In Another Country Page 4

  He'd never been so happy to hear “last call” in his life. The door guy flashed the lights on and off, and Dec actually managed to collect his brains together enough to do a thorough look-around, checking to see if anyone was staggering drunkenly off with a likely suspect. Guys were mostly fairly upright though, or at least not thoroughly shitfaced.

  Dec disentangled himself from a dude who was making a closing-time pitch, and walked out of the bar with just a quick glance in Tupper's direction. He hoped like hell Tupper caught all the desperation in that quick glance, though.

  And sure enough, Dec was only a few steps away from the door before there was a heavy hand on his shoulder, and Dec did a quick heel spin into the alley. The alley where he’d tried to get Tupper to go with him when they'd just met, a few days ago—Jesus, how was it just a few days ago?

  He walked a little ways in and leaned back against the wall and looked at Tupper. Tupper who was sweaty and panting and looking just poleaxed, like maybe the last couple of hours had been as amazing and fucked up for him as they were for Dec.

  “So,” Dec managed breathlessly. “See you tomorrow?” and then he cracked up at the look of horror on Tupper's face.

  “Nah, big guy, I would die,” Dec said, and because he couldn't not do it, because he was dying a little bit already, he reached out and grabbed Tupper's wrist and put Tupper's hand on his cock.

  Tupper groaned and pressed his hand hard against Dec's dick.

  It was so good, it felt so fucking good, and when Tupper leaned in and moaned in Dec's ear, “It would be such a bad idea, but I want to suck you right here, right now,” Dec shook all over and it was only by biting the fuck out of his lip and clenching every muscle he could clench that he managed not to come.

  “Jesus,” he said, “yes, no, bad idea. No.” He couldn't even make sense.

  Tupper pressed up against him and he was shaking too. “But your place is...too far. I can't, I can't wait, I can't…”

  Dec's place was all of a half-hour away, and Dec gasped, “Me neither.” And with the very, very last of his brains he managed to add, “Further. More in. Dark. Shadows,” and Tupper grabbed him by the waist and halfway shoved and halfway carried him further down the alley, around behind a dumpster.

  If Dec were any less turned on that smell would have derailed him, but right now he was pretty sure he'd let Tupper blow him actually in a dumpster if that was on offer.

  Tupper didn’t offer, though, didn’t say a damn thing, just shoved Dec up against the wall, hard. Rubbed his stubbled face up against Dec's neck, and bit down on Dec's shoulder, and then yanked at Dec's belt and pants and shoved them down to his knees and then Dec was half-naked in an alley because he was losing it, he was going fucking nuts here.

  Tupper still had some brain cells working, apparently, because then he slid a condom onto Dec's cock, thank you, Tupper. And knelt, and then there was his hot mouth and he was sucking and groaning and Dec couldn't think anything but thank you, thank you, thank you.

  He came in record time, slumping forward awkwardly over Tupper’s head and mumbling out some mangled version of what had been going through his brain, something like “thnnnngoo.”

  And now that he'd come, he was no longer completely thinking with his dick and sweet Jesus they could both get arrested here, and he almost said, “Let's get out of here,” but no, not fair, not after Tupper just got him off like that, so he fought through the panic and said, “What do you need?”

  Tupper leaned his face into Dec's hip and laughed a little, huffing warm against his skin, and said, “Um, nothing at the moment.”

  “You mean you…wow,” Dec said.

  “I don't think 'wow' would be my reaction so much as, ‘I would really like clean pants now,’” Tupper said. And he actually sounded a little embarrassed, which Dec was just not having, because damn. Dec was taking it as a serious compliment.

  So Dec pulled Tupper up and kissed him, and Tupper leaned back and smiled at him, then flipped the used condom into the dumpster and pulled Dec’s pants up for him. Dec was pretty sure nobody had done that since he was about three, but it was oddly sweet.

  They headed out of the alley—Tupper was walking a little funny, which Dec couldn’t help grinning at. As they hit the sidewalk Tupper jostled up against him, just getting up in his space for a second, and it was so something that Christine would have done, that Christine used to do during the good times, that without even thinking about it, Dec took his hand.

