Copyright © 2026 Nuno R.F.C.R. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles, reviews, and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by applicable copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), actual events, or real locales is entirely coincidental.
“Rounds”
The fire door on the fourteenth floor went off like a gunshot.
It was a heavy door, sprung, fire-rated, the kind that took a deliberate shove from a grown adult, and Theo Marchetti put his boot into it without breaking stride and it slammed back against the wall.
They had done thirteen flights in something under two minutes. Elliot couldn’t afterwards reconstruct most of it. There had been the lobby, and the key going into the revolving door, and Theo testing it, even now, even like this, the man had tested it, and then there had been a stairwell and a wall and a landing somewhere around six where Elliot's back had met breezeblock hard enough to knock a laugh out of him, and Theo's mouth at his throat, and the two of them stumbling up another flight.
Now the door. Now the dark office.
Theo got both hands under him and picked him up.
No bracing, no visible effort, no moment where the man gathered himself. He simply took hold of Elliot and lifted, one arm under him and the other flat across his back, and walked into the room carrying him as though the weight were an administrative detail.
Elliot's legs went round him. His arms went round the man's neck. He got about half a syllable out, some observation, he'd never know which one, they were all queuing at the gate, and Theo turned his head and took his mouth and the observation died in there and was never recovered.
"Christ," Elliot said, into him, and then, because he couldn’t help himself even now, "you're not even…you haven't gone red, you're supposed to at least…"
"No."
"That's not a…"
"You weigh nothing," said Theo, and kept walking.
And something detonated quietly in the middle of Elliot's chest.
Because he had spent four months looking at this man across a lobby doing arithmetic about him, the shoulders, the forearms, the too-small uniform, the way the revolving door looked apologetic, and none of it, none of it, had prepared him for the mathematics from the inside. Elliot wasn’t a small man. He was five eleven and he played five-a-side on Thursdays and there was nothing wrong with the shape of him. He’d spent a reasonable portion of his twenties being told so. He was simply built on a completely different scale to the man currently holding him off the ground, and against that scale he became something else entirely, narrow, light, easily moved, a thing that could be picked up one-handed and carried across a room by somebody who wasn't concentrating.
He had never once been the smaller person in a room. He was now. He found that he liked it.
Theo put him down on a desk.
Somebody's desk. Elliot registered a monitor going over, a keyboard sliding, a cardboard tray of pens hitting the carpet tiles and scattering, and didn’t care about any of it, and got both hands into the front of the uniform shirt and pulled.
"This is Callum's desk," he said.
"Yeah?"
"He's…I mean he's a nightmare, it's fine, but I want it on the record…"
Theo kissed him again and the record closed.
There was no apology anywhere in him now. No sorry, no half-beat of a man checking he was allowed, none of the enormous careful architecture that had held this person at fifteen meters for four months. It’d all gone. What was left underneath it was the thing that had been under it the whole time, appetite, plain and vast and entirely without technique, and it was, without any question, the single most flattering experience of Elliot Reyes's adult life.
He got the buttons of the uniform shirt open. Six of them, fast, and then he shoved the whole thing back off those shoulders and got his first proper look at Theo and forgot how to make a sentence.
In the lift eighteen days ago it had been a black vest and a torch beam and a man mortified about his own body heat. This was the actual thing, in the standby dark: the width of him, the depth of the chest, the dark hair across it and the way it went down. The flat plates of the stomach. The shoulders coming out of nothing like something structural. He was built the way working men are built rather than the way gym men are, and the whole of him was already damp from thirteen flights of stairs, and Elliot put both palms flat on his chest and just left them there for a second.
"You're…"
"Don't."
"I've not said anything yet…"
"You're going to say something."
"I'm going to say a lot of things, actually," said Elliot, "at length, over several weeks…"
And Theo made a low sound and took the front of Elliot's shirt in both hands and pulled it apart.
The buttons went. Actually went, two of them, one skittering away across the carpet tiles somewhere near the photocopier.
"That's a Reiss shirt."
"Yeah."
"I'm not…carry on, obviously. I'm just noting it for the file."
Theo got the shirt off him and stopped.
It was one beat. That was all it was. One beat, in the half-dark, with the whole empty floor humming its low chord around them and Elliot sitting on the edge of somebody's desk with his shirt gone and his hair a total insurrection and his heart going like a bird.
Theo looked at him.
And then he kept looking, which was worse. Went slowly down him and back up, taking in the whole of him with an expression somewhere between hunger and disbelief, as though somebody had put something in front of him that he hadn’t been informed he was getting. He put one enormous hand flat on Elliot's chest, over the sternum, and left it there. Elliot was fair-skinned and clean-lined and pale as anything in that light. Against the size and the dark hair and the working-man's bulk of the arm laid over him, the contrast was so absolute it was almost funny, and neither of them was laughing.
"You're…" Theo said, and didn't finish it.
"What?"
"You know," said Theo, and his voice had gone somewhere very low. "You've got a mirror."
"That's the…"
"You're beautiful," said Theo, to the middle of Elliot's chest, the way he might log an incident. "There. Now shut the fuck up."
Elliot did, for once, shut up.
And Theo looked at him a moment longer.
And Elliot saw the whole of it, right there on the man's face, in a way that would have been unbearable in a better-lit room. He was terrified. Absolutely terrified. Twenty-seven years old, standing on the edge of the only thing he’d never once let himself have, with his hands still full of somebody else's shirt, so frightened he could hardly breathe.
And he was doing it anyway.
‘Oh’, Elliot thought, and something in his chest gave way completely. ‘Oh. I love him’.
He didn't say it. There were about nine hundred reasons not to and every single one of them was correct.
Theo stepped back.
Elliot opened his mouth to say something about it, and then closed it again, because Theo Marchetti was taking the rest of his clothes off.
He did it without any ceremony whatsoever. That was, by now, entirely predictable: no performance, no eye contact, no awareness of any kind that he was doing something to anybody. He got the uniform shirt the rest of the way off and dropped it over the back of a chair, and then dealt with the belt, and the boots, one hand on a desk for balance.
And Elliot sat on the edge of Callum's desk, and his eyebrows went up by a small but entirely measurable margin.
"Right," he said.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"You've said 'right.'"
"I say 'right' constantly, it's a…" Elliot cleared his throat. "It's a verbal tic. It's meaningless."
Theo straightened up.
There was a pause of about a second and a half.
"Okay, no, I'd like to formally amend that," said Elliot. "I have read the fire policy for this building. Cover to cover. Twice, actually, once for an audit and once because I'm an appalling person. And I want to state for the record that there is nothing in it that covers that."
Theo's mouth twitched.
"And I say that as someone who was, until about four seconds ago, feeling quite pleased with himself," Elliot went on, at speed, "and who is now experiencing what I can only describe as a revision…no, don't smile, don't you dare, I can see you starting…Marchetti, I swear to God…"
Theo smiled.
The whole one. Slow, and about as far from the closed verdict of a face Elliot had spent months failing to read as it was possible to get, and then he crossed the two meters of carpet tile between them, without saying a single word.
Theo kissed him. He held Elliot's face where he'd left it, and when Elliot opened to him, Theo groaned, rough at the edges. Theo pressed him back, flat, on the desk, so that Elliot felt the cold surface against his spine, and held him in place with one arm until Elliot arched up, greedy for the weight, for the pressure, everything he'd ever bantered through but never quite let himself want at full volume. He wrapped his legs around Theo's waist and the man shuddered at the contact, strong enough that it set the desk vibrating under them. Somewhere nearby, a mug fell over with a soft thud and a rattle, and Elliot started laughing into Theo's mouth.
"You're…" he tried, then lost it again when Theo's tongue swept into him, all authority and no apology, and then Theo pulled away, just enough to look down.
