by Elle Keaton
“You could at least feed me. And I couldn’t find any coffee.” His eyes widened dramatically. “Please tell me you drink coffee,” he begged Seth. “You’re not some kind of healthy-living guy.”
Seth rummaged through his spices-and-other-stuff cabinet. “After all the beer we had last night? I don’t think so. I think I am out of coffee, though. Damn.”
“I’ll go. You two,” Sacha pointed a finger at both of them, “stay here.” He went into his room for a few minutes before coming back out dressed for public in shorts, a worn gray T-shirt emblazoned with “Property of US Marshals,” and an unzipped plain black hoodie. He jammed his bare feet into the shoes lying by the front door. “I mean it: stay here,” he said before shutting the door behind himself. The roar of the truck’s engine echoed across the neighborhood when he gunned it down the street. Damn, he was sexy.
“Jesus, I hate that truck.” Parker turned to look at Seth, who was standing between the kitchen and the living room. “So, you and Sacha. We need to talk.”
“Talk? About what?”
“About you and Sacha,” Parker repeated. “We may not be blood related, but he is my family.”
“I’m pretty sure Sacha and I are both adults. We can figure this out by ourselves.”
“Hmm.” Parker nodded. “You are both adults. But I don’t know you. I know Sacha.” He patted the cushion next to him.
God help him if Seth didn’t walk over and sit down as bidden.
“I’ve always suspected Sacha was gay, or bi, I guess.”
“Uh, okay.” Seth wasn’t sure where Parker was going with this or why it required sitting down on the couch.
“I was seven when he came to live with us.”
The ends of Seth’s fingers tingled. The nervous, anxious feeling fluttered in his gut.
“Okaaaay?”
Parker took a deep breath before continuing. “Look, we grew up in foster care. It wasn’t a nightmare; it wasn’t great. The family had their own agenda, and I guess, since we are still alive and none of us has had too much therapy, it wasn’t too bad. But Sacha, he’s a different kind of person. Like, he is wired to protect. But also, mmmmm—” another breath, “there’s no natural trust, right? You have to earn it. He’s always taken care of himself and a few very lucky other people.”
“You and your sister, Mae-Lin.”
“Yeah.” Parker narrowed his eyes. “And, I think, you.”
And damn if that didn’t make the nervous fluttering in his stomach intensify. Seth tried to choke it back, to swallow the swirling unease.
He hid it with a chuckle that probably sounded more like a whinny. “Nah, we’re pretty casual.”
“Casual.” Parker spat the word back at Seth. “I don’t think you understand what I’m trying to tell you. When Sacha decides he’s in, he goes all in. There’s no middle ground where he is concerned. We may not have talked much in the past few years, but I know he hasn’t changed. Lemme give you an example.”
He smoothed the blanket on his lap. “He was like a wild animal when they brought him to the house. He had nothing, not even a bag like the social workers normally hand out for kids’ belongings, only the clothes on his back. He spoke very little English and basically refused to acknowledge any of us.” Parker snorted when Seth rolled his eyes. “Yeah, that went on for a few weeks. We shared a room. At first I was scared of him, because he never spoke. That changed when Sacha was assigned to the same school as me. One day he was out during recess and saw me being bullied by some other kids. It was probably pretty harmless, but all I remember is him standing between me and them, yelling at them, protecting me.”
Parker looked at Seth, his blue eyes serious. “After that, I never worried about feeling safe. Poor guy, I bonded to him like a baby duck or something. But the thing is, I hadn’t felt safe since the fire that took my family… and suddenly somebody had my back. Sacha has never wavered from that. Even though he thinks he has been protecting me the past few years by staying away, see… he was still protecting me.”
He narrowed his eyes at Seth. “I see what’s happening. If you aren’t dead serious about Sacha, then you better back the fuck away, right now.”
“I, uh—” Seth stammered.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Asshole.”
“Hey!”
“Me and Mae have been worried about him being alone. But this is worse. If you fuck up… if you break him…”
“Are—are you threatening me?” Seth couldn’t believe this conversation, and before coffee too.
“I’m telling you to be careful. To think about what you are doing and what you intend.”
