16. A Stolen Moment
a stolen moment
Tatiana
I t does feel like a kind of madness, this desire within me. Is it masking my sorrow? Is it a response to the constant brushes with death? Or just a normal craving for intimacy with the man I am falling in love with?
The spot I chose is as ideal as you could ask for in a situation like this. We are in the farthest back right corner against the bulkhead between the cargo bay and the cockpit, in a cozy little alcove created by tall stacks of crates and pallets piled high with supplies shrink-wrapped in thick plastic.
I know this is a little reckless, but I have been pushing down and ignoring my needs ever since that too-short night in the hotel…wherever the hell that even was. Germany? Brazil, somewhere? I don’t know.
Nico slips his short, broad, densely muscled frame through the narrow gap between a five-foot-high stack of crates and a pallet. I sink to the floor, my eyes locked on his, and drag my shirt and bra up to free my heavy, aching breasts. Nico's eyes flare, raw hunger suffusing his features.
"Fuck, Tati," he breathes. "So beautiful."
I reach for him, and he whips off his shirt, folds it, and uses it to pillow my head as he lays me backward. Soft lips find hot flesh, and a sharp line of arousal sears through me as he suckles my nipple into his mouth. I bite down on my lip to stifle the moan.
He captures my mouth with his, devouring my gasp as he fondles my breasts, tweaking and twisting and pinching my nipples until I'm writhing and panting into the kiss.
Levered over me, bracing his weight on one hand, he tugs open my jeans and greedily shoves his hand under my panties, finding my sex wet and hot.
I have to bite down on my lip so hard it hurts to silence my whimper when his fingers delve inside me, and then my jaws clench so hard my molars ache when he smears my essence over my clit and circles me there as his lips tug at my nipples, one and the other in turn.
I catch at his soft, short, hair and hold his nape as he plies my breasts with kisses and licks, nips and nibbles. With my other hand, I seek his skin. Find it between his shirt and jeans. Fumble at his zipper. Eager and impatient, I get his jeans open and plunge my hand beneath his underwear and find him hot and hard and ready for my touch. He growls softly, and I put my other hand over his mouth, hushing his quiet groans as I stroke his length thumb and forefinger first, gliding my touch down his erection.
It's a race, then—and he's winning. His fingers ply my core with deft touches, pressing against my aching clit with just the right pressure, with perfect speed, until I'm panting raggedly through my nose, my gaze fraught with aroused wonder as I stare up at him.
I arch up off the floor as the first waves of orgasm shudder through me, and I clutch his cock with spasming, greedy fingers, tasting copper as I bite my lip to keep from shrieking as my climax rips me to shreds.
God, this man knows me so well. He knows how to touch me, knows my body, knows my needs. When I start coming, he continues touching me exactly in the way that got me there, and when I buck upward and shudder, he speeds up until white stars burst behind my tight-shut eyes, and incandescent heat builds beneath and behind my belly, expanding outward and overtaking every part of me.
I writhe upward, pushing into his touch, and his mouth covers mine, and his tongue drives between my teeth, and I can't breathe and couldn’t scream if I wanted to, can only shake and shudder as I come. The hot hard length of his cock in my hand is an anchor point to reality, mooring me to earth—without it, I feel like I could be flung free of the earth to float away into nothingness. But I don't. Instead, I cling to his cock and stroke it from tip to root and back up, squeezing as waves of ecstasy crash through me.
He rumbles softly, a chest-sound. His fingers slow, and I float back to earth, panting quietly but rapidly.
I feel him throbbing in my grip. I know he's close. I break the kiss, smiling up at him as I caress his length faster and faster.
He braces both hands beside my shoulders and he starts to push with helpless need into my hand.
"Tati," he whispers. "You must stop."
“Never,” I whisper back. "Lay down."
Moving gingerly, he rolls to his back. I tuck his t-shirt under his head and hold myself above him as he was above me moments ago. His hands carve up my belly to cradle my swaying breasts, and I gasp at his touch.
"Tati," he breathes. "You don't have to—"
"Shut up, Nico," I interrupt. "I love you but shut up. I know I don't have to. I want to. I need to. We can't make love—not here, not now. But I can do this. And I want to, so I'm going to, and you're going to lay there and let me."
"Yes ma'am," he answers.
I sit on his knees and carefully work his jeans down past the bandage over his hip wound—he wrapped the bandage around his belly at an angle. Once his cock is bared, I waste no time. I slip my hands under his shirt and explore the hard wonderland of his muscled torso and kiss his belly, his navel, avoiding the wounded area. He gathers my hair in his hands and piles it on my head and holds it there, cradling my head in his powerful hands. I stretch myself out, sitting on my heels and reaching up his body to toy with his hard flat nipples while I kiss my way down to his erection.
"Tati," he breathes.
