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She grins, pulls the hoodie off over her head with nothing under it. I blink. It’s the first time I’ve really seen her. She bends down and kisses me again, slow this time, and slides her hands down my chest over my shirt, down my ribs, down over my stomach, both palms flat, right in the middle. For one second, I think she might find it. Then she rolls her hips down against me, and the thought is gone.

She reaches down and rubs me through my sweats, and I sit up enough to get my mouth on her perfect tits, taking my time with each side, and when I use my teeth, she yelps and shoves me back down and bites my neck. I buck up into her. She sits up, takes my hand, and puts it exactly where she wants it, and rides the way my fingers move.

“I wanted to do this last night,” she whispers.

I palm her breast with my other hand. “So you’ve wanted me all day?”

She nods and steps off the bed, and I watch her push her sweatpants down, then her thong.

“Kylie.”

She tugs my sweatpants down and leaves my shirt where it is, rolls the condom on, and climbs back into my lap. I guide myself into her, and she sinks down onto me with her hands on my neck and her eyes on mine.

“Fuck,” I say. “Kylie.”

She likes that. I can see her like it. She rides me like she has all the time in the world, like she came here to do exactly this and nothing else and she’s going to take her time with it. Her hair falls around both of us. She sets the pace, and every time I try to push it, she slows down on purpose and smiles when I swear and does it again. I don’t try to take over. I hold her hips and watch her and give her everything she asks for. When she gets close, she drops onto my chest and presses her face into my neck and bites down on my shoulder through my shirt, and I feel her come apart on top of me, all of her, shaking, and it takes me with her. I don’t have any say in it.

For a while, neither of us moves. She’s heavy and warm on my chest, breathing hard into my neck, and there’s a wet spot on my shoulder where she bit me through the cotton. I’ve got one hand in her hair and the other on the small of her back, and I can feel her heartbeat through both, slowing down.

“Did you eat it?” she says into my neck.

“What?”

“The apple.”

“Yeah.”

“The whole thing?”

“Yeah.”

She lifts her head and looks at me like I’ve said something deeply disturbing. “Who eats the whole thing?”

“I didn’t eat the core.”

She drops her forehead back onto my chest, and I feel her smile against my shirt, and then she’s laughing, shaking on top of me. I’m laughing too, and I don’t even know what’s funny.

Then she sits up and climbs off. She finds her sweatpants on the floor and pulls them on, finds her hoodie hanging off the back of my desk chair and pulls that on too, shakes her hair out of the neck of it, and steps into her slides. I watch her while I deal with the condom and pull my sweats back up. She doesn’t find a reason to stay. She checks her pocket for her phone, then comes back and bends down and kisses me once, soft, with one hand on my jaw.

“Goodnight, you,” she says.

“Night.”

I walk her to the door, four steps, and unlock it, and she slips out past me into the bright hallway and lifts one hand over her shoulder without turning around and walks off in her slides. I stand in the doorway. One door. Two. I hear hers open, then shut. I go back inside and run a hand through my hair.

Fuck.

29

For the Record, This Is Easy

Kylie

By Thursday, the grizzly logo is everywhere. It’s on the posters in the student center, on a banner over the dining hall doors, and chalked onto the sidewalk outside the library by somebody who drew it less like a bear and more like a potato with teeth. Under every one, in the same block letters, it says SATURDAY 7 PM. The team walks around in packs of four and five in matching hoodies, quieter than usual, and Paige has sent me six photos of tops since Tuesday and asked me to rank them.

I’ve seen Nash in pieces all week. Tuesday at lunch, he sat down next to me because there was an empty chair, ate three of my tater tots without asking, and left for practice before I finished. Wednesday, he passed me in the athletic building hallway with his hair still wet and his bag on his shoulder, caught me around the waist, kissed me once, and kept walking. When I turned around at the end of the hall, he’d already turned around too. That night he texted me a picture of a banana with the caption This is a banana, and I asked what exactly he was doing with a banana that late, and he came knocking to find out whether I could fit the whole thing in my mouth. Poor Tessa had to witness it. I could not stop laughing.

It’s been a good week. I keep noticing how much I’m enjoying college, usually when I’m walking somewhere with my coffee and my earbuds in and nowhere I have to be. After the breakup, I was so scared I wouldn’t find my place here, and I think I finally have. It feels good to have a group of girls and a fuck buddy three doors down. This week has been good and normal and easy. I even signed up to volunteer at a nursing home ten minutes off campus, which was my mom’s idea and which I pretended to be annoyed about for one whole day. My first shift isn’t for almost two weeks, and I’ve already looked up what to wear.