Francis wished he had his phone out so he could snap a picture. The look on Tris’s face was one worth capturing for later reexamining. His eyes had gone huge – they were flecked with bits of hazel, striped with green and gold, Francis could see up close like this, when he wasn’t scowling – and his jaw was relaxed, which softened his face, and made him look younger; smoothed the perpetual lines from around his mouth and eyes.
Francis felt a rallying in his chest, felt emboldened enough to twist the knife – on his own chances. Only, he knew, with sharp regret, there had never been any chance. Tris Mayweather was only a hero in his childish fantasies. He said, “I don’t care if you like me or not, but we have to work together. Rest assured: I won’t make one more inappropriate overture. It’s clear you find me repulsive.” Then he stepped around Tris and continued forward across the rocks.
After a few moments, he heard the grit of boots on stone behind him, and then Tris drew alongside him.
Francis gathered himself for another dressing down. But, to his surprise, Tris said, in a mild, bored tone, “There’s some outcroppings up ahead that always fuck with the infrared. Good hiding spots. We’ve gotta check those.”
“Okay,” Francis said with forced cheer, and they proceeded along for the rest of the trip in a sort of unspoken truce.
~*~
Things got better after that. Francis stopped actively trying to avoid Tris, and Tris started appearing more and more at mealtimes; their company usually ate together at one end of a table, and Tris joined them, contributing to conversations without ever addressing Francis directly – he didn’t scowl at him, though. And he would answer, if Francis asked him a question.
A few days after their uneventful mission to the foothills, Francis walked into the training room and found Tris taping his knuckles, stripped down to his tank top, dog tags tucked inside, clearly ready for a few rounds with the heavy bag hanging in the corner. Francis paused on the threshold, and when Tris turned a faintly inquiring look on him he said, “I can come back later if–”
“I was gonna hit the bag, but if you wanna spar…?”
Francis swallowed around a suddenly tight throat. “Yeah. Okay.” He felt like he was calling the man’s bluff, but Tris didn’t respond with displeasure. He tossed over the roll of tape and started stretching out his arms.
Francis shrugged off his jacket, tucked his own tags out of the way, and made fast work of the tape, severing the last bit from the roll with his teeth. His pulse throbbed as they squared off from one another.
He hadn’t been lying when he’d told Tris that he wouldn’t make another inappropriate move. He wouldn’t; he knew that no chance for anything beyond a working relationship lay between them. But that didn’t mean that Tris wasn’t still all gorgeous, rippling muscles, and peeking chest hair, and a tattoo that was most definitely a sword wreathed in flame and flowing script. He was still, physically, a fantasy.
Francis shoved all thoughts ruthlessly aside, and engaged.
It was different sparring now, after last time, and the three strange verbal exchanges they’d had since. Oddly, Francis was less nervous. He’d asked, and received an answer; there was no need to be careful anymore, and so he wasn’t, throwing himself into jabs, and blocks, and parries. Less cautious, surer-footed, he dodged a move that would have led him to him pinned again, landed a glancing blow to Tristan’s ribs, and danced out of range again.
Tris narrowed his gaze – and then a reluctant smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “You’re getting better.”
“It just takes me a while, sometimes,” Francis said, grinning back, wide and delighted.
Tris huffed a breath, rolled his eyes, but the smile, tiny though it was, stayed in place. “Come on, again.”
iv.
Tris had never claimed to be a genius. But he wasn’t an idiot.
Except for when he was.
His whole life had been soldiering; born an army brat before the First Rift, both his parents had already been in the military, had been part of the first scramble of armed forces who’d responded to the heavenly chaos that had ensued. His father had died in combat, then.
He’d joined up at eighteen, and proved alarmingly good at killing people for a living. The Rift Walkers had seemed a natural fit. His mother had cried at his graduation ceremony.
He’d been told he was made of stone, as an insult more often than a joke, but he was a man, same as any other, on the most basic levels. He got hungry, and thirsty, and tired, and horny. In the post-Rift world, the military stopped caring so much about certain regulations: about hair, and fraternization, and which direction a person’s attractions lay. It wasn’t hard to find someone with an equal itch; to steal a few minutes in a stairwell or behind a locked dorm door, standing, or crowded together on a narrow bunk. All of it perfunctory, no-strings, and effortless.
