Adam freezes.
“Hey. Shh.” This is not really working—him in her. So he tries to still her hips, and when that doesn’t do the trick he grazes her clit again with his thumb, hoping it will help her soften. She whimpers, closes a hand around his arm with trembling fingers. Her nipples are hard little pebbles and she seems to like it, seems to breathe faster and break into a sweat and maybe want more—but she stays just as tight. “It’s okay. Relax.” He tries to stretch her. Work his finger in a little deeper. See where he can go. She’s wet inside, really wet, and it shouldn’t be this difficult, he doesn’t think.
Problem is, he cannot read her. Not consistently. Granted, he has very little recent experience, and even less clarity of mind with Olive grinding against his hand. She lets out soft groans, deep breaths, but then she’ll wince, claw her nails into his biceps, and that’s putting the brakes on pretty quickly for him, the idea that she might be in any kind of pain. “Does it hurt?” he tries to ask. She shakes her head, but a second later he sees her flinch. “Why are you so tense, Olive?” he asks, distracted, staring at his finger inside her.
“You’ve done this before, right?”
It’s a stupid question, and he instantly wants to punch himself for asking it.
Of course, she’s done this before—look at her. She’s not like Adam. She probably does this—
“Um, a couple of times. In college.”
Adam goes still. His mind empties, then blanks. Then the enormity of what is happening hits him like a freight train, and he gently pulls away, shaking his head.
This is… no. No. It’s a mistake. She clearly doesn’t take sex lightly, which means that she deserves to have it with someone… better. Someone else.
Someone who’s not this much older than her, who never failed her friend’s dissertation proposal, who doesn’t need to set an alarm for one AM to remember to stop working and go to sleep. Someone who didn’t spend the last several years pining across lecture rooms, someone who doesn’t picture her when he—
“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.