“You’re talking to it now?”
“It listens better than you.”
He works me slow, thumb dragging over the head on every pass until my hips start chasing his fist and he makes me wait for it anyway. “You drove two and a half hours for this and then drove home before morning, every time. Look what you kept leaving on the table.”
Then he goes to his knees.
He takes me into his mouth the way he does everything. Direct. Committed. The heat of it whites out every language I own. His fist wraps what his mouth doesn’t. He looks up at me the whole time, because he always looked up. For Enzo, the watching was half the event. I get a hand in his hair and concentrate on keeping upright.
“Enzo. That ends this in about a minute.”
He pulls off slowly, on purpose. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and stands.
“Bed. Now. I’m not doing this against a counter.”
We get to his room and he shoves me down onto the bed and strips off the last of his clothes. I look at him the way I haven’t let myself look at anything in the last year. Leaner than Naples. The tournament has carved him down to the machinery. Olive skin, dark hair falling forward because he has stopped trying to control it, every line of him made sharper by the tournament and worse by memory. His cock stands hard against his belly, and when I reach for it, he knocks my hand away.
“Say it,” he says, kneeling over me.
“You look like the thing I was a coward about.”
“Closer to the truth than you know. Lube, nightstand, left side. Some things about me didn’t change either.”
I get the drawer open. He rises over me and slicks my cock with a fist that knows exactly how much is enough, because it learned that three years ago and kept the notes. Then he’s working himself open on his own fingers, knees planted either side of my hips. He makes me watch. One finger, then two, his breath going short. His cock leaks against his belly.
When I reach up, this time he lets me.
“Ješte,” he says, when I press a finger in alongside his. My word. The one I taught him on his back in Naples, handed back with an accent that still isn’t sorry.
“Ješte,” I agree, and give it to him. Two of mine against his one, opening him together, until he’s swearing at the ceiling in Neapolitan and riding our hands and neither of us can stand another minute of it.
He takes my cock in his fist, lines himself up, and sinks down.
Slow. Deliberate. Entirely on his terms. His palms go flat on my chest. His breath leaves in one long line. The heat and the grip of him after a year of nothing is nearly enough to end itright there, and he knows it, and he stops, fully seated. His eyes are open, and mine are open, and the room is very quiet around the fact of it. Deep blue, his eyes, the blue you only find near the bottom of things. Months with no footage of them anywhere. The archive was starving, and I never once admitted it was an archive.
“Twelve months,” he says. Not gently.
“I know.”
“You don’t get to close your eyes.”
“I know that too.”
He rides me the way he plays, direct and then patient and then direct, no mercy in the changes of pace. He rises until I’m almost out of him and sinks back down slow enough to hurt. Then again. And again. Until I’m begging in Czech. I hold his hips hard enough to matter and meet him on the way down. We keep it quiet for the sleeping building, and the effort of the quiet makes everything louder inside.
He talks anyway. Filthy English when he wants me faster. “Harder. I’m not made of anything you can break.” Italian gone soft when I get there. “Dio, the hands. I forgot the hands. I made myself forget the hands.”
I sit up into him, chest to chest, my arms locked around his back. He groans against my mouth with the new angle that no press room will ever hear. He grips my hair. His cock slides slick between our stomachs on every stroke. This close, his eyes are all pupil. This close, there’s nowhere to file anything. No drawer, no box. Just the drag and the heat and everything I missed arriving all at once.
“Marek.” My name, against my jaw. Not realizing how much I wanted to hear that again.
I fuck up into him and stop holding anything in reserve, both of us graceless now. His hand goes between us and works his own cock in short, hard pulls.
“Look at me,” he says.
He comes first, my hand joining his, his forehead dropped to mine and his eyes open the whole way through it, spilling hot between us in pulses that rack his whole body and clench him tight around me. The sight of it and the grip of it take me over a few strokes later, as deep in him as I can get, coming hard enough that the room greys at the edges. His name said out loud into the sweat of his shoulder, in the dark of a room.
We stay like that. Upright and wrapped together, his heart slamming against my chest, both of us breathing like the end of extra time.
