True Affliction - Chapter 10

Chapter 10 might look like brunch. Parents, tea, polite conversation... but beneath it, everything trembles. I absolutely loved writing this one.

“I’ll do the tea,” I said, intercepting him at the kitchen doorway before he could colonise my kettle as well as my morning. “Go, sit. Be admired. I’ll manage.”

He tilted his head, shameless. “Will you.” It wasn’t a question. He leaned in, brushed his mouth over my temple. Quick, scandalously gentle and let his breath graze my skin. “Shout if your mother bullies you. I’ll call HR.”

“Out,” I hissed, ruined by that stupid soft kiss.

“Yes, Doctor.” He retreated with a grin that made every cupboard blush and, because he couldn’t help himself, straightened the dish towel as he went.

Mum slid in beside me the instant he’d gone, eyes bright as a fox at a picnic. “Well,” she breathed, hands already at the mugs like she owned them. “Bit of an age gap, isn’t it?”

I measured tea like it was explosives. “Eleven,” I said, too fast, too casual. “It’s hardly archaeological.”

Mum’s mouth curved. “Eleven is not nothing.”

“He’s not either,” I muttered, then wanted to press a mug to my face until I forgot I’d said it. I busied myself with the teabags, the steam, the small domestic noises that pretended this was normal. “He’s- look, I don’t even know what we are. And yet here he is… charming you within an inch of your life.”

“Within an inch?” she echoed, delighted. “Darling, he’s working in centimetres.” Then the smile softened into Mother. “What happened to Tom? Are you cheating on him? Why didn’t you tell me any of this, whatever this is?”

The kettle clicked. I poured, grateful for something to look at besides her concern. “Tom and I are done,” I said, low, honest. “Properly. It’s just… admin and boxes now.” A breath. “No cheating.”

She stepped in closer than the kettle, thumb finding the inside of my wrist the way it had when I was five and fractious. “And you’re all right?”

There was a ridiculous, treacherous burn in my throat. I nodded. “Last night was… complicated. He was good to me.” I swallowed. “And bossy.”

“I noticed.” She couldn’t help the flicker of grin. “He walked in here like a very polite hurricane and rearranged my blood pressure.”

I huffed. “Mine too.”

We loaded a tray, pot, milk, sugar, four mugs, and when we returned to the living room, the men were already behaving like a before-and-after advert for companionship. Dad had one ankle on his knee, gesturing with a half-eaten kouign-amann as if it were a gavel; Alex sat angled toward him, forearms resting on his thighs, listening like it was paid work. They were mid–garden-centre saga; Alex looked sincerely invested in the tragic fate of a mislabeled hydrangea.

“-and of course I said you can’t return a shrub for emotional reasons,” Dad finished, triumphant.

“Criminal,” Alex agreed, deadpan. “Emotional shrubs should be honoured.”

They both noticed us at once and stood -both- which made Mum look like she might adopt him on the spot. Alex relieved me of the tray with that quiet competence that made the room behave and set it down, the back of his hand brushing my hip in a private hello.

Mum, already seated, folded one leg over the other and went in, gentle missiles deployed. “So, Alex,” she said, sugaring her tea with militant precision, “tell me about you. Brothers? Sisters? ”

He smiled, easy and bright, but something flickered beneath it that wasn’t. “One sister,” he said. “I love her very much.”

“And your parents?” Mum asked, blithe on the surface, but I felt the air change by a degree.

Alex set his cup down, precise, the small clink too quiet for the weight of it. For a breath, the light slid across his face and showed me the wire under the velvet. “We don’t really… see each other,” he said, careful, each word placed where it couldn’t explode. He lifted his eyes to Mum and gave her the gentlest half-shrug. “Long story. Not a happy one.”

A seam opened in his gaze and closed again, pain passing like a shadow over water, so fast my parents might have missed it. I didn’t. It landed under my breastbone with a thud.

Mum’s hand, which had been poised to stir, paused. Her eyes softened. “Families,” she said simply, and that was the whole of it. No pity. No pry. Just an open door he didn’t have to walk through.

He inclined his head, gratitude, acknowledgement, a truce. “Exactly.”

I sat between them all, parents soothed by pastry and manners, Alex at ease as if he’d grown up in this very room, and sipped tea I hadn’t made strong enough. He was playing gentleman and enjoying every second, cheeky with me when no one was looking and reverent with them when they were, and beneath it all that streak of something old and wounded I wanted to put my hands on and never had the right.

