Page 30 of Offside

The mirror gets held up twice in one night, and twice I look away.

Back in the room, Damián’s asleep. An easy, unburdened man with hooks for his walls.

My phone is dark on the nightstand. I check it anyway. Still dark. After the tournament ends, the flights take everyone somewhere, and the doors start clicking shut. Everything shuts itself automatically. That’s the feature.

I sleep eventually, and I don’t dream about doors, and I’d testify to that.

I’d be tried for perjury.

?

Chapter 10: Tomáš

Midnight, and my thoughts are still humming.

I’ve run tomorrow twice in my head. Bus at nine forty, training, media, film, the last full session before the match. The rails are checked. The rails hold. Sleep should arrive on schedule like everything else I run, and it isn’t coming.

I pick up the phone. I put it down. I pick it up.

Šíma. Film at mine.

No time on it. I send it open-ended, a door left off the latch, and I don’t examine that, because it’s midnight and examining things is a daylight sport.

noted

Nine minutes later he comes in quietly. Hair wrecked from a pillow, no washbag. The feed that runs this man day and night must have flagged it too: no washbag, no kit, a man who came straight from his bed to mine with a cover story he didn’t build first.

“Story?” I say, out of pure ritual.

“Ice run. Machine on four is broken. Everyone knows.”

“Is it broken?”

“It will be.”

“You came without the bag.”

“I noticed that on the stairs.”

“And?”

“And nothing. I kept moving.”

That’s the whole liturgy tonight. He stands in the lamp’s half-light and looks at me. I look at him.

“Come here,” I say.

The kiss is slow from the first second. That’s not how we kiss. We kiss like men catching a train on a schedule. Five years of trains. Tonight, nothing’s running on schedule.

I undress him like there’s time. There’s never been time before. I’ve had this body a hundred ways, all of them fast and urgent. I have never once done any step of it slowly. I pull his shirt up over his stomach, his shoulders, his collarbone. He stands there and lets himself be looked at. The expression on him has no entry in my inventory. It’s never held still this long.

“Tomáš,” he says against my mouth.

I move us towards the bed and lay him down and take my time. I kiss my way down his chest to the crease of his hip, tasting salt and soap along the way. His cock hard before I ever touch it. When I take him in my hand, he exhales like a man setting down a bag he’s carried up too many flights of stairs.

I stroke him then lick my way around the head. Going slow and deep as I’ve never bothered to before. I hold his hips down when they ask for more. And he barely talks, because saying something would break this moment we started. Would require him to think.

“You’re being thorough,” he manages after a few minutes.