by Anne Calhoun
“And it might as well be you?” she said.
He gave her a short nod that wasn’t an answer.
“What would this involve?”
How did you explain water when you were a fish? He settled on, “What to do. What to expect. How to act. How to protect yourself.”
A moment’s silence passed, then she said, quite gently, “Excuse me, please.”
He stepped to the side, allowing her to walk through the door without sidling past him. She picked up her purse from the dinette table. “See you next week,” she said, opening the door.
In the silence that followed, still ringing with Rachel’s helpless cries, he wondered what would happen when she’d learned everything he had to teach.
Chapter Nine
Nearing midnight on Saturday Ben stood outside No Limits, watching the scene. He’d spent enough time at a place where sex was all but for sale, and he’d learned to read the clothes, the bodies, the messages. Intention. Except for a few oddballs, everyone who came to No Limits had the same reason for making the drive. Party. Get drunk, get laid. Have a good time. He knew there were people who stayed home, cooked gourmet meals, and played Scrabble on a Saturday night, his passionately monogamous brother and Chris among them, but in Ben’s world, this was the norm.
Tonight he watched it through new eyes, picking up tips to offer Rachel. Wear a short skirt or a halter top that exposed the soft bumps of her spine, or better yet, the black leather corset and skin-tight pants one of the women waiting in line wore. Her pink hair was cropped, spiky around ears and nape, giving her the appearance of a dominatrix anime elf. She turned and looked right at Ben, and with a shock he realized he’d gone home with her three, no four, months ago. Her hair had been jet black then, worn sleek and short, making her a dead ringer for Carrie-Anne Moss in the Matrix movies. He’d always had a thing for Trinity. She lifted an eyebrow at him in greeting, then went back to her phone.
The rules weren’t complicated, but he’d never really thought about how much of his sex life depended on the woman going along with them, thereby making things so much easier for everyone involved. No harm, no foul in the full-contact sport of hookup sex, but sleeping with Rachel brought them into stark relief
“Juliette asked about you last weekend,” Steve said.
Ben said nothing.
“Who you were seeing, or at least fucking. Was it serious? That kind of thing. I told her I had no idea. Because I don’t. Three years we’ve been standing outside the club twelve hours a weekend and I can’t name a single girl you’ve dated.”
Because he didn’t date. “You complaining?”
“Just stating a fact. Juliette said she liked the strong, silent type, so you’re welcome.”
Ben stayed focused on the line. “Who helped her get over the disappointment?”
“No one,” Steve said.
Ben cut him a look.
“No lie,” Steve said. “I offered, Carl offered, but she stayed at Tina’s. Slept on the couch.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I fucked Tina and Juliette was asleep on the couch when I left.”
“You slept with Tina after Juliette turned you down?” Ben said.
“She said she had a condom in her bedroom with my name on it.”
“Jesus Christ,” Ben said. He tried to imagine Rachel announcing she had a condom with his name on it, and failed. “You were with the State Patrol, right?”
“Gave back four years in pension when I left,” Steve confirmed.
“Ever catch a call out at Elysian Fields?”
“Yeah,” Steve said without looking up from his phone.
“And?”
Steve transferred his attention from his phone to the line. “What are we calling a group of like-minded isolationists these days? A cult? A commune? A community? They’ve withdrawn from the sinful world. Thirty years ago a bunch of families bought land together and started farming. Subsistence stuff, mostly. Eventually the world caught up with them and got interested in organic meat, milk, products like that. They homeschool the kids, who tend to marry other kids from similar communities in the South. Big extended families. Women dress in those long skirts and long-sleeved shirts, or ugly dresses. Men run the households, the Church, the businesses. Women cook and clean and do chores and have babies. Lots and lots and lots of babies. I’ve never seen so many kids in one place in my life.” He looked back at his phone. “Calls were petty theft, mostly. Vandalism. Kids from the local school used to spray-paint gigantic cocks on the barns. That kind of thing.”
