Disclaimer: Disclaimer a) Not mine, but their own, despite what Alliance may think.
Disclaimer 2): I know nothing whatsoever about Australian turtles. Indeed, it's entirely possible that Australia is wholly devoid of turtles. Which would be sad, really.

Author's Notes: Written October 2004. Eternal gratitude and willingness to bear her children go to Estrella30, who betaed me but good. She rocks so hard she's probably fallen over by now.

Story Notes: I'm told by the primary participants that this is the first bit of a WIP. They assure me that this explanation will help people understand why, after starting very firmly in the present, the story moves with alacrity to the fairly recent past and, well, stays there. They also seem to think it might help if I specified that any future bits are more than likely also going to be PWPs. Mine not to reason why and all that.

I hear Fraser's key in the lock, and there's not a thing in the world I can do to stop the evil grin that's taking over my face as I stand behind the door, waiting for him. God, he's gonna love this. He's gonna love me for this, if he doesn't already. Although I am so gonna be in trouble, too, but hey, it'll be worth it, so who cares?

Not me, that's for damn sure.

See, a while back Fraser and me, we got this laptop. Paid out of pocket for it. The department would've kicked in a little, on account of they got this new thing set up where you can get a pretty sweet deal on a computer if you're gonna use it at least partly for work. And Welsh knows we'd be good for that, what with Fraser's becoming kind of a big af- affish- fan of web research into criminal stuff and doing that the same fucking thorough way he does pretty much everything else, so there'd probably have been a way to get the 2-7 to foot part of the bill on top of that. But Fraser and me discussed it, and when I joked (mostly) with him that I figured on using the thing to download porn, his mouth got all tight and I knew the next words out of it would have something to do with "misuse of departmental resources, Ray," blah, blah, blah. So I beat him to it and suggested we just spring for the computer on our own, and he blinked at me and said okay. I figure we got plenty of other stuff to fight about, so why add this to the mix? Plus it's not like him and Dief and the turtle and me come close to burning through everything we make, even with the trips to Canada and feeding the wolf's doughnut habit and whatever else, so we could afford it.

For a while there after we got the laptop, it suddenly seemed like every two-bit shit-heel in Chicago was crawling out of the woodwork at the same time, all of them with a new way to act stupid and a burning desire to get their asses caught. So we were pretty much never home except to order pizza and fuck and eat the pizza and sleep (usually in that order, yeah, though, hey, not always), so the laptop just sat on my ratty old desk and looked new and got dusty.

Then someone told Fraser about how cheap plane tickets were online, so the next time we went up to work on the cabin he made the arrangements through one of those outfits and booked us an SUV to boot, so we could haul stuff out from town without having to borrow Jack Pierrot's old pickup, which I'm always afraid it's gonna rust into pieces right out from under us, so that pretty much made my day. And then Maggie got another promotion and this one came with a posting to a place big enough to have a decent electrical grid. So she finally had a personal email account going, which meant Fraser wanted one, too, so they could keep in touch without racking up the long-distance bills. (Not that he actually said he wanted it, of course, being Fraser. But Jesus, if I hadn't been able to figure that one out without help I'd've asked Welsh to put me on desk duty for good.) And a month or so after that, when Speedy finally kicked the bucket and I got Speedy Two (Fraser wanted to name him Speedier, but I won that one--my turtle, my boring fucking name choice, right?), I decided it'd be fun to see how exotic turtles get these days, and damned if I didn't wind up with something right off a National Geographic centerfold, shipped to me all the way from Australia in this funky little box with holes in the top and smelling like a weird mix of sea salt and the rainforest. Go figure.

And after that, we both kind of got hooked on email and Google and how much of a kick I get out of checking Fraser's accuracy on things like the exact chemical makeup of some poison (he's pretty much always right, which, hey, not all that surprising) and how much he likes to order me different kinds of beer from, like, Alabama or wherever. So, you know, good call on the laptop there, Ray.

Every once in a while, when Fraser was stuck at a Consulate reception or sleeping in after a real good night, I'd get online and do a little, um, "alternative" browsing, checking out sites I'd heard about back in Vice and clicking around from there. Found a shitload of stuff, too--the Internet's a freaky place, you know what I'm saying? A lot of it didn't do anything for me one way or the other. Some of it made me sick to my stomach; I called a couple of the worst ones of those into Vice, made myself feel a little better, though not much. Some of it made me laugh my ass off. And some of it turned my crank so hard I had to wake Fraser up with my tongue in that fucking beautiful mouth and one hand stripping his cock--fast, like he likes it when he doesn't want it slow--and a couple of fingers on the other one greased up and teasing just barely in and out of him, and half the time he'd come before he was even all the way awake, which made us both laugh.

Jesus, what he does to me.

