Łuħvie

Bunny let the door shut behind her with a quiet click. She pulled up the smile she had spent years perfecting, the one that reached her eyes just far enough to be convincing without costing her anything real, and she moved toward the vanity to set down her small kit. "Evenin', sir," she replied, voice sweet as honeysuckle draped over a fence post in July. "You get yourself settled alright?"

"Settled?" He laughed, the sound was disgustingly wet and blunt. "I been waitin' damn near twenty minutes."

"I apologize for that, sir." She turned subtly, sizing the client up again in the mirror's reflection while she appeared to be checking her hair. She took notice of the way his body tilted just slightly to the left when he tried to sit straighter. The way his hand reached for the bedpost to steady himself without seeming to realize he had done it. The glassy, navigating-through-fog quality of his stare. Bunny had been in this business long enough to know that a drunk man in a room with a woman he had paid for was a man operating without a leash, and a man without a leash was a dangerous creature.

She angled herself toward the door by a few degrees. Just enough to escape if needed. "Sir," she said, keeping her voice sweet and calm, "I just want to make sure you feelin' alright before we get started. You seem like you might've had yourself a full night already and I wouldn't want—"

The remainder of her sentence was cut off because the drunken man moved without warning. He lurched to his feet, knocking the small side table with his hip and sending its single glass of water spinning off the edge to shatter against the floor. His face had turned a particular shade of red that lived between embarrassment and fury, and his jaw worked like he was chewing something bitter before he could get the words out.

"Useless bitch," he spat. The syllables fell out of him ugly and hard. "Think I paid to have some whore tell me I done had too much to drink? Think I need you lookin' down at me? I'll kill you, you hear me?!? I'll put my hands ‘round ya' neck and I'll—"

His arm swung mid rant, but Bunny was already moving.

She dropped her chin to her chest and turned her body so the arc of his open palm caught nothing but air, and in the same motion her right hand went up to her hair. The blade she kept there was small, barely two inches of steel with a handle thin enough to disappear between two curling papers. It was something she had carried since she was nineteen years old and had learned in the most painful way possible that a pretty face and a small curvy frame were not assets in every room. Her fingers found it without hesitation, but with the calm surety of someone who had practiced the motion until it lived in her muscles instead of her mind.

She drew it in the same breath she stepped to his left side, and when she came back up, she sliced him across the cheekbone in one clean swipe.

The sound he made wasn’t quite a scream and not quite a word. It lived somewhere between the two, high and stunned. The moment he was sliced, his hand flew to his face as the blood welled immediately, vivid and dark, running between his fingers and dripping onto the collar he had loosened two buttons down. He staggered back into the bedpost as his eyes went wide, and suddenly he was brutally sober.

"Help!" The plea tore out of him then, ragged and furious. "HELP! She cut me! This wicked bitch cut my damn FACE!"

Bunny stood quietly like a marble statue with the blade still in her hand. Her chest moved in controlled, shallow breaths as her heartbeat threw itself against her ribs like a prisoner testing the walls, but her face… her face was completely still. Still like a woman who had survived more than enough dangerous rooms, and this was no different. She didn’t bother running or crying, instead she watched the blood run down his cheek and she waited.

Two seconds passed and the door swung open before the echo of his second shout had finished bouncing off the walls.

They filled the frame the way they always filled every frame they walked through, shoulder to shoulder, the both of them constructed from the same Mississippi clay and hardened by the same Jim Crow fire. Stack came through first, his jacket slightly disheveled as if he was in the middle of something… or someone, signature gold tooth catching the lamplight as his coffee brown eyes swept the room in three seconds flat. Smoke followed a half step behind, and his gaze went to the blood first, then to Bunny, then to the blade still loose in her fingers, and in that order he read the whole story without a single word being spoken.

The two of them looked at each other and it lasted less than a millisecond. They shared a sacred twin language, and there was no need to speak out loud when they could discuss everything necessary through a simple glance. There was no need for none of the vowels and consonants that other men required. Stack's chin lifted two degrees. Smoke's jaw shifted once to the right. That was all.

Smoke marched over to the bleeding man and grabbed him by the back of the collar with one hand. The client sputtered, grabbing at Smoke's wrist, voice rising again into something wheedling and enraged all at once, but Smoke wasn't listening. He was already moving, already dragging the man toward the door with that flat, unblinking quiet that was a hundred times more frightening than any raised voice.

Stack waited until the door swung shut behind his brother and then he turned to Bunny. He looked at her the way he looked at a ledger he needed to balance, thorough, patient, and giving nothing away in his expression. His hands found his jacket pockets and he stood with the loose posture of a man who had all the time left in the world. "Tell me what happened," he said.

Bunny's fingers curled tighter around the blade before she caught herself and lowered it. "He was drunk when I walked in," she explained, and her voice came out steadier than she had expected, considering. "Not just a couple of drinks. He was drownin’ in it. I called it out because I wasn't about to start a session with a man who could barely hold his head upright and when I did…" She nodded toward the door. "He called me out my name, said he was gonna kill me, and he swung. I moved… And I cut him."

Stack said nothing for a moment as his tongue rolled against the inside of his cheek. He looked at the blood on the floor where the man had been standing, then at the broken water glass, then at Bunny's face. "You ain't in trouble," he said finally, his Mississippi drawl coating every syllable like a second skin. "But I need you to hear me on this." He pulled one hand from his pocket and pointed a single finger at her. "Next time a client get rowdy, stupid, or liquored past the point of sense, you don't reach for that blade. You call for one of us. That's what we here for. Understand?"

"Yes, sir."

He held her gaze a moment longer, making sure the instruction had gone somewhere it would stay, and then he nodded once. "Go on, wash up an get you some rest." He turned for the door, then paused with his hand on the frame, not looking back. "You did real good, not fallin' apart. Just... next time… let us handle the mess."

The door closed again, and Bunny stood alone in the room with the broken glass and the ruined sheets and the small blade still warm from her grip, and she exhaled for what felt like the first time in several minutes.

Out behind the brothel, the alley smelled of ash cans and summer.

Smoke walked the man through the rear exit with the same grip he used to drag him out of the room. He deposited him against the back wall, the man's knees finally gave out forcing him to slide down the brick and land in a graceless heap on the ground, one hand still pressed to his sliced cheek, blood threading between his fingers and dripping off his chin.

Smoke stood over him. His hands went to his jacket, straightening it once, and then settled at his sides. He looked down at the man like he was a disgruntled God figuring out what type of punishment to inflict.

The man looked up at him and found whatever he needed in Smoke's expression to start talking. "She attacked me," his drunkenness slipping out of his voice now that fear had come in to replace it. "That bitch came in there and she just… she had a knife. She cut my face. You need to do somethin’ about that. I paid good money for a civil hour and instead I get—"

"You said… you was gon' kill her."

The man blinked. "I was angry, I didn't—"

"Called her out her name twice in my presence."

The man's mouth opened and closed.

Smoke crouched down until his eyes were level with the man's, and in that position he looked less like a man and more like a demon ready to indulge in his bloodlust. His voice hadn't changed. It never changed. It held that same smooth, unshifted cadence through every conversation regardless of what the conversation was about. "Ion’ know exactly what went on in that room yet," he said. "But I want you to understand somethin'. That part don't fuckin’ matter to me. What matter to me is that you walked into my house, disrespected somethin' that belong to me, an then you done put ya' voice on her in a way that reminded her she needed a blade." He paused, letting that sit. "I don't take kindly to that."

His hand moved to his jacket, fingers parting the lapel, and the grip of his pistol caught the thin light of the alley moon.

The man's eyes went very wide. His injured hand came up, palm out, his whole body pressing back against the brick like he could dissolve into it. "Wait, wait, wait, I'll pay double, I'll pay whatever you—"

The hammer drew back with a soft, final click that cut the man's sentence clean off.

Smoke looked at him with those coal-flat eyes and the man fell silent as a stone thrown into deep water. No more words. Just the ragged labor of his own breathing and the thin, continuous sound of his blood hitting the ground.

Footsteps came down the alley behind Smoke and he didn’t bother turning around because he didn't need to. There was only one set of feet in the world that sounded like that.

Stack came up beside him, his hands loose at his sides, gold tooth catching the moon when he tilted his head down at the man on the ground. He took in the full picture. The gun. The blood. The look on Smoke's face. Then he took in a breath, slow and satisfied, and began to speak.

He told Smoke everything. The condition the man had come in. The things he had said when Bunny called it out. The swing that didn't land. The blade that did. When he finished, Stack was quiet for a moment, and then he reached into the interior pocket of his jacket and produced a knife with a blade four times the size of whatever Bunny had been carrying. He turned it once in his fingers, the steel catching and releasing the light in alternating flashes, and he smiled. It was the crooked smile, the one that reached his eyes and meant he was genuinely pleased about something.

"Lemme’ talk to him first," Stack said. "I ain't had a good conversation in a minute."

Smoke looked at his brother and then he looked at the man on the ground, who was now visibly shaking, tears cutting through the blood on his cheek without any prompting at all. Smoke stood from his crouch, straightened his jacket once more, and stepped to the side. He put his pistol back without a word, folded his hands behind his back, and watched.

Stack crouched in his place, knife resting easy between two fingers, his face open and joyful in the particular way that meant the worst thing imaginable was coming next. "How you doin', friend?" he asked, accent thick as summer mud, voice warm as a lit match. "Tell me somethin'. You ever have somebody look after you real good, put you somewhere soft an warm an safe, an you go an spit in they face for it? You ever do that?"

The man couldn’t answer.

Stack tilted his head and grinned like a Cheshire Cat. "Naw, naw, take ya' time. I got all night."

The alley didn’t hear from that man again after that. Not in any language that would've made sense to a person passing on the street.

A month passed by and it had the audacity to feel like three.

Bunny sat on the edge of her bed in the room the twins had given her and pulled a brush through her texturized hair for the fourth time that evening. She counted the strokes the way she had been taught to count them since childhood, one and two and three and four, because there was nothing else to count and the act of counting kept her hands busy and her hands being busy kept her from acknowledging a particular restlessness that had been living under her skin for the better part of two weeks.

The room she was stationed in was nice. That was the first thing she had thought when Stack walked her to it, one week after the incident, with his hand at the small of her back and a short instruction to make herself comfortable. She had expected a small, utilitarian thing, the kind of space a working doll got assigned on the upper floor with a shared bath down the hall and a window that faced the brick wall of the building next door. What she got was a room with curtains. Actual curtains, silk ones that pooled at the floor and caught the last of the day's light in a way that turned the whole space the color of a candle flame. A vanity with a proper oval mirror. A wardrobe that had been stocked before she arrived with dresses and wrappers and nightgowns of a quality that made her catch her breath the first time she opened its doors, fabrics so fine they slipped through her fingers like water. On the small table beside her bed, a covered dish of food arrived three times a day whether she asked for it or not. Things she hadn't tasted since she was a little girl sitting in her grandmother's kitchen, sweet potato pie with a crust that shattered her taste buds like stained glass, braised oxtail over white rice, pound cake soaked in lemon syrup that left a sweetness on the roof of her mouth for hours.

She was being treated like a woman of some standing… And it was driving her absolutely out of her mind.

