My apartment is nothing but moonlight.

I open the door for Zenny, and after I lock back up, I don’t bother with the lights. I don’t bother with anything, actually, except coming up behind where she stands at the window and kissing along her neck. She smells, as always, faintly of roses, and her skin is so soft and delicious. I can’t stop kissing her neck, her shoulder, the secret hollow behind her ear. She sighs back into me, a sigh of contented desire this time, her hands reaching up and back to lace in my hair and keep my mouth against her neck. That small act alone has me hard beyond belief, throbbing with the need to fuck.

“Tonight?” she asks.

“Tonight,” I confirm, and scoop her easily into my arms, carrying her like a bride to my bedroom. She moves her arms around my neck, and it’s so good, so very good. She’s all I want, all I’ll ever want, and I almost don’t want to put her down when we reach my bed.

“Is this still what you want to do?” I ask her instead, still holding her tight. “Am I still the one you want to do it with?”

“Yes,” she says simply. “And yes.”

“Are you sure? I know you’ve said one part of sex doesn’t matter any more than the next part, and I know that’s technically true, but it just feels like this is different—”

“Sean,” she calmly interrupts. “If you don’t shut up and start taking my clothes off, I’m going to scream.”

And I pause, because even as she says it all bold and daring, I feel her shiver of nervous excitement, I see the shyness hiding in her eyes.

“Honest girl thing?” I check one last time. “Fun-nervous?”

“Honest girl thing,” she says clearly. “Fun-nervous. Please, for the actual, literal love of God, make love to me.”

I don’t bother to correct her adorable sex phrasing—I didn’t know people actually still said the words make love—and she’ll see soon enough that I’m not the kind of man to whom words like that apply. Instead I set her gently on the bed and crawl over her, moving in a slouching, slow prowl so that I can absorb every single detail, memorize every single part of this beautiful, trembling girl laid out in front of me.

Her parted lips and her hooded eyes. Her nose ring glinting in the dark and the shadows swirling like fog in the hollows of her collarbone and between her breasts. The gleaming skin of her legs and arms and the tempting swells of sweet, innocent curves underneath the flirtatious chiffon. And her high-heeled feet moving nervously against the bed and her hands twisting fretfully at the fabric of her skirt—both things at odds with the expression on her face, which is one of pure, aroused fascination.

Nervous and bravely wanting—even now, Zenny is a puzzle of feelings, quivering like a virgin sacrifice but looking at me like I’m her next meal. It’s endlessly enthralling, and I drink down every part of it. I’ve fucked an untold number of women, but this is something different, something much different, and it’s all to do with her. All to do with this strange cavity she’s carved out of my chest and left empty and keening.

I’d dreamt of this night since the gala—exactly how I would unwrap her body, in what gradual stages I’d uncover her nakedness and kiss and lick at her skin. Exactly how I would seduce her already willing body and introduce her to my own body and its needs. But before I can execute any of my careful plan, Zenny reaches up for my face and pulls me down for a long, lingering kiss, a deep one of shared breath and parted lips and silky tongues. Between us, my cock pulses like a living iron bar. I try to hold it up from her, which she notices.

“Be yourself. Don’t baby me,” she says against my mouth, and I remember all the times Elijah and I were trailed by a pigtailed Zenny, demanding the same thing. Don’t baby me. I’m the boy who once tied her shoelaces and helped her find her missing Barbies, and is it reprehensible or some kind of fucked-up destiny that I’m the one to initiate her into these things now that she’s grown?

“I’ve never fucked a virgin before,” I admit. I’m over her, braced up on my arms, and still tuxedoed, and the flowing skirt of her dress is everywhere, tangled around my dress shoes and half-rucked up around one of her thighs and spilling around our knees like a sea of tears.

“Really?” she asks. “Never?”

“Never,” I say, ducking my head to nip at her breasts through her dress. “You’re my first.”

“What would you do if I weren’t a virgin?” she asks curiously, her words studded with gasps as I bite teasingly at her. “Would you do anything different?”

“Some things.”

“Like what?”

I shift my weight to my knees and elbows so that I can find her hands with my own. “Well, first,” I say, leaving her breasts to kiss at her neck and jaw, “I’d pin your hands over your head, like this.” And I do as I’m narrating, stretching her arms over her head and keeping them locked there with one of my hands around her wrists.

“Oh,” she says underneath me, and she gives a shivery kind of wriggle. A happy wriggle.

