Chapter 6 #2
“That’s not — that wasn’t the deal—”
“The deal is torn,” Theo said. “You tore it. In the kitchen.” And he got Shane’s belt open, Shane’s fly, dragged the sweatpants down off his hips, methodical, unhurried even now, and looked at him, hard and flushed and already wet at the tip, looked long enough that Shane’s face went hot in the dark.
“You gonna stare at my dick all night or you gonna put that mouth to work?”
“Quiet,” Theo said. Not loud. It landed in Shane’s gut anyway, and Shane shut up, and Theo wrapped one big hand around him, a first slow pull root to tip that punched the air out of him, and then another, watching Shane’s face the entire time with that flat blue attention that had never once in five months been pointed at Shane’s pleasure and was now pointed at nothing else.
“Theo. Theo, c’mon, you can’t just do that to a guy.”
“I can,” Theo said, and put his mouth on him.
Shane stopped talking, gloriously, the loudest man in the league struck dumb for three whole seconds, one hand fisting in Theo’s hair and the other flat on the back of Theo’s skull, his head going back, his whole body a string pulled to its limit and held there.
Then the talking came back, because it always came back, because Shane Novak had never once shut up in his life, and it came back filthy.
“Oh my god, okay, okay, your mouth, you’ve done this, no way you haven’t done this, nobody’s a natural at this, fuck, Theo, your tongue, right there, right there, don’t you dare stop, if you stop I’ll die, I will die in this bed and you’ll have to explain it to immigration.”
Theo pulled off him, deliberate, and Shane made a noise of pure betrayal.
“You said it means nothing,” Theo said, conversational, his fist still moving, slow, too slow, keeping Shane right at the edge of the boil and not letting him over it.
“It means nothing, it means nothing, nothing has ever meant less in the history of meaning, put your mouth back.”
“Ask better.”
“Please. Okay. Please suck my dick, you giant Swedish menace,” and Theo did, and the rest of whatever Shane had planned to say died.
He’d expected, in whatever animal part of his brain had been imagining this (and it had been imagining this, he could admit it now, for days, for weeks), he’d expected it to be like the fights.
Fast and mean and over. It was not. Theo took him apart with patience, with thoroughness, learning him, reading him the way he read a rush.
He worked Shane slow and deep and then slower, tongue and the flat heat of his mouth and one big hand wrapped around the base, the other splayed on Shane’s stomach where the muscles jumped, finding the spots that made Shane swear and the spots that made him beg and filing them with that terrible flat focus turned entirely on Shane’s pleasure, pulling off to drag his tongue up the underside while Shane babbled at the ceiling, taking him deep again until Shane’s heels dug into the mattress.
Every time Shane’s hips tried to chase it Theo’s forearm came down across them, pinning him, that maddening control, holding Shane open to it instead of letting him take it.
“Harder, you can go harder. Yes. Yes. God, your hand, squeeze, like that, exactly like that, Theo, I’m close, I’m so close, I’m gonna come, you should—”
Theo’s answer was to take him deeper and hum, low, around him, and the warning became the event.
Shane came in Theo’s mouth with his spine arched off the bed and a sound torn out of him he’d never made for anyone, swearing, both hands in Theo’s hair, and Theo took it, took all of it, swallowed, kept his mouth on him through the aftershocks until Shane was twitching and pushing at his head, too much, too much, and then pulled off and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and Shane lay back on his own bed, wrecked, gasping, and was, for once in his stubborn life, taken care of.
“Okay,” Shane said to the ceiling, when he had a voice. “Okay. Wow. Get up here.”
When it was Theo’s turn Shane went after him clumsy with it, too eager, hands shaking as he got Theo’s slacks open, shoved them and the boxers down his thighs, got his fist around him, thick and hot and already leaking, heavier in his hand than he’d let himself imagine, and Theo’s breath came apart above him.
“Do that again,” Theo said, rough, when Shane found a stroke that worked.
“Yeah? This?” Twist at the crown, thumb through the slick of him. Theo’s hips stuttered. “Tell me. Talk to me, big guy, I want to hear it. What do you want?”
“Go down,” Theo said, the two plainest words, and they detonated in Shane harder than a paragraph of filth would have, because Theo Lindgren did not ask for things, had built a whole life around not asking, and he had just asked.
“Yeah,” Shane said. “Yeah, you got it,” and put his mouth on him, took him as deep as he could and let spit and his fist cover the rest, sloppy and loud about it and not embarrassed, learning the weight and the salt of him, the velvet-over-iron heat, pulling off to mouth at the base, to drag his tongue back up, to say “you taste good, you know that, I’ve been thinking about this since Ohio, since the stupid banquet, you in that suit,” and Theo above him making a punched-out sound at every word, the words doing as much as the mouth.
The careful man came undone in increments: the clenched jaw going slack, the hiss of air, the hand fisting in Shane’s hair without pulling, the low Swedish word he didn’t translate, the helpless roll of his hips that he caught and stilled and then stopped bothering to catch.
“Don’t stop,” Theo said, and then, quieter, ruined, “Shane,” and then, “fuck.” One syllable.
Flat. The first time Shane had heard him swear in English in five months of marriage, and it went through Shane hotter than everything else combined.
Then a word in Swedish that sounded begged.
