Country Mouse (12 page)

“Can I get you a condom to start that off?” Malcolm asked, and Owen could tell he was gasping for sanity at the end.

“You don’t need one,” Owen whispered. “I’m going to come on your ass, not in it.”

Which he did, while Malcolm spilled himself again and again, hot and slick, over Owen’s pumping fist.

Owen cleaned them up, then crawled back in bed. When Malcolm lay on his side and looked at him, Owen turned his head, suddenly embarrassed. “What?”

“I’m sorry,” Malcolm said unexpectedly.

“About what?”

“I came in your mouth last night—”

Owen grimaced, annoyed. “I wanted it.”

“But I know better!”

“You’re not my big brother,” he said. “Thank God. Grown up here, having sex, making a decision. My risk to take.”

“You’re very young,” Malcolm said.

Owen turned around and laughed at him. “Are you even thirty yet?”

Malcolm flushed. “A couple of months,” he mumbled, and Owen laughed some more.

“See? You’re barely older than I am.” He rolled on his side and frowned. “So why?”

“Why what?”

“Why the whole Dom thing? You were a total shit to that guy on the phone Friday, but that’s not you at all. Why are you all locked into that when you’re not even thirty?”

Malcolm turned away. “It is too me,” he said, and Owen rolled his eyes.

“Is not.”

“Is too!”

Owen’s face split into a grin. “Is not is not is not, infinity, I win. Now cop to it. Why?”

“Brat,” Malcolm said, which Owen cut off with “Sub!” before the word was even out of Malcolm’s mouth.

“Fuck.” Malcolm put his back to Owen, and Owen snuggled up to him, wrapping an arm solidly against his resisting chest.

“Aren’t you the one who said it’s easier to be intimate with a stranger?” he asked gently, stroking Malcolm’s chest from behind.

“It’s easier. Are you happy now?”

“Sure I am. I’m in bed with an amazing, sexy man who fucks like a god and gives his brat a good spanking when he needs it. Now explain yourself.”

“It’s easier to find a date through the scene, okay?”

“Don’t you have, like, I don’t know, real-life friends?”

Malcolm huffed. Was that a no?

“Okay. Work?”

“You kidding? At the trading desk? You’re a faggot if your tie’s too pretty. Stupid macho culture. Also, we’re all competing against each other. Even if I managed to hook up with one of them, he’d be worried I’m really after his trading strategy, not his arse.”

“School?”

“Two hundred miles up north; I see more of them on Facebook.” Malcolm shrugged. “It’s the job. I can’t really hook up with a client, I can’t do anything inside the bank—and I’m not seeing much of the outside world in any case. My brain’s all about the markets, that’s pretty much 24/7, or at least 16/5.” He grimaced. “That’s the deal you get when you sign up with a bank. You give them ten years of your life, and after that you can walk away with a boatload of cash and, if you’re half smart, never have to work again.”

“So how far into those ten years are you?”

“Uh, about five. Add a couple years to that because the economy has been an absolute nightmare. I should have gone into metal trading or oil and gas. Mates of mine made a pile in commodities, but I didn’t want to shuffle around grain and rapeseed oil futures between here and fucking Winnipeg.” He chuckled. “So, yeah. I’m a deprived workaholic. Doing this BDSM stuff just helps with the stress.”

“Mmm.” Owen folded his body behind Malcolm’s even tighter. “So how’s your stress level now?”

Malcolm sighed and went limp in his arms. “What stress?” he asked, and Owen thought that was about right.

They dozed. The respite from traveling was a welcome change, and just lying there, holding that warm, vital body was almost like a Red Bull and a shot of B12. They woke up and ate day-old bagels, and Malcolm was going to make plans for takeout, but they walked to Leadenhall Market instead. They talked, about everything, just as they had the night before, and Owen discovered that Malcolm really was quick to smile and quick to laugh, and that he enjoyed the give-and-take banter, even when they weren’t dressed to the nines and Owen wasn’t trying to be James Bond.

They made love after a lunch of broiled chicken and salad, and again after a dinner of stir-fry soy-cakes and broccoli. They talked until three in the morning, when Malcolm fell asleep mid-sentence in a story about a client who didn’t know futures from rainbow crystals, and Owen had just enough presence of mind to double check the alarm on his cell phone to make sure it could wake him from where it was charging in Malcolm’s kitchen.

The morning marched toward them with an inescapable relentlessness they could not hide from, even in sleep.

The alarm buzzed Malcolm awake at six, and even though he sometimes didn’t go to bed before midnight, getting up on three hours of sleep was brutal. Especially considering that, for once, he had a guy over on a Monday morning.

He managed to roll his legs out of bed and sit up mostly with the momentum while he reached for the phone and disabled the alarm. And the next one. And the one after, too.

He wanted nothing more than to fall back and just forget about Monday, but that wasn’t going to happen, and he knew it. Wasn’t like anybody else would trade his stuff for him. Short of needing CPR, he couldn’t even call in sick. Way too healthy, no sick days since his start day. It was a bit of a crazy, all-masculine competition, too. And sick on a Monday just screamed hangover, and hangover meant he couldn’t hold his alcohol.

