She joins me on the couch, tucks her legs under her, and cracks open the can. She takes a sip. “Why did you wait for me?”

I raise an eyebrow. “At your apartment?”

She nods. “Yeah.”

“Um…because I give a shit about you.” I knock back more of my beer. “Isn’t that obvious?”

“But you hate him,” she says as she runs her thumb around the top of the can.

“No shit. He’s a pimp. But I figured if you missed a meeting chances were you were up to something. And if you were up to something I figured you probably needed someone to talk to. Or someone not to talk to. Just someone to be with.”

“You’re not judging me for seeing Cam?”

“Kettle, can I introduce you to the pot?” I point to myself. “You think it’s so easy for me, don’t you?”

She shrugs. “Well, does this ever happen to you?”

I scoff. “What? You think I’m never tempted? You think I’m just this good little boy? Like I’m a saint or a Mormon?”

“You. A Mormon,” she says dryly.

I lift my legs onto the couch, cross them at the ankles, stretch out. She shifts closer to the cushion, giving me room. “The ladies would have loved that even more. Can you imagine? Seducing a Mormon boy?”

“I think it was the other way around,” she says, and wiggles an eyebrow, and I like that we’re back to us, back to how she can tease me about my past, and I can at least be honest with her about hers.

“A few weeks ago I went to see my parents. You know, the usual check-in, how’s school, when are you going to be a bio major and give up this art shit. But I gotta do it, right? So this investment banker woman moved into my building last week with her husband and two young kids and I swear she gave me this look in the elevator like she’d heard about me. Like they all share stories and here she is thinking, ‘Now it’s my turn.’”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Well, what happened?” She smacks my leg playfully. “I want details.”

“So she gets in the elevator same time as me. She looks at me. Her eyes light up. She says ‘Hi, aren’t you Trey?’ One name only, like Madonna or something. Like my name is known in the building, shared in their circles. Trey.”

“What did you do, Trey?” She says, saying my name with smolder, like she’s the newest hot MILF in the building, ready and eager to pounce.

“I nodded and said yes, and then in the span of a twenty-second elevator ride, I played out a million ways I could take her so I forced myself to sing nursery rhymes in my head so I wouldn’t open my mouth and say something inviting.”

“Nursery rhymes,” she laughs. “Which nursery rhyme?”

“Jack Sprat.”

“Sing it to me.” She rests her head against the couch pillow, relaxing and smiling. I don’t know that I came here to make her smile, but hell if it doesn’t make me happy to see her like this. To know she’s here, and she’s safe, and she’s not with him, and even if it was hard, and even if she’s thinking about going back, at least for tonight she’s with me and she’s laughing as I tell a story. “Jack Sprat could eat no meat. His wife could eat no lean….” I sing softly, then stop.

“That’s it?”

“Might come as a bit of a shock, but I can’t remember the rest of the words, so I just repeat those two lines.”

“Jack Sprat could eat no meat. His wife could eat no lean,” she sings to me this time in a sing-song voice. I join in and we both sing it low and soft. Then our words fade and we stop talking, but neither one of us moves. I just stay there, next to her on the couch, and the mood shifts again.

“Did you want to be with her? To sleep with her?”

I swallow, consider, let her question unfold in my mind. “I don’t know. It was more that I wanted to seduce her. I wanted to know that I could win her over in a matter of minutes, maybe hours.”

“That’s all it took?”

“For some of them, yeah.”

She parts her lips as if she’s about to say something, then stops herself. She looks down, breathes out hard, then takes a sip.

“What is it?” I ask softly.

“Is it because they were easy or you were so good?”

I bite my lip for a second, trying not to let her question make me all crazy inside for her. But I am that way. Even more so because she’s blushing now. Red is rushing to her cheeks in splotches. “You think I’m good?”

“Yes,” she says in a breathy voice that sends a buzz through my whole body. “But you knew that.”

I shake my head. I did know that. But I don’t know that either. I don’t know anything with her. I don’t know what’s real and what’s a game.

“I didn’t know that,” I say, and maybe I’m lying, but I can’t help it. I want to hear her say it, even though this is the riskiest thing to do in the world. To tread on this territory of us, of the almost-sex we had. I’m already burning up, I am hot all over.

She raises her eyes, meets my gaze. “You know what I told you that night. I mean, I don’t have anything to compare it to –“

I cut her off. “–Good.”

“But I’ve never let anyone do that to me before.”

She said that the night we were together. It made me feel electric all over hearing it from a hot girl I wanted to have a one-night stand with, a last fling before I went on the wagon. Hearing it now, knowing her, understanding her, being privy to all her deep, dark secrets is the biggest fucking turn-on of my life. I’m dying for her to touch me right now, even though I know we won’t go there, but I want it so badly. I want to feel her hands on me, I want her to unzip my jeans and do something about how fucking uncomfortable I am right now with my dick straining hard against the fly.

“Yeah?” I say in a hoarse voice because I can’t manage sentences, much less coherent thought. I can’t move either, because if I shift an inch, I will lunge at her, pull her under me, and fumble at all our zippers to get our clothes off. And I can’t, can’t, can’t do that to her. She’s a virgin, and she’s messed in the head, and if I take her virginity because she winds me up with a few words then I am more of an ass than those pathetic men who hired her.

“I told you that, Trey,” she says softly, and there’s something about this moment that feels like a confessional, like she needs to tell me these things, like she has to say them. “But I want you to know that now. Now that we’re friends. I know how you feel about what I’ve done, but I want you to know it was so different with you,” she says, and even though she’s perfectly still, her words are moving toward me, reaching deep down inside me, gutting me.

It was so different with you.

She is killing me. I am hanging on to the frayed end of a rope with the smallest bit of self-restraint left.

“No one has ever made me come. I’ve never let anyone touch me. I never wanted to be touched. I never even knew what it would feel like to have someone do that,” she says and licks her lips, and I am dying. Completely dying right now. My hands are twitching, and I grip hard on the beer bottle, so hard I could break it, but I have to hold onto something, because all I want right now is to touch her. The whole living room is burning, the space between us is hot and humming and full of all this hazy desire I feel, and it’s taking over my body, my brain, my heart, and the air between us.

If I weren’t already sitting down, I might collapse. Because this feeling is knocking breath out of me. It is staggering.

“Harley,” I say in a low voice.

“Trey, what happened last night?”

The room spins, and I know I should go, but I also know I won’t leave. But neither one of us moves. Neither one of us breaks. Maybe we are both stronger than we think. Or maybe we are both afraid of getting hurt.

“What do you mean?”

“What happened with us in the courtyard. Last night was weird.”

“You didn’t like it?” I sound defensive, and my guard is back up. Maybe this is good. I need some self-protection around her.