8. Wire
WIRE
CALEB
The mat was under my back and Ghost was over me and neither of us was fighting anymore.
The whole gym was there, exact, every detail my body had filed without permission.
The buzz of the fluorescent tubes. Rubber and iron and sweat baked into concrete.
The damp print my shoulders had left on the mat.
His forearm lay across my collarbone, but the pressure had changed, from a pin into something with a question inside it, and his weight settled onto my hips like it had decided to stay.
Six inches. His face six inches over mine, sweat sliding from his temple down along the edge of his jaw, and those pale blue eyes so close I could see the darker ring around each iris.
In the gym he'd looked like what he was, a man who put people on the ground for a living.
Now that man drained out of his face and something else filled the space behind his eyes, younger and hungrier and aimed at nothing in the world but me.
We came closer. His breath landed on my mouth, warm, quick.
Our bodies pressed full length, his legs threaded through mine, and nothing ground, nothing moved.
We just held there, sealed together, two heartbeats knocking against each other through skin, and his eyes dropped from my eyes to my mouth?—
I woke up.
My eyes opened onto a concrete ceiling and my head came online all at once, no drowse, no soft climb out of sleep.
Awake like a switch thrown. The guest room they'd moved me into after Kai cleared me, a real bed and a narrow window with the dawn barely gray behind it, somewhere in the main building of the Steel Phoenixes clubhouse.
The day after the sparring. I'd trained through the afternoon after the mat, run Tank's weight circuit until my arms gave out, and then I'd slept eight straight hours for the first time in four months.
The dream hadn't scared me awake. It had lit me up like a flare.
The ache came next, low, insistent. My cock was hard enough to hurt, tenting the sheet, pulse beating through it in time with my heart. I lay there for two breaths and told myself to get up, take the cold shower, put it away.
The dream was still burning behind my eyes. His mouth six inches from mine.
I gave up. My right hand went down and wrapped around my cock, skin on skin, and the grip alone pulled a hiss out of me.
Hot, heavy, so stiff the first slow pull dragged a bead of slick from the tip and spread it under my palm.
With my left hand I threw the cover off, and there it was in the gray light, my cock standing thick out of my fist, flushed dark, twitching every time my grip shifted.
I stroked slow and let the dream keep going.
We kissed. That was where it went first, his mouth crashing onto mine, no warm-up, his hand knotting in my hair.
I hauled his shirt over his head and got my palms flat on him, the muscle of his back shifting under my hands the way it had shifted under my cheek on that first ride through the desert.
He tore my shirt off me. I pulled his pants down over his hips and his cock sprang free the way I wanted to imagine it, big, curved up hard against his stomach, and he shoved my gym shorts down and took my aching cock in his fist while our mouths stayed locked, and then he went down.
One knee on the floor. Both hands gripping my thighs. And those ice-blue eyes tipped up at me, holding my stare, unblinking, while his mouth opened and he took my cock inside.
That was it. That was the picture that ended me.
My strokes turned fast and rough, the wet sound of them loud in the empty room, my hips lifting off the mattress on their own, and the pressure that had been building at the base of my spine detonated.
I came hard. Cum shot up my stomach in ropes, one after another, hanging in the air for half a second before they landed hot across my abs and chest, and I convulsed through every contraction, a grunt torn out of me each time, my heels digging into the mattress until the last pulse wrung itself out and left my cock jerking, still leaking, still half hard against my stomach.
My arms dropped flat on the bed.
The ceiling swam back into focus. My breath sawed. Sweat cooled at my hairline, and the cum on my skin cooled faster, going from hot to sticky in the space of ten slow heartbeats.
Then the clarity landed, the way it always does, sharp and unsympathetic as a corner man with bad news.
I'd just jerked off thinking about Ghost.
A man I'd known for five days. A man who'd pulled me out of that pit without me asking, who talked at double speed with his hands going and then went dead silent when it counted.
