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Okay, so the change in their relationship actually started with Coney Island, but Mabel was going to blame the kiss cam anyway.
Well. More like thank it.
Mabel was having a sucky time with a recent break-up that she was treating with a medicinal amount of hanging out with Theo, so when he told her he couldn’t eat pastitsio on their couch while watching episodes of Taskmaster with subtitles on for the third night in a row, it wasn’t much of a surprise that the other plans he’d made also included her.
“I have Mets tickets,” he texted from the kitchen. She was on her bed thinking about dying her hair. “You don’t have to come, but just think about how brave and strong and sexy it would be to go outside.”
She met him in their living room once she was dressed. In ASL, she declared, “So brave and strong and hot.”
He showed her a new sign, which she copied.
“Is that sexy?” she asked aloud as she did it.
Thumbs up.
“And does it mean sexy?”
He stuck his tongue out at her. Yes, then. He changed the subject, sort of. “I see you dressed for the Met Gala and not the Mets. No sweatpants!”
Under her current favorite coat, Mabel had dressed in a new t-shirt and a long wooly skirt with side slits to the knees. She’d put on makeup, earrings, and even (gasp shock) matching underwear, which always made her feel fancy. Her posture was probably showing it. “Yeah,” she signed, “We’re maximizing treats. The weather’s beautiful, we’re going out, I’m getting to wear a little outfit.”
“This will fix you.”
“This will so fix me!”
On the subway ride to Citi Field, Mabel asked, “How come a good Manhattan boy stans the Mets, anyway?”
“Because my dad is the good Manhattanite and this pisses him off. I thought about really committing and rooting for the Boston Red Sox, but I didn’t want to add treason to my rap sheet.”
“Wow,” Mabel said, drawing the word out, before switching to sign so she wouldn’t be overheard. “You’ve practically gone straight.”
“Rude!” he signed, and then, using one hand as a shield against a nun’s sightline, flipped her off.
So—fast-forward. The game was fun. They smuggled in bottled juice to stick it to the man a little bit, since they were paying stadium prices for the chili dogs with onions and Greek nachos they bought as dinner.
Anyway, maybe it was Mabel’s cute outfit, or the fact that they were laughing so hard at their own jokes that their cheeks hurt, or the fact that Theo had just put his arm as a protective buffer across the back of Mabel’s seat because a group of under-12 cousins behind them accidentally whacked her in the neck with a foam finger. They caught someone’s eye, because the kiss cam moved on from a very elderly couple in matching hats and settled on Theo and Mabel.
Maybe someone else would have thought about it long enough to decide that kissing your roommate during a televised event is a ticket for a whole carousel of awkwardness, but Mabel was already leaning in and so was he.
And they kissed for a while.
The camera had definitely moved on and they were still kissing.
They did eventually remember there was still a game going on and separate to watch it, but Theo’s arm was still around Mabel, and she settled her hand on his knee.
They didn’t discuss it. A little corner of Mabel’s brain went eeeeeeeee the whole time they were cuddled up, and it kept squealing while they held hands on the subway home.
They let go of each other in the Arconia lobby, but of course Oliver and Loretta got into the elevator with them. Mabel said something not very specific about having fun at the game when the couple paused for breath. They’d been to the ballet. Theo, his hand hidden from view by the fall of Mabel’s coat, reached over and tickled the inside of her wrist with his pinky finger.
“I think Loretta suspects something,” Mabel signed when they were alone.
“Is there something to suspect?” Theo unlocked their door while she thought about how to respond.
“I’d like there to be,” she said, with both speech and sign, and then they were kissing again.
Somewhere in there—maybe about the time Theo licked her neck—it escalated beyond kissing. She was touching his ass in a pretty unambiguous way when he knelt suddenly, ran his hands up her clothed thighs, and pulled back enough to sign, “Would you like me to fingerfuck you?” He finger spelled the key word, which meant that by the end she was excitedly signing -u-c-k along with him.
He put his hands up her skirt and let her rest her hands on his shoulders when she wanted to kick her underwear across the floor instead of leaving it hanging out around her ankles to make her feel like those animals that get caught in the ring plastic from six-packs. Mabel actually explained this to him while he was actively stroking her inner thighs, which probably wouldn’t have struck her as a move with a date, but Theo was within the top five people on the planet who were the most used to her company and he still liked her. He even laughed and kissed her hip.
She always had particularly liked being fingered, but she’d spent so much time looking at his hands...talking, cooking, picking locks. It was exciting to feel all that attention turned back on her. He was very focused on curling his fingers into her g-spot, but not entirely. He was also looking up at her, watching her face.
Theo must have seen something in her expression that suggested she needed more before she made up her own mind, because as she moved one of her own hands to press against, he was withdrawing his own. Mabel swallowed a whine. She could see he wasn’t thinking about stopping, but ASL takes two hands.
He asked, “Do you want a bed? And slash or for me to go down on you?”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding vigorously. “And. And is good.” She pulled him to his feet, not at all patiently, laughing when she stumbled over her own feet. He steadied her and pushed her gently through the doorway to his room, which was closer.
She threw her coat over a chair, but otherwise didn’t bother to undress, falling backwards onto the bed and hitching her skirt up for him. He folded up his glasses and set them on the end of the bed along with his sweater. Mabel loved that he didn’t even want to waste time walking a couple of feet to set them down on literally any other furniture. She hooked her knees over his shoulders with great enthusiasm.
Theo made her come like that, with his tongue inside her and his hands traveling. Her orgasm had a deep, toe-curling quality she associated with waiting a long time for it. Had she been thinking about this all night? Seeing their faces on the jumbotron screen felt like a distant memory.
