Ultimate Sanction

by Sarah Luddington

  “Explain, Mac.”

  He lay under me with my larger body over his shoulder and pressing against his hot flank. I stroked his chest and belly but didn’t touch his manhood. The hairs, not that he had many over his pectoral muscles, were coarse and springy. A much lighter shade than those of his beard.

  I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts but Jacob waited me out, his eyes never leaving my face. “I want you, I really do, but I can’t help this awful noise in my head.” I tapped my temple.

  “Let me guess, it sounds like your father, this voice?”

  I nodded and the tears pressed in my eyes making them sting. “He, it, says the most horrible things.” The words were barely a whisper of sound in the large room.

  Jacob stroked my grizzled cheeks. “You need to let that voice die inside you.”

  “I know.” The tightness in my chest pressed outward and I buried my face in Jacob’s shoulder. Overwhelming emotions made me shudder, but he just lay still and soothed me. So many fears chased around inside my head and heart but the worst one came to me in a flash – what if my fear chased Jacob away? What if I couldn’t make love to him the way he wanted and needed because of fear? What if I broke us because I couldn’t satisfy him?

  “Look at me, Mac.”

  My instincts were to hide the weakness inside, bury it deep and cover it in layers of stoic denial. Jacob, however, had other ideas and he forced my head up using a finger under my chin. I couldn’t resist the gentle pressure.

  “You are one of the bravest and most stubborn men I know,” he said, speaking into my heart. “You will find a way through this and I will be as patient as necessary. I can see your fear. I can feel it racing through your blood. Here’s the thing though, Mac, you can’t live like this forever. You cannot deny yourself happiness because you are afraid of your desires and passions. Not when they are so simple.”

  “Making love to you isn’t simple.” I wanted to argue with him. I wanted to justify my fears. I wanted to tell him they had some kind of power over me I couldn’t shatter. Why would I want to tell him these things when they weren’t true? Trying to understand all this made me seem weak.

  He continued to watch my face, tracking the emotions if not the thoughts. When he smiled at me the answer to my internal question came to the surface. I wanted to tell him that breaking free of my fears wasn’t possible because it required sacrifice. I carried the fear around inside me because it kept me safe, kept me behaving myself, kept me within the ‘normal’ bounds of society. I didn’t stand out. Didn’t have to be counted among those perceived as weak, immoral or corrupt.

  All these lies were a cage around me made by the words and thoughts of others. The casual homophobic references among those I worked with in the army and especially in the SF teams both in the UK and abroad. Language used to turn my desires into something dirty, something to be hidden and denied because it made me perverted.

  “How do you live with people’s opinions of you?” I asked Jacob.

  “Because of my sexuality?” He shrugged. “Most of the time I ignore them. It’s not easy though, Mac. When I came out to the team in Hereford the CO had to step in and order them to behave. I longed for you then, even if you didn’t want me, the thought of having you at my back to protect me made my heart ache in need. It was a difficult time, I can’t lie to you about it.”

  I wished I’d been there for him as well. I wished I’d been more of a friend in the first place and let him be honest about his life. If wishes were kittens, I’d be drowning in hair balls.

  “And now?” I asked.

  Again with the shrug. “Most of them are fine. They’ve moved on to other targets. You know what packs of people can be like if you’re different. Soldiers are just the same as everyone else and often worse. Some of them made it clear they wouldn’t work with me anymore. The NCOs and ruperts are aware of the problems and try to work around them.”

  I traced old scars on his belly. “Do you feel safe there?”

  “I didn’t for a while. Thought I’d get friendly fire in the back at some point but now it’s okay. If I fuck up it’s the first thing that is thrown at me. It takes a long time to change a culture and the army’s culture is always slow to change. How long did it take for men to work alongside women without being idiots about it? How long before the army treated its ethnic minorities with any kind of equality? We’re fighting the same battle because we’re different, but it doesn’t make me any less of an elite operative.”

