The prep room behind the studio smelled like a swim meet and a hospital had a baby in a closet. Chlorine and dust and the sweet chemical ghost of whatever they used to clean the mirrors, and under all of it something older — sweat worked into the wood of the bench by a hundred years of bodies sitting down to lace up skates for photos nobody would ever see.

Beck dropped his duffel on the floor and stood in the middle of the room with his hands on his hips, because there was nothing else to do with them. A single bulb hung from a cord in the ceiling. A metal sink, stained brown at the drain. A wooden table with a manila envelope on it, and his name on the envelope in Sharpie, and next to it — a second envelope with Topher's name on it, and a third door at the back of the room, closed, with a hand-lettered sign taped to it that said CHANGE 2.

His own door said CHANGE 1. Right there. Four feet away.

"So they're putting us in separate rooms," Beck said, to the room, to the envelopes, to nobody. He picked his up and weighed it. Lighter than it looked. "That's — yeah. That's a choice somebody made."

The door to CHANGE 2 stayed shut. Behind it, he could hear the small sounds of another person existing in a small space: the creak of a bench, a zipper, something set down on wood. Beck stood very still and listened to it the way he listened to a crowd when he was about to step onto the ice — reading it, waiting for it to tell him something.

It didn't tell him anything. It was a zipper.

He went into his room and shut the door.

The room was the size of a walk-in closet and about as furnished: a bench, a hook, a full-length mirror mounted on the wall with a crack running up one corner like a river on a map. Beck set the envelope on the bench and looked at it for a second before he opened it, the way you look at a bill you already know the number on.

Then he tore the flap.

Tissue paper first. Green tissue paper, folded like somebody cared, and under it something dark and soft that slid out onto his palm and sat there being exactly what it was, which was a pair of underwear that cost more than his rent and had been designed by a person who had clearly never once thought about a hockey player putting them on.

Beck held them up.

Forest green. He thought that first — forest green, deep and dark like the trees behind the rink at home. And then he registered the rest of it: the cut, the lace at the sides, the way the front panel was barely a panel, a scrap of silk with a seam down the middle and nothing else, no elastic waistband, no support, no mercy. A matching strap of fabric for the top — a bralette, he guessed, though he had never in his life had a reason to use that word — thin straps, a band that would sit right under his ribs, and the whole thing weighed about as much as a breath.

"Okay," Beck said out loud, and heard his own voice do something in the middle of the word. "Okay."

He sat down on the bench.

For a long moment he just looked at the thing in his hands, and the thing looked back, green and glossy under the single bulb, and he thought — with the kind of clarity that arrives at inconvenient moments — about the fact that Topher was four feet away through two walls of drywall opening an identical envelope with the same tissue paper and the same amount of fabric inside, and that somebody had chosen these sets for them, and that somebody had chosen them to match.

Not match. Coordinate. That was the word. There was a difference and he knew what it was and he didn't want to think about it.

He stripped. Hoodie on the hook, jeans folded on the bench because he wasn't raised in a barn, socks balled into his shoes — and then he stood there in his boxers, in a cracked mirror, in a room the size of a closet, and felt the specific absurdity of the situation land on him all at once.

"You signed up for this," he told the mirror. "Nobody made you."

The mirror did not disagree.

The boxers came off. The green silk went on.

And here was the thing about it that Beck hadn't prepared for, standing there with the straps up over his shoulders and the band snug under his ribs and the front panel doing absolutely nothing to hide the fact that he was a man in a room by himself in lingerie: it felt good. Not funny-good. Not a-joke-good. The silk was cool for about a second and then it was just — warm. Alive against his skin. The lace at his hips sat exactly where his hands rested when he stood like this, thumbs hooked, and the strap across his chest moved when he breathed and he could feel every inch of it.

He turned to the mirror. Turned sideways. Turned back.

"Jesus," he said, quietly, and it wasn't a joke either.

The green was good on him. The green was really good on him — the dark of it against his pale skin, the way it made the red in his hair look deliberate instead of accidental, the way it sat on his shoulders like it had been measured. He looked like a person somebody had thought about. He looked like a person somebody had drawn.

He looked, Beck thought, with a slow flush climbing up the back of his neck, like something Topher might —

He stopped the thought there. Put a hand on the back of his neck like he could physically hold it in.

"Nope," he said. "Nope, we're not doing that."

But it was already done. The thought had already gone in. And now he was standing in a closet in green silk thinking about Topher in the room next door and there was no version of the next ten minutes that didn't end with him seeing him, so really the only question was whether he put his jeans back on over this or not, and he stood there for a full thirty seconds deciding.

He didn't put the jeans back on.

He opened the door.

