the nothing it clearly was. 

She's far too old to sulk over it like a child. She learned young not to bother getting attached; the few things she cares for have always been broken apart because of Mark, one way or another. She doesn't blame him. It's just the way of the world. And besides, she hadn't thought to be angry at Damien for betraying her when she had been so busy panicking for Mark's safety.

No, that betrayal had struck her, later.

Anyway, both his victims were children, as far as Joan is concerned. Mark will always be her baby brother. The sun rises and sets for him. It's a good thing if the universe at large understands that everyone else is a supporting actor the way that Joan always has. 

Joan arches one eyebrow at Damien, setting him with a pointed look. "Do you really feel that helps your case?"

"Nah," Damien says, which is something of a surprise. His lips are curled in a smirk. She doesn't know why he bothers to fake it; his smiles have always been transparently miserable. "The circumstances never seem to matter much, do they?"

"It depends on your actions. Some things are certainly more justifiable and therefor more forgivable than others."

"To a point," Damien says irritably. "But then you pass that point, and from then it stops being a factor at all."

Joan leans back further, watching him. He's a predictable animal. "Yes," she says. "That's the result of breaking trust. You don't have trust anymore. Please try to wrap your head around this."

He doesn't push back like she'd expected, just lets out a puff of air and says, "Harsh."

Joan isn't disappointed. She hadn't wanted to bicker like children.

Her shoulders relax, and she rests her hands on the edge of her desk. Her fingers curl over the hard edge of it. 

He is watching her again, like he is calculating something, and she levels him with an even look, allowing him the time to process whatever conclusion it is he's drawing. His curious expression turns into one of slight confusion. His brow pinches, and he crosses his arms over his chest. One hand starts to toy with the hem of his sleeve, worrying at it like a puzzle to be solved.

"What is it?" Joan asks, with an air of exasperation, because that has always satisfied him less than open curiosity.

"I can't do that," Damien says.

She rolls her eyes at how obtuse he is being. He has always enjoyed making these leading statements, making people drag answers from him as if he's not desperate to give them away. 

"Do what?"

"Force you to talk."

"Thank God for that," Joan retorts, immediately.

This does tug the corner of his lip upwards, but it's a strangely tentative thing. It's the smile of someone who knows they are just being humored. 

"I wouldn't have told you to come here if you could," she adds. 

"Even though you miss it?"

The hot, shamed discomfort in her stomach is immediate. She knows that she hides it well—she hides everything well—but the accuracy is still sharp as a knife. 

He doesn't even say it like a taunt. More like a… clinical observation.

"Don't say that," Joan says, clipped.

He shrugs. His fingers keep toying with his sleeve; an unconscious habit of discomfort, she guesses.  

"Which did you like more?" Damien asks her, with a lazy, feigned disinterest. "Not having to feel guilty for the things I forced you to say? Or having someone so beyond your help that you didn't have to try?"

Joan refuses to dignify this with an answer, and instead ideates slapping him with such an intensity that she's not sure she can resist it. 

"Come here," she commands. 

She doesn't expect this to work.

But he moves closer, finally crossing the gap he had put between them. He walks forward until he is right in front of her. Too close, maybe. The way that she had been leaned back against her desk means she can't straighten back up without touching him.

She raises her hand, and all he does is tense his shoulders, eyes dropping to the ground like he just doesn't want to see it coming. Like he might let her hit him, if she wanted to. 

God, has he been kicked that low? To know and to accept that he deserves it?

Joan knows the kind of harm he can do, but she knows that he's here for her help, too.

He does flinch, when her fingers brush his cheek. Then all at once she curls them around the nape of his neck and tugs him towards her.

His mouth is soft on hers, careful, even as the rest of him stumbles a step closer clumsily. One leg presses between hers, his hands falling on either side of her, palms down on her desk for stability.

Damien lets out an interested hum, his lips still pressed to hers.

His hands slip closer, then slide over her hips. Down her thighs next, before he lifts her up onto the edge of her desk.

"Tell me what to do," Damien murmurs into her mouth.

She twists her hand at his nape into his hair and tugs him down.

***

"Damien," Joan whispers fervently, and somehow that makes it worse. To say his name like she's reveling in this instead of hating it like she should. 

His tongue laps at her, fingers thrusting too, and it's shameful the way she spreads her legs wider for more. She can't stand to look down at him; something about his bare arms in that t-shirt are still distracting, and so her eyes clench shut, leaving her with nothing but sensations to focus on.

The heat of his tongue; the insistent, clumsy push of his fingers. His cheek against her inner thigh. The desk is digging into the underside of her thighs as she arches towards him, burning up with a desire that she so rarely bothers to remember. She knows well that sexuality is natural, that she likes sex, but long enough without it and it's easy to bury the urge like a receipt in a drawer.

It's as if the sounds get louder in this self-enforced darkness, too—she hears the mortifying sounds of her own held breath when it releases. The wet sounds of her own slick mixed with his spit, and the low, satisfied 'mm' he makes when her hand pulls at his hair. 

This surprises her, somehow. She has files on Damien, she has countless recorded "therapy" sessions, uncooperative as he may have been. 

Clinical observation: Damien has always been desperate, but it's a desperation for escalation. For anything he can get, more than for sex. Like all that bravado was just a clueless teenage boy's idea of cool.

Clinical observation: So any attraction between them had been a misunderstanding. Whatever she had thought, she was wrong, even before he had found Mark.

His seedy breath, like he's enjoying this, like he wants to touch her, has wanted to touch her, sparks dying embers inside her hollow chest. And Lord, how low is her self-esteem that she had wanted attention from Damien? She doesn't want to think about it, or anything, and so she whispers, "Get up."

There are more mind-numbing things than this. 

More pragmatically, they really can't have much time left.

Damien draws back, wiping at his mouth with the back of one hand. His head tips to rest against her thigh, and at the sight of this, Joan feels herself clench around his fingers, still inside her. 

"So that's what you want, hm?" Damien drawls. It's less annoying, when it comes from a man kneeling on the floor, and at his pointed glance, she realizes that one of her feet had come to rest on his thigh with the sharp heel of her shoe digging in. 

When she moves it away, he stands up, and she slides down off of her desk.

"Turn around."

She rolls her eyes, and likes that it makes his lips curl. Then she obeys, turning around to bend over her desk. 

He hikes her skirt up. His hands run down the sides of her thighs with another appreciative hum. When they draw away from her she is stuck, impatiently waiting, listening to the rustle of his clothes.

His fingers touch her first, one more drag across her wet entrance. Then it's his cock, sliding into her slow and careful, chased by a ragged exhale. 

It's been a long time. God, she doesn't think she's slept with anyone since Owen, and that really isn't something she wants to think about, right now. 

Clinical observation: He had loved her. 

That makes this easier to swallow—this isn't love. This is creature comfort.

Then again, at the time she had thought the same thing about Owen.

Damien's hips press flush against her rear, and she feels his breath on the back of her neck. She has to arch onto her toes, the heels of her shoes leaving the ground to keep the angle. 

As embarrassing as the position is, as terrible as this decision may be, Joan is not willing to waste her time with bad sex.

He gives her time to adjust, then starts to move. Joan chokes at every slow, wavelike push that buries him inside her, like she's startled each time by how far he can reach, like he's rolling the breath from her lungs.

Joan has never struggled with asking for what she wants in the bedroom. She enjoys asking, even if she has found that most men struggle to obey. The trouble is that Damien's strokes are long and perfect, and his hands at her hip are holding her tight, just like she wants. 

There's nothing to ask for that he isn't giving her. 

He bends over her, so far that she feels his breath hot against the shell of her ear.

"'S that good, Dr. B?" He asks, with that familiar, cocky drawl—but there's more to it than that. It's genuine, too. 

Like he wants the reassurance.

"Very—very good, Damien," she murmurs, spreading her legs wider with the electricity of it. It feels like giving feedback. Customer satisfaction.

He exhales. It's a slow shuddering breath, like this pace is straining him. Like he would rather move faster, fuck into her harder, but instead he keeps to what he can tell she likes. Not so different from a lashed animal. The thought makes her shiver.

"Don't have a lot of time," Damien says.

"Touch me, then," Joan returns. A false impatience covers her pleasure at the chance to give another order.

He lets out a quiet puff of laughter against her neck. One hand snakes from her hip to wrap around her. Then one finger, careful, experimental, slides between her thighs.

Her legs almost go out when he strokes over her clit, and it's at least half thanks to his other hand, still holding onto her hip that she stays upright. The rest is thanks to the desk, catching her weight before she can go far. 

She must look ridiculous, with her hair messed up, spilling out over manila folders, with one hand gripping the edge of the desk. It's undignified. She is hyper-aware of the slow drag of his cock, in and out, shoving her against the edge on every thrust.

Damien grinds into her, touches her carefully, and asks as if he desperately needs to know: "Good?"

It might annoy her, from anyone else. Being asked the same thing over and over, but from Damien it's so pathetic that it makes her see stars.

"Mm-hmm," Joan manages, pushing back into him, meeting his thrusts, and squeezing down until his breath hitches. "Just like that." 

It reminds Joan of a roller-coaster. A slow, steady crawl. Anticipation building and building without change in pace, without any rush. Just a climbing excitement, up until the peak.

She comes first with a bitten back moan, palms pressing hard into the surface of her desk to ground herself. 

Despite her trembling legs she keeps rocking back against him, and tells him, "Inside," for the sole reason that it will be easier to clean herself up afterwards. 

He startles; she can feel the way his thrusts stutter, but a moment later—a bit too rough, finally caving into an urgent pace—he comes, pushed into her so hard that she's sure her thighs will have perfect horizontal-line bruises from her desk.

***

Her office has its own bathroom, and by the time she has come back from making herself presentable, Damien is seated behind her desk, feet kicked up on its surface. He doesn't appear to have looked through any files, at least, though Joan isn't sure this matters when he already knows too much.

