“We should shower,” I finally say, with no small amount of reluctance. “And then we can go to bed.”

She stirs against me (I’m pretty sure she was nearly asleep or totally there) and her curls brush against my jaw in the most amazing way when she lifts her head to look at me. “You want me to stay the night?” she asks, like I just asked her to donate a kidney.

Bossy Sean rears his head. “You’re not driving home this late. It’s not safe.”

Cue eye roll.

It’s adorable, but I still playfully pinch her ass. “Hey, I’m serious. I don’t feel good sending you out this late when I’ve got a perfectly good bed right here. And I’m an excellent snuggler.”

“I drive home from the shelter this late all the time,” she informs me. “And I live in some pretty sketchy dorms. I can handle myself.”

I swallow down my first seven reactions to this. “Sorry. Did you say sketchy? As in unsafe?”

She sighs. “Please don’t be like my parents. It’s perfectly safe if you know what you’re doing.”

I swallow down my next seven reactions. “Are you moving after you take your novice vows? After the semester ends?”

She nods. “It’s why I wanted something cheap and small before. There’s no point in me wasting money on a huge place I’m just going to leave. Plus I feel like it’s good practice for living in the monastery, you know? Basic. Economical.”

I come to a spontaneous and insane decision. “Stay with me.”

“I guess class isn’t that early tomorrow—”

“Not just tonight. For the month.”

Zenny sits all the way up and faces me. “Pardon me?”

“Sleep here, study here, be here between the shelter and class.” The more I talk about it, the better it feels. The more obvious it seems. “Think about it—you were worried about scheduling and finding time to be together before, and you want to see all the things you’re going to miss—what’s bigger than getting to live with someone? Sharing their bed all the time, eating with them, showering with them, seeing them always?”

She blinks at me slowly, her lashes going down and then up, her expression unreadable. “That’s not…I mean, we don’t—”

“You’ve known me literally your entire life, Zenny. You can’t say we barely know each other, because it’s not true. You can’t say it’s too soon because we only have a month.” I take her hands in mine. “I want you here. Say you’ll do it. Say you’ll stay with me.”

Her lips part, as if to speak, and then they close. “I have to think about it,” she finally says.

“Are you tempted to say yes?” I ask, searching her face. “Do you want to?”

The sweet middle of her mouth wrinkles slightly as she holds back a smile. “I can’t deny that there’s a certain logic to it.”

“Fuck logic,” I say, because I am. Because it might make sense on paper, but even if it didn’t, I’d still be begging her to move in with me. Because I want her, and the wanting her is sharper and bigger than anything else.

Because the idea of her leaving me tonight sends something clawing through my chest, and the idea of her leaving me every time we fuck leaves me in nothing but tatters.

Zenny seems to come to a decision. “Tonight. You can have tonight.”

“And then?”

“I said you can have tonight, Sean. Then I’ll think about the rest.”

“Meanie.”

Her hand darts out, fast as a flash, and yanks a sizable chunk of my leg hair hard enough to make my eyes water. It’s a childish move, and I respond in kind, flipping her onto her back and tickling her until her own eyes leak tears and her cheeks must hurt from laughing so hard.

I’m hard again, because of course I am, because I’m tickling and grappling with a supple, happy virgin, and I don’t bother to hide my hardness from her as I lean down to kiss her. “Did you bring a change of clothes?” I ask. “You’re more than welcome to wear my things, you know.” And I have a vision of Zenny curled up on my couch in my sweatpants and my T-shirt…and then one of her wearing nothing but a single Charvet tie of mine…

“I did bring a bag,” she says, and she says it like she’s admitting something she doesn’t want to admit. “I wasn’t sure of the etiquette, and I wasn’t even sure you’d say yes to this whole thing, but I thought it’s better to be prepared, you know, just in case—”

I’m already dropping a kiss on her cheek and rolling off her to reach for my pants. “Is it in your car? Where are you parked?”

“In a visitor’s spot in the building garage,” she says, and I make a note to get her a parking pass for my building, along with her own set of keys. The happiness I feel at the idea of her having keys to my apartment is impossible to hide or handle with a cool expression, and I keep my head ducked down, so she can’t see the carousel of near-giddy smiles as I try to wrestle back the unfamiliar sensations.

“I’ll be back fast,” I say and make an escape, grabbing her keys and going down to the garage as quickly as possible. And once I get to her car, I brace my hands on the hood and force myself to take several deep breaths.

I’ve lost my mind.

I’ve lost my mind and I haven’t even fucked her yet.

I’ve lost my mind and I don’t even care.

I realize I’m smiling like an idiot at the dented hood of a 2005 Hyundai Accent and I try to stop, but I can’t. It’s like whatever mechanism controls my mouth has stopped interfacing completely with my brain. And it’s the same with my heart, which is hammering like I’ve just gotten done fucking, like I’ve just closed a huge deal, and all I’ve done is asked her to move in with me.

