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“If you stop I will end your entire life.”

“Copy that.”

She reaches back and turns the lock without looking — three steps ahead, always — and I strip the crewneck off over her head and just look at her for a second, flushed and half-wrecked already and out of the armor. And it lands the same way it landed at midnight on New Year’s: out of a whole campus that thinks she’s a smile, I’m the one she climbs into a locked room to come apart with.

I want it to mean something. Later, I’ll mind how much. Right now I don’t let it.

Right now, I get a hand between us, under the waistband of her leggings, and she’s already soaked through the second I touch her, and the sound she makes when I drag two fingers up through her is not a quiet-library sound. I get my other hand over her mouth before it becomes a problem. She bites the heel of it, grinning against my palm, feral, nothing like the girl who alphabetizes spice racks — and I work her slow, thumb finding her clit, two fingers pushing into her, curling, and her whole body clenches around them and her nails go into my shoulder through the flannel.

“You’ve got to be quiet,” I tell her, low, against her ear. “Glass walls. Can you do that for me?”

She shakes her head against my hand. No. Honest. It nearly finishes me on the spot.

“Then this stays right here.” I press my palm harder over her mouth and curl my fingers deep, and she makes a wrecked, muffled sound into it and rides my hand, shameless, chasing it, and I could watch this for the rest of a life I don’t have the schedule for. “There it is. That’s the one nobody else gets.”

“Theo —” muffled, half a laugh, half a plea, my name gone soft in my palm. “Condom. Now. I mean it.”

“Back pocket. Wallet.”

She digs it out, tears it. There’s a graceless scramble getting my belt and jeans open with her still in my lap — she laughs into my neck, and it drags something almost like a laugh out of me too. Then she’s rolling it down over me, both of us past patience, and she lines us up and sinks down in one slow, unhurried slide that punches the air clean out of the both of us.

She goes still. So do I. Her forehead drops to mine.

“Okay?” I get out. Barely.

“Move,” she says, “or I’ll end you twice.”

So I get my hands under her and I move.

It isn’t careful. Careful left three months ago. She rides me in a study-room chair, my hand clamped over her mouth, her forehead against mine, both of us breathing the same air. I feel every sound she can’t make buzz against my palm. And I chase the ones I can pull out of her — the angle, the depth, the drag of it — until her rhythm breaks and she’s just taking it, shaking, close.

“Come on,” I say, coaxing and past caring, my free hand coming down between us. “Come on and keep it quiet. Let me feel it.”

She does. She comes so hard she sobs it into my hand, clenching around me so tight it drags me right over the edge behind her — I hold her down and follow her, my face buried in her hair, her name coming out of me like it got past every wall I own. The chair complains. The wall behind us thuds once. I don’t care.

For one long suspended second, there’s no draft, no box, no father, no scholarship, no six-week countdown — just Margo, wrecked and shaking in my lap in a locked glass room, and me, holding on like the dangerous thing finally got past the gap and I’ve decided, for once, to stop defending it.

After, the quiet is enormous.

She’s still in my lap, forehead on my shoulder, both of us wrecked and not moving. Her heart’s going against my chest. My hand’s moved to the small of her back without asking me, and she’s letting it stay — and that’s the part I’ll turn over later at two a.m. when I can’t sleep. Not the sex. The letting it stay.

“Okay,” she says into my shoulder. Muffled. “Okay. That did not happen.”

“It happened.”

“It did not happen, Theo, it’s not a thing, it’s — it’s a pressure valve. It’s stress. We’re both very busy and we hate each other and this is a completely normal way to process a group project.”

“Sure.” I don’t believe a word of it, and neither does she, and we both need it too much to say so. So I let her have it. I’m getting good at letting her have things.

She climbs off me, and the cold rushes into the place she was, and she finds her crewneck and her dignity in roughly that order. I watch her rebuild herself piece by piece — the hair, the spine, the bright — and I want to tell her she doesn’t have to do that, not with me, that I already saw the other one and liked her better. I don’t. I get my belt done and try to find where I put the version of me that keeps things out.

“We still don’t have a dilemma,” she says, back in her chair, legal pad squared, like the last ten minutes were a fire drill we’ve both agreed to forget.

“Yeah, we do.” I open the laptop the rest of the way. “Coward or caretaker. It builds. Both doors cost something. Reader can’t feel clean about either one.”

She looks at the screen. Then at me. Something crosses her face — she knows exactly why that dilemma builds, she knows we just spent an hour standing inside it — and for a second I think she’s going to say the true thing. The real answer. Not the professional one.

She doesn’t. Neither do I. We’re a matched set that way, and I’m starting to think that’s the whole problem.