Page 47 of Takedown

You don't beat a man worth beating by wanting him worse off. I lay there and let it work on me, because Frank Kovac doesn't hand out fifty words a decade and when he spends them you bank them at face value. He'd caught it from four hundred miles off, through a phone, in the dead air between twelve-three and nothing: that I'd quit wanting to beat Grayson and started wanting him diminished, which are two different appetites, and only one of them is wrestling. The other one is just the town talking. It's the valley in your mouth — if you can't have the thing clean, make sure nobody can. Salt the field. Call it pride. I'd watched it eat men my whole life, guys on my father's shift who'd have rather seen the mill close for good than watch it run one more year for somebody else's kid. And here it was up in me, wearing my own righteousness like a coat it stole, and the old man had named it in six words from a recliner and then handed me the cure in the same breath and pretended the whole thing was about setups and back position, because that channel's the only one we've ever had that carries. Fix his back. Christ. Eighth-grade education and he out-coached every dollar the Whitfields ever spent on that kid.

Saturday there was a home dual. I won 12–3 and felt nothing. He wrestled an exhibition after and won by fall and I watched from the far end of the bench with my towel job given to a freshman, because I'd asked Halloran to switch me, which Halloran did without one word and with a look I felt in my spine. The gym emptied. The team went to wings. I told Miles I had film.

I had film. I sat in my room not watching it while Toby not-watched me over his problem set, and at eleven I did the thing I'd been not doing for eleven days, which was go to the Pit, because the Pit was mine before it was ours and I wanted my room back.

He was already there. Of course he was. Five thirty-five. The bastard.

Of course he was already there. Five thirty-five to my five forty, always, permanent dispute, official record. He was on the far mat with the dummy and he stopped when the stairs announced me, and we stood forty feet apart in the half light in the one room on earth where neither of us had ever successfully told a lie.

"I'll go," he said.

"It's your family's basement."

"Danny."

"Stay. Go. Pick one." And then, because eleven days of being right came up my throat all at once with nowhere to be: "You always get to pick, Whitfield, that's the whole — you pick the room, you pick the laugh, you pick when it's real, and the rest of us live in whatever you picked—"

"Then take a pick away from me." He crossed half the room, fast, the appetite-walk, the one I taught him, and stopped inside range with his hands loose and his eyes burning and every ounce of the correctness gone. "Go live. Right now. Full pace. You've got eleven days of it in your shoulders and I can see it from here, and I owe you a target, so take one. That's the language, isn't it? The only one I never lied to you in. So let's talk."

I should have gone home. Put it in the record. Five ways to end that night clean, and I saw all five, and I walked past every one of them and hit him with a double leg that had eleven days in it.

We went live in the dark and it was ugly, and it was honest, and it escalated exactly the way you think — the fight from the kiss chapter with all the tenderness burned out of it, grips past legal, weight past reason, both of us breathing like furnaces, until a scramble put him under me with his back on the mat and my forearm across his chest and both of us stopped, pinned in the oldest geometry, three seconds, four, the fraction gone feral —

and he arched up and kissed me, or I dropped and kissed him. The record disputes it. The record was busy.

What happened after wasn't like anything we'd had. I need to write it true: it wasn't making up and we both knew it. It was two bodies overruling a cold war they had no vote in — fast, rough, wordless, his hands ripping my shirt over my head, mine pinning his wrists to the mat because if he touched my face I was going to feel something and feeling something was against the walls, all the walls, every code-compliant brick. He didn't fight the pin. He watched me from under it, eyes open the whole time — seeing me, the bastard, even now, even like this, doing the one thing Wade never did with the one thing Wade's script demanded — and I took him rough on the mat of his family's basement with his wrists locked in my grip and his body rising to meet every stroke like an argument he was winning by losing.

