While I couldn’t precisely say that IlovedShakespeare, not the way Theo did, Ihadrecited a couple of original naughty sonnets for him on our anniversary,andI’d won us first prize at the faculty’s Halloween family carnival, thanks to the way my legs filled out my hose and doublet, which was sort of close to the same thing.
More than that, though, we complemented each other. Theo’s tendency to be overly serious couldn’t withstand an impromptu Porter Sunday kitchen striptease. My bad habit of biting off more than I could chew—“Sure I can help you with your grant proposal the same week I present next year’s budget to the board while half my staff is out with flu!”—would have really gotten me into trouble if not for Theo’s organized brain breaking every task into color-coded action items. And in bed? Explosions. Fireworks. The kind of synchronicity I hadn’t known was possible.
Which meant that, all in all, there wasn’t a single thingabout my relationship with Theo Hancock that I wanted to change. Nothing about the man that I didn’t down-to-my-bones adore.
Theo’s phone buzzed. He pulled it out of his pocket, glanced at the screen, and smiled. A small, private kind of smile.
Okay, maybe therewasone thing I wouldn’t mind changing…
“Was that Remy again?” I asked, trying to sound light. “Does he have a new couplet for you to, ah… parse?”
Theo slid the phone away. “Something like that. I have to get back to him later. But first, I’m parsing my boyfriend.” He looked me over, studying me like one of the annotated texts on the shelves in his office. “Let’s work our way backward from now. You were definitely acting odd at your brother’s house earlier?—”
I snorted. “Likethatmeans anything. I’m always odd. Just ask Knox.”
“No,” Theo said with a seriousness that surprised me. “You aren’t. You’re bold, and thoughtful, and competent. You’rejoyful, and you make the people around you, including me, joyful too. But the past little while, it’s felt like somebody dimmed your sparkle. You ready to tell me about it?”
Tears, unnecessary and unwelcome, stung the backs of my eyes. When Theo looked at me like that—like he really saw me and took me seriously as a person—it was nearly impossiblenotto want to tell him about it. But the truth was not only low-key humiliating, but it might actually make Theo feel bad. So instead, I did the super-mature thing.
“No, thank you,” I said politely. Then, I bolted for the kitchen.
Theo followed me, persistent man that he was, and found me rinsing plates and putting them in the dishwasher.
“I love having Aiden here, but damn we make a mess, huh?” I commented. “Sorry I didn’t get to all this earlier.”
“Baby, since when do you apologize for making a mess in your own kitchen?”
Since never. But I couldn’t help thinking thatRemywouldn’t leave dishes in the sink overnight. Just likeRemywouldn’t have stolen his brother’s magic ceramic poultry in a fit of panic or required his boyfriend to parse him like he was written in Morse code. But that was because Remy—aka Dr. Remi-Joseph Vessy—was everything I was not.
Remy was urbane and French. He wore scarves unironically. He rolled hisr’s in a way that made the most basic things—like “ah, you are Theo’s Por-tair, non?”—sound sexy and not patronizing. He hadliteraryfreakingtattoosdown one forearm. And most annoyingly of all, he’d recently found a rare, annotated quarto ofLove’s Labour’s Lost—one of Shakespeare’s early comedies—at a small museum in Paris and had come to Vermont to ask his old pal Theo to collaborate on an academic paper about it.
Cue twice-weekly Zoom calls with Remy back in France—private ones, in Theo’s home office—and Theo spending his summer break working as hard as he did during the school year.
Cue plans to co-present the paper at some symposium this summer.
Cue my boyfriend absolutelyglowingever since.
And cue me, for the first time in my life, feeling acutely, horrifyingly, irrationally jealous… and guilty as fuck about it.
I was not an insecure person by nature. I was comfortable in my own skin, I was confident in my relationship, and I wanted Theo to have as much career success and fulfillment as it was possible for a person to have. I’d joked once, early in our relationship, that I knew Shakespeare was Theo’s first love and that if the bard ever got himself reincarnated, I’d generously grant Theo a hall pass.
But when it suddenly felt like that reincarnation had come in the form of a tight-bodied Frenchman whose smirk spokeof inside jokes from when he and Theo had been friends in grad schoolandan obvious interest in doing more than discussing rhyming couplets with my boyfriend? Well, I’d freaked out a little.
And by a little, I meant a lot.
I’d been trying for weeks to get a handle on it. I’d told myself firmly that I had no right to feel this way since I knew Theo loved me. I’d scolded myself that it was mean and unfair of me to feel this way since I knew Theo would never cheat on me physically or emotionally. I’d berated myself for being immature as fuck and not living up to my own expectations. And I could not tell Theo about any of it because that would make ithisproblem when I knew it was mine and only mine.
Like, how lowering would it be if he felt like he needed to reassure me when he hadn’t done anything to make me doubt?
“Now that I think about it,” Theo said, leaning back against the counter by the sink, still studying me, “you’ve been acting strangely for a few weeks. I offered to go seeThor: Ragnarokat the revival theater, andyousuggested we go to a student production ofMuch Ado About Nothing.Which you hate.”
“I don’t hate the whole play,” I muttered. “I just hate that Hero pays the price for Claudio’s pride and jealousy, and then she forgives him in the end, and we’re all supposed to clap.”
Theo shrugged. “Well,reason and love keep little company together,right?”
I squinted at him, trying to remember if I’d heard that quote before, then shook my head. “I don’t know that one.”
“As You Like It.” Theo’s gaze grew abstracted, and he slipped into his deep, resonant professor voice, seemingly on instinct.
