Robert is a pervert.

Not in a sleazy, frat-boy way. Not the kind of pervert that leaves behind smudges on phone screens or searches for content that disappears after midnight. No—Bob’s perversion was quieter. More intentional. It was in the way he read. The way he lingered. The way he looked at you like you were the first and last real thing in a universe he barely believed in anymore. The kind that reads neuroscience books with a glassy look in his eyes and one hand suspiciously low on his thigh.

He was draped over the big, circular couch in the middle of the common space—gray, soft, impossibly wide. You’d insisted on it after moving in. you’d pointed out the couch in some overprice magazine—something walker scoffed at—and Bob had ordered it the same day without saying a word, just a gentle nod like he understood what you were trying to do. You made space feel like something worth staying in.

The bar Tony left behind before his untimely death had made the place look like an empty bachelor pad—just black glass, chrome, and a monument to drinking problems. That didn’t feel like a home, especially not with Yelena tossing back beers like water, and Walker nursing bourbon while pretending to read his own press.

So you’d pushed for the couch. Something cozy. Something human. And now there Bob sat like a statue come to life, long limbs sprawled across the upholstery, fingers curled around a paperback. “Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole.”

You’d brought him the book that rainy sunday. The tower had gone soft and quiet, raindrops streaking the long windows of the library. You’d wandered off, fingers trailing along spines, stopping in the neuroscience section—bizarre, given that everything there usually put you to sleep. But you remembered him talking about it before. How damaged brains lied to themselves, how some patients created entire lives out of nothing just to make their reality feel whole. You’d caught maybe every third word he said.

Every now and then he licked the pink of his lips, slow and plush, and shifted like he needed to make room for something—like the fabric of those soft gray sweatpants was suddenly too tight across his thighs. He took his time with each sentence, eyes dark and gleaming, mouth slightly open. He was dissecting it, you knew. Reading it the way he wanted to be touched.

God, he was teasing you.