ೃALWAYS VENUS ᝰ jaafar jackson x oc! ( venus taraji hamilton )
Venus Taraji Hamilton has spent most of her life pretending not to notice the way Jaafar Jackson looks at her.
Four years older, fiercely independent, and one of the most sought-after fashion designers in the industry, Venus has always known better than to entertain whatever has been simmering between them since they were young. Their families are close, their lives are tangled, and Jaafar has always been just close enough to want — but just complicated enough to deny.
Jaafar, however, has never believed in denial.
Not when it comes to Venus. a/n : i know Jaafar doesn't speak spanish but for this fic he does cause i said he do dammit
Jaafar did not think he was insane for this.
Desperate, maybe. Reckless, perhaps. A man driven half-mad by patience, certainly. But insane? No. There was nothing insane about going to retrieve what had always, in some quiet and ancient part of him, belonged to him; nothing deranged about finally reaching for the woman he had spent years orbiting like some punished god circling the same forbidden star, condemned to watch her glow from a distance while lesser men warmed their hands at her fire.
Because he had been patient.
He had been kind.
He had been more gracious than he was naturally inclined to be, if he was being honest, and Venus Taraji Hamilton had worked his last nerve — not the first, not the second, not even the frayed little string of restraint he kept tied around his pride for her sake, but the very last one.
And the worst part was that she knew what she was doing.
She knew exactly what she was doing when she announced her engagement at that family dinner, the one where the Jacksons and the Hamiltons sat together under warm lights and polished silver, mingling like two old bloodlines in some mythic hall, laughing over wine and legacy as if they had not all spent years pretending they could not see the storm gathering between him and Venus. She knew what she was doing when she let another man place a ring on her finger and then offered the news up like a blessing, like a toast, like it was not a blade laid carefully at Jaafar’s throat.
And he had not even been there.
That was what nearly made him laugh, though there was nothing funny about it.
He had been away filming, swallowed whole by the tedious, sacred, gratifying work of becoming his uncle — of bending his body, his voice, his spirit toward a man the world had already turned into myth — when his mother called to tell him the “good” news. The word had come through the phone bright and harmless, dressed in congratulations, but Jaafar had heard it for what it was.
A warning bell.
A prophecy.
A door closing somewhere it never should have been opened for anyone else.
The woman at the front desk, bless her heart, had been so visibly starstruck at the sight of him that she forgot the shape of her own job, her eyes widening, her smile trembling at the edges as though Hermes himself had stepped down from Olympus and asked for a room key. She was too dazzled to follow procedure, too flustered to question why a man who was not listed under Venus Hamilton’s reservation was asking for access to her floor, and though Jaafar made a quiet mental note to raise that with Venus once they left the hotel together — because no, they would not be booking here again, not if any pretty face with a famous name could charm his way past security — he still gave the woman a soft, devastating grin, thanked her like a gentleman, and made his way toward the elevators with the calm certainty of a man walking into a temple he believed had been built for him.
He rolled his neck as the elevator doors closed, the soft gold light catching along his jaw while he pressed the button for the penthouse suite — because of course Venus would be in the penthouse, of course she would spare no expense when it came to her own comfort, her own privacy, her own little palace in the sky; and yes, he assumed she had paid for it herself, because Venus Taraji Hamilton did not let men buy her luxury when she could purchase divinity with her own black card, and Jaafar’s assumptions about her were rarely wrong.
By the time the elevator climbed to the top floor, he had already loosened his shoulders, already swallowed the last bitter mouthful of restraint sitting beneath his tongue, already made peace with the fact that whatever happened next would happen because Venus had forced his hand — or at least, that was the lie he fed himself as the doors parted with a quiet chime.
The corridor beyond was hushed and expensive, all muted carpet, low lighting, and the kind of silence that belonged to people who paid not to be disturbed. Jaafar stepped out just as a room service attendant approached her door, tray balanced carefully in hand, knuckles lifted and ready to knock.
“I got it,” Jaafar said smoothly.
The man paused, recognition flickering across his face, quick as lightning over the Aegean, and Jaafar only smiled — that easy, devastating smile that had opened doors long before he ever touched a handle — before slipping two crisp hundred-dollar bills into the man’s hand with a murmured, “Keep the change.”
It was enough. Of course it was enough.
The attendant blinked down at the money, then back up at him, already retreating with a polite nod, and Jaafar waited only until he disappeared around the bend of the corridor before he turned toward Venus’s door, slid the keycard from his pocket, and let himself inside like a man entering a room he had already claimed in every version of the future that mattered.
The suite was quiet when he entered, too quiet, the kind of expensive silence that did not feel empty so much as carefully arranged, curated by money and taste and the kind of woman who had learned very early that peace was something you could purchase if you knew which floor to book and which people to keep outside the door.
Venus had left pieces of herself everywhere.
Not mess, never mess, because Venus did not do mess unless it was emotional and even then she had the nerve to make it look intentional, but evidence; a white satin heel tipped lazily near the chaise, a pearl earring abandoned on the marble console, a bridal shower sash folded over the back of a chair as if the words printed across it had offended her and she had stripped them from her body the moment she crossed the threshold. There were flowers everywhere, blush roses and white peonies spilling from glass vases like offerings left at the altar of some beloved, cruel goddess, and along the far table sat champagne, untouched cake, little gift bags tied with silk ribbon, and enough pale, pretty bridal nonsense to make his jaw tighten.
Bride-to-be.
The phrase seemed to glare at him from every corner.
Jaafar shut the door behind him with a quiet click, the sound small but final, and for a moment he simply stood there with the room service tray in his hands, taking in the ridiculous theatre of it all; Venus in white, Venus with flowers, Venus celebrated, Venus wrapped up and handed toward another man as though she were not the same woman who had once laid beneath him until dawn with her fingers twisted in his hair and his name broken soft against her mouth.
He exhaled through his nose, slow and humourless.
“Playing house,” he murmured under his breath, setting the tray down on the dining table, his eyes drifting toward the half-open bedroom door. “You really lost your mind.”
A sound came from deeper in the suite then — the low rush of running water, maybe the bathtub, maybe the shower, and beneath it, faint but unmistakable, the soft hum of Venus’s voice carrying through the room like smoke from an oracle’s bowl. She was singing to herself, absentmindedly, some old song he had heard her play in the car years ago, back when he was still young enough for her to laugh at him without consequence and old enough to know he hated every man who made her smile.
For one second, one dangerous, merciful second, the sound softened him.
It brought him back to summers in too-large houses where their parents drank wine on patios and Venus wandered barefoot through kitchens, hair piled on top of her head, skin glowing in the heat, calling him baby Jackson when she wanted to irritate him and Jaafar when she wanted something. It brought him back to being sixteen and furious at his own age, watching her leave parties with men who had full beards and real cars and the audacity to place hands at the small of her back. It brought him back to twenty-four, when she had stopped laughing long enough to look at him properly, and the whole world had tilted on its axis like Olympus itself had leaned down to see what they would do.
Then he saw the ring box on the dresser.
Not the ring itself — no, that was probably still on her finger, where she insisted on wearing her lie — but the velvet box it had come in, open and waiting, black against all that bridal white like a funeral flower.
Whatever softness had risen in him went cold.
He crossed the room slowly, every step measured, his body held with the kind of restraint that was not peace but the last wall before ruin. He touched nothing at first. He only looked. At the flowers. At the sash. At the programme from the shower with her name printed in elegant script beside the name of a man Jaafar had never liked, not because the man was cruel or foolish or unworthy in some obvious way, but because he had committed the unforgivable sin of arriving late to a story and acting like he had written the beginning.
That was what sickened him.
The arrogance of it.
To meet Venus in the middle of her life and think a ring gave him claim to what Jaafar had known since boyhood.
The bathroom door opened.
Venus stepped out wrapped in a white robe, steam curling behind her like mist from some sacred spring, her hair pinned up loosely, tendrils escaping around her face, her skin bare and luminous from the heat. For half a breath she did not see him. She was looking down, twisting a lotion cap back into place, comfortable in the privacy she had paid for.
Then she lifted her head.
And stopped.
The air changed so violently it felt like a god had entered the room and taken offence.
Venus’s hand tightened around the bottle. Her eyes moved over him once — the open collar, the tension in his shoulders, the calm, terrible set of his face — and then, slowly, to the door behind him.
“Jaafar.”
His name did not sound like surprise.
It sounded like warning.
He smiled, but there was no joy in it. “Venus.”
She blinked once, as if giving herself time to decide which version of herself would answer him: the friend, the almost-lover, the bride-to-be, the woman who had spent years stepping over the same burning line and acting shocked when her feet blistered.
“What are you doing in my room?”
“Our room, for tonight,” he said lightly, glancing around. “Apparently. Since security downstairs is decorative.”
Her mouth parted, disbelief cutting through her composure. “You bribed your way into my room?”
“I tipped a room service attendant.”
“You got a keycard.”
“I smiled.”
“Jaafar.”
There it was again, sharper now, but he only tilted his head, watching her the way he always had, like there were languages written beneath her skin and he had spent his life learning how to read them.
“You should be more careful where you stay,” he said. “Front desk nearly fainted. Didn’t ask for a thing. You could’ve had anybody walking in here.”
Her brows lifted. “But I got you.”
Something flickered across his face.
A wound, quickly dressed.
“Yes,” he said, voice lower. “You got me.”
Venus looked away first, which would have pleased him once, back when every crack in her composure felt like victory, but now it only made something bitter twist inside him. She moved toward the dresser, setting the lotion down with deliberate care, as if the ordinary motion could restore order to a room already splitting open around them.
“You need to leave.”
“Do I?”
“Yes.”
“Say it like you mean it.”
Her shoulders tensed.
The room went still.
Jaafar took one step closer, not enough to crowd her, not enough to touch, only enough to make the distance between them honest. He watched the line of her throat shift when she swallowed, watched her fingers curl once at her side before she remembered herself and smoothed them out.
