Notes: Part Five, yay! I put this story ahead of polishing my pitch
for the conference I’m at, guys, feel
my love for you. Speaking of which, if
any of my new conference friends are reading this…hey, I warned you. Smut.
Dirty post ahead, darlins, I hope you all enjoyJ Not as
much conflict as I originally planned, but it’s coming!
Title: Paradise
Part Five: Settling In
***
The
mansion was…immense. That was really the
only word for it. Jonah had been inside
some damn big houses before; hell, he had lived on a Drifter commune ship that
meandered through space for over a mile in a million different directions, only
cohesive in the central core. That had
been big, but it wasn’t the same as this place.
This was meant to hold a single family: the Governor’s. The governor of an entire Federation planet
who was also Garrett’s father, and a general, and the son of one of the oldest,
wealthiest central system dynasties. To
say that Jonah was comfortable with the situation would have been grossly
overstating it.
Cody
was clearly having the time of his life, though. His shyness had lasted all of a minute, and
from there on out he became the cheerful, friendly and above all loud child
that Jonah recognized. He bounced
between the different members of the welcoming committee, talking nonstop about
the movie he’d made for them and how soon they could watch it, about how
different it was here and whether there were any toys in his room, when they
could have dinner and what it was going to be and when he could go for a ride
on Wyl’s bike. Wyl was encouraging him,
and Claudia looked completely smitten, even with the baby in her arms. Miles was quieter, but Jonah kind of liked it
that way. The man intimidated the hell
out of him.
They
got to Cody’s rooms, which were around the size of the entire top floor of
Jonah’s house back on Pandora, and his kid promptly lost all semblance of
control and just ran around, eyes wide, mouth open and joyfully whooping at
everything he saw. The rooms looked like
they had been designed for Cody. They
probably had, actually, given the company.
The walls were covered with Space Ranger holograms, the bed was shaped
like a rocket bike, and the floor had pressure sensors that triggered a
lightning bolt effect wherever someone took a step.
“You
can change it to do other things,” Wyl added, pulling up a control pad on the wall
beside the bed. “Jump.” Cody jumped, and a ripple effect flowed from
his feet across the floor.
“Wow…”
“Jump
again.” This time it was a firework, a
different color every time.
Cody
looked over at him worshipfully. “What
else can it do?”
“Oh
man, whatever you can think of, come here.”
Cody ran over to join Wyl and they settled in to play with the
floor. Claudia held up Renee to watch
the colors change as she stepped around the room, and the baby seemed
transfixed.
“That’s
it, hand her over.” Garrett made
peremptory, grabby fingers at his stepmother.
“You’ve had her forever, it’s my turn to hold my little sister.” Claudia rolled her eyes but handed Renee over
to Garrett, who curled her into the crook of his arm and grinned widely at
her. It was an expression Jonah didn’t
see very often on his fiance, totally open and uncalculating, even more than
with Cody. Renee was too little to need
teasing or coaxing, all she wanted was Garrett’s undivided attention, and
apparently his face to grab onto.
Garrett let her little hands roam freely over his mouth and nose, but
backed up a bit when they got close to his hair.
“What?”
he said when he saw Jonah smile. “It took
forever for me to get it this way.”
“I
didn’t say anything.”
“I
can hear you thinking it,” Garrett sniffed, turning to look back at his little
sister. “You’ve got good genes, Renee,
but remember, being beautiful still takes work.
You can’t let the haters bring you down to their sartorial level.”
“Hey,
I like the way you look,” Jonah protested.
“Gare
spent hours in front of the mirror as a kid,” Miles said. “I’m hoping Renee won’t be quite so attached
to her own reflection.”
“We
can’t heeear you,” Garrett
sing-songed, spinning in a slow circle.
“La la la la la…” Images of blue orchids
sprang up beneath his feet, the result of Wyl and Cody’s latest try, and Jonah
couldn’t have looked away if he tried.
A
quiet knock sounded by the door. They
turned and Jonah finally saw the last member of their intimate group, Robbie
Sinclair. He was in his marine uniform,
a black military jacket and slacks with a colonel’s insignia on each
shoulder. His hair was short, sandy with
grey at the temples, and he had a calm, almost grave expression on his handsome
face. It changed to a smile as soon as
he and Garrett made eye contact.
“There
you are! Honestly, what is wrong with
your people, shooting guns at tanks and making you late for the important
things in life?” Garrett groused. “Hang
on a sec.” He turned to Jonah. “Can you take her for a moment?”
