<𝟑 .ᐟ DATE NIGHT — PART 2
۶ৎ pairing — michael x fem!reader
۶ৎ synopsis — two of the biggest names in music, one used to be yours, the other one is now. the night michael said just one more time baby, you realised there never really was a choice.
۶ৎ themes — alcohol use, p in v sex, oral f!receiving, jealousy, angst, cheating, yearning, mentions of masturbation (disclaimer: i do not condone cheating whatsoever, this is just for the plot)
۶ৎ note — oh. my. god. this took me forever to write, i kept switching between plots because i couldn’t figure out where to take this!! hopefully it hits as good as part one 😭
to read part one, click here
۶ৎ tags — @platanita @taaaaurumeshal @heavencanwaitsblog @keshakim @backupschmuck @waywardgirl83 @botdfaholic @wonin1nie @kryka83 @theunsweetenedtruth @i-heart-carlisle @hwa-atz @ripesinner @milfslut @iwannarockwu @sunshineyrosie @buttismine @jenniversity @redwine-and-ambien21 @sebbysbaby @lovelyreadersposts @baka2trappy @17wishesx @naturallykae @jasppppeeee @khiarsa @cass12367 @jubs08 @xoxogossipgirl02 @peacemakersbeloved @galacticpurpl3 @cherubae111 @theplaid-wearingmoose @king-mila @michaels-left-elbow @appleheadsbiggestfan @st6rmbrn @blackbarbie20 @oidloid @rlm-11 @woolenh @andrabear23 @roromanok @berni333sworld @appleheadddluver @navy-37 @swanhoneymoon @scccm0182 (sorry it wouldn’t let me tag some people)
You and Michael split the night after the Grammys, standing in the kitchen of the house he'd never publicly acknowledged you lived in, wearing the dress you'd picked out for an afterparty you were never going to be seen at. The fight wasn't loud, that was the worst part. He didn't yell, he just stood there with that soft voice, that impenetrable gentleness, and explained again why the world couldn't know. You explained why you couldn't live like that. Neither of you were wrong, but you packed a bag anyway. It was inevitable, you couldn’t live in secret any longer whilst watching the man you loved parading around with other women because he was too proud to have you on his arm.
The breakup didn’t ruin you the way it should’ve, the way you’d expected it to. After time passed, you realised that you’d already grieved the relationship before it had ended, like a woman attending a funeral that had finished before she arrived. But knowing that never dulled the ache.
Six weeks later, Rolling Stone called.
The interview was supposed to be about your songwriting, your work on Thriller, the sessions that had made you one of the most sought-after names behind the scenes in the industry, especially now that Prince had put your name out there.
The interviewer asked about Michael. You looked straight into the camera with your hair blown out and your shoulders back in a black blazer you'd bought yourself. You claimed you'd never been with him, said you were colleagues with a smile that didn't reach your eyes. The magazine ran the quote as the headline.
Michael watched it from the couch at Hayvenhurst, barefoot in grey sweatpants, a bowl of cereal going warm in his lap. He was angry and he couldn’t depict whether it was at you for leaving or himself for screwing things up.
Three months after that, the tabloids caught you with Prince outside a recording studio in Minneapolis. He had his hand on the small of your back, you were laughing, angled towards him in a way that insinuated intimacy.
Prince Steals Michael Jackson's Mystery Songwriter.
The photo ran in every checkout line in America.
Prince thought it was hilarious. He showed you the clipping over breakfast in his kitchen, shirtless, grinning that sharp little grin of his and said he'd never been called a thief before but he liked the way it sounded. He started introducing you at parties as his girlfriend before you'd even had the conversation about what you were to each other and you let him, because being with someone who wanted the world to know you existed turned out to be its own kind of drug.
Michael didn't know. He saw the photos, sure. He read the headlines, sure. But nobody told him it was real and he didn’t ask.
The call came on a Tuesday. Quincy's voice on the other end of the line, measured and warm the way it always was, asking if you'd come out for the Victory Tour. They needed another arranger, someone who knew Michael's ear, someone who could tighten the live sets without him having to explain what he meant every five seconds. You said yes before he finished the sentence, because the money was obscene for the type of work and because some stupid, unexamined part of you wanted to be in the same room as him again even if you'd never admit that out loud.
You told Prince over dinner that night. He shrugged, twirled his fork, said something about how those Jackson boys needed all the help they could get. He kissed you on the forehead before pouring another glass of wine. He didn't ask if you still had feelings for Michael, perhaps he didn’t care or maybe he already knew the answer to that.
The rehearsal space was a warehouse in Los Angeles, cavernous and echoing, filled with equipment cases, cable runs and the distant thud of a bass drum being tuned somewhere in the back. You arrived early, clipboard in hand, hair pulled up, wearing high-waisted jeans and a white blouse knotted at the waist, gold hoops catching the overhead fluorescents. You looked good. You knew you looked good and you’d made sure of it, because a twisted part of you wanted Michael to squirm over his loss.
Tito spotted you first. He was leaning against a road case with a guitar pick between his teeth and when he saw you walk through the loading bay doors, his whole face split open into a grin so wide it looked like it hurt.
"Guys!" He called over his shoulder, not even trying to hide it. "Look who the hell just walked in."
Marlon appeared from behind a stack of monitors. Jackie materialised from the hallway. Jermaine came last, slower, arms crossed, that knowing look on his face like he'd been expecting this moment for months and was already savouring it. They gathered around you like a fence going up, all of them taller than you remembered, all of them grinning, Marlon pulling you into a hug so tight he lifted you off the ground.
"Put me down!" You laughed, swatting at his shoulder.
"Honey, you look good." Marlon said, setting you back on your feet and holding you at arm's length to get a proper look. "Too good. What's Prince feeding you?"
