In Another Country Page 3

  Yeah, it’d be great for however many days Tupper was around, and then Dec would be back to drinking every night and hauling himself into work in the morning hungover and unshowered and hating everybody and himself most of all. No thanks.

  He tossed a roll of paper towels to Tupper, because the finger-licking was really distracting, and said, “So, uh. I gotta be at work pretty early.”

  “Oh. Right. Of course,” Tupper said. His voice sounded cheerful but he wasn’t looking up at Dec—he was staring at his hands really intently while he was wiping them, like paper-towel deployment took all his concentration and if he wasn’t careful the towel might blow up and take his fingers off.

  “So,” Dec said. “You might wanna. Head out.”

  “Indeed,” Tupper said, stood up, and turned briskly to head down the hall. Dec followed him into the bedroom and took a moment to appreciate the seriously righteous view when Tupper bent over to pick up the rest of his clothes, but then the clothes started going back on him and it was just sad.

  Dec really, really wanted to say, “Take those back off,” so he said, “I hope you’re not—I mean, that was great, you know. I just. I gotta sleep.”

  “No offense taken,” Tupper said in this big cheery plastic voice. “And thank you for the post-prandial snack. A luxury rarely provided by…” his voice trailed off a lot. “One-night...hosts.”

  Dec was not sure what a prandial was. He also wasn’t sure how being thanked for a snack made him feel like even more of a shitheel for booting the guy, but it did.

  He walked Tupper to the door, and Tupper gave him a formal little nod, and Dec blurted out, “That was—really—if you weren’t, you know, leaving so soon and all, and I wasn’t. So busy.” He wasn’t even sure where he was going with that piece of babble, but Tupper said, “Of course,” like it made total sense.

  “Don’t you want to call a taxi?” Dec added.

  “I’ll walk for a bit before I hail one. Clear my head.”

  “Not a great neighborhood,” Dec said. “Not a great town.”

  “I can handle myself alone,” Tupper said, and oh, there it was, he was pissed, and he headed out the door.

  Dec locked up, chain and all, because not a great town, and then he just stood in his dark hallway for a while, leaning his head against the door, feeling like an asshole and an idiot, and he wasn’t even sure if he felt stupider about tossing an insanely hot, smart and funny guy who against all odds seemed to like him, or about the stupid half-assed things that flew out of his mouth that probably let the guy know Dec actually wanted him to stay. Because no way would that have fucking worked.

  He took a long time to get to sleep that night.

  The next day at work was—okay, it was not as bad as post-Christine, by a long shot. He wasn't hungover, he wasn't having to talk himself into eating any lunch at all after having nothing but coffee for breakfast. He wasn't having that thing where it sounded like anyone who talked to him was doing it from a huge empty echo-y room so their words clanged around in his brain for a while before he could understand them. But it was definitely a reminder of that time—there was a kind of beige boring edge to everything.

  And that must have shown on his face, because Ceci demanded to take him out for lunch.

  They got burgers and she gave him the kind of, “So, how are things?” general questions people ask when they really want to ask more specific ones but are afraid you’ll bite their head off. Which, fair enough, since Dec would.

  “I keep telling you, things are just...swell,” he said. “All things are swell. Every fucking thing.”

  And she said, “Okay, Dec,” but she kept looking at him mournfully with those big brown eyes and he was stunned by how much he suddenly wanted to blurt, “I met a seriously hot guy last night and I fucked it up.” And if he could tell anybody he could tell Ceci but Jesus, he was a cop and he couldn’t tell anybody, so he gave her one of those quick tense toothy smiles that he was pretty sure looked more like rabies than happiness, and bought them both chocolate shakes by way of apology.

  And that night he lay there sleepless for a good long while before he gave in and jacked off. Jacking off the day after he’d ended a long dry spell was just depressing—shit, back to this again. But at least it let him fall asleep.

  As soon as he got into the station the next morning, Carter caught his eye and gave him a “c’mere” wave. In the long grey drudge of yesterday Dec had managed to write up a severely edited version of the Hotshots evening, and it was probably too much to hope that the severe editing escaped Carter’s notice; Carter was not an idiot.

