I smile at this and it unlocks his own grin; he looks relieved.

“I’m not sure I totally trust why you’re doing this.” I press a hand to his chest. He looks down and shakes his head a little; he doesn’t know what I mean. “You could stay in the apartment and have the job without having sex with me, you know.”

His eyes fall closed and he lets out a little “Ahhhh,” as if I’ve just confirmed something for him.

“We could be convincing without this,” I say quietly. “But now that you know I had a thing for you before we met, I’m not comfortable doing this without knowing where you stand. It feels really unbalanced.”

His eyes flicker back and forth between mine. “My desire for you as a lover is entirely separate from my desire for the job you helped me find.”

I struggle to speak past the glow these words trigger in me. “Really? Because as you said yourself, it would be incredibly shitty of you to play me like that.”

He leans down, close enough to kiss me, but stops just shy. “Really. Of course my feelings are influenced by your understanding of music. Your opinion matters more to me than even Robert’s, or Ramón’s. But that isn’t about the job, that’s because music is part of you, too.”

I move in, resting my lips on his, and he groans, rolling over me, bringing a hand up to cup my jaw. Tension melts everywhere inside, and I rock into him when he settles between my thighs.

Making up is . . . pretty fun.

Calvin pulls back slightly, grinning down at me. “Six months before we met, huh?”

“At least,” I say, laughing and blushing. “It was a pretty epic crush.”

I slide my hands around his shoulders and then into his hair as he kisses lower, to my breasts, and my stomach, and then beneath the covers, where he kisses one thigh and then the other, and then sweeps his tongue across me.

Wanting to watch, I push the covers away, and he looks up, smiling into another kiss. He teases, pointing his tongue, nipping—almost as if he’s performing for me.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I whisper.

A long, soft suck and then: “What’s that?”

“And the answer is yes, I imagined you doing this before I met you.”

He pulls back a little, expression heating. “Imagined me kissing you here?”

I nod, and a deep ache builds just watching him watching me.

“Would you touch yourself?”

“Sometimes.”

He glides a finger over me, up and down, and then pushes it inside. “You’re getting wet just telling me about it.”

I dig a hand into his hair. “I’m not going to apologize for fantasizing about you.”

“I would fucking hope not.” He watches what he’s doing. “I don’t want you to stop fantasizing, either.”

“What do you fantasize about?”

He closes his eyes and bends to lick me, thinking. Pulling back, he says, “A lot of things,” and I feel the heat of his breath against me.

A lot of tings.

I tug at his arm, and he climbs back up my body, bending to kiss me with an open, hungry mouth.

Pulling his hand over my breast, I say, “Tell me.”

He squeezes, and then bends, sucking. “I think about saying some filthy things to you while we’re on the couch. I like when you’re facing me, so I can lick you how you like it.”

Oh. My blood heats and I arch into his mouth.

“I think about having you near the window and letting those paparazzi down on the street watch us. I get a little kick out of imagining those pictures on Twitter.”

I reach down, wrapping my hand around him, and he groans before coming back up to kiss me.

“I think about how you look when you put me in your mouth. How fast I come when you do that.” He slides his hand between us, pushing two fingers into me, and we start to move, his words speeding up. “I think about being somewhere with you, and you do that—you go down on me and no one knows.”

“Like at the theater?”

“Or anywhere,” he says, breath hot on my cheek. He grunts, fucking my hand, so close to where I want him, and I guide him there, nudging his own hand away from me. He slides in bare, so deep, and I cry out before he swallows the sound.

We haven’t done this before . . . we need to put on a condom.

“I think about this,” he whispers, “just like this. Oh, Christ, it feels good.”

It does, and so neither of us stops it. It’s so easy to keep moving, to fall into that rolling rhythm; in the past weeks he’s figured out what I need and starts there: deep, pressing, immediately. My hands roam the skin on his back, down over his ass, his thighs, as far down as I can reach.

He must know he’s forgiven because he doesn’t talk anymore, doesn’t check in with me to be sure I’m okay, and this is something I adore most about him. I think he trusts that if I didn’t want this right now, I would tell him. He isn’t going to let something go unsaid.

But even so, as he moves in these perfect circles over me, another shadow steps into view. I wonder what it is we’re fixing here, and to what end? I’ve already established that we don’t need to be intimate for him to stay here. And we certainly don’t need to be in love. But he kisses me like it’s love, and as he pushes faster into me, he sounds like a man overcome with love, and when he rolls so I’m on top of him, he watches me with something that looks a lot like love in his eyes.