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Chapter 11: Tobík
His text comes at 9:47 on Sunday morning.
Tomáš has film at 1. I'm free until 12:30. Šíma's at a coffee shop with Novotný.
I'm standing in my kitchen in briefs eating leftover lamb barbacoa from a container because Maria's lamb is better cold than most things are warm and this is Sunday and Sunday doesn't require a plate. I read the text. I read the math. The math is two hours and forty-three minutes.
I type one word and send it.
Come.
Fifteen minutes.
I put the phone down. I put the lamb back in the fridge. I pull on a shirt because answering the door shirtless feels like a declaration I haven’t planned and then I take the shirt backoff because the shirt felt like hiding and I put a different shirt on, the gray one, and the entire process takes forty seconds and accomplishes nothing and I’m aware of this.
The buzzer goes. I press the button without checking the camera because I know.
Damián. Hair up, the bun that means he left the hotel fast. A white t-shirt, shorts, running shoes. The outfit of a man who told anyone who asked that he was going for a run. His eyes find me and the blue goes focused in a way I’ve been reading for three days across ten-word texts that said nothing and meant everything.
He doesn’t say hi. He comes in and the door closes behind him. My hand is already reaching for his shirt before his mouth reaches mine.
The kiss is hungry. Two days of texting around it. His hand goes to the back of my neck immediately. My hands go flat against his chest, the breadth of him through the cotton, and his mouth opens against mine and the days collapse.
He tastes like hotel toothpaste and the coffee he probably drank on the walk over and underneath that he tastes like Damián, which is the taste I’ve been thinking about since Friday morning when he left this apartment and I stood at this counter and didn’t wash his coffee mug for six hours.
“I missed you,” I say against his mouth, because I’m a person who says true things and this one came out before the filter caught it.
He pulls back an inch. His eyes on mine. “It’s been two days.”
“I’m aware of how many days it’s been. I can count.”
“You missed me in two days.” He smiles down at me.
“I missed you in two hours. The two days were longer.”
Something crosses his face. Not the half-smile. The unprotected one. The one that arrives when I say a thing hewasn’t ready to hear and his face does the honest version before the composed version catches up.
He kisses me again. Harder. His hands at my hips, pulling me forward, and I can feel him through his shorts, already hard, the length of him against my thigh. My lower back hits the counter edge. He presses into me with wall holding me in place and the grind of him against me is so direct that my breath comes apart.
We work our way down the hall to my bedroom with his hands under my shirt pulling it up before we’ve left the entry and my hands are at his waistband and the coordination required to walk and undress a person at the same time is significant and we are not excelling at it.
He pulls my shirt off w. I reach for his. It goes. His chest in the morning light and I put my palm flat against his sternum where his heart is going fast and I hold it there because I like knowing what his heart does when he’s with me.
“You’re doing the thing,” he says.
“What thing?”
“The looking thing. Where you look at me like you’re cataloguing something.”
“I’m always cataloguing something. You have a new freckle. Here.” I touch his shoulder. “It wasn’t there Friday.”
“You’re tracking my freckles?”
“I’m observant. It’s a skill.”
He laughs. Short, warm, the surprised one, and my chest does what it always does with the surprised one and I let it.
His belt. My hands on the buckle. His hands on mine. We get each other’s shorts off with the gracelessness of two people who are in a hurry and also have large thighs, and his knee catches on the fabric and he stumbles sideways onto the bed and I follow him down and we’re both laughing and the laughing is good.
