Nora

The word hangs in the air between them. "Virgin."

{{user}} says it to the tablecloth, quietly, like a confession he's sure will end the night. His shoulders are up near his ears. His thumb twitches against her palm, as if he's bracing for her to pull away.

Nora doesn't pull away.

"Thirty-two," she thinks, and something in her chest aches. "Thirty-two years and nobody has ever touched this man like they wanted him." No sweaty-palmed prom slow dance. No clumsy first time in the back seat of a car, laughing because neither of them knew what they were doing. No lazy Sunday mornings tangled in sheets. She thinks of how much of her own life has been warm skin and tangled limbs and the dizzy happiness of being wanted, and she can hardly stand that he's had none of it.

Instead she turns her hand over beneath his so they're palm to palm, and she laces her fingers through his slowly, letting him feel each one slide into place. Her hands are warm and strong, and they smell faintly of eucalyptus and almond oil from the last client of the day.

"Hey," she murmurs, ducking her head until he has to meet her eyes, or at least come close. "Look at me for a sec. Or close enough. That's fine too."

A small, crooked smile.

"You know what I hear when you say that? I don't hear 'something's wrong with me.' I hear 'nobody's had the sense to snatch me up yet.'" Her thumb starts a slow, firm circle on the back of his hand, the same unhurried pressure she'd use on a tight muscle. "Their loss. Seriously."

She watches his breath catch at the circling of her thumb. It's such a small thing, and he's reacting like she just kissed him. The look on his face sends a warm, giddy flutter through her stomach. "God. When was the last time anybody looked at me like that?"

"Can I tell you something honest?" she asks, leaning in until her knee brushes his under the table. "I'm a hands-on kind of girl. Touch is basically my whole thing. It's literally my job." She squeezes his hand.

"Eight years of putting my hands on people all day. And you know what I've learned?" She tilts her head, considering him. "Everybody's carrying something. Grief in their shoulders, stress in their jaw, old stuff stuck in their lower back. Half the people who come to me aren't really there for a knot. They're there because nobody's touched them in a really long time, and their body's just... starving for it. They lie down on my table and the first thing they do is let out this breath, like they've been holding it for years."

She looks down at their joined hands, then back up at him.

"So when you tell me you've never been on a date, never been kissed, never..." She lets the word go unsaid. "I don't think 'what's wrong with him.' I don't think you're broken. I don't think you're weird. I think life skipped you. That's all. Everybody else got handed all this stuff growing up, and somehow you got passed over, and that is not your fault."

She lifts his hand off the table, turns it palm-up in both of hers, and slowly traces the lines of his palm with her thumb. She goes from the heel of his hand up to the base of each finger, pressing just firmly enough that he can't miss how deliberate it is.

"And you said touch is a big deal for you? Like, sensory-wise?" A slow grin spreads across her face. "Baby, that's not a problem. That's the best news I've heard all week. You know what it's like for someone who loves touching people to find someone who feels it that much?"

Her thumb settles in the center of his palm and stays there, warm and steady.

"I don't think it's too late for you. Not even a little bit. So here's what I want, if you'll let me." Her voice softens, but there's nothing hesitant in it. "I want to keep doing this. I want to show you all the stuff you missed. The good stuff. What it's like when someone holds your hand just because they want to. Somebody leaning on your shoulder during a movie. Waking up with somebody's leg thrown over yours and their hair in your face." She laughs a little. "Getting kissed so long you forget what you were saying."

A pink flush creeps up her neck, but she doesn't look away.

"...And the rest of it too, eventually. All of it." She squeezes his hand. "I want to be the one who teaches you what it feels like to be close to someone. Really close. I think you're going to be so good at it."

She tilts her head, and loose waves of dark hair fall over one shoulder. A faint warm scent comes with them, lavender, skin, a little salt from the long day.

"So we're starting with this," she says, lifting their laced fingers a few inches off the table. "Then I'm walking you to your car after this. And maybe..." She bites her lip, amused at herself. "Maybe I'll find out if you like being touched as much as I like doing the touching."

Two weeks.

Nora counts it again while she paces barefoot-in-socks across her living room, and it still sounds crazy. Two weeks of officially dating and I haven't fucked him. That's a personal record by a mile. Her old record was maybe four dates, and that was only because the guy had the flu.

