18% Gray

by Anne Tenino

  Then Matt started skating his hand down James’s torso, pinching his nipples until he gasped, moving lower to dip a finger in his navel, then circling a hip with a fingertip. Still kissing him the whole time. James had never known slow and teasing worked for him. But it clearly did.

  Matt’s fingers starting tangling in James’s pubic hair, his mouth sucking James’s earlobes and licking and nipping his jaw. Matt hooked a thumb and finger around the base of James’s shaft and squeezed. James sucked in a breath and looked down to watch Matt’s hand.

  Matt’s forearm was disappearing between his legs, the veins and tendons standing out on the underside of his wrist. His fingers cupped James’s balls, weighing them. Somehow his forearm looked both fragile and masculine at once. Like Matt was a precision instrument, finely tuned. A finely tuned man pressing gently up on James’s balls with the heel of his hand, his fingers pressing circles into James’s perineum.

  Fuck transcendent states. He’d achieved Nirvana.

  Until the instant-hot ran out of juice. The water went from steamy to icy in a couple of seconds. Matt yelped and jumped out of the shower, leaving James to deal with the water.

  But Matt stood in the bathroom with a towel, waiting for him when he got out. He dried James off slowly, occasionally kissing him still, relaxing him and bringing him down.

  “C’mon, sexy. You need to get dressed,” Matt said in his ear. James felt almost as relaxed as he would if they’d gone ahead and fucked. Cold water notwithstanding.

  “Mmmmm,” he rumbled. He caught Matt when he moved away, slipping his hands around his waist and resting them in the small of his back. Resting his forehead on Matt’s. “Thank you.”

  Matt kissed him again. James let him pull them into the main room and lead him to the packs. Then they got dressed.

  Matt went for jeans. “You sure you should go with us?” James asked him. He had to at least give it a try.

  “Yeah. It’ll make Anais and Lance feel better, trust me. Maybe they’ll start trusting you more.”

  James couldn’t deny that would be a nice thing. “You sure you shouldn’t go in drag?” He was only half joking.

  “No one’s going to believe you packed your wife off to go hunting in dresses. As long as I keep my head covered, these are fine.” Matt slapped a leg on his thigh, indicating the denim jeans.

  “Not with your ass.”

  “What are you trying to say about my ass?”

  James couldn’t believe how touchy the guy could get about his body. He didn’t know why; Matt had a seriously hot body, and he must know it. Or at least been told by every guy who ever wanted to get him into bed. Which must be, like, every guy.

  “I’m saying you have a very nice, very sexy, very tight, very male ass.”

  “Women’s asses are different?” Matt was looking over his shoulder, trying to see his butt.

  James stared at him a second. “You’re really gay, aren’t you?”

  Matt looked up at him. He lost the fight to keep the grin off his face. “Fine, I knew women had different asses, but I forget. I just don’t look at them.” His smile slipped. “You notice, don’t you?”

  James studied him a minute as he pulled on his shirt. Was that a touch of jealousy? Matt had shut the flow of info from his brain off when they left the bathroom.

  “Yeah.” No point in lying. “But I don’t generally want to sleep with women. I did in high school, yeah, but it wasn’t a big deal even then. I don’t think I was ready to be gay, yet. I still look, but it’s more like… artistic appreciation. Not attraction.”

  “Huh.” Matt turned and started dressing again.

  James sighed and sealed his shirt front. “You might want to leave your shirt off. Pearl will probably be here early to change your bandages.”

  “You just want to look at my naked flesh.” Matt smirked.

  James grinned at him. “Hell, yes.” He moved forward, but just then he could feel Pearl coming. He dropped the hand he’d been reaching for Matt with and turned toward the door.

  Pearl knocked on the door and then let herself in. She smiled at Matt. “Oh, good, you’re waiting for me. Did James tell you I was coming?”

  “Um, yeah, sorta.” Matt smiled at her. James wondered what it was that put Matt into such a relaxed mood.

