It’s not like I set out to stay a virgin. It became a habit I didn’t know how to break, like smoking. Or chewing my nails. When Simon and I first got the apartment, I was too beat up for a few months, and then we were too busy trying to just keep a roof over our heads and food in our mouths to even think about girls.

When Simon left, that’s when the drugs started. Most of a year gone to that shit until he came back on summer break, locked me in the apartment and cleaned me up.

The oranges thing had been his trick.

After that I felt like I had to concentrate on being clean. Being some version of a better me.

And after that…it was just…habit. Being a virgin. Being alone really. Habit coming up with excuses. Habit looking away when a girl looked too long. Habit finding some reason to leave a girl’s apartment earlier and earlier until I didn’t even go to the apartment. Instead, I went home and watched some shitty video of a girl being tied up and held down and made to come until she begged the guy to stop.

I mean…when I laid it out like that…this virginity thing was pretty fucked-up.

A million years ago Beth asked me in that art room if I’d been waiting for her, and it was a joke. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t then. And it wasn’t now.

I hadn’t been waiting for her, but I’d been waiting for something. Waiting to put something away. Us. That night. The person I’d thought I was.

At the truck stop about twenty minutes away from the cottage, I bought her a pair of sweatpants and I grabbed a box of condoms too.

Because I was done with this shit. I was done with living my life like I’d been poured into concrete.

I was done with the ghost of Beth. With the ghosts of both of us.

I was done being lost without her.

Tonight I’d end it all.

Because I couldn’t be the guy she wanted.

On the way back everything I wanted to do to her stacked up in my mind. Every fantasy I’d ever had put its hand up to be noticed. By the time I got back to the cottage, I was hard as stone.

I was so hard there was no doubt. No habit to fall back on.

It was me and her. And it was over tonight.

The door to the cottage opened without a sound. Jada was asleep in the bed, a small lump in the covers. The bell on Pest’s collar broke the silence as she pranced in, settling in her spot in front of the rug, and Beth sat up, hair rumpled around her face, still streaked with mascara.

She was and always would be the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

“Sweatpants,” I said, holding them up before putting them down across the back of the chair. And then I put the box on the bedside table—too hard, maybe, because it sounded like a smack in the quiet.

“Condoms,” she said and I nodded.

I waited, in part, for her to say no. To say forget it. We’d said some harsh things to each other.

“Only if you still want—”

“Of course I do,” she said, not sounding particularly happy about it. “It’s always a yes with us, isn’t it?”

I sat in the chair and pulled off my boots. Stood and pulled off my shirt. Her lips parted as she breathed, and I imagined I could smell her desire. I could feel it in the air between us. My hands went to the buttons of my jeans, and she pushed the blankets off herself and crawled to the edge of the bed.

“Let me,” she said, and I took the three steps toward her and she unbuttoned my jeans, her fingers warm against my stomach. Shocking, in a way. I put my hands against hers, flattening her palms against my belly. Her fingers to my skin.

“What did you do to your hands?” she asked, turning her hands to hold mine. I tried to pull away, so aware of the rough calluses and old scars, but she held on, turning my hands over so we were both looking at the damage.

“For years I worked without gloves. Fucked them up.”

“Why would you do that?”

I was silent because silence was where I felt safest. I didn’t know how to talk like she wanted me to.

The wolf howling at the moon T-shirt was glowing a little in the semidarkness, and it should have been funny. It was funny. I just couldn’t find the air to laugh. It was so big on her, the collar slipped down, revealing her neck, the scrapes from my beard. The place I’d sucked on her skin, leaving behind a red smudge of blood under the surface.

I had one of those on my neck too. We’d left our marks on each other.

“The scars,” I said, rubbing my thumbs over the silvery tails of some of them that could still be seen. He’d whipped my hands with something thin and vicious and the scars had not gone away so I had to do something.

“Covering up old scars with new ones?”

New pain for old pain seemed like a deal I just kept making.

