by Adira August
ONCE AGAIN, Hunter’s Bronco had been towed from a scene. Cam was waiting in the R8 when he left the hospital. He helped Hunt into the car and buckled his seat belt. Then he propped Hunt’s right arm up with a pillow he cadged from a storage room.
Cam drove them through the quiet Capitol Hill streets.
“You’re dropping me at my apartment?” Hunter was too tired to keep the disappointment from his voice.
“I’m taking us to your apartment. You’ll never stay awake long enough to get to my house and I’m not carrying you inside.”
“So I can sleep with you?”
“No,” Cam said, turning into the alley behind Hunter’s building. “And I won’t be able to sleep with you, either,” he said with a glance at Hunter’s hand.
IT WAS ALMOST NOON before Hunter swam up into consciousness, a testament to the power of pain medication. He was groggy and disoriented and surprised by the sight of his hand, splinted and wrapped in bulky bandages, sandwiched carefully between two protective pillows with Cam’s belt buckled around them.
His index finger was broken as well as dislocated, but it was a closed fracture they’d set and splinted. They’d also treated the bloody wound made by the trigger guard tearing a strip of flesh away. It felt like shit.
He managed to get the belt off and stumble to the bathroom. He pissed and semi washed his hand and downed a pain pill. He wanted coffee and doughnuts and to collapse into his chair in front of his TV. During all this, he was aware that his small apartment was very quiet.
He didn’t have to look to know Cam wasn’t there.
The complex task of making coffee and figuring out something to eat defeated him. He told himself he did not do depression and only needed a few minutes to wake up. Grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge, he propped his arm on a pillow, and turned on his TV.
They’d towed his Bronco away with his cell phone inside. He didn’t own a computer.
Hunter hadn’t felt this isolated in a very long time. His chest and throat tightened. His head fell back. He wished people would stop killing each other.
He was almost asleep again when his door opened. Camden Snow came in carrying two loaded shopping bags. He brought the smell of bodywash with him, his hair freshly-sculpted. He was shaved and dressed in a cream fisherman’s sweater and blue jeans and made Hunt felt dirty and old and weak.
“You’re up,” Cam said, taking the bags into the kitchen. “I went shopping at Snow’s Freezer and Mini Mart. Had a feeling you’d want pie. No more apple, but Gran sent a blueberry tart and pecan ring.” He looked around. “I left you note by the coffee pot…”
It was still there. Cam lowered his head at Hunter, who seemed to him almost huddled in the chair. “You thought I’d just left, is that it?”
Hunt shrugged.
“You keep piling up the consequences, sub.” Cam unpacked the bags into fridge and freezer and cupboard. “I also got actual food. Natani gave everyone the weekend off. Your phone”—he patted his jacket pocket—“is right here.”
Can took him the phone and squatted next to the chair. “First coffee and food, which will make you feel human again. Then we’ll get you cleaned up and you can nap right here.”
“Consequences?”
“You doubted me,” he said. “I think there’s a hairbrush in the kitchen with your name on it.”
Hunter’s blue-grey eyes went dark. “I don’t own a hairbrush.”
“But I do,” Cam told him.
Blood raced to his groin so fast he could feel the vessels swell with the heat and pressure. His hand no longer hurt; it barely existed for him. But he was suddenly and acutely aware he was dressed only in briefs. His cock rolled and stretched, seeking escape.
He reached down to adjust himself, expecting Cam to tell him to stop. Wanting Cam to tell him to stop.
“I’ll get started on the coffee. You want tart or pastry?” Cam turned his back on Hunter and returned to the kitchen.
Efficient and attentive, Cam served Hunter breakfast and tidied the kitchen. He brought out a small kitchen trash bag and covered Hunter’s hand, using masking tape to fix it to his forearm.
“You can get the splint wet but not the bandages for a couple days,” he said. “I left the instruction sheet and your appointment time for Monday on the counter.” He headed for the bathroom. “You want shower or bath?”
Cam steadied Hunt while he stepped into the shower and washed him down quickly, but did not join him. Clamping down hard on his natural response to Hunter’s body, to his proximity, to his very obvious desire, Cam helped him back out and dried him vigorously with a towel.
“Okay, how about some sweats? You can sleep in them if you want.”
Hunter didn’t bother to answer. He didn’t want clothes; he wanted Cam.
Cam dressed him and took care with his socks so they lay flat against his skin. He didn’t want Hunt to have to adjust them one-handed. He got Hunter settled in the chair with more pillows and his feet on the ottoman. He put the remote at his left hand.
“You want anything else before I go?”
Hunter shook his head. Cam returned to the kitchen, folding up the bags. “I put stuff in the fridge so it would thaw a bit. There’s pot pie, your second favorite of Gran’s casseroles. Couple other things. Try to rest and eat, I’ll be back at nine or so.”
He fished a big packet of something out of one of the bags.
“You ever going to really talk to me?” Hunter asked, more pissed than sad at this point. He wasn’t a fan of passive/aggressive.
Cam came over and dropped the big packet onto Hunter’s lap. He saw what it was and jumped, as if it might bite him.
“87,442 dollars,” Cam told him. “That’s what you picked over me.”