Mum reached for her cup, watching him over the rim like a satisfied detective. “So, Alex,” she said lightly, “how do you take your tea?”

“With your approval,” he returned, shameless, and the laugh that shook the room felt indecently like belonging.

Nounou chose her moment with criminal precision.

One second Alex was answering some gentle nonsense about compost; the next, ten pounds of zeal launched from his lap toward the tray, clipped his wrist, and sent his cup tilting. Tea sloshed, a neat amber arc, straight across the front of his white shirt.

“Oh hell,” Dad blurted, leaping for napkins. “Sorry, old girl, instincts of a spaniel.”

“I’m fine,” Alex said, calm, standing at once to avoid baptising the sofa. The wet patch bloomed, indecent and transparent over hard muscle. Mum looked like she might file a complaint with God.

I was already up. “Bathroom,” I ordered, snatching a stack of kitchen roll. “Come on.”

He followed, obedient for once, through the short hall and into the little white-tiled sanctuary where my dignity came to die. I shut the door with a soft click and turned on the tap like it might drown the sound of my pulse.

“Hold still,” I said, and dabbed at him. Futile. The heat beneath the cotton steamed through the thin paper; the tea had made the shirt cling in ways that were not for daylight.

His mouth tipped. “Doctor. You appear to be assaulting me with confetti.”

“Shut up,” I breathed, because my hands wouldn’t behave and neither would my eyes. The cotton was plastered to him, outlining every unforgivable plane, the cut of his pecs, the shallow dip down the centreline, heat everywhere. “Take it off.”

He went very still. The smile faded to something darker, older. “Caitríona.”

He reached for the top button, fingers deft, but I couldn’t stand the pace; I batted his hands away and did it myself. Buttons slid, one by one, the cotton parting to warm skin and the clean, maddening line of him. The damp fabric whispered over muscle as I dragged it off his shoulders and down his arms; it hit the tiled floor with a wet slap.

Heat rolled off him. Clean skin, tea, a ghost of cedar. I looked up and his gaze had gone fully black, want and warning and worship, just before he closed the inch between us and took my mouth like it was oxygen.

The kiss was a collision. Hot, hungry, us. My back found the door with a soft thud; his body caged me without cruelty, forearm braced, chest to chest, bare heat scorching through my thin sweatshirt. He angled my jaw with his fingers, thumb at the hinge, and devoured me, slow for a heartbeat, devastating, then deeper, hotter, like he’d survived the night just to earn this. I opened for him without sense or shame. Tongues met, slick, electric, my knees forgot themselves.

He lifted me as if I weighed nothing. Hands under my thighs, a firm, possessive grip that stole thought. Instinct took over; I wrapped my legs around his waist, locked at his lower back, the breadth of him settling deliciously between. He groaned into my mouth, a raw, torn sound that turned my bones to vapour, and pressed me harder to the door, hips snug to my hips, every line an answer.

“Christ, Cait,” he rasped against my lips, breath wrecked, stubble scraping my skin in sinful sparks. “You’re going to kill me.”

“Good,” I gasped, kissing him again, greedy, wet, shameless, tasting tea and mint and him. My hands were everywhere. One splayed over the hot column of his throat, feeling the desperate swallow I’d caused; the other raking into his damp hair to haul him closer when closer shouldn’t have been possible. He kissed me back like a sin he intended to keep, mouth mastering mine, then softening, then taking again, hungry and careful at once, the contradiction that undid me.

He tore a fraction back, foreheads touching, both of us breathing like fugitives. “Your parents,” he managed, voice ragged velvet. “In your living room.”

“Tragic,” I whispered, and kissed him again to prove I wasn’t a coward. He laughed once, broken, and it vibrated through me where our bodies locked.

“Insufferable woman,” he murmured, and then he changed the angle and made a saint of me. He devoured me in slow, claiming pulls that had me clutching, rolling my hips without permission, a whimper dying sweetly in his mouth. His hands flexed where they held me, strong enough to keep the world in place, one sliding to the curve just under my backside, obscene, anchoring, the other climbing my spine under the fabric to press me closer, closer, closer.

Time thinned to pulse and breath and the soft, illicit creak of the door. Heat flooded low and urgent; I felt wild, branded, very nearly gone.

“Alex,” I warned, more plea than caution.

He stilled, not entirely, never entirely; the man was heat by habit. But enough to kiss me softer. Once, twice. A reverent seal that tasted of promise and restraint and a threat he’d keep for both of us.

