“The classes…we had a nun, and she was actually pretty nice. But then she was gone. And the classes were gone. And they called them focus groups instead.”
Stefan’s chair creaked as he resettled his bulk in it. “How devastated would you be if I suggested that not only were you traumatized by the meds, and the invasion of privacy, and the restriction of your activities—but you also miss what Heliotrope Station might have been, if the management never changed over?”
“They would have folded. Krimski told me as much, when I met him.”
Stefan raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. “Did he?”
“I don’t think I’m mourning what Camp Hell might have been. I think it’s more that I’m baffled that I went in there voluntarily. I mean, no one twisted my arm. Right?”
“We were all there voluntarily. If you’ve been telling yourself differently, it’s probably a harmless little fantasy that’s been helping you deal with your experience.”
“Now you’re making it sound like maybe I am crazy.”
“We don’t use the word crazy around here. We prefer coping mechanism.”
I grabbed a tissue from a holder next to the hypnosis couch, which had probably been placed there for the suburban ladies who were moved to tears by the experiences of their regressions, and I used it to wipe off my forehead and upper lip. I wondered how coherent I’d been when I was reliving the experience of Stefan telling me about what he’d done to Movie Mike. And I suspected that Stefan was more interested in my regressions than he’d been letting on. How could he not be? He played a starring role in the tawdriest scenes.
I asked him, “What did Krimski say to you the first time you got called into his office?”
Stefan twirled his chin hairs and his gaze went far away. “No smoking. No fraternization. And that they’d finally start taking advantage of the section in our intake papers that said we’d consented to be human guinea pigs. I think I got hung up on the no-sex, no-smoking part of the lecture and didn’t realize how bad everything else would actually get.”
“And he didn’t say anything about your performance.”
“Why would he?”
I shrugged. I’m sure Stefan felt my anxiety, but its causes were so poorly thought-out that I don’t think either of us could have articulated what I was struggling with.
“Did you ever try anything with him?” I asked. “You know, like Boo-Hoo-You?” I think that the other residents suspected one of the high-level empaths was behind the unexplained bursts of tears that punctuated our days, at least some of the time, but I don’t think they ever pinpointed Stefan. Not definitively.
“Believe you me, I would’ve done all that, and worse. Remember, I never got a read on him. He had an emotional suit of armor—kind of like Jacob.”
Time stopped for a second. I tried to process. But it was like eating pudding with chopsticks. “What?”
“What do you call them, Stiffies? That’s what Krimski felt like.”
“Stiffs,” I said, too distracted to bother to make fun of his Freudian slip. “Seriously, you couldn’t read Jacob?”
“You didn’t know that?”
I wiped my face with the tissue, which was disintegrating in my hand. “How would I know? I don’t read live people, only dead ones.”
“When I push hard enough with my talent, other people give. But not Krimski. Never Krimski.”
Or Jacob. Holy shit. Stiffs were supposed to balance Psychs, but as far as I knew, everyone just saw them as being psychically neutral. Heck, NP, or non-psychic, was an interchangeable term for Stiff—old-fashioned, but more politically correct. They were a neutral gray in a world of black and white.
But what if they weren’t really gray? What if they were silver?
And there wasn’t any way to test it…because a test would bounce right off a genuine Stiff.
“Where are you right now?” Stefan asked.
“I’m here. I’m just thinking.”
“Okay. Let’s talk about it. That’s what you’re paying me for.”
I studied Stefan’s face. I’d been through hell and back with him, but he’d had thousands of experiences since then, too. He was Steven Russeau now. And whatever new idea my inadequate brain was trying to piece together, it seemed too personal to drag out, half-formed and naked, and show him.
“I’m gonna go home,” I said. I glanced at my watch. It was after seven. I could be home by eight if I didn’t run into a traffic snag. “Jacob and me…things have been kinda…bumpy…lately. I really want to see him.”
Stefan gave a careless shrug. “I don’t know how you do the whole relationship thing. It’s so complicated, so much work. I’d much rather keep things casual. It’s more fun to just date.”
