Page 27 of Takedown

I crossed the room. He taught me that.

The second kiss was nothing like the first. The first had been a fight finishing its sentence. This one started slow — his breath catching as I walked in, his hands finally figuring out where to be, one at my jaw, one fisting the shoulder of my hoodie — slow and then not slow, deepening the way a match deepens, weight coming in by degrees until we were against the wall again, until I could feel his heart going through two shirts, until the sound he made into my mouth put a match to something at the base of me that had been soaked in fuel since October.

"This is a terrible idea," he said, against my jaw, kissing down my throat like a man reading a document he intended to memorize.

"The worst."

"The wrestle-off—"

"Still happening. I'm still taking the spot." My hands were under his shirt by then, flat on the heat of him, the long muscles of his back working under my palms, and he arched into the touch like it was the correction he'd been waiting for all season. "This changes nothing on the mat. Say you understand that or we stop."

He pulled back enough to look at me. Eyes gone dark, mouth kiss-ruined, and underneath all of it — this is why I said it, I needed to see it — the wrestler, checking in, clear-eyed. "Nothing on the mat," he agreed. "I'm still taking it back at the wrestle-off. I want that noted."

"Noted."

"Iron and iron."

"Shut up," I said, and pulled his shirt over his head.

* * *

I'm going to tell this part plainly, because it was plain — plain the way the Pit is plain, no color in that room, no performance, hard light and texture and truth — and because it was the first thing either of us had done in months that wasn't in code.

We were clumsy. Two state-champion athletes, four hundred combined pounds of trained coordination, and we fumbled like the teenagers we technically still were — his elbow in the padding, my hoodie eating my head on the way off, both of us laughing once, breathless, at the sheer administrative difficulty of getting at each other. Then his skin against my skin from chest to hip, the furnace of him with nothing in the way at last, and the laughing stopped.

"Tell me the rules of this," he said, hoarse, hands moving down my back like he was learning me for a test. "There are rules, right? There have to be rules, I need one thing in my life with rules—"

"Rule one." I got my hand between us, palmed him through his shorts — hard, heavy, hot even through the fabric, and the sound he made cracked in the middle — "tap if it's too much."

"That's — " his head dropped to my shoulder, breath ragged against my neck as I worked him slow, "— that's the whole rulebook?"

"You know another sport where the safe word's built in?" I said, and took him out of his shorts, and Grayson Whitfield forgot the English language.

He was heavy in my hand, hot, already leaking — weeks of this, weeks for both of us, every stack and every stillness compounding down into exactly this — and I worked him slow on purpose, learning him the way I learn everything, by grip: what made his breath stutter, what made his forehead drop to my shoulder, what dragged that low cracked sound out of him that I intended to spend the rest of the season collecting. His hips found a rhythm against my fist and abandoned it and found it again; his hands gripped my waist like a man in weather; and when I twisted my wrist at the crown the way Wade never let me take time enough to learn anyone deserved, he said my name into my neck — my name, first name, wrecked — and forgot the English language a second time.

Here's what I'll put on the record, because the record's honest or it's nothing. Wade and I had done everything two men can do in the bed of a truck, three years of it, efficient and hot and hollow, and I thought I knew what my hand knew. I knew nothing. Because Wade had never once looked at me while I touched him, and Grayson couldn't stop — eyes open, watching my face like the score was posted there, saying my name in a wrecked whisper like it was the answer to something, and when I twisted my wrist just so and his whole body stuttered, he laughed — laughed, disbelieving, joyful, four hours of sleep and no dignity left — and said, "Oh, that's — do that again," and that, that right there, being seen and asked and laughed with all at once, that was the thing I'd been hungry for through three years of a truck bed with the lights off.

He got his hand into my shorts about thirty seconds later — impatient, coordinated now, wrestler's grip recalibrated to a completely different sport — and we stood chest to chest against the wall of his family's basement, foreheads together, breathing each other's air, working each other in the hard half-light with the radiators ticking and the whole palace asleep on the hill above us, and it was fast and graceless and I wouldn't trade the memory for any night of my life.

He came first — I take that to the wrestle-off of the soul, I won, it's in the Ledger of me — gasping my name into my mouth, hand clenching on my hip hard enough to bruise, and the sight of him coming apart, Grayson Whitfield, undone, uncorrected, loud, sent me over about four seconds later with his palm still working me through it and his lips on my temple of all places, gentle as the rest of it wasn't.

Then we slid down the wall like two dropped coats and sat on the mat in the wreckage of ourselves, shoulder to shoulder, chests heaving.

The stag skull looked down at us from over the door.

"Don't," Grayson said to it, breathless.

I laughed until my ribs hurt.

* * *

The rules got written at six fifteen in the morning, on the mat, in the state international treaties are usually drafted in: half-dressed, endorphin-stupid, sharing my water bottle because his was across the room and neither of us could feel our legs.

"Rule one." Grayson held up a finger. He'd put his shirt back on inside out. I hadn't told him and wasn't going to. "Nothing changes on the mat. Practice is practice. The wrestle-off is real. If you take a single soft shot on me out of — sentiment — I will never forgive you."

"Agreed. Rule two: nobody knows."

"Obviously nobody knows." But he said it a half-second too fast, and something moved behind it — the house with the name, the eleven lines, the father's syllable — and I let it go, because it was six in the morning and I was nineteen and his shirt was inside out. You let things go at six in the morning. They come back. That's a later chapter. "Rule three," he said. "Never outside the Pit."