Chapter 10 Marek
On the way back from team dinner, ?íma falls in beside me, and for once, he doesn’t come at it sideways.
“You’re quiet tonight. Not match quiet. Different quiet.”
“I’m conserving material.”
“Mm.” He presses the elevator button and doesn’t get in. “You get quiet like this maybe once a tournament. I’d like the version of you that talks.”
“You’ll get the version that defends.”
“I’ll take both. Sleep, Ková?.”
“I’ll sleep.”
“Mm,” he says, in the tone of a man annotating a claim for later.
I don’t sleep.
I lie in the dark doing what the sports psychologist calls visualization and what I call the corridor, on a loop.
Stop. Not here. Not now. He didn’t slow his stride at the end of it, and I have defended men at full sprint with less composure than that man walking away from his own want.
And it was want. I’ve read the weight under his movement.
The weight under that walk was enormous.
Some sentences can only be finished while moving. I am lying perfectly still. The sentence paces its box like something fed on schedule and never let out.
Novotny sleeps like a man whose conscience is a finished argument.
I dress in the dark with my shoes in my hand, out into the corridor, and go out through the loading exit the kit men use, because a man who spent two years hiding a route can get some professional use out of the skill on the way to retiring it.
Four blocks. They have never been shorter. That worries me more than anything else all day.
He opens the door before my hand decides between knocking a second time and walking away. Of course he does. Barefoot, in the old shirt, and none of the corridor in his face. That frightens me correctly. It means tonight I don’t get the referee. I get the man.
The man has dark hair wrecked from sleep or hands or both, a bare swatch of skin under the hem of the old shirt, and blue eyes that do not soften just because I came back. That is what I came for. Not softness. Him.
“It’s midnight, before a quarterfinal,” he says.
“I know what it is.”
“Your staff will have a heart attack.”
“My staff thinks I’m asleep. My roommate would testify in court.
” I keep my hands where he can see them.
Empty. No container. No pretext. “I’m not here to finish the sentence.
You said daylight, and you were right to say it, and I can’t buy daylight yet.
Tonight I just needed you to know the sentence survived.
I didn’t want to carry it onto that pitch undelivered, because you read everything else off me anyway. ”
He leans on the doorframe and takes his time looking at me. Down the hall, a door stays shut with Davide asleep behind it. I notice that, and he watches me notice.
“You counted the risk coming here,” he says. “Who saw you?”
“Nobody. I’m good at this part.” I let him hear the rest of it plainly. “It’s the part I’m quitting.”
Nobody is not the same as no one who matters. That distinction steps out of the shadows and stands there with us. I can feel it because Enzo can feel it, and because daylight, real daylight, does not mean anonymous joggers and a door that closes.
“It’s still not the noon,” he says. Level.
“No. But it can see the noon from here.”
He steps back from the door. “This is me not being perfect,” he says, mostly to himself. He steps back and lets me in.
Neither of us reaches first. That’s the strange thing, the thing I’ll be turning over for days.
We stand in his dark kitchen a meter apart, two men who have done this the fast way for two years, in windows and doorways and twenty rented minutes at a time.
Neither of us moves. He keeps his hands at his sides on purpose.
He tips his head at me. “You’re shaking.”
“It’s cold.”
“It’s Georgia in July, Marek.”
“Then July is broken.”
“Something is,” he says, and closes the distance a centimeter and no more.
The not-moving goes on until it becomes its own kind of touch.
“Say something in your language,” he says quietly. “Something I don’t know.”
So I give it to him in Czech, slowly, the thing I won’t say in any language he reads.
“Jedenáct tisíc kilometr?.” Eleven thousand kilometers.
“A jediná cesta, které lituju, je ta poslední dom?.” And the only drive I regret is the last one home.
His face changes anyway. You don’t need the vocabulary when the voice is doing that.
“Come here,” he says and pulls me toward the bedroom.
This time is slow from the first touch, and the slowness is the point of it. No rush anywhere. Not tonight.
He undresses me as if there’s no match this week.
Shirt. Belt. Everything. His mouth follows his hands, unhurried.
I return every favor at the same speed, relearning what a year tried to file away.
The scar on his hip from the Coppa final.
The exact spot under his jaw that makes him swear.
The way his skin heats under my palm before the rest of him admits anything.
The longer hair at his temple that catches between my fingers when he stops pretending to be patient.
