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“Again,” Kevin said, scooping a ball from the ground and flinging it at Neil’s face.
Neil pressed his lips together in a line. He caught the ball in the air, stumbling back a step or two from the force of the throw. Kevin gestured with his stick at the empty goal. On the scoreboard behind them, red numbers told him he had scored twenty goals.
The goals, Kevin said, did not count.
Because of course the goals did not count.
The point was not to score the goals, but to hit the marks that he had made – after rolling his eyes at the fact that Neil’s mind did not, apparently, work in the mathematical, graphical way that his did – with a roll of red electrical tape. He had ripped each piece with his teeth, and each cross – there was seven of them in total – was smaller than the palm of Neil’s hand.
Neil stared at the goal and imagined Andrew standing in the middle of it in all his bulky armour. Wouldn’t it be easier to aim at a goalie? Neil’s mind didn’t work in the imaginary, despite the lie that was his existence, he needed something physical to aim past. Despite the thrum that jolted along his forearms in memory of the last time he had shot on Andrew, it seemed a better idea than the eventuality of pulling his own hair out when Kevin declared, again, that the ball had missed the mark by a mile.
Neil wondered if Kevin would be able to tell him how far off their mark his hands around his throat would be.
He turned his back on Exy’s best striker and ran a tight half loop, his feet bouncing against the wood, the net of his racquet caressing the floor as he snatched the ball from the ground and, at a run, slung the ball at the wall. The echoing thwack of the plexiglass shuddered through the court as the ball rebound into the goal.
The stadium glowed red. The censors signifying his goal. Twenty-one points.
Neil skidded to a stop and swept the ball back into his net and went again.
“You know you are aiming for the crosses, don’t you?” Kevin scolded. “Again.”
Neil went again, and again, and again.
When sweat was blurring his eyes, and the claxon call of the goal left his hands tremoring in irritation, he slung his racquet over his shoulder and began towards the locked door of the inner ring.
“Where are you going?” Kevin demanded. A ball hit the ground just to the right of Neil’s foot.
“I’m going to get our goalkeeper,” Neil said.
“No.” Kevin moved from his spot at the goal, long legs closing the gap between them quicker than seemed fair. “No – he must choose to be here, it will not mean anything if he does it because you ask.”
“I don’t care if it means nothing.,” Neil said. “This isn’t about Andrew and your obsession with him. I can’t shoot at nothing.” Neil reached for the door, the bolt cold under his fingers. “And I think you’re going to need protection in about five minutes if you keep this up.”
Kevin’s hand slammed onto the plexiglass. Neil let out a slow exhale through his teeth.
“No. Do not defy me,” Kevin insisted. “Do not waste my time.”
Neil turned on him and planted both hands on Kevin’s chest and pushed. “We’ve been at this for an hour.”
Kevin stood his ground, fingertips still on the plexiglass. A cage. “And we will be at it for even longer if you walk away from me.”
Neil shoved him again. There was cold triumph in his chest when Kevin’s solid stance faltered and he stepped back, hand falling, heavy, onto Neil’s shoulder. Neil shrugged him off and got in his face. He went on the tips of his toes and looked down his nose at the man who spent every night teaching him how to be better, how to reach his potential. The man who believed in him so sincerely and fiercely he had fought the schoolboard for him and told Neil time and time again the painful belief that he could make Court. And it was perhaps the devastation of knowing he would die before he ever could that made it so easy, so second nature, to spit in the face of it, just as he had Lola Malcolm’s training, and like he did the mantle of prodigal Wesninski son. He had always been, his mother had told him endlessly, an ungrateful and belligerent child.
“What are you going to do about it?” Neil asked.
He wondered if, for a moment, Kevin recognized him. Did he look like his father? He could feel the lines of his smile, unnerving and pulling; the exhaustion making him sharp and mean.
If Kevin did, it didn’t move him. He was arrogant and demanding and bull-headed as usual. He got in Neil’s face in turn. He prodded his finger into Neil’s heaving chest. Neil could feel Kevin’s breath on his mouth.
