by Onley James
His hands white-knuckled the edge of the counter as Shep sucked him off, Elijah’s eyes rolling as Shep did a thing with his tongue that shot sparks of pleasure licking along his spine. “This… I am… oh, God, I’m not going to last.”
Shep pressed a hand against Elijah’s chest, pushing him back on the island counter until he stared up at the pendulum lights, eyes crossing at the tight heat of Shep’s mouth. It wasn’t Elijah’s first blowjob, but it was aggressive and chaotic and the hottest thing that Elijah had ever experienced. “Sam… Oh, fuck.” He tried to tug Shep back. “I’m gonna come,” he warned.
Shep ignored him, taking Elijah to the back of his throat, blowing air from his nose as he swallowed, his muscles convulsing around Elijah just as his thumb stroked behind his balls. Elijah’s orgasm hit him like a tidal wave and he came hard down Shep’s throat. He didn’t pull off, just continued to suck until Elijah hissed.
He sat up, pulling Shep in for a dirty kiss, tasting himself on Shep’s lips. Elijah undid Shep’s jeans, plunging a hand into his underwear to wrap his hand around Shep’s thick cock. He worked him hard and fast, Shep groaned, dropping his head to Elijah’s shoulder. “Fuck, rabbit,” Shep muttered, his words vibrating against his skin. And then he was spilling over Elijah’s fist with a harsh noise.
Elijah released Shep, both of them breathing hard. Shep raised Elijah’s hand, cum still slick on his fingers. He caught some on his thumb, pressing it to Elijah’s lips. Elijah opened his mouth, sucking his finger clean. A feral growl fell from Shep’s lips.
“Jesus,” Elijah whispered when he could speak again. “What did you used to do for a living?”
“I worked for a private military contractor,” Shep said.
Elijah barked out a surprised laugh. “Did they teach you to suck dick like that?”
“No, I watched a video on it.”
Elijah gave another laugh but then realized Shep was serious. Once more his heart seemed to flutter in his chest. “When?”
“Last night.”
Elijah absorbed that information, dumbfounded. Shep had watched a video to learn how to give Elijah a blowjob. He’d studied up. For him. Just for him. His chest felt tight and a lump formed in his throat. It was such a bizarrely sweet gesture and so very… Shep. “Well, you’re a quick study,” was all Elijah could manage, anything more and he might do something stupid like propose. People didn’t do things to please Elijah, he did things to please them..
Shep pressed a kiss to Elijah’s forehead. It was such an intimate gesture that he froze. Before he could focus too much on what it meant, a series of small beeps sounded and then the front door opened and closed.
Shep sighed. “Tell me that’s not your mother.”
“Worse,” Elijah said, hopping from the counter to tug his pants back in place just in time for Charlie’s voice to echo from the foyer.
“Hello, guys and gays.”
When Charlie entered the kitchen, Shep’s first instinct was to put Elijah behind him. Shep swore he heard him snicker. The girl plopped her huge white bag on the counter closest to her but then stopped short, wrinkling her nose. “Why does it stink like sex in here?”
Elijah’s forehead dipped to Shep’s shoulder. “Oh, my God. Why are you like this?”
“Like what? Observant? It smells like Motley Crue’s tour bus.”
“Who’s Motley Crue?” Elijah asked.
“Some old 80s hairband. Wyatt and I watched a docudrama about them. Real party goblins.”
Elijah clung to Shep’s waist, his face buried against his neck. He’d clearly been expecting Charlie if she had the door code. Shep had changed it just the night before. The girl wore one of those floral one-piece rompers with her shoulders peeking outside flouncy sleeves. She’d pulled her hair up and away from her face, dressed as if Elijah was only a stop on her journey, not her final destination. Shep hoped that meant she wasn’t planning to stay.
Charlie crossed her arms over her chest as she studied Shep. “I thought you were the straight brother.”
Did Elijah know about Mac? Shep tilted his head. “Who told you that?”
