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I groan and make myself look at him. He’s not smiling anymore. “Just . . . what do you want from me?”
“I want everything.” His tone is calm. Matter-of-fact. Naked, in a way that has nothing to do with his clothes. “I’m all in.” He slowly lowers his forehead until it touches mine. His eyes merge together into one, right on his nose. All I can hear is the sound of our breathing, and something inside me clicks into place. “What about you, Mallory?”
I don’t answer. Instead I do what I know: I push my chin up to kiss him, and it works just as well.
It’s even better than yesterday. His arms cage me against the dresser, and mine loop around his neck. I’m wearing a T-shirt, and my hands make contact with the vast expanse of his back, smooth and sunshine- hot. I open my mouth, and he licks my lower lip before his tongue slides against mine, clumsy and hot and insistent and delicious. The helpless, eager, guttural noises we’re both making are maybe embarrassing, but it’s okay.
Even if I never catch my breath again.
“Slow down,” I tell him. “Let’s just . . .”
“I think about this every second of every day.” His palm slides up my back, and my body is like a pawn in his hands. He turns us around and then we’re on the unmade bed, the twistedsheets digging into my spine. “You’ll be playing the most beautiful chess I’ve ever seen, and I dream about having you under me. It’s fuckingconfusing.”
We’re both wearing too many clothes, and suddenly I’m impatient. I want bare. I want skin—moreskin. I want him closer, in a seamless, sticky way. He’s hard against my stomach, and the two of us feel both familiar and soul- baringly intimate, like nothing has been before.
“Do you . . .” My hand slides down his abs, meets the waistband of his jeans, and it’s finally there, a hint of that hesitation, that wobbliness I expected from him. “No?” I ask.
His throat bobs as he swallows. His full lips tremble for the barest second. “Are you real?” The air between us swells, overflows. “Sometimes I’m scared that I imagined you. Sometimes I think you’re only in my head.”
“I’m here,” I breathe out. I’m a pool of liquid heat.
“I have no idea what I’m doing,” he says, biting softly the hollow under my ear.
I shiver. “I can help,” I tell him, even if my neurons are boiling to mush.
“Yeah?”
“It’s kind of like chess. I do one thing . . .” I undo the first button of his jeans, slowly. Feel, more than hear, the hitch of his breath. “And you do another.”
He holds himself up on his arms and looks down at me, like he’s inventorying, deciding where to start. His index finger hooks on the hem of my shirt and drags it upward, stopping right below my bra. He stares at my navel for what feels like minutes, then says, “I want odds. Since it’s my first time.”
“You want a handicap?”
“I wanttwomoves.”
I laugh. And then sober when he pins my hands above my head, in a way that suggests that he might not know what he’s doing but he has plans, fantasies, strategies, a rich interior world that will be put to use, and . . .
“I hope,” I say, serious, “that you’re going to like this as much as chess.”
“I think,” he tells me with a small smile, “that I already do.”
We wake up early in the morning. Do a bunch of slow, sleepy stuff with our hands that feels really good and also happens not to require a condom. I had only one, left in my backpack from who knows when; Nolan had none. Apparently we really had fooled ourselves into thinking that this wouldn’t happen. I fall asleep on his chest, his arms looped around me, feeling his rapid breathing slow down to something calmer, then slide into sleep and pull me under.
The buzz of Nolan’s phone on the nightstand wakes us up once the sun is high. He answers with a huge yawn. “Yeah?” His voice is too loud. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s the way we’re pretzeled together skin to skin, legs coiled, his free hand tangled in my hair and holding me into the curve of his shoulder. “That’s because Iwassleeping. Yup. Yeah. Sure.” He sounds unimpressed. He sounds like the delicious, warm version of Nolan that kept ordering me to stop fidgeting at 3:00 a.m. This is not real life. “Uh-uh.” I pull back to watch his slitted, tired eyes and his swollen lips. He smells fantastic. I want to sink under his skin. I want to move between his legs and dwell on the expanse of his chest. I—
“Sure. She’s here. Let me ask her.”
Nolan presses his phone against his shoulders. My eyeswiden. “What?” I whisper. “Don’t tell them I’m here! They’ll think that I . . .”
He gives me a confused look. “That you’re here?”
I groan and hide back in his neck.
“There is a charity event. Someone wants us to play together, against . . .” He picks up his phone again. “Who would we be playing against?” I hear a brisk female voice on the other side. “Some tech industry person,” he tells me, and then into the speaker again, “Is it Bill Gates again? Elle, he’sbadat chess. I can’t make the game last longer than one minute against . . . Yeah. I’ll call you back.” He tosses the phone to the side and pulls me closer, covering our heads with the blankets.
The outside world disappears.
“Who’s Elle?” I ask.
