All the Rules of Heaven

by Amy Lane

  Angel bent his head to Tucker’s chest, wondering if he was solid enough to touch, would he be solid enough to—

  “Oh damn, Angel!”

  Tucker’s taste blossomed against Angel’s tongue, salty and earthy, things Angel had never known. Angel licked again, his hand continuing its amazing journey over Tucker’s thighs, along his length, skating the silk of his lower abdomen.

  The movement of Tucker’s fingers on his own startled him and brought his attention to the frightful ache in his own groin. But Tucker needed, and Angel let him wrap Angel’s fist around his cock, and then Angel squeezed and stroked, as he’d watched Tucker do not that long ago.

  Tucker let out a soft groan, not tortured but needy, and Angel stroked again and harder. Tucker spurted against his fingers, hot and sticky. Angel wanted to taste it, but he feared it too. Would Tucker’s seed make him human forever? Would that break one of those rules of heaven?

  Then Tucker tangled his fingers in Angel’s hair, urging him back to Tucker’s chest.

  “Your hair, Angel—it feels amazing. Thank you. Thank you.”

  Angel kept stroking, his breath coming faster as Tucker broke into pants, his hips thrusting in Angel’s hand.

  “Angel, I want…. Oh God, I want.” Tucker made a move then—reciprocation? Perhaps to explore Angel’s masculine human body with his own hands, his mouth. Oh, Tucker’s mouth looked sinful and wanton, and Angel found himself craving it all over his newly discovered skin.

  But Tucker moved, and his hips arched, and Angel’s thumb caught the edge of his cockhead. Tucker let out a gasp and a soft moan, and his entire body tautened in one giant arc of climax.

  His cock spat come, graceful and scorching, covering Angel’s fist, wrist, and forearm, making him shake with the intimacy of the seed on his skin.

  Tucker grasped his hair—not harshly but firmly—and pulled Angel until they were face-to-face. Then Tucker lifted himself off the bed and pushed his lips against Angel’s, invading his mouth with an urgent, beery tongue and sweeping Angel into the whirlwind of his first kiss.

  Angel fell into it with a violence of need, and Tucker ravished him, still on his back, his body splayed, with spend cooling on his exposed skin.

  “Let me,” Tucker whispered. “I want to give you everything.”

  And then Tucker’s hand slid through Angel’s body, like Angel was mist, or a wish, or a prayer, and Tucker’s cry of loss shattered them both.

  “Angel!”

  “I’m sorry, Tucker,” Angel whispered, laying his head on the pillow next to Tucker. He wanted to cry, but he wasn’t sure he could shed tears, even ghostly ones. His incorporeal construct ached, though, ached with need, ached with loss, ached with wanting the touch of the man next to him.

  “But what happened?”

  “I think….” Angel skated his hand over Tucker’s chest, not setting it down in case he slid through skin and flesh. “I think it’s because, for a moment, you stopped bleeding.” When Tucker was hurt, Angel became human enough to touch him.

  But Angel had given him sex and comfort, and the bleeding was staunched.

  And Angel was incorporeal once again.

  Tucker’s sound of hurt almost made Angel disappear. He didn’t want to face it—didn’t want to feel Tucker facing one more goddamned loss.

  But he’d promised.

  “But I won’t leave you,” he said again.

  “You promised.”

  “I did.”

  Tucker let out a breath and pulled up his boxers, then tugged the covers up around his chin.

  When he’d settled himself back again, he stared at Angel in the darkness until Angel burst out, “What?”

  “Thank you.”

  “I promised.”

  “Thank you for that too, but that’s not what I meant.”

  Angel’s incorporeal construct heated.

  “I would have done so much more,” he said wretchedly.

  “You stayed for the kiss.”

  Angel saw back into Tucker’s memory, that terrible, wonderful, tainted memory of a kiss that never was.

  “Anyone would want to stay for the kiss, Tucker. If there was anything they could do at all to make that happen. I promise.”

  “Mm.”

  His eyes were closed. Grief, sex, and grief again. That would exhaust a man.

  “I’ll stay, Tucker. I swear that I’ll stay.”

