I woke up slowly, rolling slightly, only to find my back stuck to whatever I was lying against. My skin peeled as I sat up. Leather. I’d fallen asleep on the leather couch.

There was a soft blue blanket over my very naked body.

My very naked, very…sore body. I felt stretched wide between my legs. The muscles in my back, in my thighs—they felt like they were made out of water.

I felt like I was made out of water.

I pressed my fingers against my lips as if I could hold back the giggle. I wanted to giggle. A giggle was going to happen.

I laid my head back against the cushions and like the seventeen-year-old girl I’d never been—I giggled.

Ho. Ly. Shit. That…had been amazing. Dylan had been amazing.

What I’d had with Hoyt followed—to the letter—what my very uncomfortable high school health teacher had told us about sex. Or procreation. There had been the hardening and the insertion and the ejaculation.

It had been cold and clinical and painful.

What had happened with Dylan? I didn’t even have words for it. But if I’d had a wish list for what sex could be like, Dylan just crossed everything off the list.

I fell sideways back onto the couch, my hands between my legs, where I was warm and sore. Who knew…honest to God…who knew my body was designed to feel so much?

What a fucking miracle that was.

When I turned sixteen, our church got a new pastor. The first time he spoke from the pulpit, Mom and I went to church in the best of our Sunday best. We sat in our pew, right side, third from the back, and waited with bated breath to hear the new guy.

I remember exactly his sermon. Exactly. Tolerance. That faith was not just faith in God, or faith in people who looked like you or were attracted to the opposite sex. Faith was faith in humanity. God loved all of us. And we should do the same.

It had been a revelation to me.

Not so much for Mom. We didn’t go back until that pastor left.

It was weird, my body sore from sex, my mind blown from the power of what I could feel, but at that moment, more than any in the past few years…I missed church.

The power of those two things—the spiritual and the carnal—were connected, like the arc of electricity between heaven and earth.

From behind the cracked-open door that led to Dylan’s garage, there was a thump and a muffled curse. Dylan was up.

I pressed a hand to my heart where it pounded, barely contained by my ribs and my skin. Part of me wanted to vanish. Just…not be here. Not look at him. Not try to make conversation after what had happened between us. I didn’t know how to do that. Not with any grace.

But another part of me, alive and hungry and curious, wanted to do all of that again.

I grabbed my clothes from the floor but they smelled like sex and sweat, so I wrapped the blanket around my body and walked back to the room that was mine.

In the drawers I found a clean set of pajamas. Size small, the tags still on the soft fuchsia tee shirt. And the dark navy flannel pants with the stars and moons and bright yellow suns scattered over them.

They fit. They fit perfectly and they were pretty.

Dylan didn’t pick them out, I got that. Margaret had. For her granddaughter. But they were pretty pajamas with little suns on them and I loved them.

The storm had not stopped. Rain fell in sheets on the windows. Outside it was just a swirl of gray. I looked down out the window and wondered if there was a chance this house might slip right off this mountain.

I wondered if I’d slipped off a mountain.

I’m married.

I watched the rain fall into a dense cloud of mist, where it just vanished.

I’m a married woman.

It was one thing to lie about my name…but I’d just made Dylan a participant in adultery. I swallowed and rested my head against the window. And tried, really, really hard, to convince myself that it didn’t matter. What Dylan didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.

But it mattered.

And I knew it.

I put on a pair of thick socks I’d found in the top drawer and made my way back across the house and then slipped through the cracked door into his dark garage.

The light was on over his bench, and he sat there in a pair of jeans and boots and nothing else.

He was beautiful, his skin dusted with gold under that light. His muscles flexed and shifted under that skin.

“Dylan?” I said, standing on the cement stoop, three steps up from the floor of his garage.

“You’re awake,” he said. He didn’t turn, the muscles of his arms twitching faster as he finished what he was working on. “Just…one more second.”

In that minute, I honestly didn’t breathe.

But then he turned around, and I blew out my breath as coolly as I could before I got light-headed.

“I was tired.” Awesome. Awesome response. “It was a long night.”

“Sure.”

He was still looking at me. Not quite smiling. Not quite not smiling, either. It made me nervous, that look. Like I was something he was slowly taking apart and putting back together, over and over.

“So…what is all this stuff?” I looked around his garage because I didn’t know what else to do.

“All this stuff is cars,” he said. “Those are tires. Anything else you’re unfamiliar with?”

Oh…I couldn’t. I was too raw for teasing now. “I’m…I’m not…I haven’t done this.”

“Fucked a guy and then talked about cars?”

The laugh barked out of me.

He crossed the room and climbed the three steps, his eyes on mine, burning away the embarrassment and insecurity until all that was left was my heartbeat in my chest and the heat in his eyes.

“Hey,” he said and kissed me lightly on the mouth. Just enough. Just enough that I could taste him. The salt and spice. He’d brushed his teeth and had coffee. I could taste all of him on his lips.

“Hey,” I whispered and kissed him back. Wishing I’d had coffee and brushed my teeth.

He stepped back. “Nice pajamas. I like the suns.” He reached out and touched one of them on the front of my thigh and just like that, I was ready. I was hot and damp and…ready.

“So,” I said, stepping back for just a little distance. “What’s going on here?”

“I fix cars.” He took his own distance, taking the steps down to the floor.

He was being evasive—I knew, because that’s how we were with each other. So, I slowly gathered all those things I knew about him, the crumbs he’d left, and I followed him down the steps to the floor.

“You fix cars and go to parties in tuxedos. You live on a cliff in a beautiful house—”

“Don’t come down here,” he said. “You don’t have shoes.”

He was wearing steel-toed boots. Boots and no shirt.

I glanced down at my feet in the thick wool socks I’d found. My toes were curled over the edge of that cement step, like I was about ready to jump.

“You told me people pay you a lot of money for something stupid.”

“I fix cars.”

“You’re telling me you’re the best-paid mechanic in the world?”

He laughed and glanced over his shoulder at me. “Yeah. Sorta.”

“Dylan…” Please, I wanted to say. Throw the girl whose mind you just scrambled with what will undoubtedly be the best sex of her life a bone. “We just had sex.” What a stupid, inadequate word for what had passed between us. “And I know nothing about you!”

“That’s not true. We…” His throat bobbed and this cavern, this great cathedral of space, shrank to nothing. To zero, and I could hear his heartbeat. The sound of his swallow. “We know plenty about each other.”