I glanced back at the hypnosis couch as I stood. Luckily, my sportcoat had stopped me from leaving a giant sweat mark behind. “What about Fernando? Don’t you love him?”
“We have a good time together. It doesn’t mean I want to marry him.”
On my way to the elevator I thought about Stefan’s attitude. Or more accurately, what it said about me, that his unwillingness to get involved with someone made me sad. I flipped open my phone and hit a memory dial.
“Sticks and Stones.”
“Hey, it’s me. Listen, I was just wondering, as an empath, could you… you know. Could you get a read from Jacob?”
“Newsflash, I’m working here.”
Okay, so it was pretty tacky of me to ask Jacob’s last boyfriend how he felt psychically. But who else could I ask? “I mean, as a Stiff, was he different from other people? Was he harder to read sometimes?”
“I bet you’re trying to pull something over on him. Don’t drag me into the middle of it. Honesty is the best policy, sappy but true.”
“No, nothing like that.” The elevator door opened. I stepped on, and my phone connection got staticky. “I was just wondering if he felt different.”
“Well, sure he does. All those hours in the gym pay off.”
I almost said “Jesus,” but then I remembered him saying I was disrespectful, and I turned it into a brief sigh. “You know what, never mind. I’m sorry I asked.”
“Hasta la vista,” he said, and hung up.
I stepped off the elevator into the lobby, and saw the plate glass windows were dark. There was a handful of people wandering inside against the crappy weather, some of them poking at their PDAs, some of them on the phone. When one figure in black peeled itself off the wall and came at me, I nearly reached for my weapon, figuring it for the FPMP. But it wasn’t Officer “Andy.” It was Jacob.
“Jesus, you scared the shit—”
He grabbed me by the shoulders and stared into my eyes. “Are you okay? You’re soaked.”
“Yeah, I’m…” the feel of his hands, even through my overcoat, made me giddy with relief. I felt my whole body relax. And I thought about my internal faucet, my protective barrier, and I wondered if my proximity to Jacob made it stronger. “I’m sick of this. I want to be able to stop worrying. It’s like we’re always worried about something—like we’re always looking around to see who’s watching us.”
Even in the lobby of Stefan’s building we were the center of attention, whether or not anyone else was spying for the FPMP. Because everyone else was a conservative businessman, and none of them were currently engaged in a big, gay, personal melodrama.
Jacob slid his hand up my shoulder and cradled my cheek. So intimate, so public. And I leaned into his touch, even turned my head to brush a kiss across the inside of his wrist.
“Let’s go somewhere,” he said.
“Where?”
“Anywhere. It doesn’t matter. At least for tonight. Let’s just drive.”
-TWENTY TWO-
“Just driving” would have been a heck of a lot nicer in Jacob’s roomy Crown Victoria. But he’d taken a cab downtown, so he tilted up my steering wheel, pushed my seat back as far as it would go, and made do. We hopped on the expressway and drove. Jaco
b was at the wheel. I stared out the passenger window.
We headed south, through good neighborhoods and bad ones, then good ones again. In about an hour, we crossed the border to Indiana, where the gas prices dropped by a dime, and old signs for fireworks, half-covered by snow, periodically appeared alongside the road.
Jacob chose a small motel at random and paid for a room with cash. The desk clerk and the other clientele were all black, but although they took a good long look at us, a couple of gay white guys clearly out of their element, they didn’t seem inclined to give us any hassle.
I peeled off my overcoat, jacket and holster, and threw them on the bed. “I’m remembering so much, but I can’t make sense out of it. It’s too much. All at the same time. All jumbled up. And what sucks is that I’m not even so sure what I’m freaking out about anymore.”
“Seeing you like this? It kills me. I swear, it’s like somebody sticks a knife in my gut and gives it a good, hard twist.”
“Seeing me like what?”
“Is it possible for you to remember these things without completely reliving them? It seems like you’re doing everything the hard way. I wish you could go easy on yourself, just for once.”
