by Janey Chapel
“Are you ready?” Patrick grunted, already pulling his hands away, already opening his jeans.
Jay moaned out a “Yes” into his forearms, unable to stop his hips from thrusting back, as if he could capture Patrick’s cock all by himself.
He felt Patrick’s hand, heavy on his hip, holding him still, then his fingertips holding his cock at the entrance to Jay’s body, then the thick head pushed its way in. Patrick breathed hard and fast behind him, clutching his hips with both hands as he stretched inside, never pausing but never forcing. With the exception of the inexorable slide of his cock inside Jay’s body, Patrick was once again still. Waiting, Jay thought. Waiting for what?
“Oh my God. Christ…,” Patrick panted, and Jay felt the first small thrust, the first coiling reaction inside Patrick’s body, the first helpless motion into his own body. The rhythm took hold without Jay being aware that he was ready for it. Without conscious design, he thrust back as Patrick thrust forward, and then all of Patrick was in, every inch, up to the balls, sheathed tightly inside him.
Jay groaned, the harsh sound pulled from somewhere deep, and he heard an answer resonate from Patrick’s chest. Patrick stood straight up again, changing the angle of his penetration, and began to thrust, sending the head of his cock directly against Jay’s prostate. Chills ran through Jay’s body each time it happened, and his cock, untouched and unaided, started its own bobbing rhythm in the air in front of the desk. Patrick pounded him without restraint, without discipline, and Jay accepted the force, bending to absorb the buffeting blows, taking Patrick in, releasing him, then taking him in again, working the muscles inside to drag out Patrick’s pleasure as long as he could.
Behind him, he could hear a steady rumbling deep in Patrick’s chest, moans trapped and bubbling to the surface without his permission. The rocking rhythm lost its gait as Patrick’s control splintered, and Jay braced himself against the desk, letting Patrick’s body slam into his without resistance. Inside, he felt opened, altered, as if Patrick’s cock had let loose something primal inside him. He gave in, gave up, abandoned himself, letting the rough thrusts lift him to his toes, letting his spirit absorb the exhilaration of complete capitulation while his body did its best to consume everything Patrick had to offer. How taking could feel so much like giving, he didn’t know.
A particularly brutal thrust put Jay over the edge, his cock jerking in the air, spurting semen in streams onto the desk and the floor. Immediately, Patrick shook behind him, his own shout rising into the air, his hands gripping Jay punishingly as he thrust hard inside and held there. Jay could feel the swelling inside, feel Patrick’s cock spasm in the stretched confines of his body.
Jay’s cock twitched in envy, wanting its own snug sheath but settling for the brush of air instead. Rolling contractions spun through his body, startled aftershocks as Patrick continued to thrust slowly inside him, and he rode the pleasure until his knees gave out beneath him.
When it was over, neither man could stand. Jay sank to the floor, pulling Patrick with him, still connected, tangled in their clothes, dripping with sweat, hearts pounding out of sync with each other, almost audible. In the sweet stillness, Patrick pressed his mouth to the back of Jay’s neck, licking up the sweat until Jay groaned and turned his head to be kissed.
Patrick put a gentling hand on Jay’s hip and whispered, “Coming out.”
Jay consciously relaxed so withdrawing didn’t hurt either of them. After wrapping the condom in tissue and disposing of it, Patrick turned Jay onto his back and leaned over him, sliding a hand down to Jay’s crotch and cradling his spent cock. It twitched sleepily under his palm. Patrick rubbed the head of Jay’s cock with his thumb, semen slicking his path, and Jay dropped his head back and sighed.
Patrick leaned over and took Jay’s softening cock in his mouth, lingering to lick beneath the foreskin, dipping in to taste the slit, and Jay’s hips pushed upward instinctively. Patrick released him with one last, long lick and dropped onto his back beside him. Jay let his body reorient itself, let his breathing even out and his pulse slow, still tingling in all the right places.
