Chapter 2
Chapter two
Varga
The bagger at the Jewel-Osco put my eggs in their own bag, unprompted. I took it as a positive sign for the day.
I took the long way home, past the high school where the kids played pickup basketball two weeks into hockey season. It was sixty-two degrees at the end of September, and I had the windows down listening to “Hey Ya!” on the radio. The groceries rode shotgun, and the eggs got the footwell.
I thought about Rook the entire drive. By the time I pulled into our driveway, I’d rerun the small grin he gave me through the tape on his stick that morning at least five times. Whatever else happened today, I had that.
The garage door went up on the second tap.
The first tap had been doing nothing for three weeks.
Rook had said he would look at it, which meant he was going to replace the opener on a random afternoon without mentioning it.
I pulled in slowly, waited for the door to come down behind me, and killed the engine.
“Honey, I’m home.” I shoved the door open with my hip. “I bought duck.”
I was already mid-sentence when I saw him.
Rook was at the island in his pajama pants and the black T-shirt with a hole at the hem that he refused to throw out.
He had half a glass of water in front of him, next to his phone.
It was lying closed. His right hand was flat on the marble with the fingers spread, as if he were holding the house down.
He looked up and smiled. It was a genuine smile that shook a little at the corner.
I set the bags down, eggs first, and kept my story running at a lower volume.
“The meat guy was named Eric. He had carpe diem tattooed on his bicep and convinced me about the duck. He said a very competent home cook could do it justice, and I said I lived with one. Then he said oh in the voice of a man who assumed I was a bachelor.”
“You’re not?”
“A bachelor? Yeah, but a bachelor-in-waiting.”
I set the bags down and unpacked them. I had duck, Brussels sprouts, and a good baguette. The last item out was 70% dark chocolate I bought because our household had standards.
Stepping around the island, I put my hand on the back of his neck. His shoulders dropped, not all the way, but enough.
“Hey, where are you?” I asked.
“I’m here.”
“You’re not.”
“I’m here, Luki.”
My parents gave me Lukács. Canada changed it to Lucas. Three months in, Rook called me Luki. It was the name I’d rejected when I was nine. He could use it now because he used it for the right reasons.
I kissed the top of his head.
“Liar,” I said quietly.
“Okay, it’s a PR thing.” He leaned back against me. “Mark had a request. I’ll tell you after we eat. It’s small.”
It’s small, meaning it’s not, but I haven’t figured out how to discuss it yet.
“I’m hungry. Score the duck. I’ll handle the sprouts,” I said.
We worked side-by-side. I washed and halved the sprouts, slid them into the cast-iron, and pressed garlic with the flat of the knife the way my mother did. I did it quietly, but couldn’t resist a hum under my breath.
After he had the duck in the pan, he stepped up behind me, wrapping his hands around my waist. “Thank you,” he said into my hair.
“For what?”
“You know.”
I did. “Move,” I said. “I am not eating charcoal.”
We cooked, and Rook talked—about everything but the thing he wasn’t telling me.
He told me about Cross’s new stick. He talked about Mikkelsen calling Markel “sir” even after Coach forbade it.
Finally, he said Heath was moving funny on his right side.
He thought it might be a red flag. I thought it was Heath being Heath in October.
We ate at the kitchen table. The duck was excellent. Eric had been right.
Rook ate the sprouts first. He always ate the vegetable first, the way he had eaten the fries first the one time I had ever seen him in a McDonald’s. I had a theory about it. I had never told him the theory.
“‘Hey Ya!’” I said, with my mouth full of duck. “Outkast. It was on the radio on the way home, and now it’s stuck. You are not supposed to shake a Polaroid picture, Rook. The image fixes faster if you don’t.”
“What’s a Polaroid picture?”
“Don’t.”
“I’ve never seen one,” he said.
“You are six years older than me. You have seen many Polaroids.”
He ate a sprout, but he didn’t concede.
My father had a Polaroid of me at five, in the yard in Komárno, holding a wooden stick my grandfather had cut down for me. We were a Hungarian household in a Slovak town.
Now, after more than two decades in North America, my mother still spoke to me in Hungarian sometimes, and my father swore at the television in both Hungarian and English. The picture lived in a drawer at their home in Minnesota. I hadn’t thought about it in months.