Bunny set the hairbrush down and looked at herself in the vanity mirror with an assessing expression she reserved for private moments like these. She was thirty-four years old. She had curves that grown men wrote embarrassing letters about and women studied with something too complicated to be called jealousy and too honest to be called admiration. She had hands that knew how to work, thighs that knew how to hold, a mouth that had never once left a client feeling cheated, and a reputation in three separate cities that had always, always been built by her own effort, her own body, her own particular genius for the kind of pleasure that made a man feel like he was the most important thing in the room. She hadn’t come to this brothel to be kept like a flower in a glass case. She had come because she heard that the Moore twins ran the most lucrative operation north of the Mason Dixon and she wanted in on it. She wanted to work.

The bath she had taken earlier still clung to her skin in the form of the vanilla oil she had worked into her arms and her neck, and the nightgown the wardrobe had produced tonight was deep gold that made her brown skin glow like something lit from within. She looked breathtakingly beautiful, yet she felt like a caged thing in beautiful wrappings.

After looking herself over one more time in the mirror, she stood and made a silent decision as she made her way to the kitchen.

The brothel at midnight had a particular quality to it, a quietness that fell somewhere between a sleeping house and a thinking one. The downstairs jazz had stopped three hours ago. The girls were either asleep or occupied, and the hallways that had been warm and perfumed with commerce earlier in the evening were now cool and dim, lit by the occasional wall sconce that’s wick had been turned down low. Bunny moved through the brothel on her bare feet, the gold nightgown sighing against her legs with every step, and she told herself she was just going for a peach before confronting the twins. There was always a bowl of peaches in the kitchen. She had discovered this on her second day and found it oddly comforting that someone in this house thought fresh fruit was important enough to replenish daily.

She pushed open the kitchen door and the room was drenched in darkness. That was the first thing. The second thing was that it wasn’t empty.

As Bunny's eyes adjusted to the dimly lit room, eventually she was able to see there was a woman sitting at the long kitchen table in the dark eating cornbread.

Bunny stood in the doorway with her hand still on the door and looked at the mystery woman as she took her in piece by piece. Height first, even sitting, the woman had somewhat of a long-limbed frame that telegraphed itself. Bunny guessed that she was maybe five foot eight or nine if she stood. Her skin was deep, even brown like good molasses in a jar, paired with hair that fell straight and unadorned down past her shoulders, jet black, the color of ink before it dries. And to finish it off, she had a face that did a thing Bunny had only seen faces do in paintings, not the kind hung in houses like this one, but the kind in old churches where the artists tried to put something holy and something frightening in the same expression at the same time. The mystery woman looked young feature wise as if she hadn’t yet turned twenty-two, but her eyes… her eyes were something else entirely.

Bunny wasn’t a woman who was scared easily. She had lived too much, seen too much, and cut too many men across the face to give fear the kind of real estate it wanted in her mind. But those violet eyes made something ancient crawl up the back of her neck, not unpleasant, just… aware. Like stepping into a room and understanding that whatever was in it had been there since before the house was built.

The woman looked up from her cornbread and regarded Bunny with an expression of complete composure, as though being found eating cold food alone in a dark kitchen of a brothel in the middle of the night was exactly where she was expected to be.

"You Rosalie," the woman said. It wasn't a question.

Bunny blinked. "How'd you—"

"You look like a Rosalie." She broke off another piece of cornbread, unhurried about it. "I'm Josephine. Everybody an they mama call me Josie."

Bunny stepped into the kitchen and let the door drift shut behind her. "I go by Bunny," she said, and then, because she couldn't help herself, "why are you sittin' in the dark?"

Josie ignored the question with such thoroughness that it was almost artful. She tilted her head at Bunny and asked, "They call you Bunny 'cause you can bounce on a dick 'til a man start beggin' for his mama?"

The initial response that leaped to Bunny's lips was something ladylike and deflective. What came out instead was a flustered, sputtering exhale, as her cheeks went warm and her hand raised halfway to her mouth before she caught it. She cleared her throat. "That's… yes," she admitted. "That's… um… exactly why."

The corner of Josie's mouth moved in something that could've been a smile if it committed to itself. She pushed the plate of cornbread forward by an inch, the gesture of a woman sharing without making much of it. "Have some."

Bunny looked at the cornbread. It was ice cold and hard as a rock. She could see the waxy surface on it that cornbread got when it had been sitting awhile. She was fond of cornbread. She was not fond of that. She moved instead to the bowl on the counter and lifted a peach, testing its weight in her palm before biting into it, and she hummed as the juice ran down her chin warm and sweet.

She stood there eating the peach and watching Josie, and Josie let herself be watched for a time, eating her cold cornbread with equanimity, apparently perfectly at peace with the scrutiny. But Bunny was staring and she knew it and the reason she was staring was the thing she couldn't pin down, the thing that sat off-center about this woman the way a picture sits off-center on a wall. She wasn’t dressed like any of the other dolls Bunny had met in the past month. No lace, no slip, nothing that mirrored the nature of this house and its business. She wore a plain white blouse tucked into a flowy dark skirt with her feet bare on the kitchen floor. She looked like a woman who had stepped in from another dimension entirely and simply hadn't gotten around to leaving.

Bunny had met all the other dolls in the house during her first week. She was certain of that. This woman had not been among them.

Josie took another bite of her cornbread and looked at Bunny the way Bunny had been looking at her, with that clear, still assessment that took nothing personally and missed nothing either. "How you likin' it here?" she asked. "Smoke and Stack pretty decent owners, far as that kind of thing go."

The word owners sat in Bunny's mouth for a moment before she swallowed it. "I wouldn't know yet," she reluctantly admitted. "I had one client, one incident, and since then they've had me locked up in a room like I'm made of porcelain and they're afraid I'll chip." She took another bite of peach. "I haven't worked a single real night. I came here to make money. Instead I've been eatin' pie and watchin' the curtains move."

Josie's eyes sharpened the way a fire sharpens when you give it more air. "Which one claimed you?" she quipped.

Bunny frowned her brows in confusion. "I'm sorry?"

"Which twin? Smoke or Stack? Elijah or Elias? Which one claimed you as his doll?"

The frown deepened. "Neither of them," Bunny said slowly, like she was working out whether that was the right answer even as she gave it. "When I arrived they walked me through the rules, explained how the percentages worked, showed me the floor. Neither of them said anything about… claiming."

Now it was Josie’s turn to be confused as she stopped eating and placed her cornbread very gently on the plate in front of her. She looked at Bunny with the full force of those ancient alien lavender eyes and she was quiet for a stretched-out moment that had weight to it. Then she leaned forward and without a word of warning she took Bunny's face between both her hands and squeezed her cheeks together, compressing Bunny's lips into a surprised, rounded 'O'.

"You are thee cutest thing," Josie cooed, with the slightly awed sincerity of someone who had just found a very small, very charming animal in an unexpected location.

Bunny's eyes went wide above her squished cheeks. She made a sound that was supposed to be a protest and emerged as something closer to a muffled quack.

Josie released her with an unrushed giggle and settled back in her chair as though that had been a perfectly reasonable thing to do. "Alright," she said. "Let me explain how this house works."

Bunny smoothed her cheeks with her palms and fixed Josie with a look that she reserved for people who had just done something she didn't have the vocabulary to address properly. Then she sighed, finished the peach, and sat down.

Josie explained the rules of the house with a questionable amount of knowledge that Bunny would inquire about later. When a doll went through something the way Bunny had gone through something, they were taken off the floor. Not longer than a week, typically. No clients, no housework, just time to let the body and the mind settle back into themselves without being asked to perform. After that period, whichever twin had claimed that particular doll would take her through a retraining week. A proper retraining. Not punishment, not because she had done something wrong, but because the mind needed to be walked back through safety the same way the body needed to be walked back through strength after a sickness. The twins were a great many things, Josie explained, and some of those things weren’t things that would be listed in a church bulletin, but they weren’t complete monsters and wouldn't send a shaken woman back to work before she was ready. That wasn’t morality for morality's sake. It was also just bad business, and they were nothing if not precise businessmen.

Bunny absorbed this. Processed it. Turned it over. And then arrived at the part that had been sitting sideways in her chest since the question first got asked.

"It's been a month," she said.

Josie looked at her dumbfounded like she didn’t hear her correctly.

"It's been a month," Bunny said again. "The incident was a month ago. Nobody took me through any retraining. Nobody said anythin’ about when I'd go back to work. And you're telling me that the reason for that is…"

She could see it in Josie's expression before she said it, like she was about to deliver news that amused her to the highest degree.

"Either you one of the special ones," Josie said, the childish grin breaking through now, unconstrained, like a schoolgirl who had been holding it in for the last five minutes, "or you somehow so boring that both of them forgot you exist entirely."

Bunny straightened up in her chair. "I am not boring," she said.

"I didn't say you were."

"You implied it."

"I offered it as a possibility."

"It is not a fuckin’ possibility." Bunny's chin came up and her voice took on the tone of a woman defending something she had built with a considerable effort over many years. Before she had walked through the Moore brothers' doors she had left three separate establishments because she had outgrown them. She had a clientele that wrote letters to find out where she had gone. She had a reputation that didn’t include the word boring in any language. "I done made grown ass men cry," she said. "Not from pain… From gratitude."

Josie held up one hand in a gesture of peace, her playful grin not moving an inch. "Alright, alright. I believe you. I apologize." She folded her hands on the table. "The other explanation, then, is that they both want to claim you and neither one of them know how to go about it without steppin’ on the other's toes."

Bunny's chair scraped back half an inch. "Both of them?"

"It's rare," Josie whispered, as if she was saying too much too soon. "In the whole time this house been runnin’ there've only been two dolls that both of them claimed at once. Just two. The second one is named Buttercup. She handles their books and investments. She’s been both of theirs for many moons." A pause, thoughtful and private. "The first one…" She picked up her cornbread again and looked at it, not at Bunny. "Well..."

The silence that lingered behind that one word forced Bunny to really look at Josie's profile. She took in the serenity of it, the complete and settled comfort with which this woman occupied any space she entered, including dark kitchens in the middle of the night. The way she didn't need to finish the sentence because the sentence was already obvious to anyone paying attention.

"Hypothetically," Bunny said carefully.

Josie's mouth curved with mischief. "Hypothetically..."

"If a woman found herself in that position. Both of them. At once. How would she… manage that?"

Josie was quiet for a moment, chewing her cornbread, looking somewhere past Bunny's shoulder as though consulting a memory that lived in the middle distance. "Hypothetically," she repeated, "such a woman would need to learn how not to get frostbitten by an avalanche of coldness." A pause. "While also not burnin’ up in a lake of uncontrolled fire." Another pause, this one carrying a slightly different weight, the weight of something remembered in the body as much as the mind. "And on top of all that, she would need to learn how to take two men at the same time without tearin’ in half."

The kitchen was very quiet.

"That's… useful information," Bunny said finally.

"I thought you'd think so."

They sat for another minute, the two of them, in the warm dark kitchen with the peach bowl on the counter and the plate of cold cornbread between them, and something passed between them that couldn’t be labeled as friendship yet but was the thing that comes just before it, a recognition, a sense of shared understanding arrived at by different roads.

A few more comforting minutes passed and then Bunny stood. She pulled the gold nightgown straight across her hips and ran one hand through the freshly brushed waterfall of her hair and looked at Josie with the expression of a woman who had made up her mind about something and had no further interest in deliberating. "Hypothetically, if I wanted to speak with them tonight... you know where they are?"

