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I look at the line of his neck. His pulse pounds under the skin, and I can vaguely see it at the spot that his neck meets his collarbone.

“Can we…” I start. “Can I…uh, kiss more than your mouth today?”

I think he shivers beneath me, but I’m not sure, so I glide my hands down to his forearms where I can feel his skin beneath mine. Are those goosebumps?

“Yes,” he says, and his voice is rougher than normal. “But let's start with mouths. Sound good?”

I nod. Then I lean in and kiss his mouth first, because I know how, and because I want to show him how far I’ve come.

THIRTY-ONE

DANIEL

Quinn is in my lap on my bed, knees bracketing my hips, my hands under his shirt because at some point “Let’s practice kissing” turned into “Okay, more than that is allowed now,” and he hasn’t once asked me to stop. His mouth is warm and still a little off-center, as if he’s concentrating on the angle more than the feeling, which should not be as hot as it is. I can feel him thinking. I can also feel him hard against my stomach, which is information I’m trying very hard not to make a whole personality trait about.

I break the kiss just enough to suck in a breath of air and look at him. His glasses are crooked and his mouth is puffy and red. He looks wrecked in the sexiest way possible.

“Say something dirty to me.”

Quinn blinks slowly. Then his processing face comes on—the one he gets when a sentence could have too many meanings and he’s picking the most literal one first.

“Say. Something. Dirty. To. Me,” he repeats, carefully, as though I just said a phrase in a language he doesn’t speak and asked him to practice the pronunciation. There’s a tiny pause between each word, and he tilts his head to the side as he says them.

I make a sound that’s not sexy at all. It’s a laugh I try to swallow and fail.

“No—not like that. Like dirty. Something dirty you’re thinking. Or something you’ve done. You know…the kind of thing you’re not supposed to say out loud when someone’s got a hand up your shirt.”

He considers this with the same seriousness he gives our lab assignments. I can practically see him sorting it into categories to find the right one.

Then, completely straight-faced, like he’s reporting a lab incident to someone, “Last Friday, I used the same pair of gloves for two different buffer preps.”

I stare at him.

He nods, once, as if he nailed it. “It’s a contamination risk. I didn’t tell anyone when I realized. I just threw them out and started over and then wrote the times down as if they were sequential and not out of order.”

There’s a long, very unsexy silence in which my brain tries to find the erotic content in glove reuse and comes up empty.

I lick my lips. “That’s—” I start, and then I have to put my forehead against his collarbone because I’m going to laugh, and if I laugh in his face, he will retreat into himself, and we will lose the last twenty minutes of progress. “Quinn. That’s not dirty talk. That’s a safety violation.”

“It was dishonest,” he says, mildly offended. “And the buffers were different assays. If anyone had used the first stock, they would have gotten a shifted baseline and not known why.”

I lose it, laughing helplessly into his shirt. He smells like laundry detergent and his deodorant and a faint chemical ghost of whatever he was doing before he came back to the room. I flex my fingers on his bare skin as I get myself under control. He hasn’t climbed off my lap so that’s a start. He’s sitting there, still hard and earnest and faintly proud of his confession, waiting to see if it counted with his clarification.

“Okay,” I say, when I can finally breathe again. “New rule. Dirty doesn’t mean, ‘I committed a minor ethics breach in the lab.’”

“You told me to say something I’ve done.”

“I did. I really did.” I sigh then tip my head back up. He’s staring at my mouth as though I might give him a better definition. “Try again. Not lab dirty. People dirty. Body dirty. The kind of sentence that could get you kicked out of church.”

He frowns. I can feel the exact moment he discards another option that is probably about science too. Then he says, “Sometimes I eat cereal out of the measuring cup I use for protein powder, and I don’t rinse it first.”

I absolutely lose it again, bursting out laughing. I pull him tighter against me so he doesn’t bolt.

Quinn looks briefly, genuinely confused that his words are what caused my reaction, which only makes it worse. Tears flow down my face, and I let them. Then I kiss him, still smiling against his mouth, because of course that’s what he thinks counts as filthy, and of course I’m gone for it, whether I admit it to myself or him. He makes a small startled sound and then kisses me back, careful and hungry in that order, as though he’s filing away that laughter is allowed in the middle of this, too.

When I pull back again, he’s red down to his collar.

“That one was closer,” I tell him. “Still not what I meant. But closer.”