"We're not starting." Jackie said, leaning in to kiss your cheek. "We're just observing, noting things… Professionally of course."
"Professionally." Tito echoed, nodding solemnly.
Jermaine said nothing for a moment. He just looked at you with that slow expression, the one that meant he was about to say something designed to make you uncomfortable.
"So you really did that interview, huh?"
The air shifted and you felt it. All four of them were watching you now, not with judgment exactly, but with the particular delight of men who had front-row seats to a drama they hadn't been part of but fully intended to enjoy.
"I did that interview." You confirmed, setting your clipboard down on a nearby case.
"You broke that man." Jermaine said, his voice low and serious even though his eyes were laughing. "I mean this with all due respect, you ruined him. You know he threw a chair?"
"A whole chair." Jackie said, holding his hands apart to indicate the size. "Like, a real one. Wood, legs, the whole thing just-" He made a throwing motion. "Across the rehearsal room."
"Marlon almost died." Tito added.
"I didn't almost die." Marlon protested. "I just... had a reaction."
"He shit his pants." Jermaine said flatly.
You blinked. "He did not."
"I did." Marlon admitted, holding up both hands. "I'm not gonna lie to you. That man picked up that chair and I felt my soul leave my body.”
You pressed your hand over your mouth because the laughter was already building and you didn't want to give them the satisfaction, but it broke through anyway, a real one, the kind that comes from your stomach and shakes your shoulders. Marlon looked wounded, the others looked delighted.
"It's not funny." Marlon said. "That chair hit the wall two inches from my head."
"It's a little funny." You managed.
"It's a little funny." Marlon conceded. "But I need you to understand the terror. My brother, launching furniture because a woman said she’d never been with him."
"He was crying too." Tito said quietly and that one landed differently. The laughter didn't stop exactly, but it settled, became something smaller and more contained. Tito wasn't teasing, he was telling you because he thought you should know.
The room became a degree quieter. You looked at Tito and he held your gaze.
"After the chair, he sat on the floor and cried." Tito continued. "For like twenty minutes, we didn't know what to do. Quincy came in and just sat next to him, didn’t say anything, just sat there."
You swallowed and your throat felt tight in a way that had nothing to do with laughing.
"Anyway." Jermaine said, breaking the moment with the efficiency of a man who understood that feelings had a time limit. "That's not even the best part."
"There's a best part?" You asked.
"Oh baby, there's a phenomenal part." Jermaine reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet, flipped it open and produced a photograph that had clearly been torn from a magazine. You could see the ragged edges where another figure had been cut away. It was you. The tabloid shot. The one of you and Prince outside the studio in Minneapolis, except Prince had been carefully, methodically removed, leaving just you mid-laugh, your hand on empty air, your hair catching the light.
"He cut Prince out." Jermaine said, holding it up between two fingers like evidence. "Very carefully like surgery and kept your half."
"That's..." You started, but didn't know how to finish.
"So we're rehearsing in the small room one day." Jackie said, picking up the story with barely contained glee. "And Marlon walks in early to grab his bass and he finds this photo.” He continued, pointing at the clipping Jermaine was still holding. "Propped up against the mirror, like, set up."
"And around it." Marlon said, holding up a finger because he wanted to deliver this part himself. "There’s a pile of tissues and a bottle of moisturiser."
The silence lasted exactly one second before the warehouse erupted. Tito bent over double. Jackie turned away, shoulders shaking. Jermaine was laughing so hard no sound was coming out. You stood there with your hand clamped over your mouth again, eyes wide, something between shock and hysterics.
"Now, we didn't see anything." Jermaine said, raising both palms in a gesture of practiced innocence. "We don't know what happened, but the next morning, right, Jackie asks Michael how he slept."
"I asked very casually." Jackie said. "Very nonchalant, just making conversation."
"And Michael." Jermaine continued. "Looks Jackie dead in the eye, completely calm and says.” He paused for effect, dropping his voice into a soft, earnest impression. "'I slept fine. I was very relaxed.'"
You lost it. You bent forward with both hands on your knees, laughing so hard no sound came out at first, just your shoulders shaking and your eyes watering. The brothers were gone too, Marlon wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, Tito leaning against a road case for support, Jackie bent at the waist with his palms on his thighs.
"I was very relaxed." Jermaine repeated and that set everyone off again.
It took a full minute for the room to settle. You straightened up and dabbed at your eyes with your fingers, still catching your breath.
"He's a mess." Jackie said as the teasing drained out of his voice and was replaced by something more honest. "Genuinely, since you left. The chair, the photo, the crying. He doesn't eat, he barely sleeps, he’s been writing songs that sound like someone dying. Quincy's worried. We're all worried."
"We're basically his therapists at this point." Marlon said, gesturing vaguely between the four of them. "Four unlicensed emotional therapists on call twenty four seven. Nobody's paying us. We just sit there while he stares out the window like he's in a music video."
"He's not staring out windows." Tito said.
"He's absolutely staring out the windows." Marlon shot back. "I walked in on him last week listening to Purple Rain in the dark, not even his own album. I said 'Mike, what are you doing?' and he looked at me with those big sad eyes and said 'thinking.' Thinking? Bro, go to therapy."
"Anyway." Jermaine said, because he could feel the tangent pulling them off course. "There’s something else."
"You're with Prince. For real."
It wasn't a question. You held his gaze and didn't flinch. "Yeah, I am."
Jermaine exhaled through his nose and looked at Tito, then at Jackie, then at Marlon. Some silent conversation passed between the four of them, the kind that only brothers can have with their eyes.
"He doesn't know." Jermaine said. "Michael. He doesn't know it's real, he thinks it's just the tabloids being tabloids."
"Oh shit." Marlon murmured. "Oh shit."
"He's gonna find out." Jackie said, running a hand over his mouth. "And he is going to lose his fucking mind."
