chianti

We go south. Orla drives us through the hills toward Siena, past the tower houses of San Gimignano and the walled palazzos of Montepulciano, along cow pastures and olive groves and patchy wheat fields.

In the distance, copper-and-green hills fold over one another like mussed-up linens in a bed as wide as the sky.

The motorway exits east toward crunchy gravel roads that bounce us in our seats until the bus pulls off at an overgrown stone gate.

Theo, who fell asleep mid-sentence before we even left, jolts awake against my shoulder and picks up where they left off.

"Sort of a—" Huge yawn, eyes being rubbed. "—a circles and squares thing. Or, I mean, squares and rectangles. All Chianti Classico is made in Chianti, but not all Chianti made in Chianti is Chianti Classico."

"Sure," I say, smoothing a stray piece of their hair, "I'm always saying that."

Theo scowls sleepily. "Are we here?"

"We're here."

Here is Villa Mirabella, a centuries-old Tuscan villa tucked along the edge of Greve in Chianti. Before Theo passed out, they were explaining how important those two details are—something about counterfeiting and subzones and the percentage of Sangiovese grapes, and how only a small cluster of nine communes are legally designated as makers of Chianti Classico. I don't know. Theo's a brilliant person full of interesting thoughts, but I was mostly watching their mouth.

"Ciao a tutti ragazzi, hello everyone!" Fabrizio calls out. He explains that our room arrangements will be as usual—shared rooms for pairs who booked together, singles for solo travelers—and that a dinner prepared with ingredients fresh from the surrounding farmland will be served at nine, or whenever the cook feels like it. "The rest of the day is yours—swim, bicycle, eat, drink, make love, it is your choice."

We pour out of the bus and down the front walk to a hedged gravel terrazzo shaded by crepe myrtle trees, fig trees, lemon, apple, elm, white poplar, clusters of hortensia bushes with pink flowers. Yellow-striped chairs and bistro tables sit prettily under lemon-yellow umbrellas. It all culminates in the villa itself, four floors tall and twice as wide, its white stucco facade engulfed in ivy and hanging wisteria.

An older woman wearing a dress the same shade of yellow as the umbrellas awaits us at the doorstep, bearing a basket of fresh linens and the gravity of someone in charge. Pair by pair, she distributes antique keys as Fabrizio reads names off his clipboard, until Theo and I are the last two.

After much whispering in Italian, the signora retires to the house, and Fabrizio pulls us aside.

"Amici," he says, "Signora Lucia tells me there is a mistake. When we send the names for the tour group, there is—how do you say—a glitch? Because your original reservation is together, you have the same reservation number. It is very rare that guests book together, and then cancel together, and then use the reservation again for the same tour but not together—you see how this becomes confusing for our little office man? And I will tell you, we have a new man and I do not think he is very good. Terrible personality. We are trying to send him to the Germany office." Fabrizio trails off darkly, probably imagining the terrible office man in especially uncomfortable lederhosen. "But, the problem. Lucia has assigned for you the same room."

"Oh."

I glance at Theo.

"That's—"

"And I ask if there are more rooms, but they are repairing the third villetta. I even tell her about your situation, but—"

"It's okay," Theo says firmly. Fabrizio and I both pause. "We don't mind."

"You don't?" Fabrizio furrows his brow.

He looks to me, then to Theo, and to me again.

"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 breath in 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 pate 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's Bacchus.

"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're showing 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's David tour." 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."

And then someone knocks on the door, and the spell is broken. Theo laughs and goes "whoops" and ducks behind a wardrobe, and I pull on trunks to accept a delivery from a friendly maid.

"Complimentary wine," I call out, examining the bottle of red I've been handed. Theo emerges in their swimsuit as I turn over the monogrammed card tied to the bottle's neck to find a handwritten note. "Oh, it's from . . . your sister? She must have called ahead. That's sweet of her."

The card says:

Theo,

Might have taken it a bit too far. Sorry. Love you.

