Hey all-- so much promotion and shit to do, but I'm trying to get it done before I start my next project, and I'm dying to write a little fiction tonight.
HelLO Jai and George!
Now, for those of you who remember the timeline (and I often don't) Jai and George meet in the spring--I may have said March but I'm changing it to May. If we follow what was happening with Sonny and Ace, Redirecting the Blast happened in early September so Ellery and Jackson could investigate those events after Jackson's birthday, in late September.
And while we don't know exactly what Jai did--we do suspect it was quite a lot.
Enjoy!
* * *
"You going camping again this weekend?"
George nodded at Amal and laced up his sneakers. This particular shift had been pretty messy--he'd packed street clothes and had availed himself of the shower and had even brought his own body wash so he didn't show up in the mountains smelling like hospital.
Not that Jai had complained, of course--but more and more, George was trying to impress him.
"Yup. Annaliese is watching the cat--and probably drinking all my wine, which I plan for, so I only buy the shitty stuff, and I'm going camping." He took a deep breath of industrial cleanser scented air. "Clears out the old sinuses."
Amal narrowed his eyes. "Clears out something. Are you seriously meeting this guy again?"
George looked away and started packing his bag. "It's working," he defended. "Once every three weeks. You know. Meet, camp, fish, read, unplug, relax. It's better than a facial." He remembered their last time in bed and smirked. Jai, looming above him in the tent, fist wrapped around his mammoth cock, stroking himself off into George's waiting mouth. That sort of thing looked really good in porn, but anybody on the receiving end knew that come never really ended up in the mouth.
George hadn't cared. Jai's big, solid company, his kindness, the unexpected bursts of humor--these were the touchstones of why George showed up camping as often as he and Jai could meet.
The way he'd convulsed and come when Jai's semen had splattered across his cheek, his lips, his neck--that was the icing, in more ways than just licking it off his fingers.
"Is this a relationship?" Amal asked, still squinting. "Booty call? What?"
"Monogamous?" It was monogamous. George knew that much. Jai had shown him a recent test for their first three meetings until George had just told him that they would only bring condoms if the other one had sex with someone else.
Jai hadn't needed one, and George hadn't either--to the point where George had turned down more than one date with a guy who didn't look like a Marvin or a Gary or even a Steve.
He'd even turned down a date with a Buck, who had been built like a god with a goofy grin and a sense of irony, a paramedic who was super competent and hella sexy.
But he hadn't been six-foot-six and bald with a goatee and a fondness for fishing, so that was no good at all.
This thing in the mountains, this sort of sexual retreat, had been going on for nearly five months and George's only regret was there wasn't more of it.
That and he knew less about Jai than he had before.
That meeting in May, Jai had been a mechanic, ex-mob by his own report, working for a boss he obviously really respected, and recovering from a crush that had been--by his own report--unrequited.
He was still all those things, but now there was the added layer of mystery. Jai managed to neatly dodge any hint of where he lived, where his boss's business was, where he'd lived before that. He talked about customers, about cars, about his childhood in St. Petersburg--sometimes--and about mountains and sky and fish.
He did not, when all was said and done, talk much about himself.
And the only reason George was curious was that... that... he liked this guy. Genuinely, with all his heart. Their sex was incendiary--hadn't even begun to pall--but their time together in the quiet of the mountains had become just as precious as the sex.
So George was looking forward to meeting his mystery mountain lover by all means--but he wasn't so excited about explaining him to anybody else. Particularly when he got to the campsite and saw Jai building the fire in his shirt sleeves, a big bandage over his shoulder, and what looked like scuff marks on his face.
"Oh my God!" he cried, getting out of his truck--which had been purring like a kitten since it's once-a-month tinkering began in May. "What happened?"
Jai lifted the non-bandaged shoulder. "Work," he said calmly.
"Work? Did an engine fall on you? Let me see that--it's bleeding--"
"I have more gauze," Jai said, turning to take his hands, and then kiss him, slowly, a lazy smile on his face when he was done. "It is not important."
"But Jai! You're hurt!"
"No--I was hurt, but now I am healing. Isn't that what the bandages are for?"
George sputtered some more, and then Jai kissed him again, and George melted into him, suddenly glad--so glad--that he was there. "You could have been really hurt," he said brokenly into Jai's chest. "I wouldn't have had anybody to call me. I would have just... just shown up here, and I never would have known..."
"I would have texted," Jai said, and George wanted to thump him.
"Do you know how much that would suck?" George asked plaintively. "To show up and have you not show up? You're getting important, dammit!" He let out a miserable little sound. "And I bet nobody on your end even knows my name."
"No," Jai murmured against his hair. "Because they worry about me. And they would worry about you too."
George did thump him--on the non-injured shoulder. "So that's it? IT's just... just okay?"
Jai let out a sigh. "Are you going to go home now?" he asked politely. "I was going to start dinner, and if you're going to go home now, I don't need to cook as much."
"Would you even care?" George burst out. "If I turned around and didn't come back?"
And for the first time Jai's genial politeness faded, and he cupped George's jaw with a massive hand. "Of course I would," he said softly. "You are mine--and not much in the world is mine. It would..." He swallowed, and George saw the underlying hurt that his words had caused. "It would bother me a great deal, if I was never to see you again."