"The man has been a mess for months." Tito added, shaking his head slowly. "Throwing chairs, crying on the floor, jerking off to a magazine cutout like a goddamn teenager and you're telling us he doesn't even know about Prince?"
"He doesn't." Jermaine confirmed.
"We should tell him." Marlon said.
"You're not telling him anything." Jermaine said firmly. "She can tell him herself if she wants to, or he can figure it out on his own. Either way, that's not our business."
"Since when is anything not our business?" Marlon asked.
"Since right now." Jermaine said as he looked at you again. "He's coming in today for rehearsal. He doesn't know you're here. Quincy set the whole thing up and told us not to say a word."
Your pulse kicked, but your face kept still. "How's that gonna go?"
Jermaine smiled, slow and dangerous, and for just a moment you saw the family resemblance to Michael so clearly it made your stomach flip.
"Badly." He said. "It's gonna go so badly and we're gonna be right here watching."
Michael was late. Forty five minutes late, which was unusual for him, because he had always been the kind of person who arrived early and ran choreography in his head before walking through the door. You knew this about him. You'd always known this about him and so when the loading bay doors stayed closed and the minutes kept climbing you felt your composure begin to thin at the edges, because anticipation is its own kind of cruelty and the longer you waited, the more your body remembered things your brain was trying very hard to forget.
The brothers had gone quiet, but only in the way that men go quiet when they're waiting for a punchline. Marlon kept glancing at the side door with barely contained glee, bouncing on his heels like a kid waiting for a birthday cake. Tito was tuning his guitar with practiced disinterest, except every thirty seconds he'd look up at you and then at the door, his mouth twitching in a way that suggested he was suppressing something enormous. Jackie leaned against a monitor with his arms folded, watching the whole production unfold with the detached pleasure of a man in the front row. Jermaine was the worst of them, leaning against the far wall with his hands in his pockets, his expression so deliberately neutral it bordered on theatrical.
Quincy had given you a sheet of notes. You'd been staring at the same page for twenty minutes without reading a single word.
You heard him before you saw him, but you didn't look up. You kept your eyes on the page in front of you because some animal part of your brain understood that the moment you looked at him, everything would become real in a way that couldn't be undone and you wanted just a few more seconds inside the fiction that this was a normal rehearsal.
The silence stretched. You could feel every brother in the room holding their breath, could feel the weight of their attention not on Michael but on you, waiting for you to lift your head.
"Michael." Quincy said, his voice easy and warm, like nothing at all was happening. "Good, we’re all here. Come on in."
He was standing just inside the doorway in a red v-neck sweater over a white t-shirt, black slacks and a single rhinestone glove tucked into his belt like he'd forgotten it was there. His hair was the same as you remembered, soft and loose around his face, glossy with product, framing those cheekbones that photographers never quite captured in their full geometry.
There was a thin gold chain at his throat that caught the light when he moved. He looked beautiful. He looked exactly the way your chest ached when you heard his name spoken aloud in a room. For a single, unguarded second his face did something that had nothing to do with performance or the careful architecture of public composure. His lips parted and his eyes went wide. The clipboard in his hand slipped two inches before his fingers tightened around it again.
"Surprise, motherfucker." Marlon sang from across the room, spreading both arms wide like he was presenting a gift.
Michael didn't hear him, he didn't hear anything, because the room had contracted to the width of the space between you and him, the air becoming something dense. You held his gaze because you couldn't do anything else and your body had made that decision without consulting you. His brown eyes moved across your face like he was reading something he'd memorised but forgotten, absorbing every detail, the gold hoops, the pulled-up hair, the white blouse knotted at your waist. His throat worked once, a swallow you could see from ten feet away.
"Hey, Michael." You said, your voice coming out steadier than you had any right to expect.
His mouth opened, but nothing came out. His gaze dropped to the clipboard in his hands, then came back to you and you watched him try to assemble his face into something neutral while every expression underneath screamed something louder.
One word, barely even that. More like a sound he made because his body needed to do something with the air in his lungs.
"Oh, don't look so scared, Mike." Tito called out, grinning wide enough to show every tooth. "She doesn't bite."
Marlon tilted his head, scrunching his nose.
"I don't know about that, Tito." He said slowly, his eyes sliding to you with a grin that was pure mischief. "I seem to remember Mike coming to rehearsal once with some marks on his neck he could not explain. Said it was a rash."
"It was a rash." Michael whispered, his voice thin, his ears flooding with colour so fast it looked painful.
"A rash." Jermaine repeated from the wall, nodding solemnly. "On his neck, in the shape of teeth."
"Nobody said it was teeth, Mikey." Jackie offered, his face a masterwork of innocence. "You're the one bringing up teeth… interesting."
"Shut up." Michael breathed, but there was no force behind it, just the sound of a man whose composure had been ambushed from every direction. The tips of his ears had gone from pink to crimson and were still climbing.
"I didn't know you'd be here." He murmured, but he wasn't talking to you. He was talking to Quincy, or maybe to God. It was hard to tell.
"I know." Quincy said gently. "Sit down, Michael. We've got work to do."
"Good to see you, Mike." Jermaine added from the wall, his tone so casually affectionate it made Michael flinch. He couldn't look at anyone in the room except you and each time his eyes found yours, they held for a moment longer than the last, longer than was polite, before he'd wrench them away and fix them on his clipboard, the far wall, anywhere that wasn't your face.
Michael sat down as far from you as the space allowed. He set his clipboard on his knee and stared at the page in front of him with the fixed intensity of a man who was not reading a single word. You could feel him from that distance, could feel the frequency of his attention like heat off pavement, radiating toward you in waves he couldn't have concealed if his life depended on it.
