“Can I buy you dinner?” he asks against my lips. “Before we . . .”

I shake my head. The tips of our noses brush against each other. “No need.”

“I . . . I’d like to, Hannah.”

“Nah.” I kiss him again. Once. Deep. Glorious. “I don’t do that.”

“You don’t do”—another kiss—“what?”

“Dinner.” Kiss. Again. “Well,” I amend, “I do eat. But I don’t do dinner dates.”

Ian pulls back, his expression curious. “Why no dinner dates?”

“I just . . .” I shrug, wishing we were still kissing. “I don’t date, in general.”

“You don’t date . . . at all?”

“Nope.” His expression is suddenly withdrawn again, so I smile and add, “But I’m very happy to come to your place anyway. No need to be dating for that, right?”

He takes a step back—a large one, like he wants to put some physical space between us. The front of his jeans is . . . a mess. I want to clean him up. “Why . . . why don’t you date?”

“Really?” I laugh. “You want to hear about my socio-emotional trauma after we did”—I gesture between us—“this?”

He nods, serious and a little stiff, and I sober up.

Seriously? He really wants that? He wants me to explain to him that I don’t really have the time or the emotional availability for any kind of romantic entanglement? That I can’t really imagine anyone sticking around for something that’s not sex once they really get to know me? That I’ve long since realized that the longer people are with me, the more likely they are to find out that I’m not as smart as they think, as pretty, as funny? Honestly, I know that my best bet is to keep people at arm’s length, so that they never find out what I’m actually like. Which is, incidentally: a bit of a bitch. I’m just not good at caring about . . . anything, really. It took me about one and a half decades to find something I was truly passionate about. This friendship experiment I’m doing with Mara and Sadie is still very much that, an experiment, and . . .

Oh God. Does Ian want to date? He doesn’t even live here. “So you’re saying . . .” I scratch my temples, coming down fast from my post-orgasm high. “You’re saying you’re not interested in having sex?”

He closes his eyes in something that really doesn’t look like a no. Definitely doesn’t look like a lack of interest. But what he says is, “I like you.”

I laugh. “I noticed.”

“It’s . . . uncommon. For me. To like someone this much.”

“I like you, too.” I shrug. “Shouldn’t we hang out, then? Isn’t that good enough?”

He looks away. Down, to his shoes. “If I spend more time with you, I’m only going to like you more.”

“Nah.” I snort. “That’s not the way it usually works.”

“It does. It will, for me.” He sounds so solidly, irrefutably sure, I cannot do anything but stare at him. His lips are bee-stung, and everything about him is beautiful, and he looks so quietly, stoically devastated at the idea of fucking me with no strings attached that I should probably find this comical, but the truth is that I can’t remember ever being this attracted to someone else, and my body is vibrating for his, and . . .