Chapter 10 Unforced #2
Then Theo shifted under him, voice low. “Let me.”
Kas knew what he meant before Theo moved. He knew, and still the sight of Theo sliding down his body almost stopped his heart.
Theo took him with less patience than Kas had used, and more hunger.
The first wet heat of it punched the air out of Kas’s lungs.
Theo learned fast: tongue, hand, rhythm, eyes lifted once to catch Kas watching him.
There was no performance in it now, only the devastating pleasure of being good at something and wanting it to matter to exactly one person.
Kas put one hand in Theo’s hair.
Not pushing.
Holding on.
Theo made a pleased sound, and Kas nearly came from that alone.
“Stop,” Kas said.
Theo lifted his head, mouth wet. “Already?”
Kas’s control was not sufficient for answering. He brought him up by the chin and kissed him until Theo’s smugness dissolved into heat.
Then Kas turned him under him again.
This time Theo’s body knew the question before Kas asked it. His legs opened. One hand slid down Kas’s back, over his hip, pulling him closer. He was hard between them, slick where Kas had left him, and when Kas rocked against him, both of them went silent.
Kas rested his forehead against Theo’s. “Do you want me inside you?”
Theo’s answer came at once. “Yes.”
Kas went still.
Not because he did not want it. Because he wanted it so badly that for a second the room narrowed to the heat of Theo under him and the impossible invitation of his body opening there, willing, asking.
Then the rest of him came back online.
“No.”
Theo blinked up at him, breathless. Hurt flashed first, quick and unhidden, and Kas put a hand to his face before it could become a joke.
“Not no to you,” Kas said. “No to this badly.”
Theo’s throat moved.
Kas kissed him once, slow enough to make the distinction clear. “No lube. No condom. First time. I am not making impatience the thing you remember.”
The hurt changed. Softened. Went dangerous in another direction entirely.
“Oh,” Theo said.
“Yes. Oh.”
“You’re stopping because you want it too much.”
Kas looked at him.
Theo’s mouth curved, wrecked and wondering. “That is brutally hot.”
“It is also correct.”
Kas moved down his body before Theo could say anything else, before either of them could turn wanting into negotiation. He kissed down Theo’s chest, then his stomach, then the sharp line of his hip, and felt Theo’s hand go into his hair, not pushing, only holding on.
“There are other ways,” Kas said against his skin.
Theo’s breath broke. “Show me.”
So Kas did.
He took his time after that because time was the point.
Theo’s body had gone bright with being denied one thing and given everything else: mouth, hands, skin, Kas’s weight holding him down when he tried to chase too fast. Kas learned him by inches.
What made his hips lift. What made his hand tighten in Kas’s hair. What made the words leave him.
When Kas took him into his mouth again, Theo stopped speaking entirely.
Better.
Kas brought him close once, then let him back down, palm spread low on his stomach when he cursed. He wanted the impatience. He wanted the trust underneath it more.
“Kas,” Theo said, raw now, nothing polished left.
“I know.”
He used his hand and his mouth until Theo came hard, one hand in Kas’s hair, the other twisted in the sheet, his body giving up the last of the performance in a shudder Kas felt everywhere.
Only then did Kas let Theo pull him up.
Theo kissed him like he wanted the taste of himself there, like he wanted proof of what had happened.
His hand found Kas, slick and urgent between them, and Kas let him.
No counting. No correction. Just Theo’s mouth open against his, Theo’s fist around him, Theo saying his name once more, quieter this time, and Kas coming against him with his face buried in Theo’s neck, undone in the exact room he had tried to arrange.
For a while, neither of them moved.
Then Theo’s hand slid slowly up his back.
“Stay,” he said.
Kas did.
After, the room reassembled slowly: the cooled air, the two bottles of water, a wedge of city light under the curtains. They lay in the wreck of the evening, Theo’s head on his chest, one of Theo’s hands resting there as though monitoring the tempo.
His shoulders, he noticed from a great clinical distance, were loose. Entirely. The thing they did never. He catalogued it and did not correct it.
They made the rules of the room that night, although neither of them called them rules.
It happened in the dark, in the loose-shouldered after, Theo’s voice arriving in the lowercase register with no preamble: “I need this to be the place where I’m not handling you.