"Their office," Josie said. "End of the hall. Door on the left." She reached for the last piece of frosty cornbread. "Knock four times when you get there. Even count, same rhythm. That's how they know it's a doll behind the door and not somebody they need to put a bullet in."

Bunny's eyes widened slightly. "Good to know."

"One more thing," Josie said, without looking up, the words landing easy as a stone dropped into still water, "whoever open that door? Look him dead in the eye when you tell him what you want. Don't let him take the silence from you first. They'll stand in a quiet room and wait you out 'til you forget what you came for. Don't let him." She broke off a bite of cornbread. "Now go."

The hallway to their office was dim and long as the floorboards under her bare feet held the warmth of the day's heat, soaked up and slowly releasing into the night. She walked it with her chin level and her footsteps quiet, the vanilla oil on her skin mixing with the faint residual perfume that lived in all the walls of this house. At the far end of the hall, beneath the last sconce, a door sat closed and faintly rimmed with the amber line of lamplight from beneath it.

She stopped in front of it. Pressed her palm flat against the wood for one second. Then she knocked. Four times. Even. The same rhythm. Just as Josie had instructed.

On the other side of the door, the office breathed with the quietness of two men working in a comfortable parallel. The desk was spread with ledgers and cash in organized columns, the ashtray on its corner nursed a half-finished cigarette that had gone cold, and the lamp threw a yellow circle of warmth across the arithmetic of their operations. Stack stood at the desk's far edge, jacket off, suspenders down, his sleeves rolled to the elbow, one hand moving down a column of figures with the end of a pencil. Smoke sat on the lounge couch along the near wall, his own jacket folded beside him, a glass of brown liquor balanced on the arm of the cushion, his eyes moving across a folded sheet of paper he had been reading for the third time.

Four knocks came through the door.

Even. Measured.

Both men went still.

Stack's pencil stopped and his eyes lifted from the ledger to find his brother's face across the room. Smoke had already set the paper down. His hand had already moved to the glass, lifting it, not drinking from it, just holding it in the idle way of a man whose other hand needed to be free. His eyes were steady on the door.

The four-count knock meant a doll. Both of them knew that. The problem was that only two dolls in their entire operation knew that particular code, and neither of those two women were supposed to be within three city blocks of this brothel for another three days.

Smoke set the glass down very carefully on the side table before standing and crossing the room to the door. His shoulder holster rode against his undershirt as he pulled his pistol free in one clean motion before turning the knob and pulling the office door open.

Bunny stood in the hallway nervously shifting her weight from one foot to the other. The lamplight from inside the office hit her caramel brown skin from the side and the effect of this wasn't something Smoke had originally budgeted for. She was soft, luminous, small, and entirely the kind of woman that a man had to consciously remind himself to look away from, all of that deep-curved, warm-skinned, doe-eyed beauty arranged in the specific way that made the gold fabric laced over her body look like it had been commissioned for her personally. She blinked up at him. Her eyes were the color of good rum and they caught the light and held it, and for one unguarded half second the hardness in his face did something complicated before it arranged itself back into its usual flat composure.

Smoke held the pistol at his side. His face settled back into the expression of a man who was conducting business regardless of the hour. His eyes moved over her once, the way he surveyed any situation that required assessment before a response. "Why," he said, voice smooth and level as a road built to last, his Mississippi roots dragging slow and warm beneath every word, "is you at my door knockin' four times?"

Bunny didn’t flinch as she looked him in the eye exactly as Josie had instructed and she held the look steady. "Because," she said, "I am tired of being treated like I'm made of glass." She let a breath pass as she remembered who she was speaking to. "... Sir."

Smoke looked at her for a long minute. He ran his mind back, sorting through the preceding month like how a man sorts through a drawer looking for something he put down without thinking. The girl on the floor. The drunk client. The blade. Stack handling her, him handling the client. The decision to move her to the room across from theirs. Then the weeks had continued to happen, the operation had continued to require their attention, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, the particular task of walking her back through had gotten caught in the gap between what he assumed Stack had handled and what Stack apparently assumed he had handled.

He let the exhale come through his nose, small and contained. Then he stepped back from the door and nodded once towards the interior of the room. "Come in."

Bunny wasn’t a woman that needed to be instructed twice as she came in.

Smoke shut the door behind her and walked back to the couch, settling into it with the glass of liquor retrieved from the side table. His eyes stayed on her as she took in the office, the desk and its columns, Stack still standing at the far edge of it now with his arms folded. Smoke's gaze moved from her face to his brother's and he said, with the absolute calm of a man stating a mathematical fact, "You done forgot to recommission ya' doll."

Stack's expression moved toward as expression of confusion that was also slightly offended at the framing. "Fuck you mean my doll?" he quipped. "Thought she was yours."

"I moved her to the room 'cross the hall," Smoke said. "I was leavin' the rest to you."

"Nobody told me that."

"I ain't gotta tell you everythin’, Elias. Use ya' brain."

Stack unfolded his arms and planted both hands flat on the desk. "My brain was operatin' under the assumption that the woman sittin' over in that room with the good curtains was your doll that you was handlin' in ya' own time, Elijah. Had I known she was mine to recommission I would've had her back on the floor four weeks ago."

"She been over there four an a half weeks."

"Four an a half weeks then. My point stands, muthafucka."

"Ya' point is that you wasn't payin' attention—"

"My point is that you could've opened ya' mouth like a grown ass man an said the words 'Elias, go handle Bunny' an I would've gone an handled Bunny, but instead you sittin’ over there on that couch drinkin' ya' liquor an assumin' I was gon' read ya' mind—"

"I don't need you readin' my mind, I need you payin' attention to what's happenin' in this house—"

"Stupid bitch, I pay more attention to what happens in this house than you do, I just ain't also expected to be a fuckin' mind reader on top of everythin’ else—"

"Language, Elias.” Smoke said.

"Now I need to read ya' mind an watch my mouth?"

"We got a doll present. Tighten up." Smoke's eyes cut to Bunny for one brief moment that carried the tiniest edge of an apology.

Bunny had been watching this exchange with the expression of a woman who was simultaneously relieved that Josie was right and also annoyed that Josie was right. She looked at the ceiling for one moment, gathering something, and then she looked at Stack directly.

"I didn't come here to listen to y'all argue about whose doll I am," she cut in. The words came out clean and direct, and beneath them ran a current of something real, something stored up across four weeks in a pretty room with silk curtains and three meals a day that she hadn’t earned. "I came here because I am a woman who been working since I was old enough to understand that money you make yourself is the only kind that belongs to you in full." She let that settle for a moment. 

Before she had walked through their door she had left three establishments because she outgrew them. Before that, back when she was Rosalie and not Bunny, she hadn't been permitted to own so much as the dress on her back. That life was behind her and it would stay behind her as long as she had a body to work with and the sense God gave her to use it. "I appreciate the food," she said. "I appreciate the nightgowns and the curtains and the sweetness. I do. But I am not a woman who takes without giving back, and I am not going to sit in that room one more week eating indulging in things I ain't earn. I want to work."

The office held the sound of that for a brief second.

Stack analyzed her from top to bottom. The annoyance from the argument with his twin had drained off his face entirely, replaced by something more attentive and interesting. He possessed the look of a man who had been watching something he wanted for some time and had just been reminded of it. His gaze moved down the gold nightgown with the focused assessment of a man reviewing an investment he had forgotten to manage and was now reconsidering with renewed and comprehensive interest.

He came around the desk, crossed the office floor, and closed the distance between them until his chest was close enough for her to feel the heat radiating off him. His hands came up. His fingers settled first at the hollow of her throat, light and acquainting themselves with the shape of her, feeling the small flutter there she couldn't suppress, feeling the way she swallowed. Then they traveled with thorough patience across her collarbones, over the generous swell of her chest through the nightgown's thin fabric. She was built lavishly, heavy and warm everywhere in a way that made his hands slow down and pay attention, and he let them linger there, cataloguing her, until her breathing changed and she tried to hide the change but couldn't.

His hands continued their inventory, moving down the soft plush landscape of her stomach, the deep inward curve of her waist, spreading wide across the full round geography of her hips. He took his time with her hips. He spent what felt like an extended amount of time mapping them, as though committing their particular architecture to some private record he intended to revisit at a later date. Then one hand swept low and around, and he brought his palm down hard and flat across the full magnificent curve of her backside with a crack that split the quiet of the office like a starting pistol.

The sound rang off the walls, the bookcase, the glass in the lamp, everything. Bunny's gasp tore out of her before she had the opportunity to make any decisions about it, sharp and bright, her body moving without consulting her brain, tilting forward into the impact and then backward away from it, settling finally against Stack's chest in a way that was involuntary enough to be entirely honest.

Stack felt her melt against him and his exhale came out long and satisfied. His arm wrapped around her from behind, pulling her flush against the front of him, and he bent his mouth to the curve of her ear. "I'm gon’ be the one runnin' ya' retrainin' tonight." He pressed his mouth closer to her ear, words dropping to a rough near-whisper. "An dependin' on how that go… I might need to keep you locked away from everybody else for another month… Really take my time so ya' body don't ever forget who it belong to."

The sound Bunny made was small, strangled, and entirely against her will.

He reached for the thin strap at her shoulder and slid it down. The other strap followed. He peeled the gold nightgown from her slowly, letting it whisper down her curves until it pooled at her feet in a gilded ring, and what was left standing in the middle of their office was every generous, luminous, full inch of Bunny without a single layer between her skin and the lamplight. The lamp threw amber across the swell of her hips, the deep curve of her waist, the heavy softness of her breasts, the deep brown warmth of her, and the office became immediately a different kind of room.

Stack stepped back and bit down on his bottom lip as he took in her goddess figure. Then, with the easy authority of a man in his own house, he waltzed over to the couch where Smoke sat and dropped down beside his brother. He plucked the liquor glass from Smoke's hand, drained what remained, and reached for the refill trolley at the couch's edge. Smoke didn’t argue with his twin. He simply shifted his weight to accommodate Stack’s presence and locked his eyes on Bunny.

Two men on the same couch. Side by side. Undershirts and slacks, loafers, the warm lamplight running along the defined lines of their arms where the fabric ended, the undeniable press of their interest visible in the material of their trousers. Stack poured a fresh glass and settled into the cushion. Smoke took Bunny in from head to foot with that flat, complete attention that gave nothing away and missed nothing. The air in the room had changed and pressed heavily on all their shoulders.

Stack leaned forward, elbows to his knees, glass hanging loose in his fingers. "Show me," he said, "why you worth the trouble of retrainin' when you already cost me a dead white man, two dry cleaning bills, a shovel we had to replace after breakin' it diggin' that peckerwoods grave, plus four an a half weeks of room an board an meals that even my top earners don't see on a regular Tuesday." He settled back into the cushion. "All that, an you ain't brought us a single dollar. So show me what you got, Bunny."

Bunny stood naked in the center of their office and looked at both of them. She took one breath. Then she walked to Smoke.

She came to stand directly before him and held his gaze and placed one knee on the cushion beside his thigh and then the other, straddling his lap with the practiced ease of a woman who had made herself at home in more difficult situations than this. She could feel him beneath her already, the dense, insistent hardness of him through his slacks, and the discovery sent something bold climbing up her spine and into her shoulders. She rolled her hips, one slow and complete rotation, felt him twitch beneath her, and did it again. She leaned forward and put her mouth to the side of his neck, the warm brown skin above his collar, and kissed him there. Felt his jaw tighten. Kissed across his collarbone, the gap where his undershirt opened at the throat. She found his earlobe with her teeth, caught it just barely, and felt the exhale that came out of him, contained and controlled, the only version of a sound he was willing to give her yet.

