Returning to myself is a jarring process. I’ve collapsed on top of Aaron. Very bad sex etiquette, technically, although Aaron seems too exhausted to care. I only give myself a handful of seconds to enjoy the closeness and heat of the other man beforepulling my softening cock from Aaron’s scorching-hot hole and forcing my body off his.
Aaron must sense that I’m about to retreat entirely, both in a physical and emotional sense, the sirens in my head that scream at me to protect myself at all costs going off at full volume. I usually listen to those sirens, as they’ve quite literally saved my life in the past. But Aaron doesn’t let me go without a fight this time. He flips over onto his back, only wincing slightly at the rawness he must be feeling at his hole, and grabs for me, tugging me down on top of him.
I go easily, an untenable weakness overtaking my better judgement, and drape myself over Aaron, who doesn’t hesitate to wrap his large arms around me. We fit together better than I would have thought given our differences in size. I rest my head on his chest, curling up against him, making myself even smaller, like a cat finding a spot to settle in for a nap.
Aaron’s arms curl tighter, trapping me against him more securely and tangling our legs so we’re really locked in. His chest rises and falls with slight irregularity, and I can feel the heart that’s still mildly racing behind his ribs.
After a while of us breathing together, no words spoken, the silence that hangs between us heavy and loud enough to say everything we both need to know, Aaron shifts a hand up to slide his fingers into my hair. He makes a fist, lightly gripping the dark strands. It’s a surprisingly possessive touch and one that could be confusing if I let myself think about it in more than superficial terms.
“Will you leave?” Aaron asks, voice still rasping from all the noise. When I don’t answer right away, he adds, “Now you know that OI hasn’t recreated Liquid Onyx, and the survivors are safe, will you quit the agency?”
It’s a fair question. I came to FISA because we had a shared goal, but the need for that alliance is no longer required, at leastnot on my part. I could very easily go back to what I’d been doing before, which mostly meant dismantling my dad’s empire one brick—one explosion—at a time.
But.
“No,” I say. “Can’t. Signed a contract in black ink. HRzilla would hunt me down and cut off my balls for wasting the agency’s valuable biro reserves.”
There’s a pause before Aaron snorts out a laugh at that.
“Liz wouldn’t chase down anyone,” he says. “She’d get me to do it.”
Another weighty pause. Then.
“Would you hunt me down if I left?”
I’m not sure why I’m asking. I’m not sure why it matters. But for some reason, inexplicably, it does.
Aaron hesitates before answering, and it’s as if I can actually hear the cogs turning in his mind, like he either doesn’t know what he’d do, or he does, and he just doesn’t want to tell me.
“Don’t leave,” he says instead of directly answering the question.
It sounds like an admission anyway.
“Alright, then,” I say, breathing out slowly, releasing some of the tension from where it’s closing in around my heart. “I’ll stay.”
It doesn’t mean anything, really. It doesn’t change anything about tomorrow. But the almost imperceptible sigh of relief that slips from Aaron’s mouth still feels like something that matters.
Present
Leo
When the van doors close behind Jack, leaving me and Dan alone together, Dan does exactly what I thought he would and immediately releases me. I roll away from him, only to sit up against the van wall and beckon him to join me, which he does after a hesitant pause, green eyes darting nervously to the doors, like at any moment Jack might come bursting back into the van and attack him.
Dan sits close enough for us to touch, drawing his legs up and hugging them to his chest, but he doesn’t invade my space any more than that. He bangs his head back against the wall and closes his eyes tightly, frustration clear in the scrunch of his brow and the tense line of his shoulders.
“Hey.” I nudge his muscled bicep, mostly to show him I’m not afraid to do it, to bridge that divide and believe that he won’ttake advantage of it. “It’s okay, Dan. I know things are really complicated right now, but we’re gonna work it out.”
It isn’t okay at all, but it could be, and that has to be good enough for now.
“Oh, yeah,” Dan challenges me, “how’s that gonna happen?”
He might seem angry on the surface, but it doesn’t take much for me to read the roiling fear and scrambling desperation behind the thin veil of hostility. He isn’t trying to hide his true emotions from me as much as he should be, and I can’t tell if that’s purposeful manipulation or simple exhaustion after everything he’s been through recently.
“First,” I say, “we’ll find out how to fix what was done to you, and then we’ll stop Obsidian Inc. from doing the same thing to the world.”
Dan scrutinises me with those familiar eyes, once again full of disbelief at the crap that I’ve just allowed to come out of my face. “You’re disturbingly confident about things you have no right to be confident about, you know that, right?” He sounds offended by it, which I have to try very hard not to laugh at.
“Yeah.” My mouth quirks up into a little smile. “I know that.”
