Criss Cross Read online

  ***

  The drugs kicked in and I dozed. My miniblinds developed strips of black between the slats where sunlight had streamed in earlier. Jacob’s blanket was twisted around my ribs.

  I sat up and looked hard from shadow to shadow. Nothing moved. Satisfied that I was alone, I yawned and rolled a kink out of my neck. Nice way to spend my day off, doped up and asleep. I considered taking up drinking. But not very seriously, since the dead get really bossy when I drink.

  And speaking of the dead...I thought of the floating faces in the river and shuddered. My triple-dose of Auracel was still holding up, though, and hypothetically my sixth sense had a lid on it for the time being. But I hadn’t been on Auracel when I’d seen them, and images from earlier kept replaying themselves in my mind. Those faces. Hairless. Lips wormy and too mobile, forming soundless sounds, words. Hands reaching, trying to break the surface....

  I grabbed the first thing I could lay my hands on and threw it across the room. You wouldn’t think a plastic coaster would put such a big ding in the wall. Damn.

  I looked at the clock. A little after nine. The state still does executions at midnight, as if deliberately and methodically killing someone isn’t spooky enough as it is. Jacob would be gone until one, one-thirty. I wanted Jacob. I didn’t want to be alone with the memory of those bloated bodies.

  I called Lisa and got a message on her cell that said she wouldn’t be available for the next couple of weeks due to her coursework, but to leave her a message and she’d be back in touch soon. She sounded perky, like she just couldn’t wait to go meditate, or whatever they were teaching her. Couldn’t she have phone hours, I wondered. Did she need to devote so much time to chanting “om” that she couldn’t just talk to me for five fucking minutes to reassure me that the river wasn’t really full of dead people?

  I closed my eyes and breathed carefully and told myself that I did not want to strangle Lisa. I debated taking another Auracel, but since I had to work the next day, opted for a Seconal to just knock me out instead. I tuned the living room TV to a station I didn’t receive and slumped on the futon, watching static.

  I think it’s a white-noise kind of thing I’m after when I go between TV or radio stations. Something generic to shut out the dead. It’s not anything they taught me at Heliotrope Station, better known as Camp Hell, the sicko place where I was supposedly being taught to harness my psychic ability. I just picked up static surfing on my own.

  Channel eight was usually pretty good for a gray, textured nothingness. I hit zero-eight on the remote and settled in.

  Except channel eight seemed to be tuning something tonight. I wondered why that would be. Maybe another station had boosted its signal, or the hole in the ozone happened to be lining up with some broadcast satellite tonight, or maybe Mercury was retrograde. Damn. I’d liked channel eight just the way it was.

  I made out a face in the static and tried to match it to that of a familiar celebrity, without luck. I picked out the contour of a cheek, and an open mouth. A hand fluttered up, five fingers blurring. Sign language? I had no idea. But the Seconal was kicking in, combining with the grogginess brought on by all the Auracel I’d taken earlier, and my eyelids drooped despite the nagging compulsion to make sense of what I was seeing.

  I wouldn’t say I actually slept, at least not the whole time. Camp Hell called it a hypnogogic state, that window between sleeping and waking. Sometimes when I catch myself in that window I feel extraordinarily clear, like I’ve been going through the day wearing a pair of dirty, smudged sunglasses and it’s just occurred to me to take them off. Other times I just feel like I’m falling.

  It was in the middle of one of those sickening, falling lurches that I snapped awake, as if I’d been caught. Jacob’s face was right in mine, and he held me firmly by the upper arms. “Hey,” he said when I woke up.

  I cleared my throat. “Hey.”

  He stared hard into my eyes. “Were you...sleeping?”

  I raised an eyebrow. Evidently he didn’t think so, since he’d felt the need to grab me like that. “I dunno. Not exactly.” I shrugged. He let go of me and crouched between my legs, his elbows resting on my knees. “Sort of dreaming.”

