𝐀/𝐍 ➳ I’m back and I will never abandon this app ever again. Life was AWFUL when I stopped writing lmao.
𝐌𝐈𝐍𝐎𝐑𝐒 𝐃𝐎 𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐀𝐂𝐓 or I’ll whoop your ass
𝐂𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐑𝐎𝐍 𝐂𝐀𝐃𝐄 (riding/cowgirl)
Absolutely loves it when you ride him. He needs you on top of him at all times so he can stare at your tits all night. Only downside about this position is that he NEVER lasts long. How could he when he’s got the chance to swirl your nipples in his mouth.
PACE ➳ He always makes sure that you ride him nice and slow. Nothing too crazy because he doesn’t want to cum too fast. Your tight walls clenching around him as you slowly move up and down. The way you clench extra hard when you reach the tip because you know it makes him shiver.
BONUS ➳ he HAS to nut in you because of his breeding kink. He just wants to prepare you for the future incase y’all decide to have kids.
𝐉𝐀𝐂𝐊𝐒𝐎𝐍 𝐁𝐑𝐎𝐎𝐊𝐒 (backshots + pronebone + anything that’ll get him to see that ass)
He’s sick and tired of all the attitude you give him while he’s on the job, so he’ll definitely make sure you pay for that shit later. He’ll let it slide, making you think you’ve gotten away with your bratty attitude earlier. But later in the night, he’ll get you when you least expect it. He’ll pin you down on your stomach and force you not to move. This man will talk you through it ALL.
PACE ➳ Fast strokes cause he just can’t help himself. It drives him crazy knowing that he can’t fuck you while he’s on the job.
He’ll also put you in a headlock, forcing you to apologize after talking shit all damn day. Makes it his sole mission to make you cum at least three times. The night ain’t over unless he gets what he wants…
Lastly, he will never NOT cum in you. At the end of the day, he needs to know that you belong to him and ONLY him.
BONUS ➳ On the days that it’s too risky to fuck, then he’ll make you get on your knees and give him head. Ropes of spit dripping down your chest as he fucks your mouth. Pushes your head down and makes you swallow all of his nut without spitting that shit out. He just wants to fix that smart ass mouth you got.
𝐓𝐄𝐃𝐃𝐘 𝐒𝐏𝐄𝐍𝐂𝐄𝐑 (missionary)
That goofy persona of his disappears the second he gets you in bed. He needs to kiss you as he gets deeper inside of you. This is his favorite position because he gets the chance to kiss you all over the place. Neck kisses, cheek kisses, jaw kisses, hand wrapped around your throat, etc. The sound of your moans turn him on so fucking much he just can’t get enough of you.
PACE ➳ moderate. Not too hard or fast. Slow enough to where y’all can both see it go in and out.
BONUS ➳ if he’s feeling bold enough, then he’ll put your legs on his shoulders and dig into you. He’ll rock his hips up and down to hit your sweet spot. Or if he’s feeling REALLY bold then he’ll press his hand on your lower stomach and fuck you til your gushing all over him.
𝐋𝐄𝐃𝐆𝐄𝐑 𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐃 (spooning)
He’s a big softie so he doesn’t want to do anything that could hurt you. Rubs your clit with soft, tiny circles as he’s digging in you from the side. Squeezes the FUCK out of your titties. Got his hand on your throat as he kisses your neck too.
PACE ➳ DANGEROUSLY slow strokes that got you begging for him. Chokes you even harder when he’s ready to go faster.
𝐀𝐀𝐑𝐎𝐍 (backshots)
Loves seeing that ass jiggle as he fucks you. Pushes you down into the bed to fuck you even harder. He ain’t done unless he got you screaming and shaking. Makes it his sole mission to make sure you can’t walk after this. Your raspy moans and get louder as he thrusts deeper inside you.
PACE ➳ a rough but steady rhythm. Keeps his grip extra tight on your hips to make sure you ain’t going nowhere.
BONUS ➳ He’ll certainly make you work for your nut. He’ll force you to throw that ass back on him when he knows you’re desperate to cum.
“Don't you give me up, please don't give up on me, I belong with you, and only you, baby”
In which Jackson takes on a special case client that takes a turn for the worst… or so he thinks 🍒
warnings: 18+ content (MNI), witch! black/fem! reader x Special Agent Jackson Brooks, witchy themes, spell work, stalking, obsession, infatuation, dark! reader, cussing/swearing, flirting, smuttt— dirty talk, pnv penetration, lowk sub! Jackson Brooks, handjob, touching, creampie.
a.n: heyyy bae, we’ve unlocked a new character! 🤭 expect to see more of him and Mr. Ledger Ward <3 anyways, this is mad random but I hope y’all like it. Heed those warnings and enjoyy 😚
on the jukebox: ‘Dark Red’ by Steve Lacy + ‘I Put a Spell on You’ by Nina Simone 🍒
It was something about you that Jackson Brooks couldn’t quite understand or put a finger on.
The more he looked at your sleeping figure in his gargantuan hotel bed— that you weren’t supposed to be sleeping in— the more he continued forming questions to ask you eventually.
The more a deep settling feeling hugged on him like a blanket.
Your body shifted on top of his duvet, the hood of your jacket softly exposing your dark, reddish brown coils. You really weren’t supposed to be in his bed, you had your own bed. You knew that.
But he knew that he couldn’t go into your room— privacy reasons. He also didn’t want to wake you up and make you walk to your room. The last time he tried, you got really upset with him.
He vowed to never do it again.
As annoying that it was, it also felt like the more Jackson Brooks looked at you, he realized just how much his job mattered.
He had to protect you, he had to make sure you were safe and in his line of sight at all costs.
You were also really fucking beautiful too. That didn’t help his conflicting feelings either.
Approaching the bed, Jackson ever so gently scooped your body up and under the duvet, draping the warm cover up to your chin. Still you slept like a baby.
You truly entranced him. Even down to when you first met.
—
“Oh my god— thank GOD it’s you! Oh please, you have to help me! They’re going to kill me, please!”
Special Agent Jackson Brooks barely had a moment to register what he’d open his door to. The front door of his very private home, mind you.
Heavy rain and thunderstorms cast down on the Florida area and in the next cities over. It was dark, cold, and gloomy.
You stood draped in black leggings and sweater, drenched from head to toe. Your dark auburn curls were soaked down your back and shoulders. The rain droplets cast down your forehead and cheeks, wetting your long eyelashes.
You had a begging, pleading look in your eye, even as you continued looking from side to side. The threat of your enemies could be anywhere, you needed sanctuary.
“I-I know you don’t know me but I’ve heard about you a-and I know you help people. I’m sorry to meet you like this but I really need your help. There are men after me.. they ran me out of my house and I have nowhere to go. They’re going to kill me, I know it”
Jackson couldn’t tell if it was the rain or actual tears streaking your supple cheeks.
“You have to help me, please”
Something inside of the man lurched and he finally sprung into action. Like he was finally getting out of a trance.
He nodded almost immediately, “of course, ma’am— come in, come in, get behind me”
His arm swiftly reached out to do exactly that. With his holstered gun in hand, the man grabbed it, cocked it, and stepped out further onto his wrap around porch. Eyes surveying the area the best he could through the storm.
Nothing.
Jackson did another thorough look before stepping back inside and closing his front door, locking it. He turned to find you sitting timidly on his couch, shaking.
The man put his gun away and immediately reached into the closet close to the door and grabbed a blanket. He draped it over your shoulders as he sat down next to you.
“Thank you” you smiled gratefully.
“Of course, ma’am. I didn’t see anybody outside so you must’ve outran them but you’re safe here. Are you hurt? Did any of them harm you as you were trying to get away?”
You shook your head and cuddled into the blanket, wrapping it more around yourself.
“I have a small scrape from running and falling but that’s because the ground’s all wet from the rain, nothing my body can’t fix on its own”
Jackson nodded intently.
“I just— I don’t know how they found me but they found me. One minute I’m making some herbs, the next minute I’m hauling ass from my own home.. watching them set it on fire thinking I’m inside”
Your voice shook, watery in sound and a lump in your throat. This time Jackson knew it wasn’t rain droplets casting down your pretty face.
You glanced over at him as tears brimmed your eyes, softly turning your scleras pink.
“I already know you’re going to ask me how I found your house—“
How did you know that?
“— but I just really need your help. I-I don’t have anyone else to turn to and nowhere to lay my head. I also realized that I’m not safe here anymore. I just—“
Jackson recognized the panic in your voice and the steady rise of your chest. You were about to hyperventilate.
Without much thought, Jackson kneeled before you and gently grabbed onto your shoulders. His greenish hazels bored into your own.
“Ma’am— hey hey, try to calm down for me, okay? You’re about to have a panic attack. You don’t need to explain yourself anymore, you’re safe here. Can you breathe with me? Do a deep breath, in—“
You closed your mouth and listened. You took in an inhale, you and Jackson’s chest inflating.
“Out through your mouth”
Deflating chests on the exhale, you couldn’t look away from him. Nor could he you.
“Good.. very good, ma’am. Got one more for me?”
It was a rhetorical question but you nodded anyways.
“In through your nose..” another strong inhale, “out through your mouth” another strong exhale.
You closed your eyes briefly to try to center yourself, at the same time, you felt Jackson’s thumbs caress your clothed shoulder tops.
“You don’t have to worry about anything anymore, ma’am. My name is Jackson Brooks, I’m a regional security officer working for the DDS. If it’s help you need, I can give you that”
When you opened your eyes to look at him, a certain flash ran across your irises. It went short noticed as he soon felt your body being thrown into his. Begone the blanket, your damp arms wrapped around his neck.
“Oh, thank you so much, Jackson. I’m (Y/N)”
—
No longer residing in the Florida bayous of his home due to the threats on your life, Jackson found comfort in a luxury hotel in Paris.
It wasn’t his idea but it worked. It was better to be in a completely new country than to try your luck bouncing around hotels in the state.
It had been three months since your appearance at his door. Three months earned the man more time to learn about you and you the same about him.
If he didn’t learn it then, he surely learned now that you’d grown very close to him. Comfortable, kind of latched on. Much like a koala to a tree branch.
You slept in his bed like it was yours, he hardly ever noticed you in your own room.
Why was that?
The more he thought about it, the more he noticed the sporadic moments where you did disappear to your room. Of course to shower but other times… times where he’d smell something burning, he’d often hear your murmurs, he’d smell spices…
Curiosity suddenly piqued at the man. He glanced over at the expansive doors that connected your adjoining room to his. His eyes flickered from the doors to your sleeping figure.
If now wasn’t a good time, when?
Quietly, Jackson stood and trekked over to the door. Painted white, tall, with golden handles. His hands closed over the door knobs and just as he was ready to turn—
“Jack?”
He stood frozen and softly released his hold. Jackson glanced over his shoulder, over to see your shifting body in the bed. The hood well off of your head and exposing your red hair.
“Jack, are you here?”
The soft worry in your voice had Jackson hurriedly crossing the threshold and back into his bedroom.
You smiled when he came into your sight, you still lied in bed. Jackson rounded the bed over to your side and kneeled down to eye level.
“Yes ma’am? I’m here. Are you okay?”
You nodded. “I just didn’t know where you were. Usually you’re fast asleep on the couch or doing your work, I just didn’t see you, I got scared”
Jackson chuckled lowly and shook his head. All feelings of nervousness prior seemingly decimated with the more you spoke, with the more you were this close to him. His aura was soft for you.
“Scared for what, Miss (Y/L/N)?”
You shrugged, “maybe that one day I’ll open my eyes and you’ll just be gone. Gone without me. Would you ever do that? Like, just leave me high and dry without telling me?”
Immediately Jackson shook his head, a soft frown settling on his eyebrows.
“Absolutely not. That’s not something you have to worry about, ma’am. I know this is probably your trauma speaking but you’ve got a friend in me, I’ll never abandon you”
Boldly, you reached out and cupped the side of his face, your thumb caressing his cheekbone.
“Just a friend?” You muttered, a hint of tease in your eyes.
The same eyes that caught the blush on Jackson’s face, you giggled. His own laughter was that of a nervous one, his blush settling in deeper.
“I— well, ma’am—“ He opened his mouth to speak but all he could do was stutter. You had that effect on him.
This wasn’t the first time you’d flirted with him.
It was baby steps really. You tried every now and then, you couldn’t help it. Not when your bodyguard was this fucking sexy.
“It’s okay, Jack, I understand. Maybe one day, right? One of these days I’ll win you over?”
Your hand left his face and dropped down to the gold link around his neck. The man swallowed as you scooped it with one finger and played with it.
“I don’t mean to make you blush, sometimes I can’t help it with you, Jack. You’re just such a great guy. So great, so sweet, so kind, so easy to talk to and be around.. you’ve been my hero and I’m forever indebted to you. I really am grateful for you”
You didn’t need your physical power to pull Jack in but the soft hold on his chain made it easier for you. Easier for you to reach out and kiss the corner of his mouth.
“Thank you so much, again”
You leaned over and kissed the other side of his mouth. God, you were so close to fucking kissing him full on the lips and it was driving Jackson wild.
He was stuck on wanting to keep things professional to just wanting to indulge in your flirting. Wanting to see if you were really about the things you said to him in such a fashion.
When you pulled back, you shot him a smile. “I’ll give you your bed back. Night, Jack”
“Goodnight, ma’am”
He watched you untangle yourself from his bed and stroll over to the doors, letting yourself into your own space with a soft close.
Jackson Brooks let out the breath he was holding and stood up. It was time for a shower… preferably cold.
—
“Jack… Jackson..”
The airy, sultry sound of your voice ran in one ear and out of the other of Jackson Brooks.
“Jack, baby, are you asleep?”
Still sultry but a bit more commanding despite the question. It stirred the man awake a little. If it wasn’t your voice it was the heavy smell of vanilla, cinnamon, and sandalwood.
If it wasn’t your voice or the smell to wake the man up, it was your touch. A light but firm hand on his bare abdomen.. caressing his skin in circles.
Finally Jackson opened his eyes and the sight before him nearly scared him half to death. Even through the darkness of his room, he made out your physicals.
Your auburn hair in tousled messy curls, draping over your shoulders. You dressed in a spaghetti strapped nightgown, your breasts nearly spilling from the poorly contained, loose fabric clothing.
You were attached to his side, leaning against him. Almost like you’d spent this entire time shaking him awake.
“Miss (Y/L/N)? H-How did you get in here?” Jackson muttered.
“Did I wake you? I’m so sorry—“
He waved you off, “it’s fine, are you hurt? What’s the matter that you had to wake me up at—“
Jackson looked to his left, the digital clock on the nightstand struck a perfect—
“— 3 o’clock in the morning?”