“Not here,” he said, barely sound.

I nodded, trembling, forehead still pressed to his, eyes closed because opening them might have undone everything. He eased me down with ridiculous care, hands smoothing my thighs as my feet found tile. We stood there, foreheads together, trading breath like confessions, his bare chest warm.

“Turn around,” I managed after a beat, because if he looked at me for another second I’d strip and we’d scandalise a lineage. I reached beneath the sink, hands shaking, and dragged out my emergency armour: an old, giant charcoal sweatshirt that hit me mid-thigh on bad days. Baggy, indecent on him. Perfect.

He huffed a laugh into my hair, obediently turning. Muscles along his back moved like a sin I wasn’t ready to pay for. I yanked the sweatshirt over his head; it swallowed him to mid-hip, sleeves comically short on those forearms. He looked like a felon in borrowed innocence. Mine.

He glanced down at himself, then at me. The grin that unfurled was filthy and fond in equal measure. “This is humiliating.”

“It’s repentance,” I said primly, smoothing the hem, danger, danger, over the sharp v of his hips before I came to my senses and stepped back.

He caught my wrist, brought the inside of it to his mouth, and pressed a quick, devastating kiss there. “We’re not done,” he promised, quiet enough to live under my skin.

“We’re never done,” I shot back, too fast, too true.

His eyes flared. Then he inhaled, rolled his shoulders like a man putting armour back on, and offered me his hand. “Come on, Doctor. Let’s go convince your mother I’m safe around crockery.”

“Impossible,” I muttered, trying to arrange my face into something not freshly kissed senseless. He tugged me closer, thumb sweeping once at the corner of my mouth to erase the sin of smudged violet I wasn’t even wearing. Habit. Possession. Both.

We cracked the door. The flat beyond was all polite murmur and the rustle of pastry bags. Alex laced his fingers through mine, squeeze, anchor, ridiculous courage, then sauntered out in my oversized sweatshirt like he’d meant to be ridiculous all along.

Mum looked up, clocked the wardrobe change, and did an expression that might one day kill me from sheer wattage. Dad blinked, took in the scene, and hid a smile in his tea.

“Tea casualty,” Alex announced cheerfully, dropping back into his place as if he hadn’t just kissed me senseless against my own bathroom door. “Apologies for the outfit. Your daughter has impeccable taste in knitwear.”

Mum beamed at the word your daughter. “Suits you,” she said, lying like a champion.

I sat, equally composed and ruined, pulse still rioting, mouth settling into something that felt dangerously like a smile I hadn’t earned. Nounou resettled at Alex’s feet with a huff of proprietorial satisfaction.

He glanced sideways at me, just a flick, just for me. Promise. Trouble. Mine.

I looked down at my trembling hands, wrapped them around a mug, and prayed the tea wouldn’t notice the way I’d been kissed.

---

Brunch tried to pretend nothing had happened.

It mostly failed.

Alex lounged in my oversized sweatshirt like a felon blessed by knitwear, sleeves short on those indecent forearms, hair pushed back by my panic and his mouth looking very used. Mum did saintly composure with occasional glances at the sweatshirt like she might embroider our wedding date on the hem. Dad had adopted Alex as a temporary son and was explaining the ethics of bird feeders.

“Sunflower hearts,” Dad declared, solemn. “None of those mixed bags. It’s filler.”

“Noted,” Alex said gravely, as if he were going to roll out a nationwide policy at dawn. He nudged a plate my way with his knuckle, the smallest brush against my wrist that said I remember your mouth and eat in the same stroke.

Mum cleared her throat, the sound polite and loaded. “So, Caitríona tells us she’s… settling. New flat. New routine.” A shining, careless smile. “New boyfriend.”

I inhaled a crumb.

“Mum,” I warned, weak.

Alex didn’t blink. “I’m very new,” he said amiably, which was rich, considering how thoroughly he’d colonised my oxygen. “But I intend to last.”

Mum’s lashes did a pleased flutter. “And what does… intend to last… look like in your vocabulary, Alex?”

He rested his forearms on his thighs, met her head-on, and didn’t once look at me for help. “It looks like turning up when she tells me not to. It looks like boring domestic tyranny about hydration.” His mouth ticked. “And it looks like not letting anyone misunderstand her no.”

Dad made a satisfied noise. Mum’s eyes warmed, properly, dangerously. “Well,” she murmured. “That’s very… thorough.”

