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“You know, for a sheriff, you are mighty casual about locking up, Chris Mannix.”
The creak of the wooden floorboards behind him had sent Mannix scrambling, naked and dripping wet, for the gun he’d discarded to get undressed only moments before, but when the sound of the voice registered with him he stutter-stepped and found himself nearly tripping on the rim of the tin tub he’d lined up by the fireplace. “Goddamn it, Major! You can’t just knock on the door like any other man?”
“And miss the fool show you’re putting on for me?” Warren asked. Then his eyeline travelled pointedly to Mannix’s groin, where his dick was swinging bare, and it was only after Mannix had dumbly watched that gaze sweep down his thigh and calf to where the foot planted on the outside of the tub was collecting a puddle of water around it, and all the way back up again, that the initial shock of the interruption faded and he brought his hands together in front of him in some belated nod to modesty.
“Is it cold in here?” Warren enquired, raising an eyebrow so Mannix couldn’t mistake the implication.
“Oh fuck off,” he huffed, awkwardly shifting his weight so he could get both feet back in the tub and turn away to hide the flush that was breaking out in far too many places on his damp skin. “And will you shut the damn door, at least! Bad enough you opened it at all…”
“Are you worried someone’s gonna see me paying you a friendly call?”
“You ain’t friendly,” Mannix shot back, which elicited a laugh so deep that he was doubly glad he’d turned and Warren couldn’t see the expression on his face: showing his dick to the man, Mannix could live with; showing how it felt to make him tick with his words – well, it was just a point of pride to keep that to himself.
“Alright, I’ll take that one,” Warren conceded, and Mannix heard the door close and the latch slide across, Warren firmly on the inside. As if he’d been explicitly invited in to stay; as if he belonged. “Ain’t nobody about outside anyway; seems this place is turning into a ghost town under your tenure.”
“There’s plenty of souls here in Red Rock. Unlike somebody, they just got more calibre than to be out traversing the streets at this time of night,” Mannix told him, eyes casting around until they located the washcloth lying by the tub. He made to hitch the material around his hips to be able to free up both hands to gather his scattered clothes, and after Warren’s temperature comment, it was perversely satisfying to note how obviously inadequate it was for covering his ample dick.
“Oh, come on!” Warren snorted. “Don’t tell me you ain’t gonna get back down in that water and do what you were fixing to before I got here. It must have took you the last half hour to get that big tub full and hot enough; no sense in wasting it all.”
Mannix wavered. Warren wasn’t wrong – the effort required to prepare the actual tub instead of taking a spit bath was an indulgence he didn’t often make, and it was just his luck that Warren would choose this exact time to pay one of his sporadic surprise house calls. “I s’pose you being here means there’s some unfortunate sonofabitch who’s freezing stiff out on my front porch, then?” Mannix asked, weighing up the tempting warmth of the water around his calves against the spectacle of washing his body with Warren in the room, and finally slopped down in the tub at the thought of how quickly it would chill now, left idle.
“Nope, since I put ‘em round the back. I ain’t a cat, dropping corpses on your doorstep for your kind regard, Sheriff.”
“‘Them’ singular, or ‘them’ plural?”
“Just the one. Big fellow, though.”
“You did not!” Mannix exclaimed, his mind’s eye immediately picturing the open bounty board that was posted outside the jailhouse, and the sketch of its current most-wanted prize.
“Oh, you know I did,” Warren replied, the grin evident in his voice.
Mannix whistled. Wyoming’s motley collection of bounty hunters had been circling that obnoxious asshole for weeks, always seeming to have him get the best of them despite his dubious ability to hide a form that large and loud, and it would be typical that Major Marquis Warren had been the one to finally ride in and put everyone out of their misery. “How’d you get him?”
The distraction of a regular conversation and the fact that his back was to the other man was affording Mannix the illusion of privacy enough to take the edge off his nudity, and it let him reach for the soap and start to wash some of the Red Rock sweat and dirt off him. The water sloshed and slapped in the knees-bent circumference of the tub, but he could still hear Warren’s voice float over it.
“I got a story, but I ain’t telling it standing here in the entrance like new furniture,” Warren said. “If you want it, you better offer me a drink first; that famous Southern hospitality, or is that another one of your myths?”
“I am somewhat indisposed,” Mannix replied, irritated. “The whiskey’s on the table. Glasses – on the table. Help yourself. If you expected anything more complicated than that from me then you need to stop bein’ so unexpected yourself.”
