Chapter 10 Damián
The light comes through the window at an angle that turns the wall gold.
I don’t know what time it is. His back is two inches from my chest. He’s breathing in the rhythm of someone still asleep.
His shoulder blade rises and falls. The tattoo on his ribs catches the morning light and the Atlanta skyline at the top is the city outside this window and the city on his skin and I am in both of them.
My arm is across his waist. It’s been there all night. I know because I woke up once, around four, and my arm was there, and his hand was on top of mine, his fingers loosely folded over my knuckles.
My body is quiet. That’s the thing I notice first and can’t stop noticing.
The part of me that is usually running isn’t running.
It’s just my body in a bed in a city that isn’t mine, next to a man who is breathing, and the wall is gold.
I have morning-after etiquette for other cities, other beds.
The exit was always clean. Shower, dressed, coffee if offered, gone before the morning got complicated.
I had a system. The system involved being fully clothed within twenty minutes of waking up.
I’m not wearing anything and I have no interest in finding my clothes and the system appears to have been fired.
He shifts. A small sound, half-asleep, his body pressing back into my chest. My hand tightens on his hip without me telling it to.
His skin is warm from sleep and from the sheet and from whatever the morning is doing through this window, and when he shifts again his ass presses against me and my cock responds before any other part of me does.
Honest. Immediate. Not interested in a committee meeting about it.
“You’re awake,” he says. His voice is thick with sleep, our native language on his tongue.
“I’ve been awake.”
“How long?”
“Long enough.”
He turns over. His face in the gold light. Brown eyes, slightly swollen from sleep. The freckles across his nose that I noticed three years ago in photos and keep noticing. His hair falling across his forehead. He looks at me with his full open face, and the look is so unguarded my chest tightens.
“You’re still here,” he says.
“I’m still here.”
His hand finds my jaw. His thumb traces the line of it. Unhurried. Not tentative. He knows where he’s going and he’s choosing to take his time getting there.
Last night was not this. Last night was the dam, the rush, the three years of silence crashing through both of us at once. I’m not going to replay it. I’m keeping it.
This feels different. He kisses me. His mouth is warm and tastes like sleep and like him and the kiss is unhurried.
I feel it in my whole body. My hands move to his waist and his ribs and the tattoo line under my palm and his breath catches when my thumb traces the small spire near his hip, that I am now seeing for the first time in the light but felt and touched and kissed in the dark.
“You found that last night,” he says against my mouth.
“I’m finding it again.”
“You’re thorough.”
“I’m a center back. We cover the same ground twice.”
He grins. The grin is so close I feel it against my lips. Then his hand slides down my chest, deliberate, his fingers tracing from my collarbone to my stomach to the line of hair below my navel, and lower, and his hand closes around my cock and my hips push into his grip before I can stop.
“Tell me what you want,” he says quietly, his breath near my ear.
The question is simple and not simple. Nobody has asked me that in bed. What I wanted was never part of the equation.
“This,” I say. “Don’t stop doing this.”
“Specific,” he says, smiling. “Very helpful.”
“I’m working with new information.”
He laughs, and the laugh is warm and close and his body is pressed against mine and I feel him laughing against my chest and the feeling is so good I close my eyes.
When I open them his face is right there, the brown eyes with gold in them.
I learned three years ago in a bedroom in Brno that his eyes had gold.
That knowledge has been quietly rearranging me ever since.
I reach for him. My hand between us, finding him hard, and the feeling of another man’s cock in my hand is the thing I was supposed to be panicking about and I’m not.
My hand wraps around him and his breath stutters and his hips roll forward and I watch his face change and the watching is a revelation.
There’s just his cock in my hand and the sound he makes when I tighten my grip and the way his forehead drops against mine.
“Damián.” He moves on top of me. His weight settles and my hands find his hips and his thighs and the muscle along his sides that hockey built, core strength different from a footballer’s.
I’m hard against his stomach and he’s hard against mine and the friction when his hips roll is slow and intentional and every part of it is visible in the morning light.
His hand wraps around both of us together and I hear myself say his name and it comes out wrecked.
His hand moves and the friction is his cock against mine, his palm holding us tight, and the pleasure builds from a place in my body I didn’t know had a voice.
I’ve come before. I’ve come with people.
Not like this. Not with my hand gripping his hip hard enough to leave marks and his breath on my neck and the feeling that every nerve I have has finally found the right person. Tobík.
“There,” he says. “Yeah. There.”
He comes first. I feel it happen, the tension breaking, his cock pulsing against mine in his hand, his forehead dropping against my shoulder, the sound buried in my neck, warm and open and completely his. His hand doesn’t stop and I follow him feeling myself stripped raw from the intensity of it.
He stays on top of me. His breathing slowing against my chest. His hand still loosely between us, wet, neither of us moving to clean up. The gold light is still on the wall.
“That was a good morning. ,” he says again, into my shoulder.
“That was a very good morning.”
He lifts his head. Kisses my jaw. Gets up.
I watch him walk to the bathroom. His back, the tattoo climbing his ribs, the morning settling on his shoulders. He comes back in boxers and tosses me a wet cloth and heads down the hallway.
I hear a cabinet open and water running.
I pull on the shorts I find on the floor, which might be his, and walk to the kitchen doorway. He’s spooning grounds into a French press and talking to the coffee in Czech. What sounds like “you’ll be good, don’t worry.”
“You talk to your coffee?” I ask.
He turns. The smile starts before the turn finishes, his whole face opening.
“I talk to most things. The coffee. The plants. There was a squirrel on the fire escape last week and I had a full conversation with it.”
