“Pike’s Landing.” The low whistle I give bounces around the lobby. “It’s exactly as fancy I imagined.”

“It really isn’t. It’s just new.” He puts his hand on the small of my back as we get in the elevator, steadying me. I’m sober, but I’ve been tripping nonstop tonight, ever since our walk from the field. The road wound through about a quarter-mile of farmland before our phones could catch a signal for another ride-share.

It was so clichéd to think I was “drunk on him,” but it really did feel that way: his hands were all over me, his mouth finding new places to kiss and make me sigh, without fail. We were immersed in each other, and didn’t care that our feet were killing us, or that we both had work in the morning.

“I finally got Melanie Thatcher in the barn,” he shouted at one point, aiming his face right at the sky. The noise sounded like it went on forever. I knew it wouldn’t, just like I knew tonight would eventually end. But in that moment, it felt like it could.

“You,” I laughed, “are ridiculous.”

“Come on. You can’t tell me that stuff doesn’t flatter you, at least a little. Knowing you were basically all I thought about, all through middle and high school.”

“Not all you thought about.”

He put his hands in his pockets and kicked a soda can ahead of us, towards the stop sign where we were supposed to wait for the car. “Yeah, actually. Other than schoolwork and video games.”

We reached the sign. All of our town’s farmland—what was left of it, at least, from Civil-War era—was uphill, on this strange slope that overlooked the city, buzzing and postcard-sized below. It granted the fields prime sunlight, even though no one grew anything here, now. Nothing but cows, horses, and empty lots where kids came to party.

“What about other girls, though?” I asked. It was Blake’s fault he didn’t tell me about his feelings sooner, no question, but I would have felt immense guilt if I was the reason he never approached anyone in school.

“I got crushes, I guess. Like Avery German.”

“Oh, God.” My outburst was involuntary, but the snorting laugh that followed was far worse.

“What was wrong with Avery?”

“Nothing, nothing.” I took a breath and fixed my face. “She was…nice.” Avery German was a bookish girl, one year behind us in high school. They were partners in AP Bio, a class Blake had no business taking; he was terrible at science. Avery found it charming.

She asked him to prom during a tutoring session. Since I was back with Felix by then—strictly for prom’s sake, a mutual arrangement—I invited them to join our limo group. Big mistake.

“It wasn’t the entire ride,” he protested, preemptively. This was a story we’d told and retold—and disagreed upon—many times in the weeks that followed.

“It was. An entire limo ride,” I emphasized, “of Avery freaking German, talking about nothing but koalas and their chlamydia epidemic.”

“Her dad was a zoologist.”

“So?” I picked up a piece of gravel and threw it at the sign. It shuddered on its pole. “Look, she was nice and all. Just painfully awkward.” I elbowed him. “Who else did you like? It can’t be just me and Avery.”

He kneaded the bridge of his nose. This usually meant I was annoying him, or asking him things he didn’t want to answer.

“I ‘liked’ a lot of girls.” The rock he found and threw was much bigger than mine; the clang of the sign belted down the hill like an avalanche. In the silence, he looked at me. “But I only loved you.”

“Hey,” he says now, nudging the center of my back again. I blink. We’re at the fourth floor. “This is our stop.”

As soon as we’re in his apartment, the drunk-on-him feeling fills me again. I kiss him, tongue stumbling into his mouth like my feet across the hardwood.

“Whoa,” he laughs. “Hang on a sec.” He kicks the door shut, adjusts a dimmer switch by the door, and helps me out of his coat. “Thought you wanted romance.”

“I did.” I grab his belt buckle and pull him back to me, undoing it without breaking eye contact. “Now I want the rest of it.”

He laughs again, muting it in his throat. “I knew you couldn’t resist it. Nobody can.”

My arms tighten against my sides as he undoes my dress. It’s shimmery and pink, the kind that leaves glitter everywhere. I watch flecks of it fall, catching the recessed lighting overhead on its way down.

