When the clock struck twelve, we watched the fireworks together, clinking glasses and toasting to a new year. We'd made small talk for a bit, discussing rent and other mindless things to fill the silence. And now, at one in the morning, we sat on opposite ends of his couch, sipping our respective drinks while we listened to Theo's music.
The break in conversation was enjoyable—comforting, even. But my curiosity was building up, and it took every ounce of concentration to keep my questions from tumbling off the ridge of my loose, tipsy tongue.
"What's going on in that head?" he prompted after a moment, regarding me with cautious fascination. "You look like you have a thousand different ideas in your brain, all fighting for the spotlight."
I blinked at him, and it took me a couple seconds to string a proper response together. I wasn't sure any man had ever asked me to share my mind. "Right now, I'm thinking about your major," I admitted, lifting my knees to my chest. "What made you choose pharmacology?"
He tilted his chin to the side in a contemplative fashion. Then he peeled back the hem of his shirt to reveal a black line running from his hip to his upper ribcage. A silver cancer ribbon wove around the bar—wispy and elegant—and my heart sank to the floor.
There were only two reasons someone would have a tattoo like that: beating the disease or honoring someone who hadn't.
"I'd intended on going into music theory. Become a teacher like my mom, play some gigs on the side. But after she died, it just felt...wrong?" He lowered his shirt, rapping his fingertips across the spine of the couch. "I just knew I was meant for something different. Something outside my comfort zone. And I've always had a knack for chemistry, so..." He shrugged and looked up at the ceiling. "Sometimes it feels like this path chose me. Not the other way around."
I didn't know what to say. An apology and belated condolences felt insincere, so I just stuck with solemn silence.
"What about you?" he asked. He shot me a closed-lipped smile as a means of diminishing the awkwardness. "What kind of major warrants all that caffeine?"
I took a long sip of rum, feeling like my life choices were shallow and pathetic in comparison. How did I follow up a cancer story without sounding entitled and ungrateful?
"Honestly...I'm not sure what I'm doing. I'm studying psychology, mostly because picking apart the human brain comes naturally to me, and I enjoy it," I said. "It's just...it's not like it's my dream or my passion or anything."
If I was being perfectly honest, I wasn't sure I had one.
"Dreaming's a luxury," he dismissed, as if my indecision was no big deal, as if it were normal to be an aimless junior in college. It wasn't the judgmental response I'd expected, and it was becoming quite clear to me that I didn't know the barista as well as I'd thought. He'd clawed apart every box I'd attempted to place him in.
My posture relaxed a bit. "...How are you feeling?"
"Physically or mentally?"
"Both."
He furrowed his brow. "I'm definitely sobering up. And I'm feeling less angry. But anger was easier than what I'm feeling now."
"What are you feeling now?"
"...Gutted."
I bit my lip to keep the psychoanalysis piece of me where it belonged—inside.
He sensed my restraint. "You're not going to ask?"
"Do you want me to ask?" Baker hated it when I prodded at her emotional state or provided an unsolicited analysis, so I'd learned to bury my two cents.
"No." He scowled down at his water glass, setting his jaw. Then his shoulders sagged. "I...she slept with someone else."
It was the last thing I expected him to say, and I choked a bit on my drink, hating my near-comical reaction to such a humorless revelation. "What?"
He glanced to the side, peeved. "While she was abroad this last semester. Alyssa cheated on me with a guy in her program. She blamed it on loneliness and being away for so long."
"I..." Shit. "That's awful, Theo. I'm really sorry."
The context painted their heated argument a brand new shade of red. No wonder he'd been so pissed on his way out the door, so eager to escape her presence. If I'd been in his shoes, I'd never want to see her face again.
He glared at the window, holding it in, but for whatever reason, he must have felt safe enough to confide in me about the situation, because the words began to pour from his lips like boiling water. "I just don't understand how you can claim to love someone and then sleep with another person behind their back, multiple times. It's not like we decided to take a break while she was gone. We've always been exclusive." He took a deep breath to dispel some of his anger. "She calls it a mistake, but it was clearly a conscious decision, and I just...I can't get over the wrongness of it all. I don't think I ever will." He blinked. "Maybe that makes me a resentful, jealous dick. I don't know."
"It doesn't," I assured him, and I thought back to the two of them at the party. His outburst, her grief. "Did you break up with her tonight?"
"I ended things a few weeks before Christmas, but she's not making it easy. She pinned me down tonight and demanded that I forgive her, told me she'd come clean about the affair as soon as she got back, that her honesty had to count for something." He crushed his eyes closed. "Then she said I'd try to salvage our relationship if I ever truly loved her."
What.
"That's bullshit," I told him, enraged on his behalf, and he gave a quiet snort of assent. She had some gall to place even an ounce of blame on his shoulders. "How long you were guys together?"
He winced, and his voice dropped to a broken whisper. "...Six years."
