“Hey,” Kyle said.
Jamie looked up from the tablet, his frown smoothing out into a smile. “Hey.”
Kyle tilted his head at the hotel door. “Figured I’d head out. I got a meeting at nine o’clock and I still need to get home and change.”
He was careful to use civilian time rather than military. Kyle had shaved off the beard he’d had in the field for the past two months before heading out last night, and his hair was definitely not regulation, which helped him slip into the anonymous civilian persona he favored when prowling bars.
“It’s fine,” Jamie said easily enough. “I need to handle a couple of work emails before I head out as well. I’ll check us out downstairs when I leave.”
Ordinarily, Kyle would insist on splitting the bill. Since this was the Ritz-Carlton, and Jamie seemed more than capable of paying for that luxury, Kyle wasn’t going to fight him on it. “Thank you.”
Some little bit of heat left over from the hours of passion they’d shared crept into Jamie’s blue eyes. “I feel like I should be the one thanking you.”
Kyle couldn’t help but smirk at that. “Feeling’s mutual.”
Because there was something to be said about finding a man who was able to hold him down and give him exactly what he needed to get out of his head a little. Kyle knew he could be demanding in bed, chasing an edge very few people felt comfortable going up against. But Jamie hadn’t once faltered when Kyle urged him on. He’d held his own and then some, driving Kyle mad during their several rounds of lovemaking. Jamie had been the perfect lover and anyone would be lucky to have him.
It just wouldn’t be Kyle, no matter how much Kyle didn’t want to let him go.
Jamie got up from the bed and followed Kyle to the hotel door. Before Kyle could even reach for the handle, he felt a hand catch him by the shoulder and gently turn him around. He went willingly, body caving beneath the touch. Kyle let Jamie push him up against the door, stepping in close until they stood flush together. After the hours they’d spent learning each other’s bodies last night, Kyle didn’t fight him at all.
Warm fingers curled over his chin, tilting his head back. Kyle stared up into Jamie’s face, drinking him in, waiting for whatever the other man wanted to give him. His thumb dragged slowly over Kyle’s bottom lip and Kyle sucked in a careful breath.
“You keep doing that and we’re not going anywhere. I really do have a meeting I can’t be late for,” Kyle managed to say when all he wanted to do was fall to his knees again.
“Can’t have that, now can we?” Jamie murmured.
Jamie leaned down, slanting his mouth over Kyle’s in a kiss that was scorching in its gentleness, the memory of last night buried deep in it. Kyle twined his arms around Jamie’s neck, holding him close. He slipped his tongue past Jamie’s teeth, tasting him one last time, all the while telling himself he needed to let go, to leave, to put last night where it belonged in the morning light.
Behind him.
Jamie nipped at his mouth one last time before pulling away, his hands flexing on Kyle’s waist. Jamie opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Kyle kept staring at him, heart pounding in his chest, wondering if Jamie would ask him for something more than last night.
If Jamie did, Kyle knew he didn’t have it in him to say no.
Jamie cleared his throat and closed his mouth, the silence between them strained. Finally, Jamie shook his head and stepped back, putting distance between them. Kyle curled his hands into fists so he wouldn’t reach out and grab Jamie and never let him go.
“Thank you,” Jamie said after a moment, the words coming out thick.
Kyle nodded slowly before he wrenched his gaze away from Jamie and left the hotel room, quietly shutting the door behind him. He stood in the hallway for a few seconds, a heavy sense of regret weighing him down.
You can’t stay, Kyle told himself, forcing his feet to move.
Kyle walked away with the memory of Jamie’s hands on him and the knowledge that was all he could let himself have. He was twenty-eight years old and a Special Forces operative. His life belonged to Strike Force.
For the first time in a long, long time, Kyle wished it didn’t.
He took the elevator down to the dazzling lobby with its understated elegance and didn’t make eye contact with anyone. Walking with the sure stride of a man who had places to be, Kyle exited the building and waited less than a minute for the doorman to summon a cab for him.
Kyle gave the driver an address that was practically on the other side of D.C. On a Tuesday morning before the start of rush hour traffic, it still took him over an hour to reach it. The clock on the dash said it was 0712 as he got out of the cab. He had less than an hour to change into uniform, eat something, and suffer through his adoptive older brother’s worried pestering before they needed to get on the road.
Kyle wasn’t surprised in the least when the door to their temporary apartment in a residence tower opened before he could even press his thumb to the biolock.
“<
“<>” Kyle retorted in the same language.
“<
Alexei held the door open and Kyle slipped inside. The apartment was furnished, but it wasn’t theirs. They were renting it for the few days they were in town reporting to the brass in the Pentagon before taking a well-deserved leave from the military so long as nothing important came up. They should have been done yesterday, but the email he’d received at the bar last night about today made Kyle think they weren’t getting that leave after all.
