* * *
The apartment was sixty-three degrees because the thermostat had two settings, off and a temperature Theo refused to pay for, and Shane was still in his coat, and Theo was the one who started taking it off him. That was new too. All season the order had run the other direction: Shane stripping the layers off Theo’s tired body, careful at the right side, easing each one over the brace, learning it by feel. Now Theo’s hands worked the zipper down with the deliberateness he gave a roster, taking inventory of Shane, item by item, and the coat came off the shoulders and Shane let it, and the scarf, and Shane let that too, and then they were standing in the entryway where it had all started with nothing between them but the cold and the fact of it, and Theo said, “I am not making this small either,” and kissed him.
It was not a careful kiss. He’d spent four days being careful, careful in Mercer’s office, careful in the lot with Marek, careful with a thing he had already decided to lose, and now he had decided not to lose it and the carefulness had nowhere to go, so it went into his mouth, into the hand that came up and gripped the back of Shane’s neck, into walking Shane backward two steps until Shane’s spine met the door he’d come through, and Shane made a sound against his teeth that was relief and grief and a season of wanting all at once, and grabbed two fistfuls of Theo’s shirt and pulled instead of pushed. For once. Pulled him in. He’d run with two duffels and a head start and he was done running, and his body knew it before the rest of him did, the play first, always the play first.
“Your hands are freezing,” Theo said against his mouth.
“They’re always freezing, it’s a circulation thing, you’ve known me a—”
“I have a method.” And Theo took both of Shane’s bad cold hands and pushed them up under his own shirt, flat against his stomach, against the heat of him, holding them there with his good hand while the cold of Shane’s palms made him hiss and not move away, warming the hands that had carried everything all season the only way he knew, by giving them somewhere to be. Shane’s breath went ragged. He spread his fingers on the muscle there and Theo’s stomach jumped under them and he thought, dazed, that he was being warmed, that someone was warming him, that this was a thing that could be done to him and he was letting it.
“Four days,” Shane said into his jaw, hands sliding lower under the shirt, finding the waistband, the heat above it. “Four days on Wozniak’s couch with you in my head, four days of getting hard at two in the morning thinking about your hands and hating myself for it, and you’re standing here warming me up like I never ran. God. I want you so bad I can’t see straight, I want your mouth and your hands and I want you to fuck the four days right out of me, is that, can I—”
“Yes,” Theo said. “All of it. Yes.”
They got down the short hall in stages, because Shane kept stopping to put his mouth on Theo’s jaw, his throat, the cord of his neck, kept talking into the skin, half words, you, missed, four days, and Theo kept letting him, kept catching the doorframes one-handed to steady them, and at the bedroom Shane pulled the rest of Theo’s shirt up and off and then stopped, because there it was. The brace. The right shoulder strapped in black neoprene and Velcro, the joint that had failed against the rival and would fail again, the truth Theo had told out loud at last. Shane put his cold mouth to the top of it, the bare skin above the strap, gentle where the rest of him was not.
“We’re getting that fixed,” he said.
“Later.”
“I mean it, I don’t care about your numbers—”
“Shane.” Theo took his face in the good hand. “Later. Right now you are going to lie down, and you are going to stop fixing things, and you are going to let me.” He undid Shane’s belt as he said it, the buckle Shane’s frozen fingers would have fumbled, dragged the zipper down, pushed his hand inside and took hold of Shane’s dick through the cotton, blunt, no preamble, a man picking up a thing that belonged to him, and Shane’s whole body jolted into his palm. The deliberateness was back, the counting. “Yes?”
“Yeah.” It came out cracked. “God, yeah. Yes. Whatever you want.”
“You are hard already.”
“I’ve been hard since the entryway, you said I am not making this small and my dick heard you, that’s where I’m at, that’s the whole—” and Theo squeezed, slow, and the sentence died.
