Adrian set his mug on the worktable and didn’t say anything because the thing Milo was saying didn’t need an answer. It needed a witness. So Adrian witnessed it, the way he witnessed everything Milo gave him, by being present and not filling the silence with something easier.
Milo reached for Adrian’s wrist.
His hand was already there when the decision would have been made. The wrist, the paint on the inside of it, the pulse underneath. Adrian’s hands stopped.
Milo pulled. Adrian’s weight shifted on the stool, and then Milo’s grip tightened and Adrian came off the stool and they were standing in the middle of the studio with the painting in the dark behind them and Adrian’s glasses fogging at the lower edges from Milo’s breath.
He kissed him with the game in his body. Adrian could feel it, the muscles carrying the ache of ice time, the bruise on his ribs when Adrian’s hand found it and Milo flinched and pressed closer instead of pulling back. Something was different tonight. The kiss was harder, less careful, and when Adrian’s hand went to the back of his neck, the same spot where his teammate had grabbed him an hour ago, Milo made a sound against Adrian’s mouth that came from somewhere deeper than the previous sounds had come from.
Adrian’s hands moved. Milo’s shirt up and over, the cold studio air on his chest. Then Adrian’s shirt off, and Milo’s hands on his shoulders, pulling, his fingers digging in. They made it to the bed, which was warm from where Adrian had been lying in it reading, and the sheets held the dent of his body and Milo pressed him into it.
Milo above him. Adrian reached for his own glasses and Milo’s hand intercepted his and Adrian took them off himself, set them on the shelf, his fingers shaking, the frames clicking against the wood twice before they settled. His face without the glasses. Milo looking down at him.
They moved together. Adrian’s hip shifting, Milo’s knee finding the space between his thighs, the angle adjusting until it resolved and Adrian’s breath caught and Milo pressed forward into the catch of it. Adrian’s fingers dug into Milo’s hips. He made a sound against Milo’s jaw, low, and felt Milo shift his weight to hear it again. He did it again. Milo kept the angle and kept the pressure and Adrian arched under him.
This was not the studio sex. The studio had been Milo letting Adrian lead, Milo receiving, Milo’s body opening in careful increments. This was Milo taking. His mouth on Adrian’s throat with the scrape of his jaw, his hips grinding down, his hands pinning Adrian’s wrists to the mattress with a grip that had nothing careful in it. Adrian felt the game in his body, theresidual violence of three periods converted into something else, and he said “harder” and Milo gave him harder and Adrian’s back bowed off the sheets.
Milo’s hand between them, wrapping around both of them together, and Adrian groaned and his hand came to the back of Milo’s neck and held. The friction of Milo’s hand and their cocks together and Milo’s breath ragged in his ear and Adrian’s free hand gripping the headboard because his body needed something to push against. Milo’s forehead dropped to the side of Adrian’s neck and his hand moved faster and Adrian said his name once, said it clearly, said it so Milo would know who was saying it and where and why.
Milo came first, his hips jerking, cum hot between them, his breath breaking against Adrian’s collarbone. Adrian followed seconds later with Milo’s hand tightening through it and his own fingers digging into the back of Milo’s neck and the sound he made going into the studio’s warm air and staying.
After. The studio warm around them. Breathing slowing. The radiator ticking.
Adrian’s hand on Milo’s chest. Paint-stained fingers over his heartbeat.
Milo didn’t move it.
He’d driven here after a game and told no one where he was going. Adrian knew what that cost. He knew what the locker room looked like and what the parking structure smelled like and what it took for a man who ran the math in every room he entered to get in his car and drive to Corktown and sayit’s meinto an intercom at eleven-fifteen on a game night. He knew, because he’d been on the other side of it before, and the last time it had cost him three years.
But Milo was here. Milo kept coming here. And Adrian’s hand was on his chest and the painting was on the wall and the kettle was cooling on the two-burner and the jacket was onthe third hook and Milo’s heartbeat was under Adrian’s fingers, steady and present.
He was going to get hurt. He knew that. He’d known it since the first night Milo sat on the third stool and didn’t speak and Adrian poured the bourbon and didn’t ask. He’d known it and he’d poured the bourbon anyway and he’d painted the face anyway and he’d opened the door tonight anyway because Adrian Cross was a man who knew better and did it anyway, and that was either the bravest or the stupidest thing about him, and Nina would tell him it was both.
Milo’s heartbeat under his fingers. The radiator ticking. The city quiet outside.
He closed his eyes and let himself have it.
Milo
The left on Michigan Avenue stopped requiring a decision sometime in the third week.
He noticed it in the third week. His hands turning the wheel before the route had formed, the car pointing toward the Grotto without his involvement. He sat back and let the hands do it. He’d been in worse situations than being taken somewhere by his own muscle memory.
He knew the second-floor landing sound now. The fourth step on the second flight. The smell of his own jacket in the mornings, the turpentine note underneath the rink smell, and he dealt with it each time by scrubbing at the inside of his left forearm where paint transferred when Adrian worked and Milo stood close enough to be in the way of it.
He was playing better.
Kovac’s morning stillness had shifted, the chin-lift of someone deciding whether an improvement was real or temporary. Brody asked for coffee sooner in the post-practice cycle, reading him as more available. The puck was finding his stick with more ease, the way a lock opened when the tension on the key was right instead of forced. Not a skill he’d acquired. A friction that had gone.
Brody said it in the locker room. Not directly. He was working the tape off his wrists, seated in the stall next to Milo’s. “You look different.”
“Same,” Milo said.
Brody peeled the last strip. Balled the tape and tossed it at the trash without looking. It went in. “Yeah,” he said.
Milo laced his street shoes and went to practice, and the puck kept finding his stick, and he did not examine why.
* * *
