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iamskyereads · 1 year

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Lie to Me (xx)

JAVIER PEÑA x FEM READER

The Conclusion and a Happy One Year to this Fic!

warnings: as always my works are 18+ (MDNI), rated Explicit, alcohol mention, explicit sexual content, whole lotta feels.

word count: 10.2k (oops)

A/N: I wanted to give another special shout out to the 👑 @ezrasbirdie for always being a wonderful friend and enabler and editor extraordinaire. I loved being able to come chat with you about characters, storylines, anything and everything Javier, it was magical to have you on this journey with me. 😘😘

YES, there will be an Interlude, I wrote this finale first. Very likely also that I may release some deleted scenes or extras as inspiration strikes. Thank you to all my readers and for all your comments and love for this series. 💜❤️

AO3 // Series Masterlist // Masterlist // previous

It was approaching autumn in Washington D.C., despite the prickle of humidity clinging to the air like the last grasp of a passionate lover, unwilling to depart.

Javier almost bought cigarettes before his testimony, opting instead for a packet of Nicorettes to chew on and a cup of coffee at the shop around the corner from the Department of Justice and DEA Headquarters. His watch told him he had five minutes until the proceedings were starting, but as he approached the court room, the bailiff standing outside the doors told him they had proceeded ahead of schedule.

Forced to dump the rest of his coffee into the nearest trash can, he was ushered into the pale, silent halls of justice.

Jorge Salcedo heard him enter first. The man sat, repentant and humble dressed in a dark gray suit and tie, and wearing his stress like a second skin. Though he managed to give Javier a friendly nod, while also conveying a subtle shift of his eyebrows to the witness stand beside the judge and the woman being sworn in.

That was where Javier saw her in a navy dress and blazer duo and a saucy red lipstick. She was seated cross legged, demure and entirely at ease, save for the jiggling of her well-heeled Mary Jane, thought to be hidden by the parapet of the witness box, but visible to Javier’s eye line from the back corner of the room. The sole clue to the inner workings of her mind.

She was nervous.

Salcedo’s defense lawyer was interrogating her. State your name for the record. Occupation and credentials. All of which she answered without a touch of hesitation as Javier found an aisle seat.

It’d been six weeks since Javier had last seen her in the Bogotá airport, and goddamn, how much he missed her.

“So you’re what they call a human lie detector?” Salcedo’s lawyer asked her once she was finished with her oath. “Can you explain to the court what that is?”

She explained what that entailed, familiarizing the judge with the process of how through the science of observation, one may study and read microexpressions, body language, body habits, for signs of someone lying or deceiving.

The defense lawyer went on once she concluded. “You were familiar with my client Jorge Salcedo while he was a confidential informant for the DEA?”

“Yes, I was.”

“And given your skillset in human deception—and all that you’ve informed us about it—did you judge him to be an honest man?”

“I did. I do. I never once observed him mislead the DEA.”

It was the state appointed prosecuting attorney, a Mr. Kensington, who questioned her next. “You do know Salcedo is pleading guilty to felony criminal conspiracy charges?”

“That seems to be relative in this line of work,” she shot back, unruffled.

Kensington made a gesture of impatience. “Which would that be—guilty or criminal?”

“Perhaps I mean both.”

A shudder of unease went around the lightly packed courtroom. Murmurs of conversations spread, making dust dance under the strong beams of light coming through the high windows on the east-facing wall. The judge had to bang his gavel and call the courtroom to order.

It was well known that Javier’s ripples had made waves. The words of the highest ranking DEA Agent in Colombia accusing the government as a Narco-Democracy and granting immunity to its wealthiest players—and most importantly that the United States had not only known about it, but allowed it to happen—had sent global politics into a downward spiral.

Within forty-eight hours of the El Tiempo front page story of the criminal conspiracy and corruption that touched the highest members of government, there was protest and rebellion in Colombia. Calls for President Samper to step down went initially unheeded, until pressure mounted so high, he eventually ceded; Defense Minister Botero soon followed.

Javier had watched all this unfold from the lounge rooms of airports between Colombia and Texas. First in Miami, for a layover, then finally Laredo. It was all over the radio when his father picked him up and they drove back to the ranch in somber quiet.

In the weeks that followed, Javier heard snippets of what would come to pass from the relative peace of the Peña ranch. The Rodriguez brothers had been extradited to the United States for criminal prosecution to die in a United States prison, while their cohorts either languished or wound up dead in Colombia. There were debates over decertifying Colombia in the Clinton Administration, which would destroy their trade relations, if Colombia didn’t work to curb its drug production problems, contrary to the relative successes of General Serrano spearheading the anti-corruption task force in its inaugural weeks.

The judge peered down and reprimanded his witness when the courtroom once again fell silent. “Refrain from editorializing, missy,” he said, patronizingly.

It would not earn her points to be mouthy at the judge, as much as Javier would love to see that happen. She was holding her tongue, indignant at the moniker from the older man making her coiled like a cobra ready to strike, but her respect for the process kept it at bay.

Kensington paced before the witness box as he monologued, his argument laced with venom as he sought to discredit, ridicule, and question her credentials. Even went as far as labeling ‘human lie detection’ a pseudo-science.

Javier shifted his weight forward, resting his elbows on his knees in keen observation. A fight would only excite her. Who else but Javier recognized the hardened glint in her eyes? She had found a weakness in her opponent and was planning on supplanting it.

“Mr. Kensington, it’s not a question of ‘if’ people lie, only the ‘why.’ Some of the most honest of us lie up to four times a day. May I ask you a question, Mr. Kensington?”

“I’ll allow it.”

“What does your wife think about your ongoing affair with your assistant?”

“Objection, relevance,” Kensington shouted, eyes pleading with the judge. It was clear as a sunburn with how red he was turning with anger. The air in the courtroom drew in tight, expecting a fight to lash out.

“A moment to let me explain,” she said calmly. “When you said the words ‘guilty’ I observed a microexpression of shame upon your face—your eyes, they fell away and downward.”

She demonstrated for the benefit of the courtroom.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Kensington interrupted.

“You’ve touched the wedding ring on your left hand three times since we’ve started this conversation. And there again! An oddly romantic gesture, or perhaps more likely a self-comforting one? A sign you associate guilt with your wedding band. On multiple occasions, I witnessed body language clues suggesting a close personal relationship with your assistant—extended eye contact, lingering gestures. All seemingly innocent, but together they tell me a different story. So, evidence of shame, plus the vocal stress in your voice just now, and body language. I’m merely putting it all together.”

“This is—this is,” Kensington sputtered, passing a hand over his face. “Categorically untrue and an attempt to humiliate me.”

“Another lie. You all observed Mr. Kensington scratch his nose right there.” She leaned towards the judge. “Erectile tissue in the nasal cavity, your Honor. It engorges with blood when telling a lie. Feels like an itch.”

The prosecuting lawyers team sat still with shock, and the judge took a moment to remove his glasses, impressed, until a few snickers released under the tight lips among the gallery and the moment diffused. Javier couldn’t sit still, bursting with pride in his seat. They all waited with an enthralled bated breath to see what she would do next.

“Perhaps you care to continue to discredit me, Mr. Kensington? After you’ve collected yourself,” the human lie detector remarked archly.

“I think you’ve made your point, missy,” Kensington grumbled, with a retreat back to his chair.

“I haven’t actually, and I prefer Agent,” she said dangerously.

With a conceding gesture from the judge, she was allowed to continue her testimony.

“Jorge Salcedo saved dozens, if not hundreds more from the senseless killings that would continue if the Cali Cartel were still in operation today. He also saved mine. He willingly put himself in danger to provide information for our case, on more than one occasion, even shooting an entire cartridge of bullets into a dangerous sicario out of self defense. Some people would call that being heroic.”

On her final words it was not Salcedo she was looking at, but out to the sea of audience members sitting in the pews. Out to where she found Javier in a far corner aisle seat, and held upon his own stare firmly. A private message conveyed in the silence that followed.

Javier allowed the briefest of smiles to show on his lips. “Good girl,” he muttered.

She was thanked for her testimony and her session concluded.

“Javier Peña, please approach,” the bailiff called out.

Javier stood and approached the front of the courtroom, adjusting his suit and tie. He held open the swinging gate that separated the gallery, allowing her to pass him. Every eye in the room on them.

“Peña.”

Electricity sizzled down his spine at the heat in her voice. As she breezed past him, he caught a whiff of her familiar perfume, suddenly envious of its closeness to her skin, the thrumming of her pulse. What would he do but risk everything to gently lay his lips upon where only the perfume touched her?

Instead, he was stuck watching the striking curve of her ass as she walked away, her dress hugging her thighs, and roiling with a dark compulsion to claim her amongst this sea of witnesses.

His own testimonial on Jorge Salcedo’s behalf lasted much longer. As DEA Attaché and thus greater knowledge of the Cali cartel, Javier was required to recall as many intimate details he could provide of Salcedo’s contribution to the success of their operation. He spoke to the necessity of putting Salcedo in Witness Protection, for his family’s safety, and while a guilty plea was a stain on his record, a return to Colombia was certainly death.

It dragged on into the afternoon, and they broke for a late lunch, and Javier was told he didn’t need to return for the afternoon. He sought the audience pews for the woman in navy with red lips, who he had last seen occupying the same seat he had during the morning session. Only she was nowhere to be found.

Sitting in D.C. traffic would take its toll on Javier’s already depleting energy, and hoping to revive his mood with some fresh air since he was no longer allowing himself a smoke, he strolled around the city. Killed some time before winding back to his hotel.

He was surprised when the concierge stalled him before the elevators. “Your wife has checked in, Mr. Peña?”

“My wife?”

“Yes, she—”

“Thank you,” he snapped and rode the elevator up to his room.

Soft music was playing from the other side of the door as Javier entered the room. He recognized the soft salsa music from his years in Colombia. To the left of the entrance was a pair of Mary Janes, discarded as if tossed impatiently, and the outline of a navy dress and jacket lay on the floor at the foot of the bed.

It was what was presented upon the bed that sped up Javier’s heart rate. For laid out with precision and care, was a coquettish lingerie set—an ivory white bustier, adorned with lace frills and delicate stitching, and a matching thong with garter belt. Beside it, a pair of plain stockings, also in white.

Javier smiled, his headache clearing on the turn of a dime.

A sing-song voice spilled from the bathroom. “You’re late!”

“I walked,” he shouted back through the closed door, already shucking off his jacket and shoes. “See you didn’t waste any time in leaving before I was done.”

“I had to get ready!”

A cloud of steam billowed out, evidence from a recent shower, as the bathroom door swung open and she emerged, already ready for the evening in a one-shoulder floor-length dress the color of the crystal blue Caribbean sea. Chiffon or gauze, Javier didn’t know, but it had the shimmering effect of a placid ocean seascape reflecting sunlight and made her all the more dazzling.

He always loved her in blue.

“Weren’t you a little minx in court today,” he noted proudly.

She huffed, but a proud smirk lay underneath it. “Kensington’s an asshole. I remember him from my FBI days, I’ve been waiting to take him down a peg,” she said, presenting her backside. “Zip me.”

