15. GREED
15
GREED
“Maybe we could scout it and see if there’s another way in,” Marie suggested.
“No way in hell,” Nolan said. “We tried to scout Jinx’s apartment and look what happened.”
Adam frowned at being used as an example. Blair offered him a sympathetic smile from the other end of the bar, pointing down to his healing leg and mouthing, Welcome to the club.
Felix smashed his cigarette into the ashtray on the bar. “Which is why we take out that fucking warehouse. Best case we get Isaac, worst case we put a hurting on their numbers.”
Ricky gave Blair a look. It was weird to see big, boisterous Ricky at a loss for words with the rest of them. He usually had something to say even if it wasn’t helpful. It would have been nice to hear him pipe up, though, if for no other reason than making things feel normal again.
“Three days,” Spencer said, glaring over the top of his glasses.
Felix took out his cigarette pack, growled when he found it empty. “What?”
“Give it three days before we decide. Let me get through the damn reopening of my bar.”
“Let us have one good night before this goes down,” Julian added, swiveling on his stool to face Felix.
“Three days. Then if we can’t come to a better decision I’ll go drop the match my fucking self, and I’ll use anybody who tries to stop me as kindling. You got it?” There was a mumbling of acknowledgment throughout the bar, and Felix turned, his coat arcing out behind his boots. “Good. I’m goin’ to the corner store, I need a carton of cigarettes.”
Blair let out a breath that had been trapped in his throat. The boss usually just took one of Spencer’s cigarettes when he was out, so he assumed Felix just needed to get out of the bar before he changed his mind. The door slammed and the bell chimed all too cheerfully behind him.
Blair trusted Felix, and he admired him more than anyone else in the world, but sometimes he wondered if that raging temper caused as many problems as it solved. It had been infectious when Blair joined. He had wanted to litter the streets with blood and ashes just like the boss but now he was starting to fear it would be Felix’s ashes on the wind if he didn’t reign himself in. It’ll be okay. Blair was Incindious’ defender and if that meant protecting Felix from himself, he would do that, too. Or he’d at least try.
“Alright, everybody scram. I’m going to bed,” Spencer said.
Flushing nights weren’t quite as bright and alive as those in Manhattan, but the insomniatic murkiness of Blair’s city came as a comfort. One of the lights on Hao-Chi’s sign had been going out since he joined the gang, somehow still flickering and clinging to life. In the daylight or under one of the dim overheads in the alley, he knew he would find their emblem sprayed across the bricks. It wasn’t a luxurious place but it was his home and it was Incindious’ territory.
However, Incindious wasn’t Wren’s gang and Flushing wasn’t his city, and Blair was going to deliberately involve him in something dangerous anyway. No amount of excuses he could make to himself would change that.
He turned the shower on and stood under the spray that was just on the other side of warm, the water heater having never quite worked well enough to get it hot. There were times right after he was shot, when he still got chills, that it felt hot by comparison. It felt nice in the winter months. He didn’t care about the temperature that night, though. He wasn’t even making much of an effort to shower—he just stood with a hand against the wall, the water washing his hair down his lowered head, watching it run off longer strands that fell in front of his eyes.
Blinking the drops off his eyelashes, he wondered if Wren was awake. He wasn’t going to ask him tonight, not when Wren needed to focus on his classes in the morning. Blair just wanted to hear his voice. He selfishly wanted to say goodnight while things were still the same, as though he could take the fragile stability of their relationship and preserve it with such mundane words, in the tender hours that were neither night or morning that always seemed to bring the deepest sleep and the most thoughtless confessions.
He twisted the shower handle. The water had gone cold. Or maybe it was him that had gone cold from realizing how much of a contradiction it was, to be asking Wren to enter the line of fire when all he wanted was to keep him safe, be it from the war or his own habits, because Blair—
No. He pulled a towel over his head like it could block out those thoughts. His body dripped a puddle on the floor but he didn’t pay it any mind. His attention was seized by the divide between his loyalties and his feelings, where choosing either one seemed to inevitably lead to hurting either the gang he had sworn to protect or the person he… maybe cared about a lot.
Blair sat on the edge of the bed and sent a text before he could talk himself out of it.
You awake?
He didn’t know if it was relief or dread he felt, watching the three dots appear to indicate that Wren was typing.
Sunshine
Yeah. Are you okay?
Blair stared at the screen. He didn’t think Wren had ever asked him anything of the sort. Was it so strange to ask if he was awake? Or did Wren just have some kind of freaky sixth sense for when Blair was upset?
I’m okay but thanks. You busy tomorrow?
Sunshine
Class.
After?
Sunshine
All yours.
The words definitely didn’t give Blair butterflies. Nope, not a chance.
