Like a Freeze

by Olivette Devaux

  The thought of group drug use was new, although it shouldn’t have been. “They smoked pot last summer,” Cooper said, recalling the solstice. “But not all of them, and not during the ritual.”

  “Maybe mushrooms,” Ash said thoughtfully. “I’ve heard some people do psilocybe for what they call spiritual enlightenment.”

  “I’ve never seen them do mushrooms, other than the few foraged dinner-type mushrooms from the woods,” Cooper said.

  “It’s taken as a tea,” Ash said. “They grow in the spring, little brown things with a blue ring on the cap and blue tint on their stalk. You wouldn’t have known what was in their mugs.”

  Cooper laughed out-loud. “And you know this how?”

  “Misspent youth, mostly.” Ash’s voice was thoughtful now. “It’s not a horrible thing to do if you do it right. But... people who trip on mushrooms usually talk about it afterward. And furthermore, a trip like that will totally divert your focus. The whole idea of this solstice ritual was to focus on raising power, right? I doubt they’d be able to do that if they were tripping.”

  “Unless they’re full of shit and lying to themselves. Unless all this power-raising is just a weird cult thing and the effects don’t really exist.”

  The road hummed under the wheels, all gray asphalt and dried-on salt.

  The flat, frozen plains still flashed past them in their blinding whiteness.

  “Maybe,” Ash said after a while. “But we have both felt the ley lines and the node, and Jared.”

  There was always that. Even in the most dire moment of doubt as to the real-life impact of their doings, their own abilities always brought them down to earth, or into the river, or into a hopeful communion with a half-ruined, antique sword which had become, inexplicably, possessed by Jared’s seemingly mute spirit.

  “Maybe,” Cooper said, and yawned. “I can’t explain why I’m so tired. Maybe it’s the glare.”

  Ash fished out his cell phone and messed around on it for a while. “Can we sleep over at Ann Arbor? We’re coming home two days early as it is. We might as well take a little time for ourselves.”

  “My wish is your command.”

  “Just follow the nav,” Ash said, and yawned. “Let me know if you need me to drive. I’m going to close my eyes for a few minutes.”

  The mechanical voice of Ash’s phone told him to continue for another eighty-two miles to the next turn. Cooper turned on the radio, whacked it a few times, then fussed with the settings until he found a music station with a soft rock mix. The idea of hunkering down at the Wild Rice Bed and Breakfast, an utterly new place Ash had found using his phone app, held all the appeal of a soft bed inside a heated room, equipped with a bathroom with a claw-foot bathtub right across the hall.

  There would be normal food, and he had Ash by his side. Life was good.

  The water would be hot, plentiful, and wouldn't talk back.

  And they were unharmed.

  Cooper frowned. He didn’t know why the last two thoughts popped up in his mind as though they weren’t a given. When he pored over the days spent with his clan, it was as though he kept missing the same step on what should’ve been a familiar staircase over and over again. As though someone had died, or was born, and he had never been told.

  Just fatigue, he decided as he squinted his eyes against the late morning sun. And that, too, would pass.

  ASH KEPT BLINKING as though he just woke up, which wasn’t fair after a mere nap in a moving vehicle. He was, after all, the perky morning person while Cooper was the coffee-addicted morning grump.

  “Almost there,” Cooper whispered into his ear as the clerk behind the antique check-in counter fumbled with her computer.

  Almost there. Almost back in a real bed, with a mattress instead of a soft bed crafted of evergreen boughs. With real sheets instead of wood smoke stained blankets and animal skins.

  He shuddered at a memory of something vague, a nebulous awareness that niggled at the edges of his consciousness. He even considered lowering his shields to see if everything was fine within the local system of rivers and lakes and drainage basins.

  Yet he resisted. He was on a vacation, after all. Didn’t grandma Olga specify that they were to take a break for awhile and recharge? She had said it with that glazed expression she sometimes had when she caught a glimpse of the future. The one that made her look well past her age instead of like an in-shape, perky grandma in yoga pants whom time could never touch.

  Time.

  Something about that concept nudged him as well. Something about losing time. About forgetting.

  Ash yawned.