“Abuse? Drugs? Drinking?”
“Sure on the drugs and drinking, but usually kids and they usually wanted to handle it internally. Abuse . . .” He looked at Ben. “Physical, probably. Nothing we got called on or saw when we were there. Emotional and mental? Depends on whether you call indoctrinating people with a systemic theology that justifies your position in the world and sending your kids to special camps for extra discipline abuse. Why?”
“The woman from the auction used to live there.”
Steve whistled. “She got out?”
“What do you mean?”
“Those women, they’re under the men’s thumbs. No real high school, no college. No jobs except as relates to the farm. They’re raised to be obedient wives and mothers. Most of them don’t have access to money. They don’t talk back, they don’t question the men.”
She’d gotten out. People assumed virgin meant weak, naïve, insecure, even ashamed. Not Rachel. She was aware, thinking about what she did and why she did it, and strong enough to ask questions, plan, execute a course of action that left her alone in the world. She’d be easy to teach, easy to toughen up and prepare for casual sex in the modern world.
The thought process left him edgy.
His phone rang. He pulled it from his cargo pants pocket; his heart rate shot up when the number for dispatch flashed on the screen. “Harris.”
The dispatcher, her voice several notches higher than usual, read off an address. “I’m ten minutes away,” Ben told her before hanging up.
Steve knew what the call meant. “I’ve got this. Go.”
Ben sprinted for his truck. Flashing lights guided him to the scene from blocks away. He parked at the rendezvous point and slid out of his truck. In front of him the rest of the SWAT team pulled on gear, the special vest and flame-resistant clothing, his brain tuning out everything else as the lieutenant ran down the situation.
A simple service of an eviction notice had turned into a hostage situation when the deputy surprised a felon with outstanding warrants. The deputy took a bullet through the shoulder before stumbling out of the house and calling it in. Hostage negotiator, a K-9 unit, and about five dozen other LEOs were on scene.
“We’ve cleared the surrounding houses, secured the neighborhood. The negotiator’s trying to talk them into letting the female hostage out, but they’re not listening.” Lieutenant Jake Williams flattened a roughly drawn diagram of the house used in the earlier raid and directed his team to their positions. “Montgomery, Harris. Here, here,” he said, pointing with one thick finger.
His task in this was a simple one. Wait for the signal to rake and break, then secure his room. In this case, he’d break the window into the back bedroom and order anyone inside to lie on the floor, hands palm-up, and essentially hold them at gunpoint until other officers arrived to handcuff them. Ben pulled down his mask, shouldered his rifle, and followed Montgomery through the neighboring house’s side yard. They took up position and waited. Hours passed as the hostage negotiator tried to get the woman out of the picture. He could hear her crying until a loud slap silenced her. He clenched his teeth, exhaled slowly through his nose to calm his heart rate and breathing, and waited.
Inhale, exhale. Listen to the radio traffic coming throu
gh his hands-free headset. Inhale, exhale. Stay absolutely alert but conserve strength and energy. Inhale, exhale. After three hours of negotiation the woman was allowed to leave. Based on the sounds—a door opening, get the fuck out, bitch, and the cry and thuds of someone falling down a set of stairs—the hostage had been summarily shoved out the front door and into the waiting arms of the officers outside.
Hold your positions.
Once things escalated this far there was no backing down. Clouds cast the eastern sky in dull gray when the order to take the door came. The loud bang of a concussion grenade followed by what sounded like a hail of gunfire worthy of a full-on military assault. He’d broken the window on the back bedroom, and Montgomery was moving up the back porch when the back door flew open and caught him full in the face. Despite considerable forward momentum Montgomery slammed back into the rickety railing, which shattered under his weight, sending him tumbling onto the packed dirt at Ben’s feet.
The suspect took the stairs in a flying leap and sprinted for the neighbor’s yard. Ben took off after him, adrenaline fueling his muscles. Breath coming in short bursts, he caught the suspect in a flying tackle that took them both to the ground. Ben took a punch before he jammed his knee in the guy’s kidney and wrenched his arm high enough up behind his back to make him shriek like a little girl.
