Control,he reminded himself, over and over again, with increasing desperation.
“I want to take this slow,” she breathed, when they came up for air. “But is it sending mixed messages if I ask you to stay over?”
“Yes. Uh, no. I mean, yes, I’ll stay over,” Niko said, already so hard he felt like he was going to rip his jeans. She laughed against his lips, then pressed a soft kiss there.
“I didn’t have sex until I was twenty-two,” he blurted out. She pulled back, confused, so he clarified, “What I mean is…I’m okay with taking it slow.”
“Really?” she asked. He was always worried about being judged when he told people, but there was only curiosity there.
“Yeah,” he said, absentmindedly stroking his hand up and down her spine. “I had girlfriends and stuff, but I, um. My mom was really young when she had me. Like, high school young. I didn’t want to do anything that had any chance of getting a girl pregnant.” He paused. “I may have held out longer than I needed to.”
“Wow,” said Merritt, with a wry smile. “I can’t imagine how many bad hand jobs you must have gotten.”
Niko winced involuntarily. “I wasn’t selfish about it, though. I knew I had to get good at other things.”
“I’m not concerned,” Merritt murmured, brushing a curl off his temple, then kissing the spot where it had been. “But you know those other things are still sex, right?”
He opened his mouth to protest, but then once he thought about it, he realized she was right. It wasn’t the definition of sex he’d been (barely) taught about in school, or what his friends had considered the main event. But even though he’d called himself a virgin back then, he’d still been in physically intimate situations where everyone had ended up satisfied.
Or, at least, he’d given it his best shot.
When he met her eyes again, the corner of her mouth tugged up. “You look like your mind has been blown.”
“Kind of, yeah.” He drew her closer, tracing her jawline with his thumb. “What about you?”
She curled deeper into his arms, resting her head in the crook of his neck, and he pulled her close, his other arm under her shirt, on the bare skin of her back.
“I was fourteen. For all of it,” she said. He couldn’t see her face anymore, but her tone was threaded with sadness. “Which sounds so young now. But I remember feeling like I was already an adult at the time, just nobody else had realized it yet.”
“I remember that feeling,” he murmured into her hair. “Were you in love, at least?”
“No. We weren’t even dating. It was my best friend’s older brother. I had a huge crush on him. I think he was eighteen or nineteen, he had already graduated. He was in this terrible band, and I thought he was the coolest person alive, and he’d ask my opinion about music sometimes, which mademefeel like the coolest person alive. I started sneaking into his room when I would stay over, late at night, after she’d gone to sleep. We’d hang out and listen to records and talk.”
“What a creep,” Niko said before he could stop himself, but thankfully, Merritt just laughed.
“Truly.”
“And he was your first everything?”
She shook her head. “Not my first kiss. That was with her.” She paused, like she was bracing for his reaction, but he didn’t say anything, just smoothed his hand over her back. “When she found out, she never spoke to me again. Neither of them did.” There was a hardness to her voice, armor protecting an old bruise.
He frowned sympathetically. “You were fourteen. Everyone does reckless shit at that age. When I was fourteen, my friends and I would steal PVC pipes from construction sites and try to pole-vault into dumpsters. He’s the one who should’ve known better. It was his fault for ruining that friendship, not yours.”
“Trust me, I know that now,” she said with a rueful laugh. “But I did end up writing about it, to try to process all those feelings, and those songs were on the demo that got me signed.”
“So something good came out of it, after all.”
“Sure. I went from one predator to a whole industry full of them. Less lemons to lemonade, more frying pan to fire.”
He flinched, his stomach rolling queasily. A dozen questions crowded his mind, but all he could manage was “Jesus. Merritt…”
She quickly sat upright again, so they were face-to-face. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she said, taking his face in both hands and planting soft, playful kisses all over his cheeks, his forehead, his nose, smoothing out what must have been a stricken expression. “That was supposed to be a joke. Not trying to get too dark. I told you, I’ve been working through all of this for a long time. If I can’t change the past, at least I can laugh about it. I’m okay. Really.”
“Okay,” he said, still not totally convinced. “But if you do want to talk about it…”
She pressed a gentle kiss to his lips, cutting him off. “Thank you. Another time. Right now, I really don’t.” He readjusted his hands, resting them on the curves of her hips as she traced her thumb over his bottom lip. “Tell me more about yours,” she murmured. “You waited all that time—was it everything you hoped it would be?”
“Sort of. I think maybe I had built it up too much, waiting that long. We were serious about each other, at least—it was my college girlfriend.”
