Private Dicks

by Samantha M. Derr

  He reached out and grabbed my hand, dragging me to him then tugging me so I sprawled into his lap. Not the most comfortable position for either of us, but I guessed I'd live.

  "Maybe not God but definitely Adam Levine. And despite being old, he's fucking hot." He managed to duck the swat I directed at his head before trapping my wrist and pressing it to his lips. "But you're definitely hotter."

  "Idiot," I growled as his lips moved down my arm. "I guess I could take you out to dinner for your help in diffusing the situation."

  He stopped licking me to answer. "Or we could just go home and I could cook for you?"

  "Meat?"

  "Yep."

  "Real meat, not that tofu, veggie, soy crap?"

  He snickered, causing my body to bounce on top of him, which in turn made his noticeably half-hard dick more noticeable as it dug into my ass. "Pinky swear," he said. He smirked in that way I knew either meant he was feeling mischievous or horny—or more often than not, both. One of his hands still held my wrist to his mouth while the other inched its way down my belly.

  I moaned when his fingers slid under my shirt, one digit slowly circling my sensitive-as-fuck belly button. "Never understood pinky swear," I whispered, tilting my head back as his lips moved over my jaw.

  "Have we ever made love in your office?" His words vibrated against my skin.

  "You know we have."

  "But in this chair?"

  Groaning when he raked his teeth over the sensitive spot behind my ear, I struggled to find my words. "Mmm, no … no, not in the chair."

  His fingers slithered higher, finding one of my nipples and giving it a hard tweak. "Speaking of chairs …"

  "I'm pretty sure there have been no chairs mentioned" I groaned again and arched my back, attempting to arrange my backside into a better position against his erection

  "Do you have one of those office furniture catalogues?"

  I stopped my squirming and shifted my head so I could him in the eye. "You're kidding me, right?"

  He pecked at my mouth. "No. Have you ever sat in that chair in the other room? Fucking brutal, babe. And you really need an interior designer to spruce up this place. Shahara was right; it's kind of depressing."

  His words sparked an earlier question I'd stuffed to the back of my mind. "Are you seriously considering taking some time off?" I asked.

  "I dunno, maybe. I have a while to think about it. It'd be cool though, right? Solving cases together. Being together twenty-four seven. We could change the name to Cason Lee Investigations. No! Lee Cason." His eyes opened wide and he half-smiled. "Why are you looking at me like that? Don't wanna be my partner?"

  I wrapped a hand behind his head and touched our foreheads together. "More than anything."

  CASE 03: Glamour

  INVESTIGATOR: Holly Rinna-White

  "Hey Jace, get me a—let's see—triple tall sugar-free caramel nonfat no-foam latte."

  "Fuck you, Ciaran," Jason replied in a friendly tone to his coworker and friend, who was—as always—early for his shift. Ciaran always said that if he didn't show up early for things, he'd be chronically late. It almost made sense to Jason.

  "Language, guys," Bridget, their coworker and Jason's closest friend, hissed at them. "There are still customers here." She waved broadly to indicate the three or four people that currently occupied small, round wooden tables scattered throughout the cramped floor area. The small cafe was as much a sandwich shop as it was a coffee shop with large windows, a limited amount of space, and a few armchairs scattered around.

  Jason shrugged it off; no one was in line, and people in their neighborhood weren't likely to care too much about language anyway. Then he actually looked at Ciaran for the first time since he'd walked in and did a double take. "Whoa, no contacts today?"

  "Not today," Ciaran acknowledged, grinning. In their natural state, Ciaran's dark blue eyes lacked a visible pupil, as was the case with many Tuatha or part-Tuatha humans. Or, as Ciaran had attempted explaining once, it wasn't so much that he didn't have a pupil, but more that his eyes looked and functioned a bit differently. The difference also affected sight, so most Tuatha wore special contacts that filtered their sight to be closer to human normal and were also designed to make their eyes look normal.

