This story is based on two gay men. You must be above the legal age of 18 (or as stipulated by your country/state) to read this story. If this story is illegal in your area, PLEASE DO NOT READ IT. This story is a work of ficition. Any similarity of the characters to any person is clearly a coincidence. All other usual disclaimers apply.
Send your feedback or critisim to mikeinstudio9344(at)yahoo(dot)com o follow me @ http://www.gayauthors.org/forums/user/12573-michael9344/ The Game
Chapter 11 - Big Boys Don't Cry
They made it back to the Richards' house in record time.
Not a moment too soon. Jake cried out as they turned into Post Road and saw the lights blazing at 34, the flashing lights outside of police cars. "What happened to my son?"
The headlights of one of the police cars lit the night beyond the house, to the trees and scrub on the loamy ground of the vacant land next to the house giving an eerie glow to the scene.
"Danny! Danny!" Jake cried.
McCall pulled the Ducati up in a swirl of wet grass outside the house. Jake was off the bike before he'd booted the kickstand into place, helmet tossed into the grass and running for the door. McCall was only a heartbeat behind him.
"I'm Danny Silver's father." Jake said through gritted teeth when one of the police officer tried to bar the way inside the house. "Let me by. I want to see my son. Now" His tone would have frozen fire.
"Let him in, Officer." McCall flipped his ID, showing his government clearance. Jake pushed past the cop into the house.
"Danny! Oh son, thank God!" Jake said a moment later, racing down the hall. McCall let out the breath he hadn't known he was holding. Danny was alright...
A quick glance inside the living room told the story. A white-faced, pajama-clad Danny sat on Donna Richards' lap on a wing chair beside the fire, obviously traumatized. Danny was trying to shrink back from the towering presence of the cops, Wildman and Braveheart, his face filled with terror. Ken Richards held a gently snoring Ethan in his arms. Wildman and Braveheart wore gentle, reassuring smiles on their faces, but at six-two and six-five, and solid walls of muscle, they were seriously scary to a little kid, especially with their taut, protective stances, legs splayed and arms folded.
"D-Daddy...?" Danny looked around, bewildered, his eyes, hollow with tiredness, also held a sleepy fear, as if he was unsure he was sleeping or awake.
"Danny!" Jake said, running to him, falling on his knees beside the rocking chair. "Oh, son, I've been so worried about you! All these strangers with guns must have made you so scared..."
Jake reached out to Danny; but Danny, his eyes wild, his thin body shaking, turned his face to Donna's shoulder.
Jake turned to McCall, his face pleading for help.
Donna, looking distressed, said softly, "Danny, it's your daddy. Don't you want to go to him?"
But Danny shook even more. His hand pointed backwards, right behind Jake, where the big, strange men stood around the room like avenging furies. They might not be showing it, but they were all packing weapons, and sensitive Danny felt but the haunting aura of unseen danger that the Nighthawks always brought with them.
The miracle was Danny didn't feel any danger with McCall, the most dangerous Nighthawk on record...
McCall squatted beside Jake. "He's in shock." He whispered. "Don't push him now. He's been scared badly, and you weren't here when it happened to him. Donna is his security right now. He needs calm and quiet, and a lot of reassurance."
Jake nodded, shaking as much as Danny, his lovely face ghostlike, his pupils dilated. "I don't think I can do that. Help me, Brendan." He whispered back.
That was all the green light he needed. With a quick motion that sent all the cops and Nighthawks half a dozen steps back toward the hall, he concentrated on the shaking boy before him. "Hey. Danny boy." Speaking in gentle reassurance, making no move to touch him. "It's Brendan, pal. How're you doing?"
No move. Danny didn't speak.
"What's going on here, huh? Is all this fuss for you? Why are all these big, rough guys hanging out with a little guy? They hear about your skills in two codes of football?"
After a long moment, the tiniest chuckle came, sounding more like a hiccup.
"I'm feeling threatened here, tough guy. I thought I was your special football friend. Did you find new guys to play with?"
"N-no..." A pair of dark brown eyes peeped around, half-terrified still, but with a tiny twinkle, too.
McCall grinned and wiped his forehead in overdone relief. "Well, that's good to know. Does that mean we're on for some more games soon, if your dad lets me?"
With frozen beginning of a smile hovering at the corners of his mouth, Danny nodded. "His name is Daddy, you say it funny."
"Yeah, I do. Maybe because I haven't had a dad - um, a daddy, to practice on, for a really long time." McCall smiled at Danny with a tenderness he'd never known or felt in his stark life. "I wish I had a dad - daddy like yours. Fathers are very special people, you know. And I think yours really needs a hug right now."
