He says it plainly. The way he’d say the score at halftime.
“I didn’t sign it.”
The fan keeps moving. Nothing in the apartment changes except everything in the apartment changes.
“You didn’t sign it?”
“No. My agent’s angry. My father called this morning to talk about legacy for twenty minutes. I didn’t hear most of it.”
“What were you doing instead of hearing it?”
“Looking at my phone.”
I stand in my kitchen with a glass of water in my hand and I wait, because tonight is his to walk into.
“I don’t have a plan,” he says then looks up at me. “I haven’t signed the contract and I don’t have a plan and I’m here because this is where I wanted to be.”
“You don’t need a plan. You walked here. That’s enough.”
He sets the glass down. His hand is on the counter six inches from my hand.
“I always have a plan,” he says. “I planned Munich. I planned the captaincy track. I planned four years of my life down to the morning coffee schedule. I don’t have a plan for this. I don’t have a plan for you.”
His eyes. The focused blue. The one I’ve been reading about in twenty-seven romance novels except no novel has ever gotten the blue right because the blue is specific to one person and that person is in my kitchen.
His hand raises and his fingers find my jaw. The touch is light. I notice his hand shaking.
I don’t wait. I lean forward and I kiss him.
The sound he makes against my mouth is small and involuntary and I’ll be keeping it. His hand slides from my jaw to the back of my neck and his fingers grip and the grip says everything his words have been circling. His other hand finds my hip and pulls. I come forward, chest to chest, and his mouthopens against mine and I can feel his heart going fast through two shirts.
The kiss isn’t tentative. Whatever I expected from a man who has never kissed another man, this was not it. He kisses the way he plays. With the certainty of a body that has always known where to put itself when it stops thinking. His hand tightens on my hip and he pushes me back against the counter, the edge hitting my lower back, and his weight settles against me and I can feel him through his shorts, hard, the length of him pressed against my hip, and the reality of that sends heat straight through my stomach.
“Tobík.” He says my name against my mouth. “Christ, Tobík.”
“Hi,” I say, and the smallness of the word against the largeness of the moment is so ridiculous that he laughs, surprised, a breath that’s more than a breath, and the sound of Damián laughing while kissing me does a thing to my chest that I’m done pretending doesn’t happen.
I pull his shirt up because I need my hands on him. My hands find his stomach and the muscles contract under my palms. He pulls the shirt over his head and his chest is in my kitchen now, in the evening light, and the breadth of his shoulders is real in a way that team photos and Instagram posts have never managed to hold. He sees me looking. The half-smirk tries to surface and dies. What replaces it is unprotected and looking at me looking at him with an expression that says he needs the looking to continue.
I pull my own shirt off. The shirt I put on because the other shirt had a stain. His eyes drop and the dropping is the thing that changes the room. His gaze moves down my chest and stops at my ribs where the tattoo starts and then continues down and I watch him look at a man’s body with intention for what might be the first time in his life.
I take his hand. I walk him down the hallway. The bed is unmade because I don’t make my bed and I briefly wish I had made my bed today but it’s too late and he doesn’t seem to be looking at the sheets.
He stops in the doorway. The skyline through the window, gold on gold. The fan in the corner. The book on the nightstand.
“There’s a book on the nightstand,” he says.
“There’s always a book on the nightstand.”
“What is it?”
“You don’t want to know.” I feel the heat rush up my face.
“Tell me.” He brushes his fingers against my arm, encouraging.
“It’s a romance. With the chapter called ‘The Look.’ I’m reading it for the third time. The thing about reading these books three times is that the first time is for the story, the second time is for the craft, and the third time is because someone got something so right that you want to sit inside it for a while. There’s a scene where one man’s eyes go to another man’s mouth and the second man sees it happen and doesn’t look away, and I’ve read that scene I think fifteen times.”
He looks at the book. He looks at me. “I think I’m going to ruin your reading schedule.”
