Aidan stroked a finger down his cheek, then from the hinge of his jaw to the tip of his chin.
Caleb’s throat worked. He didn’t say anything.
Aidan leaned up and pressed his lips to Caleb’s. It wasn’t rough or aggressive, the way Caleb’s double had kissed, and it wasn’t showy, the way their public kisses had been. It was powerful in its own way. Gentle, slow, and ruinously thorough, it was a kiss that said I know what you want.
Caleb couldn’t argue with that. He couldn’t even remember his hands, hanging idle at his sides, until the kiss left them both breathless. Caleb came up for air and dove back in, bringing his hands up to clutch at Aidan’s back. Aidan pushed him down into the seat and got him drunk on whiskey-flavored kisses. It felt impossible. How could Aidan exude such power? How did they still have all their clothes on?
The lights of the city smeared in streaks outside the darkened windows until they dimmed into the sparser stars of suburban porches and windows, and Aidan didn’t stop. He reached for the hem of Caleb’s t-shirt, his fingers skimming the skin of his belly. Caleb raised his arms and let Aidan strip him.
His t-shirt floated down into the footwell. Distantly, it occurred to Caleb that he’d done that for women before, but he’d never asked any of them to do it to him. He wouldn’t have. It wouldn’t have fit.
Aidan slid his palm down Caleb’s chest, steady and inexorable, like he could tame the pulse within. But that wasn’t his goal. He dipped his fingers under the waistband of Caleb’s jeans and Caleb twitched helplessly beneath him. Then he drew his fingers over the hard ridge of Caleb's cock under his clothes. Fuck.
Like a passing flash of headlights through the window, Caleb suddenly saw all his previous experience in terms of the role he’d played. Over and over, he’d cast himself as a caricature of how men were supposed to behave around women.
Now it was only him and Aidan, and there was no script. He didn’t know how this would go. The freedom thrilled and terrified him, and he kissed Aidan for it, his fingers in Aidan’s hair, their noses bumping together. Aidan kept his hand between their bodies, the pressure a promise. Aidan undid his fly and Caleb obligingly lifted his hips so Aidan could tug his jeans and underwear down his thighs.
Aidan gave him a look that seared right into him, so hot it was almost painful. The instant between the look and the touch stretched taut until Caleb wanted to say do it, please do it, but the words caught. Waiting was good. It hit him while he was staring at Aidan, still dressed and making a leisurely study of Caleb’s nakedness. The restlessness he felt, the way he squirmed and shivered at every flick of Aidan’s eyelashes, that meant the best was yet to come. Caleb wanted this to last, and if that meant he had to lie here dripping and aching while Aidan watched, he’d do it.
When Aidan finally touched him, one hand wrapping around the base of his cock, the jolt of it nearly liquefied Caleb. He gasped. Then Aidan bent down.
“Holy fuck.” Caleb didn’t mean to speak in a reverent whisper; he didn’t mean to speak at all.
The wickedness of Aidan’s smile registered for only an instant before he dipped his head and slid the length of Caleb’s cock into his mouth.
Caleb had a lot more to say after that, but none of it was words. His breath stopped and started in a dozen little hitches and whines. He choked out praises and swallowed back pleas. It was a delicious kind of torment, being worked over by someone with such incomprehensible patience. Slick and slow, his lips locked around Caleb, Aidan gave him just enough to fuel his need for more, never enough to let him find release. Caleb’s hips jerked. He could thrust into Aidan's mouth. It would calm the urgency tightening in his body, but it would also speed them toward the end. So he held still.
Caleb rested a hand on Aidan’s head, not to hurry him along or exert control—Caleb was under no illusion as to who held all the power in this situation—but to feel the softness of his unruly black hair. It was a touch for touch’s sake. Aidan was giving him a gift. Caleb responded with as much active gratitude as he could, given that his thoughts were reduced to the diameter of Aidan’s mouth.
Aidan curved his free hand around Caleb’s hip. His grip was just firm enough that his fingers indented the soft flesh there, and that touch—warm, encouraging, authoritative—tipped Caleb over the edge. He came with a sigh, spilling down Aidan’s throat, fingers clenching in his hair.