  “You didn’t look like you were dreaming. Your eyes were half open, but they weren’t moving back and forth.”

  Oh. That must’ve been really attractive. Good thing anything paranormal, ugly or not, makes Jacob horny. But still, there had to be a limit somewhere, and I wasn’t eager to find it. I wondered if he’d had any luck with house-hunting. And then I remembered he’d been at an execution all night, and it was probably somewhere in the wee hours of the morning. “I took a sleeping pill,” I said, pushing off the back of the futon. He eased back and stood, and gave me a hand up.

  I glimpsed channel eight but didn’t see any more staticky people. Jacob turned off the television, poking the manual on/off button as we went by. The lights in the bedroom were already on; in fact, all the lights in the apartment were still on. I waited for him in the bedroom doorway while he swung around to flick off the kitchen and bathroom lights. I usually left the kitchen light on all night, since it was far enough away from the bedroom to leave my sleep undisturbed, yet it ensured that I wouldn’t awake in total darkness and see...well, I dunno what I might see, but I didn’t want to find out. But for the past two weeks with Jacob there, I’d been sleeping with the lights out. All of them.

  I didn’t move as Jacob approached the bedroom. For someone who made me feel so safe, he certainly looked like hell. A deep, vertical scowl line I’d never noticed before was wedged between his dark eyebrows, the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes just looked weary, and his mouth was pressed into a grim set. “Are you okay?” I asked. And I felt a little stupid for taking so long to ask it, but at least I’d figured it out eventually. I’m really not accustomed to having to worry about anyone but myself.

  Jacob fit himself into the bedroom doorway with me, one of us backed against each jamb, and propped his wrists on my shoulders. We were both a handful of inches over six feet tall, but his solid mass dwarfed me as he pressed his forehead into mine. “That guy they put down today, Hugo Cooper. He was a monster.”

  “Yeah,” I said, as if I knew it all. Cooper had kidnapped three women. Kept them alive in a hundred-degree attic. He probably wouldn’t have murdered them if one hadn’t escaped and run for help, causing him to panic and try to erase the whole thing in a brutal, frenzied massacre.

  I’m sure Jacob would be able give me every last detail, the location of every scattered body part. I hoped he wouldn’t.

  “Even so,” I said, “it fucks with your mind to watch ‘em fry.”

  I felt Jacob’s breath, warm, on my cheek. He kissed me, a chaste brush of his lips, and my heartbeat sped. “It was lethal injection,” he said, turning toward the bed. He sighed. “But, yeah. It was no picnic.”

  The little flutter I’d taken for pleasure felt more like panic as Jacob pulled away from me. Faces in the river, dark house, and Lisa unreachable in Santa Barbara. I slipped around him and got into bed, pulling him down beside me. He didn’t respond as quickly and eagerly as usual, but he seemed willing enough.

  I pulled Jacob close to me, arms around his neck, and pressed my mouth against his. He’s got full lips, normally set in a slightly knowing grin; nothing arrogant, just an I-got-the-joke-five-minutes-ago type of look. He worked his way out of his suitcoat as I clung to him, running my tongue back and forth over his lower lip. His jacket slid from the bed to the floor and he settled himself against me. I ran my hands down his back, which was hot through the fabric of his shirt everywhere it’d been covered by the coat. I could feel the cut of his muscles, even on his back, and even through that shirt. Jacob works out -- religiously, I’d learned since he’d been staying with me. And aside from pumping iron, the man takes a run after work if police business doesn’t keep him late. A run.

  Jacob broke our kiss and narrowed his eyes. “Why are you smiling?”


  I realized he’d probably still been thinking about the execution, and promptly attempted to look serious even though I was totally busted. “You make me happy. That’s all.”

  Jacob scowled harder. “I don’t trust you when you smile.”

  I pressed myself more firmly into his chest, and wished my psychic powers could also make our clothes disappear. “Really,” I said, loosening his tie. “I had a lousy day too, and I’m glad to see you.”

