The coffee had stopped steaming eleven minutes ago. Topher knew because he'd watched it happen — the last thin curl of heat lifting off the surface, thinning, gone — and he'd done nothing about it. His hands were wrapped around the cup anyway, palm to ceramic, thumb hooked through the handle like he was holding himself in place.

The café was loud in the way a Tuesday afternoon was loud. Blender somewhere behind the counter. A girl two tables over laughing at something on her laptop, alone, unbothered. The window glass had fogged at the corner nearest his elbow, and he'd drawn nothing in it, because he was twenty-two and not a child, and because his hand would have shaken.

His phone sat face-up on the table beside the cup. He'd been typing for six minutes.

He read it back. Again.

Six years of Lydia meant he knew exactly how she'd read it. She'd read it twice, screenshot it, and bring it up at brunch in a month. That was the deal. That was the whole point of Lydia — she was the one person he could say the true thing to and not have it come back as a weapon. So he'd typed it the way he always typed to her: no hedging, no softening, the actual shape of what was in his head.

Beck in the green. That was the line he'd opened with. Then the rest of it — the way the silk sat on his shoulders, wrong and right at the same time, like it had been cut for somebody who wasn't supposed to exist. How his skin had gone warm under Topher's fingers when he'd reached up to fix the strap. How he'd taken his time. How the taking-his-time had been the point.

He'd written: it wasn't about the strap.

He'd written: I wanted to touch him and the strap was the excuse.

He'd written: I've been standing in that room for two days and I still haven't left it.

His thumb came down on send the way it always did — fast, before the second-guessing could catch up, the same way he'd said I'm in to Beck across the library table without letting himself think about what he was agreeing to. The message lifted off the screen and settled into the thread.

And then he saw the name at the top.

Not Lydia. Not the thread he'd opened when he sat down, not the one he'd been scrolling through for the last hour of cold coffee and fogged glass. Beck. Beck's name, in the grey bar, with the little photo he'd never changed — the one from last season, helmet off, hair wet, grinning at whoever was holding the camera like the whole rink belonged to him.

Two blue ticks.

Delivered.

Topher's thumb hovered over the screen and did nothing. There was no unsend. There had never been an unsend, not on this app, not for him — he'd checked once, months ago, for a different reason, and the answer had been the same then as it was now. What was sent was sent. It sat there in the thread, under Beck's last message from two days ago, which had been a single word: morning. And now under that, in Topher's own grey bubble, the whole thing — the green silk, the skin, the strap, the confession, laid out like an autopsy he'd performed on himself without meaning to.

The blender behind the counter stopped. The girl two tables over closed her laptop. The café kept happening around him at exactly the speed it had been happening before, and none of it touched him. He was somewhere else entirely, standing in a doorway he'd just walked through with no way back.

His hand tightened on the cup.

He could picture Beck reading it. That was the worst part — not the not-knowing, the knowing. Beck would be sitting somewhere with his phone, probably on the couch at his place, probably with one leg up on the coffee table the way he always sat, and he'd see Topher's name and open it the way he opened everything, fast, no ceremony, and then —

And then he'd stop.

Topher had watched Beck stop exactly once before. On the ice, two seasons back, when Topher had gone down hard into the boards and Beck had been the first one there, and for a full second Beck hadn't said anything at all — hadn't chirped, hadn't grabbed him, hadn't done any of the things Beck did. He'd just looked. That was the face Topher was picturing now. That exact face, aimed at a phone.

The cup was cold against his palm. He hadn't let go of it. His knuckles had gone pale around the ceramic, the way they did in the third period when the game got close and he forgot he had hands at all.

A buzz.

The phone jumped against the table and Topher's whole body went still. One buzz. Not a message — a message was one buzz. He'd learned that about Beck over five years of locker rooms and group chats and late-night threads that went nowhere: Beck sent in two parts. Always. The first buzz was the thought, the second was the correction, or the joke, or the thing he actually meant. One buzz meant he was still typing.

Topher looked at the screen.

The message was there, grey bubble, Beck's side, and it was short. You had better already be on your way to me Jacobes because if your not I'll start without you.

No period. No second buzz. No correction.

And under it, still loading, the grey placeholder of an image coming through — the little blurred square that meant the photo hadn't finished arriving yet, and Topher stared at it the way you stare at a door that's about to open, and then it resolved.