Across from him, Mags is standing there, looking confused. The relief on her face is palpable when she spots Joan.

Mags says. "Dr. Rain asked me to grab you, she said she's all done with Charlotte's consultation."

Joan gives her a nod, then looks to Damien. "Get up."

As easy as anything, Damien obeys. 

Adam.

The first time Adam sees Damien in town, he writes it off as his own imagination. There are mysteries afoot, sure, but that doesn't mean that Damien is involved. The guy is not, in fact, the root of all evil. Probably.

The second time he just thinks: huh. 

The third time, he invites him over to his apartment.

Adam has always been self-destructive, after all. That's the only excuse he can think of for why he has done this absolutely insane thing, though he is trying to come up with a better excuse the whole way home.

As if anyone needs an explanation. Caitlin is already asleep, and she wouldn't recognize Damien to begin with. He tries to imagine how introducing him might go. Hey, so this is a guy who tried to kidnap me a couple years ago. My ex-boyfriend almost murdered him and I guess he lives in town. I thought that was a funny coincidence, so I invited him over to talk! At one in the morning! Also sorry that I never told you about any of that even though we were definitely best friends by then!

"What were you even doing out this late?" Adam asks, nudging at the messy pile of shoes just past the doorway. His one pair of sneakers topple over Caitlin's five hundred different ankle boots.

"Walking," Damien says, like he's stupid for asking.

Damien copies him when he takes off his shoes, which Adam finds surprisingly polite. He even moves as carefully and quietly through the shared living room as Adam does, following him into the bedroom. 

For privacy. Naturally.

"At this hour? I have an excuse, I've got a late night job, I was just getting off of work."

He winces at himself. Overly defensive. An explanation no one asked for. God, he's so pathetic these days. He got so used to being the center of someone's world, to someone thinking he was interesting. He forgets, these days, that no one fucking asked. 

"Less people around," Damien says, with a mild shrug. Then: "Stars are out."

He says it like it's obvious. It gives Adam pause. It almost sounds—romantic?

Which is stupid, because all of Adam's most romantic memories are in the daylight. In the park, in the sun, people-watching. Midday stakeouts. Watching Caleb at football practice, or doing homework together in his room. 

At night they're all more…

Well. Never mind that. 

Adam drops down to sit on the edge of his bed and gestures vaguely for Damien to take the chair at his writing desk. 

"Gross," Damien mutters to himself as he takes a seat.

Adam sets him with a look. This may be his own weird way of acting out, but he doesn't have to put up with anything more than what he wants to. "What?"

Like an idle observation as he peers around the room, like it's not earth shattering, Damien says, "You two are like one person."

Adam's hands are clammy. He wipes them on his jeans. Repeats: "What?"

"He has guests sit on the bed while he sits in the chair. You have guests sit in the chair while you sit on the bed. He wants to overpower someone, you want to be overpowered. 'S weird. Guess that's how abilities always are, though. Fucking intrusive. They reshape everything around them."

Adam had already known this was a mistake, but it's a screaming one, now. His heart beats out of time and a weak nausea rises up inside him.

"He—you mean Caleb?"

Damien nods, and then there's this particular way he tips his head back. He looks at Adam knowingly, like there's no doubt in his mind that his bizarre fucking assessment is spot-on.

Adam's discomfort shifts easily into anger, dragging fear behind it like a secret shadow. "You shouldn't be anywhere near Caleb," Adam snaps.

"I know, right," Damien says dryly.

"And don't fucking say that about him. He's not—he's not like you."

Damien sets him with a pitying look. He almost looks like he wants to laugh. "No," he says. "'Course not."

An uncomfortable silence fills the room like water. Unbreathable, heavy. Why did Adam ask for this? Why did Damien listen? Adam stares at him, like if he looks close enough he could solve the mystery. Unwind this disaster into understandable pieces and figure out what he's doing with them.

"So you," Adam says. Swallows thickly. "You saw Caleb?"

Damien shrugs. "He texted me. Wanted to talk."

"About what?" Adam cries, then flinches at his own volume. He takes a moment, listening for signs that he's woken Caitlin. But nothing. Quieter, he hisses, "When?"

Another opaque shrug. 

"You know what," Adam says, resolutely. "It's none of my business. I don't care."

Damien laughs. 

It's just as bad as it always was. It makes Adam flinch, and he has to remind himself that Damien doesn't have his ability anymore. Damien can't overpower him. Otherwise inviting him here would be a hundred times stupider than it already is. 

But just a little bit stupid isn't so bad. Just a little bit self destructive. A flirtation with an old threat, like skirting the edge of it.

"Hm," Damien says, and Adam knows that expression. It's the same exact face Caleb makes when he's trying to make sense of a strange mix of emotions. Like when someone felt relieved to be hurting. 

He was never good at understanding things like that. Caleb got that emotions aren't always what you expect them to be, but he never could process some mixes. It always sent him for a loop, like he could identify the colors he was looking at, but not fathom that they went together.

It always made his eyes narrow and his brow pinch, and his lips would pull into a slight pout. Like the idea of someone hating themself enough to be pleased at punishment never got less upsetting.

Maybe he'd just finally gotten fed up with it, in the end.

"Oh," Damien says, lightening a bit. "So you're just an idiot. Okay."

Adam once again regrets his decisions tonight. "What?"

"I'm not going to hurt you," Damien says, almost sounding offended. Not like he's been accused of it. Like he'd been asked to.

"Good?" Adam says, bewildered.

The older man gives a little nod, like he is glad this matter has been settled.

And then, for some ungodly reason, they talk about school.

***

Adam doesn't know why he invites Damien back again, nor does he know why their illicit meetings always happen at one in the morning. 

He's always been a night owl. Maybe a holdover from all the depression naps he used to take. Caleb never liked when he called them that, but Adam feels that it's his right to. Besides, Caleb wouldn't like that he thinks of these meetings as illicit, and double besides, it doesn't matter what Caleb would or wouldn't think anymore, does it?

It feels like a naughty secret. Damien in his apartment, following quietly to his bedroom while Caitlin is asleep.

They don't even do anything. They just talk, their voices hushed and low. Not about the past, so much, but sometimes. A little bit. Mostly Adam talks about school and Damien listens with a surprising attentiveness. It's nice to talk to someone who isn't just as stressed—or worse, managing the same weight without being stressed by it. 

Adam is used to being the smartest boy in the room. Teacher's favorite. It never felt like a secret, and even if it had been, once he and Caleb had started dating he'd gotten quick and constant confirmation that it was the case. 

But college is hard. The workload is bigger, the deadlines tighter, the pressure heavier. His support system thinner. Sure, he's surrounded by friends, but what about it? They're in different classes, lumbering under the same workload. 

Sometimes he just wants to complain to someone who can't one-up him by having it worse or having it better.

Sometimes he just likes to talk at a whisper. 

He has so few secrets, these days. No adventures—and why would he? He's just an ordinary person. Going to ordinary school with ordinary people. (Probably. Maybe. There could be atypicals all around him and he'd never know. Because why would they tell him? Why would he get to be a part of that secret for anyone, ever again?)

So he cherishes this one secret.

Damien in his room. Listening to him talk with a reassuring sort of detachment, sometimes looking so bored that Adam wonders why he shows up at all. Kind of a bitch, but never enough of one that Adam doesn't want him back the next time.

***

He asks, one night.

Damien is sitting on his bed, his loose hoodie unzipped and sagging off of one shoulder. His hair tied back in a sloppy ponytail, black strands curling back around one side of his throat; the other side bared under the low lamp light. He leans his weight back on his arms behind him, legs spread comfortably.

"If you're bored you can go," Adam says, pleased with how neutral he makes this sound. "I don't know why you even keep coming." 

Ask may have been an exaggeration, but this statement is close enough to a question.

Damien shrugs. "I'd be bored if I didn't come, too." Then his dark eyes land on Adam. His voice is quiet, but so low that Adam feels it roll through him. Damien says, with painful clarity, "You want me here. Because it's harder at night. In the quiet."

Adam swallows thickly. His mouth is dry. He repeats, "Harder?"

He gets no answer, but an unimpressed stare.

"So," Adam blurts out, desperate to change the subject now. He cringes when all he can come up with is, "How, uh, is Caleb?"

"Try again," Damien says flatly. "I'm not dealing with that mess."

"It's not a mess," Adam lies.

It isn't fair that Damien can tell he's lying. It's not like Damien can see the twenty billion unsent texts, or how long he's spent looking at Caleb's instagram, or how many times he's relistened to their old playlists.

"It's kind of a mess," Adam admits. "But break ups are hard! I don't know!"

"Quiet," Damien reminds him.

Adam's skin flushes hot. "Right."

Then a look. One that is becoming familiar to Adam, but that he doesn't quite know how to place. One that makes him wish he had Caleb's empathy, just for a second, just so he could figure out what that look is supposed to mean.

Damien's head turns away slightly, but his eyes stay on Adam. His lips part. Eyebrows raise in interest. Like he's surprised, a little bit, and maybe amused. He often gets this look when Adam has not said anything that merits surprise.

Damien says, "You actually want that?"

"Want what?"

Hesitation. But an even look, like Damien knows he is speaking objective fact. "To sleep with me."

Adam takes in a sharp breath and has trouble releasing it. One knee bounces erratically until he puts a concentrated effort into stopping it. "Nnn," he begins, working to a slow and obvious fake: nnnoooo? 

Then he just… gives up on denying it. The effort wouldn't be worth it. 

He says, "Yeah?"

Adam can think of a hundred Freudian excuses for himself, and considers rattling them all off to show how smart and self-aware he is. People like that, when you make bad choices. When you can talk about them in the right words. Reflection is the first step to growing, and if you do step one well enough, a lot of people won't bother to check that you're ever on step two.

