The Glamour Thieves

by Donald Allmmon

  And JT understood. Of course he understood. If someone had asked him to quit while he’d been on that high after that first job they’d all done together six years ago, JT would have said the same thing. And though he didn’t feel it now, he remembered that high, and he remembered he and Austin had gotten drunk and stoned and had fucked like animals all night. There wasn’t going to be any fucking this time, was there?

  JT said, “With everything that’s happened, I never got to say thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For Jason Taylor. For giving me the chance to be someone else.”

  Buzz leaned in and gave him a soft bittersweet kiss good-bye. “Same.”

  Austin watched JT watch the strange blue globe fly off north. JT looked melancholy, but then, JT always looked melancholy.

  “Were you actually in love with him?”

  “No. But I wanted to be.”

  The globe didn’t seem to move, not like a plane. It only shrank until it was gone.

  “It doesn’t matter,” JT said. “It’s hardly my first rodeo gone bad.”

  “Maybe it will be the last.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Austin slung his bags over his shoulder, and the two of them crossed the lot of JT’s compound toward the house.

  Dante burst out of the garage where she lived. She pointed at the sky and shouted and danced around like she was on fire. “What the fuck was that? Did you just come out of that? What was that? Was that aliens? I knew there was aliens, man! I knew it! Did you go to Mars? You went to fucking Mars, didn’t you? Or Europa or Io or some fucking place. Can I tell anyone? Is this like some secret that if I tell anyone they’ll wipe my memory or something? I won’t tell a soul, man, not a fucking soul, I swear. Except Duke, what do I tell Duke? Because he’s been wanting to know where the hell you been, and I told him I don’t know. Fucking don’t get wi-fi on Mars, do ya? Fuckin’ right ya don’t. Holy fuck, what was that? I want to go to Mars!”

  “Hi, Dante,” JT said.

  “We didn’t go to Mars,” Austin said.

  Dante went from pointing upward to pointing at Austin like she hadn’t even noticed Austin was there until he’d spoken. “What’s . . .” Dante stopped herself and finished her accusation with a pained look that evidently Austin wasn’t meant to understand.

  Austin understood just fine. Adoptive father and daughter were reuniting, and no place for Austin. “I’ll be inside.” He adjusted his bags and glared at Dante. As he brushed past the young orc, he snapped his arm like he was going to throw a punch.

  Dante jumped back. “You see that!”

  “He’s just messing with you. Don’t worry. He’s leaving.”

  Austin kept walking. “Yeah,” he muttered to himself, “Don’t worry. I’m leaving.”

  Suddenly he couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

  So why didn’t he leave, then? Just to draw out the pain, he supposed.

  Austin showered, repacked his things, and still JT hadn’t come in from talking with Dante, so he unpacked again and ran laundry. He poked around the house.

  Living room, dining room, and kitchen all one big room. The front of the house was photosensitive glass, curtainless and tinted amber by the afternoon sun. There was nothing in the house that said that once upon a time JT had been one of the most notorious data thieves in Pacifica. Nothing that hinted at Austin or Grayson or Roan or Bell Anderson. Nothing that said anything about JT except that he was a technophile with a taste for minimalist decor and exposed concrete.

  Austin sat on the couch and drifted off into a sleeping trance. Nebraska came and nudged at him, but then went away.

  Movement stirred him awake. JT had gone into the john and left the door open a crack, a bachelor’s habit. Austin heard the thunder of JT pissing. It gave Austin that vague butterfly feeling and stirred up an ache thinking of the dick that could make a stream that loud. Then he heard the hiss of the shower, and all Austin had to do was move two meters and he could have watched JT strip down through the crack in the door. He didn’t.

  He went to the fridge and rooted for food. Either Dante had eaten everything since they’d been gone, or there’d been nothing but condiments there in the first place. Probably everything would have had meat in it anyway. He threw his clothes in the dryer.

  An hour later, JT came out of the bathroom wearing a clean pair of jeans and pulling down a steam-dampened T-shirt that clung to him like paint. He wasn’t wearing underwear. Though his jeans weren’t tight, Austin knew what to look for: that thick fold of denim there along his thigh was the curve of his cock; that faint shadow was the ridge of its head. God, Austin needed to be out of here.