Other officers pounded up behind him. Seconds later the suspect was spread-eagled, one knee in his lower back, another between his shoulder blades with his hand helpfully forcing his face into the dirt while Ben finished cuffing him. Two guys hauled him up as Ben swiped at his bleeding nose with the back of his hand.
“Nice tackle. What position did you play again?” one of the other officers asked Ben.
“Linebacker,” Ben said, eyeing the suspect.
“Hear that, asshole?” the officer said cheerfully. “It’s your lucky day. A former Texas linebacker just took you down.”
“Motherfucker,” the guy spat at Ben.
Ben flashed him a grin made gory by the blood trickling from his nose. “Work on your wind in prison. You’re slow.”
“Fuck you.”
They hauled him away. Ben rounded the corner of the house where an EMT tried to hustle him to an ambulance. He ignored her until Williams pointed at the back of the bus.
Inside, Montgomery swore low and vicious while an EMT manipulated his wrist. Ben winced as another EMT pressed her thumbs to either side of his nose. “It’s not broken,” she said, then broke out the alcohol wipes to clean up the blood.
“Any of that his?” his lieutenant asked.
“No, sir,” Ben said. “He caught me with an elbow when I took him down.”
Williams watched the EMT wipe blood off Ben’s face for a second, then said, “Nice tackle. You hear me calling you off?”
Ben looked at him. “No, sir.”
“That’s why we have Hera,” he said, pointing to Ryan Sanchez, the team’s K-9 handler, and Hera, his Belgian Malinois. Hera looked pissed. Ben made a mental note to give her a wide berth when he left. “When they run we send Hera after the bad guys. She hauls them down, makes them piss in their pants, then we arrest them.”
He hadn’t heard a thing after Montgomery landed in a heap at his feet. Not a thing except his own breathing. “Yes, sir,” he said.
“Fuck it all, Harris!”
The EMT had been on enough calls to know when to make herself scarce. She packed cotton up Ben’s nostrils, handed him an ice pack, and found something else to do.
Williams got right in Ben’s face. “Yes sir, yes sir, yes sir. That’s what your patrol lieutenant and the captain said you repeated like some kind of fucking jacked-up parrot after the gas station incident. You think this kind of stunt is why we wanted you on SWAT? It’s not. We took you despite this, because your speed and strength beat out the other candidates. What you did at the gas station almost, almost”—Williams held up his surprisingly elegant fingers a millimeter apart—“got you booted off the team. You hear me?”
Ben knew better than to say anything other than, “Yes, sir.”
“You’ve got the physical skills of a world-class athlete and the judgment of a sixteen-year-old kid.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Stop saying that, Harris.” Williams studied him for a long, painful moment. “You got someone to go home to? A girlfriend? Wife?”
Prudently, Ben just shook his head.
“Just someone you call when you want to lose all of this in a warm body.”
It wasn’t a question, so he shrugged.
His lieutenant gave an impatient grunt. “Someone regular? The same warm body? Or just a list of phone numbers you got at that bar where you work?”
Ben cracked the ice pack against the side of the bus to activate it. “You ordering me to get a girlfriend, Lieutenant?”
“I’m making a suggestion. You’re eight years into the job. As far as I can tell, you’ve got nothing but the job. You need a reason to go home in one piece at the end of the day. We’ve got too much money invested in you for you to burn out in a year.”
“Sir,” Ben said, an acknowledgment that his commanding officer had spoken, nothing more.
“I mean it, Harris.” The lieutenant put his finger too close to Ben’s aching face for comfort. “Get a hobby. Get a dog. Do something. We all want to catch bad guys, but if I get any more calls from your sergeant about you doing stupid shit because you’re so adrenaline-jacked you don’t think straight, we’re going to have words.”