I take him in my mouth, lips stretched wide to wrap around his thick organ, tasting salt and skin and the distinctive tangy, smoky musk of his pre-cum.
His fingers dimple into my scalp, and apply the gentlest amount of pressure, encouraging me to take more of him. I eagerly oblige, swirling my tongue against his hot flesh, tasting his veins as they stutter against my tongue, until I've taken as much of his considerable length as I comfortably can.
He arches, hisses, and drops back to the floor. I slide my mouth up his length and bob around the plump, round head, tasting his pre-cum as it leaks out of him, and now he lets out a low huff, and then a teeth-clenched grunt as I give him my mouth in long, slow drives from the soft, springy tip down as far as I can and back up—every time I reach his glans once more, I give him a few short fast bobs, and then a long swallowing slide.
Bob, bob, bob…slide.
Again and again.
He clutches at my head and pressures me downward, thrusting into my mouth with a tightening of his ass muscles, panting raggedly now. He groans when I take him as deep as I can and bob there, my mouth and throat suckling around him—I reach up and slap a hand over his mouth, stifling another groan. He huffs into my hand, gasping as he thrusts harder, nearing climax. I let his cock pop free of my mouth and caress his hot, spit-slick length, and then suction my lips around his tip and bob there, just above my stroking hand. Hissing through gritted teeth, Nico thrusts helplessly, desperately. I bob on him faster and faster now, and plunge my fist around his root with hard, twisting strokes. Grunting once, a rough snarl in the back of his throat, he palms the back of my head and holds tight, pressing me gently downward. I accept the guidance and take more of him, gliding lower and lower, shortening the strokes of my hand as I gulp and gasp around his cock.
Now.
I feel him cut loose all at once. There's barely time to prepare for it, so sudden and fierce is his release—I think it surprised him, as well. He grunts into my palm and I taste his cum as he floods my mouth with it, and I swallow greedily, backing away to suck around his head and jack his hot, throbbing length as hard and fast as I can.
He comes and comes, writhing and desperately growling, gasping, and grunting through his orgasm, his sounds muffled by my palm. At long last, his release slows to a trickle and then subsides altogether. When I know he's done, I let him go and tuck him back into his jeans and do him back up, and then he hauls me up his body and cradles me to his chest.
“Tati," he whispers.
I touch his lips. "I know. Me too."
"You don't know what I was going to say," he protests.
I nuzzle his jaw with my nose. "Sure I do. That was amazing, and you love me, and you can't wait to get me alone again so you can fuck me until I can't take anymore."
He huffs a laugh, his belly and chest bouncing. "Pretty much, yes."
I kiss his cheek, put my lips to his ear. "I love you, Nicolae Dragos. I need this to be over so we can hole up in a room somewhere for a week straight and have sex and eat carryout and watch stupid television together."
"We are nearly there, I promise." He turns his face so our lips meet. "You amaze me, you know that? All of this was thrust upon you, and you have dealt with everything that has been thrown at you with barely a word of complaint. You have adapted as needed, and you always pull your weight, which is especially impressive in a situation so far outside your comfort zone."
My heart swells at his praise. "I just don't want to be a burden. I don't want you and your team to have to carry me through this."
"I am proud of you, Tatiana. Truly."
My nose stings and my eyes burn, and my god I'm so sick of crying, but even though Tata loved me, he rarely praised me or told me he was proud of me. He was generous with hugs and affection, frequently told me he loved me, but being praised and told that he was proud was a rarity. So hearing it from Nico…
It makes me cry, but a good kind of cry.
I lose track of time after that, dozing in the warm comfort of Nico's strong arms. I'm woken when the world tilts.
"We're landing," Nico murmurs to me. "Better go back with the others."
I hum a sleepy affirmative as I sit up and stretch. We both get up and put our clothes in order and then rejoin the others near the tail of the airplane. No one says anything about our reappearance, although Chance and Nicolae exchange looks.
"We're a very close-knit group," Nico murmurs to me. "And we live in close quarters. No one will say anything, and if they do, it will be good-natured teasing." He indicates the three brothers, Saxon, Solomon, and Silas, who are huddled together talking in low tones and laughing. "Those three are all in brand new relationships, too, so if anything, they're probably jealous that I get to sneak off with you for some private time."
"I am not sure I would want someone I love to be involved in this if it wasn't necessary," I say.
Nico nods. "I understand that. I would spare you all of this if I could."
I sniff a laugh. "What is ironic about that is even though this is frightening and exhausting, I have found you because of it, so even if I could go back and avoid it all, I am not sure I would." I sigh and shake my head. "I wouldn't want Tata, Georg, Ana, and Katya to die, though. Ana and Katya especially. They were young, smart, innocent girls with their whole lives ahead of them. They’d never done anything to hurt anyone. Killing them served absolutely no purpose whatsoever."
