Okay so the offsite was supposed to be fourteen people, a rented cabin, two days of trust falls and a whiteboard that said SYNERGY in someone’s terrible handwriting. By Thursday night it was me and Theo.
Everyone else bailed. Flu, a kid’s recital, one guy just sent a thumbs-up emoji and a “so sorry!!” at six in the morning. I didn’t bail because I’d already paid for gas and because, and I’m only going to say this once, Theo was still coming. Theo from the fourth floor. Theo who sat across the pod from me for two years and ate almonds one at a time like he was being paid per almond.
So we drove up in his car, mostly in silence, with the radio doing the talking. The snow started around the turn-off. By the time we found the cabin you couldn’t see the road we’d come in on.
“This is fine,” Theo said, standing in the doorway with snow in his hair. “This is a fun story we’ll tell.”
“To who? Everyone’s at home.”
“To HR.”
The cabin was one room and a bathroom. A kitchenette, a woodstove, a couch about the size of a loaf of bread, and one bed. Queen, maybe. A big green quilt on it that smelled like cedar and somebody’s grandmother. I looked at the bed. Theo looked at the bed. Neither of us said the thing.
“I’ll take the couch,” I said.
“You’re six-two.”
“It’s a strong couch.”
“You’ll wake up shaped like a comma.” He dropped his bag. “We’re adults. It’s a bed.”
That was the first lie of the night. We both knew it.
The woodstove took forty minutes and most of a firestarter brick. Theo crouched in front of it narrating like a nature documentary, and I stood behind him holding the flashlight and trying not to look at the back of his neck, where his hair curled up against his collar. I’d been not looking at that neck for two years. I was extremely good at it. I had a lot of practice.
“There she goes,” he said when it caught. The light came up orange on his face and he grinned at me over his shoulder, wide open, no almond-face, no meeting-face, and I felt it low in my stomach like a missed stair.
“Nice,” I said, which is a thing a person says.
The power flickered around eight and then just went. Stove light, one lantern, the wind leaning on the walls. Theo produced a bottle from his bag with the dignity of a magician. Bourbon, the good kind, the kind you get from a boss on your anniversary.
“You brought that for the team?”
“I brought that for me. The team was a pretext.”
We drank it out of two mismatched mugs, one with a moose on it. We sat on the floor with our backs against the couch and our legs stretched toward the stove, and the first mug was small talk, and the second was complaints about management, and by the third we were doing the thing where you tell the truth by accident.
“You know you tap your pen,” he said. “On the desk. When you’re thinking. Three, pause, three.”
“You can hear that from the fourth floor?”
“I sit across from you.” He said it to the stove. “I mean. Sat. Before the reorg. I could hear it through the whole move, honestly. Sometimes I’d sit there and wait for it.”
“That’s insane.”
“It’s very calming.”
My face was hot and I blamed the fire. “You eat your almonds one at a time,” I said. “Like you’re counting them. It makes me crazy.”
“Does it.”
“Not crazy bad.”
He turned his head. We were maybe a foot apart, shoulder to shoulder on the floor, and he had the moose mug in both hands and bourbon on his bottom lip. I watched it. I’m not proud. I watched him lick it off.
“Crazy how,” he said.
“I don’t know.” I really didn’t. The bourbon had eaten the part of my brain that writes the safe sentence. “Crazy like I think about your hands during budget review.”
He didn’t say anything. The stove ticked. A log shifted and sent up sparks and neither of us flinched.
“My hands,” Theo said finally.
“Forget it.”
“No, go back. What about them.”
“They’re just.” I made a vague, useless gesture. “Big. Veiny. You hold the clicker like it owes you money. I don’t know, man, I’ve had a long week.”
He laughed, really laughed, head back against the couch cushion, and when he was done he wiped his eye and didn’t look away. “I think about your mouth,” he said. “During budget review. For the record.”
“You do not.”
“You bite the inside of your cheek when Karen talks. I’ve watched you do it for two years. I’ve watched you do it like it’s a sport.”
I put the mug down very carefully on the floorboards, like it might go off.
“So,” I said.
“So,” he said.
“This is a bad idea. We work together.”
