Chapter 5: Nothing Underneath 🌶️🌶️🌶️

He came out of the bathroom and walked over to where she was standing. Tilted his head down a little, trying to find her eyes.

"I'm done."

"…Okay."

She thought his body was deadly. He had the kind of cut, masculine build that wasn't supposed to come on a boy his age. He also still had the leftover boy-ness in his face — that thing you only got at seventeen, eighteen. Limited-edition. About to expire.

She didn't dare meet his eyes. Without realizing it she'd dropped her gaze to the floor, and he'd already hooked his finger under her chin and lifted it.

"Why are you only looking at the floor, not at me?"

He sounded confused, like he genuinely didn't know.

Her face went hotter. She stepped back. She started stuttering. "You — you don't have clothes on —"

Tate was officially good-looking. He was the kind of boy a girl wouldn't normally even dare to look at too long. If she hadn't been in his homeroom — if there hadn't been a hundred small things bringing them into the same orbit — she would have only ever looked at him in secret, in pieces.

He let out a soft laugh and brushed his thumb across her bottom lip.

"Go shower," he said. His voice was low. "I'm going to run downstairs and grab something."

"Okay," she said, nodding fast. She only stopped being on edge when she heard the door close behind him.

—

The shower water was hot.

Her hair had been wet from the rain already. She washed it while she was in there. The wet black hair clung to the white slim line of her waist. The hot steam softened her skin and brought a faint pink up under it.

She looked down at the place between her legs. A length of hair slid forward off her shoulder and hid her face.

She stared for a while.

She thought about how, soon, Tate was going to be looking at her there too. Her head started rushing.

She washed herself slow. Careful. When she was done she dried her hair, wrapped the towel around herself, and came out.

A clean dry outfit was hanging on the wardrobe across from the bathroom door. Obviously something he'd just gone out and bought.

Tate was leaning at the window, looking down at his phone, dry. He'd changed into a gray-white sweat set. The pants made the length of his legs more obvious than usual.

He was tall. Six-foot-two. He had a build for clothes — there was the same straight, deliberate quality to the way he stood that color-guards had. He could wear anything and look right. Heads turned for him wherever he went.

Her throat felt a little sore.

She thought about Bianca Russo's letter again. She didn't know how he'd handled that.

Her first night ever with someone, and he wasn't even — he was on his phone…

"Lockwood."

She called him that. Her thumbnail was scratching at the side of her index finger. She'd already scraped a small raw place into the skin.

She couldn't make herself say it: Come back here and do what we were doing.

Tate turned and walked over to her. He was tall and his frame loomed when he got close. A boy she was used to feeling normal around suddenly had this unclear pressure to him.

That towel was wrapped around her. Underneath the towel there was nothing.

He could see exactly what was underneath. Or — he couldn't see it, but every cell of him could imagine it. An eighteen-year-old boy was about to come apart looking at the line of it.

He swallowed.

He'd put his clothes back on after the shower because he hadn't wanted her to feel like tonight had to happen. But now that he was standing in front of her, all he wanted to do was take everything off again.

When he'd been pretending to scroll his phone, the letters on the screen had been blurry. He hadn't been doing anything but performing. He was getting more hypocritical by the minute.

The room was silent. Their two shadows stretched long against the lamp-light, twisted together on the carpet. From another angle, you'd be able to see that the actual distance between them was still there — small, but real.

Everything was ready.

He lowered his head. Kissed her gently on her soft mouth.

There was something almost reverent in the way he did it. It was a different kiss from the careless brutal one earlier.

He brought his arm around her body and drew her in. The girl moved with it, came in. They were pressed close again in the amber light of the room, kissing — a slow, ambiguous, intimate kiss.

His fingers rubbed across her back. They got caught up in a few strands of her long black hair. Silky. Soft.

He didn't have any willpower left. He reached around behind her and unhooked the towel that had been wrapped around her body. The white cloth folded down and pooled around her ankles.

Her calves started to shake.

"Mmh…"

They had stopped kissing somewhere along the way. He was very close, looking down, watching every movement she made. His right hand was between her thighs, stroking, slow.

Her face had gone scarlet. She bit her lower lip and kept her wet eyes downcast. She didn't dare look. Her feet wouldn't hold her up.

Through the gap of her thighs she could see his three long fingers, held together, against her private parts. Sometimes he had just his middle finger in the cleft. Pressed against the small soft petal of her. Rubbing back and forth.

His finger was already slick from the wet she didn't know she'd been making — the pad of it gleamed in the lamp light like it had been dipped in oil. It glanced light off the secret hidden angle of her body in a way that felt obscene to her.

She'd never felt anything like this before.

Her body had been put through an electric shock. He was just stroking her. Just stroking. And every part of her had gone — wrong. Her toes were curling. Her toes were tingling.

Even her toes.

She didn't know why.