“In Czech?”
“In Czech. He didn’t seem to mind. I think he appreciated the effort.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Rent prices. He seemed stressed. I told him the dumpster behind the building’s underrated and he should consider it.”
“Did he take the advice?”
“He came back the next day, so I think yes.”
The laugh comes out of me without effort. Short and real. He grins at the sound.
“How’d you sleep?” he asks.
“I didn’t move.”
“I know. Your arm was around me all night. I could feel it every time I woke up.”
“You woke up?”
“Once. Around four. Your arm was there. Your hand was on my stomach and I put my hand on top of it.” He pours the water, steady, his wrist controlling the angle. The grounds bloom. “I wasn’t going to move it.”
He pours two mugs. Brings one to me. The mug is heavy ceramic, handmade, slightly uneven on the rim. His fingers brush mine on the transfer.
“This is the good mug,” he says. “The other one has a chip. I’m giving you the good one.”
“I’m honored.”
“You should be. Marchetti’s been here twice and got the chip mug both times.”
“Does he know?”
“He suspects. He keeps looking at the mug like it owes him a favor.”
I drink. The coffee is dark and slightly sweet and specific to this apartment and this morning and this man in the gold light. He leans against the counter across from me and drinks his coffee and looks at me over the rim.
“You’re quiet,” he says. “Quieter than yesterday.”
“I’m drinking.”
“You’re thinking.”
“I’m always thinking.”
“You’re thinking less. I can see it. You look different this morning.” He tilts his head. “Slower.”
“My mornings in Munich have a shape,” I say.
The sentence starts before I decide to say it.
“Alarm at six forty-five. Coffee from the machine, black, the same machine for four years. Route to the training ground, same streets, same order. The man at the café near the bridge knows my cortado and the time I walk in and the time I walk out. Four years and he doesn’t know my name.
He knows the order. That’s all he knows about me.
He doesn’t call me Tuesday, or sunshine, or honey.
” I drink. The coffee is better than the café near the bridge.
“This morning you gave me the good mug.”
He doesn’t say anything for a few seconds. “The good mug is available to you anytime,” he says.
“That’s a significant offer.”
“I’m a significant person.”
We drink in silence a few more minutes
“Your bookshelf,” I say.
“What about it?”
“How many books?”
He glances toward the bedroom. “On the shelf? Maybe thirty. More on my phone.” He sips. “Tomá? thinks I own twelve books.”
The name lands in the kitchen the way a sound arrives from another room. Present. Not close. He says it without flinching and I hear it without the floor dropping and we both drink our coffee.
“Have you read all of them?”
“Most. Some twice. There’s one I’ve read four times.”
“Four times?”
“A hockey romance. The main character doesn’t say the thing for two hundred pages and then he says it and every time I reread it I already know he’s going to say it and every time it still gets me.
” He wraps both hands around his mug. “The waiting’s the point.
The two hundred pages of not saying it. The reader knows from page three what he’s going to say.
The whole book’s about the gap between knowing and saying. ”
The words settle. The kitchen is quiet.
“What does he say?” I ask.
“I can’t tell you. It’d ruin the two hundred pages.”
“You could lend it to me.”
He looks at me over his coffee with the full attention of a person trying to hold every detail of a moment.
“You want to read one of my books?” he asks.
“Is that strange?”
“Nobody’s ever asked me to lend them one. Marchetti gave me my first one at training camp. But nobody’s asked to borrow one.”
“I’m asking.”
“Why?”
I have been in locker rooms with men who share everything.
But borrowing a book a man has read four times, a book with a note in the margin, a book that lives on a shelf in an apartment I woke up in this morning.
That’s a different kind of asking. I want to know what earns four readings from a person who pays that kind of attention.
“Because you’ve read it four times,” I say. “I want to know what earns four times.”
He sets his mug on the counter. “It’s on the shelf. Second row. Green spine. I put a note in the margin on page two fourteen. You can ignore it or you can read it, but if you read it you’re not allowed to be weird about it.”
“I’m never weird.”
“You’re frequently weird. You rehearse sentences.”
“I don’t rehearse sentences.”
“Damián. You rehearsed ‘I didn’t know you came here.’ I could tell you rehearsed it.”
The accuracy is startling. I take a drink of coffee to buy half a second.
“Okay,” I say. “I may have rehearsed that one.”
“You may have.”
“The coffee line too.”
“‘The coffee’s good?’” He says it back to me in my own intonation, the careful Czech, the performed ease, and hearing my own performance played back in his voice is like seeing a photo of a costume I forgot I was wearing. “It was very smooth.”
“Thank you.” I arch an eyebrow at him because I know it was the least smooth thing I have ever done.
“It was terrible. I loved it.”
My phone buzzes on the bedroom nightstand. The sound carries through the apartment.
I set the mug on the counter and walk to the bedroom. The phone shows a text from Tomá?, sent four minutes ago.
Dami. Tactical meeting moved to 11. Where are you?
On my way.
Tobík appears in the doorway. He sees the phone in my hand.
“Tomá??” he says.
“Tactical meeting at eleven.”
He nods. Picks my shirt up off the floor where it landed last night. Hands it to me. His fingers brush my wrist on the handoff.
“The book,” I say. “Second row. Green spine.”
“Page two fourteen,” he says. “Don’t be weird about it.”
“I’m never weird.”
“You’re always weird. Go to your meeting.”
I pull the shirt on. I take the book off the shelf on the way past. I look at him in the doorway one more time. The gold light behind him. The tattoo on his ribs. His face is still doing the thing it does when he sees me. Open and happy.