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Dan marked the time as he waited. The last month was the longest he’d gone without seeing Herbert. For ten months—ten months and three weeks, to be exact—he hadn’t gone a day without him, not counting a few sporadic ‘blink and you’ll miss him’ moments around the house during their early tenure as roommates.
Dan, an outsider to Herbert’s work, had been trusted only enough to serve as Herbert’s provider—the keeper of the home and its basement, the electricity bill in Dan’s name that powered the lights and fridge in his room, the occasional ride home from class. A loose, kept-at-arm’s-length association, negotiated with cash.
That’s all it always was. Herbert West, blackmailer and master manipulator, had insinuated himself into Dan’s home with his generosity of punctual payments, then for ten months and three weeks of almost daily contact, threatened and blackmailed Dan into heinous crimes against nature.
Never mind that they had moved beyond that first house and co-signed a new lease elsewhere, a detail which his lawyer crafted into an ongoing manipulation of Dan’s precarious finances that Herbert would have honestly found petty. Never mind they had traipsed into humanitarian work together on another continent. Dan had been grieving his fiancé, confused, twisted by West to believe he was now helplessly complicit, that there was no sanctuary to be found in the arms of the law.
In a fit of panic, Dan had proffered the truth to his lawyer. He believed that only Herbert West could rescue him from the world.
And then he had tried to rescue himself, and locked his salvation out of reach.
Dan wiped his sweating palms on his slacks. He felt like he was swerving headlong into oncoming traffic, groping to overcorrect the wheel. The sick determination to survive the crash had made him humiliate himself to the investigators; his shock as his life spun out from underneath him had brought him into the prison today. The trial was in two hours. His lawyer would have an aneurysm, knowing he was here, thinking what he thought.
He flinched when the door banged open and Herbert was escorted inside by a prison guard.
The breath went out of him. Herbert was so small. His conviction, his wild, wiry fearlessness, had built up a largeness in Dan’s mind, but seeing him now—separated from his element, cleaved from Dan’s protection—he was so small. Ten months on, four weeks off, and there he was again, separated from Dan by a gulf of guilt, shame, and the scuffed glass partition in Arkham’s non-contact visitation area. He looked tired, rangy in his orange prison-issued shirt and pants, no less disheveled than if he’d been covered in blood.
Dan leaped for the phone so quickly his chair scratched back on the tile and tipped over. As Dan waited, heart pounding, his tie dangling as his chest heaved, Herbert slipped into the seat on the other side of the glass and clasped his manacled hands on the ledge between them.
He was staring at a fixed point over Dan’s shoulder. As far as Dan could tell, he hadn’t looked at him once. He made no move to pick up the receiver on his side of the room.
The prison guard turned away, ready to leave. Still boring a hole with his eyes into the middle distance, Herbert uttered something that made the guard scoff and fold his arms. He leaned against the back wall instead of leaving. No love lost there. Dan knew without needing a single detail of their relationship that Herbert was a troublesome inmate.
Then, Herbert’s gaze flicked upward to the wall. Dan followed, hopeful and obedient, desperate to cling to every one of his motions and latch onto some clue for how he was meant to behave to get Herbert to speak to him. But Herbert was only looking at the clock on his side of the partition, the industrial kind with a second hand that spun instead of ticked.
After a short while of this, Herbert looked back over Dan’s shoulder. As if he wasn’t there at all, as if Herbert had been mildly inconvenienced by the summons to sit before a late guest. He emanated cold indifference. But he should be angry. He should be looking at Dan, and he should be furious.
Dan felt his mind lurch, another sick swerve. He wanted to make Herbert angry, to hear him yell, to snarl. Anything but this. He broke his line of sight on Herbert only to right his chair and slump back into it, dragging the phone cord with him. As he leaned closer to the glass, his free hand tapped a frantic beat on the ledge.
“C’mon, pick it up,” he murmured. “Herbert, please.”
