Page 64 of Offside

“There’s a taped oven in Sevilla that can testify. Nobody. Ever.”

“Said. Out loud. To each other, whenever it needs saying.”

“Said.” My voice is not performing well and I let that stand too. “And theirs, the squad, the families, the daylight, when it’s ours to give. Not tonight. Tonight is ours first.”

“One more,” I say. “Mine. The word, for the record, since the record is finally listening. Bisexual. It’s been correct since before Bucharest, and it was never once the problem. You’re not an exception to anything, Tomáš. You’re the finding.”

“I never needed one. A word.” He says it the way he posts bus times. Settled, not sore. “I’m not starting tonight. The thing needed a name. I didn’t.”

“Then the record shows one word and one standing preference.”

“It shows us,” he says. “That’s the whole entry.”

“Ours first,” he says. “That was always the only term I wanted.”

“Tomorrow’s the scatter. Nothing changes for the squad yet.”

“Nothing visible,” he says. “Everything else changes. I’ll run the visible. It’s what I’m for.”

And then his hands come up under my jaw, both of them, and he kisses me with the lights on.

The lights stay on. That’s the first thing. Five years of lamplight and half-dark and rooms staged for deniability. He reaches past me and turns the second lamp on too. Brighter.

“I want to watch you mean it,” he says.

The sentence nearly ends me before a hand has landed.

We undress each other slowly, the first-night choreography run in a mirror. His hands go under my shirt and take it up and off, one motion, the motion he’s done a hundred times. Then he stops and looks. Actually looks. The inventory conducted in full light, with the auditor’s name on it. He’s hard already against my hip, and I’m hard from being looked at, which is new data for a man who’s spent ten years avoiding the frame.

I get his shirt off and put my mouth on his neck, low, where the collar covers, out of five years of habit.

“No,” he says, and tips his head back. “Higher. Nobody’s checking anymore.”

I put my mouth on his throat, above every collar he owns, and mark him there. Gently. Deliberately. He makes a sound like a man paying off a mortgage.

“Bed,” he says. His word. Except tonight he says it like a place we live.

I lay him down and go down his chest the way I went in Bucharest, the original choreography, the first-night route, and this time I narrate it, because tonight the broadcast finally has the story it was built for.

“I did this first,” I say, against his sternum. “Five years ago. You grabbed my wrist like I’d stolen something.”

“You had.”

“I gave the toast that night to keep from saying something worse in Czech.” Lower. His stomach tightens under my mouth. “The grandmother knew. The forks were a message. I’ve been ignoring a direct instruction from a Romanian grandmother for five years.”

“Šíma.” His hand in my hair, laughing, wrecked. “Shut up and honor the forks.”

I take his cock in my mouth with the lights on and honor the forks.

I work him with five years of his tells finally lit, watching his stomach jump, his hands open and close on the sheets, his cock heavy and hard on my tongue, and there’s no performance in any of it, which is how I know the broadcast has finally been reassigned.

It’s slow. Every efficient beat of the old baseline run unhurried into something else. I take him deep and stay. He talks. He always talks. But tonight it’s my name, and yes, and there, and whole sentences. Actual sentences. The announcements man, announcing.

When he gets close he pulls me up, because tonight is not for finishing apart.

“The lube’s in the nightstand,” he says. “It lives there now. Like us.”

I slick my fingers and open him slow, watching his face in full light. Every response mine to see, for the first time, without a single shadow to file it under. One finger. Then two, curling, patient, his cock leaking against his stomach while I work him. His back arches. He says my name at a volume the party downstairs could theoretically hear, and neither of us reaches to quiet it.