The earth has moved. Everything has changed. It didn’t totally hit me until I’d finally come. Things usually came easily to me. Football was hard, but I’d always just done good at it. Winning the Super Bowl wasn’t easy, but I’d had a whole team to help me with that. This was the one thing on earth I’d ever had to work really, really hard for. And damned if the old saying isn’t totally right.

It’s probably the sweetest victory I’d ever had. I feel phenomenal, better than I have in months, even years.

“Well, what do you think?” I ask her, moments later, when she’s curled up against my chest.

She doesn’t say anything for the longest time. “About what?”

I knew her big ol’ brain was always turning over a million thoughts at once, but I thought for this second, this one would be at the front of it. “I don’t know. About what we just did?”

She swallows, curling tighter to me, so I can feel her phenomenal body. A body that, for the most part, she’d kept entirely hidden to me. I’d dreamed about that body, its soft curves, its pale skin, a million times, but none of those dreams could do it justice. “Can we not talk? I know it’s hard for you, but can we just not talk, for one minute?”

I feel the back of my neck prickle, the feeling I get at the very start of one of our rows. Don’t piss her off. Not now. Not after this. I squeeze my mouth shut, even though I want to know what’s in that head so bad. I manage about a minute, staring up at the ceiling before I let out an exasperated sigh. “And now?”

Her eyes flutter closed, because I feel the lashes against my chest. “Silas,” she warns, and her voice sounds muffled, strained.

Then I realize there’s another sensation on my chest beside the whisper-soft touch of her lashes. Wetness. I tilt my head to see down there, and sure enough, there are two wet tracks on her cheeks, shining in the moonlight slashing through the blinds. I tense. She wasn’t sure. This was a mistake. “Oh, fuck. Was it that bad?”

She sits up. “When will you realize that not everything is about sex?” she says, bitterness in her voice. She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand and settles down on the pillow. “And tears don’t always mean something is wrong. I’m crying because they’re so right.”

“Oh,” I say, relaxing, a slow smile spreading on my face. “So you’re not sore or anything?”

“Not at all. But . . . just out of curiosity, was it okay for you?” she asks timidly. “Like, in your experience, did it rate okay?”

I let out a laugh. Goddamn this girl could be so cute. I mimic, “Can we not talk?”

She sits up, takes the pillow, and holds it over me, pretending to be readying to smother me with it. Or maybe she really wants to. It’s a fine line with Genevieve.

“Fine, fine!” I say, holding up my hands in surrender. “It was definitely high on my list.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Top hundred, at least.”

She stares at me in horror. She thinks I’m serious. But am I ready to announce that she’s it? The top? I never felt this with anyone else. She could’ve laid there like a dead fish and I’d still have counted this day as the best of my life. And totally unexpected, too. One minute she was yelling at me for fucking things up, and the next she was all over me. I’d told her she owned me, that I belonged to her, and it’s true. But this is usually the time when the rug gets pulled out from under me.

“Relax, I’m kidding,” I say, reaching up and gripping her wrists. I easily wrestle her into submission and flip over onto her, pressing my body against her warm curves. It’s been twenty minutes since I came and my cock is already hardening for another go. And god, I want it. I want another round.

But I want something even more than that.

I drag my body down hers, kissing every inch of flesh I find, my tongue working in lazy circles as she squirms. When I get to her taut lower belly, she sits up on her elbows and tenses. There’s a look of alarm on her face. I splay a hand on her belly, pressing her down. “Just relax, baby.”

Her legs tense and she starts to press them together. “What are you . . .”

“For fuck’s sake, Genevieve. I want to make you feel good.”

“I already feel good,” she protests, as I start to pry her legs apart.

I rest my chin on the soft, curling hair of her pussy, and place a kiss there. She shudders. “Please. I want to taste you.”

She shakes her head, then pushes away, swinging her legs off the side of the bed and sitting up. “Does your shower work?”

Defeated, I roll over onto my elbow and look at her gorgeous, curved back, the bronze hair falling to the mattress in waves. “Yeah.”

“Can I take one?”

“It depends,” I say, ready to give her my demands.

She turns and gives me a look that says she doesn’t want to be fucked with.

I fall onto my back and sigh. “Yeah. Fine.”

She stands up, taking the sheet with her, wrapping it around her body so I don’t even get the thrill of seeing her naked body walking across the room. Does she realize I’ve seen it all, now? I have to shake my head at her shyness as she flips on the hall light and treads lightly toward the bathroom in her little Greek toga.

A minute later, I test the door. Dammit, she’s locked it. I knock.

She opens it a moment later, as the steam is rising from the top of the shower curtain. She’s piled her hair on her head and is still wearing that goddamn sheet. “Can I join you?”

She gnaws on her lip, then looks back at the shower, tightening the sheet around her waist. “Well . . .”

“What? What are you worried about?”

She points at my leg. “Your cast. You can’t get it wet, can you?”

Yeah. I’d forgotten about that fucking thing. I look down at it with annoyance, then hold up a finger. I grab the trash bag I’d brought in for this very purpose off the tank of the toilet bowl, step into it, and take masking tape and wrap it tight around my lower thigh, as she watches, her breaths coming slow and shallow, like a rabbit’s. When I’m done, I toss the tape in a corner. “There. Ready to go.”

But she just stares at it, at me, clutching her sheet tightly against her.

“Genevieve,” I say, reaching for the sheet. “Stop. You’re gorgeous.”

“But . . . all those women . . .”

I press my lips together. Of course, she’s thinking about that. “All those women together don’t equal half of what you are to me, you got that?” I say, taking hold of the sheet and ripping it off her, defiantly.

She gasps and tries to reach for it, but when I toss it into the hallway behind me and it’s clear she’s beaten, she crosses her arms. She steps back and looks at the shower.

