“So it probably won’t be any good.”

“You—Olive. You don’t have to. You shouldn’t.”

“Noted.” She pressed a kiss against his hip, and he groaned as though she’d done something special. As though this was beyond anything. “But if you have any wishes.”

“Olive. I’m going to—” Grunt. He was going to grunt, a rumbling noise coming from deep in his chest. She ran her nose on the skin of his abdomen, seeing his cock twitch with the corner of her eye.

“I love the way you smell.”

“Olive.”

Slowly, precisely, she wrapped her hand around the base of his erection and studied it from underneath her eyelashes. The head was shiny already, and—she didn’t know much, but he seemed close. He seemed very hard, and above her his chest heaved and his lips parted and his skin flushed. He seemed like it wouldn’t take much, which . . . good. But also, Olive wanted her time with him. She wanted so much time with Adam. “Someone has done this to you, before? Right?”

He nodded, like she’d expected he would. His hand fisted the sheets, trembling slightly.

“Good. So you can tell me, if I mess it up.”

She said the last word against the shaft, and it felt like they were oscillating, vibrating at some short-wave frequency that burst and shattered when she touched him for real. Before parting her lips on the head of his cock she looked up at him, gave him a small smile, and that seemed to do him in.

His back arched. He groaned, and ordered her in hushed tones to please, give him a moment, go slow, not let him come, and Olive wondered if his spine was melting into the same liquid, scalding pleasure she’d felt earlier.

It probably couldn’t have been more obvious, that she’d never done this.

And yet it seemed to turn him on beyond belief. He clearly couldn’t help himself—he thrust forward, threaded his fingers in her hair, pressed her head

down until her throat was tight around him. He groaned, and talked, and caught her eyes, as if constantly fascinated by the way she was looking up at him. He slurred raspy words, mumbling, “Olive, yes.” “Lick the . . .” “Take it just—deeper. Make me come.” She heard praises and endearments come out of his mouth—how good she was, how lovely, how perfect; obscenities about her lips and body and eyes, and maybe she would have been embarrassed, if it hadn’t been for the pleasure spilling rich from both of them, overflowing their brains. It felt natural, to have Adam ask for what he wanted.

To give it to him.

“Can I—?” Her teeth grazed the underside of the head, and he grunted abruptly. “In your mouth.”

She only had to smile at him, and his pleasure looked nuclear, pounding through him and washing over his entire body. What Olive had felt earlier, white-hot and just shy of painful. She was still sucking gently when he regained control of his limbs and cupped her cheek.

“The things I want to do to you. You have no idea.”

“I think maybe I do.” She licked her lips. “Some, at least.” His eyes were glazed as he stroked the corner of her mouth, and Olive wondered how she could possibly be done with this, with him, in just a few hours.

“I doubt it.”

She leaned forward, hiding a smile into the crease of his thigh. “You can, you know.” She nibbled on the hard plane of his abdomen and then looked up at him. “Do them.”

She was still smiling when he pulled her up to his chest, and for a few minutes they managed to sleep. —

IT REALLY WAS a nice hotel room, she supposed. The large windows, mostly. And the view of Boston after dark, the traffic and the clouds and the feeling that something was happening out there, something she didn’t need to be part of because she was here. With Adam.

“What language is that?” it occurred to her to ask. He couldn’t quite look at her face, not with her head nestled under his chin, so he continued to draw patterns on her hip with his fingertips.

“What?”

“The book you’re reading. With the tiger on the cover. German?”

“Dutch.” She felt his voice vibrate, from his chest and through her flesh.

“Is it a manual on taxidermy?”

He pinched her hip, lightly, and she giggled. “Was it hard to learn? Dutch, I mean.”

He inhaled the scent of her hair, thinking for a moment. “I’m not sure. I always knew it.”

“Was it weird? Growing up with two languages?”

“Not really. I mostly thought in Dutch until we moved back here.”

“How old was that?”

“Mmm. Nine?”

It made her smile, the idea of child Adam. “Did you speak Dutch with your parents?”

“No.” He paused. “There were au pairs, mostly. Lots of them.”

Olive pushed herself up to look at him, resting her chin on her hands and her hands on his chest. She watched him watch her, enjoying the play of the streetlights on his strong face. He was always handsome, but now, in the witching hours, he took her breath away.

“Were your parents busy?”

He sighed. “They were very committed to their jobs. Not very good at making time for anything else.”

She hummed softly, conjuring a mental image: five-year-old Adam showing a stick-figure drawing to tall, distracted parents in dark suits surrounded by secret agents speaking into their headsets. She knew nothing about diplomats. “Were you a happy child?”

“It’s . . . complicated. It was a bit of a textbook upbringing. Only child of financially rich but emotionally poor parents. I could do whatever I wanted but had no one to do it with.” It sounded sad. Olive and her mom had always had very little, but she’d never felt alone. Until the cancer.

“Except Holden?”

He smiled. “Except Holden, but that was later. I think I was already set in my ways by then. I’d learned to entertain myself with . . . things. Hobbies.

Activities. School. And when I was supposed to be with people, I was . . .

antagonistic and unapproachable.” She rolled her eyes and bit softly into his skin, making him chuckle. “I’ve become like my parents,” he mused.

“Exclusively committed to my job.”

“That’s not true at all. You’re very good at making time for others. For me.” She smiled, but he looked away as if embarrassed, and she decided to change the topic. “The only thing I can say in Dutch is ‘ ik hou van jou.’ ” Her pronunciation must have been poor, because for a long moment Adam couldn’t parse it. Then he did, and his eyes widened.

“My college roommate had a poster with ‘I love you’ written in every language,” Olive explained. “Right across from my bed. First thing I’d see every morning after waking up.”

“And at the end of year four you knew every language?”

“End of year one. She joined a sorority as a sophomore, which was for the best.” She lowered her gaze, nuzzled her face in his chest, and then looked back up at him. “It’s pretty stupid, if you think about it.”