The Island (23 page)

Shaw wanted more. He flicked his tongue against Lee’s nipple and, half afraid of the consequences, bit down quickly.

Lee cried out and arched farther against him. Surprise flashed through his eyes.

“You like that,” Shaw said before Lee’s brain jumped to unpleasant associations. “Feels good.”

Lee dropped back, trembling. “Fuck me, Shaw, please.”

There it was. A breathy demand. Lee
wanted
, and it was beautiful.

Shaw licked Lee’s throat and nipped at the muscle between his neck and shoulder. This time Lee’s gasp was all pleasure, and at last his hands knew where they were supposed to be. They slipped around Shaw, his fingers digging so hard into his back that Shaw knew he’d have bruises in the morning. And it would be totally fucking worth it.

Shaw felt the moment that Lee gave himself fully. His body pushed against Shaw’s, desperate for skin-on-skin contact. His legs hooked around Shaw. He began to raise himself up to meet each thrust. And he pulled Shaw’s head down and gasped into his ear: “
Fuck. Oh, Shaw. Fuck
.”

Shaw knew he wouldn’t last much longer. He reached between them and gripped Lee’s cock. It pulsed as soon as he touched it, and Shaw felt Lee shudder as he came. He threw his head back, clenched convulsively around Shaw’s cock, and Shaw laved his throat with his tongue. Lee’s whole body shook, but he didn’t let go.

Shaw thrust again and felt his balls contract. His muscles tensed, froze, and then he came as well. He sagged down onto Lee, and their sweaty bodies slid against one another as they carefully disengaged.

Shaw lay on his side and pulled Lee into his embrace. Lee was slippery with sweat and cum, and his skin was flushed. Shaw slipped his arms around his back and kissed him gently.

“That was good,” Lee murmured.

Shaw ran his tongue across Lee’s bottom lip. “It was.”

“Thank you,” Lee said.

Shaw smiled slightly, thinking of that time in the shower. “Should be me thanking you.”

Lee tilted his chin and kissed Shaw’s jawline. “Can we do that again?”

“Give me a minute,” Shaw murmured.

Lee laughed softly and poked him in the ribs. “I mean before we get to Sydney?”

Try and stop me
, Shaw wanted to say but couldn’t. There was too much off limits with Lee, and most of it was Shaw’s favorite dirty talk: I want to fuck you senseless. I can make you beg. I can make you
scream
.

He squeezed Lee’s hand as regret spread through him. “That’s probably not a great idea, Lee, is it?”

Lee’s face was unreadable in the darkness. “Oh. Okay.”

Shaw held Lee as he drifted off to sleep at last, and wondered what the hell he was thinking.

* * * *

One step forward and two steps back. Lee was never far from breaking.

Lee winced as the doctor unwound the bandages around his wrists, and clamped his mouth tightly shut.

Shaw, leaning in the doorway, wondered how long it would take until Lee unlearned what Vornis had taught him. How long until he stopped forcing down his pain responses? How long until he realized that allowing himself to show weakness didn’t mean inviting more pain?

You’re an asshole, Shaw. You shouldn’t have touched him. Not when he’s still a broken thing
.

Shaw thought of Molly. Kind words, gentle touches, and whispered endearments were all very good, but just because it had worked on a Labrador didn’t mean it would work on a human being. It just meant that he was as bad as Vornis. It just meant he thought of Lee as a dumb animal as well.

But then Lee looked up at him, and his eyes shone with the same helpless trust that Shaw had seen so many times back on the island. He was submitting to the doctor’s examination because Shaw had told him he had to, just as he’d gone quietly up to the main house on that last night. Shaw hated himself for that. It wasn’t Lee’s fault that he needed someone to trust, but it was Shaw’s fault for being a monster after all. He’d exploited Lee, just like everyone else.

I didn’t let him die. He’s grateful for that, but how long until he realizes I could have saved him at any time? I just chose not to
.

“This is healing well,” the doctor said, turning Lee’s left wrist. “It’s still infected, so we’ll put some antiseptic cream on it and bind it up again. Have you been taking your antibiotics?”

Lee looked at Shaw before he answered. “Yes, sir.”

The doctor raised his eyebrows. “Now, we’ve talked about that, son.”

Lee flushed. “Sorry. Yes, doc.”

