Chapter 28 Championship Point #3
That one word in Theo’s mouth, with no audience and no armor, nearly ended him.
“What do you want?”
Theo looked back over his shoulder. His face was wrecked. His voice was not.
“You. Inside me. Now.”
Kas’s control went thin and bright.
“You are sure.”
“I have never been more sure of anything in my life, and I have won the United States Open today, so that’s a competitive field.”
Kas laughed once, helplessly, and Theo smiled at the sound like he had put it there with his hands.
Then Kas slicked himself and pressed close.
The first push stole the room.
Theo’s mouth opened. Kas watched it happen, watched him take the first inch, then more, slow because slow was the only way not to lose his mind. Nothing between them. Just heat and pressure and Theo opening around him, raw and tight and alive under his hands.
Kas stopped halfway in.
Theo reached back and gripped his hip.
“Don’t vanish on me.”
“I am here.”
“Then move.”
Kas pushed the rest of the way in.
Theo made a sound so low and helpless that Kas had to put his forehead between his shoulders and breathe through the urge to fuck him too hard too fast. Theo was hot around him, impossibly close, his body holding every inch like it had been waiting all day to prove the word together could mean this too.
“Number?” Theo asked, breath ragged.
Kas closed his eyes.
“Still none.”
“Good?”
“The best one.”
“Then stop being noble and fuck me.”
That was Theo: tenderness in one hand, a match in the other.
Kas gave him what he asked for.
The first stroke was careful. The second less so.
By the third, Theo had pushed back to meet him, and the rhythm caught between them with brutal, immediate certainty.
No rehearsal. No signal. No need. Kas held him at the hip and fucked him with the same focus he brought to championship points, except this had no crowd to survive and no score to protect.
This was Theo under him, taking him, swearing into the pillow, then lifting his head because Kas had asked to hear him.
“Like that,” Theo said. “Kas. Like that.”
Kas put a hand under him and wrapped it around his cock.
Theo nearly came from the first stroke.
“Not yet,” Kas said.
Theo laughed, desperate and furious. “You’re giving orders now?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Kas fucked him harder.
The bed shifted under them, trophy rattling faintly on the desk, the water bottle rolling another inch under the chair.
Theo’s hand slapped once against the headboard and stayed there, bracing himself.
Kas took the angle deeper, found the place that made Theo lose language, and held him there until the only things left in the room were skin, breath, heat, and Theo saying his name like a prayer he had not meant to learn.
Kas bent over him, mouth at his ear. “Touch yourself.”
Theo obeyed so fast it was its own confession.
His hand moved under Kas’s, messy and urgent, both of them working him now while Kas fucked into him, deep and steady and then not steady at all.
The rhythm broke open. Theo pushed back for every stroke, taking him, asking for more without needing words, and Kas gave it to him because there was no virtue left in restraint.
Not tonight.
Tonight the restraint had done its work by getting them here. The rest was heat.
“Kas,” Theo said, voice cracking. “I’m close.”
“I know.”
“Don’t stop.”
“I won’t.”
“Don’t pull out.”
Kas went still for half a beat.
Theo felt it and turned his head enough for Kas to see his face. His eyes were open. Clear. Certain.
“Inside,” Theo said. “I want it.”
The room narrowed to that word.
Kas’s hand tightened on his hip. “Theo.”
“Yes.”
Kas moved again.
The sound Theo made when Kas obeyed him went through both of them. He came first, hard and shaking, cock pulsing under his hand, body clenching around Kas so tightly Kas lost the rhythm entirely. Theo said his name through it, not polished, not pretty, broken open and real.
Kas lasted two strokes after that.
He came deep inside him with his mouth against Theo’s shoulder, control gone cleanly and completely, every number lost, every system silent, nothing in him left but Theo’s body taking him and Theo’s hand reaching back to hold him there.
For a long time, neither of them moved.
Then Theo laughed once, ruined and soft into the mattress.
