Chapter 2 Tomáš
Room count at the bar, one in the morning. Eleven players, four staff, one phone still pretending to be a DJ. That’s eleven too many. We have recovery at ten.
“Bed,” I say. “All of you. Bus at nine.”
“One more song,” Novotny says.
“You said that three songs ago. I counted.” I didn’t. ?íma counts. I schedule. “Bed.”
“It’s a semifinal,” Novotny says, like the word is a permission slip.
“It’s a semifinal in six days. Tonight it’s a bedtime.” I take the bottle out of his hand and put a water in it. He looks at the water like it insulted his family. “Drink it. Go up.”
“The kitchen could do a goulash,” Novotny says. “A celebration goulash. I know a guy on the night staff.”
“You met him tonight,” Polá?ek says.
“We bonded.”
“You showed him your medal from the under-nineteens.”
“That’s bonding.”
“The goulash is at eleven tomorrow,” I say. “It’s called lunch. Bed,” I say again, and point, and they go. They complain the whole way to the lift, which is how you know they’re happy. I stay until the bar is a bar again and not a situation.
Final count: zero players, two staff, one bar handed back in acceptable condition.
Semifinal. I say it once more on the way to the lift, to nobody. The word holds up. Good word. It needs the work.
Mami calls in the lift, because of course she does. It’s one in the morning and she is my mother.
“You should be asleep,” I say.
“You should be asleep,” she says. “Running. So much running tonight, Tomá?ku.”
“That’s the job, Mami.”
“The horn was magnificent.”
“There’s a rule about air horns and I’m choosing not to learn it.”
“Rules.” I can hear her wave her hand. Somewhere in a rented Atlanta kitchen, my mother is waving away the stadium code of conduct. “Semifinal, Tomá?.”
“Semifinal, Mami.”
“Your brother watched with us. He made everyone stand up when you took the corner. Your grandfather fell asleep at halftime and woke up for the goal, which he claims was strategy.”
“It was probably strategy.”
“He has announced he will stay awake for the whole semifinal. Now go sleep.”
“I’m walking to my room right now.”
“Good. I love you. Tell ?íma the report was his best work. Somebody filmed it for me.”
“I’m not telling him that. His head doesn’t fit in the lift as it is.”
She laughs and hangs up on me, which is how she ends all calls, mid-warmth, like a woman getting off a tram.
My room is a single, because the armband comes with one privilege.
Schedule taped to the mirror. Kit laid out for tomorrow.
Two water bottles on the nightstand, because past me looks after future me.
That’s the system. I look at the schedule.
Recovery at ten. Media at twelve. Nothing until the bus at nine.
I send the film text.
?íma. Film at mine. Fifteen minutes.
It’s not about film. It’s never once been about film. It’s the one piece of scheduling I run that doesn’t go in the group chat, and it has run, without a fixture list, for five years. The reply comes back in forty seconds.
noted
That’s the whole reply. That’s always the whole reply. You could pin our entire message history to the tactics board and lose nothing but the time it took to read. Bus times, recovery slots, film at mine. A man’s life in logistics. It’s tidy. I like it that way.
He knocks twice, soft. He uses the keycard I gave him and comes in with his washbag under his arm like a man attending a very small conference.
“Fifteen minutes,” he says. “It took me nine. Note the margin.”
“Noted.” I hand him a water. He drinks half of it without being told.
He’s quieter up here. Always is. The volume he uses on tables stays on the tables. This one is better. I’ve never told him it’s better, because that’s not a thing we say, and because he’d put it in a bit and then it would belong to the tables too.
“Mami says the report was your best work,” I say. “Somebody filmed it for her.”
“I have a following.” He says it the way other men say sorry. “Tell her the critics agreed.”
“I’m telling her nothing. Damián?”
“Still humming when I left.” He sets the washbag on the desk, exactly where it goes.
“One day somebody’s going to ask what film we watch.”
“Nobody asks. You know why nobody asks?”
“Because film is boring.”
“Because film is boring and I am not.” He rolls his shoulder out of his jacket. “Five years. Nobody has once volunteered for film night. Best programming decision of my career.”
That’s the whole negotiation. Cover confirmed, window confirmed, water finished. Five years of fluency. There are club moves we’ve spent months on that don’t run this clean.
He puts the bottle down and looks at me, and the looking is the last part of the routine, and then it isn’t routine at all. His mouth is on mine and my back finds the wall.
We’re fast. Fast is what five years buys: no wrong guesses, no traffic, every touch arriving where it was aimed. His hands go under my shirt and take it up and off in one motion, and mine are already at his waistband, and neither of us has to look.
