She kept her eyes on the pebbly plastic texture of the shower ceiling as she lathered up her hair.

"His name was Brian. He went to the Naz, too, and we dated junior year. I was ... I was really unhappy back then."

After losing her faith in G.o.d, she hadn't known how to get it back. Hadn't even wanted it back, but she'd felt an aching need to fill the hole it had left behind.

"Do you want to hear this?" she asked. Because the sound of the water was soothing, but it wasn't nearly as good as the darkness for burying her apprehension.

"Yes."

Curt and gruff, even for Tony.

Still, it was what she needed to hear to continue.

"So I kind of latched on to Brian."

Brian had been so easy, so good. She'd loved that about him-how simple he seemed to find everything. As if his neural pathways were all four-lane highways, compared to the tangled, byzantine mess inside her head.

"We had about four million movie dates, and he came to my parents' for dinner and hung out with Caleb and Katie. He practically felt like a member of the family. And then one of my friends heard him talking to one of his friends about breaking up with me."

She had suds all over her hands, a great pile of shampoo lather that overflowed between her fingers. Quickly, she tipped her head back and rinsed it all out.

Then the conditioner, a cool puddle cupped in her palm.

"He'd never done more than kiss me. When I realized he was going to dump me as soon as he worked up the guts, I think ... I think I was actually angry with him, but it didn't come out like anger. I thought I loved him."

Even then she'd realized that she didn't love him enough. She never would have married him, and he must have recognized that. It must have factored into his decision to end things.

She'd just wanted to have a boyfriend. To have s.e.x and be normal. The problem was that Brian didn't really think s.e.x was a normal part of a relationship. To him, it was something that should only happen between a married couple.

"I kind of ... seduced him. Not that he made it hard, or anything, but he always kept his hands above the waist, and I moved them down. Gave him permission."

She rinsed out the conditioner and glanced through the gap in the shower curtain. Tony was leaning against the door frame, watching. Listening.

"It was bad?" he asked.

"It was terrible." It hurt, and she bled, and then she spent the whole time wishing it would be over. "He cried afterward. Like, really cried. I felt awful." Not because she thought they'd sinned, but because she'd made him do it, and she knew he would beat himself up over it forever. "And then he dumped me."

"Was the other guy better or worse?"

"Both."

"Tell me."

She twirled a bar of soap between her hands and spread suds down her arm. "The thing with Brian ... I wasn't in a hurry to do it again. But then I was going out with this guy, Andy."

One of a chain of well-meaning men pressed on her by others. Amber was happy enough to go out with them, but usually things would peter out after three or four dates. Andy had lasted longer. Met her parents. Taken her to Cleveland for a Browns game.

"Tell me, Amber."

His voice so calm and certain, the way it was on the job site when he told the workmen what to do.

Authority and kindness. Exactly what she needed.

"I was going out with him around Christmas, and he came over here for dinner and gave me a present that was way too expensive. A flat-screen TV. And I knew when I opened it, This is because he wants you to have s.e.x with him.' So he was a creep, right?"

It hadn't just been the present. She'd already noticed that he wasn't as interesting as he'd seemed at first, or as nice. And on one of their dates, he'd been rude and condescending to their waitress. Always a bad sign.

"I'd bought him a tie. Seriously, a tie. And he bought me a TV, which I don't even really watch. But I let him sleep with me anyway, because I wanted to have done it with more than one person. I felt like, I'm twenty-three, and I should know what this is like. I should be doing this."

Her hands skated over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, lathered between her legs. Her body felt sensitized, aware, but there was nothing arousing about telling these stories. It was a purging, a necessary cleansing so she could have Tony the way she wanted him.

Honest.

"That time it didn't hurt. It was just exactly what it was, you know? His body and my body, joined together in this really improbable way, and the whole thing with the condom, and trying to figure out where to put my arms.

"There was no way I was ever going to come, not in a million years. So I just made this little sound, like oh! and he seemed to think that was it, and he slapped along to the conclusion."

Afterward, she'd felt scooped-out and empty, and she hadn't been able to understand why. She'd gone to ma.s.s with her mother, just to see if she could find some glimmer of the feeling it used to inspire in her, and she'd felt nothing. No sin. No forgiveness. Just ... nothing.

"He called me a few times after that, but I didn't call him back."

She rinsed off the soap and cut the water, wrung it from her hair, and pushed the excess droplets off her arms and legs with the flats of her hands. When she emerged into the clouded bathroom, he held open her old green towel and wrapped it around her.

He leaned down and kissed her softly on the mouth.

"It's not supposed to be like that," he said.

"I know."

He walked her into the bedroom and took a seat on the edge of her bed. So stern again, serious in his wet red T-shirt and jeans, his hands braced over his kneecaps as if he needed something to hang on to.

