Phil’s not had a hard day, but Adrian has.
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. References to domestic violence, homophobia and bigotry, antisemitism, mild bigotry on Phil’s part as you’d expect from a cop (racism, antisemitism, the Islamophobia you’ve seen so far, etc).
Phil’s never been much good at cozzer banter.
He’s naturally a quiet sort, and people read him as cold, severe. He doesn’t really take part in the joking in most rooms, just listens and lets it wash over him, and it’s made some people slow to trust him, or it used to, years ago. Since he and Bav started working together four or five years back, it’s changed a little.
It’s not right, exactly, to say that Bav stands up for him – no one fucking bullies Phil, because he’s a stone fucking wall, and he’s not interesting enough to bully. He’s not one of the young kids on the force, bright-eyed and ticking off diversity boxes, better to put on the front of a recruiting booklet than to have next to you on the plod, either, so there’s not even a particular reason he should be a target.
But other lads have guessed he’s not on board the way that they are, that he’s not really part of the side – it’s why he’s never been on the promotional track, really, why he never moves up in the ranks. He gets the job done, and he comes out to the pub, even, but it’s not just about showing up.
He walks the walk, but he doesn’t talk the talk, is the thing.
When the officer across the table from him tells a joke about the Jew, the Muslim, and the Anglican, and he smiles, or even laughs, and never tells a joke of his own, there’s no reason to guess that Phil’s like they are, that he’s properly part of the club.
It’s what Tiff never used to get, before she came up with that Australia idea.
“So tell a fucking joke,” she’d said once. “If it’s about telling a fucking joke, tell a fucking joke.”
“I don’t tell jokes,” Phil had replied. “Not those sorts, anyway.”
“It’s just fucking banter, Phil. What, you think they’re all card-carrying members of the BNP?”
That’s how long ago that had been – nowadays, Bav just vouches for him, and pulls Phil in with his jokes, has Phil play second fiddle to the tunes he’s already playing, and that’s different, somehow, different enough that Phil goes along with it. Bav’s even something of a liberal, really – an out homo, and he voted Remain.
But he can kick a lad’s head in with the best of them, and he’s pretty fucking canny about how to go about being on the take, even in the digital age. His dad was a cop, and his dad’s dad, and except for shacking up with a man instead of a woman, he’s in many ways something of a traditionalist, at least when it comes to the job.
“You ever had a footjob, Philip?” Spiv Heatherton asks, his fingers resting on the table beside his pint glass, and all the boys laugh. Normally, Phil would just sit there placidly and let them laugh, wait for the conversation to naturally morph into the next subject, or for Bav to take the heat off him.
“Yeah,” Phil says instead. “Last night.”
All of them are so surprised that the laugh goes up with a boom like a firework, and Phil smiles to himself and takes a sip of his own pint, raising his eyebrows at Spiv, who is staring at him, mouth agape.
“You into that, are you, Phil?” Bav asks – he’s surprised, too, but not so much as the rest of them. He’s always better one-on-one, after all. Or maybe Bav just likes him. “You never fucking said. I’ve got good fucking feet, me.”
“Too big,” Phil says. “And this one’s a dancer, anyway.”
That makes a jeer go through the boys, although the spotlight shifts from Phil and to the usual rhythm of chatter back and forth, this week’s arrests, dramas, the football, the weather. All of it will be in the fucking WhatsApp two or three times over – he never used to be in the fucking WhatsApp groups, and that was a relief, at least, but now with Bav’s sponsorship, he has to mute a few thousand fucking notifications a week, although he figured out, at least, how to stop the stupid fucking meme pictures from downloading to his phone.
“You never said you were seeing a new bird,” Bav says as he drives Phil home. His suspension is fucked, and he’d love to think it an act of sabotage, but he knows exactly what fucking speedbump he did it on.
“I didn’t,” Phil agrees.
“Another paramedic?”
“Techie,” Phil says. “Coding and programming or… something. It’s all a bit over my fucking head, really.”
