Page 41 of Offside

He makes a sound the tile will keep. His head goes back. I work him slow, water-slick, my thumb rolling over the head the way five years knows he needs.

“Šíma,” he says. “Šíma. Your hand. Don’t stop.”

The ceiling usually gets his half sentences. Tonight I do. My name in his mouth like a man counting his one coin.

“Together,” he says, and gets his hand around my cock, and we stand chest to chest under the water working each other, foreheads down.

“Slow,” he says. An order for both of us.

“I know the tempo.”

“You invented the tempo.”

“I’m regretting it.”

His laugh breaks against my mouth and turns into something else halfway through. We find a rhythm. Ragged. Matched. His fist and mine, the water making everything slick and slow.

When he twists his wrist the way I do it to him, I have to put my free hand flat on the tile to stay in the building. It’s clumsy and it’s perfect.

“Where did you learn that?”

“Watching you,” he says. “I watch everything you do. Five years. Did you think the inventory ran one direction?”

I go to my knees on the shower floor.

“You don’t have to,” he says, looking down, water in his lashes.

“Quiet. I’m working.”

I’ve done this before. I’ve never done it like this. Water hammering my shoulders. His hand cradling my head instead of steering it. Tile hard under my knees, and not caring. I take his cock deep and slow while he says my name to the steam.

I pull back to the head of him and hold there, tongue working, until his whole leg shakes. Then to the root again, slower. His hand in my hair stays gentle the entire time.

The gentleness undoes me more than the act ever could.

I hold his hips and take him all the way and stay, and that finishes something in both of us that started in a corridor two hours ago. No performance. No countdown. Above me theannouncements man loses language in two countries, Czech arriving broken at a volume the mirror couldn’t testify to.

“Dobre,” he says, to the steam. “Prosím. Šíma. Prosím.”

“Šíma. I’m.”

He doesn’t finish sentences tonight. This one doesn’t need finishing. He comes down my throat with his hand gentle on my jaw. Gentle the whole way through it. And gentleness at that moment, from that man, in this arrangement, is the most explicit thing that has ever happened in this bathroom.

He pulls me up. He turns me. My chest to the warm tile, his body against my back, his mouth at my ear, and his fist closes around my cock slick and sure.

“Two seconds,” he says, working me. “I’d have given the whole five years for two more.”

“Tomáš.”

“I know. Don’t file it. Just.”

“Harder.”

He goes harder. His cock stirs again against my back. Five years of knowing exactly what my body does, and doing it anyway, his teeth at my shoulder now. The tile is cold under my palms. His chest is hot against my spine. I stop being able to hold both facts.

I don’t file it. I come over his fist with his name in my teeth and his mouth on my neck, low, where the collar covers. The rule holding even now. The arrangement in one image. My knees nearly go. He holds me up against the tile, both arms, the full wingspan, until the water runs cold enough to notice.

Towels. He hands me one and looks at the floor, both kits tangled where they landed.