by Mary Calmes
“You can’t leave me, and— I can’t— T,” he whimpered, pushing back, needing my fingers deeper. “What are you doing, just—please.”
“You know I will take care of you.”
“Yes, I know, always,” he agreed, but I heard the soft chanted pleading under his breath. When I notched against him, I promised to go slow.
“You will not,” he growled.
I wanted to be gentle. He wasn’t about to let me.
As I pressed forward, popping inside just a fraction, my name came out in a slur of garbled sound.
My body shivered with the need to ravish him, to take what I wanted and make him mine. It was primal, and I fought it, instead pushing in slowly, watching his hole stretch around my cock.
“I need you now!” he yelled, and I could hear the frustration and yearning and knew not listening to him was a mistake. If the roles were reversed and he did my thinking for me instead of taking me at my word, instead of trusting him, it might make me wonder if he knew me at all. I would not take the chance of losing him. I would not.
Shoving forward in one long, rough stroke, I buried myself to the balls in his ass.
“Fuck!” he roared.
I froze. “Tell me I didn’t hurt—”
“Move, T,” he begged, his whole body shuddering under me. “Do it now.”
I slipped out, just partially, then shoved back inside, and keening, mewling sounds tumbled out of his throat in response, along with renewed shivering. There was no question about what he wanted, what he had to have.
I had a hand on his hip, anchoring him to me, and the other between his shoulder blades holding him still, keeping him where I wanted him, solid beneath me.
“T,” he crooned as I thrust deep and hard into the vise of heat.
“Touch yourself,” I ordered, my movements becoming erratic, the snap of my hips getting faster as I had to have more, be in him, no more retreat.
I curled over him, kissing his neck, inhaling his scent as I nuzzled in his hair and finally lifted and turned his head to claim his mouth.
Kissing Efrem while I was inside him was my favorite thing in the world. With his heart beating under my palm, his muscles squeezing me tight, milking my length and his tongue rubbing over mine, mirroring the movement of my cock, I had never been more connected to another person. And it was then, right then, that I knew there could never be anyone else, not ever.
My heart would stop with him.
“Fuck,” I grumbled, irritated that in the middle of fucking my heart had shown up. Damn inconvenient to have epiphanies while screwing.
His laughter was a surprise.
“Ef?”
“Stop thinking, because I need you here, participating,” he said, chuckling. “Just hold me. Now!”
The last demand shouted brought me back to my body that I’d been checked out of for precious seconds.
Lifting him to his hands and knees, I took rough hold of his hair, bowed his back, and kept him there as I pistoned inside of him.
“Oh thank God,” he rasped, his voice a hoarse whine as I drew back, dragging myself slowly over the spot that made him clench and buck, feeling every sensation he did before I pushed back in, harder and faster with each stroke.
It was the friction that did it, that made him come, but also, it was me—taking care of him, being his safety net, the man he could voice his desires to, all of them, uninhibited and vulnerable—that sent him hurtling over the edge.
He clenched around me, bearing down, his body rigid beneath mine as I followed his orgasm with my own, collapsing over him, my body draped over his.
Slowly, he sank to the upholstery, me still buried inside of him, and we lay there, panting, covered in sweat, breathing in tandem.
Eventually I turned my head and kissed his sweaty temple.
“Where did you go?” he murmured, not needing me to move, instead the deep sigh of contentment letting me know he was more than happy to have me right where I was.
“I realized something.”
“Tell me.”
“I love you,” I said honestly, my voice only hitching a bit with the emotion welling up in my chest.
A shiver ran through him from head to toe. “I love you back,” he husked, and it was easy to hear the sincerity, the honesty, and understand that his heart was there for the taking.
Two days later, I knew that because I loved him, I had to change what he called me.
“Hey,” Efrem said softly, standing to walk over to me, reaching out to put his hand on my cheek as soon as he could. “T? What’s—”
“My name’s not Terrence Moss,” I told him. “It’s Darius Hawthorne.”
His gaze was riveted on me.
“I’m actually related to Nathaniel Hawthorne, the writer.”
“I don’t—”
“Do you know originally it was Hathorn?”
“I—what?”
“He added a w and an e to it.”
“I have no—”
“My father told me that it was because Nathaniel didn’t want people knowing he was related to the guy who was involved in the Salem Witch Trials since Hathorn was like the only one of the judges who never publicly apologized.”
He was processing, eyes blinking, watching me.
“It’s true, you can look it up.”
“No, I believe you.”
“Interesting, right?”
“I think you’re missing what’s truly the most riveting part of this conversation.”
“My father used to tell me that he always wanted to move back to Boston. He said that some kind of genetic memory was at work.”
“Terrence—Darius, I—”
I sighed. “I miss my father. He was funny. You would have liked him.”
“I have no doubt. Anyone related to you would be amazing, I’m sure.”
“My father used to have a framed print of our family crest in his study,” I said absently. “I wonder if I can find one.”
“Explain it from the beginning,” he prodded, taking my hand and leading me over to the chaise he’d just gotten up from.
Once we were seated, facing each other, he took my hand, his thumb sliding over my knuckles as he listened about my parents and how I had been Darius and how I was now Terrence.
