His grin splits wide open. “Opening bid of nine. Very generous.”
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
“Too late.” He takes me in his mouth and the laugh catches in my throat and becomes a sound with no humor in it at all. Just heat and the slow sure work of his mouth and the full focus of a man who has never been less than wholehearted about anythinghe’s ever done, applying that same attention to the task of taking me apart on a morning that doesn’t have a name for itself yet.
He pulls off. Kisses back up my chest. Settles over me, skin to skin, his weight warm and known.
“Come here,” I say, and pull him down. His cock hard against mine and I roll my hips and his breath goes short against my neck. I reach for the nightstand. His hand covers mine. We slick ourselves together and I wrap my hand around both of us and stroke slow, his forehead against mine.
“Stay with me,” he says. The same words from months ago. But the weight is different. Not a plea. Not asking me to hold on. Just telling me where he is. Staying.
My hand works us together. His fingers find my jaw, his thumb along my cheekbone, and he looks at me with his eyes open and I look back. Two men in a bed with nothing between their faces except the air and the fact that neither of them is going anywhere.
“Close,” he says, his voice breaking.
“Me too.” I tighten my grip and his hand covers mine and we move together and his breathing fractures and my breathing fractures and I come with his face against mine, quiet and warm and slow, the wave rolling through me without urgency. He follows, his body shuddering, a small sound pressed into my neck that has my name in it.
We breathe. His weight settles. My hand on his back, feeling his ribs slow.
From the hallway, Parker’s measured approach, the sound of a creature whose absence from the bed has exceeded her personal tolerance.
She jumps up. Walks the full length. Settles between our feet with the absolute certainty of a cat who has never asked permission and never will.
“She came back,” he says against my shoulder.
“She always comes back.”
His arm tightens around me. The quiet settles. The coffee is cold on the counter and neither of us moves to fix it.
“Summer,” he says. Half into my shoulder. “You and me and Parker in this apartment with the windows open and nowhere to be until September.”
“That’s four months.”
“Five. Playoffs go to June if we’re lucky.”
“And then.”
“And then summer. And then September. And then all of it again.” His hand finds mine on his chest and holds. “I’m not going anywhere, Zay.”
I press my mouth to the top of his head. He doesn’t need me to say it back. I said it in a kitchen over biscotti that cracked on the edges, and that’s enough, and the fact that it’s enough is the whole point.
“Zee and Tee,” he says.
My hand stills in his hair.
“You hear that?” He lifts his head. Looks at me. His face is open and wrecked and happy and the grin underneath it is the grin from a club bathroom seven months ago, the one that took up his whole face, the one I walked away from and told myself was finished. “The universe did that on purpose.”
My chest fills with a thing I don’t have a word for. A large, unnamed pressure behind my ribs that pushes against the inside of me like it needs more room than my body has. Seven months. A dance floor and a bathroom and a name I gave myself so I wouldn’t have to give my real one. And this man kept the name. Carried it through a treatment room and a secret and a reckoning and the silence that came after and the staying that came after that, and he’s saying it now in a bed where the door is just a door and the morning is just a morning and neither of us is walking away.
“That’s alphabet phonics,” I tell him, and my voice is rough and my eyes are burning and I’m smiling.
“That’s fate.” He presses his mouth to my chest. “And you are not going to ruin it for me with logic.”
He lifts his head. Looks at me. His face is open and stripped and carrying nothing except what he’s about to say.
“I love you.” No grin underneath it. No rating attached. No follow-up sentence turning it into a bit. Just Teo, in my bed, saying three words like they’re the quietest thing he’s ever said and the loudest thing he’s ever meant.
My hand stills in his hair. My breathing stops for a full beat. Then my arm tightens around him and I press my mouth against the top of his head and I don’t say anything, because he already heard mine inside a sentence about patience and now I’ve heard his inside nothing at all, and the nothing is what makes it land.
