Toby’s expression softened. He drew McBride down and kissed him, pushing his tongue against his teeth until McBride got the idea and opened up for him, pushing shyly back in return. Then he rolled out from under. “Lie on your side,” he whispered. “With your back to me. This is best, if it’s been a while for you.”
“A while…” He shifted, obedient to Toby’s guiding hands. “Toby, it’s been bloody decades. I dunno if I can.”
Toby reached over him. His warm belly pressed to McBride’s back, making him shiver in pleasure. “You can,” he assured him, opening the bedside drawer. “The way you saw to me earlier, I can take this slow for you now. Easy and slow.”
McBride saw the lubricant, the packet of condoms, and turned his face into the pillow. He shut his eyes. Once more he had the sense of life’s river running in his direction: if he could just stop fighting, he would be carried where he wanted to go. He waited, barely breathing, while Toby sheathed himself: raised his head a bit and let him slip an arm beneath it, cushioning him, holding. Strong, lube-slicked fingers caressed up the crease of his backside and then, as if aware that further preliminaries might be McBride’s undoing in one way or another, pushed straight in.
McBride cried out. He struggled onto his front, sending the bedside lamp flying. Too hot, too big—he’d made a huge mistake here, and he couldn’t get out a word to Toby to tell him. He’d left it too long. Too late to change his life like this. Another yell tore from him. He clamped a grip into the pillow, onto the side of the bed. Toby must know by now—must be crushed half to death in the expulsive spasms racking him. “Oh Christ! I can’t!”
“Can. You’re just tight, yakiri.” McBride heard him—the strange, caressing endearment—in disbelief. He sounded a bit breathless but not fazed. Didn’t he know McBride was dying here, impaled? Failing, useless, losing everything? Hot kisses landed on the back of his neck. “Lift your hips up. Let me jerk you off.”
It’ll take more than that, McBride thought dazedly, obeying him. Still, even hearing it had sent a hot flash of relief through him—made his straining arsehole flicker and gape round its intruder—and he shifted weight onto his knees, inching his hips off the mattress. Toby’s hand found its target and took competent hold. God yes. McBride thrust desperately against him, chasing bright rags of pleasure. His movement—the tiny relaxation it brought about inside—let Toby push a bit deeper. He shifted to cover him, the weight and the pressure delicious to McBride, who subsided under it, moaning.
“Do you want me to stop?”
“Oh God. No. Never.”
Because there it was—the place deep under his tailbone that Lowrie had found, after a struggle almost volcanic as this one. McBride knew what it was now, as he hadn’t then, although why the squeeze on a tiny gland should send such fireworks up and out into his frozen midnight sky remained a mystery. Toby moved, and the sparks and colours rocketed again. McBride said, “Oh,” on a deep note of surprise and yearning. “Oh, that’s it. Do it. Fuck me.”
“Yes. You’ve opened up for me. Ah, James!”
The last coherent speech from either for a long, fierce time. Toby, good as his word, ploughed him steady and hard, driving McBride on and on, past his tightness, his fear, his conviction that the world was too bad, and he himself too unworthy in it, to be given this gift. Past the point where the feel of being fucked became not just bearable, but good, and then essential, and then there was nothing else. McBride was out in sunshine by Loch Beithe. He was at his life’s beginnings, the harm that had come to him since swept away. He stiffened and rose in Toby’s arms, shouting his name. Toby embraced him, thrusting wildly, and they came on the same instant, locked together, bearing each other up through the blazing zenith. McBride spent himself into the hot grip still clenched round his cock, pulse after ecstatic pulse, as if he’d never come before and now could never stop. He broke into sobs and felt Toby seize him and cushion his fall—thrusting still, milking him and riding him as far as he would go. Melting inside him, thank God, deep spurts and a wet heat that ended the pressure, beached him at last on the mattress, facedown, boneless, done.
He struggled away. The movement yanked Toby’s spent cock out of him, but the pain didn’t matter. He had to see him, had to look into his face. Toby fought up onto his elbows as if he shared the urgency. McBride was sobbing still: he couldn’t get hold of the reins. They lay staring at each other.