“So nobody knows that name.”
“No.”
His eyes glittered in the dwindling light of the sunset as he stared at me, looking utterly besotted. I would never forget his face at that moment. “You trust me.”
“More than anything or anyone,” I promised him, because it was true. I had never even considered telling another soul my real name, not then, not for years after.
And then he lunged, and I went down under him, kissed hungrily, possessively, all the time with the litany of my new name—my birth name, the one I shared with him first.
Now, in the present, wanting to hear his answer, asked Efrem again, “Do you remember when I told you? Or doesn’t that matter to you anymore?”
Like old times, he searched my face, looking for something to hold on to, the person he knew even with all the years between us.
“I still see you,” I assured him. “How about you? What do you see?”
“Are you baiting me? Testing me?”
“No,” I said honestly, “I’d really like to know.”
He deflated, and I saw the resignation on his face as he grabbed the chair he was supposed to be sitting in, dragged it around the table—making that horrible fingernails on chalkboard noise as the rough edge of the metal scraped over the concrete—and took a seat right next to me before leaning in. He put a hand on my leg to brace himself—like no time had passed—and spoke so that his warm breath grazed my ear. “I want to talk to you.”
I hoped that wasn’t all he wanted, because having him close to me… all I wanted to do was taste him.
“Please don’t just disappear on me,” he whispered urgently.
But was it a good idea to let him in? Espe
cially at the moment, when Eastman more than likely was gunning for me and my life was changing so dramatically?
“Give me a number.”
I could barely breathe, and that in and of itself scared me to death. Nothing and no one ever rattled me or pushed me off my game, ever… until right now. “It’s dangerous,” I whispered, my voice deserting me just when I needed it.
I knew it would be. I’d known all along, from the word go, that being anywhere near Efrem would mess with my focus and my resolve, would make me vulnerable, and in return would place him in harm’s way. I’d been sure of it sixteen years ago and was sure of it now. I was pleased with myself for the choices I’d made.
“Why’s that?” he asked, staring at my mouth.
It didn’t make sitting in the same room with him any easier, though. We’d been apart for a bit more than a decade and a half because the brass saw in me a man they could mold into a killer with a cold, calculating brain, not a mindless brute. Had I shown less aptitude for dealing out death and more in diplomacy, I might have had something similar to Efrem’s perfectly respectable career path and not my infamous one complete with medals and commendations and utter secrecy.
“Darius.”
I cleared my throat. “I’m dangerous.”
“You’re not that scary, I assure you.”
“You have no idea who I am anymore.”
“Oh no?”
“No.”
“I—”
“When I walk out of here, you should just forget you saw me,” I said sharply, because otherwise I would have choked on the words I didn’t want to say.
He scoffed. “Are you kidding? You’re not walking out of here.”
“I am, actually, because, like I said, I have a guy coming.”
He leaned back, studying me, those brilliant emerald green eyes of his locked on my face. “But I thought—I was told you worked for yourself.”
Oh….
I shifted in my seat, making myself as comfortable as I could in the hard metal chair. “What file did you get?”
“What do you mean? There’s more than one?”
“Of course. I thought you were in the loop.”
I remembered his glare so well that I floundered. Anything I ever did that he didn’t like—or wasn’t sure of—I’d been on the receiving end of the furrowed brows and flash of green. “Oh, I am most definitely in the loop. This is the Office of Homeland Security you’re fucking around with.”
“I’m not fucking around with anything,” I said with a grin. “I’m just surprised that with whatever your clearance is, that the agency didn’t send over my military file.”
“I—how long did you stay with the military? Because after you were taken and I was transferred to—”
“A while,” I said, not wanting to delve into the last night I saw him, but I couldn’t stop the memory from flashing through my mind. We’d been caught, me and Efrem, in his apartment off base because, unbeknownst to me, Efrem’s buddy had been compromised and was reporting to our base commander. It had been 2001, and things were different in the military then, but some things were still the same. Consenting relationships were one thing, but officers mixing with enlisted still happened on thin ice, behind closed doors, under a constant threat of discovery. Colonel Brent Davidson, authorized that we be taught a lesson about fraternization, but as things go sometimes, you get enough men together and the mob mentality takes over.
Efrem was making chicken carbonara. I was sitting on the counter drinking a bottle of water and watching him when the front door of the tiny A-frame was kicked open and we had soldiers, men he knew because he roared at them by name, in the living room.
“The hell are you doing?” Efrem yelled, charging toward them, sure that it was a mistake, certain that he could disperse them with only his voice.
But there were six of them, and they surged around him, two guys grabbing his arms while the third punched him squarely in the face. He would have fallen if they weren’t holding him up.
“You like dick, huh, Lahm?” the leader, Leonard Barnes, Efrem had called him, catcalled as the other four men cornered me in the small kitchen.
“Get the fuck out of my house!” Efrem roared again, his gaze flicking to me, checking, more frightened for me than himself.
“I know you like that big black dick on Moss over there,” he snickered, working open his belt, “but you’re just gonna have to make do.”
