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Oscar knows he’s walking straight into a trap the moment he sets foot into his apartment, the lights in his kitchen switched on and the eerie silence of a cold, early spring night making his ears ring and his blood rush so fast towards his brain he almost keels over while hastily pulling his gun out of the holster, ready to shoot.
Deep down, he knows he should call someone. His boss, for one, or anybody who could grant him some reinforcements, whatever. Still, he gets that prickly sensation right in the tip of his fingers – there might be too much at stake for this not to be a pas de deux, a party to which he is the sole guest…and the sole host.
He takes a deep, steadying breath before entering the kitchen, his gun drawn and ready as he inspects the small space, noticing the two slices of browned bread long before smelling Lando Norris’ scent, an earthy, rich vanilla and coffee perfume that resonates deep within his bones, making his heart rattle in his chest.
He distinctly remembers leaving him for dead on a king size bed in a filthy rich flat in Montmartre. His intuition, however, is rarely wrong, so he already knew. He already knew Lando couldn’t be dead, he’s sure he would have felt that, somehow. Like a tear in his heart, a shot of ripping pain, akin to that of a blood vessel that bursts or something equally appalling.
He would have felt free, perhaps, or devoid of any purpose at last.
But nothing really noteworthy happened, so he got on the first plane back home and he had started rebuilding his life, shard after shard.
Now, Lando Norris is somewhere in his apartment and, as much as he feels like shit only for having such thoughts roaming freely through the four walls of his skull, Oscar cannot help but feel the slightest relief pooling warm and honey-sweet into the pits of his stomach.
He really doesn’t know when it started getting so bad, or how. Perhaps Paris was the catalyst. Perhaps you just cannot forget someone with whom you fucked and then stabbed almost to death in Montmartre. Perhaps it’s true what they say about Stockholm Syndrome or the theories about the reiteration of trauma. Perhaps, and that’s the most realistic outcome, he’s just an idiot who will end up dead, because you don’t stick a knife in a hitman’s guts and live to tell the story.
He carefully treads towards the kitchen table nonetheless. One of the slices of bread is half chewed on, the generous layer of jam spread over it dripping on a serving plate.
A very loud, very shameless part of him would take a bite right where the dents left by Lando’s peculiar teeth are more noticeable, just to taste his breath over his tongue once more.
Montmartre.
The long lasting taste of a minty cigarette. Champagne. Bubbles bursting in his mouth, salty and impossibly sweet.
He shakes his head. It doesn’t help clearing his mind, but at least it makes him look like someone who’s actively trying to resist whatever stupid impulse has taken hold of him recently, almost costing him his career and the life he has so hardly built for himself.
“I know it’s you,” he calmly says, eyes trained to detect every movement. It surprises him how cool he can sound even when his knees are painfully weak and his heart is hammering so hard in his jugular it fucking hurts. “Just come out, please. It’s been a hell of a day already.”
He doesn’t know why he’s treating Lando Norris with such civility. He’s a cold-blooded murderer, an assassin for hire, and now an intruder into his home. The very man who was about to screw his life up for good. Still, it feels like he cannot muster enough strength to treat him contemptuously, though he’d have every reason to shoot him in the head on sight.
“Rough day at the office?”
There's something rather poetic in a blade kissing your throat in your kitchen while you're debating with yourself about eating half of a slice of toasted sourdough just because your crush slash nemesis has bitten some off and you don't really remember what his mouth tastes like.
Oscar swallows, the tip of the knife perfectly placed over the pulse point, ready to be smoothly pushed in. Lando’s breath is hot against his ear, sticky with raspberry jam, and his lips are so close he can feel every single hair on his nape stand up, his breath coming out in a trembling gasp.
“I knew you weren’t dead,” he whispers, and that’s enough to knock almost all the air out of his lungs.
He hears Lando snort ungracefully, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and sliding his muscular, tan arm around his waist, to pull him closer than a smooth killing would require.
Coffee and vanilla hit his nostrils and Oscar feels stunned for a moment, his heart skipping a beat.
An obscenely big, ostentatious window opening over a balcony with a view. The smell of freshly baked éclairs, just delivered, still neatly placed in their all too pretty cardboard box on a formica table. Champagne, poured into two tall flûtes.
“What are we celebrating?”
“That you’ve finally found me, officer.”
Lando’s skin is marred where Oscar thought it was smooth. Someone must have tried to slice him up, judging by the long, thin cut across his forearm. He must have parried that.
