Bang (13 page)

Jack doesn't, not even long enough to promise her he won't, just curls his fingers up inside and writes his name with his tongue on her body, licking that tight circle of muscle over and over as she comes. He kneads her ass hard and rhythmic with his free hand.

“Oh my God,” Mari says when she's finished. Jack rests his forehead against the smooth, salty expanse of her lower back. He wants to give her a minute—possibly he needs a minute himself—but right away Mari's flipping over on the sofa, dark dark eyes and her hands still cuffed up on top of her head. “I swear to God, Jack, if you don't fuck me right this minute I'm going to shoot you myself.”

He can see the flash in her eyes as soon as she says it, how she isn't sure if that's going too far. Jack only smirks. He leans in and kisses her deep and aggressive so he can be sure she's tasting herself, then takes her cuffed wrists and slips them over his head.

“What the fuck?” Mari's eyes go wide as he slides his hands underneath her ass and lifts her, pink mouth forming a perfect O. “You can't fucking carry me, Jack, what the hell are you—”

“Now we need a condom,” Jack says in reply, ignoring her protests entirely, making his way toward the bedroom door. He likes the solid weight of her body in his arms. His dick is trapped between them, the scritch of the hair between her spread, clinging thighs. He slides against her clit and she gasps.

“Jack.” She's helpless like this, fingers in his too-short hair, scrabbling to get a grip. They land in a sweaty, messy tangle on his bed. Mari wrestles his face close to hers. “I love you,” she says, and she sounds half out of her mind with it. “Jack Jack Jack, I love you, I love you I love you, I—”

“Hey.” Jack presses his forehead against hers, jubilant and embarrassed in equal amounts. “Hey now. Love you too.” He wants to kiss her everywhere, her nose and cheeks and fever-hot mouth but Mari won't slow down. She meets his soft kisses with teeth.

“Inside,” she says, yanking her cuffed hands over his head so fast she nearly scalps him. “Right now, now now now, I want—”

Jack plants a wet, careful kiss on her chin and leans across the bed for the condoms, Mari scrabbling at his back all the while. As soon as he has the foil packet in hand she's clicking her fingers for him to hand it over, cuff chain rattling. The expression on her face is pure greed.

“Make sure you watch those things,” Jackson murmurs, nodding at the cuffs. “Family jewels, etcetera.”

Mari quirks an eyebrow at him, taking the proffered condom. Jack barely has time wonder if she's thinking about the conversation back at the Pint too,
you ever think about more kids
, before she's setting the packet carefully to one side on the bedspread and reaching between his legs. Only she doesn't reach with her hands.

“Shit,” Jackson says as the cold chain links slide against his dick. There isn't enough slack to wrap around but Mari tries anyway, pulling lightly, squeezing. She squeezes a little too hard and his hips jerk, dick jumping wildly. His hand darts out to close around her wrist in an iron grip before his muscles unclench enough to let go. “Watch it,” he gasps. His dick is leaking in a serious way now, shiny at the tip.

Mari blinks at him speculatively. “Or maybe we don't even need the condom,” she murmurs, dipping her head just an inch.

Jack fists a hand in her hair and yanks. “Get up here.”

Mari comes, laughing like she's pleased with herself. As soon as the cuffs are clear of his balls Jack grabs her and flips her, pinning her on her belly, dragging her up the bed until she's squealing.

“Jack.” She sounds stunned. At his manhandling, at the hard, hard grip he has on her upper arms that's probably going to leave bruises. She also sounds really fucking turned on. Jackson hums an answer at her, distracted.

“Like this,” he says, bending her arms up over her head. The cuffs make it awkward for her, he can tell, how she can't quite twist her arms naturally. Her elbows wing out ever so slightly.

“Shit,” she pants into the pillows. “Come down here, come here, come.”

Jackson shakes his head. “Bend your knees,” he says, pushing on her heels until she listens. Then he kneels between them himself, ripping open the condom. On second thought he grabs two pillows and slides them under her hips, tilting her pelvis up up up.