  “You’re the brave one out of us. I can hardly face the truth even now,” I said.

  “But I have the support of my family. They didn’t want me to hide my sexuality when I joined up and they really weren’t happy when I joined the SAS. They wanted me to be honest. Whenever you came home with me on leave, they’d struggle to keep it quiet.”

  “But all those women when we were away?” I said. “I saw you with them.”

  He sighed and a faint blush coloured his chest and neck. “I wanted to keep up the pretence. I wanted to do what the rest of you did.” He grinned. “Well, everyone but you.”

  I managed a smile, but it faded too soon. “So you went to bed with those women even though you knew you were gay?”

  “Sometimes I was too drunk and horny to care. Sometimes they weren’t women at all,” he said.

  My eyes widened as I thought back to our time in Thailand and other Far Eastern countries where we’d been invited in to train local Special Forces teams. “Oh.”

  “Yes, oh. The others… I usually just walked them home, gave them money for their time if they were working girls or told them I had to return to the hotel for an early start if they weren’t. I was always careful to leave them content, if a little disappointed. Assuming I could please a woman anyway without a road map and GPS.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, it’s not easy…”

  “It made me feel like a fraud and I’d often go home from a night drinking via a different route that would take me to a gay bar. It doesn’t take long to find a willing partner when you look like I do,” he said.

  He had a point: handsome, strong, obviously army – catnip to gay men the world over I should imagine. The thought made my guts burn white-hot a growl rose from the darkest part of my body.

  “Hey,” he said, tugging on my hair, “I’ve no reason to stray.”

  “Unless I can’t bring my demons under control enough to fuck you,” I snapped. The anger in me rose to the surface and broke through. Just the thought of him with another man, any man, who could fuck him into the kind of blissful surrender I couldn’t or wouldn’t manage, made it impossible for me to stay still.

  I rolled off his chest and paced the room to the mini bar. Hands captured mine before I could open the miniature bottle of whisky I’d snagged from the cool interior.

  “Calm down, Mac.” He put the bottle back in the fridge and pulled me back to the bed. “I’m not going to look for a man to fuck me just because you’re having a few squeamish issues.”

  “Bit more than squeamish.”

  Jacob arched an eyebrow at me. “I know, but you are squeamish amongst other things and I don’t blame you. I’m certainly not surprised by it. Besides, it was me topping most of the time. I’m not a natural bottom as you’ll discover when the time is right. For now, can we just get back to cuddling? I like it and I’ve never cuddled anyone else.”

  I stared at him in surprise. “Really?”

  “What do you think gay men do when they know it’s just a onetime thing? Hang around for hearts and flowers? We fuck, we leave. I never spent the night and I never cuddled. You are the only man I’ve ever spent the night with and that was before we were having sex.” Jacob lay back on the bed and patted the mattress where I’d lain just moments before.

  “You’ve only ever spent the night with me?” There were times when my ego could be far too fragile and needy. I climbed back on the bed and lay down.

  Jacob sighed in contentment when I returned to stroking
his chest. “Yes, Mac. All those nights we were together on missions or training where we curled up to sleep for warmth, I snuggled in for more than just your body temperature. I wanted to feel your arms around me as well.”

  “What if I can never be inside you?” I asked, refusing to look at his face. “What will you think of me? What if I can’t let you fuck me?”

  “You’re racing ahead of yourself. Some men never cross over that line. Others do but it takes time. We aren’t young men, fuelled only by hormones and accepted by our social circle. We are older, with brothers-in-arms not friends as such and many of them will struggle to accept what we have, it takes time. You need to be patient with yourself.”

  “And you’ll be patient with me?” I asked risking a glance at his face. Those honey coloured eyes were full of soft amusement at my internal struggles.

  “I’ll be as patient as necessary. Now would you kiss me so I can get hard again and we can finish what we started half an hour ago?” He tugged on my hair and I bent over his chest to kiss his firm lips.

