Blue On Blue

by Dal Maclean

  “I had a lot of plans for when I could get you into bed again,” Tom said at last.

  “I’m here,” Will said. He reached up and pushed Tom’s hair back off his face.

  “Yeah,” Tom said. And Will could almost hear, For now.

  “I left you the house,” he said self-consciously. “I want you to take it.”

  “What?” Tom looked as devastated as if Will hauled off and punched him.

  “Tom. It’s a good idea to make arrangements when you’re a serving police officer.” He’d updated his will when he went back to the Met, just as he’d named Tom then as his next of kin. For all his underlying doubts and fears, in his heart and his gut Tom had always been his partner.

  “Just . . . .” Tom’s face scrunched up in appalled distress. “Don’t. Please.”

  “Sorry,” Will said. “I’m—”

  Tom kissed him with feverish desperation and Will cooperated as best he could, trying to slow it down, to take away the fear and to make it easy and sweet. He felt no desire, in his turmoil of regret and worry, but he shared the craving for touch. He opened his mouth to press their tongues together, needing the heat and the taste of Tom. Needing closeness to him.

  But as Will relaxed into the easy sensual comfort of it, Tom tore his mouth away, as if his thoughts had become unbearable.

  “Fuck me! ” Tom looked and sounded urgent. “You haven’t done it to me bare yet.”

  Will managed an amused huff, but he felt the agony of Tom’s dread.

  “What? To cross it off my sexual bucket list?” he teased. “Or yours?”

  Things to do together before I die.

  But he could see that was part of it. That Tom was accepting that time may have finally run out for them, and he didn’t know what to do.

  They’d been here before. But the last time they’d said goodbye with their bodies, they’d been far apart, mentally, if not emotionally. Tom had been leaving Will by choice then. That had felt tragic enough.

  And now? Now Will wanted to show Tom how much he was loved. Whether tomorrow went disastrously or not. He wanted Tom to know.

  He leaned in and kissed his forehead. Then his temple. Tom’s eyes closed. He went with it when Will pushed to roll on top of him. Then Will kissed the slope of his cheek, the hinge of his jaw, his mouth again. Hot and soft, lush and liquid.

  “Tom,” he murmured against his lips. He could feel the curve of Tom’s smile against his skin.

  Emotion rolled through him hard and fast like a surfer’s wave, fierce and huge and deep.

  He pulled back to look at him. “I love you,” he said, voice hoarse and thick.

  Tom opened his eyes, and they were wet with the anguish he’d been trying to conceal. His hands rose to cup Will’s face, his thumbs rhythmically brushing the delicate skin behind Will’s ears, making him shiver.

  “I love you too,” Tom said. His voice and his hands shook. “I know I always will.”

  Will managed a grin. “This is getting really soppy.”

  Tom’s Adam’s apple bobbed. Once. Twice. “Don’t blame me. I’m just here to get dicked.”

  Will gave a startled laugh. “I’ll get right on to that then.”

  He bent to suckle an uncompromising, bruise into the skin of Tom’s throat, and Tom, who used to refuse to be marked, made an inarticulate sound of desperation and tightened his fingers in Will’s hair to hold him in place. To urge him on.

  Will took his time to prepare him for fucking, playing with his nipples, teasing and stroking his silky inner thighs and the satin skin of his erection, stretching his hole relentlessly. And Tom didn’t try to take over or to push him to go faster. His usual impatience to get on with it had been reined in to an unreachable concentration, as if every touch and kiss and moment was being marked and memorized and cataloged.

  Tom wanted to take the fuck lying on his back, which was Will’s favorite position too because he could see Tom’s reactions—he loved the intimacy of that best of all. But even when he was lubing up his cock without a condom for the first time ever, he didn’t appreciate how different, how intimate it was going to feel skin to skin.

  He pushed in slowly and steadily, Tom’s legs rising to clasp round his waist, and it felt as if his cock was sliding in to the grip of a hot, slick, velvet glove. The sensation was extraordinary; a long, inexorable slide, up and in, in to the hilt, until his hipbones and his pubic bush pressed against the smooth skin of Tom’s raised arse. And he felt instantly at the end of his tether; everything on overload, ready to spurt right away, every particle of his body ready to surrender to ecstatic relief.