“You gave me your game.”
So greedy with his things, Neil thought, breath heaving out of him.
“I’ll take it back,” he whispered. He lied. “I’ll take it back.”
Kevin’s eyes narrowed. “No.”
Neil wet his lips and Kevin’s eyes darted downwards. Something in Neil’s chest jumped and a breath shuddered out of him.
“No. You are mine,” Kevin told him, and Neil felt it.
It made something lurch in his chest, that feeling that told him he had to move. That feeling of run, run, run. He dug his heels in the ground.
You are mine.
And Neil agreed because for the past ten years, it was Kevin that he had been living for; scraps of his success and what Neil had thought was happiness making the years on the run easier, knowing one of them was living the life he had wanted. And then Kevin had found him, he had believed in him and now they were here. It was almost one in the morning and in two days they were to play their next match. But for now, they were here, and Kevin’s words were like chains that bound him and weighed his feet with their truth. Neil did not want to run, even if everything in him was on high alert, the rush of adrenaline familiar and acidic.
Kevin’s eyes darted across Neil’s face. Hesitation a flicker in his expression.
Kevin’s finger dropped down his chest, curling in the fabric of his jersey. There was padding between them, the bulk of his chest armour and the compression of his undershirt, but Neil feared, a moment, he might feel the scars there. The burn of the iron-mark, the drag of roadrash.
Run run run run—
Neil’s heart was pounding. A lump in his throat.
Kevin ducked down and kissed him.
It was the boldest thing he had ever done outside of Exy. Neil froze, his stillness off-putting and a discomfort to Kevin’s cowardice, for he pulled back and stared in white eyed panic at the space between their mouths, afraid, it seemed, to meet Neil’s eyes.
But he wasn’t going to let Kevin’s liquid spine ruin this, he would not. He bit his lip. He lifted his gloved hands to grab Kevin’s face and closed the space between them.
Neil had not kissed anyone in four years.
He did not know what he was doing.
He wanted to do it anyway.
Kevin huffed against his mouth. His fingers clenched in Neil’s shirt. Neil held him in place and kissed him like he knew what he was doing.
There was the errant thought that he should pull away, the thought similar to ‘what the fuck was he doing’. But Neil didn’t let those thoughts hold weight, because he was too distracted by Kevin’s mouth; the way that he had to stretch to reach him, and how Kevin’s frame hulked over him. Neil stepped backwards until he hit the plexiglass wall, dragging Kevin with him by his padded grip on his jaw.
Kevin pulled away. Neil looked at him and then he looked at his mouth.
“What,” Neil demanded, irritable, the gap between them feeling endless, as though Kevin stood in the goal, and Neil at half-court. Kevin’s mouth was red already, bottom lip wet and enticing in a way that Neil had never considered before. Kevin narrowed his eyes at Neil, and without thought, heat burning his face, he tried to pull Kevin back down to him, his heart pounding a warm beat in his ears.
“Give me a—” Kevin didn’t finish his sentence, impatience cutting him short.
Kevin turned his head and brought his wrist to his mouth, pulling the straps of his glove loose with his teeth before shaking it onto the ground. He repeated on the other side and then with his newly freed hands, grabbed onto Neil’s waist and pulled him close with the sort of decisiveness that he had only for the Court. Neil was stuck between the plexiglass and Kevin’s body, and it felt fitting, really, the two most important things in his life grounding him.
Kevin kissed him again and Neil’s thoughts disappeared for the sudden awareness of Kevin’s entirety pressed against him. He panted into Kevin’s mouth and realised he was probably terrible at this, and realised, secondly, that he didn’t care and that Kevin didn’t seem to either, for his tongue was in Neil’s mouth and his hands firm on his waist. He held them together and Neil could feel the long, muscular length of Kevin’s thighs, the broadness of his body and the slim dip of his waist, the tapered hips. He could feel, as he could feel the dazed blood rush in his own body, the press of Kevin’s cock against him and it was all so much.