“You stay right there, boy,” one of the men closest to me scoffed, “maybe you’ll learn a little something.”
“I say he gets fucked too,” another guy crowed.
“Nah,” the guy on my left said darkly. “I think a good old-fashioned lynching is the only way to go.”
Efrem screamed at that and kept shrieking until Barnes kicked him in the ribs, stilling his cry of terror.
I saw Barnes yank Efrem’s pants and briefs down and bare his ass before he slapped it, and the thought hit me that these men had made their intentions known, and the others, by their silence, had agreed. Not one of them had spoken up, said they should stop, think; it was only them egging each other on, and my focus tunneled down to Efrem—to reaching Efrem. I would not let them defile him. I would do whatever was in my power to prevent that.
Thinking back on that moment, as I had many times in my life, I always wondered at their stupidity. And yes, they didn’t know me, had no idea about the training I’d received and had no clue how easily I’d taken to it, but more than that, they’d cornered me in the kitchen.
Stupid. And careless. Mostly stupid.
I grabbed the chef’s knife Efrem had been using from the cutting board and drove it into the throat of the guy on my right. The blood from his severed carotid momentarily blinded the guy beside him, so I went low and put the knife first into his gut, then pulled it out and drove it hard into his sternum.
I left it there as the next two guys rushed me, and I grabbed the pot of boiling water off the stove and flung it at them. They screamed as I grabbed the frying pan full of crackling oil for the chicken and threw it as well, and the oil splashed over them.
As the rapist and the guy who wanted to hang me stood there, hands on their faces, I grabbed lynching guy’s gun and shot them both in the head, right through their fingers.
“Holy fuck!” Barnes screamed as I came forward just as I’d been taught, both hands on the weapon, arms tight but not locked, shooting the first guy who lifted his hands in surrender as he let go of Efrem and then the second as he scuttled backward against the wall.
Efrem scrambled to his feet, yanking up his pants, and I checked him, once, making sure he was okay before I turned my attention to Barnes.
“Jesus Christ, Moss, we were only gonna scare you.”
“Shouldn’t kid,” I said flatly, hearing the first siren in the distance.
It was fast once I had the gun, the pop-pop-pop as I did my killing, and as big as the man’s eyes were, how wide, I understood that he was utterly shell-shocked.
Barnes sagged to his knees, hands laced on top of his head. He must not have even considered reaching for his gun that Efrem, using a tissue from the box on the end table, took off of him.
Efrem walked over to the cut-out ledge near the kitchen, and his gaze met mine. “I couldn’t—did they hurt you?”
“No,” I huffed, trying to catch my breath, unable to, the pounding in my ears hard to hear around as well.
When he moved over to me, into my space so I could put an arm around him, hold him solidly against me and keep the gun trained on Barnes, finally, only then, could I breathe.
The police were there moments later, and Efrem and I were facedown on his carpet as Barnes babbled about scaring us and how I’d gone nuts and attacked him and his guys.
Outside in the hot, sticky sweltering summer air of Savannah, Efrem and I were separated into different police cruisers, and through the window, staring at him, his scared eyes on me, was the last time I saw him for nearly two decades.<
br />
I was surprised when a man I’d never seen before walked into the room as I sat in the brig at Hunter.
He was tall, broad shouldered, and from the way the shirt clung, muscular. It wasn’t his physique that made me stare, though; it was his eyes and the expression in them. The midnight blue color soaked up the light, and the way he was scrutinizing me, like he was deciding something, put me on edge.
“Sergeant Terrence Moss?”
“Yes,” I answered, not standing because I saw no uniform.
He moved to the bars and crossed his arms. “You’re going to be tried for the murder of five men, Moss.”
“It was self-defense,” I said flatly, not leaping to my feet, not charging the bars, my training ingrained. Emotions had no place in interrogations. Remain calm, centered, keep your voice level and noncombative. The first person who cracked, lost.
“Says you.”
“What does Barnes say?”
He tipped his head sideways. “That doesn’t matter.”
“Why not?”
“He’s an unreliable witness.”
“And why is that?”
“In his version, they were just there to put the fear of God into you for being faggots.”
I watched his eyes as he used that repellant word and noted his own lack of emotion. “So everyone is buying that story?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Where’s Efrem?”
“The question isn’t where he is, but where he’s going, and that is all dependent on you.”
“Me,” I said flatly, a statement, not a question.
He nodded slowly.
I studied him, the long sleek lines of him, the handsome face with features carved out of granite, but with the eyes of a predator. “What is this? Who are you?”
Uncrossing his arms, he reached through the bars to shake my hand, and the smile I got was real, creased laugh lines, genuinely warm. “I’m Dante Cerreto, and I’m here to make you an offer you shouldn’t refuse.”
Hard to say what got me off the hard metal shelf of a seat and across the cell to him but some of it had to be the grin. He’d amused himself, that was clear, and that in turn allowed me to breathe for what felt like the first time in hours. His hand was warm and dry, the shake firm, and then he nodded, jaw clenched, hoarsely telling me that everything was going to be all right. It was like he knew what it was like to be where I was, on the other side of the bars.