Finding You

by Max Hudson

  Adrian felt his own lips curving up into an answering smile. “Well. All right then. Good.”

  He reached up to cup Simon’s cheek with his palm and tilted his head to guide him into another kiss, using the slight leverage of his arm around his shoulders to press them closer together.

  There wasn’t really a whole lot of talking after that. Still carrying him, Simon managed to somehow make his way up the stairs to the bedroom, despite Adrian protesting that the couch was much closer. He noted vaguely that the house had almost an identical layout to Minnie’s, but didn’t exactly have time to dwell on it before Simon had rather unceremoniously dumped him onto the bed, then quickly moved to cover him, attacking his neck with a series of burning kisses.

  They were already half undressed, both shirts and Adrian’s jacket forgotten somewhere on the stairwell. It didn’t really take too much longer to divest them of the rest of their clothes, pants tossed one direction and boxers another as hands and mouths desperately explored over every new inch of exposed skin.

  Adrian found himself slightly surprised, but pleasantly so, by a shift that had seemed to come over Simon. He was, for lack of a better term, taking up space. A lot of it. His body arched over Adrian’s, pinning him to the bed and covering him completely, but rather than smothering it just felt good. Safe.

  Their kisses grew hotter, fiercer, as that burning want started to build. Their hips crashed together and Adrian gasped, letting his head fall back into the pillows with a long, low groan. “Si, please, just—”

  He could feel Simon’s chuckle rumble through his own body, vibrating across every inch they were connected. “Yeah, that’s more along the lines of what I was thinking,” he murmured against Adrian’s ear, then pressed a heavy, open-mouthed kiss against his neck.

  Adrian chuckled almost despite himself and swatted at his shoulder. “If I’d known you could get like this, I would have pushed you over the edge sooner,” he teased back breathlessly. Even as he tried to keep himself under control, his hips gave an almost independent roll up against Simon’s, rubbing them together and eliciting a small, delicious shudder from both of them.

  Then Simon shifted, and there was something cool massaged gently against him before a finger slid inside. Adrian hissed in a sharp breath and his back arched, eyes slamming shut as the jolt of sensation washed through him.

  “You okay?” Simon’s voice was in his ear again, soft and concerned.

  He nodded quickly. “Better than okay.”

  He felt Simon’s lips against his jaw curve into a smile, and his fingers started to move, slow and carefully and absolutely maddening. “Good.”

  Adrian’s hands clenched in the sheets as Simon worked him gently until his body had relaxed enough to take more. He trembled and gasped quietly with each new level of intimacy that was introduced, until it felt like he was burning up from the inside and he could not take this anymore. ”Dear God, just fuck me.”

  He accidently said it out loud. Simon huffed a slightly amused, breathless, “Yessir,” and the next thing he knew he’d slid inside, hands grasping Adrian’s hips to steady him.

  They both gasped and went still. The slight shivering that had been rippling Adrian’s frame seemed to have spread to Simon by now as well. They just stared at each other, blue eyes meeting brown. Then in a rush they came crashing together.

  Adrian reached up to tangle his fingers through Simon’s hair, the other hand dragging nails down the curve of his spine. Simon kept one hand on his hip and shifted the other to wrap around the length of him, starting to pump slowly as his hips shifted and he began thrusting in and out, almost painfully slow at first but with a steadily growing intensity.

  Sensation and time started to blur together. Adrian had absolutely no idea how long they were at it. He just knew he could feel Simon covering every inch of him, moving against and inside him. It took every scrap of will he had not to just fall apart in his arms immediately.

  Teeth and tongue clashed in a harsh, desperate kiss as they moved together, hands grasping and stroking until Adrian was seated in his lap with his face turned into the curve of Simon’s shoulder, gasping and shuddering as his release washed over him. “Simon!”

  With a last few pumps of his hips Simon followed him over the edge, fingers clutching at his back as he pressed them together almost desperately.

  They simply sat there like that for several long moments, still connected, wrapped up in each other’s arms. Eventually, Adrian lifted his head and pressed a dazed, tired kiss to Simon’s cheek.

