Mixed Signals

by Cooper West

  Frank grinned and started undressing Benjamin, unbuttoning his shirt while sitting on his cock. Benjamin whined some more, closing his eyes and trying to thrust up against Frank. They both still had their jeans on, and there was not much friction to be had, so Frank sat down farther, pressing all of his weight on Benjamin’s hips.

  “Fuck! Oh, oh!” Benjamin started stripping his shirt off, sitting up a little to let Frank pull him out of it. “You! You you you! Now!” Benjamin attacked Frank’s shirt with more enthusiasm than effectiveness, and by the time it was off, Frank was laughing helplessly.

  “What! Is this funny?” A quick shadow of doubt passed through Benjamin’s eyes, making Frank want to kill the bastard who ever made him so self-conscious in bed.

  “I’m just having fun.” Frank reached out and stroked Benjamin’s face with a gentle hand. “After all, since we’ve been dating so long and everything, I think I should take my time.”

  Benjamin rolled his eyes but moved his hands up Frank’s chest, then made desperate clutching grabs for him as he moved off and stood up. His hands froze as Frank slowly unbuttoned his jeans, performing a slow-motion striptease. He stared at Benjamin’s cock, which was starting to battle its way out of Benjamin’s own jeans, and kept at his unhurried pace. Benjamin’s eyes went wide and his hands dropped back to the bed while he watched Frank finish undressing. As soon as Frank prowled toward the bed, Benjamin frantically went for his own pants and had stripped out of them by the time Frank lay down next to him.

  He waited for the grabbing/pushing/pulling enthusiasm he expected of Benjamin, but instead Benjamin rolled up next to him, shifting slowly so their cocks brushed up against each other, and softly stroked the skin of Frank’s exposed arm, side, hip, and leg. He rested his head in his hand, propped up on his elbow, so he could see what he was doing. Frank responded by running his fingers through Benjamin’s hair.

  “Wanted to do that for a while.”

  “Oh.” Benjamin grinned, running his hand lightly, then heavily down Frank’s side, alternating strokes.

  “You know, I’m okay with us having dated this whole time. Really good with it.”

  Benjamin snorted, then rolled on top of Frank, smashing their cocks together in a hot, full-body-pressure way. Frank groaned and shoved his hips, reaching up with his lips to find Benjamin again. They kissed and adjusted until there was a rocking, steady friction between them. Benjamin pulled out of the kiss with an air-sucking gasp.

  “Not really gonna last too long, here… keep… oh, man… keep your expectations low.”

  “Mmm-hmmm.” Frank nodded, wrapping his hands around Benjamin’s plump, soft asscheeks and tightening his grip, snapping his hips up. They were both a little graceless, and lube would have helped—somewhere in his not-lizard brain, Frank was making note of that for future reference—but Benjamin began gasping out short sobs against Frank’s shoulder and mouthing skin mindlessly, writhing on top of him.

  Frank’s orgasm was almost like a cough—it welled up so quickly and unexpectedly inside of him. He let out an explosive breath, his hips stuttering, and felt his come flood out between them, slicking both of them up. Benjamin gasped and braced himself up on his hands, staring down at Frank with a dazed expression that showed just how close he was to coming.

  “Yeah, for me… come on, baby, do it.” Frank did not let up his grip on Benjamin’s ass, slamming him down hard enough to bruise his own hips, but Benjamin rode it and him and let out a long, pained moan as he came.

  Benjamin collapsed in slow motion as his cock throbbed out the last drop of come. Frank kept at a steady, rolling motion with his hips to gentle them both through the aftershocks until Benjamin dropped to one side, sliding down on the bed and curling around Frank, mumbling something unintelligible.

  Frank drew circles on Benjamin’s back as they shifted into a comfortable position and started to doze. Finally, his brain pieced together what he wanted to say.

  “You’re good for me.” He kissed Benjamin’s temple. Benjamin gave him a sloppy, sleepy grin before slipping off to sleep. Frank stayed awake, enjoying the feeling of Benjamin’s solid body against him and cataloging the numerous, perfectly built and painted model planes that lined the shelves on the opposite wall. It was a room that was smaller than his closet at the mansion, but it felt like home.

