by Jez Morrow
His keen ears picked up scattered comments.
Look at that guy! Look at that GUY!
That guy was unmistakably Jack.
What’s he got with him, though?
That would be Martin.
It’s kind of a tight little bitch, isn’t it?
Kind of hot. If you like doing it to a pine board. Man could have anyone and he picked that?
Jack was gorgeous, cheerful, outgoing and butch as hell. Jack could indeed have anyone.
The voices meant nothing. The possessiveness in Jack’s touch made Martin know that Jack wanted only one man and Martin was that one. Everyone else was just an entertaining flock of colorful birds.
They found a table for two. Jack twined his fingers with Martin’s across the table. “Are you going to make it?”
Martin nodded. “It’s not so bad.”
“I’m going to get us drinks,” said Jack, rising. “Don’t dance with anyone else while I’m gone.”
As Jack waited for their drinks at the bar, a young man slithered up against his side. The stranger caressed him with his body like a cat.
“Hey, tall, hot and hard. What’s that bitch have that I don’t have?” The stranger jerked his head back toward the table where the most beautiful creature on the planet waited for Jack.
“All of my attention,” said Jack. He put a tip in the jar, collected drinks for two and returned to Martin.
Martin was a sexual drunk. A few drinks and his eyelids became heavy and sleepily seductive. His eyes peered at Jack from under a fringe of lowered lashes. A beckoning almost-smile evanesced on his swollen, pouting lips.
“Dance with me,” said Jack.
Martin slowly blinked an okay.
Jack led him out to the dance floor.
The dance was a grind, like getting a lap dance standing up. Martin, so taut, so contained, so disciplined was a surprising natural at this. His dance was feral and sultry, his body elegant, sensual, hot. Martin’s ass moved against Jack’s groin to the primal rhythm of the music, Martin’s palms sliding along the sides of his hips. Martin’s back swayed with animal grace.
On fire, Jack had to back away. He took Martin’s hand and led him off the dance floor, back to their table.
“Did I do something you didn’t like?” Martin asked.
Jack had trouble even talking. “Oh no. Opposite problem.”
The room was getting hot and crowded.
“I need something to cool off,” said Jack getting up again. “Get you anything?”
Martin signaled no with a languid motion of his hand. “I’m pretty well marinated here. Just come back to me.”
Martin waited, pleasantly buzzed, toying with his glass of melting ice cubes.
A tall smoky man strolled to Martin’s table, stopped there, his thigh pressed against the table’s edge. The man pointed a long manicured finger to Martin. Something in the man’s crotch was pointing as well. “You. You are the hottest thing in the room. What you doin’ with that white man?”
Martin considered this, carefully studying his cocktail glass, his eyes on the ice cubes, a little confused.
He checked the color of his hands just to make sure. Because he could transform into a wolf, he took nothing for granted.
Still white.
He asked the man, “What’s wrong with white?”
“You move that body with color. I got what you need.” What the man thought Martin needed presented right there at eye level, bulging at the man’s fly. Martin wasn’t looking there. He looked up, meeting the man’s eyes.
“I love him,” he said.
“Oh. Well. Damn. I got nothin’ to answer that,” the man conceded and surrendered the ground to Jack.
* * * * *
Jack took Martin back to his townhouse.
Martin’s walk up the two flights of stairs was straight as a sober man’s but loose, raw and seductive. When he had climbed to the bedroom and turned around to face Jack, his eyes were bright, his lips licentious.
Jack flipped the loose end of a tie around one bedpost. “Do you need these?”
Martin shook his head, not so terrified now. He was tipsy, relaxed and pliant.
Jack let the tie drop. He threw Martin onto the bed in joyous abandon.
Martin showed no fear. Jack wished he didn’t need liquor but hell it was working. Alcohol made Martin a seething-hot lover. Martin writhed dreamily as he was being stripped.
Martin slowly unfastened a button of Jack’s shirt. The artistic motion of his long fingers was sweetly seductive. Jack was mesmerized watching Martin undress him. Then those long-fingered hands slid inside his shirt and laced through his coarse chest hair. His heart thundered under Martin’s hands.
