Chapter 1: Last Call and Hidden Scars
The air in The Derby smelled like regret—stale whiskey, old cigarette smoke soaked into the walls, and the faint, sour tang of last night’s spilled beer. Alice stirred her martini, watching the olive spin a slow, lazy circle. The ice had long since melted. Another Friday night, another quiet drink alone before heading back to her silent apartment. The synth-pop from the jukebox was too cheerful, a relic from the eighties that only emphasized the hollow space around her.
The stool beside her scraped against the worn floor tiles.
She didn’t look up, not at first. Men sometimes sat there, a temporary buffer between her and the louder crowd at the end of the bar. But then she felt it—a shift in the atmosphere, a charge that made the fine hairs on her forearm rise. He settled in, the weight of him palpable. She caught a scent cutting through the bar’s fog: clean sweat, something like ocean salt, and underneath, a metallic whisper of something else. Something raw.
“Rough day?” His voice was low, a gravelly baritone that vibrated right through the stool.
Alice finally glanced over. And then she truly looked.
He was devastating. Not pretty-boy handsome, but carved. Sharp jaw shadowed with stubble, green eyes that held the light like broken bottle glass. A simple black tee stretched across shoulders that spoke of serious weight rooms. His hands, resting on the bar, were large, the knuckles scraped raw and one finger wrapped with a fraying strip of medical tape.
“Something like that,” she said, her own voice sounding thin. She took a too-quick sip of her drink to cover her nervousness. “You?”
He signaled the bartender for a whiskey, neat. “You could say that. Spent the afternoon…working with my hands.”
His fingertips brushed hers as he reached for a napkin. A jolt, pure and electric, shot up her arm. She flinched, pulling her hand back as if burned. He noticed. A faint, apologetic smile touched his lips, but those eyes didn’t soften.
“Sorry. Static,” he said, though they both knew it wasn’t.
“It’s fine.” She studied him. The fatigue around his eyes was profound, but his energy was coiled, intense. “What line of work are you in?”
He downed half the whiskey in one smooth motion. “Performance art.” The words were dry, edged with a private irony. “I’m Jake.”
“Alice.”
“Alice.” He tasted her name. “You don’t seem like you belong in a place like this.”
“And what does someone who belongs here look like?”
“Like me.” He didn’t smile. He just looked at her, and it felt like being seen completely, stripped of the smart blazer and the polite veneer. It was unnerving. Exhilarating.
They talked. Or rather, she found herself talking, pulled into a orbit by his quiet, focused attention. He asked real questions, listening to her answers about her job in corporate logistics, her failed marriage, her dusty dreams of seeing the Moroccan desert. He was sharp, oddly well-read, referencing a obscure novel about lonely travelers she’d loved. He was a paradox—this physically overwhelming man with the mind of a poet and the hands of a boxer.
His touches were incidental but constant. A hand on her back as he leaned in to hear her over the music, sending warmth radiating through the silk of her blouse. A knee brushing hers under the bar. Each contact was a small shock, a promise of a different kind of voltage.
“So this performance art,” she asked, emboldened by her second martini. “Is it…violent?”
His green eyes locked onto hers. “Sometimes. It’s about power. Surrender. Truth, even when it’s ugly.” He traced a wet circle on the bar with his thumb. “It’s the only thing that feels real anymore.”
The admission hung between them, stark and intimate. Alice’s heart hammered against her ribs. This was a terrible idea. He was clearly something dangerous, something far outside her quiet world of spreadsheets and microwave dinners. But she was so goddamn tired of being safe.
“Do you want to get out of here?” The words were out before she could stop them.
Jake—Kade, a name he gave only as they stepped into the cool night air—didn’t take her to a hotel lobby. He led her to a service elevator at the back of a nondescript building, used a keycard, and took her up to a room on a high floor. It wasn’t a suite; it was a clean, generic space that smelled of industrial cleaner, clearly used for one purpose. A professional space. Her naivety frayed at the edges, but the thrill was stronger.
He didn’t kiss her in the elevator. He pinned her against the wall with his body, his hands caging her head, and just looked at her, his breath hot on her lips. The heat that rolled off him was animal. “You sure, Alice?” His voice was rough.