The rehearsal began. Quincy ran through the setlist in his calm, methodical way, calling out arrangements that needed tightening and you did your job because doing your job was the only thing keeping you upright. You called out a bridge in Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' that needed altered.
Every few minutes you'd catch the weight of his gaze settling on you, lingering on the curve of your neck, the way your hair fell when you tucked it behind your ear. Each time you looked up, he'd look away with a speed that was almost violent, his jaw clenching, his fingers tightening around his pen until the knuckles went pale.
Once you caught him mid-glance and he didn't look away fast enough. For a fraction of a second, you saw everything in his face that he was trying to hide, the ache, the want, the particular agony of looking at something you'd lost and still feeling the phantom weight of it in your hands.
Marlon watched all of this from behind his guitar with an expression of undisguised delight. At one point, during a break, he leaned over to Tito and whispered something that made him cover his mouth with his hand. When Michael glanced over at them suspiciously, they both became very interested in their equipment.
"He's obsessed." Marlon muttered to Jackie when Michael left to get water, loud enough for you to hear but quiet enough to maintain plausible deniability. "Look at him, he can't even hold a pen straight."
"His hands are shaking." Jackie confirmed, not even trying to hide it. "The man is out here having an emotional crisis in real time."
"Leave him be." Jermaine said, but he was smiling.
Michael came back with a bottle of water and sat down in the same spot. He didn't look at you for a full three minutes, which was somehow worse than the staring, because the absence of his attention felt like a held breath. When he finally looked up again, his eyes found yours immediately, like there was a wire between you pulling taut, but this time he didn't look away. He held your gaze across the room with an expression so open and unguarded that you felt it in your stomach, like a physical force.
Marlon caught your eye from across the room. He mouthed two words, slow and deliberate so you couldn't miss them.
You pressed your lips together to keep from laughing or doing something else that would have made this worse and turned back to your notes.
The dressing room smelled like sweat and cologne. You hadn't meant to be there. You’d told yourself you were just dropping off the revised arrangements for the next show, the voicing changes on Human Nature that Quincy had asked for. You’d set the pages on the counter next to a half-empty bottle of water.
You should have left. The pages were delivered, the job was done and every second you spent standing in this room surrounded by the evidence of his life was a second closer to something you'd been running from since the moment you walked back through those doors.
The door opened behind you.
He was still in his stage clothes, the jacket unbuttoned and hanging off his shoulders, the v-neck beneath it dark with sweat at the collar, his hair loosened and curling against his temples. There was a glass in his hand, something amber, half-drunk and when he saw you standing there, his steps faltered and his body stuttered through a half-second of stillness before he caught himself. He kept moving, setting the glass down on the counter with a careful motion that suggested he was concentrating very hard on not dropping it.
"Quincy said you were dropping off charts." He offered, his voice low and slightly rough from the show, or perhaps the liquor.
"That's right." You gestured at the pages. "He wanted them before tomorrow."
Michael picked up the pages and looked at them without reading them, his eyes moving across the notation with a blank, mechanical focus, his fingers tightening around the paper's edge until the tips went pale.
"You were good tonight." You said, because someone had to say something before the silence consumed the room. "The Billie Jean choreography, that was new."
He made a soft sound through his nose that wasn't quite a laugh and set the pages back down. "I've been working on it. Had a lot of time lately, not sleeping much."
The words hung there, stripped of any attempt at charm or deflection. You knew what that meant. You knew because you weren't sleeping either, because three in the morning found you in the same position every night, staring at the ceiling, your body a map of missing someone who was technically still alive and reachable but felt too far to touch.
"Michael." You began and the way you said his name must have told him something, because his eyes came up to yours with a sharpness that hadn't been there a moment ago.
The words sat in your throat, heavy and jagged, because saying them out loud would make them true in a way that couldn't be taken back, and some treacherous part of you wanted to stand here in this dressing room and pretend you were still someone who belonged in his life without conditions.
"I'm seeing someone." You spoke.
The room went very quiet. Not the comfortable kind, not the silence of two people who know each other well enough to let the space breathe, but the quiet of a moment balanced on the edge of something irreversible. You watched his face cycle through expressions rapidly. His lips parted, his brow creased, something moved behind his eyes, a flicker of dread, of the specific terror that comes from hearing a thing you already suspected spoken aloud in a voice that makes it permanent.
"Okay." He said carefully. "Okay... that’s, um. That's fine… who?"
You said the name. Every muscle in his face locked into place with a stillness that was worse than any breakdown because it was clearly taking everything he had, every ounce of discipline and self-control he'd spent his entire life cultivating, to keep his features from betraying what was happening underneath.
His eyes went glassy and his nostrils flared once. His jaw set so hard you could see the muscle jump beneath the skin, a tiny, rhythmic pulse that was the only visible sign of the enormous internal effort it was taking him not to break something.
"Prince." He repeated, his voice flat, a word delivered without inflection or feeling, which was how you knew it contained more feeling than anything he'd ever said to you.
The question came out clipped, and when his eyes found yours again, the glassiness was gone. What had replaced it was something furious, a rage so intense it was almost radiant, burning behind his brown eyes.
"A few months." You managed. "After the tabloids, we started talking and it just..."
"Don't." His voice cracked on the word, not from sadness but from the effort of containment. He turned away from you, one hand coming up to press against his mouth, his fingers digging into his jaw. He walked three steps toward the far wall and stopped there, his back to you, his shoulders rising and falling with the controlled rhythm of someone trying not to hyperventilate.
"Don't tell me it just happened." He said, his voice muffled behind his hand. "Don't stand in here and tell me it just happened with him, of all the goddamn people on this planet..."
His hand dropped and clenched at his side, his knuckles white and he stared at the wall. When he turned back to you, his eyes were wet and his mouth was pulled into a shape that wasn't a smile yet wasn't a snarl, but lived somewhere in the territory between them.
