Work Text:
Nesta’s day had started with a man screaming at her about a refund for three books he had very obviously used and read — cracked spines, dog-eared corners, and one very clear coffee ring bleeding across the back cover — and it ended with a voicemail from her father that said, Nesta, honey, before you say anything, I want you to know it’s handled.
Nothing in the history of the world had ever been handled by her father, and he’d probably gotten himself into trouble yet again. She wouldn’t be surprised if she’d receive three more of his calls before the day was done.
Moreover, throughout the entire day, she’d been bothered by her baby sister Feyre. Forty-one texts by final count, escalating from have you called Dad back to you can’t ice him out forever to a single, devastating Elain agrees with me, he’ll use the money wisely this time, sent at 6:47 p.m. Nesta’d put her phone on Do Not Disturb after that, and had ended up at Rita’s at nine o’clock on a Thursday like a sad cliché, drinking a martini she couldn’t strictly afford — especially if her suspicions about her father were correct — glaring at the bottles behind the bar.
She was on olive number two when the stool beside her scraped back.
The man who sat down took up an unreasonable amount of space. He’d been built on a different scale than anyone she’d ever seen, with shoulders that belonged on some classical sculpture of a Roman warrior or Greek god. He had dark, curly hair that fell loose to his shoulders, and ink climbing out from under his rolled sleeves in sweeping black lines, whorls and edges that she assumed were culturally significant, before she made herself stop staring. He was looking at her openly, though, and his face was devastatingly handsome. He was beautiful. Damn him and damn her and her horrible day that simply wouldn’t end.
She focused on eating her olive, trying to ignore him.
“Rough day?” he asked, clearly not trying to ignore her.
She sighed deeply, figuring every effort to not acknowledge him would be futile. “Very original.”
“I’m only warming up, sweetheart.” He signaled the bartender. “Whatever she’s having, and a beer. On me.”
“I don’t let strangers buy me drinks.”
“Excellent.” He didn’t wave the bartender off. “Cassian.”
Nesta turned her head slowly, and gave him the look that had made grown men apologize for being in her vicinity before. He simply smiled like she was the first ray of warm sunshine after a long, dark winter.
He had his hand extended towards her and watched her, looking almost hopeful.
She held the his gaze a beat longer. The third martini arrived, frosted and perfect. Her father’s voice was still ringing in her ears and Feyre was probably drafting text number forty-two. The day had already gone to hell. What was another grave mistake anyway?
“Nesta,” she said, extending her hand in return.
“Nesta.” He repeated it like he was tasting the syllables, holding her cold hand in his warm, calloused one. For a brief moment, she wondered what it would feel like if he’d whisper her name against her sensitive skin. The thought made her want to reach for the drink. “Okay, Nesta. Don’t tell me anything about your day and I’ll guess. I’m very good at reading people.”
“You’re very something, alright.”
“Three guesses. If I get it right, you drink with me. If I get it wrong, I leave you in peace forever. Scout’s honor.” He held up two fingers in a configuration that had never belonged to any scouting organization on Earth, ever.
She should have said no. She took a sip of the martini instead, which they both understood to be a yes.
“Work,” he said, watching her face like it was some sacred text he intended to close-read. “Somebody was a nightmare to you at work.” He paused. “Family. Someone is getting on your nerves. No — multiple somebodies, most probably.” He fell silent again, narrowing his eyes, warm and shrewd at once, and she had the disorienting sense of being seen, through and through, by a man she’d known for ninety seconds. “And there’s a guy.”
“Two out of three.”
“Which did I get wrong?”
“There’s no guy.”
“Huh,” Cassian said, smirking while taking a drink of his beer. Nesta had the distinct feeling he deliberately let the word yet hang in the air unspoken, so loudly that she nearly laughed.
They talked after that, and for some reason, it was easy. It had never, ever been easy to talk to a man in Nesta’s life. They’d always either find her weird, or frigid, or didn’t hide the fact that all they were interested in was to get into her pants. However, Cassian asked what she’d wanted to be at seven (a princess). He told her what he’d wanted to be at seven (a knight — “so this is basically destiny, you understand”). He argued that a martini was better stirred, not shaken, and she told him he had no idea what he was talking about. He looked at her for a long second and said, “You’re mean. I like it,” with such open delight that she had to bite the inside of her cheek.
