The corner laboratory on the seventh floor of Mittelos Bioscience was dim from a dying overhead light. Richard took note of it.
He was thorough in everything he did here, as that was his role. The eyes and ears of their people, carefully observing the wannabe scientists they'd recruited to run fake trials. The best of them were the ones who asked few questions and were content with whatever answers they received. The ones who needed nothing more than the reassurance of great purpose to believe in their work. They rose to the top of Richard's list. From there, he would quietly shadow them, keen on identifying the cream of the crop, those who would be most loyal and devout in their service.
The man he'd come to observe today was one such hopeful.
With shaggy half-blond hair, a square jaw and a surfer's tan, he looked like he'd be better suited selling ice cream at a tourist beach town, yet he'd graduated from Carnegie Mellon. That was just one of a litany of facts Richard carried around about him.
Name: Adam Smarrson. Age: 32. Height: 5'11". Dual major in bioorganic chemistry and discrete mathematics. Shockingly handsome for his field, yet noticeably lacking in girlfriend history. Spent the past several years on pharma research that helped create drugs with worse side effects than the diseases they were meant to fight. Ready to do something that mattered.
Daddy issues.
Richard was engaged in the usual: checking research log files in a semi-pretend mixture of actual need and cover story. When Adam entered the room, it was immediately clear that he knew the presence of his suited superior meant more than business-as-usual. He still feigned a lack of deference, tossing Richard only the merest acknowledging look as he went directly to his workstation.
Richard noted it; status mattered where he came from, but not so much that it should interfere with the demands of duty. Adam's choice was pitch perfect. Just one of many reasons why the recruit proved promising for a future proposition to follow him into their sub.
But he wasn't quite ready for the orange juice yet. There was still a little bit too much unknown about Adam for Richard's taste. Most of all, why he seemed to lack a personal relationship history. Richard did not like to make his ultimate recruitment pitch without certainty of all the human factors that might come into play in its acceptance or rejection. That was a skill that his mentor in Mittelos work had imparted to him, and he had learned through experience how important it was to know the ins and outs of every aspect of a possible recruit's personal world.
Though Adam certainly had natural good looks, he also had a definite sense of good hygiene and grooming, the slight fuzz on his cheeks never untamed for the rugged look Richard himself preferred, a hint of cologne beneath his flawlessly white labcoat. Not to mention the subtly stylish dress shirt and pressed pants underneath. No, Adam clearly had a personal life. The question was, with whom?
As he pondered Adam's mystery, Richard turned his thoughts to the man he considered a sort of partner-in-crime, who waited for him back on island, looking forward to word of new mental muscle and might for their efforts.
Benjamin liked to be a man of some mystery himself, but as Richard had known him since he was a small child, he was usually exempt from Ben's attempts to seem cool and in charge. While the others mostly saw Ben's warmer side in book club or his history lessons for the kids, Richard had a chance to see it every Saturday when they had a "standing date," as he liked to think of it.
Alex stayed over with her friend Melissa and enjoyed a slumber party tradition while he and Ben took a break from their regular responsibilities. They dropped their respective leadership faces and dined together at Ben's house. At first, they'd started it for a weekly chance to catch up and report to each other the goings-on, but in quiet times they found themselves to be so up to date on each other's work that there was little to say. Their banter about art and nature and philosophy began simply as a way to fill the silence.
More often than not, it was Ben's banter and Richard's listening ear that filled the evenings. He wasn't a man of many words, and had no particular need to talk and talk and talk the way Ben did at times, no love for the sound of his own voice. What he did love was the chance to feel welcomed, invited, cared about.
His disinterested personal deity preferred to hide out his days in a foot and call Richard only when utterly vital, and Richard found it hard to shake the tendency of walling out everyone else around him, a habit he'd developed with age. With Ben, he'd missed the chance to wall him out. Carrying the bleeding boy in his arms long ago had lodged a permanent empathy within his heart. Thus, when Ben first asked him over for dinner, he found it all too easy to leave aside the tent he would otherwise retreat to, and say yes.
It was Saturday night now, and instead of spending it with Ben as he wished, here he was in this small, unpeopled lab, with this lone recruit who had raised his attention when an operative passed on to Richard that he regularly clocked in after-hours.
What would Ben say about Adam?
He'd note, first of all, that yes, it was a Saturday night, when he and Richard ought to be dining together, and when a still-young and unattached man ought to be out having a nightlife. Yet here he was, engaged in his project dutifully. So, Ben would ask, was he truly devout or was there something he had to keep himself from doing out in the world? Was Mittelos his sanctuary, or his self-imposed prison?
The room was large enough to give Richard a bit of distance, but too small for him to glance Adam's way without it seeming like staring. In silence, he observed him through the sounds in the room, through the sense in the air, and it was enough for him to deduce that Adam was distracted.
