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I sink down another inch on my own.

He groans, low, fisting my hair with one hand.

“Good girl,” he murmurs against my mouth, and I can barely hear him over the pounding of my heart. “Take your time. You feel—” He cuts off on a groan that makes me clench around him.

“Don’t do that,” he says, strained.

“Do what?”

“Squeeze.” The word comes out almost a growl. “Jesus.”

The effect I’m having on him gives me the confidence I need to take him deeper. Slowly. A tiny bit at a time, watching him watching me, knowing that he wants this as badly as I do. The discomfort fades into something else, something fuller, and when I’m seated all the way down I can feel him everywhere. Inside me. Around me.

“You okay?” His voice is thick with want.

“Yeah.” I roll my hips experimentally and his fingers dig into my hip. “Oh.”

“Christ, Sienna,” he grits out. “You feel so good.”

My movements are uncoordinated at first, finding a rhythm that works, and his hand on my neck keeps me close, and when I roll my hips he makes a sound that I want to hear again and again. The pleasure builds differently this time. Deeper. Spread through my whole body instead of just one place.

“Fuck, just like that,” he growls against my throat, before pulling me down into a kiss, pushing me to move faster now. “Sienna,” he grits out, fisting my hair. “I’m close.”

“Me too,” I gasp, my forehead pressing into his.

His hand slides between us, his fingertips finding the same spot he found earlier. He rolls the bundle of nerves between two fingers.

“Gray,” I whimper, gripping him tighter.

“Come for me, Birdie,” he breathes against my mouth, his hips snapping up into me, hard, the angle changing, the pressure climbing. “Come on. I’ve got you.”

His mouth finds the corner of mine. He tugs my hair, tilting my head back and exposing my throat to the moonlight as his teeth catch the underside of my jaw.

“Gray!”

I come with a small cry of pleasure, my whole body trembling on top of him, my thighs clamping around his hips. He swears low against my throat, ragged, then he tightens his hold at the nape of my neck as his body goes rigid under me, and he pulls me down hard against his chest as he says my name like it’s the only word he remembers.

“Sienna. Sienna. Sienna.”

I collapse against his chest.

He slips out of me slowly, his mouth finding the corner of mine in a kiss that is soft and warm and tastes like Corona, and I am twenty seconds past the best moment of my life and one second into a panic I don’t have time for.

I just lost my virginity to Grayson Douglas.

On the beach behind his family’s lake house. Two days before I move to California. Six years after he carried me home when I twisted my ankle and I spent the rest of the summer writing our names in my journal. And the first person I want to call about it is the same person I can never, under any circumstances, tell.

Iris.

Our friendship would not survive the news. She created a strict no-best-friends-dating-her-older-brother policy in seventh grade, when I made the mistake of saying out loud that Grayson had gotten cute over the summer. She made me swear on the bottom bunk of her bed, on the grave of her dead childhood goldfish, that I would never, under any circumstances, ever touch her brother. I crossed my heart. I spit in my palm. I shook her hand.

Then I went home and wrote his name in the back of my notebook for another five years.

I sit up. His hands fall to my hips.

“Iris can’t know,” I blurt, my fingers pressed to my mouth.

“I know, Birdie,” he murmurs, his nose skimming the length of my throat.