“You sure?” Pete asked. He massaged his hands into Jason’s thigh, then waist. Each touch was intoxicating.
“I am. I like you… a lot.”
“Good,” Pete said, kissing him once, twice, and moving down. “Because I really like you too.”
Jason cried out in surprise as Pete sunk between his legs. Pete lifted up Jason’s shirt, kissing his belly, his ribs, and then lower toward his hipbones. He worked on undoing Jason’s belt while Jason writhed beneath him.
“If you want me to stop, let me know, okay?” Pete’s dark eyes bore directly into Jason, pinning him in place. He opened his mouth in a silent cry before letting out a low moan. Jason had to bite his fist to keep from making noise as Pete touched the curve of his dick through his boxers. When Pete slipped Jason out, he held his cock in his fist, warm and constant. He glanced up at Jason again in another silent plea for permission.
“Yes,” Jason said, his breath hitched. “Yes, this is great. Keep going.”
Pete kissed the tip, licking from crown to shaft. His mouth engulfed Jason and sent shockwaves of desire through him.
“Fuck, fuck….” Jason mumbled. He pressed his torso and hips into the couch, allowing for Pete to sink deeper onto him. He took Jason as far as he could go, then swallowed around him. He licked and sucked, doing everything that made Jason wild. When Jason started to buck into Pete’s mouth, Pete slowed his actions. He moved his kisses to Jason’s thighs and kept a firm fist around him.
“Slow down,” Pete said. “I want this to last.”
“Me too. Fuck, it’s been so long.” Jason’s cheeks bloomed red when he realized what he’d admitted. That was a lame thing to say when getting a blowjob right? He shut his eyes tight, willing the embarrassment away.
“Same,” Pete murmured, surprising Jason, before he sucked him again.
Jason shuddered. He could feel precome leaking onto Pete’s tongue and tried to control himself. He really did want this to last as long as it could. As it turned out, that only seemed to be another minute—maybe two—before Jason could speak in nothing but incomprehensible expletives. Pete gripped Jason’s thighs, preparing himself as Jason came against his tongue and lips. Jason’s hips trembled, his breathing ragged. Pete swallowed all of him down and cleaned Jason off with a careful brush of his tongue. When Pete was done, he kissed Jason’s thighs over and over. Jason reached out, running his hands through Pete’s straight black hair.
“Come here,” Jason said, voice barely a whisper. “I want to taste you too.”
Pete crawled back up on the couch and crashed his lips against Jason’s. Their make out became slow, but still as heated, as Jason reached to undo Pete’s pants. Pete was uncut, and it was the first real shock of the night for Jason. But it was pleasant, a new kind of surprise. He toyed with the skin as he and Pete continued to kiss, before daring to lean down and taste it. There were a couple minutes where Jason felt as if he was all awkward, bony limbs before they effectively switched positions. Jason’s knees dug into the hardwood floors of the living room, but he didn’t care. Pete tasted good, so good, and each moan of encouragement spurred him forward. Pete’s tugs on Jason’s hair and his ragged breathing were also huge motivators.
Jason lifted Pete’s collared shirt up over his stomach, exposing more tattoos. They were beautiful, but none of the designs on his torso could compare with the intricate line work Pete had on his arms. Jason examined Pete’s body with a keen glance for only so long, before he focused on his cock again.
Pete was thick, hard to take into the back of his throat and swallow entirely. He wasn’t as long as Jason, though, so he could lick him up and down as much as he wanted. When Pete’s hands on Jason’s hair grew tight and insistent, Jason braced himself for what was next. Pete released into his mouth and seemed to come for a long time. Jason had to swallow twice before pulling away, but still ended up with come on his lip.
“Fuck,” Pete said, his eyes still glazed with desire. He ran a thumb over Jason’s mouth, touched the come, and then pulled their lips together. Their kissing was slow, subdued, but Jason’s stomach stirred with desire again. The room smelled like sex, coffee, and maybe even a little bit of burnt cake. It was definitely not how he thought the night would go after fucking up each stage of dinner, and having to rely on Cassandra the real estate agent to make him the chili he served as his own. But fuck, it was a good night. And one he didn’t want to end.