  And then Dec realized what he was doing and yanked his hand away and was suddenly on the other side of the sidewalk. He couldn’t even remember jumping. He thought maybe he’d teleported.

  “I'm sorry, dumbass thing to do in public,” he said quietly, and Tupper said, “Don’t worry about it.”

  They headed back to their cars in silence, and when they got to Dec’s beat-up Toyota, he came really close to saying, “See ya later,” and just fleeing, because he was still really freaked out about what he just did there. Way to get both of them fired.

  But when he looked at Tupper and opened his mouth to wrap up the evening Tupper shifted his hips and made a face, and oh yeah, the pants.

  “You, uh, don't got a private room, do you?” Dec said, making a general sort of wave toward Tupper's crotch area.

  “No, since our quarters are for a temporary stay,”—and Dec didn’t think he was imagining that Tupper's grimace got even unhappier when he said that, which matched the stupid little twist in Dec's own guts—”they are rather...Spartan, and crowded.”

  “Not so good for the sneaking in with...those pants.”

  “No. One of my colleagues has been...very curious about these recent evenings out. I am unsure if he’s suspicious or...personally interested.”

  Dec’s stomach flipped again over that, and he was pretty sure part of it was panic and part of it was jealousy. Jealousy over a guy who was gonna be back in another country next month; he was such a fucking idiot.

  But he couldn’t let Tupper try to sneak past maybe-interested, maybe-suspicious guy in those...really, really incriminating pants.

  “C'mon over to my place, you can shower, I got some sweats you can borrow,” he said.

  “I would be most grateful,” Tupper said, and got into his own rental car half a block down.

  Dec had to slow down on the way to his place, because every time he tried to settle into his usual ten miles or so above the speed limit, he got way too far ahead of Tupper. Dec was gonna have to give him shit about that—what was the point being law enforcement if you couldn't at least speed a little bit?

  They finally got to the apartment house, and Tupper parked a couple blocks down.

  Dec let them in and tossed Tupper a towel. Tupper nodded and headed into the bathroom, and then Dec just stood in the middle of his living room, listening to the shower run, wondering what the heck he was supposed to be doing now. Wondering what was going to happen next—was he sending Tupper back to the barracks? Inviting him to stay and watch late-night monster movies? Inviting him back into bed?

  Finally Tupper came out of the bathroom, with his damp hair sticking up everywhere and the towel Dec tossed at him around his waist.

  And any thoughts Dec had about sending Tupper away for the rest of the night were gone, because Dec had a thing about a towel wrapped around a guy’s hips. It was weird, really, because in most situations he responded to men and women about equally, but something about the way a woman wrapped a towel way up under her arms made it just look like the dorkiest mini-dress in the world. He didn’t wanna fuck girls in towels so much as he wanted to buy them some better clothes. Guys, though. Guys with a towel jusssst barely hanging on to their hips. Dec had always had to struggle to keep his really obvious interest hidden in locker rooms, which was a bitch in junior high.

  (On the other hand, a guy wearing an oxford shirt and nothing else looked pretty doofy to Dec, but when Christine used to steal his dress shirts to hang around the house in, it turned Dec on to a
completely nutso amount. So it all evened out, kinda.)

  He walked up to Tupper and put one hand on the small of his back, that little curve that was always hard to get dry. Rubbed his fingertips into the droplets there, and then slid the other hand under the towel, reached back to cup around that ass. God, Tupper had an amazing ass.

  Weirdly, though, Dec wasn't getting hard; he wasn't really angling for anything here. He just wanted to stand there with his hands on Tupper, and tuck his face into Tupper’s neck and breathe in the clean soapy dampness of him.

  Dec was going to be so fucked when Tupper left. So, so fucked. He should just end it now before it got worse.

  “C’mon,” he said into Tupper’s neck, and took him by the hand and led him into the bedroom, and then curled around his back and listened to Tupper’s breathing slowing into sleep.

  So fucked.