  “I think I love you.”

  He could feel Simon’s heartbeat skip against his own chest. Then he’d twisted his neck to catch Adrian’s mouth with his, once again smothering him in a kiss that left him breathless.

  “Yeah… Me too.”

  Chapter Seven

  Simon Dove

  None of that had been what Simon was expecting. Pretty much everything since waking up that morning had been a slap in the face directly out of left field, leaving him reeling.

  But maybe nothing quite so much as hearing Adrian—Adrian Crow—say that he loved him.

  Well, maybe admitting that he thought he loved him back. Though the words had come out of his mouth, he hadn’t actually realized the truth of them until they had made it passed his lips. That was more than a little disconcerting.

  He didn’t want to take it back. It wasn’t untrue. It was just surprising. Apparently for the both of them, because it left them laying on the bed in silence, Adrian’s head pillowed against Simon’s chest and Simon’s arm draped loosely over his waist.

  “So.” Adrian’s voice came slowly, more a soft exhale than a proper word.

  “So,” Simon agreed, letting his head fall back further and closing his eyes for a moment.

  “What now?”

  Simon considered that for a moment, then began slowly, “Well, my first instinct is to go to the cops. But, for all we know the fact that we went before is the reason those people were there at all.”

  Adrian was already nodding, his hair tickling Simon’s skin gently as his head moved. “Yeah, I was about to say.”

  He sighed and they both went quiet. Simon was not sure what Adrian was thinking, exactly, but he knew his own brain just felt too fried to handle this. Not to mention, now that they were actually in a safe place and the adrenaline of everything that had just happened was beginning to die down, the sheer panic of what had happened at Minnie’s house finally seemed to settle in properly.

  “Hey.” Adrian’s hand pressed lightly against his chest and he started, tilting his head to look down at him. He met worried blue eyes, a slight frown drawn between the other man’s brows. “You’re shaking,” Adrian noted softly, concerned.

  Simon blinked a few times. “I—oh.” He was. Just slightly, but a few trembles were working their way regularly through his body. He shook his head and flicked his eyes up to fixate on the ceiling as though it was the most interesting thing in the world. “Yeah, just stressed, I guess.”

  A soft snort drew his eyes back to Adrian, who he found still staring at him, this time with one eyebrow slightly quirked up. “Right. Stressed. I think that may be putting it a little lightly.”

  Simon felt himself start to smile crookedly, almost despite himself. He shifted slightly so he could lift his other hand and gently drag the backs of his knuckles over the sharp line of Adrian’s cheekbone. A tiny glow of satisfaction flickered to life in his chest when Adrian tilted his head to lean into the touch, and his eyelids lowered fractionally for just a moment.

  Wrapping his arms more firmly around Adrian and pulling him up a little higher against his chest, he let his head flop back onto the pillows and exhaled sharply. “Yeah. Stressed is maybe the nicest version of saying how I’m feeling right now.”

  A fraction of a second after the words had left his mouth, his eyes widened a bit and he tilted his head to meet Adrian’s gaze again. Hurriedly, he added, “Not about—ah, fuck. You know what I�
�m trying to say here, right?”

  Adrian chuckled quietly, eyes practically sparkling, and in a rather sudden, impulsive move he rocked up to press a kiss to Simon’s cheek, raising a flush to the skin. “Yeah, I do. I don’t think stressed is how I would describe feeling about this.”

  He nodded down to the way they were cuddled together, still buck naked, then curved his lips up wryly on one side and continued, “Confused and kind of surprised, yeah. Sure. But pretty much the opposite of stressed.” Simon snorted quietly and Adrian settled back against him. They were both quiet for a long moment before the small man sighed and added in a softer voice, “Everything else though…”

  Simon nodded as he trailed of. “Yeah. Everything else.”

  “We…” Adrian paused and frowned, the kind of frown that stole over his face when he was trying to collect his thoughts. Then he huffed out a breath and muttered, “We have to do something. It would look suspicious if we didn’t report seeing or hearing anything, it’ll all come out eventually.”

