Everytime you drop the doll series, we get to see how much grace they have for serađ. The twins let a lot slide with her𤣠it shows how much love and respect they have for their wife𼚠AMAZING WRITING!â¤ď¸
Grace is an understatement đ¤ Seraphim can do no wrong in their eyes. They are obsessed with her and she is obsessed with them. If she was any other woman she wouldâve been hogtied (consensually) to a bed by chapter three đđđđžââď¸đđžââď¸
Ughhh I just finished Chapter 3 of Please Forgive Me and the series is so good. Your writing is keeping my heart fed. Thank you for always sharing and posting đ
On a side note, Smoke would lose his damn mind if the reader turned up pregnant. If we thought he was mean beforeâđŽâđ¨
Smoke if Reader ends up pregnant:
đ¤đ¤ Happy to know that my silly little stories are keeping you fed đđđ Thank you for reading and your kind words!
Authorâs Note: Welp, here I am with another one-shot. This time it's about Incubus Stack x Plus Size Reader. Dedicated to @blackpantherismyish and @theethighpriestess
Warnings: +18 | Modern AU | Incubus Stack x Plus Size Reader | Dom!Stack | Bratty Sub!Reader | Degradation kink | BDSM | Tentacles | Bondage | Oral Sex | Edging | Incubus Demon x Female Human Pairing | Spanking | Creampie(s) | Overstimulation | Stack is mean af but I love himmmmm
The dreams started the night you published your first chapter online.
You hadnât made the connection immediately, because why would you? You were a rational and disciplined woman who had spent the past three weeks defending a dissertation that had taken the better part of two years to construct, and you didnât believe in coincidences any more than you believed in the subject matter of the unknown you spent so much time dismantling. You had posted Chapter One of your preliminary findings to your academic blog at eleven forty-seven on a Thursday night, closed your laptop, washed your face, and gone off to bed⌠but at eleven forty-eight, something lurking beneath the shadows came out to feed...
The first dream that disrupted your sleep had been somewhat âsubtleâ. You were in your bedroom, not some abstracted dreamscape, and you were lying on your back on top of the covers in the dark. The ceiling fan turned overhead, and the room was stickily warm the way Mississippi summers were muggy even up here in your fourth-floor New York apartment. Unlike your usual dreams, in this one you were consciously aware that you were dreaming and that you werenât alone. The unknown presence that started as a thin shadow on your wall slithered around the dimly lit room until it decided to position itself right beside you. Then, in the way of dreams where geography was simply a suggestion, it was over you. The entity didnât have a distinct shape or body youâd be able to recall to your dream journal in the morning, just a warmth and a knowing that settled across you like a second skin.
The first touch the entity placed on your skin was barely a touch at all. Its presence hovered over you and only allowed you to feel the suggestion of its fingers trailing up the inside of your thigh. The weight of its movements carried a certainty that told you, even then, that whatever was mapping out the shape of your body had done this countless times before. Had catalogued other women before you and knew the exact nerve ending it was hunting for before it arrived at its destination.
When it finally reached its goalpost, you gasped. The sensation that radiated from the entity's single point of contact moved through your entire body like a tidal wave of pleasure, and it didnât spread outwardly from its origin the way an ordinary touch from an ordinary man did. No, this touch sent fireworks of bursting euphoric bliss throughout every single nerve ending in your body as if your nervous system had been primed for this moment and was finally given the signal to let go. Immediately your back arched off the mattress and your hands flew between your thighs attempting to grip onto something that wasnât truly there.
âShhh,â said a voice you couldnât place. It was charming and thick with the particular cadence of the Deep South. Stretched vowels, swallowed consonants and the easy rhythm of something that was in no hurry at all. âI got you.â
As your dream mind attempted to figure out who this mystery voice belonged to, a warm mouth found you.
In true dream logic fashion, you hadnât been wearing anything below the waist and your core lay bare as the first press of that skilled mouth landed against your center. Just like before, the sensations you were feeling were like nothing you had experienced in the waking hours. What you were receiving wasn't just merely oral. This was the targeted application of something that understood your body with an expertise level of intimacy that should have taken years to learn, and had no business existing in the context of a first encounter with an entity you couldnât even see.
The tongue that moved against you was much too long and too thick in a way that no human muscle could replicate it. Every time you attempted to estimate the size of its dimensions, it grew larger and slithered deeper into your pulsating canal. You silently whimpered as it curled and pressed against your pussy, finding places deep inside you that made your vision spotty and reactively forced your thighs to clamp around something that wasnât quite a head but was large and utterly unmovable like one.
In layman's terms, whatever person or thing that was between your thighs, it feasted on your core like it was famished. There was no other word for it. The way this otherworldly tongue flicked against you, it silently communicated that it was beyond the point of hunger. It was feeding on you, consuming your responses as fast as it drew them out. From the sounds you made, to the slick it pulled from your body, and the trembling of your thighs. All of this was taken over and over again without any indication it would ever be satisfied. The pleasure built past the point of bearing and it kept building as tears started to tack down from the corners of your eyes into your hair. You didn't mean to cry, and had no intentions of crying but the continuous pressure of unreleased pleasure sitting in your lower stomach was driving you towards the brick of insanity.Â
Your moans grew louder and desperate as your hands scrambled against the sheets for purchase, and then, at the precise moment when your entire body locked up and the sweet promise of release was right there, cresting, inevitable, one breath away⌠The warmth vanished and the withdrawal was instant, like a switch thrown. The weight lifted off your body and the presence withdrew so completely it was as if it had never been, leaving you flat on your back in your dark bedroom with your chest heaving, your thighs soaked, and your body wound tight around an orgasm that had been unfairly revoked at the last possible second.
You laid there sexually disgruntled for a full minute before you could move, and then you got up, changed your underwear, and told yourself a realistic dream like that was just a response to the stress from school.
The second dream was less subtle...
This one contained the same warmth and the same knowing presence, but this time it took shape, not in a way your sleeping mind could fully resolve, but enough. The entity was large and dark, with the impression of a face that was too beautiful and too something else to look at directly. Before you knew it, possessive hands gripped your hips with an assurance that allowed for no renegotiation, and this time the mouth found you faster, because it already knew where to go. It spent longer on you this time and that was the true torment of it all, the infinite patience this entity had. The way it worked you up through three distinct peaks, each one higher than the last, each one denied at the exact moment of culmination with the specific cruelty of something that knew exactly what it was doing and was enjoying itself thoroughly. You begged like a proper slut in the dream but it escaped out loud into the realm of the living, and the only reason you know this is because you woke with your voice raw and your roommate knocking on the wall between your rooms asking if you were okay.
âI-Iâm fine,â you called out. âJust a bad dream.â
Not a lie, technically.
By the fifth night the dreams had graduated to something that had no clinical framework in your research notes. You were on your hands and knees on your bed, face pressed into a nearby pillow, and the presence behind you was no longer ambiguous about its intentions. The hands on your hips were large and rough-palmed, and the weight of two enormous pieces of flesh pressing against both of your pulsating holes from behind made your sleeping body shudder with a want so deep it had no bottom. It entered both of your canals slowly, given the enormous size of its double members, and it filled you to a depth and completeness that your waking anatomy had no accurate reference for. Simultaneously, this was where your sleeping mind began to seriously question how much you could take, but before you came to your own conclusion, something else found your mouth. It pressed past your lips with a purposefulness that was entirely at odds with the roughness of the hands at your hips.Â
All three of your holes were filled and your body accommodated all of it without pain or resistance, just an obliterating fullness that pressed against every wall you had all at once.
The entity moved all extensions of itself in a synchronized rhythm that was clearly the work of a single intelligence orchestrating multiple points of contact. Three separate rods of sensation worked in unison with a calculated focus that had no interest in your comfort, only in extracting a maximum response until you were shaking apart from the inside out. The sounds the entity pulled out of you during this dream weren't any that you wanted to claim ownership of in the morning.Â
And then, right at the moment of completionâŚÂ
Poof. Gone.
As soon as the entity vanished you woke up screaming like a sexually frustrated mad woman into your pillow, and your roommate moved out two weeks later.
By week two, you started making changes to your day to day life in an attempt to combat what you still considered just stress dreams. You went to bed exhausted on purpose, hoping to fall too deeply into sleep for the dreams to reach you, but somehow they reached you anyway. You tried sleeping with the light on, but the presence didn't need darkness and the dreams still persisted onward. You tried sleeping in the living room on the couch, but somehow you always woke up in your bed without any memory of moving.
In addition to switching up your routine, you tried with increasing desperation and decreasing dignity, to relieve the built up sexual tension yourself, but that didn't work either. This was the only part you were having a hard time finding a logical explanation for. Unlike everything else, you couldnât just file being unable to masturbate under the category of a stress response or the psychosomatic effects of spending eight hours a day immersed in erotic folklore, due to the fact that playing dj hero on expert mode has always been the number one way youâve relieved stress in the past. It didn't matter what you did or how you did it, your body simply would not release. Each time you tried you would get achingly close, and then the sensation would simply stop, as though someone had reached in and removed the mechanism. As though the ability had been quietly confiscated.
You sat on the edge of your bed at two in the morning on the fourteenth night and pressed your palms to your sleep deprived eyes and said, out loud, to the room, âThis isnât real. This is not happening.â
As soon as you spoke, the shadow in the corner of your room shifted.
You looked at it for a long time before scoffing at it and mumbling, âLamp,â
The shadow didnât move again and instead of trying to indulge in self pleasure, you went back to your dissertation and wrote four more paragraphs about the psychological origins of incubus mythology with the specific, driven energy of a woman arguing with something she refused to name.
By week three, you were an absolute train wreck.
You had bruised hollows under your eyes, a hair-trigger temper, and a tight tension in your body that had moved past physical discomfort and into something pressurized that your body no longer had the vocabulary to name. You snapped at your advisor during office hours. You knocked an entire shelf of books onto the floor in the campus library and left them there before walking out. You sat in your car in the parking garage for forty minutes staring at the steering wheel before you remembered you had meant to go somewhere.
That night you came home, you were too exhausted to cook and settled on eating half a bowl of cereal before showering and falling into bed at nine-thirty like a woman who had lost a war. Because of your depleted state, you didn't notice how the shadow in the corner of your room was darker than usual, denser, like it too had reached its breaking point and needed to be fed something.Â
You were asleep for exactly four minutes and thirty seconds before you woke up to the feeling of being crushed. This crushing sensation wasn't like the ambient, low-grade unease of the past three weeks but the specific, acute, suffocating certainty of a body above yours. Whatever or whoever it was, had you pressed into the mattress with a weight that pinned the breath in your chest before youâd even fully surfaced from sleep.
Your tired eyes snapped open and hovering over you was him. His forearms bracketed your head on either side, both palms flat against the mattress, his torso blotting out the ceiling in a way that erased the water stain, the crack in the plaster, and the fan turning overhead. He had positioned himself so his weight distributed above you without fully resting on you, holding the threat of himself over you like a promise.
It took a couple seconds for your mind to try and process him. You couldn't comprehend him in his entirety and decided to process him in pieces. He was gigantic. Even braced above you with minimal space between your bodies, his frame dominated everything around it, too large for the ordinary furniture, too large for the room itself, the way a predator in a domestic setting made the furniture seem like props. His skin was a deep coffee brown, flawless in the low light of your bedside lamp, with a muscular frame that suggested he had never once in his existence worried about being threatened. Long hands planted into the mattress on either side of your head, with fingers slightly too long and nails slightly too dark at the tips.
His face was the thing that stopped you completely.
He was breathtakingly beautiful for a man⌠or a man adjacent entity. His face existed at the uncomfortable intersection of stunning and wrong, where every individual feature was arranged in a way that sent something ancient in your hindbrain screaming. High cheekbones. A jaw that could cut glass. A mouth set in a line that wasnât quite a smile but carried all the confidence of one. His eyes were red, not bloodshot or irritated, but red. A deep arterial red, the color of old garnets held up to light, glowing with their own soft interior luminescence in the dark of your room. They were fixed on your face with an expression that held no humanity, but his eyes were focused and assessing you like he had already made a decision about you and was now in the process of collecting what he considered his property. Right above his eyes held two curved, dark horns rising from his temples, sweeping back and upward with the angular geometry of something grown rather than placed. And at his shoulders, filling the space above both of you, a set of wings fanning outward to the walls of your bedroom, swallowing the available light, making the room smaller by several degrees.
The full scope of what was lingering above you registered in your body before it registered completely in your mind. You opened your mouth to speak and he wasted no time making his first move.Â
One hand came off the mattress and closed around your throat, cutting off 25% of your airway. The contact hit your nervous system like a struck match and lit every nerve from your collarbone to the base of your spine in a single cascading surge. Three weeks of compression, denial, and your bodyâs desperate need for release met that one point of contact and combusted outward. Instantly, a wall of sensation crashed through you so fast your back arched off the mattress before you could even think about it. Your thighs tried to instinctively close, but his knee was already between them, braced against the mattress, preventing it completely.
He looked down at your face as this happened. Watching your body melt completely beneath him from just one simple touch. âSo pretty,â he mumbled. His voice was everything the dream voice had been and more. âThree weeks. An one touch.â The not-quite-smile didnât deepen as he tilted his head to the side and his voice quickly shifted from charming to demeaning. âYou real fuckinâ pathetic, you know that?â
His insult quickly sobered you up as you glared at the man? entity? demon? hovering above you and began wiggling around. âGet hell off me,â you said. Your voice was shaking.Â
âMm mm.â He didnât move. The hand at your throat stayed wrapped around you like it was a necklace you were expected to wear for eternity. âYou done with that?â
This time you did more than try to wiggle out of his grasp and shoved at his chest with both hands. He might as well have been made of concrete because that shove didnât move him an inch. Instead, the close contact from both of your palms pressed against the warm bare skin of his chest sent fresh waves of pleasure radiating up your arms and straight between your thighs. Your own hands betrayed you, fingers going flat with defeat against him instead of pushing again.
He looked down at your hands and smirked with a knowing expression. âMmm hmm,â he gloated.
âDonât.â You yanked your hands back.
âLil' late for all that.â He tilted his head to the other side, reading your face like you were a new toy handed over to a spoiled child on Christmas morning. âKnow what ya problem is? You think too much.â The red eyes tracked down the length of your body beneath him, cataloguing, assessing. âLemmeâ help turn that brain off.â
âIâll scream,â you said.
âWho the fuck gonâ hear you?âÂ
The city outside your window went on about itself, indifferent and noise-soaked. You both knew he was right.Â
His free hand moved, and touched the center of your chest. One fingertip, directly over your sternum, pressing through the thin fabric of your sleep shirt with a settled intention that told you he had been here before, had mapped this exact spot, and had been waiting to press it. The surge that followed was different from the throat contact, deeper and more central, as though he had pressed a button wired directly to your spinal column. Your back arched again, involuntarily, hard enough to lift you completely off the mattress, forcing a sound from your mouth that you felt ashamed of before it finished leaving your body.
He silently watched as your body collapsed back down onto the mattress, still under his touch and control. âIf you done beinâ dramatic,â he said, âthat there is the mark⌠my mark.â
You stared up at him dazed and confused, still coming down from whatever that feeling was. âThe what?â
âYou called my name⌠said it real sweet too.â He stated simply and factually, like he was having a regular conversation about the weather. âWeek two. Third night. You was in the dream, right at the edge, an you screamed my name.â His thumb traced a single line over your sternum and each pass of it sent smaller waves of sensation radiating throughout your body, enough to keep your breathing unsteady. âWhen a marked woman calls, the mark sets. Ainât somethinâ I decided. Thatâs just the nature of the thing.â
You started up at him with a bewildered expression. You didn't know this man⌠entity from a can of paint and your brain was currently too frazzled to piece together what he was talking about. âI didnât know your damn name.â
âYouâd been writinâ âbout me for six months.â He held your gaze. âSome part of you knew.â
âSi-Six months?â The realization and the recognition started to settle in, but your stubbornness refused to believe that HE was currently present in your bedroom. After months of disproving the existence of incubus, there's absolutely no way The Shadow Man, also known as Elias âStackâ Moore, the infamous incubus known for brutally feasting and discarding his victims was present in your bedroom⌠right? RIGHT?
âYeah⌠its clickinâ now aint it?â he quipped, and a considerably dangerous flash of murderous intent slid beneath his eyes. Stack tilted his head again. âYou spent six months studyinâ what I been doinâ for over a hundred years, little scholar. Fifty women in the Delta. Thirty in Chicago. Ten moeâ up here in this city.â His thumb pressed the mark again. âAn nan one of âem still alive.â
What little air you had left in your lungs evaporated.
âI donât keep âem,â he said, with the same flat, unceremonious tone he might use to discuss something beneath his interest. âI feed, an I move. Thatâs how this goes.â He watched your face process that. âBut youâŚâ The thumb stilled. His eyes narrowed by a fraction, that cataloguing attention sharpening into something closer to actual curiosity. âYou smell different. Even through three weeks of beinâ this close to you an only takinâ the crumbs.â He exhaled through his nose. âI ainât decided yet whether thatâs your problem or mine.â
For the first time in your life, silence blanketed you and you said nothing. Every smart thing youâd ever learned felt very far away.
âNow, whatâs âbout to happen,â he continued, his voice dropping to a register that bypassed your ears entirely and settled at the base of your spine, âis Iâm gonâ finish what I started three weeks ago. All them dreams I done built up an took away.â His eyes burned. âIâm collectinâ what's mine. All of it. Tonight.â
Another deathly silence fell over the room like a weight. Then out of nowhere you gained the foolish and courageous audacity to speak up. Regardless of what you knew about Stackâs endeavors as one of the top five devious incubi to ever exist, you refused to just lay down and take what was being forced upon you without a fight. âNigga, have you lost your rabbit ass mind? I donât care what or who you are. Remove this mark and leave my room!â
When you spoke, something shifted in Stackâs face. The not-quite-smile he was holding onto cracked open into something real, brief and genuine, but it was gone in an instant and replaced with something that lacked patience or concern for your wellbeing.Â
âMmm, nice to know this lilâ school girl ainât lose that mouth,â he said softly. âBeen wonderinâ when that was gonâ come out.â
âIâm not joking.â
âI know you ainât.â He looked at you with indifference and intentionally pressed the mark again before greedily watching the wave of cruel pleasure roll through your body with clinical satisfaction. âYou scared, turned on, an you pissed off âbout both. So you come out swinginâ âcause thatâs what prey do when it ainât got nowhere to run.â He pressed again. âBut we both know how this ends.â
âYou keep saying that.â
ââCause I might tell a joke, but I ainât nevaâ told a lie.â
He sat back on his heels between your thighs, and the full height of him settled itself above you. You immediately understood with a cold, clarifying certainty that he had allowed you to see the room this whole time, had allowed you the illusion of something to run toward, because it had amused him. But tonight there would be no running. He had been living in your apartment walls for three weeks and now he wanted to live in your other set of walls for eternity.Â
Stack kept his intense glare locked on you as he reached down and removed the remainder of what he had been wearing, which had been minimal and evaporated it into thin air with the snap of his fingers. As your eyes traveled from his face down to his groin, the full reality of him boldly presented itself in the warm lamp-lit air of your bedroom. When you locked eyes with his twitching girthy member that was leaking clear ropes of precum, your brain frazzled out and stopped working. He was built proportionately, and the heavy weight that curved upward between his thighs had surprisingly not been an exaggeration within your dreams.Â
He watched you looking.
ââLeven inches,â he said, conversationally. âCase you was tryna calculate.â
Your mouth went completely dry and you could feel your face heat up with embarrassment for staring so intensely. âItâs just like⌠in the dreamsâŚâ The sentence dissolved. âBut⌠that can't be⌠That wasâŚâ
âThem dreams I gave you was accurate⌠sorta kinda,â he said nonchalantly. âI can make my pecker as big or as small as I want. Figure most women can take âleven inches⌠a properly trained slut can take moeâ.â He paused and a sly grin spread across his face as he casually palmed his hardened length and stroked it. ââMember how, in them dreams, you was never empty? Not one hole of you?â
Flashbacks to weeks of being filled and denied the ability to climax raced at lightning speed through your mind. Your thighs pressed together when you thought about the first time he filled every hole with little to no resistance, as if your body was created to take everything he gave you with no complaints. Â
âWatch,â he commanded. The air around him shifted as the shadow-substance of him slithered around his body until beneath the first rod, emerged the second. It was identical to the first one, same length and girth, separated by just a few inches of space and curving in a slightly different direction with the readiness that couldnât wait a second longer to be buried inside of you.Â
You continued to lay in the same position and said nothing for a very long time. For six months you spent hours upon hours gathering data that proved incubi were nothing more than a sexual myth spread amongst sexually deprived wives, but now the truth was staring right at you and this wasn't a dream.Â
After another minute passed you finally spoke, or at least attempted to. âOh,â you said finally.
Surprisingly your silence amused Stack. You gawked at him as if he was a degenerate spawn of Satan sent from hell (he was), meanwhile the leaking lips between your thighs revealed a truth the lips on your face refused to confess. A connection was set in stone, he was now the one who wielded the keys to your pleasure and if you wanted to cum you would need to play by his rules.Â
âOh, thatâsâŚâ You stopped yourself and thought for a moment. Your dissertation had seventeen footnotes about this specific capability. You had called it physiologically implausible mythological embellishment. âThatâsâŚâ
âReal?â he offered.
You closed your eyes briefly and took a much needed deep breath. âI owe some of my sources an apology.â
His laugh was genuine, short, and gone as fast as it came. âYeah, you do.â He positioned himself over you again and the proximity of all of him filled your senses in a way your body responded to with immediate, embarrassing clarity. âNow.â He looked down at the full length of you beneath him with the flat, appetite-driven attention of something that had waited long enough. âYou done wastinâ my time.â
That wasnât a question.
The black tentacles arrived before you had finished deciding anything. They materialized from the shadow-substance of him the way all his other alterations had, not emerging from somewhere external but flowing from within, liquid darkness given direction and purpose. The first one coiled around your left wrist, the second found your right ankle, the third and fourth bracketed your thighs and repositioned you exactly the way he wanted, spread open and presented in front of him like an offering to a deity.
Where each tendril made contact with your skin, a warmth spread inward, not the warmth of touch, but the warmth of something entering your bloodstream, a seeping heat that traveled from each contact point along your veins and gathered at your core with a rising intensity. You felt it move. Could track its path spreading under your skin, pooling between your thighs, rising up through your chest and flooding outward to your fingertips.
And then out of nowhere an intense sensation of amplified sensitivity turned your brain to mush. Your nipples hardened so fast you made a whining sound, desperate for anything to touch them. The sensation at each tip was so acute and present that even the faint flow of air against them made you gasp. The heat between your thighs went from warmth to something else entirely, something that soaked through you in a rush you felt dripping, actually felt the wetness spreading and pooling beneath you on the duvet, your body betraying you with a thoroughness that left nothing unrevealed.
Stack watched as your body reacted to the aphrodisiac released from his tentacles. Each movement and twitch you made confirmed that he made the right decision edging you for three weeks, because now you were primed and ready to take everything he was willing to give. He glared at you with an expression that went beyond incubi hunger. His gaze held no warmth in it at all. You were a resource. You were something that had responded correctly. Nothing more. Nothing less.Â
âThere she go,â he said flatly. âEvery nerve probably feel lit up like a Christmas tree.â His eyes tracked the hard points of your nipples, the soaked state between your thighs and the way your whole body was vibrating at a frequency several registers above normal. There wasnât a sliver of appreciation in his eyes. He just stared at you with the same assessing quality a man used when checking that an engine had turned over. âTook long enough.âÂ
âWhat did youâŚâ You couldnât complete a sentence. Each word required more focus than you could currently locate.
âNatural chemical process,â he said, crouching down to your level to analyze you better. âWhat my kind produce⌠it amplifies whatâs already there.â His eyes met yours. âAn what was already there wasâŚâ He looked you over again, that flat inventory gaze. âAdequate.â
Before you could register the backhanded shade, Stack reached out and barely grazed the back of two fingers across the curve of your breast and the sensation that traveled from that graze through your entire chest made your hand jerk against the tendril holding your wrist. He pulled his hand back immediately and looked at what your body had done with the expression of a man confirming a predicted result.
âSensitive,â he said, to himself more than to you.
âShadow Man⌠StackâŚâ
âDonât call me that.â His eyes cut to yours. âWhen Iâm inside you, you call me Elias. When you begginâ, you gon call me Elias. Every other time, you donât call me nothinâ at all.â
âI donâtâŚâ Your voice gave out around the sensation still radiating from where he last touched you. âIâm not going to beg for you for shit.â
He looked at you for a long, flat moment before chuckling lowly to himself. âYeah, you is,â
He dragged the same two fingers up the side of your other breast, over the top, and then traced the curve underneath, and what came out of you wasnât a sound you planned on producing voluntarily. It tore itself free from your esophagus, raw and soaked in three weeks of denial. He studied the sound the way a linguist studied a dialect. Cataloguing. Storing.
âNasty lilâ trinket,â he said, no warmth in the words, only that same nonchalant, clinical quality. âLook at all this.â His eyes moved over your body with thorough attention, the soft, generous swell of you, the brown skin gleaming covered in a thin layer of sweat, the roundness of your belly and the width of your hips and the full, heavy weight of your breasts nestled on your frame. âThree weeks I been smellinâ this an drinkinâ off the edges.â He sounded genuinely put out about it, not in the way of a man who cared about you but in the way of a man who found inefficiency irritating. âAlmost felt like I was wastinâ my time.â
âYou did it to yourself,â you managed.
âYeah⌠I did,â he agreed. âAnâ Iâm done with all that⌠Iâm starvinâ.â
All you could do was watch in anticipation as Stack positioned himself between your spread thighs with the ease of something that had done this many times before. His forearms braced on your inner thighs and the full contact of his skin against yours sent cascading surges of sensation rippling down to your core from both sides at once. He looked at the state of you with his chin nearly resting against the inside of your thigh and his red eyes moving over your center with an expression that was purely functional.
âLook at this fuckinâ mess.â He drew one finger through your swollen folds, barely any pressure at all, the lightest possible contact, and held it up, examining what it had gathered. âSoaked clean through. Drippinâ on the sheets like you ainât got no control over yaself.â He clicked his tongue in false disappointment. âAn this âposed to be the lilâ schoolgirl who spent six months tryinâ to tell the world ionâ exist.â
You hated that this cocky ass incubus was correct. For six months you scrubbed through every crevice of the internet and readily available libraries in your district. For six months you worked day and night to prove that beings like this didnât exist⌠just to be bound to a bed by one. âDonâtâŚâ You mumbled quietly underneath your breath. Your mind was too far gone to even think about fighting back, but your stubbornness still held onto a small ember of defiance you refused to let die.Â
âDonât what?â The question was filled with sarcasm as he pressed two fingers through your folds with slightly more intent and your hips jumped toward him involuntarily. He pulled back immediately, watching your body chase his hand. âLook at that. Canât even hold still. Desperate lilâ cocksleeve.â The word landed low in your belly and lit something there that you werenât going to examine at the moment. âThree weeks I kept you right on that edge an ya body got the audacity to act surprised.â He shook his head. âPathetic.â
âYou causedâŚâ
âI know I caused it.â He pressed his thumb against your pulsating clit, barely, just resting it there, not moving, just the warm weight of contact, and watched you seize beneath him. He removed it and listened to the frustrated, broken sound you produced without any change in his expression. âI caused it âcause I wanted you exactly like this. Wanted to see what the scholar look like when all them fancy words run out.â He tilted his head to the side and smirked. âYou look real stupid an needy like a bitch in heat... Case you ainât know.â
âFuck you. I am going toâŚâ
âYou gonâ what?â Again, his tone was full of ego and sarcasm as he called out your empty threat. Even if you somehow fought through the cloud of lust that now infiltrated your mind, you wouldnât last another night without tasting the sweetness of release.Â
Silence filled the room for a second before Stack let out a dry humorous huff. âThatâs what I thought.â He lowered his head. âNow shut up anâ lemme see if this juicy pussy as sweet as it was in them dreams.â
His warm mouth found you and the first contact pulled a sound from your throat that bounced off every wall in the room and came back to you unrecognizable. His tongue was just as otherworldly in real life as it was in your dreams. It was longer and thicker than it had any right to be and it was capable of configurations that no human musculature supported as it curled and pressed inside you, locating untouched zones in your pussy that your nervous system had never had a formal introduction to. It went directly where it was needed with no need for unnecessary exploration or uncertainty. Three weeks of dream-reconnaissance had given it a map it had memorized.
He licked through you like you were something he had been craving specifically, a long flat drag from base to tip that made your back bow off the restraints with your voice cracking on his name.
âE-EliasâŚâ
He lifted his head just enough to speak against you, his voice rough and scraping. âWhat I tell you?â He pressed his tongue back inside you and curled it forward in a way that made your free hand fly to his head before a tentacle caught your wrist and returned it firmly to where he wanted it placed.
He devoured your pussy like a man making a point. All the responses he pulled out of you, from the overflow of your forbidden honey to the sounds you couldnât contain, he silently catalogued everything and used it to calibrate the next strike. He found the specific place inside you that three weeks of dreams had identified as the most devastating and returned to it using his tongue with a frequency that removed your ability to form language of thought.
Just like in your dreams you began crying from overstimulation. Whenever he placed himself between your thighs you never intended to cry, but something about how he effortlessly built your pleasure past the point of bearing and kept building, your tears had no excuse but to fall from your eyes. Your body felt like it was on cloud nine and you so desperately wanted to teeter over that edge into the abyss of bliss. The tears tracked hot from the corners of your eyes down your flustered cheeks, while your thighs shook against his shoulders and your hands went pale in the shadowed restraints.
âTaste so goddamn sweet,â he growled against your fluttering pussy, and for once there was something raw in his voice outside of the nonchalant sarcasm he wore like a mask. âAll the othersâŚâ He sealed his mouth over you again, tongue working in a tight, relentless rotation, and the sentence dissolved. He said it against your skin anyway, half to himself: âNothinâ like this. Not one of âem.â
That revelation shouldnât have done what it did to you as your walls clenched at the compliment. You mentally filed this away for later.
He spread you wider with two fingers and rotated his tongue deeper before pulling his head back far enough to spit directly onto your entrance and then sealed his mouth over you again. The indignity crashed into the pleasure and made the pleasure worse, deeper, more consuming, your whole body jolting in the tendrilâs grip, a sob tearing from your chest.
âDonât⌠donât you dare stopâŚâ
Based on everything that transpired so far, you would assume that you wouldâve learned to follow Stackâs rules by now, but you couldnât help yourself. The second that whiney sentence escaped your mouth, he stopped. The withdrawal was instant and his mouth left you as the cool air hit your soaked and oversensitized skin, forcing you to make a sound that was a genuinely desperate, broken plea that you felt in your own sternum and could not recall back.
He looked up at you from between your thighs with his jaw glistening, his eyes burning, and one brow raised. âThought I told you to shut the fuck up,â he said pleasantly.
âI⌠you⌠EliasâŚâ
âYou talk,â he cut you off, âI stop. Simple math. You wanna keep beinâ difficult or you wanna cum?â
Your jaw snapped shut as you silently glared at the bane of your existence settled between your thighs. You quietly decided to listen⌠for now.Â
âMmm smart girl.â He lowered his head. âDonât make me repeat myself.â
Stack finished what he had started with a relentless focus and refusing to leave his work incomplete. He worked you up through three distinct peaks, each one higher than the last and each one permitted to crest fully because he was no longer denying you. He was getting drunk off your pussy juice and indulging on every drop you released into his mouth as if he was a dehydrated man drinking from a well.
Your first orgasm after three weeks of denial almost made your soul leave your human vessel. As your voice hit a register that surprised the both of you, your body seized and wave after wave of backed up euphoria crashed through you while he effortlessly held you open and slurped up every drop.
Even though your orgasm was enough to almost make you pass out, he didnât stop. Instead, his tongue retracted from your pulsating canal and he refilled your needy hole with two of his fingers while letting his tongue focus on your sensitive bundle of nerves. The dual input left your conscious mind with nothing to work with.
âEliasâŚâ Your voice was wrecked. âE-E-Elias, I canât⌠itâs too muchâŚâ
His massive hand came down hard across the outside of your thick thigh. The crack of it echoed in the room and the sting bloomed hot across your skin as the sharp contrast to everything else made you clench around his fingers hard enough to make him groan in delight.
âWhat I say?â he quipped against you. If you were any other human he wouldâve ended your life right then and there for making him have to repeat himself.
Your mouth locked shut as you felt his controlled murderous intent linger in the air.Â
âGood little slut,â he said, and dove back in.
The second climax rolled through you just as harshly as the first one. Long devastating waves of pleasure left your legs shaking around his head and reduced your voice to a continuous, formless sound. When he finally lifted his head, his face was soaked and his eyes were burning brighter than they had been when he first appeared. He was now well fed and his eyes reflected that as they shined brightly in the dark.Â
âTwo,â he said, voice rough and thick. âJust sumâ to the edge off.â He wiped his jaw with the back of his hand. Looked down at what was on it and then looked at you before licking your residue off his skin. âNow Iâm confident I can fuck you without killinâ you.â
He moved your plush body with ease, his hands gripped the generous, soft flesh of your hips and repositioned you in a way that pleased him. You were pliant in a way you couldnât prevent and couldnât be embarrassed about because embarrassment required cognitive resources you no longer possessed at the moment. He turned you onto your stomach. Large hands spread across the full width of your hips, lifting, tilting, and settling you at the foot of the bed, knees and upper body braced across the mattress, the full generous curve of your backside presented to the room behind you.
He silently appreciated the fullness of your perfectly round ass and his palm came down before you were fully settled. The spank cracked through the room with a sound that made your whole body lurch forward, the sting blooming hot and immediate, causing you to yelp into the soaked duvet with your hands flying back instinctively. He caught your wrists, both of them, and pressed them into the small of your back.
âKeep âem there,â he said. âMove âem again an Iâll use a belt on you.â
âA belt? But⌠you donât have aâŚâ
His hand landed again, harder, on the same spot. Your teeth snapped shut around the cry you held back.
âIâm a demon, sweetheart. If I can produce two dicks, I can produce a muthafuckinâ belt.â His hand smoothed over the heat his palm had left, squeezing the soft flesh there with the assessing grip of someone checking the quality of something he owned. âKeep. Them. There.â
You learned your lesson and refused to make him repeat himself again as you obediently kept your hands where he wanted them.
âLook up,â he said.
You complied and the floor-length mirror in front of your bed reflected everything. You were spread, flushed, and looked thoroughly undone from just two simple oral climaxes. Every roll, curve, and generous soft inch of you was displayed beautifully under the dim lamplight with no concealment available. The roundness of your belly pressed to the mattress edge. The width of your hips were framed by his enormous hands. The fullness of your thighs trembled. And behind you, rising to his full height with his shadowed wings fanning wide and his horns catching the lamplight, both of his lengths were present and heavy as they gently nudged your aching entrances.
âLook at this ass,â he said, and now there was something in his voice he wasnât entirely containing, something that crept through the flat, functional register and carried actual wanting in it. He squeezed both handfuls of your plump backside, spreading and releasing, over and over again, the flesh giving like playdough under his grip. âSoftest thing I done ever touched. Shouldâve had this weeks ago.â His hands continued to knead the generous curve of you, his thumbs pressing into the give of your lower back. âGonna mark every inch of this pretty brown skin âfore Iâm done with you. Leave somethinâ behind so ya body âmember who it belong to now.â
His palm came down again, three times in rapid succession on alternating sides, and your wrists jerked against your own back but you held them in place, tears starting fresh in the corners of your eyes from the compounding sting.
âThatâs it,â he said. âYou learninâ.â
He looked at your reflection with those burning red eyes. Watched your face while his hands mapped every soft, full inch of your derriere and thighs. âLook at yaself,â he said. âLook at what you is right now. Bent over with that ass arched up for a demon that donât know what mercy is anâ donât want to.â His head tilted to the side and smirked. âAn you love it. Look at yaâ face.â
Your reflection looked back at you with swollen lips, wet cheeks, and pupils blown wide. He was right. You hated that he was right.
He lowered his head and his teeth found the curve of your shoulder, the bite he left was sharp and deep enough to make you cry out. He sealed his mouth over the mark and sucked until your skin bruised dark beneath his lips, intentionally pressing the evidence of himself into your flesh like a brand. He pulled back to look at what heâd left there in the mirror.
âMine,â he mumbled, to the mark more than to you.
Then his teeth found the back of your neck and he bit again, harder this time, one hand gripping the back of your head to hold you in place, and the sharp bloom of pain cresting into the pleasure already coursing through your system made your whole body lurch forward into the mattress and pull back against him in the same contradictory motion.
âGot a trail of bitches I done fed on in the Delta,â he said against the nape of your neck, his voice rough and low, the drawl thickening. âCouple more of âem up here in this bright ass city.â He pressed his teeth against another patch of skin at your shoulder blade and bit again, not as deep, dragging a sound from you that you felt deep in your bones. âEvery single one of âem⌠I was done with after draininâ âem dry.â His hands gripped the full width of your hips and held. âAn then thereâs you...â
He pressed both of his lengths against you simultaneously, one against your soaked entrance, the second against your chocolate starfish the stimulant had lit up completely, and his hand came around to wrap around your throat from behind, keeping you in place and silently reminding you who was the new owner of your body.
âLook at me in that mirror,â he commanded. âYou look away, an I canât promise Iâll keep beinâ nice.â
Immediately you locked eyes with him in your reflection as he slowly began pushing both of his lengths inside. Just like in your dream, he controlled and thrusted both of his dicks at once and the stretch they left behind was obliterating. His hand at your throat tightened, just enough, just the right amount of pressure that reduced your airflow without completely cutting it off, while making every sensation sharper and more present. Â
âSo fuckinâ tight⌠mmm mmm,â he grunted, the control fraying at the edges. âPerfect lilâ fucktoy.â He drove deeper and the muffled cry you produced vibrated against his palm. âBoth these tight holes. After three weeks.â His forehead dropped briefly to the back of your shoulder and the sound he made was genuine as he let out an uncontrolled satisfied groan.
For a few precious moments, Stack continued to give you slow and careful strokes until he felt your body loosening up, allowing him to stuff you deeper with dick. The moment your body gave him a silent green light, his hips drew back and snapped forward.
Your cry hit the room and he didnât muffle it. Let it ring off the walls, watched in the mirror as your whole body absorbed the impact and rippled with it, the tender flesh of your thighs, belly, and backside shuddering with each drive of his hips. He watched that specifically. The way your body moved under him. The way the soft, full weight of you responded to every strike. His teeth found your shoulder again and tore another mark into your skin without breaking rhythm, and the quadruple combination of pain, pleasure, fullness, and his hand at your throat reduced your entire conscious mind to a single sustained frequency.