It could be about taking power back from someone who scared him, once! It could be about wanting to fuck almost anyone, just to try it, after having only dated one person for so long. It could be about proving to himself that he can't be overpowered anymore by making the choice himself. It could be about the fact that apparently Damien talks to Caleb, and Adam is a little bit crazy, actually, so he'll take the closest substitute he can reach. 

It could be a way of hurting himself.

Adam doesn't say any of these. He remembers vividly that Damien had said: I'm not going to hurt you. 

And he believes him. It's a little bit comforting. Like safety rails against his worst ideas.

He says, "I don't know. You're attractive. I only know so many people, let alone people who are into men. And I'm single now. So. It's—not that weird, right?"

"It's very weird," Damien says flatly, but with no real bite of judgment. 

"Well! It's weird to hang out in my room after midnight without ulterior motives too," Adam says, feeling childish, trying to spin this around on him. "So what do you have to say for yourself? Hm?"

Nothing, apparently.

Except for, "If it's what you want, then sure."

The wind falls away from Adam's sails. The momentum of his indignant, defensive emotions drops off, and he feels left floundering at sea. 

"Uh," he says. "Oh. Wait, really?"

***

This is wrong. Adam knows this is wrong—not because it feels bad, because it really, really does not. But because it is slotted so completely in a part of his brain labeled SECRETS. 

Probably that's a bad sign.

But.

Damien's fingers, slick with lube, push into him so nice and careful from behind. It isn't just the pleasure of that pressure, that fullness and friction. It's having a warm body spooned against his back. Feeling someone's cock twitch, hard through their jeans just from touching him. Having someone lavish him with attention and ask for nothing in return. 

Being single is hard to adapt to. You take for granted what it's like to be pampered. 

Adam lets out a soft, contented sigh as Damien mouths at the nape of his neck.

He's being too gentle, but Adam likes a slow build-up.

It's been a long time. He even has toys—one or two of them, stashed in a shoebox under his bed—but they don't see much use. There are too many factors to balance. He has to be horny, but not too tired and not too stressed, and it has to be late enough that Caitlin is for-sure-dead-asleep. 

In the end, it's usually easier to just get off with his hand, if he even bothers jerking off at all. He can't actually remember the last time he got off, now that he thinks about it. 

The anticipation is starting to get to him. God if it's been a long time since he jerked off, think about how long it's been since he actually had sex. He arches to try and look at Damien over his shoulder, ready to tell him he's plenty warmed up.

Adam can't tell if it's a misread or not that Damien leans over him and cuts him off with a soft kiss before he can get a word out—because at the same time, he feels Damien draw his fingers out and line his cock up at his entrance.

At the slow push inside, Adam lets out a low breath. Almost a moan, before he remembers to shut his mouth and stay quiet.

He'd never thought that much about how different sex might feel with anyone else. The shape of their body and the way that they move. Where they put their hands and how hard they hold onto him. He finds himself marveling over every little thing, almost more fascinated than aroused. The stretch is different. The shape of the legs behind his, the strength of the fingers that curl around his hip.

Twisting to kiss Damien is almost overwhelming in itself, but then Damien pulls Adam into him as he grinds up. He buries deep, their bodies pushed hard together, and it makes all the analysis in Adam's head clear out. 

He moves, sacrificing the kissing for leaning forward, for the deeper angle this earns him as Damien falls into a faster pace. It makes him forget things. Like there's no room for thinking. No room for words or anxiety or stress or memories when the room is drowned in the slap of their skin and the rhythmic squeak of his mattress.

Except for one thought, which is: this might be too loud, actually. 

Damien's breath is in hushed, uneven rasps now, but Adam hears himself whimper, less careful, less quiet. He mutters, "Fuck, oh fuck," like he can't help himself, and the worry is too weak a current to be moved by it.

The way Damien's hand lightly creeps up and over his neck feels uncertain. Adam squeezes, pushes back against him, arches—does anything he can to ask without asking. Including the stupidest: he moans. It's a low noise of satisfaction that he doesn't even try to muffle against his arms, even though they're right there in front of his face. 

He gets what he wanted. Alarmed at the volume, Damien's hand covers his mouth.

Damien doesn't stop moving. He keeps one hand at Adam's hip, pulling him down onto his cock with each thrust to hit as deep as he can. He grinds into him until Adam chokes, and all of Adam's murmured praise and wordless noises turn into a warm, buzzing vibration against his palm. Adam feels Damien's cock pulse inside him at each dampened groan.

"I'm gonna come," Adam blurts out as soon as he realizes. His voice is even louder than he had meant it, but behind Damien's hand it comes out: Mmfmm mm.

"Shh," Damien murmurs behind him, with such a swirling mix of scolding and reassuring that Adam shudders.

All Adam can focus on is the sounds. That tantalizing idea of getting caught like a rising river. The unrivaled beauty of having a secret again. 

Damien's hand is clamped over his mouth, almost making it hard to breathe. Adam arches his spine and tips his head back like he's being pulled. 

Damien mutters, "Quiet," more sharply. Like a threat, this time.

Adam opens his mouth to feign some kind of protest, to pretend that being held down and forcibly shut up isn't the hottest thing in the world to him, and that he hasn't always relished the times Caleb did this to him—for him.

Before he can get a word out, Damien's fingers slip between his lips. Adam doesn't even close his mouth around them. Two fingers run over his tongue, filling his mouth enough that the sound of his next moan is still suppressed, turned into a messy, wet noise around the intrusion.

He lets out some senseless attempt at words, some garbled try at I'm coming, don't stop, but spit-slick fingers only push further into his mouth, and then it's too late for the warning.

Damien fucks him through the orgasm, hard and rough and noisy. His panting has gone louder, and Adam trembles, sucking on his fingers until Damien comes too, with his teeth grazing the crook of Adam's neck.

Satisfaction rolls off of Adam in waves. He's sure if there were an empath around, they would feel it from down the fucking street.

His body is sore and tired, and there's an awkward wet sound when Damien pulls his fingers out of Adam's mouth—like he had wanted to keep sucking on them like a pacifier, for comfort. 

He hears Damien snort, as if he had heard this thought. He pulls out of Adam and there's a familiarity to how dirty this part feels. Messy. But he won't be able to shower until morning without waking Caitlin. 

God. He hopes they didn't wake Caitlin.

They both lie in comfortable quiet, breath slowly evening out, and Adam listens to any other signs of life in the apartment. 

He doesn't hear anything.

He's too pleased to be embarrassed. He knows from experience that it will take time for all the thoughts this pushed out of him to come back, and for now he can comfortably bask in an afterglow.

Almost an hour later, as Damien is creeping his way out of the room, he pauses to say, "You should talk to Caleb."

"We broke up," Adam mumbles, already tucked in and half asleep. "We're no-contact."

Damien says, "That's stupid," does not elaborate, and leaves.

Chloe.

Chloe drops down onto the plush, red-velvet bench in the museum, and stares at the painting in front of her.

It's oil paints. Impressionist, skewing almost abstract. Golden light from above and wings so wide they cast the landscape in shadow. She likes the glow around them, the way it makes that vast darkness below less scary. She likes the dappled light creeping in at the edges.

Everyone always says that art rests halfway between the artist and audience. That an artist's work should stand alone without them giving outside context. But Chloe wishes the artist was here to take a little peek into their head. She likes to know. She likes to see how hard people have worked and what they hoped people would take from it. What they'd wanted to say. 

That had been the scariest part of her ability going fuzzy. She'd had to rely on what people say out loud. 

No one ever says enough out loud.

Though she can admit, it does sometimes get overwhelming. That isn't new. 

She tries to ground herself in the paint strokes, in the crosshatch overlap, because around her there is a storm.

This is boring, one person thinks, and then, I'm hungry. Another person passes by, with a mournful, How do they do this? Why can't I do this? And then Chloe stops being able to discern person from person, until it's all just a continuous stream of thoughts. An endless spiral of: So pretty, the gold here—Wow, that outfit—He looks like—I've seen this before—What a tragedy—So quiet and awkward—Is she bored?—Work tomorrow—expensive—Where did he—need to call—

—Chloe rubs her temple. 

She hears Damien before she sees him. 

He must be across the room, because she hears the low rumble of his voice, but it's too muffled to make out any words over all the thoughts swirling around. 

When she whips around to look, she finds that he is all of two displays away. And he isn't saying anything. It's his thoughts—only it's as if they've been wrapped in a hundred thick blankets. The sound is there, the tone is there, but she can't make out a word, an image, anything. 

He hasn't even noticed her. He's just staring at a painting, hands shoved in his hoodie pocket. 

There isn't a dress-code for the gallery, but most everyone is in slacks or nice dresses. To a backdrop of a pretty crowd and high art—beautiful portraits hung on burgundy walls, and layers of pastel paint petals, and chiaroscuro cityscapes bordered by ornate gold frames—Damien is wearing torn jeans. When he runs a hand through his hair to get it out of his face, he doesn't bother to fix the way it falls.

Chloe thinks this is quite captivating, in its own way. She isn't one for photography, but if she were, she is certain she would take a photo no matter what the gallery rules say.

Her headache is starting to recede as she focuses on the unintelligible murmur of his thoughts. Like parting the sea of chatter. Like earplugs, almost. She swings her legs once, then hops back up from the bench and makes her way to Damien's side.

"Boo!"

This doesn't startle him like she had hoped. He hardly reacts at all, just tipping his head to look at her. Then blinking in a delayed surprise. 

There's an image that flickers through his mind. Too blurry for her to make out, but she can guess what it is. When it was.

Chloe doesn't want to talk about it. It isn't that it's not worth talking about, it's just that it's been so long now that she isn't desperate to. She doesn't want to talk about it now, or here, or today, and to make this clear, she blurts out: "Come look at this one—over here! I think you'll like it."

She grabs the sleeve of his shirt, and tugs him over to the painting of the angel.

Belatedly, she wonders if she should be scared of him.

But he lets her drag him away, so she settles on no. What would he even have to gain, hurting her? In a crowd, no less.