Then I do the thing I have never done for anyone, in any city, in any version of the boxes.
I go down on my knees.
He goes very still above me. The midnight versions never allowed this posture. A man on his knees is a man who has decided to stay awhile, and we both know it, and I look up at him the way he has always looked up at me and my hand goes around his cock and then in my mouth.
“Marek.” My name comes out of him with the architecture knocked loose.
He’s heavy on my tongue, hot, salt and skin, and I take him slow and deep and learn it the way I learn anything that matters. Thoroughly. With attention. His hand lands in my hair, not steering, just holding on.
“Look at you,” he says, wrecked and quiet, two languages fighting in his throat. “Dio. Look at you. I imagined this exact thing and you never once let me.”
I pull off long enough to answer. “I’ve wanted the taste of you for years. File that.”
“If I’d known this was in you, I’d have priced the noon higher.”
I go back down and hum something that isn’t language, and his hips stutter and he swears in Neapolitan, at length, with feeling.
“Stop. Stop.” He pulls me up by the jaw, kisses me hard, his taste in both our mouths now. “Not like that. Not the first time you kneel. I want to be looking at you.”
He walks me backward to the bed and follows me down onto it. For once we are face to face, his weight along the whole length of me.
I open him slowly, two fingers slick from the drawer that is still stocked. I work him until his breath goes ragged and his forehead drops to my shoulder and his cock leaks against my hip.
“Slower,” he says, and I did not know slower existed.
I find it. I add a third finger and curl them right, and he arches off the bed, swearing softly, riding my hand with his eyes shut and his mouth open. I watch every second.
“Marek.” He drags his eyes open. “Now. Before I finish embarrassing myself on your fingers.”
He lets me set the pace, all of it, which he has never done once. That undoes me more than the heat of him does.
“Je?tě?” I ask, once, checking.
“Je?tě. Always je?tě.”
“Look at me,” I say, when I finally push into him.
He does. Face to face. His legs around me, his hands gripping my back.
I push in slow, all the way, the stretch and the heat of him taking me apart centimeter by centimeter.
I watch everything that crosses his face.
I hide nothing that crosses mine. Fully seated, I stop because I have to.
Months of want ending, arriving loud, and I need one breath to survive the sound of it.
His body grips me everywhere. Something in my chest hands over its last set of keys.
“Still with me?” he says, barely a voice at all.
“Nowhere else. That’s the whole problem.”
“Then move, my problem.”
I move. Long and deep and unhurried, his cock trapped slick between us, his heel driving into the back of my thigh on every stroke.
The quiet we owe the sleeping building turns every sound we can’t make into something that travels through skin instead.
Sweat builds where we’re joined and everywhere else.
He meets every stroke with his hips and takes me deeper than I decide to go, greedy about it, both hands spread on my back like he’s holding a match ball he refuses to concede.
He talks the way he talks, both languages, filthy and tender in the wrong order on purpose.
“Harder. There, just there. Don’t you dare stop.” Then soft Italian I only half-follow, which lands harder than the filth does. I answer in the third language, the one with no words in it. Hips and hands and mouth. He receives every sentence with his eyes open.
“Say the filthy ones in Czech,” he says. “I want to learn them wrong.”
So I do, against his ear, and his laugh breaks into something else halfway through it.
“That one,” he manages. “What does that one mean?”
“Faster.”
“Then why are you slowing down?”
“Vocabulary lesson.”
When his breathing tips toward the edge, I slow down, all the way down, holding deep. He groans a protest into my mouth.
“Not yet,” I tell him. “Stay here. Stay right here with me.”
“You learned patience.” His nails bite my back. “I hate it. Don’t stop having it.”
“How long can you hold this?”
“Ask me in an hour.”
“Liar.” I smack his ass.
“Two minutes. Ask me again in two minutes.”
“In two minutes you’ll be done.”
“In two minutes we’ll both be done. That’s the design.”
We hang there, sweat-slick and shaking, at the top of it, longer than either of us has any right to manage, trading breath and filth and each other’s names in the wrong languages, and it is the single most honest conversation of my adult life.
“Closer,” he says.
There is no closer. I try anyway.
Then patience runs out. I drive into him the way he asked for at the start, hard and deep, the bedframe keeping our secret badly. He tugs at his own cock between us in short, hard pulls, urging me on in gutter Italian. Everything narrows to heat and grip, and his eyes refusing to close.
