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ASMR. Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, Google tells him. He discovers it primarily because of Liam’s obsession with pirates, so really, there’s no one else to blame but Liam Dunbar for where they are today.
A few months into his living arrangement with Liam’s family, Theo loses his phone in the preserve. Drops it somewhere in the woods, probably, amidst the knee-high blades of grass that tickle his thighs as he shoots through the trees and phases mid-leap from coyote to naked human form to stumble out of sight and earshot of the inexperienced hunters tracking him. He briefly mourns the loss of the device and all the inane memes and selfies filling his folders on it from Liam, but the thing was a cracked and refurbished piece of wheezing technology, anyway. He knows that getting clipped by a pesky wolfsbane bullet instead of prioritizing his life would end up pissing off Liam and his family more than the temporary radio silence.
So that night, after slinking back into the Dunbar-Geyer residence through the perpetually creaky back door with the rusty corner cracked through, he goes through the motions of making a hundred assurances (mostly for David’s benefit) that he remains unscathed and unbothered. With his signature mask of charm and ennui, he plucks Liam’s phone out of his hand at the kitchen counter—ignoring the beta’s squawk of protest or the futile scrabble of his fingers at Theo’s arm—and uses it to update Scott and Stiles on the events of that night’s patrol.
What Theo doesn’t tell the pack—doesn’t even tell Liam—is that the only reason he was sloppy enough to almost be caught in the first place was because he was visiting the bridge over the creek. Pausing there with his legs swinging over the choppy current that sucked his sister under so many years ago made him vulnerable, blocked off from the world in a way that he wasn’t normally.
He also doesn’t tell any of them that it’s the anniversary of her death. Just carries on with his usual feigned disinterest in anything going on in the bustle of the Dunbar-Geyer kitchen, wondering to himself how he’s going to manage a wink of sleep tonight.
Liam lets him borrow his phone for the night, since Theo could use the alarm and is the earlier riser of the two anyway. The beta is thorough enough to let Theo know that he’s allowing this purely out of the graciousness of his golden heart.
“If you don’t wake up the first time I bang on your door, I’m leaving you behind,” Theo informs him, unimpressed.
Liam’s mouth warps into an unhappy line, but his eyes tell a different story. He knows by now when Theo is tossing out his benign little white lies.
Back in the guest bedroom—his room, he has to keep reminding himself by mouthing the words—Theo pulls up the internet on Liam’s phone. He immediately forgets what he was intent on searching for when he realizes the last page Liam had open on his browser was his YouTube homepage. Aside from the usual pirate cosplay suggestions that the algorithm spits out, there’s an array of movie playlist compilations, video game playthroughs and crack edits of iconic soccer moments. What catches his attention is the video thumbnail in the upper right corner titled “ASMR Stories - Pirate Kidnapper Soothes You to Sleep.”
And come on. It’s too weird not to click on.
He remembers to stick in his earbuds at the last moment, and then lets the sounds of the first few seconds of the video wash over him.
Seagulls, distant voices, the gentle rock of waves. A sound effect like creaking wood superimposed over everything. And then, jolting Theo, the soft and raspy voice of the guy who owns the channel, addressing the viewer according to the script he’s obviously prepared.
About less than a minute in, a crawling sensation scuttles up Theo’s spine, and it isn’t quite all related to the soothing sounds the content creator prepared. He thinks to himself, Jesus, some people actually get a kick out of this kidnapper-kidnappee scenario?
Right then and there, he decides, okay, this—this is kind of bordering on too weird. Biting his lip and flitting his eyes instinctually toward his closed bedroom door, Theo lets his thumb hover for a moment over the x button, and then he moves away and navigates back to the YouTube homepage instead.
He’s careful to remove the video from Liam’s watch history and sign into his own account. He makes quick work of researching ASMR on Google, hopping from blog to blog explaining the different types and purposes of the ASMR videos that people put out on YouTube and rapidly discovering the various genres that they fall into. He makes a mental note of which ones to explore—cooking sounds, lulling nature ambience, soap crushing, slime rolling, and of course the various narrative scenarios that abound similar to the pirate one he just discovered.
Pragmatic as always, he searches up one of each kind by highest view count and queues them up in a playlist, then settles in with his cheek cradled in the crook of his elbow and Liam’s phone balanced sideways on a corner of his pillow with the brightness turned down low so he can watch the graphics on the screen with steadily drooping eyelids.