“What, and she goes to the gym when she’s not bent over her computer monitor?”
“Parvati never went to the gym.”
“No, but she was three times your fucking size,” Bav observes, and Phil laughs, and leans his head against the glass of the passenger window. “You don’t need to fuck about with me, mate, I’m not gonna bandy it about the station.”
It’s true, too.
They’re friends, he and Bav. Phil doesn’t know why.
Bav transferred over from customs enforcement after a job opened up, and he just liked Phil immediately, took pretty happily to going out on the job with him, and Phil hadn’t really known why. Their humours just mesh with one another, and Phil likes Bav – he likes that he’s gay, that he’s so fucking open about it, so brazen about it, makes the same fucking homophobic jokes back to some of the lads who start them, but retreat with the new context that Bav actually does gobble a bollock or two in his spare time.
“Not so big, this one,” Phil says. “Smaller than me.”
“Wow,” Bav says. “What kind of—”
“He’s a man,” says Phil.
It doesn’t feel good to say, especially. It doesn’t feel like some sort of relief or weight off his shoulders, or like some incredible honesty with himself, some new truth spoken aloud. Possibly because the real thing he should be coming out about is that who he’s fucking is a fucking criminal, rather than that he’s a man, but Phil can embrace a bit of honesty without going the whole way to complete stupidity.
“Huh,” Bav says, smirking. “Didn’t know you had it in you. Er— assuming you’re the party that has it in you.”
“You’re a prick,” Phil says.
“Homo,” Bav replies, but he’s smiling a little, and as he brings the car to a stop across the road from Phil’s gaff, he looks across the car at him, his hand rested on the steering wheel. “Does it feel different?”
“What?”
“Being with a man, versus a woman? For you? Does it feel different – like a relief, like a piece slotting into place?”
“Not really,” Phil admits, scratching the back of his head, where the hair is growing out a little, and it’s long enough that the curls are starting to show. It’s fucking stupid – he’s not had his hair long enough for this since he was a lad. “It’s different, obviously – I don’t know the fucking lingo. But it’s not some revelation. I’ve fucked lads before, not as many as women, but a few.”
He doesn’t say it, that the lad’s in a wheelchair – he’s already said he’s gay and a dancer, and that’s more details than he should really spread around, but he shouldn’t give anymore, let alone any clearly identifying pieces of information.
Bav’s the one that got him in on this pension fund, but he’s an old-fashioned form of bent: he takes kickbacks, he’s a bit too rough with the lads that warrant it, he skims coke out of a bag before he takes it into evidence, now and then he gives a hint or two to somebody in exchange for their services as CHIS.
He wouldn’t stand for as much fucking corruption as this, taking up with a fucking criminal and fucking him on the side, keeping shtum while he does one thing or other, while he does the sort of crimes that Phil should fucking report, and turn himself in for and all.
Bav looks appraising, considering. “Lads as well,” he muses aloud. “You never said.”
“I never say anything,” Phil says, and Bav laughs, drumming his fingers against the steering wheel. He looks Phil over. He’s not offended – he doesn’t take it as Phil having kept a secret from him, or something like that. He’s just interested, the way he sometimes is when he finds out something new about Phil.
“Is he why you’re growing your hair out?”
“You’re fucking eagle-eyed,” Phil mutters. “Ever thought of becoming a detective?”
“You want picking up in the morning?”
“No, I’ll make my own way. Cheers, Bav.”
When he goes into the house, there’s the smell of something cooking, but it’s not Adrian cooking – he’s laid on his side underneath the duvet and a weighted blanket, his face invisible, just a muss of lilac hair. Phil unlaces his boots and toes them off, then rests his hand on the back of the bed and reaches over, touches the backs of his fingers to the lad’s forehead.
He grunts quietly, but Phil’s got his answer – he’s a little warm, but not steaming.
“Hullo, Mr Hutchinson,” says Laborious. He’s standing at the hob and stirring a pot of pasta in some green pesto sauce; seated at Phil’s kitchen table is Hanzalah, who has a puzzle book open on the table in front of him.