“Maria said cocktails at six.”

The clock on the bedside table was reading a quarter past four.

“And I told tía, I would help her with finishing touches before her guests arrive.” She shimmied her shoulders, drawing his attention back to the matter of her unzipped dress, which required his assistance.

“You know,” she piped up, as he tried in vain to find the tiniest zipper ever made. “She did offer you a room at her place, it’s much nicer than the Marriott. Mom offered her place too, but you don’t want to stay there—she’s a worse interrogator than I am. We’d never have a moment’s peace.”

She added, with a roll of her eyes, “Mom’s obviously enamored to meet you. Her words.”

Javier bent his head to kiss the bare shoulder exposed by her dress. A small, grateful devotion, relishing the feel of her on his lips after the drought he’d endured.

“If we were at your tía’s I couldn’t do this,” he said, giving up on the zipper entirely, and parting the bodice of her dress. He kissed up her shoulder all the way to her hairline, nibbled on the delectable offer of her earlobe.

The dress fell from her torso, pooling into a puddle of fabric at her feet without further delay.

“Javier!” She cried, offended. Completely naked under the dress, she did her best to preserve her modesty with her arms.

He matched her energy with a growling, “cariño.” Then, paused, recollecting a prior moment. “Did you tell the concierge you were my wife?”

She mirrored his exasperation. “It was the only way they’d give me a spare key.”

“You lied.”

“Concierge doesn’t know that.”

She spun around to return his embrace, her bare breasts upon his front. Expression so calculating, it was almost as if she predicted this entire exchange. Javier greedily reacquainted himself with every inch of her body within his reach, guiding them step-by-step to the bed.

“Perhaps you should punish me then?” she said with a sultry whisper.

“Perhaps, I should,” he considered, “but that seems too easy.”

Checking he had the direction right, he flung her backwards so she bounced on the soft mattress of the king sized bed. She went with an exhilarated giggle, landing on her backside and upsetting the lingerie spread for display on the bedding.

Pluckily, she sat up on her elbows, tossing her wayward hair out of her eyes, immodestly sprawled. “Undress already,” she ordered him.

“In a minute, cariño, let me look at you.” He perched on his knees on the edge of the bed, rolling the sleeves up to his forearms, soaking up all her nudity. “Maybe I should make you wait for it? Hm? Get you all wet and needy, keep you squirming for the rest of the night? Would you like that?”

“No.”

Petulantly, she tossed the bra at him. It bounced off his chest and landed at his feet.

Fighting, however fruitlessly, as she might be against him, her eyes were trained to his hands, as he worked the white shirtsleeves over his forearms and cinched them at his elbow. Licking of her lips, while she admired him, mouth gone bone dry with arousal.

He gripped the bulging hard-on in the crotch of his pants, just to take off a little of the ache. It’d been weeks after all.

Weeks of jerking off with his own hands, and a cold bed in Texas, and only hearing her voice over the phone once a week. He’d been half-hard during the length of her testimony, watching her flaunt her skills and outsmart some asshole attorney. It drove him wild with unimaginable lust.

“Show me what I’ve been missing,” he purred.

You spread your legs to show him exactly what he’d been missing all those weeks.

Forgetting himself, he folded himself to bring his face in line with your pussy.

“This for me?” With a dip of one timid finger through your folds, he felt exactly how much you’d been craving him. “Use your words, cariño.”

“Yes, yes, all for you,” you said in a rush.

At the first touch of his tongue on a sensitive erogenous zone at the base of your seam, had you reaching for his hairline. Smothering the waves of his hair in your hand and relishing the feel of its soft touch.

“God, I missed you,” you moaned. So touch-starved you thought for sure you might pass out. Every nerve ending was on fire, your body sensitive, humming.

“Gimme more,” you pleaded. Not caring how quickly you were descending into total wreckage.

Your thighs spread over his shoulders, your legs spilling down his back as he settled upon the bed, head firmly at your center, licking and kissing, marking you with tenderness. His tongue parted your folds, entering you, tasting you. He licked from seam to clit, puckering his lips and dropping a small dollop of his saliva upon your sensitive bud, watching it drip down to your rim.

Javier dove back in, and the bridge of his nose on your clit had you cumming with a toe-curling cry in a matter of minutes. It was an easy slide of his fingers, one, then two as he curled them inside you and stroked that pleasant spongy spot with such practiced diligence you were climaxing again in rapid succession, as his tongue never left your clit and his chin and mouth were damp with your slick.

He’d been murmuring and talking you through it, good girl, and tastes so good, want you so bad, that you almost failed to notice Javier’s left hand had snaked down his pants and around his own cock. Not wishing him to have all the fun you patted the sheets beside you so he could lay there, and you’d both enjoy each other.

He stripped quickly and lay beside you. The second your lips closed over his reddened tip, he almost came right then and there, limps jumping at the contact, and his belly caved inward. With a groan, he swore and rested his forehead upon your inner thigh, trying to collect himself so as not to finish too early.

“Missed your mouth,” he said through gritted teeth. It was so erotic the way he was clamping down on his own needs, trying not to succumb just yet.

“Missed you too,” you said, rolling the hard tip of him through the webbing of your fingers.

You did. You missed the way he filled your senses. The heady taste of him, that mix of salt and musk, his clean scent lighting a fire in your belly, and eagerly you worked to bring him off in your mouth. The thickness of him made your jaw ache after no practice for six weeks, but muscle memory soon kicked in.

Javier was making it a competition. He was avidly making you cum while you bobbed messily along his dick. Trying to get you to finish again before he climaxed, and your next orgasm began to bloom quickly, body taut and high on all his attention.

You won, though, and had him spilling down your throat in no time, leaving him gasping and struggling for air, cursing the heavens in every language he knew.

Luckily, his refractory period didn’t last long. Not after six weeks of no sex.

Javier Peña was a ravenous man. He was hard again in no time.

It was almost menacing with the way he crawled up your body. Naked, hair tousled, eyes dark and set with a fiery gaze upon you. Showcasing the strong muscles of his arms as he grabbed your ankles and arranged your legs around his hips. Cock already hard and pulsating, ready for round two.

Your cunt clenched around nothing. Needy and depraved little thing, slick leaking from you and a whine curled cruelly out of your throat. So fucking desperate to have him inside you after too long.

“Looks like we’ll be late to dinner,” he said with a troublesome grin.

It was supposed to be an intimate gathering.

Of course, ‘intimate gathering’ to your tía meant a sitdown dinner for fifteen guests, plus cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. It was her first time hosting an event since her brief, though serious, spell in the hospital in Bogotá, so she had spared no expense, nor detail.

Tía Maria was born a hostess.

Her recovery was progressing smoothly since her mini-stroke—her motor skills had mostly returned, and any speech impediments were resolving. For now, there were no plans for her to return to Colombia, choosing to stay in the States while Uncle Art finished out his tenure as Ambassador.

(Since your romantic relationship with Javier had gone public, you speculated that Maria must have intervened when it came to Art’s temper, for he remained downright civil whenever you crossed paths at the Embassy.)

Javier was getting along famously with your mother, though he clocked your annoyance the first time she labeled him as your ‘boyfriend,’ and did his best to correct her and everyone else, calling himself your partner. Though he was enjoying himself, the evening was wearing on him, and not one to stomach such events of polite society, he disappeared before the dinner plates were cleared away, claiming a need for the bathroom. It was just as likely he went in search of a cigarette to escape for a moment alone.

Wine in hand, you were holding court in the sitting room with the Ambassador from Venezuela and the Mayor of D.C. in the family room. The discussion was on the almost certain move from the Clinton Administration to decertify Colombia, which would situate the DEA’s position in the country as precarious at best. The Mayor had just asked you how many months could Serrano’s Anti-Corruption Task Force survive without the backing of foreign aid, and you joked you were in need of another drink in order to answer that question honestly. Your audience tittered with jovial laughter at that, allowing you a chance to slip away.

Instead of replenishing your glass of Bordeaux, you went hunting for Javier.

He wasn’t in the living room where your mother was entertaining a few guests on the grand piano. There was a secluded spot under the main staircase that housed a bronze statue of a bald eagle—you rolled your eyes at the ludicrousy of that—but no Javier there.

The dining room was where the dessert buffet and coffee and tea were being set up, and not where Javier had chosen to brood. You didn’t think he’d be the type to wander upstairs. Besides, Maria was up there in the master bedroom showing off to her delighted few guests where she collected all her blue china, on display in the Master Suite.

That left the gardens. Making a detour through the kitchen first and dodging the wrath of the caterers, you filled a glass with fresh cold water from the tap.

The late summer sun had already made its descent over the treetops and it was growing darker. There were lights in the ground that lit up the trees and marked the path to the pool and the air smelled of orchids, Maria’s favorite, which decorated every nook and cranny. Beautiful paper lanterns hung off the brick walls enclosing the space with a homey feel. If you listened closely, you could hear the hum of traffic from the highway in the distance and the chirping of the last of summer’s crickets.

The terrace was elevated, overlooking the sunken gardens in the rear of the townhouse. Two half-circle staircases, one running east, another west, led down to the gardens and the covered patio built into the side of the house. You took the west stairs, taking care to lift the ends of your dress so as not to trip. Ivy covered the hand railings, giving it a storybook aura, and offering a stunning view of the pool.

Your hunt proved successful.

Javier was seated in the brick patio below, on an iron-wrought loveseat decorated with white cushions and linen throw pillows. He wasn’t alone though. He was seated with an elder Colombian dignitary, a retired general and first cousin to tía Maria, and a familiar face at many of her gatherings.

The men were sharing what must be a nicked bottle of expensive whiskey from Maria’s collection and smoking Cuban cigars. They were in the middle of what must have been a very long winded debate on horse breeds.

Not cigarettes at least, but all the same, you put hands on hips and made a very long-suffering glare at Javier, who didn’t even deign to appear guilty or apologetic.

“¿Es esta tu esposa?” The retired general asked his smoking companion.

Javier smiled at the ribbing. While ordinarily dashing, this smile had a touch of affection around the corners, just enough to soften its blow.

“Si, si, mi esposa,” he dared, not taking his eyes off you and tossing in a wink.

Sensing a need for an exit, the older man politely excused himself, thanking Javier for the company, who thanked him in return for sharing the cigars. Before the General departed back up the stairs and to the party, a bright smile cracked on his wizened cheeks and he winked merrily at you.

“Thought maybe you’d found a cigarette in one of Art’s hiding places and stole the whole pack,” you told Javier, disapprovingly.

“Just needed some air,” he said with a sigh, tapping at his temple, signaling the source of his headache.

You handed him the glass of water and he set the cigar down on the ashtray. “Maybe try drinking something other than whiskey the whole night.”

He was wearing the only black tuxedo he owned. Its structured clean lines and velvet lapels, and a crisp stark-white dress shirt, made him classy and debonair. It was hard to keep your hands to yourself as he dutifully drank up the water you had brought for him. With his trimmed mustache and recently shined shoes, Javier could have been mistaken for a Hollywood film star from another era— Clark Gable, or some such sort.