“Yeah, not thanks to you,” he remarks, tracing a little circle on his hypersensitive skin with the ice-cold tip of his blade. Oscar doesn’t really know what to say, because there can’t be no real defense here, he wanted Lando dead and he acted accordingly, plain and simple. He still wants him dead, but whenever he happens to think about him nowadays he gets a weird feeling right at the base of his lungs, something he can’t really explain but that’s just there, disrupting his train of thoughts, bothering and bugging him to no end.
It tastes like vanilla and coffee, but also like expensive Champagne.
He still wants Lando dead, but he also wants to kiss him. Which, honestly, should gain him at least one psych evaluation, because how fucking twisted he must be if he thirsts over someone who doesn’t only kill for a living but also for pleasure? It’s so fucking stupid.
"Who patched you up by the way? I thought you were on the run,” he ends up saying, licking his dry lips, doing his best not to lean on Lando for stability. His legs don’t feel as reliable at the moment, and the adrenaline coursing through his throbbing veins is starting to make him feel dizzy and nauseous. Or maybe it’s just Lando’s perfume, so strong and penetrating, or the fact that he’s literally holding him, tight, tight, tighter.
He’s not sure Lando was really on the run. It’s always so difficult to determine such things while following someone who works for a very secret organization that has people in positions of power killed off in many freaky ways, maybe Lando was just enjoying some time off, a little vacation. Assassins for hire do get vacations from time to time, he guesses. Some me time in between brutal killings. Company policy.
He was hiding, judging from the intel he had managed to gather. A new identity, a new city, a fake cover-up job, always paying cash – hiding from criminal organizations like the one Lando works - worked? - for is practically impossible, so he should compliment him on his survival game. That much he owes him.
“It was the french système national de santé, actually, thanks for asking. Were you worried about me, officer Piastri? I’m flattered. I wouldn’t have found myself in such dire straits if you hadn’t gutted me like a catfish. Don’t you think you owe me an apology?”
So cocky. So fucking self-confident. An arrogant prick who could probably take three men down with only a wooden spoon and a rubber duck, but still an arrogant prick.
“I let you live. Isn’t that enough?”
Lando Norris smirks against the shell of his ear. Oscar’s vision swims, and he grabs at the kitchen table so hard his knuckles hurt and turn white in order to resist the temptation to just… give in to him. Letting him have his way, even if it’d mean they’d find him dead come morning, killed in a tragic break-in while trying to protect his scant possessions, that amount to fucking none. But it would be so liberating just to let Lando take the wheel for once. To stop running around each other in circles, unable to stop and too prideful to let the other have the upper hand.
“It wasn’t difficult finding you. I’ve followed you ever since you got under my radar…and I’ve got under yours.”
“You’re quite an interesting specimen, officer Piastri. Please, have a seat. You can also have an éclair, I promise they’re not poisoned.”
A weird feeling of déjà-vu. The éclairs sickly sweet, salted caramel exploding in his mouth as he bites into one. Lando’s eyes looking almost green in the sunlight, like the moss that grows all over the tall trees all around the hills.
“ Touché. But, as I recall, you too were at the end of your rope during our little rendez-vous. Are you in the game again?”
Now Oscar allows himself the luxury to smirk, shaking his head slightly.
“Why would you care? You came here to kill me, right?”
Lando yanks at him. Suddenly, Oscar can breathe again, the pressure of the knife on his throat no longer there. It weirds him out, but at least he can be free of turning and facing Lando for good, for once grateful to his parents for having made a kid with the least expressive face ever, a blank, unfathomable stare that has earned him a whole lot of nicknames around the office. He counts on it while carefully turning, his gun back into the holster, and his stare finally meets Lando’s, his breath hitching in his throat for the briefest moment.
“Kill you? Why would I kill you? What would the fun be if I killed you?”
There’s a large, ugly looking bruise over Lando’s temple, stretching as far as the corner of his left eye, which looks sore and bloodshot. A large gash bisects his lower lip, the crust fragile, bright red, swollen at the edges. Oscar’s stomach drops. It shouldn’t, because Lando is a criminal and he got a well-deserved beating but, damn, there’s something horribly brutal in witnessing a face just like his getting disfigured in such a dramatic way – part of him does even feel jealous at that. He should have been the one making a mess out of his face, no one else. It’s like a right he has earned, he thinks, given their history.
But no.
