"The sun's gone dim, and
The moon's turned black;
For I loved him, and
He didn't love back."
― Dorothy Parker
when I was young, my mother tucked my younger brother and me into the bed we shared in our tiny two room on the outskirts of town. Then she took a large picture book from our nightstand and squeezed into the bed with us.
The hardcover book was already there when we moved in. It looked older than I was, with the illustrated pages yellowed and dog-eared by the other children it had once belonged to. Nonetheless, it was my mother’s favorite bedtime book to read us.
It was a love story.
Specifically, a tale about how the Moon loves the Sun, and how that love will never be returned.
From the dawn of time, the childish drawings told us, before the stars began to glow, before life even took its first steps on earth, the Moon has adored the Sun. Come winter or spring, rain or shine, she trails after him day after day, eager for even a glimpse of his face.
But that is all she will ever have, because while they may share the same sky, may even exist beside each other for a brief moment at dusk, the Moon was cursed to bathe in the shadow cast by the Sun’s light, silently watching, and yearning.
And at the end of every day when the Sun departs, he takes the light with him. The Moon will chase him for all eternity, and he will never once turn back to look.
I thought the story was silly.
“Why doesn’t the Moon find someone else to love her back?” I protested.
“The heart doesn’t choose who it loves, Emma,” my mum replied, smoothing my hair from my forehead. “It just does.”
Just like how her own heart chose to love my dad, who had walked away three years before with another woman.
I will never be like that, I told myself. I will love myself first, last, and every place in between.
And then it happened to me.
A sun came into my sky, shining so brightly that all other light faded away. Searing so hot that the air in the atmosphere burned up and made it hard to breathe.
Marlon da Silva is the kind of guy who does all that damage without even knowing it.
I was eighteen when I first met him.
It had been hiring day at the Specialist Academy for the graduating recruits, what we called the adoption drive. There had been mid-firm CEOs that day, high-flying executives and even a couple of celebrities. It was the closest a small-town, Arizona girl like me had ever come to the upper crust of the country.
They’d strolled about the quad where my batch had been ready in squad formation, weaving in and out of us with their hands behind their backs and their heads cocked in that supercilious way. Our mentors who had sweated and bled with us for years turned into sales reps touting their goods.
The forty of us were poked and prodded like cattle for sale the rest of the morning. We had our biceps and abs squeezed, our teeth checked. It was humiliating, but I hadn’t trained my ass off for three years just to back out at the most crucial moment.
So I gritted my teeth when another suited asshole with wine and smoke on his breath came over to pull my lower lid down and check my eyes.
And that was when I saw him strolling into the courtyard.
The future reason for my wildest dreams and my worst nightmares.
The accursed sun to my moon.
My attention darted to him immediately, as I expected was the case for every other woman in the place. It was hard not to stare when a Ricardo Baldin-lookalike was standing not thirty yards away from you, surveying the scene with a faint smile as if he found something to be secretly amusing.
Marlon da Silva looked no older than I was. Unlike the other recruiters sweating in their suits, he was dressed in a breezy cream linen V-neck with the long sleeves pushed halfway up his forearms, and black tapered sweatpants and leather sandals like he had just rolled out of bed.
But his laid-back clothes couldn’t hide what lay under them―a six-foot-one, two-hundred pound body of tight muscles built for practical use rather than show.
The recruits in my academy had a habit of ‘roiding, simply because the bigger you looked, the higher your chances of employment.
But while those guys were the size of grizzly bears, Marlon was a wolf, athletic with lean ropes of muscle winding his body. I knew that if we ever got to sparring, I’d have some serious trouble taking him down—and I’d taken some of those grizzly bears down before. Marlon’s physique was something I grudgingly respected.
What I didn’t, however, was that he also had two women in skin-tight dresses as his arm accessories. They looked like life-sized barbie dolls, tittering behind their hands, whispering and pointing their long nails at us.
But even though their high-pitched giggles grated on me, I remained stock still under the sun with sweat trickling down my back and no expression on my face. It was what I was trained to do.
Marlon is the younger son of infamous Brazilian land mogul Hugo da Silva, though I hadn’t known it then. I thought he was a celebrity, which meant that he would be looking for a male recruit. Not every guy had the self-esteem to hire a woman to guard him, and according to our seniors, the young celebrity types were the worst kind of insecure.
Knowing better than to hold my breath for this guy, I kept my gaze ahead and my fingers mentally crossed, hoping that someone would eventually select me.
My luck was shitty that day.
The number of recruits around me dwindled as all the big guys got picked, and by the end of the hour, I was one of the last few not chosen.
It didn’t matter that I’d scored top marks in my physicals, nor that I could throw a right hook faster than any guy or girl in the academy. I was an eighteen year old blonde chick, the runt of the litter.
I bit my tongue in frustration. Three years of training and fees, down the drain like wastewater. My mother would kill me, and even though Ethan wouldn’t admit it, he had been counting on me to pave his way to college.
Just when I was seriously considering throwing myself at the recruiters and begging one of them to hire me, Marlon da Silva suddenly strolled into my line of sight, coming to stand right in front of me.
I blinked at his sudden appearance.