Avoiding Parker and his knowing gaze for the rest of the morning—an absolute necessity—proved to be easy. After coffee, Sacha took Parker to go find some new clothes to replace the ones that went up in flames with the marina. Seth spent the morning researching Theodore Garrison and Owen Penn. Owen proved to be elusive, although there was a Penn family that had lived in eastern Washington that might fit. For Theodore, the likeliest candidate seemed to be Theodore Garrison, Emeritus Professor of English at the large state university in Seattle.
The problem was—in Seth’s mind, anyway—Theodore was too young, his birth year recorded on the university website as 1922. Seth stared at the picture of the two men. It was impossible to tell their ages. The men in the picture could be anywhere from fifteen to thirty. They wore cocky grins like they had a secret. Or Seth could be projecting.
The grainy quality of the black-and-white photograph didn’t help. He stared at it for several minutes, until it swam out of focus, before sliding it back on top of the stack of documents. The postcards were no help, and the letters’ handwriting was too faded and spidery to read. Dammit. He knew the biggest clue was the battered book of poetry with the dedication on the title page. The words seemed bittersweet. Where had Theodore gone that he could only hope?
Sighing, Seth stretched, his shoulders and back popping from sitting too long at the table. Where were Sacha and Parker? It couldn’t possibly take this long to decide on clothing. In any case, he had clients to keep happy and an anemic bank account to bolster.
Sacha and Parker returned as he was headed out the door. They were in the middle of an argument. Seth couldn’t tell what it was about; he thought it was mostly that Parker liked to argue with whatever Sacha said, and Sacha had the whole bossy, in-control thing going on. Seth was glad for the excuse to leave them to it, because he suspected whatever was happening between Sacha and him pushed up against a personal boundary. One he wasn’t sure he was ever going to be prepared to move across.
Seventeen
Sacha
The laughter booming over the connection was not funny.
“Bolic, you are fucking kidding me, right?” He heard Adam dragging air into his lungs so he could speak. “Lemme recap so I get this straight—so to speak.” Sacha rolled his eyes, even though Klay couldn’t see. “You leave Skagit after being undercover for years, go back to Kansas City, decide to retire. Move back here, and the first person you meet is my half-brother, who you are ‘kind of seeing’—which I am not going to think too deeply about—and now your foster brother shows up and he appears to be a witness, maybe the sole witness, to a marina fire in Florida. You do know, when the flames cooled enough for investigators to go in, they found a body, right? And Diego Smith did not die of smoke inhalation or drowning; he was leaky as a sieve with three bullet holes in his back.”
“Yeah. That’s pretty much what happened.” Adam’s summary didn’t make the situation sound any better. As soon as Seth had left that morning, Sacha’d hopped on the internet to see what he could find out about the marina fire. It hadn’t been good. Regardless of who or which side of what organization killed Diego Smith, the de Vega family would be out for blood, and Parker appeared to be the single witness. Investigators were going to need to talk to him… but Sacha was more concerned about the de Vegas.
“Well, let me call some people an
d see how they are going to proceed.”
Sacha ran his hand through his hair again, fighting the urge to pull it out. “I know you gotta look at everything, but no way was Parker involved in this; he was there by chance. He is freaky scared of fire—his family was killed in a house fire. It’s a miracle he got out. He…” Sacha looked to the ceiling as if it was going to offer advice, “he has this knack for finding trouble. I kid you not. Law enforcement should hire him, use him as a divining rod for criminal activity.”
“Yeah, okay.” Adam was silent for a minute. “Look, I’ll do what I can. Keep yourself available.”
Because he had to stay busy or go insane, Sacha left Parker at Seth’s hiding in the second bedroom and headed to the Warrick to inflict damage on walls, both real and metaphorical.
“Are you done here?” Seth’s voice broke into Sacha’s thoughts. Seth must have known he would be hard at work. The interruption was welcome; Sacha didn’t hesitate to put down what he was working on, pulling the paper mask from his face so he could talk. Stripping tiles was not his idea of fun.
They stopped at the grocery store again. The checkout clerk had served them several times now and greeted them with a cheery hello and a knowing smile.
“Grilling again?” Fucking great, the kid remembered what they had bought before.
