by Onley James
Calder’s heartbeat thudded heavy in his chest. “It’s a long story, angel.”
“You know everything about me. You’ve seen me humiliate myself so many times. I just want to know something about you. Something real. Something personal.”
Calder’s chest tightened. He never spoke of Jennifer. Not to anybody. He’d never even told his mother about her. “It’s not a nice story. I did something selfish, and somebody got hurt because of it.”
Robby frowned, the scowl so out of place on his pretty face. “I can’t believe that’s true. That’s not who you are.”
Calder looked down at him. “You don’t really know me, angel.”
“Sure, I do. If you really think what you did was bad enough to change what I think of you then tell me and prove me wrong.”
Calder sighed. “You are surprisingly relentless for somebody who is afraid of everything.”
“That’s ‘cause I’m not afraid of you,” Robby said.
Calder gave a humorless laugh. “Maybe you should be.”
Robby giggled. “That was really dramatic.”
Calder couldn’t help but smile. Robby’s laugh was infectious. “Okay, that was a little dramatic, but you’re kind of asking me to rip open my old life.”
“Technically, the funeral home already did that. Ignoring stuff doesn’t make it go away. It just makes it worse.”
Calder shook his head. He had a point. Besides, somewhere deep down, Calder knew he’d already made up his mind to tell Robby. The masochistic part of him hoped that it might chase him away so he didn’t have to break his heart later.
“It started a long time ago. I was eight, and my older sister, Megan, was sixteen. I was a surprise to my parents who were already in their forties when I was born, but they weren’t upset about my arrival. At least, they never implied as much. My dad taught middle school science, and my mom was a loan officer at a bank. We were a super average middle-class family.” He took a deep breath. “Until my sister left work one night and never came home.”
Robby sucked in a breath, taking Calder’s hand, like they’d come to a scary part in a horror movie. It felt like one at the time. Calder tried to distance himself from the story. Just state the facts.
“It was almost eleven before my parents started to worry. She was usually home by then. The store closed at ten on weeknights, and it was a Wednesday. My mom worried my sister’s car might have broken down somewhere between the store and the house. There were no cell phones back then, so dad got in the car to go look for her. But her beat up Camaro was still in the lot. All the lights were off in the store, and the doors were locked. My dad got our neighbor, Ed, and the two drove around for hours hoping to find her, but she was just gone.
“I slept through most of it until the police arrived. The lights woke me up. The officers assured us that she’d probably just gotten a ride from friends and they’d talked her into going out. My parents told them that wasn’t something she’d do, but they just dismissed them. When she didn’t come home, they implied she’d run away. It was clear to my parents the cops weren’t going to look too hard for her.
“Things just sort of fell apart after that. My mom lost her job, my dad became obsessed with finding my sister and started to fall down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. They loved me but it was clear that there was a big hole in our lives. They sort of ignored me. I understood, though. I missed her too. She was my sister. She used to read to me and do all the voices. Sometimes, she’d take me out after mom and dad had gone to sleep and we’d get milkshakes at the drive thru.”
Calder fell silent, gathering his thoughts. It seemed strange to talk about her after a decade, like conjuring a spirit he’d expelled years ago. Guilt ate at him. What had she ever done to Calder to make him force her out of his memories? Nothing.
“Are the ashes your sister’s?” Robby asked softly before placing a kiss on Calder’s bare chest.
“No, angel.” That would have been too easy. “I guess I was obsessed with the case too, and I fixated on being a Texas Ranger. I wanted to help find missing people. Living in El Paso, they immediately tried to put me in a position working border patrol, but I didn’t want to spend my life chasing after people who just wanted a better life. But that wasn’t why I was there. They put me on a special task force dealing with human trafficking. It’s a huge business in those parts, not just with Coyotes preying on vulnerable people trying to get into the U.S., but American girls and young children are also sold into the sex trade over the border.
