#ohhh this was a fun scene. this dynamic is deeply enjoyable to write he's such a weird fucked up guy

[astxrwar]

ties that bind [5/x]

SUMMARY: Quentin Beck– your old college biology professor– is still a bastard. Apparently, you’re kind of in to that.

RATING: M

WORD COUNT: 7k+

CONTENT + WARNINGS: Emotional manipulation (a given,,,). The general vibes associated with that. Sex scene will be chapter 6 because it got too long, this one is just plot and developing the AU + character. I take liberties with RC because you kinda have to in long-form works; if you're an experienced cook no you're not and if you're allergic to sesame seeds no you're not.

If you're still reading this series we're married now btw. love u babes, mwah.

PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | [PART 5]

Beck says nothing else between the car and the elevator, nothing as he presses the only slightly-tarnished silver button for the third floor, still nothing as the doors glide open and nothing when they close, either. The silence begins to coalesce like its own entity, something that pulses and breathes, alive, expanding to fill the rest of the too-small space of the elevator car; something he is, of course, unaffected by. Whatever tension is building inside of you feels precarious, uncontrolled, like a shaken-up can of coke in the seconds before an unsuspecting hand cracks the tab open, an unchecked ignition system with the fuse dwindled all the way down to nothing but a fine powder of ash, the silence before something explodes, because it has to, pressure building too high for too long, until there’s no other recourse or hope for respite. It’s nerves, and you know that, the feeling, but it’s not like anything you’ve ever felt before, better and worse and more, now, in ways that you still can’t fully comprehend or explain.

Beck studies you wordlessly from the opposite side of the elevator car as it moves upwards, the motion so fluid that if it weren’t for a small digital panel above the door, the floor numbers ticking by in glowing fluorescent red, you wouldn’t be able to tell it was even moving at all. 

“Have you eaten?” He asks, cutting clean through that silence. It calms whatever tumultuous thing is coiling in your belly, even if only temporarily, the mundanity of the question striking and strange enough to draw your attention away from it for the moment.

“No,” you answer, quieter than you’d meant to, eyes flitting up to meet his and then glancing away again of their own accord, skittering back to the panel with the glowing red two now displayed and then to the doors, gleaming and reflective, the carpet, brand-new, only faintly discolored along the common path into and out of the car, a dappled pattern of overlapping shoe prints beginning to wear into it there. “I have my wallet, we can order something, if you want—“

Beck makes a sound; not a laugh, more just a particularly harsh exhale, dismissive and uninterested. “I’m making dinner, you can get yourself whatever you’d like if you won’t eat real food.”

The display panel ticks over to three and the doors slide open, a pleasant, bell-like chime announcing the stop; you follow him out into a carpeted hallway that’s painted a bland shade of steel blue and lined with wall-mounted lamps, like a hotel. There are windows on one side, spaced evenly down the length of the wall, and from this height you can see past the lines of barren, skeletal trees, the lights of cars as they trawl like beetles along the winding length of the road in the distance. 

“What do you think I usually eat, then, if I don’t eat ‘real food’ ,” you say, instead of any of the other things that you’re thinking about— your nerves, still, trembling like the wings of a bird in the hollow of your throat, or the strangeness of him offering you dinner, or the entirely predictable way he can make that, even, sound like it’s a dig at your expense.

“Takeout,” Beck answers pointedly, mouth twitching up at the corners; you’ve arrived at his door, the numbers 34 pasted in neat silver leaf below the rounded inset glass of the peek-hole, reflective and glinting in the light from the hallway, and as he rummages in the pockets of his coat for his key and slots it into the lock you can hear your own pulse thrumming loud in your ears. “Frozen pizza, boxed mac and cheese, microwave ramen, anything they sell at the dollar store,” it clicks, and the door handle turns, and he looks at you, grinning in earnest now,  “Hot pockets, probably.”