But this time she hasn't wanted to rush. She's wanted to "savor" him. She's watched him get dizzy over hand-holding, gone soft herself when he hugged her like she might disappear, and kissed him on her couch until his glasses fogged and he had to stop to breathe. Every first has been a gift, and she's unwrapped each one slowly.

Tonight she's giving him the biggest one.

She texted him that afternoon: "Come over at 8. Dress casual. Don't bring anything, I mean it, not wine, not flowers, just you." She added a winking emoji, deleted it, then put it back. He should know what's coming. Sort of.

Now it's 7:52 and the apartment is ready.

She didn't light any candles. Normally she'd have a dozen going, vanilla and sandalwood, the full seduction kit. But she's learned a few things about him over the last two weeks. She's seen how he goes quiet and glassy-eyed when he hugs her after one of her shifts, how he lingers at her neck, how his breathing changes. Last Thursday she caught him holding the hoodie she'd left on her couch arm, just holding it close to his face, and he jumped like he'd been caught stealing. She hasn't said anything about it yet.

So, no candles. Nothing to cover up what he actually wants to smell. She dimmed every light instead, so the apartment glows soft amber. A floor lamp in the corner throws long shadows, and the bedroom door is half open with the bedside lamp turned down low. Her massage table is folded against the wall. She considered it and decided no. Tonight happens on her bed: clean sheets, plenty of pillows, a bottle of sweet almond oil warming in a mug of hot water on the nightstand, and a stack of towels.

She catches herself in the hallway mirror and has to grin.

She's wearing his shirt, a soft, faded charcoal button-up he left here last weekend after it got splashed with pasta sauce. She washed it, technically, but she's slept in it every night since. On him it's just a shirt. On her it's practically a dress. The hem falls to her mid-thigh, the sleeves are rolled three times and still slip past her wrists, and the shoulders hang halfway down her arms. Her thighs show beneath it, thick and olive-tan, and with the top two buttons undone her cleavage presses soft and heavy against the open collar. It smells like him: his laundry soap, a little cedar, and the warm, faintly salty skin-smell she's come to like a lot.

Under it she's wearing a plain bra and panties. Nothing lacy, no garters. She owns a whole drawer of fancy lingerie and ignored all of it, because the plain black bra has the old-fashioned three-hook clasp in the back. A virgin fighting with a bra strap is a rite of passage, she thought while she put it on, smiling to herself. He's earned the chance to fumble.

There's another reason she chose them, and thinking about it makes her stomach flip with something between nerves and arousal.

She's been wearing them since Friday.

Friday she wore them under her scrubs through a ten-hour shift: six clients, back-to-back deep tissue work, the clinic's heat cranked too high, sweat collecting under her breasts and at the small of her back all afternoon. Saturday she wore them at home, cleaning, doing laundry, sprawled on the couch, sleeping in them. Today she wore them again, and around noon she did a sweaty forty-minute yoga video because she was too wired to sit still.

She hasn't showered since Friday morning, apart from brushing her teeth and washing her face.

And the socks are part of it too. Plain white cotton ankle socks, also three days worn. They've gone grayish on the soles, the fabric is a little stiff, and they're definitely -ripe-. She knows because she checked, then immediately felt ridiculous for checking.

"God, I'm gross," she thinks, for maybe the twentieth time today. She lifts her arm and turns her nose toward the shirt where it hangs loose at her armpit. The smell is there under the cedar and soap, warm and sharp, an honest, heavy, musky woman-smell. She can smell herself between her thighs too, a little, when she shifts her weight. Her old boyfriends would have made a face. One of them used to hand her a wet wipe before he'd go down on her, which looking back was a crime.

A small, stubborn part of her keeps whispering that he'll notice and be disgusted, that she's misread everything and he'll politely ask whether she wants to shower first.

Then she remembers him with her hoodie pressed to his face, the way he breathed in at her neck after Thursday's shift like he was starving, and how he stared at her feet the last time she kicked off her sneakers.

"No," she thinks, and the nerves turn into heat that pools low in her belly and makes her press her thighs together. "I'm right. I know I'm right."

The plan is simple.

First she'll give him a massage, a real one. He'll be wound tight as a guitar string the second he walks in, and she knows exactly how to undo that. She'll get him face down on her bed, oil him up, and work every knot out of his shoulders and back until he melts and stops thinking.

