"Mmm. 'S nice."
Toreth had no idea where he was, or what time it was, or even what day it was. In fact, he had no idea who was kissing his chest, licking his nipples, nibbling gently along the curve of his ribcage, but he thought they deserved some encouragement.
"'Gain."
He shifted a little on the bed — was it a bed? It felt pleasantly warm and soft, whatever it was. Why had he wanted to move? What had he meant to do? Open his eyes? Lift his head? Reach out and touch whoever was —
Then he gasped, deliciously surprised as the lips he had lost track of touched his cock. He squirmed again, sighing, feeling himself hardening under the gentle mouthing. Careful, clever, caressing tongue.
Mmm. Alliterative, too.
Clever, caressing tongue, carefully coaxing his cock to . . . to . . . Toreth ran out of words.
He appreciated the care, though, because now he'd inched that much closer to waking, he didn't feel too spectacular. It wasn't the slow, thrilling sucking — oh yes please more — nothing at all wrong with that, but the rest of his body began to send in complaints for central processing. Cotton-wool mouth, slight headache, a bit queasy, aches in his back, shoulders, thighs and calves.
What
had
he been doing? Maybe later he'd remember in more detail if the night before had been worth the morning after. Yes, probably, because he definitely remembered fucking. Lots and lots of fucking. Bright green eyes. Leather and chains. Of course — the Shop. Vague recollection of pills too, so it was probably nothing more exciting than the come-down from those that left him so washed out and exhausted — a not-so-golden afterglow.
However, it was impossible to concentrate on the not very nice while the very nice indeed was still happening to him. Neither did he want to think about things too much. If he wasn't careful, he might wake up, and he'd hate to miss the end of the dream.
Hands and mouth on him, body moving more urgently against his, someone — two someones? — moaning. One of them sounded like him. Someone was whispering some very complimentary things about him, and he tried to mumble a thanks. Everything all mixed together and it didn't seem to matter that he still hadn't moved. Someone sitting astride him, hand on his cock, then shifting forwards and down, impaling themselves on him and ah, God
yes
that was good. So right and wonderful and perfect.
After that, Toreth rather lost track of events until the sweet rush of completion, hearing himself crying out to the distant accompaniment of the mystery someone gasping his name.
They sounded to be having fun too. Good. Maybe they'd do it all again in a bit.
All quiet now.
Hm.
Was he awake yet? Probably. A heavy weight still pinned his hips, so it was either a very tangible incubus, or . . . finally, he managed to force open his eyes.
Warrick, of course, which he'd known all along if he'd been awake enough to realise it.
"Good morning," Warrick said, panting somewhat. "Or rather, good afternoon."
Toreth blinked up at him, trying to remember how to focus. Usually happened on its own, he thought. "Afternoon?"
"Mm-hm."
He blinked again. The light in the room did seem wrong for a morning in his own bedroom. Looking round, he discovered that he lay on the sofa in Warrick's flat. "Uh, what time is it?"
"Four o'clock." Warrick took a deep breath and looked at his watch, which led Toreth to notice the bruises on his wrists. "No, it's quarter past, now."
Fifteen minutes. Was that how long it had taken? Toreth frowned, looking again at Warrick's wrists. There was something he ought to remember, something to do with why he was here instead of in Warrick's very comfortable bed.
What had happened last night? They'd come back from the Shop and in the end they'd settled on a suspension fuck, after Warrick had asked nicely. Very nicely. By the time he'd finished begging — Toreth wrenched his mind away from that memory, pursuing the course of events.
Warrick in the cabinet. Then Toreth had gone somewhere . . . he'd left Warrick in the chains and gone to get a drink of water because the glow had started to fade and the effects of several hours of drinking and fucking had begun to slop over the top of the pharmaceutical dam. What next? Standing in the hall, looking at the glass, wondering if he ought to take another tablet, then distracted by the sickening feeling of the night rushing up to hit him, and then . . . and then nothing. Blank.
Didn't take fifteen years' experience at I&I to work it out, though.
"Oh,
shit
."
Warrick raised an eyebrow.
"Yes?"
"I just remembered. I'm so sorry. No, really — I am."
