Chapter 13 Enzo
Davide leaves for an afternoon media thing and hands me the apartment like a man handing over the keys to something he’s decided not to understand.
“I’ll be home late after dinner,” he says at the door. “The soup pot’s in the drainer. I did not wash it. That felt like your business.”
“It’s collateral.”
“I gathered.” He shoulders his backpack, then stops. “The day version of him. I liked him too. For the record.”
Then he’s gone. The apartment is mine for the day. I text one word to a hotel four blocks east.
Now.
He’s at the door in twenty minutes, which for a professional athlete days out from a quarterfinal is a small act of recklessness. He’s brought bread from a bakery I don’t know yet.
I don’t let him get it onto the counter. I take it out of his hands and set it down. Then I back him against the door I just closed.
“Davide’s gone until tonight,” I say against his mouth.
His hands are already under my shirt. Mine are already at his belt. And the difference between this and every other time is simple. Nobody’s timing it. We both feel the clock’s absence like a third person in the room.
I make him come to the bedroom and undress him slowly, because I can. Because there’s nothing after this that either of us has to leave for. His shirt goes first. I drag my teeth over his chest, and he makes the low sound I’ve been hearing in my sleep. The whole architecture of him gives.
“Enzo.” He breathes my name out. “Slow down or this ends embarrassingly.”
“We have all afternoon. Embarrass yourself twice.”
“Ambitious.”
“I’ve watched you run for ninety-plus minutes without stopping. Don’t lecture me about stamina.”
He laughs. I feel it under my mouth. Then I stop letting him laugh. I get his belt open and his jeans off him and take his cock in my hand. He’s already hard. Already leaking at the tip. Even with the months between us, his body still answers mine as if it’s been waiting by the phone.
“Look at that,” I say, and stroke him slow, base to head, watching his jaw come loose. “You still react to me like it’s the first night.”
“It’s always the first night with you. That’s the whole curse of it.”
I put my mouth on him. All the way down, slowly, until he’s at the back of my throat and his hand fists in my hair. I do it the way I do anything that matters. With attention. What my mouth can’t take, my hand covers.
His head goes back. “Where did you learn patience? You never had patience.”
“I learned it waiting for you.” I pull off just enough to say it, then take him back down.
“That’s not fair.”
“Neither was this last year.” I take him down to the root and swallow around him, and whatever he was going to say dies in his throat. “You were saying?”
“I forget. Do that again.”
I do that again. His hips lift off the bed and I hold them down with a forearm and don’t stop, and he says my name like it’s the only word left he trusts. Then he hauls me up by the shoulders, wrecked.
“Stop. Not like that. Not this time.” His breath is ruined. “Two years I took the smaller version every single time and drove home.”
He strips the rest off me and rolls me under him, and I let him, because the one thing that has never once been in question between us is this.
He slicks his fingers with the lube that has quietly reappeared.
He opens me slow. One finger, then a second, working me loose.
A third, patient in the way that costs him, and I watch it cost him.
“There,” I tell him, when he curls them right, and I arch off the bed. “There, Marek.”
“I know. I remember. I kept every detail of you filed and could not throw a single one out.”
“Now. Before I come on your hand like a teenager.”
“That would not be the worst thing I’ve watched you do.”
“Marek. Now. I mean it.”
“I know you mean it. I can feel how much you mean it.” He lines his cock up and pushes into me, slow and complete, and the stretch of him takes me apart an inch at a time.
His eyes stay open. Mine stay open. He sinks all the way in and stops there.
Seated. Buried to the root. Both of us breathing hard, and for once neither of us is anywhere else.
No ceiling being memorized. No exits being counted.
“Say it in Italian,” he says, forehead on mine. “The thing. I want it in the language you dream in.”
So I say it against his ear, low. The thing I have not said out loud to anyone.
“I don’t know what it means.”
“You know exactly what it means. Say it back in Czech and we’re even.”
He says something rough and low that I don’t need translated, and his whole body answers before his brain catches up, and he starts to fuck me.
He moves the way he plays. Patient, then relentless, reading me, giving me exactly what the reading tells him.
His cock drags over the place inside me that empties my head.
Again. And again. I stop being able to do the thing I do.
The narrating. The guarding. The staying one step ahead.
My hands map his back, the muscles working under them.
“Harder,” I tell him. “You won’t hurt me. You never once hurt me. That was the whole tragedy of you.”
“I know exactly how much you can take.” He gives me harder, and it a sound comes out of me I don’t recognize. “I studied it for two years. There was a test after.”
“Did you pass?”
“I’m passing right now. Look at your face.”
“Nobody’s around,” I remind him between breaths. “Make me loud, Marek. Two years you only ever got the quiet version.”
That does something to him. His rhythm turns mean and perfect.
