She couldn’t pretend it was anyone else. Her body would have known him even if her mind had not, this position still encoded into muscle memory. Good memories, all of them. But inescapable. They had easily shared a thousand nights ofcomfort and body heat and sex, even allowing for the objections of their roommates and the nights he hadn’t come home.
The first orgasm she’d ever had with another person had happened in this position: the two of them crammed into a twin bed, Rose’s faded heart-print sheets from home kicked down by their feet. Tom had put his hands over hers,Show me, because he didn’t know what to do yet, and she didn’t have the words to explain it to him. Her body had seemed so complicated to the both of them, especially compared to the very straightforward, predictable way his responded to her. They’d solved that mystery with tentative fingertips, found every point that sparked pleasure on her body, and Tom’s hands had grown confident when he put them against her.
That was the way he still touched her now: like he knew what to do with her. She didn’t doubt, with mind or body, that if he slid his hand over her hip and pressed it between her legs, he would have her gasping his name in moments. She’d feel him hard against her thigh and his mouth against her shoulder, then his whole weight pressed against her body to roll her over onto her stomach. She knew exactly how it could happen.
“Slow down,” she said.
“Am I doing anything you want me to stop?” Tom asked. And she realized his hand hadn’t moved—it was still resting chastely on her arm. His hips weren’t even flush against hers.
“No, I—actually, I’m fine.” She was embarrassed. Impressive—they’d gotten to third base entirely in her head, and he was just trying to go to sleep.
“You sure?”
“Yeah. It just felt like—never mind.”
It wasn’t like he’d announced that he wanted to sleep with her. Maybe he didn’t.
“I didn’t think I was getting laid tonight,” Tom said, sounding smugly amused.
“You are absolutely not getting laid.”
“That’s fine,” he reassured her. He rubbed her upper arm with tender familiarity. “You made me work for it last time too.”
This pronouncement was so dignified and also so ahistorical that Rose stiffened and craned her head back to glare at him.
“What? Oh my God. I didnot.”
She did not. She was not someone who had ever, would ever, make a manwork for it. She liked sex. She just didn’t believe in having sex with someone she wasn’t serious about. She had sex with men she was contemplating a future with, whether that happened on the third date or after three months.
“Okay,” Tom said, making it sound like he was humoring her. Rose rolled to her back and narrowed her eyes at him.
“We met at freshman orientation. I was sleeping with you by Halloween. It was six weeks,max.”
They’d beenvirgins. And Rose had needed to dump her high school boyfriend, figure out birth control at a Catholic university, clear out her roommate for a whole night—it had happened super fast, all things considered.
Tom paused with the air of a man doing complicated mental math. “Maybe you’re right.” Even in the dark, his expression was beseeching. “But six weeks felt like a very long time.” Rose jammed an elbow back toward his stomach, and he grunteddramatically. “Six weeks would still feel like a very long time!” he protested. “It would feel like a long time to anyone!”
“What if I told you there will be no sex for you at all on this trip?” Rose demanded. She wasn’t sure whether there would be. She was letting go of expectations.
“Don’t say things you’re just going to have to take back later,” Tom said, undeterred. “There’s not much to do here in the winter. Don’t take sex off the table when it’s too cold to play horseshoes or lawn darts.”
He caught her elbow before she could jab it into his ribs again and wrapped her arm around her stomach instead.
“It’s okay, babe,” he said. “I don’t mind working for it.”
“I just want to go to sleep,” she pleaded.
Tom paused as though rifling through a mental tool kit. Then he rearranged the pillows under their heads. “I get it. You can go to sleep. I’ll be good. Just relax.” He pulled back just far enough to put both his forearms against her upper back. She made a noise of confusion, and he shushed her. It wasn’t clear what he was doing until he put his hands on her shoulders and dug his fingers into the muscles there.
Tom held on to her shoulders and let his thumbs work little circles up and down her neck. The stiffness began to trickle out of her body, minute by minute. She went quiet, caught between the pleasure of it and the boundaries she hadn’t yet decided where to place. She supposed a shoulder rub was allowed. She probably deserved a shoulder rub.
Her guard wasn’t quite down when he bent his head to the back of her neck again. If he was going to kiss her there, that felt like an escalation, so she teetered on the edge of a protest.He hadn’t kissed her yet. It ought tomeansomething if he kissed her after so many years.
And then it wasn’t his lips on the back of her neck but the tip of his nose, pressed into the downy hairs at her nape. He inhaled deeply, the unexpected intimacy of it tightening her chest.
Before she could decide how she felt about it, Tom reached up to pull her hair loose from the band, letting his fingers slide up into her hair and prompting a very embarrassing noise when he began to stroke her scalp with soft fingertips.
The novelty of it was instantly gratifying, nearly as much as the wonderful sensation of his hands in her hair. He hadn’t done this before. She would have loved it if he’d done this before, but it hadn’t occurred to him to do it, and she hadn’t thought to ask. Someone else had taught him to do this.
