The shower runs hot. I stand under it with both hands on the tile and my head down and let the morning replay. It’s going to replay whether I authorize it or not. I’d rather supervise.
He said my name. He stood in a market with a tomato in his hand. He looks the same. He looks better. That’s worse. And his voice did the thing it does when he’s being funny, that tone with the current under it. The one I used to feel against the back of my neck at two in the morning, when he thought I was asleep and I heard him say things to my ceiling in Czech he never offered to translate.
The want arrives all at once, the way it always did with him. No suggestion. No build up. Just impact.
My hand moves, and I let it. I’m done pretending this isn’t happening.
The plan is maintenance. Efficient and clinical, thirty seconds of honesty, and then film with a clear head. My cock has other information. I’ve been half-hard since the corner of that stall, since my own name left his mouth. The first slow pull of my fist drags a sound out of me that no maintenance ever made.
Fine. Then we do it properly.
I brace my forearm against the tile and put my forehead on it and slow down. Long strokes from base to head, thumb riding the crown on every pass. The water runs hot down my back. I let the memory in. All the way in. No supervision after all.
His hands first, because it was always his hands first. Working hands, blunt and certain, one splayed at the small of my back and one in my hair, tipping my head where he wanted it like a man adjusting an instrument.
The breadth of him behind me, too. Those shoulders I used to feel before I saw them, blocking out half the room and then somehow making the room feel safer for it.
The scrape of his jaw down my spine. The way he took inventory with his mouth. Unhurried and thorough. Shoulder to rib to hip to the crease of my thigh, until I was cursing him in multiple languages and he hummed against my skin as if he was confirming a measurement. The first time I said his name against his ear, Marek not Kovár, I felt the whole solid, pragmatic architecture of him shudder.
His fingers, next. Patient in a way that should be illegal in a man that impatient to leave when it was over. Two and then three fingers, working me open with the same attention he gives a back line, reading every hitch of my breath and adjusting, always adjusting, until I was the one begging and he was the one deciding when. And the sound he made on the way in. Low. Wrecked. His composure never cracked anywhere in Europe except there, seated deep inside me. There it cracked every single time. I chased that sound for so long, as if it was a trophy to win.
My knees on my own mattress in Naples. His grip printing bruises on my hips that I wore under my kit for a week like a number. The headboard learning Czech. That rhythm he’d find and hold, deep and level and relentless. The same engine that runs ninety minutes without complaint, except aimed, except mine, and me telling him exactly what it was doing to me while he filed every word and used all of it.
“Ješte,” he taught me, my one word of Czech, learned on my back with his mouth at my ear.More. Again.I own that word the way you own a new scar. Pink and raw and a throbbing pain that doesn’t stop.
I’m fucking my fist without a shred of craft. The tile is cold, and the water is scalding, and in my head he’s behind me withhis hand closing over mine, over my cock, his chest against my spine, saying my name into the wet between my shoulders.Enzo. Enzo.Like the name was the entire point of the drive from Rome.
I come so hard my knees dip, spilling over my fist and against the tile in pulses that feel years long. His name stays held behind my teeth, where it can’t get out. What gets out instead is ugly and honest. A sound like something tearing along a line somebody perforated years ago and left.
The water runs. I stay where I am, breathing, both hands flat on the tile like I’m holding up the wall of a building that has just been through something.
This is what I didn’t let the market see. This is the bill for the passport photo. Because it held. That’s the part I keep. He said my name and made me want to laugh and looked at me with a question in his eyes. I gave him the price of a peach and a good luck, and I left first.
I left first. He can learn how that tastes.
I turn the water cold for one minute, because my father says a man should finish what the day started, even when the day started it badly. I dry off. Slowly. I put on my old Napoli training shirt, faded and worn. Then I go back to the kitchen and pick up the knife, because now the peaches can have my full attention.
The want isn’t gone. The want is fine. It can sit at the table like everybody else. It doesn’t get to cook, and it doesn’t get to decide anything.
If we win against Austria, if the bracket does what brackets do, I’ll be on his wing for ninety minutes with seventy thousand witnesses. He’ll learn the other thing I’ve gotten better at in the last year.
Waiting him out.
Rosemary, honey, and a knob of butter go over the peaches in the skillet. Davide comes into the kitchen and eats the first one standing up. Over the pan. Like a burglar.
“What did the market do to deserve this?” he says.
“The market behaved.”
“Mm.” He reaches for the second one. “This one’s mine, no?”
“That’s the one I poisoned.”
“Worth it,” he says with his mouth full.
He grins through it anyway, and he doesn’t ask any more about the market, the voice, or the passport photo. I love him for every second of that, too.
Chapter 4: Marek