—Sloane

P.S. Offer still stands.

"Let me see," Theo says, whisking the bottle and card away. Their face hardens slightly as they read, mouth going sharpish. "Oh, nice. Can't imagine where else we'd find wine in a place like this."

They open the wardrobe and shove it inside. When they turn back to me, they're smiling.

"Are you ready?"

Now, that—that seems like something I wasn't meant to see.

"Let me get my book."

Theo is the first in the pool, naturally.

Past the last villetta and a wall of trees, the grounds unfold into a sloping meadow with a wide swimming pool and panoramic views of the surrounding hills. Lemon-striped loungers fan out under umbrellas in the grass, and I sink into one with my shirt open to the sun and my book open to the last place I left it. The air is hot and perfumed with wisteria, and past the birds and the snip of the gardener shears, I hear the clean, quiet ripples of Theo swimming laps.

Soon others wander to the pool, and a man in yellow linen brings trays of antipasti and buckets of chilled wine. Honeymooners cruise off into the hills on borrowed bikes with wicker baskets. A cook leans out of a green-shuttered window, calling to a maid. Signora Lucia floats about, watering plants with a loving diligence that reminds me of my maman, which is more sweet than bitter in a place like this.

"Mind if I join you?" says Ginger Calum, appearing with a fluffy white towel over his shoulder.

"Not at all."

He hands me a glass of cool amber wine and keeps one for himself. "What is it they say here? Salute?"

"Salute," I repeat, endeared.

"Shady day for this ginger lad," he says, arranging himself under the umbrella on the chaise beside mine. I thought he was flushed with drink last night, but now I see he's sporting a spectacular Florentine sunburn. He pulls a tablet and a battered field journal from his tote. "Just as well. Loads of work to catch up on."

I lift my sunglasses to glance at his pages, jammed full of time-stamped notes and hand-drawn data tables.

"What is it that you do, Calum?"

"Me? I'm a wildlife biologist."

"Is that right?" I pictured him as more of a sexy fireman or Olympic shot-putter. "What kind of animals do you work with?"

"Mostly white pointers for the past year or so, but I'm keen on all Indo-Pacific marine predators. I wrote my dissertation on chemotactile social recognition in the blue-ringed octopus."

I can't imagine a more wonderfully surprising answer from a man I heard belch the French alphabet last week.

"You're a doctor, then?"

He grins. "Don't let Calum hear you say that, he'll take the piss. He's an actual doctor, or so he says."

In the pool, Blond Calum is doing handstands, only his legs and feet poking out of the water. He has a tattoo on his calf of a prawn wearing a cowboy hat.

"That man?"

"Emergency medicine," Ginger Calum says with a fond laugh, as if revealing this is one of his favorite activities. "You should ask him about it. He loves telling horror stories."

Water splashes over my feet, and I peer over my book to see Theo poolside, elbows propped near a tray of sweating cheese and fruit.

"Don't get the crostini wet," I say.

Theo snaps off a branch of grapes and lowers one into their mouth like a Roman emperor.

"You're really not getting in?"

I hold up my book. "I'm on the last chapter. Lucy's going to admit she's in love with George."

"Oh, well"—they push up an invisible pair of glasses—"if Lucy's going to admit she's in love with George."

They kick away, grapes held over their head, and I smile.

When we were in Paris, I watched Theo striding down Boulevard Saint-Germain and wondered if I was seeing what it would have been like if we'd gone on the tour like we planned. I held them beside the image that's lived in my head all these years, the Theo in a parallel life who came with me to France.

But here, in Chianti, I see only what is, not what could have been. Us, in two arcs bent toward each other. Theo in the water, me content to sit by the pool with a book and a view.

For the first time, it seems better this way.

I continue reading, watching Lucy and George come back together, confess their love, and return to Florence to marry. By the time I reach the last page, emotion tingles sweet in my sinuses like prosecco bubbles. A droplet of water lands on my page, and I think I've summoned an actual tear until I hear Theo's voice above.

