━━━━━━ ༻ 009 ༺ ━━━━━━
" It Has Always Been You "

          THEIR COMBINED MOANS WERE a sigh of relief rode on the wings of ecstasy. The damp noises formed between their lips parting with each inclination driving closer were only a mere background to the orchestra sung from their souls in a throaty murmur that only the other could hear. All exhibitions and self-control dissolve and the freedom that came with that spoken approval between them translated into the roaming of their hands, into the eagerness with which they sped up something that their souls were ready to affirm they've earned from since the Cheltenham Races.

Thomas grazed his rough thumbs up the bare skin of Jackie's thighs. Hooking the flat of his palm underneath her knee, he helped her lift her leg up, hold around him and thus he had invited himself to step closer and reach his left arm further around her, a clear pathway to guiding her to flush her chest against his.

Jackie's hands were fast on their own quest too, because while her nightgown was loose and thin, what Thomas was wearing was rigid, running thick on multiple layers, and slightly damp from a rain she didn't even realize had started outside. There was glass shards on his coat — she heard their clinking on the floor while he cooperated with her desire to undress him, to gift him some of his mobility back in echqnge for a brief moment of pause in his lead on hungry kisses and search for sensation — and there was blood on parts of his buttoned up shirt, especially on the sleeves.

"Are you hurt?" Jackie whispered to him, when his forehead rested on her left shoulder and her hands trailed down his back removing his shirt. They took that moment to breathe — a much needed pause after he had refused to leave room between them sufficient for Jackie to shrug off a shirt she unbuttoned sloppily, ripping out some of the buttons, fact that caused her to mumble of how she can buy him a new suit later — and she gave it away thoughtlessly, though her cheeks were flushed and her breath was ragged, just to quench the avid thirst of her worry for him.

Such dispaly of care was enough to turn Tommy's head almost instantly towards her neck and place a trail of kisses that led up to her pulse. "Not anymore," he breathed there, eliciting another sound of pleasure to fall off her parted lips, something so intoxicating to him that he was certain it was this they had in mind when boiled the first spirit. To listen to her moans, her breathless puffs, to feel her shiver, tremble, warm up, that was a cure to everything Thomas Shelby had to endure that day, something that started as soon as the first hour of the morning.

That morning, his headache pulsed stronger than ever upon seeing the basket of rotten fruit and vegetables get slammed on the kitchen table by Polly Gray. His aunt didn't even look at him, though there was no doubt the display of wrath was for him to behold and feel guilty about. Such old tricks of women shouldn't phase him nor surprise him anymore, but to be wounded by them was still a possibility worthy of his grimace. Despite reading plentifully into what had just happened, he decided on the spot that given his love for his aunt, it would be far more polite of him to answer her indirect challenge than remain silent and read her lack of verbal greeting.

"Did you speak to her?" He asked, pausing his smoking, an activity that either way, seemed not to have done its vice's only quality justice since Freddie Throne, his little sister's husband and father of her child, was taken by police into arrest when they all least expected, but most importantly, when Thomas wanted it the least to happen.

"She didn't speak back," Polly replied bluntly.

"Well, did you tell her?" Tommy insisted, lowering his cigarette and crushing it in the ash tray on the table. He had tried, in vain, to convince his family that his cruelty would never reach the instance of hurting his own sister as such: he would have never planned for Freddie Thorne to be arrested on the night Ada gave birth to his son. Though it was the truth, no one believed it. Not really. And the only eyes he saw unchanged in their reflected image of him were Jacqueline's.

"I'll only tell her what I know to be true," Polly remained cold in her answers.

"It's the last time I am going to say this," he was bound to sigh tiredly, taking the nearest chair at the table as the sturdy anchor for him to lean on, hand gripping its wooden back. "It wasn't me who shopped Freddie Thorne."

"Tommy...," Polly stopped in her step headed to leaving the room. She had obviously stopped there in such a storm only to make him aware that because of him, Ada accepts none of their helps with her child. "I'd ask you to swear on the Bible, but you can't swear on that, can you? Nothing you hold is sacred."

Polly's words haunted him into a corner of silence, but she didn't leave him be there, not yet. Just when he lowered his head, she decided to continue, "If you didn't do this to Freddie, then you should revisit who of your new acquaintances you can really trust. You have invited strangers into the personal affairs of this family."

