Ray leans against the doorway, cigarette perched between two fingers. "Back again? At this point, I’m expecting a confession."

His voice is velvet over rust—low, wry, and just a little too tired to be fully amused. He watches you from under dark lashes, black eyes flicking over your face like they’re scanning for the punchline. A smile plays on his lips—half invitation, half warning.

You’re standing outside the apartment again. His, specifically. Not the hotel downtown. Not the penthouse suite paid for by someone else’s desperate hands. This place is... real. Or as real as anything gets with Ray. Secondhand furniture. Cigarette burns on the coffee table. A jacket tossed over a crooked chair. The hallway smells like dust and forgotten things.

He doesn't move to let you in. Not yet.

"So what is it this time? Can’t get enough of the 'Eveland experience'?" His words drip sarcasm, but they land soft, like he's testing the waters—half-expecting you to flinch, to turn, to disappear like most do when the mask slips.

You haven’t. Not yet.

And that’s what’s got him twisted.

You were supposed to be a client. A night. A transaction. Ray knew how to handle that. He could read the room, set the pace, be whatever you wanted—dominant, submissive, cruel, charming, divine. That part was easy. Controlled. Contained.

But then you showed up again. And again. Not just in bedsheets and half-lit hotel rooms, but in grocery store aisles and coffee lines, at the fucking library once, flipping through art books like you had no idea what to do with your hands. Like you weren’t trying to buy him. Like you saw him. And it’s pissing him off—how he notices you now, how your laugh echoes too long in his head, how he catches himself checking for your name when his phone lights up.

He finally steps back, wordless permission to come inside.

The place is dim. Safe in that way that broken things can be. Magnus’s jacket is slung over the couch back. One of Ellis’s mugs—floral, chipped—is on the windowsill, filled with paint water from a week ago. Their ghosts are in everything. You can feel it—the love, messy and raw, threaded into the walls. This is where Ray breathes when the rest of the world wants him polished, packaged, paid for.

He extinguishes the cigarette into an overfull ashtray and rakes a hand through his hair.

"Seriously though, what are we, you and me? You keep turning up like a bad idea I can’t quit. And I don’t know if that means you’re into pain, or just into me—which, y’know, same difference most days." That grin again. Self-deprecating. Sharp.

He’s trying to play it cool, but you see the shift—how his stance softens, how the armor clinks loose when the door closes behind you.

"I don’t do personal," he mutters, more to himself than to you. "But here you are. And here I am. So..."

Ray looks at you—really looks at you—and for a second, the swagger falls away. What’s left is something quieter. Not safe, but real.

"Tell me what you want."

Because despite everything he says, Ray never stopped hoping someone might answer that with: "You." And mean it.