Chapter Text
Peter Strahm had never been possessed of an active fantasy life. If pressed to put words to his unique confluence of psycho-physiological peculiarities, he might've said aphantasia, or even asexuality, or anything else that meant an absence of experiences generally held to be pleasurable. He might've said something about how his real satisfaction came from being good at his job, thank you very much, and if he couldn't focus on sex right now it was because that job was just so important, took up so much of his mental real estate. That's what he'd told his ex-wife, in so many words.
Now, though, Peter had to wonder if he'd just never had the right material for his nascent sexual urges, if he’d simply denied himself the right container to project them onto. Because lately he found himself unable to think about much else.
It started the first time Peter brought Detective Hoffman coffee. He hadn’t been buying for Hoffman specifically, of course—it had been a treat for everyone staying late to work on the latest development in the Jigsaw case—and he telegraphed that fact clearly when he delivered not the strong black coffee he knew Hoffman preferred, but a latte, sweetened. Hoffman had taken one sip and arched an eyebrow up at Peter.
“I take it black,” he’d said simply, a casual reminder as if Peter were the department’s errand boy and not a Special Agent of the FBI. But in the end, Hoffman had drunk all of it. And Peter had noticed.
The next time, Peter bought him an extra-large caramel breve with whipped cream, caramel syrup drizzled over top in an extra-special fuck you.
“Gonna give me a fucking heart attack, Strahm,” Hoffman muttered, whipped cream adhering to the plush upper curve of his lips in a way that made Peter want to gag.
“You’re welcome for the eight-dollar coffee,” Peter huffed, rolling his eyes.
Hoffman drank the rest of it without complaint.
It didn’t take long for Peter to realize that Mark Hoffman would drink any coffee concoction put in front of him, no matter how absurd or how distant its relationship to actual coffee. Once, Peter brought him a decaf frappe (more accurately a milkshake at that point) just to see if he would notice, and Hoffman had sucked it all down while reviewing tapes from the two most recent killings, the straw between his lips serving up a continuous supply of cream and chocolate and God knew what else (corn syrup, Peter thought snidely) until it was noisily sputtering at the dregs and Hoffman was glancing down at the now-empty cup with an expression of mild confusion. Dumb shit, Peter gloated, and tightly crossed his legs.
In his conscious mind, Peter reassured himself that the thrill he felt when he watched Hoffman down his second white mocha of the day (With an extra pump of chocolate in that one, please), after berating Peter for yet another screwed-up coffee order, was only a kind of schadenfreude, a little power play to make the day less bleak when one clue after another had culminated in a dead end. Colleagues pranked each other all the time. And if Peter had started upping the ante, sliding a pastry or two onto Hoffman’s desk beside each vaguely-coffee drink, then it was only morbid curiosity, a desire to see how far the prank could extend. Of course, pranks between colleagues didn’t typically result in one colleague sneaking off to the washroom to frantically jerk himself off to thoughts of how the other colleague looked with crumbs all over his shirt and the frosting from a cheese Danish glistening at the edges of his lips.
And there was Peter’s filthy unconscious leaking out all over everything. The uncomfortable truth—the truth that made him squirm and gasp and thrust mechanically into his fist—was that he enjoyed having control over Hoffman, but he especially enjoyed having this particular flavor of control over Hoffman. When Hoffman sat down at his desk and Peter noticed that the buttons on his shirt were straining just a bit more than they had last week, he was overcome with the thought that he had done that, he was changing Hoffman’s body and Hoffman was doing nothing to stop him, just opening his mouth obliviously for the next treat. Sordid ideas flickered through the black box of Peter’s imagination—how he wanted to push his fingers into Hoffman’s mouth, make him drool on them, make him beg to be filled up with food and cock, maybe both at once, his smug face shoved into a cake while Peter fucked him from behind, gripping his softening hips tight enough to leave bruises, to leave welts from his fingernails blooming red alongside silvered stretch marks, and knowing that he was marking him… Peter came hard on that thought, biting his own hand to keep from crying out in a way that would alert any hapless passerby to exactly what was taking place in the washroom.
He broke skin; he tasted blood; he imagined it was Hoffman’s.