“Oh my god,” is all you can really say to that— because, yeah, he’s described to a T the off-campus-student-with-no-meal-plan diet, and you’re not even really any good at lying to him even when you’re not feeling some dubious combination of off-balance and dangerously out of your depth, so you decide that you’re better off not even trying. “You don’t have to be an asshole about it.”

“I’m actually not trying to be, this time,” he replies, amused, as he pushes the door open and moves into the darkened foyer, hand sliding along the wall until he finds the switch and the hall is illuminated by the artificially-white glow of the ceiling light. “I was also a grad student once; I do still remember it.”

 As you pass the threshold and press the door closed behind you, he follows with, “Take off your shoes.”

You do, stepping on the heels of your well-worn sneakers to slide them off, one foot, and then the next, stacking them in the tray by the door next to his impeccably-clean and perfectly-polished black oxfords. There’s another set of sneakers there, too, much nicer and much newer than yours, and a pair of thick-treaded black winter boots, the laces wound up together in a neat little ring, tied off to keep them from unraveling, tucked in behind the tongues of the shoes. 

Ahead of you, Beck has moved further into the apartment; he sheds his coat and hangs it in a small closet at the end of the hallway, his laptop bag, too, and gestures for you to do the same with your backpack. There are other doors, one on each side of the hall, and you wonder briefly what might lay beyond them as you trail behind him, your footsteps muted and the hardwood floor cool through the relatively thin barrier of your socks. 

He flicks on another set of lights, brightening the kitchen enough for you to see the whole of it; a high ceiling and low-hanging light fixtures and clean granite countertops, the two-section sink and drying rack both empty of dishes, a keurig machine and a toaster and a blender and other assorted appliances all pushed back against the wall, spotless and free of dust. His apartment looks like a showroom, like some sort of facsimile edition of a place where real breathing people live, and you mean to say that to him in a way that you intend to be insulting, but you find when you go to speak that your mouth is dry and your tongue is uncooperative and the words don’t even arrange themselves correctly inside your head, anyways. All of this feels suddenly very real, the cool stone countertop when you press your fingers against it, the faint draft of air moving through his apartment, drawn from the windows lining one side of the wall– and his eyes on you, something you can feel without even having to look at him, like a warm, solid weight on your shoulders.

Behind you, you hear the sound of some door pulling open, the rush of colder air against your back; the fridge, probably. 

“What are you making?” you say without turning, suppressing that nervous tension, forcing it down inside of you as deep as it will go.

“Nothing complicated,” he replies. “Stir fry. Probably one of the easiest things, actually, if you ever decide to stop eating garbage.”

“Didn’t we just establish you also ate like shit during grad school?” You do turn, at that, so that he can see your face when you pointedly roll your eyes. “Besides, I just– I don’t really have time to cook. Or the energy, honestly.”

“Cooking doesn’t take much time or energy, that’s a poor excuse,” he replies, and you’re halfway through formulating a more-than-slightly-defensive response when he continues, “Learning to cook takes time and energy. You don’t have time or energy to learn , right now.”

The abrupt transition from what you’d assumed would be another insult to a gentle and even understanding correction– it makes something inside of you lurch like the feeling you get when you miss a step walking down a staircase, your balance thrown off and your center of gravity ending up somewhere unexpected.

“Really unnecessary amount of semantic nitpicking,” you say, the words tumbling out uncertain and unsteady, not sure if the warmth you feel is irritation or something else entirely.

He grins, one of those calculating ones that makes you feel like he knows something you don’t.  “It’s necessary if one statement is true and the other isn’t.”

You don’t respond to that, and in the silence you move further into the kitchen, taking residence on a bar stool on the side closest to the living room. You hadn’t seen, before, what Beck had taken from the freezer, but you can see it now; a block of tofu, semi-defrosted, dripping beads of condensation onto the countertop.

“You’re vegetarian?” You can’t keep the note of incredulity out of your voice, and you don’t try, either, knowing by now that he’d notice regardless.

