The pairing, p.28
The Pairing, page 28
“Is this too much mist?” Theo asks. “I feel like I’m at a Rainforest Cafe.”
“No, it’s nice,” I say, watching a drop of water roll down the side of their neck. “Like being a cucumber in a grocery store.”
I drink a limoncello spritz, Theo has a glass of chilled Orvieto, and we split a pizza. When we’re done, we walk uphill to the Trevi Fountain, which is absolutely awash with tourists dripping gelato and sharing crispy fried supplì stuffed with cheese and tomato. We find a spot near the fountain’s edge and sit together.
“And there waits our lover, Sexy Neptune,” I say, admiring the fountain. “He always comes back to us.”
“I think that might be less about us and more about him being a popular subject for fountain sculptures.”
“No, we have a thing going on.”
“Hmm. Hold on.” Theo studies the fountain more closely. “I know this place. It’s in the seminal rom-com—”
“Roman Holiday,” I say at the same time Theo finishes, “The Lizzie McGuire Movie,” and we laugh.
I look at them, freckles out, hair whipped wild by the helmet and frizzed from mist, beside me in Rome after all. My charioteer. They made their own life, and it brought them here, and I’m lucky enough to see it.
I think of Faustina in the Forum, Theo on the plane. I want to do better this time. I want to know what they want. And whatever they want, I want to give it to them.
So, this time, I ask.
“Theo,” I say. “What do you want?”
It’s an open question. It can mean whatever they want it to mean.
They consider their answer for a long time, watching water crash into the bowl of the fountain.
“I’m working on it,” they say. “Ask me again tomorrow.”
* * *
That night, we have dinner at the kind of family-owned side-street osteria a person would only find if they knew where to look. It’s nothing special to see—flat and brown among all the ivy-draped alleys and heroic statues—but it feels special. The walls are covered in a riot of black-and-white portraits of great-grandparents, hand-painted pizza posters, grainy shots of sauce-smeared grandchildren, and signed headshots of Italian singers. Red-and-white-checked vinyl tablecloths drape each table, and mismatched plates overflow with pasta in a dozen shapes and colors.
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.
“You like that?” Theo says, staring into my face, seeing God knows what there.
“Love it,” I breathe out. Love you.
They brace their hands on the bed behind them to lift a fraction of their weight off my lap, giving me room to move.
“Show me how much.”
Everything—the room, the heat, the day, the ache in my heart—everything falls away when I push up into the slicked clinch of their thighs.
In the absence of thought, my body supplies, glissando. A half-remembered term from classical compositions. The smooth, continuous slide from one pitch to another, low to high, down and then up. An evocation of magic or emotion or grace, written into odes to the sea in summer. That is what’s happening between our bodies.
It’s so good I can’t imagine ever needing more, until Theo shifts and I feel a new, wet heat against me, the familiar shape of their sex still messy from my mouth. They snap their hips, finding the friction they need, dangerously close to letting me slip inside. As they finish again, their gaze lands on my face like a comfort, like a command, and I’m done. I’m beyond recovery.
I’m so ruined that I don’t realize until later, in a half-awake moment in the middle of the night, that we nearly broke the only two rules we have left.
* * *
The next morning, Theo’s head is on my pillow and three new texts from Maxine are on my phone.
saw guillaume looking despondent at the cafe this morning. i think he misses you. at least parts of you.
And, you owe me updates on the theo situation. what happened after monaco?? if you’ve gotten your heart broken again i’ll kill all three of us.
And, dinner on monday night?
I switch off my alarm before it wakes up Theo and reread Maxine’s texts while I brush my teeth, puzzling out which Monday she could mean. Then I realize: She’s talking about next Monday. As in, less than seven days away. As in, the tour is almost over.
For two and a half weeks, I’ve lived in this bubble outside of reality, where I spend every day eating and drinking and touching and looking at art, dazed from too many languages and not enough sleep. Where Theo is beside me, and we’re friends again, and we share a pillow and wake up with the taste of each other on our tongues. I almost forgot that my life in Paris has been going on without me, and now it’s so close that dinner with Maxine at our usual bistro is something I could be doing in a matter of days.
I spit and rinse, but the fizz of slight panic stays in my mouth. I count the time left. One more day and night in Rome, Naples tomorrow, and then the two-day finish in Palermo. Four days and four nights until I fly home to France, and Theo gets on a plane to California. There’s nothing to stop them from blocking my number again if they want to. I feel certain that won’t happen, not after all this … but what if it does?
Where have I been hoping this would lead in the end?
From the bed comes the rustle of sheets and a low, stretching grumble.
“Kit?” says Theo’s voice, hoarse with sleep. “You here?”
“In the bathroom.”
Another grumble and the creak of bedsprings, and Theo is shuffling into the tiny bathroom, pulling a T-shirt on backward. Their hair is wild, their eyes half closed, a streak of dried drool on their chin. I don’t know how I could survive losing them again.
“Thought you left like yesterday.”
“At the villa? Did it bother you that I got up early?”
They nod, fumbling for their toiletry kit. I place their hand on the zipper before they knock their deodorant into the sink.
“Wanted to wake up together,” Theo says, which strikes me momentarily speechless. They rest their forehead against my shoulder, letting me prop up their weight.
I try to tell my heart to settle, that they’re being tender because they’re half asleep, but it clenches anyway.
