Page 20

Ezra

Ezra woke up alone the next morning and for a few blissful seconds, didn’t have a care in the world. Then, like a tidal wave, the events of the previous night came crashing over him and drowned him in every. Last. Detail. The largest takeaway being that he’d slept with Titan.

Again.

He turned his head and groaned into his pillow, internally chastising himself for his weakness. How could he have let this happen? He’d had that conversation with Al and everything, yet he’d still welcomed Titan into his bed. Demanded him into it, in fact.

He rolled from his side onto his back and felt a twinge where Titan had been inside him hours prior. Traitorously, his dick—already half-hard with morning wood—twitched with interest at the memory.

No.

Nope.

Nuh-uh.

Ezra was not going to jerk it while thinking about that jerk, and he certainly wasn’t mourning the fact that Titan wasn’t there beside him to go for another round.

He had been the one who’d insisted Titan leave, and he wasn’t about to lose his last shred of integrity by going back on the only good choice he’d made.

The sounds Titan had made, though…

The way he’d held him so hard he’d bruised his skin.

The hot, wet heat of his cum spilling into him…

“Goddamn it,” Ezra grumbled, and wrapped a hand around himself. Dignity thrown to the wayside, he gave in to the memories flooding his mind and let himself be swept away.

At least he didn’t have to feel guilty about this.

Ezra and Titan stood in complete silence just outside the doors to the mansion, waiting for their military taxi to arrive and take them to work.

Ezra was doing everything in his power to avoid looking at, engaging with, or otherwise acknowledging the alien’s existence; he focused instead on his travel mug full of coffee, pushing the slider piece up and down, but not drinking anything.

Titan stood next to him, not saying or doing anything, but Ezra had a feeling that was about to change.

There was a feeling in the air—a kind of buzzing pent-up energy—that made it feel like Titan was waiting for the opportunity to launch them both into a conversation.

Ezra clicked his slider lid faster, then took a swig.

He very purposefully did not look Titan’s way.

“You pleasured yourself to thoughts of me this morning,” Titan said out of nowhere as Ezra was mid-sip.

Ezra, who had been expecting some sort of bullshit, but had not been expecting that, choked and sputtered.

“What the fuck?” he asked, coughing, trying to get hot coffee out of his nose. “No I didn’t.”

“It is a natural thing to do. You do not need to lie about it.”

“I’m not lying,” Ezra lied.

“I can smell it on you,” Titan replied, which was among one of the wildest things anyone had ever said to Ezra, yet somehow explained nothing.

“What—” He cut himself off, glancing over his shoulder at the closed door behind them, then lowered his voice and said, “What are you even talking about?”

“I believe you humans refer to them as fairy-moans.”

“As what? ”

“Fairy-moans,” Titan repeated unhelpfully. “The smell one gives off to attract a mate.”

“Jesus Lord in Heaven, do you mean pheromones?”

“This is what I said. Fairy-moans.”

“No. Pheromones. You’re making an E sound, there’s no E sound. It’s ‘uh.’ Pher-uh-mones.”

“Yes. This is what I have said.”

Ezra rolled his eyes. “Sure. Whatever you say.”

They fell back into uncomfortable silence.

“Your fairy-moans are really quite pungent.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”

“If you had permitted me to stay with you in your bed I could have assisted you in achieving your climax, and then you would not have had to rely on thoughts of me.”

“What makes you think it was to thoughts of you?”

“What else would you pleasure yourself to?” Titan asked, sounding so earnest that it seemed like he genuinely couldn’t fathom the prospect of Ezra fantasizing about anyone but him. And like… he wasn’t wrong, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t deeply annoying.

“Here’s an idea,” Ezra said sharply. “Why don’t we not talk about my masturbation habits at seven in the morning?”

“When is a more reasonable time to discuss such a thing?” Titan asked. He wasn’t joking, and despite him self, Ezra nearly laughed.

“How about this—you can talk to me about them when I’m dead.”

“That… That does not…” Titan squinted, trying to suss out how that would work. It looked like he was about to question him further when the black military van pulled up the driveway to pick the two of them up.

“Remember, no sex talk in the Men in Black car,” Ezra whispered as the security gate opened and the van drove through.

“Is that the name of this vehicle?”

“Yes,” Ezra said, deadpan. The driver pressed the button to open the automatic door to the back seat. Ezra told the driver good morning. The driver said nothing.

