ೃLETTERS HOMEᝰ To the world, Michael Jackson belongs to everyone. To Claudia, he is simply hers.
Away from the noise of fame, Michael has built a private world around his wife, filled with tenderness, excess, and a devotion that borders on obsession. Claudia has never cared about the jewels, the houses, or the luxury; all she wants is him.
A story of marriage, fame, faith, and two people who love each other with the same beautiful, dangerous intensity. warnings : grown folk shit
Every man had his vice, some private appetite he kept tucked behind his ribs and hidden from the eyes of the world, some secret indulgence capable of making discipline buckle beneath desire, and for Michael Jackson that weakness had never been liquor, cards, women, or any of the ordinary temptations men whispered about behind closed doors.
It was Claudia.
His Claudia.
His other half, his wife, the quiet axis upon which the rest of his life seemed to turn, his own Rapunzel tucked safely inside a tower of his careful making—not imprisoned there, never that, because Claudia had teeth enough to tear apart any cage that attempted to hold her—but cherished within walls she had entered willingly, where the noise of the world could not reach her unless she invited it inside. Michael possessed the key only because she had placed it in his hand, and he guarded that privilege with the solemnity of a priest protecting the innermost chamber of a temple, understanding that access was not ownership and that devotion meant knowing the difference.
He took care of his wife.
The words sounded simple enough, almost ordinary, yet Michael treated them as covenant.
He loved music, certainly; loved the architecture of a song, the ache of strings, the electricity that travelled through his limbs when rhythm entered his body and demanded movement, but somewhere along the years his ambition had gained another altar. Every rehearsal stretched beyond midnight, every studio session pursued until exhaustion made his eyes burn, every stage beneath which thousands screamed his name became, in some secret corner of his mind, another offering carried home to Claudia.
He worked because he loved the work.
He worked harder because he loved her.
If success placed the riches of kingdoms within his reach, then his first instinct was to drape them around his wife, not because Claudia required extravagance to remain beside him, but because excess became almost embarrassingly tender when filtered through Michael’s devotion. He wanted pearls lying against the soft hollow of her throat, diamonds catching candlelight along her wrists, silks from Italy and France slipping beneath his fingers whenever he embraced her, sheets fine enough that she disappeared into them like Venus sinking beneath the foam of the sea. If there existed water clearer than what already flowed through their home, he wanted that drawn for her bath; if some craftsman in Florence could create a softer shoe, Michael wanted Claudia fitted for it; if the merchants of Rome themselves had emptied their vaults before him, he would have stood among the gold asking whether there was anything finer hidden in the back.
He wanted to adorn her the way ancient emperors adorned temples, except Claudia was never an idol to him, never some false goddess raised above the God Michael still understood as Creator. The distinction mattered deeply in the private theology of his heart. He did not worship Claudia; he served her because he loved her, and in Michael’s mind there was something profoundly biblical in service freely chosen, something that reminded him that love was supposed to kneel sometimes, supposed to wash feet rather than demand crowns, supposed to prove itself through patience and labour instead of declarations shouted loudly enough for strangers to hear.
If Christ could demonstrate love through humility, Michael could certainly carry his wife’s bags.
If Scripture commanded husbands to love with sacrifice rather than domination, then Michael intended to take the instruction literally enough to inconvenience himself.
And inconvenience himself he did.
He would cross an entire house because Claudia mentioned being thirsty rather than ring for someone else, would interrupt meetings because she had forgotten lunch, would learn the difference between fabrics he previously could not have identified at gunpoint because one made her skin itch and another made her sleep better. Her comfort became a private science, one he studied with almost ridiculous dedication, storing away preferences Claudia herself forgot she had expressed.
Yet she could live without every luxurious thing he placed before her, and Michael knew that better than anyone.
That knowledge was precisely why he adored giving them.
Claudia could admire a necklace and still remove it without hesitation. She could sleep beneath thousand-thread-count sheets and remain perfectly content beneath an old blanket on the sofa if Michael lay beside her. She could dine beneath chandeliers or eat something directly from his plate while sitting cross-legged on the kitchen counter, and neither circumstance altered the way she looked at him.
Money could delight her.
It could never purchase her.