“I’m thorough by nature.” His gaze slid to me and lingered a beat longer than manners. Heat crawled up my throat. He saw it and enjoyed it, the menace. Then, lighter: “And I’ll be audited. I’ve gathered as much.”

“Oh absolutely,” Mum said briskly. “I run a rigorous programme.”

He grinned, boyish for a heartbeat, and then something passed under his eyes, quick shadow, wire exposed, gone as soon as I clocked it. “I’ve passed worse audits,” he said softly, almost to himself. “I can do yours.”

The room gave a tiny tilt. Mum must have felt it; her hand strayed to the milk jug, didn’t pour, came back to her lap. “And boundaries?” she asked, airy, not at all airy. “I suspect my daughter has a few.”

“An orchard full.” Alex didn’t flinch. “I’m not in the business of pruning. I just put a fence round the outside so nothing poisonous gets in.”

Sure you do, I thought, half a laugh catching in my chest. You don’t just fence, Alex. You plant yourself in the middle and eat the bloody fruit.

Mum blinked, surprised into fondness. Dad nodded like a man who appreciated a decent metaphor.

My phone chose then to buzz against my thigh like a guilty conscience. I glanced down and regretted it instantly.

Tom: About later, could swing by at two? Just for a few boxes.

My stomach did a graceless lurch. Two. Today. In my flat. The timing was a cosmic prank.

Another buzz.

Tom: If that’s not a good time, say. I don’t want to be in the way.

Heat pricked the back of my neck. I put the phone face down as if that would erase the words. It didn’t. Alex’s gaze cut sideways, took in the face-down phone, the way my hand had curved protectively over it, the microfreeze of my shoulders. He didn’t ask. He didn’t need to.

Instead he reached across me, as cool as you like, and took my left hand from where it hid in my lap. He turned it palm-up on the tablecloth, ran his thumb once over the centre like he was checking a pulse, and bent to press his mouth to my knuckles. Not possessive. Not this audience. Something older. A gentleman’s claim with teeth filed down for daytime.

Mum went very still, the way people do when a rare bird lands. Dad cleared his throat and became fascinated by the pastry crumbs.

“Excuse me,” I said to the general air, which was code for I am overwhelmed and need to stand up before I combust. I slid my hand free, swallowed something sharp, and busied myself with the teapot as if liquid could disguise a thudding heart.

“Do you like your work, Alex?” Mum resumed, lightly, because she’d sensed the shift and stitched the conversation’s seam without comment.

“I like building things,” he said. “I like looking after the people who build them. I like” he flicked me a look that landed under my skin like a tack “order.”

“And what do you do when life shows up with chaos anyway?”

“I put it in the car and take it home,” he said, shameless. “Then I feed it.”

Mum laughed. Properly, delighted. “Oh, you are incorrigible.”

We ate. We talked. The afternoon light crept along the floorboards like a nosy cat. Nounou did her rounds and fell asleep upside down with her paws in the air, which Dad took as a personal compliment. My phone buzzed once more; I didn’t touch it.

At some point, Dad checked his watch and executed a subtle parental manoeuvre. “We should let the girl nap,” he announced. “And let this fellow stop performing breakfast miracles.”

Mum sprang up as if she hadn’t orchestrated the whole thing. “Yes. We’ll go. We’ve intruded disgracefully.” She kissed my hair, then my cheek, then my hair again because she couldn’t decide which bit of me to fuss. Her mouth lowered by my ear. “He’s lovely,” she whispered, like she was passing a state secret. “Don’t overthink yourself out of it.”

“I never overthink,” I whispered back, outraged on principle.

She snorted. “You were born overthinking.” Then, louder, to Alex: “It was a pleasure to meet you, Alex.”

“The pleasure,” he said, and meant it, “was entirely mine.”

Dad shook his hand with that firm, male approval that says hurt her and I’ll bury you in a raised bed. Alex took it with the clean steadiness of a man who understood the contract.

At the door mum spotted the Jaguar key again and couldn’t help one last poke. “Lovely fob,” she said innocently. “For Rosie’s TikTok.”

“Trending,” Alex said solemnly. “Hashtag lease.”

Mum’s smile tried to become a grin and failed into dignity. “Goodbye, darling.” A final squeeze to my fingers, a whisper of perfume, and they were gone. Lift doors sighing shut on the kind of parental blessing you pretend you don’t need and breathe out when you get.

