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Overtime

A Team Sport Becomes 1 v 1

By KnaughtyKat

Content Warning : This story contains explicit sexual content between adult male anthropomorphic characters, including aggression escalating into sex, anal sex, dirty talk, dubious-but-consensual locker-room dynamics, and strong language. All characters are adults. Reader discretion is advised.

DISCLAIMER

This is a work of fiction. All characters are fictional anthropomorphic adults. Any resemblance to real persons or events is coincidental.

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Chapter 1: Tip-Off

The Whitmore locker room smelled like liniment and fluorescent light and the particular ammonia of forty-five minutes of pre-game nerves trying to sweat themselves out. The lights overhead hummed at the frequency that lived in every athletic facility Marcus had ever stepped foot in — a low fluorescent buzz he'd stopped consciously hearing in college and could still hear now if he listened.

He was listening.

He was listening because he wasn't talking.

The team around him was loud the way teams were loud forty minutes before tip-off — the high register of nervous joking, somebody's bluetooth speaker playing the same warm-up playlist they'd been playing for two years, Reggie shouting at Henderson about something that had happened in Tuesday practice, Henderson firing back, the sneaker-rubber sound of guys pacing the tile because sitting was harder than moving. Normal noise. The exact noise this room had made before every home game Marcus had played in for three seasons.

The reason Marcus wasn't talking was sitting fifteen feet away, on the other side of the locker room, also not talking.

The team had a name for it now. They didn't say it out loud but Marcus could see it on their faces — the way Reggie's eyes flicked between Marcus and Kai when he thought Marcus wasn't watching, the way Henderson kept his back angled so he didn't have to acknowledge either side. The team was choosing where to stand the way you'd choose where to stand in a kitchen with a pan that might catch fire.

Marcus laced his shoes. His mane was tied back the way he tied it for every game — a tight knot at the base of his skull that he'd developed at fifteen and not changed since, because once you found a thing that didn't move during a fast break you didn't fuck with it. His ankles got the standard tape. He drank from his bottle. He looked at his hands. He did not look across the room.

He didn't need to look. He knew where Kai was without checking. The hyena had been a presence in Marcus's peripheral awareness for six months — a constant low-grade itch in the back of his attention, the way you knew where a wasp was in a room without looking at it. Kai's locker was exactly fifteen feet from Marcus's. Marcus had counted, the second week of the season, while pretending to count something else.

Coach came in and the room got quieter.

Coach Hayes was a lean grizzled wolf who'd played for the program in the nineties and come back to coach it eight years ago, and his pre-game speeches had the rhythm of a man who'd given a thousand of them and stopped trying to make them feel new. Tonight the speech was short. Hayes didn't waste words on a conference rival they'd already beaten by sixteen at their place. He looked once at Marcus. Once at Kai. The look took longer than the speech did.

"Get out there," he said.

The team stood. Marcus stood. Kai stood at the exact same time, on the other side of the room, and for a half-second their movements synced — both of them up, both of them adjusting their shorts, both of them rolling their necks. Marcus felt the synchronicity like a static shock and corrected for it without thinking. He waited an extra beat before moving toward the door. So did Kai.

Reggie was already out. Henderson too. The team flowed through the door in their warm-up jerseys and the noise of the corridor took them, and Marcus walked out into it and Kai walked out behind him, and the gap between them was the gap they'd been keeping all season.

Six feet. Marcus had counted that too.

The crowd noise hit them as they stepped onto the court. Whitmore's home arena was a four-thousand-seat box that, when full, sounded twice as big as that — the kind of building that ate sound and gave it back doubled. Marcus walked through the noise without registering it the way he walked through everything in pre-game, and the wood under his sneakers was familiar enough that his body knew it without his eyes, and he found his spot on the half-court line and bent and stretched and waited.

Kai's spot was three feet to his left.

The hyena was always three feet to his left at the line, because the starting line-up positioned them next to each other, and Marcus had learned in the first week of the season that Kai breathed through his nose during introductions and laughed through his teeth at warm-ups and rolled his shoulders the same way every time, a quick shrug-roll, and that he was beautiful in the way certain animals were beautiful when they didn't know they were being watched.

Marcus didn't think about that one.

He had a system for not thinking about that one.

The whistle blew. Tip-off. Reggie won the jump cleanly and slapped the ball back to Henderson at the top of the key, and Marcus broke for the post and Kai broke for the wing and the offence Marcus had been running for three years started to unfold the way it always did — and then Kai cut against the play.

Just a step. Just enough. Marcus saw the pass that was supposed to come to him, saw Henderson's eyes finding him, and then Henderson's eyes shifted because Kai was suddenly in the lane where Marcus was supposed to be and Henderson dished to Kai instead. Kai pulled up. Released. Buried it from twelve feet.

The crowd cheered.

Marcus's hands hadn't moved.

"Nice shot," Reggie said as they jogged back on defence, and his eyes were on Kai but his voice carried the exact tone of someone defusing.

Marcus said nothing.

The next eight minutes were a war they were running together for an audience that didn't know it was watching. Marcus called plays. Kai ran them when he wanted to and ignored them when he didn't. Marcus caught a pass from Henderson with his back to the basket, made a clean post move, drew contact, scored, drew the foul. Kai stole a ball at half-court and went the length on a fast break, finishing with a dunk so loud the rim was still ringing when the rival point guard inbounded.

They were both playing well. They were both playing alone. The team felt it — Marcus could see it in Reggie's tightening shoulders, in the way Henderson's pass selection started to favour the safe option over the right one. The opponent felt it too. Their coach was already calling switches on screens that hadn't been set yet, betting that Marcus and Kai wouldn't communicate in time.

He was right twice.

With six minutes left in the half, the rival point guard threw up a brick and Marcus and Kai both went for the rebound.

Two bodies in the air. Marcus had the position — he'd boxed out, he'd timed it right, the ball was coming to him — and then Kai's elbow was in his ribs going up. Not hard. Not hard enough that the ref saw it. Hard enough that Marcus felt the wind go out of him for a half-second and his grip on the ball compromised and he came down with it but barely.

Kai came down beside him. Their forearms touched and stayed touched for one half-second longer than they needed to.

"Watch your fucking elbow," Marcus said, low, the words coming out before he'd decided to say them.

Kai's spotted face turned to him. The hyena's grin was the involuntary kind, the resting expression of an animal whose mouth was built that way — but there was a particular muscle around the eyes that got tighter when Kai meant something. That muscle was tight now.

"Watch your fucking position," Kai said back.

The whistle blew. Reset. Marcus walked the ball up. He could feel the elbow bruise forming under his ribs. He could feel something else forming somewhere harder to name.

