Chapter One

"Now, you can't tell me that you've never heard this before." Will turned the music up a little and danced around the room toward the couch, wiggling his way around the edge of the coffee table. The Latin beat seemed to rest right in his hip bones, every movement extending out from there and making his body sway.

Mal was enchanted. "Sure." He reached for Will's hand and tugged Will down on top of his body. Dancing lying down was even nicer than watching Will put on a private show. "I've heard it. You had it on last time I was here, when we were making supper."

"Very good." Will marked his approval with a kiss, and then another.

Mallory and Will were at the start of two days off from their jobs as firefighters for the city of Ottawa, and they were making the most of it. They'd already taken a run along the Rideau Canal, had a huge breakfast out at their favorite diner, and they had plans that night to go to a movie with a couple of guys they worked with. Between breakfast and the movie there were hours to fill up with chores, napping and maybe a little dancing.

"It was memorable," Mal told him. He smiled, his hands going to Will's ass and guiding him in a semblance of a dance. It was difficult to get it just right, lying down as they were, but he thought Will got the point. "I like dancing in your kitchen. Better than anywhere else, I think."

Will laughed at him and wiggled. The mock-dancing turned into grinding and rubbing, which was what they both were after. "Better than in a bar like Cleo's where we have a dance floor and space to move?"

"We can't get naked at Cleo's." That was all too true. They'd never tried to mess around there, hadn't slipped into the bathroom to make out a little -- that was kid shit, in Mallory's mind. Aside from the entire potential for arrest and the humiliation of being in the newspaper for being in a sex scandal, there was the sheer semantics of it. They couldn't get naked at Cleo's. There just wasn't room for the kind of things that happened when Mal and Will danced and then got busy.

They were big men. They were rangy, and tall, and fire fighters. They were used to spreading out and taking over a space, and they were still at the stage in their relationship where things were being broken when they started messing around. Glasses on tables that got bumped as they stumbled toward bedrooms, chairs that fell over when one of them was pushing the other down over a table, stuff that got swept off counters.

The bill for messing around at Cleo's would take most of Mal's paycheck, he was sure. Plus, various people would kill them. Will's whole family, Mal's ex-girlfriend, Dave. It would be messy.

"Hello in there," Will whispered. "Where did you go?"

Mallory blinked. "Uh." He felt his face heat up as he blushed. "Sorry. I was adding up the bar bill for fucking around at Cleo's. You know. Broken glasses, bail, loss of income, Trish's wrath."

Will stared at him for a moment and then started to laugh. He laughed so hard he rested his head on Mallory's chest and shook, unable to speak in full sentences, just a few words here and there. They were good words, though: "weird", "bizarre", "strange", "crack me up", and "never boring".

Mallory rolled his eyes and let Will laugh. "Can we concentrate on the fucking around part?" he asked, his hands once more squeezing at Will's butt. "Come on, babe."