“We work in different pods.”
“Same company.”
“Technically there’s a snowstorm. Technically nobody knows we’re here.”
“Theo.”
“I’m not asking you to do anything,” he said, and his voice cracked a little in the middle, which was the thing that did it, honestly. Not the bourbon. The crack. “I’m just saying. In case you were wondering if you were the only one.”
I kissed him. I want to say it was smooth. It was not smooth. I went in too fast and we clacked teeth and he said “ow” into my mouth and then laughed, and I laughed, and then his hand came up and got the back of my head and stopped the laughing real quick.
He tasted like bourbon and smoke. His stubble scraped along my jaw, and I thought, distantly, so that’s what that feels like, two years of wondering and it’s just sandpaper and heat. Somewhere in there the mug got kicked over. Neither of us got it.
We made it to the bed the way drunk people make it anywhere, in stages. Couch arm, kitchen counter, the edge of the doorframe where he pinned me by the wrists and kissed my neck until I made a noise I’d never made at work. Then the quilt, the cedar smell, the cold sheets under us and the stove’s orange light crawling on the ceiling.
“This shirt is so ugly,” he said, tugging my flannel up over my head.
“You picked this shirt. At the team thing. You said it looked good.”
“I lied. I wanted to take it off you.” He got it off. Then his undershirt, my belt, his own sweater tangling up in his arms until I had to help, both of us shaking with laughter and cold and nerves. His chest was broader than I’d guessed, pale, with a trail of dark hair that ran down from his sternum and disappeared into his jeans like a signpost.
“Jesus,” I said.
“What.”
“You’ve been hiding this behind quarter-zips.”
“It’s a company policy.”
I got my mouth on his collarbone. Then lower. His breath hitched when I found his nipple and dragged my teeth across it, and he said “fuck” in this ragged, surprised voice, and his hips came up off the mattress on their own. I could feel him through two layers of denim, hard, hot, pushing at my thigh.
“Take them off,” I said. “Please. Take everything off.”
“Bossy.”
“I’m drunk and I’ve wanted this for two years, I’m allowed.”
He got his jeans down, fumbled, kicked them somewhere into the dark. Then mine. Then there was nothing left between us but heat and the awful brightness of skin on skin, and his cock was right there against mine, thick, curved a little to the left, wet at the tip already. He wrapped his big veiny hand around both of us at once and stroked, one long drag, and I swear to God I saw a color.
“Hold on,” I gasped. “Hold on, I’m gonna.”
“Already?”
“Shut up. Two years, Theo.”
“Okay.” He was breathing like he’d run up a hill. “Okay. Okay, me too, slow down, slow down.”
We didn’t slow down. I got on my side and he slid in behind me, chest to my back, his cock sliding hot and slick between my thighs because we’d lost our heads and couldn’t find anything else, and he spat in his hand and reached around and took me in his fist, and fucked my thighs, and kept saying my name in my ear. Not my first name. The name everyone at work uses, the dumb nickname. It was ridiculous. It was the hottest thing that’s ever happened to me.
“Almost,” he said. “Almost, almost, fuck, I’m.”
His whole body locked up behind me. I felt him pulse, wet and hot, all over the inside of my legs, and he bit my shoulder to keep the noise down, which was funny, since the nearest person was a mile of snow away. That did it for me. I came across his knuckles and the quilt, hard enough that my vision went white and my toes curled.
We lay there. The stove ticked. My heart was trying to leave my body through my ears.
“Well,” Theo said into the back of my neck. “That’s going in the incident report.”
I woke up at some gray hour with a stiff neck and an arm gone dead under his ribs. The stove had burned down to red. The window was pure white, like somebody had washed the world.
Theo was awake already, on his back, looking at the ceiling. His hair stuck up on one side. There was a fresh bruise on his shoulder shaped exactly like my mouth.
“Hey,” I said. My voice sounded like gravel in a blender.
“Hey.” He turned his head. “I was lying here trying to decide if I should be weird about it.”
“And?”
“I’m too tired to be weird.”
“That’s the best offer I’ve had all year.”