Your mother and Maria weren’t the only women head-over-heels enamored with him this evening. As the finishing touch, a pocket square lay in his jacket breast pocket in the identical color as your blue dress. It marked him as strictly your man, despite what one of the wives of the establishment might say, as she had been very handsy with him while the hors d'oeuvres were being served, and Javier had shot you pleading looks until you intervened.

Someone had to look out for him.

Speaking of, the bowtie under his chin was a little crooked, and unthinkingly you adjusted it. His hair was swept back during dinner, but the wind must have upset it out here, or his own hand. You combed your fingers through it, with enough pressure to massage his scalp a little, and his eyes fluttered shut. He nuzzled his nose along the inner part of your wrist, and you adjusted to massage his temples with your thumbs, gently cradling his head.

He was like a kitten under your touch, sighing and near purring with contentment. He drew his hands up your legs under the dress. A tap at the back of your knees had you shifting just enough, lured into sitting in his lap.

He smelled heavily of the cigar, an earthy and musty stench. You pretended to gag on it and he pinched your knee at your insolence. The two of you were so content to be reunited for a few precious moments out of the eyes of the public, and caught up on your lives, enjoying the pristine coziness of each other.

You mused laconically on such topics as dinner and Maria’s gigantic house, and how you planned to spend the rest of your time in D.C. You’d been invited to spend an hour or so with this eccentric academic in the field of Applied Psychology you knew by reputation alone. Your suspicion was that this was no casual lunch meeting between like-minded intellectuals, but rather a business interview for a lucrative spot at a private security firm he was building in D.C., and you wanted Javier’s opinion.

While the job would be a vertical move career-wise, it wouldn’t be the same, you divulged to Javier, from your spot on the loveseat with your head in his lap. There'd be limited control over your team, and basically you’d act as a consultant for high profile cases. But no lectures nor designing your own modules, the favorite parts of your job.

“Always more money in the private sector,” Javier chimed in. He was dotingly abrading his nails up and down your arm.

“You think I should consider it?”

“I think you already know what you’re worth.”

“Tell me about you,” you said, rebuffing the topic with a dismissive wave of your hand.

As for Javier, he’d been different since you last saw him get on that plane back to the States six weeks ago. As he explained to your mother during dinner, the only thing he was responsible for these days were the horses on his father’s ranch, and they were much gentler than humans. Significantly less stressful than running the DEA or squaring off against the cartel.

His only complaint was the occasional sleepless night and smokers cough—a side effect of his lungs clearing themselves out. Other than that, he was good; his dad was good, even The King, a moniker for Rex, Chucho’s aging bulldog, was fantastic.

“Thank you, by the way,” you said quietly, sitting up. “I really appreciate that you came tonight. Especially when you hate these things.”

He beheld you with those dark eyes of his. Intense as a tractor beam. “You’re welcome,” he said softly. He locked his arms around your waist and you were dragged back into what he deemed your rightful position—fully seated on his lap.

“I don’t hate these things,” he added.

“Liar.”

Caught red-handed, he ducked his head to snicker into your bosom.

“Okay, fine,” he chuckled, giving up too easily, but completely content so long as it kept you in his lap. “How would you like to come visit me in Texas next time?”

“Oh onto next time, are we?”

“We’ll have tamales straight from the grill and all my little cousins will be the ones giving the tours. Rex will be slobbering in your lap.”

Hope shone in him like a brimming cup, and you wanted to catch every droplet of it.

“Sounds lovely,” you agreed. Though, neither of you could pinpoint how soon that would be.

Javier’s hand wandered up your dress, caressing along your knee and the top of your thigh. “And you won’t be in this dress, unfortunately,” he purred, deliciously by your ear. “But I may convince you to wear cowgirl boots while we roll around in the haystacks.”

You made a face imagining that discomfiting detail. “Ouch,” you laughed, “sounds prickly.”

He quickly found the latch holding up your stockings, and using the garter strap as a roadmap, tapped his fingers up your thigh. A destination clearly in mind.

“Whoa there, cowboy,” you said in warning, pecking his lips. It didn’t slow his crawl.

“Maybe we should leave a little early,” he suggested, finding a tender spot under your ear and lightly sucking there while he inched higher and higher, and you had to part your knees to accommodate the thickness his fingers up your thighs, holding in your breath as to what treasure he’d find under there.

At the first gentle brush, he withdrew quickly away, caught by surprise. His mouth fell into an ‘o’, and curiously, he swept over the same spot.

“Are you wet cariño?” he drawled gruffly, confirming his findings.

Blame the weeks of drought.

Blame the way you two had thoroughly fucked each other upon that hotel mattress, before arriving at the mansion for dinner with minutes to spare. (At Maria’s utter confusion, you quickly covered your tracks, bungling a lie about D.C. traffic being a running gag, at which Javier choked on his welcoming glass of whiskey.)

Blame the warm way he was eying you all evening. Never tiring of merely looking.

Blame the gentle warmth of Javier’s fingers lightly dancing around where you needed him the most.

“Oh wow,” he uttered softly, as if he’d never felt women's undergarments before. “Shit, baby.” He glued his mouth back to your neck, sucking and nipping. Something poked at you under your thigh.

“You pack a gun in your pants, Javier?” you teased, feeling down his chest and belly, then to between your bodies and where his erection was growing under the zipper of his pants.

“You’re so fucking sexy.” His eyes were magically dark, pupils blown so wide with arousal, he was a man possessed and you were more drunk on his attention than even Maria’s vintage Bordeaux. “I oughta send you back upstairs with a mess in your panties.”

That sent you spiraling, kissing each other with renewed frenzied passion, tongues twirling.

“No, nope, we can’t,” you said, not pulling away just yet, but letting your lips linger, noses bump, both fully swimming with desire for each other.

“I can’t wait until the hotel,” Javier mumbled, his touch under your skirt growing bolder. “I need you now.”

Making a quick judgment, you adjusted in the seat of his lap, hooking a thigh over each of his knees as he spread them. He found his way under your dress again, pushing the sodden lacy panties out of the way he fully cupped your mound and his middle finger parted your folds, fitting easily inside you. His palm flexed, moving with no resistance upon your soaked clit.

His breaths were little puffs of hot air on the back of your neck. He’d nibble on your earlobe, or dust his lips on your bare shoulder; his thighs sturdy and strong underneath, and you moved together in sweet, sweet tandem, rocked back and forth, two of his fingers plunging inside you.

“You were made to ride me, cariño,” he praised. “Look at you. Get to have you all to myself.”

His erection strained through the fabric of his pants, and every shuffle of your hips had it grinding along your backside. The pleats and folds of your long dress shielded the working of his arm between your legs. The tune he was crafting with his fingers made you melt and combust and burn.

A star being born in your insides.

He circled your clit and a lewd gush met your ears at the crooking of his fingers. Javier’s whispered praise had you sighing prettily and you were coming to a head-spinning peak. Back bowed. Thighs contracting. Your inner muscles clamped down on his fingers, as you breathed in the night air, rich with the smell of the orchids, riding your high up the starry sky itself.

Floating back to the terra firma of his body all along your back, you felt the caressing of his hand upon your clothed breasts and him cleaning his fingers on the inner lining of your panties. You’d leave these marked underpants in his suitcase for him to find later in Texas. A little souvenir of your night here.

“I should take you right now,” he said, smacking his lips as he sampled your essence off his own fingers.

You mewled into his fevered kiss, tilting your neck to kiss him sloppily, but satiated. Jumping apart only when you heard the cry of your name from the terrace above you.

“Oh, lovebirds!” Maria’s shrill cry rang out. “Are you down there? Dessert is almost all gone. Javier, you must sample them!”

“Be right there, tía,” you shouted back, body flushed with heat.

“What’s that?” Maria’s voice was closer and her steps were heard coming down the staircase.

“Jesus Christ,” Javier shuffled so his erection was hidden by your body.

“Maria,” you yelped. Bless, your endlessly meddling tía. “Give us a minute!”

Her steps halted. “Bueno, mijita. Tranquilo, tranquilo.”

The sound of her heels clacking loudly, ascending the stairs and no longer descending made you and Javier exchange sighs of relief.

“Reminds me of that time we fucked in the church basement,” you quipped cheerily, turning so you were sprawled atop Javier’s chest.

There was a whole garden full of fond memories you had with him, and knowing you’d be parting ways tomorrow—you to Bogotá, Javier to Texas—made it all the more bittersweet to have him alone.

Tenderness bloomed, soft and oh so real, in his eyes as he gazed at you, the apple of your cheek fitting perfectly in his palm.

“I love you, you know that,” he said, vocals chafing.

You were not expecting this confession. For all your adeptness at navigating truth and lies, moments of pure, untarnished honesty still managed to steal your breath away. Really, you should have deducted points for his undoubtedly bizarre sense of timing to share this declaration, but you were too caught up in the profundity of the moment.

This was the real Javier—no mask, no machismo bullshit. Just Javi.

“Oh I know,” you replied airily. This smart-ass response kickstarted a series of funny quirks to his brows, crumpling and wavering, ping-ponging between austere consternation and boyish wonder. You took pity and planted a kiss onto the dynamically heart-shaped pout of his lips.

“Known for a while actually, and, it goes without saying, but I love you too, Javi.”

The more he said it, the easier it came to him. He was taken to saying it all the time. And hadn’t both your hearts, wasted on their first loves, been waiting long enough for another chance?

I love you breezed by your ear when you shivered from being outside for too long and he draped his tuxedo jacket over your shoulders and you two went upstairs to sample all of Maria’s desserts. I love you whispered in your hair on the taxi ride to the hotel after you said your goodbyes to everyone for the evening. And again, and so on, when he crashed his lips into yours and made love to you.

The sticky-sweet kind of love. Skin-sticking-on-sheets kind.

He breathed it into the kiss he gave you when you climaxed together, and ghosted it over your breasts, the first thing he said upon waking in your arms at the crack of dawn.

You couldn’t stop your own beaming smile. “I love you too,” you said back each and every time, covering him thoroughly in your love.

“Call me when you land.”

“It’ll be late.”

The two of you were wrapped in an embrace, ensconced in the safety of other’s arms. A beacon of stillness in the bustling airport terminal at Reagan National Airport.

“Call anyway,” he said, sternly. “And when you’re back at your apartment.”

He’d been glum since returning from his appointment at the DEA HQ. Agent Spencer said he could clear the resignation with a few phone calls, and offered to hire Javier back so they could send him to Mexico— “fighting the real enemy.”

The DEA’s sights were constantly shifting. The decentralization of cartels meant threats were no longer focused on big players like Cali or Medellin, and the Drug War was moving northward.

“You’re considering Mexico, aren’t you?”

“No, I turned them down,” Javier said flatly.

“But…?”

“There is none.”

“I know you, Javi, you’re not going to be a rancher forever. You can barely sit still that long.” You slid your hands down and around his jacket to give a small emphatic squeeze to his buttocks.

“I seriously haven’t thought about it,” he griped. “Believe me, you’d be the first to know if my plans change. I’m not going back to the DEA. But I worry about you over there, and I’m—” Guilt smeared his handsome features. “And I’m not.”

