Final orders, p.18
Final Orders, page 18
part #5 of Hazard and Somerset: Arrows in the Hand Series
Nude, Somers crawled onto the bed. He still had abs, still had the perfect compact musculature that made him look like something dreamed up, but he didn’t look like a boy anymore. His dick bobbed between his legs, a hot poker where it bumped Hazard. On hands and knees, he moved up Hazard’s body until he straddled him, their dicks compressed together, and Hazard shuddered. Somers buried his nose in Hazard’s armpit, and Hazard’s move was reflexive, almost instinctual: he clutched Somers’s short blond hair and held him there. When he yanked Somers’s head away, the blond man’s eyes were wet.
“John?”
“Not really our thing, I know,” Somers murmured. “God, I’m just really, really—I don’t know.”
But part of Hazard knew—a part below words, the same part that had caught him by the hair and pulled him around like a doll. That part made Hazard’s mouth twist into a smirk. “You like how I smell?”
Somers shuddered. His eyes closed.
Hazard turned Somers by his hair, exposing his throat.
Somers’s eyes squeezed shut even tighter. He nodded.
“Is that a yes?”
“Yeah. Fuck yeah. God, Ree, I love everything about you. I want you to fuck me.”
Hazard waited until Somers’s eyes opened. He met the plea there, waiting.
“Please fuck me,” Somers said. His voice was scratchy now. “Please.”
Hazard pulled him down by the hair.
If Somers had any questions, he figured them out himself. He latched on to one of Hazard’s nipples, suckling and nipping. Then the other. Then he scooted backward until he took the head of Hazard’s cock in his mouth. Propping himself on one arm, Hazard adjusted his grip in Somers’s hair. He let the blond man start like that, slow, enjoying the weight of his dick bearing down on Somers’s tongue as the man teased the head. Then, when Hazard wanted more, he pulled Somers forward until Somers gagged and drew back. Hazard eased his grip on Somers’s hair enough to let him.
“That’s all?” Hazard asked, his voice hard and flat. “You took more of me the first time you tried, baby.”
Somers went to work again; Hazard kept his hold loose, a reminder and a message more than actual control. He had to focus on breathing, on balancing. If he thought too much about how close he was, about how every moment felt like the cusp of orgasm—
By the time Hazard pulled him off, Somers was red-faced, tears leaking down his cheeks, saliva making his chin glassy when the light shifted, his lips swollen.
“Fuck,” Somers said, voice raw, and coughed.
“Yeah? You needed that?”
Somers used the inside of his arm to wipe his eyes as he nodded.
Hazard loosed his hair, stroking his head as he said, “Hey—”
But Somers shook out a hard no, and Hazard stopped himself. That part of himself, that protoverbal understanding, held him back.
Somers found the lube and prepped both of them. Hazard waited for him to move over, to lie on the mattress—or, more likely, to present on hands and knees—but neither happened. Instead, Somers swung one leg over Hazard. He raised up, and then he lowered himself, using one hand to guide Hazard inside.
The combination—Somers riding him reverse cowgirl, the heat and pressure and texture clutching Hazard, the incredible view of his husband’s shoulders and back and perfect, white ass—almost did Hazard in. Somehow, he hung on. He thought, for the most part, he was a good man. But even good men had their limits, and Hazard reached out, gripping Somers’s full ass, one cheek in each hand, spreading him so he could watch his husband take inch after inch of him.
And then Somers had seated himself, and the blond man was trembling. Hazard released one cheek. He stroked the line of Somers’s spine, his fingertips gathering sweat along the knobs and ridges. Somers drew a breath, his body curving, and then he sat up straight. He rocked at first, adjusting to Hazard inside him. Then, he planted his feet, raised himself up, and came down again. The noise sounded punched out and, at the same time strangled.
“Yeah?” Hazard asked, slapping his ass hard enough that the crack rang out in the room. “You like that dick?”
