Tipping Point

by Helena Maeve

  It took a couple of tries to slot the clip back into place and lock it before restoring the pistol to its proper place. The green cell phone that had turned up his blood pressure was damn near innocuous beside it.

  Elijah nudged the drawer shut. He stood before the dresser for a long beat, uncertainty thrumming in his bloodstream. Then he reached for the next brass handle. Doubts flashed into being between his ears, only to be discarded just as quickly. Rational or not, he needed answers. Nate wouldn’t give them, so—so this would have to do. It wasn’t right but it was his only way of finding out what he was dealing with. Or who.

  The underwear drawer offered no further surprises. It didn’t conceal a rocket launcher or poisoner’s toolkit. It wasn’t being used to store grainy surveillance photographs. Elijah didn’t let himself overthink what he was doing. He closed it and moved on to the next with all the single-minded purpose of a bomb expert searching for the correct wire. Nate’s undershirts and pajamas hid no surprises.

  The bottom drawer was all folded bed sheets, the corners neat and seamlessly aligned. Elijah ran a hand under the stacks. He was about ready to give up when his fingertips struck treasure.

  He didn’t recognize the make and model of the second gun. Ballistics expertise was not the reason Jules kept him around.

  And Nate? It hadn’t occurred to Elijah to wonder what his job was, with Jules.

  The arsenal only multiplied when Elijah expanded his search from dresser to walk-in wardrobe and bedside tables. Even the drawer beneath the bed, where Nate ostensibly kept his pillows and spare duvet, concealed a Sig Sauer—plus silencer.

  Elijah felt his way to the edge of the mattress and wearily sat down. Could be a Second Amendment nut. Could be just a gun enthusiast… But in the case, why no gun locker? Why did Nate find it necessary to secret his weapons within easy reach, like a trail of breadcrumbs?

  What’s he afraid of?

  Elijah fell back to the bed and stretched his arms to either side, clenching his fists around thin air. Cracks in the ceiling drew his eye from one end of the room to the other in a restless zigzag.

  Jumping to conclusions never helped anyone. Talk to Jules. Hear Nate out.

  Then run.

  Every action plan ultimately boiled down to fleeing the scene. Elijah pushed up from the mattress, irrationally frustrated. Yesterday, he would’ve killed for a reason to go and stay gone. Now that he had one, he wanted it erased.

  Another TCM marathon wasn’t likely to help. He switched the flat screen on all the same.

  Chapter Six

  Since prison, sleep hadn’t exactly come easy to Elijah. He’d been too shell-shocked to let his guard down at the shelter. He only rested out of necessity on the streets, when he couldn’t keep his eyes open a moment longer. There was always a risk that other panhandlers would steal his stuff while he was out, or that police would pick him up for loitering, as they ultimately did. But the same rules didn’t seem to apply in Nate’s digs.

  Whether it was his lavish king-sized bed with its plump pillows and soft sheets or the couch, Elijah conked out for hours at a time. He’d already known that was a risk when he lay down before lunch.

  He simply assumed he’d wake out of hunger—as he’d done before. But when he opened his eyes, the room was plunged into near-total shadow. Only the telescopic arm of the standing lamp in the corner cast a hazy shadow onto a newspaper clutched between two pale hands.

  Elijah sat up abruptly, stomach pitching violently into his rib cage.

  “Shit, you’re home! When did you—I didn’t hear you come in.” It wasn’t the first time he trotted out that excuse. This time, at least, it was the truth.

  Nate folded his newspaper along the crease. “About an hour ago.” His answer was little more than a whisper, as though he hadn’t yet noticed that Elijah was awake or he was too tired to adjust accordingly.

  In the low lamplight, the circles under his eyes were the color of purpling bruises. The improbable slant of his cheekbones made the flat line of his lips seem wider than usual.

  “Long day?” Elijah guessed. Terminating targets? Stealing state secrets? Putting the cache in the bedroom out of his mind wasn’t as easy as he’d hoped.

  “Something like that.”

  He waited for Nate to elaborate. It should have come as no surprise when he didn’t.