He never once looked at his phone, and she’d lost track of time somewhere around the next round he got for them both.
“There need to be rules,” Nesta said, feeling warm and fuzzy, around the time his knee had come to rest against hers and neither of them had moved away. She could feel herself come to a decision. “No last names, no phone numbers. No unnecessary personal info.”
Cassian set down his beer with the gravity of a man accepting treaty terms. “So just the important stuff, then.”
“Such as?”
“Favorite book. Whether you’re a good tipper. What you sound like when—”
“Cassian.”
“—you win an argument,” he finished, with a look of such fraudulent innocence that the laugh escaped before she could stop it — a short, unflattering burst of a sound. His whole face changed when it did, like he’d been handed something infinitely precious.
“Gorgeous,” he said, voice quiet.
“Don’t get attached.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he replied, sounding very much like he’d be dreaming of it.
She ate her last olive off the pick slowly, watching him watch her mouth. The day had burned off her like fog off water in the span of one conversation with this beautiful stranger.
“Do you live close?” she asked, coming to a decision.
He was already reaching for his wallet. “Sweetheart, if you asked, I’d carry you.”
He lived five blocks away, above a laundromat, in a third-floor walk-up that smelled like dryer sheets and the rain that had started sometime between 9 and 11 p.m. He took the stairs behind her, one hand resting at the small of her back, a coin of heat through the fabric of her dress that she felt all the way to the tips of her toes. At each landing, she caught his knuckles white on the banister, and noticed how he took long deliberate exhales through his nose, and understood with a small vicious thrill that he was pacing himself. That the easy grin from the bar had been a front, and that she was affecting him as much as he was her.
At his door he reached past her with the keys and paused, standing close enough that his chest brushed her shoulder blades when he breathed, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him through her clothes. When he spoke, his voice was dangerously low against her ear. “Last chance to make me walk you home instead, sweetheart.”
“Open the door, Cassian.”
The laugh he breathed into her hair was barely a sound at all. “As you wish.”
Inside, she noticed a duffel bag slumped by the door and a frankly criminal number of boots. His living room was filled with books, stacked two deep on a shelf made of milk crates. One enormous, thriving plant stood in the window, like a sole survivor of some doomed expedition. Somehow, it looked like a home that belonged to someone who wasn’t there a lot, but liked coming back to it nonetheless.
Then his hands found her waist and she stopped thinking about his house altogether.
“Tell me what you want,” he said against her jaw, walking her backward into the door as it clicked shut. His voice had an edge she felt low in her belly. “And how you want it.”
“For you to make me forget my horrible day,” Nesta answered, voice husky. “And don’t you dare be careful with me.”
He made a low and wrecked sound, like she’d reached into his chest and pulled something loose from its mooring. He pressed his forehead to her temple, breathing like a man on the edge of collapse.
“Anything off the table?” he whispered.
“I’ll tell you.”
“Yes, you will.” His nose traced the line of her jaw. His mouth stopped a half inch from hers and held there, taunting her. “That’s the only rule I’ve got, sweetheart. Anything’s wrong, you say the word and everything stops. No matter what we’re doing.”
“Same goes for you.”
She felt his smile against her lips, the touch feather-light. “Look at us, communicating.”
“Cassian.”
“Nesta.”
“Kiss me.”
“Thank God,” he breathed, and pressed his lips against hers. He wasn’t careful about it, kissing her deeply and all-consuming, one big hand cradling the back of her head to tilt her exactly where he wanted her, the other flattening at the base of her spine to pull her flush against him. He was hard already, a thick insistent line against her hip that made her gasp into his mouth, and he swallowed it like the sound belonged to him alone. She gave as good as she got, biting his lower lip until he groaned, and shoving his jacket off his shoulders. She dragged her nails down the ink on his forearms just to feel the shiver run through all that muscle like a current.
He pressed one thigh between hers and she ground down on it before her pride took over. The friction punched a sound out of her she’d deny until the day she died.