I’m not Mr. Brooding Romance like Tyler and I’m not Mr. Impulsive like Aiden, and the disconnect between the man I am with Zenny and the man I always thought I was is jarring. Jarring…and pleasant. One night in and I’m like a fucking convert to the Temple of Zenny.

But then there’s the moment I unlock her car to find her bag and see all the shit piled in her backseat.

Boxes and bags, all neatly labeled with colorful Sharpie. Baby clothes - Shelter, says one box. Pads/Tampons - Shelter. Used Paperbacks - Shelter. New Bras - Shelter. There’s a bag of brand new stuffed animals from a local toy shop, the donation receipt tucked neatly inside. A bag of deodorant sticks and shampoo, also with a donation receipt inside. I must have known, vaguely, that shelters like Zenny’s ran on these kinds of donations as much as they did monetary ones, but seeing this backseat full of what must have been hours of picking up and dropping off and phone calls and emails and glad-handing, I see the scale of Zenny’s dedication to helping people in need. It’s one thing to write a check here and there, but I know the shelter’s budget from this whole Keegan fiasco, and I know they’re operating on less than a shoestring.

There’s twenty sticks of deodorant back there. How long does that last at a shelter like Zenny’s? A few days? A week? How long does a box of infant formula last? Or giant box of toothpaste? The need is so huge, so vast and unending, and the shelter doesn’t have the money to keep up, and so they must go pleading to businesses and other charities on behalf of their needy. They have to beg for the beggars.

This…this work, this thoughtfulness. This kind of relentless holding back of a tide of need…

It takes faith. Faith of a magnitude that is hard for me to comprehend.

When I grab the backpack out of the front seat, my smile is gone. I’ve remembered what I already knew but had conveniently forgotten in the rose-smell of her skin and the soft pout of her mouth, which is that I’ll never be able to compete with her god. With her mission and vocation.

I’m losing my mind over her, but for Zenny, I’m merely a stop on the road to sainthood.

* * *

I’m quiet when I get upstairs, but Zenny is quiet too, giving me a small smile as she takes her backpack and disappears into the bathroom, shutting the door firmly behind her. After a few minutes, the shower starts running.

I spend a long moment with my fingers playing over the handle, my skin thrumming with the ache to be in the shower with her. I want her slippery skin, I want her eyelashes threaded with water droplets, and her body loose and warm against mine as I lick water from her lips and her collarbone and her neck…

But I also feel strange about the evidence of her indelible goodness in the car, strange because it makes me feel bad and selfish and clumsy, because it makes me worry that I was right all along and I’m dangerous for her, that I’m polluting her. And strange because I like her beyond all reason and she is the first woman to spin me up like this—and also the one woman I can’t keep.

I also distantly recognize that she might need some space. We didn’t fuck tonight, but we moved through a lot of firsts, not to mention candidly discussing things usually left unsaid. And I did manage to convince her to stay the night, so if she needs to shower alone to get her head on straight, it would be boorish of me to intrude.

I drop my hand from the handle and go clean up the kitchen.

Thirty minutes later, I’m also showered and I come out of the bathroom in a towel, brushing my teeth. Zenny’s in a tank top and Winnie the Pooh sleep shorts and it looks like…like she’s unfolding a pillowcase?

I squint at her, willing the scene to come together in some kind of logic, because I’m like ninety-nine percent sure I’ve got pillowcases. I’m not Suzy Homemaker or anything, but I have accomplished “pillowcase” level of adult. And they’re really nice pillowcases too. I told my assistant to pick out something expensive, and he pretty much found the most expensive linens money can buy.

Oblivious to my presence, Zenny takes a pillow off the bed and gently wiggles it out of its pillowcase, replacing it with her own.

“What are you doing?” I ask through all the toothpaste, confused.

She turns to face me and looks down at the pillowcase in her hand. “It’s a pillowcase from home. It’s satin,” she adds, as if that explains everything.

“Well, mine are Egyptian cotton,” I say, using my toothbrush to gesture at the bed. “They’re imported from Paris.”

“Yes, but your Parisian pillowcases won’t work for me.” With a few deft shakes, she has the pillow neatly inside her satin case.

I squint at her again, very confused, and decide this is too complex to be a toothbrushing conversation. I go to spit, rinse and dry off my face, and then I come back out. “Should I buy new pillowcases?” I ask. “Did I buy bad ones?”

I get the sense that I’m missing something when she holds her pillow in front of her mouth to hide her smile. “No, I’m sure they’re very nice pillowcases. But they’ll dry out my hair.”

Dry out her hair?

A slow-dawning horror washes over me. “Do they dry out my hair?” I try to surreptitiously catch my reflection in the decorative mirror behind her, wondering if my hair has been slowly drying out over the last year and everyone has been secretly judging me for it.

My vanity has Zenny outright giggling now. I walk up to her, still wearing nothing but a towel, and a low growl builds in my chest when her eyes rove all over my bared, still-wet chest and her smile grows shyer and also hungrier, in that Zenny way. I want to crush her to my chest and kiss that contradictory smile until we’re both dizzy and panting.

