Page 33 of Takedown

And under the table, in the roar of eleven arguments, Grayson's knee came to rest against mine and stayed there through dessert.

* * *

Room 214 had two queen beds, a heating unit with a personality disorder, a print of a lighthouse that had seen things, and a door that locked.

We stood inside it at nine forty p.m. with our bags still on our shoulders — dead quiet after twelve hours of nation-state — and the whole day, the whole bus, the whole architecture of team-loud and teammate-flat came off us at once, like tape.

"Hi," he said. Our word now. Where we start from.

"Hi."

"Curfew check's at ten. Assistant coach knocks, counts heads, leaves. After that—" the bag slid off his shoulder, "—nobody comes."

"You know the away-game protocols pretty well for a guy who's never—"

"Danny." He crossed the room. My back found the wall between the lighthouse and the heater, his hands found my jaw, and I got kissed the way you kiss when you've been across an aisle all day — thorough, unhurried, furious about the aisle — until the knock came at ten and we answered it four feet apart with our game faces on, and Coach Doyle counted two heads and said get sleep, gentlemen, and the door clicked, and the lock turned, and Grayson Whitfield turned around with his back against that door and looked at me across a hotel room, and let the correctness fall all the way off for the first time in recorded history.

"Get over here" is what I said. Command's a muscle. I was learning I had it.

He came over there.

This time nothing was clumsy. That's what scene two teaches you, the thing the first frantic time can't: hands that already know the map draw it slower. I took his shirt off like unwrapping something I'd paid for; he pulled mine over my head and then just — looked, in the lamp light, thumb tracing the bruise on my hip he had jurisdiction over, down the line of me like a man reading the Ledger, and I let him look. Being seen. Still the drug. Him watching goosebumps follow his own thumb across my stomach like he'd invented cause and effect.

"The scale Friday," he said, low. "One seventy-three point six. I've been thinking about this exact — since the scale, Danny."

"I know. You studied a zero for ten seconds."

"You saw that."

"I feel a gaze the way other men hear their names," I said, quoting him back to himself, filthy with satisfaction, and he laughed — bright, unguarded, the six a.m. laugh — and then he put me on the bed and knelt over me and took the rest of my clothes off with the unhurried confidence of a man who had spent a week planning the order of operations.

"I've been thinking about this since the scale," he said again, low, working my shorts down my legs, and then he stopped thinking about it and just looked — all of me, bare, hard, wrecked already — with an expression I'd only ever seen him aim at the Ledger. Reverent and greedy at once. "Danny."

"You're staring."

"I'm appraising. There's a difference. It's an old family skill." His hand closed around my cock, slow, testing the weight of it like everything else he'd ever learned about me — through the grip first — and my hips came off the bed and he smiled like a man who'd found a tell. "Oh, I'm going to be so good at this," he said, with the outrageous confidence of the perpetually coached, and then he put his mouth on me and set about proving it.

He was not, at first, good at it. I want history to record this: Grayson Whitfield, four generations of excellence, gagged almost immediately, pulled off coughing, glared at me for laughing, said "don't," and went back down with the exact grim resolve I'd watched him drill the no-knock single with — and that, God help me, was hotter than skill would have been. Being learned. Being a thing he was determined to master. He found the rhythm inside two minutes — he finds every rhythm inside two minutes, it's infuriating, it's the whole scouting report on him — one hand pinning my hip flat when it bucked, the other wrapped around what his mouth couldn't reach, wet heat and pressure and that murderous attentiveness aimed at every sound I made, cataloguing, adjusting, coaching himself off my breathing, until I had a fist in his hair and my head shoved back into a hotel pillow, gone, completely gone, saying his name and several words Brandt Hollow would've recognized and one or two it wouldn't have.

"Tap if it's too much," he pulled off long enough to say, smug, quoting my own rulebook into my hip bone.

"Finish what you — fuck — started, Whitfield—"

He finished what he started. Swallowed, too — a point of family pride, apparently, everything is — and crawled up my body while I was still shaking and kissed me deep, tasting of me, one thigh sliding between mine, hard against my hip and grinding slow like we had all season, which, in that room, with the lock turned, we did.

I got a hand around him and watched him come apart for the second time in four days — braced over me, forearms shaking, that composed mouth going loose and helpless, saying my name like the answer to something — and when he finished, all over my stomach, gorgeous, ruined, laughing breathlessly at the state of us, he dropped his forehead to mine and stayed there while both our heartbeats argued it out.

"Cross-training," he said, finally, wrecked.

"Basically cardio."

"I'm putting it in the training log."

"You are not putting it in the—"

He was laughing too hard to answer. We hit the shower, separately, mostly, then not, briefly — a logistics failure I take full responsibility for — and after, long after, heater rattling, one bed clearly never to be slept in and staged for the morning like a crime scene, he lay with his head on my chest, tracing the tape scars on my knuckles, one by one, like inventory.

"Semifinal at eleven," he said. "The Lehigh guy."