“That so?” Warren murmured, then left Mannix listening to his heavy bootsteps moving towards the side table, followed by the splash of liquor as he poured himself a generous helping, then another, before retreating across the room again.
Greedy bastard, Mannix thought indignantly.
“So,” Warren began, and Mannix’s hitherto efficient glide of the soap around his left shoulder, down the arm, back up, faltered as the next noise he heard was the unmistakeable sound of a gun belt being unbuckled and dropped onto a mattress.
He wasn’t… The creak of the bedframe that signalled a weight settling told him Warren very much was, and Mannix’s eyes darted to the one chair in the room, now realising it was on the side of the tub that faced him. Well, of course! Only in the name of masculine propriety would he find himself with Marquis Warren lounging in his bed.
“You’d better not be putting your dirty boots up on my blankets, Major,” he tried cautiously, resuming the soap-slide across his collarbone like this was as normal as any encounter between them could be.
“I’ll put my boots where I damn well like, because I know you ain’t coming over here to stop me,” Warren told him smugly. “Now d’you want to hear about this bounty, or not?”
“Yeah, I wanna hear, asshole.”
“So,” Warren began again, “after it became glaringly apparent that no other hunters worth a damn were operating within two hundred miles of the godforsaken ranch where Mister Fatass had somehow been eluding death for the last four weeks, I happened to have concluded my own business up in Montana and headed back to the vicinity of your fine town. Upon arriving I went straight to the place, walked up to his door while he took wild potshots at me from behind a shutter, entered the house and shot the idiot in his underwear, which for some reason he was wearing at high noon.”
“Shot him in his, or—” Mannix wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer enough to finish the question.
“Maybe not quite the exciting tale you were hoping for, after all.”
Mannix grimaced and leant forward to splash his face and skim the water off. “Not exactly, no.” He shook his head, simultaneously both to answer and to dislodge the drops. “And I’m guessing that means I should be grateful that it’s my back porch and not my front that currently bears the bountiful offering of a large corpse in underwear.”
“That is indeed the case,” Warren affirmed, and the bedframe creaked again as he apparently settled further down on it. “I do have a better story for you, though; one I know you’re gonna enjoy more…”
“Yeah?” Mannix contemplated shifting so he could wash the currently submerged parts of his body, but moving around without giving the Major another eyeful to remark upon was going to be a difficult task, so he stayed put and rubbed the steadily softening soap back over his arms and chest again instead. It didn’t hurt to soak a little, anyway, even if this wasn’t quite how he would usually do it.
“The business I was up to in Montana. Now that is a more interesting affair all around, and earned me a darn sight better reward than your pissant little town puts up, as well, by the way.”
“Hey now, no need to be a cunt about it,” Mannix told him. “It ain’t my fault there’s been a lot of crime these last few months and funds are spread thin.”
There was a pregnant silence as he worked out precisely what smart comment Warren was about to break it with, and got in there himself first. “And that’s obviously because I’ve been taking a tough line on all the outlaw behaviour in the area since I arrived, circulating bounty orders and—”
“Yeah, save the defence; I don’t care how fine a job of being sheriff you’re pretending to do for the town in return for a regular income and this house. Gives me somewhere to stay when I roll in. Now, am I telling this damn story?” There was another pause, almost teasing this time. “I’ll make it good.”
A shiver ran through Mannix’s body despite the still-warm water lapping around him. There it was: the little confirmation that this was a social call rather than just a professional one, and that perhaps it wasn’t completely an accident that Warren had arrived timed so neatly with him setting up the tub and stripping off. “Okay, tell me,” Mannix managed, the answer catching embarrassingly roughly on the tightening of his throat.
“Well, you know I like something a little off the beaten path every now and again when I’m hunting – keeps me on my toes in between all those sorry suckers who think they’re someone special until they’re staring at a loaded Springfield.”
Mannix nodded, not trusting his voice after the previous attempt, and kept his focus on running the disintegrating piece of soap over the point of his knee as if there was still any dirt there to banish. The melting tallow was creating a flimsy tideline where his skin met the water, and he wondered how long the little bar would hold up.