“James, yakiri… Are you all right?”
“Yes, but…everything’s different. It feels like everything’s changed.”
Toby reached for him. They scrambled into each other’s arms. “Yes,” Toby said, clumsily kissing him. “Everything’s changed.”
* * *
A transformed city: transformed lives. McBride sat with Toby in the window seat of their snow-lit room, high above the streets of Edinburgh. The snow had stopped, but it was thick and deep and, in this sunny dawn, unmarred. The bells of St. John’s were pealing, tumbling music out over the wynds. A fantastic tracery of frost, dragons and galaxies had painted the glass: McBride pulled the duvet back over Toby’s fine brown skin. “Don’t get cold.”
Toby smiled. “How could I be? You’re like an open fire, love.” Nevertheless he resettled the duvet over McBride’s shoulders in return. “I think that I should wish you merry Christmas.”
“Well…same to you. Is Chanukah over?”
“Yes. But I’ll get you next time around.”
Next time. They looked at each other, sobering. In this altered world, many things were the same. “I’ll look forward to it,” McBride said unsteadily. “I…do have something for you, actually. Or my kid has, anyway.” He’d woken at first light and gone to fetch Grace’s bracelet from the pocket of his coat. Returning, the sight of Toby sleeping had melted the knees out from under him, and he had sat in the window, chilly, unable to move. Toby had woken five minutes later and come to him drowsily, dragging the duvet. They’d watched the dawn in each other’s arms.
Toby took the little strand of plaited fabric. “This is from her?”
“Yes. She told me to give it to you.”
“She’s a good kid.” The band was too small to fit over Toby’s wrist. Taking off his watch, he fastened it round the strap, tying it tight. “She was never afraid of Carlyle, you know. She just…despised him, like a little queen.” He put the watch back on. “Tell her I’ll always wear this.”
Tell her yourself. No—show her; let her see. McBride bit the words back. They would have been a cry—and he knew, he knew, that their one night was over. “She is a good kid,” he said hoarsely. “She deserves better than she’s had from me.”
Toby looked up. McBride could see in his dark eyes that his understanding—his grief, his acceptance—was total. He took McBride’s hand. “You know, I didn’t go to Avrom’s funeral. I couldn’t. I cut myself off from all his family too. They loved me, and I…abandoned them. I haven’t been near them since.”
McBride nodded, swallowing hard. “Things we both need to do. Oh, I wish they weren’t in different bloody countries, love.”
“Well, that’s…what I wanted to talk to you about.”
McBride frowned. They were talking about their parting, weren’t they? About goodbye, and all the good reasons why it had to be so. He understood too, just as well as Toby…
“I’m glad that Mossad cleared my name. I thought it was everything to me, to get back to that world, that life. But…I followed Avrom there really. We both did national service in the Golan Heights. We both got picked out for training. I’d never have done it without him. And now I am without him…”
“Oh God, Toby—”
“Ssh. Let me say this. General Sharot has connections here in the UK. He wants to start up a unit to provide intelligence and protect political visitors and refugees coming here. It may not be in the north—London, more likely—but London is closer than Jerusalem, and…”
McBride remembered to breathe. His head was spinning, sparkling light from th
e morning outside flowing into his lungs. “Would you…would you want that? Would you try?”
“Yes. Yes, if you wanted me to. Oh, James, don’t look at me like that—it might take months. I might not stand a chance.”
Epilogue
Being this sober was bitterly hard.
McBride pushed back from the desk he’d been flying for the last two months. At least his office was his own again—wood panels covering some of that glass—and if he wanted to sit and stare out into the sleet, that was his own business.
The bleak back end of February. Half five in the evening and darkness beginning to fall. Each day the tides of dusk encroached a little less on the afternoon’s shore, but the change was so grudging, barely noticeable. Pretty much, McBride reflected grimly, like the changes being wrought on him by his daily AA meetings. Every day at two o’clock sharp. He hadn’t missed a single one. Amanda Campbell quietly made gaps in his work schedule, and the Harle Street team—his friends, his colleagues—stayed, for a bunch of piss-taking Scots, astonishingly far out of his face on the matter. He was clean.