âListen to you,â he said, his rhythm building, each stroke harder than the last. âAll that smart mouth an now all you can do is cry on my dick like a greedy lilâ whore.â He drove forward and your knees buckled beneath you. His hand tightened on your throat, pulling you back up. âStay up. I wanna see you take this dick.â He thrusted again. âLook in that fuckinâ mirror. Look!â
Even though it was one of the most difficult requests you were commanded to complete in a long time, you looked. What you saw reflecting back in the mirror was something you had no vocabulary for. The enormous, monstrous, and devastating reality of him behind you, wings spread, eyes burning, two separate places inside you being attended to simultaneously while his hand collared your throat and the mark on your chest glowed steady between your swaying breasts. When your eyes landed on your face you looked back at yourself as if you were seeing your reflection for the first time ever, and maybe you truly were.Â
He bit your neck again, on the other side this time, and the groan that tore from him when you seized around both lengths almost made you climax again.
âSee it?â His voice was raw, grinding through clenched teeth as he worked into the tight grip of both of you. âSee what you is right now? My cocksleeve. My personal filthy lil human fucktoy.â His free hand cracked across your backside again, hard enough to snap your attention and draw a fresh cry. âAnswer when ya Master is speakinâ to you!â
âYesâŚâ
âYes what?â
âYes, sir⌠I-I-I see itâŚâ
âMmm.â He drove forward and held, grinding deep, both lengths pressing against their respective points of obliteration simultaneously. âAn you like what you see. Donât you?â
You unintentionally stayed silent for a moment too long and his hand at your throat tightened by one fraction.
âDonât you?â
âYes,â you said, and the word came out honest and immediate, stripped of everything you had been protecting. âYes, I like itâŚâ
âThatâs my nasty lilâ bitch,â he said. The praise and the degradation arrived tangled together, inseparable, and your body seized around both of him hard enough to make his rhythm stutter. âI felt that. You squeeze me like that again an Iâll edge you for another week.â
Your inner walls loosened immediately.
âSmart girl,â he said.
He moved, and there was no performance left in it, no patience, no management, just the driven rhythm of a starved incubus taking what it had been wanting for a very long time. His hips snapped against the soft give of your ass with a force and sound that left no academic language available. The tentacles repositioned around your breasts, coiling and working your nipples with a relentless suction that pulled continuous sound from your throat above the steady percussion of his hips against yours. A fifth tendril found your swollen clit and circled it in tight, merciless rotations.
Everywhere simultaneously. Nothing was left unattended. At this point your body was nothing more than a complete and total instrument in his hands.
âYou gonna cum again,â he demanded. Not a question.
âI⌠yes⌠EliasâŚâ
âSay please.â
âP-p-PleaseâŚ?â
âPlease what, cumbucket?â
âPleaseâŚâ The word broke. âP-Please let me cumâŚâ
His free hand came down across your left asscheek. This time he landed six sharp strikes in succession that had you lurching forward into the mattress, the sting radiating up through your lower body and compounding with everything else until you couldnât tell pain from pleasure and didnât want to. âYou gonâ beg better than that,â he said.
âPleaseâŚâ Your voice was openly sobbing now, tears and saliva and all of your composed doctoral-candidate dignity dissolved completely. âP-P-Please, I need it, please⌠M-Master Elias I canât⌠pleaseâŚâ
âMmm sound like music to my ears.â his voice was low and dark, riddled with lust and domination. âThatâs how a slut beg her Master proper.â
No other words were spoken as he drove forward once, deeper than expected, and the tendril at your clit pressed hard, forcing your body to make a decision on your release without waiting to be told.
This third orgasm hit you like a structural failure. You didn't experience a simple wave of pleasure coursing through your veins like before, but instead, you felt a blissful collapse as everything that was compressed and pleading for release finally received its wish. Your whole body convulsed around him in both places, the clench of you rippling around his dicks causing a string of profanity from him that was half prayer and half something else you couldnât decipher.
âS-ShitâŚâ He drove through it, chasing the feeling, his rhythm losing its pacing and becoming momentarily sloppy. âDemon dick got you feelinâ so good you trynaâ push me out?â He bit the back of your neck again, hard enough to make you see twinkling stars, and the sting made you clench harder. âDo that shit again.â
In all honesty, at this point you couldnât have stopped even if you wanted to. His hand left your throat and came to your hair instead, gripping the base of it, wrapping once, pulling your head back until your spine curved and you could see the ceiling. The stretch of it combined with everything else made your body shudder uncontrollably under his touch.
âIâm gonâ fill you up,â he said, his voice stripped to its barest register, thick and rough and no longer making any effort at composure. âEvery single hole. Tonight.â His hips drove forward and held, both of him buried to their full and impossible depths, your body wrapped tight around everything he was giving it. âAn you gonâ take it. Understand me?â
There wasnât much time to fully break down what Stack meant about filling all your holes before a shadowed tentacle pressed into your gaping mouth. The tentacle was warm and sweet on your tongue and effortlessly slid up and down your esophagus, skillfully avoiding your gag reflex. Just like the previous tentacles, this one released aphrodisiac fluids into your mouth, sharpening every sensation. He set a rhythm then that used extensions of himself simultaneously, in and out, in and out, the synchrony of it was like an orchestra with one conductor and nowhere in your body left untouched.
He continued to pull you up by the hair until you were chest-to-back with him, both of you upright at the foot of the bed, your back against his chest and his hands now settled on the soft rounds of your breasts, squeezing, releasing, and indulging in the generous weight of them. His teeth found the junction of your neck and shoulder and tore another mark into your skin while his hands worked your nipples relentlessly, and when you jerked against the pain he held you tighter, pinning you against the full length of him with one arm banded across your chest.
Your head fell back against his shoulder. Your hands gripped his forearms.
âLook at this,â he muttered into your ear, his voice guttural. âMarked up already. Every inch of this pretty neck an shoulder got my teeth in it.â His eyes found yours in the reflection and held. âThatâs so everybody that come after me knows. Donât matter what you put on, donât matter how many layers⌠you walk out of this apartment tomorrow an you wearinâ me.â He rolled his hips forward, deep, and watched your face in the mirror as your mouth continued to deep throat his tentacle. âMine,â he said, against the freshest mark. âEvery filthy inch.â
He released your breast and tipped you forward again, your hands catching the mattress, and his hips resumed with the driven urgency of something approaching its own limit.
âImma fill this ass first,â he grunted, through his teeth. âThen that slutty lilâ pussy, an finally that smart ass mouth.â He drove forward relentlessly.Â
The tentacle in your mouth pressed deep, adjusting to the dimensions of your throat with an intelligence that left no room for resistance, making your eyes water and your fingers curl into the duvet. It continued thrusting at a set rhythm in your throat and you had no choice but to accommodate it, your jaw stretched wide around the girth of it, saliva gathering and spilling freely from the corners of your mouth as it pressed deeper with each stroke.
âEvery hole,â Stack rasped behind you, his voice stripped to its barest register. âEvery one of âem mine.â
You didnât know how it was possible but his strokes became rougher as he thrusted uncontrollably within your tight walls and mouth. The sound your body made around that much fullness was obscene, wet and continuous. Your pussy walls and stretched asshole both, spasmed protest that his hips drove through without acknowledgment.
Then out of nowhere his already large lengths began to grow. It happened slowly enough that your overworked holes registered each degree of it separately, the stretch widening by fractions, your body forced to accommodate more and then more. Both of his dicks expanded inside you at the same time, thickening and lengthening in the way the dreams had shown you was possible and that your waking body was now receiving with an airless, wide-eyed, tear-streaming reality.
âA-A-a-A-a-AhâŚâ The sound was muffled entirely by the tentacle seated in your throat. Your hands clawed at the duvet. Your thighs tried to kick apart further as if more space might be found somewhere.
âYou feelinâ that?â His voice was guttural, barely language. His hands gripped the wide, soft rounds of your hips with bruising force, his fingers pressing deep into the give of your flesh, holding you exactly where he wanted you while he continued to expand inside you. âFeel me gettinâ bigger in both them holes at once, lilâ cumbucket?â
You couldnât answer. Your throat was thoroughly occupied, the tentacle stroking deeper with each pass, the fluid it kept releasing sending cascading heat down through your chest and belly that mixed with everything else until your body felt like one continuous raw nerve.
âLook at that stomach,â he ordered, as one hand released your hip and pressed flat against your lower belly, and there it was, the faint but undeniable outline of him visible through the plush skin there, the shape of what was inside you pressing against the surface. His palm pressed over it and you felt the pressure from both sides immediately. The sound that came out of you around the tentacle was shameless and continuous. âFeel that? Feel yaâ Master all the way up in this pretty belly?â He pressed his palm firmer, and his voice when he continued had roughened by several degrees. âYou was made for this. Built just for this.â He pummeled forward and the pressure beneath his palm intensified.Â
The tentacle in your mouth pressed deeper, finding the resistance of your throat and pressing past it in slow, rocking strokes that left your eyes streaming and your lips obscenely stretched. Your face was a mess covered in a mixture of tears, drool, and sweat.Â
Stack looked at your face and growled as his dicks twitched inside of you. âMessy lilâ thing,â he mumbled. âCryinâ an droolinâ like a good filthy cocksleeve.â His hips snapped forward, the force of it knocking your knees further apart. âThatâs all you is, you know that? My new personal toy. Found you by accident anâŚâ He drove forward again, harder, and the sentence took a moment to resume. âDecided to keep you. âCause this pussy too good to waste.â He bit your shoulder again, in a place he had not yet marked, and the fresh sting drew a muffled sob from your throat. âGonâ keep you alive. Long as you keep feedinâ me like this.â
He set his full rhythm then, both hips and tentacle synchronized, the triple occupation of your body moving together in a coordinated assault that left your body unable to prioritize any single input. The tentacle stroked your throat in the same cadence that his hips rocked against your backside, the fullness inside you now specific and pressing against every interior wall you had. The additional tentacles reappeared and latched back onto your body. The two at your nipples worked in pulsing, rhythmic suctions and the one circling your clit flicked back and forth in a clockwise and counterclockwise rotation. You were experiencing nothing but stimulation layered on top of stimulation, wave stacked over wave, and your bodyâs capacity to separate any single sensation from the mass of it was completely overwhelmed.
âYou gonâ cum again,â he rasped. âRight now. With all of me inside you.â
Your muffled sounds around the tentacle were continuous and broken.
âNod if you hear me.â
You nodded and let your mind continue to get drunk on the pleasure.
His palm pressed harder against your belly, pressing the outline of himself from outside while driving deeper from within, the pressure meeting itself through the soft wall of your skin in a way that made your thighs seize. âYou so fuckinâ full. So fuckinâ stuffed like a proper lilâ bitch.â He withdrew both lengths almost entirely and then drove forward in one devastating stroke, burying himself to their hilt with no mercy.
Your final orgasm of the night had you questioning what life was like before this incubus infiltrated it and presented you with sex good enough for you to throw away your morals. Your whole body locked, thighs went rigid, back bowed, hands white-knuckled in the soaked duvet, and then finally your climax erupted through your body so violently and continuously that the tentacle in your mouth muffled a sound that might otherwise have woken the entire apartment building. Your walls convulsed around both lengths in frantic, milking waves, your body trying to process the simultaneous fullness and the crashing release at the same time.Â
Stack fucked you through every wave of pleasure. His hips never stilled, never slowed, working through your clenching and convulsing with a focused urgency as he began chasing his own limit. His rhythm became erratic and his breathing audible and ragged over your marked shoulder.
"Keep goin'," he said, through clenched teeth. "Don't stop. Gimme' every drop."
Your body obeyed its Master's command. The orgasm extended past any reasonable duration, sustained by the continued stimulation of the tentacles at your nipples and clit, drawn out past the point of coherence into something that felt less like pleasure and more like dissolution.
He hit his own limit in the middle of it. The sound that tore out of him was nothing like the controlled, drawling entity that had spent the last hour cataloguing your responses with clinical detachment. It was guttural and stripped of every layer he had on, ripped from somewhere as if he was genuinely overwhelmed for the first time in a very long time. His hips stuttered once, twice, losing the rhythm entirely, and then he drove forward with his full weight behind it and buried both lengths to their absolute hilt in a single punishing stroke that knocked you flat into the mattress and pulled a scream into the tentacle still seated in your throat.
He didnât stop there. His release came in waves of his own and he chased every one of them, hips snapping forward in short, brutal drives that had no patience left in them, just the raw and shaking urgency of something taking what it needed. The first surge of heat inside your chocolate starfish filled you from the inside so completely that you felt it everywhere at once. The second wave inside your core drew another round of undone sounds from his chest, and his hands on the wide rounds of your hips gripped so hard you knew without looking that the bruises would be spectacular in the morning. The third had him pressing his forehead into the back of your shoulder, his breathing audible and wrecked, the drawl completely gone from what little language he had left.
"Shit," he said, against your skin. Then again, lower, more honest, "S-Shit."
The tentacle in your throat released in the same rhythm, filling that space with the same hot, steady pulses, and the combination of all three holes receiving his sticky seed at once reduced your body to a single sustained note of overwhelming fullness. You felt it pooling. Felt it gathering in the tight spaces his lengths had carved out and made their own. Felt it when he rolled his hips forward one final time, grinding himself to full depth with a slow pressure that was less about chasing release and more about making absolutely certain you felt every last pulse of it.
His hands on your hips shook and you felt that. Felt the tremor in the grip of something that didn't tremble, had never trembled, had spent a hundred and thirty-seven years putting its hands on women and leaving with nothing but a full belly and a body behind. You felt it and you filed it away in the part of your brain that was still running the dissertation, the part that took notes even now, even like this, and you said nothing about it because some things were better left unexamined for both of you.
As his body calmed back down, he pressed his forehead deeply into the back of your shoulder. Neither of you made a sound for a long moment beyond breathing. The tentacle in your mouth withdrew from your throat slowly and carefully, and the gasp that followed sounded as if you were on the verge of drowning. Your lungs pulled in air with desperate, greedy pulls. Your jaw was aching and your lips were wet and swollen. You swallowed what was left on your tongue. Shuddered in delight at the taste of him, then swallowed again.
After two long minutes and a few extra spurts of cum, Stack pulled free of both places with the same careful, deliberate slowness, and the sounds your body made at the loss of him were slightly embarrassing. The emptiness that followed was its own specific quality of devastation, your body reaching for fullness that was no longer there, walls fluttering against nothing, the absence amplified and felt everywhere.
He settled you down onto the dry portion of your bed. Both hands, steadying the soft weight of you down with a thoroughness that used every generous inch. Then he sat at the edge of the bed, threw his head back, and looked at the ceiling.
âDamn,â he said, to no one in particular. His voice was wrecked. Rough and stripped and nothing like the controlled, cocky entity that had appeared above you an hour ago.
You lay face-down in the duvet and assessed your situation. You had a dissertation to revise. You had office hours on Tuesday. You were thoroughly and completely destroyed by a century-old Mississippi Delta incubus who had just filled all three of your holes simultaneously and was currently sitting three feet away looking at the ceiling like a man who had also been through something. Your neck and shoulders were marked in at least ten different places, the bruises already surfacing in the dark, already tender when the cooled air of the room touched them.
âFour footnotes,â you said, eventually, into the duvet.
Stack turned his head and analyzed you but stayed silent.
âIn the dissertation. I owe four separate footnotes an apology.â
The laugh that came out of him was genuine and startled both of you. It was gone just as fast as it had arrived, like he hadnât intended to produce it. âYeah,â he said. âYou do.â
The lamp burned low in the corner of your bedroom. The fan turned overhead. The mark on your chest glowed faintly between your breasts, warm and steady in the dark.
Stack was quiet for a moment longer. Then he reached out and pressed his palm flat against your lower back. The heat of his hand spread through tired, overworked muscle the way a brand cooled slowly, staying in the skin long after the source withdrew.
âYou gonâ be sore,â he said.
âIâm aware.â
âGonâ be sore for a few days.â
âAlso aware.â
A pause. âIâll bring you somethinâ for it.â
You lifted your face from the duvet. Just enough to look at him sideways like he lost his mind. âYou are an ancient demon entity,â you said, âwith no human morals and a documented body count.â
âMm hm.â
âAnd youâre going to bring me something for soreness instead of killing me?â
âFor a scholar you sure do have a tough time listeninâ. I done told you, you my property now,â he said, without a single inflection of irony. âCanât have you damaged. Thatâs just maintenance.â
You put your face back in the duvet and sighed. âThat is not the wholesome framing you think it is.â
âWasnât tryna be wholesome.â
Silence. The city outside went on with itself, thoroughly unaware.
âElias,â you said.
âMm?â
âThe Moore documentation from 1923.â You turned your head enough to see his profile, the strong jaw, the horns catching the lamplight, the folded wings. âHattie Price. The one who never wrote anything down.â
His expression shifted slightly. âWhat âbout her?â
âWhat did she know that Beaumont and Alcott didnât?â
A long pause.
âShe knew,â he said slowly, âthat the women who called me did it on purpose.â He looked at the ceiling. âEvery one of âem. Beaumont thought they was victims⌠Technically they was since I killed âem. Alcott thought they was sinners.â The corner of his mouth moved into a half smile. âHattie knew they was just women who wanted somethinâ they didnât have a safe way to want.â
You looked at him. âThatâs the revision,â you said quietly.
âYeah,â he quietly agreed. âThatâs the revision.â
The shadow in the corner of your room breathed with its own slow tide. The lamp flickered once and held.
You closed your tired eyes. For the first time in weeks you felt as if you would be able to get a good night's rest. âDonât let me sleep through my alarm,â you yawned lazily.
âWouldnât dream of it,â said Stack.
He was lying. You both knew it. But the hand stayed settled on your lower back, warming the marks he had left into your skin, and the shadow stayed exactly where it was as you drifted off to sleep.Â
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Author's Note: Wow what a ride (pun intended). He went from being in your walls to being in your walls.
HOLLERING!!! đđđđ Chapter two Stack is going to be in for a sweet surprise đ *cough* Heâs met his match đđžââď¸đđžââď¸đđžââď¸đđžââď¸
Mr. Smokeâs & Mr. Stackâs Doll: A Little Bunny Rabbit
Authorâs Note: Itâs Gemini season! Everyone go say Happy Day Of Birth to my sister @theethighpriestess aka Bunny đ°
Warnings: +18 | Dom!Smoke | Dom!Stack | Smoke x Stack x OC | Plus Size OC | MFM | Angst (if you squint and do a backflip) | Fluff (if you squint and do three pushups) Oral Sex | Anal Sex | Edging | Coochie Drilled To Smithereens | Overstimulation | Double Penetration | Creampie | Dollification | They⌠They arenât mean in this chapter⌠have I found God?
The room smelled like a cheap pomade and even cheaper whiskey.
Bunny had caught the scent the moment she pushed open the door to room number seven. There was a stale and sour stench lingering in the air that clung to a drunken man that was expected to be her next client. She stood in the doorway for a half second, shoulders squared beneath the ivory negligee she had been assigned for the evening, her red painted toes just crossing the threshold, and she told herself it was nothing. Men came in here smelling like all manner of sin. Whiskey and cheap pomade was the least offensive of them.
The man waiting for her was a heavyset thing. Pale as uncooked dough, with a collar loosened down to his second button and cufflinks that didn't match. His eyes swam when they found her. This wasnât the ordinary tipsy swim of a man who had had two drinks to get his nerves up before visiting a house like this. No, this was the kind of swim that came from the bottom of a bottle, from a man who had been drinking since before supper and hadn't stopped for reasons that had nothing to do with enjoying the taste.Â
His mouth curved into something that was meant to be a smile but landed somewhere closer to a sneer. "There she is," he said, his words running together at the edges like watercolors left out in the rain. "Took yaâ long enough."
Bunny let the door shut behind her with a quiet click. She pulled up the smile she had spent years perfecting, the one that reached her eyes just far enough to be convincing without costing her anything real, and she moved toward the vanity to set down her small kit. "Evenin', sir," she replied, voice sweet as honeysuckle draped over a fence post in July. "You get yourself settled alright?"
"Settled?" He laughed, the sound was disgustingly wet and blunt. "I been waitin' damn near twenty minutes."
"I apologize for that, sir." She turned subtly, sizing the client up again in the mirror's reflection while she appeared to be checking her hair. She took notice of the way his body tilted just slightly to the left when he tried to sit straighter. The way his hand reached for the bedpost to steady himself without seeming to realize he had done it. The glassy, navigating-through-fog quality of his stare. Bunny had been in this business long enough to know that a drunk man in a room with a woman he had paid for was a man operating without a leash, and a man without a leash was a dangerous creature.
She angled herself toward the door by a few degrees. Just enough to escape if needed. "Sir," she said, keeping her voice sweet and calm, "I just want to make sure you feelin' alright before we get started. You seem like you might've had yourself a full night already and I wouldn't wantâ"
The remainder of her sentence was cut off because the drunken man moved without warning. He lurched to his feet, knocking the small side table with his hip and sending its single glass of water spinning off the edge to shatter against the floor. His face had turned a particular shade of red that lived between embarrassment and fury, and his jaw worked like he was chewing something bitter before he could get the words out.
"Useless bitch," he spat. The syllables fell out of him ugly and hard. "Think I paid to have some whore tell me I done had too much to drink? Think I need you lookin' down at me? I'll kill you, you hear me?!? I'll put my hands âround ya' neck and I'llâ"
His arm swung mid rant, but Bunny was already moving.
She dropped her chin to her chest and turned her body so the arc of his open palm caught nothing but air, and in the same motion her right hand went up to her hair. The blade she kept there was small, barely two inches of steel with a handle thin enough to disappear between two curling papers. It was something she had carried since she was nineteen years old and had learned in the most painful way possible that a pretty face and a small curvy frame were not assets in every room. Her fingers found it without hesitation, but with the calm surety of someone who had practiced the motion until it lived in her muscles instead of her mind.
She drew it in the same breath she stepped to his left side, and when she came back up, she sliced him across the cheekbone in one clean swipe.
The sound he made wasnât quite a scream and not quite a word. It lived somewhere between the two, high and stunned. The moment he was sliced, his hand flew to his face as the blood welled immediately, vivid and dark, running between his fingers and dripping onto the collar he had loosened two buttons down. He staggered back into the bedpost as his eyes went wide, and suddenly he was brutally sober.
"Help!" The plea tore out of him then, ragged and furious. "HELP! She cut me! This wicked bitch cut my damn FACE!"
Bunny stood quietly like a marble statue with the blade still in her hand. Her chest moved in controlled, shallow breaths as her heartbeat threw itself against her ribs like a prisoner testing the walls, but her face⌠her face was completely still. Still like a woman who had survived more than enough dangerous rooms, and this was no different. She didnât bother running or crying, instead she watched the blood run down his cheek and she waited.
Two seconds passed and the door swung open before the echo of his second shout had finished bouncing off the walls.
They filled the frame the way they always filled every frame they walked through, shoulder to shoulder, the both of them constructed from the same Mississippi clay and hardened by the same Jim Crow fire. Stack came through first, his jacket slightly disheveled as if he was in the middle of something⌠or someone, signature gold tooth catching the lamplight as his coffee brown eyes swept the room in three seconds flat. Smoke followed a half step behind, and his gaze went to the blood first, then to Bunny, then to the blade still loose in her fingers, and in that order he read the whole story without a single word being spoken.
The two of them looked at each other and it lasted less than a millisecond. They shared a sacred twin language, and there was no need to speak out loud when they could discuss everything necessary through a simple glance. There was no need for none of the vowels and consonants that other men required. Stack's chin lifted two degrees. Smoke's jaw shifted once to the right. That was all.
Smoke marched over to the bleeding man and grabbed him by the back of the collar with one hand. The client sputtered, grabbing at Smoke's wrist, voice rising again into something wheedling and enraged all at once, but Smoke wasn't listening. He was already moving, already dragging the man toward the door with that flat, unblinking quiet that was a hundred times more frightening than any raised voice.
Stack waited until the door swung shut behind his brother and then he turned to Bunny. He looked at her the way he looked at a ledger he needed to balance, thorough, patient, and giving nothing away in his expression. His hands found his jacket pockets and he stood with the loose posture of a man who had all the time left in the world. "Tell me what happened," he said.
Bunny's fingers curled tighter around the blade before she caught herself and lowered it. "He was drunk when I walked in," she explained, and her voice came out steadier than she had expected, considering. "Not just a couple of drinks. He was drowninâ in it. I called it out because I wasn't about to start a session with a man who could barely hold his head upright and when I didâŚ" She nodded toward the door. "He called me out my name, said he was gonna kill me, and he swung. I moved⌠And I cut him."
Stack said nothing for a moment as his tongue rolled against the inside of his cheek. He looked at the blood on the floor where the man had been standing, then at the broken water glass, then at Bunny's face. "You ain't in trouble," he said finally, his Mississippi drawl coating every syllable like a second skin. "But I need you to hear me on this." He pulled one hand from his pocket and pointed a single finger at her. "Next time a client get rowdy, stupid, or liquored past the point of sense, you don't reach for that blade. You call for one of us. That's what we here for. Understand?"
"Yes, sir."
He held her gaze a moment longer, making sure the instruction had gone somewhere it would stay, and then he nodded once. "Go on, wash up an get you some rest." He turned for the door, then paused with his hand on the frame, not looking back. "You did real good, not fallin' apart. Just... next time⌠let us handle the mess."
The door closed again, and Bunny stood alone in the room with the broken glass and the ruined sheets and the small blade still warm from her grip, and she exhaled for what felt like the first time in several minutes.
Out behind the brothel, the alley smelled of ash cans and summer.
Smoke walked the man through the rear exit with the same grip he used to drag him out of the room. He deposited him against the back wall, the man's knees finally gave out forcing him to slide down the brick and land in a graceless heap on the ground, one hand still pressed to his sliced cheek, blood threading between his fingers and dripping off his chin.
Smoke stood over him. His hands went to his jacket, straightening it once, and then settled at his sides. He looked down at the man like he was a disgruntled God figuring out what type of punishment to inflict.
The man looked up at him and found whatever he needed in Smoke's expression to start talking. "She attacked me," his drunkenness slipping out of his voice now that fear had come in to replace it. "That bitch came in there and she just⌠she had a knife. She cut my face. You need to do somethinâ about that. I paid good money for a civil hour and instead I getâ"
"You said⌠you was gon' kill her."
The man blinked. "I was angry, I didn'tâ"
"Called her out her name twice in my presence."
The man's mouth opened and closed.
Smoke crouched down until his eyes were level with the man's, and in that position he looked less like a man and more like a demon ready to indulge in his bloodlust. His voice hadn't changed. It never changed. It held that same smooth, unshifted cadence through every conversation regardless of what the conversation was about. "Ionâ know exactly what went on in that room yet," he said. "But I want you to understand somethin'. That part don't fuckinâ matter to me. What matter to me is that you walked into my house, disrespected somethin' that belong to me, an then you done put ya' voice on her in a way that reminded her she needed a blade." He paused, letting that sit. "I don't take kindly to that."
His hand moved to his jacket, fingers parting the lapel, and the grip of his pistol caught the thin light of the alley moon.
The man's eyes went very wide. His injured hand came up, palm out, his whole body pressing back against the brick like he could dissolve into it. "Wait, wait, wait, I'll pay double, I'll pay whatever youâ"
The hammer drew back with a soft, final click that cut the man's sentence clean off.
Smoke looked at him with those coal-flat eyes and the man fell silent as a stone thrown into deep water. No more words. Just the ragged labor of his own breathing and the thin, continuous sound of his blood hitting the ground.
Footsteps came down the alley behind Smoke and he didnât bother turning around because he didn't need to. There was only one set of feet in the world that sounded like that.
Stack came up beside him, his hands loose at his sides, gold tooth catching the moon when he tilted his head down at the man on the ground. He took in the full picture. The gun. The blood. The look on Smoke's face. Then he took in a breath, slow and satisfied, and began to speak.
He told Smoke everything. The condition the man had come in. The things he had said when Bunny called it out. The swing that didn't land. The blade that did. When he finished, Stack was quiet for a moment, and then he reached into the interior pocket of his jacket and produced a knife with a blade four times the size of whatever Bunny had been carrying. He turned it once in his fingers, the steel catching and releasing the light in alternating flashes, and he smiled. It was the crooked smile, the one that reached his eyes and meant he was genuinely pleased about something.
"Lemmeâ talk to him first," Stack said. "I ain't had a good conversation in a minute."
Smoke looked at his brother and then he looked at the man on the ground, who was now visibly shaking, tears cutting through the blood on his cheek without any prompting at all. Smoke stood from his crouch, straightened his jacket once more, and stepped to the side. He put his pistol back without a word, folded his hands behind his back, and watched.
Stack crouched in his place, knife resting easy between two fingers, his face open and joyful in the particular way that meant the worst thing imaginable was coming next. "How you doin', friend?" he asked, accent thick as summer mud, voice warm as a lit match. "Tell me somethin'. You ever have somebody look after you real good, put you somewhere soft an warm an safe, an you go an spit in they face for it? You ever do that?"
The man couldnât answer.
Stack tilted his head and grinned like a Cheshire Cat. "Naw, naw, take ya' time. I got all night."
The alley didnât hear from that man again after that. Not in any language that would've made sense to a person passing on the street.
A month passed by and it had the audacity to feel like three.
Bunny sat on the edge of her bed in the room the twins had given her and pulled a brush through her texturized hair for the fourth time that evening. She counted the strokes the way she had been taught to count them since childhood, one and two and three and four, because there was nothing else to count and the act of counting kept her hands busy and her hands being busy kept her from acknowledging a particular restlessness that had been living under her skin for the better part of two weeks.
The room she was stationed in was nice. That was the first thing she had thought when Stack walked her to it, one week after the incident, with his hand at the small of her back and a short instruction to make herself comfortable. She had expected a small, utilitarian thing, the kind of space a working doll got assigned on the upper floor with a shared bath down the hall and a window that faced the brick wall of the building next door. What she got was a room with curtains. Actual curtains, silk ones that pooled at the floor and caught the last of the day's light in a way that turned the whole space the color of a candle flame. A vanity with a proper oval mirror. A wardrobe that had been stocked before she arrived with dresses and wrappers and nightgowns of a quality that made her catch her breath the first time she opened its doors, fabrics so fine they slipped through her fingers like water. On the small table beside her bed, a covered dish of food arrived three times a day whether she asked for it or not. Things she hadn't tasted since she was a little girl sitting in her grandmother's kitchen, sweet potato pie with a crust that shattered her taste buds like stained glass, braised oxtail over white rice, pound cake soaked in lemon syrup that left a sweetness on the roof of her mouth for hours.
She was being treated like a woman of some standing⌠And it was driving her absolutely out of her mind.
Bunny set the hairbrush down and looked at herself in the vanity mirror with an assessing expression she reserved for private moments like these. She was thirty-four years old. She had curves that grown men wrote embarrassing letters about and women studied with something too complicated to be called jealousy and too honest to be called admiration. She had hands that knew how to work, thighs that knew how to hold, a mouth that had never once left a client feeling cheated, and a reputation in three separate cities that had always, always been built by her own effort, her own body, her own particular genius for the kind of pleasure that made a man feel like he was the most important thing in the room. She hadnât come to this brothel to be kept like a flower in a glass case. She had come because she heard that the Moore twins ran the most lucrative operation north of the Mason Dixon and she wanted in on it. She wanted to work.
The bath she had taken earlier still clung to her skin in the form of the vanilla oil she had worked into her arms and her neck, and the nightgown the wardrobe had produced tonight was deep gold that made her brown skin glow like something lit from within. She looked breathtakingly beautiful, yet she felt like a caged thing in beautiful wrappings.
After looking herself over one more time in the mirror, she stood and made a silent decision as she made her way to the kitchen.
The brothel at midnight had a particular quality to it, a quietness that fell somewhere between a sleeping house and a thinking one. The downstairs jazz had stopped three hours ago. The girls were either asleep or occupied, and the hallways that had been warm and perfumed with commerce earlier in the evening were now cool and dim, lit by the occasional wall sconce thatâs wick had been turned down low. Bunny moved through the brothel on her bare feet, the gold nightgown sighing against her legs with every step, and she told herself she was just going for a peach before confronting the twins. There was always a bowl of peaches in the kitchen. She had discovered this on her second day and found it oddly comforting that someone in this house thought fresh fruit was important enough to replenish daily.
She pushed open the kitchen door and the room was drenched in darkness. That was the first thing. The second thing was that it wasnât empty.
As Bunny's eyes adjusted to the dimly lit room, eventually she was able to see there was a woman sitting at the long kitchen table in the dark eating cornbread.
Bunny stood in the doorway with her hand still on the door and looked at the mystery woman as she took her in piece by piece. Height first, even sitting, the woman had somewhat of a long-limbed frame that telegraphed itself. Bunny guessed that she was maybe five foot eight or nine if she stood. Her skin was deep, even brown like good molasses in a jar, paired with hair that fell straight and unadorned down past her shoulders, jet black, the color of ink before it dries. And to finish it off, she had a face that did a thing Bunny had only seen faces do in paintings, not the kind hung in houses like this one, but the kind in old churches where the artists tried to put something holy and something frightening in the same expression at the same time. The mystery woman looked young feature wise as if she hadnât yet turned twenty-two, but her eyes⌠her eyes were something else entirely.
Bunny wasnât a woman who was scared easily. She had lived too much, seen too much, and cut too many men across the face to give fear the kind of real estate it wanted in her mind. But those violet eyes made something ancient crawl up the back of her neck, not unpleasant, just⌠aware. Like stepping into a room and understanding that whatever was in it had been there since before the house was built.
The woman looked up from her cornbread and regarded Bunny with an expression of complete composure, as though being found eating cold food alone in a dark kitchen of a brothel in the middle of the night was exactly where she was expected to be.
"You Rosalie," the woman said. It wasn't a question.
Bunny blinked. "How'd youâ"
"You look like a Rosalie." She broke off another piece of cornbread, unhurried about it. "I'm Josephine. Everybody an they mama call me Josie."
Bunny stepped into the kitchen and let the door drift shut behind her. "I go by Bunny," she said, and then, because she couldn't help herself, "why are you sittin' in the dark?"
Josie ignored the question with such thoroughness that it was almost artful. She tilted her head at Bunny and asked, "They call you Bunny 'cause you can bounce on a dick 'til a man start beggin' for his mama?"
The initial response that leaped to Bunny's lips was something ladylike and deflective. What came out instead was a flustered, sputtering exhale, as her cheeks went warm and her hand raised halfway to her mouth before she caught it. She cleared her throat. "That's⌠yes," she admitted. "That's⌠um⌠exactly why."
The corner of Josie's mouth moved in something that could've been a smile if it committed to itself. She pushed the plate of cornbread forward by an inch, the gesture of a woman sharing without making much of it. "Have some."
Bunny looked at the cornbread. It was ice cold and hard as a rock. She could see the waxy surface on it that cornbread got when it had been sitting awhile. She was fond of cornbread. She was not fond of that. She moved instead to the bowl on the counter and lifted a peach, testing its weight in her palm before biting into it, and she hummed as the juice ran down her chin warm and sweet.
She stood there eating the peach and watching Josie, and Josie let herself be watched for a time, eating her cold cornbread with equanimity, apparently perfectly at peace with the scrutiny. But Bunny was staring and she knew it and the reason she was staring was the thing she couldn't pin down, the thing that sat off-center about this woman the way a picture sits off-center on a wall. She wasnât dressed like any of the other dolls Bunny had met in the past month. No lace, no slip, nothing that mirrored the nature of this house and its business. She wore a plain white blouse tucked into a flowy dark skirt with her feet bare on the kitchen floor. She looked like a woman who had stepped in from another dimension entirely and simply hadn't gotten around to leaving.
Bunny had met all the other dolls in the house during her first week. She was certain of that. This woman had not been among them.
Josie took another bite of her cornbread and looked at Bunny the way Bunny had been looking at her, with that clear, still assessment that took nothing personally and missed nothing either. "How you likin' it here?" she asked. "Smoke and Stack pretty decent owners, far as that kind of thing go."
The word owners sat in Bunny's mouth for a moment before she swallowed it. "I wouldn't know yet," she reluctantly admitted. "I had one client, one incident, and since then they've had me locked up in a room like I'm made of porcelain and they're afraid I'll chip." She took another bite of peach. "I haven't worked a single real night. I came here to make money. Instead I've been eatin' pie and watchin' the curtains move."
Josie's eyes sharpened the way a fire sharpens when you give it more air. "Which one claimed you?" she quipped.
Bunny frowned her brows in confusion. "I'm sorry?"
"Which twin? Smoke or Stack? Elijah or Elias? Which one claimed you as his doll?"
The frown deepened. "Neither of them," Bunny said slowly, like she was working out whether that was the right answer even as she gave it. "When I arrived they walked me through the rules, explained how the percentages worked, showed me the floor. Neither of them said anything about⌠claiming."
Now it was Josieâs turn to be confused as she stopped eating and placed her cornbread very gently on the plate in front of her. She looked at Bunny with the full force of those ancient alien lavender eyes and she was quiet for a stretched-out moment that had weight to it. Then she leaned forward and without a word of warning she took Bunny's face between both her hands and squeezed her cheeks together, compressing Bunny's lips into a surprised, rounded 'O'.
"You are thee cutest thing," Josie cooed, with the slightly awed sincerity of someone who had just found a very small, very charming animal in an unexpected location.
Bunny's eyes went wide above her squished cheeks. She made a sound that was supposed to be a protest and emerged as something closer to a muffled quack.
Josie released her with an unrushed giggle and settled back in her chair as though that had been a perfectly reasonable thing to do. "Alright," she said. "Let me explain how this house works."
Bunny smoothed her cheeks with her palms and fixed Josie with a look that she reserved for people who had just done something she didn't have the vocabulary to address properly. Then she sighed, finished the peach, and sat down.
Josie explained the rules of the house with a questionable amount of knowledge that Bunny would inquire about later. When a doll went through something the way Bunny had gone through something, they were taken off the floor. Not longer than a week, typically. No clients, no housework, just time to let the body and the mind settle back into themselves without being asked to perform. After that period, whichever twin had claimed that particular doll would take her through a retraining week. A proper retraining. Not punishment, not because she had done something wrong, but because the mind needed to be walked back through safety the same way the body needed to be walked back through strength after a sickness. The twins were a great many things, Josie explained, and some of those things werenât things that would be listed in a church bulletin, but they werenât complete monsters and wouldn't send a shaken woman back to work before she was ready. That wasnât morality for morality's sake. It was also just bad business, and they were nothing if not precise businessmen.
Bunny absorbed this. Processed it. Turned it over. And then arrived at the part that had been sitting sideways in her chest since the question first got asked.
"It's been a month," she said.
Josie looked at her dumbfounded like she didnât hear her correctly.
"It's been a month," Bunny said again. "The incident was a month ago. Nobody took me through any retraining. Nobody said anythinâ about when I'd go back to work. And you're telling me that the reason for that isâŚ"
She could see it in Josie's expression before she said it, like she was about to deliver news that amused her to the highest degree.
"Either you one of the special ones," Josie said, the childish grin breaking through now, unconstrained, like a schoolgirl who had been holding it in for the last five minutes, "or you somehow so boring that both of them forgot you exist entirely."
Bunny straightened up in her chair. "I am not boring," she said.
"I didn't say you were."
"You implied it."
"I offered it as a possibility."
