“It doesn’t matter, I can figure it out, I’ve learned whole-cell patch clamp in a couple of hours, sex can’t be much harder,” she says quickly. Like she’s under the impression that he’s put off by her inexperience. “And I bet you do this all the time, so you can tell me how to—”

“You’d lose.”

“I… what?”

“You’d lose your bet.” He sighs. His stupid, moronic cock has never been this hard. Because part of him likes this. The lie he could spin to himself: that this means something to her. That he means something to her. “I can’t.”

“Of course you can.”

He shakes 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 . . .”

She does this every single time. Makes him want to laugh, like he’s somehow not really the sulky, humorless person he knows himself to be.

Every Wednesday, she makes him forget that he’s supposed to be antagonistic and unapproachable, to hate the entire world, and even though it’s a terrible idea, he’s touching her again, smiling against her mouth while she laughs into his, telling her between kisses to stop being a smart-ass, and then, once they’re too close again: “Olive, if for any reason sex is something that you are not comfortable with, or that you’d rather not have outside of a relationship, then—”

“No. No, it’s nothing like that. I—” He pulls back and watches her, patient.

Wanting to understand. “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 . . . just to 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… 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…”

Adam wants to tell her that there’s nothing weird with her brain. That he’d forgotten sex was something he was supposed to want for years before meeting her. That he knows exactly what she’s saying. But it’s a risky truth

to admit amidst the lies, and so he just looks at her, takes in her words, and for the first time in weeks wonders if maybe there is hope.

He hasn’t let himself before. He’s not one to lie, not even to himself, and the th

delusion that this will end in anything but a clean cut on September 29 is a dangerous one to entertain. But if Olive trusts him. If she trusts him.

Maybe not now. Nor soon. She’s in love with someone else, and these things take time. But next year they’ll be both here in Boston, and maybe, if she already trusts him, Adam could convince her to let him take care of her. He doesn’t want anything in return. She doesn’t need to fall for him, because he loves her enough for the both of them. But if she trusts him—

“I want to do this,” she’s telling him. “With you. I really do.”

Adam can feel his heart expand, grow full of something fragile and unfamiliar. “Me too, Olive. You have no idea.”

“Then, please. Please, don’t say no. Please?” She nibbles on his lip, his jaw, the skin under his ear, until he takes a deep breath and nods and realizes that if this is going to happen—and it is, it absolutely fucking is—he needs be better at it. Make her comfortable. So he picks her up and deposits her on his bed, smiling at the surprised, laughing yelp she lets out.

“Okay?” he asks when she’s on her back, shifting on top of her, taking in her small nod and the new view—hair fanning hair, pale skin, jutting hip bones.

He wants to lick them. Then he wants to feed her sugary foods, keep her warm and safe till her ribs don’t stick out so much anymore. The skin of her belly—he will think about it years from now, get himself off to the memories of each soft freckle. He takes her panties off, finally, finally, and she’s wearing knee socks, bright and happy, and… just like everything else she’s ever done, he’s apparently into that. He’s into that a lot.

“Adam?”

Her voice is airy, and he takes it as an ask to hurry up. To push her legs wide open with his palms on her inner thighs and smell her lovely, honey scent.

She’s wet and sticky under his lips, smooth and soft, and he thinks he blacks out from it a little. From the pleasure of doing this to her, of exploring her with his tongue. He’s almost sure he’s done this before, and even though he doesn’t remember when, or with whom, he’s positive she was nothing like Olive. Her ass fits perfectly in his palm, he can span her hips with his fingers, and it’s a bit of a power trip, the way he can easily angle her for him to lick, and… She’s lithe. Especially compared to the oafish, lumbering mountain Adam is. He’s tried very hard to pretend it doesn’t turn him on to the extent that it does, but… no. Not possible to lie to himself, not when he’s sucking on the lips of her pussy and she’s moaning in the palm of her hand.

It makes him want to get closer, learn her even more, and—

And then she’s telling him to stop.

It takes a moment to penetrate the trance he’s been put into, but when it does he goes still. “Have you changed your mind?”

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

“You don’t like this?”

“Well, I’ve never . . .”

Adam tries to imagine having sex with Olive and not begging her to let him do this. Seems absurd. Beyond belief.

“But I’m the one who put you up to this,” she adds, “so we should do things that you are into, and not stuff for me . . .”

He finally catches her meaning and growls deep in his throat. He closes his eyes, lays his forehead against her thighs, and contemplates trashing the entire damn hotel room. But it would scare Olive, and do absolutely nothing to convince her that she is beautiful and fuckable, that he wants to absorb her into himself and lick her dry, that this is for him more than for her. So he opts for something else: pressing his tongue against her clit, gripping her squirming waist to still her, to make her take his fingers and his tongue inside her. He holds her wide open, watches her arch on the mattress in a beautiful, perfect bow. He hears her soft noises and feels her tense, clutch at his hair and shoulders with a frustrated, impatient sort of desperation, like she wants to come but she’s afraid she won’t, and he loves the feeling of it, the illusion that this precipice they’re hovering on together is unending, hidden in space and time. An arc of pleasure, suspended. But then she comes with sweet whimpers and slow, strong contractions, and Adam’s gut tightens, and his vision whites. He’d love to fuck her, but he might come from just this, and that’s okay. He wants to watch her again. She’s sensitive, writhing, laughing, small and tight and warm, beautiful, so beautiful, so powerful and perfect and beautiful. When it’s too much, when she pulls him up to her, he presses her into bed with his legs and his arms and his hands, watches her twitch with the last aftershocks of pleasure, feels her little heart beat a drum against his own. In this moment, he has everything. Every last thing he needs.

“Can I fuck you?” he asks against her mouth.

She kisses him back. Pulls him closer. Traces his hot, sweaty skin. He’s not worthy, but he wants her anyway. “Mmm?”