It takes a while of coasting through his queued videos before he hits one that does it for him—that sends that thrill down his spine like the first one he tried. It’s a young woman who speaks into a microphone telling the viewer about her day. Generic stuff at first, but then she leans closer and makes gentle eye contact with the camera, and with the quietest, most sincere timber in her voice, she utters: “I just wanted to tell you today that I’m proud of you. Whatever you did today, whatever you’ve been doing all month or all year, you’re doing so well.”
Theo sucks in a sharp breath through his nose. He flinches hard enough to jostle the phone from its resting place and tip it facedown on the bedsheets. The woman is still going on in her soothing voice with her affirmations, but Theo has half a mind to rip his earbuds out now and shut down the video.
He slaps his hands over his face and flings a quiet groan at the ceiling. Christ. Jesus Christ. He doesn’t need his Pandora’s box of trauma and self-esteem issues to spill open right now. It’s late, he’s exhausted, he needs to get up at half past ass o’clock in the morning for work, and he just needed something simple and easy to put him to sleep.
He’s kind of a wuss about these kinds of things, he reluctantly admits to himself some time later after several seconds of deep breathing and clenching and unclenching his fists. And so he exits the YouTube page, rolls up the headphones and shoves the phone under the corner of his pillow with a fruitless glare into the dark.
He doesn’t end up falling asleep until nearly two hours later. By that time, at least he’s bone-tired enough that the clawed specter of his sister doesn’t make a particularly gruesome appearance in his dreams.
—
It becomes a nightly routine after that.
Theo quickly receives a new phone—unsuccessfully fending off Jenna and David’s offer to at least pay for half of it—and every night, after kicking off his shoes and crawling into his sweatpants and then collapsing into bed, he makes sure that the door to his room is shut tight before he settles in under the covers, props the phone up on his chest, and plugs in his earphones on a new quest for ASMR videos.
As much as it makes him flush hotly with humiliation that the best videos seem to be those with human voices whispering affirmations in his ears, he can’t deny that they have some effectivity. Sure, the soap cutting was pretty interesting in the beginning and he discovered some creators who used beautiful and hypnotic color designs, but nothing quite makes his body tingle and the tension at the base of his spine bleed out quite like the soft speaking videos.
It’s on a hectic night when he and Liam get home from different ends of Beacon Hills—Liam from a pack meeting, Theo from his late-night shift at the fast food place that his manager absolutely would not let him skip under threat of firing—that Theo slips up about his secret routine.
He’s gotten a little overconfident, leaving his door slightly ajar these days, so he’s taken completely by surprise when the beta stomps into his room without so much as a knock and flops dramatically face forward across Theo’s quilt-covered feet at the end of the bed.
Theo’s heart jolts in his chest and he snatches one earbud from his ear as casually as he can given how rattled he is by Liam’s appearance. He nudges Liam by wiggling his toe once, twice. When Liam doesn’t make any indication of moving, but instead lets out a muffled scream into the bedspread, Theo relaxes and says wryly: “Want me to go get your chewy toy?”
Liam mumbles something along the lines of a threat or a curse.
“I’ll take that as a no,” Theo drawls. He finishes rolling up his headphones and shoving them under his thigh, for lack of a better hiding place. He pokes Liam’s face again with his toe under the blanket. “What’s going on?”
That gets Liam to prop himself up on his elbows and glare up at Theo through his bangs. Given how overgrown his fringe is and the way he needs to puff out a breath to blow them out of his eyes, it isn’t very effective.
“Dude,” says Liam. “Can’t you smell that shit?”
Theo takes a tentative sniff of the air. All at once, his surroundings come back to him: Jenna and David’s voices overlapping in a mixture of amusement and urgency; the flurry of bedsheets being bundled up and tossed to the side; and the god-awful, all-encompassing stench of something dead in the air.
“Jesus,” Theo swears softly. “When’s the last time you washed your socks, Dunbar?”
The look Liam serves him is entirely unimpressed.
Jenna answers Theo’s tacit question for him when she zips by the open doorway, pauses, then turns and raps her knuckles on the lintel to catch both boys’ attention. “Hey, Theo. Sorry for the late notice, but it looks like you two’ll be rooming together for a bit. At least while Liam’s room gets aired out.”
“Aired out?” Theo probes.
“Rats,” David intones over his wife’s shoulder. He’s already got something plastic rustling in his hands. “Not one, but two dead rats.” He fixes Liam with a very particular look, as though Liam himself is entirely to blame.
Knowing the beta and his chaotic ways, Theo wouldn’t put it past him.