Michael had discovered that lesson particularly well whenever he made the catastrophic mistake of allowing a gift to masquerade as an apology.
Those gifts returned with almost military efficiency.
The bracelet would arrive precisely where he had left it, nestled untouched within its velvet case. Flowers might remain because Claudia considered throwing living things away wasteful, but the card would be placed upon his desk with a line drawn beneath whatever excuse he had attempted to disguise as remorse. Once, after an especially foolish argument, Michael had sent her something so expensive that one of his assistants had looked physically ill carrying the box.
Claudia had sent it back before dinner.
Michael could picture her expression even without being there to witness it, that delicate frown settling over her mouth while the faintest crease appeared between her brows, her nose twitching in the peculiar little movement it made whenever irritation threatened to overwhelm whatever dignity she was attempting to maintain.
That nose was why she became Thumper.
“Don’t do that, Thumper,” he would murmur whenever the twitch appeared.
“Do what, Bambi?”
“That.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“Your nose disagree.”
Then she would glare harder, which inevitably made it twitch again, and Michael would have to turn his face away to conceal his smile before Claudia decided murder was an acceptable marital response.
She called him Bambi because of his eyes, because even after fame hardened so many edges of him, there remained something wide and almost painfully expressive in his gaze, some softness Claudia claimed made it impossible for him to conceal guilt properly. Michael protested the nickname only enough to preserve his dignity; privately, he treasured it because it belonged to her. Millions might scream Michael, newspapers might turn Jackson into something enormous and impersonal, but Bambi existed only in Claudia’s mouth.
He was her husband.
Her man.
And Michael took both titles with a seriousness bordering upon the archaic.
There was something almost Roman in the way he conceptualised marriage, not in the old brutality of ownership but in the grandeur of household devotion, as though their home were a private republic and Claudia stood beside him not beneath him, the keeper of its hearth while he went outward into the world and returned with whatever was necessary to keep that flame alive. Vesta might have guarded Rome’s sacred fire, but Michael guarded the peace surrounding Claudia with equal vigilance, because home ceased to feel like architecture once she was absent from it.
He wanted to provide.
Not because he doubted Claudia’s capability, for his wife possessed a mind that could make older men reconsider speaking carelessly around her, but because providing gave Michael a language for affection when language itself sometimes failed him. Tuition was paid before Claudia ever saw an invoice. Books appeared when the semester began. If she required transportation, there was a car; if a professor recommended a conference, Michael had already arranged the flight before Claudia finished deciding whether she wanted to attend.
She would receive her degree from one of the finest universities California could offer, and she would receive it without spending one anxious evening wondering how much the next semester cost.
Whenever Claudia argued that she could work while studying, Michael behaved as though she had personally proposed descending into a coal mine.
“For what?” he would ask, genuinely affronted. “Baby, what you need a job for?”
“To make money, Michael. That generally is the concept.”
“I make money.”
“That is your money.”
His brows would draw together immediately.
“Our money.”
And there lay the almost maddening simplicity of his philosophy.
Michael had no interest in making Claudia financially dependent because he wished to control her movements; in his own mind, the equation was embarrassingly romantic. He possessed more money than either of them could reasonably spend, therefore why should the woman he loved exhaust herself earning what he could place into her hands without feeling its absence? He wanted her mind devoted to her degree, her afternoons free enough to discover who she wished to become, her energy preserved for things she actually loved.
“Your job is school,” he would tell her, before softening with that little smile he saved for whenever he knew his next sentence would irritate her. “And loving me.”
Claudia would stare.
Michael would grin.
“I’m serious.”
“That is not employment.”
“It is in this house.”
“What are the benefits?”
“Excellent.”
She would inevitably laugh then, destroying whatever sternness she had attempted to maintain, and Michael would count the argument won even when Claudia insisted it was not.
Yet beneath all the teasing lived something far more consuming.
His devotion to her had exceeded reason so gradually that Michael could no longer identify the point at which ordinary love became something vast enough to frighten him. Perhaps there had never been a dividing line at all. Perhaps his affection had simply grown around him like ivy around marble, winding itself through every chamber of his life until removing Claudia would require dismantling the structure itself.
She existed inside his decisions even when physically absent from the room.
He would hear a melody and wonder whether she would like it.