"You done yet?"

They're standing beside my chair, rivulets of water running down their body. I didn't notice them getting out, but I'm very much noticing now.

"Come on," they say, finishing my wine. "I want to see what they have for lunch."

"Almost finished." A slight wobble in my voice. "One more minute?"

They lower my empty glass to regard me properly.

"Are you crying?"

"It's a beautiful story!"

"Oh, no, he's crying!" Theo crows, and then they're climbing onto the lounger, shaking their damp head over my pages, dripping with malicious intent. Their wet skin skids against mine, cold where mine is warm. I hold the book over my head and settle them with a hand at the small of their back. They wind up half folded across my lap, their knees hooked around my thighs, laughing.

"I'm not embarrassed," I say.

"I know."

"I'm allowing art to touch my soul."

"Okay," Theo says, doing a jerk-off hand gesture, still smiling.

"I'm being transported. I'm experiencing."

"Go on." Theo tugs my book down. "Experience."

They're teasing, but I decide to be earnest. I smooth the page with my free hand and pick up at the final passage, the one smudged with Theo's pool water.

"‘Youth enwrapped them,'" I read aloud, keeping my voice low. "‘The song of Phaethon announced passion requited, love attained. But they were conscious of a love more mysterious than this. The song died away; they heard the river, bearing down the snows of winter into the Mediterranean.'"

For a moment, Theo is quiet. Then they sit up, take a bottle from a nearby ice bucket, and replenish my glass before handing it to me.

"Okay, that was actually really nice." Their eyes are a little soft, faraway. "Will you come to lunch with me?"

We crunch the gravel path back to the villa's dining room, where a long antique buffet painted with vines and rosebuds heaves with food: marbled prosciutto, mozzarella on wheels of eggplant, huge garlic-simmered beans, figs and persimmons picked from the garden and sliced open so their flesh shines in the sunlight from the open windows. We fill our plates and carry them out to the biggest terrazzo.

As we eat, I catch Fabrizio watching us from two tables over, clearly noting the practiced ease with which Theo shoves panzanella onto my plate. I point this out to Theo, who instantly has that devious gleam in their eye. They make sure Fabrizio is still looking, and then they slide their hand into my lap.

This time, there's no tablecloth to hide anything. Just us in our striped chairs before the green backdrop of the garden, Theo's palm on the inside of my thigh where anyone can see. The tip of their middle finger grazes the stretchy hem of my swim trunks.

Part of wants to move their touch higher, but I think of earlier, how they hid the bottle of wine in the wardrobe, how they turned pink when I read the card from Sloane. I wonder what they're trying to conceal behind this.

Gently, I lift their hand up and press a kiss to the center of their palm. I lace my fingers through theirs, resting our hands on the table between us.

They don't pull away, and they don't laugh. They peer into my eyes for a long moment, daring me to act like this too is a bit. When I don't, they put their sunglasses on and return one-handed to their plate as if nothing has changed, but they're pink under their freckles.

After lunch, we borrow bikes and ride into the hills; they blur green-bronze as we take our feet off the pedals and coast. Out here the sun hangs as wonderfully fat in the sky as it did in Florence, but it doesn't scorch. It soaks into the hills like oil into thick, well-risen bread, and we spread ourselves across them like happy little figs.

It's nearly time for aperitivo when we return. We take our amaro behind the villa, to the grove where a gardener tends to young, bright green olives. He plucks two straight off the branch for us to taste and laughs mischievously when we choke on their bitterness. Theo jokes that it's our truest Italian aperitivo yet.

Dinner is served at a long table between the grove and the villa, covered by arching trellises of ivy and twinkling lights. We pass around heavy platters of wild boar ragù and pillowy gnocchi with greens and blistered tomatoes. The food here is rich and hearty, like it's meant to prepare the body to harvest crops instead of luxuriating with carafes of fine wine beneath a crepuscular sky.