  Chapter Twenty

  THE EVENING after his fantastic afternoon with Frank, Benjamin was whistling as he checked his various email accounts. He was shadowing the exchange between Sanford and Teague but had not expected much, so ditched that to play around with the video game for a few hours. Frank had headed out around five with a long, lingering kiss in the foyer to go to his shift at LifeFlight, and Benjamin was still wallowing a little. None of that stopped him from turning all his problems over in his mind, something that rarely paused for anything other than really good orgasms or a really bad drunk.

  The main stumbling block with entrapping Teague was that it was illegal to capture him on an audio recording without a warrant. Given that Benjamin was not a member of law enforcement and that, for all intents and purposes, Teague had done nothing illegal, that was not going to happen. The fact that Corsak had moved out to the other side of the country, following his wife’s job, worked in their favor, because there was no way Teague could demand to meet in person. Corsak acted like he did not want to talk by phone due to paranoia, and so their communication defaulted to supposedly anonymous email. Which, for Teague, was laughably not anonymous, since the only place he checked it was on his personal phone, and the email service he used was nowhere near as untraceable as they claimed.

  Still, it would be important to get him to admit to what he did. Corsak pushed, dropping hints, but Teague was not a complete fool. He was playing hard to get about doing the transfer of money to Corsak’s account, which was really a ghost account Benjamin had set up that had no legal ties to Sanford at all. But the problem was that Teague wanted some kind of guarantee that this would be “the last of it” and he’d never hear from Corsak again once the money dropped. Theoretically, it was an easy promise to make, but Benjamin kept thinking that somehow that could be their leverage to get Teague to break.

  Then Rachel called a little after 10:00 p.m.

  “Holy shit, Benji, have you looked at the news?” Rachel squeaked breathlessly at him. “Holy shit, holy shit!”

  He had not. He quickly booted up his major feed and stared at it, unblinking and uncomprehending. “What.”

  “How? How, Benji?” Rachel asked when it was clear they were on the same figurative page.

  SHELDON IN BED WITH MUDZNEWZ

  The headline screamed at him over a photo of him and Frank making out by the Tesla. It had been taken after their flight, right there in the open in broad daylight. There was no mistaking that it was Frank and Benjamin, which was bad enough, but someone, somehow, was connecting Benjamin to MudzNewz.

  “Rachel, where are you?”

  “Hiding at Maddox’s. Jane called from work and told me that there is a squadron of reporters hanging out at the salon, hoping to talk to me.” She paused, her voice wavering, and Benjamin could hear her boyfriend in the background making soothing noises. “They are going to drag up my background, aren’t they? And the DUI?”

  It was a pittance on what the media was going to do to Benjamin, but he felt like it was worse. It was his baby sister, and he had only started the whole fucking project to get back at the man who hurt her. “Don’t worry about that just yet. I’ve got to figure out how the fuck anyone linked me to the site. Stay where you are until I call you.”

  She agreed and as soon as she hung up, he called Corsak, because if the cat was out of the bag already, it didn’t matter if anyone was listening in, and Benjamin needed faster communication than an email.

  “Corsak here. Who’s this?” His voice was a lot more southern fried country than Benjamin expected, which threw him.

  “Oh. Uh, Sanford Corsak? It’s, uh, MudzNewz. Guy. MudzNewz g
uy.”

  “Dr. Benjamin Kaplan? Yeah, I saw the news this evening. I thought you were going to keep this on the down low.”

  “I am!”

  “Not if you’re dating Frank Sheldon, you’re not. What the fuck is going on?”

  “Hell if I know. No one has been able to link me to the Mudz in the four years people have been trying, including the FBI and the NSA. Suddenly I’m outed? I haven’t a fucking clue.”

  There was the sound of Sanford sucking air through his teeth. “It’s Teague, I’ll bet ya money on that. His last few emails were super sketchy; son of a bitch was dragging it out until he got someone to ID you.”

  “Theoretically not possible.”

  “Theoretically that’s for shit, man. Either someone ratted or you got sloppy.”