Two minutes later, he found Kai cutting through the lane and dished to him. The pass was harder than it needed to be — a chest-pass at full strength, the kind of pass you used to wake someone up — and Kai caught it cleanly without flinching, planted, scored.

The crowd cheered again.

The crowd kept cheering for Kai. The crowd hadn't decided who was leading this team, but it had decided who was scoring on it.

Marcus jogged back. His ribs hurt. His jaw was tight enough that he could feel his back teeth.

The half ended with Whitmore down by three. Locker room at the half was tense — Coach Hayes saying things that should have been obvious about ball movement and trust and playing within the system, not looking at any one player because he didn't have to, because everyone in the room knew exactly who he was talking about. Marcus didn't look at Kai. Kai didn't look at Marcus. The team looked at the floor.

The third quarter was worse. They tied it, then went up four, then gave it back, then tied it again. Every time Marcus called a play, he could feel Kai deciding whether to run it. Every time Kai shot, Marcus could feel his own jaw lock. The fight wasn't visible from the stands. The stands saw two guys playing well. The bench saw a slow knife going in between two ribs.

Fourth quarter, two minutes left, score tied. Marcus brought the ball up. Kai was on the wing. The play call was Kai-on-the-curl, an actual play, the right play — but as Marcus crossed the timeline he saw the rival defender cheating one step too far toward the wing and he saw the gap and he took the lane himself.

He missed.

Long rebound. Other team in transition. Layup. Whitmore down two with ninety seconds to play.

Kai jogged past him on the way back up the court. Didn't say a word. Didn't have to. The hyena's silence was its own commentary, and Marcus felt it in his ribs more than the elbow had.

Whitmore tied it at the line with thirty seconds left. Got a stop. Brought the ball up with ten seconds remaining and a chance to win the game. The play was for Marcus — drag screen, Marcus to the elbow, pull up over the screen, rhythm shot. The play that had won them games all season. The play Coach Hayes had drawn up in the timeout because Marcus was the captain and Marcus was who you trusted with the last shot.

Marcus came off the screen exactly the way he was supposed to. Caught the pass. Saw the daylight. Saw — in his peripheral vision, in the corner of his hyena-attuned awareness — Kai cutting backdoor, wide open under the basket.

Marcus shot anyway.

The ball hit the front of the rim. Bounced once. Bounced again. Fell off without going in.

The buzzer was a sound he heard from very far away.

The handshake line was muscle memory. Marcus walked through it without registering whose hand he was shaking. The other team's captain — a tall lynx who'd had a quietly excellent game — said something close to "good game" and Marcus said something close to "good game" back and neither of them meant it because they both knew what they'd just watched.

Locker room.

Coach Hayes didn't sit down. That was the first sign. He walked into the room and stood in the middle of it and waited for the team to come in and arrange themselves on the benches, and when everyone was in he started talking, and his voice was the calm voice. Coaches who were calm after a loss were worse than coaches who were yelling. Marcus had learned that at sixteen.

Hayes laid it out. The first quarter. The third quarter. The last possession. Specific plays, specific decisions, specific names. He named Marcus. He named Kai. He named both of them in the same sentence.

"The two of you," he said, "have been on the same team for ten months. I do not know what your problem with each other is. I have stopped caring what your problem with each other is. What I care about is that we just lost a game we should have won by twelve, in front of our home crowd, in conference, because the two best players on this team would rather lose than throw each other a fucking pass on time."

Nobody moved.

"So here's what's going to happen. The two of you are going to figure it out. I do not care how. I do not care if you like each other. I do not care if you hate each other. I do not care if you take it out behind the gym and beat each other to death. Figure it out. Or I'm going to make a decision about who I want on the floor in the fourth quarter, and one of you is going to be on the bench."

He looked at Marcus on the last sentence.

Then he looked at Kai.

Both of them got the look. The look meant: I haven't decided.

"Get cleaned up," Hayes said. "I'll see you Monday."

He walked out.

The room exhaled. Reggie started for his locker without looking at anyone. Henderson was already pulling at his ankle tape. The bench guys filed past Marcus's locker the way you'd file past a man who'd just been told something private, and the freshman — the kid who'd been redshirted last year and was still working out where he sat in the social hierarchy — said "tough one, cap" as he went past, with the cautious tone of someone who wasn't sure if speech was permitted right now.

Marcus said nothing back. He didn't trust his voice not to come out wrong, and the freshman moved on faster than he'd planned to.

Showers turned on. Lockers banged shut. Reggie left first, then two of the bench guys, then Henderson with his bag over his shoulder and his eyes on the floor. He paused at the door for a half-second, looked back at Marcus, looked across at Kai, and Marcus could see Henderson trying to decide whether he should say something.

Henderson decided not to. He left.

Eight minutes after Coach walked out, the door swung shut behind the last teammate. The catch clicked.

The room hummed. Fluorescent lights. A shower one of the bench guys had left running in his rush to be elsewhere — a thin steady hiss from the back of the locker room. The settling tick of the building. Marcus's own breathing, which was slower than it should have been after a game.

And across fifteen feet of locker room tile — fifteen feet exactly, the same fifteen feet that had been between them since pre-season — Kai was sitting on a bench, head down, hands clasped between his knees, breathing the same too-slow breathing.

The silence between them was louder than the game had been.

* * *

Chapter 2: Foul

Marcus spoke first. He'd known he would. He'd been writing the sentence in his head since the third quarter.

"You missed the cut on the curl in the second."

His voice came out flat. Not the voice of a captain talking to a teammate — the voice of a man reading evidence into a record. Across the room, Kai's head came up slowly. The hyena's eyes were the colour of dark amber and they were already on him before Marcus had finished the sentence.

"I missed the —"

"The curl," Marcus said. "Hayes drew it up in the timeout in the second quarter. You don't run it. You back-screen Henderson instead, which freezes the wing and gives them an extra step into the lane. We score on that play four times a game and we didn't run it once tonight."

Kai didn't answer immediately. His head tilted — the small canid-like tilt that hyenas had, the listening posture — and he watched Marcus the way you watched a fire to figure out which way the wind was about to push it.

"Anything else, Captain?" Kai said.

The Captain came out as a slap. Marcus felt it. Marcus had been waiting for it.

"Yeah. Plenty. The pass on the third-quarter break — you took a pull-up jumper from twenty feet when Reggie was wide open in the corner. The closeout in the fourth — you switched off the screen instead of fighting through it, and the kid you switched onto buried his shot. The last possession of the half — you called your own number on a clear-out without telling anyone you were doing it, which means I had no spacing on the weak side and we got nothing on the offensive rebound. I can keep going. I've got all night."

