Page 109 of Honey Cut
I read the article as Mark strolls back over. “Friendly fire in Košice,” he says. “He was supposed to meet with informants, and somehow wires got crossed. Someone else was hunting those informants and thought he was one of them.”
I look at the date on the article. It was the year of my first deployment. Around the time Eliot’s body was being shipped home from Košice, I was in Krakow watching McKenzie die in a puddle. “It’s nothing like losing a husband, but I—I had a hard year that year too. I was too late to save a friend, and I had to watch her die.”
“They gave you the ARCOM for saving everyone else,” says Mark from next to me. “I know.”
I feel stupid suddenly. “It’s not the same, a husband dying and a friend dying, I know it’s not. But I guess I just feel like…I wanted you to know that we share that year.”
“Don’t diminish your own grief for mine, Tristan,” Mark says softly. “Yes, we share that year.”
The picture in the article is only of the starred memorial wall at Langley. There’s no mention of Mark in the article at all, although there wouldn’t be, since Mark and Eliot hadn’t married under their real names. I do register a bolt of recognition when I see John Lackland’s name in the article. Apparently before he was the director of the NSA, he was part of the Langley bureaucracy. He had been Eliot’s boss at the time of Eliot’s death and had delivered a little speech when they unveiled his star.
I set the article aside and reach for one of the pictures. It’s a selfie of the two of them in a place with high blue skies and azure water. Monte Carlo, I think. Those rings would be brand-new on their fingers. Mark is kissing the cheek of the grinning man next to him, his eyes half-hooded and his hand around the back of the other man’s neck. Eliot, for his part, is smiling a dimpled, knowing smile into the camera. I have to wonder how they were together—Mark in his icy sharpness, Eliot the captivating playboy. Both Dominant, but as different from each other as they could be.
But as I find picture after picture, I understand more and more why Mark fell in love. “He really was beautiful,” I say again.
“Beautiful. And never entirely mine.” Mark has finished this glass now and sets it on the desk with a clunking gracelessness. “And then he was dead.”
I put the pictures back in the box and rearrange the stubs and key cards how I found them. When I close it and dare to look back over to Mark, he has both his hands planted on the desk, and his head is down. His eyes are shut—squeezed shut.
“You say I give you nothing, Tristan. Once I gave a man everything, and then he took it with him when he died. So go easy on me, my knight. I never planned on having someone I wanted to possess again. Much less two someones.”
My lungs are instantly in my throat.
“You want to possess me?” I ask in a whisper. “Still?
His face is heavy with desire now, lashes low and lips parted. “Can you doubt it?”
I think of him picking up Isolde’s panties, of his hands bruising my hips in Belgrade. “I doubt everything when it comes to you, sir,” I admit.
He lifts a hand and grazes his fingertips over my lips. “Sometimes I can’t believe my own jealousy,” he says in a low voice that doesn’t feel meant for me. And then: “How many times do I have left with you until I’m even with my wife?”
Oh God. “Two more. Three if we count…the garden tonight.”
Why am I saying this? Going along with this?
“Say your safeword if you need it,” he tells me, and then shoves me to my knees.
I go with no resistance; I go like my knees have never belonged anywhere but on the floor. His shove is rougher than usual, his hands fumbling on his belt, and I’m sick in the head because I love him like this, out of control and vulnerable and almost angry about it.
He’s half hard when he pulls himself out of his pants, and he holds himself out for me to lick and worship, his head falling back as he stiffens against my tongue.
“Your mouth is criminal,” he hisses as he pushes the head onto my tongue and rubs himself there. “So goddamn wrong how good it feels. Open up for me, I want your throat too—yes, just like that, puppy.God, so good, keep letting me have it. Good boy.”
My dick is pushing against my pajama pants, tenting them embarrassingly, but there’s no time to be humiliated when Mark is filling my mouth, pressing into my throat. I can’t breathe, I’m swallowing fruitlessly against my own gag reflex, which makes him growl as my throat squeezes him, and my lashes are caught with tears. The shadows behind him blur into him through my wet eyelashes, and it’s almost like being face-fucked by a shadow itself, by an incubus. His hand is unyielding on the back of my head now, and he lets me pull off for a few sucking, wet inhales, and then he pushes back in. All the way, until the crisp hairs on his lower stomach are tickling my nose. His free hand is stroking the hair back from my face, wiping the tears off my cheeks, so impossibly tender even as he suffocates me with his erection.
I see stars when he pulls out this time.
“Show me yours,” he demands suddenly. In the faint light of the lamp, his cock is wet and shiny. “Pull it out for me.”
I do as he asks, unknotting the drawstring and pulling the waistband of my pants down and hooking them under my balls.
“Shirt off too,” he says, and I obey, a vain and petty part of me eating up how his eyes trace hungrily over my arms and chest and stomach.
“Now stay there,” he says, “and let me look at you.”
He jerks himself fast and hard, his big fist flying, his eyes burning all over me, on my naked torso and my face and my blood-dark cock.
“Can see why she couldn’t stay away,” he grunts. His hair has curled the tiniest bit at the edges, possibly from the fog on the roof, and his jaw is raspy with stubble, and his cheeks are flushed from alcohol and memories and lust. “Can see why she needed to fuck you. Both of you were made to fuck—made for me to fuck?—”