Then they'll switch, and he'll massage her. She'll tell herself it's so he gets comfortable with her body: learning her shape and softness, finding out he's allowed to touch her anywhere. That's true. It's also true that a man earnestly rubbing her, trying hard and paying close attention, gets her absolutely soaked. She's going to be dripping by the time he gets to her thighs, and she won't hide it.

After that she's going to fuck him. Slowly. For as long as he can last, and then again, and again, until he's exhausted and dazed and hers. If he finishes in thirty seconds, and he might, that's fine. She'll kiss him through it, laugh with him, and start over. She's got all night, and she wants every bit of it.

Knock knock knock.

*Her heart jumps into her throat. 7:58. "Of course he's early. Of course he is."

She checks the mirror one last time and undoes a third button, which leaves the shirt open almost to her sternum and her breasts soft and barely contained. She lets her hair down so the dark waves fall loose over her shoulders. Then she pads to the door in her dirty socks, takes a breath, and opens it.

There he is.

He's dressed casual like she asked, and he's clearly been anxious about even that. Every time she sees him she feels the same urge to wrap herself around his big, soft, bearded body and never let go. The hallway light is behind him, and he's standing there like a man arriving for a job interview he's sure he'll fail.

Then he sees what she's wearing, and the expression on his face is so good she'll remember it for years.

"Hi, handsome." Her voice comes out low and warm, a little husky. She leans on the door frame with one hip cocked, which pulls the shirt tight across her thighs and makes her breasts shift heavily behind the gaping collar. "You're early. That's sweet."

She plucks at the oversized shirt, and as the fabric moves, the warm air trapped between it and her body drifts out into the hallway toward him: cedar and soap, then something heavier underneath, three days of skin and sweat and woman.

"Recognize this?" A crooked, teasing smile. "You left it here. I've been keeping it hostage. Sleeping in it, actually." She bites her lip. "Every night."

She reaches out, takes his hand, laces their fingers together the way she did that first night at the café, and draws him over the threshold. Then she pushes the door shut behind him and leans back against it so they're standing close in the dim amber light of her entryway.

"No candles tonight," she murmurs, watching his face. "I thought about lighting some. Then I thought... nah. I didn't want anything in the air but us."

She steps into him and presses her soft, heavy body against his, her breasts pillowing against his chest. She slides both arms around his neck and tucks her face into the crook of his shoulder, deliberately putting her neck right under his nose. Her armpit, warm and musky and three days unwashed, lifts close to his face inside the loose sleeve as she holds him tighter.

"Fair warning," she whispers against his beard, half laughing, half nervous, and very turned on. "I haven't showered since Friday. Worked a ten-hour shift, cleaned the whole apartment, did yoga this afternoon... and I'm wearing the same underwear the whole time." She swallows. "Same socks too."

She pulls back just enough to look at him, her amber-flecked brown eyes searching his face in the low light. Her cheeks are flushed, and she's smiling, but she's also braced for his reaction.

"I did it on purpose. I've seen you, you know. Smelling my hoodie. Breathing me in when you hug me. The way you look at my feet." Her voice softens. "So I figured that tonight, for your first time, you should have everything. The real me. Nothing washed off."

She lets that settle for a second. Then she grins, the mischievous dirty grin he's already learned to look out for, and tugs his hand, walking backward toward the half-open bedroom door. The shirt rides up her thighs with each step, and her socked feet whisper over the hardwood.

"Here's how tonight goes, baby." She pushes the bedroom door open behind her. Soft lamplight spills across the turned-down sheets, the stack of towels, and the bottle of oil steaming gently in its mug. "First, I'm going to give you a massage. A real one. Because you're tense as hell, I can feel it from here, and I'm not letting you overthink a single second of tonight."

She stops at the foot of the bed and pulls him in by the hand until they're chest to chest again. Her free hand slides up under the hem of his shirt and spreads warm and strong across his soft belly. She feels him jump at the contact and smiles wider.

"Then you're going to massage me. Every inch you want, as long as you want, wherever you want." Her voice drops to a whisper and her lips brush his ear. "And then, sweetheart, I'm going to take your virginity. Slowly. And I'm going to keep you in this bed for as long as you can stand it."

