by Aiden Bates
Pat grinned down at him, and then sank to his knees. He met Elias' eyes and kissed his knee. Then he slowly mouthed up the inside of Elias' thigh, maintaining eye contact the entire time. He hadn't shaved. The different sensations, soft lips and rough stubble, made Elias cry out even before those soft lips closed around his rapidly-stiffening cock.
Pat had always given good head. Ten years, and apparently a lot of practice, had turned him into a master. The wet heat of his mouth was like paradise, and he'd learned to deep throat somewhere along the way because that had never been part of his skill set when they'd been together in college. All that Elias could do was to lean back, grab onto that long, dark hair, and hold on.
When Pat reached out for the lube and slid a cool, slick finger into him, Elias couldn't help but buck his hips. That couldn't be fun for Pat, but all that Elias saw in his Pat's gray eyes was pleasure. Pat genuinely seemed to enjoy this, stretching him out and bringing Elias pleasure. "Oh, God." He clenched his teeth and tried to control himself as Pat slipped another finger in beside the first.
Elias thought he might actually lose his mind by the time that Pat got a third finger into him. He put his hands onto Pat's shoulders and gently pushed.
Pat pulled off of him with a pop, eyebrows drawn together. "Is something wrong?" he asked.
"No. Not at all. But I want to come with you inside me." Elias took a deep breath and tried to focus.
Pat grinned. "Yeah. Okay. I can do that." He grabbed a condom and rolled it onto himself. After he slicked himself up, he lined himself up and entered Elias with short, shallow thrusts.
Elias hadn't realized just how homesick he'd been for the past ten years until Pat was fully sheathed inside of him. He'd missed Pat, and he'd mourned what he'd lost, but he hadn't realized just how deeply they'd been connected until the moment when their bodies were as joined as they could be.
"Move," he murmured.
Pat's eyes shone as he looked into Elias' eyes, and he moved.
He pulled back and snapped his hips, pushing deep into a place that no one had touched since the last time they'd done this. Elias cried out, only to have Pat drive into him again. Pat didn't set a brutal pace; he seemed to want to express an emotion that he couldn't give voice to in any other way. His face hardened in concentration, and his body glistened with sweat. His thrusts were timed and aimed to deliver the most feeling and pleasure to Elias, and it worked.
Elias bucked his hips to meet Pat's thrusts. He would take everything that Pat wanted to give him right now. He hadn't felt this good in a decade. Pleasure heated his body until he wondered if he would spontaneously combust. He wanted to ask, to beg, Pat to touch him and help him get his release, but he didn't have to. Pat wrapped a strong, callused hand around his cock and tugged once, twice, three times.
Elias' release came in a hot explosion, all over his stomach and Pat's hand. Only then did Pat truly smile, the satisfied smile of a man who was proud of the job he'd done. Pat lost the rhythm then, and Elias could feel his release deep inside of him even through the condom.
They lay together for a little while, still joined, before Pat pulled gently out. He shuffled out to the bathroom and returned, without the condom and with a warm, wet washcloth. He kissed Elias forehead and gently cleaned him up, just as he had a thousand times when they'd been younger.
Then he moved Elias over and climbed into the bed. "Thank you for that," he said, in a small and quiet voice. "I've missed you. Is it okay if I stay here for a little while?"
Elias rolled over and draped his arm over Pat. It was Pat's bed, for crying out loud. Pat didn't need to ask for permission to sleep in his own bed. He didn't feel like debating that right now. Post-coital lassitude had sapped his energy, and he didn't think that would have been the right tactic anyway. "Of course." He rested his head on Pat's chest instead of the pillow. "It's like coming home."
Pat's arms encircled him, and he smiled.
***
Pat and Elias hung out at Pat's house for the rest of the day. They screwed around a few more times and went out for dinner before Elias had to go home. Pat wanted to ask Elias to stay. It was on the tip of his tongue. Instead, he said, "It's been great having you here, but I know you probably want your own clothes and stuff."
Elias blushed at that, because he hadn't worn a stitch of clothing since he'd gotten naked for Pat that morning, and then he nodded. "Not a bad idea. Maybe sometime soon you can come and stay with me in Providence for a night. Maybe over the weekend."
Pat almost choked. "You'd want that?"
Elias laughed at him. "Yes. I'd want that, Pat." He dropped a quick, chaste kiss onto Pat's lips. "Even if the news wasn't great, I'm glad we did this. I'd like to do it again."
Pat certainly hadn't spent the past ten years wallowing in misery. He'd had some very good moments along the way. But he still couldn't remember the last time he'd felt this overjoyed, or this complete.
It was dangerous to feel like this. Pretty soon, someone was going to come along and pull the rug right out from under him. He didn't know if it would be possible to stop himself at this point, though. He could remind himself that it was all temporary, that Elias was going to go back to Rhode Island and get back out on the road soon enough, but that didn't change the fact that his bed smelled like lilacs even after he changed the sheets.
Would it really be the end of the world if he let the fantasy stand, just for a few days?
