Chapter 10 Unforced
The corner room was one Kas had requested for sightline reasons that had never once included Theo Callahan standing in a hotel corridor working up his nerve.
He had showered. He had set the room to sixty-eight degrees.
He had placed two bottles of water on the nightstand and then moved one of them, because two bottles arranged symmetrically looked like a presentation.
Then he moved it back, because asymmetry looked like an accident, and stood in the middle of the room wondering when, precisely, he had become a man who arranged water.
Waiting was the problem. His mind did not idle.
The last time he had let anyone this far in had been Madrid, years ago: a sports physician with beautiful hands and a fatal habit of narrating Kas to his friends like a documentary subject.
It had ended quickly, by mutual audit. Before that, longer ago, a student in Budapest who wanted the cellist back and did not stay long enough to understand that the cellist had been spent on the serve.
Two entries in a lifetime. Both instructive.
Kas had concluded what efficient men conclude: want made poor scheduling material.
Then, in Doha, a man had ended a perfectly good exhibition rally with a drop shot hit between his own legs for an audience of oil executives, and Kas had walked off court furious in a way that took him an embarrassingly long time to diagnose correctly.
The fury had not been about tennis. It had been about waste: watching the most fluent pair of hands of his generation spend themselves on applause like a fortune gambled nightly, and being unable to look away from the spending.
He had filed that under instructive too. The file had sat there, mislabeled and gathering interest, until a sponsor’s deal memo slid across a glass table in Atlanta and the interest came due.
The knock came late, which was its own data.
Theo had been early all summer and was making himself wait tonight. Kas opened the door on the evidence of it: Theo with his hair still shower-damp, in a T-shirt soft from a hundred washes, vibrating at a frequency he was working very hard to disguise as casual.
“Hi,” Theo said, the corridor word.
“You are late.”
“I’ve been standing by the ice machine. I almost made friends with it.” He came in, and the door closed, and the room became a different room around the fact of him.
For a moment neither of them moved, the room going quiet around them, and Kas watched Theo’s eyes do their old sweep, the reflexive search for the angle, the camera, the audience, and watched the sweep come back empty-handed and watched what happened to his face when it did.
The performance had nowhere to land. What was left standing there in a soft gray shirt looked young, a little terrified, and like the only thing Kas had wanted in longer than he was prepared to compute.
“I don’t have a bit for this,” Theo said.
“Good,” Kas said, and crossed the room.
The kiss started where the corridor’s had stopped.
This time nothing interrupted it.
Theo came to him like he had been holding himself back with both hands and had finally lost the strength. His mouth was hot, impatient, not polished at all, and the first sound he made into Kas’s mouth was not a joke or a line or anything built for an audience. It was want, startled out of him.
Kas heard it and felt the last orderly part of his evening step off a ledge.
Theo’s hands found the hem of Kas’s shirt and stopped there, knuckles brushing skin.
“Yes,” Kas said into his mouth.
Theo dragged in a breath. “You don’t know what I’m asking.”
“Yes,” Kas said again, and put Theo’s hands where he wanted them.
That did it. Theo pulled Kas’s shirt up, awkward with urgency, and Kas lifted his arms, letting himself be stripped. The collar caught once; Theo swore into cotton, and when Kas’s head came free, Theo was looking at him with a kind of naked concentration Kas had only ever seen across a net.
No crowd. No bit. No grin.
“Slow,” Kas said.
Theo’s eyes flicked up. “That an instruction?”
“Yes.”
The laugh that came out of Theo was smaller than usual, rougher, already half lost. “Okay.”
So Kas took Theo’s off in turn, and did it slowly, because haste would have been a waste. The soft gray cotton slid up over Theo’s stomach, his chest, his shoulders, the damp wreck of his hair. Kas dropped it without looking where it landed.
Then he looked.
The body he had watched across courts for years was suddenly close enough to learn properly: lean waist, strong chest, old tan lines, a faint bruise near one hip, the fabric bands still wrapped around his left wrist like the final piece of him that had not yet been taken off.
Theo let himself be looked at for a moment before the instinct rose.
“Full scouting report?”
Kas put two fingers under his chin and brought his eyes back. “Do not perform.”
The words landed. Theo’s mouth opened, closed. The joke died before it could save him.
“Right,” he said. Quieter. “No audience.”
“No audience.”
Kas kissed him again, slower this time, until Theo stopped trying to lead and started answering.
