This story is a standalone, but takes place after Winds of Change. It's a PWP, just for fun, no money has changed hands, etc. There might eventually be a sequel.

Thanks to my readers for your excellent feedback and tremendous encouragement: Fiona, Verlaine, CC, Cindy E., Sheila, and my cybersister, Dawn.

Feedback is encouraged: racric@verizon.net

Playing Catch
by Rae _(c)2005

At one in the morning Hutch kissed the top of Starsky's head, and came around in front of him.

"What are you doing out here?"

The light from the cabin's porch away behind them didn't do much illuminating, but the moon was out, almost full. The lake reflected it back, and even multiplied it a little.

"I couldn't sleep." Starsky pulled on Hutch's arm, tugging him downward, and Hutch ended up in front of him, leaning his back against Starsky's bare chest, between his bare legs. "Been thinking."

"I thought we agreed you were going to stop doing that."

Starsky pulled his head back by the hair, and growled at him from a half inch above his nose. Then he licked it and let go. He leaned back against the big boulder and picked up handfuls of sand, showering Hutch's shoulders and chest.

"You better have an escape plan, you keep doing that." He grabbed hold of Starsky's arms that were trying to fold themselves around his neck.

"You better have a 'catch me' plan if I don't."

"Already caught you, didn't I?"

"If you take a good look, I think you'll see clearly that I'm the one who's caught you." He tightened his arms, and wrapped his legs over Hutch's, pushing them down into the sand.

"Only because I let you."

"You let me?"

"You know I did. I'm bigger and faster. Stronger. Plus, I'm blond. No way you can keep up with all that. I had to let you."

Starsky moved his right arm up around Hutch's neck, and pulled back so that Hutch involuntarily lifted his chin. He couldn't see from where he was, but Starsky was pretty sure Hutch's face was turning a darker shade in the moonlight.

He let go with his left arm and moved it downward, rubbing against the sandy chest in certain places, hard enough to make Hutch begin to struggle.

"Who caught who?" Starsky said.

Hutch tried to say, "I caught y—," but Starsky suddenly shoved a hand inside Hutch's shorts, dug around, found his target, and grabbed it. Hard. So all Hutch actually said was a word that sounded like "yawp."

Into Hutch's ear, Starsky said, "Who caught who?"

"Whom."

Starsky tightened the hold below decks. "What?"

"Who caught whom."

"You're kidding, right?" He began to pulse the fingers of his left hand, a smile pulling to the right when Hutch's hands began to fly around up somewhere near his face. Starsky tightened his right arm around Hutch's neck to make him stop flailing.

"Can you breathe?"

Hutch shook his head.

"Do you want to?"

Hutch nodded.

"Who caught who?" He stopped pulsing his left-hand fingers, and instead took a grip like he might on a hammer. A heavy hammer with a big heavy head. "Whom caught whom?

Hutch reached back fast and grabbed two fistfuls of Starsky's hair.

"Let go my hair, Hutch."

Hutch began to pull on it instead, so Starsky began to pull on what he had a hold of, matching Hutch's moves, mirroring them. Hard, short pulls with his sand-covered hand. Hutch began to kick his legs into Starsky's.

"Ow! You're hurting my legs!"

Hutch kicked faster and pulled harder on the hair. Starsky couldn't see Hutch's face because his head was tipped down and away, so he pushed his forearm up a little, up against Hutch's chin, locking in his head tight between the crook of his elbow and his own neck. His own chin–in danger of a hard bash from the back of Hutch's head–he twisted sideways, out of the way.

"Whom caught who, then?" He knew damn well Hutch couldn't answer. Couldn't open his mouth, shoved up hard against Starsky's arm the way it was. He put the right side of his face against the left side of Hutch's. Hutch tried to lean right, away from him.

"Oh, sorry. My beard too scratchy for your delicate skin?"

Hutch let go of his hair and brought an arm around fast, missing his aim and hitting his own forehead by mistake. Starsky couldn't help it. He laughed.