“Say it,” he repeated softly. “Tell me to leave, Venus, and I’ll go.”
She turned on him then, eyes bright with anger, but anger had always suited her too well, had always made her look like Athena before war — beautiful, armed, impossible to reason with because she had already decided she was right.
“You don’t get to do this,” she said.
A small laugh left him, quiet and stunned. “I don’t get to do this?”
“No.” She pointed toward the door. “You don’t get to show up here, today of all days, and act like I owe you some performance.”
“Today of all days,” he repeated, tasting the words like poison. “Your bridal shower.”
Her jaw tightened.
“Congratulations, by the way.”
“Don’t.”
“No, really.” His eyes dropped to her left hand, to the diamond sitting there with all the smug confidence of a thief in a palace. “Beautiful ring.”
Venus tucked her hand slightly into the sleeve of her robe.
The movement was small.
It still ruined him.
“Don’t hide it now,” Jaafar said, his voice dipping, something harsher bleeding through. “You wore it all afternoon.”
Her eyes flashed. “You weren’t even there.”
“No,” he said. “I heard.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I heard.”
For a moment neither of them spoke.
Beyond the glass doors, the city glittered beneath them, distant and indifferent, all those lights burning like the scattered remains of some fallen constellation. Venus stood in the middle of the suite in white, damp from steam, furious and beautiful and guarded to the bone, and Jaafar thought, not for the first time, that the Greeks would have started a war over less. Men had crossed seas for faces like hers. Men had burned kingdoms for women who looked at them with less history than Venus had in one raised brow.
He had waited years.
He had swallowed years.
And she stood there wearing another man’s promise like he had never touched the truth of her.
“You announced it at dinner,” he said finally. “With both our families there.”
Her lips pressed together.
“I wasn’t there.”
“You were filming.”
“I was working.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.” He stepped closer again, then stopped himself, his hands flexing once at his sides. “You don’t know, because if you knew, if you had any idea what it felt like to get that call from my mother, to hear her tell me you were engaged like she was telling me the weather, like she wasn’t handing me a blade wrapped in ribbon—”
“Jaafar,” she said, quieter now.
“No.” His voice cut through the room, not loud, but final. “No, you don’t get to soften me right now. You don’t get to say my name like that and make me remember I love you before I finish being angry.”
Venus went still.
There it was.
Not implied. Not dressed up in teasing, jealousy, old friendship, bad timing, childhood history, or whatever else she liked to use as fabric to cover the naked thing between them.
Love.
Plain as a wound.
Her eyes searched his face, and for one brief, devastating second she looked afraid.
Then she looked away.
And that, somehow, was worse.
Jaafar laughed again, but this time it was almost broken. “Look at you.”
“Stop.”
“No, look at you.” He gestured toward her, toward the robe, the flowers, the ring, the whole immaculate crime scene of her denial. “You’ll stand in front of a hundred people in white and smile until your face hurts, but you can’t look me in the eye when I tell you the truth.”
Her voice sharpened again because softness had gotten too close. “The truth according to you?”
“The truth according to both of us.”
“There is no both of us.”
He stared at her.
The silence that followed was cruel.
Then Jaafar nodded slowly, once, as if she had finally said something so absurd it brought him clarity.
“No both of us,” he echoed.
Venus’s throat moved.
He looked at her mouth, then back to her eyes.
“So I imagined it?”
She said nothing.
“The way you used to wait for me at parties even when you pretended you weren’t?” he asked. “The way you’d touch my arm and then act like you forgot your hand was there? The way you couldn’t stand any woman near me, but had the nerve to call me childish when I noticed?” His voice dropped. “That night? I imagined that too?”
Her face changed.
Not much.
But enough.
“Don’t bring that up.”
“There she is.”
“Jaafar.”
“No, there she is,” he said, almost tenderly now, and that tenderness felt more dangerous than the anger. “That’s the woman I came to see. Not the bride. Not the designer. Not whatever perfect little statue you’ve been posing as all afternoon. You.”
Venus wrapped her arms around herself, the robe pulling tighter, and for the first time since she had stepped out of the bathroom, she looked less like a goddess carved from marble and more like a woman cornered by her own heart.
“You have no right,” she said, but it came out softer than she wanted.
“I know.”
“You waited years.”
“I know.”
“You said nothing.”
“I said everything except the words.”
“That isn’t enough.”
“No,” he agreed, eyes burning. “It wasn’t. And I hate myself for that. I hate that I let you make me your secret without even asking. I hate that I stayed close enough to bleed and called it friendship because I was scared if I asked for more, you’d shut the door completely.”
Her lips parted.
He shook his head, almost smiling at the irony of it, at the humiliation of his own honesty.
“But I’m not twenty-four anymore, Venus. And you don’t get to keep talking to me like I’m some boy with a crush you can outgrow on my behalf.”
Her eyes flashed again, wounded this time. “I never said that.”
“You never had to.”
That landed.
He watched it land, watched her absorb it, watched the pride on her face tremble under the weight of everything she had refused to name. Outside, the city kept glowing. Inside, the room felt ancient, fated, like every choice they had ever avoided had finally risen from the floor and stood between them.
Venus turned away, one hand lifting to her forehead.
“I’m getting married,” she said.
“I know.”
“You keep saying that like it means nothing.”
“No,” Jaafar said quietly. “I’m saying it because it means everything.”
She looked back at him.
His voice lowered.
“That’s why I’m here.”
For a while, she only stared at him, and he let her. He let the truth sit there. He let the ring shine. He let the flowers wilt in their vases. He let every ghost of every almost between them crowd into the room and bear witness.
Then Venus whispered, “Why today?”
His face hardened, not with anger this time, but hurt.
“Because today they celebrated you leaving me.”
Her expression cracked.
Just barely.
But he saw it.
He always saw her.
“Jaafar…”
“Don’t marry him,” he said.
The words left him cleanly.
No poetry. No metaphor. No myth.
Just the thing itself.
Venus looked like he had reached into her chest and closed his hand around something living.
“You can’t ask me that.”
“I’m not asking.”
Her eyes narrowed, instinctively bristling.
He corrected himself, softer but no less firm.
“I’m telling you the truth before you ruin all three of us.”
“All three?”
“You. Him.” His eyes held hers. “Me.”
Her breath shook once, barely audible.
“He loves me,” she said.
Jaafar nodded. “I’m sure he does.”
“He’s good to me.”
“I hope he is.”
“He’s stable.”
“I hate him already.”
Despite herself, something almost like a laugh broke through her anger, tiny and disbelieving, and the sound struck him straight in the chest because there she was again, his Venus, the girl who used to laugh at him across dinner tables, the woman who had never once understood how dangerous her joy was in his hands.
He smiled faintly, but it faded too fast.
“He can be good,” Jaafar said. “He can be stable. He can love you properly, on paper. I’m not saying he’s a bad man.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“I’m saying you don’t love him like you love me.”
The room went silent.
Venus did not deny it.
That was the first confession. Not spoken, but there, heavy and bright as the diamond on her hand.
Jaafar’s gaze dropped to it again.
“Take it off,” he said.
Her eyes widened. “Excuse me?”
“Take it off.”
“No.”
His jaw flexed.
“Then tell me you love him.”
She stared at him.
“Tell me,” he said, stepping closer, “and I’ll leave.”
Her mouth opened.
Nothing came out.
Jaafar watched her fight herself, watched pride wrestle with truth, watched fear lay its pretty hands over her throat. He should have felt victorious. Some small, ugly part of him did. But most of him only felt tired. Tired of the game. Tired of being a shadow at the edge of her life while other men stood in daylight beside her.
Venus looked down at her ring.
For one moment, her thumb brushed over it.
Jaafar stopped breathing.
Then she whispered, “You shouldn’t have come here.”
His voice was almost gentle. “But you’re glad I did.”
Her eyes lifted.
The space between them seemed to collapse without either of them moving.
“Tell me to leave,” he said again, quieter now.
Venus swallowed.
Her eyes shone, furious and helpless and hungry with five years of silence.
“Leave,” she said.
But it was weak.
A word without a spine.
Jaafar tilted his head. “Like you mean it.”
She said nothing.
“Venus.”
That did it.
The sound of her name in his mouth, low and broken and reverent, seemed to pull something loose from her. She crossed the last of the distance first, not gracefully, not carefully, but like a woman stepping off the edge of a cliff she had spent years pretending was only a balcony.
Her hands hit his chest.
For one second, it could have been a push.
Then her fingers curled in his shirt.
Jaafar looked down at them, then back at her, his face changing in slow, devastating recognition.
“Don’t,” she whispered.
He did not touch her yet.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you already know.”
His voice softened.
“I do know.”
Venus’s breath caught.
And when he finally lifted his hand, he did it slowly, giving her every second in the world to stop him, to step back, to choose the door, the ring, the life waiting for her with polished shoes and sensible promises. But she did not move. She only stood there, trembling with anger or want or grief, and let his knuckles brush the side of her face.
The touch was barely anything.
It still ruined the room.
Her eyes closed.
Jaafar’s thumb grazed her cheek, and his voice came like a prayer dragged through smoke.
“You don’t get to marry him with my name still sitting in your throat.”
Venus opened her eyes.
Then she kissed him.
Or he kissed her.
Later, neither of them would be able to say who moved first, only that the distance between them finally gave up pretending it had ever been real. One moment they were standing in the middle of a room full of bridal flowers and lies, and the next Venus had both hands in his shirt and Jaafar had one arm around her waist, pulling her to him with a sound low enough to shame thunder, kissing her like he had spent years starving politely at a table where she kept passing him empty plates.
It was not gentle at first.
It was not sweet.
It was punishment and relief, accusation and apology, the breaking of a drought, the return of a tide, the kind of kiss that made Venus stumble back against the dresser and sent one of the little perfume bottles rolling onto its side. Jaafar caught the edge of the furniture with one hand, caging her without trapping her, his other hand still at her waist, still careful despite the storm in him.
He pulled back first, breathing hard, his forehead nearly touching hers.