The morning was spent making a run with Spencer to make a delivery before they set to the much tamer and more tiring task of repolishing the floors in the bar. He was glad to find Spencer quiet, gears turning almost audibly in his head as he tried to think of a plan. Blair left him to his thinking. He didn’t want to breach the subject, anyway, until he knew if his own idea was going to work. There was no point in mentioning it to anyone else when Wren might just refuse.
The smell of polyurethane was still lingering in Blair’s nose when he got to Gantry Plaza State Park, where they’d decided to meet. Blair parked next to the Audi and started walking after a glance through the tinted windows revealed it to be empty.
Wren stood with his elbows on the railing, staring across the water at Manhattan, at the building that made up part of his college campus.
Blair leaned back against the railing next to him and he didn’t really know who leaned over to who, only that Wren kissed him, and for a moment there was a sky’s worth of sunlight in his chest.
“Practical classes today, huh?” Blair said once they parted, nodding to Wren’s black scrubs.
Wren returned his arms to the railing. “The medical center attached to the campus gave us a cadaver.”
“That was… nice of them.” He took a deep breath that tasted of salt. “Do you remember the first time we were here, when they called me about Adam and you came to help?”
“I went to practice, but yes, I recall.” Wren’s eyes still lingered distantly on the school, so visibly cerulean and sullen when the breeze lifted his bangs from his face.
Blair took another breath, but it hitched around the anxiety in his throat, strangled out before it could reach his lungs. “I need your help again,” he said, sounding a lot more calm than he felt.
Wren raised an eyebrow. “Someone else get hit by a car?”
“No, but they will. Or worse. There’s no telling what Phantom will do next, or if the next person they target will be lucky enough to survive.” Jinx’s doll-like visage flashed in his mind. He took Wren’s hand and gently pulled him so they faced each other, with a city on either side that both felt small compared to the guilt eating through his chest. “I need you to get us into that warehouse. You built computers and wrote software, I know you can do it.”
“Us,” Wren repeated, his eyes going dark.
Blair gripped his hand tighter in what he hoped was reassurance. “Yeah, even I’m not crazy enough to go in there alone.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t go in there at all. You told them how to find the place, that should earn you the right to sit this one out,” Wren said, fingers twitching restlessly under Blair’s.
“But I don’t want to.”
“What if I do?” Wren asked, his voice shaped by something that sounded dangerously close to emotion. “What if I don’t want you to come back with another bullet in you?”
Blair smiled. “Hey, don’t worry Sunshine. This is what I do.”
Wren’s jaw clenched. He turned away, and usually Blair would have let him, but something made him reach out. Blair caught Wren around the waist and made him turn back around, keeping a hand on Wren’s hip as Wren glared down at him. Blair couldn’t keep the grin off his face. That look might have been scathing to anyone else, if they hadn’t been on the receiving end of Felix Bane’s glares for a couple years.
“You’re nauseatingly loyal to them. They don’t deserve it,” Wren said.
“They’re my family.” Blair chanced a step forward, bringing them close enough for his shirt to brush against Wren’s. “Sweet of you to worry, though.”
“I’m not worried ,” Wren said as if Blair had suggested something truly horrific.
Blair kissed him. Any plans he might have had to pull away after were brought to a halt by Wren’s hands on his face, holding them together. One of them slid around to grip the back of his neck and Blair shuddered. Maybe they shouldn’t have been making out in public, but that didn’t stop him from pushing up to meet the pressure of Wren’s lips against his. As irritated as Wren seemed before, Blair didn’t know where this was coming from and with the way Wren’s tongue dragged against his, he didn’t know if he cared.
Wren broke away but only to bring his mouth to Blair’s ear, still holding Blair in place against his body. “Let me take you home,” he murmured.
Blair’s fingers clenched in his shirt. “Yes, god yes.”
After a tense car ride and an equally tense elevator ride—since there was someone else in there with them and preventing them from picking up where they left off—they finally walked into Wren’s apartment. Blair barely had his shoes off before his back was hitting the door and Wren was on him.
Wren didn’t stop kissing him to pick him up, just grabbed him under the thighs and lifted him as casually as he’d done the first time, and it didn’t turn Blair on any less the second time. He wrapped his legs around Wren, moaning as it rubbed his stiffening cock against Wren’s body. Wren lowered him to the couch and wrenched Blair’s shirt off. Blair shivered, less from the air conditioned apartment and more from the ferocity in Wren’s touch as he gave the same treatment to Blair’s pants. Wren hooked his fingers into Blair’s underwear and pulled them down, leaving Blair naked against the leather, not an entirely comfortable feeling but not nearly enough to deter him from continuing.