You combed his hair back with your hands. “I’ll be fine, Maggie’s picking me up tonight, and Silvia and I have plans on Sunday.”

“Girls night?”

“Braiding hair, painting nails, and a Harrison Ford movie marathon. See, I do just fine—” you meant to finish it with ‘without you’, but you faltered, choking on a sudden, hidden emotion.

“Liar,” Javier huffed, churlishly, and comforted your self-doubt with kisses aplenty.

You were really going to miss him.

An interruption came in the form of an announcement over the PA system. They were calling all passengers for final boarding at your gate.

“Remember—”

“I know! I’ll call,” you appeased him. “Once when I land, and once when I get to the apartment. I haven’t forgotten. I’ll tell everyone you say hi too.”

“Do that.”

He was secretly fond of hearing that he was missed by friends and co-workers alike in Colombia, though he didn’t have it in him to say so himself. Let alone be the first one to break his self-imposed exile of silence. During your weekly phone chats, you always urged him to call Stoddard, who was promoted from Deputy and now had Javier’s old job, or the newly reinstated General Martinez, whose name was cleared after your campaign and testimony. Even a quick hello to Van Ness or Feistl—both full time field agents now—wouldn’t kill him, but Javier always found an excuse not to.

He had fully severed himself from Colombia. Not even the allure of a holiday in Cartagena or Barranquilla held any appeal.

While he may be done with the DEA, you had a private bet going that he’d be returning to law enforcement one day. He couldn’t stay away from the game forever.

You collected your carryon luggage, checked the boarding pass was still in your purse and memorized your assigned seat number.

“I hate this part,” he said lugubriously. The only thing missing was a cigarette flying between his hand and mouth to take the edge off his sour mood.

Plans were up in the air as to when you’d see each other again.

Steve Murphy had invited Javier down to Miami for Thanksgiving with his wife, Connie, and their family. Miami was a good halfway point between Bogotá and Laredo, and you were invited too, so long as your work schedule was clear. Javier, and Chucho, had already insisted on hosting you for Christmas at the ranch, but that was so far in the future at this point.

“We’ll be okay,” you said, keeping your voice neutral and fighting back tears.

“We’ll be okay,” he echoed, planting the softest of kisses upon your lips that had you aching. He brought your hand to the spot on his neck where you could feel his heartbeat, steady and sure and strong as his love for you.

“Now, play nice with the other agents. Be home before dark, and always have your gun on you,” he went on, his tone protective, giving you an affirming squeeze at your hip. “I’m so proud of you.”

“Love you.”

As you strolled off to your gate, he was grinning, but it was small and sad, and made your heart ache. “Love you, cariño mia.”

“Look at that—made ‘em all fit!” said Chucho, wiping the sweat from his neck with a bandana and smiling at the progress of the morning’s work.

Chucho and Javier loaded the last of Mercedes’ clay sculptures into the bed of the pickup truck. The collection was varied, with some pieces as big as three feet tall, and others small as common household pottery. Her paintings were piled into Javier’s truck, their boxy frames lined along the seats, safely in bubble wrap and tape.

Through the organization of a few neighbors and the Laredo Chamber of Commerce, the artwork of the late Mercedes Peña was making its debut at a local gallery in the city center.

Javier grinned under the hot Texan sun, although it did not reach his eyes under the yellow tint of his aviators.

“¿Qué esta pasando contigo?” Chucho asked his son, swatting the bandana playfully into his son’s shoulder. “You’ve been distracted all morning.”

It was true. Javier had nearly dropped one of his mother’s paintings carrying it out to the car. He tripped, not watching his footing, and the acrylic framed item had nearly landed face-down in the dusty road. He chewed mindlessly on his bottom lip. An old habit in need of a cigarette surged to the forefront, but he clamped it down by digging into his pocket for a Nicorette gum stick.

“De nada,” he lied, popping the gum into his mouth and chomping on it aggressively. After the massive eye roll from his father, Javier followed his father into the house.

The men sipped Mexican beers in the kitchen, the hour of their departure to the gallery approaching and with the opening reception scheduled tomorrow and half the town invited, the Peña men needed a moment of calm before the storm. Mercedes' sisters, Javier’s tías from Austin were expected as well.

Rex came lumbering into the kitchen, his collar clicking, and tongue wagging. Javier bent down and rubbed behind the English bulldog’s ears, earning himself a sloppy kiss on his fingers. Rex was sporting more gray hairs every month, and was starting to resemble the elder Peña, who’d been all-white for years, down to his mustache.

“She hasn’t called,” Javier finally said, after a few sips of his beer, calmly petting the family dog, “and she never misses our weekly calls. What if something happened?”

“She’s just busy, that’s all,” Chucho pacified his son. “You worry too much, giving yourself lines.”

Javier’s frown lines did indeed deepen at the jab to his appearance. “Only because I get it from you.”

He wouldn’t tell his father, but Serrano’s Anti Corruption Task Force earned itself plenty of foes as well as allies in the months of its operation. He worried constantly every time a news piece on Colombia came on the news. Proceso 8000—so deemed by the people of Colombia in the fallout of Samper’s corruption scandal—was taking its toll, but just because the cartels were gone didn’t mean the violence ended with them.

Just a week ago, after months of debate, Congress had finally voted on decertification, downgrading Colombia’s status as a world player and trading partner, effectively cutting off foreign aid and grants; Ambassador Crosby was even said to be retiring at any moment.

Jorge Salcedo’s trial had ended and he was granted protection under Witness Protection, disappearing into the anonymity of the United States. The last Javier had heard from the informant was that he and his family were safe.

“I keep waking up in the night, thinking something terrible will happen to her,” Javier admitted. The beer swished in his mouth, mixed poorly with the fake mint flavor of the Nicorette.

“She’s fine, she’s tough,” said Chucho.

Javier couldn’t disagree there, but still, he roiled with worry.

The men finished up their beers, and Rex was given a snack of turkey jerk. The plan was that Chucho would drive out first, and Javier would follow, they’d unload the trucks and all the art at the gallery and then be back at the ranch in time for feeding the horses their supper.

Javier was blending easily into the routine at the ranch in his last many months here.

Mercedes spirit hovered in the old ranch-style house. Dead over two decades ago, yet the house was the living embodiment of her memory. Every available wall space was covered in her art—abstracts in vivid colors, still lifes of the horses and scenes from the working ranch, eerily haunting landscapes of the Texas flatlands or the Rio Grandes. Most of them had been cleared for the sake of the gallery, along with a selection of her more tasteful sculptural pieces—a few of them, like the busts in the shape of women's naked bodies, were expected to raise eyebrows, and hopefully go for sale. The most priceless pieces, Mercedes’ self-portrait series, were family heirlooms, and thus not for sale, but made up a large part of the gallery’s interest in hosting this showing in celebration and memory of her life and talent.

The sound of car tires on gravel sent Rex sprinting off as fast as his arthritic knees and short legs could take him, barking at the arrival of a visitor.

Chucho squinted out the kitchen window, perplexed. “Your tía’s aren’t expected until tomorrow,” he said. “Wonder who this is?”

Javier joined his dad at the window, equally baffled at the all-black Cadillac Fleetwood with tinted windows rolling up the long driveway. Chucho went to greet the visitor, speculating it was a potential buyer coming to see their horses early before the auction next month. With an unconcerned shrug, Javier disappeared to his bedroom to change out of his sweaty shirt into a fresh one for the drive into Laredo.

By the time he was dressed, and the sleeves of the white henley already pushed to his elbows with the heat, the Cadillac was gone, having left behind a gigantic rolling suitcase on the gravel, blocking the path of pickup trucks.

“Hey, what the hell is this?” Javier asked, coming out of the front screen door with some speed, and letting it swing wildly behind him, seeing the obstruction and noting that he and his father were going to be late for the drop off window in town.

Rex was no longer barking. Javier only heard his father’s booming belly laugh coming from the barn.

A pair of the younger ranch hands, Ricardo and Dexter, were taking a smoke break, seated on the fence that separated the barn from the rest of the property.

“Never seen such a nice pair of legs in a suit like that,” Ricardo was saying when Javier passed close by to investigate where his father had disappeared to.

“What’s with the high heels, hombre?” Dexter replied. “Don’t she know this is Texas?”

Javier could hear his father’s rich baritone the closer he got to the open barn doors. “—exclusively breeding the American Quarter Horse for the last three generations.”

“Pops!” Javier yelled, rounding the corner into the barn. He halted, arrested at the sight before him.

She was modestly crouching over Rex, hindered by the shortness of her pencil skirt, giving the bulldog an abundance of belly rubs, but with one ear cocked to Chucho’s speech. At Javier’s shadow darkening the barn door, her chin rose and the brightest smile burst across her features.

Javier almost pinched himself—afraid he might be dreaming.

“I see why you call him the King, huh?” She said, patting Rex’s wide belly, all four of his legs to the barn’s ceiling, his pink tongue lagging out of his mouth. “Heard a lot about him.”

“Yes, he’s the real royalty of this ranch,” Chucho joked.

She stood, swaying slightly in her high heels, adjusted her boxy black purse onto her shoulder, and stepped gingerly around the dog and the hay and horse feed that littered the barn floor, neglected since their last sweep. She edged around the dirt and piles of horseshit and came to stand before him.

“Hi,” she said, beautifully, to Javier.

“Close your mouth, hijo,” said Chucho, “you’re gonna let the horseflies in.”

“What are you doing here?” Javier asked, too stunned to move.

They’d seen each other sparingly in the months since Javier resigned. Before the holidays were spent together, visits were few and far between, given the constraints of their distance. Weekly phone chats may have sustained them, and Thanksgiving in Miami with the Murphys offered a chance of peace, but the last time she was stateside was Christmas, and it was sheer chaos. They stayed at his tio’s ranch outside Austin and met the entirety of Javier’s extended family. They barely had a moment alone, which is why for New Year’s, Javier rented a hotel room in Laredo, planning on hopping around the city and having a proper dinner-date before she flew back to Colombia.

Only they never left the hotel room. Spending the entirety of it in bed, entangled in each other’s limbs, and ordering room service like a pair of gluttons.

That was five weeks ago—forty-two days, and six phone calls, which ate up the hours of every Sunday night.

Not that Javier was counting.

“I got an invitation.” She dug around in her large purse, all the way to her elbow before pulling out a postcard advertising Mercedes Peña: A Retrospective, that’d been through hell and high water, with Chucho’s familiar handwriting of her name and department, U.S. Embassy, Bogotá, Colombia.

Javier stood impressed that his father had not only lied, but had successfully fooled even him. “You were in on this?” he said, placing his hands firmly on his hips.

“I plead the fifth,” Chucho wisely replied, and exited the barn. “C’mon, Rex, back to the house.” A rush of air whooshed by their feet as Rex, huffing and puffing, lumbered past them.

“I didn’t want to wait another day,” she said once Chucho and Rex were out of earshot.

“You know you’re always welcome here,” he responded. “How’s work?”