  Dec snapped awake to the sound of his alarm, and was super confused for a second because he couldn’t move. He had a couple moments of thinking he’d had some sort of a stroke and was going to die in bed and nobody was going to notice until the neighbors caught a weird smell coming from his apartment and it wasn’t even going to make the newspaper because, hell, this was Fayetteville, straight-up murders didn’t even make the front page of the B section.

  And then he realized that he was pinned down by Tupper, who had an arm and a leg slung across him and his head on Dec’s shoulder. He was still completely asleep. Drooling a little even.

  Dec snorted a laugh and Tupper twitched, then blinked his eyes open slowly. And the look he gave Dec for just a second was so...Dec didn’t know how to put it. Undefended. Sleepy and affectionate and unafraid, and then, bam, Tupper sat up in bed, pulling away from Dec, and even with his bare chest and the sheet just pulled up over his hips, he was all super-straight-backed military posture and no-nonsense face.

  This was probably a good thing, because Dec couldn’t really have stood looking at the sweetness of that other expression very long, but it still made him a little sad.

  He didn’t know what to say, here, with Tupper sitting in his bed naked and military, so he blurted out something that he used to cheer himself up sometimes, which was “Waffle House?”

  “Um...what?” Tupper said, and it turned out that Canada didn’t have Waffle Houses, which was maybe the saddest thing Dec had ever heard, so he had to expand Tupper’s horizons immediately by driving him to the nearest one.

  Dec was a nice ambassador of his country and explained that despite the name of the place what you really wanted were the hash browns, and helpfully defined the lingo on the menu. So it was totally not fair that Tupper responded by ordering his “covered and topped” while tangling his feet with Dec’s under the table.

  Dec groaned and the waitress looked at him funny, but he got his own back by ordering his hash browns “alllllll the way” while looking at Tupper, whose eyelashes fluttered. Heh.

  He got distracted from thinking porny food-word thoughts when the actual food arrived, though. He had a crazy-fast metabolism anyway but when he was getting laid on the regular it got ridiculous.

  But when he finally remembered to look up from shoveling in potatoes and grease, Tupper had stopped eating, was just staring down at his half-full plate.

  “You don’t like?” Dec said, and felt kinda guilty, like maybe the guy was not used to this level of delicious grease and Dec had just made him sick.

  “It’s perfectly tasty,” Tupper said, looking up. “I just. I...find I’m not looking forward to returning home next month.”

  Dec’s stomach suddenly hurt. “That soon, huh?” he said. “I kinda lost track.” Which was not exactly true—he didn’t lose track of the numbers so much as he’d been shoving them the hell away every time they tried to appear in his head.

  “And I’m aware that that’s...self-absorbed and ridiculous!” Tupper said, sitting up even straighter and curling his lip a little, like admitting that he was having feelings was the most disgusting thing he’d ever heard.

  “I’m in a beautiful posting, and I’m doing real good for the community, and I have an extremely useful life, and…that should be more than enough. True, it’s a small enough town that there’s really no opportunity for this sort of...social interaction…” and he just trailed off.

  “Not a lot of, uh,” Dec said, “bars of interest?”

  “None, actually.”

  “Where’s the closest?” Dec said, expecting “a couple of hours drive” but Tupper shrugged, said, “The closest I know of is hundreds of miles. Further than I could get in a weekend off.”

  “Jesus God,” Dec said. “Where the hell are you?”

  “Fort Severn, Ontario. The closest real road is 450 kilometres away. You have to fly in, in the summer. In the winter, there are ice roads.”

  “Are ice roads what they sound like?”

  “More or less. And I’m sure there are...private establishments much closer. But it’s not the sort of thing one hears about as an outsider. Particularly not as an outsider in a police uniform. And almost everyone there is Cree Nation, and they have justifiable historical distrust of the Mounties, so that adds to the isolation. I am gradually winning them over, however! I’ve been there two years, and now I occasionally have something approaching a conversation.”

  “Geez,” Dec said. “What’s the population, anyway?”

  “Three hundred and eighty-seven.”

  “...thousand?”

  “No. Three hundred and eighty-seven.”

  “Holy shit, that sounds lonely,” Dec blurted.

  “Yes,” Tupper said, and then he didn’t say anything else, and they were just sitting there in the Waffle House with “lonely” out on the table between them.

