Last Line (6 page)

“Nn-nn. I did a flit.”

“Oh. John, for God’s sake.” A passing drunk buffeted him. John smiled, caught the offender and set him back on his feet, but Michael saw that he’d paled still further. He put out a protective arm. “Come here.” Installing him on Diane’s vacated stool, he mimed to the bartender for two more vodkas. “What were you worried about me for? I didn’t drop off a thirty-foot balcony today.”

“No, you didn’t. But I’ve never seen any man more…entirely freaked out than you were by the time we got done in there.” John frowned, his gaze becoming diagnostic. “Than you still are.”

Michael looked away. “Are you surprised?” he asked uncomfortably. “I thought you were dead.”

“Not about me. I mean—yes, about me, and thank you. But about that guy in the church. That was your mum’s language you were speaking to him, wasn’t it? That dialect?”

“Yeah. I knew him, that was all. I knew where he came from.”

John picked up his glass. “Ugh. What’s that? You drink like a bloody Russian peasant, you know. Do you want to tell me about him?”

I met him in a clearing in the woods. I stood by and watched my comrade shoot him; then I ran in and murdered the people he was trying to protect
. “No. There’s nothing to tell.”

He watched John settle back on his stool. He understood, with plunging relief, that he wasn’t going to push it. Michael could rely on his discretion in such matters. Christ, he could rely on him for everything. Heat flickered through him. The fifth vodka had made a difference, finally. “John,” he began, then had no idea where to take the sentence and fell silent, clenching his hands on the bar.

“You can’t come down, can you?”

Michael shivered. It was so quietly observed. John hadn’t moved or taken his eyes off him. Michael couldn’t meet his gaze, but it felt like green gold seawater around him. “What…what do you mean?”

“It’s all still banging round inside you. Everything that happened today. You feel…hot on the inside, like your skin’s a few sizes too small. You’d rip it off if you could.”

Michael lowered his head. He ran his fingers into his hair. “What the hell do you know about it?”

“Everything, mate. I’m the only one who
can
know.”

“Stop it.”

“I will. Listen to me for one moment; then I’ll get up and walk out of here, and if you don’t follow—everything’s the same, okay? You’re my partner. My best friend.”

“
John
…”

“Or come home and sleep it off with me. You can fuck me through the mattress and into the bloody basement, or I can do the same for you, or we can do both. It’s safe. I can bring you down.”

Michael didn’t move. For almost thirty seconds he sat where he was, fingertips pressing painfully tight into his scalp. The air became empty around him. When he finally looked up, John was gone.

He got to his feet. He had to keep one hand on the edge of the bar while he did so; the room was lurching around him. Then he sat down again—long enough to grab his jacket and drape it over his arm, a frail concealment but the only one available. He was an aching mass of need from the waist down. Away on the far side of the crowded bar, the door to the outside was closing. Swallowing, the breath beginning to rasp in his throat, Michael followed.

* * *

“My place, not yours. Okay?”

John glanced out of the window. The purr of Michael’s BMW had soothed him. He hadn’t noticed that they’d gone past the turning for Islington and were heading into Highgate. It was fine with John. He’d never got far enough in his fantasies of this night to endow them with a location. “Okay.”

“Too many windows. And no walls.”

John smiled. He hadn’t been about to ask. He could see how a stylish open-plan loft apartment might not suit their purposes. Only the loft-dwellers next door and passing jets could see in, but they could see everything. He inched down the BMW’s passenger window and took deep breaths of the warm, petrol-laced London night as his dreams acquired their backdrop. Michael’s white-facade Regency terrace, where you could murder someone or shout yourself mute with orgasmic yelling, and no one would be any the wiser. Thick walls, high ceilings. A place built for human habitation, not—as Mike had observed of the Islington loft—the packaging of meat. Not looking, he reached across and laid a hand on Michael’s thigh. “
Okay
. Jesus, pull off behind the bus depot and we’ll do it there if you like. I just want you.”

He waited for Michael’s laughter or his groan of disgust. But all he felt was a flicker of tension in the muscle where his palm was resting. Helplessly he thought of a caged, restless lion flicking a fly off its skin, and he withdrew his hand, wondering at the image. Cautiously he observed his partner. His hands were quiet on the wheel, but their knuckles were white. His profile was set. A trickle of unease went down the back of John’s neck. It hardly stood a chance against the cauldron of arousal farther south, but it was unexpected. He hadn’t painted for himself the prelude to this encounter any more than he’d bothered with where it would go down. If asked, though, he would have sworn that he and Mike would have tumbled into bed in the same spirit that informed all their days out of it. Laughing, ripping the piss. John swallowed drily. He’d have banked on affection. “Are you all right?”