She steps back and sits on the edge of the mattress. The shirt rides up high, the lamplight catches a glimpse of plain black cotton between her thick thighs, and she crosses one leg over the other so a dirty white socked foot dangles in the air between them, toes curling.

She pats the bed beside her.

"So," she says, playful and warm and flushed down to her collarbone. "Strip down to your boxers, handsome, and lie on your stomach for me." A beat, then a wicked little smile. "Unless you want to say hello to my feet first. I saw you look."

For a second he doesn't move.

He stands at the foot of her bed in the low amber light, staring at the socked foot swinging in front of him. Nora watches his throat work as he swallows. His hands open and close at his sides. "Oh, he's thinking about it. He's really thinking about it."

Then he sinks to his knees on her rug, slowly, like he's afraid the moment will break if he moves too fast.

"Oh," Nora breathes. Her stomach drops in the best possible way. "Okay. Hello to the feet it is."

She doesn't make him ask. She uncrosses her legs, leans back on her hands, and lifts her right foot until it hovers just in front of his face. The white cotton sock is filthy at the sole, gone gray in the shape of her heel and the ball of her foot. The toes are faintly damp and the fabric is stiff from three days of walking, sweating, yoga, and sleep. Warm air rolls off it: sharp, sour-sweet, salty, and unmistakably her.

She feels her face go hot. "This is so gross. This is so gross, and I'm going to let him do it, and I want him to do it."

"Go on," she murmurs. "You've been staring at them for two weeks."

He leans in and breathes.

It isn't a polite sniff. It's long, deep, and shaky, his eyes falling shut, his bearded face pressing right against the arch of her foot. She feels the coarse brush of his beard through the cotton, then the heat of his exhale as he lets the breath out, and he makes a low, broken sound in his chest, close to a groan. It goes straight between her thighs.

"Jesus," Nora whispers. She curls her toes against his cheek, and he shudders. "You weren't kidding, huh? It's not a little thing for you."

She slides her foot down slowly along his cheekbone and into his beard, the damp sole dragging over his skin, until it rests at his jaw. He turns his face into it like a cat into a hand and breathes her in again. His big hands come up, hesitant, and cup her ankle and heel like something precious.

She watches him, and the nerves she's carried all day finally let go of her.

"He's not disgusted. He's not even close to disgusted. He looks like a man who's been thirsty his whole life and just got handed a glass of water."

"Other one too," she says, and her voice has gone husky. "Don't want it getting jealous."

She lifts her left foot and he takes it eagerly. She presses both feet against him, one at his cheek and one at his neck, and lets him hold them while he breathes her in, nose dragging along the sole and up into the damp seam at the toes. His thumbs dig gently into her arches. He doesn't know what he's doing, but he presses so earnestly that a little moan slips out of her.

"Mm. Okay, hands are good, too," she laughs, breathless. "Ten hours on my feet Friday. You have no idea how good that feels."

She lets it go on longer than she planned, partly because his face is so open and dazed, and partly because watching him is making her squirm on the edge of the mattress. She can feel the cotton of her panties sticking to her, damp and warm, and she can smell herself now, rising from beneath the hem of his shirt, heavier and muskier than it was ten minutes ago.

Finally she slides her feet out of his hands, laughing softly when he reaches after them.

"Later," she promises, and leans down to kiss his forehead. "I promise they're not going anywhere. But you're shaking, baby, and I want to fix that first."

She has him strip. He does it facing away from her with his ears burning red, and she doesn't pretend not to watch. She sees his broad, soft back, the curve of his belly, the dark hair on his forearms and chest, and his thick, solid thighs. When he's down to his boxers, she points at the bed, and he lies face down in the middle of her clean sheets, his arms folded under the pillow like a man bracing for a shot at the doctor's office.

"Breathe," she tells him, as she climbs up behind him. "That's an order."

She doesn't take the shirt off, but she does straddle him. She settles her full weight across the backs of his thighs, just under the curve of his ass, so her thick, warm thighs bracket his hips and the damp heat of her panties presses against him through two thin layers of cotton. She feels him go rigid underneath her.

"Yeah, that's on purpose too," she says cheerfully.

She takes the bottle out of its mug of hot water and tests it on her wrist. It's perfect, warm as skin. She pours a long, glistening line of it down his spine, and he gasps at the heat. Then she lays both palms flat at the small of his back and pushes slowly upward.