  JT sniffed himself. “Nearly boiled my skin off and I still smell like zombie.”

  “It’s in your head. You smell like Lave-Love Springtime scent. There are other soaps, you know. Some of them actually smell like springtime.”

  JT shook his head. “I smell zombie.” He went back into the bathroom, used a towel to pick up his fouled clothes, and dropped the whole mess into the kitchen incinerator. He opened the refrigerator, grunted, then squirted mustard on a heel of bread. He ate it at the front window.

  Anyone else would have thought he was watching the sun set. Austin knew JT was watching the change in light over the Corvette.

  Austin leaned against the dryer. It hummed against the small of his back. “The kid knows who I am, doesn’t she? She knows who you are. She know everything?”

  “Yeah. Not every last detail. Enough. She knows what we’ve done.”

  And JT didn’t say sex or thieving or killing, so Austin assumed he meant all of the above. “You trust her that much?”

  “Yeah. I do. But it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like I said, ‘Sit down, I got something to tell ya.’ We were drunk one night and talking and elves came up and so we started talking about elves ’cause she’d never met one growing up in Greentown, just seen them a couple of times, and I told her about you and how . . .”

  And that was more than just a trailing off. That was JT deciding he didn’t want to finish that thought.

  Austin was about to press him: How what, JT? but JT said, “And I told her about you and then everything else.”

  “You talked about elves, and then you talked about me because you don’t know any other elves, and then ‘everything else’? And that’s why you blew your cover to a seventeen-year-old car thief?”

  “Yeah.”

  You’re the worst fucking liar in the world. Austin didn’t know which words were the lie exactly, or maybe they were all lies, or maybe half-truths or whatever, but there was lying in there somewhere. And maybe it was a bit hypocritical, because Austin knew he wasn’t always so truthful either, but it stung that JT would lie to him. “She’s that special?”

  “This whole life is special.”

  JT didn’t look at him when he said that, and that’s how Austin knew it was true, and how Austin knew that he really had to go.

  JT took a tiny bite from his sad little sandwich and stared out at the blacker-than-black car. He changed the subject. Or maybe in his head it wasn’t a subject change at all. “Dante says everything’s ready for the big meeting tomorrow. This is it, ya know, our first big break. I mean, we haven’t done bad so far, but it’s all been small orders except for the rigs we’ve put together for Duke and his mercs, but he’s an investor, so that doesn’t count. But Suborbital . . . Our first big break.”

  Austin didn’t say anything. What could he say? He hoped the meeting would fail.

  JT took another bite of his sandwich, grimaced at it, and tossed what was left on the dining table.

  Austin knew JT wouldn’t fail. JT was a genius. JT and Dante would do their song and dance in front of the Suborbital execs, and they’d win themselves a contract worth hundreds of millions and that would be that.

  JT chose a plastic mesh ball cap from a rack of them and went outside. Austin watched JT walk to the car. JT opened the door with his mind a
nd climbed into the driver’s seat. Austin thought that JT would take the car for one last drive, but he didn’t. He just sat there.

  The timer on the clothes dryer buzzed.

  Austin went outside to tell JT good-bye.

  “Thinking?” The driver’s-side window was down. JT was sitting inside, eyes closed, looking like he was meditating.

  “No. Just enjoying the breeze.”

  “From inside the car?”

  “I am the car.”

  A long streamlined curve ran from front fender to rear. Austin brushed his fingers along the stretch of it beneath the window. The special paint of the car absorbed radiation, so the car was still warm from the daytime sun even though the air had started to cool. “You can feel that?”

  JT didn’t open his eyes or turn to look. He nodded. “The ridge under the window.”

  “What’s it feel like?” It was a question he always asked about the way JT experienced the world. Machine sensoria was something that many took for granted, but was something Austin would never know. JT always answered unhelpfully, It feels like feeling. Except this time he said, “It feels nice.”

  Austin swiped a hand lightly over the car top. “Does it all feel the same?”

  “No.”

