Page 21 of Offside

Back at the hotel, the squad drains into the lifts, fed and happy, and the night should end there. For twenty-odd men, it does.

The text lands at ten forty. Nothing anyone can read into the exchange other than two teammates coordinating film review.

The corridor on his floor is empty at eleven. It’s always empty at eleven. I’ve cleared it myself often enough to trust the schedule.

The extra water is on the desk when I enter. Two bottles. And by the bed, where five years of nights have kept a museum display of boots lined up true, the boots are somewhere else. Moved. Tonight of all nights, after that story, the boots are not where the story left them.

A man can move his boots. It doesn’t mean anything.

“New boot policy?” I say, nodding at the corner.

“They were in the way.”

“Of what?”

“Traffic.”

I let it go the way you let go, not ready to question this change.

“You did the full Ionescu,” he says, handing me a water. “The applause section. Polášek stood up.”

“Polášek respects institutions. The wedding is an institution.”

“Mami’s going to retell it wrong at every family thing for a decade. The swan’s going to end up alive.”

“The swan deserves an arc.”

“It gets a wingspan next year.”

“It gets what it earns.”

“The swan gets an arc.” But he’s grinning, and he’s close by the end of it, and that’s the other thing about this room. The distances collapse without paperwork.

His thumb finds my jaw and tips it. The mouth that arrives is the one with no audience, and we come apart from the door in the practiced way, shirts going, his hands mapping what they own.

We’re fluent. Five years of fluency. Tonight the fluency has a current under it, the dinner still in both of us, the performance still burning off me like heat off a floodlight.

“Bed,” he says. Logistics voice.

I put him down on it and get his shorts off, and he’s hard already, flushed, familiar. Five years in and the sight of him still hits me in a way I choose not to examine closely. I wrap my hand around his cock and he exhales with a hiss. The sound he only makes on the first touch, every time.

“You’re slow tonight,” he says.

“I’m thorough.”

“You’re slow.” His hips press up into my grip. “Stay slow.”

That’s new. I note it and don’t whistle it.

I work him with my hand until he’s swearing at the ceiling, and then I take his cock in my mouth, deep as I know he likes, and hold there until his body goes still with that half-second of total attention nobody else ever gets.

Then he talks. He always talks. Half sentences, whispering, my name in the middle of them, his hand landing on the back of my neck, not steering. Holding.

“Your mouth,” he says. “Šíma…”

I stay down on him longer than efficiency wants, deep and slow, his thigh trembling under my palm, his breath going ragged in the quiet. When his hand tightens in warning, I ease off and hold him at the edge, just breathing on him.

“Šíma.” A warning. A question. Both.