"Yeah," Theo said, like he'd understood the question.
And, oh, he was big. Not just the arms, the chest, the thighs that bracketed Elliot with their stupid impossible strength, but everywhere, the way his hands engulfed Elliot's wrists, the line of his body at every angle. And when Theo ground down, pinning Elliot to the desk and rutting against him in earnest, Elliot gasped, and Theo swallowed it like it had been a gift.
Theo levered up, dragging Elliot about half a foot along the desk and then back again, the friction of the movement making everything worse, everything urgent, and Elliot clung harder, feeling the bite of Theo's stubble on his jaw and the ache of being held so firmly he couldn't even wriggle out of it, which was, it turned out, precisely what he wanted. Theo's right hand found the buckle of Elliot's belt, which was, at this hour, more a suggestion than an actual fastener, and dealt with it in one solid motion. He fumbled the button, got it, then almost tore the zipper down, letting out a breath that might have been a curse or just the aching need, and Elliot bit the man's jaw.
"Careful," Theo growled, but he was smiling, or at least Elliot thought he was, and then Theo rucked the waistband down and got Elliot out, all in one go, hooked in his palm and held, almost lifted, as though testing the weight. Elliot would have said something about the data, the survey, the comparative audit, except his brain was no longer running analytics, only input: Theo's thumb stroking him, blunting sensation until it was a single, wild, persistent note. The dryness of his own mouth. His pulse every place it could be counted.
Theo's own cock, and yes, Elliot had been curious, he'd done the arithmetic, but nothing had quite prepared him for the moment, was a whole negotiation. Elliot had a second to register the size of it, heavy and thick in the man's hand, flushed dark at the tip, before Theo spat into his palm and slicked them both up, lining himself against the V of Elliot's thighs.
"You all right?" Theo said, hoarse, forehead pressed to Elliot's.
"Yeah," Elliot managed. "Fucking hell."
Theo stroked him once, twice, as if to be sure, and then set up a rhythm, rutting them together, and the friction and heat made Elliot's hips come up into it without even a plan.
"Wait," Elliot said, croaky, "hold on…" Theo did, instantly, hands bracing Elliot back, and Elliot had to breathe for a second.
He’d gone up against the data, the anecdotal evidence, the archive, but none of it had covered the possibility of being laid out on a desk while a man's cock, well, frankly, he had never even met the upper bound for this data set. It was, there were numbers, and there were irregularities, and then there was this.
He reached down, braced, and got his hand around it, Christ, he needed both hands, that was a situation, and looked up at Theo, who was biting the inside of his cheek, pointedly not making eye contact.
"Oh my actual God," Elliot said, "you were just walking around with this the whole time? No warning? No, like, briefing, or…"
Theo's face pinched up with apology. "Sorry. That's…I should've…it's too much, I know…"
"It's…listen," Elliot was breathless, almost laughing, "I believe in proportional representation, I'm just…" He ran his thumb across the tip, then just held on, taking another incredulous look, as if it was a punchline he’d misheard the first time.
Theo gave him a look that was halfway between mortification and pride. "If you need to…stop," he managed, "it's…it's all right. Danny, she…she always found it a bit much. Said it was a design flaw."
That moment, raw and defensive and utterly unprotected, did something catastrophic to whatever guard Elliot might have had left, and he found a hot rush of something that felt suspiciously like affection but which he could, for the moment, pass off as arousal.
"Marchetti, are you really apologizing for having a world record length on you?" Elliot said, and then he had to break off to laugh, because he honestly couldn’t help it. "I was the walk of shame in Zante four years running, and I have never been so comprehensively outperformed in my life. I will need to send out a shareholder update about this."
Theo's face did something, trace of a smile, at the corner, but he looked unsure what to do with his hands for the first time since the start.
Elliot released him, wait, no, kept a grip, by all means, it was a two-handed situation, and looked up. "Do I look like Daniela?"
Theo just stared, momentarily lost.
Elliot held his gaze, all the way up, and said, "Didn't think so." He reached up, grabbed Theo by the back of the neck, and pulled him over, pulling Theo’s mouth down to his.
For a second it was nothing but the shock and heat of their mouths, but Elliot felt the dam break at the same moment Theo did. Theo’s hips ground forward, cock rutting up against Elliot and the flat of Elliot’s stomach, and Elliot made a sound into Theo's mouth, a ripping, undiluted demand.
He let himself feel all of it. The impossible, overwhelming fullness, the way Theo's body shook against him, the size and weight and heat of it. He wasn't scared. Wasn't even close. The opposite, in fact. He wanted every last inch.
He said as much, quiet but insistent, into the mouth that was kissing him like it was the only thing keeping Theo upright. "You think that's going to scare me off? Try harder," he said, then let his head fall back on the desk, offering up his throat.
Theo landed there, as if pulled by a chain, stubble scraping, mouth gone animal. Elliot’s left hand dug into Theo's biceps, right hand still stroking him, and the friction, the catch of skin on skin, he lost track of it, lost the plot, which was not a thing that generally happened.
He could feel Theo’s need, the trembling urgency, the way he seemed at every moment on the verge of apologizing but instead just kept wanting.
Elliot was not going to let him apologize for this. Not on his life.
He let his own hand leave Theo's cock, let it trail up over the sweat-damp chest and the rough texture of his jaw, pulled him back in for another, messier kiss, and found Theo had never, not once, stopped wanting him. All pretense had been stripped out, the technicalities, the holding back. Elliot wasn't a theory, a calculus, a number on a page.
Theo reached down, steadied himself, and it was a comedy of errors, the clumsy knocking together of knees and the misalignment, and he muttered, "Sorry…got the jitters…"
Elliot took hold of Theo's wrist and brought his hand up to Elliot's mouth, kissed the inside of it, soft. "So," he said. "No, that's good. You can…" He broke off as Theo lined up, spit-slick and cautious, and pressed in. The first stretch was so much, Elliot actually yelped, his body, which had thought it was ready, made a new decision on the spot.
Theo hesitated, took up the slack, kissed Elliot with a gentleness that floored him, as if to apologize, as if to ask permission. When Elliot nodded, Theo tried again, and this time Elliot bore down, taking as much as he could, minute by minute, building up to it, and the sensation was a siren going off in his blood. A few centimeters in, Theo paused, breathing ragged.
"I…"
"It's fine," Elliot said, voice fraying at the edges. "You're fine. Just…" He closed his eyes, leaned his head back against the cold of the desk, and concentrated on opening up, on feeling it all, the way it filled him, the way Theo held most of his own weight braced on one arm so as not to crush him.
Elliot reached up, dug his fingers into the thick hair at the back of Theo's head, pulled him down for a kiss, and while his mouth was busy, Theo sank the rest of the way in. ‘Sweet Christ’. The stretch of it, the fullness, the pure, annihilating pleasure.
"You're…" Elliot tried, but couldn't finish the sentence.
"I know," Theo managed, and that's when they both started laughing.
It wasn’t elegant, practiced, and it took three false starts before they found a pace that didn't make one of them gasp or curse, or, in Elliot's case, laugh so hard he almost lost the rhythm entirely. Theo tightened his grip under Elliot's thigh, and the angle changed, and suddenly it was perfect. The first few thrusts were nothing but friction and sweat and heat. Elliot clung to Theo's shoulders, gasping, both of them muttering curses or gasped jokes. After another minute, Theo found a rhythm, slow at first, almost reverent, but it didn't stay that way. The tempo picked up.
At some point Elliot became aware of the desk sliding six inches every time Theo drove into him, then of the growing pile of office debris being swept clear by the force of it, and, in the back of his mind, the certainty that Callum would never let him live this down if he found out.