Somers made a garbled response that wasn’t an answer, but Hazard could feel the trickle of precome spatter his thigh. Somers brought himself up again. And again. The mattress creaked and protested as Somers rode him. The pleasure, at its crest for so long now, became like a knife’s edge as Hazard struggled to keep control. He used his hands to part Somers’s cheeks again, watching as Somers took him over and over again. His husband’s breathing was ragged, but something about his body, about his movements, suggested determination, a kind of grim relentlessness that, as the moment accumulated, became a kind of subaudible alarm for Hazard.
Somers was an excellent sexual partner—he was usually tender, often playful, but he could be rough, within limits, as the situation demanded. He was always conscious of Hazard, of his pleasure, of the connection they were forging in the heat of lovemaking, over and over again. But tonight, his back was to Hazard, and he’d been silent aside from cries of pleasure or some kind of pleasurable distress. His movements had become a kind of pistoning up and down. And Hazard had the sudden, strange sense that his husband was blind—that, for all it mattered in that moment, he might have been riding a dildo.
As best he could, around Somers’s movements, Hazard reached around, determined to bring Somers off. Somers made a dissatisfied noise and tried to push Hazard away, but Hazard persisted, and Somers was so focused on riding him that he gave up trying to stop him. When Hazard found his dick, it was soft, although still leaking pre.
Hazard was beyond any rational thought. His mind, flooded with hormones and desire and need and, now, a cocktail of hurt and confusion, was a landscape of broken mirrors. He settled back, taking a vicious satisfaction now in watching as he split his husband open again and again. And then, without really thinking about it, he brought one hand back and delivered a huge, open-handed crack. Somers let out a shocked, warbling cry. Red bloomed along the pale cheek.
“Yeah?” Hazard asked. He didn’t recognize his own voice. He didn’t recognize either of them—or he did, but their reflections in the broken mirrorscape, them, who they might be or might have been. “You like that?”
Somers sobbed something.
Another massive crack of Hazard’s hand turned the ass cheek so red it was almost purple, and Somers cried out.
“You like that? You like me slapping your ass like that?”
Hazard switched hands and rained down smacks on the other cheek. He stopped when he finally heard a word he recognized: Somers mumbling yes, over and over again.
“Whose cock is that?” Hazard grabbed his hips and brought him down, impaling him again and again until Somers moved like a rag doll in his grip. “Whose cock is that? Whose cock is that in your hole? Whose fucking cock is that?”
If Somers answered, Hazard never heard it. All of a sudden, Somers began to jerk and shake, his whole body tensing, spine arching, the orgasm bending him and locking his muscles against the flood of release. Hazard felt it—not the hard jets he was familiar with, but a slow, steady dribble as Somers’s body gave up the orgasm against its will.
Then Hazard was coming, a mixture of horror and relief rushing through him and then, mercifully, nothing, the force of it sweeping everything away. When he returned to himself, Somers was still on top of him, slumped now and supporting himself with his hands on the mattress. They were both like that, motionless, for what felt like a long time. And then Somers moved incrementally, and Hazard stirred, and wordlessly, they worked together to help Somers ease himself off. He lay on his side, his back still to Hazard. Hazard checked himself; to check Somers now, like this, felt like a violation. He didn’t see any blood on his dick, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything.
When another minute had ticked by, he said, “Jesus Christ, John,” and his voice sounded like gravel in the bed of a truck. Another minute ticked by, and he touched Somers’s shoulder. Somers pressed his face into the bedding for a moment that felt long, and then he rolled onto his back and looked up at Hazard. His face was a million things, startled birds going in a hundred directions, and then it was blank, and he asked, “Are you ok?”
“Am I ok? John, are you ok?”
“I’m great,” Somers said with a stranger’s smile. “Better than great. Good God, I’ve never felt anything like that. I wasn’t even hard when I started coming.”
Hazard opened his mouth. But what was he going to say? You’re not ok? You’re not ok, and I know it, but I don’t know why, and I don’t know what’s happening, and I don’t know if I did something wrong? He still had his mouth open, and he still didn’t know what to say, so he shut it again.
