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Hardy’s hands freeze above the box. He’s holding the accompanying note for dear life, and he swears he can hear his own heartbeat, like some sort of fucked up soundtrack to his crumpled doggie bag of a life.
Thank fuck he’s in his office. He quickly glances up: his team are busy working the Danny Latimer case, no-one’s paying attention to him. He’s, he can do this, he’s the very picture of unbothered, he’ll deal with this on his own, and he doesn’t think Miller, who is in his office (why is she always here anyway?) has even seen –
Miller snatches the miserable piece of paper from his hands. The one that was in the box, with the, with the gift.
“Miller!”
The box just arrived here addressed to him, and like an untrained idiot, like a sodding rookie, he’d assumed it was just something vaguely police-y. Files he’d requested, or perhaps a, a part of a uniform, or something. Not this.
He looks down. What to even make of it? What messed up kind of mind comes up with this?
In the box, there’s a black dildo, a tiny packet of lube, and a soft pile of leather, which he assumes – look, he’s no blushing virgin. He knows things. That’s a strap-on.
“Who sent this?” Miller asks. Her voice is somewhere on the intersection between soft and sharp, and he can’t help but notice the way she has positioned herself between him and the open door, now, as if to shield him from any eyes peering in. Or maybe nothing so noble, maybe it’s so he can’t bolt. Which he very much wants to do right now. Dig a hole in the sand and bury himself in it like a shrimp.
He lifts the package and inspects it, as if he doesn’t already know there won’t exactly be a fucking return address on it, will there? It’s – it’s hate mail. Of sorts. He can’t figure out if it’s slightly, errr, homophobic? Or something? Plenty of straight people practice pegging in the bedroom though, of course, well, he’s never – but he – he shuts down his own thoughts, that’s what.
“Give that back,” he grabs the note from Miller’s hands, and she puts up so little resistance he’d feel a bit bad if he allowed the tight lid on his bursting chest to even unscrew a little.
He quickly rereads the message, scribbled in blue pen, in male looking handwriting. ‘This is what you did to those families in Sandbrook. Get FUCKED, Hardy.’
“Bit of a –” The words halt in his throat when he catches the look in Miller’s eyes. No. He cannot deal with any of that, whatever that is in her eyes, he cannot have it directed at him.
He feels dizzy.
“– waste of money,” he manages to push through his teeth. Heartbeat’s getting louder. Like a wave threatening to do him in, finally.
He forces himself to think of Danny Latimer. That boy’s family is counting on him to find his killer, he can’t allow himself to be distracted, be intimidated by a – a piece of silicone. Is all it is. Best not make a bigger deal out of it than it needs to be.
He puts the note back into the box and closes it, shoves it underneath his desk, and barely resists the urge to kick it, to shatter every piece of shite in this fucking place. He doesn’t have time for this.
Miller’s mouth twitches. “Any idea who wants to see you… be taken down a peg or—”
“Get out!” he yells. “Make yourself useful for once.”
She slams the door. Good. Let her stew. They’re not friends, he’s her boss, and he’s not going to let her investigate his pegging dildo, or something else insane and time wasting. They’re already short staffed as it is. The Latimer family needs him.
That evening, he waits until everyone else has gone home, then takes the box back to his hotel room. Can’t have this thing just sitting in this police station like a bomb. One of the younger staff could find it and file a complaint or whatever. He – yeah. He puts it on his hotel room’s desk and lies on the bed and looks at it, looks at it while the light outside and inside changes, ever changes, and he thinks of the necklace, the fucking necklace that was lost under his supervision.
–
They get their answers.
Danny Latimer’s family gets their answers and of course it doesn’t – doesn’t make him feel better, in fact it makes him feel worse. Like he’s birdshit on a window. Like he never should have come to this town, stain of a man that he is.
He wishes he was wrong so badly, he wishes things like this didn’t have to happen. He wishes he was out of a job due to the world being too – too good to need wretched people like him. No crimes to solve. No lives crumbling like they’re nothing. Built on quicksand.
And before he knows it, Miller’s in his hotel room, and his heart aches for her, for the news he had to deliver her back at the station. It’s – it’s not the worst case of his life of course, but it comes very – it comes very close.
He saw her hurl and cry and he had to – he had to touch her by the elbow and look at her and let her read the truth on his fucking face, the one he wishes he didn’t have to wear, ever, his serious face for families of victims. Face nobody should ever have to see.
He saw her explode in the interrogation room with her husband, all that anger, and he wishes he could have let her beat Joe up, god knows he’s wanted to beat up some of those bastards in the past, and he can’t even imagine how he’d feel if – but he had to stop her, and he feels bad about that, too.