Beck moves to the counter space by the sink, pulls a shining silver knife from the block on the counter and a cutting board from one of the cabinets below. “No,” he says, “But I don’t eat meat frequently. I assume you know enough about epidemiology to figure that out for yourself.”

He doesn’t say it like a compliment, more like a basic and trivial fact, but it still kind of– registers as one. That he just expects you to know things. You’d thought his general opinion of you to be markedly worse than that. “Lifestyle disease?”

He hums in affirmative—that, too, sounding expectant and unsurprised— unfolding the block of tofu from the plastic wrap which he discards, and placing it on the cutting board. “Bodies aren’t miracles, they’re machines. Machines need to be treated well if we want them to last.”

“Nice rendition on the much simpler ‘you should eat healthy because it’s good for you’,” you say, through something that you are deciding to call a snicker instead of a giggle, for– reasons. “You are so not beating the Patrick Bateman allegations.” 

Beck finally looks up at that, and his face does the same thing it did in the car– the mask, or whatever annoyingly impenetrable facade he maintains, it slips, for second, his face relaxes and his mouth twitches up and his eyebrow raises a little, maybe unintentionally, the sum of his features far more expressive than you’re accustomed to, surprise and amusement and something else you don’t recognize flickering across them in quick succession. “Allegations,” he repeats, nonplussed, almost a question, and then, with an undercurrent of humor, “You’ve seen American Psycho ? That movie is almost as old as you are.” 

“Not beating the allegations- it’s just a saying. It means, like, you’re living up to a stereotype.” You register what might have been a jab at your age a few moments too late to even really react to it, and you think that it should probably make you feel uncomfortable or uneasy or anything, really, but it doesn’t– which does make you uncomfortable. Because you should care. Presumably. “And, yeah, I had a computer. I think I pirated it when I was like, fifteen.”

“I had it on VHS, for a while, when I was in high school; I was too young to see it in theaters when it came out.” Beck has already turned back to the task at hand, moved to another set of cabinets under the counters further from you to pull out a large, high-walled pan. You can see, though, from the light in the kitchen, the way that his mouth tugs up at the corners still, like he can’t quite suppress it completely. “You think I could be a serial killer, and you still willingly came to my house?”

“Do I need to explain the concept of a joke to you?” you reply, intending for it to be sardonic and scathing but finding that it really just sounds like you’re teasing him. The way a friend might. And god, that’s–

(Weird. Bad. Maybe neither— is that worse?)

(You’re not going to think about it.)

He doesn’t say anything back, just hums under his breath, low and amused and barely audible, and takes out a set of bowls from a cabinet above his head that he places on the counter.

“Go in the pantry and grab me the soy sauce and sesame oil,” he says after a moment, fixing you with a look in the seconds before it registers, “I’m not your personal chef, you’re going to help.”

It still takes a moment, after that, for the request to click. Even when you do get up to do as he’d asked, you take a moment to stretch out, first, before moving anywhere, reaching your arms up to the ceiling– he looks sidelong at you and you think his eyes might linger on the revealed expanse of your stomach where your sweater had risen up, and something low and warm inside of you is fucking satisfied by that.

“You say that like you wouldn’t still be doing this if I weren’t here,” you say when he looks away.

“I would,” he acknowledges as you approach him, and tips his head towards the closed door to his right. “But since you went and lost your keys and are now intruding on my weekend, the least you can do is make yourself useful.”

The remark is so at odds with the series of events that had brought you here in the first place and in such direct contrast with his own behavior that the slight doesn’t even really register; rolls right off, like water. “Right, because this is such an inconvenience to you.” 

A smile twitches at the corners of his mouth, and there’s that new strange feeling again, like somebody’s filled your whole body with buzzing TV static. 

