The Grave Between Us by Tal Bauer
Chapter Three
They couldn’t keeptheir hands off each other the rest of the night, couldn’t keep their eyes from traveling the long lines of each other’s backs, down their legs, over their shoulders and chests. Noah’s fingers ran up and down Cole’s arm, played in the curve of his elbow. Cole tickled the small of Noah’s back, caressing the warm skin he found above Noah’s waistband and beneath his untucked shirt.
Noah guided Cole to their room as soon as Katie’s door shut.
They kissed slowly, stripping each other and leaving their clothes in piles behind them. Noah’s touch wandered all over Cole’s body, his big palms flattening over Cole’s chest and down his ribs, fingertips tracing the sharp lines of Cole’s hip bones before sweeping around and digging into Cole’s ass. Cole got his pants off, shucked his briefs, and pulled Noah to him, grinding his hard length against Noah’s. He kissed Noah until Noah groaned and his eyes rolled back. Grinning, Cole ran his hands down Noah’s arms and dropped to his knees.
He took Noah into his mouth and guided Noah’s hands to his hair. Noah bit his lip so hard his skin turned blister-pink, and Cole held his stare as he closed his lips around Noah’s cock and moved down, all the way down, taking Noah as deep as he could go. Wet, hard heat, and suction, and Cole’s hands running over Noah’s thighs, down his quads and around, up to his ass. He fingered Noah gently, his touch moving from behind Noah’s balls to his hole until Noah’s legs were shaking.
Cole guided him back until Noah reached the mattress and collapsed. He spread his legs, opening himself as he arched his neck and took a long breath. A moment later, Cole buried his face between Noah’s ass cheeks and flicked his tongue over Noah’s hole, and Noah keened, squeezing his eyes shut and gritting his teeth.
In and out, fast and slow, languid strokes and deep pushes, until Cole’s tongue was working over Noah’s wet, loose hole and Noah was panting, his hands gripping his knees as he held his trembling thighs back. “Cole,” he whispered. “Please.”
Cole reached for the lube on the nightstand and opened Noah farther, slicking himself at the same time. He knelt on the mattress between Noah’s spread legs, gazing down at the man he loved, the man he was going to share the rest of his life with. How could something so monumental happen so quickly? A year ago, he didn’t know Noah Downing. Now, he couldn’t imagine a single moment without him in his life.
He fell forward, bracing himself on the mattress beside Noah’s face as he guided his cock inside. Noah groaned, his eyes fluttering open. He leaned up, capturing Cole’s lips as Cole sank all the way in and held there. Noah wrapped his legs around Cole’s waist and his arms around Cole’s neck, and he whispered Cole’s name against his lips as they kissed.
“I don’t care how I marry you, Noah,” Cole whispered. “I just want to be yours forever.”
“I’m yours.” Noah’s fingers slid into Cole’s hair, threaded together behind his head. “You have it backward. I’m yours as long as you’ll have me.”
“Forever.” Cole grinned and kissed him, starting to move. If he could, he’d thrust all the way into Noah, far closer than skin to skin. More like atom to atom, soul to soul. “I’m going to love you forever.”
Noah kissed him, hot and hard, and he moved with Cole, arching into his thrusts, meeting him push for push. Noah was as hungry for Cole, it seemed, as Cole was for him, and Cole gave him everything, and then more. Kissing up and down his neck, nibbling on his shoulder and his collarbone. Grabbing his hips and holding Noah against the mattress as he thrust hard, as he pounded into Noah, gritting his teeth, sweat dripping down the tips of his hair. He pulled out and lifted Noah’s legs over his shoulders, grabbed a meaty thigh in each of his palms, and shoved back inside Noah in one thick push.
Noah threw his head back in a silent scream, his spine and neck arching as his muscles went taut and his hands fisted in the sheets. One, two, three more thrusts and Noah came all over himself, spurting across his chest and his belly as his ass clenched around Cole. Cole gasped, nuzzling Noah’s cheek, his hips moving impossibly faster, impossibly deeper. He came apart with a bitten-off wail that he smothered in Noah’s neck, tasting and smelling and feeling his love.