"Marchetti…" Elliot tried. Theo pulled out almost all the way and pushed back in, as if to say, what, and Elliot couldn't answer, his whole body centered on the place where they joined, on the obscene, outrageous fullness of it all. Theo's free hand wrapped around Elliot and stroked him, working him in perfect counterpoint, and Elliot let his head fall back and just let go, letting the tension build, letting Theo take him apart. The desk protested, loudly. Theo ignored it, increased his pace.
"Oh, fuck," Theo said, and for a second he stopped, trembling. "I'm…"
"Me too," said Elliot,
Theo put his forehead against Elliot's, and with a quiet, ruthless gentleness, started rocking into him again, this time with deadly purpose. Elliot felt it start in his toes, the pleasure winding up his spine, and then, quick as static, he was coming, his whole body surging with it, his vision whiting out. Theo held him through it, groaning, and a second later Elliot felt Theo jerk, hard, and freeze, clutching him so tightly the sound it knocked out of Elliot was almost a sob.
For a few seconds, neither of them moved, except for the small involuntary shudders that ran through them both. Elliot felt Theo's heart beating wild against his chest, Theo's damp hair matted to his forehead, the way his whole enormous frame seemed on the verge of collapse. Then Theo drew back, gently, and with all the delicacy of a man handling a live bomb, eased out and pressed a rough, overwhelmed kiss to the center of Elliot's chest, where, some minutes before, he’d said beautiful and meant it.
"Shit," Theo said softly, in awe or disbelief or both. "Sorry. I should've…"
Elliot reached down, found Theo's hand, and squeezed it. He meant to say, 'don't be sorry.' But what came out instead, because the filter was off and the armor was down, was:
"I could write you up for a fire code violation."
Theo huffed a broken laugh into the sweat-soaked skin of Elliot's shoulder, and then, unexpectedly, his body shuddered again and his voice cracked. Elliot lay there, naked and aching and emptied out in the best way, and ran his hands up and down Theo's back, feeling the great, shuddering breaths taper off. He said nothing, because sometimes even he knew when to just be quiet. After a long time, Theo lifted his head and tried a smile. It was a disaster, all cracked and wet, but heroic in its attempt.
For a full minute they just stayed tangled up, a cooling field of mutual devastation, Theo's heart going like a drill against Elliot’s ribs, his weight heavy and unmovable, the aftermath so profound it had its own texture, lassitude edged with a low, residual burn. Elliot ran his thumb along the cut of Theo’s jaw, the stubble like the rough side of velcro, trying to memorize everything it felt like to be at the center of that much wanting.
He only noticed, after a while, that Theo’s cock was still inside him, and that it wasn’t even close to softening.
He tried to look down, but couldn’t get further than a wriggle. Theo’s hand was clamped underneath one thigh, still bearing about half of Elliot’s body weight, and the other hand was braced on the desktop, keeping them in some impossible zero point of balance. Neither of them seemed in a hurry to move.
Elliot grinned up at Theo and said, “Are you okay, or is this a medical event?”
Theo closed his eyes for one second. “I’m…” He looked down, and then, almost shyly, “I’m fine.”
“‘Fine’ is not the term,” said Elliot, and experimentally shifted his hips. The sensation was ridiculous, so much it bordered on the mathematically implausible, and Theo expelled half a laugh, half a moan, the sound live-wired straight to the base of Elliot’s brain.
“You’re…” Theo started, but words didn’t seem to be his friend right now, so he just looked down, watching the place where their bodies met. There was something baffled, almost reverent, about the way he traced his own motion, his cock sliding slick and slow out and almost all the way back in, the pink of Elliot’s hole stretching around him, shiny with sweat and come.
“Fuck,” Theo mumbled, soft enough it could’ve been a thought, and Elliot felt it everywhere at once.
He pulled his legs back and uncoiled them from Theo’s hips, and Theo seemed to realize all at once what he meant to do and stepped back, breath catching as he slid out, the withdrawal exquisitely slow and greedy.
Elliot shivered, already missing the weight of it, and sat up a little, bracing himself on his palms. His whole body was open, flushed, gleaming with sweat and spattered with, Christ, the mess, the absolute state of him, he looked like a biology practical. He met Theo’s eyes and said, “Don’t suppose you can go again?”
Theo answered the only way he knew how: he took Elliot by the waist and spun him around, easy as a turntable, so Elliot was facing away, elbows planted on the scarred desktop with his ass presented for inspection. Somewhere to the left, a mug still rolled, and Elliot caught the angle of his own reflection in the polished black of a dead monitor: hair plastered to his forehead, skin blotched pink, Reiss shirt in ruins. He grinned at himself, idiot-wide, and felt Theo’s thigh come between his own.
The first touch was just Theo’s hand, warm and enveloping, running down Elliot’s spine and over the small of his back, fingers splayed out. Then the head of Theo’s cock, still absurdly hard, snugged into the cleft, and Theo ran it along the split, dragging up and down, making a slick, obscene sound that gave Elliot a full-body shudder.
“You…you can actually…” Elliot said.
“Don’t know. I think…” Theo lined up, pushed in, and that was the end of the question.
The angle was completely different this way, all of Theo’s body pressing down and into him, the whole mass of the man, hair rough against Elliot’s shoulder blades, hands enormous on his hips. The initial pain was sharp and bright, but then Theo was there, pushing further, worming in slow, so careful it nearly killed Elliot. No warning this time, no pause. Theo slotted all the way inside with a single, slow grind, and Elliot’s arms nearly gave out.
“Oh, God…”
“Yeah?” Theo’s voice was a low tremor right next to Elliot’s ear. “Still with me?”
He wasn’t only with him, he was utterly annihilated by him, and said as much, or the first two syllables of it, and then Theo started to fuck him for real.
Not fast, not at first, just a solid, relentless force, one that set the desk’s legs creaking against the carpet tiles, and Elliot, reduced to sensation, let his head drop and listened to the sounds Theo made above and behind him. Each time Theo bottomed out, he made a noise, a sort of stunned “fuck,” as though his own body couldn’t quite believe what it was being allowed to do.
Elliot reached back blindly, desperate to anchor himself, and Theo caught his wrist, pinning it behind Elliot’s back and bending him further, opening him up as wide as he could go. The sensation was so high, so unfiltered, that Elliot felt his eyes water. He was aware, mutedly, that he’d braced one knee on the desk and was half-rising to meet each thrust, his own cock dragging over the warped veneer with each forward motion, arousal so vicious it felt like wires under his skin.
Theo changed the angle, found a new rhythm, and Elliot felt everything coalesce into a single endless line of pleasure, a cresting wave that didn’t break or ebb, just built and built.
It occurred to him, in a moment of lucidity, that he might have just lost every single piece of armoring he’d ever built for himself, right here on Callum’s desk, with the printout still open on the next workstation, the blue-black monitor reflecting every red blotch up his chest. If anyone came in right now, if Bishopsgate burned to the ground and the fire brigade came up here, this was exactly how they’d find him: bent over, pink to the ears, being ruined by a man who was, by every metric, the stuff of bad office sex myths.
It made him laugh, wild and electric, and Theo, hearing it, bent down and bit his shoulder, a mark that would show for days, and said, “You like this.”
Elliot made a noise he didn’t know he was capable of. “Fuck, yes…don’t stop. Seriously, don’t even think about…”
And Theo didn’t stop. He let go of Elliot’s wrist and wrapped both arms around him, the full furnace of his chest pressed up against Elliot’s back, his cock working in and out with brutal deliberation. The hand that wasn’t required for grip found Elliot’s dick and started working it in time to the rhythm, almost absent-mindedly, and Elliot nearly went out of his own mind.
