Page 13 of 72 Hours

“But it was,” I interrupted. I looked at the mugs in his hands, but I wasn’t focusing on them. I couldn’t have told you what colour they were or what stupid logo they might have been emblazoned with. I think I had an inane grin on my face again. “It was fine. Very fine. I wanted you there.”

He stood in the doorway a little too long for comfort, as if he were trying to decide how serious I was. I suspected the hot mugs were starting to burn his thumbs. “Put them down,” I said. I shucked off the sheet and rolled around until I was kneeling on the bed facing him. Then I wriggled a couple of feet towards him. I was still totally naked. My skin goose-bumped in the cooler morning air, but it wasn’t just from the temperature. A deep, heavy warmth was growing and bobbing between my legs. Most distracting. “Put them down,” I repeated. “And lose those trousers. Get back over here. I’m not thirsty for coffee. I want to fuck again.”

His eyes flared some bright message, something vivid and sensual that sparked an answering shiver across my skin. His breath hitched in his bare chest, and his mouth twisted in a slow smile. “That’s good,” he replied, placing the mugs on the floor by the bedroom door with exaggerated care. “Because I wasn’t sure if you would. It was all rather fast, wasn’t it?”

“That suits me,” I muttered. I was only half joking. I couldn’t have held myself back from him if my limbs had been strapped to the proverbial wild horses. Yeah, it had been damned fast; I only met the guy three hours before we ended up in bed! I had no regrets at all, but I knew I ought to appreciate any that he had. “You’re sorry, Niall? You want to draw breath—take it slower? I understand....”

“No,” he said abruptly. “I don’t want to. But I don’t know if I should. Hell, I don’t do this a lot, Tanner. That’s all I can say. It’s just... last night, being with you... it was like I couldn’t help myself.”

“I know.” I grinned back at him. He looked even cuter, struggling with the words. I’d crawled to the edge of the bed by now and reached over for him. I plucked at his half-undone belt. “It’s the same for me. It happened, it was magnificent. I want some more. End of soul baring for today, okay?”

He gazed at me, and that beautifully understated smile crept over his face again.

I felt the blood rush through me like the tide coming in. My mouth grew dry, and my morning arousal wept shamelessly for his touch. I fell back on the bed, ignoring his laughing protests as his falling trousers snagged on his hips, toppling him onto me. He caught himself on shaking arms and leaned over me, releasing a hand to push the bedraggled hair back off my face. He gazed down at me, and laughed with me, and sank down to kiss me.

I knew even then that he was probably the best thing I’d ever seen. The best thing I could ever have imagined. The man who could quite possibly give me the best time of my life.

It was only the first time I’d met him properly, yet it was the first time we came together. There was no doubt it was right; there was never any doubt at all, though I knew very little of him then.

And probably not enough.

​​​Chapter 6 – Tuesday 02:40

The best time of my life? Oh yeah, it was!

After that night, we definitely wanted to see each other again. And then again. We wanted each other’s company like a drug; we were hungry for each other like nothing else we’d ever known. I don’t know when—or if—the other guys learned we were seeing each other, because at first we were fairly circumspect at work. But outside of work hours, we drew together like moths to each other’s flame. We drank together, ate together, watched movies, played music. All that stuff. And we fucked as if it were permanently on sale.

Glorious times. Most of the time.

We were very different, of course. From the very beginning. For me, that was the excitement, the whole stimulation. I didn’t think it mattered that we communicated in different ways too. Hell, I could manage on very little, I thought. That, and the fantastic sex.

But for us, being in a relationship was never going to be easy. For a start, we had the work situation. We weren’t always on the same jobs, and even if we were, the hours weren’t exactly nine-to-five routine. And over the course of the next six months or so, the Project Team asked more and more of us.