  “Hey!”

  “Dude, I work in IT. I’m not a genius, but I’m telling you, that’s how this shit works. Hacking isn’t half as easy as the movies make it look.”

  “I know that!” Benjamin snapped. But he could not fault the logic. He tried to think of how he could have gotten sloppy. He was pretty sure no one ratted on him, because that list would consist of exactly one person: Rachel. Who was now hiding out in terror of having her admittedly sketchy history as a rebellious teen aired in public.

  “If this comes back around to you—”

  “It won’t because it doesn’t. I got no beef with you, just Teague.”

  “Fuck.” Benjamin drew out the word on a long breath. “But you never mentioned Mudz to Teague. So how’d he make the connection?”

  “No idea. Maybe he just cast a wide net? Figured I was obviously not on the up-and-up with my superdubious blackmail?” He huffed out a laugh, sounding more sardonic than amused. Benjamin related.

  “Okay, but you’re the unknown factor here, for me. Just think for a second: did you talk about this to anyone? Email them?”

  “Aside from my wife?” There was a long pause. “Aw, shit.”

  “What? What!”

  “My lawyer from when I got my discharge. He got notice that Sheldon’s petition was being reviewed, and he called me.”

  “You told him?”

  “Not like straight up! He knew about the whole setup with Teague back then, but we had client confidentiality, you know? So I just mentioned I was getting my pride back about it. Righting wrongs.”

  “And?”

  “Told him to keep an eye on MudzNewz,” Corsak finished with a heavy sigh.

  “Fuckity fuck! Corsak!”

  “Hey! I had no idea he was that smart!”

  “Let me guess: he was probably hired by Teague to defend you.”

  There was a long, damning pause. “Oh. I never thought that. He said he took it pro bono because of the civil rights issue around homosexuality. Gay as fuck himself, if I remember. It was a deal I couldn’t say no to; I mean, I wasn’t being court-martialed, so I had no right to legal defense I did not provide for myself.”

  “Pro bono my ass—he was definitely paid off by Teague. And, again, probably in cash. Fuck!” He took a deep breath. “Okay. Okay, here’s what we’re going to do—”

  “You can’t be serious about going through with this,” Corsak said.

  “I am. Because the link between you and MudzNewz isn’t traceable, or at least Teague doesn’t want it known. I’m going to guess they got some dark-web hacker to get to your emails, or your laptop, or something—so to answer your question, looks like we both got sloppy, and we both got ratted out.” Corsak cursed on the other end of the line, but Benjamin cut him off. “If your old lawyer went and told Teague’s people that you were setting Teague up for a sting on behalf of Mudz, that’s not proof. You could have just as well said ‘watch TMZ’ or, hell, Al Jazeera. Teague’s team went fishing, caught me, and are hoping that this reveal will make you back off. So make some noise about the publicity, tell him you want the timetable moved up. Threaten him with going public. Don’t mention anything about me. Make it clear this was all on you, for your own reasons.”

  “I’ll try, man, but don’t expect him to respond.”

  “Whatever. Do it.” Benjamin hung up.

  He stared at his phone. He should call Frank, he knew that, but Frank was only a couple of hours into his twelve-hour shift, and probably (hopefully) not keeping up with the news.

  Instead he jumped on Reddit to see what the Mudzies had to say. Most were wondering how accurate the reveal was, and a few troglodytes bitched about the fact that MudzNewz was probably run by a queer, and got into long, boring arguments with others about homophobia and civil rights. The fact that Benjamin was in business with the Sheldons was what everyone was getting angry about, though, which was exactly what Benjamin had expected. He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair, feeling the ghost of Frank’s fingers there.

  Biting the bullet, he pulled up Camila López’s email. He drummed his fingers on his desk for a moment before replying again, this time with a terse, “What’s news?”

  It would be enough to either set things off or shut him down, and for the moment it was all he could do. He started crafting a public statement but knew he would have to run it by Frank, if not Alexander Sheldon himself, before releasing it. Anything he did at that point would, oh irony of ironies, affect his business relationship with the Sheldons. Which brought him back to the family side of things.

  He called Rachel back. “So. Damage control.”