“Tell me to stop,” he said.
Venus’s eyes were dark, unfocused, her mouth parted, her fingers still holding him like she hated him for being solid.
She looked at him.
At the door.
At the ring.
Then back at him.
And instead of answering, she reached down with a trembling hand, slid the diamond from her finger, and placed it on the dresser beside them.
The sound it made against the marble was small.
Tiny.
Almost delicate.
But to Jaafar, it might as well have been the fall of Troy.
The sound of that ring touching marble should have sobered him.
It should have reminded him that this was not some flirtation tucked beneath a dinner table, not some old private joke passed between them in a crowded room, not another almost they could dress up in denial and leave behind before sunrise. It should have reminded him that there was a man somewhere in the world who believed Venus Taraji Hamilton was his fiancée, that there were mothers planning flowers and aunties saving dates and a whole wedding slowly assembling itself around a lie beautiful enough to pass for a blessing.
But all Jaafar felt, watching that diamond sit cold and useless on the dresser, was satisfaction.
Not relief.
Not surprise.
Satisfaction.
Because the ring was pretty, yes. Expensive, certainly. Tasteful in the way Venus’s things were always tasteful, all quiet wealth and polished restraint, a stone chosen by a man who had clearly studied her enough to know what would look good on her hand.
Cute.
That was the word that came to him, cruel and dismissive and almost amused.
The ring was cute. The engagement was cute. The idea of Venus walking down an aisle toward that man, smiling beneath flowers, letting him take her hand like he had ever once held the storm of her properly, was cute in the way children playing at kingdoms was cute; elaborate, earnest, and entirely dependent on everyone pretending the crown was real.
Because it would never be him.
That man could give her vows, houses, honeymoons, clean promises wrapped in white linen and family approval, but he would never have what Jaafar had. He would never know what it was to be twenty-four and finally have Venus look at him like she had run out of excuses. He would never know her laughter turning breathless in the dark, her pride slipping, her voice losing all its sharp edges around his name. He would never know the unbearable intimacy of being wanted by a woman who had spent years insisting she knew better.
He could marry her.
He could not touch the myth.
Jaafar looked from the ring back to her, and whatever Venus saw on his face made her breath catch.
“There,” he said softly.
Venus’s eyes narrowed, but it was a fragile thing now, anger trying to stand upright on trembling legs. “Don’t look so pleased with yourself.”
His mouth curved.
That was the problem with him, she thought distantly — one of many, really, but the most dangerous one in that moment — Jaafar had always been beautiful, always, even when he was too young and too eager and too irritatingly sure of feelings she refused to take seriously, but adulthood had given his beauty weight. It had put command in his shoulders, arrogance in his stillness, a slow, devastating patience in the way he watched her as though he had never needed to chase because history itself had already handed him the ending.
He stepped closer, and the room seemed to shrink around him.
“I’m not pleased,” he said, though the lie sat shamelessly on his tongue.
“You look pleased.”
“I look right.”
Her lips parted.
He smiled then, not sweetly, not kindly, but with the kind of confidence that had ruined her once before, the kind that did not ask permission to exist because it had never doubted its own welcome.
“Don’t confuse the two.”
Venus should have slapped him.
She truly should have.
There were several sensible, dignified things she could have done. She could have snatched the ring back up, put it on her finger, and ordered him out. She could have reminded him of her fiancé, her family, the bridal shower downstairs, the months of planning, the life waiting for her beyond this suite. She could have told him that whatever had happened between them years ago had been a lapse in judgment, a fever, a moment of weakness caused by champagne and nostalgia and the dangerous mistake of looking too long at a boy who had become a man while she wasn’t paying attention.
But then Jaafar lifted his hand and touched the belt of her robe.
Not pulling.
Not untying.
Just touching.
Two fingers against white silk, gentle enough to be respectful, bold enough to be obscene.
Her whole body remembered him before her mind could gather itself.
That was what made him so dangerous.
He did not have to rush. He did not have to beg. He did not have to perform hunger like men who were afraid a woman might forget they wanted her if they stopped proving it for more than ten seconds. Jaafar was worse. Jaafar stood in front of her with that unbearable calm, that dark-eyed certainty, that mouth still damp from kissing her, and looked at her like he had already seen the future and she was late to it.
“Still want me to leave?” he asked.
Venus swallowed.
His gaze dropped to the movement of her throat, and the corner of his mouth lifted, barely.
“Careful,” he murmured. “You’ve never been good at lying to me up close.”
“I’ve lied to you plenty.”
“No.” His fingers slid from the belt of her robe to her wrist, circling gently, thumb pressing once against her pulse like he was checking whether the truth was still alive beneath her skin. “You’ve performed for me plenty. There’s a difference.”
Her pulse jumped under his thumb.
He felt it.
Of course he felt it.
His smile deepened.
“See?”
The arrogance of him should have offended her into sanity.
Instead, it dragged her back five years.
Back to that first night, when the air between them had finally split open after too much wine, too much laughing, too many years of him looking at her as if age was a locked door and he had simply been waiting for the key to appear. He had not fumbled then either. That was what embarrassed her most when she let herself remember it. He had not been nervous in the way she expected him to be, had not treated her like some impossible older woman granting him mercy. He had looked at her like he had been preparing for that moment his whole life and had no intention of wasting it pretending he was surprised.
That was why she had let him in the first time.
Not because he was pretty, though God help her, he was.
Not because he was a Jackson.
Not because he was younger and flattering and hungry for her attention.
Because Jaafar had stepped into his want like a throne.
Because he looked at her like choosing him was not a risk, but a correction.
Because when she had whispered, “You’re too young for me,” he had only smiled, slow and wicked and impossibly calm, and said, “Then stop wanting me like I’m not.”
And now, years later, standing in her bridal suite with her ring abandoned beside them, he looked exactly the same.
Worse, actually.
Older. Sharper. More certain.
A grown man who had outlived her excuses.
“Jaafar,” she warned, but her voice betrayed her by softening around the middle.
His thumb brushed over her wrist again.
“There it is.”
“What?”
“My name,” he said, eyes lowering to her mouth. “The way you say it when you forget you’re pretending.”
Venus’s breath left her in a thin, irritated laugh. “You are so full of yourself.”
“Yes.”
No hesitation.
No shame.
Just yes, smooth as oil over marble.
Her eyes flashed. “That wasn’t a compliment.”
“I didn’t take it as one.”
He moved then, not suddenly, not roughly, but with such surety that Venus found herself backing into the dresser before she had decided to move at all. His hand came to the marble beside her hip, caging her in only because she let herself be caged, his body close enough for heat, not pressure, his cologne and skin and rain-dark confidence filling her lungs until the room no longer smelled like roses and expensive soap, but like him.
Like trouble with a pulse.
Like the last honest thing left in the suite.
“You think that man downstairs doesn’t have an ego?” he asked quietly.
Venus lifted her chin. “He’s not downstairs.”
“Good.”
Her brows rose.
Jaafar smiled. “I don’t feel like being polite.”
“You were never polite.”
“I was very polite.” His eyes held hers, dark and amused. “Painfully polite. Saintly, even.”
She almost laughed, but she caught it too late, and he saw the corner of her mouth betray her.
His face changed at once.
Softened, but not weakened.
That was another thing she hated. How quickly he could find the girl in her. How he could strip away the designer, the fiancée, the woman with the immaculate public image, and uncover the Venus who used to sit barefoot on kitchen counters during family parties, eating fruit from a bowl and telling him to stop staring before she started charging him rent for the view.
“You remember,” he said.
“Remember what?”
“Me being polite.”
“I remember you being annoying.”
“You liked it.”
“I tolerated it.”
“You watched for me when I walked into rooms.”
Her smile vanished.
He leaned in a little, voice dropping, warm and low.
“You still do.”
Venus looked away.
He touched her chin, lightly, turning her face back to him with the kind of gentleness that somehow felt more commanding than force ever could.
Then he said, in Spanish, soft enough that it seemed meant for her skin more than her ears, “Mírame, mi Venus.”
Look at me, my Venus.
Her lashes fluttered.
That did something to her. He saw it. He had known it would.
Not because the words were complicated, not because he had dressed them in poetry, but because he said them like possession and worship were the same language when it came to her. Like her name belonged in his mouth with an accent of inheritance. Like he had not come to steal her from another man so much as retrieve her from a bad translation.
“No me mientas, preciosa,” he murmured.
Don’t lie to me, beautiful.
Her hands went to his chest, and again, for one breath, it could have been a push.
It was not.
Her fingers spread over him instead, feeling the steady, infuriating confidence of his body beneath his shirt, the calm rhythm of a man who should have been trembling but wasn’t, because Jaafar had never been afraid of wanting her. He had only been afraid of losing access to her. There was a difference.
“You think you can just come in here,” she whispered, “say a few things in Spanish, smile at me like that, and I’m supposed to forget I have a whole life outside this room?”
“No.”
His answer came too quickly.
Too confidently.
Her eyes searched his.
“No?” she challenged.
“No,” he said again, dipping his head until his mouth was near her ear. “I think you already forgot. I’m just the first person honest enough to say it.”
Her breath broke.
He kissed the space just below her ear, not enough to undo her, just enough to remind her that he knew exactly where to begin. Venus’s fingers tightened in his shirt, and Jaafar smiled against her skin because there it was again, the old truth rising between them like Aphrodite from seafoam, beautiful and shameless and impossible to drown.
“You’re engaged,” he murmured, his lips brushing her jaw.
“Yes,” she said, but the word came out thin.
“To a good man.”
“Yes.”
“With a good ring.”
Her eyes closed.
“A beautiful wedding coming.”
“Jaafar—”
“A cute little future,” he said, and this time the arrogance sharpened, turned golden and cruel at the edges. “Very cute, Venus.”
She opened her eyes.
He lifted his head and looked at her fully.
“But don’t stand here and insult me by pretending it holds a candle to this.”
The room went silent.
Every flower, every gift bag, every delicate bridal ribbon seemed suddenly ridiculous.
