All Chapters of THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

40 Chapters

Chapter 31: Full hands

Daisy’s POVI see you.I had said it and meant it and then I had picked up my camera and started packing my kit bag because that was the safest thing to do with the particular feeling that was moving through my chest. Methodical. Purposeful. Lens caps on, cables coiled, cards into their case. The ritual of packing down after a shoot was one I had done hundreds of times and it gave my hands something to do while my mind caught up to the last five minutes.He had recommended me for this booking three days ago.Before midnight. Before the corridor. Before that is still not enough. He had called someone in that firm’s communications team and put my name forward and sent them my portfolio and said nothing to me about it. Not as leverage. Not as a grand gesture designed to be witnessed. Three days before he had any reason to think it would land anywhere useful.I thought about that while I packed.The quiet weight of it. The difference between a gesture made for an audience and a gesture m

Chapter 32: She answered

Dexter’s POVShe answered the call.Right there in front of me. Not as a power move, I understood that immediately, the way I understood most things about Daisy Brown by now. Not to make a point or to send a message or to hurt anything. She answered it because it rang and she was the kind of person who picked up when someone called and she was not going to perform a version of herself for my benefit that was not who she actually was.I stood still and waited and watched her face go warm and easy the way it did when she was talking to someone uncomplicated. The slight relaxation of everything. The quality of her voice, different from how she spoke to me, was not warmer exactly but lighter. Less weight to it. The voice of someone who was not managing anything.I listened to her half of the conversation without trying to and processed it without wanting to.“Tomorrow works. Thank you.”She hung up. Put the phone in her bag. Picked up the kit bag. Looked at me.“I’ll think about dinner,”

Chapter 33: The honest conversation

Casper’s POVI had been thinking about what to say for two days.Not because it was difficult to say, the thing itself was simple and true and I had made peace with it before I picked up the phone to call her. But because the way you said simple true things mattered enormously and I wanted to say this one in a way that left her with something useful rather than something she had to manage.I arrived at the coffee shop early. I always arrived early, it was a professional habit so deeply embedded that it had become personal. I ordered, found a table by the window where the light was good and the ambient noise was low enough for a real conversation, and I waited.I thought about the evening at the restaurant. Her face across the table when I asked the question. The particular quality of the silence that followed, not the silence of someone deciding, the silence of someone who had already decided and was working out how to honour both of us at once.She had been honest with me. That mat

Chapter 34: Friday works

Daisy’s POVI cried in the bathroom for four minutes.I timed it. Not deliberately, I had looked at my phone when I walked in and I looked at it again when I walked out and four minutes had passed and in those four minutes I stood at the sink and let the thing that had been sitting in my chest since Casper said I don’t think that person is me you’re waiting for move through me properly before I had to go back out and be a person in public.It was not grief. It was not heartbreak, I want to be precise about that because Casper King deserved precision. It was the particular emotion that came from something genuinely good not becoming what it might have been under different circumstances. The mourning of a door that had been real and was now closed and had closed well, which was its own kind of loss.I washed my face. Cold water. The mirror in the coffee shop bathroom was slightly warped and made me look like a version of myself that had been through something, which was accurate.I we

Chapter 35: The sunflower

Dexter’s POVI bought it from the corner shop on the way home.Not from a florist, from the small corner shop two blocks from the building that sold everything from batteries to birthday cards to slightly overpriced fruit. There was a bucket of flowers by the door, the way there always was, and the sunflowers were at the front of it. Yellow and large and turned toward the light coming through the shop window in the particular way that sunflowers always did.I stopped when I saw them.She had said it weeks ago, not as a declaration about flowers, not as a hint, just as a thing that came out in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely. Sunflowers are the only flower that looks happy about existing. Said with that slight curve of her mouth that meant she had just thought of something she found genuinely pleasing. I had been half listening and half watching her face and I had filed it the way I filed everything she said without intending to file it.The way she took her