“Uh…sure.” An instant later Jonah’s arms were full of
baby and Garrett was at the door and in Robbie’s embrace. It was tight and warm and close…Jonah turned
his eyes back down to Renee. She stared
back at him with bright, curious blue eyes.
They looked a lot like Garrett’s, actually, the same warmth and long,
long lashes. She reached for his face
and he intercepted her little fingers with one of his own, letting her tug on
that instead. It had been a long time
since he’d held a baby. Those had been a
tense couple of years, with Cody, always worried about his health and dealing
with a slow and painful separation from the life he’d always known. Renee started to squirm, and a moment later
Claudia was there, reaching for her.
“She’s
probably hungry,” she explained. “I
should take her back to our wing and feed her.
Miles—” She turned toward the door, then frowned. “Where has he gotten
off to?” Miles and Robbie and Garrett were all missing, although Garrett came
back into the room after a few seconds.
“Sorry,
Robbie had to steal Dad because he’s a heartless bastard with a lousy sense of
timing,” Garrett explained nonchalantly.
Wyl sent him an aggravated look. “I’m sure it’s nothing serious,” Garrett
added. “Some kind of a thing over a thing, whatever, their work is never done.
So!” He looked at Jonah. “We should get moved in ourselves. Our suite is right
down the hall.”
“We
should get Cody settled first, grab the rest of his stuff out of the ship—”
Jonah started, but his son looked up with wide eyes.
“No,
not yet! Wyl has to show me how the rest of the room works. Can we do it later?
Please?”
“It’s
not a problem, I have nothing else on my schedule today,” Wyl added, his fingers
tapping fast against the tops of his thighs.
He never seemed to be entirely still.
“I’d love to spend some more time with Cody. You guys go get moved in, and you,” he
pointed at Claudia, “feed your baby. We’re good here.”
“You
sure, bucko?” Jonah asked. All he got
was a distracted nod as Cody began experimenting with sound effects.
“I
guess we’ll all meet for dinner,” Claudia sighed. “Your rooms are all set up, Gare, but just
let me know if you need anything else.”
“I’ll
let the staff know, not you,” Garrett chided her. “Honestly, woman, are you not busy
enough? Do you need another baby to use
up that extra time?”
“One
is enough, thanks,” she said dryly. She
left, and after a few moments of reassuring himself that Cody would be fine,
Jonah let Garrett tug him out of his son’s rooms. They walked fifty feet down the hall and
turned into the open door.
Garrett’s
suite was huge. The ceiling was vaulted
marble, the furniture was sparse, there were no rugs to soften the hard, cold
lines of stone and metal. It felt oddly
sterile, and sort of uncomfortable.
Garrett shut the door behind them, then looked around.
“I
almost never stayed in these rooms,” he said, glancing around. “I always preferred sleeping on my ship. I’ve had the Icarus for more than half my life, and no matter where I was
living, it was a constant place that was just mine, where I could do what I
wanted to.”
“Yeah,
this place is…it’s…” Jonah wasn’t quite sure how to express how awkward he felt
here, not just in these rooms but in this entire place. He had none of his son’s ease of integration;
instead he felt every footstep like it hurt.
“Different,” he finished.
“I
know. Try to ignore it.” Garrett took Jonah’s hand and pulled him
further into the suite, past an uncomfortable-looking couch and a tremendous
holo-screen. “Honestly, the only
advantage that these rooms have over the ship is the size of the bathroom and
the size of the bed.” Garrett pulled
Jonah through an archway with a holographic barrier for a door, showing a stone
façade on the outside. Jonah flinched a
little as he passed through, then relaxed once he saw they were entering a
bedroom.
“Wow.” That was a big, big… “That’s a big bed.”
“Yeah,
I think the original decorator just lost their mind when it came to this room
and decided, fuck it, let’s just fill it all with mattress.” It covered the entire back wall and left a
slender walkway around the edge of it to lead to the bathroom and a retracting
closet in the wall. “I mostly used this
place to store my wardrobe.” Garrett
considered the bed for a moment. “And to
have threesomes, but I didn’t really do that very often.”
Jonah
could just see it. “You sure we can’t
sleep on the ship?”
“Oh
baby, are you jealous?” Garrett wrapped
long arms around Jonah’s back, holding him securely. “You don’t have anything to be jealous
about.” Warm lips pressed to the back of
Jonah’s neck. “I never loved my life
here, no matter who I was with. I never
even came close to loving it with anyone who came into this room. But I love my life now. And I could totally love you on my bed right
now.”
Sometimes
sex was the question and the answer all in one.
“Hope they’ve changed the sheets since the last time you were in here,”
Jonah said.