You observed him some more, full on checking him out in the darkness. You were always bold and forthcoming but even this was a lot.
“I have a problem and you’re the only person who could fix it”
“What is it, ma’am?”
Your eyes were seductive in nature but it was your smirk that had Jackson reeling.
You said nothing.
Nothing as you shifted more onto your back and bent your knees, feet flat on the bed. You said nothing as you stared Jackson Brooks in the eyes and spread your knees, lifting your nightgown. You said nothing as you grabbed Jackson’s closest hand and placed it over your bare, exposed pussy.
Immediately Jackson tried to retract his hand at the feeling of your warm wetness but found that he couldn’t.
You used his hand to touch yourself, your moans soft and bouncing off of the walls of the hotel. All while staring him dead in the eyes.
“D-Do you feel my problem, baby?”
You focused his tendrils on your sopping clit.
“‘M sorry, I’ve been wanting to do this since I met you— mhmph— been dreaming of having your hands on me.. in me… this is what you do to me, Jack”
The man could hardly think or even react when you suddenly straddled him.
With that same hand in your grasp, Jackson Brooks watched you lick each digit. From the top to the bottom, the palette of your mouth warm and inviting.
“M-ma’am.. ma’am please you have to stop. This is unprofess—“
You slid your arms out of your nightgown and let it pool around your waist, exposing your eager breasts that glowed in the moonlight. A groan slipped from the man involuntarily.
“You’ve been telling me that for months, Jack but when will you admit that the professionalism is all on you? I know you think about me, I know you’ve thought about this..”
You suddenly grabbed both of his hands and open palm placed them on your chest. Using his hands to grope and pry.
“I know I have but it’s a matter of getting you and I on the same page, baby. You can’t tell me that you don’t like this..”
Indeed he couldn’t. All Jackson felt he could do was groan and inadvertently allow you to use him. His fingers zeroed in on your nipples and tugged.
If that wasn’t enough, it was your hand slithering past the waistband of his boxers and seeking out the heaviness of his dick. He was halfway there but it didn’t take much for a true erection to appear.
Still killing him with your eye contact, you dribbled spit into your palm and wrapped it around his shaft. Twisting, pulling, tugging. Jackson’s hips bucked into your hand as he moaned out into the air.
“Just like that?” You leaned down and kissed his lips for the first time.
Your soft lips moved in a perfect, synchronized harmony that pushed your own heart deep into your body— God, you’d been wanting to do that for so fucking long.
Jackson nodded, hungrily kissing you back. His resistance seemingly disappeared, you were making him feel too good for him to try to lecture you about professionalism.
So much that he wrapped his own hand around yours to jerk him faster.
Time blended into nothing. Your hand was perfect but it compared none to the feeling of his length breach past your entrance. Jackson had you on your back, sinking deep inside of you inch by fucking inch until he bottomed out.
“You’re stretching me out so good, Jack..” you murmured in his ear, teeth grazing the shell of his ear.
“Oh fuck” He choked out at the feeling of your walls squeeze him.
“Talk to me, baby” you grabbed his chin to force his eyes on you. The greenish hazel eyes that swirled in nothing but pure pathetic submission. “How’s it feel? Is it good?”
Jackson nodded immediately and leaned down to kiss you again. Fervor and passion, hungry and raw.
“‘S so good, ma’am.. so fucking good— fuck! D-do you want me to move? Are you okay?”
All you could do was giggle. You’d think you were taking this poor man’s virginity.. or maybe you were better than anyone he’s ever had.
“Take what you want from me, baby”
Jackson pulled his hips back and gave an experimental stroke. He couldn’t get too far back without your greedy walls pulling him back deeper and deeper. His groan was rugged.
“Fuuuck, ma’am” another kiss, “it’s so good, it’s so good, it’s so good”
Desperation is all Jackson Brooks knew in this very moment. His thrusts powered and he fucked you harder. His mouth was all over you— your neck, your ears, your mouth, your breasts.
Jackson could slowly feel himself losing control. And you were loving it, you fed right into it.
“Fucking me so good, I knew you needed this.. you’re gonna make me cum, Jack”
“Please” he groaned, his tone needy.
Your legs around his waist tightened and when your release hit, you clung tighter to the man. Your release coated him, walls vibrating and milking Jackson for everything he had.
He continued powering you through your orgasm, memorizing the sounds of your noises in his ear.
When you relaxed in his hold, you were still a fucking menace. Your acrylic nails caressed his buzzed head and his bare back, scratching at his skin.
If it wasn’t your ministrations, it was your salacious words as you stared him down.
“Gonna cum for me, Jack? Inside’a me like I know you want to?”
Jackson nodded vigorously.
“Yes ma’am. C-can I? Please, I’ve been so good for you”
It was your final kiss to his lips that sent the man over the edge. He spilled inside of you in thick spurts, coating your walls fully.
You caressed his back into relaxation, purring like a cat.
“How do you feel?”
You watched him smile down at you and kiss your lips once more, his forehead leaning against yours.
“Really good, thank you ma’am”
You shifted underneath him and began peppering your lips all over his face. It was when you reached his ear that he heard you say:
“I need you to wake up for me”
Jackson frowned in confusion, you weren’t pulling back to look at him.
“Wake up, Jack”
“Huh?”
“Jack? Wake up, Jack”
The reality around Jackson Brooks began to cave in. When he looked down, you were gone. He blinked and blinked until he finally reached planet Earth.
This time when he opened his eyes, you were sitting on the bed next to him, your hand on his bicep shaking him awake. He was in his room and everything was like normal.
Your auburn curls sat on your shoulders and you weren’t in a nightgown but instead one of his jackets and a pair of yoga pants.
“Jack? Are you okay? Are you awake?”
Sweat pooled his forehead and his neck, beads also on his chest. The duvet draped over his boxer clothed waist, he was just in his shirt. Exactly like..
“Do you need water or anything? You look hot”
“What time is it?” Jackson asked, a rasp in his voice.
“Almost ten in the morning. We’re supposed to get breakfast today, remember?”
Jackson took a breath, gave you another look, and sat up in his bed. He nodded at your question.
“O-okay.. okay, give me fifteen minutes and I’ll be right out”
You smiled and leaned over, kissing Jackson’s cheek.
“I’ll be outside”
Just as you turned on your heels to walk out, you approached the man once more. Your lips by his ear.
“I hope you slept well”
Huh?
You gave his lap a quick look down and when Jackson noticed it, his light face turned a reddish pink you’d ever seen.
The duvet hardly concealed the hard on Jackson was sporting. It wasn’t a tent but his print was outlined enough.
With a wink and another kiss to his cheek, you were finally gone.
“What am I supposed to do?”
—
When you returned to your confines, you couldn’t help but to giggle.
What Jackson probably thought you assumed was something normal, you knew it was something else.
You walked into your bathroom and sighed at the sight.
A spellbook sprawled out, two red and pink candles each other with Jackson’s name carved into each, herbs, incenses, candle wax, rose petals, cinnamon, and honey. A small alter if you will. The cherry on top? Picture cut outs of Special agent Jackson Brooks.
You smiled at the sight and sat down in your chair right before it. Your pride and joy.
It didn’t take much of your power to visit Jackson Brooks in his dreams, you felt everything and you knew he did too. You woke up to a mark on your neck that you knew he left you.
It was time to finalize.
Grabbing your red ink pen, you scribbled out another stanza beneath the many that you’d written. Not just since you’ve been with Jackson but before you met Jackson.
All words and scripts that helped mold all of your interactions before actually meeting the man. You already knew who he was, where he worked, what he did, and where he lived.
You knew where to go on that fateful night. He didn’t need to know the explicit details of your “attackers” but that you needed him.
You sacrificed so much to finally get to Jackson Brooks, even if it meant burning down your own house.
You knew what kind of man Jackson Brooks was, of course he’d take you in and form part of his life to making sure you were safe and looked after.
He was your bodyguard after all and you loved him. Now it was time for him to love you back.
You began writing.
‘He can never be without me and wants to be around me 24/7’
Before you could sit your pen down, three distinct and needy knocks cracked on your adjoining room door.
“Miss (Y/L/N)? Ma’am? Can we talk?”
Just like you planned.
.
.
.
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if you made it this far, hey stinka 😌 next upload: ‘Jealous Type’ — C.C x reader x R.C 😌
distant lovers ໒ྀི bodyguard!jackson brooks x princess black!reader
𓏲*𝜗𝜚 princess black!reader ໒ྀི second child of the royal family, but the eldest daughter of the family. dark swan. scholar. master of literature and mathematics. dreams of being a writer. dancer. teacups galore. movie scores. pearls. ruler of tea time. moonlit nights. quiet but stern. part-time educator for young girls. advocate for the class issues of her country. drowns in fragrances. intense vince amuto. crafter. odessa calla lilly. listener of western blues
𓏲*𝜗𝜚 bodyguard!jackson brooks ໒ྀི special agent. american. eldest of two, younger sister. protective. stern. attentive. cold but melts away. leather jackets. secret romcom lover. “<3” user but won’t admit it. jazz clubs. wine nights by himself. rings. study of foreign relations. ivy league. traveler by force. giver and pleaser. giorgio armani. heavy thinker. chroma drift
𓏲*𝜗𝜚 j.b x princess y/n ໒ྀི nods by day, phone calls by night. neither loves their government. an ocean that separates them. marvin gaye and sade adu. small giggles when mister jackson is supposed to be working. letters sat and unsent. love letters hidden in a chest. secret phone lines. matching pieces that are hidden. accidental identical rings. one sees the night and one sees the stars. lipstick fixes. dazed lovers
Nolána Moore lounged on the plush sectional in her sprawling Los Angeles mansion, the kind of place that screamed success with its open-plan living room, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the hills, and minimalist decor that hid the chaos of her rising stardom. At 27, the African American R&B sensation had curves that turned heads—full hips, a generous ass, and breasts that strained against her cropped tank top. Her smooth, deep brown skin glowed under the afternoon sun filtering through the glass, and her long, wavy hair cascaded down her back like a midnight waterfall. Fans adored her voice dubbing her as the Black Canary, her voice a sultry siren call that packed arenas and topped charts. But lately, the thrill of the spotlight had soured with anonymous threats scrawled on notes slipped into her dressing room, eerie phone calls that breathed heavy silence, and a nagging sense that someone was always watching.
Her team—manager Miriam, a sharp-eyed woman in her forties with a no-nonsense bob; George, the burly producer who also handled the money; and publicist Josh, slick and ever-optimistic—hovered around her like anxious parents. They knew more than they let on. The stalker wasn't just sending creepy letters; he'd breached her home once, leaving a single black feather on her pillow as a taunt. Backstage at her last concert, a package rigged with a small explosive had injured a stagehand, shrapnel grazing his arm. But they shielded her from the worst, fearing it'd derail her tour. Desperate, they'd called in the big guns: the Diplomatic Security Service, offering a hefty fee for their top operative.
Enter Jackson Brooks, 28, a towering 6'5 light-skinned Black man built like a linebacker, with broad shoulders, chiseled arms straining his crisp white shirt, and green eyes that pierced like emeralds. His DSS career was elite—guarding ambassadors in war zones, foiling assassination plots on senators. So when his boss reassigned him to babysit a pop and r&b star, irritation boiled over.
"With all due respect, sir? I feel one of the other agents would be better suited for the job," Jackson said, his deep voice edged with frustration during the briefing in D.C.
His superior, a grizzled veteran, leaned back. "Her team wants somebody with higher training and intelligence. Her original security needs proper oversight. You'll run operations until they nail this stalker."
Jackson groaned, rubbing his close-cropped fade. "Fine. When do I start?"
"Now. Flight leaves in an hour. Full file on 'Project Black Canary' incoming—review it en route."
He scoffs, “Project Black Canary? Who is in charge of naming these things?”
On the red-eye to LAX, Jackson cracked open the dossier, his long fingers flipping pages under the dim cabin light. It was heavier than expected. 'Management—Miriam, George, publicist Josh— withholding details from asset to protect her.' He skimmed further: stalker infiltrated residence, accessed private quarters. Explosive device at venue injured personnel. Recent shooting incident near convoy—bullets whizzed past her SUV on the freeway. Jackson groaned louder, drawing a side-eye from a passenger.
"First thing: lay it all out for her. She needs the full severity." More notes: 'Asset exhibits irritation, hostility, and anxiety. Insists original team sufficient; resistant to external intervention.' He pinched the bridge of his nose, his full lips pressing into a line. "She's gonna be a fucking headache. Difficult as hell to work with. This is why I don’t do musicians." His green eyes caught the light, flickering with resolve. "Sooner we catch this bastard, sooner I'm back to real work—diplomats, not divas. Stay professional," he muttered, snapping the file shut as the plane descended.
A black SUV whisked him from the airport to her address in the Hollywood Hills. As they pulled up, Jackson's jaw tightened. No gate. No perimeter guards. The driveway snaked openly to the front door, a sitting duck for any sniper. He shook his head, grabbing his duffel and striding in like he owned the place.
Inside, the air hummed with tension. Nolána sat with her back to the entrance, legs crossed in yoga pants that hugged her thick thighs, scrolling her phone, no sense of awareness.
Gotta teach her to be aware at all times… also self defense. This shit is a mess.
Her team clustered around the coffee table strewn with contracts and coffee mugs.
"Special Agent Jackson Brooks! Boy, am I glad to see you," George boomed, rising to pump his hand vigorously. The older man was all smiles, relief evident in his rumpled suit.
Jackson nodded, his grip firm and professional. "Glad to be here, sir."
From the kitchen, Anderson—her head of security, a stocky guy in a polo—piped up. "Appreciate the backup."
Nolána groaned dramatically, her head falling back against the cushions. She tilted her chin up, and her dark eyes locked onto him. In her mind, a spark ignited: Damn, he fine as hell. Tall, light-skinned, with a jawline sharp enough to cut glass and those piercing green eyes that seemed to undress her on sight. But outwardly, she rolled her eyes, picking her head back up. "Do I really need some suit to protect me? Anderson's doing a great job."
"Thank you, Ms. Nolána," Anderson replied, pride swelling.
Miriam stepped in, her voice calm but firm. "He's not just protection, Nolána. He'll be your primary shadow and train the team. Secure this place right."
"Whatever," Nolána huffed, crossing her arms under her ample chest, pushing her cleavage up unintentionally.
He’d seen her before. TV, award shows, who hasn’t seen her? But up close, the way she is looking at him right now? Head tilted, eyebrow raised like she feels he is full of shit already. And is that a hint of… want in her eyes?
