Riptide Rentboys

by Heidi Belleau

  Heidi Belleau was born and raised in small-town New Brunswick, Canada. She now lives in the rugged oil-patch frontier of Northern BC with her husband, an Irish ex-pat whose long work hours in the trades leave her plenty of quiet time to write. She has a degree in history from Simon Fraser University with a concentration in British and Irish studies; much of her work centered on popular culture, oral folklore, and sexuality, but she was known to perplex her professors with non-ironic papers on the historical roots of modern romance novel tropes. (Ask her about Highlanders!) Her writing reflects everything she loves: diverse casts of characters, a sense of history and place, equal parts witty and filthy dialogue, the occasional mythological twist, and most of all, love—in all its weird and wonderful forms.

  Please visit violettavane.com and/or heidibelleau.com to find free short stories, book extras, and a newsletter signup.

  Riptide Publishing

  PO Box 6652

  Hillsborough, NJ 08844

  http://www.riptidepublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Necessity’s Door

  Copyright © 2012 by Fiona Glass

  Cover Art by L.C. Chase, http://lcchase.com/design.htm

  Editors: Gordon Warnock and Rachel Haimowitz

  Layout: L.C. Chase, http://lcchase.com/design.htm

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Riptide Publishing at the mailing address above, at Riptidepublishing.com, or at chris@riptidepublishing.com.

  ISBN: 978-1-937551-39-1

  First edition

  May, 2012

  Also available in paperback as part of Riptide Rentboys: The 2012 Collection

  ISBN: 978-1-937551-40-7

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  Being an openly gay detective in Birmingham comes with its share of problems. For one, the pay is awful. For another, Jake always gets stuck with the crappy undercover jobs. Like posing as a prostitute to catch the new crime boss in town—a man notorious for rough sex with pretty young rentboys.

  Jake’s latest op is fraught with difficulties, all of them men. Like his partner, Mac, who he’s secretly fancied for months. And his new client, Graham, who he keeps sleeping with for reasons far beyond maintaining his cover. And of course there’s the target, Frank Warren, who’s much harder to lure than anyone had anticipated.

  The longer the op drags on, the tougher it gets for Jake to juggle his own needs with those of the job. They may be closing in on Warren, but Jake’s heart—and his sense of right and wrong—are slipping through his fingers. Mac is there to back him up, but is he really the man Jake needs? Tough to know among all those lies Jake's been telling himself and everyone else.

  Vice came in always at the door of necessity, not at the door of inclination.

  —Daniel Defoe

  “How the fuck did I get landed with this?” Jake knew he was grumbling to Mac again, but he felt like grumbling, dammit. His back ached from so much standing, his feet hurt from being pinched into cowboy boots that were at least a size too small, and most of all he was bored. Bored bored bored. Bored of standing on the same street corner half the night, bored of staring at the same brick wall, bored of having nothing to read and no one to talk to—except for the occasional stolen moment with his partner. They’d replaced his mobile phone with a cheap, app-less throwaway because his own was police issue and too easy to spot, and he could hardly pull out a newspaper or a book. The punters weren’t keen on intelligence when it came to choosing rentboys.

  He knew the answer to his question, anyway. He’d got landed with this the same way he got landed with so many other undercover jobs: because he was the only openly gay copper on the local force. He didn’t exactly shout it from the rooftops, but he was a member of the Gay Police Association, he went on the occasional Gay Pride march, and most unavoidable of all, his senior officers knew. It had seemed important when he’d first joined the force not to hide his true nature, but times like tonight left him wishing he’d been more discreet. Then someone else might be propped against a lamppost in nothing more than jeans and a flimsy T, acting as bait for the target they had in mind. A particularly nasty target called Frank Warren, who’d muscled in on the local drug scene a few months back and flooded the streets with cheap cocaine. A target who’d so far eluded their every attempt to catch him and who took great delight in taunting them.

  His latest effort had been to infiltrate the school which was only yards from the police station’s front door and get about a third of the pupils there hooked. Jake’s inspector hadn’t seen the funny side of that, or of the conversation he’d had with the school’s headmistress, and had put Jake to work. Jake, because the only thing they really knew about Frank Warren was that he liked good-looking young men and preferred to buy them in.

  If Jake had kept his mouth shut about being gay, someone else could have been kicking his heels on this street corner. Someone like Paul McKee, known to one and all as Mac. Mac, who provided backup on these undercover ops; who was a decent mate; who was standing here listening with the utmost patience to his latest rant. He’d be perfect in the role. He was handsome enough in a strong-jawed, manly way, and he looked terrific in jeans and cowboy boots. Sadly, Mac wasn’t Frank Warren’s type, and he himself was. He scowled and kicked the lamppost. “So go on, then. Why do I get landed with all the really crap stuff?”

  “Because you’re jail bait. The inspector would hardly pick you if you looked like Quasimodo.” It was a serious enough reply, but made with the hint of a twinkle in Mac’s blue eyes. A twinkle that Jake knew well and could respond to, even when his feet hurt and he felt like shit.

