Final orders, p.29
Final Orders, page 29
part #5 of Hazard and Somerset: Arrows in the Hand Series
“I think it’s one thing to deal with whatever feelings you had about how you treated me; I know we’ve talked about that, and I know you’ve wrestled with it. I think in some ways, you’re at peace with that part of our lives. But it’s another thing to deal with the rest of the trauma you went through.”
“I held your arm while a psycho tried to carve his initials into you. I think you’re the one who went through some trauma.”
“Splitting yourself like that, John, carrying a secret like that, wearing a mask all the time and being unable to trust or believe in the relationships you’d forged with everyone around you—that’s a kind of trauma. It’s not surprising that you’re still working on it; from what you said, it sounds like you haven’t really had to deal with it before. And it makes sense that Joyce, what she did to Evan, would have acted as a trigger, and that, subsequently, you would have projected yourself onto everything that happened with Evan.”
“Does it make sense?” Somers laughed; in the dark, the bent sound made him think of raven wings. “Because from the inside, it feels batshit crazy.”
“John, Evan isn’t you. He’s not gay or bi and hiding his true identity because he’s scared he’ll lose everything. He told you he’s not gay. He did something he’s embarrassed about, and he tried to cover it up, and that means he had a secret that other people could use as leverage. And yes, it’s a shitty reality that occasionally police work means using people’s secrets to compel them to tell the truth. But that’s not the same as what you went through; you would have done the same thing if he’d shoplifted or if he’d run over a nun or whatever the hell he was trying to hide. I think you need to hear that.”
“It’s not the same, huh?”
Hazard rubbed a circle on his belly. “No.”
“Because it feels the same. It feels exactly the fucking same.”
“But—”
“Can we not, please? Not tonight.” It was the best lie because it was true. “I’m tired, and I’m not thinking clearly.”
Hazard’s silence frayed until he said, “I don’t want you to feel like this. You did something wonderful for Colt tonight; can’t you see how important that was for him? That’s the opposite of everything you went through. He’s got love and support and acceptance, no matter who he chooses to be. You gave him that.”
“Thank you.” Somers squeezed his wrist once and released him. “Let’s go to sleep, love.”
His husband lingered, all hulking worry and helplessness. Then, after a while, he slipped into the bathroom. The water ran. The old pipes creaked and groaned. When Hazard came back, he smelled like soap and wet hair and minty toothpaste. Then darkness folded everything up, an origami of isolation, and Somers was alone inside himself again.
The dream wasn’t a dream so much as a memory: white sand, blue waters, the vinyl straps of the chaise pressing into his bare back. He remembered the sound of the waves, turning his head, and seeing Hazard there, a stripe of sunscreen on the bridge of his nose as he scowled at whatever book he was reading.
Somers woke with a start, his heart hammering in his throat. He sat up, the sheets ruching at his waist, the air-conditioned cold pebbling his skin. His nipples felt tight. His balls ached heavily. He was hard, he realized. He bucked his hips to wiggle out of his underwear.
“John?” Hazard asked muzzily.
Somers turned. His dick struck sparks at the texture of the stiff, dark hair on Hazard’s thigh. His hand found Hazard’s chest, brushing more of that dark hair, running it backward so that it stood up and tickled his palm.
“What—” Hazard began.
Somers shucked his husband out of his trunks. He was bending, already inhaling the musk between Hazard’s legs, when Hazard caught his shoulder.
“No. Not if this is—”
“It’s not,” Somers said. He tried to bend lower, but Hazard’s grip was iron, and Somers was conscious of a whine building in his throat. “Ree, it’s not. Please. I just—I need you right now.”
Indecision transmitted itself in the way Hazard rolled his thumb and kneaded Somers’s shoulder. Then his hand slid up, fingers weaving through Somers short blond hair, and tightened into that same iron grasp. He dragged Somers down to his dick. Somers opened his mouth, his tongue falling out, but Hazard yanked him again at the last moment. Somers made a frustrated noise. Hazard chuckled, and it sounded like oil about to catch fire.