Phil’s seen them do this – Hanzalah fills in the crossword answers he knows, which is a fifth or a quarter of them, and he reads out the rest of the clues one by one for Laborious to fill in. Like an old fucking married couple, they are.
“Sorry to hear about your car,” Laborious says.
“Not as sorry as I am,” Phil mutters. “Fucking kids dropping bricks in the middle of the street, little cunts.”
“Could have been worse,” Hanzalah says. “They could have tossed it at your car.”
“If they’d known I was coming, they would have,” Phil says, taking a bottle of lemonade out of the fridge and pouring himself a glass before he takes a sip. Isn’t this fucking domestic, the three of them like this? “Estate kids hate coppers like no one else.”
“They were probably just playing with them,” Laborious says. “You know how children are, Mr Hutchinson. To throw a brick through your windshield would be violent, but they’d throw them at each other as a sort of sport.”
Phil sniggers, and he hesitates a second but then sinks down at the table, half-expecting Hanzalah to jump up, or to spit at him, or toss his drink over Phil, or something. No such thing happens – Hanz shifts his knees slightly to the side to give Phil more space under the table, and it really is normal, domestic, easy.
Which is a fucked-up thing to think.
“Is he alright?” Phil asks.
“Just tired,” Hanzalah says. “Once he’s eaten and taken his meds, we’ll leave you for the evening. Six-letter word for “held in deed or bond”? Ends in W.”
“ESCROW,” says Phil.
Hanzalah stares across the table at him.
“What? I can do a crossword too.”
It’s not actually true – it’s a Hell of a fucking fluke, and Phil can’t do crosswords consistently at all, usually gets frustrated with the words he can’t do, which is most of them.
Hanzalah makes a dismissive noise, but writes down the letters in his looping capitals, and when Laborious plates up two dishes of pasta, he puts one in front of Phil and passes the other to Hanzalah, who takes it into the other room with the lad’s pill box.
Halfway through his own dish, Phil hears the sound of Adrian retching and winces sympathetically, going to the fridge and taking out the cheese box and the grapes instead, as well as some crackers off the shelf. Hanzalah comes in and trades the bowl of pasta for them, silently, and Phil sits down again.
“Is that your mother?” Laborious asks.
Phil looks to the framed picture to the right of the window – he can’t have it in the bedroom, ‘cause he’ll wake up and look at it, or dream of the portrait talking to him, or something; and he doesn’t like it in the living room, because he’s more likely to have a guest over in there than in the kitchen, and it means there’ll be more questions.
“Yeah,” Phil says. “She won an award, which is when they took that picture. It was in the paper.”
“Before you were born?”
“No, I was alive.”
“How old were you?”
“Seven.”
In his head, she still looks like that, with her cap and collar starched and white, that big belt around her waist, always in the pale blue almost-gingham, the sort of thing you only see in a girl’s school uniform now – at the hospital these days, they just wear fucking scrubs. She was a big woman, imposing, tall and square-shouldered, beefy, and she looks particularly imposing in the picture. They obviously told her to smile, and this is the closest they could get to it, tight-lipped and with an almost-curve to her mouth, but not a full smile, not an actual fucking smile.
Phil has her stocky physique and curly hair, but his dad’s shorter height, darker hair, darker colouring. He looks like her, he knows he does. He doesn’t smile, the way she did.
Laborious looks up at the picture, considering it as he chews neatly on a piece of pasta, then swallows. “No pictures of your father.”
“Nah. They divorced just after I was born.”
“She raised you alone?”
“Her and her parents,” Phil says. “Mostly her.”
“Where did she hit you?”
Phil blinks. “Don’t you mean did she?”
“No,” says Laborious in his mild-mannered, easy way.
“Jesus Christ,” Phil mutters. He shifts his foot under the table, looking down at the pasta that he’s barely been tasting – Hanzalah and Laborious are both vegetarians, and whenever they cook, it’s always something vegetarian. Phil doesn’t mind that, personally.