  Actually, why the hell was he feeling so relaxed? He was starting to think the man bewitched him on a regular basis. Under the circumstances, they should both be amped.

  Pearl had Matt on the bed and was peeling off the old patches. She hummed approvingly. James went over to take a look. Matt’s arm was almost closed up, and his shoulder didn’t look like meat so much. Now it looked like a bad, but healing, wound. Everything was pink and tender-looking or scabbing over, but it was healing really fast, thanks to the nano-menders.

  “Looks good. Might be able to leave tomorrow.”

  “Not that soon,” Pearl argued with him.

  “If he’s going to be healed by the time we get to the river, we’re fine.”

  “He’s going to need to be closed up before he leaves here. He won’t heal as fast once he’s walking all night and can’t take nano-menders.”

  “If I can find Miz—”

  “Can we argue about this tomorrow?” Matt broke in. He stood up, frowning now, and went to put on his shirt. The shirt was too big for him, making him sort of (if you squinted and it was dark) look like he could be a woman wearing her husband’s shirt. A kinda butch woman. But the shirt partially obscured that ass.

  James realized it was one of his shirts. Well, shit, that just made Matt sexier.

  Matt pulled on a hat, the kind James had seen women all over Idaho wear. It looked sorta floppy with a wide brim that partially obscured his face. It helped, making Matt look like he could pass as a woman even if you weren’t squinting. He’d still need the dark to pull it off.

  “There a moon tonight?” Matt asked.

  “Just a sliver. You’re believable.”

  Matt grinned at him as Pearl headed to the door. James gave him a partial smile back. “C’mon, wife.”

  Matt stuck out his tongue and stepped out the door ahead of James. James walked behind him, playing peekaboo with Matt’s ass.

  MATT thought he might be falling in love with James. Maybe he was already there. He’d never felt quite like this before. He’d definitely been in deep like, and plenty of lust. But not this.

  The best part was he thought it might be a two-way thing. He’d been preparing himself for a brief, hot affair that would end when James wanted it to—soon, probably—and then Matt would have a lot of tequila and ice cream floats (combining steps one and two when recovering from a broken heart—Sabine had discovered that a while ago), suck a couple of guys off in the bathroom stall at the air base, and mope a while. Maybe go on a couple of benders with his male cousins. Not that they were any damn use when it came to breakups. For a bunch of queers, they carried around a lot of testosterone.

  This was not what he’d prepared himself for. In the shower, when they’d been kissing, Matt felt like they were melting into one person. Like maybe their spirits were communing through their tongues.

  Wow. That was… poetic. And kinda weird.

  He was careful not to think about it too much. It was kinda mushy, for one thing, and for another, even if James felt it with the same intensity, Matt wasn’t sure he had any idea it was happening. Or if he would even be okay with it happening.

  The most important reason for not thinking about it was that he knew he was having a harder time keeping things from James—he could feel the brain waves leaking out of his walls—and Matt was trying not to let James know how much or deeply he felt. He had to work on those mental walls. They were trying to crumble.

  He just rode the high and didn’t think too much for the moment. And he let James feel some of that warmth and contentment because he thought it was helping him get through the mess his life had become.

  They left the prefab and stayed out of the we
ll-lit areas of the convent grounds. Pearl kept them to a sedate strolling walk (which James wasn’t particularly adept at), tucking her hands into the sleeves of her long habit. Just some relatives, catching up on a nice night, strolling along. Nothin’ to see here, Sister.

  Pearl took a rambling path to a gate in the eastern wall, where a “gardener” was lounging conspicuously. Matt could practically feel James’s suppressed snort. He dipped his head, hiding his smile, and looped his arm through his “husband’s.”

  Pearl greeted the man, and judging by their cryptic exchange it seemed he was under her influence. Possibly a Blue agent, but Matt thought not. Probably just bought and paid for.

  Blue tax dollars at work. Or NACC tithing, more likely.

  Matt’s suspicion was confirmed when Pearl slipped the man something just before he opened the gate for them and let them out.

