He had a condom—thank God, because where was my head?—and I watched him roll it on, suddenly questioning my sanity, the logic that he’d somehow fit inside me. He put a gentle hand on my hip, guided himself with the other. With his eyes on my face, Sam went slow, so slow, careful to stop when I made a squeak of pain, slow again, and then deep, and then he was moving and it was okay, I was okay.
I was better than okay. I was lost in him, in the feel of his back growing slick under my hands, and his mouth on my neck, and his waist against my thighs. Lost in the feel of the sun on my skin, the way it poured in from the window to spill across the bed. I was lost in the sense of pleasure flirting under the pain, and his breath growing hot and hungry on my neck.
He was telling me it was good,
it was so good,
did I think I could come again?
Did I want him to finish?
I did but I didn’t, because I knew we wouldn’t ever be back in that exact moment, my first—our first—and I knew, too, that as soon as it was over I’d have to face myself and this wild decision. So I told him to wait, please, I didn’t want it to end.
He did wait, or at least he tried to, with gritted teeth and fingers that pressed almost too hard and still not hard enough. But when I hooked my ankles at his back and moved with him from below, he groaned out an apology and swore, shaking under my hands.
We fell still, and the ache in me turned sharp, more discomfort than pleasure. Sam carefully pulled back. There was blood on his fingers when he took off the condom, but he didn’t look worried. He just cleaned me up, bent to kiss my forehead, and walked to the bathroom.
I was shaking so bad I pulled the covers over me, all the way up to my chin.
I barely heard the toilet flush above the ringing in my ears. I didn’t even feel like the same person. Tate Jones wouldn’t have sex with a guy she knew for a matter of days. Tate Jones wouldn’t fall for someone so fast, so immediately. But apparently Tate Butler would.
Sam walked into the bedroom, pulled on his boxers, and climbed back onto the bed, bracing over me on all fours, sweetly trapping me under the blankets.
“Are you cold or hiding?”
“Cold.”
With a little growl, Sam climbed under the covers with me and curled on his side, bracing on an elbow to look down at me. He was smiling like an idiot, but—to my horror—I felt the burn of tears across my eyes. I was so scared of the moment he left this room, and hesitation pushed out the certainty that this had been the right thing to do.
“Tate,” he said, eyes flickering across my face, worried now.
I pressed a hand to his bare stomach. “Yeah?”
He closed his eyes and then bent so his head rested between my breasts. “You’re crying,” he whispered.
“I’m just overwhelmed,” I admitted. “With good feelings, I swear.”
“I don’t want you to feel weird about doing this.”
Struggling to put myself back together, I promised him, “I won’t.”
He shook his head, and then kissed my breast, gently biting. “This is a big deal,” he said once he released me. “Having sex. I know why I did it—I’m crazy about you—but why did you?”
“Can’t my reason be the same?”
He laughed against my skin. “It can.”
We didn’t see each other after he kissed me before leaving my room at three thirty. I remade the bed and turned on the shower with a numb hand, climbing in and staring at the tiles for twenty minutes, alternating between thrill and panic.
Will he think less of me now?
Has he slept with a hundred other girls?
We used a condom but how would I know if it broke?
Will Nana be able to tell what we did? Will she see it on my face?
In the end, Nana seemed pretty oblivious. She happily caught me up on all of Libby’s gossip during dinner at Da Mario, and then we saw Hairspray at the Shaftesbury Theatre. At eleven, we fell like rocks into bed. I would have texted Sam to tell him that I couldn’t come to the garden, that Nana insisted I get to bed early . . . but he didn’t have a cell phone.
I barely slept that night. Every time I rolled over, my aching body remembered, and then I opened my eyes, stared up at the dark ceiling, and wondered whether Sam was awake down the hall, whether he was happy or regretting this, or feeling something else—some other emotion that usually follows sex and which I didn’t even have a name for.
At breakfast, my stomach felt like it was full of squawking birds, but when I came back from the buffet with just a piece of toast, Nana sent me away for protein, fruit, something substantial, Tate, we have a big day today.
I immediately felt Sam step up behind me when I was deciding which of the cold cut selections I could stomach, and my skin broke out in a warm shiver.
“Hey you,” he said quietly, reaching forward to run two fingers down my arm.
I chanced a look at him over my shoulder, and my pulse became a stampede. He was sleep rumpled, hair mussed, and eyes still tired. “Hey.”
“Are you okay?”