She got up on her knees in front of me, her eyes on mine. She pulled the howling wolf up over her head, tossing it into the darkness at the edge of the lamplight.

I felt the warm, moist breath of her exhale against my shoulder, my neck, the corner of my face, and it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough.

“This is good-bye,” she breathed.

I felt myself rising to the surface. The kid I’d been. Her Tommy.

And that was terrifying. Impossible. So I put my hands in her hair, pulling it in my fists, until her head tipped back.

She gasped and I felt the foreignness of us. We were strangers like this.

And that’s what I needed.

I needed this to be over.

Tommy was hard against my belly and his hands in my hair were rough, his mouth on my neck made me wild and all of that was my favorite flavor. But this was good-bye.

Beth was saying good-bye to Tommy, and I couldn’t do it like this. I wanted this to take a long time and I wanted to look into his eyes and I wanted…a lot.

“Stop,” I breathed against his lips, and his hands let go of my hair like I’d pulled a switch. He shifted as if to step away, but I put my hands in the open fly of his jeans, holding him where he was.

“You don’t like that?” he asked, his eyes looking anywhere but at me.

“I do like it and you know it, but this is good-bye, Tommy.”

He was silent and I kissed him. Softly, sweetly. I licked at his lips and I breathed in the smell of his skin and I felt his body under my hands Long slow kisses that would last me for years. And it took him a second, but he got into it. His arms wrapped round my back, his hands against my spine, sliding slowly down to my ass, which he gripped with his rough palms.

I finished opening his jeans and shoved them down over his hips, pulling him back against me so I could feel the length of his dick on my skin, hot and hard. He hissed at the contact, and I pushed myself harder into him, stroking him with my skin.

He took about a minute of it before he stepped back and shucked his pants.

Whatever I’d imagined his body would be like, the reality was a thousand times more compelling. I brushed my hands over the thick muscles of his stomach and chest, and I imagined, all of a sudden, painting him. Not on a canvas, but with my airbrush. I imagined turning him into a Roman statue. Or a superhero. I could put a suit of armor over his naked skin and he would be beautiful.

A work of art.

It had been months since I’d thought of painting, since I’d been inspired, but Tommy in all his glory was suddenly lighting me up again.

He knocked my hand away like I was a distraction, and instead he cupped my breasts, slid his hands around my stomach, connected, with his finger, the freckles on my hip.

I got down from my knees, sitting on my ass on the bed, my legs around his, his cock, the flushed tip of it, just below my mouth. I looked up at him, just to see his face, just to see him watching me.

And he was, his ears practically on fire, and it was as hot and sweet and sexy as I always imagined it to be.

This is good-bye, I reminded myself, and I bent, licking his cock in one long sweep of my tongue. Again I did it and then slipped him inside my mouth. I just held him there for a moment, because I wanted both of us to remember this. How it felt with his cock in my mouth. Because this wouldn’t happen again.

But then he pushed his fingers into my hair, cupping my skull in his fingers, pulling my hair with his calluses. He arched into me and away, and we found a slow, steady rhythm that had him panting.

That had me drenched.

I was gasping around his cock, my fingers clawing into the skin of his hips. His ass.

He pulled back suddenly. I leaned forward as if to chase him down, but he pushed me back onto the bed. I was spread out before him, my hair half across the white sheets, half trapped under my body.

He pulled off my underwear, nearly ripping it, and I kicked it off the rest of the way. Tommy’s hand slid down between my legs and he stroked me with his thick fingers and soon we were both wet. So wet.

“I don’t…” He shook his head like he’d forgotten what he was going to say. “Not slow.”

“Okay,” I agreed and pulled him down over my body. His naked skin on my naked skin was a feeling like none other. Like velvet and heat and comfort with just a little pain. My lungs couldn’t pull in a full breath and my heart was beating too hard, but I opened my legs and cradled him with my body.