  BEING CORPOREAL apparently expended a lot of energy—Angel slept contentedly on the bed until long after Tucker’s usual time of rising.

  When he came to, Tucker was gone, but Angel could hear him in the kitchen, and morning smells as well as morning light and sounds were coming through the wall.

  Angel materialized in the kitchen to find Tucker sitting in front of a half-eaten plate of eggs and toast, looking at the notebook Angel had pulled from his backpack the day they’d visited the cemetery and a bigger, half-filled photo album he’d apparently gotten from the boxes in the corner.

  Every so often he’d find something and grunt, then write in the notebook again.

  “Tucker?”

  Tucker looked over his shoulder and smiled tentatively. Dark circles saddened his eyes, and high patches of red showed up against a waxen complexion.

  “You should eat,” Angel said.

  “I was….” Tucker gestured. “Damien was in the graveyard.”

  “I remember now.” Damien was the ghost who’d come the closest to taking Tucker over. Even if the pile of boxes hadn’t screamed his name and Tucker hadn’t dropped it occasionally, Angel would have remembered Tucker’s anguish at seeing a noxious green spirit body of the man he’d once loved above all others. “Are you okay?”

  “I… I resisted the pull twice. Once when I tried to have a girlfriend, and once with….” He pushed his plate away as if he suddenly couldn’t stand the thought of food. “But a few times, I couldn’t find the pop—the person I was supposed to be with that night. I felt the release in my chest, and I just knew I was too late or in the wrong place or… or something had happened.”

  “That wasn’t your fault.” Angel’s chest tightened, and a shiver raced up his spine. He no longer questioned whether his body was real—too many visceral reactions related to Tucker Henderson assaulted him almost every minute.

  “I’m not saying it was,” Tucker muttered, looking down at his pad again. “It’s just—I started to keep a record book. When it happened, I searched through the newspapers and clipped out, you know, bad weird things. Because a banker shooting a guy in the middle of a cookie shop before offing himself isn’t an everyday thing. I figured those other misses would have a… a thing. Something would show up.”

  Angel swallowed against the fear that Tucker wasn’t made for this life—not like Ruth had been. Tucker was the sweet boy Ruth had told him about. He was vulnerable. He needed Angel’s help, Angel’s protection, more than Ruth ever had.

  “Why would you do that to yourself?” Angel asked, his voice rough. He sat across from Tucker, realizing that the red-padded kitchen chair had been pulled out for him already, as if Tucker was hoping he’d sit there and was trying to make him comfortable.

  Angel’s hands shook. He was tired of asking himself how that could be.

  Tucker looked up at him, surprised and, Angel was relieved to see, sane. “Just to keep it from happening again, Angel. I wanted to see how I’d missed them—how we hadn’t connected.”

  “So you could stop it from happening again?” This, at least, was proactive. Angel could understand this.

  “Yes.” Tucker flipped through the scrapbook again. He pulled in a deep breath through his nose and made a notation in his notebook.

  “What are you writing?”

  Tucker gave a half laugh. “I’m sorry. I’m not communicating well. That day at the graveyard I recognized two of the names.”

  “Damien’s.” Angel remembered Damien’s ghost, the twisted features of what had once been a laughing—and kind—young man.

/>   “Yes. And the name of my ex-girlfriend’s father.”

  “Who?”

  “The first and only relationship I tried to have, Angel. I resisted the pull, and she had to leave town because her father died of a heart attack and she needed to be with her family. It was… too convenient. I knew that it was blowback of some sort, I guess. It was why….” He swallowed and shrugged, studying the scrapbook in front of him with intent. “And his headstone was out there. I was looking to see if any of my other misses were.”

  Angel grunted, trying to put this information together. “Were they?”

  “Yeah. See?”

  Tucker shoved the scrapbook at Angel and flipped the pages. “George Alvarez—that was my girlfriend’s father. Gary Kunis—I missed him because I had pneumonia. I was in the hospital, and they’d doped me, right? And I kept begging them to let me go, I guess. They thought I was delusional.” He rubbed his wrists, and Angel bit his lip.

  “They restrained you?”

  Tucker shrugged like it hadn’t hurt.