  He froze in place, to try to hold back from just . . . giving in to it, the heightened physical sensations, the extremes of emotion. But Tom’s unfamiliar patience had already blinked out. He started moving almost the instant Will stopped, trying to fuck himself on the rigid length inside him.

  Will grasped his hips to try to make him still. But Tom tossed his head restlessly on the pillow and fought the hands holding him still, trying to infect Will with the same urgent drive to completion.

  “Will! Come on!”

  “I don’t want it to be over,” Will blurted.

  Tom’s eyes sprang open and he stopped moving as if he’d been glued in place.

  They waited together for seconds of panting stillness, Will’s head hanging low between his shoulders, until they both came back from the edge they’d been teetering on.

  “I don’t want it to be over either,” Tom said clearly, voice ragged with arousal denied; with the feelings driving through it.

  “Tom,” Will muttered. He lowered his weight down onto him and pulled him into a hug as Tom looped his arms round Will’s shoulder in turn. They lay like that for sweet, sad moments, Will’s face buried in Tom’s neck, Tom’s legs sliding down to cling round Will’s lower thighs, squeezing each other tight.

  Will’s cock was still hard inside Tom’s body, and the awkwardness of that began to get through to Will as the eroticism of their sexual joining seeped away into the thirsty ground of their love and anguish. He prepared to pull back, but Tom flexed his arse muscles and Will gave a small spastic thrust inside him. They both gasped.

  “Do it,” Tom pleaded. “Just do it.”

  Will’s face twisted, still hidden against Tom’s throat. But he pushed himself up onto braced arms and knees, urging Tom’s legs up to present his arse for fucking. And Will began again, pulling his cock back through the hot tight slippery clench, and then firmly pushing back in. Back out and in, and out and in, fucking Tom slow and deep. Pleasure burned up his spine wiping out thought.

  “God, you feel fucking unbelievable,” he groaned.

  Tom made a sound close to a laugh and clawed harder at the smooth skin of Will’s back until he all but hung off Will’s braced body, writhing on his cock.

  They fucked, panting, pleasure mounting all the time, as Will picked up the pace—pumping hard, until Tom’s heels were bouncing off his arse, keening under him, his erection rubbing against Will’s stomach with every thrust. The room filled with grunts and whimpers and halfwords and the slick obscene sounds of their coupling.

  Finally Tom slid a hand between their bodies, legs gripping tighter round Will’s waist and he managed a few rough pumps of his own straining cock before he arched violently and came over his hand and onto Will’s braced belly.

  Will tried to hold on, but he had to succumb as Tom’s body milked him mercilessly. He started to come too, hard, deep inside Tom’s body and the realization of what he was doing, what Tom was letting him do, intensified the high to unbearable levels. He spurted as if he were emptying every drop in his balls as Tom gave a low erotic moan at the new sensation of semen filling his arse. Will managed a few last spasmodic thrusts, his dick sliding through the sensual lushness of his own seed, a sensation so shockingly erotic, his exhausted prick tried to come alive again.

  But then at last, he had to accept it was over.

  He collapsed onto Tom’s
body, heart fighting to hammer its way out of his ribcage as Tom’s arms clasped round his back. And Will lay there, unable to muster the resolve to roll away or to put any distance between them, however small.

  “I think you might have knocked me up,” Tom mumbled into his ear. They both sniggered helplessly, bodies rocking together with mirth.

  Later, as Will lay awake beside Tom waiting for the dawn, he thought that if that had been their last time, it had been glorious.

  26

  Joey Clarkson ran his empire out of an office in Tina’s, his favorite club. It was situated on the edge of the City of London, with “hostesses” providing voluntary extras, and repeated police investigations had somehow never proved those extras extended to selling sex and Class A drugs. Joey still spent every morning and early afternoon there.

  James had been inside the club, but Will never had. At his lowest points, after Sanjay was killed, Will had dreamed of fighting his way past the muscle on the door and getting to Joey in his office. Beating the living crap out of him. But even in the madness of grief and guilt, he’d known Joey was untouchable. Too big to take down. And yet. . . Here they were.