“I will get you to sit on my face, Genevieve,” I challenge. “Before you leave this apartment. That’s a promise.”

She wrinkles her nose. “That’s gross.”

“Far from it,” I say, my eyes dragging down to her pussy. I lean over and touch it lightly, and she squirms. “I’ve been dreaming of tasting you forever.”

Her cheeks are red, partly from the steam and partly from embarrassment. “You don’t think it’s gross?”

“Hell, no,” I say surely.

I motion her forward. Closer. Closer. Then I kiss her, my tongue sliding between her lips softly, until she closes her eyes and lets out a little moan. “For once, turn off that big brain of yours. Don’t think. Feel.”

She nods at me. “Okay,” she says softly.

I pull aside the shower curtain and motion her in first. Steam is waft all around the cramped bathroom, casting everything in a hazy, dreamlike state. She steps in, and water immediately soaks her hair, darkening it brown. Water trickles over her curves, and her nipples go hard as rocks, and my cock twinges again for her.

She turns around as I wonder whether there’s room for me and my bum leg. I didn’t grow up in a palace. As a teen growing up, this tub was barely big enough for me. I had to bend to get my head wet. But I’m not going to let this moment—a moment with wet, slippery, naked Genevieve— go to waste, even if I end up out of the stream of warm water the whole time. She looks incredible, the water glistening on all her naked parts.

When I look back up at her face, her eyes are on my junk. She snaps her eyes back to mine, but not before I see a terrified expression cross her face.

“Hey. You scared of me?”

She shakes her head at first, but then hitches a shoulder. “No.”

There’s something she’s afraid of, though. I grab a soap and start to lather it up in my palms. I wonder if she can see through the lie I’d told her to get her into bed. So I repeat it, feeling only a little shitty, since mostly, what I feel now, is lust. “Like I said, I’m not going anywhere.”

She nods, as I begin to lather her skin. I wash her back thoroughly, taking care not to miss a single spot. “It doesn’t matter. I realized there’s no one else on this earth I’d rather have as my first than you.”

“Really?” I ask, whirling her around so I can get her front. “So you wouldn’t care if I went back to Pittsburgh?”

She squirms for me, as I run my soaped-up hands up and down her chest, and she’s clearly enjoying it from the groans she lets out. She throws her wet hair over her shoulder and gives me a sexy pout. “You don’t know what will happen, Silas.” She motions for the soap.

I hand it to her, feeling more guilt seep in. She knows. She knows I lied.

She starts to lather me up, her hands moving slickly over my body. When she reaches for my cock, it’s already rock hard again. “I thought I was going to graduate from UPenn, and move away from Bradys Bend, you know how that worked out. Things can get in the way.”

“Nothing’s going to get in the way of us, baby,” I tell her, taking a finger and pressing down the worry crease in the center of her forehead. “Feel right now. Don’t think.”

Her hands are moving harder, faster on me. I tilt my head back, savoring the feeling of her running her wet hands over my body. She stops lathering and frowns at me. “But I know how much football means to you.”

I stare at her. She’s fucking on to me. “Can we not talk about this?”

She shrugs. “I just can’t see you being happy, fixing cars all your life.”

She’s right. It’s a fate worse than hell. She knows me too well. “I’ll work all that out later. Right now, I just want to concentrate on you. And how I’m going to eat your pussy.”

She holds out a soapy hand. “Stop.”

“Stop what? I was willing to give everything up and live that life four years ago,” I say, my voice rising. “You gave me up first, Genevieve, because you were afraid. You were, remember?”

I know the second I see her upper lip curling to a snarl that I’ve gone too far. “And if I hadn’t made that choice, you’d be pumping gas with Charlie at the Sheetz,” she says, her eyes flashing with defiance. Curling her hand into a fist, she launches it at my chest. “Fuck you, Silas.”

Before she can entirely close off from me, I grab her shoulders. My hands slide down to her wrists, and I pin her against the wall, immobile. “Why are you so afraid of giving your whole self to me?”

She’s struggling against me, but not moving much. I kick her legs apart so she can’t knee me in the balls per her signature move, and her face turns rabid. I see fangs. “Get off me.”

I slam my mouth on hers, kissing her hard as the water rains down at us. She fights at first, but relents, at least for a moment, before trying to push away again. “Damn you,” she sneers at me, turning to rip open the shower curtain.

I wrap an arm around her waist before she can make her escape. Her skin’s slick, but I hold her there as she fights, pressing her against the shower wall. Bending my frame over her, I whisper in her ear, “Tell me you don’t love the way this feels. Together like this. Tell me you haven’t thought about it a million times since we were kids.”

As I expect, she can’t deny it, and surrenders to me at once. I spread kisses over her back, tossing her wet hair over her shoulder, my hands curved around her front, kneading her breasts, finding those hard nipples. She leans over, parting her legs, guiding my cock to her entrance. “Can we . . . do this, here?” she asks unsurely, looking over her shoulder at me. “Like this?”

“Condom,” I say.

She shakes her head. “Are you clean? If you’re clean, I’m on the pill.”

In answer, I thrust into her with no hesitation as she presses her palms against the shower wall. The steam from the shower swirls around us as I fuck her from behind, slow, steady, her body rocking back and forth to meet me.

“God, Silas,” she moans, and I don’t think I’d ever heard my name sound sweeter than when it came from her mouth, when she was lost in the throes of passion. “Please don’t stop.”

I don’t. I thrust into her, tightening my hands on her hips drawing her closer to me, smashing her onto my cock. She screams out her release, and I find it again only a second later, as our bodies continually meet in an explosion of heat and desire. My body pulsates and I growl as I unleash myself into her, breathing hard.

And god, I still want her, even more than ever. I’m not ready to give up this little lie just yet.