  “Okay?” She sounded so young again, it broke his heart.

  “People are going to track back to the start of this, wonder why I went after Lamarque.”

  She sucked in a deep breath. “Okay.”

  “What? Okay? Are you nuts?”

  “Benji, I’ve seen what some trolls say about you, okay? It’s pretty rough. I know they won’t play nice. I know they will drag up my DUI and my black boyfriend and the fact that I’m a ‘slutty’ hairdresser and that we’re Jewish. I know it, you know it, we both know it. So, you know what? Fuck them. Fuck all of them. It’s not like Les can sue me for libel since he’s in jail for, like, ever. Everyone knows the girls they connected to him are a fraction of the number of girls he used up before being caught. If we have to admit that we went after him because of what he did to me, and to my friends? Then so fucking be it. We did the right thing.”

  Benjamin blinked back tears for a moment, staring at the wall. “You sound just like Mom, you know that? She’d be so proud of you right now.”

  There was a soft sob on the other end of the connection. “Oh.”

  “I love you, sis.” Benjamin wiped his eyes. “Stay low, and stay safe. If you go anywhere, Maddox drives, you got that? This is not the time to thumb your nose at the establishment.”

  “Yeah. Okay,” she said, trying to get herself under control with a bleak-sounding laugh. “See you soon?”

  “See you soon, promise. I gotta go, okay?” He hung up with a heavy heart.

  It was still a clusterfuck, but Benjamin hoped he could stay ahead of the tsunami. He sent Frank a very bland text: So hey we should talk maybe? Let’s meet when you get off shift.

  He wasn’t sure how Frank would react, but he was fairly certain he would not be happy about the situation.

  Benjamin cradled his face in his hands. He had too many plates in the air, and he had run out of sticks—and time—to hold them up.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  FRANK SIGHED in relief as he pulled off his flight suit near seven that morning. It had been a fairly tame shift, just two callouts, only one of which ended up with him picking up a patient as the other had coded on-scene. Depressing, but that was generally the nature of the job, and he had learned to compartmentalize in the military. Despite the lack of air time, he had a rule about “tuning out” while on duty, refusing the check his phone or TV or radio for news or anything, really. He felt it was his job to keep his head in the zone, which sometimes meant playing a lot of solitaire, or penny poker with anyone at the hospital on break. He often bought a hard-copy book to r
ead as well. He read a lot.

  He stopped midstep outside the locker room when he saw Camila’s overworked personal assistant, Todd, waiting for him and looking haggard. It was not a family emergency; Frank knew that off the bat, since everyone knew to contact LifeFlight directly if something terrible happened and they needed Frank on the ground. But it was unusual enough to cause his stomach to drop.

  “Turn your fucking phone on and come with me,” Todd said, sounding more like a kidnapper than a midlevel bureaucrat, before spinning on his heel and walking off to the elevator. Frank jogged to catch up, turning on his phone as he did. There was no reception in the elevator, so it wasn’t until they were getting into the waiting town car outside the main entrance that his phone blew up with notifications.

  “What the hell?” Frank poked at it warily. The first one that came up was a text from Benjamin that was vague and worrisome. The rest were from, in order: Nancy, Jorge, Camila, and his father, all demanding that he call them immediately, at once, with no delay. He winced. “What the hell, Todd?” He shook his phone at Todd.

  Glaring at him, the other man pulled up something on his phone and shoved it in Frank’s face. Frank sat staring at the headline in shock. The photo, clear and crisp, was sitting at the front and center of the web page under the large words “MudzNewz gets intimate with Sheldon Campaign!” The photo was of the kiss Frank had plastered on Benjamin next to his car after their training flight.

  Nothing made sense. “What?”

  “What?” Todd echoed with barely concealed hostility. “What about the fact that your boy toy du jour is actually the man behind MudzNewz? Is the headline not clear enough for you?” His voice started rising, but he stopped. “I’m not saying another word. The last ten hours have been hell for the campaign. We’ve been up all night. Camila and Nancy asked me to pick you up because they can’t leave Warren’s offices.”

  “I take it that’s where we are going?”