: Chapter 9

I’VE ONLY BEEN in Oliver’s room one other time—when he was fixing something in the garage and needed me to grab his phone from his dresser—but I didn’t take the time to look around and take in how he’d put his secret space together. That time, it felt too personal to be in his sanctuary; I located the phone and dashed out. Back then, too, I hadn’t really let the enormity of my feelings sink in. We were still Just Friends. Being in his room wasn’t intense because he would be naked here, or sleep here. It just felt like a level of personal that Lola + Oliver didn’t do.

But right now—after that perfect kiss, after the feel of him rock hard beneath me, and knowing what we’re about to do in this room—my heart is a banging drum in my ear.

This is really happening.

I’m not dreaming.

Oliver’s hand is wrapped around mine, the memory of his mouth still makes my lips tingle, and his bed is mere feet from where we stand. It’s on the far side of the room, near the window that overlooks the ocean, which is a couple of blocks away. His window is open and it smells like salt water and ocean air and the clean pine scent of his laundry detergent.

I lead him over, and with a shaking hand pull back the covers and carefully slide in. His sheets are clean, the cotton cool beneath my back, and it makes my skin feel charged. Oliver watches me turn and lie down, and waits only a moment before he moves, slowly prowling over me and settling between my legs. His expression is so full of wonder when he looks down at me; it gives me a dizzying rush of power. He wants this as much as I do. I knew it, because he’d told me, but until just tonight, I didn’t truly believe.

The cold of the sheets is gone in only seconds and I’m too warm in an excited, frantic sort of way; the prick of sweat rises on my neck, down my chest. My nipples feel swollen and sensitive, and the heat of his skin when I rub against him pulls a soft gasp from my mouth.

“Lola.” My name is an urgent whisper on his lips, and I reach up, pulling his glasses from his face. He takes them from me and slides them onto the nightstand with so much caution that I wonder if he also feels so deliberate in every movement, it’s like moving through water.

“There,” I say when he turns back to me.

While my eyes adjust to the darkness of his room, I let my fingertips trace the outline of his face, the sharp line of his jaw. He’s angles and slopes; his skin is smooth along his cheeks, rough along his jaw. I stretch into him, pressing my bare chest to his, and Oliver lets out a shaking groan, sliding his hand down my side, along my thigh to my knee, where he pulls my leg over his hip. Beneath the denim of his jeans, his cock is rigid against me, and I feel the shape of it as we press together and apart, together and apart, rocking.

“You sure?” he whispers.

“I’m sure.”

The panel shows them prone, entwined, afire.

My breaths are violent jerks sucked in by necessity and pushed out by a wild beast in my chest. I’m completely naked except for the cotton of my underwear, and I relish the scratch of the denim on the soft skin of my thighs, but I want to feel him. The warmth, the skin, the tickle of hair. While his mouth plays along my neck, to my collarbone, and over the top swell of my breast, I slip my fingers between our bodies, unfasten his jeans, and work them as far as I can down his hips. I feel the rumbling groan in his chest before I hear it. He rocks his hips forward, making me gasp sharply when he presses himself—now only in his boxers—directly against my clit.

Oliver bends to move his mouth up my neck in a hot trail of teeth and lips. “Holy fuck, Lola—”

He cuts himself off when his mouth finds mine already open and searching for his, and I know the second I taste him that we’re skipping the slow exploration. His lips are soft and strong, sliding with mine so urgently we quickly grow messy—teeth grazing and chins captured in the hunger of it.

Want hits me like the lash of a whip, propelled by adrenaline. I grip the back of his neck, urging him to kiss me harder, to touch me. The sound I make when his thumb slides across my nipple is nearly one of pain; it pulls every nerve ending into a tight bunch, stroking me into fire, and he does it again, and again, in small, pressing circles. My heart pounds beneath his hand as he holds me there for his mouth and bends, sucking wetly . . . biting sharply . . . and his hips press forward and back, pushing himself right up against my clit until I’m scratching at his shoulders trying to get his weight to push me into the mattress, push my legs farther apart, push into me.

