His eyes narrowed. He did.
I hardly had a chance to loosen my tie before Jacob was on me. He pulled me against him roughly, slipped his hands into my sport coat, and squeezed his right hand under my holster to dig into my ribs. And here I’d been worried that I might not be able to distract him.
His mouth crushed against mine, but I turned my head in an effort to get a couple of words in edgewise. “Easy,” I said. “Lisa’s downstairs.”
“She’s got headphones on,” said Jacob. His right hand raked my back, groped my ass through my slacks. “Besides, she’s a big girl. If she hears the bed squeak, she’ll handle it.”
My neighbors at the old apartment had heard that and more. But I saw them so seldom, and only in passing, that I never really thought about whether or not they’d been treated to a ringside seat.
Jacob nipped my jaw. Hard.
“Don’t you dare bite me again,” I told him.
I felt him smile against the side of my neck. “You were into it at the time.”
“And then I looked like a dope all week with a bandage on my neck. I’m serious, don’t bite me where it shows.”
“All right, I promise I’ll be good.” He traced the skin above my collar with his hot, wet tongue. “I know, I shouldn’t have.” He nipped gently and a shock raced straight down to my balls. “I just got off on making you come really hard.” Cripes. Who can say things like that?
His hand ranged around to the front of my pants, fondled my stiffening cock. He mouthed the meaty part between my neck and shoulder right through my shirt. The material blunted the sharpness of his teeth, but it still felt hot. Another spark sizzled downward, and I was totally stiff, with my boxers bunched into a wad and my side starting to sweat beneath my holster. I snuck my arms between us enough to get rid of my tie and start working on my buttons.
Jacob slid down my body and knelt in front of me. The two of us were wedged into the narrow lane between the bed and the dresser. He took the front of my shirt into his mouth.
I heard a snap. He spat, and a button pinged to the floor.
He was nuts. He’d scammed the quarterly mental health exam and was certifiably insane.
Not that that’s ever stopped me from sleeping with anyone.
He bit the next button off my shirt, then rose on his haunches and nipped off a third.
When the lower half of my shirt was hanging open, he pressed his face against my bare stomach and sucked in a mouthful of skin, hard enough that it prickled.
“Holy shit.” I grabbed Jacob by the head and held his face against me. My cock throbbed.
I ground it against his chest and shoulder. He slid a hand between my legs and cupped his hand around my balls, and worked them with his thumb while he found a fresh spot on my stomach and started sucking on that. “Suck my cock,” I forced out between clenched teeth.
Jacob snapped off my belt—without breaking it, I hoped—and yanked my slacks down around my knees without bothering to undo them. My boxers went right along with my pants, and hobbled my knees. If I wasn’t holding onto his head, I would have fallen over.
Instead, I pulled his head against me harder. I registered a mouth closing over my cock—lips, tongue, teeth, palate, throat. And, oh fuck, he was sucking me. Hard.
My knees started to tremble, and Jacob took my ass in both hands, half holding me up, half cracking me wide open. The chilly air tickled at my exposed hole and I clenched Jacob’s head hard enough to make him grunt. He pulled off my cock with a loud slurp and looked up at me. “Fuck my face,” he demanded.
“Oh man, that’s so fucking hot,” I said. I kicked off my slacks, shoes and socks, which left me with a shirt held on by a single button and my holster and gun. I left him kneeling on the floor and shoved his head back against the mattress. I planted my good hand on the bed next to his face, rested my other hand on his head, and jammed my cock in.
It felt different than riding someone’s ass. I couldn’t shake the awareness that those were Jacob’s sexy lips wrapped around me, that was his nose bumping my pubic bone when I thrust in. It was a high, a total high, to stand over him and nail him in the mouth. He kept one hand on my bare ass so he could feel it flex as I pushed my cock into the back of his throat. His other hand fisted his cock.
The bed squeaked, slightly. The sound probably didn’t carry downstairs. I could hear Jacob’s breath hiss in through his nose, and the wet noises my cock made as it sank in deep, over and over. If I focused, I could even hear the noise his hand made gliding over his cock as he jerked off. We weren’t usually this quiet.
I realized I should probably say something, if I could think of anything to say, that is.
Take
that cock?
Cliché.
Suck it?
Yawn. It seemed like such a shame to let the opportunity slip away, though. It’s not often I get to talk to Jacob when he can’t take my words and turn them around to mean whatever he wants them to.
