His smile is luminous. “Slow your roll.”
“You catch me when I fall down hills, and you only yell about it a little bit. You have really terrible taste in music.” I hold up my hand as he starts to protest. “That’s not a plus, but it’s worth mentioning. I want the bad parts with the good.”
Theo laughs, but his eyes are suspiciously glassy.
“And last but not least, you held me up when I was at my lowest until I could climb out myself.” I swallow reflexively a few times while Theo gazes at me with the smallest, most beautiful smile. I’m glad no one’s here to take our picture; we must look ridiculous, so in love. It’s the best moment of my life. “You didn’t try to fix me. You just supported me until I believed it. I want to be that for you, Theo. Not because it’s a tit for tat thing or because I need your secrets to feel like we’re even, but because your happiness is important to me, no matter what it looks like.”
“I want that, too,” he says hoarsely. “You have no idea how much.”
“I do. It’s how much I want it.”
With a relieved exhale, he pulls me onto his lap and tangles his fingers in my hair, bringing my mouth to his. We’ve given each other so many words that now there’s nothing left to do but this. The pressure of his kiss is immediately intense, and I sag into him, wrapping my arms around his neck, feeling his heart beat hard against my chest. One of his hands moves down my back, and he cinches my hips tight against his until I can feel all of his need.
“I love you.” He groans while he says it, tightens a fist in my hair to keep me exactly where he wants me—right here with him.
I laugh against his mouth. “Yeah, you do.”
He grins, pulling back. He’s close enough that I could count each of his eyelashes individually if I wanted to spend my time doing anything but getting naked.
He gives me his stern eyebrows, but now I know all of his softness. They’re as effective as ever, but in a different way. “Your speech was better than mine, Shepard.”
I arch an eyebrow back. “It’s not a contest, Spencer.”
Our grins are mirrors of each other—euphoric love with a pinch of competition. That’s just who we are.
But shockingly, Theo concedes. “Okay, fine. This time we both win.”
He’s right. We both do, for the rest of the night and long after that.
Thirty-Three
A Year and a Half Later
I can’t wait to fall facedown on the bed and sleep for forty-eight hours straight,” I groan as I lug my suitcase up the stairs, my arms and legs screaming against the weight of three weeks’ worth of clothes, toiletries, and gifts packed to the brim.
“That sounds less fun than other things you could be doing facedown on the bed,” Theo says from behind me.
I give him a look over my shoulder, but he’s too busy staring at my ass. When I don’t respond, those deep blue eyes make their way to my face. He grins unabashedly at being caught.
“We’ve been traveling for nineteen hours, Spencer. If you’re planning to do anything other than sleep, I invite you to start talking sexy to your hand now.”
After flying in from Milan with a stopover at JFK, carrying all of our stuff upstairs is the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest. I heft my bag onto the landing with an exhausted huff.
Theo drops his suitcase next to mine and immediately pulls me into his arms for a lingering kiss.
“Nooo. I smell like airplane and airport and staleness.” Despite my protest, I melt against him, looping my arms loosely around his waist. He steps in closer, deepening our connection.
He lets his hands roam, stroking absently over the curve of my lower back, his fingers splaying wide, up along the valley of my waist until he finally reaches up to cradle my cheeks. I’m surprised at the intensity of his touch. We’ve been stuffed on an airplane together for nearly a day, and traveled all over Italy for three weeks before that. But he’s kissing me like he’s either memorizing me or this moment.
I’ve had a lot of time over the past year and a half to catalog his moods. I watched the melancholy he had to shake off with the change of his job status and the distance it brought to his friendship with Anton and, to a lesser extent, Matias. I intimately know the spark that returned when he decided to try again nine months ago, and now I regularly see it when he’s on a call with the travel nonprofit focused on local community impact he’s been working with. I recognize the calm affection he reserves for Paul when they’re bantering, the disgruntlement I have to distract him from after a phone call with his dad, and the warm amusement he shows my family.
Sometimes it’s frustration when I push him too hard to share before he’s ready, and I have to give him space. I love the quiet pride in his eyes when I come home from a job. My TikTok engagement grew exponentially after our trip, and it’s afforded me opportunities I’ve only dreamed about.
But this mood of Theo’s is my favorite: when we’re in the middle of a moment he clearly wants to remember. He’ll pull me into his arms just like this, kiss me for a minute or two or five. He makes sure I’m breathless before he pulls back. Sometimes he’ll tell me how happy he is; other times he’ll simply press a kiss to my forehead.
He does that now, then sweeps his thumbs over my cheeks and says, “Welcome home.”
The first time he said that to me when I moved into his place a year ago, he got the goofiest smile on his face. It’s become his thing—every time I walk in the door, he’ll call it out to me, even if I just walked down to the corner store. And when I get up the stairs, he’s wearing that same smile, dimple shamelessly on display.
I never get tired of hearing or seeing that, and after three weeks away from home and all the people we love, it feels like a moment I want to memorize, too.
“I love you,” I say. My life with Theo is like finally slipping into a space that’s shaped just for me. My path to get here was long, and often disorienting as hell, but the payoff was worth it.
I wish Gram were here to see. But somehow, I think she knows.
“I love you, Shepard,” Theo murmurs against my lips.
I check my watch over his shoulder—it’s after nine, but I’m starving. “Did you say Thomas and Sadie dropped off groceries earlier or did I dream that?”
“They were here,” he says cryptically, his mouth curling up as his gaze moves beyond me. I start to turn, expecting to see them standing behind us with confetti poppers, but Theo palms my cheek and brings my attention back to him.
I lean back, still in the circle of his arms. Underneath his sun-bronzed skin, his cheeks are flushed. His eyes are bright, a little wild, which I assumed was from overtiredness. He barely slept the entire ride home. In fact, he kept me up with a nearly constant bouncing knee that I threatened to put out of commission permanently.
“Are they . . . still here?” I venture.
He laughs. “No.”
“Are you worried they went through our stuff or something? Mas is nosy as hell, but Sadie knows to keep him away from bedrooms and vibrator stashes.”
“No,” he repeats. “I just don’t want you to look behind you until I tell you that I did something while we were gone. Or I had Granddad and your family do something while we were gone, with my direction.”