“Cam, I-”
“Shut up.”
Hunter’s mouth snapped closed.
Cam walked away, paced back and forth with his hands on his hips. He snatched something off the counter and tossed it into Hunt’s lap on top of the money.
It wasn’t a hairbrush. Hunter had seen it on Benedict Hart’s website with the other spanking implements. It was a BDSM rendition of a Victorian hairbrush with filigree around a cabbage rose stamped into heavy leather. The face didn’t have bristles, but was also leather, polished and shiny. The wood handle was longer than normal, round and leather-wrapped.
“I think you really are feeling things you never did before,” Cam said when he stopped pacing. “I think you care for me in a way you never cared for anyone. But you’re still the man who doesn’t submit. You fit me into your life the way I stuck that food in your cabinet, in between the things you already own.”
Cam leaned on the arms of Hunter’s chair and spoke in the so soft, so intense way that made Hunt clench and heat. But not now. Now, he only felt shock.
“I’m not an afterthought. I’m not a convenience. I’m not the thing you play with when you have the time or get bored or there isn’t a poker game. I’m a Dominant and there’re no nights off. I’m the best there is at what I do. I am that because I don’t accept less than everything there is to give. And your sometime, half-assed, so-called submission is not good enough for me.”
He stood up. “Maybe you aren’t a sub at all. Maybe you never were.” He pointed at Hunter’s lap. “Figure it out and make a choice.”
He closed the door quietly on the way out.
3:30pm - The Death of Jason Furney
* * *
“Cam! Good,” Natani said when he walked in. “Can you figure out what to do with all this?”
“Diane!” Twee admonished. “How are you, Cam? How’s the Lieutenant?”
He hung his coat on the back of his chair. “Fine and fine, thanks. You?”
She ran around the table and he lifted her into a hug. She was only about five feet tall and it was a far way to go. Camden Snow had sisters, so the shudder that he felt from her wasn’t a new experience.
�
��What’s all this?” He set her down.
“Cam, I was so rude to her.”
“She was lying to you. It was your job.”
“You sound like the Lieutenant.”
“High praise, indeed.” He settled in front of his laptop.
There was nothing left for the team to do; the case belonged to Jefferson County, now. Leon had been transferred into their custody, as had the case of the unidentified dead guy in the PEV. He’d been killed in their county before being dumped in Denver.
But Twee wouldn’t let it go and neither would Cam. Merisi had already called from his hospital bed with suggestions. They were taking this one personally.
Jefferson County had no use for the objects retrieved from the cave; they weren’t evidence of anything. As they were all the team had, they were everything the team focused on.
Twee and Natani had laid the papers from the backpack out on the conference table, trying to create some logical sequence.
“So how do we organize this so it makes sense?” Twee asked.
“I ski and look things up,” Cam said. “Give me a minute.” It took him less than that before Mike Merisi’s bandaged face looked out at them from the big monitor.
“Thank God, I’m going stir-crazy in here!”
Cam shipped images of the pages on the table to Merisi while Twee explained what they were trying to do.
“We need to make this public,” she said. “Anne Houston was a brilliant woman. This was her life’s work and we’re not going to let ‘Jason Furney’ win. But how do we explain it? Present it? And where?”
“Ms. Natani-”
“Cops who get shot in the line get to call me Diane.”
Merisi blushed, surprising himself. “You’ve been laying out complex cases for juries for years, haven’t you? How would you sell this to a jury?”
“I wouldn’t even try. The science is too complex, there’s math most of us never heard of, ideas people associate with religion. They’d react emotionally, defensively.”
“Why defensively?” asked Cam.
“People want to be right. It wouldn’t just be a devout Christian who would hate science robbing them of a mystery God in favor of electromagnetism. It would also be atheists, everyone who thinks of themselves as possessed of spiritual insight, everyone who follows a self-defined concept of how reality works. This … fact … means they didn’t need faith or reason, just a random pulse generator.”
“I agree,” Merisi said. “And besides the personal stuff, imagine explaining to non-math people how a smaller number means a more significant result.”
“So we just … what? Give up?” Twee asked.
They sat silently, no one wanting to answer Twee’s question.
The door opened and Hunter came in, awkwardly handling the doorknob with his left hand.
It was Diane Natani who got to him first and held the door. “You do know when to make an entrance.”
“Ms. Natani,” he acknowledged her. A look passed between them of old acquaintance, long affection and mutual respect tempered by equally mutual exasperation. “I thought we’d catch up on some admin, but I see the troops are assembled.”
He sat down in his chair. “Merisi, they do the surgery this morning?”
“It wasn’t much, glorified knitting.” He didn’t mention the hundred fifty-two stitches.
“First, I don’t say this enough but, if I had my pick of every cop, researcher, scene tech and lawyer from anywhere, I’d pick you all.” He took a minute getting his coat off.
“The hospital says Deputy Weston is conscious, stable and expected to recover. Could have deficits that will keep him on a desk for a while. He did very much enjoy the story of the hungry cougar. I hear he’s thinking of opening an eatery under that name when he retires.”
“I wanna go.” Twee said clapping.