She answered by pulling his mouth down to hers.
The kiss wasn’t gentle. It was a conquest. His tongue plunged into her mouth, claiming, and she met him with a desperation that shocked her. Her hands fumbled with his belt, her fingers clumsy. He chuckled, a dark sound, and finished the job himself, his jeans hitting the floor. He was already fully, intimidatingly erect. The sight of him, thick and jutting and veined, made her breath catch. Not just a man. A tool.
He walked her backwards into the room, towards the bed. “Turn around,” he commanded, his voice dropping into a register that vibrated in her spine.
She obeyed, her back to him. He pushed her blazer off her shoulders, unzipped her skirt. It pooled at her feet. His hands, those rough, damaged hands, palmed her ass through her lace panties, squeezing hard enough to make her gasp.
“You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?” he murmured, his lips against her ear. He didn’t wait for an answer. He hooked his thumbs in the sides of her panties and dragged them down. The cool air hit her wet skin. He spread her open with his thumbs, a clinical, exposed gesture. “So pretty. So fucking untouched.”
He leaned her over the foot of the bed, her cheek pressed to the cold duvet. She heard the tear of a foil packet, the sound loud in the quiet room. Then the blunt, insistent pressure of him, not at her entrance, but rubbing through her folds, slicking himself with her wetness. He was huge. Panic flickered.
“Relax,” he commanded, but it wasn’t gentle. It was an order. He pushed, and there was a burning stretch, a fullness so intense it bordered on pain. She cried out, a short, sharp sound muffled by the bedspread.
“Shhh,” he soothed, but he didn’t stop. He seated himself fully inside her with one relentless, deep thrust. “Fuck. You’re tight.” He groaned the words, his hands gripping her hips hard enough to bruise.
Then he began to move. It wasn’t making love. It was fucking. Deep, hard, piston-like strokes that shook her whole body. The initial pain blurred, transformed into a scorching, overwhelming stretch with every drive. She felt owned, used, completely filled by him. Her sounds were not words, just desperate moans punched out of her with each thrust.
He leaned over her, his sweat-slicked chest pressing against her back, his mouth at her ear. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? Something real?” He punctuated each word with a savage plunge. “You feel how deep I am? You feel that?”
She could only nod, tears of overwhelm and shocking pleasure leaking from her eyes. The rhythm was brutal, efficient. His pace never faltered. The slapping sound of skin on skin, the wet sounds of their joining, his guttural grunts in her ear—it was obscene. It was the most alive she’d felt in years.
One of his hands snaked around her hip, his fingers finding her clit. He rubbed rough, tight circles, perfectly in time with his thrusts. The dual sensation was too much. Her orgasm built not as a wave but as a detonation, raw and blinding. She screamed into the bedspread, her body convulsing around him, clamping down on his relentless thickness.
He fucked her through it, his movements becoming jagged, frantic. “Gonna come,” he growled, a feral sound. He drove into her one last time, impossibly deep, and held there. She felt him pulse inside her, a hot, rhythmic flood. He collapsed over her, his full weight pressing her into the mattress, both of them slick with sweat and spent.
In the heavy silence that followed, his breathing slowed against her back. He shifted, pulling out of her gently. The loss felt profound. He left the bed, and she heard the click of a lighter, smelled the acrid tang of a cigarette.
Alice rolled onto her back, staring at the ceiling, her body throbbing, her mind blissfully blank. She watched the smoke curl towards the ceiling from where he sat naked in a chair by the window, the city lights painting his sculpted body in blue and white.
He took a long drag, his profile etched in thought. Then he spoke, his voice quiet, stripped of its earlier commanding edge. “I filmed a scene today,” he said, not looking at her. “Before I met you. It wasn’t art. It was just… brutal. Three guys. Chains. It took six hours.” He finally turned his head, those green eyes finding hers in the dim room. They were haunted. “I needed to feel something human.”
Alice lay there, the meaning settling over her bruised flesh. The metallic scent on him earlier. The raw knuckles. The performance art. He hadn’t just come from a gym or a fight. She still didn't really understand, nor was he going to tell her the truth.
She didn’t say anything. She just held his gaze from across the room, in the wreckage of their raw, explicit truth, and waited to see what would happen next.