  Angel wrapped his hands around Tucker’s wrists, their flesh colliding, because Tucker’s heart was bleeding again, and it obviously had hurt. No shrugging and denial could change that. “They restrained you,” he repeated bleakly.

  Tucker shook his head and wiped his eyes, but he only pulled one hand from Angel’s grasp.

  “I was trying to get up in a rainstorm,” he said, and Angel pictured him, ill, desperate, fighting restraints to go out in the rain to answer the pull. He opened his mouth to cry. Howl. But Tucker shook his head and kept going. “Then there was this one.”

  Angel looked at the scrapbook, at an article about a young woman who had stepped onto the light-rail tracks at K Street; then he looked at the notebook. “Courtney Julian?”

  “I went out that night—I swear I did,” Tucker muttered. “I got pulled into a pizza joint, and I sat down, and it was like she was right there, and then she wasn’t. She must have walked out the back door or gotten pulled out by a phone call or—”

  Angel squeezed his hand. “It wasn’t your fault,” he whispered.

  “I know,” Tucker snapped. But still he didn’t move his hand. “I know it wasn’t my fault. But see? There’s three more—Chester Phillips, Todd Harold, Chastity Cardeno—all the names in my scrapbook are names you wrote down from the graveyard. All of them missed me and met their untimely end. And now they’re somehow in the invisible supernatural graveyard in the backyard. But that’s not the worst part!”

  Tucker’s anger must have given him some immunity to the pain, because his hand slid from Angel’s grasp. For a moment, they both looked mournfully at their hands resting separately on the tabletop, and then Tucker stood up and began to pace in restless circles.

  “What’s the worst part?” Angel was almost afraid to ask.

  “I don’t know all of those names in the notebook!” Tucker yelled, running both hands through his hair.

  Angel tried to assimilate this. Failed.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I thought… I thought I knew who they all were. I could deal if I’d brought them here. But I didn’t. I brought six. But there were, how many?”

  “Twenty-three,” Angel said thoughtfully. “Squishbeans! Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!” Tucker had set up the cat food and water in a corner of the kitchen, and Squishbeans pulled her gray muzzle out of a can of soft food and licked her whiskers. “C’mon, pussy, I need to touch you.”

  Out of nowhere, Tucker laughed.

  “What?” Angel asked, scooping the kitten up and cuddling her. He glanced up at Tucker and saw that some of the sadness, some of the desperation, had dropped from his shoulders, from his eyes, and he was laughing, the sound wholesome and sweet.

  For a moment their eyes met, Tucker’s twinkling with joy and Angel’s….

  Angel had no idea what was in his own eyes, but Tucker suddenly sobered and bit his lip. “Stay right there,” he murmured. He took two steps forward and bent his head, the touch of his lips on Angel’s as solid and as real as Squishbeans in Angel’s arms.

  Angel tasted him, allowing his eyes to flutter shut, and savored. Just savored. When Tucker pulled back, Angel was pretty sure his own expression was slack and dreamy.

  Tucker cupped his cheek. “I wanted… I want….” He grimaced and turned away. “We’re not having sex with the cat in the bed,” he said unequivocally. “And we need to find a way to touch in happiness as well as in pain.”

  Angel gazed at the set of his shoulders and thought, If I have to break all the rules of heaven. “Okay, Tucker. It will be like our mysteries.”

  Tucker turned around slowly, some of his earlier happiness leavening the shadows under his eyes. “Our mysteries?”

  “Bridget and Sophie and the others. The graveyard. Every time we turn around in Daisy Place, we stumble over a clue. I’m sure we’ll solve the mystery of….” His face heated. “We’ll solve the mystery of us along the way.”

  Tucker’s grooved cheek twitched as he pulled back his mouth in a half smile. “The mystery of us?”

  “Yes,” Angel said with dignity. “Of us.”

  “I like that mystery. I think you’re right. Solving the mystery of us. It will be something to shoot for.” He swallowed and strode back to the table. “Now why did you need the cat?”

  Angel smiled at him. “You are so strong,” he said, his throat thick and chest aching. “No matter what the mysteries show us, Tucker, you need to remember how strong you are.”

