Page 68 of The Grumpy Defenseman
“Yes. God, yes.”
He pushed into me, and the sound he made was rough enough to scrape. My hands found his shoulders. His found my hips, lifting, adjusting, settling me against him until there was no space left to disappear into.
“Fuck,” he breathed against my temple. “Sam.”
The word landed differently in his mouth than it would have in anyone else’s. From a man who never swore, it sounded like something coming out from under pressure that had been building for weeks.
He moved.
Slow at first, the same way he did everything: testing the angle, reading what I gave back, adjusting. Then less slow. The desk shifted beneath us. His mouth found my throat, my collarbone, the soft place below my ear that made my back arch every time he hit it. I did not know I had a place that did that until he found it.
“There,” he said, low. “Right there.”
I lost track of language.
What I remembered after, in pieces: the heat of his chest under my palm. The way his hand slid into my hair and held. The sound he made when I tightened around him, like the discipline he had spent his whole life building had finally found something it could not contain.My name in his mouth in three different registers—careful, then urgent, then wrecked.
When he came, he buried his face in my neck and held on like the room would tilt if he let go.
I held on because he needed me to.
Afterward, we stayed tangled together on the narrow desk that was absolutely not designed for this purpose, our breathing slowly finding a shared rhythm. The office hummed around us. The stripe of hallway light had moved farther across the floor. Time had passed. The world was still turning outside this room even though it felt like it had stopped.
His hand rested on my hip, thumb tracing absent circles he did not seem aware of. His breathing had finally steadied.
“I don’t know what happens now,” he said quietly.
“Me neither.”
He pulled back just enough to look at me. In the low light, his expression was stripped of every defense I had ever seen him wear.No walls. No calculated blankness. Just a man who had let someone past every barrier he had spent a lifetime constructing and was now standing in the open, terrified and unwilling to go back inside.
I touched his face. His cheek was warm under my palm.
“We don’t have to figure it out tonight,” I said.
“Okay.”
“But you should know, I’m not going to pretend this didn’t happen.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. Not a smile. The architecture of one. The closest thing he had to a promise.
“Good,” he said. “Neither am I.”
Samantha
Three nights later, an hour after the home game ended, Evan showed up at my condo with takeout and the over-edited normalcy of a man trying to pass as fine through bad lighting.
He did not look hurt.
Evan would rather throw himself into active traffic than look hurt on purpose. But I had been photographing his body for weeks, and bodies told the truth faster than mouths did.
Normal Evan dropped his keys in the bowl by the door and rolled his neck like a man coming down from a game.
This Evan used the counter edge to brace himself when he bent for the takeout bag.
Normal Evan moved like his body belonged to him.
This Evan moved like his right side had filed a formal complaint.
