Chapter 13
The last night in the one-bedroom apartment, they did not sleep, and they did not pretend they were going to.
The duffels sat zipped by the door, two of them, the sum of Shane, packed and ready in the dark for a six a.m. that would carry him ninety miles north, and the apartment was sixty-three degrees, and the bed was the one bed, and tomorrow it would be all Theo’s side again.
They both knew the arithmetic. Theo had done it the moment Mercer said tomorrow: ninety miles, an hour and forty in good weather, a visa hanging on a marriage and a marriage about to be conducted across a state line, a season of falling asleep against the same warm spine reduced now to phone calls and the gaps between road trips.
He had built a ledger of it and it had come out bad, and then he had torn that ledger up too, because there was a new rule now, the rule from the entryway, and the rule said you did not give the worst number more weight than it had earned.
The number was ninety. It was not goodbye.
He had to keep telling his body that. His body, which had spent four nights learning Shane was gone and was now being told to unlearn it for one night and learn it again at dawn.
So he did not file it. He took inventory the new way, the only way that didn’t hurt: he counted what was here.
Shane was here. Shane had pulled him down onto the bed already, no joking, no curse to take the weight off it, and was kissing him slow, slower than the reunion night, slow enough to last till morning, his cold hands framing Theo’s face.
They’d warmed against him by now; they always did.
Theo thought he might miss that most, Shane’s frozen hands going hot against his skin, the small daily proof that Theo ran warm enough for both of them.
“Stop thinking,” Shane murmured against his mouth.
“I am not thinking.”
“You’re doing the math. I can hear you doing the math.”
“It is ninety miles,” Theo said, the thing he’d decided to believe, and Shane huffed a laugh into his neck and said, “Yeah. Ninety,” and kissed the word into his throat, and that was the closest either of them got to saying the rest of it out loud. The rest of it they said other ways.
They undressed each other in the cold and got under the blanket fast, skin to skin in the sixty-three degrees, and it was different from the reunion night, the hunger banked down into a slow burn, because there was no relief to burn off now, only the leaving, and the leaving made every part of it deliberate.
Shane mapped him. That was the only word for it.
He put his mouth everywhere, the throat, the sternum, the inside of the good elbow, the hip bone, the line of dark hair down the stomach, memorizing the route, storing it for the drive, narrating it under his breath because he was Shane and even tonight the mouth ran: “this part’s mine, and this, gonna think about this at center ice, gonna be the worst defenseman in Chicago because I’m thinking about your stomach,” and Theo, hard against Shane’s chest and not hiding it, said, “Lower,” and Shane laughed into his navel and obeyed and then didn’t, detoured, because when he got to the brace he stopped, the same as he always stopped, and pressed his lips to the bare skin above the right shoulder strap, careful, and Theo’s good hand came up into his hair and held him there.
“We’ll do the surgery in the summer,” Shane said against the strap. “Off-season. I’ll drive down for it. Ninety miles, you said. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
“You will be playing.”
“I’ll be here when you wake up,” Shane said again, not arguing, just laying it down as Theo laid things down, a brick, a fact, and Theo’s throat closed and he pulled Shane up by the hair and kissed him so he wouldn’t have to answer.
“You said lower,” Shane said against his mouth. “I’m a coachable guy. Tell me again.”
“Lower.”
“Yeah?”
“Your mouth. On me.” A breath, and then, because tonight was for saying it: “Suck my dick, Shane. I want to remember it tomorrow at noon, when you are gone and I am pretending to my own coffee machine that this is fine.”
Shane made a sound that was half laugh and half torn open, said, “God, when you talk like that. Okay. Yeah,” and went down the bed and took him in his mouth, slow, no teasing in it tonight, one cold-turned-warm hand splayed flat on Theo’s stomach to feel it jump and the other wrapped around the base, working him root to tip in long pulls, wet and unhurried and devastating.
Theo let his head go back into the pillow and watched the ceiling and let himself be undone by the loud man’s quiet mouth, the heat of it, the patience of it, this man who had never been able to receive anything learning by the day how to give without keeping score.
When Shane pulled off it was only to talk, lips against the head of him, “you’re leaking, you’re so worked up, look at you, most controlled man in two leagues and you’re dripping for me,” and then back down, deeper, humming, and Theo’s good hand fisted in the sheet and then, on purpose, opened, came to rest in Shane’s hair instead, holding, not gripping, asking nothing, given everything anyway.