“But come to find out,” Warren continued, “the fool I was in Montana to reckon with is already buried under an icy mound by the time I even get to the relevant town, thanks to a local vigilante drive spurred up by their feisty new schoolmistress, of all people. And I’m fixing to cut my losses and head on to the next town over to join the nearest stage coming back, when another fool with a shiny tin star fetches up in my periphery, apparently curious to know what a Black man in a blue coat with a big rifle is doing outside the saloon; am I one of those godless gunslingers who might just take on a job considered a little ‘too sensitive’ for the locals?”
Mannix couldn’t help a small laugh at that. “And I wonder what you said?”
“I was listening, but I figured I ought to get a more complete picture of the situation before I took a proper interest. Turns out there’s a young man living out in the rough above the town; got some basic shack where he holes up with the spoils he’s been gathering from picking off unwary travellers heading in. Now the area is getting a name for itself: unsafe, go the other way, stay out of here – and that’s no good whatsoever for the businesses in the main street.”
“Why ain’t their vigilantes getting all steamed up by a schoolmistress to go out and put a stop to that problem, then?”
“Approximately what I said,” Warren replied, and Mannix heard the swish and knock of his leather boots against each other as he shifted and maybe crossed his legs, getting more comfortable.
So they were up on the bed – presumptuous fucker!
“Mister Tin Star tells me that it ain’t so easy, on account of this young miscreant is a son of this town; the bastard boy of an important man, if the rumours are true – and they never ain’t. Mama gone, hard times, and the folks can’t stomach all the carrion he’s piling up on the roadside but they also remember when he was a rosy-cheeked little sonofabitch jumping in puddles and scaring up birds, so no one’s quite got the appetite to be the buck who makes the bang.”
“Lucky you were there to help.”
“And with nothing better to do, since they apparently had no such qualms about the old fuck I went there for in the first place!”
Mannix flexed his toes in the tub and eased the muscles in his neck with a head-tilt, side to side. Whatever else you could say about Warren, his voice was suited to telling a tale, and Mannix couldn’t help anticipating all the possibilities for what was coming next.
“Okay, I said to Tin Star. I understand you need a disinterested party, and a stranger like myself fits the bill. Give me your offer, and if it’s good, I’ll shake your hand and return peace to your highway by the morning.” He paused. “It was good.”
“You went immediately?”
“Night was about falling; no time like the present.”
“How’d you find him?”
Warren chuckled. “You think I’m gonna play hide and seek with this kid? Come on, Sheriff – a lone traveller wandering away from town at nightfall; he stops by the side of the road to fetch out a bottle from his bulging bag…”
“You let him come to you.” Mannix smiled in appreciation. For all that he would go to great lengths to set up a favourable circumstance for himself, Warren could just as easily cut through with the most beautifully simple method when it suited him.
“Uh huh. By the time I reached just beyond the outskirts of the town, the moon was up but the night was clear, and I could see the lay of the land well enough. I pulled up the horse and set to having a leisurely drink, wondering all the while why it is that these roadside idiots don’t ever simply hang back and shoot from a distance. I mean, I guess maybe it’s just the way it’s always been done, but I can’t help thinking there’s a certain arrogance to it – like they want to make sure the mark knows there’s a big bad robbery underway. ‘Look at me! I’m robbing you now!’ Or is it the opposite? They ain’t really got the balls to kill a man unless they have to, so they make their threats and they wait and see if he’s gonna try and do anything about it so that they don’t got any choice but to shoot? Either way, sure enough, he’s up in the rocks to my left exactly where an idiot would be, making enough noise that any regular traveller would’ve been scared off thinking there were animals around well before this boy decides to start creeping down the path. So I have to stand there fussing with the horse like the most oblivious fuck in the territory while he’s scuffing about.”
Mannix pictured the scene, moonlight bathed; Warren in his heavy coat, biding his time – hunter as hunted as hunter. He shivered, thinking of all the guns hidden under that coat. Fool boy had no idea what he was creeping into.
“And would you believe it if I told you he came all the way within three yards of my back without saying a damn peep to me?”
“I don’t believe you let him do that.”
“You’d better believe it, Chris Mannix, because this upstart little badass was as far away from me as you are now, going along behaving like I don’t know exactly what he’s all about.”
“Is that so?” Mannix let his hand still where he was toying with the point of his knee. Oh here they went, then… “What was he all about?”
“Well,” Warren whispered conspiratorially, “I ain’t let him show me yet; not before I made my own move. I waited until I heard him breathe in ready to holler, and next thing he knows I’m facing him down with a pistol to his head.”