She watches him closely as he takes in the painting, his head cocked to the side slightly.

"Depressing," he says.

Chloe hums. "Why do you think?"

He doesn't have an answer at first, but eventually offers, "The colors, I guess?" 

Chloe decides that Damien is not very good at art analysis, but she drags him with her to the next painting anyway.

***

Three hours later, she has made him give a flat, one-word assessment of every display in the building, then spent a solid thirty minutes laughing about them over bubble tea outside. 

They watch the other visitors come and go, passing by the wooden bench they've settled on, and slowly, the air begins to chill and the sun begins to set.

Chloe hops up and offers her hand for him to shake. He stands up to do so, despite his visible confusion at the gesture. He has seemed confused by most things she's done and said today, but he'd kept his grumbling to a minimum and let her call the shots, so she can't complain. 

"Well," Chloe says, "this was a very nice date, thank you."

Damien rolls his eyes.

Chloe huffs, pulling back so she can put her hands on her hips. "Hey, this was like third base for someone like me."

After a beat she adds, "That was a joke," because sometimes she forgets that her jokes have a limited audience that they tend to hit for, and his face says that it did not. She can't hear his thoughts clearly, but the inflection of them is a question. "It was a joke—because I'm ace?"

He looks at her blankly.

"Ace," she repeats. "Like, asexual?"

He scoffs again. "That's not a real thing."

Chloe scoffs back, louder. "It is, but sorry you're stupid."

At first she thinks that maybe he's just being old and clueless—forgivable crimes, in the long-run. She's forgiven him for worse. But there's a flicker of recognition on his face.

"Doesn't that just mean having a low sex drive? It doesn't need to be a whole thing," he says, sounding unimpressed. Fine by Chloe; she doesn't particularly hope to impress him. 

But there is something about him that tugs at her. The set of his shoulders, almost hunching in. His head tucked defensively, just a fraction.

Sometimes people think that because she can read minds, she never bothered to figure out body language. But the reality is that it's only made her better. She can connect the ways people move to the specific thoughts they have, mapping out correlations like inking over a light sketch.

So even though she can't read his mind, Chloe thinks she has an idea of what he's thinking.

She observes him for a long moment as the shadows around them deepen. She asks, "Is that how you think of it?"

"What?"

She repeats, "Is that how you think of it? As just having a low sex drive?"

He pretends not to understand, but the way his gaze cuts away is a rather universal tell. "Just doesn't seem like it needs a label. If that's all it is."

"That kind of depends on the person though," Chloe says, more patient now. 

She jerks her head, nodding towards the sidewalk, and Damien walks beside her so that they can keep talking. She has never been shy about what conversations she is willing to have in public, and there aren't that many people out this late. If he had somewhere else to be, she figures he wouldn't be shy about telling her. 

She feels that upwards inflection of a question from his head again, and elaborates, "For me it's like… Even when I find people attractive... It's like I like them aesthetically more than sexually. Does that make sense?"

He gives a nod. She imagines he doesn't realize how wary his own expression has gone. Like this is some kind of trap that he has fallen for before and now he wants to stay ahead of the curve.

"Some people never want to have sex at all," Chloe says, sort-of counting off on her fingers. "Some people have a high libido but would rather handle it themself than sleep with a partner. Some people wouldn't turn down sex with a partner, but just wouldn't seek it out if it were up to them."

Damien looks straight ahead, but she doesn't miss the sidelong glance he gives her at that last one.

She wishes she could read his mind and know the question he's refusing to ask.

"Like for example," Chloe carries on, hoping she might stumble into answering it, "I could have sex. I bet it would be a fun time, and it isn't as if I'm not curious. And I've, like, you know, experimented before. But…"

"You don't want it the same way other people do."

"Exactly," Chloe says, relieved, because he does sound like he believes her. 

Sometimes people don't. Sometimes people want to fix her, or explain herself back at her like she's just gotten confused.

Damien ventures, "So you can have sex. And like it. And still be."

He doesn't finish, but Chloe is already nodding rapidly. "Sure! I mean, labels like this are just to make it easier to figure yourself out, so it's not even like you have to try and make yourself fit into hard rules or make one fit you. It's just about if the framework helps."

They walk in silence. This is a very surreal conversation to be having, and for her own amusement, Chloe tries to think of the most concise way to summarize their relationship. The trajectory of it is suddenly hilarious to her. 

He's the first person I've met who I couldn't read the mind of, so I panicked and got scared of him. But he was a mean jerk, so I was right, and then he kidnapped my best friend's boyfriend, and then he hit me so hard my brain broke for a while, and then he disappeared for a couple years. Today we went on a museum date and talked about sex!

She is giggling to herself as she hops over to balance on the curb of the sidewalk, but Damien doesn't comment on it.

Instead, the next thing he says is a slow, "You can read my mind, can't you?"

"Nope."

He looks surprised.

"I can kind of—it's like an echo. Or like someone talking reeeaaally quiet from another room. Or like when you have a fan on, and somehow the white noise is hitting the exact right frequency to sound like a tv is on in another room, like someone is talking but without any words. It's like I can figure out… Tone. But nothing coherent."

When Damien doesn't say anything, Chloe thinks to tack on a half-hearted, "Sorry. I should have told you."

"Eh." Then, like he feels the need to keep the balance by giving her a secret in return, he says, "I can feel wants. Kind of like that. An echo or something. 'S just out of reach."

This makes Chloe wince, even though she knows he brought it on himself and that she, of all people, deserves to not feel guilt or even sympathy for him. The sympathy bleeds through, anyway. She likes this about herself.

Chloe asks, tentatively, "How, um, does it make you feel?"

He considers. Then says, "Bad," and does not elaborate.

"Oh," Chloe says, after waiting a few moments just in case. "Well… Okay. Sooo what do I want right now?"

"To keep talking."

"Too easy. What else?"

Damien squints at her. He says, very slowly, "Interesting."

"Hm?"

"To have sex."

Chloe is not particularly embarrassed, because it seems only natural that she would be at her most curious after they had been talking about it. She says, "You don't have to announce that one, I think."

There's something calming in the way he says it, though. It's not an accusation. There is no doubt, like it makes her a liar. No judgment, no skeevy, over-interested leering. It's like he's just making an observation—telling her what he sees when he looks at a painting.

"It's different," he says. "Less… Messy."

She stumbles a bit and has to stabilize herself with a hand on his shoulder. She lets go and says, "I figured out a long time ago that stuff I used to think people were saying metaphorically was like… literal, to them. People exaggerate, but I didn't realize how little, you know? So it's interesting to me—the way other people feel things. It's like learning something new. How's it messy?"

"Like it comes from too many directions. Like a spiderweb. It's at the center, but there are branches into a hundred other things."

"Huh," Chloe says. "So how far can you go? Like—what does my want connect to?"

He seems to need time to figure this out. "Curiosity, mostly. Art…? Safety."

"Safety?" Chloe repeats with a laugh. "No offense, but you are not a safe person."

When he glances down, she follows his gaze to her hand on his arm. She's not sure when it got back there or how long it has been.

He points out, amused, "I never said with me."

Chloe thinks back. "So you did not."

Damien says, "Probably just safety in the sense of being… disposable. Gone when it's over. No relationship to risk, given." 

He makes a little motion between the two of them, as if to imply that they are not currently friends as far as she is concerned.

"I guess that's true," Chloe says, because she doesn't feel like putting that into words. She frowns, and at least says, "I don't like the word disposable, here."

"Hah. You think I do?"

"Maybe."

"Hm," Damien says. 

She tips her head back to look at the stars while they walk. She could count on both hands how many have come out. They remind her of stray flecks of paint, like the accidental splatter from an over-eager paintbrush. Or like the dappled light behind an angel.

She asks, "What do other people tie sex with? In their wants?"

"Control," Damien says, automatically, without even thinking about it. Then pauses, and adds more slowly, "Money. Reassurance. Stress relief. Self importance." 

Chloe lets go of his arm one last time with a little bit of regret, because they have reached her cozy hotel on the edge of down-town. It towers above them against the dark sky, scattered windows lit up like the buttons in a crowded elevator. 

Hotels are always fun, Chloe thinks. Like small, one-room adventures.

She asks, "So what do you relate sex with?"

Damien says, "I don't know."

"Well," Chloe says. "Would you like to try and figure it out?"

***

"Kissing is nice," Chloe murmurs against his lips. 

Damien hums a little agreement. He holds himself up over her with one arm, the other wrapped under her back, making her arch off of the hotel bed until her breasts are pushed against his chest. She likes the pressure of it. She likes being pushed and pulled and put in the right position—like she's part of an art-display being posed to make the whole scene work.

Chloe is not interested in conforming who she is and what she likes to match with other people. But she is interested in understanding the differences.

"It doesn't really turn me on, though," Chloe notes. "Will telling you things like that ruin the mood?"

"There isn't really a mood to begin with," Damien says flatly.

Chloe isn't terribly insulted. She can feel his erection, pushed up against her thigh. So there must be some mood. At the very least she's attractive to him, and that's a relief. Chloe is never sure what other people will find sexy. It's always a gamble to guess, but she knows well enough from reading minds that the things she sees in movies and magazines don't even begin to scratch the surface.

"Huh," she says, squirming against him with interest. She doesn't dislike the press against her thigh. The hardness is fascinating, somehow. She hadn't realized just how hard a dick could get—that had sounded like an exaggeration.

"There's no… escalation," Damien says, and she stifles a laugh at the way he holds her down by the hip to still her and just keeps talking like normal. "Other people start to spiral. Retreading the same wants over and over like they're brand new each time and always wanting more the second one want is met. But when I kiss you, your wants just… go to mush. You want it to keep going when it feels nice. When I stop, the want practically stops on a dime."

"Aw, I'm just a big mushy romantic," Chloe says cheerfully. "And so flexible! I sound very reasonable, the way you put it." 

He raises an eyebrow at her. "Do you even want to do this?"

