Chapter 13
Chapter thirteen
Varga
We won three to two, with me playing distracted. I’d played sixteen minutes, and I couldn’t remember who had scored. Somewhere in the second period I said something to Rafe on the bench that made him do the silent laugh, and I don’t remember what it was.
That kind of distraction never happened to me before, not once in twenty years. Hockey was my thing since I learned to skate at six. It was the reason my family crossed an ocean.
One o’clock. No takebacks.
I had the first line of my speech ready. I love the life you built us. I want a bigger one.
”—because she finally sent the photo,“ Trier was saying, across the aisle on the team bus, holding his phone out at an angle that required my participation. “Look at him.”
I glanced at the screen. It was a cat asleep on the radiator. “He’s sleeping.”
“He’s alive, Varga. This is proof of life. In sixteen hours I’ll be home, and I’ll fire that woman.”
“You’re going to rehire her before Christmas.”
“Obviously, I’m going to rehire her. She’s the only one the cat tolerates.
That’s not the point.” He pulled the phone back and gazed at the sleeping cat with a smile on his face.
Then, without changing gears: “Oh — the writer called me back, by the way. Kovac. About the Rook stuff. He wanted to check a quote.”
“Which quote?”
“Actually, two. The married-couple one and the thermostat.” Trier grinned, very pleased with himself. “He’s done, he said. Talked to everybody he needed. Cross, me, Heath got twenty minutes, and even the kid got a call—Rafe, what did you tell the reporter?”
From two rows up, Rafe’s head leaned against the window. “That Rook works hard,” he said to the glass.
“Incredible. He gave him nothing. He’s perfect.” Trier went back to gazing at the cat.
Cross. Trier. Heath. The kid. Everybody he needed, and my phone never rang.
I hadn’t answered his text. Rook asked me not to that night on the couch, and I’d been a little smug about my discipline ever since. Still, I know reporters. I’ve been feeding them for fifteen years. A reporter who wants you doesn’t take silence for an answer; silence is an appetizer to them.
I’d been certain Kovac would circle back with a follow-up text or a nudge through Mark.
I sort of looked forward to it because I had five years of material on Rook.
A stranger with a notebook offered me twenty sanctioned minutes to talk about the man I loved, using only facts available to the public. I’d already picked the stories.
There was nothing. Maybe Mark screened it.
I let it go. There was one item on the night’s agenda, and it wasn’t a reporter.
The bus pulled off the highway, and the city appeared close up around us: brick buildings, steam from the grates, and wet snowflakes in the bus’s headlights. The hotel took shape through the wet windshield, fourteen stories of beige with the name in blue letters, only half of them lit.
The bus hissed and knelt at the curb.
I love the life you built us. I want a bigger one.
I got off the bus into the slushy snow.
***
In the hallway, Rook and I said goodnight from six feet apart, two teammates parting at their respective doors, a performance staged for an audience of carpet and sconces.
He went into 914. I went into 911. The locks clicked one after another.
It was the Rook and Varga Show’s last performance on the road trip.
I showered and sang my lines into the steamy spray.
“I love the life you’ve built for us. I want a bigger one.”
It sounded fine. I stood dripping in front of the mirror while it unfogged and said it once more.
Halfway through, I recognized the voice.
It was my bench-mic voice, the one for the reporters.
I’d rehearsed the most private thing I’d ever wanted to say so much that it sounded like media boilerplate.
“Okay,” I told the mirror. “Don’t do that.”
The taps on my door came just after eleven. Rook arrived with his shoes in his hand, the same as always. He threw the deadbolt and connected the chain while I sat on the bed, patting the mattress beside me.
Rook stood in the middle of my room like he stands at the blue line in the last minute of a one-goal game. He had his jaw set and hands loose at his sides. He’d shaved off the day’s shadow and was wearing the gray henley. Rook was bracing for a talk.
He thought I’d asked for sixty minutes to lay it all out, and he’d arrived groomed for sentencing.