Shaw liked the doc. He had a good bedside manner, and not just with Lee. None of the crew addressed him by his rank inside the medical bay. He was just the doc. And Lee, whether he realized it or not, responded well to the man.

“Okay,” the doc said. “Take your shirt off please, Lee.”

Lee’s fingers fumbled along the hemline of his shirt for a moment, before he drew it over his head. He hunched over slightly on the examination table, swinging his legs restlessly. He squeezed his eyes shut as the doc began to inspect the marks and bruises on his torso.

The harsh fluorescent light did him no favors. Shaw remembered the first time he’d seen Lee, his skin shining in the rain. He hadn’t noticed the bruises then, and now they were all he could see. He watched as the doc’s gloved fingers moved gently across Lee’s skin.

Shaw saw the raised puncture marks left by the wait-a-while. He saw the tiny burns from the cattle prod. He saw a scar the shape of a cigarette burn on the side of Lee’s rib cage. And he saw the mottled bruises that had faded to yellow all over him. As though he’d been a blank canvas to Vornis and the rest, and they couldn’t bear to leave a square inch of his skin unblemished. Up close, his multitude of bruises were yellow, brown, gray, and red. They were messy and random, but from a distance, they coalesced into a patina of light and shadow that defined the planes of his body. Like a postimpressionist painting. Like
The Boy in the Red Vest
.

There was a sort of sick artistry in it, Shaw thought.

Lee opened his eyes, and Shaw shot him a quick smile.
You’re okay
. Lee’s own lips quirked up gratefully, and then he squeezed his eyes shut again.

“Okay,” the doc said. “Lie down on your stomach for me, please.”

Everything was
okay
and
please
with Lee. It had to be.

Shaw watched as Lee shifted awkwardly onto his stomach. A shiver ran through his thin body. Too thin, Shaw thought; too thin and too broken.

“Good,” said the doc. He patted Lee’s shoulder gently. “Okay.”

Lee was holding himself tensely. Shaw could see him trying to force himself to relax under the doc’s hand, but he couldn’t. The muscles moving under his skin were tight. His breathing was shallow. And his hands were fisted.

Lee hissed through his teeth as the doc’s fingers touched a burn. “Shaw?”

Shaw moved forward. “It’s okay, Lee.”

Lee reached out his hand, and Shaw took it. Lee was trembling, but he gripped Shaw’s hand tightly and closed his eyes again. He frowned, and clenched his jaw.

Shaw exchanged a look with the doc and wondered if he imagined something censorious in the older man’s expression. Maybe the doc was just reading Shaw’s guilt.
I could have saved him at any time. I just chose not to
. Shaw looked down at Lee’s hand in his own.

If I’d known you, he thought.
I want to know you, but not the way you are now. You deserve better.

Shaw wasn’t a human being. Not when he was working. He was something different then. He was a machine, programmed to do a task. He reduced everything to a simple calculation: risk versus reward. And he’d seen some god-awful things in his work as well, things that the machine could witness, the machine could process, but the man couldn’t. Shaw had learned to compartmentalize everything. He had learned that there was a time and a place to feel, and it was always later, always at home, either in the debriefing or in the nearest bar with Callie. And it wasn’t the fact that Lee had got under his defenses that bothered Shaw the most. It was the fact that nothing else ever had. What the hell did that make him?

A rhetorical question. Shaw knew the answer.

“You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas,”
his mother used to say.

Shaw looked away from Lee and fixed his gaze on the eye chart on the wall.

His parents knew he worked for ASIO, but Shaw told them he was an analyst in the Sydney office. Something with computers, they assumed, and Shaw had never corrected them. They didn’t know about the work he really did in the field, the people he associated with—befriended and then betrayed because he was such a clever monster—and Shaw discovered that he shed it all like a second skin the moment he was home again. It was surprisingly easy to do. That had worried Shaw at first. He’d wondered if it made him a sociopath, but then he’d learned not to look that gift horse in the mouth. He only knew it was a very thin line that separated him from men like Vornis, and it had become increasingly blurred. But he was good at his job. That was what he clung to when he couldn’t see for all the gray areas: he was good at his job. That was all that mattered.

Somehow, Lee had changed that. Shaw had thrown away his assignment. He’d made a moral decision, and it bothered him. It bothered him that he’d made it at all—the machine knew Lee’s life wasn’t worth the intel Guterman could have provided—and it bothered him that he’d made it so late. He should have found a boat and got Lee off the island the first time it had occurred to him, the first time he’d allowed the human being to override the machine’s programming. All he’d done, in the end, was prolong Lee’s suffering.

