Chapter 5 Familiar Skin
FAMILIAR SKIN
IRISH
The thing about Nolan Mercer's mind was that it made mine better.
Not better the way a tutor makes a student better, or a coach makes an athlete better.
Better the way a second engine makes a car faster.
Additive. Multiplicative. Two systems working in parallel, covering each other's blind spots, and the combined output was something neither of us could have produced alone.
We'd been at the safehouse for twelve days and in that time we'd mapped more of the weapons pipeline than the DOJ had managed in three years.
Forty-seven matched signature pairs linking Raymond Holt to both the destruction orders and the receiving manifests.
Four years of a Deputy Assistant Attorney General signing his own conviction because he'd been doing it so long he'd stopped being careful.
Tyler had called it the most important evidence against a federal official since Watergate. Nolan had gone quiet when he heard that—the bone-deep, exhausted quiet of a man who'd been carrying a truth nobody believed and had finally set it down.
The case was nearly built. The evidence was damning. And I was losing my mind.
Not about the case. About everything else.
Twelve days in a cabin with two men. One I'd loved for nearly eight years.
One I was developing feelings for that I couldn't name and couldn't stop and couldn't tell a soul about, because telling Dec meant risking the only certainty I'd ever had, and telling Nolan meant risking a man who'd already lost everything and didn't need the additional complication of his protector catching feelings.
And underneath all of it, humming through my body like a low current: two weeks without sex.
Two weeks. Dec and I hadn't gone two weeks without touching each other since the time he'd deployed to the Persian Gulf in 2019 and I'd been a walking disaster for fourteen days.
We'd shared a bed every night at the safehouse, and every night we'd lain there in the dark, hyper-aware of the thin walls, hyper-aware of the man sleeping four and a half inches away, and we'd kept our hands to ourselves like monks in a monastery built for sinners.
It was killing me. Not figuratively. My body was running hot, restless, my skin prickling with a need that had nowhere to go.
Two weeks of proximity to Dec’s body—his hands, his chest, the way he moved through a room—and now, on top of that, twelve days of watching Nolan Mercer push his glasses up with one finger and map numbers in the air with hands that made me forget how to breathe.
I was a man on fire pretending he couldn't smell the smoke.
That afternoon, the data session wrapped early because Nolan had hit a wall on the Hawthorne depot records and needed to step away from the numbers, which for him was like needing to step away from oxygen. He'd gone to the gym.
I heard the heavy bag first. The muffled rhythm of leather absorbing force, steady, controlled, filtering through the cabin walls from the detached garage. I went to the kitchen window.
The garage door was open. From this angle I could see about half the interior, the heavy bag swinging on its chain, and Nolan.
He'd taken his shirt off.
Two weeks of real food, real sleep, and daily training hadn't built a new body—they'd uncovered the one that had always been there.
The gaunt, hollow-eyed man who'd arrived at the clubhouse was gone.
What replaced him was what Nolan Mercer had always looked like before three weeks of running had stripped him down to survival mode: broad shoulders rounding with each strike, the muscles of his back shifting under skin that had filled out and tightened, his arms—God, his arms—flexing with every controlled combination.
The body wasn't new. It was restored. The fullness back in his chest, the definition back in his shoulders, the hollows under his collarbones filled in like someone had corrected an interruption and the original had resumed.
He moved with that maddening precision, every punch measured, every reset deliberate, the discipline of a man who trained the way he analyzed data: systematically, completely, without wasted motion.
Sweat traced the line of his spine. His hair, cropped close from this morning's trim, was dark with it at the temples.
The glasses were off—he must have set them aside—and without them his face was different.
Sharper. More open. The careful intellectual armor stripped away, leaving just the man underneath, hitting leather with the focused intensity of someone working through things he couldn't put into numbers.
I watched for longer than I should have. Long enough for the heat in my gut to stop being a simmer and start being an emergency.
I stepped away from the window.