He sits there and doesn’t disagree when the lads go on about being obligate carnivores, about meat being a basic part of the diet, shit about protein and whatever else, but he’s honestly never considered it an especially important part of his identity, eating meat.
“In the face,” Phil murmurs. “Mostly. Slaps rather than punches. Shoves and kicks, that sort of thing – when I was younger, a wooden spoon.”
“You were frightened of her?”
“No,” Phil says, and it’s true. She was imposing, yes, and he minded out about earning a fucking hit or two, but he wasn’t scared of her, never had nightmares about her, never worried about getting home to her. “She was fair, I think. Never hit me when I hadn’t earned it.”
“Were you close?”
“No,” Phil murmurs, and smiles a little, albeit not especially warmly, as he spears a few pieces of fusilli on his fork. “My relationship with her wasn’t that different to the ones I have now with my COs.”
“Interesting,” Laborious says, and he seems to mean it, but the fact that he says the same sort of thing – and with the same tone – about Phil’s relationship with his mother that he would about a book or a radio documentary is a little odd. Odd in general, obviously – for Laborious King, at least as far as Phil has known him, it’s not that odd at all. “Did you know your father?”
“There wasn’t much to know,” Phil says. “The way my nan said it – my mother wouldn’t talk about it – they got married after she got pregnant, and once he had her tied down, he got angrier, more controlling. She didn’t have any patience for it. She wasn’t much of a feminist, really, but she was a bit of a battleaxe, to say the least. He hit her, once – my nan was there, in the house, because he was mad that she was visiting when he didn’t want her having a key – and my mother kicked him down the fucking stairs. Broke his collarbone. Never reported it that way, obviously, he was too much of a man’s man to own up to being knocked about by his old woman.”
“I know the type,” Laborious murmurs, setting his fork down. “He didn’t want anything to do with you, in the aftermath?”
“Tried a bit, when I was twelve or thirteen – typical father’s rights bollocks, you know, only made a thing of it because he thought it would inconvenience her. I was a little bastard at that time, had a temper, used to break things, provoke my teachers, that sort of thing. I started having time with him, every other weekend, and he was married again, a very different woman to my mother, a much gentler woman, more forgiving. She was alright, but all I could ever think with him was… How fucking pathetic he was.”
“He was a policeman?”
“No, no. He worked in a leather factory in Bermondsey. Died of a stroke in the eighties.”
“And your mother died in 2002.”
“Your intel is right again, King,” Phil says, not bothering to keep the exhausted irritation out of his voice, but Laborious only smiles beatifically at him. “What did you do with Dariusz? Give him to Ysbal as a pet as well, did you?”
Laborious chuckles. “You don’t really want the grisly details, do you? What you don’t know, you aren’t obligated to report.”
“I’m a bit beyond obligation at this point,” Phil mutters, and he stands to his feet and takes his bowl and Laborious’ both over to the sink to wash up. When Hanzalah comes in, he eats the bowl of pasta that Adrian hadn’t been able to stomach, and he hands his bowl and fork off to Phil to wash up as well. “I need to wake him up for any meds tonight?”
“Let him sleep,” Hanzalah says, shaking his head. “We’ll be stationed outside, anyway, after evening prayers.”
“You don’t think people will notice, the two of you shady fucking characters sitting in a car across the road?”
“We’ll sit in your garden, Mr Hutchinson,” Laborious says. “Or did you think we did it up for you?”
Phil scoffs, but he doesn’t bother to argue as they head out, and after he washes up and does his teeth, he comes down to the living room again in his pyjamas. Adrian is sitting up against a pile of pillows, his head tipped to the side, eyes heavily lidded, as his phone plays some kind of ambient fucking noise, music over the sound of rainfall and wind.
Phil touches his forehead again, and Adrian groans a little more coherently this time, and presses his warm, clammy skin into the slightly cold touch of Phil’s fingers.
“I hope this isn’t ‘cause of last night,” Phil murmurs.
