36. Jaxson
36
Jaxson
B athsheba stays for an hour longer negotiating a few of the dictates her husband has made over the years that she’d like to see stay in the doctrine of the Sovereignty. Some of them, like allowing divorce no matter what the circumstance, I don’t even have to debate with her. We both agree on that. Then there are the ones that are just the result of Bathsheba being a product of her time and are non-negotiable and have to go on my end. And then there are the ones that I’m ambivalent about and allow her to make her case on before deciding that I’ll run it past Lauressa to see what she thinks.
Bathsheba is more amenable to not getting her way on some things than I thought she would be, though, apparently more concerned that her husband is taken down and she and her children will be left alone than anything.
To think that even my father’s own wife was waiting for his downfall. If I’d known this many people were gunning to take my father down, I would have gone to them a long time ago. But I suppose even when we’re aware of the manipulations of the Sovereignty’s doctrine and the Oracles who have led it, it doesn’t mean we’re all immune to it. Not even me. Otherwise, it would have occurred to me that I wasn’t the only one close to my father feigning devotion or, at the very least, that there were people whose grievances and doubts were greater than their faith in my father.
“Ah,” Bathsheba suddenly says, looking past me. “The woman who was the catalyst for this whole mess.”
I turn my gaze to the stairs to see Lauressa standing at the bottom of the steps. She’s clearly been up for at least a while, judging by the fact that she looks like she’s showered, washed and blow-dried her hair, and put on new clean clothes as opposed to the dirty rags she practically passed out in the night before.
“Queen Priestess,” Lauressa says.
Bathsheba laughs. “You don’t have to be so formal, dear. Call me Bathsheba. Besides, if my husband’s second son has anything to say about it, that’s about to be your title soon.”
Bathsheba stands up and approaches Lauressa at the bottom of the steps. She stares at her for a long time before reaching into her purse and pulling out an external hard drive the size of a credit card.
“Something tells me that you’re the one who’s going to give Jaxson the most use out of all this, so I’ll leave this in your hands,” the woman says, handing the hard drive over to Lauressa.
Lauressa takes it without looking, her eyes never leaving the woman’s face.
Bathsheba holds Lauressa’s gaze for a while. Then, apparently satisfied with what she’s seen, she nods her head and finally makes her way out of the living area and into the front foyer, where one of my staff is waiting to escort her out.
“What was that about?” Lauressa asks after she’s gone .
“You know the saying. Hell hath no fury,” I say as I stand in the spot where Bathsheba left.
Lauressa laughs and says, “Don’t I know it.”
I laugh in return, the agitation I’d been feeling all day because of her absence, even though she was only down the hall from me, easing. The problems I’m facing don’t feel so daunting anymore now that she’s with me.
I reach out a hand to just touch her face, to feel her skin against mine. To be reassured that she’s here and not just some unbelievable fantasy that my mind conjured in the last eight months.
Lauressa flinches away.
I don’t blame her for that. She’s been through a lot. It was only three days, but the reports I’ve gotten from my preliminary interrogations of Samson and all the S-Team members involved indicate that it was a harrowing three days. None of them are going to live after this. But I’m going to ensure that their deaths are as harrowing as the torment they put her through.
It’s only natural that her instincts are telling her to fear me.
So I try again, this time making sure to project my movement. She watches my hand warily, but just before the back of my hand can touch her cheek, she not only flinches away, she takes a step back.
I narrow my eyes. Something’s wrong.
“You know you don’t have anything to fear from me. You know I’ll never hurt you,” I remind her.
“Wouldn’t you? Haven’t you already?”
“What nonsense are you talking about?”
“It’s not nonsense,” Lauressa snaps. “You know, when Samson and your father had me locked in that room, when they tormented me and gaslit me and said it was for my own good, I couldn’t help but think that humiliation… it all felt so familiar. I didn’t want to think about it then. I just needed to survive, but now I remember why it was familiar. Because you treat me the same way. Just like your father.”
It's not the first time I’ve been accused of being like my father. It makes me bristle to hear it every time because I hate that man more than anyone on the planet. At the same time, though, it was a comparison that was necessary to suffer. Because equating myself to being like my father meant also equating myself to being the next Oracle. So I’ve suffered through the comparisons my entire life.
But like with all things, Lauressa saying it makes anger erupt inside me. Uncontrollable and untamable.
