A/N: A friend of mine inspired this. At lunch, she was describing her crush, a rather dashing Filipino boy, and she mentioned this particular feature. It made me smile, and I just had to write this. Enjoy!
DISCLAIMER: I still do not own any of the characters below. *sigh* Ah, but a girl can dream.
When a woman looks at a man's face, what is it that she admires most?
Well, it's different for most women, isn't it? Some women like a long straight nose and high cheeks. Some are partial to a heavy brow and dark eyes. Some look for a dimpled smile and clean white teeth.
Pretending to read her book, Zam Wesell examined the man sharing her couch a few cushions down.
While certainly far from unattractive, he might not be described as particularly handsome. The coffee-and-cream-colored face was lined with years before its time, and the potentially pleasant features were marred by a good number of red scars.
Still, he would be considered eye-catching. The dark intelligent eyes, shadowed beneath a sturdy brow, were an enigma unto themselves and their unsuspecting prey, who would find themselves caught quite entirely if they looked into them too long.
The nose was firm and good-looking, if a little crooked from being broken a handful of times.
The cheekbones were solid, on the high side, and led from the bridge of the nose up to the temples, where a few strands of unwelcome silver hair were beginning to show, though the man was not yet forty. Zam smiled as she looked at them. She always teased him about them, and he argued back, but let her off easy because he knew in her unspoken way that she liked them.
The jaw was strong and square, complete with a set of full lips that Zam thought were the most handsome lips on any man she had ever set eyes on. Observing them now, she felt her stomach flutter in the way stomachs are wont to do when their owners think about such things.
Perhaps it was merely because he did it so rarely, but whenever he smiled, Zam would swear up and down that it was the most beautiful smile she had ever seen.
And all these features, the eyes, the brow, the nose, the cheeks, the jaw, the lips, even the scars—while perhaps not outlandishly handsome—were handsome enough for Zam to feel overwhelmed by their magnetism.
Most women would find any one of these features their favorite, and would probably sit and moon over them all day long.
Not Zam.
Firstly, Zam was not the mooning type. Neither was Jango Fett the type to tolerate being mooned over.
Secondly, none of these features, while all most deserving of the title, was Zam's favorite.
Zam's favorite feature of Jango's entire face was his eyelashes.
She didn't know why. They just were.
She could sit and stare at them all day long, just like she was doing now, her book quite forgotten resting on her knees, a small quirk of a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
They were so dark, matching his hair. And so soft.
Maybe that's why they appealed to her so much. Between the rough scars, the clenched jaw, and the slightly-crooked nose, the only gentle thing left on his countenance was his eyelashes.
They were down now, brushing against his cheeks as he scanned over the evening holographic news. She vaguely wondered what they felt like, his eyelashes. What they would feel like against her thumb, against her cheek, against the very softest of her skin…
"Zam, did you hear me?"
She jumped, dropping her book to the floor with a solid THUMP. "S-Sorry, Jango, I didn't. What were you saying?"
He eyed her with something like a quizzical glance, which should have worried her had her attention not been captured by those eyelashes again.
"Sorry, Jango. Say it one more time?"
He flopped down the hologram generator with an exasperated sigh, mumbling something.
"What?"
"You're staring at me like I'm about to explode." He sipped from the cup of now stone-cold coffee and made a slight face. "Again."
Caught red-handed. Using the excuse of retrieving her fallen book, Zam's fuzzy mind raced to make up an acceptable reason for gaping at him like a Naboo sea monster. Again.
"And you're blushing."
Damn! Damn! He wouldn't let this one go now. If there was anything he liked doing more than being with his son, it was pestering Zam about her notoriously easy blushes.
"I'm flushing. It's hot in here. There's a difference, Fett."
"Ah." She risked a glance up at him, and her heart stopped dead at the charming little quirk of his patented amused half-smile. Damn! She fumed and finally snatched her book up from the tile, making a show of dusting the front cover. "Perhaps you wouldn't mind telling me the reason behind your, ah, flushing?"
"Don't get smart, Fett, or I'll wallop you into next Tuesday."
"I'll just ask Taun We to run a diagnostic on you. I hear they just received this new machine that reads minds—like a polygraph, only better."
She smirked nervously, doing her best to disguise the sudden trembling. "You're bluffing."
He didn't answer, but his half-smile tugged up the other corner of his mouth.
Zam glared at him the best that she could, but knew it was useless. Jango had faced down countless thugs, a bunch of hunter-killer droids, a couple of Jedi, and one very pissed-off krayt dragon—relatively, she was about as intimidating as a wingless gnat.
She was pretty sure he was bluffing. But then again, she definitely didn't want to risk it. Having her innermost emotions displayed overhead on some goofy kind of monitor for the entire lab to see was certainly not on her To-Do List.
She stared down at her book cover, fiddling absently with the flaking plastic jacket. "You don't want to know."
