Chapter 23 The Night Before #2
“The model says Saturday goes well,” Kas said. “But I would like to hear the answer in person.”
“That’s the methodology?” Theo asked, and his voice betrayed him halfway through the sentence.
Kas heard it.
“Theo.”
“Yeah?”
“What are you doing?”
Theo stared into the darkness, caught by a man down the building with no camera, no evidence, nothing but breath and the disgraceful accuracy of attention.
“Nothing.”
“That was not nothing.”
“I’m lying very badly.”
“Yes.”
Theo laughed under his breath, and the laugh turned into something else when his fingers slid lower, just once, over the hard line of himself. He stopped there, palm pressed flat, because if he kept going, Kas would hear that too.
“Don’t,” Kas said.
Theo went still. “Don’t?”
“Not like that.”
The heat of it went through him so fast he forgot the room.
“Kas.”
“I want the answer in person,” Kas said, voice lower now, less even. “I want the first time you say it where I can watch your mouth make the words.”
Theo’s breath left him.
“That is unbelievably unfair.”
“Yes.”
“You’re doing it on purpose.”
“Yes.”
The honesty of that nearly finished him.
Theo turned onto his side, phone pressed to his ear, the sheets twisted around his hips, his body bright and furious with being told no by the only man alive who could make restraint feel like a hand around his throat.
“You know,” he said, rough now, “for a man obsessed with scheduling, your timing is sadistic.”
“My timing is excellent.”
“You’re four floors away.”
“Three. You miscounted.”
Theo made a sound into the pillow. “Do not correct my floor math while being hot at me.”
“I am not being hot at you.”
“You absolutely are.”
“I am being precise.”
“Kas.”
The word came out wrong. Too much want in it. Too much room.
There was a pause, and when Kas spoke again, the voice had changed. Softer, but not gentle. Not exactly.
“Are you touching yourself?”
Theo shut his eyes.
“No.”
Another bad lie. Maybe the worst of his career.
“Theo.”
His hand tightened once over his cock through the fabric, and the sound slipped out before he could stop it.
Kas went quiet.
The silence was not empty. It was a hand on the back of his neck. It was a door held open and not crossed. It was every unfinished thing in the room with them, breathing.
“Do you want to?” Kas asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you want me to tell you not to?”
Theo’s whole body answered before he did.
“Fuck.”
“That is not an answer.”
“Yes,” Theo said. Barely sound. “Yes.”
Kas breathed once, controlled and audible, and Theo pictured him in the dark: hair still damp from the shower, shoulders loose from the match, face arranged around restraint and failing at the edges.
“Then don’t,” Kas said.
Theo’s hand stopped moving.
“Not because I do not want it,” Kas said. “Because I do. Because if you start, I will listen, and if I listen, I will come in the dark in a hotel room like a teenager, and tomorrow you will still owe me eleven words at a far court where I can see you.”
Theo pressed his forehead into the pillow.
“Oh my God.”
“No,” Kas said. “Me.”
Theo laughed then, helpless and turned on and cracked open, and the laugh made it possible to breathe.
“That was almost a joke,” he said.
“I am adapting.”
“You’re terrifying.”
“I know.”
A long quiet moved down the line. Theo took his hand away from himself slowly and put it back on his chest, as if returning a racket to the bag. His body objected. Loudly. He ignored it, which felt, somehow, like part of the answer.
“Eleven o’clock,” Kas said.
“The far court,” Theo said.
“I will bring the questions.”
“I’ll bring the answers. All of them. I drafted them tonight in anti-doping. It’s eleven words, I counted, you’d be proud.”
“I am already proud.”
That one landed without warning.
Theo closed his eyes and had to swallow before he could speak.
“Hey. For the record. Best match of my life, and the match was the second-best thing that happened on that court tonight. The first was you putting my arm up.”
A long quiet, the good kind.
“Sleep,” Kas said at last, the word with more inside it than most of the summer’s speeches. “Saturday is hours away now, not days.”
“Saturday,” Theo agreed.
They stayed on the line a while longer anyway, neither hanging up, two men in two rooms, neither willing to be first to leave. When it finally closed, Theo lay there for a while with his phone on his chest and his body still arguing for the worse decision.
Then he set his alarm for nine, plugged in the phone, and slept the deep, defenseless sleep of a man with nothing left to defend, while across the river, in a server farm in the dark, a scheduled post sat in a stranger’s drafts, patient, set to publish at fourteen minutes past nine, hours from changing everything.
* * *
He dreamed, for the first time in years, about Bradenton.
The shed courts, the eleven-dollar pizza, a young Owen with the beard just starting, the two of them hitting serves into the dusk because neither had anywhere better to be and nowhere better existed.
In the dream a third figure stood at the fence in white, watching, and dream-Theo kept playing to him, showing off, until the figure said, in a voice the dream borrowed from somewhere safe, You do not have to perform it. I have already seen it.
Dream-Theo put the racket down.
The relief followed him up out of sleep and sat on the edge of the bed in the gray light. For a few more minutes, Saturday was just a day. Then the phone rang with Owen’s name on it.