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“Wait,” McCauley spills into his mouth, and Hanna feels as much as hears the lovely tremor in his voice.
It takes several moments longer, some effort on both their behalves. When at last Hanna sits up he grins at the sight underneath him, at McCauley flat on his back on the living room hardwood, hair mussed and t-shirt pulled up, the lower half of his face raw from kissing. He would think he’s got the upper hand from his perch atop McCauley’s hips, but Hanna knows he looks just as ridiculous. His own chest is heaving hard.
“Why?”
“‘Cause I’m too old for this,” McCauley admonishes. “So are you. Come on, we’re going upstairs.”
“You’re no fun.”
“Upstairs. Bedroom. Now.”
The delivery has its desired effect. Hanna’s aching knees turn to jelly. He stumbles awkwardly to his feet and nearly trips over the toppled armchair. To his surprise, McCauley lets this pass without remark. He doesn’t seem to care. Hanna watches, his face hot from blood-rush and stubble-scrape, as McCauley rises to join him. That he manages with preternatural poise in spite of the situation in his pants feels like the real joke at Hanna’s expense. Unfair, really. Then McCauley stalks toward him with such languid intensity that Hanna practically scampers back through the kitchen to the stairwell.
He’s grateful for the chemical cocktail at work in his bloodstream, the woozy remnants of last night’s downers, the nascent fizz of amphetamine courage. Making love in morning light with a man, a stranger—though McCauley always felt too familiar for such a term, too significant for the jargon, perp, ex-con—would spook him sober. At the back of his mind floats a dim self-consciousness, more alien to him than mortal terror. Underneath the frantic erotic hunger and buzzing nerve endings is an anxiety of the unprecedented, awareness of a graver transgression. It was easier before, last night, when kissing McCauley was just another reckless gamble with his own life. This is dangerous. This is domestic.
McCauley corrals him in the bedroom and closes the door. Compensating, Hanna goes after him with renewed vigor, desperation even, trying to bring them both crashing down to the mess of sheets. It’s all he knows how to do, to fall. Let McCauley join him in his graceless descent.
McCauley laughs softly. Almost crueler that there’s no cruelty in it. His hand at the back of Hanna’s neck is strong and commanding. Like scruffing an animal, Hanna whimpers a bitten-off sound and goes pliant against him. McCauley’s house, McCauley’s rules, and he demands a gentler intimacy. A cold-blooded killer and an old-style romantic, he wants to trail kisses down the raging pulse in Hanna’s throat, stroke his face, hold his waist.
Hanna doesn’t stand a chance against this. He’s helpless. His head falls backward against the curtains, dashing a shot of sunlight into the room, flash of white behind his eyelids. He mumbles McCauley’s name over and over, intoxicated by the sound of it on his tongue, with the taste of him. Then ascending in pitch to whimpered exhortations, pathetic formless begging. “Please,” he whines, with McCauley’s warm rough hands roaming under his shirt, possessive. “Please, Neil.”
“Tell me.”
He doesn’t want to say it.
McCauley wants him to. He is savoring this like the tender spots on Hanna’s skin, always game for a genteel power play. He will continue these divine tortures until he gets his answer. He nips encouragingly at Hanna’s jaw, drawing a palm down Hanna’s front and stopping just shy of his belt.
Hanna’s hips jerk and he exclaims, “I want you to fuck me.”
McCauley draws back to look at him. A beat, then that coy riddle of a smile. But there is real affection in it, an uncompromising breadth. He understands. He pulls a thumb across Hanna’s furiously blushing cheek.
“I mean it, Neil.”
“I know.”
“Don’t you want to?”
“Yeah. But I don’t want to hurt you.”
You wouldn’t hurt me, Hanna thinks, certain of it. Then remembers, dimly, that neither of them planned for this, let alone came prepared. The house is all but empty. He’s got no rubbers in his wallet, and his toiletries are useless. He may be high on speed and a tranquilizer tail end, drunk with lust for the thief that got away, but he has a few fraying threads of sanity remaining. Enough to fear certain pain. Almost petulantly, still mortified, Hanna starts pushing at the hem of McCauley’s t-shirt. McCauley obliges, peeling it up over his head and casting it aside.
“You gonna think about it while I’m gone, though, aren’t you?”