Our packs are against the wall by the bed, mine repacked and zipped up neatly, Theo’s tipped over and spilling half-folded clothes onto the carpet. I huff a laugh and begin arranging Theo’s shirts into a more orderly pile, when my hand brushes something solid inside a ball of socks.
Part of a label pokes out, one I’d recognize anywhere. The little bottle of whiskey I gave Theo for our first anniversary, distilled the year we met. The one we were supposed to drink at the end of our tour four years ago.
They kept it. I thought they would have drunk it by now, or thrown it away, but all this time, they kept it. And when they were choosing which things to fit into their pack, they made room. They made the choice to bring it here, not even knowing they would see me.
“Where are we going this morning again?” Theo asks from the bathroom.
I cover the socks back up and move away from Theo’s bag before they poke their head into the room.
My voice is admirably normal when I answer, “Galleria Borghese.”
An hour and a half later, Orla drops us off at the Spanish Steps. Fabrizio takes us up into the huge green sprawl of the Villa Borghese Gardens, once a vineyard until Cardinal Scipione Borghese turned it into his personal party destination in the 1600s, as is an evil gay cardinal’s right. His collection of art—some obtained by abusing the pope’s funds, others by abusing the pope’s influence—still fills the villa at the center of the gardens. Now, it’s a public museum.
Fabrizio walks us through an introductory tour of the most famous pieces, then lets us explore on our own. When I ask Theo where to start, they say, “Show me your favorite Bernini.” So I lead them to Apollo and Daphne, and when I ask what they want to see next, they tell me to go on without them.
It’s easy to imagine this place as Rome’s hottest destination for fruity seventeenth-century art parties. Inside, it is the highest of high camp, from the trompe-l’œil fresco covering the ceiling of the salon to the thousands of gilded flourishes in the Room of Emperors.
I open my sketchbook and scavenge for details to bring home: the silly little face of the unicorn in the arms of Raphael’s Young Woman, the eyes of the bejeweled woman in Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, the affectionate strokes Caravaggio used for the face of his lover Mario as the Boy with a Basket of Fruit. But every time I pass the room with Apollo and Daphne, Theo remains, fixed to the same spot.
I drift to the entrance hall, to the glossy marble sculpture of a topless woman reclining in a bed of flowing linens, apple in hand. I remember studying this one. Venus Victrix, the scandalous likeness of Pauline Bonaparte sculpted when her brother Napoleon married her off to a Borghese. She’s an interesting woman—one of the great luminaries of being slutty and French, and for that I admire her—but I’m still thinking of Theo. Of last night.
In my head, I retrace our steps since we first touched in Cinque Terre. The edge in Theo’s voice in Pisa when they agreed to keep hooking up, like they were throwing themself off some perilous ledge. The unknown emotion they fought in the grotto in Florence and their grip on my hair in the alley. The morning after in Chianti, that brash, invulnerable grin and their naked body in daylight, how they tried to protect themself with sex and jokes and then collapsed into me when they couldn’t anymore. The way they pulled me into their room and their bed last night. The bottle in their bag.
The truth is, I haven’t wanted to seriously consider what it all could mean. I’ve been so willing to believe that Theo would never want me back, because as long as I have nothing to hope for, I have nothing to lose. They can’t leave me again if I don’t expect them to stay.
But I’m beginning to think it could be possible. That there’s a chance Theo could still love me.
Theo might love me. Theo might love me.
The tour is almost over, and if there’s a chance Theo feels like I do, I can’t let them go home not knowing.
If Theo loves me, then—then that’s it for me. I want it all. I want to be with them for the rest of our lives, whatever that looks like, however they ask. I’d get it right this time, plan it out so they don’t have to give anything up to fit our lives together. I’ll never ask them to follow me anywhere again. I don’t expect them to leave California, and I definitely wouldn’t expect them to move to Paris. How could I, after everything? When it hasn’t even made me happy?
When it—
I stare at Pauline and repeat the thought, testing its weight.
It hasn’t made me happy.
I wish I could ask Pauline’s opinion. Does Paris make me happy? Did coming to Rome make her happy?
Of course it didn’t. She was happy in France, rouging her nipples and making love to men who weren’t her well-bred husbands, getting caught with her skirts up behind screens. She posed nude for this, the statue commissioned to announce her as a wife to Roman society, simply for the delicious thrill, and her husband hid it away in a crate in the attic.
I don’t think my life in Paris took my wonder from me, but I do sometimes feel like it’s stored in a crate in the attic. I could take it down. I could ship it somewhere else—somewhere Theo would like to be. They could help me pry off the lid. They’re so much better with tools.
Tonight, I tell myself, taking a deep breath. Tonight, after dinner, I’ll take Theo out for a drink, and I’ll tell them how I feel. I’ll ask them if they feel the same. And if they do, I’ll tell them I’ll go wherever they want.
* * *
“Theo,” I say, “I have a very important question for you.”
It’s night, and we’re in Trastevere with our bellies full of pasta, at a tiny café table in a pocket-sized alley, perusing the wine list under a curtain of ivy. Mostly, Theo’s perusing the wine list, and I’m reading the names of unfamiliar Italian appellations out loud just to hear Theo correct my pronunciation.
Theo lifts their stare from the menu, brows frozen in a studious furrow.
“Okay.”
“If you were a wine grape,” I say, “which grape would you be?”
