Page 40 of Offside

The stairwell door closes behind us and neither of us says anything for two floors.

The protocols lasted three hours. I want that in the record. Tripled at twelve forty, signed by me. Dead by one. The man who killed them is carrying the washbag he packed while he was still pretending he wouldn’t.

The official has left the building. What’s climbing the stairs is just the man. The man’s hands aren’t steady. Neither are the captain’s. We both saw the corridor two hours ago, and we’re both still seeing it.

His room. The lock turns. The laptop is still on the desk from the meeting, closed, alibi cold.

“Your hands,” he says.

“Yours.”

We look at four unsteady hands in the lamplight, two seconds from a corridor that almost ended five years, and something in the room decides that tonight the usual order of operations does not apply.

He doesn’t kiss me. He puts his forehead against mine and stands there, holding my wrists, breathing. I stand in it. This is already against more rules than I can cite, and I can’t find the officiant anywhere in the building. The whistle got left in the corridor with everything else.

“Shower,” he says. Quietly. Logistics from the bottom of a well.

We strip like triage. Kit on the floor where it lands, which in this room is sacrilege. He doesn’t look at the kit. That tells me the size of the night. The water runs hot. The bathroom fills with steam until the mirror gives up on us, which I appreciate in a witness.

Under the water he washes the day off me like it’s his job. Hands in my hair. Down my neck. Across my shoulders. Thorough, unhurried, a man doing maintenance on something he intends to keep. Nobody has washed my hair since I was six years old. I stand there and let him.

The letting is the most honest thing I’ve done this tournament.

“Two seconds,” he says, into the water. “The door was open two seconds.”

“Two and a half.”

“You counted.”

“I count everything. You know what I do.”

“I know what you do.” His hands stop on my shoulders. The water runs between us. “Šíma. In the corridor. When I saw him. I didn’t feel what you’re supposed to feel.”

The sentence stops there anyway, short of the cliff. I watch it stop, the way his sentences have been stopping all week, brakes and no skid marks. But tonight the road’s washed out, and instead of rerouting into logistics he just stands there with the wreck of it, water running off his jaw, and looks at me.

“Say it,” I say. Against every statute I have ever drafted. “Nobody’s transcribing.”

“I wasn’t sorry.” His voice comes out flat and wrecked at once, announcement register with the floor gone out of it. “Two seconds. The door open. Marek standing there. And some part of me was glad. Glad, Šíma. I wanted the wall to come down. What do we do with that?”

The code has a box for everything. Film. Ice. Corners. Eve of match. I reach for a box and my hands come back empty.

I hear myself answer with the only true sentence in the building.

“I don’t know.”

Five years of knowing everything. Five years of writing the statutes and staffing the court. The most honest man I know finally corners me in a shower on the eve of a semifinal, and the sum of my testimony is I don’t know. He exhales like I’ve said something enormous. Maybe I have.

Ignorance, from me, is intimacy. He knows what my not-knowing costs.

Then his mouth is on mine, water between us, and the adrenaline that has been rattling both of us since midnight finally finds its exit and burns.

It’s not fast. It should be fast. Adrenaline is fast. Instead it’s deep and slow and standing, his back to the tile, my hands mapping him like the first time.

It isn’t the first time. It somehow also is.

His cock is hard against my hip. Mine against his thigh. Neither of us organizes anything about it for a long, expensive minute. We just kiss like the corridor is still watching and we’ve stopped caring. The steam holds us up.

“I’ve got you,” I say, and take his cock in my hand.