Kai stood up.

It was a slow stand. Not a confrontation-stand, not yet — more like a man getting himself into the right body position for a conversation that was going to require it. He walked three steps forward. Stopped. The fifteen feet of locker room between them was now twelve.

"You're done?" Kai said.

"I'm done."

"My turn?"

"Go ahead."

Kai went ahead.

"The pick-and-roll on our first possession," the hyena said. His voice was lower than Marcus's and rougher, and the southern edge of the South in it had got a lot more pronounced in the last two minutes. "You called it for yourself instead of for me, even though their five was hedging weak and the play was wide open for me at the elbow. The cross-court pass in the second — you skipped me on the wing because you wanted to drive instead, and you missed the layup. The timeout call in the third — you waved Hayes off when he tried to give us a play, because you wanted to set up your own. The curl you keep crying about? That play wasn't called for me. I checked the sheet at half. That play was called for Henderson and you didn't tell me, so I made the read I made."

He took a step.

"Want me to keep going? Or do you want to skip ahead to the part where you bricked the game-winner because you're so used to being the closer that you didn't see me wide open under the basket with a clear lane?"

The room was very quiet. The dripping shower in the back was the loudest thing in it.

Marcus felt his teeth set.

"That's not —"

"That's exactly it. You saw me. I saw you see me. You shot anyway."

"You're making a story."

"I'm describing what happened. There's a difference. You should know it — you make stories all the time. Stories about how the team would be lost without you. Stories about how every loss is somebody else's fault. Stories about how your way is the only way and anyone who doesn't run your way is a problem to manage." Kai took another step. "Want to hear my favourite story you tell? The one where everybody on this team defers to you because you're the captain. You know what the truth is? Everybody on this team defers to you because you make their lives miserable when they don't. And that's not leadership. That's just a guy who's used to being obeyed and can't tell the difference."

Marcus stood up.

He didn't decide to. His body did it before his brain caught up. The lion in him, the part that wasn't a basketball player and wasn't a captain and wasn't anything except a body that knew when it was being challenged, stood up and squared its shoulders and felt its ears flatten against its skull without permission.

"Watch your fucking mouth."

"Maybe if you weren't so busy being the boss," Kai said, "you'd notice you're not the best player on this team anymore."

The sentence landed somewhere lower than Marcus's stomach.

He'd been waiting for the sentence too — known it was coming, known Kai was going to say it, known it from the second the hyena had stood up. He'd thought knowing would help. It didn't. The sentence hit him in a place where he didn't have any defences, because that place wasn't built around being the captain. It was built around being him. And being him had been the same thing as being the best player in any room he walked into for so long that the alternative wasn't a thought he had words for.

He took a step toward Kai.

Kai didn't move back.

The twelve feet was now seven.

Marcus could hear Kai's breathing now — quick, controlled, the breathing of someone whose pulse was up but whose body was steady. He could see the pulse in Kai's throat under the spotted fur. He could see the way Kai's ears were forward and tense. He could see the small particular muscle around the eyes that had been tight in the second quarter and was tight now and meant something different than it had then.

"Say it again," Marcus said. His voice had dropped half an octave.

"I don't need to say it again. You heard it the first time."

"Say it again."

Kai grinned. The grin was the involuntary one, the resting structure of his face — but the eyes underneath it were cold and bright and alive.

"You're not the best player on this team anymore, Marcus."

The first name was a needle. Kai had never used Marcus's first name on the court — it had been Cap or nothing for ten months — and the deliberate switch to Marcus right now was a knife with a point.

Marcus closed the distance.

Three feet. Then two. Then one. He stopped a hand's width from Kai's chest and the hyena's chin came up to meet him and the gap between their faces was less than a foot and Marcus could feel Kai's breath on his muzzle and they were both breathing hard for no reason because neither of them had moved much.

"Step back," Kai said. Not a request.

"Make me."

Kai shoved him.

It was a chest-shove with both hands, hyena-strength behind it — and hyenas were strong, stronger than people gave them credit for, the bite-force champion of the African savanna in a body that was leaner than it should have been for the strength it carried — and Marcus rocked back a half-step before he caught himself.

He shoved back.

The lion shove was harder. Marcus had thirty pounds on Kai easy and the leverage of a longer reach, and he put both hands flat on Kai's chest and drove. Kai stumbled into the bench behind him, caught himself with one hand on a locker handle, and was already coming back at Marcus before his feet had finished settling.

Then it wasn't a shove anymore.

Kai's fist came up and Marcus saw it coming — Marcus had been watching Kai's hands all season — and he ducked the swing and grabbed the hyena's wrist and twisted, and Kai went with the twist instead of fighting it and used the momentum to drive his shoulder into Marcus's chest. They both went sideways. Marcus's hip clipped the corner of a bench and the bench went over with a crash that made the room ring. They hit the floor together and rolled and Kai was on top for a half-second and then Marcus was on top and then they were both on their feet again, panting, watching each other, the bench upturned between them like a barricade.

Marcus's lip was bleeding. He hadn't noticed the punch landing. His mouth tasted like copper and his ribs hurt where the bench corner had caught him, and somewhere in the upper-left field of his vision a locker door was hanging crooked from a hinge that had given when his shoulder had clipped it on the way down.

Kai had a scratch across one cheekbone. Marcus's claws. He hadn't noticed using them.

"That all you got, Captain?" Kai said. He was smiling. The smile wasn't reassuring.

Marcus came across the bench at him.

The second exchange was uglier. Marcus tackled him into the lockers — not a careful tackle, a body-slam — and the metal behind Kai's back made a noise that Marcus felt in his back teeth. Kai's elbow came up under Marcus's jaw and snapped his head back hard enough that he saw stars for a second. The hyena was strong. Marcus had known that intellectually for ten months and had never had it pressed against him with this kind of weight. Kai twisted under him, pivoted, used Marcus's own forward momentum against him, and suddenly Marcus's back was against the lockers and Kai's forearm was across his throat.

Not pressed hard enough to choke. Pressed exactly hard enough to let Marcus know it could be.

"Yield, Captain?" Kai said. His face was three inches from Marcus's. His breath was hot. The amber eyes were fierce and bright and alive in a way Marcus hadn't seen them all season.

"No."

Marcus reversed him.

He bent at the knees, slipped under Kai's forearm, used a wrestler's hip throw he hadn't drilled in five years and somehow still knew, and Kai went over his hip and into the bench Marcus had knocked over earlier. Kai landed on it with the small of his back. Made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a swear. Was on his feet again before Marcus could press the advantage.

