Page 79 of The Pairing

“Fuck.”

We’re moving faster, pressing harder. Theo kisses my pulse again and again, and a whine falls from my mouth each time. She’s sowarmat her center, warm and yielding but strong, the ridge of her zipper hard through the soft terry of my shorts.

“I can’t—I’ve been thinking about it so much,” Theo says. “About you. About you inside me. About me inside you. Do you think about it too?”

“All the time,” I say, barely even knowing what’s I’m saying, “all the fucking time, Theo, it’s like I’m—I’m made of it, I’ve wanted you so much.”

“Ah,fuck—” A desperate, cliff’s edge sound, half groan and half whimper. I feel her hand between us, her fingertips dipping beneath the waistband of her shorts. “Can I—?”

It’s nearly over for me then, just from the way she asks. I bite my lip so hard I taste sweet metal.

“Yes, please, touch yourself.”

Her hand plunges, and I feel the movement of her knuckles against me when her fingers find their place, listen to her sigh of relief and the sigh after, the one that’s pure, renewed need. She’ll be close soon. I remember how she unfolds, where the creases are.

“Fuck, thank you,” she says, hips and fingers moving, so wet I canhearit.“You can too.”

“Don’t need to,” I admit, getting closer, closer, so close just from her sounds and the incredible realization of how badly she’s wanted this. Wanted me. God, all this time and shewants me,and I get to have her like this. “Just—just keep doing what you’re doing.”

“Tell me again,” she gasps. “Say it.”

“I want you, Theo, I want you, I want you, please, please, please, I—”

—love you.

By some divine mercy, Theo comes before the words do. I’m right behind her, and she locks her arms around my neck until it’s done washing through me, making soft hums of approval into my hair. I can’t believe it. She’s finished me without touching me before, but not like this—inminutes,without even a kiss on the mouth.

She kisses my chin, just below my lower lip, and starts to laugh.

“What’smy Godin French again?” she asks.

My voice breaks when I answer, “Mon Dieu.”

“Mon Dieu, Kit, when’s the last time you creamed dans your pantalons?”

I groan and try to push her off, but she resists, squeezing my neck tighter, and I find myself unwilling to convince her otherwise.

“There is absolutely no reason for your French to still be so horrible,” I say.

When Theo pulls back, a beam of early moonlight falls across her face and into her eyes. She’s so gorgeous like this, laughing and satisfied. I stroke her jaw with the side of my thumb and tell myself to be satisfied with this too. If this is all there ever is with us, I can make it enough. I can learn how to touch her without telling her all the rest.

(Rilke wrote,How will I keep my soul from touching yours?)

“You said you checked the radiator?”

“That I did.”

“And the engine block?”

“Not my first time, love,” Orla says. She squints under her safari hat, its drawstring flapping in the Tuscan wind. “The head gasket looks alright too, so we’ve not blown it.”

Theo puts her hands on her hips and frowns very seriously.

We were half an hour out of Manarola when the bus started making a distressing kicked-can noise. Fabrizio came over the speakers to say it was nothing to worry about, never mind all the smoke, but in the spirit of curiosity did anyone happen to know anything about Volkswagen engines? And now Theo’s standing with Orla on the side of an Italian motorway, staring into the bus’s engine compartment as trucks whip past.

Fabrizio and I are watching from the steps of the bus, sweating through our shirts.

“Do you know, it is not far from here where Genoa defeated Pisa in the Battle of Meloria to begin the decline of the Republic of Pisa,” Fabrizio tells me, sounding like he’s succumbing to heatstroke. “Maybe Pisa does not want visitors from the northern coast. Maybe they send to us un piccolo fantasma.”

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