Jack took him in his arms and rolled back, wrapping his legs around this naked magical creature. Martin dragged Jack’s shirt off his shoulders. Jack felt Martin’s lips, tongue and teeth draw wet heat across his shoulders and up his neck.
He captured Martin’s head, covered his mouth with his lips. He kissed him, stroked his tongue with his own, drinking in his heated breaths.
Jack had to let go. He rolled Martin off him, desperate to unzip and kick out of his trousers.
When Jack was naked, Martin prowled back in on all fours, more cat than wolf, head low, topaz eyes gleaming with an alcohol shine. And Jack felt Martin’s tongue slide up the inside of his thigh, a touch like an electric current. Jack became very still, shocked and astonished. He dare not move, struggled not to come.
Martin licked the inside of Jack’s thigh, tracing the intertwined muscles up to his groin. The slight golden roughness of Martin’s cheek, the tension between masculine and feminine was excruciatingly beautiful. Martin’s hair brushed against Jack’s balls in a silken moment and made Jack gasp. Martin’s kisses drew so close to his sex that the keen agony of anticipation was near to pain. Jack’s cock was wet and so ready.
Jack wanted to seize Martin’s head, make him take him inside his mouth. He though Martin just might let him.
Might.
But Martin was half in the bag and Jack could not take advantage of his sweet, drunken lover.
Jack could wait.
Maybe.
He was in flames.
He rolled up with a roaring groan, threw Martin onto his back. He reached down to Martin’s narrow hips, wondering absurdly, just where were love handles when you needed them? He lifted Martin’s tight little ass.
He met with no struggles. Limber and languid, Martin’s legs settled over Jack’s broad shoulders. Martin’s fingers toyed with Jack’s chest hair.
Jack pushed forward and felt Martin’s cock wet on his belly. Jack bent down to graze his tongue across Martin’s fluttering eyelids. “Martin, please say you’re ready.”
Martin murmured, “Where the hell have you been?”
Jack penetrated into purest splendor.
Martin’s hands glided along the muscles of Jack’s sides as he pushed and withdrew.
Jack rode him long and slow. Time suspended at the edge of heaven.
The delicious heat grew stronger, intensified to a piercing blaze. The need goaded, extreme, urgent. Jack’s hips thrust.
Wet heat splashed down his front with Martin’s cries.
Jack came hard, long, releasing his all into his beloved’s body.
Pulsating orgasms went on nearly forever.
At last, at long last, the quakes slowly subsided into a glittering bliss.
Jack with his lover floated on a sea of air and light.
Martin was only a little sad afterward, his head resting on Jack’s chest, nestled under his arm. “I don’t want to need to get wasted to make love. I want to love you freely.”
Jack snuggled him closer, damp skin clinging to damp skin. He planted a kiss on his head and laid his cheek on the kiss.
“We’ll get there,” Jack promised.
Chapter Nine
“Martin, have you seen my laptop?”
Martin made a slow, sultry
walk across the room to where Jack was sitting. He lifted one leg as if mounting a horse to sit straddling Jack’s lap.
Jack supposed he had that coming. He held Martin’s hips. “That’s a truly splendid answer—and a much better one than I was looking for—but I meant my computer.”
Apparently noticing Jack’s serious expression, Martin said, “Jack, don’t tell me you bring Department of Defense files home with you?”
“No. Not unless you count my tax records. My laptop has my e-mail addresses, my nieces’ birthdates, letters from friends. Did I leave it at the cabin?”
Martin looked alarmed. He got up, posed like a deer in the crosshairs. “Someone has been here.”
He abruptly transformed. Where Martin had stood, there was now a wolf shaking out of a man’s clothing. His silver hackles lifted. His nose was up, snuffling the air, then down to the hardwood floor, inhaling scents.
The wolf padded up the stairs to the bedroom.
