That night she dreamed the master bedroom was papered again in that black-and-gold wallpaper. Every bit of the part she had scraped off had grown back. Horrified, she desperately lunged at one wall with a scraper; it regrew the minute she’d cleared a teeny patch.

She ran downstairs in a panic only to discover all of the walls were covered in it. Outside, Mac’s face was pressed to the window; his mouth was moving but she couldn’t hear his words, though she thought she detected the word “honey.”

She turned around to see Corbin sitting on the giant brown sofa, completely nude and wanking off. “Nobody else has wallpaper like that,” he said happily and smugly. “Nobody!”

She was so horrified she woke up gasping.

Chick Pea gave a little woof.

Sweet Jesus!

She felt a little cheated. She’d had a hot kiss yesterday! You’d think she could have at least used it for dream kindling!

Maybe that’s what her subconscious was doing.

She’d have to mull that one.

She snuggled with Chick Pea while she waited for full consciousness to settle in and provide a sort of emotional weather report.

The primary sensation was amazed, bursting joy, shot through with trepidation, all tied up in a bittersweet ribbon. Self-preservation suggested she shouldn’t kiss Mac Coltrane again.

And in the light of day, it somehow seemed entirely possible to resist him.

It would require not seeing him, of course. She knew that much. She admitted this to herself ironically.

She draped an arm across her fuzzy dog who nuzzled her cheek. So much better than waking up next to Corbin, she realized.

She fumbled for her phone: it was only eight. There were no urgent texts or emails from GradYouAte. There was a request for an interview from a trade blog, but it had a wide-open deadline; she could put that off.

In truth, she felt both determined and a little more fragile today than she did yesterday. As if in exposing a little of the darkness and hurt Mac carried around with him he had somehow exposed her, too. They were a little more real to each other now. But also a little more like two live, increasingly bare wires. And everyone knows what happens when live bare wires touch each other.

Today she intended to finish at least one damn wall of that wallpaper.

It was all she did. Methodically, meditatively. Without swearing very much. Her goal was to wear herself out, but she was still a little buzzy from nerves, contemplation, and lingering lust, so exhaustion didn’t quite set in the way she’d hoped.

At about three o’clock she finally stopped, took a shower, threw on a green striped T-shirt dress that Eden had donated, eschewing a bra because why subject herself to a lace-and-wire prison, and checked on the frozen lasagna she’d put in the oven a while ago.

She pivoted and glanced at the stove clock. Maybe she should try to make a sal—

BING BONG zzzt clank!

She about jumped out of her skin and even Chick Pea gave a little woof.

That effing doorbell. Funny how back in San Francisco she would barely blink at the sound of two drunks screaming at each other about existentialism in the street, which had in fact happened about a month ago beneath her apartment window. But the quiet here in the country was so complete all of her senses were as new as a wall scraped free of wallpaper. A phenomenon she truly hoped to experience one day.

She craned her head.

She saw the shadow at the door. And knew instantly who it was.

Boom. Boom. Boom. That was her heart.

She smoothed her hands down the front of the dress.

She opened the door.

Mac was wearing jeans and an untucked green plaid flannel shirt, which did remarkable otherworldly things to his hazel eyes. His skin gleamed from what looked like a fresh shave.

“Wow. Smells great in there,” he said. She liked his nontraditional greetings.

“It’s lasagna.”

“From scratch?”

“From Costco. Though someone really ought to name a retail chain ‘Scratch.’”

He smiled at that. And then the smile dropped away. “I . . . I brought hummus.” He gestured with a little Tupperware container.

“Ah, ‘I brought hummus.’ That’s Hipster for ‘I come in peace.’”

For some reason the words I come throbbed in the air like some sort of Sesame Street graphic and they were momentarily flustered.

A sort of fuzzy heat rushed over the backs of her arms and neck.

“Did you grow the garbanzo beans yourself in gourmet poop?” she recovered.

“Next year, I think I’ll give that a shot,” he said equably. “I’ll probably give making olive oil a shot, too. There are about a half dozen olive trees on my property and room for more. I have room for a little vineyard, too. So I think I might give wine a shot.”

He stopped talking and frowned a little, perhaps realizing that he was saying “shot” rather a lot.

“Anyway, my hummus secret is I add a few white beans in with the garbanzos. Gives it a mellower flavor. Goes a little better with crackers that have a little bite to them, like chili or garlic or za’atar. I have a few of those right . . .” He produced a little package from behind his back. “. . . here.”