I say nothing as she continues, raising her voice as she says, “How many times have you hurt me, but it wasn’t really hurting me because it was for my own good and I wanted it anyway? How many times did I fight you, did I say no, and you ignored me? How many times did I give an inch and you took a mile?”
“It was different,” I say in an even tone.
“Just like you’re different from my brother. My father. My exes?”
“Yes,” I say tersely.
Lauressa scoffs and says, “You’re your father’s son, so of course you would. But every time I was with him, the manipulation, the gaslighting, the coercion. All the things I hated about him are all things that I’ve had to put up with from you. All the things I will have to put up with from you if I go through with this.”
“If,” I repeat as she makes her way upstairs.
“Yes, if,” she snaps over her shoulder. “I’m going back to Macon. To be with my sister-in-law until she has the baby.”
“You’re not going anywhere.”
“Then stop me,” she says as she makes her way down the hall to her room.
I do just that, grabbing her and pressing her back into a wall, our bodies flush against each other, with her wrists pinned. Somehow, Lauressa manages to keep the external drive gripped in her hand the entire time.
She doesn’t try to pull her wrists from my grip. She doesn’t try to push me away. She doesn’t squirm. She doesn’t do anything to resist. Just smirks up at me. But she’s far from just humoring me. Far from playing the game that we started so long ago, where she would purposely do something to invoke my ire or make a sly comment that would make me lose all control. Now? There’s nothing smug about this. Nothing satisfied. Just a smile of acknowledgment because she thinks I just proved her right.
“What are you going to do, Jaxson? Drug me and make me think I’m being raped? Find all my other exes and torture them? Use your connections to get me put on a no-fly list? Freeze all my accounts so I have no money to rent a car or buy gas? What more can you do that’s more outrageous than anything you’ve already done to me? What can you really do to stop me from walking right out that door? ”
With sudden clarity, I realize that she wants to be convinced. If Lauressa didn’t want to be convinced, she wouldn’t have said anything. She wouldn’t have confronted me. She would have absconded into the night, and with everything she knew, she would have ruined me. Ruined the Sovereignty and gone to the feds with all this and had us raided before I could even track her down to stop her if she’d wanted. But she didn’t do any of that. She wants to talk herself into being here because, ultimately, she wants to be here. But there are too many similarities between me and everyone who ever wronged her in the past for her to be certain.
She wants to have faith in me. Everything she’s done is because she wants to have faith in me. But she doesn’t want to be wrong. She doesn’t want to be betrayed again.
“Nothing to say, Jax?” Lauressa asks when I’ve been silent for too long.
There’s plenty to say, but only one thing that I know of that will get her to believe me. That will get her to stay. Because force isn’t going to work anymore. She’s not afraid of the consequences. She doesn’t care about the consequences anymore. Not when she’s this determined.
“I…”
For one of the first times in a while, I find myself not at a loss for words, but unable to say them. Because the last person I even reasonably felt anything close to this for was my sister. Then, when she planned to get out of the Sovereignty and part of those plans was stealing the three teenagers she’d raised as her own with her, she died for it. Specifically, she died because of me. Because for all that my father wanted nothing to do with me, I belonged to him. I was his heir. And how dare my fealty be to anyone except the man who gave me life, except the man who called himself the Oracle? How dare I love someone more than I love the Supreme Force and the Oracle?
Since then, I only measured people on a sliding scale of being a potential threat to me or being useful to me. Jessie, while having little interest in power or taking charge or initiative, always has useful gossip. Abner is always compiling useful evidence of said gossip. Magdalene, while the bane of my existence since she went by Blair and Candace dragged her into our home, is useful for organizing and getting women to follow her. Landon is reckless and always has been in a way that can’t just be attributed to his youth. But he’s brave and passionate and always wants to do what he thinks is the right thing. J was useful to get me close to Lauressa and then useful in getting me information on Serenity, who was then useful when it came to figuring out why money was being embezzled from the Sovereignty coffers. Useful people are a dime a dozen. Useful people can be replaced, even if it’s difficult or an annoyance I’d rather not deal with. Useful people aren’t worth the force and effort of keeping. Useful people can’t be used against me.
But they are nothing compared to Lauressa. Lauressa? She isn’t just useful. She doesn’t need to be useful. She is everything and has been since I laid eyes on her image when we video chatted for the first time. And my father knew it as soon as he saw us walk into a room together. Finally, after two decades, someone he could use against me .
I let my indecisiveness win over and let her go. I back away from her, leaving her enough room to walk away.