They circled.

This was when Marcus's brain noticed what his body had been noticing for the last minute. They weren't fighting like guys who hated each other. They were fighting like guys who knew each other's bodies. Every move Marcus made, Kai countered before it landed — not because Kai was psychic, but because he'd been watching Marcus play basketball for ten months and Marcus moved in a fight the same way he moved on a court. And Kai's moves were the same — Marcus could read them as they were forming, because he'd been watching Kai play basketball for the same ten months, and his body knew what Kai's body was about to do better than his mind did.

They were dancing. They'd been dancing all season. They'd just been calling it something else.

The next exchange brought them back together — Kai going low for Marcus's legs, Marcus catching him by the shoulders and spinning, both of them ending up against the lockers again with Marcus on the inside this time. His forearm on Kai's chest. Kai pinned with his shoulder blades against the metal and his head turned slightly to one side and his breath coming hard.

Marcus held him there.

Two seconds. That was all the pin needed. Two seconds was how long it took to know who'd won the exchange — and they both knew. Kai's resistance under Marcus's forearm had peaked and started to ebb, and Kai was getting his feet back under him to go again, and Marcus's job was to step back and let him.

Marcus didn't step back.

Three seconds. Four.

Five.

The pin was no longer a pin. It was a hold. Marcus's forearm was still across Kai's chest but it wasn't applying pressure anymore — it was just there, weight without force, and the back of his hand was against Kai's collarbone and he could feel the heat of the hyena's skin through the fur and the rise and fall of Kai's chest as he breathed.

Kai had stopped trying to reverse. Marcus felt the moment it happened — the tension under his forearm going from coiled to held. The hyena was still breathing hard. His ears were still flat. His eyes were still bright. But his body had stopped fighting, and the way it had stopped wasn't surrender. It was a different shape, and Marcus's body recognised it before his mind had a name for it.

Marcus's other hand was on the locker beside Kai's head. He didn't remember putting it there. He couldn't remember the last second when his face had been further than four inches from Kai's, either.

The room was very quiet. The shower was still running somewhere at the back, that thin steady hiss, and the fluorescents were still buzzing and the bench they'd knocked over was still on its side, but all of it had got further away.

Kai's chin came up, just slightly. The throat-bare-up that wolves did when they were yielding to a stronger member of the pack — except Kai wasn't a wolf and wasn't yielding, and the move when he did it was its own kind of challenge. Marcus could see the underside of the hyena's jaw and the pale fur of his throat and the place the pulse was beating fast under it.

"Marcus," Kai said. Quiet.

It wasn't an attack this time. It was a question.

Marcus didn't answer with words. He pressed in closer instead — because his body had been waiting for permission to do that for ten months and the question was the closest thing to permission he was going to get. His chest met Kai's chest. The forearm became an arm became a bracket holding the hyena against the metal. His mouth was an inch from Kai's mouth and Kai's breath caught — the small sharp surprised inhale of someone whose body was telling them something they hadn't planned to hear — and Marcus heard that sound and felt something in his own chest break in a way that was nothing to do with basketball and everything to do with months of standing six feet apart and counting.

Kai bit him.

Not hard. Not the bite of a fight. The first kiss between them was the hyena's teeth catching Marcus's lower lip and holding for one second and then releasing, and Marcus tasted his own blood again where the punch had split him earlier — and then the hyena's tongue moved against the cut and then it wasn't Marcus's blood he was tasting anymore, it was Kai, and the taste of him was the moment the rest of the room stopped existing.

Marcus kissed him back. Open-mouthed, no finesse, the same brutality the fight had had a minute earlier redirected toward something it had been pretending to be the opposite of all season. Kai's hands came up and fisted in the front of Marcus's t-shirt — the same hands that had been throwing punches a minute ago — and the locker behind him rattled when Marcus's weight pressed in harder, and the bench behind Marcus's heels was the bench they'd knocked over fighting, and the geometry of the room made no sense and Marcus didn't care.

Kai broke the kiss for one second. His mouth was wet and his eyes were wide and the words came out of him like he was surprised by them.

"What the fuck are we doing."

"I don't know."

Marcus kissed him again before either of them could find a better answer.

* * *

Chapter 3: Possession

Marcus's mouth was open against Kai's. The kiss tasted of his own blood and Kai's spit and the sharp electric something that came off both of them now that they'd stopped pretending. He had one forearm against the locker beside Kai's head and his other hand at the back of Kai's neck — the same scruff-grip you'd use to steer a difficult animal — and Kai wasn't fighting the grip. Kai was pushing up into it. Pushing his throat against Marcus's mouth. Making sounds that weren't words but were definitely answers.

Marcus's mouth went down to that throat. The pulse there was visible under the spotted fur. He set his teeth against it — not a bite, the press of teeth without the close — and Kai's hands fisted in the back of Marcus's t-shirt and pulled, and Marcus could feel the hyena's cock through both their shorts, hard against his thigh, and the way it had got that way without either of them touching it.

"Take this off," Kai said. He was pulling at Marcus's t-shirt with both hands, the practice tee Marcus had thrown on after the game.

Marcus stepped back the smallest possible distance to let it happen. His shirt came up over his head and he dropped it on the bench beside them and Kai's hands were on his chest before the fabric had hit. Hands that had thrown punches a minute ago. Now they were running over the lighter fur down the centre of Marcus's sternum, the heavy slabs of pectoral, finding the edge of his tape where it crossed his ribs from the elbow Kai had given him in the second quarter.

Kai laughed. Short and breathless. The hyena's laugh, the involuntary one.

"Shit," he said. "Did I do that?"

"You know you did."

"Sorry."

"No you're not."

"No I'm not."

Kai's t-shirt next. Marcus pulled it over his head with less ceremony — caught it on one of Kai's ears for a half-second, the hyena said "ow" quietly into the fabric, Marcus said "sorry" back without meaning it, and then it was off and Marcus could see Kai bare for the first time in ten months and the seeing of it was its own kind of slap.

Kai was leaner than Marcus had expected. Three years of basketball had stripped him of any softness and replaced it with the long bracketed muscle of a man who ran for a living, and the spots on his torso ran in irregular patterns down his shoulders and ribs and disappeared into the waistband of his shorts. There was a scar across his left shoulder that Marcus had never noticed under the jersey. There was a faint tan-line at the neckline of his shirt where the spots were a slightly different shade. Marcus had spent ten months not looking at this body and his hands didn't know where to go first because they wanted to go everywhere at once.

