Until he’s not. Until his mouth is running urgently over me, and his hands are tearing my bra straps down my arms, and the whole thing winds up bunched around my waist. Then we’re both half-crazed for each other, his hands on my thighs, my mouth on his shoulder, his tongue in my mouth, his erection moving against me until my insides are violin-string taut.
“Birth control?” he asks.
“Obviously, but—”
“Got it,” he says. Of course he does. He’s just like me: even when we’re both out-of-control obsessed with each other there are still a few （dozen） threads holding reason in place. Charlie moves off me, finds his wallet, and comes back with a condom, no further questions asked, no huffing, no hint at frustration, no implied uptight, nag, or bore. He tucks his hand against my jaw and kisses me with a tenderness I feel all through my body, all these little pockets of warmth nestled between bones and muscle and cartilage: Charlie, diffused into my bloodstream. And then finally, he’s pushing into me.
Slowly. Carefully. He draws back before I’ve gotten any relief, and a laugh rattles out of him at the sound I make. “I had no idea it was possible,” he says, “for you to want me as much as I want you.”
“More,” I say, too deep into this now to second-guess admitting something like that.
“Now, that,” Charlie says, pushing deeper this time, “I know is impossible.” I lift myself up, drawing him closer. His head tips back and a groan rises in his throat. As we move together, the world goes soft and dark, everything shrinking to the points where our bodies meet. His hands massaging me, his mouth unraveling mine, my nails digging into the contours of him to urge him closer than our bodies let us get.
I’m already sad at the thought of this ending. If I could make the feeling last for days, I would. If the world was ending in twenty minutes, this is how I’d want to go out. He thrusts deeper, harder.
“Fuck, Charlie.”
“Too hard?” he asks, slowing.
I shake my head. He understands. No more caution or restraint.
“I thought about you everywhere,” he says. “There’s nowhere in this town we haven’t done this.”
Half laughing even as I’m wrapped around him, ravenous, I ask, “How was it?”
“My imagination’s not as good as I thought.”
My brain feels like fireworks across a black sky. Charlie sits up and pulls me into his lap, pushing back into me. I brace my hands on the back of the couch, working myself against him harder, until every tilt and roll of my hips has him swearing into my skin. One of his hands winds into my hair, the other flattens on my back, holding me where he wants me.
“I want more of you,” I gasp into his mouth, feeling each beat of his heart surging through me. Harder, faster, more, all.
“You’re perfect,” he rasps. “That’s the word, Nora. You’re fucking perfect.”
Oh, God. Oh, God. Charlie, on repeat in my mind. “Please,” I say.
After that, there is no more talking. I have never been so glad for someone to see straight through me, to read me like a book, as he brings me to the edge again, and again, and—yes, the romance gods would be proud—again.
30
WHEN I SIT up, Charlie catches my arm, his eyes heavy and warm. “Stay,” he whispers.
My heart flutters. “Why?”
He tucks my hair behind my ear, mouth quirking. “So many reasons.”
“I just need one.”
He sits up, his hand settling between my thighs, his mouth pressing to my shoulder tenderly as the pressure of his thumb moves in a slow circle. “One.”
“In that case,” I say, “maybe two.”
He leans in and kisses me deeply, his hand gentle at my throat, thumb nestling into the dip at its base. “Because,” he says, “I want you to.”
“I don’t stay over at strange men’s places,” I say, blood fizzing.
“Then it’s lucky this isn’t my place.”
“Yes, because if it were, your parents would come running in, bleary-eyed with a shotgun, thinking you were being burglarized.”
“But at least we’d already be inside a getaway car,” he says.
I laugh, and the corner of his mouth hitches higher.
“Stay, Nora.”
I feel that blooming in my chest again, like petals uncurling to leave something delicate exposed in its center. And then a stab of panic, a needle in my unprotected heart.
“I can’t,” I barely whisper.