She contemplated these offerings. “You actually have ‘culinary secrets’?”

“Most of them are children of necessity. As in once all I had was white beans when I was really jonesing for hummus.”

“And here I thought you weren’t into children of any kind.”

“Ha. Listen to how we banter.”

And just like that it went dead quiet and awkward.

He cleared his throat. “Avalon . . . I wanted to apologize for last night.”

“Which part of last night?”

He sighed. “You’re not going to make this easy, are you?”

She smiled crookedly. “That’s a rhetorical question, right?”

“I got caught up in the moment. I mean, that green polyester bathing suit with the little frill on it . . . you siren.”

She gave a short laugh. “Come on, Mac. It’s not like I fainted or swatted you away. You made a pass, I kissed you back. We’ve done that before. Together and separately. Not my first time.”

“Boy, could I tell.”

This statement made her realize that few people were ever this genuinely direct. It belonged in the category of things that required getting used to, like ouzo or sauerkraut, but were ultimately addictive.

“And then you dashed off all flustered,” he added.

“I wasn’t flustered,” she lied, smoothly. Sounding flustered.

There was a beat of silence.

“I was,” he said simply.

Her heart lurched painfully. Like it wanted to get to him but she’d staked it to the damn ground or something, like a savage guard dog.

Don’t do it don’t do it don’t do it, said the infinitely wise and all-too-familiar little voice in her head, the one that usually preceded her doing things she shouldn’t do.

“Um . . . why don’t you come in. You can put the hummus right here on the . . . coffee table. Which is the box thing near the couch. I have to go pull the aforementioned lasagna out of the oven.”

She walked away from the open door and left him to follow her inside.

She slid the oven mitts on and laid the pan on the counter to cool. She stayed there for about a minute, standing over the bubbling lasagna, which despite its resemblance to lava wasn’t nearly as hot or dangerous or tempting as Mac Coltrane. She contemplated keeping the oven mitts on. It would be awfully hard to get his zipper down if she was wearing oven mitts.

“Where on earth did you find this couch, anyway?” he called. “What is it, like twelve feet long?”

“Pretty close to that. It’s from my family’s rec room.”

“It’s like a freaking barge!”

He sounded delighted.

She smiled to herself. She plucked one of the dishes her mom had donated out of the cupboard—there were roosters on it.

She turned around, squared her shoulders, then returned and sat down next to him on the absurdly long sofa, at a chaste three feet or so away from him, like they were a pair of courting Amish. She even put her knees together, as if she was afraid they would fly right open like a trap door.

Behind them, Chick Pea clicked over the floor, hopped up and settled into the chair across from them and gazed at them brightly and expectantly, as if she were a couples counselor and they’d come in for a session.

He leaned over and shook the crackers out onto the rooster plate and opened the hummus up.

Even over the lasagna smell, Mac smelled faintly like soap.

Which meant he’d showered before he’d come over.

Funny. It was regular old bar soap, if she had to guess, but one whiff and she was picturing him naked in the shower. Her head swam.

“I like the music volume,” Mac said, finally.

“What a very specific thing to compliment.”

She realized she was still wearing the oven mitts. She pulled them off one by one and laid them carefully on the table, like a cowboy disarming before a peace summit.

The oven mitts each sported a rooster.

She would never understand why roosters were such a popular kitchen motif.

“In light of the Melissa Manchester misadventure, I thought I should affirm your choice.”

“Affirm?”

“I pick up words here and there,” he said, loftily, teasingly.

She smiled. Another little silence fell.

“I have wine,” she said suddenly and dubiously, “but I think my mom may have bought it to cook with, so accept it at your own risk.”

“I can guarantee I’ve had worse. I’ll take my chances.”

She sprang up again and fetched the wine from the fridge door, uncorked it and poured about a half inch into two juice glasses that sported Yogi and Boo-Boo, faded by a few hundred go-rounds in the dishwasher. So classy.

She turned around and discovered she was in the beam of his gaze. He’d been watching her that whole time.

He took a sip of the wine and his eyes got wide. He blinked a few times and then swallowed. “Salud,” he said wryly, bolted the rest, and winced.

Something had been bothering her a little. “Mac? Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah?”

“Right after you helped me down from the attic, you said something like . . . ‘better put this in the be careful what you wish for category.’”