George let out a sigh, and his fight drained out of him. He went back to leaning his head on Jai's chest, feeling defeated when he hadn't even known there'd been a battle. "It would bother me too," he said unhappily. "You have no idea."
Jai took his chin between his fingers. "Ace and Sonny--they are good people," he said softly. "And my old boss owes them a debt he can't repay. But me... I... had no lovers of my own, you understand? Because they would be in danger. If you are my regular fuck in the woods, you are of no consequence to anybody looking to hurt me. If you are the man I want my boss to contact when I am injured, then someone knows who to look for."
George swallowed, and those early fears about Jai's past, who he might have been before his current job situation, resurfaced.
But that fear--that overwhelming fear--that Jai would disappear someday, and George would never know what happened--that overshadowed any fear that might've lingered.
"Tell your boss," he begged softly. "Just him. That's all I ask. Please?"
Jai sighed, and ran thick fingers through his hair. "My boss wouldn't have known what happened either, this time," he admitted. "He... well, he got knocked unconscious. By the time he woke up, the worst was over."
George pulled back, shocked. "Knocked unconscious? The actual hell?"
"It... there was a boy who had a sister, and bad people, and the boy was desperate and..." Jai made vague motions in the air. "It was all okay in the end. Will you believe me about that?"
"Jai, what happened to your shoulder? And your face?" George demanded.
"I had to make it okay!" Jai returned, apparently puzzled by the question. "Sonny was upset, Ace was unconscious--don't worry. The boy and his sister are just fine."
George took a deep breath and tried to find a question he could ask that Jai could maybe answer in a straightforward way. "Was there anybody else who wasn't just fine?"
Jai's smile should have chilled George to his toes--but instead, it made him feel safe. "Yes. There were some people who were very much not fine. But they hurt a lot of people, and they needed to be not fine for quite sometime."
George, your booty call is a cold-blooded killer.
George looked helplessly into Jai's guarded expression, and saw nothing but self-defense. He let out a breath and melted. This thing they had, this habit--it was, in fact, sustaining him. So many painful things--so much injustice and cruelty.
Jai just talked about taking care of people, and suddenly that was all George could care about. Jai, taking care of him.
"Dinner," George said weakly.
"Da. I brought steaks, and a grill for over the fire," he said proudly.
George pulled back from his chest. "One condition, though," he said seriously.
Jai tilted his head to the side, to indicate he was th inking about it.
"Tell your boss about me. My boss knows about you. My friend who watches my cat. Even my mother knows I have a friend I see sometimes on the weekends. They don't know your name, or anything about you--but they know."
Jai let out a sigh. "That is acceptable. But only Ace."
"Not Sonny?" George asked, stung--he'd gathered Jai had carried a bit of a torch.
"Sonny would fret about meeting you. He's not..." Jai grimaced. "A comfortable person. Ace."
Okay. That would have to do for now. If George wanted to sustain this life-giving habit, that was.
Their sex that night wasn't kinky--which was sort of a surprise, because Jai could be very kinky when he set his mind to it. Instead, when they climbed into the tent, Jai took his mouth and kissed tentatively, as though asking permission.
Or forgiveness.
And George, remembering his anger, his threat to leave, kissed him back hard, possessively, without reservation. Because the truth was, George couldn't have carried out on that threat. Not even if he'd known the whole truth, whatever it may be.
Jai--ex mobster, mechanic, whoever he was now--was George's. Unequivocally. And as George pushed him down on top of the sleeping bag and straddled his magnificent naked body, George recognized something basic and immoral in himself that claimed Jai for him. George got this man. Criminal? Probably. But he was George's--not his little secret, not his mountain man booty call--just his. Jai's body in George's, shoving, thrusting, fucking, was a right--not a luxury, or a privilege--a goddamned necessity.
George needed to see him again, like he needed to breathe, needed to scrape his fingernails down Jai's chest.
Needed to cry out, full and stretched and aroused beyond endurance.
Needed to come, moaning and sagging forward, watching with eyes adjusted to the darkness as Jai used his finger to scoop off a few drops and lick it from his skin.
Needed to bear it, to come again, when Jai grabbed his hips and fucked up into him, harder, harder, ah, gods, hard and fast and fuck him, George was going to fly apart and into the starry night sky beyond the thin fabric of the tent... ah God!
George disintegrated, his body still straddling Jai's, collapsed across his chest, Jai's cock still wedged solidly in his ass, but his soul...
His soul hovered in the night sky for a moment and looked at the remoteness of the stars, feeling their alienation, their indifference to all that went on below.
As George fell back into the tent, into his sated, sweaty, aching tingly body, that remoteness faded, and he was present, one with this giant of a man who would care for him, who made love to him so sweetly, with such animal tenderness, that George's whole being was centered here, their bodies locked together as one.
George wasn't strong enough to hover with the stars and pass judgment. He was human, and his human body, his human heart, needed.
Needed the man he was merged with, regardless of his crimes.
George had to believe he wouldn't hurt innocent people.
Because Jai took such exquisite care of George, and the habit--that precious, blessed habit--of trusting Jai was not something George could overcome.
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