Part I. Phil is adjusting to being Adrian Gillespie’s pet pig.
Continuing on from A Clean Pig.
Phil Hutchinson, a detective inspector, has stumbled into being the kept pig of the beautiful young Adrian Gillespie – half his age, devastatingly attractive, and sick. Uses a wheelchair, takes a bunch of meds, is weak and ill and has a thousand allergies sick. So why the fuck does this kid have such a hold over him? Why does Phil feel like falling to the floor at his feet whenever he lays eyes on him?
Dom/sub dynamics, age gap with the younger one domming, lots of powerlessness and grappling with self esteem, building to some fucked-up sex.
Phil’s fucking tired.
Next door have a new dog that keeps fucking barking – the wife’s mother’s died, or something, so apart from all the funeral arrangements they’ve been saddled with this grumpy old dog that’s not used to all the people walking by on this street, hates the buses, goes fucking ballistic whenever it hears an ambulance siren or whenever the binmen come.
He’d thought that after the wake was done with, they’d get rid of it, but it seems they’re keeping the fucking thing – he sees the daughter walking it after she comes back from school most days, and it seems excited for all that, scruffy little black and grey terrier thing sniffing everything it can, but she never seems particularly enthused about it. Then again, she’s fifteen. Phil doesn’t think she’s enthusiastic about fucking anything.
The past two months have been pretty dull. The usual everyday stuff – paperwork, straightforward cases, even more straightforward, boring fucking interviews. Diversity meetings.
Fucking diversity meetings.
He’s coming out of a fucking pronoun workshop – 50,000 fucking knife crime offences last year, and he’s meant to be checking people over for a fucking she/her badge – and walking out to his car when he stops short, shifting his rucksack on his shoulder.
Gillespie’s car is waiting on the far side of the lot, the van standing out compared to the other cars about. Apart from the fact that it’s red instead of black or grey or silver, you might easily think it was just a waiting Uber, and Phil walks over and gets into the back as casually as he can.
It’s not an Uber.
“This is a fucking police station,” he says. “Someone’s gonna fucking notice if you just come and pick me up whenever he feels like.”
“Above my paygrade, mate,” says Laborious King from the driver’s seat, pulling out, and Phil sits back with a huff of sound, pulling the belt over his chest.
No Gillespie today, and no Hanzalah either – just the driver.
Phil doesn’t know how he’d define his relationship with Adrian Gillespie, exactly. He hasn’t fucked the lad. They’ve— Well. Gillespie’s touched him. Made him come. Made him come every time he’s gone around to his house, this being the third time that Laborious has come to pick him up from work, although it’s never on a regular schedule, and he’s never given any forewarning.
If he was a pretty girl, or even a pretty boy, some rich lad sending their car to pick him up and take him out to their house, Phil would think of himself as, if not a boyfriend, something of a toy or a plaything. But Phil’s a middle-aged cop on the pudgy side, and Gillespie is a lavender-dyed fairy boy in a wheelchair who’s twenty-something and richer than God.
The fuck sort of label do you put on that?
He knows that whenever he enters Gillespie’s presence, whenever he slides into the car and Gillespie is waiting for him in the other seat, or when he gets out to Gillespie’s house, that his breath catches in his throat. It’s scary, somehow, or maybe just invokes a bit of anxiety – more than anxiety, it invokes a sense of hunger, a sense of want, and there’s some sort of fucked-up gimp mask Marquis de Sade leash and collar shit tied up in those feelings, but Phil doesn’t have the words for it, and he’s not about to start Googling.
At least, in the absence of Gillespie today, it’s just Laborious in the driver’s seat, and no Hanzalah.
Hanzalah Biswas, Phil had initially thought of as being Gillespie’s bodyguard, but he’s learned of recent that his actual position is personal assistant. He fucking is Gillespie’s bodyguard, Phil knows that, but he’s seen him do more in the past two months than just stand guard at a door or kick someone’s (normally Phil’s) head in.
Phil’s inside, now, whatever that means, whatever that extends now, is inside Gillespie’s circle, goes into his house. He witnesses the admin that Hanzalah does – invisible work, most of it, in a way that being a bodyguard isn’t. He hears him on the phone, double- and triple-checking access somewhere Gillespie’s going – “… the ramp. You don’t know? Get me somebody who does. No, now.” – and goes through allergy lists, sends air filtration systems in advance, double-checks the grocery list with Ysbal, Gillespie’s cook. He goes ahead into venues and checks everything himself – ramps, weight limits and distances for the Gillespie’s chair, makes sure the toilet is actually accessible, puts little bans on perfume if they actually want Gillespie’s business.
Hanzalah’s office is one of the first rooms as you enter Gillespie’s little manse, and standing on the threshold of it, Phil has seen the huge set of boards that dominate one wall – a map of London, a map of the UK, with pins marking regular venues, friends’ homes (Phil’s place in Plumstead is marked with a little black pin), and then there’s lists of contacts as well: friends, suppliers, doctors, tailors, dentists, barbers, anybody and everybody, with Plans A through F available at any one moment.
Laborious is just the driver.
And he doesn’t hate Phil like Hanzalah does.