Charlie’s gaze shifted away from Shep, clearly not expecting the question. “Wyatt,” she said.
Interesting. “You and Wyatt talk about who I might want to have sex with?”
Charlie snorted. “Okay, when you say it like that, it sounds weird. We just wanted somebody to have sex with Elijah.”
“Hey!” Elijah yelped.
Shep ignored him. He appreciated Charlie’s directness if nothing else. “You could have just asked me.”
“Now that would have been weird,” she murmured.
“Okay, that’s it. We’re going to my room,” Elijah said, ducking out from behind Shep to grip Charlie’s arm and drag her towards his bedroom.
Shep pulled up Elijah’s feed on his phone propping it up so he could monitor the boy and continue with his errands. Filming in Georgia started in less than five days and Shep was coordinating security routes with the rest of Elijah’s team members, including Lucifer, who, as always, was making things far more difficult than necessary. He was in the middle of typing out a text when his phone vibrated in his hand and an overseas number popped up on his screen.
He swiped to answer. “Hello.”
A series of hisses and pops greeted him, his brother’s voice sounding like they were conducting the call with two tin cans and a piece of string. “Hey, bro,” Mac said. “Got your message. I called as soon as I could. Sorry about the shit connection. Satellite phone.”
Shep was used to dealing with shitty phone connections. “Still in Nepal?”
“Nah, man. I’m in Thailand photographing the wildlife of Khao Mokoju for Nat Geo. No sherpas… or yaks. I have an adorable guide named Anurak, but he’s married to an equally adorable woman named May, so I’m on my own.”
Like Shep, Mac was content to spend time on his own. He spent days trekking through rainforests, swamps, frozen wastelands. He’d even spent a few days in Chernobyl. The only constant in his brother’s life was his camera.
When Shep didn’t respond, his brother said, “What’s up? I don’t think you’ve ever called me for advice… ever.”
It was true. “Well, I’ve never had a problem I felt you were qualified to help me with.”
“Ouch,” Mac said, then laughed. “I’m intrigued though. There’s only one reason you’d call me instead of mom. You want something and she’d say it’s a bad idea. I’m assuming this ‘something stupid’ you referred to in your text has a name?”
Shep’s gaze shifted to the hallway before he wandered to the back terrace. “Yeah… Elijah.”
White noise filled his ear before his brother’s tinny voice said, “Eliza? Like Doolittle?”
He waited for the connection to clear. “No. Elijah.” There was a moment of silence where Shep thought the connection dropped and then his brother laughed himself sick for a solid minute, leaving Shep no choice but to sit and listen. “Are you done?” he grunted.
“Hard to say,” his brother wheezed. “I’ve been waiting for this phone call since you let Brett Lauther give you a handy sophomore year.”
Shep didn’t see the correlation. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“You tricked a guy into giving you a hand job.”
What did that have to do with Elijah? “I don’t know why you’re still bringing that up.”
“Because he thought it was me. You pretended to be me to get a hand job from another guy.”
“You were going on and on about how good sex was. It seemed the most efficient way of finding out if you were right.” Shep had no idea what the big deal was. “I never would have told you if I’d known you would act like it was a big deal.”
Mac snorted. “Like I wouldn’t have found out, anyway? Once Brett confessed to Tiffany, the entire cheer squad knew by lunch, which meant the rest of the school knew by fifth period. I lost my boyfriend over it. He thought I cheated.”
> “Can we stop reliving our high school years and focus on the problem at hand?”
“Sure, brother. As soon as you tell me what it is.” Mac said.
Shep plopped himself down on one of the lounge chairs. “I met somebody.”
“Yeah, I gathered as much. Somebody named Elijah.”
“Yes.”
Silence stretched. “Okay, and…”
His brother had never been the smart one. “And what do I do now?”
“Are you asking me for dating advice, bro?”