  The Tuatha were a race of beings not originally from Earth, though no one really knew where they came from exactly. They adopted the name Tuatha (inconveniently insisting that the word have no plural or adjective form) from old Irish mythology, which they claimed was based on their race from before they arrived en masse with all the other non-human races a century ago. They were the most prevalent of the races that stayed on Earth, but that wasn't saying much, since most had left as suddenly and completely as they arrived with only historical records to show they existed at all.

  Since then, a small percentage of the human population had developed psychic abilities. It was rare for the abilities to present strongly—even most telekinetics, prevalent though they were, couldn't lift anything much heavier than a pebble. Barney Mulligan, the manager of the pub where Jason sometimes worked nights, often joked that he could use a "TKer" to clean up the place when plates got broken or the occasional brawl broke a table.

  It was just as well that Jason's extremely minor talent for precognition wouldn't be helpful to anyone, since he sure as hell wasn't going to be telling anyone about it any time soon. Precognition was an extremely rare ability and not one Jason felt safe advertising, especially when that ran the risk of anyone finding out that his younger brother was much, much better at it than he was. Not even Bridget knew.

  "I only get harassed by a few stupid asshole customers when I have the freaky eye thing going, so I figure, why not just let it be once in a while?" Ciaran offered by way of explanation.

  Jason grinned. "Plus, Wendy will be here soon, and she totally goes for the Tuatha thing."

  Ciaran grinned back. "You know it. And hey, on the subject of being into hot people, you should've come to pool night at the bar yesterday. Eric was there."

  Jason could feel his face flushing. "So what? Why should I care?" He tried to sound like he actually didn't care, but, judging from Bridget's sympathetic look, he'd completely failed. Then again, she'd known him for eight years, so maybe she was just that good at reading through his blatant lies. "Anyway, I told you, I promised Liam I'd take him to that movie he wanted to see. I haven't been spending nearly enough time with him lately."

  "Shoulda brought him along!" Ciaran said cheerfully.

  "Fuck you, Keer; you know he's only fourteen." Jason replied, but without any heat. He knew Ciaran wouldn't seriously condone his younger brother coming to a bar with them.

  "Anyway, not to worry. I am awesome and have pictures for you to stare at longingly," Ciaran said, pulling a small, thin digital camera out of his pocket and starting to go through the pictures. "I'll email them to you later, but I thought you'd appreciate this one." Abruptly he stopped, frowning intently at the screen. Jason leaned forward to try and see what he was looking at, but the angle was wrong.

  "What is it?"

  Ciaran didn't answer for a moment. Finally he shrugged, resuming his easy smile, and handed the camera to Jason. "Nothing. Here's your boy."

  "Not 'my' anything," Jason protested, but he took the camera all the same. He had to admit it was a good picture. Ciaran must have taken it candidly—Eric Donahue was sitting at a bar stool, not looking at the camera, pose about as relaxed as Jason ever saw him. His dark hair was casually tucked behind one ear, and his expression was set in his typical Mona Lisa smile. The camera flash had illuminated his intent blue-grey eyes.

  "Now, whenever you're done mooning, I actually do want a coffee."

  Ciaran chatted with Bridget as Jason moved around making his coffee. Right about then, Jason felt a sudden sense of foreboding. At first he tried to ignore the feeling, but when it persisted, he knew better than to assume it was nothing. He cast around in his mind, trying to figure out what his meager precogn
itive ability might be trying to tell him. As always, the sense was frustratingly vague and muddled, but the moment he thought of his younger brother, the feeling noticeably intensified. Jason's heart started hammering with a sudden panic, and he completely failed to notice when the cup he was filling overflowed, spilling incredibly hot liquid on his hand. He hissed with pain and yanked his hand away, somehow managing to not spill the cup. "Ow, fuck!"

  "What's wrong?" Bridget asked at the same moment Ciaran said, "You okay, Jace?"

  "Just … just burned my fucking hand again," Jason said, going for the ice, the pain actually helping him focus on the present and not get caught up in his increasingly negative thoughts.

  Bridget winced in sympathy, but Ciaran wasn't so nice. "Aw, poor baby.”