“Okay,” he said. “You wanted the hour.” He pulled the desk chair out a few inches, then didn’t sit in it. “So talk.”
And my speech disappeared. I couldn’t remember the words.
My brain replaced them with, Not like this. Not in a rented room. Not when he’s already running on fumes.
“Luki,” he said, “Whatever it is, let’s go.”
“I want the hour,” I said. “But not for a meeting.”
He blinked and exhaled—jaw first, then shoulders and hands—visible relief. He let go of the chair.
“You’re sure?”
“I asked for sixty minutes with my boyfriend, and he showed up dressed for arbitration.” I crossed the room. “Look at you. You shaved.”
“It was getting long.”
“It was one day, and it’s always perfect. You mowed it for a conversation we’re not having.” I put my hand flat on his chest, over the henley, and felt his heart pounding hard. “Hi.”
“Hi,” he said, and the last of the blue-line stance went out of him. He was now just my Rook in a hotel room with the chain on the door.
I kissed him first. I almost always kiss him first when we’re alone. He kissed back slow and thorough, one hand coming up to the side of my neck, thumb under my jaw, tilting me where he wanted me.
“Bed,” I said against his mouth.
“In a minute.” He kissed me again, longer. “I drove past a firing squad to get here. I’m enjoying the pardon.”
“You walked nine feet.”
“Longest nine feet in hockey,” he said, and I pulled the henley up and over his head.
I put both hands flat on his pecs and took a second to appreciate what ten days of road hotels had stolen from me. He watched my face while I did it.
“Done?” he asked.
“Never. But proceed.”
I opened his belt, and he tugged off my shirt. Our jeans and shorts landed on the floor, and then his skin was against mine from collarbone to thigh. His jaw was smooth against my cheek. It was never that way at home at night.
He pressed me back across the bed and put his mouth on me like we had a week instead of an hour.
“Missed this,” he said against my throat. “Ten days. Watched you across that bus tonight and couldn’t do anything about it.”
“You could’ve texted.”
“I’m doing something better.” His mouth moved lower, found my nipple, and tugged with his teeth until I arched off the mattress.
“Rook—“
“Mm.” He moved to the other one, slower, working it with his tongue while his thumb kept the first one busy. I tangled my fingers in his hair.
“You’re going to kill me before we get anywhere.”
“We have till one.” A kiss below my ribs, then his voice again, half a murmur. “Luki, stay still.”
“I am still.”
“You’re never still.” Lower. “There. I know. I’ve got you.”
Nobody at the rink would believe it. The four-word guy ran a constant commentary into my skin.
I wanted to shout when his lips closed warm and wet around my cock.
He went slowly. Every time my grip tightened in his hair, he eased off, pulling back to long, lazy strokes of his tongue. When I relaxed my hand, he took me deep again until my hips rose off the bed.
He pinned me flat with a forearm and didn’t even break rhythm to do it.
The first time he brought me to the edge, I didn’t believe he’d stop. He pulled off with a soft sound, wrapped his hand loosely around the base of my cock, and rested his cheek against my hip while I lay there breathing like I’d done bag skates.
“You’re doing it on purpose,” I managed.
“I’m doing everything on purpose.” He kissed the inside of my thigh. “We have till one. I’m using every minute.”
“I have a heart condition.”
“You don’t.”
“I’ll develop one.”
“Then we’ll list you day-to-day,” he said into my skin, and I laughed. The laughter turned to gasps when he took me back into his mouth.
When I pulled him up by the shoulders, he came willingly, settling his weight over me on his forearms. I reached for the Dopp kit on the nightstand.
“Yeah?” he asked.
“Yeah. Stage two.”
He got the bottle out of the kit one-handed, came back to me, and settled between my legs like he was planning to stay the rest of his life.
“Knees up.”
I pulled my knees up.
The first finger went in slowly, and he watched my face the whole time the way he always does, reading me. “Easy,” he said, when my breath caught. “There you go.”
“I’m fine. Keep going.”