"It is not a fuckinâ possibility." Bunny's chin came up and her voice took on the tone of a woman defending something she had built with a considerable effort over many years. Before she had walked through the Moore brothers' doors she had left three separate establishments because she had outgrown them. She had a clientele that wrote letters to find out where she had gone. She had a reputation that didnât include the word boring in any language. "I done made grown ass men cry," she said. "Not from pain⌠From gratitude."
Josie held up one hand in a gesture of peace, her playful grin not moving an inch. "Alright, alright. I believe you. I apologize." She folded her hands on the table. "The other explanation, then, is that they both want to claim you and neither one of them know how to go about it without steppinâ on the other's toes."
Bunny's chair scraped back half an inch. "Both of them?"
"It's rare," Josie whispered, as if she was saying too much too soon. "In the whole time this house been runninâ there've only been two dolls that both of them claimed at once. Just two. The second one is named Buttercup. She handles their books and investments. Sheâs been both of theirs for many moons." A pause, thoughtful and private. "The first oneâŚ" She picked up her cornbread again and looked at it, not at Bunny. "Well..."
The silence that lingered behind that one word forced Bunny to really look at Josie's profile. She took in the serenity of it, the complete and settled comfort with which this woman occupied any space she entered, including dark kitchens in the middle of the night. The way she didn't need to finish the sentence because the sentence was already obvious to anyone paying attention.
"Hypothetically," Bunny said carefully.
Josie's mouth curved with mischief. "Hypothetically..."
"If a woman found herself in that position. Both of them. At once. How would she⌠manage that?"
Josie was quiet for a moment, chewing her cornbread, looking somewhere past Bunny's shoulder as though consulting a memory that lived in the middle distance. "Hypothetically," she repeated, "such a woman would need to learn how not to get frostbitten by an avalanche of coldness." A pause. "While also not burninâ up in a lake of uncontrolled fire." Another pause, this one carrying a slightly different weight, the weight of something remembered in the body as much as the mind. "And on top of all that, she would need to learn how to take two men at the same time without tearinâ in half."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"That's⌠useful information," Bunny said finally.
"I thought you'd think so."
They sat for another minute, the two of them, in the warm dark kitchen with the peach bowl on the counter and the plate of cold cornbread between them, and something passed between them that couldnât be labeled as friendship yet but was the thing that comes just before it, a recognition, a sense of shared understanding arrived at by different roads.
A few more comforting minutes passed and then Bunny stood. She pulled the gold nightgown straight across her hips and ran one hand through the freshly brushed waterfall of her hair and looked at Josie with the expression of a woman who had made up her mind about something and had no further interest in deliberating. "Hypothetically, if I wanted to speak with them tonight... you know where they are?"
"Their office," Josie said. "End of the hall. Door on the left." She reached for the last piece of frosty cornbread. "Knock four times when you get there. Even count, same rhythm. That's how they know it's a doll behind the door and not somebody they need to put a bullet in."
Bunny's eyes widened slightly. "Good to know."
"One more thing," Josie said, without looking up, the words landing easy as a stone dropped into still water, "whoever open that door? Look him dead in the eye when you tell him what you want. Don't let him take the silence from you first. They'll stand in a quiet room and wait you out 'til you forget what you came for. Don't let him." She broke off a bite of cornbread. "Now go."
The hallway to their office was dim and long as the floorboards under her bare feet held the warmth of the day's heat, soaked up and slowly releasing into the night. She walked it with her chin level and her footsteps quiet, the vanilla oil on her skin mixing with the faint residual perfume that lived in all the walls of this house. At the far end of the hall, beneath the last sconce, a door sat closed and faintly rimmed with the amber line of lamplight from beneath it.
She stopped in front of it. Pressed her palm flat against the wood for one second. Then she knocked. Four times. Even. The same rhythm. Just as Josie had instructed.
On the other side of the door, the office breathed with the quietness of two men working in a comfortable parallel. The desk was spread with ledgers and cash in organized columns, the ashtray on its corner nursed a half-finished cigarette that had gone cold, and the lamp threw a yellow circle of warmth across the arithmetic of their operations. Stack stood at the desk's far edge, jacket off, suspenders down, his sleeves rolled to the elbow, one hand moving down a column of figures with the end of a pencil. Smoke sat on the lounge couch along the near wall, his own jacket folded beside him, a glass of brown liquor balanced on the arm of the cushion, his eyes moving across a folded sheet of paper he had been reading for the third time.
Four knocks came through the door.
Even. Measured.
Both men went still.
Stack's pencil stopped and his eyes lifted from the ledger to find his brother's face across the room. Smoke had already set the paper down. His hand had already moved to the glass, lifting it, not drinking from it, just holding it in the idle way of a man whose other hand needed to be free. His eyes were steady on the door.
The four-count knock meant a doll. Both of them knew that. The problem was that only two dolls in their entire operation knew that particular code, and neither of those two women were supposed to be within three city blocks of this brothel for another three days.
Smoke set the glass down very carefully on the side table before standing and crossing the room to the door. His shoulder holster rode against his undershirt as he pulled his pistol free in one clean motion before turning the knob and pulling the office door open.
Bunny stood in the hallway nervously shifting her weight from one foot to the other. The lamplight from inside the office hit her caramel brown skin from the side and the effect of this wasn't something Smoke had originally budgeted for. She was soft, luminous, small, and entirely the kind of woman that a man had to consciously remind himself to look away from, all of that deep-curved, warm-skinned, doe-eyed beauty arranged in the specific way that made the gold fabric laced over her body look like it had been commissioned for her personally. She blinked up at him. Her eyes were the color of good rum and they caught the light and held it, and for one unguarded half second the hardness in his face did something complicated before it arranged itself back into its usual flat composure.
Smoke held the pistol at his side. His face settled back into the expression of a man who was conducting business regardless of the hour. His eyes moved over her once, the way he surveyed any situation that required assessment before a response. "Why," he said, voice smooth and level as a road built to last, his Mississippi roots dragging slow and warm beneath every word, "is you at my door knockin' four times?"
Bunny didnât flinch as she looked him in the eye exactly as Josie had instructed and she held the look steady. "Because," she said, "I am tired of being treated like I'm made of glass." She let a breath pass as she remembered who she was speaking to. "... Sir."
Smoke looked at her for a long minute. He ran his mind back, sorting through the preceding month like how a man sorts through a drawer looking for something he put down without thinking. The girl on the floor. The drunk client. The blade. Stack handling her, him handling the client. The decision to move her to the room across from theirs. Then the weeks had continued to happen, the operation had continued to require their attention, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, the particular task of walking her back through had gotten caught in the gap between what he assumed Stack had handled and what Stack apparently assumed he had handled.
He let the exhale come through his nose, small and contained. Then he stepped back from the door and nodded once towards the interior of the room. "Come in."
Bunny wasnât a woman that needed to be instructed twice as she came in.
Smoke shut the door behind her and walked back to the couch, settling into it with the glass of liquor retrieved from the side table. His eyes stayed on her as she took in the office, the desk and its columns, Stack still standing at the far edge of it now with his arms folded. Smoke's gaze moved from her face to his brother's and he said, with the absolute calm of a man stating a mathematical fact, "You done forgot to recommission ya' doll."
Stack's expression moved toward as expression of confusion that was also slightly offended at the framing. "Fuck you mean my doll?" he quipped. "Thought she was yours."
"I moved her to the room 'cross the hall," Smoke said. "I was leavin' the rest to you."
"Nobody told me that."
"I ain't gotta tell you everythinâ, Elias. Use ya' brain."
Stack unfolded his arms and planted both hands flat on the desk. "My brain was operatin' under the assumption that the woman sittin' over in that room with the good curtains was your doll that you was handlin' in ya' own time, Elijah. Had I known she was mine to recommission I would've had her back on the floor four weeks ago."
"She been over there four an a half weeks."
"Four an a half weeks then. My point stands, muthafucka."
"Ya' point is that you wasn't payin' attentionâ"
"My point is that you could've opened ya' mouth like a grown ass man an said the words 'Elias, go handle Bunny' an I would've gone an handled Bunny, but instead you sittinâ over there on that couch drinkin' ya' liquor an assumin' I was gon' read ya' mindâ"
"I don't need you readin' my mind, I need you payin' attention to what's happenin' in this houseâ"
"Stupid bitch, I pay more attention to what happens in this house than you do, I just ain't also expected to be a fuckin' mind reader on top of everythinâ elseâ"
"Language, Elias.â Smoke said.
"Now I need to read ya' mind an watch my mouth?"
"We got a doll present. Tighten up." Smoke's eyes cut to Bunny for one brief moment that carried the tiniest edge of an apology.
Bunny had been watching this exchange with the expression of a woman who was simultaneously relieved that Josie was right and also annoyed that Josie was right. She looked at the ceiling for one moment, gathering something, and then she looked at Stack directly.
"I didn't come here to listen to y'all argue about whose doll I am," she cut in. The words came out clean and direct, and beneath them ran a current of something real, something stored up across four weeks in a pretty room with silk curtains and three meals a day that she hadnât earned. "I came here because I am a woman who been working since I was old enough to understand that money you make yourself is the only kind that belongs to you in full." She let that settle for a moment.Â
Before she had walked through their door she had left three establishments because she outgrew them. Before that, back when she was Rosalie and not Bunny, she hadn't been permitted to own so much as the dress on her back. That life was behind her and it would stay behind her as long as she had a body to work with and the sense God gave her to use it. "I appreciate the food," she said. "I appreciate the nightgowns and the curtains and the sweetness. I do. But I am not a woman who takes without giving back, and I am not going to sit in that room one more week eating indulging in things I ain't earn. I want to work."
The office held the sound of that for a brief second.
Stack analyzed her from top to bottom. The annoyance from the argument with his twin had drained off his face entirely, replaced by something more attentive and interesting. He possessed the look of a man who had been watching something he wanted for some time and had just been reminded of it. His gaze moved down the gold nightgown with the focused assessment of a man reviewing an investment he had forgotten to manage and was now reconsidering with renewed and comprehensive interest.
He came around the desk, crossed the office floor, and closed the distance between them until his chest was close enough for her to feel the heat radiating off him. His hands came up. His fingers settled first at the hollow of her throat, light and acquainting themselves with the shape of her, feeling the small flutter there she couldn't suppress, feeling the way she swallowed. Then they traveled with thorough patience across her collarbones, over the generous swell of her chest through the nightgown's thin fabric. She was built lavishly, heavy and warm everywhere in a way that made his hands slow down and pay attention, and he let them linger there, cataloguing her, until her breathing changed and she tried to hide the change but couldn't.
His hands continued their inventory, moving down the soft plush landscape of her stomach, the deep inward curve of her waist, spreading wide across the full round geography of her hips. He took his time with her hips. He spent what felt like an extended amount of time mapping them, as though committing their particular architecture to some private record he intended to revisit at a later date. Then one hand swept low and around, and he brought his palm down hard and flat across the full magnificent curve of her backside with a crack that split the quiet of the office like a starting pistol.
The sound rang off the walls, the bookcase, the glass in the lamp, everything. Bunny's gasp tore out of her before she had the opportunity to make any decisions about it, sharp and bright, her body moving without consulting her brain, tilting forward into the impact and then backward away from it, settling finally against Stack's chest in a way that was involuntary enough to be entirely honest.
Stack felt her melt against him and his exhale came out long and satisfied. His arm wrapped around her from behind, pulling her flush against the front of him, and he bent his mouth to the curve of her ear. "I'm gonâ be the one runnin' ya' retrainin' tonight." He pressed his mouth closer to her ear, words dropping to a rough near-whisper. "An dependin' on how that go⌠I might need to keep you locked away from everybody else for another month⌠Really take my time so ya' body don't ever forget who it belong to."
The sound Bunny made was small, strangled, and entirely against her will.
He reached for the thin strap at her shoulder and slid it down. The other strap followed. He peeled the gold nightgown from her slowly, letting it whisper down her curves until it pooled at her feet in a gilded ring, and what was left standing in the middle of their office was every generous, luminous, full inch of Bunny without a single layer between her skin and the lamplight. The lamp threw amber across the swell of her hips, the deep curve of her waist, the heavy softness of her breasts, the deep brown warmth of her, and the office became immediately a different kind of room.
Stack stepped back and bit down on his bottom lip as he took in her goddess figure. Then, with the easy authority of a man in his own house, he waltzed over to the couch where Smoke sat and dropped down beside his brother. He plucked the liquor glass from Smoke's hand, drained what remained, and reached for the refill trolley at the couch's edge. Smoke didnât argue with his twin. He simply shifted his weight to accommodate Stackâs presence and locked his eyes on Bunny.
Two men on the same couch. Side by side. Undershirts and slacks, loafers, the warm lamplight running along the defined lines of their arms where the fabric ended, the undeniable press of their interest visible in the material of their trousers. Stack poured a fresh glass and settled into the cushion. Smoke took Bunny in from head to foot with that flat, complete attention that gave nothing away and missed nothing. The air in the room had changed and pressed heavily on all their shoulders.
Stack leaned forward, elbows to his knees, glass hanging loose in his fingers. "Show me," he said, "why you worth the trouble of retrainin' when you already cost me a dead white man, two dry cleaning bills, a shovel we had to replace after breakin' it diggin' that peckerwoods grave, plus four an a half weeks of room an board an meals that even my top earners don't see on a regular Tuesday." He settled back into the cushion. "All that, an you ain't brought us a single dollar. So show me what you got, Bunny."
Bunny stood naked in the center of their office and looked at both of them. She took one breath. Then she walked to Smoke.
She came to stand directly before him and held his gaze and placed one knee on the cushion beside his thigh and then the other, straddling his lap with the practiced ease of a woman who had made herself at home in more difficult situations than this. She could feel him beneath her already, the dense, insistent hardness of him through his slacks, and the discovery sent something bold climbing up her spine and into her shoulders. She rolled her hips, one slow and complete rotation, felt him twitch beneath her, and did it again. She leaned forward and put her mouth to the side of his neck, the warm brown skin above his collar, and kissed him there. Felt his jaw tighten. Kissed across his collarbone, the gap where his undershirt opened at the throat. She found his earlobe with her teeth, caught it just barely, and felt the exhale that came out of him, contained and controlled, the only version of a sound he was willing to give her yet.
She pulled back and looked at Stack over her shoulder. "I can't promise I won't cause more trouble with your clients," she said, her hips still moving against Smoke's in that slow, measured grind. "That ainât a promise I can keep. But I am an investment." She felt Smoke's hand settle on her hip, heavy and certain, the grip of a man who was claiming something without announcing he's done it. "And you'd be foolish men to let me go."
Then she climbed off Smoke's lap and moved to Stack.
She settled herself across his thighs before he had quite finished processing the intention, and his hands came up instinctively, finding her hips, and she moved against him the way she had moved against his brother, with that same frank, unhurried competence, rolling her hips in grinding rolls that had him fully hard inside his slacks under a minute. She kissed along his jaw, the corner of his mouth, found his throat and bit softly at it and felt him grip her harder. She turned her mouth to his ear. "Well?" she said quietly.
Stack's answer was both hands sliding down to fill themselves with the full, heavy weight of her backside, squeezing with the proprietary thoroughness of a man claiming something he had decided belongs to him and only him.
From the other side of couch, Smoke reached forward and caught the back of her hair in his fist. Not rough, not gentle, just completely unambiguous, pulling her head back until she was looking up at him from Stack's lap with her neck at a stretched and exposed angle. Smoke looked down at her, his eyes never leaving her face. "Who," he said, each word its own complete and unhurried thing, "taught you that knock?"
"Josie," Bunny replied quickly.
The quality of the silence that followed was specific. She felt Stack go still beneath her. She saw something shift in Smoke's expression, not much, just a recalibration of a single degree. "Josie," he repeated. Flat.
"She was in the kitchen," Bunny continued. "Just now. I spoke with her before I came down here."
Smoke's eyes moved to Stack's face. Stack's eyes moved back. That language again, the one that needed no words. Whatever moved between them in that half second was mutual and resolved by the time it was done.
Smoke released her hair. He stood, adjusted the set of his shoulder holster with one practiced motion, and looked at Bunny. "Come," he said.
Stack stood from the couch with Bunny still in his arms, lifting her from his lap without any apparent effort, her weight absorbed into his frame as a matter of course. He carried her out of the office. Smoke walked ahead through the dim corridor, his footsteps quiet on the floorboards, and they moved as a unit through the darkness of the second floor until they reached the kitchen.
Smoke pushed the door open.
Bunny looked into the kitchen from over Stack's shoulder.
The room was empty.
The room wasn't just vacant as if someone had just stepped out, the room was suddenly empty in a way that was wrong. Profoundly, specifically wrong. The chair at the table sat at the exact angle it had been in when she first sat down across from Josie, as though no one had adjusted it at all, as though no one had ever pulled it out to sit in it. The plate of cornbread was gone without a trace, not in the washtub, not on the counter, not anywhere. Simply absent from the room as if it was never there. The peach bowl sat exactly where it always sat. The lamplight came through the window at its usual angle and landed on a kitchen that offered no evidence whatsoever that a woman with ancient eyes had been sitting in it not even twenty minutes ago.
Bunny stared. The hair on her arms rose.
"She was right there," she said, and her voice had climbed half a register before she noticed. "She was sittin' right there at that table. She had cornbread on a plate, cold cornbread, she had it on a plate right there in front that chair, she offered some to me and I took a peach instead. She squeezed my cheeks." Bunny's hand rose and touched her own face at the memory of it, the very real and physical memory of Josie's palms pressing her cheeks together. "She was a real person who was in this room. She had feet. I heard her feet on the floor when she shifted her chair. That ain't somethin' I imagined." She heard her own voice rising once more and made herself stop. Swallowed down her confusion and looked from the empty table, to the empty chair, to the empty counter where a plate had been sitting less than a few minutes ago. The wrongness of the empty kitchen pressed against her like a cold hand.Â
"Where'd she go," she whispered, and this time her voice came out quieter, stripped of its former certainty, with something underneath it that was very close to fear. "The hallway is one hallway. I walked the whole length of it to get to your office. I would have seen her. I would have passed her. Where'd sheâ"
"I believe you."
Smoke's voice arrived quietly and cut through everything else like a lamp lit in a dark room. He stepped next to Stack and reached out, taking her chin between his fingers, tilting her face toward him with a gentleness that wasnât his usual mode and was therefore more effective than almost anything else he couldâve done. His eyes moved across her face, reading whatever he found there with that same thorough attention, and then he said it again without elaboration or apology. "I believe you. You saw her. You spoke to her. It's 'ight." He held her gaze until the climbing quality went out of her breathing, until her eyes settled from startled back to present. His thumb moved once along her jaw, the lightest possible contact, and then he released her chin and looked at Stack over her head.Â
The look between them lasted one second and carried something private in it, something that had history in it, some understanding of Josie that they shared between themselves and werenât presently sharing with Bunny. "Need to put a leash on that woman," Smoke grumbled, with the flat certainty of someone adding an item to a list.
"You an me both, nigga," Stack said, quietly.
Smoke turned from the kitchen. He didnât go back towards their office, instead he went the other direction, toward the room at the far end of the hall, and Stack followed with Bunny still in his arms, carrying her away from the empty kitchen and the empty chair and the cold and inexplicable absence of a woman who had been sitting in it minutes ago eating cold cornbread like she owned the place.
The room at the end of the hall was broad and purposeful. A wide bed sat at its center on a dark mahogany frame, the headboard tall and unadorned. White linens, clean. A single lamp burning low in the corner, its flame turned down until the light came out warm and intimate. This was a simple room designed for one thing and one thing only, retraining a doll that didnât need to be disciplined.Â
Stack deposited Bunny in the center of the bed with more chivalry than intended. He straightened up and looked at her sprawled across the white linens, her moisturized brown skin drinking the lamplight the way it was built to, every curve of her catching and holding the warmth of it. He let out a small satisfied grunt before rolling his shoulders once and then bending down to kiss the inside of her knee.
The sound Bunny made started in her throat and got halfway out before she caught it, her thigh twitching under his mouth. Stack felt the twitch and registered it with the calmness of a man who had spent a considerable amount of time studying the language of women's bodies, then he returned and pressed his lips to her inner knee again.Â
One kiss⌠two kiss⌠three kiss⌠four⌠Stack continued his playful worship before moving lower, or rather higher towards Bunnyâs inner thigh. He was greeted with the soft warm skin there as his mouth opened against it, tongue dragging along the crease where her thigh met nothing and then meeting the next crease. He was learning the deep inner geography of her, building the path inward with a patience that was intentionally designed to make her lose her mind before he arrived at his final destination.
Her scent hit him before his mouth did and he let out a low sound against her skin that was pure appreciation. "Four an a half weeks," he said, lips moving against her inner thigh, his breath warming the space he hadn't touched yet. "You been sittin' in that pretty room unfucked all this time, huh, lilâ bunny rabbit?"
Bunny responded vocally with something that was technically a word, or at least she thought she did.
Stack chuckled to himself and then his mouth immediately found her aching bundle of nerves. He worked her the way a classically trained musician works an instrument he knows intimately. He didnât rush his performance but instead attended to the specific truth of her responses with the kind of focused and intelligent attention that made up the difference between a man who was present and a man who was going through the motions. He learned her in the first thirty seconds, learned the particular way her hips moved when he pressed the flat of his tongue against her center, the way her thighs tried to close around his head and then caught themselves and spread wider, the way the sound she made climbed an entire octave when he tended to her clit and circled it with skilled precision.
He effortlessly brought her to the edge in under four minutes.
He knew when she was there. He had been watching for it, feeling for it in the tightening of her thighs and the change in her breathing, the way her hands had found the back of his head and were pressing down with that desperate and gnawing pressure that meant she was right there, right on the rim of it, one more motion and she would go over. He could feel her gathering herself, the coil of it pulling tight in her body and her hips tilting up to meet him.
But, because Stack was Stack, he couldnât help himself as he pulled back and denied Bunny instant relief. She wasnât a doll that needed to be punished, but she was still a doll under control of her master. He didnât pull away far, just enough for his mouth to leave her core and rest against the inside of her thigh instead. He looked utterly composed as he breathed against her soaked, twitching heat while she fell apart beneath him in a different way than she had intended.
"Stack," she breathlessly whined, the word arriving with a thicker desperation than she had planned.
"Mm," he said, mouth still against her thigh.
"Please⌠Don't do that."
"Do what? " he asked pleasantly.
She made a frustrated sound and whined again before Stack returned to his honeysuckle feast.
He took his time getting there, moving up through the wet of her with his tongue like he was reading something he found interesting, and then he was back at her clit and the sounds coming out of her rebuilt themselves immediately, climbing again, her hips rolling, her fingers curling into the sheets. He gave her forty-five seconds this time before the edge showed up again in the ragged pacing of her breathing, and he pulled back once more. Pressed his mouth to her inner thigh. Breathed. And let her curse at him out.
"You raggedy ass nigga," she managed.
His laugh came out against her skin, warm and genuinely amused. "I done been called worse, babydoll."
At the head of the bed the mattress dipped. Bunny's eyes reopened, head turning, and Smoke leaned above her, and the sight of him was enough to make every other thought in her head exit quickly. He had shedded everything. His undershirt, slacks, holster, all of it was gone, and what was left was all of him, broad and carved and rich dark brown skin. His body looked like the map of a man who had moved through the world with physical force for a long time and had the evidence of that written in muscle and old scars. He was hard, entirely and obviously, and looking at her with those flat obsidian eyes that gave nothing away.
Smoke said nothing as he reached for the small table at the bed's edge and a cigarette appeared between his fingers, a match scratched against the bedframe with a brief bright leap of flame before it found its target. He took the first pull, held it, let the clouds of tobacco climb toward the ceiling in a long and perfectly controlled column. And then he looked down at her, the cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, his eyes traveling across her face with the calm, weighing assessment of a man reviewing something he may or may not be satisfied with.
"Who," he said, voice low and quiet and warm as the smoking end of something burning, "you think you talkinâ to like that in my house?"
Between her thighs, Stack's mouth had found the soft heat of her again, and the sound that tried to escape Bunny's throat was intercepted by her own determination not to give Smoke the satisfaction of an incoherent answer before she had the chance to give him a real one. "I-I didnât mean none by it⌠I-I wasnât givinâ orders," she managed.
"Mm." Smoke's eyes dropped from her face to the space just below them, where his erection jumped and throbbed directly above her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him, and then his eyes came back up to hers. "You came to my office," he continued as he lazily gripped his manhood before taking another puff. "Told me what you was tired of. Told me what you wanted. Got yaselfâ naked in front my brother an I, then sat in both our laps like you had the right." He exhaled smoke from the side of his mouth, away from her face. "That sound like a doll who know her place to you?"
Before she could respond, Stack's tongue distracted her by circling her clit with renewed and specific intention, as one finger pressed into her slowly, testing the heat of her⌠the tight grip of her. She was utterly soaked and already shaking in a finely controlled way, like how a bow shakes just before the arrow is released.
Smoke watched her face with the careful attention of a man reading a weather report. "A doll," he said, voice quieter, the edge in it sharpening enough to send shivers down her spine, "asks. She don't tell. She don't march down a hallway an knock on my door like she owed somethin'. She asks her owner. She say please. She waits." His thumb brushed her jaw, the touch light and intentional, as his eyes dropped to her mouth and then came back up. "You still ainât proved you worth the trouble."
It didn't take much for Bunny to read between the lines as her right hand moved from the sheet and gripped Smokeâs precum dripping length. She felt the substantial weight of him against her palm and heard the slight controlled catch of his inhale as she felt him twitch against her hand. He filled her hand, dense and hot, and she stroked him from base to crown once with a grip that was firm.
She angled her head against the pillow, opened her mouth, and drew him in.
His size settled against her tongue, thick and dense, and she worked her lips around him with the exploring attention of a woman who had been told her whole career that her mouth was something extraordinary and had spent years proving it right. She hollowed her cheeks and sucked on him with an unhurried suction, her tongue mapping the underside of him on each pull, tracing the swollen vein that ran along his length, lapping at the crown when she came up before gobbling him back down again. Her free hand wrapped around his base and worked in a measured counterpoint. The combination of hand and mouth coordinated with the easy confidence of someone who had been doing this long enough that it lived in her body the way playing an instrument lives in a musician's hands had Smoke internally losing his mind.
Smoke's own hand found her hair, fingers settling among her now sweated out tresses without pressing, without directing, just resting there with a weight that communicated his full attention. The quality of his breathing changed almost immediately, each exhale coming a degree longer than it should have, each inhale a degree more controlled than usual. He brought the cigarette to his lips with his free hand and took a pull, held it, let the tobacco clouds go from the side of his mouth. The image of him above her doing that while she worked him below was the most Elijah âSmokeâ Moore thing she could imagine, controlling himself with a lit cigarette while she did her damnedest to remove that control from him entirely.
For a long minute, Bunny genuinely believed she was finally in control, but then, the devious twin still situated between her thick thighs added a second finger inside her and she gasped. It only lasted a split second as her eyes almost rolled to the back of her head while she momentarily let the pleasure consume her, but that was short lived with a slight tug to her hair.
"Look at me," Smoke demanded.
She didnât need to be told twice as she retrained her eyes back onto the owner that was in front of her.
"Mmm⌠good⌠you capable of suckinâ dick an followinâ instructions," he said softly, in a voice that had dropped below the level where it was meant to sound gentle and instead sounded much more intimate and a whole lot more dangerous. "You got somethin' to say?"
Bunny, whose mouth was still full of raw meat, slightly shook her head ânoâ and continued servicing Smokeâs dick. Her tongue continued working the underside of him in the way that she had been complimented on in cities that were miles away from this one. She went down until the back of her throat met him and held there, breathing through her nose, feeling his fingers tighten in her hair by one degree, and then she came back up and did it again.
Smoke's exhale was long and relaxed. "Mm," he said, and it was the most honest amount of praise he had given Bunny all night.
Stack had brought her to the edge twice more in the interim, each time withdrawing with the particular cruelty of a man who is enjoying the architecture of her desperation more than he would enjoy its resolution, and she was by now a tightly wounded and thoroughly soaked little doll. Her body was operating at a level of need that had begun to make her cry a little. Not from pain or unhappiness, just from the relentless accumulation of pleasure with nowhere to go.
"Stack⌠SirâŚ" she managed, pulling off Smoke for a breath.
"Still here," Stack said, against her thigh.
"Please." The word came out stripped of all pretense. Just the word. Just the need in it, raw and uncomplicated.
Stack looked up at her along the length of her body. His mouth was wet, his eyes were bright, and he looked like a man who had been given an exceptional gift that was in no hurry to unwrap it fully. "Please what?" he asked rhetorically already knowing the answer to the question.
"Please⌠l-let me finish."
"Let you finish?" His voice carried genuine amusement. "Babydoll, I barley scratched the surface."
Smoke looked at the tears streaming from Bunnyâs eyes. Something moved across his face, an emotion too foreign for anyone to decipher. He pulled free of her mouth with a soft sound and moved, climbing off the mattress and coming around the foot of the bed, and the sight of him moving toward Stack's position made Stack lift his head.
Smoke looked at his brother. Then he looked at the place between Bunny's thighs, the glistening, swollen, and desperately twitching evidence of the last fifteen minutes, and he looked back at Stack with an expression that was entirely final.
"Move," he said.
Stack sat up and squinted his eyes in disbelief. "Sâcuse you, nigga?"
"Move," Smoke said again.
Stack's eyes narrowed. "She's my doll, Elijah."
"Yeah⌠well⌠sheâs also mine," Smoke said. "I just decided."
Stack stared at him. The look on his face was the look of a mannish boy who didnât like having to share his toys. "You can't just decide that," he complained. "That ain't how this works. You can't crawl over here in the middle of my session an claim a whole woman like you canât go pick another damn dollâ"
"Elias."
"What?!â
"I been watchin' her for a month," Smoke said, with the patience of someone explaining something obvious. "She in the room âcross the hall from ours. I been the one who had her moved there. I been the one who made sure her meals was right. Made sure her room was right an made sure nobody bothered her." A pause. "She mine. She also yours. Move."
Stack's jaw tightened. He looked at Bunny. Bunny looked back at him from the mattress with wide eyes, her lips still swollen, her thighs still trembling, and her expression carrying the cocky confusion of a woman who had just been claimed by two men simultaneously while lying naked in their bed and was still in the early stages of processing this information. Stack pointed at Smoke. "You owe me," he said. "You owe me big time, nigga."
"Mhm. Add it to the list," Smoke said.
Stack moved, climbing up toward the headboard with a muttered stream of commentary, and Smoke took his place between Bunny's thighs before lowering his head. He wasted no time as his mouth found her center without preamble, his tongue worked her with the focused of a man who went through life either doing something well or not at all. The sound Bunny made was enormous and immediate, her hands flying out to grip the sheets.
Smoke was vastly different from Stack in how he devoured Bunnyâs pussy. Stack built her pleasure up as if he was an architect with a boundless amount of patience. Whereas Smoke treated her pleasure like a man reading a language only he knew. Every response she gave him, he immediately incorporated it into what he did next, adjusting, refining, arriving at the exact pressure and rhythm that made her thighs lock around his head and her back clear off the mattress as every coherent thought she had exited the premises.
He didnât bother edging her since he had already clearly read what the edging had done to her. He could read the accumulated tension in every line of her body. Instead, he drove her straight to the finish line without stopping. The orgasm that finally rippled through her felt spiritual as if her soul was raptured out of her body. Her voice tore out of her open and honest, her hips grinding against his mouth as he worked her through every wave of it, his hands locked on her hips to keep her from pitching away from him.
Stack sat at the headboard watching all of this with his arms folded like a sulking child. When Smoke finally lifted his head, Stack uncrossed his arms and pointed at his brother with one finger. "My turn," he said.
"She sensitive," Smoke said, sitting back on his heels.
"I know she sensitive. That's the point."
Smoke moved aside without any urgency, and Stack replaced him between Bunny's thighs with the eagerness of a man who had been waiting for his turn at something exceptional. He looked at the convulsing center of her for a beat with something purely acquisitive in his expression, and then he put his skilled mouth back on her.
Bunny's entire body jerked backwards. The sound she made this time was considerably more desperate than the last, her hips trying to back away from the overstimulation and Stack's hands locking around them before she got anywhere.
"Stay," he murmured against her, voice vibrating right against her hypersensitive clit.
"Stack I can't, it's too muchâ"
"You can," he growled, and meant it, and went back to work.
Smoke let his twin have his fun as he situated himself on Bunnyâs left side, and his mouth found her breast. His lips closed around her nipple and sucked on the coco nub with an intensity that sent a euphoric sensation shooting directly down her spine. His other hand flattened on her ribs, feeling the heave of her breathing, the rapid and helpless rise and fall of her chest. He worked across to her other breast with the same thorough attention, his teeth grazing just lightly enough to make her gasp, and then moan, and then grip the back of his head.
Meanwhile, Stack feasted like a starving madman. His tongue worked her pulsing and overstimulated pussy with an almost vindictive thoroughness, licking into her and circling her clit with alternating attention, building the sensation higher than it had any right to go given that she had just come apart under his brother's mouth not two minutes ago. He watched her face when he could, watched the progression of it, the way her mouth fell open, how her brows drew together, and when the tears started again fresh from the corners of her eyes, overstimulation and pleasure braided together until she couldn't separate one from the other.
When she came the second time it was different in character, wilder, less controlled, her body arching and convulsing with a force that had nothing of restraint left in it, and the flood of her against Stack's mouth was audible in the quiet room. He drank her juices down with a delighted groan while his jaw still worked her through every aftershock, refusing to stop until her thighs had gone from locked to trembling to limp and her voice had dropped from cries to the soft and utterly wrecked sound of a woman who has nothing left to give.
Thirty seconds of blissful torture occurred until Stack finally sat back. He looked at the evidence of what he had done to her with profound satisfaction, wiping his jaw with the back of his hand. He looked at Smoke. "She ready," he said.
"She definitely ready," Smoke agreed.
Smoke laid down on his back on the mattress beside Bunny, his nine inches pointing toward the ceiling. He turned his head and looked at her where she lay against the linens, trembling and thoroughly undone. His voice, when it came, was dominate and certain. "Show me," he said, "how you got ya' name, bunny rabbit. Show me why you worth the trouble."
The second Bunny heard Smokeâs request, she sat up on trembling arms. She looked at him stretched out beside her, at the full dark length of him, at the patient flatness of his expression, at the way he was simply waiting with the absolute confidence of a man who knew what was coming and secretly couldnât wait.
She was still a little loopy from her prior orgasms but gathered up enough strength and swung her leg over him. She positioned herself above him and reached down to guide him to her entrance before sinking onto him with a long, controlled descent that pulled a sound from the back of her throat and a sound from the back of his. Both of them couldnât help themselves responding to the stretch, the heat, and the fullness of her pussy wrapping around his length as she settled herself completely onto him. She stayed there for a second, adjusting, letting her body accommodate the considerable size of him and feeling him everywhere at once before beginning to move.
It only took three bounces for Bunny to prove to Smoke why she had earned her name. She wasnât just a lady of the night who knew how to ride a dick until sunrise. No. She had spent years refining a specific combination of bouncing, grinding, and rolling that made men weep, beg, and reach for her like she was the only water in a desert. She worked him with her hips, rising and falling in the deep rolling motion that used every muscle she had, the sound of their bodies meeting building in the lamp-warm room, her succulent breasts moving with every stroke, her hands braced on his chest for leverage, her thighs flexing and releasing with each downward drive.
Smoke looked up at her and something happened in his face, some arrangement of his features that wasnât quite expressionless in the way he usually was, instead something behind his eyes showed a genuine side of him that wasnât going anywhere anytime soon. His hands came to rest on her thighs, not to direct or control the pace, just to hold her, to feel what she was doing from the closest possible position.
He let her have it. He laid there beneath her and he absorbed every stroke with the stillness of a man receiving something with his full attention. His only movements were the tightening of his hands on her thighs, the slight flare of his nostrils, and the slight clenching of his jaw that betrayed how thoroughly he was feeling everything she was giving him. "That's it," he groaned, voice rough and lower than usual. "Keep goin'. Show me everythinâ."
And indeed she showed him everything. She rolled her hips in her signature deep figure-eight that made her thighs burn and made men forget what city they were in. She let out a needy whine when she felt him twitch hard inside her, felt his fingers dig into her thighs and felt the sound he made rumble up from somewhere below the place where he usually kept his inner desires.
"Goddamn," Stack praised from somewhere behind her.
Bunny had nearly forgotten, in the consuming present-tense occupation of riding Smoke, that Stack was still in the room with them. She remembered now. She remembered specifically when she felt his hand press warm and flat against the small of her back, pushing her forward just slightly, changing the angle, and she felt the presence of him settling in behind her, the specific warmth of a second body entering the space, and something in her belly turned over at the knowing of what was coming next.
"Don't stop movin'," Smoke growled below her, his voice steady and laced with something that wasnât quite command and not quite warning, something between the two that communicated that her motion was the thing keeping him from losing his composure. "Keep ya pretty eyes right here."
It was difficult, but she kept her eyes on him. She kept moving, slower now, the rhythm becoming something more rocking and less bouncing as Stack's hand remained at the small of her back and his other hand reached for something on the side table. The sound of a bottle. The sensation of something cool worked at the back entrance she hadn't been using, Stack's fingers pressed and circled with a careful, methodical preparation of a man who knew exactly how to stretch a doll without tearing her. He worked her chocolate starfish open with practiced patience, each circle and press accompanied by Smoke's hands on her hips maintaining their slow rhythm and his voice occasional and low.
"Breathe," Smoke said, one hand traveling from her hip to her stomach, palm flat and warm against her skin. "Stay with me. Just breathe."
She breathed. She kept her eyes on his and kept rolling her hips over him and breathed through Stack's fingers working behind her, opening her gradually, each moment of it accompanied by Smoke's voice and Smoke's hands and Smoke's eyes holding her in place in every sense.
After a minute of probing and preparing, Stack withdrew his fingers. The blunt pressure that replaced them was broader, and it pressed forward with the slow and inexorable patience of a man who had done this enough times to know that patience here was not optional. Bunny's motion over Smoke stuttered as the pressure built and Stack worked his way inside her. He knew better than to rush or force his way inside, instead he continued steadily forward until the stretch had gone from too much, to full, to something that rewired every nerve ending she had at the same moment and left her gripping Smoke's chest with both hands and pressing her face into his shoulder.
"There it is," Stack said from behind her, voice strained as he relished in the tightness of her asshole. "You got all of it, babydoll. You got it."
This wasnât the first time Bunny participated in anal sex, but it was the first time she had both of her holes filled to the brim. She took both of them, fully, completely, in the most total sense of that word, and the feeling of it wasnât something she couldâve prepared herself for no matter how plainly Josie had described it. Her body had become an instrument of pure sensation, attended to from both directions at once, filled past the point where she could distinguish between the fullness and herself.
"Move with me," Smoke ordered, and began to rock his hips upward in a slow, careful rhythm.