  So Austin walked around the car, running his hand along the curves and angles and lines of the fender, the bumper, the spoiler. He kept going, and at the front of the car, he traced the chrome of the headlights with his thumb and rattled his fingers across the grille. Through the windshield’s tinting, he could make out the dark outline of JT’s jaw and the ball cap he was never without, and he could see the faint red glow of arousal in JT’s eyes. It didn’t all feel the same, did it? Some of it felt much, much better.

  Front and center of the car’s hood gleamed the Corvette emblem in chrome, red, and black: crossed racing flags stylized into a V. Austin knelt before it, eyes locked on the burning eyes inside. If this didn’t work, he would look like a complete fool. Well, some things were worth the risk, weren’t they?

  Austin ran his tongue slowly along one edge of the emblem. Chrome and lacquer tasted like nothing at all. He ran his tongue along the opposite edge.

  He glanced up. JT’s head was thrown back against the headrest. His eyes were closed, lips parted in a small O. Austin smiled. Sometimes it paid to look foolish.

  Austin made love to the emblem with his tongue. It was the most ridiculous thing he had ever done. He wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t known that JT didn’t find it ridiculous at all.

  Austin swept his tongue over the flags. He dabbed at them and traced around them. He stroked one side with his fingertips while he licked the other. He did whatever came to mind, having no idea what worked and what didn’t, all of it feeling equally silly. And what did it feel like to JT? A blowjob? A rimjob? To a guy with a car fetish, maybe it felt like something incomparable.

  “Austin?” JT growled softly. “Austin, come here.”

  Austin ignored him. It was always best to ignore JT. The orc never really knew what he wanted until Austin showed him.

  Enjoying the breeze, JT had said. The emblem was wet from Austin’s spit. He blew it dry. He licked and he blew.

  “Austin!”

  Austin went around to the driver’s side. He was going to say something smart-ass, but JT reached out the window and caught his belt and pulled him hard and tight against the car door with a thump. He held Austin there with one hand and undid Austin’s belt and khakis with the other. A thrill shot through Austin. A thrill even better than seeing Nebraska pluck that eye out of Victor’s head. This was what Austin had been missing the last two years. This was what he wanted.

  JT’s warm, soft mouth sucked him in. JT’s tongue stroked him and swirled. Austin knew the satisfaction of feeling a cock swell slowly in your mouth, and he wanted JT to feel that too. So he fought the shiver that ran through him and the blood that coursed down. He tried to slow his heart rate and his breath. He wanted everything slow.

  But he’d wanted this for too long, not just from the moment he’d driven into the compound and seen JT in his grease-covered overalls, but long before that. Forever before that. And Austin, who could run barefoot over a forest floor covered in knives of ice and ignore the pain, couldn’t ignore what JT was doing. He was rock-hard in moments.

  JT’s arm snaked around Austin’s waist and held him fast. Austin couldn’t move if he wanted to. He stretched his arms forward over the roof of the car and laid his cheek against the smooth warm plastic.

  It felt dirty and exciting, getting sucked off out in the open like this. Like he was one of the prostitutes down at Volunteer Park giving his dick to some john who didn’t want to leave his car. He glanced over to the big garage, half expecting Dante to be standing there watching. Dante wasn’t. Lights flickered inside through windows and doors open to the night.

  JT covered Austin’s nuts with warmth, then cooled them with a hiss of breath, the same as Austin had done to the crossed-flags emblem. Yeah, that had worked just as he’d thought. The warmth of the car, the cool breeze on the back of his neck, the rocklike heat of JT’s arm around him, the soft tongue prodding Austin’s balls, tugging, sucking, fangs and tusks catching and nipping, the contrast of all these sensations—warm and cool, soft and firm, dull and sharp—made Austin shiver. He whispered JT’s name as heat slowly blossomed through him: JT. JT.

  JT took him in again, and Austin felt the soft head of his cock press against the softness at the back of JT’s mouth and then slide on down, JT’s throat snug around him and so warm. All of him was in JT now.

  JT fucked his own throat with Austin’s cock, insistent, needing, as rough on himself as he was on Austin, like what he really wanted was to shove all of Austin inside him and eat him alive, cock and balls first.