Hutch said nothing.

"What's a matter? Can't breathe?"

Hutch shook his head, just once, jerking it more like, from one side to the other. Starsky figured if he seriously couldn't breathe, he'd make some kind of sound, or blink twice or something, let him know somehow, but he picked his head up a little and looked at Hutch's chest. Just to be sure. It was lifting and falling at a pretty good clip. He took a moment to admire the shine of it where it was moonlit, and the shadow shapes on it where it wasn't.

"You faker," he said, though. "Don't try to fake me out. You know I don't like that." For punishment, he took his left hand away from its hammerlock grip and wandered downward an inch or so, tapping and pushing, pinching and pressing.

Hutch made a sound way down deep in his throat somewhere and Starsky said, "What was that? I caught what?"

Hutch just glared up at him, upside down from Starsky's point of view, and then he opened his eyes very wide, suddenly struggling so mightily that Starsky had to drop his left handful and instead grab at Hutch's fingers that were yanking on his right arm. Just as suddenly as he'd struggled, Hutch went limp in Starsky's arms.

"Hutch?" Starsky dropped his arms and his game, and scrambled out from under the dead weight of Hutch's body. "Hutch! Oh, shit, Hutch, come on."

He put two fingers against Hutch's neck and felt his strong bounding pulse, and just about an eighth of a second too late, made a play for his wrists. He managed to get a leg thrown across and over one of Hutch's ankles, but then the stars changed places with the stones, and he was face down in the sand, with a knee in his back and his hands pulled around behind him.

Yep. Hutch's hands were bigger than his, and in that position, they were stronger, too, but Starsky would shave his head, maybe even his chest, before he'd admit that out loud. And his shoulders were screaming, but that was a secret, too.

"Okay, you little savage," Hutch said, breathing hard and flinging hair out of his eyes. "Who caught whom?"

Starsky felt a soft rain of sand on the side of his face and tried to spit some of it out of his mouth. All that happened was that more got in. He had to close his eyes to save them from the same fate.

He had come out into the night naked as a baby. He was seriously regretting that lapse in judgment, and was getting perilously close to pretending that Hutch had caught him or let himself be caught or whatever the hell he wanted. At least just for a minute, long enough to make a few adjustments to the situation. For example, it would be nice if he could lift up a little, just enough to dig a nice big dip in the sand underneath where the most important bit of his anatomy was about to break in two. And maybe move that sharp little pebble that was threatening to dig a new belly button somewhere to the right of where the current one was.

And get the knee off him that was trying to drill a hole in his backside. He tried a squirm and a wriggle, and then a feeble kick upward, but nothing happened, nothing changed, except that now the knee pressed his own hands upside down into his own back, and he swore he heard ligaments stretching and maybe even a creak or two.

He started to say, to yell maybe, "Okay, I give in. You let me catch you. I could never have done it on my own. I needed you to let me catch you."

Before the first word made its way from his brain to his mouth, something interesting happened, and he forgot that he cared at all. Hutch had dug around underneath him and had caught hold of his bent-in-two harpoon, and instead, all he said was, "Oh jeeze, oh yeah."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah what?" Now Hutch sat back onto his heels and let go of Starsky's arms, which flopped down boneless and aching onto the sand. "Yeah what?" He squeezed his fingers a little, and pulled, just once.

"Yeah," Starsky said, "I let you catch me. I admit it, okay? I let you. I had to. You weren't making any progress on your own. It was clear you needed my help." He moved fast, pushing himself up and into a sprinter's start position. "Wanna try again?"

He made the sound of a starter's pistol, or he tried to, but it just sounded like "kapow" and he took off down the short beach, as hard and fast as he could, arms pinwheeling, like he was chasing their worst bad guy. Except he was barefoot and bare-assed and it was dark, and the beach was sharp and biting where it should have been soft and gentle.