Mike’s dark gaze didn’t leave the road. “Fine.”

“Because…this can just be John getting drunk and hitting on you again. Nothing has to happen.”

“But you’re sober, aren’t you?”

John thought about it. The rough Russian vodka was dancing with his painkillers, but he’d only had the one. One more than Michael would normally let him combine with medication, he reflected. They were pulling up in Kingsborough Crescent, an elegant urban backwater quiet at this time of night, empty but for parked cars and leaf-dappled streetlight. Whatever they were discussing—and John was no longer sure—it would have to reach conclusion soon. “Yeah,” he said. “Sober enough.”

Michael stopped the BMW outside an elegant three-floor terrace whose steps led to a pillared doorway. The building was very
him
, John had always thought. Little by way of decoration but lovely lines. He had often experienced a frisson of excitement just from running up the steps to meet him on a Monday morning.

The hand brake ratcheted up, breaking his contemplation. Michael was staring grimly at the dash. “Well, I’m not,” he announced. “In fact I…had four of those filthy peasant vodkas before you even arrived. Then I bought you one—on top of what I imagine is a skinful of meds—jumped into a car and drove you home.”

This recitation very nearly struck John as funny. He bit the reaction back. “Okay,” he said cautiously. “Put like that, it’s…out of character for you, yeah.”

“Out of character? It’s fucking unforgivable.”

“You didn’t force the drink down my throat. And I’m not condoning drunk driving, mate, but today was a bit of a one-off, wasn’t it?”

“Don’t make excuses for me. I should call a taxi for you, send you home out of my way.”

John inhaled softly. He put his hand back where it had been, on the powerful curve of Michael’s thigh. A little higher this time, to leave no room for doubt. This time the muscle remained firm and still under his palm. He said, “Yes. You could do that. If you want.”

* * *

His spine impacted hard against the wall. The blow drove breath from his lungs. He was glad, because if he had developed some kind of immortality when it came to falling off buildings, he was still human enough to bruise, and he was sore as hell. Being winded meant he couldn’t yell in pain. If he did, Michael would stop. John knew—he was completely certain—that Michael would crash to a halt at his least sound of discomfort.

The last thing John wanted. He had got him here, the beast unleashed and in his arms at last. He gritted his teeth and hauled him tight for his next urgent thrust. He’d already torn him out of his jacket. The shirt could go next. Ripping at the buttons, John lifted his face to intercept the hot mouth exploring the side of his neck. The pleasure of that—kissing Michael, though right now it felt more like a mutual devouring—wiped out even the memory of pain. “Mikey, yeah,” he grunted when he could. “Getting so hard.”

“Shut up.”

John gasped. Something in him was shocked, but his cock had leaped at the growled command, and if Michael wanted to play it strong and silent, that was fine with him. Had he spoken at all since their collision over the BMW’s hand brake ten minutes before? John wasn’t sure. The time was a blur to him. They must have made it up the steps and to the top floor somehow. Cameras in the foyer and the lift must have restrained them. Yes, he vaguely recalled standing waiting by the old wrought iron doors for the cage, Michael beside him. Both of them burningly silent.

There was no need now. The new recruits’ flats were bugged, but not, Sir James had assured them, those of trusted senior agents. John threw his arms round Michael’s neck and groaned as strong hands closed on his backside, lifting him, grinding their stiff shafts together in the prison of their clothes. Weird. He’d have pegged Mike as a talker in the sack, or a listener anyway, wanting to hear his lover’s response.

The wall behind him changed to thin air. John fought dizzily for balance. Michael had swung him around, barely set him on his feet again before beginning to back him up, step by step, through the nearest doorway. The bedroom? Passion had fogged the familiar geography, and the place was in darkness, only picked out by alarm-pad lights, TV stand-by, the phone, a spinning constellation of weird stars. Clinging to him, John let himself be borne into unknown space. The fact was that this treatment, brusque and painful as it was, was going to make him come like helpless Armageddon very soon. “Mike, slow up. At least get my pants off.”