Hazard lowered him by the hair again, and when Somers stretched to lick him, Hazard jerked him forward. The movement pulled Somers off balance, and a moment later, Hazard’s dick slapped him across the face. It came again, the hot, heavy weight of it striking his cheek. Droplets of pre struck high on his cheekbone, and then higher—maybe his hair, Somers thought distantly. Hazard dick-slapped him again, and then again. The blows weren’t hard, but they weren’t soft either. Somers was distantly surprised that the last one made his lips sting.
Then Hazard hauled him forward again, and Somers barely had time to get his mouth open. He took Hazard as deep as he could, gagged, and started to shake when Hazard pulled him off again. The bigger man made a noise in his throat, disappointment, and tried again. It wasn’t a blow job; it was a face fucking, and when Somers realized that, something curled its claws in his belly, and he moaned.
Abruptly, it was over, his scalp screaming as Hazard pulled him away again. Spit and pre cooled on his chin; some of it had dripped to the hollow of Somers’s throat, and he could see it like he was standing outside himself, glistening like mercury, cold pinpoints of fire. Hazard’s dick felt twice as hot when he struck Somers with it again. And again. And again.
“What do you want, huh?” Twisting Somers’s hair, manipulating him like he was a doll. “What do you want?”
Saliva bubbled when Somers tried to speak, and it slid from the corner of his mouth. “Your dick. I want your dick.”
Hazard sneered; the charcoal expression pulled at his face in the half-light. He dragged harder on Somers’s hair until Somers had to follow with his whole body and thought Hazard might make him roll over, like a dog. His cock throbbed between his legs. But then Hazard stopped, Somers’s head at an angle, and Somers realized why. He was staring up at Hazard, his throat exposed. Hazard stared down at him. Then he bared his teeth, and nobody would have called it a smile. Somers’s heart pounded, trapped at every pulse point.
“What do you want?”
“I want your cock.”
“Jesus, John.” This time, it was a smile—a smirk like a thumbnail moon. “Do you want the neighbors to hear you?”
More heat rushed into Somers’s face, and Hazard drew him down again. This time, he let Somers work on his cock, bobbing and lapping, trying to take him deeper. Most of the time, he was good at this. Had gotten good at this. Tonight, though, he had the yips, and every time he had to back off, he wanted to sob with frustration.
Hazard’s grip had eased, and he petted Somers’s hair. Then, with the heel of his hand against Somers’s forehead, he pushed him away. He watched him from across the darkness. His mouth barely moved, the air nothing more than a breath when he asked, “What do you want?”
“Dick. Your dick.”
Hazard’s eyes were hooded.
And then Somers knew what he wanted. “I want to be fucked.”
“Yeah, you do. Move; I want you over the side of the bed.”
Somers scrambled into position, the floorboards gritty under his bare feet, his knees finding the awkward, improvised shelf in the side of the mattress. Hazard’s hand pressed him down onto the bed, and a moment later, he was spreading Somers open, the lube cold at first, the movements strangely clinical. His fingers brushed that spot inside Somers, and Somers reacted instinctively: a moan ripped from his chest, his knees widening. His face grew even hotter. Hazard didn’t speak, didn’t chuckle; the intensity of his attention, though, observing everything, collecting, cataloguing, weighed down on Somers, threatening to crush him. He was surprised to find himself on the brink of tears.
Then Hazard was entering him, and there was the initial discomfort, the adjustments his body was determined, for a final moment, not to make. When he was ready, Hazard folded Somers’s arms behind his back and held them at the wrist with one hand. Pinioned, Somers thought as Hazard rolled his hips, and Somers’s whole world lit up. It was his last coherent thought: this is called pinioning.
Hazard fucked hard tonight, drilling Somers into the bed, driving the bed itself across the floor, the wood protesting. Somers was aware of all of it distantly; his world had contracted to those incandescent moments when his whole body lit up under Hazard, and the fractals of body and sweat and the ache in his shoulders and elbows and darkness. He knew he was making noises, but he didn’t know he was moving until Hazard released his arms, gripped his hair, and drew him back, his body bowing as Hazard continued to thrust into him.