“Jackson.” She's wise to the position now, he can tell from her voice. “I don't want you like, looking down on me while we—”

Jack slides her heels farther up the mattress, pretzeling her knees up. Her ass looks so fucking good. “I wanna look down on you, though.” He cups her, jiggling his hand a little. Mari makes a soft, embarrassed sound. “I wanna see this,” Jack says, jiggling again. He has no idea what prompts him to add, “Wanna fuck you to pieces, Jesus, Mari, I swear to God. Wanna come all over it, and—”

Mari whimpers. “Do it. Please.”

Which is how Jackson ends up accomplishing about thirty seconds of penetration before pulling out, stripping off the condom, and blowing his wad all over his partner's ass. He feels like the top of his head has come right off. Mari talks to him the whole time it's happening, telling him how good he feels and how much she wants him to. He thinks it's her voice as much as her body that gets him off.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” he says when he's finished, his whole body hot and shaky, like bombs have gone off in every single one of his joints. He can't keep himself from reaching out and rubbing the slippery mess across her skin. “Are you okay, was that okay?” he asks, voice breaking embarrassingly, tugging her hip so she'll roll over onto her back and he can see her. Suddenly all he wants in the world is a look at her face.

“Mm-hmm,” Mari says, sounding pretty wrecked herself. Then, trying to stop him from pulling her against him, “Easy, dummy. I'm going to get it all over the bed.”

“So?” Jack asks, nudging her onto her back on the mattress. “We'll do laundry, fuck. Come here, come here.” He pushes the dark, messy cloud of hair out of her face, running his palm up the sensitive inside of her arm until she shivers. Oh, he likes her from this angle too. “You remember to bring the keys to these things?' he asks her, rattling her wrists a little.

Mari makes an exaggerated
oh shit
face, then grins at him wickedly. “They're in my purse, yeah,” she says, but shakes her head when he moves to get up. “Leave 'em on a sec.”

Jack gets her off one more time while she's wearing them, slow and gentle, featherlight fingers on her clit and her hips moving ever so slightly to urge him on. She comes with a deep, satisfied shudder, and Jackson grins. “This is your real calling, I think,” Mari tells him sleepily, holding her hands out and letting him uncuff her. “Probably you should just turn in your badge.”

There hasn't been any word from work yet, though neither one of them mentions it. Jack tells himself these things can take time.

Not like there isn't plenty of distraction, anyway. They rinse off in his stall shower while the sheets are in the washer, then Jack orders a pizza while she towels off her hair. “What'd you get?” she asks, turning up in his kitchen a moment later in her panties and one of his GBPD T-shirts. He can tell immediately she's not wearing a bra.

“That's
your
real calling,” he says, raising his eyebrows. Mari smirks.

“What, my jugs, or being police?” She gives him a pointed look, sitting herself at his counter like a queen. “Now, what's on my pizza?”

She's bossier now that they're doing this, Jackson notices. He remembers how she used to talk to Andre at parties, this no-nonsense honey-do tone that made Jack absolutely sick with jealousy. The kind of voice that said,
Manners aren't for you, you're family
.

“Extra mushrooms,” he says. “Obviously.”

Mari smiles.

They wash down the pizza with a couple of beers out of Jackson's fridge, doing a lap of the condo while they figure out where to settle, from the kitchen counter to the table to sitting side by side on Jackson's leather couch. After a second, Mari reaches for the remote and flips on the flat screen.

“Yeah?” she asks, raising an eyebrow. Jack nods.

And that's the afternoon. It feels weird and novel to Jackson, watching Mari flip through the channels. In all the years they've been partners, they've never really hung out somewhere that wasn't a bar or a work event or a barbecue, never just bummed around watching TV. It takes them a while to figure out how they're gonna sit. “You're making me all sweaty,” Mari complains after five minutes, but finally they wind up with her head in his lap and her ankles crossed on the arm of the sofa, her graceful chin tilted up so Jackson can see a tiny beauty mark on her neck he's never had occasion to notice before.

“You're pretty,” he says without really thinking, tracing a path from that pinprick mole down along her collarbone. Her skin is very, very smooth.

Mari smirks, flexing her toes up on the couch arm. “Oh yeah, I'm a beauty queen,” she says.