“Mm.” Hanna watches keenly, stripping his clothes away in a hurry as McCauley pulls down and steps out of his track pants. The tug of the waistband over the bulge in his briefs makes his dick jump. “For next time.”
“You better promise you’ll be ready for me next time.”
“You be ready.”
“’Cause I don’t think I can wait much longer.”
“Shut up and come to bed.”
Hanna grins and shoves him toward the mattress. McCauley, smirking, pulls him along by the arm. They go down to the sheets together, crushed into each other, kissing, laughing, entwined.
In a pinch, hands and hips and good old fashioned friction will do. They pantomime the fucking that will have to wait, McCauley thrusting against him instead of into him. The lazy roll of his hips to assure he’ll take it slow with that beautiful, big cock of his, nice and considerate. Hanna grinds eagerly back into him. Patience is not a virtue he’s fully developed. Neither is silence. Once the action starts, he isn’t shy about making noise. McCauley’s shadowed lusty gaze, his parted mouth and quickening breaths, endorse this whole red-blooded scene, the commotion carrying through the house. He stamps his approval at the source, sucking a florid mark from the flesh beside Hanna’s Adam’s apple.
After several moments of this McCauley can no longer endure his typical forbearance. Hanna grins wildly when he pulls away, frantic with frustration, to address the interference of their briefs. He yanks Hanna’s down to his knees and tears his own away. Hanna’s seen it up close last night, tasted its heat at the back of his throat, but the image of McCauley’s cock springing free, heavy and swollen and crowned with a glistening sheen, ignites something inside him both dirty and profound. When he leans back down to press them together, sliding against each other and the flesh of their bellies, they groan in unison from relief. Slippery with sweat and eager spill, they rock against each other. The bed creaks a steady rhythm underneath a chorus of grunts and moans, Hanna’s long and plaintive, McCauley’s deep and gruff.
In the mirror atop the dresser Hanna watches the muscles ripple in McCauley’s back, the dark head bent to his neck, his own hands as they travel the arch of scarred shoulders, up his neck to rake lovingly through his hair. Here, another potent sight, McCauley’s waist ensnared by his crossed ankles. Suddenly it’s easy to see himself like this, to imagine this consummation again and again. To be held, and held in place, by the only soul he’d permit to pin him down.
Yes. McCauley can have him. He’d like that. The thought of it, with McCauley’s hand now working them both, is enough to bring him to the edge. He glances down and catches the magnificent profane visual between them, their cocks in McCauley’s grip, flushed and flush together, leaving shimmering streaks against the hair of their stomachs. He arches abruptly and throws a hand against the headboard. He cries out when he feels McCauley press another tender kiss between the hollow of his ribs.
“You like that?”
“Oh, fuck.”
“You ready to come for me?”
“Neil,” he warns, high and thready. “Neil, you’re gonna make me come.”
“Yeah,” urges McCauley. His voice is gravel-rough. “Come for me, baby.”
Hanna shoots with a wail all over his stomach, hot pulses up his navel, then down over the hand pumping them both. His hips thrust and jerk in mindless spasms as the orgasm takes him like a wave. Bolts of pleasure rattle through his every nerve and carry him over into bliss, radiant ecstasy bright white like the sun. McCauley comes right after, crying out hoarsely, his thighs quivering against Hanna’s legs, handsome face pulled in a grimace of release. Hanna feels him spend all over him, an ample pleasant scald against his bare skin. Eyes glassy, rolling back through the last shudders of his climax, he wonders what it would feel like to have McCauley come inside him. To take it all deep within him.
McCauley crumples on top of him. Hanna grunts a good-natured “oof” and then laughs, a crazed giddy laugh, low and throaty, What the hell was that? His joy is bittersweet, punctured by an ache of yearning. Reality swims at the edges of his consciousness, swelling over with its rude intrusions. Another sunrise and he will be en route to the airport, bound for home. It’s an empty term, arbitrary to him now. Even the streets of L.A., his refuge of nearly a decade, his asphalt hunting grounds, have suffered this sudden diminishment. But Justine and Lauren still command a chamber of his heart. (Perhaps beside the one McCauley has stolen, with his customary cunning.) They will worry if he does not return.
McCauley mumbles into his neck, “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.”
McCauley, skeptical, levers up on an arm to examine him.
“Don’t look at me like that. I don’t know . . . you know.” He shrugs. “How much can change in a weekend.”
