Page 127 of The Pairing

I look up to find handsome, enduring Theo thumbing the same knuckles they bruised for me when we were children. I know them. I know this person better than I know anything, better than Bernini or Middle-earth or the importance of good butter. And they know me, and they’re still looking.

This must be the moment at last. Here in long-awaited Palermo, at the end of the day, our stomachs full. This is where it’s all led.

I take their hand, gently lace my fingers through theirs.

“Theo.”

They can’t hear it. Someone else yells their name at the same time, twice as loud, beckoning us out for drinks. Theo gives me a look, and I know they want to go. They’re too curious about what might happen, too afraid to miss it.

I untwine our hands.

“Let’s go.”

We move through bar after bar, terrazzo after sticky bar top after dance floor, through the thick fog of Sicilian night. We take shots of bitter amaro and order Negronis with prosecco. I keep waiting for another opening, for a quiet moment with Theo, but there’s so much happening. Everything keeps exploding around us, spilled drinks and stolen kisses and cherries flaring at the ends of cigarettes.

We lose our friends in a dark, cramped bar with live music, a woman playing an upright bass and a man on the saxophone, the crowd thick and surging and full of smells. Theo is holding a drink with fish bones in it, complaining that my alcohol tolerance doesn’t make any sense, that I should be drunker. We can barely hear each other, so we bob wordlessly, eddied by the bodies around us, floating on an incandescent tide.

The band starts up a new song, and I recognize the first chords. Even with the words in Italian, I’d know it anywhere.

“Is that—” Theo shouts. “Are they actually playing—”

“‘Can’t Stop Loving You,’” I confirm.

Phil Collins, in a dive bar in Palermo. We’re alone in the crowd, staring wide-eyed at each other, swaying impossibly to a song we’ve sung together a hundred times, never knowing it would be the story of our lives. Nothing could convince me that isn’t some kind of sign.

Theo leans into my ear and says, “Will you—?”

I can’t make out the end of their sentence.

“What?”

They try again. “Will you please—?”

“I can’t hear you!”

The music shifts, dipping into the end of the first verse, quieter now,I could say that’s the way it goes, and I could pretend and you won’t know—

This time, I hear Theo when they look into my eyes and say, “Kiss me.”

They look like their heart might break, as if they’re begging mercy for a lost cause when they reach out to cup my face.

“One kiss, and I’ll never ask you again,” they say. “I’ll get over it one day, I swear, and we can be friends, but I—I just need a better kiss to remember it by.”

The crowd pushes us together, and I feel like I’m somewhere else, like I’m everywhere, like every heart in the room must be synced to the hammer of mine.

“Remember what, Theo?”

And they answer, “How it feels to be in love with you.”

The band kicks off the chorus. Theo’s drink hits the floor as I pull them to me.

“I can’t believe you got to say it first,” I say over the music.

Their lips part. “You’re—you—?”

“I never stopped,” I tell them, finally. “Theo,I never stopped.”

When they smile, it’s gold in the sky, unfolding green hills, a country of endless possibilities, the relief of the last turn beforehome. I take them by the waist and kiss them with everything in me, everything we made of each other, my mouth to their mouth like we sculpted them with our own hands for this, and Theo holds my face between their palms and kisses me back, deep and sure.

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