Page 72 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

He’s never talked this much. In four months, I’ve heard my name twice in pieces, and don’t stop, and Nashville. Tonight he talks the whole way through in a low, broken voice about eight inches from my face.

Most of it is nothing. Half of it is my name. He says there, then like that. Once, with his eyes shut, he says don’t go home tonight. I say I’m not going home tonight. He opens his eyes again.

I get a hand between us, wrap it around his cock, and stroke him in time with it, slick with lube and what’s leaking out of him.

It takes a while. There’s no hurry. When he comes, both hands are still on my forearms and his eyes are open. His cock jerks in my fist and he spills hot over my knuckles and both our stomachs, clenching around me so hard I nearly go with him. I keep moving until he’s finished. Then I put my forehead down on his and come about twenty seconds later, deep inside him, with his name in my mouth.

Afterward, I don’t get off him for a while.

For twenty years, every arrangement has been contained: half an hour in a hotel room in a city where I was working. I told myself I wasn’t missing anything because I never wanted anything else.

I’m forty-one weeks from my thirty-ninth birthday, and I’ve never lain on top of another person afterward.

He wraps one arm around my back, cups the back of my head with the other hand, and holds me there against his shoulder with his heart going under my ear.

Neither of us says anything.

At some point he pulls the covers up over both of us with his foot. It takes him four attempts. It’s the funniest thing that’s happened to me in nine years. He laughs, and so do I.

In the morning, I’m up first.

Sunday. Half past six. The apartment is cold. A wet towel is on the bathroom floor and there’s a chicken carcass in the fridge I didn’t deal with yesterday. I put the kettle on. Then I open the laptop at the kitchen table with a blanket around my shoulders, because that’s what I’ve done every Sunday since November.

The account log opens.

The week’s report writes itself. Balance. Fixture list. Condition: hip, left, deteriorating under load, twelve-plus weeks, untreated and unlogged by the club. Sleep: improved. Club status: pulled Thursday, footage request received Wednesday. GM has spoken to him directly.

Every line is worth money to her. The last line is worth more than the rest put together. A league footage request twenty-eight hours before anybody outside the building knows about it is the single most valuable piece of information I’ve ever been in a position to sell.

The cursor sits in the field.

I look at the cursor for a while, then close the laptop. There’s no drama in it. My hands don’t shake. I don’t have a thought worth recording. I close the laptop on a kitchen table at twenty to seven on a Sunday morning and don’t file a report for the first time in nine years and four months.

Then I go and deal with the chicken.

He comes out at eight in track pants with his hair flat on one side.

“There’s stock on,” I say.

“There’s what?”

“Stock. It’s a carcass and an onion, not a project.”

He gets a mug down, stands at the counter, and looks out at the harbor, which is gray and flat. A bulk carrier comes in past the light with two tugs on it.

“Fin’s roof,” he says. “He wants to do it in June. He’s asking me to come out and help because he can’t get on a roof with that hand.”

“So go.”

“I’m going.” He drinks the tea. “I’ve got a house up there in my head. Not his. There’s a place about four miles on with about six acres and a bad barn on it. It’s been for sale since the fall and the sign’s gone green.”

“You’ve stopped and looked at it.”

“Twice.” He says it to the window. “In June, the ice is out. There’s nothing until September. I’ve never had a summer where I wasn’t waiting for the next thing. I could put a floor in a barn in June.”

He’s talking about the summer.

Fourteen weeks ago, this man sat on a kitchen floor at four in the morning with a chair under his door handle, and this morning he’s standing at a window in his own apartment with a mug in his hand telling me about six acres and a bad barn in June.