Chapter Text
Stede Bonnet fucking hates the sunshine.
Not always—just this morning, really. It’s misleading, and Stede can’t stand willful inaccuracy, even from the weather.
First of all, it’s a Monday, so something so goddamn lovely shouldn’t be allowed on the first in a succession of five days dedicated to soulless office work and rote small talk.
Second of all, his phone has a spider’s web of cracks across the screen after falling face-first onto cold ceramic tile during its once-a-week coverless alcohol swabbing. He’s already made an appointment at his local mom-and-pop Apple Store to exchange it, but it underlines his sour disposition.
Thirdly, and maybe the most irritating, as it was quite the stab to his ego, he was stood up at a tapas bar last night by a guy in whom he wasn’t especially interested in the first place. A guy who had texted him Running 15 minutes late, and honestly, it’s the inaccuracy of the statement, since fifteen minutes had turned into thirty, had turned into the guy blocking Stede’s number when he tried to contact him.
So, Stede would just much prefer the rain this morning is all. A fucking hurricane to complement the absolutely craggy mood that he’s bringing through the rotating glass doors of Bonnet Worldwide. Instead, today he gets sunshine that matches his hair, yellow and bold, and fair temperatures that remind him of his usually more even temper.
People greet him. He ignores them.
He sees someone running for the elevator on which he holds single occupancy. He presses the ‘close’ button, feels only the slightest sting of guilt when the doors close and the thing starts moving up. Guilt that’s dissolved by the time he reaches the fortieth floor.
A ding tells him he’s reached his destination. He makes a quick mental plan to look too busy for any of his co-workers or subordinates who might be in the office early to stop him and ask about his daughter Alma’s piano recital (so much money paid for her still to be shite at scales), or his son’s new middle school adventures (also shite), or his ex-wife’s big sale of her art to show exclusively at hotels her father owns (shite in multiple ways).
He pulls out his phone on his first step out of the elevator, the sight of the thin filaments of cracks fully inflaming something in him that burns akin to a fucking ulcer.
“Fuckin’—hey,” he hears from somewhere outside his own mind, urgent and cutting.
Stede stops just in time to realize that someone has stopped him from running headfirst into a ladder, propped up in the middle of the gray-carpeted walkway. His eyes follow the sturdy metal legs of the ladder up to a sturdy pair of human legs belonging to someone he’s never seen in the office before.
The man’s face angles down, and the fluorescent lights above him cast a beatific halo around long, dark tresses, layered with gray strands that glimmer in the light, and a full gray beard under bowed lips and a rounded nose and the most intensely expressive brown eyes that Stede has ever seen.
“You almost walked into my ladder,” he says in a voice like whittled wood.
“Oh,” Stede breathes out, a breath he is only now realizing he was holding.
Stede’s nearly forgotten how to move, or that he should, staring up at the man who’s now returned to work, stretching his arms above his head to attach some piece of equipment to the ceiling. He’s wearing a pair of dusty combat boots and worker’s cargo pants and a black t-shirt that’s raising up on him, showing off a slim and soft torso dusted with black hair and stamped with tattoos like a well-used passport. Stede can make out some stars and not much else if he doesn’t want to give himself away as leering.
The man looks back down at Stede, and the corners of those eyes crinkle at the sight of him. His lips spark upward into a roguish grin. After directing the equipment at the ceiling to, “Stay… Good boy,” he descends the ladder, each step pulling a rope of tension through Stede’s body.
When he’s closer, Stede can see the earrings lining the man’s ears, the small metal spike through his septum. There are even more tattoos covering both arms—a melange of designs of varying degrees of craftsmanship. A snake winds its way down from under the sleeve of his t-shirt to the top of his hand. A beautifully-constructed centerpiece.
“Ed,” he says, sticking out a hand for Stede to shake. “From Blackbeard Security.”
“Yes,” Stede says rather sharply, some spiny residue from his hellish morning. Suddenly, he can’t find a single other word to offer this man from his profoundly extensive vocabulary, and his face heats from a quickly growing embarrassment.
“‘Yes.’ Okay, I’ll go fuck myself,” Ed chuckles, dropping his hand.