Danny blinked at him, obviously not yet ready to leave the security of Donna'a lap. "You don't have a daddy?" He sounded shocked, and more than willing to think of something aside from the recent terror he'd endured.
Solemnly, McCall shook his head. "My dad died when I was fourteen because he didn't take care of - me and - himself. That's how I know how lucky you are to have a daddy like yours. To have a family that loves you so much."
Danny's gaze switched to Jake, who was making a valiant effort to stem his tears, swiping at them with his sweater sleeve. " Daddy?"
Jake smiled at him. "I'm here, son. I'm right here with you. You're safe now."
Danny frowned and bit his lip. "Brendan's daddy didn't take care of him and died when he was still little."
"I would always take care of you, Danny." Jake reached out, tentative and slow, and touched Danny's face in a gentle caress.
Danny rubbed his face against Jake's hand in a gesture of total security. "I know, Daddy. But Brendan's alone. He's real nice and he plays good games with me." He added in sweet earnest as he hopped off Donna's lap at last and snuggled into his father's arms, his head on his chest.
Jake blinked, slow and unsteadily. A gentle flush mounted his cheek. "Yes, Danny." Danny snuggled his head beneath Jake's chin. Jake looked up and met McCall's gaze. "He's nice."
'Nice'
A damn stupid understatement in most things, yet when Jake agreed with Danny's assessment of him, more of that thick, black ice around his heart sloughed off. For the life of him, McCall couldn't make his throat work. He stayed frozen on his hunches. The man trained to go in with both guns blazing - the man named The Untouchable and The Ice Man - couldn't move or say a word as he watched the two people he'd been assigned to protect calling him nice. Completely stunned, utterly speechless.
Danny smiled up at his father, sweet and trusting. "You like him, don't you, Daddy? So do I. So can we 'dopt him?"
Choking sounds came from behind McCall, sounds of amused disbelief from men he'd worked with for years. They only knew the dark, silent "Ice Man" who was always on call, always ready to fight, rarely joined in any camaraderie on the job.
Which he had been; the job was him, defined him. Until this assignment he'd wrapped himself in isolation like a cloak, accepting that he'd always be alone. Flipper, Commander of team One, was a complete career man who didn't need anyone.
'Out of the mouths of babes.'
Shy, stammering Danny Silver had seen straight through the walls he'd used as shields since he was eight, watching his mommy walk out on him without a backward glance. Danny had seen beneath the withdrawn darkness of Team Commander McCall to the unhealed heart of little Brendan, needing love, aching not to be alone anymore.
After all these years walking through the wind-blasted darkness of his isolated world, he thought he had given up hope on finding love, or a normal life. Danny had shown him that the wound had only festered with time, not healed. Mom had abandoned him, taken Meg with her and never returned and dad had not found time to do anything but spank him. Jake de Souza left the same night he had told him he wanted him forever and Jake had never called or come to him.
Love was a delusion; myth only idiots believed would last. So he left the men he bedded before he could remember their names. Why hang around for the heartache?
After a silence in which Jake seemed as shell-shocked as he did, Jake answered his son. "You can't adopt grown-ups, Danny." He kissed his spiky locks of hair. "Brendan is a man, pal, and he's older than me. I can't adopt him."
"But - but that's not fair!"
"I know son." Jake kissed Danny's forehead. "The world isn't always fair to people, and good people sometimes don't have people to love them." His gaze met McCall's, and clung.
With a tiny smile, Donna Richards made a motion with her hand. The room emptied in silence; the door closed behind them.
"But everybody needs a family." After a frowning moment, Danny launched out of Jake's arms and into McCall's lap, snuggling in as if he belonged there. "Do you live all alone, Brendan? Have you been all alone since your dad died?"
McCall swallowed something the size of a brick in his throat. It didn't occur to him to lie to Danny. "Yeah." 'Except when I was with Jake. When Jake loved me, I never felt alone.'
He felt Jake's gaze on him and felt Jake's doubt and fear. They were both scared, so scared to reach out and trust. Yes, they were opposite ends of the social spectrum, the dark-souled, hard-ass McCall and Prince Jake, but in essence, they were two of a kind.
"Are you lonely sometimes?" Danny snuggled into him, sliding towards the wonderland of sleep. "D'you ever want somebody to just hug?"
McCall closed his eyes. "Sometimes."
"Daddy is lonely lots of times." Danny had almost gone right over into dreamland now. "Sometimes he cries when he thinks I'm sleeping. I think he wants a big guy to help him and hug him, y'know. Like I hug Bark," Danny sighed and snuggled in some more. "I think he needs all the kissy-kissy stuff grown-ups like."
McCall seeing that Danny had fallen asleep with those final words said while glancing at Jake, "Shall I shatter his illusions and tell him that I like it too?"