  He chuckled. “That your way of saying I’m good looking?”

  “Dunno if I’d go that far, sweet pea. Too many compliments and you’ll get a swelled head.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He wasn’t sure his head was most likely to swell if Mac kept on looking at him like that. He’d had the hots for his sort-of-partner for months, but wisely kept his mouth shut. Mac had a reputation as a ladies’ man, and their friendship—and Mac’s support on these undercover assignments—was too valuable to risk.

  A car dawdled along the opposite side of the street, slow and purposeful enough to catch both men’s professional attention.

  “What’s this?” Mac muttered. “Don’t tell me it’s our Frank?”

  But Jake shook his head as the car’s front window wound down. “No, I’ve seen this one hanging round before. He was at the corner shop last night, giving me the eye. Looks like he plucked up the courage to come back. You’d better make yourself scarce. I guess I’m back to work.” He raised his voice to yell at Mac for the punter’s benefit. “Told
you you couldn’t afford me, you cheapskate!”

  Mac took the hint. “Call yourself a rentboy?” he snarled back. “I could pay off half my mortgage with what you’re charging.” He spat dangerously close to Jake’s left boot and marched off.

  Briefly Jake wished his own mortgage was as miniscule as that, but the last thing he needed at a time like this was the distraction of money worries. He gave his partner’s retreating back the finger before crossing the street to lean in at the car’s open window. “Something I can do for you?”

  As he’d suspected, the man wasn’t Frank Warren, who was red-haired, had a snub nose a revolver would’ve been proud of, and tended not to run his errands himself. This guy was dark with a moustache, dressed for the office in a shirt and tie, and clearly nervous. Jake was trained to watch without appearing to and saw the guy fiddle with his tie, fiddle with his collar, and fiddle with the place where his wedding ring had obviously been only minutes before. Oh great, one of those. Happily married with about four kids, but liked to play away from home from time to time. Jake despised the type, but hoped he didn’t let it show.

  The man glanced in his rear-view mirror and cleared his throat. “Er, yeah, possibly, I mean, how much do you, well, you know . . .”

  Jake decided to take pity on him. If nothing else, he could get in the guy’s car, sit down, and get the weight off these blasted boots for a minute or two. “Hundred quid an hour for the full thing, thirty for a blowjob.”

  The prices were set deliberately high to scare off as many punters as possible. Jake needed to be out on the street attracting Frank Warren, not having to make umpteen excuses to umpteen different men as to why he couldn’t, after all, take their money and give them sex. Mostly, it had worked. Only three or four men had put their hand in their pocket and come out with cash as well as their dicks. Sure enough, the man’s eyebrows rose and his Adam’s apple dipped.

  “That’s a bit high, isn’t it? No wonder the last bloke walked off.”

  Jake shrugged. “Take it or leave it, mate. I don’t fuck for nothing.” Drive away, drive away now, he prayed in spite of his feet, but nobody Up There was listening tonight.

  “Okay, a hundred it is. Hop in,” said the bloke, and Jake had no option but to hop.

  “Nice place,” the bloke said ten minutes later, sprawling on the sofa and bouncing up again as the broken spring made its presence felt.

  “Thanks.” Jake glanced round the dingy bedsit the squad had provided in case Frank Warren took the bait. The paint was yellowed, the wallpaper peeling, the units in the tiny kitchenette a depressing shade of beige. As bedsits went, it was okay, he supposed—in his student days he’d slept in worse—but it was just a bedsit with living, sleeping, and cooking facilities jammed into one small space and an even smaller bathroom next door. Great for sardines, perhaps, but not for an adult human male or two. “I’ve got my own place in town. I just rent this for work.”

  “That makes sense. You wouldn’t want to take clients to your home, I suppose.”

  “Yeah. Fancy a beer?”

  “Please.”

  Jake fished a couple of cans out of the microscopic fridge, popped the tabs, and handed one across.

  “Cheers.”

  “Cheers yourself.”

  An awkward silence ensued: Jake’s brain froze, and he couldn’t think of a single intelligent thing to say. He took refuge in the beer, drinking it faster than he’d normally like, and wondered if Mac was moored up outside. It would have been tight. His partner would have had to leg it back to his car, start the engine, and drive it out of its hiding place, all in the short time between Jake crossing the road and getting into the punter’s car. Tight, but not beyond Mac’s capabilities. His partner might love his beer and fish-and-chips, but he’d won the squad’s cross country race three years on the trot, and there were no bulls in muddy fields to contend with here.

  The punter drifted to the room’s only window and lifted the grubby net curtain to peer outside. Jake knew from experience there wasn’t much to see—a high brick wall, a barrage of dustbins, a graffiti-encrusted gate—but the squad hadn’t picked the place for its scenic value. Rather, it was close to where Jake plied his trade. Apartments in decent areas were a twenty-minute drive away, whereas here he could be back on duty in under half an hour.

  In spite of the drab surroundings, the view seemed to fascinate his guest. He peered this way and that, then pointed to an illuminated dot in the distance. “Is that Selfridges? I’ve been getting my bearings, and you ought to be able to see it from here.”

