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Jannik expects his phone to ring. What he gets wrong, is that he expects to miss it ringing. It’s on silent, vibrate turned off, but in flinging it listlessly onto the end of the bed he’s let it fall face-up. The glare of the screen illuminates the room with the delicacy of a hand grenade. He groans. Grinds his face into the pillow. Tries to ignore the guilt twisting in his stomach, knowing it’ll win out in the end. A missed call he can bluff; an unanswered one feels cruel.
He doesn’t have to look at the ID. “Hello.”
“Why not ask for a night session?”
Jannik groans again, half-deadened by the sheets he’s still trying to suffocate himself with, Carlos’ voice far too strident against the headache eating at his brain.
“Wouldn’t be fair,” he mumbles. It’s embarrassingly croaky.
“What?”
“It would have been unfair,” Jannik repeats louder, flopping his head to one side, eyes still screwed shut. Carlos scoffs down the line.
“They would allow you. You could ask for anything.”
Jannik has, is the thing. He’s got every night match he’s wanted. Every time-out for his spasming stomach, the fucking roof in Australia. Lucky, mostly. Just tennis, always, but it hasn’t stopped the podcasts, or the tweets, or the rag-paper claims of favouritism, or the names that have stuck, and stung for months. One match to look less like he’s giving inches and taking miles shouldn’t have hurt.
Lucky. He shouldn’t have played fucking Rome.
“This is the point,” he says.
Carlos huffs, and Jannik can picture him pinching the bridge of his nose. He does it when he’s trying to filter himself. He doesn’t do it very often. “It wouldn’t kill anybody else.”
Jannik laughs at that, all high and thready. “I don’t have exactly a good excuse.”
“It’s been two years, Jan. Maybe you should.”
Jannik bites down on his tongue. He didn’t know if a day match would kill him. He still doesn’t- he’s done it in lesser heat, cap pulled down, three sets or three hours and survived. It hurts like hell to soak up the sunlight; leaves him sore and shaky and weak and sick, easily burnt and sweating out toxins faster than anyone should, but he doesn’t know for sure how bad it could get. Death seems, ironically, pretty extreme.
“It wasn’t crazy hot,” he recites blankly. “I should have been able to handle it.”
There’s quiet on the other end. Jannik listens to Carlos breathe for a minute, copying the pattern, something he forgets to do far too often these days, and the unfurling of his disused lungs nearly lulls him into a welcome, syrupy sleep. Then Carlos sighs, a grim admission: “I should have been there.”
Jannik shakes his head before remembering Carlos can’t see him. “No. It’s not that.”
“Jannik-”
“It isn’t. I’m okay. I- it hasn’t been so long. It was the sun.”
“You just said that it wasn’t. In your press, you said that you woke up sick.”
“I lied. It isn’t a problem. I can last a while-”
“It’s been a while-”
“I don’t need it.” Jannik’s sitting up now, still shaking his head like they’re on video call, digging his blunt nails into the meat of his thigh.
“Maybe,” Carlos starts, “if you stopped- if you didn’t deny it, you would have strength to go five sets.”
“Vaffanculo.”
The silent response isn’t hurt. Jannik can tell, hates Carlos for it a bit, knows that he knows he’s right, and he’s giving Jannik time to relent. Petulant and exhausted, Jannik refuses to. Truth is, the hunger gnaws. It’s been building since Monte Carlo, since he last had Carlos between his jaws. It isn’t so bad when the hunger is the only thing, but it wasn’t supposed to be this hot in May, in France. He hasn’t fed enough to take it.
Soft, and too sweet, Carlos says, “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
Jannik barks out another bitter laugh, although this one is closer to a choke. “A little late for that, no?”
“You know what I mean.”
Self-pity isn’t his game, but Jannik can’t help himself from indulging. He pulls his shirt off over his head, scrunching it up into a shape he can hold, and curls around it on his side. It doesn’t smell like anyone. For the first time in days, he’s cold.
