“Davide’s gone until tonight,” I say against his mouth.
His hands are already under my shirt. Mine are already at his belt. And the difference between this and every other time is simple. Nobody’s timing it. We both feel the clock’s absence like a third person in the room.
I make him come to the bedroom and undress him slowly, because I can. Because there’s nothing after this that either of us has to leave for. His shirt goes first. I drag my teeth over his chest, and he makes the low sound I’ve been hearing in my sleep. The whole architecture of him gives.
“Enzo.” He breathes my name out. “Slow down or this ends embarrassingly.”
“We have all afternoon. Embarrass yourself twice.”
“Ambitious.”
“I’ve watched you run for ninety-plus minutes without stopping. Don’t lecture me about stamina.”
He laughs. I feel it under my mouth. Then I stop letting him laugh. I get his belt open and his jeans off him and take his cock in my hand. He’s already hard. Already leaking at the tip. Even with the months between us, his body still answers mine as if it’s been waiting by the phone.
“Look at that,” I say, and stroke him slow, base to head, watching his jaw come loose. “You still react to me like it’s the first night.”
“It’s always the first night with you. That’s the whole curse of it.”
I put my mouth on him. All the way down, slowly, until he’s at the back of my throat and his hand fists in my hair. I do it the way I do anything that matters. With attention. What my mouth can’t take, my hand covers.
His head goes back. “Where did you learn patience? You never had patience.”
“I learned it waiting for you.” I pull off just enough to say it, then take him back down.
“That’s not fair.”
“Neither was this last year.” I take him down to the root and swallow around him, and whatever he was going to say dies in his throat. “You were saying?”
“I forget. Do that again.”
I do that again. His hips lift off the bed and I hold them down with a forearm and don’t stop, and he says my name like it’s the only word left he trusts. Then he hauls me up by the shoulders, wrecked.
“Stop. Not like that. Not this time.” His breath is ruined. “Two years I took the smaller version every single time and drove home.”
He strips the rest off me and rolls me under him, and I let him, because the one thing that has never once been in question between us is this. He slicks his fingers with the lube that has quietly reappeared. He opens me slow. One finger, then a second, working me loose. A third, patient in the way that costs him, and I watch it cost him.
“There,” I tell him, when he curls them right, and I arch off the bed. “There, Marek.”
“I know. I remember. I kept every detail of you filed and could not throw a single one out.”
“Now. Before I come on your hand like a teenager.”
“That would not be the worst thing I’ve watched you do.”
“Marek. Now. I mean it.”
“I know you mean it. I can feel how much you mean it.” He lines his cock up and pushes into me, slow and complete, and the stretch of him takes me apart an inch at a time. His eyes stay open. Mine stay open. He sinks all the way in and stops there. Seated. Buried to the root. Both of us breathing hard, and for once neither of us is anywhere else. No ceiling being memorized. No exits being counted.
“Say it in Italian,” he says, forehead on mine. “The thing. I want it in the language you dream in.”
So I say it against his ear, low. The thing I have not said out loud to anyone.
“I don’t know what it means.”
“You know exactly what it means. Say it back in Czech and we’re even.”
He says something rough and low that I don’t need translated, and his whole body answers before his brain catches up, and he starts to fuck me.