“There she is,” Cassian breathed, clearly delighted, and did it again.
“Shut up.”
“Make me.”
She kissed him quiet. It worked for about thirty seconds, which was as long as it took him to turn her around and find the zipper of her dress, drawing it down slowly, knuckles trailing her spine the whole way down. His mouth followed the same path, unhurried, vertebra by vertebra. By the time he reached the base of her spine, her forehead was against the door, breath heavy and labored.
“You,” he said, into the small of her back, “have been driving me insane since that first olive.”
“That’s a long time.”
“Indeed.” He turned her back around, and the dress slid off her body, pooling at her feet. He looked at her, taking her in from top to bottom and back, taking his time about it in a way that should have made her feel exposed and instead made her feel powerful, seeing the effect she had on him. “Fuck, Nesta.”
“Eloquent.”
“Give me a minute. All my blood just left my brain.”
She laughed softly and he grinned like he’d won something. He stood up and reached behind her, dispatching her bra one-handed with an efficiency she’d interrogate him about later. He flung it over his shoulder with real force. She heard it land, the location a mystery for later.
He placed an open-mouthed kiss on her breast and the mystery could definitely wait. He was thorough, his tongue circling one nipple while his thumb worked the other, the scrape of stubble against soft skin just right, the graze of teeth exactly hard enough. When she arched into him with her fingers buried in his hair he hummed his approval against her like she’d done something praiseworthy. Everything she did, he treated like it was something praiseworthy.
“These,” he said, sinking to his knees on the hardwood and hooking two fingers into the waistband of her tights, “are a hate crime.”
“They’re control-top.” Nesta smirked.
“They’re between me and God.” He peeled them down her legs with a slow care completely at odds with the look on his face, lifting each of her feet free like she was something breakable, which she wasn’t, kissing the inside of her knee like she was something holy, which she also wasn’t, and looking up the length of her body from the floor. He looked delectable, like something from her wildest fantasies, with his hair loose, pupils blown and hands wrapped around the backs of her thighs, thumbs stroking, patient and insistent at the same time.
“Cassian—”
“I know.” His thumbs pressed into the crease of her hips, pinning her to the door. “You’ve had a long, horrible day, sweetheart. Let me make it better.”
He dragged her thong down her legs, groaning at the sight of her — a low, reverent, ruined sound — and put his mouth on her.
Nesta instantly forgot she was having a day at all.
He started slow, with broad, flat, unhurried licks that made her whole body roll against the door, his hands anchoring her hips like he’d known her knees were already ready to give up. He learned her thoroughly, mapping what made her breath catch and her thighs jump, what made her hips chase his mouth. He cross-referenced his findings, and began applying them with a precision that bordered on too much. His tongue found her clit and worked it in tight, relentless circles until she was making high, desperate sounds into her own wrist; then he’d back off, kiss her thigh, murmur something obscene against wet skin, and start again.
“Look at me,” he demanded, voice gravelly. “Eyes on me, Nesta. I want you watching.”
She looked down, and it was both her mistake and her salvation — the sight of him on his knees with his mouth on her and his eyes locked on hers, wrecked and worshipful and shameless. He slid two fingers into her, curling them, and found the spot that set her spine alight.
“Yes—”
“Yes,” he agreed against her, sounding smug beyond belief.
She came with his name breaking apart on her tongue, one heel hooked over his shoulder and her hips grinding shamelessly against his face while he moaned — moaned, like this was doing more for him than for her, like she was doing him a favor. He worked her through it with his fingers still curling, drawing it out until the wave finally set her down. Her hands had fisted so hard in his hair it had to hurt, but he didn’t complain in the slightest.
His chin was wet when he grinned up at her from the floor, bracketed between her thighs. He made no move to fix it.
“Wipe your—”
“No.” He pressed a kiss to her hip bone, and when she twitched with aftershock he watched it happen with alarming interest. “Give me another.”
“Cassian, I can’t—”
“You can.” He curled his fingers again, slow and devastating, and her whole body jolted. She whined a weak protest. “I’m greedy, I know. Sue me.”
