Page 37 of Five Hole

“I’m just saying. A little small talk. How was your day, Emile. Nice practice, Emile. Love what you’ve done with the crease.”

He goes still against me, the whole length of him, and I’d kick myself around this room if I could get out from under him, because I brought the ice in here and that was the one thing I swore I wouldn’t do.

“Not tonight,” he says. Low. Into my collarbone. “Not in this room.”

“No. You’re right. Bon. Scratch it. Forget I have a mouth.”

“I am not going to forget you have a mouth.”

And that is the closest thing to a joke this man has made all season, and it takes me apart worse than any of the rest of it, because he went and found a joke somewhere in all that machinery and handed it over. He did that because the loud one was scared. Nobody has ever done that for me in my life.

Then he’s got my sweats off and his hand around my cock and I stop having opinions about anything.

I talk anyway. I always talk. I tell him yes and there and don’t you dare stop, and a couple of things in French I would not repeat at Bev’s counter. He lets me have all of it. Nobody knows that about him. They all think he wants the quiet. He doesn’t. He wants the noise. He just built a whole life where he was never allowed to ask for it.

“Talk,” he says, into my hip. Rough. “Keep talking.”

“Oh, now he wants conversation.”

“Emile.”

“Yeah. Okay. Yeah.”

So I talk. His mouth goes low and takes me in, and I lose the thread of whatever I was saying and pick up another one, and what comes out isn’t chirp anymore. It’s true things at a volume I’d never use in daylight. That I’ve wanted this since the equipment room. That I think about his hands when I’m supposed to be watching tape. That he’s the first thing I look for in every building I walk into and has been since the first day, and that I’ve stopped pretending it’s scouting even to myself.

He makes a low sound with his mouth full of me and I feel it in my teeth and the backs of my knees and everywhere else, and I have to get a fist in the sheet to keep myself on the bed.

“Your bag,” I say. “Side pocket. Where I left it coming down off that mountain, and don’t pretend you didn’t know it was in there this whole time.”

“I am not pretending.”

I hear the cap go. Then I hear nothing for a while, a long nothing, and the nothing is him standing over me in the dark making sure his hands aren’t cold before he puts them anywhere near me. The whole man, right there. Nobody else in the barn is ever going to be told.

Then his hand is on me and in me and I stop being able to finish anything I start. He takes it in stages. Every stage he waits me out, and I swear at him for the waiting in the language my mother swears in, and he does not hurry for it, he never hurries for anything. When he gets at the thing inside me that turns my whole spine to water I lose the commentary entirely. I go down to one sound. I make it over and over into my own forearm, and he keeps handing me reasons to.

“More. Casimir. Come on. More.”

“I have you.”

“I know you have me, that’s the whole problem, that’s been the problem since.” And whatever I was going to hang on the end of that sentence, I don’t. It’s too big for a room with a season in it. So I take the corner off it. “Since day one and your stupid glove.”

His breath catches. He heard the swerve. Of course he heard it, he hears everything, he’s just never made me finish a sentence I couldn’t afford.

“Now,” I say. “Now. I want you in me. I’m asking out loud so you can’t tell yourself later that I didn’t.”

“Yes.” Wrecked. “Yes.”

He presses in slow and I make a noise I’ll be hearing in my own head for the rest of my life. There’s the burn of it and then the part after the burn, where the whole thing turns into something with no word attached to it. He stops. Of course he stops. He’d stop if the building came down.

“Okay?”

“Go. I’m okay. Go.”

He goes. Slow at first, that terrible patience of his, the same patience that lets him hold a post on a two-on-one while every other man in the barn is already reaching. Then the patience gives out on him. I feel it go. I feel the exact stroke where he quits holding the line he’s held all season and just takes the thing he has spent months not taking, and the headboard starts talking to the wall on our behalf. The thin place. Our wall. The one I’ve conducted an entire relationship through, and tonight it’s on the wrong side of me and I don’t have to listen through it for anything.

I hold on. His back, his shoulders. I get my legs up around him and my nails in him and I say his name into his neck until it stops being a name and turns into a sound. He gets a hand between us and takes my cock in his fist and works me in time, and I’m gone. I’m making promises to a ceiling.

“I have you,” he says. “Let go.”