All other masterlists of mine, likely those fics are no longer on Tumblr.
Alternatively just use the hashtag #MelodicFic and all my fics will show up.
Sinners 👹
The Moore Kind (Smoke x Annie x Stack)
Ours to Keep
>>>>> Part 2
>>>>> Part 3
>>>>> Part 4
>>>>> Part 5
Her House, Her Rules
Pour Me Another Lie
>>>>> Part 2
What you Spit, I Swallowed
>>>>> Part 2 (A Reckoning)
>>>>> Part 3 (A Reminder)
Late, but Loved
Signed in Crayon, Sealed in Cash
The Moore the Merrier
Where Want Waits (Stack Moore x Annie)
Everything
>>>> Part 2
>>>> Part 3
Wisteria Lane
Other Works (Not The Moore Kind)
Two of a Kind
>>>> Part 2
>>>> Part 3 (NEW)
>>>> Part 4
>>>> Part 5
One Shots (Smoke Moore x Annie)
Mind Your Manners (Smoke Moore x Annie/Reader)
A Warm Spring Sunday 💐(Smoke Moore x Annie)
Touch of a Woman (Smoke Moore x Annie)
Shorts
Weight
Black Panther ⚡️
Erik
In Between the Lines [series]
As walls begin to crack, Erik & Elloise are forced to confront the blurred lines between survival and softness, power and tenderness. In this slow-burn romance with bite, intimacy isn't just physical—it's transformative.
Teaser | Part 1 | Part 2
In Me (Erik Stevens x OC)
Long, Lost & Found (Erik Stevens x OC)
Ask for it (Erik Stevens x OC) Short
T'Challa
Like a Cream Puff (T’Challa x OC)
Read at your own risk... Discontinued
There Will Be No Tears (and if you read this, you will have tears lol)
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Chapter 3 - Two of a Kind [Smoke Moore x Annie x Stack Moore]
Preview:"The difference between me and my brother," he said, his voice still quiet, still even, still so terrifyingly calm, "is that Smoke don't got a temper. Never did. Man was born patient." He looked at her steadily. "I wasn't."
Word Count: idk 😗
Warning ⚠️: They're not a trio. But everyone eats eventually 🤪
<<< Chapter 2
___
She slept better than she expected.
That was the first thing — waking up on Day 2 to light coming through the curtains at a normal hour, no pre-dawn sounds of someone else moving through the house, no particular weight of being monitored. Just morning. Just hers.
She lay there a moment taking stock of it.
The house was quiet. Stack was either still asleep or already up and keeping himself scarce, and either way she couldn't hear him, which meant she could pretend for a few minutes that she was alone. That it was just her and the morning and nobody's schedule but her own.
She got up. Didn't bother pinning her hair.
Came downstairs in her robe with her feet bare and the day entirely unscheduled in front of her and felt something loosen in her chest that she hadn't realized was tight.
Stack was at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the newspaper, already dressed, and he looked up when she came in.
"Morning."
"Morning." She moved past him to the stove, put the kettle on. He went back to his paper.
She stood at the counter waiting for the water to boil and looked out the window at the yard and didn't explain herself or account for her appearance or feel the particular low-grade awareness she always had of Smoke clocking the details of her. The unbrushed hair. The bare feet. Whether she'd slept well or poorly and what that meant and whether she needed something she wasn't asking for.
Stack just turned a page.
It was, she thought, a little bit wonderful.
The walk into town she decided on after breakfast. Nothing necessary — she wanted thread from the dry goods store, a specific color she'd been thinking about for the sewing project, and normally she would have asked Lennie to pick it up or added it to the list she gave Smoke and waited. But Lennie wasn't due until noon and it was a twenty minute walk on a pretty morning and there was no reason in the world she couldn't just go.
She came downstairs with her hat and her pocketbook and found Stack on the back porch.
"I'm walking into town," she said through the screen door. "Need a few things."
He looked up from whatever he was reading. Took her in — hat, pocketbook, the set of her that said she'd already decided.
"What time you think you'll be back?" he asked.
Not: you sure that's a good idea. Not: I'll have someone drive you. Not: what do you need, I can send for it.
Just — what time.
Annie blinked. "An hour. Maybe a little more."
He nodded. Looked back at his reading. "Alright."
She stood there a half second longer than she needed to, waiting for the rest of it. The caveat. The condition. The gentle redirection dressed up as concern.
It didn't come.
She went into town. Took her time about it. Stopped at the dry goods store, chatted with the woman behind the counter longer than strictly necessary, walked back the long way around past the church because the trees were pretty and the morning was fine and she could.
She was gone almost two hours.
When she got home Stack was in the sitting room and didn't look up from his book except to say, "Get what you needed?"
"Yes," she said, a little surprised.
"Good." He turned a page.
Annie went upstairs and put her things away and stood at the bedroom window for a moment.
Hm, she thought.
That evening she poured herself a third bourbon.
She didn't plan it. The first two had gone down easy on the porch, the night warm and the company quiet and pleasant enough, and she reached for the bottle again without really deciding to. Just did it the way she'd do it if she were alone.
Stack watched her pour.
Said nothing.
She set the bottle down. Took a sip. Looked out at the yard.
After a moment: "Smoke let you drink like that?"
Not an accusation. Not even quite a question. Just — conversational. Curious, almost.
Annie felt something move through her. Not guilt. Something more like being seen doing something she hadn't realized she was doing.
Smoke did not let her drink like that. Because Annie didn’t take bourbon well. She said it made her mean (and it did.)
But she didn’t say that. Instead she responded with "I'm a grown woman," she said.
"Mhm." He looked back at the yard.
That was it. That was all of it. He didn't push, didn't note it again, didn't give her the careful measured speech about what was appropriate.
But she felt it.
That considering quality in how he'd looked at her. Like he was making a note of something. Filing it away without comment.
She drank the third bourbon. It didn't taste quite as easy as she'd expected.
Later — later than she usually stayed up, later than she would have with Smoke in the house — she was still on the porch when the screen door opened and Stack stepped out.
He didn't say anything at first. Just looked at her, then up at the sky, then back at her.
"You turning in soon?" he asked.
Easy. Mild. Like it was just a passing thought.
"Eventually," she said.
He nodded. Went back inside.
Annie sat another twenty minutes out of principle. Then she went to bed.
She lay in the dark and thought about the way he'd asked what time she'd be back from town. The way he'd watched her pour the third drink. The way eventually had been accepted without argument.
He was easy, she decided. Easier than she'd expected. A little watchful, maybe, but fundamentally easy.
She could work with easy.
She pulled the quilt up and closed her eyes, comfortable in her assessment, already thinking about tomorrow.
She didn't notice that she'd answered his question.
She didn't notice that she'd come inside.
The invitation came on Day 3.
Pearl called in the late morning, her voice bright and unhurried through the receiver, the way Pearl always was — like she had all the time in the world and assumed you did too.
"Supper at Dottie's tonight," she said. "Just the girls. Dottie's making that roast and you know how she gets when folks don't show up for her roast."
Annie laughed. "I know."
"So you coming."
She hesitated, and hated herself for it. Hated that her first instinct was to calculate — to run through the variables the way she'd learned to, to anticipate the objection before it came. She wasn't even thinking about Smoke. She was thinking about Stack.
Which meant, she realized, that she'd already accepted that there was someone to answer to.
"I'll let you know by noon," she said.
Pearl made a sound. "Annie Moore, it's supper, not a summit—"
"By noon, Pearl."
She hung up and sat with the phone a moment.
Then she found Stack.
He was in the back garden — she hadn't known he was a man who sat in gardens, that seemed like information about him, something that didn't fit the outline she'd built — with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled and a cup of coffee going cold on the step beside him. He looked up when she came out.
"Something wrong?" he asked.
"No." She came and stood a few feet away, arms loose at her sides. Decided directness was the right approach — not asking permission, just stating the situation. "I've been invited to supper at a friend's tonight. A few of the girls. I'd like to go."
