He was right when he’d said in the desert that I wouldn’t know what to do with him if I had him. I didn’t. My hands drifted to the small of his back, to his hips, but no further. I felt the hardness of him, the heat of him, the slickness against my thigh, and I wanted him, but the mechanics were elusive and terrifying.

He took the lead. He touched and stroked, his face always just above mine, always grinning. When I began to cry out, he kissed me to keep me quiet, to keep the others asleep. He brought me to the edge but not over—the ache, the need pulsed through me, a fire stoked higher with every heartbeat, every gasped breath. Sorcha toyed with me, brought me to the brink and then a pause, to the brink and then away.

“Tell me what to do.” My voice was ragged, parched, desperate. Elated. Enraptured.

“Fuck,” he breathed in my ear. He licked my hand and taught me what to do with him. “Like this,” he said.

He lay on his back, one leg wound around my back, gripping me like a vice. My face fell against his breast, breathing in this new scent of him. He wound his fingers in my hair. I was artless; I had none of his finesse. I could not tease and taunt for him like he had for me. All I could do was give him release. He laughed when he came, a throaty, full laugh. He lay in the lamplight, laughing, his hands covering his face. I fell on to him, into the stickiness, the sweat, and laughed into his chest with him. He took my face in his hands and pulled me to him, kissed me, smiled. “Your turn,” he said. He half-purred it, half-growled it, and then he took me between his thighs. The tightness of his grip, the heat, it was so strangely different from being with a woman. Strange and similar at the same time. The strangeness of it, the singularity of it, intensified everything. Sorcha caressed me, held me with his large, strong hands, whispered in my ear a stream of unheard words in a voice of pure, raw, untempered pleasure. I confess it hardly took any time at all. I collapsed, boneless, onto him, my face in the curve of his throat. I felt the rise and fall of his breath, a steady, calm thing that grounded me.