Eventually Jay had to move, reaching down a lethargic hand to tug his briefs and trousers back into position. He needed a shower, but even Bryan’s well-stocked office couldn’t supply that. Patrick sat up, watching him zip and button up, watching his hands as they worked the clasp on his belt. Then Patrick heaved himself up in one steady motion, bringing his dangling jeans and utilitarian blue boxer shorts with him as he did so, zipping up casually, unselfconsciously reaching in to rearrange himself once he had his jeans back on.
He offered Jay a hand and pulled him up effortlessly. Jay leaned forward, putting his forehead on Patrick’s chest, and Patrick slid a hand down the back of his neck, holding him against his body for a minute before pulling away.
“Can I give you a ride somewhere?” Jay asked as he pulled his shirt over his head, tucking it carelessly back in his trousers.
Patrick’s answer came muffled through his own shirt. “No, thanks. I walked. Wasn’t sure how much I’d drink.” When his head reappeared from the trap of his T-shirt, he added, “I guess getting drunk wasn’t what I needed.”
Jay accepted the unspoken compliment with a nod. “No hangover, either,” he pointed out. The sharp edginess that had shrouded Patrick all evening had dissipated somewhat, leaving only the focus and intensity behind. He still had his game face on, but he had control. Jay almost felt sorry for the poor man who’d have to face Patrick in the morning. He’d never know what hit him.
“Nail the bastard tomorrow,” Jay heard himself say, and a wide-open grin split Patrick’s face, broadening the narrow planes of his cheeks, crinkling his eyes. A breathtaking sight, that smile.
“That’s what I’m good at,” Patrick said, and Jay found himself grinning back, enjoying the play on words, and the connection he felt, no matter how brief.
“Yes, I can believe that,” Jay said with an exaggerated leer, and Patrick laughed.
Jay cleaned up the mess best he could, emptying the trash, returning the contents of the drawer to their typical order, scrubbing all evidence of their lusty abandonment from the floor and the polished surface of the desk he shared with Bryan. His boss had the patience of Job, but somehow Jay doubted his good humor would stretch to spunk under his desk. Shit, they even scraped the gum off the bottoms of the tables once a week; God only knew what he’d say about semen stains.
They walked out together, and Patrick waited while Jay locked the bar. Jay put his hand out again, and Patrick shook it, the grip as warm and firm as Jay remembered. Without saying anything else, Patrick squeezed Jay’s hand one more time and turned into the night.
Jay watched him walk away, his steps ringing out on the sidewalk in a don’t-fuck-with-me stride.
A decent philosophy to live by, he decided as he started toward his car, hearing his footsteps echo Patrick’s on the pavement.
His phone rang on the short drive home, and his heart jumped before he remembered he hadn’t given Patrick his number. Instead, it was Bryan, checking on how things had gone at the bar. He hadn’t told Jay where he spent the evening—he took the confidentiality of his “clients” seriously—but Jay assumed another stray would soon take up residence among the staff. Maybe he’d get lucky, and Bryan would find some light-fingered dude with a knack for mopping and gum-scraping.
As sleepy Atlanta passed by his car window, he told Bryan about the tourists he’d thrown out, about a late delivery of longnecks, and a bill for barware he’d left in the top drawer of the desk. Then he said casually, “Leah might mention something about a cop coming in.”
A long pause came across the line, and then Bryan said, just as casually, “Oh? Anything I need to worry about?”
Meaning, were any of his lambs being led to the slaughter? See, there, that was Bryan in a nutshell. He took shit on, whether it was his own shit or not.
“Nope,” Jay said. “He dropped in looking for a drink, that�
�s all.”
Another pause. “Uh-huh,” Bryan said finally, and Jay couldn’t help grinning a little at the image in his head of Bryan narrowing his eyes and tilting his head, trying to figure out what Jay hadn’t told him. “And did he find what he was looking for?”
Damn, the man was good. It probably helped that he’d known Jay for a few years, that they’d spent many a late night going over the books, scheduling the staff so everybody could cover their rent, their meds, and their child care costs. He knew Jay, as well as anyone could, and so Jay told him the truth.