“I swear to God, if you do anything stupid at Rosewood, I’ll kick your ass.” Whoa. I didn’t know where that came from.
Neither did Jacob. He groaned deep in his throat and clutched my ass cheek. I heard the hand he was whacking off with moving faster.
“We will figure out what to do without risking our necks,” I said, and my voice broke a little because Jacob had started doing these flutters with the very back of his tongue while he sucked, extra friction just under my cockhead, and I couldn’t seem to catch my breath.
“We’ll…oh, fuck, God damn…what the fuck’re you doing…God, that’s so sweet….” Jacob pressed his face all the way up and breathed hard through his nose. I felt his body stiffen between my legs. The thought of him getting off with my cock jammed down his throat made me fuck his mouth even harder. Pretty soon he took my ass in both hands, one of them wet with jiz, and forced me to lose myself deep inside his gorgeous mouth.
He tickled my asshole with one come-wet finger and that seemed to spark it. Everything inside me clenched up and wouldn’t release. I hammered my cock in deep, and somehow he managed to suck harder still, like he’d suck my spine out right through my piss slit, and God damn, maybe I shouldn’t be getting off so soon after blacking out but I didn’t fucking care. And oh, fuck, Jacob was so hot and sweet and perfect.
It’s a good thing Jacob’s both solid and limber. I shot my load, and then I let myself collapse on his head.
He wrenched himself from under my legs, crawled out and leaned up against the bed beside me. I wasn’t particularly comfortable, half-on, half-off the bed. I’m sure he wasn’t, either. He looked so loopy and sated that I doubt he cared.
“Your lip is bleeding,” I said. It looked like he’d cut it on an eyetooth.
Jacob touched his thumb to the dot of blood, looked down at it, then rubbed it away between his thumb and forefinger. Then he grinned. “You should talk nasty like that while you fuck my ass.”
My balls squirmed at the sound of that, but my cock was numb from having been sucked to within an inch of its life. “Okay, sure. When you least expect it, I’ll pounce on you and read you the riot act.”
He slung his arm over my shoulder and spread his fingers over the back of my head. He pulled my face toward him and kissed me gently on the mouth. His lips felt hot and swollen, which made my balls squirm a little more, but my legs barely felt strong enough to lever me onto the bed. He pulled back a little and sighed. “I think you’re right,” he said.
“Uh-oh. It’s the end of the world.”
Jacob’s grin widened until the corners of his eyes crinkled. “Seriously.” He stroked my cheekbone with his thumb and stared at me hard. “Between you and me, we’ll figure out a way to nail Barnhardt’s ass.”
I think a normal person would have thought the look Jacob gave me was scary. Not me. I thought it was hot.
Q
Tinny words mingled from a half-dozen televisions as the residents of the wheelchair ward vied to have the loudest TV set. Jacob, Carolyn, Lisa and I stood in a semicircle at the foot of Neils Barnhardt’s bed and stared. I was doing my best to superimpose the image of the Tuxedo Ghost over his features and convince myself it was really him. Lisa’s lips moved.
Jacob glared, and Carolyn looked worried.
The question on our minds couldn’t be answered with a
si
or a no, a question that none of us knew what to do with. Carolyn asked it aloud. “So what are we going to do?” Jacob’s glance slid over to the room’s second bed. It was empty; Barnhardt’s roommate had lingered in the dining hall. I can’t say I blamed him; if Barnhardt was my roommate, I’d make it a point to be anywhere but my room. The roommate’s bed was still rumpled, his pillow dented from the weight of his head. I didn’t need to be a telepath to know that Jacob was thinking how easy it would be to pick up that pillow and smother the sonofabitch.
“Don’t even,” I said.
Jacob raised an eyebrow and coolly turned his attention back to Barnhardt.
The old man lay in bed on one side with his elbows, knees and wrists all bent at painful angles, as if he’d clenched up to avoid a smack to the head and never been able to stop cringing. His eyes were open and staring, and his breath whistled in and out through his beaklike nose.
“Can he hear me?” asked Jacob.
Lisa blinked. “Yes.”
Jacob crouched down so that his face was level with Barnhardt’s blank stare. “I will find a way to stop you,” he said, quiet and way too pleasant. I watched Lisa chafe away a shudder.