Stack looked at her.
Not the considering look from the bourbon — something more engaged than that. Like she'd said something that required actual thought and he was giving it actual thought, which was not what she'd expected.
She'd expected yes or no. Quick and clean.
He picked up his coffee. Took a sip even though it had to be cold by now. "What time?"
"Supper's at seven. It's Dottie Campbell's place, about fifteen minutes by car."
"You'd drive yourself?"
"Lennie would take me."
He nodded slowly. Set the cup back down. "What time you thinking you'd be home?"
And there it was — not no, not let me think about whether I'll allow that, just the practical question. The time. Like a man working out the shape of something reasonable.
Annie kept her expression neutral. "Ten. Ten thirty at the latest."
He was quiet a moment. She watched him think and tried not to read too much into the fact that he was thinking rather than just deciding.
"Alright," he said.
She blinked. "Alright?"
"You heard me." The corner of his mouth moved. "Ten thirty, Annie. Not eleven, not around ten thirty. Lennie brings you home by ten thirty."
"Ten thirty," she repeated.
"And you call here before you leave Dottie's. So I know you on your way."
She looked at him. "That's it?"
"That's it."
It was so reasonable she didn't know what to do with it. She'd come out here braced for negotiation, prepared with her arguments, ready to be measured and calm and persuasive — and he'd just said yes with two conditions that were so sensible she couldn't even object to them.
"Okay," she said, a little deflated.
Stack picked up his coffee again. "Tell Pearl I said hello."
Annie went inside and called Pearl back and told her she was coming and didn't mention Stack at all, because there was nothing to mention. Because it had been fine. Because he'd been completely, utterly reasonable.
She got ready that evening with something that felt almost like lightness. Put on the green dress, the good earrings, pinned her hair up properly. Looked at herself in the mirror without the particular weight of someone else's opinion of her appearance hovering at the edges.
Lennie drove her over at quarter to seven.
Dottie's was warm and loud and full of food and women who loved each other, and Annie sat in the middle of it and felt, for the first time in longer than she wanted to admit, like herself.
Just herself. Not someone's wife. Not someone's responsibility. Not a woman carefully within the boundaries of what was permitted.
Just Annie.
Pearl poured her something that was definitely not sweet wine and Annie drank it and laughed too loud at something Dottie said and had seconds of the lamb and felt the evening open up around her like a window she'd forgotten could open.
By nine thirty she was glowing.
By ten she was in the middle of a story that had the whole table leaning in.
At ten fifteen Pearl refilled her glass and someone put a record on and Dottie's cousin started dancing in the kitchen doorway and Annie thought—
Ten thirty.
She thought about it.
Looked around the table at these women, at this warmth, at the particular freedom of an evening that belonged entirely to her.
Stack had said ten thirty.
Stack, who had been perfectly reasonable. Who had let her walk into town alone and said nothing about the third bourbon and asked if she was turning in soon like it was just a passing thought. Stack who was, fundamentally, easier than Smoke.
Surely ten thirty was a guideline. A suggestion. The kind of thing a reasonable man said and a reasonable woman interpreted with some flexibility.
She didn't call before she left.
She told herself she'd forgotten, which wasn't entirely true.
Lennie pulled up to the house at eleven forty.
Annie smoothed her dress getting out of the car. The porch light was on. The house was lit from within, warm and quiet looking, and she stood on the front walk for just a moment breathing the night air, still warm from the evening, still full of Dottie's lamb and Pearl's laugh and the particular satisfaction of a night that had been entirely hers.
She went up the porch steps.
Opened the front door.
Stack was in the armchair in the sitting room facing the door.
Not pacing. Not standing. Just — sitting. Still and straight and entirely awake, one hand resting on the arm of the chair, the lamp on the table beside him throwing his face into sharp relief.
He looked at her.
Didn't say anything.
Didn't move.
Just looked at her the way a man looks at something he's been waiting on for a while, with a patience that had long since stopped being comfortable and become something else entirely.
Annie felt the warmth of the evening leave her body one degree at a time.
She thought about the phone call she hadn't made.
She thought about ten thirty.
She thought about the way she'd told herself surely and flexibility and fundamentally easier while Pearl refilled her glass.
The clock on the mantle read eleven forty-three.
"Stack—" she started.
"Close the door, Annie," he said quietly.
She closed the door.
The click of the latch was very loud in the silence.
Stack looked at her for a long moment. Long enough that she had to work to hold still under it, had to resist the urge to explain herself, to fill the silence with something.
Then he said, almost conversationally:
"You know, I told myself I was gon' be easier on you than he is."
Annie said nothing.
"Told Smoke the same thing." He tilted his head slightly.
"Said you didn't need nobody running your life for you every minute. That you were a grown woman and you'd act like one if somebody just gave you the room to."
The clock ticked.
"I believed that," he said. "I want you to know that. I really believed it."
He stood up then. Slow and unhurried, the way he did everything, unfolding from the chair to his full height. Took one step toward her. Just one.
"The difference between me and my brother," he said, his voice still quiet, still even, still so terrifyingly calm, "is that Smoke don't got a temper. Never did. Man was born patient." He looked at her steadily. "I wasn't."
Annie's heart was doing something uncomfortable in her chest.
"He's the better man," Stack said simply. "He's always been better than me. More controlled. More measured." A pause. "Unfortunately for you, he ain't the one standing in this room."
The silence that followed had weight to it.
"So I'm gon' ask you one time," he said. "And I want you to think very carefully before you answer."
He looked at her.
"What time did you say you’d be home?"
<<< Chapter 2
__________
A/N Not me pumping out these chapters 🤪 I been sitting on so much work and for that I'm truly sorry. But mama is backkk. Ours to Keep is killin' me lol. But that's truly my fave body of work so I will be putting both my feet and elbows in that to make sure that storyline is tight. Hope you enjoy this one as well, and as always your thoughts are welcomed and appreciated!
__________
My other works can be found in My Masterlist. Thanks for reading!
___________
All Fic Taglist - Interested in my future works? Let me know if you'd like me to add you to my tag list. (Also lmk if you want me to remove you. No hard feelings I promise.)
Chapter 2 - Two of a Kind [Smoke Moore x Annie x Stack Moore]
Preview: "Sugar." His voice dropped. Softer now. Almost careful. "Please don't do this."
"I'm not doing anything." She examined a loose thread on her sewing. "I'm just asking questions. You can answer them or not. You the one leaving."
Word Count: 4.8k
Warning ⚠️: They're not a trio. But everyone eats eventually 🤪
<<< Chapter 1
___
Annie woke to the sound of nothing.
No footsteps in the hall. No water running. No low hum of Smoke moving through his morning the way he always did — deliberate, unhurried, already two steps ahead of the day before she'd even opened her eyes.
Just quiet.
She lay still for a moment, ceiling overhead, the sheets on his side undisturbed and cool to the touch when she pressed her palm flat against them. He'd slept in the study. She'd known he would. He'd said as much when he walked out. And still, the confirmation of it — the empty, unslept side of the bed — sat in her chest like something swallowed wrong.
She should be angry. She was angry.
She just couldn't locate it cleanly this morning.
It kept getting tangled up with something quieter and harder to name — that particular loneliness that came not from being alone, but from being the one who'd said the wrong thing. Even if the wrong thing had been true.
Smothering.
The word sat at the back of her throat where she'd left it the night before.
She'd meant it. She still meant it. But she understood what it had done when it landed — watched his face close like a door, watched something hurt move through him before the stillness came down. Smoke didn't yell. Didn't throw things. Just went quiet in a way that was worse than either, and then he was gone.
Annie sat up. Reached for her robe off the bedpost.
The house had its morning sounds — birds off the back property, the faint tick of the pipes settling. Normal sounds. Her sounds. Except for the study door, closed at the end of the hall when she stepped out, the line of light beneath it already gone.
He was up. Already.
She stood there a moment longer than she needed to.
