Chapter 6: Somebody in the Room
The clock over the stove said 3:07, and the fluorescent tube above the table flickered like it always did, twice, then held. Connor stood at the open fridge with the light on his face and a container of leftover rice in his hand, and he hadn't taken any of it out yet. He was just standing there, reading the same shelf for the fourth time.
The stairs creaked. Hank came down in sweatpants and the old police charity shirt, not even pretending he'd been asleep. He crossed to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down facing the fridge.
"Sit," he said.
"I wasn't taking anything. I was looking."
"At three in the morning."
Connor shut the fridge. The kitchen went back to its usual dark, the flicker, the smell of old beer and the microwave's hum. He stood with the container still in his hand like he'd forgotten it was evidence.
"I got hungry again," he said. "That's all. The pipe does this. It's the drug, it rewires the..."
"Sit down."
Connor looked at him for a long moment, and whatever he was going to say about the drug or the hunger or whose kitchen it was, he put it down with the container. He came to the table and sat, and Hank got up, got a fork, and set the rice and the cold half of a lasagna in front of him without asking which he wanted. Then he sat back down across the table, empty-handed, and folded his arms.
"You're not eating alone," Hank said. "That's the whole rule. One rule. You eat, I sit here."
"This is the part where you watch me the whole time?"
"Yep."
"Every bite."
"Every one. Take your time. I've got nowhere to be."
The clock ticked. Connor picked up the fork and stabbed the rice and ate the first bite with his eyes on Hank's face, watching for the flinch, the count, the arithmetic. Hank didn't count. He looked at the window, at the yard, at the flicker, anywhere but the fork, which was its own kind of watching and they both knew it.
The second bite was harder. The third. By the fifth Connor's jaw had gone tight and mechanical, chewing past the point where the food stopped being food, and the old pressure started early tonight, faint, already speaking up, already setting up shop under his ribs with half the container left.
"Slow down," Hank said, without turning his head.
"I'm not."
"You were. Slow. It's not a race and it's not a job. It's just food."
Connor put the fork down. His hand came up and pressed flat against his sternum, right where the pressure lived, and he breathed through his nose the way the pamphlets he'd never admit to reading said to do.
"It's talking already," he said. His voice had gone small, sanded down. "Five bites in. You hear that? Five. That's the record-breaking machine you're sitting across from."
"I hear you."
"You don't. It's saying things. It's saying there's still half left and there's going to be too much and I know exactly how tonight ends, Hank, I did the map this morning, remember. I invented it this morning."
"Then we do it different." Hank turned back from the window and looked at him straight, blue eyes steady in the flicker. "Put the fork down. We're done for tonight. You ate six bites at three a.m., that's more than the plan called for, we're calling it."
"You can't just call it."
"I just did. Watch."
The fork stayed down. The pressure under Connor's ribs didn't believe it, kept swelling against a fullness that no longer existed, a ghost of accounting. He sat there with both hands flat on the table and shook, a fine visible tremor starting in his fingers and climbing his arms, and the clock said 3:22, and Hank got up without a word and came around the table.
He didn't touch him right away. He crouched first, so their faces were level, which for a man Hank's size put his eyes almost exactly even with Connor's and made him look like something out of a fairy tale, a bear pretending to be small.
"Hey. Look at me. It lied to you, that's all it knows how to do. There's six bites in you. Six. That's not too much. That's almost nothing, and it's still lying."
"I want it out."
"I know."
"I want it out so bad, Hank."
"I know, kid. Breathe."
Connor breathed, ragged, and somewhere in the middle of the raggedness he leaned forward and put his forehead against Hank's shoulder, and Hank's arm came around the back of his head, big hand cradling his skull like it was something that had already been dropped once.
"There you go. I got you."
"You got me," Connor said into the shirt, muffled, and there was something in the way he said it, the way he always said it, that was half gratitude and half accusation, a kid reporting that the leash works.
Hank's hand moved on his hair. And Connor turned his face up, eyes wet, jaw still trembling, and kissed him. It wasn't a soft kiss. It landed like something falling, open-mouthed and graceless, and Hank caught it, and then they were both pulling, Hank's hands under his arms hauling him up out of the chair, Connor's fingers hooking into his waistband, and the kitchen was too small for it the way it was always too small for everything they did in it.
"Table," Hank said against his mouth, rough, and Connor let himself be turned and set back onto it, dishes shoved screaming to one end, the fork clattering into the sink. He sat on the edge with his legs open and Hank stepped into the gap, big body caging him in against the cabinets, and the fluorescent light flickered twice and held.
