Page 26 of Victory Lap

“There it is,” he says against my neck. “The quiet.”

“Zay.”

“Right here.”

“You’re going to kill me.”

He works me slow. Slower than I want, his fist moving in long unhurried pulls, his thumb sweeping the head on every pass and coming away slick. I’m making sounds into the dark of this room that it has never heard, and the Cup next to us, absolutely silent, the best-behaved witness in hockey history.

“Zee.” My hand finds the back of his neck. “Zee, I need...”

“I know what you need.”

And then he stops, one breath, his forehead against my stomach, his fist still around my cock, and he says it.

“Teo.”

Just that. My name. The one this room has never heard him say. Not once. Four hundred hours of Marchetti, get on the table, Marchetti. He lifts his head and looks up the length of me and says it again, deliberate, a man signing something.

“Teo.”

And then he takes me in his mouth.

The first time this man ever touched me, I was on my knees for him in a club bathroom. Now his mouth slides down my cock in the room where he rebuilt me, hot and slow and absolutely certain, one hand pinning my hip to the table because he knows me. He knows exactly what my hips are about to do, and I put my forearm over my mouth and he reaches up without stopping and pulls it away.

“Door’s closed,” he says, against me. “Nobody is around to write us up.” And he goes back down on me.

I don’t last. There was never a version where I lasted. He works me with his mouth and his fist together, patient, thorough, merciless, and the heat gathers at the base of my spine, and I get out half of his name as a warning. He hums something and doesn’t pull off. I come down his throat with my hand in his hair and his name breaking out of me, loud, unarmored, in the room built to never hear it.

He works me through it. Gently through the end. He stands, wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist, and looks entirely, insufferably composed except for his eyes, which are not composed at all.

He is also hard. Achingly, obviously, straining against his shorts, and he has made no move about it whatsoever, because this man’s entire operating system is to take care of the person on the table.

Not today.

I slide off the table. I turn us and back him into the table’s edge, and he lets me do it, watching me with those deep brown eyes. I pull his waistband down and get my hand around his cock, hard and hot and criminally neglected, and I go down on my knees on the floor of his treatment room.

“Teo.” A warning. A want. Both at once.

“The first time I ever touched you,” I say, looking up the whole length of him, “I was on my knees in the dark and I didn’t know your name.” I stroke him once, slow, and watch his jaw go loose.

I take him in my mouth, deep as I can manage, and the sound he makes is not clinical. His hands hover at my head for one restraint-filled second, and then they land in my hair, and I hum my approval. I work him the way I know he likes. Slow base, tight focus, no mercy on the details. Above me the composure comes apart in increments, and I get to watch it happen from the best seat in the building. The measured breathing goes first. Then his hips start to move in small helpless corrections against every professional instinct he owns.

“Teo. Teo, I’m…”

I don’t pull off. He comes down my throat gripping the table edge with one hand and my hair with the other, saying nothing at all, which from Zay is a scream. I work him through it the way he worked me. Fair is fair. Protocol is protocol.

When I stand up, his forehead drops to my shoulder. We stay like that for a minute, both of us wrecked, the Cup presiding.

“Extremely good,” he says, finally, into my shirt that isn’t there.

The last thing I have language for is this: the room is his, and the table is his, and I have been his in here since September.

“Something on your mind, Marchetti?”

“Not one thing. That’s the entire review.”

It’s 6:50. We put the room back together the way he likes it. Tape by width. Bands by resistance. I wheel the Cup out through the corridor with Zay beside me, and at the door he stops and looks back once at the table.