A man whose road name I still couldn't pin down, whether it came from the way he vanished through a packed crowd or those pale eyes that looked straight through walls, or both.
And I was lying in a biker club's guest room with his club's blanket kicked off me, my stomach striped with my own cum, my cock refusing to stand down.
I wasn't surprised I found him attractive. That part had never been a question. I'd known which way I was built since puberty, since the locker rooms and the tournaments made it clear where my eyes went and where they didn't. It had never once been the problem.
The problem had always been time.
Dad died when I was thirteen. After that, Mom worked doubles at an Italian restaurant and came home with her feet swollen and her voice gone, and I cooked what she taught me to cook and got Liam to school and got myself to the gym, because the gym was the one room in the world where nothing was my job except the next movement.
There was no version of those years with room in it for chasing anyone.
Then Mom went too, by her own hand, when I was old enough to run a kitchen and Liam was old enough to almost not need one.
I never blamed her. I'd watched what the doubles and the grief did to her, year over year, the way exhaustion filed her down.
I think she held on until the math told her the two of us would stand without her. Then she let go.
So it was me and Liam. A cook's apprenticeship I'd finished while still in school, then the job off Charleston, because cooking was the last thing of hers I still had my hands on and the only thing I was good at besides hurting people.
Rent, shifts, his climbing gear, my training.
Men stayed a thing other people had time for.
I lay there with the proof of five days drying on my stomach, and the two halves of my life sat side by side and refused to look at each other.
That got me up. I stripped the case off the pillow, wiped myself down, balled it for the laundry, and pulled on the clothes somebody had left folded on the chair.
A black T-shirt that fit for once. Jeans a size too tight through the thighs, but they'd hold.
I grabbed the towel and headed for the shared bathrooms, and I kept my mind on water temperature and nothing else.
The kitchen announced itself from thirty feet down the hall.
Griddle hiss. A cabinet slamming. Grease and coffee and charring peppers riding the air, and over the top of all of it a voice I recognized before I saw the man it belonged to, the redheaded rider from my first night, running the room at full volume.
"—because bacon is not a suggestion, Nolan, it's a covenant! Flip it or step aside and live with the shame!"
I came through the doorway and stopped to take the room in.
The space ran the size of a mess hall. Long tables in rows, most of them full, forty or fifty people at least, men and women in cuts and work shirts, forearms like dock rope, plates moving, coffee moving.
At the far end a kitchen line big enough for a restaurant, and behind the counter three men worked it.
The redhead conducted from the griddle. Beside him a tall one, glasses, built like he could rack an engine block but handling a spatula like it might file a complaint.
And a third, dark-haired, compact power, who moved between the two of them without hurry, a referee years into the same fixture.
As I watched, he set a hand on the back of the tall one's neck, brief, thumb pressing once below the hairline, and the tall one's shoulders came down an inch and his spatula work smoothed out.
There was a current between those two, the same close-wired thing I'd caught between the silver-eyed man and Kai in the medical bay.
The room itself told me more. Fifty people fed in shifts, plates coming off the line in a steady rotation, and the noise stayed under a ceiling.
All those hard-built men and women, and the volume held at a working hum, no shouting matches, no chairs going over.
Almost military. I'd cooked for crowds this size, and crowds this size did not behave like this on their own.
Somebody had built this, drilled it in, and the whole room kept the discipline without a single order being given.
My eyes swept the tables and stopped.
Blue. Two points of pale blue across the room, already on me.
Ghost sat at a table halfway down, and heat climbed my face before I could stop it, straight up from my collar, because the last time I'd seen those eyes they'd been six inches over mine, and the time before that they'd been looking up at me from his knees in a place that only existed inside my skull.
I knew exactly what I'd done to the memory of that face an hour ago.
Before I could decide what to do with my own expression, Ghost's hand came up and he was waving me over, both arms, too much energy for the hour, nearly clipping the coffee mug of the woman beside him.
My legs were already moving. I caught up to them halfway there.