Someone else got there first, hitting hard, and somehow Oscar feels defrauded – this, however, is a feeling he’s not entitled to.
“You’ve been…beaten up.”
He doesn’t sound particularly clever while stating the obvious, his head tilted to a side, his brows slightly furrowed. Still, he might have hit a nerve, because Lando rolls his eyes and then shrugs, his cocky look a little less cocky than usual.
Fake, he finds himself thinking, trying to examine the bruise on the side of his face without reaching out to brush against it with the tip of his fingers.
“You should have seen the other guy. I mean, it’s probable you’ll see him anyway, once the river spits his body back…”
His manic, hysterical laugh is rather unconvincing. He’s not some kind of Joker, straight outta Gotham and blah blah blah, he’s more of a sad, desperate man who doesn’t look his age and perhaps not even his place in the world.
He looks rather pathetic. A living contradiction.
“Was he sent to eliminate you?”
Now it’s Lando’s turn to frown.
“Why do you care?”
In the quiet of his kitchen, Oscar weighs his options one by one, his face a mask of unreadable neutrality.
He could shoot him. Sure, Lando is fast and knows fighting techniques Oscar isn’t definitely familiar with, but as the saying goes you shouldn’t bring a knife to the gunfight and, unless proved otherwise, he is the one wielding a gun. He can’t say for sure that Lando isn’t carrying himself, though. He has seen him slipping a gun out of his sock, once, and he won’t risk his life on that. Calling for a squad would simply be impractical in his predicament and kindly show Lando the door won’t solve his problem, so…he’s left with no other option but to play along. For how idiotic the idea feels, overall.
“What the fuck are you doing here, if you don’t want to kill me?”
“Dinner,” Lando says, after a long moment of pensive silence. He manages to take Oscar aback, enough to break his composure and make the corner of his lip shoot upward in a confused look. “I’m here so we can have dinner together.”
“So, what do we do now?”
“You tell me, officer. Are you leading or am I?”
Lando Norris has big hands. Too big for a body so tiny. His fingers wrap around his neck and his head hits against the vintage fridge, hard. Swimming vision and black dots. Lando’s impossibly shimmering eyes, and his mouth so sweet and hot and possessive as he pushes him, as he corners him like a deer trapped in his headlights.
“Fuck me,” Lando whispers. Bottles of Champagne pop inside Oscar’s stomach.
Vanilla and coffee. Silk sheets. The parisian sunlight, gold and glittering, pooling all around them.
Vanilla and coffee. Oscar cannot say where he begins and Lando ends.
“fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck-”
***
“Peas? I don’t like peas. We could stick to a PBJ sandwich…”
Oscar hands him the bag of frozen peas, his brow raised in a mixture of slight disappointment and almost motherly resignation.
“It’s for the lip. It’s swelling up again.”
In lieu of thanking him, Lando nods, bringing the bag of frozen peas to his mouth and sighing with visible relief.
Oscar takes stock of the kitchen. The table is set for two, with a large bowl of salad arranged in the middle, courtesy of Lando who was very very insistent in voicing his wish to make himself useful. Oscar wonders if he’s really cooking dinner for a murderer on the run he should have already sent to jail and the answer - which is yes, by the way - isn’t at all comforting.
For the briefest moment, he considers the idea of talking to a therapist. Honestly, his situation is anything but a legal matter, or a crass matter of ethics whatsoever. It's just that a part of him genuinely feels for Lando, another loves the hunt far more than the prize, and another… well. It's got eyes. Oscar has got eyes.
Sitting at his table, picking his nails absentmindedly while keeping a bag of frozen peas over the tremendous gash+bruise combo, Lando looks nothing like the assassin Oscar has learned to loathe, just a model straight out of a magazine with oddly charming features and soulful eyes, his eyelashes so long they cast a dark shadow over his cheekbones.
“What are you making?”
Oscar stirs some rigatoni in the boiling water. He's not a pasta guy, but his pantry was a little depleted, and he has spent the last week eating at the deli or having meals delivered. He shrugs.
“Pasta. I hope the sauce hasn't expired.”
Lando makes a low noise in his throat.
“Shouldn't you call your squad, officer?” He teases then, eyes gleaming with something between gloat and genuine curiosity. Oscar doesn't really rise to the challenge, even if he would like to put his gun to Lando's bruised temple and just-
pull the trigger.
“I'd like to have dinner first. As I said, it was a hell of a week.”
