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The note on the kitchen counter said, "Enough. I know you tried." Tess's clothes were gone from the closets, her make-up was gone from the bathroom counter, the paintings she'd picked out the last time they redecorated were gone from the walls. Danny walked out to the garage to confirm that her car was gone too, then stood in the driveway for a long time, gazing at-- well, he wasn't sure what, exactly. Eventually it got dark, and he went back inside and poured himself a glass of Oban. (All the liquor was still in the cabinet, but the expensive French wines Tess favored were gone from their rack.)
Maybe he should've been more discreet about that job in TriBeCa. Or the one in Philadelphia. Or the one in... maybe he just should've been more discreet.
Danny picked up the note again. He remembered getting ready to leave prison that first time five years before, and standing there with the divorce agreement in his hands and a dull, aching pressure in his chest, like a giant fist clenched around his ribs. Now he stared at the note and braced himself for the same feeling, but it didn't come. There was only weariness and the warm, smoky burn of the Scotch in his throat.
He packed a suitcase, locked up the house, and checked into a hotel twenty minutes away. The hotel was awful: bland, expensive and overwhelmingly beige, with giant fake flower arrangements in the lobby. The room service menu was one terse page, but the booklet describing the convention facilities was ten pages of flowery prose. Rusty would've hated the place with a passion.
Thinking of Rusty made Danny feel hungry and restless. It had been a couple of months since they'd talked, longer since they'd seen each other. Several times over the past year, Danny had tried to make plans to go to California, but Tess had not been enthusiastic and the plans had always somehow turned into something else. But Danny was free to make his own plans now. He ordered room service and paced back and forth on the beige carpet while he called Rusty's cell phone.
"Hey Danny, what's up?" Rusty always sounded as if he'd been expecting Danny to call that very minute, no matter what time of day or night it was, no matter how much time had passed between phone calls.
"Tess walked out on me," Danny said.
There was a lengthy pause, the silence broken only by a faint crackle that might've been static or might've been Rusty eating a corn chip.
"Hello?" Danny said. "You still there?"
"I'm here," Rusty said. "So. How many casinos do you want to knock over to get her back this time?"
"Actually..." Danny hesitated. "I think I'm folding this hand."
Another pause, crackle-free this time. "She called your bluff one too many times, huh?"
"Something like that." Danny began to feel a little put out. Rusty sounded more amused by the news than properly sympathetic. Danny was fairly sure that he'd been properly sympathetic when Isabel had gone back to Europe the year before. "What are you up to? Still hanging around that money pit you call a hotel?"
"Not at the moment. I'm on a job."
Danny tapped his fingers against the bedside table. "Solo gig?"
"Basher's here."
"Here?"
"Seattle."
"Seattle?"
"Washington."
"I know where Seattle is, thank you." Danny rolled his eyes. "What's in Seattle?"
"A computer geek and his stamp collection."
"You've gotta be kidding me."
"Don't knock it. The computer geek is worth five hundred million, and the stamp collection's worth nine hundred grand."
"To whom?"
"To the guy who hired me to get it."
Of course. Rusty'd never go after anything that specialized unless he had a buyer already lined up.
"Need one more?"
"Nah, we've got it covered."
"You've got it co--"
"I have to go. We're meeting a contact."
Rusty hung up. Danny stood there and stared at the cell phone in his hand and struggled to wrap his mind around the fact that Rusty had just said he didn't want him on a job.
He was still standing there when room service arrived with his dinner.
Danny stayed at the hotel for four days. On the fifth day, the Women Baptists of America arrived for a convention, and he ran for it. He drove without thinking, stopping only when the gas ran low, and by the time he finally got around to paying attention to where he was, he was fifty miles south of Boston. Oh, well. Boston was as good a place as any.
He rented an apartment in Back Bay and went looking for something to do. A few days' investigation on Newberry Street yielded an artsy jewelry boutique with lots of high-quality stones and a laughably inadequate security system. So Danny put out word for a driver and a reliable fence, and settled down to case the joint properly.