“I realized pretty quickly there was a chance this is what happened to Megan. I didn’t share my theories with anybody, but I kept my eyes open. I knew what happened to girls like my sister. Best case scenario, she was dead. Worst, she was a slave, drugged and beaten, bought and sold. Girls in that world didn’t last very long. We didn’t rescue nearly as many girls as we lost, and the ones we did save had years of recovery ahead of them. I convinced myself we were heroes. We were fighting the good fight. Doing everything in our power to get to the people at the top.
“We caught a break when one of the girls leveled up in the organization. Sometimes, when the girls aren’t…profitable anymore, they’ll turn them into recruiters. Her name was Jennifer, and she didn’t want to recruit girls. She couldn’t stomach the idea of having anybody go through what she went through. She wanted out. She came to us for help. She wanted us to get her out. Said she could give us names, dates, meeting spots, tunnels. The wheels move slowly on these kinds of deals, and in the meantime, Jenny had to do her job so the bosses didn’t get suspicious. She hated it, but if she didn’t meet her quota, the punishments were severe, so we were all forced to go on with our lives and pretend we weren’t allowing girls to be raped and drugged and sold as property. A week after Jenny came to us, my parents died in a car accident. I threw myself into my job.
“Backpage launched a few months later. A sort of sleazier version of Craigslist, if you can believe that. Backpage allowed traffickers to place ads for girls, most of them underage. There were pictures, descriptions, all written in code. We checked ads daily, extracted girls when we could. But one day, while looking through these ads, one of the photos was a reflection of the girl holding the camera. A girl who looked just like Megan. An older version of her, but still her. I showed the ad to Jenny, and she swore she didn’t know the girl in the photos or the girl taking the picture but that she did know Elizer, the boss, had started using the site for his girls. I asked Jenny to try to get information from him about the girl, but she said it was dangerous, that he’d know something was up. I begged her to just try, to just see if he’d give up anything, even if it was only to say she wasn’t one of his girls.”
Calder took a deep breath and let it out. “The next day, we found Jenny in the parking lot of an abandoned building, barely breathing, beaten to within an inch of her life. He’d branded her face. The branding wasn’t new, she’d already had an E branded on her hip. Marking up her face was a message.
“We tried to find family members or even friends but there was nobody. She wasn’t brain dead. She could breathe on her own. But she just wouldn’t wake up. I used to visit her every day after work, but she never regained consciousness. I quit the Rangers. I couldn’t keep fighting against the tide. For every girl we rescued, fifty more were taken. Trafficking is a huge business, and there are just too many of them to stem the flow. I moved out here. Linc and Jackson gave me a job. I kept paying Jenny’s medical bills. It was the least I could do. Last month, she got a lung infection and they just couldn’t control it. And then she died.”
Robby sniffled, warm tears falling onto Calder’s chest. “I’m sorry.”
Calder glanced down. “Why are you sorry, angel?”
“Because you’re sad. Because you lost your sister. Because you feel guilty about this girl who had a horrible life.”
“She got hurt because I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that a girl who I saw in a reflection was my long lost
sister. I didn’t even know if my sister was alive or if my sister had been trafficked. Statistically speaking, she was dead twenty-four hours after she went missing. I put my far-fetched hope over a real girl’s life.”
“You don’t know that he beat her up for asking a question about a photograph. She was sucked into a super dangerous world whether she wanted to be or not. You didn’t put her in that situation, whoever kidnapped her did. We’ve all done stupid things that have consequences.”
Calder lifted Robby’s hand to his lips and kissed his palm. “What stupid thing have you done, angel?”
“I abandoned my brothers and sisters to a monster. I saved myself and left them behind,” Robby said softly.
“Do you have a lot of siblings?”
Robby nodded against Calder’s chest. “I had seven when I left. Four of them were older than me. My mom was pregnant when I came out to them, so I suppose I have at least one more now.”
“They have each other though, right?”
“My parents are very Old Testament with their punishments. Kneeling on rice. Being beaten with a belt. Being dunked in ice water and made to stand outside for hours. Nobody is too young for punishment.”
Calder’s heart twisted in his chest. “You are barely twenty-one years old. What were you going to do? Sue your parents for custody?”
