Page 95 of The Pairing

“Ah,I see.” A smile takes over his face. “Meraviglioso, then, this is for you! Last room on the top floor. Grazie mille!”

He hands us a heavy brass key with a green silk tassel and leaves with a wink, humming to himself.

“He definitely thinks we’re fucking,” I say.

Theo’s grin is wicked. “Why shouldn’t he?”

Almost everyone has left their doors open behind them, so muted laughter and conversations in English and Dutch and Japanese filter up the creaking stairs as we climb them. I catch glimpses past each landing, tufted blue sofas with scrolls of white flowers on distressed rugs, piles of old books tucked into windowsills and scuffed side tables painted with pink rosebuds. It’s as if some baronet and his family took the horses out to visit the next village over and will be back any minute with hot gossip about wheat prices.

On the top floor, our room is bright and warm, with a red upholstered bed patterned with the same flowers as the curtains around the open windows. The ceiling is a rugged grid of thick wooden beams and terra-cotta tiles, and fresh flowers rest in a vase by the hand-painted wardrobe. My pack falls beside Theo’s on the plush rug.

“This is wild,” Theo says. “Like a fucking Guadagnino film.”

Below the windows, behind the villa, brick steps and dusty paths connect terrazzos and flowering gardens to make a tiny, crooked village of the estate. The rest of the buildings, all clay-tiled villettas, have their doors propped open to let in guests or let out smells of pressed olives and stewing pork. I take a deep breathin and swear I can hear a romantic piano score in the air.

“You’re right,” I say, stepping away from the window. “It’s unreal.”

I turn to find Theo at the foot of the bed, tugging their shirt over their head with the same fluid motion I saw on the motorway outside Pisa. This time, though, they’re wearing nothing under it.

Having spent my childhood traipsing naked through the French countryside and my adulthood either studying artistic nudes or living in Paris, nudity doesn’t faze me. I have, however, become an Edwardian gentleman for Theo and Theo only. Every re-revealed inch of skin has set my fingers flexing and my heart fluttering in my stomach, a flash of shoulder or navel or peach-fuzzed armpit. When they put my hand on their hip in that room in Barcelona, I had to recite the steps for pâte à choux in my head so I wouldn’t lose myself completely. And now, this, their sudden bare chest in the light of a Tuscan morning.

I avert my eyes in case I wasn’t meant to see, but they toss their shirt aside and stand there facing me, casually topless. So, I look.

I see the same rib cage with the same thumbprint-sized birthmark on the upper left side, the same splash of freckles down the breastbone. The same pinkish nipples. No new scars as far as I can see, but I can tell they’ve been training muscle to reshape their chest into something even subtler and more boyish than before. They look strong, lean, gorgeously purposeful and beautifully ambiguous, like Caravaggio’sBacchus.

“What—” I swallow. “What are we doing?”

“I’m getting changed. Didn’t you see that sign downstairs? Piscina?” Theo bends to pull a swimsuit from their pack. “There’s a pool.”

I watch Theo drop their shorts next. Only their underwear remains, their thumbs hooked under the waistband. It’s so different from how they undressed in Barcelona, so brazenly nonchalant,and I realize they’reshowing off.

“What?” they say. “Did you think I wanted to—?”

“No.”

“Because using the room is against the rules.”

“I’ll remind you tonight that you said that,” I say, recovering by taking off my own shirt. Theo hates when the girls get all Edwardian. “I’m coming with you.”

“Cool, it’ll be nice to just hang out today,” Theo says conversationally. They drag their underwear down. “My feet are so tired.”

“Mine too.” My shorts hit the floor. “And I’m kind of catatonic from seeing so many Botticellis.”

“Oh, I never told you about Fabrizio’sDavidtour.” Theo stands tall, completely naked. I don’t hide how my eyes travel their body, ankles to biceps to the place I touched at Venus’s fountain. They’re still smiling, still chatting. “Did you know it was originally meant for the top of the Duomo?”

I nod. “And Da Vinci wanted to shove it in the back of the Loggia dei Lanzi where nobody would see it.”

“He wanted to fuck Michelangelo so bad, it’s embarrassing,” Theo says.

I slip off my own briefs, intensely aware of the obvious heaviness between my legs. I’m not embarrassed of how badly I want them. I’d show them so much more if they asked.

Theo looks. Theo keeps looking.

“Have you been doing squats?”

“Moving sacks of flour from the bottom of dry storage.”

“Hmm.”

---