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cinque terre

The first six months after Theo left me, I lived on sex, croissants, and a volume of Rilke's collected poems from Thierry's bookshelf.

I sat up at night and drew circles around the lines that most made me think of Theo, copied down the best ones until they stitched together a new verse. Dream in the eyes, the brow as if in touch with something far away. And, Was it not summer, was it not sun—all that heat from you, that measureless radiant warmth? And, Alone: What shall I do with my mouth?

Well. Sex and croissants, that's what.

It was Maxine who, at the end of a long evening that could have been a first date if she hadn't seen right through me, went scouring my notebook for a recipe and found the page with the Rilke. She asked, "How long have you loved them?" And I said, "Almost my whole life." And she said, "Putain de merde," and opened her cigarette case.

That was the night we became friends, and it was the night I told her about the tour. On the first day of every subsequent summer, she asked if this was the year I'd redeem my voucher, and every year I told her I couldn't, because I was waiting. I was holding out hope that someday, somehow, Theo would come back.

It isn't as if I've loved the same cold memory all this time. Rilke wrote, Even your not being there is warm with you. I'm in love with Theo's residual warmth, the indentation she left for me to grow around. All those living petals, never falling.

That's my life, in the kitchen and the café and the épicerie every morning thumbing orange rinds, nights looking into empty corners of the apartment where a liquor cabinet or a pair of boots might fit, mornings waking up on the left side of the bed. I leave space for Theo to be something that's still happening to me.

But four years is a long time, and this year when Maxine asks about the ticket, I say I'll do it as a farewell tour. I'll take my unsent letter to a beach in Palermo and bury it at sea, and I'll return to Paris and spend the rest of my life loving someone I'll never see again.

And then Theo walks out of a dream and onto a bus in London, fiercer and stronger and screamingly hotter than ever before. She can't stand to be next to me, but she wants to try, so I say yes, because I'll take whatever she'll give me. She calls me her friend in the same breath that she proposes having sex with other people, and I say yes to that too, because it's a good distraction. Because as long as we're counting, we have something to talk about, and I've missed the sound of her voice.

And she's looking at me while I'm touching someone else, and we're sleeping in the same bed, and I'm thinking of her every time I sink into another person's body, and she's sighing into my palm on the deck of a yacht. I have no room left in myself to hold it all. It has to overflow. And so, I kiss her.

I kiss Theo because I'm in love with her. I always have been. I always will be.

I'm still getting used to how different Theo looks.

The last time I saw her, her hair fell past her shoulders and down her back. She wore nail polish until it chipped away and she painted over it, shadowed her eyelids before work for better tips, wore skirts on weekends. Sometimes I would notice her checking her posture, as if she could soften the natural breadth of her shoulders, make herself delicate.

Now, she stands with her shoulders back, moves as if she knows a thousand ways to use her body and fears none of them. Her face has hardened and sharpened slightly, but it still holds a raw, hardy friendliness that makes strangers tell her their secrets, and there's never anything on it but freckles. She wears practical boots and overalls with cargo pockets and ugly bucket hats, and her hair is so short that her neck and jaw are always on display.

A month ago I'd have sworn I could never want anyone more than the Theo I knew. Then I saw this new Theo, and suddenly want wasn't big enough. This is more like need.

We're in Monterosso al Mare, the northernmost of the five villages clustered along the curve of Italy's northwestern coast, Cinque Terre. Here, pastel palazzos cascade down steep cliffs to the bright blue Mediterranean Sea. Terraced farms line green hills, growing olives and lemons and basil, and rows of striped umbrellas cram the pebbly beaches below. It's wilder and warmer here than on the C?te d'Azur, but the salt on the air is the same, and the resort beaches are almost the same, and so I am thinking—miserably, inescapably—about Monaco. About yesterday, about need.

I'm thinking about Theo between my open thighs, nothing but dried sweat and salt water between our skin. About how casually she settled there, ready for anything, while it took everything in me to keep my voice steady and my hands still. The weight of her gaze on my mouth, the pressure of her hand on my thigh, her damp hair on my shoulder, all the hysterical need I poured into émile so Theo wouldn't feel it. I was so completely willing to do anything she wanted, and so afraid that the moment I touched her, she would know it meant so much more to me.

I wonder, as I watch her ruthlessly shred basil leaves, if that was the last time we'll ever be that close.