“This is what I’m always saying about making sure you don’t leave open packages of food in your school bag, honey,” Jenna reminds her son with a sigh.
Liam grumbles an apology and creaks into an upright position, slumped over with his elbows on his knees. His parents take pity on him and take turns squeezing his shoulder, laughing lightly as the boy only groans more dramatically and buries his face in his hands.
“Hey, at least they died at the same time and you don’t need to air out the room twice,” Theo jests through his teeth.
“You’re a dick,” Liam says from behind his palms.
“Language,” Jenna and David chorus on their way out.
“Although,” Theo goes on musing, “it’s also entirely possible one died before the other. Imagine that. Little sewer rat, made to survive on instinct, unable to go on from the grief of losing its true love.”
That makes Liam lift his head and twist around, crawling on his hands and knees toward Theo with a gleam in his eye that’s not to be trusted. “Yeah, you would know all about sewer rat psychology, wouldn’t you?”
“Shut the fuck up,” Theo orders him. On a scale of one to ten of his most creative comebacks, it’s got to be a solid negative four.
“Yeah, yeah. I get the window side,” Liam announces, completely apropos to nothing.
“What?”
“The window side of the bed. It’s mine now while I’m staying in your room. Since you were a dick to me about the dead rats and everything.”
“It’s my spot.”
“Not anymore,” Liam chirps, and unceremoniously grabs him around his flank to roll him over to the other side of the bed so he can slot into the warm cocoon of the indentation left by Theo’s body.
“You fucking—”
“Oh, what’re you listening to?” Liam, the little shit, ignores Theo’s protests at being manhandled and scoops up Theo’s phone and earphones—still plugged in—where they were originally tucked under his thigh.
“Nothing. Give it back.”
Liam holds the phone up and away out of Theo’s reach, not even sparing the chimera a glance, as he starts punching in random numbers to guess at Theo’s passcode. “What? I wanna know what the big bad chimera listens to in his downtime. Like. Maybe you’re the type of person who gives off Fall Out Boy vibes but secretly you listen to, like, Kate Bush or something.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Kate Bush,” Theo mumbles. He attempts and fails again to recapture his phone from Liam’s greedy little hands.
Liam shoots him a look at that response, a single eyebrow lifted. But there’s no time to delve deeper into that rabbit hole, because then the next passcode he enters—his own birthday—unlocks Theo’s phone and opens it right back up to the screen with the ASMR video of daily affirmations that he had paused.
Liam stares at it for a full ten seconds. Then—“oh,” he says, the sound squeezing out of him like a deflated ball.
“No need to give me shit for my nightcap tastes,” Theo grumbles. He’s accepted his fate and has decided to simply lean back against the pile of pillows (seriously, the Dunbar-Geyers have a home decor addiction) with his arms crossed.
Liam doesn’t say anything else for a concerning amount of time. The silence stretches long enough for Theo’s facade to crack and for him to shift his head to the side to see what Liam’s doing. The younger boy is scrolling through the page, pausing to skim over comments on the YouTube video, and then flitting through the suggested videos in the sidebar.
“I wasn’t giving you shit for it,” he says at last. There’s an odd intonation to his voice that is difficult for Theo to place. Liam’s voice does that around him, sometimes—goes low and impossible to read, and it sometimes makes Theo squirm because nobody’s ever spoken that softly to him before. Not for the last decade, at least.
“Do you like it?” Liam presses him, when it’s clear Theo is still too embarrassed to engage in this conversation.
“Yeah, sure. I don’t think people just look up videos and watch them if they don’t like them,” Theo says, prickly in his defensiveness.
Liam’s mouth twists and he lowers the phone in his lap as he turns to face Theo, clearly scenting the air. He frowns at the first whiff of embarrassment radiating off the chimera.
“Whatever,” Theo attempts to brush him off. “I was just bored, and they’re kinda cool to look at before going to sleep, and you don’t have to be—”
“It’s fine,” Liam interrupts him, hand hovering over Theo’s elbow but not quite touching. His fingers curl back in on themselves and he lowers his fist back to his lap. “Theo, it’s literally okay. Lots of people listen to ASMR to calm themselves down.”
“I am calm,” Theo seethes. Calmly.
“Right,” says Liam, not buying it for a second.
“Maybe you should try listening to ASMR when you need to calm down,” Theo attempts to deflect.
Liam chuckles. “Been there, done that. It’s a nice thought, but ASMR in particular doesn’t work on me.” He presses closer to Theo before the chimera can continue with his distraction. “Why do you listen to it? I thought you don’t…uh…have control issues. Thought you were like, the king of control issues, actually.” He curls one hand into a claw and bares his canines in a play-snarl to demonstrate.