See a house and imagine where she would read.
Pass a boutique and notice something in the window because the colour would flatter her.
Taste some unfamiliar dish overseas and make a mental note to have the chef learn it before he returned home.
Michael carried Claudia through the world like the Israelites carried the Ark—not because she herself was holy, but because what existed between them had become covenant in his mind, something entrusted to him rather than merely possessed. He guarded their marriage from strangers, from the industry, from people who believed fame entitled them to peer inside every sacred chamber of his life, because there were portions of himself Michael would place before millions and portions that belonged only beyond the veil.
Claudia lived beyond that veil.
She was his Sabbath after six days of labour, the stillness into which he returned when the stage had taken everything from him.
She was the hand at the back of his neck when applause became too loud inside his skull, the voice that reminded him to eat, the woman capable of telling him he was wrong without trembling over what his name might do in response. She did not genuflect before Michael Jackson, and perhaps that was why Michael Joseph could have knelt at her feet without feeling diminished.
There was no rational arithmetic to it.
Ask him what Claudia had done to earn such devotion and he might have stared blankly, because the question itself misunderstood him. Love was not wages. Claudia had not completed a list of virtues and received his heart as payment.
She simply existed, and something in him had answered.
It bordered upon madness sometimes, that willingness he possessed to reorder his world around hers, the way one request spoken softly from her could outweigh the voices of twenty men speaking simultaneously. He was not unaware of it; Michael knew perfectly well how ridiculous he could become where Claudia was concerned, knew his brothers laughed whenever his entire schedule mysteriously rearranged itself because his wife had mentioned missing him.
He simply did not care.
Let them laugh.
Samson had possessed his strength, David his harp, Solomon his wisdom, and Achilles the glory men still remembered centuries after Troy had fallen.
Michael had Claudia.
And if loving her made him foolish, then foolishness was a crown he would wear gladly.
Not when his wife wrapped herself around him as though the very shape of her had been made to remember his, her legs drawing him nearer while his name fell from her lips again and again, each repetition softer and more helpless than the last, until the sound ceased to resemble language and became something closer to invocation.
Michael.
Michael.
Michael.
Gods had been called upon with less reverence.
The old pantheon had heard their names cried across battlefields, carved into marble before armies marched beneath standards soaked in blood, invoked by emperors pleading for victory and sailors begging Neptune not to swallow them whole, but Claudia spoke his name without conquest in it, without fear, without any desire to summon destruction. Hers was no decree of Mars, no desperate bargain made before Jupiter’s throne; it was love given sound, passion made audible, the private music of a woman calling for her husband because in that moment there was nowhere else she wished to be.
And Michael—Lord help him—could never hear it without becoming undone.
There were moments when Claudia’s love seemed almost cruel in its tenderness, because she had discovered every vulnerable place within him without ever setting out to search for them, and now she touched those places simply by existing. Once, when they were younger and desire still frightened him with the sheer force of its arrival, he had believed her body was the most dangerous thing about her, had thought the torment lay entirely in the curve of her waist beneath his hands, the warmth of her mouth, the perfume lingering upon his clothes long after she had left the room.
He had been such a boy then.
He understood now that the body had been merely the doorway.
The true danger was being loved by her.
It was Claudia knowing which silence meant he needed company and which meant he needed space; Claudia remembering the small things he said beneath his breath and presenting them back to him months later as proof that someone had been listening; Claudia taking the parts of him that the world either worshipped or ridiculed and regarding both with the same maddening simplicity because neither version impressed her more than the man underneath.
Her body could tempt him.
Her love could ruin him.
And Michael had long since stopped wanting to be saved from either.
She tortured him with affection, with fidelity, with the casual certainty of her belonging beside him, and there was something almost mythological in the way his devotion answered hers. Venus herself, for all the worship laid at her feet, had been saddled with stories of jealousy, betrayal and restless desire, while Claudia and Michael possessed something he imagined even the goddess might have looked upon with envy: not passion alone, but passion allowed to grow roots, desire given somewhere permanent to live.
Because theirs was not merely fire.
Fire consumed.
What existed between them built.