“It’s my hair,” Zenny finally says, but she can’t drag her eyes up from my abs. “Black girl hair. The satin keeps it from getting too dry or frizzy while I sleep. My guess is that all this noise is fine with the pillowcases you have.”

All this noise means my hair, which she says as she runs her fingertips through the wet strands, tousling them over my forehead. Her pupils dilate as she watches drops of water roll over my cheekbones and down to drip off the line of my jaw.

My stirring cock is threatening to nudge off the towel currently tucked low around my hips, and I take a step closer to her, close enough that I could lean in and kiss her.

“But satin is better for wrinkles, for everybody, so really everyone should have a satin pillowcase,” she says. “Or a silk one, but silk is more expensive. Although I guess you wouldn’t mind that.” I get the feeling that she’s reaching for something to say right now, that she’s very close to babbling nervously, which is very unlike Zenny.

Which means she probably is nervous.

Fuck.

This is so goddamn hard to figure out. Normally I wouldn’t care if the woman about to climb into my bed was nervous—for one thing, I never have a woman crawling in my bed to stay the night, because my hospitality extends only to a shower and a car service home. (A gentleman always pays for the ride home—remember that, ladies.)

For another thing, if I get the slightest wave of apprehension off a woman, it’s game off, right away. I’m not interested in coaxing a reluctant woman to bed, for a host of ethical and I-don’t-want-the-emotional-aftermath reasons. And I’m not interested in being with a woman who’s only pretending to have a good time.

I can do all that because I don’t normally care about the women coming in and out of my bed; I can find a new one who’s enthusiastically consenting before we even finish our appetizers. But I do care about Zenny, which means I care about whatever is upsetting her, and I’m going to make it better.

Trusting that she’ll call me an asshole if I push her too hard, I scoop her up and toss her gently onto the bed, crawling in after her once I drop my towel. Her eyes are glued to the erection swinging heavy and dark between my legs, and I take my time reaching for the light switch and turning it off. Then I gather her to my chest and simply hold her, ignoring the throbbing bar of heat pressed against her warm thigh.

At first, she’s tense. Rigid and holding herself still, breathing carefully, like her tent is being circled by a bad-tempered grizzly ready to maul her for her empty potato chip bag.

But slowly, slowly, as the dark settles into a hazy golden glimmer of city lights through the window, she relaxes against me. Her breathing goes even and easy, and her hands tentatively find places against my shoulder and chest.

“Everything okay?” I ask quietly.

“Yes,” she answers. It doesn’t feel like the entire answer, though.

“Honest girl thing?”

“Honest girl thing.”

I stroke her arm, long sweeping strokes just so I can feel her skin again. “You’re not going to scare me off, Zenny-bug. I’m not going anywhere.” Ever is the next word I want to say.

I don’t say it.

“I guess—” She clears her throat, plucks at the sheet. “I thought you were going to have sex with me tonight. Like we’d climb into bed, and that would be it. And I was ready for it, but I suddenly felt so stupid and immature. As if you’d want to fuck me in my Winnie the Pooh pajamas, and maybe you’d even changed your mind after we’d done all that tonight, maybe I’d done something wrong or I tasted bad or I should have—”

I silence her with a kiss. A long one.

“I’ll prove you don’t taste bad right now,” I murmur against her lips. “I’ll spend the entire night with my mouth on your cunt.”

“But—”

“Do you honestly think there’s anything you can do to make me not desperate to fuck you? I practically came as you told me about your teddy bear friend. I’m dying to fuck you in your little college-girl pajamas, I want to fuck you in your dorm room, I want you clumsy and new and inexperienced. I want you as you are, Zenny, and one of the things you are is young. I’m going to hell for it, but that’s the way it is.”

“Oh,” is all she says. But I think it’s a good oh because she’s currently rubbing her pussy against my thigh like a needy cat. I don’t even think she knows she’s doing it.

I’m not going to survive this, I think. It’s Night One, and I’m already about to have a heart attack from how fucking sexy she is.

I continue. “We’re waiting to fuck because you’re mine—”

“But only for a month—”

I growl at her words, and she shushes…and then rubs herself against me harder.

“Because you’re mine,” I repeat firmly. “And because you’re mine, I want to take my time with you.”

“That’s what you would do if this were real?”

If this were real…already I’m hating every single reminder of what this is. Project Doubt. A stop on the road to thoroughly interrogated sacrifice. “Isn’t it still real?” I ask, and I hope with everything I am that she doesn’t hear the vulnerability in my voice.

Her hand finds mine in the dark. “It’s real enough.”

“Then you’re mine, Zenny-bug. And we’ll do as I say.”

“Okay,” she whispers. “I trust you.”

And I decide that’s wholly enough talking for now. I disappear under the sheets and take care of the part of her she’d been so cutely rubbing against my leg, and afterwards, I hold her until she falls asleep, a newfound contentment staggering around on coltish, weak legs inside my chest until I too fall off into slumber.