SECRETS
Mike insisted on paying the bill. “The fire department can get this one, and the police department can get the next one, all right?” I doubted he’d actually expense the meal-though we’d talked about the case, I couldn’t see him explaining to his chief that he’d had dinner at a romantic Italian restaurant with the only gay cop on the Honolulu police force-or at least the only openly gay one.
My apartment was a half-dozen blocks away, but we drove over in his truck. “The tapes are right behind the seat,” he said, as he began to parallel park in front of my building.
I twisted around to get them and felt waves of pain surging through my back. “Shit.” I thought I whispered but he heard.
“What’s the matter?”
“I’ve got a little burn on my back. I tried to go surfing this morning and ever since I get these wicked twinges.”
He slotted the truck neatly in place. “I’ve got some cream you can use. It’s one of the necessities of life as a fire fighter.”
He got the cream from the case in the truck bed, and we climbed the stairs to my apartment. “And you complain about the way my truck looks,” he said as we walked in.
I had to admit the place looked pretty bad, even by my standards. It’s just one big room, with a kitchenette, though I have this Japanese-style screen I built from broken-down surfboards that separates the bedroom area from the rest of the room. I usually throw dirty clothes onto it. I hadn’t made the bed in the morning, nor had I gone through on one of my weekly binges where I put all the sports equipment away neatly. There were piles of books on the floor and a messy stack of newspapers by the front door, waiting for recycling. At least the kitchen was pretty clean; I try never to go to sleep with dirty dishes in the sink.
He walked over to look at my garbage can. “No fast food wrappers,” he said. “That’s a good sign.”
A good sign of what, I wanted to ask. I was losing my patience again, feeling tired. Oh, I still wanted to get into his pants, and I was getting increasingly confident that he wanted to get into mine as well. But it didn’t have to be that night.
I flipped on the TV and the VCR and slotted the first tape into the drive. He sat on my sofa with a proprietary air and I decided it was time to shift the balance of power a little. “How do you tell when a fireman is dead?” I asked.
He looked at me. “The remote control slips from his hand. That’s the oldest joke in the book.”
“Sometimes the old ones are still funny,” I said. As the first news credits started to roll I sat next to him. Close, so that our thighs were barely touching. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t move away either.
We watched all four tapes carefully, pausing and rewinding, but we didn’t see anybody who looked too interested. The KVOL tape was the last. “Hey, that’s my friend Terri,” I said, as she appeared on the screen. The reporter interviewed her about the party, and the cause. She looked beautiful and poised, despite having just escaped a major fire. I was sure Lui had approached her to appear on camera. Briefly I gave Mike a quick rundown on Terri, including the recent death of her husband, a cop I’d worked with.
“I guess that’s it, then,” I said, as the anchor went on to another story. I leaned forward toward the VCR and my back rebelled. I must have winced, and Mike saw it.
“Let me see that burn,” he said. “Take your shirt off.”
“I’ll survive. How often should I put that cream on?”
“Let me see the burn.”
I unbuttoned my shirt and threw it on top of the surfboard screen. “I can see that comes in handy.” Mike looked at my back. “Whoa. You should have gone to the hospital with this.”
“I had a fire to investigate, remember?”
“Yeah, Officer Macho, I know.” He pointed me toward the surfboard screen, and my bed beyond it. “Lie down so I can put some of this cream on you. You’ll never be able to get it on right by yourself.”
“Really, I can…”
“No arguments.”
I shrugged, and walked over to the bed. It felt terrific to lie down, and I was afraid I’d doze off, leaving Mike Riccardi to have his way with me. Well, that might not be so bad.
There was no chance of that, though. The cream smarted, making me recognize nerve endings in my back I’d never known existed. Mike’s hands, though, were sure and strong. “Your muscles are so tense. You ever get massages?”
“Once in a while.”
“I get one every week, or else my back tenses up just like this. We’ve got stressful, physical jobs, you know. Chasing down crooks and dragging heavy equipment around. You’ve got to take care of your body if you want it to last.”
“I take care of my body,” I yawned.
“I can see that.” He’d given up applying the cream by then, and he was gently massaging my shoulders. The ceiling fan above us moved the air around lazily, tickling my bare back and floating scents of aloe, smoke and salt water around us.
“That feels really good,” I said.
He leaned down and kissed the back of my neck. “You like that?”
“Yeah. I do.” I made a half turn so that I was facing up toward him. I hooked an arm around the back of his neck, pulled his face closer to mine, and kissed him. “I like that, too.”
“Mmm,” he said, licking his lips. “I can still taste the grappa.”
I sat up and unbuttoned his shirt. He had well-defined pecs, and small nipples only a little browner than his skin. I began exploring his hairy chest with my tongue and my teeth, and he shivered and groaned lightly. It took us a while to strip totally naked, after an intense exploration of each other’s bodies, kissing and licking and rubbing and even biting a little. His cock was average sized, though standing out straight from his body it looked plenty big enough. I leaned down and took him in my mouth, and I felt his whole body go tense.
“Oh, man,” he said.
I sucked him for a minute or two, then moved back up to kiss him again. And so we went for at least the next hour or so, learning the intimate geography of armpit and ass, cock and mouth, nipples and knees. I’d had relatively little experience with men by then; you could count all the men I’d slept with on your fingers and toes and have a few left over. Neither of us were particularly well-versed in what to do, but we managed, and we both made up in ardor for what we lacked in technique.
Finally we both brought each other off, him first, then me a moment later, cum spurting on our hands and stomachs. I pulled him close to me then, hugging him fiercely, feeling his long, hairy body connecting with mine at a hundred different points. I nestled into his shoulder, smelling the last vestiges of his cologne, my lips nuzzling his neck. He held me gently, careful of my burns, and I fell asleep.
When I woke the next morning it was already light, and I was alone in bed. I had no idea how long Mike had stayed. There was a note on the table that read, “Awesome! I’ll call you today. Mike.”
I felt alive, sexy, energized. I twisted around to see my back in the mirror and the burns looked less red and angry than they had the night before. I took a quick shower and applied the cream myself, as best I could. I kept smiling, wondering when I would see Mike Riccardi again.
The morning passed in a blur of busy work. I called the hospital and found that Gunter had been discharged, and Robert’s condition upgraded. My father had been moved from intensive care to a regular room, and my mother said he was breathing more easily. There were still a lot of tests left to do, though, and the doctors hadn’t said when he could go home.
Sandra’s parents had arrived late the night before, but after Cathy had appeared on all three of KVOL’s newscasts, the doctors were paying attention to her and she and the Guarinos were in a stage of truce. Sandra had shown more activity, moving and blinking her eyes, though she hadn’t woken up yet, and everybody was feeling optimistic.
The police artist brought me a composite sketch, based on what Gunter and I had both described, and what