  Our chests rubbed together as the kiss deepened, the hard and roughened surface of a man’s pectoral muscles far more appealing to me than the soft squish of a woman’s breast. Jacob groaned and pulled my leg between his so he could rub against my thigh.

  I pushed it tighter to his groin and the gentle undulation of his body underneath mine continued to build. We were both hard within seconds, now we were just building the tension, making our balls ache and our cocks throb in need.

  The kiss broke apart when I needed to rub against his bearded chin, and I began biting his throat. I held the large and delicate Adam’s apple between my teeth, and he arched his back to give me total submission. My hips were now moving in time to his though I remained on my side while he lay on his back.

  With lust now spurring me on I murmured, “I want to suck you.”

  “Fuck, yes, please,” Jacob managed.

  I kissed down his chest, nipping the places I already knew drew sounds of delighted lust from him. The ribs, the hips, the nipples. Then I detoured his straining cock and nipped the inside of his thigh.

  “Hey, I want you back here,” he complained, once more using my longer hair as a lead. I’d either have to get it cut or grow it longer so he’d have more to tug because I kind of liked it.

  “You said I needed to be patient and you’d be patient as well,” I told him, resting my chin on his thigh.

  “There’s patient and there is cruel.”

  I licked the back of his knee and he almost shot off the bed. “Don’t make me tie you down, soldier.”

  “I’ll tell you anything you ask me, just don’t do that again.”

  I laughed. “If it’s that easy to get information out of you how did you pass selection?”

  “Interrogators in the SAS don’t normally lick the back of their prisoner’s knees.”

  This idea rendered me helpless for several minutes as I imagined some of the hairy-arsed, hard nuts in the PARAs who helped with the SAS selection process licking the backs of the knees of the men they interrogated.

  Rather than licking, I nosed at his knee, took hold of his ankles and pushed them up the bed so he lay open to me. The effort it took to override the angry whispers in my head began to dwindle the more I gazed at the body resting above me. Dark eyes watched my quiet contemplation and he smiled at me, reaching between his legs to stroke my hair.

  “I love you,” he said to me. “I can’t believe you’re here and we’re together like this, it’s a miracle.” The intensity of his gaze bored into my soul and set it alight.

  “I love you as well.” The words were not a difficult confession at this point.

  I pushed up the bed just a little more and reached for the prize I’d been denying myself. Jacob’s scent filled my lungs and I licked the soft moveable skin over his scrotum. He shuddered and I took the left one into my mouth, the skin soft, the light smattering of hair rough, and the firm insides something for my tongue to roll.

  “Oh, fuck,” Jacob groaned.

  I sucked and he arched off the bed, the head of his cock now glistening and a deep red. I continued to play until I moved onto the right side and repeated the process. Jacob reached for his cock, but I smacked his hand. It spurred me on though and I licked the base, the hair clinging to my tongue until I reached his smooth skin. The veins and soft flesh belied the steel and I began to explore.

  The smell of him, the texture, the taste, the surrender of his strength, it came as a revelation. When I took him into my mouth for the first time the flavour and texture overwhelmed my senses and I groaned deep in my chest.

  “Bloody hell, Mac. Go steady or this will all be over in a second.”

  I released the suction on his cock. “Am I doing it wrong?”

  He chuckled. “Only if you want me to last longer than a minute. I think we’ve found a new sport you’d be very good at if it went to the Olympics.”

  I grinned in pleasure and returned to the task in hand: learning how to give the man I loved everything he could want from me. Jacob groaned and thrashed, bucking off the bed and forcing me to use my hand to control the amount of his cock trying to bury itself in the back of my throat.

  During the process my long-neglected manhood decided it had endured enough teasing and the sharp pangs of heated need shot through my body and burned my balls. With my free hand I reached for my cock.

  “Oh, no,” Jacob said. “If you get to play so do I. Turn round and give me what I want.”

