Chapter 9: Fridge Confessions
The embrace against the refrigerator door wasn’t gentle. It was a collapse. Levi’s arms locked around her, hands fisting in the back of her shirt, his face buried in the crook of her neck. His whole body was a tense line, trembling with a seismic energy she’d never felt from him. The cold steel of the appliance door pressed into her back.
He didn’t speak for a long minute. The only sounds were his ragged inhales against her skin and the relentless hum of the fridge motor. She could feel his heartbeat, a frantic drum against her own.
“I can’t do it again,” he said, the words muffled, ragged. “Not knowing. The waiting. The not knowing if you…” He trailed off, his breath hot on her collarbone. “Finding them… Sasha, the others… it’s a vulnerability. A thread. Anyone could pull it. And if they pull it, they find you. They take you into a system, into a courtroom, into a news cycle. They put you in a box with a label on it. And I’m outside the box.” His grip tightened. “I spent years building walls so nothing could get to you. Now this… this lawyer, this cop, they just walk right through. And I have to stand there and let them.”
“Levi,” she whispered, her hands coming up to cradle the back of his head. His hair was soft, a shocking contrast to the rigidity of his body.
“I have protocols for direct threats,” he continued, his voice low and vehement. “I have plans for fires, for breaks-ins, for grid failure. I don’t have a plan for a nice cop with a business card and a sympathetic smile. I don’t have a plan for you choosing to walk into a legal warzone.” He pulled back just enough to look at her. His grey eyes were stark, fractured with a fear she’d only seen in fragments before. “The greatest threat to your safety right now is your own justice. And I can’t protect you from that. I can only watch.”
Her phone, abandoned on the table, began to ring again.
They both flinched. The sound was like a shard of glass in the intense quiet. Levi’s eyes flicked toward it, his face hardening back into its usual guarded mask, but the echo of his terror still hung in the air.
The screen lit up with Sasha’s name.
Aria moved slowly, as if waking from a dream, and picked it up. Levi didn’t let go of her, his arm sliding to her waist, anchoring her to the spot as she answered, putting it on speaker.
“Sash, I—”
“Hold the fucking phone.” Sasha’s voice was a sharp, breathless whisper, utterly unlike her usual boisterous tone. “Aria. Wait. Hold up. Levi? You said you were with Levi.”
Aria’s stomach dropped. “Yeah.”
“Levi. As in your Levi. As in… oh my god. As in Captain Levi? As in Humanity’s Strongest Soldier, Captain fucking Levi, who none of us have been able to find for years even though he’s literally, like, a public figure here? Motorcycles? That scowling dude in the magazine profiles? That Levi?”
The silence in the apartment was absolute. Levi’s expression didn’t change, but Aria felt the muscles in his arm tense.
“Uh… yeah,” Aria said, her voice small.
A beat of dead air. Then Sasha exploded.
“AND YOU DIDN’T TELL ME?!” The whisper was gone, replaced by a full-throated shriek of pure, unadulterated betrayal. “Aria! Have you told any of the others? Armin? Eren? Fucking Mikasa? Jean? Connie? ANYONE?”
Aria squeezed her eyes shut. “Not yet.”
“NOT YET?! NOT YET?! What does that even mean? How long have you known? How long have you been with him? Is he your boyfriend? Oh my god, is he the reason you’ve been so weird about guys here? Holy shit, it all makes sense now!” Sasha was talking a mile a minute, the words tumbling out in a chaotic cascade. “Do you have any idea how many tabs I have open right now on my phone? How many times I’ve stared at those grainy paparazzi shots of some guy in a ball cap leaving a custom bike shop in Columbus and thought, ‘Nah, couldn’t be’? It is! It’s him! You found him and you just… you kept him?”
“It’s complicated, Sasha,” Aria said, a defensive edge creeping into her voice. Levi’s hand was a steady weight on her hip.
“No kidding it’s complicated! He’s a goddamn war hero twice over! He’s a mystery! He’s… he’s Levi!” Sasha’s volume dropped again, shifting into a tone of awestruck urgency. “Is he there? Can I talk to him?”