The wolf came back down with a thudding of paws and kept going down to the foyer, where it waited at the door. The wolf did not scratch dog-style for Jack to open the door for him. Instead the wolf glared at Jack, who followed at a slower pace. The wolf jerked its head toward the door in the human gesture, Get the door, dumbass.
So as not to alarm anyone outside on the street, Jack grabbed Martin’s dog collar and leash before he opened the door.
Martin, the wolf, sat politely in the doorway as pedestrians passed on the sidewalk below. When they were clear, the wolf galloped down the stone steps to the street level. The wolf snuffled at the bushes, at the window ledges, ‘round the back and at the front curb.
Inspection done, the wolf bounded back up the front steps and into the small foyer of the townhouse. Jack shut the door behind him.
When Jack climbed the stairs to the main floor, Martin, naked young man, was pulling on his clothes. Martin spoke, his voice shaking with something like rage, “Ann Jefferson was inside. Larry Hunter was out front.”
Jack laid his hand behind Martin’s neck, felt Martin stiff as a statue and vibrating.
Martin met his eyes. “They were here. Jack, I led them to your home.”
“And they took my laptop,” said Jack, simply. “If they’re looking for a security leak, all they’ll find is that they don’t have a security leak.”
“What else did they find? Have we been bugged?”
Jack did not speak. He raised his eyebrows high. They may have.
Jack and Martin both worked for intelligence agencies, so they knew all the places to look for bugs.
Jack found one in his phone. He took it out and crushed it under his heel.
Martin uncovered nothing else, and Martin had been thorough.
“Other than finding out what I take on my pizza, I don’t think they got anything important,” said Jack.
* * * * *
Jack arrived at work the next morning to find his personal laptop on his desk in the Pentagon.
Jack’s office was far from the e-ring—those elite offices with the windows. Jack’s office was in the basement.
Jack stepped out of his office, laptop under his arm, and asked one of the admins, “Where’d this come from?”
“An agent from the FBI dropped it off,” said the admin.
Jack made a noncommittal hmm. “Gotta love Inter-agency cooperation.”
Jack’s boss, the admiral, summoned him into his office. He slammed the door once Jack was inside.
Too agitated to sit, the admiral announced that he was hugely disappointed in Jack.
“Sir?” Jack said, quizzical.
Jack, the admiral reported, had been seen engaging in flagrantly homosexual behavior last Friday night at a dance club.
“I was dancing. It was a nightclub, not on the street,” said Jack reasonably. “Not at work and not in uniform, so how do you know about it anyway, Sir?”
“Inter-agency cooperation,” said the admiral. “That is the kind of activity that makes you a target for blackmail.”
“I was dancing with a man in a crowded nightclub. Doesn’t blackmail require that I have a secret to keep?”
The admiral hemmed and hawed, stumbling around for an argument. He came out with, “What would Jason think?”
He had invoked the name of Jack’s father.
Jack was not going to answer that. He said, “That is beneath you, Sir.”
The admiral backed off, realizing that he had crossed a line. He appeared to reconsider, calming down in Jack’s steady presence.
Jack Reed was the same man he had known for two years now. Jack had not changed. The admiral simply knew something about him that he had not known before. Something he never wanted to know.
He admitted, “You’re a good man, Jack. You’ve always been straight up—so to say. You’re a fine intelligence officer and a lot of people would miss you around here.”
Jack’s head tilted. How could he be missed? “Where am I going, Sir?”
“For a blood test. If you test negative, then this conversation never happened.” Then the admiral’s finger poked at the air between them, perhaps afraid to land on Jack’s chest. “But if you test HIV-positive, Lieutenant Commander, then you are out of the Pentagon, out of Intelligence and out of the Navy!”
* * * * *
Jack had some misgivings about the test, only because he did not know what kind of torture Martin had endured and if it had involved dirty needles or rape.
But Jack tested clean.
The admiral was more than happy to put Jack’s personal life completely out of mind.
* * * * *
Martin discovered that his team was watching him even more closely than he’d thought.
