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Chapter 26: Something was different
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2026-06-16 15:43:00
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THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME Chapter 48: The new normal
Ivy’s POVSunday dinner had become a thing.I was not entirely sure when it had become a thing, it had arrived gradually, the way most good things arrived, through accumulation rather than announcement. The first time it had been accidental: a Sunday three weeks ago when all three of us had been in the apartment and I had started cooking because I was hungry and both of them had gravitated to the kitchen and the next thing we were eating together at the table like a family that had always done this.The second time Daisy had started the cooking before I got home and had made enough for three without being asked.The third time Dexter had gone to the market in the morning and come back with actual ingredients rather than the strategic collection of non-perishables he had maintained in the fridge since Daisy and I had known him.Now it was the fourth time and I was sitting at the table watching my brother and my best friend argue about whether the pasta needed more salt and feeling some
THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME Chapter 47: The photo
Dexter’s POVI should have deleted it.That was the thought that arrived the moment I saw her holding my phone, clear and immediate and approximately six weeks too late. I should have deleted it the morning after I took it, when I woke up and opened my camera roll for something unrelated and found it there and understood for the first time what having taken it said about me.I had not deleted it.That was the other fact, the one that sat beside the should-have and refused to be quieter than it. I had seen it that morning and I had looked at it for longer than was reasonable and I had put my phone away and gone to the kitchen and made coffee and come back to the photo twice more before I left for work. And then I had not deleted it. And the days had passed and the photo had stayed and I had told myself various things about why, that I would get to it, that it did not matter, that keeping a photograph of someone asleep on your couch was the kind of thing that could be explained if it e
THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME Chapter 46: Trying
Daisy’s POVWe did not name it.We did not sit down and have the conversation where you defined things and attached labels and established what the other person was to you going forward. Neither of us was ready for that and neither of us needed it, there was a version of knowing that came before the naming, the version that lived in the small details of how you moved through the same space as another person, and that was the version we were in.I noticed the details.He saved me the window seat at the kitchen table. Not dramatically, just, when we both arrived in the kitchen in the morning, he took the other side and the window was mine. I noticed it the first time and said nothing. The second time I caught him doing it deliberately, the slight redirect of his movement when I came through the door, and I said nothing then either. I just sat at the window and drank my coffee and thought about what it meant that he had filed this too without being asked.I learned how he took his coff
THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME Chapter 45: Finishing it
Dexter’s POVShe said then finish it.Two words. Even and direct and looking at me over the rim of the mug with those eyes that had never once given me anything I had not earned and were giving me this now with the particular clarity of someone who had thought about it in the night and arrived somewhere on the other side of the thinking.I stepped forward.She stayed in the doorframe, leaning against it slightly, the mug in both hands, not moving back but not moving toward me either. Giving me the space and letting me use it. That was Daisy. She had always let me use the space. The difficulty had always been me and whether I would.I took the mug from her hands.She let me. Watched me set it on the small table just inside her door, the one that held her camera bag and a stack of books and the particular accumulating evidence of a person making a space of their own. I turned back to her.She was still in the doorframe. Looking at me with those eyes.I put my hands on her face.Both of
THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME Chapter 44: Not nothing
Daisy’s POVI did not sleep well.Not badly, I want to be precise about that because badly would have meant something was wrong and nothing was wrong. Nothing was wrong in the way that something being right for the first time in a long time could keep you awake with the particular pleasant restlessness of a person whose chest had something in it that had not yet found a place to settle.I lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and thought about his hand at my jaw.The warmth of it. The deliberateness of it, the way it had moved to tuck the hair back and then stayed, not gripping, not demanding, just present against my jaw with the particular certainty of someone who had made a decision and was not second-guessing it. I had stood there and felt it and not moved away and that was its own kind of decision.Then he kissed me.I pressed my hand over my eyes in the dark and breathed.The brush of it. The stillness that came over me when it happened, the complete and total stillness of
THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME Chapter 43: Bad timing
Ivy’s POVI had not planned to come home when I did.That was the honest truth of it, I had been at Sarah’s, a friend from my old job, and we had been having the kind of evening that extended itself naturally, one glass of wine becoming two becoming a third and a conversation about nothing important that felt important the way those conversations did. I had genuinely lost track of time.When I looked at my phone at eleven fifteen and saw it was eleven fifteen I had said goodbye and got in a cab and come home and let myself into the apartment with my keys and walked into my kitchen and found my brother and my best friend not looking at each other with the most elaborate casualness I had ever witnessed.I knew what I had walked into. I had walked into the tail end of something and I was not obtuse and I did not need a forensic analysis to understand what the counter-staring and the careful positioning and the slightly too-even voices were communicating.I had looked at the ceiling beca
THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME Chapter 5: Who was that?
DAISY ❀My composure cracked.Just slightly. Just enough that I felt it, a hairline fracture running through the careful architecture I had spent the walk from his bedroom building. I had told myself it was a mistake before my feet hit his floor. I had repeated it getting dressed. I had carried it
THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME Chapter 4: He kissed me.
DAISY ❀Ivy knocked twice before she walked in, which was her version of privacy.I was on the bed with the television going and a bowl of popcorn I had barely touched, half watching a reality show I couldn’t follow because my mind kept drifting to places I didn’t want it to go. She leaned against
THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME Chapter 3: He made you coffee?
DAISY ❀I knew someone might hear me.That was the thing about grief, it didn’t wait for convenient moments. It came when the lights were off and the apartment was quiet and there was nothing left to distract you from the size of the absence. I had held it together through the drive, through tea
THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME Chapter 2: The inconvenience
DEXTER ♡I never agreed to this.That is the part Ivy conveniently leaves out whenever she makes decisions for the both of us, that I live here too, that my name is also on this lease, and that having someone occupy my space without my consent is not something I particularly enjoy. But Ivy has nev
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