Hanzalah is Sylheti, with brown skin that’s darker around his eyelids and his lips, black hair that’s always combed very carefully with a particular parting, his beard and moustache always carefully trimmed. He has an oval-shaped face and there’s a lot of softness in it – he’s got dimples and rounded cheeks, lips with little definition to their shape, big round eyes – but he wears it severely, is always scowling, has furrows in his broad forehead and around his mouth from frowning.
Laborious King – whatever sort of fucking name that is – is white, from up north, converted to Islam in his twenties. He’s in his forties now with dark brown hair streaked with grey that he wears long, in thick waves down to his shoulders, and he always wears a black and silver embroidered cap that goes with the clothes he wears. Hanzalah doesn’t cover his head outside of prayers, but he exclusively wears white kaftans and loose-fitting trousers, whereas Laborious wears suit trousers and open blazers and collared shirts and a stupid silver belt buckle that has a rider on a horse, not an American cowboy, but a Persian warrior with a helmet and a bow and arrow.
They look a right fucking pair, the two of them, both of them short and stocky, Hanzalah always scowling (when Phil’s around, anyway), Laborious usually smiling.
“Good shift?” Laborious asks now in his easy, good-natured way.
“Shit,” Phil answers, rubbing at his eye. “Yours?”
“It’s been alright,” says Laborious evenly. “Hospital appointment this morning, bloods and ECG.”
“Bet Hanzalah enjoyed that,” Phil mutters. “He have to take any of the nurses to task for not masking again?”
“We got a private room across the road rather than going into the hospital proper – all clean, well-ventilated, but yeah, he did have to fight them a bit.”
They drive with no radio on. Laborious doesn’t like to have it on when he’s driving – he and Hanz will have it on sometimes when they’re just waiting in the car, some local Bangla station or sometimes a sitcom or podcast or something on Radio 4, but it’s always flicked off again when he starts the ignition.
“You’re from up North, right?”
“Up Yorkshire way.”
“Sheffield?”
“A bit further east – up past Hull.”
He’s got a sort of posh accent, for a Yorkshireman – not that it’s not Yorkshire, just that Phil is pretty sure that he came from decent money, and while he didn’t go to university when he was younger, he’s done courses now. He reads a lot, Phil knows, reads a lot of history, a lot of poetry, a lot of fucking everything. It’s one thing to feel stupid around Gillespie, who quotes Latin and Greek and went to university after going to a posh private school – it somehow feels more grating to feel stupid with Laborious, who looks like he should be rough, and seems like he should be rough, sounds like he should be, but obviously thinks a lot, and puts all that thinking to use making Phil feel like a fucking moron, as soon as they get past the small talk.
“You like London?”
“Sure.”
“Live here long?”
“Fifteen years, thereabouts.”
“Got much family?”
“Not down here.”
“Back up North?”
“Yeah.”
“Talk to ‘em?”
“Sure.”
“Wife?”
“No.”
“Kids?”
There’s the slightest hesitation, but Laborious’ tone is still easy when he shakes his head and says, “Nope.”
“You and Hanzalah together?”
“You’ve seen us. We’re partners.”
“At work.”
“Yeah.”
“In private?”
Laborious shrugs, as if the question doesn’t mean anything. “Sure.”
“You fuck?”
“Nah.”
“Haram, is it?”
“You’d want to talk to an imam for that. I’m no authority.”
“Cagey, much?”
“You’re a cop, Phil. What do you expect?” He smiles as he asks the question, like it’s friendly, like they’re friends. His eyes look soft – they’re a very light brown – but maybe he does hate Phil as much as Hanzalah does. Maybe he just shows it in a different way.
Phil is quiet, looking out of the window. “He fuck cops before? Gillespie?”
“No.”
“Older men? Men my age?”
“Sometimes. Not a regular thing, though.”
“Mostly women?”
“Hmm… Yeah, maybe. Say, fifty-five percent women, then twenty-five, thirty percent men. Nonbinary people, the rest – or androgynous ones. I don’t take a census, and I wouldn’t know as much as Hanz or Ysbal and Andreca. I’m not normally in the house with them, see. My little cottage is separate to the house.”
Phil is quiet for a long time, presented with two conversational pathways.
He’s noticed that unlike the rest of the staff, Laborious lives in a separate outbuilding at the far end of the grounds, a little bungalow cottage, and he rarely comes into the house proper except for meals. He and Hanzalah sit on the bungalow’s little porch together sometimes in the evenings, drink tea and once, Phil’s seen them smoke together, but Hanzalah always comes back to the main house, then. It’s interesting. Odd.
Nonetheless, Phil chooses the other option.
“Nonbinary,” he repeats, finally. “Like. They/them.”
“Sure.”
“What do you think about that?”
“What do I think about it?” Laborious asks, raising his eyebrows.
“Yeah.”
Laborious makes a quiet “hmm” of sound, looking forward at the road as they stop at a crossing, his fingers idly tapping a rhythm on the wheel before the light turns green and he accelerates again.
“It’s complicated, from what I can see,” he says. “All of it, the transgender stuff, from the outside. How are we to understand it? Your body not feeling like it’s right, or like it’s yours, trying to change it to fit, to make it line up. At least for the binary transgenders, there’s a playbook. You know what women look like, you know women who look like you – or you know what men look like. You have family members to go by, you know, or you have people out in the street, celebrities.
