“What, and waste someone else’s time too? I’m wasting enough on my own.”
I put my head in my hands, nearing the purlieu of my patience.
“God, Theo, sometimes you just—”
They round on me, eyes wet.
“What, frustrate you? Well, we have that in fucking common. Don’t you think I would fuckingloveto be different than this?”
“You don’t need to!” The words burst out like bitter olive in a press, crushed beyond the limits of my skin. “Je te jure, Theo, I have never met another person with more to offer the world andless faith in themself. You are brilliant, and magnetic, and strong, and impressive and—andvital,and I cannot keep listening to you talk about someone I love like this, so please, for God’s sake,stop.”
Theo is silent, eyes wide, lips parted in surprise. My heart fills my throat. I realize too late what I’ve done: I’ve said I love them. I go on before they realize it too.
“You have it backward,” I say. “It’s the rest that needs to be solved, not you. Will you hear me, please? You were good enough to get this far. You are good enough to fix it. You are good enough for anything you want, but you have to believe it.”
Theo doesn’t answer. In the dark room, we sit quietly on opposite ends of the bed, contending with our own hearts.
Slowly, Theo begins to unfold their body. They lie back on the bed with their face to the ceiling and extend an arm toward me, palm open. I ease myself backward, shifting my shoulders until our heads are bent toward each other. I lay my hand over theirs, and they twine our fingers together.
“I don’t know where to start,” they say.
I tell them, “Anywhere.”
We lie on our backs with our arms and legs spread as if we’re floating together on a wide sea. Theo takes slow breaths, in and out, until one comes out as a low, rueful laugh.
Gradually, we begin to shift closer. Theo’s ankle hooks over mine. My fingers slip to the tender point of their pulse. When I turn my head, I find them already bent toward me, their eyes deep with desire, with some other enormous thing that doesn’t look destructive at all. It looks like roots, like something that lives and grows.
“I want to change the rules,” Theo says.
“The rules?”
“Our rules.”
“Oh.”
“I think,” Theo says, “we should be able to use our rooms.”
I find my smile impossible to resist.
“I did say I would remind you—”
“Don’t be a shit,” Theo says with a pure affection that wraps tight around my heart. “Yes or no?”
Easy. “Yes.”
Our clothes fall to the floor as we tumble across the bed, grasping and grinding and tonguing skin. Theo pushes my shoulders into the mattress and climbs on top of me. They bite my neck, leave a mark on my shoulder, rub the whole front of their body against mine as if they can’t get close enough. I gasp and moan when they palm me through my underwear, and they bare their teeth at the sound.
“I missed you,” they say, like they said last night in Florence.
“I missed you too,” I breathe out.
They pull back to kneel between my legs.
“You know what else I missed?” they say.
They hook their hands behind my knees and shift me into a position that makes my breath hitch. It’s an old favorite: my legs spread apart, their hips between them, the soft-hard swell of flesh over their pelvic bone pressed against the cleft of my ass. Like this, it would usually go one of two ways. Sometimes, when we’d had the time and foresight to prepare, Theo would push into me with blunt, slicked silicone until the buckles of their harness met the backs of my thighs. And sometimes, they would take me into their own body, pound their hips into me at such a smooth, relentless pace that it became impossible to tell which of us was fucking the other.
But neither of those things is on the menu tonight. It doesn’t matter if I can feel how wet they are through our underwear, or that I’d happily accept whatever they chose to give. Fucking can encompass a thousand different things that aren’t fucking, and our rules permit so many of them.