The gentle and distant roar in the ocean could be heard in the background as Tristan Hawthorne and Paulo Costa lounged together head to foot in a hammock suspended between two jacaranda trees. It had probably been an hour since the two of them had spoken, enjoying each other’s company as they read from paperback novels as blue parakeets chirped in their zooming flights between the trees. While the dappled sunlight coming through the leaves made it too warm to stay fully entangled, Hawthorne had his foot firmly against Costa’s side, under his boyfriend’s bicep. It wasn’t always conscious on his part, but ever since the two of them had started dating nine months prior, Hawthorne couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him without at least some degree of physical closeness. At this point, it was a craving or even an addiction. Even after arguing, and even in the sweltering heat of Rio de Janeiro in January, they had a habit of ending up sprawled all over one another.

Hawthorne thought that “sprawl” was a particularly apposite word for Paulo Costa’s normal posture: the half-Brazilian man had a habit of occupying as much space as he could, his tall, muscular physique filling whatever room he happened to walk into, second only to the warmth, weight, and shine of his positive and often chaotic personality. Whatever chair or couch he sat on became a seat for one because of his tendency to drape his long limbs out as far as he could. That afternoon, he was sprawled over two-thirds of the hammock, one arm behind his head as he balanced a paperback novel on his chest with his other hand. His bold, purple swim shorts embodied the phrase “sky’s out, thighs out,” somehow working with the black, green, and pink floral short-sleeved linen shirt he was wearing with the buttons all undone. He exuded casual confidence and effortless beauty—and the ability to seem perfectly natural and even somehow righteous in his ability to take up space—even as his brows knitted together slightly as he read his book.

Meanwhile, Hawthorne was failing to read his own book. Sitting up straighter than Costa, he had a pillow all the way back on the webbing holding the hammock up, his posture seemingly reflected in his crisp, light blue oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up precisely a centimeter above his elbows. They contrasted just slightly with his pale cerulean swim shorts, which looked ironed even after he had been swimming with Costa a few hours earlier off Praia de Copacabana. Relaxing never really came naturally to him, but the current neurosis he was dealing with was wondering whether he was spoiling his boyfriend’s birthday.

After all, a quiet afternoon reading was Hawthorne’s epitome of luxury. Though Costa enjoyed reading, too, he was more likely to choose something with a little more stimulation: a soccer match, a hike, or anything with crowds, loud music, and opportunities to get into trouble. Hawthorne, by contrast, needed lots of space and time to himself after most any kind of socialization. That’s why Hawthorne couldn’t help but wonder if an afternoon of companionable silence was more engineered on his behalf than anything.

 The night before, the New Year’s Eve party Costa’s fathers had thrown was a lot to handle by Hawthorne’s standards of introversion: dozens of guests all eager to find out more about the man that Paulo Costa had brought home to meet the parents, overlayed on the existing stresses that came with New Year’s Eve. Growing up as the younger son of two diplomats, Hawthorne wasn’t a stranger to social occasions, but he wasn’t used to being the object of everyone’s curiosity after being raised to be seen and not heard. On top of that, they’d followed the Brazilian custom of wearing white for New Year’s Eve, which meant keeping an eagle eye out for stains the whole time. It had drained Hawthorne’s social batteries, and he now had a sinking feeling that this quiet New Year’s Day was more about taking care of him than Paulo having what he really wanted.

That morning, they’d woken up before the rest of the household for a swim off of the beach in the cooling waters of the Atlantic. Then, it was off to a padaria for a light breakfast of pão de queijo, açai, and cafézinho, followed by a stop at a bookshop for the two paperbacks they were now reading in the hammock.

Feeling Costa shift and then a weight on his knee, Hawthorne finished the sentence he was reading and glanced up to see Costa staring at him, a faint smile on his lips as he rested his own book on Hawthorne’s leg. Hawthorne wanted to come up with some clever quip, but he felt his cheeks flush with intermingled flattery and embarrassment as he felt Costa’s gaze on him. His warm, amber eyes shone in the light amidst the shadows of leaves that cast ghosting freckles over both of them.

“Hello?” Hawthorne asked.

“Hi,” Costa replied, grin getting wider. “I was just thinking that I wish I could bottle this moment to take with us. Being here with you is perfect,” he said.