Tris had seen all manner of terrible things as a Walker. Had watched fellow Knights die again and again, until their names, and faces, and personalities all blended together. Until it was just a role within each company: there were leaders, and steadfast rocks, like himself, clowns like Gavin, and then there was the One Who Died. Always, always, the cannon fodder, the first to fall, the weak link.
He’d taken one look at Sir Francis Gallo and known him for what he was: the One Who Died. He hadn’t understood how someone with such soft hair and such a sweet face could have been made a Knight in the first place. Though smaller, the girl, Rose, had radiating a prickly aggression that would stand her in good stead in the company.
Gallo, though…Gallo was soft.
Even more damning: Gallo made Tris feel soft.
If asked, he would have told anyone curious that he didn’t have finer feelings, an assertion that would have been taken for truth after one look at his cold, hard face. But the actual truth was that, like any other man, those finer feelings could exist, could be crippling, and so he’d packed all capacity for them away, locked them up tight, deep inside, because they had no place in a life such as his.
He took one look at that stupid, doomed to die, curly-headed boy Knight, though, and he wasn’t thinking about a quick tug in a closet. It wasn’t a faint itch on the back of his tongue that unsettled him – but a hunger. Instant, and deep, yawning painfully wide inside him, unearthing urges best left buried. He wanted to know the texture of his skin, and watch his eyes dilate up close, right before he tasted his mouth – and then every other part of him.
It was such an immediate, devastating rush of heat and not simply want, but desire, that blasted through him that he rejected it violently. It couldn’t happen. It could never happen. It would kill him.
He tried being distant with the boy, but that didn’t work because Gallo stared at him with naked wonder and worship. So then he tried helping him, thinking that, once he was seen as human, he would lose some of his mystique and Gallo would transfer his attention elsewhere, somewhere friendlier and safer.
Instead, Gallo proved himself to be quicker, and stronger, and more tenacious than expected. And cheerful – always so fucking cheerful. A bruise on his jaw, and sweat running down bare arms better muscled than Tris had anticipated, and grinning like an idiot (like a sweetheart), ready for another go.
Tris liked him, damn it, beyond the ways he plagued his every fevered dream, the ones he woke from sweat-drenched, hard, and half-humping his mattress.
And then had come that day.
The sparring match. The one in which Tris had first been shown up, and then…been shown something entirely different.
Later, during his shower, when he played it back on loop, he realized that he’d been the one to fuck everything up. Because even though Gallo had pressed back into him, and admitted to it later, it would have been an easy thing for a man not currently fighting his own arousal to brush off. A polite decline, an apology, and nothing else.
But Tris, already damp with sweat, his heart racing – and then racing harder with the exhilaration of getting Gallo pin
ned, seeing his dark curls tickling the mat, feeling the raw strength in his body as he fought the grip; feeling the heaving of his ribcage through his back, skin hot through the thin cotton of his shirt.
It had been woefully easy to envision how it might play out. Pressing back into him, shoving a hand up the back of his shirt, skin-on-skin. Leaning low to growl in his ear, and pulling back just enough so Gallo could roll over, his face flushed, his eyes glazed. Tris would kiss him, first, like he never kissed any of his hookups, because this boy was so, so pretty, and he just had to taste, had to feel the little gasp of surprise and pleasure against his lips. And then he would lower himself, bring their bodies together–
He’d panicked, plain and simple.
He’d had to leave or risk doing something idiotic, hating the crestfallen look on Gallo’s face, hating himself more. He’d meant to pretend it never happened, to go on like they had before, but he’d stepped out of the locker room one day, and there Gallo had been, lovely and awkward and sweet, trying to apologize, and Tris had reacted like a fucking bear.