  Like a dying star, the bloom of heat that wracked Austin hit critical mass. Austin Shea, greatest fuck on the western seaboard, wasn’t going to last even ten minutes with JT sucking him. It would have been shameful if it hadn’t been mind-erasing first. The bloom trembled. Austin tried to push away from the car. He wanted to watch. JT’s arm held him like a steel band. Austin fought him and JT let go, growling, unhappy.

  Austin came, one arm on the edge of the roof keeping his head from smacking down. His body contracted tight, contracted, and contracted like a black hole forming inside him. “JT,” Austin said as his spunk splashed on JT’s forehead and nose and cheek and the rack of it all drove through him. “JT.”

  A long time later he looked down. JT was resting his chin on his arm on the window’s edge, smiling faintly, all tusks and spunk, looking happier than Austin had seen him since forever.

  Austin swiped a finger through his seed as it started to slide into JT’s narrow trail of a beard. JT opened his mouth, and Austin let him suck his finger clean. JT’s tongue on Austin’s finger felt every bit as good as JT’s tongue on Austin’s cock. He pulled his finger out. Pop.

  “More,” JT said. So Austin kept feeding him.

  “More.”

  “Ain’t no more.”

  “So make more.” JT gave him a pissed-off look, like that should have been obvious.

  Austin ran his hand along his cock. JT’s eyes opened to slits, red as laser light, hungry, and watched Austin jack himself. People always thought an elf’s cock should be pretty, elegant somehow. Austin’s wasn’t. It was like the root of some old tree, ridged and gnarled and wrapped in veins. It was a great cock for sucking. Hell, it was a great cock for anything. He made sure JT got a good view of it as he stroked. And the look on JT’s face got hungrier and hungrier.

  JT glanced up at him. “You brought protection?”

  “Protection from what?” Austin smiled coyly. His hand made slick noises as he smeared JT’s spit over his cock.

  “I want you to fuck me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We don’t need protection.”

  “Yes, we do.” Wetness crackled as Austin stroked.
r />   “Glove compartment.”

  JT popped the dash and drew out a pair of oversized tungsten handcuffs. They couldn’t be bothered to make clothes or cars sized for orcs. But they sure could make handcuffs. “Good. Now get in the car.”

  Austin looked inside the car. JT barely fit in the driver’s seat as it was. Sex in that car wouldn’t be hot; it would be cramped and someone would get an elbow in the eye. “Get out.”

  JT glowered at him.

  “Come on.”

  The door swept up, and JT climbed out. He winced and tried to adjust himself, but there was no adjusting something like that. Austin was surprised that JT hadn’t already split the seams of his jeans apart. “Don’t bother,” Austin said as JT struggled to get everything unpinched. “Just strip.”

  JT plucked at the hem of his shirt, hesitant. Austin didn’t know whether he was being coy or bashful.

  “I said strip.”

  JT slowly peeled the tight shirt up over his head.

  Too much pizza and beer and not enough action had put a few pounds on JT. The four-pack abs he’d had two years ago had lost all their definition, and JT was obviously embarrassed. JT had always been so damn touchy about his body, as if most people wouldn’t kill for a body like that, green or not. Austin could never say anything, not one compliment, not even that he liked the extra weight.

  And he did like it. He liked it a lot. And he liked the trail of black hair down the stomach. And he liked JT’s absurdly broad chest, a little less ripped now than it had been, but still fanned with black hair. And he liked his tiny nipples, hard and black as obsidian. And the branching thick veins on JT’s shoulders and biceps, knotting on down to his oversized hands, Austin liked all that too. And he liked watching the cloth of the T-shirt stretch over all that muscle as if it would tear.

  Finally the T-shirt was off and fell to the pavement hopelessly stretched out of shape by the body it had hugged.

  “Jeans,” Austin prompted.

  JT worked his jeans off his hips and slid them down. He pushed the thick rod of his cock down with them. When it finally snapped free, it bobbed heavily. JT let the jeans fall and stepped out of them. And there he was, buck naked, and all for Austin.