Red Fish, Dead Fish

by Amy Lane

  Tastes of Fish

  JACKSON ALMOST regretted eating that breakfast.

  He and Ellery went home with the plan of staying just long enough for the two of them to shower and change, Jackson in jeans and a T-shirt and hoodie, Ellery in his habitual suit. Jackson spent a brief moment while Ellery was getting dressed petting his cat, accepting Billy Bob’s affection without strings and qualms—and wishing like hell he could do that with Ellery Cramer.

  It seemed so cush, right? Nice digs, nice—well, good—guy. Ellery was still a stubborn asshole who couldn’t take no for an answer, but Jackson was starting to lo—like that about the guy.

  But it made him uneasy to get so comfortable. Nearly ten years of his life had passed without a long-term relationship of any kind, besides his family, of course. Jade, and he’d loved Jade, but even being lovers since they were in high school hadn’t made him feel about Jade the way he felt about….

  Oh God.

  How could he drag Ellery into this?

  “You ready?”

  Jackson looked up from Billy Bob. “Okay, but first—your tie.”

  Ellery made a face and turned to look in the mirror. “What about it?”

  Jackson stood and stroked a finger down the fine silk. “Are you really going to wear this in to work?”

  Ellery grinned, obviously pleased. The tie had a design of tiny Siamese cats lined up in little rows. From a distance, they looked like cream-colored diamonds against a dark blue background. “You complained about the picture ones,” he said, obviously pleased.

  Jackson bit his lip, that strange shyness that accosted him sometimes in Ellery’s presence returning. “They were nice, but this is more your style.”

  Ellery shrugged, and they were both suddenly in a layer of time between. On the bottom was Jackson in his ruined home, kicking the shit out of the two drug dealers. On the top, waiting for them, was the shitshow at the morgue.

  In between was this strange feeling of safety, of intimacy, and Jackson wanted to curl up and nap in this sunshine moment, secure that this, at least, wouldn’t leap out and eat him.

  Carefully, using his good hand, he cupped Ellery’s long jaw, leaned in, and tasted him.

  Ellery opened for him, sensual, happy, and Jackson made the kiss deep and strong—but not urgent. They had no time for what Jackson really wanted to do, and he needed his blood panel to come back, and any analysis of the substance on the blade.

  He was already enough of a liability to Ellery as it was.

  On that note he pulled back, taking a step away, only to be pulled back into the kiss, but this time Ellery led.

  Aggressively.

  Jackson backed up, surprised, as Ellery crowded him against the bed, helping him lie down just carefully enough to not jounce his sore and swollen shoulder.

  And proceeded to kiss Jackson senseless.

  “Counselor—” Jackson tried when Ellery came up for air, but Ellery wasn’t listening. He was pulling off his tie and unbuttoning his slacks.

  “Shut up,” Ellery muttered gruffly. “And take off your jeans.”

  Jackson gasped, hard to the point of pain at the one command as he didn’t think he could be. He gaped for a moment, and that’s all it took for the slacks and shirt to be draped over the end table and for Ellery to be on him, ripping at the fly of his jeans and shoving them down with his briefs.

  “Ellery—augh!” Ellery’s mouth, hard and merciless on Jackson’s cock, ramped him up another 120 mph. Jackson knotted his fingers in Ellery’s slicked-back hair and tugged, trying to back him off, trying to pull his world back into safe, back into— “Nungh….”

  Ellery’s spit-slickened finger, manicured smooth, made a quick foray into Jackson’s asshole, and Jackson shook with need. Another one, stretching, scissoring, and that thing Jackson hadn’t known he craved hit his gut like a cannonball, leaving an endless, needing void behind.

  “Why?” he managed, even as he hauled at one of his thighs to spread himself wider, welcoming.

  Begging.

  Ellery let go of him, moving his warmth to scramble for the end table and the bottle of dwindling lubricant inside. Their third bottle, because as soon as Jackson had recovered enough to run, sex had been on.

  The cool of the slick against his sphincter made him hiss in pleasure, and before he’d drawn his next breath, Ellery’s cock battered at his peace.

  “Why?” he panted as Ellery filled him, stretched him, made him terrifyingly whole.

