Page 13 of The Missing Page
He kissed Leo’s shoulder and saw the edge of the bruise that he had expected to find there, given how stiff Leo’s left side had seemed earlier. “Any other wounds I ought to know about?” he asked.
“That barely even counts as a wound,” Leo said, his voice rough. “More of a muscle strain with a bit of decorative coloring, really.”
Still, James made a show of kissing his way down Leo’s torso as if inspecting him for injuries. Actually, there was noas ifabout it: he was very literally reassuring himself that Leo was in one piece. He shoved Leo’s trousers and shorts down and then off and carried on his inspection. No sense in doing things by halves.
“What do you need from me?” James asked.
Leo looked down at him, slightly dazed in a way that made James quite pleased with himself. “You’ll be doing all the work, so dealer’s choice,” he murmured.
James nearly rolled his eyes because when Leo said things like that, he knew what he’d get. When he needed something hard, something with an edge, he asked for it. When he didn’t ask—well, he was still asking, but for something else.
He bit Leo’s hip, just hard enough to keep Leo from falling asleep on him. Then he shoved both Leo’s knees up, kissed the inside of his thigh, and climbed back up his body to take his mouth in another kiss. He thrust his hips, testing the position, seeing how they rubbed together like that. And God, it felt good. Like this, he could kiss Leo senseless until he felt the other man come apart beneath him.
Leo wrapped his legs around James’s waist and sighed, like nothing so much as a sleepy, lazy cat. Their kisses fell apart until they were only mouthing hungrily at one another. One of Leo’s hands found its way to James’s chest and the other held firmly to his hip. James brought his hand up to Leo’s mouth; Leo took the hint, licking James’s palm. Then James grasped them both in one fist.
“Can you come like this?” James asked.
“Don’t stop,” Leo said, as if there were any chance of James stopping.
James loved it when they were slow and quiet together, when he could almost believe they had all the time in the world. And he loved when Leo let things unfold like this, unhurried and almost calm. He loved watching Leo’s pleasure gradually crest and finally overtake him, loved that he now knew the tightening of Leo’s grip and the slight hitch in his breath that meant he was close, loved above all how in these moments, when the two of them were cocooned in pleasure and fondness, the rest of the world receded into soft focus irrelevance.
“James, I—” Leo broke off, biting down on James’s shoulder as he came. James found himself, as he often did in these moments, murmuring soft and soothing nonsense into Leo’s ear, praise and promises, senseless words of gratitude and affection. When he came it was with Leo’s name on his mouth, Leo’s callused hands on his overheated skin.
He allowed himself a minute to lie there, collapsed half on top of Leo’s body. Then he wet a flannel in the adjoining bathroom and used it to clean Leo off.
“Now go to sleep,” James said, kissing Leo’s temple.
“You like to take care of me,” Leo said.
“If you’re only figuring that out now, you must be a terrible spy.”
At the corner of Leo’s mouth was a tired smile and James had to kiss him there too. He pulled the covers up to Leo’s chin and then turned the lamp off before getting himself ready for bed in the dark.
CHAPTER NINE
Leo woke with the depressing awareness that he was someplace new, which was quickly chased away by the discovery that James was beside him.
He reached over James’s still-sleeping body to fumble on the bedside table for the wristwatch he knew would be there, in the same way that he knew James’s toothbrush would be on the left side of the sink and that he wouldn’t eat a bite of breakfast until he had downed an entire cup of tea and got his hands on that morning’s newspaper. James did things a certain way, sometimes without even realizing he was doing so. Something in his mind was soothed by the knowledge that his watches and toothbrushes and cups of tea stayed in their proper places.
It was the sort of behavioral tic that in anyone else Leo might have found silly, but he felt fiercely defensive of James’s carefully ordered world. He would cheerfully shoot anyone who mislaid James’s toothbrush, and was only stopped by the consideration that this would displease James and also cause a great deal of annoyance for both of them.
As he shifted on the bed, he saw that a pillow and a quilt had been artfully arranged on the sofa so as to make it look as if someone had slept there. He also saw that James was buttoned up to the chin in his favorite pajamas.
According to the watch, it was half past eight, which meant he had managed a respectable eight or so hours of sleep. A few years ago, this would have left him feeling fresh as a daisy, regardless of how many nights of sleep he had missed. But now he could easily duck beneath the covers and achieve another eight hours.
Careful not to wake James, he replaced the watch, and in doing so paid attention to the way the muscles on one side of his body seemed composed entirely of bruises.
He was, by his best estimate, nearing thirty years old. And if this was how his body reacted to being in his late twenties, he couldn’t imagine how bad things would be in a decade. There were good reasons hardly any field agents were over thirty-five. Granted, few agents survived long enough to discover what kind of toll the job would take on an aging body, but that was not a comforting thought. A year ago, he would have determined to push past whatever limits his body dared to impose on him. But a year ago he had worked for a man he trusted rather than a faceless and slightly bureaucratic MI6.
A year ago he hadn’t had James.
His mind and his body were in complete agreement that it was time to quit. But then what would he do? He wasn’t fit for any line of honest work, and while he had a bit put aside for a rainy day, it wasn’t enough to spend the rest of his life as a man of leisure. Leo was too intimately acquainted with poverty to take lightly the prospect of not having work.
He needed to quit, but first he needed to sort out the next few decades of his life. From this end, thirty seemed terribly young, with too much blank space stretching out before him.
He turned his head to look at James. He could, he supposed, tell James all about these doubts that beset him. But that would only result in James offering him everything from a home to money to promises of devotion. The thought made Leo squeamish; it would be churlish to take advantage of James any more than he already had. It was bad enough that he had effectively made James’s home his own during the time he spent in England. It was bad enough that he was letting James—well, love him. There was really no question that James loved him; the fish in the sea and all the mute beasts had that one figured out, and so did Leo. Leo loved him back, which was entirely immaterial.
But the fact remained that James was everything lovely and Leo was quite content to be allowed to exist as one of the satellites orbiting James Sommers, to be allowed to share his meals and his bed, to have James’s light shine in some limited way on Leo’s shadows.
