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In the locker room after, Novo wanted to know what everybody was doing for New Year’s.

“Box,” Riggs said. “Wes is opening late. Bring cash.”

“I’m not shaking dice with you again.”

“Nobody asked you, Jonesy.”

“Cally?”

“Kid’s at her mom’s all week.” Ford pulled his shirt over his head. “I’ll show my face.”

He’d stay an hour. What he wanted was seven days in that house with nobody in it but him and Cole, and there was nobody in this room he could say it to.

Two stalls down, Cole was taking a long time with one shin pad, head down, not looking at anybody.

They didn’t say much in the truck. Halfway home, Cole reached over and set his hand high on Ford’s thigh. He left it there. Ford drove the rest of the way with both hands on the wheel and his jaw locked.

The door wasn’t all the way shut before Cole had two fistfuls of his shirt and Ford’s back against it. The coat came off the hook and stayed on the floor where it landed.

Cole went up the stairs first, backward, pulling him along by the belt. They stopped twice. At the landing, Ford put him into the wall hard enough to knock a picture crooked, and neither of them straightened it.

In the bedroom, Cole pulled his shirt off from the collar and threw it somewhere. Ford had his hands on him before it hit the floor.

He was hot to the touch. Ford ran a palm up over his ribs, over a bruise from a shot he’d blocked the week before, and Cole made a low sound and pushed into it.

“Hang on.” Ford got a hand around the back of Cole’s neck and held him off an inch. “Say something.”

“About what?”

“Anything.” He was already breathing wrong. “I want to hear you.”

Cole looked at him a beat. Then he got Ford’s belt open one-handed, without looking down at it.

“I’m going to put my mouth on your cock,” he said, right against Ford’s mouth, “and I want to hear every sound you’ve been swallowing.”

Ford’s whole body went tight. Cole pulled the belt out of the loops and dropped it on the floor.

“Okay,” Ford said.

“Yeah?” Cole dropped his mouth to Ford’s collarbone and worked up his throat.

“Yeah.” Ford got both hands into the back of Cole’s jeans and hauled him in. “Okay.”

They got the rest of it off between the door and the bed. Jeans, socks, one boot Cole had to sit down for. It took longer than it should have.

Then Cole pushed him down onto the clean sheets and came down on top of him. Every other time had been a stolen half hour with one ear on the hall. Tonight there was nothing after this. Nowhere to be and nothing to listen for.

For a while it was only that. Mouths and hands and the slow grind of Cole’s hips against his, both of them hard, neither of them hurrying now that the day was behind them.

Ford got a hand between them and wrapped it around Cole’s cock. Cole’s breath went out against his jaw. He was hot and already wet at the tip, and when Ford dragged a thumb over the head, Cole’s whole body jerked, and he swore into Ford’s mouth.

“Do that again.”

Ford did it again. He kept the strokes long and slow, working the head on the way up, and watched Cole come apart an inch at a time above him. The shudder across his shoulders. His hips losing the rhythm and shoving down into Ford’s fist.

“Keep that up, and we’re done,” Cole said.

“That’s the idea.”