So, enjoying writing me some Fish 4, and here is a thing I kept referring to, that didn’t fit into the timeline, that I felt REALLY must be written.
Enjoy!
Surprise Visit
Burton looked at the information on his screen and blinked. He knew that name.
“Uh, Jace?”
Jason Constance looked harried, his appealing looking square-jawed features pale and haggard under his neatly trimmed goatee. Tracking down the trained mercenaries who’d been “modified” into psychopaths had taken a toll on them all these past months. Constance needed to get the hell away from headquarters, even if it was just to get laid and have drinks on the beach.
“Who is that?” he asked, blinking hard.
“Man, you are looking like shit. Can you get away from here for a minute?”
“Depends on who that is?”
“Remember Rivers and Cramer?”
“Taylor Cramer, Esquire–his father?”
Burton stared at him. “His mother. Man, I told you about meeting her two months ago. Look where she popped up.”
Jason sat up as though stung. “Holy fucknuggets!”
“Yes, sir, that is mercenary chatter, and she does have a hit out on her, why do you ask?”
“Who’s taking the contract? One of Lacey’s guys?”
Burton frowned as he tried to interpret the chatter on his screen. “Looks like one of the guys working for Corduroy–something about Mrs. Cramer putting pressure on the military to investigate the organization, and see if any of the branches are utilizing them as a resource.”
Jason’s quiet snort told Burton that yes, a number of high ranking military intelligence officers were not looking forward to Ellery’s mother shoving a magnifying glass up their sphincters.
“Only one?” he asked.
“Mm… nope. Two. But they’re under strict orders to make it look like an accident, and to have no witnesses and no casualties. Anything looking like a hit that takes out civilians or other members of the family negates the contract.”
Jason looked thoughtful. “So, uh, Rivers and Cramer–they can handle themselves?”
“Rivers, absolutely. Cramer follows Jackson’s lead and tries to stay out of the way.” Unless he lost his temper because the bad guys were really awful, but Burton kept that to himself.
“Okay, do you have a relationship with Ms. Cramer?”
Burton’s eyebrows did something complicated that made his face feel scrunched. “Define that?”
“Does. She. Know. You. Oh my God, Burton–Ernie would skin you alive!”
They were alone in the room, or he wouldn’t have said that, but Burton smiled. His face went soft when he did that thinking about Ernie, but he couldn’t help it. He’d trusted Jason with that info too–they’d had him out to dinner once or twice, always under the strictest of secrecy–and Ernie had been as gentle with Constance as he had been with the feral kittens he cared for on a regular basis. You’d think Burton’s CO, hard bitten, tough as nails, as cold a killer as Lee had ever seen, wouldn’t need to be treated with kid gloves, but Burton could see it too.
Constance was getting frayed at the edges and thin in spots. The trained serial killer thing had taken it out of all of them.
“She’s met me before, sir. She wasn’t at her best, but she’d remember me.” You didn’t forget the people in the waiting room when you were hoping to hear your son would live. Particularly when your son’s lover was hanging on by a thread.
“Good. I need you to make contact and get her to the west coast. Ask her if she wouldn’t like to visit her favorite kid. I want her in their company at all times–and you and me, we’re going to be their shadows.”
Burton blinked. “Are we taking out the targets, sir?”
“They’re Corduroy, right?”
“Yessir.”
“Then we capture and question and see if we can negate the contract. Unless their targets are in imminent danger, understood?”
“Understood.”
“But first…”
Burton sighed. Even upset and holding Jackson Rivers together by force of will, Taylor Cramer was a formidable woman.
* * *
“You’re going where?” Ernie was pretty psychic, but he didn’t always know the details of Burton’s little trips.
“Sacramento.” Burton ran his palm from Ernie’s shoulder blades to the hollow above his round bottom. “Tomorrow morning. Me and Jason.”
Ernie relaxed into the caress. “Well, if Jason’s going with you, that’s okay.” He looked up from the vat of boiling oil he was cooking pastries in. “And the apple fritters will still be fresh. You can take them with you!”
Burton blinked slowly. “Uh, why would I–“
“They’re Lucy Satan’s favorite,” Ernie said. “If I make them and frost them tonight, they’ll be ready tomorrow–but you’ll probably have to wait until he next day to deliver them. You’ll be talking to the bad guys. Anyway, here!” Ernie took one of the cooled, iced fritters off the drying rack and pulled a piece from it. “Want a bite?”
Burton took the pastry from Ernie’s fingers, completely entranced. The fritter was amazing–because Ernie could cook desserts and donuts like nobody’s business–but it was Ernie himself who was mesmerizing.
Ernie caught the look and popped a piece of fritter in his mouth, blushing. “Uhm, Cruller?”
Burton moved behind him and started to kiss his neck. “Mm?”
“Do you want to do this before or after I finish with the fritters?”
“Before.”
