Gasp!

by Z. A. Maxfield

  “Hi.” Nigel pressed gentle kisses on him, his chin, his bruised cheek, even his eyelids. At last Nigel’s lips found Jeff’s mouth and parted his lips. Nigel tasted sweet, like he’d been eating the fruit he’d brought to their room. They traded unhurried kisses in a way Jeff had never really experienced before.

  Eventually Nigel pulled back and gazed down at him. “When you were a kid, which would you rather have been? A cartoon character or a superhero?”

  “Seriously?” Whatever Jeff’s early morning train of thought had been, that derailed it. “Aren’t superheroes usually cartoon characters?

  “There’s a subset that’s both.”

  “So I could be both?”

  “Don’t be a prat. If you could be a real superhero or real cartoon character, who would you be?”

  Jeff was about to make a remark about real cartoon characters, but Nigel kissed it off his lips. When Nigel was done, he said, “I wanted to be Anakin Skywalker. Does he count?”

  “No.” Nigel slipped off Jeff’s body and tucked himself into his side. He put his head on Jeff’s shoulder and—like it was the most natural thing in the world—Jeff stroked the long length of Nigel’s hair.

  For obvious reasons long hair was a novelty for Jeff, and he was surprised to find he liked it.

  “What did you want to be?”

  “I wanted to be the Doctor.”

  “Which doctor?”

  “Tell me you’re kidding.” Nigel’s muscles tensed. “The Doctor.”

  “Doctor who?” Before Nigel could rise, he laughed. “I’m kidding. I know who the Doctor is. Did you want to be all of them? Or one in particular.”

  “Actually”—Nigel nudged Jeff’s arm with his forehead—“I wanted to be Tom Baker.”

  “Does it ever feel weird for you to think that back in the day, some kid was out there listening to a Nigel Gasp CD or watching you on television and he wanted to be you when he grew up?”

  “You said you wanted to be me.”

  “I wanted to devour you.” Jeff laughed. “I still do. Big fan, Nigel. I watched you once on ‘Saturday Night Live’ and you were it for me. My room was jerk-off central for weeks.”

  “Only weeks? Then what? Did you lose interest?”

  “Then I started listening to Green Day.”

  “Oh, I like that.” Nigel smacked him, but not very hard. Jeff enjoyed that. He liked the way Nigel’s hand left a sting on his skin.

  Nigel appeared thoughtful. “I should have invested in a detergent company at some time to reap the rewards. Two-pronged approach to wealth. Create a wank fantasy and cash in at the laundry.”

  Jeff snorted. “I can’t be the only one to tell you I jerked off over you.”

  “No.” Nigel huffed a laugh. “That might have come up once or twice with someone. What about you, though? Aren’t there always boys who want to fuck a soldier?”

  “I guess. Guys like the uniform and the guns if nothing else.”

  “Why did you enlist?”

  “Well. First, to pay for school. We didn’t have that kind of money, and I never got the grades for scholarships.”

  “Deidre told me a bit about your family. Your dad got sick?”

  Jeff nodded. “We lost the house, and Mom had to go back to work. She didn’t make nearly the money he did.”

  “Times were hard then.”

  “He passed during my senior year. Mom stayed home with us, but then she had to go back to work. So not only did our finances change, she couldn’t be there all the time like before. She kept saying she should have done more, gotten a degree, planned better so she didn’t have to work two jobs.”

  “You can’t plan for everything.”

  “That’s what I told her. But I lucked out anyway because for me the army was the perfect fit. I loved it.”

  “Then you left?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How come, if it was so perfect?”

  Jeff evaded. “That’s need to know.”

  “Need to know.” Nigel poked him playfully. “Deidre will tell me. Do you miss it?”

  Jeff shook his head and lied. “Not really.”

  “You got out just in time to be stuck with me for six weeks.”

  “Sure. And now I’m fainting because of a little run-in with a—”

  “Don’t you dare say it.” Nigel crawled onto Jeff’s body and straddled his hips. “That bear was twelve feet tall and had blood dripping from its hideous monster teeth. It had paws like hubcaps, and it snarled in six different languages.” Nigel punctuated this by fastening his mouth on one of Jeff’s nipples and giving it a long suck and a gentle nip.