She pulled back and looked at Stack over her shoulder. "I can't promise I won't cause more trouble with your clients," she said, her hips still moving against Smoke's in that slow, measured grind. "That ain’t a promise I can keep. But I am an investment." She felt Smoke's hand settle on her hip, heavy and certain, the grip of a man who was claiming something without announcing he's done it. "And you'd be foolish men to let me go."

Then she climbed off Smoke's lap and moved to Stack.

She settled herself across his thighs before he had quite finished processing the intention, and his hands came up instinctively, finding her hips, and she moved against him the way she had moved against his brother, with that same frank, unhurried competence, rolling her hips in grinding rolls that had him fully hard inside his slacks under a minute. She kissed along his jaw, the corner of his mouth, found his throat and bit softly at it and felt him grip her harder. She turned her mouth to his ear. "Well?" she said quietly.

Stack's answer was both hands sliding down to fill themselves with the full, heavy weight of her backside, squeezing with the proprietary thoroughness of a man claiming something he had decided belongs to him and only him.

From the other side of couch, Smoke reached forward and caught the back of her hair in his fist. Not rough, not gentle, just completely unambiguous, pulling her head back until she was looking up at him from Stack's lap with her neck at a stretched and exposed angle. Smoke looked down at her, his eyes never leaving her face. "Who," he said, each word its own complete and unhurried thing, "taught you that knock?"

"Josie," Bunny replied quickly.

The quality of the silence that followed was specific. She felt Stack go still beneath her. She saw something shift in Smoke's expression, not much, just a recalibration of a single degree. "Josie," he repeated. Flat.

"She was in the kitchen," Bunny continued. "Just now. I spoke with her before I came down here."

Smoke's eyes moved to Stack's face. Stack's eyes moved back. That language again, the one that needed no words. Whatever moved between them in that half second was mutual and resolved by the time it was done.

Smoke released her hair. He stood, adjusted the set of his shoulder holster with one practiced motion, and looked at Bunny. "Come," he said.

Stack stood from the couch with Bunny still in his arms, lifting her from his lap without any apparent effort, her weight absorbed into his frame as a matter of course. He carried her out of the office. Smoke walked ahead through the dim corridor, his footsteps quiet on the floorboards, and they moved as a unit through the darkness of the second floor until they reached the kitchen.

Smoke pushed the door open.

Bunny looked into the kitchen from over Stack's shoulder.

The room was empty.

The room wasn't just vacant as if someone had just stepped out, the room was suddenly empty in a way that was wrong. Profoundly, specifically wrong. The chair at the table sat at the exact angle it had been in when she first sat down across from Josie, as though no one had adjusted it at all, as though no one had ever pulled it out to sit in it. The plate of cornbread was gone without a trace, not in the washtub, not on the counter, not anywhere. Simply absent from the room as if it was never there. The peach bowl sat exactly where it always sat. The lamplight came through the window at its usual angle and landed on a kitchen that offered no evidence whatsoever that a woman with ancient eyes had been sitting in it not even twenty minutes ago.

Bunny stared. The hair on her arms rose.

"She was right there," she said, and her voice had climbed half a register before she noticed. "She was sittin' right there at that table. She had cornbread on a plate, cold cornbread, she had it on a plate right there in front that chair, she offered some to me and I took a peach instead. She squeezed my cheeks." Bunny's hand rose and touched her own face at the memory of it, the very real and physical memory of Josie's palms pressing her cheeks together. "She was a real person who was in this room. She had feet. I heard her feet on the floor when she shifted her chair. That ain't somethin' I imagined." She heard her own voice rising once more and made herself stop. Swallowed down her confusion and looked from the empty table, to the empty chair, to the empty counter where a plate had been sitting less than a few minutes ago. The wrongness of the empty kitchen pressed against her like a cold hand. 

"Where'd she go," she whispered, and this time her voice came out quieter, stripped of its former certainty, with something underneath it that was very close to fear. "The hallway is one hallway. I walked the whole length of it to get to your office. I would have seen her. I would have passed her. Where'd she—"

"I believe you."

Smoke's voice arrived quietly and cut through everything else like a lamp lit in a dark room. He stepped next to Stack and reached out, taking her chin between his fingers, tilting her face toward him with a gentleness that wasn’t his usual mode and was therefore more effective than almost anything else he could’ve done. His eyes moved across her face, reading whatever he found there with that same thorough attention, and then he said it again without elaboration or apology. "I believe you. You saw her. You spoke to her. It's 'ight." He held her gaze until the climbing quality went out of her breathing, until her eyes settled from startled back to present. His thumb moved once along her jaw, the lightest possible contact, and then he released her chin and looked at Stack over her head. 

The look between them lasted one second and carried something private in it, something that had history in it, some understanding of Josie that they shared between themselves and weren’t presently sharing with Bunny. "Need to put a leash on that woman," Smoke grumbled, with the flat certainty of someone adding an item to a list.

"You an me both, nigga," Stack said, quietly.

Smoke turned from the kitchen. He didn’t go back towards their office, instead he went the other direction, toward the room at the far end of the hall, and Stack followed with Bunny still in his arms, carrying her away from the empty kitchen and the empty chair and the cold and inexplicable absence of a woman who had been sitting in it minutes ago eating cold cornbread like she owned the place.

The room at the end of the hall was broad and purposeful. A wide bed sat at its center on a dark mahogany frame, the headboard tall and unadorned. White linens, clean. A single lamp burning low in the corner, its flame turned down until the light came out warm and intimate. This was a simple room designed for one thing and one thing only, retraining a doll that didn’t need to be disciplined. 

Stack deposited Bunny in the center of the bed with more chivalry than intended. He straightened up and looked at her sprawled across the white linens, her moisturized brown skin drinking the lamplight the way it was built to, every curve of her catching and holding the warmth of it. He let out a small satisfied grunt before rolling his shoulders once and then bending down to kiss the inside of her knee.

The sound Bunny made started in her throat and got halfway out before she caught it, her thigh twitching under his mouth. Stack felt the twitch and registered it with the calmness of a man who had spent a considerable amount of time studying the language of women's bodies, then he returned and pressed his lips to her inner knee again. 

One kiss… two kiss… three kiss… four… Stack continued his playful worship before moving lower, or rather higher towards Bunny’s inner thigh. He was greeted with the soft warm skin there as his mouth opened against it, tongue dragging along the crease where her thigh met nothing and then meeting the next crease. He was learning the deep inner geography of her, building the path inward with a patience that was intentionally designed to make her lose her mind before he arrived at his final destination.

Her scent hit him before his mouth did and he let out a low sound against her skin that was pure appreciation. "Four an a half weeks," he said, lips moving against her inner thigh, his breath warming the space he hadn't touched yet. "You been sittin' in that pretty room unfucked all this time, huh, lil’ bunny rabbit?"

Bunny responded vocally with something that was technically a word, or at least she thought she did.

Stack chuckled to himself and then his mouth immediately found her aching bundle of nerves. He worked her the way a classically trained musician works an instrument he knows intimately. He didn’t rush his performance but instead attended to the specific truth of her responses with the kind of focused and intelligent attention that made up the difference between a man who was present and a man who was going through the motions. He learned her in the first thirty seconds, learned the particular way her hips moved when he pressed the flat of his tongue against her center, the way her thighs tried to close around his head and then caught themselves and spread wider, the way the sound she made climbed an entire octave when he tended to her clit and circled it with skilled precision.

He effortlessly brought her to the edge in under four minutes.

He knew when she was there. He had been watching for it, feeling for it in the tightening of her thighs and the change in her breathing, the way her hands had found the back of his head and were pressing down with that desperate and gnawing pressure that meant she was right there, right on the rim of it, one more motion and she would go over. He could feel her gathering herself, the coil of it pulling tight in her body and her hips tilting up to meet him.

But, because Stack was Stack, he couldn’t help himself as he pulled back and denied Bunny instant relief. She wasn’t a doll that needed to be punished, but she was still a doll under control of her master. He didn’t pull away far, just enough for his mouth to leave her core and rest against the inside of her thigh instead. He looked utterly composed as he breathed against her soaked, twitching heat while she fell apart beneath him in a different way than she had intended.

"Stack," she breathlessly whined, the word arriving with a thicker desperation than she had planned.

"Mm," he said, mouth still against her thigh.

"Please… Don't do that."

"Do what? " he asked pleasantly.

She made a frustrated sound and whined again before Stack returned to his honeysuckle feast.

He took his time getting there, moving up through the wet of her with his tongue like he was reading something he found interesting, and then he was back at her clit and the sounds coming out of her rebuilt themselves immediately, climbing again, her hips rolling, her fingers curling into the sheets. He gave her forty-five seconds this time before the edge showed up again in the ragged pacing of her breathing, and he pulled back once more. Pressed his mouth to her inner thigh. Breathed. And let her curse at him out.

"You raggedy ass nigga," she managed.

His laugh came out against her skin, warm and genuinely amused. "I done been called worse, babydoll."

At the head of the bed the mattress dipped. Bunny's eyes reopened, head turning, and Smoke leaned above her, and the sight of him was enough to make every other thought in her head exit quickly. He had shedded everything. His undershirt, slacks, holster, all of it was gone, and what was left was all of him, broad and carved and rich dark brown skin. His body looked like the map of a man who had moved through the world with physical force for a long time and had the evidence of that written in muscle and old scars. He was hard, entirely and obviously, and looking at her with those flat obsidian eyes that gave nothing away.

Smoke said nothing as he reached for the small table at the bed's edge and a cigarette appeared between his fingers, a match scratched against the bedframe with a brief bright leap of flame before it found its target. He took the first pull, held it, let the clouds of tobacco climb toward the ceiling in a long and perfectly controlled column. And then he looked down at her, the cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, his eyes traveling across her face with the calm, weighing assessment of a man reviewing something he may or may not be satisfied with.

"Who," he said, voice low and quiet and warm as the smoking end of something burning, "you think you talkin’ to like that in my house?"

Between her thighs, Stack's mouth had found the soft heat of her again, and the sound that tried to escape Bunny's throat was intercepted by her own determination not to give Smoke the satisfaction of an incoherent answer before she had the chance to give him a real one. "I-I didn’t mean none by it… I-I wasn’t givin’ orders," she managed.

"Mm." Smoke's eyes dropped from her face to the space just below them, where his erection jumped and throbbed directly above her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him, and then his eyes came back up to hers. "You came to my office," he continued as he lazily gripped his manhood before taking another puff. "Told me what you was tired of. Told me what you wanted. Got yaself’ naked in front my brother an I, then sat in both our laps like you had the right." He exhaled smoke from the side of his mouth, away from her face. "That sound like a doll who know her place to you?"

Before she could respond, Stack's tongue distracted her by circling her clit with renewed and specific intention, as one finger pressed into her slowly, testing the heat of her… the tight grip of her. She was utterly soaked and already shaking in a finely controlled way, like how a bow shakes just before the arrow is released.