It had been the best, the worst and hardest thing he had ever done in his life. He was grateful his desk, his new office-bound life, was within the specialist human-trafficking unit Amanda had been commissioned to set up. Her daily companionship, the sense of doing something useful, had helped keep McBride on the rails. He could almost spare a pitying thought for Lila Stone, now dealing with traffic of another kind, out in the Wester Hailes council estates. Amanda’s unit would one day liaise with General Sharot’s new security agency.
McBride didn’t let himself think about that. Despite the cold, he got up and unfastened the window sash; pushed the stiff, old frame up the few inches it would go. Damp air rushed into the room, spattering the sill with raw sleet. McBride breathed it deeply, looking down into the car park. There was an email in his inbox he simply couldn’t bring himself to open. Normally he leapt on Toby’s messages like the lifelines they were, his heart thudding like a bloody teenager’s. The last few had been hurried, short, loving scraps sent from his BlackBerry. That meant he was on an op, most likely; McBride didn’t know where. But this one was longer. Today, 27 February, was when Toby would hear back from General Sharot about the job.
McBride looked at his watch. Time he knocked off. The day’s work was done. He was best keeping busy, and there was plenty to do. Now that Gracie was once more occupying her room in his flat every weekend, and people were actually visiting him, McBride had realised what a state the place was in and was trying to rectify matters. He was, for the first time in years, buying groceries. For his kid, of course, though Grace was as likely to beg for a trip to the chippy as subject herself to her father’s home-cooked. And McBride knew, far off in the back of his mind, he wanted to keep his house decent—his house, his life—in case Toby came home.
Tyres crunched on the car park’s ice. Idly McBride glanced in the direction of the sound. It was coming from the entry road—unusual at this time of night, when everyone else was heading for the exits. Golden headlights appeared, turning the sleet to drifting petals on the wind, a memory or a promise of summer. McBride watched the car turn into one of the bays and come to a halt. He smiled. It was just the kind of vehicle Toby would shamelessly hire for himself on a visit, big and powerful, no expense spared.
The driver’s door opened. McBride’s heart lurched, and he grabbed at the windowsill, his joints trying to dissolve. He stared for a moment. Then he turned and ran out of the room, leaving the window wide.
The car park was treacherous. McBride lost traction as soon as he was off the gritted steps. He skidded but caught himself—with some grace, he thought, and was glad, because Toby was there in the sleet-storm, striding towards him. The ice soaked through McBride’s shirt instantly. He couldn’t feel it. He ran to close the gap. “What are you doing here? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Toby’s hands closed on his shoulders. “I did. Why didn’t you reply?”
That unopened email. McBride looked up into the dark, anxious gaze devouring him. “Because I knew it was about the job. I…I was too bloody scared.”
“Sharot called me over here at the crack of dawn this morning. I got the next flight. I thought it was just for a consultation, but—”
“For God’s sake, Leitner. But what?”
“But he wants me to start straightaway. Those tapes we got on Sim Carlyle were the tip of the iceberg. They opened up a huge network of trafficking, here and on the west coast. I’ll mostly be working in Glasgow, but—”
“But Glasgow’s just down the road,” McBride interrupted, voice rough with joy and relief. “Oh God. You’re here to stay?”
“Yes. How I’ll survive this filthy climate is beyond me.”
“I’ll keep you warm.”
Toby pulled him into his arms. “You can start right now,” he whispered, and McBride sought his mouth in blind passion.
The sleet turned to hail. Its sting drew McBride back to surface, and he pulled out of the kiss, not for his own sake, but for his poor exotic lover’s, shivering in his arms. “Come on,” he said. “I’m done for the day. We can go.”
“Don’t you need to get your coat?”