Theo's wearing boots today—her sensible Blundstones—with hiking shorts and yesterday's linen shirt, still smelling of sea salt and expensive champagne. Perhaps she chose them for this morning excursion on a basil farm because a good viticulturist is always prepared. Or maybe it's because I kissed her, and she's going to kick me off a palazzo.

I hold a leaf between my thumb and forefinger and squeeze until the fibers collapse, but its new, wet bruise only reminds me of the shine on Theo's lower lip in a dark alley. Theo's mouth against mine for five long seconds before I broke off and I started apologizing. The cool laugh she forced when I swore I was drunk and caught in the moment, that I hadn't meant it.

We walked back to the hotel in silence, and she hasn't spoken to me since. Not on the bus here, not during our tour of the farm, not when we were set loose to gather our own basil, not even during our adorable old farmer's lesson on making pesto. Presently, she's focused on crushing leaves with a righteous, wholehearted fury. The table creaks under her mortar and pestle, bottles of olive oil rattling nervously.

"Are you alright, Theo?" Stig asks.

"I'm great," Theo says brightly, which means she's angry, and when she's angry, she breaks things.

My hands are graceless on my own pestle, the taste of regret too thick in my mouth to get the flavors right. It took time to understand how I'd made Theo so angry she could leave me back then, but this time it's simple. I'm supposed to be her friend, and I kissed her. All the flirting and innuendos, the platonic nudity and almost threesomes—I made them mean something she never agreed to. I'd kick myself off a palazzo if I could.

When we taste everyone's finished pesto, Theo's is vibrant and complex and perfectly balanced, exactly as creamy as it should be because she whisked in the olive oil at the end instead of dumping everything together like half of us did. Theo has never encountered a straightforward, useful skill she couldn't instantly master by will and instinct. Jack of all trades, master of cunt, she once said. I've never liked anyone more than her.

I dip a corner of bread into my bowl and discover it doesn't taste like much of anything. It's the most pitiable, anemic thing I've made since patisserie school.

"You didn't crush the basil hard enough," Theo says, working her lip with her teeth. She slides a finger around the rim of my bowl, then sucks oil and herbs off her fingertip. "It tastes apologetic. Fucking commit to something, man."

I don't have an answer for that. She's right, but even if she weren't, I deserve to be bullied today.

When I took her hand on the cliff in Dover, I wondered how I could give her a reason to keep me this time. This new person with carpenter calluses where each finger meets her palm, who packs light and crosses oceans alone, the sturdier, broader Theo who cut off her hair—what would she see in me?

She saw friendship, and I was lucky for that. I shouldn't have asked for more.

On the train that will whisk us down the coast to Cinque Terre's four other villages, Theo sits across a little gray table from me and says nothing. She puts her headphones in, her knife tattoo flashing ominously as she folds her arms over her chest. I look at her and miss her twice, once as a lover and once as the friend I had yesterday.

Rilke wrote, Whispering sweetness, which once coursed through us, sits silently beside us with disheveled hair.

All day, I see double. The next village, Vernazza, is full of weathered stone stairs and beachgoing tourists. I see it, but I also see San Sebastián. I see Theo beside me in the sand, both of us fresh with the revelation that we hadn't been abandoned after all, the sun laying itself over her shoulders, and wishing so badly I'd taken the next flight out instead of wallowing around an empty apartment for a week composing dramatic letters.

Farther inland, in the hills of Corniglia, we drink Vernaccia made from local white grapes. Fabrizio tells us how Michelangelo once wrote that Vernaccia "kisses, licks, bites, slaps, and stings," and Theo says, "Damn, is she single?" I think of Bordeaux and a belly full of wine, standing before a fountain and daring to hope, the sting of hearing Theo say that losing each other was a good thing. And I think of Theo's hands on a farmhand's hips and wonder if heartbreak will fuck you if you learn to love it enough.

The bigger, busier coastal village of Riomaggiore reminds me of Barcelona, with its Gothic churches and street carts selling paper cones of calamari. I remember that second hot night, begging Santiago to fuck Theo out of my mind for long enough to catch my breath. How I heard her across the alley and raised my voice, knowing she probably wasn't listening, pretending she was. How the thought made me come so hard I passed out and had to buy Santiago an apologetic breakfast.

By the time the train drops us in Manarola, I am half agony, half hard. We wander dusty trails through the terraced hillside vineyards and climb to a pink trattoria with sweeping views for dinner. I expect Theo to leave me for another table, but she isn't avoiding me—she's aggressively ignoring me, which is at least familiar. She drops into the seat beside me on the rooftop terrazzo, across from the Calums.