Then she went downstairs and put the kettle on.
She didn't go to him. That was the thing she decided in the space between filling the kettle and setting it on the flame. She wasn't going to go to him. She wasn't going to knock on that door, wasn't going to be the one to smooth it over, to make herself small enough to fit back into his good graces before she'd even had her tea.
She'd said a true thing.
He could come to her.
But by the time the kettle whistled and she'd poured her cup and stood at the kitchen window long enough for the steam to thin, she heard his footsteps on the stairs. Steady. Even. Like nothing had happened.
Like nothing had happened.
He appeared in the kitchen doorway dressed for the day — shirt pressed, collar buttoned, shoes already on — and Annie wrapped both hands around her mug and looked at him.
"Morning," he said.
"Morning."
He moved to the stove like it was any other day. Poured his own coffee. She watched him do it — the economy of it, how he took up space without asking for it, how he was already so thoroughly himself while she was still half-assembled.
"You eat?" he asked.
"Not yet."
He nodded. Leaned against the counter across from her, cup in hand, and looked at her with that particular expression he had — patient, contained, like he was waiting for her to catch up to something he'd already sorted through in the night.
It made her want to throw her mug at him.
"You slept alright?" she asked instead, and she heard the edge in it even as it left her mouth.
Something moved behind his eyes. "Fine."
"Good." She turned back to the window. "That's good."
The silence stretched between them — not comfortable, not exactly hostile. Just there. Full of last night and everything that hadn't been resolved and his footsteps going down the hall and the study door closing and her standing alone by the vanity realizing she felt guilty for something that had been the truth.
She heard him set his cup down.
"Annie."
"I ain’t apologizing," she said. She didn't turn around.
A pause.
"Didn't ask you to."
She turned then. He was looking at her steadily, and there was nothing in his face she could argue with — no anger, no wounded pride dressed up as calm. Just him. Looking at her like she was the only thing in the room worth looking at, like he could stand here all morning if that's what it took.
"You didn't come to bed," she said.
"No."
"Because I said the truth."
His jaw shifted. "Because you needed space."
"I needed—" She stopped. Let out a breath. "I needed to not feel like a prisoner in my own house, Elijah."
"You ain't a prisoner."
"I know what I said."
"So do I." His voice was quiet. Level. "And I heard you."
That landed differently than she expected. She waited for the rest of it — the correction, the reframing, the gentle redirection that always came dressed as understanding. But he just stood there, cup on the counter, watching her.
"You heard me," she repeated.
"I heard you." He picked up his cup again. Finished the last of his coffee. Set it in the sink. "I got some business to handle this morning. Be back before noon."
And that was it.
He pressed a kiss to her temple on the way past — brief, certain, like punctuation — and then he was gone. She heard the front door, the particular sound of it closing behind him. Not slammed. Just shut.
Annie stood in the kitchen, mug in both hands, and tried to decide if being heard was the same thing as being understood.
She decided it wasn't.
But she drank her tea anyway.
_____
He came back before noon, like he said.
Annie was in the sitting room with her sewing when she heard the door — and then his footsteps, and then the particular way they slowed at the bottom of the stairs — hesitant, almost, which was not a word she associated with Elijah Moore — before he found her.
He appeared in the doorway still in his morning clothes, hat turning slowly in his hands.
She looked up. Looked at his hands. Looked back at her sewing.
"You busy?" he asked.
"No more than usual."
He came in. Sat across from her in his armchair and didn't say anything right away, which told her more than words would have. Smoke always knew what he was going to say before he said it. The fact that he was sitting there turning his hat in his hands like a schoolboy outside the principal's office meant whatever was coming, he'd been dreading it.
She kept her needle moving. Let him sit in it.
"I got business up north," he finally said. "Have to leave Thursday."
Her needle stilled.
She didn't look up yet. Just let it land. Let it take up space in the room.
"How long," she said.
"Five days. Maybe six."
Now she looked up. He was watching her with an expression she didn't see often — something tight around the eyes, something working in his jaw. Not the controlled stillness he usually wore. Something more like a man bracing.
"You telling me…" she said, "now?"
"I found out yesterday."
She set her sewing down slowly. Folded her hands in her lap. "Yesterday."
"Annie—"
"You came home last night," she said, measured, "sat across from me at dinner, argued with me about a beach trip, slept in your study — and the whole time you already knew you were leaving Thursday."
His jaw tightened. "I ain’t think it was the right moment."
"Mm." She looked at him a moment longer, then picked her sewing back up. Let the silence stretch.
She could see it working on him. Could see him trying to find solid ground and not quite getting there. Good.
"I can’t skate," he said. "If there was any other way—"
"I'm sure."
"I mean it, Annie."
"I know you mean it." She turned her sewing in her hands, not really seeing it. "You always mean it, Elijah. That's never been the question."
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped. The hat had been set aside. He was looking at her the way he sometimes did when he was really looking — not managing her, not steering, just looking. Raw around the edges in a way he'd never allow in front of anyone else.
"I hate it," he said quietly. "I want you to know that. I don't—" He stopped. Pressed his mouth together. "I don't like leaving you."
And there it was.
That soft, exposed place he only ever showed her. The obsessive, devoted, slightly unhinged part of him that needed her the way some men needed air — not gracefully, not lightly, but desperately, completely, in a way that sometimes felt like drowning and sometimes felt like the only solid thing in the world.
Annie felt it. Felt the pull of it, the familiar ache.
And then she felt something else.
The particular shift that happened when the balance tipped — when he needed her more than she needed him in this moment, when the power that was usually his came loose and floated in the space between them, waiting to be claimed.
She set her sewing aside. Looked at him directly.
"Is there anything more important to you than me?" she asked.
His head came up. "What?"
"It's a simple question." Her voice was soft. Almost sweet. "Is there something up north more important than me? Your wife?"
"No — of course not—"
"Then why are you going?"
"Annie, it's business, it ain’t a matter of—"
"But you just said there was no other way." She tilted her head. "So something up north requires you specifically. Requires you to leave. To be gone for almost a week." She let a beat pass.
"That sounds like something that matters more than me."
"That is not—" He looked almost pained. "That's not what this is."
She said nothing. Just watched him.
"You my world," he said, and his voice had gone rough at the edges. "You know that. There is nothing — Annie, there is not a thing on this earth I put above you. This is business. It's — it's not a choice."
"Everything's a choice, Elijah."
He ran a hand over his face. She watched him do it — watched the fracture in his composure — and kept her expression perfectly, serenely neutral. Patient. Like she had all the time in the world. Like she wasn't quietly turning a blade.
"I don't believe you don't have options," she said lightly. "You Smoke Moore. You always have options. You just decided this one required you."
"It does require me—"
"Mm." She turned her face slightly away. Just enough. Let him see her doubt it. Let him see her pull back.
She heard his breath change.
"Sugar." His voice dropped. Softer now. Almost careful. "Please don't do this."
"I'm not doing anything." She examined a loose thread on her sewing. "I'm just asking questions. You can answer them or not. You the one leaving."
The silence that followed was thick with him trying to hold himself together. She could feel it. Could feel him across the room like a weather system, all that intensity with nowhere to go, looking for a way back in and finding the door closed.
Good, she thought again. Feel it.
Because she felt it every time he told her no. Every time he handed her back her request, her independence, her small attempts at a life that was also hers — firm and gentle and completely immovable. He never seemed to feel the cost of that. Never seemed to register what it took from her to be contained so lovingly, so thoroughly.
Let him register something for once.
"I'll make arrangements," he started, reaching for the practical. "Lennie will be here, you'll have everything you need, all the accounts—"
"I know about the accounts."
"I'm just saying—"
"Elijah." She looked at him. "I know about the accounts. I'm not worried about money."
He fell quiet.
"I'm worried," she said, softer, and let just enough of the real thing into her voice — just enough genuine hurt to make it land — "about being here. Alone. In this house. While you're in another city." She paused. "Other women seeing a handsome man traveling by himself. Thinking he might be available."
