Page 23 of Power Play
“It’s not a defect.” Shane reached over, without deciding to, and put his hand on Theo’s knee, the braced-arm side, careful, and Theo went still under it. “We’ll figure out how to say them when they’re just feelings. Someday. When there’s not a call-up and a divorce and a clock.” His voice broke on the last word. “I’d like to hear them when they’re just feelings. Just once. No notary.”
Theo put his good hand over Shane’s on his knee, and held it, and didn’t say anything, because saying it without a notary was what he could not yet do, and they drove the rest of the ninetymiles like that, hands stacked on a braced knee. Not enough, as it turned out. Shane parked the car and neither of them moved.
The apartment was sixty-three degrees and dark. Theo fumbled the lock one-handed, and Shane reached past him to push the door, and their arms crossed in the narrow entryway, as they had been crossing for months, and Shane didn’t step back.
“We should eat,” Shane said, not moving.
“Yes.”
Neither of them moved. The certificate sat on the counter behind them in the dark, squared and still, and the place where Shane’s hand had been on his knee for sixty miles still held the phantom heat of it.
“I am going to kiss you,” Theo said, the flat voice, no question in it, “and it will not be evidence.”
Shane made a sound, half breath, half crack, and then his hands were on Theo’s face, careful of the sling, always careful of the sling, and they kissed in the entryway standing up, slow, the slowness new, because every other time had been fast and furious and plausibly deniable and this was none of those things. This was what the immigration officer had seen in them and stamped. This was just true. They stayed like that for a long time, standing, the sling between them, learning a new tempo, and somewhere in it Shane started talking into Theo’s mouth, because of course he did, because Shane processed everything out loud and he was going to process this too.
“You taste like the gas station coffee,” he said. “Federal-building husband. God. You kissed me in front of a notary in December and I’ve been thinking about your mouth for four months, that’s the truth, you want truth, there it is, four months of wanting to do this slow and being too chicken to ask.”
“Shane.”
“Yeah.”
“You are talking.”
“I’m gonna keep talking,” Shane said, against his jaw, down to his throat, “you should know that going in. That’s the package. You married a guy who narrates.”
Shane walked him backward into the apartment without breaking it, one hand on Theo’s jaw and the other finding the small of his back, steering him with his whole body pointed in the direction of what he wanted, and Theo let himself be steered, the vertigo of it, the letting, and they made it to the bedroom that had been Shane’s and then theirs and Shane eased him down onto the left side. My side, Theo thought. The side the officer knew. The side Shane knew by heart. And stood over him and said, “The shoulder.”
“It is fine.”
“Theo.”
“It is not fine. It hurts. It always hurts.” The truth, given freely, as they’d given it in the building. “But I want to keep going. I do not want to stop because of it. I want you to work around it. Work around it the way we do in the morning. In the treatment room.” His voice was rough. “You know how to move me now. You have learned my body. So move me.”
Shane had learned him: weeks in a fluorescent room mapping the shoulder’s limits with two fingers and a patience he’d never shown for anything else in his life. He undressed him with the same clinical attention he used in rehab, easing the sling off, setting the braced arm against the pillow, working the shirt off the good side first and then sliding it down the bad arm without ever loading the joint, the rehab order, the morning order, and Theo lay there and let himself be handled, which was its own obscenity, the letting. Shane got his belt open and paused with his fingers on the zipper.
“Still good?” he said. “Say it. I want to hear you say it.”
“Yes. Take them off.”
“There he is.” Shane stripped him bare and knelt up and looked at him, all of him, the brace and the scar and the rest, and didn’t pretend not to. He knew where the rotation failed. He knew which angles were safe. He knew the difference between the wince that meant stop and the one that meant more carefully, and he applied all of it now, every morning’s worth of learning, to a different kind of tending.
“Tell me,” Shane murmured against the hollow of Theo’s throat, working his way down. “The hockey answer or the real one. Which thing hurts and which thing doesn’t.”
“The real one.” Theo’s good hand found Shane’s hair, held on. “This does not hurt. Lower, yes. That does not hurt.” Shane’s mouth found the scar, the long seam, and Theo’s breath caught, not pain, the opposite, the scar that had been his most guarded secret now the place Shane went first, always first, as if to say I know this part, it is mine too. “That does not hurt. Shane. None of this hurts.”
“Good,” Shane said, into the seam of it, “because I have plans, I’ve had plans since the parking garage in Chicago, you sat in that waiting room clicking your tongue and all I could think about was getting you home and getting my mouth on you.” His mouth moved as he talked, the talking and the kissing the same act. “Gonna take you apart, big man. Slow. You okay with slow?”
“Yes.”
“You okay with me running my mouth start to finish?”
“Yes,” Theo said, and his breath went uneven as Shane’s teeth found his hip. “Do not stop.”
Shane took his time. Shane Novak, who was fast at everything, who packed a life in eleven minutes and played at full speed and processed by talking until the words ran out. Slow. His mouth on the ridge of Theo’s hip, staying there. Using the limitations of the shoulder as architecture, building around the injury so that everything else became the focus: the stomach,the thighs, the margins Shane found and made enough, his palm flat on the inside of one thigh easing it open and Theo letting it open, the braced arm dead-still on the pillow, the good hand fisted loose in the sheet. Theo’s dick was already hard against his own stomach, had been since the entryway, flushed and leaking a wet thread onto his skin, and Shane breathed over it without touching it, deliberate, watching it jump, watching Theo’s jaw set against wanting to ask.
“Look at you,” Shane said, low, filthy, reverent, all three at once. “Look how hard you are and you won’t say a word. You’d lie there at attention all night before you asked for it, wouldn’t you. Stubborn Swedish bastard. You can ask. It’s allowed. Tell me what you want.”
“You know what I want.”