  So yeah, Carter shut his office door, sat down in his creaking chair and looked at Dec over the official paperwork, with his half-glasses pushed partway down his nose, and Dec sighed the sigh of the busted.

  “You mention having spent a good deal of the evening with what sounds like a reasonable suspect, Detective, but are remarkably unforthcoming about what made you decide he was not involved. Also remarkably unforthcoming about the suspect’s name. I recognize that the environment was,” Carter coughed, “casual, but you did not even get a first name? Nickname? Nothing?”

  Dec sighed some more and nudged the office door shut with his foot, sat down. “Lieutenant,” he said, “there was some stuff I didn’t want in the record, okay? Because—he was also law enforcement.”

  “Shit,” Carter said, “was somebody poaching our investigation? It’s those SBI assholes, isn’t it?”

  “Nah,” Dec said, “a Mountie.”

  “Why was a Mountie investigating—”

  This was sounding familiar. “He wasn’t. There for personal reasons.”

  “Ah.”

  “You get why I didn’t want his name in the record.”

  “Ah. Yes. Good call,” Carter said, to Dec’s relief. But he wasn't done; he glared at the paperwork some more and then said, “I’d like you to take another shot at the club tonight. Perhaps you could institute a more formal relationship with our colleague from the frozen north.”

  “A—what?”

  “Working relationship, detective,” Carter said, and was that a tiny grin?

  “I don’t—”

  “Well, if he’s, ah, familiar with the milieu, and—how was it you describe him here—’hot like the witnesses said the perp was’—perhaps he would serve as bait?”

  “I’m the bait!” Dec said.

  “Well, nobody was taking it,” Carter said, and Dec was actually kind of offended until he caught that, yeah, that was a grin. Carter was messing with him.

  He couldn’t help thinking, though, as he headed back to his desk, that it wasn’t actually a terrible idea. It would be nice to have someone working with him when he went back into the club—somebody to help him scan the crowd, zero in on likely perps; somebody to serve as a safety backup if Dec actually managed to meet up with the bad guy.

  Somebody to keep you distracted by a hard-on while you’re trying to work, his brain, which was a total asshole, added.

  “Shut up,” he said to his brain, and Rollie on the next desk over blinked at him. Dec ignored him and sat down to start making calls to Fort Bragg.

  It took six transfers before he actually got through to the Mountie. And when he did Tupper was obviously picking up the phone in a crowded office. Dec could hear other people talking in the background, so he didn’t necessarily read Tupper’s very formal “Hello, Detective Kelly,” as frosty as he might have otherwise.

  “Hello, uh...Mountie Tupper?” he said, which couldn’t be right, what the hell did you call them?

  “That would be Constable,” Tupper said, and chuckled, and he sounded so much like he did just a couple nights ago while he was sitting on Dec naked that it suddenly really hit Dec that he was sitting here at work, in the middle of the fucking bullpen, talking to a guy he’d had sex with. He blushed hot and hoped Rollie wasn’t looking at him again.

  “Uh,” Dec said, again. He was really spouting out the sparkling conversation,
today.

  Tupper cleared his throat, and then sounded very professional again when he said, “Was there something further I could help you with, Detective?”

  You could let me suck YOU off, Dec thought, and then shook himself like a dog, sat up straighter in his chair and explained Carter’s idea because he was an adult and he could pay attention to his job.

  Tupper made mmm-hmm noises at the right times, but when Dec had wrapped up the pitch he said, “I was under the impression that you wanted to go it alone, Detective.”

  And okay, fair, guy was entitled to bitch a little after the shitty stupid way Dec wrapped up the other night, so Dec said, “Well, yeah, I was wrong.”

  “Hmmmmm,” Tupper said, and Dec closed his eyes and braced for the brushoff, but Tupper said, “Always glad to give another law enforcement officer a hand,” and Dec was pretty sure that even surrounded by other people, Tupper had a little grin going at the “hand” part.