You find the pantry at his earlier direction, open the door and scan the rows of shelves, as spotless and impeccably organized as everything else in his apartment. The sesame oil and soy sauce are just below eye height and next to each other among a neat line of various other ingredients– cooking wine and white vinegar and molasses and more that you don’t take notice of in the time it takes to grab what he’d asked for and close the door again. 

“Fridge,” he says when you place the bottles on the counter beside him, having finished cutting the tofu into neat squares that he sweeps off the cutting board and into a bowl with the flat of his knife. “Broccoli and green peppers, they’ll be in the bottom drawer on the left.”

His fridge is one of those massive gleaming silver ones with the double-doors and built-in water and ice dispenser, and it, like everything else, is pristine and neatly kept; you find both items where he’d directed you, still wrapped in those paper-thin plastic bags from the grocery store. 

“There’s beer in the door, by the way, if you want any.”

True to word there are bottles lined in the trays on the left inside shelf— wheat and fruit varieties, mostly, light and tolerable and kind of surprising; you’d have pegged him as a snobby IPA type— though you decide that, despite his often incomprehensible devotion to being an asshole at all times, you still can’t abandon the weird sort of obligations that come with being a guest in someone else’s home. Namely, the feeling that it was somehow improper to accept an offer not also indulged in by the host. “Do you?” 

He considers it for a second. “Yeah, I’ll take one.”

“Anything specific?”

“No,” There’s that edge, again, more teasing than anything else, and you ignore that, too— the difference, the lack of overt malice— with an ease that should probably be concerning, “I like all of them, that’s why they’re there. Pick one and come here, you’re making this more difficult than it needs to be.”

The words come here, because you’re pathetic, they drag that winding coil of tension in the pit of your stomach back to the surface, but then the fridge begins to beep at you–you’ve kept it open for too long, presumably– and so you push the thoughts back down and blindly pick two from the bottom rack, allowing the doors to fall closed again. 

At the counter he’s already portioned out snap peas he must have pulled from the freezer earlier, and mixed what you assume to be a sauce together in another bowl.

“Start cutting them up,” he says as he takes one of the bottles from your outstretched hands, nodding towards the vegetables you’d grabbed from the fridge, and then the cutting board, moved further down the counter to a spot where you’d have the space to stand alongside him. Beck doesn’t wait for your response; he turns and flicks on the stove and pours sesame oil down the sides of the pan, not bothering with measurements, just eyeing it with a practiced and familiar ease. He’s rolled the sleeves of his shirt up to his elbows, cuffs neatly folded and edges creased, probably while you were in the fridge, and the tanned and solid expanse of his forearms— you’re not staring, not exactly, but you’re aware of it as you rinse the peppers and the head of broccoli in the sink, the sight of him in your periphery. The oil crackles in the pan, browns and aromatizes, fills the kitchen with the smell, fragrant and rich like salt and nuts and caramel; your eyes keep getting drawn back to him, the muscles and the tendons flexing in his hands as he moves to add the already-prepared ingredients, sprinkles salt and red pepper, lifts and shakes the pan to toss the contents of it— 

“If you want to be of any use to me, that needs to be done before this is,” he says, tone deceptively mild. You’re barely halfway through cutting the broccoli up into approximately bite-sized pieces, and at his comment your eyes flicker away from where they’d drifted to him again.

You don’t say anything in response, just try to focus more intently on the task, slower and more clumsy and comparatively unskilled as you are at it; it’s not like it’s difficult, really, it’s just one of those things that’s borne out of practice, of which you had little, considering your circumstances. Begrudgingly, you acknowledge to yourself that he’d been right, before, about the challenge being less the actual cooking than the learning of it, something you had next to no energy for– much less the desire to do– as a seemingly perpetually-busy grad student. 

Some time during your finishing dividing up the broccoli and setting a pepper on the wooden surface of the cutting board he must have turned the stove down, set the pan aside; you feel him behind you before you really even know that he’s there, the air changing, growing warmer with his presence. 

“You’re going too slow.”