Nah I’m tripping.
Jackson felt a flicker—feisty, yeah, he liked that fire. But no distractions. "Ma'am, with all due respect—"
She cut him off turning to look at him with a teasing laugh, her full lips curving. "'Ma'am'? Oh my god, you can't be serious."
That did it. Jackson's patience snapped, though his tone stayed even, authoritative. "Ma'am, you need to take this seriously. The individual targeting you has breached this residence—been in your house, in your room, in your bed! He's escalated to harming innocents around you to reach you. Understand the gravity."
Nolána's playful demeanor shattered. Panic flashed in her eyes, her body tensing. "My house? My bed?!" She whipped around to her team, voice rising. "What the hell? You didn't tell me that!"
Miriam rushed forward, hands out. "Nolána, sweetie, we were protecting you—"
"By lying?" She shot up, fury blazing. "This is my life! I had the right to know that! And y’all kept it from me and then hired a fucking suit to potentially be a fucking meat shield! UGH!!!" She stormed off toward the hallway, hips swaying in agitation, leaving a stunned silence.
"Sorry about her," Miriam sighed, rubbing her temples. "She's very headstrong."
"What do you need from us?" George asked, eager to move forward.
Jackson exhaled, shifting into mission mode. "Budget approval, first. This property's a sieve—no surveillance, exposed entry points. We'll need major upgrades: reinforced windows and doors, full perimeter steel gate, outposts at all entrances, comprehensive camera grid, motion sensors. Armored vehicle for transport. File mentioned a shooting—bullets near her vehicle? We can't risk that again."
They nodded, pulling out laptops to crunch numbers. Jackson toured the house methodically—vast kitchen, home gym, recording studio—cataloging vulnerabilities. The master suite loomed at the end of the hall, Nolána's domain with its king bed, silk sheets rumpled from her earlier nap, and a faint scent of jasmine lingering. Next door: his quarters, a guest room with a queen bed, en suite bath, and window overlooking the unsecured backyard.
"Make yourself at home," Josh said, clapping his shoulder. "We'll get those funds wired by morning."
Jackson dumped his bag, locking the door behind him. Alone, the weight hit. This wasn't a diplomat in a bunker; it was a celebrity in a fishbowl, team lying, target volatile. And her—Nolána—curves that begged to be grabbed, eyes that challenged him. Professional, he reminded himself, but his dick twitched at the memory of her laugh, her ass in those pants.
He stripped off his shirt, revealing a sculpted chest rippling with muscle, faint scars from past ops crisscrossing his abs. Pants followed, boxers tenting as he sat on the bed's edge. The room was quiet, save for distant voices from the living area. Stress coiled tight in his gut—frustration at the assignment, the breach, her resistance. He needed release.
His hand dipped into his boxers, wrapping around his thick, hardening dick. Eight inches of veined girth throbbed as he stroked slowly, base to tip, thumb circling the leaking slit. Eyes closed, he pictured her—not the client, but the woman: bent over that sectional, yoga pants yanked down, exposing her plump, dark pussy lips glistening with need. He'd grip her wide hips, slam in deep, her moans echoing like her songs.
"Fuck," he whispered, pace quickening. Fist pumping firmer, balls drawing up as he imagined her turning, dropping to knees, those full lips stretching around his shaft, sucking sloppy and eager. Her tongue swirling his head, gagging as he fucked her throat. Sweat beaded on his brow, breaths ragged. The fantasy shifted—her on top in this very room, riding him reverse, ass bouncing, pussy clenching his dick in wet heat.
He tugged harder, free hand cupping his balls, muscles tensing. Cum built, hot and urgent. With a stifled grunt, he erupted—thick ropes splattering his abs, dick pulsing in his grip. He milked every drop, chest heaving, the tension easing into sated calm.
Wiping clean with a tissue from the nightstand, Jackson lay back, staring at the ceiling. Get it out now. Stay sharp tomorrow. The stalker was out there, and so was she—vulnerable, fiery, too damn tempting. He'd protect her, find the threat, and keep his hands off. For now.
The next morning dawned crisp and clear over the Hollywood Hills, the sun casting long shadows across Nolána's sprawling property. Construction crews descended like an invading army, trucks rumbling up the driveway with steel beams, concrete mixers, and crates of surveillance gear. Hammers echoed, saws whirred, and the air filled with the sharp scent of fresh lumber and diesel.
Jackson Brooks was in his element, striding across the lawn in heavy black boots that crunched gravel, black cargo pants hugging his powerful thighs, and a fitted black shirt stretched taut over his broad chest. His holstered Glock sat snug on his hip, a constant reminder of his authority, while a simple gold chain glinted at his neck, catching the light with every authoritative gesture, and his wired ear piece in his ear.
He barked orders with precision, clipboard in one hand, walkie-talkie in the other. “Anderson, get those contractors on the east fence line—steel posts every ten feet, no gaps. Roman, park the armored SUV by the garage; we're testing the new plating today.” Anderson, the stocky original guard, nodded vigorously, sweat beading on his brow as he hustled to comply. Roman, her driver—a lanky guy with a quiet demeanor—maneuvered the vehicle into position, casting admiring glances at Jackson's command.
From the living room window, Nolána watched the chaos unfold, her arms crossed under her full breasts, pushing them up against her thin tank top. Her curvy frame—wide hips, thick ass, and smooth deep brown skin—drew eyes even in repose, but today her expression mixed irritation with a spark of intrigue.
The man moved like he owned the place, muscles flexing as he pointed and directed, his green eyes scanning every detail. Half of her wanted to storm out and tell him to back off her sanctuary; the other half throbbed with curiosity about what those hands could do beyond barking orders.
“What do we know about him, really?”she asked George, who sipped coffee nearby, his eyes glued to a tablet.
George glanced up, adjusting his glasses. “DSS file's glowing. Comes highly recommended—protected senators, ambassadors in hot zones. Quick with a gun; guy's a crack shot, hits moving targets at fifty yards. Smart as hell, tactical genius. No-nonsense type, so I really wished you'd stop testing the man. He's here to keep you breathing girl.”
Nolána rolled her eyes, but her gaze drifted back to Jackson. “No... is he mixed? He doesn't look fully Black.”
George chuckled softly. “Biracial, yeah. Why? Planning to flirt your way out of lockdown?”
She shot him a glare but didn't deny it, her full lips pursing. The air inside felt stuffy, the hum of activity outside too tempting. She needed fresh air, just a moment. Pushing off the couch, she slipped out the back door, bare feet padding onto the cool patio stones, the breeze teasing her loose shorts and tank.
“Back inside now, ma'am.”
The voice hit like a whip—deep, unyielding. Jackson stood mere feet away, arms crossed, his towering frame blocking her path.
Nolána whipped around, brows arched. “Excuse me?”
“Until we secure the perimeter, it's best if you stay inside. No exceptions.” His tone was calm, professional, but laced with steel, those green eyes locking onto hers without flinching.
“Yeah, no.” She pivoted, hips swaying defiantly as she strolled toward the garden path, determined to breathe free.
“Excuse me? No?” Jackson's boots thudded behind her, closing the distance in two strides.
“Yes... no. I'm not going in.” She tossed over her shoulder, feigning nonchalance, though her pulse quickened at his proximity.
“You are going in.” His voice dropped, a low rumble that vibrated through her.
“Sure, Brooks.” She kept walking, a smirk playing on her lips, testing the waters.
“Ma'am, please get inside. I don't want to have to ask you again.” The words came out low and deep, bass resonating in his chest, sending an unwelcome jolt straight to her core. Her pussy clenched involuntarily, a warm ache blooming between her thighs.
“I said no.” She halted, turning to face him, chin lifted in challenge. Attitude HOT!
“And I'm not asking.”
Before she could retort, massive hands gripped her waist—firm, unyielding. In one fluid motion, he hoisted her up, tossing her over his broad shoulder like she weighed nothing. Her world flipped; her ass pointed skyward, curves pressed against his hard muscle, the heat of his body seeping through her thin clothes.
“What the fuck?! Put me down, you asshole!” Nolána screamed, fists pounding his back, legs kicking wildly. “This is my house! You can't just—“
“Cussing won't change facts,” he grunted, striding toward the door without breaking sweat, her weight a non-issue for his 6'5 frame. Anderson and Roman paused their work, exchanging wide-eyed looks but saying nothing.
“You kidnapping me now? Government thug!” she yelled, her voice echoing off the walls as he carried her through the house, up the hall to her bedroom. Her breasts bounced with each step, nipples hardening against the tank from the friction and fury—and something darker.
He kicked the door open, deposited her on the king-sized bed with surprising gentleness despite the slam of the door behind him. “Stay inside. That is an order!” His green eyes flashed anger, jaw tight, before he turned and stormed out, the door banging shut like a gunshot.
Nolána sat there, chest heaving, thighs slick with unexpected arousal. “Why did that turn me on? Ugh, I can't stand this man,” she muttered to herself, running hands through her wavy hair. Irritated heat flushed her skin, but so did desire—his strength, that voice, the way he'd manhandled her without hesitation.
She crossed to the window, peeking through the sheer curtains. Outside, Jackson resumed command, gesturing at a contractor welding a gate post, his shirt clinging to sweat-dampened muscles. The gold chain swayed as he moved, gun a dark promise on his hip. Her breath hitched; he looked every inch the protector, dominant and unbreakable.
Plopping onto the rumpled sheets, Nolána's hand trembled as she reached into her nightstand drawer. Her rose toy emerged—a sleek, pink suction device that hummed promises of relief. She kicked off her shorts, peeling away damp panties to expose her bare pussy, lips already swollen and glistening. Legs spread wide, she flicked the toy on low, the gentle pulse kissing her clit like a lover's tongue.
“Fuck,” she whispered, eyes fluttering shut as she circled her entrance with two fingers, dipping into her wet heat. Memories flooded: his deep voice commanding her, those hands lifting her effortlessly, the press of his shoulder against her belly. She imagined him bursting back in, pinning her down, ripping her tank away to suck hard on her nipples, teeth grazing the peaks until she arched.
The rose toy latched on, sucking her clit with rhythmic pulls that made her hips buck. She plunged fingers deeper, three now, stretching her tight walls, thrusting in time with the vibrations. “Jackson... yes, like that,” she moaned softly, picturing him between her thighs, his full lips sealing over her pussy, tongue lapping her folds while his green eyes watched her writhe.
Her free hand mauled her breast, pinching the nipple roughly, the sting heightening the build. Faster, the toy whirred on higher, suction intensifying as her fingers curled, hitting that spot inside. Sweat slicked her skin, ass grinding into the mattress. He’d flip her over, she fantasized, yank her hips up, and drive his thick dick into her from behind—pounding deep, balls slapping her clit, his grunts mixing with her cries.
Pressure coiled tight, her pussy fluttering around her fingers. “Oh god, Jackson—fuck me harder!” The orgasm crashed over her, waves of pleasure ripping through as she squirted lightly, juices soaking the sheets. The toy buzzed relentlessly, drawing out every spasm until she gasped his name on a broken sob: “Jackson...”
Panting, she switched it off, body limp and sated, but the ache lingered—not just physical. Tossing the toy aside, Nolána stared at the ceiling, a sly smile creeping in. This lockdown just got interesting. Down the hall, oblivious, Jackson coordinated the next phase of security installs, his focus laser-sharp. But in the quiet moments, her fire flickered in his mind too—a distraction he couldn't afford, yet craved.
The afternoon dragged on with the relentless clamor of construction, but inside Nolána's mansion, the real storm brewed between her and Jackson. After her solo release, she'd showered off the evidence of her forbidden thoughts, emerging in a fresh sundress that hugged her curves like a second skin—low-cut to tease her cleavage, hem flirting mid-thigh. But the glow of satisfaction faded fast when Jackson knocked on her door, his voice muffled through the wood: “Ma'am, we need to discuss your schedule. No outings until the perimeter's locked down.”
She yanked it open, eyes blazing. “My schedule? Last I checked, this is my life, Brooks. Not your personal prison yard.”
He stood there, arms crossed over his black shirt, the fabric straining against his pecs, gold chain resting in the hollow of his throat. His green eyes were cool, unreadable. “Your life includes a stalker who's already breached this house. You want to brunch with friends? Fine. But it's on my terms—armored car, full escort, and we cut it short if anything feels off.”
“Feels off? Like your bossy ass dictating my every move?” She stepped closer, jabbing a finger at his chest, feeling the hard wall of muscle beneath. Heat radiated from him, stirring that damn throb in her core again, but she shoved it down, fueling the fire of her anger instead. “I hate how you just... take over. Like I'm some helpless kid.”
Jackson's jaw clenched, a muscle ticking. “Hate me all you want, but I'm the one keeping you alive. Push me again, and you'll see how far I'll go to enforce it.” His voice dipped low, that bass rumbling like thunder, making her nipples peak against the dress. She wanted to slap him—or climb him. The confusion pissed her off more.
“Fuck you, Brooks. You're insufferable.” She slammed the door in his face, heart pounding, body betraying her with a fresh slickness between her thighs. Why does he get under my skin like this? And why does it feel so fucking good? She paced, cursing his name, the unspoken pull twisting her gut. To her, it was one-sided—him all duty and disdain, her trapped in this web of fury and forbidden want.
By evening, the tension simmered into a cold war. Dinner was silent, her team exchanging uneasy glances as Jackson reviewed blueprints at the table, his presence dominating the room. Nolána picked at her salad, shooting glares his way, imagining wiping that stoic expression off with her nails—or her lips. He ignored her, but she caught the flicker in his eyes once, a heat that vanished quick, leaving her doubting her own senses.
The next morning, she tested him again, announcing brunch with her girls at a trendy spot in Beverly Hills. Jackson didn't blink. “Armored SUV, Roman driving, Anderson and I in tow. In and out in ninety minutes.”
“You're ruining my vibe,”!she snapped, sliding into the back seat beside Anderson, Jackson up front with Roman. The engine purred to life, the reinforced vehicle rolling smoothly down the winding drive, now flanked by the half-finished steel gate.
As they hit the freeway, the city sprawl unfolded under a hazy sun. Nolána's phone buzzed with texts from her friends—emojis of mimosas and gossip—but her mood soured fast. Jackson had already vetoed extending the date, citing 'unsecured venue.' Something feels off. He can feel it. Now, barely halfway there, his voice cut through the quiet cab: “Change of plans. We're heading back early. Intel suggests elevated risk today.”
“What? No! You can't just—“ She leaned forward, fury boiling over. “This is bullshit, Brooks! I finally get out, and you yank the leash? I hate you, you controlling asshole! Who the fuck do you think you are?”
