“Like this?” he asked, then let out a faint gag as he attempted to take all of Elio’s length.
That was it. “Ja! Fuck, Milo!Yes!” Elio held onto Milo’s head as he rose on his toes, grunting as the hot pleasure in his core burst and cum rushed from his cock.
“Mmm!” Milo tried to swallow it all but laughed and caught it as it spilled down his chin.
Elio withdrew and stumbled, catching the back of the armchair before he fell into the fireplace. “Mein Gott!” He shuddered as his nerves flickered and glowed and Elio’s inner monologue alternated between English and German. “Pick an operating system!” he ordered his brain and gave his forehead a hard smack. He generally thought and spoke in English unless he was talking to his brothers but German terms of endearment swirled in Elio’s brain, tangling his tongue.
“Is that what’s supposed to happen?” Milo fell back, his limbs limp and his glasses askew.
“Uh…” Elio winced down at his cock as it softened. “More or less. Maybe not so quickly,” he murmured but Milo made a drowsy, dreamy sound as he yawned.
“I think I’d like unlimited head.”
Elio drew back and cast a wary look at the sofa. “That might kill me,” he said, making Milo giggle. “And we’d never get any work done,” he added under his breath and paused, concerned that they had created a new complication and possibly put their fledgling partnership at risk. “There’s something I have to work on but you should rest,” he said before making his escape.
He could only go as far as his bedroom, unfortunately, and Elio realized he might have miscalculated by moving into the same building as the Ashbys.
Twelve
Thatwas why sex was such a big deal.
It had mystified Milo, why people ruined their careers and personal lives for a basic, biological imperative that wasn’t physically necessary to their survival. Even the simplest organisms accomplished sex and reproduction. Nothing about procreation was unique to humans but they often behaved like animals and lost their senses over it.
Now, Milo understood and understood thathehad changed.
He had heard that losing one’s virginity was a right of passage and that by modern, misogynistic standards, the longera manremained a virgin, the less he was respected. For women, it was often seen as nobler to remain untouched until she was “too old” and then she was labeled as undesirable and possibly a “cat lady.”
None of that mattered to Milo and he didn’t feel more like “a man” because he’d crossed the invisible intimacy threshold.
He felt like a star that had pulled in too much matter and exploded into a supernova. There had been a core collapse,resulting in a dense object on the sofa. Milo could feel the neutrons in his body rearranging as the sitting room began to take shape around him. He recognized the handwriting on the dry erase board and knew it almost as well as his own now, but Elio was missing.
Milo pulled on his pajama pants and followed the sound of a bouncing tennis ball to one of the bedrooms. The one Elio had been occupying, judging from all the rumpled clothes and tennis balls on the floor and the bed. But the bed and his ill-treated wardrobe were merely afterthoughts, the dry erase board in front of the window commanded all of Elio’s attention as Milo tiptoed into the room. Elio was naked and chewing on the end of a red marker as he bounced a ball, fixated on the equation in front of him.
The string of numbers and symbols at the top of the board echoed the tattoo that had captivated Milo just an hour earlier, but he became spellbound as he followed the rest of Elio’s work. What had seemed like a wildly beautiful tattoo, yet an impossible paradox—time splitting around a particle interfering with itself—began to resolve into a functioning theory.
“Eli! What are you doing?” Milo stepped over a boot and a tennis ball, pointing at the board. “This istime! You’re taking apart quantum entanglement…and trying to prove the possibility of parallel dimensions?” He turned back to Elio, stunned and slightly alarmed.
Elio was watching Milo. Closely. “You see it, don’t you?” he asked, his voice low and hoarse.
“I’m beginning to…” Milo turned back to the board and his head tilted as he followed Elio’s calculations, then pointed when he spotted a possible complication. “What about Lloyd’s theory? This part might work if you apply closed timeline curves here,” he said as he wiped away a section with the pad of his finger, making Elio gasp and laugh.
“Lloyd’s theory! That’s—!” Elio snatched a sock off the floor and erased the whole corner of the board before turning and grabbing Milo’s face. “Thisis why I needed you, Milo!” he pressed a loud kiss to Milo’s lips, then released him and went back to the board.
Milo touched his lips, momentarily stunned by the kiss—his first. “But I…” He squeezed his eyes shut and blinked rapidly as he refocused. “I just disproved part of your theory. That had to be…months of work,” he guessed but Elio looked thrilled when he glanced over his shoulder at Milo.
“I had boxed myself into a corner!” he said and laughed ecstatically. “You found a way out in just a few minutes. You’re remarkable, Milo!”
“Well…” Milo waved it off, then paused when he realized the possible consequences of what Elio was doing. “Wait. What about the temporal paradox—the grandfather paradox? If you alter time, you alter the present.”
Elio sneered, shaking his head. “You’re talking about ethics. I don’t give a damn about that.”
“No, you probably don’t,” Milo agreed and winced. “But I do. Besides, the Novikov self-consistency principle suggests?—”
“I don’t care!” Elio shouted, his laughter getting louder and more unhinged as he wrote faster. “If I can figure out how to reverse time, I can figure out how to resolve the temporal paradox.”
“We hope,” Milo added carefully. “Eli, this isincrediblebut it’s madness. Even if you could figure out how, you wouldn’t want to. No one would back this.”
“It’snotmadness!” Elio spun around and grabbed Milo’s shoulders. ”Give me a chance to explain. See the rest of my work and you’ll agree!” Elio insisted, his tone becoming desperate. “I wasn’t ready to show you, we needed more time to trust each other, but I know that I can do this with your help.”
