by R. J. Scott
Lucien wrenched himself away. “I did something,” he confessed.
“What?” Max couldn’t help his instant fear. What had Lucien done? Seen something? Not told Max if he was worried about something?
“This is sex, right?” Lucien waved a hand between them.
Max pulled Lucien back for a kiss. “Very nice sex,” he chuckled.
“I’ve never… and I want to.” Lucien tugged out of his reach and opened the drawer of his bedside table, pulling out lube and condoms. Max went from turned-on to passion-blind in a second.
“You want me to…” He tumbled Lucien onto the bed, encouraging him to scoot up until his head was on the pillow and kissing him soundly until Lucien was wriggling under him. He pulled back. “Are you sure?”
“Does it go against bodyguard-client rules or something?” Lucien said with a smile.
Max buried his face in Lucien’s neck. He wanted to stay there for a very long time, quite apart from the whole sex offer that meant he’d have to move. “Everything we do is probably on the no way list.”
“But?”
“I want you, I want this.” He admitted he wanted to take this further, despite the fact that he should be staying at least half-conscious of the world around him and not lose himself entirely in Lucien.
Lucien wriggled again, but not to escape, just to push at his jeans. Finally Max got with the act and raised himself up and off a little so Lucien could expose more flesh. He was halfway down with his jeans when Max stopped him.
“I don’t want to rush,” he said. To underscore that comment, he kissed Lucien, long and slow, tasting each inch of skin. Lucien moved impatiently beneath him, his fingers digging into Max’s biceps and his legs trapped in denim. Max loved this, the fact Lucien could hardly move and Max could take the time to tease.
He traced pathways of kisses on taut skin, recognizing the faint taste of chlorine under the clean shower gel. Lucien had attempted to push his boxers down at the same time as his jeans, but they’d become caught on his erect cock, damp where precome had soaked into the light blue jersey. Max gently freed Lucien’s cock while at the same time Lucien moved his hands from gripping skin to twist into Max’s hair, accompanying the move with a low whimpering plea.
“Please…”
Max took his time, teasing, nuzzling, licking from base to top, the jersey caught up and under Lucien’s balls, and when he closed his lips around the tip of Lucien’s length, Max was gratified by the groan and the pressing up against his tongue.
Max brought Lucien to the edge, backing off when Lucien gripped his hair tighter.
“No…” Lucien whined.
“Shh.” Max rolled away from Lucien. “Take off your jeans.”
Lucien scrambled to comply, and Max copied his actions, although he was all fingers and thumbs. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been with someone who hadn’t… He flipped the lid of the lube and waited until Lucien settled on the bed. He lay on his front, his feet slightly apart, and the view of his muscled back and his tight ass was enough to have Max pressing down on his cock just to stop himself from losing it. He had a job to do and he was going to do it well.
“You have to tell me if you’re uncomfortable,” Max said. He recalled the guy he’d first been with saying the same thing to him.
Lucien looked over his shoulder pointedly. “Hurry up.”
Max shook his head, then straddled Lucien’s knees, leaning on one hand, and they kissed awkward and sloppy and kind of sideways. Max didn’t think he’d ever had such an erotic kiss in his life.
He took his time, kissing from Lucien’s spine over to each cheek, the entire time pressing his fingers, slick with lube, against Lucien and stretching him. The sounds that Lucien made, the pleas and the inhalations, were enough to make Max come without even being inside Lucien, and he used every trick he knew to hold off. When Max wiped off his hands and rolled on the condom, he hoped to hell he was going to be able to handle this without losing it too fast. He guided Lucien up to all fours and pressed inside, slowly, excruciatingly slowly, waiting to be told to stop, waiting for Lucien to stop.
But all Lucien did was press back against him, and they moved until they set a slow, deep rhythm. Then he sat back and pulled Lucien down with him, taking his weight on his thighs and feeling himself sink even deeper. They kissed messily, Lucien with eyes closed and the kisses little more than taste and words. Lucien’s hands rested on Max’s thighs, and Max couldn’t reach around without losing the grip he had on Lucien because his other arm was firmly on the bed, holding them steady.
“Finish yourself,” Max demanded.
Lucien turned his head and they kissed as he closed a hand around himself. In a few movements, he was shooting between his fingers and tightening around Max. The squeezing was enough to push Max over the edge and he followed Lucien, fucking up into his lover and coming hard.
They kissed—or tried to—then extricated themselves carefully until they lay flat next to each other, close together on the small bed.
“Fuck me,” Max whispered. “That was…”
Lucien simply rolled into his hold and snuggled in. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”
* * * * *
They fell asleep, and at some point Max must have turned off the side light because they were in darkness. Lucien felt uncomfortable, a little sore, but God, how he wanted to do it all again. Now. And the thought crossed his mind that maybe Max was one of these switchers who would let Lucien…
His stomach rumbled and he remembered they hadn’t actually eaten anything since lunchtime, not counting the three p.m. emergency cereal bar.
He extricated himself from Max, then pulled on his robe and went downstairs to grab snacks and coffee. Within a few minutes, he was back upstairs. Max hadn’t moved, still breathing heavily and sprawled this way and that with one foot over the edge of the bed.
