Chapter 6 Marek
There is Naples in my minibar.
It sits behind the water bottles nobody drinks, a plastic container of six-hour ragù, and every time the little fridge light comes on it looks at me. He told me it wouldn’t keep longer than a day.
Novotny finds it before breakfast, because Novotny audits the minibar the way customs audits a nervous man.
“There’s pasta in our fridge. Real pasta. Where does a man get real pasta in a hotel?”
“A dinner. Damián brought me along.”
“Damián’s been here as long as us and he’s already getting invited to dinners?”
“He’s likable. It’s a known problem with him.” I take the container out of his hand and put it back. “Touch it again and I’ll tell Polá?ek you’ve been taking his protein shakes.”
He withdraws backward with his hands visible.
Recovery day runs on rails. Pool, bikes, stretching in a line. In the shallow end, Polá?ek and Novotny find the day’s war, whether watching tape tonight is preparation or bad luck.
?íma waits until the cooldown. “The GPS flagged you. Eleven kilometers yesterday, on foot, on a rest day.”
“Walking is rest.”
“Eleven kilometers isn’t walking, it’s emigration.” He pulls his towel around his neck. “Where does a man even walk to, eleven kilometers, in a city he doesn’t know?”
“I know the city fine.” It’s out before I check it. ?íma looks at me with great patience, the way he looks at a lock he plans to come back for.
“The pool,” I say. “I’m getting back in the pool.”
“You’ve been in the pool.”
“Thoroughness.”
I eat the ragù that night standing at the minibar with a coffee spoon, Novotny out with some of the guys.
Cold, straight from the container. It doesn’t matter.
I eat all of it. Then I stand there a while, holding the empty container.
I wash it in the bathroom sink with hotel shampoo, which is a crime with two victims, and dry it with a towel I’ll have to fold so housekeeping doesn’t ask questions.
I tell myself the container needs returning tonight, on foot. Four blocks of cardio and manners.
The filing system stamps it. Manners. The system and I both know better, and neither of us says so.
He opens the door in his old Napoli training shirt and doesn’t look surprised, which is worse than him being surprised.
The shirt is soft at the collar and too loose on one shoulder, the old blue faded almost grey.
His dark hair is pushed back and failing.
His eyes are not. They are wide awake, deep blue and absolutely done accepting the smaller version of anything.
“You ate it.” He raises an eyebrow in question.
“With a coffee spoon.”
“That’s disrespectful to the sauce.”
“The sauce survived. The spoon didn’t.” I hold out the container. “It’s washed.”
“How?”
“You don’t want the answer.”
He watches me for a long time, and I can tell he’s deciding whether to let me in. Behind him, the kitchen is dark. The apartment holds one kind of quiet, the kind with nobody else in it.
“Davide isn’t here,” he says. “That is not a loophole.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because you were always very good at finding doors that opened the wrong way.”
I hold the container between us, stupid and clean and not enough for anything. “I didn’t come for a loophole.”
This is true and not true, which is how the worst answers earn their paperwork. A dark hallway is still a hallway. A closed apartment is still the old route wearing clean shoes. But I am here with no bed waiting in Rome and no exit timed before sunrise, and for tonight that has to matter.
“You came at nine at night.” He pauses. “With a clean container.”
“Yes.”
He looks at me for long enough that the stair light behind me times out. Neither of us moves to wake it.
“It isn’t noon,” he says. “I told you noon.”
“I know.”
“Outside. At a table. Where people can see your face. This is not that. And if I let you through this door, it still won’t be that.”
“I know.”
“Good.” His voice drops, but it doesn’t soften. “Because I am not discounting myself because you finally got tired of being alone with your own excuse.”
The sentence lands exactly where it should. I deserve the mark it leaves.
“I came to say I was wrong.”
His face doesn’t change.
I had the sentence prepared the complete walk over. It falls apart anyway.
“I can’t put you in a box. I tried. Roma went in a box.
My family went in a box. Every man before you went in a box and stayed there.