I tickle my fingers down his stomach, feeling both frantic and terrified.

“Yeah. Touch me,” he begs into my open mouth.

I slip my hand inside and gasp at the warmth. He’s urgent in my grip and exactly how I imagined he would feel: silken skin wrapped tight around iron and fire. Oliver’s face falls in relief as I stroke him, gently slipping his foreskin down and up, over the crown, and he begins to move, forward and back, lips distracted and hungry over mine.

The last eight months have been the slowest, most torturous foreplay, and there’s a fever beneath my skin that makes me impatient, lets me release him only long enough to push his boxers down far enough for him to kick them and his jeans the rest of the way off.

He’s unable to remain still over me, stubbly jaw razing across my sensitive nipples as he kisses down my ribs, under my arm, teeth scraping over my bicep as he rocks into my hand.

He fumbles between us, pulling my underwear down so I can free one leg and then his fingers are there, sliding over and into me and it’s like being plugged into the solar system, everything inside me is light and fire, and I’m squirming under him to get there because, already, I’m close. I want to know what he feels, how he feels when he’s touching me and I’m there, too, one finger twisted around his and he laughs into a kiss, telling me how amazing it is. How can he find words when I’m completely speechless? His thumb grazes my clit again and again and I’m so swollen and desperate and pushing up off the bed so he can reach deeper with his forever-long fingers. His cock brushes against our hands and then he shifts his hips and moves our fingers out of the way and then it’s there, closer, and with a tiny synchronized catch in our breath he’s pushing forward and he slides into me.

“Oh, fuck,” he says and “Lola. Oh fuck me. Oh fuck me.”

And it turns to frenzy.

He’s moving not just moving but absolutely fucking me and it’s Oliver and he’s inside me already and he’s moving so deep in and out, groaning into my neck.

Oliver plants his knees into the mattress and moves—there is nothing but sound in the darkness around us: the headboard slams against the wall, the hinges of the bed groan in protest. He’s grunting in my ear because it’s work, fucking me like this: fast and messy. His fingers slip over my chin and my mouth and he’s following with his tongue, licking my taste from my skin.

We’re laughing into kisses because it’s good—it’s so good—and my hands are everywhere between us: his chest and hips and stomach and the base of his cock. Somewhere deep down I knew it would be like this, I did. In the corners where I let myself imagine being close to anyone in this way, it was him. Always the fantasy had a flash of dark hair tucked into my neck, long fingers wrapped around my hip, his mouth curved into a knowing smile when I start to come—

“Oh, God—”

My words are cut off by pleasure. Smoke runs through my veins, hot and weightless until I feel like I’m floating, grappling for him with hands and nails, begging with unintelligible sounds to keep doing whatever he’s doing that’s already so good, so good, please, I’m screaming under him, so loud I hear the echo bounce sharply back to me.

Pleasure fills every limb until I’m mindless and I’m melting, burning, dissolving into relief.

His rhythm is frantic through my orgasm but as soon as I quiet, choking for air, he’s jerking back and pulling out so abruptly I feel immediately hollow.

“Fuck,” he gasps, sitting back on his heels with his chest heaving as he wipes a hand down his face. He bends, tucking his chin to his chest as he takes several gasping breaths.

Panic and bliss react oddly in my blood and I can barely find the words to ask: “What’s wrong?”

He curls a shaking palm around my thigh. “I’m not wearing a rubber. I nearly came.”

My heart is pounding, skin damp with sweat, and I’m reeling from the reality of what just happened.

We just had sex.

We fell into his bed, and within only a few minutes we were completely fucking.

Instinctively, I reach to touch his forearms when he smooths his hands up and down my spread thighs.

“Did you come?” he whispers.

I still can’t really find words, so I nod and manage, “Yes. God.”

In fact, I think I nearly passed out.

His hand moves up my hip, over my stomach, to my breast where he covers me with a warm palm. “I can’t believe.” He swallows, closing his eyes. “That we’re . . .”

