Page 18 of Rookie Mistake
He finishes with his forehead against my shoulder, breathing hard, his hands still on me, the hands not releasing, the not-releasing the most intimate thing his body has done because the not-releasing says: I do not want the distance. Distance is the control. The control is off.
I finish shortly after, his hand precise and focused, and the precision is the care and the care is the language Nikolai speaks when words are not available, and the care says: I am paying attention to you with the same intensity I bring to the thing I do best.
Afterward. The bed. The dark. His ceiling, which is white and unfamiliar and which I am looking at because looking at the ceiling is what people do after sex when the sex has changed something and the something needs a flat surface to process against.
He lies next to me. The distance between us is six inches. The six inches are his. I can feel the six inches being maintained the way I can feel a defensive scheme being maintained on the ice: through positioning and intent.
"This was a mistake," he says.
The word lands so hard I feel it in my teeth. For one second I can't hear anything except my own pulse.
My body goes still. The still is not the Nikolai-still. The still is the Eli-still, which is worse because Eli is never still and the being-still means the grin has failed and the performance has failed and underneath the failure is a man who just heard the words he was afraid of.
"That's not how it felt," I say.
"It is not about how it felt."
"Then what is it about?"
"You are a rookie. I am not some thirty-year-old who sleeps with the newest player in camp and pretends it means nothing."
"It doesn't mean nothing."
"That is not the problem."
I sit up. The sitting up is the beginning of the leaving. My body moves when my chest hurts. The moving is the survival instinct: put distance between the pain and the person causing it.
"I am not saying I did not want this," Nikolai says. His voice is quiet. The Russian accent is thicker, the way it gets when the control is at its thinnest. "It was not a mistake because I did not want it. It was a mistake because I do."
The sentence is a door. It opens both directions. The wanting is the mistake because the wanting is access, and access is the thing Alexei used, and the using is the wound that built the control. Nikolai wants me. The wanting terrifies him. Not because of me. Because of the last person he wanted, who took the wanting and made it a weapon.
I swing my legs off the bed and find my clothes because the understanding requires time and the time requires distance and the distance requires me to leave this room so that Nikolai can rebuild whatever he needs to rebuild and I can sit in the guest room (ten feet away, the longest ten feet in Atlanta) and hold the wanting like a live coal in my hands.
"I'm going to sleep in the guest room," I say.
"Eli."
"Not because I'm upset." I pull my shirt on. I look at him. He is sitting up in the bed, the sheet at his waist, the dark skin and the scars and the face that is not the control-face. The face is the underneath-face. The face is open and raw and frightened and the frightened is not about the sex. The frightened is about the wanting. "Because you need the night. You needed one last nightand I gave it to you. You need another one tonight. I'll give you this one too."
"And then?"
"And then we stop needing nights."
I walk to the guest room. I close the door. I sit on the edge of the bed with one sock half on and his scent still warm on my skin, which feels unfair enough to qualify as violence. The sheets are the same sheets from my first night in this apartment, when the water line was broken and the housing wasn't ready and I lay in this bed and listened to the shower running and imagined things I should not have imagined.
The shower is not running tonight. The apartment is quiet. The quiet is the Nikolai quiet, the built quiet, the controlled quiet. But the quiet sounds different now. The quiet sounds like a man in the next room processing the fact that he wanted something and the wanting was not a disaster and the not-disaster is the thing his architecture cannot explain.
I lie in the dark. The guest room ceiling is white. My body is warm from his body. My mouth is warm from his mouth. My chest contains the wanting and the wanting is not a mistake. The wanting is the speed and the grin and the thing that got me from Tampa to this apartment in this city with this man.
Rookie mistake. Sleeping with a veteran defenseman who says "this was a mistake" while his hands are still on you.
But his hands were still on me. That's the part that matters. The "mistake" came from his mouth. The staying came from his hands. And I have learned, in five days of watching Nikolai Sokolov, that his hands are more honest than his words.
I close my eyes. The ten feet between the rooms is the longest ten feet in Atlanta.
But the ten feet is not forever. And the wanting is real. And tomorrow I will still be here.
ELI
