“No— Oh.”

He looked up, all flushed pale skin against dark waves. “Why are you so tense, Olive? You’ve done this before, right?”

“I—yes.” She was not sure what compelled her to continue. Any idiot could see from a mile away that it was a terrible idea, but there was no room left for lies now that they were standing so close. So she confessed, “A couple of times. In college.”

Adam went immobile. Completely motionless. His muscles flexed, coiled strong under her palms, and then they just stayed like that, tense and still as he stared up at her. “Olive.”

“But it doesn’t matter,” she hastened to add, because he was already shaking his head, pulling away from her. It really didn’t matter. Not to Olive, and therefore, it shouldn’t to Adam, either. “I can figure it out—I’ve learned whole-cell patch clamp in a couple of hours; sex can’t be much harder. And I bet you do this all the time, so you can tell me how to—”

“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.