Now that my eyes have fully adjusted in the darkness I can see more of his body. It was one thing to see him in his underwear in the bright light of daytime in my living room, but it’s nothing compared to the shape of him over me in the shadows, kneeling between my spread legs. I take in the expanse of his torso, the ridges of his abdomen, the sharp curve of his hips leading down to the heavy, wet weight of his cock.

His thumb strokes over my nipple in tight, pressing circles. “I thought I would savor it more the first time we . . . if we ever did this.”

Coherent thoughts are tiny, buzzing flies in the background. “I feel too crazy right now to savor.”

“Me, too,” he admits, laughing. “Clearly.”

I want him back where he was twenty seconds ago, covering me in his weight and his sweat and pivoting his hips between my legs. Sitting up, I cup the back of his neck, kissing his swollen, wet mouth before asking, “Do you have condoms?”

“Yeah.” His fingers slide between my legs, mouth moving with mine in deep, searching kisses. When I reach for him, he’s covered in me, and I relish the wet slide of my hand up and down and the way he moans into my mouth, nearly whimpering. His free hand comes around mine, not guiding, just feeling the way my fingers wrap around him the same way mine did earlier, for a few long strokes before he begins to move with me, kisses growing more urgent as he leans in, nearly sliding back inside.

“Hurry,” I whisper, and he shushes me with his lips.

“Hang on, hang on,” he says, gently pulling my hand away. “Hang on. This . . . I want to slow down and feel all of this.” His kisses narrow into small, sweet tastes of my mouth. “I don’t want to come as fast as I will if we fuck like that again.”

I don’t know how sex with Oliver can ever be slow now that I know how it feels when he’s unhinged. Forever now, when he tries to be gentle I won’t have it. No, I’ll think. I know how you feel when you absolutely fuck me.

He reaches for the bedside table, fumbling with a box that I notice, with a small rush of satisfaction, was sealed shut. Returning with a foil packet, he drops it on the bed beside me. When I reach for it, he covers my hand with his before covering my lips with his smile.

“Wait.” He laughs into a kiss. “Wait.”

Lowering his body over mine, he bends and kisses me, slowing me down, heating me up, showing me what it feels like to savor.

The full mouth, his shoulders, and the strong, ropey lines down his arms.

The lean muscles of his back, his ass bunching in my palms as he slides wetly across me, fucking me on the outside.

The soft, dark trail of hair pressing against my navel.

We aren’t having sex yet, but we are; penetration is a technicality at this point, and I feel in his gaze that he’s telling me something with every kiss, every slide of skin over skin.

He watches me in a way that feels like he’s seeing more than my face looking up at his or my breasts shifting with his movements. He’s seeing me. The heat of it makes me wild, like skin singed, blood simmering.

“I feel like we have forever to ‘savor,’ ” I whine quietly. “I don’t—”

He reaches for the condom, putting it in my palm and kneeling between my legs. “I know.”

I tear it open, feeling it briefly to orient myself. I’m suddenly nervous and know my hands are a little fumbly, my fingers unpracticed at this. “It’s been a while since I did this.”

He smiles but says nothing, holding his breath as he watches me cover the head, anchor the condom with one hand, and roll it all the way down with the other. There’s a good couple of inches of him left uncovered and I feel the skin there, marveling until he leans forward, hands planted beside my head.

I can tell he wants to say something, but I also get the sense that it’s nearly too much to articulate without sounding trite or overly sentimental. It’s probably why I’m not saying much, either.

When he leans in, kissing me softly, he asks, “You want me like this?”

I assume he means on top of me again. “Yeah.”

His cock feels warmer than any other part of him, like fire barely contained. The feel of it in my hand makes everything inside turn liquid, makes my brain turn fuzzy. I close my eyes, bite my lip as I guide him in, shutting off some of my senses so I can process how he feels, the stretch of it when he shifts forward and into me. He’s shockingly hard where I am so soft and tender and it crosses wires in my body, makes me feel crazy, makes me wonder whether I could take him everywhere, where else he could possibly fit.