At last, Herbert adjusted in his chair, leaning forward a fraction. Dan’s heart nearly slammed out of his chest. He had so many things he needed to say, excuses and apologies he’d polished in his head, memorized, whispered under his breath every day of their separation. He’d practiced them on the drive over. Now they were all swelling on his tongue, ready to burst against the hard surface of Herbert’s stony punishment.
But Herbert wasn’t reaching for the phone. Slowly, he twisted in his chair. He crooked his head over his shoulder back toward the guard, his delicate face in profile and a serenity settling in his eyes despite his obvious fatigue. Dan knew the shape of those lips well enough to read each word he enunciated even in the silence forced between them.
“I’m finished,” he said.
He stood up, put his back to Dan, and left.
Before Herbert, there had been the clinical years at the hospital. Adrenaline had moved Dan’s feet and powered his hands, surged through his brain to make decisions, in emergency situations no less critical than filleting open a man’s gut with a machete or wrenching through a jumble of patchwork corpses in the bowels of a crypt. Before Herbert, Dan had learned the importance of decisiveness. After him, he had sharpened his self-preservation with a razor edge, the better to tear through the thin film of morality with teeth.
Dan lay in wait, then cornered Herbert’s prison guard as the man exited the hallway. The guard’s instincts moved his hand to the belt on his hip, but only for a moment. Dan had an advantage to press in situations like these, a trait that Herbert had even known to cultivate.
Dan, no matter the odds, had a face you wanted to believe and looked like he belonged. It was why he was walking free on the other side of the glass from Herbert, and why he’d get what he wanted out of the guard.
“Hey, Officer Miller.” Dan had taken note of his name earlier, and now gave him a lopsided smile and a flash of nervousness. What normal man in a nice suit wouldn’t be a little piqued to be visiting his tormentor in prison? “I really need to speak to West, but you saw what happened.”
The guard seemed distracted. “You had your time with him. Not my fault he didn’t have anything to say.”
“It’s not about what he has to say.”
Dan mastered his expression, summoned up all his politesse. Looking desperate now wouldn’t help his case. A loose canon in the depths of the prison would cause damage. A determined, put-together man on one final mission, however—a mission to sink his teeth into a prisoner Miller disliked at best and resented at worst—
“I need to say something to him. One thing.”
A lie; the most blatant of his lies, and the hardest to put his conviction behind. He needed to speak quickly to smooth it over.
“West took everything from me,” he went on. “My reputation, my career, my future with someone I loved—he took it.”
A reputation which Herbert had vowed to gild in fame and instead smeared in blood. A career which Herbert had eclipsed with new purpose, a scientific promise so dazzling Dan had gone blind staring at it, too dumb and human to comprehend what it meant he’d have to create with his hands, so clumsy compared to Herbert’s. And as for the future, Meg’s heart…
Herbert had nearly swallowed that up, too. After returning from Peru, there’d been a night in Dan’s bed, draped in darkness in the aftershock of sex, that Herbert had curled into Dan’s side, sweat-stuck to his body and shivering with something other than cold. Herbert’s surprised cries of pleasure had faded; his frantic bites and kisses were drying on Dan’s skin. For the moment, Herbert was strangely peaceable. His fingertips had explored the line of Dan’s jaw and the skin of his cheeks in something like reverence, and it had made Dan think about love.
His palms were clammy with sweat again. He needed to do this, to get this done. He took a step toward the guard.
“I can’t sleep until I look him in the eye and tell him something,” he said in a low, authoritative tone. Herbert’s tone, the one he used to command, not cajole. “That’s all I need. You can help me get that, can’t you? I have to imagine you’ve done it for people like me before. Men who just want to say their piece and move on with their lives. Besides…”
He was close enough for the exchange between their hands to go unobserved by the people in the room behind them. From his pocket, he flashed a wad of folded cash, with a hundred-dollar bill face-up.
“I can’t imagine West is your favorite inmate,” Dan said, drawing Miller’s attention back up to his face.
“No,” the man admitted after a second of Dan’s conciliatory pause. “No, he’s not.”
“Right.” Dan clapped the money into his hands in a handshake. “And what I have to say will hit him where it hurts. You know I locked him up, right? I’ll give him something to chew on after his trial that might take the edge off him. Arrogant bastard.”
