Love, Theoretically

When I wake up, the sun is high in the sky, and shadows have shortened to little stumps. It’s the latest I’ve been in bed since that time I got the flu during freshman year and spent forty-eight hours hallucinating that my skin was an eggshell and my skeleton had finally grown enough to hatch out of it.

There are no nightmares today. Just a feeling of bone-deep rest and Jack’s big body curved behind me, arms wrapped around my torso like a cross, securing me to him. It’s not unlike the way I awoke exactly two weeks ago. Except that we’re naked, our skin tacky. This time he is going to have to change the sheets.

Something nags at the back of my skull, telling me that I can’t afford to waste time, that I should get out of bed and be productive—answer emails, clean the oven, buy a cemetery plot. I shush it and stretch in Jack’s arms. He stays asleep, hard once again. I wonder if it’s another peerection. If—

“A what?”

Oh shit. “Nothing.” Did I say it out loud?

Jack’s voice is a deep rumble. “Did you just—”

“No. Nope. I—”

I hide my face in my pillow. This is why I don’t sleep in—if I get the amount of rest I actually need, my head-to-mouth filter stops working and—

Jack’s hand slides down past my stomach. He starts grinding drowsily against my ass, and my mind blanks.

“Okay?” he asks, half-asleep.

“Please.” I hook my foot behind his shin. He presses an open-mouthed kiss on the curve of my shoulder.

“You did say that we might have to work on the sex.”

I stiffen. If it wasn’t good, I said. Was it not good? I thought it was, but—what do I know? He’s the expert here. “I’m sorry, I—”

“Elsie. Work on how little I last.” He bites the spot where he kissed me, and then his cock is rubbing against me, breaching my entrance. He makes a few soft, grunt-like noises next to my ear, then presses to the hilt in one single push. I spasm around him, and the drag against my muscles is sun-extinguishingly good. It’s still a snug fit, but I’m wet from his come, soft from sleep, and he slides inside like a dream.

He pinches my hard nipple, like he knows exactly what my body wants, even when I don’t. His palm presses against my abdomen, and I wonder if he can feel himself move within me, if he can tell how full I am. His thrusts are long and slow, at once leisurely and forceful enough to shift my entire body closer to the headboard.

“Okay, okay, I—” He laughs ruefully, breathless against my throat, and I reach behind me. To touch his cheek, to hold on to him. “Maybe you should be in charge. Before I fuck you into the mattress again.”

Shockingly, I’m still capable of blushing. “What do I—”

“Just—move.” He presses a kiss where my neck meets my shoulder. “Do what feels good. Let me see you—yes. Yeah.”

I grind my ass against his abdomen, shallow, slow, awkward at first, because the position is weird and because what even am I doing? But my hips circle in a long, sinuous move, and something hits just right, and—

We gasp in unison.

“There?” he murmurs against my ear, angling my hips to give me even more. “That’s how I make you come?”

My mind blurs. “You already made me come.”

He makes a guttural noise. “I want to feel it. When my cock is inside you.”

I moan, and then I’m not in charge anymore. The pleasure gushes inside me, scarily strong, quicker than I thought possible, unraveling like an avalanche. I squeeze his fingers and he squeezes back, and when my body clamps down on his, he does press me into the mattress, and he does fuck me like his control is not fully there, and he does say my name over and over, like a war chant. He smells like sex and our sweat and the best sleep I’ve ever had, murmurs sweet, filthy things in my ear, promises that he’ll never let me go.

The sun is high in the sky, Jack is deep inside me, and I smile into the sheets for no particular reason.

•   •   •

I think I might be happy.

Though due to a lack of hands-on experience, I cannot be sure.

But in the bathroom, while chasing droplets down Jack’s throat, my legs wrapped around his waist as he pushes me into the tiled wall, I wonder if maybe this is it. This warm, comforting weight glowing shyly behind my sternum could be something like hope.

Hope that there’ll be more days like this one.

“Stop smiling like that,” he whispers in my ear. The jet of the shower pounds over his back, and his lips taste like hot water. “Or I’ll be on you all day.”

I laugh into his neck and pretend I didn’t hear him.

The clock in the bathroom, the one I imagine Jack curses at when he runs late in the morning, reads 12:37. I towel myself dry, buzzing with possibilities, with the tenuous, burgeoning impression that for once I’m not running away, but heading somewhere.