Like, ever. I handle everyone, Kas, it’s my whole résumé, and I will absolutely try to handle you, it’s a reflex, like calling a serve out. When I do it in here, call it.”
“Agreed,” Kas said. “Then the same in return. I will contain. I will go silent and call it composure. It is my résumé. When I do it in here, call it.”
A pause, the city running its lights under the curtains.
“Also,” Theo said, into the dark, the next clause arriving with the unhurried gravity of the small hours, “Cincinnati. You leave Sunday. I’m not in the draw.
That’s a week, and I just want to say, out loud, in the room, that I’ve checked the cost of missing you and it’s bad. ”
“I leave Sunday,” Kas agreed. A pause, the length of a man consulting a blueprint already amended. “I will call when I land.”
“You’ll call when you land,” Theo repeated, already knowing, somehow, with total certainty, “and you’ll be early.”
“That is speculative,” said Kas, who would be early.
“Are we negotiating,” Theo said, delighted, “a collective bargaining agreement for a hotel bed?”
“We are establishing the room,” Kas said. “One room. No audience. No lying. Everything else, the protocol can have.” And Theo had gone quiet for a moment at that, and then said, “Deal,” with no joke riding on it anywhere, and the room was thereby established, wherever they both happened to be.
“Your heart’s slower than mine,” Theo murmured, some time later. “That’s insulting. Mine’s still qualifying for Tokyo.”
“Yours has always been badly coached.”
A soft laugh against him. Then quiet, the good kind, the kind from the corridor in Atlanta that hadn’t needed filling, and Kas lay in it and felt a single curl of his own hair come loose against his forehead, damp.
Theo saw it; the man missed nothing he cared about and everything he didn’t.
He reached up, slow, telegraphing the play, and pushed the curl back with two fingers, and didn’t make the joke, didn’t say never sweats.
He just looked at it, and at Kas, with an expression Kas had no archive entry for, and said, quietly, “There you are.”
Kas had been seen by stadiums. By more cameras a match than he could count, for a decade. By line judges, statisticians, biographers of the sport.
He had never once felt it land before.
“Here I am,” he agreed, and the words came out in the wrong register, unmachined, and he let that stand too.
They talked, after, in the dark, which Kas had not known was something he did. The conversations he conducted lay in rows: press, coaching, logistics. This one had no row. It moved like rally practice, no score, the ball kept in play for the pleasure of the contact.
“The slide,” Theo said at some point, quietly, to the ceiling.
“You want to know the worst part? It wasn’t the losing.
Losing has a schedule, you lose, you fly home, there’s another day.
The worst part was that I couldn’t tell anymore which parts of me were actually holding.
You take the crowd away, the winning away, the wingspan photos away, and I’d go looking for whoever was left holding the racket and the search kept coming back empty.
Years of that. Empty court, no echo.” His thumb moved absently over Kas, reading something there.
“What do you do? After losses. You can’t possibly fly home, you’re always in the quarterfinals. ”
“I itemize,” Kas said. “Every error, logged. Then I delete the file.”
“You delete it?”
“Keeping it is sentiment. The lesson stays; the shame is overhead.” He considered the dark. The honesty kept arriving, and he kept answering it. “That is the official procedure. Twice in my career the file did not delete. Wimbledon, the year of the shoulder. And Atlanta, the tiebreak.”
Theo’s head came up off his chest. “We won everything after Atlanta. You’re climbing the rankings like nothing I’ve seen. That file’s still open?”
“The file is not about the tiebreak,” Kas said. Theo looked at him for a long moment, and then put his head back down, directly over the evidence, and said nothing, which was, from him, fluency.
* * *
The logistics, the next morning, were tender in the only dialect Kas spoke fluently.
He woke first, by design and biology, and conducted the morning the way he conducted everything: Theo’s shirt located and folded over the chair, the room service order placed for one (with a second espresso and a plate of eggs that were, on paper, also for one), the corridor camera’s rotation noted, the elevator intervals mapped.
A gap between their exits, different lifts, Theo via the gym in yesterday’s training kit so the story told itself.
Theo woke to the espresso smell and watched the operation from the pillows with one eye, hair catastrophic, pre-broadcast, entirely real.
“Your coffee order,” Kas said, apropos of the eggs, “is a large drip, splash of oat milk, one sugar before noon and none after, and you order a cortado when you wish to appear European to journalists.”