Chapter 8 — ZAY
Iset up on the desk. Warming gel, kinesiology tape, the portable TENS unit, same order I use at the facility. The routine helps. Makes a hotel room feel like a workspace instead of a room with a king bed and a door that locks.
Two quick raps on the door.
He’s in shorts and his hair is damp from a shower and he grins at me the way he does every time, like I’m a surprise and not a scheduled appointment. “Brooks. I’m right on time.”
“As you should be.” I open the door wider for him to come in.
He walks past me, spots my book on the nightstand, my headphones coiled next to the lamp. His eyes move across my things with the same easy curiosity he gives everything, like my space is interesting to him just because it’s mine. “Nice setup. Very clinical.”
“That’s the idea. Bed. Face down.”
He pulls his shirt off and drops onto my bed face first, arms at his sides. I warm gel between my palms and press into the posterior deltoid. The tissue has been responding well. My thumbs trace the muscles and he exhales into my pillow.
“Less guarding through the lower trap tonight.”
“Is that the one near my spine?”
“Lateral to your spine. Between your shoulder blade and your rib cage.”
I’m working the muscles, pressing into the knot that forms when he overcompensates in his shot, when his fingers brush my calf.
Light. The backs of his knuckles grazing the side of my leg just below the knee.
His fingertips trace a slow line down to my ankle and back up, and the touch is so light I could pretend I don’t feel it.
Pretend it’s an accident. His fingers keep moving.
Up the side of my calf, slow. Not hurried.
Just his fingertips learning the shape of my leg like he’s been thinking about this specific patch of my body and now he has access.
“Marchetti.”
“Mhm.” His fingers trace past my knee, find the outside of my thigh. His palm warm through the fabric of my shorts.
“You should stop.”
His hand stills but doesn’t leave. Then his thumb moves, one slow circle.
“I should.” His voice quiet. “But I don’t want to.”
My pulse is doing things that have nothing to do with the posterior capsule. I press harder into the knot and he winces and I feel guilty about that, using the pressure to snap myself clinical. It works for four seconds. Then his fingers slide up another inch and my focus is gone.
“Roll to your side. I need to check your anterior range.”
He rolls, and his hand stays on my thigh, and he’s not pretending it’s an accident. “How much longer does the shoulder need? To not be the thing people mention when they mention me.” His fingers tighten on my thigh a little more. “I’m asking if I’m going to be the guy who almost made it.”
I sit on the edge of the bed because standing over him while he’s being this honest feels wrong. “Your shoulder is ahead of schedule. Range is improving. Trending toward full clearance.”
“Trending toward...”
“It means the work is paying off.”
“Thank you,” he says. His voice small compared to its usual volume.
“It’s my job.”
“That’s not what I’m thanking you for.”
His hand moves from my thigh to my neck. His thumb rests along the tendon behind my ear, his fingers curling warm against the back of my head.
“Marchetti.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m supposed to be the one touching you. Not the other way around.”
“I’m aware.” His thumb traces once, slow, behind my ear. “But is this okay?”
The correct answer is no. I know the correct answer.
I have known it since September. My hands are still warm from the gel.
The hotel air conditioner hums the way the one in the training room doesn’t.
Nobody is walking past this door. Nobody is going to knock and ask if the range-of-motion numbers are updated in the chart.
I can feel my heartbeat in my wrists. In the pads of my fingers, still pressed against his shoulder. The gel cooling between us.
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t press. Just his thumb, that one slow point of contact, and his eyes steady on mine, and the room is so quiet I can hear both of us breathing.
“Yeah. It’s okay.”
He pulls me toward him and I go. His mouth is on mine and every clinical word I know leaves my mind. He kisses different from the club. I enjoy it for almost an entire minute before my brain comes back online. Then I pull back. “We need to be smart about this.”
“I care about you. The rest of it we can figure out. I’m not going to lie here and pretend I don’t want you when we both know that I do.”
He waits but doesn’t press. The quiet patience of a man who is letting me decide, and the waiting is worse than the pressing because pressing I can argue with. His hand rests on my jaw, his thumb stroking my cheek.
The door is locked. Between now and nine, this room is not the facility. Between now and nine, I am not Brooks on staff, he is not Marchetti on the roster. The lie is thin but my hands are shaking and it’s the only math I can make work.
