All Chapters of THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

70 Chapters

Chapter 41: Chemistry

Daisy’s POVThe next day we came home together to a quiet apartment, after work.I noticed it the moment Dexter pushed open the front door, the particular quality of a space that had been empty for a while, the absence of Ivy’s shoes by the door, the kitchen light off, the living room undisturbed. She had texted me at nine saying she was staying at a friend’s and not to wait up, which at the time had made me smile because Ivy’s timing was rarely accidental.Tonight I was less certain whether to be grateful or terrified.We came in and I put my bag on the hook and he put his keys in the dish and we moved into the kitchen the way we always did at the end of an evening, the instinctive migration toward the room where the light was good and the counter was there to lean against and the kettle was available if anyone needed something to do with their hands.Nobody turned on the kettle.We stood in the kitchen in our coats and the apartment was very quiet around us and the evening was still

Chapter 42: She held my shirt collar

Dexter’s POVMy hand was at her jaw.She had not moved away. That was the first thing, the fact that she was still there, still looking at me, still letting the moment be what it was without shutting it down or stepping back or doing any of the things she had done in hallways and kitchens and corridors over the last weeks when the moment arrived and she had decided it was not yet time.She was not deciding that now.I kept my hand where it was. Felt the warmth of her skin under my palm, the slight angle of her jaw, the particular stillness of someone who was present in a room completely. Her eyes were on mine and they were doing what they always did when she was feeling something she had made peace with, clear and direct and not hiding anything.“Daisy,” I said. Her name, in my voice, at whatever volume the kitchen required.“I know,” she said.I leaned in.Slowly. Deliberately. The kind of slow that was its own statement, not hesitation, intention. I was giving her every second to de

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 49: The warm evening

Daisy’s POVIt had been a good week.I was still getting used to that, the particular feeling of a week that had simply been good without requiring anything from me in exchange. No management, no navigation, no careful positioning of myself around someone else’s emotional weather. Just a week that had moved through its days with the quality of something that was working.Monday had been a shoot, a small editorial, a client I liked, the kind of work that left me energised rather than drained. Tuesday I had edited in the studio with the radio on and come home to find Dexter had made dinner without announcement. Wednesday we had argued about something on the news and the argument had been interesting rather than exhausting and had ended with neither of us convinced and both of us slightly more informed. Thursday I had a long call with a gallery about a potential commission and had come home and told him about it and he had asked the right questions, not performatively, actually wantin

Chapter 50: Her laugh

Dexter’s POVShe laughed at the couch joke.That was what had started it, beige is a cry for help delivered with the flat certainty of someone who had genuinely considered the matter, and the laugh that came out of me in response had been real before I had time to manage it. And then she had laughed too, the surprised kind, the one that came from somewhere unguarded, the one I had been cataloguing without permission since the first night in this same room over a terrible television show and a bottle of wine that had started all of this.The laugh landed in my chest the way it always did.Warm. Real. The specific quality of something undefended, the laugh of Daisy Brown when she was not thinking about what she was doing, when the wit landed faster than the composure could catch up to it. I had heard it the first time on that Monday night and something had shifted in a room in the back of my mind that I had been keeping shut for a long time.I had filed it. The way I filed everything a

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