“Hey, I mean it,” Jackson says, sounding dorkily earnest even to his own ears. “You're pretty.” Then, 'cause it's not like he's not already in it, “I've always thought so.”

Mari reaches for his hand then, laces her slender fingers through his. “I know.”

“You did, huh?” It's the closest they've come to talking about it, whatever torch he might or might not have been carrying all these years, but he finds he can't summon up the scratchy resentment he was feeling earlier today. “I thought so.”

“Kind of,” Mari admits, running her thumb back and forth across his knuckles, wrapping her fist around his middle finger in a gesture Jack feels in his groin. “What's one thing you remember?” she asks quietly, tilting her face to look up at him. “About when we were rookies?”

Jackson snorts. “Oh, you're just blatantly fishing for compliments now, hm?”

“No,” Mari defends herself, then smiles. “A little, I don't know. I did just let you put me in fucking handcuffs for an hour, Officer Ford.”

“Oh,
let
me,” Jack says with a laugh, but then he gets serious, thinking, wanting to please. “I was scared all the time, I think,” he tells her finally. “That's a thing I remember. Like, not of getting hurt, or whatever, but of like. Doing the wrong thing.”

“I remember that feeling,” Mari says. “Prepared me for having a baby, I always thought.”

Jack smiles. “What about you?” he asks. The TV is still chattering away, low volume, a commercial for one of those bogus law firms that wants you to call if you've been injured in any kind of accident. “What's one thing you remember?”

“Hm,” Mari says. Jackson scritches the fingertips of his free hand through her hair as she thinks, tugging gently through the tangles. “That feels nice,” she murmurs quietly, eyes sliding shut and then opening again. “Okay,” she says, sounding thoughtful. “Do you remember the first winter we were on the job, that kid who got stuck between the garage and the shed in the snowstorm?”

“Oh damn, yeah,” Jackson says. “I haven't thought about that in years.” The kid had been six or seven, maybe, and the two structures built close enough together in the backyard that Jack could understand why he thought he could shimmy his way through. He'd slipped on some snow, though, got himself wedged sideways, and totally panicked. His equally rattled mother had called 911, but a tipped-over space heater had turned into a five-alarm blaze at a two-family house across town, so they were pretty damn low on the fire department's priority list. Mari and Jack were the only emergency response team who showed.

“You were so patient with him,” Mari is saying, still holding his hand, her wrist twisted at an awkward angle. “Remember? You talked to him for like a full hour, until he figured out how to get out of there. You told him that story about you and your brother getting locked in a bathroom at Meredith's ballet school. And I thought, ‘I want to kiss that boy.'”

Jack peers down at her teasingly. “The little kid?” he deadpans.

Mari huffs. “Jerk,” she says, throwing her elbow in the direction of his junk. Jack catches her just in time. “I'm telling you a nice thing about yourself. It doesn't happen very often, so I'd listen if I were you.”

“I'm kidding,” Jack says, as the '90s electric guitar of the
Friends
theme song starts up. “It is nice.” It is, too, the memory of it, the winter cold and the feeling of actually helping somebody who needed it, of being out in the world with her. It's been a long time since he felt that way. He doesn't know if he has at all since he came back.

“Mm-hmm.” Mari smiles at him for a minute, but then her face gets serious. “I'm sorry I didn't come to the hospital,” she says.

Jack shakes his head like an instinct—he doesn't want to go down this road, not now. To dredge up those dark, angry feelings, and for what? “Come on,” he says, “we don't have to talk about that.”

“We do though, don't we?” Mari asks, looking at him with wide, mournful eyes. “Eventually we have to talk about it.”

Jack sighs. “Mari—”

“It wasn't that I didn't want to see you,” she tells him, fast like she wants to be sure to say it before she up and loses her nerve. “I just—I didn't want you to see
me
. Not after everything that happened.” She wrinkles her nose. “Does that make sense?”

Jack shakes his head again, laughs a little. “No,” he tells her bluntly, and pulls her face close to his for a kiss.

They eat the pizza off paper towels on the sofa, drink a couple of sour Coronas Jack's got at the back of his fridge from last summer. Around seven, Detective Bushur finally calls in with a report. He sounds hassled when Jack answers, like a man who's been running in circles all day.