“Yeah, he did,” he said. He cleared his throat. “We both did.”
“You know what you’re doing?” Bryan asked. Jay didn’t hear censure—he’d never heard censure—but he did hear concern.
“It’s done,” Jay said. “I mean, I’m not doing anything. I’ll probably never see him again.”
“Uh-huh,” Bryan said again.
“But he got to Leah. He didn’t do anything, but he was kind of intense just in general so if she says anything….” His voice trailed off.
Bryan sighed. “He wasn’t there for her.”
“Right,” Jay said.
“He was there for you.”
Jay pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at it, sure he hadn’t heard that last part right.
“He wasn’t…. I didn’t intend….”
“Are you all right?”
Bryan’s steady, warm voice reached across the night sky like a hand on Jay’s shoulder. He sighed, which Bryan no doubt heard.
“Remember those first couple of months after I got out?” he asked Bryan.
“You mean like that time the beer truck backfired and you ended up facedown under a table?”
Jay could laugh about it now, but he’d jumped at every sound for months. He’d protected himself physically and emotionally, shunning every friendly advance, distrusting and skeptical, clinging to his prison mask by a hangnail of nervous tension and pride.
Bryan had worn him down with kindness, with consistency and restraint, and with a dogged determination that still choked Jay up when he thought about it too hard. Bryan had peeled back Jay’s brittle surface a hard-won inch at a time, giving him time and space to become a better man.
“Yeah, like that,” Jay said. “Well, imagine that on a cop, times infinity, and that’s who this guy was.”
Bryan took a deep breath. “So I’ll ask again: Are you all right?”
Jay thought about it. He’d be feeling Patrick in his ass for awhile, but he knew that wasn’t what Bryan meant.
He smiled and let it show in his voice. “I’m fine. Better than fine. I think… I think if you’d met him, you’d have liked him.”
He couldn’t think of any higher compliment.
II
PATRICK nailed the bastard. Just like he’d told Jay he would. It had taken seven hours, three temper tantrums on Merriweather’s part, two warnings from the detective in charge on Patrick’s part, and it cost the Atlanta PD one folding chair, now reduced to twisted gray metal, seat stuffing bleeding out on the conference room floor, but he’d nailed him. He was pretty sure he’d never get invited to the Atlanta Policemen’s Ball, but he didn’t much care. Means to an end, boys, means to an end. If he had to get mean to get the end he wanted, he didn’t have a problem with that. It wasn’t like they were going to be buddies.
A couple of Atlanta’s finest had had the balls to question his methods. Seemed to him they were just playing a variation of Good Cop, Bad Cop, except they were all good… and he was all bad. Let them think that. To hell with ’em. They’d wanted the creep behind bars, and that’s what they’d gotten.
End of story.
And Patrick had never laid a hand on him. Not a single, solitary finger. He had the video to back him up.
It had been fun. Not fun like poker or going to a ball game. More like jumping out of an airplane, hoping your parachute worked. Fun like going camping at twelve thousand feet when there was a chance the weather just might turn. Sometimes it was fun to risk everything. His life. His career. His reputation. So what if that meant he ended up spending a lot of time by himself? Sometimes it was fun to just say, “Screw this, and screw you.”
Okay, so he got his kicks in strange ways.
Like walking into a bar and fucking the bartender over a desk.
He doubted Jay would ever know the public service he had provided. If this was a game Patrick played, it still had some limits, and he had just about reached them. He’d left the Zone 5 station the day before ready to do some serious damage to somebody or to something or to himself, if nothing else worked. He’d had the common sense to walk instead of arming himself with the unmarked Crown Vic, but beyond that, he’d had no plans except getting some relief or some release, one or the other.
He’d gotten what he needed.
First impressions didn’t always mean anything. Spend enough time in the military, and on a police force, and you learned that anyone could pretend to be anything. Most of the people he met lied as a matter of course. It would never occur to them to tell the truth. So to meet a man like Jay, who didn’t tease or prevaricate or deny that some sharp, pure thing had happened between them—that was a little miracle.
