Page 31 of Offside

“I’m always thorough.”

“Not like this.”

No. Not like this. I take his cock deeper down my throat and let that stand as the reply.

“I’m close,” he warns, hand in my hair.

“Don’t.” I pull off and feel him tremble. “Note yet.”

“Not yet,” he repeats, his voice shaking with need. His eyes are dark and open and on me the whole time.

There’s lube in my nightstand. There has been for two days. I’ve spent two days not examining that purchase. I slick my fingers and he watches me do it. When I press one into him, his whole body goes long and loose, a held breath finally spent.

I’ve had sex with him this way before. Not often. The arrangement runs the other direction more nights than not. Maybe efficiency, maybe habit. Whatever the reason before, tonight I want him under my hands, all of him, every response mine to draw out. I work him open slow, my fingers curling, until I find the magic spot I’m looking for and his hips come off the bed.

“Okay?” I say, working him.

“Better than okay.” His voice frays on the last word. “Ješte.”

My word. In his mouth. Five years and he’s never once said it back.

“Look at you,” I say, smiling down at him. “Using my word.”

“You don’t own that word, captain.”

I laugh into his hip. He laughs. We are laughing in this bed, which the arrangement also has no box for. I add it to the pile of things I’m not examining. Then I crook my fingers again and turn his laugh into something better.

“Eyes open,” I say.

“They’re open. They’ve been open all night.”

I push myself up between his legs and push his thighs up. When I push my cock into him, it’s one long stroke, both of us watching each other. At the end of it, neither of us moves. I can only hear our breathing and the hum of the hotel around us. He’s tight and hot around me and completely still. His hand comes up and grips my forearm, a man on a rail at altitude.

“Okay?” I say.

“Don’t,” he says. “Don’t ask me things right now. Just move.”

I move, in long and unhurried strokes. Nothing like we normally do and exactly like whatever this is instead. He meets every stroke with his eyes open. The talking doesn’t stop. It never stops with us. Tonight it’s down to single words with whole sentences inside them.There. Yes. Tomáš.

He pulls my mouth down to his and says it back into the kiss, and then my hand does the thing.

It leaves his hip and comes up and wraps around the back of his neck. Palm to the nape, fingers in his hair, thumb below his ear. I feel him register it. I feel the half-second where his whole body reads the gesture and knows exactly where else it lives. He has watched me do it a thousand times, to Tobík, to Damián, to Mami at a stove, to every person I have ever loved on this earth. And never once, not once in five years, in this bed or any bed on any continent.

Neither of us says anything. His eyes close for the first time all night. He turns his face into my wrist, mouth against the pulse, and stays there.

After that it stops being slow, because it can’t stay slow. I drive into him with his neck in my hand and his cock hard between us. He comes without me touching him with his whole body arching up into mine, his cock spilling hot over hist stomach between us, clenching around me so hard the room goes white at the edges. I follow him down into it, buried deep.

We lie there. His heartbeat under my mouth. My hand still on his neck. I don’t move it. He doesn’t move it. The water I set out earlier goes untouched, because neither of us is willing to be the first body that leaves but eventually I do.

The lamp’s still on. I should kill it. I don’t.

“Water’s on your side,” I say.

“Of course it is.”

“I don’t sleep anywhere else,” he says, to the ceiling, flat, like a man reading an inconvenient instrument. “Did you know that?”

“You sleep on planes.”