He smiled, slow, and rolled toward me. We kissed with morning mouth and didn’t care. It got deeper very fast, his hand sliding down my belly, finding me already half-hard against his hip. In daylight it was different. Slower. I could see everything, the flush climbing his chest, the little scar on his chin, the dark ring around his pupils when he looked at me like he was memorizing.
“I want to try something,” he said.
“Anything.”
“Don’t say that to a man in a snowstorm.”
He pushed me onto my back. He kissed down my chest, my stomach, took his time at the hollow of my hip where I’m stupidly ticklish, and I yelped, and he grinned against my skin and did it again on purpose. Then he got his mouth on my cock, and I stopped being funny.
He was bad at it for about ten seconds. Too much teeth, too much enthusiasm, and a little cough when he went too deep. “Sorry,” he mumbled around me. “Sorry, I haven’t, in a while.” But then he found a rhythm, the wet heat of his mouth sliding down, his tongue pressing flat along the underside, and one hand cupping my balls like they were something he’d been saving. I fisted the quilt. I was making noises. I couldn’t have stopped it if I tried.
“Theo. Theo. Come up here.”
“Not done.”
“I want to be inside you,” I blurted. “Is that. Do you. Can I?”
He came off me with a wet pop and stared. His mouth was red and shiny. For a second I thought I’d blown it.
“Yes,” he said. “God. Yes. I was gonna ask you.”
So there was a clumsy interlude of rooting through two bags while naked in a freezing cabin, which I do not recommend, and a muttered argument about whether the hand cream by the sink counted, and then he was on his hands and knees on the green quilt with the white light all over his back and I was behind him with my hands on his hips, and I put my thumb against him and felt him shudder.
“Slowly,” he said. “Please. I mean it. Slowly.”
“I’ve got you.”
I went slowly. Inch by inch, the tight heat of him closing around me, his breath stuttering out of him in little pieces. He dropped his forehead to the mattress and said “oh, oh, oh,” and I had to stop halfway and grip the quilt because it was too much, it was so much, I’d imagined it during budget review and I’d gotten it wrong, I’d gotten it so wrong.
“Move,” he said. “Come on, move, I’m fine.”
I moved. First slow, then not. The bed creaked like a ship. I got my arm around his chest and pulled him up against me, back to my front, his head thrown back on my shoulder, my mouth on his neck, and I fucked up into him in short deep strokes while he reached down and worked himself in time. His voice went up. It cracked on my name.
“Right there,” he said. “Right there, don’t you fucking dare stop.”
“Wasn’t going to.”
“I mean it, I will quit this job.”
I laughed into his skin, and that made me move wrong, and he moaned like I’d hit something good, so I did it again. And again. The sound of us filled the little room, slick and slapping, and under it the wind, and under that the stove settling. He tensed. I felt it before he said anything, the squeeze around me, the heat of him going tight and shaking.
“I’m coming,” he said, sounding amazed, like a man reading it off a sign. “Oh my god, I’m coming, I’m.”
He spilled over his own fist onto the quilt, clenching down on me, and that was it for me too. I buried my face in his shoulder and came inside him with a sound I’m not going to describe, hips stuttering, hanging on to him like the bed was sinking.
Afterward we lay in a tangle with the quilt over our heads, because it was cold, and because I didn’t want to see the window. Out there was the real world, snowplows and calendar invites and eventually a Monday.
“We have to go back,” I said.
“The road’s closed.”
“I mean after. To the office.”
“Oh.” He was quiet. His thumb was drawing slow circles on my hip. “I was thinking I’d bring almonds. And you tap the pen. And we just. Keep it going. Not tell anyone for a bit.”
“Like a secret.”
“Like a really bad secret. Karen will figure it out in a day.”
“Karen can’t even find the shared drive.”
He laughed. I kissed the top of his head, and he made a little contented noise and burrowed his face into my chest, and I thought about the whiteboard, and SYNERGY, and how for once whoever wrote it had been right about something.
The stove was almost out. Neither of us got up to fix it.
“Hey,” he said, muffled.
“Yeah.”
“If the snow stays another day.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t tell the plow.”
I held him tighter and told the ceiling I wouldn’t.