"You know what it's been like?" His voice was low, trembling, the words coming out in uneven bursts.
"Every magazine, every newspaper, every time I turn on a goddamn TV, there you are, with him. His arm around you, you smiling next to him like... like you're happy. Do you know what that does to a man? To see that every single day?"
"Michael, please..." Your vision blurred. You blinked and felt the tears slip down your cheek. He watched them fall with an expression that warred between tenderness and fury, his chest heaving beneath the sweat-damp shirt, his hands shaking at his sides.
"He gets to keep you." Michael whispered and the anger had cracked open now, revealing the devastation underneath. "He gets to wake up next to you, he gets to hold your hand whenever he wants, he gets to have you in all the ways I couldn't and I get to see photographs of it, that’s what I get. Photographs. And I'm supposed to act like I'm fine."
"I'm sorry." You said, and you meant it.
"Stop saying that." He took a step toward you, then stopped himself, his body jerking back like he'd touched a hot surface, like proximity to you was a thing he both craved and couldn't trust himself with. "Just... just tell me you don't love me. Tell me that and I'll stop. I'll walk out of this room right now and I'll never bring it up again. Just tell me you don't love me."
You couldn't say it. The words were right there, the simple denial, the clean escape, the sentence that would free you both yet you couldn't form it because your body had already answered for you, your hands rising to grip his wrists, not to push him away but to hold him there. The gap between what you should say and what your hands were telling him was so enormous it swallowed every ounce of resolve you had left.
"That's what I thought." He whispered and something in his expression shifted, the desperation giving way to the look of a man who has just realised he's going to get the thing he wanted and is already mourning the cost of it.
"You know what your brothers told me…" You said, your voice barely above a whisper. "About that photo, the one you cut Prince out of."
Michael's hands stilled and his eyes widened. A flush crept up his neck, blooming across his cheeks. You watched him cycle through shock, humiliation and the dawning realisation that his brothers had betrayed him with the casual ease of men who had been waiting their entire lives for this kind of ammunition.
"They told you about that?" He breathed.
"They told me everything." Your voice was steadier now, fuelled by the tiny, desperate power of watching Michael blush so hard his ears looked painful. "The tissues, the moisturiser and what you were doing with the photo..."
"Michael. They literally caught you."
His hands came up to cover his face, pressing his palms against his eyes with a groan that came from somewhere below his chest. He stood there like that for a long second, his shoulders hunched, his ears burning, the most famous man on the planet reduced to a mortified twenty five year old whose brothers had told his ex girlfriend about the most embarrassing moment of his adult life.
"I'm gonna kill them." He muttered into his hands. "I'm gonna kill every single one of those motherfuckers. Marlon first, Marlon dies first."
"They said you told them you slept fine, that you were relaxed."
"I was relaxed." He said from behind his hands, his voice defensive and completely unconvincing. You laughed so hard your shoulders shook, a wet, half-sobbing laugh that was more relief than humour, and when you opened your eyes Michael was staring at you through his fingers with an expression of such naked, bewildered hope that it made the laughter die in your throat and be replaced by something hotter and more urgent.
"Don't say his name in here." He murmured and his hands came down from his face, finding your waist as he settled there with a possessiveness that was almost unconscious, his fingers pressing into the fabric of your blouse like he was trying to anchor himself. "Not in this room, not tonight."
"What am I supposed to say instead?"
His face was close now, close enough that you could see the flecks of gold in his brown eyes, the way his curl fell across his forehead in a loose spiral. His breath was warm against your mouth, tinged with the amber of whatever he'd been drinking. His hands tightened on your waist with a pressure that was a question and a demand all at once.
"Say mine." He whispered.
His lips found yours before you could answer and the kiss was not gentle, not the exploratory press of two people testing the waters. It was a collision and his mouth moved against yours with a hunger that bordered on desperation, his hands dragging you against him, pulling your body into the sweat-damp heat of his chest with an urgency that left no room for deliberation or doubt.
You kissed him back because your body had been waiting for this since the moment you walked into that rehearsal room, since before that, since the first night without him when you'd laid in an empty bed and tried to convince yourself that the ache would fade. His hands were in your hair and on your back, tugging at your blouse with the fumbling desperation of a man who had imagined this moment so many times that the reality of it felt like a hallucination he was afraid to wake up from.
"One night." He breathed against your mouth, between kisses, each word a gasp. "That's all I'm asking, baby. Just tonight, he’ll never know. C'mon.. please."
"Michael, I shouldn't..."
"You were mine before you were his." The words came out broken and he pulled back just far enough to look at you, his forehead pressed against yours, his brown eyes blazing and wet. "You were mine first. All of it. Every part of you. He doesn't know you the way I know you, baby. He's never woken you up at four in the morning with his face between your thighs-"
"I still love you." His voice broke on it, the words emerging from the wreckage like something pulled from a fire.
"Every day, every single day. I never stopped. Not for one second. I tried, I tried so fucking hard but none of it mattered, because nothing could replace you."
"Michael, I can’t…" You said again, the words crumbling even as you spoke them, your hands already fisting in the front of his shirt, pulling him closer instead of pushing him away, your body in open mutiny against every scrap of sense your brain was trying to preserve. "I'm with someone, I can't just..."
"I'm not asking you to leave him." His mouth found your jaw, then the spot below your ear that always made your knees unreliable, his lips pressing against your pulse with a tenderness that contradicted the desperation in his voice. "I'm not asking for forever, I'm asking for tonight. One night, baby, that’s it. I just need to feel you again. I need to know I'm not crazy, that what we had was real, that’s all I need."
Your vision blurred again and he kissed the tears off your cheek with a reverence that made your chest ache, his hands cradling your face, his thumbs tracing the line of your cheekbone. The fight was leaving your body in irreversible waves, each second pulling you further from the woman who had walked into this room with the intention of leaving and deeper into the woman who had loved this man since before she knew what loving him would cost.