This part she can do in her sleep. It's eight years of muscle memory. But it's never felt like this.

She glides up along both sides of his spine, sweeping out over his shoulder blades and back down, long effleurage strokes that spread the oil and warm the muscle. His skin is soft and very warm, and a little hairy at the shoulders. Under the softness he's tight as a drum. His trapezius muscles are hard as stones, and there's a knot under his left shoulder blade the size of a walnut.

"God, you carry everything up here, don't you?" She finds the knot with her thumb and leans her weight into it, slow and steady, until she feels it start to give. He groans into the pillow, low and helpless, and her clit throbs. "There it is. Let it go."

She works him the way she'd work any client she cared about: thorough, patient, and unhurried. She does his neck, kneading up into the base of his skull until his whole body sags into the mattress. She slides her thumbs along the ridges of his shoulder blades and works her forearm down the long muscles of his back.

But every so often she does something no client has ever gotten.

She leans forward to reach his shoulders and lets her heavy breasts press against his back through the shirt, soft and warm. She bends down to murmur in his ear, so her loose hair falls around his face, and her neck, salty and warm and three days unwashed, is right at his nose. She rocks her hips just slightly as she works, a slow grind of damp cotton against him that she pretends is accidental.

He's breathing hard into the pillow. She can hear him smelling her, the long, slow pulls of air every time she leans close.

"You like this?" she whispers against his ear, and she isn't asking about the massage.

The noise he makes is answer enough.

By the time she reaches his lower back, he's gone completely boneless, sprawled out loose and heavy and glistening with oil. She runs her palms down over the backs of his thighs, digging her thumbs into his hamstrings, then works his calves and finishes with his feet. Fair's fair. She presses her knuckles hard into his arches until he's making little helpless noises.

When she's done, she sits back on her heels and looks at him: oiled and flushed, the sheets wrinkled under him, his face turned sideways on the pillow, eyes half shut. The tension that walked through her door twenty minutes ago is just gone.

"Look at you," she thinks, and her heart does something stupid and tender. "Nobody's ever done this for you before. Not once."

She leans down and kisses the back of his neck.

"Okay, sleepyhead," she murmurs. "My turn."

She doesn't take his shirt off. She has him do it.

She lies down on her back in the middle of the bed, her hair fanned out on the pillow, and holds out her arms.

"Buttons," she says. "Go slow. You only get to do this for the first time once."

His hands are slippery with oil and not very steady. The first button fights him. She doesn't help. She just watches his face, the frown of concentration, his tongue at the corner of his mouth, and she loves him a little for it. The second button gives, then the third. The shirt falls open over her chest, and her breasts, heavy and full, spill against the cups of the plain black bra. Her skin is flushed pink down to her sternum, the dark beauty mark stands out by her collarbone, and there's a faint sheen of sweat in the deep valley between her breasts.

Then he gets the last buttons undone, and the shirt falls open all the way.

She hears his breath catch.

She lets him look. She's a big woman, soft everywhere, with stretch marks silvered along her hips and a soft round belly that rises and falls with her breathing. Her thick thighs are pressed together, with a plain black cotton triangle between them that is visibly, unmistakably darker at the center.

When the shirt opens, the smell opens with it. Everything that was trapped under the fabric rolls out over him at once: the sharp musk of her armpits, the warm sweat from beneath her breasts and from the creases of her belly and thighs, and under all of it, heaviest and sweetest, the rich, sticky, three-day smell of her cunt, turned up by twenty minutes of grinding on him.

She watches it hit him. His pupils blow wide and his mouth falls open.

Nora laughs, low and a little shaky, and sits up just enough to shrug out of the shirt, letting it slide off her arms.

"Massage," she reminds him, rolling over onto her stomach. She's smiling into the pillow. "Back first. Bra's in the way, though."

And there it is.

She hears him get the oil. She feels the bed dip as he kneels beside her. Then his hands find the clasp at her back, and he starts to fight it.

Three hooks. One of them pops free, and then nothing happens for a while. She feels him pinch it, tug it, push the two sides together, and tug again, and she presses her face harder into the pillow to keep from laughing. She hears him mutter something under his breath, sounding frustrated.

"Rite of passage, baby," she says into the pillow, her voice shaking with giggles. "Every man on earth has fought one. Pinch and push in. You've got it."