That was the part Kas had not planned for: the answering.
The way Theo learned pressure, pace, where to put his hands.
The way his body went bright with attention.
The way he gave in by degrees and still made every degree feel chosen.
Kas touched him at the waist first, thumb dragging once over the skin above his waistband.
Theo broke against his mouth.
There.
Kas filed nothing. He only did it again.
Theo’s hips came forward, helpless and honest, and the contact changed the room.
Kas felt the hard line of him through the thin fabric of his shorts, felt his own body answer, immediate and undignified.
Theo noticed. His hand slid down Kas’s stomach, stopped at the button of his trousers, and waited there.
Kas covered Theo’s hand with his.
“Yes,” he said.
The button opened. The zipper followed. Theo touched him through his underwear first, palm warm and uncertain for one heartbeat before confidence caught up with want.
Kas’s breath shortened. Theo watched his face as he learned him, and Kas understood, too late, that Theo Callahan’s attention at this distance was not survivable.
Theo dropped his forehead to Kas’s shoulder. “Jesus.”
“That is not my name.”
The laugh shook through him, then turned into a sound when Kas took him in hand.
There was no elegant way to do the rest. Elegance would have insulted the room.
Shoes came off badly. Socks went somewhere.
Theo got one foot tangled in his own shorts and cursed at a volume that suggested personal betrayal.
Kas laughed once, low and surprised, and Theo looked up at him from the edge of the bed, flushed, bare, offended, beautiful enough to put an end to counting.
“Enjoying yourself?”
“Yes,” Kas said.
Theo’s expression changed at the simplicity of it.
Kas stepped between his knees.
For a moment they only touched. Mouths, hands, skin finding skin without the excuse of clothing.
Theo’s hands moved over Kas’s back, his shoulders, the line of his waist. Kas’s hands learned him in return: the flex of muscle under his palm, the warm hollow of his throat, the way his stomach tightened when Kas kissed lower.
Theo said his name then.
Not Varga. Not Ice. Not anything for cameras.
“Kas.”
It came out broken at the edge.
Kas put a hand flat on Theo’s chest and pushed him back onto the mattress.
Theo went.
Not passively. Never that. He went like a man choosing the fall.
Kas followed him down and held him there with his weight.
Theo’s legs opened around him, his body already asking, but Kas did not rush.
He kissed him until the urgency sharpened instead of scattered.
He took Theo’s wrists once and pressed them into the mattress beside his head, not hard, just enough to make the offer clear.
Theo went still beneath him.
His eyes were dark.
“Yes,” he said, before Kas could ask.
Kas lowered his mouth to Theo’s throat and felt the word move under his lips.
After that, discovery became the only useful method.
Kas used his mouth first because Theo had too much language and it needed occupying.
He kissed down his chest, over the hard plane of his stomach, lower still, learning what made Theo go quiet and what made his hands fist in the sheets.
Theo tried to joke once. Kas stopped the sentence before he finished it.
The joke became a curse.
Better.
The taste of him undid something quiet and structural in Kas. He went slowly at first, one hand spread on Theo’s hip to hold him still. Theo did not stay still. His hips moved before he could stop them, a short helpless lift, and then he checked himself with a strangled sound.
Kas looked up.
Theo was staring down at him, wrecked already, mouth open, one hand hovering like he did not know whether he was allowed to touch.
Kas took that hand and put it in his hair.
Theo’s fingers closed there.
The next sound out of him was not controlled.
Theo’s head tipped back. “Fuck.”
Kas hummed once, not because it was strategic, though it was, but because Theo saying fuck like that deserved a reply.
Theo’s hand tightened in his hair. His thighs shook against Kas’s shoulders.
Every bit of him that had once played to stadiums was gone now, narrowed to this bed, this impossible pleasure he could not turn into charm.
Kas brought him close, then stopped.
Theo made a sound of disbelief. “That was rude.”
“You were close.”
“I noticed.”
“I am not finished with you.”
Theo’s eyes changed.
Kas moved up his body and kissed him. The kiss went filthy almost immediately.
Theo’s hand found Kas, skin on skin now, and Kas lost the first clean breath he had taken in a while.
Theo touched him with both curiosity and intent, thumb learning the head, palm learning pressure, and Kas had to catch his wrist.
“Too much?” Theo asked, breathless.
“Too effective.”
The grin flashed and vanished, swallowed by Kas’s mouth.