There was a moment where Dan could recognize the swing of momentum in his favor. Was this how it had gone? Could he edit this memory for the judge and jury, too? From that first time he showed up at my house and waved money under my nose, Herbert West forced everything on me. I didn’t stand a chance.
Slowly, Miller’s hand disappeared into his own pocket.
Done, Dan thought to himself.
“You have five minutes,” Miller said, “before my shift supervisor gets back. Make it quicker, if you can.”
Five minutes wasn’t enough—not even an hour would have been enough—but he would be pushing his revenge-sick, nice-guy act too far if he demanded more. The door slammed closed behind him, leaving Dan and Herbert alone.
The moment Dan had entered the room, Herbert had put his back to him. He had been moved to a holding area cell meant for a prisoner to have a private discussion with an attorney, clergy, or mental health professional. Herbert didn’t look dangerous enough to necessitate any of these conversations to be held behind bars, nor for his hands to remained cuffed in front of him. Miller’s stipulations were clear, though. There were no cameras in the room, but if anyone happened upon Dan, he was playing a psychiatrist.
He couldn’t help making a weak joke about it to Herbert’s back. “Looks like I got myself a new certification. Didn’t even need to do a residency for this one.”
Herbert ignored him. He was favoring his left leg; Dan wondered with another fresh pang where, exactly, he was injured from the collapse of the crypt. Dan’s breathing became unsteady. All he could do was focus on Herbert, hungrily and guiltily soaking up his presence, the way his skinny ribcage expanded under the voluminous folds of his too-big prison clothes, the way his black hair was sheened under the sickly fluorescent strip lights.
“Herbert,” he tried again, annoyed to find his throat was constricting with emotion. “I have something to say to you, and I’m sure you want to talk to me, too. Please just look at me.”
Four and a half minutes to plead his case, to get some kind of reaction out of Herbert, and his voice was already failing him. Because of Herbert’s refusal to engage or play the part in the argument Dan had orchestrated in his head, he was losing his footing on the script, slipping toward a precipitous incline that would either leave him walking out of the door numb with shock or broken down in tears.
“Herbert,” he begged. “Please. C’mon, please, I can’t do this if you keep pretending I’m not here.”
There wasn’t a twitch in his posture. For all the world, he looked like a man observing art in a gallery, fixated by some distant portrait on the wall, deciding how he was meant to feel.
“I did what I had to do,” Dan said, lobbing the first of his prepared excuses across the no-man’s land between them. “It could have been both of us in here. You would have done the same thing. If it meant you could have walked free to keep working, you would have thrown me away in a heartbeat. Maybe I wanted the same thing for myself. To be free to live my life, like you would have done anything to be free to work on the reagent.”
Too late, Dan realized he’d forgotten to pull the pin on his grenade. “Our reagent,” he hazarded, desperate for Herbert to rise to the bait.
But Herbert was immobile to his bumbling. He’d always been better at insults, at riling Dan up.
Dan curled his hands around the cell bars and pulled himself flush. Closer to Herbert, as close as he could share his space. Maybe some disturbance in the air molecules between them would make him turn around.
“I wanted this to end,” Dan said. He didn’t have a plan for this part, because whenever he touched inside the molten core of his feelings, they leaped out of him under pressure, scorching his throat. “I thought it would stop when I told the world I was cutting myself off from you.”
He pressed his brow to the bars, rocked his skull along the gap, feeling the life drain out of him. This had been so pointless. All his adrenaline was pouring out of him, pooling at his feet. He stared at the spot between his toes. His dress shoes were shined to a gleam for court. He was suddenly so tired he could lie down on the floor and take a nap. Maybe that would get Herbert to react—if he went into a tailspin and collapsed.
He closed his eyes. If he knew it was going to be like this, he’d never have come. He’d have seen Herbert in court, separated by a similar distance, both of them gagged to speak to each other while their fates played out, and had his heart ripped out only once instead of twice.
He was so tumbled in thoughts about the trial that he didn’t realize Herbert was on him until he’d been slammed bodily into the cell bars by fists wrenched in his tie.
