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  We kissed a long time. Soft and hard, tiny feathering touches and deep soul kisses that sent shock waves of arousal through me. We kissed like we had nothing else to do, ever again. He breathed in, I breathed out, we shared air and spit and…trust. We shared trust.

  His hands roamed my back, then down to grip my hips and press me against him. His penis throbbed between us. My clit rubbed against the base of it, and he rocked me, rubbing, and my arousal made both of us slippery.

  His fingers dug into me, but I didn’t mind. We were moving together, our bellies a cocoon for his cock. My breasts scraped his chest. He put a hand flat on my back, holding him close, his hips thrusting upward and every movement urging another burst of pleasure from my clit.

  The pleasure ebbed and flowed, the contact indirect enough to keep me pushing closer and closer against him and at the same time hard enough to reward me. He ground me onto his cock, my pussy slick and hot and wet with desire and my clit its own tiny erection. His fingers curled under my ass to add a small up and down motion that made me gasp into his mouth. We rocked together without friction, smooth, skin gliding on skin.

  His tongue thrust inside my mouth the way I wanted his cock to fill me, and I moaned. He moaned, his hands hot on my skin, moving me, using my body as a tool for his own satisfaction, and it drove me wild to think that I could get him so hot without even putting him inside me.

  He rocked me harder, and I shuddered. Just a little more. Just a little more. Just a little more, a little harder, a little faster, a little deeper.

  He thrust against my stomach, fucking against me, each movement bringing me closer and closer to the edge. Sweat molded us together. My clit burned. My lips burned. My hips burned from where he clutched them.

  He murmured my name into my mouth, then tilted his head back against the pillows. His eyes closed, his face contorted, his penis leaped and throbbed and his body shook.

  So did mine. I came, watching him take his pleasure from my body. Bright sparks of pleasure rocketed through me. My thighs jerked. Heat flooded between us as he emptied himself against my skin. I could smell him, musk and sex mingled with my own fluids, and the scent made me groan as my body shook in climax.

  He pulled me closer, his arms around me. He held me while our bodies quieted. Our breathing slowed. I tasted the skin of his neck and found it salty. My head fit perfectly on his shoulder.

  I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to look at him. I didn’t want to unglue us. It was too raw and new, this feeling of comfort. Too easily dissolved. I didn’t want to lose it. I didn’t want to chase it away.

  We had to pull apart, of course, unstick ourselves from the aftermath of our passion. It was too physically uncomfortable to do otherwise. My thighs had cramped, something I hadn’t noticed when surging toward orgasm but was quite unable to ignore now.

  Dan rubbed my back and helped me to extricate myself from his lap. I thought I’d be embarrassed, but he gave me no time to be. His belly and chest glistened with the evidence of our actions. So did mine.

  “Want to shower?” His calm reaction to the aftermath allowed me to be calm, too.

  Genuinely calm instead of merely blank; I noticed the difference but made no comment. I nodded and held out my hand for him. I helped him up, laughing at the way he hobbled upright, apparently as stiff as I felt.

  He looked down at himself, then up at me. He linked my fingers through his. He tugged me closer, oblivious to the stickiness that had made me so squeamish.

  The kiss he gave me was tender and almost hesitant, like he feared I’d pull away again. I didn’t. There could be no turning back now, I had crossed a line with him. Even I wasn’t so fucked up to pretend it hadn’t happened.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  A simple phrase, but one that made me flinch. I hid it well, or so I thought, because I knew he didn’t mean it the way it sounded. He couldn’t know what the words meant to me, how they made me feel, what they made me remember.

  I thought I hid it well, but I didn’t realize how much he saw. He put a finger beneath my chin to make me meet his eyes.

  “Elle, what?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to talk, didn’t want words to ruin what we had done. I liked feeling close to him. I liked feeling that I could let him close to me. It made me feel normal. I didn’t want to ruin it.

  “Shower,” I said, pushing past him and going through his bedroom to his bathroom.

  I pushed aside the shower curtain and turned on the water. Hot. Steam began to fill the room, which was fine because it shielded the mirror so I couldn’t see my reflection, and I got in the shower before he could say anything.

  Thank you. He didn’t know what that meant to me or why. It didn’t matter what he’d been thanking me for—the sex, the kiss, for helping him up from the couch. He’d meant to be polite. Considerate. I knew that. And yet I still turned my face into the too-hot spray and closed my eyes, the words echoing in my head but spoken in another’s voice. Someone who thought saying thank you after doing something wrong could make it all better.

  He got in the shower behind me and reached around to adjust the water so it cooled enough not to sting. The shower was big enough to hold both of us but small enough to make it close quarters. When he moved, our bodies brushed. Elbow against belly, thigh against thigh, shoulder to breast.

  “Turn around.”

  I did, because he told me to, and because like so many other times, he knew what I wanted. Dan held up a blue washcloth and squirted shower gel into it, worked it to a creamy lather and turned me so I was out of the main part of the spray.

  Then he washed me.

  I know my mother did that for me in infancy and childhood, but I have no recollection of her doing it. I have suffered the touch of some and embraced it from others, but I’ve never had anyone bathe me. He started at my throat, eased the lathered cloth over my breasts, over my belly, my thighs, between my legs. He used soft, gentle motions, nothing rough, nothing hurried. He washed each arm, even each individual finger. He even knelt to wash my legs, lifting each foot to swipe it with the soap and rinsing them before he set them down so I wouldn’t slip.

  Water splashed my face and stung my eyes when he knelt at my feet. It turned his sandy hair dark and parted it in odd places. It pounded against his freckled back, turning his skin pink with heat and spray.

  “We all have scars, Elle,” Dan repeated as the water came down all around us, and then he stood aside to let it spray my body. Rinsing away the last of the soap.

  Making me clean.

  Chapter 16

  “I have something for you.”

  Dan pushed an envelope across the table toward me.“What’s this?” A gift?

  “Open it.” His gaze burned into me, set me back in my chair, fingers hesitating on the envelope’s flap.

  I pulled out two sheets of paper, stapled. Numbers. Data. Test results. I stared, reading the listings. Cholesterol. Red blood count. HDL. And then, on the second page, other results.

  I gaped, and a tiny gasp of surprise eeked out of me. “Oh.”

  Gonorrhea, chlamydia, HIV. All negative. I folded the paper and put it back in the envelope. I cleared my throat and sipped some ice water. Dan looked expectant.

  “Well,” I said finally, when it became clear he was waiting for me to speak. “You’re in very good health.”

  Now I knew how old he was, too, along with his blood type.

  “I thought it might make you feel better.”

  I blinked. “About what?”

  “Us.”

  I blinked again. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  But I did.

  Dan smiled. “Elle. I never asked you if you were on the Pill or—”

  “You want to stop using condoms.”

  He shrugged, cheeks staining a bit pink. It was interesting to watch him blush, for a change. “Well…yeah.”

  “As a matter of fact,” I told him, “I am on the Pill.”