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“It’s okay,” he says through gritted teeth, but he doesn’t pull away from my touch. Being allowed to atone for what I’ve done to him takes some of the sting out of my sense of horrified remorse.
“It’s not okay.” With my spare hand, I get an antiseptic swab ready.
He sighs, green-blue eyes twin gemstones that shift in the sunlight. “At least you know how to defend yourself when some strange man attacks you in his own home.”
I laugh, a bubbly sound that surprises me.
“That’s some arm you’ve got,” he adds, Adam’s apple bobbing as it’s obvious he’s fighting pain.
“I’ll take that as a compliment, coming from a quarterback.” His hair is dark and thick, falling in handsome waves against his scalp and ear. Being this close to him means I see all his edges clearly. The collar of his shirt against his neck, the small whorl of hair that spirals behind his ear. The way his cologne has faded since he last showered, the scent mingling with a very human scent, skin and oil and pheromones all blending to make a warm, tingly sensation begin between my legs, traveling up to my nipples, which tighten in response.
I swallow, hard. If I had an Adam’s apple, it would look like a slot machine lever in a casino.
“The wound,” I say, clearing my throat, as if that will do anything to stop the bass drum between my legs, “is small. Looks like I hit you with the corner of the base.” The cut is L-shaped and deceptively tiny. So much blood from such a small tear. His hair follicles are clean and even, as if he were genetically engineered. As I peer at his scalp, I move in closer, standing up slightly.
“Uh, Mal?” His voice is strangely muffled. “Can’t breathe.”
I look down and realize he’s half an inch from being smothered to death by the girls.
“Sorry!” I jump back, dropping the gauze in his lap, heart pounding.
A lazy smile turns his mouth into a weapon of mass destruction, if by mass you mean my sense of propriety. “I can think of worse ways to die.”
Bzzzz.
My phone startles me. Will rescues the gauze and presses it back against his head while I fumble for the phone. It falls at his feet. He picks it up, the text stream right there on the screen.
“Erections have no correlation with Neanderthal genes,” he reads slowly, wincing as I try to grab the phone, brushing against his ribs and shoulders, his warmth driving me nuts.
“Give that to me!”
He looks down at his crotch. “Never thought about caveman genes and my junk before.”
“Junk? You call it your… junk?”
“What else should I call it?”
“Penis. That’s what it is.”
My fourteen-year-old self has her hand in the air, jumping in her ninth-grade desk chair, begging to be called on because omigod I am in Will Lotham’s bedroom and my boobs almost smothered him and we’re talking about his penis.
“Do you use the proper terms for everything, Mallory?” He makes an inarticulate sound as I peel the gauze off the cut, wiping gently. “You call your pretty place a vulva, right? And you use the word vagina.”
“‘Pretty place’?”
He shrugs.
“And yes, I do. Vulva and vagina. And then there’s the clitoris,” I say primly.
“What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“A clitoris. Never heard of it.”
I freeze and look down at him. Bright eyes meet mine. Is he serious?
“The clitoris is a nerve cluster above the opening to the vagina,” I begin, taking a breath to continue my impromptu human sexuality lecture, because when a man tells you they don’t know what a clitoris is, you educate them immediately.