The accents trapped within her allusion demoted it into a direct bias clear enough that Tommy couldn't ignore it. So he sighed away from the chair and straightened up, "If you have something against Jacqueline, speak it plainly." Within, emotions were building up, but through his tone and across his features, nothing made it out, not even a flinch of anything else but numbness.

"She seems like a fine woman, a cunning one for that matter too," Polly hurried to walk forward, graping the chair across the table from him. She leant forward and lowered her voice accordingly, "What I think about her and what I think her capable of doesn't amount to just how concerned I am about you turning blind because of passing love. I am happy to see some part of who you were before France come back when Miss Alloways is involved, but not at the cost of your sharpness, Tommy. She's not family."

Though he dared not speak his mind into words at this time, when the betting shop just a couple thin walls away was running business, Thomas lifted his eyebrows and shook his head lightly.

Something so expressive was sufficient to have aunt Polly pale and lean back. "You want to marry her," her gasp traversed her words. "And here we were not so long ago laughing about John being an idiot for wanting to marry Lizzie, but for Christ's sake, Tommy, he at least fucked her first to tell the thinking of his cock apart from a true emotion."

Her vulgarity appalled him, but in no way whatsoever being willing to comment on it, Tommy just walked to the side.

"Alright then," Polly put no effort whatsoever into hiding her disappointment, nor her amusement with the idea of Tommy considering marriage. "And I suppose you would want to actually spend time with your wife once you marry her then. Are you telling me you're leaving Birmingham with her in one week's time?"

Her patronising tone was not worth an answer, but Tommy was planning on not giving her even the curtesy of a glance. He looked away, towards the window, feeling the morning light slipping through its dust and dirt, accentuating the headache's pulse behind his eyes.

"Then perhaps you expect her to stay here with you? As if anyone would ever leave what she has now behind for how little you can offer her here."

Tommy's jaw built up tension, clenching. His hands, hidden in his pockets, tightened into fists, but he refused valiantly to look at his aunt still, letting no sharp answer escape his thoughts through words.

"For Christ's sake, Tommy," Polly sighed at long last done with mocking him. "You shouldn't be this dumb."

Her words had been heavy, they had been rough around the edges and bruising to his mind, but them, much that everything else he had faced that day, faded away in the stumbled dance him and Jackie endorsed themselves into in order to escape the uncomfortable and cold brace of the wall for what they had now ravaged each other enough to crave like one craves fresh air after a long time spent underwater. The only distinction between a drowning man and them was that they were both sick with the madness of infatuation, thus they became willing to drown to taste heaven as it fell off of each other's lips.

After they almost tripped a few times over the mess she had made of the dinner table, Jackie took his hand into her own and led the way around the many corners of the lush hotel suite plunged into eternal darkness yet still shadowing an uneclipsed extravagance in the environment of which Tommy ached to belong. For that brief moment of having time to think, some strange panic gutted him: was he just trying to prove that he was worthy of someone like her?

Perhaps Jackie had felt the sudden tighteness of his grip on her hand and read exactly into the question of hesitation it posed, because as soon as she was certain they've reached her room, without even the care of closing the door behind them standing above her eagerness, she nudged Tommy back on her silk sheets. He expected her to follow him in the same manner, however, she stood still, slipping from his grip, waiting for him to lay back before she climbed on top. She sat in his lap and placed her right hand down on his bare chest.

"I want this," she let him know and though Tommy was aware it was sex she referred to, her hands caress across his chest made him flinch a smile at the thought she wanted his heart instead — in which case, he would have answered to her, Already yours. "I want this no matter what your answer is," Jackie continued, lifting her gaze from her hand onto his eyes, "so please, just be honest."

Tommy's hands had long sisnce lifted to hold her hips, but now, while he looked up at her eyes glazed with adoration, they started their own soft massage, up to her waist, then back down again. To her demands, he nodded.

"Is this just a one time thing?" Jackie breathed out, however had no strength to watch his eyes whilst expecting her answer. "Is this just a one time fluke? Will we be just another name for each other by the time the sun rises? I would rather know now, you see, so I don't feel the bed growing cold when you're not there, so I don't—"

Hearing her brother's words in her mind overlap her own shivering voice in a reassurance towards believing only the worse brought tears to her eyes. Before a single teardrop dripped down on his skin, Tommy sat up, his right hand cupping the side of her face.