“I could have done something. Anything really. But I didn’t. I saved myself and never looked back.”
Calder tugged Robby’s hair and kissed him gently. “You need to stop being so hard on yourself.”
“You should learn to take your own advice,” Robby told him.
“Maybe so, angel. Think you can sleep now?”
“Can I sleep right here?” Robby asked, throwing an arm and leg over Calder.
“Of course.”
Calder wanted to tell him he could stay forever if he liked, but he didn’t. He just closed his eyes and forced himself to try to sleep.
Robby sat up with a start, glancing around at the shadows of the room, his heart hammering against his ribcage, his body coated in a fine sheen of sweat. He gulped down deep breaths as he willed his body to relax. It was just a nightmare. He wasn’t even sure what he’d dreamed about, all he had was a lingering uneasy feeling and a body that didn’t quite realize he wasn’t actually in any danger.
At some point, he’d rolled away from Calder, but now he tucked himself in close, pressing his head to the older man’s furry chest, letting Calder’s heartbeat lull him. He tried to fall back asleep, but his brain was working overtime, playing the greatest hits of every embarrassing thing he’d done since birth. He hated nights like this when self-doubt and guilt gnawed at him like little bugs.
He distracted himself by letting his fingers trail along Calder’s chest, mapping a line between his nipples that hardened to tight peaks at his touch, down over the muscled plains of Calder’s abs to the happy trail that disappeared beneath the waistband of his boxer briefs. He bit his lip, glancing up at Calder’s face, his lips slightly parted as he took deep rhythmic breaths.
He ran his hand over the top of Calder’s underwear, squeezing his soft cock and sucking in a breath as it hardened at his touch. Was this okay? Should he wake Calder and ask his permission? Robby sighed, dropping kisses on Calder’s chest before resting his head on his belly, gently stroking him through his underwear.
“Whacha doin’ down there, angel?” Calder asked, voice gruff.
“Just playing,” Robby said, pushing Calder’s underwear down just enough to reveal the head of his cock, before licking over it carefully. “Is this okay?” Calder groaned, and Robby froze. “Is that a yes or a no?”
Calder stretched, arching his hips upward. “Yes. It’s an enthusiastic yes.”
Robby took advantage of Calder’s lifted torso, shoving his underwear down to his thighs. He got on his knees, once more darting his tongue out, tasting Calder’s skin with tiny kitten licks as he tried to figure out the proper mechanics of a blowjob. Calder’s fingers curled around Robby’s leg, his thumb skimming over the sensitive skin of his inner thigh. It wasn’t like Robby didn’t know what a blowjob entailed. Well, he at least had a general idea, but Calder’s touch was definitely a distraction he hadn’t planned for. But maybe he should have.
All Robby could do was try. He took Calder into his mouth, pressing down until his nose skimmed against the springy curls of Calder’s pubic hair and his cock shoved past his tonsils, triggering his gag reflex. He pulled off, eyes tearing as he glared at Calder’s erection.
Calder chuckled, his hand teasing at the skin on the back of Robby’s neck. “Easy, angel. Not so much.”
“I just want to make you feel good,” Robby muttered, grateful it was too dark for Calder to see him blushing.
“You don’t have to blow me to make me feel good. Your hand works too. Hell, just you half-naked and squirming your hot little body on top of me has been more than enough.” Robby knew Calder was trying to make him feel better but good wasn’t good enough. He took Calder’s spit-slick erection in his hand and jerked him a few times. Calder hissed, his hips coming up off the bed as he fucked himself into Robby’s tightened grip. “Yeah, like that, angel.”
Robby wanted Calder to enjoy their time in bed, but he wanted to know what he was doing too. Calder’s mouth had felt so good on him in that bathroom. Robby wanted to make Calder feel that good too. He pressed his mouth back down over Calder, keeping his fist at the base so he didn’t go too deep. He tried not to blush at the loud sucking noises he made as he bobbed his head.
Calder moaned. “Oh, fuck. That’s it, baby. That’s so good. Good boy.”