“Mhmh. Too much crime in Gotham City?”
“They're trying to give me another lead,” he finds himself saying, the unexpected bout of sincerity disconcerting him first. “Since everyone thinks you're dead, they're trying to make me focus on something… someone else. But I knew you were alive, so…”
He fishes a rigatoni out of the water, testing it. He doesn't really trust the cooking time printed on the box, he likes his pasta al dente, slightly crunchy under his teeth. It occurs to him that he should ask Lando how he likes his pasta but this, unfortunately, would be too much even for him.
“How did you know it?”
He wisely decides to skip the stupidly sentimental explanation and go straight with a kinder version of the proverbial bad penny, but since there is none, he just shrugs.
“Intuition,” he says.
He doesn’t hear the air move, not even the tiniest sound, but suddenly Lando is behind him, pinching at his hips rather shamelessly, hard enough to leave a bruise.
“So I am your only one, officer Piastri? I am honored,” he chirps, and for how much Oscar tries not to give into his unexpected urge to rest his eyes and just lean into him, it’s all in vain; he does, of course, his heavy eyelids quivering under the immense weight of the nightmarish workday he had – on days like this, even the company of a hired killer makes him feel safer than walking into his office and facing a bunch of assholes who think he’s spiraling out of control running after ghosts. Ghosts that are very much alive, just like he suspected, but how could his squad know? He has stopped wondering what the fuck he’s doing with his life on that fateful day in Montmartre anyway.
Lando’s chest is unexpectedly solid against his back, all lean muscle and taut tendons, and his fingers are so warm he can actually feel them under his shirt.
Lando is a killer.
Lando makes a living by murdering people.
Lando has got the blood of countless people on his very hands.
The fact that Oscar has to remind himself the main reason why Montmartre happened in the first place speaks fucking volumes.
“How did you learn to move like a ninja?” He mutters, almost letting out a moan when Lando’s long fingers finally slide under his shirt, untucking it, brushing ever so gently right over his hipbone.
“Training,” he breathes against his ear. Then, with a swift move, he snatches a fork from the countertop and stabs a floating rigatoni that he brings to his mouth without even checking if it’s too hot to eat. “Dinner’s ready!” He declares afterwards. Oscar mourns the loss of contact the exact moment his fingers slip away, leaving him panting and disarrayed to strain the pasta.
***
The knife slips out of his sleeve right when Lando is undoing the buttons of his shirt, biting into his collarbone like some feral creature, all snarling teeth and nails that leave bloody grooves into his skin.
Sliding it into his lower belly is easy, easier than cutting through the hard crust of a sourdough, the flesh surprisingly compliant, surprisingly soft.
A gust of wind makes the pearly white muslin curtains swell like clouds behind him. Outside, the Montmartre sun beats against the saxophonist that’s playing smooth jazz for a handful of coins.
Crimson blood against smooth silk. Silk doesn’t soak up, so the blood keeps pooling on the surface, spilling over the wooden floor. There’s blood on Oscar’s face, some even into his hair. Lando spreads it all over his mouth, sealing it shut.
“Let’s make it our little secret.”
***
“Do you still want to kill me?”
Lando is pinning him against the wall, arms above his head, his wrists held in a tight chokehold that makes his curled fingers tingle unpleasantly.
“Yes,” Oscar whispers, pecking at his lips. He can feel Lando’s hard cock press insistently against his thigh, and it twitches when he says that yes, he still wants him dead, as if their little game isn’t sick enough as it is.
“And what about bringing me to justice?”
Justice? What justice? he would like to argue, but it would bother him immensely to kill the mood. Eros and Thanatos, lust and death. The thought crosses his mind briefly before being swallowed by the white noise that has taken hold of his brain when Lando has cornered him, kissing him until all the wind had been knocked out of his lungs and all he could do was hold onto him for support, asking for more.
That’s a new low, even for him. And since his path has crossed Lando’s for the first time, he has been repeatedly hitting lows he didn’t even know were there.
“No. I don’t think it was ever my intention.”
“This is to the death, and no sooner it will stop,” Lando muses, quoting something Oscar doesn’t recognize.
But he is right. It’s either Lando or him. Oscar doesn’t want to dwell on the implications right now, not when Lando is rocking his hips against him, making Oscar’s cock strain inside his unbuttoned trousers, the belt slacking over his hips.