Aidan swallowed and kissed the inside of his thigh. When he tilted his head back, his lips glinted with wetness. An unspoken challenge burned in his expression, so Caleb seized him by the shoulders and dragged him up into a faintly salty kiss. He didn’t care. Aidan’s tongue was in his mouth. What else was there to care about?
The car rolled to a stop. They’d arrived. A huff of laughter interrupted their kiss, and Caleb was glad he wasn’t the only one who’d forgotten where they were. He pulled his clothes back on and paid for the cab, leaving another stack of hundred-dollar notes on the back seat. Something about the money made the whole experience feel sordid, but Caleb did his best to focus on the rest of it: the warm after-sex languor, the glee of having gotten away with something filthy and thrilling.
The cab drove off as soon as they’d exited. Thank God none of the house’s other occupants would be awake to greet them at the door; the house itself was another question. As they stood at the edge of the long, looping driveway, far from the pool of yellow porch light illuminating the house’s absurdly grand entrance, Caleb nudged Aidan. “Maybe if we make out the whole time, the house won’t see your face.”
“Not that I don’t see the appeal of that plan, but I’m gonna have to breathe at some point, and I’d rather not go to prison for it.”
“Well,” Caleb said. “I guess we’d better use protection, then.”
Aidan laughed and pulled off his glasses to exchange them for the algorithm-disrupting pair he was carrying in his jacket pocket. Before he could put them on, Caleb put a hand on his arm.
“Hey, just… give me a second.”
“So we can stand here in the dark? I can think of better uses of our time.”
“Shh.” Caleb cupped his face with both hands, the skin velvet and warm to the touch, and mapped the arcing ridges of his cheekbones, softening and dipping under his eyes, then rising toward the peak of his nose. The disruptor could only change what he saw, not what he felt. “I want to know it’s you.”
He leaned in until their noses knocked together and their foreheads touched, until he could feel Aidan’s breath on his lips when he said, “You will.”
And then they were kissing again, deeply and at such length that when they came apart in the chilly night air, Aidan laughed and said, “Seriously, though, I do actually want to go inside.”
He slipped the disruptor on, and they made their way to the door. If not for the gigantic mansion looming over them, it would have felt just like sneaking back to one of the many apartments Caleb had shared, trying to bring his date home without waking his roommates. They tiptoed through the hallway, hand in hand like they were navigating the dark. They weren’t, since the house had lit their path, dimming the lights appropriately. Like so much technology, it was creepy and convenient at the same time.
Caleb forgot it as soon as the door clicked shut behind them. In the clean, climate-controlled air of the bedroom, the scent of sex clung to both of them, rich and heady, rousing some animal part of his brain. He pushed Aidan up against the door and kissed him again, reaching between them and gripping Aidan’s cock through his clothes.
“Can I,” Caleb started to ask, then interrupted himself to let his teeth graze the side of Aidan’s neck.
“Yeah,” Aidan said, pushing him to his knees with none of the careful deliberation he’d possessed in the car. He shrugged out of his jacket and tossed his shirt on the floor.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Caleb said. Aidan already knew that. There was no need to blurt it out. He blushed and glanced up.
Aidan carded his fingers through Caleb’s hair.
“I have faith you’ll figure it out.”
Aidan’s glasses were crooked, but the illusion filter was still in place. It must be set to mask changes in the wearer’s expression, since his cheeks were untouched by color, but a flush curled down his naked chest. High up his throat, a pulse beat rapidly under his skin, undisguised.
As Caleb undid Aidan’s fly and shoved his pants down, his pupils grew huge and dark, leaving only a slender ring of green iris visible, and then reset to normal. Uncanny.
Aidan’s body, at least, wasn’t hiding anything. His cock was uncircumcised, hard and thick, its based surrounded by a nest of wiry black hair. Caleb had seen it before, but not like this.
It had never occurred to him that he wanted to look. That struck him as absurd now. He licked his lips. “I’ve wasted a lot of time in my life.”
Aidan choked on a laugh, and then said, “Well, this isn’t going to take long.”
Caleb wet his palm, dragging his tongue along it to make sure, and then took hold of Aidan’s cock.
