i may be a lil smizzed but first 10 minutes i’m GAGGGED
aniya got her fuckin groove back. I do not recall her giving kc this much ! (this is a tool for later)
sad boi dylan crushed me (I giggled at him hunched over NOT HUGGING HER BACK) is he deadass or just running with it? like has dylan been a bit waiting on his storyline? he was deadass looking at the cameras. dylan absolutely without a doubt is a production plant. she gave him a handy under the covers man come on ik what i’m talking about
gal feet is dirty & he smiling in amora face im blew but not surprised. amora def like yt boys anyway.
kenzie has a habit of nodding her way through hard conversations. she feel guilty as fuck over gal & dylan just walked her right into a relationship she do not want. she’ll be head over heels next episode tho. this statement will have repercussions.
production is counting cards & pulling tf out them stringsssss. they waited until every couple possible showed mutual interest & on somewhat solid terms to throw another challenge. bonus points that the fans been begging for movie night. doing the mf job for them
either they clip farming or the og girls cliqued up & missed MAJOR information. I can’t recall any of the ogs sitting & chatting with casa girls. that’s exactly why alannah was never mentioned. casa girls also stopped fw caleb after he coupled with jaiden. we never even saw them definitively announce they were closed off & coupled up. caleb was def gossipy & would tell it immediately if pressed for info
kayda stay piggy backing an argument to find a problem with zach. I hate her success rate for a valid argument be so high bc she do indeed be tripping other times.
aniya can do no wrong sorry don’t care. we can start a black women don’t cheat campaign in her honor lmk. she looked damn good all on carl sorry not sorry
damm I forgot ab sista sol. she was kc bombshell but sincere gave her some real screen time lmaoooo he could not leave her aloneeee. it’s one thing to be cheating but it’s a whole nother when you begging to cheat. their scenes were so cringe, brotha was starvingggg
boy these bombshells be TEMPTATION in a bikini my godddd. titi & sol was honey traps. also even if aniya & kc did get sexual, titi would’ve blew ts out the waterrrrrr no shade to aniya baby
oh mela i’m forming opinions & tears for you. “america doesn’t think you’re crazy, they see it too” wow
okay clearly there’s certain locations in the villa where they know this will be in the tv reel right? like I get some places are more “private” than others but let’s be serious guys the house is bugged & booby trapped. I bet they stay tf out the speakeasy & say less room now
what’s tea with amora & titi giggling everytime sydney mentioned?? I wanna laugh & I got a feeling I know why
I still think dylan is a plant & the outro proved it. they needed kenzie to have a story line but they kept sizzling out bc she was picking wrong so they said fuck it & sent a man in to get the damn job done. they ain’t expect her to be trifling tho & that’s what yall get thinking you can predict & manipulate strangers.
melanie should’ve brought corey back just to spite sincere
gal sucks balls. his employees are also lowkey running a smear campaign against him on tiktok. i’m waiting to see if an ex employee speaks out & really tells it
i’m scared they gone pull some shit up about carl ngl. is he really too perfect or am I projecting?
the kc think pieces are lowk spot on but I can’t support all of them bc it’s thinly veiled racism
corbingpt & persian cat’s connection seems very surface level. I also think they planned this & were already talking/a couple before the show. I think they planned to come in acting like total strangers but parmida blew they cover lowk by mentioning she dm’d him previously. they keep mentioning how similar they are but the only thing listed was living in miami & working out. we also haven’t seen them work out together once!!!
I cannot form an opinion on melanie bc every episode is a fall from grace & a redemption arc. however, I can appreciate that the same people she cries to she also holds them up when it’s their turn to cry. somebody mentioned she never said she’s a girls girl, she just shows love when needed without being called on. I fw that! I hate a crier that avoids everybody else’s tears
kenzie is losing me unfortunately. i liked the silly hannah montana vibes at first but now it’s irritating. I neeeeeed her to lock in & pick a man!!! I also don’t like that it’s been days of “I need to talk to gal more to decide if I like him” but never pulls him for a chat or gives any real reasons on why she’s interested in him. jen is completely right to say kenzie does not like 2 boys, she likes 2 boys attention no shade. hopefully that’s solved by tonight
I don’t doubt that kc & corbin actually like their partners but it’s obvious them girls the only ones feeling them. they relationships will only last out of desperation, especially if there’s no new bombshells that looks better than their current partners. i’m sure corbin & parmida will keep fucking around after the show (still think they was fucking before!!!!!) but kc & titi probably won’t work bc he ain’t moving to south central. he said himself this show was the biggest risk he’s ever taken. an experience like this will leave you absolutely rattled, good or bad. the anxiety of being perceived will keep him locked down for a while after this. titi also don’t seem like the type to uproot her life for a man. side note they saying she lying about her age & I believe it. she’s giving me 30-35 vibes (the eyebrows specifically)
also I think it’s a waste how some of them are like “such & such is my perfect type, I would absolutely talk to them back home.” ima hold you hand when I say this: if this the same fine shit you could pull back home, why is you here??? that’s like going on vacation& only eating mcdonald’s everyday. it’s mcdonald’s at home!!!!!!!!! no shade if i’m on an island with literally greek gods & free reign to fw all of them, the comfort face would be my absolute last option sorry
that’s all folks, finna go watch the new episode I will be back
im so late to the love island party but some thoughts:
let kenzie have her splits man she don’t have much else to do anyway
I thought melanie would be this season’s huda but she ain’t that bad🦦. gimme 10 night was insane but she locked in after bc she knew her edit would look ridiculous
casting & production need to be stricter about allowed/encouraged hairstyles. full wigs & half wigs need to be banned ! not saying no names not pointing no fingers. i’d like to see more braids/natural styles. every challenge being something slimy guaranteed to fuck your hair up is blowing meeeee
kc kinda remedial & aniya knows that but the options was slim at the time so oh 🐋.
ACAB but sean was tea. that’s all I have to say.
this is petty but kayda & kenzie’s raspy voices blow me
zach & bryce be kissing & touching each other off screen. bi-island will def be casting once this is up mark my mf words
caleb was literally introduced for kenzie idk why she stayed with corbin for so long that’s irritating me. she spent multiple episodes mentioning wanting a blue collar country boy w boots & an accent & a truck. let mr jamaica goooooo you would never talk to him irl anyway
justice for sol 🫶🏽. you cannot trust tiktok to give an accurate description of this show. they made it seem like sol was completely bald & advocating for alopecia awareness to anyone that would listen. she in fact had a pixie & mentioned hair loss ONCE to the only boy that showed any interest in her & we never heard about it again
I don’t like corbin’s accent/pronunciation. he’s hiding a jamaican accent, which makes no sense??
that’s all for now folks thanks for coming to my ted talk
Chapter 2 - Two of a Kind [Smoke Moore x Annie x Stack Moore]
Preview: "Sugar." His voice dropped. Softer now. Almost careful. "Please don't do this."
"I'm not doing anything." She examined a loose thread on her sewing. "I'm just asking questions. You can answer them or not. You the one leaving."
Word Count: 4.8k
Warning ⚠️: They're not a trio. But everyone eats eventually 🤪
<<< Chapter 1
___
Annie woke to the sound of nothing.
No footsteps in the hall. No water running. No low hum of Smoke moving through his morning the way he always did — deliberate, unhurried, already two steps ahead of the day before she'd even opened her eyes.
Just quiet.
She lay still for a moment, ceiling overhead, the sheets on his side undisturbed and cool to the touch when she pressed her palm flat against them. He'd slept in the study. She'd known he would. He'd said as much when he walked out. And still, the confirmation of it — the empty, unslept side of the bed — sat in her chest like something swallowed wrong.
She should be angry. She was angry.
She just couldn't locate it cleanly this morning.
It kept getting tangled up with something quieter and harder to name — that particular loneliness that came not from being alone, but from being the one who'd said the wrong thing. Even if the wrong thing had been true.
Smothering.
The word sat at the back of her throat where she'd left it the night before.
She'd meant it. She still meant it. But she understood what it had done when it landed — watched his face close like a door, watched something hurt move through him before the stillness came down. Smoke didn't yell. Didn't throw things. Just went quiet in a way that was worse than either, and then he was gone.
Annie sat up. Reached for her robe off the bedpost.
The house had its morning sounds — birds off the back property, the faint tick of the pipes settling. Normal sounds. Her sounds. Except for the study door, closed at the end of the hall when she stepped out, the line of light beneath it already gone.
He was up. Already.
She stood there a moment longer than she needed to.
Then she went downstairs and put the kettle on.
She didn't go to him. That was the thing she decided in the space between filling the kettle and setting it on the flame. She wasn't going to go to him. She wasn't going to knock on that door, wasn't going to be the one to smooth it over, to make herself small enough to fit back into his good graces before she'd even had her tea.
She'd said a true thing.
He could come to her.
But by the time the kettle whistled and she'd poured her cup and stood at the kitchen window long enough for the steam to thin, she heard his footsteps on the stairs. Steady. Even. Like nothing had happened.
Like nothing had happened.
He appeared in the kitchen doorway dressed for the day — shirt pressed, collar buttoned, shoes already on — and Annie wrapped both hands around her mug and looked at him.
"Morning," he said.
"Morning."
He moved to the stove like it was any other day. Poured his own coffee. She watched him do it — the economy of it, how he took up space without asking for it, how he was already so thoroughly himself while she was still half-assembled.
"You eat?" he asked.
"Not yet."
He nodded. Leaned against the counter across from her, cup in hand, and looked at her with that particular expression he had — patient, contained, like he was waiting for her to catch up to something he'd already sorted through in the night.
It made her want to throw her mug at him.
"You slept alright?" she asked instead, and she heard the edge in it even as it left her mouth.
Something moved behind his eyes. "Fine."
"Good." She turned back to the window. "That's good."
The silence stretched between them — not comfortable, not exactly hostile. Just there. Full of last night and everything that hadn't been resolved and his footsteps going down the hall and the study door closing and her standing alone by the vanity realizing she felt guilty for something that had been the truth.
She heard him set his cup down.
"Annie."
"I ain’t apologizing," she said. She didn't turn around.
A pause.
"Didn't ask you to."
She turned then. He was looking at her steadily, and there was nothing in his face she could argue with — no anger, no wounded pride dressed up as calm. Just him. Looking at her like she was the only thing in the room worth looking at, like he could stand here all morning if that's what it took.
"You didn't come to bed," she said.
"No."
"Because I said the truth."
His jaw shifted. "Because you needed space."
"I needed—" She stopped. Let out a breath. "I needed to not feel like a prisoner in my own house, Elijah."
"You ain't a prisoner."
"I know what I said."
"So do I." His voice was quiet. Level. "And I heard you."
That landed differently than she expected. She waited for the rest of it — the correction, the reframing, the gentle redirection that always came dressed as understanding. But he just stood there, cup on the counter, watching her.
"You heard me," she repeated.
"I heard you." He picked up his cup again. Finished the last of his coffee. Set it in the sink. "I got some business to handle this morning. Be back before noon."
And that was it.
He pressed a kiss to her temple on the way past — brief, certain, like punctuation — and then he was gone. She heard the front door, the particular sound of it closing behind him. Not slammed. Just shut.
Annie stood in the kitchen, mug in both hands, and tried to decide if being heard was the same thing as being understood.
She decided it wasn't.
But she drank her tea anyway.
_____
He came back before noon, like he said.
Annie was in the sitting room with her sewing when she heard the door — and then his footsteps, and then the particular way they slowed at the bottom of the stairs — hesitant, almost, which was not a word she associated with Elijah Moore — before he found her.
He appeared in the doorway still in his morning clothes, hat turning slowly in his hands.
She looked up. Looked at his hands. Looked back at her sewing.
"You busy?" he asked.
"No more than usual."
He came in. Sat across from her in his armchair and didn't say anything right away, which told her more than words would have. Smoke always knew what he was going to say before he said it. The fact that he was sitting there turning his hat in his hands like a schoolboy outside the principal's office meant whatever was coming, he'd been dreading it.
She kept her needle moving. Let him sit in it.
"I got business up north," he finally said. "Have to leave Thursday."
Her needle stilled.
She didn't look up yet. Just let it land. Let it take up space in the room.
"How long," she said.
"Five days. Maybe six."
Now she looked up. He was watching her with an expression she didn't see often — something tight around the eyes, something working in his jaw. Not the controlled stillness he usually wore. Something more like a man bracing.
"You telling me…" she said, "now?"
"I found out yesterday."
She set her sewing down slowly. Folded her hands in her lap. "Yesterday."
"Annie—"
"You came home last night," she said, measured, "sat across from me at dinner, argued with me about a beach trip, slept in your study — and the whole time you already knew you were leaving Thursday."
His jaw tightened. "I ain’t think it was the right moment."
"Mm." She looked at him a moment longer, then picked her sewing back up. Let the silence stretch.
She could see it working on him. Could see him trying to find solid ground and not quite getting there. Good.
"I can’t skate," he said. "If there was any other way—"
"I'm sure."
"I mean it, Annie."
"I know you mean it." She turned her sewing in her hands, not really seeing it. "You always mean it, Elijah. That's never been the question."
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped. The hat had been set aside. He was looking at her the way he sometimes did when he was really looking — not managing her, not steering, just looking. Raw around the edges in a way he'd never allow in front of anyone else.
"I hate it," he said quietly. "I want you to know that. I don't—" He stopped. Pressed his mouth together. "I don't like leaving you."
And there it was.
That soft, exposed place he only ever showed her. The obsessive, devoted, slightly unhinged part of him that needed her the way some men needed air — not gracefully, not lightly, but desperately, completely, in a way that sometimes felt like drowning and sometimes felt like the only solid thing in the world.
Annie felt it. Felt the pull of it, the familiar ache.
And then she felt something else.
The particular shift that happened when the balance tipped — when he needed her more than she needed him in this moment, when the power that was usually his came loose and floated in the space between them, waiting to be claimed.
She set her sewing aside. Looked at him directly.
"Is there anything more important to you than me?" she asked.
His head came up. "What?"
"It's a simple question." Her voice was soft. Almost sweet. "Is there something up north more important than me? Your wife?"
"No — of course not—"
"Then why are you going?"
"Annie, it's business, it ain’t a matter of—"
"But you just said there was no other way." She tilted her head. "So something up north requires you specifically. Requires you to leave. To be gone for almost a week." She let a beat pass.
"That sounds like something that matters more than me."
"That is not—" He looked almost pained. "That's not what this is."
She said nothing. Just watched him.
"You my world," he said, and his voice had gone rough at the edges. "You know that. There is nothing — Annie, there is not a thing on this earth I put above you. This is business. It's — it's not a choice."
"Everything's a choice, Elijah."
He ran a hand over his face. She watched him do it — watched the fracture in his composure — and kept her expression perfectly, serenely neutral. Patient. Like she had all the time in the world. Like she wasn't quietly turning a blade.
"I don't believe you don't have options," she said lightly. "You Smoke Moore. You always have options. You just decided this one required you."
"It does require me—"
"Mm." She turned her face slightly away. Just enough. Let him see her doubt it. Let him see her pull back.
She heard his breath change.
"Sugar." His voice dropped. Softer now. Almost careful. "Please don't do this."
"I'm not doing anything." She examined a loose thread on her sewing. "I'm just asking questions. You can answer them or not. You the one leaving."
The silence that followed was thick with him trying to hold himself together. She could feel it. Could feel him across the room like a weather system, all that intensity with nowhere to go, looking for a way back in and finding the door closed.
Good, she thought again. Feel it.
Because she felt it every time he told her no. Every time he handed her back her request, her independence, her small attempts at a life that was also hers — firm and gentle and completely immovable. He never seemed to feel the cost of that. Never seemed to register what it took from her to be contained so lovingly, so thoroughly.
Let him register something for once.
"I'll make arrangements," he started, reaching for the practical. "Lennie will be here, you'll have everything you need, all the accounts—"
"I know about the accounts."
"I'm just saying—"
"Elijah." She looked at him. "I know about the accounts. I'm not worried about money."
He fell quiet.
"I'm worried," she said, softer, and let just enough of the real thing into her voice — just enough genuine hurt to make it land — "about being here. Alone. In this house. While you're in another city." She paused. "Other women seeing a handsome man traveling by himself. Thinking he might be available."
"Annie—" The flash of something almost desperate crossed his face. "You know I would never—"
"I know what you say."
"It's what I mean—"
"Then you should stay." She picked her sewing back up. Simple. Final. "If I'm your world, stay."
"I can't—"
"Can't or won't?"
"Annie, please—"
And there it was. Please. From Elijah Moore. Turning his hat in his hands and saying please to her in his own sitting room like she held something he needed.
She kept her eyes on her sewing.
Let him sit in it just a little longer.
Then, without looking up:
"Who's going to be here with me?"
A pause.
"I asked Stack to come stay."
She looked up slowly. Let him see the full weight of that land on her face — the offense, the disbelief, the particular exhaustion of a woman who has just been told her husband is leaving and also that he doesn't trust her alone.
"Your brother," she said.
"He's family—"
"Will be in my house. Watching me. Like I'm something that needs minding."
"That's not—"
"While you up north." She stared at him. "With other women. Who don't know you're taken."
He looked, genuinely, like a man being pulled in four directions at once. The guilt of leaving. The defensiveness of being doubted. The obsessive need to know she was safe. The desperate desire for her not to be angry.
She watched him cycle through all of it.
Then she picked up her needle, turned back to her work, and said pleasantly:
"Well. I hope that business of yours up north is worth it."
And left him sitting there with nothing to do but feel the weight of every single thing she hadn't said.
____
He left Thursday morning before the sun was fully up.
Annie was awake. Had been for an hour. She lay on her side facing the window while he moved through the room in the grey pre-dawn quiet — the soft sounds of him dressing, the drawer opening and closing, the particular weight of him sitting on the edge of the bed to put his shoes on.
She didn't turn over.
She heard him pause.
"Angel."
She kept her eyes on the window. The sky was doing that thing it did just before light, that deep blue that wasn't quite night anymore but hadn't committed to morning either.
"Annie." His hand came to her shoulder, warm through the thin cotton of her nightgown. "I'm heading out."
"I know."
"Look at me before I go."
She didn't. She pulled the quilt up a little instead, tucking it under her chin. Small. Deliberate.
She heard his exhale. Long and quiet and controlled, the way he controlled everything — but underneath it, just barely, something fraying.
"Baby, please."
"Have a safe trip, Smoke."
He noted the switch. Seems he wasn’t Elijah to her today.
The hand on her shoulder tightened slightly. Not rough. Just — needing. Like he could hold on long enough to make her turn around.
She didn't turn around.
After a moment he leaned down and pressed his lips to her hair. Stayed there a beat too long — breathing her in, she knew, the way he always did, that particular obsessive cataloguing of her that he probably didn't even realize he did. Like he was memorizing something he was afraid of losing.
She closed her eyes and said nothing.
"I'll call tonight," he said against her hair. "When I get in."
"Mm."
Another pause. She could feel him standing at the side of the bed, could feel him looking at her curled up with her back to him, and she knew exactly what it was doing to him — knew because she knew him, knew every frequency of his obsession, knew that leaving on bad terms was the particular hell he'd built for himself by needing her the way he did.
Good.
The bed dipped as he straightened. She heard him pick up his bag. Cross to the door.
He stopped in the doorway.
She waited.
"I love you," he said. Rough at the edges. Not his usual register — not warm and certain, not a statement so much as something he needed her to have before he walked out.
Annie pulled the quilt a little higher.
"Lock the door on your way out," she said.
The silence that followed lasted three full seconds. She counted them.
Then his footsteps down the hall. The stairs. The front door, closing with a quiet, careful click — like even in leaving he was trying not to disturb her.
She lay there for a long time after.
The room was very still and very his — his smell on the pillow beside her, his book still open on the nightstand, a cufflink he'd missed gleaming dully on the dresser.
She didn't feel as victorious as she'd expected to.
She felt the absence of him like a change in air pressure. Immediate and total, the way it always was — because that was the other side of loving Elijah Moore, the thing she never said out loud. That his presence was so complete, so all-encompassing, that when he left the room it registered in her body before her mind caught up.
She hated that.
She hated that she could be furious with him and still feel the shape of where he'd been.
She lay there another half hour. Then she got up, put on her robe, and went downstairs to make her tea.
___
Lennie arrived at eight.
She'd come about three years ago. Smoke had noticed Annie doing everything herself — the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry, the preserving, the mending, all of it stacked on top of each other from first light to last — and had decided, with the particular logic of a man who loved you and didn't always ask first, that it didn't make a lick of sense for her to be doing all that alone. He'd shown up one Tuesday morning with Lennie behind him and said this is Lennie, she'll be here weekdays like it was already settled. Because it was already settled.
Annie had bristled. Had opened her mouth to explain that she didn't need — that she was perfectly capable — that this house was hers to run and she ran it fine —
Smoke had kissed her forehead and gone back to work.
Lennie had watched him go. Waited until his footsteps faded all the way down the front walk and the door had closed behind him. Then she'd turned to Annie, calm and unhurried, and said:
"I'm old enough to know I work for you, baby. Mr. Smoke just cut the check."
That had been that.
Stack was due by evening.
Annie moved through the morning the way she moved through most things she couldn't control — with her hands busy and her face composed and the part of her that was genuinely unsettled tucked away somewhere it wouldn't show.
She baked. Reorganized the linen cupboard. Sat on the back porch with her second cup of tea and watched the property in the late morning quiet and tried not to think about the fact that by tonight this house would have someone else in it.
Stack.
She'd known Stack for as long as she'd known Smoke — which meant she knew him the way you knew a man's brother. At a slight remove. Through the lens of someone else's love for him. He was easier than Smoke on the surface, quicker to laugh, less likely to let a silence stretch until you felt it in your teeth. He'd always been kind to her. Warm, even.
She'd never had occasion to test what was underneath that.
She wasn't particularly worried about it.
He was Smoke's brother, not Smoke. Whatever this arrangement was — whatever name Smoke had put on it when he'd called Stack and asked this of him — it was going to be five days of someone in her space, underfoot, pretending she needed looking after.
She could manage that.
She was good at managing things.
She heard the car at half past six.
She was in the kitchen, something on the stove, hair pinned up, apron still on — and she'd told herself she wasn't going to go to the door, wasn't going to receive him like company, because he wasn't company. He was an imposition dressed up as a favor and she wasn't going to pretend otherwise.
She heard Lennie let him in. Heard his voice in the front hall — and then Lennie's laugh, bright and surprised, the kind that got pulled out of a person before they'd decided to give it. Then something that sounded like Lennie swatting him on the arm and telling him to behave, and his laugh underneath it, low and genuine.
Annie stirred her pot and said nothing.
His footsteps moved through the house unhurried, like he'd been here a hundred times, like the layout was already his. And then he appeared in the kitchen doorway and she turned just slightly, enough to acknowledge him without welcoming him.
He was leaning against the frame with his jacket already off and his sleeves half-rolled, bag presumably already dealt with, looking for all the world like a man who'd come home rather than arrived somewhere he'd been sent.
"Something smells incredible," he said, and it wasn't a line — it was just true, and he said it the way he said most things, like he hadn't considered dressing it up. His eyes moved to the stove, genuinely curious. "That a roast?"
"Chicken."
"With what — is that tarragon?"
She blinked, despite herself. "Yes."
He made a sound low in his throat that was almost reverent. "Annie." He said her name like it was its own sentence. Like she'd done something personally to him. "You didn't have to do all that."
"I was cooking anyway."
"Still." He pushed off the doorframe, moved into the kitchen with that easy, unhurried way he had — not crowding her, just present — and peered over her shoulder at the pot with unself-conscious curiosity. "Smoke ain’t tell me you could cook like this. He just said you could cook."
"He don’t miss any meals in this house.”
Stack laughed. Full and easy, head tipping back slightly. "Lord, that's true. Man is lookin’ heavy.” He shook his head, still smiling, and moved back to give her space. Leaned against the counter across from her instead, arms loose at his sides. "He gon’ call tonight to check in and I'm gonna have to lie to him."
She glanced at him. "About what."
"Tell him dinner was just alright." He said it perfectly straight. "Otherwise he'll spend the whole week feeling bad he's missing it. And then I'll have to hear about it."
Annie looked at him for a moment.
Then, against her better judgment, against the coolness she'd been intending to maintain all evening — she felt the corner of her mouth move.
Not a smile. Just the suggestion of one.
Stack caught it. Didn't make a thing of it. Just turned to look out the kitchen window at the last of the evening light like he hadn't noticed.
But she saw his own mouth curve.
"Table needs setting," she said, turning back to the stove.
"Yes ma'am," he said easily, and went to find the plates without being told where they were.
The dishes were done by eight.
Lennie had gone home. The house was quiet in that particular way it got after a meal — settled, warm, smelling of food and the faint sweetness of the candles Annie had lit without thinking about it. She stood in the kitchen for a moment after the last dish was put away, hands dry, apron folded over the drawer handle, and listened to the house.
Stack was somewhere. She could feel it the way you felt another person's presence in a space — a subtle occupation, a difference in the air.
She took the bottle of bourbon from the cabinet. Poured herself a small glass. Thought about it. Poured a second.
The back porch ran the length of the house, screened in, the swing at the far end facing out over the yard and the dark tree line beyond. Annie came out here most evenings when the weather allowed. It was hers in a way most of the house didn't quite feel — the one place Smoke never tried to improve or expand or make more than it was.
She sat. Set both glasses on the small table beside the swing. Pushed off gently with one foot.
The night was warm and soft, full of crickets, the occasional low call of something further out in the trees.
She'd been sitting maybe ten minutes when the screen door opened.
Stack stepped out, looked at the second glass, and looked at her.
"That for me or were you just being optimistic?" he asked.
"Figured you'd find your way out here eventually."
He took the glass. Settled into the wicker chair across from her rather than the swing, which she appreciated without saying so. He stretched his legs out, crossed them at the ankle, and looked out at the yard the way she'd been looking at it — easy, unhurried, like the dark had something worth seeing in it.
They sat like that for a while. Just the crickets and the bourbon and the swing's soft creak.
"You do this every night?" he asked eventually.
"Most nights."
"Smoke come out here with you?"
She considered that. "Sometimes. He doesn't sit still as well as he thinks he does."
Stack made a sound that was almost a laugh.
"This a good porch," he said.
"It is."
"Good bourbon too."
"Don't tell Smoke. He thinks I drink sweet wine."
He turned to look at her then, something amused and a little appreciative in his expression. "Is that right?"
"He'd have opinions."
"He'd have a whole committee meeting about it." He shook his head, looked back at the yard. "My brother."
"Your brother," Annie agreed, and there was something in the saying of it — fond and tired and complicated all at once — that felt more honest than anything she'd said all day.
Stack heard it. She could tell by the way he was quiet for a moment, not filling the space, just letting it be there.
"He means well," he said finally. Not defending. Just stating.
"I know he does." She pushed the swing gently. "That's the hardest part."
Stack looked at her. She kept her eyes on the tree line.
"Harder to be angry at a man who loves you that much," she said. "Easier when they're careless. When they don't notice. But he notices everything." She paused. "Notices everything and still."
She stopped herself. Picked up her glass.
Stack didn't press. Didn't offer anything to fill the gap she'd left. Just sat with it, which was — she noticed — different from how Smoke would have handled it. Smoke would have had a response. Smoke always had a response.
Stack just let her have the thought.
It was disarming in a way she hadn't expected.
"Thank you for dinner," he said, after a moment. Easy. Moving them back to solid ground without making a production of it.
"You already thanked me."
"Deserved a second one."
She looked at him then. He was watching the yard again, glass resting on his knee, entirely at ease in her space in a way that should have irritated her and somehow didn't quite.