“For the ones that want something else, where do you start? Being androgynous, feeling androgynous – what does that look like? Where are the role models? Kids are androgynous, but that’s because they’re not yet developed. That’s fucked up, right? That you’d have to go back to that, to be hairless, flat, undeveloped, to be read as neutral, or that you’d have to develop everything to an extreme the other way. Massive tits, massive beard. Where do you start, and where do you stop?”
Phil doesn’t say anything. He isn’t sure what he was expecting, but this sort of fucking philosophical musings on the whole thing, on how to actually go about it, was not what he expected.
“Massive tits” was one of the things a man could not have brought up in today’s fucking pronoun conversation.
“You haven’t read any of the Hadith, I’m guessing,” says Laborious. “Or Classical Poetry.”
“You’d guess right.”
“Mukhannathun, I don’t know what they would call them today, what the kids would call them, but men who are very beautiful, effeminate. Musicians, artists, but not necessarily. Men who resemble women, and live in the way that women do – men who are delicate, soft, instead of hard, and who other men desire.”
“Like your boss, you mean?” Phil asks, and Laborious laughs.
“Maybe,” he says, smiling fondly. “He is the sort of man that other men write poetry about.”
“Mucka… That’s not haram?”
“Some were servants – eunuchs, some of them, or possibly just, you know, in-between, not transgender, but like, hermaphrodite. Khuntha. The prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, at least, I think, twice, insisted they be removed from the homes of women as household servants, where they were commonly employed because they weren’t felt to be sexually interested in their mistresses, but that was to do with the, um… Gradation? Not every mukhannath was the same, some were more effeminate, some were attracted to women, and might actually want to try to seduce them, and that made them unacceptable – some were musicians, and that was bad in itself.
“Just being effeminate or incongruous with an expected gender isn’t itself sinful. I suppose it’s all about if you choose to act in a certain way, or if you have been made that way, and have little choice in it.
“We are well-designed, carefully, thoughtfully designed, in our bodies, but we are permitted to change them – for reasons of cleanliness, or if we are sick, or injured. Men and women were each created and designed, and designed to be different to one another, but all the ways in which we are different, and how, the ideas about that change with time.
“To be transgender, even to be nonbinary, is that an injury of the mind, a mismatch of the mind and the body, that needs correcting? To be intersexual, androgynous, in some way? To be wired, for lack of a better word, to desire men instead of women, or to desire women, where we should desire men? Where is the line between how we are created, and how we choose to act? It’s a conversation between our scientific understandings of biology and the body, of bodily chemistry and the mind, as much as it is between scholars of scripture.”
Nodding to himself, Laborious stopped smiling now, but looked serious. “It’s a good question, but I’m no great scholar,” he said, as if Phil had just posed this whole conversation as, again, some kind of philosophical prompt. What the fuck should he have expected from a man who listens to Radio 4?
“No great scholar”. Ha.
Stopping at another junction, Laborious glances up at him in the rearview mirror, and Phil meets his gaze.
“You use that word pretty confidently,” he observes. “Haram. Everything isn’t haram, Phil. What do you think, that Islam is a religion where everything is proscribed against in holy law, everything that isn’t expressly encouraged as sacred, is forbidden?”
“It isn’t?” Phil asks, wryly. Laborious’ smile has no sharp edge to it, but it still makes him feel uncertain.
“The word of Allah is there to love and guide us, to improve us, and light our way,” he says. “Mashallah, my God is not a policeman.”
“Fuck off,” says Phil, and Laborious laughs – at him, not with him.
Phil sits in uncomfortable silence, his skin prickling hot under his clothes, the rest of the way out to Chislehurst, and Laborious is kind enough, at least, not to prompt any more conversation.
* * *
There’s a pool in the basement of Adrian Gillespie’s home. It’s not some full-sized Olympic thing, the massive luxury things you see in some TV Yank mansions – half the cellar is dedicated to stuff that needs controlled, cold storage, a little bit of wine, but mostly medical supplies.
This half of the basement level is dedicated to the pool, which is long and narrow, lets Gillespie do lengths, getting exercise without putting undue stress on his joints or the more sensitive parts of his body. There’s a little jacuzzi as well, and both have gentle slopes to allow easy access, loads of bars to support yourself or pull yourself up.
When they’d pulled up, it was Ysbal who’d said, “Oh, hullo, Mr Hutchinson. Why don’t you take this tray downstairs as you go?” and put it into his hands – a bottle of some kind of awful-looking iced tea for Gillespie, a glass of water for Phil himself, and a plate of cut fruit, cheese, grapes.
“You into this raw food shit?” Phil asks as he walks over the wood decking that forms most of the floor – not as slippy as tile – and puts the tray on the table, then settles into one of the seats.
Gillespie is a slowly moving streak of white and lilac in the water, his strokes perfect and even and very well-choreographed, good examples for somebody trying to learn. He does three more lengths, then rests his pretty white hands against the side of the pool, lifting his head out of the water.
“I don’t know, Phil,” he says softly, wryly, in his posh Edinburgh accent, “what that question is supposed to mean.”