The Calums have been uncharacteristically quiet today, and they simply nod their chins at her in approval. I don't spend much time with traditionally masculine men unless they're, quite frankly, fucking me, but I like the Calums. They exude a certain harmlessness, the earnest and beefy benevolence of Channing Tatum, or a cow. Theo loves them, of course, because Theo was a frat daddy in a past life.

Waiters bring around bottles of cold white wine and a parade of seafood antipasti—fileted anchovies brined in lemon and olive oil, squid braised in their own ink, herbed octopus. Then come plates of fresh-cut pasta drenched with cuttlefish ink and clattering with mussels and clams, and then fat-bellied amberjack that gleam like they're still dewy from the fisherman's hold.

It's an incredible meal, and we're all sitting around it, barely talking.

Finally, Theo jabs her fork at the Calums and says, "What's going on with you two? Did you get drunk and have sex or something?"

Ginger Calum's face pinkens and Blond Calum suddenly becomes fascinated with a prawn. My interest is piqued.

"Oh my God," Theo whispers, leaning in, "you did."

"We didn't," Blond Calum says to his prawn.

"Right," Ginger Calum agrees, "because you were too busy stabbing me in the back with your cock, mate."

I lower my eyebrows. "Sorry, did you have sex or not?"

"I did not stab you in the back!" Blond Calum snaps, rounding on his fellow Calum. "I seized an opportunity!"

"Pause." Theo holds up both hands. "What happened?"

Neither Calum says anything, both scowling. Finally, Ginger Calum speaks.

"Last night in Monaco, we were out with two birds, and we were both trying to . . . well, you know."

"Do the ol' rudie nudie," Blond Calum provides.

"But then Calum took both of them home while I was in the toilet. And he didn't even ask me first."

"It was their idea!"

"I liked her!"

"You couldn't even decide which one you liked better."

"They're both lovely women!"

"You would have done the same thing if you hadn't been fucking munted," Blond Calum says. "I told you, you can't hold your champagne."

"Can I say something?" I interject before Ginger Calum can go off. "In my experience, group sex with a close friend can get a bit . . ." I deliberately don't glance at Theo, but I can feel her eyes on me. "Emotionally complicated."

Ginger Calum frowns. "What do you mean?"

"Calum," I say, "is it possible you're not upset about the girls, but that Calum had a threesome and didn't invite you?"

Both Calums are silent again. Theo is quiet too, arms crossed, swirling her wine around in its glass.

"Is that it?" Blond Calum asks Ginger Calum.

Ginger folds his arms. "We promised that if we ever did it, we would do it together."

"When we were fifteen, Calum! It didn't mean anything!"

"It meant something to me!"

Theo presses her knuckles to her lips. The Calums share a long moment of intimate eye contact. I share a long moment of intimate eye contact with the branzino on the table, reflecting on the week I've had.

"I didn't know it was that important to you," Blond says softly. "Honestly, I didn't think you'd mind."

Ginger says, "Well, it hurt my feelings."

"I'm sorry, mate. I was just—I was caught up in the moment, I guess. I wasn't thinking."

"In Calum's defense," Theo chimes in, leaning forward. It seems like the phrase caught up in the moment may have activated something in her. "I think we all probably made some questionable decisions in Monaco."

She looks directly at me. I clench my jaw.

"It was something in the air, wasn't it?" Blond Calum says.

"Definitely," Theo agrees. "I mean, Kit kissed me. Can you believe that?"

My heart drops.

"No!" Ginger Calum shouts, instantly lit up with laughter. "Naughty lad!"

Blond Calum jumps in too, and I order myself to laugh along and take my ribbing, but my sinuses are beginning to sizzle, which can only mean one thing. Theo is watching my face closely over her glass.

"Yes, very funny, what was I thinking," I say, pushing my chair back. "Excuse me."

I leave the terrace as quickly and discreetly as I can, praying nothing happens until I'm out of sight. Through the dining room, down the stairs, out to the street—I don't stop until I'm on the gravel, where no one but an old man sitting by the road in a kitchen chair will see if my nose starts to bleed.

Most of the time I find it romantic and even somewhat sexy that, ever since that water taxi in Venice, my nose sometimes bleeds when I feel an especially powerful emotion. It's like being the victim of a curse in a Greek tragedy or Satine in Moulin Rouge. But Theo isn't stupid, and if this keeps happening, I'm going to give myself away even more than I already have.