“And then I’d reach under your dress and check your pussy, to see if you were wet for me.” And I do that too, finding the weightless hem of her dress and sliding my hand up her warm thigh, my thumb brushing across the bare, slick skin of her snatch. She lets out a low whimper, her legs falling completely open and her back arching the tiniest bit underneath me.

“No panties?” I ask in a growl, rising up to my knees and yanking her dress up to her waist to see for myself.

“No panties,” she agrees. And sure enough, that cunt I’m so obsessed with is naked and exposed, a velvet split between her legs. The revelation that she was bare all night like this, that I could have pulled up her skirt and tasted her whenever I wanted…

I groan at the very thought, leaning down to smell her.

“Sean!” she says, her voice embarrassed as I press my nose and lips to her cunt and breathe her in deep. Why she hasn’t accepted the terminal thing I have for her pussy yet, I don’t understand. I love everything about her cunt; I love to smell her and to taste her and even just to look at her, which is what I do now. I spread her legs, and in the moonlight, I stare at the welcoming, wet seam; I use my thumbs to part her folds and see the tight, pink place I’m about to fuck. And very suddenly, it’s not enough to be only looking at her, I need more, more, more, and I settle between her thighs for a long kiss on her pussy, and I stay there for several more kisses, enjoying the delicate scrape of her high heels along my back, the tangle of her skirt around my head, and her taste. Fuck, do I enjoy her taste. Sweet and intimate and all her.

“Sean,” she says again, but her tone has changed, and now she sounds like she’s been running, like she can’t quite remember how to breathe. “Sean, oh, oh God—”

I’ve added a finger now, and then another, and she’s unraveling into a sheer sensation, all twisting limbs and panting breaths and that delicious dress tangling everywhere around us, and then her first climax rolls through her like a storm, sending her tightening around my fingers and grinding against my face.

I love it.

I’m ready to do it again.

But then Zenny comes down from her peak and reaches for me, and I reluctantly come up from between her legs, torn between kissing her cunt to another climax or crawling into her arms. But it’s worth sacrificing the chance to give her another orgasm to have her hold me, to hold her again, to kiss her and let her lick her own taste off my mouth like some kind of curious kitten.

It also makes me nearly wild with need, and enduring her kissing me like this is something close to madness.

“You’re shaking,” she whispers, pulling away from our kiss to search my face. Her eyes are metallic, her mouth is wet. Jesus Christ.

And I am shaking. I’m shaking because I need to fuck, I’m shaking because the woman I need to fuck is a woman I’m feeling insane things for, I’m shaking because I’m going to fuck a woman I’m in love with for the first time in my life.

I’m shaking because—wait.

Wait.

Am I in love with Zenny?

The idea stuns me even as the truth of it thrums down to my bones, and it floods every part of me as we kiss again, as she wraps her legs around my waist and pulls me close. I love her. I love Zenobia Iverson, and maybe I have since the moment she knocked on my door, asking me to make her doubt. Since our first kiss, even. Or the night at the gala, when I met her as an adult and red silk kissed her skin in all the ways I couldn’t.

“Teach me now,” she breathes, oblivious to the earth-shattering awakening I’m having, oblivious to the real source of my trembling. “Do the thing where you teach me?”

I move my lips away from her mouth and kiss her ear. “Is that how you want to do this?”

“Yes,” she says. “It makes me feel…special. Safe.”

And how can I argue with that?

I yank at my bow tie as I rise up on my knees, unknotting it and shucking my jacket. I’m in the middle of unbuttoning my shirt when she gives a little whine.

“What is it, baby?”

She bites her lip and then says, “We’re going to have lots of sex, right?”

“Lots and lots.”

“Then save all the tenderly undressing parts for later. I want you to fuck me now.” She sounds a little grouchy, and I have to laugh.

“Such a demanding little virgin,” I murmur, leaning down to nip at her jaw. “I thought I was supposed to be the teacher here, hmm?”

“As long as you teach me fast,” she says huffily. And after I untie the dress’s halter at the back of her neck, I rise up to look down at her. Her skirt is a puddle of blue-green around her hips, her thighs are spread revealing a wet and kiss-swollen pussy. The bodice of her dress is now drooping off her chest, revealing her upthrust breasts with their furled, needy tips. A demanding little virgin, indeed, all the traces of nervousness now melted away and leaving only unselfconscious desire in its wake.