“You have a fucking cook,” Phil says, watching Gillespie loosely grip the bar and lean on it as he moves slowly up the ramp. He’s in a tight lilac set of trunks and nothing else, all scarred flesh and a few tattoos – a tattoo of Bagpuss on one ankle, a packet of Parma Violets tattooed down on his hip, visible over the waistband of his trunks, and inked on the back of his neck, a little Disney Tinkerbell. “But half the time, all she puts out for you is fruit and cheese.”
“I don’t want to eat a hot meal, I only just finished swimming,” Gillespie says mildly, taking his dressing gown from over the bar and pulling it on, pink and fluffy terrycloth as he pads over in bare feet.
When he stumbles slightly, but doesn’t reach for the little rollator he has with the seat for using here in the pool, Phil gets up and puts his arms out, and Gillespie grips his forearm with one hand and his shoulder with the other, leaning on Phil to be supported over to the table.
As he picks at a slice of edam and plucks a few grapes out of the bowl, Phil goes over to the rollator and brings it over, passes the towel for his hair out when Gillespie holds out his hand for it, and brings over his slippers, too.
“But you do eat hot meals,” Phil says. “Fucking when?”
“Tonight,” Gillespie says, “if it meets with your approval. Ysbal has been stewing rabbit in red wine since early this morning – rabbit, tomato, carrots, potatoes.”
“Rabbit,” Phil repeats uncertainly. “I’ve never eaten rabbit before.”
“Squeamish?” Gillespie asks, raising his eyebrows as he keeps on towelling off his hair, working the moisture out of it before he tips his head forward and wraps it up. “It’s not Thumper, dear. Would you rather have something else?”
“It taste like chicken?”
“It’s gamier than chicken.”
“The fuck does gamey taste like?”
“Like game, Philip.”
“I don’t eat game, I’m a domestic fucking pig, lad, lived in London all my fucking life. Not even free range.”
No matter that Phil’s just told a joke, Gillespie laughs in a condescending way that makes Phil’s heart flutter in his chest, rolling his shoulders and leaning back in the chair. There’s still a little water on his chest and down his neck, little droplets of shining wet at his neck and the top of his sternum.
It’ll taste salty, if he has Phil lick it off him – saltwater pool, less chlorine, not as irritating as a real chlorinated pool.
“You’ll enjoy it,” Adrian says. “Ysbal is a very good cook, I’ll have you know.”
“I believe you. Just only seen her do salads and cheese plates, that’s all.”
“I don’t bring you here to enjoy Ysbal’s cooking,” Adrian says softly, with a little smile like he’s keeping a secret, and Phil’s whole chest feels hot – his cheeks are burning, and there’s heat between his legs, too, his cock twitching. He’s glad he’s in his work trousers instead of jeans – there’s a little more give in these than the denim would give him. “Do I?”
“No,” Phil whispers.
“And what do I bring you here for, Philip?”
Phil clears his throat. “You’d know better’n me,” he says, then takes a sip of his water.
“Perhaps I want to hear you say it.”
“Well,” Phil says. “You bring me here to fuck with my fucking head.”
“Is that all I’m fucking with?” Adrian asks, raising lilac eyebrows, and Phil exhales, shaking his head. “You look tired. Too much mischief in the pigpen this evening?”
“Next door have got stuck with this fucking dog. Yappy little thing, barks it fucking head off all fucking hours. It’s not like it’s somewhere really busy – it’s fucking Plumstead – but it used to live out in the fucking country. The old lady died, but it’s too old to put in a rescue.”
“The barking is keeping you up at night? You should borrow some earplugs.”
“Freaks me out,” Phil mutters, shaking his head. “Sleeping with headphones in, too – feels, uh. I don’t know. Vulnerable.”
“I suppose you can’t do an accurate threat assessment with one sense silenced,” Adrian murmurs. “Surely you aren’t worried about burglaries in Plumstead?”
He puts a lot of emphasis on every sound in the word, on the P, on the s, the t, the d, makes it sound like Phil lives in a fucking shithole.
“No, I’m not worried about burglaries,” Phil says, “but sure, somebody might want to break in and rough me up. It’s not common, but it fucking happens. I’ve put a lot of people in the fucking nick.”
“Does that make you feel powerful, Philip?” Gillespie asks, taking a draw from the awful iced tea drink. “Sending scary men to prison – sniffing out their little malfeasances, taking evidence, putting them behind bars?”
“Why would that make me feel fucking powerful? Most of ‘em get a few years and come right out again – if they don’t get put on bullshit house arrest in the first place.” Phil mutters, running a hand through his hair and irritably picking a grape out of the bowl when Gillespie pushes the bowl toward him. “You’ve seen what the fucking Serco service is like, they’ve got all these work experience cunts driving around in vans, none of the EMS registers are where they should be. They take those security ankles on and off as easily as if they were jewellery.”
“Hanzalah watched the Dispatches on Channel 4,” Gillespie says mildly. “I didn’t watch it myself.”
“You call yourself fucking informed?”
“I don’t need to watch a Channel 4 documentary to know the prison system is in shambles.”
“Uh huh. You’re a real fucking intelligentsia.”
“Intelligensio.”
“Fuck off.”
“Eat the grape, Phil, don’t just hold it in your palm like somebody’s left bollock.”
Phil puts the grape in his mouth and pops it, chewing, swallowing.