  “Ready?” he asked James.

  It was midmorning and they sat in Will’s gray Volkswagen Passat because they hadn’t wanted to take a pool car. They both wore stab vests with Body Worn Videos on their shoulders, but the cameras’ yellow stickers, proclaiming what they were, had been carefully concealed with black electrical tape. They also carried extendable batons and mace sprays. Otherwise, they were unarmed, like nearly all British police officers were.

  “Yeah,” James said. “I’m ready.” They looked at each other for a moment. “Magnus knows what to do if anything happens. And he’s far too obnoxious to shut up.” He gave a wry smile. “I had this whole independence thing, striking out for truth and justice, away from the filth of the corporate world. And here I am, having to use my dad as guarantor of the Met’s honesty. Sir Magnus Henderson: whistleblower.”

  Will laughed. “Did you speak to him?” He had no idea how he managed to sound so relaxed. His guts were lodged in his soles of his shoes.

  “No way. He’d be here, in the car, trying to stop me. I emailed a few minutes ago.” He grinned and Will thought that Ben was right; much as he mocked it, James secretly reveled in his father’s efforts to smother him. Will had called his parents that morning, just to say hello. James added, “I’m glad I got time with Ben though.”

  “Yeah.” Will could still see Tom in his mind’s eye, staring at him wildly as he got ready to go. He’d grabbed Will’s head in both hands and kissed him roughly, greedily. Goodbye. But Tom hadn’t tried to talk him out of it. He understood that this was what Will was. A copper.

  He switched on his body cam, as James did the same. Then they got out of the car and walked along the pavement until they turned a corner toward Tina’s.

  It was drizzling, and the air smelled of diesel. It suited Will’s mood.

  The two guards on the club door were both dressed head to toe in bouncer-black, their jackets cut loose to hide shoulder holsters for guns they probably had no legal right to carry. But this was Joey’s fiefdom where the law didn’t apply.

  Will’s chest felt rigid as if his lungs were encased in glass. But it wasn’t just apprehension—there was anticipation too.

  He and James showed their warrant cards and announced they were there to see Joey, then they waited while one of the men talked into his sleeve like some secret service operative protecting the American president from lethal risk. The pretension made Will’s lip curl.

  “Wait,” the man ordered. Will and James had decided, in advance, not to waste their energy getting to Joey if they didn’t have to. So they stood together just inside the main door, out of the rain, waiting for a gracious summons.

  Will turned round and peered curiously along the short passageway into the body of the club. As far as he could tell the decor was black—ceilings and floors included—with flashes of red and silver. Inset spotlights in the ceiling turned the blackness to murk.

  It was deeply old-fashioned club decor; womblike, grim and tawdry in sober daylight. But Will could imagine its predictability would give a sense of security to the people who came here to buy their fantasies.

  The bouncer who’d communicated their arrival finally got an answer in his earpiece and he nodded toward the end of the passageway. “Mr. Clarkson’s secretary’ll come to get you.”

  “She needn’t bother,” James said. “I know where to go.” The man shrugged and spoke to his sleeve again before waving them on.

  Will followed James into a large cavernous space with raised, roped off areas around the edges, red neon lights everywhere, and a large stage at the back, with a row of floor-to-ceiling poles lodged in front of it. A gray-haired woman in overalls was pushing a huge, whining industrial vacuum cleaner over the silver-flecked black carpet. The room smelled of stale booze, with a hint of vomit.

  “This way,” James shouted over the racket. He skirted the top of a set of wide steps which led into the body of the club and headed instead toward a huge bar. Then a few yards before they reached it, he pushed through a concealed black door in the right-hand wall.

  When the door swung closed behind them, it was a different world. The noise of the vacuum cleaner was silenced, the carpet felt luxuriant under their feet and the air smelled of vanilla and coconut. The only common feature with the club was the dimness of the lighting.

  James nodded at a door on the left that bore Charles Priestly’s nameplate.

  “Last time I was here, we were interviewing him,” James said. “Joey’s office is at the end of the corridor.”