“Do you want to kill me now?” He asks breathlessly, finding Lando’s mouth and trapping it into a showstopping kiss, his heart hammering under his ribs.
“Do you?”
“I don’t know.”
He didn’t pay enough attention in Montmartre. Lando’s lips are soft and plush, softer than he could have imagined, and his skin is dotted with dark moles, so juicy he wants to lick at them, he wants to know whether they taste like chocolate or not.
“We should move to a room with fewer knives.”
Oscar nods, not even sure about what he has agreed to. Even now he’s not paying enough attention to the details, all of his focus trained on a single thing, on the murderer that’s pinning him against a wall, grinding him to the edge. Still, he’s got enough spirit in him to show Lando the door to the bedroom, barely turning his eyes towards it, letting Lando take care of the logistics. It’s fast and effective; for some reason, he should have seen it coming, and yet he gasps with surprise when Lando ties up his hands, tightening the belt around his wrists right on the brink of pain, but not quite.
“Safety precautions,” he mouths against his throat, ravaging it, marking him. They leave a trail of discarded clothes behind them. Lando’s nondescript clothes literally scream that he’s on the run, that he has been running long before their rendez-vous in Montmartre, and as much as he’d like to pry, Oscar knows he’d never get a satisfying answer on that, so he doesn’t, because he’d get himself killed before killing the mood – now he’s tremendously aware of that, and it chills him to the bone.
Lando is never really rough with him, not even when he pushes him onto the bed, still tied up, making sure his gun is out of reach for both of them, lest someone gets ideas.
Oscar watches in a trance as Lando lets his tight boxers slide down his muscular thighs, his legs covered in sparse, translucent hairs, while his dick rests against a curly, dark bush, which looks soft enough for Oscar to dip his nose in, inhaling his scent, feeling lewd and filthy like a mating animal, all instincts and skin and want, want, want.
“Like what you see, officer?”
Enraptured, Oscar nods, wondering if perhaps he’s under the influence of some weird chemical his body cannot properly process.
“I’m going to untie you. Don’t do anything stupid,” Lando warns. Only now Oscar notices how sharp his teeth look, how pearly, stark white against his dark skin. No wonder he felt sore for a week after Montmartre, given how many times Lando had bitten him, back then.
He’s not surprised at all, however, at how skillful his fingers seem, how fast. He unclasps the belt, allowing him a couple of seconds to massage some circulation back into his hands, before grasping at his fingers and pulling his open palm against his belly, where the pink, ugly-looking scar left by the very knife he has stuck into him is still healing.
Slowly, Oscar traces its outline with the tip of his index finger, feeling every dent left by the stitches, picturing the blade puncturing the skin, making its way through the muscular fascia, digging, tearing. Cutting through him so easily, gliding into his flesh smoothly, meeting no resistance whatsoever.
“You wanted me to hurt you,” he says, realizing what he should have known all along, not without feeling some butterflies messing around in his stomach at the thought.
“I wanted a token of your love, officer. You cannot blame a man for having some…peculiar needs.”
“But I don’t-”
love you, he would like to say, but the words die on his tongue long before he has the courage to utter them out loud. Lando cups his face, squishing a little too hard. He’s got fucking big hands. It doesn’t even feel right, given how tiny - albeit ripped - he is.
“I guess you keep a folder with my name on it on your desk…” he teases, using his other hand to roughly undo the last buttons of his shirt, taking his sweet time with the small buttons on his cuffs.
“Yes,” Oscar whispers, arching his back as Lando peels the shirt away from his shoulders, letting out a weirdly musical whistle of admiration.
“You take your workout seriously, officer Piastri,” he compliments him, his fingers running across the V shape of his hips, dragging around the defined lines of his abdomen. “So, what’s in my folder?”
There’s a genuine hint of curiosity in his always so derisive, taunting singsong tone. Oscar could recite by heart the scant information he has on him. No birthplace, no real name, just Lando Norris, the alias he goes by preferably, though there are others, many others, some of which ludicrously stupid – he likes playing tricks on the Interpol, apparently, and he doesn’t really hide that he’s got a God complex, probably tangled into layers and layers of past trauma and abuse, some of it even reported in his file.
“The birthdate that was given the first time you went to juvie,” Oscar replies, in between appreciative moans, as Lando straddles him. “Your earliest criminal record. Arson. You stole a car and crashed it into the dehors of a cafè. You never completed your social service program. Then there’s nothing…until 2018. You pop up in the UK and you get arrested for carrying counterfeit money.”
