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“For a personalized taxi service, you give really shitty directions.”
Theo doesn’t even startle. He was expecting Liam to rip open the passenger door of his truck any second now, having texted him Here now. Get your butt outside about five minutes ago and tagged the scent of his boyfriend on the breeze through the open windows a full minute before Liam surfaced through the teeming crowd of travelers.
Not that Theo hadn’t been itching to jump down from his truck and go to Liam himself at the gate. But he’s not exactly parked legally, and he’s of no use to either of them if he left his truck to be towed—or worse, mowed down by some over-aggressive soul bent on getting as near as possible to the door of the terminal on this side of LAX—so he’d sat tight instead and counted down the seconds until Liam appeared.
“You don’t need directions,” Theo quips. “You have a nose. You’re a werewolf.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Liam huffs as he tosses his duffel in the back seat. “And you have a mouth that could be doing better things than talking.” Without missing a beat, he twists around over the console to grab Theo by the front of his denim jacket, yank him in and kiss him senseless.
Theo makes a token protest in the back of his throat, something along the lines of the passenger door still being very much open and their less-than-PG reunion being very much on display, but it’s swallowed quickly by the way Liam’s warm and bruising lips on his erase any trace of coherency. Theo hurtles headlong into that addicting taste of Liam’s tongue and his warm breath and everything between them snapping back into place, melding into one, like all is right with the world again and Liam never left in the first place.
He’d considered confessing to Liam about all the nights he jerked awake at half past three, fingers splayed on the cold sheets beside him seeking the familiar body that always entangled itself with his in the night. But now that Liam is here, now that the world has righted itself once more on its axis, Theo finds there’s little need anymore for words.
Liam pulls away at last from the preposterous instinct to breathe, and Theo is left dazed, his eyes slitted and his mind fizzy and kissed-stupid. He fixates on the red-bitten swell of Liam’s lips, so unfairly attractive, as Liam’s hand slides up from Theo’s chest to the back of his nape to keep him in place. Not that Theo would have dreamed of even moving. The only thing he’s capable of doing at the moment is letting his hands slide up under the hem of Liam’s shirt of their own accord and tangling his fingers through the belt loops of his jeans to anchor Liam in place.
Theo pushes forward, bumps their foreheads together in his bid to chase the aftertaste of Liam’s lips. “Welcome back,” Theo says hoarsely. “How was alternative spring break?”
“It was alternative,” Liam replies, just as breathless and distracted. “There wasn’t much of a break or a spring in it.”
“At least you got credits,” Theo points out.
“Every time you open your mouth you’re making this conversation way less sexy,” Liam complains, and dives right back in for another dizzying kiss.
It’s an embarrassingly unnamed amount of time later when they finally disentangle from one another and Liam shuts the door behind him, cheeks flushed, while Theo clears his throat and smirks and pulls out of their illegal spot to weave through the crowds of pedestrians and speed toward the highway. Liam is quiet as Theo navigates, likely a combination of exhaustion and contentment finally setting in. Theo can faintly tag the shift in Liam’s scent as it gradually sweetens and settles.
Sure enough, when Theo glances over at him ten minutes later in the midst of the crawling nighttime traffic, Liam’s head has lolled to the side to rest against the seatbelt and his breaths have evened out in sleep.
Theo glances down at Liam’s hand that is upturned carelessly on the passenger seat next to his thigh. Without thinking too much about it, Theo reaches across the console and slips his hand into Liam’s, fingertips brushing over the valley in Liam’s warm palm and nestling there. With a thumb, Theo fans soothing patterns over the back of Liam’s knuckles. Something inside Theo warms and settles, then: something human as much as it is animal, something instinctual.
The last time he’d done this while Liam was unconscious now seems like eons ago. Having dumped Liam’s dead weight into the passenger side of his truck right after the near-fiasco at the zoo, then hopping into the driver’s seat ready to book it out of there, Theo had made the mistake of glancing over at the boy beside him one more time and noticing the blood drying in crusted rivers between his knuckles. Theo had sighed and dug around in his glove compartment for a pack of wet wipes, then had reached over with only a moment’s hesitation to scoop up Liam’s hands from his lap and wipe them clean.
He’d meant to make quick work of it. Just get the blood wet enough to swipe it away so Liam didn’t immediately look like he’d been in a bar brawl. But then Theo remembered the sickening crack of the bones in Liam’s hands as he crashed them into the stone face of the cliff inches from Nolan’s cheek, and Theo knew exactly what kind of face Liam would have upon waking and seeing and smelling the blood on himself. He could picture it, the divots in his forehead and the fully committed downturn of his mouth in a frown. The eyes going dark and misty with disappointment. Self-loathing.
So Theo had picked those hands back up and run over them a second time, a third time with the wipes, scraping every last bit of evidence out from underneath the fingernails and from the crevices in his knuckles until the cloth was dry and Liam’s skin was spotless.
And maybe he had taken a selfish moment or two to run a thumb over the back of Liam’s hand, hoping, imagining. Waiting.
Now he doesn’t have to wait anymore. He doesn’t have to flinch at his own selfishness. Because Liam stirs now at the brush of a particularly ticklish pattern that Theo traces with his thumb over his knuckles, and then Liam’s heart picks up a little and his eyes flutter open.
And Liam mumbles, with his eyes gone pink from the glow of the car tail lights around them: “Are we there yet?”
“Not yet,” Theo says with a smile. “Go back to sleep, sweetheart.”
He goes to withdraw his hand, but Liam doesn’t let him. Instead he grabs Theo’s hand more firmly, intertwines their fingers so Theo can’t escape, and brings their interlocked hands up to his chest and cradles it there while he closes his eyes with a contented snuffle.
“Wake me up when we get there,” Liam slurs sleepily.
“Sure,” Theo lies. Because he knows he’ll likely want to hit pause on that moment and watch his sleeping boyfriend a few minutes longer even after they’ve pulled into the parking lot of their apartment.
After all, after everything that’s changed? They have all the time in the world to have this moment.