  “Ah. Ha-ha. Stop.”

  Nigel wouldn’t stop tickling. He had a way of being everywhere at once, of skimming cool hands over all the hills and valleys of Jeff’s body and wrapping his legs around him tight. He strained and chased and opened like a flower, until Jeff fell in—just like a fly into a pitcher plant—until he fell down into the sticky sweetness that was Nigel’s truest essence and drowned in it.

  Jeff rolled on top of him and nudged his knee between Nigel’s legs.

  “Oh Christ, Jeff.”

  “Where’s the lube?”

  Nigel groped beneath the pillow for lube and condoms, and they moved quickly through brief preparation. Jeff guided his cock into Nigel’s tight entrance until the head breached the muscles guarding it, then braced himself on his arms and nudged up with his hips. Nigel strained like hell to meet him and take him deep.

  They pulsed together, straining, kissing, biting, pinching, and grappling toward release.

  As hard as Nigel wanted it.

  As hard as Jeff needed it.

  “Ah God,” Nigel’s arms tightened around Jeff’s neck as each thrust drew grunts from deep within him. “You were made for me. Just for me, you hot bastard.”

  “Hell yeah.” Jeff gripped Nigel’s shoulders and held him fast. Nigel’s scent—sharp and tangy—rose from his skin and where his cock was trapped against Jeff’s belly. “What you said.”

  Nigel’s muscles bunched as he tried to get closer still. He rubbed their bristly cheeks together while Jeff reveled in body contact. Their skin touched everywhere, from toenails to eyebrows. Before Jeff realized it could be that goddamn good between them, before he even registered that no one had ever made him feel like Nigel could make him feel, the heat of Nigel’s release spattered between them and his ass clenched around Jeff’s cock like a vise. Jeff came so hard he thought he’d die in Nigel’s arms. He was wholly prepared to welcome his demise that way.

  “You…” Jeff slumped limply over Nigel’s body as Nigel tightened his hold. Jeff’s mouth felt positively arid, as though every bit of his body’s moisture had flooded out through his cock. “I see fucking stars when I’m with you.”

  Nigel smiled against his neck, then bit him.

  “Ouch.”

  “Sorry.” Nigel didn’t look sorry; he looked carnivorous, and it made Jeff want to believe in vampires.

  Jeff got a grip on the condom and pulled out. The resulting loss of balance pulled him off Nigel’s body. He flopped onto his back and lay there, limply, under the whoosh, whoosh of the ceiling fan. Sweat and spunk dried, cooling his heated skin.

  “Water?” From Nigel’s side of the bed, he heard the crack of a safety seal opening. Nigel slipped an arm around his shoulder and lifted him enough to hold a bottle to his lips. “Here you go.”

  Jeff took several healthy swallows before his head dropped back to the pillows again. “Thanks.”

  “Keeping your strength up is in my best interest.”

  “Right, mine too…” He licked his lips, and his tongue felt thick and slow. Christ. What’s going on? “I’m usually a lot tougher than this.”

  “You said you might be coming down with something.”

  “I’m drained as hell. I thought it was from being back.”

  “Like PTSD?”

  “Not everyone gets PTSD. I’m remarkably healthy for someone w
ho…”

  “Who what?”

  Someone who dreams about death every night. Jeff shook his head. Not going there. “I saw some action. It was hard, and it’s going to stay with me. But this is more like after the holidays. I mean, not in a good way, but when things settle down and you feel like you’re starting all over.”

  “I see.”

  “So far I’ve had no sore throat, no fever. No weird stomach stuff.” He had been feeling under the weather. He’d chalked it up to the altitude or dehydration. He worried it might be civilian life making him soft. “I’ve been feeling exhausted, though, and that’s not normal, is it? I blamed it on you, Red Chief. But…maybe you’re right. I should see a doctor.”

  “Maybe it’s the flu, and it’s just not got hold of you yet.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What about STDs?”

  “No way. I’ve never had unprotected sex.”