  Ellery closed his eyes and shook his head, the lawyer for once out of words. He finished his thrust, bit his lip, and opened his eyes again, locking Jackson in place with his murderous intensity.

  “Just stay there,” he grated. “Don’t fucking move.”

  Jackson sucked at following orders. He let go of his leg and grabbed his own cock, squeezing hard, running a firm stroke from balls to head. His focus turned inward as he lost himself in the invasive joy of being mastered, taken, forced to open and enjoy someone else’s attention.

  So many lovers—and only Ellery took him this way. Dorky, prissy, uptight Ellery, who could make Jackson lose his inhibitions.

  His mind.

  His heart.

  That last thought hurt—and Jackson never minded a bite of pain when he was coming.

  He cried out, spurting hot and dirty on his hand, and Ellery’s angry “I’m coming!” wasn’t far behind. Ellery’s hips stuttered, and what had been a hard and fast fuck turned into mindless rutting. He froze, whole body caught in that indignant time warp of orgasm, and the heat of Ellery’s seed inside Jackson’s body warmed him, filled that void again.

  Jackson gave a soft cry and spurted one final time just as Ellery collapsed, mindful of the bandage on his shoulder.

  When Jackson could hear over his own heartbeat, he asked it again. “Why?”

  Ellery took a couple of deep breaths before falling to the side, resting his head—almost by habit—on the uninjured part of Jackson’s chest. “I’m tired of you kissing me good-bye,” he said at last. He’d obviously not fucked the irritability out of his system.

  Jackson gave a half laugh and palmed the back of Ellery’s head possessively. “Just to check, is there a secret password I need to know so you’ll know I’m not going to take ‘You can’t break up with me’ for an answer?”

  Ellery scowled at him, and then a strange expression, one Jackson remembered seeing a lot when he’d been in the hospital, crossed his face. “If I come home and the cat’s gone,” he said softly. “Then I’ll know you mean it.”

  Jackson turned his head to the side and noticed that the cat—unimpressed by the shenanigans on other parts of the bed—had curled up on Jackson’s pillow and was licking where his balls used to be.

  “You two deserve each other,” he grunted, but he kept his hand fisted in Ellery’s hair and pulled his head back gently, but still with some control.

  Ellery raised his face—oh, sober and earnest with a knife-edged nose and velvet brown eyes—and Jackson took his mouth again, plundering and stealing, taking what Ellery had already taken, allowing himself to need.

  Ellery made a little hum in his throat, and Jackson released him. They both had things to do. It was time to start their day.

  But Ellery stopped and ran tender fingertips over Jackson’s cheekbones, his forehead, his eyelids. “I deserve you,” he whispered. “The good and the bad. Don’t take that away from me.”

  Jackson closed his eyes and felt. Felt the sweat cooling from his body, felt the spend dripping between his cheeks and down his thighs, drying on his stomach.

  Felt the fragile balance of how strong he wanted to be and how brittle his iron really was, crackling along his bones.

  “Please.”

  Augh. Ellery only begged when Jackson was taking him apart in bed.

  “Okay,” Jackson said gruffly. “I’ll stay—at least until my place is clean again and we’ve got those guys wrapped up. And….” Oh, this sounded corny. “Even if I move ba
ck into my place, uh… you and me, Chinese Food Fridays, Mac and Cheese Mondays, these things can still happen. You know that, right?”

  Ellery just looked at him for a moment, like he was figuring something out in his head. Finally he nodded. “Yeah, Jackson—they can still happen. You and me can still happen. But it’s a lot easier for them to happen if you’re living here.”

  Jackson opened his mouth to argue and then shut it. There was nothing he could say—no amount of “Your place is too nice for me,” or “My cat would wreck your carpet,” or even “I need room to stretch” that wouldn’t be a lie.

  Yeah, he’d been forced here because he’d been recovering from surgery and his own place had gotten shot up, but he liked it here. He genuinely enjoyed Ellery’s company, even when they weren’t fighting or fucking or running together in the morning or working a case together.

  He was having enough trouble maintaining the pretense of being okay today. He couldn’t compound it by lying about not liking it there.

  “I’m selfish,” he said after a moment. Ellery just looked at him, brown-eyed gaze unwavering. “It’s just so… so easy-good to stay.”