“Food,” he tells me once I’m wearing my—his—hoodie and a pair of socks that won’t stay up on my calves. His smile is handsome, self-deprecating. “I have these elaborate daydreams that I’m feeding you a five-course meal I hunted, field-dressed, and prepared all by myself,” he says with a kiss on my forehead.

“Why?”

He gives me an arch look. “Don’t ask why, like it’s a rational impulse. So, what do you want?”

“What can you make?”

“Nothing.” He shrugs at my startled laugh, then throws me over his shoulder to take me downstairs. I feel like a sparkly drink. “I’ll learn. It’s a new obsession for me.”

I can’t remember the last time I giggled this much.

The five-course meal turns out to be slightly burned grilled cheese with boxed tomato soup. I sit on my stool at the island, and he eats his own standing across from me. It’s simultaneously the most ordinary and the best thing I’ve ever tasted.

On my phone there is a text from Cece, time stamp 9:23 a.m.

CECE: “I’ll never spend the night at Jack’s,” she said. “I’m destined to die alone, strangled by the tumble of cobwebs that have overtaken my vulva due to sexual inactivity,” she said.

I laugh, and Jack smiles just because of that, which is a little unlike him and also stupid. He’s stupid. I’m stupid. We’re stupid. Or maybe we’re just sixteen. Jack Smith, Jack Smith-Turner, Jonathan Smith-Turner and I have had sex. More than once. More than more than once. And now we’re having breakfast at one p.m. This is not my timeline, but I’ll claim it anyway.

I tell him about the science of grilled cheese, the negative surface charge of the lipid molecules, stress and strain, the optimal pH, which should always be somewhere around 5.5. (“Manchego, then,” he says. “Or mild cheddar. Gouda, too.”) My heart is spinning dizzily at the thought of this man who knows the pH of different cheese types off the top of his head, when my phone beeps.

A reminder to change my insulin pod. I consider putting it off till I’m home, then look at Jack and think, Honesty. This day, this not-too-good soup, this man with a black-hole tattoo peeping out of his T-shirt sleeve, they are too good to not spend some honesty on.

“I’m going to need a few minutes upstairs,” I say, hopping off the stool. “But I’ll be back.”

“What’s going on?”

“Just need to change my insulin pod.” I rummage in my purse and then hold my kit up triumphantly—a pale yellow bag with little hedgehogs Cece got me years ago. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to be there. I know people get squeamish. I’ll do it in your bedroom—”

“Show me how you do it.”

He puts down what’s left of his sandwich. Washes his hands.

I laugh. “Why?”

“Because I want to know.”

“Why would you—oh my God. You want to put high-fructose corn syrup in my insulin. Was this a long con to murder me?”

He smiles and shakes his head. “I’m starting to be partial to the way you bypass all rational explanations for everything I say, and dash straight to me being an unhinged serial killer.”

“I think it’s our thing.”

His biceps bunch up when he leans his palms against the table. “Show me how it works,” he repeats. It sounds like a soft order, and I answer with a soft question:

“Why?”

“Because I want to know these things.”

There’s something unsaid in this. Because I want to know your life, maybe, or Because I want to know you. My eyes fall on the kit, and I picture myself using words like reservoir and expiration advisory and ketoacidosis. Explaining how each component works. I’ve never said some of those words out loud. They live exclusively in my head, together with the rest of my problems.

Even Cece knows only the basics. But this is Jack. So I swallow. “Do you have any disinfectant?”

The dimple is back. “I thought you’d never ask.”

Less than an hour later, I settle between his long legs on the couch, toes brushing against his calves, his hand splayed on my stomach under the hoodie. He refuses to watch the end of Twilight (“I think I’ve seen enough”) but agrees with me that New Moon is the best in the series (“Relativistically”), curls around me for a two-hour nap during Eclipse (“You smell like me—you should always smell like me”), and then wakes up as the afternoon stretches into evening, just in time for Bella’s unexpected pregnancy.

“This is atrocious,” he says, laughing at every single thing the characters do.

“Shut up.”

He laughs harder against my nape.

“Shut up—she could die!”

More laughter.

“It’s about the hardships and sorrows of the universal human experience, Jonathan.”

He nibbles on my ear a little too hard. “Still better than 2001, Elsie.”

“Obviously.” Something occurs to me. “By the way, is Millicent okay?”

“Yup. Why do you ask?”

“It’s Sunday. Shouldn’t she be calling you with a vital emergency? Isn’t the newspaper boy tossing the Times into her rosebushes or something?”

