Chapter 11 Tobík
I'm standing in my kitchen in briefs eating leftover lamb barbacoa from a container because Maria's lamb is better cold than most things are warm and this is Sunday and Sunday doesn't require a plate. I read the text. I read the math. The math is two hours and forty-three minutes.
I type one word and send it.
Come.
Fifteen minutes.
I put the phone down. I put the lamb back in the fridge.
I pull on a shirt because answering the door shirtless feels like a declaration I haven’t planned and then I take the shirt back off because the shirt felt like hiding and I put a different shirt on, the gray one, and the entire process takes forty seconds and accomplishes nothing and I’m aware of this.
The buzzer goes. I press the button without checking the camera because I know.
Damián. Hair up, the bun that means he left the hotel fast. A white t-shirt, shorts, running shoes.
The outfit of a man who told anyone who asked that he was going for a run.
His eyes find me and the blue goes focused in a way I’ve been reading for three days across ten-word texts that said nothing and meant everything.
He doesn’t say hi. He comes in and the door closes behind him. My hand is already reaching for his shirt before his mouth reaches mine.
The kiss is hungry. Two days of texting around it. His hand goes to the back of my neck immediately. My hands go flat against his chest, the breadth of him through the cotton, and his mouth opens against mine and the days collapse.
He tastes like hotel toothpaste and the coffee he probably drank on the walk over and underneath that he tastes like Damián, which is the taste I’ve been thinking about since Friday morning when he left this apartment and I stood at this counter and didn’t wash his coffee mug for six hours.
“I missed you,” I say against his mouth, because I’m a person who says true things and this one came out before the filter caught it.
He pulls back an inch. His eyes on mine. “It’s been two days.”
“I’m aware of how many days it’s been. I can count.”
“You missed me in two days.” He smiles down at me.
“I missed you in two hours. The two days were longer.”
Something crosses his face. Not the half-smile. The unprotected one. The one that arrives when I say a thing he wasn’t ready to hear and his face does the honest version before the composed version catches up.
He kisses me again. Harder. His hands at my hips, pulling me forward, and I can feel him through his shorts, already hard, the length of him against my thigh.
My lower back hits the counter edge. He presses into me with wall holding me in place and the grind of him against me is so direct that my breath comes apart.
We work our way down the hall to my bedroom with his hands under my shirt pulling it up before we’ve left the entry and my hands are at his waistband and the coordination required to walk and undress a person at the same time is significant and we are not excelling at it.
He pulls my shirt off w. I reach for his. It goes. His chest in the morning light and I put my palm flat against his sternum where his heart is going fast and I hold it there because I like knowing what his heart does when he’s with me.
“You’re doing the thing,” he says.
“What thing?”
“The looking thing. Where you look at me like you’re cataloguing something.”
“I’m always cataloguing something. You have a new freckle. Here.” I touch his shoulder. “It wasn’t there Friday.”
“You’re tracking my freckles?”
“I’m observant. It’s a skill.”
He laughs. Short, warm, the surprised one, and my chest does what it always does with the surprised one and I let it.
His belt. My hands on the buckle. His hands on mine.
We get each other’s shorts off with the gracelessness of two people who are in a hurry and also have large thighs, and his knee catches on the fabric and he stumbles sideways onto the bed and I follow him down and we’re both laughing and the laughing is good.
I’ve seen him. Thursday night, Friday morning. He’s seen me. But the looking now has a different quality because his eyes move down my body and stop and come back up and what’s in his face isn’t curiosity. It’s intention.
“I want to be inside you,” he says. The words land in the room like something that’s been waiting.
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’ve been sure for six years, Damián. The specifics are new. The sure isn’t.”
The half-smirk on his face starts and dies. What replaces it is open and raw and looking at me like I’ve said a thing he’s going to hear for the rest of his life.
“Have you done this before?” I ask. “With anyone.”
“No. Not like this.”
“Then I’ll show you what to do.”
I reach for the nightstand drawer. Lube. I hand it to him. I reach for the condoms. Pause. We look at each other. Team physicals, both clean, neither of us sleeping with anyone else. The conversation happens in the look. I put the condoms back. The choice is its own intimacy.