Judith never said anything directly, but she was obviously under pressure to produce results. She drew in about a dozen other agents, but our group remained the core. And it was a damned small core. There was no official brief, just an amazingly wide collection of skills and enthusiasms and a bunch of people who itched restlessly to use them. But there was also no margin for error. The jobs they kept pitching our way were complex and often messy. I reckoned we got the stuff that other departments had turned down as too tricky. Flattering, but risky too. We were in on anything and everything; celebrity security issues, assassination threats, industrial sabotage, political sleaze. We’d investigate it, then decide how to deal with it.

And we did produce results. Good ones.

Seemed the variety and the risks suited us all just fine. We bounced ideas off each other and developed a way of working well, whatever the combination. I never felt as good as when I was in that Team, when I was with the guys, using the talents we had, working always at top speed, at top awareness. We had an exhilarating banter going between us; we were young and fit and full of confidence. And working like dogs.

In some ways, I thought that was better for me and Niall, in that we worked together; we shared the tension and the excitement and the long days planning and directing. So okay, we had very little leisure time and weren’t always on the same schedule, but we’d find places to be together when we needed to. We laughed at ourselves, sneaking around like school kids, but I guess our passion was heightened by the adrenaline rush and the half-secrecy of our early relationship. Yeah, I got a blowjob in the supply cupboard! Jeez, I had trouble looking seriously at the office cleaning materials for weeks afterward. I’d recall the image of my foot stuck in a metal bucket, my jeans around my ankles and my hair tangled in with a mop head. The handle jerked alongside me as I climaxed into Niall’s mouth, in a weird pseudo-sexual dance of its own. Niall laughed so much that my cum dribbled out of his mouth and all down his shirt.

There were more anecdotes than could fit in one of the more lurid men’s magazines. We worked irregular hours when no one else was around, and we also knew where all the internal cameras were sited. Unobserved and uninterrupted, we christened the office tables, several cubicles, underneath the fire escape. And there was one particular stall in the executive toilets on the third floor of the main Department’s head office that had Niall’s fingernail tracks as a permanent feature of the Italian tiling.

We even did it once on the back seat of an official car. Judith had been called into the Department for an update meeting, and they’d sent the official car for her. On her way back, she picked us up, intending to run a late Team briefing. Then someone from the Department rang her cell, asking for clarification on some point or other. She parked the car and went ahead of us into the office to take the call, leaving us to amuse ourselves for a while.

We certainly did that. We flipped the windows up and down and played with her video telephone like naughty kids, and then Niall pushed me on to my back on the broad leather seat and wriggled his hand down the front of my jeans. Two minutes later, they were around my ankles, my head was twisted awkwardly against the door panel, and my legs were wrapped tightly around Niall’s bare hips as he pushed into me. Mercifully, the windows steamed up quickly, and the expensive suspension proved more than equal to the challenge.

He had to press his hand over my mouth to shut me up when I came. It was fast and funny and poignant, like the way tears squeeze out during a laughing fit. Don’t think Judith ever guessed what we’d been up to. We were easily decent by the time she returned to find out why we hadn’t followed her, though there was a rather rich aroma inside the car. Anyhow, we never risked it twice! Had to find alternative, less potentially dangerous places to satisfy ourselves.

No one had ever made me enjoy sex so much. It was brilliant. He was brilliant. That’s how it all seemed to me. We wanted each other, we were both committed to the world we lived and worked in, and life was all there in front of us. But I don’t think either of us understood what was happening to us.

I know I didn’t.

I SUPPOSE I NEVER GAVE much time to thinking it through – where we might go with this affair, what we both wanted from it all. Neither of us could think straight, it seemed, except through our dicks. But Niall seemed happy enough with it all, happy enough with me. That’s what I thought, anyway. I didn’t always have a lot to go on. There’d been confusion between us as often as there was lustful joy.

“Just tell me what you’re feeling. How you think it’s going.”

“What do you mean?” That was a popular phrase of his. He stood opposite me in the lounge of his apartment on a typical evening, a half-empty beer bottle in his hand and tiredness in his eyes. “Tanner, I don’t see why I have to talk about everything. You know how I feel.”