So I lean in and kiss him again. I push him flat on his back and his breath catches. His hips push up and I feel him, hard, against my thigh. His hands find the hem of my shirt and he pulls it over my head and the cold air hits my skin. His fingers spread across my ribs, exploring.
His palms are warm. The pressure is light, unhurried, and the feeling of his hands on my ribs pulls forward a voice I haven’t thought about in years.
My advisor at University of South Carolina, his hand on my shoulder in the hallway after my final clinical, quiet so no one else could hear: “Isaiah, you are going to be excellent, and you are going to have to be excellent twice to be seen once. It’s not fair, but it’s true.
” He knew what the system asked of men who looked like us.
Teo’s hands move up my ribs, patient, counting the bones under my skin. And I am looking at this man beneath me, his chest moving with each breath, and I am terrified, but I don’t think I can stop.
“Hey.” His thumb brushes my jaw. “You still with me?”
“Yeah.” I lower myself back down and his arms close around me and the feel of skin against skin hits me so hard I have to breathe through it. “I’m still with you.” I lean down and kiss him again, my mouth hungry for his.
His palms settle on my waist and his thumbs find the hollow above my hip bones and press in, and the sound I make is not clinical. He pulls me tighter against him and I feel the full length of him against me and my hips roll against his.
He does it back, pushing up against me, slow and deliberate, and we find a rhythm before we’ve even gotten our clothes off. His hands on my back pulling me into each roll of his hips, and the friction is not enough and too much simultaneously.
I put my mouth on his neck. His pulse is fast under my lips.
I drag my mouth down to his collarbone, the hollow at the base of his throat, and he tilts his head back and his hand comes up to the back of my head and holds me there.
I press my tongue flat against the notch between his collarbones and his hips stutter.
“Zay.”
I move lower. My mouth on his chest, the flat plane of his chest, and then I find his nipple and close my lips around it and his back arches off the bed. I use my teeth, light, just enough, and the sound he makes goes straight through me.
“Zee, I need you. Now.”
“You’re not going to rush this,” I tell him against his skin. “We waited four months. You can wait ten more minutes.”
“That’s ambitious.” His voice is wrecked and I’ve barely started.
I hook my fingers into the waistband of his shorts and pull them down slow. He lifts his hips to help and I take everything, shorts and briefs together, and then he’s bare on my bed and I sit back on my heels and look at him.
I have seen this body hundreds of times.
On the table, in the training room, through the clinical filter of assessment and treatment.
I know the curve of his shoulder, the pattern of his breathing when he’s in pain versus when he’s lying about being in pain.
I probably know this body better than he knows it.
I have never seen it like this. Hard and flushed and spread out on my sheets, his chest moving fast, his eyes watching me watch him.
“Quit staring,” he says, but his voice is soft. A smile on his lips just for me.
“No.” I lower my mouth to his hip. The cut of muscle there, the line that runs from his hip bone down and inward. I trace it with my tongue and his thigh tenses under my hand. I take my time because I want to hear every breath he takes.
“You’re going to kill me,” he whispers, dropping his head back to the pillow.
“I’m being thorough.”
“You’re being cruel.”
“Thorough.” I turn my head and press my mouth to the base of his cock and he stops breathing. I drag my tongue up the full length of him and his hand flies to my head and grips. The taste of him settles on my tongue and I close my lips around the tip and the sound he makes goes straight to my dick.
I take him deeper. My hand wraps around the base and my mouth works the head, slow, learning what he likes. His fingers twist in my hair and I remember my fingers in his, all those months ago in a bathroom in the back of a club. The same grip. The same desperation.
“Zay, I need...” He pulls at my hair, tugging me up. “I need you up here. I need all of you.”
I pull off slow, deliberate, letting my lips drag.
I strip the rest of my clothes off and settle over him again.
The full contact of skin on skin, nothing between us now, his cock against mine, both of us hard and pressed together, makes us both go still for a second.
His hand finds my cock alongside his and wraps around both of us and strokes slow and my forehead drops to his shoulder
“I’m tested,” he says against my ear. “I’m on PrEP.”
“Same.”
“Okay.” His hand tightens around both of us, one slow pull, and his mouth brushes my ear. “Then fuck me. I need you.”