"One night." You whispered and it was surrender, it was capitulation. He heard it for what it was because his whole body changed, the tension in his shoulders releasing, his breath leaving him in a long, shuddering exhale that sounded like a man being pulled back from the edge of something fatal.
"Thank you." He murmured against your mouth, a gratitude in his voice that was so genuine and completely stripped of the charm that the world knew him for. "Thank you, baby. I swear, just tonight. Just tonight."
His fingers found the buttons of your blouse, working them open one by one with hands that trembled so badly he fumbled the second button twice before it gave and when the fabric parted he pulled back just far enough to look at you. His eyes dragged down from your face, to the lace of your bra, to the exposed skin of your stomach with a look that bordered on anguish, like seeing you undressed was a reminder of every night he'd spent alone imagining exactly this.
"You're so beautiful." He murmured and his voice cracked on the last syllable, fractured by the weight of months of not being allowed to say it. His hands slid the blouse off your shoulders and down your arms with a gentleness that contradicted the urgency of the kiss, letting it fall to the dressing room floor. His fingertips traced the line of your collarbone, the slope of your shoulder, the curve of your breast above the lace. Every place he touched lit up, your skin remembering his hands with a relief so intense it was almost painful.
"Michael." You breathed and he answered by dropping his mouth to the hollow of your throat, kissing the pulse point there, his lips pressing against the frantic beat of your heart with a tenderness that made your fingers curl into his shoulders. His tongue traced a slow line up the side of your neck and the sound he made against your throat was obscene, a groan that vibrated through your collarbone.
He unclasped your bra with a practiced ease that should have annoyed you but instead made your breath hitch, the lace falling away and leaving you bare from the waist up. He pulled back to look at you. His hands came up to cup your breasts, his thumbs grazing your nipples with a touch so light it was almost not there, a whisper of contact that sent a shockwave straight down through your belly and into the space between your legs. You arched into his palms with a gasp you couldn't suppress, your body responding to him with a readiness that was embarrassing, that betrayed every oath of loyalty you'd made to someone else.
"Tell me you missed me." He murmured, his mouth moving down from your throat to your chest, his lips tracing the upper curve of your breast, his tongue flicking against your nipple with a teasing, deliberate slowness that made your hips jerk against the counter's edge. "Tell me you thought about me, baby. I need to hear it. I need to know it wasn't just me."
"It wasn't just you." You breathed and it was true, it was the truest thing you'd said since you walked into this room. His mouth closed around your nipple and sucked, gently at first, then harder, his tongue swirling in slow, wet circles that sent heat flooding through your entire body, pooling low in your belly. Your back arched as your hands fisted in his curls, pulling him closer without meaning to, your body making decisions your mind had already voted against.
"I dreamed about this." He breathed against your skin, switching to the other breast, his hand replacing his mouth on the first, his fingers rolling your nipple between his thumb and forefinger with a pressure that was just on the edge of too much. "Every goddamn night, baby. I'd lay there and close my eyes. I’d try to feel you, try to remember the way you sounded, the way you tasted and it was never enough. It was never close to enough."
His hands moved to your waist, his fingers finding the button of your jeans, working them open, pulling the zipper down with a sound that was obscenely loud in the quiet room. He hooked his thumbs into the waistband and eased them down your hips, his knuckles dragging against the bare skin of your thighs with a slow, reverent pressure that left goosebumps in its wake.
The jeans joined the blouse on the floor and you were sitting on the counter in nothing but your underwear, your legs parted where he'd positioned himself between them, his body pressing into the space between your thighs with a heat that you could feel through every layer of remaining fabric.
He pulled back and looked at you, really looked, his eyes moving over every inch of exposed skin with the same focused, consuming attention he gave to a stage, except this was private, this was his. The hunger in his expression was so naked, that you felt it in your pussy, your hips shifting against the counter of their own accord, seeking friction, seeking him.
"Michael, please." You whispered. You didn't know what you were asking for, or maybe you knew exactly what you were asking for and the word please was just a container big enough to hold all of it, the want, the guilt and the desperation.
The sight of him on the floor of his dressing room, looking up at you from between your parted thighs with those dark, wrecked eyes, his curl falling across his forehead, his lips swollen and wet from kissing you, his hands gripping your thighs with a possessive pressure that would leave marks tomorrow, sent a jolt through your body so violent your legs tried to close on instinct. He pressed them apart with his palms, firm but gentle, his thumbs tracing slow circles on the inner softness of your thighs.
"Don't close up on me, baby." He murmured, looking up at you. "Let me.. I need to taste you. I've been thinking about this for months, I need..."
He didn't finish the sentence. He pressed his mouth to the thin cotton of your underwear, his lips parting against the fabric, his breath hot and damp, seeping through to the skin beneath. The sensation was so specific, exactly the thing your body had been screaming for, that your hips bucked off the counter and his hands tightened on your thighs to hold you in place.
He pinned you with a strength that was easy to forget when he was standing upright in a sweater looking gentle and unassuming but became very apparent when he was on his knees with his mouth between your legs.
He pulled the underwear to the side, his fingers trembling against your inner thigh. The first touch of his tongue was exploratory, a long, flat stroke from the bottom of your slit to the top, curling at the end against your clit with a precision that made your entire body seize. Your hands slapped down on the counter behind you for balance, your head falling back, a sound leaving your mouth that you didn't recognise.
"Oh God." You gasped and he groaned against you in response, the vibration of it buzzing through your clit, sending a cascade of sparks down through your legs. His hands slid beneath your thighs and pulled you closer to the edge of the counter, tilting your hips up toward his mouth, opening you wider. The second lick was firmer, more deliberate, his tongue finding the exact spot that made your thighs shake and working it in slow, excruciating circles.