Blushing again from the sincerity of that comment, Hawthorne averted his gaze from Paulo’s brown eyes to the scene of Brazilian splendor around them. The welcome from Costa’s family had been as warm and pleasant as the weather—especially compared to the perfectly fine but physically and emotionally frosty time they’d had the week before in London with the Ranier-Hawthorne clan. Ensconced in the safety of the literal walled garden that was Costa’s fathers’ backyard, it was hard to conceive that Earth had come so close to destruction the same day Hawthorne and Costa had transmuted a decade of animus into love.

They were born a week apart, Hawthorne on Christmas Day 2372 and Costa on New Year’s Day 2373. With their transfer to the Apollo pending, they’d been granted enough time off to spend their birthdays back on Earth together. Both of them were quite used to their own days being subsumed into the holidays they fell on—even Christmas remained a popular secular tradition for both of their families—but they’d managed to be the centers of attention after spending most of their twenties in space. More than that, though, it meant something positive about the direction their relationship was heading. They were racing through milestones at warp speed.

“It really is perfect,” Hawthorne agreed, though Costa evidently did not find his tone convincing.

“You sure about that, baby? You’ve been pretending to read that page for about five minutes now,” Costa observed, voice low and affectionate as he thumped his book absently on Hawthorne’s thigh. “You’re also pouting. Tell me what’s going on in that big, beautiful brain of yours.”

Hawthorne chuckled, disarmed by Costa’s perceptiveness and the easy, confident way he was always able to talk about feelings.

“I was just thinking… You know that sometimes I need space after social gatherings, like last night, so I just hope that you’re having a good birthday and I’m not boring you,” Hawthorne admitted, knowing that it was pointless to debate him. “I hope you understand that we can do absolutely anything you want today.”

“Baby,” Costa said, his voice tender with reproach. “I’m exactly where I want to be right now. With you. Just being us. This is perfect, T,” he said.

All things considered, Hawthorne preferred “baby” among the pet names that Costa had come up with. It felt warm and intimate, especially given that it almost always came with a drop in Costa’s voice by about an octave, becoming a word you could wrap yourself up in like a blanket. “T” was one that Hawthorne had long bristled at before they’d put aside their differences. It had felt disrespectful and dismissive then, but now it felt effortless and casual. He couldn’t help but smile in response to Costa’s reassurance.

“I love it when you smile like that,” Costa purred. He sat up, his legs straddling the canvas of the hammock. The rope momentarily groaned as he recentered his weight. “I know you pretend to be so sexily aloof and stoic all the time, but I can always tell when you’re really happy. Your smile is probably the only thing in nature that could escape a black hole. And that is the best birthday present I could ever hope for.”

Again, Hawthorne was caught off-guard by the earnest sincerity of that admission—as well as its patent and unashamed sappiness. Shameless in the most positive connotation of the term, Costa was only ever genuine. In order to move the conversation back to territory that he was more comfortable with, Hawthorne reached over to gently slip Costa’s novel out of his hand. He examined the cover: it was Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles, a book that Hawthorne had read himself many, many times—though not in the Portuguese edition that Costa had there.

“Ah,” Hawthorne said, handing it back to him as his smile transformed into a smirk. “We really need to cut back on your intake of romance novels, Costa. Madeline Miller was very talented, but I think you have to admit that the dialogue is a tad bit… on the nose, no?”

Costa looked personally wounded as if Hawthorne had managed to insult not just him but his entire lineage through centuries of Mexicans and Brazilians alike. Visibly grasping for words as his mouth flapped uselessly, he was left temporarily stunned in sheer, affronted disbelief—speechless in a way that Hawthorne had rarely been able to achieve from him.

“You take that back right now,” Costa insisted, eyes wide.

“I won’t,” Hawthorne said.

“You will,” Costa replied, lunging at him.

The rope holding the hammock up creaked dangerously as their weight shifted, but Hawthorne was too overwhelmed by Costa’s physicality to fully register the implications of that. The two mock-wrestled, Costa pulling Hawthorne down so they were entangled together, writhing and squabbling for dominance. Hawthorne’s breath hitched as Costa’s weight settled on top of him. His boyfriend was all warmth, muscle, and reckless energy. For the pair of them, given their long history as rivals, there was a charge in everything they did—every conversation they had was likely to get physical, one way or another.

