Ultimate Sanction

by Sarah Luddington

  The stars were distant, cold, untouchable.

  Jacob was not.

  A pulse of need made my groin stir and a small sound of protest escaped. A tight, agonised sound of confusion and longing. My heart ached, stomach clenched, throat tightened, and my breaths were laboured.

  I whimpered, the pain so intense I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I’d been stabbed, shot, tortured – I was a fucking good soldier who faced fear and acted anyway because that was my job and my training but this…? It would kill me.

  I wanted to puke but how could I when my throat kept tightening?

  “Mac?” Jacob’s voice broke through the shifting quicksand under my world.

  My knees buckled and hit the rich loam of the Congo.

  “Mac?” The sound of the Bergens hitting the ground and rushing feet. A strong hand touched my back and I flinched away.

  “Bastard,” Jacob hissed, the grief and instant rage flashing hot bright between us. An arc of poisonous electricity. “I thought I could trust you. I thought you cared enough about me to accept me. Homophobia isn’t something I can tolerate.” The anger battered me.

  I wanted to explain. I wanted to explain. I wanted…

  God, I wanted.

  A soft mewl of protest. A pleading sound of soul’s agony begging for understanding because words were far beyond me.

  “Mac? Explain yourself. For God’s sake, have the fucking the decency to look at me, even if you hate me.”

  I doubled over. A tree felled.

  “Mac?” Concern now. The hand again. The energy switching, knife blade quick. “Mac, I realise it must be a shock but…” He knelt at my side. The scent, the heat, the feel of him so comforting. My safe place. My friend.

  I forced my hand to move. I’d climbed out of an artic crevice once, hand over hand, because our team lost a man down the hole and he broke his leg. This small movement, just incremental millimetres scared me far more than that brutal sub-zero climb. I reached for the back of his neck and the soft hair brushed my fingertips, the sweaty skin, the fabric of his t-shirt.

  “Help,” I managed to squeeze out.

  Jacob, unknowing, pulled me into his chest. “Breathe, Mac. Just breathe. I’m here. I’ll always be with you. I just need you to accept what I am and we’ll never lose touch again.”

  “Help me,” I whispered, tightening my hold on his neck.

  His arms cradled me, pulling me into his body. He sat back on the ground and I collapsed into his strong arms.

  “What’s wrong, Mac?” he asked with a tenderness I remembered, craved in the dark seconds between breaths during darker nights.

  The soft flesh of his neck rested against my lips. They tingled and I licked. The salt. The musk. The taste of a man not me. I jerked at the pain in my groin. Jacob stilled.

  “Yes, Mac,” he murmured. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

  My lips moved, was it a kiss? Was it a kiss? Was I kissing a man’s throat? My lips moved again; my tongue darted out to taste again. He’d given permission. I had permission from someone I trusted.

  He groaned and his hands tightened on my back, drawing me up to his face. He cupped my jaw and I stared into his eyes, lit by the starlight shining its benediction onto the dark centre of this complex continent. The beating of the universe running through the veins and arteries of a land more ancient than any I’d seen in England.

  “Mac, just say yes for me and we can make this real.”

  His beautiful amber eyes blurred, and I growled, unable to speak using human language. I was elevated to using a language older than time, the language of protons, like drawn to like across the vast distances of galaxies to form stardust – to form us. He understood. His lips pressed to mine for the first time and held still. My eyes slid shut and I groaned, a sound dragged from that heated centre of the universe. He released me.

  “More,” I moaned.

  “Anything,” he whispered against my tingling lips. I’d never been more aware of them than in that moment and he claimed them and opened his, a light lick with his tongue seeking more. When was the last time someone kissed me?

  My heart raced and my skin hummed. A wet kitten in his arms and yet also the strongest man on the planet. Our tongues touched, mine tentative, his confident, demanding – a heat-seeking missile of desire. I wanted so much more. Decades of fear spun away from me at the speed of a supernova explosion. I wanted this. I wanted it all. I wanted Jacob. We were made of stardust and gravity – pulling together the very stuff of the galaxy turning above our joined bodies.