"You shouldn't have to ask that!"

Dryly, he says, "Most people would rather be asked."

"We aren't most people."

His head tips to the side like an admission that this is a fair point. Chloe doesn't know why she always has to remind other atypicals of this. 

"Put your arm under my back again," Chloe says, even though he is already halfway to doing it.

"I know? I can feel what you want. That's the—the whole point."

"But you might not do it," Chloe points out.

He holds her body up against his, and she shifts her legs to get more comfortable. Damien is backlit by the dim overhead light, but his curious expression is still clear as he stares down at her. 

He looks as if the thought had never occurred to him to not act on any wants he feels.

"Oh boy," Chloe says, because she can hear that muffled, upward inflection. The question marks without a sentence before them. Like his internal monologue has turned into: ?????????

"It's fine," Damien says, and even through the haze she can read I don't wanna talk about it from his body, and from the way he kisses her again before she can argue.

The kissing is so nice that she doesn't mind.

When her head feels pleasantly warm and mushy again, he holds up his weight with the hand beneath her back. His other arm roams, palm gliding over her skin, squeezing gently at her ribcage beneath her breast, then her hip, then her thigh.

Each touch feels like a tiny, centralized massage that she doesn't want to end. She worries it won't, if he only listens to that want, so she spreads her legs, inviting his touch. His hand slides between her thighs, exploring along the way. She likes the way he treats her skin—like it would be a waste to pass without touching.

A startled gasp slips out of her when he thumbs over her lips through the thin layer of her underwear. He pauses, but she spreads her legs wider for him to keep going. To stroke over her like a vague, blurry friction. The layer of cotton keeps it from being overwhelming, from being overly intimate, and she shivers at the sensation.

She doesn't complain when Damien draws back, though she had really liked the full-body pressure of him pressed against her. She lets him hook his thumbs in her underwear, and lifts her hips to help him slide them off.

He lowers down between her thighs, and she bites the inside of her cheek to keep from giggling at the light scratch of his stubble. A second later it turns to biting her lip to keep back a whimper as his breath hits her, hot and pleasant and shockingly close.

"Oh," Chloe breathes, at the push of tongue at her entrance. It's smoldering and wet, the light pressure of it perfect as he licks her in a steady rhythm. She giggles when she feels the nudge of his nose against her, and is relieved that he doesn't stop or get annoyed. 

When she arches up against him experimentally, his hand squeezes her thigh, encouraging, and so she lets herself do it again. She listens to her body, rocking gently against him, helping him angle until his tongue stripes over her just-right. She wonders if he can feel how she wants it—if he needs the guidance at all, or if he just knows she wants some semblance of input. 

His even-patterned movements feel meditative. His eyes are closed softly, his brow relaxed. Her mind is wandering and she isn't doing a good job of focusing on the sensations, but she thinks that this might be okay, this time.

His thoughts are too quiet to make out, but the sound of them is comforting. It's as if someone with a pleasant voice is reading her a calm, sleepy story. It reminds her of when she had thought the voices were angels. How soothing it had been to feel protected and safe, to feel like some higher being was on her side. That something divine had wanted her to be special and to know the world's secrets.

The gentle push of his thumb inside startles her. She flinches, then leans into it with a sigh of approval. He doesn't move fast or hard, but just rocks one digit into her, and gives her just that little bit of extra friction.

This makes it easier to focus on the right thing. On the slight intrusion, and the rest of his fingers resting against her so gingerly. On his tongue running over her, and on the slow nod of his head between her thighs. 

She runs her fingers through his hair and listens to his content, wordless thoughts until she comes.

Damien lets her card her fingers through his hair for a long moment longer, before he rises up to lie down beside her in the bed.

"That was nice," Chloe says, and does wish that she had better words for it. "Thank you."

He looks a bit breathless still, and wipes his mouth on his inner wrist. She watches the rise and fall of his chest, and the slow-fading flush on his cheeks.

Fair or unfair does not really cross her mind, but curiosity does.

Damien turns his head to look at her and asks, dubiously, "Do you even know what you want?" as if he thinks one of them is mistaken.

"Tell me," Chloe says, with a smile.

It's cute that he flushes all over again. That he speaks falteringly, as if he can't find the words. "To. Watch me."

Chloe nods, and sidles up against his side, tucking herself against him. "If you don't mind," she says.

With fascination, she watches him lift up to tug his pants and underwear off. His cock bobs free, swollen hard and needy, flushed at the head. When he circles a hand around it, giving a tentative squeeze, translucent precum drips, sliding down over his fingertips. 

Chloe sort of wishes she could draw it. The gentle curve is interesting, and she likes the angles of his slender fingers. 

She would like it more if he weren't so nervous.

"Pretend I'm not here!"

"No," Damien says, giving her a brief look like the suggestion is baffling. She knows that he means it, even when he closes his eyes as if he needs to concentrate.

His fist starts to move, sliding up and down his length slowly. Squeezing tighter at the tip, lingering there, sometimes thumbing over the slit to spread the precum around. Back down again. Back up. 

Though rare, the slight, unconscious rise of his hips captivates Chloe like nothing else.

She crosses one leg over his, enjoying the skin-to-skin contact despite the slight sheen of sweat on him. She isn't used to having to ask, but the curiosity gnaws at her until she does: "What do you think about?"

He exhales, shaky and distracted. His hand stutters, then finds its tempo again. "Kind of abstract."

"You said people relate sex to control. Do you?"

He doesn't say anything, which she thinks is a 'no' more than it is a refusal to answer, even if his thoughts imply uncertainty.

"Maybe it's more about giving up control," Chloe says. 

His thoughts go breathy and soft, and she thumbs over his hip bone, curiously. He has a freckle, just above it, and she keeps running her finger over it like she's expecting to feel a bump.

It reminds her of an impasto painting. She always wants to feel them for herself, always wants to trace over the bumps of thick, dried paint as if that might help her to understand the piece better.

She whispers, "Can I touch?"

When he nods, she lets her hand roam. Her palm runs down his thigh. Then back up to cup his balls, giving a gentle, curious squeeze that makes his breath hitch. Next she touches his cock, trying to keep out of his way as best she can, fingers only lightly tracing over him. She's struck again by how hard he is, and by the heat of his skin. 

Chloe closes her hand over his, stroking along with him.

When Damien speaks, his voice is hushed, as breathy as the voice in his head has been. So soft that it makes Chloe feel like she is privy to a secret even better than the ones she finds out by accident. This one isn't for her because of what she can't help doing. 

This one is on purpose. 

Damien says, "It's hot when someone wants you."

"Of course it is," Chloe murmurs. "Since you can feel it and be sure of it more than any normal person could."

Like a guilty admission, he says, "Since I didn't put it there."

"Everyone wants to be wanted," Chloe says, giving a light squeeze of her fingers around his. "Do you know what I want now?"

Damien's eyes blink open under heavy eyelids, and after a short pause he nods his permission.

Chloe lets go of him. When she climbs over his lap, it's easy to sink down on his cock. She's still wet with his spit and her own come, still comfortably relaxed enough that it isn't a painful stretch. His quiet hiss beneath her makes it worth it to have bottomed out in one movement.

This is her first time going all the way with anyone. It doesn't feel bad. Strange, but not bad. For a moment she just marvels, thinking about the feel of his body between her legs. Of balance. Of the angle, looking down on someone from on top of them like this.

She doesn't have the energy to rise up and lower herself back down the way she imagines this is supposed to go, but it feels good just to rock back and forth, grinding against him with his cock buried deep. She knows it feels good for him too, from the scramble of his hands to hold her thighs and squeeze, to the shuddering breath he lets out.

His thoughts sound scrambled. 

She rolls her hips like a wave, back and forth, feeling his cock swell. And when he comes, his thoughts gone completely silent, his lips letting pass a low groan and his cock twitching inside her, she just keeps moving. She rides him through it until she is warm inside and his grip on her thighs finally loosens.

Then she leans forward to give him a quick peck on the cheek before climbing down, laughing at the way his face scrunches up at the kiss.

Chloe flops back down beside him and says, "I think that was pretty fun. Takes a lot of energy, though. Also, I was thinking, should I get into photography?"

Town Hall.

"Oh please," Joan is saying over brunch, with a little roll of her eyes. She is holding her coffee cup, gesturing with it despite the availability of plenty of table space in front of her. "Mark has notoriously terrible taste in men."

"I appreciate that you specified men," Sam says, sounding amused. "That was very polite of you."

"Aw, I think it's sweet," Chloe says. "It's like—he always sees the best in a man!"

Mark gives a mock-bow for the compliment. "I actually have very discerning tastes, and sometimes there's more than meets the eye."

"Sometimes there really isn't," Joan says.

"No, there totally is!" Chloe insists. She waggles her eyebrows. "Buuut maybe sometimes it's more about, you know… chemistry?"

Mark groans. "Do not say the word chemistry in my presence, please. Oliver has been—"

"—A case in point," Joan interrupts, lips quirking.

"I don't think you have room to talk," Chloe says. "You've had relationships before that were only for, umm, physical… r…eas…ons…" 

She trails off, in part because her own joke has rendered her a bit embarrassed, and perhaps trepidatious for bringing up Owen at all—but in part because Joan's thoughts take a hard, unexpected swerve.

Joan, for just a split second, thinks about sleeping with Damien. Not in the way of an intrusive thought or a fantasy or a curiosity. In the way of a memory. It's a visceral flash of sensation, wordless and heated and hardly visual at all, but the visual is there, too.

Chloe's face goes bright red. She is used to knowing too much about her friends like this, but the awkwardness never lessens, and there are always shocking secrets to be blindsided with. 

She tries to sink into the surrounding thoughts of everyone else, willfully letting Joan's thoughts be drown out by Caleb and Sam's near identical why are we talking about this, oh my God, and Mark's what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck.

Oh, right. Oops.