Shane watched the wall come down brick by brick, drunk on it, on being the one who could do that, on reaching the man under the man, and worked him faster, mouth and fist together, humming, merciless, until Theo’s whole big frame went rigid and his hand spasmed in Shane’s hair and he came with Shane’s name buried inside a Swedish word, pulsing hot over Shane’s tongue and his knuckles, more than Shane was ready for, and Shane took it anyway, all of it, and kept his fist moving slow until Theo caught his wrist, done, oversensitive, breathing in great ragged pulls, a full penalty kill’s worth of breathing.
They moved together in the cold dark after, the radiator ticking, the bruises forgotten, the bad shoulder cradled safe between them by an instinct neither of them named, and at the end Theo held him through it, his good arm locked across Shane’s back, and Shane let himself be held, and did not narrate, and did not deflect, and the silence was the most honest thing he’d done in a year.
* * *
After, they lay on their backs in the dark, not touching now, a careful inch of cooling air between them, both staring up at nothing, and Shane’s heart was still hammering, a shift just finished, and the panic was already coming back, the what did I do, the my mother, the deal, the line he’d pressed so hard into a napkin.
“That was a mistake,” Shane said, to the ceiling.
“Probably.”
“It can’t — Theo, it can’t be a thing. There’s two hundred and twenty thousand dollars and my mom and the government and a divorce on the other end of this, and if it gets — if we get attached and it goes bad, it doesn’t just hurt, it costs her her treatment, it costs you your status—”
“I know the math,” Theo said. “I know it better than you. I built it.”
“So we agree. It was nothing. Steam. We don’t do it again.”
A long silence. The parking-lot light through the curtain. The slow, even quiet of Theo, the maddening calm back in place, except Shane had seen behind it now, had heard the Swedish word, and he’d never be able to believe in the calm again.
“We don’t do it again,” Theo agreed, in the dark, in the flat voice, and Shane lay there and listened to the man he’d married lie as badly as Shane had ever heard anyone lie, and recognized it, because it was his own lie, in a Swedish accent, and he closed his eyes.
* * *
Shane woke to gray light and the sound of the resistance band.
One second of nothing, the warm undifferentiated dark of deep sleep, and then it all arrived at once, no staggering, no mercy: the dive bar, the club soda going warm in his hand, the kitchen, the word coward in his own mouth, the bed, the bruise on his ribs and Theo’s mouth on it, deliberate and soft, an apology neither of them had earned.
What Theo had said into his skin about who’d taught him he was only worth what he gave.
Shane lay very still on his back and stared at the ceiling and his whole body ached, muscle and bone and the floated rib and the place on his inner arm where the ice pack strap had left a red mark, and he waited for the regret he’d promised himself before he fell asleep.
The ceiling didn’t move. His hands were flat on the mattress.
He noticed, distantly, that he’d slept on his half.
His half, because somewhere in the last eight weeks he’d started thinking of it that way, the left side mine, the right side his.
At some point in the night he’d moved to the center, and he was still there, and the sheets on the right side were cold.
He made himself get up. Made himself be fine about it: feet on the cold floor, thirty seconds in the bathroom, a face he didn’t look at too hard in the mirror.
His ribs ached the deep inward ache of a healing bruise and he pressed two fingers to it and remembered the shape of Theo’s mouth there and had to put his hand down on the sink and breathe.
No regret. Still none. He’d checked.
The coffee was made. Two cups, because Theo made two cups now without being asked, had started doing it sometime in week three and never mentioned it, and the left one was on the left side of the machine, in reach, exactly where Shane put his hand every morning, and that small routing of a habit that wasn’t even his yet, that Theo had learned without announcement and without credit, sat in Shane’s throat for a second before he swallowed it.
Theo was on the floor in the gray light, the resistance band around his wrist, the slow pull and release of his shoulder rehab, the same as every morning, the same twenty-three reps, the same counting Shane had learned to hear from the other room, and Shane stood in the kitchen doorway with his coffee and watched him and couldn’t make himself move, and in his chest a pressure built, too big and too soft, the thing he’d been calling nothing for four days, and he shut his eyes against it.
“You are awake,” Theo said, not turning around. “I can hear you panicking. It is very loud.”
“I’m not panicking.”
“You are doing the breathing. The shootout breathing. In through the nose, hold, like you are about to take a penalty shot.” The band released, slow and controlled. “We said it does not have to mean anything. So it does not. You can stop taking the penalty shot.”
The out, handed over, the permission to call it nothing, and Shane stood there with his coffee and looked at the back of the man offering it: Theo expected to be left.
Expected this to be the morning the loud American came to his senses, was already making himself small and easy to leave.
I’ll make it cost you nothing, the same move as the money, the same move as everything. Take it and go and don’t feel held.
“What if I don’t want it to not mean anything,” Shane heard himself say.
The band stopped.
Theo didn’t turn around for a long moment. When he spoke his voice was very careful. “Then it is more complicated. And more dangerous. And there is still a call-up coming and a divorce in the deal.”
“Yeah.” Shane stared at the ceiling. “I know.”
“So we should be smart.”
“Yeah. We should.” Shane got up, and crossed the cold floor, and crouched down next to his husband on the living room rug, close, and Theo turned to look at him, pale eyes wary as a stray, and Shane didn’t kiss him, just looked, just stayed.
“We’ll be smart on Tuesday. We’ve got a game Tuesday.
We’ll be smart then.” And Theo looked at him, the wary eyes going wide and quiet at once, looking at what he’d been told his whole life wasn’t there, and didn’t say anything, and they were not smart, and they had a game Tuesday, and they did it again on Sunday.