Chapter 10 Tomáš
Midnight, and my thoughts are still humming.
I’ve run tomorrow twice in my head. Bus at nine forty, training, media, film, the last full session before the match. The rails are checked. The rails hold. Sleep should arrive on schedule like everything else I run, and it isn’t coming.
I pick up the phone. I put it down. I pick it up.
?íma. Film at mine.
No time on it. I send it open-ended, a door left off the latch, and I don’t examine that, because it’s midnight and examining things is a daylight sport.
noted
Nine minutes later he comes in quietly. Hair wrecked from a pillow, no washbag. The feed that runs this man day and night must have flagged it too: no washbag, no kit, a man who came straight from his bed to mine with a cover story he didn’t build first.
“Story?” I say, out of pure ritual.
“Ice run. Machine on four is broken. Everyone knows.”
“Is it broken?”
“It will be.”
“You came without the bag.”
“I noticed that on the stairs.”
“And?”
“And nothing. I kept moving.”
That’s the whole liturgy tonight. He stands in the lamp’s half-light and looks at me. I look at him.
“Come here,” I say.
The kiss is slow from the first second. That’s not how we kiss. We kiss like men catching a train on a schedule. Five years of trains. Tonight, nothing’s running on schedule.
I undress him like there’s time. There’s never been time before.
I’ve had this body a hundred ways, all of them fast and urgent.
I have never once done any step of it slowly.
I pull his shirt up over his stomach, his shoulders, his collarbone.
He stands there and lets himself be looked at.
The expression on him has no entry in my inventory. It’s never held still this long.
“Tomá?,” he says against my mouth.
I move us towards the bed and lay him down and take my time.
I kiss my way down his chest to the crease of his hip, tasting salt and soap along the way.
His cock hard before I ever touch it. When I take him in my hand, he exhales like a man setting down a bag he’s carried up too many flights of stairs.
I stroke him then lick my way around the head. Going slow and deep as I’ve never bothered to before. I hold his hips down when they ask for more. And he barely talks, because saying something would break this moment we started. Would require him to think.
“You’re being thorough,” he manages after a few minutes.
“I’m always thorough.”
“Not like this.”
No. Not like this. I take his cock deeper down my throat and let that stand as the reply.
“I’m close,” he warns, hand in my hair.
“Don’t.” I pull off and feel him tremble. “Note yet.”
“Not yet,” he repeats, his voice shaking with need. His eyes are dark and open and on me the whole time.
There’s lube in my nightstand. There has been for two days. I’ve spent two days not examining that purchase. I slick my fingers and he watches me do it. When I press one into him, his whole body goes long and loose, a held breath finally spent.
I’ve had sex with him this way before. Not often.
The arrangement runs the other direction more nights than not.
Maybe efficiency, maybe habit. Whatever the reason before, tonight I want him under my hands, all of him, every response mine to draw out.
I work him open slow, my fingers curling, until I find the magic spot I’m looking for and his hips come off the bed.
“Okay?” I say, working him.
“Better than okay.” His voice frays on the last word. “Je?tě.”
My word. In his mouth. Five years and he’s never once said it back.
“Look at you,” I say, smiling down at him. “Using my word.”
“You don’t own that word, captain.”
I laugh into his hip. He laughs. We are laughing in this bed, which the arrangement also has no box for. I add it to the pile of things I’m not examining. Then I crook my fingers again and turn his laugh into something better.
“Eyes open,” I say.
“They’re open. They’ve been open all night.”
I push myself up between his legs and push his thighs up.
When I push my cock into him, it’s one long stroke, both of us watching each other.
At the end of it, neither of us moves. I can only hear our breathing and the hum of the hotel around us.
He’s tight and hot around me and completely still.
His hand comes up and grips my forearm, a man on a rail at altitude.
“Okay?” I say.
“Don’t,” he says. “Don’t ask me things right now. Just move.”
I move, in long and unhurried strokes. Nothing like we normally do and exactly like whatever this is instead. He meets every stroke with his eyes open. The talking doesn’t stop. It never stops with us. Tonight it’s down to single words with whole sentences inside them. There. Yes. Tomá?.
He pulls my mouth down to his and says it back into the kiss, and then my hand does the thing.