Smoke watched her face with the careful attention of a man reading a weather report. "A doll," he said, voice quieter, the edge in it sharpening enough to send shivers down her spine, "asks. She don't tell. She don't march down a hallway an knock on my door like she owed somethin'. She asks her owner. She say please. She waits." His thumb brushed her jaw, the touch light and intentional, as his eyes dropped to her mouth and then came back up. "You still ain’t proved you worth the trouble."

It didn't take much for Bunny to read between the lines as her right hand moved from the sheet and gripped Smoke’s precum dripping length. She felt the substantial weight of him against her palm and heard the slight controlled catch of his inhale as she felt him twitch against her hand. He filled her hand, dense and hot, and she stroked him from base to crown once with a grip that was firm.

She angled her head against the pillow, opened her mouth, and drew him in.

His size settled against her tongue, thick and dense, and she worked her lips around him with the exploring attention of a woman who had been told her whole career that her mouth was something extraordinary and had spent years proving it right. She hollowed her cheeks and sucked on him with an unhurried suction, her tongue mapping the underside of him on each pull, tracing the swollen vein that ran along his length, lapping at the crown when she came up before gobbling him back down again. Her free hand wrapped around his base and worked in a measured counterpoint. The combination of hand and mouth coordinated with the easy confidence of someone who had been doing this long enough that it lived in her body the way playing an instrument lives in a musician's hands had Smoke internally losing his mind.

Smoke's own hand found her hair, fingers settling among her now sweated out tresses without pressing, without directing, just resting there with a weight that communicated his full attention. The quality of his breathing changed almost immediately, each exhale coming a degree longer than it should have, each inhale a degree more controlled than usual. He brought the cigarette to his lips with his free hand and took a pull, held it, let the tobacco clouds go from the side of his mouth. The image of him above her doing that while she worked him below was the most Elijah “Smoke” Moore thing she could imagine, controlling himself with a lit cigarette while she did her damnedest to remove that control from him entirely.

For a long minute, Bunny genuinely believed she was finally in control, but then, the devious twin still situated between her thick thighs added a second finger inside her and she gasped. It only lasted a split second as her eyes almost rolled to the back of her head while she momentarily let the pleasure consume her, but that was short lived with a slight tug to her hair.

"Look at me," Smoke demanded.

She didn’t need to be told twice as she retrained her eyes back onto the owner that was in front of her.

"Mmm… good… you capable of suckin’ dick an followin’ instructions," he said softly, in a voice that had dropped below the level where it was meant to sound gentle and instead sounded much more intimate and a whole lot more dangerous. "You got somethin' to say?"

Bunny, whose mouth was still full of raw meat, slightly shook her head ‘no’ and continued servicing Smoke’s dick. Her tongue continued working the underside of him in the way that she had been complimented on in cities that were miles away from this one. She went down until the back of her throat met him and held there, breathing through her nose, feeling his fingers tighten in her hair by one degree, and then she came back up and did it again.

Smoke's exhale was long and relaxed. "Mm," he said, and it was the most honest amount of praise he had given Bunny all night.

Stack had brought her to the edge twice more in the interim, each time withdrawing with the particular cruelty of a man who is enjoying the architecture of her desperation more than he would enjoy its resolution, and she was by now a tightly wounded and thoroughly soaked little doll. Her body was operating at a level of need that had begun to make her cry a little. Not from pain or unhappiness, just from the relentless accumulation of pleasure with nowhere to go.

"Stack… Sir…" she managed, pulling off Smoke for a breath.

"Still here," Stack said, against her thigh.

"Please." The word came out stripped of all pretense. Just the word. Just the need in it, raw and uncomplicated.

Stack looked up at her along the length of her body. His mouth was wet, his eyes were bright, and he looked like a man who had been given an exceptional gift that was in no hurry to unwrap it fully. "Please what?" he asked rhetorically already knowing the answer to the question.

"Please… l-let me finish."

"Let you finish?" His voice carried genuine amusement. "Babydoll, I barley scratched the surface."

Smoke looked at the tears streaming from Bunny’s eyes. Something moved across his face, an emotion too foreign for anyone to decipher. He pulled free of her mouth with a soft sound and moved, climbing off the mattress and coming around the foot of the bed, and the sight of him moving toward Stack's position made Stack lift his head.

Smoke looked at his brother. Then he looked at the place between Bunny's thighs, the glistening, swollen, and desperately twitching evidence of the last fifteen minutes, and he looked back at Stack with an expression that was entirely final.

"Move," he said.

Stack sat up and squinted his eyes in disbelief. "S’cuse you, nigga?"

"Move," Smoke said again.

Stack's eyes narrowed. "She's my doll, Elijah."

"Yeah… well… she’s also mine," Smoke said. "I just decided."

Stack stared at him. The look on his face was the look of a mannish boy who didn’t like having to share his toys. "You can't just decide that," he complained. "That ain't how this works. You can't crawl over here in the middle of my session an claim a whole woman like you can’t go pick another damn doll—"

"Elias."

"What?!”

"I been watchin' her for a month," Smoke said, with the patience of someone explaining something obvious. "She in the room ‘cross the hall from ours. I been the one who had her moved there. I been the one who made sure her meals was right. Made sure her room was right an made sure nobody bothered her." A pause. "She mine. She also yours. Move."

Stack's jaw tightened. He looked at Bunny. Bunny looked back at him from the mattress with wide eyes, her lips still swollen, her thighs still trembling, and her expression carrying the cocky confusion of a woman who had just been claimed by two men simultaneously while lying naked in their bed and was still in the early stages of processing this information. Stack pointed at Smoke. "You owe me," he said. "You owe me big time, nigga."

"Mhm. Add it to the list," Smoke said.

Stack moved, climbing up toward the headboard with a muttered stream of commentary, and Smoke took his place between Bunny's thighs before lowering his head. He wasted no time as his mouth found her center without preamble, his tongue worked her with the focused of a man who went through life either doing something well or not at all. The sound Bunny made was enormous and immediate, her hands flying out to grip the sheets.

Smoke was vastly different from Stack in how he devoured Bunny’s pussy. Stack built her pleasure up as if he was an architect with a boundless amount of patience. Whereas Smoke treated her pleasure like a man reading a language only he knew. Every response she gave him, he immediately incorporated it into what he did next, adjusting, refining, arriving at the exact pressure and rhythm that made her thighs lock around his head and her back clear off the mattress as every coherent thought she had exited the premises.

He didn’t bother edging her since he had already clearly read what the edging had done to her. He could read the accumulated tension in every line of her body. Instead, he drove her straight to the finish line without stopping. The orgasm that finally rippled through her felt spiritual as if her soul was raptured out of her body. Her voice tore out of her open and honest, her hips grinding against his mouth as he worked her through every wave of it, his hands locked on her hips to keep her from pitching away from him.

Stack sat at the headboard watching all of this with his arms folded like a sulking child. When Smoke finally lifted his head, Stack uncrossed his arms and pointed at his brother with one finger. "My turn," he said.

"She sensitive," Smoke said, sitting back on his heels.

"I know she sensitive. That's the point."

Smoke moved aside without any urgency, and Stack replaced him between Bunny's thighs with the eagerness of a man who had been waiting for his turn at something exceptional. He looked at the convulsing center of her for a beat with something purely acquisitive in his expression, and then he put his skilled mouth back on her.

Bunny's entire body jerked backwards. The sound she made this time was considerably more desperate than the last, her hips trying to back away from the overstimulation and Stack's hands locking around them before she got anywhere.

"Stay," he murmured against her, voice vibrating right against her hypersensitive clit.

"Stack I can't, it's too much—"

"You can," he growled, and meant it, and went back to work.

Smoke let his twin have his fun as he situated himself on Bunny’s left side, and his mouth found her breast. His lips closed around her nipple and sucked on the coco nub with an intensity that sent a euphoric sensation shooting directly down her spine. His other hand flattened on her ribs, feeling the heave of her breathing, the rapid and helpless rise and fall of her chest. He worked across to her other breast with the same thorough attention, his teeth grazing just lightly enough to make her gasp, and then moan, and then grip the back of his head.

Meanwhile, Stack feasted like a starving madman. His tongue worked her pulsing and overstimulated pussy with an almost vindictive thoroughness, licking into her and circling her clit with alternating attention, building the sensation higher than it had any right to go given that she had just come apart under his brother's mouth not two minutes ago. He watched her face when he could, watched the progression of it, the way her mouth fell open, how her brows drew together, and when the tears started again fresh from the corners of her eyes, overstimulation and pleasure braided together until she couldn't separate one from the other.

When she came the second time it was different in character, wilder, less controlled, her body arching and convulsing with a force that had nothing of restraint left in it, and the flood of her against Stack's mouth was audible in the quiet room. He drank her juices down with a delighted groan while his jaw still worked her through every aftershock, refusing to stop until her thighs had gone from locked to trembling to limp and her voice had dropped from cries to the soft and utterly wrecked sound of a woman who has nothing left to give.

Thirty seconds of blissful torture occurred until Stack finally sat back. He looked at the evidence of what he had done to her with profound satisfaction, wiping his jaw with the back of his hand. He looked at Smoke. "She ready," he said.

"She definitely ready," Smoke agreed.

Smoke laid down on his back on the mattress beside Bunny, his nine inches pointing toward the ceiling. He turned his head and looked at her where she lay against the linens, trembling and thoroughly undone. His voice, when it came, was dominate and certain. "Show me," he said, "how you got ya' name, bunny rabbit. Show me why you worth the trouble."

The second Bunny heard Smoke’s request, she sat up on trembling arms. She looked at him stretched out beside her, at the full dark length of him, at the patient flatness of his expression, at the way he was simply waiting with the absolute confidence of a man who knew what was coming and secretly couldn’t wait.

She was still a little loopy from her prior orgasms but gathered up enough strength and swung her leg over him. She positioned herself above him and reached down to guide him to her entrance before sinking onto him with a long, controlled descent that pulled a sound from the back of her throat and a sound from the back of his. Both of them couldn’t help themselves responding to the stretch, the heat, and the fullness of her pussy wrapping around his length as she settled herself completely onto him. She stayed there for a second, adjusting, letting her body accommodate the considerable size of him and feeling him everywhere at once before beginning to move.

It only took three bounces for Bunny to prove to Smoke why she had earned her name. She wasn’t just a lady of the night who knew how to ride a dick until sunrise. No. She had spent years refining a specific combination of bouncing, grinding, and rolling that made men weep, beg, and reach for her like she was the only water in a desert. She worked him with her hips, rising and falling in the deep rolling motion that used every muscle she had, the sound of their bodies meeting building in the lamp-warm room, her succulent breasts moving with every stroke, her hands braced on his chest for leverage, her thighs flexing and releasing with each downward drive.

Smoke looked up at her and something happened in his face, some arrangement of his features that wasn’t quite expressionless in the way he usually was, instead something behind his eyes showed a genuine side of him that wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. His hands came to rest on her thighs, not to direct or control the pace, just to hold her, to feel what she was doing from the closest possible position.

He let her have it. He laid there beneath her and he absorbed every stroke with the stillness of a man receiving something with his full attention. His only movements were the tightening of his hands on her thighs, the slight flare of his nostrils, and the slight clenching of his jaw that betrayed how thoroughly he was feeling everything she was giving him. "That's it," he groaned, voice rough and lower than usual. "Keep goin'. Show me everythin’."

And indeed she showed him everything. She rolled her hips in her signature deep figure-eight that made her thighs burn and made men forget what city they were in. She let out a needy whine when she felt him twitch hard inside her, felt his fingers dig into her thighs and felt the sound he made rumble up from somewhere below the place where he usually kept his inner desires.