“Pretty sure newspaper delivery hasn’t worked like that since the early 2000s. And she did her weekend routine yesterday. Sent a photo of an alligator coming out of a toilet in a Florida gas station. Claimed it was happening in her en suite.”

“She knows how to send pictures?”

“Impressive, right?” He drums his fingers against my stomach. “I stopped by for lunch. Gave her the novel. Got scolded for not taking you.”

“Oh.” I flush. With . . . pleasure?

“Can’t remember the last time she liked someone. Not that she’d admit to liking you.”

I laugh. Then, after a few seconds, I hazard, “She told me she liked your mom.”

There is a change in Jack, but not for the worse. He doesn’t stiffen, just seems less relaxed, a little more on guard when he says, “I think so.”

I’m encouraged. “She was a physicist, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Theoretical?”

He lets out a deep, overacted sigh that lifts me up and down. “Unfortunately.” I pinch his forearm in retaliation. Rudely, he doesn’t notice.

I’m tempted to bring up the article. Find out how he could do something like that to his mother—to all of us—and demand that he take ownership of its consequences. But I also don’t want to disrupt this . . . fragile, new, radiant thing we have. And after a bit of arm wrestling, the latter pull wins, and what I ask is “Do you have memories of her?”

I feel him shake his head. “She died too early.”

“Did she”—I roll around till I’m facedown on top of him—“look like you?”

“There aren’t many pictures. My family mostly scrubbed the house clean of them.”

If he’s bitter about it, I cannot tell. “When did you take her last name?”

He laughs softly. “That was Millicent’s decision, actually. She had me legally change it when I was ten. I think she felt uncharacteristically guilty.” He pushes a strand of hair behind my ear. “I do know that she was Swedish. Blond. Her eyes had the same weird . . .”

“Heterochromia?”

“Yeah. She was taller than my father. And kept some detailed diaries about her work. Millicent gave them to me when I started becoming obsessed with physics.”

“Did she have any publications?”

His jaw works. “Just two. She got married halfway through her doctorate and didn’t go back to work after she had me. Her diagnosis came quickly after.” His tone is wary, like he’s choosing his words carefully.

“Why didn’t she go back?”

He exhales. “There were . . . issues. With the lead researcher of her group.”

“Why?”

“They had some . . . disagreement over their joint research. He was intensely controlling. She refused to abide. You can imagine the rest.” His face is blank. “Her diaries are . . . She wasn’t well when she found out that she wouldn’t be allowed back.”

“That’s bullshit. How dare he cut her out of her own research group?”

Jack doesn’t respond. His pause feels a little longer than normal. “Her work was on semiconductors.”

My eyes widen. It’s not my field, but I know a bit about it, because it’s one of the topics my mentor works on. I wonder if I read Jack’s mom’s papers years ago without even realizing it. An invisible string, tying us together. “Good stuff?”

“Very solid, yes.”

“I bet she was great. I mean, she was a theoretical physicist.”

“True. On the other hand, she did marry my dad.”

“Good point. Maybe he used to be more . . . engaged with his surroundings?”

“Maybe. Maybe she needed a green card? Or the Smith money.”

“She was a grad student. It’s a move I can respect.”

“For sure.” His smile is fond. And has me asking, “Do you miss her?”

A long pause. “I don’t think you can miss someone you’ve never met, but . . .” He organizes his thoughts. Orders his feelings. “It’s easy to look at how dysfunctional my family is and laugh it off now that I have my own life. But when I was in my teens, there were times when things got really bad at home. And I’d read her diaries and think that maybe if she’d been around, everything could have been . . .” His throat works. “But she wasn’t.”

I’ve felt out of place my entire life, and nothing anyone ever said made me feel any less so. So I stay silent and just lean forward, hide my face in Jack’s throat, press a kiss to his Adam’s apple right as it moves. His hand comes up to cup my head, keep it there, and I feel him turn to the screen again. Bella’s pregnancy complications are getting alien-like, and he groans into my hair.

“Elsie. I can’t watch this.”

“But it’s the best part. The emotional roller coaster of her transformation. The inappropriate Jacob plotline. Her face when she drinks blood.”

“No way.”

“Fine. You may amuse yourself otherwise. But stay close, because you’re a space heater disguised as an organic life-form.”

“Perfect.” He lifts me like I’m a pliant little thing, flips us around, braces himself over me. I can only watch him in confusion while he lowers himself down my body with a concentrated frown between his brows and then lifts my hoodie as though . . .

Is he . . .

