Author's Notes: Thanks owed to the following luminaries, sages, and other professional thinking persons: pearl_o, whose fertile brain threw out the image that got this ficlet started; brooklinegirl, who very kindly allowed me to borrow said image; and, as ever, the amazing and creative estrella30, beta to the max. Anything you don't like, she couldn't make me fix.

Story Notes: Written October 2004 for the Anywhere But Here Challenge on ds_flashfic. Ray asked for exotic. He wound up in Ohio. Such is life.

Honestly, when it happens, it kind of surprises them both.

This is partly because, hey, a truck-stop in Toledo? Not where most people would think to find anything real out of the ordinary. Coffee even worse than Frannie's, maybe, or coming face to face with a beehive hairdo for the first time since that B-52s concert in 1981, but that's pretty much it for truck-stop shock value.

But it's also partly--okay, it's mostly--because at the moment, for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture because they're gonna become painfully obvious any minute now, someone's fingers are in someone else's mouth. And right now coffee and hairstyles are about the farthest things from Ray's mind maybe ever, because--and here's the really surprising thing--the fingers involved are Fraser's, and the mouth around them is Ray's.

See, Ray doesn't know about Fraser--what with the whole born-in-the-middle-of-nowhere thing, Fraser's probably never even seen a truck stop before today--but Ray himself actually expects to find prize-winningly undrinkable coffee in the hands of long-haulers. Because those guys? They don't give a shit about taste; they just want to get enough caffeine in their systems to make it to Kansas without stopping to sleep. Likewise, after more than a decade as a cop Ray's sort of used to the idea that Midwestern hairdressers--at least the ones that work with waitress coif--quit reading Vogue in about 1957.

Hell, Ray's even on board with the whole mouth-and-fingers thing. He and Fraser have not been whatever it is they are now for all that long, but he's had plenty of time to make a mental list of "ways to be done by Fraser", and that fucking sinful mouth tasting him--tasting him, from his scarred-up smoker's hands to a whole lot more--came high enough on the list that he begged for and got it real early on. (Not that he had to beg all that hard, but still.)

Now, though, he's wondering why he didn't think to turn that fantasy around. Because this?

Fuck: this is hot. This is dangerously hot.

And not just because at this particular point in time what they should be doing is helping the FBI bust one of those caffeine addicts out there for interstate traffic in contraband, courtesy of some weird thing Welsh has going with the Feebie office in Chicago, which Ray doesn't care about the details of so much as it bugs him to be stuck in fucking Ohio, of all places. Or it did, until Mr. Bat-Ears over here figured out just in time that the sting's target and the target's buddy were taking a leak in the same restroom they'd been heading for--but not in enough time to do anything more than yank Ray back around the corner before he motormouthed the bad guy into making a break for it. Ray's sure there's a reason Fraser didn't pick up on the truckers' talking earlier--echo off the tile, too much `70s CB lingo, something--and he's also sure Fraser's gonna explain it to him at the earliest opportunity, whether Ray wants him to or not.

Right now, though, he doesn't give a damn, because right now he's got Fraser's fingers in his mouth--feels like the middle and ring fingers, yeah--caught past the second knuckle between Ray's teeth from where Fraser slapped his hand over Ray's open mouth to shut him up when he pulled him away from the restroom.

Fraser's fingers. Ray's mouth. Holy shit.

Ray's hard so fast he's dizzy with it, and he can't help himself: he has to taste, he fucking has to. He licks out against Fraser's fingers, running his tongue along the length of each one as far as he can reach, tracing the knuckles, feeling the roughness of Fraser's skin, tasting truck-stop coffee and that plain white soap and a little sugar and a little steel. Tasting Fraser. Fraser's fingers are strong, like his hands, like the rest of him, thicker and more powerful than Ray's--and Ray's body knows that, Fraser's hands have been all over Ray's body and Ray's body hasn't felt that good in probably ever, but Ray's mouth is only now getting with this particular program. And shit, this is good, this is greatness, why didn't he think of this before?

Before he can stop himself, he sets his teeth in Fraser's finger and bites down, sucking hard at the same time.

Behind him, braced against the wall and holding Ray immobile, Fraser grunts deep in his throat. It sounds like surprise, but Ray can feel Fraser's cock where it's pressed up against his ass, feel it twitch and thicken and harden, and he can feel the tension in Fraser's arm where he's gripping it--right, he was gonna pull Fraser's hand away from his face, he was gonna do that, although now he's not sure why--and he's pretty sure that that solid warm bulge right, ah God, there is not Fraser being surprised. He sucks again, stroking his tongue against the parts of Fraser's fingers that he's captured in his mouth, and Fraser breathes through his nose so hard Ray can actually hear the air whistle on the inhale. Fraser's hand tightens over Ray's mouth, pulling Ray's head back onto Fraser's shoulder, and his other hand flattens over Ray's hip.

Ray's own hands are frozen in place, one clenched around Fraser's forearm, the other flung out against the wall behind them. And Ray's pretty sure that if he lets Fraser's fingers go, he won't be able to stop moving and he'll wind up spinning around and pinning Fraser to the fucking wall with his hips, sucking Fraser's tongue into his mouth instead of Fraser's fingers and holding those amazing hands away from Fraser's body by their thick, strong wrists--holding Fraser the fuck down. At which point the Feebs and the druggie truckers and, hey, a waitress or two could stage a full-out gun battle around the two of them and Ray probably wouldn't notice a thing, being too busy coming all over his partner in about thirty seconds flat, drug bust be damned.

Which most of Ray doesn't care about--really, his cock could not care less, and the rest of his body's not far behind. But he hasn't been a cop for this long without his brain learning a few survival skills to use when the rest of him's in a tight situation. And his brain picks this second to chime in with a quick reminder of how much fun it would not be explaining to Welsh exactly how Ray and Fraser ruined this operation, not to mention the coming out very much in public and the possibility of a bullet ruining the moment and so on and so forth.

So Ray makes himself let Fraser's arm go, and let his own hands relax, and let Fraser's fingers slip from his mouth (slowly, stroking--he's not that close to reality yet). And Fraser sighs deeply--silently, but Ray's still plastered up against him from neck to knees and he can feel that sigh, he can feel how much he turned Fraser on just now, just like he can feel him letting go of it and shaking himself back into Mountie mode. Ray's hearing fades back in as his hard-on diminishes, and shit, that felt like it went on forever, but the truckers are still in there zipping up, so it's not too late to bust them, thank God.

Ray turns to face Fraser, hand reaching for his gun, ready to set `em up and knock `em down as usual, and looks to Fraser for the signal.

And when Fraser nods at him, once, slowly, he knows that's for them--for where they'll take each other when the bust is over (which looks to be any minute now) and they're back at the Motel 6 with a whole night to kill before heading to Chicago in the morning. It's for what Fraser will let Ray do to him now, and it's for what he might do to Ray, next time, if Ray asks him to.

Ray nods back.

And he waits for Fraser's second nod before he moves, quick and quiet, around the corner and back into real time. 1