There was a pause, a lingering in the mutual flattery that had been bordering on gratuitous since the night before.

“You really have changed since college.” He knitted his brow, appraising her.

“I have?” she asked, startled by his change in tone.

“College Alex would never tolerate such critical levels of sincerity from either of us.”

A small huff of laughter escaped her.

“Well, College Danial had a very high tolerance for sincerity, if I recall.” She leaned against the wall, crossing one leg in front of the other. “Didn’t he start a men’s-only feminist book club?”

“Joined. He joined a men’s-only feminist book club.”

“Where one of the books was She Comes First?”

He rolled his eyes, and the sight of it was so beautiful Alex felt she might faint.

“First of all, I wasn’t picking the books. Second of all, if you want to talk about critical levels of anything, I was at terminal levels of virginity when I joined that club. Reading a book about the female orgasm seemed like the best possible use of my limited free time.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You can’t be serious.”

“About what?”

“About… being a virgin.” Her voice dropped at the end of her statement, only realizing mid-sentence how much she was revealing about her college perception of him.

“Alex,” he deadpanned, “come on. I was an enormous nerd. I didn’t even round third base until senior year.”

Instinctively, she did the mental math, confirming that Daphne was his first real sexual experience. Though it was slightly pathetic a full decade later, she still flushed with a bit of jealousy.

“I never would have guessed,” she answered. “You always seemed so cool to me.”

He observed her for a moment, the corner of his mouth flicking into a doubtful grin.

“You were the one who went out with Paul on Friday nights and had grown men sending you bottles of champagne. I can guarantee your sex life was far more interesting than mine.”

She briefly weighed the pros and cons of being honest: confessing that she’d never slept with those men, that there was an entire two-year period where she couldn’t even conceive of a sexual act that didn’t involve him. But instead, she decided to return them to the present, to enjoy what they had now.

“So?” She smiled, feeling her legs grow heavy beneath her. “Did you learn anything useful from that book?”

His body language immediately responded to the playfulness of her words, extending an arm against the stone wall behind her to prop himself up. “I think you’ll have to be the judge of that.”