This Sin Called Hope (New Reality Series, Book Seven) by Anna Mayle

by Anna Mayle

  Enoch had no idea what Jacobi was babbling about. But the beautiful man with pliant and nearly purring. “Why are you so focused on being good? Your life is short; most humans would just take what they wanted.” He reached around and cupped his hands over the tight ass of the hacker who had literally melted against him. With the new support, the white clad man wrapped his second leg as well and leaned close as he could get.

  “I guess…a kiss couldn’t hurt,” he decided, eyes locked on Enoch’s mouth.

  “This isn’t one of those books,” Enoch warned. “True love’s kiss isn’t going to turn me into a prince.”

  Jacobi giggled, the little bursts of breath teased Enoch’s mouth. “I was always under the impression that if it’s true love’s kiss, it shouldn’t need to make you anything but what you are. You’re already loved.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” Enoch accused, not harshly.

  Jacobi gave him a slight peck and nodded his agreement. “Out of my body too, but that doesn’t mean anything here.” He canted his hips forward and groaned at the rough contact. “I want you in my body. You should really just admit that you love me.”

  Enoch closed the minute distance between them and captured the hacker’s lips. Jacobi smiled even wider, forcing the kiss into a shallow peck instead of the deep delving Enoch had intended. He tried to coax those soft lips to close around his, but the hacker began to giggle in his delighted fashion and made it next to impossible.

  Left with silly and sweet instead of hot and heavy, Enoch was extremely frustrated. “Do you want me to beg?”

  A full body shiver ran through the man in his arms. Enoch closed his eyes and rode the delicious sensation for a moment. “Skies, that’s hot.” Jacobi breathed and leaned in closer, chest to chest, belly to belly, groin to thick and throbbing groin.

  Enoch smirked. The breathy little sounds Jacobi made as he rutted against him desperate for contact were musical. By running his hands just right over his exotic instrument, Enoch imagined he might well draw an aria from those moist, begging lips. He held Jacobi up with one hand while the other skimmed up his delicate spine to the soft and perfect skin at the nape of his neck.

  A jump and groan announced it as a sweet spot. Enoch’s lust flared. He tore Jacobi from him, spun the man around and bent him over the large wooden desk, scattering books everywhere. Pressed in above him, Enoch completely covered the little hacker. He ran his hands over the thin arms splayed in front of him, trailed it down the sculpted side, shifted even closer. Jacobi wriggled beneath him, leaned into each touch while trying not to move away from the press of groin to ass. Enoch took hold of the slighter man’s trim waist and gave a sharp tug, pulling him into solid contact with the evidence of Enoch’s interest in him. A mewl of frustration and that tight, round backside rolled up, offering, wanting. Enoch let his trousers fade away, nipped at that wonderful neck and laved the bite mark attentively. He worried it to a fine pink blush while the hacker danced beneath him hard and Insistent. Enoch purposely pulled him back far enough that he couldn’t rut against the desk to relieve any of the mounting tension. He could only buck and sob and beg Enoch for his touch.

  All that lay between them was the thin white material of Jacobi’s slacks, nearly made transparent by sweat. The darker skin of his hungry opening was visible through the gauzy cloth. Enoch slid to his knees behind the pleading man, held those quivering hips still, and gave one long lick, over the fabric, from just behind his tensing sac all the way up and over that welcoming entrance.

  Jacobi cried out, arched back and, at the same time, seemed to be trying to make himself pull away.

  “You need it,” he said in a soft rumble. “You need me.”

  “Yes,” the young man sobbed.

  Enoch rewarded him.

  Jacobi jumped at the intense contact. He was hot, too hot. The cool wood of the desk should have been burning under the touch of his skin. Enoch pressed his tongue firmly over the thin film of Jacobi’s trousers and it was only through a feat of epic willpower that Jacobi didn’t give into the urge to let them fade into nothing. They got thinner though. He swallowed down a yelp when the questing tongue pressed on, pushed itself and the gossamer fabric into that first ring of muscle. Enoch laved that intimate part of him, moistened it. Jacobi could feel his body opening itself up to exquisite intrusion. Then Enoch’s solid weight draped over him again.

