“She’s not feeling well and has decided to move into my dad and Whitney’s bungalow. You know, to be close to her mom,” he responded simply.

To this day, she had no idea what Alexander said to Eleanor to get her to go along with his plan to seduce her, because when she saw Eleanor the next day, she didn’t seem sick at all.

“But what if she comes into the room?” Anna asked. Eleanor never even watched rated-R movies because she found gratuitous violence and sex abhorrent.

“They don’t call me the Greenwich OG for nothing,” he said, shaking his head and laughing. Alexander held up Eleanor’s key card to show he already had it covered. “Can we please stop talking about my sister?”

Anna smiled. It was rare for her boyfriend to display a sense of humor about himself. She knew he found his given nickname to be ridiculous and had never once heard him refer to himself by it. But she found hearing him say it now surprisingly sexy.

She had never asked Alexander whether he was a virgin as well, mainly because she didn’t know if it was something she could ask him, and also because she wasn’t sure if she wanted to hear about the girls who came before her. By the time Anna learned that a lot of girlfriends grilled their boyfriends about their past exploits, it was too late to broach the subject with him. Then, that night in Bora Bora over their candlelit dinner, he told her it was going to be his first time, too. She knew she should be touched by this, happy that they would have a shared experience as a couple. But, in fact, she was disappointed to hear the news. While they shared a chocolate soufflé for dessert all she could think of was that if they were both virgins, how the hell were they going to know what to do?

They figured it out, of course, after much fumbling and awkwardness. It wasn’t rocket science, after all. The sex hurt more than she thought it would, but by the second day, she finally relaxed enough to enjoy it a little. Yet Anna always wondered whether there was more to sex than what she was experiencing. Even for that split second when she saw Lolly on top of her brother, she felt more electricity in the room than any time she had been with Alexander. She wondered whether this was because her brother had a lot more experience and was better able to show Lolly the way.

“Done!” Her brother’s voice brought her back to reality.

“What’s done?” she asked, having forgotten what was last said between them.