Chapter 13 Šíma
The stairwell door closes behind us and neither of us says anything for two floors.
The protocols lasted three hours. I want that in the record. Tripled at twelve forty, signed by me. Dead by one. The man who killed them is carrying the washbag he packed while he was still pretending he wouldn’t.
The official has left the building. What’s climbing the stairs is just the man. The man’s hands aren’t steady. Neither are the captain’s. We both saw the corridor two hours ago, and we’re both still seeing it.
His room. The lock turns. The laptop is still on the desk from the meeting, closed, alibi cold.
“Your hands,” he says.
“Yours.”
We look at four unsteady hands in the lamplight, two seconds from a corridor that almost ended five years, and something in the room decides that tonight the usual order of operations does not apply.
He doesn’t kiss me. He puts his forehead against mine and stands there, holding my wrists, breathing. I stand in it. This is already against more rules than I can cite, and I can’t find the officiant anywhere in the building. The whistle got left in the corridor with everything else.
“Shower,” he says. Quietly. Logistics from the bottom of a well.
We strip like triage. Kit on the floor where it lands, which in this room is sacrilege. He doesn’t look at the kit. That tells me the size of the night. The water runs hot. The bathroom fills with steam until the mirror gives up on us, which I appreciate in a witness.
Under the water he washes the day off me like it’s his job. Hands in my hair. Down my neck. Across my shoulders. Thorough, unhurried, a man doing maintenance on something he intends to keep. Nobody has washed my hair since I was six years old. I stand there and let him.
The letting is the most honest thing I’ve done this tournament.
“Two seconds,” he says, into the water. “The door was open two seconds.”
“Two and a half.”
“You counted.”
“I count everything. You know what I do.”
“I know what you do.” His hands stop on my shoulders. The water runs between us. “?íma. In the corridor. When I saw him. I didn’t feel what you’re supposed to feel.”
The sentence stops there anyway, short of the cliff.
I watch it stop, the way his sentences have been stopping all week, brakes and no skid marks.
But tonight the road’s washed out, and instead of rerouting into logistics he just stands there with the wreck of it, water running off his jaw, and looks at me.
“Say it,” I say. Against every statute I have ever drafted. “Nobody’s transcribing.”
“I wasn’t sorry.” His voice comes out flat and wrecked at once, announcement register with the floor gone out of it. “Two seconds. The door open. Marek standing there. And some part of me was glad. Glad, ?íma. I wanted the wall to come down. What do we do with that?”
The code has a box for everything. Film. Ice. Corners. Eve of match. I reach for a box and my hands come back empty.
I hear myself answer with the only true sentence in the building.
“I don’t know.”
Five years of knowing everything. Five years of writing the statutes and staffing the court. The most honest man I know finally corners me in a shower on the eve of a semifinal, and the sum of my testimony is I don’t know. He exhales like I’ve said something enormous. Maybe I have.
Ignorance, from me, is intimacy. He knows what my not-knowing costs.
Then his mouth is on mine, water between us, and the adrenaline that has been rattling both of us since midnight finally finds its exit and burns.
It’s not fast. It should be fast. Adrenaline is fast. Instead it’s deep and slow and standing, his back to the tile, my hands mapping him like the first time.
It isn’t the first time. It somehow also is.
His cock is hard against my hip. Mine against his thigh. Neither of us organizes anything about it for a long, expensive minute. We just kiss like the corridor is still watching and we’ve stopped caring. The steam holds us up.
“I’ve got you,” I say, and take his cock in my hand.
He makes a sound the tile will keep. His head goes back. I work him slow, water-slick, my thumb rolling over the head the way five years knows he needs.
“?íma,” he says. “?íma. Your hand. Don’t stop.”
The ceiling usually gets his half sentences. Tonight I do. My name in his mouth like a man counting his one coin.
“Together,” he says, and gets his hand around my cock, and we stand chest to chest under the water working each other, foreheads down.
“Slow,” he says. An order for both of us.
“I know the tempo.”
“You invented the tempo.”
“I’m regretting it.”
His laugh breaks against my mouth and turns into something else halfway through. We find a rhythm. Ragged. Matched. His fist and mine, the water making everything slick and slow.
When he twists his wrist the way I do it to him, I have to put my free hand flat on the tile to stay in the building. It’s clumsy and it’s perfect.
“Where did you learn that?”
“Watching you,” he says. “I watch everything you do. Five years. Did you think the inventory ran one direction?”
I go to my knees on the shower floor.
“You don’t have to,” he says, looking down, water in his lashes.
“Quiet. I’m working.”
I’ve done this before. I’ve never done it like this. Water hammering my shoulders. His hand cradling my head instead of steering it. Tile hard under my knees, and not caring. I take his cock deep and slow while he says my name to the steam.
I pull back to the head of him and hold there, tongue working, until his whole leg shakes. Then to the root again, slower. His hand in my hair stays gentle the entire time.
