Fish Out of Water (29 page)

“I turned on the air conditioner,” Ellery said, propping his chin on his palm. “It gets
hot
in here!”

Jackson nodded. He sheened with sweat, and even though the light was off and the drape was over the sliding glass door, he could tell Ellery was the same.

“Not really in a cuddling sort of place,” he warned.

“No cuddles, then.” Ellery smiled, all teeth. “Come here and talk to me.”

“We keep playing this game!”

Ellery nodded. “And we keep getting better. Think about it. Right now we know that we need to show each other our favorite movies, we both have a borderline unhealthy attachment to our families, and we could definitely take a vacation together in the future. That’s more than some people know after months of dating.”

“We also know that Jackson is a needy, whiny baby,” Jackson muttered, hating himself, “and that he apparently likes to bottom.”

“So is Ellery.” He dimpled. “And he
loves
to bottom.” His smile faded. “But he’s also usually a selfish bastard, and if he sees a chance to give something—something needed—he’s going to do that and feel good about himself.”

Reluctantly Jackson let a smile twist his lips. “You feel pretty good about yourself, do you?”

Ellery patted the bed. “Come here,” he ordered softly. “Come here and talk to me. We’re going to think of not-awful things right now and touch each other really, really gently. And we’re going to pretend you have some hope that when Kaden is out of danger and your family is safe, you and me can be a thing.”

Jackson sighed, and a part of him gave in. He threw himself across the bed and let the overhead fan do its best to dry the sweat on his skin.

“We’re a thing,” he admitted reluctantly. “I mean, you’re going to have to go home sometime—”

“I’ll come back,” Ellery promised readily.

Jackson scowled at him. “Until the day that you don’t. I’m not stupid, I know how this works.”

“Jackson—”

“But, you know, until that happens, I’ll stop trying to make you go.”

Ellery sighed and reached out hesitantly and started pushing Jackson’s thick, curly blond hair back from his forehead. “That’s acceptable,” he said humbly. “But I mean, you’re right. I’ve seen your mother—not met, really, but—”

“It was a mercy,” Jackson said darkly.

“So I gather. But can you tell me in actual words what makes
you
so reluctant to start a relationship? I mean, I can hazard lots of guesses, and they might even all be right. But I want to hear you say it.”

“Why?”

“Because words are my business, Jackson. Arguing is my business. When it’s just a big silent wall, it’s hard to fight. When you break it down to words….”

Against his better judgment, Jackson felt hope. “You’re a defense attorney. I get it. Ellery Cramer, defend our life!”

Ellery’s smile glinted in the dim little room. “I fully intend to,” he said. He brushed his fingertips against Jackson’s cheek, and the air conditioner kicked on. Both of them shivered, and Ellery dropped his arm and lay down parallel to Jackson, so they were face-to-face and could talk.

“I don’t really know how to do this unscripted,” Jackson warned.

Ellery touched his face again and then walked his fingers down Jackson’s shoulder. “Okay. So let me do what I do best.”

“Talk?”

Ellery finished up his finger walk with a kiss so gentle, Jackson’s skin puckered with the chill of the touch. “Bingo.” He kissed again, and again, teasingly but not quite hard enough to arouse, and Jackson found himself giving in to the moment, relaxing into the mattress and simply allowing himself to be touched.

Ellery’s lips skated his bullet scars, and his tongue traced the edges of each one. Jackson grunted and breathed deeply, fighting not to shake him off. Lots of people had touched the scars—one freaky chick had even gotten off on them—but this was different. This was
accepting
the scars, and Jackson wasn’t sure he could endure it.

“Talk to me,” Ellery whispered.

“You keep telling me that, but I don’t know what—”

“Okay. When did you know you were bi?”

Jackson thought about it, smiled. “Jade and I… we’d been together for about four years. We sort of knew… you know. Not lasting forever. I asked her who she’d want to date if she wasn’t dating me. She told me… who was it? Tomas Serrano. Yeah. He was cute. Big puppy-dog eyes, full lips. One of those kids who could grow a mustache in the tenth grade and just sort of let it go all chia beard?”

“Not in prep school, but go on.”

Jackson laughed, thinking that was probably true, and Ellery kept up his gentle, seemingly random touches on Jackson’s back, his neck, his backside, his thighs.

