Page 22 of Offside

“I know,” I say, as I pull off him. I kiss the inside of his thigh, match-hard muscle, the salty taste of sweat from the Atlanta heat.

“Lube,” he says. Logistics voice, wrecked edition.

The washbag gives it up in five seconds, packed the way it’s packed. I slick my fingers and rim his hole, getting it ready. I open him the way he likes. One finger, then two, his knee hooked over my arm, and he’s pushing back onto them before I’ve asked anything, impatient, captain of everything including this. When I crook them where five years says to crook them, his head goes back and the Czech arrives.

“Ješte.”More.

“Eight minutes tonight.” If I am smug about it, that’s only because I have earned it.

“Shut up. Don’t stop.”

“Two instructions. Pick one.”

He laughs, breathless, and pulls me up by the back of the neck and kisses me hard, tongues tangling together. I slick myself andpush into him. He takes my cock the way he’s taken me for five years. Easy, open, made for it.

He kisses me through the first strokes, deep, unhurried, swallowing the sound I make, which is a sound I didn’t authorize. His heels find the backs of my thighs.

“Still with me?” he says, into the stillness.

“Doing the math.”

“Do it slower.”

I move. Long strokes, full, unhurried, his hands fisting the sheet and then my hair, his cock trapped between us, hard against my stomach, leaking. I watch his face for the expression no camera in nine countries has ever caught.

We move like we always move, except the tempo. Somebody has turned it down without a meeting, and neither of us corrects it.

“Tomáš,” I say into his neck.

“I know,” he says. “Keep going.”

I keep going. I get a hand around his cock and match the stroke to my hips. He goes loud enough that I put my mouth over his to keep the corridor innocent. He comes like that, into the kiss, ropes of come spilling over my fist, clenching around me hard enough to take my rhythm apart, and the sound he makes belongs to nobody but me. I follow him over two strokes later, deep in him, emptied out, no bit anywhere in my head. The commentator is off the air. There’s just the room, and the man in it, his heartbeat going under my chest, and a potential problem I will file in the morning.

“Water,” he says, eventually, to the ceiling. “Both of us. Doctor’s orders.”

“Which doctor?”

“Me.”

The rules say we do the following: brief cooldown, fast shower. Washbag, rolled and zipped. Then gone.

But he doesn’t move. Neither do I. The moment the rules should kick in arrives, presents itself, and stands in the corner, ignored.

“You know what I noticed tonight,” he says, to the ceiling, his hand still in my hair like it grew there. “Nobody asks you anything. After the story. Five years I’ve watched it. You give them the wedding, the swan, the toast, forty minutes of the best material in the federation, and nobody at that table has ever once asked more questions.”

“They’re full.”

“That’s what it’s for. That’s the trick. You feed them so full they never ask about the clerk, or the grandmother, or the room.”

The officiant in me stands up to object. Nothing comes out. Objection withdrawn.

“It’s a good system,” I say.

“It’s a great system. Best I’ve ever seen. I’ve captained probably a hundred men over the years and I can’t do what you do to a room.” His hand keeps moving in my hair, maintenance rhythm. “You pace it like a training plan. Every dinner, the same splits. Four drinks, spread across the meal at precise intervals.”

Here it is. The room gets specific.

“You don’t drink like that up here,” he says. Soft. Not a lecture. Closer to an inventory, read aloud once. “Five years. Not once, up here. I notice, that’s all.”