I stripped off my shirt. It was rank. I threw it on the floor, went into the bathroom, and ran the water. I unwrapped one of those little bars of soap. My skin was blotchy across the stomach, where I hadn’t rinsed off the High John the Conqueror well enough and my skin had reacted poorly to it.
Jacob came over and leaned against the doorway with his arms crossed. He had done that the day I met him in Maurice’s basement, while I was trying to swallow a pill that was struck on my tongue. See, I was able to have a pleasant memory. And maybe not everything that happened in a basement was traumatic. Not always.
I wasn’t eager to put my clothes back on until they’d had a trip to the cleaners, so while I took a shower, Jacob ran out and got me some sweats from one of the half-dozen strip malls we’d passed. I noted a smaller shopping bag inside the large one that held a new bottle of lube, too. It was reassuring to know that Jacob thought lube might come into play that night, given the roller coaster ride that our life had turned into.
We stretched out side by side in the strange bed with sheets that smelled like bleach, and we stared at each other in the dim, yellow light of the bedside lamp.
“Don’t be mad at me for protecting our house.” Jacob brushed a strand of hair off my forehead. “I just want us to be safe. I want us to be happy.”
“I’m not mad.” He did make me feel safe. And happy. Just looking at him made me feel like my heart was so big that my body couldn’t contain it. He was decisive, and Type A, and I had known that from the beginning. That was what I liked about him.
I covered his hand with mine, and he leaned in for a slow, easy kiss. When I opened my eyes afterward, he was watching me. “You need to know who’s sending those faxes. And I think Doctor Chance is the one who can tell you.”
I thought about spotting Sanchez, dead, in the corner of his office. And how Krimski knew that I’d spotted him. “Yeah? What if the whole reason they brought me in was because they were testing me to see if I could find her?”
“What if it was? They probably think she’s gone now, because Richie performed the ceremony on that repeater.”
Maybe so. He’d said it was sudden, violent. A gunshot—I remembered he’d said gunshot, not suicide, and he didn’t name a gender. They could’ve thought he meant Chance.
Jacob rolled me onto my back and straddled my hips. He sank his elbows into the hard, unfamiliar mattress on either side of my head, cupped his chin in hands, and stared down at me. Breathing was a challenge, with all his weight on me like that. And I felt good. Safe.
“Do you want to keep going?” I asked him. “Just drive—anywhere? I’ve got money.”
His dark eyes softened, and a wistful smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “I would, if I thought it would work. I like hearing you say it, though.”
“Like” being Jacob’s shorthand for the growing bulge pressing into my hipbone. “So if you won’t let me run away with you…why are we here?”
Jacob brushed my hair back again, then kissed my temple, my eyebrow. “Everything in our house reminds me of the FPMP. All of our stuff is a potential hiding place for a bug. I just wanted to be alone with you, only you, even if it was for a single night.”
I slipped my arms around his back and pressed him against me tighter. He felt even bigger than usual, as if he’d been working out his frustration about the unrelenting surveillance with extra bench presses. “Then we’ll have to make a choice.” I really never expected me to be the one to say it. “Whether we live with the FPMP watching us and accept that there isn’t shit we can do about it, or we cut the cords, and we go.”
Jacob traced his finger along the top of my ear, and I shivered. “Where would we go?” he asked.
I drew a blank. Because mostly I was thinking that I could totally feel the shape of his cock. And I wondered if I should grind myself against it. “France?”
Jacob’s mouth brushed mine. His goatee tickled my chin. “I don’t speak French.”
Neither did I. “Mexico?”
“I doubt we’d be any better off. They have their own brand of corruption in Mexico.”
Jacob shifted, and grunted when my stiffening cock slid into place beside his, bulge against bulge. I gave in to my urge to hump him, and his breath hissed in.
“I’ve been thinking about Crash,” I said. Actually, I’d been thinking of something Stefan said, but it was all connected.
Jacob rolled off me and pulled me against him, chest to chest, with my leg locked between his. “Okay.”
