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Epilogue

ASHER

W e’ve been dating for six months.

If you can call it that.

I’m not sure what to call it, really. “Dating” feels like something teenagers do. Too normal, too tidy for whatever this is. There’s no label that fits us without lying a little. But he’s in my bed more nights than not. I wear his shirts, even when they hang too loose on me. He makes me breakfast I didn’t ask for. I yell at him. He buys me flowers like that somehow makes it even. We fuck. We fight. We don’t go to therapy. We pretend we’re okay.

Maybe that’s love. Maybe it’s something else.

Blake—Kaleb—whatever name he’s wearing that day, still watches me when he thinks I’m not looking. Not through cameras anymore. At least, I think not. But with his eyes. Always with his eyes. Calculating. Possessive. Quietly obsessed.

Sometimes it turns me on. Sometimes it makes my skin itch. Usually it’s both.

He never really apologized. Not in the way a normal person would. No real remorse. No explanation. Just: “I couldn’t help it. You were mine the second I saw you.” And somehow that was enough. Somehow I stayed.

I tried to leave once. Packed a bag. Slammed the door like I meant it. Told myself it was over. He showed up at my place at two in the morning, barefoot, drenched from the rain, holding the hoodie I left at his place like it was a child’s toy he couldn’t bear to lose.

He didn’t say sorry.

He said, “Don’t do that again.”

I didn’t.

The fake boyfriend thing? That lie lasted all of one fight. I shouted it at him during an argument, just to feel like I still had a weapon to swing. Just to see if he’d finally flinch. He didn’t.

He dragged me into his lap, held my wrists down, and murmured against my throat, “That’s cute. You needed a story to make me jealous. You could’ve just said you wanted me to be rougher.”

I bit him.

He liked it.

We’ve never fixed what broke between us. Never tried, really. It’s easier to let it rot quietly in the corner of the room. We walk around it. Step over the broken pieces like they’re part of the furniture now. We find new ways to hurt and heal each other. It’s a rhythm. Familiar. Predictable.

And I think that’s what makes it real. Honest. We don’t lie about who we are anymore. We just stopped pretending we’re trying to be better.

That’s the most stable thing we’ve got.

***

He’s watching me from across the kitchen. I can feel it, even before I look up from my phone. He’s leaning against the counter like he’s casual, but I know better. His jaw tightens when I laugh at a text. His fingers twitch where they hold the towel, like he needs to be gripping something harder.

“You gonna tell me who that is?” he asks. Calm. Too calm.

The towel in his hand is already clean, but he keeps wringing it like it might bleed answers if he squeezes hard enough.

I smile. Slow. Sweet. Just a little bit cruel. I sip from my coffee like it’s the most interesting thing in the room.

“No,” I say simply.

He steps forward. Measured. Intentional. His voice drops.

“Don’t be cute, bambi.”

My breath stalls in my throat. The mug stills in my hand.

He hasn’t called me that in months. Not since that night, the night when everything broke open. When I found out Kaleb and Blake were always the same man. When I realized the person I trusted most to protect me had already claimed me long before I said yes.

He steps close. The air shifts. I can smell him, clean skin, black coffee, the faint bite of his cologne.

“You know I don’t like sharing,” he says softly, brushing his knuckles against my jaw like it’s an apology he doesn’t know how to give.

I meet his gaze. My stomach twists. I should be angry. Should be afraid. But all I feel is that familiar ache, the one that sits somewhere between desire and surrender.

I don’t answer. I don’t need to.

He knows.

He always knows.

He leans in, lips brushing the corner of my mouth, and I let him. My pulse stutters, betrays me. When he kisses me, finally, it’s soft. Not sweet. Just quiet. Possessive. Like he’s reminding me who I belong to.

And I let him.

Because I'm taken by him.

Whether it healthy or not, I don't care.

BLAKE

He doesn’t think I know when he’s baiting me.

That little smile over the rim of his coffee mug. The slow turn of his body so I catch the outline of his hips. He’s been doing it since our first session. A long con with no name, no rules, no end.

Six months in, and he still thinks he’s in control. That this is a push and pull. A dance. A negotiation.

It’s not.

I knew what I wanted the moment he walked into my office. No, before that, when I saw him in that dingy club. A little cracked thing, playing hard to get with his pain like he wasn’t dying for someone to catch him bleeding.

I caught him.

And I’m never letting go.

People ask if I’m happy now. Colleagues. The one or two friends I haven’t entirely abandoned. Even Wendy, when she texts on occasion. Am I happy?

What a stupid question.

What I am is full. Anchored. Finally living in a world where he wakes up tangled in my sheets, where his toothbrush sits beside mine. Where his hair clogs my drain. Where he screams at me just so I’ll drag him into bed and remind him what it feels like to be owned.

I used to think I needed him compliant. Sweet. Cured.

But no. I love him wild. Teeth-bared. Poison-tongued and dangerous. It means I get to be the one who tames him. The one he always returns to.

I don’t need his peace. I need his chaos, because it matches mine.

Sometimes he tries to run.

Sometimes I let him.

But he always comes back.

And if he ever doesn’t?

I still have the backup camera feed.

The keylogger.

The private folder.

The burner phone that still logs into his forum account.

He is mine. Entirely. Irrevocably. He can scream, he can claw, he can kiss me through gritted teeth, but it doesn’t change a thing.

I won.

And when I slip into bed behind him at night, when I press my lips to the back of his neck and feel him shiver, I whisper the only truth that’s ever mattered.

“You don’t belong to anyone else.”

He never says it back.

He doesn’t have to.

I feel it in the way he exhales when I wrap my arms around his waist.

I feel it in the way he sleeps only when I’m touching him.

I feel it in the way he hates me.

And still chooses me.

Every single time.

And I'll love him through them all. Love him until he finally sees that he's worthy of any love he's ever been denied.

Doesn't need those horny, pathetic men.

He has me, now.

And, I have him. All of him.

THE END