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Dexter has a craving.
He can’t really place what it is. Only that Rita’s bed is too soft and that her body against him is too warm and nothing is right. She’s been asleep for twenty, thirty minutes, curled up against his side, but the craving is only getting worse and worse the longer he stays here.
Dexter fights the urge to shove Rita off him and flee. He’d be gone before she got her wits about her. But she’d call. Of course she’d call. He’d have to explain. And where would he even go?
His apartment, maybe, but that’s not right either. Without really knowing where he’s trying to go, he extricates himself from Rita as quickly and efficiently as he can and whisper-foots into the hallway.
His feet move of their own accord, attuned to the crying out from his brain’s backseat.
He dawdles wobble-kneed into Rita’s laundry room.
He’s been in here before, searching for Astor’s lost shirt or moving work clothes to the dryer for Rita. Tonight, he barely registers anything about the space except for the way the walls close in and the darkness hangs in the air. He stumbles further in and slides down to the tile.
The cool surface of the dryer presses against his bare back. The sharp shriek in his head quiets just a little. Enough for him to make out the words of that non-voice leading him on.
He needs– narrow, dark, cold, right. And he needs it now.
He needs to fold himself in and sink away. He needs to go back there. Back to the blood. Why? His lizard brain refuses to answer. Is it punishment?
Narrow. Cold. Dark.
Dexter pulls his knees to his chest. He can almost taste it, that salt-iron smell of too much blood. Blood two inches thick. A metal vat of blood below a pale, cold lump of dead flesh. His life is a lie.
Close your eyes, Dexter. Don’t look. Close your eyes.
He closes them, and yet he can hear and smell and taste and he’s somewhere, somewhere narrow and bloody and dark, and it’s awful, but he feels the hammering in his head relent into a steady buzz.
He’s still craving something he can’t place. It’s not killing he wants, it’s just… just…–?
Dexter presses his spine into the corner, into that nook between the dryer’s side and the wall, until he can no longer move backward, and it’s right. His knees curl close to his chest.
There is something soothing in the discomfort. Something vital in the small, tight space, in the press of the corner shrinking him in. Something intuitively ideal, deeply desirable, necessarily neat. He needs it.
Someone is making sounds. Ugly, groaning, gasping, hiccuping sounds.
Don’t look. Mommy loves you. Don’t look, Dexter. Dexter, Dexter, Dexter. Dexter, please.
There are hands on his hands, pulling them from his face, and he can’t look at that blood anymore, he can’t, he’s sorry, and doesn’t Biney know that he never wanted to, he just had to, there’s a difference–
“Dexter, wake up!”
Dexter breathes. It’s one of those deep, harsh breaths that someone takes when you rip the duct tape off their mouth and they can fill their lungs up to scream. But no scream comes out, only some funny wounded animal half-noise. The rest stops up inside him and shakes around.
Rita’s wide eyes are the first thing he sees. Her hands wipe at his wet, clammy face. Since when did Dexter cry?
“It’s me,” Rita says very helpfully.
“I know.”
“You’re okay.” she breathes, low and slow, and presses his forehead against his.
All he can think of is that kill room. The sound of his blade through his brother’s neck.
There’s light seeping in from behind her, from some lamp or nightlight in the house.
“No.” There’s an unhappy mutter from somewhere behind his eyes, and he mirrors it to her: “Close the door.”
“…Oh.”
She leaves him for a moment to shut it.
“Of course. You wouldn’t want the kids to see you so stressed out.”
Rita’s so helpful about that– about filling in the gaps with so much of her normal that Dexter doesn’t have to explain. She sees what she wants to see, and that version of him is preferable.
He senses a new tension in her as she settles in front of him. It’s the usual human reaction to being in the dark. But Dexter is a night-creature. It’s where he feels most comfortable. In the anonymity it provides, he can close his eyes and take another try at breathing. Except, no he can’t, because Rita is talking to him and he needs to react.
“I… I felt you get up. I thought that you were… well, I wasn’t sure. But when you didn’t come back I got worried about you.”
Her thumb smooths over his cheekbone. Too warm. She’s sweet, isn’t she? Rita tries so hard. If he could feel, his heart would be all gooey and soft and weak for her. Good thing he doesn’t have emotions. They tend to be so messy.
“What happened? Bad dream?”
“Sort of.”
“I heard you talking about your mother.”
Whatever mask he’s managed to reassemble is shattered.
“Uh.”
Dexter, for all his wit, cannot find one explanation for that. Nothing but the truth, which he knows will taste like needles on the way out. The truth, which will certainly make Rita wince, make her look at him differently, because after that who exactly could be normal? Certainly not Dexter.