Boxers. Beck's bedroom, the one with the crooked blind and the poster he'd never taken down from first year. Beck standing in front of the mirror, phone held at chest height, bare everything except the boxers — dark green, the same green as the set from the shoot, and Topher knew that was not a coincidence, and Beck knew he knew, and neither of them was going to say it. The scar on his left forearm caught the light. The grin was there, the shameless one, the one that promised trouble and always delivered. His hair was damp. He'd just showered. He'd showered and put on the green and taken a picture and sent it to Topher without a single word of explanation, because Beck never explained anything, he just did it and let you catch up.

Topher's hand went white around the cup.

He hadn't moved. The message wasn't addressed to him — not the Topher who sat in cafés with cold coffee and typed confessions he didn't send to the right person. It was addressed to the Topher who'd stood in that studio and taken his time with a strap. Beck had read what Topher wrote and he hadn't flinched, hadn't asked what he meant, hadn't done any of the things a friend was supposed to do when his friend accidentally told him the truth. He'd just — answered. In kind. With an image and a dare and start without you, like it was the most obvious thing in the world, like Topher was the one who'd been slow.

Maybe he had been.

Five years. Locker rooms, road trips, the two of them the last ones in the weight room more nights than not. Beck's hand on the back of his neck after a bad game. The way Beck always found him in a crowded room, always, without looking, like there was a string between them that only Beck could feel. And Topher had spent all of it telling himself it was friendship, because that was the safe word, because that was the word that let him keep Beck without risking him.

The phone buzzed again.

Three dots. Dancing. Beck typing. Topher watched them the way you watch a wave come in — knowing it's going to hit, unable to do anything about it, weirdly calm in the second before.

He didn't read the message when it came. He set the phone face-down on the table, screen to the wood, and sat with his hand flat over it like he could hold the whole thing still. The café hummed. Somebody laughed at the counter. The fog on the window had started to run.

His other hand was still around the cup. He looked at it, at the pale knuckles, the thumb hooked through the handle, and he thought, clearly and without any drama at all: I'm going to go.

Not because Beck had told him to. Not because of the image, or the dare, or the five years of things neither of them had said. Because the coffee was cold and he'd been sitting here for an hour pretending he was deciding something he'd already decided in that studio, at the moment his fingers touched Beck's shoulder and he'd let them stay a beat too long and known, in the pit of his stomach, that he wasn't going to take them back.

He stood. The chair scraped. The girl two tables over glanced up and then back down, unbothered, and Topher envied her the whole shape of her afternoon.

He picked up the phone. He didn't turn it over. He slid it into his pocket with the screen still dark against his thigh, and he left the cup on the table, half-full and cold, and he walked out through the door into the street, and he didn't look back at the café, and he didn't look at the phone, and he turned left, toward Beck's building, because that was where the string had always been pulling him and he was finally, finally letting it.

The door had a bell on it. He'd never noticed that before — six years of this café and he'd never once registered the small brass thing over the frame, but it rang when he pushed through, a thin bright note that followed him out onto the pavement and hung there a second before the street swallowed it. Behind him the glass still held his shape for a moment, fogged where his shoulder had been, and then the door swung shut on its hinge and the shape was gone and the café went back to being a room he wasn't in.

Cold hit him first. Not winter cold — late October, the kind that got into the collar of his jacket and sat there, patient. He'd left without zipping it. He noticed that the way you notice a thing you've done wrong but can't be bothered to fix, and he kept walking, and the zipper stayed where it was, teeth open, the wind finding the gap at his throat and moving in.

The phone was a flat square against his thigh. He could feel it through the denim — the whole weight of it, the message sitting in there unanswered, the second buzz he'd never read. He'd felt it vibrate once more while he was standing, he was almost sure, a small insistent tick against his leg, but he hadn't taken it out and he wasn't going to, and the not-taking-it-out was a kind of answer too, the only one he had.

He passed the bus shelter. Two people under it, a guy in a puffer jacket and a girl with a violin case between her knees, both of them looking down the road for a bus that wasn't coming. Topher had stood under that shelter a hundred times. He knew the timetable by heart — the 4:15 that ran late, the 4:40 that ran later. He'd never once thought about what it meant to be the person waiting versus the person walking past. He thought about it now, briefly, and then he stopped thinking about it, because it didn't matter, because he was walking and they were waiting and neither of them was Beck.