Her eyelashes fluttered as she looked down at the dirty barn floors. “I’m not going back. Serrano’s dissolved the Task Force. Should be all over the news by tomorrow—Congress voted to pull the plug on funding to Colombia. DEA has been on a dwindling staff for months now. They’re sending all their best agents to Mexico, even Feistl is going.”

“So how long are you in town?”

“Just a few days. Maria wants me in D.C. for a bit, and I have to get this new job off the ground.”

Javier’s heart plummeted directly into his stomach. That private security firm in D.C., they’ve been openly courting her skills for months—she must have decided on it. But before he could confirm it, she was shaking out her head and pecked a kiss sweetly upon his cheek, dispelling his anguish.

“It’s good to see you,” he said tightly, holding her close and returning her kiss with gusto. Though, he was trying to hide his disappointment at the brevity of their time together.

“Before you get all pouty on me,” she said smartly, pulling away from one more peck on his lips. “It’s not in the way you think. I’m starting my own.”

His brows shot up. “Your own?”

“Yeah, my own. I miss the teaching part of my job. Figure, I have enough contacts in law enforcement and I can do my own consulting and deception training the way I want to.” She said she was already putting a team together, including Maggie as her assistant, and one very enthusiastic Silvia.

Her smile turned devilish. “Plus, I got this really great pitch to this former Fed I know. He’s already a big name in law enforcement. Could be a big draw for some high profile clients.”

She fiddled with the four small buttons on his henley. Something warm and fuzzy took root in Javier’s belly.

“Oh yeah?” he asked, flirtatiously. “Former Fed, you say?”

“Yeah. Big deal. Infamous,” she chuckled, playing along. “Apparently he had something to do with catching some kingpin drug lord. Pablo Escobar, maybe? I’m fuzzy on the exact details.”

Her fingers inchwormed from button to button, like a tightrope walker, until they planted on the hollow of his throat. Pressing in just enough he could feel the way his pulse jumped hotly at the skimming of her fingertips. Javier was suddenly far too warm under his shirt.

“If he’s not too busy these days,” she added with a knowing smirk.

He sucked air in through his teeth, clicking his tongue. “I don’t know—blood pressure might be an issue.”

Her laugh rang out musically and this time she gave up all coyness and prodded a muscle on his pecs. None too gently. “Oh I don’t know, he’s got some years left. Besides, I can be very…”

Her lips came tantalizingly close. Javier’s own lips quivered, disturbed by their closeness to her orbit. And yet a kiss—to steal his breath away—remained just out of reach.

“Persuasive,” she breathed, her eyes flicking up darling and seductive and so goddamn sexy, Javier’s cock was twitching to life in his tight jeans. “I mean we work pretty well together already, and I know you said you were done with the DEA but this isn’t—”

He shut her up with a kiss, lifting her clean off her feet—purse, high heels and all—and swallowing down her squeal of surprise at his show of strength. He poured everything in him to each pass of their lips. All their love translated into the sliding of their tongues, the sharing of their breaths.

When he set her back squarely onto her feet upon the barn floor, she clutched at him, weak in the knees.

“So, whadda say? You wanna work with me?”

He sighed, suddenly daunted by their future. “Cariño—mi amor…”

His father had told him, look for a place to set down roots, where the soil is good, and there is water and sunlight—look for the woman who will let you flourish and love you for it.

Well, Javier had found her. And he had found a patch of sunlight too, planted the seed of her brilliance, and all it took was a little coaxing, a gentle push, and some distance to let the roots take effect, and she flourished.

Yes, he had to give up a lot to let it happen. He had to watch the whole thing from the sidelines, and—on the days when he was being completely honest with himself—that had hurt a little. A lot.

But letting her go just to be able to watch her shine, and all on her own, made all of it worth it.

Did he deserve even a sprinkling of her light?

“Javi, look at me,” you said to him, armed and ready to allay his fears.

The horses in their stalls nickered and whinnied, huffing out air as if they knew exactly the stakes of their conversation. A rattle of wind made the barn door squeak on its hinges and a dragonfly buzzed past by your ear. Even the doves in the rafters seemed to lean in, wanting to hear more.

Your eyes met tentatively. His, brown and tortured, betraying his vulnerabilities despite his stoicism; and yours, steady and true.

“I’m choosing you,” you said, putting all his doubts to rest once and for all. “You put so much on the line to give me a chance to flourish in Colombia, and I am forever grateful for that. Truly. But, I’m not doing this without you, Javi. I want the highs and lows. I want to fall asleep reading my book to you, and wake up in your arms, and make mistakes and fight until we have the most amazing make up sex.

“I’m choosing you because you’re a good man, Javier, and you may think your story is done because you put Colombia behind you, and you have to suffer for it, but that’s not true. Every single person is wrong about you, even you’re wrong about you—I’m here to tell you that for the rest of your life.”

The words hung in the air, falling as ash, charged with purpose. The doves no longer cooed in their rafters, and even the horses had gone quiet.

And here you were—feeling ridiculous in an outfit more suited more for the halls of the Embassy or Washington, D.C., sticking out like a sore thumb, sweating and jetlagged and exhausted, but full of hope, in the middle of a messy horse barn in dusty Texas—offering him a chance to grow with you.

To flourish together.

Javier drove the heel of his cowboy boot on the barn floor, cocking a hip. “Was that your pitch?”

You laughed, specks of tears brimming in your eyes. “Not exactly.”

He let his gaze drop seductively down your body, never more in love with you than the first time he said it to you. Since maybe even, the first time he laid eyes on you.

“And I won’t be able to change your mind?” he asked peevishly.

“Don’t even try.”

He found your lips in a messy kiss, lips slotting together. Chaos gone quiet, everything tucking neatly into place.

“You mean it, you want me?” he asked, his lips hovering over yours.

You took the rigid clench of his hand upon your hip and arranged it so two of his fingers touched the pulse point under your jaw. Just enough so he could feel the drumming of your heart.

“Am I lying?”

FIN

Javi in That Henley

Javi in that Tuxedo

dividers by firefly-graphics

#javier peña #javier peña/reader #javier peña imagine #javier peña/you #narcos fanfiction #lie to me series #pedro pascal character #pedro pascal character smut #pedro pascal character fanfiction

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iamskyereads · 1 year

Text

Lie to Me (xix)

JAVIER PEÑA x FEM READER

warnings: as always my works are 18+ (MDNI), rated Explicit for sexual content, coarse language, alcohol mention and smoking, mild angst

A/N: here we go folks!!! Coming around to the end. Also, I totally lied (whoopsie), there will be another interlude before the finale. I’m just bad at outlining, also I wanted more tenderness amidst all this angst, it’s what we (and Javier) deserve.

word count: 7.9k and all beta’d by the wonderful @ezrasbirdie

AO3 // Series Masterlist // Masterlist // previous // next

“Sh, sh.”

That was what you heard first.

Javier, apparently awake, was making trouble on this fine early morning. You felt the bed dipping as he was moving around, and heard the slide of skin-on-sheets, his breath, a caress on the back of your legs.

With your nose buried in his pillow and mid-mumbling out a question as to what he was doing down there, instead of being up here with a good morning kiss on the mouth, and were silenced by the feel of his warm palm dragging up your calf.

“Cariño, stay like this,” Javier uttered. A kiss landed upon the skin on the back of your naked thigh, as dewdrop on a petal.

With the broad weight of his hand upon you, he spread your legs, exposing you obscenely. Javier crawled into the empty space your parted legs made—one extended, the other at ninety-degrees to your hip. You felt his thumbs discovering the very crease of your inner thighs.

You heard him inhaling you deeply, the very tip of his nose running along your most intimate seam, delicately parting your folds. Heat and desire dropped like a dirty bomb into the depths of your nethers, pooling your very center with a tingling, shimmery sensation. Warm and incandescent.

Late last night, the two of you returned from Cali eager for sleep. Too exhausted for full sex, you sped through the foreplay, until he could sink his cock inside you wilting like flowers upon the bed when he was sheathed all the way. It was all pleasant sighs and gentle kissing before sleep overwhelmed you both.

In the translucent light of morning, Javier was making up for it. Pressing the smallest of soft and supple kisses upon your outer lips, and running his tongue delicately through your seam. Little ripples of pleasure unfurled, as tendrils, and with it all your pent up lust and desire coursed to the surface of your awareness as Javier’s tongue explored you, eagerly seeking all that you could drip into his awaiting mouth.

Your breath hitched at a particularly soft pass of his tongue down to your clit, then moved upwards through your seam. His relishing hum left you hiccoughing for air, made your toes curl and your hips cant, enough to produce a limber curve to the bottom of your spine.

Two fingers prodded at your soaked entrance. At the moment of their give, easing inside you Javier groaned in satisfaction.

The most movement you could make from this position was tiny rocks of your lower body, extending and flexing to encourage him, but Javier’s abrupt detaining on the back of your hip.

“Don’t move, just take it.”

It made your ears burn and you did as he said, relaxing with a muted sigh into the soft pillow, buttressed by your arms.

The fit of his fingers was snug and you swore you could feel every ridge and dip in his knuckles and every callus of his trigger finger. A crook, and the pads of his fingers swept over a spot you had difficulty reaching yourself. You tensed—the severe arch returning to your back, until Javier coaxed you back into softening it.

A reedy moan left your lips when he corkscrewed his fingers and an audible squelch met your ears.

“Take me so well, baby,” he said, while placing damp, open-mouth kisses at the apex of cheek-meet-thigh, humming his approval.

Your orgasm was rising with surprising swiftness with the slow, torturous build of only his fingers.

“God, Javi, lemme cum. Lemme cum, lemme, lemme cum,” you babbled.

“Is that what you want?” The tease. “Do you feel it? Feel how hard I am?” He skimmed his length along your extended leg, rutting into the small hollow of the back of your knee. The sheer size of it, nestled there, overwhelmed you.

“Fuck me already.”

“Wanna taste you first, baby,” he murmured.

The mattress moved as he adjusted himself, laying down more fully between your parted legs.

Left suddenly empty, a groan of objection was halfway out of your mouth when his tongue plunged deeply inside you, and that groan became a wrecked sob. Wetness seeped out of you, marking his chin, with spit and slick, and when his fingers made circles upon your soaked clit, you cried out, delirious. The easy rubbery glide of his fingers and tongue brought you to a spinning head rush.

The coil wound tighter in your belly, and you arched taut like a bow. He dove in, propping up your hips so he had better access and he went right for your sensitive bundle of nerves, that plump little bud, which he took into his lips and sucked.

You were hit with rolling waves of pleasure, and you rocked backwards into Javier’s face, chasing the friction, twitching with overstimulation, and had to grab onto the hair on the crown of his head to push him off you.

You were mumbling incoherently into the pillow, having lost which way was the ceiling and which way was the floor. Javier hovered over you, seemingly everywhere. A warm glide of his hand up your hip. A kiss on your lower back. The bracket of his strong thighs framing your legs. The scratch of his mustache as his kisses climbed higher up your body while you floated in a pool of bliss, limbs all rubbery and heavy.

“Take a sip,” Javier instructed. You peeked your eyes open to discover a glass in his hand extended towards you, and you sat up enough to do as he said, chugging down half the water with gumption.

