PsyCop 4: Secrets (13 page)

On the way home, Lisa and I stopped at a big-box store that was open until eleven so that she could grab a couple of outfits and a pair of shoes. Lisa was as picky about shopping for clothes as I am, which meant that nothing would probably fit her very well, but we were out of that store within twenty minutes. That was fine by me. I’d never been in the ladies’ section before, and I didn’t realize that “cleanup in Aisle Six” involved a repeater with a bullet hole in her face.

Once we got out of there, we hit a fast food drive through and scored five extra-large fries.

Lisa made me promise not to tell anyone. I found the idea of anybody caring whether or not I lived on fries to be ridiculous and couldn’t see why she’d think it was embarrassing, but I agreed just to make her feel better.

Jacob’s car was in front of the cannery when we got back. I pulled up behind it, relieved that he hadn’t felt the need to stop off anywhere before he came home. He’d even had time to shovel the walk, which meant he’d left Rosewood shortly after we had.

I said goodnight to Lisa and went right up to the bedroom. Jacob was reading in bed, some tattered Stephen King paperback that looked about ready to disintegrate, with nothing on but a pair of plaid flannel lounge pants. His feet were bare.

I stared at those sexy bare feet of his and recalled that I was pissed off at him. Or I had been, a few hours ago—before Irene and the green gelatin and the head in the elevator.

Maybe everything else that’d happened that night had crowded my anger out. Or maybe the emotion had flared hot and sputtered out as soon as I’d vented it.

I looked up at Jacob’s face and saw he’d pressed the open book against his chest to mark his page. He watched me watching him over the top.

“You lied to me all week,” I reminded him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Did he look sorry? He was all big-eyed and sincere—but maybe too sincere. I’m sure he knew how hot he was and how much he could get away with. “I thought you wouldn’t be able to handle talking about anything that had to do with a hospital or a clinic. Obviously, I was wrong.”

I hung my shoulder holster off the dresser drawer knob, then sat on the edge of the bed and untied my shoes. I really, really wanted to fight, but how could I when I’d thought the same thing? Blind rage was the sole reason I’d made it past Rosewood’s front doors. If I’d thought about it at all I probably would’ve just waited to ambush Jacob in the parking lot.

“I only saw one ghost there,” I told him. “Not that I did a thorough sweep or anything.”

“Scary?”

“Yeah. But maybe that had more to do with the stuff he walked through than anything else. He was one of those really solid ones who look like they’re alive.” The blankets rustled behind me as Jacob settled himself. His book clunked to the floor.

“Tell me,” he said. I realized his voice was a little too quiet, like he was straining to be casual about it. But no, of course it was no casual thing. Ghost stories at bedtime were the stuff of wet dreams for him.

I glanced back at him. He’d rolled onto his side and inched toward the center of the gigantic bed. His head was propped up on one fist and he was all ears. Well, probably something else, too, but I didn’t look there. There wouldn’t have been any definition in those flannel pajama bottoms, anyway.

“Well, let’s see. It was an older black guy. He probably wasn’t too pretty in life. His clothes were all ragged and his hair was in dreads. He came at me fast and gave me this look.” I took another peek at Jacob. He was so focused on me that he wouldn’t have noticed if the roof caved in. I stripped off my shirt, pants and socks and left them wadded on the floor. It wasn’t exactly balmy in the room, so I pulled the comforter up over both of us after I got into bed. I rolled onto my side and mirrored Jacob’s position, facing him. I stared into his eyes. I’d caught him in a lie. Maybe he wasn’t so much smarter than me. Or maybe I wasn’t nearly as stupid as I’d thought.

I slipped a hand between his thighs. It felt hot between his legs, and the flannel was soft, a nice contrast to the boulder-like musculature of Jacob’s quads. “You know what was really weird?” I said, and I totally milked it, baiting him for all I was worth.

I swear, he was so jazzed that his pupils looked blown. “What?” I dragged my hand higher until my thumb grazed his balls. Jacob gasped, but his eyes were still trained on mine.

“This guy….” I rocked my thumb against Jacob’s sack and felt his nuts shift. “I dunno. Do I really wanna tell you?”

Jacob’s breathing went shallow, and he was trying so hard to hold still, to give nothing away, that he trembled a little bit. I’d hit a nerve.