“Oh, fuck, I’m…Marchetti…” It wasn’t even a warning, it was a declaration of defeat. It hit him in waves, every muscle tensed and then liquefied. He convulsed in Theo’s grip, vision going white at the edges.
Theo held him through it, and a moment later, with a clipped curse, he followed. He locked up, buried deep, and held Elliot so tightly around the ribs that for several seconds Elliot couldn’t even draw a breath.
They collapsed as one onto the mess of desktop and paperwork, Theo’s weight a blanket, both of them sticky, ruined, and so thoroughly spent it was genuinely unclear how they would ever move again.
After a long while, Elliot found the presence of mind to say, into the crook of his own arm, “So, hypothetically, if I was to die at this moment, would you tell my boss or just leave me here?”
Theo, still panting, managed, “I’d move you to a safer place first.”
“Very prudent. You’re good at risk mitigation.”
Neither of them moved.
Elliot did an inventory, because it was the only cognitive function still available. Legs: theoretical. Hands: shaking, both of them, quite badly. A mark on his shoulder that was going to be a problem in a shirt with a collar. His heart going at a rate nobody had yet informed the event was over. And the whole of his back, from neck to hip, pressed against a chest that was slick and hot and rising and falling like something at the end of a race.
Right, he thought.
Nothing followed it.
That was, he noted it from somewhere far off, genuinely remarkable. Fourteen years of never once being caught short. Fourteen years of always having the line ready, the tension-breaker, the thing you say so nobody in the room has to sit inside a feeling for longer than four seconds. And there was nothing there at all. He reached for the shelf and the shelf was bare.
The hand on his stomach flexed slightly. Not a caress. More like a man checking something was still there.
"Reyes," Theo said, into the back of his shoulder.
His voice was wrecked.
"Yeah."
"I'm going to have to sit down."
Elliot laughed, one shocked undignified bark of a thing, out before he could stop it, and felt Theo huff against his skin in return, and that was, for the moment, the entire conversation.
Standing up was its own event.
There was a moment of separation that neither of them handled well. Theo took his hands away and stepped back, and the cold air arrived all down Elliot's back where the heat had been, and it was so abrupt and so unwelcome that he actually made a small noise about it and then was mortified.
They faced each other.
That was the thing. The specific and terrible reckoning of it: forty minutes ago they had been on a wet pavement being two people who hadn’t touched each other, and now they were standing three feet apart in a dark office, both of them mostly undressed, having to ‘look at one another’.
Elliot had done this before. Not this, obviously, not on the fourteenth floor of his own place of employment with a security guard, but the general shape of it, the after, he’d done a reasonable number of times and had a whole system for. You made a joke. You got dressed while making the joke. The joke did the work of the next four minutes so that nobody had to.
He opened his mouth.
"So," he said.
"Yeah," said Theo.
And then they both stood there.
Theo had put his hands in his pockets, except he didn’t have pockets, so what he actually did was put his hands somewhere approximately where pockets would be and then, having discovered the problem, leave them there. He was looking at the floor, and then at Elliot, and then very deliberately at a point about nine inches to the left of Elliot's head, and there was a flush going all the way up his neck into the beard.
He looked, Elliot thought, exactly like a man who had just knocked something over in a shop.
"Are your shoes on?" said Elliot.
Theo looked down.
One boot was on and laced. The other was not on at all and was, on inspection, about four meters away under a chair.
"Some of them," he said.
"You did thirteen flights of stairs."
"I did."
"With…carrying…" Elliot gestured at himself, at the whole situation, at the physics. "In one boot?"
"Both boots were on for the stairs," said Theo, with dignity.
And that was it, that was the thing that undid him, the dignity of it, the man defending his footwear at one in the morning in a dark office with his shirt on the floor, and Elliot put a hand over his face and laughed until he had to sit down on the edge of the desk.
Theo watched him do it with an expression Elliot couldn’t see, being occupied, and which he would’ve paid a considerable amount of money to have seen.
They found the clothes.
This took longer than either of them had any right to expect. Elliot's coat was in the stairwell. One sock was missing and stayed missing. A button was recovered near the photocopier and pocketed, for no reason, ceremonially. And Elliot, holding up his own shirt discovered that of the eleven buttons it had left the house with, four remained.
"Four," he said.
"Right."
"Four buttons, Marchetti."
"I'll get you a shirt."
"You'll get me a…what, from where? Where are you getting a shirt at one in the morning?"
"Lost property," said Theo. "There's a box."
Elliot lowered the shirt and looked at him.
"There's a box of lost property," he said, "in this building?"
"In the plant room off the loading bay."
"And what's in it?"
"Umbrellas, mostly." Theo considered. "There's a bike helmet nobody's ever come for. A wedding ring, which we're not allowed to give out, it has to go to the police, but nobody's come for that either." A pause. "It's been in there since 2022."
"That is the saddest thing I've ever…"
"There's a shirt, though," said Theo. "Blue one. Been there eight months."
"I'm not wearing a stranger's abandoned shirt to a board meeting."
"You've got four buttons."
"I've got dignity," said Elliot, "which is at an all-time low, admittedly, but it's not zero…"
And Theo laughed, and Elliot looked up at the sound of it and caught him at it, head down, shaking his head slightly, that whole enormous shape of him standing in the dark between two rows of desks in an unbuttoned uniform shirt, and something happened in Elliot's chest that he had absolutely no idea what to do with.
They both stopped laughing at slightly different times, which made it worse.
"Right," said Theo.
"Yeah."
Silence.
It was, Elliot thought, one of the strangest silences of his life, because it was not uncomfortable exactly, or not only that. It was loaded. It had a great deal in it. Both of them were standing there half-dressed at one in the morning with a shared and extremely recent memory sitting in the middle of the room, and neither of them had the first idea of the etiquette.
He became aware, distantly, that he wasn’t managing this.
He was supposed to be managing this. That was his job, in any room, always, and had been since he was eleven years old, locate the awkwardness, get in front of it, make everybody comfortable, be the reason it's all right. He’d never once failed to do it.
He couldn’t do it now. He couldn’t do it because every single available line required him to be at a slight remove from what had just happened, and he wasn’t at a remove from it. He was still in it. His hands were still shaking.
So he said, instead, and quite quietly:
"I don't know what to do now."
Theo's head came up.
"No," he said. "Me neither."
"I mean I'm normally…" Elliot made a small helpless gesture. "There's usually a bit here. I've got a whole bit. It's very good, it's got a callback."
"Right."
Theo looked at him for a long moment.
Then he crossed the two meters between them and put one hand on the side of Elliot's neck, thumb along the jaw, and kissed him, slowly, and not briefly, and then let go and stood back and said, gruffly, to the desk:
"That all right?"
"Yeah," said Elliot. His voice had gone. "Yeah. That's…yeah. That'll do it."
"Right."
"You can do that whenever you…"
"Right," said Theo, and turned away and started doing up his shirt with hands that were not entirely steady, and Elliot sat down on the edge of Callum's desk in his four-button shirt and watched him do it and didn’t say a single word, which was, by some distance, the most affectionate thing he’d ever done for anybody.
The radio, when Theo eventually located it, had been under a chair for over an hour.
He picked it up and looked at it.
"What time is it?" he said.
Elliot checked. "Ten past one."
"Rounds were at half twelve."
"Ah. Is that bad?"
"It's…" Theo pressed the heel of his hand into one eye. "It's not good."
"Right." Elliot nodded, slowly, and looked at the carpet, and then said, in the manner of someone attempting to be extremely casual about something and getting perhaps sixty percent of the way there, "No, you should…yeah. Go and do them. Obviously."
"Yeah."
"You've got to go and check that the building is still, broadly speaking, a building."
