Love, Theoretically

My first thought is I’m going to buy him curtains.

My second: I’m going to do without cheese, insulin, and possibly toilet paper for the next six months. To save up. To buy him curtains.

Blackout. Rod pocketed. Floor to ceiling.

It’s unacceptable, falling asleep that late and then waking up at what—seven thirty? Eight? Nine? Just because some guy doesn’t know that shades exist. Seems like a pretty simple concept to—

“I’ll get you a sleep mask.”

I open my eyes and I think, Blue. Which—less than one-eighth of his eyes is blue. It makes no sense. “How do you know what I was—?”

“Your frown woke me up,” he says, voice rough with sleep. He shifts in a stretching yawn, and it’s like a seismic event, a huge tectonic fault shifting under the crust of the earth. Because during the night, I ended up facedown on top of Jack.

“How?” I ask.

“You moved around a lot,” he says. “Felt like the easiest way to keep you from kicking my shins.”

“Wait—when did you—?”

“About five minutes after you fell asleep.”

“Wow.” I should move away. But he makes for a good bed, firm and bulky and warm. I’m groggy with sleep that was either not enough or too intense, and don’t want to leave just yet.

For once, I feel myself, my body. Jack’s hand is on my lower back, under the hoodie. My feet are wrapped around his shins. His mouth is several inches away, but also accessible, and I reach for it.

I aim for a simple peck, suspecting a mess of rotten-eggy morning breath, but there’s none of that. He tastes like himself, familiar, and deepens the kiss into something gentle, slow, deliciously lazy. Time doesn’t exist. This bed is the expanse of the universe. We’re still dreaming, tucked safely inside our heads.

There is no urgency in him, no pressure point. Just the unhurried rhythm of his tongue against mine, leisurely patterns traced against my skin. His heartbeat speeds up but remains steady. His breathing grows shallow, but I know it only from the rise and fall of his chest against mine.

It’s a good way to wake up. I want to wake up exactly like this again and again and again. I want to feel the blinding sunrays wash over us, and this new brightness inside me, fragile and scalding hot all at once.

Maybe that’s why there are no curtains. In the light, it’s easy to feel brave. All those things I’m scared of seem conquerable, and honesty is almost effortless.

“Jack?” I pull back, balancing on my palms, one on each side of his head. My hair has come undone and drapes around us like a shrine.

“Elsie.” His palms come up to hold my face.

“I . . .” I’m not scared. I’m just not. “I lied.”

His mouth quirks sleepily. “Which time?”

I glare. “I hate you.”

“Sure.” His thumbs swipe gently over my cheeks. Lovingly. Because that’s what this is about. “What’s this lie you speak of?”

“I said I didn’t know. But I do.”

“Know what?”

I swallow. “Where this is going. Where we’re headed. The two of us.”

Something thickens between us, dense and weighty. I know. He knows. We’ve acknowledged it. It’s almost a sign, the universe’s permission to move forward. Jack’s eyes are warm and probing, and he says, “Come here.”

I don’t remember taking off my bra last night, but I must have, because when he tosses my hoodie to the floor, my too-pale skin is bare in the blinding light. I don’t even want to ask him to look away.

Jack sees me. And it’s okay.

“Come here,” he repeats, and his mouth’s on mine, insistent, brakeless this time. Like he’s kissing me for now, for all the times he couldn’t before, for later, too. Whatever it was that held him back yesterday, two nights ago, the past two weeks, it melts in the morning sun.

You, a voice suggests. All those Elsies that aren’t really you are what stood between him and this.

I’m out of breath when he sits up to take his shirt off, and this—this is actually new. He’s almost as undressed as I am, we’re equals, and when he tries to pull me down to him, I shake my head and begin to inspect him. I sit astride his hips, riding him as though he were a mellow, compliant beast instead of the most dangerous thing in my life.

“I used to . . . Back before my interview, I used to try to picture them.” I trace the inside of his elbow. “Your tattoos.”