  Nigel relaxed visibly. “Good to know.”

  “You should probably ask before you let someone fuck you,” Jeff told him. “Just sayin’.”

  Nigel didn’t rise to the bait. “Were you exposed to anything while you were deployed?”

  “Like toxins, or some kind of fungus or something? There’s always a chance, but I doubt it.”

  “I’m a little worried.” Nigel’s brows drew together. “If only because you are.”

  “I’ll find a doctor. In the meantime I’ll call Deidre and tell her I’m not a hundred percent. Christ, Nigel. If anything were to happen to you because I can’t do my job, she’d kill me.”

  Nigel stretched his leg over Jeff’s knees and curled up around him. “So touching how you worry about my welfare.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I know. Rest now. We’ll call Deidre later. We can have her send out a rent-a-cop. One who isn’t afraid of bears.”

  “I’ll pretend you didn’t say that.” Jeff was already falling back to sleep. “That bear was fifteen feet tall. He had teeth like a great white shark, and paws like manhole covers.”

  “Yeah. Well. You’d better keep your manhole covered if Deidre ever finds out I nearly got eaten by a bear.”

  Jeff lay with Nigel in his arms, comfortable and happy, floating on a haze of purely male sexual satisfaction. Every so often he huffed a light laugh. Memories—good and bad—drifted up inside him at odd moments, like the little bubbles in champagne.

  Jeff couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed because he was happy.

  “Should I be worried? I’ve never had a bloke laugh after shagging.”

  Jeff had been drifting off, and it was a matter of some lip smacking and prying his eyes open before he could speak. But yeah, Nigel’s head was pillowed on his upper arm, and he was gazing up at Jeff with a satisfied smile on his face.

  “I feel good,” Jeff confided. “Kind of lighthearted.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Happy, I guess.”

  “Me too.” Nigel shot him a deeply sensual look from under his lashes, like he was pretty fucking proud of himself.

  Maybe he had a right to be.

  At noon Jeff’s phone rang. He’d left it on the nightstand, along with his watch, and by habit he hit Speaker to answer and then put on his watch, snapping the clasp around his wrist. “Paxton.”

  “Well right back atcha,” his sister said. “Talk to me. What’s got Nigel’s panties in a wad. Are you sick?”

  “I’m not sick, exactly. I’m just not well.”

  “Oh my God. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Something, or Nigel wouldn’t be calling me before he usually even cracks an eye open in the morning. Spill.”

  “I’m just a little run-down.” He understood why Deidre worried. She was a half-empty girl sometimes. They’d lost their dad young. She equated the army with getting killed and gay with HIV and he could never convince her otherwise.

  “Jeff—”

  “For God’s sake don’t go there. I’m having some issues. Fatigue, mostly. I suppose I haven’t been taking great care of myself since I got out. I drink more, and I don’t eat regularly. I work out less.”

  “You’re going to the doctor. Amil will pick you up at two this afternoon to see a Dr. Rosen right there in Bluebird Mountain. It’s all arranged.”

  “I can damn well drive myself to a doctor’s appointment—”

  “Amil is already scheduled. If you aren’t going to humor me, then humor Nigel, who is worried as hell. He’s the one who called and asked me to set it up.”

  “I’ve been a shitty bodyguard, Dee.”

  “That’s oh so true, but since Nigel needs a lion tamer more than he needs a bodyguard—”

  “I heard that.” Nigel peered in from the hall, where he’d been listening. “Did you just say I need a lion tamer?”

  “You need Mary Poppins, Siegfried, and Roy, and you know it.”

  Jeff waved Nigel away and got up. “Getting back to the matter at hand, if you just tell me the address—”

  “Amil is already on his way, Jeff. Don’t worry about it. Consider it a perquisite of working for Team Gasp.”

  “I don’t even know what a perquisite is,” Jeff admitted.

  Nigel shot him a leer. “I’ll be happy to demonstrate until Amil gets here.”

  For a second there was a stony silence on Deidre’s end of the call.