I stopped teasing with my thumb and held his balls. Jacob bent his top knee, planted his foot on the mattress, and spread his legs. I rolled his balls together gently, felt the flannel grow taut as Jacob’s cock stiffened. “Think you can handle it,” I said, “knowing this freak’s wandering around on your case?”

“Tell me,” he said.

The realization that he was actually vulnerable, actually needy, hit me like a ton of bricks.

I’d always figured that Jacob didn’t need anything. He wanted things, sure. But what Jacob wanted, Jacob got. He walked up to it and took it. The thing is, all the confidence, all the charm in the world, would never make him psychic. He could take a handful of psyactives, wash them down with Jack Daniels and turn the GhosTV up to eleven and he still wouldn’t see anything. And there I was, taunting him about it.

He deserved it. He’d been lying to me all week.

“Strip,” I told Jacob. He kicked off his pajama bottoms in no time flat. I pushed his hip and he rolled onto his back. He stared at me with a look that was intense, even for him. I got between his legs and left my boxers on. I was dog-tired and not even that aroused—not physically, anyway—but I couldn’t seem to keep my hands off Jacob, to see how much I could make him need me.

I ran my thumb from the base of his cock to the underside of the head, and his breath caught. “I was with Lisa in the elevators when I saw this guy,” I said. I wrapped my fingers around Jacob’s cock and started pumping it.

His breath went shaky. He was way too turned on to only be responding to the way I was touching him. I’d hardly even given him a few pulls. I licked the first two fingers of my left hand and then slid them under Jacob’s balls to wet his hole. His eyes almost rolled back in his head, but he didn’t let them. He was too set on watching me talk ghost.

“He came at us fast, right as the elevator doors shut. I thought he was real, but the doors kept on closing, ‘til he was nothing but a head. A fucking head. Right there in front of us.”

Jacob’s hips jumped. His cock was totally stiff, and his ass begged for something to fuck it. Holy shit. This was why Jacob got off on watching me get fucked. I could get used to being begged.

I wet my fingers again and pressed them in. Jacob broke eye contact because he couldn’t keep from squeezing his eyelids shut, his face twisted in a hot sex-grimace. And his ass.

Fuck. His ass. He’s so tight and hot inside, and I could feel every pull I gave to his cock twitching through to his ass. He held his breath. He was already close.

“I still hadn’t read him as ghost, you know? It all happened in maybe a second. But then the head moved. It slid down the seam of the doors, and I thought for sure some homeless fuck had just decapitated himself in front of me.” Jacob groaned. He flexed his hips and pressed his stiff cock into my hand harder, faster, while his ass pulled at my fingers. I buried them down to the last knuckles.

“As the elevator went up, his head kept sliding down.” I folded my body over Jacob’s hips while I finger-fucked him and jacked him off. The blankets covered both us completely, but enough light shone through that we could read each others’ expressions. Jacob looked like he was ready to shoot. His eyes were wide, cheeks flushed, and mouth open as he struggled to get enough air.

I laid a lick across the bottom of his ribs just because I could reach, and maybe to panic him a little into thinking that I’d decided I was through talking.

I looked back up and made sure he was looking me in the eye, and then I let my voice drop and go all campfire-ghost-story. “The whole time his head slid down that crack, he was staring me right in the eye.”

I kept my fingers pressed in deep and stroked Jacob’s cock hard and fast. He grabbed for my head when he came, held me by the hair while he made sure that neither one of us looked away. The orgasm dragged a wordless noise from his throat, and his ass pulsed around my fingers while he shot. His hot jiz painted his belly and my chest, string after string, four giant spurts. Once his cock was spent, I squeezed a final drop of come from it, and his body went limp. He let go of my hair and allowed his arms to drop down on either side of him, tangling us both in the comforter. His breath hissed when I pulled my fingers out of his ass, but other than that, he was practically in a coma.

I didn’t want to marinate in his jiz, so I kicked at the blanket until I’d carved out a spot at Jacob’s side where I could press up against him. He was still catching his breath.

I laid my cheek against his chest and wondered why it’d taken me so long to figure out that Jacob had never been looking for me to parrot his dirty-talk back to him. He was turned on by my own special brand of sick. Was that as kinky as I thought it was?

“C’mere.” Jacob grabbed for me, half asleep. He pressed his bellyful of sticky come against me. “Fuck my face.”

