It’s another kind of relief, it turns out. To be shit at it, and to just be able to say so.

“This being, what? Girls?” She’s smiling.

“Yeah, you’d love for me to admit that.”

“It would make me pretty happy to hear you say you’re shit with girls, yeah.”

“You didn’t used to have any complaints about my skills.”

“But that was, like, a practice environment. Make-out homework.”

“You’re saying I might be the kind of person who can’t hack it in a real-world application.”

She turns toward me, resting her shoulder against the wall. “I’m saying I have a feeling you’ve never had a girlfriend before.”

“That’s true,” I tell her. “I’ve been with girls but I’ve never—”

I think about how to put it, and I start to tie myself up in knots before I remember that it’s just Caroline and me. I get more than one shot at putting it right if it comes out wrong the first time.

“You’re the first girl I ever cared about this way.”

I thought admitting that to Caroline would be like taking a piece of myself and handing it to her.

It is.

And it isn’t.

It’s more like … like there’s all this stuff I’ve packed into myself, a defense against what I’m afraid of. Rocks and dirt, bits of rebar and junk that I’ve found by the roadside. And what I’m giving her isn’t me, it’s a clawed-off piece of this barrier that I’ve gotten used to thinking of as me.

I don’t need it. Not to keep me safe from her.

She’s smiling, looking down at her hands where they’re laid out on the bed. Just an inch or so from my hands. She nudges her fingers over until they overlap the tips of mine. “You know what the magic word was, at my room?”

“No, what?”

“Boyfriend.” She glances at my face, then back down. “That’s why I came with you. Because you said that.”

“I should’ve said it a long time ago.”

I mean it, too. I wish I’d been able to. I wish I hadn’t wasted every night I might have been able to spend with her. “Friend. Boyfriend. You deserved both.”

She reaches up to touch my face. Her fingers stroke over my forehead, past my temple, over my cheekbone, curling into a loose fist so she can skate her knuckles over my mouth. “You’ll really tell me anything?”

“Yeah.” The word is a whisper, the movement of my lips against her skin.

“If I asked you why you got so upset when I gave you that money at Christmas …”

God damn. Way to pick a woman who goes for the throat.

“Yes. If you asked me.”

She sits, watching me for a moment.

“If I asked you why you came out to my car that night at the bakery?”

I nod and turn her hand over. Kiss her palm. It’s corny, I guess, but I’m just so fucking happy she’s here.

“How many … partners you’ve had.”

I kiss her wrist. “Yes.”

“How you feel about me.”

“Yes.”

But I think maybe she knows that already. I think it’s there when I look at her, when she looks at me. If it wasn’t already there, we wouldn’t have lasted so long. We wouldn’t have put each other through so much when it would’ve been easier to just not.

I like her, and I love her, and I want her.

If she asks, I’ll tell her.

For now, though, because I want to and she’s staring at my lips, I kiss her neck. I find her pulse and pause there, lick it, imagining the rush of blood and heat at her throat. Flattering myself that her heart’s beating faster because of me.

I keep thinking she’s going to stop me, but she doesn’t, so I kiss all along beneath her jaw, behind her ear. I kiss her eyelids and her nose, her cheekbones, her chin.

I get my hand at the base of her spine, press up so she’ll lift her hips, ease her down onto the bed.

I kiss her mouth.

She tastes like everything I’ve been starving for.

I keep on kissing her, and she keeps letting me. Her arms sneak around my back and rake down my spine. I’m over her, hips centered above hers, hard against soft. I didn’t plan this, but her lips shape the welcome I’ve been waiting for my whole life, her arms are the anchor I need, her body is my home.

We’re right together, Caroline and me. Even if I’m doing this wrong, completely fucking wrong, it doesn’t matter.

We’re right.

“Tell me what you need me to say.”

There has to be something. I can’t just get to kiss her. Nothing in my life is this simple.

She pushes me away and sits up. I follow her, think she’s going to start making demands now. Insist on the answers to all the questions from a minute ago, which, okay, some of them aren’t pretty. The answer to that first question, in particular, might mean she never wants to kiss me again, and doesn’t that mean I have to tell her?

Does it? I’m not sure.

Caroline reaches down for the hem of her shirt, pulls it over her head, and throws it on the floor.

She’s not wearing a bra.

Fuck, this isn’t fair. I’m already having trouble with the ethics of the situation. I can’t think about right and wrong while Caroline’s tits are exposed, her nipples puckering in the cool air, her arms an open invitation.

“I should … We should. You know. Talk. If you want to?”

“I’m good. But you’ve got too many clothes on.”

She unbuttons my dress shirt, working from the bottom while I hold on to her waist and gawp at her like I’ve never seen a naked woman before. There’s just something different about Caroline. There always has been.

She takes her fingers off my buttons to snap them right in front of my eyes. “Up here.”

I blink and shake my head, breaking the spell. “Sorry.”

“And here I thought you missed me.”

I kiss her forehead. “I did.”

She yanks the last button free and says, “Off.”

“You sure?”

She goes up onto her knees, so she’s taller than me. Puts her hands on my shoulders, stares me right in the eye. “All I needed to hear was that you’d tell me. That you trust me.”

“I always trusted you.”

“No. You can’t keep everything to yourself and still call it trust. Take off your shirt.”

I shrug out of my button-up but hesitate on the T-shirt. I worked a long shift, and I had to hustle. “I stink.”

She casts her eyes at the ceiling and grabs my hem, so I lift my arms above my head and let her pull the shirt off me. When I open my eyes, her breasts are in my face, and I don’t see that I have any choice in the matter. I have to touch them.

God, she’s so fucking soft. I hold them, testing the weight in my hands. I haven’t forgotten the taste of her, the pressure of her nipple against the roof of my mouth. When she moans, I knock her over and fall on top of her, going after her with no art or plan or restraint. Sucking and licking, molding and squeezing, rubbing myself against her thigh, between her legs, over her hip bone, like a stupid kid.

Which is what I feel like. Young and dumb and lucky.

She’s just as bad, grabbing at me in fistfuls—hands in my hair, on my ass, gripping my hip, raking up my back. And still I make one more half-assed attempt to talk to her. “Listen, about the questions—”

She rubs the heel of her hand up and down my cock, and my jaw goes slack. My brain goes slack. All the tension in my body is busy flooding to where her hand is working me over.

“Later,” she says.

Later works for me.

She urges me onto my back and straddles me, centering herself over my hard-on, rubbing back and forth and swaying her tits in my face. I’m the luckiest guy alive.

I suck her and she rides me. Her skin’s so pale, one nipple swelling and softening, darkening as I twist the other between my fingers. Her eyes are closed, her throat mottled pink, her body rising and falling in a slow, even rhythm I can hardly bear. It’s been too long since I came. The first few days after she walked out of my room, I was seething with misplaced resentment. I whacked off like I was planning to make a profession of it. But after a while I lost interest, lost heart.