Author: Oreitheia

Title: Jailbait

Pairing: Jack Dalton/Dennis Rickman (EastEnders)

Rating: erm, dunno. 15 by UK standards, maybe.

Disclaimer: All characters from eastEnders belong to the BBC. They're not mine, dammit; I'll give them back once I've played with them.

Note: The legal age of consent for homosexual acts in the UK was changed to 16 in November 2000" hence the title. Jack Dalton is twice the age of Dennis Rickman, as revealed on EastEnders 18/07/03. Inspired by their conversation in the same episode about their mutual past.

~ Jailbait ~
by Oreitheia

Sweet sixteen, never been kissed....

Jack Dalton doubted that the second part of the sentence was true of the young man who stood, stripped to the waist, on the side of his pool. He leaned on the marble-topped counter that ran the length of three sides of the kitchen and sipped at the glass of chilled buck's fizz. It was past midday, and really one should only drink buck's fizz with breakfast, but Dalton was never one to play to the rules.

Bending and breaking rules was second nature. It had amused him to build the conservatory on the back of the Regency villa despite the protests from residents and a visit from the council to withhold planning permission. He had enough clout amongst Brighton's higher echelons and enough favours to call in from the lowlife to ensure that both council and residents could only watch helplessly as the conservatory spread its skeletal fingers upwards and outwards, quite overshadowing the neatly-manicured lawns of suburbia surrounding him. Not content with this small victory, he'd compounded the offence by installing coloured glass that glinted and winked obscenely like a floundered disco-ball.

A few aggrieved neighbours had hurled bricks at the conservatory when it first went up. Jack Dalton did not believe in casting stones at people who lived in glass houses, so he sent a few of his boys around to repay the favour. After two incidents when householders had found their elegant white-plastered frontages splintered, smashed and defaced down to the underlying brickwork while their tall windows remained untouched, the residents lowered their heads
to the ground in defeat.

When he had decided to add the swimming-pool to the garden, there was only a rumble of opposition. The councillors were invited to examine the plans, and they sweated nervously as Dalton showed them around the property. They all declared that it sounded wonderful, and they approved the blueprints unanimously. No complaints were lodged when the simple little pool of the original plans transformed into something resembling a half-sized Olympic pool, built on its own raised terrace overlooking the remainder of the garden.

The only problem with gathering such baubles about him was that he had to pay someone to take care of them. He already had a gardener and a housekeeper, but both turned their noses up at cleaning the pool on the grounds that it was neither part of the garden nor the house. Dalton had solved the problem by getting a succession of his lads to clean the pool, but they invariably complained and demanded jobs more appropriate to their standing jobs that
made them men in the eyes of their peers.

Dalton quickly came to realise that while there would always be a steady stream of men willing to harm, steal and kill for advancement in his empire, there would never be a man who would be willing to clean his pool for nothing.

However, there was a boy who'd be grateful for the chance.

He'd met Dennis quite by accident one day on the sea-front when the tide was high and the wind a sharp easterly. The groynes that stabbed into the Channel were drowning beneath the waves as the white horses rushed their fences, and the sound of the suck and hiss of the water on the pebbled shore was loud enough to drown the fall of the rain. Fresh from a deal that had left him several grand richer, Dalton had been sufficiently intrigued by the slender figure slouched in the face of the storm to approach him.

His interest had been purely aesthetic at first. As he'd got nearer, Dalton could appreciate the leggy, coltish grace of the young man: long thighs embraced by damp jeans, grey t-shirt plastered to his chest by spray and rain, dark hair brushed forwards and curling in the wet above shadowed eyes and killer cheekbones.

Then, when he'd stopped beside him, his interest obvious, the young man had said something so extraordinary that Dalton knew he'd never forget it.

"It's so beautiful, isn't it.?"

Dalton had followed the young man's gaze out across the grey waves to look at the collapsing wreck of the pier. Cast adrift, its bridge to the land long gone, the pavilions were burnt out and tumbledown, timbers bare to the weather. Once a proud symbol of Brighton's prosperity, it was now widely regarded as an eyesore. Despite appeals to save the pier, to restore it to the grandeur of its sister further along the front, each winter storm and each rising neap tide smashed more of the structure. Reduced to little more than immobile flotsam, it still held up its head, arrogant in its bitterness and sneering at the townsfolk who ignored it each day.