Theo sits across from me, sun-kissed and windswept, wearing that lovely black linen thing from our second night in Paris. Fairy lights dapple their skin through the leaves. I want to touch them so badly. I imagine running my fingertip down the center of their chest to the point of their neckline's vee.

I let them catch me looking. I tip the last of my wine past my lips and show them the contours of my jaw, how my throat moves when I swallow. They bite their lip.

Soon, the villa's sweet, muddling magic sweeps us from one moment to the next, and we're retiring to a dark, warm sitting room. Signora Lucia brings out trays of crunchy, almond-flecked cantucci, and Fabrizio pours viscous vin santo into little crystal cups so we can dip the cookies before we eat them, as is the Tuscan way.

It seems it's also the Tuscan way to drape ourselves over antique couches and tell long stories in loud voices, because that's how we spend the rest of the night. I ask Blond Calum for his best emergency medicine stories, knowing I'll hate the answer as much as Theo will love it. The one he decides to share is about his first, long before he began to study.

He and Calum were thirteen, best friends who never paddled out to surf without each other, which was how he was able to act so quickly when Ginger went under in a cloud of red. A white pointer—a great white—had torn a hunk from his shoulder, and he would have bled out if Blond hadn't pulled him onto his board, paddled them both to shore, and pressed a towel to the wound until help arrived. Theo and I listen with our hands over our mouths.

"Cheers to that bloody shark," Blond says, raising his vin santo, "the reason I do what I do."

"Here, here," Ginger agrees, lifting his own glass. "Remarkable creature. Can't hold it against him, can ya?"

"I'll drink to that," Theo says. "Hey, how do you feel about Jaws?"

Eventually, the Calums drift off to their rooms with suspiciously similar timing to Montana and Dakota, and Theo draws me lazily to their side, letting out a long breath when I lean my head on their shoulder. I listen as they tell the Swedes a story about a bottle of wine the Somm's mother left in a window, and then as Lars asks how one bottle could possibly have been worth so much, Theo takes out their phone and dials the Somm on speakerphone.

"Hello, stranger," says the Somm's gruff voice on the third ring.

"Hey!" Theo says, leaning in. "Listen, I'm here in Chianti with a couple of Swedes, and I just told them about your mom's Romanée-Conti. They don't believe that it was worth forty-two grand. Can you back me up here?"

"It would have been, yes."

Lars shakes his head, smiling incredulously. "Unbelievable."

"Thank you!" Theo says. "That's—"

"But, Theo," the Somm interrupts, "you're forgetting the end of the story."

"I am?"

"We opened it, my brother and I, and we drank it," he goes on, "and it was the best goddamn wine I ever tasted."

A slight collapse happens around Theo's brow, as if this information has somehow injured them.

"I did forget that part."

"Hey, why'd you leave me hanging on that Scottsdale distributor thing?" the Somm asks. "Are you studying in Chianti? Have you been tasting? You remember, it was the Chianti subregions that got you on the written exam—"

"I know, I know," Theo says, eyes suddenly wide, "I have them now—"

"You better, if you want to pass this time."

Theo snatches their phone up and ends the call.

The others barely seem to have noticed, and Theo laughs it off, but they won't look at me. They drain their glass, mutter something about being tired, and they're gone.

I've only seen Theo cry three times: when they fell out of a tree and broke their arm at age nine, the first time they saw me after my mother died, and the day I left for New York. It's not that Theo doesn't experience huge emotions. They just muscle it down.

They'll squint and scrunch their nose, as if they're annoyed to waste energy on something so useless, then their face clears, and they keep going.

Right now, they're making that face.

I found them upstairs, tearing apart their backpack to get to their dopp kit. They're at the bathroom vanity now, peeling off their clothes.

"Theo, is there—are you okay?"

"Yeah," they grunt, stepping out of puddled linen and throwing on a T-shirt. "I'm just really tired all of a sudden."

"We can talk about it, if you want. You can tell me."

They try to open their kit, but the zipper is stuck.