Gillespie is smiling at him, once again, in the indulgent way you might smile at a pet dog or a cat – and he fucking hates it, and it makes his dick hard. When Gillespie keeps his heavily-lidded gaze on him, Phil reaches out, takes another grape, and eats it.
“You eat lunch today, Philip?”
“Uh huh. Was in the station all fucking day, ordered in from some fucking place his boyfriend likes. Pasta.”
“Pasta too gay a meal for you, Phil?”
“It’s not about it being fucking gay. I just think it’s crazy to order takeaway fucking pasta.”
“What did you order?”
“Bolognese.”
“You are so abhorrently and loathsomely English, do you know that?”
“Uh huh.”
“Eat another grape.”
Phil does.
He eats another grape just because Gillespie fucking told him to, and he doesn’t even like grapes – he knows it, Gillespie knows it. They both know it, the two of them down in this fucking rich kid’s playroom together, that Phil will eat anything Gillespie fucking tells him to, the grapes, the strawberries, the cheese.
Phil swallows if Gillespie spits in his mouth – fucking thanks the kid, if Gillespie spits in his mouth.
He’d eat a fucking crab stick if Gillespie told him to, and see if his dick could get hard in the time it took for him to wheeze and beg for his Epi-pen.
Phil watches Gillespie eat, waits for him to finish the plate and stop picking at it, stop sipping at his drink – when Gillespie stops picking and pushes the plate aside, Phil gets up and helps him to sit on the seat of the rollator, then pushes him over to the lift.
“You look fucking tired,” Phil says. He can’t keep the genuine anxiety out of his voice, and he doesn’t know where it comes from, the sudden terror of this kid fucking dying – he’s sick in all kinds of ways, injured in all kinds of ways, fragile in all kinds of ways. Fucking dangerous, but vulnerable, too, and Phil wonders for a second what he’d fucking do with his life if Gillespie died, what the Hell he’d do with his life.
This is, what, the sixth time he’s even met the kid in person? The seventh?
It makes him fucking dizzy, the sudden terror of being all alone in the fucking world again, and that’s what he’d be, fucking alone. Alone and pathetic and not even getting his head fucked with.
“I had a bad reaction to something on Tuesday,” Gillespie says as Phil pushes him into the lift, rubbing at the side of his nose and then pinching the bridge. “I went to that poetry reading off the West End, and Hanzalah did go and check the ventilation would be alright, and I was near to the door, but this group of girls came in in a whole cloud of perfume. I was just a little itchy at first, then I was coughing and hacking. Slept very badly, and then I was poorly the day through, I’m still a bit weak now.”
“Fuck’s sake,” Phil mutters, shaking his head, and steps out of the lift after pressing the button to send Gillespie up, and he rings the bell to let Hanzalah know he’s coming up.
He picks up the tray and their glasses, bringing them up the stairs – Ysbal and Andreca are playing cards at the small kitchen table, and Ysbal smiles when he comes in.
“Oh, Mr Hutchinson, you are good,” she says. “Just leave it there on the side, I’ll wash up and put everything away now in a minute.”
“He ask for anything?”
“Nah,” Phil says. “He might have asked Hanz, I don’t know, I just sent him up in the lift.”
Hanzalah helps Gillespie shower whilst Phil changes into some pyjamas and a hoodie, and then they settle in the small sitting room with the heating on because Gillespie can’t help fucking shivering at the change in temperature once he’s been in the hot water – the pool is heated, but it’s not such a big difference. He’s wearing flannel pyjamas even though it’s still decently warm out and wrapped in a duvet, and he looks fucking miserable and pale sitting in the big armchair with his feet up.
Crazy, that this kid can be so weak, so fragile, and yet have so much fucking power over him.
Phil doesn’t sit down, just stands aside as Hanzalah moves through the room, tidying up a little and bringing over a hot water bottle to help him ‘cause he can’t regulate his own fucking body temperature when he’s sick, stands next to him as he takes some pills and drinks his water, and then puts a cup of tea next to him, and a little plate of biscuits.
Phil knows why he really eats so many cold meals – because the smell’s not as strong when his meals are cold, and it doesn’t set off his fucking nausea as fucking bad. He looks a little green as he snaps a NICE biscuit in half, then into quarters, and puts it on his tongue, crushes it against the roof of his mouth instead of chewing it between his teeth, swallows.
“You need anything else?” Hanzalah asks.
“No,” says Gillespie. “Thank you.”
Hanzalah touches the backs of his knuckles to Gillespie’s shoulder, then heads off, giving Phil a scornful look as he slips out of the room. Phil doesn’t sit down on the sofa next to Gillespie’s chair – as Gillespie picks up the remote for the TV and flicks idly through one fucking streaming service or other, Phil comes closer.
He doesn’t even like movies that much, Phil knows – he likes to read books, and he likes to sit in the quiet and the dark and listen to an album with his headphones on all the way through, then makes notes on it in a little table. But he can’t lie down at the moment without falling asleep, and if he falls asleep, he’ll sleep too much tonight, and come out of it with a bad fucking headache; and he can’t concentrate on reading, either, ‘cause the words will swim in front of his face.