She thought about what she'd expected when Smoke told her. The imposition of it. The indignity. Someone planted in her house to make sure she stayed where she was put.
This wasn't — he wasn't what she'd braced for.
Which was, she supposed, information.
She finished her bourbon. Set the glass down.
"I'm heading in," she said, standing.
Stack looked up. "Goodnight, Annie."
"Night." She moved to the screen door. Paused with her hand on it. "There's coffee things on the counter. Help yourself in the morning."
"Appreciate it."
She went inside. Let the screen door close softly behind her.
Upstairs, she washed her face and got into bed and lay in the quiet of the house — his smell finally fading from the pillow, the bourbon warm in her chest — and thought that this might be alright. Five days of easy company and someone else's presence and then Smoke would be home and everything would go back to whatever it was.
She could manage five days of Stack.
She was almost sure of it.
<<< Chapter 1
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A/N One day I'll learn not to turn every prompt into a multi-part situation. Today is not that day, but it is your lucky day. I submitted my resignation today and figured I just use the next 2 weeks to coast while wrapping things up at my job. Therefore... More fics!
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My other works can be found in My Masterlist. Thanks for reading!
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All Fic Taglist - Interested in my future works? Let me know if you'd like me to add you to my tag list. (Also lmk if you want me to remove you. No hard feelings I promise.)
Pairing: Déjà (Black Female OC) / Elias “Stack” / Elijah “Smoke”
Summary: Three years after a devastating betrayal shattered her relationship and fractured her family, Déjà returns to the Mississippi Delta for a Sunday dinner she never thought she’d attend again. The Moore family still welcomes her with open arms, refusing to let old wounds erase the place she once held in their lives. But while Déjà tries to navigate old memories, lingering hurt, and a man who can’t seem to let go of what he destroyed, an unexpected connection begins to form with the last person she should be looking at. What starts as anger, pride, and revenge quickly becomes something far more dangerous.
Warnings: explicit sexual content, infidelity, cheating, revenge sex, emotional manipulation, jealousy, family drama, toxic relationships, messy romance, angst, hurt/no comfort, grief over lost relationships, emotional infidelity themes, morally gray characters, complicated family dynamics, unresolved trauma.
Three Years Earlier
The air in the hallway of their shared home always smelled of turpentine and linseed oil, a scent Déjà had come to associate with peace. It was the smell of her livelihood, of her soul spilled across canvases in the sun-drenched spare room she’d claimed as her studio. Tonight, the scent was sharper, cutting through the thick, cloying sweetness of the Delta summer that seeped through the window screens. It was a Wednesday, close to midnight. Elijah should have been at the club, ‘The Low Bottom,’ handling the Wednesday night rush, leaving her to the quiet company of her unfinished portrait of a magnolia blossom, its creamy petals captured in thick, impasto strokes.
She’d been wrestling with the painting for a week, trying to capture the way the moonlight seemed to bleach the flower’s edges, giving it an ethereal, almost holy glow. It was a feeling she knew well, the feeling of being seen by him. Five years. Five years since Elijah Moore, with his quiet authority and eyes like old whiskey, had walked into her little booth at the town’s annual arts festival. He’d bought her first-ever sale, a small watercolor of the cypress swamp, and then he’d bought her a beer. He’d been running the club with his brother for two years then, a smooth, dangerous operation that was the heartbeat of their small town’s nightlife. He was Smoke, the calm in the chaos, the one who saw everything and said little. And he’d seen her.
Her bare feet were silent on the cool hardwood floor as she padded down the hall, a smear of cadmium yellow on her cheek like a war paint she didn’t know she wore. She was just going to the kitchen for a glass of sweet tea, a small break before she tackled the stubborn white highlights again. But as she passed their bedroom door, she heard it. A sound that didn't belong. A high, breathy giggle that wasn't hers.
It was her sister’s giggle. Kiera’s.
Déjà froze, her hand hovering over the light switch in the hall. The sound was like a shard of ice in her veins. Kiera was supposed to be in Jackson, finishing up her junior year at Millsaps. She wasn’t due home for another two weeks. Déjà’s mind, a painter’s mind, immediately tried to frame the scene, to find a logical composition. Kiera must have come home early as a surprise. Maybe she was on the phone, her laughter echoing in the empty house. But then she heard another sound. A low, familiar groan. Elijah’s groan.
The turpentine and magnolia-scented peace she’d been cultivating for five years evaporated, leaving behind a toxic vacuum. Her hand, trembling now, left a smear of yellow on the pristine white doorframe as she pushed it open.
The scene that hit her eyes was a masterpiece of betrayal, painted in the lurid glow of a single bedside lamp. Their bed, the one they’d bought together from a flea market in Natchez, the one they’d spent hours sanding and restaining, was a tangle of limbs and sweat-slicked skin. Elijah’s back was to her, the powerful muscles she knew so well, the ones that held her at night, flexing as he moved. His dark skin, usually a source of comfort and warmth, was now just the landscape of her ruin. And beneath him, her head thrown back against the pillows Elijah had meticulously fluffed for Déjà every morning, was Kiera. Her sister. Her baby sister, whose face was a mask of ecstasy that twisted into shock when her eyes landed on Déjà standing in the doorway.
For a beat, nobody moved. The world was a silent film. Déjà could see the details with horrifying clarity: the way Elijah’s hand gripped Kiera’s thigh, the same way he gripped Déjà’s when he was deep inside her. The small, heart-shaped birthmark on Kiera’s shoulder, a mark that Déjà had teased her about since they were children. The way the cheap gold chain Elijah was wearing—a gift from Déjà for their last anniversary—swayed between them, catching the light.
It was the sight of that chain that broke the spell.
A sound tore from Déjà’s throat, was a wounded animal’s cry. It wasn’t a word. It was pain.
Elijah froze, his body going rigid. He turned his head slowly, his face, when he saw her, a canvas of pure horror. The cool control he wore like a second skin evaporated, replaced by a naked, boyish panic. "Déjà," he breathed, his voice a ragged thing. "Baby, no—"
But she was already moving. The painter, the lover, the woman who built a world with this man, was gone. All that was left was a sister. A daughter of the Delta, whose blood ran hot and whose temper was legendary.
She launched herself at the bed, not at Elijah, but at Kiera. Her hands, usually stained with paint and gentle with a brush, became claws. She grabbed a fistful of Kiera’s weave, the expensive, silky stuff Déjà had helped her pay for last Christmas, and yanked. Kiera screamed, a high, thin sound of shock and pain as she was dragged sideways across the sheets.
"You!" Déjà’s voice was a raw, ragged shriek. "In my bed! In my fucking house!" Her fist connected with Kiera’s jaw, a sickening, solid thud that sent shockwaves up her own arm. She didn't feel it. All she felt was the fire, the righteous, burning fury of a bloodline betrayed.
"Dej, stop! Get off her!" Elijah was trying to pull her off, his hands on her arms, but she was a whirlwind. She twisted, her elbow catching him hard in the ribs. He grunted, his grip loosening for a second, and she used it. She shoved Kiera back against the headboard, her sister’s face a mess of shock and dawning fear.
"I trusted you!" Déjà screamed, her vision blurred by tears of rage. "I loved you! You were supposed to be my blood!"
Kiera was sobbing now, trying to cover her face. "I'm sorry! I'm so sorry, Déjà!"
"Sorry?" The word was a laugh, bitter and broken. "Sorry don't fix this!"
Elijah finally managed to wrap his arms around her waist, lifting her off the bed. She kicked and thrashed, her bare feet connecting with the wooden bedframe. "Déjà, calm down! Calm down!" His voice was desperate, the voice of a man who knew he’d just detonated his entire world.
Calm down. The words were an insult. She stopped fighting, her body going limp for a moment, and Elijah, fool that he was, thought he’d won. He loosened his hold, and she used that split second to spin around in his arms. Her hand, still trembling with adrenaline, drew back and then swung forward with all the force her body could muster.
Her palm connected with his face. It wasn't a slap. It was a punch. A solid, satisfying crunch of knuckle against bone. His head snapped to the side, and he stumbled back a step, his hand flying to his eye.
"You don't get to tell me to calm down," she seethed, her voice dropping to a venomous whisper. "You don't get to touch me. You don't get to breathe my air."
He looked at her, his good eye wide with disbelief, a dark, purple bruise already beginning to form around the other. He saw it then. He saw the finality in her eyes. He saw that the woman he loved had just died in that doorway, and he was standing over her corpse.
She didn’t wait for another word. She didn’t look at Kiera, sobbing in their bed. She turned and walked out of the room. She didn't slam the door. She didn't scream again. She walked through the small house that was supposed to be their forever home, her steps steady and sure. She grabbed her keys from the hook by the door, her purse from the chair. She didn't pack a bag. There was nothing in that house she wanted anymore.
She walked out into the thick, humid Mississippi night, the chirping of the cicadas a deafening roar in her ears. The air was heavy, smelling of damp earth and night-blooming jasmine. She got into her old beat-up Honda, the one Elijah had helped her fix last month, and she drove. She didn't know where she was going. She just drove away from the turpentine, away from the magnolias, away from the man with the whiskey eyes and the heart full of lies. She drove until the town was just a pair of distant, fading lights in her rearview mirror, and she didn't look back.
Present
The Mississippi heat in June was a living thing. It didn’t just warm you; it pressed down on your shoulders, seeped into your bones, and made the air feel thick enough to swim in. For three years, Déjà had let it press down on her from a distance. But today, as she turned her rented sedan onto the gravel drive of the Moore family home, the heat felt like a welcome, an old, familiar adversary. The air, heavy and sweet, carried the scent of her past: fried chicken crackling in hot oil, collard greens simmering with a ham hock, and the faint, promising sweetness of cornbread cooling on a windowsill. It was the scent of Sunday, of sanctuary. It was also the scent of a battlefield she’d sworn she’d never revisit.
The phone call had been a week ago. The name on her screen had sent a jolt through her, a Pavlovian response she thought she’d trained out of herself. Mama Moore. She’d let it ring twice, her thumb hovering over the decline button, before a wave of something stronger than her own pride, a residual love for the woman who’d been a second mother to her, made her answer.
“Déjà, baby.” Mrs. Moore’s voice was a warm, low hum, unchanged by the three years of silence between them. “How you doing?”
“I’m good, Mama Moore. Just working.” Déjà had kept her own voice neutral, polite.
A heavy sigh on the other end. “Listen, baby. I know things been… strained. But Elijah don’t own this family. He don’t own this Sunday dinner. We miss you. Pearline’s asking for you. We’re having a little cookout. Just family. We invited you.”
Déjà’s heart had hammered against her ribs. She knew what that meant. He would be there. Smoke. Elijah. The man whose face still haunted the edges of her dreams, sometimes in anger, sometimes in longing. She’d spent three years building a life in Jackson, a life of gallery shows, new friends, and a quiet apartment that smelled of fresh coffee and acrylic paint, not betrayal. Going back felt like chipping away at the foundation of her peace.
But then Mrs. Moore had said the magic words, the ones that bypassed all logic and self-preservation. “Baby, you are still my girl. You always will be.”
So she’d agreed. And now, here she was, parking her car between a dusty pickup truck and Elias’s ridiculously pristine, candy-apple red ‘72 Chevelle. She took a deep breath, the humid air filling her lungs, and got out.
The moment her feet touched the gravel, the back screen door flew open.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in!”
It was Aunt Carol, a woman built like a linebacker with a laugh that could shake the rafters. Before Déjà could even formulate a greeting, she was engulfed in a hug that smelled of Chanel No. 5 and fried okra. More bodies poured from the house. Mrs. Moore, her face softening with a genuine, unadulterated joy that made Déjà’s chest ache. Granny Moore, her silver hair in neat cornrows, took Déjà’s face in her soft, wrinkled hands and kissed her forehead. They were a whirlwind of affection, pulling her toward the house, their voices a symphony of welcomes.
“Look at you, girl! Still too skinny! You need to eat!”
“Ooh, I love that dress on you! That color is everything!”
“Don’t just stand there, come on in the kitchen. I got some lemonade that’s so sweet it’ll make your teeth hurt.”
Déjà let herself be swept along, a smile plastered on her face that felt surprisingly real. In the kitchen, the chaos was beautiful. Pots bubbled on the stove, counters were covered in bowls and cutting boards, and the radio was playing a low, bluesy tune. This was the heart of the Moore home, the place she’d spent countless hours. This was where she’d learned to make Mrs. Moore’s famous mac and cheese, where she’d sat with a crying Pearline after a bad breakup, where she’d helped decorate for a dozen birthdays. When Elijah had thrown her away, she hadn’t just lost a boyfriend; she’d been exiled from this. This vibrant, messy, loving world.
They fussed over her, shoving a plate of still-warm cornbread into her hands and a glass of that deadly sweet lemonade. They asked about her job as a junior curator at a small but respected gallery in Jackson, about her paintings, about her life. They listened with an intensity that made her feel seen, cherished. And through it all, they pointedly, masterfully, ignored the one person who was supposed to be the center of it all.
Elijah was sitting at the massive oak table on the screened-in porch, a bottle of beer in front of him. He was a statue carved from shadow and cold fury. He’d always had a presence, a quiet authority that commanded a room without him ever having to raise his voice. Now, that presence was a black hole, sucking all the warmth and light toward him and leaving only ice in its wake. He was darker than she remembered, his jaw sharper, the faint lines around his deep brown eyes etched with a permanent scowl. The bruise she’d given him that night was long gone, but the memory of it hung between them, a ghost at the feast.
He watched her, his gaze a physical weight. He didn’t smile. He didn’t nod. He just watched, his eyes tracking her every move as she was pulled from one hug to the next.
“Déjà, baby, you remember my cousin Tyree? He just moved back from Atlanta,” Aunt Carol said, introducing a lanky man with a kind smile.
“Nice to meet you,” Déjà said, shaking his hand.
“Elijah, pass your cousin the salt, baby,” Mrs. Moore called from the stove, not even looking at him.
The salt shaker was right beside Déjà’s plate. She reached for it, but Elijah’s hand shot out, snatching it. He leaned across the table, his movements stiff, and handed it to Tyree. “Here,” he grunted, his voice a low growl, the smoke-and-whiskey tone she once loved now just gravel.
The small act of petty cruelty hung in the air. A hush fell over the women in the kitchen. Tyree looked confused, taking the salt with a mumbled thanks. Déjà didn’t flinch. She simply turned back to her conversation with Pearline, who was now filling her in on her latest drama, her calm indifference a weapon more powerful than any retaliation she could have mustered. She could feel the frustration rolling off Elijah in waves. He wanted her to shrink, to feel unwelcome, to be the one who was out of place. But she wasn’t. She was home. And that was driving him insane.
Throughout the afternoon, the slick comments kept coming, little darts thrown with the hope of drawing blood.
“Didn’t know you were still in touch with everybody,” he said when she was laughing with his grandma.
“Still painting those little pictures?” he asked, his tone dismissive, when his mama praised her latest gallery show.
Each time, she met his gaze with a placid smile, never giving him the satisfaction of a reaction. But with every comment, with every possessive glare he shot her way when another male relative paid her a compliment, a new understanding began to dawn on her, sharp and ugly.
He didn’t want her back. He didn’t miss her. He just didn’t want anyone else to have her. He didn’t want her to fit here, without him. He was like a child who throws away a favorite toy, only to get angry when another child picks it up to play with. The hypocrisy of it all settled in her chest, not as sadness, but as a cold, hard anger. He had cheated on her with her sister, in their bed, and destroyed their entire world. And now he had the audacity to be angry that the world he’d destroyed had continued to spin without him at its center.
It was then that she felt another gaze, one entirely different. From the far end of the porch, sprawled in a rocking chair that looked too delicate for his large frame, was Elias. Stack. The younger twin, the unfiltered, chaotic yin to Elijah’s controlled yang. He was a walking temptation, all raw energy and easy confidence. He wore a fitted white t-shirt that strained against his broad chest and a pair of black dickie pants that were artfully worn. He watched the entire tableau with an amused, knowing smirk playing on his lips.
He saw everything. He saw the tension in Elijah’s face, the expertly hidden hurt in Déjà’s eyes that she thought no one could see, and the pathetic way his brother was trying to assert a dominance he no longer had any claim to. Their eyes met across the porch, over the heads of their family. Elias didn’t look away. He just took a slow sip of his beer, his smirk widening into a slow, knowing grin. It was a silent acknowledgment. I see you, his eyes said. I see him. And I see the game.
Later, as the sun began to dip lower, painting the sky in strokes of orange and purple, Déjà found herself on the porch steps, peeling shrimp with Mrs. Moore. They were laughing about a memory from years ago, a story involving a failed attempt at making gumbo and a very confused fire department.
“I swear, that boy of mine has been a mess in the kitchen since you left,” Mrs. Moore said, her voice softening. “He burned the rice last week. How you burn rice?”
Déjà laughed, a genuine, light sound that felt foreign and good. “Some people just don’t have the touch, Mama Moore.”
The screen door creaked open, and Elijah stepped out onto the porch. He stopped when he saw them, his eyes landing on Déjà’s face, alight with a laughter he hadn’t put there. He saw the easy way she was sitting next to his mother, the way his mother looked at her with a love that hadn’t dimmed one bit. He saw her, in their space, fitting perfectly into the groove she’d left behind.
The irritation that had been simmering in him all day boiled over. It wasn’t just anger; it was a profound, gut-wrenching sense of loss. He had ruined this. He had thrown this woman, this beautiful, vibrant woman who loved his family as much as he did, away for a cheap, meaningless fling. And seeing her here, happy and whole without him, was a punishment more fitting than any she could have devised.
He turned away, walking to the opposite end of the porch and staring out into the sprawling yard, his back a rigid line of defeat. And from his chair, Elias watched his brother, then looked back at Déjà, a slow fire lighting up his eyes.
The sun had bled out, leaving the sky a deep, bruised purple. The air, thick with the day's heat and the remnants of a feast, was now punctuated by the rhythmic chirp of crickets and the low, lazy hum of the porch light. The family had migrated from the yard to the long dining table inside, the space now filled with the clatter of plates and the low murmur of conversation that settled over a Moore family gathering like a comfortable blanket. Déjà found herself wedged between Pearline and Aunt Carol, a strategic placement that felt both protective and suffocating. She was part of the fold, but every nerve ending was attuned to the silent, brooding presence at the other end of the table.
Elijah hadn't spoken to her directly since his petty salt-shaker power play. He’d engaged with everyone else, his voice a low rumble of forced civility, but when he looked at her, his eyes were flat, devoid of any warmth. He was treating her like a ghost, a disruptive spirit in his sacred family space, and his family, in turn, was treating him like the intruder. The dynamic was a delicate, vicious dance, and Déjà was beginning to enjoy the music.
Granny Moore emerged from the kitchen with a triumphant smile, carrying a tray of her famous sweet potato pies. The crusts were a perfect golden brown, the filling a glossy, burnt-orange river that promised pure, unadulterated bliss. She placed a generous slice in front of everyone, saving Déjà for last.
“There you go, baby,” she said, setting the plate down with a wink. “I know how you love my pie. Made it extra sweet just for you.”
“Thank you, Granny,” Déjà said, her smile genuine. The old woman’s kindness was a balm, a reminder of everything good that had been tangled up with the bad.
Déjà picked up her fork, but as she went to cut into the pie, the flaky crust gave way under the pressure, and a perfect dollop of the molten filling oozed onto her thumb. It was an innocent mistake, a common occurrence with Granny’s pies. Before she could even reach for her napkin, a voice cut through the low hum of conversation, sharp and laced with disdain.
“Still eating with your hands, I see.”
It was Elijah. He wasn't looking at her, but at his own plate, as if the comment were a casual, throwaway observation. But it wasn't. It was a poisoned dart, dipped in the history of their relationship. It was an inside joke, one of a thousand. He used to tease her about her messy, enthusiastic way of eating, calling it his favorite thing about her, a sign of her unapologetic enjoyment of life. He’d kiss the sauce from the corner of her mouth, the chocolate from her lips, and call it his dessert. Now, he’d twisted it into an insult, a public indictment of her supposed lack of class.
A hush fell over the table. Pearline’s fork froze halfway to her mouth. Mrs. Moore shot her son a look that could curdle milk.
Déjà didn't flinch. She didn't wipe her thumb on a napkin. She didn't blush with embarrassment. Instead, she slowly, deliberately, lifted her thumb to her lips. Her eyes locked with Elijah’s, her gaze unflinching. She held his stare as she stuck out her tongue and licked the sweet, spiced filling from her skin, the movement slow, sensual, and utterly deliberate. A soft, wet sound in the sudden silence.
She lowered her hand, a small, satisfied smile playing on her lips. “Some things are just too good to waste, Elijah,” she said, her voice clear and calm.
The use of his full name was the final twist of the knife. Elijah was for the world, for business, for authority. Eli was for her. Elijah was a formal distance she was now enforcing.
His jaw tightened, a muscle twitching in his cheek. His eyes, for the first time all day, flashed with something other than cold fury. It was fury, the kind that came from being publicly checkmated. He had no response. He had been disarmed, and he knew it.
Déjà held his gaze for a beat longer, then turned away, dismissing him completely. She turned her body, her attention, her entire energy, toward the man sitting on Elijah’s other side.
Elias.
He’d been watching the entire exchange, his fork paused midway to his own mouth. Now, as Déjà’s focus landed on him, a slow grin spread across his face. He didn't even try to hide his amusement. He was enjoying the show immensely.
“So, Stack,” Déjà began, her voice lighter now, infused with a new purpose. “Pearline was telling me you finally got that garage up and running. How’s that going?”
Elias leaned back in his chair, his broad shoulders relaxing. He was all loose-limbed confidence, the opposite of his brother’s rigid tension. “It’s going, for real. Got a ’69 Chevelle in there right now, trying to bring her back from the dead. It’s a money pit, but what else is new?”
He launched into a story about the engine, about sourcing a rare carburetor, his hands gesturing expressively as he spoke. Déjà laughed at all the right places, her head tilting back, the sound a little louder than it had been before. She leaned in, her elbow on the table, her chin propped in her hand, hanging on his every word. She was giving him a performance, and he was a receptive audience.
“…and the dude who sold it to me swore the transmission was solid,” Elias was saying, his voice a low, engaging rumble. “Lying-ass nigga. I had to drop the whole damn thing.”
As he laughed, a deep, throaty sound, Déjà reached for her napkin. It had slid just off the edge of the table, near his leg. Her hand, moving with a dancer’s grace, brushed against his thigh. It was no accident. The touch was light, fleeting, but it was electric. She felt the hard muscle of his leg through the thin fabric of his pants, and she let her fingers linger for a fraction of a second too long before pulling back with the napkin.
Elias’s voice faltered for just a moment. His eyes, dark and glittering, met hers. The amusement was gone, replaced by something hotter, more intense. He saw exactly what she was doing. And he was all in.
“Damn, Dej,” he said, his voice dropping a register, turning it into something private meant only for her. “You ever come by the garage, I’ll show you how to handle a carburetor. Hands-on and everything.”
The double entendre hung in the air between them, thick and promising. Déjà felt a thrill go through her, a dangerous, heady rush. This was power. Not the quiet, possessive control Elijah used to wield over her, but a sharp, glittering, weaponized power of her own making.
Later, as the plates were being cleared and the conversation shifted to football, Elijah pushed his chair back with a scrape. “I’m getting more tea,” he muttered, standing up and stalking toward the kitchen.
Elias watched him go, then caught Déjà’s eye. He gave a subtle, almost imperceptible nod before getting up himself. “I’ll help.”
The kitchen was the only room in the house that wasn’t laughing.
Through the door, Déjà’s laugh drifted through the kitchen, Soft. Familiar. Dangerous.
It hit Elijah like a knife every damn time.
The scent of sweet tea and lemon pound cake hung heavy in the air. The ceiling fan turned lazily overhead, doing little to stir the thick, humid atmosphere. Somebody’s auntie had left gospel music playing low from a speaker on the counter, a mournful, hopeful sound that only seemed to mock the tension coiled in Elijah’s gut.
It should’ve felt like home.
Instead, Elijah felt trapped.
He stood at the refrigerator with his back to the door, jaw tight enough to crack a tooth. He could feel the weight of his family’s judgment, the warmth of their affection for Déjà, a physical force pushing him out, making him an intruder in his own childhood home.
The second he heard the door swing shut behind him, he knew who it was. He didn’t have to turn around. He could feel his brother’s energy, a chaotic, unfiltered counterpoint to his own rigid fury.
“Elias.”
His voice came out rough.
Warning.
Not greeting.
“Don’t.”
Elias snorted, a sound of disbelief.
“Shit.”
The refrigerator door opened, flooding a corner of the room with cold, white light. Ice rattled in a dispenser. A pitcher scraped against glass as it was lifted from the shelf.
“You ain’t even asked what I’m doing yet,” Elias said, his voice deceptively calm.
“I know what you’re doing,” Elijah seethed, the words barely contained.
Elias poured himself a glass of tea.
Slow.
Patient.
Like he had all the time in the world.
Like he wasn’t standing in the middle of a minefield of his brother’s making.
“No,” he said quietly, setting the pitcher down with a soft click. “You know what I’m doing with her.”
The room went still. The air grew thick, heavy with unspoken history. Elijah finally turned, his movements sharp and aggressive. Their eyes met. For a second, they looked exactly alike—the same broad shoulders, the same dark skin, the same Moore features carved by their father’s genes. Then Elias’s mouth twisted, a bitter, knowing smirk.
Because they weren’t alike at all.
“What the hell you think you’re doing?” The words came out harsher than Elijah intended, laced with a raw, ugly possessiveness that he couldn’t disguise. And judging by the look on Elias’s face, he heard it too.
For a moment, neither man spoke. Then Elias laughed. Not because anything was funny. Because he genuinely couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“Me?” He pointed a thumb at his own chest, his grin widening. “Me?”
“Elias—”
“Nigga, you cheated.”
The room became quiet.
Heavy.
Elijah’s jaw flexed, a muscle twitching in his cheek. His eyes darkened, a storm gathering. “That ain’t what this is about.”
“The fuck it ain’t.” Elias’s voice rose, the casual facade dropping away to reveal the anger beneath. He slammed the pitcher down on the counter, the sound cracking like a whip. “You wanna know why I’m pissed?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He took a step forward, his presence filling the small space. “What kills me is that you’re standing here acting like somebody stole something from you. Like somebody took something that belonged to you.” Another step. “But ain’t nobody took shit.”
Elijah’s shoulders squared, a defensive posture Elias knew all too well. “Elias.”
“No.” For the first time all evening, real anger cracked through Stack’s voice. Not playful. Not teasing. Anger. “You wanna know why I’m really doing this? Because she still shows up. After everything. After what you did. She still calls Mama on birthdays. She still checks on Grandma. She still remembers Pearline’s graduation. She still sends Christmas cards.” Every sentence hit harder, every word a hammer blow to the wall Elijah had built around his guilt. “She loved this family, Eli. She loved us.”
Elias shook his head, his expression a mixture of disbelief and disgust, and he took another step closer, invading his brother’s space completely. “And your dumb ass threw that away. For her sister. For what? For a few cheap fucks? And now you’re sitting in here acting all possessive and pissed off, like you have any right to be mad that she’s breathing the same air as us. You don’t. You lost that right.”