The street curved left past the science building and he took the curve without deciding to, the way his body knew this route better than his head did. Five years of walking it. Five years of the same left turn, the same cracked slab of pavement outside the chemistry labs where the root of the old oak had lifted the concrete into a lip you had to step over or trip on. He stepped over it. He always stepped over it. Beck had tripped on it once, first year, gone down hard with a full coffee in his hand, and laughed the whole way through the fall, and Topher had stood there and watched him laugh and hadn't helped him up for a full three seconds because he'd been too busy looking at him.

He hadn't thought about that in years. He thought about it now, and it sat in his chest like something he'd swallowed wrong.

The image was still there when he closed his eyes. Not that he closed them — he was walking, he needed them — but it was there anyway, in the back of his skull, the way a song gets in and stays: Beck in the doorway of his own bedroom, phone up, green boxers, damp hair, that grin. The scar on the forearm. The light from the crooked blind cutting a stripe across his chest. Topher had stood in that room a hundred times. He knew the crooked blind. He knew the poster — some band from first year that Beck had never actually liked, he'd just kept it because taking it down would have been a decision and Beck didn't make decisions about rooms, only about people.

His hand went to his pocket. He didn't take the phone out. He just put his palm flat over the shape of it through the denim, the way he'd put his hand flat over it on the table, like he could keep it still, like he could keep the whole thing from moving until he'd caught up to it.

A car went past and splashed the gutter and he stepped sideways without looking and his shoe came down in the wet and stayed wet.

He was two blocks from Beck's building. He knew that the way he knew the timetable of the bus he never caught — not because he'd counted, but because his feet had counted for him, years ago, and never stopped. Two blocks. The corner with the laundromat that smelled like hot cotton. The dog that barked from the third-floor window on Wednesdays, which meant it wouldn't bark today, which meant the street would be quieter than it should have been, which meant he'd hear his own footsteps the whole way.

He heard his own footsteps the whole way.

What he was going to say — he didn't have it. That was the thing. He'd had six minutes of typing and he'd spent all of it on the wrong person, and now he was walking toward the right one with nothing prepared, no line, no opening, no way to make it a joke if it went wrong. Beck always made it a joke. Beck had a joke for everything, a chirp for every silence, and Topher had spent five years letting him fill the gaps because it was easier than filling them himself. He wasn't going to have that this time. He could feel it — the shape of the conversation waiting for him at the end of these two blocks, and it had no jokes in it, and he was walking toward it anyway.

The laundromat came up on his right. Hot cotton, exactly like it always smelled, and the door was propped with a milk crate and a woman inside was folding a sheet the size of a sail, and Topher walked past all of it without slowing down, and the sheet went on being folded, and the street went on being a street, and he went on being a person walking toward a thing he'd spent five years not walking toward.

His phone buzzed against his palm. He felt it through the denim, one short tick, and his whole hand closed over it before he could stop himself — a reflex, the same reflex that had made him say I'm in before he'd thought about it, the same one that had made him send the message before he'd read the name at the top.

He didn't look. He kept his hand where it was, closed over the phone through the fabric, and he kept walking, and the corner with the laundromat fell behind him, and the next block came up, and Beck's building was there at the end of it, grey and low and ordinary, the way it had always been, the way it would always be, and Topher walked toward it with his hand closed over a phone he wasn't going to look at and a message he wasn't going to read and a thing he was finally, finally going to say.

Beck's building had a buzzer, but Topher had never used it. He'd used it the first time, first year, when he'd stood on the step and pressed the button and waited for Beck's voice through the little speaker and gotten it — yeah, come up, door's open — and after that he'd just never needed to. The lock on the front door was broken. Had been since October of first year, when somebody's little brother had come to visit and kicked it in for a laugh, and the landlord had fixed it wrong, and now if you pulled the door toward you and lifted it a half-inch on the hinge it swung free. Beck had shown him that. Beck had shown everybody that.

Topher pulled the door toward him. Lifted it. It swung.

The stairwell smelled like the same stairwell it always smelled like — wet concrete, somebody's cooking on the second floor, the faint chemical sweetness of whatever they used to clean the hallway and never rinsed. He took the stairs two at a time because he always took them two at a time, and because if he took them one at a time he'd have time to think, and thinking was the thing he'd come here to stop doing.

Third floor. The landing. The corridor with the carpet that had a long dark stain near the radiator that nobody had ever explained. Beck's door was the second on the left, 3B, with the number hanging crooked because Beck had never fixed it and the RA had never noticed.