Theo’s heart does not melt at the sight of the boy playing wolf next to him. It does not.
“I’m not listening to it to calm down. I do it to try to go to sleep.”
Liam’s mouth rounds out in a little soundless O. He bites down on his bottom lip, plush flesh catching under his two front teeth, as he considers this information.
“D’you…are you still having trouble sleeping?”
Theo blinks at him. Still? He wasn’t aware that Liam was aware of any sleep troubles of his in the first place.
Liam simply stares back, waiting, obstinate in his quiet patience.
“Yeah,” Theo says at last. A two-part admission in itself.
Liam doesn’t miss the soft waft of renewed shame from Theo. He listens to his instincts and lays a hand on Theo’s elbow this time, gripping lightly, letting his thumb brush across the wrinkled fabric and soothe the chimera’s pulse by touching the warm skin underneath.
“You could’ve told me,” he murmurs. Not should have, but could. He hopes Theo can tell the difference.
Theo shrugs. It’s not unusual to be unable to wring any truth out of him when he’s like this.
Liam lets out a quiet huff and relinquishes his hold on Theo’s phone. “You can have it back,” he says, superfluously.
Theo rolls his eyes at him, more out of habit than anything else, most likely. Their fingers brush for a second as he takes the phone and then rolls over to slip it under his pillow. When Liam gawks at him, Theo raises both brows and wiggles the edge of the duvet in his hands. “Sleep? It’s what beds are for? Ever heard of it, Dunbar?”
Liam goes to slap him on the arm for his insolence but the chimera dodges nimbly, leaving Liam to flop inelegantly on his side as they both get nestled in bed. After much squirming and rustling, Liam eventually settles on his stomach with his arms sprawled at odd angles across the pillow and the edge of the mattress.
Rolling his eyes for real this time at the beta’s antics, Theo tugs the covers up near his chin and rolls over with his back to Liam to attempt to get some shuteye.
—
Some indeterminate amount of time later, Liam wakes with a jolt. He blinks groggily, tongue darting out to check the corner of his mouth for drool out of habit. The pillow beneath his cheek is thankfully dry, if somewhat scratchier than the sleep-worn pillowcase he’s accustomed to from his own room.
It’s when he draws in a deep breath and the scent of the boy next to him suffuses his consciousness that he remembers where he is and why. He also realizes, in the next second, what it was that awoke him.
Theo has rolled over on his side at some point during the night, and he’s facing Liam, features wrought and the distress in the lines of his brow clear in the silver moonlight. His hair is mussed and his mouth is parted slightly, twisted in a picture of terror. The look of pure fear on his face, coupled with the thundering heartbeat that threatens to rattle his ribcage and tear through his flesh, has Liam shoving himself upright on one hand and shuffling closer on instinct.
“Theo?”
In the early days of Theo moving in with the Dunbar-Geyers, Liam has a dirty little secret. He used to hear the telltale signs of Theo’s nightmares in the wee hours of the morning—the dry rasp of his breathing like his lungs were caving in, the occasional whimpers that escaped his mouth when he wasn’t biting down on his lip till it bled—and though Liam never had the courage to slip into Theo’s room and simply wake him up, on more than one occasion he couldn’t bear to just let the chimera suffer in the night. So he would slip out of his room on tiptoe as silently as he could and settle on his butt right outside Theo’s door, arms looped around his knees and huddling into a ball there on the floor with his back pressed to the wood.
And more often than not, as Liam waited and counted the drumbeats of Theo’s heart, the chimera’s pulse would crest, plateau and then drift downward back to normal.
Liam isn’t an idiot. He knows about anchors, of course. He’s pretty sure Theo knows about them, and knows that he’s Liam’s personal tether that grounds him, but Liam doubts that Theo knows that he has one of his own. Much less needs one.
So now, Liam is presented with the dilemma of proximity. He might count it a privilege in the same breath: now he can simply reach over and touch Theo’s arm, brush his fingertips along the bare skin of Theo’s wrist, and he knows chances are a million to one that he could anchor Theo now and bring him back from his nightmare.
Given how humiliated Theo clearly was during their earlier conversation about the ASMR videos, though, Liam is unsure how welcome his touch would be when the chimera inevitably wakes from the contact.