“Yeah?”

“What did you wish for?”

“Oh,” he said easily. “I wished to know what it was like to have your legs wrapped around me.”

It was as if she’d just bolted whiskey distilled from Lust.

She would not have trusted herself to stand just then. She would have wobbled like a dreidel.

She cleared her throat.

She gestured to his Yogi Bear glass. “Ah. Can I get you another glass of—”

He leaned over and kissed her.

It was as unhurried yet as deliberate as if she’d just asked him to pass the hummus. And she supposed she’d had time to dodge if she wanted to. His mouth landed unerringly on hers, warm and soft, then warm and firm and a little more demanding. He delicately teased the ever-so-slightly parted seam of her lips with his tongue in a way that relit little fuses all over her body. Ones she never even suspected had gone out. Others she never even suspected she’d possessed. And in seconds it seemed her core temperature had ramped to about a thousand degrees and her bones were well on their way to melting.

It was over in a few seconds.

She opened her eyes a few seconds after that.

Surprised to realize she’d closed them.

Interesting. She was pretty positive the room hadn’t been turning around in circles before she’d closed them.

Last night’s kiss was child’s play compared to what had just happened.

Mac sat back, as if to admire his handiwork.

But not all the way back.

She could feel his breath on her chin. She was hypnotized by the rise and fall of his chest.

They stared at each other, and he looked just as hazy-eyed and astounded as she felt.

“I had to,” he explained, sounding genuinely befuddled. “It’s just . . . you were just . . . and your eyes were . . . and I just . . .”

He kissed her again.

And when he did, her hand rose to guide his face in, and her arm looped around the back of his warm neck and the low moan that had been building escaped. She shifted to fit right up against and underneath him as he levered over her, as synchronized as if they were on Dancing with the Stars.

Then again, she supposed she had practiced that move or something like it before, quite a bit: in her mind, with her pillow, in the dark, when she was a teenager.

It was almost funny how take-charge and matter-of-fact he was. His competence and confidence were erotic as all get-out and were somehow so convincing she couldn’t come up with a single reason not to reach for Mac Coltrane’s zipper while he was sliding his tongue down her neck . . . right down to the little tender place where it joined her shoulders . . . where he nipped so, so softly. Little bolts of lightning shot through her veins, lit her up with pleasure.

He kept one hand cradled around the back of her head and the other slipped beneath her dress and he quite sneakily and deftly hooked a few fingers in the waistband of her underwear. And as smoothly and subtly as he might have slipped a maître d’ a fifty for the best table in a fancy restaurant, he slid them all the way down her thighs and calves. She gave her feet a little flick to shed them completely.

It was starting to feel a bit like the equivalent of jumping Whiskey Creek on her bike, or off Devil’s Leap for the first time. But she was already midair and everyone knew there was no turning back once you got that far.

And as his hand slid casually around to her bare hip and rested there—no doubt he had interesting plans for it and that was just the starting gate—there were still layers and layers of pleasure to be had from this kiss, and dear God the way he kissed—sensual, carnal, with a tenderness underlying the hunger so unexpected, and yet so exactly how she remembered him . . . it about did her in. And then his hand was skimming up and up and up and she took her lips away from his as her head went back hard and her breath hissed in when his fingers slipped between her legs and slid against her, hard. He did it again.

“Mac . . . I want . . .”

And with more of that seamless dexterity he maneuvered her pretty quickly onto his lap. He was an engineer, after all.

He tugged at the top of her dress. Thank God for stretchy clothing.

The word that matched the expression on his face when he had her peeled was: “Hurrah!”

But what he said aloud was something like “Ungh,” and he closed his hands over her breasts as if he’d found the grail.

He cupped his hands beneath them and as he dragged his fingers she made a sound, some hybrid of sigh and whimper and filthy oath. It might as well have been the first time anyone had ever touched her there. Never had it been quite this electric.

And then it got even better when he closed his lips around her nipple and sucked lightly. She felt that everywhere, all at once, as if it had been a lightning strike. She felt nearly savage with a building want. His arms went around her to brace her as she arced helplessly into the sensation and then she took control.

She looped her arms around his neck and slid along the length of his cock, teasing, both herself and him. He arched his hips up to meet her and she slid just out of the way, but the friction was shredding her control. And finally he gave a short, breathless laugh, nearly a mad one, and took matters, and his cock, into his own hands: he held her fast, and guided himself in.