  "Cut the shit, Keer; it fucking hurts," Jason said as Bridget helped him fill a bucket with ice water. He winced again when he stuck his hand in. "And it was your fucking coffee. Any chance I could get you to trade off early?" he asked, internally relieved to have such a good excuse for the request. He wanted to be out of there and looking for Liam as soon as possible.

  "Yeah, yeah, I'm just ragging on you," Ciaran replied, a bit more sympathetically. "You go off and lick your wounds; I'll hold down the fort."

  "You going to be okay?" Bridget asked, looking concerned—possibly a little more concerned than a simple burn accident would warrant. Jason hated how well she could read him sometimes. Then again, maybe he was just obvious and Ciaran was just dense.

  "I'll be fine. Don't worry about it," Jason replied, trying to look a lot less distressed than he actually was. He pulled his hand out of the ice water, gently toweling it off. He claimed his bag from the corner where it resided and stuffed his café apron haphazardly inside. "See you later."

  "Okay. Tell Liam I said hi," Bridget responded, still looking worried.

  "Right," Jason replied. He just hoped he'd be able to pass on the message.

  *~*~*

  It took willpower for Jason not to run the entire way home to the apartment he shared with his brother. Ten minutes had never felt so long. Halfway home he tried calling Liam. It just made him feel worse when there was no answer. By the time he reached their street, he was nearly vibrating from tension and worry. The fact that the feeling of foreboding had mostly faded told him that he was almost certainly too late to prevent whatever had happened. He found himself imagining all kinds of worst case scenarios from Liam lying in an alley somewhere to Child Services having decided that Jason was unfit to be his guardian. His imagination even managed to come up with a complicated scenario involving feral raccoons.

  Once he actually made it inside his door, he found he was right about one thing: Liam should have been home, and he most decidedly wasn't. School had let out hours ago, and Liam always let Jason know ahead of time when he wasn't going to be home, even if just by text. Jason futilely checked his phone again, but of course no missed calls or messages had appeared in the last few minutes. Growing increasingly worried, Jason dialed Liam's number again.

  The phone rang from inside the apartment. Liam never left his phone at home.

  Over the next hour, Jason did everything he could think of: walked the route that Liam usually took to school and some of the surrounding area, called Liam's school, and called several of Liam's friends. There was just no sign of him. He started asking neighbors near their apartment, but the best he found was that a fire alarm had gone off in the building. More than one person said they'd seen Liam then, so he'd at least made it home. Jason finally just tried waiting at home to see if Liam might show up, but barely 10 minutes had passed before he panicked at the lack of action.

  Bridget. He should call Bridget; she was always much better about keeping a cool head, and he knew her shift would be over by now. Maybe she'd be able to think of something. He closed his eyes and took a few deep, even breaths until he felt a bit more rational, but he still couldn't keep his hands from shaking as he pulled up Bridget's number on his phone.

  "Hey Jason, what's up?" Bridget's voice came from the other end of the line, and Jason already found himself feeling better. Bridget could always calm him down.

  "Bridget, Liam's gone. He's not at home, he's not at school, he didn't say anything to me, and he actually left his phone at home, which he's never done, and something might have happened, and I'm kind of freaking out," Jason said all in a rush.

  "Okay hon, stay calm. I'm sure this'll turn out to be no big deal. I'm coming over right now."

  Jason sighed in relief. "Thanks, Bridget. You're amazing."

  "Don't you know it. See you soon, hon."

  *~*~*

  An hour later found Jason pacing the length of his small living room with Bridget looking on from the battered, dark blue couch that was the only real piece of sitting furniture in the room.

  "Bridget, something's happened to him," Jason insisted, not for first time. "We've tried all of my ideas, all your ideas, and it's now been hours. Something's wrong." Speaking half to himself, he added, "Child Services couldn't just pick someone up off the street, could they? They tell you before they do that, right?"

  "Why do you think Child Services might have taken him?" Bridget asked sharply, leaning forward and suddenly looking a lot more concerned. "Have there been any problems?"

  "No, but—"

  "But you're being paranoid," Bridget finished, visibly relaxing. "And no, they generally don't pick kids up off the street."