"Annie—" The flash of something almost desperate crossed his face. "You know I would never—"
"I know what you say."
"It's what I mean—"
"Then you should stay." She picked her sewing back up. Simple. Final. "If I'm your world, stay."
"I can't—"
"Can't or won't?"
"Annie, please—"
And there it was. Please. From Elijah Moore. Turning his hat in his hands and saying please to her in his own sitting room like she held something he needed.
She kept her eyes on her sewing.
Let him sit in it just a little longer.
Then, without looking up:
"Who's going to be here with me?"
A pause.
"I asked Stack to come stay."
She looked up slowly. Let him see the full weight of that land on her face — the offense, the disbelief, the particular exhaustion of a woman who has just been told her husband is leaving and also that he doesn't trust her alone.
"Your brother," she said.
"He's family—"
"Will be in my house. Watching me. Like I'm something that needs minding."
"That's not—"
"While you up north." She stared at him. "With other women. Who don't know you're taken."
He looked, genuinely, like a man being pulled in four directions at once. The guilt of leaving. The defensiveness of being doubted. The obsessive need to know she was safe. The desperate desire for her not to be angry.
She watched him cycle through all of it.
Then she picked up her needle, turned back to her work, and said pleasantly:
"Well. I hope that business of yours up north is worth it."
And left him sitting there with nothing to do but feel the weight of every single thing she hadn't said.
____
He left Thursday morning before the sun was fully up.
Annie was awake. Had been for an hour. She lay on her side facing the window while he moved through the room in the grey pre-dawn quiet — the soft sounds of him dressing, the drawer opening and closing, the particular weight of him sitting on the edge of the bed to put his shoes on.
She didn't turn over.
She heard him pause.
"Angel."
She kept her eyes on the window. The sky was doing that thing it did just before light, that deep blue that wasn't quite night anymore but hadn't committed to morning either.
"Annie." His hand came to her shoulder, warm through the thin cotton of her nightgown. "I'm heading out."
"I know."
"Look at me before I go."
She didn't. She pulled the quilt up a little instead, tucking it under her chin. Small. Deliberate.
She heard his exhale. Long and quiet and controlled, the way he controlled everything — but underneath it, just barely, something fraying.
"Baby, please."
"Have a safe trip, Smoke."
He noted the switch. Seems he wasn’t Elijah to her today.
The hand on her shoulder tightened slightly. Not rough. Just — needing. Like he could hold on long enough to make her turn around.
She didn't turn around.
After a moment he leaned down and pressed his lips to her hair. Stayed there a beat too long — breathing her in, she knew, the way he always did, that particular obsessive cataloguing of her that he probably didn't even realize he did. Like he was memorizing something he was afraid of losing.
She closed her eyes and said nothing.
"I'll call tonight," he said against her hair. "When I get in."
"Mm."
Another pause. She could feel him standing at the side of the bed, could feel him looking at her curled up with her back to him, and she knew exactly what it was doing to him — knew because she knew him, knew every frequency of his obsession, knew that leaving on bad terms was the particular hell he'd built for himself by needing her the way he did.
Good.
The bed dipped as he straightened. She heard him pick up his bag. Cross to the door.
He stopped in the doorway.
She waited.
"I love you," he said. Rough at the edges. Not his usual register — not warm and certain, not a statement so much as something he needed her to have before he walked out.
Annie pulled the quilt a little higher.
"Lock the door on your way out," she said.
The silence that followed lasted three full seconds. She counted them.
Then his footsteps down the hall. The stairs. The front door, closing with a quiet, careful click — like even in leaving he was trying not to disturb her.
She lay there for a long time after.
The room was very still and very his — his smell on the pillow beside her, his book still open on the nightstand, a cufflink he'd missed gleaming dully on the dresser.
She didn't feel as victorious as she'd expected to.
She felt the absence of him like a change in air pressure. Immediate and total, the way it always was — because that was the other side of loving Elijah Moore, the thing she never said out loud. That his presence was so complete, so all-encompassing, that when he left the room it registered in her body before her mind caught up.
She hated that.
She hated that she could be furious with him and still feel the shape of where he'd been.
She lay there another half hour. Then she got up, put on her robe, and went downstairs to make her tea.
___
Lennie arrived at eight.
She'd come about three years ago. Smoke had noticed Annie doing everything herself — the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry, the preserving, the mending, all of it stacked on top of each other from first light to last — and had decided, with the particular logic of a man who loved you and didn't always ask first, that it didn't make a lick of sense for her to be doing all that alone. He'd shown up one Tuesday morning with Lennie behind him and said this is Lennie, she'll be here weekdays like it was already settled. Because it was already settled.
Annie had bristled. Had opened her mouth to explain that she didn't need — that she was perfectly capable — that this house was hers to run and she ran it fine —
Smoke had kissed her forehead and gone back to work.
Lennie had watched him go. Waited until his footsteps faded all the way down the front walk and the door had closed behind him. Then she'd turned to Annie, calm and unhurried, and said:
"I'm old enough to know I work for you, baby. Mr. Smoke just cut the check."
That had been that.
Stack was due by evening.
Annie moved through the morning the way she moved through most things she couldn't control — with her hands busy and her face composed and the part of her that was genuinely unsettled tucked away somewhere it wouldn't show.
She baked. Reorganized the linen cupboard. Sat on the back porch with her second cup of tea and watched the property in the late morning quiet and tried not to think about the fact that by tonight this house would have someone else in it.
Stack.
She'd known Stack for as long as she'd known Smoke — which meant she knew him the way you knew a man's brother. At a slight remove. Through the lens of someone else's love for him. He was easier than Smoke on the surface, quicker to laugh, less likely to let a silence stretch until you felt it in your teeth. He'd always been kind to her. Warm, even.
She'd never had occasion to test what was underneath that.
She wasn't particularly worried about it.
He was Smoke's brother, not Smoke. Whatever this arrangement was — whatever name Smoke had put on it when he'd called Stack and asked this of him — it was going to be five days of someone in her space, underfoot, pretending she needed looking after.
She could manage that.
She was good at managing things.
She heard the car at half past six.
She was in the kitchen, something on the stove, hair pinned up, apron still on — and she'd told herself she wasn't going to go to the door, wasn't going to receive him like company, because he wasn't company. He was an imposition dressed up as a favor and she wasn't going to pretend otherwise.
She heard Lennie let him in. Heard his voice in the front hall — and then Lennie's laugh, bright and surprised, the kind that got pulled out of a person before they'd decided to give it. Then something that sounded like Lennie swatting him on the arm and telling him to behave, and his laugh underneath it, low and genuine.
Annie stirred her pot and said nothing.
His footsteps moved through the house unhurried, like he'd been here a hundred times, like the layout was already his. And then he appeared in the kitchen doorway and she turned just slightly, enough to acknowledge him without welcoming him.
He was leaning against the frame with his jacket already off and his sleeves half-rolled, bag presumably already dealt with, looking for all the world like a man who'd come home rather than arrived somewhere he'd been sent.
"Something smells incredible," he said, and it wasn't a line — it was just true, and he said it the way he said most things, like he hadn't considered dressing it up. His eyes moved to the stove, genuinely curious. "That a roast?"
"Chicken."
"With what — is that tarragon?"
She blinked, despite herself. "Yes."
He made a sound low in his throat that was almost reverent. "Annie." He said her name like it was its own sentence. Like she'd done something personally to him. "You didn't have to do all that."
"I was cooking anyway."
"Still." He pushed off the doorframe, moved into the kitchen with that easy, unhurried way he had — not crowding her, just present — and peered over her shoulder at the pot with unself-conscious curiosity. "Smoke ain’t tell me you could cook like this. He just said you could cook."
"He don’t miss any meals in this house.”
