Page 40 of Victory Lap

I close the laptop and sit with it for a second, the ordinary miracle of a Thursday that costs nothing. A few months ago, a Thursday weighed nine hundred pounds. Now it’s a video call from a balcony, and a woman who repotted a plant because I bullied her with data. Recovery is not a straight line. It is, however, ratable, and the trend continues up.

The shower happens before dinner.

We’re both in it, which is tradition. The villa’s shower is technically a one-person shower. We have never once respected that. Steam builds against the little window and the bougainvillea shadow moves in it, and Wes crowds me back against the tile with his hands already moving, over my shoulders, down my arms, slow and thorough. The kind of unhurried that Wes has been since Miami. Since always. Hands moving over me like I’m something he’s developing in a darkroom.

“Missed this,” he says, against my jaw. We have been in the same city for six weeks and he only came down a few days before me. It doesn’t matter. I know exactly what he means. There is Atlanta-us and Miami-us, and then there is this-us, the one that only exists where nobody knows our names, and we have both been missing this-us since February.

“Prove it,” I say, because provoking him is the fastest route to everything I want.

He proves it. His mouth comes down on mine, hard, water running between our faces, and his thigh pushes between mine and I am hard against his hip. He takes his time anyway. His hand slides down my chest, flat, deliberate, and wraps around my cock with the firm certainty that has been dismantling me since a couch in Miami years ago, and the first slow stroke pulls a sound out of me that the tile throws right back.

“There he is,” Wes says, low, pleased with himself, entirely too calm.

“You’re at a seven,” I manage. “The grip is an eight. The pace is dragging the composite.”

“The pace is on purpose.”

“I know the pace is on purpose. You’re a menace.”

He laughs into my neck, and the laugh turns into his teeth at my collarbone, gentle then not, and I stop having numbers. I get my hand around him and he exhales like I’ve knocked the air out of him, heavy and hot in my grip, his hips pressing forward into my fist, and for a while the only sounds in the room are water and skin and the two of us breathing like it’s the third period of a game. He strokes me slow and I stroke him not slow, an argument we conduct entirely by hand. He wins it the way he wins everything, patiently, his thumb dragging over the head of my cock on every pass until my knees start filing complaints and my head goes back against the tile.

And that’s when I notice.

The water is drumming on my chest. Drumming. Even, hard, insistent. The spray is holding its line from his shoulders all the way down to where our hands are working, no sputter, no sulk, no mid-shower loss of conviction.

“Wes.”

“Mm?”

“The water pressure.” He doesn’t stop what he’s doing, which makes this the hardest inspection I have ever conducted. I put my hand flat on his chest anyway. Professional standards. “Wes. Stop. Look at the showerhead. This is a nine-one. This shower has been a six at best since we started coming here. I have rated it. Multiple times. On the record.”

“Mentioning is not a complaint,” he says, into my wet hair, quoting me from long ago, his hand still moving, slow, evil. “Mentioning is a permission slip.”

“The landlord finally fixed it.” I’m panting and inspecting plumbing simultaneously, which is the most me I have ever been. “Wes. If the landlord fixed the shower, the landlord takes requests. The lock. The kitchen faucet that cries at night. I’m making a list. One document, itemized, before we…”

“You should take it up with management,” Wes says, smiling at me.

There’s a tone. I’ve known this man almost three years. I know all of his tones. This is the tone from the gelato counter. The tone from a kitchen in Miami with the retirement in his mouth. The tone of a man who has been carrying something and has just decided to set it down. His hand has gone still on me. His heart, under my palm, is going like a rookie’s.

“Wes?”

“The owner mentioned he was selling,” he says, shrugging his shoulder. “In April, when I called to book. He was going to list it after our week here. So I made him an offer.” Water runs between us. He pushes my wet hair back with one hand, careful, like he’s framing me. “It closed in June. I had them fix the water pressure first thing. I left the lock. The lock’s load-bearing.”

“You bought the villa?”

“Yes. Sort of,” he says, and his mouth does the smallest thing. “I bought it for us. I paid for it but it’s ours. Consider yourself the landlord. I am sure management is going to have notes about your list.”

The showerhead drums on. A nine-one. Somewhere in my chest an entire filing system undergoes an event.

I have a plan. I’ve had a plan since the handshake line of his last game. The plan has a document. The document has columns. And this man just stood in a shower he secretly bought for us, in the one country where we never had to hide, and called a sticking lock load-bearing. The plan just became unbearably slow. All of it. Every column.

I kiss him with the water going everywhere. He laughs into it, startled, and then he stops laughing, because I have him by the back of the neck and I am done being inspected today. I turn us. His back hits the tile and I press the whole length of myself against him and take us both in one hand, his cock against mine, slick and hot in the tight space between our bodies, and the sound he makes goes straight through me.

“Luca.” His voice has dropped through the floor of itself. His hands find my hips and grip hard enough to leave the good kind of evidence. “Fuck.”

“You bought me a house,” I say, working us slow, then less slow, his breath going ragged against my temple. “You kept it for months. Through the playoffs. Through the parade. Through my entire Cup day schedule, which you helped me plan, in the house that you had already bought.”

“I made the lime tree stay quiet too,” he manages.