  “Time is it anyway?” he asked, oddly desperate to keep conversation going. He couldn’t reconcile the arsenal in the bedroom with the man seated across from him now, one leg tucked under the other and newspaper ink brushed dark onto his fingertips.

  “Midnight, I think.” Nate bent forward to retrieve his phone from the coffee table.

  Despite himself, Elijah thought of the burner in the dresser. Did Nate know he’d received a call? Elijah toyed with the thought of telling him as much—indifferent-like, selling it as a bit of trivia for the road. Wisely, the words caught in his throat. It was probably for the best.

  “Yeah,” Nate confirmed. “Midnight. You should head to bed.”

  “Maybe we should switch tonight. You look like you could use a real rest.”

  Nate snorted, the corner of his lips twitching. “Thanks.” He must’ve been more tired than he appeared, because he put up no argument. Nor did he move from the leather armchair.

  Elijah pretended that his intent was solely to lend a hand when he staggered to his feet and shambled awkwardly toward him. It didn’t explain how halfway there he wound up sinking to his knees on the shaggy, synthetic rug and crawling the rest of the way.

  He heard Nate’s inhale before he felt the twitch of a kneecap under his hand.

  “Elijah—”

  “Not drunk this time,” he blurted out, as though that alone could be an impediment. Reason and want clashed like rival armies inside his skull. The whoosh of blood against his eardrums was the resulting skirmish.

  It didn’t make it all that easy to think, let alone justify what he was doing.

  Nate shuffled both socked feet onto the floor and set aside the paper. Elijah had just about convinced himself that this was the beginning of the end when Nate slid the blunt tip of a pencil under Elijah’s chin, tipping up his gaze.

  He obeyed. Meeting Nate’s eyes wasn’t really a challenge. As long as he didn’t think about it, as long as he didn’t try to unpack the restless spasms in the hollow of his chest, it was as if this wasn’t really happening.

  The potential for a screw-up lessened proportionally.

  “You look good,” Nate breathed, his voice low and husky.

  “I’m wearing your clothes,” was all Elijah could think of to say in response.

  “I mean… You look good down there.” Nate skimmed his gaze slowly down Elijah’s body, expression unreadable. “That sounds wrong. You know what I mean.”

  Better than you can imagine. Elijah nodded. His mind was a dangerously blank slate, ready to be inked with whatever demands Nate made of him.

  He tried not to think about being asked to get up and go away.

  Danger hovered in every heartbeat. Dread swarmed his senses when Nate tipped forward and curled a hand behind his neck. His sigh was ponderous, defeated, a sort of ‘what should I do with you’ that Elijah understood to mean he’d overstepped his bounds again.

  Apologies brimmed on the tip of his tongue in every form except for the frightening, honest confession that he wanted this.

  “You really shouldn’t tempt me,” Nate warned. A shock of inky hair drooped into his eyes, further shadowing his gaze.

  “Why not?”

  “You’re very handsome.”

  Elijah aborted a scoff as soon as he felt Nate’s fingers clench around his nape. He tensed instinctively, but Nate’s hand was warm and his eyes were kind, and it was easy to believe that he meant well.

  “Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately?” Nate wondered.

  “Every morning since Jules brought me here,” Elijah affirmed. It was more of a confession than he’d intended,
but something about being on his knees between Nate’s legs made it difficult to lie. “Shower’s helped, sure, but…” He couldn’t resist scraping a hand through his newly trimmed beard. He’d thought about shaving it off, but he didn’t want to ruin Nate’s razor blades with his scruff.

  It didn’t seem practical, either, if he wasn’t sure how much longer he had on the sunny side of town. Growing out a five o’clock shadow into some decent length on his whiskers made for an unpleasant experience.

  Nate shook his head, disappointment hefty in his gaze, and combed his fingers through Elijah’s hair. He didn’t yank, but the pressure in his wrist intensified by increments, until Elijah had no choice but to tilt forward and rest his cheek against the surprisingly soft wool of Nate’s pant leg.

  “Here’s what I see,” Nate murmured. “I see a man who made it through seven years in a maximum security prison and came out in one piece. I see a fighter… I see a loyal friend who still gives the benefit of the doubt to the woman who landed him in prison in the first place.”