He looked up at her with wicked triumph: I’ve got you now.

He held on to her hips, and arched up into her, eager, begging, as she came down and rose up again. But she took her time about both. She set the pace. Steady, but slow. She wanted to savor his sawing breath, the taut cords of his neck. Her hair dropped down over her eyes, and she whipped it back. He was flushed now, his mouth a slit through which his breath came in hot short gusts, his eyes burning. She smiled down at him. Torturing both of them deliberately.

Somehow it made sense to do this in broad daylight, in front of the hummus and the dog, with her dress furled both up to her waist and down to her waist, her looking down at him looking up at her. His pupils like mirrored black dimes in which she could see herself riding him, slowly, rising and falling slower than his breath. He bucked up to meet her, urging her on; he swore and begged under his breath; he moaned as the release banked.

And their eyes met. And locked. There flashed across his face something raw and unguarded. Something close to awe, maybe yearning. She closed her eyes, because she was afraid he’d see something like that in her own, times a dozen.

She half suspected she was seeing her own reflection.

“Avalon . . . please . . . have mercy, for fuck’s sake.” His hands slid to her hips to brace her, to buck his hips, and she could have tormented him because something buried deep in the strata of her heart believed he deserved a little torment. But in truth her control was nearly gone, she wanted what he wanted and that was the explosive release she could feel hurtling toward her. Even now she could feel it preparing to yank her right out of her body.

“Oh God oh God yes . . .” He made it a breathless prayer and a Hosannah as their bodies collided, harder, and faster, and then the world began to get blurry around the edges as if she were about to be launched into space, and her skin was spangling and she heard her voice as if from light years away. “Mac . . . I’m . . . oh God, I’m . . .”

And then it was like a detonation.

She shattered into what felt like smithereens, all of those smithereens made of bliss. It whipped backward and shook her and shook her.

Seismic.

She might have keeled over if he hadn’t gripped her and drummed relentlessly toward his own release as she nearly toppled.

“Avalon . . . Christ . . .”

He went still and with a roar reminiscent of gladiators going at each other with spears, his eyes shut, his head falling back. His big body quaked and shuddered.

She collapsed against him and he held on to her as if they’d narrowly missed a building cave-in and were celebrating life. Lungs heaving. Bodies sheened in sweat where skin was visible. Heathens that they were, the only article of clothing on the ground was her underwear.

His hair was a shambles.

It had been only around fifteen minutes from the time he rang the doorbell.

She ought to get up now.

“Where’s Chick Pea?” he murmured suddenly.

“She must have gotten bored and left. If she’d had a remote she would have changed the channel.”

He gave a muffled laugh. He was still breathing warmly against her sternum. And then he placed a whimsical little kiss there, a chaste one, right over where her heart was still thudding hard.

She scanned the room.

Chick Pea was on her dog bed near the big window, ignoring them, having a bath and making snorkeling noises into her flank.

She slid from Mac’s lap.

This part was always a little awkward. The return of sanity, the reassembly of clothing.

With a series of tugs she got her dress more or less back to the way it was before she pulled the lasagna out of the oven.

“I’m going to . . .” He gestured toward the bathroom.

“Okay.” She glanced around on the floor.

“I think they wound up under the couch,” he suggested over his shoulder.

She found her undies and she headed down the hall in the opposite direction, toward another bathroom, tugging her dress down as she went. She caught a glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror: her mouth was kiss-swollen and her face was pink and her hair was every which way and there were faint mascara shadows under her eyes. She looked surprisingly luscious and ravished and disreputable. Even in San Francisco, she might have crossed the street if she’d seen herself walking toward her in the wee hours of the morning.

Either that, or high-five herself. Because there really was no question about what she’d just been up to.

“I’d even do me, the way I look now,” she said to the mirror.

Her expression regarded her, stunned. How in God’s name had she gotten so carried away? One moment she was sitting there all demure, and the next she’d gone full cowgirl.

Possibly it was a couple of decades overdue, and that was all. With this guy.

It was also possible all the stuff with Corbin had derailed her more than she realized. That maybe she ought to explore that avenue for an explanation.

Except that deep in the heart of her she wasn’t convinced that was true.

She’d better leave this bathroom before Mac decided she was going to disappear again on him for another decade or so.