  They looked at each other for a last steadying moment, switched on their shoulder cameras and went in.

  The annex they entered was lit by skylights and shockingly bright after the dim hallway. A stern-looking woman sat behind a desk to the left, looking like someone’s fancy-dress idea of a secretary. She was middle-aged with permed dark hair, horn-rimmed spectacles and a cream blouse with a pussycat bow. She didn’t get up, but Will was pretty sure the rest of the outfit involved sensible shoes. Joey seemed to like everything in his business to reach caricature levels of predictability.

  His club. His muscle. His PA. His mind games. Will wondered how many coppers had waited to bow the knee in here.

  “Mr. Clarkson is engaged,” the woman said. She sounded disdainful and upper crust. “He’ll fit you in when he has a moment. If you’d like to take a seat . . . .” She indicated a sofa and chairs set across a luxuriant expanse of white carpet on the other side of the room. “Coffee or tea?”

  “Neither thanks,” Will said and headed for the door at the end of the room. James was right behind him. The secretary made a high squawking noise and tried to get to her feet, but she had no chance of reaching them before they barged in.

  Will closed the door behind them.

  Joey looked up from his desk. He was alone, working in his shirtsleeves, hair immaculately slicked back, his eyes gimlet pale.

  Will rapidly took in the details of the room—large and very bright with pale wood flooring, huge skylights and a vast window behind Joey’s substantial wooden desk. The desk was old-fashioned, leather topped and traditional, out of place in the aggressive modernity of the office. There were two leather chairs in front of the desk for visitors, and a camera fixed to the top of the wall to Will’s right.

  “’S all right luv,” Joey called to the secretary who’d managed to twitter her way into the room. “I’ll deal wiv it.”

  His gaze was watchful as she left, but he showed no apprehension. He must know how much evidence they’d gathered by now, yet still, he seemed supremely confident. Will wondered how much of that was habit; and how much the knowledge that he controlled Will and James’s superiors.

  “Good morning Mr. Clarkson,” Will said. His voice at least was level. “This is DI James Henderson.”

  Joey gave them both a considerin
g look. “An’ you think your questions are more important than my business? I thought you’d ‘ave better manners, Will. Gotta say I’m disappointed. An’ our Hols ‘as quite the crush on you as well.”

  Will let out a long deliberate sigh. “Joseph Edward Clarkson. I am arresting you on suspicion of perverting the course of justice and various offenses under the Sexual Offenses Act 2003. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?”

  It was terrifying and euphoric, like hitting the highest point of a rollercoaster and looking down.

  Joey blinked slowly. “You know, that’s the first time I’ve ever been arrested,” he said. He sat back in his chair and huffed a laugh. “No one’s ever ‘ad the balls before.”

  Will kept his expression as neutral as he could. He’d expected rage, not Joey’s amused indulgence, as if a protégé had done something new and daring.

  Joey sniffed. “I knew I was gonna like you,” he said.

  Beside Will, James shifted minutely. Will could almost feel his rising unease. He couldn’t blame him, given Joey was treating him like a soon-to-be house-trained pet. Fuck, was James thinking he was bent too?

  “We’d rather not use cuffs Mr. Clarkson,” James said. “But we will if we have to.”

  Joey’s smile became considering. “You know, integrity’s somethin’ to be valued even in my line. Stickin’ to the job in hand, despite . . . obstacles. I ain’t met many coppers I can respect. But you . . . I could use men like you.” He tapped his lip theatrically with a fingertip. “Course money’s no object for you,” he said to James. “But, there are other things.”

  “Are you trying to bribe us, Mr. Clarkson?” James didn’t react to the evidence that Joey knew who his father was. His radio crackled loudly.

  Joey grinned. “That’s a shockin’ accusation, Jamie. You don’t mind if I call you Jamie? I’m talkin’ about possible employment prospects in the future. ’S very commendable what you’re tryin’ to do. Rootin’ out bent coppers. I mean . . . I’m just a businessman, but I ‘ear things. Like your DCI fittin’ up some poor kid for Ricky Desmond’s murder. For fifteen grand . . . so I heard.”