” I look down at the container because his face is too much.
“You don’t. Tonight I ate your pasta standing up at a minibar with a coffee spoon, and there’s no box for that either.
I don’t know what it looks like. I only know what it isn’t. ”
“What isn’t it?”
“Kindness,” I say. “Leaving like I did. Calling it kindness.”
Something moves in the dark between us.
“No,” he says. “It wasn’t.”
“I know.”
“You didn’t know for an entire year.”
“I did. I just made the file name better.”
That almost gets him. Not a laugh. Not forgiveness. Something smaller and worse.
He takes the container from me. “This doesn’t pay the price. It doesn’t even put down a deposit.”
“I know.”
“It gets you through the door long enough to stop lying in my hallway.”
My throat works.
“That’s all?” I ask.
“For tonight,” he says.
Then he steps back into the dark.
“Come in, Marek. Before you spend another minute pretending this is manners.”
The door closes behind me, and the fluency comes back with the sound of it, instant, whole.
He puts the container on the kitchen counter without looking at it. Then his hands are on my jaw. Mine find his hips, and his mouth lands the way it always landed.
“The shirt,” he says against my mouth. “Careful with the shirt. It’s older than your career.”
The sacred Napoli shirt comes off over his head with his arms up, no save attempted. Mine follows. His hands go flat on my chest and slide down. He watches them do it. Unhurried. Taking inventory.
“Gym,” he says. “You’ve been living in a gym.”
“It was the gym or your street.”
“It was always my street.” He drags my belt open and gets my fly down, and closes his hand around my cock in one motion. No ceremony anywhere in it. He squeezes exactly hard enough to knock my head back against the wall. “There he is,” he says, low and delighted. “Hello.”
“You’re talking to it now?”
“It listens better than you.”
He works me slow, thumb dragging over the head on every pass until my hips start chasing his fist and he makes me wait for it anyway. “You drove two and a half hours for this and then drove home before morning, every time. Look what you kept leaving on the table.”
Then he goes to his knees.
He takes me into his mouth the way he does everything.
Direct. Committed. The heat of it whites out every language I own.
His fist wraps what his mouth doesn’t. He looks up at me the whole time, because he always looked up.
For Enzo, the watching was half the event.
I get a hand in his hair and concentrate on keeping upright.
“Enzo. That ends this in about a minute.”
He pulls off slowly, on purpose. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and stands.
“Bed. Now. I’m not doing this against a counter.”
We get to his room and he shoves me down onto the bed and strips off the last of his clothes.
I look at him the way I haven’t let myself look at anything in the last year.
Leaner than Naples. The tournament has carved him down to the machinery.
Olive skin, dark hair falling forward because he has stopped trying to control it, every line of him made sharper by the tournament and worse by memory.
His cock stands hard against his belly, and when I reach for it, he knocks my hand away.
“Say it,” he says, kneeling over me.
“You look like the thing I was a coward about.”
“Closer to the truth than you know. Lube, nightstand, left side. Some things about me didn’t change either.”
I get the drawer open. He rises over me and slicks my cock with a fist that knows exactly how much is enough, because it learned that three years ago and kept the notes.
Then he’s working himself open on his own fingers, knees planted either side of my hips.
He makes me watch. One finger, then two, his breath going short. His cock leaks against his belly.
When I reach up, this time he lets me.
“Je?tě,” he says, when I press a finger in alongside his. My word. The one I taught him on his back in Naples, handed back with an accent that still isn’t sorry.
“Je?tě,” I agree, and give it to him. Two of mine against his one, opening him together, until he’s swearing at the ceiling in Neapolitan and riding our hands and neither of us can stand another minute of it.
He takes my cock in his fist, lines himself up, and sinks down.
Slow. Deliberate. Entirely on his terms. His palms go flat on my chest. His breath leaves in one long line.
The heat and the grip of him after a year of nothing is nearly enough to end it right there, and he knows it, and he stops, fully seated.
His eyes are open, and mine are open, and the room is very quiet around the fact of it.