The next day he headed into work. Elias beat him there, as usual, not that Pat blamed him. He probably left super early to beat the traffic. Ryan was there already too, and he just smirked at Pat. "Feeling better?"
"As a matter of fact, yeah. Apparently, I passed out at dinner. The waiter wanted to call an ambulance, but fortunately Elias was able to talk him into letting me go home with supervision." Pat squared his shoulders. He didn't report to Ryan, and he wasn't about to be treated like he'd been skipping school. "Go ahead and call Doyle's once they open. Ask for Matt. He'll be happy to back me up on that."
Ryan rolled his eyes. "I'm not going to check with the waiter, dude. Settle, buddy. Can we get back to work now?" He gestured to the conference table. "Dead kids ring a bell?"
Elias snorted and pressed a few keys on his laptop. "What do you think about getting the parents together?"
Pat scratched his head. Maybe he shouldn't have jumped down Ryan's throat like that. "Do you think that's necessary at this stage?" He sat down next to Elias without thinking about it, but Elias didn't object. On the contrary, Elias laced their fingers together under the cover of the table. "I mean these people are scattered all over the state, and in some cases beyond. It would be kind of disruptive to them to drag them here without being close to a breakthrough."
"Maybe." Elias wrinkled his nose. "If we get them together, though, they might be able to bounce descriptions against one another."
Ryan hummed and leaned his chair back. "I'm switching this chair out for the one at my desk. It's so much more comfortable. Yeah, you've both got good points. And who knows how long it's going to take us to figure out where the kids are being held. Or growing up," he amended, with a nod to Pat. "We sent troopers from Troop B out to explore the areas we identified from the helicopter ride. So far, they've made two pot farm busts and taken out one meth lab."
Pat raised an eyebrow. "I don't suppose we get some credit for that."
"Um, sure. Well, you did. I quote, 'Goddamn Tessaro can't stop showing me up even when he's been out of Vice for three years!' So, there's that."
Pat smirked. "Meyer was always a jealous bastard."
"Well, he's still a jealous bastard, so congratulations I guess." Ryan's lips twitched, like he was trying to fight off a grin. "I also heard from the local police in Colrain, on the northern edge of Franklin County. At about six thirty this morning, a woman reported that a strange woman attempted to snatch her baby out of her car while she was paying for gas at a local gas station."
Pat's stomach turned, and Elias d
ropped his hand to clutch at his middle. "Jesus," Elias said. "What happened?"
"The mother thought fast. She hit the panic button on her key ring, which brought the gas station clerk out. I guess he's had some problems with meth heads or something, I don't know, because he came out with his shotgun and he was loaded for a bear." Ryan straightened up. "At some point, someone should probably have a talk with him about that, but given that he's being praised as a hero on the local news, I don't think we're going to be doing that too soon.
"Anyway. The kidnapping attempt was thwarted, the mother and baby were brought to Baystate Children's Hospital in Springfield just as a precaution. Because of the diphtheria." Ryan tugged at his collar.
"Right." Pat stood up. "I guess we're taking a field trip, then."
"No time like the present." Ryan grinned. "There's already a sketch artist out there, but I don't think that the mother's been told much yet."
"Probably just as well." Elias closed his laptop. "We should probably be the ones to explain it, since we've got more information than anyone else. The poor woman's probably a wreck, though. Her kid's being isolated and she's got no idea why."
Pat took the situation seriously, and he cared about the woman and her child. He still let Ryan drive, and gave some serious thought to sitting in the back seat with Elias so they could cuddle. That wasn't reasonable, though, and it wasn't something cops did. It sure as hell wasn't something Pat Tessaro did, not anymore. He rode up front and let Elias spread out in the back, and enjoyed the speed that came with being allowed to use the sirens.
The mother, as it turned out, was allowed to stay in isolation with her baby. That probably kept her a little saner than she would have been if they'd been kept apart, although she was still chomping at the bit by the time the three cops walked into the room. Her name was Monica Ribiero, and she was Brazilian.
The baby was a little one, only three months old. Her name was Cátia, and she smiled readily when Pat went over to her little crib. "Is it all right if I pick her up?" he asked. "I've been immunized."
"I guess so." Monica shrugged. "The doctors just want to make sure that she doesn't get it. She got the two-month shot, but not anything else yet."
Pat picked the little girl up, which seemed to fill her with delight. Elias looked on with a far-away expression on his face, and for a second Pat regretted picking the baby up. He couldn't regret it too much, though. The baby was happy, and Monica seemed to relax once she realized that the cops weren't a bunch of oafs who couldn't handle themselves around a baby.
"I'm sorry. They haven't told me anything. I have no idea what's going on. They said something about exposure to diphtheria, but this is America. This is Massachusetts. You can't walk but you trip over a doctor. Why is there diphtheria?" The mother tugged at her curly blonde hair.
The cops exchanged glances, and Elias sat down across from Monica. "Okay. We could be wrong here. Before we get started, can you describe the woman who was trying to get at Cátia here?"