"Goddamn," Stack praised from somewhere behind her.

Bunny had nearly forgotten, in the consuming present-tense occupation of riding Smoke, that Stack was still in the room with them. She remembered now. She remembered specifically when she felt his hand press warm and flat against the small of her back, pushing her forward just slightly, changing the angle, and she felt the presence of him settling in behind her, the specific warmth of a second body entering the space, and something in her belly turned over at the knowing of what was coming next.

"Don't stop movin'," Smoke growled below her, his voice steady and laced with something that wasn’t quite command and not quite warning, something between the two that communicated that her motion was the thing keeping him from losing his composure. "Keep ya pretty eyes right here."

It was difficult, but she kept her eyes on him. She kept moving, slower now, the rhythm becoming something more rocking and less bouncing as Stack's hand remained at the small of her back and his other hand reached for something on the side table. The sound of a bottle. The sensation of something cool worked at the back entrance she hadn't been using, Stack's fingers pressed and circled with a careful, methodical preparation of a man who knew exactly how to stretch a doll without tearing her. He worked her chocolate starfish open with practiced patience, each circle and press accompanied by Smoke's hands on her hips maintaining their slow rhythm and his voice occasional and low.

"Breathe," Smoke said, one hand traveling from her hip to her stomach, palm flat and warm against her skin. "Stay with me. Just breathe."

She breathed. She kept her eyes on his and kept rolling her hips over him and breathed through Stack's fingers working behind her, opening her gradually, each moment of it accompanied by Smoke's voice and Smoke's hands and Smoke's eyes holding her in place in every sense.

After a minute of probing and preparing, Stack withdrew his fingers. The blunt pressure that replaced them was broader, and it pressed forward with the slow and inexorable patience of a man who had done this enough times to know that patience here was not optional. Bunny's motion over Smoke stuttered as the pressure built and Stack worked his way inside her. He knew better than to rush or force his way inside, instead he continued steadily forward until the stretch had gone from too much, to full, to something that rewired every nerve ending she had at the same moment and left her gripping Smoke's chest with both hands and pressing her face into his shoulder.

"There it is," Stack said from behind her, voice strained as he relished in the tightness of her asshole. "You got all of it, babydoll. You got it."

This wasn’t the first time Bunny participated in anal sex, but it was the first time she had both of her holes filled to the brim. She took both of them, fully, completely, in the most total sense of that word, and the feeling of it wasn’t something she could’ve prepared herself for no matter how plainly Josie had described it. Her body had become an instrument of pure sensation, attended to from both directions at once, filled past the point where she could distinguish between the fullness and herself.

"Move with me," Smoke ordered, and began to rock his hips upward in a slow, careful rhythm.

Stack matched it from behind, withdrawing just barely and pressing back in on the same count, the two of them falling into sync with the ease of people who have shared a frequency their entire lives. Bunny gripped Smoke's chest and held on.

Smoke's hands ran up from her hips to her waist to the curve of her sides, mapping her as she moved, grounding her with the weight and warmth of his hands when the sensation from everywhere else threatened to become too much. "Look at me," he said.

She looked at him.

"You ours," he continued. Not a question, just a statement of something that had apparently been decided and was now being confirmed. "You understand that."

"Yes," she breathed.

"Say it."

"I-I-I'm yours," she whined, and her voice cracked on the last word because Stack had adjusted behind her and found the angle that turned her thoughts entirely to static.

"Fuck," Stack hissed through his teeth. "Keep squeezin’ me like you finna cum an I'm gon' embarrass myself."

Smoke's jaw ticked. He drove his hips up sharper than he had been, once, and her forehead dropped to his chest. "Hold it," he said, one hand traveling up her spine, settling between her shoulder blades. "Don't finish yet."

Like a good little doll, Bunny obeyed even if withholding her orgasm was one of the hardest things for her to do. She held it through the next several minutes of the two of them working her from both sides with building and competing intensity. Stack's hips found a rhythm behind her that grew less restrained with each stroke, his hands gripping her waist with the force of a man holding onto something he didn’t intend to lose. Meanwhile, Smoke drove up into her pussy with a calculated and precise force that hit the same place every time and built the pressure in her body to a pitch that had no precedent in her experience.

She held back her orgasm with her fingernails deep in Smoke's bare chest and tears running freely down her face from the sheer accumulated pressure of pleasure with nowhere to go. Her body shook uncontrollably between them in continuous tremors.

"Hold it," Smoke said again, quieter this time, his hand moving from between her shoulder blades to the back of her neck, his thumb pressing at the base of her skull with a firmness that was grounding. "Hold it for me. Just a little longer."

She felt like an overfilled waterballoon on the verge of popping but she held it a little longer.

"Now," he said.

The second Smoke gave the command, Bunny let go. This orgasm made her entire body convulse between them, and the viper grip of her fluttering holes around both of them became violent and involuntary, her voice tearing out in a sound that came from a place so primal and ancient it didn’t have a name. Stack grunted hard behind her, the sound losing its edges, his rhythm breaking apart, his hips pressing deep and going still as her body worked around him without any input from her at all. Smoke's hands locked on her hips and held her through every spasm, his breath coming in controlled pulls through his nose, his jaw set, his eyes on her face.

She was still a shaking mess when they moved her.

Stack withdrew and the absence of him was its own overwhelming sensation as they repositioned her between them with fluid and efficient coordination, guiding her body into the new arrangement before she could fully process that things were changing. Her hands and knees were positioned on the mattress with Smoke now behind her. Stack was in front of her, already at the edge of the bed, his hand finding her hair, his thumb tilting her chin upward.

"Open," Stack said, his voice dragged rough by the effort of the last several minutes.

She opened. He slid into her mouth and she wrapped her thick lips around him and worked him with the full attention of a woman who had made sucking dick into an art form, her tongue pressing along his length, her cheeks hollowing with each pull. Behind her Smoke gripped her hips with both hands and pressed into her pussy from behind with a force that had nothing of restraint left in it, each thrust was deep and drove her forward into Stack so that the two of them worked her from both ends in a rhythm that had its own crude, overwhelming music.

Smoke's hand came down on the curve of her backside, a sharp slap that made Stack look over her head at his brother with raised brows.

Smoke looked back at him with an expression that communicated absolutely nothing except his full awareness of what he had just done. "She a doll. She our whore," he said casually between thrusts.

Stack's grin broke across his face, gold tooth and all. "Mm hm." His hand joined Smoke's sentiment, fisting tighter in her curls, working himself into her mouth with an authority that matched his brother's behind her. "Take it," he said, "just like that. All of it."

She took it. She took all of it, from both of them, from behind and in front. Her tears ran freely down her face again, dripped off her chin, and ran down Stack's length where he fucked into her throat. She felt another climax building from somewhere deeper than the previous ones had come from, further down, more structural, and her body told her it was coming whether she was ready or not.

Stack felt it in the change of her mouth around him. Smoke felt it in the change of her hypersensitive pussy around him. Both of them drove harder at the same time as Smoke's hand came to her hip and gripped it with the force of a man who wanted to feel the final round tightness squeeze around him. "Give it," Smoke said, rough against her.

Bunny’s body clenched and released in a rolling sequence that started at her core and moved outward, her voice was muffled around Stack’s twitching length and her thighs shook against Smoke's grip. Everything in her narrowed down to the specific and enormous fact of coming apart between these two men who had decided, right then and there, that she was theirs. Stack's hips completely lost their rhythm entirely and he groaned from deep in his chest, his hot sticky release filling her throat in long, heavy pulses, his hand in her hair tightening as he worked through every second of it. Behind her Smoke thrusted into her through the spasms of her climax with a final series of strokes that cost him the last of his control as his hips pressed flush against hers and stayed there while he finished inside her, the sound that came out of him brief and real.

The room after was silent except for breathing.

Three people in various states of collapse across the ruined white linens, the lamp still burning in the corner, the amber light still doing its only job. Bunny was laying face down in the center of the bed with no intention of moving for the foreseeable future. Stack was somewhere to her left, his hand resting on the mattress near her shoulder. Smoke stood after a moment, crossed to the washstand, and returned with a warm cloth. He cleaned her with that same focused efficiency she had heard other dolls gossip about but never experienced, his hands moved over her with the attention of a man who considered this part of the task just as important as any other.

It was Stack’s turn to move from his spot on the bed, as he waltzed over to a nearby drink cart and poured himself a fresh glass of whiskey glass, took a long sip, and exhaled with the deep satisfaction of a man at genuine peace with every decision he had made in the last several hours. He looked at Bunny where she laid against the linens, a beautiful and thoroughly claimed wreck of a woman. Then he turned to look at his brother across the room.

"She can't go back on the floor," he said.

Smoke wrung the cloth out over the basin. "Mm?"

"I'm serious, Eli. Her talent is undeniable. That thang she did with them hips is somethin' I intend to study at length for the next several weeks of my life." He took another sip. "But her control? Her control is nonexistent. She finished too many damn times in one session. You put her in a room with a payin' client who came here expectin' an hour an she gon' be done in two minutes. That man gon' feel robbed an robbed men talk… an talkin' men bad for business." He set the glass down and crossed his arms over his chest like a man presenting a logical conclusion. "Two more weeks. Minimum. We retrain her every night ‘til she can hold back a nut the way a real doll ‘posed to."

Smoke stayed quiet as he came back to the bed, sat at its edge and looked at his twin with the knowing expression he wore when Stack was making an argument he wanted to put an immediate end to. "Elias," he said.

Stack looked at him.

"Drink ya' whiskey an shut the fuck up."

Stack sucked his teeth but he kept his eyes on Bunny.

Bunny turned her face against the pillow and looked at both of them from the comfortable horizontal vantage point of a woman who had been thoroughly wrecked. Smoke, quiet at the bed's edge, let his hand come to rest at her ankle. Stack, whiskey back in hand and gold tooth gleaming was already building his next argument with the enthusiasm of a man who was looking forward to the next two weeks considerably more than he is letting on.

"Two weeks," she mumbled underneath her breath, to the ceiling.

Stack pointed at her with excitement. "See! She gets it. That’s a good lil’ bunny rabbit."

"But the food stays the same," she added.

The room went quiet for a moment. 

Then Stack started laughing, full and genuine, the sound rolling through the room and finding all the corners. This time he pointed at Smoke with the glass. "Eli," he said, "I like her."

"I know," Smoke replied as he kept his hand on her ankle. “I know…” 

.

.

.

.

.

Author’s Note: Wowzers! See I ammmmm capable of writing the twins as civilized deviants… *cough* So… um… how about that Josie?? 😏

Nobody:

Bunny:

The first time Smoke notices something is wrong, it isn’t dramatic.

It isn’t a fall. A hospital call or the kind of moment that turns into a big story later.

It’s a Tuesday. Late afternoon. The light outside is thin and pale, and his mother is standing in the kitchen staring at the open pantry as if it’s a riddle she’s been given and refused the answer.

He’d come by after work, expecting to step into a house that still felt identical to his childhood, instead he was greeted by an eerie silence.

His father is at the table, glasses on, hands wrapped around a mug that’s been reheated too many times. The television is on without sound.

“Ma?” Smoke says, soft.

She turns, startled, eyes wide in a way that makes his stomach dip. Then she smiles too bright, too quick, as if she’s trying to cover up something.