He chose Kai's collarbone. Set his mouth there. Kai's head tipped back against the locker and the small white patch of fur on his throat showed and Marcus heard himself make a sound he hadn't planned to make.

Kai's hands had found Marcus's belt. The plain leather game-day belt. He had it open in two seconds — the speed of a man who had practised undoing belts under low-light conditions — and Marcus's shorts were sliding down his hips before he'd finished kissing the hollow of Kai's throat.

He stepped out of them. Kicked them aside. The cold air of the locker room hit his cock as it sprang free against his stomach — already hard, had been hard since Kai's tongue had moved against the cut on his lip — and he saw Kai's eyes go down to it.

The hyena's eyes stayed there for a beat.

"Christ, Marcus."

Marcus's cock was lion-cock, which was its own particular shape. Thick at the base, heavier than long, the head broad and flushed dark with the kind of full-blood arousal that had been building since the second quarter. There were fine pale ridges at the base where the species's anatomy made itself known. He'd had partners look at it the way Kai was looking at it now. He'd had partners make the same exact face — a small involuntary widening of the eyes, a half-second of mental recalibration.

"Yeah," Marcus said. "I know."

"You don't even apologise for it. That's so on-brand for you."

"You want me to apologise for it?"

Kai's eyes came back up to his. "No."

Marcus reached for Kai's shorts. The drawstring was double-knotted — that had been a thing the rookie equipment guy had started doing this season — and Marcus's drunk-on-adrenaline fingers fumbled it for two seconds before he gave up and just shoved the shorts down past the knot. Kai's shorts came down with his briefs together, all of it pushed past his hips, and the hyena stepped out of the tangle and kicked his sneakers and the shorts somewhere into the corner and his cock was free and Marcus's eyes went to it the way Kai's had gone to his.

Kai's cock was canid-style — long and tapered and flushed pink at the head, slipping out from a sheath of spotted fur, the base thicker and hinting at the small canid-style knot that hadn't started to swell yet. Smaller than Marcus's. More elegant. A different geometry of arousal entirely. It bobbed against Kai's belly when Kai shifted his weight and the head left a smear of pre-come against the dark fur of his lower stomach.

Marcus dropped to a crouch.

He hadn't decided to. His knees made the decision and his body followed. He had Kai's cock in his hand and his mouth on the head of it and Kai's whole body went rigid against the locker and the sound that came out of the hyena was a single short surprised vocalisation that didn't have any equivalent in any other species. Marcus tasted salt and musk and skin and the particular heat of Kai's body and worked his tongue once around the head and then took half the length down his throat.

Kai's hands slammed against the metal behind him. The lockers rang.

"Fuck. Fuck. Marcus —"

Marcus pulled off as suddenly as he'd gone down. Stood up. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Kai was breathing like a man who'd been hit and the look on his face was the look of a man who'd been planning a different sequence of events.

"That was —"

"Shut up," Marcus said.

And he kissed Kai again so the hyena couldn't finish the sentence, because if Kai had finished the sentence Marcus would have had to finish thinking about what he'd just done, and he wasn't ready for that yet. He pushed Kai harder against the lockers and Kai's cock was against his hip now, hot and slick where the head was leaking, and Marcus's own cock was against Kai's thigh and the fact of skin on skin where neither of them had earned the right to it yet was almost too much.

Kai bit Marcus's lip again. Harder this time.

Marcus growled into his mouth — not the basketball-court captain growl, the lion growl, the one he never let out where anyone could hear it — and Kai's body shivered against him in a way that was neither fight nor protest.

"Turn around," Marcus said.

Kai's body went still.

Two seconds. The hyena's eyes were six inches from Marcus's eyes and the amber in them was wide and dark and very much present. Marcus could see the calculation happening — the wolf-tilt of Kai's head, the slight shift of his weight, the moment where the rival in him went up against the something-else in him and they had a quick brutal argument and the something-else won.

"Make me," Kai said. Quiet.

The same words Marcus had used twenty minutes ago about the shove.

Marcus made him.

He took Kai by the shoulders and physically turned him — firm hands without a trace of violence, the same body-knowledge he'd used in the wrestler's hip throw earlier put to a different purpose. Kai went with it, but only because he was choosing to. Marcus felt the cooperation in the way Kai's feet moved. Felt the resistance underneath the cooperation, the part of Kai that was furious at being moved and was deciding, second by second, to allow it.

Kai's chest met the cool metal of the lockers. His palms went up against the door beside his face, fingers spread, claws extended a half-inch involuntarily. His spotted back was in front of Marcus now — the long line of his spine, the dip of the lower back, the curve of his ass under the ridiculous tan-line where the gym shorts had been all season.

Marcus put his hands on that ass.

The hyena's whole body jerked at the contact. Not away — into. Marcus's palms were big enough to nearly cover the cheeks and the muscle there was hard and full and built from years of running the floor and jumping and landing, and Marcus parted them with his thumbs the way he had wanted to do for ten months without admitting it to himself.

The hole between was tight. Pink-pale against the dark fur. Smaller than the hole of a man Kai's size should have had, because Kai was a hyena and hyenas didn't get fucked unless they let it happen.

"Christ," Marcus said. Quietly. To himself.

He set his forehead against the back of Kai's neck. Just for a second. Just to ground himself. The hyena's fur was damp with sweat and smelled of the game and something underneath that was specific and warm and made Marcus's cock kick against Kai's lower back without his permission.

"You sure," Marcus said. It came out rougher than he'd meant.

Kai's voice came back muffled, cheek against metal.

"If you stop now, Marcus, I will fucking kill you."

Marcus huffed a laugh against the back of Kai's neck and the laugh surprised him because it was real.

He stepped back. Spat in his palm — twice, working it onto two fingers — and wished he had something better, a bottle of anything, a tube of anything. He didn't. There was a first-aid kit in the trainer's office down the hall and a bottle of skin-cream in his locker for chafing and neither of those was a thing he could go and fetch right now without breaking whatever this was. So spit. Nothing about this was elegant. Nothing about this had been elegant since the buzzer.

He touched Kai with one slick finger.

The hyena's whole body locked. A full clench, every muscle. His palms pushed against the locker doors and his claws made small grooves in the metal and his tail — Marcus had not been thinking about Kai's tail until now — pressed flat against Marcus's stomach, the fur damp and matted with sweat. Marcus put his other hand flat between Kai's shoulder blades. Pressed. Steady weight. Holding the hyena to the earth.

"Breathe."

Kai breathed. The exhale shuddered out.

