15. Roman
ROMAN
Ifail the test in the first ninety seconds, and the worst part is that the knee isn’t even the reason.
It’s a basic battery. Single-leg landings, a lateral bound, a stop-and-cut at three-quarter speed with Gus running the clipboard and a kid from the analytics group filming it on a tablet for the file.
I’ve done these landings ten thousand times in my life.
I did them at fourteen on a pond with no one watching.
I did them at twenty-three in front of eighteen thousand people, my body knowing how before my brain ever got a vote.
And I plant on the cut. The leg holds, the knee holds, the rebuilt ligament does exactly what it was rebuilt to do.
The rest of me just isn’t there. I’m slow.
I’m a half-second behind my own feet. My hands are sandbags.
My lungs are tin, the floor keeps coming up wrong, and I bail out of the second bound before I even land it because some animal part of me knows I’ll go down if I commit.
Gus doesn’t yell. Gus used to yell at me when I was a rookie jumping the boards too early, and I’d kill for the yelling now. Instead, he just lowers the clipboard and looks at me like he’d look at a truck that won’t turn over anymore, and he says, “Take five, Vane,” in a voice with nothing in it.
And then he turns to the analytics kid, and he thinks I’m out of earshot because I’m bent over with my hands on my knees pretending to catch a breath I can’t catch, and he says it low.
“Off the record. Knee’s fine. Scans are clean.
But that—” a tip of his head at me, at the wreck of me sucking wind on his nice clean floor, “—I’ve seen that before.
That’s not a knee. Maybe the kid’s just done. ”
Done.
The word lands somewhere deeper than the knee ever could.
Because here’s the thing nobody tells you about being the name on the back of eighteen thousand jerseys: you stop being a guy and start being a number on a board, and you let it happen, you’re glad to let it happen, because the number is cleaner than the guy.
Roman Vane the man missed a six-year-old’s birthday.
Roman Vane the number won a building three trophies.
You do the math the city does. You learn to be the number.
And then one Tuesday a guy with a clipboard says maybe the kid’s just done.
What he’s really saying is the number’s coming off the board.
If the number comes off the board, I genuinely do not know what’s left standing here in these gym shoes.
That not-knowing is a drop with no bottom, and I have found exactly one thing in this world that stops me falling down it.
He doesn’t say it cruel. That’s what guts me, same as Theo not being mad, same as Blake picking a kinder word.
Gus says it like he’d say it about a horse, a sad practical fact, and he’s not even wrong.
I straighten up with my face arranged into nothing.
I walk off the floor, into the hall, and I do not go to Gus and ask him what he meant.
I do not go to Theo, who is fifteen minutes away and would drop everything.
I do not go to Blake, who has been trying to hand me a rope for a month.
I get in my truck with my hands shaking on the keys.
I drive the one direction my body always drives now, the only place the word done can’t reach me.
I’m halfway there before I’ve decided anything, and I wasn’t ever really going to decide anything else.
—
I don’t knock. I have a keycard that still works and a man who stopped pretending he doesn’t expect me.
I let myself into his office at the end of the day.
He looks up from his desk and reads the whole thing off my face in about two seconds, because reading me is what he does better than anyone alive.
“Gus ran me,” I say. My voice comes out wrong. “I failed it. Knee’s fine. It’s me. He said maybe I’m just done.”
Elias sets down his pen. He doesn’t tell me it isn’t true.
He doesn’t tell me I’m not done, doesn’t reassure me, doesn’t do a single one of the things Theo would do, and that’s exactly why I came here instead of to Theo, because I can’t stand to be lied to kindly right now and Elias never bothers.
He just looks at me, that flat assessing quiet, and lets the word done sit in the room without arguing it, and somehow that’s the only thing that’s loosened my chest all day.
“Come here,” he says.
We end up at his apartment because that’s where we go now.
I stand in the middle of his clean living room while he takes my coat off me like I’m something he’s bringing in out of the weather, and I let him.