“I love you,” Noah whispered against his hair, his hands dragging up and down Cole’s sweaty spine. “I promise to try to be a good husband.”
“You will be.” Cole kissed his pulse, the tip of his nose. Noah still looked uncertain.
They stumbled to the bathroom later to brush their teeth, and Noah wrapped his arms around Cole’s waist as he finished and rinsed his mouth with Listerine. Cole’s eyes found his in the mirror, and they smiled at each other, Noah with his chin on Cole’s shoulder, his fingers tracing fresh and fading hickeys he had left across Cole’s chest. They fell asleep facing each other, lying on their sides, hands entwined and knees touching.
In the morning, Noah rose at five, stumbling to the shower. He was still standing faceup in the spray when Cole joined him, taking his turn to slide his arms around Noah’s waist and rest his chin on Noah’s shoulder. That seemed to jolt Noah awake, or maybe it was Cole’s morning wood pressing against his ass. Noah went from sleeping on his feet to grinning and sinking to his knees in under a minute, sucking Cole deep as the water rained over his face. Cole braced himself against the tile wall and gently fucked Noah’s mouth, then spread his legs as Noah’s fingers found his hole. He came quickly, then dragged Noah up and returned the favor. He hitched one of Noah’s thighs over his shoulder and alternated between sucking Noah’s cock and eating his ass until Noah buried his hands in Cole’s soaking hair and screamed into the shower.
“You should never have to face a day of soybean testimony without a good orgasm to tide you over,” Cole said, kissing Noah as he rose to his feet.
“Soybeans? What soybeans?” Noah grinned.
Noah dressed in his suit while Cole tugged on a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt and padded downstairs to start the coffee. There was silence from behind Katie’s bedroom door. At least Noah hadn’t woken her.
They had twenty minutes in the predawn kitchen, sharing coffee and playing footsie. Noah traced Cole’s fingers where they lay against the granite while they talked about the drive Noah and Jacob were taking that day, about Cole’s schedule, about Katie’s homework and her winter and spring cheer tournaments. All the ins and outs, the moments, the minutes that added up to hours that added up to days and eventually a life together, spun from fragile, quiet mornings and smiling eyes and feet hooked on each other’s barstool.
Eventually, Noah’s phone buzzed on the counter. Jacob was pulling into the driveway. He’d driven over to carpool with Noah. Cole poured a second travel mug of coffee for Jacob and walked Noah out to his SUV. Even at six in the morning, Jacob was all smiles, and he thanked Cole for the coffee as he climbed into Noah’s car. The SUV was the largest vehicle the FBI had, and still, Jacob looked squished. Even so, he said, it was better to drive than to fly. Sitting in coach on an airplane, he’d said once, was like trying to yoga himself to suck his own dick.
Cole kissed Noah through the open driver’s window. Noah tasted like coffee and a hint of sugar, and he smelled like his shaving cream and shampoo. “I’m not going to be able to think about soybeans.”
“Come back quickly and I’ll give you more ways to not think about them.”
Noah laughed and put the car in reverse. Cole headed back to their front porch, wrapping his arms around himself as the February chill sank into his skin. There were patches of snow on the lawn, dirty mounds clinging to the dormant, dreary grass. The air had teeth that nipped at his skin and made his back molars quiver, but the sky was empty, not a cloud in sight. Dawn spilled across the eastern horizon, blood orange and buttery yellow lightening to a kind of iridescence, thanks to the stars flickering on the edge of the morning. It would be a good day, a crisp day. When Noah got back, they could share a beer on the back porch, wrapped up in their jackets. Hold hands and watch the moon rise, listen to the thump of Katie’s iPod through the sliding glass door. They’d bought a house together that backed up to a farmer’s field and then a nature preserve, so now they had corn and woods and miles of sky to stare at. When an owl hooted, it felt almost crowded.