It leaves his hip and comes up and wraps around the back of his neck.
Palm to the nape, fingers in his hair, thumb below his ear.
I feel him register it. I feel the half-second where his whole body reads the gesture and knows exactly where else it lives.
He has watched me do it a thousand times, to Tobík, to Damián, to Mami at a stove, to every person I have ever loved on this earth.
And never once, not once in five years, in this bed or any bed on any continent.
Neither of us says anything. His eyes close for the first time all night. He turns his face into my wrist, mouth against the pulse, and stays there.
After that it stops being slow, because it can’t stay slow.
I drive into him with his neck in my hand and his cock hard between us.
He comes without me touching him with his whole body arching up into mine, his cock spilling hot over hist stomach between us, clenching around me so hard the room goes white at the edges. I follow him down into it, buried deep.
We lie there. His heartbeat under my mouth. My hand still on his neck. I don’t move it. He doesn’t move it. The water I set out earlier goes untouched, because neither of us is willing to be the first body that leaves but eventually I do.
The lamp’s still on. I should kill it. I don’t.
“Water’s on your side,” I say.
“Of course it is.”
“I don’t sleep anywhere else,” he says, to the ceiling, flat, like a man reading an inconvenient instrument. “Did you know that?”
“You sleep on planes.”
“Ninety minutes. A professional nap. It’s a technique, not sleep.
” His thumb moves once against my wrist, absent, a man checking a watch that isn’t there.
“In Sevilla, I watch the ceiling. I could draw that ceiling from memory. Brno, my bedroom ceiling. Hotel ceilings all over. Everywhere on this earth, I lie down and take a series of professional naps until the sun comes up.” A breath.
“With you, I sleep like the dead. I have to set an alarm to make sure I wake up before it’s too late. I’ve never said that out loud.”
The arrangement has a box for everything. Logistics, cover, exits, code. I go looking for the box that sentence goes in. I come back with nothing. There’s no box for this.
“Since when?” I ask. The room is dark enough to ask in.
“Bucharest.” Already going under, half a breath from gone, the truest thing said in this bed. “Since Bucharest.”
“Then sleep,” I say.
“Training at ten,” he says, eyes already closed. “Bus at nine forty.”
“I know. I set the times.”
“I know you know.” The words are coming slower now, spacing out like footsteps at the end of a run. “I like the sound of the schedule.”
“Go to sleep, ?íma.”
He sleeps.
?íma, who has a washbag packed for exits, who has never in five years been unconscious in my presence longer than a cooldown, goes to sleep in my bed with my hand still warm on his neck, between one breath and the next, like a switch thrown.
And I lie there in the lamplight and do the audit.
It’s not easy. It has never been easy. The arrangement is the one thing in my life that cannot be lost, and things get lost when you name them.
This has survived five years precisely because nobody ever said it out loud.
It runs because it’s unnamed. You don’t repaint a moving engine.
Conclusion: Say nothing. Change nothing. Guard it harder, quieter, better. Keep the label wrong on purpose, forever if the engine asks for it, because a wrong label on a full folder beats a right label on an empty one.
I fall asleep with his breathing in my ear teaching my breathing what to do.
Five twenty. I wake the way I always wake, all at once, on schedule, no alarm.
?íma is asleep in my bed.
Face down, arms under the pillow, taking up space like a man who has never once shared anything.
The light through the curtain seam is the gray before the gold.
He sleeps like the dead, just like he said.
I sit there for one minute and look at him, the wrecked hair, the slack hand. Nobody alive has seen this.
The rules say nobody stays. He stayed.
I get up without waking him and dress in the dark, running kit.
I fill a water bottle and set it on the nightstand where he’ll find it, because my hands do that whether I authorize it or not.
At the door, I stop and look back once, one breath past protocol, old habit from a peephole I’m not thinking about.
Then I go running. Rules-perfect. Gone before morning can happen to us. Out the lobby door, into the gray. The first kilometer is the coldest thing I’ve done all summer.
Say nothing. Change nothing. Guard it harder.
I run the decision until it sounds like discipline instead of fear. Somewhere around kilometer four, with the sky going gold over the skyline, it almost does.
I run faster.
?