“No. Sorry—” Stede reaches for the hand at Ed’s side, taking a calloused palm in one hand and cupping the other over Ed’s knuckles. “I’m Stede. Bonnet,” he says, shaking the man’s hand profusely.
“Bonnet Worldwide Bonnet?”
“Yes.”
“Ah. You have very soft hands, Stede Bonnet,” Ed blurts out, when the notion hits him.
Stede lets go of the awkward handshake he’s forced Ed into, apologizes immediately.
“Doesn’t require a fuckin’ apology, man,” Ed tells him. “Anyway, you’re the one I’m looking for.”
“You’re…looking for me?” Stede asks.
“Yeah, I’m putting up your cameras.”
“I didn’t know we were getting security cameras,” Stede says. He’s sure any intention to mention it to Stede—or run it down the line to him—has slipped his father’s mind, since they only talk when the moon is at waxing gibbous and Mars and Venus are simultaneously visible. And Stede would very much prefer to keep it that way.
“Yeah, fortieth floor’s the last one, and then I’ll be downstairs for a week making sure the equipment goes off without a hitch,” Ed tells him.
“You’ll be here all week?” Stede asks him, feeling something flicker in his chest.
“That okay?”
A blink of Ed’s feathery eyelashes has Stede’s stomach folding in on itself. “Of course,” he replies. “More than okay.”
“Mm,” Ed hums, eyes playfully dancing with Stede’s. “They sent me a blueprint of the floor, but it’s fuckin’ shit. I can only make out a couple locations, so I asked them for a better copy. They told me to come find you. Not that I’m mad about that.”
Stede leaks out something close to a laugh, the sonic equivalent of a flat soda. “That’s really building management’s job,” Stede says, and by god, if he could just take a step back from himself this one time.
“I dunno, man. I’m going where they tell me to go.”
“Of course. It’s just—you’d think they would find it unusual to come to the Director of Operations for these matters.”
“Just trying to get the cameras up,” Ed says with a wide smile.
Stede swallows hard around a parched throat, mentally shoos the butterflies flapping around his stomach. “Yes, then come into my office,” he tells him.
They make their way across the personality-devoid open floorplan of desks and computers, with millennial-baiting posters hung on the walls: brightly-colored with out-of-context quotes from Steve Jobs and Maya Angelou and Patrick Stewart. “Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.” Take that, capitalism.
Stede’s office is tucked behind glass at the end of the room. He pushes open a glass door marked STEDE BONNET, DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS in a black Proxima Nova font that was hand-picked by Stede, holds it open for Ed to enter.
“’S you.” Ed points to the name on the door with impressed brows and a titter.
Stede follows him in, sweeps over to his desk and takes a seat behind it. While he logs in to his computer, Ed politely rifles through some of the things on his desk: a brass beluga whale paperweight that he found at an antique bookshop in Germany, a ZZ plant called “Murray” with three new little sprouts bursting out of the soil, and a framed picture that Ed picks up for a closer look—Stede’s children at a Lunar New Year parade in China four years ago.
“Cute,” Ed lauds, setting the frame back down on the desk. “You’re here early. No one is even in the office yet.”
“First one in, last one to leave,” Stede laments, pulling up a folder marked “Building Operations.”
“You ever take advantage of the alone time? You could do fuckin’ anything—naked yoga, shirtless jumping jacks, dong out coffee hour?”
Stede delivers a mildly baffled look. “Only things that require nudity in some form, then?”
“I can think of some that don’t,” Ed says, barely hiding a smirk.
Cheeky bugger. Incredibly handsome, cheeky bugger.
“I’ll bet you can,” Stede replies. “Here is the blueprint for the fortieth floor.”
Before Stede’s finished his sentence, Ed has circled around the desk to hover closely over Stede’s shoulder for a better look, mumbling to himself about connecting wires and cross-angles. His cologne—woodsy and sharp and instantly recognizable to Stede as quite expensive—wafts keenly into Stede’s nostrils. It’s layered under a light fog of cigarette smoke and something else that Stede surmises belongs to Ed and Ed alone.
“One’s going up here, too…” Ed says, pointing a broad finger with a nail coated in a sumptuous aubergine lacquer at the north side of the map, near the restrooms. Stede’s mesmerized by the head of that snake tattoo nesting next to a pair of nautical stars on the back of Ed’s hand.