He looked back once, and he shouldn't have. It slowed him down, and Hutch grabbed him by the waist and took them both, legs still paddling fast, into the lake.

The cold water was a shock, but this was better. There were some advantages to spending your teen years six blocks from the beach, and Hutch's frequent but pathetic "I was a Sea Scout" proclamations didn't change the fact that Starsky could swim better and faster and stronger than he could. Being blond didn't make a difference when your hair was wet.

Starsky dove and dolphined, and surfaced quietly, twenty yards out beyond Hutch, where the water was deep and colder, and demolished the nice big skyscraper he'd had going on. He wasn't worried, though. There were plenty more where that'd come from.

Hutch turned fast in the water, eyes gleaming wide, and Starsky took a big breath and sank quietly under. He swam back toward the beach, hoping he was going straight, hoping he wouldn't swim straight into Hutch's legs and ruin the plan. When he ran out of breath, he surfaced again, trying to see where Hutch was, trying to stay low in the water, eyes slitted so they wouldn't give him away.

"Starsky!" Hutch's rising voice sounded a little panicky. "Starsky!"

Sinking again, Starsky swam closer and found the side of one of Hutch's legs, and nipped it a little harder than he'd meant to. Hutch lurched away so fast, yelping and splashing so loudly, that Starsky almost took a breath before he could get his head above the water.

"Scared of sharks, Hutch?" He kept his voice low, hoping Hutch would follow his lead, otherwise someone somewhere across the lake was going to call the sheriff, and they'd be stuck explaining to Joe why they were outside in the dark, skinny dipping and raising hell when normal folks were asleep in their (separate) beds.

Except that Hutch still had on his shorts. So Starsky dipped in and pulled downward on them, hard, so that his legs lifted up out of the water and Hutch got a strong hold of one of them.

It really wasn't a good thing to be upside down in a black-dark lake with a crazy person holding your legs up over your head. Only one way out of the situation. He jacknifed upward, grabbing as he moved, and caught hold of Hutch's down-around-the-ankles shorts with one hand, and with the other–

Hutch's screech was clearly audible under water. He dropped Starsky's leg and tried to step back, but he was undeniably and inextricably caught. He tripped over the Starsky-held shorts and fell back into the lake as Starsky rose up out of it, lifting and laughing, water streaming over his eyes and mouth, sputtering it out into the air in front of his face as he coughed and choked. He shook his head, dog-like, and bared his teeth.

"Now, who did you say caught who?" he said, voice very low, and lisping a little with the lake streaming down over his lips. "Huh? I didn't hear you."

He lifted Hutch's midsection by pulling on his handle, so conveniently located, and when it cleared the surface, he bent over and licked the tip of it, the way he'd licked his nose, full-tongued but quick. When Hutch yelped again and began to sink, Starsky let go of him and pulled his shorts down from his knees, untangled them from his ankles, and held them up, triumphant, but away from his own head where their streaming drips created a distraction. He turned them fast, high up over his head like a lasso, spray flying, and meant to fling them out onto the beach, but he let go at the wrong moment and they went the other way instead.

"Oops."

He watched them drown, and made no move to rescue them.

Hutch sputtered something that most probably was "You son of a bitch," but it came out more like "Yunobstinch."

"What did you just call me? A nobstinch? What the hell is a nobstinch? That better not mean what I think it does."

Starsky knew how to look pissed off, and was gratified when Hutch took a splashing stroke backward. He followed, arms making long ripples with shiny sides and dark sides as they slid away behind him.

Hutch knew how to look scared, and turned fast to make a freestyle run for land, but Starsky was faster, and caught him before he could get his body arrowed in the right direction.

Problem was, he'd caught him from behind, arms around his waist, left hand angling downward, but too late, and Hutch claimed the advantage by letting himself fall over backward. Starsky had time for one quick gulp of air before he went under, thrashing, Hutch's body solid and heavy on top of his.