  They both fell silent for a long moment, but Jason's mind continued to whirl. The Bureau of Paranormal Investigations might do that. They could have somehow found out that Liam was an unregistered psychic and then taken him away. But then again, surely even they wouldn't be allowed to just kidnap people in secret like that. The penalty for not registering wasn't that severe. Even with the shady rumors surrounding the BPI's treatment of people with rare abilities, he was pretty sure they didn't resort to outright kidnapping. Did they? Despite what had happened to his father, he remembered the BPI had made every effort to seem legitimate at first. His father had been in 'official training' for years before he'd just disappeared.

  "You know, Jason," Bridget began cautiously, her tone immediately setting Jason on the defensive, because that was definitely her 'you're not going to like what I'm about to say' voice, "Have you considered that Liam might just be going through some kind of rebellious phase?"

  That was patently ridiculous enough to make Jason stop pacing just to scowl at her. "Come on, Bridget, are you kidding me? You know Liam. He's more responsible than I am."

  "Can't deny that," Bridget agreed, an amused smile on her face, which Jason chose to ignore in favor of resuming his pacing. He caught Bridget rolling her eyes; she sighed and leaned backward on the couch, picking at a frayed thread. "Look, if he's not back in two days, we can file a missing person report."

  Jason stopped again, staring at the off-color wall, not turning back to face her. No small amount of frustration seeping into his voice, he replied, "No. I can't."

  "Hon, I know you don't want to wait that long, but …"

  Jason cut her off. "No, I mean I can't file a police report. Not about anything to do with Liam."

  Bridget was silent for a moment, and Jason finally turned to look at her, struggling to keep his expression neutral. She frowned at him, staring intently, almost as if she were willing the truth out. When she spoke, her tone was measured, but Jason caught the underlying suspicion. "And why not?"

  "I'm not going to risk involving the police in anything to do with Liam."

  "You're repeating yourself. What aren't you telling me?" Bridget's expression was hard, and Jason realized she knew. Well, it was pretty damn unlikely she knew specifically about his or Liam's abilities, but it was suddenly obvious she knew he had been keeping a major secret from her. He'd be pretty upset, too, in her position.

  Jason sighed and came to a decision. He had to tell her. Maybe a filtered version, and maybe not everything, but she wasn't going to give up on the poli
ce angle unless he actually told her why that was impossible.

  After he'd worked so hard keeping Liam's abilities a secret, it felt surreal to actually say the words out loud. "Bridget … Liam's an unregistered psychic."

  Bridget stared blankly at him. Whatever she'd been expecting, it apparently hadn't been that. "That's it?" She finally asked.

  Stung, Jason snapped at her, "Bridget, this is a big fucking deal to me!"

  "God, Jason, I thought you were smuggling drugs for the mob or something!" Bridget crossed her arms and sat up stiffly; she had an odd habit of going formal in her posture when annoyed. "How long have you known? And why the hell did you keep it from me?"

  "Bridget, come on. I didn't tell you because no one is supposed to know. Yes, not even you. It's not something I tell people." Jason carefully avoided the question of 'how long'. He wasn't sure how well she'd take 'since before we even met' as a response.

  "I don't get what all the secrecy is about," Bridget said. "People dodge registration all the time. I get not publicizing your brother's a psychic, but come on; it's not that big a deal."

  Bridget's casual attitude just agitated Jason further. “It is a big fucking deal, Bridget, and don’t you dare let this knowledge leave the room.”

  "Christ, Jason, what's your problem? I mean, you don't believe the bogey stories about how people never come back from the BPI's registration training period, do you?” Bridget paused at the serious look on Jason's face. Her expression grew earnest as she tried to calm him down. "You know my friend Ted, right? His cousin did the registration year, came back when they said he would, and never had any problems. All the bad hype about the BPI—it's just rumors, you know?"

  Jason held her gaze for a long moment, completely serious. "Bridget, I do believe the bogey stories."

  Bridget sighed. "You know I would always keep your secrets. Even if I think you're being unreasonable."

  Jason gave himself a moment to feel relieved, and then he leaned forward, head in his hands. He still had no idea how the hell to find his brother.