He hadn’t meant to drag him down a hallway, and definitely not to threaten and insult the hell out of him at the same time. But once he opened his mouth, he was bowled over by an ugly fit of jealousy, because he knew that he couldn’t have Gallo for himself, it was impossible, but the idea of Gallo turning that adoring grin on someone else around base, someone actually willing…it turned him vicious.
He’d berated himself when he got back to his dorm, called himself ten different kinds of idiot.
Then had come the knock.
Then had come Gallo, bristling, defensive, and not taking one ounce of bullshit.
That hadn’t done a damn thing to help with Tris’s…well, he couldn’t call it a crush. It was too hot and destructive for that.
A truce existed, now, because Gallo had insisted on it, self-deprecating, and cheerful, and hurting, and stronger than Tris had ever been in this respect.
So they had a truce. They talked, sometimes, and they sparred, and Gallo had packed away all his awe and longing, and Tris might as well have been Gavin for all the lingering looks the boy gave him. And that was fine.
And Tris was going insane.
The first chance he had to do anything about it was in New Mexico.
It was snowing, soft flakes mixing with floating gray ash, all their breath pluming in the chill air. String lights cast a festive glow over the open-air markets, hawkers calling from stalls, scents of food and leather and poured candles wafting along on the breeze.
Gavin slung an arm around Gallo’s shoulders, grinning like a loon.
Tris knew where he would take him. Knew exactly where.
Tris turned, and walked off on his own, desperation pounding inside him like a second heartbeat.
He knew where he had to go; couldn’t put it off any longer.
The establishment he sought sat behind a row of market stalls, occupying the second and third floors of an old, drab building whose brick had once been red; it was accessed via the grocery shop on the first floor, a sad affair with buzzing low-energy bulbs and more cigarettes than food available. At the top of the stairs, a bouncer took his fifty up front, patted him down, and nodded him through.
Madame Zelda, lined and worn, her makeup doing nothing to conceal the rough texture of her face, never seemed to age past a certain point. She regarded him with flat disinterest, in her curtained, overly-perfumed parlor, and went to get the books for him. Laid them out on a black lace covered table and flipped right past all the girls, knowing better.
This part always left him overheated in an unpleasant way, keenly aware of the woman’s gimlet stare, breathing in cigarette smoke and chemical flowers as his heart thumped and lurched. It always seemed necessary to seek out a place such as this when he had gone too long without, stretched thin and distracted; and especially this time, with Gallo there every time he turned his head, tempting, and fierce, and sweet, and absolutely off limits.
But now, as it always did in moments like these, when he was choosing…his stomach shriveled, and his chest felt hollow, and he just wanted it over with. A physical release of tension that would help him get through the next days, weeks, months without doing something rash – like confessing or some such bullshit.
He stared unseeing as Zelda turned the pages, tension winding tighter and tighter in his belly, until one photo finally arrested him.
The young man looked about thirty, still boyish, but like he knew what he was doing. His smile in the photo was too cocky, too knowing, but he had dark, curly hair, and blue eyes, and, if he squinted, Tris thought be might be able to pretend, at least for a little while, in a dark room.
“That one.” He tapped the laminated page, and Zelda nodded, and rang the bell.
~*~
A small part of Francis held out hope that, despite the heavy arm across his shoulders, and the lecherous winks, and all the unsubtle innuendos, Gavin wasn’t in fact taking him to a brothel. But then they were stepping off the street, away from the bustle of the market, through a black-curtained doorway and into a room bathed in pink light, and they were most definitely in a brothel.
“Uh – Gavin–” he tried, once again, only to be ignored, once again.
It was a surprisingly large room, with swaths of dark fabric draped in loops from the high ceiling to offer an air of intimacy. He saw the door to a hallway in back, as well as a few screened-off areas. There were…sounds. And there were sofas, cozy just for two, and a few for three, and people strewn across them: city men in rough dress, and girls in all shapes and sizes wearing scraps of lace and leather holding their attention. One man sat on a sofa between two beauties, and Francis hastily looked away, face flaming.
“Gavin.”
His teammate swung around, and clapped both hands down on his shoulders. “Hey, it’s okay to be nervous. Everyone’s first time is a little scary,” he said with patronizing sympathy.
