Chapter 24
Chapter
Twenty-Four
FADE
One of the few improvements I made to my house when I moved in was to give it a large tub. Big enough for two guys to wash each other’s backs. I don’t take baths often, but there are times when I want to relax and I don’t want to wear any clothes while I recline against the jets.
Of course, I first put in a hot tub out back, but that was before the neighbor started harassing me about what I wear.
Honestly, if people weren’t so concerned about what everyone else was doing, we’d live in a far better world.
I maintain that I’ll wear what I want in my own yard, but on days when I’m too exhausted by life to fight about it, a bath is preferable.
One of the positive sides of soaking against the jets inside is that it’s also air conditioned, so I can spend longer relaxing before I get too hot. Sinking low in the tub with eyes closed, I can block the world out and pretend there isn’t ugliness poking its head around every corner.
My eyes open when I hear a thunk on the floor beside me. Erez is there, and he’s just dropped his shorts. The noise was probably his phone in his pocket. He’s watching me, looking exhausted and tense, as he continues to take his clothes off.
I’m a man obsessed, so with every additional inch of exposed skin, my cock stands a little straighter and becomes a little harder. By the time he climbs into the tub, there’s a flagpole between my legs.
Erez doesn’t sit at the opposite end. He sits on my lap. I groan at the same time he laughs under his breath.
“Not to sound cliché or anything, but are you happy to see me, Fade?”
I sigh heavily. “You’re fucking gorgeous, so I’m always fucking turned on when you’re naked.”
As has been the case over the last five years, Erez finds my comment amusing instead of serious. Right now, I’d really like to shake the shit out of him until he understands that I’m not joking at all. I never was. I want all of him.
I have all of him, though. Don’t I? Everything except the conscious decision to be with me romantically.
Erez wriggles in my lap, and I wrap my arms around him to keep him still. He’s not helping the situation with all that friction. He laughs again, becoming limp in my arms for a minute.
“I can’t get on your dick if you’re pinning me down,” Erez says.
My hips jerk up all on their own, and my arms tighten. “I don’t have a condom in the tub. We’ve been over this.”
“Then don’t come inside me,” he says, “but let me on your dick. Stop being so selfish with that thing.”
I snort. “Selfish, huh?”
“Clearly. You have the kind of dick sonnets are written about, and you’re constantly telling me no because you don’t have a condom. I call that selfish.”
Laughter bubbles up before I can stop it. “You’re ridiculous.”
“Just get inside my ass already,” Erez complains. “If I tell you I need a distraction from all this waiting, will you take pity on me and just do it?”
Seriously, utterly ridiculous. “He’ll call this afternoon. He promised.”
I can feel Erez’s grumpiness in response to my words. It makes me smile.
We’re still waiting for Zephyr’s meeting with the Van Doren police contact to come to a conclusion and to be told which direction we’re going in. Personally, I want the police department to take over since I’m not sure I have the stomach for what’s happening.
On the other hand, I’m very aware of how broken the system is in this country.
We live in a society that elected and continued to support a pedophile for president, and that’s exactly what we’re dealing with now.
I’m not up on all the details of the horror island that the former blight on our democracy was a part of.
I was a very young child when it was being uncovered, but I imagine that the kinds of terrible shit we’re discovering now must be parallel in horror to what had happened all those years ago.
I say “all those years ago” as if twenty-five years is a long fucking time, but in reality, it’s relatively short. A blip in time.
So yeah. Letting the government—local, state, or federal—deal with this is basically a slap in the face to the victims and a slap on the wrist to the pedophiles. Even if it makes me uneasy, I understand why the Deth brothers would prefer to deal with it themselves.
Erez has been patient for a decade now. He’s uncovered the truth about his sister’s past, and he’s tired of waiting to enact justice. I try to imagine how I would feel in his place, but I can’t bring myself to put Shye in the position Erez’s sister was in—even hypothetically.
“You’ve waited days already. A couple hours is nothing.”