  His fingers were strong but gentle on my back. Mine were not, they clutched in a frantic need to keep this going, to never release this moment in case someone stole it from me forever. Forever… I was forever changed. It should terrify me, isn’t that how people coped with change, by being scared? But it didn’t. How could it?

  I lay in the arms of the man I had always wanted.

  Jacob shifted and pulled back enough to end the kiss. I whimpered and he chuckled. “It’s alright, Mac. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Unable to form a coherent thought well enough to create a sentence I opted to nose under his jaw, the scratch of his beard setting off tingles on my nose and cheek.

  “Shh, it’s alright, Mac. I’m here. I’m here,” he murmured, stroking my back. “But it’s not very comfortable outside on the ground and to be honest I’m a little concerned about the bugs hereabouts so could we move inside? Maybe even use grown-up words?” The tender laughter in his voice brought me back from the brink.

  I retreated from him in an instant. “Sorry.” My hands dropped away, aching for him already.

  He didn’t let me go far, a hefty yank on my t-shirt drawing me back. “Don’t do that. Don’t assume I am pushing you away. I will never push you away. I would like you to look at me though.”

  A soft smile played on his swollen lips and when my gaze reached his eyes, they weren’t amber, they were a deep honey. “Hello, Mac. Where have you been all these years?”

  My cheeks coloured, the heat unmistakable, and his smile grew wider. “Running away,” I admitted.

  He laughed. “It speaks!”

  I smacked his arm and managed to drag myself off the damp ground. Jacob offered me his hand, so I pulled him up and our chests bumped together. Standing I could look down into his face, at just over 6 foot I had at least 10 centimetres on him and it gave me a rush. His breath quickened at whatever he saw in my face and his tongue licked those soft lips. For the first time in my life I initiated a kiss with a man. I cupped his jaw, the beard sending sparks through my palm and pressed my lips to his, the entire length of his body yielded against me and his hard cock pressed against my thigh. My body hummed in acknowledgement of his presence. Rainbows exploded in my blood, I swear it.

  The tough ex-squaddie had been reduced to thinking of rainbows as a way to explain the euphoria of having this explosion of freedom. I’d been imprisoned for decades and Jacob gave me a key of such simplicity it made me giddy.

  “Bags,” I growled when I let him surface for air.

  “Yeah, okay, bags.” He sounded breathless and a shiver of pride went through my body at the thought of making him weak for me. “Interesting house by the way.”

  A truer statement had never been uttered. In England it would barely be classified as a shed, maybe a small barn, but here it qualified for a house. Four walls of slatted wood over a simple wooden single storey frame. Two windows facing out, either side of the doorway. The windows were now glazed but they hadn’t been when I’d taken over the place. The roof consisted of corrugated iron painted red and a small front veranda, also of wood, covered the front. It sat on a very solid frame raised off the ground about a metre, so when the rains came it didn’t get washed into the jungle. There were two huge Iroko trees either side that the local community protected from loggers.

  We lifted the bags into the house along with the box of ammunition. “Food,” I said. “You need to eat.” The interior rem
ained dark until I managed to start the lamps I kept near the doorway. The small kitchen sat off to the left, the lounge to the right, a bedroom and what qualified as a bathroom at the back. Everything in the place was simple. A rug covered the floor, old paperbacks filled a bookcase, two rocking chairs and a small sofa qualified as lounge furniture. I didn’t have a TV, but an FM radio and a CB radio sat on a table I used as my dining room. A film of dust covered everything, but dust covered all of Africa, except for the posh bits. This was not a posh bit.

  “There’s no hot water,” I said. “And someone robbed my solar panels, so I don’t have electric at the moment. We can buy some food in the morning from the neighbours but for now it’s going to be simple.”

  “Can we cook and talk?” he asked.

  “Okay.”

  I unpacked the Bergens and removed the water sterilisers, then set about priming the water pump for the well. Next came some of the ORPs; I chose the least disgusting, chilli-con-carne and grabbed the unopened whisky I packed as well. I tried not to drink, but damn, it had been a very long day and I deserved the burn. Jacob took the bottle off me and set about finding two glasses.