His hips twitched, and Kevin moaned into his mouth. Kevin’s hands on his waist suddenly dropped lower, dragging against his clothed skin and to his ass. He pulled Neil impossibly closer, his leg pressed tight between Neil’s legs.
“Neil,” Kevin murmured, and kissed along his cheek, down his jaw, his face buried in Neil’s neck, teeth scraping the length of it in a way that made Neil’s eyes shut and head fall back against the plexiglass. He still wore gloves, and he clumsily curled his fingers around the back of Kevin’s neck, holding him there.
“You improve every day,” Kevin said into his neck, his voice low, and Neil realised he was talking about Exy. He was talking about Exy as his hardness was pressed against Neil’s torso, and his mouth was on Neil’s throat. Neil bared his teeth in what he was surprised to find was a fierce smile, because he liked that too. Staring up at the lights in The Foxhole Court while his hips moved without any real awareness and Kevin marked, certainly, for there was the addition of teeth now, his throat.
“Is this how I get you to praise me?” Neil mused. “You’ll tell me I’m good like this?”
And Kevin hummed and their movement increased just so, Kevin’s hand sliding down his thigh and tugging him, moulding him as he saw fit – wasn’t that typical of them? Kevin the one with the vision, Neil the one being shaped into it? - to hitch around his own thigh.
“Maybe,” Kevin said, and pulled back, a wildness in his eyes that made Neil think of the forest.
Neil, behind Kevin’s head, worked his gloves off and let them fall to the ground.
Kevin’s eyes had caught on something over his shoulder, and Neil dropped his head back to look. Andrew in the stands, leaning back on his hands. His attention on the both of them, Neil realised now that he could feel it on him; that the weight of his gaze was as familiar as Kevin’s presence was now.
“We should stop,” Neil said, because they should stop, shouldn’t they? When had this gotten away from them that he’d forgot, a moment, the presence of Andrew? When had Neil ever forgotten Andrew’s presence?
Kevin hummed. His gaze didn’t move and he kept, firmly, Neil’s thigh on his own, his balance teetering just so in their unconscious grinding into one another. Kevin swiped a dismissive hand in the air and said, “we have talked about it.”
And he didn’t deign to give Neil any more information, but it set Neil’s mind racing nonetheless.
What did it mean that they had talked about it? To what extent, and what did that mean Kevin and Andrew were to one another besides outside appearances?
Though the suddenness of it all meant that he didn’t ask– what with his brain power deteriorating in a way that he frankly found concerning – content with the diversion back to the way they were touching and the way that Andrew had, apparently, consented to whatever they were doing, spontaneous as Neil had thought it to be.
“Can I?” Kevin asked and slowly let Neil’s leg slide down to the ground, his big hands pulling up his torso before one tugged at the waistband of Neil’s shorts, and his brain short-circuited and he panicked, slightly, and thought of what scars he had, and what Kevin would think and what this would turn into if he saw them. Kevin saw it in his eyes and his hand dropped, knuckles grazing along where Neil was trapped in his shorts, a hard line; but he pushed no further and instead, tugged Neil from the wall and took his place.
“What?” Neil asked as Kevin gave him his back – broad shoulders, hands against the wall, spidery lines of scars a map over his left hand. Neil closed the space between them automatically, pressing himself into the curve of Kevin’s back.
“You do not want me to see you,” Kevin explained impatiently. Neil pressed a kiss against his spine. He rubbed his forehead into the dip between his shoulder blades. It did nothing to balm his heightened heart rate, his own arousal. “I do not care.”
Neil skimmed a hand down Kevin’s side. Kevin dropped a hand from the wall and slid their fingers together, pulling Neil’s hand around the front of him. Neil took the hint. He was big in Neil’s palm, the fabric of his shorts pushing his cock up along the top of his thigh. Neil had never done this before, but it felt instinctual to wrap his fingers around him as Kevin continued speaking, voice a little shakier than before as Neil toyed with him.