“Fade! Stop being a bitch and put your dick in me.”
I laugh again, and because I’m a weak man, I release him so Erez can rearrange himself to slide down my dick.
With the ease in which I slide in, I have a feeling he planned this and prepped in the bedroom.
I know for certain he cleaned out this morning from our morning activities.
I was in the shower with him, and I cleaned him personally. The slick inside him now is new.
Erez’s head falls back onto my shoulder, and I listen to his moan fill the room. It echoes off all the tiles and bounces right back so I’m surrounded by his sexy sounds.
All kinds of clichés play in my head, and I only barely manage to keep them to myself. Like how no one has ever felt as good as he does. Why do people say that to every lover they’re with? In my lifetime, I’ve tried very hard to never say those words. They’re just too common. They’ve lost meaning.
Doesn’t make it untrue, though.
“Oh my god,” Erez says, exhaling heavily. “I’ve never sat on your dick like this before. I think you’re going to split me in two. Or you’ve gotten fatter like this.”
“All that wriggling,” I say, the words breathless.
He huffs laughter.
I hit the controls to turn the jets off. I have a feeling that we’re going to make enough of a mess without their help.
Erez’s hands are tight on my forearms, trying to keep his weight a little elevated from me. That won’t do. He insisted on riding my dick right now, and I need to feel all of him.
I pry his nails from my arms and pin them to his chest, giving him no choice but to give into gravity entirely. He gasps as his body jolts and tenses. “Holy fuck,” he grunts as his head falls back once again. “You gained four inches.”
I snort and nearly say something as stupid as no, you gained seven inches, but I refuse to be one of those guys. To keep the stupid shit playing through my head inside, I clasp my mouth over the hollow of his neck and suck.
Keeping his hands pinned to his chest with one of my arms, I drop my other hand to his cock. Erez’s hips jerk as soon as I touch him.
“Your body acts as if you haven’t gotten off in months. It’s been less than a handful of hours,” I muse.
He doesn’t answer with words. Just a series of grunts and groans. There’s some heady power that comes with knowing you turn someone on that much. He wants me so much that he can’t form words.
I stroke his dick without much intensity. I’m not entirely interested in getting him off—not yet, anyway. Especially since I’m going to be stuck in limbo without a condom.
My eyes widen. Fucking hell, I’m in Erez without a condom!
Erez’s sharp inhale interrupts my momentary freak-out. He’s about to come already. Seriously, he just got off. He shouldn’t be this ready to explode. Has he been edging himself?
Ohhhh….
I continue to stroke his throbbing dick until his ass clenches right before he’s ready to get off, then release his erection. Erez’s complaint isn’t in words. He whines, body shaking, ass grinding on my cock.
Oh no. Not going to happen. Instead of letting him get himself off using my cock, I grip the base of his dick and squeeze until he’s practically sobbing.
“Fade,” he whines, dragging my name out as if there are eight syllables in it.
“I think we’re going to drag this out a little. Don’t you?”
His whimper has my dick pulsing. Okay, that’s dangerous. He can’t be making those noises, or we’re going to have a sticky situation.
I wait until Erez is mostly relaxed on my lap again before I stroke his dick once more. As with the first time, I’m slow and purposeless. I’m not trying to get him off. I want to make him feel good but not to the point where he’s ready to come.
This time, it takes him quite a while to get to the point where he’s clenching around me and gasping. I’m very proud of the fact that I can read his body as well as I can in a relatively short time. As soon as he’s ready to come, I grip the base of his dick and squeeze him once more.
Erez’s body spasms as a sob breaks from his chest. “Please, Fade,” he whines. “I need to get off.”
Good fucking god, if he begins begging, I’m done.
This time, I don’t let him come down completely before I begin jerking him. The longer I prolong our sexy time, the more frantic and desperate he sounds. His begging picks up. I shorten the time between near-orgasms, and his body becomes a live wire, unable to hold still.