“You with me, mate?” Ed asks him. “You seem distracted.”
“You’re very close,” Stede replies, ears and underarms heating at the realization that Ed has been speaking and Stede wouldn’t be able to recall a single word for the life of him.
“And that’s distracting?” Ed says with a smug look, his eyes darting over Stede’s face, landing on his lips just as Stede flashes the tip of his tongue out to lick at the sudden dryness.
“Very,” he responds, the edges of his lips pulling upward, eardrums keeping the rhythm of his loudly beating heart.
“Sorry, mate. I’ll try to be less distracting for you,” Ed says, voice lowered.
Oh, fuck him.
“Can you print this out for me?” Ed requests.
“Of course.”
He does so, sending the mechanical whiz of the printer right outside Stede’s office to break the silence that hangs in the air between them.
“That a Rolex?” Ed asks him, reaching a hand down to touch a thumb and forefinger just outside of the silver watch’s pearl-toned face.
“You fancy a fine watch?” Stede returns, gathering words to throw on the fire of conversation that’s just been kindled.
“Think maybe I do.”
“Well, yes, it’s a—”
“Datejust. Oyster. Perpetual,” they say simultaneously, grinning by the end.
Stede’s face lights up with appreciation. “Yes.”
“Women’s,” Ed adds. “I prefer the women’s watches.”
“I bought my wife this one as an anniversary present years ago,” Stede tells him.
“Lucky woman.”
“Ex-wife,” Stede corrects quickly. “She, um, thought it too gaudy.”
“Well, I’m a pretty ostentatious fuck, so I think it looks fuckin’ rad,” Ed says.
“I suppose it does.”
“Can I try it on?”
Stede looks up at Ed with wide eyes, eyebrows twisted into question marks.
“Not gonna steal it, mate,” Ed adds.
“No, of course not. That’s not—I don’t think that,” Stede insists, unclasping his watch and sliding it off his wrist. “Give me your wrist.”
Ed holds out his arm, the smooth underside faced up, a long green artery crossing down the center buffeted by the cords of his tendons. Stede loops the watch over Ed’s hand, slips it to his wrist and holds Ed’s arm to press the clasp closed.
“There,” he says, letting go of Ed’s arm.
Ed gives the watch a couple of quick shakes on his wrist, admiring the look of it, bringing it closer, then holding it farther out. “’S nice,” he says. “Might have to stop by and get myself one on the way home.”
“Well, you can wear this one for the rest of the day. If you’d like.”
Ed looks at him, eyes focused. “You serious?”
“Think of it as a test drive.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Ed smiles.
“A Rolex is quite the spontaneous treat for someone who installs security systems.”
Ed cracks out a laugh. “Yeah,” he agrees. “But, not as much for someone who owns the company.”
Christ.
Stede’s heart sinks to his stomach at a presumed shallow assumption, which must be written all over his face, because Ed keeps laughing, gives Stede a wink as he leaves his office. “I’ll be here all day. Come say hi,” Ed throws back on the way out. “I’ll be the bloke up on the ladder.”
Stede watches from his office as Ed takes the papers from the printer and rolls them up for an easy slide into his back pocket before scaling back up his ladder. Stede keeps his eyes on that strip of skin that gets exposed when Ed raises his arms again to continue his camera installation.
Mood somehow suspiciously lifted, Stede logs back in to his desktop to begin his workday.
*
Much to his disappointment, Stede doesn’t get to say hi to Ed much that day—twice on his way to the restroom, once before his two hour Apple Store trip, and once on the way back, letting his eyes linger on those tattooed arms, the curl at the ends of his salt and pepper strands that lightly catch on the cotton fibers of his shirt. Letting Ed’s eyes catch him staring, each time returning to his handiwork with a knowing little smirk that Stede wants to lick off of his face.
Maybe he laughs a little too hard at Abshir’s thinking that it’s Tuesday, maybe he quirks a head over his shoulder to see if Ed notices, maybe sees Ed smiling to himself.
He’s at his desk still at six-thirty, the office empty again, the lights dim.