Venus stared at him, and Jaafar stared back with no apology at all, his face close to hers, his hand steady at her waist, his whole body speaking in the language of a man who had already compared himself to the competition and found the competition wanting.
“You’re unbelievable,” she said.
“I know.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“You think one night means more than a proposal?”
Jaafar’s expression shifted.
The smugness did not leave him, not entirely, but something older moved beneath it, something wounded and devoted and frightening in its certainty.
“No,” he said. “I think our one night meant more than his whole proposal.”
Venus’s lips parted.
“And that’s why you’ve been running from it for five years.”
The words hit her so cleanly she had no defence ready.
He watched her absorb them, watched anger flare and fade behind her eyes, watched the truth settle where pride could not immediately reach it. His hand slid from her waist to the small of her back, and still he did not pull her in. Still he waited.
That made it worse.
He was giving her the dignity of choosing her own ruin.
“Tell me I’m wrong,” he said.
She inhaled.
“Tell me,” he repeated, quieter. “Tell me you don’t remember how it felt to stop fighting me.”
Venus’s eyes glistened, furious with him, with herself, with the ring sitting beside her like a witness.
“You don’t get to make this romantic.”
His smile was faint. “Baby, I didn’t have to make anything.”
Her face tightened.
He lowered his voice.
“You did that when you took the ring off.”
For a moment, Venus looked as if she might break.
Then she kissed him again, and this time there was nothing accidental about it.
She reached for him with both hands, pulling him down to her like she was tired of losing arguments to her own body, tired of being noble, tired of being sensible, tired of standing in rooms full of flowers while pretending she was not haunted by a man who had learned too young how to want her and too well how to wait.
Jaafar caught her immediately.
Of course he did.
One arm closed around her waist, the other bracing against the dresser as her back met marble and her mouth opened beneath his, and the sound he made was low, pleased, almost victorious — not surprised, never surprised, because in Jaafar’s mind this had always been where they were going. Every engagement party, every avoided conversation, every man she put between them, every year she spent calling him younger like it was a spell strong enough to keep him out; all of it had only been a delay.
Not a denial.
Never a denial.
He kissed her like he wanted her to understand that.
Like he wanted the memory of him to bruise every future she tried to build without him.
When his hands found her waist again, he lifted her easily onto the edge of the dresser, and Venus gasped against his mouth, one hand flying to his shoulder while the other knocked into the perfume bottle behind her. It clinked against the marble, sharp and delicate, but neither of them looked at it.
Jaafar did pull back then, only enough to see her.
And that was almost worse than the kissing.
Because he looked at her with his lips slightly swollen, his shirt gripped in her fists, his eyes dark and alive with the kind of masculine satisfaction that made Venus want to curse him and kiss him harder in the same breath. He looked beautiful and unbearable, like Apollo with a grudge, like a prince arriving late to a wedding he had every intention of interrupting.
“What?” she snapped, because his silence was too much.
He smiled.
“You’re mad.”
“I am.”
“No.” His thumb brushed her lower lip, slow and possessive. “You’re mad because you missed me.”
Her stomach turned over.
He leaned closer.
“And you’re mad because I know exactly how much.”
Venus shook her head, but there was no conviction left in it. “You’re so arrogant.”
“I had to be,” he said. “You gave me nothing else.”
That quieted her.
His face softened, just slightly.
“I had to believe this meant something,” he said, his voice lowering into something almost tender. “Even when you acted like it didn’t. Even when you put that ring on. Even when you smiled for everybody today like you weren’t sitting there lying through your teeth.”
Venus’s throat worked.
“Jaafar…”
He kissed her once, slower now, less punishment than proof.
Then he rested his forehead against hers.
“Do you know what I thought when my mother told me?” he asked.
She did not answer.
His hand slid up her back, holding her with maddening steadiness.
“I thought, she’s really going to make me come get her.”
Venus huffed out a laugh, broken and disbelieving, even as her eyes shone. “You are insane.”
“No,” he said, smiling against her mouth. “Desperate, maybe.”
Her hand rose to his face before she could stop herself, fingers grazing his jaw, and the touch stole some of the triumph from him. For a second, the ego, the confidence, the controlled arrogance all thinned, and beneath it was the boy who had loved her too early, the man who had waited too long, the friend who had stood beside her life while slowly starving on what she refused to give him.
Then he turned his face and kissed her palm.
Soft.
Devastating.
“Pero no estoy loco,” he murmured. “No por ti.”
But I’m not crazy. Not for you.
Venus closed her eyes.
And Jaafar, seeing the surrender move through her before she could name it, smiled like a man watching the gates of Troy open from the inside.
“Does he even know how you like it?” he murmured against her skin, his mouth moving slowly over the slope of her shoulder, not quite kissing, not quite sparing her either, his lips ghosting over the small pale scar she had carried since childhood — a thin, stubborn little mark from the summer she had fallen off the monkey bars and scared everyone half to death, including him, though he had been too young then to understand why seeing her hurt had made something violent and helpless twist inside his chest.
His thumb brushed beneath it now, reverent and possessive all at once, as though he remembered not only the scar but the girl who had earned it: Venus at twelve, furious with tears in her eyes because everyone kept fussing over her, swatting hands away while pretending she was not shaken; Venus at sixteen, rolling her eyes when he asked if it still hurt; Venus at twenty-eight, arching beneath his mouth like she had finally stopped pretending she did not know exactly what he had grown into.
Jaafar smiled against her shoulder, slow and arrogant, because that was the thing her fiancé would never understand.
He could learn her schedule, her favourite flowers, the cut of her gowns, the polite version of her smile.
But Jaafar knew the scar, he knew Venus, better than anyone would.
“Hard from the back while you watch.” Venus shuddered as he pressed another kiss against her shoulder, a hand weaving around her waist as he drew her back into him
“I’m telling you right now, Venus,” he murmured, his voice low against her skin, all velvet and warning, the kind of calm that came before gods split seas and men burned cities for women they had no intention of losing. “There ain’t no way in hell you were walking down that aisle with me still alive.”
Venus went still beneath him.
Not because the words shocked her — no, some part of her had known, had always known, that Jaafar’s patience had limits, that beneath all his charm and careful restraint was a man arrogant enough to believe fate itself had made a mistake by giving her another man’s ring — but because hearing him say it out loud made the whole room feel smaller, hotter, more dangerous, as if every flower from her bridal shower had suddenly become funeral lilies.
He lifted his head just enough to look at her, his mouth close to her shoulder, his eyes dark with five years of swallowed want and wounded pride.
“You really thought I was gonna sit there?” he asked, almost amused now, and somehow that was worse. “In a suit? Smiling? Watching him take your hand like I don’t know what it feels like when you stop fighting me?”
Her breath caught.
Jaafar’s thumb brushed over the old scar on her shoulder, gentle in a way that did not soften the possession in his voice.
“Baby, please,” he said, the faintest smile touching his mouth. “I would’ve objected before the preacher got his mouth open.”
“So this what you gon’ do for me,” he whispered, his voice low and steady against her throat as his fingers found the silk ties of her robe, tugging once, slow enough to make her breathing change, deliberate enough to make it clear he was not rushing a thing.
Venus’s hands tightened against his shoulders.
“Jaafar—”
“No,” he murmured, kissing beneath her jaw, the word warm against her skin, almost gentle, though nothing about him felt soft right then; not the set of his mouth, not the weight of his hands, not the impossible certainty in his voice as the silk loosened beneath his fingers. “You done talked enough. You done lied enough too.”
Her breath caught, and he smiled like he heard it, like even that belonged to him.
“You gon’ call downstairs,” he continued, dragging his mouth to the side of her neck, “and switch the card on this room to mine, because I’m not having another man pay for the place where I remind you who you belong to.”
Venus’s eyes fluttered shut.
“And after that,” he said, voice deepening, lazy and lethal with confidence, “you gon’ book five more days.”
Her eyes opened then, sharp despite the way her body leaned into him. “Five?”
“Five,” he said, without hesitation, as though he had already decided it somewhere between the elevator and her door, as though the number had been handed down from Olympus itself. “Maybe six if you keep looking at me like that.”
“You’re unbelievable.”
“I know.”
He kissed her again, slower this time, letting the arrogance of that answer sink into her skin.
“Then you gon’ take that pretty little ring,” he murmured, glancing toward the diamond sitting abandoned on the dresser, “put it back in its box, and give it back to that man when you get home.”
Venus stilled.
Jaafar lifted his head, his eyes finding hers, dark and calm and far too sure of himself for a man who had just walked into her bridal suite and started rearranging her entire life with his mouth on her neck.
“And you gon’ be kind when you do it,” he said. “Because he ain’t do nothing wrong except think he could marry a woman who was never really his.”
Her lips parted, but no words came.
His thumb brushed her cheek, almost tender.
“After that,” he said, softer now, but somehow more devastating, “we gon’ change the invites.”
Venus stared at him.
The city glittered behind him, all gold and glass and distant little stars, but Jaafar looked brighter than all of it, beautiful with audacity, wearing his confidence like a crown he had no intention of taking off.
“You lost your mind,” she whispered.
He smiled.
“No, baby,” he said, dipping his head until his mouth hovered over hers. “I found my wife.”
Her breath broke.
Jaafar kissed the corner of her mouth, then the other, slow enough to be cruel and patient enough to be obscene, as if he had all the time in the world now that the ring was off her finger, as if the bridal suite, the flowers, the wedding plans, the man waiting somewhere with her future in his hands — all of it had become little more than theatre dressing around the only truth that had ever mattered.
“Because you and me?” he whispered, his mouth hovering against hers, his voice low and velvet-dark, heavy with the kind of confidence that did not ask to be believed because it had already crowned itself king. “We finna get married instead.”
Venus stared at him.
For one suspended second, the whole room seemed to hold its breath: the city burning gold beyond the glass, the white roses and peonies spilling from their vases like offerings at Aphrodite’s altar, the closed velvet ring box sitting on the dresser like a dead prophecy, and Jaafar standing between her knees with his hands on her waist and certainty all over his face, looking at her as if Zeus himself had leaned down from Olympus and told him, Go get what is yours.