Before Richard could come up with a clever, subtly probing question that would elicit some information from Adam and make Ben proud, Adam offered up some information of his own in a glance his way, one that lingered just a little too long.
Richard straightened up and turned to look at him. The slight parting of the man's lips and the intent direction of his eyes confirmed it. Adam was cruising him.
With more decades than he cared to count under his belt of more loneliness than commitment, Richard had gradually learned his way through the mores of many different cultures when it came to-well. There was no polite way to think of it, he mused. Fucking.
Each decade had its own sort of way about it. The crash landers from the twenties were a fun and freewheeling crowd when they broke out their store of forbidden booze. The fifties had seen more than one door he had to knock upon offer up a housewife happy to jump his bones. His cock remembered more of the sixties than he did. Sometime after that, he'd found his way into his first bathhouse.
It had been a hundred years since he'd cared much about what acts he engaged in or what bodies he did it with-his immortal soul was already damned anyway, so it hardly mattered. Thus the whole concept of cruising, of men discreetly seeking out other men, struck him as unnecessarily subtle when it began to blossom in popularity beyond Navy docks and dark corners of highly moralistic societies. Nowadays, cruising had a place out in the open as well, and was certainly common where pride in men loving men had long since won out over shame.
But it still got the job done where discretion remained critical. And that seedier sort of cruising seemed to be Adam's method of choice.
Was this the demon he was running from, locked up at work on a Saturday night? Religious family, perhaps? Couldn't come to terms with his sexuality, had to sublimate it time and again until here, caught in a moment of unexpected privacy with his exceedingly male boss, he could hold it back no longer?
Richard licked his lips, but he had to admit, it wasn't at the satisfaction of having a possible answer to the odd question mark in Adam's file. It had been a while since he'd been off the Island, and his body had been aching for some attention from hands other than his own.
If he succumbed to this sudden rush of arousal, Richard knew he had to call the whole recruitment plan off. He wasn't willing to invite such complications home with him. But, he pondered, he did have at least eight or nine other possibles on the list. If the most attractive of the lot were to "fail," who would miss him? No one, Richard was certain, but his cock might dearly miss that mouth.
In the brief eternity he'd spent up in his head considering the offer, Adam hadn't budged his gaze. Indeed, the man seemed so intent that Richard began to wonder if Adam had really stuck around tonight for work alone. If he had somehow become aware of Richard's intentions to pay the facility, and him, a visit. Perhaps caught a roving glance from Richard before and seen possibility, even nudged help out of Richard's own operatives.
Richard's failure to avert his eyes from Adam's stare was answer enough under cruising rules.
But just to make it definitive, he shot the man a smoky look.
Taking a half-step closer, he could make out in the beam from Adam's workstation light the bulge beneath his pants. Any question left in his mind of where this could go evaporated at the sight. He felt his own body awakening, alerting him of its hunger. Adam took a step towards him.
Apparently, this was going to happen.
And yet, as Richard slowly closed the distance between them, the next thought on his mind was not of condoms or lube or whether or not Adam would find the rolling materials table uncomfortable if Richard were to slam him down across it.
No, he wondered what Ben would think.
And there was a part of him that wished he could tell Ben what he was about to do. Yes, he was private, he kept to himself by choice. But after so many flings over the years, it had become a little lonely, having no one else to appreciate or even simply accept that this side to him existed. That there was more to him than work and duty and retreating alone to his own bed at the end of the day.
He played the staring game with Adam, knowing that this particular involvement would end with this night, after which he would find himself swiftly transferred. When he allowed Adam to drop to his knees, take hold of his belt and his zipper, and run his mouth over his briefs, he knew this would be all there was, and after it, he would be yet again keeping it to himself.
Not like Ben would actually want to know, he reminded himself.
He knew that Ben was lonely. Sometimes it was quietly evident in the way pairs of candles lingered around his house, collecting dust, seemingly set out for a romantic evening that never came to pass, and then abandoned. Sometimes he could almost smell it on him, when Ben stood a little too close to him in the kitchen, asked him to stay a little too late into the night.
No, sharing his misadventures with Ben would not only be an invitation for reprimand, but it might even be unintentionally cruel, a reminder of everything Ben chose not to have. He knew enough about Ben to be certain that chance hookups were not his style, that he was much more the type for romance and monogamy, something his current position in life had so far failed to offer him.
Adam's mouth was on him fully and lavishly, as if the man were afraid it might run out of hard inches if he didn't suck it with ferocity. Richard didn't get this kind of physical treatment under Ben's dining room table. So why couldn't he keep his mind in the present instead of floating off to some past or future Saturday when they could be together again?
Simple enough, he realized, looking down at the vision of himself buried to the balls within the closeted man's lips.
It felt fantastic, but empty.