No more Evelyn, who can’t for the life of her figure out how to use headphones on a Zoom call. No more Jeffrey, with his brown-nosing compliments of school-aged achievements that Stede accomplished while the two were boarding schoolmates. And, after he knocks on his door and wishes him good night, no more Ed.
Ed.
He’s been thinking about the man all day.
Thinking about his smell, the cat-like grace with which he moves. Thinking about how those work-worn palms would feel gripping Stede’s cock in the open air of the office, right in-between the fucking copy machine and the fake dracaena fragrans outside his door. How that voice would sound growled into his ear telling Stede how much Ed has also been thinking about him, how much he wants him.
His cock swells in his pants with Ed on his mind, and Stede makes no move to stop it, makes no move to send his thoughts elsewhere. He stays at his desk, carefully watching the empty office floor for any signs of life.
Strange way of putting it, Stede thinks, as the place still has no life even when bodies fill it out.
Belt and pants loosened, he reaches into his underwear. Fingers skate down the soft skin of his shaft, feeling the heat and the swell of veins underneath. He gets a snug hold around himself, pushes his hips up into his fist in a slow rhythm, letting his head fall on the back of his ergonomic office chair, letting starved breaths leave his mouth, gaped open with pleasure.
Images overtake him of Ed’s eyes and the long lashes that line them, that hair like spun moonglow that falls over his shoulders. He conjures that smoky voice and Ed’s tattoos and that fucking smile that makes him look like something dangerous but altogether inimitable.
Picking up the pace pulls out a desperate little whimper from deep in his throat, the only sound in the office other than the low squelch of his cock, slick with his precum, sliding against his hand and an infrequent grumble from the copier trying to keep itself awake.
Before Stede can stop himself, his orgasm is dragging through him, and he shoves the back of his hand to his mouth to stifle the moan climbing out of him. He pants hard on the come down as he tries to catch his breath, reaching for a handful of Kleenex from the box on top of his desk to clean the mess he’s made of his hand.
It’s been a decent span of time since he’s done this in the office. The last time he needed a quick pick-me-up after office hours was months ago, when he jerked himself off to the memory of a drunken make-out with his freshly-hired assistant three years ago. He was newly-divorced, and the assistant was going through a (temporary/well-timed) breakup with their significant other. Neither of them speaks about it to this day, but Stede still thinks about how far it could have gone.
Now, all he wants is Ed. It’s a singleminded, highly specific endeavor, but it’s the only one he wants to entertain. He doesn’t know how he’d be satisfied otherwise.
*
The next morning, Stede comes into the office with a smile on his face. He’d gone home the evening before and thought about Ed in the shower and again in bed. Still doesn’t understand the logistics of how sudden and consuming his lusty thoughts and his anatomy have consolidated, but he doesn’t question it.
He holds the elevator for a pregnant woman to board. “Lovely morning, isn’t it?” Stede asks her on the ride up. She smiles politely, keeps her head down in her phone.
The familiar ding lets him know that he’s reached his floor. Empty, as he’d hoped. Overhead lights dimmed, Stede sees that two computers have picture slideshow screensavers still on. He makes a bee-line to his own desktop to pull up blueprints to the basement.
To find out where the security room is.
Before he can sit, he notices a white paper bag and a lidded white cup on his desk. Upon opening the lid, steam drifts into the air from the surface of hot coffee. Further intrigued, he opens the bag: one napkin-wrapped glazed doughnut. Stede lets out a huff of a laugh before guessing, second-guessing, then letting his assumptions settle that this thoughtful breakfast on his desk has been provided by Ed.
Giggling and slightly dizzy with it, Stede looks in the bag again and shakes his head at the act of kindness, the sweet little flirtation that Stede now has to find a way to top. Something catches his eye on the bottom of the bag—black ink scrawled on the napkin. Stede’s heart flutters at the thought of even seeing Ed’s handwriting, much less in a note addressed to him, and when he pulls the napkin out, all of the blood drains from his face.
Were you thinking about glazing my face like this in your office last night?
- x
Shit.
Stede’s head spins around to the fucking camera that Ed was installing the previous day, and he knows—he knows—Ed’s eyes are on him right now.