It had remade him slowly, almost invisibly, until one morning Michael had looked at the life surrounding him and realised Claudia had not simply become part of it; she had become woven through its foundations. Her books occupied shelves beside his records, her shoes appeared where he inevitably stumbled over them, her perfume haunted pillows, and her handwriting lived upon scraps of paper scattered across rooms he had once thought belonged exclusively to him. Even his body seemed to recognise her before conscious thought did, shoulders loosening when she entered, hands reaching automatically, his whole nervous system responding to her presence as though some ancient creature beneath his skin had learned the difference between spectacle and home.
She had breathed life into him.
Not in the manner God had breathed into Adam, because Michael would never confuse romantic devotion with divine creation, yet the biblical image returned to him sometimes with startling tenderness: dust becoming flesh only after breath entered it, something fashioned but unfinished until life arrived.
Before Claudia, Michael had often felt like something fashioned by other hands.
Joseph’s discipline had shaped him.
The stage had shaped him.
The audience had shaped him.
Expectation had carved and sanded and polished him until he sometimes wondered whether anything untouched remained beneath all that craftsmanship.
Then Claudia had loved him.
Not the product.
Not the prodigy.
Not the obedient son, the gifted brother, the beautiful boy under the lights.
Him.
And somehow that love had returned breath to places in him he had not realised had gone still.
She had made the vessel feel inhabited.
He thought perhaps that was what becoming a man truly meant, and how foolish he had been to imagine manhood as control, dominance, or some cold ability to remain unaffected. A boy believed strength meant never bending; a man eventually learned that there were things worth kneeling for. A boy guarded himself because he feared surrender would diminish him; a man could place his heart into another person’s keeping and understand that vulnerability chosen freely was not weakness but covenant.
Marriage had taught Michael that.
Claudia had taught him that.
He was her husband not because a certificate declared possession, nor because a ring transformed her into something belonging beneath his authority, but because he had stood before God and promised that his life would no longer be considered in the singular. His days had become their days, his triumphs their celebrations, his burdens something he would allow her to help carry rather than hoarding them beneath the mistaken belief that masculinity required suffering alone.
And he would give her all of it.
His days.
His nights.
The shirt from his own back if she were cold, and the coat over that when the shirt proved insufficient.
His last dollar if circumstances somehow reduced the fortune surrounding them to one crumpled bill.
His seat if she were tired.
His plate if she were hungry.
His sleep if she needed somebody awake beside her.
His pride, particularly his pride, because loving Claudia had taught him that sometimes the most masculine thing a husband could do was walk into a room after an argument, swallow whatever stubbornness sat like iron beneath his tongue, and say I was wrong before resentment found somewhere permanent to live.
Service no longer felt like lowering himself.
Service felt like love with sleeves rolled up.
He thought often of Christ washing the feet of those He loved, choosing humility even while knowing who He was, and Michael understood the comparison only in its smallest human echo: that love did not always stand above and provide commands. Sometimes it knelt. Sometimes it washed. Sometimes it carried. Sometimes it placed another’s comfort before its own without needing applause for the sacrifice.
So let the world call him king.
He would still kneel to fasten Claudia’s shoe if the strap came loose.
Let people bow when he entered rooms.
He would still bend over his sleeping wife to pull the blankets across her shoulders.
Let stadiums shake beneath his name.
Nothing those thousands could scream compared to Claudia whispering Michael against him in the darkness, because their love required no audience to make it real.
That was his weakness.
Perhaps his greatest strength, too.
He had breathed life into Claudia in all the ordinary ways spouses did when they built a life together, encouraging her, protecting room for her dreams, pouring tenderness into whatever wounds she allowed him to see, while she had performed the same quiet resurrection upon him, and somewhere within that exchange Michael had ceased merely being a boy who desperately wanted to be loved and become a man capable of loving deliberately in return.
Not perfectly.
Never perfectly.
But wholly.
So when Claudia looked at him with that unbearable softness, when she called him Bambi and smiled as though she knew exactly how quickly the name could strip every defence from his body, Michael felt the old ache rise beneath his ribs, vast enough that language again became useless.
He would give her everything.
Not because she demanded sacrifice.
Because she never did.
And perhaps that was the final cruelty of Claudia’s love: she asked so little from a man who wanted desperately to give her the world.
