“Okay.” He nodded likeoh, yeah, I hear that all the timeandmaybe I should check under the hood to see for myself. “Because it’s painful? Or is there something else?”
“I just—” I stared around his shoulder, dying a little at putting all of this into words. I didn’t embarrass too easily, not after everything I’d gone through as a kid, but I was still learning how to talk about the things I wanted when it came to sex. Because I didn’t have a lot of it. Hardly any. “It just doesn’t do anything for me.”
“Then”—he leaned in close, his words barely more than breaths on my neck—“what do you like?”
“There are a few things,” I admitted. My knees were sinking into the mattress and I had to weeble-wobble to keep my balance. “But I haven’t done a lot of”—I wiggled my shoulders, hoping he understood the multitudes contained inside that gesture. Though also still wobbling. “I haven’t done a lot. With a lot of other people.”
He reared back, his eyes flashing wide. “Tell me you are not a virgin. Please, Sunny, I am begging you—”
“I’m not a virgin,” I said. “I’ve been with people.” When his brow crinkled, I added, “But not a lot with penises. Just two, actually.”
“Oh. Okay.” This time his nod was likethere’s no winning a land war in Russia but that’s not about to stop me from rallying the troops. “And it wasn’t good for you?”
“The first time was—well, I’ll save you the story and say it didn’t end positively for anyone involved.” I glanced up at him, my bottom lip snared between my teeth. “Another time, with another guy, we didn’t get all the way. In, that is.”
His gaze darkened. “You’re practically a virgin.”
“No, I am not,” I cried. “And you know what? Sex isn’t just about where you put a penis, and virginity is a very strange made-up thing that doesn’t really matter.”
“Oh my god. Sunny.” He closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to his forehead, grimacing as if I’d told him my vagina was sealed up like a soup can and he’d need to provide his own tools. “At the risk of you throwing me out on my ass, I have to ask: Do you want to slow down? Stop?”
“Don’t you dare.”
He dropped his hands and blinked at me as if these things didn’t compute, and perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps sex was a straight arrow for Beck. Perhaps he’d woken up one teenage morning and known without question that he’d find satisfaction from the standard slate of heterosexual experiences, and he’d pursued that with clear-minded vigor every day since. Perhaps most people who didn’t have decades of bodily autonomy issues lived that way. Perhaps anyone who hadn’t won the bonus prize of a seizurein the middle of their first timelived that way.
I didn’t. I had a handful of experiences with men and women ranging from unbelievably bad (see: the one with the seizure) to lukewarm to actually kind of okay, and all that got me was a cringey conversation when the only thing in the world I wanted was to pull him down on top of me and turn off my mind.
“I really don’t want you to stop. I want to try it again,” I said, searching his eyes for some sign that he believed me. His answering groan reverberated into the chambers of my heart. “If you’ll go slow with me.”
“Oh my god. Sunny.” He drew his hands down my hips, held me close, his fingers pulsing into my skin as shaky breaths passed between us. “I will doanythingyou want but I need you to be very clear about what that is.” His words were tight, like bolts turned too far, but his face was calm, steady. Even. “Tell me what you do like. We’ll start there and figure it out as we go. Okay?”
“Okay.” I moved his hand to my inner thigh. I covered his fingers with mine, pressing hard, navigating as best I could in the comfy new darkness of not knowing what came next. For once, I kind of loved that confusion. “I like it when you touch me.”
“I can do that.”
He ran his knuckles up my leg and I had to look down and watch him do it because I didn’t understand how these hot, bubbling sensations could be real. How they could come from nothing more than skin on skin. How my entire body could light up fromthis.
His thumb swept over my underwear, careful and methodical, like he was counting in his head, and I appreciated that he made not a single comment about the soggy condition of the fabric. He brought his other hand to the back of my neck and brushed his lips to mine, and I was certain I’d dissolved into liquid.
Minutes passed and my internal temperature spiked to somewhere around the surface of the sun while he made no move to pull off my shirt or slip that thumb into my underwear. I wanted those things. I wanted everything—and I had to be the one to take it. In the absence of any other readily available solution, I flopped back on the mattress to wriggle out of my skirt.
Beck watched from beside the bed, one arm folded over his chest while he held the other toward me, as if prepared to intervene if needed. And that made sense seeing as this was the most complicated possible way to get out of a skirt made of multiple miles of fabric.
“It’s in the way,” I said, red-faced and slightly breathless as I kicked it off.
Beck caught the skirt and folded it in half, then in half again. He set it on the dresser and gave me athat was really somethingglance. “I could’ve helped you with that.”
“I had it under control.”
“And what an amusing show of control it was.”
The t-shirt had settled past my waist, around my hips, though it was rucked up on one side. I felt the weight of his gaze there. I reached down, wanting to know how that weight would feel with a lot less underwear in this equation, when a raw, growly noise rasped out of Beck.
He brushed my hands away and flattened his over the front of my boy shorts, his thumb pressed into the line of my cleft. The pressure of his palmrequiredme to do something, anything to find some relief and, without thinking about what it meant, I rocked against him. A shrill, shameful whimper broke out of me and our eyes met, locked.
“Please.”
“You have to tell me what that means, sweetheart.” He gave a slight shake of his head as he stared at me. “What makes you feel good?”