"Michael, I can't, that's..."
His tongue moved with a focused, relentless rhythm, alternating between long, flat licks and tight, concentrated circles around your clit, his lips sucking gently, his breath hot and ragged against your wet skin. The pleasure built in waves, each one higher and more consuming than the last, radiating outward from the point of contact between his mouth and your clit, spreading through your belly. His fingers joined his mouth, one sliding inside you, then two, curling upward in a beckoning motion that hit a spot so deep that your hips jerked violently and you had to bite your lip to keep from screaming.
"Don't hold back." He murmured against your thigh, his lips dragging across the sensitive skin, his fingers still moving inside you in slow, deliberate strokes. "I want to hear you, baby. Nobody can hear you. Just me, let me hear you."
He dipped his head back down and sucked your clit between his lips, his tongue flicking against it in quick, targeted strokes. His fingers pumped deeper, curling harder and the pleasure that had been building suddenly crested, every nerve in your body firing simultaneously. You came with his name on your mouth, your thighs clamping around his head, your hands fisting in his hair. Your hips pushed against his face as the orgasm tore through you in long, shuddering pulses that left you gasping and completely dismantled.
He kissed his way up your stomach into the space between your breasts, his mouth wet with you and glistening. When he reached your face he kissed you deeply, letting you taste yourself on his tongue, the intimacy of it so raw it made your spent clit throb with renewed want.
"I need to be inside you." He whispered against your mouth, the words wrecked. "Please, baby. I need..."
He stood quickly, fumbling with his belt. His hands were so uncoordinated with want that it took him three tries to get his slacks open so you reached down and helped him, your fingers brushing the hard length of him through his boxers. The sound he made was not a moan but a shudder, his entire body going rigid, his eyes squeezing shut and his jaw clenching with a control that visibly cost him.
"Don't." He breathed. "Don't touch me yet, I'll lose it. It's been... shit, baby, I haven't..."
He didn't finish. You understood. He pushed his boxers down and his cock sprang free, hard and flushed, leaking at the tip, curving up toward his stomach. The sight of it made your thighs fall open of their own accord, your body inviting him in with a shamelessness that your mind couldn't argue with.
He stepped between your legs, one hand gripping the base of his cock, the other braced on the counter beside your hip. He paused with the head pressing against your entrance, not pushing in, just resting there, the slick heat of you kissing the tip of him. His eyes found yours with a look that was so vulnerable and desperate that for a moment the whole world contracted to the two of you and the space between your bodies.
"I love you." He whispered and it was not seduction, just the raw truth torn from somewhere within him.
He thrusted inside of you.
The stretch was almost too much, a burning fullness that bordered on pain, your body remembering him in the way that muscle memory remembers a song. Your walls fluttered around him, adjusting, gripping, pulling him deeper with a greed that had nothing to do with your conscious mind.
He sank into you slowly, inch by inch, his forehead dropping to your shoulder, his breath coming in ragged gasps against your collarbone. When he was fully seated inside of you, his cock buried to the hilt. He went still, trembling, his hands gripping your hips hard enough to bruise.
"Fuck." He breathed into your neck and the word sounded like something he'd been holding in for months. "Fuck, baby, you feel... shit, I forgot how... no, I didn't forget, I could never forget, but..."
"Fuck me." You whispered, your arms wrapping around his neck, your ankles locking behind his back, pulling him impossibly closer. "Michael, please."
He pulled back and thrust in, slow at first, a deliberate withdrawal followed by a deep, rolling push that bottomed out inside you and made your back arch clean off the counter. A cry tore from your throat that you couldn't have contained if you'd wanted to. He set a rhythm that was agonisingly controlled, each thrust slow and deep, aimed at the spot inside you that made your vision blur.
"Look at me." He panted and when you opened your eyes, his face was inches from yours. "I want to see your face. I want to watch you, baby, don’t close your eyes."
"Harder." You gasped and something in him snapped, the controlled rhythm giving way to something faster, rougher, his hips slamming into you with a force that rattled the counter, that drove the breath from your lungs in sharp, rhythmic punches. His hand slid between your bodies and found your clit, rubbing in tight, frantic circles that matched the pace of his thrusts. The dual sensation, the fullness inside and the pressure outside, sent you spiraling toward the edge with a speed that terrified you, your orgasm building.
"I'm close." You whimpered, the words coming out broken, demolished by the force of his thrusts, each one jolting the syllables apart. His fingers moved faster on your clit, his cock slamming into you with a rhythm that was punishing and perfect and exactly, precisely, what your body needed.
"Come for me baby." He groaned, his voice stripped to its foundations. "Let me feel you, c’mon, let go. I've got you."
The orgasm hit you like a collision. Every muscle in your body locked as your back bowed and your mouth opened in a silent scream. You clenched around him in rhythmic pulses, dragging him over the edge with you. He buried himself deep and came with a groan that sounded like it had been excavated from somewhere below his chest. His hips stuttered as his cock pulsed inside of you, his forehead pressing against yours, his breath hot and ragged against your mouth.
"I love you." He gasped, still coming, his body jerking with the aftershocks. His hands gripped your hips so hard you knew there would be bruises, purple and tender, where you would press them in the morning and feel the echo of this moment. "I love you, I love you, I love you."
He said it like a mantra, as though saying it enough times could stitch the broken thing between you back together. You held him while he trembled, your arms around his neck, your face buried in the damp curve of his shoulder. His cock softened inside of you, his heartbeat hammering against your chest.
For a long, suspended moment neither of you spoke, because speaking would mean confronting what you'd just done and neither of you were ready for that. Not yet, not with his body still warm inside of yours and the dressing room door closed against a world that would not understand this, that would not forgive this.
