When Maude Chavez Crashes In, NSFWLover Gets Real Dirty

Waking Up Hungover to a Gunshot

I was halfway into a dream about lemon pancakes and my old dog, Puck, when the gunshot cracked through the walls. A second later, Maude crashed through my apartment door like a hurricane made of leather and blood. She stumbled in, bleeding from her side, clutching something shiny and probably illegal.

"Don’t ask," she hissed, kicking the door shut behind her. "Got a towel?"

I didn’t flinch. I mean, this wasn’t the first time Maude had used my place as a bandage stop. In the nine months I’d known her, she’d shown up like this four times. Maybe five. Hard to count when each time was as chaotic as the last.

I tossed her a kitchen towel—one with a cartoon eggplant on it—and she pressed it to her wound, grinning through the pain like a lunatic.

“You know this is the fifth time,” I muttered, helping her toward the couch. “And that’s the last eggplant towel I got.”

"You're a saint, baby," she said, and collapsed onto the cushions like a ragdoll.

Coffee, Blood, and Morning News

The thing about Maude is—she doesn’t apologize. Ever. Not for bleeding on your rug, not for stealing your charger, not for dropping a dead guy’s burner phone in your sink because “I needed it fried, okay?”

She just exists in this blur of chaos. Cyber assassin one minute, snoring with her boots on my couch the next.

I brewed two cups of coffee and handed one to her as she squinted at the morning light. The wound wasn’t deep. Just a graze. She’d already patched herself up with duct tape and God knows what else.

“You should really stop pissing off the Gravedogs,” I said, sipping mine.

“They started it.”

“You blew up their drone hub.”

She shrugged, smirking. “It was a small one.”

I didn’t even bother arguing. I turned on the news—a fuzzy pirate stream out of Sector 9. Usual stuff: explosions, political scandals, new AI-control laws that no one would follow.

She took a long sip of coffee and muttered, “They’re tightening the city again. More cameras. More checkpoints.”

“You worried?”

“About me? Nah.” She flashed that wild grin again. “I don’t get caught. I vanish.”

The Deal That Went Sideways

By noon, she was already itching to leave. She paced my living room like a caged animal, checking her gear, re-tightening her thigh holster, tapping on a cracked smartglass wristband.

“You sure you wanna go back out there?” I asked.

“Can’t afford not to,” she said. “Got a job waiting. Big one.”

“Big like… jail time? Or big like ‘another corpse in your purse’ big?”

She laughed. “Both, maybe. You worry too much.”

She left with a wink and the eggplant towel still tied around her waist like some kind of makeshift sash. I didn’t hear from her for two days.

Then—at 3:17 a.m. on a Tuesday—she messaged me: “Need pickup. Dockyard. Bring smokes.”

I cursed out loud, threw on jeans, and grabbed my jacket. I hadn’t smoked in years, but I always kept a pack in the freezer. For Maude. For moments exactly like this.

When I found her, she was crouched behind a stack of neon crates, fiddling with a drone remote and muttering to herself.

“You brought menthols?” she asked, not looking up.

“No. Regular.”

She gave me a look like I’d just ruined her birthday. “You suck. But thanks.”

Turns out, the deal had gone sideways. The guy—some ex-corp exec turned arms broker—had set her up. Tried to tag her with a neural tracker. She’d cut it out of her arm with a penknife and a shot of vodka.

“He didn’t expect me to bring friends,” she said, gesturing to the half-fried drone hovering in the shadows.

“You really need better hobbies,” I replied.

The Quiet Moment After the Fire

Maude slept on my couch again that night. No blood this time, just grime and soot and the smell of burnt plastic. I watched her for a while. Her breathing was shallow but steady. A woman who looked like she barely held herself together—and maybe that was true—but there was something weirdly peaceful about her in that moment.

In the daylight, she always felt like a glitch in the world’s code. Like she didn’t belong in any timeline except the wrong one. But here, wrapped in a secondhand blanket, boots still on, face half-buried in a throw pillow she’d probably stolen—she looked almost human.

Almost.

I made toast the next morning. She took one bite and said, “This is burnt.”

“Then cook it yourself.”

“Nah. I like the effort.”

And just like that, she was gone again. No goodbye. Just the smell of toast and smoke, and a bootprint on my wall where she’d kicked it on the way out.

That’s the thing about Maude Chavez. She never stays long enough to be real. But she’s real enough to leave a mark.

Sometimes I check the news and wonder if she’s still breathing. If she’s off somewhere, dodging drones and lighting fires she’ll never put out.

And sometimes—when it’s quiet and I catch the scent of menthol from the back of the freezer—I swear I hear her laugh in the static of my busted radio.