He puts the phone on speaker and lays it down by his ear, voice watery and unconvincing. “If I was starving- if I thought I was- I could have fixed it myself.”
Carlos’ conflicted contemplation is palpable. Jannik knows he doesn’t like that solution- him tearing himself open. It’s suboptimal; his own blood from his own veins, like breathing in the air from an oxygen tank after too long. Stale and recycled and not half as sustaining as the real thing. Jannik would take it over Carlos’ blood any day, if he’d let him. Anything to push back on the monstrosity of his existence just a little. A feedback loop of his own sickness, contained and non-contagious.
The only thing closer to normality is pure starvation: not drinking blood at all.
“But you didn’t.”
“I didn’t think I had to,” he whispers.
“Jannik.”
There’s a lump in his throat. He tucks his knees up closer to his chin, hugging his shirt tighter, and breathes through the growing throb.
“Two now,” he rambles. “Funny. It’s funny? Non voglio- to get it this way, but-”
“You’re tired,” Carlos says kindly. “You’re hungry.”
“Yes.”
He’s so hungry it hurts. Carlos’ voice is worsening it. Jannik can nearly taste his words, how warm and alive he is, and his stomach clenches with a sharp pain, forcing an audible whine.
“If I was there,” level, brave, “what would you do?”
Jannik presses the balled-up shirt into the hollow of his gut. He’s shaking with how empty he is. Words tumbling in a desperate slurry, punched out of him: “I would eat all of you.”
He hears the halt in Carlos’ voice. “Please.”
Jannik’s heart doesn’t beat anymore, but his noxious blood still flows. He doesn’t know why. He can feel it thrumming in his veins, where his pulse points used to be. Carlos says please again, moves fabric against fabric, or maybe against skin, breath picking up like Jannik’s would, if he was still as living as him.
“I want you to,” honey in his ears. “I want you to eat.”
Jannik rolls onto his front. He shoves the t-shirt away in favour of getting one hand in his sweats, barely grasping his half-hard cock, just a slow thrust into the heel of his palm. A secondary hunger, muted by the need in his stomach. Jannik gets his other arm up by his teeth.
“What are you doing?” Carlos purrs, and Jannik has to angle his face awkwardly to be heard around the bone of his wrist.
“Nothing,” he breathes. Spit wets his skin, mouth panting and open over his artery. “Need you.”
He’s all tangled up in himself. He’s got his sharp teeth pressed without pressing in, wrist slick with drool, waiting. To be told he can. To be told that he’s good.
“You want to eat me,” Carlos reminds him, and Jannik nods with a whimper. “Then do.”
Jannik wants to say thank you, but his mouth is already filling with blood. There’s no burn to the bite yet, only heat on his tongue that fast travels through his veins; he swallows and swallows and doesn’t spill a drop to start, keeps it all circling inside. His stiff body thaws. Every inch of his limbs turn jelly; melting into the mattress as he drinks from himself. Carlos is soothing him over the phone. Jannik can’t make out a single word. He clamps his teeth down harder, and feels flesh tear. More blood hits his throat, and he wonders why he waited so long- nothing feels this good; no slam title, no ranking, nothing he could do to make any other person proud. His skin flays, and still he digs his tongue into the wet, ragged grooves, unclenching his jaw just to move along further, lapping up blood as he grows sloppy with rapacity. His lips are tingling. Sensation he didn’t realise he’d lost returns to his fingertips, tired muscles tightening, the dry, peeling itch of a sunburn on the back of his thigh flaking away into nonexistence.
It’s a filthy kind of fill. Not like a living thing; Carlos under him writhing, crimson bleeding, bright and whole and bucking up into the bite. The jitters start whilst Jannik is still buried in himself. He can’t stop, biting down until his teeth hit bone, no fat left in the way, going even when he hears a definitive crack. He’ll heal fast enough. He’s out of the Open early, anyway.