Never told Fraser about my extracurricular surfing, though, not even those mornings. He is un-fucking-believable in bed--more so than I'd've guessed before we got our act together, if you want to know the truth, but now I know, and let me tell you, sex with Fraser is, like, the best dance ever. Like competition-level dancing, except without the ugly-ass trophies and the pointy shoes. And so far he hasn't said no to anything I've suggested, which has taken us to some very, very good places, believe you me. Still though, I just didn't figure him for the type who would be into...well, I didn't think it'd be his thing, that's all it was, really.

Until I caught him.

See, usually either Fraser and I get home together, because we're working the same case, or I beat Fraser home, being as how his new C.O., while not so much with the "Constable, before you retire for the evening, please clean all the andirons in the building with this single Kleenex" type of time-wasting bullshit, still manages to find plenty for Fraser to do outside of your normal office hours. Whereas Welsh, thank God, gets that his guys have a life and tries like hell not to get in the way of it.

This one night a couple of weeks ago, though, the Lieutenant put his size-13 down in a big way, chewing my ass out over the seriously tall stack of incomplete case reports sitting on my desk, and I would up spending a couple of extra hours two-finger-typing the pile into submission.

So when I got home Fraser was already there, which I could tell because his Jeep was in the driveway and I could see light under the front door where the weather-stripping pulled up from the floor Monday and neither of us had gotten around to tacking it back down. Plus I could smell homemade spaghetti sauce heating up, which, mmm, pasta and Fraser, hard to beat that combo. Made me seriously hungry, and I figured the spaghetti could wait better than I could and Fraser'd be easy either way, so I gave the front of the house a miss and went into the den through the open garage door, thinking to pull a fast one on Fraser and get him into bed--or at least up against a wall--before he had time to say no.

And he was there, where I'd figured he'd be, sitting at the laptop, head bent and that little streak of white hair over his ear where a perp clocked him last year shining in the light from the desk lamp. He had his lower lip caught in his teeth as he stared at the screen, and he looked all studious and intent and completely fucking gropeable.

You know you got it bad when watching someone work turns you on. Me? I got it worse: it doesn't matter what he's doing, he turns me on regardless. Taking out the trash, bitching at me for missing the hamper, sweeping the front walk again, whatever: I want him, 24-7. Tough on the heart, being hard for my partner pretty much all the time at my age, but what can I say, it's not a problem I'm sorry to have. Plus I love him 25-8, which is even tougher on the heart, I grant you, but I wouldn't trade it for anything on earth.

So there he was, and to be honest I had a hard time not just jumping him from the doorway and biting his neck, the way he won't admit he loves me to when I can catch him off guard. Figured that'd kind of ruin the whatsit, the element of surprise, though, so I added that back onto my mental list (long and getting longer, since when we do something on it we usually just wind up doing it again), reached down and shifted myself around a little (didn't help much, but damn, it felt good), and cat-footed it up behind him. When I was close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him--the man's a furnace even when he's sitting still, I swear to God--I lifted my hands and dropped them onto his shoulders, ready to dig into those muscles at the base of his neck that I found out real quickly are one of his hot buttons, plus they're always tight from the way he holds himself when he's in uniform.

But his head shot up and back and banged hard into my stomach, which, just, oof. And while I was trying to get some breath going, he booked it out of the chair and hightailed it over to the far wall, grabbing the laptop on the way. He wound up backing himself into a corner, staring at me with a look on his face like nothing I'd seen on him in the whole time we'd been together, this weird combo of surprised and seriously turned on and embarrassed ... no, it was shame, that was it, and what the fuck had he been looking at, anyway?

And he was hard as a fucking rock.

Yeah, duh, I looked. Always did, from the first time I met him, and I sure hell never saw any reason to stop, even after I'd gotten his permission to do way more than look. Sometimes I look at his cock, swelling behind that white spot he's worn into the crotch of every single pair of his jeans, before I look at anything else. (Except his hands, which I just fucking love so much even when they're not all over me that I always have to start there, always.) Sometimes just looking at his cock through his clothes gets me hard. Him too: once I made him come just by staring at him, which was a head trip like nothing else we have ever been through and made me shake even harder than it did him. Looking with intent. Oh yeah.

So I looked, and he was hard--which I could also, mmm, smell, so he'd been hard for a while and he hadn't taken care of it. Considerate, which is totally like him. But also not, since both of us have pretty good recovery times--what Fraser calls "a surprisingly short refractory period for two mature human males over forty, Ray" and what I call "fucking amazing chemistry, Fraser, just go with it already"--and we're also past that whole everybody's-gotta-come-the-same-number-of-times-in-the-same-night fairness hangup of his, so by now he knows he can do himself solo if he wants to or needs to and it won't bug me. (Far from it, actually: someday soon I want to be there while he does it, watching him. Jesus God. Haven't checked that one off the list yet.) And I know he sometimes does do himself--for relief, you know--when I'm not around. Which, really, I love that he can relax his own rules--the ones he came into this with, that he still sometimes beats himself up about when he forgets that I mostly don't care--enough to get to that point.