Then Venus laughed, but it was not amusement that broke out of her, not really; it was disbelief, panic, fury, longing, and all the years she had tried to keep stacked neatly inside her chest finally rattling loose.
“You are out of your damn mind.”
Jaafar smiled, slow and devastating, his lashes low, his mouth still too close to hers. “No,” he said, and the word came out soft, almost gentle, which somehow made it worse. “I’m done letting you act like you don’t know what this is.”
“This?” she echoed, breath catching despite the sharpness she tried to force into her voice.
“This,” he said, and pulled her closer with one sure hand at the small of her back, not rough, not careless, but with the calm authority of a man who had waited so long that waiting had become a second skin and now, finally, he was stepping out of it. “You and me. All these years. All this back and forth, all this timing our lives wrong on purpose, all this pretending we just kept missing each other by accident.”
Venus’s expression shifted.
There it was.
The little fracture.
The tiny betrayal of the face before pride could cover it.
Because that was the part neither of them had ever wanted to say out loud: whenever Venus was single, Jaafar had someone, some beautiful girl with bright eyes and a soft hand tucked through his arm, some woman smiling too widely in photographs as if she had not sensed the ghost standing between them; and whenever Jaafar was finally alone, Venus had someone, some polished man in tailored suits, some collector or architect or financier with the right watch, the right manners, the right age, the right everything except the one thing that mattered.
He was not Jaafar.
And they had done that dance for years.
Round and round, like two foolish mortals cursed by some bored Greek god, always reaching for each other only after placing somebody else in the way, always pretending jealousy was coincidence, always pretending the timing was tragic when the truth was far uglier.
They had both been cowards.
Venus swallowed, her hand tightening in the front of his shirt. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Act like you weren’t part of it.”
Jaafar’s mouth stilled against her skin.
For the first time all night, something like guilt moved behind his eyes, but it did not weaken him; if anything, it made him more dangerous, because even his guilt came wrapped in confidence, wrapped in the quiet arrogance of a man who believed that everything he had done, even the mistakes, had still been orbiting her.
“You think I didn’t know?” Venus asked, her voice low now, shaking not with fear but with all the old hurt she had taught herself to wear elegantly. “You think I didn’t see you? Every time I was finally alone, there you were with somebody else. Some girl smiling at you like she had won something. Some girl wearing your jacket. Some girl touching your chest in pictures like she had permission to touch what I—”
She stopped herself.
Jaafar’s eyes darkened.
“What you what?” he asked softly.
Venus looked away.
He touched her chin and brought her face back to him, his fingers gentle, his gaze not gentle at all.
“No,” he murmured. “Finish it.”
“Don’t.”
“Mírame, Venus.” Look at me, Venus.
The Spanish left his mouth like heat over marble, intimate and inherited, not performed but pulled from somewhere deep in him, from blood and memory and the side of his family that had taught him affection could sound like command when spoken softly enough.
Venus’s lashes fluttered.
Jaafar saw it, of course.
He saw everything.
That had always been the problem with him.
He noticed too much, remembered too much, knew too much; he knew the scar on her shoulder from the monkey bars, knew the perfume she wore when she wanted to feel untouchable, knew the way she went quiet when she was hurt, knew that she laughed louder around people she did not trust and softer around people she did, knew that she hated being rushed in the morning, knew that she kept handwritten notes in a box like little relics from a private temple, knew that she could design gowns fit for goddesses and still sleep in old T-shirts when no one was watching.
Her fiancé knew Venus Hamilton.
Jaafar knew Venus.
That was the difference.
“No me mientas, preciosa,” he whispered, thumb brushing along her jaw. Don’t lie to me, beautiful.
Venus exhaled shakily, her fingers curling tighter in his shirt. “No me mandes.” Don’t order me around.
His smile came slow, pleased, wicked at the edges.
“Then stop obeying.”
Her eyes flashed, and for a second the woman he had known all his life came back in full force: sharp, proud, radiant, impossible, Athena with lip gloss and a temper, ready for war even with her robe loose at her shoulders and her ring abandoned behind her.
“You are so arrogant,” she whispered.
“Yes.”
No shame.
No hesitation.
Just yes.
Venus let out a disbelieving breath, but it trembled too much to be a laugh. “You’re not even going to deny it?”
“Why would I deny what you like about me?”
The sentence landed between them like a match dropped in oil.
Her mouth parted.
Jaafar tilted his head, watching her with that infuriating calm, that unbearable certainty, that grown-man confidence that had ruined her the first time because, God help her, he had not come to her like a boy begging for a chance, had not stumbled over his want, had not treated her like some older woman he was lucky to touch.
No.
At twenty-four, Jaafar had stood in front of her like a young Apollo already aware of his own beauty, already certain the sun would rise because he told it to, and when Venus had whispered, “You’re too young for me,” trying desperately to place four years between them like a locked gate, he had only smiled, stepped closer, and said, “Then stop wanting me like I’m not.”
And that was why she had let him in the first time.
Not because he was famous.
Not because he was beautiful, though he was beautiful in a way that felt almost offensive, all dark eyes and long limbs and mouth made for trouble.
Not because he was younger and wanted her with the devotion of a man who had turned longing into religion.
But because Jaafar had never made his desire feel uncertain.
He had looked at her like choosing him was not a scandal, not a mistake, not a lapse in judgment, but a correction the universe had taken too long to make.
And now he was looking at her that same way again.
Only worse.
Older.
Sharper.
More assured.
A man who had grown into every dangerous promise his younger self had made.
“You think one night means more than a proposal?” Venus asked, but the question came out too soft, too wounded, too much like she already knew the answer and hated him for making her ask it.
Jaafar’s hand slid from her waist to her back, firm and warm through the loosened silk. “No,” he said. “I think our one night meant more than his whole engagement.”
Venus went still.
“And that’s why you’ve been running from it for five years.”
The words hit her cleanly.
There was no mercy in them, but there was truth, and truth had always been more dangerous between them than touch.
“You don’t know that,” she whispered.
Jaafar smiled faintly.
“Yes, I do.”
“You don’t.”
“Venus.” He leaned closer, his mouth near her ear now, his breath warm enough to make her close her eyes against her will. “If he had touched anything in you that could make you forget me, I wouldn’t be standing here.”
Her breath broke.
There it was, the ego.
Not loud, not childish, not desperate.
Worse.
Certain.
Jaafar looked at her fiancé’s ring and saw something pretty. Expensive. Tasteful. Cute, even. He could admit that much. The man had chosen well. But the ring did not frighten him, the proposal did not humble him, the wedding did not make him feel beaten, because in Jaafar’s mind, all of it was surface — lace over a wound, flowers over a grave, a polished altar built on ground that had always belonged to him.
Her fiancé could give her a diamond.
Jaafar had given her a memory she could not survive.
Her fiancé could put her name on invitations.
Jaafar had his name sitting in her throat.
Her fiancé could stand at the end of an aisle.
Jaafar was the reason she would tremble before she took the first step.
“That ring is cute,” he murmured, glancing toward the velvet box.
Venus blinked, offended despite everything. “Cute?”
“Very cute.”
“You are such an ass.”
“But it ain’t me.”
Her lips parted, and Jaafar’s smile deepened because he felt it — the pulse jump beneath her skin, the old truth rising between them like Aphrodite from seafoam, naked and beautiful and impossible to drown.
“He can put a ring on you,” Jaafar said, his voice low and slow, every word deliberate. “He can stand in front of everybody and promise you stability, houses, children, Sunday brunch, whatever pretty little life he thinks he’s offering.”
Venus swallowed.
“But he can’t stand in a room where he ain’t even present and make you forget how to breathe.”
Her eyes shone.
“Jaafar…”
“No me corras más,” he whispered against her cheek. Don’t run from me anymore.
She closed her eyes.
He kissed the side of her face, just beneath her temple, so tenderly it nearly hurt more than the arrogance.
“No me corras más, mi Venus.” Don’t run from me anymore, my Venus.
Venus made a small, wounded sound, and his hand tightened at her waist, not to trap her, never that, but to hold her steady beneath the weight of what they were finally saying.
“You were my problem,” she whispered, the words slipping out in Spanish before she could dress them in English and make them safer. “Siempre fuiste mi problema.” You were always my problem.
Jaafar went still.
For the first time, the godlike certainty flickered.
Only for a heartbeat.
But Venus saw it.
She saw the boy beneath the man, the child who had watched her fall from monkey bars and cried after everyone else stopped fussing, the teenager who had scowled every time she brought someone older to a family party, the twenty-four-year-old who had kissed her like he had been waiting his whole life to prove he was no longer too young, the man standing before her now, beautiful and arrogant and wounded by every year she had refused to choose him.
So she said it again.
“Siempre.” Always.
His eyes darkened, but not with victory this time.
With ache.
“Venus…”
She shook her head, her voice trembling now, Spanish and English tangling together because one language was no longer enough to hold everything bleeding out of her. “Every time I tried to be smart, every time I tried to be good, every time I chose the man who made sense, the man who was there at the right time, the man who didn’t come with all this history, all this mess, all this—”
“Love,” Jaafar said.
The word cut through her.
She stared at him.
He stepped closer, until there was barely anything between them but breath and silk and five years of cowardice.
“Say it.”
Her eyes filled. “No.”
“Dilo.” Say it.
“No me mandes,” she whispered again, but weaker this time. Don’t order me around.
Jaafar smiled, soft and devastating.
“Then stop wanting to obey.”
Venus kissed him like she was furious that he knew her, furious that he could stand there wrapped in arrogance and tenderness and be right, furious that the whole world had made sense an hour ago and now every safe thing she had built was turning to ash in his hands.
Jaafar caught her immediately.
Of course he did.