“I brought food,” he whispered into Max’s ear. “Wake up.”
“M’wake,” Max mumbled and turned on his side, his eyes blinking open. Lucien saw a different Max there, not a man on high alert but a man totally relaxed and normal. That only lasted for a second, though, and pretty quickly Max was back into bodyguard mode. Lucien saw him check out the door, check out Lucien, then glance at the food before relaxing.
The plate Lucien had gathered was a collection of snack bars, grapes he’d found in the fridge, some bread they’d picked up this morning, and ham.
They ate in companionable silence, but Lucien caught Max’s frown when Lucien winced as he moved.
“I hurt you,” Max said.
“No.” Lucien leaned up and they kissed. “You made me feel.”
Max grunted but fell back into eating one-handed while grasping Lucien’s hand with the other.
“So, you’re twenty-eight.”
Max glanced up at him from where he’d been carefully piling ham on bread. “Yeah…?” he said cautiously.
“Do you think it’s a blessing or curse that you look younger than that?”
Max stopped fiddling with the ham. “I was always cute as a kid, which was good when it came to fostering. I was still young-looking in the RAF. It earned me the nickname of ‘baby,’ which lasted until I thumped the guy who started it.”
“Did you get in trouble?”
“Dave was my best friend, a good guy, never said a word after I thumped him; in fact, we bonded over it.”
“Was a good guy?”
“He was killed in an airstrike in Gaza.”
“I’m sorry.”
Max lifted a shoulder in an approximation of a shrug. “It is what it is.”
“He was your friend, and it must have hurt. He was a real person.”
Max looked at him and smiled softly. “Yeah, it did.” So much was in those few words, compassion and sorrow aside.
Lucien considered whether to focus in on the other part of what Max had said, but then he figured what the hell. After all, he’d already put his size tens into dying in war.
“So you were fostered?”
Max nodded. “From the age of five. Dad died when I was young, mum couldn’t handle it, usual story. She died when I was sixteen. No, I don’t have any siblings and no, I don’t miss that.”
He said it all so matter-of-factly, like none of it was part of what shaped him to be the man he was today.
“I get it,” Lucien offered. “The RAF was probably like a family, and now BI.”
“Uh-huh. You want any more of this bread?”
Lucien looked down at the plate. All the ham was gone, the grapes, only bread remained, a small piece. “Uhm, no thanks.”
Max finished it off in one bite and chased it down with coffee before releasing his grasp of Lucien’s hand and scooting up the bed to get comfortable. Lucien put the plate on the floor, stripped his robe, and climbed into bed to cuddle in to a very accommodating Max. He didn’t expect any more talking from Max. That was fine, sleeping he could do, cuddling he could do, and while in reality he might want to avoid the whole butt sex thing again for a while longer, he’d probably be up for a blow job a bit later. Which was why he was a little surprised when Max began to talk.
“No one ever sympathized, you know. Not with losing a friend in war or my mum and dad not being around or the crash that meant I lost a career. Don’t get me wrong, people were sympathetic, but I was nothing different, you know? Other kids in the foster system had lost their families, I wasn’t unique. Other men have lost their careers for one reason or another in war. And so many of us lost friends out there, plus some back here when the horrors became too much. But you said you understood, that Dave was a person. That’s different. So thank you.”
Lucien was choked up. Max was speaking from the heart, and Lucien pressed a quick kiss to the nearest skin he could find, a small patch of chest. He wanted to share something of himself, maybe about his brother.
“Everyone said it was a release for Seb when he died. That he’d gone to a better place, that he wouldn’t be in pain anymore. The only one that ever spoke to me about it was my tutor—you remember I mentioned him, Bryce—he said I was right to grieve, that I would become a better person if I could learn to grieve.”
“He was right.”
“No one else said that to me, I was just the brother. But they would speak to my parents who had long before come to terms with their grief and put it all in the right boxes. So yeah, I get when everyone gives you the platitudes or doesn’t expect you to grieve, like it isn’t your right.”
“Grieving is a good thing.”
“Unless it descends into losing nights at the bottom of a bottle and attempting to have sex with a married man.”
“Well, there is that,” Max said on a smile. He hugged Lucien a little closer. “You know what we are?”
“Gorgeous, sexy twentysomethings tired from sex?” Lucien teased.
“That. But also we’re complicated humans with all the grieving and the loving and the needs and all those things that maybe others think we don’t have. And sometimes we just need people to tell us they understand.”
“Wow,” Lucien said. He kissed that same piece of chest, this time moving a little closer to a nipple. “That is profound.” He touched his tongue to Max’s nipple, and quickly Lucien had Max pinned beneath him. “Tell me about the scar on your back.”
“Part of the accident.”
“I don’t have anything as dramatic as that in my past.”
“Trust me, you don’t want it.” Max smiled up at him and Lucien’s chest clenched. To have come so close to not even meeting a man who had come to mean so much to him was impossible to contemplate. He loved Max, and more than his next breath, he wanted Max forever. For days he’d wanted to say the word, but he’d promised he’d leave it until after this was done. But the emotion wouldn’t stay inside.