Finally, she’s the one knocked off kilter, opening and closing her mouth as she stares at me.
Then she shakes her head and says, “You’re just going to let me leave?”
“What do you want me to say? Reassure you that you’re wrong? That I’m not like my father? That I’m not like all the other men you ever had to fight in your life? Not as controlling or manipulative or conniving. Not as power-hungry. I won’t insult my intelligence or yours by telling you I’m not. Because we both know it’s true,” I finally answer with a shrug. “We both know that if it were just up to me, nothing in the Sovereignty would change. Not substantively. I’d attract more people, attract more money and donors, turn a blind eye to sins that weren’t hurting anyone as long as they were discreet, be more efficient and effective than my father ever was, and hurt more people than he ever did.”
“If you’re trying to resell me on all this, you’re doing a terrible job,” Lauressa points out.
“Because I’m not trying to sell you on anything. It’s true.”
“Then what’s the difference?” she yells, practically begging at this point with tears in her eyes. “I helped you with the understanding that things would be different. But if it’s all going to be the same, what’s stopping me from walking out that door with this fucking flash drive and tearing the Sovereignty down to the ground? Why shouldn’t I? ”
I have to say it. Something I haven’t told anyone in twenty years. Not even in a playful manner. It’s the only thing that might get her to stay.
“Because I love you.”
Those words have the effect of doing something that I’ve rarely been able to do on purpose, which is getting Lauressa to be quiet.
Since she has nothing to say, I continue, “There’s no substantive difference between me and my father that would matter to you. I don’t traffic women and fuck them and then slit their throats in the name of purifying them. But that’s a low bar to clear. The real difference between me and my father is that I love you,” I say.
“You love me?” she asks.
“Yes.”
She huffs. “You’ve got one hell of a way of showing it, Jaxson Devine.”
“I don’t know how else to show it but the way that I have. It’s the way I was taught love looked like. The God of Noah and Abraham and Lot? He was cruel. Jealous. A murderer. Powerful. Malevolent. Mostly disinterested in the affairs of men until he decided he didn’t like the way they were living and wanted to flex his power and control. Except for his chosen messengers and his prophets. They were his friends. They were the men he loved.”
“So you’re my God and I’m your prophet? You’re going to love me the way God loved them?” Lauressa huffs. “You being Oracle and me being your queen priestess. It’s going to be you constantly testing me. Me constantly arguing against you. You constantly hurting me when I do, to prove that you’re always right and omniscient? People constantly after me and hurting me just because they know I’m yours? That’s what your love is always going to be?”
“You’re forgetting how those biblical stories always end. God’s enemies learning that there’s a reason he chose his prophets and messengers. That in the end, they realize that you’re stronger and more powerful than you or them ever could have imagined. And once that’s proven, God swoops in as a reaper of death to avenge his messengers against those who tormented them. Ridiculed them. Humiliated them,” I state.
I press us together, bodies flush against one another, my hand reaching to caress her face in awe of her.
“Eight months ago, before you met me, did you think you could take down a cult leader? Would you have been given the power to take down the Sovereignty singlehandedly with a single information dump of files onto a federal investigation server? Look how powerful my love has made you, Snow White.”
My words aren’t just to convince Lauressa to stay. To not fight me. To remember her place will always be at my side. They’re also true. A truth I hadn’t even comprehended until I said them. Eight months ago, she was a diamond in the rough. So rough that no one recognized she was a diamond. That with the right love, the right attention, cultivation, cutting, and polishing, she would sparkle brighter than the sun.
We are more than that, though. We are God and Joseph. Allah and Prophet Muhammad. Yaweh and Moses. We are —
“Look at us. The Supreme Force and his anointed one. My Oracle,” I say, running my hands through her hair and then grabbing it close to her scalp to bend her neck up to me.
Lauressa is the one who closes the gap between us.
Kissing her again feels like the first breath of life. No. More precious than that. It’s the first breath of life after being resurrected. Because making Lauressa my own only to almost lose not just her life to my father but also her rightful place at my side felt like dying. And now she’s back with me, and no one can take her from me.
“Jaxson,” Lauressa whispers against my lip. “I don’t… Samson…”
“I don’t want to hear you whisper another man’s name right now,” I say with a warning growl.
“But he… I…”
“I know exactly what he did,” I say.