My cock perked up. It was tempting. That goatee of his looks even sweeter when it’s wrapped around my hard-on. But I was worried that I’d lose the rare moment of understanding I was having if I took Jacob up on his offer. “I’ll take a rain check,” I told him, though I wasn’t sure what the world was coming to if I preferred quiet reflection to a blow job.

“Aw, come on,” he said, but he was so drowsy he sounded drunk.

I peeled myself off Jacob well enough to stretch across his chest and turn off his reading lamp. He was already snoring by the time the light went out. As I lay back down, I stuffed the comforter in between us so that I didn’t find myself stuck to Jacob like flypaper in the morning. What did I care? It wasn’t my job to do the laundry.

I should probably tell Lisa to leave it for Jacob, though. Three brothers or not.

Jacob was gone by the time I woke up the next morning with the comforter stuck to my chest. Nice. I called Bob Zigler, and he didn’t care much one way or another if I took a personal day. He had a ton of paperwork to do on the frozen cat lady, and it was probably a lot easier for him to do it without me sitting across the desk from him making paper clip sculptures.

I cleaned myself up in the minuscule half-bath next to the bedroom and wondered if it’d be possible to get a shower put in upstairs. The cannery’s last owner, an artist who was eligible for the fifty-cent senior coffee at McDonald’s, probably never needed to think about wandering past her houseguests covered in dried semen. But Jacob and I had some practical considerations to mull over if people were going to be showing up on our doorstep.

Given that there was no blushing or awkwardness as Lisa and I filled our travel mugs, I figured that I had been quiet enough the night before. And that Lisa didn’t find it weird that the water had been running in the upstairs sink for nearly fifteen minutes.

We each scarfed down a piece of toast on our way out the door. “Does it still look like a bite?” I asked Lisa. I tilted my head to give her a good look at my neck.

“Uh-huh.”

“Damn.”

“You could put foundation over it.”

“Um. No. I’m not wearing your makeup to work.” I went into the downstairs bathroom—

the one with the shower—and stuck a bandage over the bite mark.

“My sister and me, when we had hickeys, we always used to say we burnt ourselves with the curling iron.”

“Did anyone buy it?”

“Probably not.”

When we got to Rosewood there was a pair of patrolmen in the lobby, as well as a fresh set of cops outside room 304. None of them were holding coffee cups. Jacob was poring over a fan of notepaper on the bed while Carolyn scowled at the computer, and both of them went silent when Lisa and I walked in.

“Are you gonna spend your
si-nos
early,” I asked, “or will you pace yourselves and spread ‘em throughout the day?”

“That depends,” said Carolyn. “Jacob says you saw a spirit yesterday.” Oh God. Did he mention I had my fingers up his ass while I told him? “Do you think he’s connected to the case?”

I shrugged. “Could be. Hard to say. We didn’t have a chance to chat.”

“Think you can find him? I’d like you to make contact before Jacob and I use up our
si-no
questions.”

Interesting tactic. They had two additional Psychs at their disposal, Lisa and me, and they had to choose which of us they were going to prioritize. They were burning my ability before Lisa’s. Was I more expendable to them? Or were they taking advantage because I hadn’t put any limits on my willingness to ghost-hunt, other than promising to stop if I saw something I couldn’t handle? I looked over at Lisa, who was peering at Irene’s image on the webcam. I could get into the idea of someone other than me being the more powerful Psych.

“C’mon,” I told her. “We’ll do a sweep.”

From the moment I walked in, Jacob had been staring at me as if he wanted to eat me alive. The corner of his lips curved up when I finally met his eye. Maybe it was a good thing he didn’t have psychic powers. If he did, he’d probably be able to get me off with one of those looks.

I tried to look stern. He obviously dug my “stern look.” His gaze slid down the front of me and back up again. I wondered if my clothes were going to disintegrate.

“Vic,” said Lisa. “You coming?”

“Uh-huh.” I backed away from Jacob’s force field. He kept on staring, with that cryptic half-smile frozen in place. “Let’s go find some ghosts.” Once I finally got out of the room, I saw that the cops were outside Irene’s doorway instead of 304. They looked poised to do something fast, if only they knew what that something was. “Ma’am, should I…? Ma’am? What’s…?”