The prep room was empty and the bulb was still swinging very slightly from the draft, and the door to CHANGE 2 was still shut, and Beck walked out into the middle of the room in green silk and bare feet on cold concrete and stood there with his arms crossed over his chest like he was waiting for a bus. Which he was, sort of. He was waiting for a door.

He heard the handle turn.

And Topher came out.

And Beck's entire brain — every part of it, the part that talked, the part that planned, the part that had a comeback ready for every single thing that had ever happened to him — went completely and totally silent.

Midnight blue.

That was the first thing. Midnight blue, so dark it was almost black until the light caught it and then it was blue, deep and cold and rich, and it was on Topher's body, and Topher's body was — Beck had seen Topher in a locker room a hundred times, he had seen him in a towel, he had seen him in nothing but shin guards and a bad mood, and none of that had prepared him for this. The blue was cut high on his hips and low on his chest and it made his skin look like it had been lit from underneath, sun-warmed and gold, and the straps sat on his shoulders like they'd been tailored, and there was a strip of silk down his front and nothing else, and the whole length of him — the long lines of him, the thigh muscles, the flat plane of his stomach, the elegant goddamn hands hanging at his sides — was just there. Outlined. Offered.

Beck did not say anything.

He tried. He opened his mouth. Nothing came out. The air in the room had gone thick and slow and he could hear his own pulse in his ears and he was standing there in green silk with his arms crossed like an idiot and he could not make a single sound come out of his mouth.

Topher's eyes came up.

Silver-grey. Catching the bulb. And Beck watched them go over him — down and up, fast, the way you check a scoreboard — and he watched them stop, and he watched what happened on Topher's face when they stopped, which was nothing. Nothing happened on Topher's face. That was the thing. Topher's face did absolutely nothing, composed and blank and steady, except that his hands — his elegant, steady, physiotherapist hands — curled. Both of them. Fingers curving in toward his palms, slow, like he was holding something back, and then releasing, and then curling again.

Beck saw it. Beck saw it and something in his chest turned over like a key.

"You're wearing the green," Topher said.

His voice was even. Perfectly even. Like he was commenting on the weather. Beck had heard that voice a thousand times and he knew exactly what it cost, and he knew that because he was doing the same thing right now with his own throat, standing there with his arms crossed trying to remember how words worked.

"They gave me the green," Beck said. It came out rough. He cleared his throat. "They gave me the green, yeah."

"Huh."

Topher walked out into the room. He walked like he was crossing a rink — that unhurried, long-strided, weight-back thing he did, and the blue moved with him, and Beck stood exactly where he was because he was not sure his legs were going to do anything he asked them to. Topher stopped at the wooden table, three feet away, and picked up his envelope, and turned it over like there was something on the back he needed to read, and there wasn't, and they both knew there wasn't.

"So," Topher said, to the envelope.

"So," Beck said.

"This is — " Topher gestured, vaguely, with the envelope, at Beck, at himself, at the room, at the entire situation. "This is a lot of fabric."

Beck laughed. It came out of him before he could stop it, a short surprised bark of a laugh, and the sound of it did something to the room — cracked the shell of it, let some air in. "That's your read? That's what you're going with?"

"It's a comment."

"It's a bad comment."

"You didn't say anything at all for a full minute," Topher said, and there it was — the edge under the composure, sharp and quick, the thing he did when he was cornered. "I had to say something."

"I was looking."

The words were out before Beck had decided to say them. He heard them land in the room and he watched Topher's hands curl again, both of them, and he watched Topher not look at him, which was somehow worse and better than being looked at.

"Yeah," Topher said, quietly. "I noticed."

Beck uncrossed his arms. He didn't do it on purpose. He just — let them go, let them hang, and stood there in the green silk in the middle of the room with nothing to hide behind, and he watched Topher's eyes come back to him and stay this time, go down the length of him slow and unhurried, and it was the longest four seconds of Beck's life.

"The green's good on you," Topher said.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

Beck took a step closer. He didn't decide to. His feet did it. "The blue's — " and he stopped, because there was no safe way to finish that sentence, and he could feel the whole thing balanced on the edge of him, the teasing and the truth right up against each other with no gap between them, and for once in his life Beck Marlow did not reach for the joke.

"The blue's what," Topher said. Not a question. A door held open.

"The blue's making it really hard to remember I'm supposed to be making fun of you right now."

Topher's mouth did something. Almost a smile. Almost. And then he looked at the floor, and his hand came up and pushed back a piece of his hair that had fallen forward — almost-black brown, thick, and it slid through his fingers slow — and Beck watched him do it and thought, with a kind of dull wonder, that he had watched him do exactly that a thousand times and had never once felt it in his teeth like this.