“Now that you’re not mad at each other anymore, it’s obvious that you’re close. Good friends. And even though I want to smack him sometimes—really hard—I think I can say the same for him and me. And I’m sure we’d have a blast if we took him to bed with us.”
I trailed off to gather my thoughts, lapsing into silence long enough that Jacob had to prompt me. “But…?”
But I wasn’t in it for the “fun.” At least not the way Stefan had talked about it, him and Fernando. “Having a three-way with Crash is something I would’ve done in a heartbeat when I was younger. And I’m figuring out that I don’t really like myself, not the way I was back then. Especially seeing it through my eyes…now. I’m not that guy anymore. And I don’t want to act like him.”
“I’m sure Crash will be devastated. And then he’ll find a dozen other men who’ll be more than happy to take his mind off us.”
“A dozen? Seriously?” I twitched my hips, and our hard-ons rubbed. “You think they’ll be hot?”
Jacob’s mouth covered mine, and I felt him smile. “There’s hot, and then there’s hot.”
I turned my head aside so I didn’t laugh directly into his mouth. “Yeah, right.”
He trailed his fingertip over my lower lip, down my chin. “What can I say? I’m a sucker for blue eyes.”
Jacob took advantage of the moment I was completely blown away by the notion that he was after anything other than my Psych talents. He snuck a hand down the front of my sweatpants, and then the waistband of my new boxers, which were still sharply creased from the package. It seemed like everything here was squeaky clean and new, or at least freshly-scrubbed. What a nice change.
Jacob gripped my cock loosely, and stroked the underside of the head with his thumb. My cock swelled until it was good and stiff. He nuzzled my wet hair out of my ear, then teased me with his tongue, in and out, like a preview of what my ass could expect.
I arched into his touch. I realized I’d been holding my breath, and sucked in air in one big, loud gasp. He moaned in my ear, and pressed his stiffening cock against my hipbone. I wedged my hand in between us and grabbed his balls, right through his jeans. I caressed them and he flexed into my hand.
“I noticed you bought something besides the clothes,” I said.
�
��It’s amazing what you can find at SaverPlus these days.” He gripped me harder and started stroking. I used to think Jacob squeezed just a little too much when he handled my cock. But now my inner masochist was totally into it.
“So are you gonna just beat me off, or do you plan to break in the new lube?”
“That’s what you want?” he said, in his low, hot porno-voice. His nuts shifted in my hand. I traced my thumb over the root of his shaft. He felt ready to bust out of his jeans.
“Yeah.”
He tongued my ear again, hot and wet. “Tell me.”
Damn it all, did I have to? I sounded like a moron in bed. But I was still loopy from the blue-eyed comment, so I gave it a shot. “Grease up that thick, hard meat of yours and fuck me with it.”
Jacob’s breath caught. “Suck it first,” he whispered. Needy. Hot.
I undid his jeans and peeled them open. His cock was ruddy and hard, thick with veins. I did my first slow lick right up the middle with the flat of my tongue. My mouth filled with salty cock-taste. I curled my tongue over the head and wet it with my spit, letting Jacob feel the heat and wetness, but not sucking, not yet.
Jacob held onto my head two-handed, fingers in my hair, pressed against my scalp. I let my lips drag against the head while I licked it all over, down one side, back up, and down the other. I eased up to the slit, and stroked the saltiness out with the very tip of my tongue. Jacob’s fingers tightened on my scalp, and he shuddered.
I wrapped my lips around the head, and Jacob groaned. He wanted to thrust, I could tell, but instead he held himself still. He probably wanted to jam my face down over the whole massive girth of it. I reached into my new sweats and gave myself a few quick pulls at the thought of it.
One inch, then another. I worked my way down slowly, until my jaw was stretched to capacity, and I felt the tickle of his pubes on my lips. And then I started to suck.
Jacob gave a moan that probably carried back to the motel office, and his fingers clenched in my hair. “So good,” he said, the words nearly lost in all the sexy noises.
PsyCop 5: Camp Hell Page 18