I tugged her sleeve and backed into the hall. A pair of patrolmen hovered at the end. There was another pair by the elevator, a third in the lobby and a scattering of guys outside. I hadn’t seen so many checkered hatbands since the coffee shop on California came out with a double chocolate long john. I turned my back to the wary-eyed officers and spoke low. “I can’t see Barnhardt,” I said. “I mean, his astral body. Now what do we do?”
“How about those bath salts?”
I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the box Miss Mattie had given me. It was squashed flat, with less than a spoonful of pellets inside. “I don’t think there’s enough. I don’t know what good it would do, anyway. It’s not like I can reason with the guy. I can’t even catch him.”
“Yes, you can. But you need something to….” Lisa stopped and talked to herself. “Something to make your ability stronger.”
Cripes. Telling me to ratchet up my talent was like telling Marcel Marceau to shut up.
“The Clinic’s not gonna give me any psyactives. No way. Not after that stunt that Burke and Chance cooked up. Besides, I don’t want to give anyone the impression that I can even tolerate those things. Not to turn all conspiracy-theory like Carolyn, but if the wrong people got wind that I could perform with enhancements, I’d probably be scooped up by someone a lot scarier than the Fifth Precinct.”
“No one has to know. Who’s gonna tell? I’m not gonna tell. We’ll just let Carolyn know that it’s not safe to give her any details and she won’t even ask.” I jammed the heel of my hand into my right eye. Ahh. That felt good for about half a second. Then it hurt. “I can distract Jacob while you and Carolyn do something about Barnhardt. How about that?”
Lisa talked to herself. “No. Jacob’s going to do something. Even you can’t talk him out of it.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said. He’d promised me he wouldn’t. Hadn’t he? Or maybe he hadn’t.
Maybe I’d taken him swallowing a load of my jiz as a yes.
Lisa peeked over my shoulder. “What’s with all the extra cops?” I shrugged. “Slow day at the Twelfth Precinct?”
“No. They’re not from the Twelfth.”
I scratched my hair and tried to look over my shoulder as casually as possible. The two patrolmen stood, backs ramrod straight. I remembered the first two jokers from the Twelfth with their coffee cups and lousy postures. I turned back to Lisa and spoke even quieter.
“Are they even cops?”
Her eyebrows knit together. “Yes. I think.”
“Not regular cops.”
“No.”
Crap. Oh crap. Someone was watching Jacob, waiting for him to fuck up so they could swoop in and grab him. He was the high profile PsyCop, the one who made for good photos in the Tribune and the six o’clock news. Maybe he’d finally stepped on the wrong toes. Maybe our little hand-holding incident leaked out and someone with an axe to grind was looking to take him down a peg. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I slipped around Lisa and stormed back into Barnhardt’s room. “Jacob,” I said in a harsh whisper. He was bent over Barnhardt, and he straightened up and looked at me. “We’re being watched.” Jacob’s eyes cut around the room.
“Not here. In the hall.”
He nodded slowly. “And?”
“And so you can’t do anything stupid.”
“The more you talk,” said Carolyn, “the more he feels the need to prove himself. Just so you know.”
“I need to talk to Barnhardt,” Jacob said. “I want some answers from him. Can you do that for me?”
“I don’t even know where he is. I can’t see him. I was all hopped up yesterday, and I think that was the only reason I could.”
Lisa looked at me meaningfully.
I sighed. “But I’ll, uh… I’ll see what I can do. Just don’t touch him ‘til I come back.” I thought I could sense the eyes of the patrolmen on me even though they still stood at attention, looking straight ahead. Lisa led me to the elevator and we stared at each other awkwardly while we waited for it to putter up to the third floor. It sat with its doors closed for several seconds, then disgorged a couple of white-haired ladies in wheelchairs pushed by nurses in squeaky shoes.
We got into the elevator and glared at the doors until they closed.
“Well,” I said, “I guess we can see if Crash has more of that—” Lisa punched the second floor button and the elevator stopped.
“What?” I asked.
Lisa’s lips moved. She was on the trail of…something.
The elevator sat. And sat some more. And then the doors opened.
There weren’t any patrolmen on the second floor. Odd. Lisa strode up to the desk where the linebacker-turned-nurse watched NASCAR on a portable TV. He straightened up when he saw her coming at him. “Uh, yeah?”
“Sir, I need you to open the second drawer of that filing cabinet.” The color drained out of the guy’s face. “Uh, I mean….”