  “All done,” Cooper said. He was already carrying their shared overnight bag, the one that held their one change of spare clothing and toiletries and books. And phones and chargers, and gum, and... and Jared, whose sheath stuck out of the duffle bag’s zipper in a guilty and entirely inappropriate manner.

  Up the stairs. Down the short hall, and to the right.

  “The bathroom is here, I think. Right next to us.” Cooper peeked in through the door at the end of the hallway. “Yep. You need to go?”

  Yes, yes he did. Ash stumbled in and did his business. He washed his hands at the small pedestal sink afterward. As the water laved his hands, tepid and sleepy, he had the strangest sensation of being watched.

  “Babe?” Cooper’s knock was followed by the old, white-painted door cracking open. “Hey... you alright back here? You’ve been washing your hands for ten minutes.”

  “Was not,” Ash grumbled.

  “Was, too. I think you’re tired and you need to sleep.”

  “I think Al was trying to talk to me, but I don’t know if that was just a dream, or me hallucinating, or what,” Ash said suddenly. “He said... hell, it made no sense. He was talking about losing data. What river spirit has anything to do with computers?”

  “A tired one,” Cooper said decisively. “Come on. We both need to crash.”

  COOPER WOKE UP in a room lit by the brilliant colors of the sun setting outside the three-pane bay window of their room. The orange highlights, underscored by wild shadows of fuchsia and purple, played on the walls which were, in all likelihood, white. It was hard to tell with the special-effects light show going on.

  The lacy curtains were pulled to the sides, flanked by drapes of something heavy and soft and glowing with warm amber hues. The winters in Ann Arbor must’ve been brutal compared to Pittsburgh, Cooper reflected as he considered all the precautions the owners took to keep the warmth inside.

  The headache that had announced its presence once he had finally parked before the Wild Rice Inn was blissfully gone. Undistracted by pain, Cooper allowed himself to feel the pleasant mattress under him, and the heat he and Ash had built up under the thick down comforter.

  Carefully, slowly, he turned. Ash was sprawled on his back, his raven hair spilling on a pillow like silk, free and unrestrained. His left arm was up, stretched above Cooper’s head as though he had made a sleepy effort to occupy Cooper’s space yet not wake him.

  Sweet warmth filled Cooper’s chest at the thought, and the smile that blossomed on his face reflected the inner, unshakeable certainty that he and Ash were in the right bed at the right time. They occupied the same space-time, side by side and watching each other’s back the way they had from the moment they had met.

  The way they had since forever.

  Cooper’s breath hitched the slightest bit at the thought that they might be one of those couples who stayed together from one lifetime to the next. It was a fanciful, irrational idea, yet he had heard stories, and… and why not them? They completed each other perfectly. Even their flaws were such that they allowed them to mesh and form a stronger whole than had they been utterly perfect.

  Ash cracked his eyes the slightest bit. Then a small smile began to tug on the corners of his lips, and he slithered his arm under Cooper’s neck and pulled him in.

  No words were necessary. Their bodies fit with the comfort borne of fre
quent and pleasurable practice.

  The way Ash liked to tuck his head into the crook of Cooper’s neck, and just inhale.

  The way Cooper loved his well-muscled arms under his own strong hands.

  The burn of a three-day beard, one which he had never seen Ash grow before, but one that had made such sense considering the cold, and the rustic camping conditions.

  Ash tried to pin his legs under the comforter with his own just as Cooper flipped them in an effort to loom over Ash. Coy smiles, fierce grins, a tangle of limbs and the heat of mock battle sent their comforter slithering to the floor.

  Yet they didn’t stop.

  The room was comfortably warm, and they were still wearing their short-leg briefs and undershirts.

  Except Cooper had found those garments in the way. Ash was on top of him now, thinking he might win - whatever that meant. With a single, well-practiced tug he pulled Ash’s briefs down his legs.

  Ash froze. Their eyes met, all challenge. “Oh yeah?” Ash’s voice was but a whispery rasp.

  “Yeah.” The sight of Ash looming over him coiled the heat of lust in Cooper’s belly and his already hard length keened with want.