He twisted in his seat, green eyes locking on hers through the rearview, unflinching. “I'm the guy who knows a tail when he sees one. Black sedan, two cars back. Been with us since we left the house.” His hand rested on his hip, near the Glock, posture shifting to alert.
Nolána scoffed, crossing her arms, breasts heaving with each rant. “Tail? You're paranoid! My girls are waiting, and you're—fuck, Roman, don't listen to him. Drive to the restaurant!”
Roman gripped the wheel tighter, eyes flicking to Jackson. “Boss?”
“Ignore her. Slow gradual, like traffic's building. Get us back to the house—it's the nearest safe spot.” Jackson's tone was ice, but his gaze scanned the mirrors, tracking the sedan as it mirrored their speed.
She kept cussing, words spilling hot and fast. “Ignore me?! You asshole! Take me to my friends! I swear, if you ruin this—“ Her voice cracked on a curse, but underneath the rage, that pull tugged again—his calm command in crisis, the way his shoulders tensed, ready to shield her. It made her ache, even as she seethed. God, why him? Why now?
The SUV eased off the gas, weaving toward the exit for her neighborhood. The black sedan hung back, then surged closer, a glint of something metallic in the passenger window—sun off a barrel? Jackson's hand drew the Glock in a blur, thumb flicking the safety.
“Roman, pull up to the gate—now. Anderson, cover the rear.” The house loomed ahead, construction crews scattering as the vehicle approached quickly.
Nolána's rants faltered, eyes widening as she spotted the sedan closing in. “What the—“
“Brake!” Jackson barked as Roman braked hard in front of the driveway, the gate swinging open remotely. He flung his door, pivoting with weapon raised. “Roman, get her inside! Lock it down!”
Roman gunned the engine, tires screeching as he barreled through the gate. Nolána twisted, heart slamming, catching a glimpse of Jackson's broad back as he advanced on foot.
“Wait we can’t leave him!” She yells panicked.
“He is fine Ms. Nolána.” Anderson reassures.
“HE NEEDS BACKUP!” She yells.
“He is the back up Nolána. Sit back!” Roman orders.
The sedan swerved, trying to U-turn, but Jackson fired—crack, crack—two precise shots shattering the rear windshield. Glass exploded; the car fishtailed, clipping a curb before peeling away down a side street, vanishing into traffic. No tags.
Inside the SUV, Nolána gripped the seat, breath ragged, the echo of gunfire ringing in her ears. Roman punched the garage code, sealing them in. She stumbled out, legs shaky, the anger fracturing into something raw—fear, gratitude, and that damn unspoken heat coiling tighter. Jackson was out there, exposed, because of her. And as much as she hated him, the thought of him hurt twisted her insides.
From the window, she watched him jog back, holstering his gun, barking into his earpiece for backup. His shirt was untucked, sweat gleaming on his light skin, and for a split second, their eyes met through the glass. His nod was curt, professional—but to her, it burned with promise, or maybe just her imagination running wild again.
A/n: chapter 1 done! Are yall ready for more Tyriq aka Jackson Brooks
Summary- Jackson Brooks, also your new bodyguard. After the “accident,” your father insisted on it; now, you had to have an unduly handsome man following you around as your protection.
Tags: @yourleogf, @plan3tch1ld, @theliterarybeldam, @litlforestfellow, @sexychickenmagnet, @wolverinesgirll, @melinatedlifeline, @freshbonggwater, @cozygirljay, @ardeneverse, @bubblegumbattleaxe, @darkseidex, @sativadivastuff, Let me know personally if you want to be removed. Comment or dm asking to join. Must be 18 and over!
A/n: Masterlist here. Playlist, here. I'm extra, y'all know I made a playlist, zon't play. No lie though, the playlist will probably fit the next chapters more than this one. I switched this up with this while writing it, so yeah. I think I low-key created an antagonist, so we bouta have problems. Y'all also probably gon haaate me for the ending, apologies in advance. Nothing else besides leave ya feedback and stuff(no threats y'all, I don't fight)
CW- Low-key starts(and ends) with drama, suggestive mentions/comments, some humor, mentions of guns, usage of guns(nobody gets shot, yet), slow burn, mentions of attempted murder, mentions of murder, Jackson’s POV(once), frenemies vibe, reader got a last name: Salge, reader not over her ex mans fr, I also leave y'all on a cliffhanger. After all, it's fun for me.
The slow rain poured down, tapping against the window. The room was tense from the recent events, an overwhelmingly uncomfortable feeling. Your mother was silent and tense, clutching her dress in her fist. Your brother sat in a corner, eyes scanning the room, and your father, it was safe to say, had the worst reaction.
“This is going to wreck our image completely,” he murmured, pacing back and forth, impatiently waiting for his team.
“Maybe it’ll be alrigh’,” your mother said, trying to comfort him.
He turned toward her, silent and slow, eyes burning with rage. The heavy silence hung for a moment until,
“Alright?! Guns! Shots fired! We ain't alright, woman!” he yelled violently, hurling his phone at the wall in frustration, making your mother flinch.
“Funny how you're more worried about our image instead of the fact that we could've died,” you bluntly stated, being the only one with the balls.
“I ain't got no motherfucking time for your smart-ass comments, understood?!”
You huffed in reply.
Of course, the night wasn't supposed to go like this. Nobody expected a sudden shooting. It was supposed to be a regular event, celebrating your new mayor, until the enemies of your father ruined it.
Being one of the wealthiest families with royal lineage came with its struggles, of course, but sometimes you wondered what the hell he could be doing to have so many enemies.
Small things had happened before—threats of all kinds, anonymous packages, someone vandalizing your property—but never a shooting.
Along with the rain intensifying, you could hear several cars speeding toward the safety building.
“Come on!” he shouted again. You almost stayed, just to piss him off for being such an asshole, but instead you stood up and walked behind your family.
Before opening the door, your father adjusted his jacket, forced a fake smile, and pushed the door open. There was a small crowd, some paparazzi. It was manageable, nothing your father's team couldn't handle.
Your family made their way to the large black SUV, but you refused to ride in the same vehicle as that man.
“Where are you going?!” your father exclaimed.
He was obnoxiously good at being an annoying asshole.
“To the other car!” Before he could protest, you got in the car, slamming the door shut behind you.
A sigh of relief escaped your lungs. The sense of ease washing over you was the most refreshing thing you’d felt all day.
The car ride was smooth; your chauffeur was quiet, understanding your stress when no one else did. You had taught yourself not to complain about your life—you had it all: money, properties, fame, and everything you wanted, but damn, life could still be a piece of shit.
You didn't ask for the life you were living—money and power, but no love or care. It was worthless, a pointless existence you were forced to call your life. Everyone painted life as either scary or lively, but you didn't have either, anymore.
Life was a void, there was no thrill, fear, excitement, or euphoria—just you trapped in an endless cycle of repetitive actions that brought nothing. You lived as if it wasn't your life, a slave to your family’s image, which you loathed.
After you made it home that night, you stared at your ceiling, tears at your waterline. The reason? You didn't know, they were falling but you felt nothing on the inside. Your body ached but from pain you couldn't feel, your mind was awake but with no thoughts or emotions.
Just blank pain.
What is life worth when you don’t experience emotions—happiness, heartbreak, fear, or faith?
—
You didn't know what to expect, but it wasn't that. The next morning, you expected everything to be cleared up except for some small-town gossip. That’s the usual when anything controversial happens with your father. He had a top-tier team just for situations like that and the few that came before.
So, no, seeing your family's faces all over the news was not something you expected.
“During a celebration of the election and our new mayor, a shocking turn of events occurred. What we know is that five gunshots were fired at the Salge family while Abel Salge was giving his speech. Sources suspect it is the enemies of the wealthy family; others say it might be linked to his youngest daughter's affair with famous artist Anthony Welm.”
You huffed and rolled your eyes before muting the TV, wanting to hear nothing about that man.
“They never fail to bring him up, that doesn't even make sense.” You walked into the kitchen of your townhouse, annoyance mounting.
“Maybe you shouldn't have fucked a married, famous painter who was thirty-two years old,” your brother, A’mais, muttered while throwing and catching his ball. He was always nonchalant about heavy situations, but let a girl not fall for his charm, and suddenly he's the most emotional man.
“One, I didn't know he was married. Two, I was young and in love.” You threw a bagel at him, snarling at his ridiculous comment.
He grumbled when the bagel hit his oversized head and tossed it back at you.
“Missed, shithead.” You grinned smugly, making him flip you off.
You smeared cream cheese on your bagel, your mind flooded with memories of him. It was stupid — the whole adultery thing and everything that came with it. Every time you tried to move on, it followed you like a stalker.
“I love you, Anthony,” you’d murmur, lying on his bare chest, wrapped in the blankets he shared with another woman.
“I know, and I love you too,” he’d reply, pressing a kiss on your crown.
“Then why can't we be public?” you asked, fingers tracing his beard as you admired a man destined to hurt you.
“Can't have people knowing about my pretty girl. You know how they are with age gaps.”
That was his usual excuse. Yes, your relationship was taboo, and people might not have accepted it — especially considering you were ten years apart — but the real reason was that he couldn't risk his wife finding out about you.
And you found out in the worst way.
You left your townhouse as usual, only to be greeted by more paparazzi than ever before. Questions flew back and forth, microphones shoved in your face, cameras invading your personal space.
The more you listened to the chaos, the clearer it became — your entire relationship was exposed, labeled as an affair.
The sobs that night.
The screams.
The slams.
The pain and agony.
Pure emotion.
Maybe that's what you missed — what you missed about him. He made you feel — your heart clenched, veins pulsed, brain pressed against your skull.
The words would never come out, but you missed all of it — the pleasure, the toxicity, the thrill of secrecy, the fights, and the sex. That was all you wanted — just to feel again.
“Hey donkey! Ma’ said she needs us.” His ball hit your head, snapping you out of your racing thoughts.
“If anyone's a donkey, it's you. Smell like one too.” Your snarky tone made him mock you, and as he walked out the door, you closed your bagel and followed.
You hoped the day would go smoother and that your mind would calm down a bit.
Jackson’s POV
He was familiar with the situation — a father, a daughter, danger, and the need for protection. Having gone through this process many times before, he was used to it. Submitting to be your bodyguard couldn't be difficult — just another job, at least that's what he thought.
He leaned back in the chair, his foot tapping the ground as he impatiently waited for your father to finish his interview with the other candidates. He wasn't scared — not at all. He was the tallest, biggest, in the best shape, and healthy; being beaten by any of the men around him was the last of his worries.
If he was worried about anything — which he most definitely wasn't, not at all — if he had to pick one, it would be who you were.
He was new to Louisiana, but he’d heard the stories, rumors, and gossip. Everything from, “She's a very sweet girl,” to “She's a whore, who deserves to rot in hell.” With mixed reviews about you from the public, he didn't know what to expect — but again, he wasn't worried.
“Mr. Brooks, Jackson Brooks! You're up!” Abel's assistant called out. He immediately sat up straight, waving to her, then strode into the office.
He pushed the door open and was met with whispers and rustling papers.
“Jackson, Jackson Brooks, I'm here for the interview.” He cut through the whispers.
The room fell into a tense silence after he spoke, Abel's eyes burning into him, and the staff giving him hostile side-eyes.
“Sit,” Abel ordered, pointing his pen at the chair. Jackson obeyed, sitting down, crossing one leg over the other, then un-crossing after overthinking it.
What the hell was happening? He was never nervous. Sure, Abel was intimidating but not that much — he couldn't quite pinpoint why his nerves were so high.
“So, Jackson,” Abel laced his name with venom, “you are aware I need someone available today, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hm, portfolio.” Abel held out his hand, and Jackson placed his in it.
Abel flipped through it with a snap of his teeth, eyebrow raised as if he doubted Jackson’s potential.
“Everything's in there — my past jobs, my health… y’know, all you need to know.” Jackson awkwardly placed his elbows on the chair's armrests, laced his fingers, and watched Abel for a reaction.
“I didn't ask, Mr. Jackson,” Abel replied bluntly.
Before he could finish his response, Abel snapped his fingers, and suddenly his staff yanked Jackson up from his chair. Jackson’s reflexes almost fought against them, but he settled himself, wary of what might happen.
Suddenly, a measuring tape was stretched along his side, and hands felt out his broad muscles — an entire inspection as if checking the quality of a product.
“Six feet, five inches,” a staff member said.
“Solid physique,” another added.
The staff pushed him back into his seat and left the room.
“You're quite impressive,” Abel nodded, flipping through his portfolio.
“Thank you.”
“The most impressive I've seen. Would you like to take this job, Jackson?”
“Yes, sir, of course.” Jackson flashed a charming smile, straightening himself after the earlier tension.
“You think you've got what it takes? To protect her in every situation, stand up when you sense danger, fight anything in her way, risk your life for her?” Abel’s tone grew darker and more intimidating.
Jackson paused. Was he ready? Could he risk it all? The pressure felt unlike anything he’d ever experienced — his previous jobs were easy, but this one was different. Maybe because you were considered royalty, maybe because of the wealth — whatever it was, it weighed heavily on him.
“…Yes. I've got what it takes. I'm ready.” Jackson regained his confidence, locking eyes with Abel to show his resolve.
Abel grinned, sliding the contract toward him. Jackson flipped through it, pretending to examine the pages. He reached the last page, grabbed his pen, and was about to sign when he heard:
“Jackson,” Abel began, “before you sign.”
Jackson looked up, pausing. Suddenly, a click came from under the desk, and in a flash, a gun was pressed against his glabella.
“If you touch, look, or even think about my daughter romantically, I'll murder you and make sure there’s no trace of you left. Understood?”
“Keep it professional, understood,” Jackson said calmly, as if there wasn't a gun to his head.
“Good. Sign.” Abel lowered his weapon, shoving it back into his belt.
Jackson quickly signed, a familiar process for him.
“Good, you're a smart man, Jackson. She should be here soon.”
Abel nodded, a small smile at the corner of his lips. Jackson nodded back, stood, adjusted his jacket, lifted his chin, and walked out of the room with Abel.
Assuming he was ready for whatever his new job had in store.
—
Readers POV
“Why are we here? What does he want now?” You walked into the building with your mother and A’mais, confused as to why, on your free Saturday, you were dealing with your father.
“He's got a surprise for you.”
“The only good surprise would be him suddenly flying to Bora Bora, far from me,” you mumbled under your breath, already irritated.
“That is not a nice thing to say,” your mother scolded.