The whole time there’s a thing building in my chest that I don’t have a name for until it’s almost out of my mouth.
“Make it stop,” I say.
He goes still.
“All of it. The knee, the word, Gus, Theo’s face, the kid’s empty chair, all of it. You’re the only one who can make it stop. So make it stop. I don’t care how. I’m asking you to.” I’m gripping the front of his shirt now and I don’t remember grabbing it. “Please. Make everything stop.”
And something moves in his eyes that I’ve never seen there before.
Not triumph. Something more careful than that, more interested, a man recalculating.
Because I’ve never asked. In every locked room before this I’ve been taken, I’ve surrendered, I’ve been the thing it happens to.
Tonight I walked in and grabbed his shirt and asked.
He’s clocking the difference, filing it, deciding what to do with it.
What he does with it is hand me the reins, and I understand even as it’s happening that it’s a gift he’s choosing to give and could take back, that letting me have this is its own kind of having me, but I’m too far gone to care.
“Then take it,” he says, low, close to my mouth. “You want to stop being the one it happens to? Fine. Stop. Put me where you want me.” His hand closes over mine where it’s fisted in his shirt. “Go on, Captain. Take something for once.”
I’ve never been on this side of it with him.
My whole life I’ve been the one with the size and the reach, the one who throws the hit.
With him, I gave all that up the first night and never asked for it back.
Now he’s handing it to me, and I take it, because taking it is louder than the word done and right now loud is all I want.
I get him to the bed. He lets me move him, lets me put my hands on him hard.
I know he’s letting me, that none of this happens unless he allows it, but his shirt comes off under my hands, his belt, the rest of it.
For the first time it’s his body laid out and waiting on what I’ll do instead of mine.
He hands me the lube without being asked, watching my face the entire time, and I slick two fingers and work him open, because even now, even drunk on the turnaround, I won’t just take him without this.
I go slow. One finger, then two, curling into him until his breath catches and his hips push back against my hand.
I watch the cold calm of the most controlled man I know crack open an inch at a time, feel him start to give around my fingers and not bother to hide it.
“You’re stalling,” he says, and there’s something close to a smile in it. “I said take it.”
So I do. I line up and push into him, slow at first, feeling him stretch and give around my cock.
The tight heat of him closes over me inch by inch until I’m seated all the way, and we both go still with it.
Then not slow. His hands flat on the headboard, my grip bruising on his hips.
I fuck him like I’ve never let myself, hard and deep and selfish, the slap of my body against his loud in the bare room.
It’s not gentle, it’s not tender, it’s not the careful held thing I’d want it to be in some better version of my life.
It’s me trying to fuck a single word out of my own skull, done, done, done, driving into him like I can leave it behind in the next thrust, and he takes all of it, every brutal stroke, his cock hard and untouched against the sheets, watching me over his shoulder with those flat eyes that miss nothing, even now reading me, even now in charge of the thing he’s letting me think I’m running.
And it works. For however long it lasts it actually works.
There’s no knee, no Gus, no chair with a party hat.
There’s just the heat, the grip, the sound he makes, the white noise filling up every room in my head where the bad things live.
I come with my forehead between his shoulder blades and his name in my mouth, and for about four seconds I am nowhere, nothing, free.
—
The four seconds end like they always end. I’m not even all the way out of his bed before the dread comes back up my throat like water filling a hull.
It comes faster every time. Used to be I’d get an hour after, a whole clean hour where the quiet held.
Then twenty minutes. Now it’s the time it takes my heartbeat to come down, and it’s already coming down.
The word is already back, done, and Gus’s flat face, and the analytics kid filming my body as it forgets how to work.
I’m lying there sweating in the sheets of the man I just fucked, and the silence is already turning on me, already filling up with everything I drove here to outrun.
“Hey.” My voice cracks. I roll over and find him, find the cold, solid fact of him beside me. “It’s coming back. It’s already coming back. I need—” I don’t even know how to finish it. “More. I need more. Don’t let it come back yet. Please.”