I let my hand drift over her tummy and find a place holding her hip still as my other hand goes to my fly. Pinning her like this as I one-handedly get my cock out feels filthy, on just this side of wrong, and judging from the way she squirms and chews on her lip as she stares at my hand working open my pants, she feels the same.

The breath she lets out once it’s free actually eclipses my own, as if she felt the discomfort of my trapped arousal as acutely as I did, and then I take her hand and guide her to me, guide her into handling and stroking me. I grunt with pleasure at her still-uncertain handling of my cock.

“You feel how hard it is, baby?” I ask. “It’s like that for you.”

She makes a low purr of satisfaction, her eyes not on my face but on the crude thickness of my erection in her hand.

“Here,” I say, taking her hand and wrapping it around the head of my cock. “This is where I’ll start. Just with the tip of me. I’ll find where you’re wet and tight, and I’ll begin to push in. It’ll feel big, Zenny, so big at first, like I’ll split you open, and just when you think you can’t do it, I’ll push in a little bit more.” I circle my hand over hers and push it down, just a little, so that she’s gripping me around my shaft just under my tip. “I’ll be stretching you to take me, and I’ll be petting you and rubbing you the entire time so that the stretch feels good, it feels like what you need.”

“And then?” she asks in a whisper, looking up at my face.

I guide her hand all the way down to my root. “And then I’ll be all the way inside you. And it will feel so good, baby, so full, full like you’ve never felt. Then I’ll start to move, start to slide—” I coax her hand into mimicking the motion. “—that’s when I’ll be thrusting. That’s how we’ll fuck.”

“Yes,” she says, looking a little dazed and a lot excited. “That’s how we’ll fuck.”

I lean over to my end table and fish out a condom, handing the packet to her once I have it, patiently waiting as she fumbles to get it open.

“This way,” I say kindly, showing her how to start it with the pinch and the roll, and then letting go and allowing her to roll it all the way on. Seeing her like this, eager and clumsy, is painfully arousing, and I find myself breathing in deep, shaky breaths to keep from tackling her and fucking her bare. I’ve never fucked a woman bare, and it’s never been something that I’ve thought much about before, but God, the image of my naked cock pushing into that sweet, tight cunt…

Fuck. I want it. I want it and I’ll never be able to have it.

“There,” Zenny says, sitting back and admiring my shining, sheathed penis. She looks proud of her handiwork, and it’s really quite charming. She’s sitting in a pool of unbound chiffon, mussed and well-pleasured, and she’s looking at my erection like a term project she’s just gotten a good grade on.

“Such a good student,” I praise. “Such a good girl.”

She looks pleased.

“It’s time, sweetheart. Lay back.”

And she does, spreading her legs without me telling her, and I praise her for that too, for being so smart, for being so perfect. I lean forward and tuck a pillow under her head, and then I give her a quick kiss on the lips. “Watch,” I tell her, and with the pillow behind her head, she can and she does. She watches as I kneel between her legs, as I brace myself over her, my loose bowtie dangling between us. I should tear it off, but both my hands are occupied and I honestly can’t bring myself to care right now.

I’m about to fuck the woman I love, and that’s all I can ever care about.

I take myself in hand and caress her entrance with my cock. The head of me is blunt and fat and wide, and much, much bigger than the tiny seam it’s currently rubbing against, and she stiffens the moment I make contact, the moment she feels for herself exactly how big the cock is that wants inside her pussy.

And so I lean down and croon in her ear about how brave she is to take me, how sexy she is, how good I’ll make her little cunt feel if she’ll let me. And as I say all this, I keep pressing and rubbing and gently pushing until finally, finally, my tip squeezes inside of her.

She arches underneath me, letting out a stung noise, and I’m letting out the same noise, because it’s so tight, God help me, it’s so tight. I’m only barely inside her, and already I can feel my groin clenching hot and deep with the need to release.

“Stay with me,” I murmur, dropping my forehead to hers. “Stay with me.”

She nods underneath me, her hands coming up to lace around my neck in a gesture that conveys pure, unsullied trust. Trust I don’t deserve, but I’ll do everything not to betray.

“It’s going to pinch,” I tell her. “But it shouldn’t hurt, because you’re nice and wet and ready for me. But if it does hurt, tell me and I’ll fix it.”

She nods again. “Okay. I—” she gives the most tentative of movements with her hips, and I nearly come from that alone. “It feels better now. Put more inside me.”