  The object seeking entrance this time was definitely not a tongue. Moist through the thin barrier between them, it pressed close, almost there. It would only take the slightest…

  Jacobi angled his hips up and welcomed the hard, throbbing intruder. Open, full, whole, so many wonderful feelings flashed through him. It wasn’t enough. The fabric of his slacks cradled Enoch inside of him, kept him from entering fully, one last line of defense guarding his virtue.

  Willpower be damned. He could feel Enoch’s breath against him, smell his heavy musk permeating the room around them. He was drawn and drowning happily in all things Enoch.

  Jacobi let his clothing vanish and mewled in need and frustration when instead of seating himself fully, Enoch pulled completely away.

  “No,” he sobbed and pressed back, but his aching flesh only met air.

  “Yes,” Enoch panted harshly.

  Jacobi turned himself to face the other man. His legs wobbled and he lowed himself to the floor, back to the desk. He tried to clothe himself again but the result could only loosely have been called clothing, so he sat there with knees bent and splayed open to frame the very obvious need tenting material that protected not a hint of his modesty. He was coated in sweat, his cock wept against its confinement. Jacobi fought to control his breathing; he should have had perfect authority over reality. This was the Network after all. He couldn’t help it though. Skies, he hadn’t known! He couldn’t have imagined…

  Enoch was staring at him, a sharp and needful fire burned in eyes so dark they were nearly red. His fists clenched and released at his sides. Shining wet muscles stood tense and beautiful, glistening in the light.

  His cock pulsed between his legs, jumped in its clear prison. “You stopped,” he rasped and wiggled his hips, trying to alleviate even a bit of the tension. The drag of moist fabric over his weeping crown only made things worse.

  Enoch squared his jaw and stared, it felt like he stared clear through to Jacobi’s soul. “Do you love me, hacker?”

  Jacobi closed his eyes, a full body shudder wracked his slender frame. “Oh, that is not fair, so very not fair.”

  Enoch licked his lips and Jacobi longed to chase that tongue back into its mouth, to languish there a while just lapping and suckling and joining even in that one small way.

  “I didn’t make the rule.” Enoch’s voice broke his fantasy and they watched each other with equal amounts of want and need.

  “I might have been a little hasty,” Jacobi tried.

  The Angel shook his head.

  “Please? Do you want me to beg?” Jacobi sobbed, “I’ll beg.”

  “I don’t know what I want from you,” Enoch admitted ruefully. “That is the problem.”

  “Just a touch,” Jacobi begged with tears streaming down his face. He was so swollen, heavy and he didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t focus enough to pull up a query screen. Everything he was had become centered in his hot and aching groin. “Anything, please.”

  Enoch shook his head, but his eyes never left Jacobi.

  Jacobi fell forward onto hands and knees. He had to pause as his thick cock and tight balls swayed beneath him freely. He lay his head and chest on the floor, ass in the air and face hidden until he could even remotely control himself again. Finally able to raise up, he crawled across the floor to Enoch’s legs. Raised up to run trembling hands over the plains of that perfect chest and begged again. “Please.”

  Enoch’s eyes were wide. Jacobi flattened himself against the still man and thrilled when hard need met hard leg. He rutted mindlessly against the Angel, until Enoch grabbed him by
the arms and lifted him up, holding him away.

  “I need! Please, Enoch, please. I’ve never felt…it’s too much! Please!”

  “I don’t love you.” Enoch warned.

  Jacobi didn’t care. He was so far beyond caring. “I don’t care, please! Enter me, own me, fuck me, please I can’t stand this. I’m on fire, Enoch.”

  The large man sat him down, pulled up a query screen and called up the information Jacobi needed. “You’ll thank me for this, once you’ve come to your senses.” Then he left Jacobi to take care of himself.

  “Enoch!” he cried after the Angel.

  * * * *

  Enoch floated in the lake, the Network plug bobbed near his head, a thin tendril around his neck was all that kept it from floating away. He couldn’t bring himself to care. Network or not, his body had responded to Jacobi’s untrained sexuality.