"Something like that."
"Go. Walk your doors." Elliot flapped a hand at him and then, because the hand had nowhere to go afterwards, put it in his lap. "It's fine. I'm not…"
And then he stopped.
Because he’d been about to do the bit. The whole bit, fully formed, sitting right there: ‘don't worry about me, I'll be off, I've got things, big night ahead, several appointments’, the thing you say so that the other person doesn't have to feel responsible for you, the thing he’d said in one form or another to every single person he’d ever left a room with since he was seventeen years old.
He looked at the four buttons on his shirt.
"I haven't actually got anywhere to be," he said.
Theo went still.
"I mean it's ten past one in the morning," Elliot said, to the shirt, "and I live in Bethnal Green, and there's a night bus but it takes forty minutes and it's…" He shrugged. "There's nobody at mine. There's nothing at mine. There's a fridge and a plant I'm not doing very well with."
Silence.
"So I could just…" and here he looked up, finally, and it cost him something, and he did it anyway. "I could stay. While you go. If that's…I could wait here. And you could come back."
He heard how it sounded about half a second after it’d left him, and it sounded, to his own ears, appallingly like asking.
Theo didn't say anything.
He stood there with his radio in one hand and his shirt half done up, and he looked at Elliot.
"Okay," he said.
And turned, and went.
He got as far as the fire door. He put one hand on the bar and stopped, half in the dark and half in the light of the stairwell, and didn’t look back over his shoulder, spoke to the door instead.
"Don't put your clothes back on."
The door boomed shut behind him.
"...Right," Elliot said, to nobody at all.
*
Sometime later, and neither of them could have told you how much later, because the clock on the wall by the print room had been out of Elliot's line of sight for a considerable period, the two of them were in his chair.
His actual chair. The ergonomic one he had filled in a form for. Theo was sitting in it with his feet flat on the carpet tiles, and Elliot was on him, one knee either side. His arms were over the shoulders. His face was in the side of Theo's neck. He wasn’t sure he had bones.
They were both absolutely soaked.
The chair, which had been designed by a Swedish company for the purpose of preventing lower back complaints in office workers, had rolled about a meter and a half from its original position and was now, Elliot noted distantly, up against the leg of somebody else's desk.
He thought he was spent, but Theo Marchetti had other ideas.
The man's stamina was, much like the rest of him, quietly wild, the kind that didn't brag but made itself evident by simply refusing to run out. Elliot only realized he was hard again when Theo shifted under him, a lazy shift of the hips, and Elliot gasped out loud. Sounded off, almost choked, like he'd been plucked out of a dream too soon.
Theo had started covered, but shed everything for this. Now it was just skin, Elliot's knees straddling Theo's thighs, the contact messy and so much better than anything he'd imagined. He bounced up and down, slow at first, then picking up pace with every push from below, the kind of rhythm you might expect from a man with metronomes for bones. Every time he came down all the way, he could feel Theo inside him, so thick it filled the whole universe for a second, then up again, quads burning, a ridiculous athleticism to it that made him want to laugh.
His eyes kept rolling backwards. He tried to say something to that effect but the only thing that came out was a high, wordless sound and his head dropping forward, sweat darkening the fringe at his brow. He could see himself, semi-reflected, edge-on, in the black glass of the nearest window, pale and stripped and gleaming, knees spread wide and a flush up his neck, legs quivering where they met Theo's sides. The only other sound was the grind of the office chair and Theo's nails leaving brief, red trails along his spine.
"How the fuck…" Theo managed, hands gripping Elliot just above the hips, "How are you even…"
Elliot tried to laugh, except it wasn't a laugh, it was almost crying from sensation. "Don't…talk," he gritted out, voice shuddery, "I'm…doing…a…thing…"
Theo grunted, something like a broken "Right." The man's face was a whole weather system now, forehead pressed to Elliot’s chest, lips parted, disbelief plain in the way he stared up at him. Every few seconds Elliot caught him blinking, like the data coming in was overwhelming the processor.
"You good?" Theo said, lower now, concern rumbling deep even as his hips bucked, steady and huge.
"Incredible," Elliot got out. He was. He was. "Beyond…beyond good. It's…fuck…"
He was going to lose it. He felt his own cock bouncing along each downward slam, leaking over the hair at the base of Theo's stomach, friction everywhere, nothing gentle about it. He couldn't even guess how he had the legs for it, but he kept going, kept levering himself up and down, working up to something so big he could taste it at the back of his teeth.
Theo's hands went from his waist, up his sides, to the small of his back, then up to Elliot's neck, cradling the skull, coaxing him down. "You're going to kill me, Reyes," Theo said, not even joking, not even a shade of it, voice breaking like it was a confession.
"Don't care," Elliot said, on the way down, and this time he didn't bother to slow or balance, nearly choked on the stretch of Theo opening him up all the way. "I want…" The thought escaped, replaced by the joker's smile splitting his mouth. He kissed Theo, or tried to, but what actually happened was that Theo caught him, opened to him, and kept him there, holding tight as though if he let go the whole building would shake apart.
"Jesus Christ," Theo said, and then started to lose rhythm, pace dropping to something frantic and ragged, hands panicky, grip bruising. Elliot could feel him getting close, could feel the wild irregular spasms of cock inside him. Even so, Theo was trying to hold out, muted grunts, long slow thrusts, determined to land the plane but already in free fall.
Elliot was the one who finished first. He felt it coming, sharp and hot, a kind of detonation that crested from his toes and took the top of his head off. He jerked forward, muscles seizing, and his own load hit Theo's chest and neck in a hot, sticky mess, high and copious, enough to drip down and pool between their bodies. The sight set Theo off immediately, one more brutal upstroke, and then Theo bucked up with a lurch, body tensing from his calves to his jaw, eyes scrunched shut.
The sound he made was more animal than anything else. Elliot felt it, deep inside, the squeezing pulse as Theo came, the warmth, the possessiveness of it. Theo's arms locked around him, pinning Elliot's shaking body to his own, and for a long fifteen seconds they were simply a single knotted tangle of skin and sweat and breath.
Afterwards, Elliot collapsed forward, limp as a failed puppet, face pressed into the shelf of Theo’s shoulder, their chests sticking together, uncomplaining.
"Full marks," Theo managed, eventually, voice shredded.
"I think…" Elliot gasped, no air but full of words anyway, "…we've destroyed my entire pelvic floor." He let Theo arrange him, hands gentle now, pulling Elliott closer until his cheek was mashed against the rough stubble of Theo's jaw and neither of them was letting the other go. He floated in the after, the slow delicious throb, the way Theo's hand kept rubbing up and down his spine, like even now he couldn't get enough of contact.
"You want to sit here for a bit?" Theo said, eventually.
"Can't move. Literally cannot. I have done a PB on both stamina and stretch." He felt his own laugh, weak but real, and realized, in a flash, that it was the first time he'd been held like this without planning an escape route. He could wait out the night. He could wait out anything.
Theo stroked the sweat-soaked hair off Elliott’s brow, and looked at him. There were words in the look, thousands of them, shy and fighting for position, but none of them came out.
They stayed like that a long time.
And then, later, when it was practical to talk again, Elliot straightened up, and said, hoarse and grinning, “For the record, that’s definitely a violation of office policy.”
“You started it,” Theo said, like it was almost reasonable.
“Can’t argue with the facts,” Elliot said, and let himself go boneless once more, spent and content, the blueprint for disaster rewritten, at last, on Theo’s lap.
Then Elliot pushed himself back, not far, six inches, his hands still on the shoulders, and let his forehead come down against Theo's, and they stayed like that, breathing at each other.
"Reyes," said Theo.
"Mm."
