Chapter 9 Tobík
He texts me on Thursday.
Czech, short, the way Damián texts when he isn’t editing.
?íma won’t stop watching something. Hotel room’s too small for this much volume.
I’m standing at the kitchen counter eating a peach over the sink because the peach is ripe and the sink is right there and this is how I eat peaches in July.
I read the text. I read it again. I type my address and send it before the part of my brain that manages consequences catches up with the part that manages thumbs.
His three dots appear. Disappear. Appear.
Twenty minutes.
I put the phone down. I change my shirt.
Not because I’m performing. I change from the practice shirt to the green polo, the one that people tell me I look good in, and I’m doing this because the practice shirt has a stain and the green polo does not have a stain and that is the reason I’m giving myself and I’m letting the reason stand.
I straighten the books on the counter. I move a cup. I’m rearranging objects in my apartment because a man is coming over and my body needs small tasks to focus on.
His knock. Three taps.
I open the door.
Damián. Hair down, curls against his neck. A simple gray t-shirt. The evening light from the stairwell window falls across one shoulder.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
He holds up a bottle of wine. “I brought this. I don’t know if you drink wine.”
“I drink wine. Sometimes. When a person brings it to my apartment.”
“Has that happened before?”
“You’re the first person to bring wine to my apartment. This is a historic moment.”
The corner of his mouth turns up.
“Come in,” I say as I open the door wider for him.
The apartment feels smaller with him in it. He looks around the way a person looks around a room they’ve decided to pay attention to. He takes everything in.
He puts the wine on the counter. His hand stays on the bottle for a beat and then falls away. He leans against the counter. My counter. The place where my hip goes in the morning when I’m waiting for the water to reach ninety-three degrees.
“Water?” I say. “We have the wine you brought. Or I also have coffee if you want the full experience.”
“Water’s fine.”
I pour him a glass. The kitchen is small enough that pouring a glass of water for someone puts you close to them. I hand it over. Our fingers don’t touch. I made sure our fingers don’t touch.
“The contract. The deadline was yesterday.”
He says it plainly. The way he’d say the score at halftime.
“I didn’t sign it.”
The fan keeps moving. Nothing in the apartment changes except everything in the apartment changes.
“You didn’t sign it?”
“No. My agent’s angry. My father called this morning to talk about legacy for twenty minutes. I didn’t hear most of it.”
“What were you doing instead of hearing it?”
“Looking at my phone.”
I stand in my kitchen with a glass of water in my hand and I wait, because tonight is his to walk into.
“I don’t have a plan,” he says then looks up at me. “I haven’t signed the contract and I don’t have a plan and I’m here because this is where I wanted to be.”
“You don’t need a plan. You walked here. That’s enough.”
He sets the glass down. His hand is on the counter six inches from my hand.
“I always have a plan,” he says. “I planned Munich. I planned the captaincy track. I planned four years of my life down to the morning coffee schedule. I don’t have a plan for this. I don’t have a plan for you.”
His eyes. The focused blue. The one I’ve been reading about in twenty-seven romance novels except no novel has ever gotten the blue right because the blue is specific to one person and that person is in my kitchen.
His hand raises and his fingers find my jaw. The touch is light. I notice his hand shaking.
I don’t wait. I lean forward and I kiss him.
The sound he makes against my mouth is small and involuntary and I’ll be keeping it.
His hand slides from my jaw to the back of my neck and his fingers grip and the grip says everything his words have been circling.
His other hand finds my hip and pulls. I come forward, chest to chest, and his mouth opens against mine and I can feel his heart going fast through two shirts.
The kiss isn’t tentative. Whatever I expected from a man who has never kissed another man, this was not it.
He kisses the way he plays. With the certainty of a body that has always known where to put itself when it stops thinking.
His hand tightens on my hip and he pushes me back against the counter, the edge hitting my lower back, and his weight settles against me and I can feel him through his shorts, hard, the length of him pressed against my hip, and the reality of that sends heat straight through my stomach.
“Tobík.” He says my name against my mouth. “Christ, Tobík.”