The thought formed with the crisp clarity of a tactical decision: Nolan was in the gym. The gym was detached from the cabin. He'd be there for at least another twenty minutes based on the pace he was keeping.
I went to the bathroom, opened the cabinet, and pulled out the kit I'd packed alongside the medical supplies and the encrypted phones—because some kinds of preparation were just as essential as ammunition, and a man who'd been with the same partner for eight years knew when to plan ahead.
It took a few minutes of quiet, efficient work that didn't need narrating.
I washed up, cleaned up, and looked at myself in the mirror.
Flushed. Bright-eyed. Grinning at my own reflection like a man about to do something stupid and brilliant.
I found Dec outside the front door.
He was leaning against the porch railing, one boot up on the lower rail, watching the desert with the patient focus of a man whose body was always half on guard duty even when his mind was somewhere else.
Late afternoon light caught the side of his face, turning the hard planes of his jaw golden-brown.
His arms were crossed over his chest, the sleeves of his black T-shirt straining around biceps that could crack walnuts, and he looked like something someone had carved out of bronze and forgotten to tell it wasn't alive.
I leaned against the doorframe and studied him the way I'd been studying him for nearly eight years and still hadn't gotten bored.
"Hey there, stranger."
He glanced over. One eyebrow, barely lifted. "Stranger."
"You look like you've been standing here a while." I let my voice drop into the register that Dec knew meant trouble. The one that sat somewhere between casual and predatory, like a cat stretching before it pounced. "Must get lonely. Out here. In the desert. All by yourself."
The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. The ghost of one. "I'm on watch."
"Watching what? Coyotes?" I pushed off the doorframe and crossed the porch until I was behind him, close enough that my chest nearly touched his back.
I could feel the heat of him through his shirt.
My lips found the side of his neck, just below his ear, and I pressed a kiss there—light, barely there, more breath than contact.
"Because I've got something way more interesting to look at. "
His body didn't move. But I felt it react. The subtle tension that ran through his shoulders, the shift in his breathing—deeper, slower, the controlled inhale of a man deciding what to do with what I was offering.
"You know how long it's been?" I murmured against his skin.
My hand slid around his hip, fingers trailing down the front of his jeans, finding the shape of him through the denim.
Already half-hard. I cupped him, slow, letting the heel of my palm press against the thickening length.
"Two weeks, Dec. Two weeks of being in bed with you and keeping my hands to myself like some kind of born-again—"
"Sean." Low. Warning. But his hips pressed forward into my hand, involuntary, the body overriding the discipline for half a second.
"Two weeks of your body right there next to me." I stroked him through the jeans, slow, deliberate, feeling him swell against my palm. "Two weeks of smelling you. Feeling you breathe. And being quiet. So goddamn quiet."
His hand found my wrist. Didn't pull it away. Held it there, his fingers tight around the bone, his thumb pressing into my pulse point as if he was counting my heartbeats and finding them unsatisfactory.
"Nolan's in the gym," I said. "Has been for twenty minutes. Heavy bag session. He'll be another twenty at least." I kissed his neck again, slower this time, open-mouthed, tasting the salt on his skin. "I cleaned up."
The words landed. I felt the moment they registered—felt it in the way his grip on my wrist tightened, in the way his breathing stopped for a full second before resuming at a pace that had nothing to do with keeping watch over the desert.
I pulled away. Stepped back. Let the absence of contact do the work.
"Bedroom's right there." I said it like I was commenting on the weather.
Then I turned and walked back through the front door, not looking back, because I didn't need to. I knew the sound of Dec’s boot hitting the porch floor behind me.
I knew the cadence of his stride when he was trying to look controlled and failing.
I'd been listening to that man move for nearly eight years, and right now every step said I'm done waiting.
The hallway was short. Our bedroom door was open. I walked through it and let the grin take over my whole face because nobody was watching and I could finally stop pretending I wasn't desperate.