I tip my head forward and lean against a garden wall, waiting for the feeling to subside. It works: When I swipe my thumb over my upper lip a few minutes later, it's dry.

I release a sigh and contemplate calling Maxine, or even Paloma, just to tell someone what I can't tell Theo.

There was a moment, a month after Theo and I settled into our apartment in Palm Springs, when things began to shift. I glanced up from my morning reading and I caught her staring at me with a private sort of tenderness in her eyes, and for the first time in a long time, I wondered if she loved me the way I loved her. If this was how she always looked at me when she didn't think I could see.

For all my regret, I felt that bud of hope last night too. It was only a breath, a quiet swish in through her nose and then a softening of her mouth, as if she might have pulled me deeper if I hadn't already been staggering away. But I'd be a fool to hold on to that after how she talked at the table just now, as if it was all a joke to her, as if—

The door behind me flies open.

"Kit!"

Theo charges out into the street, hair wild and amber in the windy dusk.

Her boots pound against the stones, and my first thought is, good. Theo should always walk with heavy footsteps. She should leave deep tracks wherever she goes so everyone can know she was there, like a historical event. Archaeologists should put tape around her footprints and study them with brushes.

She draws close and demands, "What are you doing out here?"

"Nothing," I tell her. "I just—I needed some air."

"We have an outdoor table," Theo points out.

"Different air."

"Why?"

Every day of this trip, I've wanted to tell her. And every day, I've told myself no. But I've been so close to her, and everything has been so beautiful, and I've swallowed so many words already. I've made meals of my heart. If she keeps pushing, I'm afraid I won't last.

"Theo, I know I fucked up last night, and you have every right to be angry," I say, closing my eyes, "but was that necessary? In front of the Calums?"

"I didn't think you'd mind," Theo says, "since you said it didn't mean anything to you."

And I hear myself say, "I meant it."

Rilke wrote, Who hasn't sat trembling before his heart's curtain?

"I meant it," I say again. "I'm sorry I did it, and I wish I could take it back, because I have loved being your friend again, but I have been going out of my mind trying to hide this from you, and then on the yacht, when I thought we might—when we almost—it was too much, Theo. And for one moment, I couldn't keep pretending that I haven't wanted to kiss you since you walked onto that bus in London." I take a breath. "But I will never do it again if you don't want me to."

Theo stares at me, lips parted, chest falling and rising. The trees above us shiver in the wind.

"I knew it," she says at last. I was braced for that, but not for the furious triumph in her voice. "You feel it too."

My heart thumps hard in my chest. She can't mean—

"Theo," I say, "what do you feel?"

"This—this—thing between us," Theo says. "This problem."

Ah.

Theo continues, beginning to pace.

"We've had sex in the past," she says, "and now we're not having sex anymore, but we're talking about sex all the time, and thinking about sex, and thinking about each other having sex with other people, and I thought that would help, but it's doing the opposite. Not fucking each other is making us both stupid. And I think we have to do something about it. Like, get it out of the way."

I put my hands on Theo's shoulders, stopping her pacing. A cloud of dust settles around her boots. Her face is inches from mine, eyes bright.

"What are you saying?" I ask her. "That we should have sex?"

"No, that would be too much like getting back together, and we're not getting back together," Theo says plainly. "That's out of the question. Right?"

"I—" I remove my hands. "I do see how having sex would feel like getting back together."

"Yeah," Theo says, nodding hard. "But we have to do something because—" She sucks in a breath and pins me under her steady gaze. "Because I do very much still want to fuck you. So, do you want to fuck me?"

"Theo," I say. "Worse than you can possibly imagine."

"Great," Theo says. Color bursts high in her cheeks, her breath short like she's about to take off running. I love her. "Then, I think—I think we should have sex, just . . . without actually having sex."

"Yes," I say immediately. "Or—I don't know what you mean, but yes. Tell me how."

"Pretty Woman rules. No kissing on the mouth." She thinks about it. "But no skin-to-skin contact from the waist down either."

I nod, feeling my pulse in my fingertips. In other places. I can do this. I want to. If this is the most I can have of her, I'll gladly take it. And if this is all she wants from me, it's easy to give.

"Anything else?"

"I don't think we should do it in our rooms," she adds. "That's—that seems like a slippery slope."

"Sure," I say, as if I wouldn't love to slip. "Are we allowed to make each other come?"

"It would be fucking encouraged."

"Then yes. Absolutely yes. When?"

Theo considers the question for all of one second.

"Now?"