  Hard and uncomfortable, Enoch recalled the sound of that usually light voice made deep and husky with want. He could almost still see the man crawling toward him, ass swaying with the motion, round and tempting. The image of the young hacker lying against the desk, his clothing nearly cellophane-thin between them. It had been a long time since Enoch had needed to take care of such a need, but he found that no matter how he tried to meditate, shift his focus, or simply turn off his mind…it kept finding its way back to Jacobi. The porcelain skin, long limbs, boyish charm and enthusiasm, Oh that enthusiasm.

  Enoch had little doubt that beside his…rescue…that had been Jacobi’s sexual awakening. And he offered it to me, he thought. And I turned it down. Why did I turn it down? He unfastened the clasps on his coveralls. The cool water hit his need directly. After the show Jacobi had put on, just that small shift was almost enough to finish him.

  Taking himself in hand, his mind supplied images of a nearly cupid bow mouth, blond curls, lust shuttered blue eyes framed in thick dark lashes that trembled like butterfly wings against his cheek. The tension that had leveled within him rose higher and higher, coiled into a knot of pressure in the core of his being, have you realized you love me yet? His climax swelled, his body bucked and thrashed in its restraints and his seed burst free to disperse into nothingness in the fluid around him. His choked cry of, “Jacobi!” was captured by the breathing mask, buffered by the water, and would remain his secret.

  He idled there, alone with his thoughts until finally a small light flashed on his mask, warning him to surface. A few quick buttons and his clothing was hastened back into place. Enoch slid the cuffs from his ankles and gave a few powerful kicks, propelling himself to the surface.

  The pain was still manageable. Foregoing the usual injection, he made his way to the Network monitor glowing at him from the hub. On it, Jacobi waited, cheeks a charming pink and eyes downcast.

  “This wasn’t…” Enoch looked back at the pod hammock where Cora slept.

  “I only just turned it on,” the reassurance was spoken in nearly a whisper.

  Enoch nodded and watched Jacobi’s soft tongue dart out to moisten his mouth. “Do you love me?” Enoch had no idea what brought those words to his lips.

  “Yes.”

  Taken aback by the solemn answer from the face on the screen, Enoch didn’t even notice his arm moving until his palm lay against the glass. Jacobi matched the movement in the Network, and they stood staring at each other.

  “Palm to palm,” the avatar smiled at him, almost shyly. “I read somewhere that it’s a holy palmer’s kiss.”

  Enoch looked long at their hands. “Do you understand what was meant by that?”

  Jacobi shook his head, “Best guess, since holy is something Once Worlders worshiped, so it’s a divine kiss exchanged through intent and not contact.”

  Enoch had never been one for fiction and fantasy, those books he did have in that genre had been his mother’s, lovingly scanned into the maiden systems of the original Network. She’d safe guarded them, for Enoch, for humanity. Jacobi may have been the first person to open their virtual pages since her passing. He’d read Romeo and Juliet, but hadn’t been able to make sense of its meaning or purpose. “You’re a romantic.”

  The smile that received was warm, “Good. You deserve romance.”

  “This is not a book, Jacobi.” Enoch chastised, “This is life; harsh, deadly and real. You might not be out in it, but for the sake of the child sleeping behind me, do remember that we are.” He wrapped the words around him like a sutra, a mantel…a finger stuck in a breaking dam. “There’s no place in this world for sweet sentimentality.”

  “You don’t believe that.” Jacobi insisted, too observant for his own good. “You might wish you did, but somewhere inside the misgivings and doubts you keep looking for something that will make it all worth it. Why else would you still be keeping the Network and rescuing orphans. You have an anticipation of more, optimism—”

  “You’re saying I have hope,” Enoch surmised.

  Jacobi nodded joyfully, eyes bright and happy. He flexed his fingers on the other side of the screen as if to bring attention to the fact that Enoch, annoyed as he sounded, had not moved his own hand away.

  Feeling much like a child proving a point of pride, Enoch pulled back and stared at the lonely fingers he’d abandoned there. “Hope is an irrelevant response to the harshness of reality. It isn’t based on anything tangible. It’s the fall back of those weak in mind and helpless to change their lot in life.”