Aria looked up at Levi. His face was unreadable. He gave a single, almost imperceptible shake of his head.
“He’s… not really a phone person,” Aria said lamely.
“Right. Right. Of course. Okay.” Sasha took an audible, steadying breath. “Okay, new plan. Fuck Marlene, fuck your creep doctor, fuck everything. I’m coming to Columbus. Tonight. I’ll borrow my roommate’s car. I need to see this with my own eyes. I need to hug him. Oh god, he’ll probably hate that. Does he still hate… everything?”
Aria felt a hysterical laugh bubble in her throat. “Most things, yeah.”
“I’m coming. Text me the address. Don’t you dare say no.”
“Sasha, wait—“
“No. Nope. This is bigger than your weird secret-keeping. This is… this is family. Or whatever’s left of it. I’m coming. We’ll deal with your lawyer bullshit together. With him. Maybe he can, like, intimidate them into going away. He’d be good at that.” Sasha’s voice softened. “Ari… we’ve been looking for each other. All of us. Scouring the internet, putting out feelers. Armin has a whole encrypted forum going. And you had him the whole time?”
The guilt was a physical weight, pressing down on Aria’s ribs. She’d kept Levi a secret, a guarded, precious piece of her old life she was too terrified to share. She’d told herself it was to protect him, his sanity, his hard-won solitude. But hearing the raw hurt in Sasha’s voice, she knew it was also to protect herself. To keep this one perfect, complicated thing from being pulled apart by the collective need of a scattered, broken family.
“I’m sorry,” Aria whispered.
“Don’t be sorry. Just send me the damn address. And tell him… tell him Sasha Braus says hi. And that I’m bringing potato stew. The good kind.” The call clicked off.
Aria lowered the phone. The silence that followed was different now—charged, expanded, filled with the ghosts Sasha had just conjured.
Levi hadn’t moved. His gaze was fixed on a point on the far wall, somewhere past the tactical whiteboard with its desperate scrawl: She’s still out there.
“She’s coming here,” Aria said, stating the obvious.
“I heard.”
“She’s bringing stew.”
A flicker of something crossed his face—not annoyance, not quite. A profound, weary recognition. “Of course she is.”
He finally looked down at her. The raw fear from before was tucked away, replaced by a calculated intensity. The emotional crisis was over; the tactical problem had evolved. “This changes the perimeter. Significantly. Sasha is… unpredictable. A security risk.”
“She’s our friend.”
“She’s a variable I haven’t accounted for in three years. She brings with her everything we’ve avoided. Connections. Attention. Questions.” He paused. “The others. She’ll tell them.”
“Maybe that’s okay,” Aria ventured, her heart pounding. “Maybe we don’t have to hide from them anymore.”
Levi’s jaw tightened. He turned and walked to the whiteboard, staring at the phrase he’d written and rewritten. She’s still out there. He picked up a marker, uncapped it, and slowly, deliberately drew a single, bold line through the words.
“No,” he said, his voice quiet, final. “We don’t.”
He turned back to her. “You need to call the lawyer. Today. Before Sasha gets here and turns everything into a… reunion.” He said the word like it was a foreign, slightly dangerous concept. “We get the facts. We assess the threat level of this lawsuit. Then we decide.”
“And Sasha?”
“We let her in,” he said, the words sounding strangely resigned. “We feed her the stew. We get the updates on… everyone.” He ran a hand over his face. “And then we secure the situation. My shop has a back room. Reinforced. It’s where I keep the high-end prototypes. It has its own bathroom, a separate entrance. You’ll stay there until we know what this lawyer wants, until we know if Vance or anyone connected to him is stupid enough to try anything.”
It wasn’t a suggestion. It was an operational update. The safehouse was being moved.
Aria nodded. The path forward was suddenly, brutally clear. Call the lawyer. Face the machine. Let the past in through the front door. And hide in a back room full of motorcycle parts while Levi stood guard.
