Theo took his time.
It was agonizing.
“I didn’t really know what I was going to do in college. My mom wanted me to be a lawyer, like her and my uncle and my grandfather, but I have no interest in that bullshit. Never have. I’m too much like my dad. I loved art too much, loved working with my hands too much. Itried law for a year after undergrad, but it wasn’t for me. I was miserable, so I left and went for my MFA instead.” He flashed her another roguish grin, the twin of the one his father wore in the photo upstairs, though this time, it was paired with a bitter huff. “Turns out I’m the black sheep of the family—I think my dad was the only one who ever understood me. I don’t know why I’m still surprised by that.”
Her panties snagged briefly on her ankle before Theo tugged them free, and Audrey’s cheeks heated when she caught a glimpse of them glistening in the bright blue light of the nearest sculpture. They were soaked through. Theo’s pupils dilated further at the sight and his breathing quickened, but he tucked her panties reverently into his pocket before turning his attention back to her.
“Even though I was on an athletic scholarship when I first went to college, my mom still threatened to withhold some finances from me if I didn’t do what she asked. So as a compromise for declaring a visual arts major, I promised her I’d do something more ‘pragmatic.’ Her words, not mine.” He rolled his eyes, but it was just a flash. He didn’t seem to want to take them away from her for long.
He placed his hands on her hips and pulled her to the edge of the table, nestling himself more firmly between her thighs. His left hand wandered up her skirt and between her legs again while his right slid up her back, bracing her as solidly as he could for what she assumed he was about to do. Audrey’s heart thrummed in her ears, mixing with the buzzing of the neon lights surrounding them.
“I wasn’t sure what that more ‘pragmatic’ major would be until I decided to take chemistry for my science credit. And we learned about the noble gases.”
Theo’s calloused fingertips trailed along the soft skin of her inner thighs. They paused, and his eyes searched her face for one more moment before he slid his fingers up further—and along her slit. She was slick already, unbearably wet, and he closed his eyes and breathed out slowly, gathering himself while he began to stroke her gently.
“I’d already worked with some of them in my dad’s shop, actually.” His voice was ragged, but he continued anyway, his fingers gentle and slow and soft, circling and caressing and soothing, as if she were the most delicate thing he’d ever handled—as if he were terrified of breaking her. “Hold on to me, sweetheart,” he whispered as an aside, bending forward slightly so Audrey could wrap her arms around his neck. She obeyed, twining them around his head and burying her fingers in his hair. He grunted and surged forward when she accidentally tugged a bit too hard on his roots with a trembling hand, but he pressed a quick kiss to the side of her neck before speaking again, his hand gradually increasing in speed.
Audrey gave in with a groan.
She couldn’t help it.
Her hips rocked against his palm of their own accord.
“Argon is a shielding gas in welding, so I knew some of their properties. When the gases are inert, you can’t perceive them. They’re colorless, odorless, tasteless, formless, transient, and, frankly,extremelyrare. They’re completely invisible to the naked eye, their true natures kept hidden from both science and man for centuries, and they have to be manufactured or created in labs for us to use.” He paused, and Audrey wanted to die when he did. The lack of friction was unbearable now. “Do you know where we find these gases out in nature?”
She shook her head.
“We find them in the stars.”
Theo slipped one finger inside her, and Audrey arched into him with a gasp at the sensation of it. His hands were so big, so wide, his fingers so thick and strong that only one of them was nearly enough to fill her entirely. When he curled it, beckoning, she curled over his shoulder, hardly able to breathe at the rising heat and pressure threatening to overwhelm her at every one of his strong, slow strokes.
“If you take those gases and apply a little energy, a little friction,a little…stimulationin the form of electricity—” Theo pulled his finger out only to replace it with two, sliding them both in slowly, so slowly, and stretching her carefully, gloriously as he pressed them deeper and deeper inside of her.
God, she’d never felt so full before.
His thumb continued his earlier work, circling gently across her clit while he stroked his fingers along that elusive ridge inside. “If you provide that, they burst into light, explode into color, swirl and form into stars. It’s chemistry, yes, but it’s also physics, it’s metaphysics, it’s philosophy. It’s everything that drives us and drives the cosmos, the basis of life and light and everything we build upon it.
“When I realized that, I knew what I wanted to do. I saw it then, sitting in that chemistry lab, images of exploding light and sculpture in my mind, electricity buzzing into life, the fabric of the universe stitched in beautiful, vibrant colors. I already sketched incessantly, I already painted, worked with clay, was taking life drawing classes with live models, but everything paled in comparison to the idea I had of this medium.”
His brows knit together, but not because he seemed unhappy—he seemed to be seeing something else, something that wasn’t quite there in front of him. “Neon is both new and not new, a distinctive piece of America’s iconic, early twentieth-century past, over a hundred years old now—but at the same time, the gases you use in it weren’t discovered until recently, not compared to other forms of art, other media, other tools and structures and components. It’s both traditional and futuristic, classic and avant-garde, of the now and not. But it’s grown stale over the years, and it needed its boundaries pushed. I decided to be the one to push them.”
“Th-Theo. Theo, I’m—”
He’d increased the speed of his strokes inside her as he talked, pumping his fingers in and out, curling and uncurling, stretching and widening and filling her full, so full, and Audrey couldn’t stopherself. She clung to him while she rode his hand, suffering, shaking,agonizingthrough the buildup of an intense wave of pleasure on the verge of cresting. She couldn’t speak, she could hardly breathe, she could only bury her face in Theo’s shoulder while she moaned, while she burned, while she let herself be consumed by the fire he generated both inside and out.
“Look at me, Audrey.”
She’d never heard him be so commanding, so sharp, but it was more than that: there was an urgency in his deep voice she couldn’t ignore. It took everything she had to pull away from his neck and face him, panting and hot and so achingly close to breaking.
“I work with neon because it’s the material that drives the stars, that fuels the cosmos, that lights up the universe with galaxies. Whenever I ignite a piece for the first time, it’s like a new sun bursts into being. There is no greater creative feeling than that,” he gasped. What heat she could discern in his face through the shifting, colored lights seemed just as scorching as her own. “It’s like I become God.” Theo rocked back and forth with her in time with her hips, dipping down to press his forehead to hers and his lips to her own. His right hand slid up and gripped the back of her neck, shaking but strong while his fingers tangled in the sweat-soaked hair at the nape.
“Audrey, I need you to look at me. I need to see it—I need to see when I lightyouup for the first time, brighter and more beautiful than any star. More gorgeous and glorious than any piece of art I myself can ever hope to create.”
It was the intensity in his eyes when he said it that sent her over the edge.
It shattered her completely.
Audrey seized and cried out as the wave crested and pleasure crashed through her body, wiping out any sense of self she might have tried to cling to. Instead, the only thing she could grasp on to was Theo, and she dove into him while stars exploded behind hereyes, while heat pulsed across her skin, while her body melted into the fire he somehow always seemed to create, before disappearing into the ether. She went blind, sightless, weightless, soundless and voiceless, save for the ragged screams of pleasure echoing somewhere in the distance beyond the black, beyond the veil.
