Page 115 of Caden & Theo
“Climb on top of me,” I say. It’s not a command. It’s a request to share the same line of heat.
He does. We’ve always fit, and after our breaking point, we still do. He tucks his face into the angle of my neck and inhales like he’s been underwater for years and only just remembered how to breathe. I stroke the back of his head, the line of his spine, the place at the base of his skull that makes his whole body loosen. He drifts there, muscles letting go in increments, until what’s left between us is steadiness.
“Tomorrow,” he says quietly.
“I know,” I answer.
“I don’t want this to be just tonight,” he says. He doesn’t make it a question.
“It isn’t,” I say. “It won’t be.”
He nods against my shoulder. I feel him believe me. Maybe that’s the miracle tonight, more than the undressing, more than the removal, more than the careful choreography of hands and breath. The miracle is the parts of us that trusted each other as boys finding each other again as men and choosing to trust deeper, with more to lose.
“Teach me the rest,” he says after a long while, and the way he says it makes it clear he’s not talking about mechanics anymore. He’s talking about a life.
“We have time,” I say. I mean it, even if the clock on my flight will contradict me in the morning. We have time because we’ll make it. We have time because tonight stretched it like gold leaf and laid it over everything we lost for fifteen years.
He kisses my mouth again, and the heat builds in a way that needs no description to be understood. It’s in the tremble of his hands against my ribs when I work my fingers inside his tight channel, the catch of his breath when I draw him closer, the way his weight settles over me like it belongs here when he stretches around me and sinks down on my cock.
We move together, slower and then not slow at all, guided by all the yeses we’ve already said—some aloud, some only in the way our bodies lean and give. I trace the long line of his back, committing each dip and curve to memory as if I haven’t been carrying the ghost of him in my hands for fifteen years.
“Theo,” I whisper, the name breaking on my lips like a prayer I’ve been holding too long.
He pulls back to peer down at me, then rests his forehead against mine, and our noses bump, clumsy and perfect. His voice is ragged when he answers. “I’m here. I’ve got you.”
My chest aches with everything that spills into that promise. Twenty years ago, he was the first. My first kiss that meant something, my first confession, my first time feeling what it meant to give myself over completely. And God, lying beneath him now, I want him to be my last.
“I—” My throat closes around the words, but I force them out in fragments. “Don’t… don’t let go. Not this time.”
His mouth finds mine again before I can choke on the plea. The kiss is steady, grounding, like an oath sealed in breath. He enlaces his hand with mine, pinning it to the mattress, and I feel his pulse hammering in his grip.
As he moves, careful and sure, I guide him with small touches, with broken words as he rides me, hips moving, thighs working. “Yes… slower, that’s—Theo—God, yes.” Each sound is half moan, half confession.
He shudders above me, muttering against my skin. “You feel… you feel like home. Like—like I’ve been waiting for this… for you. Always you.”
The intensity swells between us, tenderness sharpened by years of hunger neither of us could feed. Every shift, every press, every gasp carries an edge of desperation—like we’re trying to make up for every night we spent apart, all the time we should’ve been here and weren’t.
My back arches, dragging him deeper against me, and I stammer through the sensation. “Theo, I—oh, God—I can’t?—”
“Yes, you can,” he breathes, pressing his forehead harder to mine, his voice breaking with need. “We can. Together.”
The rhythm builds, faster, fiercer, but never careless. His hands map me like he’s relearning a country he once called his own. My nails scrape down his shoulders, not to hurt butto hold, to anchor. The air is thick with the sounds of us—our ragged breathing, the helpless sounds caught between groans and gasps, the near-sobs offinally, finally.
“I love you” slips from me in a rush I can’t stop. It bursts out raw, desperate, undeniable.
He falters for half a beat, a shiver running through him, then whispers back like it’s the only truth he’s ever known. “Always. Always have.”
That does it. The urgency tips over, all the careful control breaking apart. The world narrows to his weight above me, his breath against my mouth, the heat and pressure that coils tight, too tight, until release rips through me with a cry I don’t recognize as mine. His name leaves me again and again, my voice cracking on it like I’m twenty-two all over.
Theo follows me, his body shaking with the force of it, his face buried against my neck as if he needs to hide as he comes undone. I feel him everywhere—his trembling, his broken moans, the way his grip on my hand never loosens, not even for a second.
And when the shudders fade and the frantic rhythm softens into stillness, he doesn’t roll away. He stays pressed against me, breathing hard, whispering my name like it’s the anchor that will keep him here.
I close my eyes, my heart still pounding, and think,Twenty years ago, he was my first. Please, God, let him be my last.
Later, when the room is quiet, he reaches down without thinking and straightens the sock I pulled on for comfort after we had sex. It’s such a small thing that it almost undoes me again. I catch his hand before it leaves and keep it there, covering the place he’s just tended. He looks at me like I’ve handed him something. Perhaps I have.
“Stay,” he whispers.
