He had big fingers—that must be why they didn’t fit. The first knuckle was just shy of too much, a pinching ache and the sensation of damp, uncomfortable fullness. She shifted on her heels, trying to adjust and make room, and then shifted some more, until he had to grip her hip with his other hand to keep her still. Olive held on to his shoulders, his skin sweat slicked and scorching hot under her palms. “Shh.”
His thumb grazed her, and she whimpered. “It’s okay. Relax.”
Impossible. Though, if Olive had to be honest, the way his finger was curving inside her—it was already getting better. Not so painful now, and maybe even wetter, and if he touched her there . . . Her head lolled back. She clutched his muscles with her nails.
“There? Is that a good spot?”
Olive wanted to tell him that no, it was too much, but before she could open her mouth, he did it again, until she couldn’t keep quiet anymore, all groans and whimpers and wet, obscene noises. Until he tried to get a little further inside, and she couldn’t help wincing.
“What is it?” His voice was his regular voice, but a million times raspier. “Does it hurt?”
“No— Oh.”
He looked up, all flushed pale skin against dark waves. “Why are you so tense, Olive? You’ve done this before, right?”
“I—yes.” She was not sure what compelled her to continue. Any idiot could see from a mile away that it was a terrible idea, but there was no room left for lies now that they were standing so close. So she confessed, “A couple of times. In college.”
Adam went immobile. Completely motionless. His muscles flexed, coiled strong under her palms, and then they just stayed like that, tense and still as he stared up at her. “Olive.”
“But it doesn’t matter,” she hastened to add, because he was already shaking his head, pulling away from her. It really didn’t matter. Not to Olive, and therefore, it shouldn’t to Adam, either. “I can figure it out—I’ve learned whole-cell patch clamp in a couple of hours; sex can’t be much harder. And I bet you do this all the time, so you can tell me how to—”
“You’d lose.”
The room was chilly. His finger was not inside her anymore, and his hand had left her hip.
“What?”
“You’d lose your bet.” He sighed, wiping a hand down his face. The other one, the one that had been inside her, moved down to adjust his cock. It looked enormous by now, and he winced as he touched it. “Olive, I can’t.”
“Of course you can.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
“What? No. No, I—”
“You’re basically a vir—”
“I’m not!”
“Olive.”
“I am not.”
“But so close to it that—”
“No, that’s not the way it works. Virginity is not a continuous variable, it’s categorical. Binary. Nominal. Dichotomous. Ordinal, potentially. I’m talking about chi-square, maybe Spearman’s correlation, logistic regression, the logit model and that stupid sigmoid function, and . . .”
It had been weeks and it still took her breath away, the uneven tilt of his smile. How unanticipated it always was, the dimples it formed. Olive was left without air as his large palm cupped the side of her face and brought it down for a slow, warm, laughing kiss.
“You are such a smart-ass,” he said against her mouth.
“Maybe.” She was smiling, too. And kissing him back. Hugging him, arms draped around his neck, and she felt a shiver of pleasure when he pulled her deeper into himself.