Stack matched it from behind, withdrawing just barely and pressing back in on the same count, the two of them falling into sync with the ease of people who have shared a frequency their entire lives. Bunny gripped Smoke's chest and held on.
Smoke's hands ran up from her hips to her waist to the curve of her sides, mapping her as she moved, grounding her with the weight and warmth of his hands when the sensation from everywhere else threatened to become too much. "Look at me," he said.
She looked at him.
"You ours," he continued. Not a question, just a statement of something that had apparently been decided and was now being confirmed. "You understand that."
"Yes," she breathed.
"Say it."
"I-I-I'm yours," she whined, and her voice cracked on the last word because Stack had adjusted behind her and found the angle that turned her thoughts entirely to static.
"Fuck," Stack hissed through his teeth. "Keep squeezinâ me like you finna cum an I'm gon' embarrass myself."
Smoke's jaw ticked. He drove his hips up sharper than he had been, once, and her forehead dropped to his chest. "Hold it," he said, one hand traveling up her spine, settling between her shoulder blades. "Don't finish yet."
Like a good little doll, Bunny obeyed even if withholding her orgasm was one of the hardest things for her to do. She held it through the next several minutes of the two of them working her from both sides with building and competing intensity. Stack's hips found a rhythm behind her that grew less restrained with each stroke, his hands gripping her waist with the force of a man holding onto something he didnât intend to lose. Meanwhile, Smoke drove up into her pussy with a calculated and precise force that hit the same place every time and built the pressure in her body to a pitch that had no precedent in her experience.
She held back her orgasm with her fingernails deep in Smoke's bare chest and tears running freely down her face from the sheer accumulated pressure of pleasure with nowhere to go. Her body shook uncontrollably between them in continuous tremors.
"Hold it," Smoke said again, quieter this time, his hand moving from between her shoulder blades to the back of her neck, his thumb pressing at the base of her skull with a firmness that was grounding. "Hold it for me. Just a little longer."
She felt like an overfilled waterballoon on the verge of popping but she held it a little longer.
"Now," he said.
The second Smoke gave the command, Bunny let go. This orgasm made her entire body convulse between them, and the viper grip of her fluttering holes around both of them became violent and involuntary, her voice tearing out in a sound that came from a place so primal and ancient it didnât have a name. Stack grunted hard behind her, the sound losing its edges, his rhythm breaking apart, his hips pressing deep and going still as her body worked around him without any input from her at all. Smoke's hands locked on her hips and held her through every spasm, his breath coming in controlled pulls through his nose, his jaw set, his eyes on her face.
She was still a shaking mess when they moved her.
Stack withdrew and the absence of him was its own overwhelming sensation as they repositioned her between them with fluid and efficient coordination, guiding her body into the new arrangement before she could fully process that things were changing. Her hands and knees were positioned on the mattress with Smoke now behind her. Stack was in front of her, already at the edge of the bed, his hand finding her hair, his thumb tilting her chin upward.
"Open," Stack said, his voice dragged rough by the effort of the last several minutes.
She opened. He slid into her mouth and she wrapped her thick lips around him and worked him with the full attention of a woman who had made sucking dick into an art form, her tongue pressing along his length, her cheeks hollowing with each pull. Behind her Smoke gripped her hips with both hands and pressed into her pussy from behind with a force that had nothing of restraint left in it, each thrust was deep and drove her forward into Stack so that the two of them worked her from both ends in a rhythm that had its own crude, overwhelming music.
Smoke's hand came down on the curve of her backside, a sharp slap that made Stack look over her head at his brother with raised brows.
Smoke looked back at him with an expression that communicated absolutely nothing except his full awareness of what he had just done. "She a doll. She our whore," he said casually between thrusts.
Stack's grin broke across his face, gold tooth and all. "Mm hm." His hand joined Smoke's sentiment, fisting tighter in her curls, working himself into her mouth with an authority that matched his brother's behind her. "Take it," he said, "just like that. All of it."
She took it. She took all of it, from both of them, from behind and in front. Her tears ran freely down her face again, dripped off her chin, and ran down Stack's length where he fucked into her throat. She felt another climax building from somewhere deeper than the previous ones had come from, further down, more structural, and her body told her it was coming whether she was ready or not.
Stack felt it in the change of her mouth around him. Smoke felt it in the change of her hypersensitive pussy around him. Both of them drove harder at the same time as Smoke's hand came to her hip and gripped it with the force of a man who wanted to feel the final round tightness squeeze around him. "Give it," Smoke said, rough against her.
Bunnyâs body clenched and released in a rolling sequence that started at her core and moved outward, her voice was muffled around Stackâs twitching length and her thighs shook against Smoke's grip. Everything in her narrowed down to the specific and enormous fact of coming apart between these two men who had decided, right then and there, that she was theirs. Stack's hips completely lost their rhythm entirely and he groaned from deep in his chest, his hot sticky release filling her throat in long, heavy pulses, his hand in her hair tightening as he worked through every second of it. Behind her Smoke thrusted into her through the spasms of her climax with a final series of strokes that cost him the last of his control as his hips pressed flush against hers and stayed there while he finished inside her, the sound that came out of him brief and real.
The room after was silent except for breathing.
Three people in various states of collapse across the ruined white linens, the lamp still burning in the corner, the amber light still doing its only job. Bunny was laying face down in the center of the bed with no intention of moving for the foreseeable future. Stack was somewhere to her left, his hand resting on the mattress near her shoulder. Smoke stood after a moment, crossed to the washstand, and returned with a warm cloth. He cleaned her with that same focused efficiency she had heard other dolls gossip about but never experienced, his hands moved over her with the attention of a man who considered this part of the task just as important as any other.
It was Stackâs turn to move from his spot on the bed, as he waltzed over to a nearby drink cart and poured himself a fresh glass of whiskey glass, took a long sip, and exhaled with the deep satisfaction of a man at genuine peace with every decision he had made in the last several hours. He looked at Bunny where she laid against the linens, a beautiful and thoroughly claimed wreck of a woman. Then he turned to look at his brother across the room.
"She can't go back on the floor," he said.
Smoke wrung the cloth out over the basin. "Mm?"
"I'm serious, Eli. Her talent is undeniable. That thang she did with them hips is somethin' I intend to study at length for the next several weeks of my life." He took another sip. "But her control? Her control is nonexistent. She finished too many damn times in one session. You put her in a room with a payin' client who came here expectin' an hour an she gon' be done in two minutes. That man gon' feel robbed an robbed men talk⌠an talkin' men bad for business." He set the glass down and crossed his arms over his chest like a man presenting a logical conclusion. "Two more weeks. Minimum. We retrain her every night âtil she can hold back a nut the way a real doll âposed to."
Smoke stayed quiet as he came back to the bed, sat at its edge and looked at his twin with the knowing expression he wore when Stack was making an argument he wanted to put an immediate end to. "Elias," he said.
Stack looked at him.
"Drink ya' whiskey an shut the fuck up."
Stack sucked his teeth but he kept his eyes on Bunny.
Bunny turned her face against the pillow and looked at both of them from the comfortable horizontal vantage point of a woman who had been thoroughly wrecked. Smoke, quiet at the bed's edge, let his hand come to rest at her ankle. Stack, whiskey back in hand and gold tooth gleaming was already building his next argument with the enthusiasm of a man who was looking forward to the next two weeks considerably more than he is letting on.
"Two weeks," she mumbled underneath her breath, to the ceiling.
Stack pointed at her with excitement. "See! She gets it. Thatâs a good lilâ bunny rabbit."
"But the food stays the same," she added.
The room went quiet for a moment.Â
Then Stack started laughing, full and genuine, the sound rolling through the room and finding all the corners. This time he pointed at Smoke with the glass. "Eli," he said, "I like her."
"I know," Smoke replied as he kept his hand on her ankle. âI knowâŚâÂ
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Authorâs Note: Wowzers! See I ammmmm capable of writing the twins as civilized deviants⌠*cough* So⌠um⌠how about that Josie?? đ
Mr. Smokeâs & Mr. Stackâs Doll: A Little Bunny Rabbit
Authorâs Note: Itâs Gemini season! Everyone go say Happy Day Of Birth to my sister @theethighpriestess aka Bunny đ°
Warnings: +18 | Dom!Smoke | Dom!Stack | Smoke x Stack x OC | Plus Size OC | MFM | Angst (if you squint and do a backflip) | Fluff (if you squint and do three pushups) Oral Sex | Anal Sex | Edging | Coochie Drilled To Smithereens | Overstimulation | Double Penetration | Creampie | Dollification | They⌠They arenât mean in this chapter⌠have I found God?
The room smelled like a cheap pomade and even cheaper whiskey.
Bunny had caught the scent the moment she pushed open the door to room number seven. There was a stale and sour stench lingering in the air that clung to a drunken man that was expected to be her next client. She stood in the doorway for a half second, shoulders squared beneath the ivory negligee she had been assigned for the evening, her red painted toes just crossing the threshold, and she told herself it was nothing. Men came in here smelling like all manner of sin. Whiskey and cheap pomade was the least offensive of them.
The man waiting for her was a heavyset thing. Pale as uncooked dough, with a collar loosened down to his second button and cufflinks that didn't match. His eyes swam when they found her. This wasnât the ordinary tipsy swim of a man who had had two drinks to get his nerves up before visiting a house like this. No, this was the kind of swim that came from the bottom of a bottle, from a man who had been drinking since before supper and hadn't stopped for reasons that had nothing to do with enjoying the taste.Â
His mouth curved into something that was meant to be a smile but landed somewhere closer to a sneer. "There she is," he said, his words running together at the edges like watercolors left out in the rain. "Took yaâ long enough."
Bunny let the door shut behind her with a quiet click. She pulled up the smile she had spent years perfecting, the one that reached her eyes just far enough to be convincing without costing her anything real, and she moved toward the vanity to set down her small kit. "Evenin', sir," she replied, voice sweet as honeysuckle draped over a fence post in July. "You get yourself settled alright?"
"Settled?" He laughed, the sound was disgustingly wet and blunt. "I been waitin' damn near twenty minutes."
"I apologize for that, sir." She turned subtly, sizing the client up again in the mirror's reflection while she appeared to be checking her hair. She took notice of the way his body tilted just slightly to the left when he tried to sit straighter. The way his hand reached for the bedpost to steady himself without seeming to realize he had done it. The glassy, navigating-through-fog quality of his stare. Bunny had been in this business long enough to know that a drunk man in a room with a woman he had paid for was a man operating without a leash, and a man without a leash was a dangerous creature.
She angled herself toward the door by a few degrees. Just enough to escape if needed. "Sir," she said, keeping her voice sweet and calm, "I just want to make sure you feelin' alright before we get started. You seem like you might've had yourself a full night already and I wouldn't wantâ"
The remainder of her sentence was cut off because the drunken man moved without warning. He lurched to his feet, knocking the small side table with his hip and sending its single glass of water spinning off the edge to shatter against the floor. His face had turned a particular shade of red that lived between embarrassment and fury, and his jaw worked like he was chewing something bitter before he could get the words out.
"Useless bitch," he spat. The syllables fell out of him ugly and hard. "Think I paid to have some whore tell me I done had too much to drink? Think I need you lookin' down at me? I'll kill you, you hear me?!? I'll put my hands âround ya' neck and I'llâ"
His arm swung mid rant, but Bunny was already moving.
She dropped her chin to her chest and turned her body so the arc of his open palm caught nothing but air, and in the same motion her right hand went up to her hair. The blade she kept there was small, barely two inches of steel with a handle thin enough to disappear between two curling papers. It was something she had carried since she was nineteen years old and had learned in the most painful way possible that a pretty face and a small curvy frame were not assets in every room. Her fingers found it without hesitation, but with the calm surety of someone who had practiced the motion until it lived in her muscles instead of her mind.
She drew it in the same breath she stepped to his left side, and when she came back up, she sliced him across the cheekbone in one clean swipe.
The sound he made wasnât quite a scream and not quite a word. It lived somewhere between the two, high and stunned. The moment he was sliced, his hand flew to his face as the blood welled immediately, vivid and dark, running between his fingers and dripping onto the collar he had loosened two buttons down. He staggered back into the bedpost as his eyes went wide, and suddenly he was brutally sober.
"Help!" The plea tore out of him then, ragged and furious. "HELP! She cut me! This wicked bitch cut my damn FACE!"
Bunny stood quietly like a marble statue with the blade still in her hand. Her chest moved in controlled, shallow breaths as her heartbeat threw itself against her ribs like a prisoner testing the walls, but her face⌠her face was completely still. Still like a woman who had survived more than enough dangerous rooms, and this was no different. She didnât bother running or crying, instead she watched the blood run down his cheek and she waited.
Two seconds passed and the door swung open before the echo of his second shout had finished bouncing off the walls.
They filled the frame the way they always filled every frame they walked through, shoulder to shoulder, the both of them constructed from the same Mississippi clay and hardened by the same Jim Crow fire. Stack came through first, his jacket slightly disheveled as if he was in the middle of something⌠or someone, signature gold tooth catching the lamplight as his coffee brown eyes swept the room in three seconds flat. Smoke followed a half step behind, and his gaze went to the blood first, then to Bunny, then to the blade still loose in her fingers, and in that order he read the whole story without a single word being spoken.
The two of them looked at each other and it lasted less than a millisecond. They shared a sacred twin language, and there was no need to speak out loud when they could discuss everything necessary through a simple glance. There was no need for none of the vowels and consonants that other men required. Stack's chin lifted two degrees. Smoke's jaw shifted once to the right. That was all.
Smoke marched over to the bleeding man and grabbed him by the back of the collar with one hand. The client sputtered, grabbing at Smoke's wrist, voice rising again into something wheedling and enraged all at once, but Smoke wasn't listening. He was already moving, already dragging the man toward the door with that flat, unblinking quiet that was a hundred times more frightening than any raised voice.
Stack waited until the door swung shut behind his brother and then he turned to Bunny. He looked at her the way he looked at a ledger he needed to balance, thorough, patient, and giving nothing away in his expression. His hands found his jacket pockets and he stood with the loose posture of a man who had all the time left in the world. "Tell me what happened," he said.
Bunny's fingers curled tighter around the blade before she caught herself and lowered it. "He was drunk when I walked in," she explained, and her voice came out steadier than she had expected, considering. "Not just a couple of drinks. He was drowninâ in it. I called it out because I wasn't about to start a session with a man who could barely hold his head upright and when I didâŚ" She nodded toward the door. "He called me out my name, said he was gonna kill me, and he swung. I moved⌠And I cut him."
Stack said nothing for a moment as his tongue rolled against the inside of his cheek. He looked at the blood on the floor where the man had been standing, then at the broken water glass, then at Bunny's face. "You ain't in trouble," he said finally, his Mississippi drawl coating every syllable like a second skin. "But I need you to hear me on this." He pulled one hand from his pocket and pointed a single finger at her. "Next time a client get rowdy, stupid, or liquored past the point of sense, you don't reach for that blade. You call for one of us. That's what we here for. Understand?"
"Yes, sir."
He held her gaze a moment longer, making sure the instruction had gone somewhere it would stay, and then he nodded once. "Go on, wash up an get you some rest." He turned for the door, then paused with his hand on the frame, not looking back. "You did real good, not fallin' apart. Just... next time⌠let us handle the mess."
The door closed again, and Bunny stood alone in the room with the broken glass and the ruined sheets and the small blade still warm from her grip, and she exhaled for what felt like the first time in several minutes.
Out behind the brothel, the alley smelled of ash cans and summer.
Smoke walked the man through the rear exit with the same grip he used to drag him out of the room. He deposited him against the back wall, the man's knees finally gave out forcing him to slide down the brick and land in a graceless heap on the ground, one hand still pressed to his sliced cheek, blood threading between his fingers and dripping off his chin.
Smoke stood over him. His hands went to his jacket, straightening it once, and then settled at his sides. He looked down at the man like he was a disgruntled God figuring out what type of punishment to inflict.
The man looked up at him and found whatever he needed in Smoke's expression to start talking. "She attacked me," his drunkenness slipping out of his voice now that fear had come in to replace it. "That bitch came in there and she just⌠she had a knife. She cut my face. You need to do somethinâ about that. I paid good money for a civil hour and instead I getâ"
"You said⌠you was gon' kill her."
The man blinked. "I was angry, I didn'tâ"
"Called her out her name twice in my presence."
The man's mouth opened and closed.
Smoke crouched down until his eyes were level with the man's, and in that position he looked less like a man and more like a demon ready to indulge in his bloodlust. His voice hadn't changed. It never changed. It held that same smooth, unshifted cadence through every conversation regardless of what the conversation was about. "Ionâ know exactly what went on in that room yet," he said. "But I want you to understand somethin'. That part don't fuckinâ matter to me. What matter to me is that you walked into my house, disrespected somethin' that belong to me, an then you done put ya' voice on her in a way that reminded her she needed a blade." He paused, letting that sit. "I don't take kindly to that."
His hand moved to his jacket, fingers parting the lapel, and the grip of his pistol caught the thin light of the alley moon.
The man's eyes went very wide. His injured hand came up, palm out, his whole body pressing back against the brick like he could dissolve into it. "Wait, wait, wait, I'll pay double, I'll pay whatever youâ"
The hammer drew back with a soft, final click that cut the man's sentence clean off.
Smoke looked at him with those coal-flat eyes and the man fell silent as a stone thrown into deep water. No more words. Just the ragged labor of his own breathing and the thin, continuous sound of his blood hitting the ground.
Footsteps came down the alley behind Smoke and he didnât bother turning around because he didn't need to. There was only one set of feet in the world that sounded like that.
Stack came up beside him, his hands loose at his sides, gold tooth catching the moon when he tilted his head down at the man on the ground. He took in the full picture. The gun. The blood. The look on Smoke's face. Then he took in a breath, slow and satisfied, and began to speak.
He told Smoke everything. The condition the man had come in. The things he had said when Bunny called it out. The swing that didn't land. The blade that did. When he finished, Stack was quiet for a moment, and then he reached into the interior pocket of his jacket and produced a knife with a blade four times the size of whatever Bunny had been carrying. He turned it once in his fingers, the steel catching and releasing the light in alternating flashes, and he smiled. It was the crooked smile, the one that reached his eyes and meant he was genuinely pleased about something.
"Lemmeâ talk to him first," Stack said. "I ain't had a good conversation in a minute."
Smoke looked at his brother and then he looked at the man on the ground, who was now visibly shaking, tears cutting through the blood on his cheek without any prompting at all. Smoke stood from his crouch, straightened his jacket once more, and stepped to the side. He put his pistol back without a word, folded his hands behind his back, and watched.
Stack crouched in his place, knife resting easy between two fingers, his face open and joyful in the particular way that meant the worst thing imaginable was coming next. "How you doin', friend?" he asked, accent thick as summer mud, voice warm as a lit match. "Tell me somethin'. You ever have somebody look after you real good, put you somewhere soft an warm an safe, an you go an spit in they face for it? You ever do that?"
The man couldnât answer.
Stack tilted his head and grinned like a Cheshire Cat. "Naw, naw, take ya' time. I got all night."
The alley didnât hear from that man again after that. Not in any language that would've made sense to a person passing on the street.
A month passed by and it had the audacity to feel like three.
Bunny sat on the edge of her bed in the room the twins had given her and pulled a brush through her texturized hair for the fourth time that evening. She counted the strokes the way she had been taught to count them since childhood, one and two and three and four, because there was nothing else to count and the act of counting kept her hands busy and her hands being busy kept her from acknowledging a particular restlessness that had been living under her skin for the better part of two weeks.
The room she was stationed in was nice. That was the first thing she had thought when Stack walked her to it, one week after the incident, with his hand at the small of her back and a short instruction to make herself comfortable. She had expected a small, utilitarian thing, the kind of space a working doll got assigned on the upper floor with a shared bath down the hall and a window that faced the brick wall of the building next door. What she got was a room with curtains. Actual curtains, silk ones that pooled at the floor and caught the last of the day's light in a way that turned the whole space the color of a candle flame. A vanity with a proper oval mirror. A wardrobe that had been stocked before she arrived with dresses and wrappers and nightgowns of a quality that made her catch her breath the first time she opened its doors, fabrics so fine they slipped through her fingers like water. On the small table beside her bed, a covered dish of food arrived three times a day whether she asked for it or not. Things she hadn't tasted since she was a little girl sitting in her grandmother's kitchen, sweet potato pie with a crust that shattered her taste buds like stained glass, braised oxtail over white rice, pound cake soaked in lemon syrup that left a sweetness on the roof of her mouth for hours.
She was being treated like a woman of some standing⌠And it was driving her absolutely out of her mind.
Bunny set the hairbrush down and looked at herself in the vanity mirror with an assessing expression she reserved for private moments like these. She was thirty-four years old. She had curves that grown men wrote embarrassing letters about and women studied with something too complicated to be called jealousy and too honest to be called admiration. She had hands that knew how to work, thighs that knew how to hold, a mouth that had never once left a client feeling cheated, and a reputation in three separate cities that had always, always been built by her own effort, her own body, her own particular genius for the kind of pleasure that made a man feel like he was the most important thing in the room. She hadnât come to this brothel to be kept like a flower in a glass case. She had come because she heard that the Moore twins ran the most lucrative operation north of the Mason Dixon and she wanted in on it. She wanted to work.
The bath she had taken earlier still clung to her skin in the form of the vanilla oil she had worked into her arms and her neck, and the nightgown the wardrobe had produced tonight was deep gold that made her brown skin glow like something lit from within. She looked breathtakingly beautiful, yet she felt like a caged thing in beautiful wrappings.
After looking herself over one more time in the mirror, she stood and made a silent decision as she made her way to the kitchen.
The brothel at midnight had a particular quality to it, a quietness that fell somewhere between a sleeping house and a thinking one. The downstairs jazz had stopped three hours ago. The girls were either asleep or occupied, and the hallways that had been warm and perfumed with commerce earlier in the evening were now cool and dim, lit by the occasional wall sconce thatâs wick had been turned down low. Bunny moved through the brothel on her bare feet, the gold nightgown sighing against her legs with every step, and she told herself she was just going for a peach before confronting the twins. There was always a bowl of peaches in the kitchen. She had discovered this on her second day and found it oddly comforting that someone in this house thought fresh fruit was important enough to replenish daily.
She pushed open the kitchen door and the room was drenched in darkness. That was the first thing. The second thing was that it wasnât empty.
As Bunny's eyes adjusted to the dimly lit room, eventually she was able to see there was a woman sitting at the long kitchen table in the dark eating cornbread.
Bunny stood in the doorway with her hand still on the door and looked at the mystery woman as she took her in piece by piece. Height first, even sitting, the woman had somewhat of a long-limbed frame that telegraphed itself. Bunny guessed that she was maybe five foot eight or nine if she stood. Her skin was deep, even brown like good molasses in a jar, paired with hair that fell straight and unadorned down past her shoulders, jet black, the color of ink before it dries. And to finish it off, she had a face that did a thing Bunny had only seen faces do in paintings, not the kind hung in houses like this one, but the kind in old churches where the artists tried to put something holy and something frightening in the same expression at the same time. The mystery woman looked young feature wise as if she hadnât yet turned twenty-two, but her eyes⌠her eyes were something else entirely.
Bunny wasnât a woman who was scared easily. She had lived too much, seen too much, and cut too many men across the face to give fear the kind of real estate it wanted in her mind. But those violet eyes made something ancient crawl up the back of her neck, not unpleasant, just⌠aware. Like stepping into a room and understanding that whatever was in it had been there since before the house was built.
The woman looked up from her cornbread and regarded Bunny with an expression of complete composure, as though being found eating cold food alone in a dark kitchen of a brothel in the middle of the night was exactly where she was expected to be.
"You Rosalie," the woman said. It wasn't a question.
Bunny blinked. "How'd youâ"
"You look like a Rosalie." She broke off another piece of cornbread, unhurried about it. "I'm Josephine. Everybody an they mama call me Josie."
Bunny stepped into the kitchen and let the door drift shut behind her. "I go by Bunny," she said, and then, because she couldn't help herself, "why are you sittin' in the dark?"
Josie ignored the question with such thoroughness that it was almost artful. She tilted her head at Bunny and asked, "They call you Bunny 'cause you can bounce on a dick 'til a man start beggin' for his mama?"
The initial response that leaped to Bunny's lips was something ladylike and deflective. What came out instead was a flustered, sputtering exhale, as her cheeks went warm and her hand raised halfway to her mouth before she caught it. She cleared her throat. "That's⌠yes," she admitted. "That's⌠um⌠exactly why."
The corner of Josie's mouth moved in something that could've been a smile if it committed to itself. She pushed the plate of cornbread forward by an inch, the gesture of a woman sharing without making much of it. "Have some."
Bunny looked at the cornbread. It was ice cold and hard as a rock. She could see the waxy surface on it that cornbread got when it had been sitting awhile. She was fond of cornbread. She was not fond of that. She moved instead to the bowl on the counter and lifted a peach, testing its weight in her palm before biting into it, and she hummed as the juice ran down her chin warm and sweet.
She stood there eating the peach and watching Josie, and Josie let herself be watched for a time, eating her cold cornbread with equanimity, apparently perfectly at peace with the scrutiny. But Bunny was staring and she knew it and the reason she was staring was the thing she couldn't pin down, the thing that sat off-center about this woman the way a picture sits off-center on a wall. She wasnât dressed like any of the other dolls Bunny had met in the past month. No lace, no slip, nothing that mirrored the nature of this house and its business. She wore a plain white blouse tucked into a flowy dark skirt with her feet bare on the kitchen floor. She looked like a woman who had stepped in from another dimension entirely and simply hadn't gotten around to leaving.
Bunny had met all the other dolls in the house during her first week. She was certain of that. This woman had not been among them.
Josie took another bite of her cornbread and looked at Bunny the way Bunny had been looking at her, with that clear, still assessment that took nothing personally and missed nothing either. "How you likin' it here?" she asked. "Smoke and Stack pretty decent owners, far as that kind of thing go."
The word owners sat in Bunny's mouth for a moment before she swallowed it. "I wouldn't know yet," she reluctantly admitted. "I had one client, one incident, and since then they've had me locked up in a room like I'm made of porcelain and they're afraid I'll chip." She took another bite of peach. "I haven't worked a single real night. I came here to make money. Instead I've been eatin' pie and watchin' the curtains move."
Josie's eyes sharpened the way a fire sharpens when you give it more air. "Which one claimed you?" she quipped.
Bunny frowned her brows in confusion. "I'm sorry?"
"Which twin? Smoke or Stack? Elijah or Elias? Which one claimed you as his doll?"
The frown deepened. "Neither of them," Bunny said slowly, like she was working out whether that was the right answer even as she gave it. "When I arrived they walked me through the rules, explained how the percentages worked, showed me the floor. Neither of them said anything about⌠claiming."
Now it was Josieâs turn to be confused as she stopped eating and placed her cornbread very gently on the plate in front of her. She looked at Bunny with the full force of those ancient alien lavender eyes and she was quiet for a stretched-out moment that had weight to it. Then she leaned forward and without a word of warning she took Bunny's face between both her hands and squeezed her cheeks together, compressing Bunny's lips into a surprised, rounded 'O'.
"You are thee cutest thing," Josie cooed, with the slightly awed sincerity of someone who had just found a very small, very charming animal in an unexpected location.
Bunny's eyes went wide above her squished cheeks. She made a sound that was supposed to be a protest and emerged as something closer to a muffled quack.
Josie released her with an unrushed giggle and settled back in her chair as though that had been a perfectly reasonable thing to do. "Alright," she said. "Let me explain how this house works."
Bunny smoothed her cheeks with her palms and fixed Josie with a look that she reserved for people who had just done something she didn't have the vocabulary to address properly. Then she sighed, finished the peach, and sat down.
Josie explained the rules of the house with a questionable amount of knowledge that Bunny would inquire about later. When a doll went through something the way Bunny had gone through something, they were taken off the floor. Not longer than a week, typically. No clients, no housework, just time to let the body and the mind settle back into themselves without being asked to perform. After that period, whichever twin had claimed that particular doll would take her through a retraining week. A proper retraining. Not punishment, not because she had done something wrong, but because the mind needed to be walked back through safety the same way the body needed to be walked back through strength after a sickness. The twins were a great many things, Josie explained, and some of those things werenât things that would be listed in a church bulletin, but they werenât complete monsters and wouldn't send a shaken woman back to work before she was ready. That wasnât morality for morality's sake. It was also just bad business, and they were nothing if not precise businessmen.
Bunny absorbed this. Processed it. Turned it over. And then arrived at the part that had been sitting sideways in her chest since the question first got asked.
"It's been a month," she said.
Josie looked at her dumbfounded like she didnât hear her correctly.
"It's been a month," Bunny said again. "The incident was a month ago. Nobody took me through any retraining. Nobody said anythinâ about when I'd go back to work. And you're telling me that the reason for that isâŚ"
She could see it in Josie's expression before she said it, like she was about to deliver news that amused her to the highest degree.
"Either you one of the special ones," Josie said, the childish grin breaking through now, unconstrained, like a schoolgirl who had been holding it in for the last five minutes, "or you somehow so boring that both of them forgot you exist entirely."
Bunny straightened up in her chair. "I am not boring," she said.
"I didn't say you were."
"You implied it."
"I offered it as a possibility."
"It is not a fuckinâ possibility." Bunny's chin came up and her voice took on the tone of a woman defending something she had built with a considerable effort over many years. Before she had walked through the Moore brothers' doors she had left three separate establishments because she had outgrown them. She had a clientele that wrote letters to find out where she had gone. She had a reputation that didnât include the word boring in any language. "I done made grown ass men cry," she said. "Not from pain⌠From gratitude."
Josie held up one hand in a gesture of peace, her playful grin not moving an inch. "Alright, alright. I believe you. I apologize." She folded her hands on the table. "The other explanation, then, is that they both want to claim you and neither one of them know how to go about it without steppinâ on the other's toes."
Bunny's chair scraped back half an inch. "Both of them?"
"It's rare," Josie whispered, as if she was saying too much too soon. "In the whole time this house been runninâ there've only been two dolls that both of them claimed at once. Just two. The second one is named Buttercup. She handles their books and investments. Sheâs been both of theirs for many moons." A pause, thoughtful and private. "The first oneâŚ" She picked up her cornbread again and looked at it, not at Bunny. "Well..."
The silence that lingered behind that one word forced Bunny to really look at Josie's profile. She took in the serenity of it, the complete and settled comfort with which this woman occupied any space she entered, including dark kitchens in the middle of the night. The way she didn't need to finish the sentence because the sentence was already obvious to anyone paying attention.
"Hypothetically," Bunny said carefully.
Josie's mouth curved with mischief. "Hypothetically..."
"If a woman found herself in that position. Both of them. At once. How would she⌠manage that?"
Josie was quiet for a moment, chewing her cornbread, looking somewhere past Bunny's shoulder as though consulting a memory that lived in the middle distance. "Hypothetically," she repeated, "such a woman would need to learn how not to get frostbitten by an avalanche of coldness." A pause. "While also not burninâ up in a lake of uncontrolled fire." Another pause, this one carrying a slightly different weight, the weight of something remembered in the body as much as the mind. "And on top of all that, she would need to learn how to take two men at the same time without tearinâ in half."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"That's⌠useful information," Bunny said finally.
"I thought you'd think so."
They sat for another minute, the two of them, in the warm dark kitchen with the peach bowl on the counter and the plate of cold cornbread between them, and something passed between them that couldnât be labeled as friendship yet but was the thing that comes just before it, a recognition, a sense of shared understanding arrived at by different roads.
A few more comforting minutes passed and then Bunny stood. She pulled the gold nightgown straight across her hips and ran one hand through the freshly brushed waterfall of her hair and looked at Josie with the expression of a woman who had made up her mind about something and had no further interest in deliberating. "Hypothetically, if I wanted to speak with them tonight... you know where they are?"
"Their office," Josie said. "End of the hall. Door on the left." She reached for the last piece of frosty cornbread. "Knock four times when you get there. Even count, same rhythm. That's how they know it's a doll behind the door and not somebody they need to put a bullet in."
Bunny's eyes widened slightly. "Good to know."
"One more thing," Josie said, without looking up, the words landing easy as a stone dropped into still water, "whoever open that door? Look him dead in the eye when you tell him what you want. Don't let him take the silence from you first. They'll stand in a quiet room and wait you out 'til you forget what you came for. Don't let him." She broke off a bite of cornbread. "Now go."
The hallway to their office was dim and long as the floorboards under her bare feet held the warmth of the day's heat, soaked up and slowly releasing into the night. She walked it with her chin level and her footsteps quiet, the vanilla oil on her skin mixing with the faint residual perfume that lived in all the walls of this house. At the far end of the hall, beneath the last sconce, a door sat closed and faintly rimmed with the amber line of lamplight from beneath it.
She stopped in front of it. Pressed her palm flat against the wood for one second. Then she knocked. Four times. Even. The same rhythm. Just as Josie had instructed.
On the other side of the door, the office breathed with the quietness of two men working in a comfortable parallel. The desk was spread with ledgers and cash in organized columns, the ashtray on its corner nursed a half-finished cigarette that had gone cold, and the lamp threw a yellow circle of warmth across the arithmetic of their operations. Stack stood at the desk's far edge, jacket off, suspenders down, his sleeves rolled to the elbow, one hand moving down a column of figures with the end of a pencil. Smoke sat on the lounge couch along the near wall, his own jacket folded beside him, a glass of brown liquor balanced on the arm of the cushion, his eyes moving across a folded sheet of paper he had been reading for the third time.
Four knocks came through the door.
Even. Measured.
Both men went still.
Stack's pencil stopped and his eyes lifted from the ledger to find his brother's face across the room. Smoke had already set the paper down. His hand had already moved to the glass, lifting it, not drinking from it, just holding it in the idle way of a man whose other hand needed to be free. His eyes were steady on the door.
The four-count knock meant a doll. Both of them knew that. The problem was that only two dolls in their entire operation knew that particular code, and neither of those two women were supposed to be within three city blocks of this brothel for another three days.
Smoke set the glass down very carefully on the side table before standing and crossing the room to the door. His shoulder holster rode against his undershirt as he pulled his pistol free in one clean motion before turning the knob and pulling the office door open.
Bunny stood in the hallway nervously shifting her weight from one foot to the other. The lamplight from inside the office hit her caramel brown skin from the side and the effect of this wasn't something Smoke had originally budgeted for. She was soft, luminous, small, and entirely the kind of woman that a man had to consciously remind himself to look away from, all of that deep-curved, warm-skinned, doe-eyed beauty arranged in the specific way that made the gold fabric laced over her body look like it had been commissioned for her personally. She blinked up at him. Her eyes were the color of good rum and they caught the light and held it, and for one unguarded half second the hardness in his face did something complicated before it arranged itself back into its usual flat composure.
Smoke held the pistol at his side. His face settled back into the expression of a man who was conducting business regardless of the hour. His eyes moved over her once, the way he surveyed any situation that required assessment before a response. "Why," he said, voice smooth and level as a road built to last, his Mississippi roots dragging slow and warm beneath every word, "is you at my door knockin' four times?"
Bunny didnât flinch as she looked him in the eye exactly as Josie had instructed and she held the look steady. "Because," she said, "I am tired of being treated like I'm made of glass." She let a breath pass as she remembered who she was speaking to. "... Sir."
Smoke looked at her for a long minute. He ran his mind back, sorting through the preceding month like how a man sorts through a drawer looking for something he put down without thinking. The girl on the floor. The drunk client. The blade. Stack handling her, him handling the client. The decision to move her to the room across from theirs. Then the weeks had continued to happen, the operation had continued to require their attention, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, the particular task of walking her back through had gotten caught in the gap between what he assumed Stack had handled and what Stack apparently assumed he had handled.
He let the exhale come through his nose, small and contained. Then he stepped back from the door and nodded once towards the interior of the room. "Come in."
Bunny wasnât a woman that needed to be instructed twice as she came in.
Smoke shut the door behind her and walked back to the couch, settling into it with the glass of liquor retrieved from the side table. His eyes stayed on her as she took in the office, the desk and its columns, Stack still standing at the far edge of it now with his arms folded. Smoke's gaze moved from her face to his brother's and he said, with the absolute calm of a man stating a mathematical fact, "You done forgot to recommission ya' doll."
Stack's expression moved toward as expression of confusion that was also slightly offended at the framing. "Fuck you mean my doll?" he quipped. "Thought she was yours."
"I moved her to the room 'cross the hall," Smoke said. "I was leavin' the rest to you."
"Nobody told me that."
"I ain't gotta tell you everythinâ, Elias. Use ya' brain."
Stack unfolded his arms and planted both hands flat on the desk. "My brain was operatin' under the assumption that the woman sittin' over in that room with the good curtains was your doll that you was handlin' in ya' own time, Elijah. Had I known she was mine to recommission I would've had her back on the floor four weeks ago."
"She been over there four an a half weeks."
"Four an a half weeks then. My point stands, muthafucka."
"Ya' point is that you wasn't payin' attentionâ"
"My point is that you could've opened ya' mouth like a grown ass man an said the words 'Elias, go handle Bunny' an I would've gone an handled Bunny, but instead you sittinâ over there on that couch drinkin' ya' liquor an assumin' I was gon' read ya' mindâ"
"I don't need you readin' my mind, I need you payin' attention to what's happenin' in this houseâ"
"Stupid bitch, I pay more attention to what happens in this house than you do, I just ain't also expected to be a fuckin' mind reader on top of everythinâ elseâ"
"Language, Elias.â Smoke said.
"Now I need to read ya' mind an watch my mouth?"
"We got a doll present. Tighten up." Smoke's eyes cut to Bunny for one brief moment that carried the tiniest edge of an apology.
Bunny had been watching this exchange with the expression of a woman who was simultaneously relieved that Josie was right and also annoyed that Josie was right. She looked at the ceiling for one moment, gathering something, and then she looked at Stack directly.
"I didn't come here to listen to y'all argue about whose doll I am," she cut in. The words came out clean and direct, and beneath them ran a current of something real, something stored up across four weeks in a pretty room with silk curtains and three meals a day that she hadnât earned. "I came here because I am a woman who been working since I was old enough to understand that money you make yourself is the only kind that belongs to you in full." She let that settle for a moment.Â
Before she had walked through their door she had left three establishments because she outgrew them. Before that, back when she was Rosalie and not Bunny, she hadn't been permitted to own so much as the dress on her back. That life was behind her and it would stay behind her as long as she had a body to work with and the sense God gave her to use it. "I appreciate the food," she said. "I appreciate the nightgowns and the curtains and the sweetness. I do. But I am not a woman who takes without giving back, and I am not going to sit in that room one more week eating indulging in things I ain't earn. I want to work."
The office held the sound of that for a brief second.
Stack analyzed her from top to bottom. The annoyance from the argument with his twin had drained off his face entirely, replaced by something more attentive and interesting. He possessed the look of a man who had been watching something he wanted for some time and had just been reminded of it. His gaze moved down the gold nightgown with the focused assessment of a man reviewing an investment he had forgotten to manage and was now reconsidering with renewed and comprehensive interest.