Two days later, he decided the place was too damned easy to bother with. He checked out three more places. They were all too damned easy to bother with. The last few jobs he'd done had all been like that; the excitement had come not from the con, but from the effort of keeping what he was doing secret from Tess. And that, now that Danny thought about it, was a pathetic state for a seasoned professional like himself to be in. He needed to find himself a proper score, something big and showy. Not for the money -- unless the Swiss economy collapsed, he was never going to need money again -- but because if he didn't, he was going to end up like Saul, chewing antacids under a palm tree somewhere and reminiscing about the good old days. He needed a challenge, and he could think of at least a dozen ways to find one in the Boston area, but they all required Rusty to be in the equation.
No problem. He'd just wait a few days. How long could it take to steal a stamp collection, anyhow?
As it turned out, it took about a week. Danny found the news item buried in the back of the *Seattle Times,* nothing but the usual generic newspaper-speak about "unidentified perpetrators" and "police making inquiries". No mention of anything going boom either. Rusty's jobs usually went like this, unspectacular but clean, and apparently he had managed to keep Basher in line, too.
Danny gave Rusty two days for post-job clean up before hopping on a plane to California. He didn't call first, because the whole point of Danny and Rusty was that they never needed to call first, and also because while Rusty was annoyingly good at sounding unsurprised when Danny called, he was less good at looking unsurprised when Danny just showed up. Danny thought surprise was a good look on Rusty. He liked the way Rusty's eyes went just a little wider than normal, and the way his lips parted, and the way his face would go perfectly still, only for a moment, before he recovered. Danny had expended a lot of effort over the years putting that look on Rusty's face, both in and out of bed.
Rusty wasn't at his house, and he wasn't at the hotel either. The new manager -- a short, scarily competent young woman in a conservative charcoal suit -- didn't know where he was, except "away on business." Danny retreated to the bar and called Rusty's cell phone again.
"We're in Miami," Rusty told him. "But we're leaving for Havana in... oh, about five minutes. A friend of a friend of Saul's needs a favor done."
Danny knew he should be asking, "What kind of favor?" Instead, he found himself asking, "We?"
"Basher and I. He's actually been to Havana before."
"Figures," Danny muttered. "Try not to spark any international incidents, okay?"
"I'll do my best," Rusty promised. "Have to go now, our taxi's here."
So Rusty went to Havana, and Danny stayed in LA and was bored stupid for five days straight before calling Saul.
"Rusty and Basher?" Saul said. "They got back yesterday and went away again. How should I know where? Young people today can't sit still."
"No shit," Danny grumbled and called Rusty for the third time.
The voice on the other end of the line was annoyed, hoarse with sleep and unmistakeably British.
"Basher?" Danny held the phone away from his ear and looked at the screen to make sure he'd dialed the right number. "Is that you?"
There were some creaking noises and muffled thumps. Basher swore, then broke off mid-word and lowered his voice to a stage whisper. "Danny? What the fuck is it now?"
"Where's Rusty?"
"Asleep. Like most decent blokes are at two in the morning. Like I ought to be. And man, there had better be somebody tryin' to kill us again, 'cos that's the only excuse I'll take for you calling up at this hour."
It was four in the afternoon by Danny's watch. "Basher, are you London?"
"No, I'm in bloody Shangri-La. Of course I'm in London, you tosser! I live here, don't I?"
Someone muttered something in the background, the words too faint to make out but the voice definitely Rusty's. Basher's reply was also faint, spoken away from the phone.
"Hey," Danny said, a little more loudly than he'd meant to.
"Look, Danny," Basher said, "no offense, but I need my bo-peep. You want to chat, call up at a decent hour, all right? Cheers."
