Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood

            “Barbed wire. A Bon Jovi quote. Elon Musk’s face.”

            “Jesus.”

            I laugh, but I’m not breathing easily. “Sorry.”

            His tattoos are beautiful. The Dirac equation. The electron cloud. Beta decay. The Fibonacci spiral. Kinematic models, astral planes, Drake’s formula, the molecular structure of MBBA. Black strokes of faded ink interlocked together in a beautiful painting. The entire foundation of modern physics is on his broad shoulder, wrapped around his large biceps. I trace every line of it, every curve and every corner, and he lets me explore. Vibrating with restraint, but he does. I’ve never been so selfish before, never taken up so much time for something that is only mine, and I think he knows. I think that’s why he allows it.

            “Remember how it was?” I ask. “Learning them for the first time? The Schrödinger equation. The standard model.”

            He nods. His throat bobs. He’s hard under my core, patiently impatient. “Knowing that the universe can be made sense of.”

            “Made of patterns. Rules that can be learned, discovered, predicted.”

            “Find them out, and you’ll know how to make the world into what you want,” he says.

            “Find them out, and you’ll know how to make yourself into what the world wants,” I say in return.

            We regard each other for a moment. My hands are on him, and his hands are on me, and I’m thinking of two-, five-, ten-year-old Jack, alone in the world, calling someone Mom, being told not to. The only fair-haired Smith. I’m thinking of a young boy determined to shape his surroundings. He chose his own world in the end, didn’t he? Greg. Millicent. His friends. He carved a place for himself.

            And I’m certain he’s thinking of me. All the Elsies I’ve created to fit all the worlds I’ve inhabited, all the people in them. He’s stripping them off me one by one, like he has since the day we met.

            We’re not so different, you and I, I think, and then hear myself exhaling hard. I’ve been holding my breath without realizing it. “I know where we’re going,” I say again, feeling the certainty of it deep within my bones, like Dirac, like relativity, the strong interaction between quarks and gluons, and he takes it like what it is: permission to take charge, to roll us over, pin me underneath him.

            He takes my panties off. Slides them under his pillow—hoarding, like a dragon. “You could be my entire world,” he whispers in my ear before moving to my collarbone. “If you let me.”

            I stroke his hair. “I think I will.”

            “Then I’m sorry.”

            “What are you—ah, what are you sorry for?”

            He’s making room for himself between my legs, spreading them open, touching me there purposefully, exploringly, urgently, like he’s looking for answers. Do I want this? Am I ready? Am I wet enough? Yes. Yes. I don’t know.

            “Because I’m never going to let you go.”

            I moan. His erection brushes against my stomach, and I reach down for him. I want to feel him, too. I want to touch him. But the second my hand closes around him through his pants, he seems to stutter. His expression blanks and then he inhales sharply. He is hard. He’s really hard.

            “Stop,” he orders, choked.

            I obey. But say, “Honesty? I’d like to keep going.”

            He’s not sure whether to believe me. But he lets me push us on our sides, and when I slide my fingers past his waistband, he’s still, motionless but for the movement in his throat.

            “You don’t like this?” I ask.

            “I do,” he rasps.

            “You seem . . .”

            “It’s new for me, too.”

            I laugh softly. “Hand jobs?”

            “Being with someone that I . . .” He doesn’t finish. My fingers wrap around him, and his eyes drop shut. He seems to fall backward. Into himself. “Fuck.”

            I pump up and down, but it’s weird, clumsy, with his pants on. He’s too distracted by my touch, and I have to tug at the waistband several times before he understands that I want him to pull them down.