“Make all the noise you want,” Hazard gritted into his ear. “Moan like a fucking whore. But if you hump one out on the bed, John, I will fucking tear your ass apart. Do you hear me?”
Somers babbled some kind of yes; it must have been enough because Hazard released him, and he fell onto the mattress again.
And then Hazard had stopped. Frustration tightened Somers’s throat. He had been close, his whole body working now to whet the edge of that final moment. Hazard had stopped holding his wrists when he’d grabbed Somers’s hair, but Somers realized now that he had kept his arms in place, locked behind his back, without needing to be told, and his joints were live coals.
“This?” Hazard asked with a lazy rock forward that made Somers bite the bedding to quiet himself. “This is what you want?”
Mouth full of wet cotton, Somers nodded blindly.
Hazard pulled out. “No, it’s not.”
Somers made a muzzy noise, lifting his head.
“This isn’t what you want.”
“No, Ree, I do. I want—”
“You don’t even know what you want.” The mattress dipped; springs pinged as Hazard crawled past him to lie in the center of the bed. His dick stuck up, the faint light glinting along the slick length.
Somehow, Somers loosened his arms, muscles protesting at the pull and the unfamiliar twinges. He dragged himself up onto the bed. He felt wrung out, and he hadn’t even been doing the hard part, but he managed to swing a leg over Hazard.
“What are you doing?” Hazard asked. One arm was behind his head. His biceps was huge.
“I told you.” Somers’s mouth was cottony. His whole head was cottony, packed with it. “I want to be fucked.” He lowered himself; his shoulders contracted with a shiver as Hazard pressed against that spot. “I want you to fuck me.”
The silence beat against him like a wave. Scarecrow eyes caught the ambient light and gave nothing back. Then Hazard asked, “Yeah?”
Somers rocked forward, testing Hazard inside him. Goose bumps broke out across his chest, and he heard the noise he made when he found that spot again.
“That’s what you want, is it?”
He was nodding, barely aware of it, as he raised himself up and slid down again. And then again. Their last encounter like this came back to him, a rush of shame and arousal that made him move faster. Part of him understood what was happening as he pistoned up and down, even before Hazard’s fingers bit into his hip, driving him down harder each time.
When Hazard began to speak, his voice was thick, the words broken with grunts and panting breaths. “You want dick so much you’ll beg for it. You want dick so much you’ll crawl for it. You want dick so much you won’t just lie there and take it; you’ll get up and fuck yourself on the closest one. John-Henry Somerset, goddamn chief of police. What would people say if they could see you now?”
It didn’t build or sharpen or crest. It hit him at once, every muscle tightening, a guttural noise escaping him as he shot his load all over Hazard’s chest. Hazard’s back arched, and he humped up into Somers, growling. It was forever. And then it was over, and Somers remembered again the island, the ocean, the hatchet blows of the waves at the horizon, the backwash leaving him with the realization that there was no such thing as solid ground.
Then he was sobbing. He was distantly aware of Hazard’s questions, of the bigger man’s hesitant, cautious attempts to separate them, and then he was lying down, his face buried in Hazard’s chest, big arms tight around him.
“John, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
The murmured apologies kept coming, Hazard’s fingers stroking his shoulder, the back of his neck. After a while, Somers could draw a few wet breaths one after another. And then, after a little longer, he wiped his face on the pillow and rubbed his eyes. He had to talk himself up to opening them; when he did, Hazard’s frozen amber was staring back.
“Sorry,” Somers said, a wry smile cracking before he could get it settled. “That was a lot.”
“No, John, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking—”
Somers shook his head, and Hazard cut off. The air came on; the ductwork in the old house made its familiar booming noise and then quieted again. “God,” Somers said, dropping his forehead against Hazard’s chest. A loose laugh slipped out of him. “How am I going to explain it when I show up in a wheelchair tomorrow?”
But Hazard didn’t laugh. His fingers curled around Somers’s nape, too tight.