His brother didn’t seem to be making fun of him, but Shep proceeded with caution, anyway. Was he asking for advice? Dating was for normal people to decide if they liked each other enough to consider cohabitation and breeding together. Shep was past all that. “I don’t need to date him. I want him. I don’t need to test him out. I just want him to know I’ve… chosen him.”
His brother barked out another surprise laugh. “He’s not chained up in your basement or anything, is he?” When Shep said nothing, his brother’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, “Is he?”
Shep frowned. “What? No. This house doesn’t even have a basement.”
There was a long pause. “Jaynie, you know you can’t just, like, claim him, right? You can’t just hit him over the head and drag him back to your cave. That’s not how relationships work.”
Shep sighed. His brother and sister had been making these jokes since he was eleven years old. Contextually, he understood them, but he just never found them funny. “I know how relationships don’t work. I’m asking you to tell me how they do work.”
“Do you, though,” his brother asked. “You know how you get when you find something that… triggers you. You can get a bit… obsessed.”
Shep frowned. “I don’t know what you mean.” Mac hesitated once again. “Just spit it out.”
“Mrs. Jenson’s beagle.”
The name triggered a strange sensation deep in his gut. “What?”
“You know what I’m talking about, Jaynie.”
“I know who you’re talking about. I just don’t know what you’re talking about,” Shep said, skin growing hot.
“That dog was the first time mom saw you show any kind of… affection towards another living creature.”
Shep was quickly losing patience with his brother. “Okay.”
“Jayne, you became obsessed with that dog, you started sneaking out of the house to pet him. You begged Mrs. Jensen to let you have him and when she said no you flew into a rage. You ripped her garden apart. You scared her so badly, she put her house up for sale and moved.”
Shep felt like his skin itched. “I was six.”
“Have you ever felt that way about another living thing… ever?”
“Yes,” he answered.
“When?” Mac asked, clearly not believing Shep.
“Now.”
Once more his brother sighed. “Exactly. What if the same thing happens here?”
“I’m not six years old anymore, Mac and Elijah isn’t a beagle.”
“No, now you’re a six-foot-six trained killing machine with a background in advanced interrogation techniques and no supervision.”
“You think I would hurt Elijah?” Shep asked, the thought striking him like a knife through his windpipe.
“No. But I think you might hurt anybody who you perceived as a threat to Elijah.”
Of course, he would. “Why is that a bad thing?”
“Because you can’t just go around hurting people because they hurt somebody you care about.”
This felt like they were talking in circles. His brother didn’t understand, he never could. Shep often felt that Mac had sucked most of the emotions from the womb leaving hardly anything for Shep. Now, he wanted to take Elijah too. “I know the rules. Besides, aren’t we supposed to protect our own?”
“Does he want to be yours? Have you even asked him how he feels? Does it matter to you what he wants?”
That brought Shep up short. He had asked Elijah what he wanted. Just now, in the kitchen. Elijah was upset that Shep hadn’t praised him for his performance. Elijah had wanted sex and Shep had given it to him. “I gave him a blowjob in the kitchen.”
Once more Mac barked out a laugh. “Well, that’s great, buddy, but I don’t think letting a guy suck your dick equals accepting a proposal of marriage. But, hell, what do I know about marriage proposals? Maybe it is.”
Mac made the last comment under his breath, so Shep ignored it. “Should I ask him?”
“To marry you?” Mace asked.
“No. Should I ask him if he’s mine?”
“I really think you should talk to mom about this. She knows about these things. She studied them.” Shep knew his brother really meant she’d studied him. But he didn’t say that. “You should probably touch base with her, anyway.”
Shep did not want to get his mother involved. “I’m asking you.”
A series of pops and hisses came across the line and then Mac asked, “How long have you been together?”
“Together?”
“Like dating? Hooking up? In a relationship?”
“I started guarding him a little over two weeks ago.”
There was a strange noise and then a garbled sound and then it sounded like his brother was choking. “What?” he sputtered. “You’ve only known him for two weeks? What do you mean guarding him? That’s not like code for stalking, is it? Jaynie, be careful.”