You hum, in response, before you try to speak, making sure your voice isn’t going to betray you and crumble the second you say anything in return, “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” he says, unconcerned, and for whatever reason that, too, feels like– something. Something weird.  “You’re learning.”

When he moves closer, his head above your shoulder, his arms bracketing yours and his hands lingering somewhere near your wrists, your breathing catches and your pulse picks up and that thing inside of you— the thing that had never really gone away in the first place, hadn’t ever faded or lessened at all since you first got out of his car, that ever-widening chasm of your own want like a fucking fault in the earth that you’d just somehow been managing to ignore this whole time— it rears its head again, dizzying, requisitions the bulk of your attention span to the point where you nearly nick your fingers. 

“Wow, actually, maybe you’re not learning,” he murmurs, gently mocking, low in your ear as his hands move down to overlay your own, steadying your grip on the knife. “So much for making yourself useful.”

“I’m not great at tuning out distractions,” you tell him, and in your head you imagine you say it with enough bite to imply that he’s being annoying, but in reality it just comes out soft, plaintive– a confession rather than an accusation.

“Oh, really? Couldn’t tell.” You can hear the smile, bleeding into the tone of his voice.

With him directing you, it goes much faster, turning with one hand and cutting with the other, the movements methodical and clean; rationally, you know it must have been no more than a minute or two, but it feels like so much longer and so much shorter, somehow, your perception defying all sense of logic, your entire body thrumming with the awareness of him, the broad span of his chest and the places it’s almost touching your shoulders, his hands, steady and warm and rough, his breathing, too, the rhythm of it against the shell of your ear, the goosebumps it sends prickling across your neck—

“There,” he says when it’s done, when he steps back and the air goes cold and that stupid thing inside of you twinges with an embarrassing amount of disappointment, “Not so hard.”

Beck returns to the stove, cranks the heat back up; you swallow and steady your breathing and reach for your beer on the counter, the top already having been cracked open for you; when he’d even had time to do that, you have no idea, but you murmur a quiet thanks as you reach for it and drain a long sip, if only to have something to do.

“Garbage is the drawer on the left by the wall,” he says over his shoulder, “Just throw out what’s left over and put the dishes in the sink. The bottles away, too,” he jerks his head towards the sesame oil and the soy sauce, “And then you’re good.”

“And then I’ll have made up for ‘ intruding on your weekend’ ?” you reply, still far softer than you’d intended it to be as you move through the tasks, tossing the seeded pepper cores and the stump of broccoli in the garbage alongside the scraps from the cutting board, placing that and a stack of bowls in the sink.

His answering chuckle is soft and low, the particulars of his expression blocked from view by the pantry door as you replace the items you’d pulled from there. “No, honey, then you’ll have helped with dinner. Making up for intruding on my weekend–” When he laughs again, the sound is a lot less kind than before; and maybe he’s amused by the reference, or maybe the circumstance, or maybe something else entirely, some other thing that only he knows about, a punchline to a joke that you’re not in on. “You will.”

It’s the way that he says it, probably, or the particulars of the words– the difference between you will and you can that seems impossibly large and unfathomably significant in this context– but it makes your breath catch and your pulse tremble and that warmth– the heat– it rages back before he’s even really finished speaking, searing and unavoidable like somebody had turned the gas on a stove up to the very top or just gone and broken the dial off completely. You could blame what happens next on the effect of all of a half a beer on an otherwise-empty stomach or the terrible realization of both being so far beyond outside of your depth and having lost control of whatever tenuous hold you ever really had on your own desire, but–

The last bottle– does not even matter which one it is and you don’t fucking care anyway– slips from your fingers a centimeter from the edge of the shelf, and though you catch it before it hits the ground and return it, more carefully, this time, to its’ place, you know— you just do, even though you can’t see him, even though he can’t see you, even though he’s ostensibly busy, preoccupied, not paying attention — that he still somehow notices it, too.