Jake shook his head, his attention on Danny. "Let him be innocent for as long as he can. But one day he'll know." He looked up and smiled. "He'll need to know that's it's alright to want to kiss a guy and hug him."
"So it's alright for me to want you?" McCall asked in almost a whisper, not wanting to wake Danny.
Jake's gaze fluttered to McCall's mouth and he leaned toward McCall. "Yes." Jake breathed. "Yes, it's alright..."
And Jake kissed him, there in the warm half-dark of the fire lit room, sitting on their knees and a sleeping child between them. A chaste, barely there kiss; yet as their kiss earlier tonight slammed into body, this one tiptoed into his heart and he could fell Jake.
The kiss went on, slow and gentle and so infinitely tender. A kiss that shimmered with promises... promises to give McCall all he's lost. *****
It took all Jake had not to let the tears fall as he kissed McCall, but he managed it. For the first time in ten years, Jake had seen inside the soul of a man. He wanted to give McCall the love he hadn't known in his life.
But he had to leave.
Tonight, McCall had proven himself as the man he claimed to be. He and Danny were safe, against all odds, and it was thanks to McCall's mysterious group of spies.
Falcone would have McCall pushed for it. Falcone would find out the name of the man in his way and he'd have it wiped out, deleted like a virus in a computer. Falcone had had Dan Casell, an eighty-five-old man, shot execution style through the head for helping him. If he let McCall into his life, let Danny love him, he could only imagine what Falcone would do to McCall.
Years ago, Jake's fame and a team of bodyguards had protected him from becoming a victim of Falcone's. Then Marcus' innocent curiosity led to a meeting, diamonds and yachts and exotic places and wedding; all within a month. Falcone who had married Marcus' under the name Jacob de Souza, obsessively believed he had the right to claim the real Jacob, body and soul.
Or kill him for taking away his son.
It was only now that he realized the foolishness of making his simple dream come true. Yes, he was normal, invisible and anonymous. But Jake found out the he had no protection apart from that anonymity, and the measures Dan and Harry had set up for him. Jake had little chance of getting away.
He had to disappear completely. The time he had to make sure that all traces of his and Danny's existence vanished.
With exquisite slowness, Jake pulled back, watching McCall's face.
McCall looked as moved as he felt. McCall's eyes were dark with emotion. "Jake..." The name was a guttural whisper, as if he wasn't capable of speech.
Shaken, Jake reached out with a trembling finger and brushed McCall's hair back from his face. "I know." He whispered.
As if his touch undid him, McCall closed his eyes. His face followed the movement and he kissed Jake's palm.
The smiling lips warming Jake's skin melted what little ice that was left around his heart. Whether Jake believed McCall's story or not was immaterial. He loved McCall, in all the sweet flush of first love with which he'd loved him ten years ago. Papa's words had destroyed his trust and put his heart in permafrost, waiting for McCall to come back and bring him back to life.
But he had to leave McCall behind. Too many people had already been destroyed by Jacob de Souza. Jacob had to remain dead, forever.
So Jake smiled when he desperately needed to cry. "IT's time for this boy to go to bed - and I smell hot chocolate waiting for us."
"It's probably cold by now." McCall smiled back at him, warm and strong and all man, his barriers of remoteness smashed to pieces at Jake's feet. "We seem to have bad timing with hot chocolate tonight."
Bad timing. It seemed to be the chant of their relationship; both times they'd been together. Jake longed to ask, 'Did my father lie about?', but McCall's sense of duty was strong. Within hours McCall's spy group would have McCall's confirmation of his identity, decisions out of his hands, taken over by the CIA, MI6 or any other government or international organization after the tapes on Falcone. They would put him and Danny in protective custody within hours, separated from Danny while they asked day after day of questions.
And the moment they got what they wanted, they'd turn their precious resources to more important witnesses on other cases, and he and Danny would be left to the mercy of Falcone's hired hit men. And what they'd do to McCall...
"I'll put him to bed. Which way is the bedroom?" McCall looked down on Danny, cradled in those big, strong arms.
"Down the hall, first on the left." Jake whispered.
One lithe movement and McCall was on his feet, so smooth Danny's breathing barely changed rhythm. With the grace and silence of a jungle cat, McCall left the room. Jake averted his gaze from McCall's butt and with far less grace, uncurled his legs and forced leaden feet to the kitchen.
Jake knew he had more codes to give Donna.
Escape tonight seemed impossible now, with the police and McCall's friends watching, but he had one choice.
Jake decided to give Danny one day to play with his friend, for him to cement his plans for escape and...
'One more day with McCall. One more touch, another kiss.'
A single tear ran down his cheek. He wiped it off.
'Big boys don't cry.'