MATCHSTICK MEN: a Hunter Dane investigation

by Adira August

  Cam stood with him. "I'll walk you out."

  THE SECRET ROOM

  The bar felt good under the would-be killer's fingers. Cool against hot skin. Heavy. Solid.

  It felt right to take it from the drawer. Free it from hiding, from the secret room so small it hardly earned the name. But even a closet could be a room, if someone occupied it.

  There was power in the darkness, holding the bar lightly, balanced, down by a thigh. Crossing the porch. Tripping lightly down the stairs. Power made you feel light and strong. Power made you graceful.

  The car was parked between the streetlights. Dark was always more impenetrable bordered by light.

  In the car, the bar lay on the seat, along the same thigh. Trailing fingers along its hard length, the would-be killer imagined. Imagined the swing, the impact -- almost feeling the shock travel up a forearm. The pull of muscles along shoulders and back and chest, bringing the bar around to swing again.

  Hearing the muffled thunk against bone under skin and hair. Again. Again.

  There'd be blood. There should be blood.

  It was important.

  Focus. The car was pulling too far ahead. The almost killer's fingers curled around the bar. The gap between the cars closed.

  I wonder if I'll come?

  8:17pm Dinner With a Friend

  "Isn't it hard to fit skis in this thing?" Hunt asked as Cam swung the R8 out of the parking lot.

  "I use the collapsible kind," Cam said, shifting through three gears before they reached the mouth of the alley.

  Hunt grinned and eyed the Audi's gated shift lever. "What the hell year is it?"

  "Hey, it's a classic," Cam told him, stopped at a light. "I bought it with my first endorsement check. My mother almost had a stroke." He smiled in the reflected light from a diner.

  "If this is where we're eating, I warn you, the fries are limp," Hunt told him.

  The light changed and Hunt's seat clutched at him as Cam came off the line. They flew up an entrance ramp and onto I25 southbound.

  "I said 'C'mon, I'm feeding you,'" Cam corrected him. "I didn't say restaurant. Guess you make assumptions, too."

  "What assumptions are you making?" he asked Cam quietly.

  "None." Cam considered. "Okay, that's not entirely true. I'm assuming you are not a vegetarian. In fact, I'm assuming you eat dead cow."

  Hunter laughed; he couldn't help it. "Yeah. Not often, but, yeah. Listen …"

  "I have no agenda tonight, Hunt," Cam cut in. "You said we could be 'friends with benefits.' I'm a kick-ass home cook and that's one of the benefits."

  Hunter nodded and then realized Cam couldn't see it.

  "Okay. You didn't show up at the club tonight looking for me?"

  "Oh, yeah. Sherrilynne called me. Thought you might need a cheering section."

  "So, you didn't come to collect?"

  A beat. Cam's voice took on an intimate timbre that went straight to Hunter's gut. "Would you be disappointed if I didn't?"

  Shit. Belted into the narrow seat with the scent of Cam in the air, hurtling through the night inside a four-wheel booster rocket, set a low flame behind his balls.

  "I'm not sure," Hunt said.

  "Let me know if you figure that out," Cam told him, downshifting onto an exit ramp.

  Hunt didn't miss the fact that Cam hadn't answered his question.

  The temperature had dropped precipitously by the time they reached Cam's big A-frame in the foothills. Inside, Cam started a fire in the great room fireplace, while Hunt wandered around.

  "I'll start dinner. Let me know if you want a drink," Cam told him.

  While Hunt examined shelves of books, he wondered at himself. Being here. With him so close, Hunt couldn't avoid thinking of the things Cam had done. The things no one had ever done to him. The things Hunter needed so desperately that night.

  He glanced over at Cam, behind a large granite counter, moving with grace and confidence, whisking something. He'd turned up his shirtsleeves. White. He always wore a white shirt and jeans. The shadowed edges of muscles and veins caught the light, obvious even from thirty feet away. Strong. Sure. There.

  Hunt's body shivered with anxiety and thrilled with anticipation. In the bathroom of the big playroom, before the flogging started, Cam had taken him apart. It had never been like that for him before. Helpless against the humiliation. The pleasure. The desire.

  There was no box in his mind that memory couldn't ooze out of. Now, here, a swift flood. He ducked into a small alcove next to the fireplace, a sanctuary to allow his traitorous dick to calm.