In Mabel’s happy haze, she was aware of Theo lying down beside her and stroking her face gently. “Hey,” she said presently, grinning. She couldn’t see him very well in the dark room, but she saw his answering smile and knew they’d communicated.
It was still a surprise when he scootched up the bed and turned on the 3D-printed moon lamp on his nightstand. It wasn’t a very strong light—she couldn’t have told him the color of his quilt just from that—but she could see the positions of his hands clearly. “How far do you want to take this?” Theo signed.
“Tonight, or, like, in life?” she signed back.
He gave her an extraordinary look that made her wish they were in full light after all. He looked dazzled, hopeful, amused, and aroused. She didn’t believe for a moment that he hadn’t wondered about it, too: What it would be like to be partners and not just friends and roommates, do all the things they did now and more. Theirs wasn’t an uncomplicated relationship, but…it would be worth it, wouldn’t it? It was just that there was always something going on. She’d had a girlfriend, and then a boyfriend, and so had he. There had been bi-coastal travel and murders and new jobs and she did forgive him, but she would have to tell her mom, who probably had already decided what she thought about Mabel marrying Theo, because that was really where this was leading, in her mind. If Mabel Mora ever kissed Theo Dimas, she would want to marry him, and now she had.
But if she told him that, they would have to stop having sex for at least a couple of minutes, and that was unbearable. “If you have protection, I want you in me,” she signed, unsure of the sign for condom.
He pointed to the drawer. She hopped up to look, turning her face to watch him when she realized he was communicating with her. “Would you totally hate it if we left the lamp on?” His hands stilled, but he didn’t lower them, so she grabbed the condom while he put his thoughts in order. When she met his eyes again, he added, signing more slowly, “It’s usually not negotiable for me, the first time I hook up with someone, but I know you well enough that if you would, I can do without it.”
Mabel sat beside him and bumped her knee against his affectionately. In sign only, she told him, “You want to be able to talk, I get it. I probably wouldn’t choose light, but yeah. It’s you. But I’ll probably leave on my camisole.” She finger spelled camisole, and Theo shook his head to tell her he didn’t know the sign for it, either. That happened to them sometimes with unshared hobbies and gendered clothes, and a couple of times she’d been able to figure it out and triumphantly teach him.
“You don’t like being looked at?” he asked incredulously, almost not completing the words before his hands were occupied running along her torso.
“I don’t like people looking at my whale tattoo,” she explained, this time mouthing the word she didn’t know, whale. He knew it was there, but still, “Not the first time I sleep with them.” She didn’t like it when people who hadn’t heard the story yet asked if it had any significance. With Theo it was only that she didn’t want that much vulnerability on top of all the other newness. She pulled her t-shirt off and guided one of his hands under the green silk camisole to show he was allowed to touch there.
She kissed him again, since she could. When Theo broke the kiss, he asked, “How do you feel about getting on top?”
“Very positively.” A flicker of relief crossed his face along with desire. It took her a couple moments of undressing to process why. “Oh!” she said out loud, twisting with just one boot unlaced to sign, “Oh man, you can’t sign when you’re holding yourself up with your arms. Is that…can we talk about whether that’s ever okay with you sometime? For next time, I mean, I feel like we both know there’s going to be a next time, but if I’m wrong…”
He cut her off with a playful chopping gesture and stuck-out tongue. “It’s fine. I’ll just do more of the talking at the start. But it feels more intense, and first times are always a little intense. Or if something else is going on, sometimes it really helps that I can sign.” He kissed her cheek. “It’s fine,” he repeated. “You were making noise while I was going down on you, right?”
“Yes. Mostly it was just 'yes, oh my god, Theo.'”
He winked. “I could tell, because you were petting my head, and you were squeezing me with your thighs, and at one point you arched your back and accidentally kicked me.”
“Sorry!”
“It was really sexy! And you had ways of telling me if you didn’t think so. I don’t always need or want to talk.”
“Sometimes people like being gagged,” she joked.
Theo bit back a smile for a beat while she remembered he’d gagged her once. “So remind me, what base is kidnapping?” he asked. Mabel hit him with a pillow.
But she kissed his dear face afterwards, while he laughed, and they did get his clothes all the way off so she could ride him. He said something self-deprecating about being hairy, to which she signed, “What are my hands telling you?” and dragged them appreciatively across his chest.
There was very little other talking they felt moved to do. The main thing seemed to be that having the option made them both a little more confident. Theo called her beautiful, but he was saying that with the rest of his body, too. She came again from touching her clit while he touched her breasts in an especially excellent way. She tipped him over the edge by putting her fingers in his mouth.
Afterwards, Mabel did not offer to get up and sleep in her own bed, nor did Theo suggest she might want to be anywhere else. When she came back to bed from her turn in the shower, he’d grabbed her pajamas from the basket of neglected clean laundry and laid them across his bed for her. She put on the pants and threw the shirt on, unbuttoned, over her camisole before cuddling up to him. He’d turned the lamp off and was looking at his tablet. He kissed her temple. “Do you want to watch Would I Lie to You?” he suggested, typing the question out. She poked at the screen to pull up an episode with a presenter she particularly liked, and when the woman got into a story about her husband’s underwear and Mabel started giggling wildly, Theo paused the video to ask whether she was reacting to something uncaptioned or just the general silliness.
She wouldn’t have been able to answer him right away if she’d had to talk, but she signed, “I just remembered my underwear is still in our foyer,” and Theo, snort-laughing, put his head on her shoulder.