  And damn, Dec wanted a hand, wanted a hand and a mouth and everything else, wanted way more than he’d had, way more than would be sensible on a second date, and he didn’t do second dates, he didn’t do dating, not at all, so this really needed to be strictly a work thing, and he wanted to be mad at Carter for talking him into this but really, it didn’t take much.

  Dec hurried through the details of tonight’s meetup, and slogged through the rest of his day in a distracted haze.

  He spent a lot of time after work rummaging through his piles of clean laundry for his tightest remaining jeans and tee, and a lot of time working the hair gel until his permanently startled-looking hair could pass for intentional, and told himself it was so he could be better bait. For the perp, of course.

  He and Tupper met at a diner near the club so they could talk the case over before they had to go into character. And yeah, Tupper was gorgeous still, but he was so obviously into the work—asking good questions, laying out a plan—that it wasn’t too hard for Dec to actually focus on what they were there for.

  They decided it made the most sense to go in separately—if the perp was already there scouting for a target, he’d probably be reluctant to go after anyone who seemed to have a buddy looking out for him. But they planned to keep an eye on each other— “Subtly, Dec,” Tupper said, and gave him kind of a look, so yeah, Dec had probably been staring not-very-subtly. But hell, Dec hadn’t been in a situation lately where he could practice subtly watching someone who’d sucked him off a couple days ago eat pancakes, so he was a tad bit rusty.

  Tupper left a few bills on the table and headed over to the club while Dec settled up. Dec paid with a credit card and scooped up the cash, and in between the bills Tupper’d left a business card. RCMP official issue and all, and there was like— a buffalo? a bison? —some kind of big shaggy bull thing, on the logo. Dec was expecting maybe a moose. Or a beaver. There was a number for Tupper’s home—precinct? but when Dec flipped it over there was a scrawled number with a local area code—guy had surprisingly terrible handwriting, maybe worse than Dec’s—with “if you need to get in touch with me more directly than this morning” written under it.

  “Subtle my ass,” Dec murmured under his breath, and of course he wasn't gonna take the guy up on it, tonight was the end of it and tonight was work, but he couldn’t stop grinning while he walked the couple blocks to the club anyway.

  It wasn't hard to find Tupper once Dec got in the club—he was at the bar, and everyone in that end of the room was staring at him. Dec felt a little better; it wasn’t just him, then—Tupper didn’t inspire subtlety. Which was a good thing—maybe he was drawing in their suspect—so Dec squashed the completely ridiculous surge of jealousy.

  Dec gave him a little head-jerk meant to imply, “I’m gonna head for the dance floor,” and Tupper nodded very slightly and carried on with being surrounded by hopeful drunks.

  Dec leaned against the wall near the dancing for a few minutes, scoping out the possibilities. There were quite a few guys who fit the vague description already on the floor, but Dec couldn’t exactly just cut in; not the etiquette of these places. So he was trying to send out “available” vibes while scoping.

  After a bit a reasonable candidate came over and said, “Dance?” and they hit the floor. Guy wasn't bad, decent sense of rhythm. And after a couple songs he draped an arm over Dec’s shoulders and steered him pretty firmly toward the bar, then bought him a drink, all of which put him solidly in the suspect camp. Or in the “perfectly nice guy hitting on Dec” camp, admittedly. Ordinarily Dec’d be a little pissed about not being able, since he was on the clock, to follow through on that possibility. But he found himself...noting sort of just with his head, not with his dick, that the guy was hot without any of that zing of wanting to do anything about it. And he was having to work really hard not to look around for Tupper, damn it.

  Although, wait, he should start looking around for Tupper, check how his half of the investigation was going. But Dec’s current semi-suspect was making small talk, so Dec had to pay at least a little attention while the guy said his name was Gage and he was new in town, blah, blah. But then Gage apparently decided things were moving too slowly for his tastes and he leaned in, wrapped his arms around Dec and slid one hand in Dec’s back pocket.

  “Mmmmmmmmmm,” Dec said agreeably in his ear, and took the opportunity to look over Gage’s shoulder for Tupper.

