Was it suddenly hotter in this office than five seconds ago?

Axel was faced with a blast from the past, and the sight of Walker seemed to bring with it the fire of the Syrian sun beating down on his back. Of all the missions, all the fighting, this smart-mouthed little guy with his enchanting amber eyes was the one thing he remembered the most clearly.

It was weird how the brain worked that way.

“You wanna show me your what, exactly?” Axel kept his voice down. It was clear Walker wanted to stay quiet, and he was already here, which meant Walker knew more about the current situation than Axel did.

Walker’s cheeks flushed to match his hair. “ID,” he whispered, though it came out weirdly sultry. Walker’s throat jumped as he swallowed, and his hand dug into his jacket. When his fingers reappeared, they held a black leather wallet and snapped it open with the ease of years of practice.

Axel glanced to it, but there was nothing unexpected there. Walker was still with the CIA after all these years. Jesus, how long had it been? Seven? Eight?

Eight years, and Axel remembered him like it was yesterday.

“Still?” was all Axel said as he looked back up to Fox’s eyes.

“You?” Walker retorted.

Axel nodded. It was a reasonable request, especially as the last time they’d met it was under significantly different circumstances. He withdrew his own ID and flipped it open for Fox to see.

Walker scanned it quickly and blinked a few times. “You quit the Army?”

“Assholes wanted to promote me. Can you believe it?” Axel snorted and put his ID away. “I don’t do desks.”

“That’s a shame. Desks are fun.” Fox glanced to the side—to the desk in the room—and his flush returned. He groaned softly. “Okay. I guess you’ve got business here and I’ve got business here, so now we figure out whose business wins. You first.”

Axel sucked his teeth. “Sure.” He did his damnedest not to step closer to Fox, but his body was priming itself like he was being hit on in a bar, and that made less than zero sense under the current circumstances. “My branch office is investigating a group which is, according to all intelligence, planning domestic terrorism activities. On raiding one of their properties we discovered a business card for this address, so while my team interrogates the suspects I’m here to see what I can sniff out. Your turn.”

Fox tipped his head back, which exposed his throat a bit and didn’t help Axel’s situation. “Can I see the card?”

“Sure.”

Axel took it from his jacket pocket and offered it across, but Fox’s fingers brushed his as the smaller guy reached for it.

The jolt which zinged up Axel’s arm made his pulse race and his throat turned drier than the desert. He forgot to breathe.

If Fox had noticed, he didn’t react. All he did was turn toward the light so that he could hold the evidence bag up and squint at it. “Damn, what’d you do, put this shit under a microscope?”

Axel cleared his throat and idly checked that his jacket was still buttoned up, as though somehow contact with Fox could have made it fly open. “Nah. Just held a flashlight behind it.”

“Smarter than the average bear.” Fox’s Yogi impression was perfect and so was his smile as he handed the card back.

There was no contact this time, and Axel couldn’t tell whether that was good or bad.

“But then you always were,” Fox added, more wistfully. “My turn. My terrorists aren’t domestic, but they are operating on American soil. I’ve been digging through their data trails for months, and this is the latest stop on my magical mystery tour of this fine country. Did you know down here they batter steak and then call it chicken fried steak, but then just to really mess with your heads you can order chicken fried chicken if you don’t want the steak. Why not just call it ‘fried chicken’? Oh, oh, and the quality of grits is like super variable. What’s that about?”

Axel returned the card to his pocket and snorted. “I don’t know. I’m not from around here. The FBI rarely posts you to the place you grew up in case there’s a conflict of interest.”

Fox’s mouth made a little ‘o’ of understanding, but somehow seeing his lips take that shape created a conflict in Axel’s goddamn pants.

See? The voice at the back of his head chose now to rear its ugly head. This is what happens if you go too long without a date. Too much alone time. You start getting funny over another guy.

That kind of thing happened all the time during deployment, of course. Not to Axel, but among the men it wasn’t uncommon. Guys would sneak away to jerk each other off in the showers or suck cock behind the quartermaster’s tent, but what were a bunch of guys stuck in the desert to do while waiting for their next mission? Didn’t make ’em gay. Just about everyone had an experimental phase sooner or later, and it just so happened that most soldiers’ phases were while they were away from home and holed up in a barracks with twenty or thirty other fit, trained men they shared every waking moment with. It was just a fact of life.

Axel never really went for it. He’d always had his eye on Special Operations, and devoted every waking hour to perfecting all the skills he would need to cross into it as early as he could in his career. He’d made it, too. Captain by the age of twenty-five. If they hadn’t tried to promote him out of the field he’d still be there, but the irony was that he didn’t want a desk job, yet one of the most solid opportunities for employment back home for a man with his training was effectively a desk job.

Still, he got to get out and arrest people now and then, and at least the investigative work tested his skill every day.

He just never got out any other time.

“So what have you been doing since Syria?” Fox’s redness had faded, and he was all bright eyes and even brighter smile again, just like the first time Axel had ever seen him.

“Solving crime, arresting bad guys, all the same things as you, I imagine.” Axel smiled easily. “Unless you did something different?”

“You probably did it way more heroically than me.” Fox’s gaze flickered toward the door for a second. “Okay. We can’t hide in here forever. They’ll wonder where we got to. It’s a small place. They talk fast.”

Axel nodded. Fox was right. Axel had a lot of questions to ask. “Yeah. You read my mind. How about later on we catch up over a beer?” He tugged a card from his pocket and handed it to Fox. “Call me any time after six.”

Fox’s delicate fingers plucked the card from his hand and he grinned as he stowed it away. “I’ve waited eight years for you to buy me that drink, Captain Ford. No way I’m gonna pass on that.”

Jesus. It really had been eight years. So much time had passed. They’d both waved it off as time spent arresting criminals, but eight years was really a hell of a while.

What did Fox mean when he said he’d waited? He didn’t mean, like…

No. He couldn’t mean that. Axel was leaping to conclusions. Maybe there’d been fumes at this morning’s bust. The entire crawlspace beneath the house was stuffed to overflowing with canisters, and they didn’t look to be in the best of conditions. If any had leaked they could have been subtly polluting the air inside through the floor vents.

Yeah, that made more sense than getting hung up on the idea that Fox had, like, held a torch all these years or something.

Or that Axel suddenly felt alive in the guy’s presence.

But it’d been a while since he’d had a good sit-down chat with anyone who’d been in Syria. That place was special. Different. The civilians there were warm and kind, starved out of their livelihoods by endless drought and famine only to be assaulted on all sides by both their own government and the encroaching forces of ISIS.

It was why the idea of domestic terrorism was so alien to him, and why he decided to take a stand against it after he left the military. There were countries whose governments were exterminating their own people in acts of attempted genocide, yet at home people killed each other for what? Being black? Changing their gender? Falling in love?

That wasn’t the America he’d fought for, so he came home and continued to fight. All those years he’d put everything he had into that fight and sometimes it felt like it might never end.

For the first time in as long as he could remember, he felt something new. Like the clouds had parted and the sun had finally risen. Warmth flowed through him at the prospect of sharing a beer. Catching up on old times. Finding out what Fox had done with his life since then. God, he hadn’t got married, had he? No, there was no ring on his finger, nor any mark where one used to sit.

“We better get outta this closet,” Fox said, interrupting Axel’s train of thought.

Axel blinked at him, then pointedly looked around the room. It was small, sure, but not that small. “Pretty sure it’s an office, Walker.”

Fox laughed warmly and grabbed the door handle. “My bad.” He winked as he tugged the door open. “Office, closet, they’re so alike.”

Axel’s response was lost in the explosion which tore through the building and slammed Fox into his chest.