“Nobody?” I ask. Blake, as always, understands what I’m really asking.

“It was a joke, Mellie.”

“Oh.”

He runs his hand down his face. I see some glitter get caught in his stubble. “Okay,” he says, “yes. I’ve had other girls up here. I’ve had sex with them, just like I’m sure you’ve had sex with other guys. Right? We can’t pretend the last three years were some chaste ‘I’ll wait for you’ deal.”

“I know that.” Idly, I finish undoing his belt. “I just want to make sure I’m not…just some number on a list, I guess.”

He grabs my chin in his hand and angles my face to his. I remember him doing it in the car yesterday: first hard, then softly. Right now, it falls in the middle.

“You,” he whispers, voice low, “are not a number.”

My smile is weak, but there. I feel better, even though I’ve now got a hundred more questions: how many were there, between our first times and now? Did he say anything to them like what he said to me, in the planetarium? How many girls have stood in this exact spot before me and stared into those iced blue eyes, entrusting him with all they had?

You can’t be upset, I scold myself. He’s right: I’ve been with plenty of guys since then, too. Those three years apart could destroy this, if we let them. And I’m not sure what “this” is, right now; I have no idea what we have, or what it might turn into, but I won’t let it crash and burn before we can even find out. Not again.

My dress slips down my skin and pools on the floor. My bra and panties follow quickly, while I unbutton his shirt and toss it down. His phone rings, but he kicks off his pants and ignores it, adding it to the trail of breadcrumbs we’ve left from the front door to the bedroom.

There’s a dimmer switch in here, too, but he shuts it off after he lights a group of candles on the bureau. In the dancing light, we look at each other. I fight my instinct to cover myself, wondering how my extra ten pounds look to him, or if he even notices.

“As beautiful as I remember,” he smiles. I relax.

“You,” I say, as he leads me to his bed, “look very different, I’ve got to say. Not that I couldn’t tell that, already.”

“Weights and patience.” His mouth flinches to a smile as he kisses me. He’s so sweet and slow, his hands barely touching me, that I wonder if all his promises in the planetarium were just talk.

Until I reach for his boxers, when he grabs my wrist and squeezes.

“Go lie down and put your arms over your head for me. I’ll be right back.”

My stomach flips. I actually feel giddy as I climb into his bed and position my arms the way he instructed. While my head somersaults with the echo of his promises, I look around.

His room is exactly how I pictured it: modern and masculine. It’s also a lot like the one at his dad’s house: perfectly clean and organized. The bed is made, but I realize the comforter was already turned down. Did he do that without me noticing? Or did he plan on bringing me back here all along? Knowing what I do about the new, confident side of Blake, I’m willing to bet it’s the latter.

When he comes back, the sight of the rope in his hands gives me that same feeling I had in the car, when he pinned me to the seat and kissed me—fear, but the best kind possible. The kind that hits you like a wave, and you know it could either drown you…or take you higher than you’ve ever been.

He straddles me. His form is so solid and looming, it’s all I can focus on while he loops the rope through the headboard slats.

“There,” he says, tightening it one last time. It’s a laundry line, simple and soft, but the pressure of it on my wrists sends a shower of sparks through me. “Can you move?”

“No.” I prove it to him by straining against his expert knots. Not even a little give.

“Perfect.” Blake brushes his lips over mine and migrates, leaving a tingling trail from my mouth to navel. When he pauses, hovering over the place I need him to touch most, he says, “Don’t worry about keeping count. I’ll handle that.”

“Keeping count?” I’m so excited, I’ve forgotten that part—“How’s ten sound? You think you can handle that many?”—until he’s already started. I sigh his name and lose myself in the night, in him, all over again.

Every swipe of my tongue elicits a whimper from Mel. I push my fingers into her and flex them slowly, until she asks for more.

“Deeper,” she pants. “Harder, just...God, just—everything.”

I add a third finger and move them in hard circles, pushing into her until she can’t accept any more. My mouth never leaves her skin, relentless.