He leaned in, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial, venomous whisper that was somehow more cutting than his shout. “Look at me, Eli. I’m the last nigga on earth who should be giving this speech. I fuck. I bounce. I leave women’s numbers on napkins and don’t think twice. I’ve had more ass than a public toilet seat, and I plan on having more. But I’m not blind. I’m not stupid. I know a good woman when I see one. And Déjà… that wasn’t just a good woman. That was the kind of woman you build a whole universe around. The kind that makes a man want to be better than he is. The kind that looks at this loud, messy, all-up-in-your-business family and doesn’t run. She digs in. She loves harder. She stays. You don’t find that. You don’t just get that. That’s a once-in-a-lifetime hand, and you folded it like a fucking coward.”
“You know nothing,” Elijah seethed, his hands clenching into fists at his sides. “Stay away from her.”
“Or what?” Elias challenged, stepping into his brother’s space until they were chest to chest. They were identical, but in that moment, they were miles apart. Elijah was all cold fury and wounded pride; Elias was a blaze of righteous anger. “You gonna fight me? You gonna try and tell me what to do? You had a queen, Elijah. A queen. And you traded her for a damn jester. Don’t you dare stand there and get mad at me for admiring the crown you so willingly threw on the floor.”
Elijah looked away, couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop himself. Elias saw it. Saw the hesitation. The guilt. The truth. His laugh this time was bitter.
“There it is,” he said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial, cruel whisper. “I think that’s what really got you fucked up. You thought she’d always be waiting. You thought no matter what happened… she’d still belong to you.”
The silence that followed was brutal.
Because Elijah couldn’t immediately deny it.
And that told them both everything.
“Yeah,” Elias said, a slow, sad nod. “Thought so.” He pointed toward the dining room, toward the sound of her laughing with Grandma. “That’s why you mad. Not because she came. Not because she’s sitting at the table. Because she looks happy. Because she isn’t hurting loudly enough for your comfort. Because she’s moving on, she moved on. And you hate it.” He leaned in closer, his voice almost a caress, which made it hurt more. “You don’t miss having her. You miss knowing she wanted you.”
The words almost made Eljah bend over in pain.
Small.
Barely noticeable.
But Elias caught it.
And his face hardened.
“Yeah. Thought so.”
The room fell silent. Only the hum of the refrigerator remained. Only the distant sound of laughter outside. Only the ghost of everything Elijah had destroyed. Finally, very quietly, Elijah spoke again, his voice a broken plea. “Stay away from her.”
Elias stared at him, his eyes cold. He grabbed the two glasses of tea. He stared his brother down, his eyes burning with a fury that was as much for Elijah’s stupidity as it was for the hurt he had caused.
“She ain’t yours no more,” Elias said, his voice dropping back to a low, dangerous rumble, a final, absolute sentence. “Not your woman. Not your problem. Not your future.” He paused, letting the words sink in, then delivered the killing blow. “You had your chance.” He turned toward the doorway, then stopped. Without looking back, he said, “And if somebody else sees her worth now? That’s your punishment. Not mine.”
Then he walked out, leaving Elijah standing alone in the suffocating silence, the weight of his brother’s words—and the terrible, undeniable truth in them—crushing him.
The night settled over the Moore house like a shroud. The laughter died down to a low murmur, the clatter of plates replaced by the gentle hum of crickets and the distant drone of a lone cicada. Dinner was over. The energy had shifted from boisterous reunion to the quiet, heavy pull of an ending. Déjà found herself on the porch swing, a thin wool blanket draped over her legs, sipping the last of her lemonade. Beside her, Granny Moore dozed in her rocking chair, her head tilted to the side, her breathing soft and even.
Elijah had disappeared. One minute, he was a brooding statue on the porch; the next he was simply gone. Déjà had felt his absence like a change in barometric pressure, the storm finally breaking and leaving behind a strange, hollow calm. He hadn’t said goodbye. He hadn’t looked at her. He had just retreated into the house, defeated, a wounded animal crawling back to its den to lick its wounds.
It was over. She had done it. She had faced him, faced them, and she hadn’t broken. She had walked through the fire and come out the other side, not singed, but forged. A part of her felt a surge of triumph, a clean, sharp victory. But another part, a quieter, more honest part, felt the profound exhaustion of a long-fought war. She was tired.
“Alright, baby,” Granny Moore murmured, her eyes fluttering open. “Time for this old lady to get to bed before she turns into a pumpkin.” She patted Déjà’s knee, her hand frail but warm. “You drive safe now, you hear? Call me when you get home.”
“I will, Granny,” Déjà promised, leaning over to kiss the soft, wrinkled cheek.
She said her goodbyes, a round of hugs, and whispered promises to visit again soon. Mrs. Moore held her a little too long, her embrace a silent apology for her son’s behavior. “He’ll come around to his senses one day,” she whispered into Déjà’s hair.
Déjà didn’t answer. She just hugged her back, knowing that some senses were lost forever.
She stood on the front lawn, the cool grass damp beneath her sandals, and looked at her rented sedan. It was a sensible, boring car, a silver Toyota that smelled of air freshener and anonymity. The thought of driving it through the dark, winding Delta roads, alone with her thoughts, was suddenly unbearable. The adrenaline of the evening was wearing off, leaving behind a bone-deep weariness. She hated driving at night, a fear Elijah used to tease her about, always taking the keys without a second thought.
“Need a ride?”
The voice was a low, familiar rumble, cutting through her hesitation. She turned to see Elias leaning against the fender of his Chevelle, his arms crossed over his chest. The car was a beast, gleaming under the porch light, a testament to his patience and skill. He looked like part of it, all sharp lines and raw power.
“I have a rental,” she said, though her voice lacked conviction.
He pushed off the car, a slow, easy movement. “I know. But it’s late. And you look tired.” He wasn’t asking. He was stating a fact, offering a solution. “Come on. Let me take you to your hotel.”
She hesitated for only a second. It was a terrible idea. A dangerous one. But she was so damn tired of being sensible. She nodded once, a sharp, decisive motion.
The ride was thick with unspoken tension. The engine was a deep, throaty purr that vibrated through the leather seats and into her bones. The radio was on, a low, oldie station that filled the silence but didn’t break it. He didn’t talk. He just drove, one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the gear shift, his fingers tapping out a silent rhythm. He drove with an easy confidence, taking the winding roads with a practiced skill that was both thrilling and comforting.
Déjà stared out the window, watching the dark, silhouetted trees rush past. The moon was high and full, casting a silver sheen on the swamps and fields. It was beautiful, but it was a lonely beauty. She could feel Elias’s presence beside her, a solid, magnetic force. He wasn’t looking at her, but she could feel his awareness of her, a palpable energy that filled the small space of the car.
He didn’t drive toward the small, chain hotel on the edge of town where she was staying. Instead, he turned off the main road, following a winding path that led up a small hill. He pulled the Chevelle into an empty parking lot at the edge of a local park, the place teenagers went to make out and escape the prying eyes of the town. Across the lake, the lights of the small city spread out like a carpet of scattered jewels.
He killed the engine, and the sudden silence was absolute. He didn’t turn to her right away. He just stared out the windshield, giving her space, letting the moment settle.
“He’s a fool,” he said finally, his voice a low rumble that seemed to come from the car itself. “Always has been.”
He wasn’t just talking about the dinner. He was talking about three years ago. About all of it.
Déjà let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. “He is.”
He turned to her then, his face half-shadowed, his eyes glittering in the dim light from the dashboard. “You know why you’re here, right?”
The question was direct. No games. No pretense. He was calling her out, not with judgment, but with a shared, understanding clarity.
Déjà met his gaze, her own heart hammering against her ribs. She didn’t try to deny it. She didn’t try to play coy. “I’m tired of being the bigger person,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “I want to be the storm for once.”
A slow grin spread across his face. It wasn’t a smirk. It was a look of appreciation. “Well,” he said, his voice dropping to a low, intimate growl. “It’s about to rain.”
And then he was on her.
It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t sweet. It was a collision. He leaned across the console, his hand cupping the back of her neck, his fingers tangling in her hair, and he kissed her. It was a kiss of teeth and tongue, of years of unresolved anger and betrayal. It was raw and desperate and hungry. He tasted of moonshine and weed, and something wild and untamed. She kissed him back with equal force, her hands fisting in the front of his t-shirt, pulling him closer. It wasn’t about love. It wasn’t about tenderness. It was about catharsis. It was about claiming and being claimed.
The windows began to steam up, blurring the city lights outside until they were just hazy, indistinct smears of color. The air inside the car grew thick and hot, smelling of his cologne, the rich scent of leather, and the sharp, electric tang of their shared desire.
He pulled back just enough to look at her, his breathing ragged. His eyes were dark, burning with an intensity that made her feel like she was the only person in the world. “You gonna make him feel this?” he asked, his voice a rough, velvet rasp.
Déjà’s lips were swollen, her pulse racing. “Every time he looks at me.”
“Good.” A feral grin. “Show me what he threw away.”
His words were a lit match to gasoline. She didn’t need to be told twice. She climbed over the console, straddling his lap, the awkwardness of the position forgotten in the surge of adrenaline. The center console dug into her thigh, but she didn’t care. All she cared about was the hard, solid feel of him beneath her, the way his hands immediately came to rest on her hips, gripping her.
He was vocal, and she loved it. “Damn, Dej,” he groaned as she grinded against him, the friction sending shocks to her core.
His hands were everywhere, sliding up her back, tangling in her hair, gripping her ass. He was worshiping her with his touch, praising her with his body. “He’s a fool,” he breathed against her neck, his teeth scraping her sensitive skin. “A goddamn fool.”
She fumbled with the button of his pants, her fingers trembling with a mixture of nerves and anticipation. The sound of his belt buckle coming undone was loud in the confines of the car, a sharp, metallic click that signaled a point of no return. He lifted his hips, helping her push his jeans down just enough.
The act itself was raw, a little desperate, but powerful. It was Déjà taking back control, using her body as a weapon, a balm, a celebration. She was riding him, her back arched, her head thrown back, the city lights painting her skin in a kaleidoscope of colors. She wasn’t thinking about Elijah, not consciously. But in the back of her mind, she knew. This was for him. Every roll of her hips, every gasp that escaped her lips, every time she cried out Elias’s name, it was a message. A final, brutal, beautiful fuck you.
Elias was an eager, more-than-willing participant in her revenge, but he was also genuinely into her, seeing the woman his brother was too stupid to keep. He met her thrust for thrust, his hands guiding her, his mouth praising her, his eyes never leaving hers. He saw the fire in her, the strength, the resilience, and it turned him on in a way he hadn’t expected.
As she rode Elias’s dick, every moan, every time he gripped her tighter, she thought about the night Elijah had her sister in their bed, her walking in on them fucking, and with every thought she fucked Elias harder. The image of Elijah’s back, the muscles she knew so well flexing over her sister, flashed behind her eyelids. She dug her nails into Elias’s shoulders, the sharp sting grounding her, and she slammed her hips down, taking him deeper, a punishing rhythm that was as much for her as it was for the ghost watching from the shadows of her memory. Elias groaned, his head falling back against the seat, his hands gripping her ass so tight it would leave bruises. "Fuck, Déjà," he gritted out, his voice strained with pleasure. "Just like that." She heard Kiera’s giggle, that high, breathy sound, and she clenched around Elias, her body a vice, a silent scream. She leaned forward, her mouth against his ear, her breath hot and ragged. "You feel that?" she whispered, her voice a raw, broken thing. "That's what he threw away." And she rode him harder, faster, chasing a release that wasn't just pleasure, but obliteration.
“Take it,” he urged, his voice strained. “Take what you need.”
And she did. She took everything he was giving her, and in doing so, she took back a piece of herself she thought she’d lost forever. She was the storm. And the storm was glorious.
The second time was slower, but no less punishing.
It wasn’t the frantic, desperate clash from the night before. This was a deliberate, drawn-out reclaiming. The morning sun was just beginning to bleed through the cheap blinds of Elias’s bedroom, painting the room in stripes of hazy gold. The air was thick with the scent of their exertion, sweat, and something deeper, more primal. Déjà was on her stomach, her face turned to the side, her cheek pressed into a pillow that smelled of him. Elias was behind her, his weight a solid, grounding presence, one hand braced on the headboard, the other gripping her hip as he moved inside her with a deep, rhythmic stroke that stole the air from her lungs.
Each thrust was a statement. Each ragged breath a confirmation. He wasn’t just fucking her; he was erasing his brother. With every roll of his hips, he was rewriting the narrative, carving his own name into a story Elijah had tried to burn to the ground. She pushed back against him, meeting him, taking everything he gave, her own release building not as a peak of pleasure, but as a tidal wave of catharsis. When she came, it was a silent, shuddering thing, a full-body tremor that left her boneless and spent.
He collapsed against her, his forehead resting between her shoulder blades, his breathing harsh and uneven. For a long moment, they just lay there, a tangle of limbs in the harsh morning light. Then he shifted, pressing a soft, surprisingly tender kiss to the damp skin of her back before rolling off her.
Déjà lay there, tangled in sheets that smelled like him—leather, weed, and something uniquely Elias. The sun was brutal now, its rays cutting through the blinds to spotlight the dust motes dancing in the air. Her body ached in a satisfying, visceral way, a pleasant soreness between her thighs, a dull throb in her muscles. For a moment, there was peace. A quiet, settled peace she hadn’t felt in three years. The storm had passed, and in its wake was a strange, beautiful calm.
His arm around her waist tightened instinctively. The peace was shattered, replaced by a jolt of adrenaline. This wasn't just revenge anymore. Revenge was a fire you set and walked away from. This... this felt like she’d been standing too close to the flames and now her clothes were smoldering. She had meant to use him, to be the storm, but the way he’d looked at her, the way he’d praised her body like he was discovering a new continent—it had felt too real. She hadn't just slept with his brother; she'd let him see the hurt his brother caused.
Moments later, the bedroom door creaked open.
The sound was small, insignificant, but it landed in the room like a thunderclap. Déjà didn’t have to look. She could feel him. The air in the room changed, growing heavy, charged with the kind of history that suffocates.
Elijah was standing there, framed in the doorway. He was in the same clothes from last night, his t-shirt wrinkled, his jeans stained with the dust and dew of a night spent outside, or in his car, or wherever he went to lick his wounds. His face was a ruin. The cool, composed mask he wore like a second skin was completely gone, shattered into a million pieces. All she saw was the man she’d loved, the man she’d built a world with, looking at her like she’d just reached into his chest and carved out his heart with a rusty spoon.
His eyes were hollow, sunken, ringed with the dark circles of a sleepless night. They tracked from her face, down the tangled sheets, to the tattooed arm slung possessively over her bare hip. The sound he made was something between a sob and a snarl, an animal’s cry of agony and disbelief. It was the sound of a man breaking.
Déjà froze, the peace of moments before turning to ash in her mouth. She felt Elias stir behind her, his body waking slowly. He blinked, his eyes focusing, and then he saw him. He saw his twin brother standing in the doorway, his face a mask of devastation.
And a lazy smirk spread across Elias’s face.
He didn’t move to cover her. He didn’t flinch. Instead, he tightened his grip on Déjà, pulling her flush against his naked body, a blatant, unapologetic act of ownership. He pressed a soft, deliberate kiss to her shoulder, his eyes never leaving Elijah’s.
Elijah’s voice was a broken whisper, a ghost of a sound. “How could you?”
Elias chuckled, a low, dark rumble that vibrated through Déjà’s back. He nuzzled her neck, his voice a loud, clear mockery meant only for his brother. “Nah, nigga. He paused, letting the silence hang, thick and suffocating. He lifted his head, looked his twin dead in the eye, and delivered the killing blow.
“You acting like I took something from you.”
A pause.
“Can’t steal what a man already threw away.”
The finality of that line hung in the air. It was a complete reversal of their history. It was the ultimate insult, the most profound violation of their bond. In this moment, Déjà was the main event, the one worth keeping, the one worth waking up to. And Elijah was nothing more than the pathetic, lingering memory, the cheap prelude to the main act. It was messy, cruel, and irrevocably shattered their world.
𝚃⃨𝚒⃨𝚝⃨𝚕⃨𝚎⃨: 𝑺𝒐𝒎𝒆𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏' 𝑺𝒘𝒆𝒆𝒕
𝙿⃨𝚊⃨𝚒⃨𝚛⃨𝚒⃨𝚗⃨𝚐⃨: 𝐄𝐥𝐢𝐣𝐚𝐡 "𝐒𝐦𝐨𝐤𝐞" 𝐌𝐨𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐱 𝐎𝐂
𝚂⃨𝚞⃨𝚖⃨𝚖⃨𝚊⃨𝚛⃨𝚢⃨: Smoke only ever came into ‘Luela’s Dressings’ to collect for the month. So he had been reluctant to ask if she could mend his shirt. Sweetea hadn’t batted an eye at the request—or the shakiness in his hands as he struggled to unbutton it—but she had taken over the task for him.
“Whoever tailored this made these bartacks too tight.” Had been her tactful explanation. “You’d do better with a keyhole stitch.”
She’d carefully loosened them on every jacket and shirt he brought to her ever since, making them easier for him to handle. That was all it really took to loosen him up; to relax the button to his britches the same way—work them down past his hips. Smoke swore things had just gone too far. That a tryst like that wouldn’t happen again. He wasn’t going to come back.
He’s a married man.
But just like he had every other week, he came back to collect—looking for something sweet.
𝚆𝚊𝚛𝚗𝚒𝚗𝚐𝚜: 🔞 Explicit Sexual Content & Language, Oral Fixation, Fellatio, Smoke gets his soul sucked out like 7/11 slurpee, Mild Humiliation Kink, Submissive Smoke, Switch Smoke tbh, Nipple Play
For more extensive tags, see Ao3 listing below
❥𝑀𝑎𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑡 ❥
It wasn’t often a Smoke-Stack twin made a habit of sneaking around in their own town; Clarksdale was their stomping grounds, after all. But this evening, Smoke was a ways off from home, where he should be.
The sign in the little shop window said ‘closed’, but when he pulled the handle to the door, it swung right open for him. The spindles of thread, folded cloth, and tailoring materials lining the shelves drew his attention. He idly browsed a few for nothing other than a need to waste a bit of time. The young man ringing up his purchase at the counter was dragging—taking his sweet ass time—talking up the owner. After a minute or two of his cheesing and dallying, Smoke put an end to the conversation.
He strolled over, letting the coolness of his shadow drop over the chatting couple. He caught the other man’s shoulder seconds later. Parry, the youngblood running his mouth, turned around, ready to hurl an insult.
“Now, who the hell comin’ up behind me when I’m tryna–”
The rest of the words died on his lips when he saw who stood before him.
“O-oh…H-hey, Sm-Smoke, I, uh…” He nearly choked on his own spit, habitual childhood stutter clicking back into place when he identified the flash of forged carbon steel that had tapped his shoulder in place of a hand or finger.
Parry was summarily ignored and nudged aside.
Smoke’s gaze swept up to meet the stare of the woman standing behind the counter. Her brown eyes sparkled almost mischievously, but the lift of one delicate brow feigned reproach for his bull-headed interruption.
“Evenin’.” He nodded cordially. “Need a minute of your time, Miss Tea.”
She tilted her head, dark hair reflecting a smooth, softened shine under the light. It smoothed back into two pressed rolls behind her ears that tucked and secured the rest in place with a ribbon. Her skin was luminous in comparison; warm, toasted golds and ambers that reminded him of the sweetened drink she was named after.
She drummed a nail on the wood of the counter. “What for?”
Smoke glimpsed the unopened jar of canned peaches in front of her, shifting his weight from foot to foot. His expression dithered a moment as he considered the options before him.
But in the end…he settled on the choice he wanted—not the one he needed.
Author’s Note: Welp, here I am with another one-shot. This time it's about Incubus Stack x Plus Size Reader. Dedicated to @blackpantherismyish and @theethighpriestess
Warnings: +18 | Modern AU | Incubus Stack x Plus Size Reader | Dom!Stack | Bratty Sub!Reader | Degradation kink | BDSM | Tentacles | Bondage | Oral Sex | Edging | Incubus Demon x Female Human Pairing | Spanking | Creampie(s) | Overstimulation | Stack is mean af but I love himmmmm
The dreams started the night you published your first chapter online.
You hadn’t made the connection immediately, because why would you? You were a rational and disciplined woman who had spent the past three weeks defending a dissertation that had taken the better part of two years to construct, and you didn’t believe in coincidences any more than you believed in the subject matter of the unknown you spent so much time dismantling. You had posted Chapter One of your preliminary findings to your academic blog at eleven forty-seven on a Thursday night, closed your laptop, washed your face, and gone off to bed… but at eleven forty-eight, something lurking beneath the shadows came out to feed...
The first dream that disrupted your sleep had been somewhat “subtle”. You were in your bedroom, not some abstracted dreamscape, and you were lying on your back on top of the covers in the dark. The ceiling fan turned overhead, and the room was stickily warm the way Mississippi summers were muggy even up here in your fourth-floor New York apartment. Unlike your usual dreams, in this one you were consciously aware that you were dreaming and that you weren’t alone. The unknown presence that started as a thin shadow on your wall slithered around the dimly lit room until it decided to position itself right beside you. Then, in the way of dreams where geography was simply a suggestion, it was over you. The entity didn’t have a distinct shape or body you’d be able to recall to your dream journal in the morning, just a warmth and a knowing that settled across you like a second skin.
The first touch the entity placed on your skin was barely a touch at all. Its presence hovered over you and only allowed you to feel the suggestion of its fingers trailing up the inside of your thigh. The weight of its movements carried a certainty that told you, even then, that whatever was mapping out the shape of your body had done this countless times before. Had catalogued other women before you and knew the exact nerve ending it was hunting for before it arrived at its destination.
When it finally reached its goalpost, you gasped. The sensation that radiated from the entity's single point of contact moved through your entire body like a tidal wave of pleasure, and it didn’t spread outwardly from its origin the way an ordinary touch from an ordinary man did. No, this touch sent fireworks of bursting euphoric bliss throughout every single nerve ending in your body as if your nervous system had been primed for this moment and was finally given the signal to let go. Immediately your back arched off the mattress and your hands flew between your thighs attempting to grip onto something that wasn’t truly there.
“Shhh,” said a voice you couldn’t place. It was charming and thick with the particular cadence of the Deep South. Stretched vowels, swallowed consonants and the easy rhythm of something that was in no hurry at all. “I got you.”
As your dream mind attempted to figure out who this mystery voice belonged to, a warm mouth found you.
In true dream logic fashion, you hadn’t been wearing anything below the waist and your core lay bare as the first press of that skilled mouth landed against your center. Just like before, the sensations you were feeling were like nothing you had experienced in the waking hours. What you were receiving wasn't just merely oral. This was the targeted application of something that understood your body with an expertise level of intimacy that should have taken years to learn, and had no business existing in the context of a first encounter with an entity you couldn’t even see.
The tongue that moved against you was much too long and too thick in a way that no human muscle could replicate it. Every time you attempted to estimate the size of its dimensions, it grew larger and slithered deeper into your pulsating canal. You silently whimpered as it curled and pressed against your pussy, finding places deep inside you that made your vision spotty and reactively forced your thighs to clamp around something that wasn’t quite a head but was large and utterly unmovable like one.
In layman's terms, whatever person or thing that was between your thighs, it feasted on your core like it was famished. There was no other word for it. The way this otherworldly tongue flicked against you, it silently communicated that it was beyond the point of hunger. It was feeding on you, consuming your responses as fast as it drew them out. From the sounds you made, to the slick it pulled from your body, and the trembling of your thighs. All of this was taken over and over again without any indication it would ever be satisfied. The pleasure built past the point of bearing and it kept building as tears started to tack down from the corners of your eyes into your hair. You didn't mean to cry, and had no intentions of crying but the continuous pressure of unreleased pleasure sitting in your lower stomach was driving you towards the brick of insanity.
Your moans grew louder and desperate as your hands scrambled against the sheets for purchase, and then, at the precise moment when your entire body locked up and the sweet promise of release was right there, cresting, inevitable, one breath away… The warmth vanished and the withdrawal was instant, like a switch thrown. The weight lifted off your body and the presence withdrew so completely it was as if it had never been, leaving you flat on your back in your dark bedroom with your chest heaving, your thighs soaked, and your body wound tight around an orgasm that had been unfairly revoked at the last possible second.
You laid there sexually disgruntled for a full minute before you could move, and then you got up, changed your underwear, and told yourself a realistic dream like that was just a response to the stress from school.
The second dream was less subtle...
This one contained the same warmth and the same knowing presence, but this time it took shape, not in a way your sleeping mind could fully resolve, but enough. The entity was large and dark, with the impression of a face that was too beautiful and too something else to look at directly. Before you knew it, possessive hands gripped your hips with an assurance that allowed for no renegotiation, and this time the mouth found you faster, because it already knew where to go. It spent longer on you this time and that was the true torment of it all, the infinite patience this entity had. The way it worked you up through three distinct peaks, each one higher than the last, each one denied at the exact moment of culmination with the specific cruelty of something that knew exactly what it was doing and was enjoying itself thoroughly. You begged like a proper slut in the dream but it escaped out loud into the realm of the living, and the only reason you know this is because you woke with your voice raw and your roommate knocking on the wall between your rooms asking if you were okay.
“I-I’m fine,” you called out. “Just a bad dream.”
Not a lie, technically.
By the fifth night the dreams had graduated to something that had no clinical framework in your research notes. You were on your hands and knees on your bed, face pressed into a nearby pillow, and the presence behind you was no longer ambiguous about its intentions. The hands on your hips were large and rough-palmed, and the weight of two enormous pieces of flesh pressing against both of your pulsating holes from behind made your sleeping body shudder with a want so deep it had no bottom. It entered both of your canals slowly, given the enormous size of its double members, and it filled you to a depth and completeness that your waking anatomy had no accurate reference for. Simultaneously, this was where your sleeping mind began to seriously question how much you could take, but before you came to your own conclusion, something else found your mouth. It pressed past your lips with a purposefulness that was entirely at odds with the roughness of the hands at your hips.
All three of your holes were filled and your body accommodated all of it without pain or resistance, just an obliterating fullness that pressed against every wall you had all at once.
The entity moved all extensions of itself in a synchronized rhythm that was clearly the work of a single intelligence orchestrating multiple points of contact. Three separate rods of sensation worked in unison with a calculated focus that had no interest in your comfort, only in extracting a maximum response until you were shaking apart from the inside out. The sounds the entity pulled out of you during this dream weren't any that you wanted to claim ownership of in the morning.
And then, right at the moment of completion…
Poof. Gone.
As soon as the entity vanished you woke up screaming like a sexually frustrated mad woman into your pillow, and your roommate moved out two weeks later.
By week two, you started making changes to your day to day life in an attempt to combat what you still considered just stress dreams. You went to bed exhausted on purpose, hoping to fall too deeply into sleep for the dreams to reach you, but somehow they reached you anyway. You tried sleeping with the light on, but the presence didn't need darkness and the dreams still persisted onward. You tried sleeping in the living room on the couch, but somehow you always woke up in your bed without any memory of moving.
In addition to switching up your routine, you tried with increasing desperation and decreasing dignity, to relieve the built up sexual tension yourself, but that didn't work either. This was the only part you were having a hard time finding a logical explanation for. Unlike everything else, you couldn’t just file being unable to masturbate under the category of a stress response or the psychosomatic effects of spending eight hours a day immersed in erotic folklore, due to the fact that playing dj hero on expert mode has always been the number one way you’ve relieved stress in the past. It didn't matter what you did or how you did it, your body simply would not release. Each time you tried you would get achingly close, and then the sensation would simply stop, as though someone had reached in and removed the mechanism. As though the ability had been quietly confiscated.
You sat on the edge of your bed at two in the morning on the fourteenth night and pressed your palms to your sleep deprived eyes and said, out loud, to the room, “This isn’t real. This is not happening.”
As soon as you spoke, the shadow in the corner of your room shifted.