  He found the five Gold and two Silver winter Olympic medals in an unlighted glass case.

  "My mother did it," Cam called from the open kitchen. "She wanted to put it in her office, but I told her she could do that when she earned them."

  Hunt wandered over to the granite-topped island and perched on a counter stool. "How'd that go over?"

  Cam grinned. "She said she made the one who won them, so they should be hers by proxy." He kept smiling and Hunt realized Cam liked his mother. It was refreshing and a little sappy. But so was Cam.

  Hunter gazed back around the great room of Cam's A-frame. It had been professionally decorated, with respect for open space and floor-to-ceiling window views. The furniture spare and masculine. But it was not a magazine layout. Boots under the edge of the couch, a pile of papers on an end table, a sweatshirt tossed on a footstool.

  It was the very expensive home of a twenty-something kid who skied for a living. And Hunter was a thirty-five year-old homicide cop with a one-bedroom apartment who knew exactly who he was. And wasn't.

  Once everything was on the dining table in front of the fireplace, Cam brought out a bottle of red wine. "You have to drive, later," Hunter said.

  "Do I?" Cam asked, forcing the point of the screw into the cork with a twist.

  "Unless I'm calling a cab way out here. I have to go in, in the morning, for an hour or so."

  "You don't worry. I'll get you home," Cam said, pulling the cork.

  "You're going to get hurt," Hunter said.

  "Am I?" Cam asked, eyes locked on Hunter's.

  A decade younger and a couple inches shorter, pouring wine into Hunter's glass, Cam still radiated an aura of power that made Hunt feel slight and hollow and needful.

  "Is that why you didn't show up Saturday?" Cam asked.

  No answer. Cam retreated to his chair and set the bottle down.

  "Please,"-- he motioned with his fork --"eat before it gets cold."

  Hunt took a moment to savor the first bite. "This is outstanding," he said. Cam was, indeed, a hell of a cook. The steak au poivre was perfect. Crusty with cracked peppercorns, rare inside, the brandy sauce rich but not cloying. Accompanied by a simple salad.

  Cam colored and gave him a shy smile.

  "Glad you like it," he said.

  They ate in silence for a few moments. A thin whistle of wind reached them from the eaves.

  "So tell me how you came to know you needed men for power, women for sex and no one for intimacy," Cam said. His tone was curious. Polite. Judgment free.

  "There was a TV show we watched when I was about fourteen, I guess," Hunt began. "It had these two brothers and the younger one, the nerdy one, got the queer charge thrown at him at school."

  Hunter took a sip of the wine. It was outstanding, too. "So, the younger brother asks the older, how do you know if you're gay?"

  "The older brother was gay?" Cam asked.

  "No, but plenty of straight kids deal with the question. Anyway, the older brother asks him what he thinks about in the shower."

  Cam grinned. "Smart."

  "It was. But it made me wonder for the first time if I was something. In terms of sex. What did I think about when I jacked off? I thought about men and girls. The first string linebacker and my chem lab partner, to be specific."

  Cam used a knife and fork to cut his salad into manageable bites. "But the things you did with each of them in y
our head were different?"

  Hunt nodded. "And they were different, the real life people. The linebacker was gay and out, which was unusual then, but he was also a fuck of a big guy and nobody gave him crap about it. And the girl was a sweet thing, quiet and liked being led. I didn't know what submissive was, then, but her demeanor turned me on."

  Cam sat back, twirling the stem of his wineglass. "But you don't think you 'are something,' right?"

  Hunter sighed. "The way it seems to me, sexual preference is about more than who you want to have sex with. It's about who you make your primary emotional attachment to."

  Cam considered this. "And you don't form emotional attachments."

  "Like I told you Friday," Hunter said. "And you, Cam, are, most definitely, something."

  "Which is why I'm going to get hurt?"

  Hunter nodded.

  "It's a hell of an assumption that every gay man who fucks you is going to fall in love with you," Cam said. His mouth twitched in a gentle smirk. "But you still offered me your ass for my pleasure. Why?"

  I was overwhelmed by gratitude.

  Hunter shrugged. "I thought you'd do it, then. We had time. It would be part of the whole Dom/sub thing. No personal relationship involved. I should have specified."