As they tucked themselves away and sat back on the couch, their making out didn’t cease. It grew lazy and slow instead. Eventually, when Pete laid his head on Jason’s chest, he took it as the signal to wind down the action. Jason ran his hand through Pete’s hair, down his back, and pressed kiss after kiss on his forehead.
“What time is it?” Pete asked, his voice croaky from disuse.
“Um….” Jason glanced over the couch into the kitchen. The clock read two in the morning. “Two. So daylight savings is officially done.”
“Good to know.” Pete turned up to meet Jason, pressing another kiss to his lips. “I had fun tonight.”
“Me too.”
Pete pulled away from a kiss Jason started, frown evident on his face. “Oh, having fun makes leaving that much harder.”
Jason hugged his arms tighter around him. “You really have to go?”
“Yeah. I’d like to stay some other time, though. You know. Maybe get to know you better. See all your rooms.”
“Read me a bedtime story?”
Pete laughed. “No, no, I have other plans for that.”
When their mouths met again, Pete made their hips collide in a low grinding motion, as if to hint at what was to come. Jason mewled under him, already hard again. He knew Pete had to go—he’d mentioned needing to work at the museum tomorrow—but that didn’t mean Jason couldn’t think about what fucking him would be like. Or would Pete top? Jason was a switch most times, but it had been so long now that he’d really been with someone, making him wonder if he’d like to bottom at all times. He recalled the feeling of Pete in his mouth, thick and hard, and wondered what it would be like to have him inside of him. Above him, entering him….
“I have to go,” Pete said again. He halted their rhythmic grinding and nuzzled Jason instead. “But I really, really had fun tonight.”
“I did too. We’ll do it again.”
“Yeah, we will.”
Pete helped Jason to carry the mugs to the kitchen and rinsed them out, kissing only once or twice more as they did. When Pete had his jacket on again, he lingered in Jason’s doorway, another broad grin on his face.
“So. The museum is having a special lecture series coming up,” Pete said.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. It’s part of the new rotation now that it’s getting to be dark more often. If you and Micah both liked that story I told, you should come.”
Jason’s mind filled with a million questions about what the show was on more specifically, but his own lethargy dulled them. All he wanted was another chance to see Pete, so he’d take whatever he could get. “That sounds wonderful. We will come by soon.”
“No rush,” Pete said. “I’ll be there the whole season. And most likely the next.”
Chapter Ten
JASON WAS the happiest he’d been in years. Each morning as he arrived at work, he’d take advantage of the darkness around him to skip across the parking lot to the front, and then spend the rest of the morning bouncing in his cubicle seat as if he was listening to music. The admin assistant Jenny started to notice his random mood shift and accused him of being a morning person everyday now. Jason went along with it, since it seemed like the easiest thing to concede to. He didn’t exactly want to risk saying that he was pretty sure he was falling in love.
The last time he’d been this happy was when he’d aged out of the foster care system and met up with Alison in downtown Toronto. The two of them shared a shitty apartment with bed bugs and no heat, but they’d been so, so happy because they had applied for sc
hool. They were going to get out of the mess they called their lives and start over as something even better.
Six months of bliss and working crummy cashier jobs passed, and only Jason got the acceptance letter to university. Their lives had changed drastically after that, filled with regret and guilt, along with success and better things. Because if not for their lives changing paths like that, Micah would have never been born. The six months following his birth when Alison, Adelaide, and Jason all bought and moved into the same house together and lived like a giant misfit family was probably the other time Jason had been the happiest. Even those times had to end, and if not for that ending, Jason would not have been here, in the Yukon, with the best kid in the world and this strange and interesting Inuit man who texted him random YouTube videos throughout the day and recipes for desserts he wanted to try.