My stomach bottomed out, and I nearly dropped the glass in my hand.
Holy shit.
I'd never even made it past a few consecutive dates, and Theo had spent six trips around the sun with one partner. And then she'd gone and destroyed that overseas, all for a fling.
Why?
Why would someone gamble their earnings after they'd won the lottery?
"We were high school sweethearts," he added, shaking his head, and I could feel the pain rolling off of him in waves. Pain and frustration. Betrayal and sadness. "Ridiculous to think we'd last forever, right?"
I looked him over, this person I'd always pegged as a loner who never grew out of his skater phase. Someone I'd never seen as a romantic, nor someone who valued a healthy, long-lasting relationship with another human being. I'd never missed the mark so badly.
"No," I answered quietly. "It's not ridiculous. I think we all wish for someone to spend forever with. I did at one point."
He detected the resignation in my tone, and he shifted to face me. "What changed?"
The alcohol weighed my walls down, and at this point, they were simply too heavy to lift. "I guess I've realized that I have these idealistic expectations of love and what it's supposed to look like, you know? Maybe I grew up watching too many Disney movies. Or maybe I wanted to believe there was more to a loving relationship than what my parents call marriage." I expelled a short, mirthless laugh. "I keep waiting for this story straight out of a fairytale, but it's never going to happen. And I have to learn to accept that."
He watched me intently, eager to hear my own pain and insecurities laid out before him, even if they paled in comparison to the loss of his mother and his girlfriend's betrayal.
His attentiveness threw me for a loop.
I'd never spoken with a guy my age who bothered to listen to my grievances. Usually, they made me feel like I was rambling on too long. Oversharing, and taking up too much space. But Theo, drunk or not, sat here encouraging me to continue, and I wasn't sure what to do with that.
Tentatively, I carried on. "It's like everyone else is in love, or getting engaged, or leaving the country, or pursuing their dream job, and then I'm here, waiting for Mr. Right and the perfect career choice to fall into my lap. It's my perfectionism, you know? That all-or-nothing mentality. The fear of failure. And even though I recognize that, I keep living in my head because it's safer there." I shook my head. "Sometimes I just feel like I'm three paces behind the rest of the world, and it stresses me out."
His gaze met mine, and I was startled by the sincerity there. "It's not a race," he said. "Look where falling in love got me."
I stared back at him, his damp eyes, his soulless expression, and I suddenly understood.
Theo wasn't an asshole. Or at least...that wasn't his only character trait. He was a pessimist whose grim beliefs were constantly reinforced by external events, and if the world was ruthless, then he could exist as an agent of indifference. If the world stopped caring, so could he.
After premature death and heartbreak—why let anyone in after that?
Why bother dreaming?
Emboldened by compassion and a dash of liquor, I set the rum down on the coffee table and crawled to his end of the couch, watching him observe me with a guarded expression. I sat back on my knees a few inches away, testing the waters—like a handler approaching a nervous shelter dog. Then, with a soft, sympathetic sigh, I pulled him in for a hug.
He went rigid in my arms, shocked by the gesture. We were practically strangers, after all, and on most days of the year, self-diagnosed enemies.
Sober me never would have done it.
"I'm sorry she hurt you," I said, and as unhelpful as it was, I truly meant it. Cheating was the epitome of selfishness, and it was guaranteed to cause irreparable damage to a partner. I'd seen as much with Jay and his ex-wife. She'd left him for a younger man as soon as he'd fallen ill, and her betrayal had killed something precious and tender inside him.
Wounds like that cut deep, and for some of us, too deep to ever love again.
Slowly, Theo's arms wrapped around me, and he dipped his forehead to my shoulder, letting out an exhausted breath.
An embrace was such a simple thing to offer, but I was happy he trusted me enough to accept the gesture. It was a nice feeling, to be that pillar of support for someone. Even if that someone was Theo.
I slid my fingers across his nape, the soft strands of hair there, and even more tension bled from his posture. Reassured by my willful participation, he ran his hand up my spine, pushing me closer, our bodies molding into one. Warmth bloomed between us, and I felt waves of dopamine and oxytocin flood my brain.
This serenity was dangerous.
Dangerous, and lovely.
I closed my eyes, and our embrace grew tighter, our bodies relying on our joint stability, like two towers leaning against each other, doomed to collapse without the other. I waited for him to release me, but he didn't. He just held me there to him silently, motionless, as if he were afraid to let go.
Enraptured by his vulnerability, and too eager to feed the need for intimacy, I lowered my chin, pressing my lips to the warm stretch of his neck. Burrowing into him.
Closer.
He was receptive to the contact, and I felt his hand sink to my lower back, where calloused fingertips—guitar hands—dragged across a sliver of exposed skin.
The muffled, content sound I made had him stilling against me, as if he'd just realized what he'd done. And to whom.
