Page 5 of Offside

“Still humming when I left.” He sets the washbag on the desk, exactly where it goes.

“One day somebody’s going to ask what film we watch.”

“Nobody asks. You know why nobody asks?”

“Because film is boring.”

“Because film is boring and I am not.” He rolls his shoulder out of his jacket. “Five years. Nobody has once volunteered for film night. Best programming decision of my career.”

That’s the whole negotiation. Cover confirmed, window confirmed, water finished. Five years of fluency. There are club moves we’ve spent months on that don’t run this clean.

He puts the bottle down and looks at me, and the looking is the last part of the routine, and then it isn’t routine at all. His mouth is on mine and my back finds the wall.

We’re fast. Fast is what five years buys: no wrong guesses, no traffic, every touch arriving where it was aimed. His hands go under my shirt and take it up and off in one motion, and mine are already at his waistband, and neither of us has to look.

“Match hands,” he says, at my knuckles, which are taped. “You punched an Italian?”

“The grass. Twice.”

“The grass had it coming.” I feel him smile against my lips.

I get his shirt off. I know his chest better than I know my own. That’s not a line. I don’t look at my own for hours. His mouth goes to my neck, low, where the collar covers, because that rule stopped needing words years ago.

I push him towards my bed and we go down together. His weight lands on me the way it has landed on me in nine countries, dozens of hotel rooms, and too many nights too count. Twenty minutes ago I was dead on my feet in a lift. Now my body is wired again.

I get his shorts down and take his cock in my hand, hard already, familiar as my own kit. He exhales through his teeth. Quiet, the way he never is anywhere else in this hotel.

“Slow or fast?” I say. The logistics are important.

“Fast. You need to be rested for your media at twelve.”

“You checked my schedule?”

“I check everything. There,” he says, when my thumb moves over the head of him. Everything he says in this room is in his flattest voice, and his flattest voice is the honest one, and I’ve never once told him I know that either.

He leans down and puts the head of my cock in his mouth. Teasing his tongue around the slit. An expert at the one thing he will do unhurried. I put my forearm over my eyes and count backward from a hundred. He knows my body like a route he’s run for years. He knows it better than the club physio, better than the national team physio, better than me. He pulls off and works me with his fist, slow, and watches my face.

“You should get the lube,” I say.

He gets the washbag and it takes him four seconds, because it’s packed the way it’s always packed. Roll it open, everything where it lives. If the alibi ever gets audited, the audit will find a man with excellent toiletries.

He preps me with his fingers and no wasted motion, working me open while his other hand keeps a lazy count on my cock, and it isn’t romantic, it’s precise, and precise is what this body wants after ninety minutes plus stoppage.

“Ješte,” I say.

“There’s what I wanted to hear,” he says, low. “Twelve minutes. I’ve timed it.”

“Stop timing me.”

“Somebody has to keep the record.”

Then he’s pushing into me, one long stroke, full, and the record can say whatever it wants. I take him easily because I’vebeen taking him like this for years. It’s Šíma. It’s easy. Those are the same sentence.

He gives me a second I don’t need. I pull him the rest of the way in with my heel, and he laughs, once, into my shoulder. Nobody else gets that laugh.

“Good?” he says, kissing me just below my ear.

“Yes. Go.”