“I know.”
“Good.” His voice drops, but it doesn’t soften. “Because I am not discounting myself because you finally got tired of being alone with your own excuse.”
The sentence lands exactly where it should. I deserve the mark it leaves.
“I came to say I was wrong.”
His face doesn’t change.
I had the sentence prepared the complete walk over. It falls apart anyway.
“I can’t put you in a box. I tried. Roma went in a box. My family went in a box. Every man before you went in a box and stayed there.” I look down at the container because his face is too much. “You don’t. Tonight I ate your pasta standing up at a minibar with a coffee spoon, and there’s no box for that either. I don’t know what it looks like. I only know what it isn’t.”
“What isn’t it?”
“Kindness,” I say. “Leaving like I did. Calling it kindness.”
Something moves in the dark between us.
“No,” he says. “It wasn’t.”
“I know.”
“You didn’t know for an entire year.”
“I did. I just made the file name better.”
That almost gets him. Not a laugh. Not forgiveness. Something smaller and worse.
He takes the container from me. “This doesn’t pay the price. It doesn’t even put down a deposit.”
“I know.”
“It gets you through the door long enough to stop lying in my hallway.”
My throat works.
“That’s all?” I ask.
“For tonight,” he says.
Then he steps back into the dark.
“Come in, Marek. Before you spend another minute pretending this is manners.”
The door closes behind me, and the fluency comes back with the sound of it, instant, whole.
He puts the container on the kitchen counter without looking at it. Then his hands are on my jaw. Mine find his hips, and his mouth lands the way it always landed.
“The shirt,” he says against my mouth. “Careful with the shirt. It’s older than your career.”
The sacred Napoli shirt comes off over his head with his arms up, no save attempted. Mine follows. His hands go flat on my chest and slide down. He watches them do it. Unhurried. Taking inventory.
“Gym,” he says. “You’ve been living in a gym.”
“It was the gym or your street.”
“It was always my street.” He drags my belt open and gets my fly down, and closes his hand around my cock in one motion. No ceremony anywhere in it. He squeezes exactly hard enough to knock my head back against the wall. “There he is,” he says, low and delighted. “Hello.”