It’s only when he registers Carlos’ voice again does Jannik realise he’s still going. Recognition alone tells him he’s got the best of it, but the effort to prise himself away is too much. His lips are slipping over the blood that’s soaking his entire forearm, savaged skin torn up beneath his molars, gnashing deeper in to chase the waning high.
The first clear word he can hear again is a softly accented, “Stop.”
Jannik nods. Shakes his head. Wipes his dripping mouth on his sheets and rasps, “Can’t. You told me-”
“I know,” Carlos says, an edge of fear in it now. “I am telling you now, stop. If you had me, you would stop.”
Jannik hacks up a sob. It’s true. He thinks it’s true. It is true. If Carlos were here, if Jannik’s flesh was his instead and he hadn’t stopped by now, there would be no recovering for either of them. He can feel veins catch like racket strings in his teeth as he laps up the wasting, ebbing flow. He’s hardly even full. Another inadequacy of drinking from himself: the blood helps, it heals the worst of the asthenia, but ultimately only ends in equilibrium. If he’s messy, like he is now, it’s a net loss.
Carlos would be dead, but Jannik could still destroy his own arm. If he doesn’t stop, it’ll be impotent for Wimbledon.
Garbled, with a spray of sluggish black from his lips onto the bed, a desperate echo of other calls, he says, “Make me.”
He’s tainting even this. These stolen moments, countries apart, Carlos always better at guiding Jannik into a daze as he’d fucked himself into countless hotel mattresses. The next time he sees him always met with a small, secret smile that would make his cheeks hot in another life. Jannik’s risen to Carlos’ level with practice, working through giggles to tell him to strip, ask him what he’s wearing, knowing half the time that Carlos is already bare and waiting for him, just playing along for the thrill. Jannik’s made him come with his voice. Sometimes that’s worth the distance.
“You have me,” Carlos says, a low balm.
“No.”
“You will. Soon, I’ll be there. Today I should have been there.”
Jannik winces at the thought. There’s still gore in his gums. “I would have- I would-”
Carlos shushes him down the line. Jannik can see him shaking his head, giving him a different smile to the one everybody else gets to see. A small curve. Quiet as Carlos can ever be. “You can control yourself. I believe you, come on, show me.”
Jannik slowly, painfully, pulls his wrist clear of his teeth. He must hiss, because Carlos tells him good, says, “Breathe,” and Jannik does even as he has to remember how.
He drags the phone closer across the bed, putting it between his mouth and his bleeding arm. If he has to bite again, it’ll be glass and metal.
“You feel better?”
It’s not a question he has the words for. He doesn’t feel like a shadow anymore. He feels, mostly, the dirty drag of a nauseating, impending crash. It’s not dissimilar to how he’d felt on the court, only this time he’s put death far out of reach. “No.”
“What do you feel?” Carlos is gentle.
It’s kind of funny, a vague gag in the sound Jannik makes. “Not good.”
Carlos laughs, too. By itself, it’s grounding. “No. Your sheets. Your hand. Tell me, really, what you feel.”
His hand fucking hurts. He doesn’t say that part out loud, realising quickly that it’s not the hand Carlos means. “Wish it was you,” he says, face still mashed into the sodden pillow, acutely aware of his second poor performance of the day, but he’s got nothing left.
There’s a warmth in Carlos’ voice. Like the easiest thing in the world, he says, “It is. You can touch, you can taste me.”
Despite the ache, Jannik pictures it. Through the blur of match replay, he can see Carlos in his lap, tanned thighs wrapped around his waist, cock rubbing up against Jannik’s tensed stomach and neck exposed in loose, open access. He grinds himself slowly against his unmauled hand. Feels himself fill his palm.
“What are you thinking about?” Carlos crackles down the phone. There’s a hitch to his breath, one that Jannik would recognise before his own name.
“Monte Carlo,” he hums. “I want- want you again like that.”
“Losing?” Carlos teases. Jannik laughs.