“I know you’re fine.” A second finger, and his mouth at the inside of my knee. “I’m not in a hurry.”
“You’re a menace.”
“Mm.” He crooked his fingers and found the spot on the first pass. My spine arched. “There he is.”
“Rook—“
“Look at you.” He said it quietly, almost to himself, working me open. His voice ruined me, the one nobody else ever heard. “Ten days. I get to look all I want. I’m making up for lost time.” The third finger entered, and I whimpered into my forearm.
“Look from closer.”
“I’m getting there.” He kissed my knee again. “You’ll keep.”
“I will not keep. I’m thirty. The decline could start any minute.”
“I’ll risk it,” he said, and took his time until I was rocking down onto his hand and swearing at him in both English and Hungarian. Only then did he pull back and slick himself up, one hand braced beside my head.
“Luki.” His eyes were on mine. “Still like this?”
“Like this? Do belugas—damn, where’d that—“
He pushed inside slowly, one long press that took the rest of my words with it.
He went still and dropped his forehead to mine. Neither of us moved. His heart was pounding hard where my hand was caught between us.
“All okay?”
“Move,” I said.
His hips rocked, slow and deep, and I wrapped my legs around him. He found the angle on the third thrust. He said my name, low against my ear, again and again with the rhythm—“Luki, Luki”—and the sound started building in my chest.
I reached up, found his left hand, and brought it down over my mouth before it got out. I pressed his palm there and held it, my hand over the back of his.
He continued—deeper and a little ragged. His control was gone. The headboard knocked against the wall. He dropped to his forearm, his weight coming down on me solid, and he pushed his other hand between us.
The palm left my mouth, so I kept my hand there, while he stroked me in time with his hips. I came shouting into my hand, every muscle in my body locking up, eyes open, staring into his, the whole way through. He watched me the entire time. He always watches.
Watching me finish wrecked him. A dozen thrusts, rougher, his rhythm falling apart, and then he drove deep and came hard, groaning my name into my neck. His body shook while I held him through it, heels in the backs of his thighs.
He cleaned us up afterwards with a warm washcloth, matter-of-factly kissed my hipbone, and came back to bed.
The television murmured across the room, local news at a low volume. A man in front of a weather map promised six inches of snow by morning. School closings crawling along the bottom for towns named Cheektowaga and Lackawanna.
“Cheektowaga,” I said to the ceiling.
“Don’t.”
“I’m just saying it. Cheektowaga. It’s a beautiful word. The kids of Cheektowaga get a snow day tomorrow, and we get a charter at noon.”
“Tragic,” he said, eyes closed, and his chest jumped once under my ear as he laughed.
We lay there. “Hey.” Rook’s voice was low. “You sure there’s nothing?”
“I’m sure,” I said.
It wasn’t true, but I couldn’t interrupt the moment.
The sentence was there, in the back of my throat.
I want more than this.
Then the control followed it. Don’t make a scene. Don’t ask the sun to come closer. I swallowed.
The words didn’t go all the way down, and they came back in the one way I could say them out loud.
“Tobbet akarok ennél.” The words in Hungarian.
“Mm. What’s that?” Rook asked.
“It means go to sleep,” I said.
One o’clock arrived. He slid out from under me a centimeter at a time, and I let him go finger by finger. He bent over the bed and kissed me, and his hand came to rest at the back of my neck, staying a beat past the kiss.
After he closed the door, I counted thirty seconds.
Rook: I’m back.
I lay there with the phone lighting the ceiling. Under I’m back, I typed the words.
I want more than this.
My thumb hovered.
I deleted it because I couldn’t send it in a text. It was a kitchen sentence. It belonged in the house, in daylight, without a chain on the door.
We’d be home on Sunday.
I got up, pulled the curtain past its gap, and stood at the window in the dark. The snow was coming down heavy through the streetlight, burying the parking lot and the entire city.
I made an appointment with myself. Sunday, at the table, I’d say the words out loud.
And if the sun didn’t like being asked to come closer, the sun could take it up with me. I was done orbiting.