Sighing, Ezra turned to Titan.

“C’mon,” he said, already resigned to his day being a day. “Let’s go to work.”

The drive to the Darvrokian consulate had been painfully awkward.

Titan had behaved himself, staying quiet about the previous night’s exploits, but Ezra had sat in constant anxiety anyway, certain that at any second he would pipe up with an “Ambassador Ezra finds me to have superior mating abilities” or some shit, and then, before he knew it, all of the world governments he worked with would know that he was an alien fucker.

Or worse, that Al would find out.

They made it in without incident, though, not that it helped Ezra breathe any easier.

There were still plenty of ways Titan could blow up his life.

Maybe by informing a client that Ezra liked to take it up the ass, or perhaps by asking Kyle if he’d heard Ezra moaning his name last night.

The possibilities were endless, and the horrors eternal.

Joy .

Security escorted them to the conference room where Ezra—and now Titan—screened Darvrokian visitors. Like always, Ezra wished them a good day and they replied by shutting the door in his face, leaving him and Titan alone.

“When I first arrived here,” Titan said in that same moment, validating Ezra’s every fear, “I envisioned how beautiful you would look should I bend you over this table.” He patted the conference table for emphasis, and Ezra felt his whole body go hot, as the thought of gripping the edge of the table for dear life while Titan plowed into him entered his mind unbidden.

“We’re at work,” he said through gritted teeth. “Don’t say stuff like that here. It’s unprofessional.”

“I am the most professional,” Titan said, offended. “I am even wearing the fabric rope you humans use to indicate professionalism.” He pointed at his tie, which was tied like shoelace bunny ears. Ezra had politely not commented on it all morning, which he felt was very kind of him.

“Right, sure. You’re an inspiration to businessmen everywhere. I get it. Just stop talking about us having sex. It was a bad idea and I just want to forget about it.”

“You said this about our first time fucking, yet we did it again,” Titan pointed out.

Ezra scowled at him and pulled out the file detailing the first client they were expecting that morning. “You’re such an asshole,” he muttered under his breath, then thwapped the file down onto the table before taking a seat.

“What was it that you said?”

“I said sit down and do what we’re getting paid to do.”

Titan narrowed his eyes and mumbled something to the effect of, “I do not believe this is truly what you said,” but he didn’t question him further.

Blessedly silent, he pulled out a chair at the same end of the table as Ezra, folded his hands in front of him, and looked at him expectantly. Ezra nodded, satisfied.

“Th is is the client we’re vetting this morning,” he said, handing the file over to Titan. He checked the time on his phone and added, “Kyle should be arriving with him and his escort any minute.”

As Titan flipped through the file, Ezra downed the rest of his coffee, lukewarm now with congealed sugar at the bottom, and grimaced. Maybe, he thought, it was time he get into tea.

When he set his mug down, Titan said something in his native tongue, getting his attention. “Sorry?”

“That is this man’s given name,” Titan explained. “But I see here in his paperwork that he wishes his human name to be Joe Johnson.” Titan pronounced the “H” when he said “Johnson,” and Ezra smiled a little in spite of himself.

“Yeah, not even Joseph or anything. Just Joe. There’s a picture of him pinned to his paperwork there. Do you recognize him? He says he’s a relative of yours, although I’m not gonna lie, the vast majority of people we have come through here are related to you somehow. Your family is gigantic.”

“Darvrokian families do tend to produce more offspring than human families,” Titan agreed.

Ezra watched him examine the little two-by-three picture paperclipped to the file.

It was a headshot of Joe in his Darvrokian form, which displayed none of his marking.

Ezra had tried to tell the US government that it was pointless to require photo identification for a species of shapeshifters who could change their appearance at will, but of course, they hadn’t listened.

They hadn’t even cared enough to create a field where each Darvrokian’s markings could be listed despite Ezra having explained that those markings were their equivalent of fingerprints.

It was, to put it mildly, a disaster, but who was Ezra to tell the government how to run itself? He was just the ambassador to their people, after all. No big.

“I do not recognize this being,” Titan announced with a shrug after a moment of consideration.

He set the file down. “This does not mean he is being untruthful, however. As you said, my family is quite large. I do not know many of my distant relatives personally. In fact, there are times I struggle to remember the faces of my much older siblings. Mine is the youngest of five clutches, and some of our ages are very far apart.”