"I don't," they snap.

With a furious yank, their kit explodes open and expels its contents all over the floor. They swear and fall to their knees, chasing bottles and tubes.

"Theo," I say, getting down beside them. They swat my hands away. "Theo!"

At last they go still. They sit back on their heels and look up at the terra-cotta ceiling, lip balm and toothpaste clutched in their fists, their face a vivid, mottled red.

"I'm—I fucked up."

"Okay. What happened?"

"It's not even something that happened. I think—I think it's something I am. I'm a fuckup."

"No, you're not," I say, not even beginning to know where this is coming from. I gently work their fingers loose, one by one.

"I am. I'm a fuckup, and I can't stop being one, no matter how much I grow and how hard I try—and I try so fucking hard—" Their voice breaks. They choke it back. "I can't change the fact that it's me. I'm me, and that means I'll keep fucking up forever."

"That's not true. You—"

"I've failed the sommelier exam three times."

That finally pulls my attention from their lip balm. I sit back, watching a muscle clench in Theo's jaw.

"I've been lying to you." Theo's voice is flat, sour. "I didn't plan to lie, just imply, but you were so impressed when you thought I had, and I'm taking it again when I get home, so I thought, you know, if he asked me a month from now it would be true. But, honestly, I'll probably find some new way to fuck it up, so I might as well come clean."

"Okay." I blink slowly, processing. "Is . . . is that all?"

Theo scowls, like this was the wrong thing to say.

"The bus bar is fucked too."

Oh, no. "Fucked how?"

"Upside down. Out of money. Negative money." They start snatching things up and hurling them into their kit. "I get all these big ideas, blow my entire budget on artisanal pickled kumquats and imported Persian saffron for one fucking cocktail, lose track of client emails, and it all gets fucked. I lost that big wedding gig because I got sidetracked with you." Their eyes flash—I can't tell if that's a confession or an accusation. "And now I—I don't see how it's not over. That gig was going to save me. I'm gonna have to sell the bus just to pay off my credit cards. So, I lied about that too. I'm nothing I told you I was. There you go."

They zip the kit up, climb to their feet, and drop it on the bedside table. Then they sit on the edge of the mattress and draw their knees up to their chin, looking absolutely furious with themself.

I sigh and pinch the bridge of my nose.

"Why . . . why would you lie to me about all of that?"

"Because I wanted you to think I had my shit together!" Theo says miserably. "I wanted you to think I'd grown. I wanted you to see me for the first time in four years and be amazed."

"That would have happened no matter what."

They roll their eyes spectacularly. "Whatever. I couldn't have you pity me, and I still can't, so just—please don't look at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you think I could do better," Theo says. "That's how Sloane looked at me too."

"Sloane? Did she—is that why she sent the wine?"

"I tried to talk to her about it, and she sort of laid into me about, you know. My nepo-baby complex."

I frown. "Your . . . ?"

"She tried to give me money. Called it an investment, like it's not charity. And when I said no, she went off about how I make my life harder on purpose just to prove a point."

"Ah. And when was this?"

"In Nice. After I left you with Apolline."

The pieces of the past few days begin to rearrange themselves.

"So, when we got to Monaco, you were . . . ?"

"In full self-destruct, yeah."

I pull myself off the floor and sit on the foot of the bed. Is that all this has been to them, with me? Self-destruction?

I don't know what difference it would make if it was. Does it matter if Theo is fucking me to destroy themself, if I'm destroying myself to fuck Theo?

I push my fingers through my hair and concentrate.

"How do you feel now?"

Theo answers after a long pause, their voice quiet but firm.

"I cannot build a life on being a Flowerday. I want to build a life on being Theo."

"Then don't use the family name," I say. "Or the connections, or the favors—you never needed any of that to be great." I choose my next words carefully. "But, Theo . . . maybe you should consider taking the money."

Theo fixes me with a hard look. "You'd take it, wouldn't you?"

"I would. And then I'd make it mean something."