  “First I need to know you’re alright,” Jacob said.

  “Trying hard not to think too much,” I muttered. I didn’t want to burst the bubble created by our passion outside. I feared thinking.

  The hand pump in this place took forever. I needed to replace those damned solar panels.

  Jacob watched me. “Don’t do that.” His words were so soft I almost missed them.

  My hand paused but I didn’t turn to look at him. “Do what?”

  “You’re closing down again. Please, talk to me, Mac.”

  Why did he have to be so damned perceptive? Were soldiers like us supposed to be perceptive? Weren’t we just bullets fired from a gun owned by the British Government and used by the security services?

  The feel of Jacob’s lips on mine, his fingers on my body, the groan I elicited from him by holding him close… These things reminded the quaking and lonely man inside the brutalised one on the outside that I needed this to survive, just as much as I needed food or water.

  I braced on the edge of the metal sink. “My father…” I swallowed and tried again. Talking about him raised his ghost and I hated that fucking monster. “My father is an evil bastard. He beat me every time I showed any kind of weakness.” I glanced at him and a sad smile of reassurance made my heart hurt. I had to look away, so Jacob reached for my hand. A gesture of tenderness. He rubbed his thumb over my knuckles. Old grief washed up on the barren shores of my memory.

  “We have time, Mac. If it’s too painful you don’t have to talk to me. Let’s just eat something and bunk down.”

  I snarled before managing to form words. “By the time I hit puberty I already knew that being a faggot would get me a beating so bad I might not walk away.”

  “Don’t use that word, it’s not right. It is not how I think of myself and it’s not how you see me. Is it?” Jacob asked, the final question delivered with such a look of horror on his face my stomach flipped.

  Terror shot through every cell in my body. I clutched his hands, now able to make eye contact. “No, Jacob. No, that’s not how I see you. But…”

  He studied me for a moment. “Christ, Mac. It’s how you see yourself, isn’t it?”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat.

  He disengaged his fingers from mine and cupped either side of my jaw, staring hard into my eyes, willing me to understand how important his words were. “There is nothing wrong with being gay, Mac. There is nothing wrong with the emotions and carnal needs we share.”

  Logically I knew he was right but what place did logic hold when the fear instilled in a young mind is never cured? Could I overcome the narrative that my father injected into me with a syringe made of fear and hate?

  I studied my hands, they gripped Jacob’s wrists. “I don’t know if I can be the man you need.”

  “You are the man I want, Mac. You are the man I’ve always wanted. It’s why I wanted to come out in the first place. Tell the world I’m gay so I could tell you and I prayed you’d respond. I could see the longing but…”

  “Being gay in the SAS isn’t really an option,” I finished for him.

  Jacob managed a chuckle and dropped his hands. “No, it’s not the easy option.”

  “I guess there have been a lot of men?” I asked, half fearing he’d give me an answer.

  He didn’t quite meet my eyes as he said, “There have been enough for me to know I want you. Only you.”

  I nodded, accepting that as a sensible answer. “I tried to have relationships with women, before you joined the Regiment. They always seemed to know something was wrong, even though I managed to have sex with them. I don’t think I’m very good at it.” The heat on my skin added to my humiliation but Jacob deserved to know that even at forty-two I’d had less experience than the average bloke, gay or straight.

  He came up behind me and encircled my waist as I tackled the water pump again. “Then we’ll need to practice. A lot.”

  My turn to chuckle, then gasp as his lips suckled my neck. I shivered in his arms and grew hard. His hand strayed over my belly, over the belt buckle and cupped my cock and balls through my combats. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d summoned enough mental energy to masturbate, even my sexual fantasies had to be straight. Just that morning I’d turned my body down, denying myself because of the illicit thoughts I had about the man currently wrapping his arms around my needy body. The sudden desperation of my body’s denial made my hips thrust into his hand hard enough to cause pain.

  Jacob made a satisfied hum because of my reaction to his stimulation and I realised he held all the cards now. He had the experience, the confidence, the drive to push us towards something new and potentially beautiful.

