“Meg,” Reid whispers softly, right against the shell of my ear. “Do you want to stop?”

“No!” It’s too loud in the quiet room, my hands gripping at his hips involuntarily, my eyes squeezing closed at the threat of impending confrontation over this.

“I want to keep going,” I say, more softly now, nuzzling at his jaw, and he makes a low, humming noise against my skin, the sound a metronome for that beat I skipped, and I pulse my hips again.

But he presses up on his arms, moving his hard length away and looking down at me. “We can slow down.”

I want to whimper without his heat, but before I can get the sound out he picks up one hand from where he’s had it pressed against the mattress beside my head. He strokes his fingers slowly, carefully, right down the center line between my breasts, where my heart flutters beneath the skin.

“You seem nervous.”

I blink up at him, then close my eyes again and shake my head, feel those fingers stroke, patient and soothing, against me. Of course he’d know. Of course he can read every code, every sign my body leaves for him.

“I’m not.”

“Don’t hide from me,” he says, and I open my eyes, look up at his triple-take face, set in patient determination.

He’ll protect you, I remind myself. This is practice. This is staying.

“I’m not easy,” I tell him, wrapping my arms around his waist, my fingers trailing up those fanned-out muscles, a big, blank canvas for the nervous, directionless loops I draw there. “I mean that it’s . . . not always easy for me to finish. To come.”

I’ve worked up the courage to tell exactly two men this before. The first was after the third time I had sex with my high school boyfriend, an excruciating conversation that mostly included him asking me impatient questions I didn’t know the answers to, all of them some version of “What should I do different?” as though I could produce an annotated diagram about my anatomy when I’d barely had enough sexual experiences to know the basics. Eventually, frustrated with my own limited vocabulary and his sullen, perfunctory responses, I’d simply stopped expecting to finish—with him or with the handful of guys I dated after him.

The second was a guy I’d gone out with two years ago, so sweet and kind and attentive on all of our dates until that one, when I’d told him and he’d said, with an undeserved, confident smirk on his face, “It’s only because you haven’t been with me yet, baby.”

I’d texted Sibby with our this-is-a-bad-date signal and three minutes later, she’d called to pretend she had an emergency that I absolutely had to leave to help her with.

I never saw him again.