Jason chuckled as he stepped into the elevator in his office. Life was strange. But he’d learned to embrace that strangeness for what it was when he was a kid. Maybe that was why, when Jason also became ridiculously happy, he fully embraced it. Happiness, like those times of depression and despair, were always temporary. In the back of his mind, Jason worried that in another six months, this happiness would go away and he’d be left with something else to deal with.
Jason checked his phone. It was mid-November. He’d been in the Yukon now for a little over two and a half months. If his life kept up the six months of bliss pattern, he had another three to enjoy what he had now. He pushed the rather depressing thought away as he stepped out on the sixth floor where his office was. He placed his shoulder bag at his desk, logged into the computer, and sauntered to the break room to get a cup of coffee while the PC warmed up and the accounting software loaded.
By the time he got back to his desk, Bobby was already standing there. “Hey, man. How the hell are you a morning person when it’s frigid pitch black outside?”
Jason laughed. “It’s difficult, but not impossible. Coffee sure helps.”
“Figures.” Bobby glanced around the office and leaned forward conspiratorially. “You hear about the break-in?”
“What break-in?” Jason surveyed their row of cubicles. All the computers were present and accounted for and the conference room seemed to be well stocked. Nothing was amiss, but the other floors could have been tampered with.
“Not here, but like, the computer servers,” Bobby clarified. “That’s apparently why none of our machines are loading the company software. Someone in the IT room is scanning to see what was leaked and then we’re going to have to start all over again.”
“Wait. What do you mean?” Jason glanced at his computer screen. It had gone to sleep in the time he was away. When he wiggled the mouse and typed in his password, he was surprised to find his desktop stripped. No icons other than the recycling bin, no software programs, and no photo of Micah he’d been using as a background. The thought of losing that image—even if he had a dozen others on his phone—was almost as bad as the thought that his budget work was now gone. He’d given a presentation to his boss at the end of September on the fracking costs, and like he figured, the project was green-lighted. His boss, Chester Lake, had surprised Jason by assigning him another budget for the upcoming years for fracking and “any other means you see fit to invest in”; Jason figured his boss had meant equipment upgrades or proposals for other locations to frack in, and he’d investigated those avenues, but Jason had also taken his boss’s words as a blank permission form to search out whatever he wanted to propose at the next budget meeting. He’d been working consistently for the past six weeks on exploring alternative energy methods like solar, wind, and turbine so that while the Eakon Company continued to frack, the excess money they’d save in that avenue could be put to something better and more sustainable.
But if his computer was stripped, that meant his Excel sheets, Word Docs, and everything else for the project was gone. Maybe—maybe—he remembered to save something in his Google Drive, but the thought of hackers or the Eakon Oil’s IT men not accessing and wiping that at all were slim.
“I don’t understand. Why would they do this?”
“No idea. It’s happened before, though,” Bobby said. “Maybe two years ago? I’m not sure. I just logged on and nothing was there, then a memo was sent out for a meeting at ten.”
“But this still doesn’t make sense.”
“Sometimes protest groups, you know, like the one outside from a few months ago will want to hack into our systems and fuck stuff up. Kind of like the more low-key version of the Anonymous group. You know, the one with the mask?” Bobby gestured to his face as if his pale skin and blond hair could be a substitute for the V for Vendetta masks the online group used. “Anyway, some of these groups think that by leaking our data that it will somehow expose the company. But we’re not breaking any laws, and the fracking has already started, so I don’t know what they hoped to accomplish. Other than to make management have a heart attack.”