Ann Jefferson had pictures. She presented them to Martin in the conference room with an attitude that said she had the goods on him now.
Martin felt his face go hot and cold. He was really out now.
He kept his expression slightly bored, mildly curious. The angle was through the window of the townhouse.
Martin tried to sound nonchalant. “Who you going to show these to, Annie? Dicks dot com?”
He forced himself to appear as calm as he possibly could upon seeing himself tied to the bed, with Jack unmistakably deep inside him. Part of him was utterly mortified and embarrassed to death. While another part marveled, That is a magnificent man. In one photo his own cock was right up there between them.
“This is what we call ‘private’.” Martin said.
“You have no private life,” said Special Agent Ann Jefferson.
“Well, not now.” The pictures revealed everything. “Here, give ‘em to Hunter, in case he gets cold and lonely.”
Martin tossed a couple pictures to Larry Hunter, who was just walking in. It was a brisk toss, so no one could see Martin’s hands shaking.
It took a moment for Hunter to focus on what he had. When he did, he dropped the pictures as if they were coated with anthrax. “Shit!” He couldn’t get away from them fast enough. As if something in them would come off on his hands.
Moo Park came in. His curious look turned to utter horror. “Oh my God, Martin, they tortured you!”
“That’s not torture, Moo. That’s what wild blindingly good sex looks like,” said Martin, wishing his face were not radiating like a furnace. The blazing red color he felt was ruining his I-don’t-give-a-shit act.
Ann Jefferson asked, “What if your friend asked you to do something against your country, Martin?”
“That’s one of the things I love about him. I know he would not do that. Annie, what are you going to do with these?”
She looked like she was not sure now. She had not expected Martin’s reaction. She answered brusquely, “Turn them over to Internal Affairs, of course.”
“I’m sure these aren’t the kind of affairs they’re looking for.”
Executive Assistant Director Cobb came into the room. He regarded his four agents as if they were a bunch of squabbling children. “What are you all at
now?”
He glanced at the photos spread on the table. He pulled back in disgust. “Get those out of here! I am running an intelligence department, not a smut tabloid! And I don’t want to see these in anyone’s file either!” He stormed out.
Indignant, Ann Jefferson gathered the photos up from the table. From a distance, Hunter turned his head sideways curiously for a last look.
Martin reached. “Wait, I want that one.”
The photo clearly showed Jack’s face caught in the moment of rapturous climax.
* * * * *
Martin rode the Metro home, his thoughts all circling around Jack.
Want him. Want him. Want him. Yet Martin could not help the irrational panic that welled up and took over every time he got too close, spurring him to run from everything he wanted.
He loved Jack. Loved everything about him. That smile. The proud and easy set of his shoulders. The sparkle in his eyes. His joy of being. His complete certainty in just being Jack. Martin ought to be able to go down on that man.
He loved feeling him inside. The man filled him with astonished wonder. Gave him those moments in which time stopped, ceased to exist, and his body became incandescent.
He relived Jack’s sliding into him with passion and need. Oh, my love!
And out. Oh, come back! Come back!
And in, with a long luxurious stroke. Come in, in!
And out. Please don’t go!
In, with a blossom of wet fire. Oh my God.
He relived the fire spreading through his body to the tips of his eyelashes, the tip of his cock, his whole body consumed in a divine lightning strike.
The hell of it was he had to get tied up or drunk to get there.
He could not so much as kiss the part of his lover’s body that gave such pleasure.
Jack’s cock was beautiful and daunting. Drawing near to it, Martin’s nostrils quivered at his intoxicating male smell—dark, musky, and dangerous. It was intensely exciting, erotic and forbidden.
But get too close to taking it inside his mouth and something reared up inside him.
Martin had thought he was handling it.
His mind was handling it. His body had other plans. His body was scared to death. Come too close and his heartbeat quickened, beating so hard he felt his pulse hammer in his fingertips. A weird vibration filled him like poison. His body mutinied. A wave of nausea swept over him. He would have been sick but Jack never pushed a heartbeat beyond the word “Stop”.