Chloe looks up at Mark, who has gone very still, staring at Joan. His hands are clenched on his own thighs, white-knuckled. At the edge of her sight she sees Caleb wince. 

It looks like it was recent, Chloe thinks. Like—after he lost his ability! His hair was all long and stuff. So you don't need to worry about her. Besides, I know he wouldn't—

"—Joanie," Mark interrupts, as if he had not been listening to Chloe. She knows that he had.

"I would love to drop this conversation," Joan says, successfully sounding amused until her voice cracks halfway through the sentence, broken under the weight of her acute awareness that they are both mind-readers right now, and both looking at her very intensely.

Even without empathy, Chloe can guess that Mark's emotions are doing something wild. That Sam is now anxious and that Joan is flooding with guilt. 

Caleb's eyes pass from person to person, and he ventures, awkward but too kind to stop himself, "Um, it's nothing to be embarrassed about. We're all adults. We all. Uh."

Chloe does think it's a little cute that he won't say the word sex, given that he's far from a virgin. 

He adds, to lighten the mood, "Except Chloe, I guess?"

She does not say: Oh, I've had sex! And she does not say: With Damien!

Mark's head still whips to look at her, eyes narrowing. 

Sam says, helplessly, "I'm sorry, I feel like multiple conversations are happening at once right now and I can only hear one of them, so can we, um. Sorry. What's going on?"

"We are learning some things about each other," Chloe says, diplomatic.

Sam pauses. "About… Your sex lives?"

Joan rubs her temple with one hand. "Chloe, please do not make this public information."

"What, that you slept with Damien?" Mark snaps hotly.

"Skating by on a loophole, I see," Joan murmurs, but sounds more tired than angry.

Caleb and Sam both exclaim, "What?!" Then demand, voices overlapping, "When?" "Why?!"

The sigh that heaves out of Joan is so heavy that it manages to silence the table, all of them obeying the command to quiet in exchange for this imperative information. 

"Last Summer," Joan says, and clears her throat. "He asked for help. Apparently his neighbor's daughter is an atypical and he felt she needed The AM's resources. He came to my office and…"

Her composure fractures. She looks more annoyed than embarrassed, eyes closing like she has a headache. She's only given away by her face flushing—and her racing thoughts. 

Chloe hears Mark take in a sharp breath. He covers his eyes like that could block him from seeing into her mind.

"In your office," Chloe gasps, scandalized. 

"I really didn't want to know this," Mark mutters.

Sam makes a quiet, unimpressed sort of noise. His hand drops and his eyes slice to hers, and just as fast, she turns her head to look away guiltily. 

"We didn't—we never—" he says, with what Chloe imagines is more patience than he'd give anyone else who might make the accusation: Like you haven't slept with him too.

"Sure," Sam says, appeasing, but her thoughts don't reflect belief. 

"I have," Chloe volunteers, casually. Mark already knows, and she likes to think this might serve as some kind of penance for knowing others' secrets. Besides, she doesn't find it particularly embarrassing. It was nice.

"It what," Mark mutters in disbelief.

"You have… What…?" Sam asks, slowly, like she already knows and doesn't want to believe it.

"I slept with Damien. For fun!"

"Jesus Christ," Mark says.

"Uhhhh," Caleb says. 

"Well," Sam says.

They all go quiet, taking stock of one another. 

Each of them thinks: You too? with such intensity that Chloe is certain they don't need mind-reading to know it.

Chloe offers, "It's nice to have something in common?"

"I'm gonna be sick," Mark says.

"I cannot at all believe you," Joan says, her eyes passing over everyone but Mark with a frankly unfair amount of judgment. "I… know it wasn't my best moment, but I do have something of a history with Damien—one longer than the rest of you."

"Okay, well, no offense," Caleb says, "but I think we all have a complicated history with him now." 

At the afterthought that chases this, Chloe slaps a hand over her mouth to keep from blurting out: Even Adam?! 

She's glad Caleb can't hear the rather uncharitable things Mark is thinking, though she doesn't blame him for them, necessarily.

"Can I ask what… happened?" Sam ventures, looking at Chloe. "I mean. You're…"

"Oh, sure! We ran into each other at a museum. I went there for a specific showcase and I guess he was there too! And then we were chatting about art and had a really nice day, and I was like, joking about it being a date… And then one thing kind of led to another and I thought it would be fun to experiment a little. It was nice."

"Please stop saying that," Mark says, even though she had only thought it the first time.

Caleb volunteers himself to go next, despite being completely red-faced and unable to look up from the edge of the table. "I, uh. When my ability went weird. I reached out to him. I thought he might know how to reign it in or… Something. And then… Well. It just kinda. Happened."

Mark's thoughts have once again gone so uncharitable that Chloe winces. 

She asks, "But was it—good?"

And Caleb sighs, a bit wistfully. "It was."

Now Mark's thoughts become completely unintelligible, which Chloe finds funny. Like a fast, tidy stream of cursive suddenly devolving into nothing but a furious scribble so big it goes off the page.

"Sam?" Chloe prompts.

She rubs at her red cheeks with her fingertips. "When he stopped cashing the checks I was sending him—to get out of town, you know? I thought I'd go check on him. Just in case. I was worried he'd like… Die on the streets or something. And, um, it was—he's still annoying—but yeah. It was good."

Mark ignores all of this to say, halfway to hysterical, "You paid him?"

"I thought about paying him," Chloe says, in case this might help. 

"Shit," Caleb says, "I only bought him coffee."

Joan scoffs. "I didn't give him anything."

Chloe chirps, "Well, you did help him out with—Charlotte? Aww, she's cute."

Mark looks like he might vibrate out of his skin. His thoughts haven't recovered from the knot they've tied themselves up in, and they are moving so fast and intense that Chloe can't even process them. 

"I guess I was last," Chloe says, to distract herself—though she worries Mark really is going to be sick if they keep talking about this. "But I think Dr. Bright was just a little before me."

"I hate this conversation," Mark says.

Sam glances to Caleb, thoughtfully. "I guess… I was probably first?" Then her gaze slides to Mark. "Or maybe second."

"I didn't," Mark tries again.

Chloe normally would not push this. Would not dig for something beyond the surface, or at the very least wouldn't do it for something so sensitive. But she allows herself the indulgence, just this once. There are dire circumstances at play.

"Huh," she says, marveling at the truth of it. "You really haven't."

Sam is visibly startled; then her expression dissolves into guilt and she stares down at the edge of the table, wordless. Caleb winces without looking at her. 

Chloe thinks Sam owes Mark an apology, but maybe that's something for them to handle in private. 

"I told you that," Mark mutters.

Chloe looks at him and thinks: Well, realistically. Given what we just figured out. He probably would if you just asked.

I'm not fucking doing that, Mark thinks, scowling. I don't even want to! And don't argue with me just because you know that's a lie.

Okie dokie.

"It was, like, really good, though," Caleb reiterates, unprompted.

Joan concedes, in tones of objectivity, "It was."

Sam nods, and Chloe says again, "It was nice."

Mark closes his eyes. "Please stop saying that."

Mark.

It's absurd how difficult it is to arrange a meet up with Damien.

Mark had thought it would be as simple as a text—an easy: Hey, I heard you bumped into the others. Ready to try to be a person? 

He is quite proud of this balance between forgiveness and a fair wariness. He will send this text, and then Damien will probably crawl back to him on hands and knees. Which both deeply is and deeply is not what Mark is looking for, here. 

But what actually happens is: he sends the text. It marks as read within seconds.

And then two fucking weeks go by.

He tries to keep it in the back of his mind where it belongs, tries not to let it eat at him during the day, during conversations, when he's in the shower, and before bed. He tries! 

When he finally gets a response back it's at two in the morning and it just says: 

no.

Mark paces back and forth in his apartment for nearly an hour straight, ranting and raving in his head about how fucking delusional Damien is, how annoying, how impossible, and how insane everyone around him must be to have—God, not just talked to him ever again, after everything, but hooked up with him like they're fucking college kids at a party.

Caleb and Adam are college kids, he supposes, but this really only makes it worse.

After that he spends another hour fumbling his way through the same rant, out loud this time, to Oliver, who just watches him with raised eyebrows and stays alarmingly silent.

When Mark is finally done, Oliver says, "It's four in the morning. Maybe you should get some sleep."

"I've been cursed with visions," Mark says gravely, 

"Ah, that's a healthy reaction, I'm sure." 

"Plagued with nightmares."

"You're fixating."

Mark throws his hands in the air. "You really can't criticize me for that."

Oliver sniffs. "I can do anything I want."

"Ugh."

***

So you'll meet up with literally everyone in my social circle but not me. 

This, Mark thinks, is an ill-advised text. This one is not so balanced. This one makes his jealousy crystal clear, and he doesn't love that, but some small part of him thinks: Well, maybe Damien will. 

It has been three days since Damien's resolute, middle-of-the-night rejection, and he can't take it anymore. If the ball was in Damien's court, then Mark is crossing the boundary to go steal it back anyway.

Mark doesn't wait to see if he gets left on red; as soon as he sees the notification, he hits call. 

It surprises him that Damien answers. The ringing cuts off, interrupted by the white noise of static. He hears a tv on in the background—commercials, it sounds like. 

Damien doesn't say anything, which is not how answering the phone is supposed to work. 

Mark waits a few moments, then snaps, "So?"

"So, what?" Damien snaps back, immediately.

Mark had not mentally prepared himself to actually hear Damien's voice. He realizes that's a strange thing to need to psych himself for. Like that rough, low voice is just another substance addiction. 

He had called it Pavlovian, once, the way he still wanted to help Damien, after everything. Even without his ability. Months under the influence had left him trained well to do what he was told. But privately he has wondered if Damien's voice wasn't at least a factor.

Mark takes a deep, calming breath.

"So—why no?"

Damien doesn't answer.

Mark tries another angle. "How was it? Seeing the others?"

"Fine," Damien says, and sounds remarkably normal for a man who had apparently fucked every last one of them like he had a checklist.