Topher stood in front of it.

His hand was already up. He hadn't decided to raise it. It was up, knuckles a few inches from the wood, and he stood there with his heart doing something in his throat that he was not going to name, and he listened — because he could hear, through the door, the low hum of the shower still running, or maybe the fan in the bathroom, or maybe nothing, maybe just the building and his own blood.

He rapped twice.

Flat. Loud. Two knuckles, quick, the way you knocked on a teammate's door before a road game. The sound went down the corridor and came back off the far wall and died, and then there was nothing, and Topher stood in the nothing with his hand still half-raised and his jacket still unzipped and his phone still a flat square against his thigh with a message he hadn't read.

Inside, a chair scraped.

Not a chair being moved. A chair being pushed back from — from a desk, from a table, the short ugly scrape of wood on wood and then a footstep and then another, and Topher's hand came down to his side and he stood very still, because the footsteps were coming, and the door was going to open, and he had no line prepared, no opening, no joke to fall back on, nothing in his mouth but the cold air he'd been breathing the whole walk over.

The lock turned. The handle went down.

The door swung open.

Beck stood in it.

Damp hair, darker where it was wet, pushed back off his forehead and already starting to dry at the ends. Bare chest. Bare everything except the boxers — the dark green ones, the exact green, and Topher's eyes went to them before he could stop them and then away, up, to the face, because the face was the safe place and the face was also the worst place and there was nowhere in this doorway that was safe.

Beck didn't say anything.

He stood with one hand still on the door and the other hanging at his side, and he looked at Topher the way Topher had been picturing him looking at a phone — the face from the boards, two seasons back, the one that didn't chirp and didn't grab and didn't do any of the things Beck did. Just looked. The pale blue eyes not doing anything clever. The grin not there. Not even the beginning of it, not the corner of it, nothing.

The hallway hum. The radiator ticking somewhere down the corridor. Somebody's television on the floor below, muffled through a wall, a laugh track, cut off.

Topher's mouth was dry. He could feel his own pulse in his knuckles, the ones he'd knocked with, still tingling from the wood.

Beck waited.

And Topher understood, standing there in the doorway with the cold still on him and the phone still in his pocket and the whole five years stacked up behind him like a road he couldn't see the start of anymore — he understood that Beck was not going to speak first. Not this time. Beck had sent the last word, sent it twice, sent a picture and a dare and start without you, and now he was standing in his own doorway in the green boxers with the water still drying on his shoulders and he had gone quiet, and the quiet was the whole question, and it was Topher's turn to answer it.

He opened his mouth.

Nothing came out.

Not a word. Not a syllable. His throat closed around the thing he'd been walking here to say and held it, and he stood in the doorway of Beck Marlow's apartment at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday with his jacket unzipped and his hands at his sides and he could not make his voice work.

Beck's jaw moved. A small thing, barely anything, the muscle at the hinge of it flexing once and going still. His hand stayed on the door. He didn't step back to let Topher in. He didn't step forward. He stood exactly where he was, in the frame, and he kept his eyes on Topher's face and let the silence do whatever it was going to do.

Down the corridor, the radiator ticked once, twice, and went quiet.

He had rehearsed it on the walk over. Not words — he'd given up on words somewhere around the laundromat — but a shape. The shape of standing here and saying it and having it said. He had built the whole thing in his head without a single sentence in it, and now he was in it, and the shape had no door in it, no handle, no way through.

Beck's shoulder was still wet. There was a bead of water at the notch of his collarbone, sitting there, not moving, and Topher watched it because it was easier than the eyes.

He got the first word up.

“I—”

It came out thin. Half a word. It hung in the doorway between them and did nothing, and Topher heard how it sounded — how it sounded like a boy at a tryout, not like him, not like the person who took the stairs two at a time and said I'm in before he thought about it — and he stopped.

Beck didn't move. Didn't blink, didn't shift his weight off the door, didn't do any of the things he did when a silence got long — no laugh, no chirp, no eyebrow, no you gonna stand there all day, Jacobes. He just stood, and the bead of water at his collarbone finally slipped and ran down his chest and stopped somewhere in the flat of his sternum, and neither of them looked at it.

The television below cut back on. Some game show. A bell, a burst of applause, muffled and wrong, coming up through the floor like it belonged to another building entirely.