"Want you to feel it," Hank said, mouth at his jaw, his throat. "Right now. You're shaking. Want you shaking under me for a different reason."
"Then do something, Jesus."
Hank's hands went to his hips, dragged his sweats down over his hips, off one ankle and left hanging off the other, and Connor gasped at the cold tabletop against his bare ass and then gasped again, louder, when Hank dropped to his knees between his legs like a man at prayer and took him into his mouth. No warning, no working up to it, just the wet heat of it swallowing him down, and Connor's head went back and hit the cabinet door with a thud.
"Fuck. Fuck, Hank."
Hank hummed around him, the sound buzzing up his spine, one broad hand pinning his hip flat to the table so he couldn't buck, the other sliding up under the hoodie, palm finding the ridges of his ribs and resting there, warm and heavy, like a hand laid on a bible. His mouth worked slow and deep, pulling off to the head, tongue flat against the slit, then swallowing him back down until his throat fluttered around the tip, and every time it did Connor's whole body jumped and the table creaked on its legs.
The clock ticked. The microwave hummed. Connor fisted one hand in the gray hair and fucked up into the wet heat as far as the pinning hand allowed, and the shaking that had been terror five minutes ago was something else now, the same electricity routed to a different wire.
"Tell me," Hank said, pulling off, lips wet, voice wrecked gravel. "Tell me what it's saying now."
"Nothing." Connor laughed, breathless, half sob. "It's quiet. It's quiet when you do that."
"Then I'll keep doing it."
He went back down, hungrier now, faster, the wet sounds obscene in the fluorescent flicker, and Connor's thighs shook against his ears and his heels hooked behind Hank's back and his fingers scrabbled across the table for purchase, knocking the chipped mug an inch toward the edge. It didn't fall. Connor did, or felt like he did, hips stuttering up against the hand that held them, the pressure under his ribs flooding downward and turning into a single gathering coil, and he was saying it now, words he'd deny later, Daddy, please, Daddy, I'm close, please, and Hank groaned around him and didn't let up.
The coil pulled tight. Connor cried out, one hand slapping flat on the table, and came down Hank's throat with his spine bowing off the wood, the whole thin length of him arched, and Hank held him through it, mouth sealed, hand firm, until the shaking slowed and Connor sagged back against the cabinet, panting, blinking at the flickering light like he'd come back from somewhere.
Hank stood up slowly, wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, and looked at him, at the sweat-dark hair, the heaving chest under the rucked-up hoodie, the sweats around one ankle.
"Still shaking," Hank said.
"Yeah." Connor's voice was gone to gravel. He reached out, hooked a finger in Hank's waistband, and pulled. "Your turn. Get up here."
Hank looked down at him, at the finger hooked in his waistband, and huffed.
"I'm forty-eight, kid. My knees just spent five minutes on tile. I ain't climbing on any table."
"I didn't say climb. I said get up here." Connor tugged again, and there was nothing playful in it, just want with its teeth out, and Hank went, because he always went. He braced one hand on the table edge and swung himself up onto it with a groan that was half protest and half surrender, boots and all, and the legs of the thing knocked once against the cabinet.
"There goes my deposit."
"You don't pay deposit. You pay mortgage on a house that smells like a distillery." Connor climbed up after him on his knees, hoodie still rucked to his armpits, one sweatpant leg trailing off his ankle like a shackle. He pushed Hank flat with both palms on his chest, and Hank went down onto the wood with a grunt, and Connor straddled him and sat back on his thighs and just looked.
Six foot two of ex-cop laid out under a flickering tube light, gray hair fanned on the table where dishes ate every night, shirt ridden up over the soft heavy belly, the gray in his beard catching the light. Connor's throat worked.
"Stop staring like I'm the last truck in the parade."
"Shut up." Connor's hands went to the waistband, dragged the sweatpants and the boxers down together, and Hank lifted his hips to let them, no shame left in him anywhere, that was the thing about Hank, he'd fuck anywhere, anyway, like his body was a tool he'd stopped needing to impress anyone with. Connor wrapped a hand around him and he was thick and heavy in Connor's palm, already half hard, and Connor bent and took him in his mouth with no ceremony, because he'd learned this, he was good at this, it was one of the few things about his body he didn't hate using.