You don’t eat at the table, because he does not, strictly speaking, have one. What he has instead is just one of those chest-high dividing walls that acts to partially separate the kitchen from the currently unlit living room, outfitted with enough counter space to hold dishes for maybe a grand total of four guests. The food cools in the pan until the sound of crackling oil fades and then goes silent completely, leaving just the steam to rise from it and spiral up towards the ceiling in wavering lines; Beck brings it over to the bar, then, uses a fork to fill both plates, and sets the pan in the sink. 

You mumble a thanks, to which he responds with a noncommittal, wordless hum; you eat mostly in silence, perched on the stool you’d sat in before, on the end of the bar outside the kitchen. He sits across from you and you try not to look at him too often, but you’re certain you don’t succeed, as much as you’re certain that he must know, somehow, must be keenly aware of each and every time that you glance up at him— at his forearms, his sleeves still rolled to his elbows, his chest, too, the first two buttons of his shirt undone, the heat of the stove having softened the crisp, pressed lines of it, his tie gone, discarded at some point. He looks more relaxed than you’ve ever seen him, more at ease, and you are affected by that, apparently.

He finishes eating before you, and you watch him then, too, as he moves around the kitchen, slotting his plate and the silverware and the used bowls into the dishwasher, scrubbing clean the cutting board, setting it to dry, washing the knife by hand with a sponge in the sink and returning it to the block on the counter.

“You’re so organized,” you blurt out, without meaning to, suddenly aware that your beer is less than half full, probably less than a quarter, and you’d drank most of it well before you’d eaten anything. 

“I take it I’m still not beating the Patrick Bateman allegations, then,” he replies, with a grin you could only really describe as conspiratorial. For a second you don’t realize he’s actually made a joke that wasn’t at your expense– one that was, actually, weirdly, at his own– and when it registers you’ll blame being halfway drunk for the involuntary and genuine and utterly helpless burst of laughter that escapes you before you can even so much as think to stop it. 

Whatever emotion passes briefly across his face in response to that seems almost pleased. But it’s late and you’re tipsy and unthinking and it’s easy to just not worry about it, any of it, to just let yourself react like you would in any other interaction with anyone else, for once unconcerned with the machinations of whatever game he’s always playing. 

“I was actually– ” you start, the words stumbling to a halt when you find yourself laughing again, and when they start back up they come spilling from you faster than your brain can comprehend, a precarious situation that results in far more honesty than you intended.  “That was— it was kind of a compliment.”

“A compliment,” he repeats, the tone of his voice mocking and sly; his expression has shifted to one of those pointed and intentional looks, the corners of his mouth curled up, not a smile and not even really a nice thing at all, but the rush of warmth that floods your face in response is still immediate and abjectly fucking damning. “And here I thought you would sooner drop dead than ever entertain so much as a positive thought about me.”

Part of the flush in your cheeks, you reason, is probably the alcohol, another part the way it’s gotten warmer in the kitchen with the stovetop on, but there’s still some that’s just due to whatever thing that’s been simmering inside of you this whole time– the way it’s buzzing, right now, nervous and flighty and alive as you watch him move back towards you. He’s grabbed two more beers from the fridge, with his empty, and yours nearly there; the thought occurs to you to decline, in the interest of preserving whatever remains of your ability for clear-headed and rational thought, but–

You realize, with far less shame than you figure you should be feeling, you don’t actually want to preserve that at all. 

“I don’t have to like someone to recognize they can have good qualities,” you say, flippant, more relaxed than you feel, “Everyone does. You’re still a human being, even if you do get on my nerves.”

Beck goes quiet and still for a second, takes a long, slow sip from his beer, and then fixes you with this look that’s so intense it’s unsettling. “So, what, you don’t like me, then?”