“I don't disagree with her, and you know I never agree with her on anything,” A’mais told your mother, hands stuffed in his pockets while he chewed gum excessively loud on purpose.
“Nothing, literally not anything,” you added.
“Okay! I'm sure this is a nice surprise, act right, you two.”
Of course, you didn't believe her. Your father rarely did anything remotely nice; the only way he'd do anything was if he got money out of it.
Your father was the gluttony they spoke of in the Bible; his only wishes were for power, fame, and wealth. Your grandfather raised him that way because he was that way, and your father was passing his toxicity onto your brother.
You were sure that's why your sister disappeared — because of your father’s disgusting habits. You remembered the nights, you didn't speak of them, and everyone assumed you were too young to remember, but you did.
The fights, the nights he’d lock her away in her room because she denied his chains, the tears that stained her face until the next day, the yelling that pierced through everything, and then one morning, she was gone. Vanished like she was never born, and you hadn't seen her since.
And you were trapped in the same chains. She escaped — if only you knew how.
“Hey, baby,” your father exclaimed, suspiciously happy. “I thought about what you said and you're right, I should be more worried about your well-being-”
“What are you getting at?” you interrupted him.
“I got you a bodyguard, for protection. This is Jackson Brooks.” Your father pointed at Jackson, who emerged from the darkness, extending his hand toward you.
You took his large hand in yours, your gloves rubbed over his hand, eyes scanning him as if searching for his motive.
“I don't need one,” you said, glaring at your father while ripping your hand away from Jackson.
“You do. He's for your safety. He’ll also be coming with you to the event this afternoon.”
“What event?” you scrunched your nose in annoyance, brows furrowing.
“The mayor's daughter—it's her birthday. You were invited, and you have to go, especially to resolve what happened that night.”
You wanted to fight back, but the look on your mother's face told you not to.
“I don't need him to go to an event full of harmless brats.” You shot Jackson a side eye, just to see him smirking, then rolled your eyes back to your father.
“This won't be a debate,” your father responded sternly.
You let out a heavy breath, caving and nodding for Jackson to walk with you. He obeyed and strode beside you, on guard and tall. You could hear your father saying something, but honestly, you didn't care enough to pay attention.
You had no intention of befriending the man next to you, so you stayed silent on the way to the car. You could feel his eyes on you, curious — and you didn't know why. You weren't an interesting person, and he was only in it for the money, so curiosity should've been the least of your worries.
You reached the car, and he pulled the door open for you.
“If this is your way of charming me, it's not going to work.”
“Doin’ my job, sweetheart,” he said, mockingly using the pet name.
You stepped into the vehicle, and he followed behind. Sitting across from him, your eyes couldn't help but drift toward him. You weren't interested in him; it was just that he was different.
Like a new shiny piece of jewelry, he enticed you — not in admiration, but in that feeling of something different in your cycle of same actions. It made your pulse race. Maybe excitement, maybe happiness — but you were feeling something. He represented change, something you’d been searching for.
Deep down, you felt you knew he had something more planned for you.
You arrived at the event, and it was exactly what you expected—a bunch of women who didn't really like each other, throwing fake laughter and backhanded compliments. The only positive part was your friends, Leisha and La’mia, who were there; everything else felt like a needle in the ass.
Your eyes mindlessly scanned the space, from face to face. The atmosphere was full of insincerity—nothing felt real. It was a familiar scene for you; the life you led was a facade—lies, secrets, a dollhouse painted to look perfect but broken inside.
It came with the price of fame—deception and the illusion that life couldn't be better, both for the public and yourself. Convincing everyone it was perfect while struggling internally to find the truth—was it really?
And the craziest thing about fame? Once you're in its grip, escaping is tough. It drags your body to the pavement, shackles your mind, and mentally blocks you from truly living—all because you were born into it.
“Girl?!” Leisha called out.
“Yeah, what?!” You snapped out of your thoughts.
“Were you listening?! We asked who that fine man you brought in is!” She pointed toward Jackson, making you look back at the man watching you from afar.
“My new bodyguard,” you replied simply, shrugging him off.
“You get to have him following you around?! You’re lucky, girl!” Leisha exclaimed.
“Hm, if I had that guy, I’d need several forms of protection. I’d be all over that,” La’mia added, grinning as she eyed him.
“For real, speaking of all over that, girl, he looks big,” Leisha nodded approvingly at your statement.
“He does, like, six inches. I bet he keeps it clean too!” La’mia giggled, eyes drifting farther down Jackson than they probably should.
“I bet he shaves it and pats it dry after he pees,” Leisha said with a grin, and you couldn't help but roll your eyes.
“You all are gross—go back to church,” you muttered, sipping your cocktail.
“You only act like that because you still thinking about Anthony,” La’mia said, not noticing she touched a nerve.
“Girl,” Leisha scolded, “you know she doesn't like talking about him.”
“Damn, I'm tipsy and all, I'm sorry-”
“It's fine. I'm good. I'm going to grab something to eat. Be back,” you lied through your teeth, standing up from the table.
You moved over to the table full of food, gathering yourself. You were supposed to be over him—were you? No, no you weren't. He haunted your dreams, your late-night thoughts—disgusting. You didn't want him, but the feelings—the way he made you feel—the only feelings only he ever brought out.
You piled food onto your plate, not paying attention to what you grabbed—just mindlessly filling your plate to give yourself time to clear your mind.
“Hey,” Maria, the mayor's daughter, said beside you; her high-pitched voice almost startled you.
“Hi, happy birthday,” you greeted with a smile.
“Thank you, I like your dress,” she said kindly. Even if you wouldn't admit it, she was sweet—just surrounded by assholes.
“Thanks. I just wanted to say sorry about the scare at the celebration. I know that could've been frightening,” your voice softened at her sweet presence.
“Oh no, it's fine. You didn't pull the trigger; I just hope it never happens again,” she laughed breathily.
“Yeah, me too.” Your smile faded slightly as the conversation seemed to wind down.
“Oh, before you go! Some man asked me to give this to you,” she said, holding out a small note. Your brows furrowed, but you took the note from her fingers.
“Oh, okay, thanks. Have a good time!”
“You too!” With a spring in her step, she skipped off full of life. You wondered how she managed to stay so happy. You looked down at the note—its scent was musky and familiar. You rolled your eyes, assuming it was from some secret admirer, and shoved it back into your bag.
You returned to the table, ready to enjoy the night with your girls, Jackson watching from afar—his guard so high, even danger seemed scared of him.
You enjoyed the night—that was a surprise, but you did. You smiled and laughed, even if it was just for a few hours while you were feeling tipsy; it was still feelings. You made the bold decision not to take a car, so Jackson walked with you, also making sure you didn't trip over your own feet.
“You probably deal with a lot of girls like me, huh?” Your question caught his attention, making him turn his head toward you.
“What do you mean?” He raised a brow.
“Like entitled and spoiled.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, I've dealt with girls like that, but not you. You're quiet and reserved, different, mean, but different.”
“What makes me different?” You squinted and looked up at him.
“I don't know, most girls I've dealt with are spoiled and love it. You don't seem to care much about wealth. But then again, what is wealth without happiness?” He shrugged, stepping in front of you.
He was right; it surprised you. Within a few hours of hanging out with you, he was already figuring you out. His job was to be attentive.
You nodded at his comment as he led you up the stairs of your townhouse, guiding you as if you were a child learning how to walk.
“I can walk.”
“Don't need you getting hurt.” He replied, with a smug, teasing grin, like he had full control of everything. You pushed past him, unlocked your door, and pushed it open. Just as you were about to shut the door, he stopped you.
“Unfortunately for both of us, I can't leave.” He pushed his way inside your townhouse, lips in a tight line.
“Why not?”
“According to your father, until we figure out my living situation, I have to stay here.” If you had the energy to argue, you would have, but instead, you rolled your eyes and went to your room.
“Well, goodnight to you too, I'll be on the couch.” He shouted your way, and you responded by slamming your door.
You heard him fall onto the couch, and after that, it was silence. You sighed and sat on the edge of your bed, staring into space.
It was that time of night when your mind raced with emptiness, when loneliness drowned you, when the vacuum pulled you down, and all you could do was float in it.
The time when you could only hug yourself as you trembled, pain coursing through your blood and pulsing through your veins, when you banged internally on the windows of your dollhouse.
You stepped out onto your balcony and sat on the ground, staring at the moon. A new moon—full and clear—the sky was free of clouds, giving you a perfect view of the new moon, symbolizing new beginnings. Sitting under the dim light of the moon cleared your mind, even just a little.
You sat there, fidgeting with your rug, trying to bring yourself peace before you fell asleep when something caught your eye—your bag. The note—it would probably be something fun, to see what your secret admirer had written.
You walked over and dug the note out of your bag. You unfolded it and read:
“Come behind your building, 9pm tonight." You raised a brow—some anonymous nonsense. Still, it was intriguing; from the scents to the handwriting, it was a stupid idea, but part of you really wanted to go. You could get kidnapped, killed, or whatever, but the thrill made you want to go.
It was a dumb decision.
You slipped on a dress quickly, then quietly snuck out after checking Jackson, who was asleep. You didn’t want to risk waking him.
You slowly opened the door—creak—and Jackson stirred but didn't wake. You dashed out.
You ran down the steps and hurried to the back of the building, where a shadow was lurking.
“Hello,” you called out.
“Hey, pretty girl,” a low voice responded from the darkness.
Pairing: Jackson Brooks x Black OC!Sydney Brooks
Summary: Jackson Brooks isn't as big and bold behind closed doors as people may assume.
Content: Sensuality. Husband and wife. Slight D/S dynamics.
WC: 684
Note: Jackson Brooks girlies arise!
Sydney Brooks was stealth. Her existence was hardly known save by name and his quick, “I have a wife,” whenever wandering eyes grew too curious and assignments forced too much distance between two hearts way too experienced at growing fonder.
It was when your existence wasn’t evident, known, or recognized by the public eye that power wielded itself strongly.
No assumptions made under pretenses of imagination or pseudo-information gathered from a sad game of telephone between coworkers. Or people who were more concerned with the life of a man who could end theirs in the blink of an eye, than the ones they were sworn to protect and serve.
It was interesting. Fascinating, even. That the man who commanded a room with one breath and a sharp gaze was someone drastically different behind closed doors. An enigma. When the badge fell to the wayside, the gun lay with the clip emptied, and his scuffed shoes pressed against the baseboard in the hallway, he was different.
Because Special Agent Jackson Brooks didn’t exist outside of sterile walls and stale-faced commands, no. The skin of a warrior draped in strategy and wild in power became small by the sixth hour of every evening, and lay at rest until duty showed up, dressed in urgency and war the next morning.
It was here, in the privacy of a house built by steady hands and a home nurtured by gentle warmth, where Special Agent Brooks was made to submit. To lay down the persona of the man who didn’t appear frazzled in the heat of the fire. The man who didn’t stumble over traps set by enemies with replenishing heads. His one duty was to retreat to his truest form—himself. The version of him that was most natural. Comfortable. Instinctual. Innate.
Because pleasure was natural. To be on the receiving end of someone’s attention and affection was desired. But Jackson, Jackson had long since broken out of the cocoon of ignorance that conditioned young men to believe that receiving was heaven’s greatest gift to man.
Now older, wiser, sharper, and more rugged around once-smooth edges, Jackson leaned into what was outside the status quo. The societal norm. What would be unbelievable to those who’d seen the boulder of a man towering over junior-level agents with a tight expression and brooding dominance.
Submission.
Obedience.
Pliancy.
All at the hands of one Sydney Mikal Brooks—Aphrodite in her gaze, Artemis in her carefree spirit, and Peitho in her charming speech. The same charming wordsmith who had him blushing and nervous in that hole-in-the-wall bar five years ago.
Some people, some women, wouldn’t be fond of the idea of remaining in the shadows. And she understood, she truly did. But there was something so riveting, so exciting about being a master ventriloquist behind a curtain yet to be fully opened. Pulling every string until her favorite one prompted a—
“—Please,” so low and borderline broken beneath staggering breaths, filled her ears.
She grinned.
Wide and bold.
Her eyes glinted with mischief.
It wasn’t enough.
Sydney cooed.
Mockingly.
Tauntingly.
Then stilled her movements.
“You can do better than that, baby…” Her nails pinched taut skin as she used his legs as leverage to drag herself up the strong planes of her body. Her wet tongue dropped liquid lust along his quivering abdomen and along his collarbone. Her lips suckled his ear. “You know you can.”
Her sensual features darkened beneath ambient light, haloing her crown of curls like worship. Ethereal. She was absolutely ethereal. And absolutely maddening. His hips shifted beneath hers, but he didn’t move. Teathered. Held in place by the control he handed over the moment he saw that crooked smile outside the bar years ago.
Sydney Brooks wasn’t just a wife. Wasn’t just a successful journalist with venomous words leaking off her tongue like scripture stained. No. She was the master of his will. Fully and totally. The only earthly being he’d bow in reverence to.
Slowly.
Quietly.
Passionately.
“Please…” A shuddered breath. “Let me touch you…ma’am.”
Sydney hummed victoriously and kissed him slowly. “My good boy…”
-
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⋆.ೃ࿔YOU ME & TUSCANY ᝰ
In which Jackson Brookes and Selene Brookes are love incarnate.
warnings: grown shit, d/s dymanics ( they're really switches)
a/n : okay y'all... imma leave this one alone....
pairing: jackson brookes and selene brookes
The air inside the Tuscan villa carried him everywhere, as if the walls had learned his language and were whispering it back to her in fragments: musk warmed by skin, the dark sweetness of vanilla and cocoa, the green, clean bite of pine, and that faint trace of eucalyptus from his aftershave that lingered in the room like the last cool note of evening after the sun had gone down. Selene stood in the hush of it all and watched him move through the suite with the unstudied ease of a man who did not know he was being adored in the smallest, most dangerous ways, watched the white towel hanging low on his hips, watched the broad sweep of his back as he reached for his watch, the absent-minded precision with which he adjusted a cufflink lying on the dresser, the faint crease that gathered between his brows whenever he was concentrating on something utterly mundane and therefore, to her, devastating. It had always been the ordinary things that undid her most completely, never the grand performances of masculinity the world was so eager to reward, but these quiet domestic rituals that made him seem less like a fantasy and more like a country she had somehow crossed into and could no longer imagine leaving, the kind of place a woman arrived in by accident only to realise she had been homesick for it all her life.
