“You’d lose.”

The room was chilly. His finger was not inside her anymore, and his hand had left her hip.

“What?”

“You’d lose your bet.” He sighed, wiping a hand down his face. The other one, the one that had been inside her, moved down to adjust his cock. It looked enormous by now, and he winced as he touched it. “Olive, I can’t.”

“Of course you can.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

“What? No. No, I—”

“You’re basically a vir—”

“I’m not!”

“Olive.”

“I am not.”

“But so close to it that—”

“No, that’s not the way it works. Virginity is not a continuous variable, it’s categorical. Binary. Nominal. Dichotomous. Ordinal, potentially. I’m talking about chi-square, maybe Spearman’s correlation, logistic regression, the logit model and that stupid sigmoid function, and . . .”

It had been weeks and it still took her breath away, the uneven tilt of his smile. How unanticipated it always was, the dimples it formed. Olive was left without air as his large palm cupped the side of her face and brought it down for a slow, warm, laughing kiss.

“You are such a smart-ass,” he said against her mouth.

“Maybe.” She was smiling, too. And kissing him back. Hugging him, arms draped around his neck, and she felt a shiver of pleasure when he pulled her deeper into himself.

“Olive,” he said inching back, “if for any reason sex is something that you . . . that you’re not comfortable with, or that you’d rather not have outside of a relationship, then—”

“No. No, it’s nothing like that. I—” She took a deep breath, looking for a way to explain herself. “It’s not that I want to not have sex. I just . . . don’t particularly want to have it. There is something weird about my brain, and my body, and—I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I don’t seem to be able to experience attraction like other people. Like normal people. I tried to just . . . to just do it, to get it over with, and the guy I did it with was nice, but the truth is that I just don’t feel any . . .” She closed her eyes. This was difficult to admit. “I don’t feel any sexual attraction unless I actually get to trust and like a person, which for some reason never happens. Or, almost never. It hadn’t, not in a long time, but now—I really like you, and I really trust you, and for the first time in a million years I want to—”

She couldn’t ramble anymore, because he was kissing her again, this time hard and bruising, as though he wanted to absorb her into himself. “I want to do this,” she said, as soon as she was able to. “With you. I really do.”

“Me too, Olive.” He sighed. “You have no idea.”

“Then, please. Please, don’t say no.” She bit her lip, and then his. And then nipped at his jaw. “Please?”

He took a deep breath and nodded. She smiled and kissed the curve of his neck, and his hand splayed against her lower back.

“But,” he said, “we should probably go about this a little differently.”

—

IT TOOK HER the longest time to realize his intentions. Not because she was stupid, or oblivious, or that naive about sex, but because . . .

Maybe she was a little naive about sex. But she truly hadn’t thought about it for ages before Adam, and even then, it was never quite in these terms—him above her, pushing her legs wide open with his palms on her inner thighs and then kneeling between them. Sliding down, low.

“What are you—”

The way he parted her with his tongue, it was as though she was butter and he meant to slice through her like a hot knife. He was slow but sure, and didn’t pause when Olive’s thigh stiffened against his palm, or when she tried to squirm away. He just grunted, rich and low; then ran his nose in the skin at the juncture of her abdomen, inhaling deeply; and then he licked her once more.

“Adam—stop,” she pleaded, and for a moment he just nuzzled his face against her folds like he had no intention of doing any such thing. Then he lifted his head, eyes foggy, as if aware that he should be listening to her.

“Mmm?” His lips vibrated against her.

“Maybe . . . maybe you should stop?”

He went still, his hand tightening around her thigh. “Have you changed your mind?”

“No. But we should do . . . other things.”

He frowned. “You don’t like this?”

“No. Yes. Well, I’ve never . . .” The line between his eyebrows deepened. “But I’m the one who put you up to this, so we should do things that you are into, and not stuff for me . . .”

This time it was the flat of his tongue against her clit, pressing just enough to make her clench and exhale in a rush. The tip was circling around it, which—such a small movement, and yet it sent her hand straight to her mouth, had her biting the fleshy part of her palm.

“Adam!” Her voice sounded like someone else’s. “Did you hear what I . . . ?”

“You said to do something I’m into.” His breath was hot against her. “I am.”

“You can’t possibly want to—”

He squeezed her leg. “I can’t remember a moment I didn’t.”

It just didn’t feel like standard hookup fare, something this intimate. But it was hard to protest when he looked spellbound, staring at her, at her face and her legs and the rest of her body. His hand was large, open over her abdomen and holding her down, inching higher and closer to her breasts, but never close enough. Lying like this, Olive was a little embarrassed of how concave her stomach was. Of the way her ribs stuck out. Adam, though, didn’t seem to mind.

“Wouldn’t you rather—”

A nip. “No.”

“I didn’t even say—”

He glanced up. “There isn’t anything I’d rather do.”

“But—”

He sucked on one of her lips with a loud, wet noise, and she gasped. And then his tongue was inside her, and she moaned, half in surprise, half at the feeling of— Yes.

Yes.

“Fuck,” someone said. It wasn’t Olive, so it must have been Adam. “Fuck.” It felt incredible. Otherworldly. His tongue, dipping in and out, circling and lapping, and his nose against her skin, and the quiet sounds he made from deep in his chest whenever she contracted, and Olive was going to—she . . .

She wasn’t sure she was going to come. Not with another person in the room touching her. “This might take a while,” she said apologetically, hating how thin her voice sounded.

“Fuck, yes.” His tongue swiped the entirety of her, a long, broad stroke. “Please.” She didn’t think she’d ever heard him quite this enthusiastic about anything, not even grant writing or computational biology. It kicked the whole thing a few notches higher for her, and it got worse when she noticed his arm. The one that wasn’t cupping the cheek of her ass and holding her open.

He hadn’t taken himself out of his pants yet, that Olive could see, and wasn’t that unfair, since she was all splayed open for him. But the way his arm was shifting, how his hand was moving up and down slowly, that was just unbearable. She arched further, her spine shaping a perfect curve as the back of her head hit the pillow.

“Olive.” He leaned back a few centimeters and kissed the inside of her shaking thigh. Took a deep breath with his nose, as if to hold the smell of her within himself. “You can’t come yet.” His lips brushed against her folds as his tongue dipped in again, and she squeezed her eyes shut. There was a liquid, burning heat blossoming in her tummy, spilling all over her. Her fingers clawed at the sheets, grasping for an anchor. This was impossible. Unmanageable.

“Adam.”

“Don’t. Two more minutes.” He sucked on— God, yes. There.

“I’m—sorry.”

“One more.”

“I can’t—”

“Focus, Olive.”

In the end, it was his voice that ruined everything. That quiet, possessive tone, the hint of an order in the low rasp of his words, and the pleasure broke over her like an ocean wave. Her mind snapped, and she was not wholly herself for seconds, and then minutes, and when she had a sense of the world again, he was still licking her, except more slowly, as if with no purpose but to savor her. “I want to go down on you until you pass out.” His lips were so soft against her skin.