"It should be pulled down," Dalton had responded, more to needle the young man than from any particular belief of his own.

"They've been saying that for years," was the soft reply.

Dalton had put a hand on the grey-clad shoulder and felt the warmth of skin beneath the sodden fabric. The young man seemed not to notice the contact.

"It's dangerous," Dalton said vaguely, of the ruined pier.

The young man had turned his head then, giving Dalton the dizzying shock of a direct look. Hardly anybody dared to look him in the eyes these days. They were always too afraid or too much in awe; so this was a pleasant surprise. More than pleasant, when the eyes that challenged him were set in a face that promised a certain rough beauty in a few years' time.

"So am I," the young man said with the slightest hint of a smile.

Dalton had never been interested in women. Sex was a weapon and love was a game for fools. He found it amusing when his enemies and rivals fell for the crudest of honeytraps, and felt sorry for any of his boys when they landed themselves with a bird that wanted to settle down. Neither had he ever shown any preference for men, contemptuous of the poofs that paraded through the streets with their rainbow pins and twisted loops of red ribbon.

He'd thought his lack of interest in sex was a bonus in empire-building, and felt smugly superior until that day on the sea-front, when he found a siren-call too strong for him to resist, and he took it in gladly without even being aware of what he was doing.

Dennis, he said his name was. Dalton offered him a ride in his Mercedes, all silver paint and beige leather interior. Dennis had folded himself into the seat, careless of how the water on his clothes would stain the upholstery, and spoke with such cocksure arrogance that Dalton was captivated. He claimed to be nineteen, and added that he was looking for work.... *any* kind of work; and for a terrible moment Dalton had thought that he'd picked up a rent-boy.

That he hadn't was obvious when the Mercedes pulled up outside the Regency villa. Dalton watched his guest's reaction as he showed him around the house. Dennis might have been a streetwise punk, but he was no cheap slut. Little things impressed him, like the cappuccino machine and the wide-screen television, while his glance passed over Rolexes and Mont Blanc pens without a single flicker of interest. Dalton would never stop being amazed by how the simplest things in life seemed to be so wondrous to those who had nothing. He could no longer remember how it felt; he'd made his first crooked deal at fourteen and had never looked back.

In Dennis he saw an innocence that pleased him. To corrupt that innocence would surely be a shame, and so at first Dalton offered the young man the job of cleaning his pool in return for a few creature comforts.... a swim, the chance to raid his liquor cabinet, several hours spent in front of the television, or whatever else caught his fancy.

Now it was August, and Dalton had discovered that his pool-boy had just celebrated his sixteenth birthday. He should have guessed earlier that Dennis wasn't nineteen. Dalton eyed him through the kitchen window and reflected that he looked older than sixteen in many ways: his eyes were wary with distant pain, his replies were always given with the surety of one older than his years, and his body... Dalton took another gulp of his drink as he let his gaze wander down Dennis' torso, over broad shoulders and delicious chest and flat stomach. A child in an almost-adult's body. He would fill out nicely, given the right motivation.

Dennis had been right when he'd said he was dangerous. Whether he'd made the claim purely to impress, or as a warning, Dalton didn't rightly know: all he did know was that every weekend when he came round to clean the pool, Dalton wanted Dennis all the more. At first he could pretend he was taking a fatherly interest.... after all, he'd recruited kids straight out of school before... but then he'd seen Andy staring at Dennis one day and he'd felt a flash ofblind rage that his lieutenant should even dare lay eyes upon *his* property.

The way to Hell is paved with good intentions; and Dalton had never had good intentions to begin with.

Outside, Dennis dumped the last of the ornamental cherry leaves scooped from the pool onto the side of the terrace. The net sprinkled water droplets across the stone, leaving a trail that evaporated almost immediately under the heat of the day. Without any care for the net, he swung it back and forth through the air as if it were a quarterstaff before he tossed it against the wall of the villa.

Dalton tightened his grip on the glass as Dennis kicked off his battered trainers and wriggled free of his jeans. He stood poised on the tiled edge of the pool, enjoying the anticipation of the cool water below him; then, as Dalton leaned closer to the window to get a better view, he dived.

A clean dive, no awkwardness, and fast enough to leave only the slightest splash in his wake. Dalton followed the splintered, jagged figure beneath the water until he surfaced. Dennis trod water for a moment, shaking his hair from his eyes and raising his hands to brush the wet curls back from his forehead, then he kicked away and did steady laps of the pool.