The fire beside them had come fully alive, flames lifting and folding over one another within the hearth as though some small domestic god had been summoned expressly for the evening, sending amber light across the room in restless waves that turned every polished surface golden and made the shadows tremble along the walls. Beneath Claudia, the thick rug cushioned the length of her body so completely that she seemed to have been laid upon something softer than earth, its fibres warm beneath her back while the heat from the fireplace gathered against her skin and softened the edges of everything beyond Michael.
Nearby, the bottle of wine stood abandoned beside two half-filled glasses, an absurdly expensive vintage he had brought home from one of France’s finest vineyards because somebody had assured him, with tremendous seriousness, that it was exquisite. Michael had listened, nodded as though he understood every word about tannins and oak and whatever else the man had been describing, then purchased it immediately because Claudia had smiled at the bottle.
Neither of them particularly liked it.
It was much too bitter, the sort of wine that seemed determined to punish the tongue for drinking it, yet they had spent the first half of the evening pretending otherwise, lifting their glasses with ridiculous dignity and discussing its “complexity” in increasingly elaborate terms until Claudia finally caught Michael grimacing after a sip he had believed she was not watching.
“You hate it,” she had accused.
“I do not.”
“You look like you swallowed medicine.”
“It’s sophisticated.”
“It tastes like somebody soaked a tree branch in vinegar.”
Michael had nearly choked laughing, the expensive wine threatening to come straight back through his nose as Claudia collapsed against him, and whatever performance of elegance they had attempted died there between them.
Because beneath all the silk, all the polished marble and imported furniture, beneath the chandeliers and paintings and bottles brought across oceans simply because Michael possessed the means to do so, there remained two children from Gary somewhere inside them, two kids who could still recognise themselves beneath everything success had placed upon their shoulders.
Perhaps that was what Michael loved most.
Claudia could sit beside him drinking wine worth more than some families earned in weeks and still wrinkle her nose because it tasted terrible. She could wear diamonds to dinner and kick her shoes off beneath the table before dessert. She could inhabit every luxury he offered without ever becoming impressed by luxury itself, because the grandeur mattered only insofar as it became something they could enjoy together.
The castle meant nothing without its queen.
Claudia lay beneath him now, her shirt discarded somewhere beyond the reach of either of them, abandoned among the small evidence of an evening that had gradually forgotten everything outside itself. Her eyes were closed, lashes resting against her cheeks while the firelight moved warmly over her face, and the expression there struck Michael with such force that for several seconds he simply watched her.
There was pleasure in it, certainly, but something far more intimate beneath the pleasure—the complete absence of vigilance.
Claudia trusted him enough to close her eyes.
That thought possessed him more thoroughly than any physical desire ever could.
Michael had spent so much of his life being watched that he understood the violence hidden inside observation, the strange way another person’s gaze could turn a body into an object and a moment into performance. Cameras had followed him since childhood, audiences studying every movement, strangers deciding what his face meant before he had finished making the expression.
Yet Claudia lay before him without performing anything.
She did not arrange herself beautifully for his benefit.
She simply existed.
And because she trusted him, Michael was permitted to witness her that way.
His hand moved over her with the almost absent-minded tenderness of someone reassuring himself that the beloved thing before him was real, not grasping, not hurried, but lingering wherever warmth met his palm. There was an emotional hunger in him that physical closeness could never entirely satisfy, because what Michael wanted was not merely proximity to Claudia’s body; he wanted proximity to every hidden chamber inside her, wanted to understand whatever thoughts moved behind her closed eyes and whatever dreams she kept folded beneath the ordinary conversation of their days.
He wanted to be let in.
Again and again and again.
Marriage had not cured him of yearning; if anything, having Claudia had made him yearn more desperately, because now he understood precisely what could be lost.
He leaned closer, his forehead brushing hers while the fire continued crackling beside them, and Claudia’s breath caught softly between them, the sound disappearing against his mouth when he kissed her.
There was nothing hurried about it.
That was the strange luxury of belonging to one another.
They had nowhere to be.
No doors needed opening.
No crowds waited beyond the room.
No stage manager counted down the minutes until Michael belonged to somebody else again.
The world could survive without him for one night.
He kissed Claudia slowly, tasting the faint bitterness of the wine still lingering upon her lips and smiling against her mouth when she made the smallest dissatisfied sound.