Biting his lip, Liam casts about for another solution. His eyes alight on the rectangular shadow of Theo’s phone lying on the other side of the bed. Crawling forward cautiously so as not to jostle Theo, Liam scoops up the phone, plugs in the earphones that are lying next to it, and unlocks the screen so he can pull up Theo’s last YouTube view.
Slowly, ever so carefully, Liam inches the earbuds forward and presses first one, and then both into Theo’s ears.
Theo’s entire body tenses. Liam freezes, mouth caught in a grimace. But the moment passes. As Liam’s werewolf hearing picks up the soothing susurrance of the woman on the screen whispering assurances, Theo, too, relaxes and loses the stiffness in his muscles. Soon he’s draped almost bonelessly against the mattress and his head rolls forward again across the pillow with all his previous distress smoothed from his expression.
Liam allows the pent-up sigh he didn’t know was churning inside his lungs to shudder out of him.
He could reach out and touch Theo’s hair. Smooth the dampened bangs from Theo’s forehead and rub his thumb across the pale skin. He’s so close now that he really could. But Liam simply sits there, watching and waiting, until he’s certain that Theo will not be revisited by the night terrors. And then he sinks back down beneath the covers and smiles, small and private, at Theo’s unconscious countenance.
“Night, Theo,” he murmurs.
—
The next morning, they don’t talk about it.
They don’t talk about it the day after that, or even the next day after that.
All Theo knows is that during the first three days after Liam gets kicked out of his room because of the dead rats and moves into the guest room with Theo, he wakes up in the middle of the night, groggy and half-conscious, to the murky awareness of the body next to him shifting around and a soft breath fluttering over his face. And then the next thing he knows, it’s morning again, and he awakens gently, with his ears stopped up with his earbuds where he doesn’t remember putting them in the night before.
The fourth night, Liam grimaces to himself when he attempts to turn on Theo’s phone and finds it dead. His own is charging on the opposite nightstand, the cord too far away to let him drag the device over and hook up Theo to his usual ASMR and get him to have a calm night’s sleep.
Liam chews his lip and stares at Theo beside him, considering. Theo’s back is slightly turned to him this time, and from the steady rise and fall of his ribs no one would ever really guess that he might be in distress. Only the tiny uptick in his pulse to Liam’s well-attuned ears serves as a clue that tonight might be a rough night again.
And then Liam’s brain sparks with an idea.
Settling in more comfortably below the covers, Liam scoots over across the sheets until he’s almost close enough to press his knees to the back of Theo’s thighs if he curled up enough. Resting his hand on the space on the pillow between them, merely a centimeter away from the lock of hair at Theo’s nape, Liam huffs out a breath somewhere between embarrassment and amusement at himself and then starts to whisper.
He talks about his day, at first. Theo was there for part of it—they had a pack meeting that was really more like a pack outing to celebrate their approaching graduation, less than a month from now. But Liam goes through the whole rundown anyway, starting with his early morning run and the adorable little squirrels he saw along the pathway, then the quick grocery errand he and Jenna ran when he got back, then what he and David were up to in the basement when Theo came back from his morning shift.
“We were actually talking about making some more house renovations now that I’m gonna be liberated from school in a bit,” Liam murmurs confidentially. “You know that tree house I used to have in the back that got blown down during that one storm? And we never got a chance to fix it because some shit or other kept happening? Well, cross my fingers and hope I’m not jinxing it, but I swear this summer we’re gonna finally get it redone. And I want you to help me. I know you’re gonna be complaining the entire time even if I, like, ply you with a week’s worth of Snapple. But you’re gonna love it. I know you just get like that when you’re actually excited about something. It’s your defense mechanism, Mason says.” Liam grins privately to himself. “You’re really not all that hard to read, Theo.”
Theo huffs and shifts in his sleep. Liam pauses in his narrative, listening. From the slowing heartbeat he hears, it seems the sound of his voice—as unsoothing as he normally considers it—is starting to work magic.
“I had a pretty fun time imagining what it would be like to just sit back and watch you carry lumber while me and Dad order you around,” Liam admits, smiling. “I’d take all your iced tea and not let you have any until you agree to help.” And he’d probably make Theo take off his shirt under the blazing sun because it’s entirely too impractical to be sweating outdoors under layers and layers of fabric, Liam is gracious enough not to add aloud.