"I do not know if I have said it, but I am truly sorry for all the loss you have endured, Tatiana my love," Nico says.
I don't know what to say to that other than thank you, but I'm saved from having to reply when the pilot sticks his head out the cockpit door. "We will be landing in a moment, my friends. Hold on to something, please."
We all brace ourselves against crates and pallets and find handholds. Without windows, however, there is no way to know when we will touch down, none of that increasing sense of speed as you approach the ground. There is only the faint sense of movement, a gentle side-to-side rocking as the pilot feathers the controls, and then a sudden jarring bounce and a loud bark of rubber tires on the tarmac, another smaller and gentler bounce, a third touchdown without a bounce, and then we're flung forward as the pilot brings the aircraft's speed down.
Several minutes of taxiing and waiting, and then we're greeted by the hydraulic whine of the ramp lowering, and brilliant Brazilian sunlight slices through the relative gloom of the cargo plane's interior.
We all file out of the cargo bay and into the blazing heat, stretching and flexing. Once the pilot has finished his post-flight duties, he joins us on the tarmac in front of a massive Quonset hut hangar, from which streams a gaggle of workers with forklifts and dollies and such, ready to unload the cargo.
The pilot holds up his clipboard. "I have to oversee the unloading so I must stay here, but Lorenzo arranged for a vehicle for you." He grins sheepishly. “It is…well, you will see. But it is the best that could be done on short notice. Once you have finished with it, just leave it anywhere. If it finds its way back to me, then good. If not?" He shrugs. "Oh well."
We all shake his hand and thank him, and then follow his verbal directions to where the vehicle is parked in an out-of-the-way alley behind a dusty, forgotten old hangar on the edge of the airfield.
It's a battered, rusty old passenger van, the kind with several rows of benches and a sliding door on the righthand side. Once white, it is filthy, covered in dirt and rust, and, somewhat concerningly, bullet holes.
Rev whoops when he sees it, bizarrely excited. "Chance, what does this piece of shit remind you of?"
Chance frowns, and then his face clears into laughter. "Fuck me, I'd almost forgotten about that op. Jesus, what a hysterical clusterfuck that was."
Solomon arches an eyebrow. "Care to share with the rest of the class?"
"I'm driving," Rev says, slinging himself behind the wheel. "Chance, you got shotty, just like old times."
"Fucking church vans," Chance mutters. "Rev, bro, you are way too fuckin' excited about this."
We all pile in, with Solomon in the middle of the second row so he can direct Rev. Once we're away from the airfield and on a two-lane highway, Rev tells the story.
"So, a couple years after we made Recon, we were sent on this op in the Congo. The actual details of the op are classified, obviously, but suffice it to say the whole thing was a goddamn shitshow from the jump."
I lean closer to Nico. "I do not know what many of these words mean. Recon, classified shitshow, from the jump."
"Recons are a special forces group in the Marine Corps," Nico answers in a murmur. "Classified means only certain people are allowed to know about it. Shitshow just means a messed up situation. From the jump means right from the start."
I nod my understanding and tune back into Rev's story.
"…So we were supposed to be protecting a CIA asset. Intel was that it was gonna be a nice, easy, boring op. The asset was supposed to meet us at a certain place and time, and we were gonna escort him to some other location. Even we didn't know too many details, just 'get this person from point A to point B and don't let 'em get fuckin' killed.'"
Chance cackles bitterly. "Man, that shit was FUBAR'd the second we were boots down."
Nico mutters to me, "FUBAR means 'fucked up beyond all recognition.'"
"So worse than a shitshow," I say.
Rev hears me and glances at me over his shoulder. "Yeah, babe. We got a whole system of describing the levels of fucked-up-ness in the military. It started out a shitshow and went FUBAR real goddamn fast."
"It was not a simple escort mission, I assume," I say.
Chance belly laughs. "No ma'am, it most certainly was not."
Rev picks up the thread. "The second we got off the plane, I knew shit was gonna get hairy. We were supposed to have a real fuckin' ride. A HUMVEE or a Jeep, a Suburban, fuckin' anything that wasn't a rusted-out bucket of bolts. But some pencil-pusher decided to save a few bucks and put us in a church van like this one, only way older and way shittier."
"Why do you call it a church van, please?" I ask.
Chance answers. "Oh, well, in the States, vans like this are often used by churches to transport kids or whoever from the church to some activity or something I dunno, I never went to church. " He laughs. "Honestly, I just know they're called church vans."
“Oh."
Rev thumps the dashboard with a huge fist. "Man, that van was the sorriest fuckin' piece of shit I've ever seen. It was literally held together by duct tape in some places. It had no A-C, and this was fucking Africa. Windows didn't roll down either. The engine had been replaced by some tiny little four-banger that was barely able to get the goddamn thing moving. Floorboards were so shot I coulda Flintstoned that fuckin' thing.” I don’t bother asking what a four-banger is, or what Flintstoning means—the point is that it was a terrible automobile.
