Page 105 of Agency

But not like something disposable. No, like something to be put on a pedestal and brought down for special occasions. A wonderful, unique, perfect thing that could never be replicated.

Now naked, and with my clothes in a pile on the floor, Morgan turned me around to face Andrew, a knowing smile on both their mouths. Andrew was holding something, a necklace of some kind made from twine or string.

A small key hung at the end of the loop. A key I recognized.

“What’s that for, sir?”

He didn’t answer, simply lifted the necklace and brought it down over my head, so that the familiar key’s cool metal fell between my breasts. As he did, Morgan grasped my wrists and pulled them behind me, to the small of my back.

“Sirs?” I asked. “What are you—?”

“You’re a smart slut, Ambyr,” Andrew said, cutting me off. “I think you can figure it out.”

Metal bracelets pressed against the flesh of my wrists, then, and the cuffs locked my hands behind my back.

“What—?”

“You have an assignment,” Andrew said, lowering smiling lips to mine, but grazing past on his way to my ear. “A very grave one–one that only you can succeed at, should you choose to accept.”

Then he began to tell me his plan. No, their plan. Because I could definitely feel Morgan’s wonderfully quivering length pressing into me from behind…

Never before–not in all my years of active service or my years in the “private sector”–had I been so hot and bothered in a mission briefing.

Never.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Jericho

“This is bullshit,” I said aloud to myself as I read a line from some book I’d found on Gramps’sbookshelf, an earlier translation of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations by George W. Chrystal. I knew who Marcus Aurelius was. Or well, I’d at least heard the name. Some Roman emperor, if I remembered correctly.

“Dude should’ve learned to wash his pits when he was a kid.”

I was seated in the living room across from the fire. The old coffee table I’d grown up with had disappeared at some point while I was away serving, so now I was using an old ammo crate I’d found down in the cellar years before as an end table of sorts for the beer I was nursing. But, Gramps’ big, overstuffed couch was just as comfortable as ever, and practically swallowed even me.

But, still, no matter how comfortable the couch was, I couldn’t feel exactly relaxed. Not perfectly. I’d tried sitting with my legs up on the couch, had tried shifting to other cushions. But, still, there was an ache within me, one which seemed to be at my core and reach out through my limbs to the rest of my body, leaving me restless in my depths.

“Alright, that makes sense,” I said as I read another quote, about being a reasonable and social being. Then back to, “Nope, that’s bullshit. That’s just bullshit elitists tell themselves,” when I got to the part about how the lower social order were created by the universe to serve the upper parts, and the upper parts naturally gravitated towards each other.

I’d met the brass. I’d spoken with the brass. There wasn’t anyone naturally better than anyone else at the top of the echelon.

I almost shut the book.

But then there were some lines I found myself nodding along with after that, and so I kept going as I nursed more of my beer. After all, when was the last time I’d actually sat down with a book? Especially one of Gramps’? Sure, he’d only been a farmer, but he’d had a keen mind even into his older years.

Which, I suppose, was another refute to the passage about the elites being better than everyone else by virtue of their birth. After all, who in this world was viewed as more lowly than a man working his own land and trying to get by in the world?

As I flipped pages, I considered how many times Gramps might have read this book in quiet contemplation in this same house, and how we could connect to the people in our lives in such strange ways. Sometimes, that connection was from reading the same books they’d once collected in their modest libraries. Other times, that connection might come from sharing a meal with people we cared about most in the world.

People like Morgan and Andrew… And… other people…

People like…

Fuck me.

People like Ambyr.

What to do with her? What to do with thisthingthat seemed to exist between us, as much a product of my own being as hers? We’d known each other for less than a week, but already we’d crammed in a lifetime of experiences. That first night in the back of the Tahoe, then up in her hotel room. Then the running firefight on the streets of St. Louis. Then the next morning, when she’d saved my life.