The summer air wraps around you like a secret, thick and electric, and you know without turning around that JJ Maybank is close. You can feel it—the way the hair on your arms prickles, the pull in your stomach that only ever happens when he’s near.

“Trouble,” he says behind you, low and amused.

You turn, lips quirking in spite of yourself. “Don’t start.”

He grins, and it’s that grin—the cocky, lazy one that should come with a warning label. “My kind of trouble,” he murmurs, and steps in close. Too close.

He always does this. Stands just near enough that your breath hitches, leans in like he’s telling a secret, voice brushing your ear as he asks something completely mundane. But the way he looks at you? Like he already knows how flustered you’re pretending not to be? That’s the part that drives you insane.

“You gonna keep pretending I don’t get to you?” he asks, voice barely above a whisper.

You scoff, stepping back—only for him to tug on your waistband and pull you right back in. “Come here,” he says, like you’re his and he knows it. Like he knows you’ll melt for him every damn time.

You want to be annoyed. You want to roll your eyes. Instead, you look up at him and say, “You’re the worst.”

But he just smiles, brushes your hair from your face with a touch so gentle it makes your chest ache, and says, “Eyes on me.”

He kisses you like it’s the only thing that matters, slow and deliberate, hands on your waist, lips dragging down your neck. You cling to him without thinking, already dizzy, already too far gone. And when he pulls back—just when you’re breathless and needy—he whispers, “You drive me insane,” right against your lips.

Later, when the world feels like it’s falling apart—yelling voices, plans going sideways, the storm that always follows the Pogues—he presses a kiss to your forehead and tucks you behind him like instinct. “I got you,” he whispers, low and certain. “Always.”

And he does. Even when you’re losing your mind because he marked you up the night before and you can’t stop thinking about the way he grinned seeing it in the mirror. Even when he rests his hand on your thigh like he doesn’t know exactly what it does to you. Even when he’s dragging those damn lips across your collarbone like he’s trying to ruin you, whispering, “Tell me what you want,” like he won’t stop until you break.

JJ Maybank is chaos. He’s fire and saltwater and sunburned skin and trouble with a capital T.

But he’s yours.

And God help you, you’re his.