"Was that better?"
Elliot lifted his head.
"Sorry…better?"
"Than the first time." Theo said it entirely without inflection, the way he said everything.
And Elliot sat back on the man's thighs and looked at him, and thought: ‘right. Careful. Handle this correctly’.
Because it was, when you got down to it, a genuine question. There was no fishing in it whatsoever, no angling, no performance, none of the elaborate usual apparatus.
Elliot had, at last count, about eleven jokes available.
He deployed none of them, which was, by a considerable distance, the most restraint he had exercised in his adult life.
"Right," he said. "Okay. I'm going to answer that honestly, because I've had a long think about this and I've decided that the last thing this world needs is you walking around with any further confidence."
"That's not…"
"Because you're already…" Elliot gestured at the entire man beneath him, up and down, comprehensively. "You're this. And you don't know it. And that's the only thing keeping the rest of us alive."
"Reyes…"
"So I'm going to be measured," said Elliot. "I'm going to give you the sort of feedback Marjorie gives, which is fair, proportionate, and slightly disappointing."
"Right."
"Yes," said Elliot. "It was better."
Theo's mouth moved. He tried to stop it. He wasn’t successful.
"There it is," said Elliot. "That's exactly what I was afraid of, that's the…no. Stop that. Put it away."
"I've not done anything."
"You've done a face."
"It's my only face."
"Marchetti, I've now seen at least four of them and one of them's going to be a problem for me long-term…" Elliot took the man's jaw in one hand and turned it slightly, examining him with enormous mock severity. "God, look at you. You're insufferable. You've had two goes at this and you're already…no. We're stopping. The feedback session is concluded."
"You said it was better, though."
"I said it was better in a managed way…"
"How much better?"
"Absolutely not," said Elliot. "That's…no. There's a scale, obviously, and you're on it, and you're doing fine, and that's all you're getting." He let go of the jaw and patted the side of it, twice, condescendingly. "You'll get your review in April like everybody else."
And Theo laughed, right there, six inches away, and the sound of it went through Elliot like a hot drink on a cold day, all the way down.
"It's just…" Theo said, when it had died down. His hands had found Elliot's hips and had settled there. "You're the first bloke I've been with."
Elliot didn’t move.
There was a pause of perhaps a second and a half, during which the entire fourteenth floor of Pellicorp Tower was extremely quiet.
He pulled back.
"Sorry," he said. "Sorry. Say that again."
"What?"
"You just said that like you were telling me the bins go out on a Tuesday."
Theo blinked at him. "You knew that."
"I suspected it. There's a…there's a considerable difference between suspecting a thing and having a man announce it from a seated position while holding your…"
"You want me to say it different?"
"I want you to say it with some kind of ceremony, Marchetti, there should have been a…" Elliot stopped.
Because here it came.
The whole queue of them, seven or eight, fully formed, arriving simultaneously and jostling for position, all of them very good, all of them absolutely lethal, all of them the sort of thing that got a room, and every single one of them the exact wrong thing to say to a man who had just handed him something like that in a flat voice with his hands on his hips.
So he shut his mouth.
He sat there on top of a security guard in an ergonomic chair at two in the morning with his jaw clamped shut and his eyes watering slightly from the effort.
"You've gone red," said Theo.
"I'm fine."
"You've gone…"
"I’m…processing," said Elliot, "at speed, an extremely large amount of material, and I would ask you to give me a moment…"
"You want to say something."
"I want to say nine things…"
"Go on then."
"No," said Elliot.
And he meant it, and he watched it land, watched Theo register that Elliot Reyes, who had never once in four months let a moment pass without decorating it, had just declined to.
"No," he said again, quieter. "Not that one. That one you get to keep."
Theo looked at him.
"Right," he said. And then, after a moment, gruffly, to somewhere around Elliot's collarbone: "Cheers."
They sat with it. The chair creaked.
"Can I ask you something instead?" said Elliot.
"Yeah."
"What's the difference?"
Theo's head came up.
"I'm asking," said Elliot, "because I genuinely don't know and I'm never going to. I've never been with a woman. I knew at about eleven and I've never had any curiosity about it whatsoever, which people find very rude, apparently." He shrugged. "So you're the only person I'm ever going to be able to ask."
And Theo took his time with it.
Of course he did. He took a genuinely absurd amount of time with it.
"You laugh," he said.
Elliot waited.
"That's it," said Theo.
"That's…sorry, that's the difference? That's your…"
"You laughed," said Theo. "During." He said it with total gravity, like he was reporting a finding. "Didn't know that was allowed."
And Elliot Reyes threw his head back and cackled.
It came out of him at enormous volume and it didn’t stop, a huge, ugly, uncontrolled, absolutely delighted noise, nothing like the laugh he did in meetings or the one he did in pubs or the polished chuckle he had been deploying at parties.
It was the laugh from his mother's kitchen. The one from being eight years old on a carpet with his cousins. It bounced off forty empty desks and came back off the windows and went on for a very long time, and he had to grab the back of the chair to stay on it, and at some point he stopped making any sound at all and simply shook.
And when he finally got his eyes open, wet, wrecked, gasping, Theo was watching him.
Just watching him. Not laughing. Not joining in. Sat perfectly still underneath him with both hands on his hips and his whole face wide open, looking up at Elliot.
‘Oh’, Elliot thought.
And everything went very quiet in him.
Because he understood, all at once and with total clarity, what had just happened. He’d been laughed at his entire life, affectionately, by people who loved him, that was the arrangement, that was the trade, he made the joke and the room laughed and everybody went home happy. And he’d spent every one of those fourteen years making absolutely certain that nobody ever saw this one. The real one. The one with no timing in it and no room-management and no craft whatsoever, that came out of him sideways and made a noise like a gate. He’d trained it out of himself at about fourteen. He couldn’t remember the last time it’d happened in front of another human being.
He’d just done it, at full volume, in an empty office, on top of a man he had known for eight weeks.
‘He likes it’, Elliot thought, and the thought arrived with a sort of vertigo.
He’d spent his whole life being liked for what he could do.
Nobody had ever, once, simply enjoyed him.
"What?" said Theo.
"Nothing," said Elliot. His voice had gone completely. "Nothing."
"Right."
"Shut up."
"I've not said…"
"I know," said Elliot, and put his forehead back down against the man's, hard, and stayed there while he got himself in order.
It was the clock that did it, in the end.
He opened his eyes on the wall by the print room and the clock said twenty past two, and something in the back of his head, the part that had a board presentation at nine and a shirt with four buttons on it, sat up and cleared its throat.
"It's getting late," said Elliot.
"Yeah."
"Like…properly. It's twenty past two. I've got Ian Pellicorp in six hours and forty minutes and I have to go home and find a shirt and possibly a new personality…"
"Cleaners aren't in till half four," said Theo.
Elliot stopped.
"Sorry?"
"Half four. Rosa and the others." Theo's hands had not moved off his hips. His voice had gone somewhere low and entirely level, and he was looking at a point just past Elliot's ear. "And I've not got rounds till three."
"Marchetti."
"So there's forty minutes."
"Are you…" Elliot sat back. "Are you negotiating with me?"
"I'm stating the situation."
"You're using a shift pattern as a chat-up line…"
"It's forty minutes," said Theo, "and you've said yourself, you're going to be tired either way."
"That is outrageous reasoning…"
"Is it wrong, though?"
And Elliot opened his mouth to say something absolutely devastating, and looked at him, at the enormous, ridiculous, entirely serious man underneath him, offering him a forty-minute window, and found that the devastating thing had gone the way of everything else that evening.
"No," he said. "It's not wrong. It's not remotely wrong. It's the single best-argued case I've ever heard put. And I want you to know that if you'd applied this energy to literally anything else you'd be running this building."