“Hi,” I say, and the smallness of the word against the largeness of the moment is so ridiculous that he laughs, surprised, a breath that’s more than a breath, and the sound of Damián laughing while kissing me does a thing to my chest that I’m done pretending doesn’t happen.
I pull his shirt up because I need my hands on him.
My hands find his stomach and the muscles contract under my palms. He pulls the shirt over his head and his chest is in my kitchen now, in the evening light, and the breadth of his shoulders is real in a way that team photos and Instagram posts have never managed to hold.
He sees me looking. The half-smirk tries to surface and dies.
What replaces it is unprotected and looking at me looking at him with an expression that says he needs the looking to continue.
I pull my own shirt off. The shirt I put on because the other shirt had a stain.
His eyes drop and the dropping is the thing that changes the room.
His gaze moves down my chest and stops at my ribs where the tattoo starts and then continues down and I watch him look at a man’s body with intention for what might be the first time in his life.
I take his hand. I walk him down the hallway. The bed is unmade because I don’t make my bed and I briefly wish I had made my bed today but it’s too late and he doesn’t seem to be looking at the sheets.
He stops in the doorway. The skyline through the window, gold on gold. The fan in the corner. The book on the nightstand.
“There’s a book on the nightstand,” he says.
“There’s always a book on the nightstand.”
“What is it?”
“You don’t want to know.” I feel the heat rush up my face.
“Tell me.” He brushes his fingers against my arm, encouraging.
“It’s a romance. With the chapter called ‘The Look.’ I’m reading it for the third time.
The thing about reading these books three times is that the first time is for the story, the second time is for the craft, and the third time is because someone got something so right that you want to sit inside it for a while.
There’s a scene where one man’s eyes go to another man’s mouth and the second man sees it happen and doesn’t look away, and I’ve read that scene I think fifteen times. ”
He looks at the book. He looks at me. “I think I’m going to ruin your reading schedule.”
I laugh, surprised out of me, because Damián being wry while standing in the doorway of my bedroom with no shirt on is a thing I could not have prepared for and the laugh is what closes the last distance between us.
He pushes me back onto the bed and follows me down.
His weight settles over me and the weight is real.
Not soft. Dense, trained, the weight of a body built for contact, settling without apology.
Every place we touch is hard meeting hard.
The lines of his hips against mine. The plane of his chest on mine.
His thighs alongside my thighs. The mirror that nobody before me has put up against him.
“Oh fuck.” He drops his forehead to mine. His eyes are shut. “It’s different. The feel of you under me. Your mouth. Everything is.”
He rolls his hips. Experimental. His cock dragging against mine through the fabric, and the friction causes me to moan into his mouth.
“That,” he says. “That sound is what I want. Again.”
He rolls his hips again. Deliberate now, the rhythm finding itself the way rhythms find themselves in athletic bodies. The pressure between us building, his cock hard against mine through two layers of fabric, and I can feel the heat spreading.
His mouth finds my throat. His jaw against my jaw, stubble on stubble, the matched friction, and the sensation is new for him. I can feel it in the way he pauses. Registers. Continues. His teeth scrape my collarbone. His mouth moves lower.
“The cities,” he says against my ribs.
“All four. Atlanta’s the new one.”
He kisses the line. Hip to rib. The chimney. Brno. Kladno. Atlanta. His mouth on the skyline I added in March, the newest part of me and the part I chose.
The romance novel on the nightstand has a scene about this. I’m choosing not to think about the romance novel right now. The notes have officially become useful in my actual life. The research can close. Future Tobík will handle the paperwork.
His hand goes to my belt. The buckle comes apart under his fingers with the efficiency of a man who has decided something.
“Tell me if anything’s wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong. Nothing’s been wrong since you knocked.”
He pushes my jeans down my hips and I kick them off and his hand finds me through my briefs, his palm flat against my cock, and the touch is so direct that my head drops back against the pillow.
“Tell me,” he says. Low. The back-line voice deployed in a context it was never built for. “Tell me what you feel.”
“Everything. I feel everything.”
“Be specific.” His hand presses harder. His fingers trace the shape of me through the cotton. “I want to know what this does to you.”