Page 104 of Breakaway
He starts to move. Slow. He pulls almost all the way out and pushes back in and I feel every inch of him and the drag of him inside me makes my nails bite into his shoulders. His body meets mine on every thrust and my cock is trapped between us, hard and leaking against both our stomachs.
"There," I say. "Right there. Harder."
He gives me harder. He shifts the angle and my back arches and my mouth opens and the sound that comes out of me is nothing like the locker room, nothing like the bench, nothing like the hotel rooms or the buses or the fifteen years of being the man who keeps his register even and his voice below the line where someone might wonder what's underneath. This is the sound underneath all of that.
He presses his forehead against mine. "Look at me."
I look at him. His face is close and his eyes are dark and I am looking at him and he is inside me and there is nothing between us. His body in mine and his breath on my face and the rhythm we are building together.
He wraps his hand around my cock and strokes in time with his hips. I gasp, my head thrown back against the pillow, and he leans down and bites the tendon of my neck and I groan and my body tightens around him.
"I'm close," I say. "Luca, I'm close."
"Yeah. Me too."
"Come inside me." I put my hand on his face and pull him back to look at me. "I want to feel you."
He holds my gaze and moves deeper and my body goes taut underneath him and I come hard, his hand on my cock, the wave breaking through me, and my body clamps down around him and he follows me with a groan he buries in my neck, his hips stuttering, spilling inside me, my name on his mouth.
Both of us breathing. His chest against mine. The slick mess between our stomachs and the sweat on his skin and the shake in his arms as he holds himself above me. He is still inside me. My hand is on the back of his neck, my fingers in his hair, and his breathing is the only sound in the room besides the ocean.
He pulls out carefully. I make a soft sound at the loss. He goes to the bathroom and comes back with a warm cloth and cleans my stomach, my thighs. I watch him do it. He does not ask me ifI'm okay. He does not ask me what I need. He knows what I need and he is doing it and the knowing is quiet and precise and it is the same way I have known him for three years, except that he is the one doing it to me, and I have not been on this side of the knowing before.
He drops the cloth on the floor and lies down beside me and I pull him against my chest and my arm settles around him heavy and warm.
"I love you," I say into his hair.
"I love you."
He is quiet for a minute. His heartbeat under my hand. The fan. The water.
"Nine-point-seven," he says. His voice is loose and half-gone.
I look over at him. "You are not rating this."
"I'm rating the ambiance. The ocean sounds are an asset. The sheets are a surprise bonus. Point-three deduction for the stove light you left on in the kitchen."
"The stove light is a safety feature."
"The stove light is a six."
I put my hand over his mouth. He grins against my palm and then he kisses it, soft, and the grin fades into something quieter and he puts his head back on my chest and closes his eyes.
?
Chapter 36: Luca
Third period. Two-one. The building has not been this loud all year and the clock shows six-twelve and I am on the bench with my stick across my knees watching Marchetti work the puck along the far boards. A win tonight and the first-year expansion team that nobody projected past twenty-eighth goes to the playoffs.
Coach sends me over the boards with Thompson and Mäkinen. My skates hit the ice and the surface is chewed, third-period texture, the edges less reliable than the first period's clean sheet. I take the left wing. Thompson wins the draw. The puck comes back to the point and Mueller fires it wide and the boards catch it and I chase.
My legs are good. The stride has been good for weeks now, not the stride from October, which was mechanical, the body going through repetitions that had nothing underneath them. This stride has push in it. The edges are mine.
I win the puck off the wall and cycle it back to Mueller and Mueller puts it on net and the goalie covers and the whistle goesand the building rises again because every whistle in the third period of a clinch game is its own small event.
Columbus pulls their goalie at one-fifty-two. Six skaters. Mäkinen blocks a shot at the blue line. The puck squirts free. Jensen chips it out of our zone and the puck rolls across the center line and Hájek is there.
He is twenty years old and his edges are the fastest on our roster and the puck is on his tape with an empty net at the far end.