Phil drops to his knees on the rug, which has fucking— Christ, not Pokémon, some other fucking thing that’s basically like Pokémon. Yugi something, or Digimen, or something. Something like that on the rug.
It doesn’t matter: little creatures that feel the same under his knees as he crawls forward, rests his elbows on the pouffe, and puts his hands flat against the hot water bottle under Gillespie’s feet for a few minutes, letting them warm up, before he grips at Gillespie’s right foot.
Immediately, he groans, and Phil thrills with want and heat at the look on his face as Phil slides his thumbs up against the arch of his foot, up toward his toes, pressing into the meat and muscle. He can see the strain and discomfort in Gillespie’s face as Phil works his foot over, see him trying to relax, but he can’t, ‘cause it feels good, but his body hurts, and it’s weak.
Phil goes until his own hands fucking hurt, until he can’t anymore, and Gillespie looks down at him, his eyes slowly opening, wrapped in his fucking blankets, feeling too cold, and still fucking sweating.
“Do you want me to put my foot in your mouth, Philip?” he asks softly. “Would you like me to step on your pathetic little cock and balls, grind them into the floor with the heel of my foot, crush them just a little? You could come in those ugly trousers you wear to work, couldn’t you, if I rested my foot on your neck, against your jaw, put my toes over your tongue?”
Phil swallows. It’s a loud gulp, ugly.
Why does this kid fucking affect him the way that he does? Why does he make his heart beat so fast, and his ears fucking ring? He’s not even hard right now, not like he was downstairs – he’s horny, but it’s fucking, he doesn’t know, intellectual, psychological. He’s horny and slavering with want at the idea of serving this fucking kid, not just sucking his toes, but maybe feeding him the fucking grapes instead of just bringing him the plate, maybe kneeling here on the floor and holding his fucking cock in his mouth.
Gillespie’s slapped him around a little, hurt his cock and balls – squeezed them, slapped them, twisted them around, done the same to his nipples. Made Phil touch himself whilst Gillespie watches and makes commentary, but barely ever fucking touches himself.
The idea of Gillespie actually touching him makes Phil feel a little faint. He wonders what a heart attack feels like. He wonders if Gillespie could actually fucking give him one day.
The best he could fucking hope for is to die before this fucking kid does.
It’s too much at once, all this fucking feeling, all this emotion, all this fucking heat. His head feels full, like it’s been filled with cotton wool, or wall insulation, or fucking candy floss.
“Which one do you think hates me more?” he asks, hearing his own voice come out hoarse. “Your driver or your PA?”
“Oh, Laborious, hands down,” says Gillespie without hesitation. “He doesn’t hate very much, that man, he tries very much not to, but if he does hate, he hates the police. Hanzalah just finds you disgusting. Laborious cringes away from the concept of your existence.”
“Huh,” whispers Phil from his place on the floor. He doesn’t know how to feel about that, either – makes him feel kind of crazy, but hey. At least the vibes he’s been picking up from King aren’t for nothing. “Why does he try not to hate things? Is that a Muslim thing as well?”
“Some men have a lot of reason to hate the world and the people in it,” Gillespie says, and shrugs his shoulder, “but if they start, they’ll never be able to stop. There’ll never be room for anything else. The sort of – scumbag, I believe, is a suitable word – who becomes a policeman.”
“You think I fucking hate the world and the people in it? You think that’s why I do what I fucking do? What, you think the same thing about fucking, the binmen? Cleaners? That’s all the police are. People want to make it out that we’re fucking, heroes, all that shit – no, I don’t believe that. But we’re the fucking cleaners. It’s our job to clean things up. Clean a street up. Get the fucking, dealers, the thieves, the thugs, out, so lads like you can wheel along and go un-fucking-molested.”
Gillespie clucks his tongue. “Where do these early release debacles and overfull prisons fit into this metaphor? Rubbish dumps that need to be filled in and started over?”
“Bring back the death penalty. Prisons’ll have room again.”
“Oh, Philip,” says Gillespie, and he slides his foot against the side of Phil’s face, rests it against his shoulder, and Phil is having fucking palpitations at the contact of it, at the intimacy, at how tiny he feels at Gillespie’s feet like this. “Whatever am I to do with you?”
“Fuck my fucking asshole, probably,” Phil mutters.
“I’m getting to it,” Gillespie whispers, and Phil can’t hold back the shiver that runs down his spine.
He takes a little while to pick something, and then he irritably rings the bell for someone to come in, which takes Phil by surprise – it’s Hanzalah, and he leans in to listen to Gillespie’s request, then nods his head like it’s something normal and basic and reasonable.
Which is why it takes Phil by surprise when Hanz pulls him up to tie his hands behind his back. He doesn’t protest. He doesn’t fucking say anything, just stares at Gillespie as Hanz ties his wrists very neatly and then ties his ankles too. He wonders for a second if he’s about to be fucking killed, be killed in the fucking silken pyjamas that he wears in Gillespie’s house and the soft hoodie in pastel blue that’s not his fucking colour either. He wears these clothes because they’re soft and comfortable for Gillespie to touch, no polyester for him to be allergic to, no smells from work, nothing.
Just—
Softness.
(And Phil likes the softness. He’s never had clothes this soft in his fucking life, before coming here.)
