Page 65 of Offside

“Volume,” I say anyway, grinning, five years of protocol dying hard.

“Let them wonder.” His eyes are dark and open and on me. “No. Actually. Let them never wonder anything again after Sunday. But tonight, come here, and do it slow, and don’t you dare file one second of this.”

I push my cock into him slow, one long stroke, watching, watched. Nothing between us. No code. No clock. No cover story cooling on a desk somewhere. He takes me the way he took me the first night in Bucharest, easy, made for it. Except tonight both of us are saying so, out loud, in two languages. The arrangement is dead. The thing it was hiding is alive and has the lights on.

We move slow. His hands map my back like a man signing every page. The talking never stops. His and mine. Half Czech, half nonsense, all of it true.

“Slower,” he says, greedy, an announcements man conducting.

“We have all night.”

“We have all of them. Slower anyway.”

I go slower. And when his hand comes to the back of my neck, the gesture, the family gesture, I say the thing into his shoulder that I’ve said once before, in the dark of my own skull, at six in the morning.

“I love you.” Out loud. With my name on it. Pushed through the front of my own face. “Five years. The whole time. Every telling.”

“I know,” he says, and his voice breaks in the middle of it, announcements man to the end. “Me too. The whole time. Keep going.”

He comes with my hand working his cock and my name in his mouth, arching, loud, unfiled, spilling hot between us, clenching around me. I follow him over with the lights on, buried deep, watched all the way through it, hiding nothing. It is the single most explicit thing I have ever done in my life, and the anatomy was the least of it.

After, nobody moves. That’s not new. What’s new is that nobody is counting.

“I kept an alarm,” he says, into my hair, after a while. “Five years. Five forty, every night we had. In case a night ran long and you needed waking. I un-set it two days ago.”

“Set it again.”

“You’re not sneaking out anymore. That’s in the terms.”

“No. But dawn’s ours now too, and I’ve only ever seen it from stairwells. I’d like the other view.”

He laughs, once, into my neck, and reaches for his phone, and sets an alarm for five forty, and shows me the screen like a man entering evidence.

“Damián comes back to an empty room tonight and assumes a bar,” I say.

“Last time he ever does.” A yawn takes him mid-sentence. “Sunday I tell nobody. Ours first. But I get to know it in front of people. That’s allowed. Knowing at people.”

“You’ve been knowing at people your whole life.”

“Now it has content.”

The room settles. The party below surrenders to Sunday, song by song. His breathing goes long against my back, and the lastitem in tonight’s file is his voice, half gone, running logistics one final time.

“Breakfast at eight. The plate’s back.”

“Both bananas?”

“Both bananas. Standing order. Forever clause.”

The commentator files the clause and, for once in his documented career, has nothing at all to add.

The lamp goes off eventually because sleep wants it off, not because protocol does. We lie in the dark, his chest against my back this time, wrapped, the position from the worst night, repurposed for the best one, and his mouth is at my ear, and I am almost asleep in the second bed in five years I’ve ever slept in, when he says it.

“Radek.”

In the dark. Meant. The name lands the way it landed at the pool, like contact, except this time there’s no ask behind it and no answer required. It’s not a question. It’s a man checking that the word works in the new world. Testing the good word. Exercising it.

“Still here,” I say.