He’s not . . .

Is he actually?

“What are you doing?”

“You told me to amuse myself.”

I sit up on my elbows. “I meant take another nap, or do today’s Wordle—”

“Just watch your movie, Elsie.”

“But—”

He takes my hips within his hands and holds me like I’m a precious artifact, at once firm and gentle. His kisses between my legs are long, savoring, messy, slow licks that have me arching up against the couch and trembling into his mouth. There is something shameless about this—the way he enjoys it, the sounds he makes, the fact that he seems to go away at moments, like he does this for his pleasure more than for my own.

“Oh,” I say, clawing my nails into his scalp. His arms wrap around my thighs, palms holding my knees open, and for a while I manage to swallow down the begging, moaning sounds in my throat. Then no more. “Oh. Oh, Jack” and I come once, then once again, then some more, and then his shirt is off and he’s above and inside me, patient thrusts as he kisses me endlessly and tells me how beautiful I am, how much he loves this. Breathless laughter against my gasps as he reminds me of when I was afraid that this wouldn’t be good between us—that this resplendent, life-altering, unearthly sort of pleasure might not be enough.

“It was cute,” he rasps in my ear, “how you thought that fucking you once would make me want to fuck you less.”

I cling to the sweaty muscles of his back, feel my entire body shake, and when he orders, “Eyes on me,” my lids flutter open and we both come. The pressure in my belly and chest is heavy, overwhelming, delicious, and my nails sink into his shoulders as the evening becomes night.

“Second time we do this with Twilight in the background,” he says.

“I can’t believe we missed the part when Bella beats up Jacob.”

“Jesus, Elsie, what is this movie?”

The room is pitch black except for the glow of the TV. I laugh into Jack’s skin, and it feels just like coming home.

•   •   •

He won’t let me leave. Though, to be fair, I’m not trying very hard.

“I have class at eight a.m. tomorrow.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“At Boston University.”

“Still doesn’t matter.”

“I need to get to my place, get dressed, pick up my stuff, take the bus—”

“I’ll drive you.”

“Drive me where?”

“Anywhere.”

I’m sitting on the counter while he chops carrots for the soup I’m craving. The recipe is pulled up on his phone, a bright-red ad for a couples’ cooking class blinking at us from the counter. “You’d have to wake up at, like, six. I cannot ask you to do that.”

He sets down the knife and comes to stand between my legs. Even like this, he’s taller than me. I’m trying to resent him for that, but my heart has grown a million sizes in the span of the last seven days. It’s about to float away into the sky.

“You don’t have to ask.” He kisses the tip of my nose, then my mouth, then my nose again. “Because I’m offering.”

My heart swells some more. I’m running out of space. “What if I say no?”

“Don’t do that. Okay?” I break into a smile, and his hand slides under my hoodie and up my waist.

I love this. Just as much as I thought I hated him. And Jack’s right: this is going fast—too fast, maybe. But I wonder if certain relationships are living proof of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: their position and their velocity simply cannot both be measured at the same time, not even in theory. And right now I’m too busy savoring where we are to consider anything else.

“What?” he asks.

I shake my head. “Just thinking.”

“Thinking of . . . ?”

“You know, during my interview, I was picturing how it would be if I got the job. Working with you. And I had these painstakingly intricate fantasies.”

His interest is piqued. “Did I pack you sandwiches in a Twilight lunch box?”

I laugh. “Oh, no.”

“Were you wearing that red dress from Miel, and I bent you—”

“No.” I can still blush—amazing. “It was mostly me harassing you into quitting in disgrace.”

“I see.” He looks intrigued. “What were you going to do?”

“Oh, you know. Jell-O your office supplies. Spread the rumor that you poop in the urinals. Frame you for white-collar crimes. Those kinds of things.” His expression is delighted. “I mean . . . I could still do it.”

“You could.”

“Some would say I should.”

“Some would.” He kisses the corner of my smile. “Maybe next year,” he says, and it sounds low and hopeful, a promise nestled inside it, and I realize that I’d love to accept George’s offer because I want to work with her, because I want to dedicate my brainpower to liquid crystals, because I want to not spend eleven-fifteenths of my time commuting between campuses, and because I want to have enough money to surprise Cece with little hats for her ugly, murderous quill-nugget. But this man, who was going to be the absolute worst part of my dream job, might still turn out to be the thing I want the most.

To no one’s surprise, I end up staying. And because of what happens on the following day, it turns out to be a pretty good decision.