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Carlos’ apartment was not the college jock disaster you’d expect from a single guy in his early twenties living by himself. His furniture wasn’t carelessly constructed from old beer crates, for instance, and his couch didn’t look like it’d been retrieved from a dumpster. A row of family photos - Carlos surrounded by smiling faces - broke up the lines of books on the shelves; titles in Portuguese and English, yes, but in French, and Spanish, and others too. I trailed my finger along the spines.

“When do you have time to read?”

A chuckle. “When Brayden is shaking his ass on stage, and while you’re posing for Clay to imagine you with X-ray vision?”

I gave him a knowing look, letting my stare slip down. Across his t-shirt, and the cut-off shorts below that, all the way to his bare feet. Not hiding my smile nor my fascination by the time I met his eyes again. “You don’t need X-ray vision if you’ve already seen what’s underneath their clothes.”

Carlos laughed again. “Objectified in my own home, how shocking.”

My fingers itched for him.

I wondered, sometimes, what it was like for my big bros in their classes, their lectures, their tutorials. Trying to imagine Carlos discussing foreign literature with a room of other students; what they might think when they saw him. A jock, sure, muscles and confidence, but that same polyglot mouth which had made me cry out with unintelligible need turned, instead, to topics far more esoteric.

A spike of pride in my chest - unearned, perhaps, but no less intense for that - at my clever, handsome teammate.

He crossed the room to an old-school turntable. Black and slab-sided, and a leaning stack of sleeved vinyl against it.

“Have you seen Brayden perform?”

A half-glance back, over his shoulder. Enough for me to see his smile.

“Not from the front row, lil bro, but close enough.”

I’d watched what happened to those in the front row. Brayden’s aim was haphazard, but you couldn’t accuse him of lacking range.

A faint hiss-crackle, and then the sharp, grinding stab of a bassline. Carlos turned the outsized volume knob, already nodding in time with the beat.

There was something predatory to how he turned. Hungry, in a way that had a long-buried genetic streak of prey animal in me squeak out with remembered terror. A shivering, wriggling delight of a feeling; like waiting with my face pressed to the fold of my arms and my ass pushed high, for the inevitable rasp of a tongue.

“Brayden’s music doesn’t sound like this,” I pointed out, my voice already hoarse.

Carlos shook his head as he stepped across the room to me. “You didn’t ask me to teach you how to strip, lil bro. You asked me to teach you how to dance.”

I’d felt his arm slip around my waist before, felt his fingertips scrape a path from the crook of my elbow to my palm. On the mats, in practice: Carlos dialing back his strength and experience to levels that would test, not overwhelm. And then again, in the locker room or in the showers. As he positioned me, spread me, splayed himself across me. Showed me the other uses for my muscles and stamina, regardless of who was inside who.

I wanted to apologize for my damp palm, for the heat under my arms as he gripped me. Plead nerves, anxiety; blame the heaving saw of the instruments that now wove in and out of the bass rumbles.

But Carlos had held me when I was sweaty. Provoked it, indeed. Tasted it in the crook of my neck as I clung to him; pressed his face against the flushed, sticky skin between my shoulder blades as he rutted inside me.

I didn’t have to apologize to my bros. Knowledge that left me dizzy every time.

“I think...” he started, then released me just long enough to strip the t-shirt off me. “Better.”

I bit my lip, the stab of grounding pain embarrassingly welcome, and then we were moving.

My feet stumbling at first, half-dragged as Carlos guided us across the room. Trying to match his footsteps, and map the places his hands squeezed me, and follow the narration he whispered into my ear. Lips so close, they brushed my skin as we turned and he propelled us back again.

“You must at least know of the tango, lil bro,” he murmured to me.

“I... yes...”

Expecting me to talk seemed cruel, unfair. Mind swimming in the drums and the strings and the five points of pressure as his fingertips dug into my spine.

“Four beats: like a clock, like your hips as you fuck. Four beats, lil bro, over and over.”

He hauled my arm up, raised it high, as he span us. The gasp slipping out of me, no hope of holding it inside.