“Was it necessary, sending me up alone? I doubt Lucrezia patrols the hallways.”

“That’s not why, Maya.”

“What, then?”

“A chance for you to change your mind. Clear your head.”

“You’re assuming that I can’t think clearly when you’re around.”

“I can’t think clearly when you are around.” He breaks eye contact. “You’re way too fucking young to—”

“To consort with boys, to have sexual desires, to choose who to satisfy them with.” A still moment. “Conor?”

His frown is displeased.

“Can I tell you a secret?”

He nods once.

“You are so fucking boring.”

The line of his jaw softens. His exhaled huff could be laughter, too. “Thank you, Trouble.” He pushes away from the door, crossing the room to me. In the soft, warm light of the floor lamp, his hair is pitch black. Without the speckles of gray and fine lines around his eyes, this Conor could easily be a boy, ten years younger than I know him to be.

And he would still bitch about being too old for me.

“Do you do it on purpose?” he asks, standing squarely before me. We haven’t been this close since Edinburgh. I’ve taken off my T-shirt, and his head dips to look down at me, fingertips tracing the top elastic of my bikini bottoms, stopping right above my belly button.

Suddenly, violently, I am light-headed. “What?”

“The stuff you wear. You do it to drive me out of my mind, don’t you?”

I glance at myself. I didn’t have a chance to go shopping before this trip, or I’d have bought the flossiest piece of nylon-spandex blend on the discount rack, just to annoy the shit out of him. But the bikinis I already owned are style over skimpiness. Retro. Vintage high waist. Lots of polka dots. Jade calls them my hipster librarian swimsuits.

“You don’t even know how grateful you should be, Conor.”

“Is that so?”

“It’s not revealing at all—”

“It’s not about revealing, Maya.” His fingers dip down past the waist of my bottoms, and my breath catches. “It’s the way you take over the space around you. You remind me constantly, loudly, indecently, of all the little things that make you you. It’s impossible to escape, and it makes me very angry.”

His hand inches down, and I bite my lower lip. “I’m sorry for being myself.”

“You should be,” he says, but the last syllable becomes something groaned and choked and dragged out, and he’s touching me right between my legs. I’m wet, because…because of him. It’s not new. But maybe he didn’t know, and when the tips of his fingers first brush against me, his eyes flutter closed. “Fuck me, Maya.” He seems to sink back into himself for a heartbeat. All his muscles clench, as though knowing that I’m this ready triggered an earthquake inside him.

“That’s what happens every time I see you,” I say. My hand finds his thigh. “I hope you think about it from now on. Every single time we are together.” He’s hard. I can feel the heat of his erection between us. My palms travel upward to cup him, and—