  Elijah glanced up, lips parting of their own accord. “You knew about that?”

  Nate nodded. Jules must have told him—but why? She hadn’t wanted Elijah to take the fall. She’d actively campaigned to sabotage his defense until it became obvious that he’d sooner make a deal with the DA than recant his testimony.

  Jules had never berated him worse than she did when he claimed to be the one who put a bullet into the undercover CIA agent who’d been tailing her. He’d called it a private misunderstanding and angled for manslaughter rather than murder.

  As far as the US court system was concerned, that was enough to convict.

  Langley hadn’t wanted a long trial, much less a public admission that the Company operated on domestic soil. And Section, which had employed about fifty percent of Jules at the time, was so satisfied with the outcome that they’d reassigned her to a post abroad.

  Elijah fell through the cracks as the ideal scapegoat—there one day to take the blame and gone the next.

  “What you did took guts,” Nate noted quietly as he slid his palm to cup Elijah’s cheek. “And what you’re doing now…isn’t necessary. You know that, yeah?”

  “Swear I’m not doing anything ’cause I have to,” said Elijah, which wasn’t the same as saying he wasn’t doing anything.

  They’d passed the point of pretending this was just a slip-up the second Nate put his hands on him for some other purpose than shoving him away. They were revisiting last night’s mistake. Best to acknowledge it and move on.

  “I’m not drunk,” he reiterated, for good measure, and slowly turned his lips into Nate’s palm, pressing a kiss to his lifeline. “Were you serious, before? Do you find me…? I mean, do you want to—”

  Concrete details were hard to spell out. He found himself trusting Nate to read between the lines.

  “I’ve always had a thing for blonds,” Nate confessed.

  It wasn’t the sheepish confession it should have been because Nate chose to rest his thumb over Elijah’s lips and gently press in, giving him time to open his mouth and let the graphite-stained digit graze his tongue.

  Elijah wouldn’t have answered if he could. Heat suffused his senses, the kind of incipient blaze he knew could easily flare into a boiling inferno. Nothing felt quite solid around him anymore, not the hardwood floor biting into his knees, not the scratch of borrowed cotton against his cock.

  The room fell gradually out of focus, aided by the dim glow of the standing lamp, until all Elijah saw was Nate, leaning in, knuckling his chin up and—oh, God—kissing him.

  Elijah tried and failed to bite back an embarrassing whimper as Nate’s mouth opened to him with a hushed gasp of surprise. It slipped out all the same, muffled slightly by the pressure of Nate’s lips against his.

  He shivered as Nate traced a spit-slick thumb down his neck, too gentle to stir any dormant fears. “Is this what you want?” Nate wanted to know. His voice had dropped an octave, growing even sultrier than before.

  The Prince William accent didn’t hurt, either.

  If Nate had a thing for blonds, then Elijah was fast discovering he might have a thing for posh Brit boys—who kept a whole arsenal tucked away in their sock drawer. He locked that thought away in favor of focusing on the sweet pull of Nate’s fingers through his hair.

  “Elijah.”

  “Hmm? Oh… Yeah.” He didn’t realize he’d closed his eyes until he opened them to find Nate gazing at him with an arched eyebrow. “I won’t freak out again if you’re—”

  “I’m not worried about that.”

  It was too swift to be a lie and too self-assured to be false comfort.

  “Good,” Elijah echoed, thinning his lips, “but if I do…you won’t hold it against me, right?” I want this. I don’t want to fuck it up again. He was already skating on thin ice with Nate.

  He felt a flicker of regret at the thought. Nate didn’t even know the half of it.

  “I can feel you trembling,” Nate answered obliquely.

  “Guess I’m cold.”

  But Nate wasn’t fooled. “No, it’s different. It’s like you crave to be touched…”

  Oh. That sounded different, indeed, and Elijah couldn’t deny it. “Y-yeah,” he breathed, voice strangled with want.

  Nate didn’t help when he sat back and spread his legs a little wider. “Been a while, hasn’t it?”

  Elijah nodded, the best he could do with honey cloying his tongue to the roof of his mouth and breaths in short supply.

  “Do you trust me?”