  “He’s letting us go because he trusts me not to be doing anything truly nefarious. And for the money, of course. Don’t trust him yourselves,” she warned in a low voice once they were away from the wall.

  “What would he consider truly nefarious?” Matt couldn’t help asking.

  “Sneaking two fugitives from the RIA out to contact an agency in the Blue that’s assisting their escape. That kind of thing.” Judging by her voice, Pearl was enjoying herself. Probably her career in R&D hadn’t allowed for a lot of playing spy.

  It took a while to walk to the abandoned gas station on the nearby highway that they were apparently aiming for. Matt was starting to flag, and he was relieved when they got there and he could stop. James looked at him sharply, but wisely kept his comments to himself.

  “So, what’s here?” Matt clamped his lips shut when he realized how out of breath he sounded.

  Pearl pointed to a strange-looking square column poking out of the ground next to the wall of the abandoned building. It had some kind of boxlike structure attached to the top half, with an open side and bottom. As they approached it, he saw there was something in the box.

  “Is that a pay phone?” He’d seen a few before, but they were obsolete oddities. You only ever saw them… at abandoned structures just like this, actually. Or in museums.

  Pearl was grinning so big the minimal moonlight glinted off her teeth. “In case no one has ever mentioned it, Lance is a resourceful guy.”

  “I’ve noticed.” Matt’s voice was dry. How could he have worked for QESA almost three years and never come across this before? It explained how Lance ended up with all those contracts to pass com on from Blue agents, though.

  There was no vid, but it was a secure communication because you couldn’t scab on the waves. It relied largely on ground lines that had been laid more than one hundred years ago and then abandoned. Once the initial footwork was done and the abandoned pay phones with viable communication paths still intact were identified, it took very little maintenance and very little encryption. The quality varied, and occasionally someone, somewhere, destroyed a connection and it was lost, but for the time being it worked well.

  Matt picked up the handset at Pearl’s urging and held it awkwardly to his ear. “Gah!” he yelped, and dropped it. It fell to the end of its little cord and hung there, making that strange, high-pitched droning sound. “What the hell is that noise?”

  “It’s called a dial tone.” James was smirking. “It’s how you know you have an open line.”

  “Th’fuck,” Matt muttered. He turned on James. “What did you do when you heard it?”

  Pearl laughed. “Pretty much what you just did. Except he took cover.”

  “Thought it was an alarm,” James muttered sheepishly.

  “You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?” Matt scowled at Pearl.

  She shrugged. “Yeah, Carmella did it to me when I came here. I’ve been waiting years for a victim.”

  “I only had to wait a day.” James sounded downright gleeful.

  Matt snorted, sounding alarmingly like James to his own ears, and picked up the handset. “’S not working,” he reported after standing there a minute. He turned and looked. Pearl was grinning again, and James was back to smirking. “’Kay, now what?”

  “You have to dial the number.”

  Matt blinked. Duh. People still had com numbers. Except…. “What’s the number?” It was only ten digits, no letters or symbols. Old school all the way. He listened to the phone ring after a number of strange clicks and pauses.

  “Hello?” shouted a voice in his ear.

  “Jesus! I can hear you; you don’t need to shout.”

  “Matt?” It was Grampa Lance. “It’s good to hear your voice, son.” Oh, God, he was calling him son. He could tip into sentimental any second.

  “Yeah, Grampa, good to hear you, too.” Matt took a gamble that calling him Grampa would satisfy Lance’s emotional needs rather than invite him to become more maudlin. Either things were dire, or it worked, because Lance got down to business.

  “Are you healing?”

  “Almost there. Maybe two days and no broken skin.”

  “Good. Can’t have you in the river with an open wound. We can’t get a Feng Niao bird in to pick you up ’til you’ve humped thirty-two klicks past the river.”

  “Thirty kilometers is, like, a day of hard walking. I can do that.” Matt knew he might not be able to, but he had a weird faith that James would get him out of this. He glanced at James. The guy was giving him a piercing look, like he knew what Matt was thinking.

