He’s damp from the rain. Dark jacket, a look on his face like he knew you’d open it fast. Damn him.

“Thought you might be asleep,” he says.

“I was.” You step aside to let him in. He brushes past you, close enough that you catch his cologne — cedar, something warm — and you hate how well it works on you.

He takes in the candles. The wine. The fact that you are absolutely, obviously not asleep.

“Mm.” That’s all he says. One syllable. Like he’s filed it away for later.

You pour him a glass. Hand it over. He takes it without touching your fingers — deliberately — and leans against your kitchen counter like he owns it.

You don’t move. You take a slow sip of wine.

He knocks again. Patient. That’s the problem with Marcus — he’s never rattled.

You pad to the door on your third minute exactly and pull it open.

He’s leaning in the doorframe, arms crossed, a small smile playing at his mouth. “You made me wait.”

“I was deciding,” you say.

“And?”

You step aside. He walks in. And as he passes you, he leans just close enough to say quietly, near your ear: “I’m going to enjoy tonight.”

Something shifts in the air. You’re not entirely sure who just won that exchange.

His reply comes in four seconds: “Sure.”

And then the knock.

You laugh — actually laugh — and open the door. He’s grinning. He knows. He knows you texted that while standing at the door.

“You’re terrible,” he says.

“You showed up at midnight.”

“You invited me.”

“I said I might be asleep.”

He steps inside, and the way he moves into your space — unhurried, like he belongs — makes something tighten in your chest that you weren’t budgeting for. You were supposed to be the one having fun here.

The conversation stays on your terms for a while. You’re good at this — keeping the temperature warm without letting it boil. You’re flirting and you both know it, circling like something slow and inevitable.

He sets down his glass. Crosses to you. And instead of kissing you, he reaches up and tucks a strand of hair behind your ear — such a small thing, so deliberately gentle — and then his hand stays there, curled at your jaw.

“You’ve been running this whole evening,” he says, voice low. Not an accusation. An observation.

“And?”

He tilts your chin up, just slightly. “What if I ran the rest of it?”

Your pulse does something embarrassing. The yes forms before you’ve made a conscious decision.

He comes to you — of course he does. You’re curled on the couch and he sits close enough that your knees almost touch, turning to face you with an expression you’ve started to recognise: that particular kind of patient focus that means he’s decided something.

“You’re doing the thing,” he says.

“What thing?”

“The unbothered thing. Where you pretend you’re not thinking exactly what I’m thinking.”

You blink at him. “Incredibly arrogant assumption.”

He smiles. Sets down his wine. And then he reaches over and traces one slow line down the inside of your wrist — barely a touch, just fingertips — and your breath catches before you can stop it.

“There it is,” he says softly.

You don’t mention it. You pour wine, you talk, you perform total normalcy while his words sit in your chest like a warm coal.

I’m going to enjoy tonight.

He’s effortlessly comfortable in your space — touching your bookshelf, reading the spines, asking about the one with the broken spine. You answer. You’re good at normal. You’ve always been good at normal.

Then he turns, and there’s something in his eyes that says he hasn’t forgotten either.

“Come here,” he says. Quietly. Like it’s simple.

The moment you give in, something changes in him — not dominant, exactly. More like focused. All that energy he’d been holding loosely? He settles it on you.

He kisses you like he has nowhere to be. One hand in your hair, tilted back just enough that you’re following his lead, and the realisation registers somewhere in the back of your mind: you’re following his lead.

When he pulls back, you’re breathless. He isn’t.

“Bedroom,” he says. Not a question. He says it the way you’ve been talking all night — like a decision already made.

And that’s how you understand, fully and finally, that this was never your game. You just got to go first.

He takes his time. That’s the part you didn’t expect — not urgency, but deliberate, unhurried attention. He learns what makes you react and then uses it methodically, until you’ve stopped being strategic about any of this and you’re just in it.

At some point your wine goes cold on the table and you don’t care even slightly.

He pulls you into his lap and holds your face in both hands. Looks at you for a beat longer than is comfortable. Then: “I want you in your bedroom. And I want you to let me show you what I’ve been thinking about since Tuesday.”

Tuesday. That’s four days ago. He’s been thinking about this since Tuesday.

You swallow. “Tuesday,” you repeat.

“Long week,” he says, and he smiles, and that’s the last moment you feel anything like in control.

He accepts the challenge.

You push, he matches. You set a boundary, he comes right up to the edge of it. You test him with something sharp — a look, a deflection, a deliberate step backward — and he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t chase, just stays exactly where he is and waits.

That’s when you understand the game you’re actually playing. You’ve been testing whether he’d break. He’s been waiting for you to tire of testing.

You’re not tired, exactly. But you’re — something. Curious. Interested in what’s on the other side of the test.

“Fine,” you say, eventually. “Impress me.”

Something shifts behind his eyes. He crosses to you, takes the wine glass out of your hand — sets it behind you — and pins both your wrists back against the wall. Light pressure. A question, not a statement. His eyes ask before he does anything else.

Yes?

Yes.

In your bedroom the candles are just barely throwing light under the door. He undresses you slowly — not because he’s teasing, but because he wants to look at you, and he does, and the way his gaze moves over you makes you feel desired in a way that has no armour against it.

You’ve lost count of the number of times you’ve tried to regain some kind of upper hand. Each time, he simply waits, and then takes it back gently, and you find that you — you, who negotiates everything — you let him.

He takes you apart methodically, patiently, like he knows every note and plans to play each one. His hands move with the same focused quiet he’s had all evening, learning where you respond, staying there, and the sounds you make are nothing you planned. When he finally pulls you close and holds you there, his weight warm and real against you, you stop thinking about strategy entirely.

You come with his voice low in your ear, telling you exactly what you are to him in this moment — and for once, you don’t argue the point.

Afterward, he pulls you close and you think about how you’d invited him over to feel in control.

Funny, how things go.

You sleep better than you have in months. You don’t examine why.

You kiss him hard — your hands in his hair, your terms, your pace — for exactly long enough that he makes a low sound in the back of his throat. Then you pull back.

“Okay,” you breathe. “Now you can run it.”

He looks at you like you just gave him something rare. And then he does exactly what he said he would — runs every remaining moment with the kind of focused attention that takes you apart piece by piece. He uses his hands first, then his mouth, cataloguing every place that makes you gasp, and by the time he finally moves over you the word control has stopped meaning anything at all.

You give him everything. He takes it like he’s been waiting for permission.

Later, in the dark, you try to work out who won.

You conclude it might have been him. You also conclude you don’t hate that conclusion.

You file this information away and decide to investigate it further next Tuesday.

“Tell me,” you say. “What you’ve been thinking. I want to hear it.”

He doesn’t hesitate. He tells you — low, unhurried, his mouth near your ear — exactly what he imagined. Where. How. What he wants from you and what he wants to do to you, specific and unashamed, and by the third sentence your hands have gone tight in the fabric of his shirt and by the end of it you’ve forgotten entirely that you were ever the one conducting this evening.

In the bedroom he makes good on all of it. He is slow where he said slow, demanding where he promised demanding — one hand pinning your wrists above your head while the other works with devastating patience between your thighs, watching your face like he’s memorising it. You come the first time before you meant to, embarrassingly quickly, and he doesn’t let you recover before he starts again.

There are moments where you are so overwhelmed you stop thinking in full sentences and start existing in pure sensation instead. You do not regain control at any point during the night. You don’t try.

Around 3am, rain still going, his arm loose around you, you realise: you set up the whole night to feel powerful. And somehow, in giving it all away — you feel more like yourself than you have in a very long time.

That’s worth thinking about. Later. When you can think again.