Work Text:
By Holy Monday, he is crawling out of his skin.
“How long again till Easter?” he asks Nile, halfway through their Scrabble game, and wonders if she’d notice if he pressed his hand against his crotch underneath the table. Discreetly, of course.
She gives him a strange look. “It’s this Sunday,” she says, then pauses.
“Wait, are you Catholic?”
His laughter sounds slightly hysterical even to his own ears. “No, of course not,” he says. “No, it’s just – that means Lent ends on Thursday, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” Nile nods. “I do look forward to drinking coffee again.”
She looks down at the board and frowns.
“I don’t think ‘sexile’ is a valid Scrabble word, by the way.”
“Well it should be,” Joe says, indignantly.
At the stove, he can see Nicky smirking into a pot of tomato sauce.
On Tuesday, Andy takes mercy on him and offers to spar with him.
It’s a terrible idea, but at this point he’ll take being slammed into the pavement in front of the rookie if it helps take the edge off just the tiniest bit.
“Two more days, huh?” Andy grins knowingly when she offers him a hand to pull him up, for the third time in the past hour or so.
He wipes the sweat off his face. His hand comes away red.
“Huh,” he says. “Was I bleeding?”
“I think I broke your nose,” Andy nods. “Looks fine now. You want to stop?”
“No,” he says, and exhales a shuddering breath. “But I think Nile is starting to freak out a little bit.”
Andy wraps an arm around his shoulder and leans into his side. “It’s Tuesday already,” she says. “You’ll survive.”
He chuckles mirthlessly. “I have no doubt.”
She squeezes his biceps sympathetically. He allows himself to let his forehead fall against her temple, and ignores the feeling between his shoulder blades telling him that Nicky is watching him from the porch.
On Wednesday, he’s right in the middle of jerking himself to a hurried, unsatisfactory orgasm when Copley calls him on his cell.
“What?” he snaps into the phone, and the momentary silence on the other end of the line tells him that he didn’t quite manage to keep the frustration out of his voice.
“Mr. Al-Kaysani?” Copley asks carefully.
“Sorry,” he says, right hand still sliding up and down his aching cock while he’s switching to speaker phone with the left. “I’m here.”
“I may have a job for you,” Copley says, a little hesitantly, as if he’s wondering whether Joe is going to bite his head off at his next words. “You’d have to be on a plane to Dhaka by next Tuesday. Think that’s doable?”
Pitifully, Joe looks down at his wilting cock. “As long as it’s after Easter,” he says, resigned.
“Yes, it … wait, what?” Copley asks. “Are you Catholic?”
“No, I –” Joe sighs deeply. “Never mind.”
Nicky cooks a nice dinner on Thursday, to celebrate, as he tells Nile, the beginning of Paschal Triduum.
He doesn’t tell her that it’s also always meant as a kind of apology, although at this point in the game, Joe could not care less about food.
By the time he’s done with the panna cotta, he is shifting noticeably in his seat, and he likes Nile, he really does, but she is taking her time to savor her first cup of post-Lent after-dinner coffee, and he is increasingly feeling tempted to strangle her.
In his defense, Nicky is looking equally impatient, although his only actual tell is the way he is catching his bottom lip between his front teeth, which makes him look seductive, and thus doesn’t exactly help.
“We are going to get a drink,” Andy finally tells Nile, and slowly gets up from her chair.
Nile wrinkles her forehead. “We are?” she asks, looking slightly confused as she sets down her mug.
“We are,” Andy smiles, and rests a hand against her shoulder in a gesture that doesn’t leave any room for protest. “Get your coat.”
Nile blinks, but she obeys without further questions, and for once Joe is grateful for military types who have learned when it’s time to do as they are told.
He barely waits for Andy to close the door behind them before he’s out of his seat.
“Come here,” Nicky says softly, tilting his head back to look up at him with a beckoning smile.
“You fucking asshole,” Joe says angrily, and pushes Nicky backwards in his chair, “Ya Ibn el Sharmouta, porco Dio, fuck Jesus for getting himself killed, and also, fuck you”, and already he’s on his knees, his fingers tugging desperately on the zipper of Nicky’s pants.
“Christ, Yusuf,” Nicky curses, lifting his hips slightly from the chair, his hands sliding deep into Joe’s curls to hold on to him.
“Come on, hurry, please …”
“Sorry, I forgot –” Nile throws the door open, then freezes in the doorway, staring at them with her mouth hanging open, her eyes wide. Joe blinks up at her from below as well as he can without letting Nicky’s cock slip out of his mouth, because he’ll be damned if he lets go of it now that he’s finally got it between his lips for the first time in far, far too long.
“Uh,” Nile says, looking a little ashen. “Never mind,” she continues, retreating as hastily as she came. “You know what, I don’t think I need a hat after all.”
“Have fun at the bar!” Nicky shouts after her, and then bites back a groan when Joe takes him deeper and slips a hand under his balls.
Joe spends most of Good Friday, as is tradition, getting his ass plowed by Nicky’s cock. As Joe and Nicky discovered, sometime in early 1100 AD, there are some rather odd side-effects to immortality, one of them being a dramatically shortened recovery time.
Good Friday is one of the occasions where it comes in handy, because it means that Nicky barely has to pull out between fucks: Tightly entwined, they lie together, their hearts beating in synch while they recover from their little deaths, until one of them starts moving, and then they simply go again.
Joe leaves the room only once in the evening, heading to relieve himself in the bathroom down the hall.
On his way back, he hears Nile’s voice coming from the kitchen. “And they do this every year?” she asks, her tone wavering somewhere between intrigued and vaguely horrified.
“When we are not on a mission,” Andy confirms, the smile audible underneath her words.
“Maybe …” he hears Nile say slowly, the door handle already dipping under his hand. “Maybe next year you and I should go on a trip the week after Easter.”
Her voice drops lower. “Don’t they want, you know, privacy?”
“Honestly?” Andy says, and he can picture her careless shrug as she answers. “I don’t think they’ll notice much whether we are here …”
… or gone, she probably finishes, but Joe is already back in the bedroom, and doesn’t pay them attention anymore.
“Hey,” he says, crawls across the covers, and leans down to press a kiss against Nicky’s half-open lips.
“Hey,” Nicky smiles and brings his arms up to slide them tightly around Joe’s back.
“Six weeks is too long,” he says, whining a little. “I missed you.”
“I missed you too,” Joe says softly, and doesn’t point out that Nicky always says that, and then the next year he always does it again.
Instead, he swings a leg over Nicky’s thighs, setting his hands on Nicky’s chest.
Until they have to leave for their job on Tuesday, they have three more full days to celebrate the resurrection of Christ.