I type. The three hundred words take six minutes. Cole shifts back against the headboard and settles in. Dante drifts to the window. I build the story into twelve hundred words about the two men in this room, their goals, their passes, their ice time, all of it reduced to analysis and attribution. My name on the byline. Their bodies turned into data. I read it once, fix a comma, kill an adverb, and hit send. The document disappears into the editorial system.
Filed. Done.
I close the laptop.
The room goes quiet, climate control humming under the muffled city and the distant elevator. The desk belongs to the hotel. So does the bed. Fourteen floors above a city that doesn’t know we’re here, the room holds its borrowed silence. We’re graduating in three weeks, and Elm House will hold other people next year. The “next place” from the bathtub conversation is real now. Chicago. Two hockey players and a journalist in a city all three of us are about to learn.
I leave that thought where it is.
Dante stands at the window beside the bed, his reflection caught in the glass with the city lights behind him. His hands hang at his sides. The tension is still in his shoulders, tucked beneath damp hair and clean clothes, his fingers too still againsthis thighs. He played forty-one minutes tonight. Scored twice. Won every board battle in the third period with enough force to make defensemen stop wanting the puck.
Cole is on the bed, watching me. His legs are stretched out, his back against the headboard, his body looser than Dante’s. His eyes are sharp, fixed on me. He has been looking at me since he walked in, and with the laptop closed, there is nothing left between that focus and my skin.
“Come here,” Cole says.
“Not yet,” I say.
His eyebrows lift.
“I want to watch you two first.”
Cole goes still first. Dante turns from the window, and his reflection slides out of the glass. His eyes find me across the room, dark and steady, before his face reacts.
“Watch us,” he repeats.
“You just played the best game of your lives. You’re both wired. I can see it.” I lean back in the desk chair and cross my legs. “I’ve been watching you from sixty feet for three years. I want to watch from six.”
Cole looks at Dante. Dante looks back. Cole’s mouth curves. A fraction of tension leaves Dante’s jaw.
Cole stands from the bed and crosses to Dante in three steps.
The hotel room is smaller than the bedroom at Elm House, and the distance collapses fast. Cole’s chest stops six inches from Dante’s. Close enough for a kiss. Close enough for a fight. The space between them feels like something I can count.
Cole’s hand comes up and finds the back of Dante’s neck, the place he always takes hold. His fingers close there. Dante’s eyes shut, and his chin drops a fraction.
Cole kisses him. Hard.
His mouth is rough on Dante’s, one hand pulling him in by the neck, the other fisting the front of Dante’s shirt. Dante gripsCole’s waist and pulls, and the two of them collide with the force of men who have been touching each other in public-safe increments all night and are now in a locked room with me watching from six feet away.
Dante makes the low sound against Cole’s mouth. The one I hear through the wall at Elm House, muffled by plaster and darkness, always right before his control starts coming apart. In here, the sound reaches me bare, stripped of plaster, hallway, and the closed door that usually lets me pretend I am only hearing it by accident.
Cole pulls Dante’s shirt over his head. The tattoos catch the city light from the window, the geometric sleeves, the ink I have traced with my fingers and my mouth. Dante strips Cole’s shirt in return, and my pulse punches once as their chests brush. Cole broader. Dante leaner, his muscles cut sharper, his body built for explosive speed and precision violence on the ice.
I stay in the chair. My pulse is loud in my ears. My thighs press together.
Cole pushes Dante backward. The backs of Dante’s knees hit the bed, and he sits. Cole follows him down, one knee on the mattress and then the other, straddling Dante’s lap without letting their mouths separate. His hips roll once against Dante, and the friction pulls a groan from both of them, the sounds overlapping in the small room.
“Slower,” I say from the chair.
They slow.
Cole pulls back an inch, his forehead against Dante’s, both of them breathing hard. Dante’s hands stay on Cole’s thighs, his thumbs tracing the hip bones above the waistband.
“She’s directing,” Cole says quietly against Dante’s mouth.
“She’s always directing,” Dante says. “She just usually does it from the press box.”
“Tonight I’m doing it from six feet.” I uncross my legs. “Dante. His neck.”