Topher made himself look at Beck's face. All the way. The whole thing. He'd spent five years looking at this face in pieces — the grin from across a locker room, the jaw in profile on a bus, the eyes over a shoulder in the middle of a shift — and he made himself take it in whole now, in the doorway, with the hallway light doing something to it that the rink light never did.

It was the same face. That was the problem. It was the same face he'd been looking at for five years and it had never once been this. Or it had, and he'd been looking at the pieces so he wouldn't have to see the whole, and now the whole was standing in front of him in a doorway with its hand on the door and it wasn't going to help him.

“Beck.”

That came out. His own name for him, the short one, the one he used on the ice. It came out steadier than the first thing had, and it landed, and Beck's eyes — those pale blue ones, doing nothing clever, doing nothing at all — stayed on him.

“I don't have anything.”

Beck's head tilted. A degree. Maybe less.

“I mean—” Topher's hand came up, and he didn't know what it was doing, and it stopped at his chest and hung there. “I walked over here and I didn't have a line. I still don't. I had six minutes of typing and I sent it to the wrong person and then I walked here without a single thing to say to the right one, so if you're waiting for me to say something good, I don't—” He stopped. Breathed. “I don't have it.”

Beck's mouth did something. Almost. The corner of it, the left one, a movement so small Topher would have missed it if he hadn't been staring, and then it was gone, and the face was back to the face from the boards, two seasons back, the one that just looked.

He was not going to say anything. Topher could see it now, clear as the crooked 3B on the door — Beck was going to stand in this doorway all afternoon if he had to, and he had all afternoon, and he had the green boxers on and the water still drying and he was not, under any circumstances, going to be the one who spoke first. He'd already done the speaking. He'd done it in a photo and a text and a dare, and he'd laid it all out where Topher could see it, and now he was standing back and letting Topher walk into it or not.

Which meant Topher had to walk into it.

His phone was still against his thigh. He could feel it there, the flat weight of it, the message he still hadn't read — start without you, probably, or something worse, something that would have been easier than this. He could have read it on the stairs. He could have read it in the doorway. He hadn't, and now it didn't matter, because the phone wasn't the thing he'd come here for.

He took his hand off his chest and let it drop.

“I read your text,” he said. “The first one.”

Beck's weight shifted, finally — a small redistribution, one foot to the other, the door creaking a quarter-inch on its hinge. Not a step. Not yet.

“You sent me a picture of the green ones and a dare and I—” Topher heard himself and stopped, because he was doing it again, listing it, laying out the evidence like a report, and that wasn't how this went. That wasn't how any of it went. He'd spent five years doing it that way, laying out the pieces so nobody had to look at the whole, and he was doing it right now, in this doorway, with the one person he'd never managed to do it to.

So he stopped.

He looked at Beck. Beck looked at him.

The hallway hum went on. Somewhere behind the wall, the radiator ticked and stopped and ticked again, and Topher counted the ticks without meaning to, one, two, and on the third one he said it.

“I came here because it's you.”

It came out quiet. No build, no run-up, nothing to hide behind — just the sentence, in the corridor, with the light doing what it did to Beck's face and the water still drying on his shoulders.

“The whole thing. The calendar, the sets, the—” He didn't gesture at the boxers. He didn't need to. “I didn't say yes for the calendar. I said yes because you called me a chicken and I couldn't — I couldn't let you be right. And then I sat in a room in a set of lingerie you picked out and you looked at me and I couldn't—”

His voice did something then. A wobble, low down, the kind he'd have been able to hide anywhere else. Here he couldn't.

“I couldn't do the thing where we don't say it anymore.”

Beck's hand came off the door.

It was the only movement in the whole corridor. He didn't step back, didn't step forward — he just let the door go, and the door stayed where it was, half-open on its hinge, and his hand came down to his side and hung there with the other one, and he stood in the doorway of his own apartment with both hands at his sides and his eyes on Topher's face and something happening in them that Topher had seen once before, two seasons back, on the boards, in a game that had gone wrong, and had never once been able to name.

He still couldn't name it. He was standing three feet from it and he still couldn't name it.

But he knew what it was for.

“So,” Topher said. His voice was wrecked. He didn't fix it. “That's — that's the whole thing. That's why I'm here. If you want me to go, I'll go, and we'll do the shoot on Thursday and it'll be fine, and I'll never bring it up again, and you can call me a chicken for the rest of our lives and mean it and I'll take it. But I'm not going to stand here and pretend I came over to borrow a—”

Beck moved.

