Page 7

I lift my head. Look at him. His eyes are dark, pupils blown wide, and there’s a flush high on his cheekbones. I want to see more of him. I want to touch more of him.

“You’re the first one to say it.” I slide my hands under the hem of his shirt. “Or see it.”

He sits back on his heels and yanks the shirt off in one fluid motion.

The sight of him in the moonlight is almost unfair. A tan stretched over the kind of body that comes from mornings in the weight room at Brown and afternoons on the rugby pitch, a dusting of dark-blond hair on his chest, the cut of his v-line leading down to the leather belt sitting low on his hips. I let myself look. I let myself touch. My palms flatten on his chest, his breath hitches, and his fingers hook into the hem of my sundress.

“Off, Birdie,” he rasps.

He drags the dress slowly up my body, his knuckles tracking up the sides of my ribs, and pulls it over my head.

I am bare under him now, wearing nothing but moonlight. His eyes trace a line from my mouth, down my throat, over my collarbones, down to my breasts where his gaze catches and rolls over the curve of my stomach, the apple of my hips, and the dip of my waist, and back up to my face.

“Christ,” he breathes, his palm spreading wide across my stomach.

His palm is warm and rough and so big it spans from one hipbone to the other, and the second his fingertips drag across the strip of skin just above my underwear, every nerve in my body lights up. My stomach jumps.

I am about to do the thing I almost did in the back of a limo two months ago, and I am about to do it on a beach with a boy I have been in love with since sixth grade. The part of me that planned the candle and the playlist and the underwear is screaming somewhere in the back of my head that this is not what I planned, and the rest of me doesn’t care.

“Are you clean?” The question blurts out of me, practical and necessary, my voice high and breathless. “I mean, I’m on the pill, but I should’ve asked, I just, I haven’t done this before, and I should’ve asked you that before I, before we…”

“Yes,” he answers, his eyes locked on mine. “I would never, if I wasn’t sure.”

He pushes up onto his knees between my thighs, both hands going to the buckle of his belt. I watch him work it open, the leather sliding through his fingers, the bottle opener clinking against the metal once before he tosses the whole thing into the sand beside us. He unbuttons his jeans, then the zipper, and I cannot stop staring as he pushes the denim and his boxers down over his hips in one smooth motion.

“Okay.” I breathe deeply, raking his body with my eyes as he takes his cock in his hand and settles back between my thighs.

I forget how to swallow.

He’s bigger than I expected. Significantly bigger than the diagrams in the puberty chapter of my freshman year textbook. Even more significantly bigger than the accidental glimpse I got of Radien when he turned the wrong way coming out of the lake at the end of junior year. And my entire understanding of what is about to fit inside my body undergoes a rapid and panicked revision.

“And I’m a virgin,” I remind him, my voice coming out an octave higher than I want it to. “So. You know.”

He laughs, slowly stroking his length. “I know, Songbird,” he murmurs. “We can stop at any time.”

I lick my lips, my eyes trained on his cock. “I don’t want to stop.”

Without warning, he grips my hips and flips us over, and suddenly I’m sitting on top of him, straddling his hips, my hair falling down between us. He holds my thighs, warm and steady.

“You have control, Birdie,” he murmurs, his fingers threaded into the curls at my nape. “Whatever you want. However you want it.”

I nod against his forehead. I’m not sure I can make my voice work.

“Breathe, Songbird,” he whispers, pressing a kiss to the corner of my mouth.

I breathe.

He eases me down onto him, slowly, and I feel the stretch at my entrance. It’s a lot.

His fingers were a warm-up, and even that felt like overfill. But now the stretch of his cock is deeper, sharper, an ache that pulses outward from the place we are connected into the muscles of my thighs and the small of my back.

A whimper catches in the back of my throat. I freeze.

“Easy, Birdie.” He gently steadies my hips, holding me still while I adjust to the stretch. “I’ve got you.”

I take a second. Longer. My thighs are shaking, and I press my forehead harder onto his.

“Breathe.” His breath warms the damp skin below my ear. “Just breathe through it.”