Laughing and arguing, the two continued to struggle. Hawthorne thought he was acquitting himself rather well, though he doubted that either of them was actually trying to win—he definitely didn’t want it to end, at least. He almost didn’t hear the sound of barking coming from across the yard. By the time it got closer, it was too late for him to react and stop three eager golden retrievers from bounding up into the hammock with them. Apparently excited by the noise, the two puppies and their mother had decided to join in on the fun.

“Off, no!” Hawthorne grumbled as one of the younger dogs started licking his face. Complaints were mingled with unbecoming giggles as the two men struggled to settle the dogs back down. “You’d think one was enough. Why did they need three of you?!” he exclaimed.

Before Costa could react to that, the frame holding the hammock up groaned. The two of them stopped moving entirely. For about half a second, it seemed like they might get out of their predicament with no consequences. Then, it all came crashing down. Their combined 150 kilos thrashing about at just the wrong spot on the hammock caused the rope on Hawthorne’s side to snap clean off, sending them both tumbling to the ground. Costa wrapped himself protectively around Hawthorne, though that didn’t soften the blow much.

With barely enough time to come to terms with the fact that they’d broken the hammock, the dogs resumed the full intensity of their chaos. They had only just managed to pry the twisted canvas off of themselves when they saw Costa’s brother running over from the house. While physically identical to Paulo Costa, Felix Navarro (he used their other father’s surname) was a twin in every way but temperament. Where Paulo was unserious and unbound, Felix was serious and exacting in equal measure. He was an academic—an art historian at a university—and was soft-spoken, serious, and responsible. In many ways, Hawthorne found himself intimidated by him, while baser parts of himself in the back of his mind wondered what life would have been like if he’d met the other twin earlier. In another universe, maybe…

“I can’t wait to hear how you are going to blame this on the dogs,” Felix chided, his voice as identical to his brother’s as his looks were in timbre, but off in its added sharpness and precision. “Are you two okay?”

“Claro,” Costa managed as they pulled the hammock off of themselves and sat up. He laughed as one of the dogs went for his neck. “How could I blame anything on these beauties?”

“Você está quase fazendo 30 anos, Paulo. When are you going to stop acting like a child?” Felix complained. Tristan bit back a groan as he knew they were about to be both linguistically fascinating and deeply irritating. “I liked this hammock.”

“Pois claro, le redjuiste la integridad estrucural, hermano,” Costa quipped in Spanish.

Born in Los Angeles, the two half-Mexican, half-Brazilian brothers couldn’t seem to decide on which language they wanted to argue in. It drove Hawthorne (and the universal translator, which he’d long since decided to leave in his luggage) crazy trying to keep up. The false lexical friends between the two languages were deeply frustrating to him and deeply amusing to Costa. Sometimes, they switched languages mid-sentence, seemingly for no reason.

“Ou talvez fossem vocês dois, dois homossexuais apaixonados, rolando nisso como filhotes,” Felix replied, staying in Portuguese, his exasperation at Costa and Hawthorne’s antics coming through quite clear, even as Hawthorne tried to grapple with the specific vocabulary in use there.

“I’m bisexual, actually,” Costa quipped. “He actually did start it this time, though. I just finished it,” he said as he helped Hawthorne up to his feet.

“I’ll allow that because it’s your birthday,” Hawthorne replied. He cleared his throat, looking between the twins and considering the unusual communicative situation he found himself in. “Your birthdays, I guess?”

Felix chuckled. “Speaking of that… What I came out here to say was that dinner will be ready in an hour, so you two might want to get cleaned up. And maybe fix that hammock before anyone else notices.”

With a snap of his fingers directed towards the dogs—who immediately followed him—Felix walked back towards the house. Hawthorne’s eyes flickered after him for a moment, then settled back on Costa. As much as Costa’s too-laid-back persona and seemingly sloppy and slapdash approach to life had infuriated him in the early part of their careers, Hawthorne couldn’t imagine how boring it would have been if he’d ended up with the wrong twin.

“Te amo,” Hawthorne said, smiling. He pecked him on the lips. “Even if you are a menace.”