“I love you,” he said.
Max’s eyes widened. “What?”
Lucien leaned on his elbows and cradled Max’s face. “For however long I have you here, I love you.”
Max’s eyes widened and he swallowed before talking. “I don’t know what to say,” he finally admitted.
Lucien ignored a twinge of disappointment. He realized that Max might not feel the same and that was okay. “Nothing. Don’t say anything.”
Instead of talking, they kissed, and when they were sleepy, Lucien burrowed deep into Max’s hold. He wasn’t worried that Max couldn’t say the L word back, what Max thought didn’t define what Lucien felt.
He’d never been so safe. And he’d never been in love before this.
Both of those things were wonderful.
Chapter 11
Lucien had been dreaming about Seb when the phone broke through his dreams. The insistent ringtone had him near throwing the damn thing across the room. He didn’t recognize the number on the screen, but instinct made him answer even as Max woke and sat up in bed.
“Hello?”
“Luke, I’m at the police station. Can you come get me?”
Jamie? Lucien shook his head, attempting to clear it. “What?”
“They said I could go home, but they won’t let me go on my own.”
“I’ll be there in ten,” Lucien promised. Then he realized he didn’t even know where the station was, although it was too late to ask because Jamie rang off.
“What happened? Who was it?” Max demanded.
Lucien closed his eyes briefly, trying to pull himself back to the here and now and away from the dreams. Nothing like a middle of the night call to stop your wallowing. “Jamie. He’s been arrested, I think, or something. He’s at the police station.”
Max lay back with an exaggerated sigh. “Might be a good thing,” he said.
Lucien got out of bed. “I have to go.” He dressed and added several layers. Cardiff at five a.m. in February was going to be cold.
Max sat up. “You can’t go now. It’s the middle of the fucking night.”
Lucien winced at the horror and censure in Max’s voice, but he was determined to do right by the only friend he had. “He needs me, Max.”
“He needs a fix,” Max muttered under his breath.
“He’s my friend.”
“He’s not a friend, he’s a user—”
Lucien went on the defensive immediately. Something about Max’s tone stole the afterglow of cuddles and affection and left a dark hole. “He’s a friend who’s in trouble.”
“Lucien, he’s just a housemate.”
Lucien put on another sweatshirt and socks. “I’ll go on my own, then.”
Max cursed and rolled up and out of bed, yanking at his clothes until he was dressed. “When we get there, I will kill him.”
Lucien stopped Max at the door with a hand on his arm. “Thank you.”
Max looked at Lucien and something softened in his stern, pissed-off features. “I’m going because I’m looking out for you, but I will kill him,” Max grumped, though he sounded less pissed and more concerned now.
They checked the address for the police station, which was actually only a fifteen-minute walk and not worth using Max’s car for. They spent most of the walk in silence, although at least they were hand in hand, which gave Lucien a nice warm feeling.
When they reached the police station, Max held Lucien back. Gone was the lover, the man with the smile, and in his place was the man Lucien had met back at BI on that first day. Max carried himself with confidence and focus.
“Let me do the talking,” he advised.
Lucien nodded. He could handle that. The whole incident at the pool with the police making inquiries had been hard enough, to get involved with the police again wasn’t something he relished.
Cardiff Central Police Station was a large building, lit up in the darkness but quiet on the inside. They made themselves known to the desk clerk, who ushered them to a seating area and told them to wait. Five minutes passed and another man joined them in the seating area. He was wearing a suit, cell phone in hand, and he had the kind of arrogance than Lucien hate
d in other people. He pointedly stared at Lucien and Max and crossed one leg over his knee like sitting in a police station meant nothing to him. Shocking white-blond hair was artfully tousled, and there was something about him that Lucien recognized.
“I think I’ve seen him before,” he whispered to Max. “Around the house.”
For his part Max was stonily silent, and even when Lucien talked to him, he didn’t engage. There was something different about him: he was on the edge of his seat, his muscles tensed, his knuckles white with the grip he had on the edges of the chair. He was leashed violence and Lucien found himself shuffling away a little. This was not a good situation.
“Jamie’s coming with us,” Max said firmly. Lucien glanced at him. Who was he talking to?
The blond pocketed his cell. “We’ll see,” he said.
“You know him?” Lucien asked.
Max said nothing and Lucien didn’t push. Instead all three of them sat silently, and they all looked up when Jamie was led to the waiting room. The cop who was with him didn’t stay. Blond guy stood, Max just as quickly on his feet. Jamie stepped back from them both, then looked around to see Lucien.
“Luke, thank you for coming,” he said. His voice sounded wrong, forced and tiny, nervous and shaky.
Lucien muscled past Max, who let him, and grasped Jamie by the arm. “Let’s get out of here.”
All four of them moved out of the station and into the brisk cold air, their breaths puffing into small clouds of white. Whether by accident or design, they ended up in the shadows of the alley by the station.
“Where’s my money?” blond guy snapped immediately when they stopped walking.
“I don’t have it,” Jamie said.
Blond guy moved into his space, right up in his face, and snarled, “You think I believe that?” He grabbed Jamie’s jacket and yanked him closer.