There were six empty shower stalls and Adrian picked the one right next to mine, again, and I stood there with shampoo running down my back pretending that was normal.
It had been three months of that. Masters team, late practice, the 8:30 lane when everybody with a real life has already gone home. Me and Adrian and the pool lights buzzing and the smell of chlorine so deep in my skin I tasted it in my coffee. Me in the pink jammers the old guys in lane two pretend not to see, him in plain black like a normal person. We both always ended up at the same time in the same corner of the locker room and neither of us ever said one word about it.
“You missed a spot,” he said through the wall of water.
“Where.”
“Hair.”
I turned my back to him. That’s the ritual. I know how that sounds. I know exactly how it sounds, I’ve said it to myself in the car, but that’s what it was, a ritual, and I let it happen every single time like a guy who’s been tricked into a thing he picked.
shower · hair washing, conditioner slick
Adrian stepped around the divider, which is not even a real divider, it’s a waist-high tile lip, and put his hands in my hair. Shampoo, a lot of it, more than anybody needs. His fingers dragged slow over my scalp and his thumbs pressed in behind my ears and my whole body went loose like somebody cut a string.
“Mm,” I said. Not a word. A sound.
“Good?”
“you’re so bad at this” I said, with my eyes shut and my head tipped back into his hands.
“Liar.”
He said it soft, right by my ear. I could feel his chest almost on my back, the heat coming off it through the steam, and he wasn’t wearing anything and neither was I and the water was hitting the tile and neither of us moved.
“You do this with everybody?” I said, because I’m a coward and needed to say something dumb.
“Only teammates with terrible hygiene.”
“Adrian.”
His hands stopped. Just stopped, in my hair, and the water kept going and the whole room got so quiet I could hear a drip somewhere down by the lockers.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay. Liar.”
I turned around. Soap running into my eyes. He was right there, wet and pink from the heat with his hair plastered flat and I did not have one single joke left in me.
“Do you want to kiss me?” I said.
“Yes.” Instant. No pause at all, and that’s the part that did it, that he didn’t even try to make me wait for it.
So we kissed under the water. Careful for about two seconds and then not careful at all, his hand on the back of my neck, my hands on his ribs, his mouth tasting like mint and chlorine, and I stepped back without looking and hit the soap dispenser with my whole spine. It came off the wall and bounced on the tile like a gunshot and we both cracked up into each other’s mouths.
“Oh my god.”
“Leave it,” he said, and kissed me again.
I could feel him against my hip by then, hard already, and I was too, and I thought if we stay in here on wet tile one of us is going to crack his skull open and that’s how the team finds out.
“Bench,” I said.
“Bench,” he agreed.
locker bench · towel draped, hand on cock
The bench outside the showers is wood and it’s always dry because nobody sits on it, and we sat on it anyway with towels around our waists like two idiots. Two grown men dripping on the floor of a rec center at nine at night. Adrian’s hair kept falling in his eyes. I reached over and pushed it back off his forehead and left my hand there.
That should have been normal by now. It wasn’t.
He looked at me. I looked at his mouth.
He put his hand on my thigh, over the towel, just resting there heavy and warm, and didn’t move it.
I looked down at it. Then up.
“You’re waiting,” I said.
“Yep.”
“For what.”
“You tell me.”
So I took his wrist and slid his hand up my thigh, higher, till his fingers were under the edge of the terry cloth and I could feel the heat of his palm right where my leg meets my hip.
“Better,” he said, and laughed through his nose, and kissed me again.
The towel was not doing its job anymore. It had come loose between us and my cock was just there, standing up under the wet cotton, and I felt him notice because his whole body went still against mine. His eyes went down. Then back up to my face, dark.
“Can I?”
“Adrian, yes, god. Yes.”
His hand slid under the towel and wrapped around me and I exhaled so hard it came out as a groan. My head went back and hit the locker behind us with a hollow bang.
“Careful.”
“shut up, don’t stop”
He didn’t stop. He jerked me slow, thick slow, thumb dragging over the head every time he came up and spreading the wet there, and I watched him do it. That was a thing I found out about myself on that bench. I couldn’t stop watching. I watched his forearm flex and his lip get caught in his teeth and his eyes going back and forth between his own hand and my face like he was memorizing what I did when he did it.
“You like this,” I said, hoarse.
“You told me to.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Yes.” He sped up. “God, yes, I’ve been standing next to you in the shower for three months with my hands doing nothing.”
I got my hand under his towel. He sucked in a breath through his teeth when I found him, and he was so hot and hard and slick already that I laughed out loud.
“Oh, you were not doing nothing. Look at you.”
“Shut up.”
“You’re leaking all over my hand.”
“Milo—”
I loved the way he said my name. Wrecked. Like it was just coming out of him whether he wanted it to or not.
For a while neither of us said anything smart. There was just the sound of two hands working under two wet towels and the pool filter humming through the wall and Adrian’s breathing, which was going ragged way before mine. I jacked him the way he was doing me, same speed, same twist at the top, and when I got it right his hips came up off the bench.
“Competitive,” I said.
“God, shut up—”
His hand tightened around me. It got faster, rougher, and I stopped laughing. I couldn’t have laughed if I’d tried. Heat was climbing the backs of my thighs and my stomach was going tight and I had my face turned into his neck breathing his skin, that smell of him, soap and chlorine and sweat.
“I’m close,” I said into his throat.
He started to ease off, like a gentleman, like a guy who thinks he’s supposed to slow down.
I caught his wrist.
“Don’t you stop.”
“Yeah?”
“Do not stop, I swear to god.”
He didn’t. He gave me everything, fast and tight and a little mean on the upstroke, and I held his shoulder with one hand and kept working him with the other and said his name into his collarbone about nine times in a row. Then it hit. It tore up through my whole spine and I came hard into the towel and over his knuckles, hot, with my forehead jammed against his shoulder and my teeth almost in his skin.
He didn’t let go until I was done shaking.
“Adrian,” I said. “Adrian, I’m going to—you’re gonna—”
“I know. Keep going.”
I kept going. I turned my hand over, tightened my fingers, rubbed my thumb under the head the way he’d done me, and I felt him go rigid. He bit down on a groan against my temple and came all over my wrist in thick pulses, and his hips jerked against my hand and he said “fuck, fuck, Milo” over and over until he ran out of air.
We sat there. Two towels, one bench, both of us sticky and gasping and honestly kind of stupid with it.
He kissed my temple. Slow and gentle, right on the damp part by my eye.
“Very graceful,” he said.
“You knocked a soap dispenser off the wall during the first kiss.”
“That was unrelated.”
“It was extremely related.”
He laughed so hard he had to lean his whole forehead on my shoulder. I laughed too. I couldn’t stop, we sat there in the dim light of the locker room and laughed till it hurt, and then he got up and went to the rack and came back with a fresh towel and put it around my shoulders. He tucked it under my chin, which should have been annoying, and wasn’t.
“Same shower tomorrow?” he said.
“There are six stalls.”
“I know.”
The next evening there was a clean towel already hanging on my hook. Folded in thirds. Waiting. There was a strip torn off the lane sheet tucked in the fold.
I used the stall beside his anyway. Then I let him wash my hair, and this time neither of us pretended the shampoo was the point.