"But you won't see me," Mark says.

"Nope," Damien says.

"Why?"

"You can keep repeating the question if you want," Damien says, and has the nerve to sound  distracted, "it's not going to make me answer."

"Or you could just communicate. Like a normal person."

Damien drawls, "That's not really a motivator for me." Mark hears a voice in the background, so shrill that it makes Damien let out an irritated grunt. Then he says, very quickly, "Gotta go. Babysitting," before hanging up.

Mark pulls his phone away from his ear and stares down at it in shock.

He isn't even sure how to convey the depths of this frustration to Oliver, anymore. All he wants to do is kick his legs and shout like a child throwing a tantrum. To wave his arms around and cry, but it's me! As if that should be enough to get him anything he wants.

When it comes to Damien, he had expected it to.

***

If it helps, he knows that he is being a crazy person. He does.

Oliver says, "Self-awareness doesn't really, uh, fix the problem, Byron."

Sam says, "Not that I have much room to talk, but stalking is like… I don't know. Pretty bad? I got his address for you, though."

Joanie says, "I'm not going to stop you, but I want you to check in with me by evening or I'm going to assume the worst and have him arrested."

Caleb says, "Oof. Um. Maybe some meditation first. Before you go. Are you like… Good?"

Adam says, "He works weekends, so you're better off hitting him up on Tuesday or Wednesday." (And Caleb says: "Why do you know that?")

It's nice that everyone has learned better than to try talking him out of his worst ideas by now. Mark appreciates this. He might have listened, if any of them had genuinely tried to dissuade him, and pragmatically, their openness to the idea does say something good about Damien. 

As a person, not as—not for—not just because—

—Anyway, the nail in the coffin is Chloe, who says very sincerely, "I think he'll like a visit from you very much, Mark."

And he can see in her thoughts that she believes this.

***

Mark knocks on the door, briefly nervous that he's got the wrong half of the duplex, or worse, somehow wound up in the completely wrong neighborhood. But he's triple checked the address, and sure enough, Damien answers the door.

He looks healthier now, than before. There's a little more color to his skin. The same dark bags under his eyes. Longer hair. Messy, falling in his eyes and brushing at his shoulders. The tips dyed blue. He's wearing a loose T-shirt and sweatpants, and has his cell phone in one hand.

Mark only has a moment to process all of this, because Damien looks at him, blinks, and then slams the door in his face.

Mark seethes, "What the fuck!"

"Shoes," Damien's voice says from the other side of the door. 

Mark doesn't make sense of it in time, but a moment later Damien opens the door again and steps outside. He shuts the door behind him before pushing past Mark, setting off down the sidewalk at a steady pace.

Mark is so bewildered that it takes him a second to move, and then he has to half-run to catch up. 

"Hey," Mark repeats, falling in-step with him, "what the fuck?"

Damien just looks at him with a vague confusion. "Had to put shoes on."

Mark throws his hands in the air, but he doesn't waste his breath on then say that! or you didn't need to slam the door on me!

Instead he takes a second to calm down, then asks, "So where are we going? Exactly?"

"Dunno."

With a clarity unlike any other he has felt before, Mark decides he hates Damien, actually. 

"Then why were you in such a hurry?"

Damien doesn't answer this, but unlike his usual refusals it isn't a clear shut-down. His bottom lip pulls between his teeth like a nervous habit. A hesitation.

He wants to answer.

Mark can feel it. Damien's mind is right there at the edge of his own—just past the boundary of what he can control. Like it's through a closed window. He can't reshape that want, but he can see it so vividly. 

It's tantalizing to be this close to touching it, denied only by a distance so precise that he can't stretch past it. Not power, not stubbornness, not an ability or a serum deflecting him away. Just an inch. A centimeter. A millimeter.  

Mark pushes his tongue against the back of his teeth while he mulls this over. If he can feel Damien's wants, then that means Damien can feel his. If Mark can't influence Damien's wants, then Damien can't influence his.

The understanding that what had happened with each of the others had been driven by their own desires is viscerally uncomfortable, but an obvious conclusion. He hadn't expected anything else, necessarily, with the way they had talked about it. But this isn't just a series of bad choices, anymore. 

It's Damien acting on the information he has.

So what does it mean, then, that he had rushed Mark away from privacy?

Around the corner, the sidewalk tapers off into gravel. The row of houses stops, and then a new paved path picks up, nearly as wide as the road, cutting through a vast, grassy field.

The emerald sprawl might be nice, if it weren't such an overcast day, but the clouds overhead are dark grey, and their shadows creep over the well-maintained grass in blotches.  

Mark hadn't realized how close they are to the river. As they follow the path, it curves right up alongside it, separated only by evenly-distanced trees, their leaves rustling loudly over a soft hillside drop down to the water.

He can't come up with anything to say. He feels like he is a child pushing up against the glass of a candy-shop window, peering in at Damien's wants longingly.

Damien wants to kiss him.

He opens his mouth to say: I'm not going to do that, but then snaps it shut. Too easily, he can imagine Damien retorting: Even though you want to? 

It's a stalemate. 

Mark can't mock what he knows Damien wants, because Damien must know already that Mark wants it too.

But neither of them act.

They just walk, until the path offers a turn onto a bridge and Damien veers onto it.

The view is admittedly lovely. The water down below is nearly black beneath the cloudy sky, and it flows far off into the horizon, surrounded by lush greens on both sides. The wind-chill from its surface is a bit much, but Mark can imagine it's heaven-sent in the summer.

He wonders if people float beneath this bridge in little inner-tubes. If that public park they'd passed is filled with picnickers and kids playing soccer. If the benches along the bridge fill up with people out enjoying the sun. He doesn't know how to slot Damien into any of that.

In dreary weather like this, it's empty. They're alone, and Mark feels the subtle mix of Damien's wants—disappointment and relief in equal measure.

Damien stops in the middle of the bridge, pulls a carton from his pocket, and shakes loose a cigarette.

Mark makes a face, watching him produce a lighter next. He makes sure he's upwind of the smoke and says with disapproval, "That's new. "

"Not really," Damien says.

Mark wishes more than anything that he wasn't completely spellbound by the dull, red-orange glow against Damien's cheeks. The shadows of the day are so dark beneath the clouds that even low embers are a sharp contrast. The ring of flame eats the end of the cigarette as Damien breathes in, pulling it closer. The light flickers in his eyes.

Damien breathes out, and Mark watches the smoke swirl in the air before quickly dissipating against the breeze.

He should have brought his camera.

Damien would hate it if he had brought his camera.

"Why're we out here?" Mark asks, helplessly. "It's cold."

Damien takes another unhurried drag before he gestures to his head. There's something self-deprecating in his smile. "There's a pattern here. I picked up on it."

Mark snaps, "I didn't come here to fuck you, if that's what you're thinking," but knows right away that this was a grave mistake.

The knowing look Damien gives him is devastating. "'Course not," he says, and doesn't bother to sound even remotely convinced.

Mark crosses his arms on the railing and leans over it, staring down the river. The water is moving fast, rushing underneath them endlessly. He can't make out the bottom, but there's a long bit of tree-trunk stuck sideways against the support beams.

The wind picks up, and Damien doesn't seem to mind the way it blows his hair into his face, though he has to reach up and hold it back so he can smoke.

"I hate having my picture taken," Damien reminds him.

"I know," Mark says, defensively. "I wasn't going to."

"Hmm."

"People have self control. I know it didn't feel like it when you were the one controlling them, but people can have wants without immediately acting on them."

Damien makes a small noise under his breath, almost a laugh, almost a dismissal. Without real argument, the words are lost to the wind like smoke.

Mark is staring. He keeps trying to take in the scenery, but each time he notices something new—a bridge off on the horizon, lit up with passing headlights, or a flock of ducks at the other side of the river—he finds himself looking right back at Damien afterwards.

It's hard to reconcile the parts of Damien that he remembers most fondly. The Damien who kidnapped him had been far from good, but he'd had his moments. He had been the Damien who drove through the summer with the windows down and the radio up. Who had laughed. Who had flirted, whether he'd meant to be doing it or not. 

Damien blows out a thin wisp of smoke that the wind steals away in an instant and asks, lips curling up in a smirk, "You want me to flirt with you?"

He doesn't even know, Mark realizes, how flirtatious his stupid smirk looks. How cute the little scrunch in his eyes is as they sparkle with amusement. How seductive his voice can be.

That's strange in a way, because hasn't he had five different people prove it to him by now? That Mark knows of. There could be more. 

He hadn't thought of that until now, and it makes his lips pull thin.

"See," Damien says.

"See what," Mark mutters, with the vague hope that Damien will not answer. 

"It'd be dangerous to be alone with you." 

He doesn't know why he would ever expect Damien to do what he hopes. 

"We're alone now," Mark points out.

Damien rolls his eyes. "You know what I mean."

"I'm not the dangerous one here," Mark reminds him.

Damien murmurs, "If you say so," and puts out his cigarette on the railing. 

It makes Mark's blood boil. His anger-flushed skin is at least a reprieve from the cold, until even this one single benefit is taken from him, as a drop of rain hits his cheek. Then another.

Damien lets out a very mild, "Ah," as the downpour starts. Slow, at first, like a scattered darkness being sprinkled over the cement in patches. Then the rain comes down so heavy that all the colors underfoot are the same wet dark.

The sound of it hitting the water is deafening. There's not even any point in rushing for shelter with how instantly soaked the both are. 

Damien's hair sticks to his skin, like drawing lines over his cheeks and curling in around his throat. He pushes it from his face, but all that does is expose the curve of his throat for raindrops to slide down. His shirt clings to his arms, to the thin silhouette of him.

When Damien laughs, it's that same, familiar way that Mark loves. A little incredulous, but pleased—as if he likes to be surprised, even if it's an inconvenience.

Clarity strikes him again to tell Mark what he already knows. He does not hate Damien, and he is so, so fucked.

