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