“Guess I was thirsty,” you croaked, and Javier’s small smile melted you a little. He finished off the rest of the glass himself then placed it back on the nightstand and settled in beside you, nose-to-nose. He placed a small kiss to the corner of your mouth, and you could taste yourself on his mustache.

“Jesus,” you said, groaning at the debauchery at that, and stroking a light swipe of your tongue on the underside of his upper lip to taste again.

“Just Javi,” he snarked back. He nuzzled you, smiling cheekily at his own sense of humor first thing in the morning. “No need to go overboard.”

“Ha-ha. I can taste myself.”

“Mhm, savoring it for later.”

The illicitness of that knowledge. You on Javier’s mustache for the rest of the day, the week even—

Walking around the Embassy, or sitting in a meeting, knowing all he had to do was slide the tip of his tongue across the hairs over his upper lip where your fragrance was embedded on his skin, on the hairs of his mustache.

The smell sitting directly under his nose—

A burning hunger made you toss your thigh over Javier’s hips and roll him onto his back, attaching your mouth to his in a feral kiss and he responded in kind, kissing so wantonly and the abrasiveness of your need shocked even you.

“Take the day off with me,” you urged him, his cock was trapped between you. “Let’s stay in bed. We’ve earned it.”

“I’ve got meetings.”

“Not today. Stoddard can fill in for you,” you responded, nuzzling your way down his neck and finding all your favorite places to dote on with kisses.

Javier harrumphed. It was toothless, because you were soon making him writhe with every inch of attention and affection you were covering him in.

“All you have to do today is make sure Salcedo gets on that plane—”

“Already is,” Javier interrupted coarsely. “Call this morning confirmed it.” That made you sit up with attention, gazing down into those dark brown eyes of his. “I didn’t want to wake you, I took it on the balcony.”

“In the nude?” you posed, picturing him talking to his agents in the field while he stood bare ass on display.

“Stop talking about work while you’re like this,” he growled.

“Like what?” you posed, angling back on your knees so you were poised over his cock. “About to fuck you?”

Javier’s attention zeroed to the place he was centimeters from breaching the soft velvety walls of your cunt, moistening his lips with hunger. The muscles on his neck rose and fell with eagerness as his throat worked, attempting to coax words, but thus failed. Rendered speechless by the sight of you, gloriously naked above him.

His impressive cock was already pulsating when you gripped it. His eyes rose to yours, taking his sweet time along the way—the give of your hips in his hands, the softness of your breasts, and the stiff peaks of your nipples. Let himself get carried away by every curve and line he had committed to memory—the little hollow of your throat, and the smiling apple of your cheeks, the fondness in your gaze, the way the soft light seeping around the curtained window caught the depth in the color of your hair. You never felt more beautiful than the way he looked upon you.

As if he never wanted to look away.

“Baby,” he said, no more than a whisper, “you could make a man forget himself.”

A little flutter in your chest worked into overtime at the compliment. You swiftly switched positions, hiking your knee over to meet the other and turning so your backside was to him. Javier exhaled with a soft wheezing sound when he realized what you were doing.

“Oh fuck—fuck, baby,” he choked out, guiding your hips to place you into position above him in reverse. Wanting you so badly, he pulsed in your hand when you gripped him again. The round head of his cock notched easily, breaching you with little resistance.

“Stay then,” you told him over your shoulder, and tilted your hips so you sank all the way down, inch by inch, upon his cock. “Stay here.”

You gave a firm squeeze around him so a noise stuck in the back of his throat. The whimper from a man undone by the way your walls hugged him so tightly.

Smug, you rocked forward and back, building a light tempo to your movements, riding his dick. You made a little figure-eight roll with your hips and his hand came down and slapped your ass cheek, then squeezed a rapacious palmful.

“Yeah, baby, that’s it,” he whispered, worshipfully, smacking you again when you teased with another figure-eight that drove him wild. Every sound punching from him was pure bliss. Your movements became more ardent, rising in cadence, the headboard thumping upon the wall. Filling you so deeply, you felt him all the way up in your torso.

“Give in,” you gasped while you rocked. “Stay with me, Javi.”

He was on the brink of finishing too quickly. So with a rash movement, he took hold of your sides, and grunting, rolled the two of you upon the mattress so he was firmly on top.

“Get on your knees,” he demanded with such a cutting edge to it that made you exhilarated.

You did as he said, buried your face between the cradle of your arms, hot and flustered. He started up much the same tempo as before, leaving you gasping for air, coming apart piece by piece as he ravaged you.

Javier liked to fuck you in every position. Missionary, so he could kiss you; spooning, so he could cuddle you, or fall asleep while inside you; in his lap, so he could hold the back of your thighs; you grinding, grinding upon him, or you on top, so he could worship you.

But bent on all fours, you were an offering he couldn't refuse. He’d pound into you from behind. It was loud with the sound of skin slapping skin, urgent and primal, a pure chase of sensation—

This was how Javier loved to fuck.

Normally, this macho show never held any allure to you. It was part of the way Javier had gotten under your skin, made you throw all reason out the window. Because when Javier was like this, when he was fucking you like this, all grunts and sweaty skin, manipulating you while he drilled into you relentlessly, enough so your ass bounced, and your breasts swayed, it made your pussy weep. He hammered upon your deepest self until you were mewling and braying. Fucked the very thoughts out of your head.

You snaked a hand down your body and rubbed furiously at your clit, buzzing at the thrill of yet another orgasm on its way to shudder through you.

Shatter through you.

“Touching yourself? Good girl.”

He must have felt it, because he started swearing, and the roughened grunt of your name falling from his lips had you coming so hard you actually expelled him out of you, and he faltered, before plunging back inside you. He took you so the bones of his narrow hips imprinted on the back of your legs, and you came around his cock, crying and sobbing into utter devastation.

Boneless, your knees slipped out from under you and Javier’s full weight almost landed on your back, except he caught himself on his forearms at the last second.

“Cariño mia,” he whispered, raspy and pussy-drunk, wiping the sweaty hair off the skin of your neck and face. He began to move again, in shortened, shallow ruts, so you could hear how soaked you were. He punctuated three long, deep strokes with a hoarse yell.

Javier fell over you, his nose under your ear and a cry stoppered in his throat and you felt the rich current of his cum spurting inside you. In your eyeline, was his right hand, and you inched your face towards it, pulling his thumb into your mouth, lazily sucking on it while he recovered.

“Christ, woman,” Javier wheezed, pained. “We’re getting good at this, huh?”

“All that practice,” you murmured.

Even with the small drippings of his cum beginning to ooze out of you, and around his softening cock, neither of you moved. A shower would be needed, eventually, and your throat was parched for more water, but it felt like the biggest indulgence to remain like so, nestled on your sides, sated, and filthy, but warm in each other’s embrace.

It was you who eventually moved first, grimacing at the wetness, now congealing and drying between your thighs. You must have fallen back asleep for a few moments, Javier too. Small rays of sunlight were fighting to get through the thick curtains, meaning the sun was higher in the sky.

You shifted enough for Javier’s cock to fall out of you, and it rested on his thigh, smeared with the drying white marks of your slick and his seed. Inching around his body, you were careful not to disturb him, you found his watch on the nightstand, which read way an hour way later than you anticipated, and you tiptoed into his kitchen to use the landline to call into work.

Maggie was every shade of worried.

“It’s all over the news, can’t believe you haven’t heard it,” she was rambling. “They’re saying the Cali cartel is dead in the water. Also the CNP is furious. They said some cartel accountant has shown up unannounced at the DEA in Miami, claiming asylum, and they’re blaming the DEA—”

“I get it, I get it,” you stalled her. “What happened?”

David Rodriguez was dead—the son of Miguel, nephew of Gilberto, and the last pillar of the Cali cartel dynasty. Gunned down in the streets of Cali, along with his sicarios. Rival narcos gangs in the North Valley of Colombia had sent their retaliation once and for all.

“Crosby is a walking hurricane because the Generals are demanding a meeting with Peña, and he’s not here, and everything’s a shitshow!” Maggie paused in her tirade. “Nothing to do with you?”

“You know I can’t tell you.”

“Are you coming in?”

You sighed, really looking forward to having at least one day off, but knowing that you and Javier were too committed to your jobs.

“Yeah,” you said, forlornly. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

“Okay, see you, and hurry!” Your assistant signed off.

There was a slight hitch in your step, and a satisfied throb deep in your center when you waddled back to the bedroom. You bent at the waist to land a kiss upon Javier’s mustachioed lips, smirking at the lingering taste of you there, then grabbed your shower supplies from your overnight bag and headed to the bathroom to freshen up.

You’d only just started scrubbing your body with Javier’s body wash when you heard familiar heavy loping steps join you in the bathroom. He didn’t say a word while he pissed in the toilet, and you went on bathing yourself.

“Called in at the Embassy, Maggie says the Generals are in a tizzy over Pallomari,” you said. Javier replied by flushing the toilet. “Everyone’s wondering where you are.”

The shower curtain drew aside in such a rapid fluid motion that a noise between a squeak and a yelp escaped your mouth. You were expecting the tired scowl Javier awoke with every morning, or annoyance to have dug twin ravines in the space between his brows, instead he was surprisingly unperturbed by this news.

“Getting started without me?” He questioned and stepped over the rim of the tub, drawing the curtain back behind him.

“We slept in,” you said, apropos of nothing.

“I noticed,” he mumbled into your lips as he kissed you.

You stopped soaping your body long enough to properly return it. You felt him petting curiously at the top of your mound and grazing over the sensitive lips of your well-fucked pussy.

“How she feeling?” He asked in a low, concerned tone.

“Like magic.”

He dropped to his knees.

“Hey now,” you winced, aware how sore you were down there, but he was only pressing soulfully soft kisses to the swell of your mound and the tops of your thighs. Didn’t seem to mind the spray of the shower pouring over you both, or the soapy rivulets that fell over your body where he placed his lips.

You petted at the back of his dark head slowly wetting under the spray, wondering what was making him so soft this morning. Javier wasn’t particularly sentimental, though he had his protective and caregiving tendencies.

Loving—for that was what he was showering you with now. The tender kind. Spared nothing to dote on you in his own private way.

He lay his forehead upon your navel, hands gently rubbing up and down the sides of your legs, before spotting one more kiss just south of your belly button, then rose and began to wash himself, as if he hadn’t spent the prior moments as a devotee, literally on his knees to you.

Taking a few days off wasn't in the cards for either of you, and the thought of you and Javier finding time for yourselves away from work was becoming more and more of a pipe dream. For the next week, it was nonstop madness at the Embassy. You started coming in on the weekends, just to stay on top of your own growing pile of work.

The final body count of the North Valley gang’s violence had come in. Without a leader to emerge, either dead or imprisoned, and its sicarios murdered and scattered, the dynasty of the Cali Cartel would finally dissolve into nothingness.

There were plenty of procedural hoops to jump through in the wrapping up of the final dregs of the Cali cartel case. The accounts and the evidence would be signed off, and subsequently boxed and shipped to the lawyers for the Grand Jury. Indictments would be drafted, including the shocking one on Samper’s ties to the cartel and Defense Minister Botero’s bribery.