  “Sometimes stuff is easy to do because it’s right, Jackson. You ever think of that?”

  Jackson wrinkled his nose. “You’ve met me, right?”

  Every decision in his life to do the right thing had been the hard decision. Ellery knew that. He rolled off the bed and started pulling on his boxers and his suit, not even bothering to clean up.

  Jackson would have to live with the knowledge of their sex on Ellery’s skin for the rest of the day.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ve met you.” Ellery yanked his boxers up savagely. “I’ve fucked you.” And there went his slacks. “I’ve lived with you.” His dress shirt—it took a while to do the buttons. “I should have known better. By all means, let’s make this relationship as challenging as possible. Let the games begin.” He finished the buttons, grabbed his tie, and stomped off to the bathroom, presumably to fix his hair.

  Jackson pushed himself up off the bed painfully and started to pull on his own clothes.

  Well, the cat was still here and so was Jackson. Ellery should be happy for that win.

  AN HOUR later, Dr. Creedy—older, tiny, no-bullshit, with a tiny careworn face—stared at Jackson’s chart and poked at his shoulder wound with patent disapproval.

  “Your tox screen says there were no traces of heroin on the knife, Mr. Rivers. If there was any at all, it should probably be out of your system by this point, but you shouldn’t drive.” She frowned. “Did you drive here?”

  “No,” Jackson said briefly.

  “Good. You may want someone there when you sleep—in case your dreams are especially intense tonight.”

  “Got one of those,” Jackson said, thinking he should probably warn Ellery. It was only fair.

  “You’ve had a tetanus shot, and… and Jesus, son, do you think you can let yourself heal before you take another shot to that shoulder?” Surprised, she peered in horrified fascination at the network of scars and tender skin.

  “Well, I am working part-time,” Jackson told him, because she seemed like a nice lady and possibly needed a break today.

  “Did this happen on the job?”

  Jackson held out his good hand. “Yes, no… it’s a gray area. It happened on my property, but, well, about two hours after I leave your office, it’s going to become my job.”

  Dr. Creedy raised ginger eyebrows. “Sounds like a good way to visit your doctor. A lot.”

  “My last visit lasted a month,” Jackson told him, pained. The one before that had lasted a year.

  “You’re a young man,” Dr. Creedy said, eyebrows going up higher. “Don’t you have anything to live for?”

  Unbidden, Ellery’s face as he’d nailed Jackson to the bed popped behind Jackson’s eyes—and stayed there for a couple of moments, followed, finally, by Billy Bob licking his privates, which was followed very quickly by Kaden and Rhonda Cameron, their kids, and Jade and Mike.

  “Hunh.”

  Dr. Creedy probed at his shoulder with gentle fingers. “Is that a yes or a no?”

  “Ouch!” Because that spot right there was tender.

  “Okay—shoulder first. Your EMT did as good as he could with a butterfly bandage, but I’m going to shove a stint in there and irrigate the crap out of that, and then stitch it closed with a shunt to drain it.”

  Jackson wrinkled his nose. “That’s sexy.”

  Creedy scowled at him. “No, it’s not. In fact, it will send most women screaming from your bed for at least a week until the shunt comes out.”

  “What about men?”

  Those graceful ginger eyebrows really did look like flying birds. “Sometimes gross things impress men. It’s a crapshoot. My point is, if you would like people in your bed, maybe try not to have things sticking out of your body that don’t belong there.”

  Ellery would probably take it as a challenge.

  “Ten-four, ma’am. I’ll keep it in mind.”

  An extremely uncomfortable half an hour later, he was hurrying to the morgue, Ellery trying to keep up at his side. Ellery’s dress shoes rang sharply on the tile, and Jackson’s tennies just sort of squeaked pathetically. Aces.

  “What’d the doctor say?”

  “She said my shoulder is hella gross and you should probably not want to sleep with me.”

  Ellery stopped in the hallway, outraged. “The hell she did!”

  “Well, she should have, because it is,” Jackson grunted. He didn’t want to think about the little plastic tube draining crap into the gauze taped to his skin. Everybody had their phobias. Spending over a year in the hospital hadn’t changed the way Jackson saw needles and draining shunts, and the extra time he’d spent this year hadn’t either.