I frowned, turning back to the trays of meat. Was my mental clutter visible all over my face? “Yeah, I’m great. Why?”
“You didn’t come to the garden.”
Oh. I nodded, stepping down the line. Sam grabbed a plate and followed me. “We got back late from the play,” I explained, “and Nana wouldn’t let me head out.” I smiled up at him, face heated. We had sex. Is he remembering it too? “You’d know this if you had a phone.”
Sam laughed. “What do I need a phone for?”
“So you’re not sitting out in the garden waiting for me.”
He scooped two fried eggs onto his plate. “It was worth it.”
“Why?” I asked, laughing. “Did someone else show up?”
He bumped my shoulder gently. “Seriously, you’re okay?”
“I’m good.”
“Not . . . hurt?”
Oh. If I thought my face felt hot before, when his meaning hit me, I grew feverish. “A little, but . . .” I looked over at him. His mossy eyes were studying me so intently, his lips parted. Truth magnet. I mirrored his words: “It was worth it.”
His gaze dropped to my mouth. “That’s a pretty good answer.”
“I think I’d worried you’d be weird today.”
Putting down the bacon tongs, he looked at me, confused. “Weird how?”
“Just—”
“This is what I meant,” he interrupted with quiet urgency, looking over my shoulder to make sure we weren’t being watched, “how it happened fast, and I didn’t want you to regret it afterward.”
“I don’t.”
“I’m not being weird,” he insisted, holding a very solemn hand to his chest.
I bit back a laugh at the earnest gesture. “Well I’m not being weird either.”
With a flirty grin, Sam reached up, tugging on a long strand of my hair. “Good.”
I reached up, too, pressing my thumb to his comma scar. “Good.”
seven
NANA AND LUTHER ATE like sloths. At every meal, each bite was carefully cut, poked, chewed, swallowed. Pauses were taken for sips of water or wine, and there was far too much conversation. In contrast, Sam and I shoveled our food in our faces, and then sat, waiting—staring while Luther and Nana nattered on, oblivious to our brain-melting boredom. Meals—particularly lunch—were becoming a drag, and neither Sam nor I had any patience for sitting for two hours in the middle of the day.
Plus, afterward, Nana always ordered coffee, but then had to sit and wait for it to cool to room temperature before she could drink it. At lunch, just twenty-four hours after we had sex—it was all I could think about—I looked at Sam, who, as soon as Nana lifted her hand to get the waiter’s attention to order coffee, was already looking at me with Get me the hell out of here written all over his face.
Finally, I broke: “Nana, can we go outside and walk around?”
She gave her order, and then looked over at me, concerned. “ ‘Walk around’?”
“I mean,” I amended, “just sit outside and people-watch?” I winced apologetically. “It’s hot in here, and I am super bored.”
This was enough teenage attitude to earn a lecture later, but if she let us out into the fresh air, it would have been worth it. With a tiny flick of her wrist, we were dismissed.
We didn’t wait for confirmation: both Sam and I were up and bolting from the dark, subdued restaurant before either she or Luther could change their minds.
There was a bocce court in the back garden of the restaurant, and a few small tables with chessboards. The bocce court was occupied, but Sam pointed to a chess table and I followed him over, hoping my rusty skills would return quickly.
I sat in front of the white pieces; he sat in front of the black, looming over the table. With a tiny tilt of his chin, Sam smiled over at me. “You start.”
I moved my king’s pawn two spaces and opened my mouth to speak, but stopped when I heard Luther’s voice just on the other side of the window. All of that internal flailing over our boredom, and we’d only managed to move three feet away.
Sam laughed quietly, shoulders pulled up to his ears, and he was so adorable I wanted to stretch across the table and put my mouth on his. The day before was still a fresh, singing echo in my thoughts and all over my skin.
I think he could see the memory in my eyes, too, because his attention dropped to my lips and he rumbled a quiet, “We could go make out in the bushes.”
My reply that making out would be way more fun than chess but also way more punishable by grandmother-inflicted death was cut off when Nana’s voice filtered out to us: “No, actually. My husband died when I was thirty-five.”
Across from me, Sam’s flirty smile seemed to dissolve.
“On the one hand,” Nana said, “I had a six-year-old daughter to raise alone. But on the other hand, I was no longer being yelled at for not keeping the house clean enough.” I heard her pause and imagined her lifting her cup, inhaling the coffee before deciding it was still too warm and putting it down again. “I have the restaurant, and it makes enough to support us. So, no, I never wanted to marry again.”