The official statement from the office of the Country Attaché expressed ignorance on the matter as to how Guillermo Pallomari, a known fugitive escaped from Colombian law enforcement and wound up in the States, but that didn’t stop CNP’s suspicions of DEA meddling. Enough to require Ambassador Crosby’s mediation on the matter.

Meanwhile, you’d seen little of Javier, who was working later and later hours.

A few nights after that harrowing night of violence in Cali, you finally had a moment to yourself and were cooking dinner in your apartment. You’d just replaced the water in the vase of Javier’s roses, burying your nose in their beautiful scent and admiring how they spruced up your little apartment, when the phone rang.

Javier’s hollowed-out voice wound down your telephone wires. “Can’t convince you to come over, can I?”

“Mr. Peña, calling me at home? What a surprise!” you replied with a laugh over your marinated chicken dinner sizzling on the pan. “I was just admiring my roses.”

You heard the telltale sounds of a lighter being lit on the other end. “It’s been too many hours since I’ve seen you.”

“It’s been approximately four,” you said, noting the time on your oven clock, and counting back since you last saw him in halls of the Embassy. “I’m cooking food.”

“Great. I’m hungry. I’ll come to you then.”

“Are you still at the office?” His silence was guiltily long. “It’s nearly eight, Javier! Do you forget you have a deputy? You could always get him to, you know, deputize so you don’t have to work so late.”

The timer rang, telling you to check the rice, which you did, all the while the phone cord tailed you around the small galley kitchen. Javier’s indignant snort echoed in your ear and he sighed, a loud billowing sound that made static erupt in the telephone. Then, he switched tactics, his voice dropped a tenor, playing salaciously in your ear.

“What are you wearing?”

“Just an apron,” you lied, deciding to toy with him.

“Cooking naked, cariño?” A patronizing tut. “Now I really have to see this for myself.”

Not half an hour he was there, disappointed you were not naked but took his endeavor seriously in peeling the clothes off your body and having his way with you bent over the kitchen counter. Dinner had nearly burned, and the vase of roses had nearly tipped over (rescued at the last moment), but he had you coming to such a tippy-toe-curling finish you swear you saw stars.

After dinner, and dressed down to a cotton tank nightie, you were lathering an unscented lotion on your legs and gabbing excitedly about the training session you’d completed that week with the cadets and how impressed you were with their growth in the field of deception training. It was difficult balancing CNP’s distrust of the DEA, but having General Serrano in your corner made it easier to navigate the minefield of political maneuvering.

Though Javier had brought some reports to look over before bed, he wasn’t paying them much attention. Every so often, he’d make a small hum to show he was listening, leading you on with a pointed question or two about the progress of your work, and overall genuinely interested in what you were relaying to him. Done applying lotion, you rounded towards him on the bed, and a warm candid grin was hiding under the shadow of his mustache.

“What’s this?” You kneed across to space to where he was seated, propped up on your pillows, naked, save for the grace of the sheets around his hips.

“Drafts of our indictments. Legal is going to look it over before we submit it to the D.O.J.”

“No, not that. This.” You tapped your index finger upon the left hand corner of his upper lip where that smile had mysteriously vanished. “A touch smitten there, Peña.”

With a hoarse huff, he went back to the drafts, not encouraging your teasing.

“The face never lies,” you sang out but Javier was squinting awfully hard at his reports, holding them very close to his face. “Hm, do you need reading glasses?”

“No.”

“Yeah, but should you?”

He snapped the files into his lap. In an instant, he was on you, wrangling your limbs underneath him in a pseudo-wrestling match on the bed that had you squealing and guffawing with laughter while you fought, futile though it was, out of his grasp. Javier’s files had gone scattered to the floor but the two of you didn’t care, too entangled in a languid, messy make-out session sprawled across the sheets.

The fact of the matter was that all the extra work to close the Cali case as diligently as possible had the two of you missing each other, and quiet moments together were becoming fewer and further between.

The next day you found yourself in the bi-weekly meeting with all the department heads at the Embassy. The Ronald Reagan Conference Room on the third floor was full of chattering executives and high ranking DEA agents when you arrived, having just concluded a very successful demonstration of subversion tactics in a polygraph interrogation to a group of DEA rookies.

Javier was there, in a dark suit and maroon tie, and he gestured surreptitiously to the empty seat next to him while you chatted amicably with General Serrano.

“Agent,” Javier greeted you. So unflappable and collected in his demeanor, it was almost like he was an entirely different person in this room than the man he was in your bed last night.

“Mr. Peña,” you responded, just as insouciantly, flattening down your skirt before taking the unoccupied seat next to him. You didn’t miss the way Javier’s gaze traveled down your hips to where the gingham skirt spread tightly over your thighs.

Crosby entered just then, turning the room’s focus onto the agenda. Your uncle’s eyes narrowed at you from across the room, and you returned his seething glare with a haughty one of your own. Given that you had yet to receive a scathing reprimand from your mother on your weekly phone chats, reason deduced that Art had not shared with her the unpleasant rumors about you circling the Embassy, nor the results of your angry confrontation.

If anything, Art was taking the route of noninterference.

Word had reached you that Tía Maria was recovering at home. While you sent off a card of your well wishes, you weren’t sure how to accept her direct invitation to their house for the time being, given the sour relationship between you and Art at present, but you missed your tía dearly.

Shortly, the meeting began. The most noteworthy item on the agenda was the DEA’s next steps in the wake of the dissolution of the Cali Cartel.

General Serrano, seated adjacent to Javier, was courting the Embassy for assistance on starting a task force that combined the brightest minds and strategists to address corruption in his country. With the weakening of the cartels, and the allegations of misconduct reaching the highest offices of government, a staunch anti-corruption faction was growing, and under Serrano’s incorruptible spirit and impeccable leadership of Search Bloc, it was also gaining popularity and traction among other interested parties outside of law enforcement. The DEA and the American Embassy had every interest in maintaining good relations with Colombia going forward and thus approved of collaboration, and provision of foreign aid, with this task force.

As the lead DEA Agent in charge of a department devoted to psychological profiling, you and your team were tasked with starting a talent scout for the General’s project—in much the same process you chose Serrano as the leader of Search Bloc.

Once dismissed, the Department heads began to exit but Crosby was watching you and Javier like a hawk.

“Peña,” Crosby barked. “Stay a minute.”

You filed out behind General Serrano, inviting him to your office to further discuss ideas for his task force, leaving Javier behind with the Ambassador.

It was so late, you thought you imagined it in your sleep, but then another ring from the landline trilled into your darkened apartment. You shot out of bed, throwing off the covers and skittering over to the kitchen phone, answering it with a breathless hello.

“I woke you, shit.”

Javier.

“Jesus, where are you?”

“Downstairs.” He must be on his sat phone. “Can I—can I come up? I can’t sleep alone.”

“Yeah, yeah, of course.” You rubbed the sleep out of your eyes and turned on the hall lamp. In a matter of moments after hanging up, you heard footsteps outside your apartment and opened your door to find him in the tomb-quiet of the hallway.

“You smell like cigarettes.” You let him kiss you anyway. Whiskey was on his breath too. He stumbled, taking his shoes off, teetering off-balance. “Have you been drinking?”

He was in the same dark suit and maroon tie. His eyes were misty, red, and the way he sniffed and huffed, you’d think he’d been crying, but it was exhaustion winning out.

“What did my uncle want earlier? That looked serious.”

“Don’t, cariño, I just want to sleep.”

He led the way back to your bedroom, stripping off his clothes. You followed, turning off the lights.

Down to the nude, Javier collapsed face first into your pillows and you crawled over, kissing the sharp blades of his shoulders and the muscular ridges of his back, tense with an unnamed stress, as you drew the blankets over you both.

Who would ever notice the things that you noticed about him?

There was a crease on his left ear, and he had freckles across his nose when he spent too much time in the sun and didn’t wear sunscreen. That his lower lip was plusher than the upper, and that sometimes you could tell he’d been in a rush in the morning because his trimmed mustache had uneven hairs; that there was an almost perfect replica of the constellation Orion’s belt—three freckles in a row—upon his Adam’s apple, and many more, whole galaxies worth, that spattered along his chest.

How many others noticed his laugh lines? Even though these days he barely laughed, except with you, and his big round eyes would turn into nothing more than thin slits.

That there was an old scar on his left knee from falling off a horse when he was a kid. That he complained of soreness in his back, his neck, that he clenched his jaw so much, he got spontaneous tension headaches.

That sometimes when he was really tired, his left eye would droop more than his right, and when he was especially snarky, his smirk would favor the same left side. That the dimple on his right cheek showed most prominently when he sucked on a cigarette, but sometimes—sometimes—he gave you a beautifully bashful smile, and the dimple would appear then too, as the sun peeking out of the clouds on a rainy day. A ray of hope.

Details like these sustained you on those nights you were particularly vulnerable. When solitude needed a companion in her misery, and something else clawed out of the lonely shadows of your mind, made you doubt that maybe—just maybe—you weren’t enough.

What were you and Javier without this job? Without Colombia? What lay in your future with him? If there ever was such one.

Then you’d remember those laugh lines and how you traced with the pad of your finger, and the imperfect, asymmetrical crease of his left ear—as you did now, hoping it would draw him out of whatever temper he had cast himself into. For who else felt the dips and crevices of his moods as well as you?

Who else did he allow in so completely?

Who else came as close as you did to the plush feel of his lips, but the glass of whiskey, or the filtered end of a cigarette? Such meek substitutions, at least to the offer of your kiss, the design of your thumbprint. The pull of you.

You were the only one who could tell the precise moment a frown line could easily tip the scales. Defy gravity and pessimism. Defy the lifetime of stress that formed it, and curl itself into that beautiful upward arc of a smile, and all these harbored hurts would simply melt away.

“Cariño?” You heard him mutter in the darkness.

You’d fallen asleep with your cheek upon his side, nestled in the hollow between his arm and ribcage. There was no seeing the clock with the hour, but you knew you must have gotten at least an hour’s more rest.

“M’here, Javi,” you hummed, letting his arm drape over your prone form. “Go back to sleep.”

His hand found yours and drew it so you were cradling his face, and mindlessly, you swept your thumb across the plane of his cheek, back and forth, back and forth, upon the same spot.

It was minutes, or hours later when you heard him speaking. Voice so clear, you knew he’d been lying awake the whole time.

“Crosby shut down the indictments.”

It lingered in the dark for many long moments. You lay, listening to the steady rhythm of his breathing. Knowing in the steadiness of his voice, that this was no lie.

“The D.O.J. isn’t going to let it go through,” he eventually went on. “Washington doesn’t want political instability in the region.”

“But the godfathers?”

“The godfathers are going to stay in prison, but as for Samper, and the rest of it, the money, the corruption.” Javier puffed out a billowy breath from deep within his lungs. He was caressing up and down your side. “It’s going to stay a secret, and everyone can go on pretending they care, and pretending they're winning.”

