Chapter 13 #4
“More,” Shane agreed, and gave him a second finger, and Theo’s good hand fisted in the sheet and his healing arm stayed dead-still on the pillow, held there by trust and not a strap, and Shane worked him in long unhurried strokes, scissoring him open, curling his fingers down until he found the spot that made Theo’s breath punch out of him, and then staying on it, merciless, his other hand stroking Theo’s dick slow and out of rhythm so there was nothing to brace against. “There it is,” Shane said, low, delighted, filthy.
“There it is. You should see yourself. Mr. Lindgren of the federal interview, taking my fingers, riding my hand, and I’m not gonna decorate it, no comparison does it justice, it’s the best thing I’ve ever watched. You want three?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah you do.” Three, more lube, slower, the stretch of it deliberate, and Theo’s hips started moving without his permission, riding Shane’s hand, the body voting before the ledger could, and Shane talked him through all of it, a low run of you’re so tight, four weeks, we’re never doing four weeks again, I’m getting you traded, I’m getting me traded, I don’t care which, until Theo was open and slick and breathing the name like it was the only word he had left.
“Shane. Enough. Now.”
“Bossy.” But Shane’s hands shook as he slicked himself, and he saw Theo see it, and didn’t hide it. “Say it once more. I want to hear it while I do it.”
“Fuck me,” Theo said. Plain. No accent it could hide behind. “I am asking. That is the entire sentence.”
And then Shane stopped, hovering over him, hard against the inside of Theo’s thigh, and looked down at the length of him, the scar and the healing shoulder and the body that was livelihood and lifeline, as exposed as it had ever been, and his face went quiet, the quiet he got right before he made a play he’d already decided on.
“I see you,” Shane said, what Gitta had told him to do.
“All of it. The shoulder, the account, the part that thinks it’s only worth what it gives.
I see all of it and I’m not going anywhere.
You’re not useful to me, Theo. You’re — you’re the thing I’d give the useful stuff up for.
You get that? You’re what I stopped competing for the call-up over because winning you mattered more than winning.
I’d do it again. I’d do it every time.” And Theo, who had no wall left, who had given the wall to Mercer and the truth to Shane and his whole heart to a loud broke American who’d married him for money and meant it more than anyone had ever meant anything.
Theo put his good hand over Shane’s and didn’t move it.
“I see you too,” he said, the flat voice gone.
“Now come here. Slow. We have all the time. For once we have all the time.”
So Shane came into him slow, one hand braced on the mattress beside the healing shoulder so his weight never landed there, the other locked with Theo’s good hand against the sheet, the blunt head of his dick pressing in past the first resistance, and Theo’s breath went out of him long and shaking, the stretch and the burn and then the deep stunned fullness of it, Shane sinking in by degrees, an inch and a pause and an inch, watching Theo’s face do its arithmetic and lose, until he was seated, all of him, buried to the root, both of them holding still in the late light while Theo’s body learned the size of him again.
“Okay?” Shane breathed. His arms were trembling with the holding still.
“More than okay.”
“Talk to me. I need actual words. You went somewhere behind the eyes.”
“I am here. I am very here. You are—” Theo’s breath caught as his body settled around him. “Full. I am full of you. That is the report.”
“That’s the report,” Shane repeated, unsteady, and laughed, and the laugh moved him inside Theo and they both made a sound about it. “Don’t make me laugh, I’ll finish in four seconds and I have a reputation, I told you I’m taking my time—”
“Then move,” Theo said. “Husband. Move.”
And Shane moved. Slow, the slowness the entire point, drawing nearly out until just the head of him held Theo open and rolling back in deep, the long wet drag of it, finding the angle that made Theo’s good hand spasm in his, doing it again, again, and again, the catch of breath and the bed not even creaking because nothing here was fast, and Shane talked, of course Shane talked, a low wrecked stream against Theo’s jaw: “God, you’re so tight around me, you’re so good, four weeks, never again, I’m fucking my husband in our bed and the government approved it, there’s a stamp, we have a stamp, am I hitting it, tell me when I hit it, I want to hear you say there—”
“There.”
“There,” Shane said, and stayed on it, grinding in deep on each stroke now, no longer pulling far, just working that one place over and over while Theo came apart underneath him by line items: the good hand first, then the breath, then the voice.
Theo, who caught everything, who had math for everything, lost the count entirely.
There was no ledger for this. There was only Shane’s weight on him and Shane’s dick buried deep, Shane’s forehead dropping to Theo’s collarbone as he said his name like it cost something to say it.
He fucked into him long and slow and complete, asking, “Is it good? Tell me it’s good. ”
Theo answered every time, “Yes. Good. Do not stop.”
The consent became a call-and-response, a liturgy of the crudest words they had and the truest. Theo wrapped his good hand around his own dick between their stomachs and stroked in time, and the whole careful, accounted-for length of his life came undone at the bottom of his spine.
“You close?” Shane gasped. “Tell me you’re close, I’m dying up here, I’ve been holding on since Belvidere—”
“Close. Do not slow down. Do not be careful with me.”
“Never careful,” Shane said, a lie, his hand still planted clear of the shoulder, his hips finally letting go of slow, snapping in deep and quick, the bed speaking up at last. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you, stay, stay—” and Theo came with Shane still moving inside him, clenching down around him, the spill hot across both their stomachs and his good hand locked white in Shane’s, his healing arm obedient and safe on the pillow where it had borne nothing all night but its own weight, which it could carry now, and the clench took Shane with it, a half-dozen strokes later, deep, shuddering, his rhythm breaking apart, coming inside him with Theo’s name breathed into the scar, swearing it there, and held there, buried, hips pressed flush, while the late light went gold and then grey across the bed neither of them had been able to make a home until now.
They stayed joined a long time. Shane softening inside him and refusing to move, his mouth slack against the seam of the scar, and when he pulled out at last he did it slow and apologized to Theo’s collarbone for it, and got a warm cloth without being asked, the unglamorous tending, the treatment-room religion, cleaning Theo’s stomach and his own and the place where their hands had been locked, and Theo lay there and let himself be tended, which he could do now.
He had learned it in a fluorescent room at six in the morning. It transferred.
After, in the dark, the certificate squared to the laminate in the next room, the season clock for once just a clock:
“Marion’s treatment,” Shane said, drowsy, his head on Theo’s good shoulder.
“The salary covers the next round. And the one after. She called me crying again, she does it every week now, it’s a whole thing, she says you saved her life and she’s gonna make you a sweater.
A bad one. She knits badly. You have to wear it. ”
“I will wear the bad sweater,” Theo said.
“And the green card. Dana says we’re clean. You stay. For real. Married for real, green card for real, the whole—” Shane lifted his head. “We did it backwards, you know that? Married first, fell in love second, meant it third. Whole thing’s backwards.”
“Yes,” Theo agreed.
Shane was quiet a moment. Then, soft, almost to himself: “My grandmother used to say — don’t get married until you mean it.” A beat. “We got there. Long way around. But we got there.”
“We meant it,” Theo said, into the dark, into the country that had tried to send him home and would not get to, into the warm impossible thing he’d sworn off at twenty and found anyway at a beige counter in December. “We mean it.”
And outside, the ninety miles of highway lay quiet between Rockford and the show, between the Blaze and the Fury, between everything they’d each won and everything they’d nearly lost winning it, and for the first time all season the distance wasn’t a divide. It just felt like the drive home.