He exhales a low curse, pressing his mouth to the skin just below my ear. “Fuck,” he says again.

When I roll my hips under him, pulling him even deeper, he stops me with a rough hand on my hip. “Wait. I’m too—”

I still beneath him, except for the slow roaming of my palms up his back when he pushes himself up onto his hands. It’s the most surreal feeling, to feel joined to someone else like this. Not just rutting or moving together but actually connected.

With a slow exhale, he pulls back slightly and pushes in, groaning and giving in to the act as he starts to really move.

And I find I was wrong: slow and deep is just as perfect as Oliver’s frenzied fucking.

I’m amazed how he looks, moving over me. I’ve seen him from every angle a friend could see: standing side by side, seated across a table, in my car or his, on my floor while I’ve sketched him. I’ve even had my head in his lap looking up at him, and seen him roll out from beneath my car after he’s checked a suspicious leak. But I’ve never seen him like this. Naked, damp with sweat, with his hands propped beside my neck as he stares down the length of our bodies, watching himself. Arms flexed, lip snared between his teeth . . . enjoying just looking, feeling as he slides lazily forward and back.

I close my eyes, let out a tight choked breath, and his body snaps forward, so deep.

“Lola. Fuck. I . . .”

My hands find his hips, guiding him when he falters and I want him closer, want all of that skin on mine, sliding up and over and all around in me. One hand trails up his side, to his shoulder and around to his neck, pulling, urging him lower.

Oliver bends, his hair brushing my forehead. “I can’t. I can’t believe it. I can’t stop looking at you.”

He’s so hard inside, stilling as he catches his breath, and I know it’s more from emotion that he’s lost it in the first place. This time certainly isn’t rigorous sex. It’s so slow it’s almost embarrassingly intimate.

Still, I would have expected to feel self-conscious to look him in the eye while he’s inside me. He seems even more naked without his glasses. But it’s not weird, not even a little, and in an explosive burst of emotion I adore him so acutely it’s nearly painful. This is the man I’ve spent nearly every day with, joking, talking, unloading my triumphs and fears. Without warning, my body clutches him, needing, and he groans, finally bending his elbows and carefully lowering his chest to mine.

“Did you know how long I wanted this?” he asks.

I smile into his neck, before sucking it gently. “No. Harlow says I’m so oblivious it’s painful.”

He laughs, and when I laugh, too, he gasps and pulls his hips back, nearly leaving my body before he slides back in. So deep.

“I didn’t think you were interested,” I admit. “I asked you to sleep with me that night, you know.”

He stills, kissing my shoulder. “When I met you, I didn’t think you were the kind of girl I’d fall for, because of the Vegas situation. Then you were the kind of girl I’d fall for.” His mouth makes its way up my neck, to my ear. “And then you were the girl I was falling for. I didn’t want our story to start in some cheesy-ass Vegas bullshit. I didn’t want to fuck you that night in some crusty hotel room. That’s the quickest way to ruin something, by rushing in like that.”

“Not for our gang.”

He growls out a little laugh. “True.”

I kiss his neck, sucking. He tastes so good, he’s firm and warm and I imagine biting down onto the smooth, strong skin.

“I’ve loved you for a while now,” he says. So simply. God, it’s so bare and straightforward and it makes me want to be brave.

I’m terrified of loving him.

I don’t know how to keep it from happening, though.

“You don’t have to say it back,” he adds in a whisper before kissing the corner of my mouth, and I can tell he’s sincere.

“I’ve had feelings for a while, too,” I say, and it sounds like a lame admission but it feels big. I love him for so many reasons, I’m not sure my heart is ready for that kind of love yet. The biggest kind of love.

“Have you ever been in love before?” he asks.

I swallow thickly before admitting, “No.”

He hums into my neck, sucking. I want him to move, but I also don’t. I’ve never had a conversation like this at a café or in a car, let alone while someone was over me, inside me, moving in a way that makes me want to beg.

“Can I make you come again?” he murmurs, sliding closer to kiss me, and I hear his smile in the words. His mouth moves from mine and down, sucking at my jaw. “And then we can talk some more?”