"They're going to come get us," Topher said. "In a minute. Somebody's going to knock."

"Yeah."

"And we're going to have to walk out there."

"Yeah."

"In this."

"In this," Beck agreed, and neither of them moved, and the bulb swung a little on its cord, and the room got very quiet in a way that had nothing to do with silence.

Beck looked at Topher's hands. They were at his sides now, not curled, just — there. Elegant and still. And Beck thought about how easy it would be to cross the last three feet and take one of them. Just take it. And how he had touched Topher a hundred times — a shove at the boards, a hand on the shoulder, a knuckle to the ribs — and how none of those had ever been this, none of them had ever been three feet of cold concrete and green silk and blue silk and a door that hadn't opened yet.

"Hey," Beck said.

Topher looked up.

"You look — " Beck started, and stopped, and made himself finish it, because he was not going to be the one to flinch, not in this room, not in this outfit. "You look really good. That's all. I just wanted to say it before somebody knocked."

Topher didn't answer. He looked at Beck for a long moment, and his jaw moved, and his eyes were doing something Beck couldn't read — the grey going darker the way it did when he was really listening, when he'd stopped performing and started paying attention — and then he said, in a voice that was carefully, deliberately level:

"You too."

A pause.

"That's also all."

And then, before Beck could do anything with that — before he could decide whether to close the distance or make a joke or just stand there and let the whole thing keep happening — footsteps in the hall outside. Two people. A knock on the prep room door, brisk and cheerful and completely unaware of what it was walking into.

"Boys! You decent?"

Beck looked at Topher. Topher looked at Beck. Neither of them moved toward the door, and neither of them moved away from each other either, and the knock came again, and somewhere behind it Lydia was probably — no. Not Lydia. Beck didn't know who was out there and he found he didn't care, because the only thing in the room that mattered was the three feet of cold concrete between him and a man in midnight blue who had just told him, in the flattest voice in the world, that he looked good.

"Yeah," Beck called, without looking away from Topher. "We're decent."

Topher's mouth twitched. Just at the corner. Just once.

"Speak for yourself," he said, quiet enough that only Beck could hear it.

And Beck — standing in green silk in a concrete room with a photographer knocking on the door and the whole rest of his life waiting on the other side of it — laughed, and reached out, and put his hand on Topher's shoulder. Just there. Just for a second. Felt the warmth of him through the strap of the bralette, felt the muscle under the silk, felt Topher go very still under his palm and not step away.

"Come on," Beck said, and his own voice surprised him, low and rough and steady. "Let's go get looked at."

He let go. He walked to the door. And he heard, behind him, Topher's bare feet on the concrete — following him. Close. Closer than he needed to.

His hand was on the handle before he'd finished deciding to put it there. Cold brass, worn smooth in the middle from a hundred years of other hands. He stopped. Just — stopped, with his fingers wrapped around it and the door still shut and his own breath loud in the small concrete room, and he turned his head.

Topher was right behind him. Close enough that Beck could see the single bulb caught in the dark of his hair.

Beck didn't say anything. Neither did Topher. They just stood there in the green and the blue with the knock still hanging in the air, and Beck looked at him — really looked, the way you look at a person when the door's about to open and you know exactly what's going to change the second it does. Topher's jaw was set. His eyes were steady. And his hands, down at his sides, were still and quiet for the first time since he'd walked out of CHANGE 2, and that — the stillness of them — was somehow the loudest thing in the room.

Beck tilted his chin. A question without words. You good?

Topher's mouth moved. Almost nothing. Almost a nod. But it was there, and Beck caught it, and something in his chest settled into place like a bone going back in a socket.

He turned the handle.

The door swung, and the light came in first — not the bulb, real light, white and flat and enormous — and then the voice, bright and impatient and already halfway through a sentence:

"— there you are, I was starting to think you two ran off. Honestly, I've had brides do it. Brides. You're not brides, you're hockey players, but I've had—"

The photographer stopped. She was short, somewhere in her forties, with a lanyard around her neck and reading glasses pushed up into a nest of grey-brown curls, and she had a clipboard in one hand and a coffee in the other, and she looked at Beck and then at Topher and then back at Beck, and her whole face did a slow, delighted thing.

"Oh, you're coordinated," she said. "Nobody told me you were coordinated. I was told 'two hockey boys, we'll see what we get.'" She turned and started walking without waiting for either of them, her voice carrying back down the corridor like she expected them to follow it. "I have ideas."

The corridor was short and bright and smelled like the inside of a new car. Beck stepped out of the prep room and the concrete went to linoleum and the bulb went to strip lighting and everything got very loud and very white and very real, very fast. He could hear the studio before he saw it — a fan somewhere, the low hum of a light rig, somebody moving a stand, a radio playing something soft and old at low volume under all of it.