He was even more stunning up close, with unruly dark curls and strong brows slashing over piercing hazel-green eyes. His curved eyelashes were so thick and long that they tangled in the corners.
While I had met my fair share of hot guys in the academy and was pretty much immune to them, Marlon had the added trait of looking so damned gorgeous that I couldn’t help a dry swallow.
He leaned in to study me, rubbing his lightly-stubbled jaw with one hand, resting the other casually on his hip. He smelled frivolous, like he had just rolled about in a field of exotic flowers. It took me a second to realize that the same scent also came from the girls beside him.
“Emmaline Brown.” His low, pleasant voice held a heavy accent as he read my name tag over my left breast. “That’s a pretty name.”
“Thank you, sir.”
His lips curved to show even teeth that were startlingly white against his olive skin.
“My name is Marlon, not sir,” he said with an amused expression.
Was he toying with me, like some of the other recruiters had? I didn’t know what to reply to that, so I merely dipped my head in a small nod, still staring straight ahead.
Marlon eased back and conversed in his native language with the two girls at his side.
Then he looked back at me.
“Your scores are impressive, Emmaline,” he said conversationally. “Top marks in hand-to-hand combat and firearms, and more important to me, you’re also good at intelligence recon.” The diamond studs in his ear twinkled as he cocked his head and smiled. “Brains, brawn, and beauty. In your country you call that a triple threat, no?”
He was wrong there.
Because one thing you need to know about me? I’m a tomboy, and not in the cute, quirky, Cara Delevingne way.
My wavy but short blonde hair was cut in the same style as Marlon’s—longer at the top and buzzed at the sides. It’s good defence during fights, because it hurts like hell when someone yanks upwards on the hair on the sides of your head.
I never had makeup on either, and my shoulders were angular and my biceps unfemininely muscled. I only wore sports bras, the complete opposite of the two stunning girls on Marlon’s arms who had the top halves of their boobs spilling over their dresses like delectable muffins.
On my best days and under the right lighting, I thought I looked pretty good, if in an unconventional way.
But beautiful? That was a stretch.
“So,” Marlon continued, folding his arms and causing his biceps to strain against the long sleeves of his shirt. “Want to come work as my bodyguard? The job is pretty simple, and I pay good money. And I promise not to get in too much trouble,” he added with a wink.
The girls giggled, and I blinked at his sudden offer. I hadn’t expected that someone as insouciant as him would want to hire me.
Marlon grinned slowly at my hesitance.
“Say yes, querida,” he prompted softly, his lips tipping with humor as he watched me. “I really need you with me.”
And as he smiled down at me with those gorgeous brown-green eyes, looking like we were sharing a secret that no one else in the world knew, I knew that I was in trouble. It was the wrong moment to fall for him, but honestly, I never stood a chance. It was my first time hearing that someone needed me, after all.
Maybe it made me feel important. Maybe it meant that I was more than the south-western girl who flunked her way through high school and was only good at talking with her fists, the one who fit in nowhere in her town or in the world.
It didn’t matter to me. For the first time, someone needed me, and I was glad to be needed.
With wide, shiny eyes, I dipped my head in a small nod, and Marlon gave me an approving grin that I tucked into the vaults of my memory for future reminiscing.
The next day I got an email from his secretary offering me the job as his personal bodyguard.
I accepted it. I moved into Marlon’s apartment, and became his closest friend and his most trusted confidante. I fell even deeper in love with him, with his kindness to me, with his cunning and ruthlessness to his enemies, with his wit and wicked sense of humor.
And every single day for the next six years, I paid the price.
Because those two girls on Marlon’s arm that day? Turns out, they weren’t just his accessories.
They were his girlfriends, and his spies.
One thing I wish I knew before signing on the dotted line is that Marlon da Silva isn’t just a playboy heir. That’s only part of it. The other half involves corporate espionage for his family.
And his method?
Sex.
So much so that Marlon even opened a nightclub four years later with the purpose of hosting strippers that he calls his girls to entertain his business partners, gathering corporate secrets to further the empire of da Silva.
But the worst part is that Marlon takes part in the debauchery himself, every time.
Have you had the man you love tell you all about his sexual exploits, leaving no detail out?
Have you ever had to drag him home from a club room where he had been semi-passed out and surrounded by half a dozen naked girls, one of whom was still blowing him?
Have you heard the groans of pleasure that come from his throat when he decides to take them home and screw them in his bedroom right beside yours?
It kills you.
It reaches into your chest and grabs your heart and twists it so fucking hard that you cannot breathe for the tears that are choking you. Tears that you refuse to let fall because you’re better than that girl who loves a guy who’ll never see her.
Why doesn’t the Moon find someone else to love her back?
Because the heart doesn’t choose who it loves. It just does.
Did you know that the sun’s gravity is twenty-eight times that of Earth? It’s so strong that entire planets are drawn to it, helplessly circling for all eternity.
I can’t leave Marlon’s side any more than they can stop their orbit, and just like the Moon in the storybook, I’ll never have him. We may exist in the same sky, in the same time, but he’ll forever be out of my reach.
But my greatest fear of all is having Marlon realize what he really means to me. Because then I’ll hear from his lips what I mean to him.
And I already know the answer to that.
This is our story.