You looked at it for a long time before scoffing at it and mumbling, “Lamp,”
The shadow didn’t move again and instead of trying to indulge in self pleasure, you went back to your dissertation and wrote four more paragraphs about the psychological origins of incubus mythology with the specific, driven energy of a woman arguing with something she refused to name.
By week three, you were an absolute train wreck.
You had bruised hollows under your eyes, a hair-trigger temper, and a tight tension in your body that had moved past physical discomfort and into something pressurized that your body no longer had the vocabulary to name. You snapped at your advisor during office hours. You knocked an entire shelf of books onto the floor in the campus library and left them there before walking out. You sat in your car in the parking garage for forty minutes staring at the steering wheel before you remembered you had meant to go somewhere.
That night you came home, you were too exhausted to cook and settled on eating half a bowl of cereal before showering and falling into bed at nine-thirty like a woman who had lost a war. Because of your depleted state, you didn't notice how the shadow in the corner of your room was darker than usual, denser, like it too had reached its breaking point and needed to be fed something.
You were asleep for exactly four minutes and thirty seconds before you woke up to the feeling of being crushed. This crushing sensation wasn't like the ambient, low-grade unease of the past three weeks but the specific, acute, suffocating certainty of a body above yours. Whatever or whoever it was, had you pressed into the mattress with a weight that pinned the breath in your chest before you’d even fully surfaced from sleep.
Your tired eyes snapped open and hovering over you was him. His forearms bracketed your head on either side, both palms flat against the mattress, his torso blotting out the ceiling in a way that erased the water stain, the crack in the plaster, and the fan turning overhead. He had positioned himself so his weight distributed above you without fully resting on you, holding the threat of himself over you like a promise.
It took a couple seconds for your mind to try and process him. You couldn't comprehend him in his entirety and decided to process him in pieces. He was gigantic. Even braced above you with minimal space between your bodies, his frame dominated everything around it, too large for the ordinary furniture, too large for the room itself, the way a predator in a domestic setting made the furniture seem like props. His skin was a deep coffee brown, flawless in the low light of your bedside lamp, with a muscular frame that suggested he had never once in his existence worried about being threatened. Long hands planted into the mattress on either side of your head, with fingers slightly too long and nails slightly too dark at the tips.
His face was the thing that stopped you completely.
He was breathtakingly beautiful for a man… or a man adjacent entity. His face existed at the uncomfortable intersection of stunning and wrong, where every individual feature was arranged in a way that sent something ancient in your hindbrain screaming. High cheekbones. A jaw that could cut glass. A mouth set in a line that wasn’t quite a smile but carried all the confidence of one. His eyes were red, not bloodshot or irritated, but red. A deep arterial red, the color of old garnets held up to light, glowing with their own soft interior luminescence in the dark of your room. They were fixed on your face with an expression that held no humanity, but his eyes were focused and assessing you like he had already made a decision about you and was now in the process of collecting what he considered his property. Right above his eyes held two curved, dark horns rising from his temples, sweeping back and upward with the angular geometry of something grown rather than placed. And at his shoulders, filling the space above both of you, a set of wings fanning outward to the walls of your bedroom, swallowing the available light, making the room smaller by several degrees.
The full scope of what was lingering above you registered in your body before it registered completely in your mind. You opened your mouth to speak and he wasted no time making his first move.
One hand came off the mattress and closed around your throat, cutting off 25% of your airway. The contact hit your nervous system like a struck match and lit every nerve from your collarbone to the base of your spine in a single cascading surge. Three weeks of compression, denial, and your body’s desperate need for release met that one point of contact and combusted outward. Instantly, a wall of sensation crashed through you so fast your back arched off the mattress before you could even think about it. Your thighs tried to instinctively close, but his knee was already between them, braced against the mattress, preventing it completely.
He looked down at your face as this happened. Watching your body melt completely beneath him from just one simple touch. “So pretty,” he mumbled. His voice was everything the dream voice had been and more. “Three weeks. An one touch.” The not-quite-smile didn’t deepen as he tilted his head to the side and his voice quickly shifted from charming to demeaning. “You real fuckin’ pathetic, you know that?”
His insult quickly sobered you up as you glared at the man? entity? demon? hovering above you and began wiggling around. “Get hell off me,” you said. Your voice was shaking.
“Mm mm.” He didn’t move. The hand at your throat stayed wrapped around you like it was a necklace you were expected to wear for eternity. “You done with that?”
This time you did more than try to wiggle out of his grasp and shoved at his chest with both hands. He might as well have been made of concrete because that shove didn’t move him an inch. Instead, the close contact from both of your palms pressed against the warm bare skin of his chest sent fresh waves of pleasure radiating up your arms and straight between your thighs. Your own hands betrayed you, fingers going flat with defeat against him instead of pushing again.
He looked down at your hands and smirked with a knowing expression. “Mmm hmm,” he gloated.
“Don’t.” You yanked your hands back.
“Lil' late for all that.” He tilted his head to the other side, reading your face like you were a new toy handed over to a spoiled child on Christmas morning. “Know what ya problem is? You think too much.” The red eyes tracked down the length of your body beneath him, cataloguing, assessing. “Lemme’ help turn that brain off.”
“I’ll scream,” you said.
“Who the fuck gon’ hear you?”
The city outside your window went on about itself, indifferent and noise-soaked. You both knew he was right.
His free hand moved, and touched the center of your chest. One fingertip, directly over your sternum, pressing through the thin fabric of your sleep shirt with a settled intention that told you he had been here before, had mapped this exact spot, and had been waiting to press it. The surge that followed was different from the throat contact, deeper and more central, as though he had pressed a button wired directly to your spinal column. Your back arched again, involuntarily, hard enough to lift you completely off the mattress, forcing a sound from your mouth that you felt ashamed of before it finished leaving your body.
He silently watched as your body collapsed back down onto the mattress, still under his touch and control. “If you done bein’ dramatic,” he said, “that there is the mark… my mark.”
You stared up at him dazed and confused, still coming down from whatever that feeling was. “The what?”
“You called my name… said it real sweet too.” He stated simply and factually, like he was having a regular conversation about the weather. “Week two. Third night. You was in the dream, right at the edge, an you screamed my name.” His thumb traced a single line over your sternum and each pass of it sent smaller waves of sensation radiating throughout your body, enough to keep your breathing unsteady. “When a marked woman calls, the mark sets. Ain’t somethin’ I decided. That’s just the nature of the thing.”
You started up at him with a bewildered expression. You didn't know this man… entity from a can of paint and your brain was currently too frazzled to piece together what he was talking about. “I didn’t know your damn name.”
“You’d been writin’ ‘bout me for six months.” He held your gaze. “Some part of you knew.”
“Si-Six months?” The realization and the recognition started to settle in, but your stubbornness refused to believe that HE was currently present in your bedroom. After months of disproving the existence of incubus, there's absolutely no way The Shadow Man, also known as Elias ‘Stack’ Moore, the infamous incubus known for brutally feasting and discarding his victims was present in your bedroom… right? RIGHT?
“Yeah… its clickin’ now aint it?” he quipped, and a considerably dangerous flash of murderous intent slid beneath his eyes. Stack tilted his head again. “You spent six months studyin’ what I been doin’ for over a hundred years, little scholar. Fifty women in the Delta. Thirty in Chicago. Ten moe’ up here in this city.” His thumb pressed the mark again. “An nan one of ’em still alive.”
What little air you had left in your lungs evaporated.
“I don’t keep ‘em,” he said, with the same flat, unceremonious tone he might use to discuss something beneath his interest. “I feed, an I move. That’s how this goes.” He watched your face process that. “But you…” The thumb stilled. His eyes narrowed by a fraction, that cataloguing attention sharpening into something closer to actual curiosity. “You smell different. Even through three weeks of bein’ this close to you an only takin’ the crumbs.” He exhaled through his nose. “I ain’t decided yet whether that’s your problem or mine.”
For the first time in your life, silence blanketed you and you said nothing. Every smart thing you’d ever learned felt very far away.
“Now, what’s ‘bout to happen,” he continued, his voice dropping to a register that bypassed your ears entirely and settled at the base of your spine, “is I’m gon’ finish what I started three weeks ago. All them dreams I done built up an took away.” His eyes burned. “I’m collectin’ what's mine. All of it. Tonight.”
Another deathly silence fell over the room like a weight. Then out of nowhere you gained the foolish and courageous audacity to speak up. Regardless of what you knew about Stack’s endeavors as one of the top five devious incubi to ever exist, you refused to just lay down and take what was being forced upon you without a fight. “Nigga, have you lost your rabbit ass mind? I don’t care what or who you are. Remove this mark and leave my room!”
When you spoke, something shifted in Stack’s face. The not-quite-smile he was holding onto cracked open into something real, brief and genuine, but it was gone in an instant and replaced with something that lacked patience or concern for your wellbeing.
“Mmm, nice to know this lil’ school girl ain’t lose that mouth,” he said softly. “Been wonderin’ when that was gon’ come out.”
“I’m not joking.”
“I know you ain’t.” He looked at you with indifference and intentionally pressed the mark again before greedily watching the wave of cruel pleasure roll through your body with clinical satisfaction. “You scared, turned on, an you pissed off ‘bout both. So you come out swingin’ ‘cause that’s what prey do when it ain’t got nowhere to run.” He pressed again. “But we both know how this ends.”
“You keep saying that.”
“‘Cause I might tell a joke, but I ain’t neva’ told a lie.”
He sat back on his heels between your thighs, and the full height of him settled itself above you. You immediately understood with a cold, clarifying certainty that he had allowed you to see the room this whole time, had allowed you the illusion of something to run toward, because it had amused him. But tonight there would be no running. He had been living in your apartment walls for three weeks and now he wanted to live in your other set of walls for eternity.
Stack kept his intense glare locked on you as he reached down and removed the remainder of what he had been wearing, which had been minimal and evaporated it into thin air with the snap of his fingers. As your eyes traveled from his face down to his groin, the full reality of him boldly presented itself in the warm lamp-lit air of your bedroom. When you locked eyes with his twitching girthy member that was leaking clear ropes of precum, your brain frazzled out and stopped working. He was built proportionately, and the heavy weight that curved upward between his thighs had surprisingly not been an exaggeration within your dreams.
He watched you looking.
“‘Leven inches,” he said, conversationally. “Case you was tryna calculate.”
Your mouth went completely dry and you could feel your face heat up with embarrassment for staring so intensely. “It’s just like… in the dreams…” The sentence dissolved. “But… that can't be… That was…”
“Them dreams I gave you was accurate… sorta kinda,” he said nonchalantly. “I can make my pecker as big or as small as I want. Figure most women can take ‘leven inches… a properly trained slut can take moe’.” He paused and a sly grin spread across his face as he casually palmed his hardened length and stroked it. “”Member how, in them dreams, you was never empty? Not one hole of you?”
Flashbacks to weeks of being filled and denied the ability to climax raced at lightning speed through your mind. Your thighs pressed together when you thought about the first time he filled every hole with little to no resistance, as if your body was created to take everything he gave you with no complaints.
“Watch,” he commanded. The air around him shifted as the shadow-substance of him slithered around his body until beneath the first rod, emerged the second. It was identical to the first one, same length and girth, separated by just a few inches of space and curving in a slightly different direction with the readiness that couldn’t wait a second longer to be buried inside of you.
You continued to lay in the same position and said nothing for a very long time. For six months you spent hours upon hours gathering data that proved incubi were nothing more than a sexual myth spread amongst sexually deprived wives, but now the truth was staring right at you and this wasn't a dream.
After another minute passed you finally spoke, or at least attempted to. “Oh,” you said finally.
Surprisingly your silence amused Stack. You gawked at him as if he was a degenerate spawn of Satan sent from hell (he was), meanwhile the leaking lips between your thighs revealed a truth the lips on your face refused to confess. A connection was set in stone, he was now the one who wielded the keys to your pleasure and if you wanted to cum you would need to play by his rules.
“Oh, that’s…” You stopped yourself and thought for a moment. Your dissertation had seventeen footnotes about this specific capability. You had called it physiologically implausible mythological embellishment. “That’s…”
“Real?” he offered.
You closed your eyes briefly and took a much needed deep breath. “I owe some of my sources an apology.”
His laugh was genuine, short, and gone as fast as it came. “Yeah, you do.” He positioned himself over you again and the proximity of all of him filled your senses in a way your body responded to with immediate, embarrassing clarity. “Now.” He looked down at the full length of you beneath him with the flat, appetite-driven attention of something that had waited long enough. “You done wastin’ my time.”
That wasn’t a question.
The black tentacles arrived before you had finished deciding anything. They materialized from the shadow-substance of him the way all his other alterations had, not emerging from somewhere external but flowing from within, liquid darkness given direction and purpose. The first one coiled around your left wrist, the second found your right ankle, the third and fourth bracketed your thighs and repositioned you exactly the way he wanted, spread open and presented in front of him like an offering to a deity.
Where each tendril made contact with your skin, a warmth spread inward, not the warmth of touch, but the warmth of something entering your bloodstream, a seeping heat that traveled from each contact point along your veins and gathered at your core with a rising intensity. You felt it move. Could track its path spreading under your skin, pooling between your thighs, rising up through your chest and flooding outward to your fingertips.
And then out of nowhere an intense sensation of amplified sensitivity turned your brain to mush. Your nipples hardened so fast you made a whining sound, desperate for anything to touch them. The sensation at each tip was so acute and present that even the faint flow of air against them made you gasp. The heat between your thighs went from warmth to something else entirely, something that soaked through you in a rush you felt dripping, actually felt the wetness spreading and pooling beneath you on the duvet, your body betraying you with a thoroughness that left nothing unrevealed.
Stack watched as your body reacted to the aphrodisiac released from his tentacles. Each movement and twitch you made confirmed that he made the right decision edging you for three weeks, because now you were primed and ready to take everything he was willing to give. He glared at you with an expression that went beyond incubi hunger. His gaze held no warmth in it at all. You were a resource. You were something that had responded correctly. Nothing more. Nothing less.
“There she go,” he said flatly. “Every nerve probably feel lit up like a Christmas tree.” His eyes tracked the hard points of your nipples, the soaked state between your thighs and the way your whole body was vibrating at a frequency several registers above normal. There wasn’t a sliver of appreciation in his eyes. He just stared at you with the same assessing quality a man used when checking that an engine had turned over. “Took long enough.”
“What did you…” You couldn’t complete a sentence. Each word required more focus than you could currently locate.
“Natural chemical process,” he said, crouching down to your level to analyze you better. “What my kind produce… it amplifies what’s already there.” His eyes met yours. “An what was already there was…” He looked you over again, that flat inventory gaze. “Adequate.”
Before you could register the backhanded shade, Stack reached out and barely grazed the back of two fingers across the curve of your breast and the sensation that traveled from that graze through your entire chest made your hand jerk against the tendril holding your wrist. He pulled his hand back immediately and looked at what your body had done with the expression of a man confirming a predicted result.
“Sensitive,” he said, to himself more than to you.
“Shadow Man… Stack…”
“Don’t call me that.” His eyes cut to yours. “When I’m inside you, you call me Elias. When you beggin’, you gon call me Elias. Every other time, you don’t call me nothin’ at all.”
“I don’t…” Your voice gave out around the sensation still radiating from where he last touched you. “I’m not going to beg for you for shit.”
He looked at you for a long, flat moment before chuckling lowly to himself. “Yeah, you is,”
He dragged the same two fingers up the side of your other breast, over the top, and then traced the curve underneath, and what came out of you wasn’t a sound you planned on producing voluntarily. It tore itself free from your esophagus, raw and soaked in three weeks of denial. He studied the sound the way a linguist studied a dialect. Cataloguing. Storing.
“Nasty lil’ trinket,” he said, no warmth in the words, only that same nonchalant, clinical quality. “Look at all this.” His eyes moved over your body with thorough attention, the soft, generous swell of you, the brown skin gleaming covered in a thin layer of sweat, the roundness of your belly and the width of your hips and the full, heavy weight of your breasts nestled on your frame. “Three weeks I been smellin’ this an drinkin’ off the edges.” He sounded genuinely put out about it, not in the way of a man who cared about you but in the way of a man who found inefficiency irritating. “Almost felt like I was wastin’ my time.”
“You did it to yourself,” you managed.
“Yeah… I did,” he agreed. “An’ I’m done with all that… I’m starvin’.”
All you could do was watch in anticipation as Stack positioned himself between your spread thighs with the ease of something that had done this many times before. His forearms braced on your inner thighs and the full contact of his skin against yours sent cascading surges of sensation rippling down to your core from both sides at once. He looked at the state of you with his chin nearly resting against the inside of your thigh and his red eyes moving over your center with an expression that was purely functional.
“Look at this fuckin’ mess.” He drew one finger through your swollen folds, barely any pressure at all, the lightest possible contact, and held it up, examining what it had gathered. “Soaked clean through. Drippin’ on the sheets like you ain’t got no control over yaself.” He clicked his tongue in false disappointment. “An this ‘posed to be the lil’ schoolgirl who spent six months tryin’ to tell the world ion’ exist.”
You hated that this cocky ass incubus was correct. For six months you scrubbed through every crevice of the internet and readily available libraries in your district. For six months you worked day and night to prove that beings like this didn’t exist… just to be bound to a bed by one. “Don’t…” You mumbled quietly underneath your breath. Your mind was too far gone to even think about fighting back, but your stubbornness still held onto a small ember of defiance you refused to let die.
“Don’t what?” The question was filled with sarcasm as he pressed two fingers through your folds with slightly more intent and your hips jumped toward him involuntarily. He pulled back immediately, watching your body chase his hand. “Look at that. Can’t even hold still. Desperate lil’ cocksleeve.” The word landed low in your belly and lit something there that you weren’t going to examine at the moment. “Three weeks I kept you right on that edge an ya body got the audacity to act surprised.” He shook his head. “Pathetic.”
“You caused…”
“I know I caused it.” He pressed his thumb against your pulsating clit, barely, just resting it there, not moving, just the warm weight of contact, and watched you seize beneath him. He removed it and listened to the frustrated, broken sound you produced without any change in his expression. “I caused it ‘cause I wanted you exactly like this. Wanted to see what the scholar look like when all them fancy words run out.” He tilted his head to the side and smirked. “You look real stupid an needy like a bitch in heat... Case you ain’t know.”
“Fuck you. I am going to…”
“You gon’ what?” Again, his tone was full of ego and sarcasm as he called out your empty threat. Even if you somehow fought through the cloud of lust that now infiltrated your mind, you wouldn’t last another night without tasting the sweetness of release.
Silence filled the room for a second before Stack let out a dry humorous huff. “That’s what I thought.” He lowered his head. “Now shut up an’ lemme see if this juicy pussy as sweet as it was in them dreams.”
His warm mouth found you and the first contact pulled a sound from your throat that bounced off every wall in the room and came back to you unrecognizable. His tongue was just as otherworldly in real life as it was in your dreams. It was longer and thicker than it had any right to be and it was capable of configurations that no human musculature supported as it curled and pressed inside you, locating untouched zones in your pussy that your nervous system had never had a formal introduction to. It went directly where it was needed with no need for unnecessary exploration or uncertainty. Three weeks of dream-reconnaissance had given it a map it had memorized.
He licked through you like you were something he had been craving specifically, a long flat drag from base to tip that made your back bow off the restraints with your voice cracking on his name.
“E-Elias…”
He lifted his head just enough to speak against you, his voice rough and scraping. “What I tell you?” He pressed his tongue back inside you and curled it forward in a way that made your free hand fly to his head before a tentacle caught your wrist and returned it firmly to where he wanted it placed.
He devoured your pussy like a man making a point. All the responses he pulled out of you, from the overflow of your forbidden honey to the sounds you couldn’t contain, he silently catalogued everything and used it to calibrate the next strike. He found the specific place inside you that three weeks of dreams had identified as the most devastating and returned to it using his tongue with a frequency that removed your ability to form language of thought.
Just like in your dreams you began crying from overstimulation. Whenever he placed himself between your thighs you never intended to cry, but something about how he effortlessly built your pleasure past the point of bearing and kept building, your tears had no excuse but to fall from your eyes. Your body felt like it was on cloud nine and you so desperately wanted to teeter over that edge into the abyss of bliss. The tears tracked hot from the corners of your eyes down your flustered cheeks, while your thighs shook against his shoulders and your hands went pale in the shadowed restraints.
“Taste so goddamn sweet,” he growled against your fluttering pussy, and for once there was something raw in his voice outside of the nonchalant sarcasm he wore like a mask. “All the others…” He sealed his mouth over you again, tongue working in a tight, relentless rotation, and the sentence dissolved. He said it against your skin anyway, half to himself: “Nothin’ like this. Not one of ’em.”
That revelation shouldn’t have done what it did to you as your walls clenched at the compliment. You mentally filed this away for later.
He spread you wider with two fingers and rotated his tongue deeper before pulling his head back far enough to spit directly onto your entrance and then sealed his mouth over you again. The indignity crashed into the pleasure and made the pleasure worse, deeper, more consuming, your whole body jolting in the tendril’s grip, a sob tearing from your chest.
“Don’t… don’t you dare stop…”
Based on everything that transpired so far, you would assume that you would’ve learned to follow Stack’s rules by now, but you couldn’t help yourself. The second that whiney sentence escaped your mouth, he stopped. The withdrawal was instant and his mouth left you as the cool air hit your soaked and oversensitized skin, forcing you to make a sound that was a genuinely desperate, broken plea that you felt in your own sternum and could not recall back.
He looked up at you from between your thighs with his jaw glistening, his eyes burning, and one brow raised. “Thought I told you to shut the fuck up,” he said pleasantly.
“I… you… Elias…”
“You talk,” he cut you off, “I stop. Simple math. You wanna keep bein’ difficult or you wanna cum?”
Your jaw snapped shut as you silently glared at the bane of your existence settled between your thighs. You quietly decided to listen… for now.
“Mmm smart girl.” He lowered his head. “Don’t make me repeat myself.”
Stack finished what he had started with a relentless focus and refusing to leave his work incomplete. He worked you up through three distinct peaks, each one higher than the last and each one permitted to crest fully because he was no longer denying you. He was getting drunk off your pussy juice and indulging on every drop you released into his mouth as if he was a dehydrated man drinking from a well.
Your first orgasm after three weeks of denial almost made your soul leave your human vessel. As your voice hit a register that surprised the both of you, your body seized and wave after wave of backed up euphoria crashed through you while he effortlessly held you open and slurped up every drop.
Even though your orgasm was enough to almost make you pass out, he didn’t stop. Instead, his tongue retracted from your pulsating canal and he refilled your needy hole with two of his fingers while letting his tongue focus on your sensitive bundle of nerves. The dual input left your conscious mind with nothing to work with.
“Elias…” Your voice was wrecked. “E-E-Elias, I can’t… it’s too much…”
His massive hand came down hard across the outside of your thick thigh. The crack of it echoed in the room and the sting bloomed hot across your skin as the sharp contrast to everything else made you clench around his fingers hard enough to make him groan in delight.
“What I say?” he quipped against you. If you were any other human he would’ve ended your life right then and there for making him have to repeat himself.
Your mouth locked shut as you felt his controlled murderous intent linger in the air.
“Good little slut,” he said, and dove back in.
The second climax rolled through you just as harshly as the first one. Long devastating waves of pleasure left your legs shaking around his head and reduced your voice to a continuous, formless sound. When he finally lifted his head, his face was soaked and his eyes were burning brighter than they had been when he first appeared. He was now well fed and his eyes reflected that as they shined brightly in the dark.
“Two,” he said, voice rough and thick. “Just sum’ to the edge off.” He wiped his jaw with the back of his hand. Looked down at what was on it and then looked at you before licking your residue off his skin. “Now I’m confident I can fuck you without killin’ you.”
He moved your plush body with ease, his hands gripped the generous, soft flesh of your hips and repositioned you in a way that pleased him. You were pliant in a way you couldn’t prevent and couldn’t be embarrassed about because embarrassment required cognitive resources you no longer possessed at the moment. He turned you onto your stomach. Large hands spread across the full width of your hips, lifting, tilting, and settling you at the foot of the bed, knees and upper body braced across the mattress, the full generous curve of your backside presented to the room behind you.
He silently appreciated the fullness of your perfectly round ass and his palm came down before you were fully settled. The spank cracked through the room with a sound that made your whole body lurch forward, the sting blooming hot and immediate, causing you to yelp into the soaked duvet with your hands flying back instinctively. He caught your wrists, both of them, and pressed them into the small of your back.
“Keep ‘em there,” he said. “Move ‘em again an I’ll use a belt on you.”
“A belt? But… you don’t have a…”
His hand landed again, harder, on the same spot. Your teeth snapped shut around the cry you held back.
“I’m a demon, sweetheart. If I can produce two dicks, I can produce a muthafuckin’ belt.” His hand smoothed over the heat his palm had left, squeezing the soft flesh there with the assessing grip of someone checking the quality of something he owned. “Keep. Them. There.”
You learned your lesson and refused to make him repeat himself again as you obediently kept your hands where he wanted them.
“Look up,” he said.
You complied and the floor-length mirror in front of your bed reflected everything. You were spread, flushed, and looked thoroughly undone from just two simple oral climaxes. Every roll, curve, and generous soft inch of you was displayed beautifully under the dim lamplight with no concealment available. The roundness of your belly pressed to the mattress edge. The width of your hips were framed by his enormous hands. The fullness of your thighs trembled. And behind you, rising to his full height with his shadowed wings fanning wide and his horns catching the lamplight, both of his lengths were present and heavy as they gently nudged your aching entrances.
“Look at this ass,” he said, and now there was something in his voice he wasn’t entirely containing, something that crept through the flat, functional register and carried actual wanting in it. He squeezed both handfuls of your plump backside, spreading and releasing, over and over again, the flesh giving like playdough under his grip. “Softest thing I done ever touched. Should’ve had this weeks ago.” His hands continued to knead the generous curve of you, his thumbs pressing into the give of your lower back. “Gonna mark every inch of this pretty brown skin ‘fore I’m done with you. Leave somethin’ behind so ya body ‘member who it belong to now.”
His palm came down again, three times in rapid succession on alternating sides, and your wrists jerked against your own back but you held them in place, tears starting fresh in the corners of your eyes from the compounding sting.
“That’s it,” he said. “You learnin’.”
He looked at your reflection with those burning red eyes. Watched your face while his hands mapped every soft, full inch of your derriere and thighs. “Look at yaself,” he said. “Look at what you is right now. Bent over with that ass arched up for a demon that don’t know what mercy is an’ don’t want to.” His head tilted to the side and smirked. “An you love it. Look at ya’ face.”
Your reflection looked back at you with swollen lips, wet cheeks, and pupils blown wide. He was right. You hated that he was right.
He lowered his head and his teeth found the curve of your shoulder, the bite he left was sharp and deep enough to make you cry out. He sealed his mouth over the mark and sucked until your skin bruised dark beneath his lips, intentionally pressing the evidence of himself into your flesh like a brand. He pulled back to look at what he’d left there in the mirror.
“Mine,” he mumbled, to the mark more than to you.
Then his teeth found the back of your neck and he bit again, harder this time, one hand gripping the back of your head to hold you in place, and the sharp bloom of pain cresting into the pleasure already coursing through your system made your whole body lurch forward into the mattress and pull back against him in the same contradictory motion.
“Got a trail of bitches I done fed on in the Delta,” he said against the nape of your neck, his voice rough and low, the drawl thickening. “Couple more of ‘em up here in this bright ass city.” He pressed his teeth against another patch of skin at your shoulder blade and bit again, not as deep, dragging a sound from you that you felt deep in your bones. “Every single one of ‘em… I was done with after drainin’ ‘em dry.” His hands gripped the full width of your hips and held. “An then there’s you...”
