Elliot waited a minute or two, then followed.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
HUDSON
Hudson knewthey were expected to stay away from each other. Chen had made that pretty fucking clear. Shaw had agreed to it. Reed had given himthe look—the one that saiddon't be an idiot—at least three times during the week. Even Novak had pulled him aside yesterday to ask if everything was okay.
Hudson didn't care about any of it.
Nine days until he got on a truck heading west and Shaw headed east and they’d never see each other again. And Hudson was supposed to spend them avoiding him?
Yeah. No. That wasn't going to happen.
It had taken no more than twenty-four hours after the equipment shed before Hudson found Shaw in the dining hall and sat down across from him. Shaw had looked up, giving nothing away, and Hudson met his eyes with a challenge:tell me to leave.
He hadn't.
They'd eaten dinner in silence while Reed sent him concerned glances from two tables over. Hudson hadignored him. When Shaw left, he’d waited exactly two minutes, then followed.
They'd ended up in a supply closet on the second floor. Quick, efficient, and probably stupid, but Hudson had stopped caring about stupid somewhere around the same time someone decided what he could and couldn't do.
That was four days ago.
Since then they'd hooked up in the equipment shed twice, the storage room once, and that weird maintenance corridor behind the administrative building that nobody ever used. They were being careful: never left together, always checked for witnesses, stayed sharp in formation.
Shaw kept trying to talk him out of it like the boy scout he was, but Hudson didn’t give a shit.
"This is so… fucking… reckless," Shaw had said one night, in between kisses. Backed against the wall in the equipment shed, Hudson's hand down his pants.
"Sure." Hudson kissed him to shut him up.
"You should worry more."
"All I worry about—" Hudson gave him a long stroke “—is gettingthis. Preferably before lights out.”
Shaw had opened his mouth to argue again, and Hudson had dropped to his knees. That ended the conversation.
Now they were getting ready for a forty-eight-hour field exercise that should’ve been exhausting enough to keep Hudson's mind occupied.
They weren't partnered this time—funny enough—but Hudson tracked Shaw's position anyway. Couldn't help it. He knew Shaw’s location at all times, when he finished the breach-and-clear scenario at checkpoint three, and the exact moment he crossed the final line seven minutes before Hudson. He saw him, shoulders back, not evenwinded, looking like he’d gone for a light jog instead of two days through rough terrain.
Annoying. Perfect.
When they returned to base, everyone was too tired to do anything except shower and sleep. Hudson lasted maybe four hours before his brain woke him up with the very helpful reminder that he had seven days left and was wasting time sleeping.
He checked Shaw’s bunk: empty.
Hudson found him in the showers at 0200, alone. Thank god, because Hudson's self-control was pretty much non-existent at this point.
"What are you doing here?" Shaw kept his voice flat, but his eyes tracked Hudson's movements as he undressed and stepped under the shower next to him.
"Showering. Obviously." Hudson let the water run cold for a second before it heated up.
"At oh-two-hundred?"
"Couldn't sleep." Hudson glanced over. Shaw's dark wet hair clung to his forehead, water running down his neck and his shoulders. Hudson's brain, unhelpfully, supplieda lotof filthy ideas for how this could go. "You?"
"Same."
