Chapter Two

Ethan

My heart pulsated through my chest and I didn’t think I could hold on for much longer. The frightening, terrorising feeling of his fingers slipping through mine was causing the arm that was gripping to the edge of the cliff to shake.

“Hold on, Harry! I’ve got you, I swear! Please, just hold on!” my voice held a shrill of terror to it and my eyes were filling with tears; tears of pain, frustration and sheer horror.

Harry moved his gaze from our slipping fingers to my eyes. “It’s okay, Ethan. Let go. You can’t save me; not this time.” I hated how calm his tone was. I hated how defeated he sounded. He had never given up – we always held hope for one another! We never gave up.

“Don’t you say that to me! Don’t you fucking say that to me!” I roared, a small sob escaping my lips.

Harry just smiled sadly, his muscular, beautiful body swaying in the harsh wind. The fall was so big; he would surely die of a heart attack before he hit the ground. I prayed to God he would.

No.

I was breaking my own rule; I would not give up on him. Either both of us live or neither of us would. My life would be over the second his ended, anyway.

“I love you, Ethan. I’ve always loved you, so much. I just wish I had told you sooner. We would have been so happy together.” His voice grew more emotional towards the end, and I could tell he was trying to stay strong for my sake.

That was ironic. He was about to die by plummeting to the ground from a 300ft cliff and he was trying to make sure I was okay.

That’s what he always did, though. Through all of his mocking and joking, I was always his first priority. The day I took a bullet for him, he nearly broke down in the ambulance to the hospital. He thought I hadn’t remembered that, but I did. He likes to pretend it’s all one joke. But really, his jokes hide his true feelings.

I’d never get a chance to tell him all of this. To show him how much I really know him. I’d never get a chance to tell or show him how much I loved him. How had we gotten here?

I was snapped out of my thoughts when our hands edged closer and closer away from each other. I was pumping sweat with exertion at holding onto his hand, but it was no use.

“I love you, too,” I cried out, before his hand slipped from mine.

His eyes stayed on mine for as long as he could as he dropped away from me. I would follow him in a matter of seconds, however. We wouldn’t be apart for long.

Just as I was about to let go of the cliff, I found myself being hoisted upwards. What the fuck?

I tore my gaze away from his falling body and saw George pulling me off of the cliff’s edge.

“Come on, Ethan. We’ve got you.” He was trying not to look at Harry’s body, which was now probably splattered on the ground below us.

“No!” I roared, trying to pull my arms away from the agents who arrived too late to save both of us. “No!” I screamed, “I have to be with him! I can’t live without him, let me go!”

“Ethan, it’s alright.”

George was speaking to me, but it was Harry’s voice that came out. I looked at him in confusion, my eyes streaming with tears. “Let me go, please,” I begged in a whisper.

“Ethan, it’s alright.”

“You’re not listening to me! It’s not alright, he’s dead! He’s dead!” I screamed, thrashing away from the recovery team who had managed to successfully pull me onto the cliff’s edge.

“Ethan, calm down. It’s alright. You’re dreaming.”

“Why do you sound like him? Stop it!” I roared at George.

“Ethan, wake up!” Harry’s voice came from the wrong face once again. I was getting angrier and angrier.

“STOP IT!”

I managed to break one of my hands free and punched George square in the face. His momentary shock at this allowed me to wrestle free from him and the other agents holding me down.

I didn’t even think twice. I rolled off the edge of the cliff and followed my beloved.

My eyes opened instantly. Was I in heaven? Why did heaven look like my apartment room back in the complex? Was I destined to spend eternity in this small apartment with Harry? I would take it happily.

As my groggy eyes cleared up, I began gaining some clarity. I looked to a moving figure on my ground and reached over instantly to turn on my light beside my bed. I raised my fists to the intruder but retracted when I saw Harry, rolling around clutching his nose.

“You bastard! You fucking bastard, you’ve broken my nose! The pain... The pain!” Harry’s dramatic voice rendered me speechless and my lips trembled.

It had all been a dream. The whole god-damn thing. I had thought those nightmares had ended a few weeks after our last mission – apparently something must have triggered them to return.

I was still in shock from the dream and all of the emotions I’d gone through in it were resurfacing. I started shaking, so I balled my hands into fists to try and hide it.

“Aren’t you going to help me, you son of a bitch?!” Harry was sitting in an upright position, clutching his nose that had blood pumping from it. Oh shit.

It seemed I’d just realised that Harry was in fact injured, and not just looking for attention.