His hips wanted to move. Shane’s hand on his stomach said go ahead, pressed and released, permission, and Theo rocked up into the wet of his mouth, shallow, controlled even now, and Shane took it and hummed and worked him with tongue and fist together until Theo was saying his name in the broken two-language way, until the heat gathered low and certain and he had to tug Shane off by the hair because he wasn’t going to last and that wasn’t how he wanted the last night to end.
“Come here. I want—” He stopped, started again, plain, no disguise. “Like before. Like the first night. I want to be sore tomorrow, in the morning, after the car is gone. I want to keep the feeling for the drive.”
“You’ll feel it,” Shane said, and his voice cracked on it. “I’ll make sure. Come here.”
He reached for the drawer, the same drawer, slicked his fingers warm against the heat of the work, and opened Theo slow in the cold dark, and this time there was no rush in it at all, one finger until Theo said more, two until Theo’s breath went uneven, then three, stretching him soft and thorough, watching Theo’s face by the streetlight through the cheap blinds, watching the controlled man come apart by degrees, talking him through it low and constant: “still good? tell me. there, right there, I know, I’ve got it, I’ve got you, you’re gonna take me so easy, gonna be so good,” and Theo, three fingers deep and past all pride, said, “Enough. Now. I want your dick, not your commentary,” and Shane laughed, wrecked, and said, “You get both, it’s a package deal, you married the roster spot and the mouth,” and slicked himself and lined up, and when he pushed in, both of them arranged so the bad shoulder stayed clear of the mattress, on the side that was Shane’s now; neither of them had to say a word about it anymore.
It was learned. It was theirs. Shane sank deep, all of him, seated to the hilt, and went still and dropped his forehead to Theo’s and just breathed there, joined, neither of them moving, for a long ragged moment that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the dawn coming.
“Ninety miles,” Shane whispered, wrecked.
“Ninety miles,” Theo said, and wrapped his good arm around Shane’s back and pulled him in, and they moved.
It was long and it was slow and it was the kind of thing you do when you are storing it up.
Shane rolled his hips in deep unhurried strokes, kept his weight on his arms, kept the bad shoulder safe, ground in at the bottom of every stroke until Theo’s breath broke each time on the same low note, and talked, because the talking was Shane, was the point of Shane, was the noise Theo had married: “feel that? that’s not going anywhere, ninety miles is nothing, I’ll drive it Sundays, I’ll drive it after back-to-backs, I’ll walk in the door and you’ll be at the table in the cold, being you, and I’ll still want you this bad, exactly this bad,” and Theo pulled him down by the back of the neck and said into his mouth, “Stop talking about the door. Fuck me like you are staying,” not loud, but the obscenity in his flat accent went through Shane, a current, visible, and Shane moaned and gave it to him, harder now, deeper, the headboard finding the wall again, every stroke deliberate, and got a hand between them around Theo’s dick and stroked him in the same slow time, slick with what he’d been leaking all night.
“Close,” Theo said. An inventory item. A gift.
“Yeah. Me too. With me, okay? Eyes open. There you are. There you are.”
He came with his eyes open, looking up at the man who was leaving in the morning and staying anyway, who had learned at last how to give, spilling hot over Shane’s fist between them, and the long clench of it pulled Shane after him, deep, shaking, coming inside him with his forehead pressed to Theo’s and Theo’s name in his mouth, ninety miles from a city that wanted him and zero miles from the only place he’d ever let himself be carried.
After, neither of them got up. Shane shifted his weight to the side of the bad shoulder, the wrong side, the side he always took now, and pulled the blanket up over them both, and they lay in the sixty-three degrees with the duffels by the door and did not talk about the duffels.
His hands were warm. Theo traced the spine with two cold-warmed fingers, lazy, certain.
“It’s just ninety miles,” Shane said into the dark, and this time it wasn’t a thing he was making himself believe. It was a thing he’d decided to defend. A lead. You held it.
“Just ninety miles,” Theo agreed, and held him, and somewhere before dawn one of them slept, and then the other, and the season clock, which had been running down all chapter, ran out.
* * *
The bed was cold by noon.