I slick my own fingers. I reach back to start opening myself up because someone has to start and I know what I’m doing and his face when he watches me is worth every second of the last six years I have wanted him.
“Let me,” he says. “I want to do that.”
One finger, careful, the hesitation of a man who has never done this and is terrified of doing it wrong. His eyes stay on my face, reading me the way he reads a striker’s body, looking for the thing that tells the truth.
“Slow,” I say. “Deeper. Yes. Curl your finger. Yeah, like that.”
“Like this?”
His fingers hit the spot, and my body arches off the bed. “Fuck. Yes. Exactly like that.”
He adds lube and a second finger joins the first. The stretch is good and his face when he feels me open around him is focused and reverent and slightly wrecked.
“You’re so warm,” he says. “I didn’t. I didn’t know it would feel like this.”
“What did you think it would feel like?”
“I didn’t think. I just wanted.”
“That’s the best answer you could’ve given me.” I smile up at him.
His fingers move. He’s learning the angle, learning to read the way my breathing changes, and when he curls his fingers and finds the right spot my hips come off the bed.
“There,” I say.
“There?”
“Right there. Don’t stop.”
He doesn’t stop. His other hand wraps around my cock, stroking slowly while his fingers work inside me, and the combination is devastating.
A third finger. More lube. The stretch wider now, fuller, and Damián’s eyes are dark and his breathing is rough and his cock is hard against my thigh and I can feel the heat of it.
“I’m ready,” I say. “Come here.”
He moves between my legs. His hand on himself, slicking, and I watch him touch his own cock with lube and the watching is a thing I’m keeping. He positions himself. The head of his cock against my hole. He pauses.
“Tell me if I need to stop.”
“I’ll tell you.”
The first push in. His breath catches and mine catches and my hand finds his wrist and holds on. The pressure is full and I can feel the care in every inch.
He stops halfway. His jaw tight. “Wait. Wait. Just give me a second.”
“Take your time.”
“If I move I’m going to come immediately and I don’t want this to end in thirty seconds.”
He breathes. His eyes closed. His arms trembling on either side of me. I keep my hand on his wrist. Grounding him. Letting him find the version of this that lasts.
He opens his eyes. He pushes the rest of the way in. His forehead drops to my shoulder and his whole body shakes with the effort of holding still.
The words in Czech in the morning light in my bed with the skyline through the window and his body shaking and his forehead on my shoulder. I’m going to remember this specific second for the rest of my life.
He moves. The first careful thrust. Then the next. The rhythm finds itself the way rhythms find themselves in athletic bodies, the timing that lives in muscle, and his hips settle into a pace that is slow and deep and thorough.
“God,” he says. English breaking through. “Fuck, Tobík. Does it…Tell me if it’s good.”
“It’s good. Deeper. You can go deeper.”
The angle shifts and the shift puts him against the right spot. I say his name and the saying of his name makes his hips stutter and then push harder and the harder is what I want.
I turn onto my side. He follows, behind me now, his chest against my back, his arm around my waist, his cock inside me, and from this angle every thrust pushes him deep enough that my vision goes bright at the edges.
His mouth is at my neck. His hand slides from my waist to my cock and strokes in time with the way he’s moving inside me and the dual sensation is relentless.
He’s making sounds. Low ones. My name. Czech words that aren’t sentences, just sounds in his throat. English when the Czech isn’t enough. “Fuck” and “God” and “Tobík” and then back to Czech and the language-crashing is the thing that tells me he’s close to gone.
“I’m close,” I say.
“Me too. I can’t stop.”
“Don’t hold back.”
“I want you to come first.”
“Then make me come, Damián.”
His hand tightens on my cock. His hips drive forward. Three more strokes, four, his grip perfect and his cock hitting the right place and I come with his hand on me and his body inside me and his breath on the back of my neck, and the tightening of my body around him pushes him over.
He comes inside me. I feel it. His hips pressing hard, his arm locking around my waist, his mouth open against the back of my neck, the sound buried in my skin. A shudder through his whole body that I feel in mine.