We don't have a plan; we pick a direction and hike back into the vineyard trails. I have half an idea of finding a secluded clearing or rocky alcove or even a decent-sized gap in the grapevines, but then it appears. A groundskeeper's shed, carpeted with ivy like it's been abandoned for some time.

We exchange a look. The door handle is rusted through. It'd only take one good push.

"Good enough?" I ask Theo.

"Good enough," Theo declares, shoving me through the door.

Inside the shed, it's nearly dark. A strip of sunset through one high, narrow window reveals rickety shelves of plant pots and sacks of gravel and a cluttered worktable. It smells of mulch and wet granite, and I immediately bang my elbow into two different shelves.

"Ow, fuck," Theo swears, punting something noisy and metal out of her way. I push aside a bundle of trellis wire, and Theo knocks over a rake, and then it's quiet. All the obstacles are gone. We're alone, in a pocket of privacy, nothing between us but air.

As my eyes adjust, I make out the lines of Theo's face. Her expression is focused, her jaw working like she's tonguing the sharp parts of her teeth.

God, I've missed her.

"I don't even know where to start," I confess.

She says, "Anywhere."

And we crash together.

At first, it's more a fight than anything. Two people who know each other's bodies better than anyone else ever could, with years to think about all the weak spots. She pushes the full strength of her body against mine, and I push back, kicking dirt and pebbles across the slab floor as we scramble for purchase. She pins my thigh between hers, and I bury my face in the side of her neck and take her weight. I thought it would be harder to do this without kissing, but hands go where mouths would—her fingertips at the corner of my mouth, my thumb at the center of her lower lip. We swear, and we groan, and we fit the way we always did.

When I would dream of holding her again, I imagined taking my time, undressing her inch by inch, a kiss for every night apart. That, I realize, was the wrong fucking idea. I should have pictured us starving and delirious from consuming everything but each other, no self-control left to take it by spoonfuls. I want to rip the cloth off the table and feast. I want her to open wide like an animal and take a bite out of me. Everything I've held back since London was only an apéritif.

I touch her lips and think of how she took the wine into her mouth in Bordeaux and sucked the taste of cherries from it. I bite a bruise into her neck the way I wanted to under the dance floor lights in San Sebastián, swipe my tongue over her collarbone like I wanted when I saw the cut of her neckline in Paris. The fingers that grazed my skin in the water near Saint-Jean-de-Luz, the rough voice from the next balcony in Barcelona, the capable hands from that kitchen in Nice—I let myself have it all, for now.

In one violent shove, Theo clears the worktable and throws me against it. Shears and trowels clatter to the floor. A pail clangs into the wall. My knees buckle, and then she's straddling me. She presses the heel of her hand to the ridge of my throat, her thumb digging into the vulnerable flesh under my chin, her breath crashing through her teeth. My hands claw across her back, grabbing fistfuls of her shirt and tugging it down her shoulders.

Her teeth nearly graze my bottom lip, and I remember this, the pause before a kiss, the way she liked to wait me out until I begged or closed the gap myself. I want it more than anything—a good kiss, an intentional one, the kind of kiss Theo deserves. Instead, I tilt my hips up to show her what she's done.

Her mouth skids sideways, close to my ear as she feels how devastatingly hard I am and swears.

"Is that for me?"

"Yes," I tell her, and she grinds against me, giving me both the relief of friction and the agony of not enough. My voice is dark and crumbling, like butter burned into the bottom of the oven, but I can't keep the smoke trapped when she's easing the door open like this. I'll give her anything she asks. I'll turn the kitchen walls black. "You're—you make me like this. You always do."

"In Barcelona, that morning—" Her breath hitches, short nails nipping my neck. I slide a hand under her shirt to grip her hip for leverage. "Were you hard for me then too?"

"Yes," I say again. I'm moving with her now, or she's moving where my hand guides her, or maybe it's both. Maybe we've only ever been this one continuous, gasping thing. "I was dreaming of you."

"Tell me. Tell me what I did to you."

"We—we were in the bar, in Paris. On the bed. But I was under you, and—" And she was kissing me, telling me she loved me. "—you were touching me. You had me in your hand."

Theo snaps her hips forward. "Can I tell you a secret?"

"Yes."

"I dreamed about you that night too."

I bite down a moan. "How? Where?"

"I dreamed we were at that last restaurant, and you ate me out on the table."

"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 so warm at 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 can hear it. "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 she wants 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—in minutes, without even a kiss on the mouth.

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

"What's my God in 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?)

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