Adrian #2
Adrian leaned against the corridor wall and pressed his palms flat against the concrete.
The cold came through his jacket and into his shoulder blades.
The fluorescent above him flickered at one end with a rhythm that wasn’t quite regular.
Behind the closed door, the media room was running, the muffled sound of questions and voices filtering through the steel.
Adrian breathed through his nose and looked at the ceiling and let the wall hold him up because his legs were not entirely committed to the task.
His hands were shaking.
The door at the end of the corridor opened.
Milo came through in his base layer and practice pants, the pullover gone, his hair damp and the overhead fluorescent catching the line of his jaw and the angle of his cheekbones and the eyes that found Adrian against the wall the way they always found him.
He walked down the corridor and his footsteps echoed on the concrete and he stopped in front of Adrian with about six inches of air between them.
Anyone could come through either end of this hallway.
A trainer, a journalist, a teammate, a member of the arena staff.
Milo stood in front of Adrian and did not look at the corridors.
Did not check. Did not flinch. His shoulders were down with the particular looseness of a body that had been at full physical output for three hours and was now at rest, and his jaw stayed open, and the armor did not reconstruct itself.
Adrian looked at him. “You didn’t have to do that.” His voice broke on the last word. He heard it and didn’t fix it.
Milo’s face went further open, past the version Adrian had seen in the studio, past the version from the bed, into territory that had no precedent. “Yeah,” he said. “I did.”
Adrian stepped forward and put his hands on Milo’s face.
His palms against the jaw, his thumb finding the hinge where the muscle had lived for months, pressing against the absence of it.
Blue-black paint against Milo’s skin. He kissed him in the hallway with the fluorescent flickering overhead and the arena sounds through the walls and whatever came next around every corner.
Milo’s mouth was warm and tasted like the electrolyte water the trainers pushed postgame and under that it was just him, just Milo, the taste Adrian knew from every room they’d been in together.
Milo’s hands came to the front of Adrian’s jacket and gripped the lapels and pulled him closer, and the grip was not the grip of someone holding on because it might go.
It was the grip of someone holding on because it was here.
They stood in the hallway and held on.
* * *
Adrian turned the work lamp low when they got back to the studio, and the room settled into its midnight version, the radiator ticking against the cold, the turpentine and linseed oil rising in the warmth.
Milo took the wooden chair near the south wall the way he always took it, shoes left by the door, socked feet on the paint-spattered floor, his head tipping back against the wall.
His jaw was loose. Adrian hadn’t seen it loose in a room with the lights on before tonight.
Adrian made tea, the gas clicking three times before it caught under the kettle.
He rinsed two mugs, one chipped at the rim, one not, and brought them over and put Milo’s in his hands.
Milo took it the way he took everything Adrian gave him now, with both hands, accepting the weight of it, his thumbs settling against the ceramic.
He closed his eyes for one second and opened them and looked at Adrian and the looking had the quality of arrival, a man who had traveled a long way and was letting the fact of being here register in his body.
They drank. The tea was too hot. Adrian blew across the surface and waited. Milo drank his without waiting, the way he did everything physical, directly, accepting the burn, and Adrian watched his throat work as he swallowed and wanted him so badly his hands ached with it.
“The painting,” Milo said. He was looking at the new canvas on the east wall where the blue-black and umber caught the low light. “What’s it going to be?”
Adrian looked at it. He’d been looking at it for days. The surface was patient and wet and it held the colors he’d put on it without revealing what they were building toward, the way all foundational work held its intentions in reserve.
“Two people,” he said. “In a room. I haven’t figured out the room yet.”
Milo looked at the canvas for a long time. The lamp caught the line of his profile, the nose, the jaw, the angle of his brow that went sharp when he was thinking and softer when he wasn’t. He wasn’t thinking now. He was looking.
“Okay,” Milo said.
Adrian turned the lamp down further and the studio became the version of itself that existed between lit and unlit, the canvases along the walls showing their edges, the city’s glow through the north windows making shapes visible.
He looked at Milo in the lower light and Milo looked at him and the eyes were open in a way that was not the bar’s guarded version and was not the performing-the-absence-of-guarding version either.
Just open. The face of a man who had said the thing in front of cameras and driven to the studio and sat in the chair and drank the tea and was here.
Adrian crossed to him. He put his hands on the arms of the wooden chair, one on each side, and leaned down until his face was close enough to see the individual lashes and the lines at the corners of Milo’s eyes and the spot below his left ear where the razor had skipped that morning.
He looked at Milo from this distance and Milo looked back and the not-looking-away was the whole thing.
Adrian kissed him.
Milo’s hands came to his waist and the grip tightened, the hold-on that Adrian had been reading since the first night in this studio.
But the quality had changed. The fingers pressed into Adrian’s sides without the white-knuckle urgency of before, without the edge that had always carried the feel of someone gripping a ledge.
The same strength applied with a different intention.
Holding on because it was here and the holding was chosen and clean.
“Come on,” Adrian said against his mouth.
He led Milo down the corridor past the Matisse print, the cobalt and cadmium orange his mother had sent him when he moved to Detroit, her handwriting on the backing card.
The bedroom where the radiator’s reach didn’t quite extend and the cold came through the window frame in a draft that shifted the curtain at the bottom edge.
The bed unmade from that morning. Adrian’s hands were shaking and he didn’t try to stop them.
Milo’s hands found his arms. Both of them, settling against the tremor with the flat-palmed weight Adrian had been missing for days, warm and even and pressing into the muscle as though the shaking were something to be with rather than something to stop.
Adrian breathed and the breath came out ragged and Milo’s hands stayed on his arms and waited.
Adrian’s hands went to Milo’s chest. Through the base layer’s thin fabric he could feel the heat of Milo’s skin and the ribs expanding with each breath and the heartbeat under his palm, steady and fast. His fingers found the hem and worked the fabric up over Milo’s ribs, over his chest, Milo lifting his arms to let it clear, the compression material pulling free with a faint static snap.
The body underneath was the body Adrian knew, the lean winger’s build, the muscle that sat close to the bone, the definition along the obliques that caught the corridor’s light.
The bruise on his left side from tonight’s game was already going green at the edges.
Adrian’s thumb found it and pressed the border where color met unmarked skin and Milo’s breath deepened and his hand came to the back of Adrian’s neck and pulled him into a kiss that was harder than the hallway, hungrier, Milo’s mouth opening against his and the heat of his tongue and Adrian groaning into it.
Milo’s hands worked Adrian’s shirt up and off, the cold air hitting Adrian’s chest for one second before Milo’s body was against it and the cold was irrelevant.
Skin to skin. Adrian pressed his face into the side of Milo’s neck and breathed him in.
The rink was still there, cold air fading from his skin, clean sweat in the hollow below his ear, and the studio around them in the turpentine and linseed oil and the particular warmth of a room that had absorbed years of work into its walls.
Both scents in the same breath. Both worlds in the same room.
Adrian’s mouth found Milo’s collarbone and his hands moved down Milo’s ribs, each one distinct under his fingers, over the narrowing at his waist, to the practice pants where the elastic sat low.
His thumb traced the line the elastic made against Milo’s hip and Milo’s breath caught and his hand tightened on the back of Adrian’s neck.
They made it to the bed. Adrian’s knee on the mattress first, the sheets cold for one second before their bodies made them warm.
Milo pulled him down and Adrian went and they lay chest to chest with their legs tangled and Milo’s mouth hot against his throat and Adrian’s hands in Milo’s hair and their hips grinding together through the remaining layers of fabric.