But he hadn't done it tonight. And now that I could see his face--could really look at him--it was obvious that he'd been keeping himself on the edge for a good long while. It was plenty cool in the house, but he'd sweated through his Henley under both arms and right down the center of his back, and his face was flushed all over and beaded with sweat at his hairline. He'd changed into khakis when he got home, but he'd left on the suspender things that went with the uniform (never told him I've got a thing for leather, but he's no dummy), and whatever he'd been doing had heated them up to the point that I could smell them, too. He was breathing hard enough that I could see his chest moving, and quickly enough that I could hear him, and the pulse in the hollow at the base of his throat was visible from across the room.

And he'd leaked a wet spot on the front of the khakis the size of a Susan B., in that same place where his jeans get worn.

God. God. My jeans tightened up even more over my cock, which was swelling to match Fraser's, and my palms got wet. I was itching to touch him, couldn't think of anything I wanted to do at that moment more than I wanted to grab him and bite that lower lip and make him groan like a dying thing and watch him fucking come in my hands.

But he was holding the laptop in front of him like he couldn't decide whether to shield himself with it or throw it away like a live grenade, and his nipples were standing up under the Henley but his face hadn't gotten any less red and he hadn't lost that air of shame, and that was weird enough that it backed me down a little, just enough to ask the question.

"Fraser. Jesus. Are you okay?" And then: "What the hell have you been doing in here?"

He started to answer me, but the deep breathing and the surprise and the rush of blood to his cock had dried his mouth out some, and he wound up coughing instead. I took a step toward him and his arms came up, clutching the laptop kind of awkwardly to his chest. He tried again.

"N-nothing, Ray."

I stared at him. "Nothing. Uh-huh. Try again, Frase."

"Nothing. Really, nothing. Just--just research. I'm re- I'm researching s-something."

I stared at him some more. His cock stayed hard and his face stayed red and he stayed silent, leaning against our bookshelves, still breathing like a runner, his eyes all pupil. I could see him willing me to believe him, but I didn't know why, and I was getting pretty damned interested in finding out what had put that look on him. On the other hand, the room already smelled like hot, sweaty, rough-edged sex--mostly my favorite kind, although offhand I couldn't come up with a kind I didn't like where Fraser was concerned--and we hadn't even touched each other yet.

And the more I stared at him, the more I could see a different look, one I'd seen some version of more times than I could count and couldn't imagine ever getting tired of: the look he had when he came, broken wide open and out of his mind with pleasure and so incredibly, painfully, solely himself that I wanted to get him right back to that place the next fucking second just to see him that way again.

And it was like Fraser could see into my brain, could see the minute when my cock won out and my mind got the hell off the field. His hands relaxed on the laptop--I'd been so focused on his face I hadn't noticed until then that he'd been white-knuckling the thing, and the single small part of my brain that was still functioning added fear to the mix and filed the whole thing away for consideration later. (Much later, if I had anything to say about it.) He straightened away from the bookshelves and came towards me, almost loping now that I'd let him off the hook, setting the laptop carelessly (carelessly?!) down on the desk and closing it to put it to sleep. He didn't stop when he got to me. Instead, he backed me up towards the door into the garage, reaching out behind my head with those long fucking arms and shutting it so that when we got there it was solid against my back, matching the pressure of his body all down the front of mine but a lot less warm and not...moving.

Oh, God. He was moving--he was moving--only a little, but more than enough, his hips thrusting into mine over and over and over again, no way to get away from it and no end to the way it made me feel, and his chest brushing against my nipples so that the one he'd asked me to pierce throbbed with my--with his heartbeat, damn it.

God. God. I clenched my hands into fists, figuring out as I did it that they'd followed a familiar path and were resting on Fraser's ass just above the small of his back, and tried my damnedest not to come. Not yet, not yet, shitshitshit, please, not yet.

And he was smiling. Grinning, actually, with an almost devilish tinge to it that I was pretty sure I was the only one who'd ever seen and that if I had my way no one but me would ever, ever come close to again. At the back of his smile, I could see traces of the expression he'd worn when I'd scared him out of his chair minutes--hours? days?--ago, but even as I wondered about it I was losing it, losing it, so close to losing it. My plans and my plot and my wondering slipped away from me, completely fucking drowned in how much I needed to thrust back against him and what I needed to do for--to--with him...

So it wasn't until a couple of days later, when a troop of Canadian Girl Scouts (and who knew Canada even had Girl Scouts, really) were in town to earn their Jazz Badge or whatever and Fraser was stuck chaperoning them, being as how the woman who was supposed to be showing these kids the Windy fucking City had caught a stomach bug from her preschooler right before the trip and was currently puking her guts out in the Queen's Bedroom's bathroom, that I got back to the laptop. And its History file.

And figured out what Fraser'd been looking at. 1