"Reyes."
"I'm just saying, the rigor…"
"Reyes."
"Yeah," said Elliot. "All right. Yeah."
And he got a hand round the back of the man's neck and pulled him up, and the chair rolled another half a meter into somebody else's desk, and neither of them noticed that either.
*
The coffee room on fourteen had a sofa in it that nobody had ever sat on.
It was a company sofa, which is to say it’d been chosen by a procurement process rather than a person: low, wide, upholstered in a hard-wearing grey-blue weave designed to survive an industrial tribunal. It faced the dead coffee machine, which still had the Comic Sans apology taped to it, OUT OF ORDER SORRY FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE, eight weeks after the fact, because facilities had come, looked at it, and left.
At ten past three in the morning, Elliot Reyes was flat on his back on it, and had revised his opinion of the sofa entirely.
Theo was over him and half on him, one forearm braced into the cushion by Elliot's head taking most of the weight.
They were both still soaked.
Elliot was jelly.
Worse: he wasn’t even jelly, he was a residue of jelly, a smudge and a scrape deserted in the bottom of a Tesco meal deal. All his major systems had checked out. He was sweat-veined and vague, running purely on marathon feedback loop: sensation, analysis, and a thirty-second buffer of memory. Everything else was dark. No language center, no fine motor skills, not even much sense of where he ended and the man above him began.
Theo was fucking him hard. Impossible, tireless, whole-body thrusts, the sort of stamina that a medieval bishop might have written a rude letter about, and Elliot, who had survived four years of Marcus and year twelve rugby, was comprehensively outperformed. He had a view of the ceiling tiles, steady, then a view of the man’s head, then ceiling tiles again, the rhythm perfect and regular and obliterating. His own legs were bracketed between Theo's thighs, and every time the man bottomed out, the bounce of ass in his lap could have powered the office’s emergency generators for a week. The couch announced their progress with a long, oscillating squeak that was going to get them both prosecuted under the Building Control Act.
Theo had him wide open, legs caged, pinning him with his weight, his cock driving in at an angle that had, on the last go, made Elliot’s toes curl so hard he thought he’d broken a metatarsal. He made a sound. Tried to be funny, tried to reach for a line “…fucking Christ, performative much?” maybe, or “are you aiming to hit the basement,” but couldn’t articulate it past the breath being punched out of him.
Every next word got replaced by raw, shocked moaning. He tried, once, for a full sentence, made it as far as “you are…” before Theo hit that place again and the rest of it choked off into white fuzz. He could feel himself opening, stretching round the man’s cock, less and less resistance every time. Could feel, with a certain technical interest, his own body’s absolute willingness to be pounded into next Tuesday. He arched up, wanting more, and Theo’s grip around his thigh went fierce, nearly painful, and Elliot loved it, wanted more of that, wanted all of it. His own cock was hard, slapping wetly against his stomach. Theo palmed it, barely a motion, and Elliot was already splattering the flat of his chest, before he could even warn himself.
He almost blacked out.
For a stretch of time, he must have been gone, because the next thing he knew, Theo was still pounding into him, the man’s face a mess of sweat and stubble, and something deep in Elliot’s body ached so sharply he thought he might have come again just from the aftershocks. His stomach was painted, sticky, cum pooled in his navel.
Theo slowed, not much, but enough for Elliot’s brain to buffer up new reality. He could see the man’s ass working furiously, read the change in Theo’s breathing, sense, rather than hear, the engine-room groans. He braced, waiting for the end, and prepared to make some kind of joke out of it. And instead, Theo, as if handed a cue, yanked out, dropped his own cock in both hands, and finished all over Elliot’s chest and face, splashing the lines of Elliot’s neck, a shot across his mouth, the rest dripping, slow and hot, down between his pecs and over the come that was already there. It was, to the numbers, a statistically heroic volume.
Elliot, blinking through the pearlescent line that had landed directly in his left eye, could only gasp: “…Christ, was that the fucking entire stock…”
Theo, panting, didn’t answer, just wiped his own hand off on the couch, then, with more coherence than anyone had a right to, leaned down and said, "Sorry. Sorry," and awkwardly tried to catch the runnel with his thumb, smearing it sideways under Elliot’s eye.
Elliot, who was now substantially covered in a mixture of his own and Theo’s DNA, just grinned, let the man do what he liked. “Fucking hell, Marchetti. You ever heard of a warning shot?”
Theo’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. It was clear, even without words, the man genuinely didn’t have a draft for this. Instead, he offered a kind of half-laugh, half-growl, low and choked, and then did something bizarre: he got down on his knees in front of the sofa, pulled Elliot’s legs up onto his shoulders, and started licking the mess off Elliot’s skin, slow and methodical, like he was working through a checklist.
Elliot looked up at the ceiling, at the weird pattern of shadows it made, and thought about how this was, by distance, the most unprofessional thing he’d done in his entire career to date, and that it was also, by distance, the best possible start to a Thursday. Theo was still at it, cleaning up the cum, quiet, focused, almost reverent. When he got to Elliot’s face, he paused, looking up, waiting for some kind of permission. Elliot used the last of his energy to nod, and then, because Theo seemed genuinely obsessed with maintaining good data, bracketed the man's face between his hands and let him kiss the rest of the mess from his lips. ‘Fine, then’, thought Elliot. ‘Fine’. Let the whole building burn down, let Marjorie and Ian Pellicorp and the entire staff of Pellicorp Holdings find them like this, eating each other alive on a defunct sofa, not funny and not even trying to be.
Because there was nothing in the world he wanted more than this.
Nothing else, right now. Just this, and this, and this.
Theo was kissing him. Slowly.
He was doing Elliot's shoulder. He would kiss the skin and then rest his mouth there for a second and then move an inch and do it again, in a line, and every time he moved he made a small sound against the skin, low, half a word, not really addressed to anybody.
Elliot lay there and looked at the ceiling tiles.
"You're soft," Theo murmured, into his shoulder.
"That's not…"
"Not soft like that." He moved an inch and kissed again. "Your skin. It's…smooth. Everywhere." A pause.
"That's the strangest…"
"And you taste like salt," said Theo. He said it against Elliot's collarbone, absently. "I've thought about what you'd smell like. That's…sorry. That's probably weird."
"It's not weird."
"I've thought about it in the lobby."
"Marchetti."
"Four months," said Theo, unbothered, and kept going.
And Elliot lay on a company sofa in a coffee room with his eyes on a ceiling tile and let the whole thing wash over him and thought, with a sort of drunken clarity, because he hadn’t slept and wasn’t going to and had passed some threshold hours ago, ‘I have never in my life been this happy’.
It arrived quite plainly. And immediately behind it, the way it always did, with the reliability of a train, came the other thing.
"You'll get tired of it eventually," he said.
He heard it leave. The old machinery, still running down there in the dark somewhere under everything.
"They all seem to," he added, and even managed to make it sound light.
Theo stopped.
He went completely still against Elliot's shoulder, and stayed that way for a second, and then he lifted his head.
Theo reached up and took his chin, and he turned Elliot's face off the ceiling and round to look at him. And there was no getting out of it. There was no angle to be found, and nowhere else to put his eyes, and about four inches of air between them in a room at ten past three in the morning.
"It's always the good ones that reckon they're rubbish." Theo murmured as his thumb moved slightly along Elliot's jaw.
There was a silence.
"You've got no idea what you are," Theo said. "You come through that door every day and the whole place goes up. Everybody. The girl on the barriers, the cleaners, Gav, and Gav doesn't like anyone. I've stood behind that desk for months watching you do it and you've got no clue. None."
