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“Theo —” wrecked, laughing, tugging at my hair. “Oh my God, that’s — okay, that’s not fair, that’s — get up here, it’s your turn, I have things I want to do to you and forty minutes to do them.”

“Bossy.”

“I contain multitudes.” She’s already flipping us, shoving me back against the pillows with a firm palm to my chest and a look in her eye I’d sign anything for, and God, this — the after-practice her, the unmanaged her, the her who climbs on top and takes what she wants — this is the one nobody else on this campus knows exists, and I’m the one she shows it to, and I’m so far past the wall on this girl I can’t see it anymore.

Then her mouth is on me and I stop having thoughts that organize into sentences. She licks the underside of my shaft and sucks the head of my cock into her mouth, rolling her tongue. i’m aching for this woman, and watching her take me — all of me — until i feel the back of her throat is enough to drive me crazy. Which it absolutely does.

She’s got the same thing I’ve got — the athlete’s engine, the stamina, the sheer bloody-mindedness of a body trained to keep going long past where it wants to quit — and she uses all of it, unhurried and filthy and looking up at me the whole time like she’s enjoying every second of taking me apart the way I took her apart. I last longer than I’ve got any right to, and it’s still not long enough, and I have to drag her up by the shoulders before she finishes me, breathing like I ran suicides.

“Come here. Now. I’m not doing this without you.”

“So demanding.” But she’s grinning, wrecked and pleased with herself, and she lets me pull her up and roll her under me, and I reach for the drawer.

She takes the condom out of my hand. Tears it herself, rolls it down over me slow, watching my face the whole time like she wants to see what it does to me — and it does plenty, and I let her see, because that’s the deal in this bed, even if it’s on no list: she gets the real one.

Then I’m settling between her thighs and she’s wrapping her legs around me and I push into her, slow, all the way, and we both make a sound we’d never make anywhere with witnesses. She’s warm and slick and tight around my cock and her nails are already in my back and her forehead touches mine.

“Fuck,” she breathes. “Okay. Okay, that’s — move, Theo, I swear to God —”

“Thought you had a clinic at three.”

“I will end you and skip it, move —”

So I move. And it’s not careful, because careful left a long time ago, and because she doesn’t want careful — she wants the thing neither of us says out loud. I get an arm under her hips and change the angle, driving deep into her, and she stops forming words. We’ve got the same engine, is the thing I keep coming back to: two bodies built to go, trained to outlast, so there’s no rush and no give-out, just her pussy taking me every time and both of us climbing. Her cussing gets filthier the further gone she is — the Charleston polish stripped clean off, just want and my name and words that’d scandalize her mother — and I catch every one of them like they’re mine, because they are, because nobody else on this earth gets this Margo.

“Right there — don’t you dare stop, don’t — God, Theo —”

“I’ve got you.” Into her throat, her jaw, her mouth. “I’ve got you. Come on. Let me feel it.”

She goes over with a sound I feel more than hear, clenching around me, dragging me right to the edge and holding me there — and I hold on through it, work her all the way through it, and only when she’s shaking and boneless do I let go, deep and undone, my face buried in her hair and her name coming out of me like it got past every wall I own.

For a long second, neither of us moves. Both of us wrecked. Both of us breathing hard. My heart going against her chest, and hers going against mine, the whole schedule she planned this around evaporated, nothing in the room but the two of us and the gray afternoon light and the thing we’re not naming.

After, we’ve got maybe fifteen minutes and neither of us is moving.

She’s tucked into my side, her leg thrown over mine, her hand splayed on my chest, and I’ve got an arm around her holding her there, and this is the part that breaks every term on the list — no sleepovers, sure, but nobody wrote down anything about this, about lying in the wreck of my bed at two in the afternoon with the winter light coming gray through the blinds and a girl breathing slow against my ribs like she’s got nowhere she’d rather be. She’s tracing something on my sternum, idle, half-gone. The planning voice is nowhere. This is the most unguarded I’ve ever seen her, and I know exactly what it costs her to be this, and I’d fight anyone who tried to take it off her.

“This is nice,” she says. Quiet. And then I feel her hear herself, feel the little flinch, the manager waking up. “The — the logistics. This was very logistically nice. Efficient use of a gap in our —”

“Margo.”

“— schedules, which is all this is, a scheduling efficiency —”

“You don’t have to do the bit. Not with me.” I say it into her hair. “I already saw the real one. I like her better. I keep telling you that.”

She goes still against me. And then, soft, almost to herself, in a voice with no bright left in it at all. “You know this would honestly be so much easier if we just —”

She stops.

I feel her hear it — the exact half-second where the words got out ahead of the guard, where if we just dated almost made it into the gray afternoon air of my room, and I feel her flinch back from it, physically, her hand going still on my chest.

“Never mind,” she says. Fast. “Ignore me. Post-sex brain. I don’t mean anything by it.”

And here’s the crack, the one I won’t tell her about: for one whole second, I want it so bad I can taste it.

I want the version where I take her to a Sunday dinner and put my hand on the back of her chair. Where she’s mine out loud. Where I don’t drop her at her car and drive home alone. I want to call my mom and have a name to give her. I want it fast and total and I have to hold still against how much I want it, this girl, for real, in the light.

And then my phone lights up on the nightstand.