“Oh. Baby.” She laughs. “I was—”

Her eyes move past him, then back. Searching for the right words.

“I was about to—” she tries again, and the words disappear.

Smoke stands still. He waits. He gives her time.

His father doesn’t move at all. Doesn’t intervene or rescue her from the moment.

That’s the part that makes Smoke finally look at him.

His father’s jaw isn’t clenched. His expression isn’t angry. It’s tired in a deeper way—tired with edges worn down.

“She can’t find the cereal,” his father says quietly, as if naming it makes it less terrifying.

His mother blinks, then frowns at the pantry again.

“The cereal’s not—” she mutters. “Somebody—”

Smoke steps forward, opens the right cabinet without thinking, and pulls the box down. Places it gently on the counter.

“There it is,” he says.

His mother stares at it like it’s appeared by magic. Then she laughs again, more fragile this time.

“Well, ain’t that somethin’,” she chuckled, as if God himself is playing jokes.

Smoke doesn’t laugh with her.

He kisses her forehead, quick—because he can’t do slow, not right then—and turns his face away before she can see what happens to his expression.

He takes a breath that doesn’t help and looks back toward the table.

“Pop,” he questions.

His father meets his eyes and says, in the same low tone he used to use when Smoke and Stack were kids and he didn’t want to scare them, “She’s had a rough few days.”

Smoke nods once.

A few days means it’s been happening. Quietly. Without Smoke witnessing it.

A few days means his father has been catching her before she falls off the edge herself.

A few days means Smoke is late.

After that, the house becomes a place Smoke goes to even when he has no reason to be there.

He comes with groceries no one asked for. He comes with takeout because his father has started forgetting to eat unless Smoke puts food in front of him. And he comes with mail he picked up from their mailbox downtown.

With him coming by the house daily, he starts noticing small things.

Sticky notes on the refrigerator: turn off stove in his father’s handwriting, the letters larger than Smoke remembers. A drawer half-open. A pot put away in the wrong cabinet. His mother’s purse hanging on the doorknob, keys inside, as if she was about to leave and forgot where.

Some days are fine.

Some days are even good.

His mother makes coffee and remembers everyone’s preferences, teasing Smoke about being too picky, Stack about being too messy and their father about being too stubborn. Those days feel almost normal, and Smoke hates them because they trick him into hope.

Other days…

His mother’s eyes skim over Smoke’s face as though she’s trying to place him in a line of people she once knew.

She calls him by his father’s name.

She asks where the boys are, and Smoke stands there with his hands at his sides, trying to answer in a way that doesn’t sound as helpless as he feels.

“The boys are right here, Ma,” he says once, voice careful.

She squints. “Don’t tease me. Y’all too grown.”

Smoke laughs because it’s easier than swallowing.

“Yeah,” he says. “We are.”

She stares at him, still unsure, then nods as if she’s decided to accept the lie.

On the drive home, Smoke grips the steering wheel so hard his knuckles ache. He keeps his eyes on the road because if he looks at anything else, he’ll see his mother’s face again—her confusion, her smile, the way she tried to cover it up so nobody would worry.

And the thought hits him in a cold, cruel way:

She is trying to protect them.

Even now.

Stack comes less.

Not because he doesn’t love her.

Because he loves her too much.

Smoke knew it the first time Stack slips out early.

It’s a Sunday. They’re all in the living room, his mother is sitting between them on the couch with a throw blanket folded neat across her lap. Their father is in his chair, remote in hand, pretending to watch a game.

Smoke has his arm along the back of the couch, shoulders heavy, trying to stay present. Stack is close enough that their knees touch. It used to happen naturally when they were kids, a habit that never completely left.

Their mother glances at Stack and smiles.

“You look good,” she says warmly.

Stack grins. “I’m always lookin’ good.”

She laughs. Then her smile falters, the way a candle flickers when a door opens.

“And you are…?” she asks him.

The room goes silent, but not in a dramatic way. In a way that feels accidental. The kind of silence where nobody knows what sound belongs next.

Stack’s grin freezes. Smoke sees his brother’s eyes glass over so fast it’s almost unnoticeable—almost.

“Ma, it’s me,” Stack says, too bright. Too loud. “Elias.”

Their mother’s face tightens with embarrassment.

“Of course,” she says quickly, reaching for his hand. “I know that.”

But her grip is uncertain, fingers patting his knuckles as if she’s searching for proof through touch.

Stack’s mouth opens like he’s going to say something else, then closes. He swallows, and Smoke can almost hear it.

“I—” Stack starts.

Smoke slides in, quick, gentle.

“Ma, you want some ice cream?” Smoke asks. “That butter pecan you like. We got it in the freezer.”

Their mother’s face brightens instantly.

“Oh, yes. Yes, baby. That sounds nice.”

Smoke stands, heading for the kitchen so Stack doesn’t have to hold that moment any longer than necessary.

He hears the couch creak. The front door opens, then closes.

By the time Smoke returns with bowls and spoons, Stack is gone.

Smoke doesn’t call him back.

But later, when Smoke walks outside and finds Stack sitting in his car with his forehead pressed against the steering wheel, Smoke taps on the window.

Stack rolls it down halfway. His eyes are red. He laughs once, bitter, because he can’t stand to let it be obvious.

“She looked right at me,” Stack says. “Right at me. And didn’t know who the fuck I was.”

Smoke leans against the car door. He doesn’t tell him to calm down or that it’ll be okay.

“It’s hard,” Smoke says.

Stack’s hands grip the wheel.

“I can’t do it,” he whispers. “I can’t sit there and watch her get lost in front of me. That’s my mama. That’s my—”

He breaks off, breath catching.

Smoke nods, slow.

“Then don’t,” Smoke says. “Not if it tears you up like this.”

Stack laughs again, shaky. “So what, you just gon’ do it alone?”

Smoke looks back at the house, where the lights glow warm behind the curtains. Their father’s silhouette moves past the living room window.

“No,” Smoke says quietly. “I’m not alone.”

But he doesn’t say what he’s thinking:

I’ll be the one who stays. 

Somebody has to.

Their father doesn’t want help.

Smoke learns that during the first real argument they have about it—an argument that isn’t raised voices, but something older. Something that has lived between them for years.

It starts with a brochure.

Smoke brings it over one evening, laying it on the kitchen table beside the mail and the unpaid bills and the little pile of pill bottles that keeps growing.

A memory care facility, not far from their neighborhood. Clean. Bright. Structured.

Safe.

Smoke taps the paper with two fingers.

“I looked into it,” he says, voice even. “They got good staffin’ ratios. They got a unit for early onset. They do activities. Therapy. They got security. She wouldn’t be—”

“She won’t be here,” his father interrupts.

Smoke looks up.

His father stands at the sink, hands in dishwater that’s gone cloudy. He doesn’t turn around, but his shoulders are rigid.

“This her home,” his father says. “I’m not puttin’ yo’ mama in some place where strangers—”

“Pop,” Smoke says, controlled. “They trained. It’s not—”

“It’s a place where folk go when they families don’t want to deal wit ‘em no more,” his father snaps, finally turning. His eyes flash with something fierce. “That’s what that shit it is.”

Smoke’s stomach twists.

“That’s not what I’m sayin’,” Smoke replies.

His father shakes his head like he’s trying to shake off the idea itself.

“You keep offerin’ solutions that get her out my sight,” he says. “You think I can sleep at night knowin’ she somewhere else? Not in this house? Not wit’ me?”

Smoke takes a breath, chooses his words.

“You think this is sustainable?” Smoke asks. “You think you can do this by yourself?”

His father’s face hardens.

“I been doin’ it,” he says.

Smoke’s voice drops lower, firmer only in honesty.

“And it’s eatin’ you alive.”

His father flinches at that, just barely.

For a moment, Smoke sees fear. Not anger.

Fear.

Then it’s gone, replaced with stubbornness.

“I made vows,” his father says. “I’m not leavin’ her.”

Smoke’s hands spread on the table, palms down.

“Nobody’s askin’ you to leave her,” Smoke says. “But you need help. You need someone here who knows what they doin’.”

His father scoffs, a small sound.

“And what. You want to hire a muthafucka to take my place?”

Smoke looks at him, and in that moment he understands something he’s been avoiding:

This isn’t just about his mother.

It’s about what his father can’t admit.

That he’s losing her.

That he can’t fix it.

That he can’t outwork this.

And Smoke, fortunately or unfortunately, is his son. The one who shows up with paperwork, solutions, money and thinks practicality can save them.

The one who mirrors his father’s worst habit: trying to wrestle fear into submission.

Smoke softens his tone.

“I’m not tryin’ to hire nobody to take your place,” he says. “I’m tryin’ to keep you from collapsin’.”

His father’s eyes flick toward the hallway where his mother is. Then back.

“She don’t need strangers,” his father says.

Smoke exhales slowly.

“Then it’s not strangers,” Smoke says. “It’s help. In-home. Somebody comes here. She stays here. You stay here. We bring the help to the house.”

His father hesitates. Smoke sees it. The smallest crack.

And Smoke presses gently through it.

“Let’s compromise,” Smoke says. “Just try it.”

His father doesn’t answer right away. He looks down at his hands, wet and pruned from the dishwater.

Finally he mutters, “Your brother agree wit’ this?”

Smoke doesn’t look away.

“Elias can’t be here the way I can,” Smoke says. “You know that.”

His father’s mouth tightens.

“He should still—”

“He loves her,” Smoke cuts in, then catches himself, breathes. “He loves her too much. He can’t handle seein’ her forget him. I’ll be here. I’m here.”

His father stares at him for a long time, eyes narrowed—assessing.

Then, grudgingly, he nods once.

“Fine,” he says. “In-home.”

Smoke’s shoulders loosen a fraction.

“We’ll cover it,” Smoke adds. “Me and Elias.”

His father’s pride flickers. He opens his mouth—

Smoke’s voice becomes firm.

“No,” Smoke says. “Don’t start. Not over money.”

His father’s expression darkens, irritation flaring hot.

“You always think money solve everythin’.”

Smoke holds his gaze.

“No,” Smoke says quietly. “But it’s just the only thing I can control.”

Silence drops over the kitchen, thick and heavy.

His father looks away first.

“Find somebody,” he says. “But they better be good.”

Smoke nods.

“I will.”

Finding the right person turns out to be its own kind of war.

Smoke doesn’t trust easily. He reads reviews. Checks licenses. Interviews agencies. Asks questions until people get uncomfortable. He watches their faces when they talk about dementia, about behavioral changes, about safety measures and dignity and patience.

He watches for the ones who say the right words like they’re reading off a script.

He needs someone who can do the job and still see his mother as a human—not a case.

When he finally gets the call, it comes on a Friday afternoon while he’s in his office pretending to work.

“Mr. Moore?” the agency coordinator says. “We have someone available who fits the level of care you requested. Skilled nursing, memory care experience. She’s been with us a while. Good references.”

Smoke sits up straighter.

“What’s her name?”

“Annie—,” the coordinator says, then gives the last name. “Carter.” Smoke repeats it in his head, trying to make it mean something. It doesn’t.

“Age?”

“Late twenties,” the coordinator says. “She has experience with early-onset cases.”

Smoke rubs his thumb along the edge of his phone.

“When can she start?”

“Monday.”

Smoke glances at his calendar, already knowing he’ll clear his schedule. Already knowing he’ll be at the house, no matter what.