Not a step back. A step forward — one, into the doorway, close enough that Topher could feel the heat coming off him, the shower-warmth still in his skin, close enough that the wet at his shoulder was between them now, and his hand came up and his fingers closed around the collar of Topher's jacket, the unzipped one, the one Topher had been wearing the whole walk over — closed around it, firm, and pulled.

Topher came with it.

Their foreheads touched. Beck's was warm and slightly damp and there was a bead of water somewhere in his hairline that transferred and sat cold on Topher's skin, and Beck's eyes were right there, pale and close and not doing anything clever at all, and his other hand came up and landed flat on Topher's chest, over the jacket, over the shirt, over the place where Topher's heart was doing something he was absolutely not going to name.

He didn't say anything.

He just stood there, holding Topher by the collar with one hand and pressed flat against his chest with the other, forehead to forehead, breathing, in the doorway of 3B, with the door half-open and the hallway hum and the radiator and the game show below and the whole five years stacked behind them like a road neither of them could see the start of anymore.

Topher's hands stayed at his sides.

He didn't know where to put them. That was the truth of it — he'd walked over here with nothing prepared and now he had Beck's forehead against his and Beck's hand on his chest and he didn't know where to put his own hands, so they stayed at his sides, and he stood there and let Beck hold him in the doorway and did not move.

Then Beck's mouth opened, and Topher felt the breath of it before the words, warm against his own lips, and the words were barely sound at all.

“Took you long enough.”

For one second, nothing moved. The hallway hum, the radiator down the corridor, the game show bleeding up through the floor — all of it kept going, but inside the doorway the air went still, and Topher stood with Beck's forehead against his and Beck's hand fisted in his jacket collar, and he had the whole shape of it right there, close enough to breathe, and he did not move.

Then Beck's hand on his chest slid up. Flat palm, slow, over the shirt, over the collarbone, up to the side of Topher's neck, and his thumb pressed in under the jaw where the pulse was going, and he felt it — Topher knew he felt it, because the corner of his mouth did the thing again, the almost-thing, and stayed there this time.

Topher's hands were still at his sides. Five years of not touching him, and his hands had learned the shape of that, had worn it smooth, and now they didn't know how to be anything else.

Beck's mouth came off his ear and stopped an inch away, and his breath was warm and it smelled faintly of mint, and his eyes were so close the pale blue had gone almost colorless, and he said, low, the way he said things on the bench when the coach wasn't listening:

"You gonna stand in my hall all night, or you gonna come in."

Not a question. Beck didn't do questions like that. It was a door being held and a dare being laid and the exact same thing he'd been doing since the library, since the green set, since first year, and Topher had spent all of it catching up.

He caught up.

His hands came off his sides. Both of them at once, no plan, and the left one landed on Beck's hip, above the waistband of the green boxers, on skin that was warm from the shower and still faintly damp, and the right one went up and closed over the back of Beck's neck, fingers into the wet hair at the nape, and he pulled — not hard, just the weight of it, the whole weight of five years in the pull — and Beck came in the last inch and their mouths met.

It was not a soft kiss. Beck kissed like he played — fast, forward, no ceremony — and Topher met it with the thing that had been sitting under his sternum since the studio, and for a few seconds it was just that: mouths, breath, the small wet sound of it, Beck's thumb still pressed under his jaw, feeling his pulse jump like it was a scoreboard.

Then Topher's hand on Beck's hip slid back, and down, over the curve of him, and gripped the back of his thigh — the muscle there, hard from years of skating, and Topher's fingers dug in and he lifted.

Beck made a sound against his mouth. Not a word. Something shorter than a word, caught in his throat, and his legs came up without being asked — both of them, locking around Topher's waist, ankles crossing at the small of his back, and the green boxers were nothing between them now, and Topher could feel the heat of him through his own jeans, the whole length of him pressed in.

He walked them forward.

The door swung wide on its hinge and hit the wall with a flat wooden slap, and Topher took the step into the apartment — one, two — and the hallway fell behind them, the hum, the radiator, the game show, all of it cut off the way a room cuts off when a door comes open and the room takes over.