Hank's breath went out of him in a long gravelly curse. "Christ, kid." His hand found Connor's hair, not pushing, just holding, thumb tracing Connor's temple, and Connor worked him with tongue and fist, cheeks hollowed, taking him deep enough that his eyes watered, and he didn't stop, swallowed around the thickness in his throat and kept going until Hank was fully hard and dripping and swearing at the ceiling.
"Enough. Enough, you'll finish me before I..." Hank pulled him off by the hair, gently, and sat up partway, breathing hard, and looked at him. "You want it?"
"You know I want it."
"How?"
"How do you think."
Hank's mouth curled. He reached past him, and his jacket was on the back of a chair where it always was, and the wallet, and the condom, and the little bottle that lived there like a family member. He rolled the condom on himself with one hand and slicked his fingers with the other, and Connor watched him do it, kneeling over him, thighs shaking again, the good shaking.
"Come here. Sit on my hand first."
"Hank."
"First. You're wound up like a watch spring and I'm not tearing you in half at three in the morning."
Connor lowered himself onto Hank's thigh and Hank's fingers went back between his cheeks, one slick fingertip pressing in, slow, and Connor's breath caught and his head dropped forward onto Hank's shoulder. The finger worked in and out, patient, deeper on every stroke, then a second, and the burn of it was bright and real and it filled the space where the pressure had been, pushed everything else out of the room.
"That's it. Breathe. There you go."
"You've done this before," Connor mumbled into his neck, and Hank laughed, a low rumble Connor could feel through his chest.
"Once or twice. Third finger. Breathe out."
The third finger stretched him open and he rocked back onto it, shameless now, fucking himself on Hank's hand with his sweatpants hanging off one ankle, and Hank watched him do it with his jaw slack and his eyes dark.
"Okay. Okay, that's enough, get up here."
Connor rose up on his knees and Hank gripped himself and held still, and Connor sank down onto him slow, inch by inch, mouth open, no sound coming out at first, then a cracked moan when Hank's hips bottomed out against him. Full. The word hit him like a wave. He was full, the good kind, the kind that didn't lie, and he sat there with Hank all the way inside him and shook.
"There it is," Hank said, rough, hands finding his hips. "Feel that?"
"Yeah."
"That's real. Nothing in that head of yours made that up."
Connor started to move. Slow at first, rolling, then faster, hands braced on Hank's chest, riding him with his teeth gritted, and Hank met him from below, thrusts driving up hard enough to make the table legs stutter on the tile. The chipped mug skated an inch. The empty beer bottles rang against each other. Neither of them cared. The fluorescent tube flickered and held, flickered and held.
"Harder." Connor's voice broke on it. "Fuck, Hank, harder, don't be careful, I'm not..."
"I know what you're not."
Hank got his feet flat on the table, planted, and fucked up into him in earnest, deep brutal strokes, one big hand splayed across Connor's lower back to steer him, the other gripping his ass hard enough to bruise, and Connor took it with his head thrown back and his ribs showing under the hoodie and noise coming out of him that would've woken the whole house if the whole house wasn't used to noise. Gavin's bruises, Niles's pipe, Connor's shrieks at three a.m. The house's inventory.
"Touch yourself," Hank ordered, breathless. "Come on my cock, kid, want to feel you."
Connor's hand flew to himself, fisted, stroking fast and graceless, and it didn't take anything, he was still raw from the first time, oversensitive, the coil gathering again almost immediately, and Hank's thumb pressed into the jut of his hip bone and Connor came apart, spilling over his own fist and Hank's shirt, clenching around him, and Hank groaned low in his chest and drove up three more times and held, buried deep, shuddering under him.
They stayed like that. Connor folded down onto Hank's chest, both of them heaving, the condom's warmth gone out of him and the ache settling in sweet and dull. Somewhere above them the tube light buzzed.
"Your heart's going like a jackhammer," Hank said, hand flat on Connor's back, counting the ribs through the hoodie without meaning to. "You're twenty-two. That's not a good sound."
"Don't start."
"I'm not starting. I'm observing."
"You're always observing."
"Yeah, well." Hank's hand kept moving, slow, up and down the knobbed line of his spine. "Somebody's gotta. You're busy."
Connor huffed a laugh into his shirt, and then, before he could stop himself, quieter: "Do it again tomorrow."
"What, the table?"
"All of it. Sitting there. Watching me eat." His face was hidden, which was the only way he could say it. "Nobody's ever done that."
Hank was quiet a second. Then his arm came around Connor's back and held on, hard, like something that had already been dropped once.
"Alright. Tomorrow. Same chair."