  Cam stood and walked around Hunt's chair to stand behind him, hands on his shoulders. He bent down and ran his nose through Hunt's hair and whispered, "But you didn't, Hunter."

  Cam's warm, wide palm slid down, over Hunt's chest. And his lips found the hollow place behind the clavicle.

  Hunter leaned into the pressure, shifting to get more of each - the reaction atavistic, elemental. He felt blood rush to his pelvis.

  "I'm going to make you feel so good, Hunter. And you're going to let me."

  Hunt licked his lips, his cock lengthening along his thigh inside his slacks.

  "Is that an order?" he asked, his voice hoarse.

  "A prediction." He felt Cam's lips curve against his skin. "Orders come later."

  They cleared the table together and washed up.

  Hunt asked about the next winter games. Cam said they'd probably be his last. He'd been skiing competitively since he was eleven. He'd achieved every goal he'd ever set for himself. He wanted something new. Something else.

  "Do you have anything in mind?" Hunt asked, handing Cam a rinsed plate for the dishwasher.

  "Thing is, I don't." Cam closed the door and pressed the start button. "There are too many interesting things out there."

  "You have a degree, right?"

  Cam ducked his head over the counter he was wiping. "Yeah. Just a bachelor's."

  "Oh my God, you're blushing," Hunt said. "What? Were you bottom of your class? You studied advanced ski waxing? What?"

  Cam mumbled something and Hunt laughed. "Unless it was the finer points of waterboarding, I don't think you have anything to be embarrassed about. C'mon, I didn't hear you, speak up."

  "Library and media science," Cam admitted.

  "That makes sense, you seem to like solving puzzles," Hunt told him.

  Cam's eyes widened in surprise. "Yeah. It's just - it doesn't fit most people's image of me."

  Hunt shrugged. "So, don't have it printed on any of your drink cups. They get to have the image; you get to have yourself."

  "Or, you do." Smiling like he couldn't help himself, Cam brushed against Hunter as he reached for more counter to polish.

  Surfaces gleaming and dishwasher humming, Cam put away the last of the cleaning supplies.

  "I'm going to hit the head. You can go on up to my room and use my bathroom, if you want." Cam wasn't blushing, anymore. Shoulders back, eyes darkening, he gestured across the great room. "Or, I can take you back to your car."

  Hunter looked from the open wood staircase ascending to the loft above, and back. He licked his lips. His car seemed like such a cold, dark alternative. But he couldn't - he couldn't claim it.

  Cam nodded to the staircase. "Check the bottom left-hand drawer of the vanity."

  4 oz. bulb syringes. Lube packets. The wet wipes were on a shelf within easy reach of the toilet.

  It didn't occur to him to not do what Cam wanted. His Friday experience taught him that Cam used his long, strong fingers, as well as going in bareback. The last thing Hunt wanted was to be less than clean for him.

  I cannot believe butthole douching has become a topic in my life.

  The birch-panelled bathroom was the size of his living room. A massage table waited near the shower. Hunt's body cooperated by needing to take a dump, anyway. After, he cleaned himself thoroughly and used a couple lube packets.

  Filling one of the bulbs with warm water, he moved to the table. The feel of his lube-slick buttocks sliding against each other with every step was curiously erotic.

  He laid on the bench. For a moment, he wished Cam was there to do this and make it less awkward.

  Get on with it.

  He bent one knee.

  Hunter emerged twenty minutes later, clean inside and just-washed outside. He found Cam dragging the bedclothes off the California king. He left the bottom sheet. The room was dim, lit only by small bedside lamps positioned to illuminate the field of white.

  Cam stood at the side of the bed, solid and strong.

  "Come here, I'm going to undress you."

  He took his time. Opening and loosening Hunt's clothes, he ran his hands over Hunt's body, under his shirt, inside his pants. It was intimate and frustrating and Hunt clutched at Cam, wanting. But Cam pushed his hands away.

  "Be patient."

  So Hunter took it. Took Cam's continued whole body assault. Palms painting Hunt's body with swaths of heat and need.

  Finally, Hunter stood nude, flushed and hard.

  "Lie on the bed. Face down. In the center," Cam told him.