"The squeal of that engine," Chance groans, laughing. “You could hear it from a mile away."
"Second issue was the asset was a legit dumbfuck. Like, listen, most dumbfucks in this world aren’t actually stupid, they just don't always think things through or make good decisions. But this dude, he was…" Rev shakes his head, laughing. "He not only got the day and time of the meet wrong, he was in the wrong place. At the wrong time on the wrong day. Once we were boots down, we had no communication with anyone, so we had no way of getting in touch with anyone to let them know the asset never showed. Our hostel sprang a leak the second day and all our shit got soaked. And then, once we finally made contact with the idiot fuckin' asset, a big ol' fight popped off and we couldn't go anywhere—couldn't get out of the city, couldn't leave our leaky fuckin' room. So finally, middle of the night, we packed our sopping wet shit and piled in that cosmic joke of a van, and we booked it outta there. But the fuckin' thing was so goddamn loud between the squealing belt and the missing muffler that we got made before we'd gone a mile and had to shoot our way out."
Chance snickers. "And that little fuckin' asset, man. Dumb as a post. We were behind cover, right? Hunkered down behind this old piece of wall, who knows how fuckin' old that shit was. And this dipshit kept poppin' his head up to see what was going on. He didn't speak dick for English and none of us spoke his language, and again, some pencil pusher decided we didn't need a fuckin' interpreter."
"It was an actual literal miracle he didn't take one to the head," Rev says. “It was pop goes the weasel with that guy. We'd shove his head down and get off a few shots, and then he'd crawl somewhere else and pop right back up, like duhhhh, please shoot me."
“Dude was stupid," Chance says.
"If he was so stupid, why was he an asset?" I ask.
Chance and Rev shake their heads, guffawing in laughter. "That right there is the million dollar question," Chance says. "Why the actual mother fuck would you send a whole-ass Recon unit all the fuckin' way to the Congo with no comms to mission control, no ride, no oversight, and no interpreter to protect a so-called asset who couldn't find his own ass if you gave him a map and a goddamn flashlight? Like, what possible value could someone as empty-headed as that dude provide to the CIA? And why the Congo? A billion questions and no answers.”
"Every time I see a white church van," Rev says, "I think about that op. I think about that pipsqueak of an asset just trying to get himself killed."
Kane launches into an even funnier story of a mission he went on, which featured a runaway cow and a very angry farmer. All the way to our destination, then, the team regales each other with stories, and it seems to be a competition to see who can get the most laughs. The stories get increasingly ridiculous, to the point that I eventually lean into Nico again.
"Are these stories true?" I ask. "Some of them seem…quite implausible."
Nico laughs. "They're probably sixty or seventy percent true, ten or twenty percent heavily embellished, and the rest is made up."
"Why?"
He shrugs. "Time-honored tradition among soldiers, my love. You tell stories to pass the time. Life in the military is a lot of waiting around, so you find ways of entertaining yourselves and each other. You sleep, play cards, read books, write letters, and tell stories to make your friends laugh. Especially if you're about to go into combat."
"And lying and embellishing the truth is part of it?"
"Sure. If your friend tells a funny story, it is an unspoken rule that you or someone else has to tell a funnier one. It's just the way it is. And in order to make it funnier, you make things up. Everyone knows it's all bullshit, or mostly, but it's for fun. Later, you might talk to your friend who told the story and get the truth from him." He shrugs. “It is the way of things with men like us." Scarlett, behind us, clears her throat. "My apologies, Scarlett—guys and girls like us."
She leans forward onto the bench-back between us. "By the way, Tati, it's more like fifty percent true and fifty percent made up or embellished. And anything that Sol tells you, probably all bullshit."
Solomon hears this and holds up both middle fingers without turning around. "Heard that. And that's just not true. Now Scarlett— she's a real bullshit artist."
We have been traveling away from Rio de Janeiro and into increasingly rugged terrain. The road switches back and forth as we climb, and the engine is groaning as if in agony. Solomon consults his phone and then leans forward. "Should be a turnoff up ahead, Rev. Pull over. We're getting close—less than three miles to the estate."
Rev nods, and sure enough, we round a bend and the road widens, the shoulder infringing into the forest to create a place where you can pull over or turn around. Rev pulls over and stops, shuts the engine off and rolls down the window.
Sol consults his phone again. "So, we're gonna have to send a couple people to do some recon. Get the lay of the land, check out possible approaches, see how many tangos Mercado has, and if possible, get eyes on Inez." He glances at Nico. "Lash—Nico, I mean. You and me. Yeah?"
Nico nods. "Very well, then. Let us recon."
And yet again I have to sit idly by and watch as the man I love strides boldly into danger.