  Jake took his turn at the window, gazing where the man’s finger indicated. Sure enough, the small, metallic gleam above the rooftops could well be Selfridges’ distinctive metal discs. “You could be right. I’d never noticed before.”

  “That’s because you’re looking without seeing.”

  More likely it was because he’d spent a total of about two hours in the place since the department had rented it for him, and precious little of that involved staring out of windows. He didn’t bother to explain, since punters tended not to like a smart-arse, but squinted at the guy out of the corner of his eye. For the last few minutes, he’d had the nagging feeling they’d already met, but couldn’t remember when or where. Could it be the fleeting glimpse from the corner shop the night before? Or was it the similarity to Mac’s blue eyes and short, dark hair? Probably not, since a brief glance revealed nervous tics—the constant fiddling with curtains, hair, and tie, the nervous energy imbuing his every move. Not Mac’s rugged stoicism, then, but nervy Edward, the love of his life who’d turned out to be anything but. Even his moustache was like the one Edward had grown.

  You really know how to pick them, he thought with a downward pull of his mouth, but at least the resemblance helped to settle his mind. Despite Edward’s shortcomings, he’d been a very attractive bloke, and anyone who looked anything like him was likely to float Jake’s boat. He’d been wondering whether it was too late to put the guy off, and if not, which excuses to use. But attraction flickered like a cramp in his belly, and he thought perhaps he could go with the guy after all. He nodded towards the bed. “D’you want to . . . ? It’s not much, but the sheets are clean.”

  “Oh yeah.” The guy peeled off his jacket and slung it towards a nearby chair. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  Jake wasn’t back at his lamppost in half an hour, or even an hour. It wasn’t so much that the sex was fantastic, but that everything else was so . . . unexpected somehow. Graham stopped to introduce himself midway through the rush to lose each other’s clothes. He didn’t simply demand a blowjob and lie back with his eyes closed, but tried to engage Jake in the process and ensure his pleasure as well. He’d even brought a pack of condoms and insisted on using them.

  The sex itself was less successful and reminded Jake of Laurel and Hardy, assuming Laurel and Hardy had ever turned to porn. Graham dropped the first condom he unwrapped, and it landed with an unwholesome splat, half on the floor and half on Jake’s left boot. When he retrieved it again—rapping his head on the bedside cabinet—it was covered in fuzz and resembled nothing so much as a tiny, hairy sock. Jake took one look and had to suppress a fit of giggles, with only limited success.

  Graham noticed and fumbled his next attempt at a condom so badly that Jake took over, but the minute he touched Graham’s cock, Graham flinched and pulled away with a muffled snort.

  “Sorry, that tickles. Look, why don’t you do me?”

  Since Jake preferred that position anyway, he agreed faster than was probably polite. Their foreplay had been so surreal that he wasn’t expecting much from the main event, so it was a real surprise when he came with a bang that was only partly the headboard slamming against the wall.

  Once he’d regained his breath, the surprise he’d felt came flooding back. The job was the job; he did it because he had to, because it got results, because there was no one else. It didn’t mean he enjoyed the work, or the rushed and sleazy encounters in
stinking back alleys and draughty doorways that the work entailed. This, though, had been different enough to make him think. Graham had been different enough to make him think. The bloke might fumble as if he had five left thumbs, but Jake hadn’t had to resort to his usual ploy of thinking about Mac to get himself off, and would even consider sex with him again. That wasn’t true of anyone else he’d seen for months. That, he thought as he stumbled out of bed, was the biggest surprise of all.

  They showered together, and what with the warm water sliding down his back and Graham’s breath against his ear, he could easily have let himself get carried away. But Graham was showing signs of nerves again, soaping himself briskly and ducking his head out of the shower curtain to peer through the steam at his watch.

  Jake watched wistfully over one shoulder, half hoping that Graham would take the hint, grab him and shove him up against the tiles. He didn’t often like it that way round, but that coiled snake of attraction was back, twisting itself round his guts.

  “Sorry, got to go,” Graham said, towelling off even more briskly—so much so he left red marks on his skin. “I’m late as it is. I should probably have said—I’m married.”

  As a professional copper, Jake had already worked it out. As a rentboy, he wasn’t supposed to care. “There’s a surprise. And, of course, your wife doesn’t understand you.”

  Graham surprised him yet again. “Oh, no, I think she understands me only too well. She chooses to turn a blind eye as long as I’m discreet.”

  “Yeah? Bit unusual, that, isn’t it?”

  Graham just shrugged.

  Before he left, he placed two fifties on the cabinet by the bed, then ruffled Jake’s already rumpled hair. “Don’t suppose I can see you again?”

  Jake was tempted for a second time, but told himself it was a bad idea for all sorts of reasons, the least of which was work. He didn’t have time for relationships with everything that was going on. He didn’t like dating married men. He was holding out for Mac, against all hope and even though he wouldn’t admit it properly to himself. He was kidding himself about kidding himself.