When he was with Ben, it felt fantastic in an utterly different kind of way. He felt the warmth of companionship and camaraderie. He could sense how much Ben cared about him, no matter how easily Ben hid it when they were in front of everyone else or when a crisis was at hand. It was in his home-cooked meals, his gentle questions, and his hours of chatter, more self-revealing than Ben likely knew. He felt wanted, needed, in a way that Adam's want and need couldn't touch.
Stubborn and hazy with a lust disconnected from the prattling of his mind, Richard pressed forward, dragging Adam up by his hair, tearing apart his buttons, tugging at his zipper, thrusting him backwards towards the materials table.
He cherished the brief thrill of shoving the meaningless contents aside-they were all fake anyway, made to create a show of importance. They scattered to the floor, giving Richard a moment of power to enjoy, to distract him from the kind of Saturday night he missed.
He splayed the man across it, feeling fairly unmoved by the foggy, half-lidded look of anticipation trained upon him as he flipped out his wallet. Condom: check. Lube: check. He was always prepared for anything, be it a surprise assault in the jungle or a chance to invade a young and well-muscled ass like the one he found under Adam's boxers.
The cock that met him was marvelous, too. There were no erect and slightly dripping shafts awaiting him at Ben's house, so why, the lusting part of his mind asked again, why think so much on dinner?
He stroked it thoroughly before finding a laboratory glove to begin the familiar process of lubing up his conquest's passage. Adam graduated from one finger to two and then three, swiftly enough that Richard knew for sure this was on his list of pastimes.
His curiosity as to why Adam would need to hide his desires in the modern age had gone out the window once he had chosen to go down this path. As soon as he returned to his work, he would close Adam's file, so he could cease paying any sort of close attention to the man. He had nothing to gain in wasting time learning more about him.
Learning about Richard was something Ben had always taken up with studied caution. Ben knew just how far was too far, and asked him questions no further. Was that why Ben never pried into Richard's own apparent lack of a personal life? Or was he too unwilling to invite a return probe into his own solitary state?
Surely, Ben would be none too pleased to know that Richard was now penetrating Adam's ass instead of his secrecy. Yet Richard chose to indulge himself, if only for a short while, in the fantasy that he could find in Ben someone with whom to share his own secrets, the sexual life that no one knew he led.
As he fucked Adam without restraint, he imagined first the process of recounting the encounter over a glass of wine with Ben. Imagined Ben reacting to it in character as if it were a fascinating discovery he'd made, or an exceptional new recruit he'd spotted for them- which should have been the news he would be bringing home.
He imagined, then, bringing Ben along with him to further his pursuit. Enjoyed Ben's approving comments.
Excellent work, Richard. I'm very pleased. Yes, keep working on him. A little to the left... Good, that's very good.
"What?"
The sound of Adam's voice was jarring. Not a word had actually yet passed between them that night. For all his studious knowledge, he had forgotten what the man sounded like. He gaped down at him, almost accusingly for the break away from any noise that wasn't a low moan or a grunt.
"You, you're grinning, Mr. Alpert," Adam panted from beneath him. "Wh... Why?"
Slightly mortified, Richard fixed his face back into a stoic mold, and murmured down at him, "That's on a need-to-know basis. And you don't need to know."
He renewed his thorough plowing of the soon-to-be ex-recruit, suddenly feeling determined to bring it to a conclusion. To keep him from asking any more stupid questions, he grabbed Adam's hand and wrapped it around the man's own cock, wordlessly demanding a show.
Adam was eager to please, and began to stroke himself like a champ. The show was sufficient enough to draw all his attention down into the burning meeting of their flesh. The man's moans became wild, but Richard's thrusts remained focused and efficient, even as they sped up to match a piston's force.
You're doing a phenomenal job, Richard... Keep going... Take him, _claim_him_... Then hurry back, Richard, hurry back home... To me...
The instant of Richard's climax intermingled so perfectly with the sudden return of Ben's imagined voice within his ear that he felt lost for a brief while afterward, out of place to find himself still there in the dimly lit lab, not instantly transported back to where he ought to end his Saturday night.
His withdrawal from Adam was lacking in ceremony. But it was obvious from Adam's demeanor, hastily rising and shuffling to clean off his own release from his chest and close his buttons as swiftly as they had been opened, that this was exactly the way Adam wanted it to be.
No hurt feelings, and no concern that Adam would ever say a word. It had turned out to be the perfect encounter.
Yet still so empty.
Not long after, Richard sat alone in his barebones mainland apartment, closing out Adam's file.
With that matter nearly sealed and done, Richard found himself drawn towards the bulky communication device that provided him a radio line in right to Ben. He had no idea exactly what time it might be over there, and he wasn't scheduled to call, but he felt a surprisingly deep need to hear the sound of Ben's voice outside of his own imagination.
Ben picked up after only a few seconds, indicating that he was likely at his desk. "Richard?" his voice came through, both pleasant and concerned in tone.