Deep blue, his eyes, the blue you only find near the bottom of things.
Months with no footage of them anywhere.
The archive was starving, and I never once admitted it was an archive.
“Twelve months,” he says. Not gently.
“I know.”
“You don’t get to close your eyes.”
“I know that too.”
He rides me the way he plays, direct and then patient and then direct, no mercy in the changes of pace.
He rises until I’m almost out of him and sinks back down slow enough to hurt.
Then again. And again. Until I’m begging in Czech.
I hold his hips hard enough to matter and meet him on the way down.
We keep it quiet for the sleeping building, and the effort of the quiet makes everything louder inside.
He talks anyway. Filthy English when he wants me faster. “Harder. I’m not made of anything you can break.” Italian gone soft when I get there. “Dio, the hands. I forgot the hands. I made myself forget the hands.”
I sit up into him, chest to chest, my arms locked around his back.
He groans against my mouth with the new angle that no press room will ever hear.
He grips my hair. His cock slides slick between our stomachs on every stroke.
This close, his eyes are all pupil. This close, there’s nowhere to file anything.
No drawer, no box. Just the drag and the heat and everything I missed arriving all at once.
“Marek.” My name, against my jaw. Not realizing how much I wanted to hear that again.
I fuck up into him and stop holding anything in reserve, both of us graceless now. His hand goes between us and works his own cock in short, hard pulls.
“Look at me,” he says.
He comes first, my hand joining his, his forehead dropped to mine and his eyes open the whole way through it, spilling hot between us in pulses that rack his whole body and clench him tight around me.
The sight of it and the grip of it take me over a few strokes later, as deep in him as I can get, coming hard enough that the room greys at the edges.
His name said out loud into the sweat of his shoulder, in the dark of a room.
We stay like that. Upright and wrapped together, his heart slamming against my chest, both of us breathing like the end of extra time.
“The container,” he says eventually into my hair.
“What about it?”
“Worst pretext I’ve ever been handed. And I once accepted a man returning one sock.”
“There was no sock tonight.” I can’t help but ask, “Who returned the sock?”
“A goalkeeper. Two thousand nineteen. Terrible year for everyone.”
He laughs once, and I feel it everywhere we’re still joined. Neither of us picks the laugh up to look at what’s under it. He slides off me, and I find a washcloth to clean us up.
The count starts on its own, the way it always did. Shoes by the door. Belt over the chair. Phone in the jacket. Twenty seconds, door to stairs.
He’s propped on one elbow watching me, sheet at his waist, and he doesn’t say stay. He won’t say stay. He watches me as I sit there, both aware that the protocol has never once included sitting.
He lies back and looks at the ceiling and lets me leave or not leave, entirely, on purpose. “It isn’t staying, whatever this is. Tonight can’t be staying. Say it so we both heard it.”
“It isn’t staying. Tonight I still go.”
“Correct,” he says. “And note the tense you were given. Tonight.”
“I noted it.”
“Then go slower,” he says quietly. “That’s all. Go slower.”
I go slower. An extra minute sitting on the bed.
Two extra to get dressed. Another extra to reach the door.
I stop at the counter where the washed container sits in the dark, empty, exactly where a plate with my name on it used to sit.
In Naples, I made this same walk with no argument in me at all.
I heard the door click shut behind me that night and drove two and a half hours and called the whole thing kindness before I could disagree.
Tonight the label won’t stick.
The stairwell is empty. No neighbor, no dog, no excuse arriving on time. I stand a second under the stair light out of respect for tradition. Nothing comes.
Novotny is asleep when I get in, negotiating gently with Roman. I put the key card on the desk and my shoes by the bed, side by side. They face the door out of habit. I lie down in the dark of a room that has everything I brought to this country in it.
Everything is where I left it. I am not where I left me though.
Four minutes over protocol. A true sentence carried four blocks on foot, and his name said out loud at the exact moment I had the least cover for it. I file it under new problems. Somewhere in the dark between the alarm and the ceiling, I’ve stopped pretending.