I’m so fucking sorry, Lee
. He squeezed Lee’s hand.
I am so fucking sorry.

Lee flinched under the doc’s examination and turned his face away.

Chapter Sixteen

Two steps back. Shaw could sense the impending crisis.

“What do I say?” Lee asked in a small voice when Shaw set the laptop in front of him. He bit his lip.

Shaw raised his hand before he even realized. Raised it to touch Lee’s face, to soothe away Lee’s frown, to run his thumb along Lee’s lip until his teeth released it. And then what? Well, that was the fucking problem, wasn’t it? Neither of them knew where to stop. Shaw moved back. He sat down and leaned his elbows on the table. He smiled slightly. “I dunno, mate. Just tell them you’re okay.”

This wasn’t Shaw’s idea. This was the DEA’s idea. And Shaw thought that it was bullshit. Two days. Why couldn’t they give him two days and let him do this inside a psychologist’s office? What difference would two days make to the people who had thought Lee was dead?

Shaw was not qualified for this.

Lee squinted at the screen. He sucked in a breath. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

Shaw had read Lee’s file that morning, or at least what the DEA had passed on to Callie. Lee Anderson, twenty-two years old, DEA, Denver office. He had been born in Andover, Minnesota. Shaw had been right about his accent.

“What were you doing in Colombia, Lee?” Shaw asked him. He couldn’t imagine a Minnesota boy ending up in Colombia via Colorado. Which was a conceit, probably, because Shaw had been born in Ayr, a small town on the north Queensland coast with a population of about eight thousand. But Lee was still so young. Not the nineteen or twenty Shaw had first thought, but still young. He must have been ambitious at one point. He must have been assertive. Shaw couldn’t imagine that.

What a difference two months made. Would the people back home even recognize him?

Lee’s gaze flicked up from the screen. He looked grateful for the distraction. “
Um
, surveillance.”

“I know that.” Shaw smiled. “I meant you, specifically.”

“Oh.” Lee flushed. “I wanted to get more field work. I was on a temporary transfer to the Miami office. It was a joint operation…” He bit his lip. “Shit, I don’t know if I’m allowed to tell you any of this.”

Shaw shrugged. “Nah, I guess not. I was just curious about you. I wondered why you joined the DEA.”

“I wanted to be a cop, but…” Lee said. A shadow crossed his face and he looked away. “Doesn’t matter.”

“I wanted to be an astronaut,” Shaw told him and waited until Lee looked up again. “But it turns out we don’t have those.”

Lee rewarded him with a hesitant smile. “So you became James Bond instead?”

“Something like that,” Shaw agreed.

Somewhere under there was Lee Anderson, and Shaw was slowly drawing him to the surface. Shaw wanted to see him as a human being, just once, before it was all over. He wanted to know about his life. He wanted to know what sort of person he’d been before Vornis had broken him.

“Write your e-mail,” he said gently. “They’ve already been told you’re alive, Lee. They just want to hear it from you.”

Lee hunched over. “I don’t know what to say.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Lee said. He reached across the table and caught Lee’s hand. “Dear Mum and Dad, I’m okay. I’ll see you soon. Love, Lee.”

“Mum,” Lee said and snorted with amusement. “
Mum!
”

Shaw felt his breath catch in his throat. Was that the first time he’d heard anything like a laugh from Lee? Jesus, he wanted to hear it again! He raised his eyebrows. “Are you taking the piss out of my accent?”

“
Mum
,” Lee muttered and then laughed.

Shaw laughed as well. “Okay,
Mom
.”

He saw the moment Lee sank into himself again. The light faded from his eyes, and he pulled his hand away. He hunched his shoulders and stared at the screen of the laptop. “Yeah. Do you think I should say that? Do you think I should say I’m okay?”

Shaw forced an encouraging smile. “I think that’s enough for an e-mail. I think anything else you need to tell them should be done face-to-face.”

“I guess,” Lee said. He closed his eyes for a brief moment. “I didn’t think I’d see them again. I was sort of glad.”

Shaw didn’t say anything. He wondered if Lee was waiting for him to condemn him, to call him selfish or deluded, but Shaw didn’t believe in black and white. Shaw existed in shades of gray. Other men painted themselves into idealistic corners, but never Shaw.