McBride gave it thought. The coat, not so much, but the keys and wallet inside it might be necessary. “You’re right,” he said. “I’ll not be a second.”
He looked up at the office windows. They were brightly lit against the oncoming dark. And unmistakably outlined in their frames, in varying shapes and attitudes of excitement—Amanda, Andrew Barclay, Lenny Royston. Davies, clearly nudging McKay in the ribs. “Oh God,” McBride said. “Look at that. Like a row of Gracie’s bloody stuffed toys.”
Toby snorted with laughter. “Want me to come in with you?”
“No way I can face them by myself. Yes, come on. And then—” he reached back and felt Toby seize his hand, invisibly to their audience in the secret space between them, “—and then I’ll take you home.”
About the Author
Harper Fox is an M/M author trying to make it as a full-time writer, with just that bit more urgency after being made redundant from her day job. Interesting times! In a way it's great, because she gets to spend most of every day doing what she loves best—creating worlds and stories for the huge cast of lovely gay men queuing up inside her head. She lives in rural Northumberland in northern England and does most of her writing at an old kitchen table in her back garden, often with blanket and hot water bottle.
She lives with her SO, Jane, who has somehow put up with her for a quarter of a century now, and three enigmatic cats. Chief among them is Lucy, who knows the secret of the universe but isn't letting on. When not writing, she either despairs or makes bread: specialities are focaccia and her amazing seven-strand challah. If she has any other skills, she's yet to discover them.
I Heard Him Exclaim
By Z.A. Maxfield
Who Likes a Skinny Santa?
Steve Adams’s heart hasn't been in the Christmas spirit ever since doctors put a stent in it and ordered him to clean up his act. No longer filling out his Santa suit or allowed to make merry, he’s forgoing the holidays this year and heading to Vegas to indulge in the few vices left to him: gambling and anonymous sex.
His road trip takes a detour when he encounters Chandler Tracey, who’s just inherited guardianship of his five-year-old niece. Overwhelmed, Chandler’s on his way to deliver Poppy to his parents. But fate has other plans and, after car trouble, Chandler and Poppy accept a ride home with Steve. Though the heat between the two men is obvious, they put it on simmer while they band together to make Poppy’s Christmas as perfect as possible.
Steve soon comes to believe that while Chandler is the right person to look after Poppy, someone needs to look after Chandler. Fortunately, Steve knows just the man for the job.
Dedication
Many thanks to Lex Valentine and the local Word Warriors—Carol, Jaime, Karenna, Pam and Alyce. You make work fun every
day!
Acknowledgements
Thanks so much to Angela James for the invitation; my editor, Deborah Nemeth; and everyone at Carina for making this story possible.
Chapter One
Rudolph, the red-nosed ’69 Super Bee Six Pack ate up the tarmac after Barstow. If Steve hadn’t been driving like a bat out of hell, he might have enjoyed it more. He missed lazing around when the weather cooled down in the winter, when the sporadic yet drenching California rain made it harder to get jobs. When the wind blew from the north and the light slanted in through his kitchen window at its lowest angle, it was time to drag out the furry suit and play Santa.
Something in the crisp air gave him the holiday urge—a combination of energy, enthusiasm and lack of self-control peculiar to the men of his family. His father and brothers already had the light wars going. Even his sister, who could usually be counted on to keep a level head all the way through Valentine’s Day, had baked so much that delicious smells emanated from her house and surrounded it like scented magic.
It was a lousy time to be feeling sorry for himself but he was, damn it.
He missed smoking.
It wasn’t as if he ever smoked in his little red honey car, but he missed having the pack in his pocket, missed the sure and certain knowledge that it was there, waiting for him to hit the rest stop before Zzyzx and Baker. He still held his Zippo in his right hand and drove with his left while he flipped the lighter’s lid open and closed, rhythmically, to the music on the car’s scratchy original AM radio. The Mad Greek would be another big hurdle. Usually he chowed down on a gyro or two, fat with greasy mystery meat and dripping with that creamy white sauce he couldn’t pronounce.
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