“I do not care,” he reiterated. “Use me.”
“How?” Neil asked, maybe to hear Kevin say it out loud in that softly wrecked voice of his. The voice that had been critiquing him all night, weeks and weeks of it, now asking him for something. Or maybe it was just because it was hot. Or maybe because he really didn’t know. He rubbed his thumb over the tip of Kevin’s erection.
“Neil,” Kevin ground out, head dropping between his arms.
“You’re usually so good at telling me what you want, Kev,” Neil said.
“You can use my thighs,” Kevin told him. “Fuck my thighs.”
Neil groaned, didn’t even know he’d wanted it until Kevin put it in his head but now, he couldn’t believe he’d never thought of it. Kevin’s legs were long and muscular and went all the way up to Neil’s waist. His thighs, particularly, were thick with muscle and pressed together when he stood. Neil had seen the power in them when Kevin pushed himself across the court, stride long and confident.
“Can I?” he asked pulling at Kevin’s shorts. The waistband snapped against his skin.
He could practically hear Kevin’s eye roll. Neil stepped back, a breath between them and tugged Kevin’s shorts down unnecessarily, shoving them to his feet. He could’ve kept them on, but he knew Kevin would bitch if he damaged his kit, no matter how many spares he had.
“Come on,” Kevin encouraged, slumping forwards with his back arched slightly.
Neil pushed up the bottom of Kevin’s jersey. Kevin got the hint and knotted it at the front just above his little waist. He grazed his fingers down the small of Kevin’s back, grabbed his ass just to see what he could get away with. Kevin’s answering moan told him he was doing something right, and that also they should hurry up.
“Always a show on court,” he murmured to himself.
Neil glanced around the stadium once more, cheeks reddening at the blur of Andrew in the dark stands, before he pulled down the waistband of his shorts and pulled himself out. It was obscene to be doing this at the court, he knew. He was wet and he wrapped his palm around himself and spread the precum down himself. He ducked his head down and let a line of spit drop onto his cock, slicking himself up before he pressed against the tight press of Kevin’s thighs.
Their height difference meant he was lower down than perhaps he should have been, but Kevin let out a soft sound as Neil pushed between his legs, the wetness of his length smearing into Kevin’s dark leg hair, making his legs slick, hot, tight.
“You feel so—” Neil cut himself off on a groan, eyes fluttering shut.
Neil watched Kevin’s right-hand duck down between his legs. Kevin’s breathy encouragement, and the frankly overwhelming tightness of his thighs pushed Neil to movement. He didn’t think he would last long, and he didn’t really care.
He still didn’t know if Kevin intended to finish practice after this.
“Fuck,” Kevin muttered. “Neil.”
Neil leant forwards so his forehead pressed into Kevin’s back as he moved.
Kevin’s thighs tensed and released. Beneath his hands, Neil could feel Kevin shaking and his hand squeezed at his hip, nails digging into the skin.
The movement of his hips was uncontrolled, back-and-forth, the tight grip of Kevin’s thighs on the edge of too much. The sounds they made in the empty stadium were obscene, the wetness from his cock slicking the delicate insides of Kevin’s legs, the hair matted and damp. Neil wet his bottom lip, caught, a moment, in the view of his cock dipping in and out and the red tinge beneath his mad grip on Kevin’s hip. He felt himself raising to his toes as he chased his pleasure.
“Do you think he can see us?” Neil found himself asking.
“Not—not as much as he would like,” Kevin said. Neil felt Kevin begin to move his arm move faster and he bit a grin into Kevin’s back.
“Do you think he’s…?’
Kevin moved his head, looked up.
“No,” Kevin said.
Neil wished, a moment, that he could see Andrew’s face. Would he have tells like Kevin did? Were his cheeks pink, like the back of Kevin’s neck, the tips of his ears? Or would there be no change to his expression at all, that in itself its own taunt?
