Dinner’s mostly uneaten next to us, gone cold, and I wince at it. My appetite’s shot to hell now, but… he made me dinner.
“I mean, after we finish—”
Thio hauls me to my feet. “It’ll keep.”
Chapter Fifteen
Thio’s bedroom smells so strongly of him that I’m shunted into an aphrodisiacal cloud. It buffers the sharp edges of the transition, dinner to revelation to desire.
I take a beat to note the room—gray bedding, dark gray walls, a soft light Thio dims via a switch near the door. This space would be as cold and impersonal as the rest of the apartment, if not for the plants bearding the edges of the room. That’s why it smells like him here, not the burrowing in of his cologne, but the hearty abundance of plant life, potted trees and flowers. Like his mom’s place at the care facility.
This room is more lived-in, clothes spilling across the floor, a stack of books on a dresser, the barest suggestion of the mess Thio scatters all over our lab.
He stops a few feet in front of me.
“What do you need?” he asks again, breathless, respectful.
Not this.
I cringe, and he catches it, his face pulsing in confusion before his eyes shut.
“Sebastian,” he whispers. “I’m not sure I can continue to be impersonal. That I can put the space you need with—”
“That’s not it.” I sit on his bed. “I—”
That’s a lie. Thatisit; my instinct is to throw up a boundary. Especially after something like what we just did, me being so voluntarily candid, with no flicker of deprecation.
If I make a mockery of things, if it’s light and unserious, then everything’s fine. It’s proof I’m not hurt because, look, I can joke around, see? I don’t need gentleness because only broken people need gentleness andI’m not hurting.
But this does hurt.
And when I think we’ve reached the bottom of the pain Thioand I will inspire, no, there’s more, sublevel after sublevel of vulnerability.
I’ve never gone down this deep. I won’t know my way back up.
I reach out, fingers quaking. “Thio.”
His eyes open. He takes my hand, and I pull him to stand between my spread legs. His fingers on my cheek catch tears I’d forgotten about, wipe them away with sure movements.
“Let me take care of you,” he implores. “Please.”
No, I don’t need that; no, I’m not broken; no, I’mfine.
My jaw clenches against all my self-preservation, and I nod.
He leans down, cradling my jaw in his palm, and offers me a kiss. Slow, velvet swipes of his lips, each brush reverent. It doesn’t build, doesn’t push faster, stays the same until I surrender to its constancy. That constancy becomes its own evolution; my inhales get ragged, my hands find Thio’s shoulders and grip on.
More,part of me cries out.
This,another part says.This, forever.
He peels off my sweater and motions for me to move higher up the bed. I lie back on his pillows and he grabs the hem of his shirt, whips the whole thing off one-handed.
My eyes pop. “Oh.”
“What?”
“Oh. Justoh. An unremarkable exhalation of sound. Oh, it’s Friday. Oh, it rained a few days ago. Oh, a hot guy did the one-handed cross-body shirt-stripping move. No biggie.”