Something in your subconscious prickles at the question or maybe just at the fact that he’d even asked it; he doesn’t sound offended, or upset, or even like he cares much at all either way, which doesn’t surprise you. But you can’t figure out exactly why he would be asking, otherwise. You take another sip of your beer, finishing the bottle; wordlessly, Beck reaches across the table for the second one, and cracks the top open on the edge of the counter; you murmur a quiet thanks as he sets it beside you.

“I mean– you definitely don't like me, so I don’t see how that would be unexpected,” you say after a while, not really answering outright, unsure you would even be able to. Not knowing for certain what the answer even is, anymore. 

Beck blinks, expressionless for a second, before he breaks out into another smile, this one markedly unkind, suspended somewhere between derision and incredulity. “Of course I like you,” he says, in a tone like he’s talking to a particularly stubborn or particularly stupid child, and if he were saying anything else right then maybe you would have remembered to be irritated at him for that. “You’re— god, sometimes you’re so obtuse. I mean, you’re smart as a whip, really, but you’re just– clueless.”

And–

None of that makes sense to you, and you get the feeling that the alcohol isn’t to blame, that even stone-cold sober you would still be left parsing this same inexplicable and fundamentally contradictory amalgam of facts and secondary emotions– one, he thinks you’re smart, really smart, even, and there’s a part of you that does something awful and pathetic like fucking preens at that, and two, he also apparently and simultaneously thinks you’re stupid, which isn’t that much of a surprise, and three, perhaps most confusing of them all–

“What the fuck do you mean, you— you like me?” 

Beck exhales, this long-suffering sound as if you’ve proved his point by even asking, and says, “Really, just– it’s not complicated. Exactly what it sounds like.” He drains probably a quarter of his second beer, leans forwards on his elbows, and shrugs. “You said that I dislike you, and I’m saying that you’re wrong.” 

“Okay, I don’t–” you tear your eyes from him, stare hard at your plate, pushing a browned piece of broccoli around the mostly-empty edges of it with the tines of your fork, certain you can feel the actual cogs inside of your head as they turn, uselessly, stuck in place and uncomprehending. “That doesn’t make any sense. You– I mean, you’ve basically had a vendetta against me since I was in undergrad.”

“No,” he says, that patient, vaguely annoyed quality still lingering in the word, and when you look up again his eyes are fixed on you, dark and unreadable, “I had an interest in you.” 

“An interest in, what– bothering me?”

“Something like that.” The barest traces of humor infiltrate his otherwise still indecipherable expression. “You’re easily bothered, honey.”

“So, what, you—“ you stop to take another sip of your beer, head spinning, “You bother me on purpose, for years, and then you’re confused that I actually might not have liked you very much? At all, even?”

“I knew full well you didn’t like me. It didn't matter and it still doesn’t,” he says, with a level of disregard that you know, objectively, should concern you, “I’m not asking about then. I’m asking about now.”

Whatever your immediate response to that dries up as soon as you open your mouth, like your thoughts are flying by so quickly you can’t hold onto them long enough to figure out how to say them. You know, somewhere, deep down, that you should be angrier than you are about this. That you should be a lot of other things, too, things that are stronger and more important than anger– you should feel victimized, probably, violated , even, uncomfortable and uneasy and unsafe , knowing that he’d had some sort of fixation with you and with garnering your frustration for what amounts to numerous actual years. A subconscious part of you, though, might have already known a lot of that– or at the very least suspected it– since the very beginning of whatever the fuck this whole thing has even become, and there was that to contend with, too. But right now he’s admitting to it, all of it, explicitly; the intentional provocation and the unabashed harassment and the fact that he hadn’t cared at all about your feelings or your opinions or anything you thought that whole time– because it didn’t matter to him, not when what you felt had no direct impact on his ability to get what he wanted from you. He’s admitting that, presumably, the reason he feels some approximation of care– no, not even, just interest, cold and objective and impersonal– regarding those things now is because now it actually can impact things. What you feel about him now could absolutely stop him from getting whatever it is that he wants from you– sex, presumably, though he clearly still enjoys getting under your skin, too-- because now you have no contractual obligation to even so much as exchange pleasantries with him anymore, much less be here, in his house. You could leave, easily, never see him again if that’s what you wanted, if you really disliked him that much. 