He longed, too, to see Kevin’s face. Was his hair beginning to curl from sweat, as it did in practice? What did his mouth look like, red, open? He could glimpse a blur of him in the smeared plexiglass; something like a watercolour red painting, or a Monet, fuzzy the closer he got.
Neil gripped Kevin’s hip tighter and his thrusts were harder, more forceful. He felt the power of his movement jolt Kevin forwards into the wall. The push made Kevin’s thighs loosen around him and the absence of it made Neil gasp.
How had he become greedy for something that before tonight he’d never known he’d even wanted?
“Stay,” he ground out and knocked Kevin’s thighs back together, holding him shut, clamped like a vice around Neil’s cock until he felt like stars were blaring behind his eyelids.
“Neil,” Kevin moaned, hooking his ankle around Neil’s and holding him close, Neil’s come dripping between his thighs as Kevin’s hand moved on himself until his breath stuttered and his frame slumped into the plexiglass wall.
Neil let out a startled sound and wrapped him in his arms and held him up, their breathlessness loud in the empty stadium.
He nosed against Kevin’s back, holding him until the ache in his arms from earlier reappeared. He gave the striker a shake.
“You’re too big for me to hold you up for long,” Neil said, squeezing Kevin’s waist but not letting go until he knew that the wobble had gone from his knees.
He slipped from his space between Kevin’s legs and tucked himself back into his shorts with a wrinkle of his nose.
Kevin turned around slowly and Neil blushed to see him. His shirt was still hitched just above his waist and there was a dark trail of hair that led down to his cock which was big even in its softness. There was come across his abs and down the fronts of his legs. Neil wrenched his eyes up and curled his hand around the back of Kevin’s neck. He tugged him down for a kiss. He bit at Kevin’s bottom lip and held him there, tight, until they pulled back and ground their foreheads together instead.
“I can’t say I expected that,” Neil said finally.
Kevin, he could feel, rolled his eyes. Kissed him a final time and pulled away to tug black boxers up his long legs, kicking aside his shorts for laundering. He didn’t deign to respond straight away, and Neil laughed and held up his hands in surrender, and Kevin shrugged.
“Nothing would have ever happened if I left it up to you,” he said.
Neil had no arguments. He collected their things from the floor.
“So you were being a bitch all night to make sure this happened?’
Kevin narrowed his green eyes at Neil and pulled the bolt on the door. “Hurry up on sorting the court, won’t you?” he said. “It will be another late night tomorrow.”
Kevin stepped out of the court and left Neil to clear up. He watched Kevin slow at the stands and Andrew step down to meet him. He loitered a couple steps above Kevin, making him only a head or so taller. It was dark, but Neil saw Andrew curl a hand around the back of Kevin’s neck and squeeze.
Neil looked away.
He went to tidy up.
-
When they left The Foxhole Court it was nearly two in the morning, and Andrew walked a few steps ahead of them with his black hood drawn up over his head.
“You’re welcome,” Kevin said around a yawn, walking past them both with his long strides.
Andrew let out an incredulous sound. “And do tell me what I’m thanking you for?”
Kevin turned, walking backwards so he could look at them both. “He was going to get you to stand in goal,” he said. He sent a look towards Neil. “Not that that would have made him any better.”
Neil stared at him. Perhaps it was comforting to know that this part of Kevin would, apparently, never change.
Andrew levelled Kevin with a look. “What a sacrifice you made, however might I thank you?”
Kevin gave Andrew a soft look that Neil didn’t think he’d ever seen before. A lazy, slow smile that made Andrew bat him in the chest when they reached the door out to the parking lot. The striker’s eyes creased at the corners, warmth in his gaze, before he moved out of the way.
Andrew strode ahead of them once more and Kevin fell into stride with Neil.
Kevin nudged against him as they left the building into the hazy orange lit lot.
“Same again tomorrow night.”
It was not a question.
And Neil, who didn’t know which part Kevin was talking about, nodded.