“I’m fine, honestly,” Somers said to the unasked question. “It was a lot, like I said, but I’m fine. Maybe better than fine. That was weirdly cathartic. Or maybe not weirdly, I guess. Looks like I’ve still got some work to do there.”
“I shouldn’t have said—”
“Ree, please. It was hot. Clearly, I reacted pretty damn strongly to it. And I know what you were doing. I need some time to process, well, a lot of things; that’s all.” He pulled back, met Hazard’s gaze, and said, “I love you.”
“I love you too.”
Somers kissed him. When he pulled back, he said, “A few notes, though.”
“I’m getting notes?”
The grin came easier this time. “One, I definitely need to do more squats.”
“Interesting, because the last time I asked you if you wanted to go to the gym, you told me, quote, ‘I promised I’d help Colt with his homework,’ and when I got back, the two of you were an hour and a half into your Back to the Future marathon.”
“Two,” Somers said, the smile bigger now, making his cheeks ache. “We’re officially old people now. It’s missionary only for the rest of our lives.”
“Nice fucking try.”
“And three, I need you to go put the ladder outside our window, because that’s how I’ll be coming and going from the house since I can never look our son in the face again.”
In the darkness, Hazard’s smirk was white and winging. “I asked him to sleep downstairs.”
Somers sagged against his chest. “Oh, thank God.”
“I had a feeling something like this might happen.”
“Thank you, Jesus God.”
“He made a lot of throwing up noises, and I had to agree to buy him that stupid video game he wanted.”
“You are perfect. You are the perfect man. Have I ever told you that?”
“This sex is going to cost me sixty dollars, John. That’s coming out of your clothing allowance.”
Propping himself on an elbow, Somers considered his husband. He reached out to brush aside the longish, wavy dark hair. Hazard watched him until Somers whispered, “I love you. I really do. I wish I’d been brave enough to be this person a long time ago.”
“I love you too, John. Now, let’s go to sleep so you can still fit in a full REM cycle before you need to get up for work.”
It was even better in its own way, Somers thought, that Hazard genuinely had no idea why he started laughing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
MAY 22
FRIDAY
8:25 AM
AFTER PACKING HIS HUSBAND off to work and his son off to his last day of school, Hazard decided to treat himself. Instead of going straight to the office, he gave himself an hour for a quick clean: straightening the pillows on the sofa, depositing the million water bottles that Colt had left lying on every available surface in the recycling, tossing shoes and clothes up the stairs, loading the dishwasher, wiping down the counters, cleaning out the fridge. When he caught himself turning the chairs upside down to clean the legs and the bottom of the seat, he realized he might be stalling.
He opened up Instagram and searched for the Wildcat Tea account. True to his word, Colt had gotten the posts about Gwen removed; Hazard had trusted his son to do the right thing (eventually), but it never hurt to verify. And, just to be safe, Hazard followed the account. He wanted to know if Colt had any more genius ideas about using social media to leverage a relationship with his we’re-not-boyfriends-but-we-literally-sleep-on-top-of-each-other-on-Saturday-afternoons, which was probably a whole new color they needed to put on the progress flag.
The problem, of course, was that he knew he needed to let Loretta Ames’s death go. Ayelet and Ruff were gone, back in Manhattan. Derrick Sturgis was dead. From everything Somers had told him, the evidence verified the alibis that their suspects had given. And while Hazard could, for example, watch the surveillance footage again, trying to find something that everyone else had missed, he knew in his gut he’d be wasting his time. This wasn’t like the case from several months ago, when Palomo’s eagerness had made her overlook a crucial piece of evidence. There were two law enforcement agencies working this case, and multiple sets of eyes had looked at every piece of evidence validating their suspects’ alibis.
Their suspects.
The thought came so clearly and suddenly that Hazard almost dropped the chair he was righting. He set it down, turned, started to walk, turned again, walked some more, barely aware of his ambling as he tried to catch up with his own thoughts.
Their suspects. The Wahredua PD and the sheriff’s department had both spent God only knew how many hours examining the video footage available to confirm that their suspects had been where they claimed to be. But nobody, as far as Hazard knew, had looked at video recording to follow their victim’s movements.