“Now,” he says, and tightens around me on purpose, merciless about it. “You first. Give me the show.”
It takes three more strokes. He watches my face the whole way down, greedy, cataloging, and I let him have all of it, every second, nothing filed and nothing withheld, and I’m still shaking when his own control goes.
He follows me over with my hand wrapped around him and his teeth in my shoulder to keep the building innocent, hot pulses between our stomachs, his whole body one long shudder against mine.
For a while neither of us moves. His heartbeat argues with mine through two ribcages.
“Your heart is loud,” he says.
“It’s had nothing to say at this volume since last year. Let it.”
After, we lie face to face on the wrecked sheet, breathing each other’s air, his hand flat over my heart like he’s checking the engine is real.
“The corridor,” he says eventually. “I walked away from that sentence this afternoon and it cost me the whole evening, and I want you to know that, because you were about to spend tonight thinking my no came easy, and nothing about my no has ever once come easy with you.”
“I know it wasn’t. I watched you walk and read the weight.”
“Five years of reading me.” His thumb drags once across my chest, absent-minded. “On Wednesday you’ll use all of it to ruin my afternoon.”
“Every gram of it.”
“Good,” he says, fierce and quiet. “Don’t you dare go easy on me in front of seventy thousand people. Whatever this is, it doesn’t step on the pitch.”
“Promise the not-easy back, then. You owe me a ruined afternoon too.”
“On my career,” he says, and means it like a vow.
He looks at me, and the room gets very still around what comes next. “It isn’t staying,” he says. “Tonight can’t be staying. You know the words.”
“I know the words. It isn’t staying. Tonight I still go.”
“Twice now,” he says. “The same goodbye, word for word.”
“Third time we retire it. One way or the other.”
The words come out worn smooth, and neither of us fixes them. The sentence that would replace them isn’t allowed out until daylight.
“Then go slow enough that I don’t mistake it for the old way.”
“Sleep four hours at least,” I say, finding my shirt. “You’re playing a fast man in a few days.”
“I hear his opponent is slow in the last twenty minutes.”
“He saves something for the last twenty minutes.”
I go slow enough. I find my clothes in the dark at a speed that would have embarrassed the man I was a year ago.
At the door I stop, one hand on the frame.
The old me stands in a stairwell holding his shoes, and I finally see him clearly.
It was never the neighbor. It was never the dog.
Getting caught was never the danger, getting caught was the exit I wanted and couldn’t allow, because an accident absolves you and a choice does not.
I ran from the version where it was my fault on purpose. Kindness never entered the building.
“After the match,” I say from the doorway. “Whatever the score does. The sentence finds its daylight.”
“Don’t schedule what you can’t survive, Marek.”
“I’m not scheduling it. I’m promising it. There’s a difference.”
At the door, he catches my sleeve. “Text me when you’re back at the hotel.”
“Since when do we text?”
“Since tonight. One word, Marek.”
“You’ll get two.”
“Go,” he says then, and the warmth gets loose around the edges of it, and the last thing I see before the door closes is him standing in his dark kitchen, barefoot, not guarding any of it.
The walk back is quick. The night smells like rain that hasn’t committed, and the city hums its one flat note over a man walking home with a promise in his mouth instead of an exit. I could draw this route with my eyes closed, and I am done needing to.
Inside the room, I send one word. Inside. The reply is a single thumbs-up, and then, a second later, the picture of a moka pot, which is either goodnight or a threat of coffee, and I don’t decide which.
In the room, Novotny graciously concedes a point to Roman in his sleep. I stretch out in the dark on top of the covers, and somewhere between the pillow and the ceiling the decision finishes making itself. Quietly. No announcement. The way the real ones apparently arrive.
I want to try. Not the wanting. The trying.
The noon, the sun, the witnesses, all of it at the stated price.
There’s no procedure for becoming someone else, and I’m going to attempt it anyway, and somewhere in the early steps, there’s a coffee I owe Damián.
Somewhere past that, eventually, in some city, in daylight, there’s a market with favas in it.
I’m not ready to look directly at that one. It’s enough that it’s on the list.
Step one, play the quarterfinal. Step two exists. That is already more steps than the old plan ever had.
The second alarm sits on the nightstand, already working before it goes off, keeping watch for a man who has to wake up twice today. Once for the match.
Once for the rest of it.