He came around the desk, crossed the office floor, and closed the distance between them until his chest was close enough for her to feel the heat radiating off him. His hands came up. His fingers settled first at the hollow of her throat, light and acquainting themselves with the shape of her, feeling the small flutter there she couldn't suppress, feeling the way she swallowed. Then they traveled with thorough patience across her collarbones, over the generous swell of her chest through the nightgown's thin fabric. She was built lavishly, heavy and warm everywhere in a way that made his hands slow down and pay attention, and he let them linger there, cataloguing her, until her breathing changed and she tried to hide the change but couldn't.
His hands continued their inventory, moving down the soft plush landscape of her stomach, the deep inward curve of her waist, spreading wide across the full round geography of her hips. He took his time with her hips. He spent what felt like an extended amount of time mapping them, as though committing their particular architecture to some private record he intended to revisit at a later date. Then one hand swept low and around, and he brought his palm down hard and flat across the full magnificent curve of her backside with a crack that split the quiet of the office like a starting pistol.
The sound rang off the walls, the bookcase, the glass in the lamp, everything. Bunny's gasp tore out of her before she had the opportunity to make any decisions about it, sharp and bright, her body moving without consulting her brain, tilting forward into the impact and then backward away from it, settling finally against Stack's chest in a way that was involuntary enough to be entirely honest.
Stack felt her melt against him and his exhale came out long and satisfied. His arm wrapped around her from behind, pulling her flush against the front of him, and he bent his mouth to the curve of her ear. "I'm gonâ be the one runnin' ya' retrainin' tonight." He pressed his mouth closer to her ear, words dropping to a rough near-whisper. "An dependin' on how that go⌠I might need to keep you locked away from everybody else for another month⌠Really take my time so ya' body don't ever forget who it belong to."
The sound Bunny made was small, strangled, and entirely against her will.
He reached for the thin strap at her shoulder and slid it down. The other strap followed. He peeled the gold nightgown from her slowly, letting it whisper down her curves until it pooled at her feet in a gilded ring, and what was left standing in the middle of their office was every generous, luminous, full inch of Bunny without a single layer between her skin and the lamplight. The lamp threw amber across the swell of her hips, the deep curve of her waist, the heavy softness of her breasts, the deep brown warmth of her, and the office became immediately a different kind of room.
Stack stepped back and bit down on his bottom lip as he took in her goddess figure. Then, with the easy authority of a man in his own house, he waltzed over to the couch where Smoke sat and dropped down beside his brother. He plucked the liquor glass from Smoke's hand, drained what remained, and reached for the refill trolley at the couch's edge. Smoke didnât argue with his twin. He simply shifted his weight to accommodate Stackâs presence and locked his eyes on Bunny.
Two men on the same couch. Side by side. Undershirts and slacks, loafers, the warm lamplight running along the defined lines of their arms where the fabric ended, the undeniable press of their interest visible in the material of their trousers. Stack poured a fresh glass and settled into the cushion. Smoke took Bunny in from head to foot with that flat, complete attention that gave nothing away and missed nothing. The air in the room had changed and pressed heavily on all their shoulders.
Stack leaned forward, elbows to his knees, glass hanging loose in his fingers. "Show me," he said, "why you worth the trouble of retrainin' when you already cost me a dead white man, two dry cleaning bills, a shovel we had to replace after breakin' it diggin' that peckerwoods grave, plus four an a half weeks of room an board an meals that even my top earners don't see on a regular Tuesday." He settled back into the cushion. "All that, an you ain't brought us a single dollar. So show me what you got, Bunny."
Bunny stood naked in the center of their office and looked at both of them. She took one breath. Then she walked to Smoke.
She came to stand directly before him and held his gaze and placed one knee on the cushion beside his thigh and then the other, straddling his lap with the practiced ease of a woman who had made herself at home in more difficult situations than this. She could feel him beneath her already, the dense, insistent hardness of him through his slacks, and the discovery sent something bold climbing up her spine and into her shoulders. She rolled her hips, one slow and complete rotation, felt him twitch beneath her, and did it again. She leaned forward and put her mouth to the side of his neck, the warm brown skin above his collar, and kissed him there. Felt his jaw tighten. Kissed across his collarbone, the gap where his undershirt opened at the throat. She found his earlobe with her teeth, caught it just barely, and felt the exhale that came out of him, contained and controlled, the only version of a sound he was willing to give her yet.
She pulled back and looked at Stack over her shoulder. "I can't promise I won't cause more trouble with your clients," she said, her hips still moving against Smoke's in that slow, measured grind. "That ainât a promise I can keep. But I am an investment." She felt Smoke's hand settle on her hip, heavy and certain, the grip of a man who was claiming something without announcing he's done it. "And you'd be foolish men to let me go."
Then she climbed off Smoke's lap and moved to Stack.
She settled herself across his thighs before he had quite finished processing the intention, and his hands came up instinctively, finding her hips, and she moved against him the way she had moved against his brother, with that same frank, unhurried competence, rolling her hips in grinding rolls that had him fully hard inside his slacks under a minute. She kissed along his jaw, the corner of his mouth, found his throat and bit softly at it and felt him grip her harder. She turned her mouth to his ear. "Well?" she said quietly.
Stack's answer was both hands sliding down to fill themselves with the full, heavy weight of her backside, squeezing with the proprietary thoroughness of a man claiming something he had decided belongs to him and only him.
From the other side of couch, Smoke reached forward and caught the back of her hair in his fist. Not rough, not gentle, just completely unambiguous, pulling her head back until she was looking up at him from Stack's lap with her neck at a stretched and exposed angle. Smoke looked down at her, his eyes never leaving her face. "Who," he said, each word its own complete and unhurried thing, "taught you that knock?"
"Josie," Bunny replied quickly.
The quality of the silence that followed was specific. She felt Stack go still beneath her. She saw something shift in Smoke's expression, not much, just a recalibration of a single degree. "Josie," he repeated. Flat.
"She was in the kitchen," Bunny continued. "Just now. I spoke with her before I came down here."
Smoke's eyes moved to Stack's face. Stack's eyes moved back. That language again, the one that needed no words. Whatever moved between them in that half second was mutual and resolved by the time it was done.
Smoke released her hair. He stood, adjusted the set of his shoulder holster with one practiced motion, and looked at Bunny. "Come," he said.
Stack stood from the couch with Bunny still in his arms, lifting her from his lap without any apparent effort, her weight absorbed into his frame as a matter of course. He carried her out of the office. Smoke walked ahead through the dim corridor, his footsteps quiet on the floorboards, and they moved as a unit through the darkness of the second floor until they reached the kitchen.
Smoke pushed the door open.
Bunny looked into the kitchen from over Stack's shoulder.
The room was empty.
The room wasn't just vacant as if someone had just stepped out, the room was suddenly empty in a way that was wrong. Profoundly, specifically wrong. The chair at the table sat at the exact angle it had been in when she first sat down across from Josie, as though no one had adjusted it at all, as though no one had ever pulled it out to sit in it. The plate of cornbread was gone without a trace, not in the washtub, not on the counter, not anywhere. Simply absent from the room as if it was never there. The peach bowl sat exactly where it always sat. The lamplight came through the window at its usual angle and landed on a kitchen that offered no evidence whatsoever that a woman with ancient eyes had been sitting in it not even twenty minutes ago.
Bunny stared. The hair on her arms rose.
"She was right there," she said, and her voice had climbed half a register before she noticed. "She was sittin' right there at that table. She had cornbread on a plate, cold cornbread, she had it on a plate right there in front that chair, she offered some to me and I took a peach instead. She squeezed my cheeks." Bunny's hand rose and touched her own face at the memory of it, the very real and physical memory of Josie's palms pressing her cheeks together. "She was a real person who was in this room. She had feet. I heard her feet on the floor when she shifted her chair. That ain't somethin' I imagined." She heard her own voice rising once more and made herself stop. Swallowed down her confusion and looked from the empty table, to the empty chair, to the empty counter where a plate had been sitting less than a few minutes ago. The wrongness of the empty kitchen pressed against her like a cold hand.Â
"Where'd she go," she whispered, and this time her voice came out quieter, stripped of its former certainty, with something underneath it that was very close to fear. "The hallway is one hallway. I walked the whole length of it to get to your office. I would have seen her. I would have passed her. Where'd sheâ"
"I believe you."
Smoke's voice arrived quietly and cut through everything else like a lamp lit in a dark room. He stepped next to Stack and reached out, taking her chin between his fingers, tilting her face toward him with a gentleness that wasnât his usual mode and was therefore more effective than almost anything else he couldâve done. His eyes moved across her face, reading whatever he found there with that same thorough attention, and then he said it again without elaboration or apology. "I believe you. You saw her. You spoke to her. It's 'ight." He held her gaze until the climbing quality went out of her breathing, until her eyes settled from startled back to present. His thumb moved once along her jaw, the lightest possible contact, and then he released her chin and looked at Stack over her head.Â
The look between them lasted one second and carried something private in it, something that had history in it, some understanding of Josie that they shared between themselves and werenât presently sharing with Bunny. "Need to put a leash on that woman," Smoke grumbled, with the flat certainty of someone adding an item to a list.
"You an me both, nigga," Stack said, quietly.
Smoke turned from the kitchen. He didnât go back towards their office, instead he went the other direction, toward the room at the far end of the hall, and Stack followed with Bunny still in his arms, carrying her away from the empty kitchen and the empty chair and the cold and inexplicable absence of a woman who had been sitting in it minutes ago eating cold cornbread like she owned the place.
The room at the end of the hall was broad and purposeful. A wide bed sat at its center on a dark mahogany frame, the headboard tall and unadorned. White linens, clean. A single lamp burning low in the corner, its flame turned down until the light came out warm and intimate. This was a simple room designed for one thing and one thing only, retraining a doll that didnât need to be disciplined.Â
Stack deposited Bunny in the center of the bed with more chivalry than intended. He straightened up and looked at her sprawled across the white linens, her moisturized brown skin drinking the lamplight the way it was built to, every curve of her catching and holding the warmth of it. He let out a small satisfied grunt before rolling his shoulders once and then bending down to kiss the inside of her knee.
The sound Bunny made started in her throat and got halfway out before she caught it, her thigh twitching under his mouth. Stack felt the twitch and registered it with the calmness of a man who had spent a considerable amount of time studying the language of women's bodies, then he returned and pressed his lips to her inner knee again.Â
One kiss⌠two kiss⌠three kiss⌠four⌠Stack continued his playful worship before moving lower, or rather higher towards Bunnyâs inner thigh. He was greeted with the soft warm skin there as his mouth opened against it, tongue dragging along the crease where her thigh met nothing and then meeting the next crease. He was learning the deep inner geography of her, building the path inward with a patience that was intentionally designed to make her lose her mind before he arrived at his final destination.
Her scent hit him before his mouth did and he let out a low sound against her skin that was pure appreciation. "Four an a half weeks," he said, lips moving against her inner thigh, his breath warming the space he hadn't touched yet. "You been sittin' in that pretty room unfucked all this time, huh, lilâ bunny rabbit?"
Bunny responded vocally with something that was technically a word, or at least she thought she did.
Stack chuckled to himself and then his mouth immediately found her aching bundle of nerves. He worked her the way a classically trained musician works an instrument he knows intimately. He didnât rush his performance but instead attended to the specific truth of her responses with the kind of focused and intelligent attention that made up the difference between a man who was present and a man who was going through the motions. He learned her in the first thirty seconds, learned the particular way her hips moved when he pressed the flat of his tongue against her center, the way her thighs tried to close around his head and then caught themselves and spread wider, the way the sound she made climbed an entire octave when he tended to her clit and circled it with skilled precision.
He effortlessly brought her to the edge in under four minutes.
He knew when she was there. He had been watching for it, feeling for it in the tightening of her thighs and the change in her breathing, the way her hands had found the back of his head and were pressing down with that desperate and gnawing pressure that meant she was right there, right on the rim of it, one more motion and she would go over. He could feel her gathering herself, the coil of it pulling tight in her body and her hips tilting up to meet him.
But, because Stack was Stack, he couldnât help himself as he pulled back and denied Bunny instant relief. She wasnât a doll that needed to be punished, but she was still a doll under control of her master. He didnât pull away far, just enough for his mouth to leave her core and rest against the inside of her thigh instead. He looked utterly composed as he breathed against her soaked, twitching heat while she fell apart beneath him in a different way than she had intended.
"Stack," she breathlessly whined, the word arriving with a thicker desperation than she had planned.
"Mm," he said, mouth still against her thigh.
"Please⌠Don't do that."
"Do what? " he asked pleasantly.
She made a frustrated sound and whined again before Stack returned to his honeysuckle feast.
He took his time getting there, moving up through the wet of her with his tongue like he was reading something he found interesting, and then he was back at her clit and the sounds coming out of her rebuilt themselves immediately, climbing again, her hips rolling, her fingers curling into the sheets. He gave her forty-five seconds this time before the edge showed up again in the ragged pacing of her breathing, and he pulled back once more. Pressed his mouth to her inner thigh. Breathed. And let her curse at him out.
"You raggedy ass nigga," she managed.
His laugh came out against her skin, warm and genuinely amused. "I done been called worse, babydoll."
At the head of the bed the mattress dipped. Bunny's eyes reopened, head turning, and Smoke leaned above her, and the sight of him was enough to make every other thought in her head exit quickly. He had shedded everything. His undershirt, slacks, holster, all of it was gone, and what was left was all of him, broad and carved and rich dark brown skin. His body looked like the map of a man who had moved through the world with physical force for a long time and had the evidence of that written in muscle and old scars. He was hard, entirely and obviously, and looking at her with those flat obsidian eyes that gave nothing away.
Smoke said nothing as he reached for the small table at the bed's edge and a cigarette appeared between his fingers, a match scratched against the bedframe with a brief bright leap of flame before it found its target. He took the first pull, held it, let the clouds of tobacco climb toward the ceiling in a long and perfectly controlled column. And then he looked down at her, the cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, his eyes traveling across her face with the calm, weighing assessment of a man reviewing something he may or may not be satisfied with.
"Who," he said, voice low and quiet and warm as the smoking end of something burning, "you think you talkinâ to like that in my house?"
Between her thighs, Stack's mouth had found the soft heat of her again, and the sound that tried to escape Bunny's throat was intercepted by her own determination not to give Smoke the satisfaction of an incoherent answer before she had the chance to give him a real one. "I-I didnât mean none by it⌠I-I wasnât givinâ orders," she managed.
"Mm." Smoke's eyes dropped from her face to the space just below them, where his erection jumped and throbbed directly above her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him, and then his eyes came back up to hers. "You came to my office," he continued as he lazily gripped his manhood before taking another puff. "Told me what you was tired of. Told me what you wanted. Got yaselfâ naked in front my brother an I, then sat in both our laps like you had the right." He exhaled smoke from the side of his mouth, away from her face. "That sound like a doll who know her place to you?"
Before she could respond, Stack's tongue distracted her by circling her clit with renewed and specific intention, as one finger pressed into her slowly, testing the heat of her⌠the tight grip of her. She was utterly soaked and already shaking in a finely controlled way, like how a bow shakes just before the arrow is released.
Smoke watched her face with the careful attention of a man reading a weather report. "A doll," he said, voice quieter, the edge in it sharpening enough to send shivers down her spine, "asks. She don't tell. She don't march down a hallway an knock on my door like she owed somethin'. She asks her owner. She say please. She waits." His thumb brushed her jaw, the touch light and intentional, as his eyes dropped to her mouth and then came back up. "You still ainât proved you worth the trouble."
It didn't take much for Bunny to read between the lines as her right hand moved from the sheet and gripped Smokeâs precum dripping length. She felt the substantial weight of him against her palm and heard the slight controlled catch of his inhale as she felt him twitch against her hand. He filled her hand, dense and hot, and she stroked him from base to crown once with a grip that was firm.
She angled her head against the pillow, opened her mouth, and drew him in.
His size settled against her tongue, thick and dense, and she worked her lips around him with the exploring attention of a woman who had been told her whole career that her mouth was something extraordinary and had spent years proving it right. She hollowed her cheeks and sucked on him with an unhurried suction, her tongue mapping the underside of him on each pull, tracing the swollen vein that ran along his length, lapping at the crown when she came up before gobbling him back down again. Her free hand wrapped around his base and worked in a measured counterpoint. The combination of hand and mouth coordinated with the easy confidence of someone who had been doing this long enough that it lived in her body the way playing an instrument lives in a musician's hands had Smoke internally losing his mind.
Smoke's own hand found her hair, fingers settling among her now sweated out tresses without pressing, without directing, just resting there with a weight that communicated his full attention. The quality of his breathing changed almost immediately, each exhale coming a degree longer than it should have, each inhale a degree more controlled than usual. He brought the cigarette to his lips with his free hand and took a pull, held it, let the tobacco clouds go from the side of his mouth. The image of him above her doing that while she worked him below was the most Elijah âSmokeâ Moore thing she could imagine, controlling himself with a lit cigarette while she did her damnedest to remove that control from him entirely.
For a long minute, Bunny genuinely believed she was finally in control, but then, the devious twin still situated between her thick thighs added a second finger inside her and she gasped. It only lasted a split second as her eyes almost rolled to the back of her head while she momentarily let the pleasure consume her, but that was short lived with a slight tug to her hair.
"Look at me," Smoke demanded.
She didnât need to be told twice as she retrained her eyes back onto the owner that was in front of her.
"Mmm⌠good⌠you capable of suckinâ dick an followinâ instructions," he said softly, in a voice that had dropped below the level where it was meant to sound gentle and instead sounded much more intimate and a whole lot more dangerous. "You got somethin' to say?"
Bunny, whose mouth was still full of raw meat, slightly shook her head ânoâ and continued servicing Smokeâs dick. Her tongue continued working the underside of him in the way that she had been complimented on in cities that were miles away from this one. She went down until the back of her throat met him and held there, breathing through her nose, feeling his fingers tighten in her hair by one degree, and then she came back up and did it again.
Smoke's exhale was long and relaxed. "Mm," he said, and it was the most honest amount of praise he had given Bunny all night.
Stack had brought her to the edge twice more in the interim, each time withdrawing with the particular cruelty of a man who is enjoying the architecture of her desperation more than he would enjoy its resolution, and she was by now a tightly wounded and thoroughly soaked little doll. Her body was operating at a level of need that had begun to make her cry a little. Not from pain or unhappiness, just from the relentless accumulation of pleasure with nowhere to go.
"Stack⌠SirâŚ" she managed, pulling off Smoke for a breath.
"Still here," Stack said, against her thigh.
"Please." The word came out stripped of all pretense. Just the word. Just the need in it, raw and uncomplicated.
Stack looked up at her along the length of her body. His mouth was wet, his eyes were bright, and he looked like a man who had been given an exceptional gift that was in no hurry to unwrap it fully. "Please what?" he asked rhetorically already knowing the answer to the question.
"Please⌠l-let me finish."
"Let you finish?" His voice carried genuine amusement. "Babydoll, I barley scratched the surface."
Smoke looked at the tears streaming from Bunnyâs eyes. Something moved across his face, an emotion too foreign for anyone to decipher. He pulled free of her mouth with a soft sound and moved, climbing off the mattress and coming around the foot of the bed, and the sight of him moving toward Stack's position made Stack lift his head.
Smoke looked at his brother. Then he looked at the place between Bunny's thighs, the glistening, swollen, and desperately twitching evidence of the last fifteen minutes, and he looked back at Stack with an expression that was entirely final.
"Move," he said.
Stack sat up and squinted his eyes in disbelief. "Sâcuse you, nigga?"
"Move," Smoke said again.
Stack's eyes narrowed. "She's my doll, Elijah."
"Yeah⌠well⌠sheâs also mine," Smoke said. "I just decided."
Stack stared at him. The look on his face was the look of a mannish boy who didnât like having to share his toys. "You can't just decide that," he complained. "That ain't how this works. You can't crawl over here in the middle of my session an claim a whole woman like you canât go pick another damn dollâ"
"Elias."
"What?!â
"I been watchin' her for a month," Smoke said, with the patience of someone explaining something obvious. "She in the room âcross the hall from ours. I been the one who had her moved there. I been the one who made sure her meals was right. Made sure her room was right an made sure nobody bothered her." A pause. "She mine. She also yours. Move."
Stack's jaw tightened. He looked at Bunny. Bunny looked back at him from the mattress with wide eyes, her lips still swollen, her thighs still trembling, and her expression carrying the cocky confusion of a woman who had just been claimed by two men simultaneously while lying naked in their bed and was still in the early stages of processing this information. Stack pointed at Smoke. "You owe me," he said. "You owe me big time, nigga."
"Mhm. Add it to the list," Smoke said.
Stack moved, climbing up toward the headboard with a muttered stream of commentary, and Smoke took his place between Bunny's thighs before lowering his head. He wasted no time as his mouth found her center without preamble, his tongue worked her with the focused of a man who went through life either doing something well or not at all. The sound Bunny made was enormous and immediate, her hands flying out to grip the sheets.
Smoke was vastly different from Stack in how he devoured Bunnyâs pussy. Stack built her pleasure up as if he was an architect with a boundless amount of patience. Whereas Smoke treated her pleasure like a man reading a language only he knew. Every response she gave him, he immediately incorporated it into what he did next, adjusting, refining, arriving at the exact pressure and rhythm that made her thighs lock around his head and her back clear off the mattress as every coherent thought she had exited the premises.
He didnât bother edging her since he had already clearly read what the edging had done to her. He could read the accumulated tension in every line of her body. Instead, he drove her straight to the finish line without stopping. The orgasm that finally rippled through her felt spiritual as if her soul was raptured out of her body. Her voice tore out of her open and honest, her hips grinding against his mouth as he worked her through every wave of it, his hands locked on her hips to keep her from pitching away from him.
Stack sat at the headboard watching all of this with his arms folded like a sulking child. When Smoke finally lifted his head, Stack uncrossed his arms and pointed at his brother with one finger. "My turn," he said.
"She sensitive," Smoke said, sitting back on his heels.
"I know she sensitive. That's the point."
Smoke moved aside without any urgency, and Stack replaced him between Bunny's thighs with the eagerness of a man who had been waiting for his turn at something exceptional. He looked at the convulsing center of her for a beat with something purely acquisitive in his expression, and then he put his skilled mouth back on her.
Bunny's entire body jerked backwards. The sound she made this time was considerably more desperate than the last, her hips trying to back away from the overstimulation and Stack's hands locking around them before she got anywhere.
"Stay," he murmured against her, voice vibrating right against her hypersensitive clit.
"Stack I can't, it's too muchâ"
"You can," he growled, and meant it, and went back to work.
Smoke let his twin have his fun as he situated himself on Bunnyâs left side, and his mouth found her breast. His lips closed around her nipple and sucked on the coco nub with an intensity that sent a euphoric sensation shooting directly down her spine. His other hand flattened on her ribs, feeling the heave of her breathing, the rapid and helpless rise and fall of her chest. He worked across to her other breast with the same thorough attention, his teeth grazing just lightly enough to make her gasp, and then moan, and then grip the back of his head.
Meanwhile, Stack feasted like a starving madman. His tongue worked her pulsing and overstimulated pussy with an almost vindictive thoroughness, licking into her and circling her clit with alternating attention, building the sensation higher than it had any right to go given that she had just come apart under his brother's mouth not two minutes ago. He watched her face when he could, watched the progression of it, the way her mouth fell open, how her brows drew together, and when the tears started again fresh from the corners of her eyes, overstimulation and pleasure braided together until she couldn't separate one from the other.
When she came the second time it was different in character, wilder, less controlled, her body arching and convulsing with a force that had nothing of restraint left in it, and the flood of her against Stack's mouth was audible in the quiet room. He drank her juices down with a delighted groan while his jaw still worked her through every aftershock, refusing to stop until her thighs had gone from locked to trembling to limp and her voice had dropped from cries to the soft and utterly wrecked sound of a woman who has nothing left to give.
Thirty seconds of blissful torture occurred until Stack finally sat back. He looked at the evidence of what he had done to her with profound satisfaction, wiping his jaw with the back of his hand. He looked at Smoke. "She ready," he said.
"She definitely ready," Smoke agreed.
Smoke laid down on his back on the mattress beside Bunny, his nine inches pointing toward the ceiling. He turned his head and looked at her where she lay against the linens, trembling and thoroughly undone. His voice, when it came, was dominate and certain. "Show me," he said, "how you got ya' name, bunny rabbit. Show me why you worth the trouble."
The second Bunny heard Smokeâs request, she sat up on trembling arms. She looked at him stretched out beside her, at the full dark length of him, at the patient flatness of his expression, at the way he was simply waiting with the absolute confidence of a man who knew what was coming and secretly couldnât wait.
She was still a little loopy from her prior orgasms but gathered up enough strength and swung her leg over him. She positioned herself above him and reached down to guide him to her entrance before sinking onto him with a long, controlled descent that pulled a sound from the back of her throat and a sound from the back of his. Both of them couldnât help themselves responding to the stretch, the heat, and the fullness of her pussy wrapping around his length as she settled herself completely onto him. She stayed there for a second, adjusting, letting her body accommodate the considerable size of him and feeling him everywhere at once before beginning to move.
It only took three bounces for Bunny to prove to Smoke why she had earned her name. She wasnât just a lady of the night who knew how to ride a dick until sunrise. No. She had spent years refining a specific combination of bouncing, grinding, and rolling that made men weep, beg, and reach for her like she was the only water in a desert. She worked him with her hips, rising and falling in the deep rolling motion that used every muscle she had, the sound of their bodies meeting building in the lamp-warm room, her succulent breasts moving with every stroke, her hands braced on his chest for leverage, her thighs flexing and releasing with each downward drive.
Smoke looked up at her and something happened in his face, some arrangement of his features that wasnât quite expressionless in the way he usually was, instead something behind his eyes showed a genuine side of him that wasnât going anywhere anytime soon. His hands came to rest on her thighs, not to direct or control the pace, just to hold her, to feel what she was doing from the closest possible position.
He let her have it. He laid there beneath her and he absorbed every stroke with the stillness of a man receiving something with his full attention. His only movements were the tightening of his hands on her thighs, the slight flare of his nostrils, and the slight clenching of his jaw that betrayed how thoroughly he was feeling everything she was giving him. "That's it," he groaned, voice rough and lower than usual. "Keep goin'. Show me everythinâ."
And indeed she showed him everything. She rolled her hips in her signature deep figure-eight that made her thighs burn and made men forget what city they were in. She let out a needy whine when she felt him twitch hard inside her, felt his fingers dig into her thighs and felt the sound he made rumble up from somewhere below the place where he usually kept his inner desires.
"Goddamn," Stack praised from somewhere behind her.
Bunny had nearly forgotten, in the consuming present-tense occupation of riding Smoke, that Stack was still in the room with them. She remembered now. She remembered specifically when she felt his hand press warm and flat against the small of her back, pushing her forward just slightly, changing the angle, and she felt the presence of him settling in behind her, the specific warmth of a second body entering the space, and something in her belly turned over at the knowing of what was coming next.
"Don't stop movin'," Smoke growled below her, his voice steady and laced with something that wasnât quite command and not quite warning, something between the two that communicated that her motion was the thing keeping him from losing his composure. "Keep ya pretty eyes right here."
It was difficult, but she kept her eyes on him. She kept moving, slower now, the rhythm becoming something more rocking and less bouncing as Stack's hand remained at the small of her back and his other hand reached for something on the side table. The sound of a bottle. The sensation of something cool worked at the back entrance she hadn't been using, Stack's fingers pressed and circled with a careful, methodical preparation of a man who knew exactly how to stretch a doll without tearing her. He worked her chocolate starfish open with practiced patience, each circle and press accompanied by Smoke's hands on her hips maintaining their slow rhythm and his voice occasional and low.
"Breathe," Smoke said, one hand traveling from her hip to her stomach, palm flat and warm against her skin. "Stay with me. Just breathe."
She breathed. She kept her eyes on his and kept rolling her hips over him and breathed through Stack's fingers working behind her, opening her gradually, each moment of it accompanied by Smoke's voice and Smoke's hands and Smoke's eyes holding her in place in every sense.
After a minute of probing and preparing, Stack withdrew his fingers. The blunt pressure that replaced them was broader, and it pressed forward with the slow and inexorable patience of a man who had done this enough times to know that patience here was not optional. Bunny's motion over Smoke stuttered as the pressure built and Stack worked his way inside her. He knew better than to rush or force his way inside, instead he continued steadily forward until the stretch had gone from too much, to full, to something that rewired every nerve ending she had at the same moment and left her gripping Smoke's chest with both hands and pressing her face into his shoulder.
"There it is," Stack said from behind her, voice strained as he relished in the tightness of her asshole. "You got all of it, babydoll. You got it."
This wasnât the first time Bunny participated in anal sex, but it was the first time she had both of her holes filled to the brim. She took both of them, fully, completely, in the most total sense of that word, and the feeling of it wasnât something she couldâve prepared herself for no matter how plainly Josie had described it. Her body had become an instrument of pure sensation, attended to from both directions at once, filled past the point where she could distinguish between the fullness and herself.
"Move with me," Smoke ordered, and began to rock his hips upward in a slow, careful rhythm.
Stack matched it from behind, withdrawing just barely and pressing back in on the same count, the two of them falling into sync with the ease of people who have shared a frequency their entire lives. Bunny gripped Smoke's chest and held on.
Smoke's hands ran up from her hips to her waist to the curve of her sides, mapping her as she moved, grounding her with the weight and warmth of his hands when the sensation from everywhere else threatened to become too much. "Look at me," he said.
She looked at him.
"You ours," he continued. Not a question, just a statement of something that had apparently been decided and was now being confirmed. "You understand that."
"Yes," she breathed.
"Say it."
"I-I-I'm yours," she whined, and her voice cracked on the last word because Stack had adjusted behind her and found the angle that turned her thoughts entirely to static.
"Fuck," Stack hissed through his teeth. "Keep squeezinâ me like you finna cum an I'm gon' embarrass myself."
Smoke's jaw ticked. He drove his hips up sharper than he had been, once, and her forehead dropped to his chest. "Hold it," he said, one hand traveling up her spine, settling between her shoulder blades. "Don't finish yet."
Like a good little doll, Bunny obeyed even if withholding her orgasm was one of the hardest things for her to do. She held it through the next several minutes of the two of them working her from both sides with building and competing intensity. Stack's hips found a rhythm behind her that grew less restrained with each stroke, his hands gripping her waist with the force of a man holding onto something he didnât intend to lose. Meanwhile, Smoke drove up into her pussy with a calculated and precise force that hit the same place every time and built the pressure in her body to a pitch that had no precedent in her experience.
She held back her orgasm with her fingernails deep in Smoke's bare chest and tears running freely down her face from the sheer accumulated pressure of pleasure with nowhere to go. Her body shook uncontrollably between them in continuous tremors.
"Hold it," Smoke said again, quieter this time, his hand moving from between her shoulder blades to the back of her neck, his thumb pressing at the base of her skull with a firmness that was grounding. "Hold it for me. Just a little longer."
She felt like an overfilled waterballoon on the verge of popping but she held it a little longer.
"Now," he said.
The second Smoke gave the command, Bunny let go. This orgasm made her entire body convulse between them, and the viper grip of her fluttering holes around both of them became violent and involuntary, her voice tearing out in a sound that came from a place so primal and ancient it didnât have a name. Stack grunted hard behind her, the sound losing its edges, his rhythm breaking apart, his hips pressing deep and going still as her body worked around him without any input from her at all. Smoke's hands locked on her hips and held her through every spasm, his breath coming in controlled pulls through his nose, his jaw set, his eyes on her face.
She was still a shaking mess when they moved her.
Stack withdrew and the absence of him was its own overwhelming sensation as they repositioned her between them with fluid and efficient coordination, guiding her body into the new arrangement before she could fully process that things were changing. Her hands and knees were positioned on the mattress with Smoke now behind her. Stack was in front of her, already at the edge of the bed, his hand finding her hair, his thumb tilting her chin upward.
"Open," Stack said, his voice dragged rough by the effort of the last several minutes.
She opened. He slid into her mouth and she wrapped her thick lips around him and worked him with the full attention of a woman who had made sucking dick into an art form, her tongue pressing along his length, her cheeks hollowing with each pull. Behind her Smoke gripped her hips with both hands and pressed into her pussy from behind with a force that had nothing of restraint left in it, each thrust was deep and drove her forward into Stack so that the two of them worked her from both ends in a rhythm that had its own crude, overwhelming music.
Smoke's hand came down on the curve of her backside, a sharp slap that made Stack look over her head at his brother with raised brows.
Smoke looked back at him with an expression that communicated absolutely nothing except his full awareness of what he had just done. "She a doll. She our whore," he said casually between thrusts.
Stack's grin broke across his face, gold tooth and all. "Mm hm." His hand joined Smoke's sentiment, fisting tighter in her curls, working himself into her mouth with an authority that matched his brother's behind her. "Take it," he said, "just like that. All of it."
She took it. She took all of it, from both of them, from behind and in front. Her tears ran freely down her face again, dripped off her chin, and ran down Stack's length where he fucked into her throat. She felt another climax building from somewhere deeper than the previous ones had come from, further down, more structural, and her body told her it was coming whether she was ready or not.
Stack felt it in the change of her mouth around him. Smoke felt it in the change of her hypersensitive pussy around him. Both of them drove harder at the same time as Smoke's hand came to her hip and gripped it with the force of a man who wanted to feel the final round tightness squeeze around him. "Give it," Smoke said, rough against her.
Bunnyâs body clenched and released in a rolling sequence that started at her core and moved outward, her voice was muffled around Stackâs twitching length and her thighs shook against Smoke's grip. Everything in her narrowed down to the specific and enormous fact of coming apart between these two men who had decided, right then and there, that she was theirs. Stack's hips completely lost their rhythm entirely and he groaned from deep in his chest, his hot sticky release filling her throat in long, heavy pulses, his hand in her hair tightening as he worked through every second of it. Behind her Smoke thrusted into her through the spasms of her climax with a final series of strokes that cost him the last of his control as his hips pressed flush against hers and stayed there while he finished inside her, the sound that came out of him brief and real.
The room after was silent except for breathing.
Three people in various states of collapse across the ruined white linens, the lamp still burning in the corner, the amber light still doing its only job. Bunny was laying face down in the center of the bed with no intention of moving for the foreseeable future. Stack was somewhere to her left, his hand resting on the mattress near her shoulder. Smoke stood after a moment, crossed to the washstand, and returned with a warm cloth. He cleaned her with that same focused efficiency she had heard other dolls gossip about but never experienced, his hands moved over her with the attention of a man who considered this part of the task just as important as any other.
It was Stackâs turn to move from his spot on the bed, as he waltzed over to a nearby drink cart and poured himself a fresh glass of whiskey glass, took a long sip, and exhaled with the deep satisfaction of a man at genuine peace with every decision he had made in the last several hours. He looked at Bunny where she laid against the linens, a beautiful and thoroughly claimed wreck of a woman. Then he turned to look at his brother across the room.
"She can't go back on the floor," he said.
Smoke wrung the cloth out over the basin. "Mm?"
"I'm serious, Eli. Her talent is undeniable. That thang she did with them hips is somethin' I intend to study at length for the next several weeks of my life." He took another sip. "But her control? Her control is nonexistent. She finished too many damn times in one session. You put her in a room with a payin' client who came here expectin' an hour an she gon' be done in two minutes. That man gon' feel robbed an robbed men talk⌠an talkin' men bad for business." He set the glass down and crossed his arms over his chest like a man presenting a logical conclusion. "Two more weeks. Minimum. We retrain her every night âtil she can hold back a nut the way a real doll âposed to."
Smoke stayed quiet as he came back to the bed, sat at its edge and looked at his twin with the knowing expression he wore when Stack was making an argument he wanted to put an immediate end to. "Elias," he said.
Stack looked at him.
"Drink ya' whiskey an shut the fuck up."
Stack sucked his teeth but he kept his eyes on Bunny.
Bunny turned her face against the pillow and looked at both of them from the comfortable horizontal vantage point of a woman who had been thoroughly wrecked. Smoke, quiet at the bed's edge, let his hand come to rest at her ankle. Stack, whiskey back in hand and gold tooth gleaming was already building his next argument with the enthusiasm of a man who was looking forward to the next two weeks considerably more than he is letting on.
"Two weeks," she mumbled underneath her breath, to the ceiling.
Stack pointed at her with excitement. "See! She gets it. Thatâs a good lilâ bunny rabbit."
"But the food stays the same," she added.
The room went quiet for a moment.Â
Then Stack started laughing, full and genuine, the sound rolling through the room and finding all the corners. This time he pointed at Smoke with the glass. "Eli," he said, "I like her."
"I know," Smoke replied as he kept his hand on her ankle. âI knowâŚâÂ
.
.
.
.
.
Authorâs Note: Wowzers! See I ammmmm capable of writing the twins as civilized deviants⌠*cough* So⌠um⌠how about that Josie?? đ
Annie, an 18-year-old from New Orleans, moves to Clarksdale with dreams of building a life all her own. There she meets Smoke, a 21-year-old war veteran with a dangerous reputation. What grows between them is sweet, sticky, and Southernâ a smoldering love set against a world of bootlegging, Hoodoo, and blues.
The Blue Room was Coahoma Countyâs most popular Black supper club. Music, fine foods, good liquor, and special company. Just north of Clarksdale, it sat on a small island in Moon Lakeâa crescent-moon shaped oxbow lake that curved delicately into the Mississippi River.
Smoke stood just outside the back entrance watching his truck while Stack and Della stepped inside to speak with the clubâs owner, Clay. The leveled brick roads were damp with the aftermath of a sudden shower, the earthy scent of rain and exhaust smoke wafting through his nose carried by a cool October breeze. The lantern above the back door was still lit from the night before, its flame flickering in the wind like it was barely hanging on despite its thick glass cover. Smoke was leaning against the tarp covered truck, arms folded across his chest, when the back door of the club suddenly flew open. Stack stomped outside, wet leaves crunching under the steel toe of his boots. A familiar voice followed right behind him.Â
âWhy you canât just be cool?âÂ
Smoke sighed hard, running a hand down his face.Â
Mary.
The octoroon offspring of Cecily, the woman who nursed him and his brother after their mother died in childbirth and their father started drinking his earnings away. She took them in later on when his fatherhood turned into fists.Â
Cecily was like family.
But Mary?
She was a pale little thing. Slender frame, pointy nose, mousy brown hair. She stepped outside into the muddy grass in just a rose-colored silk robe, a few clusters of pearls around her neck, and fire in her eyes.
âSo, you can flirt with her in my face? You saidââ Mary hissed.
âKeep your voice down now, Mary,â Stackâs voice boomed in the silence of the alleyway as he looked around to make sure nobody else was listening. Rain dripped slowly from the gutters onto the street.Â
âI ainât witchu. Ainât ever gonâ be witchu. You need to get that through that thick skull aâyours sooner rather than later,â Stack snapped, pushing back through the door with a look and not another word. It slammed shut with a loud thud, leaving only the sound of an engine idling and Maryâs soft sniffles.Â
She cleared her throat, swallowing the words that got stuck there. She wrapped her robe tighter around her small frame when she saw Smoke looking dead at her. His eyes were tight little beads void of any warmth as he closed the distance in the narrow alleyway behind the club. He could smell the heavy perfume that she piled on to disguise her helplessness.Â
âMary,â he said firmly. He paused, taking a second to cool the rage bubbling up inside. âDonât make me choose between mercy and my brother. Understand?â
Maryâs bottom lip trembled. She turned on her heel to leave when Smoke grabbed her forearm. Not too harshly, just enough to stop her in her tracks.
