Dean realized, with the kind of clarity that always arrived too late to be useful, that there was in fact a pattern to his life.
A humiliating one.
More specifically, Dean kept making choices that felt brilliant in the moment and then left him suffering under their consequences afterward, and an alarming number of those consequences had Arion's face, Arion's voice, or Arion's hands somewhere in the architecture of the disaster.
It would have been easier to resent if he had not, on some deeply compromised level, kept participating.
Voluntarily.
Repeatedly.
Dean stood at last, which already felt like an achievement worthy of formal recognition, and reached for his clothes with the stubborn dignity of a man pretending he had not made several questionable choices in rapid succession. His body was still too aware, his skin too warm, his thoughts too disorganized for his liking, but vertical was vertical, and he intended to maintain that advantage.