He toed off his boots inside the front door and listened as Katie’s footsteps echoed overhead. He put the kettle on the stove and set out her cereal and a bowl, a mug, and a tea bag. Upstairs, he got dressed in his khakis and a polo, grinning when he saw Noah had drawn a heart over his sink in dry-erase marker. Would they ever not be ridiculous about each other? Would this hummingbird heart he had for Noah ever slow down? God, he hoped not. He loved loving Noah.
Katie was bleary-eyed and noncommunicative when he came back downstairs, grunting at him for a good morning and scraping the spoon against the cereal bowl for conversation. She fell asleep on the drive to school but woke up enough to say goodbye to him and even smile before she slammed shut the car door and hurried into the library.
His day was slow, and kind of boring, but Cole didn’t mind. By lunch, he’d helped Sophie Ranger, the new ASAC—promoted when Noah was moved into the SAC spot—with her reports for a meth distribution case, and he joined the rest of the office for pizza in the conference room. Megan, Dale, and Miya were all young agents, a few years out of the academy, doing their time in a smaller office to season up before transferring to larger field offices. Megan wanted San Francisco or Seattle. Dale wanted Miami, and both Sophie and Miya wanted to go to DC and headquarters. They all gave Cole a good-natured teasing about making the move from the high-speed world of DC and the BAU to Des Moines, Iowa.
“In fifteen years, the Des Moines office will still have Noah, Cole, and Jacob showing up every day,” Megan said, winking. “Mark my words.”
“Think Jacob will ask to stay? Not rotate out to greener pastures?” Dale asked.
“Oh, yeah. Him and Holly?” Cole nodded. “He’ll stay for her, and for Brianna.”
“Ahh, love,” Sophie said. She snorted. “I hope I never fall in love. No, thank you. I’ve got too much I want to do.”
“You can have a career and fall in love,” Cole protested. “It’s not mutually exclusive.”
“I can name the FBI agents I know who are happily married on one hand,” Sophie said. She barreled on, ignoring how Cole’s smile froze, how every muscle in his cheeks went taut. “And most of those are on their second marriages. It took the first one to shake out the kinks, I guess. But I’m not going to compromise my life. I want what I want. I’m not going to slow down for anything or anyone. I want to chase monsters and put them down, and I don’t want to be worrying about someone tapping their feet at home, waiting for me. Best to stay single. Like you. You were single when you were in BAU, Cole.”
He remembered wanting what Sophie wanted. He remembered that hunger, that drive. He remembered that need to tear into the darkness and rip the monsters out of the shadows. His first monster, and the bottle of tequila he drank alone in his bathroom after, made him move a little more slowly, a little more carefully, as he entered the darkness.
Hunting monsters was noble, yes. But every monster hunt demanded a sacrifice, and the price was always paid in the mind, and sleepless nights, and nightmares that lived inside the bone marrow. He had seen things that were etched into his retinas, that tinged his days with sickly shaded memories. Even banal moments like taking Katie to the mall could bring a monster out of nothing, manifest a nightmare under fluorescent lights with the smell of Chinese food in his nose. Or in dimly lit kitchens, or beneath exposed beams, hearing the creaking of a knotted rope against wood.
Silence used to cling to him, a heaviness that hung from his bones and shadowed his footsteps in his empty condo. Silence that carved him away from the rest of humanity, made up of the first steps he’d take into a crime scene, or the smell of arterial blood soaking into carpet, or dirt and mud mixing with the slip of decomp and decay.
He couldn’t describe the exact way pooling blood shone mirror-black, left behind in the stillness after a murder. That knowledge lived like a hum under his skin. He couldn’t explain how it felt to hold an unwavering stare across an interview table, force a steady inhale-exhale through his lungs as a murderer described every moment of his acts. He’d watched more men spontaneously orgasm recounting their murders than he ever wanted to count.
All those memories created an open grave inside Cole where part of him would live forever. It was a place no one else could enter.
Not even—or maybe especially—Noah.
Maybe that was why he’d bailed from the BAU. Maybe it wasn’t the weekly flights to Des Moines, the exhaustion of trying to maintain the frantic pace of a profiler while also giving his all to the man and daughter he loved with a ferocity he hadn’t known he was capable of. He’d stood at the doorway of that silent cave inside himself, seen the moonlight shining on still, blackened waters, and turned away.