He caught her like he had always known she would come to him eventually, like every year, every lover, every jealous performance, every photograph with the wrong person, every almost, every silence, every family dinner where they sat too close and said too little had only been the long road back to this room.
His mouth moved against hers with slow command, heat and restraint braided together, his hands firm at her waist, his body close but not careless, his confidence so complete it became its own kind of seduction.
He did not touch her like he was lucky.
He touched her like he had been chosen.
That was what ruined her.
Jaafar pulled back only enough to look at her, his mouth slightly swollen, his eyes dark, his expression beautiful in its shameless satisfaction.
“You’re mad,” he murmured.
“I am,” Venus breathed.
“No,” he said, thumb brushing her lower lip. “You’re mad because you missed me.”
Her face tightened.
He smiled.
“And you’re mad because I know exactly how much.”
“You are impossible.”
“I know.”
“You think you can just walk in here, speak Spanish, kiss me, tell me I’m marrying the wrong man, and I’m supposed to fall apart?”
Jaafar’s gaze moved over her slowly, from her loosened robe to her wet eyes to the ring box behind her, and when he looked back at her face, the arrogance in him glowed like Helios dragging the sun across the sky.
“No,” he said. “I think you already fell apart when you took the ring off.”
Venus’s breath caught.
He leaned in, his lips brushing the old scar on her shoulder, the one he knew before any man had thought to study her, the one her fiancé had probably seen but never understood.
“Does he even know how you like it?” he murmured against her skin, the question low enough to be wicked, tender enough to be cruel.
Venus’s eyes closed.
Jaafar kissed just above the scar, not quite on it, as if he were worshipping the memory as much as the woman. “Does he know this?” he asked. “Does he know you cried when you fell off those monkey bars, then yelled at everybody for acting like you cried?”
A breathless laugh slipped from her, broken and unwilling.
His mouth curved against her shoulder.
“Does he know you hate being called delicate, but you keep every fragile thing anybody ever gives you?” He kissed her again, slower. “Does he know you get quiet when you want something too much?”
“Jaafar…”
“Does he know you?” he asked, lifting his head, eyes locking onto hers. “Or does he just know how pretty you look behaving?”
That one hurt.
She looked away, but his hand found her cheek and brought her back.
“No,” he whispered. “Don’t hide now. Not after all this.”
Her eyes shone.
“I was scared.”
His face changed.
The arrogance softened, but did not disappear; it became protective, almost reverent, like Ares lowering his sword not because the war was over, but because the woman in front of him mattered more than victory.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do.” His thumb brushed under her eye. “You were scared because I wasn’t supposed to be it.”
Venus stared at him.
“I was supposed to grow out of you,” he said quietly. “You were supposed to laugh about my little crush until it became harmless. Then I got grown, and you got quiet.”
Her lips parted.
“And after that night?” His voice dropped, rich and low. “You couldn’t call me young anymore. Not honestly.”
Venus looked at him, and the shame of it, the truth of it, moved through her like heat.
Because he was right.
After that night, the four years between them had stopped feeling like a reason and started feeling like an excuse.
“You think very highly of yourself,” she whispered.
Jaafar smiled.
“Only because you taught me.”
“I did not.”
“You did,” he said, mouth brushing hers. “That first night? The way you looked at me after?” He shook his head slowly, almost amused. “Baby, I been unbearable ever since.”
A laugh broke from her, wet and helpless, and Jaafar grinned like the sound belonged to him too.
Then his expression softened again.
“Five years,” he murmured. “Five years of sitting beside you at dinners, watching you laugh, watching you touch my arm like you forgot what your hands do to me. Five years of you calling me your friend like it didn’t disrespect both of us.”
A tear slipped before Venus could stop it.
Jaafar caught it with his thumb.
“No llores, preciosa.” Don’t cry, beautiful.
Venus gave him a shaky, wounded smile. “You don’t get to make me cry and then tell me not to.”
“I know.”
“You’re cruel.”
“Only when you make me beg in silence.”
That undid something in her.
Not the kiss.
Not the Spanish.
Not the arrogance.
That.
The confession buried beneath the confidence.
Venus lifted her hand to his face, fingers tracing his jaw, and for one rare second Jaafar went still beneath her touch, all his ego quieting just enough for her to see the devotion underneath it.
“I did love you,” she whispered.
His jaw flexed.
“Don’t say it in past tense.”
Her breath trembled.
“Jaafar…”
“No.” His voice was soft, but absolute. “Don’t give me a grave when I came here for a future.”
Venus closed her eyes.
The room blurred around her: flowers, silk, glass, gold, the ring box, the city, the life she had built because it was safe enough to survive.
Then she opened her eyes and looked at him.
Really looked at him.
The boy she had known.
The man she had wanted.
The god she had tried to make mortal by calling him young.
“Te amo, Jaafar,” she whispered. I love you, Jaafar.
Jaafar stopped breathing.
Venus’s hand trembled against his face, but she did not look away.
“Todavía te amo.” I still love you.
For a moment, all the arrogance left him.
Not because it had been defeated, but because the thing beneath it — the thing he had armored for years with charm and ego and other women and pretty smiles in photographs — had finally been touched directly.
He looked almost stunned.
Almost young.
Almost like the boy who had loved her before he knew what to do with love that big.
Then his hand slid to the back of her neck, and when his confidence returned, it came back quieter, deeper, more dangerous, like Poseidon pulling the tide back before swallowing the shore.
“Say it again,” he whispered.
Venus’s eyes fluttered.
“Te amo.”
His thumb brushed her pulse.
“Again.”
“Te amo.”
Jaafar kissed her then like the words had given him back his own name, like Troy had burned, Olympus had opened, Aphrodite had laughed, and every wrong turn they had ever taken had finally led them to the only room where the truth was waiting.
And somewhere behind them, inside its velvet box, the ring sat closed and silent.
Cute.
Pretty.
Finished.
He picked her up with ease, as if all the years between them had only been training his body for this exact moment, one arm locked beneath her while the other swept across the counter with quiet arrogance, swiping the velvet ring box into his hand before tossing it farther down the marble as if it were nothing more than an inconvenience, some pretty little trinket left behind by a man who had mistaken proximity for possession.
Venus watched him with a shaky breath caught behind her teeth, watched the way his shoulders moved, the way his jaw flexed, the way he handled her with that infuriating confidence, as though carrying her was not effort but instinct, as though he had been waiting since boyhood to hold her without apology.
“Jaafar,” she whispered, but it came out too soft to be a warning.
He only looked at her.
That was all.
Just looked at her with those dark, devastating eyes, his mouth still touched by her, his face beautiful with victory and restraint, like some young god come down from Olympus with no intention of returning empty-handed.
Then, without looking away, he lifted her foot and pressed it against his chest.
The gesture should have been ridiculous.
It should have broken the tension.
Instead, Venus felt her breath leave her altogether.
Jaafar’s hand curled around her ankle, warm and steady, his thumb brushing once over the delicate bone there before he lowered his mouth to the ball of her foot, kissing her slowly, reverently, as if even that part of her deserved ceremony. His lips moved upward, over the arch, to her ankle, then higher, each kiss unhurried and deliberate, climbing her like a prayer spoken against skin, like he had all the time in the world to remind her that he did not worship gently when he had been denied for too long.
Venus let out a breathy sigh and shut her eyes, her head tipping back as heat moved through her in slow, golden waves, warm as Helios dragging morning over the sea.
Jaafar smiled against her skin.
Of course he did.
He heard everything — every unsteady breath, every swallowed sound, every little betrayal her body offered before her pride could stop it.
“Still think I don’t know you?” he murmured, his voice low, amused, unbearably sure of itself.
Venus’s lashes fluttered, but she did not open her eyes.
His mouth moved higher, his hand firm beneath her calf, the other steadying her with such control that she hated how safe she felt in his arrogance.
“Answer me, Venus.”
She swallowed.
“Eres insoportable,” she whispered. You’re unbearable.
Jaafar’s smile deepened against her.
“Y todavía me amas.” And you still love me.
Her breath caught, and when his lips brushed the inside of her knee, slow and warm and devastating, Venus’s fingers tightened in his shirt as if she needed something to anchor her before the last of her common sense slipped beneath the tide.
“Sí,” she breathed, barely audible, the word breaking out of her like surrender. “Todavía te amo.” Yes. I still love you.
Jaafar lifted his head then, eyes dark and triumphant, the kind of triumph that did not need to shout because it had already won.
“I know,” he said softly.
And God, that was the worst part.
He did.
She watched as he brought her knee to his shoulder, tossing the other over the other shoulder too. He looked up to watch her, his brown eyes meeting her own as he hiked up her robe and latched his lips onto her slit.
He hadn’t tasted her in years, he realised, five years to be specific, one thousand eight hundred and twenty-five days ( not that he was counting, of course). He’d spent half of a decade wanting this, dreaming of the day they’d reconcile, and now that they were here, together, where they should’ve been all along, he didn’t think he’d be able to let it go again.
She bit her lip to stop her loud moans, grinding her hips against his face as he sucked on her clit, pulling it back before releasing and blowing cool air and watching with wonder as her mound twitched. He moved down to her pussy, running the tip of his tongue on the edges of her lower lips. He watched as she curled her toes when he spat on her lips and flattened his tongue to lick it up once more.
He remembered it all, he remembered what she liked and how she liked it, he remembered how to curl his tongue when he ate it, he remembered how hard to suck and how much to curl his fingers the way she liked, the same way that made her writhe that one night burned into his brain more than he wanted to admit, more than it should’ve been; but fuck why wouldn’t it be? He kept her up all night, years of desire melding together into that one moment as her sighs and moans became his favourite symphony.
Just as the pressure began to build up, she tried to write away from him, the polished wood of the grand piano she was hoisted on making her movements smoother as she whined, but he just tightened his grip around her waist, pulling her back to where he wanted her. “Deja de estar jodiendo conmigo, Venus.”
Stop fuckin’ playing with me, Venus
And then he returned, adding two fingers and eating at the same time. Just like that, her mouth flew open with a moan, spurring Jaafar on, her hand tangling in his curls as he curled them to the right, an action he knew would make her lose the shred of sense she claimed to have.