Chapter 36: Lily again

Ivy’s POVThe first call I could explain away.Eight months of silence and then a warm check-in, that was within the range of things that happened between people who had shared a social circle and drifted. I had not liked it but I had been able to file it as possibly genuine and move on.The second call I could not explain.It came on a Wednesday evening while I was in my room pretending to read and actually thinking about the sunflower on the kitchen counter and whether Daisy had seen it yet and what her face had done when she did. My phone lit up with Lily’s name and I looked at it for a moment before I answered.“Lily,” I said.“Ivy.” Warm. Easy. The particular voice of someone who had practised this call before making it. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”“Not at all,” I said. “What’s up?”“I was thinking about Marcus’s birthday next weekend,” she said. “He’s doing something at that rooftop place on the west side, you know the one. And I thought it would be lovely to have a proper gr

Chapter 37: He asked again

Daisy’s POVWednesday morning arrived the way Wednesday mornings did, without announcement, without ceremony, with the particular quality of a week that had already been significant and was not finished yet.I had slept well. That was worth noting because I had not been sleeping well for most of the weeks I had been in this apartment. The grief moved around at night, finding the gaps in the day’s busyness and filling them. But Wednesday morning I woke up at seven and the room was light and I lay there for a moment and felt something that was not quite peace but was in that direction.Friday works. I had sent it. It was sent. The message existed in the world and Dexter had read it. I knew because the small indicator under the text had changed, and that meant the thing was in motion and I had made a choice and I was standing inside it.I was choosing not to be afraid of it.That was the decision I had arrived at somewhere between the sunflower and the bathroom mirror and Casper’s hand

Chapter 38: Getting it right

Dexter’s POVI had been thinking about this dinner since Wednesday morning.Not obsessively, I was a lawyer, I had a full caseload, I had a managing partner who sent emails at six in the morning with the cheerful energy of someone who did not believe in boundaries between professional and personal time. I had things to do and I did them. But underneath the doing of them, in the background of every meeting and brief and phone call, Friday was there. The awareness of it. The particular weight of something I had wanted to get right and now had to actually get right.I had made a reservation at a restaurant I had eaten there once, two years ago, for a quiet dinner with a colleague after a long trial at court. It was not a place designed to impress. No marble entrance, no lighting that felt like a set, no menu that required translation. It was a corner restaurant in a quieter part of the city with good food and close tables and the kind of warm noise that allowed for conversation without p

Chapter 39: The Dinner

Daisy’s POVThe restaurant was exactly right.That was the first thing I thought when we walked in, not impressive, the way he had said, but right. Small and warm and lit with the kind of light that made people look like themselves rather than like versions of themselves designed for being seen. Close tables with enough distance between them for real conversation. A menu written on a small card without the ceremony of leather covers. The kind of place that existed for eating and talking rather than for being seen to eat and talk.He had thought about this.Not about what would look good or communicate the right signal, about what would feel right. There was a difference and I had spent enough time around people who confused those two things to appreciate it when someone understood the difference.We were seated at a corner table. He pulled out my chair and I sat and he sat across from me and we opened the small menus and I looked at the food and thought about how very ordinary and ver

Chapter 40: The Evidence

Ivy’s POVI came home to an empty apartment.That was the first thing, the particular quality of a space that had been recently occupied and recently vacated. Not the empty of a place where nobody had been all day. The empty of a place where two people had been and were now somewhere else together.Both doors closed. No sound from either room. No Daisy on the couch. No Dexter in the study with the light on and a case file open. Just the apartment in its Friday evening quiet with the city outside the windows doing its weekend thing.I stood in the hallway for a moment and just registered it.They were out. Together. At the dinner that had been booked and confirmed and anticipated since Wednesday morning when I had heard his voice through the walls saying have dinner with me and her saying yes and I had stood in the corridor with my hand over my mouth being extremely mature about the whole situation.I went to the kitchen.The counter told its own story.A takeout menu, the one from t

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