He glanced back.

Topher was two steps behind him. Barefoot on the linoleum, midnight blue catching the overheads, walking with that long unhurried stride like he'd been doing it his whole life. He didn't look at Beck. He looked straight ahead, at the doorway at the end of the corridor, at whatever was waiting in it. But his hand — his right hand, the elegant one — was swinging at his side with the thumb curled into the palm, and Beck watched it and knew exactly what it meant, because he'd watched that exact hand do that exact thing before every single game they'd ever played together.

"Hey," Beck said, quiet, sideways.

Topher's eyes flicked to him. Just a flick.

"They're not gonna bite," Beck said.

"I know."

"I'm serious. It's a camera. I've seen you take a slapshot with a broken finger."

Topher's mouth moved at the corner. "That's not the same thing."

"It's exactly the same thing."

"It's a camera pointed at me wearing this," Topher said, and the word this came out with a whole life in it — flat and dry and somehow still doing something under the surface, the way it always did when he was pretending not to care.

Beck snorted. "Yeah. And you look—" He caught himself. Stopped. The photographer was six feet ahead of them and could hear every word and he found, weirdly, that he didn't care. "You look fine. You look better than fine. You've looked better than fine for the last ten minutes, that's kind of the whole problem."

Topher didn't answer. But he didn't look away either, and they walked the last few feet of the corridor with their eyes on each other and the studio opening up in front of them like a stage.

It was bigger than Beck had pictured. High ceiling, black floor, a sweep of white seamless paper curving up the back wall, and lights — lights everywhere, soft boxes and umbrellas and a strip light low on a stand and a fan pointed at the paper to keep it moving, which explained the rustle. A rack of clothes stood off to one side under a plastic cover. A table with water bottles and a bowl of fruit nobody was going to eat. And in the middle of the white, right at the point where the seamless curved, a single wooden crate. Just a crate. Sitting there like it had a job.

"Okay," the photographer said, setting her coffee down on the table and turning around with the clipboard against her chest. "I'm Dana. I'm going to be in your business for the next hour and I'm going to be very direct about it, so let's get that out of the way. What are your names?"

"Beck."

"Topher."

"Beck and Topher." Dana wrote something. "Great. Now. Here's the thing." She looked at them both, one and then the other, and her face did that delighted thing again, slower this time, like she was solving something. "You two have been standing next to each other for forty seconds and I've watched you do it. Whatever you're doing, keep doing it. That's not a note, that's a compliment."

Beck felt his own face get hot. He heard Topher shift his weight beside him.

"I — okay," Beck said.

"Great." Dana pointed at the crate with her pen. "Topher, on the crate. Beck, right here, ground level. First setup's simple, I just want to see how you two settle, and then we'll build."

Topher walked to the crate. He climbed onto it in one movement, the way he did everything, and then he stood up on it and the seamless paper ran away from him in a white curve and the fan pushed his hair back off his forehead and the blue caught the strip light and went almost black and then blue again, and Beck — standing on the black floor six feet away with his arms hanging at his sides — forgot, for a second, how to stand like a person.

Dana saw it. Of course she saw it. She had a camera in her hands now, a big one, and she was lifting it to her eye and she said, without lowering it, "Beck, you're staring."

"I'm aware."

"Good. Keep it."

The shutter went. Once. Twice. A third time, and then a run of them, and Beck heard the clicks and the little mechanical whir between them and he stood there on the black floor in green silk and bare feet and watched Topher on the crate under the light, and Topher watched him back, and neither of them did anything at all.

"Okay," Dana said, lowering the camera. "That's — that's already good. But I want to try something. Beck, come here."

He walked over. Bare feet on black floor, green silk moving against his thighs, the fan catching the strap across his chest and pulling it a quarter-inch and setting it back. He stopped next to the crate. Dana put a hand on his shoulder and moved him an inch to the left, and then a half-step back, and then she stepped away and looked at the two of them through the camera and made a small sound.

"Yeah," she said. "Okay. Topher, look down at him. Beck, look up. Just — don't perform. Don't do anything. Just look."

Beck looked up.

Topher looked down.

And the room went very quiet. The radio kept playing something soft and old. The fan kept moving the paper and the paper kept rustling and Dana kept taking pictures, click, click, click, and Beck stood there with his head tilted back and his eyes on Topher's face and Topher's eyes on his, and the distance between them was maybe two feet of air and a crate's worth of height and nothing at all.