Calder’s praise emboldened him, and once he found a rhythm, he had Calder fisting the bed sheets and making the sexiest noises Robby had ever heard. He wanted to make Calder come. Wanted to taste it flooding his mouth, but before he could figure out how to take him deeper, Calder was tugging at his hair, pulling him back up to capture him in a kiss.
Robby found himself underneath the heavy weight of Calder’s frame, his wrists captured by Calder’s hands. “My turn,” Calder growled, biting at Robby’s jaw and throat.
Robby shivered as much over Calder’s raw snarl as his words. Robby yelped as teeth tugged at the bars through his nipples until it was just this side of painful before Calder was biting at his ribs, his hip bones.
“Roll over.” It wasn’t a request.
Robby did as Calder demanded, panic consuming him when Calder gripped his hips and yanked them into the air. Had this all suddenly escalated faster than he’d planned? He wanted to go all the way with Calder, more than anything, but weren’t they skipping some steps? He forced himself to relax as Calder spread him open.
“Damn, even your hole is pretty,” Calder muttered.
Before Robby could even respond, Calder’s tongue teased across his entrance. Robby gave a strangled moan, arching his back, pushing himself closer. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” Robby heard himself whispering as Calder’s mouth did things to him that were probably still illegal in most states. How could that feel so fucking good yet feel like it wasn’t enough at the same time?
Calder laved over Robby’s hole with his tongue before pushing it against him. “You like that, baby?”
Pleasure caused goosebumps to erupt along his skin and his hips swayed closer to Calder against his will. “Yes. Yes. Yes.”
Calder massaged Robby’s hole with his thumb before letting it slide down to massage behind his balls while his tongue went back to flicking over his entrance. When Calder’s hand closed around his cock, jerking him in time with his tongue, that was it—Robby couldn’t stop himself from falling over the edge with a surprised cry, streaks of cum landing on Calder’s worn blue comforter.
When Robby felt Calder shift his weight, he flipped over, careful to avoid the wet spot he made. Calder settled himself between Robby’s legs, kissing him thoroughly. “I guess you liked that, huh, angel?”
Robby could feel Calder’s hard cock, wet at
the tip, pressing against his inner thigh. It occurred to Robby then that this didn’t have to be over for the night. Just because he’d come didn’t mean there wasn’t more they could do. He made a decision then. “Fuck me,” Robby said, ignoring Calder’s question.
Calder gave him a startled look. “What?”
He wanted to bury his face in Calder’s shoulder as he spoke, couldn’t bear the thought of looking him in the eye as he begged for what he wanted. But Calder needed to hear the words. He needed to know. “I want you inside me. I want you to take my virginity. I won’t tell anybody. Nobody will ever have to know but us. Please? I want it to be you. It’s supposed to be you. I’ve known it since the second I saw you.”
Calder stared at him, a thousand emotions seeming to flit across his face before he settled on a strained look. “I don’t want you thinking that you’re my dirty little secret. You deserve better than that.”
Robby blinked rapidly as he teared up, his heart shriveling in his chest. “If you don’t want to, I get it. I’m sure having sex with a virgin is probably boring and awkward.”
Calder grabbed Robby’s hand and brought it to his cock. “Does this feel like I’m bored? Every fucking thing you do turns me on. Three hours ago, I told you something I’ve never shared with another living soul. This isn’t about me not wanting to be with you like that, it’s about me not wanting to have to lie about what you are to me.”
Robby was almost positive his heart stopped beating. “What…what am I to you?”
Calder brought his forehead to Robby’s. “Fuck, angel. I don’t know. Special? Important? Cared for? More than you should be but too much for me to push you away?”
Robby swallowed the lump in his throat. “I didn’t mean to push you. I just want to be with you in all the ways before this goes away.”
Calder dropped a soft kiss to his lips and then sat up. Robby’s stomach sank. He bit down hard on his lip to keep himself from crying for the thousandth time. Then Calder was reaching for something on the side table. Robby frowned as Calder’s phone lit up. Was he making a phone call? Now? Robby had never been so confused. He heard the gruff greeting, even with the phone pressed to Calder’s ear.