“Okay–I’ll turn off the heat.” He reached out and did that, and put a lid on the deep fryer, and Burton kissed down his spine, rucking up his shirt when it got in the way. Ernie’s body, lean, pale, with little freckles dotting his shoulders from recent forays into the southern California sun, was still as tender and delicious as the day Burton had first devoured him, back in October. Ernie dropped his chin to his chest and leaned into Burton’s hard embrace. “Mmm… do you have plans for us to be more naked?”
“Oh yes.”
“Do you want to sit in the hot tub first?”
“Nope.”
“Shower? I’m all sweaty from cooking.”
“Sure.”
They’d purchased the house built int he middle of Victoriana for a song. The suburb had been meant to grow out in this direction, but businesses had failed and people decided that the desert was just not that exciting to live in, and as a result, Burton had about an hour commute to the secret military base in Barstow where he and Constance were not stationed.
Also, he and Ernie had a home, one with a really awesome hot tub, and a shower built for four, but those days were over for Ernie, and all Burton had ever wanted was the one.
The one lover–Ernie, as it turned out–who knew who and what he was and what he did for a living and saw the warm beating heart under the badass exterior. And who melted in Burton’s hands like Burton was made to wear him like a second skin.
Burton soaped his body thoroughly in the shower, all his crevices, cleaning him, teasing him, chafing his nipples and slowly jacking his cock with a soapy washcloth. “Is that all you want clean?” Ernie taunted, spreading his legs and planting his hands against the wall. Burton took the washcloth and parted his cheeks, cleaning, and then poking and then stretching, with soap and three fingers, while Ernie urged him on.
Finally Burton pulled out his fingers and rinsed them both, and then, when he would have toweled them both off and taken him to the bedroom to make slow love to him, Ernie leapt into his arms instead.
The temperature in the shower jacked up to about a thousand degrees, and Ernie clung to Burton’s body while Burton positioned his cock at Ernie’s cleaned and stretched entrance, while Ernie slid down ecstatically. Burton’s knees trembled, and he shoved Ernie’s back agains the shower wall and held him in place while he undulated his hips, slowly, slowly, slowly, until Ernie reached between them and grabbed his own cock, and squeezed hard enough to come.
The ejaculate fountained up to hit Ernie on the chin, but Ernie’s head was back against the wall and his limbs were going slack around Burton’s body, and Burton had no choice but to rocket his hips and rut into Ernie’s ass until he came too, his knees going out and both of them sliding to the ground in a not-so-clean heap of repletion.
“Burton?”
“Ung?”
“Water’s going cold.”
“You wreck me kid. You wreck me every fucking time.”
“Good. You’re leaving me for a week and I hate that.”
“I’m sorry.” And he was. Ernie had known this would be their lives–and for the most part their lives were pretty good. There was a surprising amount of time to have sex in the shower and other unusual places in their spacious ranch style house in the middle of the fucking desert.
But leaving him was never easy.
“I know, baby. Let’s get out and go have round two in the bedroom. I want to rim you until you cry.”
Burton’s cock started to grow hard just thinking about it. He struggled to stand up without slipping and knocking his head and fucking up the op before he had a chance to leave for it.
They made it to the bedroom and Ernie made good on his promise and this time he topped, and Burton gave himself over, the few moments of his life not in control, and Ernie saw him to the finish as he always did.
They ate dinner then–soup Ernie had cooked earlier–and ate some more of Ernie’s donuts while the apple fritters were cooking. It wasn’t until they were eating the donuts, big glasses of milk next to them on the table, that it hit Burton.
“Hey–did you know I was going?”
Ernie took a nibble of crispy outside with icing. “No. But I knew I had to make apple fritters.”
Burton took his own bite, going for the tender inside with the apple filling. “Because they’re Ellery’s mother’s favorites?”
“Oddly enough I didn’t know that until you said you were going to Sacramento. It’s an imperfect system, Cruller. I’ll let you know when I fine tune it enough to be useful.”
Burton grinned at him. “You’re pretty useful without the woo-woo stuff, Ernie. I’d rather have you fuck me like the god you are than tell me what my next op is.”
Ernie grinned back. “Yeah? Good–because I always thought sex was way more fun than woo-woo shit.” He took another bite of fritter. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t clue you in if I get a flash on your next op, okay?”
“Deal.”
One more sleepy bout of love making for the road after that, and they fell asleep early, so Burton could get up two hours before dawn. Ernie must have gotten up some time in the night, because he’d taken a pink pastry box from the stacks of them he ordered and filled it with fritters. He’d filled another one with crullers, and wrote For Jason and Lee on top of it, which was nice. The one with the fritters said, Don’t throw away, I’ll know.
Which was a nice way of telling Jackson and Ellery who sent the donuts without writing his name.
Burton sighed and put both boxes in the seat of his truck before starting off into the blackness of morning. Ernie had looked so sweet as he’d left, asleep, black lashes fanning his cheeks. Like an angel.
Devious little shit–he’d managed to convince Burton to make a six-hundred mile donut delivery while Burton was running an op.
But then, anything Burton could do that would let Ernie keep thinking he was a hero was okay with Burton.