A gush of air was punched involuntarily out of his lungs. His hands flew off the bars to stick fingers around his collar and ease the pressure at his throat. His shoulders and cheekbones smarted where they’d struck the metal, and he had to pull back against Herbert’s death-grip, fighting for an inch to get his face away from the gap.
“Did it end for you, Daniel?”
Another jerk on his tie. Herbert’s face was close, so close, but twisted aside; there was a glare on his glasses, shrouding the blaze in his eyes.
“Well? Speak up, since you’ve insisted on irritating me today with the sound of your voice. Did it all end for you, when you decided to turn me in?”
“No,” Dan murmured. “No.”
Herbert’s fists rearranged, manacles clinking against the bars as he climbed up the rope of Dan’s tie to find purchase on the lapels of his suit jacket, never letting up. Dan was a little shocked to see he’d braced a foot against the lower cell bars for leverage to keep Dan dragged toward him, the toe of his prison-issued slip-ons shoved into a 4-inch gap.
“So it was all for nothing, this betrayal,” Herbert said.
Sweat was pooling under Dan’s arms. The air was suddenly too hot and stifling in the room. “I don’t know. I don’t know, Herbert, I’m sorry…”
“You worthless coward.”
Herbert was simmering with anger, nose wrinkled as he curled his lip. He still wouldn’t look at Dan, letting all that emotion blast into the corner of the cell. Dan longed for the force of it. He wanted to boil in it, feel it punch through him like scattershot. Anything to feel something, to know he still existed in Herbert’s mind, that he could claim Herbert’s attention in this last plane of contact between them, the last chance they’d get to sink hands in each other. His only chance to feel Herbert’s breath on his face.
“Look at me,” he pleaded. “Say that again but look at me this time. Please.”
At last, Herbert stared straight at him. The full force of it almost made Dan stagger. A tumult of sense-memories overwhelmed him, crowding in his head—Herbert watching for his reaction in the lab; smiling at him, encouraged, when Dan tossed him a throwaway inquiry or recitation of some chemical component to show he was still paying attention, that despite himself he still cared. Herbert, angrier, beseeching him for assistance, clutching tight to his arm.
Herbert crawling to his side in bed, peering up at him. Underneath him, full lips rounded as Dan tore a moan out of him, as Dan slaked a thirst with a draught of cool, clear bliss that he’d never experience again.
Fear seized Dan. He pressed his face through the gap and forced Herbert into a desperate kiss.
An electric shock ran up his spine and groin, a bolt through his system sparked by the press of Herbert’s lips. Although he wanted to grab fistfuls of him or secure his head in place to make sure he didn’t tear away, Dan was afraid Herbert would writhe out of his grip and put his back to him again in the cell. Instead, he kissed with only one glorious point of contact, tightening his hands on the cell bars until he felt the skin twist painfully on his palms.
Herbert let out a soft pant of surprise. His grip slackened just enough for Dan to feel the pressure ease on his shoulders. They drank at each other’s mouths, curious at first and then angry, savage, disgraceful. Saliva lubricated Dan’s dry lips. Herbert tasted like a new toothpaste—prison toothpaste. A full shudder of revulsion at himself made Dan force his teeth and tongue into the kiss, hoping Herbert would distract him from his shame by biting him.
During the kiss, they’d been griping at each other in a language of abrupt hums, but now Herbert shattered the dialogue with a sharp inhale. He reeled backward, cuffs clanking on the bars as he dragged Dan’s suit jacket with him.
But he wasn’t leaving. He wasn’t looking away. Whatever Herbert was feeling, whatever he’d been trying to avoid thus far, the kiss had transformed him. His big, bright eyes had hooded. The muscles in his face had relaxed, frown lines ironed smooth. A gravity came over him, a heaviness that made him waver on his feet.
Herbert had looked like this once when he’d walked by Dan’s open bedroom door hours after a stinging fight. He’d considered Dan where he lay in bed with a book, and proceeded to enter uninvited, undress Dan to his knees, and suck him off, moaning and whimpering to himself all the while.