  He flipped them - at the cost of his own shirt. Blinded, stuck in the stupid garment with his arms overhead, he might have been splayed over Ash now, but it was Ash’s teasing tongue that worked his nipples now. And - “Oh no, no you won’t!” Cooper half-laughed as Ash buried his nose in his hairy armpit.

  And inhaled.

  “That’s so gross,” Cooper whined. “I haven’t showered in days!”

  “You smell like you, except more so,” Ash said thickly into the tender skin under his armpit. “So sexy. It’s all musk and pine-needles and the north wind! If you could bottle your sexy, you’d be a millionaire!”

  Well, then. Being appreciated never hurt Cooper’s ego. He turned and wrapped himself all around Ash, shedding the T-shirt in the process.

  A slow, questing touch of Ash’s fingertips down his flank set off lust in a cascade of coruscating heat. A tumbling brook of balmy, warm water that still somehow refreshed, that brought him to a state of full, primal alertness.

  Cooper ditched his underwear and pressed the evidence of his need into Ash’s hip. “I want you so bad.”

  “Then take me, if you think you can.” Heat flashed in Ash’s eyes, spiced with challenge.

  “I can, and I will.”

  WORKING COOPER INTO a state was a new experience, considering how careful they have been up till now. Painfully careful and slow, always watchful not to go off and have Cooper release his power hard and fast, triggering another earthquake.

  This was new. Ash relished seeing Cooper like this, all eager and wanting - and, for some reason, he didn’t see that old fear in his lover’s eyes.

  Cooper was wild with lust, yet in full control of his powers. Whatever had happened during the ritual, whatever visions or communions Cooper had had in that dim, smoky sweat-lodge had granted him a new level of control and of confidence.

  Cooper had a memory of bending Ash over and going with the flow of energy that others had built up around them, but that was nothing compared to what he saw and felt right now.

  That might as well not have happened.

  A stray thought. Ash banished it and focused on the here-and-now, on the delicious scratch of Cooper’s thighs against the back of his own, their hair catching, tugging. The discomfort only accentuated the pleasure he felt as Cooper’s hot, thick cock slipped between his legs and toward his balls.

  Encouraged by Cooper’s warm hand between his shoulder blades, he sprawled half on his chest and half on his side. The way his lower leg straighted and the top knee rested bent on a spare pillow, Ash knew perfectly well that he lay like an offering on a silver platter. He also knew he was painfully, uncharacteristically passive this time around. The urge to take charge and make Cooper feel the heat and the pressure of an incipient release was still there.

  He fought it.

  He did it for Cooper, so that Cooper could have the experience of, eventually, sliding inside him and fucking him into the mattress. Due to their control issues, it was usually the other way around. After all, if Ash suffered a lapse of control, a weather system got stalled over Pittsburgh and it rained.

  Sometimes, local flooding ensued.

  He felt guilty about the flooding and always helped with the aftermath, but… but a rainstorm and a flooded creek was a far cry from an earthquake, and that’s how Ash became the designated top.

  Until now.

  Now that Cooper had control in spades, Ash was only too content to stretch under him and exercise his own patience. His own control.

  “Is this good?” Cooper rasped next to his ear.

  “Oh, yeah.” Yes, yes it was so good, so delicious to feel the lube-slicked fingers slide in and play around, and - “Oh!” Ash gasped, then writhed in place as he desperately tried to move, yet not move out of Cooper’s sphere of influence.

  “No condoms,” Cooper gasped right before he latched onto his neck and sucked hard.

  “Okay,” Ash said, not knowing whether he was agreeing to going raw with Cooper for the first time, or whether he was just acknowledging the sad lack of condoms within convenient reach.

  And the he felt it, Cooper’s blunt cockhead against his ass. Between his cheeks, searching, gliding until with a frustrated grunt Cooper found his target, and pushed.

  He pushed carefully, with measured force. With loving care, holding back to make sure Ash was okay, Ash was good, Ash had every opportunity to enjoy.

  Except Ash rose his rear hard, meeting Cooper more than halfway.