He will stay where he is, but he can’t help touching me. His hand comes up to my rib cage, thumb stroking the outside of my breast. “How did you know I had tattoos?”

I swallow. “I could see the end of one.”

“Ah.” His thumb moves to my nipple, feathery light. I arch into the touch. “What did you think they were?”

“Barbed wire. A Bon Jovi quote. Elon Musk’s face.”

“Jesus.”

I laugh, but I’m not breathing easily. “Sorry.”

His tattoos are beautiful. The Dirac equation. The electron cloud. Beta decay. The Fibonacci spiral. Kinematic models, astral planes, Drake’s formula, the molecular structure of MBBA. Black strokes of faded ink interlocked together in a beautiful painting. The entire foundation of modern physics is on his broad shoulder, wrapped around his large biceps. I trace every line of it, every curve and every corner, and he lets me explore. Vibrating with restraint, but he does. I’ve never been so selfish before, never taken up so much time for something that is only mine, and I think he knows. I think that’s why he allows it.

“Remember how it was?” I ask. “Learning them for the first time? The Schrödinger equation. The standard model.”

He nods. His throat bobs. He’s hard under my core, patiently impatient. “Knowing that the universe can be made sense of.”

“Made of patterns. Rules that can be learned, discovered, predicted.”

“Find them out, and you’ll know how to make the world into what you want,” he says.

“Find them out, and you’ll know how to make yourself into what the world wants,” I say in return.

We regard each other for a moment. My hands are on him, and his hands are on me, and I’m thinking of two-, five-, ten-year-old Jack, alone in the world, calling someone Mom, being told not to. The only fair-haired Smith. I’m thinking of a young boy determined to shape his surroundings. He chose his own world in the end, didn’t he? Greg. Millicent. His friends. He carved a place for himself.

And I’m certain he’s thinking of me. All the Elsies I’ve created to fit all the worlds I’ve inhabited, all the people in them. He’s stripping them off me one by one, like he has since the day we met.

We’re not so different, you and I, I think, and then hear myself exhaling hard. I’ve been holding my breath without realizing it. “I know where we’re going,” I say again, feeling the certainty of it deep within my bones, like Dirac, like relativity, the strong interaction between quarks and gluons, and he takes it like what it is: permission to take charge, to roll us over, pin me underneath him.

He takes my panties off. Slides them under his pillow—hoarding, like a dragon. “You could be my entire world,” he whispers in my ear before moving to my collarbone. “If you let me.”

I stroke his hair. “I think I will.”

“Then I’m sorry.”

“What are you—ah, what are you sorry for?”

He’s making room for himself between my legs, spreading them open, touching me there purposefully, exploringly, urgently, like he’s looking for answers. Do I want this? Am I ready? Am I wet enough? Yes. Yes. I don’t know.

“Because I’m never going to let you go.”

I moan. His erection brushes against my stomach, and I reach down for him. I want to feel him, too. I want to touch him. But the second my hand closes around him through his pants, he seems to stutter. His expression blanks and then he inhales sharply. He is hard. He’s really hard.

“Stop,” he orders, choked.

I obey. But say, “Honesty? I’d like to keep going.”

He’s not sure whether to believe me. But he lets me push us on our sides, and when I slide my fingers past his waistband, he’s still, motionless but for the movement in his throat.

“You don’t like this?” I ask.

“I do,” he rasps.

“You seem . . .”

“It’s new for me, too.”

I laugh softly. “Hand jobs?”

“Being with someone that I . . .” He doesn’t finish. My fingers wrap around him, and his eyes drop shut. He seems to fall backward. Into himself. “Fuck.”

I pump up and down, but it’s weird, clumsy, with his pants on. He’s too distracted by my touch, and I have to tug at the waistband several times before he understands that I want him to pull them down.

“Can you tell me? How do you like this?” I ask, adjusting my grip. I need two hands. Yes, it’ll be better with two hands. Still an awkward position, but also intimate, how close we are. Nice. I smell him deep in my nostrils and he’s good. So good.

“I like it too much, Elsie.”

