His hand slid into my jeans and wrapped around me and the sound I made was not quiet, which answered the question about which two. He covered my mouth with his other hand and the sensation of being silenced while being touched, the dual submission of sound and body, was so intensely erotic that my hips bucked against him involuntarily.
He worked me with the focused efficiency of a man who had learned my responses over the past week and was applying the data under pressure. Tournament conditions. No practice reps. Just execution. His grip, his rhythm, the specific twist at the top of each stroke that he had discovered made me lose the ability to form sentences. All of it deployed in a hotel bathroom at 12:47 AM with a sleeping rookie twenty feet away.
I came hard. Into his hand. Biting down on his fingers to muffle the sound, which was a detail I had not planned and which produced an expression on his face that was so raw with want that I immediately dropped to my knees.
The bathroom floor was cold. I didn't care. I pulled his boxers down and took him in my mouth and his hand went to the counter edge and gripped it and the sound he made was, credit where due, considerably quieter than mine, though the restraint cost him visibly. His jaw was clenched and his throat was taut and the tendons in his neck stood out like cables and the sight of Jonah Park exercising superhuman vocal control while I took him apart was the most powerful I had ever felt.
He came with a shudder and a bitten-off version of my name that was more consonant than vowel and I swallowed because the logistics of the situation did not permit alternatives and because I wanted to and the wanting was its own revelation.
Afterward. On the bathroom floor. His back against the tub, my head on his thigh. The exhaust fan humming. Eriksson snoring through the wall.
"We are going to get caught," he said.
"We are not going to get caught. Eriksson sleeps like a man in a coma."
"Not by Eriksson. By someone. This is not sustainable. Sneaking through hotel hallways at midnight. Hooking up in bathrooms."
"It's a little sustainable."
"Ren."
"I know." I lifted my head from his thigh and looked at him. The fluorescent light was doing him no favors and he was still the most beautiful thing in the room. "We tell Cole after the road trip."
"After the road trip."
"I promise."
"Okay."
I kissed him. He kissed me back. The bathroom was small and bright and smelled like hotel soap and the specific, private scent of what we had just done, and the combination should have been unromantic but was instead the most intimate space I had ever occupied because the intimacy was not about the setting. It was about the man.
I snuck back to my room at 1:15 AM. The hallway was empty. The elevator was empty. The fourteenth floor was silent. I let myself into my single room and lay on my single bed and pressed my hand against my own mouth where his hand had been and felt the ghost pressure of his palm silencing me and the ghost pressure was enough to make my heart rate spike all over again.
The road trip continued. Miami. Carolina. Two more games, two more hotel nights, two more exercises in the specific, excruciating discipline of pretending the person you love is just a colleague.
We won all three games. Jonah played beautifully. I watched from the press box and took notes and the notes were professional and the feelings behind the notes were anything but.
On the flight home, Jonah sat four rows ahead of me. He did not turn around. He did not text. He was a professional in a professional setting and the professionalism was appropriate and I respected it and also I wanted to climb over four rows of seats and sit in his lap.
When we landed, we shared a ride home from the airport. In his truck. The radio on low. The familiar drive from Hartsfield to Midtown.
"We made it," he said.
"We made it."
"Nobody noticed?"
"Luca noticed."
"Luca notices oxygen molecules. He doesn't count."
"He mouthed 'careful' at me during dinner."
"Of course he did."
We pulled into the apartment parking lot. He turned off the engine. The truck was dark. The city hummed around us.
"I don't want to sneak through hotel hallways anymore," I said. "I don't want to be quiet in bathrooms. I want to be loud in our apartment and eat breakfast at our table and hold your hand when we walk to the car."