He could see the pulse in Topher's throat. He could see the strap of the bralette sitting on his shoulder where the muscle met the bone. He could see a small scar on his left forearm, old and white, that Beck had never noticed in five years of locker rooms, and he thought — absurdly, briefly — how have I never noticed that, and then the thought was gone because Topher's eyes had shifted, just slightly, down to Beck's mouth and back up, and Beck felt it happen in his own chest like a hand closing.

"Hold that," Dana said. "Hold — yes. Yes. That's the one."

Click. Click. Click.

"Now," she said, "I want a hand."

Neither of them moved.

"A hand," Dana repeated, patient, like she was talking to a dog. "One of you puts a hand on the other. I don't care which. I'm not going to tell you where. Figure it out."

Beck heard his own breath go out of him. He looked up at Topher and Topher looked down at him and the crate creaked under Topher's weight as he shifted, and Beck watched him decide — watched the whole decision cross his face in half a second, the way it crossed his face on the ice right before he made a pass nobody else could see coming — and then Topher's hand came down.

It landed on Beck's shoulder. The bare one. The one the strap didn't cover. Fingers spread, warm, steady — the same hand Beck had watched curl and uncurl in the prep room, now flat and open and resting on him like it belonged there, and Beck felt every one of those fingers individually, the heat of them, the slight callus at the base from years of stick work, the pressure of the thumb where it hooked into the muscle.

His own hand came up before he told it to. It landed on Topher's hip. On the blue. On the silk that was stretched over the bone there, warm from his body, and Beck felt the shape of him through it — the hard ridge of hip, the flat of stomach above it, the strap of the bralette just under his palm — and Topher went very still on the crate, very still, the way he'd gone still in the prep room, and didn't step back and didn't look away.

"There it is," Dana said, soft. "There it is."

Click. Click. Click. Click.

"Don't move," she said. "Don't you dare move."

Beck didn't move. That was the thing — Dana had said don't move and every muscle in his body had taken it as an order, feet planted on the black floor, chin tilted up, one hand on the blue silk at Topher's hip and the other hanging at his side doing nothing, and the fan pushed the paper behind them and the paper rustled, and somewhere out past the lights somebody's radio kept playing something soft and old that Beck couldn't have named under pain of death.

Topher's hand was still on his shoulder. Warm. Fingers spread. Beck could feel the exact shape of them through his own skin, the slight weight of the palm, and the longer he stood there the more the warmth of it stopped being a thing he was noticing and started being a thing he was inside of.

Click. Click.

"Good," Dana said, low, from somewhere behind the camera. "Now give me something different. Same hand, same place — but I want the other one to move. Beck, you're the one in motion. Slow."

Beck's fingers tightened on Topher's hip. Just once. Just a reflex, the way a hand closes on a stick before a faceoff, and he felt Topher's hip move under the silk — not a flinch, not a step back, just the smallest shift of weight, the way you brace when you know something's about to happen and you've decided to let it.

"Slow," Dana said again. "I mean slow."

Beck moved his hand.

It wasn't much. It was maybe four inches. He slid his palm off the point of Topher's hipbone and back along the line of him, over the flat of his waist, and the silk went with his hand — that was the thing he hadn't expected, the way the fabric moved when he moved, cool on the outside and warm underneath and sliding over the muscle like it was doing the touching for him. His thumb dragged. His fingers spread. And then his palm came down flat on the small of Topher's back.

Topher's breath caught.

Beck heard it. Everybody in the room heard it — it was one of those sounds that came out of a person before they could get the lid back on, a short sharp pull of air that stopped halfway, and Beck felt it happen at the same time he heard it, because his hand was on Topher's back and Topher's back was where the breath lived. He felt the ribs go still under his palm. He felt the muscle along the spine tighten, one long cable of it, and then hold.

And then Topher leaned in.

Not far. Barely anything. An inch, maybe two, the kind of lean you'd miss if you weren't looking, except Beck was looking, Beck was standing on the black floor with his head tipped back and his hand on the small of a man's back in a room full of lights and he was watching Topher's whole body come toward him a quarter of the way and stop, and there was nothing in the world he would have traded for that inch.

Click.

"Oh, that's it," Dana said. "That's — hold, hold, hold."

The crate creaked. Topher's hand on Beck's shoulder slid down an inch, just an inch, fingers curling over the edge of Beck's collarbone, thumb settling into the hollow above it, and Beck felt his own pulse go up into that thumb like the man had reached in and found it on purpose. The strap of the bralette was loose on his shoulder — the fan had been pulling at it for ten minutes and it had worked itself a little off the bone — and Topher's fingers were right at the edge of it, right at the place where silk met skin, and Beck stood there and felt the air move across the bare half-inch of his shoulder and did not move to fix it, did not move at all.