You lay still, growing every more awake with this devastating news. “We’re fucked then.”

He pillowed his head on his arm and curled closer to you, lying nose-to-nose and knee-to-knee.

“I can fix it,” he whispered, breath fanning across your face.

His mouth covered yours in the darkness, his tongue sneaking past your parted lips and claiming any objection you could voice. You hummed into his kiss, winding a hand through his hair and tugging. He deepened the next kiss and your needy noises were muffled by the urgent press of his lips. He rolled onto you, and you welcomed him between the seat of your thighs, caging his narrow hips.

It wasn’t long before the hem of your nightdress was moving past your belly, and the fully hardened shaft of him entered you noiselessly, and he made love to you with a tenderness he hardly ever exhibited. His body covered yours, hardly moving but for the gentle, gratifying rolls of his hips. Disrupting your kisses only to murmur sweet, airy names to each other.

He spilled into your wet heat with a satisfied groan, his full weight atop you, and you lay kissing and kissing into a restless sleep.

With the oncoming of dawn, Javier spoke again.

“I’ll go to El Tiempo. I’ll go on the record with everything. The tapes, the money trail that leads straight to Botero and Samper.”

“You’d burn your whole career down.”

You were laying side by side, sharing each breath while his hand made lazy patterns upon your backside.

“It’s the only way people know the truth.” He sounded resolute, more than your own feelings on the matter, murky even in the morning light.

“But Javi—”

“Don’t change my mind, cariño, you won’t be able to.” He kissed you soundly. Sealing his final decision.

It wasn’t until later, when he had already left, dressed back in the same rumpled suit from yesterday, sneaking out of your apartment before the city woke, that those were your words.

It was evening when Javier returned from El Tiempo, turning the key to let himself into his apartment.

A spicy and peppery smell met him first thing when the door swung open. Half-expecting to find the housekeeper doing her weekly cleaning of his apartment, (though marveled at the lateness of her appearance) he was surprised to find another, much more welcome guest, seated in his living room armchair and sipping whiskey out of a glass.

Waiting for him.

She must have been here for a while. Seated in a sexy black lingerie ensemble, she was deeply absorbed in a book, her feet tucked underneath her, opaque black tights running up her legs, and a sheer robe hanging off her shoulders.

Tension was already easing off his shoulders when he slipped off his suit jacket, and went loping over to kiss the lips of the woman he could call his.

“Hola cariño mia,” he uttered with a tired smile.

She replaced her bookmark and stood to hug him. Javier tucked his nose into where her shoulder met her neck and was greeted with the scent of her elegant perfume.

“Here, sit. You’ve had a long day,” she said.

He was guided into the armchair, which he sat upon with a heavy sigh, and loosened his tie knot-first, watching the woman on her knees before him and lauding her penchant for wanting to take care of him, despite the equally stressful demands of her job. Wondered all the while what the hell he did to deserve this treatment.

His shoe landed halfway across the room with a dull thud, and she dug her thumb into the stiff arch of his foot. He hissed, pain shooting up his foot, which slowly eased as she massaged it. She started up the same on his other foot, discarding his shoe and massaging his sore feet.

“Drink?” she asked and he nodded, enthused.

She went over to his liquor cabinet and poured him two fingers worth of his favorite bourbon. When she returned she already had a cigarette pack and a lighter for the ready. The drink came first, and he swallowed down a morsel while she lit up one of the cigarettes. Careful to blow the smoke over her shoulder, she gave it to him and he took a heavy drag, holding it in his lungs for a few seconds before releasing, and the nicotine zinging a familiar tune into his head.

The smell of dinner was making his stomach grumble with hunger. He had barely eaten all day, other than the stale coffee at the newspaper offices. The cigarettes he had smoked had mostly suppressed his appetite, which was returning with a vengeance at the delicious smells pervading his apartment.

“Your housekeeper left enchiladas in the fridge,” she said, reading his mind. “I’m just heating them up.”

Grateful, he pulled at her wrist until she was between his legs. The robe was discarded off her shoulders and his vision was dominated by her womanly curves in a black brasserie and high waisted panties. Two thick straps ran down the front and back of each thigh, holding up the stockings. On her wrist was the delicate black leather strap of her watch, reading an hour far too late for dinner.

“You should have eaten without me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she bit back.

Something in him burned knowing he had a woman who took such good care of him. Almost like a housewife. His housewife. She filled all his senses, and his cock twitched, riled by her closeness and the brushing of her body upon his.

If this was the woman he was lucky to come home to, Javier would do everything in his power to deserve her. He’d have her in any way she let him.

She was massaging the stiff joints of his neck, her nails raking along his scalp and he groaned softly in his throat, tipping his head back to deepen the stretch of his neck and melting under her sporadic ministrations.

“Gimme five minutes to check on dinner,” she said softly before kissing the ruffled hair at the crown of his head.

He mourned the loss of her touch as she swept into the kitchen for a moment’s breath. The ferment returned once the shadow of her figure and the note of her perfume were lost, and a migraine threatened to descend, a swirling, tenebrous cloud of self-doubt and a mercurial mood.

He inhaled another pungent billow of smoke, almost imagined he could feel it dirtying his lungs with the force of it.

From this seat in the living room, he could see the lights of the city outside the window. The traffic of cars driving into the downtown. The lively nightlife of Bogotá, and he, divided from it. The fate of this country was no longer his responsibility.

The countdown was ticking. He couldn’t stop it now. The things he had spilled to the journalist, Carolina Alvarez, would be all over the front page by tomorrow.

It was out of his hands now. He was resigned to it.

Javier sipped the whiskey down neat, savoring it on his tongue as he mulled over the consequences of his actions and what lay ahead.

The hush of stockinged-feet were coming from the kitchen, and in a matter of seconds, the enchanting figure of cariño came around the corner into the living room, in the midst of saying three more minutes until the food was ready when she stopped and caught whatever microexpression he quickly attempted to school into sobriety upon his features.

“What?” She said, coming quickly to his side, and spilling herself cozily into his lap. “Such a grumpy face for a man about to enjoy his supper.”

She really was too smart for him.

“Why—are you on the menu?”

“I’m dessert.” She declared with a naughty wink.

Javier couldn’t smile, sobering all too quickly. He sought the burn of the whiskey to fill his mouth, rather than the sour words that threatened to spoil their amorous mood. They didn’t have the luxury of time in their relationship, not anymore. For Javier was fearful that with this ticking time bomb of information he spilled in the offices of El Tiempo, with it came another, more deadlier deadline.

This he was afraid to voice.

Before returning here, he had already negotiated a way to save her in the fallout of the destruction this newscycle would bring to his own career. As to her acceptance of it, Javier couldn’t guarantee that. She was an independent spirited woman.

“Cariño,” then he interrupted himself, saying her name instead, dispirited by how it rolled off his tongue so somberly. “Serrano’s task force—”

“I’m already working on the candidates,” she asserted, confidently, attempting to assuage what she assumed was his anxiety. “I’ll have a list of names for you by the end of next week.”

“I already gave Serrano a name and he accepted,” he interrupted her gently. “Yours.”

An impenetrable silence lasted far too long between them. Javier witnessed all five stages of grief stride across her pretty features—there was anger and surprise, disbelief, and bargaining, but denial was winning out.

“It’s a fancy title, DEA Liaison-something or other, I’m told there’s even an end-of-year bonus,” Javier said. “You’ll be working mostly with the CNP where they already are familiar with your work, and Serrano likes you—I know you look up to him.”

That was an understatement. She idolized General Serrano. She was going to flourish, all on her own.

“Cariño, I’m resigning.”

It was the first time since the idea had entered his head, that he allowed it to be spoken aloud.

“I’m done,” he said. Then, with more confidence, “I’m done. This is the end, but not for you.”

Her breath caught sharply at his admission. Tears began to show in her eyes, little diamonds of light that fell in a straight line down her cheek. He could barely look at her as more tears fell down her cheeks.

“I would never ask you—” he started to say, the very words chaffed in his throat. “I would never ask you to follow me down this path, to choose…”

Choose me. A little voice of hope filled in, but Javier, despairingly, forced it down.

“To choose to ruin your career,” he said instead.

His voice was splintering, cracking as ice under the swing of an ax. Betraying his innermost confessionals. He sniffed, swallowing down a mouthful of regret with concealed effort. A stinging rose in his chest and he snuffed it with a strong whiff of the cigarette.

“I can’t do this without you,” she said. “I–I won’t be able to.”

Javier dispelled her apprehension with a vehement shade of his head. “That’s just it. Yes you can. I have to do this for myself. I have to leave, so, accept the promotion—help good people like Serrano make change from the inside, cariño. This is where you belong. The way you talk about work, the way this place excites you. It gives me hope.”

Hope was in short supply around here.

It was so quiet between them; Javier could make out each individual tick of the second hand of his wristwatch. She was assessing him, hearing the veracity of his tone, the solidity of his bearing, the begging in his eyes, and found his truth in it, the very one he was unable to speak freely and so fresh tears started in her eyes.

“Okay, okay, I accept,” she warbled. “But are we—will we—” It fell into a choked sob.

Javier feared this more than anything. “You know I can’t lie to you.”

“But you could, just this once,” she said, her lower chin wobbling with uncertainty. “Are we going to be okay?”

“I have to believe we will be,” he said, full of conviction.

Javier couldn’t help it, he set aside the drink and the cigarette so he could draw her more fully into the cradle of his arms, wiping her tears himself and kissing those wet cheeks. “You’re going to do amazing things. You’re amazing—you are.”

She attempted to laugh through her tears, but it fell flat. “I know.”

“I don’t tell you enough.”

“Yes you do,” she sniffed, wiping her running nose with the back of her hand. “In your own way.”

She was watery with tears again and Javier’s own eyes were pricking with a sensation like acid, which he blinked back, fighting valiantly against them.

“Well, let me tell you this way too.” He couldn’t fight the hoarseness of his voice, holding his fingers by her ears. “You’re amazing.”

He kissed all over her face. Incredible, he spoke, on her left cheek, brave to her right, smart upon her brow—all the love he couldn’t speak. Javier poured it all into his next kiss, this one upon the bow of her lips. I Love You I Love You I Love You.

“Shit,” he grated. “I am an idiot for leaving my number one girl just as you’re getting started, you’re going to be so sexy. A—what did you call it—a Big Bad DEA Agent?”

She couldn’t bring herself to snicker at it, clinging to him instead.

“What will you do?” she asked him, gravely, from her spot buried in his neck.

“I think I want my dessert first,” he said, with a rapacious glide down the contours of her prettily decorated body. “We better get all our practice in.”

“Unbelievable,” she replied archly. Then, lifting her head, she affixed him gravely. The intimidating interrogator. “I mean it—what will you do?”

He kept skimming his palms down her back, from the blades of her shoulders to the plumpness of her hips, then back up again, mesmerized. “I don’t know, but right now, I just want to be with you for as long as I can.”

“I can make that happen.” She kissed him soundly.

dividers by firefly-graphics

#lie to me series #javier peña #javier peña/reader #javier peña/you #javier peña x female reader #javier peña x reader

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