Page 24 of Five Hole

I take my time with him. I have not been allowed to take my time. Not with anything, not ever. I learn him the slow way, with my mouth and my hands. His breath catches high in his chest when I get my teeth into the muscle over his ribs. It goes out of him all at once when I put my mouth low on his hip, and he says my name there like it surprised him. He is not quiet. He was never going to be quiet. Here, for the first time, he doesn’t have to swallow it, and I get to hear the whole of it. And I understand that I have been rationing something. Something I did not have to ration.

I press my mouth to the inside of his wrist and feel his pulse jump under it. To the crook of his elbow. To the flat of his chest where his heart is going hard. I want to know all of it. I have spent a season learning him against my own will, and now I get to do it on purpose. With permission. In a warm room with the storm shut out. I take everything the slow way. I move down him. I take his cock in my mouth. Slow. The way I have wanted to and would not let myself. He says my name and it comes out torn. His hand comes into my hair and does not push. Only holds. He arches under me and says it again. Ragged. He reaches for me and I let him have my weight. The way I have never let anyone have my weight. All of it. Nothing held back on the shelf for later. There is no later in the room. There is only this. The lamp. The two of us learning that slow is a thing we were never allowed. A thing we are allowed now.

There is oil in his bag. He tells me where. His voice already gone. I warm it between my fingers first. Because the room is cold and he is not. Then I open him up. Slow. Slower than he wants, and he tells me so, out loud, in two languages, at length. I do not hurry for either of them. His face an arm’s length from mine the whole time, every catch of his breath landing somewhere under my ribs. He rocks down onto my hand and says more. Says please. So I give him more. I press up into him until his whole body pulls taut and his mouth comes open on nothing at all, and I stay right there. Until he is loose and open and shaking. Until he is saying my name and yes and now. Over and over. Into the warm air of the room.

He pulls me down. He says please. Once. Low. Wrecked. A word I have never heard him use for anything. “Yes,” he says, when I line myself up against him. “Yes. I want it. I want you.” I give him what he asks for. I press into him slow. Slower than I have ever let anything be. I feel him open around me. I feel the moment the sting in him turns into something else. His breath punches out of him. His legs come up around my back. “Don’t stop,” he says. “Please don’t stop.” I do not stop. I move in him slow. Until slow is not a thing either of us can stand another second of. Then I stop being slow, and the sound he makes is the whole night coming open. His hands find my back and hold on. His nails drag. I get a hand between us and take his cock in my fist and stroke him in time. He says my name. I say his. We are loud in a room with no wall to be quiet for. When he goes, he goes with my name in his mouth. I feel him clench tight around me. It takes me with him. I spill into him deep. We come apart close enough together that I feel it go through him and through me at the same time. One thing. After, we do not let go.

Afterward he does not sleep. Neither do I. The not-sleeping is a different animal than mine usually is. Lighter. Not a watch kept against the dark. Just two men awake in a warm room with a storm on the glass. Not wasting the awake on sleep. I lie on my back. He lies on his side facing me. One hand flat on my chest. Watching me in the low lamp. I let him watch. That in itself is a thing I couldn’t have done when I got here.

“Is the road going to open?” he says, after a while, to the ceiling.

“Tomorrow. Or not tomorrow.”

“That is the calmest anybody has ever been about anything.”

“There is one road. It opens or it does not. Neither of us is going to plow it.”

He turns that over. I can feel him turn it over, through the hand on my chest. “Say that to me sometime when it isn’t about a road,” he says, “and watch how it lands.”

I do not have an answer for that, so I do not make one up.

Then I do the thing I have never done on purpose. Not in front of another living soul.

I let him watch me set the day down.

I do it in the air, from the bed, on my back, with two fingers. The way I do it on the shelf. Glove. Blocker. The corner touched, once. I move nothing real. It is only the shape of it, the sentence spoken with my hand instead of my mouth. I name none of it out loud. I do not have to. He knows the whole of it and has for weeks.

I let him see me run it, where no one has ever been allowed to see it. Not Sowa. Not Babcia at the end, when she could not have followed it anymore. No one. I run the last course of the day in the air over my own chest with a boy’s hand resting on it. It is not a thing he broke his way into. It is a thing I opened.