He and Brian could have had a new normal. They could have been free. Brian would understand. Dexter wouldn’t have to hide, wouldn’t have to apologize for anything. But he killed that in the freezer room. Harry’s code upheld, but at what cost?
“What happened to your mother, Dexter?”
He has never shared this, not with anyone. It was his and Brian’s secret. Now it’s his alone. Until he opens his mouth and lets it fall out, that is.
“She… when I was little, she–“
He finds himself grabbing clumsily at Rita’s hands, seeking… contact, he thinks, a touch to keep him there, that firm tactile comfort that only Brian was able to give him. Never before had he felt such comfort, such complete safety.
Rita wraps his hands up in hers without asking why. He never really has to ask for anything from Rita.
They’re soft, small hands that could never really understand what it means to kill, but it’s the closest thing Dexter can still have and when he closes his eyes again it even helps.
It’s humiliating. He has never felt more human. Weak, woozy, hammer-hearted human.
“She… died.”
Rita’s hands grip his tighter, as if she can squeeze all the answers out of him like a tube of toothpaste.
“I was there. I didn’t– couldn’t remember, but.” He breathes in. Out. In. The wall presses securely against his spine. “Something at work. Brought it back.”
“Oh, baby,” Rita says, like she’s talking to Cody with a scraped knee and not Dexter with a dead mom. “You could have told me. Even if you had to wake me up. You don’t have to hide in here by yourself.”
It’s too much to explain why he chose this place. Privacy sure, but if he really just wanted privacy he would have gone home. Deb’s asleep or at the gym, he’s certain.
If he leaves it like this Rita will assume it was a simple homicide, a burglary gone wrong or a stray bullet in the wrong part of town. In Miami, it could happen to anyone. It’s much more normal than a drug dealer chopped to pieces in a shipping container. Blood two inches thick. Salt-iron cold narrow dark.
“I thought you’d get freaked out.”
“Well, that’s what you bear for someone you care about.” She doesn’t sound angry, just… something else. Something all choked up and sappy. He can’t really understand it. “There’s nothing you can do to scare me away– especially something like this. I promise you. Okay?”
If only you knew, he thinks.
“Okay,” he says instead.
Rita moves to occupy the space between his knees and pulls his head into her shoulder. His arms wrap around her like habit, and it’s… right? No. But it’s not bad, either.
It’d be nice to tell her, Dexter thinks. Right now on the laundry room floor. He could crack his ribs open and invite her in to take first pick on that knot of smooth muscle other people called a heart.
Sure, Rita, you can have it. I don’t use it much anyway. I think you’ll take good care of it.
I kill people, you know. Bad people. I have to do it. I love to do it, always have. Keeps me going. You’re not scared, right? Nothing I do could scare you. Go ahead. Take it. That’s all of Dexter, all wrapped up and ribbon-tied for you. Happily ever after. Rita and Dexter, sitting in a tree.
It would scare her. It would hurt her so badly. Because how could a normal, gullible person like Rita really factor ‘serial killer’ into the possibilities her boyfriend had in store?
But it’s not just that. Even Brian couldn’t really accept him, could he? He’s not human enough to fit among humans, not monster enough to coexist with a monster. You can’t be a killer and a hero. It doesn’t work that way.
Dexter takes a deep breath, and instead of salt and metal it’s skin and that peachy perfume Rita always wears when she knows he’s sleeping over.
“I won’t make you tell me if you don’t want to, but… whatever happened, you couldn’t control it. You were so little, weren’t you?”
“Three.”
“Only three. You must have been so scared.”
“I.. was. I think.”
“Anyone would be.”
This must be that ‘feeling it’ that Rita talked about. Well, he’s certainly feeling something, and he doesn’t know that he likes it. He’s supposed to be a cold, neat creature, born free from emotions and a conscience and all the things that make someone this weak.
Rita’s fingers slide through his hair. His eyes are stinging and sore. He feels anything but neat. There is something so comfortable about being held like a small, wounded animal that he tolerates the blow to his dignity.
“If you ever have another dream, baby, tell me. You’ve always been so good to me. I want to be there for you, too. But you have to let me in.”
“Okay,” Dexter says again, drawing meaningless fidgety patterns on her back. “Sure.”
It’s an admirable effort, but useless.
She can’t know everything. Never. It would do too much damage to this little piece of normal he’s carved out for himself. But for tonight, she can have this one thing. And he can still have the comfort of her arms squeezed tight around him, and the rhythm of her heart under his ear, and the soft, perfumed smell of her collarbone. For a moment, Dexter can have her.