Blair grabbed the hem of Wren’s shirt and pushed it up his torso, and Wren took it the rest of the way off since that was the highest Blair could reach without getting up from the couch. Something about the way Wren stood over him gave Blair the impression Wren liked him where he was. His heart raced, watching Wren pull a small bottle out of his pocket. He couldn’t even bring himself to give Wren a hard time for the fact he was carrying lube around with him since it was currently very fucking convenient.
Wren pulled his hips to the edge of the couch and Blair let his head fall back against the couch as a slick finger circled his entrance. Blair spread his legs on either side of Wren, propping his feet on the coffee table. He didn’t realize he’d closed his eyes until the feeling of that finger breaching him made his eyes fly open, and he found Wren leaning over him, his hand braced on the back of the couch beside Blair’s head. A low moan tore out of him as that finger curled inside him.
“More,” Blair gasped.
He saw his own hunger mirrored in their locked gazes, and Wren added a second finger, working Blair open roughly and making Blair love every second of it. By the time he added a third finger Blair was prepared to beg, but Wren’s patience seemed to be just as depleted since he made quick work of twisting and scissoring them to open Blair up before slipping them out. Blair couldn’t even bring himself to feel embarrassed by being on display with how badly he wanted Wren inside him.
Blair drew a quick breath as Wren lined himself up with his entrance. He swallowed back the demands for Wren to hurry up; it was probably for his own sake that Wren was easing him into it, and the thought filled his chest with tingling warmth.
Wren pushed Blair’s knees back as he eased his lube-slick cock into him, practically folding Blair in half. Blair couldn’t move at all, save for grasping Wren’s shoulders. He could only take, and Wren gave, slowly sinking into him so deep that Blair’s cock leaked precome from the stretch alone.
“How’s your leg?” Wren asked.
“S’fine,” Blair panted. “Fuck me.”
“You—” Wren said it like he meant for it to be an insult, but it was tinged with something else. Something soft. He withdrew almost all the way, then snapped his hips forward. Blair’s moan didn’t even taper off before Wren set a brutal pace, reducing Blair’s voice to a trembling cadence of pleasure and need. Wren bent over him so far that his bangs brushed against Blair’s face. “You drive me insane , Blair.”
Blair’s legs shook in Wren’s grasp. Wren hit his prostate with deadly precision, staring down at him all the while. Blair tried to keep himself off the edge but he never stood a chance, he was the oxygen to Wren’s acetylene, burned away mercilessly as Wren blazed around him.
“Touch yourself. I want to see you make yourself come,” Wren said. He’d only taken himself out of his pants without bothering to take them off, so the open folds of his jeans rubbed against Blair with every thrust, rough compared to the leather couch that was becoming slippery from his sweat.
Blair didn’t bother telling him that he could have come even without having his cock touched. He didn’t think he could have denied Wren anything in that moment, strung up so high on the ecstasy of Wren fucking into him. He circled his fingers around his cock, spreading precome down his length to stroke himself as quickly as his shaking hand would allow.
“Oh f-fuck,” Blair gasped, writhing but trapped between the back of the couch and his own folded legs against his chest.
He could lean his head up, though, and he caught Wren’s lip between his teeth, worrying it gently at first before biting. Wren’s pace faltered, a moan spilling from his mouth into Blair’s. The sound snapped the tension already coiled so tight inside of Blair, his nails sinking deeper into Wren’s shoulder as he came.
“That’s it,” Wren said against his ear, his voice so raspy and wrecked that it brought another wave of Blair’s orgasm crashing over him.
What he didn’t expect was for Wren to keep fucking him like he had no intention of stopping.
“Wren, I can’t… not again,” Blair said around a panting breath.
“You can,” Wren replied, lowering Blair’s legs to his waist and then picking him up off the couch. “And you will.”
Blair shivered as the room spun and his back hit the cold glass that made up the entire far wall of Wren’s apartment. Wren held him up against it, pulling Blair down against every upward thrust. Blair’s moan was almost a scream as Wren found the angle to hit his overstimulated prostate, arms winding around Wren’s neck, fingers sinking into the tousled black strands of Wren’s hair. He wanted to argue that he couldn’t possibly come again but Wren touched him like he needed him, and it was enough, more than enough for Blair to give him everything he wanted. He clung to Wren and rode out the twinges of oversensitivity until his cock had fully hardened again between them.
“Wren,” Blair moaned, his voice pleading without even knowing what he was asking for. “ Wren .”
Wren shuddered against him. “Come on, Blair, let go. Come for me.”
Blair was amazed the glass hadn’t cracked with how viciously Wren was fucking him against. His back was going to be sore as all hell, but god it was going to be worth it. Wren’s precarious ponytail finally came loose, his hair falling around Blair’s fingers, and Blair pulled it so hard that Wren’s head jerked back.