“Oh,
they’re fresh,” Garrett assured him, swiveling around Jonah’s body and sitting
down on the edge of the bed. “White and
virginal. Perfect for making all
delicious and filthy and debauched.”
“You
wanna debauch our sheets?” Jonah asked, distracted by Garrett’s swift
undressing. Blue cloth fell away and was
tossed aside as Garrett got nude. He
wasn’t hard yet, but he looked well on his way.
“Well,
I want to debauch you on them. It’s debauchery through osmosis, baby.” Garrett tugged Jonah closer, then set to work
getting him naked. Jonah tried to help
but Garrett slapped his hands away.
“Mine,” he said simply. Jacket,
shirt, belt, pants…Jonah’s brain went back online when he realized he was
effectively hobbled as long as he kept his shoes on, and he kicked them and his
pants off before joining Garrett on the bed.
“We
don’t have a lot of time,” Jonah mumbled around the kisses they shared, both of
them on their knees, touching each other nonstop. “Cody could come in here any time.”
“No,
Wyl knows the score. He’ll keep him
occupied for at least half an hour,” Garrett said, biting gently at Jonah’s
lower lip. “That’s enough time for me to
blow you.”
“Oh,
hell.” Jonah clenched his eyelids shut
for a moment. “Gotta save some time for
me, darlin’. I don’t want to leave you
hangin’.”
“I
can come just from looking at you,” Garrett assured him. “But we’ll see.” He pushed Jonah onto his back and crouched
between his legs. He looked strange
there, beautiful and a little feral all made up, and Jonah reached down and
worked his fingers into Garrett’s sculpted hair, messing it up as well as he
could from that angle.
“Better?”
Garrett asked archly, no word about his hours of work gone to waste now.
“Almost.” Jonah tugged and Garrett bent down
immediately and sucked him into his mouth.
Fuck…there
was nothing like this, nothing. Being
inside of his fiance’s body was good, it was so good, but when it came to
coming hard and fast, there was no substitute for Garrett’s mouth. Warm heat enveloped Jonah’s length, sliding
up slowly, with his slick tongue bathing the underside of the shaft and
circling the head eagerly. Eager,
Garrett was always so fucking eager to take him in…
A
hint of teeth caught at the flare of his foreskin. “Fuck,” Jonah groaned, his body caught
between flinching away from the sensation and moving into it. Garrett hummed appreciatively as he pulled back.
“Good?”
“Bad,”
Jonah said, and Garrett smiled.
“But
good bad.”
“Garrett—”
Warmth
again, heat and pressure and fast,
this was going to be really fast, so
fast it would have been embarrassing if they were at home, but this was the
first time since they’d left that Garrett had really laid hands on him outside
of a few very tight, very hurried showers on the ship, and fast was all Jonah
was capable of giving right now. Fast,
hips rocking up without him realizing it, noises he hadn’t approved coming out
of a rebel throat, all of it tight and on the edge of losing control, the very fucking edge, and when Garrett just
opened his throat and took him deep and pressed down hard on the skin right beneath his balls—
It
was over. Done. He came with a flash of light, with a flare
of darkness, all the effects Cody had been displaying on his floor erupting
behind Jonah’s eyelids. He came hard and
panting and mostly delirious, and Garrett just let him flail and grasp and hold
his once-perfect hair way too tightly as he rode out the sensations one
shivering wave at a time.
Slowly the tension slid away and so did Jonah’s grasp on Garrett,
dissolving into pleasant lethargy. Garrett
pet his thighs gently for a moment before straddling his chest. Jonah’s arms were trapped by his sides, and
it was all he could do to open his eyes and look at his lover as Garrett took
himself in hand and beat off quickly, short, jerky strokes of his wrist
culminating in a spray of white all across Jonah’s neck and chin. The scent of it filled his nose and made his
mouth water. Garrett, because he had to
be psychic, caught his breath and swirled a finger through the mess, then lifted
it to Jonah’s lips. He took it into his
mouth and suckled gently, cleaning it off with his tongue.
“You’re mine,” Garrett said hoarsely, his expression
strangely fevered and needy. “We’re for
each other. Nothing else matters.”
“Just you,” Jonah said, wondering how they had gone from
sexual to soothing so fast. “’Course it’s
just you, darlin’.”
For a second it looked like Garrett would say something
else, something serious, but then his body became like liquid and he slid down
onto his side, draping himself casually over Jonah. “Good.
Shower? Because no offense, but
you’re a fucking mess, baby.”
“I blame you.”
“Fair enough.”