He gets a hand between us and wraps my cock and strokes me in time with every thrust. I stop keeping any of it quiet.
There’s nothing to keep it from. The sound of it is its own kind of daylight, the thing I swore I’d never settle for less than, happening in the full light of a Sunday afternoon.
“Look at me.” He feels me getting close and slows, buried deep, holding us both at the edge. “Give me all of it. Don’t you dare look away.”
I don’t hide. I let him watch every second of it, the way he let me watch him.
He fucks me deep and works my cock in his fist and keeps his eyes on mine, and when it breaks it breaks everywhere at once.
I come with his name in my mouth and my eyes locked on his, spilling hot over his fingers and my own stomach in pulses that leave me wrecked.
The clench of me drags him over a breath behind.
He drives in as deep as he goes and comes with a low, broken sound, nothing held back anywhere, both of us shaking through the whole long finish of it.
He doesn’t pull out right away. He stays. Forehead to mine, still inside me, both of us wrung out and gulping air like men who just finished ninety minutes in the heat. We stay joined a long time after. Because we can. Because nobody has to go.
“That’s what it’s supposed to be,” I whisper into his hair before I’ve decided to say it. “That’s the whole thing you kept driving away from.”
“I know.” His hand goes flat on my chest and stays. “I’m not driving anywhere. Do you understand? I’m not counting the hours to anything.”
“Say that again in three days and I’ll believe it.”
“I’ll say it Wednesday night. After I ruin your afternoon on the pitch.” He tips his head up to look at me, giving me a soft grin. “That’s a promise, not a schedule. You taught me the difference.”
“I’m starting to regret teaching you things.”
“Too late. I’m a very good student. You said so once, in Naples, with your mouth full.”
And there it is. The thing my whole careful life warned me against. I let myself believe him.
I stop guarding the door. I let the warmth all the way back online, the rationed thing I’ve kept leashed, and it floods the room.
It feels like relief. It feels like the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done.
To believe this is to hand him the exact instrument that gutted me last time and trust him not to use it.
I do it anyway. It’s the most deliberate risk a man can take, wide awake, knowing the number and choosing to bet it anyway.
Later I cook, because of course I cook. He sits on the counter and watches me build pasta from what’s in the house. He steals basil.
“That basil goes in at the end,” I tell him.
“I’m inspecting it.”
“You’re eating it.”
“I’m inspecting it with my mouth.” He hooks a heel around the back of my knee, keeping me in the kitchen, within reach. “Feed me properly and I’ll stop stealing.”
“That is not how it works. You steal because you’re a defender. Defenders take what isn’t theirs. It’s your whole job.”
“I’m taking what is mine,” he says. He steals more basil. I let him. Neither of us says out loud how large that sentence just got.
It’s so exactly the life I want, the stolen basil and a man on my counter with nowhere he needs to be, that my throat does something inconvenient. I turn to the pan so he won’t see. Of course, he sees.
“You’re allowed,” he says, quietly, behind me. “To want it. You’re allowed to have wanted it the whole time.”
“I know I’m allowed. That was never the problem.” I put the basil in at the end, the way my father does, the way I’ll do until I die. “The problem is what it costs to want it out loud. I paid that once. I’m paying it right now, standing here. You can’t see the bill. I’m looking straight at it.”
“Show me, then.” He says it carefully. “What does it cost?”
So I turn around and show him. I let him see the whole thing. The want and the fear on the same face, no rationing, no leash. The most exposed I’ve been to another person since a man vanished from my place months ago.
“That,” he says looking at it. “Okay. Now I know what I’m holding.”
“Don’t drop it.”
“I’ve dropped it once. I know exactly what it weighs now, and I know what the floor does to it.”
“People say that...”
“I’m not people. I’m the specific man who did the specific damage. Nobody knows the fragility of this better than the person who broke it. That’s the one qualification I actually have.”
We eat at the small table. Two plates. Two glasses. Bread in the middle. It’s a preview of a life. We both know it’s a preview. That’s the hairline under the whole beautiful afternoon, because a preview is what they show you before they decide whether you get to keep the thing.
Later, he falls asleep on the couch, the way he used to.
Except he doesn’t wake at some black hour and find his shoes.
He sleeps. In the light. On purpose. I sit at the other end with his feet in my lap and watch a man sleep in my borrowed living room.
Asleep, the curls resign. They come loose over his forehead, light brown gone boyish, and the face under them is one no press room has ever met.
I let myself have it. The whole picture. Wanting it completely.
Somewhere under the wanting, quiet, hairline-thin, is the part of me that has been left before and knows exactly what a preview is.
I don’t listen to it. Tonight I’ve decided to believe the man on the couch. That’s the bet. I made it with my eyes open. I already know it’s the one that can ruin me.