Danny snapped his phone shut with a click and stared at it. He seemed to be doing that a lot lately. He'd known, of course, that there were rumors about Rusty and Basher. There were rumors about Rusty and just about every person Rusty had ever met. Most of the time, Danny knew which ones were true. But the talk about Basher had apparently started sometime while Danny was in prison, and Danny hadn't even picked up on it until after the Benedict job was over. And then Danny was with Tess, and Rusty was with Isabel, and it was none of his business anyway whom Rusty had been banging while Danny was locked up.
Technically, it was none of his business now either. Danny contemplated that thought for about five seconds before he ordered the tickets to Heathrow. Two days later, he was breaking into Rusty's room at the Savoy.
The room had a king-sized bed in it, but the clothes in the dresser were all Rusty's, and there was only one toothbrush in the bathroom. The small table by the window was littered with candy wrappers and sheets of what looked like alarm system schematics. Danny draped his jacket over the back of an antique-looking armchair, took some cognac from the minibar and sat down to study the schematics. He was about halfway done when Rusty came in.
"Danny." Rusty didn't look in the least bit surprised. He was wearing a shiny, pale gray suit that looked entirely out of place in a room at the Savoy, and a paisley shirt that would've looked out of place anywhere. "You'd better be keeping those in order."
"Do I look like an amateur?" Danny rustled the sheets in his lap. "So. I'm guessing a museum, but not one of the larger ones."
"Warm-up," Rusty said. "I'm going for the crown jewels next week."
"Hard to move those."
"Actually, I thought I'd keep them." Rusty shrugged out of his suit jacket and hung it in the closet. "Take them home. Wear them to parties."
"They'll go great with that shirt," Danny said, but he was starting to run out of patience with the banter. "All right, Rusty what's the deal?"
"There's a deal?" Rusty shoved his hands into his pockets and lounged casually against the wall. That in itself was enough to convince Danny that there was a deal. When Rusty was nervous, he rubbed his mouth. When Rusty was nervous and trying hard to hide it, he put his hands in his pockets to keep himself from rubbing his mouth.
"Apparently." Danny started to say more, then stopped himself. Looked around. Considered the set of Rusty's shoulders, his carefully neutral expression, the very expensive hotel room with just the one toothbrush in the bathroom. Basher had a flat only twenty minutes away. Rusty wasn't in it.
"Rusty," Danny said, "I hate to tell you this, but you have no talent at all for playing hard to get."
Rusty shrugged. "I like to think of it as lack of experience rather than lack of talent. Either way, I figured it was worth a try."
"Why," Danny demanded irritably, "would you figure something like that?"
Rusty's hands twitched a little inside his pockets, as if he was having trouble making them stay put. "If you must know," he said, "Tess suggested it."
Danny barely avoided doing a spit-take with the cognac. "You spoke to Tess?"
"She called me. She's in Hoboken, by the way. Shacked up with a nice accountant."
"I know." Danny had made it a point to find out, during the boring days in LA. He thought it had been a reasonable precaution, given that the last time Tess had ditched him, she'd wound up with Terry fucking Benedict. "Why were you talking to Tess?"
"She called me," Rusty repeated with an air of exaggerated patience. "She said, and I quote, 'make him work for it this time, Rusty, it'll do him good.'"
"You took relationship advice from Tess?"
"Well, it worked for her." Rusty's mouth quirked into a wry half-smile. "Twice, even. And it worked now. You're here, after all."
"I was going to be here anyway! I would've been here sooner, if you hadn't kept moving where 'here' was!"
"You do realize that sentence makes no sense, don't you?"
"Rusty." Danny knocked back the remains of his cognac and stood up, scattering sheets of paper from his lap to the floor.
"Hey," Rusty said, "you were supposed to be keeping those in order."
Enough was enough. Danny marched across the room, pulled Rusty away from the wall and kissed him.
