“Roll to your side. I need to check your anterior range.”
He rolls, and his hand stays on my thigh, and he’s not pretending it’s an accident. “How much longer does the shoulder need? To not be the thing people mention when they mention me.” His fingers tighten on my thigh a little more. “I’m asking if I’m going to be the guy who almost made it.”
I sit on the edge of the bed because standing over him while he’s being this honest feels wrong. “Your shoulder is ahead of schedule. Range is improving. Trending toward full clearance.”
“Trending toward...”
“It means the work is paying off.”
“Thank you,” he says. His voice small compared to its usual volume.
“It’s my job.”
“That’s not what I’m thanking you for.”
His hand moves from my thigh to my neck. His thumb rests along the tendon behind my ear, his fingers curling warm against the back of my head.
“Marchetti.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m supposed to be the one touching you. Not the other way around.”
“I’m aware.” His thumb traces once, slow, behind my ear. “But is this okay?”
The correct answer is no. I know the correct answer. I have known it since September. My hands are still warm from the gel. The hotel air conditioner hums the way the one in the training room doesn’t. Nobody is walking past this door. Nobody is going to knock and ask if the range-of-motion numbers are updated in the chart. I can feel my heartbeat in my wrists. In the pads of my fingers, still pressed against his shoulder. The gel cooling between us.
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t press. Just his thumb, that one slow point of contact, and his eyes steady on mine, and the room is so quiet I can hear both of us breathing.
“Yeah. It’s okay.”
He pulls me toward him and I go. His mouth is on mine and every clinical word I know leaves my mind. He kisses different from the club. I enjoy it for almost an entire minute before mybrain comes back online. Then I pull back. “We need to be smart about this.”
“I care about you. The rest of it we can figure out. I’m not going to lie here and pretend I don’t want you when we both know that I do.”
He waits but doesn’t press. The quiet patience of a man who is letting me decide, and the waiting is worse than the pressing because pressing I can argue with. His hand rests on my jaw, his thumb stroking my cheek.
The door is locked. Between now and nine, this room is not the facility. Between now and nine, I am not Brooks on staff, he is not Marchetti on the roster. The lie is thin but my hands are shaking and it’s the only math I can make work.
So I lean in and kiss him again. I push him flat on his back and his breath catches. His hips push up and I feel him, hard, against my thigh. His hands find the hem of my shirt and he pulls it over my head and the cold air hits my skin. His fingers spread across my ribs, exploring.
His palms are warm. The pressure is light, unhurried, and the feeling of his hands on my ribs pulls forward a voice I haven’t thought about in years. My advisor at University of South Carolina, his hand on my shoulder in the hallway after my final clinical, quiet so no one else could hear: “Isaiah, you are going to be excellent, and you are going to have to be excellent twice to be seen once. It’s not fair, but it’s true.” He knew what the system asked of men who looked like us.
Teo’s hands move up my ribs, patient, counting the bones under my skin. And I am looking at this man beneath me, his chest moving with each breath, and I am terrified, but I don’t think I can stop.
“Hey.” His thumb brushes my jaw. “You still with me?”
“Yeah.” I lower myself back down and his arms close around me and the feel of skin against skin hits me so hard I have tobreathe through it. “I’m still with you.” I lean down and kiss him again, my mouth hungry for his.
His palms settle on my waist and his thumbs find the hollow above my hip bones and press in, and the sound I make is not clinical. He pulls me tighter against him and I feel the full length of him against me and my hips roll against his.
He does it back, pushing up against me, slow and deliberate, and we find a rhythm before we’ve even gotten our clothes off. His hands on my back pulling me into each roll of his hips, and the friction is not enough and too much simultaneously.
I put my mouth on his neck. His pulse is fast under my lips. I drag my mouth down to his collarbone, the hollow at the base of his throat, and he tilts his head back and his hand comes up to the back of my head and holds me there. I press my tongue flat against the notch between his collarbones and his hips stutter.
“Zay.”
I move lower. My mouth on his chest, the flat plane of his chest, and then I find his nipple and close my lips around it and his back arches off the bed. I use my teeth, light, just enough, and the sound he makes goes straight through me.