“Match hands,” he says, at my knuckles, which are taped. “You punched an Italian?”
“The grass. Twice.”
“The grass had it coming.” I feel him smile against my lips.
I get his shirt off. I know his chest better than I know my own. That’s not a line. I don’t look at my own for hours. His mouth goes to my neck, low, where the collar covers, because that rule stopped needing words years ago.
I push him towards my bed and we go down together. His weight lands on me the way it has landed on me in nine countries, dozens of hotel rooms, and too many nights too count. Twenty minutes ago I was dead on my feet in a lift. Now my body is wired again.
I get his shorts down and take his cock in my hand, hard already, familiar as my own kit. He exhales through his teeth. Quiet, the way he never is anywhere else in this hotel.
“Slow or fast?” I say. The logistics are important.
“Fast. You need to be rested for your media at twelve.”
“You checked my schedule?”
“I check everything. There,” he says, when my thumb moves over the head of him. Everything he says in this room is in his flattest voice, and his flattest voice is the honest one, and I’ve never once told him I know that either.
He leans down and puts the head of my cock in his mouth.
Teasing his tongue around the slit. An expert at the one thing he will do unhurried.
I put my forearm over my eyes and count backward from a hundred.
He knows my body like a route he’s run for years.
He knows it better than the club physio, better than the national team physio, better than me.
He pulls off and works me with his fist, slow, and watches my face.
“You should get the lube,” I say.
He gets the washbag and it takes him four seconds, because it’s packed the way it’s always packed. Roll it open, everything where it lives. If the alibi ever gets audited, the audit will find a man with excellent toiletries.
He preps me with his fingers and no wasted motion, working me open while his other hand keeps a lazy count on my cock, and it isn’t romantic, it’s precise, and precise is what this body wants after ninety minutes plus stoppage.
“Je?tě,” I say.
“There’s what I wanted to hear,” he says, low. “Twelve minutes. I’ve timed it.”
“Stop timing me.”
“Somebody has to keep the record.”
Then he’s pushing into me, one long stroke, full, and the record can say whatever it wants. I take him easily because I’ve been taking him like this for years. It’s ?íma. It’s easy. Those are the same sentence.
He gives me a second I don’t need. I pull him the rest of the way in with my heel, and he laughs, once, into my shoulder. Nobody else gets that laugh.
“Good?” he says, kissing me just below my ear.
“Yes. Go.”
He goes. He sets a pace like a professional, which he is, and I meet it, which is my job, and the bed takes the load.
“Hips up,” he says, and I go up, because in this room, and only in this room, I like being the one who gets told. He drives deeper and I stop pretending to run anything.
His hand finds my cock between us without looking. Mine find his back, his hips.
“Tomá?.” His mouth on my neck, his voice a whisper I can barely hear.
“I know,” I say, responding to whatever he didn’t ask. “Keep going.”
He shifts the angle because he knows the angle, and I stop being articulate in any language. I come with his hand working me and his mouth pressed to my jaw, not kissing, just parked there, and he follows a minute after, deep, with my name said quietly, once, like a man closing a door carefully.
Clock check: forty minutes, text to finish. I lie there while the heart does its cooldown lap and file the night where the nights go. Good match. Good party. Good this.
He’s up at the right moment. Not the second it ends, that would be cold, and not five minutes after, because five minutes is more intimate than either of us is willing to be.
There’s a version of the rules where I wrote that clause and a version where he did, and after five years I couldn’t tell exactly which it was.
He showers fast and gets dressed. He repacks the washbag the way it goes, roll and zip, refills his water at the tap, drinks, caps it.
“Bus at nine,” I say, from the bed. “Front seat if you’re on time.”
“I’m never on time. I’m early or I’m mysterious.”
“Semifinal, ?íma.”
He stops at the door, one hand on the handle, and grins the grin nobody photographs. The one I get in private.
“Semifinal,” he says. “Night.”
“Night. And don’t oversell the ceiling fan to Damian.”
“I never oversell. I let the fan speak for itself.”
The door closes behind him. Protocol is one look through the peephole to confirm the corridor, so I look.
The corridor is empty except for ?íma going down it, through the fisheye lens, smaller and smaller, then taking the stairs he always takes.
He doesn’t look back. He never looks back.
The stairwell door swallows him and clicks.
I breathe three times. Then I check the lock and drink the second water.
The bed smells like both of us, which is normal. After five years that’s just what normal smells like. I set two alarms. Across the room the schedule says semifinal in six days, and the word does one more lap, in my own voice this time.
?