He made it as far as the corridor. The bar door hadn’t finished swinging shut before the footsteps started up behind him, and he didn’t speed up. He wasn’t going to be chased down a hallway, and he hadn’t planned past this.
“Where are you going?”
Daniel didn’t turn. “Away from you.”
“Walk away? That’s it?”
“The match is over.”
“Bullshit.”
He should have kept walking. He stopped.
When he turned around, Alex was closer than he should have been. He had the same colour up his neck he’d had on the mat, and he was breathing like he’d run.
“Forty seconds,” Alex said. “They timed it.”
“I’m aware.”
“And?”
“I won. That’s all that happened.”
“You know exactly what you did.”
Daniel didn’t give him the step back.
“You’re reading into it.”
“Am I?”
He was done. Two steps toward the lifts, and the hand closed on his shoulder. He was still turning when Alex put both hands in his chest and drove him back into the wall. His shoulders hit first.
Then the hands didn’t come off. All of Alex’s weight came through them, hard, and the wall took the rest. Alex held him there, long enough that it stopped being a shove and turned into something he was doing on purpose.
“There.” Right up close, and his voice had gone rough with it. “Now you know what it fucking feels like.”
He got a hand on Alex’s wrist and pushed off, and Alex leaned into it and put him on the wall again. Heavier than he looked, and he’d set his feet for it. Alex was too close. Forearm hard across his chest, his mouth inches off, breath warm along his jaw. Whatever Daniel had been about to say went out of his head.
Green eyes, this close. He hadn’t known that.
“Not so easy when it’s you, is it?” Alex said.
He dropped his hips and turned hard into the arm, the same escape Alex had been using on him all match. The hold came apart, and he put Alex into the opposite wall hard enough to hear it.
His forearm was across Alex’s collarbone. He hadn’t decided to put it there.
Alex fought it, got his hands on his shoulders and shoved. Daniel put his weight into him, chest to chest, a thigh between his legs for base, the way he’d pin anyone on a mat. Alex shoved again, harder, and Daniel matched him, pressure for pressure, and none of this felt like a mat.
Then Alex’s grip on his shoulders changed. Still tight, still holding, but the fight had gone out of it, the way it had gone out of his shoulder under the triangle. Alex had chosen to, this time.
“Fuck,” Daniel said, out loud in the empty corridor.
Alex’s breath came fast, close enough to be wet on his mouth. His forearm was still across Alex’s chest, and he should have stepped back, and he didn’t.
He could feel every exhale in the chest against his, and the corridor carpet was the kind that ate sound, and nobody had come around the corner yet, which meant nothing except that nobody had come around the corner yet. The hands on his shoulders had stopped pushing.
Alex’s fingers tightened, pulling him in, and his hips came off the wall, into him.
His breath stopped. Alex was right there, and Daniel had put him there, and one more second and he’d—
He stepped back hard enough that his shoulders hit the opposite wall.