  It didn’t escape Elijah that the request was phrased like a question but sounded more like a demand. Trust me. Do as you’re told. If anything, prison only slammed home the need to conform.

  Elijah leaned in, greedy for contact, and found himself nosing at Nate’s inseam, scraping his trimmed beard against wool in a vague bid for permission. It was all he could do not to reach up and unzip Nate’s slacks himself. He didn’t know if it was allowed, was terrified of overstepping, still, but his heart settled back down into his ribcage when Nate tightened his grip on his nape, guiding him closer. He was on the right track.

  As though reading his mind, Nate reached down with his free hand and unfastened belt and zip fly.

  There was nothing delicate about the way he slid out his cock, fingers white-knuckled around the base of the shaft, but dread was the furthest thing from Elijah’s mind at the sight. All he could think of was that Nate was turned on. That it wasn’t just flirtation, what he’d said before. He was hard, his erection straining out of a thatch of sparse curls as he gave himself a slow, leisurely pump, and Elijah was the reason why.

  He gladly would have gone on watching him a while longer, even sat back and played rapt audience to Nate jacking off for the next five minutes. He had no desire to push back against Nate’s palm. He parted his lips obediently when Nate brushed them with the engorged, silky-smooth head of his erection. He wasn’t so large that Elijah needed to worry about his jaw aching by the time they finished.

  It was just as well, because thoughts of what came next fled his mind as he swallowed Nate down—not to the root, but close, as close as Elijah could get. He hummed with pleasure at the sensation of Nate filling his mouth, eyes sliding shut.

  Above him, Nate gasped. “Oh, that’s good…”

  For all of the control he seemed to exhibit, that gasp was free, uninhibited. He let Elijah slide up until only the tip of his erection balanced on his tongue before slowly dragging him back down. It was an excruciatingly deliberate back and forth, but as long as Nate was in the driver’s seat, Elijah found it easy to surrender to the sensation.

  He’d always enjoyed being taken—even when it hurt and he was ashamed, and the men he was with didn’t give a damn about his pleasure, a small, stubborn part of him sought comfort in the experience. He knew it was fucked up. The contrast was glaring. Nate, for instance, couldn’t seem to stop touching him. His fingertips were warm on Elijah’s cheek
as soft, pleased moans escaped his lips.

  No matter how tight the grip he had on Elijah’s hair, it never registered as a chokehold.

  “You’re gonna make me come,” Nate rasped, delighted. “Fuck, that’s it, love…”

  Terms of endearment were few and far between in prison—or used to demean rather than flatter—but that soft whisper of affection on Nate’s lips plucked a cord deep at Elijah’s core. He wrapped a hand around Nate’s length, holding him steady as he doubled his efforts. The other he used to cradle his silky sac.

  His whole being suddenly boiled down to the slip-slide grip of his fist around Nate’s cock, the dizzying bob of his head.

  He was vaguely aware of Nate’s clenching fingers, his one last garbled warning, but the taste of him still flooded Elijah’s mouth in a sudden torrent, unanticipated. Elijah did his best to swallow, savoring the sense of accomplishment more so than the flavor of his release.

  It was a contradiction Elijah had never been able to untangle. He liked going to his knees and he got off on pleasing his lovers, but he didn’t especially love swallowing. Still, it felt rude somehow to spit it out onto the hardwood floors.

  The stroke of Nate’s hands through his hair and down the wings of his shoulders more than made it worthwhile.

  “Good God, Elijah… You’re so good for me. Christ. You liked that?”

  His cock slipped from Elijah’s lips as he nodded.

  He’d long struggled to understand why it was that he reveled in letting other men use him, and what that said about him as a man, but in the moment the how and why of it didn’t matter. He knew that Nate would take care of him. He’d already done so much.

  Elijah pressed a hand over his own denim-trapped erection, shivering as the pressure sent an electric shiver skittering down his spine.

  It came as no surprise when Nate picked up on that little earthquake.

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah,” Elijah mumbled, his eyes too heavy to pry open. “I just…”

  “You need to come, don’t you?” Nate palmed his cheek, stroking his thumb lightly over the hinge. “Go on. Touch yourself for me. Want to see you get yours.”