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I run a bath.

He doesn’t argue about it. I get the other shoe off him, then his shirt, his pants. I get an arm under him and take his weight on my shoulder. He goes into the water in stages, holding the edge. He makes a noise when the leg goes under that he wouldn’t make in front of anybody else.

The bathroom is small, and it goes to steam in three minutes. There’s one towel on the rail, a razor on the sill, and a bottle of the shampoo they give them in the locker room at the arena.

He puts his head back against the tiles with his eyes shut.

“Thirty-one shots,” he says.

“I saw.”

“You watched it?”

“On a laptop. In a kitchen.” I roll up my sleeves. “You were slow off the post on their second one and you weren’t slow on anything else. I know exactly why you were slow off the post. So does the trainer. One of these days, he’s going to stop asking you and start writing it down.”

“He’s not writing anything down.”

“He will.”

Then I sit on the closed lid of the toilet with my sleeves rolled up and work his hip with my hands for forty minutes.

There’s nothing pleasant about it. It’s a joint capsule that’s been compensating since November and a set of muscles across the front of the hip that have gone to wood. The only way through it is slow pressure held past the point where he wants me to stop.

He puts his forehead on the edge of the bath.

“Breathe out.”

“I am breathing out.”

“You’re holding it at the top. Out all the way, then let me in.” I get my thumbs into the front of the joint and hold. “There.”

“Christ.”

“That one’s the whole problem. Again.”

By the end of it, the leg moves through most of its range and he can lift the knee an inch out of the water without the tendon standing out at the top. I get him out, stand him against the sink, and dry him with a towel—hair, shoulders, back, both legs. He lets me, standing there holding the edge of the sink with both hands.

I walk him to the bed and put him on his back.

“I’m all right now,” he says. “You should⁠—”

“Lie down.”

He lies down.

I put a hand flat on the middle of his chest and hold him there, and for the first time in four months I put my mouth on him—the inside of his knee, the inside of his thigh, the crease of his good hip. His cock is filling against his stomach before I get anywhere near it. By the time I get where I’m going, he’s stopped talking entirely.

I lick him from the root to the head, slow, then take his cock in my mouth with both hands pinning his hipbones to the mattress.

He tastes of soap and hot water. He’s already leaking. I take that on my tongue and go down.

He can’t move. That’s the arrangement. I don’t explain it. He works it out inside about four seconds; every time he tries to lift into it, my weight is already there. His hands come down to my head. I take one by the wrist and put it back on the sheet beside him.

“No,” I say. “Not tonight. You don’t do anything.”

“Marek—”

“Nothing. You lie there.”