The rope is soft too. It feels soft as Hanz ties his ankles together, then grips Phil by the hood at the back of his neck and pulls him toward the sofa, shoves him down, and Phil stares up at him, at the expression of professional neutrality on his face. The ropes around his wrists and his ankles aren’t tight or biting into his skin – they’re tight enough to bind him, but loose enough and made of a soft enough weave to be comfortable.
“Anything else?” Hanz asks casually, and Gillespie, his mouth twisted, gestures for Hanzalah to help him get to his feet, which Hanz does, putting out his arms the way that Phil did earlier to support him and help him move around to the sofa. Phil learned how to do it from Hanzalah.
He breathes in sharply through his parted teeth as Gillespie eases himself onto the sofa and then leans over his lap, one elbow between his thighs, a pillow under his head – he presses back against the sofa cushions, squeezing his eyes shut, as Gillespie positions himself over his thighs and against the swell of Phil’s belly. Hanzalah brings over the hot water bottle to put under his feet and puts the blanket over him, pulls the table with their drinks on and the TV remote within reach, and then takes his leave.
“What the fuck,” Phil whispers.
“I’m tired,” Gillespie mutters – this is hot, though. It’s fucking hot. It’s hot for Gillespie to call in his fucking PA to turn Phil into a useful, still piece of the furniture, to make it easier for him to leech heat off him, and Phil doesn’t know that he’s a good person for being fucking hard about it, but Gillespie doesn’t acknowledge the press of Phil’s half-hard cock against the back of his upper arm.
He just settles in place, half-dozing, and Phil doesn’t move. He can’t play with Gillespie’s hair or stroke his back, can’t fidget or shift around, try to wrap his arms around Gillespie, which he fucking would do, if he wasn’t tied up, he knows, not to be annoying, not to be a dick, just because.
After a little while, not able to follow the fucking chick flick Gillespie’s turned on, Phil dozes too.
* * *
They don’t—
Is it right to even call it fucking when Phil’s never fucked the lad, and… Well. Gillespie’s never fucked him either. Phil feels his stomach flipping whenever he considers it, because no one’s ever done that to him before, and he’s never done it to himself, either. The closest he’s come is some people who’ll give his bollocks a squeeze and tickle whilst blowing him.
Women.
He’s never let a man sucking him off do that, always fucks a man’s throat rather than letting him control it like he would a woman. It’s felt too close, somehow, to the tables turning, even with his cock in another man’s mouth, to let him put his hands between Phil’s legs, or up towards his bollocks, his arse, his cheeks.
It’s different, here.
Gillespie can do whatever he wants to Phil.
Fuck him, even, if that’s what he wants.
Gillespie uses him as a pillow all night, first in front of the TV with his wrists and ankles tied to keep him still, then untying him to use him as a pillow in bed, moulded against his side. He uses Phil like one of his weighted blankets sometimes, holds Phil over his lap or against his side and strokes through Phil’s hair, which he’s been growing out a bit, the past few weeks, or over the lighter hair on the back of his shoulders, but tonight is different.
Phil’s not normally under the sheets with him, is normally laid at the foot of the bed or on top of the sheets – tonight, Gillespie keeps him a lot closer, and it’s very different. Each time Phil gets up in the night to piss (he’s not getting any fucking younger, there’s a reason they didn’t try tying him up overnight as well) and then returns to bed, Gillespie clings sleepily to him like a freezing fucking limpet, left shivering with Phil having gone away from him.
In the morning, Phil helps him on with some long socks, his thick pyjamas, some fluffy hoody thing, and Hanzalah turns the heating pads on in his fancy gaming chair for him to work on.
He’s tired and groggy and out of it, and Phil can fucking see that, see it.
It terrifies him, and he’s fucking relieved when, just past seven, he gets into the car and Laborious drives him back to the station to work.
He thinks it’ll be another week or two before anything else.
He’s wrong.
The day is easy enough, mostly just involves finishing up the case report he hadn’t managed to finish in the week because of the fucking diversity time wasting, and then helping Baz out with an interrogation of some little prick forger, not really doing much, just being another body in the room so he doesn’t feel like him and his solicitor are outnumbering Baz.
When he gets out of the car and walks up to his door, he initially thinks he’s in the midst of being fucking burgled. The door is unlocked and there are bags of his stuff lined up beside the sofa, and most of the shit in the room has been moved around, but it’s not a fucking burglary.
That would be far too fucking sane for the way his life is these days.
In one black bag are assorted bottles and jars; apart from that are a few other bags, boxes of his stuff. The open wicker crate is full of neatly folded bedsheets and some of Phil’s own shirts – random ones, he thinks at first, ‘til it clicks in his head a second later and he knows what the connection is: the polyester. The bedsheets and duvet covers, the four shirts – two of them are actually too small for him and have been festering in the back of his wardrobe for the better part of a decade, because he’d not gotten around to having a clear out.
The stuff in the black bag is a mix of cleaning products – mostly laundry stuff – and toiletries, and then the snack things and dry stuff from the kitchen, stuff with peanuts, stuff that will have avocado or banana or chestnuts, and mainly, certain food dyes.