She looked at the blacked-out windows, at the tactical gear, at the man who had just crossed out his own mantra. The walls weren’t just coming down. They were being breached from all sides.
“Okay,” she said, picking up Officer Rourke’s business card from the table. Her fingers were steady. “Let’s make the call.”
The call to Miranda Keller lasted eleven minutes. It was clinical, a series of probing questions answered with vague assurances. Keller’s voice was like polished slate—smooth, cool, and hard. She wanted a meeting, in person, to discuss Aria’s “potential claim.” Levi listened from inches away, his breath a silent rhythm against Aria’s temple, his finger tracing a warning circle on her knee when Keller pressed for details about her “current living situation.” Aria ended the call with a promise to consider a meeting date, her mouth dry as paste.
Levi took the phone from her shaking hand and placed it on the counter. He didn’t speak. He simply pulled her from the stool, his hands firm on her hips, and walked her backward towards the bedroom. The sterile grey of the main room blurred past her. This wasn’t about comfort. It was a claiming, a reassertion of control in a world suddenly flooding with variables—Sasha’ arrival, the lawyer’s cold voice, the specter of a courtroom.
In the darkened bedroom, he turned her to face the wall beside the door, his body caging hers. “Don’t move,” he muttered, his voice rough. His hands pushed her sweatpants and underwear down to her thighs in one sharp motion. The cool air kissed her skin, followed immediately by the heat of his palm cupping her cunt from behind. She gasped, her forehead pressing against the cool paint. He growled low in his ear. “You held it together in there. Good.” His fingers parted her, sliding through her wetness with a brutal, purposeful familiarity. “Now fall apart for me. Only for me.”
He didn’t bother undressing fully. The rasp of his zipper was loud in the quiet. He spat into his own hand, a crude, wet sound, and she heard him slick himself. The broad, blunt head of his cock pressed against her entrance, nudging, demanding. He was always thick, a stretch that bordered on pain before it became pleasure. Today, he pushed into her with a single, relentless thrust, burying himself to the hilt without ceremony.
Aria cried out, a sharp sound swallowed by the room. Her hands flattened against the wall for balance. He was impossibly deep, the invasion absolute. Levi’s groan was a visceral thing against her neck.“Fuck. That’s it. Take it.” He didn’t wait for her to adjust. He set a punishing rhythm immediately, each drive of his hips slamming her into the wall. The force rattled the frame of the door.
His arm banded around her waist, locking her in place, his other hand braced high on the wall beside her head. Every snap of his pelvis was a punctuation mark against the chaos. His breaths were harsh grunts in her ear.“Mine. In this room, in this mess, you are mine. They don’t get this. They don’t get you.”
She was split open on him, each thrust a jolt of electricity that melted her thoughts. The fear, the uncertainty, the guilt—it all dissolved into raw sensation. She could feel the sweat soaking through his shirt where her back met his chest. “Levi,” she gasped, her voice breaking on the second syllable.
“Say it.” He bit the juncture of her neck and shoulder, not hard enough to break skin, but enough to brand. His pace grew more frantic, losing its military precision.
“I’m yours,” she choked out, the words half-sob, half-moan. “God, please.”
“Come for me. Now.” His hand slid from her waist down to her clit, his calloused fingers finding the swollen bud and circling with a ruthless, perfect pressure. It was too much—the fullness, the friction, the deliberate, overwhelming intensity of his possession. Her climax ripped through her with violent suddenness, a white-hot detonation that made her legs buckle. He held her up, fucking her through the convulsions, his own control shattering.
With a final, guttural curse, he drove into her one last time and stilled, his body bowing over hers. She felt the hot, pulsing release of him deep inside, a flood of heat that seemed to seal his vow. They stayed like that, welded together, breathing in ragged tandem, the only sound their heaving lungs and the faint traffic hum from a world below they were both trying to keep at bay.
