Page 73 of Offside

“Ostrava,” I say. “Fence. I was fourteen.”

“There’s a fence story?”

“There’s always a fence story. Later. Come here.”

Daylight is a different country. I know his body the way I know the fixture list, but I know it in lamplight and half-dark and other people’s rooms. I’ve been reading the away kit all along. In the sun he’s ridiculous. In the sun he has freckles on his shoulders, and I inform him of each one individually until he pulls me down by the back of my neck to shut me up. The kiss is long and lazy.

My mouth on his throat, above the collar. My name in the room at conversational volume, because volume was only ever about witnesses, and the flat has none.

“Say that again,” he says.

“Which part?”

“Any of it. All of it. We have all day. Say everything twice.”

His hands map my back the slow way, and when I take him in hand he exhales like a man setting down bags at the end of a very long trip.

“There’s the science,” he says.

I laugh into his shoulder. Actually laugh, mid-act, because it turns out you can. Nobody teaches you that on the road. Laughing was for the bit and this was for the dark, and the daylight merges the accounts. He’s hard in my hand and grinning at me with the sun on his face and it’s all one thing now. It was always one thing. We finally have the lighting for it.

Slow hands. His mouth, then mine. When he finishes it’s with my name, the surname, the one he’s always used, said soft into my ear like a password to a door that’s already open. I follow him with his hand steady on the back of my neck. The family gesture. The last thing I think before I stop thinking is that nobody is going to knock.

Nobody does.

After, we lie there while the gold goes up the wall. His heartbeat under my ear does its metronome thing.

“The reservation,” he says, to the ceiling. “You said you know a place.”

“I know every place. I’m Brno’s problem, remember.”

“Then call one.”

“Tomorrow, not tonight. Tonight I’m not sharing you with a waiter.”

“Agreed. Tomorrow.”

Evening. The kitchen again. He cooks the second thing he knows, which he claims is a different scramble. I set my table for two people, which requires both plates I own. We eat while the window goes blue.

There’s a bottle of red on the table, open, because dinner gets a bottle. That’s civilization. His glass does its work. Mine sits there, one swallow gone, catching the last of the light, and stays where it is, and the meal goes on around it.

Then I pick up the phone and call U Kastelána, because Ondra runs the floor on Sundays, and Ondra owes me nothing but likes me anyway.

“Ahoj, Ondro. Šíma.” Pause for the noise he makes. “Yes. That one. The medal is bronze, don’t inflate it. Listen. Tomorrow, eight o’clock. Table for two.”

Tomáš watches me from the sink, towel over his shoulder. I hold his eyes while I do it.

“Šíma,” I say again, into the phone. “Under Šíma. With the accents, like the footballer. Because it IS the footballer. Two people. No, no occasion.”

His eyebrow goes up across my kitchen. I amend for the record.

“A good table, though, Ondro. It’s a little bit an occasion.”

I hang up. The reservation exists. In a ledger in Brno, in my own name, in my own city, a table for two, tomorrow, eight o’clock. Visible to anyone and legible to no one, because two footballers having dinner is nothing. Is Tuesday. Is invisible.

That was the punchline all along. We could always have done this. The doors were never locked. I checked every one of them personally, for five years, from the inside, holding the key, briefing the guards.

“Eight o’clock,” I tell him. “Wear the blue thing.”