“Further,” he said looking straight at Cam. “I was eavesdropping outside the door. We don’t do half-assed, here. We don’t give less than everything we have. It is not in the nature of anyone here.”
“What’s the plan, Boss?” Cam.
“There’s vocation and avocation. I suggest between cases, Anne Tussey’s lifetime of work be organized, and put in a public place. These images, the data, it all needs to be preserved. Maybe a simple website. We need to reference collateral researches. Lay out the evidence in an orderly way and let it be known it exists. That’s all, we don’t try and convince anyone of anything.”
“Seek and ye shall find,” Twee said.
“Precisely.”
“We destroy Jason Furney and there’s not fuck-all anyone can do about it,” Merisi said.
“The city won’t approve it, much less pay for it,” Natani said.
“Our time is free if we give it and it doesn’t interfere with our case work. For the rest, we do what Tussey did. Find private funding. I very recently came to know a man who has 87,442 dollars he’s looking to do something useful with.”
5:35pm - Lesson One
* * *
It was Friday rush hour and what was a five-minute drive at midnight became a twenty-minute crawl.
“That was fast,” Cam said, at a stop sign a block from the office. Hunter knew he was referring to his choice.
“I compartmentalize to serve my purposes,” Hunter said. “But I don’t hide from myself. I do know I’m a natural submissive. I also know only you, or someone a lot like you, would be … at my level.” He didn’t like that answer. “That sounds arrogant.”
“No, it doesn’t. It sounds realistic. Sensible. But that means you should be a great sub for me. So what’s the problem?”
Hunter laughed a little, at himself. “I don’t know what it is to do it.”
“Go on.” Cam finally found a gap to slide the R8 into and turned onto a one-way. At least now they were headed in the right direction.
“You’re not ordering me around outside of sex, you don’t do the controlling for the sake of control things the Doms at the club did. When I thought about it, I realized you’d only ever given me one order outside of sex which I fucked up. I didn’t know … didn’t think about it as an order.”
Cam considered this. “I know you want us together. What I don’t know is if you want to be my submissive.”
Hunter shifted in the seat. Just Cam’s proximity and the question made his balls heat.
Cam shot him a look. “That means all the time. We’ve had the sex worked out from the beginning.”
“I want to say yes, but, can I ask questions about it? Two.”
“Two questions. Go ahead.”
“Will things change?”
“For awhile. I don’t have any reason to trust you in this, so for a while, there’ll be a lot more orders. We’ll see how you do.”
An Audi R8 really was a very small car, and as he answered, Cam had shifted into Dom. And Hunter responded.
Cam shot a look at Hunt’s bulging crotch. “Looks like I’ll have to cage that thing.”
“Fuck.” Hunter’s cock jumped. He hadn’t realized it could do that.
“Second question?”
“You need to teach me,” Hunter said. “I want you to know, be sure you get, that I’ll screw up.”
“Oh, I definitely get that.” They stopped at a light three blocks from Hunter’s street. “Why do you think I bought the paddle?”
Hunter was now in real pain and not from his hand. His dick was hard and bent and a fold in his briefs seemed to be trying to sever one of his aching balls from his body. He had to adjust -
“Sit still.” Cam said, turning into Hunt’s alley. “From now on you do not touch yourself without asking permission unless you’re taking a piss or a shower.”
His cock got impossibly harder and his trapped testicle shot bolts of electricity deep into his gut. He whimpered.
“First lesson,” Cam said, parking in Hunter’s empty space near the back entrance of the building. “You
’ll learn to go soft or stay soft when I say. I say so now. But I understand you need help. Unbutton your fly, and pull out your penis.”
Hunter’s anxiety spiked. Rush hour. His neighbors were coming home. The R8 was a low slung vehicle. It was broad daylight.
Cam unbuckled his seat belt. “I’ll explain how this works only one time. You do as you’re told or you will be punished and have to do it, anyway. In this case, I’ll spank your bare ass with my belt over the hood of this car right now until you agree to do as you were told. Then you will.”
By the time Hunter got to the second metal button, he was flaccid.
“That’s enough,” Cam said. “See how well that works?”
“Oh, yeah,” Hunter answered. “Do I - am I supposed to wait for an order to button up?”
“A good rule of thumb is, if your Dom starts it; your Dom finishes it. Isn’t that what you do?”
Hunt was surprised. “I do. I just-”
“Never thought about it,” Cam finished.
Someone rapped sharply on the glass next to Hunter’s head. This time, his whole body jumped. Dana, his always cheerful upstairs neighbor, waved at him through the glass.
“What happened to your hand?” Her voice distorted through the glass.
Cam smirked and turned away. Hunt shrugged. “Nothing big, just scraped it.” He didn’t lower the window. Dana tilted to get a better look at the driver, but didn’t press.
“Well, you be careful!” She waved a little as she entered the building.
Hunter looked unbelievingly at Cam, who cocked an eyebrow at him.
“You saw her pull in.”
“Teaching aide.”
The depth of Hunter’s resentment surprised him. “I didn’t know I’d feel like this.”
“And you want to make your feelings my problem?”
No answer.
“Did you ask me to teach you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you learn something?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have the right to question my methods?”