Her second orgasm took her apart at the seams, sharper and dragged out of her while she was still raw from the first, his mouth merciless in drinking every drop of her pleasure, his free arm banded across her hips, holding her exactly where he wanted her while she shook. She heard herself make sounds she had never once made in her life, high and helpless moans and whines, and felt him groan his approval against her sensitive skin. When her knees finally buckled in earnest, he caught her and rose off the floor with her in his arms like she weighed nothing at all, and the casual display of it — the easy strength — sent one more humiliating pulse of want through her body.
“Bed,” she managed.
“Of course, sweetheart,” he chuckled.
He carried her to his bedroom and tossed her into the middle of the unmade bed. He wasted no time stripping off his shirt, and she got her first full look at him. The ink swept over his shoulders and down his ribs in those same dark lines, a scar cut pale and old through the design along his side. He had a body built for hard work.
She sat up, gripped his belt, and pulled him to the edge of the bed by it.
“You don’t have to—”
“Did I ask?” She got the buckle open, as well as the button and the zipper, and shoved the denim and boxers down in one ruthless sweep, and… well. She’d assumed, from the feel of him pressed against her. Still, it was deeply gratifying to be right. He was thick and heavy and flushed, already leaking at the tip, and when she wrapped her hand around him he made a sound like a man taking a punch.
“Nesta—”
“My turn.” She looked up at him. “Unless you have any objections?”
“Not a single one in the world,” Cassian said, hoarse, and then she took him into her mouth and he stopped constructing sentences altogether.
She wasn’t gentle about it, because turnabout was fair play after all. She took him deep and slow, hollowed her cheeks, worked the base with her fist where her mouth couldn’t reach, cataloguing his tells with a scholar’s satisfaction: the abdominal muscles jumping under ink, the hands flexing helplessly at his sides, hovering, asking.
She pulled off just long enough to say, “You can touch.”
Both hands sank into her hair on a groan, holding, trembling faintly with the effort of not pushing. She hummed around him and his whole body bowed.
“Okay — okay — “ He pulled her off him with a ragged curse, chest heaving, and hauled her up his body to kiss her, deep and messy and tasting of both of them. “Not like that, not the first time. I have plans.”
“You lasted ninety seconds.”
“I lasted ninety heroic seconds. You and your wicked mouth.” He was already reaching for the nightstand. She laughed at his antics of quickly rolling on the condom, and then very much not laughing, because he was kneeling over her with that focused look. The sheer size of him against her made her stomach drop like a missed stair.
She planted a hand on his chest, pushed him onto his back, and swung a leg over him.
“Oh,” Cassian said. His hands slid up her thighs and gripped, hard enough to leave delicious bruises. “Oh, hell yes.”
She lined him up and sank down in one slow, ruthless slide, and they both went silent — the first real silence of the entire night. He was a lot, the stretch of him stealing her breath an inch at a time. She took him at her own pace while his jaw clenched and his fingers flexed and every line of that big body screamed with the effort of holding still for her. When their hips were finally flush, both of them full and breathing like sprinters, he exhaled her name.
“Nesta.” Like she was somehow his salvation. Nobody had ever said her name like that.
She reached down, took both his wrists, and pinned them to the pillow above his head. The muscle in his jaw jumped. His eyes went even darker, which she wouldn’t have thought possible. He could have broken her grip with a shrug, and they both knew it. Instead he flexed once against her hands, deliberately, letting her feel exactly how much strength he was laying down at her feet, and went still.
“Look at you,” she said, slightly breathless, “letting me.”
“Anything,” Cassian rasped. “Anything you want. All night.”
So she took it. She rode him, slow at first, grinding deep, watching him come apart by degrees beneath her: the flush spreading down his throat, the litany spilling out of him low and constant, that’s it, take it, you feel unreal, you were made for — God, sweetheart, look at me. Look at me. She did, and his eyes on hers while she moved on him cracked something open behind her ribs that she’d been keeping bolted shut for years, her rhythm stuttering with it.
He caught the stutter like he’d been waiting for it. Her pin dissolved as he surged up, wrapped her legs around his waist, and flipped them in one smooth, effortless, infuriating motion. He drove into her deep enough that the headboard cracked against the wall.