Things changed fast, because Starsky hadn't grabbed enough breath, and he couldn't get out from under Hutch's weight. Hutch seemed to be trying to get up and off, but not fast enough, not fast enough, and Starsky began to struggle, more and more urgently, sure Hutch wouldn't realize, wouldn't understand what was happening. At about the moment when Starsky could no longer be sure which way was air and which way was drowned, he felt Hutch's grabbing fingers, and latched onto his wrist. Hutch pulled hard and he came into the air gasping and choking, head down, his hands still in a death grip on Hutch's arm.

"Jesus, Starsk. Okay, you're okay. Take a breath. You're okay."

"Hutch."

It came out more like "shhh" but it was the best he could manage. He felt the heat of Hutch's arm as it slid around his waist, holding him up while he tried to avoid breathing in any more of the lake. He stumbled over Hutch's feet and brought them both down again, into the water together, still holding each other hard, and still choking and gagging. Except that Hutch was laughing and trying not to.

"Sorry about that, buddy."

Hutch tried to tow him to shore, but Starsky regained his breath and his footing, and resisted.

"You tried to kill me." He shoved his wet hair out of his eyes. "And now you're laughing?"

"Aw, Starsky, I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to kill you." He made his "I'm not laughing" face, and turned his head from side to side so Starsky could see how sad he was, how sorry.

All Starsky saw were the little drops glimmering on his lashes, and the way the water ran down over his lips, and into his mouth. It was open just a little, so that he could see a bit of moonlight on the tops of his teeth, and the edge of shadow where it fell just inside, just at the edge of his tongue. He let go of his death grip on Hutch's arm and took a step forward, having forgotten that he was on his knees in two feet of water.

Unbalanced, and with nothing to grab onto to stay upright, he fell, and Hutch, long arms gleaming wet and starry, caught him as he lurched forward, splashing, and held him, gathered him in, and grinned.

"Who's caught whom now?" He put his face close to Starsky's, nose to nose, so that everything went out of focus.

There was nothing but the heat of Hutch's body all along the front of him, and the cold of the water everywhere else. It made Starsky crazy.

"You," he said. "You caught me."

He ran his hands down Hutch's sides, his water-wrinkled palms rough on the soft skin over the ribs, coming to a stop at his waist, and then down into the water, down the outsides of his hips, feeling the muscles, and the hard edges of his hip bones. Down and around, leaning into him, reaching around behind and lifting. The fronts of their thighs pushed together hard, their erections returning, sudden and strong between their bodies.

Hutch looked at his eyes, and blinked, and smiled, and bent his head just a little, just enough. Against Starsky's lips, he said, "I caught you."

He put his tongue out, just the tip of it, and touched it to center of Starsky's upper lip, just at the place where it always started to lift upward when he smiled.

"Want to know what I'm going to do with you, now that I've got you?"

Starsky didn't try to speak. Nothing coherent would come out of him now anyway.

Without moving, lips still almost touching, Hutch said, "I'm going to push you back, real slow, and hold you so you float, right in front of me."

Water from Hutch's hair slid down over Starsky's nose and made it twitch. He didn't move, and made no sound.

"And then I'll put my arms under you, holding you, one arm under your legs, and one under your back. You'll float. In my arms, floating."

Something very tiny nibbled at the hairs on Starsky's legs. A flashing image of minnows with Great-White-size jaws distracted him, and Hutch saw it. He moved the smallest bit forward and pulled Starsky's lower lip in between his own and ran his tongue along the edge of it, and let go.

"And if you don't pay attention, I'll stop. Whatever I'm doing, I'll stop."

Starsky decided on the spot that the minnows could bite both his legs off and he would let them.

"You'll put your head back, and your arms out, and you'll close your eyes." Hutch took a sudden step back, and bent down, pushing him back in the water, and, with an arm under his knees, lifted him so that he lay on the surface of the lake.