What Lauressa went through during the three days she was captured was my top priority, and before I could even get myself medical attention, I was grilling Samson, all his men, the S-Team, and my father about what happened. He may not have touched her, because he’d likely already be a dead man for that. He would be a dead man now if I hadn’t had a sliver of wits about myself and considered that Lauressa might want to have a part in his downfall.
“And?”
“And he’s going to die for it, having had the unfortunate blessing of witnessing a goddess like you at the peak of ecstasy.”
“No ecstasy about it,” Lauressa mutters. A pause, and then she says with a crack in her tone, “Jaxson. Your father. All those girls. I—”
“Shhh,” I mutter against her lips. “Let me reward you for your sacrifice and suffering on my behalf, my Oracle.”
I silence her with another kiss, picking her up and hiking her legs around my waist to carry her to my bedroom.
Once there, I put my hand in the one holding the hard drive. She relinquishes her grip on it to me, and I set it on the side table.
I remove the long shirt she was wearing, finding only naked skin underneath. I remove my own clothes afterward, pick her back up, and lie her on the bed. Then I’m on top of her, covering her body with mine, kissing her. She moans into our kiss, squirming under me and grinding her cunt on my erect cock.
Already she’s wet for me. Even after threatening to run away. Even after doubting me, she wants me. She kept her faith in me, and now, I’m going to spend every day after this proving that such faith wasn’t misplaced.
I could fuck her right now. But I want to take my time with her. I want to torment her. I want to torture her. Not the way I normally torture her with sex. There will be time for that later. Right now, she doesn’t need a punishment. She doesn’t need a reminder of who she belongs to. Nor are those things I want to do to her right now. Right now, I want to torture her with want and desire for me. I want to reward her for a job well done. A mission accomplished. An impossible mission assigned to her by a God she wasn’t sure she could have faith in but did until the end.
I pull my lips from hers and kiss down her jaw, her neck, her torso.
“Jaxson,” she whines, squirming under me in want. Desire.
I chuckle. “Patience, Snow White. ”
“Say it again.”
“Say what?” I say as I kiss beneath her belly button, at the juncture where her torso meets her pelvis, just above the coarse curls of her private area.
“Say that you love me,” she demands.
The words still get choked up in my throat. Choked up by the instinctual fear that they will be used against me in the near future. But I swallow the fear. It’s illogical since in literally a few days, I will be the Oracle.
“I love you,” I say, and it’s easier to say than it was the first time.
Lauressa opens her mouth to say something more, but then my mouth is on her cunt, and the only sound from her mouth is the moan that escapes it.
Her legs shake around my head and shoulders as I taste her, traveling down to my cock and making it even harder. The feeling is so potent that it feels as though some invisible force is gripping my cock and stimulating me to an orgasm. That’s never happened before. Not with anyone who wasn’t Lauressa. With previous women, eating their cunt was just a necessary prelude to the main event. Something any man with an ounce of pride and ego, if not respect, would do. It certainly wasn’t something that I’ve ever gotten off on in the past. But now, I can eat Lauressa’s cunt, listen to her pretty little moans. Feel her legs shake. Feel her hands tug on my hair all day and be satisfied.
I do have all day. I have all week if I want. All month. All year. The rest of our lives. So when she finally comes into my mouth, back arching off the bed, loud moan echoing through the room, I don’t stop. I run my nose up the length of her cunt, from clit to hole to clit and back, and keep pleasing her with my tongue, this time inserting it directly into her hole.
“Jaxson,” she gasps. “Jaxson… I…”
Her next orgasm steals the words from her mouth. I move back to her clit, inserting my fingers into her hole this time. She comes again, and above me, she becomes little more than a quivering mass of flesh. Chest flush red and heaving with her choked gasps for breath. Dark nipples pointing straight in the air. Legs continuing to shake rhythmically around me. Hands fisted in the sheets. It’s a mesmerizing point of view. Determined to keep it, I continue to pleasure her with my mouth.
Her cunt squirts out hot liquid the fourth time, and I’m so fucking hard, I rut my cock against the sheets under me, having no desire to take my mouth away from her cunt and lose this beautiful view, but also so fucking turned on by the sight.
I lock my arms back around Lauressa’s thighs to stay in place on her cunt and increase the friction of my rut against the bed. Feeling me rutting back and forth, she begins to instinctively rock and grind her hips up and down in time with me, helping to increase the friction against my cock. Her breast now bouncing up and down with the movement.
I groan into her cunt as the hot tension coiling in my groin, tightening my balls, becomes unbearable, aching for relief.