Dalton watched him, the buck's fizz no longer enough to refresh him. Brut champagne should never be mixed with orange juice, he decided; next time he'd use the demi-sec. He wondered if Dennis had ever had buck's fizz, or if he'd think it was just a pop group.

He threw the remainder of the drink down the stainless steel sink and turned on the cold water tap, filling the glass and taking thirsty gulps as he found his gaze fixed on Dennis pulling himself from the pool. His boxers were wrinkled and heavy with water, dragging at the hem, and Dennis unselfconsciously adjusted his shorts before he turned around.

Dalton couldn't help it. Even though he admired the curve of the young man's arse, what the wet cloth concealed between his thighs was so much more fascinating, as was the soft dusky down that trailed from just beneath his navel to disappear into the low-slung shorts.

Only sixteen, Dalton reminded himself: I wonder if he's a virgin...

Such thoughts had occupied his mind far too often of late, along with the pleasant daydreams that invariably began with a man-to-man chat and ended with Dennis on his knees, wide-eyed and grateful for anything his boss wanted to give him. There the fantasies would run free as fancy took him. Unaware of what poofters did to one another, Dalton assumed that taking a man would be similar to fucking a woman.... an issue of power with a hint of a struggle for a
certain piquancy. He adjusted the fabric of his dreams accordingly, shocked by how deeply arousing it was to picture Dennis' lithe young body beneath him rather than the curves and softness of the women he'd slept with.

From there, it was remarkably easy to imagine other acts. His favourite was to recall the evening he'd given Dennis his first taste of black market vodka, its proof so strong that to even strike a match within ten feet of the bottle would be to court disaster. The look of challenge had been back on Dennis' face, and he'd slammed down the drink despite Dalton's warnings to take it slow.

When realisation kicked in, Dennis hadn't spat out the vodka, nor thrown up, passed out or even sat down. His eyes had widened fractionally before he buried his surprise behind his habitual hooded expression, and although his face had gone red as he'd forced himself to swallow, he kept the sneer on his lips and then had the cheek to hold out the glass and ask for more.

Dalton remembered the way his lips had glistened with the final traces of the vodka; the way he'd pressed them together to stop his first instinctive reaction to rid himself of the drink; and the way he'd smiled and smiled so arrogantly.

Like that he wanted him, on his knees and yet still sure of himself, lips wet with vodka and eyes hazed with alcohol. Dalton imagined taking his mouth, forcing Dennis to coat his cock with saliva before he drove between those lips to find haven in that beautiful, arrogant mouth. It thrilled him to think that Dennis would be receptive to his advances, willing to degrade himself from gratitude; but Dalton preferred to think of him as being proud and wilful: at first horrified, then afraid, and finally submissive.

In his wilder fantasies, Dalton considered summoning Andy to join them as pay-back for the time he'd dared look at Dennis so covetously. He'd make Andy watch; make him hold Dennis down while he took his pleasure over and over again. Dennis would fight, of course; for Dalton, the idea of having him restrained was painfully exciting.

One thing that never changed was that he could see Dennis' face when he finally screwed him. No matter what the build-up, Dalton knew he had to look into those eyes, to throw back that challenge in the hope that it would be met.

Outside, Dennis passed so close to the kitchen window that Dalton could see the individual droplets of water sliding down his body and clinging diamond-bright in his dark hair. Instinctively, Dalton drew back; and in the very act of doing so, caught Dennis' attention.

Dalton held his breath, wondering how Dennis would react to the fact that his boss had been watching him so closely.

There was a pause as Dennis lifted his head, and their gazes locked through the glass of the windowpane. A moment passed when neither of them moved, and Dalton despaired of knowing Dennis' true emotions.

And then Dennis raised an eyebrow, and smiled. It was not a nice smile, but neither was it a sneer. Instead it was contemptuous, full of adult knowledge and wholly mocking.

It only lasted a second, and then he tossed his head, almost a child again, and walked away. Dalton gripped the kitchen counter and breathed hard, torn between shame and lust that Dennis *knew*.

Like the smile, it was an emotion quickly gone as he began to plan how best to regain lost ground.

One day, Dalton promised himself, one day he'll owe me properly. And then...

end