With every moan, her chest rose, and the robe came looser and looser, the cool air caressing her skin, cooling her down and yet still she felt hot, like she wasn’t getting enough air in her lungs. He was making the Venus Taraji Hamilton succumb to him, the same Venus that claimed to have it all together, the one who was as strict as a ruler growing up, was here, with him. Her moans grew louder as she felt a pit form in her stomach, it wasn’t long until she released with a loud cry, succumbing to an orgasm so intense the corners of her vision whitnened, as she fought her consciousness. Like a beggar, he feasted at all he gave her, lapping her juices up as he groaned to himself.
He lifted his lips, pressing a kiss to her lips, ensuring she tasted herself on his lips. Then he pulled her closer to him as he unblocked his belt with his left hand , the right tugging the robe away from her body. She cared for Kenan, she truly did, and that was perhaps the cruelest part of it all, because there was no easy hatred to hide behind, no convenient flaw she could point to and say, There, that is why this was never enough. He was kind to her, attentive when his life allowed it, successful in the steady, impressive way men like him were expected to be, and yet no matter how many times they had found their way into each other’s arms, no matter how familiar his touch became or how earnestly he tried to make her feel chosen, it had never compared to this.
Granted, they had both been busy. Venus had been drowning in fabric swatches, tailoring appointments, and sleepless nights designing Jaafar’s looks for the premiere of his movie, while Kenan had been consumed by boardrooms, acquisitions, and the endless machinery of his companies; their love, if she could call it that, had learned to exist in scheduled windows, between flights, after meetings, beneath the polite exhaustion of two people with too much to do and too little fire left to burn.
But with Jaafar, nothing felt scheduled.
Nothing felt polite.
Nothing felt like something she could fold neatly into the margins of her life and return to later.
This was consuming, unreasonable, almost mythic in its intensity, like some reckless offering laid at the feet of Aphrodite and set aflame before either of them could think better of it. Truly, Venus felt crazy — crazy for wanting this with him, crazy for wanting the very man she had spent years trying to outrun, crazy for craving him with a hunger so deep it frightened her, for wanting him to consume her whole again and again until the world outside the suite blurred into nothing, until the ring, the wedding, Kenan, and every sensible choice she had ever made became distant and weightless, until she could barely tell where Jaafar ended and where she began.
She felt the head of his dick nudging her entrance. While she was embarrassingly drenched she didn’t seem to care, not as her eyes met his, not as he took her hand and intertwined their fingers and became one, not even as her walls stretched around the familiar yet overwhelming stretc of him.
“For better or for worse,” she whispered, the words trembling somewhere between a promise and a surrender as she gazed into his brown eyes, her fingers lifting to brush the loose hair away from his face with a tenderness that made the whole room feel quieter.
Jaafar stilled beneath her touch.
There was something unbearably intimate about it — not the heat, not the want, not even the wreckage of the ring sitting somewhere behind them — but this, Venus looking at him as if she had finally stopped running long enough to recognize the man who had been waiting for her all along.
Her thumb skimmed his temple, soft and reverent.
“For better or for worse,” she repeated, quieter this time, like she was testing the weight of forever in her mouth and realizing, with a terrifying kind of peace, that it sounded like him.
Jaafar’s eyes searched hers, the heat in them quieting for just a moment, softening into something more dangerous than desire, something old and aching and almost boyish beneath all that confidence.
He turned his face into her palm, pressing a kiss there, slow and deliberate, before his hand came up to cover hers.
“Para bien o para mal, en esta vida y en todas las que vengan después,” he whispered.
“For better or for worse, in this life and the ones after it.”
…
By the time Venus Taraji Hamilton was twenty-four, she had already mastered the delicate art of pretending not to notice when Jaafar Jackson looked at her. It was not that he was subtle, because God help him, he was not; he had the nerve to believe silence could hide devotion when devotion had already made a home in his eyes, when every glance he gave her lingered too long, burned too warm, settled too low in her chest to be mistaken for anything innocent. But Venus had grown skilled at turning away before the moment could become a confession, at laughing when he became too serious, at calling him young whenever the air between them grew too thick to breathe through.
Young. That was the word she kept like a little shield tucked against her ribs. Four years younger. Family friend. Baby Jackson, when she wanted to irritate him. Jaafar, when she forgot herself. He was twenty then, tall already, beautiful already, dangerous in the unfinished way young gods must have been before Olympus gave them thrones — all dark curls, long lashes, quiet confidence, and that strange, steady way of watching the world as though he expected it to open for him eventually. Venus should have known then that time was not going to save her.
They had ended up in the pet shop because of rain. That was what she would remember years later, though she could never decide if the rain had been coincidence or conspiracy, some private orchestration from the gods, as if Zeus had cracked open the sky just to push them beneath the same little awning on a quiet afternoon when neither of them had intended to be alone together. Their families had gone ahead to lunch, their mothers distracted, their fathers talking too loudly about old friends and business, and Venus had stepped away to avoid the chaos, ducking into the first open shop on the corner with Jaafar right behind her like a shadow with a heartbeat.
The bell above the door chimed when they entered, and inside, the world softened. The pet shop smelled faintly of cedar chips, clean water, birdseed, and rain-soaked pavement carried in on their shoes. Parakeets chattered near the window, bright as stolen jewels; sleepy puppies pressed their noses against glass pens; and a fat orange cat watched from a carpeted tower with the offended dignity of Hera herself. Everything inside felt warm and gold and strange, a tiny ark hidden from the storm outside, humming with life.
Venus shook rain from the ends of her hair, frowning at the dampness on her sleeves. “You didn’t have to follow me,” she said, though they both knew that if she had truly wanted him gone, she would have said so long before the bell above the door stopped ringing. Jaafar only leaned against the doorframe for half a second, pushing wet curls from his forehead, looking entirely too pleased with himself for someone who had just been caught trailing her through bad weather. “I didn’t follow you,” he said. “It was raining.” Venus gave him a look, and he smiled, and that smile was already a problem.
Not fully grown yet, not as lethal as it would become later, but enough to make her look away, enough to irritate her because she knew exactly what it would become once age finished carving patience into his face. Jaafar at twenty did not yet have all the weight he would carry as a man, but he had the promise of it, the early shape of confidence, the beginning of that infuriating certainty that one day, if he waited long enough, she would run out of excuses.
“You are so annoying,” she muttered, moving deeper into the shop, pretending to be interested in a display of tiny ceramic bowls painted with paw prints. Jaafar followed at an unhurried pace, hands in his pockets, watching her with the kind of calm that made her want to throw something soft at his head. There was no rush in him. That was the truly dangerous part. Even then, even young, even with all that longing sitting visibly beneath his skin, he had never behaved like a man afraid of losing the race. He behaved like someone who believed the race had already been won.
The aquarium section glowed blue in the back of the shop, and Venus saw it first. Against the far wall, beneath soft white lamps, glass tanks shimmered with small flashes of moving colour: goldfish, bettas, little silver schools of minnows flickering like coins tossed into sacred water. But in the largest tank, set slightly apart from the rest, two koi moved slowly through the water with a grace that made the whole shop feel suddenly hushed. One was white with patches of deep red across its back, bright as pomegranate seeds spilled over snow, and the other was black, orange, and gold, its scales catching light like pieces of Helios’s chariot broken across a river.
They circled each other. Not chasing, not fleeing, but turning in the same slow rhythm, one passing beneath the other, then beside it, then around again, their bodies folding through the water like silk ribbons pulled by an invisible hand. Venus stepped closer despite herself, and Jaafar came to stand beside her. For once, neither of them spoke. The rain tapped against the front windows, the parakeets quieted, somewhere in the shop a dog whined softly in its sleep, and there, before the koi tank, time seemed to lose its shape.
“They’re beautiful,” Venus whispered. Jaafar looked at the koi for a moment, then at her. “Yeah,” he said, quietly enough that she knew, without needing to ask, that he was not only talking about the fish. She turned toward him, ready to scold him, ready to call him young, ready to tuck the moment safely back into the box she kept for impossible things, but he was already watching her, and there was nothing boyish in his eyes. That was what stole the words from her.
At twenty, Jaafar should have looked at her with hunger, with impatience, with the clumsy intensity of youth. Instead, he looked at her as though he recognized her from somewhere older than memory, somewhere before language, before family dinners and age gaps and all the careful little rules people built around desire. He looked at her the way Orpheus must have looked back toward the underworld, not because he doubted what he loved was following, but because love itself had become unbearable without proof.
Behind them, a soft voice said, “They always know.” Venus startled slightly and turned. An elderly Japanese woman stood near the end of the aisle, small and neat in a navy cardigan, silver hair pinned back, a name tag clipped to her chest. Her eyes were kind, amused, and far too knowing, the way old women in stories always seemed to be, as though age had given them access to secrets the young kept embarrassing themselves trying to hide.
Jaafar straightened, polite at once, but the woman only smiled and stepped closer to the tank. “Koi are good to look at,” she said. “They teach patience. In Japan, koi are symbols of perseverance, strength, and good fortune. They swim against the current. They endure. Some stories say that when a koi is brave enough to climb the waterfall, the gods turn it into a dragon.”
“A reward for not giving up?” Jaafar asked, his eyes moving back to the fish, interest sharpening his face. Venus laughed softly before she could stop herself. “That sounds like something you would like.” He glanced at her, and there it was again, that little flash of arrogance she found so irritating because it suited him too well. “I have a high opinion of being right,” he said.
The old woman smiled like she had seen this exact argument a thousand years before in a thousand different forms. “Two koi together can also mean harmony,” she said. “Balance. A love that must keep moving, even when the water is difficult.” Venus’s smile faded a little. Jaafar went still beside her. The koi circled again, one pale, one dark, touching only for a second as they passed, then separating, then finding the same rhythm once more.