He pressed both of his lengths against you simultaneously, one against your soaked entrance, the second against your chocolate starfish the stimulant had lit up completely, and his hand came around to wrap around your throat from behind, keeping you in place and silently reminding you who was the new owner of your body.
“Look at me in that mirror,” he commanded. “You look away, an I can’t promise I’ll keep bein’ nice.”
Immediately you locked eyes with him in your reflection as he slowly began pushing both of his lengths inside. Just like in your dream, he controlled and thrusted both of his dicks at once and the stretch they left behind was obliterating. His hand at your throat tightened, just enough, just the right amount of pressure that reduced your airflow without completely cutting it off, while making every sensation sharper and more present.
“So fuckin’ tight… mmm mmm,” he grunted, the control fraying at the edges. “Perfect lil’ fucktoy.” He drove deeper and the muffled cry you produced vibrated against his palm. “Both these tight holes. After three weeks.” His forehead dropped briefly to the back of your shoulder and the sound he made was genuine as he let out an uncontrolled satisfied groan.
For a few precious moments, Stack continued to give you slow and careful strokes until he felt your body loosening up, allowing him to stuff you deeper with dick. The moment your body gave him a silent green light, his hips drew back and snapped forward.
Your cry hit the room and he didn’t muffle it. Let it ring off the walls, watched in the mirror as your whole body absorbed the impact and rippled with it, the tender flesh of your thighs, belly, and backside shuddering with each drive of his hips. He watched that specifically. The way your body moved under him. The way the soft, full weight of you responded to every strike. His teeth found your shoulder again and tore another mark into your skin without breaking rhythm, and the quadruple combination of pain, pleasure, fullness, and his hand at your throat reduced your entire conscious mind to a single sustained frequency.
“Listen to you,” he said, his rhythm building, each stroke harder than the last. “All that smart mouth an now all you can do is cry on my dick like a greedy lil’ whore.” He drove forward and your knees buckled beneath you. His hand tightened on your throat, pulling you back up. “Stay up. I wanna see you take this dick.” He thrusted again. “Look in that fuckin’ mirror. Look!”
Even though it was one of the most difficult requests you were commanded to complete in a long time, you looked. What you saw reflecting back in the mirror was something you had no vocabulary for. The enormous, monstrous, and devastating reality of him behind you, wings spread, eyes burning, two separate places inside you being attended to simultaneously while his hand collared your throat and the mark on your chest glowed steady between your swaying breasts. When your eyes landed on your face you looked back at yourself as if you were seeing your reflection for the first time ever, and maybe you truly were.
He bit your neck again, on the other side this time, and the groan that tore from him when you seized around both lengths almost made you climax again.
“See it?” His voice was raw, grinding through clenched teeth as he worked into the tight grip of both of you. “See what you is right now? My cocksleeve. My personal filthy lil human fucktoy.” His free hand cracked across your backside again, hard enough to snap your attention and draw a fresh cry. “Answer when ya Master is speakin’ to you!”
“Yes…”
“Yes what?”
“Yes, sir… I-I-I see it…”
“Mmm.” He drove forward and held, grinding deep, both lengths pressing against their respective points of obliteration simultaneously. “An you like what you see. Don’t you?”
You unintentionally stayed silent for a moment too long and his hand at your throat tightened by one fraction.
“Don’t you?”
“Yes,” you said, and the word came out honest and immediate, stripped of everything you had been protecting. “Yes, I like it…”
“That’s my nasty lil’ bitch,” he said. The praise and the degradation arrived tangled together, inseparable, and your body seized around both of him hard enough to make his rhythm stutter. “I felt that. You squeeze me like that again an I’ll edge you for another week.”
Your inner walls loosened immediately.
“Smart girl,” he said.
He moved, and there was no performance left in it, no patience, no management, just the driven rhythm of a starved incubus taking what it had been wanting for a very long time. His hips snapped against the soft give of your ass with a force and sound that left no academic language available. The tentacles repositioned around your breasts, coiling and working your nipples with a relentless suction that pulled continuous sound from your throat above the steady percussion of his hips against yours. A fifth tendril found your swollen clit and circled it in tight, merciless rotations.
Everywhere simultaneously. Nothing was left unattended. At this point your body was nothing more than a complete and total instrument in his hands.
“You gonna cum again,” he demanded. Not a question.
“I… yes… Elias…”
“Say please.”
“P-p-Please…?”
“Please what, cumbucket?”
“Please…” The word broke. “P-Please let me cum…”
His free hand came down across your left asscheek. This time he landed six sharp strikes in succession that had you lurching forward into the mattress, the sting radiating up through your lower body and compounding with everything else until you couldn’t tell pain from pleasure and didn’t want to. “You gon’ beg better than that,” he said.
“Please…” Your voice was openly sobbing now, tears and saliva and all of your composed doctoral-candidate dignity dissolved completely. “P-P-Please, I need it, please… M-Master Elias I can’t… please…”
“Mmm sound like music to my ears.” his voice was low and dark, riddled with lust and domination. “That’s how a slut beg her Master proper.”
No other words were spoken as he drove forward once, deeper than expected, and the tendril at your clit pressed hard, forcing your body to make a decision on your release without waiting to be told.
This third orgasm hit you like a structural failure. You didn't experience a simple wave of pleasure coursing through your veins like before, but instead, you felt a blissful collapse as everything that was compressed and pleading for release finally received its wish. Your whole body convulsed around him in both places, the clench of you rippling around his dicks causing a string of profanity from him that was half prayer and half something else you couldn’t decipher.
“S-Shit…” He drove through it, chasing the feeling, his rhythm losing its pacing and becoming momentarily sloppy. “Demon dick got you feelin’ so good you tryna’ push me out?” He bit the back of your neck again, hard enough to make you see twinkling stars, and the sting made you clench harder. “Do that shit again.”
In all honesty, at this point you couldn’t have stopped even if you wanted to. His hand left your throat and came to your hair instead, gripping the base of it, wrapping once, pulling your head back until your spine curved and you could see the ceiling. The stretch of it combined with everything else made your body shudder uncontrollably under his touch.
“I’m gon’ fill you up,” he said, his voice stripped to its barest register, thick and rough and no longer making any effort at composure. “Every single hole. Tonight.” His hips drove forward and held, both of him buried to their full and impossible depths, your body wrapped tight around everything he was giving it. “An you gon’ take it. Understand me?”
There wasn’t much time to fully break down what Stack meant about filling all your holes before a shadowed tentacle pressed into your gaping mouth. The tentacle was warm and sweet on your tongue and effortlessly slid up and down your esophagus, skillfully avoiding your gag reflex. Just like the previous tentacles, this one released aphrodisiac fluids into your mouth, sharpening every sensation. He set a rhythm then that used extensions of himself simultaneously, in and out, in and out, the synchrony of it was like an orchestra with one conductor and nowhere in your body left untouched.
He continued to pull you up by the hair until you were chest-to-back with him, both of you upright at the foot of the bed, your back against his chest and his hands now settled on the soft rounds of your breasts, squeezing, releasing, and indulging in the generous weight of them. His teeth found the junction of your neck and shoulder and tore another mark into your skin while his hands worked your nipples relentlessly, and when you jerked against the pain he held you tighter, pinning you against the full length of him with one arm banded across your chest.
Your head fell back against his shoulder. Your hands gripped his forearms.
“Look at this,” he muttered into your ear, his voice guttural. “Marked up already. Every inch of this pretty neck an shoulder got my teeth in it.” His eyes found yours in the reflection and held. “That’s so everybody that come after me knows. Don’t matter what you put on, don’t matter how many layers… you walk out of this apartment tomorrow an you wearin’ me.” He rolled his hips forward, deep, and watched your face in the mirror as your mouth continued to deep throat his tentacle. “Mine,” he said, against the freshest mark. “Every filthy inch.”
He released your breast and tipped you forward again, your hands catching the mattress, and his hips resumed with the driven urgency of something approaching its own limit.
“Imma fill this ass first,” he grunted, through his teeth. “Then that slutty lil’ pussy, an finally that smart ass mouth.” He drove forward relentlessly.
The tentacle in your mouth pressed deep, adjusting to the dimensions of your throat with an intelligence that left no room for resistance, making your eyes water and your fingers curl into the duvet. It continued thrusting at a set rhythm in your throat and you had no choice but to accommodate it, your jaw stretched wide around the girth of it, saliva gathering and spilling freely from the corners of your mouth as it pressed deeper with each stroke.
“Every hole,” Stack rasped behind you, his voice stripped to its barest register. “Every one of ’em mine.”
You didn’t know how it was possible but his strokes became rougher as he thrusted uncontrollably within your tight walls and mouth. The sound your body made around that much fullness was obscene, wet and continuous. Your pussy walls and stretched asshole both, spasmed protest that his hips drove through without acknowledgment.
Then out of nowhere his already large lengths began to grow. It happened slowly enough that your overworked holes registered each degree of it separately, the stretch widening by fractions, your body forced to accommodate more and then more. Both of his dicks expanded inside you at the same time, thickening and lengthening in the way the dreams had shown you was possible and that your waking body was now receiving with an airless, wide-eyed, tear-streaming reality.
“A-A-a-A-a-Ah…” The sound was muffled entirely by the tentacle seated in your throat. Your hands clawed at the duvet. Your thighs tried to kick apart further as if more space might be found somewhere.
“You feelin’ that?” His voice was guttural, barely language. His hands gripped the wide, soft rounds of your hips with bruising force, his fingers pressing deep into the give of your flesh, holding you exactly where he wanted you while he continued to expand inside you. “Feel me gettin’ bigger in both them holes at once, lil’ cumbucket?”
You couldn’t answer. Your throat was thoroughly occupied, the tentacle stroking deeper with each pass, the fluid it kept releasing sending cascading heat down through your chest and belly that mixed with everything else until your body felt like one continuous raw nerve.
“Look at that stomach,” he ordered, as one hand released your hip and pressed flat against your lower belly, and there it was, the faint but undeniable outline of him visible through the plush skin there, the shape of what was inside you pressing against the surface. His palm pressed over it and you felt the pressure from both sides immediately. The sound that came out of you around the tentacle was shameless and continuous. “Feel that? Feel ya’ Master all the way up in this pretty belly?” He pressed his palm firmer, and his voice when he continued had roughened by several degrees. “You was made for this. Built just for this.” He pummeled forward and the pressure beneath his palm intensified.
The tentacle in your mouth pressed deeper, finding the resistance of your throat and pressing past it in slow, rocking strokes that left your eyes streaming and your lips obscenely stretched. Your face was a mess covered in a mixture of tears, drool, and sweat.
Stack looked at your face and growled as his dicks twitched inside of you. “Messy lil’ thing,” he mumbled. “Cryin’ an droolin’ like a good filthy cocksleeve.” His hips snapped forward, the force of it knocking your knees further apart. “That’s all you is, you know that? My new personal toy. Found you by accident an…” He drove forward again, harder, and the sentence took a moment to resume. “Decided to keep you. ‘Cause this pussy too good to waste.” He bit your shoulder again, in a place he had not yet marked, and the fresh sting drew a muffled sob from your throat. “Gon’ keep you alive. Long as you keep feedin’ me like this.”
He set his full rhythm then, both hips and tentacle synchronized, the triple occupation of your body moving together in a coordinated assault that left your body unable to prioritize any single input. The tentacle stroked your throat in the same cadence that his hips rocked against your backside, the fullness inside you now specific and pressing against every interior wall you had. The additional tentacles reappeared and latched back onto your body. The two at your nipples worked in pulsing, rhythmic suctions and the one circling your clit flicked back and forth in a clockwise and counterclockwise rotation. You were experiencing nothing but stimulation layered on top of stimulation, wave stacked over wave, and your body’s capacity to separate any single sensation from the mass of it was completely overwhelmed.
“You gon’ cum again,” he rasped. “Right now. With all of me inside you.”
Your muffled sounds around the tentacle were continuous and broken.
“Nod if you hear me.”
You nodded and let your mind continue to get drunk on the pleasure.
His palm pressed harder against your belly, pressing the outline of himself from outside while driving deeper from within, the pressure meeting itself through the soft wall of your skin in a way that made your thighs seize. “You so fuckin’ full. So fuckin’ stuffed like a proper lil’ bitch.” He withdrew both lengths almost entirely and then drove forward in one devastating stroke, burying himself to their hilt with no mercy.
Your final orgasm of the night had you questioning what life was like before this incubus infiltrated it and presented you with sex good enough for you to throw away your morals. Your whole body locked, thighs went rigid, back bowed, hands white-knuckled in the soaked duvet, and then finally your climax erupted through your body so violently and continuously that the tentacle in your mouth muffled a sound that might otherwise have woken the entire apartment building. Your walls convulsed around both lengths in frantic, milking waves, your body trying to process the simultaneous fullness and the crashing release at the same time.
Stack fucked you through every wave of pleasure. His hips never stilled, never slowed, working through your clenching and convulsing with a focused urgency as he began chasing his own limit. His rhythm became erratic and his breathing audible and ragged over your marked shoulder.
"Keep goin'," he said, through clenched teeth. "Don't stop. Gimme' every drop."
Your body obeyed its Master's command. The orgasm extended past any reasonable duration, sustained by the continued stimulation of the tentacles at your nipples and clit, drawn out past the point of coherence into something that felt less like pleasure and more like dissolution.
He hit his own limit in the middle of it. The sound that tore out of him was nothing like the controlled, drawling entity that had spent the last hour cataloguing your responses with clinical detachment. It was guttural and stripped of every layer he had on, ripped from somewhere as if he was genuinely overwhelmed for the first time in a very long time. His hips stuttered once, twice, losing the rhythm entirely, and then he drove forward with his full weight behind it and buried both lengths to their absolute hilt in a single punishing stroke that knocked you flat into the mattress and pulled a scream into the tentacle still seated in your throat.
He didn’t stop there. His release came in waves of his own and he chased every one of them, hips snapping forward in short, brutal drives that had no patience left in them, just the raw and shaking urgency of something taking what it needed. The first surge of heat inside your chocolate starfish filled you from the inside so completely that you felt it everywhere at once. The second wave inside your core drew another round of undone sounds from his chest, and his hands on the wide rounds of your hips gripped so hard you knew without looking that the bruises would be spectacular in the morning. The third had him pressing his forehead into the back of your shoulder, his breathing audible and wrecked, the drawl completely gone from what little language he had left.
"Shit," he said, against your skin. Then again, lower, more honest, "S-Shit."
The tentacle in your throat released in the same rhythm, filling that space with the same hot, steady pulses, and the combination of all three holes receiving his sticky seed at once reduced your body to a single sustained note of overwhelming fullness. You felt it pooling. Felt it gathering in the tight spaces his lengths had carved out and made their own. Felt it when he rolled his hips forward one final time, grinding himself to full depth with a slow pressure that was less about chasing release and more about making absolutely certain you felt every last pulse of it.
His hands on your hips shook and you felt that. Felt the tremor in the grip of something that didn't tremble, had never trembled, had spent a hundred and thirty-seven years putting its hands on women and leaving with nothing but a full belly and a body behind. You felt it and you filed it away in the part of your brain that was still running the dissertation, the part that took notes even now, even like this, and you said nothing about it because some things were better left unexamined for both of you.
As his body calmed back down, he pressed his forehead deeply into the back of your shoulder. Neither of you made a sound for a long moment beyond breathing. The tentacle in your mouth withdrew from your throat slowly and carefully, and the gasp that followed sounded as if you were on the verge of drowning. Your lungs pulled in air with desperate, greedy pulls. Your jaw was aching and your lips were wet and swollen. You swallowed what was left on your tongue. Shuddered in delight at the taste of him, then swallowed again.
After two long minutes and a few extra spurts of cum, Stack pulled free of both places with the same careful, deliberate slowness, and the sounds your body made at the loss of him were slightly embarrassing. The emptiness that followed was its own specific quality of devastation, your body reaching for fullness that was no longer there, walls fluttering against nothing, the absence amplified and felt everywhere.
He settled you down onto the dry portion of your bed. Both hands, steadying the soft weight of you down with a thoroughness that used every generous inch. Then he sat at the edge of the bed, threw his head back, and looked at the ceiling.
“Damn,” he said, to no one in particular. His voice was wrecked. Rough and stripped and nothing like the controlled, cocky entity that had appeared above you an hour ago.
You lay face-down in the duvet and assessed your situation. You had a dissertation to revise. You had office hours on Tuesday. You were thoroughly and completely destroyed by a century-old Mississippi Delta incubus who had just filled all three of your holes simultaneously and was currently sitting three feet away looking at the ceiling like a man who had also been through something. Your neck and shoulders were marked in at least ten different places, the bruises already surfacing in the dark, already tender when the cooled air of the room touched them.
“Four footnotes,” you said, eventually, into the duvet.
Stack turned his head and analyzed you but stayed silent.
“In the dissertation. I owe four separate footnotes an apology.”
The laugh that came out of him was genuine and startled both of you. It was gone just as fast as it had arrived, like he hadn’t intended to produce it. “Yeah,” he said. “You do.”
The lamp burned low in the corner of your bedroom. The fan turned overhead. The mark on your chest glowed faintly between your breasts, warm and steady in the dark.
Stack was quiet for a moment longer. Then he reached out and pressed his palm flat against your lower back. The heat of his hand spread through tired, overworked muscle the way a brand cooled slowly, staying in the skin long after the source withdrew.
“You gon’ be sore,” he said.
“I’m aware.”
“Gon’ be sore for a few days.”
“Also aware.”
A pause. “I’ll bring you somethin’ for it.”
You lifted your face from the duvet. Just enough to look at him sideways like he lost his mind. “You are an ancient demon entity,” you said, “with no human morals and a documented body count.”
“Mm hm.”
“And you’re going to bring me something for soreness instead of killing me?”
“For a scholar you sure do have a tough time listenin’. I done told you, you my property now,” he said, without a single inflection of irony. “Can’t have you damaged. That’s just maintenance.”
You put your face back in the duvet and sighed. “That is not the wholesome framing you think it is.”
“Wasn’t tryna be wholesome.”
Silence. The city outside went on with itself, thoroughly unaware.
“Elias,” you said.
“Mm?”
“The Moore documentation from 1923.” You turned your head enough to see his profile, the strong jaw, the horns catching the lamplight, the folded wings. “Hattie Price. The one who never wrote anything down.”
His expression shifted slightly. “What ‘bout her?”
“What did she know that Beaumont and Alcott didn’t?”
A long pause.
“She knew,” he said slowly, “that the women who called me did it on purpose.” He looked at the ceiling. “Every one of ‘em. Beaumont thought they was victims… Technically they was since I killed ‘em. Alcott thought they was sinners.” The corner of his mouth moved into a half smile. “Hattie knew they was just women who wanted somethin’ they didn’t have a safe way to want.”
You looked at him. “That’s the revision,” you said quietly.
“Yeah,” he quietly agreed. “That’s the revision.”
The shadow in the corner of your room breathed with its own slow tide. The lamp flickered once and held.
You closed your tired eyes. For the first time in weeks you felt as if you would be able to get a good night's rest. “Don’t let me sleep through my alarm,” you yawned lazily.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Stack.
He was lying. You both knew it. But the hand stayed settled on your lower back, warming the marks he had left into your skin, and the shadow stayed exactly where it was as you drifted off to sleep.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Author's Note: Wow what a ride (pun intended). He went from being in your walls to being in your walls.
I read/watched sb say film/tv companies & actors are paying tiktok bot pages to post their clips & paying them by views. i’m so tired of my eyes being bought
Mr. Smoke’s & Mr. Stack’s Doll: A Little Bunny Rabbit
Author’s Note: It’s Gemini season! Everyone go say Happy Day Of Birth to my sister @theethighpriestess aka Bunny 🐰
Warnings: +18 | Dom!Smoke | Dom!Stack | Smoke x Stack x OC | Plus Size OC | MFM | Angst (if you squint and do a backflip) | Fluff (if you squint and do three pushups) Oral Sex | Anal Sex | Edging | Coochie Drilled To Smithereens | Overstimulation | Double Penetration | Creampie | Dollification | They… They aren’t mean in this chapter… have I found God?
The room smelled like a cheap pomade and even cheaper whiskey.
Bunny had caught the scent the moment she pushed open the door to room number seven. There was a stale and sour stench lingering in the air that clung to a drunken man that was expected to be her next client. She stood in the doorway for a half second, shoulders squared beneath the ivory negligee she had been assigned for the evening, her red painted toes just crossing the threshold, and she told herself it was nothing. Men came in here smelling like all manner of sin. Whiskey and cheap pomade was the least offensive of them.
The man waiting for her was a heavyset thing. Pale as uncooked dough, with a collar loosened down to his second button and cufflinks that didn't match. His eyes swam when they found her. This wasn’t the ordinary tipsy swim of a man who had had two drinks to get his nerves up before visiting a house like this. No, this was the kind of swim that came from the bottom of a bottle, from a man who had been drinking since before supper and hadn't stopped for reasons that had nothing to do with enjoying the taste.
His mouth curved into something that was meant to be a smile but landed somewhere closer to a sneer. "There she is," he said, his words running together at the edges like watercolors left out in the rain. "Took ya’ long enough."
Bunny let the door shut behind her with a quiet click. She pulled up the smile she had spent years perfecting, the one that reached her eyes just far enough to be convincing without costing her anything real, and she moved toward the vanity to set down her small kit. "Evenin', sir," she replied, voice sweet as honeysuckle draped over a fence post in July. "You get yourself settled alright?"
"Settled?" He laughed, the sound was disgustingly wet and blunt. "I been waitin' damn near twenty minutes."
"I apologize for that, sir." She turned subtly, sizing the client up again in the mirror's reflection while she appeared to be checking her hair. She took notice of the way his body tilted just slightly to the left when he tried to sit straighter. The way his hand reached for the bedpost to steady himself without seeming to realize he had done it. The glassy, navigating-through-fog quality of his stare. Bunny had been in this business long enough to know that a drunk man in a room with a woman he had paid for was a man operating without a leash, and a man without a leash was a dangerous creature.
She angled herself toward the door by a few degrees. Just enough to escape if needed. "Sir," she said, keeping her voice sweet and calm, "I just want to make sure you feelin' alright before we get started. You seem like you might've had yourself a full night already and I wouldn't want—"
The remainder of her sentence was cut off because the drunken man moved without warning. He lurched to his feet, knocking the small side table with his hip and sending its single glass of water spinning off the edge to shatter against the floor. His face had turned a particular shade of red that lived between embarrassment and fury, and his jaw worked like he was chewing something bitter before he could get the words out.
"Useless bitch," he spat. The syllables fell out of him ugly and hard. "Think I paid to have some whore tell me I done had too much to drink? Think I need you lookin' down at me? I'll kill you, you hear me?!? I'll put my hands ‘round ya' neck and I'll—"
His arm swung mid rant, but Bunny was already moving.
She dropped her chin to her chest and turned her body so the arc of his open palm caught nothing but air, and in the same motion her right hand went up to her hair. The blade she kept there was small, barely two inches of steel with a handle thin enough to disappear between two curling papers. It was something she had carried since she was nineteen years old and had learned in the most painful way possible that a pretty face and a small curvy frame were not assets in every room. Her fingers found it without hesitation, but with the calm surety of someone who had practiced the motion until it lived in her muscles instead of her mind.
She drew it in the same breath she stepped to his left side, and when she came back up, she sliced him across the cheekbone in one clean swipe.
The sound he made wasn’t quite a scream and not quite a word. It lived somewhere between the two, high and stunned. The moment he was sliced, his hand flew to his face as the blood welled immediately, vivid and dark, running between his fingers and dripping onto the collar he had loosened two buttons down. He staggered back into the bedpost as his eyes went wide, and suddenly he was brutally sober.
"Help!" The plea tore out of him then, ragged and furious. "HELP! She cut me! This wicked bitch cut my damn FACE!"
Bunny stood quietly like a marble statue with the blade still in her hand. Her chest moved in controlled, shallow breaths as her heartbeat threw itself against her ribs like a prisoner testing the walls, but her face… her face was completely still. Still like a woman who had survived more than enough dangerous rooms, and this was no different. She didn’t bother running or crying, instead she watched the blood run down his cheek and she waited.
Two seconds passed and the door swung open before the echo of his second shout had finished bouncing off the walls.
They filled the frame the way they always filled every frame they walked through, shoulder to shoulder, the both of them constructed from the same Mississippi clay and hardened by the same Jim Crow fire. Stack came through first, his jacket slightly disheveled as if he was in the middle of something… or someone, signature gold tooth catching the lamplight as his coffee brown eyes swept the room in three seconds flat. Smoke followed a half step behind, and his gaze went to the blood first, then to Bunny, then to the blade still loose in her fingers, and in that order he read the whole story without a single word being spoken.
The two of them looked at each other and it lasted less than a millisecond. They shared a sacred twin language, and there was no need to speak out loud when they could discuss everything necessary through a simple glance. There was no need for none of the vowels and consonants that other men required. Stack's chin lifted two degrees. Smoke's jaw shifted once to the right. That was all.
Smoke marched over to the bleeding man and grabbed him by the back of the collar with one hand. The client sputtered, grabbing at Smoke's wrist, voice rising again into something wheedling and enraged all at once, but Smoke wasn't listening. He was already moving, already dragging the man toward the door with that flat, unblinking quiet that was a hundred times more frightening than any raised voice.
Stack waited until the door swung shut behind his brother and then he turned to Bunny. He looked at her the way he looked at a ledger he needed to balance, thorough, patient, and giving nothing away in his expression. His hands found his jacket pockets and he stood with the loose posture of a man who had all the time left in the world. "Tell me what happened," he said.
Bunny's fingers curled tighter around the blade before she caught herself and lowered it. "He was drunk when I walked in," she explained, and her voice came out steadier than she had expected, considering. "Not just a couple of drinks. He was drownin’ in it. I called it out because I wasn't about to start a session with a man who could barely hold his head upright and when I did…" She nodded toward the door. "He called me out my name, said he was gonna kill me, and he swung. I moved… And I cut him."
Stack said nothing for a moment as his tongue rolled against the inside of his cheek. He looked at the blood on the floor where the man had been standing, then at the broken water glass, then at Bunny's face. "You ain't in trouble," he said finally, his Mississippi drawl coating every syllable like a second skin. "But I need you to hear me on this." He pulled one hand from his pocket and pointed a single finger at her. "Next time a client get rowdy, stupid, or liquored past the point of sense, you don't reach for that blade. You call for one of us. That's what we here for. Understand?"
"Yes, sir."
He held her gaze a moment longer, making sure the instruction had gone somewhere it would stay, and then he nodded once. "Go on, wash up an get you some rest." He turned for the door, then paused with his hand on the frame, not looking back. "You did real good, not fallin' apart. Just... next time… let us handle the mess."
The door closed again, and Bunny stood alone in the room with the broken glass and the ruined sheets and the small blade still warm from her grip, and she exhaled for what felt like the first time in several minutes.
Out behind the brothel, the alley smelled of ash cans and summer.
Smoke walked the man through the rear exit with the same grip he used to drag him out of the room. He deposited him against the back wall, the man's knees finally gave out forcing him to slide down the brick and land in a graceless heap on the ground, one hand still pressed to his sliced cheek, blood threading between his fingers and dripping off his chin.
Smoke stood over him. His hands went to his jacket, straightening it once, and then settled at his sides. He looked down at the man like he was a disgruntled God figuring out what type of punishment to inflict.