• • •
Ben extracted the packed cotton from his nose somewhere in the second hour of paperwork, finished up around ten, then hauled himself home to shower. Only when he saw his neighbors leaving dressed for church did he remember Rachel would arrive at his apartment at eleven. At least he didn’t have to text anyone to help him work off the adrenaline rush. Rachel would show up in thirty minutes with nothing more on her mind than sex.
He left his filthy clothes on the bathroom floor, swallowed Tylenol for the dull ache threatening his shoulder and the throbbing across the bridge of his nose, and stepped into the shower. As the water coursed over his face and shoulders, flashes of the night came back to him. The call. Suiting up, breaking the glass, seeing Montgomery go ass over teakettle through the railing. That undeniable thrill of taking off after a felon. The impact of his body against the runner’s, their bodies against the ground. Life was a full-contact sport, and sex was a part of life. Didn’t need anything but the job.
There was an inevitable reaction to the stress of the job. Warm water trickling over his cock only heightened the reaction. He braced both arms on the wall under the showerhead and let his brain work over all the possibilities for a morning with Rachel. Last time he’d made her ask for what she wanted. This time she’d see how she dealt with a man with one thing on his mind.
When he saw her little dented Focus pull into the parking lot, he unlocked the door, then sat on the arm of his sofa. She pushed the door open. Her eyes widened when she got a good look at his face, but she closed and locked the door before dropping her purse and crossing to stand in front of him.
“What on earth?” she asked.
“SWAT got called out,” he said.
“I’d hate to see the other guy,” she quipped. “I can come back another time.”
“You’re exactly what I need.” He didn’t say anything. He just sat there, a bottle of water dangling between his knees while Rachel studied him with those unreadable whiskey eyes. When her gaze became too much he leaned forward, wrapped one arm around her waist, and hoisted her over his shoulder. In the bedroom he knee-walked to the center of the bed, then put her down with her back to the plain wood headboard. He straddled her legs, then worked his fingers into her hair, pulling out pin after pin until he lost count and the sleek mass streamed down over her shoulders and brush
ed her cheeks. “I want you to use your mouth on me.”
She didn’t move or react in any way, and he wondered if he’d just thought the words, not actually voiced them into the sunlight filtering through his blinds. He was prepared to explain himself, to justify the demand by saying guys liked it, they’d expect her to know what she was doing. But without moving she reached for his hand and lifted it to her mouth. Her soft, hot breath on his abraded knuckles sent his nerve endings into high alert.
That wasn’t what I meant, but oh, fuck that’s hot . . .
“What happened?” she asked before she flicked her tongue into the sensitive skin between his fingers.
“He ran,” he said. “Must have scraped my knuckles when I tackled him.”
She turned his hand and kissed the inside of his wrist. “Why did he run?”
He paused to savor the sensation of her full mouth on his inner arm. “He was trapped. No one wants to be trapped.”
She flicked him another look, then put her mouth to his shoulder. Slowly, her mouth covered his chest with kisses as her hands smoothed down his ribs. He inhaled short and sharp when she found a sore spot. Again she bent forward and this time she used her tongue to trace the ridges of muscle in his chest before she hesitantly lapped at his nipple. This time his shaft pulsed between her legs, so she kept it up, her confidence growing with each pass of her tongue over his flat nipples.
“Jesus,” he said when she leaned back. He straightened, bringing his abdomen in line with her face. She looked up at him, dark hair highlighting her pale face flushed with heat, and those mysterious eyes, then put her mouth just below his navel. The touch of her lips, wet and gentle and teasing all at once, made his cock feel like it was hardened steel. He’d felt this before after a good day on the job. He usually worked it off drinking, dancing, fucking.
Never before like this. Never before knowing that what she’d do for him was the first time she’d done this for anyone.
Her breathing was even but shallow when she lifted the elastic waist of his shorts over the head of his cock. It bobbed free at mouth level. She gripped it, stroked down to the base, then bent forward and licked the precome from the tip. Her lashes fluttered upward. Barely breathing, he stared down into her eyes.