Now she’s here, all broken trembling pieces barely held together by a piece of string, sitting opposite him in the chair in his hotel room. Christ, she’s even still wearing her orange coat, that’s how close she is to falling apart, and he knows, knows how that feels.
He sits on the bed and puts on his listening face, that’s the one thing he can bloody give her, isn’t it? He’s in just his shirt and his tie as if to tell her, look, no suit jacket, I could be your stand-in friend for tonight, and he tries to offer some perspective and answer her questions best he can, even though he has even less answers. Why are there people like that in the world, fuck if he knows, he’s no psychologist, he’s just the guy who puts them away.
He listens to her, and she looks like she’s about to cry, fucking hell, she won’t need a – a hug, will she?
“All along you said don’t trust — Why is that there?!”, she suddenly yells.
It jolts him out of his thoughts like a defibrillator to the chest.
He follows the wild trail of her eyes, and he curses himself to hell and back, because yes, right there on the hotel’s cheap little desk is the strap-on. Still inside the box it arrived in, unused, of course, but this whole situation – his inferior in his room, wee hours of the morning, with a dildo of all things, oh, human resources would have a field day with this one. Not to mention the press, if word got out, and isn’t her nephew that Daily Mail reject, oh fuck him sideways with a rake —
“I haven’t been using it or anything!”
She looks at him wide-eyed, like he’s gone mad. And who can blame her? He swallows like there’s a piece of driftwood stuck in his throat.
“I just —” He looks away, stares at the wall. It has a crack in it, from when he kicked it one night just to win from something in his life, inanimate or not. It hurt his toe a whole sodding lot it did. “I haven’t figured out yet how to recycle it correctly and—”
“Oh, shut up.”
He snaps his head up. She’s still looking at him like he’s a case. No, like he’s an entire case wall, and all his evidence is splayed across, his insides photographed, dissected. Every word he’s ever said to her, circled in red. His eyes pinned like crime locations on a map.
“You’ve been punishing yourself with it,” she says.
“What? I’m telling you, Miller, you’re — you’re miles out of line, and I never —”
“Not literally, you expired milk of a man. No. You’ve been displaying it in your hotel room like some sort of medieval torture device, like the opposite of a shrine, like a reminder of your failures in Sandbrook.”
“Oh, come off it.” This isn’t – that. This isn’t a therapy session, they aren’t friends, and this is just. A dildo. She needn’t overthink it.
“No. You’ve been coming home to sad sack Hotel California every night and looking at the Sandbrook Strap-on truly, truly believing you deserve it.”
“Don’t call it that,” he says, frowning, affronted. His mouth feels like it’s full of wet sand. His heartbeat’s back for an encore, right in his throat this time, like it’s knocking on a door. Thump. Thump.
Miller gets up and before he even realises what’s happening, she has taken the dildo out of the box, black and daunting, oh god, detective sergeant Miller is holding a sodding dildo in his hotel room, of all the things he thought might happen in his life. But it’s been a long, strange day, and stranger things have happened, she’s pointing it at him like a gun and looking at him, shadows tripping over her face.
“What are you going to do, beat me up with it? Fuck me in the arse?”, he says, leaning back, but the line doesn’t quite land, and he can’t quite hold himself up on those trembling arms like he wishes he could, it’s been – it’s been a day. He looks up at her from the bed.
And just like that, the atmosphere in the room shifts. They’re on the edge of a bloody cliff, and all they need is one little push, one little gust of wind, and he can’t, he can’t hear his own thoughts over the sound of his own heartbeat.
“Only if you beg me to,” Miller says, DS Miller, he reminds himself, but yes, that’s what Miller releases into the room, like a meatless bone thrown at a dog, and what is he? What is he but the wild, starved animal that’s going to launch itself at it, and accept a kicking to boot?
His mouth’s hanging open.
He’s staring at her, and she’s staring at him, and it’s the way that plausibly, that could still have been a jest, an off-colour joke between two coworkers after a long day at the office, never to be mentioned again. Only. Yeah. Only not like this, not in this room, not with the air this wet and heavy, not with him like a pile of washed up wood on the bed.
She shifts on her hip, like she’s waiting, and she is, isn’t she?
“Please,” he whispers, and a fear grips his heart – what if he, what if he misread this entirely, this is so inappropriate, he’s put his foot in it again, hasn’t he? He needs to send her away and hit his head on the pillow repeatedly and test if it’s physically possible to smother oneself.
But Miller, she – she clenches her jaw, and she says: “Turn over.”
And Hardy freezes. He’s never seen her so – so in charge.