"That's just…"
"It's not the funny," said Theo. "It's that you look at people. You look at people while they're talking." He said it flatly, and it was the flatness that did it. "Nobody does that."
Elliot's eyes had started stinging and he didn’t trust himself to open his mouth.
He lay there under the weight of that hand and looked up at him.
"Okay," he said.
His voice came out in about three pieces.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." He breathed.
Theo nodded once, satisfied, and put his head back down on Elliot's shoulder like a man returning to work. And Elliot lay on the sofa in the coffee room with his hands in the man's hair and his eyes wide open and wet, staring at a ceiling tile, thinking absolutely nothing at all.
Somewhere out in the building, a clock or a timer or a system on a schedule went off, one short flat electronic tone, twice, from a plant room or a riser or somewhere in the walls.
Both of them heard it.
Neither moved for a moment.
Then Theo said, "That's the half three," and Elliot said, "Yeah," and that was the end of it.
They got up.
It took a long time and neither of them was quick about it, and there was something in the way they moved around.
They didn’t talk much. Elliot found his shirt, four buttons, and put it on and did up the four, which achieved approximately nothing, and tucked it in anyway because he was going to be walking through a lobby. Theo did his uniform properly: every button, collar straight, tucked, belt, the radio back on the shoulder, and Elliot watched him reassemble himself piece by piece and felt something enormous and grim settle behind his ribs.
Because it was like watching a man put armor on.
That was exactly what it was. Every item that went back on was a piece of the other thing coming back, the lobby, the desk, the log book, the flat face, the fifteen meters of marble. Twenty minutes ago that man had been holding his chin and telling him he wasn't allowed to say bad things about himself. In half an hour he was going to be standing behind a prow-shaped desk saying ‘evening’ to a courier.
They put the coffee room back together.
They straightened the sofa cushions. They put Callum's monitor back upright and squared it to the desk, and picked the pens up off the carpet and put them back in the cardboard tray, and Elliot found Nadia's mug and set it where it lived. Theo rolled the ergonomic chair back to its original position and, after a moment's consideration, adjusted the height.
Nobody said anything about any of it.
They were removing the evidence. They both knew they were removing the evidence, and neither of them said the word, because the word would have meant saying out loud that what had happened on this floor tonight was not something that could survive contact with half past eight in the morning.
At the fire door Theo stopped.
He had his hand on the bar.
"Cleaners are in at half four," he said. "You'll want to be gone before."
"Yeah."
"There's the…" He gestured vaguely. "Lift'll be running."
"Yeah."
That was all there was. There wasn't anything else. No version of ‘when will I see you’ that either of them could have got out of their mouth, and no version of ‘what is this’ that wouldn’t have brought the whole thing down, and both of them knew it, and so neither of them tried.
Theo pushed the bar.
He got one step into the stairwell and then he stopped, and turned round.
They looked at each other through the open fire door.
And Theo Marchetti smiled.
The whole one.
And Elliot smiled back.
*
The first Central line train of the morning is a strange and slightly holy thing.
It runs at twenty to six and it carries a very specific congregation: cleaners going home, cleaners going in, a man in chef's whites asleep upright with his mouth open, two nurses at the end of something and one at the beginning of something, and a scattering of people in last night's clothes who’ve made choices and are now travelling with them.
Elliot Reyes fitted comfortably into the last category.
He was sitting with his bag on his knees and his coat done up to the throat, because his shirt had four buttons on it and none of them were near the top, and he’d been awake for twenty-three hours, and he’d passed through exhaustion at about four and come out the other side into a strange floating state that was not unlike being drunk in the sunshine.
"You're going to be a disaster," he informed himself, quietly.
The chef's whites man didn’t react.
"Nine o'clock. Ian Pellicorp. Ten minutes on the suspense codes." He let his head go back against the glass. "You've had no sleep. You've got no shirt. You're going to walk into that board room and say something unhinged…"
He had it worked out. There was a plan. He'd be at the flat by twenty past six, in the shower by half, and if he lay down for forty minutes, not sleep, just horizontal, just lying down with his eyes shut, and then found a shirt and got the 7:52, he'd be at his desk by half eight with time to run the thing once more in the print room where nobody could hear him.
Forty minutes. He could do a lot on forty minutes. He'd done a board pack on eleven.
‘And it was worth it’, said a voice from somewhere near the base of his skull, with enormous smugness.
"Yeah, all right," said Elliot.
His phone buzzed.
He got it out expecting Priya, who was capable of sending a text at any hour of the day or night and frequently did, and looked at the screen.
+44 7* **91
Good luck this morning.
T.
Elliot sat up so fast his bag went off his knees.
He read it four times. And something started in the middle of his chest and went out to the ends of his fingers, and he was aware that he’d begun, uncontrollably, to grin.
T.
Not the full thing. Of course not the full thing, the man had said ‘Reyes’ into his mouth about nine times in the last six hours and had never once, not at any point, in any condition, used his first name. But T. At the bottom, on its own line, like a man signing off a memo.
It was, Elliot thought, the single most beautiful piece of correspondence he’d ever received.
He started typing.
Elliot: how have you got my number
Elliot: actually don't answer that. incident report. four pages. I know how this works
T: You put it on a courier form six weeks ago.
Elliot: SIX WEEKS AGO
T: It's on file.
Elliot: marchetti that's not "on file" that's a MEMORY. that's you REMEMBERING a phone number for six weeks
T: I'm good with numbers.
Elliot: I'M good with numbers. it's my JOB. you're good with FIRE DOORS
He was still grinning. One of the nurses had glanced over.
T: How are you feeling?
Elliot: like a photocopy of a man
Elliot: genuinely I think if I blink slowly I'll just go
T: Get some sleep.
Elliot: can't. shower, shirt, train, board.
Elliot: also and I want to be clear about this. this is YOUR FAULT
T: I offered you the option to leave at ten past one.
Elliot: you offered me a FORTY MINUTE WINDOW using a SHIFT PATTERN
T: And you accepted the terms.
Elliot: I want it minuted that I was under duress
T: Minuted.
Elliot put a hand over his mouth.
It occurred to him, somewhere around Bethnal Green, that Theo Marchetti texted in complete sentences with full stops at the end of them, and that this should’ve been ominous and was in fact so unbearably endearing that he had to look out of the window for a second.
And then, after a gap of about forty seconds.
T: I want to see you again.
Elliot looked at it.
The train came out of the tunnel somewhere and the sky through the window was going the color it goes at six in the morning in November, that thin blue that isn't day yet, and Elliot Reyes sat with his phone in both hands and his heart going like a bird and typed.
Elliot: marchetti you see me every day
Elliot: twice a day
Elliot: I walk past you at 8:20 and 6:10 like a hostage in a proof of life video
There was a pause.
It went on for quite a long time. The dots came. The dots went.
T: I meant with your clothes off.
Elliot made a noise.
One of the nurses turned round properly. The man in chef's whites woke up, looked at him with pure hatred, and went back to sleep. Somebody's headphones came out.
"Sorry," said Elliot, to the carriage at large.
He put the phone down on his knee, face-up this time.
He leaned his head back against the glass and shut his eyes.
He had a board presentation in three hours and eleven minutes. He had no sleep in him at all. He had a shirt with four buttons, an office chair that had rolled two meters out of position, a mark on his shoulder that was going to require a considerable amount of collar, and a message on his phone from a man who had signed it with a single letter.
He was, he thought, in absolutely no condition to do anything.
Elliot Reyes got off at his stop at four minutes past six in the morning, in a coat done up to the throat over a ruined shirt, walking about four inches taller than usual, into a cold blue London morning that hadn’t properly started yet.
And, all the way up the road to his flat, he couldn’t for the life of him stop smiling.
(To be continued…)
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