---

Silence. The flat exhaled. I did too, shoulders sliding down from beside my ears.

Alex didn’t move for a second. He stood in my hallway in my ridiculous sweatshirt and looked at the closed door like he could still see my mother through it, then turned his head and looked at me like he could still see last night printed on my skin.

“You survived,” he said softly.

“You were very… much,” I returned, because humility would kill him and I was, apparently, a coward about compliments.

He drifted toward me, slow, deliberate, stopping just shy of my toes. The air between us tightened, sang. He tipped his head, considered, then lifted his hand and touched my jaw with one knuckle as if he were checking I wasn’t a dream he’d bullied into existence.

Then he reached past me, plucked my phone off the coffee table, and woke it with his thumb on the side button like it had personally offended him.

“Excuse me?” My voice cracked whip-fast.

He didn’t look up. His jaw set like a locked door. The screen lit his face a cold, surgical blue; every sharp plane went harsher, the pretty stripped out of him until only function remained. Predator, not guest.

Tom: About later, could swing by at two? Just for a few boxes.

Another below it:

Tom: If that’s not a good time, say. I don’t want to be in the way.

A muscle feathered in Alex’s cheek. The kind of tiny movement that means incoming weather. He lifted his gaze just enough to skim the room, as if measuring distances. Door, lift, fault lines. Then dropped it back to the phone like he could set the thing on fire by glaring.

The vein at his temple ticked. His fingers, those careful, expensive hands that had poured tea for my parents like a benediction, curled around black glass until their tendons stood out in pale cords. When he spoke it was quiet and homicidally polite.

“Absolutely not.”

He thumbed the message open.

“Alex.” I moved too late. “Don’t you-”

His mouth was a blade. He typed three words with clinical precision and hit send. No flourish. No punctuation. Just verdict.

Alex (from my phone): No. Absolutely no!

The delivery ping chimed cheerful and obscene. Silence fell with weight, thick, ringing, new oxygen.

“What,” I said, very calm in the way that means not calm at all, “did you just do.”

He locked the screen and finally looked at me.

The blue light was gone; the man remained. Fury lived under his skin the way heat lives under steel, contained only because steel had the courtesy to be steel. His eyes were dark water with no shore; his mouth, that wicked, generous mouth, had gone thin with control. He breathed once and I watched him put the world back in order enough to speak.

“I handled it.”

The words landed neat as a stamp; the it contained multitudes. My phone. My past. A ghost at two o’clock.

I stared. He didn’t blink.

I felt the fury coming off him in measurable degrees. Not loud, not showy, but industrial. A furnace throttled back. He held the phone out to me, flat on his palm like evidence, then withdrew it before I could take it, as if he’d remembered at the last second that letting me touch it might undo his work.

“Don’t,” he said, softly. Not a plea. A cord around a live wire. “Don’t explain him to me.”

“I wasn’t-”

“Yes, you were.” His voice thickened a fraction. “I know the script, Caitríona. Just a few boxes. Only ten minutes. He doesn’t want to be in the way.” He flicked the phone with two fingers, as if the plastic could bruise. “He wants to be in.”

“You don’t know anything about-”

“I know he was in your bed before I was,” he snapped, control fraying enough to show wire, “and I know he texted the morning after I put you to sleep when you were too drunk to stand. I know men. I am a man. I know exactly what he’s doing.”

His chest rose hard once, twice; the sweatshirt moved with him, soft and obscene, like a joke fate had made at my expense. His jaw worked. He lifted a hand, aborted a gesture, hair, neck, something violent, and let it fall, fingers flexing as if the absence of a fight had to go somewhere.

“He doesn’t get today,” he said, calmer, deadlier. “In fact, he doesn’t get any day from today. Not Thursday, not next month, not ever. Because you are mine.”

I opened my mouth. He cut me a look that pinned me to my own floorboards.

“You think I’m unreasonable,” he went on, more quietly, “because I am. I am unreasonable about you.” His throat worked. “I woke up with your heartbeat under my hand and I do not have the bandwidth, this morning, to watch a man who let you go walk back in here and act like he’s entitled to the air you’re breathing.”

He stepped in. One deliberate step that closed heat over me like weather, then stopped as if he’d hit a tripwire and couldn’t risk another inch.

He took that last step like a man choosing a side and the room chose with him, air sharpening, walls listening.

“Give me my phone,” I said, tight.