"Quite the contrary, actually." Jango casually set the holographic newspaper module on the butler's table next to the sofa. "Usually the things that cause you to…flush…prove most interesting."
Wishing she had her purple veil to cover her flaming cheeks, Zam lifted the open book to her nose. The pages were cool against her face. "You'll just get mad at me. Or think I'm weird, or something like that."
Jango's half-smile stretched into one of his drop-dead-gorgeous full ones, making his dark eyes suddenly twinkle like two stars. Zam did her best not to hyperventilate and failed miserably.
"Eyelashes."
It was like her mouth had blurted out the word without her permission. Turning a whole new unexplored shade of scarlet, Zam found an interesting spot on the sofa and examined it intently.
Jango's eyebrows shot up. "Beg your pardon?"
Zam swallowed. Well, nothing for it now. She looked at him timidly and mumbled, "What I was staring at. Your eyelashes."
He blinked a couple of times, making said features flutter, and Zam's heart skipped what felt like fifteen beats. Gods above, he was so handsome. Even without the smile that presently seemed to have dropped from his face.
"Why? What's wrong with them?"
"Nothing!" Damn! She wondered if there was a surgery to shrink the blood vessels in her face. "I just…I…"
Begging that the floor would just swallow her up, Zam floundered for what to say. The man down the couch from her merely stared, expression unreadable, eyes boring into her as though they could see her soul. She wondered if they really could.
Helpless, she sighed, and gave in, matching his gaze and smiling sheepishly. "I like them. I-I think they're, erm…very nice-looking."
And I wonder if they're soft. I want to touch them, feel them against every part of me…
More blushing. DAMN!
Her eyes, which had lowered as she completed the sentence, risked a glance up at Jango.
He was sitting there on the couch, frozen in the same position he had been when she had blurted 'eyelashes' in the first place. Powerful arms were slung casually across the back of the sofa, legs hung nonchalantly off the side, but all movement had stilled. It was like someone had carved an exact replica and swapped it for the real Jango when she wasn't looking.
Lowering her eyes again, Zam resumed picking at the flaking plastic cover on her book. She knew he'd be angry at her. She shouldn't have said anything.
"You know…"
His voice was incredibly low when he said that. That's another feature Zam forgot to mention that was incredibly attractive—his smooth, accented voice. Gods…she glanced up again.
He was smiling, no, grinning, another beautiful smile that made his eyes twinkle and Zam's heart lodge somewhere in her throat.
"Most women, when they stare at a man like you've been staring at me," (her face felt like it was on fire), "are looking at something like eyes or mouth, or something like that."
So he was going to tease her, was he? Zam fumed and began reading her previously forgotten book with great intensity. "Well, I'm not most women."
"No, you're not."
The tone of his voice…she risked another glance at him, but this time, he caught her. The instant her green eyes met his dark ones, she was finished.
He raised two fingers. "Come closer to me, Zam."
She struggled valiantly in her mind while her body, about as solid as pudding, helplessly obeyed, like a fish on a hook. Those eyes could not be ignored.
Heart thudding like a Coruscant train, she moved towards him a couch cushion, but hesitated. What was he planning on…
His eyes darkened. "Closer."
Again, helpless to obey, her body found itself less than two feet from his. She paused again, took in a breath to say something, to protest.
"Closer."
She wanted to move closer, oh, she wanted to move closer to him so badly. But she was afraid. Afraid she'd get close only to be pushed away, only to do something stupid and make a fool of herself, only to reaffirm his suspicions that she was a rash, useless, empty-headed…
So she stayed put, immobile, afraid that if she moved one way or the other she would be torn in half. She hadn't blinked since his command, but since her eyes didn't hurt, she didn't notice.
He didn't move either for a moment. For the span of a second, the air in the room thick with tension, the only movement was his chest rising and falling with breaths. Zam's own breath had ceased long before this.
They stared at each other.
Then he reached for her, slowly, yet firmly, both arms enfolding her waist before she was fully aware of the situation.
"Jango-"
Her words stilled when her torso touched his warm chest, and his arms enfolded her in a definite embrace.
Somehow, she had most certainly migrated into his lap, where she hung now, loosely suspended from his hands like a limp rag doll between his legs. What was it about this man that made her so weak?!
In a trance that probably had something to do with his intoxicating scent of sun-baked grassland and…mango?...Zam was only slightly aware of her own arms drifting lazily behind his back, fingers tangling in the hair at the nape of his neck. Like her body was on autopilot and it was all she could do to hang on.
Though her eyes were having trouble focusing, she could make out the heart-stopping smile on his lips again, that triumphant little smirk showing off the fact that he knew something the rest of the world didn't.
She wanted so badly to withdraw, wipe that smug grin right off his face with a cold shoulder, but she couldn't do it. Not even if she wanted to. She wasn't that strong.
"Zam, move up."