Warrick shook his head. "The timers opened the cuffs after three-quarters of an hour or so. No harm done. I was a little concerned about
you
, but when I found you in here the snoring sounded healthy enough. You didn't seem interested in regaining consciousness for long enough to get to bed, so I covered you up and left you."
"I needed the rest." Well, Warrick genuinely didn't sound too upset, which saved a lot of tedious apologizing. Toreth's arms seemed to be responding again, so he stretched and yawned. "I don't think anyone's ever fucked me in my sleep before."
"I did try to wake you first. Hourly, in fact, since eleven. However, I can only wait so long." Warrick grinned sheepishly. "I tried wafting coffee under your nose several times, but even that didn't work. So in the end — " He shrugged.
"God. You're —" What was the word he wanted? Warrick would know. "What's that word? The one that you are."
Warrick's smile widened. "Insatiable?"
"That's the one. You're it." He pushed ineffectually at Warrick, in a way designed to suggest that he could stay there all damn day if he wanted to. "And it's not even as if you'll get the I&I death-in-service money after you've fucked me into an early grave. I signed that over to Sara years ago."
"Sorry," Warrick said, not sounding it. "If it's any consolation, there's plenty of hot water for the shower, and headache tablets, fresh coffee and bacon sandwiches, all ready for you." He smiled again, with a wicked edge. "So you can get your strength back for later."
Toreth closed his eyes, because sometimes, like now, Warrick was too much to look at. It felt too . . .
Had he ever had such an enjoyable hangover in his life?
Toreth had been quiet all day — in the morning, at the gym, at the restaurant they'd had lunch in. So the question, asked out of the blue as they sat reading in Warrick's living room, surprised Warrick.
"Warrick, have you been in the sim lately?"
Warrick looked up to find Toreth still slumped in the chair, one leg resting over the arm. Warrick bit back a comment — at least he'd taken his shoes off. The screen Toreth had been reading lay flat on the back of the chair.
"Not recently, no." He thought back. "Not for about six weeks. The last time was with you, in fact. I've been too busy with other things, and since we suspended the Yes programme I don't have a direct involvement with testing any more."
Toreth nodded, frowning slightly. Then his expression changed to one of determination. "How many men have you fucked?"
It was such an an uncharacteristic question that Warrick couldn't believe he'd heard it correctly. However, the phrasing left no room for misinterpretation.
Toreth was looking at him expectantly.
"I beg you pardon?" Warrick asked, playing for time.
"You heard me. How many men have you fucked?" Toreth tilted his head, then grinned suddenly. The effect wasn't reassuring. "I'm not planning to hunt them all down and kill them for not psychically deducing that however many years later you'd be fucking me."
Warrick raised his eyebrows, and Toreth swung his leg down and sat up.
"Oh, come on," Toreth said. "Melissa's still alive and well, and I know where she lives."
"Do you?"
"Yeah. Flat seventeen, Symphony-Parker Building, corporate four. With her husband and their shiny corporate kids."
"How the hell do you know all that?"
"It was in the SimTech investigation file. Ex-wife, former shareholder, that made her a pretty unlikely but potential suspect. The address stuck in my mind. Come on, how many?"
"Why do you want to know?"
"I'm curious."
Perhaps that was all, but Warrick doubted it. For one thing, the question was too sudden and too out of character for a man who usually cared little for anything beyond the immediate here and now. For another, Toreth making a joke of jealousy meant he was hiding something about which he felt even more uncomfortable.
Warrick closed his hand screen and patted the sofa beside him. After a moment's hesitation, Toreth joined him.
"Very well," Warrick said. "I will tell you,
if
you tell me why you want to know."
Toreth stared at him, clearly trying very hard for an expression of puzzlement. Then he equally clearly realised Warrick didn't buy it, because he looked away and ran his hand through his hair. When he spoke again, all the studied casualness had gone and his voice was tight with anger.
"Who's Tom?"
Warrick stared. For a moment, the name genuinely meant nothing to him.
"Because I woke up this morning," Toreth said as if he'd asked, "and you were still asleep and when I reached — when I moved, I touched your arm and you turned over and said 'Tom'. And some other stuff that made it pretty clear you've done more than code with him. So who the fuck is he?"
