Page 47 of Offside

He works me unhurried, his mouth at the back of my neck, his cock hard against me, and we move like that, fitted together.

“Good?” he says.

“Don’t stop.”

“I’m not stopping tonight. Ask me something harder.”

“Tomáš.” His mouth at my ear. “Let me.”

“Yes.”

The lube is in the nightstand. My own, since Tuesday. He opens me on our sides, patient, slick fingers, his arm under my head like a pillow he’s decided to be.

“Okay?”

“Keep going.”

“Tell me if.”

“I’ll tell you. Šíma. Keep going.”

His mouth moves at my shoulder, Czech and English mixed, quiet nothing-words, the opposite of the broadcast. Nobody has ever been this careful with me. It’s this that takes me apart.

When he pushes his cock into me it’s from behind, both of us on our sides, his arm wrapping my chest, his hand splayed over my sternum. Slow. Deep. It isn’t like anything we’ve ever done, because we’ve never once done it wrapped.

Every other night in five years had a shape with an exit built in. This one is closed all the way around. His body a wall at my back. His mouth at my nape. And inside the wall, for the first time all day, nothing is ending. There’s just this.

“There,” I say, when he finds it. “There. Don’t.”

“I won’t.”

He doesn’t. He keeps the angle, his cock dragging slow over the place that whites my vision, and his hand leaves my sternum and takes the back of my neck.

And holds. Doesn’t steer. Doesn’t move. Just holds, the way you hold a thing you’re keeping.

Palm to the nape. Fingers in my hair. Thumb below my ear. My own gesture, the one my hands gave him two nights ago, returned to sender with the weight intact, and something in my chest tears loose along a seam I didn’t know was perforated.

That’s when it comes out of me. Not planned. Not discussed. Spoken once, into the dark, while he’s inside me and his hand is on my neck and the dead schedule of my life is lying in pieces around the bed.

“This is the only thing this summer I’m not losing.”

He doesn’t answer in words. His arms go tighter around me, all the way, both of them, iron. His mouth presses to the top of my spine and stays there. He drives into me deeper, slower, like punctuation, like a man signing something with his whole body.

That’s the answer. That’s the whole answer. It’s enough.

It builds the way tides build. His hand back on my cock, matched to his hips. My hand reaching back to grip his thigh, pulling him in.

The world gets very small and very warm, his chest sealed to my back, two men keeping the smallest possible country alive in the dark.

“Close,” I manage.

“I’ve got you. Go.”

I come first, hard, spilling over his fist with a sound I don’t recognize as mine, clenching around his cock, and he follows inside me two strokes later with his face pressed between my shoulders and my name breaking in half in his mouth.

We don’t move for a long time. He softens and slips from me. His arm stays. His breath slows at my back.

“The horn didn’t sound,” I say, to the dark. “All match. She had it in her lap. I looked.”