Page 113

I take my time. All of it. I open him up with my fingers and my mouth until he's shaking and begging and wet, until he's saying please in a voice I'll hear in my sleep. I edge him once, twice, three times, and every time he says please, I say not yet, and every time he takes it, and holds there for me, and waits.

Then I push into him.

I fuck him slow and deep, with my hand on his throat, not pressing, just there, so he can feel it. His heels are locked behind my back. His taped hands are pulling against the headboard. He's looking right at me. He doesn't look away once.

"Tell me," I say.

"I love you." He says it against my mouth. "I love you, I love you, Dane⁠—"

"Again."

"I love you⁠—"

"You can come," I tell him. "Now. Come for me."

He comes with my name in his mouth, so hard his whole body bows up off the bed, clenching around me.

And I'm right there. I'm right on the edge. I've been on the edge since he knocked on my door. Every muscle in my body is shaking with it.

I stop.

I hold still inside him, and look down at him. At his face, wrecked and flushed and happy. At his wrists in the tape, seven wraps, the way he does my sticks. At the guy who stood on the blue line every morning and missed the fifth one on purpose because he didn't want it to end.

I put my forehead against his.

"Theo," I say.

"Mm." He's barely there. He's floating.

"Can I?"

His eyes come open.

He looks at me. I've given him orders all year. I've decided everything. When he eats. Where he sits. When he comes. I've never once asked him for anything that wasn't an order.

His face changes. Slowly. Something comes into it I've never seen before.

"Ask me again," he says.

"Can I come," I say. "Please."

He smiles.

"Yes," he says. "Yes. Whenever you want."

I come so hard I see stars. Buried in him, with his heels pressing me in and his taped hands straining toward me and his mouth against my ear saying yes, yes, yes, I've got you.

After, I unwind the tape. Every wrap. I rub the marks on his wrists with my thumbs until they're gone.

I don't run a bath. We're too tired. I get a washcloth, and clean us up, and get back into bed, and he puts his head on my chest, and I pull the blanket up over both of us.

Through the open window, Birch Street's dark and quiet. Somewhere a long way off, a train.

"Nationals next week," he says, into my chest.

"Yes."

"Then the season's over."