Stack laughed. Full and easy, head tipping back slightly. "Lord, that's true. Man is lookin’ heavy.” He shook his head, still smiling, and moved back to give her space. Leaned against the counter across from her instead, arms loose at his sides. "He gon’ call tonight to check in and I'm gonna have to lie to him."
She glanced at him. "About what."
"Tell him dinner was just alright." He said it perfectly straight. "Otherwise he'll spend the whole week feeling bad he's missing it. And then I'll have to hear about it."
Annie looked at him for a moment.
Then, against her better judgment, against the coolness she'd been intending to maintain all evening — she felt the corner of her mouth move.
Not a smile. Just the suggestion of one.
Stack caught it. Didn't make a thing of it. Just turned to look out the kitchen window at the last of the evening light like he hadn't noticed.
But she saw his own mouth curve.
"Table needs setting," she said, turning back to the stove.
"Yes ma'am," he said easily, and went to find the plates without being told where they were.
The dishes were done by eight.
Lennie had gone home. The house was quiet in that particular way it got after a meal — settled, warm, smelling of food and the faint sweetness of the candles Annie had lit without thinking about it. She stood in the kitchen for a moment after the last dish was put away, hands dry, apron folded over the drawer handle, and listened to the house.
Stack was somewhere. She could feel it the way you felt another person's presence in a space — a subtle occupation, a difference in the air.
She took the bottle of bourbon from the cabinet. Poured herself a small glass. Thought about it. Poured a second.
The back porch ran the length of the house, screened in, the swing at the far end facing out over the yard and the dark tree line beyond. Annie came out here most evenings when the weather allowed. It was hers in a way most of the house didn't quite feel — the one place Smoke never tried to improve or expand or make more than it was.
She sat. Set both glasses on the small table beside the swing. Pushed off gently with one foot.
The night was warm and soft, full of crickets, the occasional low call of something further out in the trees.
She'd been sitting maybe ten minutes when the screen door opened.
Stack stepped out, looked at the second glass, and looked at her.
"That for me or were you just being optimistic?" he asked.
"Figured you'd find your way out here eventually."
He took the glass. Settled into the wicker chair across from her rather than the swing, which she appreciated without saying so. He stretched his legs out, crossed them at the ankle, and looked out at the yard the way she'd been looking at it — easy, unhurried, like the dark had something worth seeing in it.
They sat like that for a while. Just the crickets and the bourbon and the swing's soft creak.
"You do this every night?" he asked eventually.
"Most nights."
"Smoke come out here with you?"
She considered that. "Sometimes. He doesn't sit still as well as he thinks he does."
Stack made a sound that was almost a laugh.
"This a good porch," he said.
"It is."
"Good bourbon too."
"Don't tell Smoke. He thinks I drink sweet wine."
He turned to look at her then, something amused and a little appreciative in his expression. "Is that right?"
"He'd have opinions."
"He'd have a whole committee meeting about it." He shook his head, looked back at the yard. "My brother."
"Your brother," Annie agreed, and there was something in the saying of it — fond and tired and complicated all at once — that felt more honest than anything she'd said all day.
Stack heard it. She could tell by the way he was quiet for a moment, not filling the space, just letting it be there.
"He means well," he said finally. Not defending. Just stating.
"I know he does." She pushed the swing gently. "That's the hardest part."
Stack looked at her. She kept her eyes on the tree line.
"Harder to be angry at a man who loves you that much," she said. "Easier when they're careless. When they don't notice. But he notices everything." She paused. "Notices everything and still."
She stopped herself. Picked up her glass.
Stack didn't press. Didn't offer anything to fill the gap she'd left. Just sat with it, which was — she noticed — different from how Smoke would have handled it. Smoke would have had a response. Smoke always had a response.
Stack just let her have the thought.
It was disarming in a way she hadn't expected.
"Thank you for dinner," he said, after a moment. Easy. Moving them back to solid ground without making a production of it.
"You already thanked me."
"Deserved a second one."
She looked at him then. He was watching the yard again, glass resting on his knee, entirely at ease in her space in a way that should have irritated her and somehow didn't quite.
She thought about what she'd expected when Smoke told her. The imposition of it. The indignity. Someone planted in her house to make sure she stayed where she was put.
This wasn't — he wasn't what she'd braced for.
Which was, she supposed, information.
She finished her bourbon. Set the glass down.
"I'm heading in," she said, standing.
Stack looked up. "Goodnight, Annie."
"Night." She moved to the screen door. Paused with her hand on it. "There's coffee things on the counter. Help yourself in the morning."
"Appreciate it."
She went inside. Let the screen door close softly behind her.
Upstairs, she washed her face and got into bed and lay in the quiet of the house — his smell finally fading from the pillow, the bourbon warm in her chest — and thought that this might be alright. Five days of easy company and someone else's presence and then Smoke would be home and everything would go back to whatever it was.
She could manage five days of Stack.
She was almost sure of it.
<<< Chapter 1
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A/N One day I'll learn not to turn every prompt into a multi-part situation. Today is not that day, but it is your lucky day. I submitted my resignation today and figured I just use the next 2 weeks to coast while wrapping things up at my job. Therefore... More fics!
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My other works can be found in My Masterlist. Thanks for reading!
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All Fic Taglist - Interested in my future works? Let me know if you'd like me to add you to my tag list. (Also lmk if you want me to remove you. No hard feelings I promise.)
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I was thinking about our favorite trio and wondering which twin is legally married to Annie. I know they’re both her husbands, but whose name is name is on the marriage certificate?
OH I AM SO EXCITED THAT YOU ASKED THIS BECAUSE GIRL. I HAVE THIS WRITTEN. IT EXISTS. I PROMISE YOU.
Here is a snippet of that conversation. It's part of a cute 5 part I'm writing. <3
~.~.~.~.~.~.~
"We need to talk about that other thing," Stack said after a while.
Smoke glanced at him. "The papers."
"Mhm." Stack shoved his hands in his pockets. "Been thinkin' about it. I want it to be me."
Smoke's jaw tightened slightly, but he nodded. "Figured you'd say that."
"Not 'cause I love her more," Stack said quickly. "You know that ain't it."
"I know."
"It's just… I want to. Want my name next to hers. Want that paper that says she mine—legally mine, even though we both know she's ours."
Smoke studied his brother for a long moment.
"You sure?" he asked quietly. "Once it's done, it's done. Whole town'll know she's Mrs. Elias Moore. Folks may try to make it seem like she ain't mine too."
"Let 'em," Stack said, voice firm. "We know the truth. She know the truth. That's all that matters."
"And when people ask why I'm always here? Always around?"
Stack grinned. "Tell 'em you love your sister-in-law real special."
Smoke barked out a laugh. "You a damn fool."
"You know we two sides of the same coin." Stack shot back. "I'm ya twin. Your brother. And now, your wife's husband."
Smoke shook his head.
The words hung in the air between them.
It was complicated. Messy, maybe, to anyone looking from the outside.
But to them? It was simple.
They both loved her. She loved them both. And they'd figure out how to make it work within the confines of what the world would allow.
_____
I'll leave it here but. I just love them so much. This plot line is really special. A little funny too but so many feels, and we'll get to see Smoke be a little more smitten.
Hi, first I just wanted to say I love that you’re right now. I was checking every single day, but I was also wondering if you were gonna continue two of a kind please ?🤍🤍🤍🤍
Thank you for looking out girl 🥹 I sure am. Lowkey scared for our girl though. Stack takes her through the wringer. RIP to her fr.
I’m interviewing for a new job rn. Gimme a week. I promise u I got u on uploading that next chapter. 🫶🏾
Ok I need yall to listen and not judge me okay…I have oneshot idea/prompt that is a lil freaky:
Annie and Smoke have been married for a while (maybe the 7 year itch) and there has been a lull in their love life—a dry spell if you will. During this rough patch Annie has started confide in a fella at work, a work hubby, (idk if she full out cheats or if it’s just flirting/emotional) and Smoke finds out.