“You liked it?” Arguably the answer was right in front of him. But he wanted to hear Aidan say it. Had that been different or special for Aidan? Maybe other people were having wildly transcendent sex all the time and Caleb had just never known it could be that way. “What we did in the car, I mean. You liked it?”
Aidan exhaled roughly as Caleb stroked him. “Yes.”
“I liked it too,” Caleb said. That didn’t come anywhere close to how he really felt. He couldn’t have come up with other words, not while he was gliding his hand back and forth, reveling in every tiny response he elicited: a shiver here, a hitch in breath there. His pale, slender body concealed nothing, and Caleb couldn’t look away. Everything in Aidan that he usually thought of as sharp was rendered delicate, fragile, vulnerable. He was so beautiful. Caleb should have noticed before.
With great care, he leaned forward and took Aidan’s cock into his mouth. It was heavy against his tongue. His first tentative, exploratory lick made Aidan groan and drop his head back against the door. Heat raced over Caleb’s skin. He’d wanted this and hadn’t understood how much.
Caleb moved, using his hand and his mouth at once, taking his cues from the rhythm of Aidan’s hips. Aidan’s hand fisted in his hair and Caleb took him as deep as he could.
Aidan’s orgasm spurted against his tongue, sudden and hot. He trembled, breathing hard, but made almost no sound.
Caleb swallowed, wiped his hand over his mouth, and leaned his head against Aidan’s thigh. Then Aidan pulled him up and kissed him, and the two of them stumbled into bed, shedding their remaining shoes and clothes along the way.
Aidan lay behind him, stroking his back, his fingertips leaving four trails of sensation in their wake. Something about the act—sensual, freely given—was almost more intimate than the sex. Caleb closed his eyes and melted into the mattress. He’d expected the sex to be fun, and it had been. He hadn’t expected to feel cherished. This tenderness didn’t fit into what Aidan had offered him, a few days of low-key fooling around in private, but maybe Aidan was like this with everyone. It must be great to be in a real relationship with him.
Caleb could feel his breathing and his thoughts slow down with sleep, drawn into the languid rhythm of Aidan’s hand.
The strangest part wasn’t that he’d given another man an orgasm, but that the man in question was Aidan. And there’d been so much that Caleb hadn’t known about him. It was like discovering a new room in the house he’d always lived in.
15
Solidarity
His idiot science-fiction twin had robbed him. Some cash and his tablet, nothing too important. There was more cash and an unloaded CX-93 locked in the bottom drawer of his desk, but neither the gun nor its ammunition had been touched. Caleb would bet all that stolen cash and more that his alternate self didn’t know how to shoot.
He didn’t know how to cover his tracks, that was for sure. The door log didn’t show any new entries, which meant he’d used the Nowhere, at least. But A Tale of Two Cities had been lying face-down, open to the last page he’d read, and now it was closed, its black-and-gold cover face-up and as good as a signature. Someone who had the inclination and the time to flip through his book mid-robbery, but not pick the lock on the desk drawer in search of better loot. An idiot.
More of an annoyance than a real crime, the robbery still pissed him off. And those people on the other side, they’d fucked with him first. Going through that rift they’d ripped open had made his shakes worse. And they’d stolen the telekinetic from his cell. Spying was justified. Retrieving his stuff and scaring the shit out of his dumb twin would be a bonus.
So he’d crossed over. It had taken him days to get any traction. His first few visits to that other reality, his double hadn’t been anywhere in sight. A search of his room—undetectable, because he was fucking good at his job—had produced the stolen tablet, abandoned now as if it was worthless, which it was, over here.
He’d spied on the other occupants of the asteroid, which they called Facility 17, enough to learn their names and jobs and a lot of other shit he didn’t care about. For people who were destroying space-time, either accidentally or on purpose, they were boring. There were a couple of hushed, concerned conversations about the rift, but nobody took action. They mostly talked about someone named Quint, a name that meant nothing to Caleb. They didn’t like this Quint, and Caleb, not liking them, figured the enemy of his enemy was a useful person to know. He wasn’t stupid enough to make friends.
