All Chapters of THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

40 Chapters

Chapter 11: Unknown Number

IVY♡I had always been good at reading rooms.It was something I developed young, growing up with Dexter meant learning early how to read the temperature of a space before you walked fully into it. When he was in a good mood the apartment had a certain looseness to it. When he was not, everything had edges. I had spent twenty four years calibrating myself to my brother’s atmosphere and I knew every version of it.This version was new.He was quieter than usual. Not the comfortable quiet of a man at ease in his own home, the other kind. The kind that came from someone thinking too hard about something they had not yet decided to act on. He worked longer hours. Came home later. Sat at dinner and contributed exactly enough to the conversation to avoid questions and not one word more.I watched him.I also watched Daisy.Daisy was lighter. That was the only word for it, a quality of lightness that had come into her in the last few days that had not been there before. She texted more. She

Chapter 12: The first date

DAISY ♡Casper picked me up at seven.He was waiting outside the building when I came down, not in the lobby checking his phone, not parked at the curb sending a text to say he was there. He was standing outside, his hands in his jacket pockets, looking at the street with the easy patience of someone who was not bothered by waiting. He turned when he heard the door and smiled and it was a straightforward smile. No performance in it.“You look great,” he said.“Thank you,” I said. “So do you.”He did. That was the honest answer. He was tall and easy in his clothes and he held the car door open without making it a production and when I got in he closed it gently and walked around to his side and that was it. No commentary. No expectation. Just a person opening a door because that was the kind of person he was.We drove uptown.The restaurant was on a rooftop, fairy lights strung between low structures, the city spread in every direction below the railing, the sky doing that particular

Chapter 13: At 11 P.M

DEXTER♡I was not waiting.I want to be clear about that. I was not sitting on the couch in the dark at eleven fifteen on a Saturday evening waiting for Daisy Brown to come home from a date with a cardiologist whose staff profile I had looked at twice and whose publication history I had absolutely not skimmed.I could not sleep. That was all. I had tried, gone to bed at ten, lay in the dark, looked at the ceiling, listened to the city. My mind had declined to cooperate. It did the thing it had been doing for the past week which was to present me with a rotating selection of things I was not ready to think about yet and refuse to offer anything more restful instead.I got up. Came to the living room. Sat on the couch.I did not turn the television on because I did not want noise. I did not turn the lamp on because the dark felt more honest for what I was doing which was sitting with something I had not yet named and letting it have the space it was taking up whether I wanted it to or n

Chapter 14: The return

LILY♡I do not lose.That is the foundational truth I built myself back on after Dexter. Eight months of careful reconstruction, my professional reputation polished back to its best, my social calendar full again, my appearance as controlled and considered as it has always been. I went through the private falling apart that nobody saw and I came out the other side the way I always come out of things. Intact. Focused. Clear on what I want.What I want is Dexter Hart.I have known that since the ending, if it could even be called an ending. That careless cowardly thing he did that I still do not have clean language for. He moved on before he told me he was done. I found out from a mutual friend over drinks on a Wednesday evening and I sat with it for exactly twelve hours before I put it away and started building a plan instead.Plans are what I am good at, I am always good at constructing things that is why I am a public relation executioner. I called Ivy first because Ivy is the

Chapter 15: The floral cologne

DAISY ♡Ivy made pasta on Thursday evening.The good kind, the kind she only made when she had time and the particular domestic energy that came over her when she wanted an evening to feel normal. Sauce from scratch, proper parmesan, the kitchen smelling warm and like something that required no complicated feelings to enjoy.I set the table. Poured the water. Sat down.We talked about easy things first. A film Ivy wanted to see. A client of mine who had emailed three times in one day about minor adjustments. The downstairs neighbour who had started playing guitar at seven in the morning with more enthusiasm than skill. Normal dinner conversation, the kind that asked nothing from either of us.Then Ivy reached for more parmesan and said it casually, in the tone she used for things she was pretending were less significant than they were.“Lily called me the other day.”I kept eating my pasta.“Dexter’s ex?” I said.“Mm.” I said looking at my plate. “Just catching up apparently. Asking