That’s where the freaky comes in, Smoke is so angry but also so in love with his Annie that he is willing to do anything; Smoke suggests that Annie test to see who fucks her better—him or her work husband.
They are both there to service and submit to her every desire. I really imagine it as a woman being pleasured in every way possible, the focus being her pleasure and making her happy.
Smoke so crazy about Annie I think he might kill ole boy after she fuck him 😂😂 but I like this idea it’s so different and creative !! If you write it you know I’ll read it !! I think it would be so good 🙌🏾
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That was what Stack would think later — not the men, not the route she'd taken, not any of the hundred small decisions that had compounded into catastrophe. The wisteria. Because if Annie didn't love those ridiculous purple flowers the way she did, she wouldn't have made the detour she made every Tuesday, and if she hadn't made the detour, none of the rest of it would have happened.
But Annie loved her wisteria, and there was nothing to be done about that.
She had discovered the vine three springs ago, growing wild along the fence line of an abandoned lot on the far end of Decatur Street — a great sprawling tangle of it, untended, extravagant, spilling purple down the rotted wood like it had decided to be beautiful despite everything. She had stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk and stared at it for a full minute. Stack had been with her that day, and he had watched her stare, and even then he'd known it was over.
She had gone back every Tuesday since.
Sometimes she brought cuttings home for her workroom. Sometimes she just stood there for a while, among the smell of it. Sometimes she brought a small cloth and wiped the blooms down — which was, Stack maintained, the most Annie thing that had ever happened in the history of Annie things.
"You cleaning flowers," he'd said once, watching her from the gate.
"They dusty," she'd said, without turning around.
"They outside, mama. They supposed to be dusty. They don't know the difference."
"I know the difference."
He had laughed until his ribs hurt. Had told Smoke that evening, and they'd both laughed again. And the next Tuesday she'd gone back, and the Tuesday after, and it had simply become part of the architecture of their week.
Tuesday was Annie's wisteria day.
That particular Tuesday morning, she'd been in good spirits.
Stack remembered that too — the specific quality of her mood, light and anticipatory, the way she'd hummed while she dressed and come to find him in the warm tangle of the bed where he was still trying to talk himself into consciousness.
She'd perched on the edge of the mattress and put her hand on his arm. "I'm heading out. Market first, then Decatur."
"Mm." He'd found her hand without opening his eyes. "Your flowers."
"My wisteria," she corrected, with the primness of a woman defending something she knew was ridiculous and had decided not to care. "They were coming in beautiful last week. I want to take some cuttings before the heat gets to em’."
"You and them flowers, I swear." He'd cracked one eye open to look at her. She was already done up — hair pinned, a pale yellow dress, looking like the kind of morning a man would want to wake up into. "Normal women collect dishes. Spoons. You out here unnaturally attached to a weed."
"Wisteria ain’t a weed."
"It's growing on an abandoned fence, in the middle of—"
"It is not a weed," she said, with great dignity, and he'd laughed and pulled her down and kissed her temple and her cheek and the corner of her mouth until she was trying not to smile and failing completely.
"You a crazy woman," he'd murmured into her hair. Fond. Helplessly fond.
"You in love with this crazy woman," she'd said back, soft and certain, and pressed her lips to his jaw before she stood and smoothed her dress and went.
He'd listened to her footsteps move through the house. The quiet of the front door.
Then he'd turned his face back into the pillow and gone back to sleep, easy and untroubled, because it was Tuesday and Annie was going to the market and then to her flowers and then home.
That was how Tuesday worked.
The juke was quiet in the late afternoon — the interim hour between the day men leaving and the night crowd arriving, when the place belonged mostly to the staff and the sound of chairs being set right.
Stack was going over the week's receipts at the back table when Deacon Hollis wandered in, which was not unusual. Deacon was seventy-something and had been drinking at this particular establishment through three different owners and two of his own wives. He came in most afternoons for one glass of something and whatever conversation was available.
He settled at the bar and said to the boy wiping down the counter, "Busy on Decatur Street today. Had to go all the way around."
Stack didn't look up.
The bar boy made a sound of mild interest.
"Some kind of commotion," Deacon continued, with the relish of a man who had no urgent business anywhere and could therefore linger on details. "Couple hours back, maybe more. Police come through, asked some questions. Seemed like somebody saw something they shouldn't have, or something got moved that shouldn't be."
Stack turned a page.
"Right near that empty lot," Deacon added. "The one with all them purple flowers on the fence."
Stack's hand stilled on the page.
Just his hand. Nothing else visible changed — not his expression, not his posture, nothing that the room would have clocked as meaningful. But his hand stopped moving, and in the space behind his eyes something very cold and very focused began assembling itself.
The lot with the purple flowers.
Annie's lot. Annie's Tuesday. Annie who had left that morning with a cloth in her bag for wiping down the blooms and had said I want to take some cuttings before the heat gets to them and whom he had not heard from since.
He set the receipts down.
"Deacon," he said, and his voice came out even. Measured. "What time you say that was?"
Deacon turned on his stool, pleased to have an audience. "Oh, two o'clock maybe? Half past? The officers was already gone by the time I come through, but old Ruth from the dress shop was still standing outside talking about it. Said she'd seen a woman—"
Stack was already standing.
Deacon blinked. "You alright, son?"
But Stack was already moving through the back, already pulling the curtain aside that separated the main room from the office where Smoke was doing what Smoke was always doing — sitting with numbers and a cigarette and that particular quality of stillness that could mean anything or nothing.
Smoke looked up.
He took one look at his brother's face and put the cigarette down.
"Talk," he said.
Stack talked. Smoke listened with the unnerving focus he brought to all things that required it, and when Stack finished, Smoke didn't say anything for a moment. Just looked at the middle distance. Doing the same arithmetic Stack had already done and arriving at the same unbearable sum.
Then he stood, picked up his coat, and said, "Let's go find out."
They found out.
A man named Lenny Briggs, one of their runners, who had heard something he hadn't known what to do with and had been working up the courage to come to the juke when Stack found him first on the corner of Fifth and Marsh. Lenny had the look of a man who would have preferred not to be found.
He told them what he knew.
Slim’s men — a rival outfit who had been circling the east side numbers territory for the better part of a year, looking for a pressure point, looking for the particular lever that would bring the Moore brothers to a table they hadn't chosen. They had found their lever. They had taken her off the street somewhere between the market and the lot — right around the wisteria, which Stack would think about for a long time after — and they had her at the old Beaumont property on the south road.
Lenny gave the address with the energy of a man trying to make a down payment on his own continued wellbeing. Stack received the information without expression, said "Thank you" in a voice that was quiet and even and somehow worse than shouting, and turned south.
Smoke fell into step beside him and put one hand briefly on his brother's arm. The old signal. Wordless. Be smart. We get her first. Everything else after.
Stack's jaw was granite. He nodded once.
They were smart. They were fast.
There were two men outside and three within.
Smoke handled the outside — efficient, practiced, the kind of violence that begins and ends cleanly because it has a purpose and knows what that purpose is. Then he pushed through the door.
Stack was still in the room with the last one.
The man was on the floor. Had been on the floor for a while, by the look of it. Stack was crouched over him, one knee on the ground, and he was not finished. The man had stopped being a threat some time ago and Stack had continued anyway, methodical and terrifyingly quiet — no rage in his face, which was somehow worse than rage. Just something hollow and absolute, like a door that had been opened onto nothing.
Smoke stood in the doorway for a moment and watched.
Then he said, "Stack."
Stack didn't stop.
"Stack." Harder this time. Not a shout — Smoke didn't shout — but weighted. The kind of voice that expected to be heard.
Stack's hand stilled.
He stayed crouched for a moment, breathing. The sound of it filled the room — ragged, too fast.
Smoke crossed to him and put one hand on the back of his neck. Firm and present. "She's in the back," he said, low. "She's okay. We got her. Come on back now."
A long beat.
Stack looked down at what was in front of him. Something shifted in his face — not quite recognition, not quite regret. More like a man surfacing from very deep water and finding the light strange.