I cleaned up. Rook watched me, and at some point the look on his face made me put the towel down.
“Bed?” I asked.
“Bed.”
He stood and killed the lights over the sink and the stove. I locked the door to the garage and checked the bolt on the front.
We brushed our teeth in the upstairs bathroom. I spat, rinsed, and watched him in the mirror.
“Come on,” I said.
He turned off the light.
The bedroom was dark except for the ray of hall light that reached the dresser. I glanced at the Bobby Orr stick over the headboard. We’d bought it together at a charity silent auction.
Rook pulled me into bed sideways and put his arm under my head. His other hand landed flat on my chest.
I pushed my face into the side of his throat and breathed him in. He smelled like the organic body wash I’d convinced him to try. It had an evergreen forest scent. He teased me that it made him smell like a Christmas tree.
He kissed my hair.
“You smell good,” he said.
“You’re stalling.”
“Okay, I love you tonight.”
“Only tonight?”
He grabbed my package, and my breath caught in my throat.
“Careful, fragile valuables down there.”
He kissed the corner of my eye and kissed the spot beneath my ear. “Damn, you know I’m thinking,” he said.
“Of course I do.”
“Okay, the thing with Mark. It’s a reporter who wants a sit-down.”
“And?”
“And I know him. From a long time ago. Before you.”
“Know him or know him?”
Rook huffed a laugh, and he squeezed the jewels again. “Not a biblical knowing. It’s probably nothing, and I should have told you this morning. I’m telling you now.”
“And there’s more?”
“Tomorrow,” he said.
“Tomorrow, or whenever you’re ready.”
I worked myself up onto one elbow so I could see him. It couldn’t be major. Rook didn’t hide things from me. He wouldn’t start now.
I leaned down and kissed him slow. It was the right speed for tonight. I pushed up and straddled his hips, both hands flat on his chest.
The hole in the hem of his T-shirt was right there under my thumb. I tugged it up and over his head.
I kissed a bruise on his right rib cage. “Heath’s stick this morning,” I said into his skin. “I saw you take it.”
I sucked at the tender spot, and he hissed lightly. Then I moved over to the right and licked the light trail down the center of his abs.
“Luki.”
“Yeah?” I smiled at him.
“Slow.”
I knew how to take it slow. I kissed down to his navel. I knew Rook’s body. I had been doing field research for five years.
He looked at me. “Pants.”
I helped him out of those. He lifted his hips, and I dropped them on top of his T-shirt. Straddling him again, I sat back on my heels and looked at my man in the half-light from the hall.
He looked unfair. Not young—we’d both skated past that. He was unreasonably handsome. Hockey had tightened him over the years rather than thickened him. He had long, muscular legs and heavy forearms. Scars crossed his body at random angles, like roads snaking through an atlas of the mountains.
And his face—God.
The public version of Rook was all hard jaw, narrowed eyes, and don’t-start-with-me posture. The man in my bed looked like somebody took that face and breathed humanity back into it.
“What?” he asked, already smiling a little.
“Nothing.”
“Liar.”
“I’m looking respectfully.”
“I’m naked.”
“I will be too. Shh. I’m being professional about this.”
He snorted once through his nose, and there it was again, the private version of him nobody else got to see. The one that made me feel, every single time, like I’d somehow shoplifted something priceless and gotten away clean.
He reached for the hem of my shirt and pulled it off. I peeled off my jeans, and I was on him, smooth skin to that hairy chest, sliding down until my collarbone connected with his thigh. He was already hard, and his cock pressed against my cheek.
I slid my tongue along the length of it while I gripped the base, feeling it jump. “Fuck,” he muttered.
When I took the head between my lips, Rook arched his back, muscles pulling taut in his thighs. I worked slowly, rocking my head forward and back.
I reached up with one hand, rubbing his chest and rolling a nipple between finger and thumb. He grunted. He had a full vocabulary of sex sounds I could never get enough of.
Pulling my mouth back, I dragged my thumb across his cock head. His body jerked.
“Eyes,” I said. He opened them, but he couldn’t pull them completely into focus. He was getting close.
“When your eyes are open, you go there with me,” I whispered.
He curled the fingers of one hand into the sheets, and he swatted my bare ass with the other. I grinned and swallowed his cockhead again.