Lando bends over to suck a mark into his collarbone, and Oscar can feel the corners of his mouth curl in a grin, but he doesn’t understand if it has something to do with him squirming at the sudden pain or what. For as much as he, too, can be kinda unfathomable, Lando is just so unhinged it’s hard to understand what motivates him, or whether any of his feelings could be true or just faked, straight out of a psychopathology manual.
“And then, the handsome rookie links me to a series of murders, and the rest is history…”
“It’s not written yet.”
“Amen to that, officer Piastri.”
What happens next is nothing more than a blur. Lando on top of him, obscenely grinding, grinding, grinding. I want you to cum in your pants for me. He does, he does, the pressure in his lower belly so hard the release almost sends him into a blackout, and then there’s Lando’s tongue, lapping at his cum, licking him clean.
“Will you fuck me, this time?”
“Yes.”
He goes pliant, unresisting under Lando’s unyielding pace, restless, relentless, seeking something Oscar doesn’t really understand but he feels it, he feels it, embedded into his very bones.
Kinship.
Not exactly love, but someone who you can call your equal.
It’s like an epiphany of sorts.
This is to the death, and no sooner it will stop.
It rings into his ears until he comes, and he comes, and he comes and he’s spent, finally letting his eyes flutter close and darkness engulf him, Lando’s labored breath in his ear, lulling him to sleep.
***
“Officer. I thought my ass bouncing on your dick sent you into a coma.”
Oscar flinches at first, startled, not really used to having someone sleeping in his bed…or whatever Lando Norris, murderer and wanted criminal, was doing while he was passed out, his brain finally shut down like a broken laptop. The most restful night’s sleep he had in a while, it almost pains him to admit to that.
“You wish,” he mutters, rubbing his eyes. “How long was I gone?”
It’s weird to wake up to their tangled bodies, Lando’s arm draped across him, their noses touching just so in the dim light coming from the street below.
It feels like Montmartre all over again.
It has nothing to do with Montmartre.
“Who do you think I am, someone who really gives a shit about what time it is? Jesus Christ, officer Piastri. I’m not in a rush, and so aren’t you.”
Oscar grunts. It’s beginning to feel a lot like familiarity and this, too, is far from ideal. Developing a taste for someone like Lando Norris could be extremely dangerous – it fucking is.
“Unlike you, I have things to do, tomorrow.”
Lando exaggerates a very dramatic pout.
“Well, I do too, officer. For example, getting the fuck away from this country before someone quietly puts a bullet in my head.”
“So you really are on the run.”
“Nah. It’s far more complicated than this.”
Oscar sighs. The digital clock on his nightstand reads three in the morning, so he should assume he hasn’t slept a lot, but it was enough to make him feel energized, like he has actually slept and not just napped.
Maybe he just needed to fuck. Or just to lend the wheel to someone else for one night. Either way, ethical matters aside, it worked splendidly, and he doesn’t care if the person sharing his bed - and occupying half of his body - is the salaried equivalent of Ted Bundy, he’s just feeling more or less fine for the first time in ages, he might as well enjoy it while it lasts.
“So, was your purpose to fuck or to say goodbye, Lando?”
His name rolls out of his tongue in an almost purring sound, which makes Lando ruffle his feathers with delight.
“It’s nice when you call me by my name, Oscar.”
He doesn’t know if Lando’s perfect british accent is fake or natural, he likes it nonetheless, it’s reassuringly posh, somewhat charming. Calming. And he shouldn’t feel so confident in the company of someone who has a body count that could make any serial killer look amateurish but, as they’re both naked, he cannot think of a place in which Lando could be storing a knife or a gun, since he cannot feel any under the bedsheets.
“I asked you a question,” he says, drawing tiny circles in the small of his back. Lando scoots closer, shifting until he’s laying between Oscar’s leg, his chin resting on Oscar’s breastbone.
“Fine. Yes, maybe I wanted to fuck. Maybe I just wanted someone to dine with, it’s not a crime, I think, no? But yeah, I also wanted to say goodbye. It’s been a nice chase, officer, but I really must go.”
Oscar can’t help but let out a small, husky laugh.
“You know I’ll be onto you in no time, right?”
“Nah. You won’t find me. As I said, I loved our little game, but I can’t make any mistakes this time. There’s worse fates than being killed by you, you know?”
“I bet I could find you anyway. Even if you don’t make any mistakes.”