“Shit, yeah, sorry. What happened?” I asked as I ran to get the first aid kit in the bottom of my wardrobe – Harry insisted we didn’t need one in the apartment but I hid one in my room for situations like this. Harry had said that if we plan for injury, we would get injured. I seriously questioned his thoughts on the world sometimes. Also, the day they were handing out first aid kits in the main lobby was the morning after he’d gone drinking, and he had too big of a hangover to get out of bed to get one.

Right now, however, he seemed more than delighted that I’d gone and gotten one. It really was stupid that every apartment wasn’t given one automatically – an argument I’d raised plenty of times with the committee. It was all a big hoax on saving money, or whatever their stupid excuses were.

“You punched me, is what happened,” Harry grumbled in reply to my question, taking a cloth I’d handed to him and pressing it against his bleeding nose. He leaned against the bed for support and leaned his head backwards.

“I punched you?” I asked incredulously. I’d been asleep – how the fuck had I punched him? A memory of the dream came back to me with that question. George, at the cliff’s edge; I’d punched him square in the face. Obviously I must have lashed out in my sleep, too.

It would also explain Harry’s voice coming out of George’s mouth.

“Yes, you punched me! You were having another nightmare – I thought those had stopped,” he squinted at me, lowering his head forward slowly. His nose wasn’t broken. He wouldn’t be able to touch it if it was, never mind apply pressure to it with a cloth. It was just another thing I loved about him; he never ceased to entertain.

“So did I,” I replied after a few seconds of silence. We both remembered when I had my recurring nightmares. It happened a few times after our previous mission. And yes, it had been probably due to the fact that I really had caught Harry just in time before he plunged off of a cliff, moments after he kicked an assassin off of it.

I’d never felt so scared in my life. I had thought I’d lost him, but George and the guys managed to help me pull him to safety. My mind was riddled with ‘what ifs’, though. What if the guys hadn’t been right behind me? I’d been so angry with Harry for so long that he’d gone after that assassin without me. Yes, if he’d waited for me in the car like I’d told him to instead of chasing after him, we’d have lost one of the world’s most sought after killers.

But at what risk? He almost lost his fucking life. And, as my dreams confirm what’s always been in my head, my life would have been thrown away too.

I sat down next to Harry with an anti-bacterial wipe in my hand. “Let me see,” I murmured, pushing his hand away from his nose. The cloth was deep red with blood, but it seemed to have stopped bleeding now.

Harry grunted some insults but obliged, turning to face me. I patted the wipe against the blood stains around his nose, trying to detect whether or not I’d broken the skin or if it was merely internal.

Harry winced a couple of times, making a big show out of the situation. It was hilarious, his attitude. For situations like this, he made the biggest deal out of it and demanded sympathy for days.

But when we were on missions, nothing fazed him. He’d once broken three fingers in a stand-off between himself and two of an illegal weapons exporter’s bodyguards. Harry had won, but barely. He walked away from the fight, leaving the two unconscious, and went straight for their boss, punching him out cold with the same hand. I’d been busy with other bodyguards and when I reached him, he was busying himself calling the agency to send in the helicopters, not realising his fingers were in pieces. He’d even told me not to worry about it when I pointed them out.

“Ouch, man, go easy!” he scolded, bringing his hand to mine to stop what I was doing. I looked at his hand over mine and realised how close our faces actually were. It was a rather intimate setting, what with my room dimly lit from my bedside light and our close proximities, his hand on my arm.

I cleared my throat and nodded, pulling away. “Pussy,” I mocked, putting the first aid kit away.

Harry cleared his throat and stood up too, sniffling a few times to ensure all of the blood was out. “Careful, Moore, or I’ll be reporting you for assault,” he threatened, but I could feel a smile on his face, even though my back was to him.

“Followed by my statement on the true whereabouts of Agent Sumner’s false eye,” I retorted, spinning around to face him. He was wearing a close-fitted white vest and blue boxers. I had gotten used to Harry’s lack of clothing over the years, but my tolerance to it never stemmed my desire.

“You wouldn’t dare,” he breathed, narrowing his eyes with a smirk on his face.

Agent Sumner lost his eye years ago whilst on a mission. Nobody ever found out how he lost it, but it had been a well known fact that the retired agent took the false replacement out every night before he went to sleep.

On a drunken night of truth or dare, Conor, a Grade B agent, dared Harry to steal the false eye from Agent Sumner’s beside locker. Nobody had expected Harry to actually do it, but I knew that he would do everything in his power to get it when I saw that familiar gleam in his eye.

It is now proudly kept in our common room in an egg-cup, for anyone who wants to be reminded of Harry’s ‘bravery’, or so he called it.