“What? No. No, it’s not my first time.”
Gavin tilted his head. “You sure about that?”
“What – yes. Yeah, I’m sure. I’m not” – he hissed the last – “a virgin.”
Gavin grinned, and winked, the bastard. “Sure. Don’t worry. I’ll pick you out a real nice one.”
A real nice one, Francis reflected. What a gentleman.
Before he could protest further, he found himself behind a screen, sitting in a wide chair, a half-naked, curvaceous girl introducing herself as Dolly.
He held up a hand as she put her hands on the chair arms and leaned down, trying to thrust her breasts into his face. “Wait! Wait. Sorry, um…”
She cocked her head, confusion pulling at her plucked brows.
“Sorry, sorry, just, um. Dolly, wasn’t it? Hi, Dolly. I’m sure – I mean you are lovely, it’s just…”
She cocked her head to the side, smile breaking slow and full of promise. “You nervous, baby? Don’t worry. I’ll take real good–”
“No, no.”
Her expression froze. Clearly, she wasn’t used to being refused quite this vehemently – or refused at all, probably.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “You’re beautiful, but I’m just…not interested.”
She straightened, and studied him a moment, all her seductive grace giving way to a practical air that he much preferred. “If you’d rather have one of the guys–”
“No, no, just.” He fished a handful of cash out of his pocket and thrust it toward her. “Just a few minutes alone would be great, honestly.”
She shrugged, disinterested, tucked the money inside her bra, and left him.
He hadn’t lied to Gavin: he wasn’t a virgin. But casual sex had always felt cold, awkward, and unpleasant for him. The perfunctory trading of orgasms was even less appealing when he knew that money would change hands, and that she would be faking.
And when he still, despite all his best efforts, couldn’t get a certain grumpy Knight out of his head.
He wound u
p outside, leaning back against the building with his face tipped up to the falling snow and ash. Gavin finally staggered out, pink-faced, beaming, and shaky-legged.
He clapped Francis on the shoulder with a wordless exclamation, sex-drunk and satisfied. “How was she?”
“Fine,” Francis said, unable to scrape together a smile.
It didn’t matter; Gavin was oblivious. “See? I told you.”
They bought sandwiches at a food stall, and wandered back to where they were supposed to meet the others. Rose and Lance had obviously gone off together, and Rose might have looked a little less sour than she had a few hours ago.
When Tris joined them, Francis took one look at him – and his stomach dropped.
He knew without being told where the other Knight had been. For one, his shirt was buttoned up the wrong way, and for another, his hair was rumpled, and his face flushed in a way it normally wasn’t. His expression was forbidding, and he refused to meet Francis’s gaze, and that was fine, wasn’t it? It didn’t matter if Tris went off and paid for sex, because he certainly didn’t want to have sex with Francis, and it wasn’t any of his business.
It stung, though.
~*~
Despite the obliging, eager attentions of the prostitute who’d introduced himself as Blue, and having come twice, Tris couldn’t fall asleep when he stretched out on his borrowed bunk that night. Despite physical fatigue, his thoughts wouldn’t settle, and he rolled from one side to the other, teeth gritted against the dark – against something that felt an awful lot like guilt.
He was stronger than this, damn it.
Finally, he climbed out of his bunk, dressed, and went in search of the gym. If he couldn’t sleep, then he might as well do something useful.
It wasn’t unheard-of to find the training rooms back at home base occupied at this late hour. Peace wasn’t something that existed in the world anymore. He knew a few Knights who managed to sneak alcohol onto base, and who drowned their worries and nightmares each night, passing out into blessed oblivion. But he’d never liked feeling muddled like that; the hangover was never worth it, and a pounding headache could be the difference between life or death on a mission. So he wasn’t surprised to hear, on his approach, someone having a go at a punching bag, the rhythmic thud of fists as someone dealt regular jabs, and then a quick flurry of strikes, the chains that held the bag chiming. Strong, he thought, absently. Whoever was working out had a hell of a throw.
Mystic Wonderful : A Hell Theory Novella Page 5