  “You had a lousy day...fishing?”

  Boy, nothing got past him. “Let’s not talk about it,” I said, stripping his shirt off, then pulling my ratty sweatshirt over my head. I knew the perfect thing to take Jacob’s mind off the crap day we’d each had. But of course I’d forgotten the condoms -- again -- so I’d just have to make do. Not that I’ve ever known anyone to complain about getting a blowjob.

  I pushed Jacob onto his back and got to work on his belt. His expression grew less pensive as he watched me unzip his fly and start tracing the muscles on his abs with my tongue. Maybe he even grinned a little, too. Or at least he’d stopped scowling. I ditched the rest of my clothes fast, then finished stripping Jacob a little more respectfully. He wears expensive tailored suits that don’t appreciate being torn off and wadded up on the floor. The Seconal -- not exactly a modern sleeping pill, actually a barbiturate that used to be a party drug in the 70s -- had made me mellow, more apt to finesse his clothes off than tear at them.

  Once I’d undressed him I ran my palms down Jacob’s thighs, feeling the swell of hard muscle beneath the skin. He lay back and watched me taking him in, and he definitely looked less stressed than he had when he’d gotten home.

  I settled myself between his legs with my feet sticking off the bottom of the bed and I kissed him on the stomach again, but now Jacob’s cock was brushing against my chest and I let that contact happen, almost as if it were accidental, and felt him swell against me.

  I slid my hands over Jacob’s hips and held onto them as I worked my mouth lower. His skin was pleasantly salty; the hair on his thighs was soft against my cheek. My mouth found its way to the base of Jacob’s cock and he let out a low groan. His hands covered mine, and our fingers meshed together. He squeezed my fingers encouragingly.

  I ran my tongue higher, licking along the underside of his cock while it rose up to meet my mouth. It’s a big, wide cock, but it looks right on him. And there’s something dirty about trying to cram it into my mouth and going to work the next day with an aching jaw that really gets me off.

  “Mmm, yeah.”

  Speaking of dirty: Jacob’s a talker. And keeping my mouth full of cock has the added bonus of me not having to answer him. Not that the words aren’t sexy as hell -- I just worry that I’ll sound like an idiot if I’m the one saying them.

  “Uhn, that’s right, Vic. Yeah...sweet mouth.”

  My cock gave a throb into the bedspread, but I couldn’t grab it since Jacob had my hands tight. The thought of that made me even harder. I got his cockhead into my mouth, the slick salt of precome wetting the back of my tongue.

  Jacob gave a sharp gasp and squeezed my fingers.

  I felt the girth of him with my lips and slid back, wetting Jacob’s cock so it’d slide a little easier.

  “God, Vic. Yeah.”

  I bore down on it on that first good stroke, taking him into my throat. I could appreciate why Seconal was so popular if it made me that relaxed and still let me get hard.

  Jacob moaned louder.

  I was digging the thought of a big slab of cockmeat invading my throat -- probably that was the residual high of the Auracel talking -- so I took Jacob hard and fast. Lots of suction, lots of speed. His hands clenched at my fingers and his body arched up off the bed.

  “Oh God! Oh my God!”

  He was loud enough for the downstairs neighbors to hear and I loved it, humping myself into the bunched-up covers while Jacobs’ cries grew wordless and louder still. He yanked my arms, dragging me onto his cock, battering the back of my throat with its stiffness. I sucked hard and let him guide me, no, slam himself into me.

  And suddenly he was still, a choked yell escaping him that was more like a long, hard breath, too intense even for sound. Hot bitterness surged over the back of my tongue and my gag reflex was gone in a haze of prescription meds, and I welcomed Jacob’s shot, let the come warm me and fill me up. His fingers had gone slack, and I jerked my hands away and grabbed my own cock, fisting it with quick, efficient strokes.

  I wanted to just let it rip, but there was the ghost of a dead newborn in the laundry room, and I only had one change of sheets left. At the last moment I clapped my other hand over the tip, catching my own load as it shot.