“Yep, my buddy is hungry from a day of manual labor.”
The kid eyed Seth with a different sort of interest, one that put Sacha on edge. His gaze traveled up and back down what he could see of Seth from his side of the counter. Then his eyes widened and jerked back over to Sacha. Sacha realized he’d stepped closer to Seth; he may possibly have growled.
Seth snickered, patting him on the shoulder. “Down, boy.” Seth tried to pay, but Sacha knocked his hand away from the card reader, which for some reason made him chuckle again. Sacha grabbed the bags and stalked out to the parking lot.
“What crawled up your butt?” Seth asked from behind him. “I’ve grown used to the tall, dark, and grouchy part, but you’ve taken it to a new level.”
Aside from wondering what kind of trouble Parker could possibly have gotten into over the course of the afternoon, Sacha was still trying to process his conversation with Adam. He was out of sorts and generally irritable. Seth didn’t deserve that.
Sacha took a deep breath, letting it back out slowly, “Sorry, I’m fighting with the city over electrical permits and the fact that I need them this century; this year would be nice.”
“Are you in some kind of hurry?” Seth stopped at his car, popping the hatch for Sacha to load the groceries. “I mean, it’s not like I know anything, but I had the impression this, erm, project was running on your own timeline?”
“The city is a pain in my ass. I don’t understand why everything has to take so long. I may actually have to go to a Chamber of Commerce meeting.” It wouldn’t kill him, but he didn’t have to like it. As irritating as it was to admit, though, Seth was right: there was no time limit. He had all the time in the world. Maybe not all the money, but plenty of time. Stretching out endlessly ahead of him.
That evening the three of them avoided touchy subjects like murder and arson, instead indulging in homemade pizza and, since neither Seth nor he owned a TV, several hours of gin rummy. Seth was a terrible card player, but he more than made up for it, distracting Sacha by running a hand along his thigh, teasing, pressing, touching. Halfway through the game, Sacha was hard enough he couldn’t concentrate and worried he had a wet spot on his shorts.
Parker pretended he didn’t know what was going on. He also won. With a look far too knowing for his little brother, Parker threw his last card down on the discard pile.
“For the win.” He looked at them both, shaking his head. “I’m sleeping in your bed tonight, Sacha, since you won’t be using it. I promise not to emerge before morning.” With that, he disappeared into the spare room, swiping a pair of headphones off the table before he exited.
Seth grinned. This time he cupped Sacha’s erection through the rough fabric of his shorts, squeezing a little. Sacha groaned, unable to control the thrust of his hips.
“I think you need a little distraction from permits and pesky relatives.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Sacha scooted his chair back from the tiny table and patted his thighs. “Come here.” Seth cocked his head like he was thinking about it before complying, coming to perch lightly on Sacha’s lap, legs spread wide so Sacha could see the bulge in his shorts.
“What do you want?” Seth asked breathlessly, scooting close so their cocks rubbed against each other in a most tantalizing way.
“Fuck,” Sacha gasped, swimming in sensation from the hours-long tease fest.
“That, yeah, for sure. Can I suck you first? I wanna taste you on my tongue.”
Seth didn’t wait for an answer, which was good because Sacha’s brain was off-line. He scooted back so he could unbutton Sacha’s shorts. He’d opened Sacha’s zipper sometime toward the end of the game, sliding a finger tentatively in, stroking Sacha randomly. Sometimes running a fingernail as far up and down the side of him as possible in the tight space. It was a wonder Sacha had lasted. His heavy cock, still constrained by boxer briefs, throbbed in time with his heartbeat. Seth slid to his knees, opened his own shorts, and pulled his erection out, pumping himself a couple times while Sacha watched, breathing hard.
Seth tugged at Sacha’s shorts. He lifted himself so Seth could pull them all the way down and off, taking the underwear with them. Sacha was splayed wide for Seth to see, taste, and touch as he wished. As he wished. Sacha had to shut his eyes for a moment.
Finally Seth put his lips against the crown of Sacha’s penis, pulling it into the hot wet of his mouth. Sacha moaned, breathless, “Fuck, Seth.”
