Closer. Closer.

After a few moments he pulls back, abandoning my breast to bury a hand in my hair and force my eyes on him. “Relax,” he tells me again, his voice so commanding it sends a shiver down my spine.

“I am relaxed.”

“No, sweetheart. You’re not. You’re clenching your teeth and your thighs and your hands. You’re locked up tight. Is it where we are? Does that bother you?”

I shake my head and answer, “I’m concentrating.”

The corner of his mouth twitches.

“On? You know it’s guys who try to distract themselves so they won’t come, not girls . . . right?”

“That’s not what I’m doing.” And now I’m blushing. Furiously. Though I’m not sure my last blush ever went away, so more likely I’m just purpling a little more.

“Then what are you concentrating so hard on?”

God, how can I possibly answer that?

“I’m concentrating on . . . on the opposite of what you said.”

His brows furrow, and he studies me for several long moments. He sighs and shifts away from me. This time the kiss he places on my lips is short, quick. All that raw, overwhelming feeling? Gone. He pulls his hand out from my clothes, and the loss makes my knees nearly collapse. It’s not easy for me to orgasm. I don’t even do it to myself that often because it takes too long. It’s too difficult. But he had me close in a record amount of time. His voice gruff, he says, “Come on.”

Something in my gut unravels.

“But . . . we . . . what?”

He wraps an arm around my waist, tucking me close to his side. “This isn’t going to work.”

He pulls me out of the stacks, into the aisle. “Where are we going?”

“We’re leaving. The cop has to be gone by now.”

I frown, but let him pull me along, and the entire time we’re in the elevator and during the walk back to his pickup, I can feel something turning and turning in my stomach. Like when you watch people make cotton candy, and the spun sugar just gets bigger and bigger. Each step is another spin, each step builds up the cobwebs of dread inside me.

I knew this was a mistake. I knew it. I just . . . he and I are from different worlds. How could I possibly think that we would be compatible, that me, a naive virgin, would be able to keep up with someone like him?

I should have stuck to my original sense of him. He’s dangerous. In ways bigger than I ever realized. I’m smart when it comes to everything else, but not with this, not with him. I feel so incredibly stupid, and it’s not something I know how to deal with.

I hate it.

He keeps his arm around me as we walk, but I wish he would just let me go. I’m weird and inexperienced, and I guess we’re not as compatible as I thought we were. The only good thing about all of this is that it happened before we actually tried to have sex. I can only imagine how awful that would have been. And now I just want to acknowledge the mistake and move on. I want him to stop touching me because . . .

Because even though I feel humiliated and stupid, I still want him. And with his arm around me, I’m struggling to cut him and all of this off like I should.

We parked in an open lot behind the student union building. It’s as empty now as it was when we arrived. He parked his truck in a corner space, away from the streetlights. It’s dark, so I stick close to his side, but he doesn’t walk me around to the passenger door. He opens the driver’s side, leans over the seat to fold up the middle console, and then helps me climb up and sit in the middle.

Confused, I try to scoot over the rest of the way, but he slides in beside me and stops me with a hand on my thigh. He points to my bag in the floorboard and says, “Get your list.”

I hesitate, and the hand on my thigh squeezes. “Get the list, Nell.” I reach down for my bag while he turns on the overhead light. I pull out the spiral like he said, but don’t open it.

He reaches across me to the glove compartment and pulls out a pen. He hands it to me, and I realize he wants me to mark the tasks off my list. Uneasy, I open the spiral, trying to keep it angled away from him so he can’t see, and I search for the items I’ve completed.

4. Do something Wild.

Yeah. I’d say that one is gone after tonight.

15. Flash someone

Oh God, I’d flashed him. Who am I and how do I get normal Nell back?

I skip to the end of the list, to the new items I’d added after talking to Torres.

20. Take a picture with the Thomas Jefferson Rusk “Big Daddy Rusk” statue.

I cross the items one by one, wishing it were that easy to just strike through this night and my mortification. I go to close the spiral, but he stops me, settling his hand over the page. I look up, stiffening automatically, but he’s looking at me, not the list.

“I need you to add something else to your list.”

I raise my eyebrows and ask, “What?”

What was this about? Surely this isn’t about the Sweet Six thing again, not after how poorly things went in the stacks.

“I want you to add ‘Have the best orgasm of my life.’ ”

I drop his pen. I very nearly drop my spiral.

“You want . . . what?”

“You heard me, Nell. Now add it.”

He’s back to the dominant Mateo that comes out when he’s kissing me, and the ache he’d started back in the library flares to life between one breath and the next. I reach for the pen, but I’m too distracted by what this could mean.

So we’re not over? He still wants me? How could he still want me? My heartbeat speeds up as I mentally dissect our evening up until this point, and when it takes me too long to find the pen, he growls, “Oh, fuck it. Add it to the damn list later.”

He grabs the spiral and tosses it into the passenger seat. I sit up, and he pulls at the stretchy fabric on the thigh of my yoga pants, letting it snap back against my skin.

“Take those off.”

I blanch. “What?”

“This will be easier without them. You can leave your underwear on if you want. Though I might point out you’ve already been naked in my arms.”

“We were underwater. And it was dark.”

He turns off the overhead light, dousing the entire cab in black.

“Better?”

I blink a few times, and my eyes slowly adjust. I can see the shape of him in the dark, but no details. I sigh, considering.