“Blake,” she squeaks. It’s different from Caitlin-Anne’s; I love it. “Oh, God, baby….”

Hearing her call me “baby” flips that switch in me. I’ve been holding back, trying to show her I can be the boy she remembered—but only enough to make her stick around and see the rest, the guy I am now. The one she turned me into. The one who would never have let her leave, that day.

I keep the pressure of my tongue the same, but work my hand even harder, everything on overdrive to get her there. In this moment, it’s all I want. I showed her I can do romance. Now, it’s time to show her what else I can do.

Within seconds, I feel her muscles clamp down around my fingers and start to quiver.

She gasps. Her hands strain against the rope as the orgasm rises and ebbs away. Instinctively, she tries to push me off; things are too sensitive.

I know she needs a break, so I pause. But I don’t stop.

“One,” I say, before getting right back to work.

Four. Five. Six. By the time we reach seven, I’m crying.

Tears stream down my temples and into my hair as Blake keeps up his pace. His tongue never stops, except to announce the new number.

He’s loving it. He has me reduced to this tense, shivering ball of nerves on his bed. He has all my control.

The weird thing is, right now, I don’t even want it back.

How much time has passed? A few minutes? Hours? It feels like days to me, just an endless session of pleasure that exists outside of time. It’s like being in the hayloft again, staring up at the spaces in between the stars. Lost in a vastness you can’t comprehend until you’re right there, stranded in the middle.

“Blake,” she rasps, after the ninth orgasm, “put it in.”

I laugh. “Wow. Now who’s romantic?”

She shakes her head. Somehow, I know exactly what it means: I’m lucky I can even talk. No time for romance.

It’s fine with me. I’m more than ready. Her sex is wet and swollen, impossibly tight as I reposition myself and ease inside. She strains against the ropes again, to no avail.

She’s not going anywhere.

“I knew you wanted this,” I tell her, as I start to thrust. “All that shit you gave me in the planetarium—I didn’t buy it for one second.” I sink into her as deeply as I can, savoring the hushed cry of my name she gives, and withdraw while I roll one of her nipples between my thumb and forefinger. When I repeat the sequence, I switch sides.

“You’re losing your voice, aren’t you?”

She doesn’t answer, just nods. The other women I’ve been with repeated everything like parrots; they knew the prompts, memorized the script. But Mel, as always, follows her own rules. It’s one the things about her that I loved, that I still love, but also frustrates me as much now as it did then. I never knew where we were headed, with Mel leading the way.

But things are different now. In here, I’m in charge.

My thrusts stop. I withdraw almost completely, towering over her.

Mel’s bottom lip trembles. “Blake, don’t stop!”

“Don’t stop…what? Fucking you stupid?”

She swallows hard. “Yes.” The tears on her face have smudged her makeup. It drives me crazy, just knowing I did it to her.

I press my mouth against hers. “Sound byte.”

For a second, she gives me another look I recognize: stubborn refusal, and this squint like I’m being an idiot.

“Please,” she says, practically rolling her eyes, “fuck me stupid.”

I kiss her gently this time, before I let my hips do exactly what they’ve wanted all along. In a bit of poetic justice, her eyes do roll, but to the back of her head.

I love what I’m doing to her. It’s a power play and a gift, all at once: I get the thrill of being in charge, overwhelming her to the point of hysteria. But I’m also offering her pleasure because....

Because you love her. I never stopped.

She stares at the ceiling with her mouth open as she comes one final time, speechless. Drowning.

“Hey,” I tell her, and she’s so lost, I have to grab her chin and make her look at me, like yesterday. I’m kinder this time, my anger from then dissolved in the whiskey and fake stars, the real ones and dirt roads and realizing, more than anything, just how much I missed her.

When she catches her breath, she locks her eyes with mine. The headboard creaks until her hands relax again.

“When I said ‘stupid,’” I whisper, “you didn’t have to take it so literally.”

The smile on her face, half hidden in the crook of her arm, is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in years.