Page 26 of Takedown

That's the only way I've ever been able to describe it, so it will have to do. Every locked gallery at once. Every alarm, finally, gloriously, too late.

I closed the distance the way he taught me. No announcement. No knock.

The first kiss was a collision — teeth, the copper of his lip, his gasp against my mouth like a man surfacing — and then his hands came up, not to wrestle, and gripped the back of my neck and the front of my shirt, and hauled me in, and it stopped being a collision and became the single most articulate ninety seconds of my life. Everything we'd said at the wrists all season, translated at last into its original language. His back hit the mat wall and I followed him into it, my forearm above his head, his heat coming through both our shirts like the radiators had moved indoors, his mouth opening under mine and the sound he made — low, wrecked, finally — landing somewhere at the base of my spine and living there permanently, rent-free, to this day.

I kissed him until neither of us had air. Broke, gasped, foreheads together — the drilling position, God help us both, we ended up in the drilling position — and his eyes were open and so close and so light, the flat grey gone, burned off, and his thumb moved once against the back of my neck, deliberate, unmistakable, a question.

And I heard myself, from a long way off, in a voice with my father's tailoring still on it, say:

"That didn't—"

"Don't." His thumb stilled. His whole body stilled — I felt it happen under my hands, the loading of it, a man bracing for the shot he can see coming. "Don't you fucking dare, Whitfield. You started it. You crossed the room."

I looked at him. Bleeding, pinned to the wall of my family's basement by nothing — I wasn't holding him, my hands were flat against the padding, he could have moved anytime, he was staying — and I did the math I'd been refusing all season, in the one room where the numbers were honest. The wrestle-off. The letter he thought I didn't know about; Halloran knew, Halloran had told me with one look weeks ago. My father's syllable. The Ledger, eleven lines above the empty space, forty feet from where I stood with another man's pulse under my palms.

Everything said get to the door.

"I crossed the room," I said.

His breath went out of him. Both hands still on me. "Say it again."

"I crossed the room." Easier the second time. The whole gallery, burning merrily. "I've been crossing it since October. You're a strategic catastrophe and your double leg is a war crime and I have thought about the corner of your mouth during a board dinner, Danny, I—"

He kissed me quiet. Gentler this time, which was worse, which was so much worse for the museum, and against my mouth, flat Pennsylvania, terms and conditions:

"Six a.m. tomorrow."

"It's Saturday."

"Six a.m.," said Danny Kovac, picking his hoodie up off the mat with his split lip and his ruined hair and his eyes still burning holes in me, "and this time bring the whole Whitfield. Not the towel guy."

He went up the stairs. I stood in the half dark of the Pit for a long time, touching my own mouth like an idiot, heart going like a fight in a bag, alone with the skull and the Ledger and the radiators and the smoking ruins of twenty years of excellent locks.

Sort it out, Grayson.

Oh, I thought, I have sorted it, Dad. It is extremely sorted. I have never in my life been more sorted.

I laughed out loud, alone, in the basement. It echoed. I didn't recognize the sound, and I wanted to hear it again, and Saturday was in seven hours, and I did not sleep, and I did not care.

Chapter 12 — DANNY

I got there at five forty. He got there at five thirty-five.

We know this because we argued about it later — it became a whole thing, who was earlier, a matter of permanent dispute in the official record — but at the time, at five forty in the morning on a Saturday in November, I came down the stairs into the half-lit Pit and Grayson Whitfield was sitting against the mat wall with his forearms on his knees, in the exact spot where I'd had him pinned by nothing seven hours earlier, and he looked up at me, and neither of us said anything for about ten years.

"Hi," he said finally.

"Hi."

"I didn't sleep."

"Me neither."

"I rehearsed things to say," he said. "In the car. I had material."

"How's the material."

"Gone. All of it." He got up — one motion, wrestler-smooth, and my body noted it the way my body noted everything now, openly, the agreement dead and buried — and stood there in the half dark with his hands not knowing where to be, Grayson Whitfield, twenty years of coached correctness, fidgeting. "I don't know how to do this part," he said. "I know how to do the mat and I knew how to do the towel voice, and I burned the towel voice down last night, so the mat's all I've got, and if we tie up right now I'm going to mean something completely different by it, so I need you to—"