Once — once — my grip ground bone and his fingers moved: tap-tap, faint, against my palm. I eased off before I'd finished registering it. Instantly. Reflex deeper than rage. His eyes flickered — there you are — and that half-second of gentleness inside all that fury was the truest thing either of us said all night, and we both pretended it hadn't happened, and went back to the war.

"Bag," he got out, when it was clear where this was going, jaw tight, chin jerking toward the wall. "Side pocket."

I found it one-handed, and stopped — one beat, one single beat of the war suspended — because the side pocket of Grayson Whitfield's gym bag held what it held, had been holding it, which meant that through eleven days of the towel voice and the dead-air drilling and my code-compliant walls, he'd been carrying hope to practice in a side pocket like a man who packs an umbrella in a drought. He watched me understand it from the mat, wrists free now, going nowhere, and had the decency not to say anything, and I had the rage not to either.

I opened him fast and none too gentle and he took it that way on purpose, breath hissing, hips pushing back against my fingers with his eyes locked on mine — no ceiling-staring, no drifting off into the body, seeing me, always the seeing, the one weapon I couldn't confiscate — and when I lined up and drove into him it was one long stroke with eleven days behind it, and the sound he made cracked off the mat walls and lived in that room permanently as far as I'm concerned, the Ledger can have it.

There was no rhythm you'd call generous. I fucked him the way we'd wrestled twenty minutes before — forward, relentless, like weather, like a bill — one hand pinning his hip to the mat, the other planted beside his head in the position, the eternal position, drilling stance gone feral, and he met every stroke with his heels dug in and his fists in my shirt, pulling me harder into him, refusing to lose even this, even like this, especially like this. Sweat dripped off my jaw onto his throat and ran, and he arched into it. The radiators ticked. The skull presided. Somewhere in it he said my name once — not a request, a verdict — and I bit it off his mouth before it could do to me what it was doing to me.

He came first, untouched, shouting into my shoulder, his whole body clamping down and taking me over the edge with him inside three strokes — I spilled into him with my teeth in the meat of his shoulder and eleven days going out of me at once, every righteous brick, all of it, gone into the dark of his family's basement — and then it was over, and the room was just breathing and pipes.

We lay side by side on the cold mat after, not touching, chests heaving at the ceiling, two feet of dead air between us where all season there'd been a shoulder.

I lay there in the dark two feet from him and ran the accounting my body runs whether or not I sign off on it. Here's what it came back with. I had just taken the one person who ever looked past the conditions to the guy generating them, and I'd tried to use him the exact way Wade used me — heat with the eyes shut, a body to spend a bad mood on and walk away from clean. That was the whole plan. Get my room back. Put him under me. Prove it was only ever this, the animal thing, nothing that could cost me a cent. And it hadn't taken, because he wouldn't close his eyes. Eleven days I'd spent rebuilding the precise wall Wade lived behind his whole life, and I'd hauled it down into that basement to hide behind, and Grayson had looked at me over the top of it the entire time — refusing to be Wade for me, refusing to let this be that, refusing every single exit I'd built into the night. You can't run a cold war on a man who won't stop seeing you. I learned it from the wrong side, flat on the mat of his family's house, having just proved it to myself the hard way and lost the match I thought I was winning.

The radiators ticked. The skull kept its counsel.

"That didn't fix it," he said, finally, to the pipes.

"No."

"Nothing's fixed."

"No."

Silence. Then, quietly, with the crack showing: "But you stopped. When I tapped. Eleven days of hating me, at full pace, in the dark, and your hand let go before your head knew—"

"Don't." I was already up, already finding my shirt, because he was doing the thing, the seeing thing, reading the one true sentence my body had said and holding it up to the light, and I could not afford the light. "That's reflex. That's training. It's not—"

"It's you," he said, still flat on the mat, not moving, watching me dress from the floor with his ruined hair and his mouth I'd bitten and his voice with no armor left on it at all. "The training is you. The reflex is you. That's what I know now that I didn't know at the party. I met the man with the walls down, Danny. I know which one's real."