Chapter 28 Championship Point #2
The night after a major title was supposed to belong to sponsors.
They gave it one hour: the ceremony, the trophy with both their names already being engraved, Theo doing the on-court interview for them both and saying, when asked the inevitable, only, “Tomorrow. We’ll see you tomorrow at the press conference, both of us.
Everything you want to ask, we’ll be there.
” No jokes. The room full of journalists went up like a flare; the answer was an answer; and the ServeBot man in the third row stopped writing.
The trophy went to the engraver’s table under the stands while they did press, a folding station with a felt cloth and a man named Gus who had cut names into US Open silverware for decades. They stopped to watch on the way out because Theo insisted.
“It’s the best part. It’s the only part that’s permanent.”
Gus ran the graver through the second surname and said, without looking up, in the tone of a man sanding a chair, “Doubles names take longer. That’s how they get you.”
He blew the brass dust off the line.
“Worth it, though.”
That was all, and they carried it out into the night plaza, where, for the first time in the history of the partnership, one car waited instead of two.
They had decided in the locker room, in three words.
“One car,” Theo had said.
“Yes,” Kas had answered.
That was the entire negotiation, the protocol of a whole summer retired in a sentence.
They crossed the plaza together, champions, side by side, gear bags and silverware, past fans and phones and a security cordon, hiding nothing, announcing nothing, two men leaving work in the same vehicle like millions of other people on earth.
The photos that resulted were, the internet would note within the hour, completely unremarkable, which was the remarkable thing.
* * *
They drafted the statement that night together, propped against the headboard with the trophy on the desk wearing Theo’s cap. The laptop sat open between them on a document Kas had created in the corridor weeks of feeling ago, AMENDMENT, repurposed now.
Theo lobbied hard for sentence four.
“Melbourne. Trust me. You give them a future and they’ll forgive you the past. Oldest move there is. End on the next season.”
Kas read the line again.
We will both be entering the doubles in Melbourne.
“It is also true,” he observed, which from him was a standing ovation, and typed it in clean.
“Your part’s drafted,” Theo said. “Mine I’m doing live.”
“That is unwise.”
“That’s the point. A lifetime of drafts.
They’ve heard every version of me except the unrehearsed one.
” He looked over, and the fear was there in him, visible, invited in, sitting in the room like a guest who would be staying.
“He talks slower. Worse jokes. I figure it’s time he did a press conference. ”
Kas saved the document, closed the laptop, and regarded him for a long moment. “I have met him,” he said. “He will be fine. He is better than his material.”
Then they went up in the same elevator, in front of God and the hotel cameras and an elderly couple from Ohio who recognized neither of them, and the door of 1142 closed on the world.
* * *
What happened in that room was the opposite of the wrong night, and both of them knew it from the first touch, because the first touch had a question in it and the question got answered out loud.
“Here?” Theo asked, hand at Kas’s waist, thumb under the hem of his shirt.
“Yes.”
“Still?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me if the number changes.”
“It is not changing.”
“Kas.”
“It is improving.”
Theo laughed once, low and relieved, and kissed him.
No production. No target. No third party anywhere in the dark. Just Theo, present and unhidden, asking for what he wanted in that lowercase voice and giving what was asked for in return.
Slow, at first. Specific. Theo’s hands learning him with the same infuriating attention he brought to a serve toss, except now there was no court between them and no rule against touching twice.
Kas let himself be moved back against the door, then away from it, because neither of them wanted the door involved any longer.
The bed took the backs of his knees. Theo followed him down.
“Still?” Theo asked again.
Kas took his face in one hand. “You may stop asking every twelve seconds.”
“You said verification.”
“I did not say bureaucracy.”
That got the real laugh, and the laugh broke something open.
Theo kissed him through it, then lower, mouth at his throat, his shoulder, the place below his collarbone that made Kas lose the sentence he had been forming. Kas’s hand found Theo’s hair and stayed there, not directing, only holding on.
The championship was still in their bodies.
Theo’s pulse under his palm. Kas’s legs still heavy from the tiebreak.
The ache of the day turning into another kind of ache, one chosen on purpose.
Clothes came off in stages, with pauses for breath and one muttered complaint from Theo about athletic tape where athletic tape had no business remaining.
Kas lost the count there and never went looking for it.
Theo noticed. He lifted his head, hair wrecked, eyes dark and careful.
“What number?”
Kas answered honestly. “None.”