  “Nigel, are you fucking my brother?” Jeff and Nigel raced to see who could disconnect the call first. Too late. “You are, aren’t you? You’re fuck—”

  Nigel laughed when he snatched the phone out of Jeff’s hand and hung up.

  “Ah, shit.” Jeff was in for the longest lecture in a lifetime full of long lectures. Nigel looked perfectly, incandescently happy to have stirred shit up, as usual.

  “Well. There goes your yellow hat, lover. We know she can’t fire me…”

  Chapter Eight

  Jeff’s head lolled. He stood in the center plaza of some foreign city, watching an office building blow apart. Windows shattered, and bits of wood and glass and paper—the detritus of a thousand simple, efficient office workers’ lives—fell from the sky like a burning rain.

  Debris fluttered all around him, but he stood untouched, as if he’d been sealed inside some invisible, indestructible bubble—an inverted snow globe from which he was forced to watch all the pain of the world shake out around him.

  He was deaf to the noise, oblivious to the sick scent of burning insulation and electronic equipment. He was immune to gut-wrenching cries of pain.

  The world shook around him while he remained safe inside, surrounded by clear fluid and frozen in a single scene of…something…maybe a memory from his childhood that insulated him from all the chaos and called him home again.

  A peaceful day of fishing with his dad.

  The smell of his mother’s pancakes.

  Hearing his sister tell him he was going to be an uncle.

  Knowing family waited for him at home gave him something to cling to and count on. Was that what kept him from feeling the very real and very human suffering all around him?

  The sharp pull of the Range Rover woke Jeff when Amil turned onto the road leading back to Nigel’s rental.

  Now that he knew why he’d been feeling so awful, it was easier to take.

  Fish tapeworm.

  Who knew?

  Given some of the things he’d eaten and some of the places he’d eaten them, he was lucky a fish tapeworm was his only problem. Other than anemia, he’d had no symptoms at all. The doctor said it sometimes happened like that. The first clue anyone had to the existence of a tapeworm was fatigue and mild anemia.

  Amil took the mountain road like an Italian rally car driver, and Jeff held on in the passenger seat. He drifted between drowsiness and motion sickness, keeping his thoughts to himself. Certainly Amil’s handling of the SUV wasn’t helping things much. He closed his eyes and drifted into a dream about white-water rafting on the Salmon River in Idaho. Currents sucked hi
s raft along while he paddled like hell to keep from being swamped. He didn’t know the river, didn’t have a guide. The rapids were harrowing, swirling and eddying around him in great gusts of white water that seemed to rise high enough on either side of his boat to capsize it and push him down beyond the river bottom itself.

  Then everything changed, and for a while he drifted lazily along in calm water. His body ached all over, and his clothes were damp with river water and sweat. He felt dirty and tired. Sunburned and dry as a corn chip. He was looking for something to drink when a fish jumped into his lap. Jeff tried to catch it, but it slipped out of his hands, leaving iridescent scales and bits of shiny skin behind.

  Before leaping back into the water, it spoke with a strange accent, “Go, my friend. We will meet another day.”

  “Shit.” Jeff startled awake again, gripping the door frame.

  “What?”

  “Dream.” Jeff waved off Amil’s concern. “I dreamed I was white-water rafting.”

  “Do you do that? Shoot the rapids?”

  “Some.”

  Amil nodded.

  Jeff glanced at him. Amil kept his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel. He appeared sober and intelligent. He was dark-skinned, clean shaven, and he had one of the most engaging smiles Jeff had ever seen. He rarely made conversation, but maybe that was because they’d always had Nigel between them. The help wasn’t exactly supposed to talk.

  “Thanks for driving me even though I’m only a temp.”

  “Sure. What are your plans after Deidre comes back?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll probably go back to Austin where my mom lives. Get a job. Go back to school.” Maybe he’d bounce or tend bar. “I could probably get another gig like this one, security or roadie, whatever.”

  “I thought you couldn’t stand it.”

  “It grew on me.” But that wasn’t the entire truth. It’s Nigel who is growing on me.

  “I like driving since that’s all I have to do,” Amil admitted. “I couldn’t stand being at some spoiled man’s beck and call like you are.”