“No, I—” I shake my head against his chest. “Tell me how you do this. When you’re alone.”

“This is—fuck, it’s good. Just . . . slow for now. Steady. And if you—the head—yes. Yes, there.”

“What else?”

I hear him swallow. “Your voice.”

“I . . . What?”

“Just speak.”

“I’m not . . .” Laughter bubbles out of me. “I don’t think I can do dirty talk.”

“You can go with nematics. You can count to ten. I don’t care, just—”

“I . . . I could talk about George’s offer. How I’ve been seriously considering. If I accepted, we’d be working together. I’d be at MIT with you next year. I’d earn a livable amount of money, so maybe we could go to lunch together sometimes. I’d buy—”

He makes a deep, guttural sound. His hand moves down between our bodies, and I think he’s about to shoo me away, but his head dips forward and his fingers tighten around his balls, then fist around mine. “I want to fuck you,” he says into my hair. “Please, let me fuck you.”

I simply nod.

It’s beautiful, having him on top of me. He’s so wide and heavy, I’d have expected feeling constrained, unpleasantly held down, but there’s none of that. I wrap my arms around his neck, tip my chin up to kiss him, let him press me into the mattress and deliciously contain me.

And then, when his stomach slides across mine, I get a stab of panic.

“Wait.”

He stops instantly. Looks down at me, watchful.

“If it’s not good, we’re going to work on it. Right?”

He laughs against my lips. “It’s already the best sex I’ve ever had.”

“But if—”

“Yeah.” He eases my legs open, or maybe they spread all on their own. His cock pushes against my abdomen first and then slides down the wet mess of my folds, slots against my entrance. “We will.”

It suddenly seems improbable that this is going to work. He’s much bigger than J.J., and even though I was aware of this before, at some abstract, theoretical level, the practical implications are now glaringly obvious. This is a physical impossibility. That, or it’s going to hurt like hell. And this is the part of sex I’ve always liked the least—someone pushing inside me, and me struggling to adjust, to keep up, to accept. I imagine it will be the same, and for a split second I wonder if I could bear it, not liking this. With Jack.

It’s new, worrying about my own enjoyment. I’m contemplating it, vaguely dumbfounded, when something changes.

Jack presses into me.

The head of his cock slides inside, just one or two inches.

My body contracts around him in a small spasm.

I let out a choked cry, and he slurs something that sounds like “Fuck” against my cheek. I arch into him as air rushes out of my lungs, trying to get closer, trying to chase that feeling.

This is—nice. Really, really nice. Unprecedentedly nice. Maybe I’m just wet enough, maybe I’m more relaxed than ever, but he’s not even halfway inside and I’m fluttering around him, the tingling of an orgasm already deep inside my belly.

“Holy fuck,” Jack rasps, and helps me go after whatever this is. His hand slips between us, thumb pressing against my clit, and I tighten even more around him, a reedy whimper coming out of my throat, mixing with his loud groan.

My head whites out. I’m confused. Dizzy. I don’t think I came, but this is good in a way I cannot even begin to parse. This feels right, and my body knows, because it welcomes Jack inside like I’m where he belongs.

So maybe you like to be full.

Yes. Yes. It appears that I do like to be full.

“Is it all in?”

He shakes his head. I consider laughing in his face, telling him that he’s lying, but he’s in no shape to do so. His eyes are glassy. The arm he’s propped himself up on is shaking on the side of my head, like the effort to pace himself is somewhere above the realm of what’s human.

“You’re . . . big.”

He nods, like he knows and it doesn’t matter. My nipples are hard pebbles against the expanse of his chest, and the contact is exquisite. I could come just from this—rubbing myself against him.

I let out a reedy laugh. “Is this what sex feels like for normal people?” I ask, moving my hips, circling, tipping back and forth, just to see where this could end up going. The possibilities are tantalizing.