Marcus worked his finger in slow. The wolf's hole — hyena's hole, his brain corrected mid-thought — was vice-tight, gripping him in waves like Kai's body was trying to refuse him and accept him in the same motion. Marcus could feel Kai's pulse in it. He stopped. Let the body negotiate. Pushed in another fraction. Stopped. Pushed.

Kai made a sound.

Not a word. Not a name. The sound was somewhere in the family of the involuntary noises hyenas made when their bodies were doing things their minds were three steps behind on. A short sharp vocalisation that started in the chest and broke at the end. Marcus felt the sound in his own teeth.

"More," Kai said, when he could.

Marcus added a second finger. Worked them together, slow circles, learning the way Kai's body opened — and it did open, but in stages, each one its own argument. Kai was not built for this. The hyena's body had been made to do things to other bodies, not to receive them, and every centimetre of accommodation had to be earned. Marcus earned it. He took his time. He pressed his mouth between Kai's shoulder blades and bit the muscle there gently, and Kai's body unlocked another fraction, and Marcus added a third finger.

Kai swore. Long and low.

"How you doing?" Marcus said. Mouth still against Kai's back.

"Fucking — I'm — Marcus, I'm —"

"Use your words, hyena."

"I want it."

"You want what."

"I want you to fuck me. Now. I want it now. Marcus."

The way Kai said his name was different from the way he'd said it earlier in the fight. Earlier it had been a needle with a point. Now it was a hand reaching for something. Marcus pressed his forehead against the back of Kai's neck again and felt his own cock leak against the small of Kai's back and almost lost it then and there.

He pulled his fingers out. Spat in his palm again. Slicked himself — long deliberate strokes, twice over, the spit and his own pre slicking him as best they could.

He lined up.

Pressed forward.

Slow.

The head met the rim. He pushed and the rim held and then gave, just barely, just a fraction, and Kai made a noise like something tearing at a thread. Marcus stopped. Held. The hyena's body around the head of his cock was beyond believing — tighter than his fingers had told him it would be, hot, gripping him in slow involuntary pulses. He could feel Kai's heartbeat in it.

"Breathe," he said again.

Kai breathed. Marcus pushed in another inch and Kai's claws scraped grooves into the locker door and his entire spine arched and Marcus stopped, held, let the body negotiate. Another inch. Another wait. The hole stretched around him in a perfect ring, and Marcus could feel every muscle in there working — clenching, releasing, clenching again — as Kai's body tried to figure out what to do with the size of him.

"Christ — Marcus —"

"Almost there."

"Almost — fucking — how big are you, what the —"

Marcus huffed another laugh. Couldn't help it.

"Almost there."

He pushed the last of the way in. Bottomed out. His balls met the back of Kai's thighs and his hips pressed flush against the curve of the hyena's ass and they both went still, both breathing hard, both feeling the impossible fit of one body inside another body that hadn't been built for it but had decided to make space anyway.

Marcus put his forehead between Kai's shoulder blades again. Just held there. The fur was damp and the smell of Kai was in his nose and the hyena's body around his cock was the most aware Marcus had felt about anything in his life. He had been not-thinking about this moment for ten months and the actual moment was nothing like the not-thinking, because the not-thinking had been clean and abstract and the actual moment was hot and tight and very much a person, very much Kai, very much the rival who had spent the season being the only thing in any room that wouldn't fall in line.

"Move," Kai said.

Marcus moved.

Slow at first. Pulling back an inch. Pushing in. Learning how the hyena's body opened around him. The tightness didn't fade — Kai's body kept gripping him on every withdrawal, kept clenching on every push, like the body itself hadn't decided what it wanted yet. Marcus worked through it. Slow. Slower than he wanted.

Then deeper. Then faster. The bench they'd knocked over earlier was three feet to Marcus's right. The locker door beside Kai's hand had a fresh scratch where Kai's claws had caught it. The shower in the back was still running. Marcus registered all of it from very far away.

He found the rhythm. Steady and full, balls forward to slap against the back of Kai's thighs on every push. The soft heavy sound of it filled the locker room — that and Kai's panting, that and the rattle of the locker every time Marcus drove in. Slap. Slap. Slap. The metronome of two bodies finding the thing they'd been refusing to find.

Kai was pushing back to meet him now. Marcus felt it — the moment where the hyena's hips started moving on their own, joining the rhythm instead of just absorbing it. Kai had stopped being still. Kai was working with him. The wolf — hyena — was meeting every stroke and the sounds coming from his throat had stopped being involuntary surprise and started being involuntary want.

Marcus's hand had slid up to the back of Kai's neck again. The scruff. He gripped it. Held the hyena there against the lockers. His other hand was on Kai's hip and he was using it to control the angle, tilting Kai's pelvis back, finding the depth that made Kai's whole body jolt.

He found it.

"There — fuck — there, Marcus —"

Marcus hit it again. Again. The hyena's voice broke into something that wasn't a word — the involuntary whoop-call that hyenas had, the sound their bodies made when they were past language. Marcus had heard it from a distance once when Kai had hit a buzzer-beater in pre-season. He'd never heard it close. Hearing it close, three inches from his ear, with his cock buried in the body that was making it, was its own undoing.

He growled into Kai's neck. Lion-low. The kind of growl he'd never made in front of another person.

"Mine," he said.

He hadn't meant to say it. The word was out before he'd checked it. Kai's body shuddered around him at the sound and the shudder was the sound's answer, and they both felt it.

He fucked Kai harder. Athlete-stamina, captain-pace, the kind of relentless rhythm Marcus had been built for in the gym for four years and had never put to this particular use. Kai was taking it. Kai was taking it and meeting it and his hands were no longer flat against the locker — they were fisted against it, then gripping the doorframe, then reaching back to find Marcus's hip and pull him in deeper. The rival who'd never yielded was pulling Marcus deeper.

Marcus pulled out.

Kai made a sound — protest, half-laugh, the noise of a body that had got used to something and didn't want it taken away.

"What — Marcus, what —"

"Bench," Marcus said. He was already turning the hyena around, lifting him bodily. Kai weighed nothing in his hands or Marcus had too much in his blood to feel weight any more, and he set Kai on the edge of the bench they'd knocked over earlier — the bench Kai had landed on with the small of his back, the bench that had become part of the geometry of this room since the fight. Kai's legs went around Marcus's hips automatically, heels finding the small of Marcus's back, and the new angle put them face to face for the first time since the kiss against the lockers.

Kai's eyes were wrecked.

Pupils blown wide, the amber barely visible, his mouth open and his lower lip bitten and a streak of his own sweat across his forehead and the locker mark where his cheek had been pressed against the metal still red on the side of his face. The hyena's grin was gone. The grin had been the resting structure of his face for ten months and Marcus had never seen Kai without it until now, and the absence of it was a different kind of nakedness.