The bed was the one bed, the all-his-side bed Theo had slept wrong in for four nights, and they fell into it half-dressed and got the rest off in a tangle, jeans and socks kicked to the cold floor, Shane’s underwear hooked off one ankle with a foot because his hands were busy, and then it was skin and the sixty-three degrees raised gooseflesh everywhere their bodies weren’t touching so they touched everywhere, Shane pulling Theo down on top of him, taking the weight, wanting the weight, the press of another whole person who had decided to stay. Theo braced on his good arm. The right he kept tucked, the elbow in, and Shane caught the adjustment and rolled them without being asked, smooth, reading it as a play developing, so the bad shoulder came down into the pillow and the good arm was free, so Theo didn’t have to ask, so nobody had to say the word careful.
“There,” Shane said, settling over him, knees bracketing his hips, and looked down at the man who’d given everything away with nothing disguised. Hard against Theo’s hip, flushed down his chest, grinning and wet-eyed at once. “Now you can’t reach the folder.”
“You are talking.”
“Make me stop.”
Theo’s hand was already moving, the good one, wrapping them both together where they were both hard between their stomachs, dicks pressed in one slick fist, and Shane’s smart mouth shut on a groan and his head went back and his hips went, helpless, fucking into the grip, into the friction, into the drag of Theo against him, and Theo watched him as he watched everything that mattered, taking it in, filing it. The flush spreading down Shane’s chest, the cords standing in his throat, the cold hands now planted on Theo’s good shoulder and the pillow by his ear, the small punched-out uh he made on every downstroke and would have died to know he made.
“Harder,” Theo said.
“You. Okay. Yeah.”
“Harder, Shane. I am not careful tonight. You will not break me.” He tightened his fist and twisted at the top and Shane swore, broke, ran, the old run-on rhythm turned clean around into want: “fuck, fuck, okay, you’re gonna make me come in four minutes and I refuse, I have plans, I had four days to make plans, don’t stop, that, do that, your thumb, right there, fuck, I’ve got you, don’t worry about the shoulder, shoulder’s under, I’ve got the weight, I’ve got you,” meaning he had the position, the bad side safe in the pillow, meaning he could do this part, this he could carry, and Theo let him carry it, let himself be braced over and rocked into and held, let Shane grind down into his fist until they were both leaking and the slide of it went easy and obscene and loud in the quiet cold room.
He’d wanted this so long he’d filed it under things that cost too much. He stopped filing.
“I want,” Theo said, and stopped, because the sentence was hard, because for thirty years his sentences had ended in what other people needed. He started again. “You. Inside me.” Flat, plain, no disguise on it. “I have wanted it the whole season. I am telling you the price out loud — your hands and then your dick, tonight, now, while I am still brave. I want you to fuck me.”
Shane went still over him. All of him, even the mouth.
“Say words,” Theo said.
“You said fuck,” Shane said, voice dropped to almost nothing. “Okay. Okay, yeah, words, here’s words: yes, God, yes, I’ve thought about it since November, you on your back saying my name, I used to lie there listening to you breathe and want it so bad my teeth hurt, tell me if anything’s wrong, tell me about the shoulder, tell me everything, I want to hear all of it,” and he was already reaching blind to the drawer they both knew, the one on Theo’s side, knocking the lube against the lamp, catching it.
His cold hands warmed fast against the heat of the work. He slicked his fingers and opened Theo with a patience that cost his loud body everything, one finger first, slow, watching Theo’s face for the verdict, getting it, “good, more,” then two, curling, finding the spot that made Theo’s hips come up off the mattress and his good hand fist in the sheet and his bad arm stay tucked, safe, and a sound come out of him that no opponent and no coach and no team in two countries had ever heard. Shane talked him through all of it because Shane could not have shut up under anesthesia: “that’s it, there it is, look at you, you take it so good, you’re so tight and you’re letting me, you’re letting me, tell me when, tell me you want it, I want to hear you say it again.”
