"I want to taste you. Properly."
His eyes went dark. He nodded. I moved down his body with the focused attention of a man who had spent his life studying details and was now applying that skill to the most importantsubject he had ever encountered. His hip bones. The inside of his thigh, where the skin was thin and sensitive and my breath alone made him shiver. And then my mouth on him, taking him in, learning the weight and the heat of him against my tongue.
I was not practiced at this. The mechanics were new and the angle required adjustment and I was acutely aware that my technique was more enthusiasm than expertise. But Luca's response obliterated any self-consciousness. His voice, which was normally an instrument of warmth and humor, became something raw and uncontrolled. He said my name like it contained more syllables than it did. He gripped the sheets and then my hair and then the sheets again, as if he couldn't decide what his hands needed to hold onto, and the indecision was the most flattering thing I had ever witnessed.
I found a rhythm. He found a pitch. The synchronization between us was intuitive in a way that defied the newness of the act, as if the bodies had been having this conversation longer than the brains had been aware of it.
He warned me. The words were barely coherent but the meaning was clear. I stayed. The choice was deliberate and the result was overwhelming, the intimacy of it, the trust of it, the absolute destruction of every boundary I had ever maintained between myself and another person.
He pulled me up afterward. Kissed me. Tasted himself on my tongue and didn't flinch, which was its own kind of trust.
"Your turn," he said, and his voice was wrecked and determined and the combination was devastating.
His mouth on me was thorough and expert and patient in the specific way that Luca was patient about everything, which was to say that his patience was not passive but active, an engaged, responsive attentiveness that tracked every reaction and adjusted in real time. He did something with his hand and his tongue simultaneously that I had no name for and thatproduced a sound from my chest that was closer to a shout than a moan.
The orgasm, when it came, was not the controlled, efficient release I had experienced in previous relationships. It was total. A full-system event that started in the base of my spine and expanded outward until my hands were shaking, not with the post-fight tremor but with something better, something that felt like the tremor's opposite, the shaking of a body that was overwhelmed not by violence but by joy.
We lay in the wreckage. Sheets twisted. Cake destroyed. Frosting on surfaces that would require explanation when the sheets went to the laundry.
Luca laughed into my chest. The vibration of it against my skin was my new favorite sensation, replacing bread dough and ice and every other tactile experience I had previously ranked.
"Best cake I ever had," he said.
"You barely ate any of it."
"I ate the important parts."
"The frosting is on the ceiling."
He looked up. A smear of chocolate buttercream was indeed on the ceiling, the trajectory of which neither of us could explain.
"We should leave it," he said. "As a monument."
"To what?"
"To the night Wes Chen came out to his team and baked his boyfriend a cake and discovered that frosting has applications beyond pastry."
"I'm not leaving frosting on the ceiling."
"You're leaving frosting on the ceiling. It's historic frosting. It's load-bearing frosting. If you remove it, the emotional infrastructure of this apartment collapses."
I looked at the frosting. I looked at Luca, whose hair was a disaster and whose body was marked with my mouth and whose eyes were bright with the specific combination of satisfactionand mischief that I had come to understand was his default state when he was happy.
"Fine," I said. "The frosting stays."
"The frosting stays." He kissed my chest. "I love you."
"I love you too."
"I know. You baked me a lopsided cake and brought it to bed. That's the Wes Chen love language. Imperfect carbohydrates delivered horizontally."
"That is not a love language."
"It is now. I'm adding it to the taxonomy."
I held him. The sheets were a lost cause and the cake was rubble and the ceiling was decorated and none of it mattered because Luca Moretti was in my arms and the world knew about us and tomorrow I would go to the rink and play hockey, actual hockey, and come home to this man and these sheets and this life.
The bread starter in the refrigerator could wait. Tonight was a cake night.