“<
“<
Alexei followed Kyle into the kitchen. Kyle ignored his brother and poured himself a mug of synthcaf, slurping at the bitter liquid. Mass-produced coffee had gone the way of the Dodo after climate change made the delicate Coffee Belt inhospitable to the small tree. It was still grown in carefully monitored vertical greenhouses owned by a conglomerate of corporations, but its care and production was costly, which meant its price point was astronomical. The real stuff was a true luxury that most people on the planet would never taste. Synthcaf was the bitter, synthetic alternative that everyone else drank for a caffeine fix.
Alexei leaned against the counter, staring at Kyle. “<
Kyle set down his mug with a heavy sigh. “<
At twenty-eight and twenty-nine respectively, Kyle and Alexei had a long history of figuring things out together. They’d met when Kyle was ten and Alexei and his family had just arrived in Boston, transplanted generational refugees seeking asylum whose request was finally granted forty or so years after Alexei’s grandparents submitted it. Alexei had grown up in the Eastern European contested region, his family resigned to a refugee city in Ukraine when he was a young child.
Alexei’s family was harassed over the years by Ukrainian soldiers and citizens who condemned them for wanting to leave, and Russian Federal Security Service agents who still saw the entirety of the Ukrainian population as belonging to the motherland. When their number finally came up, the United States agreed to take the entire family, transplanting them to Boston, where Alexei met Kyle.
They’d become friends due to their outsider statuses, with Alexei a refugee knowing little to no English, and Kyle the son of a known Irish Mob enforcer. They managed to stay friends despite their differences, with Kyle spending time with Alexei’s family more and more to escape his own over the years until his presence there became permanent when he turned thirteen and his family was murdered in a retaliatory gang attack. Kyle and Alexei had snuck out of Kyle’s home to go see a movie that night and returned to a smoldering floor in their apartment complex, a murdered family, and Alexei’s parents frantically screaming his name on the street.
; They’d taken Kyle in because Alexei wouldn’t leave his side. At the time, the Department of Children and Families couldn’t find any other family members willing to take Kyle in, and group homes were overfull. Kyle was adopted by the Dvorkins when he was fifteen, joined the Army with Alexei after he finally became a legal adult under a Special Forces contract, and they hadn’t looked back since. Their individual skills had differed even if their commitment never had, despite everything they’d been through.
The one thing which would never change was they would always be there for each other.
“<
Kyle turned to give him a flat look. “<
Alexei shrugged. “<
“<
“<
Kyle made a face. “<
“<
“<
“<
“<
Alexei gave him a pointed look. “<
Kyle grabbed his mug and gulped down the rest of his synthcaf. “<
“<
“<
“<
Kyle elbowed Alexei on his way out of the kitchen. “<>”
“<>”
“<
Alexei pulled a horrified face. “<
Kyle left the kitchen laughing, feeling a little lighter despite having the sinking feeling that something good had slipped through his fingers that morning.
5
Storm On the Horizon
Wednesday found Jamie leaving his luxury condo in the West End at Katie’s insistence for a late lunch get-together. Katie had as good a grasp on team dynamics as Jamie did, with the single exception that she saw it as her duty to watch over Jamie like a goddamn mother hen and probably always would.
“I thought you’d be in Chicago?” Jamie asked as he slid into the front passenger seat of her Maserati.
They’d all received major hazard and survival bonuses after Tripoli, but not enough to compensate for what they lost. Jamie had handed out his own version from his own accounts to his surviving teammates after the fact. Katie had used most of hers to buy a ridiculously fast car to help clear her mind and occasionally outrun the cops when she opened it up along the coastal seawall highways.
Katie looked at him over her aviator-styled sunglasses, blonde hair pulled up in a messy ponytail, soft yellow sundress revealing the lean muscles in her arms and slim, defined shoulders. A tangle of gold chains and onyx beads hung around her neck and drew attention to her cleavage, the style matching the rings on her fingers. Her tote bag sat on the floor between Jamie’s feet, a brand name he vaguely recalled his sister preferring over most others. Katie was good at pretending to be something she wasn’t, and today she had the rich-girl-with-nothing-better-to-do-than-lunch vibe down perfectly.
“Mama said everyone was fine. She didn’t want me to waste a flight there and back on a three day libo.”
“It wouldn’t be a waste.”
Katie shrugged one slim shoulder and pulled into the street at a normal rate of speed. At 1400, the streets weren’t terribly busy, nowhere near as bad as it could be near The Mall. Congress was still in session for the rest of the week before it would break for summer recess and alleviate the traffic congestion a little.