She reaches into the box to take out the harness and starts to put it on over her trousers, christ on a stick, she’s not even going to undress for this, absolute madwoman, and Hardy’s never been so – he’s never been so fucking hard in his life.
“I’m not going to ask again. Turn around,” she says. She does remove the orange jacket, thank fuck for that. “I don’t want to look at your face.”
He notices her check his reaction for how those last words hit him, and he lets her see him smile. Briefly. Very briefly. Let’s not make a habit of this.
“You better not try cuddling or anything,” he barks with no bite, and he scoots further on the bed.
“Oh trust me, that’s the last thing – “
She doesn’t finish that sentence, but he finishes it in his mind: the last thing you deserve. That’s right. He’s an arsehole, isn’t he? The most this town’s had to deal with was parking tickets until he arrived. Walking bad luck charm he is, carried it all over from Sandbrook to this peaceful, boring shithole.
He quickly removes his tie, but not his shirt, that feels a bit – much. He removes his trousers, but not his pants, that feels a bit – presumptuous? He’s ridiculous, he’s so fucking ridiculous, he curses at himself, and he’s grateful he already wasn’t wearing shoes anymore. Should he try to remove his socks?
“Stop fiddling,” Miller orders, and he immediately drops down like a dog, and this is interesting, isn’t it? Did he need to be already in his forties until he discovered – this? He glances back at her, and she’s wearing the harness like it’s natural, like she’s worn one every day for years, and she’s opening the tiny lube packet with her teeth.
When she spots him staring, she snarls. “Don’t look at me.”
He immediately obeys.
Fuck, he’s such a cliché, isn’t he?
His cock’s straining against his dark pants, peeking out over the edge of it, and it’s weeping pathetically, oh, he’s just another dime a dozen authority figure that likes being ordered around in the bedroom, isn’t he? Completely weak for it, even. Begging for it. He’s breathing through his nose, let’s try and get this bloody heartbeat normal, get it down, down, down. His vision’s swimming a bit. But he’s horny, comes with the territory.
She touches his shoulder. Like a boat hitting water.
“I need you to not look at me, can you do that?”
He nods.
She moves her fingers to his hair, touching him lightly there, and he’s a – a weak dog, whimpering, barely audible.
“If you want me to stop at any point, I’ll kill you if you don’t say anything, got it?”
He nods, eyes still firmly closed. “Get on with it, Miller.”
She lets go of his hair and it’s, it’s fine, really. He doesn’t care, doesn’t need it. Would ruin the mood, this, any hint of softness and it would take him out of it, he’d walk out, straight into the sea, never look back.
The mattress dips as Miller gets on. She positions herself above him and unceremoniously slides down his pants. It’s – it’s embarrassing, isn’t it? The many seconds it takes to get the thing down his uselessly long bony legs. And he’s thankful she can’t see from that angle how pitifully hard he is.
He opens his legs a little more, like a needy pet.
“Oh, you – you’re gagging for this, aren’t you?”
He doesn’t reply, just lies there, ready to take what she gives. He can still feel all the energy radiate off her, all the pent-up anger, all the questions and frustrations and the radioactive dust of a house in shambles.
She sits between his legs and slides a hand upwards. “I don’t have much lube,” she says, a bit hesitant.
“Doesn’t matter,” he says, swallowing. Wrong words. She won’t like it. “Just – use it wisely. Both on me and the – the thing, okay?”
He doesn’t say it, but he knows that she knows it – he wants it to hurt, a bit. He’d hate for it not to. Because everything else does, doesn’t it? Why should he get to be an exception? Escape the pain of, of everything?
She spreads him, there’s no going back from this, not ever, he inhales sharply – thump, thump, thump in his throat – and soon he feels lube being applied to his hole. It should be cold, but she’s warmed it a bit between her fingers, and it’s, it’s doable. The soft pad of her finger is pressing down on it, not breaching it, just circular motions. Textbook.
He feels like the walls are going to crash in on him.
“Bloody hell, Miller, this isn’t a soft porn, we’re not doing a romantic scene, just, fucking, just do it,” he says.
It’s the wrong thing to say, it’s the exact right thing, because he can practically feel the way she’s shooting daggers at his shirt-clad back, he can feel her anger boiling.
“Don’t,” she warns him, then slips her finger in, and it’s – it’s got that resistance to it that he’s been craving so much, it doesn’t exactly hurt him, but he feels it, every bit of it, he feels it so good it drowns out the sounds of his heartbeats.
She almost pulls out fully, then slides back in, fucking him on her finger, while he, pathetically, seeks friction against the mattress. Christ. He could finish just from this.