He was beautiful.

And now that she'd told him, she felt different. Not quite perfectly calm, because her heart was pounding way too fast, and she felt as if she were floating an inch or two outside her body. But more sure of herself.

She wanted Tony for different reasons than she'd wanted Brian or Andy. Not because she expected him to rescue her or change her or fix her, and not because she had anything to prove.

Because he made her hot. Because he was s.e.xy. And maybe more than either of those, she wanted him because she liked him. The actual him.

It was a good reason.

He didn't look like he agreed, though. He looked like she'd drawn him to the edge of an abyss, and he wasn't sure he ought to go over it.

"What are we doing, Amber?"

She tried to lighten the mood. "I thought you planned to-to-"

"To f.u.c.k you?"

"Right."

"Say it."

There was that c.o.c.ky smile again. That Crest gleam, with its dirty subtext.

"To f.u.c.k me."

l.u.s.t fired up between her legs, just like that. Amazing, what those four little letters could do. She supposed she'd always known. Why else had she avoided swearing, once she'd given up on the whole notion of keeping her soul immaculate?

But she hadn't understood that the power cut more than one way. It could be s.e.xy to talk like this. Liberating.

"To f.u.c.k me," she said again, and this time she watched that hard k light a fuse in his eyes. "I thought you planned to f.u.c.k me and then leave me a weeping mess."

"That's the plan."

But his eyes were too kind, too warm. He wasn't that sort of man. Not for her, anyway.

He reached for her waist, his hand a clamp, stronger than her own grip could ever hope to be.

He liked her. She thought maybe he liked her just as much as she liked him, and he didn't know what to do about it. She didn't know what to do about it, either, except to keep fumbling forward and see what happened.

Maybe it wasn't the right thing.

They would find out together.

She stepped closer and placed her palm flat against his chest. It rose with his deep inhale.

His fingers tightened at the top of her thigh. When he spoke, the teasing tone was gone. "You sure you want this, Amber? With me? I don't want to be the guy who finishes off the job of wrecking s.e.x for you."

"You won't." She smoothed her hands over his shoulders, running her thumbs up his neck. So tense. "Do you-do you still want to do this?"

His eyes dropped to the tuck in her towel. "If you're sure."

"You did say you would teach me how to misbehave." She lifted his hand to the center of her chest. "So teach me."

"I brought a condom up from the truck."

"I have some in the bathroom."

"All right, then." He stroked his hand over her collarbone, then let it drop away. Rising, he grabbed a handful of shirt behind his head and pulled it off in one quick shucking motion.

Holy mackerel.

In a photograph, he'd be beefcake-bigger and more chiseled than any man she'd ever seen shirtless, bigger even than she might have thought she wanted, if she hadn't already wanted him so much.

But the reality of him was so much better, so much more than the way he looked. The heat of his skin. The smell of his body, like rain and soap and sweat. The rise and fall of his chest.

He was beautiful and real. Not a body, flat in two dimensions, but a heart, a soul, a mind. All here because he wanted to be with her as much as she wanted to be with him.

Awe rose inside her, pushed tears into her eyes and made her breath catch.

Tony gripped her wrists and pulled her hands to the flat of his stomach, just above his belt buckle. "Touch me."

She couldn't quite believe she had permission, but she took it, gladly. She moved her hands off his belt onto his stomach, letting her knuckles drift lightly over all the shapes of him. The ridges of his abs, the swells of his pectoral muscles, his tight shoulders and the dip between bicep and elbow. Forearms and hands. He closed his eyes, and she shaped him, wanting a physical knowledge to match the pictures in her mind.

Not just a body. Tony's body.

"You feel amazing," she said.

"You're killing me."

She glanced at the front of his jeans. Whoa.

Her hands skimmed down to his belt buckle, and she worked the leather loose from the loop slowly, allowing her fingers to brush against the ridge of his erection.

Hard.

She traced the shape of him with one finger, and he sucked in a deep inhalation through his nose.

"So big," she said.

A strained smile. "Music to my ears."

Amber palmed him. So hard. "What do you call it?"

"Honey, if you don't know what it's called-"

He stopped talking when she stroked up and down, and she watched the pleasurable agony overtake him, barely able to believe she had this much power. "I want to know what you call it."

"My d.i.c.k, I guess."

"Is that what you want me to call it?"

A light squeeze, and his eyes closed. He looked like he was dying. "No," he gasped. "I want you to say c.o.c.k.' "

A more forbidden word. She should have guessed. The more forbidden it was, the more pleasure he got from coaxing her into the transgression.

"So if I say I want to touch your c.o.c.k ..."

He groaned.

"Or that I want your c.o.c.k inside me-"

He thrust into her hand, a quick, sharp motion that matched the escalation in his breathing.

"-that turns you on?"

"You have no idea."