The man looked up at him and found whatever he needed in Smoke's expression to start talking. "She attacked me," his drunkenness slipping out of his voice now that fear had come in to replace it. "That bitch came in there and she just… she had a knife. She cut my face. You need to do somethin’ about that. I paid good money for a civil hour and instead I get—"
"You said… you was gon' kill her."
The man blinked. "I was angry, I didn't—"
"Called her out her name twice in my presence."
The man's mouth opened and closed.
Smoke crouched down until his eyes were level with the man's, and in that position he looked less like a man and more like a demon ready to indulge in his bloodlust. His voice hadn't changed. It never changed. It held that same smooth, unshifted cadence through every conversation regardless of what the conversation was about. "Ion’ know exactly what went on in that room yet," he said. "But I want you to understand somethin'. That part don't fuckin’ matter to me. What matter to me is that you walked into my house, disrespected somethin' that belong to me, an then you done put ya' voice on her in a way that reminded her she needed a blade." He paused, letting that sit. "I don't take kindly to that."
His hand moved to his jacket, fingers parting the lapel, and the grip of his pistol caught the thin light of the alley moon.
The man's eyes went very wide. His injured hand came up, palm out, his whole body pressing back against the brick like he could dissolve into it. "Wait, wait, wait, I'll pay double, I'll pay whatever you—"
The hammer drew back with a soft, final click that cut the man's sentence clean off.
Smoke looked at him with those coal-flat eyes and the man fell silent as a stone thrown into deep water. No more words. Just the ragged labor of his own breathing and the thin, continuous sound of his blood hitting the ground.
Footsteps came down the alley behind Smoke and he didn’t bother turning around because he didn't need to. There was only one set of feet in the world that sounded like that.
Stack came up beside him, his hands loose at his sides, gold tooth catching the moon when he tilted his head down at the man on the ground. He took in the full picture. The gun. The blood. The look on Smoke's face. Then he took in a breath, slow and satisfied, and began to speak.
He told Smoke everything. The condition the man had come in. The things he had said when Bunny called it out. The swing that didn't land. The blade that did. When he finished, Stack was quiet for a moment, and then he reached into the interior pocket of his jacket and produced a knife with a blade four times the size of whatever Bunny had been carrying. He turned it once in his fingers, the steel catching and releasing the light in alternating flashes, and he smiled. It was the crooked smile, the one that reached his eyes and meant he was genuinely pleased about something.
"Lemme’ talk to him first," Stack said. "I ain't had a good conversation in a minute."
Smoke looked at his brother and then he looked at the man on the ground, who was now visibly shaking, tears cutting through the blood on his cheek without any prompting at all. Smoke stood from his crouch, straightened his jacket once more, and stepped to the side. He put his pistol back without a word, folded his hands behind his back, and watched.
Stack crouched in his place, knife resting easy between two fingers, his face open and joyful in the particular way that meant the worst thing imaginable was coming next. "How you doin', friend?" he asked, accent thick as summer mud, voice warm as a lit match. "Tell me somethin'. You ever have somebody look after you real good, put you somewhere soft an warm an safe, an you go an spit in they face for it? You ever do that?"
The man couldn’t answer.
Stack tilted his head and grinned like a Cheshire Cat. "Naw, naw, take ya' time. I got all night."
The alley didn’t hear from that man again after that. Not in any language that would've made sense to a person passing on the street.
A month passed by and it had the audacity to feel like three.
Bunny sat on the edge of her bed in the room the twins had given her and pulled a brush through her texturized hair for the fourth time that evening. She counted the strokes the way she had been taught to count them since childhood, one and two and three and four, because there was nothing else to count and the act of counting kept her hands busy and her hands being busy kept her from acknowledging a particular restlessness that had been living under her skin for the better part of two weeks.
The room she was stationed in was nice. That was the first thing she had thought when Stack walked her to it, one week after the incident, with his hand at the small of her back and a short instruction to make herself comfortable. She had expected a small, utilitarian thing, the kind of space a working doll got assigned on the upper floor with a shared bath down the hall and a window that faced the brick wall of the building next door. What she got was a room with curtains. Actual curtains, silk ones that pooled at the floor and caught the last of the day's light in a way that turned the whole space the color of a candle flame. A vanity with a proper oval mirror. A wardrobe that had been stocked before she arrived with dresses and wrappers and nightgowns of a quality that made her catch her breath the first time she opened its doors, fabrics so fine they slipped through her fingers like water. On the small table beside her bed, a covered dish of food arrived three times a day whether she asked for it or not. Things she hadn't tasted since she was a little girl sitting in her grandmother's kitchen, sweet potato pie with a crust that shattered her taste buds like stained glass, braised oxtail over white rice, pound cake soaked in lemon syrup that left a sweetness on the roof of her mouth for hours.
She was being treated like a woman of some standing… And it was driving her absolutely out of her mind.
Bunny set the hairbrush down and looked at herself in the vanity mirror with an assessing expression she reserved for private moments like these. She was thirty-four years old. She had curves that grown men wrote embarrassing letters about and women studied with something too complicated to be called jealousy and too honest to be called admiration. She had hands that knew how to work, thighs that knew how to hold, a mouth that had never once left a client feeling cheated, and a reputation in three separate cities that had always, always been built by her own effort, her own body, her own particular genius for the kind of pleasure that made a man feel like he was the most important thing in the room. She hadn’t come to this brothel to be kept like a flower in a glass case. She had come because she heard that the Moore twins ran the most lucrative operation north of the Mason Dixon and she wanted in on it. She wanted to work.
The bath she had taken earlier still clung to her skin in the form of the vanilla oil she had worked into her arms and her neck, and the nightgown the wardrobe had produced tonight was deep gold that made her brown skin glow like something lit from within. She looked breathtakingly beautiful, yet she felt like a caged thing in beautiful wrappings.
After looking herself over one more time in the mirror, she stood and made a silent decision as she made her way to the kitchen.
The brothel at midnight had a particular quality to it, a quietness that fell somewhere between a sleeping house and a thinking one. The downstairs jazz had stopped three hours ago. The girls were either asleep or occupied, and the hallways that had been warm and perfumed with commerce earlier in the evening were now cool and dim, lit by the occasional wall sconce that’s wick had been turned down low. Bunny moved through the brothel on her bare feet, the gold nightgown sighing against her legs with every step, and she told herself she was just going for a peach before confronting the twins. There was always a bowl of peaches in the kitchen. She had discovered this on her second day and found it oddly comforting that someone in this house thought fresh fruit was important enough to replenish daily.
She pushed open the kitchen door and the room was drenched in darkness. That was the first thing. The second thing was that it wasn’t empty.
As Bunny's eyes adjusted to the dimly lit room, eventually she was able to see there was a woman sitting at the long kitchen table in the dark eating cornbread.
Bunny stood in the doorway with her hand still on the door and looked at the mystery woman as she took her in piece by piece. Height first, even sitting, the woman had somewhat of a long-limbed frame that telegraphed itself. Bunny guessed that she was maybe five foot eight or nine if she stood. Her skin was deep, even brown like good molasses in a jar, paired with hair that fell straight and unadorned down past her shoulders, jet black, the color of ink before it dries. And to finish it off, she had a face that did a thing Bunny had only seen faces do in paintings, not the kind hung in houses like this one, but the kind in old churches where the artists tried to put something holy and something frightening in the same expression at the same time. The mystery woman looked young feature wise as if she hadn’t yet turned twenty-two, but her eyes… her eyes were something else entirely.
Bunny wasn’t a woman who was scared easily. She had lived too much, seen too much, and cut too many men across the face to give fear the kind of real estate it wanted in her mind. But those violet eyes made something ancient crawl up the back of her neck, not unpleasant, just… aware. Like stepping into a room and understanding that whatever was in it had been there since before the house was built.
The woman looked up from her cornbread and regarded Bunny with an expression of complete composure, as though being found eating cold food alone in a dark kitchen of a brothel in the middle of the night was exactly where she was expected to be.
"You Rosalie," the woman said. It wasn't a question.
Bunny blinked. "How'd you—"
"You look like a Rosalie." She broke off another piece of cornbread, unhurried about it. "I'm Josephine. Everybody an they mama call me Josie."
Bunny stepped into the kitchen and let the door drift shut behind her. "I go by Bunny," she said, and then, because she couldn't help herself, "why are you sittin' in the dark?"
Josie ignored the question with such thoroughness that it was almost artful. She tilted her head at Bunny and asked, "They call you Bunny 'cause you can bounce on a dick 'til a man start beggin' for his mama?"
The initial response that leaped to Bunny's lips was something ladylike and deflective. What came out instead was a flustered, sputtering exhale, as her cheeks went warm and her hand raised halfway to her mouth before she caught it. She cleared her throat. "That's… yes," she admitted. "That's… um… exactly why."
The corner of Josie's mouth moved in something that could've been a smile if it committed to itself. She pushed the plate of cornbread forward by an inch, the gesture of a woman sharing without making much of it. "Have some."
Bunny looked at the cornbread. It was ice cold and hard as a rock. She could see the waxy surface on it that cornbread got when it had been sitting awhile. She was fond of cornbread. She was not fond of that. She moved instead to the bowl on the counter and lifted a peach, testing its weight in her palm before biting into it, and she hummed as the juice ran down her chin warm and sweet.
She stood there eating the peach and watching Josie, and Josie let herself be watched for a time, eating her cold cornbread with equanimity, apparently perfectly at peace with the scrutiny. But Bunny was staring and she knew it and the reason she was staring was the thing she couldn't pin down, the thing that sat off-center about this woman the way a picture sits off-center on a wall. She wasn’t dressed like any of the other dolls Bunny had met in the past month. No lace, no slip, nothing that mirrored the nature of this house and its business. She wore a plain white blouse tucked into a flowy dark skirt with her feet bare on the kitchen floor. She looked like a woman who had stepped in from another dimension entirely and simply hadn't gotten around to leaving.
Bunny had met all the other dolls in the house during her first week. She was certain of that. This woman had not been among them.
Josie took another bite of her cornbread and looked at Bunny the way Bunny had been looking at her, with that clear, still assessment that took nothing personally and missed nothing either. "How you likin' it here?" she asked. "Smoke and Stack pretty decent owners, far as that kind of thing go."
The word owners sat in Bunny's mouth for a moment before she swallowed it. "I wouldn't know yet," she reluctantly admitted. "I had one client, one incident, and since then they've had me locked up in a room like I'm made of porcelain and they're afraid I'll chip." She took another bite of peach. "I haven't worked a single real night. I came here to make money. Instead I've been eatin' pie and watchin' the curtains move."
Josie's eyes sharpened the way a fire sharpens when you give it more air. "Which one claimed you?" she quipped.
Bunny frowned her brows in confusion. "I'm sorry?"
"Which twin? Smoke or Stack? Elijah or Elias? Which one claimed you as his doll?"
The frown deepened. "Neither of them," Bunny said slowly, like she was working out whether that was the right answer even as she gave it. "When I arrived they walked me through the rules, explained how the percentages worked, showed me the floor. Neither of them said anything about… claiming."
Now it was Josie’s turn to be confused as she stopped eating and placed her cornbread very gently on the plate in front of her. She looked at Bunny with the full force of those ancient alien lavender eyes and she was quiet for a stretched-out moment that had weight to it. Then she leaned forward and without a word of warning she took Bunny's face between both her hands and squeezed her cheeks together, compressing Bunny's lips into a surprised, rounded 'O'.
"You are thee cutest thing," Josie cooed, with the slightly awed sincerity of someone who had just found a very small, very charming animal in an unexpected location.
Bunny's eyes went wide above her squished cheeks. She made a sound that was supposed to be a protest and emerged as something closer to a muffled quack.
Josie released her with an unrushed giggle and settled back in her chair as though that had been a perfectly reasonable thing to do. "Alright," she said. "Let me explain how this house works."
Bunny smoothed her cheeks with her palms and fixed Josie with a look that she reserved for people who had just done something she didn't have the vocabulary to address properly. Then she sighed, finished the peach, and sat down.
Josie explained the rules of the house with a questionable amount of knowledge that Bunny would inquire about later. When a doll went through something the way Bunny had gone through something, they were taken off the floor. Not longer than a week, typically. No clients, no housework, just time to let the body and the mind settle back into themselves without being asked to perform. After that period, whichever twin had claimed that particular doll would take her through a retraining week. A proper retraining. Not punishment, not because she had done something wrong, but because the mind needed to be walked back through safety the same way the body needed to be walked back through strength after a sickness. The twins were a great many things, Josie explained, and some of those things weren’t things that would be listed in a church bulletin, but they weren’t complete monsters and wouldn't send a shaken woman back to work before she was ready. That wasn’t morality for morality's sake. It was also just bad business, and they were nothing if not precise businessmen.
Bunny absorbed this. Processed it. Turned it over. And then arrived at the part that had been sitting sideways in her chest since the question first got asked.
"It's been a month," she said.
Josie looked at her dumbfounded like she didn’t hear her correctly.
"It's been a month," Bunny said again. "The incident was a month ago. Nobody took me through any retraining. Nobody said anythin’ about when I'd go back to work. And you're telling me that the reason for that is…"
She could see it in Josie's expression before she said it, like she was about to deliver news that amused her to the highest degree.
"Either you one of the special ones," Josie said, the childish grin breaking through now, unconstrained, like a schoolgirl who had been holding it in for the last five minutes, "or you somehow so boring that both of them forgot you exist entirely."
Bunny straightened up in her chair. "I am not boring," she said.
"I didn't say you were."
"You implied it."
"I offered it as a possibility."
"It is not a fuckin’ possibility." Bunny's chin came up and her voice took on the tone of a woman defending something she had built with a considerable effort over many years. Before she had walked through the Moore brothers' doors she had left three separate establishments because she had outgrown them. She had a clientele that wrote letters to find out where she had gone. She had a reputation that didn’t include the word boring in any language. "I done made grown ass men cry," she said. "Not from pain… From gratitude."
Josie held up one hand in a gesture of peace, her playful grin not moving an inch. "Alright, alright. I believe you. I apologize." She folded her hands on the table. "The other explanation, then, is that they both want to claim you and neither one of them know how to go about it without steppin’ on the other's toes."
Bunny's chair scraped back half an inch. "Both of them?"
"It's rare," Josie whispered, as if she was saying too much too soon. "In the whole time this house been runnin’ there've only been two dolls that both of them claimed at once. Just two. The second one is named Buttercup. She handles their books and investments. She’s been both of theirs for many moons." A pause, thoughtful and private. "The first one…" She picked up her cornbread again and looked at it, not at Bunny. "Well..."
The silence that lingered behind that one word forced Bunny to really look at Josie's profile. She took in the serenity of it, the complete and settled comfort with which this woman occupied any space she entered, including dark kitchens in the middle of the night. The way she didn't need to finish the sentence because the sentence was already obvious to anyone paying attention.
"Hypothetically," Bunny said carefully.
Josie's mouth curved with mischief. "Hypothetically..."
"If a woman found herself in that position. Both of them. At once. How would she… manage that?"
Josie was quiet for a moment, chewing her cornbread, looking somewhere past Bunny's shoulder as though consulting a memory that lived in the middle distance. "Hypothetically," she repeated, "such a woman would need to learn how not to get frostbitten by an avalanche of coldness." A pause. "While also not burnin’ up in a lake of uncontrolled fire." Another pause, this one carrying a slightly different weight, the weight of something remembered in the body as much as the mind. "And on top of all that, she would need to learn how to take two men at the same time without tearin’ in half."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"That's… useful information," Bunny said finally.
"I thought you'd think so."
They sat for another minute, the two of them, in the warm dark kitchen with the peach bowl on the counter and the plate of cold cornbread between them, and something passed between them that couldn’t be labeled as friendship yet but was the thing that comes just before it, a recognition, a sense of shared understanding arrived at by different roads.
A few more comforting minutes passed and then Bunny stood. She pulled the gold nightgown straight across her hips and ran one hand through the freshly brushed waterfall of her hair and looked at Josie with the expression of a woman who had made up her mind about something and had no further interest in deliberating. "Hypothetically, if I wanted to speak with them tonight... you know where they are?"
"Their office," Josie said. "End of the hall. Door on the left." She reached for the last piece of frosty cornbread. "Knock four times when you get there. Even count, same rhythm. That's how they know it's a doll behind the door and not somebody they need to put a bullet in."
Bunny's eyes widened slightly. "Good to know."
"One more thing," Josie said, without looking up, the words landing easy as a stone dropped into still water, "whoever open that door? Look him dead in the eye when you tell him what you want. Don't let him take the silence from you first. They'll stand in a quiet room and wait you out 'til you forget what you came for. Don't let him." She broke off a bite of cornbread. "Now go."
The hallway to their office was dim and long as the floorboards under her bare feet held the warmth of the day's heat, soaked up and slowly releasing into the night. She walked it with her chin level and her footsteps quiet, the vanilla oil on her skin mixing with the faint residual perfume that lived in all the walls of this house. At the far end of the hall, beneath the last sconce, a door sat closed and faintly rimmed with the amber line of lamplight from beneath it.
She stopped in front of it. Pressed her palm flat against the wood for one second. Then she knocked. Four times. Even. The same rhythm. Just as Josie had instructed.
On the other side of the door, the office breathed with the quietness of two men working in a comfortable parallel. The desk was spread with ledgers and cash in organized columns, the ashtray on its corner nursed a half-finished cigarette that had gone cold, and the lamp threw a yellow circle of warmth across the arithmetic of their operations. Stack stood at the desk's far edge, jacket off, suspenders down, his sleeves rolled to the elbow, one hand moving down a column of figures with the end of a pencil. Smoke sat on the lounge couch along the near wall, his own jacket folded beside him, a glass of brown liquor balanced on the arm of the cushion, his eyes moving across a folded sheet of paper he had been reading for the third time.
Four knocks came through the door.
Even. Measured.
Both men went still.
Stack's pencil stopped and his eyes lifted from the ledger to find his brother's face across the room. Smoke had already set the paper down. His hand had already moved to the glass, lifting it, not drinking from it, just holding it in the idle way of a man whose other hand needed to be free. His eyes were steady on the door.
The four-count knock meant a doll. Both of them knew that. The problem was that only two dolls in their entire operation knew that particular code, and neither of those two women were supposed to be within three city blocks of this brothel for another three days.
Smoke set the glass down very carefully on the side table before standing and crossing the room to the door. His shoulder holster rode against his undershirt as he pulled his pistol free in one clean motion before turning the knob and pulling the office door open.
Bunny stood in the hallway nervously shifting her weight from one foot to the other. The lamplight from inside the office hit her caramel brown skin from the side and the effect of this wasn't something Smoke had originally budgeted for. She was soft, luminous, small, and entirely the kind of woman that a man had to consciously remind himself to look away from, all of that deep-curved, warm-skinned, doe-eyed beauty arranged in the specific way that made the gold fabric laced over her body look like it had been commissioned for her personally. She blinked up at him. Her eyes were the color of good rum and they caught the light and held it, and for one unguarded half second the hardness in his face did something complicated before it arranged itself back into its usual flat composure.
Smoke held the pistol at his side. His face settled back into the expression of a man who was conducting business regardless of the hour. His eyes moved over her once, the way he surveyed any situation that required assessment before a response. "Why," he said, voice smooth and level as a road built to last, his Mississippi roots dragging slow and warm beneath every word, "is you at my door knockin' four times?"
Bunny didn’t flinch as she looked him in the eye exactly as Josie had instructed and she held the look steady. "Because," she said, "I am tired of being treated like I'm made of glass." She let a breath pass as she remembered who she was speaking to. "... Sir."
Smoke looked at her for a long minute. He ran his mind back, sorting through the preceding month like how a man sorts through a drawer looking for something he put down without thinking. The girl on the floor. The drunk client. The blade. Stack handling her, him handling the client. The decision to move her to the room across from theirs. Then the weeks had continued to happen, the operation had continued to require their attention, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, the particular task of walking her back through had gotten caught in the gap between what he assumed Stack had handled and what Stack apparently assumed he had handled.
He let the exhale come through his nose, small and contained. Then he stepped back from the door and nodded once towards the interior of the room. "Come in."
Bunny wasn’t a woman that needed to be instructed twice as she came in.
Smoke shut the door behind her and walked back to the couch, settling into it with the glass of liquor retrieved from the side table. His eyes stayed on her as she took in the office, the desk and its columns, Stack still standing at the far edge of it now with his arms folded. Smoke's gaze moved from her face to his brother's and he said, with the absolute calm of a man stating a mathematical fact, "You done forgot to recommission ya' doll."
Stack's expression moved toward as expression of confusion that was also slightly offended at the framing. "Fuck you mean my doll?" he quipped. "Thought she was yours."
"I moved her to the room 'cross the hall," Smoke said. "I was leavin' the rest to you."
"Nobody told me that."
"I ain't gotta tell you everythin’, Elias. Use ya' brain."
Stack unfolded his arms and planted both hands flat on the desk. "My brain was operatin' under the assumption that the woman sittin' over in that room with the good curtains was your doll that you was handlin' in ya' own time, Elijah. Had I known she was mine to recommission I would've had her back on the floor four weeks ago."
"She been over there four an a half weeks."
"Four an a half weeks then. My point stands, muthafucka."
"Ya' point is that you wasn't payin' attention—"
"My point is that you could've opened ya' mouth like a grown ass man an said the words 'Elias, go handle Bunny' an I would've gone an handled Bunny, but instead you sittin’ over there on that couch drinkin' ya' liquor an assumin' I was gon' read ya' mind—"
"I don't need you readin' my mind, I need you payin' attention to what's happenin' in this house—"
"Stupid bitch, I pay more attention to what happens in this house than you do, I just ain't also expected to be a fuckin' mind reader on top of everythin’ else—"
"Language, Elias.” Smoke said.
"Now I need to read ya' mind an watch my mouth?"
"We got a doll present. Tighten up." Smoke's eyes cut to Bunny for one brief moment that carried the tiniest edge of an apology.
Bunny had been watching this exchange with the expression of a woman who was simultaneously relieved that Josie was right and also annoyed that Josie was right. She looked at the ceiling for one moment, gathering something, and then she looked at Stack directly.
"I didn't come here to listen to y'all argue about whose doll I am," she cut in. The words came out clean and direct, and beneath them ran a current of something real, something stored up across four weeks in a pretty room with silk curtains and three meals a day that she hadn’t earned. "I came here because I am a woman who been working since I was old enough to understand that money you make yourself is the only kind that belongs to you in full." She let that settle for a moment.
Before she had walked through their door she had left three establishments because she outgrew them. Before that, back when she was Rosalie and not Bunny, she hadn't been permitted to own so much as the dress on her back. That life was behind her and it would stay behind her as long as she had a body to work with and the sense God gave her to use it. "I appreciate the food," she said. "I appreciate the nightgowns and the curtains and the sweetness. I do. But I am not a woman who takes without giving back, and I am not going to sit in that room one more week eating indulging in things I ain't earn. I want to work."
The office held the sound of that for a brief second.
Stack analyzed her from top to bottom. The annoyance from the argument with his twin had drained off his face entirely, replaced by something more attentive and interesting. He possessed the look of a man who had been watching something he wanted for some time and had just been reminded of it. His gaze moved down the gold nightgown with the focused assessment of a man reviewing an investment he had forgotten to manage and was now reconsidering with renewed and comprehensive interest.
He came around the desk, crossed the office floor, and closed the distance between them until his chest was close enough for her to feel the heat radiating off him. His hands came up. His fingers settled first at the hollow of her throat, light and acquainting themselves with the shape of her, feeling the small flutter there she couldn't suppress, feeling the way she swallowed. Then they traveled with thorough patience across her collarbones, over the generous swell of her chest through the nightgown's thin fabric. She was built lavishly, heavy and warm everywhere in a way that made his hands slow down and pay attention, and he let them linger there, cataloguing her, until her breathing changed and she tried to hide the change but couldn't.
His hands continued their inventory, moving down the soft plush landscape of her stomach, the deep inward curve of her waist, spreading wide across the full round geography of her hips. He took his time with her hips. He spent what felt like an extended amount of time mapping them, as though committing their particular architecture to some private record he intended to revisit at a later date. Then one hand swept low and around, and he brought his palm down hard and flat across the full magnificent curve of her backside with a crack that split the quiet of the office like a starting pistol.
The sound rang off the walls, the bookcase, the glass in the lamp, everything. Bunny's gasp tore out of her before she had the opportunity to make any decisions about it, sharp and bright, her body moving without consulting her brain, tilting forward into the impact and then backward away from it, settling finally against Stack's chest in a way that was involuntary enough to be entirely honest.
Stack felt her melt against him and his exhale came out long and satisfied. His arm wrapped around her from behind, pulling her flush against the front of him, and he bent his mouth to the curve of her ear. "I'm gon’ be the one runnin' ya' retrainin' tonight." He pressed his mouth closer to her ear, words dropping to a rough near-whisper. "An dependin' on how that go… I might need to keep you locked away from everybody else for another month… Really take my time so ya' body don't ever forget who it belong to."
The sound Bunny made was small, strangled, and entirely against her will.
He reached for the thin strap at her shoulder and slid it down. The other strap followed. He peeled the gold nightgown from her slowly, letting it whisper down her curves until it pooled at her feet in a gilded ring, and what was left standing in the middle of their office was every generous, luminous, full inch of Bunny without a single layer between her skin and the lamplight. The lamp threw amber across the swell of her hips, the deep curve of her waist, the heavy softness of her breasts, the deep brown warmth of her, and the office became immediately a different kind of room.
Stack stepped back and bit down on his bottom lip as he took in her goddess figure. Then, with the easy authority of a man in his own house, he waltzed over to the couch where Smoke sat and dropped down beside his brother. He plucked the liquor glass from Smoke's hand, drained what remained, and reached for the refill trolley at the couch's edge. Smoke didn’t argue with his twin. He simply shifted his weight to accommodate Stack’s presence and locked his eyes on Bunny.
Two men on the same couch. Side by side. Undershirts and slacks, loafers, the warm lamplight running along the defined lines of their arms where the fabric ended, the undeniable press of their interest visible in the material of their trousers. Stack poured a fresh glass and settled into the cushion. Smoke took Bunny in from head to foot with that flat, complete attention that gave nothing away and missed nothing. The air in the room had changed and pressed heavily on all their shoulders.
Stack leaned forward, elbows to his knees, glass hanging loose in his fingers. "Show me," he said, "why you worth the trouble of retrainin' when you already cost me a dead white man, two dry cleaning bills, a shovel we had to replace after breakin' it diggin' that peckerwoods grave, plus four an a half weeks of room an board an meals that even my top earners don't see on a regular Tuesday." He settled back into the cushion. "All that, an you ain't brought us a single dollar. So show me what you got, Bunny."
Bunny stood naked in the center of their office and looked at both of them. She took one breath. Then she walked to Smoke.
She came to stand directly before him and held his gaze and placed one knee on the cushion beside his thigh and then the other, straddling his lap with the practiced ease of a woman who had made herself at home in more difficult situations than this. She could feel him beneath her already, the dense, insistent hardness of him through his slacks, and the discovery sent something bold climbing up her spine and into her shoulders. She rolled her hips, one slow and complete rotation, felt him twitch beneath her, and did it again. She leaned forward and put her mouth to the side of his neck, the warm brown skin above his collar, and kissed him there. Felt his jaw tighten. Kissed across his collarbone, the gap where his undershirt opened at the throat. She found his earlobe with her teeth, caught it just barely, and felt the exhale that came out of him, contained and controlled, the only version of a sound he was willing to give her yet.