“Okay,” he says. “Send me everything.”

He hangs up and stares at the blank space on his desk for a moment.

Monday.

A stranger will walk into their home.

A stranger will see his mother the way she is now.

A stranger will see his father’s exhaustion, Stack’s absence, Smoke’s frantic attempt to hold it all together with planning and presence.

Smoke hates that, but also needs that.

He leans back in his chair and closes his eyes.

In his mind, he sees his mother as she was—her laugh loud, her hands always warm, the way she moved through their lives with purpose. He remembers her telling them to stand up straight, to say thank you, to look people in the eye. He remembers her fixing Stack’s collar before school, pinching Smoke’s cheek even when he acted too grown to want it.

He thinks of the way she used to sing in the kitchen on Saturdays, dancing while she cooked, pulling their father into it until he smiled despite himself.

He opens his eyes again.

Monday.

He doesn’t know what he’s hoping for.

A miracle isn’t coming.

But maybe—just maybe—someone walking into the house with the right kind of hands can keep his mother comfortable longer. Can keep his father from drowning. Can keep Smoke from breaking in the corners of rooms no one checks.

Smoke picks up his phone and texts Stack.

We got in-home help startin’ Monday. Skilled nurse. Memory care.

A few minutes pass.

Then Stack replies:

Okay.

Then, after another pause:

She good, the nurse?

Smoke stares at the question, feeling a strange pressure behind his eyes.

He types:

I don’t know yet. But I’ll be there.

Stack replies almost immediately:

I’ll come when I can.

Smoke reads that one twice.

He doesn’t answer with anger.

He answers with truth.

I know.

Monday arrives cold, though it shouldn’t be. The sky is overcast, and the kind of gray that makes everything look muted.

Smoke gets to the house early.

His father is already up, already dressed. He’s made coffee and cleaned the kitchen like he’s expecting company he invited willingly. Because he wants the house to look normal. Because he wants to look capable.

“You didn’t have to come this early,” his father says when Smoke walks in.

Smoke sets a bag of pastries on the counter and shrugs out of his coat.

“Didn’t want you dealin’ with this alone,” Smoke replies.

His father scoffs, but it isn’t cutting. It’s almost grateful.

“You act like I’m soft.”

Smoke looks at him.

“You human,” Smoke says.

His father’s gaze holds for a moment, then slides away.

In the living room, his mother is awake, sitting in her usual chair by the window. Her hair is brushed. She’s wearing earrings—small pearls she’s had for years. She looks put together in a way that breaks Smoke’s heart, because it’s effort. It’s a performance she doesn’t realize she’s doing.

“Baby,” she says when she sees Smoke, and for a moment he feels relief so strong it almost drops him to his knees. She knows him. Today, she knows him.

He crosses the room, kisses her cheek.

“How you feelin’?” he asks.

She pats his hand.

“I’m fine,” she says firmly. “Yo’ daddy keep fussin’ over me.”

His father huffs from the doorway. “‘Cause you keep forgettin’ you left the stove on.”

She turns her head, offended.

“I did not.”

Smoke smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. He slides into the chair across from her, elbows on his knees.

“You got company comin’ today,” Smoke says gently.

His mother brightens.

“Oh? Who’s comin’?”

Smoke glances at the clock.

“Someone to help you out durin’ the day,” he says. “Just to make things easier for you and Pop.”

His mother’s smile falters for a second.

“I don’t need help,” she says, instinctive.

Smoke keeps his tone calm.

“I know you don’t,” he says. “But we doin’ it anyway. ‘Cause you deserve to have it easy.”

His mother looks between Smoke and his father as if trying to read what’s happening behind their words.

His father clears his throat.

“It’s just durin’ the day,” he says. “So I can run errands. Get some rest.”

His mother studies him, then nods as if she’s decided to allow it, not because she understands, but because she trusts him.

Smoke’s phone vibrates.

A notification from the agency: Nurse en route. ETA 5 minutes.

Smoke stands.

“I’ll get the door.”

As he walks down the hallway, he feels his pulse quicken. Not excitement or nerves, but something else.

A protective instinct.

This person is about to see them at their most exposed.

The doorbell rings. Smoke reaches the front door and pauses with his hand on the knob.

He exhales once, slow, controlled.

Then he opens it.

A woman stands on the porch with a tote bag slung over her shoulder and a folder tucked against her chest. She’s dressed in scrubs—simple, worn in, the fabric softened by too many washes. Her hair is pulled back neatly, not styled so much as managed.

Smoke is unprepared for her face though.

For the way her features settle—balanced, warm, unmistakably pretty without effort. For the quiet confidence in her posture. For the fact that she fills the doorway in a way he doesn’t expect, curves generous beneath the loose fabric, unmistakably feminine even in clothes designed to disappear a body.

But it’s her eyes that stop him.

Large. Dark. Soft in shape but not in awareness. The kind of eyes that take things in fully before responding. They don’t dart or skim. They rest on him, even and thoughtful, like she’s cataloging everything.

And her skin—

Smooth, deep brown, rich as polished wood in the morning light. It catches the sun at the edge of the porch, glowing without trying to. There’s something grounding about it. Familiar in a way he can’t place, but instinctively trusts.

He feels it before he understands it.

The composure. The warmth. The presence.

His brain clocks the details before his conscience steps in.

Then he straightens slightly, reins himself back.

Wrong time.

Wrong place.

This is his mother’s house. This woman is here to care for her.

The thought embarrasses him—not because he noticed, but because he had the audacity to notice at all.

She looks at him and smiles, easy and unforced.

“Hi,” she says. “I’m Annie Carter. I’m here for Mrs. Moore.”

Her voice is calm. Not sugary. Not forced. Just… present.

Smoke blinks once, caught off guard by how normal she seems. How unafraid.

He steps aside.

“Uhh—yes, come in,” he says, clearing his throat. “I’m Elijah, Mrs. Moore’s son.”

Annie nods as she crosses the threshold.

“Nice to meet you, Elijah.”

As she moves into the house, Smoke notices something small—how she doesn’t rush. How she looks around without staring. How she seems to register the photos on the wall, the silence, the weight, and doesn’t flinch.

His father appears behind him, posture stiff again.

Annie turns toward him, offering a hand.

“Mr. Moore?” she asks.

His father hesitates for half a beat, then shakes her hand.

“Yes.”

“I’m Annie Carter, thank you for having me,” Annie says. “I know this can feel… intrusive. But I’m going to work with what you already have in place. I’m not here to change your home. I’m here to support you.”

Mr. Moore’s expression stays guarded, but something in his shoulders eases.

Smoke watches Annie’s face closely, looking for cracks. Looking for signs of someone who will get overwhelmed, impatient, careless.

He doesn’t see any.

Annie turns her attention toward the living room.

“Would you like me to introduce myself to Mrs. Moore now?” she asks looking between Smoke and Mr. Moore.

Smoke nods.

Annie walks toward his mother with the same unhurried pace, like she understands that the space between people matters. When she reaches the chair, she lowers herself slightly, not in a towering or hovering way.

“Good morning,” Annie says warmly. “Mrs. Moore? My name is Annie. I’m going to be here with you during the day to help out.”

Smoke’s mother looks up at her, eyes narrowing in that familiar assessing way.

“Well,” she says, drawing the word out. “You’re pretty.”

Annie’s smile widens.

“Thank you, so are you,” she says, as if she’s genuinely pleased. “I love your earrings. Those pearls are beautiful.”

His mother touches her earlobe, surprised, delighted.

“Oh… these old things?” she says, suddenly shy. “I’ve had these forever.”

“They suit you,” Annie says.

Smoke feels it—his mother’s attention locking onto Annie’s face, her expression softening. The way her shoulders drop, relaxing without even realizing it.

And Smoke realizes, with a strange pull in his chest:

His mother feels safe with her already.

His father clears his throat, resisting emotion through irritation.

“What exactly will you be doin’, Ms. Carter?” he asks.

Annie turns toward Mrs. Moore. 

“I’m just going to speak with your husband for a moment, alright?” she says gently. “I’ll be right back.”

Mrs. Moore nods, distracted by the framed photos on the mantel.

Mr. Moore follows.

They move a few steps away, voices lowered but not secretive.

“Please, call me Annie. I’ll be with her during the day,” Annie explains calmly. “I’ll help make sure she takes her meds on time, stays safe, and has some kind of routine—nothing rigid, just familiar. I’ll pay attention to things that may upset her, what settles her, what she responds to. And I’ll keep notes so you’re not guessing. We’ll take it one day at a time.”

His father’s eyes narrow.

“And if she gets upset?”

Annie doesn’t flinch.

“Then we slow down,” she says. “We don’t argue with her reality. We redirect gently. We keep her dignity intact.”

Smoke watches his father’s expression change—not fully trusting yet, but listening.

Annie looks back at Smoke’s mother.

“Would it be okay if I sat with you for a bit?” Annie asks.

His mother nods, already leaning into Annie’s presence.

Smoke stands there, hands at his sides, feeling… uncertain.

Not because Annie has done anything wrong.

Because Annie has done everything right.

In the span of five minutes, she has entered their home and eased something that Smoke has been wrestling for months.

It’s relief.

It’s jealousy.

It’s fear.

It’s hope, which is the most dangerous one.

Smoke steps back toward the hallway, giving them space, but he doesn’t leave. He stays where he can see, where he can hear.

Annie begins talking to his mother—not big questions. Simple conversation, gentle humor. She asks what Mrs. Moore likes for breakfast. What music she enjoys. What she did for work when the boys were little.

His mother answers in fragments, sometimes wrong, sometimes half-true, and Annie listens intently. She follows her down each path as if it’s worth walking.

Smoke’s throat tightens.

He looks toward his father, who stands near the doorway, arms crossed, watching. His eyes are damp, but his face remains controlled, as if he’s refusing to let anyone see the softness.

Smoke understands that too well.

Annie laughs quietly at something his mother says, and his mother laughs back, a warm sound that fills the room.

Smoke closes his eyes for a second, just to hold it.

When he opens them again, Annie looks up—briefly—and meets Smoke’s gaze across the room.

There’s no flirtation in it.

No invitation.

Just an acknowledgment.

A silent message that lands without words:

I see what you’re carrying.

Smoke doesn’t look away.

He gives a small nod, almost imperceptible.

Because for the first time in a long time, the house doesn’t feel quite so airless.

And Smoke realizes something else, too—something he won’t say out loud yet:

He’s going to come every day.

Not because he doesn’t trust Annie.

But because he doesn’t trust himself to miss whatever moments his mother can still give them.

And because there’s a presence in his family’s home now that makes the grief less lonely.

He watches Annie smooth the throw blanket over his mother’s knees, fingers careful as they tuck the fabric just beneath her hands. The movement is unhurried. Familiar. She adjusts it without fuss, like she’s done it a hundred times before, like comfort is something she knows how to place precisely.

He steps forward at the same moment she does, instinctively reaching to fix the corner she’s already straightening. Their hands hover inches apart, close enough to feel the warmth from each other’s skin.

Neither of them touches.

She withdraws first, subtle, giving him room he didn’t realize he needed.

The space between them lingers longer than it should. Not empty. Not accidental.

And for the first time, Elijah feels the pull—not loud, not dramatic—just a quiet awareness that something has begun to move beneath the surface, slow and patient, waiting for its moment.

End Note: So what do you think so far? 😏

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