  “Or maybe it’s what motivates people to make changes they would otherwise see as impossible.”

  “You are impossible,” Enoch barked.

  Jacobi nodded, proud of it. “I’m cute, too.” He pretended to preen as if the screen were a mirror and blew a kiss.

  Enoch scowled at his antics, partially because in a tiny corner of his mind hidden in cobwebs and covered in dust, there was a part of him who wanted to agree with the hacker. “You’re a dreamer.”

  “There are lots of dreamers out there. Look at all of the stories with noble heroes and happy endings.”

  “The people who wrote those stories are all long dead. Maybe in the past things were different. Here and now, our lives don’t turn out the way your faerie tales do,” Enoch pointed out.

  Jacobi shrugged. “Nothing wrong with dreaming. Besides, maybe there’s a happy ending waiting for you. You’re a hero.” He motioned to Cora’s hammock.

  Enoch ignored that. It would just lead into another argument about the value of human life and he was tired of it. Instead he kept his focus on the topic at hand. “Happy endings require something I will never have.”

  “Long flowing locks?”

  He found himself staring, nonplussed, at the screen, “An ending, Jacobi. An ending.”

  Jacobi shook his head, eyes still bright with surety. “You need a beginning before you worry about an end. Don’t worry, I’ll help.”

  “I’m not looking for hope or other fictions,” Enoch admonished him.

  The hacker nodded, “But that’s usually when you find something, once you’ve given up on it.”

  Enoch turned off the screen and stretched out in his hammock, tired of beating his head against the wall of Jacobi’s optimism…

  …and a bit worried that it might be contagious.

  Chapter Eight

  The window before him closed and Jacobi watched the place it had been for a few moments longer. The fact that Enoch had felt the need to run meant that Jacobi was getting to him. It was a start.

  He opened a new window and linked in to the security feed. Enoch’s gaze flickered up to the camera when it moved to focus on him. There was something unsettled in the pale man’s face, something…hyperaware, but that focus was only vaguely directed outward.

  He watched the camera idly a moment then sighed. “Good night, Jacobi.” And pulled the hammock closed around him.

  Jacobi ran his fingers over the curve of Enoch’s covered form. “Good night, Enoch,” he whispered longingly. He wished Enoch had left himself uncovered, wished that he could spend the evening w
atching the large man sleep. What must it look like, all of that strength and concentration at willing rest, still and calm except for that one soft and rhythmic sigh of precious life. Jacobi had seen Enoch unconscious, but that and sleep were very different things. He pressed his lips to the image. “Sleep well.”

  * * * *

  “And the beast strode through the great double doors of the dining hall, his claws clicked on the marble as he approached the table where she sat to dine. He lowered himself into a delicate chair, stared in contempt at the fine china and crystal. Beauty tried as ever to make small conversation, but his responses were clipped and his gruff voice ever held a growl behind his words. He sat and she ate, both in stilted silence. When the meal was over, the beast rose to his full height proudly and asked as he had each night before and as he would each night to come, ‘Do you love me, Beauty. Will you marry me?’ Her quiet and sad reply was simply ‘No, Beast’.”

  Enoch looked up from his soldering. He knew those words, not quite those words, but… “What story is that?” he asked suspiciously.

  Jacobi smiled through the monitor and Cora spun on her stool to face him and answer, “Beauty and the Beast. It’s my favorite.”

  “Beauty?” Enoch shook his head.

  “You are quite stunning,” Jacobi agreed.

  Cora nodded her approval, “Jacobi is the beast since he might be, in this world, because an avatar is what you make it.”

  The recitation was smooth, not a pause for thought. The girl was parroting. “How many times has she asked for this story?”

  “Every day since the first time I read it to her.” Jacobi smiled. “I like it too. It’s full of redemption and hope for change. It teaches us not to give up, that no matter what life may bring, you can’t allow yourself to give up on it, or grow bitter toward it. If you do, you might not notice your chance to change things.”

  Cora nodded sagely, “and you can’t give up on love.”

  Enoch donned the goggles he’d been working on and snarled. “Now you’re recruiting the child to aid in your agenda?”