  Or he was thinking Matt was nuts for thinking he could walk that far after swimming the Snake. Matt turned away and shut his mind down tight. He didn’t care what James thought. He would paddle his way across the Snake with his tongue and crawl forty kilometers if it would get James out of this fucking place.

  “Matt, don’t push it. I’m trusting James to keep you safe.” Matt raised his eyebrows. They did trust James. Sorta. “Don’t jeopardize his testicles, Matt. I’m getting the impression you want him fully functioning, and Anais will take him down if anything happens to you.” Or Lance was trying to manipulate him. Relatively successfully.

  “How do you know how I feel about his testicles?” he hissed.

  “Your faith in him gave it away. When you refused to believe he wasn’t who he said he was, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary?”

  “Oh. That.”

  “Should I get the sit rep from James or you?”

  Oh, dammit all. Why front? “James is in a better position to give you that.”

  “And he told you the POA?”

  “Yeah, got the plan.”

  “Okay. Don’t hang up. Sid wants to talk to you. Take care, son.”

  Grampa Sid? Good lord. He was being coddled via telephone.

  “Matt?”

  “Grampa?”

  “Don’t be a smartass.”

  “How is that being a smartass? I called you Grampa.” Grampa Sid didn’t usually sound so annoyed with him. Usually.

  “You’re goddamned lucky it’s me checking up on you and not your mother. I had to argue with her for forty-five minutes on vid to get her to stay in Weimer and wait for you there. By the way, guess where you’re going soon as you get out of Idaho?” he added conversationally.

  “You couldn’t tell her I’m an adult and this is part of my job?”

  “No. She’s my daughter, dumbass. And your mother. She’s more worried than we are. The only thing keeping her there is knowing you’re coming to see her first. You wanted your family to find out about the shit hitting the fan after it was all over, you shoulda hired-on somewhere else.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind when my contract’s up.”

  “You don’t have a contract, Matt.” Grampa’s voice was smug. Matt stuck his tongue out at the handset. “I heard that,” Sid shot back.

  He was fucking psychic.

  “I had grandparents once, too, you know.”

  Or, you know, just experienced. Matt sighed. “Grampa,” he said in a forcibly calm voice. “Was there something
in particular you wanted to ask me?”

  “Yeah. We’ve done some looking into Lieutenant James Ayala’s service record. I approve.”

  “What is with you people? How did you know?” He decided denying it was pointless.

  “I’m psychic.” Matt snorted. If Sid was, it was the first he’d heard about it, and he’d been close to the Grampas his whole life. “Lance needs to talk to Ayala, now.”

  “Okay.” Matt was happy to hand over the phone.

  “I love you, son.” Grampa said it just before Matt passed the phone to James. Sentimental old bastard was gonna make him teary.

  James was looking at him with concern when he took the handset. Matt checked, and sure enough, he was leaking brain waves to James. Dammit, ever since he’d had sex with the guy he’d had a hard time controlling that.

  James took the handset and slipped his other hand around Matt’s neck, squeezing it comfortingly. Matt sighed and gave in to it. He rested his head on James’s shoulder and listened to his conversation with Lance.

  “Yes, sir,” James said crisply into the phone. An unintelligible answer, then James started to explain the situation. How they had excess baggage (Benigna), the state of Matt’s injuries (hadn’t he already covered that?), James’s estimate for time to the rendezvous, his estimation of problems and needs. Fairly quickly Matt zoned out, and the next thing he knew, James was nudging him toward the wall of the old gas station, and Pearl had the phone, talking sci-speak with Anais.

  James kept his arm around Matt’s waist, holding him carefully until Matt had managed to lower himself to the cracked cement and lean against the wall. James looked like he’d like to sit next to him, but didn’t.

  “Sit down,” Matt said. Then he cringed inside at the pleading note in his voice. In the next instant he decided it didn’t matter. He was going balls to the wall with James, so the guy may as well know that he craved him. Not just the sex, but the little things like this.