I flushed with embarrassment, and his cheek brushed mine as we slowly peeled away from one another.
The look on his face was frighteningly easy to read. The heavy-lidded eyes, the dimpled brow, the parted mouth. There was no question what thoughts plagued his mind, and I suspected I matched his transparency.
One of his hands rose to my face, tracing the edge of my jaw, the contours of my face. Then his eyes fell to my neckline and up, flashing with a mix of want and guilt and surrender.
"How drunk are you right now?" I whispered, my own traitorous gaze wandering south of his nose.
His thumb brushed my upper lip, then my lower. "If you're asking for my consent, you have it."
My pulse pounded in my ears. Those were potent words falling off his tongue. Potent, and transformative.
"Are you saying that because you mean it or because you're full of alcohol?" I asked.
"Probably a bit of both. You?"
My breath hitched. "A bit of both."
It was all he needed to hear.
Every seed of hesitation vanished from his body, and his lips crashed against mine like he'd been waiting to kiss me for weeks—his mouth needy and warm and pliant against my own. I hummed against him, pleased with his technique, and it encouraged him to swipe his tongue across my lower lip, striking the nerve endings there like a row of matches.
This make-out session was already leagues better than Andrew's invasion of the mouth. This was a warm caress, not a forceful entry, and yet such a small detail made all the difference.
Emboldened by his enthusiasm, I slung my leg over his hip so I was properly straddling him on the couch, and the hand supporting my lower back slid up, up, up, over my naked spine and under the ugly strap of the Walmart bra I'd bought on clearance. He didn't seem to care about the cheap material though; he unclasped the fabric in one pinch, and I couldn't help but marvel at his single-handed efficiency.
As I pulled the bra out my shirt sleeve, he groaned quietly into my mouth, and it sent a wave of heat through my core, pooling there and simmering like a kettle ready to scream.
My hands traveled over his shirt, his shoulders, and then back to his hair, tangling in those wavy locks before tugging him in for more. He gladly obliged, and talented lips moved down to my neck and collarbone, teeth grazing the tender skin there, tongue sending little sparks of pleasure through me, all the way down to my toes.
I made a high-pitched sound I was definitely not proud of, and he looked up at me, those twin forests ablaze.
The look of complete and utter want in his eyes left me breathless. That was not allowed. He was not allowed to look at me like that.
His grip on me tightened, and suddenly, I was being hoisted from the couch and carried toward the bed. At that exact moment, I expected Carl to spring from his dungeon, but Theo's voice had lulled him to sleep.
There was no anxiousness now. Only warm hands on my thighs and soft lips on my skin.
Instinctively, my legs circled his waist, and I clung to him as he kissed me deeply, eagerly, each of us struggling to quench our dehydrated souls. He set me down on the mattress with a grace that surprised me, and as I leaned back against the pillows, his body followed.
He stared down at me through tousled bangs, his sultry gaze taking in my flushed skin and wild hair with a hunger I'd never been the recipient of before. I passed him a nervous smile, and he returned it, biting his lip as he dragged his eyes over my body.
Sitting up on his knees, he tugged off his shirt, and this time I didn't glance away. Unabashed, I studied his lean build, the gentle dips and curves of his exposed chest, the tattoo spanning his ribcage, the hip bones protruding from his jeans—and the subtle happy trail snaking beneath them.
He must have enjoyed the look on my face because he dove in again with renewed vigor, and I trembled as his mouth made love to the most sensitive spots on my neck. His hands wandered down my chest, then up under my shirt, teasing me with the lightest of touches, tantalizing me with his breath. He reveled in the way I writhed and panted and shuddered beneath his fingertips, and it wasn't long before my plaid shirt was hastily flung across the room.
Entangled in his mayhem, I felt present and hyperaware of every graze, touch, lick, and bite. His steaming palms knew exactly how to trigger my most humiliating sounds, and I was too intoxicated—by alcohol and endorphins alike—to feel embarrassed.
When those dexterous fingers dipped past the belt loops of my jeans, my entire body tensed, sensing a threshold to be crossed.
Theo rose to search my face, his chest heaving with every eager breath. "Do you want—"
"Yes," I gasped out, biting my cheek as his palm settled on my naval. "I haven't...I haven't before..." He paused, and his eyes widened as he realized exactly what I was saying. "But I'm so sick of waiting."
Waiting for the perfect man, like my parents told me. Waiting for my dreamscape to materialize. Waiting for someone who was willing to learn me, study me, inside and out. It was clear to me now that I'd been stalling for a fictional future—an impossible request—and I didn't want to waste my life stuck in a daydream.
Not anymore.
Theo nodded that he understood, but his expression was more serious now, his gaze more intense. "Don't be afraid to tell me if something hurts, okay? We'll go slow, and we can stop any time y—"
I yanked him back down for another kiss and melted into him.
Blood, bones, and tissue.