  “I can’t wait to taste you,” he whispered.

  My heart skipped several beats and fear diminished my lust. The need to curl up and hide made me pull away from him.

  “Mac?” he asked in obvious confusion.

  “Can we take this real slow? I… um… I’ll go air out the bedroom and scare off the cockroaches.” I didn’t meet his gaze as I fled the scene.

  8

  Jacob had the good sense not to push me and I retreated to being the ‘Mac’ I’d always been around him because my beleaguered and confused state of mind couldn’t give itself permission to imagine how this night might end if I allowed myself free rein.

  We ate the chilli, moaned about the chilli, drank whisky and toasted our dead friends. After that Jacob’s anger resurfaced. “How are we going to find Clark? It’s not like we can go to the Firm and ask them to locate him.”

  “Brant’s coming soon, she’ll have an idea or two,” I said, mind half on the conversation and half on the fact I needed to sleep but only had the one small double bed.

  “Are Unit 12 really that good? If Clark is responsible for the death of my team and none of us saw him coming, how the hell are we going to fare any better?” Jacob asked, the rocking motion of his chair increasing.

  “Unit 12 are the best,” I stated. “Colonel Brant is one of the few people I trust enough to know if I die working for her, then I die in a good cause. She might not always give us all the information but for a rupert she’s good. Unit 12 have some of the best minds from MI6, MI5 and Special Forces working towards protecting British interests around the world.”

  Jacob grunted. “What happens when a country doesn’t agree with British interests?”

  I managed a smile. “We’re soldiers, it’s our job to work for British interests regardless of whether it’s right or wrong. I like to think we’re morally right most of the time.”

  “Tell that to my grandfather,” Jacob muttered.

  “Ireland was never simple, Jacob, don’t be obtuse.”

  He huffed. It wasn’t the first time we’d discussed the rights and wrongs of our lives being spent by a Parliament that seemed ben
t on war more than peace. Sometimes I wondered why Jacob had joined up at all, never mind breaking his back to become an elite soldier. It’s one of the things I’d missed most when I’d left him, a good argument about ethics and morals, sometimes I’d argue against my beliefs just to push him to think more deeply about his motivations. It had been my downfall with him really. Not only was he a tawny beauty of power and grace, but he had a brain as well and a strong moral compass.

  I yawned. “Sleep.”

  We’d both showered – nothing more than a hosepipe with cold water – and when Jacob rose from the chair, he held out his hand. “Come, we’ll do nothing more than sleep, but I want to feel you wrapped around me.” In one simple move he’d taken away all my options.

  Giddy, that’s how I felt, knowing I could hold him, giddy. My belly fluttered like a medieval maid on her wedding night. I allowed him to lead me to the bedroom, the space barely large enough to contain a bed and two men, but what space did we need when all I wanted to feel was my arms around him?

  He removed my t-shirt and I removed his. The smile on his face as his eyes roved over the surface of my body made me feel self-conscious. “What?” I asked.

  Strong fingers tangled among the black and grey hairs. “I can’t believe I finally get to feel all this,” he whispered. A light brush ghosted over my nipple and I sucked in a breath at the intimate contact. He looked me square in the eyes and said, “When you feel ready to fuck me, it’s going to be amazing, Mac. Right now, though, I just want you to hold me.”

  I nodded, struck dumb by the visual image of Jacob under me, or maybe over me, our bodies joined, him taking pleasure from me while I gave it willingly. My jeans dropped off my narrow hips and my cock strained at the surface of my boxers, but Jacob ignored both his erection and mine, instead he just pulled me onto the bed and we lay, facing each other.

  “Can I kiss you?” I asked.

  “If you do it won’t stop there,” he murmured.

  I placed my hand on his backside, the snug boxers leaving little to my imagination, and yanked him into my body. “Don’t want to stop.” My lips and his joined, our tongues danced, our hips rocked, and Jacob slipped a thigh between mine to give me something to grind against. He pushed my underpants down and the feel of his calloused hands on my naked backside made me whimper and rock against him harder.