Daylight — and recognition — dawned. "A name from the very distant past. He was, in fact, the first man I ever had sex with. Or boy, I should probably say."
Toreth's gaze searched his face, then the tension suddenly drained out of him and he flushed slightly. "Okay."
Warrick rested his elbow on the back of the sofa and leaned closer. "You know, you could just have asked me."
"Yeah, well . . ." He shrugged. "I'm a para-investigator. 'Just ask' isn't the way it works."
"Do you want to search my bedroom for evidence while you're at it?"
"'Course not — I trust you." Toreth looked at him more closely, then closed his eyes briefly as Warrick raised his eyebrow. "Fuck. How could you tell?"
"I've found things moved from time to time. Mostly it was a guess. You turned the place over the very first time I left you here alone, so I assumed you'd done it again since."
Toreth flushed. "You could have fucking said something."
"Why? It doesn't matter." He didn't keep much in the flat that he minded Toreth seeing, and if the security on the study was good enough to satisfy SimTech, then it was good enough to keep Toreth at bay.
"So what about the answer to the other question?" Warrick asked. Toreth blinked at him. "How many men? Do you still want to know?"
"Oh. No, not really. Or rather —" Toreth stood up abruptly and walked over to the window. When he turned, the light behind him hid his expression. "Yes." He didn't sound at all sure.
"Mm. In that case I'll just say that, excluding professional contacts in the sim, you'd probably find it a reassuringly small number. I could invite them all to dinner, along with their female counterparts, and have no problem fitting them round the dining room table."
"Yeah?" Toreth sounded cheered, as Warrick had expected. After all, it wasn't a very large dining room. "Too busy with SimTech?"
"Quite so." Simple agreement was easier than attempting to convey to Toreth the alien concept that a constant stream of casual sex wasn't everyone's idea of fun.
Warrick hoped Toreth would drop the conversation. And, indeed, he didn't say anything straight away. After a moment, Warrick expanded his screen and started reading again. However, he couldn't concentrate on the words. He watched out of the corner of his eye as Toreth strolled over to the mantlepiece and picked up one of the ornaments — a small copper sculpture of a hissing cat — and turned it over in his hands, apparently absorbed in study.
Warrick looked deliberately down at the screen. He invited Toreth here, he wanted him here. He had to accept that Toreth touched things, and not always with what Warrick considered a proper degree of care. Most of the time Warrick coped perfectly well. He no longer even minded that Toreth only remembered to pick up towels from the bathroom floor two times in three; looked at from the correct perspective, a sixty-six percent success rate was something of a triumph.
Some things still bothered him, though, even after all this time and despite his best efforts. The ornaments was one of them. Warrick didn't have many, and every one meant something — they were gifts from close friends and family, or things he had bought because he liked them enough he couldn't help it.
"This is pretty good," Toreth said, running his fingertip over the delicate whiskers.
Warrick supressed a wince. "It's one of Cele's pieces. Actually, it's a copy of a much larger bronze. I saw the original in her studio and asked if she could make another, but unfortunately the purchaser had commissioned it as an exclusive piece."
"So what was this? A model for it or something?"
"Not quite. She made it as a surprise for my birthday. Because it was a gift in a different size and material, it slipped through a loophole in the contract. Or so she said." He vividly remembered opening the box to find the tiny, perfect miniature copy glowing in its nest of tissue. "Actually, I prefer it to the larger one — the copper is so beautiful."
After a minute, Toreth set the cat down again, out of place on the wrong end of the mantlepiece. Warrick knew it wasn't deliberate; it simply didn't occur to Toreth that it mattered exactly where the cat stood, and of course he was right. It didn't. It was a purely decorative piece of metal. Now with fingermarks that would need polishing off before the copper tarnished. Warrick bit his tongue. He could clean the cat later and put it back in the right place. A little disturbance was good for him.
"So tell me about Tom," Toreth said. "Was he good?"
Warrick sighed and snapped the screen shut. He'd known that the topic wasn't closed. "He was a friend. Of Dillian's first, so he was a year younger than me. He had a sister who was two years older. Than me, that is — three years older than him. I had an absolutely hopeless crush on her." Even now, the memories brought a twinge of something, a shadow of the blind intensity of desire. "You know how Dillian and I share a strong family resemblence?"