  Cam undressed in Hunt's sightline in a corona of lamplight. Hunter watched, head on his crossed arms.

  What he wanted to do was bury his face in the mattress until it was over. But Cam wouldn't like it. He wasn't afraid of Cam's reaction. But this is how Hunt offered to thank the Dom. He would give him everything he could.

  "Friday, you knelt for me because you needed to suffer," Cam said, laying his shirt over a chair on top of Hunter's clothes. "You wanted pain. I gave you that. And I did it very well."

  Hunter nodded slightly. Cam had done it perfectly, in fact.

  Cam's jeans and knit briefs followed his shirt. "You were a virgin and I shoved my cock into you to hurt you. That was for you, to serve you. It's what you needed."

  Hunt nodded again. He'd known that.

  "But tonight," Cam said, "is about my agenda."

  Hunt bit his lips. Cam didn't accept limits; his agenda could be anything.

  "What you need to believe, Hunter Dane, is that I do everything I do very well. Tonight, here with me, is your real first time. Tonight, my agenda is your pleasure. And I will not fuck you, unless you ask me to."

  A howl of wind hit the house, then backed off to a low moan. Hunt startled.

  Cam settled on the mattress next to him and ran his hand over Hunt's shoulder. "The wind comes blasting out of the canyons; the house is on a rise." His warm hand kept soothing Hunter, stroking his shoulder and back. "I get slammed. It's the leading edge of a storm stalled over the mountains. Ski areas will get three feet tonight."

  With his free hand, Cam retrieved lube and a bottle of massage oil from the nightstand drawer and put them on top.

  "You trusted me Friday, and it worked for you. I need you to trust me again, because, dude, you are lying on a bed and I can see every line and shadow and edge of every muscle. And you're beautiful, you know. Sculpture. But you can't feel when you’re like this."

  Hunt shifted in fear and anticipation. He knew Cam could make him feel. He just wasn't sure he wanted to.

  Cam laid down on his side and pried one of Hunt's his arms loose. He took Hunt's hand in his own, massaging gently.

  "This isn't a scene. There're no restraints. We aren't in
a club. Yeah, I'm still a Dom; I'm always that. But you can use safewords."

  He smiled at Hunt's surprised expression. "Of course, you can. I want you to do what I say because you trust me to make you to feel good. Because you want from me what I want to give you. Friends with benefits."

  He brought Hunter's hand to the side of his face and pressed into it, turning until his lips found the palm's center. Cam sucked the skin against his teeth.

  Hunter gasped. An electric shock ran the length of his dick. He snatched his hand back, fist closing.

  "This is your chance," Cam said. "Get up, get dressed, I'll take you to your car. Friends. No benefits. If you stay, I'll make an assumption. I'll assume you trust me. And, I'll assume you want this, too."

  He moved far enough away from Hunter that they were no longer touching, giving him space to decide.

  Hunter took a breath and a long look at the extreme Dom and sweet Alpha male he'd offered himself to. Camden Snow was beautiful in the lamplight. It wasn't just his solid, smoothly muscled body. The shining thick blond hair. His substantial cock.

  It was the very thereness of him that was beautiful. All of a piece. Cam was surety. In the playroom, Cam had cared for him. Soothed him and tortured him with a relentless compassion.

  What if it's the same but without the torture? What Cam didn't know was that Hunter Dane had never, in his life, done this before. It had always been Dom/sub, at a club. He had never had simple sex. Had anyone make love to him. Nor he, them.

  But here, together, in this remote house, sunk in a raging river of air, what if this once …

  He turned his face into the mattress. "Cam," he whispered.

  Cam put his arm around Hunter and leaned in to hear him.

  "I'm here, Hunter."

  "Just for tonight. Just … tonight …"

  "Just tonight," Cam assured him.

  "Own me."

  Cam started at Hunter's feet. Massaging oil between his toes, over the soles. Kneading. Hunt groaned with pleasure.

  Pushing Hunt's feet apart, Cam knelt between them, working his way up strong calves and firm thighs. He massaged Hunt's lovely rounded buttocks with his thumbs, squeezing with his fingers. Cam's hands moved in long, strong strokes, revelling, worshipping Hunter's supple body, the shadows and valleys well-defined for the camera he knew the man under his hands posed for.