Jason’s heart rate elevated. He didn’t like the insinuation about the protest group. He hoped everyone at work had forgotten about the slight unpleasantness, especially since they hadn’t come back. Not even their pamphlets or zines had shown up on the property. Maybe people forgot about his involvement with Pete. It had only been Jenny, the admin, who had seen them together. More than anything, though, Jason hoped that Pete wasn’t involved in this. They’d kept their word not to talk about their jobs and everything had been fine. But what if Jason’s laptop had been out? What if his work e-mails had been open and Pete had been able to get his passwords? Jason shook his head, knowing that Pete would never invade his privacy like that. But what if someone Pete knew—like the man with the beard or the woman who looked startlingly like Pete—had followed him, and therefore followed Jason one night and somehow managed to get through the firewall on Eakon Oil’s computers using information they’d gleaned from Jason? A million different scenarios popped up in Jason’s mind. He could barely hear Bobby talking anymore.
“Does it work?”
“Hmm?” Bobby asked, halting his rant about Anonymous and V for Vendetta. “What works?”
“The leaking of files. Is there a chance that the company could stop the fracking if there was enough of a threat?”
“Oh, not a chance. We’ve already started and they invested too much already. I figure the meeting today will be about reinforced security and a bunch of other stuff. It’s all garbage, but necessary. Then it’ll be back to work as usual. They’ll try to forget it happened, you know? They won’t want to harp on it for too long.”
As if on cue, Mr. Napier came out of his office. He walked down the rows of cubicles and talked to everyone as he went by. By the time he got to Bobby and Jason, they knew what was going on.
“Meeting’s been moved up from 10 a.m. Please file to Mr. Lake’s office for the next hour. Do not bring your phones. Do not bring anything.”
Jason’s heart pounded the entire walk down. He knew he’d done nothing wrong. He was sure, in his heart of hearts, that Pete had done nothing wrong either. But it wouldn’t matter if they were both innocent if The Environmental Crew had done something. They were too close to one another, and the scene of the crime, to not suffer some fallout.
So much for having six months of bliss. Two and a half months had never seemed so short.
AS JASON sat and listened to Chester Lake speak about their security breech, the worst spy or espionage clichés played through his mind. Lake was a spitting image of an older Robert Redford, with a chiseled jawline, sandy hair, and freckled skin, but with slightly worse fashion sense and definitely not as smooth. Lake listed off all the ways in which their cyber-security had been tampered with by a possible sleeper cell in the organization, completely overselling the point. Once Lake was done with his rant, someone from the IT department spoke in a logical voice about the next steps.
“Your computers have been scrubbed and all the software will be reinstalled. We needed to make sure there were no vi
ruses on them. All your previous work has been saved by us, but we’ll be assigning some people new projects from the start. Don’t worry. You’re not being blamed. But we do need you to be wary of what’s going on. We found an encrypted file on someone’s computer, which seemed to be the cause of the problem. We will talk to that person afterwards, though we don’t believe their involvement was malicious. We are aware that things happen. You all check Facebook and sometimes click links you’re not supposed to. We urge you to be careful with what you download and install the new antivirus system we’re handing out on discs, but we do understand that things happen. Let’s not make this a repeat endeavor.”
Jason adjusted his tie, throat suddenly dry. It’s gotta be my computer. Did Pete send me stuff? Did anyone send me anything? Jason hoped he wasn’t glowing with guilt. That had to be the reason why they removed Micah’s photo from his computer; there must have been something encrypted in it. The rest of the jargon from the presentation went over his head. He tried to parse out a million different responses to what was going on and rehashed all his potential speeches for when they called him back to the boss’s room while the meeting faded out. When the people around him pushed out of their chairs, Jason followed.
“Robert Hench,” the IT director said. “Do you have some time to talk with us?”
Bobby shot Jason a forlorn look before he shrugged. It was only Bobby and Jason remaining in the conference room, and with Bobby now carted away into a semiprivate meeting area, Jason was left staring at the table. When Mr. Napier realized Jason was still inside, he furrowed his brows.
“Flores. Back at your desk. We need new budgets and account information reentered into the system.”
“Uh, yes, sir.” Jason walked back to his desk in a daze. So it’s not me. It’s not Pete. He let out a low laugh, trying to regroup. He’d finished nearly half of his reentry by the time Bobby came back.
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