I lift my head so that she can lift hers and continue to watch as I push in another inch. The stretch of her around my cock is the filthiest thing I’ve ever seen and also the sweetest thing I’ve ever felt, and then I give her another inch. “You’re so tight here,” I mutter, and I can feel sweat starting to bead along the muscled furrows of my back and stomach. My bracing arm is trembling—my entire body is trembling, actually—with restraint.

“You’re shaking again,” she says.

“It’s because of you.”

This earns me a kiss. “More,” she commands, like a little queen.

“Darling, I’m going to have to push,” I say, my voice as shivery as my body right now. “It’s so fucking tight, I can’t—”

“More,” she says impatiently, and so I press my hips forward and slide in deeper, regretting every bit of force it takes to wedge in deeper.

She’s been watching me as I feed my cock into her pussy, but with this last thrust, she falls back, her eyes squeezing closed.

I freeze. “Zenny?”

“It doesn’t hurt…exactly,” she assures me, eyes still closed. Except her words aren’t very reassuring. I start to withdraw and her hands fly from my neck to my hips.

“No,” she begs. “Stay. Keep going. I’m breathing through it and…oh.” This last comes as I rock in and out the tiniest bit, giving her a little taste of what it will be like when I fuck her in truth.

“It doesn’t hurt,” she says again, but this time her words have a faint wonder to them. “It feels good.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Halfway there, baby,” I soothe her. “Halfway there.”

I look down at where we’re joined myself and groan. Fuck me, but she’s tight, and the stark visual of my thickness spearing her virgin pussy is nearly too much. It’s only the barest shred of my control that keeps me from piercing the rest of the way home in one, sure thrust. Instead, I go slowly, agonizingly slowly, until finally at last, I’m all the way inside. I’m finally able to let go of my cock, and I brace myself on my elbows so that I can cradle her face in my hands.

“How are you doing?” I ask her, searching her face. “Okay?”

“Yes,” she says, and her hands move to pet at my stomach and chest. “Very yes.”

“I’m going to start moving now, and I’m going to play with your cunt as I do. We’re going to go slowly at first.”

And that’s how we begin for real—in slow, succulent movements, with her running her fingers along my abs and me braced on one arm by her head, my other hand splayed near her hip and my thumb working soft circles around her clit. And I’m murmuring more teacher words to her, telling her how good she is, how clever and how curious, telling her to move her hips or to hug my waist with her thighs. It takes all I have to be a teacher right now, all of my threadbare control, because she’s fitting me like a tight, hot glove, she’s so wet and everywhere she is so beautiful, so perfect, so Zenny. Even the tangle of chiffon around her hips is her, even the unpracticed catch of her heels on the bed. I love her and I’m fucking her, and I see now why she used those words earlier, make love, because that’s what this is. It’s still dirty, it’s still raw—I’m still gloating over the way her virgin cunt feels on my cock, I’m still biting at her breasts like an animal—but how I feel about her is a shimmering, golden thread through it all. It’s electric, sizzling everywhere, ionizing everything, transforming everything into something more than just biology.

I can’t explain it because I don’t understand it. I don’t understand myself, even.

I only understand that I love her.

“Sean,” she moans, and her head is flung back again, but this time not in pain, definitely not in pain. “I’m going to come again, oh God, oh my God—”

With a cry, she buckles and seizes around me, going so tight and so delicious, and the difference in this orgasm from her first is stunning, momentous, like it’s eating her alive and she can’t get enough of it. Her cries echo through the room, and she writhes and twists under my body, even as I keep her pinned in place with my hands and my hips. Impaled on my dick, she squirms and whimpers her way through it, finishing at last with an almighty shudder, and the sensation is so carnal, so vulgar, to have another person use you so baldly for their pleasure—and then for that person to be a gorgeous virgin who currently looks stunned, as if she never knew something could feel so good, as good as your cock inside her—

“Shit, shit, shit,” I mumble, because I’m coming, I’m going to come while I’m in her pussy, and I can’t, I promised her I wouldn’t, and I slide out of her cunt just in time. We both watch in crude, animalistic interest as my cock juts glistening and heavy between us, and then with several vicious throbs, fills the condom.

“Oh my God,” she breathes, “Sean, oh my God,” and then her hands are all over me as I finish grunting and pulsing my way through it, the condom finally full and my body drained.

“Shit,” I say again, but it’s probably the most reverently that word has ever been uttered.

Then my demanding newly-not-virgin sits up and says, “I want to do it again.”