Chapter 16: A date ended in a motel

DEXTER ♡The date had been fine. I guess it was fine. That was the honest assessment, fine, in the way that things were fine when they were technically without fault and entirely without feeling. She was beautiful. She was easy company. She had a sharp sense of humour and she laughed at the right moments and she looked at me across the restaurant table with the kind of straightforward interest that I had always known how to meet.I smiled at the right moments. I said the right things. I asked the right questions and listened to the answers with the right degree of attention and when the evening ended I was pleasant about it in all the right ways.I felt absolutely nothing the entire time.Not nothing as in distracted or preoccupied, nothing as in the specific absence of the thing that should have been there. I had sat across from a beautiful woman on a Thursday evening and experienced the entire event at one remove, like watching a film of someone else having a perfectly acceptabl

Chapter 17: The studio

DAISY ♡The booking came through on a Tuesday.Sarah Mills. Headshots. A standard consultation request, brief, professional, nothing unusual in the wording. I confirmed it, blocked out the slot in my calendar and thought nothing more about it.Wednesday morning I set up the studio the way I always did for consultations, clean backdrop, good natural light from the north window, the reference portfolio open on the desk for clients who wanted to look through styles before we discussed direction. I made tea. Then I waited.She arrived exactly on time.The woman who walked through my studio door was striking. That was the first thing, not beautiful in a soft way but striking, every detail deliberate and in its right place. The clothes considered. The hair is considered. The way she moved through a room was considered, the particular ease of someone who had practised being looked at and was comfortable with what she had practised.She smiled when she saw me.“Daisy,” she said, extending

Chapter 18: The bracelet

DAISY ♡I sat on my swing chair that comforted me whenever I had pictures to edit or had something that was bothering me, the bracelet was bothering me, it really did. How can lily trace me to my studio leaving this bracelet here on purpose because she knew I was going to see it. I had to lock the studio and go home, I had my mind still looping around the name crested on the bracelet and the different name who had booked a photo shoot appointment with me that just left twenty minutes ago. They were both different names. I just locked the studio and stood outside on the pavement for a moment with my bag on my shoulder and the bracelet inside it and the city moving around me like it always did, indifferent and loud and completely unconcerned with the thing I was turning over in my mind.“To Lily, always. D.”I had read it twice in the studio and then I had put it in my bag and gathered my things with the careful movements of someone who had decided to think about something properly

Chapter 19: unsaid truth

DEXTER♡what it was before I finished looking at it before Daisy took it from me.Fine chain, small clasp, the particular weight of something I had held in a jewellery shop two years ago and turned over in my hands before deciding it was right. I had bought it on a Tuesday afternoon in a moment of what I had told myself at the time was generosity and understood later was guilt dressed as affection, the particular currency of a man who could not give what was being asked of him and kept trying to substitute other things for it.I had given it to Lily on her birthday. She had worn it every day for seven months.I had not seen it since the ending.I looked up at Daisy.Before she left the kitchen. She was standing across the kitchen counter with her hands in her pockets and her face composed in that way she had, completely still, every muscle held in place, the look of someone who had decided what they were going to show and was not negotiating on it. I had learned to read her in the wee

Chapter 20: The bathroom floor

IVY♡I went for a run that evening, which I normally do when I feel overwhelmed or stressed. I was stressed about the conflict between my best friend and my brother. I met Daisy on the floor of my bathroom, though she wasn’t crying. That was the first thing I noticed, the absence of it. Daisy sat on the tiles with her back against the bathtub and her knees pulled up and the bracelet in her open palm and she was not crying. She was just sitting. Looking at the thing in her hand with the expression she wore when she was thinking something through and had not finished yet.I had come upstairs to brush my teeth and the bathroom door was open and there she was.I did not ask what was wrong. I could see the bracelet from the doorway and I could see her face and I had known Daisy for long enough to know that sometimes the most useful thing you could do for her was remove the expectation of explanation. So I went in and sat down on the bathroom floor beside her without saying anything and l

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