  A ways down the bar, Tupper was looking directly at him. And he looked pissed.

  What the fuck? Did Dec drop a ball here? Had he missed Tupper interacting with a prime suspect or something?

  “I gotta…bathroom,” he mumbled to Gage, who promptly ground against him and breathed out, “Yeahhhh.”

  “Not like that. I mean, alone. I mean, stomach issues.”

  “Fine, sure,” Gage said, kind of huffily, and stalked back off to the dance floor.

  Dec head-jerked again at Tupper and headed for the men’s.

  He had a couple seconds to scope the place—no feet visible under the stall doors—before Tupper came in, still looking like the wrath of God.

  “Shit, what?” Dec said. “What’d I miss?” and then he shut up because Tupper was crowding him into a stall and shoving him up against the wall and kissing him. Kissing his mouth and neck and ears, pressing into him with his hips, and it was all so good it took Dec a minute to notice that in between kisses Tupper was muttering a bunch of—just the worst sex talk ever, like “this is completely inappropriate” and “I’m sorry” and “this is so stupid of me.”

  Dec pushed him back a few inches—reluctantly—and said, “What? I mean, really, what?”

  Tupper hung his head. He was flushed and his chest was heaving and he was ridiculously fucking beautiful. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I…I’m not sticking to the job very well.”

  “Yeah, no shit,” Dec said, but that made Tupper step back and straighten up, hands behind his back, parade rest, and no, that was not where his hands needed to be. So Dec added, “Glad it wasn’t just me,” and Tupper grinned, pushed up against Dec again, got his hands on Dec’s ass.

  Dec groaned, reached around Tupper and pulled the stall door shut.

  They just kissed for a long time. Everything else receded to a background hum—the fact that the bathroom didn’t smell that great, the fact that Dec could occasionally hear somebody using the urinal.

  Dec was so dialed in on Tupper that none of that mattered.

  Until someone hammered on the stall door and growled, “Jesus, guys, quit hogging the toilet, come on,” and they bailed out sheepishly.

  By the time they pushed past the stall-door-hammerer, both of them desperately avoiding eye contact with him, and made it out to the hall, Dec had come out of the kissing enough to feel thoroughly ashamed of himself. Not for what they were doing—Tupper was too pretty to feel ashamed about—but for what they weren’t doing, which was their fucking jobs.

  “We gotta, we gotta stop this,” he said. “For a little while. Just for a couple hours, right? Gotta
do our fucking jobs.”

  “Right, right,” Tupper said, nodding like a dashboard bobblehead. He was panting a little and his hair was sweaty and his eyes looked glazed, and Dec took a moment to feel smug that he made somebody that good-looking into kind of a mess. But then he pulled himself together, gave Tupper a determined very professional nod, and headed back out onto the dance floor.

  The next couple of hours were the weirdest combination of hellish and maybe the most turned on Dec had ever been in his life. He must have been giving off “do me do me” vibes after that unfinished bathroom encounter, because all of a sudden, he was the belle of the ball or, heh, the cock of the walk—everybody wanted to dance with Dec. He wasn't usually lacking for dance partners—or “hey let’s get a motel room for the night” partners, for that matter—when he cut loose in Durham or Wilmington but this was bananas.

  So multiple guys were grinding up against him with serious intent, and Dec was scanning the crowd trying to see if anyone looked like they were getting roofied, and every now and then he caught a glimpse of Tupper. Tupper was just as mobbed, and he was giving Dec these looks—not pissed or jealous this time, just hungry. Jesus.

  The music was pounding and everyone smelled like cigarettes and sweat and beer, and some guy was rubbing up against Dec's ass and Dec was rubbing up against some other guy's ass, because...because undercover had to be authentic, right? And there was—there was just so much rubbing, and Dec had caught that starving look from Tupper so many times by now that it was thrumming through his head, a constant refrain to the dance beat of Tupper's starving for me, Tupper wants to taste me, and Dec was genuinely starting to think he was going to come in his pants. He hadn’t done that since he was necking with Christine at fourteen.