“It doesn’t take a huge amount of physical effort to manipulate your cock with my feet, Philip,” Adrian says, his voice hoarse and drawn as Phil climbs into bed on the other side, and Adrian tips his head from one side to the other, so that it flops as dead weight against Phil’s shoulder, his cheek pressing against Phil as best he can manage.
Phil thinks about it, about Adrian lying back against these same pillows and easily toeing up the length of Phil’s prick, heel against his bollocks, gripping him between his soles as easily as he might use his fucking hands, the whole time smirking, dark-eyed and superior and so, so fucking… untouchable.
“No,” Phil agrees. “But making soup, and making bread, and wheeling about this house, chatting away with that idiot Tevye, coordinating the disappearance of Dariusz with your boys, and manipulating my cock with your feet? The physical effort adds up.”
“I wish you wouldn’t scold me,” Adrian mumbles against the lower part of Phil’s neck, blindly scrabbling for his phone and groaning when Phil gently picks it up for him and pauses the noise machine. He wraps his arms around Adrian, slides his hand under the lad’s thighs and lifts him up to be eased into Phil’s lap – Adrian sighs and goes limply against him, pressing his body tight against Phil’s and leeching as much of Phil’s heat from him as he can, his hands sliding against Phil’s armpits, one of his feet between Phil’s thighs.
“Were you warm enough? This place doesn’t heat as well as yours.”
“I was quite insensible to the ambient temperature,” Adrian mutters. “I’m constipated to my back teeth, and today’s piss went into bedpans. I scarce even emerged from these bedclothes.”
“Sorry, kid,” Phil says, and the sympathy in his voice isn’t feigned at-fucking-all, because even if this little prick wasn’t the devil incarnate, a criminal, and twisting Phil’s heart and cock and mind in his fucking hands (and feet), it’s miserable to fucking imagine it, exhaustedly lying in Phil’s fucking living room, too tired to move, in so much fucking pain.
No one deserves this shit.
Adrian chuckles, the sound quiet and muffled against Phil’s chest. “Your condolences are noted and appreciated,” he mumbles. “How was work?”
“Alright,” Phil says. “Had a BLT for lunch. Mostly a paperwork and records day, to be honest, sat at my fucking desk, had to interview a few lads. Went for pints after.”
“At the Golden Goose, yes?”
“That’s the place. Got it bugged, have you?”
“I have far better things to do with my time than listen to recordings of policemen telling rape jokes to one another over cheap beer, Phil. I hope you know that.” He’s out of fucking breath, saying those two sentences back to back, and he sounds fucking dizzy. Phil winces a little and presses his nose into Adrian’s hair, which doesn’t smell as nice as usual – Hanzalah has obviously given him a go with the dry shampoo, but it’s a dustier, less pleasant scent than the real stuff he bathes with – and idly rubs his back up and down, then circles on his lower back.
“The beer isn’t that cheap,” Phil says, and Adrian laughs, then coughs, then groans in pain, and Phil sits up slightly and grabs the water bottle at the side of the bed and brings it to Adrian’s mouth, who initially resists, but then takes a sip.
Phil wonders how it must feel, being so fucking powerful, and at the same time, so fucking weak, so reliant on an obvious inferior. Phil’s not one of Adrian’s carefully cultivated and well-paid members of staff: he’s just a fucking pig that for some reason, he’s taken an interest in.
Phil could do anything to him, right now, with his boys on the other side of town, and he wouldn’t be able to do anything to resist.
Kill him, rape him, hit him.
Arrest him.
“Can I do anything for you?” Phil asks quietly.
“I’m quite satisfied with the status quo,” says Adrian hoarsely, taking another sip of water.
Perhaps it’s wrong of him, perverted, somehow, in a way that’s more complicated, more soul-deep, than the footjobs and the anal play and the sadomasochism of it all, but Phil sleeps very, very well with Adrian on top of him, wrapped around him.
He actually feels guilty when his alarm goes off in the morning, and he has to crawl out from Adrian as he groans and whines in frustration at the loss of him.
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