When I finally take pity on him, Erez has tears in the corner of his eyes and his body hasn’t stopped trembling. I think his dick is the hardest I’ve ever felt it. I imagine it’s red and angry with need. This time, when I stroke him, I do so with purpose and let him come.
He’s loud. While I can only see his face in blurry profile, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen as I allow him to succumb to his pleasure. His dick throbs in my hand with each spurt. Pretty confident I feel it like a heartbeat.
It’s several long minutes later that he comes down and his body becomes nothing more than a boneless doll.
Both of my arms wrap around him this time, and I hold him close.
Partly for him but also for me because I’m so damn ready to get off.
It’s right there, and if I move too much, I’m going to come inside this man.
Erez is barely lucid again when his phone begins ringing. He groans in frustration, body sagging against me. “Seriously?” he mutters. “The fucking timing.”
I chuckle. “It’s right there on the floor. Just reach over and get it.”
He does. His shift in the tub brings him off my cock, and I’m both relieved and frustrated. When he comes back, he traps my dick between his back and my stomach as he answers the phone.
“Hey.”
“You busy?”
Erez huffs. “Tell me what the verdict is?”
“As we suspected. The solid evidence we have is acquired illegally since our cameras are on personal property. Nothing we have of Alice’s is actually evidence. If they were photographs, that would be a different story, but these are paintings.”
His teeth clench, but he doesn’t comment.
“Bottom line, we have the go ahead. We’ll be in close conversation with them, so they’ll know when we’re moving in. They’ll make sure that the precinct has no reason to be in the area, so our activities go unnoticed.”
Erez sighs. “Okay, good. Now what?”
“Meet us in my office tomorrow, and we’ll begin planning.
Grey and Paisley are already assembling a team that’s going out immediately.
We have to find all involved locations before we go in.
That’s not negotiable. The only way we’re going to stop this operation is if we don’t leave any loose ends open. ”
Erez nods. “I know. It’s just frustrating to wait.”
“It is. Trust me, with the exception of our resident psychopaths, we’re all very aware that the longer we wait, the more kids are being hurt. Now that we have a solid go, we’re going.”
Chills break out over my skin. My heart races for entirely different reasons than it had been three minutes ago.
“Okay. Okay, good.”
“Good. Feel better now that we’re not standing still?”
“Yes and no. I feel like we’re twenty-five years too late.”
Zephyr sighs. “I know, Erez. We couldn’t get her to talk to us about what happened to her before you found her.
We tried. Our parents were just talking about the times they tried to talk to Alice, but she would either tell them she didn’t want to talk about it, she didn’t know, or shut down completely. I know you asked her too. Didn’t you?”
Erez nods. He shifts in my lap and curls into my arms so I hug him against me. “I did. I never pushed so much that she’d shut down, but I got the same answers.”
“Either she didn’t want to relive it, or maybe it’s like Matty said. They were trained, probably threatened, never to speak of what was happening to them. I’m guessing that trauma clung to Alice, even as she grew and healed.”
“Healed,” Erez says bitterly.
“Lan made another… weirdly insightful comment this morning. He said that Alice did or was healing. She was happy. Maybe the thing that haunted her was her inability to tell anyone what happened to her. We don’t know to what extremes they went to make sure these kids don’t speak.
What we do know is Alice wouldn’t utter a word for three years.
Maybe Lan is right. Maybe she was able to move on from the torture she went through.
What she couldn’t escape was whatever had been so…
ingrained in her that she couldn’t speak about it. ”
“But she was speaking about it,” I say without realizing I said the words out loud. “Painting the words into pictures is speaking about it. Her journal is speaking about it. All the hidden images under the coloring pages.”
“Maybe whatever fear kept her from speaking caught up to her,” Zephyr says quietly.
“Maybe we’ve been looking at and blaming the most obvious demons in those paintings, but what we haven’t truly focused on was her inability to talk about it.
She did anyway, in her own way, and maybe that’s the battle she lost.”
“Or escaped,” Erez says.