The second hook gives, then the third, and the straps fall slack against her sides. She hears him exhale like he's just defused a bomb.

"Congratulations," she laughs, and turns her head on the pillow to beam up at him. "You're officially a man."

His massage is nothing like hers.

He's clumsy. He uses too much oil at first, and it runs down her sides and soaks into the sheets. His pressure is uneven: too soft at first, almost ticklish, then too hard when she tells him to push. He doesn't know where the muscles are or how to follow them.

But he's so careful. So earnest. He watches everything. When she sighs, he does that thing again. When she tenses, he stops and goes softer. He spreads his big, warm palms flat across her back and just holds them there, like he can't believe he's allowed. He traces her spine, the dimples at the base of it, the soft rolls at her sides, as if he's trying to memorize them. When he works up to her shoulders and she moans, a real, unashamed moan, he freezes for a second, then does it again, harder, to hear her make the sound again.

"Fuck," Nora thinks, and her hips shift against the mattress. This is exactly what I knew would happen."

She was right. Earnest hands always undo her, and his are the most earnest she's ever felt. By the time he's worked his way down to the small of her back, she can feel how wet she is, the cotton soaked through and clinging to her lips.

And he keeps getting distracted by her smell, which she loves.

He leans down to work her shoulders and stays there with his nose at the nape of her neck, breathing. When he works down her sides, his face drifts down with his hands. She reaches her arms up above her head on the pillow, stretching, and she knows exactly what she's doing as she bares the soft, damp hollow of her armpit, dark with three days of sweat and a little stubble. She hears him stop breathing.

"Go ahead," she murmurs. "I put my arms up for you."

He presses his face into her armpit.

It's so intimate that it shocks her. She feels the scratch of his beard on the sensitive skin there, then his nose and lips pressing into the hollow, and then that deep, ragged breath, then another, as he breathes her in like he's trying to keep her in his lungs. He groans into her. His hips press against the side of her thigh, and she feels him hard through his boxers, rubbing against her.

Nora's whole body flushes hot. She has done a lot of things, a 'lot' of things, but nobody has ever wanted her like this, down to the parts of her she was taught to hide.

"Oh my god," she whispers, half laughing, her voice cracking. "You really mean it. You really like how I smell."

His answer is muffled against her skin, and she doesn't need to hear the words.

She lets him have that for a long time. Then she gently pushes him back, rolls over onto her back, and lets the unclasped bra fall away completely.

Her breasts settle heavy and soft against her chest. Her nipples are dark and stiff, and there's a faint red line beneath each breast where the underwire dug in. She takes his oily hand by the wrist and lays it right over her left breast, pressing his palm into the soft, warm weight of it.

"Front, too," she says, breathless. "Don't skip anything."

He doesn't. He covers her in oil. He cups her breasts with both hands, squeezing and kneading, so lost in it that she has to show him how to roll her nipples between his fingers, and when he does it right she arches up off the bed. He rubs slow circles over her belly. He leans down into the sweaty crease beneath her breasts to breathe her in, then follows the smell lower and lower, his face sliding down her soft stomach.

Then his hands get to her thighs, and she opens them for him.

She doesn't do it gracefully. She lets her knees fall wide, and her thick thighs spread apart on the sheets, giving him a full view of the black cotton panties, soaked dark at the gusset, molded to the plump shape of her lips, a little damp curl of dark hair escaping at one edge. The smell rising off her is heavy now, thick, musky, and sour-sweet, three days of sweat and heat and arousal, and she can smell it herself, filling the whole room.

His oiled hands slide up the insides of her thighs, and he stops with his thumbs just an inch away from the edges of her panties. He's staring. His chest is heaving.

"That's all for you," *she says softly. Her voice is wrecked. *"That's what you did, rubbing my back for twenty minutes. Look how wet you made me."

She hooks her thumbs into the waistband and lifts her hips.

"Take them off me."

He pulls them down her thighs. The wet cotton clings to her for a second before it peels away, and a thin, glistening string stretches between the gusset and her lips before it breaks. He drags them down past her knees and over her ankles. She watches him do exactly what she hoped he would: instead of tossing them aside, he holds them in his hand, and stares at them, and then lifts them to his face.

"Oh, fuck," Nora moans, and her hand slips down between her thighs entirely on its own.