For a few seconds, Rusty held still, his lips pressed together and his shoulders rigid under Danny's hands. Then he made an odd sound in the back of his throat, half amused and half resigned, and relaxed into the kiss, wrapping his arms around Danny's waist.
Danny leaned closer, pressing his body against Rusty's, pushing with his weight until Rusty retreated a step and put his back against the wall again. He eased one knee between Rusty's legs, and felt Rusty's hands clench against his back. He let the kiss linger a little longer before turning to brush his lips along Rusty's jaw to his ear.
"Rusty," he whispered, "I said I was done with Tess."
"You said that, yes."
Danny pulled back to look Rusty in the face. "You don't believe me."
Rusty's smile was crooked. "I believe that you believe it."
"I see." Danny tightened his grip on Rusty's shoulders, steered him away from the wall and gave him a light shove toward the bed. "Sit."
"Woof," Rusty said and rolled his eyes, but sat. Danny crouched on the floor in front of him and began to undo the buttons on Rusty's shirt. When Rusty tried to help, Danny caught his hands and guided them back down.
"I've got it," he said.
Rusty's eyes crinkled with amusement. "It's good to know," he said, "that a clever thief like you can unbutton a shirt."
"Yeah, it's looking at it that's the problem." Danny undid the last button and pulled the shirt off Rusty's shoulders and down his arms. Rusty started to pull his hands through the cuffs, but Danny reached around to grab his wrists. "Leave it," he said, and twisted the fabric into a makeshift knot. It was nothing Rusty couldn't have ditched in two seconds flat, but Rusty showed no inclination to ditch. He just tilted his head to one side and watched Danny with a faintly quizzical expression.
"What are we doing, Danny?"
"You wanted to make me work for it? Fine." Danny pressed one hand against Rusty's chest. "Lie back and let me do the work, then."
"You have a funny definition of work," Rusty drawled, but he let Danny push him back until he was sprawled across the bed, with his legs dangling over the side and his arms trapped under him. The position made his back arch and his hips tilt up a little. Enough to show the bulge of his erection clearly beneath his trousers.
Danny allowed himself a brief, satisfied smirk. He'd been hard since practically the moment Rusty had walked into the room. It was nice to know he wasn't the only one.
Danny moved up to sit on the edge of the bed. He cupped his hand over Rusty's cock and stroked, the heel of his hand gliding smoothly over fabric. Rusty closed his eyes and breathed noisily through clenched teeth. Danny let his hand move higher, sliding over Rusty's stomach and chest. He thumbed a nipple until it hardened, then bent down to lick at it. Rusty's skin grew slick with sweat. He wriggled his shoulders against the bedspread but made no effort to untangle his arms. Danny was grateful for that; he wouldn't have wanted to bet on his own self-control if Rusty started touching him back.
"You're welcome," Rusty muttered. Danny bit back a grin.
He trailed a line of licks and kisses from Rusty's throat down to his navel, then pulled back to undo his fly. Rusty squirmed impatiently and bucked his hips against Danny's hands, but had enough presence of mind to kick his shoes off before they could get in the way. Danny pulled Rusty's trousers off and dropped them to the floor. Shorts and socks followed a few seconds later. Danny snickered, and Rusty raised his head with a visible effort.
"What?"
"Your socks are paisley, Rusty."
"They match my shirt."
"That's not a recommendation."
"Do you want to critique my wardrobe, or do you want to have sex?"
"I multitask." Danny slid his hands up Rusty's bare legs, taking his time about it. He'd had years -- decades, actually -- to learn all of Rusty's sensitive spots, and he found every one of them now, first with his fingers and then with his mouth. By the time he ran his tongue in lazy swipes over the crease of Rusty's inner thigh, Rusty was quivering with tension, muscles tensing helplessly wherever Danny brushed his fingers over warm skin. His cock was inches from Danny's mouth, hard and heavy looking and terribly tempting, but Danny confined himself to a single slow lick before rising to his feet.
"Hold that thought," he said and quickly stripped off his own clothes.