“That would be very unfortunate, Oscar. It would only mean that you’d be a little too late.”
Oscar ends up sighing, especially when Lando starts leaving a trail of slow, wet kisses all over his chest, taking his left nipple between his lips and sucking gently.
“Up for a smoke?” He asks, once he has had his fill of moans and gasps that Oscar cannot take back. Oscar nods. He’s not a smoker but he keeps a pack of cigarettes in his drawer just because. In his line of work, the pressure is just too much, sometimes.
“Let’s put something on first,” he mutters, not at all happy with the idea of getting dressed, when all that he wants is to stay in bed, maybe not cuddle but something frighteningly similar, naked, warm.
Still, Lando doesn’t need to know about it. So, Oscar puts on his big boy pants and trudges to his desk, to retrieve a beaten pack of Chesterfields from the top drawer.
***
“What were you thinking when you were stabbing me?”
Oscar’s fingertip falters, then it resumes its featherlight stroking, up and down the puckered scar adorning Lando’s taut stomach. He remembers thinking how easy it was. How smoothly the knife was puncturing his belly. How wrong he was when he used to think that humans wouldn’t go without uttering a sound, as Lando gasped and gurgled almost silently under him.
“I thought that killing someone might be easier than anybody’s willing to admit,” he says, his voice dropped to a barely audible whisper, blowing out a cloud of bluish smoke that disappears into the cloudy night sky.
“You went all in. You wanted me to bleed out.”
“It seems like I didn’t tear a major vessel, though.”
“Yeah, well, it was effective, even if you didn’t manage to kill me. When I woke up in the hospital, I was fairly impressed.”
“Wow, thank you. I really feel validated, now.”
Lando huffs out a giggle.
“See, officer? It’s your sarcasm. That’s what got me in the first place.”
Oscar snorts ungracefully. Here, exposed and cold, it’s easier to show Lando his unguarded flank, the traitorous blush spreading all over his cheeks. He shakes his head, squishing the butt of his cigarette against a pot that has once hosted a long dead basil plant, and he takes his sweet time examining him, trying his best not to let the tiniest detail slip.
How curly and soft his hair looks. How many moles dot his upper body. How muscular his legs are, how perfectly straight his naked feet. His hands, so big and strong and warm, pleasantly calloused. His nipples, dark brown, crowned with soft, straight hairs. He thinks Lando couldn’t be more handsome. He has no fucking right to be this handsome, while being the vilest creature Oscar has ever met.
“You should go. The odds may be in your favor if you catch a train before dawn.”
Lando shrugs. Oscar wonders how he cannot be shivering in this cold while wearing nothing more than a clean pair of borrowed boxers. He, on the other hand, is freezing in his short-sleeved pajamas, his hands hurting from the biting wind.
“They’ve never been,” he replies after a while, pulling Oscar closer, inhaling his scent. “But thanks for the tip. I’ll see myself to the door.”
Together, they head back inside, and Lando helps himself with some clothes from his closet. Oscar doesn’t really know why he’s letting an assassin for hire rummage through his clothes as if they normally share them, but he’s still buzzing with the pleasant bliss of his multiple orgasms, so he doesn’t really complain. He lets Lando borrow a gray hoodie, some soft, comfortable sweats, a jacket and even a pair of jeans he stuffs inside a supermarket bag.
He doesn’t see himself to the door, eventually. Oscar tags along, shuffling his feet against the ice-cold floor, and he doesn’t pull back when Lando kisses him, his fist closing around the hem of his old shirt and tugging so fucking hard.
“I hope I’ll never see you again, officer Piastri,” he whispers against his lips, breath hitching.
“I will find you. You know I will.”
Lando’s fingers end up tangled in his hair, and he strokes and pulls, hard enough to hurt a little.
“You’re so fucking determined to die, aren’t you? They know who you are, Oscar. Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Wow. Careful, Lando, or I will start thinking that you care about me.”
There’s no snarky comeback from his part, only an enigmatic smirk followed by a slight shrug.
He goes off into the chilly night without looking back, but Oscar knows he’ll find him, one way or another, mistakes or not.
This is to the death, and no sooner it will stop.
He crawls back to bed, where Lando’s peculiar scent lingers, embedded into his pillows and linens. It’s somehow later than he thought. When he manages to fall asleep again, his alarm is set to go off in less than a hour and a half, and yet he doesn’t remember having slept so soundly in a long time.