Jay had seen him at his best and worst, and accepted him, accepted it. More than accepted it, he embraced it. To be honest, there had never been much in the way of accepting and embracing in Patrick’s life. He took it where he found it.
And he’d found it in Jay.
In an ex-con, if that didn’t beat all.
He’d wanted something Jay could give him, and Jay had let him take it.
The thing was… he wanted more.
He wanted more than just that one blistering night. At the very least, he wanted another blistering night. He wanted the chance to see if his first impression of Jay was just his dick talking or not. Because Jay came across to him as a good man. Not just an okay, average guy, but a good, strong man with his head on straight. And yeah, maybe that sounded a little strange, since the guy had apparently fucked up enough at some point to do time for it, but Patrick didn’t meet people with their shit pulled together often enough to let one slip away when he crossed his path. Everybody had a story to tell, and he realized that he wished he could hear Jay’s. Maybe he was making excuses, bending over backward to think the best of Jay. He knew damn well he might not bend that far if Jay were a gnarled sixty-five instead of a toned twenty-five, but he let it go; it would take more than that to harsh his glow.
So he’d had a good day. He nailed the bad guy. He had the longest, hottest shower he could ever remember, and he had the biggest, juiciest steak he could find for dinner. After fighting both the suspect and his brothers in blue for two days, he was feeling pretty self-indulgent, and the only other thing he needed to make the day complete was to hear Jay groaning his name while Patrick sucked him dry.
He had the hotel room for one more night. He had his stuff packed and gas in the Crown Vic for the next day. He had twelve more hours where he didn’t have to report to anybody, or get orders from anybody, or take any shit for doing his job right, and if he could find Jay, he hoped to spend most of those twelve hours naked and sweaty.
His feet remembered the way to Bryan’s Bar.
It looked the same. A different band played in the corner, but there were about the same number of people hanging out, watching the band, drinking. He stood in the doorway again for a minute, taking a look around. All right, so he was posing. So what? It had worked before. His skin wasn’t tingling, not like last night, and he didn’t even need to look behind the bar to see that Jay wasn’t there. What surprised him was how disappointed he was. His heart felt like it was sitting somewhere around his Adam’s apple. He headed over to the bar anyway, and caught the eye of the bartender. He looked about fifty, a solid guy with a shock of salt-and-pepper hair and a Marine Corps bulldog tattooed on his left bicep. He had to be the mysterious Bryan, the former parole officer who collected ex-
cons and made them at home in his bar.
“What can I get you?” the bartender asked.
Patrick wondered how far he’d get with, “How about Jay Hinshaw spread-eagled on a bed?”
He ordered a beer.
When the guy brought it over, Patrick asked him if he was Bryan, and he looked a little surprised, but nodded. Patrick put out his hand and said, “Patrick Graves. I’m a friend of Jay’s. I was hoping he’d be here tonight.”
Yeah, not too subtle, but frankly, subtle wasn’t how he felt.
Bryan looked him over, and Patrick couldn’t begin to guess what kind of first impression he was making. At the very least he was clean, shaved, and in a decent shirt and khakis. Whatever he saw made Bryan relax a little and he said, “He’ll be in around nine. He’s finishing up some work at the gym.”
The gym. That must be where Jay’s stellar physique came from. It took discipline to maintain a body that good. Patrick admired that—both the body and the discipline. He settled himself in for the wait. He let himself have a couple of beers, not enough to get sloshed, just enough to make the time pass. Bryan was good company. They talked some about the Marines once Patrick told him they had that in common. It turned out neither of them were too fond of the desert, or the trickle-down chain of command fuckups, but they both missed their Corps brothers.
He was watching Bryan’s face when Jay opened the door, but he didn’t need to see the smile to know he’d come in the room. He wasn’t clairvoyant or anything, but the air changed. The room felt smaller and hotter before he even turned around, and once he did, he couldn’t breathe.