“Do you . . .” My hand slides down his abs, meets the waistband of his jeans, and it’s finally there, a hint of that hesitation, that wobbliness I expected from him. “No?” I ask.
His throat bobs as he swallows. His full lips tremble for the barest second. “Are you real?” The air between us swells, overflows. “Sometimes I’m scared that I imagined you. Sometimes I think you’re only in my head.”
“I’m here,” I breathe out. I’m a pool of liquid heat.
“I have no idea what I’m doing,” he says, biting softly the hollow under my ear.
I shiver. “I can help,” I tell him, even if my neurons are boiling to mush.
“Yeah?”
“It’s kind of like chess. I do one thing . . .” I undo the first button of his jeans, slowly. Feel, more than hear, the hitch of his breath. “And you do another.”
He holds himself up on his arms and looks down at me, like he’s inventorying, deciding where to start. His index finger hooks on the hem of my shirt and drags it upward, stopping right below my bra. He stares at my navel for what feels like minutes, then says, “I want odds. Since it’s my first time.”
“You want a handicap?”
“I want two moves.”
I laugh. And then sober when he pins my hands above my head, in a way that suggests that he might not know what he’s doing but he has plans, fantasies, strategies, a rich interior world that will be put to use, and . . .
“I hope,” I say, serious, “that you’re going to like this as much as chess.”
“I think,” he tells me with a small smile, “that I already do.”
We wake up early in the morning. Do a bunch of slow, sleepy stuff with our hands that feels really good and also happens not to require a condom. I had only one, left in my backpack from who knows when; Nolan had none. Apparently we really had fooled ourselves into thinking that this wouldn’t happen. I fall asleep on his chest, his arms looped around me, feeling his rapid breathing slow down to something calmer, then slide into sleep and pull me under.
The buzz of Nolan’s phone on the nightstand wakes us up once the sun is high. He answers with a huge yawn. “Yeah?” His voice is too loud. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s the way we’re pretzeled together skin to skin, legs coiled, his free hand tangled in my hair and holding me into the curve of his shoulder. “That’s because I was sleeping. Yup. Yeah. Sure.” He sounds unimpressed. He sounds like the delicious, warm version of Nolan that kept ordering me to stop fidgeting at 3:00 a.m. This is not real life. “Uh-uh.” I pull back to watch his slitted, tired eyes and his swollen lips. He smells fantastic. I want to sink under his skin. I want to move between his legs and dwell on the expanse of his chest. I— “Sure. She’s here. Let me ask her.”
Nolan presses his phone against his shoulders. My eyes widen. “What?” I whisper. “Don’t tell them I’m here! They’ll think that I . . .”
He gives me a confused look. “That you’re here?”
I groan and hide back in his neck.
“There is a charity event. Someone wants us to play together, against . . .” He picks up his phone again. “Who would we be playing against?” I hear a brisk female voice on the other side. “Some tech industry person,” he tells me, and then into the speaker again, “Is it Bill Gates again? Elle, he’s bad at chess. I can’t make the game last longer than one minute against . . . Yeah. I’ll call you back.” He tosses the phone to the side and pulls me closer, covering our heads with the blankets.
The outside world disappears.
“Who’s Elle?” I ask.
“My manager.” He pushes my hair behind my ear. “What should I tell her?”
“When is this happening?”
“Not until the spring.”
“Why the tech industry?”
“It’s full of people who have a hard-on for chess, apparently.”
It makes a surprising amount of sense. “Why do you have a manager?”
“All pro players do. You’ll need one, too.”
I won’t be a pro, Nolan. You know it. “Would you recommend Elle?”
“Hell no. Save yourself.”
I laugh. “Can I . . . think about it? The charity thing.”
“Sure.”
We fall quiet, cocooned by the soft cotton of sheets, impossibly close. Did last night really happen? I wonder, feeling stuck in a dream. Did it happen to you like it happened to me?
Then he murmurs, “Good morning,” while pressing a kiss on my forehead, and it all starts to seem warm, and precariously good, and true.
NOLAN HAS NO POKER FACE. NO ABILITY TO LIE, OR TRICK, OR hide. No intention to, either.
He tracks my movements with a small smile whenever I step away from the chessboard to grab a glass of water. He kisses me against the fridge while the three GMs are talking about the French Defense five feet from us. He takes my hand and pulls me out for a walk in the snow as the sun is about to set, like healthy habits are something he suddenly cares about.
I wish I could say I minded, but I love every second of it.
There’s a curious, painfully honest confidence about him. Last night was good, really good, but it was also his first time, our first time: messy and imperfect, full of hushed questions and trials and errors. His hands on me were bold, but inexperienced and tentative. Other guys would be drowning in their fragile masculinity today, but Nolan just seems deeply, genuinely happy.
Then again, remembering the sounds I made, the gasps . . . I guess he got glowing feedback.
“Can’t believe he used an Evans Gambit three years ago,” he says about the Koch game we just analyzed. His footprints in the snow are almost twice as large as mine.
“Yeah, well. It was a bad choice, since Thagard-Vork destroyed him.”
“Still. I haven’t seen the Evans since the week I learned how to play.”
I smile. “When was that, by the way?”
“What?” He gives me a curious look.
“When did you learn to play chess?”
“I don’t remember. Pretty sure it’s on Wikipedia.”
“Yeah. But unlike my sister, I refuse to read it. Boundaries and stuff.” I stop him with a tug on his coat. I’m wearing his gloves, because it’s freezing and I forgot to bring mine. They dwarf my hands, and Nolan smiles at the sight. “But I still want to know.”
“I was . . . five? But I didn’t really understand. Not until I was well over six.”
“Your grandfather taught you?”
“Kind of. He was training a lot of people at the time, and I just . . . I wanted to be in the midst of things. He was the coolest person I knew, and I wanted him to pay attention to me.”
“And your parents didn’t want you to?”
He shrugs. “My dad’s an asshole. And even if he weren’t, he just doesn’t have the chess bone. When I was little, I would spend hours thinking about puzzles or Legos or toys, reasoning over them, analyzing, and he couldn’t understand why. He thought there was something wrong with me. Put me in all sorts of sports. And I was good enough at them, because I was tall and quick, but they were never . . .”