“I’m going to clean up,” Somers said, and when he sat up, he winced. Before Hazard could say anything, he grinned—that other person, the one Hazard didn’t know, grinning from his little shard of mirror. “I’m fine, Ree. Swear to God.”
Somers had padded halfway to the bathroom when Hazard finally found a few words. “You’re sure? I mean, I didn’t—” And he stopped because it was so much more awful, hearing them out loud.
“No, love, you didn’t hurt me.” That dazzling smile. The one Hazard had fallen in love with. “That was exactly what I needed.” Then he laughed and raised an eyebrow. “What we both needed, it looks like.”
Hazard wasn’t sure why, but he pulled the sheet across his lap, and he couldn’t meet Somers’s eyes.
The water ran. It shut off. When Somers stepped out, he brought the smell of his soap and deodorant with him, and his hair, dark with water, looked like hammered gold. “I think we might have gotten a little carried away,” he said as he picked his way toward the dresser.
You think, Hazard asked inside his head.
“So, maybe one of us should, you know, discreetly let Colt know that everything’s ok. You know, so he doesn’t think—”
Whatever Somers feared Colt might have thought—or not thought—he didn’t finish; his phone buzzed, and Somers dug it out of the pile of clothing. He held it to his ear, his face screwing closed, and said, “I’ll handle it.” Then he tossed the phone on the dresser and grabbed a Wahredua PD tee from his drawer. As he pulled it on, he spoke again, his voice muffled. “I’ve got to get over to Dulac and Darnell’s place. Someone called in a domestic disturbance.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MAY 16
SATURDAY
8:43 PM
HAZARD COULDN’T SLEEP; the sex had left him wrung out, itching inside his skin. After the front door closed behind Somers, he got up and changed the sheets and showered. Steam ghosted the tile. The air was too thick, suffocating, and he turned the water to cold and rinsed off and shivered as he toweled himself dry.
One look at the bed sent him toward the dresser, and he pulled on jeans and a Wildcats Baseball tee and carried a pair of socks downstairs. The living room was dark except for a lamp. He padded through the kitchen and stopped at the top of the basement stairs. The light was on below, and the sound of murmured TV voices drifted up.
“Colt?”
“What?” And then, in an even surlier tone, “Are you done?”
Instead of the flash of embarrassment, the words stirred cold ashes. Are we done, Hazard thought, clutching the jamb. Kind of.
He forced himself to speak. “I need to run in to work. John put your phone in the office if you need it.” When the only answer was TV voices, he said again, “If you need it.”
Colt grunted. Then the sound of movement came, and the boy’s shorn head came into view, his brow creased. “What’s going on?”
“I thought of something I need to do for work.”
“What?”
“Something I need to follow up on.”
Colt rolled his eyes at the non-answer. “Where’s J-H?”
“He had to go help Gray with something.”
“With what?”
“With something, Colt.” Asperity gave the words an edge, and Colt’s scowl deepened. Hazard tried to soften his voice as he added, “I don’t know; he answered the phone and said he had to go.”
“Something is weird. You’re acting really weird.”
“I’m going to make sure the doors are locked. If you want to get your phone and keep it with you downstairs, that’s ok. Just be reasonable about how much time you spend on it.”
Colt nodded slowly. As Hazard turned toward the garage, Colt spoke again, his voice so quiet it barely made it up the stairs. “Pops, are you ok?”
Easier, Hazard decided, to pretend he hadn’t heard. Easier for him, anyway, even though it meant leaving a child with his own doubts and fears. As Hazard settled himself behind the steering wheel of the Odyssey, he caught the fucker in the mirror and asked when, since when, had he become such a cowardly little shit.
Market Street shifted on weekends. The revived riverfront featured bars and shopping and family-friendly restaurants and condos and apartments, even hotels. During the week, it was busy with local traffic, people getting a meal or a drink, people picking up a gift, but most of all, people going to work. On the weekends, though, and at night, everything a dead orange under the streetlights, it became a place for out-of-towners: families who wanted a weekend in a nice, quiet place; bachelorette parties in search of cheap hotels and good food and local wineries; men who came in to drink and try to pick up the girls from the bachelorette parties.