The woman lifted one finger, pointing gently toward the red-and-white koi. “That one always waits,” she said. “The black one goes ahead, then turns. The white one follows, then waits. They keep losing each other for one moment, but they do not panic. They know where the other will be.”
Something moved through Venus then, so quiet and sharp she almost missed it. They know where the other will be. Jaafar did not say anything, and that was worse. If he had joked, if he had smiled too widely, if he had made some arrogant little comment, Venus could have rolled her eyes and dismissed the whole thing, but he was silent beside her, his shoulder barely brushing hers, his attention fixed on the two koi as if the woman had reached into the water and pulled up some hidden truth he had not yet earned the right to say.
“There is another story,” the woman continued. “Not koi. A red thread. Many people mix the meanings now, but the old idea is that two people who are meant for each other are tied by an invisible red thread. It may stretch. It may tangle. It may take years.” Her eyes softened. “But it does not break.”
Venus’s heart gave one foolish, humiliating beat. She laughed because she had to. “That sounds dangerous.” The old woman looked at her with gentle amusement. “Only if you fight it.” Jaafar finally looked at Venus, and she felt it before she met his eyes. The thread. It was ridiculous. There was no thread, no bright red string looped around his thumb and her finger, no visible proof that the universe had tied them together behind their backs while they were busy pretending family history and four years could protect them.
And yet, standing there beneath the blue aquarium light, with rain blurring the windows and two koi circling like fate had given itself scales, Venus could almost feel it — something fine and red and impossible, a line drawn from him to her, not tight enough to trap, not loose enough to ignore.
Jaafar lifted his hand, and for one breath she thought he might touch her. He did not. He only reached toward the glass, placing two fingers lightly against it as the gold-and-black koi swam past. “Does it hurt?” he asked quietly. The old woman looked at him. “What?” Jaafar kept his eyes on the fish. “The thread. If it stretches.”
Venus turned to him, something in her chest going painfully soft. The question was too young and too old at the same time, too bare for a boy who had spent most of the afternoon smirking at her like confidence was armour. He did not look at Venus when he asked it, but she knew, somehow, that the question belonged to her. The old woman studied him for a moment, then said, “Only when one person keeps walking away and the other stands still.”
Venus forgot how to breathe. Jaafar’s hand dropped from the glass. Outside, thunder rolled faintly across the sky, low and distant, like Zeus had overheard enough and was warning them not to make him repeat himself. Venus cleared her throat, forcing a smile that felt too thin. “Well,” she said, “that’s dramatic for a pet shop.” The old woman laughed gently. “Love is dramatic everywhere.”
The two koi had begun circling more tightly now, one turning around the other in a slow, endless shape, like an infinity symbol drawn in water. “They look like they’re dancing,” Venus said, because it was safer than saying what she was thinking. Jaafar watched the fish, his face suddenly quiet and reverent, less like a young man sheltering from rain and more like Apollo standing at the edge of a prophecy he had not yet learned how to survive. “They keep missing,” he said.
“Only by a little,” Venus murmured. “They come back around.” Jaafar looked at her then. “Yes,” he said quietly. “They do.” Venus should have said something clever. She should have called him annoying again, reminded him that he was twenty, that she was twenty-four, that whatever lived under his skin when he looked at her was not something she could entertain without feeling like she had betrayed common sense itself. But the words did not come.
The old woman eventually returned with a tiny paper cup of fish food and handed it to Venus. “Here,” she said. “You feed them.” Venus took it carefully, then glanced at Jaafar. “Why me?” He shrugged, smiling faintly. “Maybe they like you.” She rolled her eyes. “Everything likes me.” His smile widened. “There’s that ego.” “Learned from you.” His expression shifted, amused and soft all at once. “I’m younger. How you learning from me?”
She froze. He knew it instantly. The forbidden thing had slipped between them again, dressed as a joke and yet not a joke at all. Younger. There it was. Her shield. Her excuse. Her little gate. Jaafar’s smile faded by inches. “You always mean it when you say that,” he said, and there was no accusation in his voice, which somehow made it worse.
Venus looked down into the cup, guilt sitting sharp beneath her ribs. “I didn’t mean—” “Yes, you did.” The words were quiet. Steady. Too honest. Then, before the moment could split open completely, he nodded toward the tank. “Feed them before they start judging us.”
Venus turned back to the koi and sprinkled a few flakes over the water. They rose at once, mouths opening softly, bodies brushing the surface, colour flashing beneath the blue light. Jaafar came to stand beside her again — not too close, just close enough — and for a while, they watched the koi eat in silence.
The black-and-gold koi moved first, then the red-and-white one followed, close enough that their fins brushed. A strange little hush moved through Venus as she watched them, and before she could stop herself, she imagined the invisible red thread the old woman had described. Stretching. Tangling. Crossing years. Looping around other lovers, other cities, other rooms, other mistakes. Never breaking.
When she looked down, her smallest finger was close to his hand. Not touching.
Almost.
Jaafar noticed.
Of course he noticed.
His gaze dropped to the narrow space between their hands, to the delicate almost of it, her smallest finger resting close enough to his that the air itself seemed to tremble there. Venus could have moved away. She should have moved away. She could have tucked her hand behind her back, reached for the paper cup again, made some sharp little comment to cut the moment down before it grew teeth.
But she did not.
For one dangerous second, their hands hovered side by side over the edge of the tank stand, his little finger near hers, the space between them so small it felt indecent; then Jaafar moved, barely, just enough for his pinky to brush hers. The touch was so light it could have been an accident, except Jaafar Jackson had never accidentally wanted her a day in his life.
Venus’s breath caught.
He did not look at her.
She did not look at him.
They stood there like that, hands almost touching, koi circling, rain falling, and Venus thought with sudden terror that maybe the gods did not always announce destiny with thunderbolts. Maybe fate arrived quietly. Maybe it smelled like aquarium water and cedar chips. Maybe it wore damp curls and a too-calm expression. Maybe your soulmate did not arrive with some grand, flaming sign from Olympus; maybe he simply stood beside you long enough for your body to recognize him before your mind could object.
“Venus,” Jaafar said softly.
She closed her eyes for half a second. “What?”
“When I’m older,” he said, stubborn as a prayer, “you gon’ stop saying that.”
Her eyes opened.
The shield rose in her immediately, familiar and automatic. He was twenty. She was twenty-four. That was supposed to mean something. That was supposed to protect her from the way he looked at her, from the quiet certainty in his voice, from the awful little truth sitting between them like the red thread itself had tightened around their fingers.
“Jaafar,” she warned.
But he only turned to her fully, his gaze steady, his voice low enough to belong only to her. “What you mean is you need a reason to act like you don’t feel this too.”
Venus went still.
The koi moved beneath them, red and gold and black and white, circling, circling, circling, two little gods trapped in glass and still somehow freer than she felt. She looked down and realized their pinkies were still touching. Barely. Almost nothing. Enough to ruin the air.
“You don’t know what I feel,” she said, but it came out too quietly to be convincing.
Jaafar’s gaze dropped to their hands, then lifted back to her face. “Yes, I do.”
The confidence should have made her furious. Instead, it made her afraid, because there was no cruelty in it, no demand, no childish arrogance dressed up as romance. Just certainty. Warm and calm and devastating. The kind of certainty that did not need to raise its voice because it believed time itself would eventually testify on its behalf.
Venus pulled her hand away.
Jaafar let her.
That was almost worse.
He did not chase. He did not grab. He did not make a scene. He only nodded once, as if this too was part of the pattern, as if she was the koi swimming ahead and he already knew she would circle back.
“You’re impossible,” she whispered.
His smile returned, softer this time, touched with something that made him look younger and older all at once. “You keep saying that.”
Before Venus could answer, the old woman passed behind them again and glanced once more at the tank, her expression warm with that unsettling wisdom old women in stories always seemed to possess. “They like you two,” she said.
Venus gave a weak laugh. “You think so?”
“Yes,” the woman replied. “They can tell when people are tied.”
Venus’s body went still.
Jaafar’s eyes moved to her face, but she kept hers on the water because looking at him right then felt too much like confession.
“By the red thread?” he asked.
The woman shrugged lightly, as if fate was not something to be proven, only recognized. “Maybe. Maybe by water. Maybe by something older.”
Venus tried to smile. “Older than what?”
The woman looked at them both, then at the koi moving below the blue light. “Than the reasons people make to stay apart.”
The words settled over them like a blessing and a warning.
Venus looked back at the tank.
This time, the koi were side by side.
No circling. No missing. No thin ribbon of blue between them. Just moving together through the water, slow and certain, two bodies following the same invisible current as though they had been doing it long before anyone thought to name it love.
For once, Jaafar said nothing.
He did not need to.
The rain softened outside, and soon their families would begin wondering where they had gone. The world would return with its noise, its rules, its ages, its careful little categories. Someone would call Venus’s phone. Someone would ask why Jaafar had disappeared too. Lunch would resume, parents would laugh, old friends would hug, and Venus would have to step back into a life where pretending was easier than admitting that something in her had shifted in the blue glow of a koi tank.
But for that one suspended moment, she let herself stand beside him.
She let herself feel the brush of his sleeve against hers. She let herself imagine the red thread. She let herself imagine two koi swimming through difficult water, separated by turns, tangled by timing, always circling, always returning, always finding the same current again.
And though she would not say it then, though she would spend years swallowing the truth until it grew teeth inside her, some quiet part of Venus knew.
Not hoped.
Not wondered.
Knew.
Jaafar Jackson was going to be the hardest thing she ever tried to outrun.
And one day, when she was tired enough, honest enough, brave enough, she would stop swimming against him and call it fate.
tags <3 : @lov3lylxvender @melaninjoys @cinnamoncunt @healthenature @kryptonianheart @sagittalust @tenacioustestamentambush @tatumcelts @jakardyz @freaky1nterlude @daliscrim @michealsapplehead @asiatarg @imgenuinelyinsane @mrs-dylanobrien265 @plan3tch1ld @mamasturn ( lmk if you want to be added or removed)
