Swish

© 2016 E. Davies

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“I wanna make you feel good.”

Alex's heart pounded as he pushed his fingers inside Thomas. He kissed at the corners of his lips and then the fullness of them.

Thomas moaned in response, then breathed out hard. His involuntary twitches were the hottest part. His body was so pleased that he arched off the bed, tensing up. Then, Thomas pushed up into his fingers and circled his hips. He thrust them in rhythm with Alex's fingers.

Alex moaned his approval, watching as Thomas's body flinched and twitched.

He was already such a sight – skinny but gorgeous, naked and splayed on his bed, his hands digging into the bed near him.

Alex had never dreamed he'd see Thomas in
this
state. He was vulnerable with his need, and though his body was so familiar, it had also changed.

Christ, what a difference a handful of years made.

Now, Thomas knew what he wanted and Alex knew how to give him just that.

When Alex pulled his fingers out, Thomas squirmed. His flushed, wet cock bobbed in the air above his stomach while he tried to wait patiently.

Alex didn't want to make him wait. The condom and lube took just seconds, and then he was pressing his tip against the tight opening.

Thomas's eyes flew open. He ran his hand down his own stomach towards Alex's cock. Thomas's fingers were thin, nimble, and soft, from paperwork and a climate-controlled office. They wrapped around Alex's cock firmly.

“Nnh,” Alex approved, echoing Thomas's groan. He pushed inside inch by inch as Thomas held him steady, letting Thomas get a feel for the thickness of the base of his cock.

Finally, when he was almost all the way inside, Thomas let go and grabbed Alex's ass.

Alex's mind spun. “You're a little tease,” Alex whispered. “I forgot.”

“I have my – nnh – moments,” Thomas moaned. Then, the request that made Alex's ears burn.

“Fuck me.”

In his idle daydreams for
years
, Alex hadn't imagined Thomas being bold enough to ask for this.

But everything was different now.

Alex laced their fingers together, palm to palm. He stifled Thomas's moans of approval in open-mouthed kisses. He was going to make the most of this moment, but his gut instinct told him it wasn't his last chance.

They were together again. This was just their second beginning.

“How's your hand?”

“I'll be fine,” Cam laughed, the sound carrying through the cold winter morning. “It won't fall off from shoveling the driveway once. Let me do this.”

Thomas glanced across his windshield to Cameron's driveway. His arms burned from scraping the ice off in quick, sharp thrusts of plastic across glass. It was the hard kind of ice; shard-like ice chunks sprayed across his hands and face.

God, January mornings were the worst. The sun wasn't even up yet, but he was already out and cleaning up the driveway with his brothers and their boyfriends. Now that Noah lived with Cam and Chase with Jackson, they had five people to help. Good thing since last night's freezing rain and snow had left a mess.

Sometimes only one or two of them got up early. They tried to shovel at least each other's walkways if they had time before work. Other times, Thomas barely had time to dig himself out of the snow, but when he came home from work his driveway was cleared.

It was nice to be able to count on his neighbors to swap favors. Living between his brothers had its perks, even if he wanted to knock their heads together sometimes.

With all the extra hours he was taking lately, helping cover shifts thanks to his coworker Cassandra's winter trip to the Caribbean, he was gone even more. Then again, he had a forty-hour work week as it was. He knew he was damned lucky.

“Getting cold?” Thomas called across the thin row of branches. In the summer, it was a leafy hedge separating their driveways.

Noah, the now live-in boyfriend of one of his big brothers, had already pulled off Cam's glove. He was rubbing Cam's right hand briskly to warm it up again. Ever since his denervation surgery, Cam had said half of his body reacted differently to the cold. But that was a small price to pay for a decreased risk of heart failure.

“No, I'm fine.” Cam swatted Noah lightly and laughed. “I'll go inside if I'm in danger of frostbite.” He pulled on his glove and briskly shoveled again, clearing a path down to the mail box and street.

Noah still stayed nearby and eyed him suspiciously as he cleaned up after Cameron. He hadn't let Cam shovel alone over the last two weeks. Just before Christmas, Cam had been declared safe to occasionally exercise, but they still hadn't let him.

“What's wrong?”

Jackson was the oldest of the three brothers, and he lived on the other side of Thomas. He was leaning on his shovel and peering over the scraggly hedge at Thomas, then beyond at Cam. No doubt he was concerned that Cam was having an episode of some kind for the first time since surgery. Behind him, Jackson's boyfriend, Chase, was watching.

“No, it's fine,” Thomas assured them both with a laugh. “Just his one cold hand.”

“I've heard of special gloves that can warm your hands up,” Chase spoke up. He pulled down the back gate of Jackson's truck to shovel the bed out. “I should've gotten you those for Christmas.”

“Or a plane ticket to Florida,” Cam suggested. “I'll accept that.”

“Excuse me?” Noah pulled the rim of Cam's toque down over his eyes.

Cam laughed and yanked it back up again. “Two plane tickets,” Cam corrected himself, grinning at his boyfriend.

Thomas's heart squeezed a little as he watched the two interact. Cam and Noah had been dating since April. They met when Cam and Thomas joined Jackson in their hometown of Fredericton. The two men were still going strong, and he admired the deep affection they both held for each other.