He was young enough to, still. He’d seen a lot, but he hadn’t seen the end, not like other profilers he’d known had. Sometimes it was the twelfth, or the thirtieth, or the four hundredth murder, just one too many times they’d seen the after left behind when bone-deep rage and a pair of pliers met a woman’s breast and the killer decided he liked the sound that combination made. Some agents walked away when they hit the line, and some spent the rest of their lives trying to walk away. Into booze bottles or pills or traffic, or even the barrel of their gun. One profiler he’d worked with had spent days meticulously transcribing audio recordings a killer made of his torture and murder of eleven young women in the back of his van. She filed her report, drove home, did the laundry, made lunches and dinners for the next week so her husband wouldn’t have to worry about feeding their sons, and then ate her handgun in the shower so she’d be easy to clean up. She said so, in the sticky note she left on the closed bathroom door. I’m sorry. I can’t stop reliving it.
She’d gone too far out, gotten lost in the darkness, and become the murderer’s last victim. She hadn’t been able to turn off the sound of his voice, wall him out with silence and distance, leave him in that grave inside herself. He’d infected her psyche until he was everywhere, the sly, ugly weight of him dominating her from the inside. She’d put a bullet in her head to exorcise him. Cole understood why she’d done it. He could even see himself picking up his own weapon if the day came when his own silences no longer held the world and evil away.
There was no way to explain all the different shades of black, all the degrees of horror, all the different smells of death and murder, or how dark the night truly could get, to Sophie and Miya. Or to anyone. Hunting monsters wasn’t fun. It was listening to screams on unspeakable recordings, tasting decay in the back of your throat, digging your fingers through wet earth and into the hollow orbital openings of a long-discarded victim’s skull. Listening, in the stillness, for the murderer’s ecstasy, and trying to hear the whispers of their movements as they glided like dark echoes through society. The worst murderers twanged like tuning forks struck against brimstone, and the only way to stop them, to catch them, was to harmonize with their discordance, if only for a moment. Feel as they felt, see what they saw. Get inside their eyeballs and the vacuums of their desiccated souls, look at your own hands and see their fingers moving. Feel the gnawing of their hunger, their need, inside you. The craving was Sisyphean: there would never be an end to that burn-the-world-down bloodlust. A good profiler had to take that stone on their own shoulders. Step into those shadows. Feel how far from the rest of humanity you could go.
He couldn’t imagine that life anymore. Couldn’t imagine a life that didn’t include Noah. Couldn’t imagine not wondering if he was having a good day or a bad one. Even now, his fingers itched to text him, ask him about soybeans and whether he’d managed to keep a straight face during the deposition. He wondered how Katie was feeling at school, if an injection of friends before first period had jolted her awake better than caffeine. How chemistry was going, and if she was understanding the new unit in pre-calc. These were the thoughts he wanted in his head: living things, mundane things. Was there enough bread for Noah’s toast or cereal for Katie, or did he need to stop for more? What would they have for dinner tomorrow? Would Noah hang up his damp towel or fling it on the end of their mattress for the seven thousandth time? Signs of life, of home, of a comfortable, warm contentment. Happiness. He didn’t have to think about burials in the woods or how the flesh on a skull decays faster than the rest of the body when it’s left in the open. Beetles through eye sockets, ants crawling over teeth. Cheerleading, shoes left to trip over, the crinkles at the corners of Noah’s eyes.
He made some kind of comment, something pedestrian that moved the conversation along, and the rest of the team started in on their career goals, what they wanted out of the Bureau, and where they would be in ten years. They all agreed: none of them would be in Des Moines with Jacob, Cole, and Noah. Cole smiled. Said nothing.
He slid his phone out of his pocket and texted Noah, a single heart and hope the soybeans haven’t been the end of you. He checked the time. Four hours until he picked up Katie, another two after that until Noah was due home. Until then, he’d be the one tapping his foot, looking at the clock. Watching, and waiting, for the man he loved.
