Page 109 of The Pairing

It can’t be possible for our history to repeat so exactly, for us to be lying here loving each other and not saying it again, but I wonder. I watch Theo’s hand move, and I groan at my own touch, and I wonder.

“Kit,” Theo says, and for one thick moment I think they’re actually sighing my name in pleasure, until they repeat, “Kit.”

“Yeah?”

“I wanna change the rules again.”

“Yeah,” I say readily, “yeah, okay.”

“No kissing, no penetration,” they say, “but anything else goes.”

My hand stills.

“Anything?”

“Anything.”

“Are you sure?”

They lean in and drag their mouth across the corner of mine. It’s not a kiss, but it’s enough like one to make me shiver.

“Please,” Theo says. I’ve never said no to anything Theo asks for nicely.

In the space of a second, I jackknife off the mattress and twist around, using the momentum to flip Theo on their back and pin myself between their thighs. Theo lets out a scream that’s mostly a laugh, legs already lifting.

“Fuck, could you always do that?”

I shift forward, bracing my shoulders under the firm curve of their ass.

“I have some new techniques.”

Theo grins luxuriantly. “My little pastry school valedictorian.”

“Yours,” I echo, heart aching.

I put my mouth to them until they’re gasping, until their hips buck off the bed, until their hands are buried in my hair, gripping and tugging and crushing my face into them so hard my vision blacks out blissfully at the edges.

They finish loud, and as soon as they’ve caught their breath, they wrench me up by the root of my hair and throw me backward, crowding me until I’m sitting with my back to the headboard. Lube appears from somewhere—the nightstand, maybe, I don’t honestly care—and they’re pumping it into their open palm, and then—and then—

Theo wraps their hand around me.

The texture of their hand is different than I remember—more calloused, more scarred—but the shape of it, the pressure of each finger and the cant of their wrist, the way their palm accommodates me, it’s all so devastatingly familiar I almost come at the first touch. Tears instantly prick at the corners of my eyes, and I can’t find it in myself to be ashamed. Through the blur, I see Theo’s face, their fierce determination as they spread lube over me with one hand and on the insides of their thighs with the other.

Then they’re climbing over me and aligning their hips above mine, and for one delirious second I think they’re going to abandon the rules and fuck me the old-fashioned way, and I’m more than ready to let them.

Instead, they twist their body to the side and sink down onto my lap. They close their strong legs around me, trapping my full length between their thighs, slick on slick, soft encompassing hard.

A stream of swears slips from my mouth so fast, even I don’t know what language I’m speaking. Tongues, maybe. Ancient Latin. I’m so completely, suddenly surrounded that I can barely think, barely control the way my hands grasp Theo to keep them where they are, seated sideways with their shoulder to my chest and their thighs clenched tight. They shift their hips in a demonstrative tease, and I swear again as I understand what they’re offering.

“You like that?” Theo says, staring into my face, seeing God knows what there.

“Love it,” I breathe out.Love you.

They brace their hands on the bed behind them to lift a fraction of their weight off my lap, giving me room to move.

“Show me how much.”

Everything—the room, the heat, the day, the ache in my heart—everythingfalls away when I push up into the slicked clinch of their thighs.

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