Chapter 3: Hotel 🌶️🌶️

She’d been pressed against him for a while. Her scalp was tingling.
After what felt like a long time she finally looked up at him again, and found him looking down at her, brow drawn, like he was deliberating how to explain this.
Their eyes met in the wet, humid air. Caught each other off guard.
The clouds had thickened. The sky had gone completely black.
The streetlights along the boulevard had clicked on in long rows, as if they had been waiting for it. Tires hissed across the shining black asphalt. Everything in front of them blurred — the world flattened out, like a movie shot through a wet lens.
The traffic light at the intersection threw red, then yellow, then green light across the wet pavement in long irregular slicks. The falling rain broke the color into pieces and tossed it back up. Standing under the awning, both their faces caught the warm pieces of it.
He took a deep breath. Let it out. Like he’d decided something.
The spot of him she was leaning against — the spot below his belt — still had a vein in it that was throbbing. His arms hadn’t loosened. He didn’t back away from her. He took another step toward her instead.
She lost her balance in his hold and stumbled back half a step.
A boy who had always been polite — always careful with boundaries, always good — had stopped being reasonable.
“Tate —” Her face was red, she could barely catch her breath, and her voice trembled out of her like she was breathing on him.
“I like you,” he said. He looked at her steadily. His voice was clear, but there was a thread of hoarseness running under it, and that hoarseness made everything he said sound deeper.
She felt like her heart was going to burst out of her chest. She hadn’t known a boy’s arm could be this strong. She tried to wiggle. He didn’t seem to feel it. Their bodies were still pressed close. He wasn’t letting go.
The rain hadn’t stopped. The wind was still moving. But she wasn’t cold anymore. Tate’s body was burning. Her face was so hot she felt cooked.
The boy you liked could do whatever he wanted with you, and you couldn’t say no. Especially when that boy was the team captain — the one who’d been looking after you, quietly, before you’d ever been a thing.
“I — I like you too.”
They’d been dating a while now. They’d been together long enough that this thing was probably going to happen. She’d overheard girls in the cafeteria talking about who had done what with who. Just thinking about this happening between her and Tate made her body shake. Her legs almost gave out.
It was such a subtle question to be asked. He still had that hard thing pressed against her.
It was a yes or a no.
…She liked him too.
“Do you want to?” she asked. She gave him the out. She bit her lip. Both of her cheeks were burning.
He stared at her for a beat, like he hadn’t expected that. His face didn’t tell her a thing.
“You have your ID on you?”
The dean had collected senior IDs the week before. She’d just gotten hers back yesterday. She hadn’t put it back at home yet.
“Yes.”
He let her go and walked into the lobby of the building across the awning. After six or seven minutes he came back out and led her inside with him. She gave her ID at the front desk too — let them scan it. Then they went to the elevators.
The elevator rose, slow. Seventeen floors.
They went down a long hallway, took a couple of turns. He swiped a card.
The room was big. Open floor plan. Tastefully decorated. The thing she couldn’t stop looking at was the wide white bed sitting in the middle of it.
She didn’t know what to do with her hands.
She watched him cross the room and turn on every lamp, one by one. Then he turned off the harsh ones above the bed. A low amber light was all that was left.
The bed was so big.
The kind of room she was standing in finally registered in her head, and her scalp started buzzing. Her whole body went numb. Tate was walking toward her, and his breath was a little heavier than normal, and one arm came around her waist, and his mouth came down on hers.
He didn’t hold himself back here.
There wasn’t a sound in the room. She could hear his breath. Short. Off-rhythm.
They’d only ever kissed once before now.
It had been last month — after an exam, when she’d brought her answer key over to compare and a lot of them hadn’t matched up. She’d gotten more nervous as they went, and she’d started stumbling over her words. He’d kissed her, then — just a quick brush of his lips, like he was trying to break her out of her own head.
It had been her first kiss. Soft and a little sad-tasting.
He’d stared at her for a long time afterward. She hadn’t been able to read his face. She’d thought maybe she had something on her cheek.
In her head, kissing was when lips touched and rubbed slow against each other.
This kiss was nothing like that.
He was like an animal that was about to become an adult. One hand pinned her against his chest. The other locked behind her head. He was breathing in deep, hard, sucking on her mouth. He worked the inside of his lips against her bottom lip, then her top lip, then her bottom lip again.
It made her legs go weak. It made her arms go weak.
They were doing this in a private space, alone, behind a locked door. And there was this strange wrong-feeling thrill in the air around them — like no one was watching them but everyone, somehow, was.
She couldn’t breathe. She needed air. She let out a heavy nose-breath into his skin.
He felt the change in her, and instead of giving her air he kissed her harder. He used his teeth.
He bit, gently, on her lower lip. He kept her face close to his, kept his cheek against hers, and said it close to her mouth:
“Open up. Let me kiss you.”
“Mm,” she answered, vague, and parted her lips.
The second they opened, something hot and wet slid into her mouth. His tongue. He pressed her tighter against him. He stroked her body without any order to it. There were small low gasps coming out of him she could hear now, breaths he wasn’t quite getting all the way under control.
The wet sound their mouths made together was sticky and dim and intimate. Hungry.
Under the uniforms a boy and a girl had stopped being able to hold any of it down.