“ Fuck ,” Wren choked out.
Blair twisted Wren’s hair around his fist to keep the pressure, the sting, because if he was going to fall apart then Wren was going to fall apart too. Wren slammed into his prostate just two more times before he buried a moan against Blair’s neck and went over the edge. The feeling of Wren’s cock throbbing with release dragged Blair over right along with him.
Only the smallest amount of come trickled out when Blair came, his body seizing up with a mostly dry orgasm that was somehow more intense than the one before it. His legs went boneless as the pleasure subsided. His arms, too. If Wren wasn’t holding his entire weight up Blair would be on the floor.
They did end up on the floor, but in a much more deliberate fashion than Blair would have managed. Wren eased out of him and laid him down, then fell on his back next to him on the dense carpet. Blair turned and put his head on Wren’s chest. He felt oddly disconnected, like every thought in his mind had drained out of him and the sound of Wren’s heartbeat was the only thing keeping him from floating away. Wren was still for a moment, then slowly brought his arm up around Blair’s shoulders.
For awhile, they just breathed, with the late afternoon sunlight coming through the window to warm Blair’s back and the heat of Wren’s body warming his front. It was a soft kind of silence. It carried the floaty feeling from his mind into his chest, and it was nice.
“Hey, Wren.”
“Hm?”
“You were worried about me,” Blair said, folding his arms on Wren’s chest and propping his chin on them.
“Shut up.”
Blair didn’t bother trying to breach the subject of the warehouse with Wren again. He contented himself with laying on the floor while Wren stroked his hair in an absentminded way that made Blair’s whole body feel warm. As a result, though, he was back to square one with ideas for how to approach Phantom once they left. The doors to that warehouse were too solid to brute force without drawing the attention of anyone who might be inside. There shouldn’t be many people in there, judging from how desolate the parking lot had looked, but having them grouped up and ready wouldn’t be ideal.
He invited Wren to come to the bar’s grand reopening, and Wren seemed as enthused about the idea as Blair expected. It was worth a shot.
After helping Spencer take an exhaustive last minute inventory of the newly replenished liquor, they were as ready as they were ever going to be to reopen Harlowe’s .
“Blair, I need one more favor today,” Spencer said as he emerged from the doorway between the two shelving units of bottles behind the bar.
Blair hopped off his stool. “What’s up?”
Spencer took a duffel bag from behind the bar and sat it between them. “I need you to make a delivery. Usually I’d just make ‘em come here, but I don’t want to be trying to do this kind of business on our first night open again.”
“Oh… don’t we open in another hour?” Blair asked, disappointment seeping into him as he lifted the heavy bag.
“Don’t worry, we’ll still be open long after you get back. You’re really doing me a solid here.”
He looked out the open curtains into the gloomy day. It looked like the rain was on its way back. Unable to resist the heartfelt gratitude on Spencer’s face, he sat the duffel bag down long enough to grab his jacket off the coat rack by the door and flip the red hood up. The rain itself didn’t bother him but it was a raging pain in the ass to ride his bike with his hair dripping into his eyes. He shouldered the duffel bag and tried not to sound too petulant when he asked, “Where am I taking these?”
Blair frowned at the cars lining the sidewalk in front of the bar when he returned. He was glad it had such a good turnout, but he had really wanted to be there to help, preferably in the kitchen. One vehicle he didn’t see was an Audi R8. He checked his phone; the bar had opened over an hour ago, surely Wren would have been there already if he was going to come. Not that he had any reason to. Blair’s shoulders sunk as he pulled the heavy door open. It seemed selfish to be in such low spirits when Spencer had put so much into the grand reopening, but he couldn’t help but feel disappointed.
Standing inside the door, looking at the happy crowd and tables full of food that had been prepared just fine without his help, he felt painfully unnecessary. But he wasn’t going to bring down the mood. The bar was thrumming with more energy than he’d ever seen it, so he put on his best smile as he tied his damp hoodie around his waist and threw his hand up to several lower ranking members of the gang that he didn’t see often. He yelled greetings over the buzz of conversation and the music coming from Julian’s record player, where a black vinyl rolled smoothly under the needle. It was all on his way to the bar. The least he could do was tell Spencer how great everything looked and get a drink to celebrate. Maybe with enough alcohol he would actually feel like he was celebrating and not lamenting the absence of his—
“Wren?” he cried in shock.
Wren sat at the bar, throwing back shots with Spencer. Blair gaped as Wren coughed and pushed the shot glass aside to join the empty one next to him. Spencer had a matching pyramid of them on his side of the bar with three to Wren’s two. Blair blinked but the hallucination didn’t fade. No fucking way.