He doesn’t want that, you realize, with a dawning understanding. He does not want you to dislike him, at least not enough to drive you away. Not now, because now– now it runs counter to his own interests.

“I don’t know,” you say finally, looking up at him and feeling unsteady just in doing it, not sure whether your instincts should be telling you to do now– because they aren't telling you to do anything more than what they’ve pretty much always done every time you’ve so much as seen him in the last four months. You still want him, the maddening and terrible way that you feel like you always do just at the sight of him alone, that desire simmering right under your skin, and maybe in the moment you could blame the one-and-a-half beers or the time or the circumstance, but none of that would really even be true. Your survival instincts, what little of them you even possess to begin with, have always, always been next to nonexistent when it comes to this. 

Him. 

Whatever.

God, none of this would be an issue if the sex was worse. If it was even just average. Or even–

“So you don’t, then,” he replies, and as soon as he speaks it’s like your awareness snaps to him, narrows and refines like adjusting a microscope, everything falling outside the edges of the lens drifting out of focus. Your thoughts; your ability to reason, too, probably. This was a terrible, terrible idea, you had thought that in the hallway in the biology building what feels like actual lifetimes ago, and you’d been right, then; you should not be here. 

It’s alarming, the way that you can’t even seem to summon up the will to care.

“I said I don’t know.” That horrible iniquitous thing in your belly coils itself tighter, twisting in on itself like a snake, hollow and starving, like it wants to sink teeth into him, and would do it, too, if he were closer.

“Right. And maybe you don’t,” Beck replies, as if to say, I do , a hard gleam of satisfaction in his eyes that betrays the otherwise light, conversational cadence of his voice. 

You don’t respond to that. In your belly, that heat pulses and burns brighter. 

There’s a silence, then, drawn out and excruciatingly unbearable, and during it you drain the rest of your beer, maybe just to do something with your hands, relieve that nervous itch in your fingers. Maybe to chase the feeling of being somewhere beyond your own control– because that’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Because– well,  presumably because there is something fucking wrong with you.

“Thank you,” you say, after a long while, “For dinner.”

Whatever you see in his expression then; it seems like enjoyment. Like he’s pleased. And while you could almost understand all the rest of the things you’d just seen from him–

You don’t understand that.

“It’s late,” he says, with a casual nonchalance, taking your plate from you to the dishwasher and waving a dismissive hand at your protests, you being an adult who is perfectly capable of putting your own dishes away, and all. 

When he turns back, you rise from the bar stool and meet him halfway, in the middle of the kitchen. Like this, you have to tip your head back to look at him, just a little, and whatever shameless thing inside of you that you try so hard to repress when you’re not tipsy and unthinking is way too into that, but seeing as you are both of those things at the moment, you don’t care. That feeling, the climbing, steady warmth; it just spreads further, sweeps through your limbs and fills every part of you, until you think it must overtake every cell in your body. Until it’s all you can think about.

He looks at you, for a second, and one of those slow, sharp smiles curves across his face. When he moves past you and towards the living room,he steps into your space to do it– on purpose, you know it’s on purpose, if there’s ever anything you’re absolutely sure about when it comes to him it’s that everything is always on fucking purpose– and you can’t stop any of the things that you know must happen; the way your body must go tense and strung taut with anticipation or how your breathing must catch somewhere in your throat or how your pupils must dilate, the breadth of your irises reduced to just a tiny sliver of color–

“Come on,” he says, without looking back, voice unbearably even. “I’ll put something on the TV.”

And–

That feeling inside of you– it pulses and trembles and wants, and then it doesn’t really matter what you do or don’t understand or what little sense you could ever make of his behavior or motivations, because–

You understand this, at least.