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And then she’s pushing at her jeans. She gets the button undone and then lies there with her hands on the zipper and stops. She’s been brave for a long time in the last fifteen minutes, and this is the next thing, and she’s staring at the ceiling with her hands on the zipper and her breath going too fast.

I stop and don’t say anything. I just stop and lie there next to her with my head propped on my hand.

She turns her head and looks at me for a long second. Then she takes my hand off the comforter and puts it on the zipper, under hers.

I pull it down slow. She lifts her hips so I can get the jeans off, and I pull them down her legs and get them caught on her feet. She laughs and kicks at them, and one of her socks comes off with them and goes flying somewhere toward the window. I don’t know where it lands. Neither of us looks.

She’s lying on my bed in her underwear, plain and black like the bra, and one sock, and her face is red. I get up on my knees and take off my sweats because it’s only fair, and I see her eyes go down and widen.

She doesn’t say anything for a second.

Then, quietly, “Oh.”

I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know if it’s a good oh or a bad one. I stay where I am on my knees on the comforter.

She looks back up at my face.

“That’s—” she says, and stops, and starts again. “Okay.”

“Tess.”

“I said it’s fine.”

And I start laughing. I can’t stop. I put my face in my hands on my knees on my bed and laugh until my stomach hurts, and she laughs, too, and smacks my thigh.

“Stop it, I’ve never seen one in person,” which makes it worse.

When I can breathe again, she’s propped up on her elbows, looking at me. Not at my face. Lower. With her head tilted a little to one side.

She reaches out. She doesn’t ask this time. She just grabs my dick while watching my face, the same way she did with her hand on my chest. And the first touch of her hand wrapped around me is so light and so careful that my whole body locks, every muscle, and she feels it and stops, and looks up at me.

“Is that—”

“Yeah,” I say, through my teeth. “Yeah. That’s.”

I don’t finish. I don’t have the end of the sentence.

She moves her hand again. She’s watching me the whole time. Running it again. I can see her doing it. The research project. She’s learning, the way she learns everything, by trying it and watching what happens and trying it again, and the thing she’s learning is me, and she is very, very good at it.

I have to take her wrist again.

“If you keep doing that,” I say, “this is going to be over a lot faster than either of us wants.”

She looks at me and that look comes back. Pleased. Wicked, almost, in a way I didn’t know she had in her.

“Really?”

I nod.

I push her back down onto the pillow with my hand flat on her sternum, and she goes, laughing. I lie down along her side and put my hand on her stomach.

She stops laughing. I go slow. Slower than anything. My hand on her stomach, and then lower, over the cotton, just resting there, and her breath stops. Her shoulders come up. I stop. I don’t say anything. I don’t ask. I just wait with my hand where it is and my face next to hers on the pillow.

Her shoulders come down. Her hand comes down over mine and presses it.

So I learn that, too.

I learn her the way I’ve learned everything about her in the last month. By watching. What her breathing does. Where she goes still and where she moves toward me. When she grabs my arm and when she pushes my hand somewhere else, a little to the side, with hers and holds it there until I get it. She doesn’t say anything. She shows me. She takes my hand and puts it where she wants it, and I follow. I feel the moment she stops being nervous. It’s in her hips. They stop holding still. They start moving against my hand like she doesn’t know she’s doing it.