His cock, the incendiary heat of it, fell between my legs, into the wet of my pussy. We both gasped, and I arched my hips, rocking back and forth, fucking him a little without actually fucking him.

I slid forward and he groaned. I slid back and he groaned again. It was a slow grind against him, a tiny shift, and we were so ready, so hot for each other that it was enough.

“Get a condom,” I said, and he pulled back, grabbing the box at the bedside table. He tore off the top in one big piece of cardboard, and I smiled.

“Caveman,” I said.

“Stupid box,” he said. He pulled out the long silver strip of condoms, and I was relieved he’d gotten a box.

This good-bye of ours might take a few tries.

The silver packet was tiny in his massive hands, and he tore the corner with his teeth, pulling out the condom. With his hands shaking he started to put it on.

“That’s inside out,” I told him.

He looked up, blinking. I reached out, inverted the condom and slid it over him down to the base of his cock.

I was so fond of his bemused, blank face I could barely stand it. All the remainders of our affection, of our past, of my not ever, not even a little bit resolved feelings, they all appeared, and I imagined them like tentacles reaching around him, tying us together.

“Come here,” I said and scooted back on the bed. He came up over me, his knees pushing aside my knees, his hands braced beside my head. I slipped my legs up, over his thighs, urging him down to me, closer to me.

Into me.

But he stopped, held himself suspended, his face bent so I couldn’t see his eyes.

“Tommy?”

He grunted and eased into the cradle of my legs, not inside me, but closer. And he stilled again.

“Please, Tommy,” I breathed, arching into him, bathing him with my heat and wet and desire. He groaned and used his hand between us, notching himself against me, the head of his cock filling the entrance to my body. And again he stopped.

I reached up, lifting his head to face me, his eyes met mine, and whatever was happening, it was big. And I wondered, for one horrible, heart-stopping moment, if what nearly happened to me in that office had happened to him in that office.

“Do you want to stop?” I asked.

“God…no,” he said with a huffing, hasty laugh.

He leaned down and kissed me. He kissed me and kissed me, and all my thoughts scattered. All my fears vanished. His tongue in my mouth, mine in his. The rake of his teeth.

The beautiful perfect taste of him.

“I’m a virgin,” he said against my lips.

I stilled.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

A thousand questions. Literally a thousand. I pushed against his shoulders, a weak attempt to get distance so I could process what the fuck he’d just said, but in that moment, he slid, hot and heavy, inside of me and I was pinned on the bed.

I gasped, stuffed full of him. I remembered worrying in the art room that he would be too big. And he almost was. He was just this side of too big.

And he was a virgin?

He was smiling, and when he pulled out and thrust back in, he was laughing. Just once. A hard bark of disbelieving joy.

I stroked his face, loving him more in this moment, with him inside my body, with his truth ringing in my ears, than I’d ever dreamed possible. And while I watched, his face sobered like he knew what I was thinking, like he saw the feelings he’d broken free when he fucked me.

“It’s okay,” I said, wanting to tell him that my feelings were mine and not his. This was still good-bye. “Fuck me, Tommy.”

He grabbed my hands and held them above my head, and I arched against the tension. Tommy’s control was broken; I could see it hanging in tatters around him. Like chains he’d broken clear through.

“Do it,” I breathed.

And he pounded into me, filling me harder and fuller until I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move; I laid there and took it. I pushed against his hand, and when he didn’t let go, I said, “I want to come. Let me go or use your finger—”

He held my wrists with one hand and put his other hand between my legs, his fingers pushing down and against my clit, and I immediately fell apart, the orgasm tearing me to pieces.

“Again,” he said. “I want you to come again.”

I nodded, because I could. I would. And his thumb rode my clit and his cock rode me and his arms held me down and I came again and just as the wave rolled over me, he stopped. And he watched.

Good-bye, I thought. And fell apart.

And then he did the same, jerking into me and coming with a hoarse shout that sounded like surprise. But I wouldn’t know. Because I kept my eyes closed. Unable to watch.