“You still taste like that awful wine,” she murmured.
“So do you.”
“That’s your fault.”
“I bought it for you.”
“You bought terrible wine for me.”
Michael laughed quietly, pressing another kiss against the corner of her mouth. “Cost a fortune.”
“That make it taste better?”
“No.”
“Then hush.”
Her fingers found the back of his neck and drew him closer, and Michael went willingly, because surrender had become instinct where Claudia was concerned.
Outside these walls, people called him many things.
A genius.
A phenomenon.
A king.
Inside the room, none of those titles carried any weight.
Here he was simply the man Claudia touched without ceremony, the husband whose hair she tangled her fingers through, the boy from Gary who had somehow built a palace and remained most content lying upon a rug beside the woman who remembered him before crowns ever entered the conversation.
The image almost amused him.
King and queen, sprawled before the hearth like they owned the world, drinking wine neither of them enjoyed and laughing too loudly inside a house large enough to swallow their voices whole.
And perhaps they did own something greater than any kingdom.
Not land.
Not wealth.
Not the impossible machinery of Michael’s fame.
They possessed solitude.
A rare little country they had created between themselves, invisible upon every map and impenetrable to everyone who did not know its language.
Their home became its borders.
Their marriage its law.
Their bed, the rug before the fire, a kitchen at midnight, the back seat of a car, any place where one reached for the other and was answered became another province of that private nation.
People often imagined loneliness as the inevitable cost of being shut away from the world, but Michael had discovered something different with Claudia.
Alone was not truly alone when she was there.
Silence did not become emptiness when her breathing occupied it.
Isolation did not become exile when her hand remained inside his.
Even a castle, with its absurd number of rooms and corridors long enough for footsteps to echo, became intimate when Claudia moved through it, because she had a way of shrinking enormous spaces around them until the entire universe seemed no larger than whatever distance remained between her mouth and his.
Michael looked down at her as the firelight caught within her eyes when they finally opened, and the devotion that struck him was so sharp it bordered upon pain.
He had bought the house.
Filled the cellar.
Chosen the rugs.
Imported the wine.
Made certain every room held whatever comfort money could purchase.
Yet Claudia was the one who had turned any of it into home.
And when her arms tightened around him, drawing him back into the warmth of her body while the fire crackled beside them and the bitter wine went forgotten, Michael understood once again that the finest thing he owned had never belonged to him at all.
She had chosen him.
That was better.
Even now, as her moans echoed through their home, his favourite symphony, one he wished he could bottle up and keep with him, only for his ears, the recordings he had of her never did her justice, never captured the way her brows pinched as her orgasm ran through her, it didn’t capture the curling of her toes or the way her hands shot out for anything to hold onto for purchase as she drenched both of them in her nectar.
“O-oh Michael, Michael, Michael,” she wailed as he chased his own high, his hand in hers, their rings clinking together, a chime that resembled their glasses of champagne they’d had in the confines of their hotel room after they’d eloped.
He was overwhelmed, his senses truly overwhelmed in her, in Claudia, in her taste, in the way her sweaty skin felt against his, in the scent of her sweat, in everything that Claudia found imperfect but he worshipped. The sight of the slight stretch marks at her hips, the very same hips that would carry their children someday soon if the creator was willing. Her eyes rolled to the back of her head as a thick globule of spit landed from his mouth to her clit, his hand immediately rubbing the swollen and sensitive nerve in unison with her thrusts as he worked her into another orgasm, never truly satiated with the first, second or third she’d given him that night. She squealed as she wriggled away from him, or tried to, but he immediately pulled her into a sitting position, ensuring she was on top of him, his back digging into the sectional as now they were face to face, breathing in the same air, her pussy soaked enough it ran down his balls onto the carpet below them.
“What did I say ‘bout that runnin’ you do?” he asked her as he brought her closer, her pebbled nipped rubbing against her chest as he pressed a kiss to her mouth, sloppy but his devotion present as her lips moulded against his, their tongues brushing one another as his tongue reached to taste the leftover wine and cum from when her mouth had pleasured him earlier.