“Not another word from you,” she warns, fingering him, and he whimpers, which doesn’t count as a word, no sir. “You wet paper bag of a man, is this what you’ve been imagining? You’ve been looking at that stupid box in your sad hotel room this whole time, thinking this is what – what you deserve? Is that it? This?”
She punctuates the ‘this’ by slipping another finger in, and, well, some moisture springs to his eyes, not tears, of course not tears, but it’s so good, it’s been so long since he’s had sex with anyone, and he – he needs this. Needs this like a fish needs a wriggling worm on the fishing hook. He’ll bite. He’ll bite, bleeding, always.
Two fingers are now thoroughly fucking him, and Miller’s adding a little more lube to the situation, but he knows she has to use it sparingly, so it’s not enough, it’s just enough, exactly what he wants, the way he clenches around her, or, she makes him open up for her, and he’s begging for it with every tiny noise he makes.
She adds a third finger, and his breath stutters, he sees stars, black dots swim before his eyes, when she crooks them a little, touching him in that place, that spot, fuck, he needs this, he needs – he needs more. He rocks back on her hand like his body’s saying please, please, it’s a full body beg, because he’s got no self preservation, no dignity, all of that was left back in, back in –
She removes her fingers entirely, and he whines, because of course he does, whines right on the bed he’s been falling asleep in mid-wank most evenings. He covers his face in his hands to keep from looking back, spread out, defenseless.
He hears Miller throw the empty packet on the carpet, hears her spread the rest of the lube on her – her cock. Getting it ready.
He’s never done this, but he thinks, yes, fuck, yes, why has he never done this, forty-three years old he is, who knows how much time he’s even got left with that battered heart of his, he’s forty-three and his cock is weeping against the mattress for all the time lost, both ways, past and future.
He should have done better. Been better. A better husband, a better dad, a better detective. If anything – if he was going to lose his family for being a no-good wastebasket of a man, then he should have at least solved every case that’s ever been thrown his way, at least it would have been worth something.
The tip of the dildo slides against him, and he almost wails. It slides up and down the cleft of his arse, catches on his rim, lets go, slides down to the backside of his balls, then back up, fuck, fuck all this. Miller pushes slightly forward, and Hardy slowly opens up for her, around the tip of the damn thing, and he wishes she’d just plough forward, get it over with already, shove it into him.
She doesn’t. She pauses after she slips inside him with just the tip of it, he feels himself close painfully slow around the silicone glans, until he has sucked that inside, greedy body that he has.
“Please,” escapes from his lips, and he hates himself a little for it, for how much he wants it. How little he can hide it. Like he’s been a dam these past 59 days and suddenly the levee’s breached and it can’t be stopped, can’t be contained. It needs out, out of him.
“God, you’re sad,” she says, and his cock twitches, how long is he even going to last like this?
He nods, panting, and tries to push back a little against her, suck more of her cock inside him, begging with his whole body for her to move, he feels the slow slide of it against him, the drag of it, and he’s crying from the adjusting, but he wants more, more of this, still.
She exhales hard and moves, pushes a bit further inside, and he moans with the force of it, the feeling of being filled with something so Other. He bathes in the glory of it. Of being used, not having to act, but being acted upon.
“You should have been better,” she says, and he can hear the emotion in her voice. He – he can’t argue with that. He should have been.
“You should have solved it sooner,” she thrusts inside him a little harder, and this, this is everything he wants, exactly this. Fuck. It feels so good. He whimpers, feels the thump thump thump of his heart behind his eyeballs, they’re stinging with it, bursting with the tears threatening to spill.
“Why didn’t you see it?” Even though she asks him, he knows, he knows she’s talking to herself more than she is to him, but he repeats it, in his head, to himself: why didn’t you see it? Why didn’t you protect her?
“Why did you come here?” She punctuates the question with another rough thrust, and he has no answer, he, he shouldn’t have, that’s the truth of it, not the real truth. But it is.
Of course he knows he’s not actually at fault for the boy’s murder, that would have happened with or without him around anyway, and they – the local community, they needed him to find the murderer, they needed an outsider to help them see, but, but it’s a truth he feels in his bones. He shouldn’t have come here, shouldn’t have listened to the cruel call of the water, of the cliffs, carrying his whole heart as it was threatening to spill between his fingers always.
“I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” she says, thrusting hard, and fuck, he knows it’s not true of course, it’s just something she needs to say, and he lets her say it, and not only that, it’s those words that push him over that very edge, it’s embarrassing is what it is, but it’s then, and so humiliatingly soon too, that he comes.