“Careful of what? I was an interrogator for six years. I know how far I can push a person before I break them. I’m not stalking him. I’m his bodyguard.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s an actor.”
“A famous actor named Elijah… Elijah who?”
“Elijah Dunne.”
“Oh, Jesus. Elijah Dunne? Christ, Jaynie. He’s an A-list celebrity,” his brother said, exasperated, before saying, “Wait, you blew Elijah Dunne. Damn, that kid must be into some weird shit.”
Shep’s nostrils flared. “There’s nothing wrong with Elijah.”
“See this is what I’m talking about. You never get mad and you’re seething over a comment. It’s not safe. Your brain just works differently than other people. Does he know that? Does he understand… what you are?”
“What I am?” Shep repeated.
“Your—Your diagnosis. Does he know?”
“It never came up.”
“He has a right to know who he’s sharing a bed with. But you need to be careful, Jaynie. If you’re this obsessed with him after two weeks, what the hell is it going to be like in a month? A year? Very few people can handle that level of… devotion and even if he can, what about his fans? Are you going to deal with the way they paw him and demand his time and attention? What about when he gets a bad review or somebody threatens him online? Then what?”
This wasn’t fair. His brother somehow still saw him as a teenager. Shep had spent years in the military without incident. He’d never lost his temper, never killed a man in anger. He was methodical. Exacting. The military had lauded him for the very traits his brother thought made him a monster.
“How many fights have you been in?” Shep asked.
“What? I don’t know… the fight we got into in middle school. Um, I got into a bar fight in Singapore. Oh and I kicked Jimmy Pensatelli’s ass for trying to grope me coming out of Rooster’s in college.”
“Do you know how many fights I’ve been in?”
“I know you’ve been in at least one fight because I was there.”
“That’s it. That’s my only fight. Mom and Dad spent a lot of time and effort teaching me to be normal. I’ve never been in a fight. I’ve hurt nobody outside a controlled environment. I’ve had moments of anger. Not many, but some. But in those moments, I never even considered killing somebody. I know you don’t understand what it’s like in my head, but I’m not always two seconds away from murder.”
“I know that. I do. I’m just worried about you. I want to m
eet him, but I don’t get back to town for another four weeks. I really think you need to call mom. Maybe bring Elijah to her. She can… watch you. I don’t know if people like you can live a normal life with white picket fences.”
Shep shook his head even though his brother couldn’t see him. “I don’t want a normal life. I just want Elijah.”
“What if he doesn’t want you back?”
Elijah’s words from a few minutes ago echoed back through his head. What if you don’t like what I want to do?
“I just want him to be happy.”
Mac sighed once more. “Okay, Jaynie. I clearly can’t talk you out of this, but please call mom. She should really meet him.”
“You think I should bring Elijah to meet mom?”
“Yeah. Just to be safe. Just, like, not in the trunk.”
“Is that another serial killer joke?”
“I love you, bro. Take care of yourself,” Mac said by way of an answer. Then he disconnected, leaving Shep to stare at the sparkling blue water of the swimming pool. He considered following Mac’s advice and calling his mother, but something stopped him. Maybe Mac was right. Maybe it was too soon. He wanted Elijah, but what if Elijah didn’t want him? If that was the case, Shep didn’t want to know. Not yet.
He just needed more time, then he’d call his mother and confess everything. He was certain she’d have a lot to say about this situation. He just wasn’t ready to hear it. Once more his phone beeped, this time a text… from Webster.
Webster: I can’t find anything on why Elijah left Los Angeles. He just up and left. I can tell you his grandfather bought his way out of a movie contract and took him back to Montana, but there’s literally no explanation anywhere. I’ll keep digging.
Shep stared at the message for way too long, his heart pounding out of his chest. Elijah had fled Los Angeles in a hurry at just twelve years old. Was it because somebody had hurt him? Was this why he said his grandfather protected him? If so, who hurt Elijah and, more importantly, was he back in the picture?