"That's the problem," Theo insists. "I won't do anything great with it. I'd take Sloane's money and blow it, and that would always be between us. I can't risk that. She's my best friend, and I can't—I can't—"

The unfinished sentence hangs in the air between us: I can't lose another best friend.

"You don't know that's what would happen, Theo."

"Precedent says otherwise," Theo replies. "I want to do all these things on my own, and I—I just can't. It was stupid to think I could."

"Then use the money to hire someone to help you."

"What, and waste someone else's time too? I'm wasting enough on my own."

I put my head in my hands, nearing the purlieu of my patience.

"God, Theo, sometimes you just—"

They round on me, eyes wet.

"What, frustrate you? Well, we have that in fucking common. Don't you think I would fucking love to be different than this?"

"You don't need to!" The words burst out like bitter olive in a press, crushed beyond the limits of my skin. "Je te jure, Theo, I have never met another person with more to offer the world and less faith in themself. You are brilliant, and magnetic, and strong, and impressive and—and vital, and I cannot keep listening to you talk about someone I love like this, so please, for God's sake, stop."

Theo is silent, eyes wide, lips parted in surprise. My heart fills my throat. I realize too late what I've done: I've said I love them. I go on before they realize it too.

"You have it backward," I say. "It's the rest that needs to be solved, not you. Will you hear me, please? You were good enough to get this far. You are good enough to fix it. You are good enough for anything you want, but you have to believe it."

Theo doesn't answer. In the dark room, we sit quietly on opposite ends of the bed, contending with our own hearts.

Slowly, Theo begins to unfold their body. They lie back on the bed with their face to the ceiling and extend an arm toward me, palm open. I ease myself backward, shifting my shoulders until our heads are bent toward each other. I lay my hand over theirs, and they twine our fingers together.

"I don't know where to start," they say.

I tell them, "Anywhere."

We lie on our backs with our arms and legs spread as if we're floating together on a wide sea. Theo takes slow breaths, in and out, until one comes out as a low, rueful laugh.

Gradually, we begin to shift closer. Theo's ankle hooks over mine. My fingers slip to the tender point of their pulse. When I turn my head, I find them already bent toward me, their eyes deep with desire, with some other enormous thing that doesn't look destructive at all. It looks like roots, like something that lives and grows.

"I want to change the rules," Theo says.

"The rules?"

"Our rules."

"Oh."

"I think," Theo says, "we should be able to use our rooms."

I find my smile impossible to resist.

"I did say I would remind you—"

"Don't be a shit," Theo says with a pure affection that wraps tight around my heart. "Yes or no?"

Easy. "Yes."

Our clothes fall to the floor as we tumble across the bed, grasping and grinding and tonguing skin. Theo pushes my shoulders into the mattress and climbs on top of me. They bite my neck, leave a mark on my shoulder, rub the whole front of their body against mine as if they can't get close enough. I gasp and moan when they palm me through my underwear, and they bare their teeth at the sound.

"I missed you," they say, like they said last night in Florence.

"I missed you too," I breathe out.

They pull back to kneel between my legs.

"You know what else I missed?" they say.

They hook their hands behind my knees and shift me into a position that makes my breath hitch. It's an old favorite: my legs spread apart, their hips between them, the soft-hard swell of flesh over their pelvic bone pressed against the cleft of my ass. Like this, it would usually go one of two ways. Sometimes, when we'd had the time and foresight to prepare, Theo would push into me with blunt, slicked silicone until the buckles of their harness met the backs of my thighs. And sometimes, they would take me into their own body, pound their hips into me at such a smooth, relentless pace that it became impossible to tell which of us was fucking the other.

But neither of those things is on the menu tonight. It doesn't matter if I can feel how wet they are through our underwear, or that I'd happily accept whatever they chose to give. Fucking can encompass a thousand different things that aren't fucking, and our rules permit so many of them.

As if they can hear my thoughts, they say with tight, meted remove, "I want to propose another amendment."

