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“Of course you can.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
“What? No. No, I—”
“You’re basically a vir—”
“I’m not!”
“Olive.”
“I am not.”
“But so close to it that—”
“No, that’s not the way it works. Virginity is not a continuous variable, it’s categorical. Binary. Nominal. Dichotomous. Ordinal, potentially. I’m talking about chi-square, maybe Spearman’s correlation, logistic regression, the logit model and that stupid sigmoid function, and . . .”
It had been weeks and it still took her breath away, the uneven tilt of his smile. How unanticipated it always was, the dimples it formed. Olive was left without air as his large palm cupped the side of her face and brought it down for a slow, warm, laughing kiss.
“You are such a smart-ass,” he said against her mouth.
“Maybe.” She was smiling, too. And kissing him back. Hugging him, arms draped around his neck, and she felt a shiver of pleasure when he pulled her deeper into himself.
“Olive,” he said inching back, “if for any reason sex is something that you . . . that you’re not comfortable with, or that you’d rather not have outside of a relationship, then—”
“No. No, it’s nothing like that. I—” She took a deep breath, looking for a way to explain herself. “It’s not that I want to not have sex. I just . . . don’t particularly want to have it. There is something weird about my brain, and my body, and—I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I don’t seem to be able to experience attraction like other people. Like normal people. I tried to just . . . to just do it, to get it over with, and the guy I did it with was nice, but the truth is that I just don’t feel any . . .” She closed her eyes. This was difficult to admit. “I don’t feel any sexual attraction unless I actually get to trust and like a person, which for some reason never happens. Or, almost never. It hadn’t, not in a long time, but now—I really like you, and I really trust you, and for the first time in a million years I want to—”
She couldn’t ramble anymore, because he was kissing her again, this time hard and bruising, as though he wanted to absorb her into himself. “I want to do this,” she said, as soon as she was able to. “With you. I really do.”
“Me too, Olive.” He sighed. “You have no idea.”
“Then, please. Please, don’t say no.” She bit her lip, and then his. And t
hen nipped at his jaw. “Please?”
He took a deep breath and nodded. She smiled and kissed the curve of his neck, and his hand splayed against her lower back.
“But,” he said, “we should probably go about this a little differently.”
* * *
—
IT TOOK HER the longest time to realize his intentions. Not because she was stupid, or oblivious, or that naive about sex, but because . . .
Maybe she was a little naive about sex. But she truly hadn’t thought about it for ages before Adam, and even then, it was never quite in these terms—him above her, pushing her legs wide open with his palms on her inner thighs and then kneeling between them. Sliding down, low.
“What are you—”
The way he parted her with his tongue, it was as though she was butter and he meant to slice through her like a hot knife. He was slow but sure, and didn’t pause when Olive’s thigh stiffened against his palm, or when she tried to squirm away. He just grunted, rich and low; then ran his nose in the skin at the juncture of her abdomen, inhaling deeply; and then he licked her once more.
“Adam—stop,” she pleaded, and for a moment he just nuzzled his face against her folds like he had no intention of doing any such thing. Then he lifted his head, eyes foggy, as if aware that he should be listening to her.
“Mmm?” His lips vibrated against her.
“Maybe . . . maybe you should stop?”
He went still, his hand tightening around her thigh. “Have you changed your mind?”