âI said,â he repeated slowly. âDo you understand?â
A single tear fell down her right cheek. âI get it, Smoke,â she said with a trembling voice.Â
He released her and she stumbled back into the club. He wiped his hand on his trousers and walked slowly back over to his truck, looking up to the windows of the next-door building to see if anyone was watching.
No eyes.Â
Good.Â
He was sick of running interference for Stack. Especially over a liability. His teeth ground together just thinking about it.Â
His mind drifted away to a better place. Somewhere that would calm his spirit. Take the edge off.Â
Annie.
His irritation cooled a little faster thinking about her. Her warmth. How light he felt around her. He could almost taste her scent on his lips when he kissed her the night before, the sweetness of her skin like a tattoo, hitting nerve endings every time he licked his lips. Heâd been doing it since he left her under the magnolia tree, like a damn fiend.Â
A few minutes later, Stack peeked out from the back entrance, signaling it was time to bring in Dellaâs wooden box of things from her cellar. Her special liquor, tonics, and special blend teas. He grabbed the box, secured the back, and cut the engine.Â
The air in the supper club was thick with cigar smoke and the smell of black-eyed peas from the kitchen. Smoke stepped inside with the box, nodding at the workers and greeting the women who moved around him as he walked through the hallway behind Stack. They reached Clayâs office where Della balanced a thin cigarette holder and a slice of whiskey cake at his desk. Clay reached over to light her cigarette as he took another puff of his own.Â
âHave a seat,â he gestured to the plush leather chairs in front of his office desk.
A few minutes earlierâŚ
The whiskey cake was a sugary, buttery, boozy delight that melted in her mouth. Della carefully wiped the side of her lips with a napkin before taking another bite.Â
âCongress movinâ forward with the prohibition bill,â Clay said, exhaling a puff of smoke above his head. âItâs official.â
âWhat they sayinâ?â
âJanuary.âÂ
âThis good!â she mumbled between chews.Â
âAda used a spice cake this time instead of vanilla. Give it more kick.âÂ
âA lot more kick. She put her foot in this!âÂ
âAda!â Clay yelled to the open doorway.Â
âYessir,â Ada yelled back from the kitchen.
âBring us some more of that cake! Four more slices!âÂ
Clay sighed and turned in his swivel leather chair towards the window. Rain beaded slowly down the glass, the sky behind it a solemn, murky gray.Â
âWhat vice talkinâ bout?â
âI ainât worried about them. Iâm too deep in they pockets.â
âThen whatâs the problem?â
âRailroads. They puttinâ vice on the railroads startinâ in January.â
âShit.â Dellaâs fork clinked loudly in the silence after her words.
âI was thinkinâ bout the twins. Usinâ they network. They got the North on lock. I got Memphis in my back pocket. Together, we can make a good team.âÂ
The doorway darkened. Stack entered first, then Smoke with Dellaâs box which he set in the corner by the liquor cabinet.
âWhat you got for me this time, Delilah?â He asked, lighting her cigarette. He stood, moving to the cabinet where he poured two fingers of whiskey in two glass tumblers and handed them to the twins.Â
âHave a seat.âÂ
Smoke set his tumbler on the desk as he sat down. Stack took a sip of the brown liquid as he made himself comfortable in the chair next to his brother.
Ada walked in with four slices of whiskey cake on a platter and mirth in her eyes. She wore a thin blouse tucked into the tiny waist of her skirt that stopped at her knees. Her hair was pulled back with a satin headscarf folded once and tied over it.Â
âMorninâ,â she cooed as she set the platter down on the office desk. She smiled politely at everyone before returning to the kitchen. Clayâs gaze followed her with heat in his eyes as she sauntered out of his office. Nobody missed it.Â
Mary slinked past the ajar office door with a sad look on her face. The sound of her pearls and sharp click of her heels echoed in the hallway.
âMary?â
Mary stopped just in the doorway looking hopeful.Â
âInstead of mopinâ around here, how âbout you bring us some coffee?âÂ
She nodded at Clay, her eyes automatically falling on Stack. âCominâ right up, sir.âÂ
Della cleared her throat slowly and Smoke took the opportunity to reach for some cake, and immediately dug into a slice. He closed his eyes and hummed in satisfaction at the rich taste of the whiskey, spice, and sweet glaze.
âNever took you for a sweets man, Smoke,â Clay chuckled.
âThis nigga got a sweet tooth if I ever seen one,â Stack joked. âSurprised they ainât fall out yet.â
âStill got time,â Smoke mumbled between chews.Â
Mary came back with a steaming pot of coffee, four cups and saucers, a small jug of milk, and a small ceramic bowl filled with sugar cubes on a silver serving tray. Sitting the tray on the liquor bar top, she offered coffee to everyone in the room before taking her leave.Â
âShut the door behind you, Mary.âÂ
Mary left the room without another word.
Everyone took sips of their coffee and let the room settle before Clay finally spoke again. Smoke dumped his whiskey in his coffee. Stack did, too. And Della stirred a sugar cube in, the silver stirring spoon scraping gently against the porcelain cup in a steady rhythm.Â
âI was tellinâ Delilah here, I wanna bring you two in on my operation.âÂ
The statement registered, then settled deep into both of them like water in dirt when it rains. Smokeâs chewing didnât slow, but Stack could almost feel his brotherâs jaw tighten over the words. âOh yeah?â He leaned closer. âTalk to me.âÂ
Clay Chavis was a Black man in his 50âs. Salt and pepper coils cropped short and moisturized so well they looked shiny. Clean shaven except his sideburnsâthe one sentimental thing he allowed himself.Â
He wasnât born with silk pocket squares, eating whiskey cake. Maybell Plantation raised him. Reconstruction taught him possibility. Jim Crow taught him ambition.Â
Hustler. Entrepreneur. Pimp. He was whatever he needed to be to get shit done.Â
He saw Black folks who came out of the Civil War as politicians, illustrious statesmen, business owners. Pockets fat with real money, not that plantation scrip.Â
He saw how power had changed his community for the better.Â
And heâd seen it fall.Â
It stirred a hunger in him that couldnât be satiated by money alone.
So, he played their little game. Paid off racist sheriffs and crooked politicians because he could. He even had a few senators on his bankroll to look the other way.Â
But deep down was a festering anger.Â
So, he poured his heart into his creation: The Blue Room. The supper club and social room was his muse, his baby, his safe haven and his one true love besides Black opulence.Â
The music, liquor and women may have been its heart, veins, and arteries, but he was the blood. The pulse that kept it moving.
Clay snuffed his cigar. Cleared his throat. Smoothed out his cuff links.Â
âTell me âbout Harlem.âÂ
Smoke and Stack shared a look.Â
Stack spoke up first. âWhat about it?âÂ
âLong story shortâ they crackinâ down on the railroads. Sendinâ vice to inspect the cars.â
âShit,â Stack sucked his teeth.
âRight,â Clay agreed.
âPay âem off,â Smoke cut in. âFind âem, pay âem off. No more vice.â
âIt ainât that simple,â Clay said simply.
âIt ainât?â Smoke said incredulously.Â
âWhat my brother tryna say isâŚâ Stack gave Smoke a look out of the corner of his eye that said back down. âWhat that gotta do with us?â
âHow much time you two spent in Harlem? Before the war.â
âFew years.â
âYou seen how they operate up there. The mob and the mafia.â
Smoke mumbled something under his breath. He took another bite of whiskey cake.Â
âWell, Chicago mob like to come down to my club every so often. Their leader some cracka who go by the name of Diamond Jim. They call him Diamond âcuz he like to carry a bunch of fuckinâ diamonds on him for no reason.âÂ
Stack snorted into his coffee. Smoke worked his way through Stackâs slice of whiskey cake.Â
âFat mufucka just walkinâ around with diamonds in his waistcoat. Shit donât make sense.â
Aunt Della giggled and shook her head.Â
âHe and his wife like to talk to my girls. Donât do nothinâ else, just talk to âem. They own a bunch of brothels up North,â he continued. âTown donât like âemâŚbut I do. You know why?âÂ
It was a rhetorical question.Â
âCuz they see green, instead of just black and white.âÂ
Clay continued. âSee up North all the peckerwoods divided amongst themselves. Irish, Italian, Polish, Scottishâthey all the same down here but up there, thereâs a difference. A pecking order.â He paused, took a sip of coffee and let the heat linger on his tongue. Then he set the cup down, the saucer clinking against the mahogany office table. The sound was loud in the quiet of the room, like everybody was holding their breath waiting for the punchline.
Annie didnât realize how late it was until Luellaâs assistant stepped outside to light the oil lamps. âOh Lord,â she murmured, blinking towards the windows.
Luellaâs shop was covered in warm amber light, the colors of the evening settling over lace collars and half-finished hems while jazz crackled softly from the phonograph in the corner. Somehow between talking, laughing, and getting measured for alterations, sheâd lost the entire afternoon.
Luella looked up from pinning a sleeve. âWhat?â
âI forgot how early the sun goes down this time of year. What time is it?â
âI know right?â Luella glanced at her pocket watch. âItâs almost five.â
âOh shitâŚI gotta go.âÂ
Luella grinned. âWhere you rushinâ off to? Meetinâ somebody?â Luella asked casually, carefully stripping her of the dress mold. Annie slipped her robe on and bent over to gather her things.Â
Luellaâs eyebrows lifted. âOhhhhhh, you are!âÂ
âIt ainât like that,â Annie muttered, scurrying off to the washroom.Â
âMhmm.â Her voice was teasing, playful. Knowing. âI should have the shell stitched by next Monday. Can you come back Thursday to pick out accessories?â
âYesss,â she said through the washroom curtains. âThank you.â
She walked past shoppers and onlookers admiring sequined handbags and velvet shawls, through the narrow hallway connecting Luellaâs Dressing Room and Ritzy Beauty Salon, up the stairs, and onto the sidewalk. Outside the sky had darkened into deep blue, the last pieces of sunlight caught low against the rooftops. Her feet carried her towards the boarding house quickly where the porch light was already lit. She slowed her steps as she climbed the porch stairs, opening the door with the same amount of care.Â
âYou finally done galivatinâ?â Aunt Della said from the stove in the kitchen. She didnât need to turn around to recognize the shape of Annieâs presence.Â
Annie rolled her eyes softly. âI was at Luellaâs.â
âMhmmmm.â
Then, casuallyâ
âTwins was here earlier.â
Something tugged low in Annieâs chest before she could stop it. âOh.âÂ
âThey ainât stay long.â
Annie nodded once, setting her bag down carefully beside the stairs like she suddenly had to think about where her hands belonged. She decided to put them to work, washed up, then helped in the kitchen. Supper passed without incident, a simple meal of fried fish and spaghetti. Dessert was a drunken peach cobbler. It was around 7:30 that evening that Annie had an unexpected visitor.
âAnnie, Georgiaâs here!âÂ
Annie came out of the kitchen wiping her hands with a kitchen towel. âHey Gigi.âÂ
âAnnie!âÂ
Gigi was dressed nicely, like she was coming or going to or from town.Â
âHungry? We got leftovers I can put in the warmer.âÂ
âNo, I already ate dinner at home.â
Annie stopped just short of her. âWhatâs up?âÂ
âWellâŚI was heading to the Savoy to see a play andâŚI wanted to see if you wanted to go.â
âTonight?â
âMhmm.â She looked at her watch. âIn âbout an hour.â
Annie thought about it.Â
âOh come on! Live a little. Itâll be fun. Just go put somethinâ on real quick!â
âOkay fine,â she said already heading toward the stairs. âGimme like 15 minutes.âÂ
Their steps made the stairs groan as they made their way to Annieâs room. Gigi followed right behind her, automatically going for her dresser drawers.Â
âOhh, wear this one!âÂ
She pulled out a royal blue dress with a white collar and trim. Annie paired it with a pair of Oxford heels and her handbag and in thirty minutes they were out the door.Â
The air was that balmy type of cool, the one that sat on top of the skin. The marquee lights of the Savoy on Issaquena shone bright in the nighttime as people congregated in front of the ticket box. Annie and Gigi bought their tickets and were heading for the concession stand when two men approached them.Â
Isaiah.
And the man Gigi had her eyes on during the churchyard picnic.Â
Annie felt her heart drop.Â
âHow yâall doinâ?â the man with Isaiah asked.
Isaiah kept his eyes on Annie. She could see Gigi and his friends were eying each other down.Â
âWe good,â Gigi answered for both of them as the concession line moved forward.Â
âIâm Will, this is Isaiah.â
âIâm Gigi, this is Annie.âÂ
âNice to meet you, Annie.â Will said first.
âYeah, nice to meet you Annie,â Isaiah said, holding his hand out.Â
His voice was deep. So deep she could feel the bass deep in her chest like a vibration. She shook his hand politely. âNice to meet you, Isaiah.â
âWhere you from?âÂ
âLouisiana.âÂ
âAh okay. I can hear it in your voice.â
âYeahâŚâ she trailed off. âI figured that much.â
Isaiah smirked. âYou been here a while?â
ââBout a month,â she replied, trying to look around discreetly.
Isaiah blinked. âYou lookinâ for somebody?â
Annie frowned. âNah, itâs justâthis my first time here.â She recovered quickly, rubbing her arm as a distraction.Â
She looked over at Gigi who was fully enthralled in conversation with Will. This little heifa planned this. She looked way too comfortable with Will for somebody who didnât even know his name yesterday. Annie made a mental note to bring it up later. She wasnât slick at all trying to set her up and make it look like a coincidence.Â
The play was a series of skits. It was filled with romance, drama, comedy, even a murder mystery.Â
They were sandwiched between the two men, with Gigi resting her head on Willâs shoulder while Annie sat stiff in her chair feeling Isaiahâs eyes burn holes through her during the show. Â
During intermission he caught her coming back from the washroom.Â
âYou want some more popcorn?âÂ
âIâm all good.â
âSomethinâ to drink then?â
She almost said no. But then she looked at his face and relaxed hers. âI could use a milkshake.âÂ
Isaiahâs face softened, and when his teeth were revealed between his parting lips she saw a peek of gold at the bottom.Â
The rest of the night went surprisingly smooth. Annie and Isaiah whispered amongst themselves while Gigi and Will disappeared until halfway through the second part of the show when they snuck in the back row. She learned Isaiah was originally from Bogalusa. He worked for the sawmill there until the labor strike in August of this year, then hightailed it to Clarksdale to work for the railroad.Â
âI knew I heard a lilâ somethinâ somethinâ in your voice,â Annie remarked. âA lilâ Louisiana in there.âÂ
Isaiah chuckled low. âDid you like the show?â He asked Annie as they walked up to meet a very bashful looking Gigi and Will.Â
âYeah, I did,â she sighed satisfactorily. âIâm glad I came out tonight.â
Isaiah paused. âYou should let me take you out sometime. Just us.âÂ
Annie hesitated a little. Isaiah caught it.
âJust think about it,â he reassured her.
Annie nodded. âIâll think about it,â she said genuinely.Â
âI stay at the Yellow Dog rooming house.â
âOkay.â
She had no idea what or where that was.
âItâs the only yellow one,â he said with a smile. âRight by the tracks.âÂ
âGot it,â she said.Â
Annie smiled politely. Isaiah was handsome. Nice. Engaging. But he just wasnâtâŚ
âWell,â Gigi started, linking her arm with Annieâs and damn near dragged her away from the front of the theater. âIt was nice seeinâ yâall. We gotta go. Yall have a good night!âÂ
She waited until they were far enough from Will and Isaiah so they couldnât hear their whispers. Annie snatched her arm away from Gigi. âGirl donât be dragginâ me? Why the hell you runninâ away from that man?âÂ
âI never wanna see him again,â she declared as they hurried down the street.Â
âWhy? I thought you liked him the way y'all were all over each other.âÂ
âHis feet.â
Annie blinked. âWhat?â
âHis feet stink,â she repeated slowly.
âI heard what you said. Iâm just tryna understand how you saw his feet on the first date.â
âWhen we came back from gettinâ food,â she started. Annie narrowed her eyes. âAnyway, when we came back the ushers only allowed us in the back row.â
Annie crossed her arms under her chest, curious as to where this was going. âUh-huh.â
âAnd he said he wanted to take his shoes off. Let his feet breathe a little.â
âAnd they smelled like shit,â Annie finished for her.
âAlmost burned my nose hairs off.â
Annie snorted. âNose hairs?â
âAlmost became a casualty of an atomic bomb.âÂ
Annie laughed quietly. A mix of amusement and disbelief. âLordâŚâ
âIâm serious.â
âI believe you. The way you got us up outta there, I knew somethinâ went wrong.âÂ
They had reached Aunt Dellaâs house by then, the chirp of crickets carried by the wind over the rooftops.Â
âSeems like you and Isaiah hit it off.â
âYeah, I guess.â
âWhat?â
âNothinâ. He asked to take me out.â
âAnd you said yes, right?â
âNo.â
âNo?â
âI said maybe.â
âMaybâ,â she sighed hard. âWe'll talk about this later. Lemme get out of here before it gets too late.âÂ
âYou sure you donât wanna stay? Walk back when itâs light out?â
âI'm on the next street over.â
âWell, donât make any stops on the way.â She looked Gigi up and down. Gigi just rolled her eyes.
She turned to leave then turned back for a second while Annie idled in the doorway. Her voice sounded genuine, warmer than it had since she met her. Even a bit grateful. âThanks for cominâ out with me.âÂ
Annie smiled warmly. âNight, Gigi.â
âNight, Louisiana!â she threw over her shoulder as she skipped down the road. Annie watched her until she was out of sight.Â
The next day, Smoke came over to fix the wire on the backyard fence so the chickens couldnât escape. He stood in the backyard in a wife beater and a pair of trousers that hung loose on his hips. Suspenders not suspending a damn thing. Annie clutched her ileke beads. Lord forgive me, but that man look unfair, she thought to herself as she discreetly watched him through the back window. She shook her head.Â
Earlier that day she had been collecting eggs from the chicken coop at five somethinâ in the morning when Smoke scared the shit out of her, appearing from the backyard mist like the hero in a romance novel appears from the shadows.
She gasped when she saw him through the morning fog. Loudly. Her breath fogged the air in front of her.Â
Smoke looked genuinely amused. âWhat was all that shit you was talkinâ the other day? I canâtâŚwhat?âÂ
âShut up!â she snapped, but her words held no bite.Â
They went about their work, sneaking little glances at each other out of the corner of their eyes.Â
âHow you feelinâ?â Smoke asked.Â
Annie sighed. âTired as hell.âÂ
âUp late?â
âOut late.âÂ
Smokeâs ears perked up, his jaw tightening. âDoinâ what?âÂ
Annie smirked at his concern. âI went to the Savoy with Gigi,â she started. âThis girl I met at church the other day.âÂ
âHow was it?âÂ
âGood,â she replied quickly.Â
Smoke grunted.
âYou good over there?â she teased.Â
Smoke grunted a very distracted âmhmmâ while tightening a piece of wire with a pair of pliers.Â
Two days later she waltzed through the front door of Luellaâs to browse accessories to match her Harvest Party dress. She felt him before she saw him. He was across the street at the barbershop again, those same eyes piercing through the store window.Â
By Friday he was back at Aunt Dellaâs when she got home from work. This time with Stack. They were reattaching the tin roof to the top of the shed in the back.
She was gonna let them work, but she decided to bring out a pitcher of ice water and two sandwiches.Â
âHungry?â
âHell yeah!â Stack said eagerly taking one of the sandwiches from Annie's outstretched hand.
Smoke wrapped his arms around her before grabbing a sandwich and pulling the wax paper back from the top to take a bite. âThank you,â he said quietly.
Stack looked at Smoke. Then he slowly looked over to Annie.
He decided to keep his mouth shut.
This time.
Sunday night they were underneath the magnolia tree again. Annie with her sheets of paper, Smoke with his pipe, puffing circles into the air. They talked about friends. The past. Occasionally, their conversation hit somewhere deeper than expected.Â
Smoke talked about the day he realized the war had become part of his bone marrow.
September 30th, 1918. SĂŠchault, France.Â
His regiment was occupying a small town by the ocean. They had run the Germans out. Bombed their strongholds and blown parts of the French countryside to pieces.
Then there were the trenches. The noise. Taking cover while the world exploded around him. The ringing in his ears that felt like a strong vibration reaching far into the depths of his soul.
He had gotten up early that morning to walk along the boardwalk like he always did. It helped clear his mind.
It was peaceful by the water. As peaceful as wartime occupation could be. He even saw a few kids playing with seashells by the shore.
At first, he thought it was just a shiver. A result of the cool air that came off in waves from the Atlantic. But by the time he got to the mess hall his hands were still shaking.Â
Annie talked about her family. All six siblings, even the one who died in the war. How she was the youngest and he was the one she was closest to. How she says a prayer for his soul every morning and night, knowing his spirit isnât settled on that foreign land.Â
That night ended with another kiss. This one was longer, more exploratory. Their tongues met and did a short dance before they pulled away from each other.Â
By the following week, he was asking about her work schedule. Heâd show up to drop her home if she worked past sunset and come sit with her if he was in town and business was slow.Â
Lunch rush. Business was steady. Smoke was sitting at the bartop with a catfish sandwich in his hands and crumbs all over his mouth watching Annie refill coffee and yell out orders.Â
âI made the catfish batter today,â Annie said proudly.Â
âMhmm,â he said between bites, âthis shit good too.âÂ
Annie clicked her tongue. âI know.âÂ
âYâall got anything sweet?â
âApple pie.â
âItâs decent?âÂ
âMhmm.âÂ
âLemme get two slices.â A beat. âAnd some ice cream.âÂ
They spent weeks getting pulled into each otherâs orbit and accidentally falling into a routine. A missed connection turned into a budding bond. A magnetism. A tether that lived behind the ribs like a slow, settling ache. Two people quietly becoming important to each other before either of them fully realized it.
Annieâs hair was currently a giant halo of ebony coils that reached up to heaven. It had been washed, stretched, and air dried, and now she sat between Aunt Dellaâs legs on the steps of the front porch as she separated it into sections and oiled her scalp. The cool feeling of almond oil hit the sensitive skin on her head, and she relaxed back until she was leaning against her auntâs thighs.
âDonât fall asleep yet. I ainât even got the first row braided,â Aunt Della warned.Â
Felix leaped from the porch railing to the space next to where she was sitting. She stroked his back and listened to him purr under her touch. He curled his body up and laid under her hand like a velvety loaf of bread.Â
âYou just want straight backs?â
âYes, please.â
It was early evening, the golden sky being swallowed by the purple shadows of nighttime. Porch lights started to flicker on as folks moved from the supper table to the porch. Annie felt herself drifting off as Aunt Della swiped a bead of hair grease from the back of her hand and put it on her scalp as she started her first cornrow.Â
âI remember when you were younger, you used to fall asleep every time ya mama put some braids in your head.â
âReally?â
âMhmm. Sure fire way to get you to stay still, though.âÂ
Annie sighed deeply. âI hope she got my letter.â
âI know she did. Lorettaâs good at what she does.âÂ
âI hope so.â
âI know so.âÂ
Annie yawned where she sat and a shiver went down her spine from the sudden breeze that made goosebumps form on her arms. âOoh!â she exclaimed. âGot cold all of a sudden.âÂ
âAlmanac said itâs gonna be our coldest winter yet.â
âHow cold?â
âThey forecastinâ snow this year. As early as Thanksgiving.â
âGuess Iâma need a heavier coat, then.â
âWe can go to the 1 & 5 cent store next week. See what they have. If they donât have anything, we can order one from the Chowâs.â
âWhat about Luella?â
âShe only do fancy stuff. Big furs, stuff with sequins. You want somethinâ practical.âÂ
âShe said sheâd make my harvest party dress without charging me extra.â
âWhat yâall decide on?â
âA flapper dress with sequins on it. She even givinâ me a handbag, some shoes, and a thin little coat to wear over it with furry trim.âÂ
Aunt Della hummed. âHow you doinâ your hair?â
âShe said I should straighten it out, then curl it, and pin the curls into a bob.â
âThatâd be nice.â
âI wanna do a red lip too, since the dress is dark green. Almost black.âÂ
âLook at you all excited. Arenât you happy I convinced you to go?â
âYes maâam.â Annie grinned and ran her hand over Felixâs coat. Sheâd only been in Clarksdale a month and a half and already felt like she was starting to find some sort of community for herself within the town.Â
But something was still missing.Â
âI wanna get back to practicinâ,â Annie said suddenly.
Aunt Della had finished her first cornrow by then, and paused as she was parting her hair to start the next one. âPracticinâ how?â
âI wanna start mixinâ teas and makinâ tonics again,â she lamented. âLike I was learninâ to at grandmaâs shop.â
Then, a little quieter. âI feel disconnected from her. From them.âÂ
âYou been doinâ your prayers? Your rituals? You shouldnât feel disconnected, baby.â
âI have, but I do. I wannaâŚmake things. Help people. Not just myself.âÂ
Aunt Della swallowed hard. She hadnât yet shown Annie the underground storage where she spent time while everybody else slept. But maybe now it was time. She sighed into her words. âWeâll start lessons Monday,â she said simply. âFirst thing after we send the men off, just after breakfast.âÂ
Annie rubbed her great-auntâs bony knee and whispered, âThank you.âÂ
âWord of warning though,â Aunt Della continued. âI might be ya grandmotherâs sister, butâŚI ainât her.â
âWhat you mean by that?â Annieâs face twisted up.Â
âThe way I teach is a littleâŚunconventional.â
Annie blinked. âYou do left hand work?â she whispered.
âI do what works for me, sugar.â
âOhâŚokay.âÂ
âBut Iâll only teach you what you comfortable with, and how to send back what you ainât.âÂ
âI ainât got no problem with that.âÂ
âGood.â Aunt Della smirked a little and continued her braids. Another breeze blew by, bringing with it the warm scent of impending rain. âLetâs go inside. Storm about to come.âÂ
âCome on Felix,â she picked up the tuxedo cat from its place on the steps. âInside mâpiti.âÂ
Annie sat comfortably on a pillow on the floor as Aunt Della resumed her braiding. âAuntie?â
Aunt Della hummed.
âWho taught you thatâŚleft hand work?â
She breathed deeply, like she was choosing her words carefully. âMy mama. Your great-grandmother.â
âReally?â
âMhmm. She was born a slave. Separated from her mama as a baby. Raped by the massa, his wife, and his son.â
Aunt Della took a moment to collect herself.Â
âOne day she went to a woman lookinâ for a hex to put on the family. She told her she was gifted, said she was born with a caul. Could tell just by lookinâ at her.â
Annie listened carefully.Â
âWell that lady taught her how to protect herself. It ainât evil work if you protectinâ yourself from the evils of this world.â
âWhite folks.â
âMhmm. They ainât all bad. But a lot of them are.â
Silence hung between them. A skin deep, ancestral silence.Â
âYou was born with one, too.â
âWith what?â
âA caul.â
âWhatâs that?â
âItâs a little piece of afterbirth that sticks to your face when you come out. Like a veil.â
âOh,â Annie sighed.
âI remember it like it was yesterday. The Mississippi was high that whole year. Gulf waters was reckless. Storms bad all summer, oh Lord, the bayou kept floodinâ,â she laughed to herself. âThen you came.âÂ
âYou real special, Annie,â Aunt Della continued. âMore than that. I knew it then, and I can feel it now.â
She stopped braiding for a moment and grabbed Annieâs chin from behind, tilting her head so she could look into her wonder-wide eyes. âSo make sure you guard your gift, and be careful what and who you use it for. You understand?â
âYes maâam,â she said quietly, her mind going a mile a minute.Â
âNow tilt your head down chile,â Aunt Della declared. âYou can fall asleep after Iâm done.â
The alleyway between King Tamales and Blackbird CafĂŠ smelled sinful. Freshly steamed corn tortillas with succulent meat smothered in red chile sauce on the inside, wrapped in corn husks and steamed to perfection. Catfish. A perfectly seasoned batter, crispy on the outside, perfectly done on the inside. And the rich, savory aroma of pot greens. It made Stack Mooreâs stomach twist with hunger. It made him divert from what he was doing and step into Blackbird CafĂŠ. He wiped the beading sweat off his brow when he stepped through the door, the cooler air a balm against the heat on his skin.Â
The first thing he noticed was the emptiness. No servers by the register. No Luther grunting himself into a chair by the hallway to watch the dining room. Just a lone diner that sat in a booth by the window nursing a drink.Â
Please Have A Seat, the sign read. So he sat, choosing a stool at the bar by the kitchenâs pass-through window.
He was looking at the menu when he heard a familiar voice that made him look up. âFancy seeinâ you here.â
Annie moseyed over to Stack in a black short sleeved shirtwaist dress with a white collar and a half apron overtop. Her hair was neatly cornrowed and pulled back into a bun at the back of her head. Her nametag sat just above her heart, a small rectangle with a white background and black lettering.
He couldnât help but smile. âHey Annie.âÂ
âHey Stack.â She looked him up and down. âWhat can I get you?â
âLemme get uhhhâŚ,â he looked down at his menu again. âPorkchop sandwich and a Coke,â he tapped his finger on the bar top while Annie wrote his order down on a pad of paper. âAnd a slice of that pecan pie.â Â
âCominâ right up.â She turned to the pass-through window. âI need a porkchop sandwich and slice of pie!âÂ
âI didnât know you worked here,â Stack questioned as Annie wrote the total in the ledger.Â
âI just started last Monday,â she admitted as Sheila checked the order ticket.Â
Sheila mumbled to herself. âA porkchop sandwich and aâhey Stack!âÂ
âSheila,â Stack said with a grin.Â
âYou been stayinâ clean?â Sheila asked as she slung a clean kitchen rag over her shoulder. âYou always into some trouble.âÂ
âWhat can I say? Trouble love me,â he joked. âLike itâs my middle name.âÂ
âIt is your middle name, Stack.â Sheila winked at him before turning around. âIâma fry you one fresh right now. Extra crispy,â she called out over her shoulder.Â
âJust how I like it, thank you baby.â He straightened out his suit jacket.
Annie chuckled under her breath. âAight Romeo, thatâll be forty cents.âÂ
Stack took the coins out of his coat pocket and into Annieâs open hand. She dropped them into the till then wrote something else on the ledger before closing it. She was fixing to turn the corner when Stackâs voice got her attention again.
âSo what made you work here?â he asked.
Annie slowed. Stopped. Turned around looking confused. âWhat you mean?â
âDonât you doâŚâ her eyes narrowed. He almost said the quiet part out loud but he recovered quickly. His voice dropped a little. âThe same shit as your aunt?âÂ
âYou mean work at the boarding house?â
Stack nodded.Â
âI still do.â
âSo why you got two jobs?â
âBecauseâŚIâm savinâ up for somethinâ.â
âOrder up!âÂ
She set Stackâs food in front of him and grabbed a bottle of Coke and a cup from the cabinet behind the bar. âFor what?â
âYou said you savinâ upâŚfor what?â
Annie sighed, letting all the air out of her chest. âA shop.â She said it quietly, like saying it too loud would make it real. Which is what she wanted, but the thought still scared her a little.
Stack took a bite of his sandwich and looked Annie over as she stood in front of him. She put her hand on her hip and leaned against the bartop. âWhat kind?â
Annie looked off into the distance. âOne like my grandmother has. A cafe and apothecary.âÂ
âYou mean sellinâ those teas and shit like your aunt?â
âMhmm.â
âAnyone buy them from you now?â
âNo, not yetââ
âWell how you gonâ open a shop with no customers?â
âTheyâll come when they need themââ
âThey gotta know they can get them from you first.â Stack put his sandwich down. âFirst rule of business is you gotta sell the product before you sell the product. Understand?â
Annie nodded her head. âYeah.â
âYou gotta market yourself. Start with friends first. Then word of mouth will get around. Before you know it you gonâ have people cominâ to you instead of you goinâ to them.â
Annie nodded again, taking his words in. âI can do that.â
âYou tryna rent a place?â
Annieâs eyes lit up. âI wanna own one.â
Stack looked at Annie perplexedly. âYou.â He dusted his hands off and pointed at her. âWanna buy a shopâŚby yourself?â
âMhmm,â Annie said proudly, digging into her apron and taking out the sketch she'd been working on. âLike this.â
She slid the drawing to the side of his plate, a sketch of a modest shack with a shed attached to the side. Sitting on cinderblocks, surrounded by trees. It looked like something quiet. Peaceful. Something Smoke would like. Something heâd love. Annie explained where everything would goâ a smokehouse, a root room, a chicken coop and goat pen, even where the sun needed to rise and set in order for her vegetable garden to flourish. Stack looked at the expression on her face, the excitement in her voice, the spark in her eyes. His voice softened. âHow long you need to work and save for it?â
âBout a year.âÂ
Stack grinned. Annie did too. âSo, in a year I can come to you for a slice of that bread pudding I heard all about?â
Her cheeks warmed. âMhmm,â she hummed. âThatâs what Iâm workinâ toward.â
âWell, I hope it all works out for you,â Stack muttered. âTruly.âÂ
âThank you, Stack,â she said sincerely. âAnyway, enough about me.âÂ
Stack had resumed eating his sandwich, the crumbs from the bread gathering at the corners of his mouth. âWhatâs up with you, Stack?â
âYou know meâŚjust shootinâ the shit. Beinâ on my best behavior in these Clarksdale streets.â
âOh,â she said, voice flat, rolling her eyes. âOkay.âÂ
He wiped his mouth with a napkin. âHow you and my brother been?â
Annie paused. Her face gave nothing away. Or that's what she liked to think.
âYeah,â he remarked, pushing his plate back. âI know.â He popped open the top of his Coke with the ring on his finger.Â
Annie crossed her arms across her chest. âWhat you think you know?âÂ
âEnough,â he shot back, leaning back on the barstool.Â
Stack stared at Annie. And Annie stared right back.
âYou ainât gotta admit nothinâ,â he said finally, taking a swig of his soda. âBut yâall both make it obvious. Actinâ all giddy around each other.â
âI donât act giddy.âÂ
âSo there is somethinâ goinâ on.â He studied her face. She still didnât crack even though her heart started beating faster ever since he first mentioned Smoke.Â
âI donât act giddy,â she said. Quieter now, like she was trying to calm the pulse lodged in her throat.Â
âMy brother canât hide nothinâ from me. No matter how hard he try, Annie.â
Annie huffed, turning her head away. Stack stood up to leave and stretched his arms above his head. âMy brotherâŚhe a good man.âÂ
âStack, I ainât no child. I donât need no advice on how to handle a man.â
âI ainât givinâ you advice. Iâm just lettinâ you know.â
âI got eyes. I can see just fine.âÂ
Stack chuckled softly. He liked her spunk. Her fire. Her wit. She was playful, but she could turn deadly if need be. âSee you next week.â He tapped his hand on the bar top twice before heading towards the door. âHeadinâ to Memphis soon.â
âWhat?â she didnât mean for the word to slip out soâŚdesperately.
Stack smiled fully, his eyes almost looked warmer at her slip up. âJust tilâ Friday. Donât worry, your man gonâ come back in one piece.âÂ
She rolled her eyes. âBye Stack.â Annie tried to act like it didnât catch her off guard, like she actually understood what they got up to in Memphis. She didnât. But she wasnât naive. She could take a wild guess and probably land somewhere close. But for some reason, her stomach twisted a little thinking about Smoke being gone for that long. What was worse was she didnât understand why his leaving bothered her this much yet.Â
Smoke and Annie were sitting at the kitchen table in the boarding house. The window was open, a gentle breeze flowing through it, making the corner of her paper lift up slightly as she sketched the side of his face. At least that's what she was trying to do. Smoke agreed to let her draw him, then kept fidgeting where he sat.
âIâma be gone âbout a week.âÂ
âWhen you leavin?â Annie replied.Â
âTomorrow.â A beat. âWe goin toââ
âTo Memphis,â she finished. âI know.â
Smoke tilted his head. âHow you know?â
âStack came to my job the other day andâwill you quit movinâ?âÂ
His jaw clenched a little when he heard his brotherâs name.Â
âI ainât movinâ.â
âYou is. Arèt.â
Smoke mumbled under his breath. âThat another French lesson?â
âAnotherânigga I said stop movinâ!â she said with a playful slam of her pencil.Â
He wanted to grin. He could barely stop the one threatening to spread across his face when she fussed at him. Why? He ainât even know. She wasnât the first girl who did. Wouldnât be the last. It was something about her tone. That purry Louisiana lilt. The way she rolled her Lâs. The way her tongue wrapped around his name. Smoke. He wondered how sheâd say his real one.Â
âYou ainât say thatâs what it meant.â
She looked up at him slyly as she blindly shaded in his left dimple. âYou still knew I meant stop, though.â
He didnât respond. He couldnât. It was those eyes again, those big brown eyes that wrapped him up in warmth and wouldnât let go. Those perfectly shaped eyes that almost looked feline. Deep, almost endless. Dark, like midnight couldnât hold a candle to them. Dangerous, like he need to quit starinâ out the corner of his eye before he got himself in some trouble.Â
âNow you canât talk?âÂ
âYou told me to be quiet.â
âI told you to be still.âÂ
âSame thing,â he grumbled.Â
âNo it ainât.âÂ
âYou done yet?â
âI said donât move.â
He sighed heavily. âAight.âÂ
A few more strokes of her pencil and she was done.Â
âDone.â
âCan I see it?â
She exhaled sharply. âNo.â
Smoke sucked his teeth. âWhy not?â
âIon like it.â
âYou made me sit still for how long just to not let me see it?â
âGuess so.â She smiled mischievously.Â
âYou somethinâ else, Annie.â
âI know,â she said gleefully.Â
He reached for the folded up paper and she hovered her pencil above the middle of his hand.