She pulled back and looked at Stack over her shoulder. "I can't promise I won't cause more trouble with your clients," she said, her hips still moving against Smoke's in that slow, measured grind. "That ain’t a promise I can keep. But I am an investment." She felt Smoke's hand settle on her hip, heavy and certain, the grip of a man who was claiming something without announcing he's done it. "And you'd be foolish men to let me go."
Then she climbed off Smoke's lap and moved to Stack.
She settled herself across his thighs before he had quite finished processing the intention, and his hands came up instinctively, finding her hips, and she moved against him the way she had moved against his brother, with that same frank, unhurried competence, rolling her hips in grinding rolls that had him fully hard inside his slacks under a minute. She kissed along his jaw, the corner of his mouth, found his throat and bit softly at it and felt him grip her harder. She turned her mouth to his ear. "Well?" she said quietly.
Stack's answer was both hands sliding down to fill themselves with the full, heavy weight of her backside, squeezing with the proprietary thoroughness of a man claiming something he had decided belongs to him and only him.
From the other side of couch, Smoke reached forward and caught the back of her hair in his fist. Not rough, not gentle, just completely unambiguous, pulling her head back until she was looking up at him from Stack's lap with her neck at a stretched and exposed angle. Smoke looked down at her, his eyes never leaving her face. "Who," he said, each word its own complete and unhurried thing, "taught you that knock?"
"Josie," Bunny replied quickly.
The quality of the silence that followed was specific. She felt Stack go still beneath her. She saw something shift in Smoke's expression, not much, just a recalibration of a single degree. "Josie," he repeated. Flat.
"She was in the kitchen," Bunny continued. "Just now. I spoke with her before I came down here."
Smoke's eyes moved to Stack's face. Stack's eyes moved back. That language again, the one that needed no words. Whatever moved between them in that half second was mutual and resolved by the time it was done.
Smoke released her hair. He stood, adjusted the set of his shoulder holster with one practiced motion, and looked at Bunny. "Come," he said.
Stack stood from the couch with Bunny still in his arms, lifting her from his lap without any apparent effort, her weight absorbed into his frame as a matter of course. He carried her out of the office. Smoke walked ahead through the dim corridor, his footsteps quiet on the floorboards, and they moved as a unit through the darkness of the second floor until they reached the kitchen.
Smoke pushed the door open.
Bunny looked into the kitchen from over Stack's shoulder.
The room was empty.
The room wasn't just vacant as if someone had just stepped out, the room was suddenly empty in a way that was wrong. Profoundly, specifically wrong. The chair at the table sat at the exact angle it had been in when she first sat down across from Josie, as though no one had adjusted it at all, as though no one had ever pulled it out to sit in it. The plate of cornbread was gone without a trace, not in the washtub, not on the counter, not anywhere. Simply absent from the room as if it was never there. The peach bowl sat exactly where it always sat. The lamplight came through the window at its usual angle and landed on a kitchen that offered no evidence whatsoever that a woman with ancient eyes had been sitting in it not even twenty minutes ago.
Bunny stared. The hair on her arms rose.
"She was right there," she said, and her voice had climbed half a register before she noticed. "She was sittin' right there at that table. She had cornbread on a plate, cold cornbread, she had it on a plate right there in front that chair, she offered some to me and I took a peach instead. She squeezed my cheeks." Bunny's hand rose and touched her own face at the memory of it, the very real and physical memory of Josie's palms pressing her cheeks together. "She was a real person who was in this room. She had feet. I heard her feet on the floor when she shifted her chair. That ain't somethin' I imagined." She heard her own voice rising once more and made herself stop. Swallowed down her confusion and looked from the empty table, to the empty chair, to the empty counter where a plate had been sitting less than a few minutes ago. The wrongness of the empty kitchen pressed against her like a cold hand.
"Where'd she go," she whispered, and this time her voice came out quieter, stripped of its former certainty, with something underneath it that was very close to fear. "The hallway is one hallway. I walked the whole length of it to get to your office. I would have seen her. I would have passed her. Where'd she—"
"I believe you."
Smoke's voice arrived quietly and cut through everything else like a lamp lit in a dark room. He stepped next to Stack and reached out, taking her chin between his fingers, tilting her face toward him with a gentleness that wasn’t his usual mode and was therefore more effective than almost anything else he could’ve done. His eyes moved across her face, reading whatever he found there with that same thorough attention, and then he said it again without elaboration or apology. "I believe you. You saw her. You spoke to her. It's 'ight." He held her gaze until the climbing quality went out of her breathing, until her eyes settled from startled back to present. His thumb moved once along her jaw, the lightest possible contact, and then he released her chin and looked at Stack over her head.
The look between them lasted one second and carried something private in it, something that had history in it, some understanding of Josie that they shared between themselves and weren’t presently sharing with Bunny. "Need to put a leash on that woman," Smoke grumbled, with the flat certainty of someone adding an item to a list.
"You an me both, nigga," Stack said, quietly.
Smoke turned from the kitchen. He didn’t go back towards their office, instead he went the other direction, toward the room at the far end of the hall, and Stack followed with Bunny still in his arms, carrying her away from the empty kitchen and the empty chair and the cold and inexplicable absence of a woman who had been sitting in it minutes ago eating cold cornbread like she owned the place.
The room at the end of the hall was broad and purposeful. A wide bed sat at its center on a dark mahogany frame, the headboard tall and unadorned. White linens, clean. A single lamp burning low in the corner, its flame turned down until the light came out warm and intimate. This was a simple room designed for one thing and one thing only, retraining a doll that didn’t need to be disciplined.
Stack deposited Bunny in the center of the bed with more chivalry than intended. He straightened up and looked at her sprawled across the white linens, her moisturized brown skin drinking the lamplight the way it was built to, every curve of her catching and holding the warmth of it. He let out a small satisfied grunt before rolling his shoulders once and then bending down to kiss the inside of her knee.
The sound Bunny made started in her throat and got halfway out before she caught it, her thigh twitching under his mouth. Stack felt the twitch and registered it with the calmness of a man who had spent a considerable amount of time studying the language of women's bodies, then he returned and pressed his lips to her inner knee again.
One kiss… two kiss… three kiss… four… Stack continued his playful worship before moving lower, or rather higher towards Bunny’s inner thigh. He was greeted with the soft warm skin there as his mouth opened against it, tongue dragging along the crease where her thigh met nothing and then meeting the next crease. He was learning the deep inner geography of her, building the path inward with a patience that was intentionally designed to make her lose her mind before he arrived at his final destination.
Her scent hit him before his mouth did and he let out a low sound against her skin that was pure appreciation. "Four an a half weeks," he said, lips moving against her inner thigh, his breath warming the space he hadn't touched yet. "You been sittin' in that pretty room unfucked all this time, huh, lil’ bunny rabbit?"
Bunny responded vocally with something that was technically a word, or at least she thought she did.
Stack chuckled to himself and then his mouth immediately found her aching bundle of nerves. He worked her the way a classically trained musician works an instrument he knows intimately. He didn’t rush his performance but instead attended to the specific truth of her responses with the kind of focused and intelligent attention that made up the difference between a man who was present and a man who was going through the motions. He learned her in the first thirty seconds, learned the particular way her hips moved when he pressed the flat of his tongue against her center, the way her thighs tried to close around his head and then caught themselves and spread wider, the way the sound she made climbed an entire octave when he tended to her clit and circled it with skilled precision.
He effortlessly brought her to the edge in under four minutes.
He knew when she was there. He had been watching for it, feeling for it in the tightening of her thighs and the change in her breathing, the way her hands had found the back of his head and were pressing down with that desperate and gnawing pressure that meant she was right there, right on the rim of it, one more motion and she would go over. He could feel her gathering herself, the coil of it pulling tight in her body and her hips tilting up to meet him.
But, because Stack was Stack, he couldn’t help himself as he pulled back and denied Bunny instant relief. She wasn’t a doll that needed to be punished, but she was still a doll under control of her master. He didn’t pull away far, just enough for his mouth to leave her core and rest against the inside of her thigh instead. He looked utterly composed as he breathed against her soaked, twitching heat while she fell apart beneath him in a different way than she had intended.
"Stack," she breathlessly whined, the word arriving with a thicker desperation than she had planned.
"Mm," he said, mouth still against her thigh.
"Please… Don't do that."
"Do what? " he asked pleasantly.
She made a frustrated sound and whined again before Stack returned to his honeysuckle feast.
He took his time getting there, moving up through the wet of her with his tongue like he was reading something he found interesting, and then he was back at her clit and the sounds coming out of her rebuilt themselves immediately, climbing again, her hips rolling, her fingers curling into the sheets. He gave her forty-five seconds this time before the edge showed up again in the ragged pacing of her breathing, and he pulled back once more. Pressed his mouth to her inner thigh. Breathed. And let her curse at him out.
"You raggedy ass nigga," she managed.
His laugh came out against her skin, warm and genuinely amused. "I done been called worse, babydoll."
At the head of the bed the mattress dipped. Bunny's eyes reopened, head turning, and Smoke leaned above her, and the sight of him was enough to make every other thought in her head exit quickly. He had shedded everything. His undershirt, slacks, holster, all of it was gone, and what was left was all of him, broad and carved and rich dark brown skin. His body looked like the map of a man who had moved through the world with physical force for a long time and had the evidence of that written in muscle and old scars. He was hard, entirely and obviously, and looking at her with those flat obsidian eyes that gave nothing away.
Smoke said nothing as he reached for the small table at the bed's edge and a cigarette appeared between his fingers, a match scratched against the bedframe with a brief bright leap of flame before it found its target. He took the first pull, held it, let the clouds of tobacco climb toward the ceiling in a long and perfectly controlled column. And then he looked down at her, the cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, his eyes traveling across her face with the calm, weighing assessment of a man reviewing something he may or may not be satisfied with.
"Who," he said, voice low and quiet and warm as the smoking end of something burning, "you think you talkin’ to like that in my house?"
Between her thighs, Stack's mouth had found the soft heat of her again, and the sound that tried to escape Bunny's throat was intercepted by her own determination not to give Smoke the satisfaction of an incoherent answer before she had the chance to give him a real one. "I-I didn’t mean none by it… I-I wasn’t givin’ orders," she managed.
"Mm." Smoke's eyes dropped from her face to the space just below them, where his erection jumped and throbbed directly above her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him, and then his eyes came back up to hers. "You came to my office," he continued as he lazily gripped his manhood before taking another puff. "Told me what you was tired of. Told me what you wanted. Got yaself’ naked in front my brother an I, then sat in both our laps like you had the right." He exhaled smoke from the side of his mouth, away from her face. "That sound like a doll who know her place to you?"
Before she could respond, Stack's tongue distracted her by circling her clit with renewed and specific intention, as one finger pressed into her slowly, testing the heat of her… the tight grip of her. She was utterly soaked and already shaking in a finely controlled way, like how a bow shakes just before the arrow is released.
Smoke watched her face with the careful attention of a man reading a weather report. "A doll," he said, voice quieter, the edge in it sharpening enough to send shivers down her spine, "asks. She don't tell. She don't march down a hallway an knock on my door like she owed somethin'. She asks her owner. She say please. She waits." His thumb brushed her jaw, the touch light and intentional, as his eyes dropped to her mouth and then came back up. "You still ain’t proved you worth the trouble."
It didn't take much for Bunny to read between the lines as her right hand moved from the sheet and gripped Smoke’s precum dripping length. She felt the substantial weight of him against her palm and heard the slight controlled catch of his inhale as she felt him twitch against her hand. He filled her hand, dense and hot, and she stroked him from base to crown once with a grip that was firm.
She angled her head against the pillow, opened her mouth, and drew him in.
His size settled against her tongue, thick and dense, and she worked her lips around him with the exploring attention of a woman who had been told her whole career that her mouth was something extraordinary and had spent years proving it right. She hollowed her cheeks and sucked on him with an unhurried suction, her tongue mapping the underside of him on each pull, tracing the swollen vein that ran along his length, lapping at the crown when she came up before gobbling him back down again. Her free hand wrapped around his base and worked in a measured counterpoint. The combination of hand and mouth coordinated with the easy confidence of someone who had been doing this long enough that it lived in her body the way playing an instrument lives in a musician's hands had Smoke internally losing his mind.
Smoke's own hand found her hair, fingers settling among her now sweated out tresses without pressing, without directing, just resting there with a weight that communicated his full attention. The quality of his breathing changed almost immediately, each exhale coming a degree longer than it should have, each inhale a degree more controlled than usual. He brought the cigarette to his lips with his free hand and took a pull, held it, let the tobacco clouds go from the side of his mouth. The image of him above her doing that while she worked him below was the most Elijah “Smoke” Moore thing she could imagine, controlling himself with a lit cigarette while she did her damnedest to remove that control from him entirely.
For a long minute, Bunny genuinely believed she was finally in control, but then, the devious twin still situated between her thick thighs added a second finger inside her and she gasped. It only lasted a split second as her eyes almost rolled to the back of her head while she momentarily let the pleasure consume her, but that was short lived with a slight tug to her hair.
"Look at me," Smoke demanded.
She didn’t need to be told twice as she retrained her eyes back onto the owner that was in front of her.
"Mmm… good… you capable of suckin’ dick an followin’ instructions," he said softly, in a voice that had dropped below the level where it was meant to sound gentle and instead sounded much more intimate and a whole lot more dangerous. "You got somethin' to say?"
Bunny, whose mouth was still full of raw meat, slightly shook her head ‘no’ and continued servicing Smoke’s dick. Her tongue continued working the underside of him in the way that she had been complimented on in cities that were miles away from this one. She went down until the back of her throat met him and held there, breathing through her nose, feeling his fingers tighten in her hair by one degree, and then she came back up and did it again.
Smoke's exhale was long and relaxed. "Mm," he said, and it was the most honest amount of praise he had given Bunny all night.
Stack had brought her to the edge twice more in the interim, each time withdrawing with the particular cruelty of a man who is enjoying the architecture of her desperation more than he would enjoy its resolution, and she was by now a tightly wounded and thoroughly soaked little doll. Her body was operating at a level of need that had begun to make her cry a little. Not from pain or unhappiness, just from the relentless accumulation of pleasure with nowhere to go.
"Stack… Sir…" she managed, pulling off Smoke for a breath.
"Still here," Stack said, against her thigh.
"Please." The word came out stripped of all pretense. Just the word. Just the need in it, raw and uncomplicated.
Stack looked up at her along the length of her body. His mouth was wet, his eyes were bright, and he looked like a man who had been given an exceptional gift that was in no hurry to unwrap it fully. "Please what?" he asked rhetorically already knowing the answer to the question.
"Please… l-let me finish."
"Let you finish?" His voice carried genuine amusement. "Babydoll, I barley scratched the surface."
Smoke looked at the tears streaming from Bunny’s eyes. Something moved across his face, an emotion too foreign for anyone to decipher. He pulled free of her mouth with a soft sound and moved, climbing off the mattress and coming around the foot of the bed, and the sight of him moving toward Stack's position made Stack lift his head.
Smoke looked at his brother. Then he looked at the place between Bunny's thighs, the glistening, swollen, and desperately twitching evidence of the last fifteen minutes, and he looked back at Stack with an expression that was entirely final.
"Move," he said.
Stack sat up and squinted his eyes in disbelief. "S’cuse you, nigga?"
"Move," Smoke said again.
Stack's eyes narrowed. "She's my doll, Elijah."
"Yeah… well… she’s also mine," Smoke said. "I just decided."
Stack stared at him. The look on his face was the look of a mannish boy who didn’t like having to share his toys. "You can't just decide that," he complained. "That ain't how this works. You can't crawl over here in the middle of my session an claim a whole woman like you can’t go pick another damn doll—"
"Elias."
"What?!”
"I been watchin' her for a month," Smoke said, with the patience of someone explaining something obvious. "She in the room ‘cross the hall from ours. I been the one who had her moved there. I been the one who made sure her meals was right. Made sure her room was right an made sure nobody bothered her." A pause. "She mine. She also yours. Move."
Stack's jaw tightened. He looked at Bunny. Bunny looked back at him from the mattress with wide eyes, her lips still swollen, her thighs still trembling, and her expression carrying the cocky confusion of a woman who had just been claimed by two men simultaneously while lying naked in their bed and was still in the early stages of processing this information. Stack pointed at Smoke. "You owe me," he said. "You owe me big time, nigga."
"Mhm. Add it to the list," Smoke said.
Stack moved, climbing up toward the headboard with a muttered stream of commentary, and Smoke took his place between Bunny's thighs before lowering his head. He wasted no time as his mouth found her center without preamble, his tongue worked her with the focused of a man who went through life either doing something well or not at all. The sound Bunny made was enormous and immediate, her hands flying out to grip the sheets.
Smoke was vastly different from Stack in how he devoured Bunny’s pussy. Stack built her pleasure up as if he was an architect with a boundless amount of patience. Whereas Smoke treated her pleasure like a man reading a language only he knew. Every response she gave him, he immediately incorporated it into what he did next, adjusting, refining, arriving at the exact pressure and rhythm that made her thighs lock around his head and her back clear off the mattress as every coherent thought she had exited the premises.
He didn’t bother edging her since he had already clearly read what the edging had done to her. He could read the accumulated tension in every line of her body. Instead, he drove her straight to the finish line without stopping. The orgasm that finally rippled through her felt spiritual as if her soul was raptured out of her body. Her voice tore out of her open and honest, her hips grinding against his mouth as he worked her through every wave of it, his hands locked on her hips to keep her from pitching away from him.
Stack sat at the headboard watching all of this with his arms folded like a sulking child. When Smoke finally lifted his head, Stack uncrossed his arms and pointed at his brother with one finger. "My turn," he said.
"She sensitive," Smoke said, sitting back on his heels.
"I know she sensitive. That's the point."
Smoke moved aside without any urgency, and Stack replaced him between Bunny's thighs with the eagerness of a man who had been waiting for his turn at something exceptional. He looked at the convulsing center of her for a beat with something purely acquisitive in his expression, and then he put his skilled mouth back on her.
Bunny's entire body jerked backwards. The sound she made this time was considerably more desperate than the last, her hips trying to back away from the overstimulation and Stack's hands locking around them before she got anywhere.
"Stay," he murmured against her, voice vibrating right against her hypersensitive clit.
"Stack I can't, it's too much—"
"You can," he growled, and meant it, and went back to work.
Smoke let his twin have his fun as he situated himself on Bunny’s left side, and his mouth found her breast. His lips closed around her nipple and sucked on the coco nub with an intensity that sent a euphoric sensation shooting directly down her spine. His other hand flattened on her ribs, feeling the heave of her breathing, the rapid and helpless rise and fall of her chest. He worked across to her other breast with the same thorough attention, his teeth grazing just lightly enough to make her gasp, and then moan, and then grip the back of his head.
Meanwhile, Stack feasted like a starving madman. His tongue worked her pulsing and overstimulated pussy with an almost vindictive thoroughness, licking into her and circling her clit with alternating attention, building the sensation higher than it had any right to go given that she had just come apart under his brother's mouth not two minutes ago. He watched her face when he could, watched the progression of it, the way her mouth fell open, how her brows drew together, and when the tears started again fresh from the corners of her eyes, overstimulation and pleasure braided together until she couldn't separate one from the other.
When she came the second time it was different in character, wilder, less controlled, her body arching and convulsing with a force that had nothing of restraint left in it, and the flood of her against Stack's mouth was audible in the quiet room. He drank her juices down with a delighted groan while his jaw still worked her through every aftershock, refusing to stop until her thighs had gone from locked to trembling to limp and her voice had dropped from cries to the soft and utterly wrecked sound of a woman who has nothing left to give.
Thirty seconds of blissful torture occurred until Stack finally sat back. He looked at the evidence of what he had done to her with profound satisfaction, wiping his jaw with the back of his hand. He looked at Smoke. "She ready," he said.
"She definitely ready," Smoke agreed.
Smoke laid down on his back on the mattress beside Bunny, his nine inches pointing toward the ceiling. He turned his head and looked at her where she lay against the linens, trembling and thoroughly undone. His voice, when it came, was dominate and certain. "Show me," he said, "how you got ya' name, bunny rabbit. Show me why you worth the trouble."
The second Bunny heard Smoke’s request, she sat up on trembling arms. She looked at him stretched out beside her, at the full dark length of him, at the patient flatness of his expression, at the way he was simply waiting with the absolute confidence of a man who knew what was coming and secretly couldn’t wait.
She was still a little loopy from her prior orgasms but gathered up enough strength and swung her leg over him. She positioned herself above him and reached down to guide him to her entrance before sinking onto him with a long, controlled descent that pulled a sound from the back of her throat and a sound from the back of his. Both of them couldn’t help themselves responding to the stretch, the heat, and the fullness of her pussy wrapping around his length as she settled herself completely onto him. She stayed there for a second, adjusting, letting her body accommodate the considerable size of him and feeling him everywhere at once before beginning to move.
It only took three bounces for Bunny to prove to Smoke why she had earned her name. She wasn’t just a lady of the night who knew how to ride a dick until sunrise. No. She had spent years refining a specific combination of bouncing, grinding, and rolling that made men weep, beg, and reach for her like she was the only water in a desert. She worked him with her hips, rising and falling in the deep rolling motion that used every muscle she had, the sound of their bodies meeting building in the lamp-warm room, her succulent breasts moving with every stroke, her hands braced on his chest for leverage, her thighs flexing and releasing with each downward drive.
Smoke looked up at her and something happened in his face, some arrangement of his features that wasn’t quite expressionless in the way he usually was, instead something behind his eyes showed a genuine side of him that wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. His hands came to rest on her thighs, not to direct or control the pace, just to hold her, to feel what she was doing from the closest possible position.
He let her have it. He laid there beneath her and he absorbed every stroke with the stillness of a man receiving something with his full attention. His only movements were the tightening of his hands on her thighs, the slight flare of his nostrils, and the slight clenching of his jaw that betrayed how thoroughly he was feeling everything she was giving him. "That's it," he groaned, voice rough and lower than usual. "Keep goin'. Show me everythin’."
And indeed she showed him everything. She rolled her hips in her signature deep figure-eight that made her thighs burn and made men forget what city they were in. She let out a needy whine when she felt him twitch hard inside her, felt his fingers dig into her thighs and felt the sound he made rumble up from somewhere below the place where he usually kept his inner desires.
"Goddamn," Stack praised from somewhere behind her.
Bunny had nearly forgotten, in the consuming present-tense occupation of riding Smoke, that Stack was still in the room with them. She remembered now. She remembered specifically when she felt his hand press warm and flat against the small of her back, pushing her forward just slightly, changing the angle, and she felt the presence of him settling in behind her, the specific warmth of a second body entering the space, and something in her belly turned over at the knowing of what was coming next.
"Don't stop movin'," Smoke growled below her, his voice steady and laced with something that wasn’t quite command and not quite warning, something between the two that communicated that her motion was the thing keeping him from losing his composure. "Keep ya pretty eyes right here."
It was difficult, but she kept her eyes on him. She kept moving, slower now, the rhythm becoming something more rocking and less bouncing as Stack's hand remained at the small of her back and his other hand reached for something on the side table. The sound of a bottle. The sensation of something cool worked at the back entrance she hadn't been using, Stack's fingers pressed and circled with a careful, methodical preparation of a man who knew exactly how to stretch a doll without tearing her. He worked her chocolate starfish open with practiced patience, each circle and press accompanied by Smoke's hands on her hips maintaining their slow rhythm and his voice occasional and low.
"Breathe," Smoke said, one hand traveling from her hip to her stomach, palm flat and warm against her skin. "Stay with me. Just breathe."
She breathed. She kept her eyes on his and kept rolling her hips over him and breathed through Stack's fingers working behind her, opening her gradually, each moment of it accompanied by Smoke's voice and Smoke's hands and Smoke's eyes holding her in place in every sense.
After a minute of probing and preparing, Stack withdrew his fingers. The blunt pressure that replaced them was broader, and it pressed forward with the slow and inexorable patience of a man who had done this enough times to know that patience here was not optional. Bunny's motion over Smoke stuttered as the pressure built and Stack worked his way inside her. He knew better than to rush or force his way inside, instead he continued steadily forward until the stretch had gone from too much, to full, to something that rewired every nerve ending she had at the same moment and left her gripping Smoke's chest with both hands and pressing her face into his shoulder.
"There it is," Stack said from behind her, voice strained as he relished in the tightness of her asshole. "You got all of it, babydoll. You got it."
This wasn’t the first time Bunny participated in anal sex, but it was the first time she had both of her holes filled to the brim. She took both of them, fully, completely, in the most total sense of that word, and the feeling of it wasn’t something she could’ve prepared herself for no matter how plainly Josie had described it. Her body had become an instrument of pure sensation, attended to from both directions at once, filled past the point where she could distinguish between the fullness and herself.
"Move with me," Smoke ordered, and began to rock his hips upward in a slow, careful rhythm.
Stack matched it from behind, withdrawing just barely and pressing back in on the same count, the two of them falling into sync with the ease of people who have shared a frequency their entire lives. Bunny gripped Smoke's chest and held on.
Smoke's hands ran up from her hips to her waist to the curve of her sides, mapping her as she moved, grounding her with the weight and warmth of his hands when the sensation from everywhere else threatened to become too much. "Look at me," he said.
She looked at him.
"You ours," he continued. Not a question, just a statement of something that had apparently been decided and was now being confirmed. "You understand that."
"Yes," she breathed.
"Say it."
"I-I-I'm yours," she whined, and her voice cracked on the last word because Stack had adjusted behind her and found the angle that turned her thoughts entirely to static.
"Fuck," Stack hissed through his teeth. "Keep squeezin’ me like you finna cum an I'm gon' embarrass myself."
Smoke's jaw ticked. He drove his hips up sharper than he had been, once, and her forehead dropped to his chest. "Hold it," he said, one hand traveling up her spine, settling between her shoulder blades. "Don't finish yet."
Like a good little doll, Bunny obeyed even if withholding her orgasm was one of the hardest things for her to do. She held it through the next several minutes of the two of them working her from both sides with building and competing intensity. Stack's hips found a rhythm behind her that grew less restrained with each stroke, his hands gripping her waist with the force of a man holding onto something he didn’t intend to lose. Meanwhile, Smoke drove up into her pussy with a calculated and precise force that hit the same place every time and built the pressure in her body to a pitch that had no precedent in her experience.
She held back her orgasm with her fingernails deep in Smoke's bare chest and tears running freely down her face from the sheer accumulated pressure of pleasure with nowhere to go. Her body shook uncontrollably between them in continuous tremors.
"Hold it," Smoke said again, quieter this time, his hand moving from between her shoulder blades to the back of her neck, his thumb pressing at the base of her skull with a firmness that was grounding. "Hold it for me. Just a little longer."
She felt like an overfilled waterballoon on the verge of popping but she held it a little longer.
"Now," he said.
The second Smoke gave the command, Bunny let go. This orgasm made her entire body convulse between them, and the viper grip of her fluttering holes around both of them became violent and involuntary, her voice tearing out in a sound that came from a place so primal and ancient it didn’t have a name. Stack grunted hard behind her, the sound losing its edges, his rhythm breaking apart, his hips pressing deep and going still as her body worked around him without any input from her at all. Smoke's hands locked on her hips and held her through every spasm, his breath coming in controlled pulls through his nose, his jaw set, his eyes on her face.
She was still a shaking mess when they moved her.
Stack withdrew and the absence of him was its own overwhelming sensation as they repositioned her between them with fluid and efficient coordination, guiding her body into the new arrangement before she could fully process that things were changing. Her hands and knees were positioned on the mattress with Smoke now behind her. Stack was in front of her, already at the edge of the bed, his hand finding her hair, his thumb tilting her chin upward.
"Open," Stack said, his voice dragged rough by the effort of the last several minutes.
