“You know what I want,” Park murmured. “Come on. Give it to me. Let me see you make a pretty mess all over yourself.”
Cooper thrust a couple more times into Park’s grip and tipped over the edge into orgasm. Feeling, not as if he himself had moved, but as if the world had dropped—hurtling suddenly and violently away from him, leaving him behind, untethered and weightless. The only awareness that he still had a body at all, the warm, glowing epicenter of him, seated deep and powerful between his hips.
The world returned to him in pieces. When he licked his lips, he realized Park’s hand was no longer on his mouth. When he opened his eyes, he saw Park was kneeling up, stroking himself jerkily over Cooper’s body. Cooper just watched him for moment, feeling treacle-slow and detached. On Park’s thigh he saw the spot he’d bitten him, nowhere near hard enough to break skin, but it was blotchy and might bruise for a day. Cooper reached out to brush his fingers over it and Park looked at him, startled.
“Come here,” Cooper croaked, touching his own lips, fine with however that was interpreted. Park shuffled over to Cooper’s head, and guided his dick to his mouth.
Cooper kissed and licked at it, holding eye contact, before tentatively suckling the head. It wasn’t long before he felt Park stiffen and jerk. He pulled back to come over Cooper’s chest and neck, then collapsed with a groan.
They lay like that, not touching in a T-shape by the bottom of the bed, Park lying on his side and facing away, perpendicular above Cooper’s head. After a while, when they’d caught their breaths, Cooper began to laugh. “Well, we’ve certainly got the fucking part of our relationship cover story down, anyway.”
Park chuckled. “I’m all for practice, but you don’t think they’ll be watching us in our private room, I hope.”
“You never know,” Cooper said, sobering a bit. He tilted his head up slightly to look at Park, noticing the now familiar, faint scars that littered his back.
“You’ve never mentioned it before,” Park said hesitantly, still facing away from him. “That you worked undercover.”
Cooper didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “Not much to tell. I did a couple assignments in my FBI days. Nothing too intense.”
He traced one silvery scar shaped like a wishbone with his eyes. It was a startling reminder that there were still things they didn’t know about each other. Or, hell, maybe there weren’t. Not very important things, at least. In real life, not every scar had a story. Not every silence hid a dark secret. Maybe that’s what a long-term relationship was. After the heady rush of discovery had passed, it was time to learn when to reopen a healed wound and when to just let the scar fade. He supposed he had plenty of opportunity to ask at couples’ camp.
“Any tips?” Park asked, and Cooper frowned, confused. “Any tips on being undercover?” he clarified.
“Hmm.” Cooper thought about that. “I find the key is not to lie.”
He could feel Park’s skepticism. “That seems...counterintuitive.”
“Even if you’re a good liar. Especially if you’re a good liar. The first lie is easy. The second one isn’t that hard, either. But then there’s the third. Three lies is the beginning of a character sketch. And if there’s something off about your character, if the lies don’t add up to the same believable person, you get found out. Trust me, everyone’s a wannabe psychoanalyst, ready to get on the couch and dissect your inconsistencies.”
“So to be undercover, we tell the truth?”
“We tell a bunch of truths. As many truths as you can. Overwhelm them with true things until they know so much about you they won’t even notice that they don’t know anything important at all.”
Park sighed mock tragically. “And people think I’m the scary one.”
Cooper studied his back. “I hope you know I don’t think you’re scary. Not ever,” he said quietly.
Park didn’t react, but his body was very still, like he didn’t quite know what to do with that information. Then, abruptly his hand reached back behind him, seeking, and Cooper grabbed it.
“See? I told you,” Park said, holding on to his hand like it was something precious. “You’re just different.”
Chapter Three
“Why does it feel like all our cases send us to the gloomiest places off the map?” Cooper asked as they drove the endless, winding road into the mountains. There were hardly any turnoffs, though occasionally they passed a few cars parked to the side, clustered by short wooden fences and rickety stairs—scenic pull-offs that overlooked some waterfall or natural swimming hole.
“High altitudes, high crime rates?” Park offered from the driver’s seat of the airport rental car. It wasn’t their usual big, dark, intimidating SUV, but a vain little sports car about seven years past its heyday. Precisely the sort of thing a fairly well-off couple in the midst of a crisis might drive. Santiago had set it up for them and it wasn’t exactly suited for navigating these North Carolina mountains. Cooper half-feared the aforementioned crisis would be them not making it there in one piece.
“One day, we’ll get assigned a nice, sunny beach murder,” Cooper said. “And it will be wonderful.”
“What nice, normal goals you have,” Park murmured, slowing as they approached a subtle wooden sign to the side that simply read Maudit Falls. “Is this it?”
“Um...” The deeper into the mountains they’d gotten, the more inconsistent the phone service had become. For the last fifteen minutes or so Cooper had been navigating them based on a printed-out sheet of instructions the retreat had provided online. He held up the rudimentary map so Park could see the primitive black lines with a couple of triangles drawn in the upper right corner he imagined must be mountains. It looked more like something a child had scrawled in the sand with their toe than a guide. Unhelpfully, the words Mill, Lodge, Falls and A New Beginning were handwritten in various places but didn’t seem attached to any roads or structures.
“Let’s see, triangles in the distance? Check. Coffee stain on the left... Yeah, this is definitely it,” he said.
Park shot Cooper a look but took the turn anyway. Immediately the road turned to dirt and the atmosphere got even darker. According to the car clock, it was just after one, though from deep within the shadows of forest it could have been dawn, dusk or a particularly eerie midnight under a full harvest moon. The ambiguity of the light only heightened the sense that they had been en route forever, trapped in some never-ending time loop that Cooper always felt when travelling.
Their flight had been painfully early though short, and Cooper and Park had spent most of it reviewing the details of their undercover identities. As Cooper had predicted, only the most basic and vague information was given. What they could tell the truth about, they would. An elaborate lie was a short-lived one.