âYou finna stab me over a picture?âÂ
Annie shrugged. Eyes daring.Â
âBetter put that thing up, woman.âÂ
They looked at each other in silence for a minute. Circling. Nothing but suppressed smirks and squinting eyes. Smoke broke first this time, pulling his hand back before he ended up with a hole in it.Â
âCrazy ass.âÂ
Annie just grinned.Â
âWhen you work next?âÂ
âTomorrow.â
âYou makinâ decent money at that place?âÂ
âMhmm. Tips good.âÂ
âPeople?â
âThey good, too.â
âNobody givinâ you a hard time?â
âNope.â She moved from the kitchen table to the icebox. âBesides, I can handle myself. I keep tellinâ you this.â
There she go, fussinâ again. The grin threatened to return. He bit his bottom lip instead.Â
âWant somethinâ to drink?âÂ
âIâm good.âÂ
âSuit yourself,â she said, taking a cold Coke from the icebox. She popped it open and took a long sip.Â
Damn he looks good doinâ that, Annie thought to herself. She pretended not to look at him while she was definitely looking at him. That plump, soft lip pulled between those pearly white teeth. Lord have mercy. She cleared her throat, and those thoughts, from her head.Â
âYou go in early tomorrow?â
âLate. They got this band cominâ up from Tutwiler to perform at supper and they need some extra hands in the kitchen.âÂ
âHow late?â he asked quickly.Â
âProbably til close.â
His jaw clenched. âAnd what time is that, woman?âÂ
Annieâs face twisted up. âSmoke, I know you ainât just lose yo damn mind in my home.âÂ
Smoke shook his head. âI donât want you walkinâ by yourself that late.âÂ
âAnd who is you?â she sassed playfully, blinking her eyes slowly at him.Â
Smoke paused, like he was actually thinking about it. Then he chuckled low. A little too low. Because whatâs so damn funny? The sound reverberated deep in her chest and sent a shiver, no, a shock, up her spine. She almost gasped at the feeling. He stood up and stalked to her seat at the table, tilting her chin up so she had no choice but to look him in the eyes.Â
Her gaze was unwavering when she looked up at his unreadable one. His hand moved from her chin to cup her cheek and when he kissed her, it stole the breath out of her lungs. She pulled away from him dazed with kiss-bruised lips.
âSee you next week.âÂ
He whispered it but it sounded stern, damn near like a warning. But the energy radiating off of him was so heavy, so mannish, that it made her thighs press together like she had no control over herself.
Damn that man, she found herself thinking.Â
Annieâs eyes followed him as he tipped his hat and dipped through the front door silently. He bit back a grin as he slipped into the afternoon heat. But not before he said one last thing.Â
âBe good.â
Annieâs mouth dropped open, but no sound came out.
The screen door didnât snap closed like it usually did. It fit into its frame quietly, like it was scared to fall out of line too.Â
âHi, Iâm Annie.âÂ
Annie stood in a group with the servers as they introduced themselves to the entertainment of the night. It was a small band of two, just a quirky guitarist and a singer.Â
The place was already starting to fill up in anticipation, and Mr. Hightower was taking care of drinks at the bar while the other staff helped the musicians with their set up.Â
âIâm Reeny, and this D.W.,â she said with a bubbly disposition.Â
She was a cute girl. Couldnât be more than five feet tall. Caramel colored skin, a patch of freckles across her nose, and a pendant necklace that caught the dimming lights of the cafĂŠ every time she bounced around like a ball of energy. She wore a tan dress, similar in design to their uniforms, with a simple pair of yellow flats.Â
âWhere yâall from?â Loretta asked them.Â
âShelby.âÂ
âHow long yâall been playinâ?â Sheila chimed in.Â
Reeny and D.W. looked at each other. ââBout five years,â D.W. said.
âYâall look young!â Loretta exclaimed.Â
âIâm 26. Heâll be 30 next year.âÂ
âDamnnnnnn,â Felicia said, pointing at Loretta. âYou need to get your eyes checked. Mr. Hightowerâ you sure itâs a good idea for her to be head cook? She can barely seeâŚ.â she joked walking off towards the bar.Â
The guitarist strummed a few notes to warm up. Then the melody kicked in. It was a mix of bass and alto that sounded so enchanting it felt like they were casting a spell. Reenyâs voice was breathless but deep, magnetic but so light it made the air in the room feel like a whisper against skin. She belted from her diaphragm, giving all she had into that little microphone like she was in front of an audience of thousands instead of the 30 or so people packed into the dining room of Blackbird.Â
People on the street stopped what they were doing to look inside and couldnât believe the big voice coming from this little woman.Â
I got the deep river blues
I would never lose youâŚ
The spiriiiiiits they soak my soulâŚ
I said, them water spiriiiiiiiiiiitsâŚthey live in my soulâŚÂ
I got the backwoods, muddy water, deep bayou river bluesâ
And I could never lose youâŚ
The heady warmth of the blues spread through the cafĂŠ like heat in the dead of summer. The guitar rolled low underneath the angelic, soulful sound of Rubyâs voice that drowned out the sounds ofâŚeverything. Time, space, surroundings. What was left behind was pure magic. Excited shouts and joyous stomps made glasses rattled on tables as couples engaged slow two-steps and gyrations to the sultry rhythm of the music.Â
Of course it wasnât magic in the literal sense. The magic was in a community finding joy in the little things. Music. Love. Gathering together. Carving beauty out of a world set up for them to fail. Annie eventually caved and joined in, even with a serving platter in her hands. Sweat dripped down her neck as she shook her hips and shimmied her shoulders in tandem.Â
The song ended with a roaring applause. Whistles, cheers, stomps rang out from the room and all the way down the block. Almost everyone on Fourth Street had stopped to witness the show at Blackbird. Tips were rolling in, drinks were flowing. Mr. Hightower even looked like he was enjoying himself instead of micromanaging or waiting around for something to go wrong.Â
âYou walkinâ home?â Mr. Hightower stood with his arm hanging off the counter by the kitchen as Reeny and D.W. transitioned into a slower tune.Â
Annie turned at the sound of his voice. âYes, sir.â
âGonâ home.âÂ
âYou sure?â
âGonâ git. Before it get too late.âÂ
âAlright alright Iâm goinâ,â she said. âGoodnight.â
He nodded and disappeared down the hall. Annie padded behind him and turned into the break room. She put her apron in her locker, slipped her purse around her shoulder, then slipped out the back door.Â
The moon was high, nighttime glittering all around her. The sound of the music faded slowly as she made her way back to Aunt Dellaâs, but the bass still thumped behind her ribs like a heartbeat. She felt sated. Electric. She walked up the steps of the front porch glowing from head to toe. She took a deep breath and let it out.
She felt home.
Annie could see candles burning in the kitchen as she stepped through. The house was asleep. All except Aunt Della. She was rummaging around in one of the kitchen drawers for something when she heard the front door close and lock.Â
âHowâd it go?âÂ
Annie exhaled loudly, her bag sliding down her arm.Â
Aunt Della chuckled. âThat night shift rough, huh?âÂ
âMy arms feel like wet noodles,â Annie whined as she slumped into a chair in the front room. âAnd my ears wonât stop ringinâ.â She exhaled hard. âBut I had fun.âÂ
Aunt Della walked into the front room with two mugs of sweet smelling liquor. âHere,â she held a mug to Annieâs lips. âDrink.â She sunk into the middle of the couch, crossed her legs, and took a slow sip from her own mug.Â
âWhatâs this?â Annie asked, not waiting for an answer before she tasted it.
âSomethinâ to take the edge off. Relax after a long day.â
She hummed in delight as the taste of orange blossom, cinnamon, and honey flooded her tastebuds. A little fizz. The sharpness of hooch, without all the bitterness. âThis gonâ put me right to sleep.âÂ
âMhmm.â Aunt Della cleared her throat and set down her mug on the coffee table. ââBefore I forget,â Aunt Della said matter-of-factly. âSmoke left this for ya before he left.âÂ
âOh, did he now?â
She grabbed the book from the coffee table and set it on Annieâs lap. It was larger than a standard book. Thinner. Sturdy. Leather bound. Smelled like tobacco and old wood. A picture book maybe?Â
She opened it to find blank pages.
Nothing but a line at the top to write in titles or dates.Â
It was a sketchbook. Something she could use to keep all her drawings in one place.Â
Her cheeks warmed and a grin spread across her face before she could tighten her lips to stop it. As she flipped through the pages, a small piece of paper slipped out and floated onto the floor landing face down. She bent down to pick it up and flipped it over in her hand.Â
His handwriting was neat. So neat. Tight. Precise. Just like him.Â
Except his j.Â
It was traced over a few times, like somebody bumped his arm while he was writing and he tried to fix it. She read the message and released a breath she didnât realize she was holding.
It took me reading halfway through this fic to realize itâs a damn series and I need to start from the beginning đđđđđ But this chapter was so good my confused ass just kept reading anyways.
Let me go back to chapter one so I can get the full scope đđžââď¸đđžââď¸đđžââď¸đ
Now Poosy I know you seen that bold font chapter 6 on there đđđ but no seriously Iâm so glad you like it and I hope you get to read the rest when you get a chance đ
Do you only complete requests from friends? I sent a fic request months ago and you never responded đ
You must be new here. *clears throat*
My page isnât ran like a democracy where equality resides. My page is ran like a dictatorship.
Overlord Poosy writes WHAT she wants to write WHEN she wants to write it.
My friends will always have priority⌠because⌠they arenât just my friends. Weâve signed a Death Row contract and these are my SISTERSSSSSSSSSSSSS.
On a serious note, I appreciate you guys submitting your request and trusting me with your concepts, but please remember these few things.
1.) I currently have three incomplete Sinners series posted on Tumblr and three more I want to start đđ fml
2.) I write fanfiction when I need a creative outlet from my irl work. Poosy is not a robot. Poosy has a life and job outside of this internet bubble.
3.) Ummm Iâm the ultimate procrastinator đđžââď¸
It may take me 40 days and 40 nights to get to your request but Iâll complete it eventually.
Mr. Smokeâs & Mr. Stackâs Doll: A Little Bunny Rabbit
Authorâs Note: Itâs Gemini season! Everyone go say Happy Day Of Birth to my sister @theethighpriestess aka Bunny đ°
Warnings: +18 | Dom!Smoke | Dom!Stack | Smoke x Stack x OC | Plus Size OC | MFM | Angst (if you squint and do a backflip) | Fluff (if you squint and do three pushups) Oral Sex | Anal Sex | Edging | Coochie Drilled To Smithereens | Overstimulation | Double Penetration | Creampie | Dollification | They⌠They arenât mean in this chapter⌠have I found God?
The room smelled like a cheap pomade and even cheaper whiskey.
Bunny had caught the scent the moment she pushed open the door to room number seven. There was a stale and sour stench lingering in the air that clung to a drunken man that was expected to be her next client. She stood in the doorway for a half second, shoulders squared beneath the ivory negligee she had been assigned for the evening, her red painted toes just crossing the threshold, and she told herself it was nothing. Men came in here smelling like all manner of sin. Whiskey and cheap pomade was the least offensive of them.
The man waiting for her was a heavyset thing. Pale as uncooked dough, with a collar loosened down to his second button and cufflinks that didn't match. His eyes swam when they found her. This wasnât the ordinary tipsy swim of a man who had had two drinks to get his nerves up before visiting a house like this. No, this was the kind of swim that came from the bottom of a bottle, from a man who had been drinking since before supper and hadn't stopped for reasons that had nothing to do with enjoying the taste.Â
His mouth curved into something that was meant to be a smile but landed somewhere closer to a sneer. "There she is," he said, his words running together at the edges like watercolors left out in the rain. "Took yaâ long enough."
Bunny let the door shut behind her with a quiet click. She pulled up the smile she had spent years perfecting, the one that reached her eyes just far enough to be convincing without costing her anything real, and she moved toward the vanity to set down her small kit. "Evenin', sir," she replied, voice sweet as honeysuckle draped over a fence post in July. "You get yourself settled alright?"
"Settled?" He laughed, the sound was disgustingly wet and blunt. "I been waitin' damn near twenty minutes."
"I apologize for that, sir." She turned subtly, sizing the client up again in the mirror's reflection while she appeared to be checking her hair. She took notice of the way his body tilted just slightly to the left when he tried to sit straighter. The way his hand reached for the bedpost to steady himself without seeming to realize he had done it. The glassy, navigating-through-fog quality of his stare. Bunny had been in this business long enough to know that a drunk man in a room with a woman he had paid for was a man operating without a leash, and a man without a leash was a dangerous creature.
She angled herself toward the door by a few degrees. Just enough to escape if needed. "Sir," she said, keeping her voice sweet and calm, "I just want to make sure you feelin' alright before we get started. You seem like you might've had yourself a full night already and I wouldn't wantâ"
The remainder of her sentence was cut off because the drunken man moved without warning. He lurched to his feet, knocking the small side table with his hip and sending its single glass of water spinning off the edge to shatter against the floor. His face had turned a particular shade of red that lived between embarrassment and fury, and his jaw worked like he was chewing something bitter before he could get the words out.
"Useless bitch," he spat. The syllables fell out of him ugly and hard. "Think I paid to have some whore tell me I done had too much to drink? Think I need you lookin' down at me? I'll kill you, you hear me?!? I'll put my hands âround ya' neck and I'llâ"
His arm swung mid rant, but Bunny was already moving.
She dropped her chin to her chest and turned her body so the arc of his open palm caught nothing but air, and in the same motion her right hand went up to her hair. The blade she kept there was small, barely two inches of steel with a handle thin enough to disappear between two curling papers. It was something she had carried since she was nineteen years old and had learned in the most painful way possible that a pretty face and a small curvy frame were not assets in every room. Her fingers found it without hesitation, but with the calm surety of someone who had practiced the motion until it lived in her muscles instead of her mind.
She drew it in the same breath she stepped to his left side, and when she came back up, she sliced him across the cheekbone in one clean swipe.
The sound he made wasnât quite a scream and not quite a word. It lived somewhere between the two, high and stunned. The moment he was sliced, his hand flew to his face as the blood welled immediately, vivid and dark, running between his fingers and dripping onto the collar he had loosened two buttons down. He staggered back into the bedpost as his eyes went wide, and suddenly he was brutally sober.
"Help!" The plea tore out of him then, ragged and furious. "HELP! She cut me! This wicked bitch cut my damn FACE!"
Bunny stood quietly like a marble statue with the blade still in her hand. Her chest moved in controlled, shallow breaths as her heartbeat threw itself against her ribs like a prisoner testing the walls, but her face⌠her face was completely still. Still like a woman who had survived more than enough dangerous rooms, and this was no different. She didnât bother running or crying, instead she watched the blood run down his cheek and she waited.
Two seconds passed and the door swung open before the echo of his second shout had finished bouncing off the walls.
They filled the frame the way they always filled every frame they walked through, shoulder to shoulder, the both of them constructed from the same Mississippi clay and hardened by the same Jim Crow fire. Stack came through first, his jacket slightly disheveled as if he was in the middle of something⌠or someone, signature gold tooth catching the lamplight as his coffee brown eyes swept the room in three seconds flat. Smoke followed a half step behind, and his gaze went to the blood first, then to Bunny, then to the blade still loose in her fingers, and in that order he read the whole story without a single word being spoken.
The two of them looked at each other and it lasted less than a millisecond. They shared a sacred twin language, and there was no need to speak out loud when they could discuss everything necessary through a simple glance. There was no need for none of the vowels and consonants that other men required. Stack's chin lifted two degrees. Smoke's jaw shifted once to the right. That was all.
Smoke marched over to the bleeding man and grabbed him by the back of the collar with one hand. The client sputtered, grabbing at Smoke's wrist, voice rising again into something wheedling and enraged all at once, but Smoke wasn't listening. He was already moving, already dragging the man toward the door with that flat, unblinking quiet that was a hundred times more frightening than any raised voice.
Stack waited until the door swung shut behind his brother and then he turned to Bunny. He looked at her the way he looked at a ledger he needed to balance, thorough, patient, and giving nothing away in his expression. His hands found his jacket pockets and he stood with the loose posture of a man who had all the time left in the world. "Tell me what happened," he said.
Bunny's fingers curled tighter around the blade before she caught herself and lowered it. "He was drunk when I walked in," she explained, and her voice came out steadier than she had expected, considering. "Not just a couple of drinks. He was drowninâ in it. I called it out because I wasn't about to start a session with a man who could barely hold his head upright and when I didâŚ" She nodded toward the door. "He called me out my name, said he was gonna kill me, and he swung. I moved⌠And I cut him."
Stack said nothing for a moment as his tongue rolled against the inside of his cheek. He looked at the blood on the floor where the man had been standing, then at the broken water glass, then at Bunny's face. "You ain't in trouble," he said finally, his Mississippi drawl coating every syllable like a second skin. "But I need you to hear me on this." He pulled one hand from his pocket and pointed a single finger at her. "Next time a client get rowdy, stupid, or liquored past the point of sense, you don't reach for that blade. You call for one of us. That's what we here for. Understand?"
"Yes, sir."
He held her gaze a moment longer, making sure the instruction had gone somewhere it would stay, and then he nodded once. "Go on, wash up an get you some rest." He turned for the door, then paused with his hand on the frame, not looking back. "You did real good, not fallin' apart. Just... next time⌠let us handle the mess."
The door closed again, and Bunny stood alone in the room with the broken glass and the ruined sheets and the small blade still warm from her grip, and she exhaled for what felt like the first time in several minutes.
Out behind the brothel, the alley smelled of ash cans and summer.
Smoke walked the man through the rear exit with the same grip he used to drag him out of the room. He deposited him against the back wall, the man's knees finally gave out forcing him to slide down the brick and land in a graceless heap on the ground, one hand still pressed to his sliced cheek, blood threading between his fingers and dripping off his chin.
Smoke stood over him. His hands went to his jacket, straightening it once, and then settled at his sides. He looked down at the man like he was a disgruntled God figuring out what type of punishment to inflict.
The man looked up at him and found whatever he needed in Smoke's expression to start talking. "She attacked me," his drunkenness slipping out of his voice now that fear had come in to replace it. "That bitch came in there and she just⌠she had a knife. She cut my face. You need to do somethinâ about that. I paid good money for a civil hour and instead I getâ"
"You said⌠you was gon' kill her."
The man blinked. "I was angry, I didn'tâ"
"Called her out her name twice in my presence."
The man's mouth opened and closed.
Smoke crouched down until his eyes were level with the man's, and in that position he looked less like a man and more like a demon ready to indulge in his bloodlust. His voice hadn't changed. It never changed. It held that same smooth, unshifted cadence through every conversation regardless of what the conversation was about. "Ionâ know exactly what went on in that room yet," he said. "But I want you to understand somethin'. That part don't fuckinâ matter to me. What matter to me is that you walked into my house, disrespected somethin' that belong to me, an then you done put ya' voice on her in a way that reminded her she needed a blade." He paused, letting that sit. "I don't take kindly to that."
His hand moved to his jacket, fingers parting the lapel, and the grip of his pistol caught the thin light of the alley moon.
The man's eyes went very wide. His injured hand came up, palm out, his whole body pressing back against the brick like he could dissolve into it. "Wait, wait, wait, I'll pay double, I'll pay whatever youâ"
The hammer drew back with a soft, final click that cut the man's sentence clean off.
Smoke looked at him with those coal-flat eyes and the man fell silent as a stone thrown into deep water. No more words. Just the ragged labor of his own breathing and the thin, continuous sound of his blood hitting the ground.
Footsteps came down the alley behind Smoke and he didnât bother turning around because he didn't need to. There was only one set of feet in the world that sounded like that.
Stack came up beside him, his hands loose at his sides, gold tooth catching the moon when he tilted his head down at the man on the ground. He took in the full picture. The gun. The blood. The look on Smoke's face. Then he took in a breath, slow and satisfied, and began to speak.
He told Smoke everything. The condition the man had come in. The things he had said when Bunny called it out. The swing that didn't land. The blade that did. When he finished, Stack was quiet for a moment, and then he reached into the interior pocket of his jacket and produced a knife with a blade four times the size of whatever Bunny had been carrying. He turned it once in his fingers, the steel catching and releasing the light in alternating flashes, and he smiled. It was the crooked smile, the one that reached his eyes and meant he was genuinely pleased about something.
"Lemmeâ talk to him first," Stack said. "I ain't had a good conversation in a minute."
Smoke looked at his brother and then he looked at the man on the ground, who was now visibly shaking, tears cutting through the blood on his cheek without any prompting at all. Smoke stood from his crouch, straightened his jacket once more, and stepped to the side. He put his pistol back without a word, folded his hands behind his back, and watched.
Stack crouched in his place, knife resting easy between two fingers, his face open and joyful in the particular way that meant the worst thing imaginable was coming next. "How you doin', friend?" he asked, accent thick as summer mud, voice warm as a lit match. "Tell me somethin'. You ever have somebody look after you real good, put you somewhere soft an warm an safe, an you go an spit in they face for it? You ever do that?"
The man couldnât answer.
Stack tilted his head and grinned like a Cheshire Cat. "Naw, naw, take ya' time. I got all night."
The alley didnât hear from that man again after that. Not in any language that would've made sense to a person passing on the street.
A month passed by and it had the audacity to feel like three.
Bunny sat on the edge of her bed in the room the twins had given her and pulled a brush through her texturized hair for the fourth time that evening. She counted the strokes the way she had been taught to count them since childhood, one and two and three and four, because there was nothing else to count and the act of counting kept her hands busy and her hands being busy kept her from acknowledging a particular restlessness that had been living under her skin for the better part of two weeks.
The room she was stationed in was nice. That was the first thing she had thought when Stack walked her to it, one week after the incident, with his hand at the small of her back and a short instruction to make herself comfortable. She had expected a small, utilitarian thing, the kind of space a working doll got assigned on the upper floor with a shared bath down the hall and a window that faced the brick wall of the building next door. What she got was a room with curtains. Actual curtains, silk ones that pooled at the floor and caught the last of the day's light in a way that turned the whole space the color of a candle flame. A vanity with a proper oval mirror. A wardrobe that had been stocked before she arrived with dresses and wrappers and nightgowns of a quality that made her catch her breath the first time she opened its doors, fabrics so fine they slipped through her fingers like water. On the small table beside her bed, a covered dish of food arrived three times a day whether she asked for it or not. Things she hadn't tasted since she was a little girl sitting in her grandmother's kitchen, sweet potato pie with a crust that shattered her taste buds like stained glass, braised oxtail over white rice, pound cake soaked in lemon syrup that left a sweetness on the roof of her mouth for hours.
She was being treated like a woman of some standing⌠And it was driving her absolutely out of her mind.
Bunny set the hairbrush down and looked at herself in the vanity mirror with an assessing expression she reserved for private moments like these. She was thirty-four years old. She had curves that grown men wrote embarrassing letters about and women studied with something too complicated to be called jealousy and too honest to be called admiration. She had hands that knew how to work, thighs that knew how to hold, a mouth that had never once left a client feeling cheated, and a reputation in three separate cities that had always, always been built by her own effort, her own body, her own particular genius for the kind of pleasure that made a man feel like he was the most important thing in the room. She hadnât come to this brothel to be kept like a flower in a glass case. She had come because she heard that the Moore twins ran the most lucrative operation north of the Mason Dixon and she wanted in on it. She wanted to work.
The bath she had taken earlier still clung to her skin in the form of the vanilla oil she had worked into her arms and her neck, and the nightgown the wardrobe had produced tonight was deep gold that made her brown skin glow like something lit from within. She looked breathtakingly beautiful, yet she felt like a caged thing in beautiful wrappings.
After looking herself over one more time in the mirror, she stood and made a silent decision as she made her way to the kitchen.
The brothel at midnight had a particular quality to it, a quietness that fell somewhere between a sleeping house and a thinking one. The downstairs jazz had stopped three hours ago. The girls were either asleep or occupied, and the hallways that had been warm and perfumed with commerce earlier in the evening were now cool and dim, lit by the occasional wall sconce thatâs wick had been turned down low. Bunny moved through the brothel on her bare feet, the gold nightgown sighing against her legs with every step, and she told herself she was just going for a peach before confronting the twins. There was always a bowl of peaches in the kitchen. She had discovered this on her second day and found it oddly comforting that someone in this house thought fresh fruit was important enough to replenish daily.
She pushed open the kitchen door and the room was drenched in darkness. That was the first thing. The second thing was that it wasnât empty.
As Bunny's eyes adjusted to the dimly lit room, eventually she was able to see there was a woman sitting at the long kitchen table in the dark eating cornbread.
Bunny stood in the doorway with her hand still on the door and looked at the mystery woman as she took her in piece by piece. Height first, even sitting, the woman had somewhat of a long-limbed frame that telegraphed itself. Bunny guessed that she was maybe five foot eight or nine if she stood. Her skin was deep, even brown like good molasses in a jar, paired with hair that fell straight and unadorned down past her shoulders, jet black, the color of ink before it dries. And to finish it off, she had a face that did a thing Bunny had only seen faces do in paintings, not the kind hung in houses like this one, but the kind in old churches where the artists tried to put something holy and something frightening in the same expression at the same time. The mystery woman looked young feature wise as if she hadnât yet turned twenty-two, but her eyes⌠her eyes were something else entirely.
Bunny wasnât a woman who was scared easily. She had lived too much, seen too much, and cut too many men across the face to give fear the kind of real estate it wanted in her mind. But those violet eyes made something ancient crawl up the back of her neck, not unpleasant, just⌠aware. Like stepping into a room and understanding that whatever was in it had been there since before the house was built.
The woman looked up from her cornbread and regarded Bunny with an expression of complete composure, as though being found eating cold food alone in a dark kitchen of a brothel in the middle of the night was exactly where she was expected to be.
"You Rosalie," the woman said. It wasn't a question.
Bunny blinked. "How'd youâ"
"You look like a Rosalie." She broke off another piece of cornbread, unhurried about it. "I'm Josephine. Everybody an they mama call me Josie."
Bunny stepped into the kitchen and let the door drift shut behind her. "I go by Bunny," she said, and then, because she couldn't help herself, "why are you sittin' in the dark?"
Josie ignored the question with such thoroughness that it was almost artful. She tilted her head at Bunny and asked, "They call you Bunny 'cause you can bounce on a dick 'til a man start beggin' for his mama?"
The initial response that leaped to Bunny's lips was something ladylike and deflective. What came out instead was a flustered, sputtering exhale, as her cheeks went warm and her hand raised halfway to her mouth before she caught it. She cleared her throat. "That's⌠yes," she admitted. "That's⌠um⌠exactly why."
The corner of Josie's mouth moved in something that could've been a smile if it committed to itself. She pushed the plate of cornbread forward by an inch, the gesture of a woman sharing without making much of it. "Have some."
Bunny looked at the cornbread. It was ice cold and hard as a rock. She could see the waxy surface on it that cornbread got when it had been sitting awhile. She was fond of cornbread. She was not fond of that. She moved instead to the bowl on the counter and lifted a peach, testing its weight in her palm before biting into it, and she hummed as the juice ran down her chin warm and sweet.
She stood there eating the peach and watching Josie, and Josie let herself be watched for a time, eating her cold cornbread with equanimity, apparently perfectly at peace with the scrutiny. But Bunny was staring and she knew it and the reason she was staring was the thing she couldn't pin down, the thing that sat off-center about this woman the way a picture sits off-center on a wall. She wasnât dressed like any of the other dolls Bunny had met in the past month. No lace, no slip, nothing that mirrored the nature of this house and its business. She wore a plain white blouse tucked into a flowy dark skirt with her feet bare on the kitchen floor. She looked like a woman who had stepped in from another dimension entirely and simply hadn't gotten around to leaving.
Bunny had met all the other dolls in the house during her first week. She was certain of that. This woman had not been among them.
Josie took another bite of her cornbread and looked at Bunny the way Bunny had been looking at her, with that clear, still assessment that took nothing personally and missed nothing either. "How you likin' it here?" she asked. "Smoke and Stack pretty decent owners, far as that kind of thing go."
The word owners sat in Bunny's mouth for a moment before she swallowed it. "I wouldn't know yet," she reluctantly admitted. "I had one client, one incident, and since then they've had me locked up in a room like I'm made of porcelain and they're afraid I'll chip." She took another bite of peach. "I haven't worked a single real night. I came here to make money. Instead I've been eatin' pie and watchin' the curtains move."
Josie's eyes sharpened the way a fire sharpens when you give it more air. "Which one claimed you?" she quipped.
Bunny frowned her brows in confusion. "I'm sorry?"
"Which twin? Smoke or Stack? Elijah or Elias? Which one claimed you as his doll?"
The frown deepened. "Neither of them," Bunny said slowly, like she was working out whether that was the right answer even as she gave it. "When I arrived they walked me through the rules, explained how the percentages worked, showed me the floor. Neither of them said anything about⌠claiming."
Now it was Josieâs turn to be confused as she stopped eating and placed her cornbread very gently on the plate in front of her. She looked at Bunny with the full force of those ancient alien lavender eyes and she was quiet for a stretched-out moment that had weight to it. Then she leaned forward and without a word of warning she took Bunny's face between both her hands and squeezed her cheeks together, compressing Bunny's lips into a surprised, rounded 'O'.
"You are thee cutest thing," Josie cooed, with the slightly awed sincerity of someone who had just found a very small, very charming animal in an unexpected location.
Bunny's eyes went wide above her squished cheeks. She made a sound that was supposed to be a protest and emerged as something closer to a muffled quack.
Josie released her with an unrushed giggle and settled back in her chair as though that had been a perfectly reasonable thing to do. "Alright," she said. "Let me explain how this house works."
Bunny smoothed her cheeks with her palms and fixed Josie with a look that she reserved for people who had just done something she didn't have the vocabulary to address properly. Then she sighed, finished the peach, and sat down.
Josie explained the rules of the house with a questionable amount of knowledge that Bunny would inquire about later. When a doll went through something the way Bunny had gone through something, they were taken off the floor. Not longer than a week, typically. No clients, no housework, just time to let the body and the mind settle back into themselves without being asked to perform. After that period, whichever twin had claimed that particular doll would take her through a retraining week. A proper retraining. Not punishment, not because she had done something wrong, but because the mind needed to be walked back through safety the same way the body needed to be walked back through strength after a sickness. The twins were a great many things, Josie explained, and some of those things werenât things that would be listed in a church bulletin, but they werenât complete monsters and wouldn't send a shaken woman back to work before she was ready. That wasnât morality for morality's sake. It was also just bad business, and they were nothing if not precise businessmen.
Bunny absorbed this. Processed it. Turned it over. And then arrived at the part that had been sitting sideways in her chest since the question first got asked.
"It's been a month," she said.
Josie looked at her dumbfounded like she didnât hear her correctly.
"It's been a month," Bunny said again. "The incident was a month ago. Nobody took me through any retraining. Nobody said anythinâ about when I'd go back to work. And you're telling me that the reason for that isâŚ"
She could see it in Josie's expression before she said it, like she was about to deliver news that amused her to the highest degree.
"Either you one of the special ones," Josie said, the childish grin breaking through now, unconstrained, like a schoolgirl who had been holding it in for the last five minutes, "or you somehow so boring that both of them forgot you exist entirely."
Bunny straightened up in her chair. "I am not boring," she said.
"I didn't say you were."
"You implied it."
"I offered it as a possibility."
"It is not a fuckinâ possibility." Bunny's chin came up and her voice took on the tone of a woman defending something she had built with a considerable effort over many years. Before she had walked through the Moore brothers' doors she had left three separate establishments because she had outgrown them. She had a clientele that wrote letters to find out where she had gone. She had a reputation that didnât include the word boring in any language. "I done made grown ass men cry," she said. "Not from pain⌠From gratitude."
Josie held up one hand in a gesture of peace, her playful grin not moving an inch. "Alright, alright. I believe you. I apologize." She folded her hands on the table. "The other explanation, then, is that they both want to claim you and neither one of them know how to go about it without steppinâ on the other's toes."
Bunny's chair scraped back half an inch. "Both of them?"
"It's rare," Josie whispered, as if she was saying too much too soon. "In the whole time this house been runninâ there've only been two dolls that both of them claimed at once. Just two. The second one is named Buttercup. She handles their books and investments. Sheâs been both of theirs for many moons." A pause, thoughtful and private. "The first oneâŚ" She picked up her cornbread again and looked at it, not at Bunny. "Well..."
The silence that lingered behind that one word forced Bunny to really look at Josie's profile. She took in the serenity of it, the complete and settled comfort with which this woman occupied any space she entered, including dark kitchens in the middle of the night. The way she didn't need to finish the sentence because the sentence was already obvious to anyone paying attention.
"Hypothetically," Bunny said carefully.
Josie's mouth curved with mischief. "Hypothetically..."
"If a woman found herself in that position. Both of them. At once. How would she⌠manage that?"
Josie was quiet for a moment, chewing her cornbread, looking somewhere past Bunny's shoulder as though consulting a memory that lived in the middle distance. "Hypothetically," she repeated, "such a woman would need to learn how not to get frostbitten by an avalanche of coldness." A pause. "While also not burninâ up in a lake of uncontrolled fire." Another pause, this one carrying a slightly different weight, the weight of something remembered in the body as much as the mind. "And on top of all that, she would need to learn how to take two men at the same time without tearinâ in half."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"That's⌠useful information," Bunny said finally.
"I thought you'd think so."
They sat for another minute, the two of them, in the warm dark kitchen with the peach bowl on the counter and the plate of cold cornbread between them, and something passed between them that couldnât be labeled as friendship yet but was the thing that comes just before it, a recognition, a sense of shared understanding arrived at by different roads.
A few more comforting minutes passed and then Bunny stood. She pulled the gold nightgown straight across her hips and ran one hand through the freshly brushed waterfall of her hair and looked at Josie with the expression of a woman who had made up her mind about something and had no further interest in deliberating. "Hypothetically, if I wanted to speak with them tonight... you know where they are?"
"Their office," Josie said. "End of the hall. Door on the left." She reached for the last piece of frosty cornbread. "Knock four times when you get there. Even count, same rhythm. That's how they know it's a doll behind the door and not somebody they need to put a bullet in."
Bunny's eyes widened slightly. "Good to know."
"One more thing," Josie said, without looking up, the words landing easy as a stone dropped into still water, "whoever open that door? Look him dead in the eye when you tell him what you want. Don't let him take the silence from you first. They'll stand in a quiet room and wait you out 'til you forget what you came for. Don't let him." She broke off a bite of cornbread. "Now go."
The hallway to their office was dim and long as the floorboards under her bare feet held the warmth of the day's heat, soaked up and slowly releasing into the night. She walked it with her chin level and her footsteps quiet, the vanilla oil on her skin mixing with the faint residual perfume that lived in all the walls of this house. At the far end of the hall, beneath the last sconce, a door sat closed and faintly rimmed with the amber line of lamplight from beneath it.
She stopped in front of it. Pressed her palm flat against the wood for one second. Then she knocked. Four times. Even. The same rhythm. Just as Josie had instructed.
On the other side of the door, the office breathed with the quietness of two men working in a comfortable parallel. The desk was spread with ledgers and cash in organized columns, the ashtray on its corner nursed a half-finished cigarette that had gone cold, and the lamp threw a yellow circle of warmth across the arithmetic of their operations. Stack stood at the desk's far edge, jacket off, suspenders down, his sleeves rolled to the elbow, one hand moving down a column of figures with the end of a pencil. Smoke sat on the lounge couch along the near wall, his own jacket folded beside him, a glass of brown liquor balanced on the arm of the cushion, his eyes moving across a folded sheet of paper he had been reading for the third time.
Four knocks came through the door.
Even. Measured.
Both men went still.
Stack's pencil stopped and his eyes lifted from the ledger to find his brother's face across the room. Smoke had already set the paper down. His hand had already moved to the glass, lifting it, not drinking from it, just holding it in the idle way of a man whose other hand needed to be free. His eyes were steady on the door.
The four-count knock meant a doll. Both of them knew that. The problem was that only two dolls in their entire operation knew that particular code, and neither of those two women were supposed to be within three city blocks of this brothel for another three days.
Smoke set the glass down very carefully on the side table before standing and crossing the room to the door. His shoulder holster rode against his undershirt as he pulled his pistol free in one clean motion before turning the knob and pulling the office door open.
Bunny stood in the hallway nervously shifting her weight from one foot to the other. The lamplight from inside the office hit her caramel brown skin from the side and the effect of this wasn't something Smoke had originally budgeted for. She was soft, luminous, small, and entirely the kind of woman that a man had to consciously remind himself to look away from, all of that deep-curved, warm-skinned, doe-eyed beauty arranged in the specific way that made the gold fabric laced over her body look like it had been commissioned for her personally. She blinked up at him. Her eyes were the color of good rum and they caught the light and held it, and for one unguarded half second the hardness in his face did something complicated before it arranged itself back into its usual flat composure.
Smoke held the pistol at his side. His face settled back into the expression of a man who was conducting business regardless of the hour. His eyes moved over her once, the way he surveyed any situation that required assessment before a response. "Why," he said, voice smooth and level as a road built to last, his Mississippi roots dragging slow and warm beneath every word, "is you at my door knockin' four times?"
Bunny didnât flinch as she looked him in the eye exactly as Josie had instructed and she held the look steady. "Because," she said, "I am tired of being treated like I'm made of glass." She let a breath pass as she remembered who she was speaking to. "... Sir."
Smoke looked at her for a long minute. He ran his mind back, sorting through the preceding month like how a man sorts through a drawer looking for something he put down without thinking. The girl on the floor. The drunk client. The blade. Stack handling her, him handling the client. The decision to move her to the room across from theirs. Then the weeks had continued to happen, the operation had continued to require their attention, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, the particular task of walking her back through had gotten caught in the gap between what he assumed Stack had handled and what Stack apparently assumed he had handled.
He let the exhale come through his nose, small and contained. Then he stepped back from the door and nodded once towards the interior of the room. "Come in."
Bunny wasnât a woman that needed to be instructed twice as she came in.
Smoke shut the door behind her and walked back to the couch, settling into it with the glass of liquor retrieved from the side table. His eyes stayed on her as she took in the office, the desk and its columns, Stack still standing at the far edge of it now with his arms folded. Smoke's gaze moved from her face to his brother's and he said, with the absolute calm of a man stating a mathematical fact, "You done forgot to recommission ya' doll."
Stack's expression moved toward as expression of confusion that was also slightly offended at the framing. "Fuck you mean my doll?" he quipped. "Thought she was yours."
"I moved her to the room 'cross the hall," Smoke said. "I was leavin' the rest to you."
"Nobody told me that."
"I ain't gotta tell you everythinâ, Elias. Use ya' brain."
Stack unfolded his arms and planted both hands flat on the desk. "My brain was operatin' under the assumption that the woman sittin' over in that room with the good curtains was your doll that you was handlin' in ya' own time, Elijah. Had I known she was mine to recommission I would've had her back on the floor four weeks ago."
"She been over there four an a half weeks."
"Four an a half weeks then. My point stands, muthafucka."
"Ya' point is that you wasn't payin' attentionâ"
"My point is that you could've opened ya' mouth like a grown ass man an said the words 'Elias, go handle Bunny' an I would've gone an handled Bunny, but instead you sittinâ over there on that couch drinkin' ya' liquor an assumin' I was gon' read ya' mindâ"
"I don't need you readin' my mind, I need you payin' attention to what's happenin' in this houseâ"
"Stupid bitch, I pay more attention to what happens in this house than you do, I just ain't also expected to be a fuckin' mind reader on top of everythinâ elseâ"
"Language, Elias.â Smoke said.
"Now I need to read ya' mind an watch my mouth?"
"We got a doll present. Tighten up." Smoke's eyes cut to Bunny for one brief moment that carried the tiniest edge of an apology.
Bunny had been watching this exchange with the expression of a woman who was simultaneously relieved that Josie was right and also annoyed that Josie was right. She looked at the ceiling for one moment, gathering something, and then she looked at Stack directly.