“Anyway, I thought about Tomas and how he looked on the soccer field without his shirt, and how he was really sort of a gentle guy when we went to a shitty school, and I thought, ‘Yeah.’”

“Did you tell Jade?” Ellery asked, sounding genuinely curious.

“Of course.” Jackson shifted so he could look Ellery in the eyes. “Yeah. I didn’t keep secrets from her
or
Kaden. Jade was sort of hurt at first. I told K that it was just like seeing a pretty girl. I wasn’t going to cheat on her just because Tomas turned my key too. K smoothed it over, and Jade and I….”

He smiled. This memory was sweet.

“You’ve got to finish that sentence.”

“Well, we sort of got Tomas alone one day and asked him which one of us he wanted to kiss.”

Ellery sucked in a breath. “You’re killing me.”

“He’d never been kissed before,” Jackson said, remembering the wide-eyed curiosity. “Jade went first and….” Jackson grunted, pushing himself against the bed. “Mm. Hot.”

“And….” Ellery’s voice sounded strained.

“My turn, and Jade had gone in sort of fast and hard, so I just leaned forward, about an inch away, and told him to put his hands on my shoulders.” He could still see the bright eyes, feel Tomas’s almost panicked breaths against his mouth, smell his sweat and the wildflowers that grew behind the portable buildings. “And suddenly he’s going for it, pushing me up against the wall, sticking his tongue down my throat and grinding up against me.” The memory made him hard. “Jade moved in behind him and nibbled on his ear and his neck and then reached down his pants, and we… we just
got off
, all wearing clothes and shit. I mean, you know. Adolescent and clumsy—but
damn.
”

“Hot,” Ellery croaked, and Jackson glanced at him slyly, running a finger down the delineated line of his chest, down his pectoral, along his flank, tracking the indentation of his waist. He got to Ellery’s hip and kept tracing that line, across his hip bones and to his groin, then up his hardening cock. Ellery breathed deeply, oozing some pre, and Jackson caught it with his finger, bringing it up to his lips and sucking, hard.

“Hot,” he agreed throatily.

Ellery groaned and rolled to his stomach so they were shoulder to shoulder. “Stop seducing me,” he scolded, burying his face in the covers. “I’m looking for experiences here.”

“Well,” Jackson said, feeling sexy and sassy and in control for the first time all day, “that was quite an experience.”

“What happened?” Ellery asked. “After?”

Jackson grunted and turned his face away. “Tomas… well, he was so embarrassed the next day he couldn’t talk to either of us. And Jade, she… she told me that we’d seen the end coming, and maybe I should go see if girls were really what I wanted. I mean, they
were
. It just depended on the person, you know?”

Ellery gave a bemused chuckle. “Uh, no. When I was fifteen, I took a psychology elective—”

“Because prep school—”

“Damned straight. Anyway, so, they got to the Kinsey scale, and there was this girl I was friends with—”

“Name?” Jackson asked, knowing where this was probably going.

Ellery buried his head in his own shoulder. “I don’t remember!” he wailed. “Because I am a
terrible person
.”

Jackson laughed outright and told him to go on with his story.

“Anyway,” Ellery continued when he’d recovered from his bout of social conscience, “this girl, whatever her name was, had been hanging out with me and being my very best friend and I had no idea—”

“None?”

“Swear to God, none. And the Kinsey scale came up, and we had to do an assessment test, and of course we were supposed to keep the answers private, but everybody was bragging about how the
whole class
was a solid zero—”

“Statistically improbable,” Jackson said dryly.

Ellery cast him a foul-tempered look. “The whole way we look at the scale is statistically improbable—like the whole world is
mostly
heteronormative, with only a small percentage of gay or bisexual people? Do you
know
what the odds of that are?”

Jackson rolled his eyes. “The same as the odds of most of the people claiming they’re straight when they’re really bi? Yeah, I get it.”

Ellery’s lower lip formed
the
most adorable little pout when he was miffed. “You say that like it’s common knowledge,” he grumbled. “I thought I was the only one who thought that.”

“Nope,” Jackson said, reaching up to tap Ellery’s lip back in. Ellery stuck out his tongue to tease his finger, and Jackson snatched it back. “Not the only one. Most of the guys I’ve slept with have believed the same thing, because they’ve known about the girls. And the other way around, actually. It’s a thing. Now are you going to finish telling me about breaking this poor girl’s heart?”