Her gaze lingered on his mouth when his lips tugged slightly in thought, that familiar near-frown, near-smile expression that still had the power to make something low and tidal stir inside her, and she bit her own lip as if that small pressure might keep the wanting contained, though by now she knew better than to pretend he did not move through her like weather. Jackson Brooks had always been that kind of force in her life, not a passing storm but something older, larger, elemental in the way the sea is elemental, beautiful enough to worship and strong enough to humble anything foolish enough to think it could master it. There were moments, even now, in the soft aftermath of vows and secrecy and a ring that felt heavier than law, when she looked at him and thought of Poseidon in the old myths, not for cruelty, nor for temper, but for that impossible command over unseen depths, for the way he could stand still and yet make a woman feel the pull of distant tides in her bones.
And perhaps that was what they had always been to one another from the beginning: land and sea, each appearing separate to the untrained eye, each convinced for a time that they had distinct borders, only to discover that the line dividing them was never fixed at all, that coastlines are merely places where longing keeps arriving in waves. Jackson and Selene, two sides of the same coin, yes, but more than that, they were two ancient forces that had spent years testing whether they could survive contact without erosion, whether desire could speak without wreckage following close behind. Eight years lay between them, but Jackson had never flinched from the distance, had never treated it as a gulf to be bridged or a problem to be solved, only as one more fact about her, as natural and unthreatening as the colour of her eyes or the cadence of her voice, and when he had first pressed his mouth to hers all those months ago, while Selene had still been trying to rebut desire with intellect, trying to cross-examine the heat between them until it confessed to being temporary, he had kissed her with the calm certainty of a man who knew some truths were older than argument.
Now here she was, standing in the low gold light of their villa with his initials imprinted on her ring finger, the mark subtle but unmistakable, the band itself more intimate for its restraint, because rings had always seemed to her like a public shorthand for private vows, a bright little symbol people wore in place of saying what they truly meant. This, by contrast, felt almost mythic in its discretion, less ornament than inscription, as though he had not adorned her hand so much as written himself there in a language only the two of them were fully entitled to read. Selene Davenport, Attorney General, woman of marble halls and sharpened press conferences and power worn like armour, had become Selene Brooks in the quietest and most astonishing way, not by surrendering herself, not by becoming smaller, but by being met completely and loved without reduction. She had spent so much of her life belonging to institutions, to history, to the ravenous machinery of politics that was always eager to consume a woman whole and still ask for more, and yet with Jackson, there was no consumption, only recognition, only the strange and sacred relief of being wanted not as symbol, not as spectacle, but as herself.
That was the hunger at the centre of it, she realised as she watched him turn toward the mirror, one large hand dragging a towel through his hair, the muscles in his forearm shifting with careless grace. It was not merely lust, though God knew there was enough of that between them to make saints nervous. It was yearning in its more ruinous form, the kind that did not begin in the body and end there, but moved through memory and instinct and the hidden chambers of a woman’s life until wanting someone became almost theological. Jackson had become, for Selene, what Ithaca had been for Odysseus, not because he was simple or soft or waiting, but because he was the place toward which all her wandering had secretly been pointed, the answer hidden inside every wrong turn, every compromise, every cold and glittering room in which she had once mistaken admiration for intimacy. She did not merely desire him. She returned to him, again and again, in spirit long before she ever did in flesh.
He turned then, catching her watching him, and the crease in his brow softened into that look she knew too well, the one that always made her feel as though the world had narrowed itself down to a single lit path between them. There was no arrogance in it, no masculine vanity, only that infuriating, steady heat of a man who knew his wife wanted him and was moved by it rather than made careless by it. The villa around them seemed to breathe with the silence that followed, terracotta walls gathering the morning warmth, the curtains stirring at the open windows where the Tuscan breeze wandered in carrying the scent of cypress and sun-struck earth, the land outside rolling gold and green toward the horizon like a promise too old to need repeating. Even the light seemed complicit, brushing his skin in amber strokes, laying itself across the line of his shoulders and the planes of his chest as if Helios himself had a taste for ceremony.
Selene felt her longing rise slow and full inside her, not as panic, not as hunger sharp enough to wound, but as something tidal and sovereign, something that filled her from the inside the way the sea fills hidden coves, patient and inevitable and impossible to command backward once it has decided to come ashore. Freshly married, secretly eloped, standing in a borrowed Eden of stone and olive trees and honeyed light, she looked at Jackson Brooks and understood with a clarity that was almost painful that love had never made her less herself. It had only made her more visible to herself at last. And if the old poets had been right, if the gods truly did envy mortals for the intensity with which they could love knowing all things ended, then surely they would have envied her now, standing there with her husband’s name living warm against her hand, her whole heart turning toward him as naturally as coastline toward sea.
It came back to Selene sometimes not as memory, but as weather.
Not gently, not in the soft and orderly sequence by which the mind is supposed to retrieve the past, but all at once, like a storm front moving in over open water, the pressure in the air changing before the rain ever touched ground, her body remembering before her thoughts could arrange themselves into language. One look from him, one silence held too long, one night too full of salt wind and old ache, and she was there again—back in that room, back in that impossible hour when love had already happened between them and neither of them yet knew how to survive it.
The house had stood on a bluff above the sea, all white stone and dark windows, some government-owned hideaway made to look softer than it was, but nothing about that night had been soft. Outside, the Atlantic had been in one of its moods, hurling itself against the cliffs below with the blind persistence of grief, each wave striking rock like a god trying to force open a sealed gate, and inside the room the lamps burned low, spreading amber light over half-packed bags, a chair overturned in the corner, Jackson’s jacket thrown across the back of the sofa as though even discipline had finally lost its temper. Everything looked interrupted. Everything looked like it had been caught in the act of becoming something else.
Selene stood near the window with her arms wrapped around herself so tightly it almost looked elegant, as if posture alone could disguise the fact that she was holding herself together by force. The glass behind her reflected a splintered version of the room, her own face pale and furious, Jackson’s figure cast in shadow several feet away, broad shoulders tense beneath a plain black T-shirt, his hands braced on his hips for a moment before one dragged down over his mouth in that way he had when he was trying not to say the thing that might change everything. The sea beyond him roared and roared, tireless as prophecy.
And God, she had loved him then.
Not in the tidy, civilised way the world preferred to speak of love, not as devotion dressed for company, but in the old catastrophic sense, the kind the Greeks would have understood, the kind that made mortals build temples and call ruin sacred if it arrived wearing the right face. She had loved him like coastline loved tide, resentful of the erosion and helpless before the return, and it made her angrier still that even in the middle of heartbreak she could not stop noticing him, the hard line of his jaw, the breath moving in his chest too quickly for calm, the way his hands flexed as if they were built for violence and yearning in equal measure. Desire was still there beneath the hurt, stubborn and humiliating and alive, moving through her like a current beneath black water, because there are some men a woman does not stop wanting simply because they are breaking her heart. If anything, heartbreak refines the wanting into something sharper.
When she finally spoke, her voice came out rougher than she intended, the words caught halfway between accusation and plea.
“So you’d kill for me,” she said, looking at him as though she might drag the truth out of him with nothing but eye contact and fury, “you’d stain your hands for me, you’d stand between me and anything that meant to do me harm, but you still will not look me in the face and tell me how you feel?”
The silence after it seemed to split the room down the middle.
Jackson looked at her as though she had put a blade beneath his ribs and twisted, not because the question surprised him, but because it was the one question he had been outrunning from the moment she became more to him than assignment, more than duty, more than the woman he was meant to protect. The sea threw itself again against the cliffside. Somewhere in the house a door shifted faintly on its hinges. Neither of them moved.
“What do you want me to say, Selene?” he asked at last, and his voice was low, but there was strain beneath it now, a crack in the iron. “What is it you want from me, huh? You want me to stand here and say I love you? You want me to tell you that I think about you every damn day, that I have been trying to outrun you in my own head and losing every time? That every room I walk into, I look for you first? That half the time I can’t even hear myself think when you’re near me because wanting you is that loud?”
The words struck her one by one, each of them a wave arriving with enough force to alter the shore.
He took a step closer then, and she hated that her body knew him before her pride could object, hated the way her pulse leapt in answer, hated the way she still wanted him to keep coming. “I am trying to keep you safe, baby,” he said, and that last word, spoken raggedly, nearly undid her on its own. “That has been the point from the beginning. I can’t do that when—”
“When what, Jackson?” she cut in, and now her own voice broke open, now the polished edges gave way, because there are only so many times a woman can be noble about her own devastation before the nobility curdles into rage. “When I love you back? When it matters to me too? When you brought me all the way here”—she pressed a hand to her chest then, helpless and furious, not even knowing whether she meant the room, the coast, the precipice of this feeling, or the ruined country inside her that he had somehow made into a homeland—“and taught me how to need you, only to turn around and call your leaving protection?”
He flinched.
It was small, almost invisible, but she saw it, and because she saw it, she knew she had finally reached the part of him he kept under lock.
“You do not get,” she said, stepping toward him now, each word trembling with the effort not to sob, “to make a home out of me and then act as though you are noble for refusing to live there. You do not get to kiss me like that, touch me like that, look at me as if I am the only honest thing left in your world, and then stand in front of me pretending this is about safety, as though I am too stupid to know the difference between fear and love.”
By then they were only a breath apart.
The room had become unbearably quiet, the kind of quiet that does not soothe but watches, and Jackson looked down at her with something in his face she would carry to her grave, something so nakedly torn between restraint and hunger that for a moment he did not look like a man at all, but some ancient thing hauled up from the depths and forced to choose between its nature and its vow. Poseidon might have known that expression, she thought wildly, that fury at being asked to still the sea inside oneself.
“Selene,” he said, and her name sounded wrecked on him.
“No,” she whispered, because she knew if he said her name like that again, softer, she might forgive him before he had earned it. “No, don’t you dare try to soothe me now.”
“I’m not trying to soothe you.”
“Then what are you doing?”
He laughed once then, but it was a terrible sound, empty of humour and full of defeat. “Trying not to ruin your life.”
At that, something in her face changed.
Not because the line was new, but because she was suddenly, devastatingly tired of men deciding what shape ruin ought to take in her life and then calling the decision love. Malcolm had wanted to own her and called it devotion. The world wanted to consume her and called it duty. And now Jackson, Jackson, the one man who had ever made her feel seen rather than managed, wanted to abandon her in the name of protection and call that tenderness.
Her eyes filled despite her efforts to master them. “You arrogant, impossible man,” she said, so quietly now that it felt more intimate than if she had screamed. “Do you really think you are the one who gets to decide whether loving you ruins me? Do you think I am some girl you can tuck away from yourself for my own good, as though I have not stood in rooms full of men more dangerous than your fear and made them blink first?”
He stared at her.
The wind rattled the windowpane. The ocean below rose and broke and rose again, endlessly returning to the place that wounded it.
“I was fine,” she said, and even she knew it was only half true, but heartbreak is allowed its own rhetoric. “I was fine before you. And then you came into my life with all your steadiness and all your restraint and all that goodness I had no business trusting, and you made me…” She stopped, breath shuddering, because this was the part pride hated most, the part where truth had to emerge without armour. “You made me feel chosen in a way that had nothing to do with power. You made me feel like a woman before I was ever a title to you. So do not stand there and insult me by pretending this has only happened to me.”
Something hot and helpless flashed across his face then, and when he moved, he moved all at once, closing the last of the space between them with the kind of urgency that made her heart stutter in spite of itself. He did not touch her, not yet, but his hands came up on either side of her, bracing against the window behind her, trapping her there without laying so much as a finger on her, and the restraint of it was more intimate than grabbing would have been. She could feel his heat. She could feel his breath. She could feel the war inside him as if it were being fought in her own blood.
“You think this only happened to you?” he asked, and now his voice was rough enough to splinter. “You think I leave because this is easy for me? Selene, I have spent every day since you walked into my life trying to be the kind of man who does not take what he wants just because he wants it, and you are standing here asking me to confess to the one thing I have been trying not to make your problem.”
Her breath caught.
His eyes dropped once, traitorously, to her mouth, and she felt the look there like surf striking bare skin. When he spoke again, the words came quieter, more dangerous for it. “I love you,” he said, finally, as if the sentence had been dragged from somewhere deep and guarded and bleeding. “There. Is that what you needed? I love you in a way that makes me stupid. I love you enough to leave if staying means putting you in the path of what comes with me. I love you enough to know that if I let myself keep you, I will start wanting things I have no right to want.”
Selene’s eyes closed for one awful second.
Because that was the cruelty of it, the unbearable, heart-clenching cruelty of it: she had wanted the truth, and now that it was here, it hurt no less than the lie. It hurt more.
When she opened her eyes again, he was still there, still looking at her like the answer to prayer and punishment had somehow taken the same shape.
“And I love you,” she said, the words trembling free before she could stop them, quiet as a confession whispered into temple dark. “Do you hear me? I love you too. I love you enough to be angry that you think leaving is noble. I love you enough to hate that some part of me still wants you to kiss me while you are standing here destroying me.”
The silence that followed was no longer empty. It was crowded with everything.
His gaze fell to her mouth again.
Her own lips parted, not in invitation exactly, but in that older, more dangerous language the body speaks when pride has run out of useful things to say. Desire moved between them then with all the inevitability of tide answering moon, ancient and humiliating and holy in equal measure, and Selene thought, with a kind of grief-stricken clarity, that this was what the old stories had always meant about gods and mortals, not grandeur, not spectacle, but this feeling of being too small for what had entered your life and loving it anyway.
Jackson bowed his head until his forehead rested against hers.
The gesture was so tender it nearly killed her.
“I would kill for you,” he murmured, and the words brushed her mouth as he said them, warm and wrecked and utterly sincere. “You know I would.”
She let out a shaking breath that felt almost like a laugh, except there was no joy in it, only devastation polished into sound. “And yet,” she whispered, her fingers finally fisting in the fabric of his shirt as though that small violence were the only thing keeping her upright, “you would rather break my heart than stay and let me keep yours.”
His hand came to her waist then, careful, reverent, fatal.
Outside, another wave crashed against the cliff below, and in the room the world seemed to hold itself still around the two of them, as though even time had stepped back to watch whether love would make cowards or martyrs of them first.
A year ago, on these same shores, they had broken one another open and then, with the same trembling hands, tried to piece each other back together again. They had fought with all the violence of people who had mistaken love for something they could reason with, had made gods of their pride and then watched those gods fail them, had found their way back to one another not because the road was easy, but because some ties are less like thread and more like tide, forever retreating only to return with greater force. The sea had borne witness then, as it did now, throwing its body against the coast in long, breathless waves, as if it understood better than either of them that there are reunions written into the nature of certain things, that shore and water may wound one another endlessly and still meet again at the same edge by morning.