  I pulled back from my ministrations. “What?”

  “Sixty-nine, my sex starved student. Get on with it before I flip you over and do it anyway.”

  “Um…” I liked the thought, I just struggled with the concept. It would make me vulnerable and expose parts of my body –

  “Mac, stop it, it’s perfectly normal. You need to let your fears evaporate and just enjoy the things I know you’ll like. This is something you will really enjoy, and I know I will.” He tugged on my hair, encouraging me to turn around and swing a leg over his face. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  I found the position perfect for giving him deeper penetration into my mouth and nudging the back of my throat but when he pushed down on my arse and took me deep in one movement I almost fainted. He tugged on my balls and breathed hard, sucking deep and the rising tide of lust swept away conscious thought. The world came down to two things, the feel of my lover’s cock in my mouth and the feel of mine in his.

  I couldn’t prevent the roll of my hips but with every flex Jacob groaned and bucked up into my mouth. The heat between our bodies made us slick with sweat and I stopped trying to control the amount of Jacob’s length filling me. Instead I gripped the backs of his thighs, my elbows on the firm mattress trying to keep my weight off him, while I took everything I could in a frenzy of building desire.

  A muffled, “Gotta come,” warned me of the impending explosion and I released the tenuous hold I had on my self-control.

  Jacob howled around my cock, he pulsed but I didn’t pull off. The pressure of the first jet took me by surprise but I sucked it down and groaned as the lightning of my orgasm exploded through me. Flash bright, flash white. Jacob sucked as I licked and he rolled us with great care onto our sides, trapping my head between his strong thighs.

  I tapped out. He released me and I turned to scoot up the bed only to find his tongue replacing his cock in my aching mouth. Strong arms dragged me close and he wrapped his leg over my hip nudging my still half hard and very sensitive cock.

  After the kiss he gazed at me and a sleepy smile appeared while he ran his fingers through my hair. “I love this,” he said.

  “My hair?”

  “No, you nob, just lying here and being naked with you. I love being naked with you.”

  “Go to sleep, Jacob.”

  His eyelids dropped and I watched him slide off the edge of the waking world.

  15

  Unfortunately, sleep eluded me, despite ha
ving Jacob curled up against my flank. His story rolled around inside my head gathering dust bunnies full of bullets and blood. My memories fought to escape the careful control of the boxes I used to capture them before further securing them in a room I kept locked so they wouldn’t overwhelm me.

  We all joined the army for different reasons, mine were so I could escape my father; maybe succeed at something important; maybe make a difference in a world I struggled to understand as a teenager. No one thought about the consequences of signing up to a life of violence.

  It was years before I understood the truth. The army didn’t give a shit about me beyond my ability to do my job and the moment I couldn’t, it wanted me and the skills I had gone. There were always more people willing to fight. Soldiers had to be young when we signed up, before the world broke our optimism.

  I sighed, recognising the wheel of misery I was about to travel. These thoughts led in one direction, just like a donkey having to go in a circle to grind grain, going around in an endless circle and never reaching its destination.

  With care I extricated myself from the bed, pulled on some clothes and slipped from the room. A quiet drink at the bar might just be enough to switch me off. When I arrived, I found Brant. She sat, spine straight but eyes downcast, watching the amber liquid in her glass. I almost left the bar, but she turned, saw me and nodded. I walked over and sat beside her on a stool.

  “Can’t sleep?” she asked.

  “Jacob’s out cold, at last,” I said, nodding at the barman and signalling two of whatever Brant drank.

  “How is he?” she asked.

  “How much of his service do you know about?” I countered.

  “Jacob? All of it.”

  “Including Syria?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I read the reports. I had to before coming out here. There’s a warning all over his file. They only needed one more reason to boot him.”

  I considered the wisdom of my next words, but I had to know more, and Brant held the keys to the lock. “He thinks the men with him lied for him, that’s why he wasn’t tried for murder.”