The heat came off Topher's body in a slow wave. That close, Beck could smell him — the same soap he'd smelled in a hundred locker rooms, sharp and clean, but under it now something warmer, something that was just skin, and Beck breathed it in through his nose and let it sit in his chest and did not, for once in his life, say anything about it.

His palm was flat on Topher's lower back. The silk had warmed all the way through. He could feel the dimples at the base of the spine, the two small hollows, through the fabric — he'd have known them blind, he'd stood behind Topher in enough showers to know them, and knowing them with his hand instead of his eyes was turning out to be a completely different fact.

Click. Click.

"Topher," Dana said, "chin down a little. Beck, don't look at me, don't look at the camera, look at him. You're already looking at him. Just — yes. That."

Beck looked at him.

Up close like this, from below, Topher's face was doing something Beck had never seen it do. The composure was still there — it was always there, it was the whole architecture of the guy — but it had gone thin. There was a flush sitting high on his cheekbones and a shine on his lower lip and his eyes had gone the dark end of silver-grey, the color they went when he was really paying attention, and he was looking down at Beck with all of it, no performance in it anywhere, and Beck felt the bottom drop out of his own stomach like a bad step on a stair.

He moved his thumb. That was all. A small arc, up and back down, over the silk at the top of Topher's spine, and Topher's eyes closed.

Just for a second. Just a flicker. But Beck saw the eyelids come down and stay down for one full beat and then come back up, and the flush on Topher's cheeks had moved lower, into his throat, and the hand on Beck's shoulder had gone tight — fingers digging in, thumb pressed hard into the hollow, the way you grip a rail when the ice tilts.

Neither of them said anything. The fan hummed. The paper rustled. Somewhere out past the lights a phone buzzed against a table and nobody looked at it.

"Okay," Dana said, and her voice had gone quieter, almost careful, like she was talking to something she didn't want to spook. "Okay, I've got that. Now I want to change it up. Same two people, same hands, but Beck — turn. Not away. Into him. You're going to put your back against his front. Topher, you stay on the crate."

Beck's hand didn't want to leave. He noticed that. He noticed that his palm had been on Topher's lower back for a minute and a half and that letting go of it felt like a thing he was going to have to actively decide to do, and he decided it, and his hand came away, and the silk was cool where his palm had been.

He turned. He put his back to Topher's chest.

The crate put Topher's sternum at the back of Beck's head. He could feel the heat of him along his spine before they even touched — the whole long front of him standing there on the crate, and Beck on the black floor, and the height difference meant that Topher's body ran down behind him like a wall that had been built to his exact shape. Beck leaned back. Just a little. Just enough to make contact.

The blue silk touched his shoulder blades. The green silk touched the blue. And Topher's hands came down and landed on Beck's shoulders — both of them now, both elegant hands, fingers spread, thumbs at the base of Beck's neck — and Beck felt his whole spine go long and loose the way it did when a trainer worked the knot out of his upper back, except this wasn't that, this wasn't anything like that, because a trainer didn't stand behind him breathing slow and even against the back of his head.

"There," Dana said. "Hold that. Both of you look at me now — no, not me, look past me. Look at the same point. Yes."

Beck looked at a spot on the white paper. He could feel Topher's breath moving the hair at the back of his head. He could feel the strap of his own bralette pressed flat against his chest by nothing but the fan and the position and the fact that he was standing in a room in his underwear with a man's hands on his shoulders and had somehow stopped being embarrassed about it about four minutes ago.

Click. Click. Click. Click.

"Good," Dana said. "Now Beck — turn your head. To your left. Look up at him. Slow."

Beck turned his head.

He turned it slow, the way she'd asked, and it brought his face close to Topher's throat — close enough to see the pulse there, close enough to see the small notch at the base of the neck where the strap of the bralette sat, close enough that if he'd turned another inch he'd have been breathing into the hollow of it. Topher looked down. Their eyes met at a steep angle, Beck's chin tipped up and Topher's tipped down, and neither of them moved and neither of them looked away and the camera went click, click, click like it was keeping time with something.

Topher's thumb moved on the back of Beck's neck. One slow stroke, up and back. Deliberate. Beck felt it go all the way down his spine and land somewhere low and hot and he had to close his eyes for half a second, and when he opened them Topher was still looking at him, and the look had changed — it had gotten quieter and worse, the way it got when Topher had made a decision and wasn't going to tell anybody what it was.

"Almost," Dana said. "Almost. Hold on."

She moved. The soft box swung on its stand as she shifted around them, and the light went across Topher's face and out of it and back, and Beck stood there with his back against a man's chest and his head tipped up and his whole body tuned to the two hands on his shoulders like they were the only thing holding him up, which — honestly — they might have been.