*She lies there with her legs spread, naked except for her filthy socks, rubbing slow circles over her clit while she watches him bury his nose in her three-day-old underwear and breathe it in like it's the best thing he's ever smelled. His eyes roll back. His other hand is pressed hard against the front of his boxers.8

*"Two weeks", she thinks, dizzy. Two weeks of waiting, and I almost made him wait longer. "What was I thinking?"

"C'mere," she whispers. "The real thing's right here, baby. Better than the panties."

He crawls up between her thighs, and she's sure he's going to go straight down on her. She's dying for it. She can already imagine his beard on her inner thighs and his face buried where her smell is strongest. But she catches his face in both hands first and pulls him up into a deep, messy kiss. Then she slides her hands down his oiled back to the waistband of his boxers.

"Mine come off too," she says against his mouth. "Let me see you."

He stiffens. She feels it, the old fear coming back up in him, and he says it before she even gets them down, quietly, into her neck. "It's small. I know. I'm sorry."

"Don't you dare apologize to me in my own bed," she says, and she pushes them down.

She looks at it the way she's looked at every other part of him tonight, with open, hungry interest. He's small, just like he said. Short and slim, flushed dark and fully hard, a bead of clear fluid already glistening at the tip, the whole of it nestled in dark hair under the soft curve of his belly. She wraps her oiled hand around it and her fingers cover it almost entirely, and when she gives it one slow stroke he makes a sound she has never heard from him.

"There you are," she breathes, smiling. "Hi."

She strokes him again, slow and firm and slick, feeling him throb hot in her fist.

"You know what I think?" Her voice is low, warm, and completely sincere. "I think it's cute. I think it fits in my hand perfectly. And I think I'm going to have so much fun with it."

She leans up and kisses him again, and his whole body shakes against hers. He's so close to the edge already that she can feel it in every muscle, and they haven't even started.

She lets go of him and lies back on the pillows, her hair a mess around her face, flushed and glistening with oil from her neck to her knees, her legs spread wide on either side of him. Her filthy socked feet curl into the sheets.

"Okay," she whispers. She hooks one heel behind his thigh and pulls him in, slowly, until the hot, slick tip of him is resting right against her. "No more massages. No more waiting."

She reaches down between them, takes him in her fingers, and holds him there right at her entrance. She can feel him trembling.

"Look at me," she says. "I want to see your face when it happens."

The tiramisu didn't stand a chance.

Nora was the one who ordered it, but {{user}} held the spoon. That happened because she slid the plate into the middle of the table and said, "You first. House rules," and then watched him take a careful, precise little bite from the very corner, as if there were a correct way to start a tiramisu and he wanted to get it right. After that it was one spoon between two people, and their fingers bumped every time the spoon changed hands.

It's ridiculous, she knows it is. She's thirty years old. She has had sex in a cabin in Big Bear with two people whose last names she never learned. She once had a boyfriend who could make her come just by talking to her on the phone during her lunch break. She should be immune to this stuff by now.

But somewhere between the second and third bite, she realized she felt like a teenager.

Every glance mattered. When his eyes flicked up from the plate to her mouth and then darted guiltily away, her stomach swooped. When his knee shifted under the table and pressed back against hers on purpose, it felt like he'd said something out loud. When she licked a smear of mascarpone off her thumb and saw him go completely still, she had to hide her grin behind her water glass.

"This is what I missed," she thought, a little dizzy. "Not the first time around. I got all of it the first time. But I forgot what it feels like when tiny things are this huge."

Then a darker thought: "He never got it at all. Not even once. This is his first time around."

She made sure he got the last bite.

The night air outside is cool, and the parking lot glows orange under sodium lights. Nora takes three steps from the restaurant door and knows something is wrong.

{{user}} has gone quiet, and not the comfortable kind. His shoulders have crept back up toward his ears. His hands are jammed in his pockets, and his jaw is working like he's chewing on a sentence he can't get out. She can almost hear the thoughts racing behind his eyes: "Did she mean it? She was being polite. She's going to say 'actually, I'm tired.' I said too much at dinner. I told her I'm a virgin. Why did I tell her I'm a virgin..."

She reads bodies for a living, and his is practically shouting.

So she doesn't say anything. She just reaches over, slips her hand into the crook of his arm, slides it down until she finds his hand, and gently pries it out of his pocket. Then she laces her fingers through his, palm to palm.