The gentleness undoes me more than the act ever could.
I hold his hips and take him all the way and stay, and that finishes something in both of us that started in a corridor two hours ago. No performance. No countdown. Above me the announcements man loses language in two countries, Czech arriving broken at a volume the mirror couldn’t testify to.
“Dob?e,” he says, to the steam. “Prosím. ?íma. Prosím.”
“?íma. I’m.”
He doesn’t finish sentences tonight. This one doesn’t need finishing. He comes down my throat with his hand gentle on my jaw. Gentle the whole way through it. And gentleness at that moment, from that man, in this arrangement, is the most explicit thing that has ever happened in this bathroom.
He pulls me up. He turns me. My chest to the warm tile, his body against my back, his mouth at my ear, and his fist closes around my cock slick and sure.
“Two seconds,” he says, working me. “I’d have given the whole five years for two more.”
“Tomá?.”
“I know. Don’t file it. Just.”
“Harder.”
He goes harder. His cock stirs again against my back. Five years of knowing exactly what my body does, and doing it anyway, his teeth at my shoulder now. The tile is cold under my palms. His chest is hot against my spine. I stop being able to hold both facts.
I don’t file it. I come over his fist with his name in my teeth and his mouth on my neck, low, where the collar covers.
The rule holding even now. The arrangement in one image.
My knees nearly go. He holds me up against the tile, both arms, the full wingspan, until the water runs cold enough to notice.
Towels. He hands me one and looks at the floor, both kits tangled where they landed.
“The kit,” he says.
“Leave it. Housekeeping files no reports.”
“Breakfast is at eight. coach talks at nine.”
“Then it has until eight,” I say.
He nods like a man approving a schedule. The dark. His bed.
Nobody says nobody stays. Nobody says anything. He sleeps in pieces, waking every hour on match-eve nerves, and every time he wakes his hand finds me, checks, settles.
“Still here,” he says once, around two, mostly asleep. Not a question.
“Still here.”
He’s under again before the words finish landing.
I hold them the rest of the night myself. I don’t sleep at all. I lie in the dark of the captain’s room doing the thing I do now instead of sleeping, which is watching the ceiling price what I’ve got.
And somewhere between three and four, in the dark, with his breathing finally even beside me, the officiant comes back.
He comes back quiet, the way he always comes back. He picks the whistle up off the corridor floor. He shows me the arithmetic, one more time. Patient. Terrible. True.
Here it is. The semifinal is in fourteen hours. Then fifteen flights, and the schedule that holds this thing together stops existing, and what’s left is two men and a question. Questions get answered. Answers end things.
Half of Tomá?, forever, beats all of him once.
That’s the whole ruling. It held in Bucharest five years ago.
It holds tonight, with him breathing beside me and Ková? drowning somewhere down the corridor, and if there’s a flaw in it I can’t find it at three in the morning fourteen hours before a semifinal.
I stop looking.
The correction goes in before dawn.
Five ten. I get up. He doesn’t wake. He’s finally under, the deepest hour. I dress in the dark without a sound, ten years of practice. The washbag repacked by feel. Roll and zip.
Then I do the protocol. All of it. The coldest, cleanest version I have ever run.
The kit we dropped like triage, I fold. His goes on the chair, squared to the seat edge the way he squares things. The towels, hung. The glasses by the sink, rinsed, inverted, hotel-neutral.
Every trace of the night collected, corrected, returned to regulation. The room walked backward into a room where nothing happened. I’m good at this. I’m the best there has ever been at this.
I have never once hated it before.
The water bottle stays in my bag. He left me one two nights ago, at hand height, filled, capped. I look at the nightstand. I could leave one. The man who leaves one is making a promise. I put it back in the bag.
The precision is the mercy. Get it right and nobody bleeds today. Today of all days, he cannot bleed. He has a semifinal in thirteen hours. Half of him plays better whole. That’s the finding.
I’m at the door at five fifty-eight. The lock is silent. I’ve done this a hundred times.
This is the first time it has ever felt like the thing it is.
“Match day.”
His voice, from the bed. Awake after all. Flat in the dark. Not a question. Not an accusation. Not the register from the shower. Just the schedule, spoken aloud, one professional to another.
“Match day,” I say.
I don’t turn around. He doesn’t say anything else. The door opens on an empty corridor and closes itself behind me. One click. The feature, working as designed. I take the stairs down through a hotel that will wake in two hours to the biggest day any of us has ever had.
At breakfast there will be a plate at my seat.
At noon there will be a stadium. Somewhere in between, the man I just walked backward out of a room will put on an armband and lead us out of a tunnel.
I will be four meters to his left, where I have been for ten years. The distance the formation requires.
Half, forever.
It held last night. It holds this morning.
It’s a semifinal. Everything else is filed.
?