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He lets his head fall back on the pillow. “Christ,” he says to the ceiling, and it sounds like giving up.

I take my time with him. Long, wet drags of my mouth, all the way down until my nose is in the dark hair at the root and he’s at the back of my throat, then all the way up to suck at the head. I learn him. I learn that the underside just below the crown makes his stomach jump. That he goes silent when I take him deep and swears when I pull off. That his thighs tremble when I hold him in my throat and swallow.

I edge him once. Not to make him ask for anything, only because I want this to last. I pull off with his cock wet and jerking against his stomach, hold still with my hand flat on his hip, and watch him come back from it with his mouth open and his chest heaving. Then I take him in again.

I pull off long enough to wet two fingers in my mouth. I push them into him, slow, wet, nothing like the last time, and crook them until I find the right place and stay on it. Then I take him back in and keep him there, sucking at the head, taking him down to the root when his thighs start to shake. I don’t hurry any part of it. It takes a long while. He’s loud in a way he wasn’t the first time. He leaks steadily onto my tongue. About a minute before the end, he stops making any sound at all and puts both hands flat on the headboard behind him.

He comes down my throat with his whole body arched off the mattress except for his hips, which I’m still holding down. I swallow every pulse of it and keep my fingers in him, stroking until he whines and tries to twist away.

I let him go only when he’s soft on my tongue and shaking. His hole is still clenching in small pulses around my fingers when I ease them out.

Afterward, he lies there with his forearm over his eyes and his chest heaving.

“Come here,” he says. “Let me.”

“No.”

“Marek.”

“No.” I get up. I’m hard enough that it hurts to stand, and I ignore it. I rinse my mouth at the bathroom tap and come back to put the covers over him. “Not tonight. Go to sleep.”

He takes his arm off his eyes and looks at the ceiling.

“I don’t know what to do with that,” he says.

“I know you don’t.”

“No, I mean it.” He’s still looking at the ceiling. “I take something, work out what it costs, and then I’m fine. It’s quick. It’s about two seconds, and then I’ve got somewhere to put it. And there’s nothing on this one. I’ve been lying here doing it for a minute, and there’s nothing there.”

“Good.”

“It isn’t good. It’s like a stair that isn’t there.”

He’s asleep in ninety seconds, on his back, which he never sleeps on.

I sit on the floor by the bed with my back against the nightstand until his breathing goes long, and I don’t tell him about the twenty-fourth of April.

17

The tape doesn’t go on right.

Left wrist first. Thumb anchor, three passes up, last one flat. By the third pass the tape is a quarter turn out of true and sitting wrong on the bone. I strip it off, drop it on the floor, and start again.

Second time, the anchor is loose.

Third time, I get the left done, but the right doesn’t mirror it. I take both off and sit with my forearms on my knees, looking at two lengths of white tape on the floor while the room fills up around me.

Fourth time, it comes out right.

It’s ten to ten in the morning on the third of April, and the room is loud. Two of the young guys are arguing about a video game. The stereo is on. Somebody is getting his skates sharpened in the back.

I look up.

Emil is at his stall across the room, wrists on his knees and a roll of tape in his hand. He’s doing it—thumb anchor, three passes, last one flat. Left first. Then the right, mirrored.

He catches me looking and grins with the tape in his teeth.

“It’s a good system,” he says around it.