A thump answered from the other side of it.
“Sorry!” Cassian bellowed at the drywall, slightly breathless, not slowing down in the slightest, and Nesta discovered it was possible to laugh and moan in the same breath, a piece of information she’d been living her whole life without. Then he hitched her knee up over his arm, changed the angle by crucial degrees, and hit the spot that erased every coherent thought from her brain.
“There — there, don’t you dare stop—”
“Never.” He moved, hard and deep and exactly right, sweat-slick and relentless, his mouth at her ear pouring out praise in his gravelly voice. “You feel — fuck — tonight you’re mine, sweetheart, just tonight, say it—”
She didn’t. She came instead, clenching around him hard enough to drag a shout out of him, her nails carving lines down his back that he’d wear for a week. He followed her over the edge two thrusts later with her name breaking on his tongue, hips stuttering, forehead dropping to hers, the full glorious weight of him pressing her into the mattress for one long, crushed, perfect moment before he rolled to spare her and took her with him.
For a long time the only sound in the room was the two of them relearning how to breathe.
“That’s never happened before,” Cassian said finally, to the ceiling.
“I know.”
“No, Nesta.” He turned his head, hair stuck to his temple, expression stripped from the familiar cockiness. “That doesn’t happen. That was—” He exhaled. “I don’t have words.”
“You? Speechless?”
“Historic,” he agreed, smiling softly. “Somebody should notify an archive.”
He dealt with the condom while she cleaned up in his bathroom. She snuggled beneath the covers, watching him come back with a glass of water she hadn’t asked for. He slid in beside her and found the fingerprint bruises already blooming on her hip, pressing one lightly with his thumb, something flickering across his face.
“Don’t you dare apologize.”
“Wasn’t going to.” The flicker resolved into a grin. “Was going to ask if you wanted a matching set on the other side.”
“You’re impossible.”
“Drink your water. All of it.” He nudged the glass at her, watching her comply with open satisfaction, and gathered her against him once she finished like it was the most natural thing in the world. “You’re going to need your strength.”
“For what?”
He just smiled and kissed down her neck.
He woke her sometime later with his mouth on her shoulder and a question murmured into the dark.
“Again?”
“Obviously,” she murmured, already turning, but he caught her hip and kept her where she was, her back against his chest, pressing his lips to the nape of her neck.
“Stay like this,” he murmured. “Let me.”
The room felt hushed. The rain had stopped, and the streetlight laid one pale bar across the ceiling. It felt like the whole city was holding its breath, suspended in this moment of bliss. He ran hot enough that the blankets had become redundant. She was wrapped in him instead, the hot wall of his chest at her back, one heavy thigh sliding between hers, and an arm banded over her waist. Nesta, who had spent her entire adult life running cold, pressed back into all that heat, savoring it, burrowing closer.
He felt it. The low, satisfied sound he made into her hair in response was insufferable and she wanted to hear it again and again.
He touched her first. Unhurried in the dark, he moved one broad hand over her like a man reviewing his own best work — the weight of her breast, the peak of her nipple rolled slowly between finger and thumb until her breath went thin, the dip of her waist, the crease of her thigh. By the time his hand slid between her legs she was rocking back against him in small, helpless motions, and what he found there dragged a groan out of him that she felt vibrating along her spine.
“Sweetheart.” His fingers moved through her slick heat, learning her all over again like the first time had been a rough draft. “You’re soaked.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“Mine.” He didn’t hesitate, sliding two fingers into her and curling, and her head tipped back against his shoulder on a gasp. “All mine. Say it.”
“It’s — Cassian—”
“Close enough.”
He worked her like that until she was trembling, her hand clamped around his forearm and her hips chasing his fingers with zero remaining dignity. When she was right there, he disappeared, pulling a whiny moan from her. She heard the tell-tale crinkle, and then felt the blunt, heavy press of him against her sensitive flesh. He pushed into her in one long, slow, endless slide, and it pulled a moan up from the very floor of her. She was swollen and oversensitive from everything that had come before, and he was a lot from this angle, deeper somehow, the stretch of him a slow, bright burn that tipped over into perfect. Behind her, Cassian went rigid and swore into her hair with real feeling.