“At the side?”
“I said, ‘facing him down’.”
“Yeah, but the gun – the muzzle – did you have it to his forehead at the side or at the front?” Mannix asked, and it earned him another one of those deep dark chuckles.
“Excuse me, I didn’t realise how important it would be to you to visualise this accurately. Since you enquire, I put my gun in his face from the front, close enough so he had to cross his eyes to see the tip of it, and he was so darn taken by surprise that he didn’t even close his mouth from being half-open to call out. Stopped that white boy’s heart so bad he couldn’t finish getting his own pistol up to meet me, just standing there frozen in place.”
“What did you do then?”
“I took it from his hand and I put it in my belt. Don’t want no accidents to happen, now. So there he is, no gun, no plan, practically the distance you are from me there, just waiting for me to tell him what to do.”
Mannix bit his lip, and when the little click of the Colt’s hammer cocking sounded clear across the room, it only confirmed what he’d been waiting for, and the shiver broke out down his spine all over again.
“Look what you done done, son! You got a bigger, badder bastard than you with his gun aimed at your head,” Warren crowed. “Ain’t that a predicament? And he’s there like a stunned fish, tongue running over his lips like maybe he’s gonna answer that with something, but I don’t want to hear what he’s got to say. Truth is, he can say anything, but it’s not what a man says that matters; it’s what he does.” Warren cleared his throat, and Mannix heard the bed creak once more, reacting to the way the Major’s weight shifted. Closing his eyes, he wondered where the trajectory of the bullet currently lay; was it really on the back of his head?
“And what he does now?” Warren continued quietly. “That’s up to me.”
Then there was the gentle thud of his boots setting down on the wooden floorboards again, footsteps crossing the brief distance between them until Warren was right up at the edge of the tub behind him. When Mannix opened his eyes, his tall frame had blocked out half the light casting over it, and his skin goose-bumped like Warren had obscured the sun, even though the water was still warm and the sun had never been in the picture anyway; moonlight – it was a moonlit night…
“You’re gonna get to your knees for me, son,” Warren whispered, and Mannix took a deep breath, the unspoken ‘why?’ hanging in the air, not his to ask. “Now, you may think you got a choice in the matter, like you might bargain with the man who’s holding a gun on you right now, but we both know that ain’t gonna happen ‘cause you made your choice a long while back – to head out and leave the daddy who didn’t want you and the mama who’d be turning in her grave if she could see what you get up to now. And I said, get on your knees, didn’t I? Facing me.”
Mannix scrambled, awkwardly turning inside the tub and sending a splash of water up the side to slop messily onto the floor where the puddle from earlier had already soaked into the wood, softening the splinters.
“Sit right back on your heels, I want to see you.”
Mannix looked down at himself, checking the view, and winced at the pallor and the pull around the red pucker of the scar on his thigh as it shimmered through the water. All the little imperfections of his body seemed only accentuated by how the surface was breaking against him, and by the rivulets that were navigating the stiff pebbles of his nipples and the wiry dusting of dark hair on his chest and stomach to make their way straight towards the one bit of him that generally did impress people.
“Well, well, well, you’re gonna make me think you might like doing what I say,” Warren exclaimed. “Maybe I got you all wrong? You ain’t here waiting for a traveller to hand over their spoils; you want something else from ‘em.”
Mannix flushed guiltily, his eyes helplessly flicking from his own naked embarrassment – half of his body too soft; the other far, far too hard – to take in the firmness of Warren’s clothed body.
“That’s right, isn’t it? I got something you want here.” Warren caught his eye expectantly and Mannix swallowed, potential responses bubbling up inside his throat only to disintegrate like the remnants of the soap between his fingers. He flexed his hands and saw Warren’s gaze zero in on it.
“Yeah, why don’t we put those to some use to start with? Are they warm right now? Rub them together for me.”
Mannix did it, grateful for a direction he could focus on the feeling of – the sloppy wetness of his palms running over each other, clasping and unclasping above his knees like a prayer. Warren was still holding the gun up towards his face, his aim true and steady despite the fact his attention was clearly elsewhere, and Mannix settled his own gaze on the muzzle. If Warren were to move it a little closer, or if he just leant his head a fraction further, Mannix knew he’d be able to see the condensation from his breath mist up the metal to a dull damp. His tongue throbbed at the thought of licking it shiny again; what would it taste like? Oil? Smoke?