I nod and he shifts over me, back and in, kissing my chin, my cheek, and then my mouth, his hand sliding into my hair and the other at my hip to hold me in place as he begins to move harder, in earnest. I’m seeing this side of him that feels dirty and secretive: his firm hands, the deep shove of his body in mine, his unapologetically wild mouth. Someday we’ll sit with all of our friends and talk about mundane everyday things while the entire time I’ll remember the way he tilts my hips, greedily thrusting into me, fingers slipping between us to rub me, his rasping voice, accent thicker with pleasure when he tells me to keep fucking up into him, that it feels so good he might keep me spread under him all night.

He talks about how soft my thighs are, how warm and slippery I feel.

He rolls to his side, fucking me hard with my leg over his hip, and he grunts hoarsely with every deep, hard shove. Biting my neck, he wonders absently how it’s even possible my cunt feels better than it tastes.

My skin ignites, shock and lust curling tight inside me at his words.

He grates across my clit again and again, each time with more intent, and I can tell he knows exactly how close I am when he pulls back to watch, his eyes so close to mine, teeth pressed to my jaw as he growls out tiny sounds of encouragement.

I close my eyes under the weight of the looming explosion, but he bites down into my jaw, hissing an Open, and cupping my ass, rocking me up into him.

I gasp, my wide, thrilled eyes meeting his calm, knowing ones and an electric storm builds in me, curling my spine and pulling my legs apart. He groans when he feels me go off like a bomb all around him. A million tiny eternities pass with his teeth pressed roughly against my jaw, my body liquefying beneath him.

The panel shows the girl dissolving into a sky full of stars.

“Lola,” he gasps, hips faltering and then gaining speed, and if he ever managed to iron out that accent I would crumble.

He grunts into my neck, hand moving up my body, gripping my breast somehow too hard and just right and then he’s moaning, “I’m coming . . . fuck, here I come,” and I feel him shake over me, pushing deep. The sound he makes when he does—a choking, rasping approximation of my name—carves itself deep into my heart.

I can hear the ocean in the silence that follows. The distant hum of cars, a palm frond scratching against the side of the house in the wind. Oliver’s breath is warm and rapid against my neck, his hand sliding up over my breast and down my waist, along the curve of my hip, my thigh, to my knee, and then back again, over and over, as if measuring me with long, sure sweeps of his hand.

“I don’t need you to love me yet, Lola, but I can’t do casual with you,” he whispers when my eyes open and I return to orbit. “I’m completely in love with you and if this is only—”

My heart catches high in my throat and squeezes so tight I cough. “It’s not. It’s not casual.”

Oliver’s eyes stall on my lips, and he grins with relief, kissing me once, softly, before pulling out of me, pushing the covers back, and sliding the condom off. He reaches for a tissue and I watch him the entire time; there’s so much man to his movements: the easy comfort he has touching his own cock, knowing exactly what to do with the condom, the shadow of dark hair on his chest, the muscular line of his shoulders as he turns and climbs back between the sheets with me. His hand slides down over my stomach and between my legs, where I’m still warm from the friction of him pounding into me. I love the possessive flat plane of his palm, the confident command of his fingers when he touches me.

“You okay?” he murmurs into my neck.

“Yeah.” But my hips instinctively shift away as he slides his fingers inside me.

He moves his hand back up my body and he runs his knuckles between my breasts. “When was the last time you were with someone?”

It might feel intrusive or weird to be asked this so soon after sex with any other new lover, but with him, I don’t mind the question; I want to unload it all. Every event, everything else that happened before him. We’ve shared all of the everyday details of ourselves but not these: the most sacred, the barest.

Turning his hand, he brushes the back of his fingers over my breast, before sliding the index and middle apart and capturing my nipple between them. He bends to lick the very tip. I close my eyes, struggling with the mental calculation while he’s doing that.

“Um . . . March?”

“March of last year?” His fingers tease their way down my ribs and there’s no jealousy in his voice when he asks, “Who was he?”