"Everything's all right over here," Richard gave him immediate assurance. "Just felt like giving you a call. That okay?"
There was a slight sound of hesitation on the other end, and yet the sound that followed was bright and grateful. "...Sure, Richard, of course it's okay. So... weren't you working on that possible recruit? Adam Sharrson, if I have it right?"
Richard smiled at Ben's skillful memory, and the thought of how Ben had "helped" him tonight with that very assignment. "That's right."
"Well, how'd it go?"
Richard paused, glancing down at the blank line atop the file, waiting for him to fill in the official reason for termination of consideration . "He was... too easily distracted."
"Can't have that," Ben chuckled, and he left it there. Richard knew he would, and yet, he couldn't help but think of his fantasy that Ben might someday want to know.
But was that truly the fantasy? Richard had to wonder as he noticed the warmth he felt inside at the mere familiar sound of Ben's voice. Maybe he didn't really seek to rub in his exploits to his lonely dining partner. Maybe he just wanted more of Ben's company, and pretending Ben was somehow involved in his other life was the quickest way at the time to have it.
"Ben..." Richard said, surprising himself at the soft and confessional sound the name suddenly had on his tongue.
"Yes, Richard."
"Hope this doesn't sound strange, but... It's Saturday night over here, and I... miss you."
Ben sounded gentle, even merry, when he at last replied. "You and I had a delicious ham. You were pretty quiet, but that's typical of you, don't you think?"
"Ben... You pretended I was there?"
The deliberate tenor of Ben's voice came across even sweeter now, through the rough crackle around the edges of their distance-crossing words.
"That's what I do, Richard, when you aren't here. You always have a place at my table."
Richard smiled, wide enough that he could feel it on his face. "That's... that means a lot to me to know, Ben."
"Richard..." Hesitancy was back in the faraway voice. "I... I've been thinking, and... there's something... I've... I've been meaning to..."
"I'm listening," Richard said encouragingly. Aware now not just of his smile, but also of his heartbeat picking up in his chest, he felt oddly more in tune with his own body while talking into a cold metal speaker than when he'd finished himself off inside another man just hours before.
"I... I hope it doesn't sound too ridiculous, but... I, well, I've been on my own for quite some time now... I mean, I have Alex, of course... but... but in terms of companionship, you, you're really... I haven't really had anyone else in my life but you..."
Richard waited patiently, the shy murmurs emerging from the speaker like music to his ears.
"I just... I feel a little... out of practice with, with anything outside the bounds of, of friendship, and I was wondering if you might, if you would consider, if you could possibly humor me and... let me... And-and I know we're both men so I'm sure it will sound absurd to you to begin with-"
"Benjamin, I'd love to."
Somehow, Richard could almost feel Ben blush from halfway around the world. Or maybe it was his own blush, but there wasn't a question in his mind that whatever it was that Ben wanted, if it was something that would bring them closer, something that might give him more to look forward to than meaningless one-night stands off-island, he wanted it. Oh, he wanted it now.
"You-you don't even, I-I rehearsed it so many times, I just-Richard, I didn't tell you... what I..."
Ben's flustered voice was far more delightful to Richard than the most attractive and sexually willing near-stranger could ever be. "Whatever it is, Ben, yes."
"Yes..? Yes to... to anything...? "
He barely caught the tremulous turn in Ben's tone, so distracted by a rising glee that something in fate or the universe had led Ben to ponder such inviting, reconsidering thoughts towards him as he had towards Ben. Richard leaned in towards the speaker, determined to come through loud and clear, and perhaps even a little... sultry.
"Yes, Benjamin. Yes, yes, yes."
There was a long and almost nerve-wracking pause before Ben finally spoke up again. The tremor was gone and in its place, a more thrilled brand of anxiety.
"You're back on Friday, aren't you?"
"Sure will be."
"So... How's next Saturday night?"
"Perfect."
"Great... Great."
They sat there together, as far apart as they could be, and yet Richard had not felt quite so close to anyone in longer than he could remember. The warm, quiet moment they shared could not possibly be more different than the determined, heated silence of the Mittelos laboratory.
"...Till then. Have a productive week out there, Richard. I... I look forward to seeing you."
Ben's giddy, nervous attempt to be polite was somehow the hottest moment of Richard's entire night.
"I can't wait to come home, Ben," he purred, and ended communication.
Richard was left alone again with the file. The night with Adam already seemed like a fading daydream. All that was left to do was fill in the blank on the front: Reason for Termination of Consideration.
Richard penned it in just as he'd told Ben, but he would keep the real reason quietly to himself. One more secret of a long, long life lived alone, devoid of welcoming care, with no one to share in his unexpected adventures.
He hoped that Ben would give him the chance to embrace a new way to live, starting with next Saturday night.