He stood. Didn't say anything. Just turned and walked toward the back of the building, and Smoke followed, and neither of them looked back at the room.
The door came off its hinges.
Not broken — removed. Stack had simply decided it was in his way and dealt with it accordingly, and Smoke caught it without breaking stride and set it against the wall with the quiet efficiency of a man long accustomed to making the world cooperate, and stepped through the threshold behind his brother.
The room was dim. Smelled like damp wood and kerosene and something metallic that neither of them dwelled on.
And there, in the far corner —
There she was.
Their matriarch. Their woman. Their Annie.
Smoke exhaled. Just the one breath. One single moment of relief so complete it was almost physical, before he folded it away and put it somewhere safe.
Stack didn't bother with any of that.
He crossed the room in four long strides. Annie barely had time to register him before he pressed her back against the wall — not rough, not cruel, but absolute. Like he needed something solid behind her. Like he needed to know she couldn't be taken anywhere else.
"Stack—" Smoke started.
The younger twin didn't hear him. Or if he did, it didn't matter.
His hands came up to her face. Both of them. Palms bracketing her jaw, thumbs moving across her cheekbones, fingers pressing back into her hair. Frantic eyes cataloguing everything — the dried tear tracks, the slight swelling at her wrist, the small cut at the corner of her lip that made something behind his eyes go very briefly and very darkly wrong before he forced himself onward. Keep checking. Keep confirming.
Here. Alive. Breathing. Theirs. Home.
Annie had never felt more precious than in that moment. Not cherished — that was too soft a word for what was happening. Something rawer. Something that lived below language.
Once he had confirmed what he needed to confirm, he swept down and claimed what had always been his.
Blood still painted his face. She could smell the iron as he descended, and some distant sensible part of her registered that it should frighten her — the state of him, what it implied, the fact that none of that blood was his.
But she was not always a sensible woman when it came to these men.
She let him have it. Let him take the kiss like it was owed — because it was. Raw and primal and a little gruesome the way all true things are a little gruesome. His chest heaved against hers, and his hands were trembling — Stack's hands, which she had never once seen tremble — moving over her arms, her sides, her face. Touching. Feeling. Verifying.
She felt it all move through her like weather. His fear. His fury. His absolute, immovable devotion.
I know, she thought. I know, baby. I know.
She murmured it into his hair when he finally broke, forehead dropping to her shoulder, a shudder moving through him she felt with her whole body.
"I know. I'm here."
Smoke stood back and watched.
Because Stack needed this. Maybe Annie needed it too — to be held this completely, this desperately, after hours of not knowing when or whether. But Stack needed it most. So Smoke stayed where he was and gave the man the room.
Annie met the older twin's eyes over Stack's bowed head.
Nothing passed between them except everything. She saw the tightness at the corner of his jaw. The controlled version of the same thing Stack was barely containing. She held his gaze until she saw his shoulders drop a single fraction of an inch.
I see you. I'm alright. He's alright. We're alright.
Stack made a sound then — small and cracked and quiet, pressed into her shoulder. The kind a man makes only when he doesn't mean to. She felt it like something giving way.
She pulled him in tighter.
"It's okay," she murmured, hand pressing flat between his shoulder blades. "I'm here, baby. I ain't goin' nowhere."
He held on.
Annie had been the one taken.
But it was Stack who felt like he had lost his heart.
A long moment passed. Then, muffled against her shoulder, rough and still unsteady — somewhere between a reprimand and a man who had been terrified into raw honesty:
"And you ain't gon’ do no shit like that again."
Annie closed her eyes.
Her hand moved slow and steady through his hair.
"No," she said softly. "I ain't."
Smoke pulled the lamp low before he sat at the foot of the bed.
It was well past midnight. The house had gone completely quiet. Annie lay in the middle of the bed, Stack curved against her back with his face tucked into her hair, one arm thrown across her waist like a man holding on even in sleep.
Cleaned up now. Dressed down. The blood long gone — Annie had done it herself at the basin, quiet and methodical, and Stack had sat on the edge of the tub and let her. Had not said a word while she washed his hands and his face and his split knuckles, which told their own particular story that she had received without comment and without flinching.
She was awake. Smoke had known she would be.
"He out?" Smoke asked, low.
"Mm. Fought it some." Her hand moved slowly through Stack's curls. "But he's out."
A beat of quiet between them. The lamp flame held steady.
"You alright?" he asked.
"I'm whole," she said. Her particular answer — the one that meant something more than fine and less than undamaged and asked him to understand the distance between those things.
He accepted it. He would look at her properly in the morning.
"Elijah." Soft but weighted.
"I'm listening."
She was quiet a moment, eyes on the ceiling.
"I ain’t never seen him like that," she finally said.
Smoke was quiet too, for a long stretch of seconds.
He had been there. He had witnessed what Annie had not fully seen — what had happened in those rooms before they reached her. He knew the shape of what his brother had done, and he knew that Stack, of all people, of all the men Smoke had stood beside in all the years of their lives — Stack was not supposed to be the one who went that far past the line.
"No," Smoke said. "Neither have I."
She absorbed that. Let it settle.
"Was it bad?" she said.
"Depended," Smoke said, "on which side of it you were on."
A breath that was almost a laugh. "That ain't an answer."
"It's the honest one." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, looking at his brother's sleeping face. The furrow still between his brows, even now. "He went past what was needed. Kept going after it was done. I had to call him back." A pause. "Twice."
Annie's hand stilled in Stack's hair for just a moment. Then resumed.
"He was ahead of me the whole way there," Smoke continued, quieter now. "I known Stack all my life. Watched him in situations that would've laid other men down. He's always had something working up here even when he's pushed — he thinks. He's always been able to think." He paused. "Tonight he wasn't thinking."
"What was he doing?" she said.
"Feeling," Smoke said simply.
Annie closed her eyes.
Stack shifted against her in his sleep, brow tightening, and she made a soft sound and his face smoothed again, like he could hear her even under everything.
"He knew something was wrong before anyone told him," she said. Not quite a question.
"Yes."
"How?"
Smoke was quiet for a beat. "Your flowers."
Annie stilled.
"Deacon came in talking about a commotion on Decatur. Near the lot." Smoke glanced at her. "Stack was across the room. He heard the words purple flowers and that was all it took."
Something moved across Annie's face. Too complicated to name.
"All those Tuesdays," she said softly.
"He knows your Tuesdays, Annie." Smoke's voice was matter of fact, the way he said things that were simply true and required no decoration. "He knows how long the market takes and which way you walk and what time you're usually back. He noticed before any message came. Before anyone came to us at all. He put it together himself."
She was very quiet for a moment.
"Lord," she breathed.
Outside, the wind moved through the pecan trees, that soft sound of a summer night settling into itself.
"You need to say something to him when he wakes," Smoke said. "Not about what happened in that room — he doesn't need to explain himself and you don't need the details. But he needs to hear that you see him the same." He looked at her steadily. "That tonight ain’t change your eyes when you look at him."
"It didn't," she said. And then, smaller: "It just — added to what's already there."
Smoke held her gaze for a moment. Then nodded once, slowly.
"And me," she said, after a breath.
"And you," he confirmed.
"Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow," he agreed. "When he's with us and you've both rested. But Annie." His voice dropped a register, quiet and absolute. "What you love doing, where you go — none of that changes. But how you move through the world when we not with you?" He held her gaze. "That's the conversation we're gon’ to have."
Annie's chin lifted slightly. She didn't argue it. But she held his gaze long enough to communicate that it would be a conversation and not a sentencing, and Smoke acknowledged that with the smallest dip of his head.
Good enough for tonight.
He rose and came around to his side — the familiar geography of their life, every night for years — and settled in.
The bed held all three of them, as it always had.
Annie lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and listened to the two men breathing, one deep in sleep, one slipping toward it.