  “Wait—Jackson, what did she do?”

  Jackson shuddered. “Put a shunt in. I need to change the dressing periodically.” And then, because it was true, “She said it would have gotten really infected if you hadn’t made me come in, so, you know. Thanks for being a big nagging baby who didn’t want me to die.”

  “And some guys hold out for flowers,” Ellery muttered. “Jackson, slow down.”

  “I told Toe-Tag we’d be there—”

  “Fifteen minutes ago. I texted him while I was waiting for you. He gets it. Now slow—hell.” They came to the elevator and stopped to wait. Ellery was panting a little, and Jackson had a head rush. Yeah, he’d pretty much rocketed out of the room as soon as the doctor said he could go. “Jackson, do you really want to run into the morgue like this? Seriously, ten minutes of internal prep—”

  “It’s not as though I liked this person,” Jackson said through gritted teeth. “You said it yourself. If it wasn’t this, it would have been an OD or hit by a car ’cause she was high or fallen into the river or—”

  “You’ve thought about this a lot,” Ellery said quietly as the doors opened.

  “It’s like having this… this thing sticking out of my body.” Jackson stepped into the elevator with his hands clenched, angry at the cold sweat that stuck his T-shirt clammily to his skin. “It’s necessary, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

  “Your mother?”

  “She wasn’t my mother!”

  “Your… your personal Easy-Bake Oven, then. You just compared her to a drainage shunt.”

  “Skanky cunt, drainage shunt—”

  “Jackson!”

  “I can’t do this now,” Jackson snarled, meeting his eyes and begging him, begging him to see that Celia Rivers didn’t get a regular grieving process. “I can’t get all… all soft. All… introspective. I’m not going to see the meaning of life when I see her corpse, Ellery.”

  “Then why look? Most people do this with pictures. You know that, right?”

  Jackson took a deep breath, and the elevator doors opened to the basement. Like a switch, he could smell it—cold and rot and shit and meat.

  The morgue.

/>   “Murder, Ellery.” He blinked slowly and squared his shoulders. He had things to do today. He had to interview the little shits who’d broken into his house and cooked not-meth over a propane stove in his kitchen. He had to start an investigation for their boss, find the key players. Inform the police. Perhaps launch an investigation or tip-off for an arrest.

  And he had to find out how Celia Rivers had been killed and look into that death like he poked, prodded, and nosed his way into everything else.

  “You’re not here to grieve.” Ellery spoke through clenched teeth. “You’re here to kick some ass.”

  “It’s all I got,” Jackson told him.

  Ellery shook his head, muttering “No it’s not,” but at that moment they rounded the corner and took a right into the medical office that fronted the morgue.

  “Mr. Rivers?” The assistant forensic pathologist was a surprisingly young man, broad as a barn, with a sweet-cheeked face and aw-shucks-ma’am blue eyes and blond hair.

  “Josh? I mean, Dr. Black?” Jackson felt a massive twitch of twisted reality as he stepped forward to shake the hand of the young internist who had worked on him when he’d been in the hospital proper eight years earlier. “You’re working down here now?”

  Josh Black shrugged uncomfortably. “Well, I’ve always gotten along better with the dead than the living. You know that.”

  Jackson smiled nostalgically. “What on earth did you say?”

  “I have no idea.” He shook his head with emphasis. “There was an old lady in a coma, and I told a dead cat joke to a pretty nurse, and suddenly there was screaming and hysteria, and the next thing I know I’m being sued for threatening to kill this woman’s cat. I didn’t even know her cat! Anyway—the hospital sort of stashed me here.”

  In a day full of fraught emotions, Jackson felt an unlikely smile fighting to take over his face. “Well, you and Toby should get along great.”

  Josh nodded. “I love him. His wife cooks for me. I think she’s trying to set me up with their oldest son. I don’t have the heart to tell her I’m straight. She cooks really well.”

  Jackson laughed a little and was about to ask to be brought into the morgue proper when Josh drew nearer and spoke conspiratorially. “Look, there’s a homicide detective in there—just so you’re not blindsided. This body you’re looking at, Toby was just supposed to put it on the bus for the coroner’s office and the autopsy, but he sort of commandeered it, and the coroner bitched to the cops and the cops sent—”