She opened. He slid into her mouth and she wrapped her thick lips around him and worked him with the full attention of a woman who had made sucking dick into an art form, her tongue pressing along his length, her cheeks hollowing with each pull. Behind her Smoke gripped her hips with both hands and pressed into her pussy from behind with a force that had nothing of restraint left in it, each thrust was deep and drove her forward into Stack so that the two of them worked her from both ends in a rhythm that had its own crude, overwhelming music.
Smoke's hand came down on the curve of her backside, a sharp slap that made Stack look over her head at his brother with raised brows.
Smoke looked back at him with an expression that communicated absolutely nothing except his full awareness of what he had just done. "She a doll. She our whore," he said casually between thrusts.
Stack's grin broke across his face, gold tooth and all. "Mm hm." His hand joined Smoke's sentiment, fisting tighter in her curls, working himself into her mouth with an authority that matched his brother's behind her. "Take it," he said, "just like that. All of it."
She took it. She took all of it, from both of them, from behind and in front. Her tears ran freely down her face again, dripped off her chin, and ran down Stack's length where he fucked into her throat. She felt another climax building from somewhere deeper than the previous ones had come from, further down, more structural, and her body told her it was coming whether she was ready or not.
Stack felt it in the change of her mouth around him. Smoke felt it in the change of her hypersensitive pussy around him. Both of them drove harder at the same time as Smoke's hand came to her hip and gripped it with the force of a man who wanted to feel the final round tightness squeeze around him. "Give it," Smoke said, rough against her.
Bunny’s body clenched and released in a rolling sequence that started at her core and moved outward, her voice was muffled around Stack’s twitching length and her thighs shook against Smoke's grip. Everything in her narrowed down to the specific and enormous fact of coming apart between these two men who had decided, right then and there, that she was theirs. Stack's hips completely lost their rhythm entirely and he groaned from deep in his chest, his hot sticky release filling her throat in long, heavy pulses, his hand in her hair tightening as he worked through every second of it. Behind her Smoke thrusted into her through the spasms of her climax with a final series of strokes that cost him the last of his control as his hips pressed flush against hers and stayed there while he finished inside her, the sound that came out of him brief and real.
The room after was silent except for breathing.
Three people in various states of collapse across the ruined white linens, the lamp still burning in the corner, the amber light still doing its only job. Bunny was laying face down in the center of the bed with no intention of moving for the foreseeable future. Stack was somewhere to her left, his hand resting on the mattress near her shoulder. Smoke stood after a moment, crossed to the washstand, and returned with a warm cloth. He cleaned her with that same focused efficiency she had heard other dolls gossip about but never experienced, his hands moved over her with the attention of a man who considered this part of the task just as important as any other.
It was Stack’s turn to move from his spot on the bed, as he waltzed over to a nearby drink cart and poured himself a fresh glass of whiskey glass, took a long sip, and exhaled with the deep satisfaction of a man at genuine peace with every decision he had made in the last several hours. He looked at Bunny where she laid against the linens, a beautiful and thoroughly claimed wreck of a woman. Then he turned to look at his brother across the room.
"She can't go back on the floor," he said.
Smoke wrung the cloth out over the basin. "Mm?"
"I'm serious, Eli. Her talent is undeniable. That thang she did with them hips is somethin' I intend to study at length for the next several weeks of my life." He took another sip. "But her control? Her control is nonexistent. She finished too many damn times in one session. You put her in a room with a payin' client who came here expectin' an hour an she gon' be done in two minutes. That man gon' feel robbed an robbed men talk… an talkin' men bad for business." He set the glass down and crossed his arms over his chest like a man presenting a logical conclusion. "Two more weeks. Minimum. We retrain her every night ‘til she can hold back a nut the way a real doll ‘posed to."
Smoke stayed quiet as he came back to the bed, sat at its edge and looked at his twin with the knowing expression he wore when Stack was making an argument he wanted to put an immediate end to. "Elias," he said.
Stack looked at him.
"Drink ya' whiskey an shut the fuck up."
Stack sucked his teeth but he kept his eyes on Bunny.
Bunny turned her face against the pillow and looked at both of them from the comfortable horizontal vantage point of a woman who had been thoroughly wrecked. Smoke, quiet at the bed's edge, let his hand come to rest at her ankle. Stack, whiskey back in hand and gold tooth gleaming was already building his next argument with the enthusiasm of a man who was looking forward to the next two weeks considerably more than he is letting on.
"Two weeks," she mumbled underneath her breath, to the ceiling.
Stack pointed at her with excitement. "See! She gets it. That’s a good lil’ bunny rabbit."
"But the food stays the same," she added.
The room went quiet for a moment.
Then Stack started laughing, full and genuine, the sound rolling through the room and finding all the corners. This time he pointed at Smoke with the glass. "Eli," he said, "I like her."
"I know," Smoke replied as he kept his hand on her ankle. “I know…”
.
.
.
.
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Author’s Note: Wowzers! See I ammmmm capable of writing the twins as civilized deviants… *cough* So… um… how about that Josie?? 😏
Warning(s): If you’re squeamish, this may not be the story for you. Smut (18+, MDNI, but tbh it’s not very explicit), Southern Gothic themes, dark romance, toxic relationships and dynamics, angst, cheating, violence, body horror, gore, romantic cannibalism (lol), horror
Lovergirlnote: Hi, my beautiful lovergirls. So this story was me being a bit experimental and writing in first person. Also, this is somewhat of a personal story for me, as I have incorporated aspects of my own relationships with the men in my life and past loves. (lol let’s not get into that trauma), but I’m really curious to see what you all think of this! Let me know, and as always, thank you all so much for the love and support. 🥹♥️
I remember the first time that I met you.
You were standing in the middle of the room, women and men flocking around you. All hoping for just one chance to have your eyes on them.
I watched you that night. I don’t think there was one moment when my eyes didn’t glance in your direction. I was at a weird point in my life. I’d just lost Anthony. Another heartbreak added to a list of unreliable men that all derived from my father.
I kept my eyes on you. I could feel my interest growing more and more with each passing glance that I gave you. I wanted you to see me just as much as you were seeing everyone else. Call it a coincidence or some sick act of fate, but you did.
You slid your body into the seat next to mine and ordered a glass of Hennessy. I knew that you were waiting for me to finally acknowledge you, which I did after a few short seconds. I was “playing hard” as my mother had taught me as a young girl. You always make men wait for you. Never let them get the assumption that you’re “easy” because then they’ll leave.
At least, that’s what my mama always told me.
“So you gone keep pretendin’ like you don’t see me starin’ at you?” You asked.
I flicked my gaze over you, “I thought they taught all good Southern boys that it was rude to stare.”
You laughed, and not some mild chuckle, you fully laughed at my statement. A smile crossed your face next. I’d known enough men to know what each smile meant. That night, yours meant trouble. You leaned closer to me, as if we were sharing some deep secret, “Well, suga’, I’m not one of those good Southern men ya’ mama and grandmama probably told you about. I’m way better.”
I liked that about you. Your arrogance. It wasn’t like other men’s arrogance. Where theirs bordered on into dangerous territory, yours ventured more in line with self-assuredness. You knew who you were, and you weren’t afraid to let it be known.
“What’s your name?” I asked, taking a small sip from my drink.
“Elias Moore, but you can call me Stack,” You answered in return.
I rolled the syllables of your name around in my mouth for a few moments. Three syllables. What I found interesting was the notion that the “lie” sound in your name stretched out. I suppose that should’ve been my first warning not to fall for you. But I’ve always been bad at relationships, and I’ve always been good at picking very bad men, including you.
You asked for my name, and I gave it to you.
Naturally, you complimented my name. ‘Said it fit my face and that it was the prettiest thing you’d ever heard. For the remainder of the night, we sat at that bar, exchanging knowledge and thinly concealed desire. I liked it. I liked being seen by you. I now recognize why so many people were drawn to you. You had the distinct ability to make others feel like they were the center of your universe.
And God was it infecting.
I wanted more.
I needed to have more of you.
I’ve known many men in my life.
But I can say with full assurance that I haven’t loved many. In fact, I’ve only loved three.
The first was my father.
He was bound to be the first man that I’d love in my lifetime. But see, my father, he’s a very talented man. He’s the only man that I know who can disappear and reappear all at the same time. By the time that I was born, my mama and daddy had already split up. Problems that were too complicated for a child my age to understand, but I grew to know more.
Growing up, I didn’t see my father much. There’d be a handful of times that I could count on my hand that I had memories with him. He’d appear in my life with empty promises of sticking around and building our relationship. I’d always been a foolish and naive girl, and it started with him. I believed that he meant it when he said that he wanted to be around.
But reality comes in quick to remind you that love isn’t always eternal.
I liked to think of my father as a Jack-in-the-box. One minute, he was here, and next, he wasn’t. There’d be a bitter acidic feeling swirling through the cavity of my chest when I realized that he had left. The phone calls decreased. The Saturday pickups stopped. He was my very own ghost.
When my father appeared again, he didn’t appear alone. He appeared with another girl whose resemblance to mine was nearly identical. I watched as he laughed and paraded his perfect daughter around. I watched their interactions. The inside jokes and laughs. There’d be moments when I saw him be immortalized in pictures with her when I had none of my own to cherish.
That was the first time I’d ever felt the hunger.
It clawed away at my chest and rattled beneath my ribs. My gums ached with a distinct urge to consume.
My father was the first.
Lee was the second.
Sweet Lee.
I was a sophomore when I met him. He’d just gotten out of a relationship with a very pretty girl. We clicked together in this strange way. The first moment of us texting consisted of corny jokes and poor pickup lines, but I liked it all. I liked being in those moments with Lee when it felt like I was at the center of his entire world.
The strange thing about Lee and I, we never had a moment to properly kiss until our last moments together.
There’d been this moment outside of school where we stood toe-to-toe, like we were in some romance movie, and we smiled at each other, but I felt the hunger simmering low beneath my stomach. When he leaned in to kiss me, I turned my head at the last second so that his lips landed on my cheek. What I loved about Lee is that he was a real gentleman. He didn’t mind that I turned my head. He just assumed it meant that I was shy.
I smiled at him that day–perfect porcelain teeth hiding thinly concealed fangs.
A common theme in my life with men is that they all inevitably leave. And coincidentally, they all end up leaving for another woman. I’d watched my father leave and go on to create a perfect family with another woman and child. His perfect family.
It was only nature that Lee would do the same thing.
The aforementioned girl from earlier wasn’t over Lee. In fact, she was just as possessive over him as I was. I saw that look in her eye. It’s a look of predatory disposition that only women can seem to sense in each other. However, the girl didn’t know that I possessed something much more dangerous than she and anyone else could ever comprehend.
This face that I wear is not my own.
It’s one that I inherited from my mama and from her mama, but that’s all it is–a mask. I’d grown so used to wearing it that I can’t remember what my real face looks like. I knew I loved Lee, but I was never brave enough to say it aloud. I wouldn’t express that kind of emotion unless he told me that he loved me first. I knew that we were well on our way to that stage until his love started to waver.
The calls decreased. The texts went unanswered for hours. I knew in my heart that he was with her.
Then came the feeling again.
The hunger. The ravenous bloodthirst and ache in my gums to sink my teeth into raw flesh.
By the end of the week, I asked you to come over. You thought it was to finally end things, which was true in some way. That night, I stepped closer to you. Your chest was pressed up against mine, and I could hear the thudding of your heartbeat against my breasts. I trailed a hand up your chest before settling it upon your cheek. I remember you leaned into my touch and closed your eyes at the warmth of my hand.
I brought your face closer to mine until your lips were pressed to mine.
Only a few minutes later were you gone.
The ache and hunger that I felt were gone, too.
Anthony was the third.
He was the one that I loved the most out of any man. I loved Anthony more than my father, and I loved him more than Lee. I met Anthony in my senior year of high school. I was bright-eyed and eager to finally transition to the next stage of my life.
Then he walked in and ruined my life.
Smooth brown skin and hazel eyes.
My mama had always told me to watch out for those men with the pretty eyes. They’d use their eyes to draw you into their lies. That’s exactly what Anthony had done to me.
I tried to fight the interest that I had for Anthony. It was all in vain when he spoke, and his words wrapped around me like silk. He was the first boy that I’d ever let see me–the real me. I bared parts of myself to Anthony that I don’t think I’ve ever recovered.
Anthony started the game first. He’d been doing this for far longer than I had. We developed a friendship first. Isn’t that how all good relationships start? The relationship came next, or I’d rather refer to it as something more parasitic. Anthony took, and I gave. That’s the way that it worked.
He’d give me scraps, and like a hungry dog, I licked them obediently from the floor. Even worse, I’d look at him and thank him for it. There’s always been something interesting about Anthony. He was so talented at giving you breadcrumbs of his love and then stealing the rest away for later.
The first time that Anthony kissed me, it felt like he was taking something away from me. I could taste the metallic iron on his tongue, and only after a few seconds did I realize that it was my own. He swirled his tongue around in my mouth like he wanted to consume every piece of me for himself. He held me close, hands gripping at the curves of my still girlish body. He trailed his lips down and ran his tongue upon my neck before biting down. I remember the dizziness that I felt from it all. The hunger settled in my stomach, and it felt like a hot piece of iron searing into the depths of my soul.
In that moment, I gave every piece of myself over to Anthony, and he’d given me a small portion of himself, too.
There were moments of bliss before the darkness started to take over again.
He found another girl.
When he wasn’t with me, he was with her. I’ll let you in on a little secret: he was always with her more than he was with me. Just as my father, Anthony, would immortalize himself in pictures with his other, more perfect girl. I watched. I wept, but I still wasn’t ready to let him go. He’d come back eventually. He’d take a piece of me as an offering each time before he’d disappear. I let him.
It was only when he was taking from me that I ever felt wanted by him.
The hunger grew inside me–stronger than I’d ever felt it. This time, it made me sick to my stomach. I’d wake up in the morning with my gums aching something awful before running to the bathroom to throw up yellow bile. I dry heaved over the ceramic bowl as my mother rubbed my back.
As she looked at me, I knew that she recognized all the signs of my peril.
Besides, she’d been the one who passed this curse down to me.
“You need to eat, baby,” She whispered against my hair.
I don’t remember when the change happened, or when the light switch flipped, but suddenly, I wanted to reclaim all of the parts of me that Anthony had stolen. I wanted to take from him just as he’d done to me. That night, I rubbed at my gums, smearing blood across my teeth and moaning at the taste of it.
I met Anthony in the middle of the woods.
In those very woods, our bodies connected one last time, rolling around in the dirt like we were animals. I clawed at his back, fingernails carving at his back. I wanted him to feel the pain and not be able to discern it from pleasure.
Then he was gone.
There was blood. Lots of it. It covered my body. I went down by the river and washed it from my face. I walked home, and my mama was waiting there for me on the porch. A cloud of smoke covered her face as she held the Virginia Slim between her fingers. She stood from her chair and ushered me inside the house.
I sat between her legs as she picked the dried leaves and things from my hair. She was so patient and soft as I lay my head against her thigh. She started at the front of my hairline and began to braid my hair. She leaned down to press a kiss against my temple, “It’s okay. It’s over now.”
I let myself close my eyes as I still tasted the remnants of blood on my tongue.
You surprised me, Stack.
I didn’t expect ot fall for you as quickly as I did. But you made it so easy to want you. After the first night of meeting you, I started to see you everywhere. You’d even managed to haunt my dreams when I closed my eyes at night.
I saw you a few days later at The Chow’s grocery store. I felt you before I saw you. Funny enough, I could smell your cologne permeating throughout the air, even though I was sure that you were still standing at the front of the door. The hairs on the back of my neck stood to attention as you slithered behind me.
A serpent came to tempt Eve, and Lord, I was willing to eat any forbidden fruit if it meant that I got experience life with you.
“Sure is nice seein’ you here,” You said, shamelessly trailing your eyes up and down my figure. The dress clung to my body due to the sticky nature of the humidity that day.
I locked my eyes onto you, “You sure you ain’t stalkin’ me?”
You smirked, flashing that gold in my direction. Your smile, it always felt dangerous, even if it was sincere. There was something predatory that lay beneath that smile. But I’d always been the lamb that found herself being devoured by the wolf.
“No stalkin’. You know this town is small enough for me to turn around and see you. Plus, it’s easy to spot you, seein’ as you ain’t from here.”
“What gives you the impression that I’m not from around here?”
You leaned your body closer to mine, “Well, I’ve been livin’ here my whole life and I ain’t neva’ seen a pretty gal like you here. Trust me, I’d remember.”
I remember laughing at your statement. You always had this way of making me laugh, even when I was so mad at you and ready to burn the house down. You’d blown the match out and made some joke about keeping me warm. You always made me laugh, Elias.
I miss that about you.
I’d be telling a lie if I didn’t say that our relationship progressed rather quickly. Once you were in my life, you became entwined in ways that I couldn’t fathom. You introduced me to your family: Smoke, Annie, and lil’ Sammy. I remember the first time that Smoke and Annie saw me. That almost quick, indiscernible look of concern as they took me in, standing next to you.
I was smart enough to avoid any contact with Annie.
I know she’d figure me out with just one touch.
It was Smoke who kept his eyes on me the whole time. I never told you about the conversation that he and I had in the kitchen.
“Where you from?” Smoke asked from behind me.
I turned from the sink and leaned against it, “All over. My mama and I moved a lot growing up. I grew up in the Delta, though.”
He nodded. That quiet disposition and distrust sinking away at his eyes. For a moment, I felt that ache in my gums. I wondered what his eyes would taste like squishing between my molars.
I took another sip of water to dispel the hunger.
“My brother seems to like you a lot,” Smoke commented.
“I like him a lot.”
“You don’t think that’s pretty quick?”
I shrugged, “When it’s meant to be, it’s just meant to be. No use fightin’ it.”
Smoke nodded, but I could still see that weariness and older sibling protectiveness dripping from him. However, he was right to worry.
“Just be careful. My brother can be very careless when it comes to women.”
“Noted. Thank you, Elijah.” I said, concluding the conversation. Even though he tried to hide it, I watched the flinch that overcame him at me saying his name.
I took you to meet my mama.
I don’t think you realized how much of a privilege it was. I rarely brought men home to meet my mama unless I was sure that it was serious. My mama greeted you with a smile and a Virginia Slim between her fingers.
I watched the interaction between the two of you.
You were being your usual charming and charismatic self. You didn’t even realize that my mama had already picked up on what type of man that you were. She’d always been good at spotting wolves, even when they tried to hide in sheep’s clothing.
Later that day, as my mama and I sat on the porch, she brought you up, “Be careful with that boy of yours. He ain’t the type to be chained down.”
Upon hearing her words, I felt the ache and burning start to consume my throat. My mama rocked in her chair and held the cigarette out in my direction. I grabbed it from her fingers and took a long drag from it. The bitter nicotine burned at my throat, but it helped satiate the hunger.
“It’ll be different this time. I care about him. We’ll make it work.”
My mama didn’t say much. Just took the cigarette from my fingers and held it back up to her lips. As she expelled the smoke from her mouth, she spoke again, “I hope for your sake that it’s true. But remember this, baby…you need to eat.”
I didn’t go visit her for weeks.
There’s something about you, Elias. You have a way of slithering yourself beneath the layers of my skin that I was aware of. You’re the embodiment of physical desire and passion. You always had this way of making me feel like I was on fire everywhere. When you touched me or pressed your lips against mine, I always felt like you were taking a canister of gasoline and pouring it all over me.
I’d gladly give you the match.
Late at night at the juke joint, you press my body against yours, holding me close like I’d slip through your fingers. You settled your mouth against my pulse and kissed there.
“All these men here. Lookin’ at you and wishing that they had a chance, but you’re all mine, babygirl. I ain’t eva’ letting you go.”
I remember the chills that scattered across my body at your clear possession over me. You wanted me. You desired me. I didn’t have to question it.
I remember looking up into your eyes, “I’m all yours, Elias. Forever.”
That night was the first time that we made love. I’d never felt anything like it before. It felt like I was being infected with you, and there was no cure for it. You and I weren’t gentle about it either. I remember how you slammed me against the wall, rutting your body into mine. The sounds of your hips slapping against mine as I clawed relentlessly at your back.
It looked more like we were fighting than making love.
It was something primal, but it was ours. I remember that as I rolled my hips across yours, I draped my body across yours and mouthed at the place where your neck and shoulder met. Suddenly, it was as if I could feel the blood moving beneath your skin, and my mouth watered in anticipation.
I bit you.
Not just some gentle love bite. A bite hard enough to imprint my teeth in your skin. You flinched and came inside me. I think it surprised you just as much as it surprised me. When I released you, I could feel the shame settling over my body. I was prepared for you to throw me off you and kick me out.
But you surprised me.
You smiled. Wild, unhinged, and dark. You threaded your fingers throughout my hair as you brought me down into another earth-shattering kiss.
My eyes met yours as we pulled back from the kiss, “You can bite me too if you want.”
It’s funny how things seemed to deteriorate for us, Stack.
We were good. God, we were so good.
You’d told me you loved me more times than I could comprehend. Even though he was still wary, Smoke had started to come around to the idea of you and me being together. From what I’d discerned, this was the longest relationship that Stack had been in.
It felt good to hear it be called a relationship. Not some situation, but an actual relationship between you and me.
But I was so blind. So consumed by love that I didn’t see the signs that you were starting to fall out of love with me.
It started when she came into town.
Mary.
Some white girl, yet you claimed that she was nothing of the sort. I should’ve sensed the signs when you couldn’t keep your eyes off of her in the train station. When I asked you about her, you claimed that she was old news. Nothing to worry about. How naive I was to actually believe your words.
It started small with you. You trailed crumbs across the floor of your indiscretions and sins. You wouldn’t be outright with your betrayal. No, you were a man who valued the thrill of danger. Your connection with her started emotionally before it became physical.
That’s what hurt more.
You’d already been giving her the pieces of yourself that I had masterfully crafted and catered to. The hunger, it came back fierce and unwavering when you came home, smelling of her perfume. I pretended not to notice, but it made me sick to my stomach.
That night, we engaged in another session of primative mating. It was borderline violent as I released my frustrations onto you. I think you suspected that I knew, but you gave it back to me just as fiercely as I gave it to you. Your fingers tangled in my hair, and you pulled so hard that I could feel the strands breaking.
I wondered if you were this rough with her.
Did you give her these same brutal thrusts, or were you gentle? Were you slow and methodical in your movements? Did you whisper sweet nothings into her ear as she withered and cried in pleasure? What was she giving you that I wasn’t?
I bit you again that night. Harder than I ever have before. This time, it broke skin. Your blood filled my mouth and trailed down your back. You moaned through it all as our mutual releases hit. I let you go and wrapped my arms around your neck as the blood continued to seep down between our bodies.
Hot tears flowed down my face and burned as hot as lava.
You turned my face to yours as the tears touched your skin. For a moment, we stared at each other. For a moment, you were in love with me again. For only a moment, you were mine again.
Only a moment later did I watch your love go away.
Small towns have a way of holding the darkest secrets, especially if it’s for one of their own.
Curiously, I waited for someone to slip up and confirm your infidelity. I wanted to see if there’d be any brave souls who wanted to put me out of my misery, but there were no takers. They’d all kept their loyalty to you.
But I saw the stares. The low murmurs as I passed through the stores. The poorly hidden faux masks of sympathy. You were parading your whore around at night, while her husband and I were expected to play supporting characters in your affair.
I waited.
You left for the night to go to the juke joint. I followed you, but I stayed concealed by the shadows to observe. I swallowed down the bile as I watched you and her, bodies coiled together like a piece of rope. You held her and whispered in her ear just as you’d done to me. What hurt the most was how carefree and in love you looked.
There was a clicking in my throat and that familiar burning of hunger.
By the time that you came home that night, I’d quietly packed my things to leave. I walked to my mama’s house, and as expected, she was waiting there with a pack of Virginia Slims.
“Come here, baby,” She said, patting her lap. I sat between her legs, just as I’d done a thousand times in my life. She ran her fingers across my forehead, feeling the spike of heat beneath her fingertips.
“You need to eat,” She said, smoke billowing around us. The quiet song of crickets and frogs filled the outdoor space as my mama continued stroking my hair. I felt my mouth water as the violent urge to devour enveloped me. I turned my head to my mother’s bare leg and bit down roughly. Her metallic blood filled my mouth, and she never made any signs to show that it hurt her.
Besides, we’d been doing this since I was a child. Just as her mother had done for her and her mother before her. We were all women weaned on violence, and we’d give this same thing to our babies.
It was just the way of life.
Word spread rather quickly of me leaving you. You showed up just as I expected. Sorrow and shame were present in your eyes as you stood in front of me. The hunger was back. It tore at my gums and scattered across my taste buds.
Suddenly, I wanted to take from you. I wanted to see the inside of you and feel your blood dripping into my mouth. I invited you into the house. My mama was gone for the day.
I turned to face you as you stood across from me in the bedroom, “Did you ever love me, Elias? Truly love me?”
“I did. I mean, I do. What Mary and I have is complicated. But you matter to me just as much as she does.”
A low laugh rattled from my chest as the hunger rummaged beneath my ribcage. I stepped closer to you, “So choose. Me or her.”
I waited for your reaction. I wanted to see, and just as expected, you disappointed me. The flash of conflict in your eyes let me know that it’d never be me. It’d always be her. You’d managed to become my father, Lee, and Anthony all in one blink of an eye.
I trailed my fingers up your chest before grasping your face in my hands. I pressed my lips against yours softly. I could taste the remnants of her on your lips, and it made me ill.
“Make love to me one last time, Elias.”
The grief passed through your eyes. You always were selfish and greedy. You truly believed that you could have it all. Our clothes fell to the floor in whispers. I straddled your thighs on the bed as I sank down on you. That same breathless gasp left your mouth. We weren’t violent this time. There was no need to sully this moment with violence. Just as your climax consumed you, I clamped down on the same place where I’d bitten you before.
Only this time, I didn’t let go.
This time, I tore the piece of flesh from your neck and swallowed it. Your eyes widened in pure terror as the blood spluttered from the wound and covered both of us. You tried in vain to push me off of you, but the blood loss was happening too quickly. I held your wrists down to the bed as I drank my fill of your blood. My teeth sank into the middle of your neck as I ripped another piece from you. Your vocal cords were exposed.
I watched the muscles contract. The same vocal cords that you’d used to tell me you love me and lie to me all in one breath. You continued sputtering on the bed, but I was able to witness that final moment when you’d taken your last breath and your eyes glazed over.
I made sure to hold contact with you so that I’d be the last thing you ever saw.
I ate the rest of you. Each and every piece. I didn’t want any piece of you to go to waste. Even when I’d made it to your bones, I sucked the pieces of meat from the bone and swallowed them all. Your cum was still staining the bed, and it had mixed with your blood. I licked the tangy and sweet fluids from the sheets.
The only thing that I’d kept of yours was your skull.
I added it to the collection next to my father’s, Lee’s, and Anthony’s. You’d be forever immortalized with them. You’d be with me forever. I’d always love you, Elias. By consuming you, I was honoring you and showing you that love.
My mama came home later as I lay beside your skeleton.
She took your bones and buried them down by the swamp. Surely, no one would ever find you there, unless there was some gator or storm that washed you up.
She came back and ushered me from the bed. My mama led me to the bathroom where she’d drawn a warm bath. She ran the sponge across my skin as the blood stained the water a violent red. She dressed me just as she had when I was a child.
In the living room, I sat between her legs as she grabbed the wide-tooth comb and the Blue Magic Grease. Just as she’d always done, she braided my hair.
“It’s okay. We’ll be gone in the morning before they come.”