“Got your hands all slicked up now; why don’t you finish soaping yourself?” Warren nodded down at him. “One on your chest, the other round that dick you’re so proud of, come on.”
Mannix cringed at how fast he moved, the tone of the command connecting to something inside him so powerfully that it felt like a relief; like a trick to ease the tension that was suddenly crackling in the back of his throat, in his peaked nipples and the twitching stiffness of his cock. Running his fingers over his chest and up and down his straining shaft nearly had him gasping already, breath quickening, but he didn’t miss the way Warren shifted while he watched, the bulge underneath the material at his groin becoming more noticeable as he responded in kind to Mannix’s arousal.
“You gonna suck that for me?” Warren asked him, chin tilting to indicate the jut of the gun held firm between them, and Mannix swayed forward in reply, taking the muzzle between his lips. He had to clench the back of his thighs to hold the angle he needed to reach everything he was touching at once, and pain bloomed sharp and quick where his knees were pushing against the base of the tub. He closed his eyes as well; didn’t want to see if Warren would keep his finger resting on the trigger, but he was pretty sure he knew the answer without looking, anyway.
“That’s it, see, you’re gonna get what you wanted after all,” Warren said. “Boy who ought to know better; ought to be better, ain’t that right? But you can’t help yourself.”
Mannix heard himself groan around the metal on his tongue, and flushed all the way up his neck and across his face, cheeks burning with the truth of Warren’s words. He was no better than the bastard son of a struggling town, walking the edge of the road at night in case a traveller passed through who would give him what he needed; money, violence, or something else… He was earning his reputation.
Warren whistled low and lewd. “Well, ain’t you a sight, Chris Mannix? Blushing redder than the apple on my cigarettes; gotta make a man wonder what exactly you’re thinking of right now. What’s got your eyes closed so tightly, hmm?” he asked. “Something you wanna see really bad? Something you don’t?”
And Mannix flinched with the rush of shame at just how deftly Warren could take him and twist him up in knots. Here, in his own house, in his own tub – Warren could walk straight in the door and— No, his mind faltered: by the side of the road, on a moonlit night – Warren with his bounty at his mercy, down on his knees. Mannix moaned filthily around the gun again, letting it slip deeper towards the soft flesh at the back of his throat while the grip he had on his rigid cock tightened up with every stroke.
The abrupt push of fingers between his lips alongside the gun, prying them open wider, turned the moan into a gasp, and it wasn’t until the muzzle was pulling out and the fingers were corkscrewing and gathering all the messy wetness from the curve of his tongue that Mannix’s mind caught up with what was happening and he blinked his eyes open in shock. Warren’s skin tasted of salt and dirt, and he could feel his mouth watering with the impulse to suck just like he’d been taking in the Colt.
“Nuh-uh, I know you want to, but—” Warren must have been able to read him like a book because suddenly he was grinning and pinching the flat of Mannix’s tongue hard, then swiping up the resulting drool as he drew his fingers back out. “Stand up and turn around again,” he commanded. “Bend forward, all the way.”
Mannix’s stomach flipped. Oh shit. Warren’s breath sounded so much rougher now than it had just before, and the fact that he’d let him hear that – let the effect of the encounter come out in his voice – sent a surge of heat through Mannix’s veins that sweetly deadened the flash of nerves at what he figured was about to happen.
“Come on, get your ass up,” Warren demanded, “I won’t tell you again!”
Mannix moved as fast as he could on legs that were protesting the pressure of having taken his kneeling weight at a succession of awkward angles, and he wondered where the gun had ended up as he heard the rustle and shuffle of Warren moving to get his clothes open and make use of those spit-soaked fingers to slick himself up. Then that same hand was pressing heavily on Mannix’s mid-back to urge him over, making him tilt and reach for the rim of the tub on the opposite side for whatever balance bracing there might give him.
“Yeah, that’s it – all the way down,” Warren murmured, and then it was happening; his hard cock found its target and pushed home.
“Oh fuck!” Mannix couldn’t stop himself from cursing loud at the shocking mess of sensations suddenly competing to overwhelm him at once, and he was pretty sure the hand that had just been pressing him down was now hooked firmly around his side to help hold him up. This couldn’t be right… Mannix felt like there should’ve been more pain. In the past, when— with other— there had been pain, but now there was just an intense pressure instead; a thick, all-encompassing pressure that was making his temperature rise impossibly higher and his skin pinprick like every little water droplet was evaporating off him. He shivered bodily and it only seemed to feed the sensation further, tension vibrating through him.