“This guy I saw a few times, from my digital cinema class.”

“Was it good?”

I trace the shape of his jaw from his ear to his chin. “One of the times it was pretty good, I guess,” I say. “The others . . . it wasn’t particularly memorable.” I close my eyes, finding bravery. “What about you?”

“A woman on the bike trip.”

“This last one? In June?”

He nods as he kisses my collarbone. “It was at the end of May, actually, but yeah. That trip.”

“Before you met me?”

I know the answer to this. Of course it was before he met me. He met me in Vegas, at the end of their journey. But I guess I want to somehow acknowledge that after me, he wasn’t with anyone.

“Mm-hmm. Albuquerque. She worked at the hotel restaurant.”

“Was it good?” I echo.

“Nothing particularly memorable,” he echoes back. “For her, either, I don’t think. We were all pretty lit.” He laughs, admitting, “I was too drunk to finish.”

We haven’t given these other people names. I can barely remember the last guy’s face or how his body felt under my hands. With every possessive touch, Oliver erases the trace of any other men from my skin.

“No one since?” I ask.

He smiles as he kisses me. “No one since.”

“Is it weird for you to go that long?”

He answers this with a shrug. “I wanted this gorgeous woman named Lorelei Castle too fucking much to play around.”

I pull back enough to meet his eyes. “You’ve had options.” I hear the tiny sting in my voice, jealousy over the could-have-beens.

His smile dissolves my tension like sugar in hot water. “So have you, pet.”

“Fewer.”

He laughs. “Hardly.”

“I have five hundred things going on right now; who wants to put up with that?”

“I do.” Oliver’s expression straightens and he bends to kiss me again, lips pulling at mine. With a groan, he’s over me again, pressing his nose beneath my arm, grating his teeth up over my bicep, sucking each of my fingers and biting the tips. His cock is already an urgent presence between us again, heavy and pressing.

He groans when I grab him, shaking as I squeeze and pump.

Already, again, it feels feral, grabbing and biting. Oliver flips me to my stomach, sliding his cock between the cleft of my ass as he bends and sucks at the back of my neck, hands coming between my body and the mattress to play with my breasts. His touch is frantic but somehow assured. There’s no Can I. No Do You Want. A million tiny fantasies play out with his teeth on my skin and with his hands full of me.

I hear the tear of foil again, the wet slide of a condom over him, and then he’s lifting my hips, thighs still bracketing mine, and he’s pushing back into me, groaning at the warmth, the softness, the view he has over and behind me.

With my thighs pressed together and the stretch of my body around his I’m pressing up and grinding and making these wild, desperate sounds, feeling like I might shatter. I am light shot into a prism, scattering in a thousand directions. Oliver is riding me, hands curled around my hips as he pistons forward and back, hitting deep.

I’m screaming into a pillow, arching at the sensation of his sweat hitting my spine, wanting to spread my legs to take him completely into me, but forced together to hold the pleasure in a tiny radius of contact.

It’s too much.

I need more.

Oliver smacks my ass hard, grunting at the surprised clench of my body around his.

“It’s good,” he grates out. “It’s fucking bliss.”

I nod, pressing into him and feeling like I’m fraying at the edges when he takes my ass in his grip, short nails digging, hips moving wild and fast behind me. His hands spread me, thumb slides closer, circling and I don’t know . . . I like it but—

“Shh, it’s okay.” He reaches for my face with his other hand, cupping my cheek and turning me toward him so he can kiss the side of my mouth. “You’ve never . . . ?”

I shake my head.

“It’s okay.” His kiss turns wilder, an urgent match struck somewhere inside him.

I press into his palm, desperate for more: for his kiss, his weight, the sound of him coming.

“Whatever you want,” he says, his breath warm on my lips. “I’ll give you whatever you want.”

“I want to see you.”

Oliver withdraws, rolling me onto my back again. His hands slide from my ankles to my knees and he cups them from behind, bending them to press them to my chest. His elbows come underneath, hooking, holding me open as he stares and then slowly eases back into me with a groan. The sound is pain and joy, his relief dragged along the edge of a knife.