“She got off lucky,” Ellery said. He rolled to his side, propping up his head again, and Jackson mirrored the pose. A part of him remembered that he and Jade had been doing the same thing less than a week ago, but that didn’t seem as important as this did. That had felt like old friends parting. They’d see each other again and still be friends.

This felt like something else. Something bigger.

It was intimate and painful, and he studied Ellery’s face in the falling darkness, almost eagerly. The bony jaw, the dark and probing eyes, the hair that fell across his brow when it wasn’t slicked back.

His heart was an Etch A Sketch, and every turn of their conversation inscribed another line, another detail in the chambers within.

He almost couldn’t breathe with the urgency of each new moment, the two of them sharing stories and breath.

“Lucky how?” Jackson asked so the story didn’t go away.

“Well, everyone was lying about being a zero, and she came and said, ‘I’m a zero, Ellery—are you one too?’”

Jackson grimaced. The impersonation hadn’t been flattering. “And….”

“And I said, ‘I’m a five, Clarissa—’
Clarissa
!
That
was her name! Anyway, ‘I’m a five, Clarissa, but that’s okay, I think your brother is hot!’”

“No!”

“I swear. I just hated everybody lying—I mean, I knew some of those boys had checked me out. There’s eye contact. You know. And I thought that in twenty years, when we all showed up with our significant others,
I
didn’t want a soul there to think I was a liar or a hypocrite or any of the other bullshit, you know?”

Jackson shook his head. “See, I just figured that if I wasn’t sleeping with someone, it wasn’t any of their fucking business.”

“Yeah. I get it. Sexual politics—not your thing.”

“No, it’s not that, it’s just personal. I was a big advocate for gay rights—even on the force when it could have been a big deal—because, yeah. Hypocrite thing. But I didn’t put on my rainbow T-shirt and parade because… because just like the government should stay out of my sex drawer—”

“Condoms and lube. That’s all you got, Jackson, I was just there.”

“And porn.”

“That must be on your computer.”

Jackson laughed wickedly. “And yes, yes it is. Anyway, as I was saying….”

In those moments, as the shadows lowered and the air conditioner dusted their skin, they talked. Jackson could remember the name of every person he’d ever slept with, and it was quite a list, but he couldn’t remember
ever
having a conversation like that one.

After an hour they got up, stretched, went to the bathroom, walking casually in their nakedness, and then came back to bed.

Jackson went first and was sitting on the bed and stretching when Ellery returned. For a breath, he paused, regarding Jackson from the doorway, the oddest smile on his face.

“What?” Jackson asked. “Ugly naked?” He crossed his arms in front of his scars, self-conscious for the first time in recent memory, but Ellery shook his head and walked gracefully to the bed.

“No,” he said softly, bending down and putting his hands on Jackson’s shoulders. “Beautiful naked.”

Jackson raised his face and closed his eyes like a virgin sacrifice, of all things.

But when Ellery’s mouth lowered to his, he felt blessed, and as they fell into the bed, the feeling grew stronger. Ellery rolled to his back this time, spread his legs, arched against Jackson in wordless need, and Jackson had always been good at giving.

He slid the condom on and sank into Ellery’s body like it was home, and Ellery tilted his head back, closing his eyes and gasping like Jackson’s cock invading his flesh was the sweetest thing he could beg for.

That moment froze, maybe for both of them, and Jackson held his breath, wanting that picture of Ellery locked behind his eyes forever. He was beautiful and strong and elegant and brilliant, and he was giving himself to Jackson of his own free will.

When Jackson started to move again, thrusting gentle and slow, Ellery smiled, and his eyes fluttered open.

“Fuck me, Jackson. Take me fucking hard. I want to remember your cock in my ass for
years
.”

“
Yessss
….”

He wanted that too.

THERE WAS
a sharp rap on the door at eight in the morning—then five of them, no bullshit—and Jackson sighed, wiped the drool from his mouth, slid out from under Ellery’s possessive arm at his waist, and hopped into his jeans.

The cat moved up from the foot of the bed to bogart Jackson’s spot, and Ellery curved into him.