  “It isn't,” Dec finally said, “it’s not all sunshine down here either. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to win the ‘I got it worse’ sweepstakes, because, damn, you got it rough. But having a scene, even the little bit of one that Fayetteville’s got, and knowing that you can’t...that you could lose your job…” He shrugged, summed up with, “Not a picnic.”

  “Have you ever thought of any alternate career path?” Tupper said. “Not that there’s any guarantee you wouldn’t lose any job if outed, but...law enforcement is a particularly, ah, straight and narrow path in that regard.”

  “Yeah, it’s crossed my mind,” Dec said. “But...I dunno. I like the getting out and talking to people. I like the driving around. Don’t think I’d do well cooped up in an office all day. When I was married it was a steady paycheck, and Christine was—is—a real estate agent, so she ended up making better money, but I was the one with the health insurance. And I just—I can’t come up with anything else I could stand doing that I’d be good at. I’m not going back to school for something, because school and I are not buddies. And, okay, this is embarrassing, but I really—okay, I will deny it up down and sideways if you tell anybody this, but all that ‘serve and protect’ stuff? I know it doesn’t always work out that way, there’s some dirty damn cops out there, and some days I feel pretty fucking burned out on the job and don’t do so great myself, but overall. Yeah. I actually buy that shit, most days.”

  He’d been looking over Tupper’s shoulder out the window because he couldn’t stand to see it if Tupper burst out laughing over that dumbass confession. But after he didn’t hear any laughing for a few moments he looked over to see that Tupper was actually just...beaming at him.

  “You’re a romantic, Dec,” Tupper said, softly.

  “Yeah, well. Fat lot of good it’s done me,” Dec said, but he couldn’t help smiling.

  “But I disagree with your assessment that your only marketable skills are in police work,” Tupper said.

  “Yeah?” Dec said. He couldn’t imagine what was coming next. Yeah, he’d been way more open with Tupper than with anybody else in the last year, but still, they’d only known each other a few days—it was probably going to be something tragically off base, like “accountant.”
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  “You need to find a, what’s the term? Sugar father?” Tupper said.

  “What?”

  “I think you would make an excellent gigolo,” Tupper said, with a completely straight face, and Dec just blinked at him for a couple seconds before Tupper’s mouth quirked up the tiniest bit on one side and Dec lost it.

  He had his head down on his arms on the table, hiccupping with laughter, when the waitress bussed their table. Every now and then through his hiccups he managed to say, “Sugar daddy,” which he was ninety-nine percent certain Tupper knew, anyway.

  Tupper sneakily paid the bill while Dec was incapacitated.

  When he’d recovered some he leaned back in the booth and studied Tupp. “How?” he said, and waved his fingers to vaguely indicate the whole of Tupper. “I mean, why?”

  Tupper blinked at him and said, “I fear you need to be a bit more specific.”

  “Even if you live in the ass-end of nowhere—” and Dec had to stop for a minute to let Tupper get through choking on his coffee.

  “Your regionalisms are remarkably descriptive,” Tupp said, wiping his face off with a napkin.

  “Yeah, okay, even if you live in an extremely rural area, how…” Dec glanced around to make sure nobody was near, “how do you not have every gay guy in a five hundred mile area knocking on your door? Have you looked at you?” And then he realized he was making some assumptions here, and added, “Or...and..ladies? Do you, uh, do ladies? Shit, sorry, none of my business.”

  “No, you are welcome to ask. I am very fond of women, but...not in that manner,” Tupper said, solemnly.

  “So. Seriously, how are you single? Shit, you are single, aren’t you?” Dec said, in a sudden panic that he’d aided and abetted cheating.

  “Entirely,” Tupper said. “And you’re exaggerating my attractions, for which I thank you. And as for why I am currently, and usually have been solo… You may find this laughable given the couple of evenings we’ve shared, but I am, normally, shy. I’m not sure why I wasn’t with you.”

  Dec shrugged and said, “Away from home, out of your usual routine, a little alcohol, adrenaline buzz from you thinking I was a bad guy for a hot minute.”