“Okay?” he asked, the word barely above a whisper.
“Move.”
He obeyed, taking his time. He set a pace like they had until the end of the world: deep, rolling thrusts that dragged over every single exposed nerve and rang her like a bell, his hips a patient tide against her, his breath going ragged at her ear one long stroke at a time. Then his hand slid from the crest of her hip and splayed flat and low on her belly, pressing down.
Nesta’s breath left her in broken pieces.
The feel of him was intense, as was the slow drag of him inside her rising up to meet the firm press of his palm, every inch of the next thrust given a new, obscene depth. Behind her, Cassian made a sound like he was being ruined by his own idea.
“Feel that?” he ground out, wrecked and awed. His palm flexed with the next slow roll of his hips, and she sobbed something wordless into the dark. “That’s it, sweetheart. Right there. Right — there. God, feel how deep you take me—” His forehead pressed to the back of her head, his voice breaking entirely. “Nesta—”
“Please, Cassian — don’t—”
“Never.” His hand stayed pressed low and firm on her belly, riding the motion of them. Her voice climbed once more, and she was unable to rein in the sounds escaping her, lost in the haze of pleasure so intense she forgot her own name.
He hauled her back against him. One arm banded beneath her breasts and pulled her close, until her spine bowed against his chest and her head tipped onto his shoulder, her body drawn taut as a strung bow, arched for him, held open for him. The angle made her vision white out. He drove up into her deep and slow.
His hand left her sternum and took hold of her jaw.
“Cassian,” Nesta gasped, followed by a long moan. She bit the pad of his thumb, and the laugh he breathed into her neck was dark and delighted. He settled his hand over her mouth — big enough to do the job with room to spare, gentle enough that turning her head an inch would have freed her — and she gripped his wrist with one hand while the other held onto his hand on her belly.
“Shh,” he whispered, his lips at her ear, his hips never once losing that slow, grinding, merciless rhythm. “Can’t have you waking the neighbors with those pretty sounds, sweetheart.” He pressed a kiss just below her ear, soft and sweet and so at odds with what he was doing to her. “Those are mine. Every single one of them.”
She didn’t hold back after that. Muffled into his palm, she gave him every gasp, every ruined climbing sound, spilling helplessly against his hand while he caught them, while he held her arched and open and took her apart. She was shaking, arched against a man built like a fortress while his voice was pouring quiet ruin into her ear and she had never in her life felt less trapped. It was incomprehensible. Held at every point and utterly, dangerously free.
“Close?” he breathed. She nodded frantically against his hand. “I thought so, sweetheart. I can feel you.” The hand on her belly pressed, timed to the deep grind of him, and she cried out against his palm. “Come for me, Nesta.”
She came apart with a scream that his palm muffled into barely a sound. Her whole body locked, the sensation endless, her spine bowing harder into the arch he held her in, her nails leaving crescents in his wrist. He worked her through every last shudder of it, hips slow and relentless, murmuring praise into her ear like a man saying grace. When she finally came down she was boneless against his chest, and his hand slid from her mouth to her jaw, tilting her face back so he could kiss her deeply, unhurried, swallowing the last small sounds she had left.
“So beautiful,” he whispered, against her lips. His rhythm finally, finally frayed. She fluttered and clenched around him, and the groan that punched out of him at that was the most undone she’d heard him all night. He pressed his face into her shoulder and followed her over, hips stuttering deep, her name whispered against her skin like a secret meant for her ears only.
Nesta lay in the dark and watched the streetlight move on the ceiling, waiting for the previous day to begin its slow crawl back in.
Refunds are store policy, ma’am. It’s handled. Elain agrees with me.
Good things, in her experience, curdled if you simply waited long enough. It was better to set them down while they were still perfect.
So at 4:51 a.m., she began the delicate work of extracting herself. Getting out from under his arm alone took four minutes. She gathered her clothes, finding her dress and one shoe by the door. The other shoe, for some reason she couldn’t remember, she found under the kitchen table. She wasn’t even going to start trying to pull on her tights, instead balling them into her bag. Her bra had simply vanished, gone wherever, and after three full minutes of crawling around a strange man’s floorboards in the gray pre-dawn, one arm sweeping under the couch like a search operation, Nesta made the executive decision to leave her fallen soldier behind.