The air struck him all along his front where Hutch had been, where Hutch had warmed him. He shivered once, and then again, harder.

"Close your eyes."

"I w–"

"Close your eyes."

He closed them.

"I–"

"And your mouth." He kissed it, so it seemed less like an order. But that made Starsky open it wider, though he didn't really mean to, and, without thinking, he tried to lift his head up to get closer to the heat of Hutch's mouth, and to reach his arms up around his neck, to pull himself back upright.

"You impatient little fish," Hutch said. "I'm trying to reel you in, but you're going to break the line if you keep fighting the inevitable." He disconnected Starsky's hand from where it had locked onto his neck, gentle, persistent, until Starsky was back where he'd been, floating, eyes closed, mouth shut. "That's much better."

Starsky didn't dare try to look, to see why Hutch had gone silent, and motionless. The hands still held him floating, though, and after a minute or two, they were all that kept him connected to the planet, to himself. His arousal calmed. The water near his body felt the same as his own skin, the air just above him the same. His arms felt loose and disconnected–they might float away–and his legs were nothing more than distant galaxies resting in Hutch's hands. If the hands moved away, he'd be lost, somewhere alone and lost, with no way to get back to Earth. He wanted to speak, if only to get Hutch to tell him to shut up, but he said nothing and let his thoughts leave him like little dories set adrift.

A slight sensation of lifting and falling, the tiniest lap of water against his skin, but still he wasn't ready for the heat of Hutch's mouth on his cold and limp little flagpole.

Instinctively his stomach muscles contracted, and his head snapped back, but Hutch's hand was there, and steadied him before he swallowed most of the lake.

It brought him back into his body, suddenly and thoroughly, and there was no chance of him not paying attention now, shark-toothed minnows be damned.

"Hutch," he meant to say, and "Oh, jeeze," but nothing audible came out of him.

Hutch lifted his head up and away, and Starsky arched his body up to follow, not wanting to be let loose, set free, and Hutch said, "Hold onto my shoulders. I need my hands."

That he could do. Eyes still closed he reached up to where he thought he'd find shoulders, but he was just waving his hands around in the air. He wondered for one amused second what they might look like at that moment to someone watching from some other planet, and he almost smiled. Hutch saw it.

Fortunately, he mistook the momentary loss of attention for momentary loss of control, and didn't stop whatever he was doing.

Right about then, Starsky decided he wanted out of the water. Hutch didn't have a clue what to do next, that was clear, and while his intentions were great, there just didn't seem to be any good way to do the deed, and no way to hold himself so he could focus on the action. He was about to say something, something soft and sweet, like, "Why don't you just throw me out onto the beach and gut me like a fish."

But Hutch beat him to it. "I've got you," he said, and put his hands under Starsky's knees, pushing him around in the water so that Starsky's head pointed toward the beach. He took hold of the flapping hands, and put one, then the other, where he wanted them, on the tops of his shoulders, so that he could concentrate on what he was doing, and not have to worry about drowning Starsky while he worked.

"Don't touch anything else," he said. "Understand?"

Starsky nodded–forgetting about dry land–and tried to comply, but his hands on the slippery skin, over the lifting planes of muscles, had minds of their own. They insisted on wandering. One traveled down a collar bone, following the shadow it made, into the little hollow in the middle of Hutch's chest, where Starsky knew it was soft and smooth, and where, if he rested his tongue, he could sometimes taste Hutch's heart beating. The other hand wandered upward, feeling the delicate roughness of Hutch's midnight beard, and up a little more to where the rough gave way to the soft edge of his lips, that, when they moved and slipped over him, often made him wonder if there were a chance he wasn't himself anymore, and whether it mattered if he weren't.

His shoulders scraped on sand, a shock on his skin. He felt heavy and clumsy now, reattached, reconnected, but it didn't matter, because Hutch's hands were pushing up on his knees, pushing hard, and his eyes, wide and shimmery, looked up and into Starsky's as he moved. Starsky's skin got ready, and his cock got ready, lifting up out of the water where the cool air touched it and shifted it into overdrive. But Hutch ignored it, and, still looking at Starsky's eyes, took a huge breath and submerged.