  Angel watched the flush creep up his pale cheeks and along this throat. “Thanks, Angel. What are you looking at?”

  “These other names,” Angel said, using the power of Squishbeans to leaf through Tucker’s notebook. “I mean, your computer, the internet. Surely you could research these people and see if they’re alive, right?”

  “Yeah!” Tucker’s tired smile gave Angel hope. “That’s a great idea—”

  “And this name!” Angel felt a thrill through his stomach and up in his chest. “I know this name. You know this name!”

  Tucker leaned over Angel’s shoulder, and for a moment his breath against Angel’s face made Angel yearn for all that was human. “Wait. That’s Senior. That’s Thomas Conklin Senior. Angel, that’s the guy who… who….”

  “That’s who you saw die,” Angel said, his mind racing. “So… so six of these are people you brought here. They’re your ghosts, Tucker. But this man—he’s a man who was killed here. They should all be the same.”

  “But there were more!” Tucker backed away from the table. “There were lots more than just the twenty-three down on the ground. And what were my ghosts doing here anyway?”

  “Well, this place does capture energy. Maybe they were… they were on your mind. You dragged their energy up here.”

  “Great. Like I need that on my conscience too!”

  “Well, maybe if you let them go from your conscience, they could get off your property!” Angel burst out, frustrated and hurt. “Tucker, you are carrying around too many souls. It’s because you’re a good man—I know that. And you were given a job.” Angel wanted to howl, but he refrained. “A job that would have broken someone without your… your good humor. Your honor. But you have to let go of them. You have to let go of at least one of them.” There was no doubt as to which one he was talking about.

  “I don’t know how!” Tucker stood and pounded the wall behind his boxes. “Don’t you think… don’t you think I wanted to live all these years? But what was I supposed to do? I still had to get up every day and wait… just wait for that thing in my chest to pull me to bed. How was I supposed to go somewhere, do something, be anybody, if I got pulled away any time of day or night? And the one person—the one person—I could talk to about it, about how much it sucked, about how strange it was that my whole life was spent being the fuckpuppet of the gods, I killed him with my one act of rebellion!”

  “You didn’t kill him!”

  Squishbeans meowed and leape
d from Angel’s hands.

  “Sorry, pussy,” Angel said sadly, and the high tension in the kitchen eased back a touch. “You didn’t kill him,” he said again. “I don’t know why it happened—and you’re right. The divine probably had something to do with it. But….” It was Angel’s turn to stand and pace, although it felt like was moving through gelatin. Something was pushing against him, as though he had a giant sail on his back, but Angel was too preoccupied to figure out what.

  “The divine doesn’t do things like that.” Angel stopped pacing, tired out by the forces acting to keep him still. “There is not supposed to be anything cruel in the divine. If the fates are screwing with you, Tucker, there’s got to be another force at work.”

  Tucker sank to the table, apparently as tired as Angel. “It would be nice to think the forces of irony weren’t just dicking with me,” he mumbled, laying his head on his arms.

  Angel sat down next to him and stroked his hair back with an incorporeal hand. The strands stirred under the wind of his passage, and Angel was content with that for the moment.

  “Even if they are,” he said, voice hoarse, “it’s not your fault. You need to let him go.”

  “I loved him, Angel.”

  “I know.”

  “Nobody is going to love me like that.” He wiped his eyes with the palm of his hand. “Ever again.”

  “I told you.” Angel felt Tucker’s scalp under his fingertips and closed his eyes, living in the moment, in the touch. “I’ll break all the rules of heaven for you.”

  A faint smile tinged Tucker’s lips. “That’s a pretty promise, Angel. What’s it mean?”

  A shiver built up then, from the pit of Angel’s groin to the outer edges of his aura, and he clenched his hand in Tucker’s dark curly hair. “I can’t tell you now, but I think we’ll find out.”

  Suddenly Angel frowned. “Tucker—what is that thing on your neck?” He recognized it actually. Tucker had looped it over the rearview mirror the day he’d gone out and gotten the truck—the day they’d gotten Squishbeans.

  Tucker frowned and straightened in his chair. “It’s Rae’s pendant. I left it in the truck.”