  “But,” Simon picked up as he trailed off, “we have no idea if we can actually trust anyone at the station. Not to mention, reporting what happened means we out ourselves for breaking into Minnie’s house. Twice.”

  Adrian chuckled dryly and replied, “I’m actually less worried about that.”

  Simon shook his head with another small snort. “Of course you are.”

  “But the main point remains valid.” Adrian huffed and dropped his head onto Simon’s shoulder, turning his face into the slight slope of his shoulder. Simon tried not to shiver as his hair tickled at his skin again, raising goosebumps. “What are we gonna do?”

  They both fell quiet for a long, long moment. Then, with a heavy exhale, Simon shifted slightly beneath him and reached up to absently card his fingers through Adrian’s hair. “For starters,” he began slowly, “we probably should get up and out of this bed.”

  Adrian grumbled something low and curse-laden at that, summoning a very soft chuckle from Simon. “Yeah, I know, I don’t exactly want to either. But I don’t exactly see any way of handling this craziness naked from my bed.”

  “Yeah, fine.” Adrian pressed a quick kiss to his shoulder and sat up with a low groan. Simon shifted onto his side, propping himself up with one elbow while Adrian glanced around the room—he thought he might be looking for their clothes.

  “Ah…” A little flushed, Simon cleared his throat and reminded him, “I think most of our stuff is on the stairs.”

  “Oh.” To his surprise, Adrian actually blushed too, just a little, but he was also smirking. “Right. Yeah.”

  He slid out of the bed and managed to collect his boxers, tossing Simon’s onto the bed as he did. “C’mon. If I have to be up, so do you.”

  Simon huffed, but where once that comment might have been a little irritating, now he was just amused. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he muttered, starting to pull his boxers on while simultaneously glancing around for where his pants had ended up.

  Spotting them, he rolled to the side and started to get out of bed, but was halted by a soft touch on his shoulder and a quietly murmured, “Hey.”

  He paused, twisting to look back over his shoulder at Adrian, whose grip on his shoulder tightened fractionally when their eyes met. “I, ah…”

  Adrian sighed and closed his eyes, then gave himself a little shake and raised his head to lock their gazes again, jaw set firmly. “I meant it, you know. What I said.”

  Simon was quiet for a long moment, feeling his heart pulse erratically beneath his breastbone while his breath caught in his throat, just for a second.

  “I know,” he murmured eventually in reply. Slowly, carefully, he reached up to cover Adrian’s hand with his own and squeezed gently. “So did I.”

  “Oh—Okay.” Adrian’s lips started to curve up at the corners. “Well, ah. Okay then. That’s good. Okay.”

  Simon chuckled as Adrian squeezed his hand softly in returned, then drew his own hand back. “I thought I was supposed to be the awkward stammerer?”

  Adrian snorted and darted in to peck his lips, then drew back with that familiar smirk in place. “Hey, you said it, not me.”

  Simon rolled his eyes, but he was smiling himself, despite everything. “Right, and you’ll never let me forget it.”

  “Damn straight.”

  Adrian leaned in to kiss his cheek before letting him get up from the bed, then turned to leave the room and gather the rest of their clothes. They both dressed quietly, lost in their own thoughts.

  “Well we have to tell someone,” Simon finally said into the quiet that had settled over them, dropping down to sit on the edge of his bed again once he was fully dressed. He fiddled a little awkwardly with the sleeve of his shirt, eyes downcast and a frown drawn over his brow.

  To his slight surprise, Adrian nodded in what looked like agreement, though he was also frowning, his eyes fixed on the window as he thought. “I know one or two people down at Minnie’s station that I actually trust,” he finally said slowly after several long moments more of quiet. “We could go to them. Tell them what happened.”

  Simon nodded. “That probably means we’ll be turning ourselves in for breaking and entering, doesn’t it?” he tried to joke after another moment or two of the deafening silence, though his voice fell rather flat.

  Adrian snorted. “Somehow I think they’ll have bigger issues to deal with. But yeah, it does.”