He fucks me tender then brutal, hips circling to make me scream before my hands are pinned at the side of my head and he hits deep in tiny, sharp stabs that shove the breath from my lungs in these blissful forced gusts.

I am mesmerized watching him like this: my calm, gentle friend unleashed. My lover now, so tender with me, so brutal in his drive to make it good. He waits until I’m shaking, until my cries are cut apart by relief, and then he lets himself come again with his mouth open and groaning against mine.

Sweaty, chest heaving, Oliver lands heavily on me.

As soon as he rolls me to my side and tucks in behind me, exhaustion hits me like a physical blow. His lips press to my neck, voice thick with the approach of sleep. “I’m fucking exhausted, but I don’t know how long I can sleep knowing you’re in my bed.”

I hum, smiling into the arm he’s tucked under my neck and wrapped around my front.

“I’ll wake up wanting more,” he whispers with a tiny catch in his voice, part preemptive apology, part warning. His cock is still half-hard, pressing warm against my thigh.

“Me, too.”

I fall asleep feeling my breaths synchronize to the easy rise and fall of his chest behind me.

THE WORLD INVADES first with the sound of a car horn, then the wind, then the distant sound of waves. I open my eyes and relish the slow appearance of the sun in the eastern sky.

I stretch in Oliver’s arms, too warm. Somehow I’m curled up facing him now. He was an octopus in his sleep, endless arms that gripped me deliciously when I tried to move even an inch away.

I feel when he wakes—that tiny startled twitch in his arms around me—and quietly wait for it to become awkward: we left nothing hidden last night. His room smells heavily of sex and still we’re entwined, completely naked. There’s a condom wrapper somewhere near my left foot, another visible behind Oliver at the edge of the mattress.

Last night comes back to me in scattered flashes of sound and sweat and sensation: the low hiss he made when he pushed inside. The rise and fall of his shoulders as he moved above me. The way his mouth covered mine, tongue skilled and urgent.

I ache between my legs. My skin still feels the friction of his hands and mouth all over me. I knew sex could be like that, I just never knew it could be like that for me.

He’s so solid beside me, so vital. The idea of moving out of the circle of his arms is almost as appealing as cutting off an arm or leg.

What happens when emotion is too big, when it fills the chest and the veins and the limbs? I imagine sunshine filling me until I shatter—leaving starburst-coated girl shrapnel strewn across this bed.

I close my eyes, mentally drawing the way the sun slants across our bare legs instead. I count to ten, and then twenty, focusing on pulling air into my lungs. It will never be what it was before. Oliver and I are forever changed. Something clicks inside me, something permanent and concrete, and it’s both thrilling and terrifying. . . .

I’m wildly, deeply in love.

He lifts his head from where it was buried between my neck and shoulder, kisses me, and whispers, “Good morning, Lola Love.”

I pull the sheet up over my mouth. “Morning.”

He kisses me again through the sheet. “I love you still.” He pulls the sheet away, kissing my chin, and watches me as his smile straightens a little but doesn’t leave his eyes. “Whatever else you’re thinking . . . that’s not changed with the sunup. I loved you before last night. I’ll love you tomorrow. I’ve just said the words now.”

I saw my teeth across my lip, feeling the sunshine fill my chest and bleed up into my eyes.

“I’ve wanted to fuck you long before last night,” he says, playful smile back in place as he climbs over me, spreading my thighs with his knee. “And now that I’ve had you, I want it even more.”

This is a sentiment I can easily reciprocate: “Let’s fuck for the rest of the day.”

His laugh is a happy, warm sound. “Week.”

“Month.”

“Year.”

He’s said it. It’s longer than I’ve ever been with anyone else, so easily assumed. We stare at each other, neither of us saying it. It’s too soon, even with all of the declarations rising like smoke in the air. But the longer Oliver looks at me, the more I know he’s thinking it.

Life.

“All right then,” he murmurs.

I answer against his mouth: “All right then.”