“Remember when you helped him cut down that Christmas tree a couple months ago?” Liam’s laughing to himself now. “You really wanted to impress him. I don’t think anyone in our entire neighborhood, or even in Beacon Hills for that matter, even cuts down their own Christmas trees anymore. But you did. G-d, you looked good with that axe. And, um—” Liam swallows. “You looked good. Helping. I mean. You’re always helping, your default these days is like, chauffeur services extraordinaire, but…that day was different. I remember…I remember turning around and seeing you look up at the sky. I don’t think you noticed me staring. It had just started snowing, or flurrying or whatever, and your face was just…” Liam casts about for the right word. “Radiant.”
His chest feels tight at the memory of that day. Theo had looked so soft, face smoothened of worry and a genuineness to the light in his smile that even David and Jenna hadn’t seemed to miss. Liam remembers faintly how his parents glanced at one another knowingly when Theo took a break and rested his chin on the handle of the axe to simply observe the cotton-whitening of the skies.
Liam drops his voice until it’s barely above a whisper. “You were so beautiful, I could’ve kissed you right then and there,” he confides.
Theo’s body is still, so still. Doesn’t stir in reaction.
“I wish I could see that look on your face every day. I think sometimes that’s how you should’ve looked if none of the things that happened to you before ended up happening. But I guess what I’m trying to say is…”
He knows what he’s trying to say. He’s never really had any difficulty acknowledging it to himself. Just with getting the words to form themselves into sound on his tongue, perhaps.
“You’ve become the sort of person I love,” Liam breathes, like a secret. Because it might as well be. His hand twitches with the need to touch the skin at the base of Theo’s neck. “Yeah. I just…I love you.”
He doesn’t have much else to say after that. A beat passes, and then another, and then Theo sighs. The unmistakable rasp of his voice murmurs back, “Love you too.”
Liam frowns, a divot forming between his brows. He cradles his cheek on his arm and huffs into it. “Idiot,” he sighs fondly. “Talking in our sleep now, are we?”
And then, to his stomach-jolting shock and horror, Theo shuffles and turns around so the slant of moonlight reveals how his eyes are open in slits. “No, I’m awake, you imbecile,” Theo says, gravelly and horrifyingly tender. “I said I love you too.”
What the fuck, what the fuck, blares through Liam’s mind like an airhorn. He’s pretty sure all other thoughts have been wiped blank from his brain.
“Um,” is the eloquent sound his mouth makes.
Theo gets up on his elbows, face and hair still sleep-mussed, and honestly he has no right to look this beautiful when he’s just woken up and he’s wearing Jenna’s ratty Boston University t-shirt with the groundhog-shaped bleach stain in the middle of it.
Theo shakes his head at Liam, lips pulling up in that lopsided smirk that makes Liam’s stomach flip. “For a personal live ASMR generator, you’re pretty damn loud.”
Liam’s brain unsticks then long enough for his face to morph into his characteristic whole-body frown. “Shut up.”
Theo, the little shit, just keeps on smiling. “Fine, then I guess I won’t be able to say it any—”
“No,” Liam interrupts him. “Not what I meant. Say it again.”
“Say what again?”
“You know what I meant, asshole. Say it again.”
Theo chews his lip, pretending to mull it over. When Liam erupts in a frustrated little sound at the back of his throat, Theo relents with another shit-eating grin. “I love you.”
Liam has gone starry-eyed. “Say it again.”
“No.”
“Please, Theo.” The beta’s heart is racing for the hills and hasn’t calmed down in the last two minutes. To be perfectly honest, Theo’s heart isn’t faring any better.
By way of answer, Theo gets up on his hands and lays both palms on either side of Liam so he’s hovering over the younger boy, their faces mere inches apart. Liam’s eyes widen and the light from the window catches how impossibly dark his pupils go as they dilate.
Theo wastes no more time and dips his head down, down, down, until their breaths are one and their lips are pressed together in a gentle moving of warmth and understanding.
Liam sighs and melts into the kiss. His mouth falls open, taking Theo by surprise enough that his elbows buckle and he nearly crushes Liam under his weight as they press impossibly close together. But it doesn’t matter, because Liam’s arms wind up and around the back of Theo’s neck of their own accord, drawing him in and drawing him closer, locking him in and never letting him go.
Their tongues touch and lights explode behind Theo’s eyelids. He pulls away just a fraction, their lips parting with a soft and wet sound, and Liam’s chest is heaving, his cheeks flushed and his mouth red and glistening in the gloom.
“Say it again,” Liam whispers breathlessly.
And Theo cannot say no to that. Teeth flashing in a grin, he leans down to press their smiling lips together and capture the sweetness of Liam’s mouth again.
And again, and again, and again, until they’re wide awake and breathing as one, limbs tangled inseparably and the blaze of their foreheads pressed together.