“Fuck,” I mutter into her cunt, pleasure zinging up my spine, and I’m so hard, so desperate to come, I can hardly breathe.
“Shit,” I curse again into Lauressa’s cunt, unable to do little more than keep the warmth of my mouth on her hot cunt.
Lauressa is all too willing to do the work, though. She grinds her hips down against my mouth one final time, in rhythm with me rutting down on the sheet.
She comes in my mouth, liquid gushing from her and choking me at the same time as I come, hot spurts of seed ruining the sheets even more than they already are and making a sticky mess on my stomach.
I rub my head into her thigh, inhaling the scent of her cunt as I slowly come down from the high. But I’m not sated. It’s not enough, and just as fast as I had my orgasm, I’m hard again.
“Up here,” Lauressa says, shifting her legs and pulling me back on top of her until I’m covering her body with mine again.
Our lips meet. Her hips raise to meet my cock. It seems I’m not the only one left not completely sated.
I guide my cock into her hot hole, taking all the self-control I have left to muster not to come right then and there.
“Fuck. You’re so fucking tight,” I say.
The laugh Lauressa lets out feels like the first rays of the sun coming out to grant warmth after a cloudy, snowy Chicago winter.
Then she teases, “Language.”
I would laugh if I weren’t damn near losing my mind from being gripped so tight by her.
We are little more than our instincts as I rock my cock back and forth inside her, and she gives me back as good as she’s got. Just us. In our bodies. In our own world .
With the high importance placed upon marriage in the Sovereignty, there’s also an emphasis on sex being making love. Every time I heard it, I tried not to roll my eyes and sometimes failed. In my opinion, sex was no better or different with someone you loved or someone you didn’t, as long as all parties involved were enthusiastic about it. It was all biology and psychology. Making love was just a term used because religious zealots needed to convince people there was a difference between waiting for a god to send the supposed right person for someone to marry and fucking them, and fucking them or anyone else outside of marriage.
But now I wonder if they were right. Because even though I’ve fucked Lauressa a dozen times before and never been able to get enough, this time feels different. Maybe there’s some truth to the idea of making love, if it exists. And if it doesn’t exist, I imagine that what Lauressa and I are doing now is the closest thing to it.
“You’re so good to me,” Lauressa says breathlessly, holding me close and forcing me to make more shallow thrusts. “I didn’t understand it. But you are. You’re so good. I…”
She trails off as our lips meet once more, cutting off the rest of her confession. But I don’t need to know that she loves me. Frankly, I don’t care if she did or didn’t. I love her, and my love is obsessive. My love is torment. My love is torture—painful, possessive, jealous, and a myriad of other heinous emotions. Regardless, she’s mine, for now until beyond eternity. Our two souls intertwined as one.
“My Oracle,” I mutter to her .
Her cunt clenches down on my cock in response, legs shooting straight out as though she’s possessed as she comes again, milking my own orgasm from me. Her moans become shouts of ecstasy.
Everything is too much. The smell of sweat, sex, and fluids in the air. The sounds of our moans and shouts. The tastes of her skin and lips. The sight of her body squirming uncontrollably under me. The feel of her cunt gripping my cock. Her skin on mine. It’s all too much, like suddenly I’m something more than human. Some superior being with heightened senses that I can’t control, resulting in being overstimulated. But at the same time, it’s not enough.
I keep thrusting into her; her walls keep clamping down on my sensitive cock, the sensations so intense it’s painful until the pain subsides, giving way to more pleasure.
I lose count of the orgasms after that. Or maybe it’s all just one long wave of ecstasy and pleasure. It doesn’t matter regardless.
After it’s over, we lay on soiled sheets, sticky with fluids and sweat. We should probably drag ourselves out of bed, clean up, and change the bedding. But I’m too exhausted to force myself, and judging by the way Lauressa isn’t complaining about being a mess and needing to shower yet, she’s just as exhausted.
We say nothing. There’s nothing else to say. Everything has been said. And what can’t be said has been felt and conveyed.
After a while, Lauressa reaches over to the nightstand and picks up the external hard drive, flipping it over idly in her hands.
“I know how to get the Sovereignty to accept that your father was a false Oracle and that you were actually the one meant to be Oracle,” she says .
“Do you?” I ask, not particularly concerned. The last thing I feel like thinking about is this mess with the Sovereignty.
Lauressa rolls over to face me and grins. “I’m going to make you a martyr.”