Conflicted—that’s what the expression was. Dan didn’t see it very much, but then it was an emotion all for him. Herbert wanted him in equal amounts that he regretted him.
Dan could relate.
“I’ll do whatever you want,” Dan said. “Right now, just ask me, and I’ll do anything you want. Please, Herbert.”
He had three minutes left to prove himself. All his memorized lines, all his compunctions from earlier, had withered under the power of Herbert’s scrutiny. Offering himself was the best he could do.
Herbert’s mouth was twitching as he debated his own iron will. “You’re the crudest sort of animal. Is that why you came crawling here? Is your girlfriend not enough stimulation for you that you had to insinuate yourself into my hell for more?”
Dan cast around through his frazzled thoughts, tried to hear himself think over the heartbeat that roared in his ears. “Francesca? You think she stuck around a second after all that?”
A rare, feral grin revealed Herbert’s smile up to his eyeteeth. “There’s your proof of principle, Cain. Be only loyal to yourself, and everyone will tear themselves apart from you.”
A vision, a blinding, gore-soaked flash in his mind: the woman they’d created, screaming, deconstructing her own chest cavity in the wake of Dan’s rejection. What had Herbert just said? Tear themselves apart from you—or in front of you?
Dan moaned. He was too heady, too sick to his stomach, to get into this with him. “Please, Herbert. I’ll do anything.”
Herbert released his grip in Dan’s clothes. Slowly, almost experimentally, he angled his bound hands through the bars, twisting to accommodate the handcuffs. His beautiful surgeon’s hands butterflied open at the wrists, cupping Dan’s chin and cheeks, and a throb of relief went through Dan, so profound it wrenched tears to his eyes. Herbert was touching him again, evaluating him with something other than pure hatred.
“Baby,” Dan whispered. “Baby, I’m so sorry—”
Bad decision, summoning up words from sweeter times. Herbert’s fingernails sunk into his flesh. He scratched down Dan’s cheeks, then scrambled his grip into Dan’s hair, yanking at the base of his scalp so hard his head was hinged back and his throat exposed.
“Damn it,” Herbert seethed through gritted teeth. His hands were extended as far as he could reach, the cuffs clanking and shivering against the bars. “Damn it, the trial—I can’t leave welts—or I’d shred your face, Dan, I swear, I’d tear you apart—”
“Oh, God.” Dan swallowed with effort, trying to readjust himself from being slammed into the cell again. The pain along his scalp reached a level so excruciating that he was sure Herbert was yanking a patch of his hair out, but he didn’t want to ask him to stop.
This was his punishment. “Do whatever you want to me. Please. I don’t care, I won’t blame you, I would never mention I was here today.”
Herbert let out a nervy, giddy laugh. “‘It wasn’t him, I fell down the stairs’—is that how you’re playing this now, when everything’s already been put on the line?” He was trembling, eyes darting all over Dan, his expression naked with fear. “How much time do we have?”
“A few minutes.”
“Touch me.” His voice cracked. “I need you to touch me.”
Dan seized him through the cell, gathering as much of him as he could get. The bars stopped his arms at his biceps. Thwarted to draw Herbert into a crushing embrace, he kissed him again, and suffered a bite in return. He felt his lip swell as the sharp edge of Herbert’s teeth moved to pinch the tendons in his neck. He didn’t care if it left a mark. He moaned as Herbert suckled his skin and clawed at him, dragging fingertips to bruise tender spots under his clothes.
Every gesture of Herbert’s was maximized to inflict damage. It was different than how Dan asked for it when they were fucking, when Herbert would take out his overstimulation on Dan’s back. Sometimes, Herbert had left his fingernails purposefully long for the task of drawing blood. He made a point to complain about it, how it impeded cleanliness in the lab; Dan was meant to feel guilt and suspense for this sacrifice, left wondering when Herbert would use them to retaliate, treated to their savagery before Herbert was pleased with Dan’s reaction and nonchalantly trimmed them again.