“That’s what I said. But you know Mama. She’d rather I come for a long stay so she has time to throw all the single men she knows at me.” Katie pitched her voice into a different tone, the scrape of a Russian accent several generations removed from the motherland coming through. “Katen’ka! When will you give me grandbabies? You’re almost thirty, so old to have no children!”
“You’d eat those boys alive.”
“Yeah, I would, and Mama knows that. She still tries to match-make though.” Katie gave him a sidelong look. “You’re in a better mood than you usually are after dealing with your father.”
“What makes you say that?” Jamie asked mildly.
“You’re using words and not grunts.”
Jamie snorted out a laugh. “Dinner was shit.”
“And after dinner?”
Katie knew him well, just like the rest of the team did, but in some ways, she knew him better. Maybe it stemmed from her being his NCO for years before the mission in Tripoli, a sergeant with a vested interest in keeping her baby nugget alive until he earned the railroad tracks on his shoulders. Katie gave no quarter when Jamie gave the world attitude, having knocked him off his spoiled brat pedestal enough times during their early years together for him to learn to like standing on the ground with her instead of lording it over everyone else.
“I got my head screwed on straight,” Jamie finally said.
More like he nearly got his dick screwed off, but that wasn’t something he was going to share with Katie. She’d tease him mercilessly if he did. Long-distance relationships were always hard for those in the military, and Jamie hadn’t had a solid one since his discreet attempt during his third year at Annapolis with a politician’s son. Katie knew he picked up anonymous one-night stands every few months if he had the downtime for it and was in the mood. Sometimes he casually dated people affiliated with the MDF for a few weeks, though those were the only ones he ever brought to his condo. Sex was nice, but there was something to be said about missing out on the emotionality of the act. Jamie was getting old enough to miss it, if Monday night was anything to go by.
Kyle had hit all his buttons and several more Jamie didn’t know he had. That night at the Ritz-Carlton ended up being some of the best sex he’d had in years, but they’d both gone into it knowing it was a once-off, no matter how compatible they seemingly were. They’d parted ways after one last lazy fuck in the early morning light, Jamie’s cock buried in Kyle’s ass, both of them trying to make it last just a little longer after a night of seriously ruining the sheets. The kiss at the hotel suite door had been a gentle, painful goodbye, at odds with the way they’d battled in bed, fiercely taking their pleasure from each other and loving every moment of it.
He regretted not asking for Kyle’s contact information when he had the chance. It wasn’t every day Jamie second-guessed his decisions, but letting Kyle go Tuesday morning was beginning to feel like a serious mistake. He was half-tempted to ask Katie to hack the Ritz-Carlton’s system to get a clear picture of Kyle’s face in order to run a facial recognition search. It would be highly illegal, but still. He thought about asking.
“You got something screwed all right, judging by the look on your face, or should I say someone?” Katie said. “Don’t get off in my car. I don’t need a bill for that on its maintenance record.”
“Fuck you,” Jamie retorted with a laugh.
“No thanks. You’re not my type.”
He would have responded except the sound of their restricted comms beeped in his ears even as the control screen on the dash snapped on, revealing a familiar face. Jamie shared a grim look with Katie before he tapped a finger at the accept icon on the control panel to answe
r the call.
“Callahan,” Jamie said at the same time Katie got out “Ovechkina.”
“Hate to interrupt your downtime, but we need you back on base. We’re green-lighting Alpha Team for a mission,” the drawling voice of Deputy Director Ranisha Stirling said, the sound of it coming through the vehicle’s speakers and their comms.
Jamie grimaced even as Katie sped up in order to catch the yellow light at the intersection and skid into a sharp U-turn. They both knew better than to ask for details over the line. “Understood. We’re on our way. ETA thirty minutes.”
The connection went dead, their ears losing the echo of the call.
“Any idea why they’re recalling us early?” Katie asked.
“No, but it has to be important.”
Katie sighed mournfully. “I was so looking forward to lunch.”
The director was firm in his belief that active MDF field agents, especially metahumans, needed downtime between missions to be at their fighting best. A regulatory minimum of three days was given after every mission, which could be upped depending on the damage an agent incurred. Early recall happened only if something big was coming down the pipeline, usually an emergency mission gleaned from chatter, and that never boded well for anyone.
The drive to MDF headquarters in the Arlington area of the D.C. megacity was made mostly in silence, broken only by Jamie calling the other members of his team for their ETAs. By the time Katie skidded her car to a halt in the subterranean parking garage beyond the security checkpoints, they were both more than a little on edge.
In the Wreckage: (M/M Sci-Fi Military Romance) (Metahuman Files Book 1) Page 6