“You got that right.”
“You’re as surprised as I am. I don’t know if I should be relieved or worried.”
“Why?”
“You opened a door, Neil. I’d hate to see it closed.”
“The door remains open,” says McCauley decisively. A charming, slightly peevish look crosses his face. He’s searching for the words. “And it was you who went around . . . picking all kinds of locks.”
“That’s rich, coming from you! Though I appreciate you taking and running with my metaphor. Well, you’re a thief, after all.”
“I brought you down here. This—right here, right now—this is on you.”
“I wish I could tell you I’m sorry.”
“No you don’t. I’m not sorry, either.”
“Is that why you stayed?”
McCauley breathes a toothless sigh. “You ask too many questions.”
“That’s what you get for ‘crawling into bed with a cop,’ remember? You made that bed, baby. I happen to enjoy lying in it with you.”
The pretense of annoyance vanishes. McCauley toys with the pendant on one of Hanna's necklaces, for a moment seeming almost boyish, timid. “Me too.”
“And besides, you keep answering them.”
“Against my better judgment.”
“I bet you do a lot of things against your better judgment.”
He kisses Hanna again. It’s reassurance that he abides by his decision, mistake or no mistake. If this error they’ve committed can be called as much it has no business feeling like absolution for a life of other sins, misdeeds of all categories. The quotidian failures of marriage and partnership, the mortal risks of lawlessness and law enforcement. No, it’s true, they were never so different. It was unlucky circumstance for the universe to have placed them at odds. And yet here they are, stripped bare in every sense, negotiating their rather creative armistice.
Hanna was never one for fantastical ideas, but with McCauley in bed with him he might entertain a strictly theoretical notion of fate. Could fate engineer such happy endings—hopeful beginnings? He can’t remember the last time he smiled this much.
McCauley rolls over on his back and laces his fingers across his stomach. Head propped in hand, Hanna skims his knuckles along his forearm. They watch each other, disheveled, contented. McCauley inhabits the silence easily, observing intently, never one to speak without reason to speak, to shrink from intensity. But the morning’s repose is a silent lullaby, and with Hanna stroking his arm, his eyelids grow heavy. In no time, he drifts off, looking like somebody’s father with his head canted over his chest, as though he belongs on a recliner in front of the television. Under the linens, Hanna assumes his legs are crossed at the ankle.
He smiles fondly. The sight amuses him, and he finds it deeply touching. Not 24 hours ago McCauley’s gaze had traced his every move with all the subtlety of a laser sight. Now he is dozing comfortably after a romp in the sheets.
Sleep won’t come so easily for Hanna. He doesn’t mind. He should be conscious for every moment in McCauley’s presence, awake and alive to the change within himself. He feels it unfolding in real-time, contemplating its workings at a placid remove. It’s like watching himself on a screen from the back of an empty theater. A plot twist he never saw coming—though examination reveals the signs were always there. 23 years a servant of law and order, believing they stood for something sacred, these self-evident unimpeachable ideals. And now to tumble headlong and happily astray, into another universe of possibilities. Screw around with one criminal and wild alternatives suddenly present themselves. He had long since written off all other ways of being. You resign yourself to the facts as they stand.
The fact is that McCauley stirs something inside him too essential to go without. Too powerful to submit to traditional moral reproach, to better judgment. What they have, Hanna believes, suspends the usual mechanics. It transcends the governance of a regular-type life. He had believed in that strongly enough; he’d fought fiercely to preserve what was never available to himself. Everything is different, now. What was once second nature plays second fiddle to other, overriding impulses. He leans over to smooth McCauley's hair, then kisses his forehead. McCauley doesn't stir.
A weekend of poignant, amateur fucking and the encroach of tranquility no longer bothers him. Go figure.
Careful not to wake his companion, Hanna swings his legs out over the bed and treads slowly toward the curtains, drawn but for a blazing sliver against the ascending tropical sun. The floor is cool and pleasant against his bare feet. He tugs them aside a fraction with his finger, peering out at the pastel beach with its rustling palms, the brilliant complementary blues of ocean and sky, great puffy clusters of clouds drifting lazily on atmospheric currents. The night’s storm has subsided. The earth spins onward into another day.
He blinks dreamily, squinting, but the light no longer burns his eyes.
Astonishing fanart by the amazing @san-hun-po on Tumblr/X!