Harry focused his eyes on me, staring me down. He was trying to intimidate me to stand-down, as I was trying to do the same to him. This always happened when we gave each other ultimatums. I usually won.

However, I was the first one to stand down from our staring match this time. I was a man with great tolerance, and hiding my feelings had become a thing of second nature. But I still had my weaknesses and soft-spots. And following that dream where I just saw Harry die a horrible death, looking at him now was becoming difficult to maintain.

I had known for years that I was gay, but I had also known that if I wanted to receive any form of recognition in this line of work, gay wasn’t what I needed to be. I had considered telling Harry of my true sexuality, seeing as how we’d formed a bond over the years. But telling him became harder and harder as we grew closer.

I then knew I could never tell him, once I’d established I was in love with him. This realisation hit me when I dove in front of him six years ago as a bullet was fired towards him during one of our missions in Italy.

Seeing him sobbing in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, I’d had hope that he felt the same way. But once my injury had been deemed non-life threatening, Harry’s worries slipped away, and he was back to his normal self. That included, filling me in on his romps with several of the Italian models he’d been with over the course of our stay in Milan.

I could deal with the fact that he was just going to stay as my best-friend, and nothing more. I told myself I could deal with that fact, anyway.

It worked in my favour that I was not very tolerant of people – my quietness could be easily blamed on my personality on days when I struggled with our platonic relationship.

I expected Harry to take full advantage of me standing down, following our staring match, but instead, he just dropped his eyes to the ground and smiled a little.

“Right, well,” he murmured in his British accent, “I’m going back to bed. We have to be up in a few hours to meet with the committee...” he trailed off, raising his eyes to mine again.

I just nodded, my tongue seemingly stuck in my mouth. There was a tension filling the room like air in a balloon. I knew he could feel it too, since he was wringing his fingers nervously.

But as suddenly as the tension filled the room, it was gone.

“Try not to wake up screaming in terror for the remainder of the night, eh?” he exaggerated his words and rolled his eyes dramatically, “Honestly, I think you do these things on purpose, Ethan Moore.” He started towards the door, yawning dramatically.

I hated when he did this. Whenever anything got serious, he ran to the safe-haven of his humour.

I just sighed and nodded, walking back to my bed. “Night,” I muttered, falling into my covers.

“Night, you old dog,” Harry replied, turning around to close my door. I was able to catch the look of concern in his eye just before he closed it, though. He was worried about my nightmares coming back. I was, too. I was terrified I’d call his name out in my sleep again.

I’d had trouble explaining that one, seeing as how I’d never told him that he was in any of my dreams. I put it down to the enemies we were sent to take down – they were the ones who were always in my nightmares.

When truly, the only person who ever appeared in every single one of my nightmares was him. And the content of my nightmare always consisted of him, moments from death and me, unable to stop it happening.

Because that was my biggest fear; the inability to protect him. He was so vulnerable and I was always going to be there to protect him. It seemed like the universe was mocking my intentions by putting me through the hell of seeing him die before my eyes every night.

The medication I was prescribed helped to keep the dreams away. And as weeks went by after missions, the dreams would simply fade away. But now that we had a meeting with the committee tomorrow, I knew that this was the reason I’d had a nightmare. We were being put back out into the field; the one place where my protection of Harry was paramount, and also the one place where he could slip from my grasp.

I reached over to turn my light off, closing my eyes. I thought of the life I wanted to have as I drifted back to sleep. I thought of a life where Harry and I weren’t spies, where we were normal people with normal worries. In that alternate universe, I wouldn’t have to worry about him the way I did. No enemies would try and take him away.

Pretending I wasn’t a spy and neither was Harry before I fell asleep every night was what helped me close my eyes. We had at least another fifteen years left on our contracts to the agency, so any hope of leaving would be diminished when our contracts which we’d signed eight years previously were brought out.

My last thought before I fell asleep again was what I usually thought of before a meeting with the committee; Please let this be an easy case.

It never was. I also could never have predicted that this would be the case that changed everything.

So, as I’ve just finished my other boyxboy story ‘Unexpected Love’, I’ve finally got the time to put an effort into this story. I hope you’re enjoying it so far, and please let me know your thoughts in the comments! Also, if you enjoyed the chapter giving it a like wouldn’t go unnoticed ;)

What do you all think of Ethan? I think it’s refreshing to have a male protagonist who knows his true sexuality and is open and honest with himself about it. (Even if he’s not honest with everyone else.) That’s what will be a struggle with Harry in the forth-coming chapters and I’m excited to get stuck into it!

Okay, sorry for rambling! Thanks for reading <3

By the way, the image on your right is of Ethan :)

-O.