  I looked up and Jacob was watching with heavy-lidded eyes and definitely grinning now. I leaned over him to get a tissue from the bedside table and wiped my wet hand with it.

  “You should’ve come on me,” he said. I don’t know how he can look me in the eye and just say that. Even with the drugs, it wasn’t anything I could speak out loud. “You’d look hot, really hot.”

  I didn’t feel like talking about the real reason why I hadn’t, so I threw the tissue into the wastebasket and snuggled up beside him instead.

  Even though it was three in the morning and Jacob had to be exhausted, he didn’t let it go. “Do it next time, okay? I want to see it, shooting all over my chest.”

  I sighed.

  “Okay?”

  I rolled over, pulled a pillow against my face and spoke into it. “I have this hangup about the laundry room,” I said. Good thing the pillow was there. It sounded even dumber aloud than it had in my head. No wonder I worried about talking dirty; talking in general seemed to escape me.

  Jacob pressed himself into my back. His body was much warmer than mine, tacky with sweat, and his chest hair tickled against my shoulder blades. “Okay,” he said, and kissed the nape of my neck.

  ***

  I woke to a slender ray of sunshine streaming through the miniblinds and nailing me directly in the eye. A sharp twinge of pain flared behind my eyeball, somewhere in my brain. “Fuck.”

  I sat up and looked at the clock. Eight thirty-eight, and my shift started at nine. Not good. I vaulted over Jacob while the pain, apparently fueled by my movement, flared again. I staggered a little as I went into the kitchen and retrieved my cell phone from my jacket pocket. I’d be late, and I was in no shape to drive. I hit memory dial seven, the last programmed number on my phone. Roger Burke.

  “Burke here.”

  I squeezed my eyelids together. Couldn’t he just answer with his last name like every other cop? I chalked up my annoyance about the word “here” to my Auracel hangover. “Hi, Roger. It’s Vic.”

  “Oh, hi, Vic!” He was way too happy for a Wednesday. “What’s up?”

  “Listen, I uh....” I realized I probably should have rehearsed the way I was going to say it. Damn. And then I remembered his phone message from the day before. “I wanted to take you up on your offer and get a ride from you today.”

  He didn’t miss a beat. “Sure, no problem.”

  As I searched for a way to end the conversation without explaining any further why I couldn’t just drive myself like a regular person, I realized I heard the ambient noise of the Fifth Precinct behind him -- the peculiar phone ring and the sound of male laughter as the uniformed cops joked around the water cooler. Christ. Roger was at work already and he’d leave to come back and get me? I shook my head. “Gimme, like half an hour,” I said, and hung up.

  I figured I should at least take a shower so I didn’t smell like sex. I washed a couple of aspirin down with a slug of orange juice from the carton and turned the shower on. The room filled with steam. I got under the scalding spray and the pain in my head seemed to lessen a little as my capillaries all opened up.

  The shower curtain rustled as Jacob slid in behind me. His chest pressed into my back and he wrapped his arms around my middle. “Morning,” he purred.

  My cock stirred a li
ttle at the feel of a big, hot body behind me, but the pain in my head was more insistent than my groin was. “Hey,” I said, and clapped my soapy hands over his to keep them north of the border.

  He seemed to pick up on my body language, the way he picks up on everything; he massaged my shoulders, not my cock, as the hot water tumbled over me. “I’m looking at a condo on the lake today,” he said. “Why don’t you come with me?”

  “To make sure it’s clean?”

  “Clean is good,” he said, and his soapy hands slid down my back, grazed my ass, then slipped back up to work the knots out of my shoulders again. His voice was light and teasing, and I wondered if he was angling to move in together -- for real, and not just a temporary, stopgap arrangement.

  Jacob nuzzled my wet hair aside and dragged his lips along the back of my neck. My cock started swelling. “Roger’s picking me up,” I said.