Page 72 of Omega’s Forward

“Yeah pregnant, not made of glass. Move.”

I keep being careful anyway, right up until I’m inside him. Then there’s no careful left in either of us. He hooks a leg over my hip and pulls me the rest of the way in himself, and we both stop breathing for a second, exactly like the first time — except nobody’s in heat now, nobody has an excuse, and neither of us says a word about that.

It’s fast and loud and six months overdue. He gives orders. I follow the ones I feel like following and get sworn at for the rest. His nails put lines down my back that I’ll be keeping away from the locker room for a week, and when he comes he says my name — Brody, not Callahan — and that finishes me, buried deep, his teeth clamped in the meat of my shoulder where the old mark used to sit.

After, he lies sprawled across my chest with his ear over my heart, and I run my hand up and down his spine and feel him breathe.

“This changes some things,” he says, eventually.

“Yeah,” I say. “I know.”

The second time is slow, and it’s his choice. He puts me on my back and takes me astride, my hands exactly where he sets them, and he takes me apart with all the patience the first round skipped. I relearn him inch by inch — what’s the same, what’s new, what makes him lose the thread of his own orders halfway through giving them. He finishes with his head thrown back and my name in his mouth, and I follow him over, and by the end of it the whole flat smells of the pair of us.

We eat toast at midnight, standing up at the counter, because toast is the only thing in the kitchen that doesn’t need cooking and neither of us is willing to get dressed enough for a restaurant.

At half past midnight he walks to the sofa and turns the TV on, and he doesn’t explain and I don’t ask. There’s an American sports package on it, the expensive kind they sell to homesick expats, under a profile named Guest. He puts on the Barons–Marauders game. It’s already the first intermission over there.

“You’ve been watching,” I say.

“Every game.” He settles into my side with the blanket over both of us. “Don’t make it into anything.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

First shift of the second period, Ozzy catches up to Dorn behind the play and asks him the question with his gloves already coming off. Dorn has to answer — the whole barn is on its feet demanding it — and Ozzy feeds him three short ones and takes him down, and even through the TV I can hear what our crowd thinks of that. Matching fives. Worth every second. Early in the third, Linus walks their defenseman and roofs one, and the camera finds his grin through the glass, and Everett’s hand tightens on my ribs. I have the sense not to say so.

My phone lights up between periods. JP, from the room:

ozzy says you’re welcome. tell london hi.

Everett falls asleep on me somewhere in the third, mid-sentence, in the middle of telling me he isn’t tired. The Barons are up two. Dorn hasn’t taken a shift since the fight. I mute the TV, stay exactly where I am so I don’t wake him, and text JP one-handed.

found him.

22. Everett

I wake reaching for him and find cold sheets.

For one bad second I’m six months in the past, standing in a stripped guest room with my suitcase already packed. Then I hear the kitchen. Cupboard doors opening and closing. The clank of a pan on my hob. A man singing off tune under his breath.

He stayed.

I lie there and let my heart slow down. The whole bed smells of him — woodsmoke worked into the pillows, into the sheets, into me — and the kicking low in my belly starts up as though it’s been waiting for an audience. I put my hand over it. “That’s your father,” I say, to the general area of my navel. “I’m afraid the singing may be permanent.”

By the time I’ve showered and found a shirt that still does up, my kitchen has been colonized. Both pans out. Eggs, toast, butter. He’s at the hob in a clean t-shirt with his hair flat on one side, and there’s a mug of tea already steaming on the counter.

“Morning.” He doesn’t turn around. “Sit. Eat.”

“You cooked.”

“You had nothing in. I went down to the shop on the corner while you were asleep.” He slides eggs onto two plates. He puts one of the plates in front of me.

The eggs are good. He waits until I’m halfway through the plate before he starts.

“How attached are you to this apartment?”

I put my fork down. “Extremely. Why?”

“Six flights,” he says. “No elevator.”