Page 25 of Victory Lap

“It is.”

“There’s a protocol for that table.”

“There’s a protocol for everything in this room. I’ve read the memo.” I put my hand flat on the table next to the Cup. “Everyone gets a day with it. Today’s mine. And I stood in my kitchen last night making a list of everybody who should touch it, and the list kept starting in the same place.”

He comes in slow. He walks around the table once, full orbit, reading the Cup like he reads a shoulder. His hand comes up and stops an inch off the silver like he’s waiting for intake paperwork.

“You can touch it, Zee.”

His hand settles on the bowl. He’s quiet for a long time. The HVAC hums in the background.

“You brought it here first,” he says. “Before your family. Before everyone.”

“I brought it to you first.” No joke arrives to protect the sentence. I let it stand there without one. A year ago that would have killed me. “I know staff doesn’t get their own day with the Cup. I love you. I wanted to share this with you, before everyone else.”

“Before everyone…”

“We have limited time, Zay. You’re wasting minutes on being emotionally moved by this amazing gesture from me.”

He looks at me across the table, across the Cup. Then he does something I have never seen him do in this room in my life.

He closes the door.

It clicks. The corridor light stays in the window and everything else goes soft dark. Zay turns around with his hand still on the handle. I understand exactly what he just did. I was there for every hour of the door being open. The open door was the rule. Whatever was between us, it stayed outside this building. That’s what he told me months ago, standing right where I’m standing.

“What happens between us stays outside the building. Outside this room,” he says, low, quoting himself across a year. “That’s what I told you.”

“You did.”

“I built this whole room to be the place where we weren’t real.” He crosses to me, unhurried, the clinical walk. His hands come up and take my face. Both of them. Warm as ever. Warmer. “The audit’s done. The memo’s filed. You’re Tyler’s patient and the season’s over and every person who signs my checks knows exactly what you are to me.” His thumbs trace my cheekbones once, assessing. “I know exactly what this room is, Teo. It’s July. I’m off the clock. The building is empty, and I’m choosing this with both eyes open.” A breath. “So...”

“So?”

“So everything that happens in this room exists now.”

I don’t get to answer that, because his mouth is on mine. It’s not the hotel kiss or the kitchen kiss or any kiss this room ever almost saw. It’s slow and absolutely certain. My back finds the table’s edge. His hands leave my face, land on my hips.

“On the table,” he says, against my jaw. “Shirt off.”

The laugh punches out of me, one beat, and then his hands slide under the hem and the laugh is gone. That’s the thing he does. That’s the thing he has always done, since a bathroom where I didn’t get his name. He unbuilds my sentences. I run my whole life on commentary. He takes it apart hand over hand until there’s nothing in my head but the place where his palm is flat over my chest, easing me back onto the paper.

“Okay?” he asks. He asks every time. He will ask forever.

“Extremely okay.”

“Look at you. Using those advanced words.”

He takes his time, because Zay has never once been hurried by anything I wanted. He goes exactly as slow as he decides, his mouth mapping down my chest along the lines his hands used to measure, and I'm already hard enough that the drag of my shorts is its own event, and he knows it, and he ignores it, professionally.

“Zay.”

“I’m assessing.”

“You’re stalling.”

“Same discipline.” His thumb hooks my waistband. “Different application.”

He strips me on his table. Shorts, gone. The air of the room I’ve been half-dressed in a hundred times lands on all of me at once, and my cock is flushed and heavy against my stomach and his eyes go down the length of me like a man reading a chart he wrote. He wraps his hand around me, firm, sure, and strokes once.