I climbed onto the bed. Over him. The weight of my body on his produced a sound from him that I cataloged and treasured, a low exhalation that was surprise and relief and the specific, physical pleasure of being touched by someone after a long drought.
What followed was slow and thorough and devastating. Mars's analytical mind, which processed everything as data, was attempting to catalog every sensation and failing beautifully, the failure visible in the way his eyes kept closing and reopening as if his brain couldn't decide whether to observe or experience and was choosing, again and again, to experience. I guided him the way he had guided me on the ice: with patience and directionand the absolute commitment to making sure the person I was leading felt safe.
His hands on my body were tentative at first, then firmer, the goalie's hands finding their function in a new context. The hands that stopped pucks learned what it felt like to touch without stopping. To explore without preventing. To give instead of block.
I moved my mouth down his body and the sounds he made were the sounds of a mask disintegrating, each one rawer and more exposed than the last. When I took him in my mouth, the sound he made was my name, spoken in a voice I had never heard from him, a voice that was not precise or controlled or analytical. A voice that was simply, completely, a man's voice saying the name of the person he wanted.
He was close. I could feel it in the tension of his thighs and the grip of his hands in my hair. I pulled back. He made a sound of protest.
"Together," I said.
"Together."
The adjustment was physical and logistical and we navigated it with the specific, trial-and-error intimacy of two people doing this for the first time together, the fumbling and the laughter and the brief, awkward pause for practical considerations that reminded us both that sex between humans was never as smooth as fiction suggested and was better for the imperfection.
We found the rhythm. Face to face. His eyes on mine. The eye contact during the most vulnerable physical act either of us had ever performed, and the eye contact was the thing. Not the touching. Not the friction. Not the building. The eyes. Looking at Mars Santos while he came apart was the most intimate experience of my life because the coming apart was the mask's final dissolution, the complete, total, irreversible removal of every barrier between the person and the world.
He came first. With my name in his mouth and his hands on my hips and his face, in the amber light, cracked open like something that had been sealed too long and was breathing for the first time. I followed, watching his face, and the watching was not the watching of a judge or an audience. It was the watching of a witness. The watching that he had taught me was possible. The watching that saved instead of scored.
Afterward. The bed. The lamp. Axel's distant purring from the living room, where the cat had been diplomatically banished and where he was probably destroying the couch in retaliation.
Mars lay on his back, one arm under my head, the other hand tracing patterns on my shoulder with the absent, tender touch of a man who had just discovered that touching without purpose was more pleasurable than touching with it.
"The mask is off," he said.
"How does it feel?"
"Like the ice after the Zamboni. Clean. Open. No marks."
"No marks?"
"No marks. You resurfaced me."
"That's the most goalie thing anyone has ever said after sex."
"I'm a goalie. This is how I communicate."
I laughed. The laugh vibrated through both our bodies and Mars smiled at the vibration and the smile was the real smile, the full smile, the one without seams.
"The regional is in three weeks," I said.
"I'll be there."
"What if I fall?"
"Then you fall. And I'll still be in the stands when you get up."
"That's the whole thing, isn't it. Getting up."
"That's always been the whole thing. For both of us."
I pressed my face into his chest. His heartbeat was steady. The goalie's heartbeat, trained for calm under pressure. But the rhythm was slightly elevated, and the elevation was for me, andthe for-me was the most beautiful data point in the history of measurement.
"Mars?"
"Mm."
"Thank you for letting me see behind the mask."