His breath washed over her face, a concentrated version of his body. Gods, if they could bottle that smell and sell it…
Sighing, allowing her eyes to close, Zam did as she was told, and raised her torso so that her sternum now pushed firmly against his. His house-clothes made a nice change from the harsh Mandalorian armor, although his chest was hard and muscled enough to pass for its own armor…
DAMN! She was turning red again.
"Someone's heart is pounding."
He just had to point it out, didn't he? She opened her eyes with another sheepish quirk on her mouth she hoped looked contrite.
He leaned back against the arm of the couch, smiling at her in a way that made said heart do a few cartwheels in the midst of hammering. His dark eyes—brown, almost black—deepened, twinkling with something Zam wished she could definitely identify as affection.
"Lean down."
Blinking stupidly, suspended above him by the trembling arms that only just managed to hold her without collapsing from the force of his smile, Zam stayed stiff.
"What?" she muttered.
His smile stretched even more, and the corners of his eyes wrinkled. His hands slid up to the sides of her face, which flamed under his fingers. Oh, gods, his touch felt so good. She closed her eyes again, smiling a smile that probably looked insane.
Gently, his fingers, light against her cheeks, led her down, leaning her face closer and closer to his. She could feel the heat.
He wasn't going to…no! Was he?
Something like a mix of relief and disappointment flew through her when she felt his breath against her left ear. So, he wasn't going to…then what was he doing?
Her left cheek touched his, the tan skin rough with time and scars under her flawless, fabricated illusion. Her heart jumped at the connection, and jumped higher when she was sure she felt him catch his breath as well.
But she had little time to dwell on this, as Jango's fingers delicately slipped beneath her pointed chin, and raised her face a little, so she felt the crinkles at the corners of his eyes against her cheekbone. The tip of her nose touched his hairline.
What was he…
And then she felt it.
Jango, who must have kept his eyes open this entire time, suddenly, with a forbidden sigh, closed them.
His eyelashes brushed against the very apple of her cheek, where he had positioned them perfectly.
She couldn't help it. Without opening her eyes, Zam gave a breathless chuckle. Her heart sang. It felt so good!
The crinkles against her cheekbone deepened as he smiled again. She didn't remember him smiling so much at once. He opened his eyes again, and his eyelashes tickled her face again so she was forced once more to give a breezy laugh.
Jango's arms slipped from her chin to around her shoulders, and positioned themselves quite comfortably around her waist. "You are like no woman I have ever known."
Feeling emboldened, Zam softly pressed her lips to the flecks of gray at his temples. She smiled when she felt the vein that pulsed there quicken an infinitesimal amount. "All because your eyelashes fascinate me so?"
"All that and more, Zam."
When he spoke, his breath blew against her left ear. "I'm flattered, Master Fett." She grinned and returned the favor by turning her attention to his own left ear with the softest of kisses she could manage.
She was rewarded when he gave what felt like a barely restrained groan, and his eyelashes fluttered closed again, brushing against her cheek.
She smirked, and murmured, "Someone's heart is pounding."
"Something else is pounding."
"And I can feel that, too." Tilting her hip a slight bit, she nudged said area with a wide grin, and he snatched in a breath. "Ah, that's another thing I forgot to mention women look for in a man."
Growling lightly, Jango migrated his hands from her waist to bury them hungrily in her short blonde hair, panting between breaths, "What about…what a man…looks for…in a woman?"
"Oh, I figured that out a long time ago," she grinned as she sampled his earlobe tenderly, eliciting a strangled groan from the bounty hunter. "Quiet, Jango, Boba will hear you."
"Zam, you won't like where this is going."
"Oh, I'm quite certain I will, Fett," she whispered in his ear gently, casual hands beginning to toy with the ties on his house clothes as her hip surreptitiously brushed against him. "But if you're not up for this, we can definitely do something else…do you like checkers?"
He said nothing. Without another word, he scooped her up from the couch, attacked her mouth with his, and made with all due haste towards his bedroom.
Smiling, she mumbled through two sets of lips, "Since when do you have to be in a bedroom to play checkers?"
"I'll show you checkers," he smirked fierily, slamming the door shut with one foot as he tossed her on the bed. "Just let me show you checkers, Miss Wesell."
She gave a predatory grin in return—gods, how she loved this man!—and silently flicked off the lights, plunging his bedroom into pure, loving darkness.
Like the blackness was a trigger, Jango's warm body tumbled into the sheets beside her, and began to smother her in a flurry of kisses and caresses.
But just before the heat totally usurped her wavering control, Zam managed to speak a final time. "Oh, Jango, wait…"
"What is it, Zam?"
She couldn't help the blush that flitted across her features. "However it is you play checkers; will you please make sure it involves eyelashes?"
There was a pause.
And then his voice, the smiling crinkles in his eyes tangible on her cheek. "Oh, Zam…"
FIN.
A/N: One of my less tame endings. :) Click the little link below, and tell me how much your innocence has been corrupted.