“No one has felt like this in all of history,” he tells me, voice deep and shaky, and then he’s kissing me hard, his tongue licking inside my mouth, and after a few seconds of that I’m softer, I’m open, I’m lost, and it takes only two upward thrusts, one forceful and the other almost accidental. Then I’m taking him right to the hilt, feeling his sack flush against me, and it feels like something dreamt, something meant to be.

“Fuck,” he murmurs again, but I barely hear him. I focus on my own body, the way it’s stretched full. I feel Jack in the bones of my skull, in the tips of my toes, and everywhere in between. I thrum, flutter gently around him, and even though I’ve never been this close to anyone else, it’s still not enough. He must know, because he gathers me off the mattress in his arms. I am completely, utterly surrounded by him, by the perfect tension of this moment, and Jack begins to push in and out of me, in and out, delicious rhythm and drawn-out friction.

I cannot take it. It’s too brilliantly, stupidly good. My head lolls back against his pillow, and his lips find my jaw, nip my chin, bite my neck. “I’m going to fuck you everywhere, Elsie.” He licks the hollow of my throat. “Between today and the day we die, I’m going to fuck you everywhere.”

I nod. Let him know that he can. There is a tight, liquid pool blooming inside my stomach, twitches of pleasure making their way down my limbs, surging up my spine. I reach for Jack again, pull him to me for the kisses I want, but it doesn’t work. We’re too raw, too new at this, too desperate to catch every drop of this. Our lips press together, then they pause, forgotten by both of us.

“Can you come like this?” he asks, his breath a hot wash against my ear.

I’m drifting away. I’ll never hear his voice and not think of this. Of the deep, rough bite of it sinking inside my brain. Of the whispered Yes and This way and Perfect and—

“Elsie.” His body trembles around mine. On the verge of tipping over. “Can you come this way?”

“I don’t know. I—maybe?” I’m close, I think. About to snap. It’s phenomenal, the way he hits everywhere inside me at once, a masterpiece of biology that something could work so gloriously, and I just need a little more—just a little more—

“Shit.” His thrusts quicken, he buries his face in my throat, and I think he’s getting close. I think he didn’t expect it. He doesn’t want to come, not yet, but this might be fully out of his control.

And it’s what I want. To see him lost in something. “You’re good. This is good,” I urge him, and the word is such a paltry substitute when what I mean is This is the best thing I’ve ever felt and Thank you and Whatever you want, really, whatever you want, just take it.

“Fuck,” he says again, and I see it in his face, the second it’s all over for him. His hand closes around my hip, holding me to him while he presses as far as he can go, and then I feel his cock jump in quick, jerky movements. “Elsie.”

I’m moaning. He’s gasping. His skin slides against mine, sweaty, and my body clamps down on him. His back tenses into a slab, and I hold him while his hips turn erratic, then stop, then—

The heat spreading inside me comes to a halt. I watch Jack’s eyes go blank, feel him bite my collarbone like I’m his anchor, like he wants to be reminded that I’m really here. The grunts he lets out come from somewhere deep inside him, somewhere I doubt he himself knows, and I hold him to myself until his orgasm dies down to a few clumsy, involuntary thrusts.

I’m still buzzing with thrumming, unsnapped tension. And it should be frustrating—it is frustrating that he came and I didn’t, that there’s heat pushing against the seams of me, simmering from within. But it was good anyway. And after a moment he pulls out, breaths rapid and choppy, and looks down at me. His expression is shaken, a little astonished.

“Shit,” he breathes into my neck, his heart a drum against my skin. I cannot stop trembling. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I—”

He pushes my legs open with his palms, and I arch like a rainbow when he slides two of his fingers inside me, feeling blissfully full again.

He can kiss me properly now, soft, deep, hungry, and says, “Let me—I’m going to—”

He’s more reptilian brain than anything else. I’m wet with his come and my own slick, and he draws fast, beautiful circles around my clit that immediately push me over the edge. I shut my eyes tight and come in strong waves, and when I do, he pushes inside me again, something delicious to clench around, something beautiful and grounding, and when we fall asleep like that, I think that wherever it is that we’re going, maybe, just maybe, it might turn out to be a place I never want to leave.