The Pairing(92)

After, Theo and I finally make it to our rooms. For our two nights in Rome, we’re booked into an old apartment building turned hotel, our rooms at the top of five flights of marble stairs so steep we take the last one gasping on hands and knees. On a dusty, open-air landing lit by string lights, Theo unlocks their door and finds our bags dumped inside.

I reach for mine, but they take my key and say, “You should stay.”

In Theo’s room, we take turns rinsing dried sweat off with cold showers. Even then, it’s too hot to consider clothing, and since yesterday at the villa—God, how can that be only yesterday?—there’s no reason for modesty. We leave our damp towels in the bathroom and lie naked on our backs atop the duvet, careful not to share body heat by touching. Our heads soak wet halos into the pillowcases.

I’m not looking at Theo with any real intent. But there is the plain, extraordinary fact of their body beside me: the taper of their forearms from elbow to wrist, the ridges of their shins and the sturdy knot of bone at their ankles, the gingersnap hair that dusts each leg and thickens between them. Their chest is almost as smooth as mine when they lie like this, subtle swells a shade pinker at each peak. It’s not only the beauty of their body but the casual presence of it, the way I’m allowed to lie beside it in a quiet room, that gets to me.

“Kit,” Theo says.

“Theo,” I say.

“You’re hard.”

I close my eyes. “I know.”

Theo spreads their feet apart, indenting the bedspread in two soft points under their heels. One of their hands—those strong, lovely hands—skims down their stomach and between their legs. They lift it to the lamplight and show me the wetness glistening on their fingertips.

It’s an admission and a question. I answer both by reaching down and pushing into my own palm.

And so we lie there on a bed in Rome, twelve hours after settling our scores, touching ourselves together.

There was one other time like this, when we were nineteen and high and eaten up with longing. A late night in my room, an endless conversation that had drifted to the people we were fucking instead of each other. For years we pretended not to remember lying beneath the same blanket with our hands under our own waistbands, the rustle of cotton and whisper of skin, but I couldn’t forget how it felt to learn the sound of Theo getting off.

It can’t be possible for our history to repeat so exactly, for us to be lying here loving each other and not saying it again, but I wonder. I watch Theo’s hand move, and I groan at my own touch, and I wonder.

“Kit,” Theo says, and for one thick moment I think they’re actually sighing my name in pleasure, until they repeat, “Kit.”

“Yeah?”

“I wanna change the rules again.”

“Yeah,” I say readily, “yeah, okay.”

“No kissing, no penetration,” they say, “but anything else goes.”

My hand stills.

“Anything?”

“Anything.”

“Are you sure?”

They lean in and drag their mouth across the corner of mine. It’s not a kiss, but it’s enough like one to make me shiver.

“Please,” Theo says. I’ve never said no to anything Theo asks for nicely.

In the space of a second, I jackknife off the mattress and twist around, using the momentum to flip Theo on their back and pin myself between their thighs. Theo lets out a scream that’s mostly a laugh, legs already lifting.

“Fuck, could you always do that?”

I shift forward, bracing my shoulders under the firm curve of their ass.

“I have some new techniques.”

Theo grins luxuriantly. “My little pastry school valedictorian.”

“Yours,” I echo, heart aching.

I put my mouth to them until they’re gasping, until their hips buck off the bed, until their hands are buried in my hair, gripping and tugging and crushing my face into them so hard my vision blacks out blissfully at the edges.

They finish loud, and as soon as they’ve caught their breath, they wrench me up by the root of my hair and throw me backward, crowding me until I’m sitting with my back to the headboard. Lube appears from somewhere—the nightstand, maybe, I don’t honestly care—and they’re pumping it into their open palm, and then—and then— Theo wraps their hand around me.

The texture of their hand is different than I remember—more calloused, more scarred—but the shape of it, the pressure of each finger and the cant of their wrist, the way their palm accommodates me, it’s all so devastatingly familiar I almost come at the first touch. Tears instantly prick at the corners of my eyes, and I can’t find it in myself to be ashamed. Through the blur, I see Theo’s face, their fierce determination as they spread lube over me with one hand and on the insides of their thighs with the other.

Then they’re climbing over me and aligning their hips above mine, and for one delirious second I think they’re going to abandon the rules and fuck me the old-fashioned way, and I’m more than ready to let them.

Instead, they twist their body to the side and sink down onto my lap. They close their strong legs around me, trapping my full length between their thighs, slick on slick, soft encompassing hard.

A stream of swears slips from my mouth so fast, even I don’t know what language I’m speaking. Tongues, maybe. Ancient Latin. I’m so completely, suddenly surrounded that I can barely think, barely control the way my hands grasp Theo to keep them where they are, seated sideways with their shoulder to my chest and their thighs clenched tight. They shift their hips in a demonstrative tease, and I swear again as I understand what they’re offering.