Chapter 21 — DANNY #2
I opened him fast and none too gentle and he took it that way on purpose, breath hissing, hips pushing back against my fingers with his eyes locked on mine — no ceiling-staring, no drifting off into the body, seeing me, always the seeing, the one weapon I couldn't confiscate — and when I lined up and drove into him it was one long stroke with eleven days behind it, and the sound he made cracked off the mat walls and lived in that room permanently as far as I'm concerned, the Ledger can have it.
There was no rhythm you'd call generous.
I fucked him the way we'd wrestled twenty minutes before — forward, relentless, like weather, like a bill — one hand pinning his hip to the mat, the other planted beside his head in the position, the eternal position, drilling stance gone feral, and he met every stroke with his heels dug in and his fists in my shirt, pulling me harder into him, refusing to lose even this, even like this, especially like this.
Sweat dripped off my jaw onto his throat and ran, and he arched into it.
The radiators ticked. The skull presided.
Somewhere in it he said my name once — not a request, a verdict — and I bit it off his mouth before it could do to me what it was doing to me.
He came first, untouched, shouting into my shoulder, his whole body clamping down and taking me over the edge with him inside three strokes — I spilled into him with my teeth in the meat of his shoulder and eleven days going out of me at once, every righteous brick, all of it, gone into the dark of his family's basement — and then it was over, and the room was just breathing and pipes.
We lay side by side on the cold mat after, not touching, chests heaving at the ceiling, two feet of dead air between us where all season there'd been a shoulder.
I lay there in the dark two feet from him and ran the accounting my body runs whether or not I sign off on it.
Here's what it came back with. I had just taken the one person who ever looked past the conditions to the guy generating them, and I'd tried to use him the exact way Wade used me — heat with the eyes shut, a body to spend a bad mood on and walk away from clean.
That was the whole plan. Get my room back.
Put him under me. Prove it was only ever this, the animal thing, nothing that could cost me a cent.
And it hadn't taken, because he wouldn't close his eyes.
Eleven days I'd spent rebuilding the precise wall Wade lived behind his whole life, and I'd hauled it down into that basement to hide behind, and Grayson had looked at me over the top of it the entire time — refusing to be Wade for me, refusing to let this be that, refusing every single exit I'd built into the night.
You can't run a cold war on a man who won't stop seeing you.
I learned it from the wrong side, flat on the mat of his family's house, having just proved it to myself the hard way and lost the match I thought I was winning.
The radiators ticked. The skull kept its counsel.
"That didn't fix it," he said, finally, to the pipes.
"No."
"Nothing's fixed."
"No."
Silence. Then, quietly, with the crack showing: "But you stopped. When I tapped. Eleven days of hating me, at full pace, in the dark, and your hand let go before your head knew—"
"Don't." I was already up, already finding my shirt, because he was doing the thing, the seeing thing, reading the one true sentence my body had said and holding it up to the light, and I could not afford the light. "That's reflex. That's training. It's not—"
"It's you," he said, still flat on the mat, not moving, watching me dress from the floor with his ruined hair and his mouth I'd bitten and his voice with no armor left on it at all.
"The training is you. The reflex is you.
That's what I know now that I didn't know at the party.
I met the man with the walls down, Danny. I know which one's real."
Wrestle the man in front of you. Not the one in your head. The old man's voice, in his mouth, upside down.
I stood at the bottom of the stairs with my hand on the rail.
"Wrestle-off's in six days," I said. "Don't be soft in it. Whatever this was — if you take one soft shot on me in front of that room, I'll never forgive you. That rule's still alive. It's the only one that is."
"It won't be soft." Something in his voice made me look back — he was sitting up now, mat-burned, wrecked, and completely, dangerously calm, the calm I'd learn to read six days later in front of everyone. "I promise you, Danny. It'll be the truest thing I've ever done."
I want to be honest about why I went up those stairs so fast, since I promised the record honesty and this is the part that costs me to write.
It wasn't that I didn't believe him. It was that I did.
It'll be the truest thing I've ever done — I heard it land, I felt it go in, and I knew, the way you know a shot's good the instant your hips fire and there's nothing left to do but finish it, that he meant every word and that he'd do it, whatever it turned out to be, in six days, in front of the whole room.
And that scared me worse than any lie he could've told.
Because a lie I could have wrestled. A lie I could've walled off and beaten and gone home righteous about.
But a man saying a true thing to you at full pace, in the dark, with his hands open and nothing held back — there is no defense in the entire book for that.
There's no counter. All you can do is climb the stairs with it lodged in you where you can't reach it, and pretend you can't feel it, and pray six days is enough time to work out how to stop being the only coward left in a room full of honest men.
I climbed the stairs with that sentence in my back like a blade I couldn't reach, and the cold outside was clean, and I was still right about everything, and it had never bought less.
Six days.