She stepped on one of his boot, stumbling and catching herself against the wall, and one of the floorboard shrieked like a banshee in the night. She paused, holding still, listening.
On the bed, Cassian stirred. She heard him mumble something that sounded distinctly like five more minutes, Chief. He rolled over, taking the entire duvet with him in one sweep, and settled once again.
Nesta stood frozen with one shoe on, heart hammering, feeling like some sort of burglar. She hopped while putting on her other shoe, swearing quietly at the soreness of her body.
By the door, on the side table, she saw a pen and a takeout menu with a white margin exactly wide enough for ten digits. She looked at it for a long moment.
Don’t get attached, she’d told Cassian. She was going to listen to her own advice. Nesta let herself out and clicked the door shut as softly as she could, closing the door on the best night of her life.
Four days later, she had tried everything in her power to stop thinking about him. Nothing helped. She thought about him while shelving the romance section, which had transformed overnight from merchandise into a coordinated personal attack. She had thought about him during Sunday dinner, where her father had indeed begged her for more money and Feyre had watched her across the table like a parole officer. She had thought about him on Monday night, alone in her apartment, thinking about going back to Rita’s, before thinking better of it. Because what exactly was the opening line, if he’d even be there? Hello, remember me? The woman who fled your apartment at crack of dawn? The bra is yours to keep. It seems rude to ask for it back.
She was in the bath on Tuesday night, a glass of wine on the ledge and a book propped against dry knees, when the fire alarm went off. It was the building’s alarm. Industrial, ancient, a sound engineered to instantly induce tinnitus.
Which was how she came to be standing on the sidewalk at 10:40 p.m. in leggings, a tank top, and a bathrobe pulled tight, with her hair dripping down her collar. She was holding the three items she grabbed in a hurry on the way down three flights of stairs: her phone, her keys, and the book she was reading. Around her the whole building milled in their nightclothes — Mrs. Laurent from 2A clutching her enormous orange cat, the creepy guy from the first floor filming everything vertically — while smoke drifted, thin and greasy, from a fourth-floor window.
Sirens swelled and two engines turned onto the street, lights washing the whole block red. Nesta pulled the robe tighter around herself and watched the crews spill out, moving like one unit, which they’d rehearsed probably a thousand times. She was somewhere in the second paragraph of the strongly worded email she was composing in her head, which she’d be sending the building manager once this was cleaned up, when a voice spoke up behind her. Warm and low and horribly, wonderfully familiar.
“If you wanted to see me again, you could’ve just left your number, sweetheart. There was no need to set the building on fire.”
Nesta turned around slowly, only to find Cassian standing there in full turnout gear, his coat hanging open over suspenders, soot smudged along one cheekbone, and his helmet tucked under his arm, grinning at her like Christmas had come early. The name tape across his chest read CASSIAN, no surname.
“Who are you? Beyoncé?”
“I’m just that good, sweetheart.” He smirked, and his eyes did a slow tour over her robe, wet hair, and paperback clutched to her chest, his grin deepening. “Is that a romance novel?”
“No. It’s literature.”
“There’s a shirtless man on the cover, Nesta.”
“So? You sound pretty prejudiced, Cassian.”
“Uh-huh.” He glanced up at the fourth floor, where two of his crew were already through the window, and looked back at her, suddenly looking impossibly gentle. “4B fell asleep on a pot of pasta. It’s smoke, mostly. You’ll all be back inside within the hour, and nobody’s hurt.” Then, gravely, he continued. “Your book was never in danger.”
“I hate you.”
“You left me.” He pressed a hand to his chest. “Sneaking out before dawn like a thief in the night. Do you know what I woke up to? One bra and a lifetime of questions.”
Mrs. Laurent turned fully towards them, cat and all, and stared.
“I panicked,” Nesta hissed.
