“You ever been with a guy?” Teo asked, and he was moving around in the bed, stretching his arms up behind his head. I could see his biceps in the moonlight, the faint black marks of some of his tattoos.
“What do you mean?” My heart was thudding so loudly in my throat I thought he must be able to hear it.
“I mean, you ever had sex?”
“N-no.” I wanted to ask him not to repeat that,neverto tell Finch, for example, but I didn’t want to sound like I was accusing him of having a loose tongue. Anyway, I assumed this sort of conversation would be covered by bodyguard-client confidentiality. Right?
“Then if you don’t know what you’re missing,” Teo went on, “maybe you should leave it that way. You know? Like with dogs. Better to cut their balls off before they really know what they’re for.”
“Uh,I’mnot having my balls cut off,” I snorted, and we both laughed.
“You know what I mean, though, right?” Teo persisted. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just…not know what you’re missing?”
“Iknowwhat an orgasm feels like,” I said.
Teo gave a little huff of laughter. “Uh-huh. Well, let me tell you, they feel a lot different with someone else. Like kissing the mirror versus kissing a real other person.”
“I’ve never even kissed anyone,” I said quietly, and Teo went very still in the bed. “That’s one thing I…Iwouldhave liked to experience, before I took my vows. Sometimes I look at Finch and Luca when they kiss and…” What had come over me, I wondered? I would never in a million years have said any of this in the middle of the day, sitting opposite Teo. But here in the dark, in the same bed, even if we weren’t touching—I felt much freer. As though I were kneeling in the confessional, where every impure thought and deed could be understood, dealt with. “…and I wonder what it feels like,” I admitted. “Sometimes Finch looks half-drunk after Luca kisses him.Reallykisses him, I mean. Maybe I’m just envious of what they have.”
“They sure do love each other,” Teo agreed. We were silent for a few minutes, and I could hear his quiet breathing, in and out. Then he asked, “You really never kissed anyone?”
“I mean. When I was eleven, this girl dared me to come behind the church and kiss her after Mass.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah. That’s when I realized I wasn’t, you know. Into girls so much.”
“Mm. Hell of a way to find out.”
I was remembering that kiss. The pasty slug of tongue invading my mouth. It wasn’t actually that I’d realized I didn’t like girls; I didn’t know then that boys could be anoption. I’d wondered if there was something wrong withme, if maybe I was meant for God instead of girls.
It was only later, when I’d had a hard time keeping my accidental boners hidden in the locker room, that I started to think maybe I wasn’t quite as non-sexual as I’d thought.
It had been a difficult time for me, the school years.
“If you want,” Teo began, and then cut himself off with a snort. “Fuck, no. Forget it.”
“What?” I swallowed, wondering if he was thinking what I, now, was thinking. Hoping.
“It’s nothing.”
“Tell me. Please?”
He sighed. “It’s dumb, but…I was gonna say, if you wanted to try kissing someone—just to see what it was like—I could, you know. Kiss you.”
I swallowed again. My mouth had turned into the Hoover Dam, swimming in spit. I was about to be ordained, I reminded myself. And it was dark and I was scared for my life and there were a million reasons why this was, as Teo said, a dumb idea.
“You’d kiss me?” I croaked.
He cleared his throat. “Well, yeah. If you wanted. Just to try it.”
“Just to try it?”
“And then, you know. At least you’d know youdidtry it. Before you took your vows’n…all that.”
It was a bad idea. It was aterribleidea.
“I’d like that,” I said.
