She tips her head upward, every detail of her face impossibly lovely in the low lighting. “Well on my way to a 4.0,” she says, and then launches into a discussion of Plato’s allegory of the cave, the topic of a recent philosophy paper.
Moments like this are his favorite: When that mask she shows the world slips. When she forgets she’s supposed to be Ramona Wilder and she justis. They’ve been happening more and more.
“Wilder. All of this we’re doing…you really like spending time with me?” He hates the way it sounds, like some middle schooler asking her to check a box on a note that readsDO YOU LIKE ME?“You’re sure this isn’t just Sad-Sack Professor Appreciation Month?”
“There’s a whole month?” she teases. She smooths the neckline of his shirt, the casual effort of it rendering him almost useless. When she rakes her fingers along his stubbled jaw, his legs turn liquid. If he were a hopeful man, he might realize that she always seems to find reasons to touch him there. “I don’t think you’re a sad sack. Not at all. You’re…a really great guy. Thoughtful. Funny. The kind of person you’d want as an emergency contact. Not in a boring way, just—you know you’d be safe.” Then she’s quiet for a while, as though it’s not necessarily easy for her to admit any of this. “Yes, I like spending time with you,” she says, her voice low. “I like this.”
“I—me too,” he manages. He’s afraid to compliment her back, too unsure what might spill out.
I like this.
She could be referring to any number of things: hanging out, going to parties, dancing this close.
He hopes it’s all three.
“I want to tell you something.” Ramona bites down on her lip, as though suddenly debating whether she wants to tell him at all. “It’s about what happened in your office. I know we said we weren’t talking about it, but…”
They’re not. They shouldn’t. But curiosity gets the best of him. “You can tell me.”
A slow blink before she leans in closer, nose grazing the side of his neck. In response, he grips her back harder. “That was…no one’s ever—I mean, I’ve never…” When she trails off, his mind fills in the blanks with flashes of her on his desk. Face in his shirt with his hand in her panties, coaxing her closer and closer.
Her lips brush his earring, and he thinks he might pass out. “…finished like that before.”
With every fiber of his self-control, he urges himself to remain upright, trying to understand what she’s saying. “That was your first orgasm? Ever?”
This makes her snort-laugh. A roll of her eyes. “You dweeb, definitely not. It…was my first with someone else.”
Everything in the room disappears, and it’s not Halloween and he’s not in a stranger’s beautiful house, it’s just the two of them and this delicate confession.
Her first. With someone else.
Sure, there’s an undeniable hint of pride there. A rush of heat through his body. And yet he can’t fathom it, someone lucky enough to go to bed with this girl and not wanting to do everything in their power to make her moan.
“Oh,” he says quietly, the intellectual that he is. Take away his PhD.
Her words pulse between them. He’s had nothing to drink and yet he feels unsteady, off balance. Another pair of dancers bumpsNick from behind, and he thinks he mumbles an apology before his feet start working again.
When he speaks, his voice is a rasp. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I just thought it might—I don’t know. Build your confidence or something to hear that,” she says. “When you’re getting back out in the dating world.”
A hard swallow. A bucket of cold water. “Right. Well—thank you.”
Ramona drops her forehead to his collarbone, this sweetly intimate gesture that shouldn’t be too foreign given what she just shared, and he fights back a swell of desire. He wants to pull her into a dark room and press his mouth to her thigh.
And then he wants to cook her dinner and find out what her favorite dessert is.
All of it is so confusing, the friendship and the UCLA handbook and his hormones acting like he’s a teenager all over again. He wants to think his self-esteem isn’t that far in the gutter, that his ex didn’t shatter it, but even as a naturally confident guy, the divorce made him wonder if he was actually, truly lovable. What else was he supposed to think when the person who loved him the most simply…stopped? And here is this beautiful girl, this clever and secretly compassionate girl, who’d somehow rather be here with him than any number of guys eager to worship her.
It’s not love, of course it’s not, but it’s the closest he’s felt in a year.
The music switches to something faster and Ramona’s tugged away by Betty declaring it’s her favorite song, and Nick is left with a flood of emotions he doesn’t know what to do with.
He was her first orgasm.Hewas her first orgasm. The revelation makes him high, furious, and horny all at once.
When he gets home at two a.m., he’s certain he won’t be able to sleep. It wasn’t just the schoolgirl costume or the dancing or hearing her confirm that she liked spending time with him. It was the way she spoke low and rough into his ear, her mouth grazing the earring he got back in college during one drunken night with his buddies. Like she wanted to bite it.
He opens the drawer with her panties inside.