He walks slowly through the living room, is aware of the lack of scent on the air and he sees how fucking spotless his kitchen is. After kicking off his boots and heading upstairs, he finds Hanzalah and Laborious easing his old carpet into a black bag, because they’ve laid a new fucking carpet down in his bedroom too. It’s nearly the same colour, too, virtually the fucking same to look at.
“Alright, lads?” he asks defeatedly, not even bothering to try fucking arguing. New carpet. New sheets on the bed, new duvets and towels in his chest of drawers. He wonders if they’ve been here all day, wonders if they had to take the fucking bed apart to lay a new carpet down.
The whole place has been hoovered, dusted, cleaned from top to bottom. In the high corner of the stairwell, where there’d been a cobweb he’d broken a fucking broom trying to get down the month before last, it’s now cleaner than he’s ever seen it. He can’t even see the fucking ladder they must have used, imagines Hanzalah on Laborious’ shoulders for a second, and leaning over the bannister to reach.
Phil does a clean of the house once a week – Thursdays, usually – but he can smell the difference on the air and see all the little areas that are shining or spotless clean that were on his list. They’ve done his skirting boards, even, which he’d been meaning to do this week coming.
“That dog won’t be bothering you anymore,” says Laborious instead of anything else.
Phil stares at him, turning his head back toward the street as he realises he didn’t hear any barking as he got out of the car, as he slammed the door, came into the house.
“What?”
“Do all those shirts downstairs fit you?” Hanz asks, raising his eyebrows. “Some of them looked too small.”
“No, they don’t,” Phil mutters. “You can toss them.”
“We’re donating everything.”
“Right. Did you— Did you nick my keys?”
“Didn’t need them,” Laborious says.
“What, you asked Sandra in number 12 for a spare?”
“Picked the lock,” Hanzalah says blandly. “It was quicker. Did you want us to tell all your neighbours we were here?”
“I suppose not,” says Phil, and it feels so surreal, because he can see himself from the outside not reacting to any of it. He can fucking see himself not resisting, not threatening them, not arguing as they go down the stairs with the carpet they’ve just pulled up in the bedroom. It’s like when people talk about seeing a car crash happen in slow motion, but instead, what’s happening in slow motion is his own fucking life.
He’s a copper – he’s a fucking police detective, on the fucking DCI track, at that – and the two staff members of this fucking criminal’s son have broken into his house and they’re stealing all his stuff that has allergens in it and they’re donating it and they didn’t even tell him they were coming.
It’s mental – he’s mental for letting it happen.
“Is he coming here?” he hears himself ask, watching them go down the stairs. “It’s not exactly wheelchair accessible.”
“The backdoor is,” says Hanzalah, and Phil blinks, because, sure, there’s a fucking ramp instead of a few steps like there is at the front door, but his back garden is mostly overgrown—
Or, it was.
When he looks out of the window, he sees that the gravel path has been replaced with a perfectly laid red brick walkway that’s wide enough to accommodate a wheelchair; the back hedge has been trimmed back and the rusted-shut gate has been replaced with a new beech one, and the shitty bramble-thick path has been cut back to perfect neatness. There’s potted plants, even, a few of them, and a new bench and a table.
“Right,” he hears himself say, imagining Adrian Gillespie sitting in his living room and watching Holby City with him.
Phil doesn’t know how long he stands there, looking out of the window and into the garden, or just standing in his bedroom and thinking about it, thinking about Gillespie here with him, about his chair coming in through the slightly wider backdoor and him struggling a little to make his way in because of the length of the kitchen counters but managing to get through the door, and then, what? Sitting on Phil’s now slightly lumpy sofa that he bought in a DFS sale the better part of fifteen years ago?
Is Phil meant to carry him up the stairs to the bedroom, or will Hanzalah come in for that, for the sake of Phil’s back, for the sake of his not dropping Gillespie at a crucial fucking moment?
By the time he stops having a fucking crisis and goes downstairs, Hanzalah and Laborious have taken all the boxes and bags out to the car, and Phil slowly moves to the door to follow them out, but when he turns the handle, he finds the front door is locked – they locked it behind them.
Standing there, powerlessly surprised for a moment, he stares out of the window and watches Laborious drive off.
He doesn’t have Gillespie’s phone number, or email address – not on his own fucking phone, anyway. He doesn’t have contacts for any of these people, and he’s made a point of not asking for them, because that’s too much of a commitment, maybe, to creating a fucking paper trail, something somebody else could notice, could see, could track.
A transcript that might later be read in court.
For the same reason, he can’t exactly drop a text to one of the lads, or complain about it over pints the way that Shady’s always complaining about the wife, or Sam about the latest girlfriend, or Baz about his partner. He’s standing there rubbing the back of his own head (Gillespie told him not to get a haircut, and it does feel nice, the lad touching it as it grows a little longer between them seeing each other one time and the next).
In lieu of somebody else to talk to, Phil asks his own empty living room, “So, what? They just killed the fucking dog?”
Phil’s not that crazy yet – nobody answers.
Huffing out a breath, he thinks about going to Asda, picking some stuff up, but he doesn’t know what’s safe, what’s good. He doesn’t know if Gillespie’s coming here, and when he’s going to if he’s going to, and he doesn’t actually have a list of Gillespie’s allergens or safe foods.
He goes to the fucking chippy on the corner, and then goes about his night as usual.
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