Damien sighs, and he starts the short trek back to his house. He points at Mark, like he is scolding an animal, and says very firmly, "No."

***

Damien's clothes are too big on Mark, which he thinks is a little funny, because he's the taller one between them, and Damien has barely filled out from being a twig. A little bit, though, admittedly.  Mark could tell from the way his wet clothes had stuck to him.

Mark looks at himself in the bathroom mirror, inspecting the black hoodie he has on. It has a few tears in it, some up near the right shoulder and one at the fraying hem, and he genuinely can't discern if they are for fashion or just from being over-worn.

He leaves the bathroom and passes through the kitchen, lifting up the hoodie by the chest and giving it a curious sniff. It's definitely well-worn, either way. It smells like laundry detergent, and like smoke, and unfortunately he is still holding it up to his nose when he rounds the corner into the living room.

Damien looks at him, eyebrows high.

Mark lets go, cheeks burning, but trying not to look like a man who has been caught red-handed. He says, before Damien can comment, "You have a cat!"

Immediately, Damien says, "No I don't."

"Um," Mark says, because Damien is sitting on the floor, idly petting a white cat that has settled between his spread legs.

When Damien rises up from the floor, he moves slowly, taking care not to disturb the cat—who of course waits until he has finished to casually get up and wander off anyway. 

Damien stares after it and mutters, "Okay, bitch." Then he looks to Mark, eyes glossing right past him like they can't stand to linger, and says, "You can just keep those and leave."

Mark huffs. "Why are you being like this? I can—I can feel what you want from me, it's not like you actually want me to leave."

Damien winces, so quick Mark almost thinks he'd imagined it. Then says, "Hurts," so quietly that Mark's frustration loses momentum. 

Mark rolls his shoulders to get some of the tension out. "What do you mean?"

"I know what you want from me," Damien says, which isn't really an answer to the question.

"That's just—one thing. You don't have to fixate on it. It's not like that's the only thing I want. God." Mark pauses, the implication of this sinking in. "Do you just do anything people want you to?"

Damien frowns. "No." At Mark's skeptical look, he repeats, firmer, "I don't. You'd know."

That's fair. Damien has been far from obedient, today.

"So you actually wanted to. With the others."

A flush rises on Damien's face, gaze still resolutely set past Mark, and he gives a mute nod. 

Mark hums, the sound of it much more condescending than he actually feels. It feels good, for a second, to take out his irritation on the man doing the irritating.

But then Mark watches him reach up to rub the back of his neck, peeling still-damp hair from it. His shoulders slant small, like he actually feels guilty. Somehow it's more striking than any change in his appearance.

Mark sighs. 

"Just—like I said. Obviously I can't lie and say that's not a thing at all. It—we—you know. Okay? But it's not the only thing on my mind. Everyone else got to see you. Everyone else said you seemed… Better. I still wanted to just talk. Mend bridges, you know?"

"You just didn't want to be left out," Damien says, and the subtle tone of mockery is somehow a relief.

Mark concedes, begrudgingly, "I guess. So can we just talk? Without you freaking out like I'm gonna… I don't know. Do something you don't want?"

"I'm not freaking out," Damien grumbles, and does not point out the much more obvious: it isn't something he doesn't want. 

When Mark plops himself on the couch defiantly, Damien just sighs and drops down beside him.

"So!" Mark says, trying to drain away the awkwardness they have been wading through since he got here. "What's your cat's name?"

***

It's an awkward start, but it slips away into something more familiar. For hours, they talk like they used to—when the stretches of road were long and the radio was out, and Damien didn't have some cruel fragment of information he was digging in for. 

The rain stops briefly, revealing a starry midnight sky out the back door and a big, silver moon. Then it starts back up, heavier than before, and Mark takes this as an excuse to stay even longer. No one likes to drive in the rain, after all.

There is no depth to the topics they flit through—complaints about work, about the people they know. Silly stories and anecdotes, and even simple things like movies and books and podcasts. 

All the while they exchange small snipes back and forth with a satisfying comfort.

Mark delights in the way Damien starts to unfurl. His shoulders stop hunching in, and he twists on his side of the couch to face Mark more openly. Rests an arm over the backrest and pulls his legs up onto the cushion between them.

His laugh still shakes something loose in Mark's heart. It's a short reprieve from his sarcasm, from his rolled eyes and sardonic comments. But his eyes scrunch up when he laughs, and afterwards his expression falls, unaware, into a loose grin. For a couple of seconds, Mark can pretend this is what he always looks like—relaxed and happy, and a little bit red in the cheeks. 

Invariably, a moment later the look slips away, and Damien is back to having resting bitch face. Even then, his eyes follow Mark's gesturing with acute interest, and when Mark leans in to tell a story, he mirrors him and leans close, too. 

Mark had meant it when he suggested they just talk. He had.

But he makes some off-hand comment about Joanie that makes Damien laugh again. Then that warm, contented grin. His head tips towards his hand, fingers sloppily holding his hair back behind one ear. It makes Mark feel drunk.

He leans across the couch and kisses Damien.

If he had done this earlier, he wonders if Damien would have pushed him away. Now, at nearly four in the morning, Damien just balls a fist in Mark's borrowed sweatshirt and pulls him in closer.

Damien's tongue runs over Mark's bottom lip, and Mark lets himself be pulled in. He parts his lips and lets his tongue press against Damien's, enjoying the slick heat and the uneven puffs of warm breath between them. He leans into Damien so hard that the other man is bent over the arm-rest, back arched in a way that looks very nice, but Mark is sure must be uncomfortable. 

The hand that slides under his shirt is burning up, his own skin shockingly cold to the touch. He shivers, leaching heat. The sound of rain outside drowns out the whole world; the only sound to rise above it is Damien's heavy breathing when they part. His lips are swollen, his eyes dark.

Mark murmurs, "Wanna go upstairs?"

Damien is peeling his shirt over his head before they even reach the first step.

***

Mark's head goes cloudy as he looks down at Damien's back, spread out in front of him. His gaze drinks in the stark line his spine draws, like an arrow leading up to the flushed nape of his neck where his hair is all swept to one side. 

Damien's want spikes, impatient and fussy as Mark fingers him open. When Damien pushes back against his palm for more, Mark takes vindictive pleasure in pushing him down between the shoulder-blades and keeping his careful pace.

It's for Damien's own good, after all. Mark isn't precisely sure what Damien meant when he had said hurts, but he is determined to make sure this doesn't. 

Even if the shape of Damien's wants twist and beg and demand that hurt from him.

He tells himself that this means he does not have a sadistic streak, and pats himself on the back for it. Then he pushes his fingers deep and crooks them until he hears Damien choke. 

He gets it. He gets why everyone wanted this. 

Every little thing about Damien crawls under the skin and spreads like vines along veins, and he had known that first.

Damien's head on the pillow turns to look at Mark over his shoulder. He looks messy, hair splayed out and cheeks red. He mutters, so visibly embarrassed that Mark's cock throbs before he even gets out the word, "Please."

It's an irresistible plea.

Damien lets out a long, rasping breath as Mark finally sinks his cock into him, careful as ever. Inside of him is hot and tight, and Mark sees stars knowing that he's the only one to take him like this. 

It makes him want to wreck him like he deserves, whispering cruel words like sweet nothings—but he resists the impulse.

Not that it matters. Mark fantasizes about calling Damien a slut, and Damien's wants take a sharp turn into wanting him to do it, latching onto the want like it had been an offer. 

His malleable, reactionary thoughts make Mark want to laugh, and he swallows this back, too. Their wants feed into each other gleefully. It feels manic, the way he can't muster any shame.

He drives into Damien, focused more on the satisfaction of burying to the root each thrust than anything else. 

It almost feels like cheating. Like the reason everyone had said fucking Damien was good was because he had been responding to what they wanted. 

When he tries to do the same, chasing after Damien's wants, he finds they splinter out like a broken window, each cracked fissure shooting off down another path. He can't follow them all. He doesn't even have the focus to interpret them all. 

He follows the fracturing web as best he can, latching onto the easy parts, closer to the core. Like Damien wants, he grinds into him, and lingers when their skin is pressed together. Like Damien wants, he holds onto his hip tight, and digs his thumb into his lower back.

Like Damien wants, he bends over him and buries a fist in his hair to hold him down against the pillow. 

The sound Damien makes is unintelligible, like he had made an attempt at words and failed.

Mark takes the hand in Damien's hair and tugs. Breath hitched and legs trembling, arching into the pull, Damien comes. And in his head, silent, he begs for more; for a harder pull, a deeper thrust, a slap, anything, anything. 

The pathetic desperation of it makes Mark's whole body twitch, and then he delivers.

The thought of making sure it doesn't hurt slips away from him, and Mark fucks into Damien hard. He pulls him by the hair just to feel the way it makes him squeeze down around him.

He comes with his eyes closed, just to revel in the sounds that Damien makes—grunts and whines that Mark can't place as pain or pleasure.

***

Mark wakes up to the sound of light rain, but with the sun shining down through the window. He shivers and snuggles back into the blankets, pleased with their warmth, and the body heat from Damien curled up behind him with an arm slung over his hip.

Damien's chest against his back rises and falls. His breath puffs against the nape of Mark's neck.

Mark smiles, cozy and pleased.

Then he remembers Joanie’s threat, and scrambles for his phone. His pants are just off the side of the bed, and Damien grumbles a bit at the movement, but sidles up behind him again when Mark settles.

He texts Joanie: I'm safe and sound do not call in a swat team for my extraction.

She answers right away: I said to check in last night and it is two in the afternoon a day later, but thank you for the update.

He decides not to answer the late-night text from Caleb that just says: 👀

Because he doesn't know what he would say besides a deeply satisfied: Yeah. 

Epilogue.

"I see," Marley says very slowly, as the onslaught of visions finally falls away from him.

Across the table from him, Damien just buries his red face in his hands.