  Simon nodded slowly, turning the idea over in his head.

  It was the only option that made sense. Those people in Minnie’s house had changed something, made this whole thing abruptly and painfully much more terrifying. They had clearly been looking for her, even just the little snippets that he and Adrian had overheard had made that perfectly clear.

  As if sensing the resolve that settled itself over Simon’s shoulders, Adrian nodded sharply from across the room and suddenly turned back from the window, jaw set and eyes just slightly narrowed. “Right. We should head back to my place first, grab that file and the note we got from Minnie’s place. It’s evidence, if they send someone down there to search her place.”

  Simon nodded slowly in return. That made sense. “Right. Okay. Think we’ve waited long enough to risk heading back to the car?”

  Adrian gave a sharp, affirmative jerk of his head and started for the bedroom door. “Yeah, probably. I’ve been followed on the road before though. I know what to look for and I can probably lose them if it happens.”

  Simon blinked, then stood from the bed to follow him out. “You have what?”

  A very slight easing of the tension from his shoulders was the only sign that Adrian might have been amused by that. “Oh, don’t act so scandalized. It was never dangerous, really. Just like PIs that the people I was investigating hired to figure out what I was up to. They were usually too late to stop me by the time they figured it out anyway.”

  Simon snorted, shaking his head. “Right. No big deal.”

  He used to think Adrian just liked talking about his job because it made him seem dangerous. Sort of on the edge, a kind of “bad boy” type—which really was kind of hilarious, if you just went by your first look at the man.

  Now he got the feeling it was something else. It wasn’t just that over the last two days or so he’d gradually grown not just to accept Adrian’s occasionally odd or once-irritating idiosyncrasies, but he thought he’d started to figure out some of the reasonings behind them, and maybe even appreciate a few of them.

  After what had just happened at Minnie’s house in particular. He was inclined to believe that talking about what had happened to him while he did his job was Adrian’s way of coping, of putting something that seemed almost absurd on the surface into words and then quickly dismissing it as “no big deal” so that he didn’t have to confront any part of his work that was actually dangerous.

  It was rather panic-inducing, actually, once he wrapped his head around the idea.

  What was more upsetting was realizing why
that in and of itself was terrifying. Simon actually loved Adrian—though no one was as surprised about that as him—and being able to see just how easily he could compartmentalize objectively scary things, events that could have been genuinely dangerous, was nerve-wracking.

  Now is probably not the right time for that conversation though, he admitted to himself with a small sigh as they made their way to the front door. He paused for a moment by the coat closet to duck in and grab a different jacket, hoping vaguely that if anyone had seen them leaving Minnie’s house, maybe the slight change of clothes would help move attention away from them once they left, at least at first glance.

  “Here.” He tossed Adrian a jacket too.

  Adrian caught it easily and glanced over at him, then quirked his lips up on one side as he realized what he was doing. “Good thinking,” he praised with a chuckle as he slipped into the jacket. “Maybe you’re more cut out for this sort of thing than you realized.”

  Simon decided not to specifically comment on it for the moment. Instead, he just shrugged and replied, “Well, you’d be surprised how different a person can look with just one distinct article of clothing changed.”

  Adrian’s smirked turned just a hint more crooked. “That more bank teller wisdom?”

  Simon shrugged. “Yeah, actually.” He glanced to the door and hurried on with, “Are you ready?”

  Adrian’s half-smile faded and his jaw set again. He nodded. “Ready when you are.”

  “Right.” Without thinking about it, Simon reached out to take his hand, quickly and deftly lacing their fingers together.

  They both froze, evidently equally surprised by that. Then Adrian’s lips twitched in the tiniest hint of a smile and he gave Simon’s hand a light squeeze. Simon nodded back, took a breath and quickly stepped back out through the door. Nothing.

  No strange men waiting to ambush them, not even an overly curious neighbor peeking out through their curtains. Simon tried to swallow a quick, instinctive sigh of relief. He knew he was being paranoid, but in that moment he thought he was fairly justified for it!