Seth proceeded to lick, suck, and lavish attention up and down from base to tip and back again. His lips stretched around Sacha, obscene with spit and the precome dripping from Sacha’s erection. Massaging Sacha’s balls but keeping a firm grip on the base, Seth leaned closer, pushing his nose against Sacha’s pubes and breathing deeply, the scruff on Seth’s cheek soft against Sacha’s aching cock.
“Bedroom,” Sacha rasped.
“Mmmm.” Seth popped off, leaving Sacha bobbing in the cool air.
“Now.”
“Oh, hot and bothered, are you?” Seth leaned back onto his heels. “But… bedroom is good. Very good.”
Later, Sacha would not be able to recall exactly how they got from the table to Seth’s bed, only that they landed on it a tangle of arms, legs, and naked skin, a mess of sensation.
“Is this okay?” Sacha remembered to ask. He had Seth on his back, legs spread wantonly, massaging Seth’s hole, pushing a finger inside.
Seth smiled up at him, eyes half closed. “Hell yeah… inside me.” He pushed down a little, forcing Sacha’s finger further inside, groaning as he did so. “Hurry up, I’m not made of glass. I’ve been to the rodeo before.”
Sacha tortured him a few more minutes until both their cocks were leaking again, enough precome that they almost didn’t need lube. The condoms were in a plastic bag by the side of the bed. Sacha fished one out and, as quickly as he could, suited up. The thought that he would like to do this bare flashed through his head.
Turning his attention back to the incredible man laying sprawled on the bed, Sacha asked, “How?”
“Like this, on my back.”
Sacha crawled between Seth’s legs, positioning himself before pushing carefully into Seth’s heat. He was tight and hot; Sacha was going to go insane.
“I said, I’m not glass.” Again, Seth tried to take control by driving himself further onto Sacha.
“If you do that, I am going to come, and I wanna try to make this last,” Sacha grumbled.
“Fuck me already.” Seth’s mouth, swollen from sucking Sacha’s cock, was irresistible. Sacha leaned down so he could lick across his lips and swallow them in a ferocious kiss, pushing his a
ching cock all the way into him with steady pressure until his balls rested against Seth’s ass. Caving to Seth’s demands, Sacha set a relentless pace, pounding—and, from the moans and fucks he was hearing, also hitting Seth’s prostate.
It was too soon when Sacha felt himself start to tighten. Seth had been teasing him for hours; he had no control.
“Do it,” Seth demanded.
One last thrust and Sacha was coming hard into the condom, the intense heat of Seth’s body lighting him up as he pulsed. Seth’s ass tightened around Sacha’s now-sensitive penis, and he pulled out, removed the condom, and tossed it into the plastic bag. Returning his attention to the incredible man splayed out on the bed, cock hard but looking well fucked, Sacha leaned closer and took Seth into his mouth. He’d hardly closed his lips around him, reveling in his soft skin and scent, before Seth was coming with a groan that probably shook the walls. Quiet his boy was not.
Sacha released him to slump over Seth’s limp body. “That was fucking incredible,” Seth murmured. Sacha was pretty sure he responded, but the next thing he registered was Seth skootching around, pulling a sheet over the both of them. Sacha fell into a dreamless sleep, his arm thrown across Seth’s waist, Seth’s taut ass tucked into the well of Sacha’s hips.
Eighteen
Seth
Seth knew Mrs. Anderson would be bursting with excitement when he arrived to take her to one of the local garden centers. He’d done a lot of research since moving to town, and this particular nursery was, in his opinion, divine. Seth forced himself to stay away if he was low on funds; he always found something that needed a home.
Since Sacha and Parker were hunched over a laptop trying to figure out the fuck-fest Parker had made of his life, Seth was grateful for the excuse to leave. The two of them were like vinegar and baking soda… except the obvious affection between them was clear for anyone to see.
Seth considered himself experienced, worldly. An open person. And he loved sex. His policy had always been to have sex with pretty much anyone where there was mutual interest. There had been a few people he’d liked more than others but never anyone who dogged his thoughts. Seth figured he wasn’t cut out for a long-term relationship; somehow he had been broken or born with an emotional defect that kept people at arm’s length.