“No.” Flat. He slid it into his back pocket like a confiscated weapon. “You’ll call him. You’ll tell him it’s fine. You’ll be kind about it because you’re cruel to yourself. And then he’ll walk in here and give you those eyes and you’ll think you owe him something.”

My laugh came out brittle. “And instead I owe you? We are-” I waved a wild hand between us “-a day old.”

“I don’t care if it’s a minute old.” His voice jumped an octave of quiet, danger, not volume. “It’s real.”

“Oh, that’s very convenient for you,” I snapped. “Walk in. Reorganise the furniture of my life. Appoint yourself Head of Security. Brand me with your ridiculous note and your ridiculous mine.”

“Because you are,” he bit out.

“I am not a sodding acquisition!”

“Then stop acting like open stock,” he fired back, control snapping on the last word.

We both went still. The silence after it shocked the glass on the table into a tiny tremor.

I felt the heat rip up my spine. “Get out.”

He flinched, half an inch, nothing a normal person would catch. Then his jaw locked. “No.”

“Alex-”

“No.” Louder. The word cracked the air. “I don’t share. I don’t negotiate with ghosts. You are mine Caitriona. “

“You don’t get to decide that unilaterally!”

“I’m not deciding,” he said, stepping in again until the cedar of him drowned sensible oxygen. “I know it. And you know it too, or you wouldn’t be shaking.”

“I’m shaking because you’re a tyrant,” I hissed.

“Then call me names and come over here,” he shot back, chest rising hard. He dragged the hem of my sweatshirt off, over his head in one furious sweep, and flung it aside. Bare skin. Heat. Control hanging by its teeth. “Because I am not doing this with cotton between us.”

“Put that back on,” I managed, even as my eyes betrayed me and climbed the line of him. “This is not-”

“It is,” he said, all gravel and need, “exactly what this is.”

“What, possessive melodrama?”

“Us,” he said.

“God listen to yourself.” I shoved him. Palms to the hard plane of his chest. He took the shove like an offered hand and came with it, catching my wrists, pinning them above my head to the wall with a single, obscene ease. My breath fled. The argument rode the ragged edge of a kiss.

“Say stop,” he warned, voice ruined. “Say it and I will. You know I will.”

I hated him for that. I loved him for that. “Don’t you dare stop,” I whispered, treachery wrapped in steel.

His mouth crashed to mine, heat and fury and relief exploding in a single, wrecking sweep. The kiss was a row dressed as worship, teeth, stubble, the sweet sting of having my own fury kissed out of me. He swallowed my curse like a victory. I lifted onto my toes, chasing him, caging him back with my body even as my mouth said no to everything but him.

“Mine,” he said against my lips.

“I hate you,” I lied into his.

“Good.” His hands slid down, rough and reverent, bracing my waist. He hauled me up the wall until my feet left the floor and locked my thigh over his hip, the press indecent, perfect. “Hate me harder.”

“Arse,” I breathed, biting his jaw, tasting skin and reckless male.

“Menace,” he rasped, and then his hand was under the elastic of my sweats, heat, palm, a sure wickedness. Not a question; a pause that was a question. I answered with my body, arching into his hand, the word yes burning my tongue and choosing not to be a sound.

He worked me with brutal accuracy. No show, no mercy. His mouth at my throat, his other arm holding me high and pinned, keeping the world up while he undid mine. The row didn’t stop; it short-circuited into gasps and broken syllables.

“You think I’ll let him through this door?” he ground out, mouth at my ear, fingers learning me like a map he already knew. “Over my dead body.”

“Over your ego,” I choked, nails in his shoulders, eyes stinging at the sheer, obscene relief of him. “You don’t get to- God- run my life like a-”

“Like a man who can’t breathe if you hurt,” he snarled, changing pressure until logic shattered and something low in me climbed, coiled, begged. “Say my name.”

“I won’t,” I gasped, right before I did. “Alex- Alex-”

“Eyes on me Cait,” he said, and I did. The world narrowing to dark blue eyes and heat and the way his jaw clenched when I broke open in his hand. It took me hard and sudden, a bright, brutal flood that arched my back off plaster and pulled a wrecked sound out of my throat I’d deny in any court. He caught the sound with his mouth, swallowed it like a secret, held me through it, eased, pressed, coaxed, until the shuddering shook itself down to tremors and I hung there on him, ruined and furious and alive.

We stayed welded, breath, sweat, heartbeat punching my ribs. His forehead to mine, our arguments breathing each other’s air.