“Okay,” he said.
Kas, still inside him, breathed against his skin. “That is your assessment?”
“I’m workshopping.”
“Workshop silently.”
Theo laughed again, and the sound moved around Kas in a way he would think about for the rest of his life.
Eventually, carefully, Kas withdrew. Theo made a small protesting sound, then immediately pretended he had not. Kas let him have the dignity because Theo had very little left and had spent it well.
Cleanup took longer than it should have because they kept touching. Water, towel, one kiss against the bathroom counter that turned into three, Theo bent back against the sink with one hand in Kas’s hair and the other braced beside the faucet.
“Again?” Theo asked, voice low.
Kas looked at him in the mirror, at both of them wrecked and flushed and still alive in the reflected city light.
“Yes,” he said. “But slower.”
Theo’s grin appeared, private and filthy. “You say that like you think you’re in charge of the concept.”
“I am in charge of all concepts.”
“Sure, baby.”
Kas stopped.
Theo’s grin widened. “Oh, that did something.”
“Do not weaponize pet names.”
“I’m absolutely going to weaponize pet names.”
Kas kissed him quiet, which worked for a while.
The second time was slower.
Not gentler exactly. Slower. Theo on his back now, open and shameless beneath him, one leg hooked high around Kas’s waist, the other heel digging into the mattress when Kas pushed back inside.
There was no first-time caution left, no public armor left, no wrong night in the room with them.
Just Theo asking for what he wanted and Kas giving it to him until asking became unnecessary.
Kas made him come again with two fingers inside him and his mouth around his cock, because thoroughness was a virtue and Theo had made several insulting remarks about his stamina.
Theo returned the favor with his mouth, filthy and generous and determined to make Kas lose every language he had.
He succeeded in Hungarian first. English went shortly after.
By the time they finally collapsed sideways across the bed, the city had shifted past midnight and the contract had expired without ceremony.
The armor of two careers lay where it had been dropped, somewhere by the door, and would not be missed.
After, in the wreck of it, Theo’s head rested on his chest, one hand over the rhythm there like he was still learning what steadiness felt like. Kas felt the curl come loose against his forehead, damp, the third time all summer, and reached up before Theo could.
He pushed it back himself.
“Hey,” Theo protested, into his side. “That was mine.”
“You may have the next one. There will be a next one.” Kas considered the ceiling, the city light, the ringing. “I am told this is what sustainable looks like.”
Theo lifted his head. His hair was catastrophic and his eyes were doing the undignified thing again, but the grin underneath it all was the unaimed one, the real one.
“Tomorrow we tell them.”
“Tomorrow we answer them,” Kas corrected. “They asked first. We are merely returning serve.” He pulled the man back down, settled him, two heart rates negotiating toward a shared number in the dark. “Together. Both inside. One play.”
* * *
At midnight they called Owen, on speaker, the phone propped against the water bottles, because some ratifications required the registry.
He answered on the second ring with the sound of a hotel bar behind him and said, before either could speak, “Took you LONG enough,” and then, “Wait. Which thing are you calling about, the trophy or the other thing,” and Theo said, “Both. Tomorrow. Together,” and the bar noise vanished, Owen visibly relocating himself somewhere quiet with the urgency of a man clearing a runway.
What he said then took a while and was mostly unrepeatable for reasons of sentiment rather than language, and ended: “All these years, Theodore,” Owen said finally.
“Jesus Christ. You absolute idiot. I’m so happy for you I may need to sit down.
” A pause, and then, with the gear-change of a doubles man till death: “Varga. He’s left-handed and dramatic and he’ll be four minutes early to your funeral. Take care of my guy.”
“It is in the schedule,” Kas said, and Owen’s laugh came down the line warm and helpless and carried them to the edge of sleep.
“One play,” Theo said, and the last thing either of them tracked, before sleep took the champions of the United States Open, was the other one’s breathing, evening out, unguarded, and close enough to keep.