Jackson and Chase had only been dating since about August – exactly when wasn't really clear. Neither would say exactly when it had turned from friendship to romance. They were just as sweet as Cam and Noah.

That left just Thomas single. By choice as much as by chance, really. It wasn't like he hadn't had offers...

Ugh.
Thomas pushed that thought aside and kept scraping the windshield, cleaning off the last few bits of ice. He pushed the wipers back down with twin muffled thumps and scraped the rest of the windows.

At last, Thomas shoveled a path for his car down to the street. It was gonna be a little hairy until he got to the well-plowed street beyond suburbia, but he'd grown up driving here. He knew as well as his brothers how to avoid losing all control.

In every area of his life, too. Sometimes, though he'd never admit it, he
wanted
someone to sweep into his life. He wanted to be unable to turn down a good thing. Noah had entered Cam's life with a bang, and Chase had started a whirlwind romance with Jackson.

Could he have something like that?

Thomas dropped off his shovel on the porch and grabbed his lunch from inside, then locked up his house. “See you guys later,” he waved to a chorus of goodbyes as he climbed into his car and started it up. The engine turned over a few extra times. Then, it purred to life and he was gliding through the drifts for the short, chilly drive to the bank.

The rock music coming through the speakers in the car was so soft it was almost inaudible. Alex leaned back in the driver's seat, his profile half-hidden to passersby. Not that anyone was walking down the quiet street this time of night. It was the perfect location, and Alex ought to have been glad.

Instead, Alex was more restless than usual. He'd spent hundreds of hours, going on thousands by now, just sitting on stakeouts. This time, he got to sit in the car and listen to music. He even checked his phone when he dared to take his eyes off the front of the house. Compared to some of his previous cases in Ontario and here in New Brunswick, this was a cakewalk.

“Must be the caffeine,” he murmured to himself at last, rubbing his eyes. He focused on a few points in the distance and close to him to keep them fresh. He'd grabbed a coffee from Tim's before coming out here, expecting he might have to stay up late.

Alex much preferred the kind of surveillance that ended around three or four in the afternoon. He'd be home and relaxing in front of the TV before most people were even finished work.

But cheaters weren't always caught at noon. This one favored late nights, even though his wife was staying with a friend for the week.

This would be a lot easier if he could just go back to his old ways. Alex had been a
fantastic
honeytrap, even for straight men like this Darren seemed to be. But he'd had to knock that off since moving back here. Plus, with a gay community this small, he might wind up working for women who'd married gay men. That came with too much baggage even for him.

Movement.

He froze, then slowly raised his camera to rest on the windowsill. He hit the record button and zoomed in until he got a good look at the woman stepping out of the house. As far as he knew, the house didn't belong to either the cheater or the mistress, Anna. It was owned by one of Darren's buddies. That guy had to be in on it, or else the cheating asshole Darren was good at keeping it quiet.

Darren's wife, Lexy, had hired him to find out for sure if Darren was cheating, and if so, with whom. She especially wanted to know if it was an ongoing affair or a one-time mistake. A series of one-time mistakes seemed better to her than an affair.

Alex had wanted to tell her that it didn't matter. An asshole cheating on her with a string of women was no better than with one woman. He knew a lot of people didn't think that way. Back in his honeytrap days... well, Christ, he was glad to say goodbye to some aspects of that job.

The problem, of course, was that he had no other choice
than
to say goodbye to his Ontario jobs. He'd been forced to move back here, and now he had to take whatever cases he was offered. Things were getting a little better though. Lexy had gotten his name as a reference from a friend he'd worked with. Referrals meant steady business.

But still... there was no plan B.

Anna stepped into her car and waved, then pulled out of the driveway as Darren leaned in the doorway. Darren disappeared back inside and, within a minute, was back out and heading to his car. It was nothing to tail him back to his apartment building. Alex sat outside just long enough to make sure the lights were off and Darren had gone to bed, then rubbed his face.

That was it for the night. Hours of waiting and watching for one little clip in the one AM darkness. They hadn't even kissed goodbye.

“That's okay,” Alex muttered. “I'll catch you sooner or later, asshole.”

Alex pulled away again. He wanted rotisserie chicken and chips from the 24-hour grocery store nearby. He'd eat and watch TV by himself – as always – and get some sleep.

It was a far cry from his last life, where he might have gone to a club or picked a number from his phone after eating and showering. But he also had a reputation to keep here.

“Rep, shmep,” he muttered, but it was a peaceful protest. On some level, Alex appreciated a quieter routine in his sleepy, small hometown. The quiet hours watching people together just drove home the less-balanced aspects of his life.

And when he thought too hard about it, half his reluctance to go out and socialize was unsurprising. He'd had a steady downhill slide in his mood since... oh, November. Maybe it was SAD; maybe he was just depressed about being stuck here. No longer was he making bank and sleeping with hot guys every other weekend.

He'd had friends, but he'd drifted out of touch with them over the summer. Working his ass off taking every job he got kept him too busy. A lot of people just didn't get his life – irregular schedules, confidentiality agreements, occasional danger... And then there was incredible monotony.

For once, he didn't let himself mope as he crawled into bed. When one guy turned him down, another might be around the corner. Sometime, he'd find what he'd been missing for years. Maybe not in exactly the same form, but... something close.