It’s the orgasm of the century, of a — of a lifetime. He comes incredibly hard. He’s panting, bloody hell, the whole room’s swimming around him, he comes and then – then a metal glove squeezes around his useless heart, nothing’s ever hurt this much in his life. Bloody fucking fuck. His fingers are shaking, he tries to grip the sheets, tries to reach for – anything.
Everything goes black.
—
He wakes up in the hospital. It’s a – a real fucking miracle. Wakes up with a burst of love for life and gratitude towards whatever’s up in the sky, which must surely be because of whatever medication they’ve put him on. Thankfully, he returns to his old self rather quickly when he sees who’s hovering over his bed, grim look on her face.
Right. Almost died with a dildo up his bum. He’s never going to live that down, they – they’ll never –
“You’re alive.”
Miller says it almost like she’s giving him an order. He’s alive. So he’ll live. He agrees.
“Aye,” he says, narrowing his eyes. Clears his throat like he needs to flush his whole body. “Did you…”
“Got you dressed a bit while I waited for the ambulance,” she says quickly.
A weight lifts off his chest, one he didn’t know anyone placed there (perhaps him, perhaps he did it to himself, as usual).
“Had to give you mouth to mouth first,” she says, like she’s angry, but he can see it’s not that, not anger. It’s – fear.
Can’t bloody have that, can they?
“I said no kissing,” he scolds her.
And it works, her face changes, frown lines following a different road.
“We didn’t agree shit!”
They can do this. They do this. Yelling. It’s easy. It’s them.
“It was unspoken, Miller!”
She hits his arm. What? Isn’t he supposed to be the — the pampered patient?
The machine that all his wires are attached to starts beeping, and for a second he’s afraid nurses will rush in, and they’ll look at him like they know what’s been going on. How he got here. Though surely they only patched up his heart, and they didn’t check the state of his arsehole while he was out cold?
Nothing happens. It’s still just him and Miller in a depressing hospital room.
She crosses her arms. Yes, that’s his luck, barely survived an orgasm, now about to get yelled at for it.
“You best not think I’m going to start calling you Ellie now,” he tries to disarm her, which somehow is very close to antagonising her.
“Wouldn’t want you to,” she says. “Not anymore.”
Right. They probably promoted her while he was being resuscitated.
“You know, if you wanted my job that badly, I was, I was leaving anyway.” He tries to sit up, grunts with the raw effort of it. Is this his life from now on?
Her mouth twitches, and suddenly she’s all over him, grabbing his hospital gown like she’s going to find a way to strangle him with it. She would, is the thing. She could.
But she leans close and hisses: “You don’t ever do that to me again, do you hear me? Don’t you bloody dare die on me, insufferable git.”
And maybe she meant it to come out harsh, but it’s entirely too soft, and Hardy feels the fucking fishing trap around his heart tighten, tighten, tighten.
“No. Wouldn’t want your kids to have two murderers for parents,” he spills from his stupid mouth, and he watches the words hit her. Watches her straighten up, retreat back into herself like a snail.
He regrets those stupid words immediately. But he won’t — he won’t take them back. He won’t launch a sorry at her like a cowardly missile. This is her chance to walk away from all this, the mess he is, he won’t take that chance away from her.
She’s scanning his whole face like she’s a sodding MRI scanner or something, and then she softens.
She raises an eyebrow.
“You think I’m gonna let you die before solving Sandbrook?”
It should hurt more than it does, words like shards of glass. If he said them to himself, they’d be a knife.
She sighs deeply, an audible eye roll. But it’s like she’s made a decision about something, like there was an Alec Hardy board meeting he wasn’t invited to, but he’s about to hear the results anyway, no appeal.
She throws a black plastic bag in his lap. He grunts from trying to catch it, a sharp pain flashing through his entire body. No, he won’t be playing any type of sports any time soon. Or walking. Good. He hates walking anyway, hates this whole place, the, the bloody sights.
When he looks inside the bag, his mouth suddenly feels dry.
It’s a dildo, a purple one, slightly thicker than the other one. And a harness. And a rather large bottle of lube.
“That’s not from the hospital gift shop,” he manages.
“It’s not, you watery soup of a man.”
Hardy looks at her. She shrugs.
“I binned the Sandbrook Strap-on.”
He pinches his nose. His whole body’s made of headache. “Don’t call it that.”
“That’s exactly why I binned it,” she says. He glances up at her, scarcely stitched together creature that he is, fish on the hook, begging to be thrown away, begging to be forced to stay.
“Besides,”, she adds, and she runs her fingers through his hair – his traitorous breath catches in his throat as she does. More, his weak heart thumps, more.
“Bloody gentleman you are. I haven’t even come yet.”