Everything swam together in Hazard’s vision. He braked at a crosswalk as taillights flared in front of him—a drunken twentysomething in muddy jeans and a neon-green shirt had fallen in front of the car ahead of him. On the sidewalk, clumps of bodies compressed and then broke up again in spills of laughter or, less often, shouts. When Hazard got to his building at the far end of the street, he parked and closed his eyes. Shadows moved restlessly behind them.
He let himself in at the ground floor access door, went up a flight of stairs, and then at the landing, fumbled through keys until he got the right one. When he went inside, the office was dark, and it smelled lingeringly like the floral-scented cleaner Nico used at the end of the day. He shut the door behind him, locked it, and crossed the room in darkness. In his office, he shut that door as well. Here, virtually no light reached. He stumbled around, knocking into the client chairs, then the desk, until he found his seat and dropped into it. No sound, either, he realized. The silence was like the darkness, both of them not quite there, both of them stirring with unquiet energy: phantom black specks floating at the edges of his vision; the hiss of brown noise in his ears.
The sound of a key in the front door jarred him. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been sitting there, how much time he’d lost. He reached for the drawer where he kept pepper gel spray before realizing that whoever was coming in had a key, and that meant either Somers or Nico. The possibility that it was Somers froze him. He had a half-formed thought that Somers might come into the office, might accuse him of—what? Hazard didn’t know, but he could picture it, Somers towering over him, finger stabbing down. What, Hazard wanted to ask. What? And then the memory of their fuck, of Somers impaling himself again and again.
The whir of the printer and a muffled curse shattered the moment; the voice was Nico’s, and relief crashed through Hazard. He got up from the chair, which creaked and clattered as it rolled across the boards. From the office came a sudden cessation of movement.
“It’s me,” Hazard said.
“Jesus Christ.”
“I’m coming out.” It wasn’t until he added, “Don’t shoot,” his voice jokey, that he realized how disoriented he was.
When he emerged from the office, Nico was leaning against the desk, arms folded across his chest. The only light came from a desk lamp, and it painted one side of him the color of egg yolk. He was wearing flip-flops, gym shorts that barely hit him at mid-thigh, and a ratty Bob’s Burgers tank. He had apparently stopped shaving his pits since the last time Hazard had seen him in this kind of getup.
“Were you sitting in there this whole time?”
Hazard shrugged.
“In the dark?”
“I just got in.”
Nico covered his face with one hand. He looked like he was trying to hold the pieces in place. “Emery, what the hell?”
“Why are you here?”
“Because I’m—” Nico stopped himself. “Because I’m so upset about Loretta. I needed to stop thinking about it, so I decided to do some work. What are you doing here?”
“You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not. I’m heartbroken. She was one of my favorite authors—”
“Not about that.” Hazard focused on the computer monitor behind Nico, which was displaying the Delta website’s flight cancellation page. He pushed past Nico, who made a protesting noise that Hazard ignored. “These are the tickets for your conference,” Hazard said, studying the screen more closely. “What’s going on?”
“What does it look like?” Nico snapped.
“Why?”
“Because my phone was acting weird, and I wanted to cancel them before I changed my mind again, and the university makes you print off the cancellation so they know you actually aren’t going, and I figured I could do all of that here without anybody bothering me. Because, you know, it’s the middle of the night.”
“It’s a quarter after nine,” Hazard said. “And you know what I meant. Why aren’t you going to the conference?”
Nico hugged himself more tightly and looked toward the window.
“I’ve had a lot of practice with this,” Hazard said. “With Colt. I’m getting very good.”
“Because Chase doesn’t want me to go,” Nico chewed off the words, turning back to give Hazard a dark look. “And because I keep fucking things up with him, and he’s so sweet and keeps taking me back, and this is something I can do for him.”
“Chase doesn’t want you to do something that’s important for your professional development?”