"I'm open to that," I say, just as taut.

"I would like to get your cock out."

Something like a solar eclipse happens inside my brain. I stare directly into it and go momentarily blind.

"But," they go on, "I'm not going to touch it."

"You're—you're not?"

"No," they say, "you are. And I'll tell you how."

"I—I think that was already allowed, technically."

"Don't be such a fucking priss."

I smile, tipping my chin up.

"Don't like it so much, then."

Theo's grip hardens, but their expression does the opposite.

"Is that a yes?"

"Yes. Fucking—yes, but I'll need lube."

At the exact same moment, we reach for our toiletry kits on opposite nightstands. We stop, then burst into laughter.

"What's yours?" Theo asks. "Fucking organic unrefined coconut oil?"

I feel around my kit for its familiar shape, tossing it on the bed as Theo tosses theirs.

"Coconut oil can cause yeast infections," I say. "I'm a more considerate lover than that."

Theo eyes my travel-sized, fifteen-mil vial of lube. "That's not a lot."

"I packed refills."

"Hm." They nod thoughtfully, as if they're not currently bending me up like a Bavarian pretzel. "Sustainable."

I read the label on Theo's much bigger, sapphire-blue pump bottle, feeling lightheaded. "Aloe based? And you called me bougie."

"Shut up," they say, and I do.

True to their word, they don't touch me. I lift my hips at an instructive raise of their eyebrows, and they tug my underwear down until it cups the bottom of my ass, leaving me heavy and hard and exposed to the honeyed lamplight and the mild breeze carrying distant, wine-loose conversation through the open windows. They stare down at me, at the bright, wet glisten of anticipation already showing.

"Still so pretty when you're needy," they murmur, like I'm not meant to hear. I respond anyway, hitch a low whine in the back of my throat to make them claim it.

They look up then, directly into my eyes, and take their hand away.

"Hands on the pillow. Don't move them until I tell you."

Again, I do as I'm told. Theo shifts, widening their knees, then takes a small, blunt thing from their kit and slips it into their underwear. A pause—their teeth dig into their lip in a moment of disorientingly adorable concentration—and then comes the low rumble of their little vibe switching on.

A short huh punches out of them. They roll their hips forward, using my body to pin the pressure where they need it, and through the single layer of fabric separating us, the hum resonates into me, into the muscle they once trained with their fingers.

"Fu—uck," I exhale.

For a while, I'm happy to simply watch, pacified with how gorgeous they are grinding against my ass, making themself feel good. But it's hu?tres gratinées for apéro, too rich and too filling to prime the palate and not enough for a meal. I pitch my voice up, rut uselessly against air, heart-wrenchingly untouched.

"Please," I say. "Tell me to do something."

Theo kisses the bend of my knee and says, generously, "Get yourself wet."

My hands snatch up the nearest bottle—Theo's—and then I'm gasping at the shock of cold lube on warm, sensitive skin. Theo answers with an approving snap of their hips, so I make the sound again as I work myself over.

"What now, Theo?"

I can feel the plaintive look on my face, how readily I've shown them my throat and the whites of my eyes, and my heart swells at the thought that I'm being easy for them. I want to remind them how good they can be at something when they decide to be, how well they can take control, see a plan to completion.

"Go slow." They keep their voice low and steady even as their hips shift into a higher gear, core muscles flexing. "Tease yourself for me. Okay?"

"Yes. Okay, yes."

Theo gives calm, short commands, and my hand and body listen. They talk me through every change in pressure and speed, every twist of my wrist and slick glide of my palm. They push my knees toward my chin until my thighs burn, ease me through to blissful, slack surrender, I know you can do it, beautiful, you can take more, guide me right up to the precipice and then make me stop and watch them come instead. Then they start over.

