Chapter 22 Sully #2
I sat on the bed and pulled off my socks.
"I was seeing this guy in Providence," I said.
"We'd been circling each other for about three weeks, which felt like a very long time when I was twenty-six.
We finally got to the point. Everything was going fine.
I'm naked in his bed, and then his cat—this enormous orange cat, a beast of an animal—jumps onto the bed and sits directly on my chest, staring at me. "
I had Pratt's full attention as he slowly peeled off his t-shirt.
"Like a judge," I said. "Completely unmoved by the situation. I was trying to hold it together, and the guy says, in a totally serious voice, 'Don't worry, she does this. She'll leave eventually.' And I said, 'When?' He said, 'When she decides it's okay for you to be in my bed.'"
Pratt nearly laughed.
"She stayed," I said. "The entire time. At some point, I accepted that there were three of us involved and adjusted accordingly." I paused. "I maintain that I performed admirably well under difficult conditions."
"And the second?" Pratt said.
I looked at him. "Who said there was a second?"
"You always have a second."
I laughed. "First year at Carver's," I said. "We'd gone back to my place, which was a studio the size of a generous closet, and in the process of things happening, one of us—I'm not going to say who—knocked over an entire shelf of books. It wasn't a small one. It was floor-to-ceiling."
Pratt sat and looked at me.
"The noise was significant," I said. "My neighbor knocked on the wall. My other neighbor knocked on the ceiling, and then my phone rang. It was my landlord asking if I was alright." I looked back at Pratt. "I answered it."
"You answered it?"
"I answered it," I said. "I said that I was fine and had just dropped a few things. The guy was absolutely gone by then. He couldn't recover. We ended up ordering pizza and reading the backs of the fallen books for an hour. It was a great night."
Pratt climbed onto the bed, reached out with one arm, and dragged me into the middle of the bed with him. "Sully," he said.
"Yeah?"
"Stop talking."
I opened my mouth.
He cut the words off by kissing me.
It was a fully committed, tongues dancing, kiss. He lay on my chest with me flat on my back. His heart was already pounding against my chest.
"The cat," he said, "had better judgment than you're giving it credit for."
I laughed, and he rolled onto his side, still facing me. "Naked?" he asked.
"There's no way to say no to that."
We both removed the rest of our articles of clothing and climbed under the sheets facing each other, close enough that I could feel his breath.
An old instinct surfaced. Speed up, introduce momentum, keep the moment from sitting still long enough to become something I'd have to feel all the way through.
I didn't move.
"Stay with me," I said.
"I'm here."
We'd done this enough times that I knew the broad strokes—what Pratt would do first and the intensity of his gaze.
What I hadn't accounted for was how different it felt when I wasn't trying to manage any of it.
I relaxed into the room and Pratt's hands.
As every sports announcer pointed out, he had extremely good hands.
He moved with the same deliberation he brought to everything. No wasted motion. He approached intimacy the way he owned the crease: patient, angle-driven, and leaving nothing to chance.
At some point, he reached for the nightstand drawer. He located what he needed without looking, and had the condom dealt with in approximately four seconds. I timed it involuntarily. I have a bartender's sense of elapsed time, and I cannot turn it off.
"You're thinking something," he said.
"I'm always thinking something."
"Say it."
"You opened that drawer," I said, "like you knew exactly where everything was."
"I did know exactly where everything was."
"You organized my nightstand?"
A pause. "While you were in the shower one morning. The configuration was inefficient."
I opened my mouth. He put his hand over it in a kindly way.
"Later," he said.
Later was reasonable, and I accepted it.
Another joke arrived somewhere in the middle of things, fully formed as always, and genuinely funny, but I couldn't say it. Not with Pratt's fingers—I let it go.
He said my name once, low.
I said his back.
We'd gotten to the climb gradually, the way everything happened with Pratt. He didn't make sudden movements. He moved directly, with power in the thrusts.
I'd stopped tracking anything except the pressure of his weight and the speed of his hips. He was slow at first, then faster. The rhythm was still balanced, but he was working harder as I threw my head back.
He dug his thumbs into my hips and held on. I felt it all the way up my spine. He wrapped one hand around my cock and began stroking.
I got there first, which I interpreted as a home-ice advantage.
He followed, and then his entire weight collapsed against me, his breath brisk and uneven against my neck. I put my hand on the back of his head.
He lifted his head and looked at me with the biggest smile I'd ever seen on Pratt's face. His hair stuck out in three different directions.
"Hi," I said.
He looked at me.
"Sorry, I don't know why I said that."
"I do," he said, and put his head back down.
Afterward, we lay without moving, Pratt's arm across my chest. I stared at the ceiling and thought, "Huh."
It wasn't meant to diminish anything. It was the only word that seemed to fit the size of what had just happened.
Pratt's thumb moved against my ribs. He wasn't asleep yet.
I thought about Bryan, and it wasn't the sharp sideways thing it had been for three years. It was quieter.
He would have had something to say about this precise moment. It would be the voice of someone who'd known me long enough to cut straight to the thing.
You're still in his bed, Sul.
I know.
He didn't leave.
I know.
Pratt shifted slightly, resettling. He moved his hand forward to wrap around my far side and pull me closer. His breathing stayed slow and even.
I had come close to not having this. Another month at that pace I was moving, and I'd have found a reason to keep things at the temperature where I could end it cleanly. Pratt probably would have considered me temporary, and we'd have become next-door neighbors who once had a fling.
The thought arrived without panic. It was a blunt fact I could examine.
Two games left in the regular season. To the analysts and however many people packed into the arena or watched from their couches, Pratt was the last line. He was the wall, the reason the Ironhawks were still worth watching in April.
To me, he was the guy who had organized my nightstand while I was in the shower and considered it unremarkable.
It was exactly what I wanted.