His own cock was twitching impatiently, and his hands didn't feel entirely steady. It took an unreasonably long time to undo his belt buckle and untie his shoes. At one point, as he fumbled with the laces, Danny thought he heard Rusty chuckle. He ignored the sound, finished undressing, climbed back onto the bed and brushed a tangle of sweat-damp hair back from Rusty's face.
"How patient are you feeling?" he asked.
Rusty's eyes were glazed and his lower lip was swollen from biting. He blinked slowly at Danny's question, as if he had trouble processing the words. "I don't know," he admitted after a few deep breaths.
Danny bent down to brush his mouth against the exposed curve of Rusty's throat. "Well, then, let's find out," he said and went back to work.
It tested his own limits at least as much as Rusty's to keep to the pace he'd set himself, to make every kiss last and every touch linger. Rusty didn't make things any easier, with all his desperate squirming and the breathless, pleading sounds he didn't even try to stifle. Danny kissed him to silence, then made him plead again, and again, until they were both shaking and it was a great relief all around to feel Rusty's hands on his shoulders, guiding him.
Danny let himself be guided, let Rusty roll them both over until Danny was flat on his back and Rusty was on top of him, pinning him down. Rusty was trying to make up for lost time, apparently, because his hands were everywhere all of a sudden, roaming over Danny's skin with an urgency that made Danny feel a little bit dizzy.
"Easy." Danny clutched at the bedspread as he thrust helplessly into Rusty's fist. "Slow down, Rus. I'm not going anywhere."
"Damn right, you're not." Rusty curled his fingers a little more tightly around Danny's cock. He rubbed his thumb in slow circles over the head, and Danny nearly tumbled them both off the bed as his entire body bucked in response.
"Oh, fuck, I'm going to--" And then there was no point in finishing that sentence, because he was gulping for air and shuddering all over as he came into Rusty's hand.
Rusty kept stroking until Danny stopped shuddering, then planted a quick kiss on Danny's collarbone before reaching for the tissues on the nightstand. Danny took the opportunity to catch his breath and to make sure his hands were steady before he pulled Rusty back towards him. Now that his own tension was released, it was easier to take it slow again, to spare more time for kisses and light, teasing touches. By the time Danny bent down and sucked Rusty's cock into his mouth, Rusty was tugging at his hair and gasping, "God, Danny, please," and Danny barely had time to get a rhythm going before the words became meaningless noises and Rusty dug his nails hard into the back of Denny's shoulders as he came.
Afterwards, they kicked the bedspread off and climbed under the covers. They were both too tired to move, though it was barely six o'clock and Rusty would probably be calling for room service within the hour.
"Just for future reference," Danny asked, "is this going to be one of those things where we can't work with Basher ever again, or was he in on Operation Make Danny Work for It?"
"No worries." Rusty stole Danny's pillow and piled it on top of his own. "Basher's good."
"Right." There were a number of ways to take that statement, and Danny suspected that Rusty might've meant all of them. "I do appreciate you getting a hotel room, by the way. It might've been ugly if I'd had to break into Basher's flat to get you."
"I'd never make you break into Basher's flat. The man's got it so booby-trapped, he can't get in himself half the time."
"So I hear." Danny lay back on his (now annoyingly pillow-less) side of the bed and gazed sleepily at the ceiling.
"You know," he said after a while, "it could be done."
Rusty's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "What?"
"The crown jewels."
"You've got to be kidding me."
"No, really. We wouldn't even have to move them -- we could just ransom them back."
"Who was telling me not to spark any international incidents just the other day?"
"That was different."
"How?"
"I meant, don't spark any international incidents without me."
Rusty rolled over and punched Danny in the arm, but the noise he stifled against his stolen pillow sounded suspicously like a laugh.
"Come on," Danny said, "don't you want to hear the idea?"
"Sure," Rusty sighed. "After we eat."