He eventually softened, slipping from her body. He gently pulled her clothing back up, his hands tender now, at odds with their previous fury. He turned her around and kissed her, slow and deep, tasting of salt and her. “We’ll handle it,” he whispered against her lips, a command to the universe.
The Miami air didn’t just embrace you; it swallowed you whole. It was a thick, wet blanket of salt and exhaust and blooming decay that coated the back of Armin Arlert’s throat. From the tiny, overpriced balcony of their efficiency apartment, he watched Eren below, a figure of coiled tension amidst the chaotic ballet of the dock.
Eren moved with a familiar, furious grace, hauling crates from a container ship. His tanned skin gleamed under the savage sun, muscles cording in his arms and back with each lift. But from this height, Armin could see the stutter in his rhythm, the way he’d occasionally pause and stare out at the flat, endless blue of the Atlantic as if it had personally offended him. The displaced rage was a live wire in him, humming just beneath the surface of this new, baffling life.
Armin’s own world was the small, dark room behind him. Two laptops glowed on a cheap folding table, screens alive with scrolling code, encrypted chat windows, and layered maps. This was his ocean. For weeks, he’d been diving into it, using skills he’d never dreamed of in another life to trawl databases, social media fragments, and news archives. The search was a quiet, desperate obsession. Find Mikasa.Find Jean. Find Connie.Find Captain Levi. Find anyone.
A notification pinged softly from a specialized program he’d built. A hit on a new image-recognition parameter. His breath hitched. He clicked, expanding the window.
It was a blurry, zoomed-in still from a three-year-old local news segment in Columbus, Ohio. A report on a custom motorcycle shop’s expansion. In the background, a man in a dark jacket and a ball cap was walking away from the camera, his face turned. The algorithm had flagged the posture, the specific set of the shoulders. Armin’s heart hammered against his ribs. He’d seen that posture a thousand times on survey corps expeditions, in war councils, in the frantic dash to close a gate.Captain Levi.
“Eren!” The name tore from him, sharp and loud. He was on his feet, his chair screeching back.
Below, Eren jerked his head up, his green eyes narrowing against the glare. He dropped a crate with a bang that made the foreman shout, ignored him, and loped towards the rusty external staircase. He took the steps three at a time, bursting into the apartment a moment later smelling of sweat, salt, and diesel fuel.“What? What is it?” Eren demanded, his chest heaving.
Armin pointed a trembling finger at the screen. “Look.”
Eren leaned in, his damp hair brushing Armin’s cheek. He stared at the grainy image for a long, silent moment. His expression, usually a mask of simmering anger, fractured. Something raw and painfully young broke through. “Is it…?”
“The algorithm is eighty-seven percent confident,” Armin said, his voice tight with excitement. “Postural recognition is more reliable than facial when the image quality is this poor. It’s triangulated with the shop’s location, its specialty in high-performance custom builds—it fits a skillset transition. It’s him, Eren. I think we finally found him.”
Eren didn’t reach out to touch the screen. He just stared, his jaw working. “Columbus,” he breathed, the word a promise. Then his eyes snapped to Armin’s, the old fire blazing anew. “When do we leave?”
“We need to be sure. I need to dig deeper, find a current address, a way to approach without…”
“Without what? Scaring him off?” Eren’s laugh was short, harsh. “He’s Levi. Nothing scares him.” He paced the small room, his energy suddenly too big for it. “We go. We find him. He’ll know about the others. He has to.”
Armin watched him, the strategist in him calculating. The direct approach was Eren’s only setting. It was reckless, could ruin everything if Levi had reasons for his silence. But the look on Eren’s face—the first unfiltered hope Armin had seen in years—crushed his caution.
“Okay,” Armin said softly. “We go.”
Eren stopped pacing. The frantic energy seemed to coalesce, redirecting itself onto Armin. The heat of the day, the adrenaline of the discovery, the constant, gnawing frustration—it all fused into a sudden, intense pressure in the tiny room. Eren’s gaze dropped to Armin’s mouth.
“We should celebrate,” Eren said, his voice dropping to a rough register that had nothing to do with finding their lost captain.