Beck's apartment in the late afternoon. Topher knew it the way you know a place you've been a hundred times without ever once being in it like this. The crooked blind was down but not all the way, and the light came through in a long bar across the floor and up the side of the couch. The poster from first year was still on the wall, still crooked, still a band nobody liked. There was a mug on the coffee table with something cold in it. There was a hoodie over the back of the chair Beck had pushed back from his desk — that was the scrape Topher had heard through the door — and the desk had a laptop open on it with the screen gone dark, and a call sheet beside it, printed, one of the corners curling up.

Topher saw all of it in the half-second it took to cross the room, and then he didn't see any of it, because Beck's mouth was back on his and Beck's hands were in his jacket, pushing it off his shoulders, and the jacket went down his arms and hit the floor somewhere behind him and neither of them looked.

Beck's hand came up into his hair and closed, and pulled his head back — not gentle, a real pull — and his mouth went to Topher's throat, open, teeth on the tendon there, and Topher's whole body answered it. His fingers tightened on the back of Beck's thigh. His other hand was still on his neck and he could feel Beck's pulse under his thumb now, fast, faster than the hallway, faster than the rink in the third period, and he thought, with the one clean part of his brain that was still working: he's not calm. He's not doing any of this like he's calm.

Beck's mouth came up off his throat. "Couch," he said, against his jaw. "Or bed. Pick."

Topher didn't pick. He turned — one pivot, Beck's weight shifting with him, the two of them a single unbalanced thing — and the back of Beck's shoulder caught the edge of the doorframe between the living room and the short hall to the bedroom, and Beck grunted and laughed at the same time, that laugh, the one from the ice when he went down hard and came up grinning, and it went into Topher's mouth and he swallowed it whole.

"Wall," Beck said. "Okay. Wall's fine."

Topher pushed him into it.

Not hard — the wall took the weight of both of them and Beck's back hit the plaster and his legs cinched tighter around Topher's waist and his hands came up and grabbed the collar of Topher's shirt with both of them, and then they were nose to nose in the dim of the short hallway, breathing into each other, the bathroom somewhere behind Beck with the fan still going, a thin white sound under everything, and Topher could feel the whole length of Beck against him — the green boxers, the bare chest, the damp hair, the scar on the forearm that was pressed flat against Topher's ribs now, the one he'd never noticed in five years of locker rooms and had seen for the first time in a photograph two minutes after it was taken.

He noticed it now. He noticed it the way you notice a thing you've been looking past your whole life.

Beck's hands loosened on his collar. One of them came up and landed on Topher's face — fingers along his jaw, thumb at the corner of his mouth — and he did not kiss him. He just held his face, and looked at him, and the pale blue eyes were doing the thing from the boards again, the thing with no chirp in it, and Topher stood there with Beck's legs around his waist and Beck's hand on his face and the wall doing the work, and neither of them said anything, and the fan went on going, and somewhere in the apartment the fridge hummed and clicked off and the quiet got one degree deeper.

"Say it again," Beck said. Quiet. Barely sound.

Topher's mouth was dry. He'd walked two blocks with nothing prepared and he'd said the whole thing in the doorway and he did not have it in him to say it a second time, not the same way.

So he said it differently.

"Five years," he said.

Beck's thumb moved, once, along his jaw.

"Five years," Topher said again, "and I never once let myself — " He stopped. His hand was still on Beck's thigh and his fingers were white on it and he made them let go, one at a time, and put the hand flat against the wall beside Beck's head instead, palm to plaster, holding himself up, because his legs had gone unreliable somewhere between the doorway and here. "I told myself it was the team. The locker room. That it was — normal. That everybody looks at their — "

He couldn't finish it. He didn't need to. Beck's face was right there and Beck's face already knew, had known longer than Topher had, probably, and was not going to make him say the rest of it out loud in a hallway.

"Yeah," Beck said. Just that. Yeah. And then, because he was Beck, because he couldn't help it: "You're kind of an idiot, Jacobes."

"I know."

"No, I mean — " Beck's hand came off his face and went flat on his chest, and pushed, a small push, testing, the way he tested a defender's edge on the ice. "I've been standing in front of you for five years."

Topher went still.

The fan hummed. The light through the crooked blind, wherever the window was, made a pale bar on the floor of the hall and did not move.

"The green set," Beck said, and his voice had gone rough at the bottom, the way it did when he'd been skating hard. "You think I picked green because it matched my eyes? Dana handed me a box. I opened it. And I stood there in the changing room and I thought — if he sees me in this, he's gonna know." His thumb pressed once into Topher's sternum. "And then you walked in in the blue and I couldn't — I couldn't say one word to you. You remember that? You said something and I just — " He shook his head against the wall. "I couldn't talk. I've never not been able to talk in my life."