And now here they were.
Now here she was, watching him from the soft wash of Tuscan light, her body no longer the same body that had stood before him on that first, ruinous stretch of coast, no longer guarded in quite the same places, no longer carrying love like contraband hidden beneath the ribs. White lace clung to her brown skin with an almost devotional delicacy, tracing rather than concealing, catching the golden hour as though the light itself had become greedy in her presence, and Jackson looked at her the way men in old myths must have looked at miracles they had not prayed for but would spend the rest of their lives trying to deserve. Selene had always watched him, had always been helpless to that private worship, to the quiet habit of studying him when he did not know it, and perhaps that was one of the truest shapes her love had ever taken, not loud, not theatrical, but constant as moon-pull, attentive as the sea.
She watched the way his gaze softened the moment it landed on her, that hard and capable face gentling at once as though every sharp thing in him knew to lay itself down when it came near her, and she felt the familiar ache of it unfurl inside her, warm and tidal and deeper than simple wanting. She watched him reach for her with that same reverence he had somehow never lost, even now, even after the fights and the vows and the secret marriage and all the ways they had already learned one another, and when he drew the silk slowly from her legs, it was less an act of undressing than of unveiling, as though he were peeling back some final veil between worship and witness. His eyes closed for one suspended moment beneath the force of his own desire, and that, more than anything, undid her, not because it flattered her, but because it revealed him, because it showed her how fully he felt, how fiercely he was moved by her still, as though wanting her were not habit but astonishment renewed.
Him, him, him.
It was always him.
The line of his mouth when he was trying to master himself and failing by degrees. The breadth of his shoulders turned golden by the dying sun. The care in his hands, which held strength the way the earth holds heat after daylight, quietly, completely, with no need to announce itself. Selene watched him and felt that old, dangerous tenderness rise through her with all the inevitability of a tide answering the moon, and it seemed to her that love had not entered her life as a single event, not as lightning, but as weather, gathering by imperceptible degrees until one day she looked up and realised the whole sky had changed.
She did not know when it had become all-consuming.
She did not know when affection had deepened into hunger, when hunger had softened into devotion, when devotion had grown roots so deep that even absence could not kill it. Perhaps it had happened there, on the coast, in the aftermath of fury, when he had looked at her as though she were both wound and remedy. Perhaps it had happened in smaller moments, in the ordinary holiness of being known, in the way his hand found the small of her back without thought, in the way his voice changed when he said her name with no one listening. Perhaps love, like the ancient seas, had been shaping her all along in increments too subtle to see, wearing away old stone until what remained was not ruin, but coastline, vulnerable and beautiful precisely because it had been touched so many times by the same returning force.
And what made it bearable, what made surrender feel less like annihilation and more like homecoming, was the certainty that he felt it too.
Not in the shallow, easy way men sometimes perform feeling when desire is new and untested, but in the older, heavier way of a man who has already tried to outrun his own heart and discovered it keeps the better pace. She saw it in the way his gaze lingered on her as though looking were its own form of prayer, saw it in the near-pained restraint that crossed his face when wanting her became almost too much to contain, saw it in the tenderness that never left him even when passion burned hottest between them. Jackson loved her with the gravity of land, steady and broad and capable of bearing weight, while she loved him with the persistence of the sea, returning, returning, returning, and somewhere between those two elements they had made a world of their own.
Outside, the shore breathed in long silver sighs against the land, and inside the villa the evening gathered around them like a blessing too intimate for speech. Selene looked at him and felt, with a clarity that was almost frightening, that if the Greeks had been right about anything, it was not that the gods were cruel, but that they were envious, because no immortality could compare to this, to being finite and still capable of loving someone so much that the sight of their eyes closing from sheer feeling could make the whole world seem newly made.
“You gon’ keep watchin’ me?” he asked as he came toward her, the towel sitting low and sure on his hips, the white of it startling against his skin in the honeyed light that poured through the villa like melted gold, and by the time he stopped between her legs, close enough that the heat of him seemed to alter the air, Selene had already parted her knees for him with the easy, instinctive surrender of a woman whose body had long since learned the shape of its devotion. There was nothing hurried in the movement, nothing embarrassed, only that quiet, intimate fluency that comes when love has been spoken often enough in touch that the body begins answering before the mind can frame the sentence, and when he lifted his hand to her face, cupping her cheek with a tenderness that somehow made his size feel even more dangerous, he tilted her chin just enough to make her look up at him as though he wanted the truth of her eyes before he took anything else.
“Ain’t nobody else I wanna look at,” she whispered, and the words came from her soft and low and full of that private certainty only he could pull from her, the kind that made a vow sound less like promise than instinct, and Jackson’s mouth curved at one corner in that way that never failed to unmake her, a smile touched with heat and affection and the faint arrogance of a man who knew, at last, just how thoroughly he was loved. Then he kissed her, and the kiss landed not with violence but with inevitability, their mouths finding one another as naturally as tide finds shore, as though all the space between them had only ever been a delay in the sea’s return. Her lips softened beneath his at once, moulding to his with the ease of something long-practised and still miraculous, and Selene let herself lean into him, let the tension slip from her in increments as she sighed into his mouth, the sound quiet and helpless and far too honest, because Jackson had always known how to kiss her in a way that felt less like conquest than homecoming.
When he lifted her, it was with that same effortless strength that never ceased to startle her, one arm securing her as though she weighed no more than silk in his hands, and the sudden shift made a breathless laugh catch in her throat before he tossed her onto the bed. She bounced once against the mattress, the linen rustling beneath her, the whole room seeming to tilt pleasantly out of balance as she looked up at him from the spread of white sheets and late-afternoon light, her pulse moving in warm, insistent waves under her skin. There was always something in that moment, in the sight of him above her and coming toward her still, that made yearning rise in her like the sea under a full moon, old and silver and impossible to command backward, because Jackson did not merely approach her, he arrived the way weather arrived over water, changing the whole atmosphere by degrees until the woman she had been before his nearness no longer seemed to exist.
“Mrs. Brooks,” he murmured as he rounded the bed, and her new name on his mouth sounded less like title than invocation, as though he were calling up some softer, secret version of her that only he had the right to summon. The sound of it moved through her with the deep and terrible sweetness of myth, like Persephone hearing her own name spoken in a voice that promised not underworld but return, not captivity but choice, and Selene felt herself flush beneath his gaze, not from shyness, never that, but from the sheer intimacy of belonging to him in a way that had nothing to do with ownership and everything to do with being known. She watched him come closer, watched desire darken his features until even his silence seemed touched by it, and it struck her, with that same aching force it always did, that loving him had become less like falling and more like erosion, every sharp edge in her slowly worn down by the steady, beautiful persistence of his tenderness.
Jackson climbed onto the bed with the measured grace of a man trying to keep control of himself and only half succeeding, and when he looked at her, really looked, his eyes moved over her with such naked reverence that she felt for one dizzy second as though she were both woman and coastline, something to be worshipped precisely because the sea could not keep from returning to it. His hand found her ankle first, then traveled upward in an unhurried line that made her breath catch, not because the touch itself was so bold, but because of the care in it, the way he seemed to savour every inch of nearness as though desire had made him patient rather than reckless. Outside, the Tuscan land stretched golden and lush beneath the descending sun, olive groves bending faintly in the breeze, cypress standing dark and faithful against the hills, and inside the room their wanting gathered like weather over warm water, heavy with promise, electric with the knowledge of what it might become.
Selene reached for him then, unable not to, her fingers curling lightly around his wrist before sliding higher, drawing him down until the space between them thinned to breath and heat and the soft collision of shared hunger. “You say that like you still can’t believe it,” she murmured, meaning the name, meaning all of it, meaning the ring and the vows and the miracle of him still looking at her as though marriage had not dulled desire but sanctified it. Jackson’s expression shifted at that, something molten moving beneath the steadiness, and when he lowered his forehead to hers for the briefest second, the gesture was so tender it made her whole chest ache.
“Believe it?” he said, his voice gone rough around the edges, all velvet over stone. “Baby, I thank God for it.”
And there it was again, that impossible blend that had always been so uniquely his, the devotion threaded cleanly through the want, the hunger made holier by love rather than lessened by it, and Selene felt her yearning bloom wide and bright inside her, not frantic, not uncertain, but lush and certain as summer pressing its full weight into the earth. She kissed him again before he could say anything else, because sometimes love grew too large for language and had to be answered in older, quieter forms, and as his mouth met hers with that same deepening heat, the villa around them seemed to exhale, the light leaning softer, the curtains stirring like witnesses too discreet to look away, while somewhere beyond the windows the sea kept moving toward the land in long, faithful sighs, as if nature itself understood the oldest truth of all, that some things were made to return to one another until returning became indistinguishable from fate.
“I love you, Selene Brooks,” he whispered, and the words seemed to settle over her skin before his mouth ever did, warm and intimate and weighted with that quiet, ruinous sincerity that always undid her faster than anything else, because Jackson did not say love like a man making a declaration for effect, but like a man laying something sacred at her feet and trusting her not to mock the offering. Then he kissed his way down her body slowly, reverently, as though he had all the time the gods had denied other mortals, as though each inch of her was a country he had crossed before and still found newly holy with every return, and Selene felt herself come alive beneath the path of him, every nerve waking in his wake like land after rain. He took her in with deep, measured inhales as he moved, the breath leaving him almost rough, almost humbled, and there was something in that alone that made yearning tighten low and sweet inside her, the fact of being wanted not carelessly but with attention, with hunger disciplined into tenderness, with the kind of desire that looked less like appetite and more like worship.
Their ring fingers brushed when his hand slid over her thigh, and the sight of it struck her with a force she had not expected even now, even after vows and signatures and secrecy and the sweet delirium of knowing he was hers. The JB imprinted upon her finger and the SB worked into his own seemed, in that moment, less like initials and more like inscriptions in some private myth, as though the two of them had stepped outside the reach of ordinary names and entered the old language of belonging, the kind spoken by people who had loved each other so hard they began to leave marks that outlived speech. White lace still clung to her body, delicate and bright against her brown skin, but it did nothing to deter him, nothing at all, and when Jackson sank to his knees before her, the movement was so deliberate, so unhurried and sure, that Selene’s breath caught in her chest as if her own body had suddenly remembered the oldest stories, the ones where mortals built temples not because gods demanded it, but because awe had nowhere else to go.
He looked at her from there, his face darkened by wanting and softened by devotion, and she had the wild, impossible thought that if the sea could kneel, it would look something like that, its vast power bowed willingly before the shore it could have battered but chose instead to return to in longing. He did not seem diminished on his knees, not for a second. If anything, he looked more dangerous, more devastating, because there was such strength in the surrender of him, such unmistakable choice in the way he placed himself before her as though saying without words that this too was his nature, this too was part of how he loved. Selene’s fingers drifted into his hair almost helplessly, not to guide him, not yet, but simply because she needed to touch him, needed some proof that this man with his broad shoulders and reverent mouth and eyes gone molten with feeling was real and not one more beautiful cruelty imagined by a woman who had spent too much of her life starving for gentleness.
Jackson pressed another kiss to her, then another, each one patient enough to feel like a vow renewed in flesh, and her head tipped back with a soft, involuntary surrender as sensation unfurled through her in slow silver waves. The room around them seemed to deepen into gold and shadow, the villa all warm stone and open windows and Tuscan evening breathing softly at the curtains, while somewhere beyond the hills the sea went on making its long, faithful confessions to the land. Selene could feel the parallel of it inside herself, the tide of her own wanting rising with each touch of his mouth, each slow pass of his hands, until she no longer knew whether she was trembling from desire or from the unbearable sweetness of being so fully adored. That had always been the thing with Jackson, the reason he could unmake her so completely, even now, even after all the ways they had already known one another, because he never touched her like a man trying only to take. He touched her like a man discovering, like a man grateful, like a man who understood that yearning, if tended properly, could become its own kind of liturgy.
“Jackson,” she breathed, and his name left her sounding almost like prayer, low and thinned by feeling, because she did not know how else to speak when every part of her had begun to turn toward him the way flowers turned to heat, helpless and faithful and born for it. He looked up at her then, and the sight of his mouth softened by kisses and his eyes dark with devotion made her whole body ache with love so fierce it bordered on grief, that old and beautiful grief of knowing you have been given something so precious it makes the heart tremble under the weight of its own gratitude. Her thumb brushed the line of his cheekbone, and his lashes lowered for one fleeting second beneath the tenderness of it, as if even he, all that steadiness and strength, could still be moved silently by the fact of her choosing him back.
“I swear,” he murmured against her skin, the words half-lost in the warmth of her, “there is nothing on this earth I want more than you.”
And Selene believed him, not because men had not said grander things to her in prettier rooms, but because Jackson’s love had never depended on grandeur. It lived in gestures, in breath, in the way his hands held her as though she were both woman and world, in the way desire never made him careless with her but more deliberate, more attuned, as if loving her had sharpened every instinct he possessed. She looked down at him there, kneeling between her thighs like some beautiful heretic worshipping at an altar of his own making, and felt her yearning crest inside her with all the inevitability of surf breaking against rock, full and bright and impossible to call back once it had committed itself to shore.
So she drew him upward at last, fingers in his hair, her body already arching toward his before he had fully risen, and when their mouths met again it was with the force of tide answering moon, ancient and breathless and beyond the reach of denial, the white lace between them becoming less a barrier than a surrendering veil. The bed took their weight with a soft rustle, the light around them going honey-thick as evening lowered its head, and Selene kissed him like a woman who had long ago stopped fearing the size of her own love, like a woman who knew now that desire need not diminish devotion, that the two could live inside one another the way sea lived in salt and land in root, inseparable, elemental, endlessly returning.
“I need you to use me,” he whispered against her lips, pecking them thrice more before he lay on his back, watching her with his eyes hooded as he bit his lip, watching as she pulled her panties to the side and climbed up his body, settling over his face; she watched him from below, her eyes meeting his.
He took in a whiff of her, savouring his meal as he felt the saliva in his mouth build up; there was nothing better than the ambrosia between her legs, he was certain of it, so damn certain as his hands spread over the thickness of her ass, kneading the flesh between his legs as she lowered herself onto him gently, something that still annoyed him greatly– the carefulness she possessed, the fact she still thought she needed to take it slow with him.
He grunted impatiently as his hands met her hips and forced her down onto his waiting mouth. Instantly, his tongue darted out and licked up all her juices. Selene nearly jumped at the abruptness, but his hands held her still, making it damn near impossible for her to go anywhere, let alone form a coherent thought. It brought her back to the late nights in her office, nights where he’d spend knelt before her as he worked her towards her peak, but back then, they didn’t have the luxury of noise; now they did, and she was going to let him know how good he was, how good he was making her feel.