A tablet for a tablet, then. Stealth came naturally to him after years of practice, but he hardly needed it to steal a tablet from these people. Living on an asteroid, they weren’t accustomed to worrying about petty theft, and they left their belongings in the common room all the time.
His twin’s room was empty, the mattress that had been on the floor removed to somewhere else. His twin and the scrawny guy who’d been sleeping in here had left, and their absence felt permanent. They’d obviously done something down on the surface of his world, since they’d stolen cash, although not enough to get by for long. That meant they’d probably crossed back over.
On his newly stolen tablet, Caleb attempted a search: Oswin Lewis Quint. The same name he kept hearing in whispers over here.
At first, there was no signal, which struck him as unlikely. This was a high-tech facility in space; even if something went wrong with the array of antennae, they wouldn’t leave themselves without communications for long. A broken connection might be the result of tampering. If the problem was physical, he was fucked. He wasn’t equipped to go outside and fix the array himself.
Luckily, it wasn’t physical. It still took him forty-five goddamn minutes to hack his way around it. This search had better be worth it.
Quint was rich as fuck in this reality, but his double was nobody. That meant Caleb’s double was trying to run a scam. Interesting. He hadn’t struck Caleb as the type. Too trusting. Too dumb.
There were a lot of videos in his search results. The one with the most views was behind a paywall, but whoever owned this tablet had a credit card stored in its memory, so Caleb charged it to them and watched, of all things, a psychic.
Caleb had once been sliced open in a fight and had to stuff a gleaming, bloody handful of guts back into the wound before he could jump back to Heath and have her patch him up. That hadn’t fazed him. It was the job.
This video on the other hand… He didn’t give a damn about Quint, or telling the truth, or love, or much of anything, but there was something disgusting about it.
His own face, looking like that, and it wasn’t even real.
Caleb dredged up a reluctant admiration for his double’s skill. He’d thought the other Caleb was a naive idiot, but instead, the man was so slick at lying that it made his skin crawl. Christ.
Caleb didn’t want anything to do with that. His double wreaking havoc on a stranger’s reputation wasn’t his problem. The whole fucking multiverse was falling apart, and
more importantly, so was he. When it came to the shakes, no amount of gritting his teeth and holding his guts in could save him. He didn’t have time to fuck around.
The first time he’d encountered Aidan, Aidan had said something about not being a runner anymore. Either these people had a way to fix the multiverse, and possibly him, or they didn’t. Caleb erased his browsing, wiped the tablet down, and stole back into the common room to return it to where he’d found it.
He was about to jump when he heard shouting in the hallway.
“You can’t keep me here!”
“Seems like I can.”
Caleb didn’t recognize the first voice—male, imperious—but the second voice belonged to the short, purple-haired guy, Kit, one of the few people at the facility he hadn’t immediately known. He was a born runner and had no double.
Kit continued, his tone nasty, “Or maybe you’d prefer I take you elsewhere? There’s a whole lot of space out there, if you’re feeling cooped up in here.”
“One injection of suppressant and you’ll never touch the Nowhere again,” the other man said, quiet and icy. “You’ll be just as stuck as me. Then we’ll see how brave you are.”
An injection that could un-make runners. Holy shit. Aidan had been telling the truth. These people had a cure for the shakes and they were using it to threaten each other. Caleb risked a peek into the hallway and was confronted with a face from the video he’d just watched, but redder and more disheveled. Oswin Lewis Quint.
“Uh-huh,” Kit said, affecting nonchalance. The mention of the injection had scared him. That must mean it worked. “Good luck with that. We destroyed it all. Shot it right out the airlock with the rest of our trash. I’d be happy to demonstrate.”
Caleb had to get his hands on that suppressant. Quint knew about it. He waited for the sound of their bickering to recede down the hallway, marking which way they went, and then crept after them. When Kit came back from locking Quint into his room, Caleb ducked into a storage closet only to discover a makeshift surveillance room. One of the screens showed the telekinetic lying motionless in an empty room and another showed Quint pacing a sparsely furnished bedroom. The telekinetic—Lange—was of interest to Heath, but she’d want a cure for the shakes just as much as he did.
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