Great. He ran a hand along Owen’s flank, pulled the covers back into place (Owen was fine, but Malcolm felt like fussing, however perfunctorily), and got to his feet. It was inhumane to wake him just to ask when exactly he’d leave. Something about noon? Cab? Something. He jumped under the shower, shaved there, got dressed and sat in the kitchen for five minutes trying to pull his brain together and wake up. Didn’t work that well, so he just grabbed a Post-it from a drawer and a few banknotes from his wallet.

“Get some breakfast and/or lunch, and a cab,” he wrote, considered it, decided it was too bossy, then decided Owen would read it how he’d meant it. Maybe he’d find the tone funny. Also, there wasn’t that much space on a Post-it. “Please get in touch, okay?” Too late to strike out the needy “okay?” there, so he threw that note away, re-wrote the first sentence, then the second: “Do get in touch.” Much better. Now what? “See you, Malcolm.”

There. He was happy. He put the Post-it on top of Owen’s phone, and stood for a moment, looking at it with blurry eyes. Sure. The kid would get in touch. He seemed to have been raised right—at the very least a thank you when the suit arrived on his doorstep, right?

Excellent. He’d just grab his keys and his coat and walk away. Good. Just head for the door.

Owen stumbled out of the bedroom while he was standing there gazing with sightless eyes at a Post-it.

He looked up and swallowed. “I hated to wake you up.” His voice was gravelly, and Owen grimaced.

“A Post-it? Classy, Malcolm.”

Malcolm swallowed his resentment. “I labored over that Post-it,” he snapped, and Owen looked at him sideways.

“I bet you did,” he said, shedding Malcolm’s bad temper like so much water. He walked up to Malcolm in his boxer shorts and caught Malcolm’s chin in his thumb and forefinger. “Kiss me like a man, Malcolm, and tell me to have a good journey, or my feelings will be hurt, okay?”

Malcolm closed his eyes. “It’s a good thing you’re going,” he said gruffly. “That much emotional honesty would fucking kill me in a week.”

Owen’s breath—still rank from sleep, not like Malcolm cared—brushed his face. “You’re tougher than you think,” he said, and brushed his lips softly against Malcolm’s. Malcolm’s body woke up, though his brain was still mush, and he raised his hands into Owen’s haystack of hair and pulled him closer, because he didn’t care about morning breath and he suddenly didn’t care about looking calm and in charge—he just cared that Owen was leaving, and that his throat was almost too tight to breathe.

The kiss grew hard, grew brutal, and Owen pulled back from it and wrapped those long arms around Malcolm and held him, his whole body taut and fighting the embrace. Owen just stood there until Malcolm accepted it and sagged into him, a little bit of misery seeping out.

“I’d hate to hurt your feelings,” he whispered.

“I’d die before I hurt you,” Owen whispered back.

“Have a safe journey, Yank. Call me. Come visit. Send me a fucking Christmas card. Something.”

He ducked out of Owen’s arms then because he couldn’t do this anymore, and strode for the door, grabbing his keys and wallet from the counter and his coat from the coat rack and fleeing the apartment before he could make an arse out of himself and ask for the impossible and the ludicrous from a man he’d known barely sixty hours.

Owen swallowed as he watched him go, then headed for the shower in this stranger’s apartment. He had four hours before he had to be at the Eurostar terminal to meet Jenny, and they stretched out in front of him interminably. Forever. Years.

Okay, basics
. The three S’s: shower, shit, and shave—every man could do that in his sleep.

So he did.

He managed his complete morning routine in a mental and emotional coma. It wasn’t until he went back into the bedroom to make the bed and scan for any last thing he’d left that he turned around and saw the suit, neatly hung in the closet, his address on a Post-it safety-pinned to the bag.

He sat down on the now neat bed and looked at it and swallowed against the tightness in his chest. Malcolm had run out of the flat, just run, like he was afraid of what he’d do next. Like he was terrified he’d say or do or show the wrong thing, and Owen had watched him go, thinking,
You can’t go. I’m the only person on the planet who knows who you are.

And Malcolm was the only person on the planet who could see
him
—son of a hippie, starving student, recently graduated IT guy from the backwoods of California—in a suit like that.

And Malcolm had tried to leave him by Post-it note because . . .
Because that last kiss in the kitchen had hurt too much
, he thought with a swallow. And who wanted to face that if they didn’t have to?

Fucking suit. Fucking suit, fucking Post-it, fucking Brit, fucking trip to see the world.

Fucking wish that this apartment, spare and modern as it was, could possibly be his home too.

After a huge coffee—half a liter of cappuccino, plus extra shots because all that milk just didn’t do anything—Malcolm made a game attempt at breakfast during the morning call while his Bloomberg terminal booted. Pile of papers and printouts on his desk, the whole trading department a labyrinth of flat-screens, assembled into three pairs per desk. Six screens had seemed excessive when he’d started—surely trading wasn’t like flying the USS Enterprise, and Sulu only got one screen—but that was before he’d known some traders used eight.

Normally plenty of feed coming in to keep himself busy. Client calls, getting a feel for the Asian market based on the Bloomberg headlines. Just a quick scan, just to catch the mood in the frantic white noise that was the capital markets.