I'd be screaming with frustration if I weren't so fucking happy to see it. So relieved, so proud. This is what Theo can do. The command, the deliberate force of will and want, the total inhabitance of their body, the fucking range to fuck me better than any person ever has or could, the power of that, the breathtaking endlessness of it. They're a catastrophe like an earthquake is a catastrophe, an act of the gods. They're the crumbling of an empire and the simple, immediate crash of glass on the floor for good luck. They're everything, and they're Theo. Singular Theo, everlasting Theo, Theo the superbloom.

Finally, somewhere in the valley of it, in the cleavage of hills and the ripe, red center of vines, Theo kisses my face and speaks in a voice I've heard in my dark, empty flat a thousand times when I'm bringing myself over the edge, "Come for me, Kit, let me see you." And that's so easy to give, because the only thing I want more than release is for Theo to be looking at me.

When I finish at last—at long fucking last, God—it's with a broken half sob, my free hand knotted in Theo's hair, release spilling over my own skin. Theo's mouth falls open as they watch, and a second orgasm seems to take them by total surprise. A soft, awed sound wrenches out.

For a long time after, I just look into their eyes, and they stare wonderstruck into mine, and I feel the same magnificent fear from this morning, like I'm seeing a part of them I'm not supposed to. I nearly look away. But they wrap me in their arms, and they don't let go, even after they fall asleep.

I let myself wonder if maybe, just once, when I heard their voice in my ear in my bed in the 6th, they were on the other side of the world, hearing mine.

Morning floods across the wood and terra-cotta ceiling, turning everything to pure, pale wheat and apricot. The villa is quiet, and the smell of baking bread wafts up from the kitchens. Breakfast must not even be laid out yet.

I lift my head to look at Theo in this light while it lasts: the shape of their mouth, the dip of their collarbone, the gentle shadow cast by their nose that pools with the darkening freckles on their cheeks. It's been so long since I woke up peacefully beside Theo, and a whole life waiting to wake to this Theo.

When I'm satisfied, I slide out of the sheets.

In Paris, the quiet hours before I get dressed are my favorite hours of the day. I make the rounds to my houseplants, or write grocery lists, or mend socks with a darning needle and yarn, or fold the clean laundry hung to dry in the window. It's when I feel most full of possibility, like I could solve anything. So, this morning, I take a sketchbook down to the gardens and contemplate how I could help Theo.

It's not until I'm settling against a fountain that I realize one other person is wandering the estate: Signora Lucia, carefully clipping today's flower arrangements. I look on quietly as a breeze stirs her dress around her, surrounded by cosmos and zinnias, dahlias and roses. She sees me and smiles, waving with a gloved hand.

She really does remind me of my mother.

Maman loved Theo like a fourth child, and Theo loved her like a second mother. Outside of Ollie and Cora, there's nobody on earth who knows the exact shape and flavor and weight of losing her. That was one of the sharpest pains of losing Theo: losing this vestigial piece of my mother too, the deposit of her love in Theo's heart. It's been nice to talk about her without explaining anything.

Signora Lucia carries her flowers off toward the villa, and I sketch and think of Theo. It must be around seven now. Serving spoons clank against platters in the distance, quiet conversations twinkling to life on the terrazza. A few guests have come out for coffee and fruit, but most are sleeping off their late night. I expect Theo to do the same.

But minutes later, Theo comes tromping into the garden, dressed in boots and light jeans and a barely buttoned shirt.

"I knew you'd be here," they call, affecting the snobbish voice they used in the pool to tease me about my reading, "doing your morning taxonomy exercises."

I grin. "However else will I win the vicar's favor? I never learned pianoforte."

"Blow him," they suggest. "Hey, do you want to go for a bike ride before we leave? Apparently there's a trail that goes past an old castle. Twenty minutes each way. Could be cool."

"Aren't we loading up soon?"

"Not for another hour and a half. And I put our bags on the bus, so we don't have to go back up. We'll be fast."

I shift my weight, deliberating. My phone is in my pack, so I can't keep us on schedule. I'll have to rely on Theo. I can see the anxious hope in their eyes, a subtle, sunny glow.

"Alright," I say. "Which way?"