“We don’t have anything to celebrate yet,” Armin reasoned, but his pulse was already kicking up, a responding beat to Eren’s intensity.
“We have a lead. That’s more than we had yesterday.” Eren closed the distance between them in one stride. He smelled like the ocean and hard work. He cupped Armin’s face, his thumbs rough on Armin’s cheekbones. “Let me feel something good for five minutes, Armin. Please.”
The plea hung in the humid air, stripped of all pretense. Armin watched the conflict in Eren’s eyes—the fierce independence wrestling with a deep, aching need to surrender. It was a look Armin knew intimately, a landscape he had learned to navigate. He didn’t answer with words.
He kissed him.
It wasn’t gentle. It was conquest. Armin’s hands fisted in Eren’s sweaty tank top, pulling him close, his tongue claiming Eren’s mouth with a certainty that made Eren shudder. Eren yielded instantly, a groan vibrating from his chest into Armin’s. His own hands came up, not to push but to cling, fingers digging into Armin’s shoulders.
Armin broke the kiss, breathing heavily. He looked at Eren’s flushed face, his kiss-swollen lips, the desperate trust in his green eyes. “How do you want it?” Armin’s voice was low, a rough command that brooked no evasion.
Eren’s eyelids fluttered. He didn’t look away. “Hard. Make me forget my own name.” His whisper was raw, confession and plea fused together.
A sharp nod. Armin’s strategist mind shifted gears, calculating a different kind of campaign. He guided Eren backward, not to their bed, but to the single sturdy wooden chair by his desk. The one Armin used for his long coding sessions. “Take your clothes off. Then kneel.”
Eren obeyed with a speed that was almost reverent. The sweaty tank top, the grimy work pants, his briefs—all were shoved to the floor in a heap. He knelt on the thin carpet, the gritty fibers pressing into his bare knees. He was already hard, his cock standing thick and flushed against his stomach. He looked up at Armin, his breath coming fast, his body a sculpture of taut submission.
Armin didn’t undress. He stood over Eren, a dominant silhouette against the glow of the monitors. He let the silence stretch, let Eren feel the weight of the moment, the power differential. He palmed himself through his jeans, watching Eren’s gaze track the movement with hungry fascination.
“Open,” Armin said, his voice cool.
Eren parted his lips, his tongue darting out instinctively. Armin unzipped his jeans, freed his own erection, and guided the head to Eren’s waiting mouth. He didn’t push in. He just rested the sensitive tip on Eren’s lower lip, a teasing threat. “You’re doing this because I allow it,” Armin stated, his thumb stroking Eren’s cheekbone. “You come when I say. You scream when I permit it. Understood?”
A whimper escaped Eren’s throat. He nodded, a quick, eager jerk of his head.
“Good.”
Armin fed his cock into Eren’s mouth, a slow, deliberate invasion. Eren took him eagerly, his lips stretching, his tongue flattening to welcome him. He hollowed his cheeks, sucking with a desperate rhythm, his hands coming up to clutch at Armin’s thighs. Armin watched himself disappear into that perfect, hungry mouth, a surge of possessive heat tightening his gut.
He set the pace, gentle at first, then deeper, firmer. He gripped a handful of Eren’s sun-streaked brown hair, not to hurt, but to steer, to control the angle. “That’s it. Take it all. You want it, don’t you?”
Eren’s answering moan was a muffled, vibrating affirmation. Saliva slicked Armin’s length, spilling from the corners of Eren’s stretched lips. The sight was obscenely beautiful—Eren Yeager, a force of nature, brought to his knees and rendered blissfully, willingly useless. Armin fucked his mouth with measured, relentless strokes, his own pleasure coiling tight and low.
He pulled out suddenly, the wet pop loud in the room. Eren gasped for air, a string of spit connecting his lips to Armin’s glistening cock. His eyes were glazed, pleading.
“Stand up. Bend over the desk.”
Eren scrambled to obey, his body moving with a fluid obedience.