“Making you feel it, huh?” Warren asked hoarsely.
“F-fuck,” Mannix stuttered out like half an answer, but Warren seemed to get the gist.
“Yeah, I will.” And then he started moving in earnest and it was all Mannix could do to keep enough concentration on his balance to stay upright and meet the rough shove of Warren’s body into his, the rhythm getting him right back to where he had been with his hand on himself and the gun in his mouth minutes earlier in embarrassingly quick time. It was a fierce pleasure, pulsing with every stroke and getting harder and harder not to give in to.
He couldn’t have taken a hand off the tub to touch his straining cock even if he’d wanted to, and a tiny, crazy part of him wondered if Warren might slide the hand that was gripping his hip just a little further across, crook those calloused fingers around him and— Oh Lord, was he even going to need it? He was fully shaking now, and Warren was saying something he couldn’t hear over the sound of his own blood rushing in his ears, and then as sure as the tide, the roiling wave of heat inside him was surging up to finally break in a euphoria that had him crying out.
It took a few moments for him to get his bearings afterwards, still hitched over in the tub, and realise that Warren had pulled out and left his ass and the back of his thighs striped with rivulets of more than just the water. Mannix’s mind was scattered enough that he nearly said something out loud about how it was the first time they’d taken it as far as that; or the first time it’d felt like that, or the first time Warren had let himself do that to him at all. But he stopped his lips just in time.
“Better finish cleaning yourself up before the water’s all the way cold,” Warren told him, the barest hint of triumph in the voice that was now coming from over by the bed once more, and Mannix knew if he turned around he would see that Warren was already buttoned back up.
“Yeah,” he agreed, automatically crouching down in the tub again. His aching knees regretted the speed of the movement, and the scar pulled and twinged like it always did, although the rest of his body was too relaxed to really care about it. Mannix sluiced himself off without even bothering to try and find any remnants of the soap that had melted into the water, ruefully aware that he wasn’t getting out of this bath quite as clean as he had planned when he started it. “Uh, can you toss me the dry cloth over there?” he asked Warren, and to his surprise he picked it up and actually walked it across to him, holding it for Mannix to stand up and take. “Thanks.”
He stepped out and started to roughly dry himself off, noting that Warren’s Colt was lying on the bed by his discarded gun belt, and that the floor around the end of the tub was completely and utterly drenched. Wincing, Mannix dropped the cloth on the ground there and toed it down a few times. “Left myself some work to do in the morning, I guess.”
“Ain’t the only job you got waiting on you then,” Warren told him, a flash of a smile crossing his face.
“What— Oh.” Mannix remembered what Warren had come there for in the first place – that there was a bloated corpse freezing up on his back porch, and a payment owing. Then, wait, that also reminded him of something he had wanted to ask: “Hey, you said you got a much better reward from the folks over in Montana – how much did they give you for all what you did to that poor boy on the roadside?”
Warren fixed him with a strange stare and then shook his head, and for a second Mannix thought it must be because he was still standing there naked – the fact of which, he realised, seemed to have just faded into the background for him.
“Chris Mannix,” Warren began, “sometimes I wonder how someone so quick on the uptake half the time can be so slow all the rest… There wasn’t any disowned boy working the roadside out of that town, and no vigilante posse impassioned by a schoolmistress to inconveniently beat me to the boring-ass bounty I originally went there to get, either. But if you want a proper conclusion to the tale I told instead for your enjoyment? Well—” he winked, “—if I did get a reward for putting a desperate man on his knees with my gun in his face, I think we can agree it wasn’t the good folks of Montana who gave it to me, was it?”
Mannix couldn’t help letting a little bit of his own smile show then, before he moved away to retrieve his clothes and the glass of whiskey that he could now see hadn’t been Warren greedily taking a second shot earlier, but rather what he’d poured and left sitting on the side table for him. Lord, Mannix really was starting to question whether time and familiarity were making them better, or worse, at doing this with each other! He had to admit though: since he was thoroughly fucked out, and Warren had apparently ended up in a good mood as well… it seemed like whatever spoils were coming of it, they were both getting a share.
-end