“But I want to. And I want to do other things too.” The way his voice dips, his hands tighten, oh God, he’s talking about sex. I want to hide my festering face in my hands. “This is you, this is still you, and I missed you.” He cradles my jaw and despite myself, despite everything, I lean into him. “I don’t care about this. It’s still you.”

He’s not lying. He is completely, utterly honest. I want to tell him how awful of an idea it is, how he’ll regret it, how much I missed him, and I’ll take anything he gives me.

He says, cautiously, “I can kiss something else.”

My embarrassed laughter comes out as a squeal. “Theo! Do not phrase it like that!”

“I phrased it that way for a reason?”

“I swear to God!”

“Don’t bring Him into this!”

But we’re both giggling, and his hands push under my shirt and find the edge of my sports bra and get under that too. He kisses my not-torn cheek, the crook of my jaw, all the way down my neck. He gets to the dip of my collarbone, I unzip my jacket for him. The quiet noise he makes when he gets to the soft skin of my shoulder makes me brace myself on the pew.

It’s just like it used to be.

“Your…,” Theo mumbles against me, fingers winding through my belt loops.

“Cargo shorts.” I bite down a laugh as I fumble with the button. “How sexy of me.”

He snorts. “I put up with a lot for the sake of being into men.”

Men. I’m a man. Theo has seen me as a man from the moment I told him. I’ve always been his boyfriend, his fiancé, his future husband. Always Benjamin. Always me.

All that gets reduced to an elegant, “Gayyy.”

“That’s kind of the point,” Theo says.

He kneels on the dirty carpet between my knees, and I missed this, I needed this, Jesus, I needed him.

“Let me do something for you,” I insist afterward, even though I couldn’t move if I tried.

Theo pulls a pack of ancient tissues out of his pocket, which means he planned this, and I don’t have the energy to be annoyed. I just wrestle my ass back into my pants and stare up at the ceiling of the church, where the ribs arch up toward the spine.

“Nope,” he says. “Don’t even think about it.” He climbs up off the floor to sit beside me. “Been a while?”

“I can’t believe you—”

He brandishes the used tissue like a weapon. I yelp and throw my hands up.

“Still you, remember?” he says.

Still me. “Yeah, whatever.”