He was first to find words. Of course he was.

“Look at me,” he said. Low, command wrapped in velvet.

“No.” I kept my eyes on his mouth because it wasn’t fair. “You don’t get to bark orders and rearrange my life.”

“Then tell me to leave.” Quiet. Terrible.

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.

He huffed a laugh that wasn’t a laugh. “Exactly.” His thumb ghosted my lower lip, a slow threat. “Say what you’re going to do about him.”

“I’m not saying anything.” My spine found steel I wasn’t sure I owned. “I’m angry, I’m hungover, and I am not promising you a thing five minutes after you hijacked my phone.”

His jaw ticked. “You’re allowed to be angry.”

“I am.”

“You’re not allowed to let him back in.”

“Watch me.”

“Don’t test me, Caitríona.”

“Stop trying to own me.”

His eyes darkened. “Too late.”

I shoved him, palms to bare chest. He took the shove as if it helped. “You can’t stand there half-naked and decree my admin,” I snapped. “We are nothing.”

“We are the only thing that feels like anything,” he shot back, voice rising a single lethal notch. “You want clean? Fine. Here’s clean: I can’t breathe at the thought of him in your doorway. I won’t pretend otherwise to make you comfortable.”

“Then leave,” I said, even though my hands didn’t.

“Tell me you want me to.” He stepped in, heat, cedar, the wall at my back. “Use your words.”

I glared at him so hard my eyes hurt. “I want you to stop ordering me around.”

“Not what I asked.” His mouth skimmed my jaw, barely there, a wicked brush that made my knees consider treason. “Tell me to go.”

“Don’t-” My breath stuttered. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?” He murmured it into the corner of my mouth like a sin. “Make it hard to lie?”

“Alex,” I warned.

“Yes, Doctor?” Silk and wire.

“I will not be bullied into-”

“Good,” he said softly, and it wrong-footed me so badly I forgot the rest. “I don’t want you bullied. I want you decided.” His palm closed around my wrist, then set it back against my own chest like he was returning property. “So decide. Choose him at two. Text him back. I’ll walk out and I won’t come back.” A beat, viciously gentle. “Or choose me.”

My throat burned. “That’s emotional blackmail.”

“That’s the truth,” he said. “And I’m sick to death of men dressing up cowardice as courtesy.”

“God, you’re insufferable,” I breathed.

“I’m right.” He dipped, stole a kiss so quick it felt like a stamp. “Now. Tell me: what are you going to do about him?”

I clung to the last scrap of defiance like a cliff edge. “I’ll… think about it.”

“Wrong answer.” His fingers slid into my hair, not pulling holding. A warm, steady cage at my nape. “You think yourself into loopholes. We’re not doing that.”

“Stop telling me how I work.”

“Then prove me wrong.” He paused, let me feel the choice breathing between us. “Say ‘no contact.’”

I stared at the line of his mouth, the danger of how desperately I wanted it. “No.”

“Say it,” he repeated, soft as a blade.

“I said no,” I snapped and then he changed tactics with surgical cruelty: his free hand banded my waist, drew me flush, his mouth brushing my ear on a breath that felt like a hand. My body went traitor-soft in an instant.

“I’m going to help you,” he murmured, voice wrecked velvet. “And you’re going to let me. Because you want me as much as I want you. Use your words, Cait.”

“I hate you,” I whispered, shaking.

“Look at me.” It wasn’t loud. It obeyed gravity; everything fell toward it. I lifted my eyes. Big mistake. The room, my objections, the clock, all of it slid out of focus until there was only the heat and the order. “Say what you’re going to do.”

“Alex-”

“Now.”

Silence pressed. Something in me, the part that wanted peace more than it wanted to win, tipped.

“I’ll end it,” I forced out, the words scraping. “Properly.”

His exhale shivered through us both. “Better,” he said. “How?”

“An email.” I swallowed. “Logistics only. No… kindness.”

“Good girl.” It landed like a match on dry tinder. I hated how my body answered to praise from that mouth. He felt it, the bastard, his eyes warmed with feral satisfaction. “And when?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do. You’re avoiding saying it.” His thumb traced the hinge of my jaw once, reward or warning, I couldn’t tell. “Today.”

“Alex-”

“Today.” A whisper, an anchor. “By three.”

I looked at his mouth again because I was weak. “Fine,” I said, and it cost me. “By three.”