Marcus pushed back inside him. Slower this time, because there was no lockers to brace against, and Kai's claws went into Marcus's shoulders and held. The new angle was deeper. Different. Marcus felt it the moment Kai did — the hyena's whole body jolting, his head snapping back, the sound coming out of him scraped raw.

Marcus kissed him while he fucked him. Open-mouthed, no finesse, swallowing every sound the hyena made. Kai's tongue pushed against his and Kai's hands were in his mane, the tie that had been holding it back for the game coming undone under the hyena's grip, the dark blond falling around both their faces. Kai's hips were rocking up to meet every thrust now and the bench under them was creaking and the locker room ceiling above them was the same ceiling Marcus had stared at after wins and losses for three years and none of it was the same room anymore.

Kai broke the kiss to breathe.

"You're —" he started. "I can't — Marcus, I'm gonna —"

"I know."

"I haven't even touched my —"

"I know."

Kai's claws dug into Marcus's shoulders hard enough to draw blood through the fur.

Marcus reached between them and took Kai in his hand. The hyena's cock was leaking against his stomach, slick and hot, and Marcus stroked once and Kai's whole body convulsed and Marcus hadn't even hit the second stroke before the hyena was coming.

Kai came with his face buried in the side of Marcus's neck and his claws in Marcus's shoulders and his whole body locked around Marcus's cock in a series of tight pulsing waves that pulled Marcus over the edge with him. Marcus came inside him — the first hot release, the second, the slow drag of climax that Marcus had been holding off for what felt like the entire game — and the sound he made into the spotted fur of Kai's shoulder was a sound he didn't recognise as his own. The lion he kept locked away on the basketball court was loose in the locker room and it was making noises in the back of Marcus's throat that didn't have a place in any other part of his life.

They stayed like that. Kai on the edge of the overturned bench with his legs around Marcus's hips. Marcus still inside him, still pressed close, his face in the hyena's neck. Both of them breathing like they'd run something the whole length of the court and back and again.

The fluorescents hummed overhead. The shower was still running somewhere. Marcus's mane was in Kai's mouth and Kai's claws were still embedded in the back of Marcus's shoulders and neither of them moved for what felt like a long time.

Marcus's forehead was against Kai's. He hadn't put it there. It had got there on its own.

Kai's eyes were closed. His breathing was slowing. The wreck of his face was something Marcus would not stop seeing for a long time.

"Fuck," the hyena said. Quietly. Into the small space between them.

"Yeah."

Neither of them moved.

* * *

Chapter 4: Whistle

Marcus pulled out. Carefully.

Kai hissed through his teeth at the loss of him. The hyena's body had been clenched around him for what felt like minutes and the separation was its own small wound. Marcus stepped back. He didn't know what to do with his hands. They were sticky. His cock was sticky. The come — his — was running down the inside of Kai's thigh and onto the bench between them. He noticed it the way you noticed any inconvenient mess at the end of any inconvenient thing.

He moved away.

Two steps back. The cool air of the locker room hit the front of him and his cock was softening already and he reached for the towel that was hanging from the hook beside his locker — his post-game towel, the one he'd put there before the warm-up — and used it to wipe himself with the same automatic movements he used after every game. The towel went around his waist. His hands were shaking, very slightly, in a way he hadn't noticed until he tried to make them do something specific.

Kai was still on the bench.

The hyena hadn't moved. Head down, arms loose at his sides, legs still apart in the position they'd been in when Marcus had been between them. His chest was rising and falling and his breath was slowing and his eyes were closed. There was a streak of come on his stomach where his own had landed when he'd finished, and there was more between his legs where Marcus's was leaking out of him, and his shoulders had marks on them — claw marks, Marcus's, four parallel lines down the front of each one — and he wasn't doing anything about any of it.

Marcus looked at him for a long beat.

He'd never seen Kai still before. Even the still version of Kai that sat at his locker before games hadn't been still in this way. This was a stillness that had to be earned. This was a body that had been broken open and was deciding how to put itself back together.

Marcus didn't speak. There was nothing to say that wasn't going to be wrong.

He turned. Walked to his own locker. Picked up the half-empty water bottle from the bench and drank. The water was warm. Tasted like plastic. He drank the whole thing without stopping and set it back down on the bench and braced both hands on the bench and stood there for a moment with his head down, breathing.

Behind him, he heard Kai stand up.

Slow. Like the hyena's body was still negotiating with what had just happened to it. Marcus didn't turn around. He listened to Kai walk — bare-foot, the slap of soles on tile — toward the back of the locker room. Toward the showers. The shower that one of the bench guys had left running was still running, and Marcus heard Kai turn it off and turn another one on, and the sound of water came back at a different angle.

Marcus took his own shower.

He went to the front of the showers, the ones nearest the door, the ones furthest from where Kai was. The hot water hit him and he stood under it with his eyes closed and let it run over his back and his neck and the marks Kai's claws had left in the front of his shoulders. The water turned pink for the first ten seconds, ran clear after that. He could feel the cut on his lip where Kai had kissed-bit him and the knot under his ribs where the bench corner had caught him during the fight and the place on his throat where Kai's mouth had been and the place lower down where his own body had finished doing the most surprising thing it had done all year.

The water hit him for a long time.

He could hear Kai's shower running at the other end. He didn't look. He didn't go down there. The two of them in the same shower would have been a sentence too many.

He turned the water off. Walked back to his locker dripping. The locker room looked like it had been hit by something. The bench they'd knocked over was still on its side. The locker door Marcus had clipped with his shoulder was still hanging crooked. There was a faint smear of blood on the tile near the lockers where one of them — both of them — had bled from a split lip during the fight. There was a pile of clothes Marcus didn't recognise as his own until he picked them up. His shorts. Kai's shorts. They had got tangled together on the floor.

He separated them. Set Kai's on Kai's bench. Began to dress.

The mundane ritual happened in silence. Socks first. The compression socks he'd put on at five o'clock for warm-up, now stiff with dried sweat. The same socks he'd put on for every home game for two years. Sweatpants. T-shirt. He had a hoodie in his locker but he couldn't be bothered to find it. He sat on the bench in front of his locker and bent forward to lace his shoes and his ribs hurt where the bench corner had caught him and he didn't care about that either.

Across the room, Kai was dressing too. Marcus didn't look. He could hear the hyena moving — the rustle of fabric, the small click of a buckle, the zip of a duffel — and he tracked Kai by sound the way he had tracked him by peripheral vision all season, and the tracking didn't stop just because the situation had changed.