What he did next nearly ended Starsky, a happy ending, no matter who was watching from galaxies away. Hutch let his breath out slowly, and the bubbles it made drifted upward, pinging against Starsky's skin where his legs were widespread, where the skin was hot and already insane, where even the cold water hadn't cooled it.

"Oh, God," he said, pressing his legs hard against Hutch's hands, and pressing his fingers hard into Hutch's neck, just below his ears. Against his pushed-up ankles, Hutch wiggled his fingers, and in some clouded and foggy way, Starsky knew that, underwater, he was grinning.

At the little soft space where the back of his leg met the edge of his butt, he felt a small twinge, a small sting, like the bite of a very small fish. It never occurred to him that it might, in fact, be a fish, because by then, he no longer knew he was anywhere a fish might be. He was somewhere up above, up in the black starflung sky, and if something wanted to nibble on his skin at just that time, in just that spot, that was no longer a bad thing. He began to make a sound, an odd breaking sound, and when the heat of Hutch's tongue under the cold of the water pressed against the base of his cock, the sound became a little frantic, a little frenzied.

Hutch rose above the surface and blew out a spray that fell onto Starsky's chest and the end of his cock and set him on fire. Hutch let go of his legs, then, and his knees flopped out to the sides, splashing, and making a stabbing white pain at the tops of his hips. As the pain turned blue, Hutch took hold of his wrists and pulled him up and forward, up out of the water, and it streamed down his back, and fell in rivulets down his chest, and dripped from his hair onto the tip of his cock.

Hutch licked away the drips, slowly, carefully, and blinked the lake away from his own eyes. He took another breath, and took Starsky into his mouth, and he sank again, not quite under the water, pushing and pulling against Starsky's hips, pushing and pulling himself in the water, back and forth teeth and tongue on and off cold and hot and off and on. Starsky couldn't hold himself upright and fell back again, hands on top of Hutch's, digging into the backs of them, pulling at his fingers, lifting himself, digging his heels into the lake bed, and feeling the water swirl under him and against his sides like a whirlpool, swirling under and around him, pulling him down, or up, or somewhere he had no way of recognizing.

He began to fall inward, into himself, where, somewhere deep inside, Hutch had moved in, taken up permanent residence, and expanded. There was no room for anything else. He began to flex his hands around Hutch's, in time with the building storm inside. He tried to hold onto it just for another moment, just a little longer, but there was nothing he could do, caught as he was in its vortex. He let himself go, and spiraled, out of control, crying out into the night, coming hard and hot, holding tight to the sides of Hutch's head until, finally, he could relax and release him. The moon came down from above and kissed his eyes, and his mouth, and laid itself along his body, heavy and warm, and laughed.

"See what happens when you get to thinking?" Hutch said.

"You think doing that's gonna make me stop?"

"It did for a little while, didn't it?"

"For a little while." His breathing slowed.

"What were you thinking about anyway?" He rolled off of Starsky's body and lay in the shallow water alongside him, so they could both see the same thing.

"I was thinking about taking flying lessons."

"You were not."

"Was, too."

"Dangerous hobby."

"How about horseback riding lessons?"

"I can just picture that, Mr. Scared of Things with Extra Feet."

"How will we get away after we rob the banks in Bolivia, then?"

"Good point."

"If I fell off . . ."

"I'd catch you, Starsk."

Starsky sat up out of the water, slowly, groaning a little, feeling the breeze lift the hairs on his arms and back. He flexed his shoulders and stood himself up, and put a hand out for Hutch.

"Come on inside," he said. "What I was thinking about . . . well, I think it's better if I just show you."

He'd never seen Hutch move faster.

"But only," he said, already in motion, "if you can catch me."

_____________

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