"I didn't come here to listen to y'all argue about whose doll I am," she cut in. The words came out clean and direct, and beneath them ran a current of something real, something stored up across four weeks in a pretty room with silk curtains and three meals a day that she hadnât earned. "I came here because I am a woman who been working since I was old enough to understand that money you make yourself is the only kind that belongs to you in full." She let that settle for a moment.Â
Before she had walked through their door she had left three establishments because she outgrew them. Before that, back when she was Rosalie and not Bunny, she hadn't been permitted to own so much as the dress on her back. That life was behind her and it would stay behind her as long as she had a body to work with and the sense God gave her to use it. "I appreciate the food," she said. "I appreciate the nightgowns and the curtains and the sweetness. I do. But I am not a woman who takes without giving back, and I am not going to sit in that room one more week eating indulging in things I ain't earn. I want to work."
The office held the sound of that for a brief second.
Stack analyzed her from top to bottom. The annoyance from the argument with his twin had drained off his face entirely, replaced by something more attentive and interesting. He possessed the look of a man who had been watching something he wanted for some time and had just been reminded of it. His gaze moved down the gold nightgown with the focused assessment of a man reviewing an investment he had forgotten to manage and was now reconsidering with renewed and comprehensive interest.
He came around the desk, crossed the office floor, and closed the distance between them until his chest was close enough for her to feel the heat radiating off him. His hands came up. His fingers settled first at the hollow of her throat, light and acquainting themselves with the shape of her, feeling the small flutter there she couldn't suppress, feeling the way she swallowed. Then they traveled with thorough patience across her collarbones, over the generous swell of her chest through the nightgown's thin fabric. She was built lavishly, heavy and warm everywhere in a way that made his hands slow down and pay attention, and he let them linger there, cataloguing her, until her breathing changed and she tried to hide the change but couldn't.
His hands continued their inventory, moving down the soft plush landscape of her stomach, the deep inward curve of her waist, spreading wide across the full round geography of her hips. He took his time with her hips. He spent what felt like an extended amount of time mapping them, as though committing their particular architecture to some private record he intended to revisit at a later date. Then one hand swept low and around, and he brought his palm down hard and flat across the full magnificent curve of her backside with a crack that split the quiet of the office like a starting pistol.
The sound rang off the walls, the bookcase, the glass in the lamp, everything. Bunny's gasp tore out of her before she had the opportunity to make any decisions about it, sharp and bright, her body moving without consulting her brain, tilting forward into the impact and then backward away from it, settling finally against Stack's chest in a way that was involuntary enough to be entirely honest.
Stack felt her melt against him and his exhale came out long and satisfied. His arm wrapped around her from behind, pulling her flush against the front of him, and he bent his mouth to the curve of her ear. "I'm gonâ be the one runnin' ya' retrainin' tonight." He pressed his mouth closer to her ear, words dropping to a rough near-whisper. "An dependin' on how that go⌠I might need to keep you locked away from everybody else for another month⌠Really take my time so ya' body don't ever forget who it belong to."
The sound Bunny made was small, strangled, and entirely against her will.
He reached for the thin strap at her shoulder and slid it down. The other strap followed. He peeled the gold nightgown from her slowly, letting it whisper down her curves until it pooled at her feet in a gilded ring, and what was left standing in the middle of their office was every generous, luminous, full inch of Bunny without a single layer between her skin and the lamplight. The lamp threw amber across the swell of her hips, the deep curve of her waist, the heavy softness of her breasts, the deep brown warmth of her, and the office became immediately a different kind of room.
Stack stepped back and bit down on his bottom lip as he took in her goddess figure. Then, with the easy authority of a man in his own house, he waltzed over to the couch where Smoke sat and dropped down beside his brother. He plucked the liquor glass from Smoke's hand, drained what remained, and reached for the refill trolley at the couch's edge. Smoke didnât argue with his twin. He simply shifted his weight to accommodate Stackâs presence and locked his eyes on Bunny.
Two men on the same couch. Side by side. Undershirts and slacks, loafers, the warm lamplight running along the defined lines of their arms where the fabric ended, the undeniable press of their interest visible in the material of their trousers. Stack poured a fresh glass and settled into the cushion. Smoke took Bunny in from head to foot with that flat, complete attention that gave nothing away and missed nothing. The air in the room had changed and pressed heavily on all their shoulders.
Stack leaned forward, elbows to his knees, glass hanging loose in his fingers. "Show me," he said, "why you worth the trouble of retrainin' when you already cost me a dead white man, two dry cleaning bills, a shovel we had to replace after breakin' it diggin' that peckerwoods grave, plus four an a half weeks of room an board an meals that even my top earners don't see on a regular Tuesday." He settled back into the cushion. "All that, an you ain't brought us a single dollar. So show me what you got, Bunny."
Bunny stood naked in the center of their office and looked at both of them. She took one breath. Then she walked to Smoke.
She came to stand directly before him and held his gaze and placed one knee on the cushion beside his thigh and then the other, straddling his lap with the practiced ease of a woman who had made herself at home in more difficult situations than this. She could feel him beneath her already, the dense, insistent hardness of him through his slacks, and the discovery sent something bold climbing up her spine and into her shoulders. She rolled her hips, one slow and complete rotation, felt him twitch beneath her, and did it again. She leaned forward and put her mouth to the side of his neck, the warm brown skin above his collar, and kissed him there. Felt his jaw tighten. Kissed across his collarbone, the gap where his undershirt opened at the throat. She found his earlobe with her teeth, caught it just barely, and felt the exhale that came out of him, contained and controlled, the only version of a sound he was willing to give her yet.
She pulled back and looked at Stack over her shoulder. "I can't promise I won't cause more trouble with your clients," she said, her hips still moving against Smoke's in that slow, measured grind. "That ainât a promise I can keep. But I am an investment." She felt Smoke's hand settle on her hip, heavy and certain, the grip of a man who was claiming something without announcing he's done it. "And you'd be foolish men to let me go."
Then she climbed off Smoke's lap and moved to Stack.
She settled herself across his thighs before he had quite finished processing the intention, and his hands came up instinctively, finding her hips, and she moved against him the way she had moved against his brother, with that same frank, unhurried competence, rolling her hips in grinding rolls that had him fully hard inside his slacks under a minute. She kissed along his jaw, the corner of his mouth, found his throat and bit softly at it and felt him grip her harder. She turned her mouth to his ear. "Well?" she said quietly.
Stack's answer was both hands sliding down to fill themselves with the full, heavy weight of her backside, squeezing with the proprietary thoroughness of a man claiming something he had decided belongs to him and only him.
From the other side of couch, Smoke reached forward and caught the back of her hair in his fist. Not rough, not gentle, just completely unambiguous, pulling her head back until she was looking up at him from Stack's lap with her neck at a stretched and exposed angle. Smoke looked down at her, his eyes never leaving her face. "Who," he said, each word its own complete and unhurried thing, "taught you that knock?"
"Josie," Bunny replied quickly.
The quality of the silence that followed was specific. She felt Stack go still beneath her. She saw something shift in Smoke's expression, not much, just a recalibration of a single degree. "Josie," he repeated. Flat.
"She was in the kitchen," Bunny continued. "Just now. I spoke with her before I came down here."
Smoke's eyes moved to Stack's face. Stack's eyes moved back. That language again, the one that needed no words. Whatever moved between them in that half second was mutual and resolved by the time it was done.
Smoke released her hair. He stood, adjusted the set of his shoulder holster with one practiced motion, and looked at Bunny. "Come," he said.
Stack stood from the couch with Bunny still in his arms, lifting her from his lap without any apparent effort, her weight absorbed into his frame as a matter of course. He carried her out of the office. Smoke walked ahead through the dim corridor, his footsteps quiet on the floorboards, and they moved as a unit through the darkness of the second floor until they reached the kitchen.
Smoke pushed the door open.
Bunny looked into the kitchen from over Stack's shoulder.
The room was empty.
The room wasn't just vacant as if someone had just stepped out, the room was suddenly empty in a way that was wrong. Profoundly, specifically wrong. The chair at the table sat at the exact angle it had been in when she first sat down across from Josie, as though no one had adjusted it at all, as though no one had ever pulled it out to sit in it. The plate of cornbread was gone without a trace, not in the washtub, not on the counter, not anywhere. Simply absent from the room as if it was never there. The peach bowl sat exactly where it always sat. The lamplight came through the window at its usual angle and landed on a kitchen that offered no evidence whatsoever that a woman with ancient eyes had been sitting in it not even twenty minutes ago.
Bunny stared. The hair on her arms rose.
"She was right there," she said, and her voice had climbed half a register before she noticed. "She was sittin' right there at that table. She had cornbread on a plate, cold cornbread, she had it on a plate right there in front that chair, she offered some to me and I took a peach instead. She squeezed my cheeks." Bunny's hand rose and touched her own face at the memory of it, the very real and physical memory of Josie's palms pressing her cheeks together. "She was a real person who was in this room. She had feet. I heard her feet on the floor when she shifted her chair. That ain't somethin' I imagined." She heard her own voice rising once more and made herself stop. Swallowed down her confusion and looked from the empty table, to the empty chair, to the empty counter where a plate had been sitting less than a few minutes ago. The wrongness of the empty kitchen pressed against her like a cold hand.Â
"Where'd she go," she whispered, and this time her voice came out quieter, stripped of its former certainty, with something underneath it that was very close to fear. "The hallway is one hallway. I walked the whole length of it to get to your office. I would have seen her. I would have passed her. Where'd sheâ"
"I believe you."
Smoke's voice arrived quietly and cut through everything else like a lamp lit in a dark room. He stepped next to Stack and reached out, taking her chin between his fingers, tilting her face toward him with a gentleness that wasnât his usual mode and was therefore more effective than almost anything else he couldâve done. His eyes moved across her face, reading whatever he found there with that same thorough attention, and then he said it again without elaboration or apology. "I believe you. You saw her. You spoke to her. It's 'ight." He held her gaze until the climbing quality went out of her breathing, until her eyes settled from startled back to present. His thumb moved once along her jaw, the lightest possible contact, and then he released her chin and looked at Stack over her head.Â
The look between them lasted one second and carried something private in it, something that had history in it, some understanding of Josie that they shared between themselves and werenât presently sharing with Bunny. "Need to put a leash on that woman," Smoke grumbled, with the flat certainty of someone adding an item to a list.
"You an me both, nigga," Stack said, quietly.
Smoke turned from the kitchen. He didnât go back towards their office, instead he went the other direction, toward the room at the far end of the hall, and Stack followed with Bunny still in his arms, carrying her away from the empty kitchen and the empty chair and the cold and inexplicable absence of a woman who had been sitting in it minutes ago eating cold cornbread like she owned the place.
The room at the end of the hall was broad and purposeful. A wide bed sat at its center on a dark mahogany frame, the headboard tall and unadorned. White linens, clean. A single lamp burning low in the corner, its flame turned down until the light came out warm and intimate. This was a simple room designed for one thing and one thing only, retraining a doll that didnât need to be disciplined.Â
Stack deposited Bunny in the center of the bed with more chivalry than intended. He straightened up and looked at her sprawled across the white linens, her moisturized brown skin drinking the lamplight the way it was built to, every curve of her catching and holding the warmth of it. He let out a small satisfied grunt before rolling his shoulders once and then bending down to kiss the inside of her knee.
The sound Bunny made started in her throat and got halfway out before she caught it, her thigh twitching under his mouth. Stack felt the twitch and registered it with the calmness of a man who had spent a considerable amount of time studying the language of women's bodies, then he returned and pressed his lips to her inner knee again.Â
One kiss⌠two kiss⌠three kiss⌠four⌠Stack continued his playful worship before moving lower, or rather higher towards Bunnyâs inner thigh. He was greeted with the soft warm skin there as his mouth opened against it, tongue dragging along the crease where her thigh met nothing and then meeting the next crease. He was learning the deep inner geography of her, building the path inward with a patience that was intentionally designed to make her lose her mind before he arrived at his final destination.
Her scent hit him before his mouth did and he let out a low sound against her skin that was pure appreciation. "Four an a half weeks," he said, lips moving against her inner thigh, his breath warming the space he hadn't touched yet. "You been sittin' in that pretty room unfucked all this time, huh, lilâ bunny rabbit?"
Bunny responded vocally with something that was technically a word, or at least she thought she did.
Stack chuckled to himself and then his mouth immediately found her aching bundle of nerves. He worked her the way a classically trained musician works an instrument he knows intimately. He didnât rush his performance but instead attended to the specific truth of her responses with the kind of focused and intelligent attention that made up the difference between a man who was present and a man who was going through the motions. He learned her in the first thirty seconds, learned the particular way her hips moved when he pressed the flat of his tongue against her center, the way her thighs tried to close around his head and then caught themselves and spread wider, the way the sound she made climbed an entire octave when he tended to her clit and circled it with skilled precision.
He effortlessly brought her to the edge in under four minutes.
He knew when she was there. He had been watching for it, feeling for it in the tightening of her thighs and the change in her breathing, the way her hands had found the back of his head and were pressing down with that desperate and gnawing pressure that meant she was right there, right on the rim of it, one more motion and she would go over. He could feel her gathering herself, the coil of it pulling tight in her body and her hips tilting up to meet him.
But, because Stack was Stack, he couldnât help himself as he pulled back and denied Bunny instant relief. She wasnât a doll that needed to be punished, but she was still a doll under control of her master. He didnât pull away far, just enough for his mouth to leave her core and rest against the inside of her thigh instead. He looked utterly composed as he breathed against her soaked, twitching heat while she fell apart beneath him in a different way than she had intended.
"Stack," she breathlessly whined, the word arriving with a thicker desperation than she had planned.
"Mm," he said, mouth still against her thigh.
"Please⌠Don't do that."
"Do what? " he asked pleasantly.
She made a frustrated sound and whined again before Stack returned to his honeysuckle feast.
He took his time getting there, moving up through the wet of her with his tongue like he was reading something he found interesting, and then he was back at her clit and the sounds coming out of her rebuilt themselves immediately, climbing again, her hips rolling, her fingers curling into the sheets. He gave her forty-five seconds this time before the edge showed up again in the ragged pacing of her breathing, and he pulled back once more. Pressed his mouth to her inner thigh. Breathed. And let her curse at him out.
"You raggedy ass nigga," she managed.
His laugh came out against her skin, warm and genuinely amused. "I done been called worse, babydoll."
At the head of the bed the mattress dipped. Bunny's eyes reopened, head turning, and Smoke leaned above her, and the sight of him was enough to make every other thought in her head exit quickly. He had shedded everything. His undershirt, slacks, holster, all of it was gone, and what was left was all of him, broad and carved and rich dark brown skin. His body looked like the map of a man who had moved through the world with physical force for a long time and had the evidence of that written in muscle and old scars. He was hard, entirely and obviously, and looking at her with those flat obsidian eyes that gave nothing away.
Smoke said nothing as he reached for the small table at the bed's edge and a cigarette appeared between his fingers, a match scratched against the bedframe with a brief bright leap of flame before it found its target. He took the first pull, held it, let the clouds of tobacco climb toward the ceiling in a long and perfectly controlled column. And then he looked down at her, the cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, his eyes traveling across her face with the calm, weighing assessment of a man reviewing something he may or may not be satisfied with.
"Who," he said, voice low and quiet and warm as the smoking end of something burning, "you think you talkinâ to like that in my house?"
Between her thighs, Stack's mouth had found the soft heat of her again, and the sound that tried to escape Bunny's throat was intercepted by her own determination not to give Smoke the satisfaction of an incoherent answer before she had the chance to give him a real one. "I-I didnât mean none by it⌠I-I wasnât givinâ orders," she managed.
"Mm." Smoke's eyes dropped from her face to the space just below them, where his erection jumped and throbbed directly above her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him, and then his eyes came back up to hers. "You came to my office," he continued as he lazily gripped his manhood before taking another puff. "Told me what you was tired of. Told me what you wanted. Got yaselfâ naked in front my brother an I, then sat in both our laps like you had the right." He exhaled smoke from the side of his mouth, away from her face. "That sound like a doll who know her place to you?"
Before she could respond, Stack's tongue distracted her by circling her clit with renewed and specific intention, as one finger pressed into her slowly, testing the heat of her⌠the tight grip of her. She was utterly soaked and already shaking in a finely controlled way, like how a bow shakes just before the arrow is released.
Smoke watched her face with the careful attention of a man reading a weather report. "A doll," he said, voice quieter, the edge in it sharpening enough to send shivers down her spine, "asks. She don't tell. She don't march down a hallway an knock on my door like she owed somethin'. She asks her owner. She say please. She waits." His thumb brushed her jaw, the touch light and intentional, as his eyes dropped to her mouth and then came back up. "You still ainât proved you worth the trouble."
It didn't take much for Bunny to read between the lines as her right hand moved from the sheet and gripped Smokeâs precum dripping length. She felt the substantial weight of him against her palm and heard the slight controlled catch of his inhale as she felt him twitch against her hand. He filled her hand, dense and hot, and she stroked him from base to crown once with a grip that was firm.
She angled her head against the pillow, opened her mouth, and drew him in.
His size settled against her tongue, thick and dense, and she worked her lips around him with the exploring attention of a woman who had been told her whole career that her mouth was something extraordinary and had spent years proving it right. She hollowed her cheeks and sucked on him with an unhurried suction, her tongue mapping the underside of him on each pull, tracing the swollen vein that ran along his length, lapping at the crown when she came up before gobbling him back down again. Her free hand wrapped around his base and worked in a measured counterpoint. The combination of hand and mouth coordinated with the easy confidence of someone who had been doing this long enough that it lived in her body the way playing an instrument lives in a musician's hands had Smoke internally losing his mind.
Smoke's own hand found her hair, fingers settling among her now sweated out tresses without pressing, without directing, just resting there with a weight that communicated his full attention. The quality of his breathing changed almost immediately, each exhale coming a degree longer than it should have, each inhale a degree more controlled than usual. He brought the cigarette to his lips with his free hand and took a pull, held it, let the tobacco clouds go from the side of his mouth. The image of him above her doing that while she worked him below was the most Elijah âSmokeâ Moore thing she could imagine, controlling himself with a lit cigarette while she did her damnedest to remove that control from him entirely.
For a long minute, Bunny genuinely believed she was finally in control, but then, the devious twin still situated between her thick thighs added a second finger inside her and she gasped. It only lasted a split second as her eyes almost rolled to the back of her head while she momentarily let the pleasure consume her, but that was short lived with a slight tug to her hair.
"Look at me," Smoke demanded.
She didnât need to be told twice as she retrained her eyes back onto the owner that was in front of her.
"Mmm⌠good⌠you capable of suckinâ dick an followinâ instructions," he said softly, in a voice that had dropped below the level where it was meant to sound gentle and instead sounded much more intimate and a whole lot more dangerous. "You got somethin' to say?"
Bunny, whose mouth was still full of raw meat, slightly shook her head ânoâ and continued servicing Smokeâs dick. Her tongue continued working the underside of him in the way that she had been complimented on in cities that were miles away from this one. She went down until the back of her throat met him and held there, breathing through her nose, feeling his fingers tighten in her hair by one degree, and then she came back up and did it again.
Smoke's exhale was long and relaxed. "Mm," he said, and it was the most honest amount of praise he had given Bunny all night.
Stack had brought her to the edge twice more in the interim, each time withdrawing with the particular cruelty of a man who is enjoying the architecture of her desperation more than he would enjoy its resolution, and she was by now a tightly wounded and thoroughly soaked little doll. Her body was operating at a level of need that had begun to make her cry a little. Not from pain or unhappiness, just from the relentless accumulation of pleasure with nowhere to go.
"Stack⌠SirâŚ" she managed, pulling off Smoke for a breath.
"Still here," Stack said, against her thigh.
"Please." The word came out stripped of all pretense. Just the word. Just the need in it, raw and uncomplicated.
Stack looked up at her along the length of her body. His mouth was wet, his eyes were bright, and he looked like a man who had been given an exceptional gift that was in no hurry to unwrap it fully. "Please what?" he asked rhetorically already knowing the answer to the question.
"Please⌠l-let me finish."
"Let you finish?" His voice carried genuine amusement. "Babydoll, I barley scratched the surface."
Smoke looked at the tears streaming from Bunnyâs eyes. Something moved across his face, an emotion too foreign for anyone to decipher. He pulled free of her mouth with a soft sound and moved, climbing off the mattress and coming around the foot of the bed, and the sight of him moving toward Stack's position made Stack lift his head.
Smoke looked at his brother. Then he looked at the place between Bunny's thighs, the glistening, swollen, and desperately twitching evidence of the last fifteen minutes, and he looked back at Stack with an expression that was entirely final.
"Move," he said.
Stack sat up and squinted his eyes in disbelief. "Sâcuse you, nigga?"
"Move," Smoke said again.
Stack's eyes narrowed. "She's my doll, Elijah."
"Yeah⌠well⌠sheâs also mine," Smoke said. "I just decided."
Stack stared at him. The look on his face was the look of a mannish boy who didnât like having to share his toys. "You can't just decide that," he complained. "That ain't how this works. You can't crawl over here in the middle of my session an claim a whole woman like you canât go pick another damn dollâ"
"Elias."
"What?!â
"I been watchin' her for a month," Smoke said, with the patience of someone explaining something obvious. "She in the room âcross the hall from ours. I been the one who had her moved there. I been the one who made sure her meals was right. Made sure her room was right an made sure nobody bothered her." A pause. "She mine. She also yours. Move."
Stack's jaw tightened. He looked at Bunny. Bunny looked back at him from the mattress with wide eyes, her lips still swollen, her thighs still trembling, and her expression carrying the cocky confusion of a woman who had just been claimed by two men simultaneously while lying naked in their bed and was still in the early stages of processing this information. Stack pointed at Smoke. "You owe me," he said. "You owe me big time, nigga."
"Mhm. Add it to the list," Smoke said.
Stack moved, climbing up toward the headboard with a muttered stream of commentary, and Smoke took his place between Bunny's thighs before lowering his head. He wasted no time as his mouth found her center without preamble, his tongue worked her with the focused of a man who went through life either doing something well or not at all. The sound Bunny made was enormous and immediate, her hands flying out to grip the sheets.
Smoke was vastly different from Stack in how he devoured Bunnyâs pussy. Stack built her pleasure up as if he was an architect with a boundless amount of patience. Whereas Smoke treated her pleasure like a man reading a language only he knew. Every response she gave him, he immediately incorporated it into what he did next, adjusting, refining, arriving at the exact pressure and rhythm that made her thighs lock around his head and her back clear off the mattress as every coherent thought she had exited the premises.
He didnât bother edging her since he had already clearly read what the edging had done to her. He could read the accumulated tension in every line of her body. Instead, he drove her straight to the finish line without stopping. The orgasm that finally rippled through her felt spiritual as if her soul was raptured out of her body. Her voice tore out of her open and honest, her hips grinding against his mouth as he worked her through every wave of it, his hands locked on her hips to keep her from pitching away from him.
Stack sat at the headboard watching all of this with his arms folded like a sulking child. When Smoke finally lifted his head, Stack uncrossed his arms and pointed at his brother with one finger. "My turn," he said.
"She sensitive," Smoke said, sitting back on his heels.
"I know she sensitive. That's the point."
Smoke moved aside without any urgency, and Stack replaced him between Bunny's thighs with the eagerness of a man who had been waiting for his turn at something exceptional. He looked at the convulsing center of her for a beat with something purely acquisitive in his expression, and then he put his skilled mouth back on her.
Bunny's entire body jerked backwards. The sound she made this time was considerably more desperate than the last, her hips trying to back away from the overstimulation and Stack's hands locking around them before she got anywhere.
"Stay," he murmured against her, voice vibrating right against her hypersensitive clit.
"Stack I can't, it's too muchâ"
"You can," he growled, and meant it, and went back to work.
Smoke let his twin have his fun as he situated himself on Bunnyâs left side, and his mouth found her breast. His lips closed around her nipple and sucked on the coco nub with an intensity that sent a euphoric sensation shooting directly down her spine. His other hand flattened on her ribs, feeling the heave of her breathing, the rapid and helpless rise and fall of her chest. He worked across to her other breast with the same thorough attention, his teeth grazing just lightly enough to make her gasp, and then moan, and then grip the back of his head.
Meanwhile, Stack feasted like a starving madman. His tongue worked her pulsing and overstimulated pussy with an almost vindictive thoroughness, licking into her and circling her clit with alternating attention, building the sensation higher than it had any right to go given that she had just come apart under his brother's mouth not two minutes ago. He watched her face when he could, watched the progression of it, the way her mouth fell open, how her brows drew together, and when the tears started again fresh from the corners of her eyes, overstimulation and pleasure braided together until she couldn't separate one from the other.
When she came the second time it was different in character, wilder, less controlled, her body arching and convulsing with a force that had nothing of restraint left in it, and the flood of her against Stack's mouth was audible in the quiet room. He drank her juices down with a delighted groan while his jaw still worked her through every aftershock, refusing to stop until her thighs had gone from locked to trembling to limp and her voice had dropped from cries to the soft and utterly wrecked sound of a woman who has nothing left to give.
Thirty seconds of blissful torture occurred until Stack finally sat back. He looked at the evidence of what he had done to her with profound satisfaction, wiping his jaw with the back of his hand. He looked at Smoke. "She ready," he said.
"She definitely ready," Smoke agreed.
Smoke laid down on his back on the mattress beside Bunny, his nine inches pointing toward the ceiling. He turned his head and looked at her where she lay against the linens, trembling and thoroughly undone. His voice, when it came, was dominate and certain. "Show me," he said, "how you got ya' name, bunny rabbit. Show me why you worth the trouble."
The second Bunny heard Smokeâs request, she sat up on trembling arms. She looked at him stretched out beside her, at the full dark length of him, at the patient flatness of his expression, at the way he was simply waiting with the absolute confidence of a man who knew what was coming and secretly couldnât wait.
She was still a little loopy from her prior orgasms but gathered up enough strength and swung her leg over him. She positioned herself above him and reached down to guide him to her entrance before sinking onto him with a long, controlled descent that pulled a sound from the back of her throat and a sound from the back of his. Both of them couldnât help themselves responding to the stretch, the heat, and the fullness of her pussy wrapping around his length as she settled herself completely onto him. She stayed there for a second, adjusting, letting her body accommodate the considerable size of him and feeling him everywhere at once before beginning to move.
It only took three bounces for Bunny to prove to Smoke why she had earned her name. She wasnât just a lady of the night who knew how to ride a dick until sunrise. No. She had spent years refining a specific combination of bouncing, grinding, and rolling that made men weep, beg, and reach for her like she was the only water in a desert. She worked him with her hips, rising and falling in the deep rolling motion that used every muscle she had, the sound of their bodies meeting building in the lamp-warm room, her succulent breasts moving with every stroke, her hands braced on his chest for leverage, her thighs flexing and releasing with each downward drive.
Smoke looked up at her and something happened in his face, some arrangement of his features that wasnât quite expressionless in the way he usually was, instead something behind his eyes showed a genuine side of him that wasnât going anywhere anytime soon. His hands came to rest on her thighs, not to direct or control the pace, just to hold her, to feel what she was doing from the closest possible position.
He let her have it. He laid there beneath her and he absorbed every stroke with the stillness of a man receiving something with his full attention. His only movements were the tightening of his hands on her thighs, the slight flare of his nostrils, and the slight clenching of his jaw that betrayed how thoroughly he was feeling everything she was giving him. "That's it," he groaned, voice rough and lower than usual. "Keep goin'. Show me everythinâ."
And indeed she showed him everything. She rolled her hips in her signature deep figure-eight that made her thighs burn and made men forget what city they were in. She let out a needy whine when she felt him twitch hard inside her, felt his fingers dig into her thighs and felt the sound he made rumble up from somewhere below the place where he usually kept his inner desires.
"Goddamn," Stack praised from somewhere behind her.
Bunny had nearly forgotten, in the consuming present-tense occupation of riding Smoke, that Stack was still in the room with them. She remembered now. She remembered specifically when she felt his hand press warm and flat against the small of her back, pushing her forward just slightly, changing the angle, and she felt the presence of him settling in behind her, the specific warmth of a second body entering the space, and something in her belly turned over at the knowing of what was coming next.
"Don't stop movin'," Smoke growled below her, his voice steady and laced with something that wasnât quite command and not quite warning, something between the two that communicated that her motion was the thing keeping him from losing his composure. "Keep ya pretty eyes right here."
It was difficult, but she kept her eyes on him. She kept moving, slower now, the rhythm becoming something more rocking and less bouncing as Stack's hand remained at the small of her back and his other hand reached for something on the side table. The sound of a bottle. The sensation of something cool worked at the back entrance she hadn't been using, Stack's fingers pressed and circled with a careful, methodical preparation of a man who knew exactly how to stretch a doll without tearing her. He worked her chocolate starfish open with practiced patience, each circle and press accompanied by Smoke's hands on her hips maintaining their slow rhythm and his voice occasional and low.
"Breathe," Smoke said, one hand traveling from her hip to her stomach, palm flat and warm against her skin. "Stay with me. Just breathe."
She breathed. She kept her eyes on his and kept rolling her hips over him and breathed through Stack's fingers working behind her, opening her gradually, each moment of it accompanied by Smoke's voice and Smoke's hands and Smoke's eyes holding her in place in every sense.
After a minute of probing and preparing, Stack withdrew his fingers. The blunt pressure that replaced them was broader, and it pressed forward with the slow and inexorable patience of a man who had done this enough times to know that patience here was not optional. Bunny's motion over Smoke stuttered as the pressure built and Stack worked his way inside her. He knew better than to rush or force his way inside, instead he continued steadily forward until the stretch had gone from too much, to full, to something that rewired every nerve ending she had at the same moment and left her gripping Smoke's chest with both hands and pressing her face into his shoulder.
"There it is," Stack said from behind her, voice strained as he relished in the tightness of her asshole. "You got all of it, babydoll. You got it."
This wasnât the first time Bunny participated in anal sex, but it was the first time she had both of her holes filled to the brim. She took both of them, fully, completely, in the most total sense of that word, and the feeling of it wasnât something she couldâve prepared herself for no matter how plainly Josie had described it. Her body had become an instrument of pure sensation, attended to from both directions at once, filled past the point where she could distinguish between the fullness and herself.
"Move with me," Smoke ordered, and began to rock his hips upward in a slow, careful rhythm.
Stack matched it from behind, withdrawing just barely and pressing back in on the same count, the two of them falling into sync with the ease of people who have shared a frequency their entire lives. Bunny gripped Smoke's chest and held on.
Smoke's hands ran up from her hips to her waist to the curve of her sides, mapping her as she moved, grounding her with the weight and warmth of his hands when the sensation from everywhere else threatened to become too much. "Look at me," he said.
She looked at him.
"You ours," he continued. Not a question, just a statement of something that had apparently been decided and was now being confirmed. "You understand that."
"Yes," she breathed.
"Say it."
"I-I-I'm yours," she whined, and her voice cracked on the last word because Stack had adjusted behind her and found the angle that turned her thoughts entirely to static.
"Fuck," Stack hissed through his teeth. "Keep squeezinâ me like you finna cum an I'm gon' embarrass myself."
Smoke's jaw ticked. He drove his hips up sharper than he had been, once, and her forehead dropped to his chest. "Hold it," he said, one hand traveling up her spine, settling between her shoulder blades. "Don't finish yet."
Like a good little doll, Bunny obeyed even if withholding her orgasm was one of the hardest things for her to do. She held it through the next several minutes of the two of them working her from both sides with building and competing intensity. Stack's hips found a rhythm behind her that grew less restrained with each stroke, his hands gripping her waist with the force of a man holding onto something he didnât intend to lose. Meanwhile, Smoke drove up into her pussy with a calculated and precise force that hit the same place every time and built the pressure in her body to a pitch that had no precedent in her experience.
She held back her orgasm with her fingernails deep in Smoke's bare chest and tears running freely down her face from the sheer accumulated pressure of pleasure with nowhere to go. Her body shook uncontrollably between them in continuous tremors.
"Hold it," Smoke said again, quieter this time, his hand moving from between her shoulder blades to the back of her neck, his thumb pressing at the base of her skull with a firmness that was grounding. "Hold it for me. Just a little longer."
She felt like an overfilled waterballoon on the verge of popping but she held it a little longer.
"Now," he said.
The second Smoke gave the command, Bunny let go. This orgasm made her entire body convulse between them, and the viper grip of her fluttering holes around both of them became violent and involuntary, her voice tearing out in a sound that came from a place so primal and ancient it didnât have a name. Stack grunted hard behind her, the sound losing its edges, his rhythm breaking apart, his hips pressing deep and going still as her body worked around him without any input from her at all. Smoke's hands locked on her hips and held her through every spasm, his breath coming in controlled pulls through his nose, his jaw set, his eyes on her face.
She was still a shaking mess when they moved her.
Stack withdrew and the absence of him was its own overwhelming sensation as they repositioned her between them with fluid and efficient coordination, guiding her body into the new arrangement before she could fully process that things were changing. Her hands and knees were positioned on the mattress with Smoke now behind her. Stack was in front of her, already at the edge of the bed, his hand finding her hair, his thumb tilting her chin upward.
"Open," Stack said, his voice dragged rough by the effort of the last several minutes.
She opened. He slid into her mouth and she wrapped her thick lips around him and worked him with the full attention of a woman who had made sucking dick into an art form, her tongue pressing along his length, her cheeks hollowing with each pull. Behind her Smoke gripped her hips with both hands and pressed into her pussy from behind with a force that had nothing of restraint left in it, each thrust was deep and drove her forward into Stack so that the two of them worked her from both ends in a rhythm that had its own crude, overwhelming music.
Smoke's hand came down on the curve of her backside, a sharp slap that made Stack look over her head at his brother with raised brows.
Smoke looked back at him with an expression that communicated absolutely nothing except his full awareness of what he had just done. "She a doll. She our whore," he said casually between thrusts.
Stack's grin broke across his face, gold tooth and all. "Mm hm." His hand joined Smoke's sentiment, fisting tighter in her curls, working himself into her mouth with an authority that matched his brother's behind her. "Take it," he said, "just like that. All of it."
She took it. She took all of it, from both of them, from behind and in front. Her tears ran freely down her face again, dripped off her chin, and ran down Stack's length where he fucked into her throat. She felt another climax building from somewhere deeper than the previous ones had come from, further down, more structural, and her body told her it was coming whether she was ready or not.
Stack felt it in the change of her mouth around him. Smoke felt it in the change of her hypersensitive pussy around him. Both of them drove harder at the same time as Smoke's hand came to her hip and gripped it with the force of a man who wanted to feel the final round tightness squeeze around him. "Give it," Smoke said, rough against her.
Bunnyâs body clenched and released in a rolling sequence that started at her core and moved outward, her voice was muffled around Stackâs twitching length and her thighs shook against Smoke's grip. Everything in her narrowed down to the specific and enormous fact of coming apart between these two men who had decided, right then and there, that she was theirs. Stack's hips completely lost their rhythm entirely and he groaned from deep in his chest, his hot sticky release filling her throat in long, heavy pulses, his hand in her hair tightening as he worked through every second of it. Behind her Smoke thrusted into her through the spasms of her climax with a final series of strokes that cost him the last of his control as his hips pressed flush against hers and stayed there while he finished inside her, the sound that came out of him brief and real.
The room after was silent except for breathing.
Three people in various states of collapse across the ruined white linens, the lamp still burning in the corner, the amber light still doing its only job. Bunny was laying face down in the center of the bed with no intention of moving for the foreseeable future. Stack was somewhere to her left, his hand resting on the mattress near her shoulder. Smoke stood after a moment, crossed to the washstand, and returned with a warm cloth. He cleaned her with that same focused efficiency she had heard other dolls gossip about but never experienced, his hands moved over her with the attention of a man who considered this part of the task just as important as any other.
It was Stackâs turn to move from his spot on the bed, as he waltzed over to a nearby drink cart and poured himself a fresh glass of whiskey glass, took a long sip, and exhaled with the deep satisfaction of a man at genuine peace with every decision he had made in the last several hours. He looked at Bunny where she laid against the linens, a beautiful and thoroughly claimed wreck of a woman. Then he turned to look at his brother across the room.
"She can't go back on the floor," he said.
Smoke wrung the cloth out over the basin. "Mm?"
"I'm serious, Eli. Her talent is undeniable. That thang she did with them hips is somethin' I intend to study at length for the next several weeks of my life." He took another sip. "But her control? Her control is nonexistent. She finished too many damn times in one session. You put her in a room with a payin' client who came here expectin' an hour an she gon' be done in two minutes. That man gon' feel robbed an robbed men talk⌠an talkin' men bad for business." He set the glass down and crossed his arms over his chest like a man presenting a logical conclusion. "Two more weeks. Minimum. We retrain her every night âtil she can hold back a nut the way a real doll âposed to."
Smoke stayed quiet as he came back to the bed, sat at its edge and looked at his twin with the knowing expression he wore when Stack was making an argument he wanted to put an immediate end to. "Elias," he said.
Stack looked at him.
"Drink ya' whiskey an shut the fuck up."
Stack sucked his teeth but he kept his eyes on Bunny.
Bunny turned her face against the pillow and looked at both of them from the comfortable horizontal vantage point of a woman who had been thoroughly wrecked. Smoke, quiet at the bed's edge, let his hand come to rest at her ankle. Stack, whiskey back in hand and gold tooth gleaming was already building his next argument with the enthusiasm of a man who was looking forward to the next two weeks considerably more than he is letting on.
"Two weeks," she mumbled underneath her breath, to the ceiling.
Stack pointed at her with excitement. "See! She gets it. Thatâs a good lilâ bunny rabbit."
"But the food stays the same," she added.
The room went quiet for a moment.Â
Then Stack started laughing, full and genuine, the sound rolling through the room and finding all the corners. This time he pointed at Smoke with the glass. "Eli," he said, "I like her."
"I know," Smoke replied as he kept his hand on her ankle. âI knowâŚâÂ
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Authorâs Note: Wowzers! See I ammmmm capable of writing the twins as civilized deviants⌠*cough* So⌠um⌠how about that Josie?? đ
So I deleted my old taglist because I want a fresh start since itâs a new year. This taglist is for those who want to be tagged in all my sinners work, whether that be Smoke x Annie, Smoke x OC, Smoke x Reader, Stack x OC, Stack x Reader, Smoke/Stack x OC/Reader. Doesnât matter! Please comment below so that I can save everyoneâs blogs to tag you in future updates and new works!
I love your stories but I wish you took request for real people âšď¸
Itâs been a cool minute since I explained why I donât do this, so hereâs a quick refresher.
I know dada man, and I know dada man is a certified freak who wouldnât mind me slutting him out through fanfiction (Erik, Smoke, Stack, etc.)
I do NAWT know ManMan, and I have no idea how he would feel about me inserting him into fanfiction and writing him doing ungodly things he may not agree with or feel comfortable portraying. (Mikey + all the other attractive, talented celebrities that fall into that category)
With that said, I donât judge anyone who enjoys reading or writing fanfiction about irl celebrities. Live your life, babes. But for me, thatâs a hard boundary I choose not to cross out of respect for real people.