“Why, Nes? Didn’t I make it good enough for you?” He stepped closer, and underneath the smoke and diesel he smelled exactly the way he did on the night she’d been failing not to think about for days. His voice dropped to something quieter. “I looked for a number. Checked the apartment twice.”
Good things curdled if you held them too long. That had always been her philosophy. Except he was long past the expiration date she’d assigned him, and here he was anyway, uncurdled, with soot on his cheek, looking as impossibly handsome as he did that first night. Looking at her like the actual fire was the second most interesting thing on this street.
“Give me your phone,” Nesta said.
He had it out of his coat before she finished the sentence — absurd, eager, beaming — and she typed her number in, her heart pounding hard. When she held her own phone out in return he took his time with it, thumbs flying over the screen. He handed it back with the new contact card still open on the screen.
In Case of Emergency.
“That’s presumptuous,” she said.
“Merely hopeful, sweetheart,” he corrected.
His radio crackled. Somewhere behind him a voice shouted his name and he started backing toward the engines with his eyes still on her, stepping over a charged hose line without so much as glancing down, insufferable to the very last.
“I get off at midnight,” he called.
“Come back when you’re done,” Nesta said, before she could doubt herself. “3C.”
Cassian went still for a beat, and then the stillness broke into something so bright it was frankly blinding. “Yeah?” he said.
“Before I change my—”
“AZRIEL.” He’d spun toward the engines before she finished, one arm raised, bellowing across the entire block with zero shame whatsoever. “Az! Trade me your Saturday and cover for me! I’ll take your Sunday too, I’ll clean the truck for a month—” A dark-haired firefighter by the pump panel looked at him, looked at Nesta, and raised one slow, eloquent thumb. Somewhere behind the engine, someone wolf-whistled.
“Subtle,” Nesta said.
“I have never once been subtle in my life,” Cassian said, radiant, “and it has literally never mattered less.”
The fire was out in twenty minutes and the all-clear took thirty. Thirty minutes of watching him work, which she would also be taking to her grave: the economy of him, the way the crew moved around him like he was a fixed point, the way he checked on the residents, pausing at Mrs. Laurent and letting the enormous orange cat judge him at close range while coming away grinning like he’d passed an exam. When the residents finally shuffled back inside, he peeled out of his coat and helmet, handed both off to Azriel with a handshake that looked like the signing of a treaty, and materialized at her side in suspenders and a soot-streaked station tee, smelling of smoke.
“Ma’am.” He held the lobby door. “I’m going to need you to walk me through your evacuation protocol. You saved a paperback, that doesn’t sound like you’ve got your priorities straight.”
“It’s a good paperback.”
They climbed the stairs. Much like four days ago, she was hyper aware of him one step behind her the whole way up — the size of him filling the stairwell, the heat of him at her back, the fact that this time there was no expiration date on this, no scheduled extraction mission at dawn, nothing to curdle — and she had just reached the second-floor landing and turned around to say something cutting to suppress her nerves when Cassian stopped her. “Okay, hold on. Regulations.” He folded at the waist, and her world tilted.
Her stomach hit his shoulder and she clutched the paperback, biting back a scream. The floor was suddenly very far away as she was slung over the shoulder of this impossible firefighter.
“Cassian—”
“This building was recently an active fire scene.” He straightened with her over his shoulder like she was a rolled length of hose, one arm clamped warm and immovable across the backs of her thighs, and set off at a lazy stroll. “Standard re-entry protocol. Civilians get carried.”
“That is not the protocol!”
“I’m the one with the training, sweetheart.”
“Put me down.”
“Which door?”
“You absolute — put me—”
“Which. Door.” She could hear his grin, the absolute bastard. Down the hallway a door clicked softly open — Mrs. Laurent, cat tucked under one arm, absorbing the scene with the expression of a woman whose entire year had just been made.
Nesta hung over Cassian’s shoulder, and suddenly couldn’t stop laughing, feeling slightly helpless because of it. She found she didn’t want to fight this at all, and gave up on every last shred of the war.
“Up,” she managed. “3C.”
“That’s more like it.” He gave her ass a soft pat and carried her over the threshold of her apartment like she was some sort of damsel, kicking the door firmly shut behind them.