She thought about that morning. The yellow dress. The cloth she'd tucked into her bag for the blooms. Stack's voice still rough with sleep, laughing at her — you and those flowers, I swear — and pulling her down and kissing her like she was something ridiculous and wonderful and entirely his.
Crazy woman.
Your crazy woman.
She pressed her lips to his temple in the dark. Soft as a secret.
His arm tightened across her waist even in sleep.
Love should be calm, she thought. Peaceful. The kind of thing you can sleep inside of and wake up still held by.
But she thought about the words purple flowers landing across a quiet room. About the hand going still on the receipts. About Smoke’s thirty-some years of knowing someone so well that the wrong silence sounded like a scream.
The act of love, she thought, was something else entirely.
She exhaled.
She was home.
They were home.
Outside, somewhere, her wisteria grew on its rotting fence — untended, extravagant, stubbornly beautiful — and knew nothing about any of it.
______
A/N If you could find it in your hearts to forgive me? 🥺 Don't know what to say that would explain this absence so I'm not going to say anything. Feels like all I give ya'll is excuses for real. I am okay. Doing well. Life is just lifeing, interviewing for a new job (pray I get it!) I'll be in Chicago next week actually. So I'll def do some writing there :) Hope you're all well. Hope you enjoy this bite sized piece of our lovely trio. Love you <3
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This work of art is part of "The Moore Kind" universe. Where Smoke, Annie, and Stack exist as a Trio. If you'd like to learn more about them, check out My Masterlist 😘
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Annie was crying before she even made it through the door.
Not loud - she wasn’t that kind of crier - but the tears were hot on her cheeks and her hands were shaking as she tried to get her key in the lock. It took three tries before the door finally opened.
She stepped inside, set her basket down, and just stood there in the entryway. Trying to breathe. Trying to stop the tears that wouldn’t stop coming.
The house was quiet. Stack was out - she remembered him saying something about meeting someone at the juke. But Smoke…
She heard him before she saw him. Familiar footsteps from the back of the house, steady and unhurried. Then he was there, coming around the corner, and he stopped when he saw her.
His eyes did that thing - that quick assessment, taking in her face, her posture, the basket abandoned by the door.
He didn’t ask what was wrong. Didn’t rush forward or make a big show of concern.
He just said, “Come here.”
Annie’s feet moved before her brain caught up. Two steps, three, and then she was close enough that he could reach out and pull her in. His hands settled on her waist - solid, grounding - and he turned her, guided her toward the kitchen.
“Sit.”
She sat at the table, and he moved to the sink. She heard water running, the clink of a glass. When he came back, he set it in front of her and crouched down so they were eye-level. One hand came up to cup her jaw, thumb brushing away a tear track on her cheek.
“Drink first,” he said quietly. “Then we’ll talk.”
She picked up the glass with shaking hands and took a sip. The water was cool, and it helped - just a little. His hand stayed on her face, steady and warm, until she’d finished half the glass.
“Good,” he murmured, then stood and moved to the stove.
She heard him doing something - the strike of a match, the hiss of the burner catching. The kettle being filled.
Annie wiped at her face with the back of her hand and tried to pull herself together. “I’m sorry, I just-”
“Don’t.”
She looked up at him. He had his back to her, watching the kettle.
“Don’t apologize for crying in this house,” he said. His voice was level, matter-of-fact. “Something happened. You’ll tell me when you’re ready.”
The kettle started to whistle. He poured hot water into a cup, added a tea bag from the tin on the counter. Brought it over and set it in front of her, taking the water glass away.
“Let it steep a minute.”
Then he pulled out the chair next to her - not across from her, next to her - and sat down. Close enough that his knee pressed against hers. Close enough that she could feel the heat of him.
His hand found hers on the table, covered it completely. Just held it there, his thumb moving in slow circles over her knuckles.
They sat like that while the tea steeped. Annie focused on breathing, on the warmth of his hand, on the simple fact that he was there.
After a minute, he reached forward with his free hand and pulled the tea bag out, set it on the saucer. Nudged the cup closer to her.
“Drink a little,” he said. “Then you tell me.”
Annie wrapped her fingers around the cup - chamomile, of course he’d known to make chamomile - and took a sip. The warmth spread through her chest.
Smoke’s hand was still covering hers on the table. Waiting. Patient.
She set the cup down and took a breath.
“Mrs. Henderson,” she said. Her voice came out thin and wobbly. “At the shop.”
His hand tightened slightly on hers. Not painful, just… present.
“Tell me what happened, angel,” he said quietly. “What’d she say that made you cry?”
The endearment, the gentle command in his voice - it loosened something in her chest. Annie looked down at their joined hands.
“She said some things. About me. About us.” Her throat tightened. “About how I’m living in sin. How I ought to be ashamed. How my mama would be ashamed if she could see me now.”
Smoke’s jaw tightened, but his voice stayed even. “She say this to your face?”
“Loud enough for half the store to hear. People were starin’, and I just… I didn’t know what to say. I just stood there and took it, and then I left.” A fresh tear slipped down her cheek. “I should have said something back. Should have-”
“Hey.” His hand left hers, came up to cup her face again, turning her to look at him. “You did exactly what you should’ve done. You left. You came home. To me.”
His thumb brushed under her eye, catching another tear.
“What she said about your mama,” he said after a moment. “That true?”
“No.” Annie’s voice was firmer now. “Mama would’ve… she would’ve wanted me happy. She wouldn’t have cared about the rest.”
“Then that’s all that matters.” He held her gaze, making sure she heard him. “You know who you are. You know what we are. Some old bitter woman at the market don’t change that.”
Annie nodded, and he stroked her cheek once more before dropping his hand.
“Thank you,” he said.
She blinked. “For what?”
“For telling me.” He picked up her tea, pressed it back into her hands. “For coming home and letting me take care of you.”
Annie’s chest tightened again, but this time it wasn’t from tears.
Smoke watched her take another sip of tea, and she could see him thinking. That look he got when he was working something out, planning.
“You don’t go to that store alone for a while,” he said finally. “Stack or I go with you. Or you send us and we’ll bring back what you need.”
“I can’t ask you to-”
His hand came back to cover hers, stopping the words. “You’re not asking. I’m telling you what’s gonna happen. Just for a few weeks, until this dies down, you don’t go alone. That’s it.”
Annie nodded, and something in his expression softened just slightly.
“Good girl,” he murmured, then stood. “Come on.”
He pulled her up gently, kept hold of her hand. Led her through the house to the back porch.
“We’re gonna sit out here until Stack gets home,” he said, settling into one of the chairs and pulling her down into his lap before she could protest. His arms came around her waist, solid and sure. “You not gon’ think about Mrs. Henderson or anybody else for the rest of the day. Only me. Understand?”
Annie leaned back against his chest, felt him adjust her weight, one hand splayed across her stomach.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“You alright now?”
She thought about it honestly. The tears had stopped. Her breathing had evened out. And Smoke was warm and solid behind her, holding her like she was something precious.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m alright.”
“Good.” He pressed a kiss to her temple - brief but deliberate. “Stay right here with me.”
They sat in silence, and after a while, the tightness in her chest eased completely.
Annie didn’t know that Smoke was already thinking about Mr. Henderson. About how a quiet conversation with the man might ensure his wife understood there were lines she didn’t cross. About how it could be handled without Annie ever knowing, without upsetting her further.
All she knew was that Smoke was here. Holding her. Making sure she was alright.
And that was enough.
_____
A/N: I like the idea of dropping shorts so yall have something to read while I work on longer chapters or series’. This is something small that showcases the 1:1 relationship Annie and Smoke have. This takes place earlier in their timeline. So Annie isn’t the strong confident, witty woman we know her as in the series… yet.
Will format this and tag yall when I get to my computer. 💗
Oh Annie😔 I love how Smoke cares for her by doing physical acts in the moment that will calm her. And I know Mr. Henderson will cuss Mrs. Henderson smooth out for having Elijah Moore pull up on him for a little “talk”!
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