No, his mind decided then, when his heart ripped in a thousand pieces to see her try to smile through tears. He brushed her tears away and held her face, beckoning her closer. No, this wasn't pride. This had nothing to do with ambition and sin. This is pure. Purer than everything in my life, he thought.

"The sun will rise and we'll still be making sweet love to one another," he vowed, and though it was not his intention, he smiled when his promise awakened her giggle. Jackie tried to hide her puffy eyes away from him, but Tommy found it particularly easy to hook a finger under her chin and lift her gaze back up. "Jacqueline Alloways, I didn't come here because I've had a rough day and a burning need for carnal deeds." His left arm supported her back such that throughout his next move, sweeping her off of him and down on the bed, she felt very little of the impact. On top of her, his right hand cleared her face of loose strands of her auburn hair with incredible patience, enjoying their softness one by one. "I've sought you out, though you have never been and never will be a whore to me, because my life flashed before my eyes, my nightmares haunting every aspect of it, until I saw you. You were my single glimmer that held me back then in France, a glimmer they stole from me and buried under mud and dirt and the glimmer who had me in that moment when death seemed within reach. It..."

He hesitated, lowering his gaze whilst recalling the fright he had. The meeting with those two IRA members — him, quite like Jackie had promised them guns without any plan of delivering, and not for the lack of the promised goods — had pulled out of him the animalistic soldier who forgot the shine of the sun in tunnels, and learned the ticking of the enemy pickaxes until he dreamt it in his sleep. If they managed to corner him into a situation where he had no other choice but to fight back with a brutality that ended up with him bashing someone's head in with a vase, he was rendered into a paralysing fright to think what they might do to Jackie when they discover she's redistributed their promised guns to the Peaky Blinders.

"I didn't find it fair to you to say it at the races," Jackie's voice brough his mind back to the present, restoring focus to his eyes. "But you remember a splinter of me from when we were in France now, so... I've had this feeling in my soul, when you held your hand over my chest, and you cried into my palm. Your eyes were familiar ghosts and I never even knew your name back then, but I knew one thing for certain. You were written for me, Thomas Shelby. If there's a God out there and He makes us who we are, like thos avid writers going mad in their studies seeking perfection, then you and I were written by Him to be together. I've held you in my dreams, I've let you go there too, but when we met again at the races, I..."

"I love you," Thomas breathed out. And he would continue to chant his adoration in her ear even as their naked bodies clashed and they became one in a game that ravaged her silk sheets and bathed the room in a miasma of passion. They reeked of love and the night's darkness was no longer shadow, but the cradle of privacy in which their minds, bodies and souls had their first slow taste of heaven together.

His right hand held her left pinned to the bed, their fingers interlocking after his grip slipped from her wrist.

Jackie echoed his admissions religiously, until she felt herself capable of only uttering his name — sweet music to his ears, similarly to how his gasps of pleasure were quenching catalysts for her. Upon the hills of that crescendo which made her bed recall it could creak from all its hinges given the right owners, she became greedy to be hold and feel everything Thomas Shelby had to offer: from their physical connections to the ethereal bridge formed between their eyes.

That chessboard... she got it all wrong; for once, the hidden piece was on her side, not the side of the enemy. His piece's color was her own.

It was then, in those two beats: the final thrust leading into an infinite wave of pleasure for them to drown into and the descent into the clarity of what was left behind once their tensions found their culmination. It was then that Thomas Shelby saw Jacqueline Alloways remain the same in his eyes — just as beautiful, just as angelic, just as marvelous. Her skin glistened above the flush he created on her face. Her lips remained parted, hot breaths exhaled. And he dared not move, not while he trembled her high and he panted his away. He dared not move a single inch because it was then that he knew: It has always been you, Jacqueline Alloways. You've hidden yourself from me in memories I could not remember, but it has always been you that held the key to all I have been missing.

AUTHOR'S NOTE:
I am such a sucker for how romantic this book actually is right now 😭😭😭😭 Held my breath for multiple parts of this chapter gosh. But this is a quick author's note to warn you all that this book will have multiple acts ( each act kinda a season ) AND I do love a happy ending so when stuff goes down, down bad I mean, remain hopeful !!! I have a plan, as Tommy would say too.