My hand shakes a little, running it out in the open like that. I feel him feel the shake. Through the hand on my chest. He does not say anything. He does not still it. He just lets it be a thing that is happening. The way he let me set my bag square to the wall. I get to the end of the sequence. The corner touched, once, in the empty air. And the settled feeling comes. Here, of all the places I have ever been. In a strange bed on the wrong side of a closed mountain. With the one variable I could never manage. Lying warm along my side. It does not come slow. I will carry that. Every night of my life the peace has come slow. If it came at all. Tonight it comes all at once. The moment I let him watch.

“Thank you,” he says. Quiet. He understands exactly what it cost. I can hear that he understands. There is no chirp anywhere in it. No grin. Just the low true version of him. The one only the dark gets.

I do not answer him. There is no answer in the order for it. I will not hand him a lie. Not in this room, of all the rooms. But I find his hand in the low light. The one flat on my chest. I close mine over it and hold it. That is an answer. We both know it is an answer.

Outside, the storm keeps the road shut. In here the radiator ticks and the lamp stays on and I hold a boy’s hand on my own chest and do not let go. The dark stays out of the room without one wall between us to keep it there. He keeps it out and does not know he is doing it. That is the part I carry back over the mountain when the road opens. Not the win. Not the net. I have not found the words to tell him and I am not sure I ever will.

Neither of us sleeps. Neither of us pretends to. Everything at the bottom of the mountain is still down there waiting on us. The thin wall. The two elevators. A list with my name at the top of it that has quietly begun to belong to him. It can wait for the plows. For the length of one closed pass this room is the whole size of my life, the net and the boy both inside it and no wall between them, and it is enough. I have never in my life said that about anything.

Chapter 13

Emile

I get my first real start on the back half of the road trip. Everything I ever wanted shows up that week. So does the other thing, riding in on the same bus, sitting two rows back the whole way, and by the time I can tell the two of them apart it’s already too late to hand either one back.

Marquette tells me on the bus without making a thing of it, coming down the aisle with the roster on his phone, stopping at my seat to say my name exactly once. I look up from the window and the gray country going by. He says it plain. “You’re going tomorrow. Second of the back-to-back. I’m resting Wrobel’s legs.” Then he keeps walking, because Marquette doesn’t stand around watching a kid try to keep his face still.

I don’t keep my face still. I turn back to the window so nobody catches it. And out there it’s fields, a river, a town with one steeple and a hardware store. I’ve looked at a thousand miles of this on a thousand buses, always the guy who dresses and never eats, always the corner seat I earned by being first and staying last. Now the country going by looks different. And it looks like the road to a start. My start. Mine.

A nothing game on paper, a team we should handle, midweek, half a barn. On paper it’s a throwaway. You think I care what it is on paper? I’ve wanted to stand in a net that counts since I was a kid in cheap pads on a river that froze early. And here it is, the thing I’ve dressed for my whole life, finally on my plate.

I don’t sleep much at the hotel. I lie in the dark running the other team’s shooters, their winger who cuts late, their center who fakes the shot and waits. I’ve watched the tape, because I always watch the tape. I lie there letting the animal in my chest do its laps until it wears itself out, and even then it doesn’t lie all the way down.

I text my mother. It’s late, but Manon keeps her phone on the counter, answering late for me like she has since I was a kid calling home from tournament hotels. I get the start tomorrow, I write. A real one. She sends back a wall of it, no periods, every good thing at once, and at the bottom, eat something before, you always forget to eat before. I read it three times in the dark. She’s watched me dress for other people’s championships my whole life and she has never in her life said the quiet part. Which is what? That she wanted this for me worse than I did. So she says eat something instead, the same word Bev says over a counter, the word people use in this family when they mean I’m proud of you, I’m scared for you, here.

The other bed has a sophomore D-man in it, dead asleep, snoring the honest snore of a guy with nothing riding on tomorrow. I lie awake next to that and run the shooters again. Crisse, how does a person sleep the night before the only thing he ever asked for? He doesn’t. He lies there in a strange bed and lets it chew on him until the alarm.

In the room before, I’m vibrating, my music too loud even for me, and I’m the guy who has never in his life thought music was too loud. Guys are taping sticks and cracking the usual jokes, the freshman D-man pretending he isn’t nervous by being loud about nothing. “Câlisse, you gonna tape that stick or marry it? Because I want an invite, me. I’ll bring a dish,” I tell him, and he flips me off. The room laughs. And for one second I’m just a loud guy in a room instead of a guy about to find out what he is. The room smells like fresh tape, cold rubber, that particular funk of a road bag zipped shut too long. Rocco moves through it the way he moves through everything, setting the temperature just by sitting in it. He stops in front of my stall for about as long as it takes a man to read a number off a jersey.