“Oh, I will. Wait there.”

The edge of something banged into John’s back. Not the bed or any of the furniture in Michael’s room… He was suddenly released, grabbing at the object’s cold edge to stay upright.

The kitchen table. Breathing hard, John watched his partner turn and stride calmly off into the hallway. He heard the sound of a drawer opening and closing somewhere in the flat, and then Michael was back, a panther-like darkness cut out of the doorway. John could see only the glimmer of his eyes, catching amber from the streetlights. “This gonna be it, then?” he asked hoarsely. “Here in the kitchen?”

“Yes,” Michael said. His voice was bleak. “Right here.”

John could have stopped him. A word would have done it. Less—this was Michael, who knew he had an itch before he reached to scratch it. Michael of a thousand dangerous city days. He could have read a muscle twitch in John that said he wasn’t ready to be fucked facedown across his kitchen table.

John knew this. And yet for a few bitter seconds he also knew he would regret trying him—knew he had better keep any protests or twitches to himself. Pain lanced through him, even while he squirmed out of his jeans, letting those and his briefs be roughly yanked down round his thighs. What had he expected—hearts and flowers?

Yes. At least those. This was Michael, who had wept to think that he was dead.

Michael’s fingers, lube-soaked, found the entrance to his body. John’s mind went gloriously blank. “Oh
yes
,” he whispered. Two fingers, hot and strong, broached his rim, and he stretched out on the table’s cool oak surface, groaning. The pressure inside him mounted, then withdrew a little. Knuckles caressed his anus from the inside in a circling motion that pulled a wail of pleasure from him. He clenched on the intrusion, writhing. “Mike, you bastard…” More lube, a third finger, and a reach inside that woke his prostate.

He shoved up onto his elbows. His body was beginning preorgasmic cramps, hot contractions in his balls and the root of his cock where it was painfully trapped. He could resist them for a while, but once the deeper rhythm started, he would be lost. In another world, he’d have Michael do him like this, put his hand up there and fist him unconscious, but now he knew he’d better court his fate before it overtook him uninvited. He could feel Michael’s shaft pushing hard against his arse. “Don’t make me come like this. Fuck me.”

Rubber. Flinging a hand back to welcome and guide him—Christ, not that he needed either—John’s fingers brushed the steel-cold buttons of Michael’s open fly and then a length of condom-sheathed cock. Already it was burrowing into his body. Snatching his hand away, he slammed it to the table’s surface. God, he was big! Shuddering, fists clenching and flattening, John heaved back against him. He wouldn’t have asked him to wear a condom. Somehow, stupidly, hadn’t expected him to put one on unasked. Why? Michael wasn’t a saint. And if things had been the other way round, John might have wanted—Michael thrust hard, and the thought disintegrated in John’s mind, patching itself back together in rags—he’d have wanted to wear three of the damn things, with his track record…

Another thrust, this one big enough to slam John flat, impaled. He felt a new depth in him open. His mouth stretched soundlessly. To his ecstasy and desolation, Mike clenched a fist in his hair, yanking his head back, and without another second’s warning, John came, shooting his load violently against the table’s edge.

He hadn’t meant to. It had felt like detonation, not a climax. Sucking breath back into his lungs, he fought to brace up, not to melt into inertia as Michael took serious hold of him and began to fuck him hard. He didn’t know John had gone over, did he? And John couldn’t tell him—for want of breath, partly, and out of shame too, for bursting like a randy kid so soon. At least Michael’s arms were around him now, the cable-cord muscle tight across his belly and over his chest. The shove of his hips, the hot tight friction of his body, sent flowers of pain blooming up and down John’s bruised spine, but to be held like this—yes, that was some part of how he’d dreamed it. The embrace would carry him through being screwed this hard on the wrong side of climax.

No. Not the wrong side. John cried out, a wild, incredulous moan. Almost a protest, as against all odds and all his experience of what his flesh could do, excitement rose in him again. “
Jesus
,” he rasped. He spread his feet, got a grip on the floor and fought back hard enough to free his cock. Felt it leap, still semen-soaked, rising stiff into his hand. The savage motion of Michael’s hips, the twisting bloody earthquake it was causing inside, became too much. He bore down, a terrible involuntary spasm as if he would thrust him out, and he came again, convulsing in his embrace.