“You love me?” he asked as he began thrusting up hard into her, knocking the wind out of her and snatching her ability to respond as he watched her eyes roll to the back of her head as he stole her breath. “Mhm l-love you s-so much,” she whined as her thoughts scrambled with how fast and hard he fucked up into her wet heat. The rhythmic plap…plap…plap resonated through their living room as the grand picture of them above their fireplace watched them silently, spectators to the loving he’d given her time and time again.
His thighs burned as he fucked up into her, groaning into her ear as her pussy gripped him like a vice, eager to pull him in further and further as Claudia mumbled unintelligibly about how she could feel him in her stomach.He did not want to stop, could not seem to find the point at which wanting her became enough, as though Claudia had made an insatiable thing of him and marriage had merely given that hunger somewhere holy to live; and wasn’t a husband permitted a little excess in the arms of his wife, after vows had been spoken, rings exchanged, every rule obeyed and every door crossed properly, surely some sins became pardonable when they were committed in the name of devotion, because when it came to Claudia, Michael had never learned moderation, only the aching certainty that no amount of her would ever feel like enough.
With that in mind, Claudia let out a yelp as she felt herself being lifted up and taken against the wall, letting her drop one leg onto the floor as the other one rested against his shoulder, his arms around her waist to steady her as he slowed his pace, thrusting into her slower than before, eager to prolong their pleasure. “I missed this dick, missed it soo much,” Claudia whined, her mind hazy as their essence dripped onto the ground.
“Yeah? You missed me baby?” he whispered as he watched her bite her lip as her hand went down to toy with her clit, her titties jiggling as he thrust up into her.
“Mhmm… don’t go on tour no more,” Claudia whined, the words dissolving together as she clung to him, eyes heavy and unfocused with exhaustion and affection, as though she had forgotten there was an entire world beyond the warmth of him.
Michael laughed softly against her temple, breath still uneven as he ground himself into her body, going in deeper as his coily pubic hair gave her clit that extra stimulation. “Gotta work for us, mama…”
“Y-you don’t gotta do none of that,” she interrupted, shaking her head before he could finish, suddenly earnest beneath all that dreamy softness. Her fingers tightened in his hair like she was afraid somebody might come through the door and take him back from her. “Ion need none of it… don’t need the houses, don’t need them diamonds, don’t need you runnin’ all over the world tryin’ to give me everything.”
Her voice cracked faintly, and Michael’s smile disappeared.
Claudia looked at him then, properly looked at him, pupils heavy and expression almost painfully open, every sensible barrier lowered until all that remained was the same frightening devotion he carried for her reflected straight back at him.
“I just need you,” she whispered, pulling him closer until there was hardly room for air between them. “That’s all you gotta do. Jus’ love me, Michael. Come home and love me. You hear me?”
There was something almost pleading about it now, something possessive hiding beneath the tenderness.
“Let everybody else have the records and the shows and all that Michael Jackson mess,” she murmured, nose brushing his. “But you? You mine. Michael Joseph? That’s mine.”
And Lord, that did something terrible to him, something nasty as he pulled out of Claudia and turned her toward the wall, her cheek brushing the cold surface as he tapped his wet dick against her folds…once… twice…thrice before sliding back in.
Because perhaps he had spent all these years believing he was the unreasonable one, the husband with devotion wound too tightly around his ribs, only to discover Claudia had been quietly carrying the same madness inside herself.
The fire burned lower as the night folded itself around them, its once-bright flames sinking into a slow amber glow while the forgotten wine remained untouched beside the hearth and the great house seemed to exhale around its king and queen. Michael lowered his mouth to Claudia’s again, softer this time, all teasing gone, and when she drew him nearer he followed without hesitation, allowing the rest of the world to disappear beneath the sound of her moans, the warmth of her hands, and the quiet repetition of his name against his skin. Somewhere beyond those walls waited music, obligations, headlines, and a kingdom forever demanding something from him, but none of it could cross the threshold tonight; there was only Claudia, only Michael, only two wedding rings catching the last flicker of firelight as their hands found one another and the room surrendered gently to shadow.
tags : @mamasturn @plan3tch1ld @yourleogf @freaky1nterlude @tenacioustestamentambush @faiology @chocotragedy @tenderlyboundlessparagon (lmk if you want to be added or removed)