Eventually he pulled out of you and the emptiness that followed was its own kind of ache. He rested his forehead against yours, his hands cradling your face, thumbs tracing the tracks of tears you hadn't realised you'd shed. Michael looked at you with an expression so saturated with love, with guilt and the bittersweet agony of getting exactly what you want and knowing it's going to cost you everything.
"I'm not gonna be able to let you go again." He whispered and the words should have been a warning, a red flag, a reason to stop, but instead they settled into your chest. You pressed your lips to his temple and let the salt of your tears mix with the sweat on his skin. You said nothing because there was nothing to say that wouldn't make this worse or better and you couldn't distinguish between the two anymore.
Outside the dressing room door, you could hear the muffled sounds of the venue winding down. The whole world carried on without any regard for the fact that inside this room, you had just detonated your life and rebuilt it around the shape of a man who loved you in a way that was selfish and consuming.
Morning would come and so would the guilt. The weight of Prince's trust, of Michael's impossible promises, of the secrecy that was already wrapping itself around this moment like a second skin, all of it would come.
But morning wasn't here yet. Michael's arms were around you and his lips were pressed to your hair. He was rocking you gently, the way you rock something precious that you're afraid to set down.
You knew Marlon was going to lose his shit.
But it didn't stop there. You both knew it wouldn't. One night had been a lie, a word you'd both spoken because admitting the truth, that this was not a relapse but a reopening, was too enormous to say out loud in a dressing room that still smelled like sex and the particular brand of cologne he'd been wearing since you first met him.
The second night was after the Detroit show, a supply closet, his hand over your mouth, his lips against your ear whispering you feel that, baby, you feel what you do to me? And when it was over, he straightened your skirt and kissed your forehead, walking back to the afterparty like a man who had not just had his cock buried inside someone else's girlfriend.
The third night was his hotel room. The fourth was a bathroom at the venue, the counter digging into your back, his hand fisted in your hair, your skirt hiked up around your waist and his whispered shh, baby, someone's coming doing nothing to stop either of you, only making you wetter, making him groan against your throat when he felt the effect those words had on your body.
By the second week, you had stopped pretending this was temporary. Your hand would find his beneath tables, in the backs of cars and in the gaps between other people's attention. He couldn't get enough. Once Michael had decided he wanted something, he would find you, his eyes locking onto yours across rooms full of backup dancers and his own brothers with a focus so intense it felt like a hand around your throat. Sometimes he would say nothing, or he would say come here in a voice so low only you could hear it and you would follow him because your body had stopped asking your brain for permission somewhere around the third night.
And it wasn't always private. That was the part that surprised you, the part that turned your blood hot and reckless. Michael, who had spent months hiding you, was now making a point of doing the opposite.
A dark corner of a loading dock after the Phoenix show, his hands on your hips, your back against a concrete wall, the sound of crew members moving equipment thirty feet away. Michael would pull back just far enough to look at you with those dark eyes, his cock pressed against you through the thin barrier of your underwear.
I'll never hide you again he’d murmur with his forehead against yours, his breath hot hovering over your mouth. You hear me, baby? Never again. I don't care who sees.
Michael, someone's right there you’d whisper with your hands on his chest, never pushing him away, your body arching into him even as your voice protested, the contradiction so constant it had become its own language between you.
Let them see he would say as he pulled your underwear to the side, the head of his cock nudging against your entrance. Let the whole goddamn world know you're mine, baby. I'm done hiding. If we get caught, we get caught. I don't care anymore.
He’d pushed inside you and fucked you there against that wall with the crew on the other side, his mouth on your throat, each thrust a declaration, each whispered you're mine, you've always been mine a manifesto written on your body. He’d come inside of you with a groan he didn't bother to suppress, his whispered shit, baby, I love you, I love you so goddamn much loud enough that you pressed your hand over his mouth and he laughed against your palm.
The brothers knew. Of course the brothers knew. Marlon had figured it out first, catching a look between you and Michael during a meal, but he'd said nothing, only raised his eyebrows at you from across the table with an expression that conveyed both congratulations and genuine concern for the inevitable fallout.
Tito found out when he walked into a dressing room unannounced and trailed back out so fast he nearly took the door off its hinges. Later that night, Michael appeared at your hotel room door looking sheepish. Tito saw us, baby, don't worry, he's not gonna say shit he’d say with the casual confidence of a man whose brothers had been covering for him since before either of you were born.
Quincy knew without being told, reading it in the air between you the way he read music. One afternoon, he'd pulled Michael aside and spoke to him in a serious voice that you couldn't hear but could interpret from the way Michael's shoulders tightened. After, he kissed you in the hallway, his hands framing your face, murmuring. Quincy can talk all he wants, baby, I'm not stopping, I can't stop, you understand me? and you'd understood, because stopping felt like asking your lungs to stop breathing.
You never talked about Prince. He called the hotel twice, both times while you were in Michael's room and both times you stood at the payphone in the lobby the next day, telling him you'd been in rehearsal, your hand gripping the receiver so hard your knuckles ached. The ease with which the lie came, was its own kind of horror.
The secrecy that had destroyed your relationship the first time had become the architecture of your affair. The hiding that had driven you away was now the structure that held you together and whether being complicit in your own concealment was freedom or just a more sophisticated form of the same cage, was a question you pushed to the back of your mind every night when Michael's arms found you and his voice, when he’d whisper, I love you, baby, I love you so much against your skin with a tenderness so devastating that it made every other version of your life that existed outside of this room, feel out of reach.
Marlon never did lose his mind, but he did start locking dressing room doors behind him and when Michael looked at him across dinner tables he would raise his glass with a knowing, infuriating smirk that made Michael's ears turn red. Marlon would say nothing, because the silence was so much more effective than words and because the best therapists, know exactly when to let the patient sit in the discomfort of the thing they refuse to name.
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