"Yeah. She had her hair in these two greasy braids. It was brown, but there was a lot of gray in it. I didn't get a great look at her face, but she had a scar. Right here." Monica rubbed at the space between her eyes. "It looked like an old one, but it was bad, you know? I don't know. Why did she want my baby?"
Elias winced. "Monica, the woman you saw is suspected of abducting as many as twenty-six children over the past twenty years. She's not… she's not entirely well, I think. We don't know her name or her identity yet, but she does seem to be caring for these children as well as she's able."
Ryan nodded and took up the narrative as Monica's face drained of all color. "We think that she's an abuse survivor who wasn't helped by the system. In her illness, or whatever, she seems to be picking up on children whose parents are having rough parenting days." He grinned at her. "Every parent has them, don't get me wrong. I've got a little guy of my own and believe me, I ain't perfect myself. When she sees little kids whose parents are having those moments, it seems to trigger something in her head. She thinks that she's saving them."
Monica pursed her lips. "I'm going to try not to take that personally, since you said it's in her head."
Pat chuckled. "One mother's 'abuse' was letting her baby cry in the supermarket while she bent down to get something off a low shelf. Another was turning her back while her toddler threw a screaming tantrum, kicking and screaming on the ground. It's not personal. I mean no, you're not technically supposed to leave the kid in the car when you go into the gas station, but it's not like this little bundle of sunshine was going to be able to get into trouble."
Monica slumped. "Right? I could see the car from where I was."
Ryan snapped his fingers. "So, she approached on foot."
"Yeah, I guess." Monica tilted her head and squinted at him. "I mean, I didn't see a car or anything. She was carrying a shovel. It looked new."
"Probably stolen." Pat looked at the others and then turned to Monica. "We think she's running a farm, hiding out with these kids and raising them as her own. She seems to be doing the best she can by them as far as we can tell, but there's a catch."
Monica gave him an old-fashioned look. "You mean besides the part where she's kidnapping other people's babies?"
"Yeah. Besides that." Elias tugged at his collar. "No vaccines."
Ryan rubbed at the back of his neck. "She came to our attention, finally, because one of the children she kidnapped ten years ago died from diphtheria. That's why they brought you here. They were worried that you, or your baby, might have been exposed, and they wanted to handle the situation with an abundance of caution."
Pat shifted Cátia, who'd fallen asleep against his chest. "Here, they can treat either or both of you if the worst should happen. I don't think that it will. I mean you weren't near her and there was a car door between her and the baby here. But it's better to be safe than sorry, you know?"
"I guess." Monica closed her eyes and shook her head. "It just all seems like so much, you know? I mean I was just going to visit some family and then boom! Here I am in the middle of a kidnapping, with a disease from the 1800s to move things along."
"We're doing everything we can to find her and bring her in." Ryan gave her his most reassuring smile. "She needs help, and those kids are going to need help too. But listen, you're going to need to be very careful. We don't know how fixated she gets. I don't know how much research she's going to be able to do, if she's going to be able to track you down, or if she's going to give up now that you and Cátia aren't right in front of her anymore."
"I was going to visit some family up in Vermont," she explained. "They're up near Killington; they work for a hotel up there. I'll be fine once I get there."
"Awesome." Pat smiled and glanced at Elias. Elias just gave a wistful smile and looked away.
Ryan shook Monica's hand and went to leave. Elias did the same. Pat went to give the baby back, but Monica smiled up at him and switched to Portuguese. "You're so good with her! You must be a great dad."
Pat's cheeks burned. Elias shuffled toward the door, back to Pat. He wouldn't be any help here. "No, sorry." Pat made himself smile and shook his head. "The one I love can't have them, and I love him more than I love kids. Besides, this way I can enjoy the good parts and skip the three a.m. feedings!" He handed Cátia back to her mother and kissed the baby's head. "If you need anything, or have any trouble at all, give me a call." He passed her a card, and then caught up to Elias and Ryan who waited by the door.
They headed back out to the car, and Ryan announced that he was going to go and get them all some coffee. "Alone," he added, with a lift of his eyebrows. Then he walked away, at a pace that could almost be called "running" if it didn't have so much dignity to it.
Pat leaned against the car. "You okay?"
Elias made a face and hung his head. "Yeah. Sorry. I just—I mean you, with that mother in there." He covered his face with his hands for a moment, and then he rubbed. "She was right, you know."
Pat frowned. "About?"
"You. With that baby. You looked so good. Natural, even. You looked so right with a kid in your arms." Elias sniffed. "I mean I've never seen it before."
Pat huffed out a little laugh. "Elias, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have picked her up like that."
"No, no. It's okay. I'm not that delicate, okay?" Elias bit his lip.
Pat read the pause. "I meant what I told her, you know. It's okay. I like kids, and I'm good with kids. I'm okay with not having them. I always was." He reached out and took Elias' hand. "I didn't exactly come from a functional family to begin with, and it was always about you and me. I'd have welcomed kids, but I didn't need them."
Elias looked away for a long moment. Then he turned his face back toward Pat's. "You can say that now. If I'd have called you then, with the fresh incision in my belly and still with a catheter, what would you have done?"