“Say, ‘I promise.’”

I flinched. “Don’t-”

“Say it.”

Fury and want tangled like barbed wire. “I promise.”

“Again.”

I shut my eyes, hated him, loved him, opened them. “I promise.”

He nodded once, decisive. One hand tipped my chin up; the other caught the back of my head and held me still for the softest, most devastating press of his mouth to my lips.

“I should go,” he said, voice hoarse with the restraint I hadn’t earned. “If I stay, I’ll start a new row just to get you against a wall again.”

---

Night curled round the windows; the flat had that hush of things finally decided. My phone blinked once.

Alex: Report.

I stared, then typed:

Me: You are a fucking psychopath. It’s DONE !

A beat.

Alex: Good girl. I can still feel you shaking in my hand.

My lungs forgot themselves.

Me: That’s illegal.

Alex: It’s accurate. Listen carefully: hands stay above the duvet tonight. You don’t touch yourself without me. If you need, you ask. Clear?

I stared, heat and fury making an unholy treaty.

Me: You are so bossy.

Alex: Say yes.

A long second. Treachery won.

Me: Yes.

Alex: Proud of you. Sleep

The call came while I was staring at the ceiling pretending not to think about hands-above-the-duvet.

“Mum” lit the screen. I braced for impact and hit accept.

“Are you alive,” she announced, “or did that man seduce you into a coma with pastry and knitwear?”

“Alive,” I said. “Hydrated within an inch of my civil liberties.”

“I liked him,” she admitted, in the tone of a woman confessing to shoplifting. “Hatefully much. Your father has been pacing the kitchen saying ‘sunflower hearts’ like a mantra.”

I snorted. “He and Alex bonded over emotional shrubs.”

“Oh we noticed.” A beat. “So. Administrative matters. Why did we learn about the end of Tom from your living room tulips and not from your actual mouth?”

I pulled the duvet up to my chin. “Because my actual mouth was busy pretending to be fine.”

She made the soft, murderous noise that means my baby. “Is it final?”

“Yes.”

“Proud of you,” she said, immediately softer. “We can fall out of love and still mourn the shape of a life we thought we were building with him. So if you need to cry in the bath and text me pictures of bubbles, I’m available.”

“Noted,” I said, eyes stinging like a traitor. “And… thank you.”

“Good.” Paper rustled; the Thorne maternal filing system engaging. “Now. Where did you find Mr Devastating? Did you steal him from a Jane Austen heritage site?”

“At work” I said, trying for casual. “It’s complicated.”

A reverent inhale. “Oh my God. He is a patient isn’t he?”

“Mum.”

“Do you feel safe with him?”

I stared at the dark. “Yes,” I said, because the truth was clean and inarguable. “He’s… bossy. Unbearably.”

Silence. The kind with a hand in it.

“All right,” she said at last, satisfied in a way that loosened the knot under my ribs. “Bossy we can manage. Unsafe we cannot. If he ever treats you like an option, I will arrive with Tupperware and violence.”

A laugh punched out of me. “A balanced diet.”

“Exactly.” She exhaled. “Age gap still eleven?”

“Still not archaeological.”

“Good. Your father’s only condition is that he continues to stand up when I enter a room and refrain from returning shrubs.”

“Deal.”

Another rustle. “He looked at you like oxygen, you know.”

I stared at the ceiling, traitor-smile happening without permission. “I noticed.”

“Well, keep your feet on the ground while your head’s in the clouds,” she said briskly, back to logistics. “And next time, tell me before we stumble over a Jaguar key in a bowl and I have to improvise a TikTok career for Rosie.”

I groaned into my pillow. “I panicked.”

“You performed. Right. Go to sleep. Do not spiral. If that man texts you at dawn to remind you to hydrate, tell him he has my blessing and also to stop being right.”

“Night, Mum.”

“Night, love. And Cait?”

“Mm?”

“We like him. We love you. In that order only if he behaves.”

She hung up before I could get soppy. I lay there in the warm, phone on my chest, very much not spiralling and absolutely failing to keep my hands above the duvet.

---

Tell me everything🖤

I read and respond to every comment, and I’m absolutely dying to know what you thought of this chapter 🖤 The tea, the kiss, the fight that felt like foreplay… Alex behaving like the most beautiful menace alive. Be honest, did he get under your skin too? Leave me your thoughts, your favourite lines, your unfiltered reactions… I want them all 🙊 ❤️‍🔥

Ax