Page 32 of Roadrunner

“It’s perfect,” I said, before he could finish the sentence.

I meant it. I’d take the back of my own Jeep, windows fogging, one eye on the parking lot for parishioners, over any candlelit dinner or rose-petal trail anyone could have dreamed up for me.

His face fell. “I don’t have a condom.”

I was almost embarrassed to admit I did. A whole box, bought and tucked into my purse weeks earlier, just in case. “I do,” I said.

“You carry those around?”

“I wanted to be prepared.” I shrugged. “CVS.”

“You’re sure about this?”

I’d never been surer of anything. Whatever love was supposed to feel like, I’d found it. It hadn’t come with an instruction manual or a deadline. I wasn’t sure sex could make it any bigger than it already was. I wanted to find out anyway.

I dug the condom out of my purse and tore the foil with my teeth because my hands wouldn’t hold still. Riley rolled it on with more patience than either of us had left. The cargo area of the Jeep was a ridiculous place for a first time. A blanket of old road maps, a socket set that kept rolling into my hip, the dome light painting us the color of a cheap motel room. It was still the only place I wanted to be.

He settled between my thighs and paused. The head of him pressed against me. “Tell me if I hurt you.”

“You won’t.”

He did, a little. A sharp, stretching burn that made my breath catch. He froze. I dug my fingertips into the small of his back and pulled him the rest of the way in. The burn became pressure, then fullness, then something that was not pain at all.

“Jesus, Alex.” He winced.

“Don’t you dare stop.”

He moved like he did everything else. Careful at first, then certain. The windows fogged. Someone’s headlights swept the lot and kept going. I dug my nails into the leather of his kutte because he hadn’t taken it off. He was still wearing the club’s colors while he was inside me, and the thought of that undid whatever was left of the girl who used to lock herself in a cliff house and wait for parents who never came home.

I came with my face against his chest and his name in my mouth. He followed a dozen strokes later, as a sound I’d never heard from him escaped.

Half growl and half prayer.

We stayed like that until the condom became a problem and the night air found the sweat on my skin. He tied it off, dropped it in an empty cup, and pulled my shorts back up my legs like I was something that might break.

“Ice cream,” I said, because if I said anything else I was going to cry.

He laughed against my hair. “Ice cream.”

We bought two pints of vanilla and a plastic spoon. Della’s cobbler was still warm when we got back. Nobody asked why a five-minute errand had taken forty. Addy smirked into her coffee. Antonio talked about the weather. Riley’s hand found my knee under the tablecloth and stayed there through dessert.

On the drive to my apartment I kept touching my own mouth, as if the shape of the night might rub off. He walked me to the third-floor door and kissed me like the church parking lot had only been a beginning.

“Twenty-one was a stupid rule,” he said.

“You think?”

He tapped the promise ring on my finger. “Still means what it meant on Christmas.”

“I know.”

He made me lock the door from the inside before he went down the stairs. I stood with my back against it and listened to his boots fade. Then I sat on the loveseat with my textbook unopened in my lap and understood, with a clarity that scared me a little, that I was never going to love anyone the way I loved him.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Alex

Then