I stroked the base of his cock, and he swatted me again. I loved the sting.
When I tugged on the nipple, he hissed, and his ab muscles contracted. He was close.
“Look at me,” I said again.
“Please, fuck.” He struggled to keep the eyes open. His jaw went slack.
“Come, Mattias.”
That was it. Saying his first name when he was on the edge was always the shove over. He reached for the hair on my head, gripped tight and shouted, “Varga, fuck!”
I’d swallowed since the very first blow job I gave him, and he said I grinned like a man who’d just seen God at a roadside diner.
“I think I saw God,” I said. He laughed so long and hard.
I landed on my side beside him, and he told me it was my turn. Rook worked me slow. He brought me to the edge three times, and I gasped louder each time.
He knew it wouldn’t hold much longer. “Mine, Luki?” he asked.
I nodded. Was that ever a valid question? It stopped being one a month into us.
My breath stopped, and I stared into his eyes. “I—“ No other words came out as the orgasm obliterated me. I buried my face in his chest as the last drops pumped out onto his belly.
“Mm,” he said, quietly pleased. “You okay?”
“Am I still alive?”
“I think so. You’re speaking.”
“Then I’m okay.”
He whispered something that I didn’t quite make out.
“What?”
“I said szeretlek,“ he said. “Just tried to say it. Pretty sure I murdered it.”
He had murdered it. He had a granite-block American mouth, and the soft Hungarian sz slid out of him sideways. The lek came out with a hard k. I had stopped correcting him years ago on the night I figured out I never wanted him to say it correctly. I wanted him to say it his way.
“Murder it again,” I said into his collarbone.
“Szeretlek.”
“Do it worse.”
“Szeretlek.”
“Beautiful.”
It was his attempt to say “I love you” in my native Hungarian, and I treasured it.
He got up. I watched him walk to the bathroom. Five years and I couldn’t get enough of seeing Rook move naked. He came back with a damp washcloth and wiped me down, over my stomach, between us where we’d ended up sticky, and down the inside of my thigh. He was matter-of-fact about it.
He tossed the washcloth into the laundry hamper, came back to bed, and pulled me down with my ear over his chest and his hand spread flat on my back.
I lay there, closed my eyes, and started telling him about Rafe. I had a bigger thing I wanted to say, but tonight wasn’t the night to say it. The Rafe story was small, and I wanted to talk Rook to sleep. He had talked me to sleep a thousand nights.
I told him about the haircut. It was short at the sides and a flop on top, like a kid had asked his older brother to do it with kitchen scissors. I told him about yes sir three times in twenty minutes, the third one after Markel had said no more sir.
I said Markel had looked at the kid over the top of his reading glasses and said Mikkelsen, I am not your father, and Rafe had said sorry sir.
Cross laughed into his hand. I told him I was going to have to take Rafe out for a beer he wouldn’t drink and explain that Markel was not, in fact, his father, but that I was going to do it gently, because he was the kind of kid who would remember the conversation forever.
Still, some of that sir was going to make him a captain in eight years.
Rook’s heartbeat slowed under my cheek.
I kept going.
I told him about Cross’s stick, and I told him about Eric the duck guy, and Eric’s carpe diem tattoo.
I told him I had almost told Eric that the duck was for my boyfriend.
I wanted to see what the face of a man at a Jewel-Osco meat counter on a Tuesday afternoon did when somebody said the word out loud.
Rook’s breathing was deep and even.
I told him, more quietly, that I had been thinking lately about our routines.
I wondered if someday there was going to be a Tuesday afternoon at a meat counter where I could just say the word and watch the face do whatever it was going to do, and walk out of the store with the duck and the eggs in their separate bag.
He didn’t answer. He was asleep.
I shut my mouth and lay there.
I lifted my head half an inch to look at Rook.
The hand he had spread on my back had slid, in sleep, to my hip, palm warm and heavy where it had settled.
I looked at the bruise under his collarbone, the silver at his temple, and the small line at the corner of his eye that hadn’t been there when we met.
The night I took painkillers and asked him to stay, I hadn’t known that I was asking for the rest of my life.
He said yes by bringing chicken and rice the next night, and the night after that .
I put my head back down on his chest and shifted my hip against his palm. I fell asleep too.