Now, the pain was just revenge. Dan groaned, clinging to the terrified creature in a cage of his making, humbly offering up parts of himself to wound, as if that would somehow make this better.
“Don’t hate me,” he murmured into Herbert’s temple. It was the most he could press himself against his face through the bars. Still, it allowed him to inhale the familiar oils of his hair, the scent of his skin, a perfume he must have been addicted to for the last ten months as they co-habited, something that had altered his brain chemistry. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. Please don’t hate me. You have to forgive me.”
Herbert pushed away, leaving a pulsing ring of pain on Dan’s throat where his hands withdrew. “You revoked your right to demand anything of me, most of all my forgiveness.”
His heart clenched in his chest. He only had a few minutes. He could comfort Herbert, soothe him, show him how truly sorry he was. There was still time to beg for his mercy.
Dan sank to his knees, prostrating himself. He put his hands on Herbert’s slender hips, tucking a thumb up under his shirt, lifting it to the navel. He’d never really pictured Herbert in jail. He hadn’t let himself get hung up on the details. When he’d turned him in, he’d imagined him through the lens of disgusted vengeance, remembering those last terrible moments in the basement lab. All the blood, the mutilated experiments, the dust of the crypt.
He’d never pictured him cleaned up, revived, sober in the stark, sterile light again. He’d never thought about his little body shrouded in stringent detergent-smelling prison clothes, cold and alone for days on end.
With his brow pressed to the metal bars, wishing it was the warm indent of Herbert’s belly instead, he moved his hands to Herbert’s thighs.
“Please,” he said. “Herbert, please.”
Herbert’s breath hitched. He knew what Dan wanted to do. His hands froze on the crest of Dan’s head, the weight resting against his skull.
“Good,” he said, leaning his body forward as far as he could against the bars. “Go on.”
That one word of dubious praise—good—shivered through Dan. He tugged down Herbert’s pants to reveal his hard cock, then nosed into the vulnerable crease of his thigh, trapping himself desperately in the smell of sweat and the coarse rub of hair.
Undoing Herbert this way had been a favorite victory of his. Herbert had been shocked the first and subsequent time, uncertain when Dan had redirected Herbert’s administrations on the couch so that Dan was on his knees instead. When Dan had taken him in his mouth, Herbert had gasped at the sensation.
Dan figured he knew what to do, but Herbert, the unlikely expert, had wanted to guide his clumsy enthusiasm with fists in his hair. Which made Dan feel even more proud of himself when his work reached a point when Herbert had given up and curled his whole body away from Dan in an ecstatic arch, pressing his palms to his face underneath his glasses, and let loose a cry that was almost a scream.
It was trickier now than it had ever been for either of them, even in the empty rooms at the hospital, the driver’s seat of the car, the furious attempts made behind a sweltering shelter in Peru. Dan maneuvered his lips down Herbert’s shaft, straining to soak his whole cock in his mouth and pump his fist down his length with the impediment of the bars between them. Dan longed suddenly for their beds. The old house. Anywhere Herbert was free and he wouldn’t be alone.
“Dan.”
Such a sweet sound, his name breathed out so painfully through Herbert’s lips. Dan was rushing—not his best work, not taking the time to slide his tongue around his balls and tease him, savor him—but he was salivating all over Herbert’s cock, mindful not to catch the drips onto his pant legs. There’d be grit on his knees to brush off, maybe a tear along the seam of his dress shirt from Herbert’s wrath, but hell if he’d walk out of here and into the trial with flecks of spit and come on his clothes.
“Dan.”
Herbert’s fingernails crawled up the sensitive skin on the back of Dan’s neck. His thighs trembled. The cell door rattled as he shifted on his feet, shoving his weight forward; it must be equally as painful for him, forced against the metal. Dan was going at a breakneck pace, feverish to wring everything out of Herbert before their time was up, hopeful to overpower him and extract something other than his name out of the morass of his moans. He wanted old adoration, whimpered encouragement.