“Fuck baby, you’re doing so good.” She shuddered, placing her hand at the back of his head as she rode his face, her eyes rimmed with tears, as she looked down at him. He looked high on her, damn near in another realm, almost as if he didn’t care for air as his main purpose was to slip his tongue inside and out of her, to bring his wife to pleasure over and over – because that's how he felt. He felt his purpose in life was to serve his wife, to be at Selene’s beck and call, to take whatever his goddess gave him as her most devoted worshipper. He trailed her hands up her body, letting go of her hips to pull her breasts out of the confines of the white lace. His hands flicked her nipples as he ran his tongue up and down her pussy before finding her clit with ease and sucking, watching as her eyes rolled and her pace stuttered.
“You’re so good, baby boy, you d-doing so good baby f-fuck,” she whimpered as she arched her back, her body full of bliss as her eyes squeezed as he moaned against her. Jackson knew her body well; he knew she was right there, right where he wanted her. He felt his own release impending as he grabbed her ass, grinding her harder against his face, and she whined, ignoring the strain in his tongue, he still dragged his tongue through her walls, finding that one spot easily and abusing it.
“‘M gonna cum baby, I’m right there, o-oh,” she whined as she released. Jackson grunted as he worked to swallow her release, groaning into her as his own painted the white towel that covered his lower body. “F-fuck,” he moaned into her, and she jolted against his mouth. Her chest moved up and down as she fell onto the bed next to him, watching him rise on his elbow and connect their lips, ensuring she tasted herself on him; a gift he wasn’t too greedy this time to keep for himself. When they separated, a string of saliva connected them, pulling himself closer once more, he opted to lick across her lips, ensuring none of what he gave her went to waste.
She hummed in delight as she pulled him in for a final kiss before she stood up, albeit a bit shakily, to pour him a glass of water, something to replenish his energy. Jackson watched the dampness of her underwear settle against her wet flesh, and he shook his head as he felt himself stiffening in the towel once more.
He reached down to undo the knot, which, quite frankly, surprised him, as it had remained steady during their rendezvous while he stood and met her at the dresser. He pressed her into the wood, keeping her looking at them in the mirror mounted on the wall as his dick prodded her from behind, long, curved, thick and waiting to make itself home within her walls, this time as her husband.
“So you gon’ do whatever you wanna do, huh?” he whispered as he kissed up her neck, his hands forcing hers to rest against the dresser. “Ain’t nobody told you to get up off me, Mrs Brooks.”
She felt him widen her stance as his hands raked up her legs, kissing down her shoulder as he pulled her panties to the side and gently got her into the position he desired, pressing her up against the mirror slightly, her hand clutching the wood of the dresser as she felt him tap the tip against her clit as he pressed the blunt head against her entrance.
His hand slid over hers, their tattooed hands intertwining as he slid into her with little to no effort. Jackson curled his toes as her warmth surrounded him, still sensitive from his previous release. Seat dripping down his forehead onto her arched back. He reached down to rub it into her skin, with a sigh, “Fuck baby.”
He kept her eyes on Solene in the mirror. She leaned her head back, whimpering softly as she adjusted to his size. She could feel him, deep in her stomach; she didn’t know where she started, and he ended, but she didn’t want to know. She wished they could stay like this forever, together, just them with no one else, no distractions.
“You know you my whole heart?” he whispered as he drew out and in, building up a rhythm, her pussy fluttering against her crotch, drawing him in, deeper and deeper, she felt his thickness pound into her, the dresser groaning in protest as Jackson huffed in protest, swiping the water and trinkets off the surface, ignoring the way they crashed onto floor and shattered, fully bending her over the vanity, with a whine she reached behind her to slow him down.
“W-wait baby, f-fuck I-” her breath cut off short as he bent his knees slightly, driving deeper into her, prodding at her cervix as her chest tightened, almost as if someone had wrapped their hands around her lungs and squeezed, each breath coming out in spurts, shallow and jagged in moans, an ancient tongue only he seemed to understand.
“Whose dick is this baby?” he grunted. He planted a hand on her back, making sure she held her arch.
“Mine, ‘s my dick,” she whined as she pounded into her relentlessly.
“And you gon’ take that shit, ain’t you, Mrs Brooks?”
“I’m gon’ take it, baby, promise I’m gon’ take it.” The sounds of their flesh colliding filled the room as she swore she went cross-eyed, she swore she couldn’t breathe straight, her brain turning to mush as his balls slapped against her slit and the backs of her thighs. She listened to the sounds of his deep breathing and grunts, feeling her core throb as her walls tightened around him involuntarily, her moans borderline screams at this point as she thanked whoever pushed her to buy a villa in the remote area of Tuscany.
“You look so pretty like this, baby. I love you,” she whispered as he pulled her up, connecting their lips in what could be called a kiss. His tongue plunged into her mouth as he kept pounding into her from below. She struggled to return the sentiment as she reached for the nearest object to steady herself. Watching his hand from the corner of his eye, he grabbed it and pressed it behind her back.
“Uh uh, where the hell do you think you goin?”
“N-nowhere, baby boy, promise,” she whined.
She whined as she felt Jackson’s grunts and frantic thrusts as he painted her walls. He bit into her shoulder, ignoring the faint coppery taste, all in favour of getting closer to her in any way he could.
Selene anticipated rest, she anticipated a breather when he came inside her, but her lover knew of no such thing as his hand found her clit, swollen and sensitive as he rubbed tight circles onto her as he contoniued to pound into her He kissed the spot he bit earlier, gently licking up the faint crimson against her brown skin as he whimpered into her ear, “C’mon mama, give it to me, please,” Tearns lined his eyes as he powered through the pleasure that ebbed into pain as began to fuck herself back onto him.
“Use me baby, t-take what you need,f-fuck you’re so pretty baby, so damn pretty like this, my wife, m-my pretty girl,” he rambled as he quickened his circles on her clit, making them tighter and faster as Selene let out a long cry,ackson catching her as waves of pleasure raked through her body as it happened. What would follow, Selene wouldn’t be able to recall as the heat in her lower belly gave way, her moans long and drawn out as the stars built at the corner of her eyes started to go blank, as her legs gave out from underneath her.
She squirted everywhere.
All over his dick, his thighs, the dresser and the floor, once she started, she couldn’t stop as Jackson worked her through it. Her throat burned as though the very act of breathing was strenuous and damn near took energy from her. Her body slumped against the dresser as he gently pulled out of her and lifted her onto their bed, kissing between her thighs as he widened them, watching her pussy throb, full of their release.
He lay on his stomach as he landed a glob of spit on her clit, watching as it twitched. “Baby, why are you fucking me like this?” Selene whined as she inched up the bed, trying to get away from him, but he dragged her back to where she was.
“Jus’ can’t get enough of you, one more baby. I promise, after this imma leave you alone.”
“You lyin’,” she whined as he licked up her slit, moaning at their combined taste as he dove back into her; the obscene sounds of his slurping and her weak moans sounded like a damn symphony to him as he got lost in her for a moment longer, watching as her walls convulsed and let out the nectar they had been preserving.
Once he was sated, he kissed his way back up her body with the reverence of a man returning from battle to a temple he feared he had entered too roughly, his mouth softening over every place he had touched in hunger as though tenderness might gather the scattered pieces of passion and lay them back down in proper order. By the time his lips met hers again, the storm had already passed. However, its warmth still lived everywhere, in the flushed sheen of her skin, in the disarray of the room around them, in the shallow rise and fall of her breath as she seemed to drift somewhere just beyond speech, floating in that fragile, silvery distance where sensation had not yet fully loosened its hold. Jackson felt the state of her before he had language for it, saw it in the softened heaviness of her lashes, in the way her body answered him now with trust more than urgency, and something protective and almost worshipful moved through him at once.
The dresser behind them stood as evidence of what desire had made of the evening, its surface half-cleared by his own impatient arm, glass, perfume bottles, and scattered trinkets thrown down in glittering disarray across the floor, catching the low light like the remnants of some tiny constellation shattered underfoot. The room looked beautifully ruined, as if love had passed through it wearing the face of a minor god, one of those old Olympians, too overcome by the urge to remember that mortals preferred their homes intact. Yet for all the wreckage, all the displaced things and the sharp little casualties of passion, Jackson’s attention narrowed to only one thing: her.
“Hey,” he murmured against her mouth, his voice gone low and warm and steady, no trace of the roughness that had possessed it before, only the deep, anchoring gentleness of a man returning to shore. “Stay with me, baby.”
Selene gave the smallest sound in response, not quite a word, more a breath shaped by trust, and Jackson’s heart tightened with a tenderness so acute it almost felt like pain. He gathered her into him carefully, one arm braced around her waist, the other coming up to cradle the back of her neck as though she were both precious and spent, which, to him, she was. Her cheek found his shoulder instinctively, the soft weight of her against him enough to turn everything in his chest liquid. He stood there for a long moment simply holding her. At the same time, the villa settled around them, the curtains stirring faintly in the evening breeze, the land outside exhaling its warm Tuscan breath through the open window, the sea farther off making its slow and faithful confessions to the shore.
He pressed a kiss to her temple, then another to the crown of her head, and only when he was sure her knees would not bear the burden of movement alone did he ease her away from the dresser. He glanced once at the floor, at the broken and scattered things lying in wait, and a curse left him under his breath, not angry exactly, only chastened, as though he resented the very existence of anything sharp enough to threaten the softness of this moment. “Don’t move,” he said gently, though she barely seemed inclined to, and lifting her in his arms came to him as naturally as breathing.
She curled into him at once, pliant in that dreamy, loosened way that made his entire being orient around care, one arm slipping faintly around his neck while he carried her to the bed. Jackson lay her down with extraordinary caution, as though the mattress itself might be too abrupt for her, then climbed beside her only long enough to pull the sheets around her body, tucking the linen up over her with a tenderness that felt almost old-fashioned in its devotion. The sight of her there, flushed and dazed and wrapped in white, her hair undone around her like a dark, silk-spun halo, struck him with the same helpless awe the ancient poets gave to men who stumbled into the presence of goddesses and came out of it ruined for ordinary life.
His eyes caught then on the mark at her shoulder.
The bite he had left there had broken the skin just enough for a faint crescent of red to bloom against her brown skin, and the sight of it made remorse and desire rise together in him in that complicated, humbling way only love could manage. He reached toward it as if asking permission even in silence, his fingertips feather-light near the edge of the mark. “I know, baby,” he murmured, more to himself than to her, his voice threaded through with apology. “I know.”
Selene blinked slowly up at him, her gaze still half-veiled, and the softness in her face undid him more thoroughly than any passion had. “Jackson,” she whispered, and his name on her lips was no accusation at all, only recognition, only that quiet tether between them that seemed to survive every version of heat and tenderness alike.
“I got you,” he said at once, because that was the truest thing he had.
He disappeared only briefly into the bathroom and returned with a warm cloth, a glass of water, and the small first-aid kit he had insisted on keeping close because preparedness was so deeply stitched into him that even honeymoon tenderness could not fully strip it away. Kneeling beside the bed, he set everything within reach. Then he wet the cloth, wringing it out with careful hands before pressing it softly to her skin, wiping away the traces of sweat and the warm evidence of passion with the kind of quiet concentration that made care itself look sacred. There was nothing clinical in the gesture. It was too intimate for that, too full of unspoken feeling. He moved with the patience of a man tending a shoreline after a storm, smoothing the earth where the sea had struck hardest, kissing the places it had touched too fiercely, grateful beyond reason that the land still welcomed its return.
When he came to her shoulder, his hand gentled even further. He cleaned the tiny crescent of blood with the warm cloth, his mouth tightening with regret so tender it became its own form of worship, then dabbed a little ointment there, his breath brushing her skin in soft apologies. Afterwards, he pressed a kiss just above the mark, then another below it, as if he could bracket the hurt with enough tenderness to transform it into something cherished rather than inflicted.
“There she is,” he whispered when her eyes finally seemed to sharpen a little more, though the softness had not left them. He lifted the glass to her lips and tipped it carefully, patient while she drank, one swallow and then another, until colour returned a little more fully to her face. “Good girl,” he said without thinking, the praise low and instinctive and wrapped so thoroughly in affection that it landed not as command but comfort, and Selene’s lashes fluttered at the sound of it.
He smiled then, small and wrecked and full of love, and brushed his thumb over her cheek. “You with me?”
“Mm,” she answered, a faint sound, but enough.
“That’s my wife.”
The words changed the room each time he said them, laying a sweetness over everything that no amount of broken glass or wrinkled sheets could disturb—his wife. The syllables seemed to warm even the air, seemed to settle into the beams of the villa and the long evening light as if the house itself were learning her new name and blessing it.
Once he was sure she had drunk enough, he set the glass aside and reached for her hand instead, threading his fingers through hers until their ring fingers brushed, her JB and his SB glinting softly where they met. He stared at the initials for a moment with a kind of private astonishment, as though desire had carried him so far and so fully that he had to look again at the proof that all of this, the woman in the bed and the vow on his hand and the tenderness flooding him near to drowning, was real.
Selene turned her face toward him more fully then, still hazy at the edges, still drifting, but unmistakably his in the quiet way that mattered most, and Jackson climbed onto the bed beside her, careful to keep the sheet wrapped around her as he gathered her close. He did not take; he only held. He tucked her against his chest, one hand spanning the back of her head, the other rubbing slow, soothing circles at her spine through the linen, each pass of his palm unhurried enough to feel like a lullaby translated into touch.
Outside, the hills darkened by degrees, the cypress trees becoming silhouettes against the last wash of gold, and beyond them the sea went on breathing against the land in those long, ancient sighs that made all love feel old, and all tenderness feel fated. Jackson lay there with her in his arms. He thought of nothing grander than this, nothing more miraculous than a woman softening against him after trusting him with every version of herself. He understood, perhaps more deeply than ever before, why the gods of old were always meddling in mortal affairs. It was envy. It had to be. Because what immortality could rival the holiness of being allowed to care for someone you loved when they were at their most open, their most unguarded, their most beautifully undone.
He kissed her forehead, then the bridge of her nose, then the corner of her mouth.
“I love you,” he murmured into her hair, not as seduction now, not even as reassurance, but as fact, as atmosphere, as the truest thing in the room. “I love you, and I’ve got you.”
And Selene, tucked against him while evening draped itself over the villa and the broken things on the floor lay forgotten for another hour, let out a long, soft breath that sounded almost like the sea itself finally coming to rest.
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