It escalates quickly. For me, at least. There is a stretch of seconds, maybe minutes, in which we just kiss and kiss and kiss, Erik leaning even closer and me following his lead, liquid heat flooding inside me. And then I start noticing them: the soft groans. The sharp hiss as his cock rubs against my inner thigh. The way his fingers dig hungrily into my hips, the nape of my neck, the small of my back. He alternates between clutching me to his body as tight as he can and avoiding touching me at all, hands white-knuckled against the edge of the shelf as he puts some distance between us. I think he might be trying to slow this down. Pace himself, maybe.

I think he’s not managing to, not very well.

I pull away, and his eyes slowly blink open. They’re glassy, unfocused, a nearly black blue fixed on my lips. When he tries to lean down for another kiss, I stop him with a hand on his chest. “Bedroom?” I gasp, because he looks like he could just fuck me in the hallway, and I’m afraid that I’d gladly let him. “Or if you want . . . here is . . . fine, if you—”

He cups a hand under my ass and carries me all the way down the hallway, like I’m no heavier than his cat. When he flips the light switch on, the bed is huge and unmade, and the room smells so much like him, I have to briefly close my eyes. He sets me on my feet, and I’m about to ask him if this is necessary, if we could please do this in the semi-dark, but he’s already unbuttoning his shirt, eyes fixed on me. My mouth goes dry. On second thought, light’s fine. Probably.

Erik is a mountain. A giant dome of flesh and muscles—not GQ-cut, ridiculously defined ones, but solid, oak-tree big, and I might have gotten absorbed into staring and catastrophically lost track of time because:

“Take off your clothes,” he says, no, orders, and I shiver again. There’s something about him. Something commanding. Like his first instinct is to take charge. “Sadie,” he repeats. “Take them off.”

I nod, shrug out of my jeans first, then my sweater. I’m frantically looking for the courage to continue when I hear a low, hoarse, “Not purple.”

I look up. Erik stands in front of me, naked, tall, big, and like . . . like a minor deity from some Norse pantheon, a reserved one who likes to keep to himself but would still get a couple of Baltic Sea islands named after him. He is gloriously unself-conscious about his nudity. I, on the other hand, am apparently too embarrassed to take off my white tank top or to glance any lower than his belly button.

Not that he seems to notice. His eyes are glassy again, staring at the way my black panties stretch around my hips like he’d like them burned into his retinas. I am tempted to put my jeans back on. “What?”