Kai finished first. Of course he did. Kai had less to put on than Marcus and worked faster and Marcus heard the duffel get hoisted to the hyena's shoulder and the soft pad of basketball shoes on tile coming closer to the door.

Marcus looked up.

Kai was at the door. Bag over his shoulder. Hand on the handle. He hadn't opened the door yet. He had paused there with his back to Marcus, and then — slowly, the way you turned to look at something you were not sure you wanted to look at — he turned his head.

Their eyes met for the first time since the kiss against the lockers.

Two seconds. Maybe three. Marcus couldn't read the look on Kai's face — the wreck of the sex was still there in the wide pupils, but something else was in the set of the jaw, something that hadn't been there at any other point in the season. Marcus didn't know what it was. He wasn't sure Kai knew either.

Kai didn't speak. Didn't nod. Just held the look.

Then he opened the door and walked out.

The door swung shut behind him. The catch clicked.

Marcus sat in the empty locker room.

The fluorescent lights hummed. The shower in the back — the one one of the bench guys had left on, the one that had been running through the entire fight and the entire kiss and the entire everything — was finally off. Kai must have turned it off when he'd taken his own shower. Marcus hadn't noticed the silence of it until now.

He looked around the room. The bench on its side. The crooked locker door. The smear of blood on the tile. The faint mark on the locker where Kai's claws had left grooves when Marcus had been inside him. The bench in front of him with the dark patch where Marcus's own come had soaked into the wood. Physical evidence of a fight. Physical evidence of something else if you looked closely enough. By practice tomorrow at four, the equipment guys would have righted the bench and somebody would have noticed the locker door and somebody would file a maintenance request and the room would look like a room again. But the marks on the metal where Kai's claws had been would still be there, unless someone looked very closely. Marcus would know. Kai would know. Nobody else would.

He sat with that knowledge for a long time.

He replayed the night. Not the sex — he wasn't ready to replay the sex, not yet, not while he was still sitting in the room where it had happened. He replayed the moment before. The pin against the lockers. The fifth second. The point where his forearm had stopped pressing and started just being there. The tiny chin-up that Kai had done — the not-yielding throat-bare — and the way Marcus's body had read it as an invitation when his mind had been telling him for ten months that there was no invitation to read.

His mind had been wrong.

His mind had been wrong about the whole thing.

The hatred had not been hatred. The hatred had been the only acceptable shape for a feeling Marcus had not been able to look at directly, and he had spent ten months keeping the feeling in the only container he had a permit for, and tonight the container had cracked because Kai had said one true thing about Marcus's leadership and Marcus's body had not been able to keep the lid on anymore.

Marcus thought about the season. The six feet between them at every line. The fifteen feet between their lockers. The number of times Marcus had counted those distances and pretended he was counting something else. The way he had read Kai's body language all season under the cover of being his captain. The way he had noticed when Kai changed his post-game routine and the way he had noticed when Kai had cut his hair and the way he had not noticed that he was noticing.

The animal had known. The lion had known for months. Marcus's mind had been the only thing that hadn't.

He stood up.

The hoodie was in his locker after all. He pulled it on. Closed the locker. Picked up his bag. Walked to the door of the locker room and stopped there with his hand on the handle the way Kai had stopped half an hour ago.

He looked back at the room one more time. The wreck. The bench. The crooked locker door. The bench in front of his locker where his come had soaked into the wood. The fluorescents humming above all of it.

He walked out.

The corridor was dark. The arena was dark. Whitmore's home court was a closed building at this hour and the only people in it were the security guard at the front desk and the night janitor making his rounds, and Marcus walked past both of them with his bag over his shoulder and his hood up and neither of them said anything to him because everyone in the building knew the team had lost tonight and nobody wanted to be the one to say something about it.

He pushed the front door open and the cold air hit him.

The parking lot was almost empty. His truck was in the captain's spot — they gave the captain the closest spot to the door, which was the kind of small cosmetic privilege that came with the title and that Marcus had stopped noticing — and there was one other vehicle two rows over. Kai's car. A beat-up sedan, the same one Kai had been driving since pre-season. Marcus had logged it into the same peripheral file where he kept everything else about Kai.

The sedan was still there.

Marcus stopped walking.

Kai had left the locker room half an hour before him. Kai's car was still in the lot. That meant Kai was somewhere — sitting in the car, maybe, with the engine off. Or standing somewhere out of sight. Or walking the perimeter of the building because he hadn't been able to drive home yet either.

Marcus looked at the sedan for a long beat.

He didn't go to it.

He walked to his own truck instead. Got in. Sat behind the wheel. Did not start the engine. The cold of the cab settled over him and he looked through the windshield at the empty parking lot and the lights of the highway in the distance and the Whitmore arena behind him in the rearview, and he thought about Monday.

Monday was practice. Four o'clock. The same locker room. The same bench. The same lockers — minus the one with the crooked door, which would be fixed by then. The same six feet between Kai and him at the line. The same fifteen feet between their lockers. The same routines. The same plays. Coach Hayes would walk in at three forty-five and clap his hands and tell them to bring it in, and Marcus and Kai would stand in the same circle of teammates and listen to the same speech, and the team would watch them with the careful eyes of people watching for whether the thing had been fixed or had just been hidden under a carpet.

And nobody on the team would know.

Marcus would know. Kai would know. The lockers would have new scratches. The bench in front of his locker would have a faint stain that would dry pale and last until somebody cleaned it. And Marcus would walk into that room on Monday at three forty-five and Kai would walk into the same room and they would both be doing exactly what they had done every Monday for ten months — and it would be entirely different from any of those Mondays, because Marcus would know what Kai's mouth tasted like and Kai would know what Marcus's hands felt like on the back of his neck, and neither of them was going to be able to unknow it.

Marcus closed his eyes.

Tomorrow was a closed door. He was not going to open it now. He was going to drive home and shower again — because the first shower had not been long enough — and lie in bed and not sleep and wait for tomorrow to arrive, and tomorrow would arrive whether he was ready or not.

The sedan in his rearview mirror. He looked at it once more before he started the engine. He thought, for a half-second, about getting out and walking over and knocking on Kai's window.

He didn't.

He started the engine. Pulled out of the spot. Drove to the exit of the parking lot. The sedan was still there in his rearview when he turned onto the road, and it was still there in his rearview when the road curved and the parking lot disappeared behind a row of trees, and Marcus drove home with his hands at ten and two and his jaw set and the knowledge in his chest that wasn't going anywhere.

Practice was at four o'clock on Monday.

He already knew exactly how it was going to feel.

~ End ~