"One more," Dana said, from somewhere off to the left now. "This is the one. Beck, don't move your head. Topher — put your mouth near his ear. Don't touch it. Near it."

Beck heard Topher's breath go in. Slow. Controlled. The hands on his shoulders shifted — one stayed, one slid up, up, until it was cupping the side of Beck's neck, thumb along the jaw, and the heat of that palm against his throat was the single most deliberate thing that had ever happened to him.

And then Topher leaned down.

His mouth came to the side of Beck's ear. Not touching. Not quite. Close enough that Beck could feel the warmth of his breath move across the shell of it, close enough that the small sound of it — the low, careful sound of a man breathing through his nose — went straight into Beck's skull and stayed there, and Beck stood frozen with his eyes on the far white wall and his whole nervous system rerouted to one square inch of skin.

The room went very quiet. Even the radio seemed to have gone soft.

Beck's hand came up. He didn't plan it. It came up and back, behind him, and landed on Topher's thigh — the outside of it, the long muscle there, silk over hard muscle, and he felt Topher's whole leg go rigid under his palm and then, slowly, deliberately, relax.

Click.

The shutter went once more, and the sound of it was different this time — final, the way a door sounds when it closes instead of when it opens — and then Dana lowered the camera, and the room came back in around them all at once, the fan and the radio and the hum of the light rig and the cold of the black floor coming up through Beck's bare feet.

"That's the shot," Dana said.

Dana's voice was still hanging in the air when Topher moved.

He didn't step down the way a person stepped down from a crate. He didn't look for the edge or reach for balance or think about the three feet of drop between his bare feet and the black floor. He came off it in one motion, forward and down, and Beck had half a second to understand that the man was coming at him, not around him, and then Topher's feet hit the floor.

The crate rocked behind him once and settled.

They were the same height now. That was the first thing Beck's body registered, before his brain caught up — that they were standing on the same floor for the first time in an hour, and Topher's face, which had been up there above him, was level with his own, and the whole geometry of the last twenty minutes had just flipped over. The fan pushed warm air across both of them. The radio was still playing something low and indistinct, and the light rig hummed, and somewhere past the edge of the paper backdrop Dana's camera hung at her hip and she hadn't said anything yet.

Topher reached up.

His hand went to Beck's shoulder — the left one, the one the strap had slipped off, the one that had been bare for the last ten minutes with the air moving across it. He didn't ask. He didn't telegraph it. His fingers found the loose strap of the bralette where it had worked itself down off the bone and he took it between his thumb and forefinger, and the backs of his knuckles came down flat against Beck's shoulder to do it.

Skin. The whole back of his hand, from the wrist to the last knuckle, laid flat across the bare top of Beck's shoulder, and it was warm — hotter than the room, hotter than the air, the heat of a hand that had been curled around the back of a neck a minute ago and had not cooled off since.

Beck's breath went in through his nose and stayed there.

Topher's eyes were on the strap. That was the thing — he was watching his own fingers do the work, watching the silk come up over the curve of Beck's shoulder, watching it seat itself back where it belonged, and he was doing it slowly, slower than the job required, the way you did a thing when you wanted to feel the doing of it. His thumb pressed the strap down flat. His knuckles stayed where they were.

The room had gone quiet. Not the held quiet of the shoot, the quiet of a shutter about to go — the other kind. The kind that comes when everybody present has stopped and is waiting on one person to say something.

Beck could feel his own pulse under Topher's hand. He could feel it in the muscle of his shoulder, a hard fast beat right up against the warm weight of those knuckles, and he knew — the way you know things about your own body — that Topher could feel it too. There was no way to miss it. His hand was on the place.

He looked at Topher's face.

The composure was back. Mostly. The flush had settled down out of his throat and into his ears, where it sat pink and obvious against the dark of his hair, and his jaw was set in that way it got in the third period when the game turned, and he was still not looking at Beck's eyes. He was looking at the strap. At his own hand on the strap. And Beck, who had spent four years reading this man across locker rooms and benches and the length of an ice rink, understood with a clarity that went through him like cold water that Topher was not fixing the strap.

Topher was standing there because he wanted to be standing there.

His fingers moved. Not away. Down. The tips of them dragged an inch along Beck's shoulder, along the ridge of bone under the skin, and stopped. His thumb was still pressed flat on the strap. The heel of his hand was still over the joint. He had not let go and the amount of time he had not let go was starting to become a fact in the room.

Beck heard himself breathe.

"So," he said. His voice came out lower than he'd planned. "That's a pretty thorough job."