Good, Danny, that’s good. Herbert’s fingers clenched on Dan’s shoulders, his voice pitched into helplessness. My good boy…
But matters had changed. Herbert wasn’t losing himself in the moment, not forgetful or uncaring of their circumstance. And the pain was back, the twist of his shackled hands in Dan’s hair, tearing it out at the root. Dan throbbed at each of Herbert’s stifled noises regardless. His dick strained at his clothes; he had half a mind to beg Herbert to stick a foot through the bars and into his lap.
Shaking, still breathing through each dip and pull at Herbert’s cock, he freed a hand to unbutton his slacks and slip out his dick, a hot, needy handful to rival the one in his mouth. As he strained on his knees and stroked himself, he imagined Herbert going down on him, suckling and writhing; Herbert who was wanton for him, with no whisper of Dan’s betrayal between them.
Dan groaned, miserable. Immediately after, an orgasm went through Herbert like a gunshot. He tossed his head back, chest and groin pressed forward into the bars as he pulsed into Dan’s mouth. The sudden salt-sweat taste made him choke; he flattened it around his tongue anyway before swallowing it down.
It was the small noise Herbert made more than anything else that pulled Dan over the edge. Not the full, rapturous cry Herbert sometimes made when he came, but something more wounded and plaintive. As if he was resigning himself to the situation, and Dan.
A white-hot flare of pleasure obliterated Dan’s senses, washing out the prison cell, as he spasmed in his own hand and replayed that sound of Herbert’s. Fate had decided for them—Herbert was destined to forgive him. As long as he could see Herbert again like this, remind him, touch him and please him, Dan had a chance. He’d come groveling on his knees every chance he could get and they could fix what he had rent.
He panted as he rested his head against the bars. He wiped his right hand along his boxers where they clung to his hip, his cock jerking as he remembered a time when Herbert had seized his wrist and licked it clean. The phrase ‘conjugal visit’ spiraled around his head, slippery as an eel in his post-climax haze. A question for the lawyer. Somehow, he’d need to convince his lawyer that he wanted contact with the man he’d put away to save his own skin, whose trial he was attending in the next two hours.
Herbert was sagging against the cell door. His handcuffs clanked as he jerked his hands back to his chest. He looked disheveled, confused, fighting not to stare at Dan and failing. Triumph spurted up in Dan, and relief as raw as love.
After a moment, Herbert cleared his throat and said, “Fix me up.”
Right. His pants. Dan shuffled forward and tucked him back into place, caressing his sides as he adjusted his clothes and stood to pet down Herbert’s flyaway hair through the bars, making his gestures gentle and intimate. Herbert, who’d once flushed red and squirmed under such administrations, was silent and cold again, his face turned aside.
“Herbert,” Dan said, fingers hastening to redo the button of his slacks and the knot Herbert had stripped from his tie. “Herbert, I’ll come back to you—”
A harsh rap at the door. Dan flinched. “Hold on,” he called.
But Miller was already pushing inside. Dan had only a second to scrub a hand flat along his head to fix his mussed hair and swipe a foot along the place where he’d knelt, smearing the spit thin enough to dry. There was sweat trickling down his temples and cheek, but it was too late to wipe it off.
“Hot enough in here,” Dan said to Miller, hands jammed in his pockets. “Or I guess I just got worked up. Did you hear me yelling?”
“Be glad I didn’t, because my supervisor’s back.” Miller jerked his head toward the door. “Get out of here.”
Dan chanced a glance at Herbert, hoping to read some measure of approval. I’m getting better at lying, he thought. See what I’m willing to do for you?
But Herbert was impassive. He had gone rigid again, standing like a pillar in the center of the cell. And Dan thought that was how they were going to leave it—at least for now. He’d promised him he’d return. He’d find a way to prove he could still manage this, that although he’d locked his salvation away, he wasn’t entirely out of reach. That despite everything Dan had done, he hadn’t lost the light of forgiveness.
Trembling, resisting the urge to look back again under Miller’s perceptive gaze, he went for the door.
“Cain,” said Herbert.
Dan wheeled around, his heart in his throat. “Yeah?”
“I’ll save you the time you took from me.” A saint’s smile, beatific and calm. “Your last sight of me will be today, in court.”