  Cooper’s gasp, his struggle for control, was music to Ash’s ears. “I love it,” he said, encouraging. “I love feeling this stretched. Your cock is just perfect. Just like you.” Ash cringed a little inside. It sounded campy, he thought. A bit overboard.

  Yet Cooper withdrew, not quite making it all the way out, and thrust again. Hard. “Like this?”

  “Yes!”

  And then they spoke no more. Absorbed within each other, joined and meshed like the perfect puzzle, they chased their pleasure until it caught them and tagged them back.

  Ash erupted with a muffled moan, Cooper’s hand on his cock and Cooper’s cock in his ass.

  And then Cooper grabbed his hips and rode him hard, and when he came, the heat of his pleasure marked Ash in a new and an entirely unexpected way.

  He cried, sobs barely muffled and tears blinding his eyes.

  Still inside him, Cooper pulled him into a tender embrace. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

  Ash shook his head. “N… No. It was the best ever, Coop.” Then, so quietly he didn’t think Cooper could hear him, he said, “I don’t ever want you to leave me.”

  “I won’t,” Cooper whispered with heat that propelled his words and made them more than just idle pillow-talk. “I won’t.”

  CHAPTER 19

  JARED

  Of all the times to reach out to borrow Cooper’s senses. Jared froze, uncertain what to do about the onslaught of the sensations that flooded him.

  “Is everything… ?” Shika’s hand landed on his shoulder, and now he felt not only the drag of Ash’s fingers up Cooper’s flank, but also Shika’s energy pouring into him with concern.

  Shika froze. “Oh. Oh!” His sudden understanding was apparent.

  Mortified, Jared tried to feel the old wooden planks of the porch dig into his thighs - but there was the glide of Ash’s thighs across Cooper’s. He tried to feel the hard bamboo of Shika’s shakahachi flute in his hand - but felt the hard, hot heat of Ash’s arousal caress Cooper’s palm.

  And when Shika leaned against him and their minds touched, he felt his body respond.

  [: This is so embarrassing. :]

  Hands, mouths, limbs. The soft breath tickled his ear, and he couldn’t tell whether Shika decided to jump into the fray, or whether he had experienced Ash’s kiss through the connection he had opened at su
ch an inadvertent time.

  [: It’s me. And I don’t have a real breath in this world, but I can use my energy to make you feel as though I do. :] That had been Shika’s voice just then, darkened with his amusement and his… his lust?

  Could a spirit feel lust?

  [: Let me raise shields around us so you don’t broadcast every single caress, and I’ll show you. :] Shika’s aura flared around them into a protective sphere of blues and greens. It darkened, growing opaque and private, like a little cavern by the sea with just a bit of sunlight drifting through a far-away opening.

  “I can hear the surf,” Jared whispered, careful not to send his thoughts and his emotions. “And I can smell you. You’re like… like sandalwood and tea!”

  “For now,” Shika allowed. He slid around Jared and straddled his thighs. The pleats of his hakama wrapped their legs in an impenetrable veil of black silk. And that was too bad, because getting to Shika’s skin through all that was going to take forever.

  “Not forever,” Shika untied the silk cord that held up his topknot and tossed his hair, making the dark waterfall hide flirty gaze, his kissable lips. Then, slowly, his layers of traditional Japanese clothing disappeared until he wore only the fundoshi loincloth.

  “You’re beautiful.” The words tore out of Jared’s throat unbidden. He ran his hands up Shika’s sleek, strong arms and his narrow yet defined shoulders. Up his neck. Into his hair. “And your hair’s like silk,” he whispered. Was this why he never had a girlfriend? But he had never had a boyfriend either.

  “You like silk?” Shika whispered back, and at Jared’s shy nod, a rich, turquoise kimono appeared on his torso and under Jared’s hands. Its shimmering silk was woven with a delicate design of cranes, which gave its surface a slightly uneven feel.

  “You’re better than silk,” Jared amended, but Shika’s playful smile told him the fabric was there to stay.

  “You’ll take your clothes off for me without using your hands,” Shika said evenly. “You’ll imagine them gone, and only then I’ll imagine mine gone. Remember, in our realm, thoughts are deeds. If you can visualize it with true intent, then you can make it happen.”