Theo went still.
“Good none?”
Kas pulled him down until the question was against his mouth. “The best one.”
After that, the room gave up any remaining claim to order.
The trophy sat on the desk wearing Theo’s cap. The laptop slept open somewhere. One water bottle went over and rolled under a chair. Theo said his name like a point he had no intention of conceding, and Kas answered with his hands, his mouth, the full reckless fact of his body.
This was not discovery anymore. Not the first night, not the careful map-making.
This was knowing and wanting anyway. Theo knew where Kas went silent when pleasure caught him wrong.
Kas knew where Theo hid the first sound and how to take it from him.
They had learned the rules. Tonight they broke them on purpose.
Theo pushed him onto his back and followed him down, mouth open, hips already working, cock hard against Kas’s thigh. He kissed like he had won something and still needed proof, one hand at Kas’s throat, not holding, just feeling him swallow.
“Tell me,” Theo said.
Kas looked at him through the city-dark. “Tell you what?”
“What you want.”
There was no joke in it. No cleverness left to hide behind. Only Theo over him, flushed and bare and still wearing one wristband, asking to be used honestly.
Kas put a hand at the back of his neck and pulled him down.
“You,” he said. “Open. Loud. No performing. No hiding what it does to you.”
Theo’s breath caught.
“There he is,” Kas said softly.
Then he turned him.
Theo went with it, a full-body yes, rolling under Kas and spreading for him before Kas had to ask. That was new too, or not new, but newly fearless: Theo wanting and not disguising the shape of it. Theo reaching back for him, hand finding his hip, pulling him closer with no room left for dignity.
“Lube?” Kas asked.
“Bag,” Theo said. “Side pocket.”
“You were optimistic again.”
“I’m a growth mindset.”
“You are a luggage problem.”
“Kas.”
The way he said it ended the joke.
Kas got the lube and came back to find Theo on his stomach, one knee drawn up, head turned on the pillow, looking at him with nothing arranged. No grin. No bit. No beautiful exit. Just want and trust and championship sweat still drying on his skin.
Kas set the bottle on the bed and bent over him.
He kissed the back of Theo’s neck first. Then the long line of his spine. Then lower, over the warm, muscled curve of him, until Theo’s breath changed and his fingers twisted once in the sheet.
“Still?” Kas asked.
Theo laughed into the pillow, wrecked already. “If you stop now, I’ll retire.”
“You would be terrible at retirement.”
“I’m terrible at waiting.”
“I know.”
Kas opened him with his mouth first because he wanted Theo gone past language before the first finger, wanted the room stripped of every last polished thing.
Theo made a sound into the pillow that had no relationship to any public version of him.
Kas put one hand on his ass, spread him open, and licked him again, slower.
Theo cursed.
Kas smiled against him and did it again.
There was nothing careful in the sense of distant.
There was care in the attention, in the hand at Theo’s hip holding him steady, in the pause when Theo’s breath hitched too sharply, in the way Kas waited until Theo pushed back against his mouth before taking more.
But the want was not polite. The want was filthy and earned and alive under his tongue, Theo shaking with it, cock hard against the sheets, one hand reaching back and finding Kas’s hair.
“Fuck,” Theo said, voice ruined. “Kas. Jesus.”
“Wrong name,” Kas said against him.
Theo made a sound that was almost a laugh and almost not.
Kas worked him open that way until Theo was shaking, until the pillow had muffled him badly enough that Kas lifted his head.
“No.”
Theo turned his head, eyes dark. “No?”
“I want to hear you.”
That did something visible to him. His face went open, then hungry, then embarrassed by neither.
“Then get up here.”
Kas slicked his fingers and gave him one. Theo took it with a breath that broke at the end, hips lifting, body remembering. Kas leaned over him, chest to Theo’s back, mouth at his ear.
“Good?”
“Yes.”
The second finger went slower. Theo’s hand found his wrist, not stopping him. Holding him there. Kas felt the give, the heat, the way Theo opened around him and tried to chase more before he was ready.
“Impatient,” Kas said.
“You like me that way.”
“Yes.”
“Then stop complaining.”
Kas crooked his fingers and found him.
Theo’s whole body jerked.
“There,” Theo said. “There. Fuck, do that again.”
Kas did. Again, then slower, then held him at the edge of it until Theo was panting into the mattress and saying his name in pieces.
“Please,” Theo said finally.
Kas stilled.