Topher's mouth moved. Almost a smile. Almost not. "It was hanging off you for ten minutes."

"I know. I was there."

"You didn't fix it."

"No," Beck said. "I didn't."

That landed. He watched it land — watched the flicker go through Topher's eyes, that silver-grey going darker at the edges, and the hand on his shoulder tightened by something so small Beck only knew it because he was counting.

"Why not," Topher said.

It wasn't a question with a question mark on it. It came out flat and low, the way he said things when he'd already decided to say them and was just getting the words out of the way, and it was the most direct thing anyone had said to Beck in a year.

Beck opened his mouth.

"I didn't tell you to touch that," Dana said.

Both of them moved at once. Topher's hand came off Beck's shoulder like the silk had gone hot — fast, clean, back to his own side — and Beck's shoulders squared up and turned half an inch toward the sound, and the two of them stood there on the black floor a foot apart looking at the photographer like a pair of kids caught behind the rink at midnight.

Dana was standing by the soft box with her arms crossed and the camera hanging off her wrist, and she was looking at them with her head tilted and her mouth doing something that was not quite a smile and was certainly not displeasure.

"But I'm not mad," she said.

The fan hummed. Somewhere the radio finished a song and started another one and neither of them heard which.

Dana let the silence sit there a beat longer than was comfortable, and then she reached up and clicked the soft box off. The light over them dropped by half and the room went from white to grey, and the paper backdrop, unlit, turned into just paper.

"We're done for today," she said. "I've got what I need. More than what I need, honestly — that last set, the two of you, that's the spread. That's the cover if the AD lets me have it."

She bent and started gathering a lens cap off the table.

"Wardrobe goes back to Renata in the bin by the door, both sets, don't fold them, she'll kill you if you fold them. There's water in the cooler and I don't want to find any of it on the floor. Tomorrow's call sheet goes up tonight, Topher, you're in the morning block, Beck, you're afternoon —" she looked up, "— which I did on purpose, and you can both pretend you don't know why."

She shouldered her bag and walked out. The door swung shut behind her with a soft pneumatic hiss, and then it was just the two of them and the fan and the hum of the rig powering down.

Beck stood there.

His shoulder was cold where Topher's hand had been. That was the whole of it — that one square of skin, the place under the strap, had gone cool in the air, and he could feel the difference between it and the rest of him, and he did not move to cover it. He could still feel the shape of the knuckles. He could still feel the exact spot where the thumb had pressed.

Topher had turned away. He was at the crate, picking up his own shirt off the top of it — a plain grey tee, folded, because of course it was folded — and he shook it out and pulled it over his head in one motion, and the silk of the bralette disappeared under cotton and the man who turned back around was just Topher again, hair a little flat, ears still pink, hands going to his pockets.

"I should —" Topher said, and stopped.

"Yeah," Beck said.

Neither of them moved.

The fan swung its head slowly from one side of the room to the other and back. Beck looked at the far wall, at the roll of seamless paper with its faint scuff marks from the shoot, at the bin by the door with both sets of lingerie in it, midnight blue and green, and he thought about the fact that in about ninety seconds one of them was going to have to say something that wasn't "yeah" and walk out of this room, and he thought about the fact that he had been standing in his underwear for an hour in front of a camera and he had not once, not for a single second, felt like the one who was exposed.

Topher's hand came out of his pocket. Went back in.

"The strap," he said.

"What about it."

"It was going to fall off again."

Beck looked at him. Topher was looking at the bin by the door, at the blue silk folded in with the green, and his jaw was working the way it worked when he was about to say something he'd been holding since the third period.

"Yeah," Beck said. "It probably was."

Topher's eyes came back to him. They stayed there. The room was grey and cooling and the light rig ticked as it powered down, and the two of them stood at opposite ends of a black floor in a room that smelled like warm dust and hot lights and the soap they both used, and neither of them said the next thing.

Beck's phone buzzed on the table behind him. Once. Then again — two parts, the way he always sent them.

He didn't turn around to look.

"I'll get the bin," Topher said.

He walked past Beck to the door — close, close enough that Beck caught the soap again and under it the warm skin-smell that had been in his nose for the last twenty minutes — and he bent and picked up the bin, and the two sets of silk shifted against each other inside it, midnight blue against green, and Topher stood there with the bin in both hands looking at the door.

"Topher."

He stopped. Didn't turn.

"You didn't have to fix it," Beck said. "You know that."

The fan swung back the other way.

"I know," Topher said, to the door. And then he pushed it open with his shoulder and went out, and the door hissed shut behind him, and the bin went with him, and Beck stood alone on the black floor with his phone buzzing a third time on the table and his shoulder still cold where the hand had been.