Topher remembered. He remembered standing in the door of the studio in a set of midnight blue silk he'd never agreed to wear, and Beck looking at him like he'd walked into the wrong room, like he'd walked into the wrong life, and not saying anything, and Topher had thought — he'd actually thought, in that moment — that he'd done something wrong. That he'd looked ridiculous. That Beck was about to laugh.

He hadn't laughed. He'd just stood there with his mouth closed and his eyes doing what they were doing now.

"I thought you were gonna laugh," Topher said.

"I know you did." Beck's hand slid up, over his chest, over his throat, and settled at the side of his neck again, thumb back under his jaw, back on the pulse. "You always think I'm gonna laugh. That's the whole problem."

Topher's hand came off the wall. He put it on Beck's hip again, both hands now, one on each side, and he held him there against the wall and he looked at him, the whole face, whole, the way he'd made himself do in the doorway, and he did not look away, and Beck did not look away either, and the hallway got very small and very warm and very quiet, and the bar of light on the floor did not move.

Then Beck's heels pressed into the small of his back, both of them, a deliberate thing, and his legs tightened around Topher's waist, and he pulled himself up an inch and settled back down, and the whole length of him moved against Topher through the green silk and the denim, and Topher's breath went out of him in a sound he didn't authorize.

"There it is," Beck said. Quiet. Almost fond. His mouth curved, finally, the real grin, the one from the ice, the one that promised trouble and always delivered, and it was aimed at Topher from six inches away and there was nowhere to be but in it. "There's the face."

Topher's hands tightened on his hips. He could feel the waistband of the green boxers under his thumbs, the elastic, the heat under it, and Beck was hard against him — there was no hiding that, not at this distance, not through nothing — and Topher was hard too and had been since the doorway and there was no pretending otherwise, and neither of them was pretending, and that, more than anything, was the thing that had changed between the café and this hallway.

He shifted his grip. Slid both hands back under Beck's thighs, the way he had in the doorway, and Beck's legs came up higher, ankles locking, and Topher took his weight fully off the wall — Beck's back came off the plaster and his hands came up and grabbed Topher's shoulders — and he carried him.

Three steps down the short hall. The bathroom door on the left, fan still going, a stripe of light under it. The bedroom door at the end, half-open, the crooked blind in there too, the same long bar of afternoon on the floor and up across the unmade bed, and Topher walked them into it, Beck's mouth at his temple now, Beck's breath in his hair, Beck's whole warm weight in his arms, and the green boxers were the last thing in the room that wasn't skin, and they were not going to be for long.

He got a knee onto the edge of the mattress. The bed gave under them, the way a bed does, and Beck's grip on his shoulders tightened and then he was tipping back, and Topher went with him, and they came down together — Beck's back into the sheets, Topher over him, one hand still under a thigh, the other braced on the mattress beside Beck's head, and the light from the crooked blind lay across the both of them now, a pale stripe over Beck's chest and up over his throat and stopped at his mouth.

Beck looked up at him. Hair fanned dark on the pillow, still wet at the ends. That grin, smaller now, quieter, the trouble still in it but something else under the trouble, something Topher had seen once on the boards and never been able to name and could still not name, here, with Beck's body under his and Beck's hand coming up to find the front of his shirt.

His fingers closed in the fabric and pulled.

"Off," Beck said. Not a dare this time. Just the word, low, and the hand that wouldn't let go of the shirt.

Topher's phone buzzed in his pocket. Both of them heard it — the short flat tick of it against the mattress, muffled through denim — and neither of them looked.

Beck's other hand came up and caught Topher's jaw, turned his face back down to him, held it there.

"Don't," he said. "Whatever it is. Don't."

Topher hadn't been going to. He hadn't looked at the phone since the café and he wasn't going to now, not with Beck under him and the light on both of them and the shirt coming off in Beck's fist, and he let Beck turn his face and bring it down and he kissed him again — slower this time, deeper, the whole weight of his body behind it — and Beck's hand let go of his jaw and went to the small of his back and pressed, and his legs came up around Topher's hips again and locked, and the phone in Topher's pocket buzzed once more, and again, and went quiet.

Outside the crooked blind, a car went by. The bar of light on the wall moved an inch and stopped.