He stays. His cock still inside me, softening. His breathing rough against my neck. His arm still around me, heavy, keeping me close.
“Christ,” he says.
He pulls out, slow, careful, watching my face. Kisses my shoulder before separating. Gets up.
I hear water in the bathroom. He comes back with a warm cloth. He cleans me first. Then himself. The gesture of a man who knows what care looks like. I didn’t teach him that. He brought it here.
He lies down behind me. His chest to my back. His arm across my waist. The fan turning. The city outside doing its Sunday thing. Both of us breathing.
I’m starting to think about whether he can stay for lunch when his phone buzzes on the nightstand.
He reaches for it. His body changes in a single second. The post-sex looseness gone. The composure returning like a jersey pulled over a person.
“Fuck.”
“What?”
“Tomá?.” He sits up. “Film moved up. He wants me there in thirty minutes.”
I don’t sit up. I stay in the bed. I watch Damián become Damián-in-public. The careful posture. The controlled breath. The half-second of panic that arrives and gets managed before it finishes arriving.
He’s up, looking for his clothes. Shorts on the floor.
Shirt in the hallway where it landed. He pulls them on at a speed that suggests extensive experience in leaving places quickly, and I file that observation away with mild amusement and zero jealousy because the person he’s rushing to leave is me and I know he doesn’t want to be rushing.
He’s in my bathroom with the door open, washing fast, his face in the mirror. The shower he doesn’t have time for. The cloth instead.
“My hair,” he says. “Tobík. My hair.”
“What about your hair?”
“It’s…Look at it.”
“I’m looking at it. It looks like a man who just had sex. Which is accurate.” I smirk at him from the bed.
“This is not funny. I have to sit in a room with your brother in twenty-five minutes.”
“It’s a little funny,” I say as I shrug.
“Find me a brush.”
I get out of bed. I find the brush. I hand it to him.
We’re standing at my small bathroom mirror, him in his shorts trying to get his hair into the bun with the urgency of a man defusing a bomb, me in my briefs watching him fight his own curls, and the comedy of it is so complete that I lean against the doorframe and let myself enjoy it.
“You’re enjoying this,” he says to the mirror.
“I’m not enjoying this. I’m observing this. There’s a difference.”
“There’s no difference. You’re smiling.”
“My face does what it does, Damián. I have no control over my face. This has been established for many years.”
He gets the bun. It holds. He checks the mirror. He checks again. He turns to me.
“Do I look like I just…?”
“No. You look like you went for a run. Which is what you told them.”
“Okay.”
He walks to the front door. Dressed, hair fixed, mostly composed. He pauses with his hand on the knob.
“I have to go.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know how to do this, Tobík. I don’t know what to do with the fact that I’m going to sit next to him for three hours and I just left you in a bed where I...” He stops. “Where we...”
“I know. I’ve been thinking about that for three years. You’ve been thinking about it for two days.”
He stops. The three years lands.
“Two days,” he says.
“Two days. And I’m just saying. Tomá? is hard. I know he is. We don’t have to figure it out today.”
“We have to figure it out at some point.”
“I know. Some point. Not now. You have film in twenty minutes.”
He kisses me. Quick. His hand at the back of my neck for one second. Then he’s gone.
The door closes. The elevator dings down the hall. His footsteps fade. I stand in the hallway in my briefs.
I’m going to stand in this hallway and not text Tomá? back about the brunch plans he’s been asking about since Friday because I can’t sit at a table with my brother and look at him across a plate of eggs and not have my face do the thing my face does.
I change the sheets. I shower. The water is hot and the bathroom still smells faintly like his soap and I let it.
I make myself eggs because I’m hungry and because making eggs is a thing a person does on a Sunday afternoon when they’re living forward.
I pick up my phone. I text him.
Good luck with film review. Tell me how it goes tonight.
I set the phone down. I watch the screen. Ten seconds.
I’ll tell you tonight.
Four words. I read them twice. I choose to believe them.
I pick up the book from the nightstand, the one I was reading before his text came, the one where the heroine is keeping a secret she thinks will cost her the person she loves. I already know how this one ends. She tells him. He stays. The secret was never as heavy as she thought it was.