“All over.” Carlos’ hands in Jannik’s sweat-damp hair, racket calluses rough on his cheeks and his fingers in his open mouth. Fingering the sharp points of Jannik’s teeth. He’d told Carlos that was a dangerous play, and Carlos had said something stupid, fuck with the fox and you get the fangs, or some half-Anglicised approximation, and shut him up promptly by lifting himself, and working back down. It’s not like they mattered- the fingers in his mouth. Jannik had fed straight from the jugular by the end of the night. “You taste good- when you are losing to me.”
“I’ll lose again to you. Are you touching yourself?”
In answer, Jannik begins to properly stroke. “Yes. Fuck. Taste better when you win.”
“I’ll do that again, also,” Carlos assures. “Can drink me dry.”
Unbidden, Jannik groans. The friction of his grip, his own calluses and the steady move of his hips against the bed has him wetting the palm of his hand. Carlos says his name right up by his ear, a murmur, and Jannik goes lightheaded like there’s breath against his skin.
“Are you-” he tries to get out, more strangulation than fully formed words.
“Yeah,” Carlos exhales anyway. “Imagining you with me, here. In me. Your mouth-”
Jannik’s hips stutter. He takes his hand out of his pants, spits into it, and the ease of the following slide over his length makes his thoughts short-circuit.
“Next time, you’ll win,” Carlos’ own voice is losing composure. “And I’ll be with you. I can be your prize. Any way- God, Jannik- any way that you’re wanting me.”
Jannik wants him like this. Calling the shots, telling him what to do- turning off his fucking brain. He chokes out yes, because that’s easiest, the cord between his words and his mouth fraying and leaving a circle of clean, bloodless spit on the sheets. When they’ve done this before, Carlos has said all kinds of insane, fantastical things. Have me on the court. I’ll take you in the lockers. Give the world something to really talk about. The unarmed truths he’s spilling down the line right now are new, scraped raw and scraping Jannik raw.
“I won’t let you go hungry.”
Jannik grips the base of his cock, fucks himself down, and comes hot with a jolt and an aborted cry. Beyond the ringing in his ears, he can hear Carlos doesn’t take long to follow. The sound of him moaning- fist on skin, clearly no hotel staff to stifle his volume for- sends violent shudders through Jannik’s spent spine. He rolls his hips some more. Until there’s white noise behind his eyes, hand sticky, throat dry from gasping.
For a while after, Jannik listens to Carlos breathe. Rapid, then growing slower. Jannik mimics his coming down. There’s a hum of satisfaction, and a soft humour in the staccato before Carlos speaks.
“Don’t be letting yourself starve, as well.” It isn’t above a whisper. Too sincere. “You need it. You aren’t human.”
Jannik snorts, unmoving and increasingly heavy. “This is what they say.”
“Jannik.”
“Mhm.”
His fucked arm has begun to sting already. Proving Carlos right, seemingly never on Jannik’s side, his body has started to knit itself back together. Torn up tendons stretching back over split bones, marrow clotting, hypodermis stitching, slow as sunrise and just as excruciating. By all rights, it should need amputation. It’ll look like a dog attack for weeks to come, but it’ll heal. He tests the flex of his fingers. All he can muster is a broken little twitch.
Jannik drags his other hand out of his pants, wiping cum onto the pillow with dawning disgust, like it’s any worse than the vast expanse of thick, jet blood, splattered and sticking like an oil spill. He picks up the phone. “I have to shower.”
A pause. “Then you will sleep?”
Jannik stares at the mess. “I have to clean.” He senses the hovering concern- pitches in before Carlos can interrupt. “Then sleep. I will.”
The relieved exhale that follows tickles against his ear. “Dream of me.”
Carlos knows that Jannik doesn’t have dreams anymore. Jannik presses his tongue into the sharp of his teeth. “Ho fatto una cazzata. I should- two times, I-”
“Hey,” Carlos says. “Don’t.”
Jannik nods, eyes burning, and bites down. His blood has lost all appeal as it coats his gums, straight from the soft give of own mouth. It’ll taste like rot until Wimbledon.