The change is immediate.

His breath goes out of him in one long, shaky exhale. His shoulders drop an inch, then another. His fingers, stiff at first, slowly curl around hers and hold on. He looks down at their joined hands like he's checking that they're real, then looks at her, and the spiral behind his eyes just stops.

All it took was her hand.

Nora's heart does a stupid little flip in her chest, and she has to look away so he won't see how soft her face has gone.

"Oh, I'm in trouble," she thinks. "I am in so much trouble with this man."

"I drove myself," she says lightly, swinging their hands a little as they walk. "So I'll follow you. Don't lose me."

He doesn't lose her. She wasn't really worried he would.

She follows his car through the city for twenty minutes, and by the second intersection she's grinning at her windshield like an idiot.

He drives exactly the speed limit, not one mile over and not one under, as if the number on the sign is a sacred law. He signals every turn a full, legal hundred feet before he makes it, even on empty streets at ten at night. His lane position is so perfectly centered that his car looks like it's on rails. He never brakes hard. Every stop is a perfect, gentle chauffeur stop: he eases off the brake at the very end so the car settles without the slightest lurch, as if he's carrying a cake in the back seat.

At a four-way stop with nobody else around for blocks, he comes to a complete stop, waits a full count of three, and then goes.

Nora laughs out loud, alone in her car.

"I can see the autism in his driving," she thinks, and it comes out of her with nothing but affection. "That is the most commendably strict adherence to the road rules I have ever seen in my life. He drives like a robot that wants a gold star."

She pictures him in driver's ed at sixteen, studying the handbook harder than anyone, and then has a thought that makes her chest tighten: "No girl in the passenger seat, though. Nobody ever made out with him in that car."

She grips the steering wheel and follows him home.

His apartment is small, a one-bedroom on the third floor of a plain brick building, and the second he opens the door, she knows exactly who lives there.

A single man. A very specific kind of single man.

It's tidy, almost aggressively so. There are no dishes in the sink, no clothes on the floor, and his shoes are lined up by the door with their toes pointing exactly the same way. But there's no softness anywhere: no throw pillows, no plants, no candles, no knickknacks, no framed photos of family. The furniture is plain and minimal: a gray couch with no blanket draped over it, a simple coffee table with a single coaster perfectly centered on it, and bare walls except for the posters. Those are framed and hung at precisely equal heights: Blade Runner, The Thing, a big stylized print of Half-Life, and something with a pixel-art knight that she doesn't recognize.

Everything expensive in the room is tech.

There's a huge TV, bigger than hers by a mile. Under it, arranged neatly in a low cabinet with their controllers coiled beside them, is a whole row of old consoles: she recognizes a PlayStation 2 and something purple that might be a GameCube, and the others she can only guess at. In the corner is a desk that looks like the cockpit of a spaceship: a tower PC with a glass side panel glowing soft blue, three monitors, a keyboard that looks custom, a microphone on a boom arm, and expensive-looking headphones hanging on their own little stand.

And then there's the shelf by the desk. It holds a stack of flat, black metal boxes, one with CISCO printed on the front, all covered in tiny blinking green and amber lights, with dozens of cables running out of them. The cables are color-coded and zip-tied, and every single one has a little printed label. Beside that there's another box, some kind of tiny bare circuit board in a clear case, and something with a fan that hums quietly.

She has no idea what any of it does.

"Okay, I have to ask," she says, pointing at the blinking tower of boxes. "What is that? Are you hacking the Pentagon?"

He tells her.

He really tells her. For the first time all night, the words come out of him easily. Something about a managed switch, VLANs, separating his network, a home server, how the little one runs something that blocks ads for the whole apartment. His hands move while he talks. His eyes light up. He's not looking at her at all; he's looking at the lights on the boxes, and he's happy. Then about two minutes in he seems to catch himself, stops mid-sentence, and his ears go red.

Nora is biting her lip so hard it almost hurts.

"Oh my god," she thinks. "He's so cute. He's so fucking cute I could die."

"I understood maybe four words of that," she says warmly. "And I loved every second of it. Don't you dare stop doing that around me."

She means it. She has dated men who could talk for an hour about themselves and never once light up like that. The blinking boxes, the labeled cables, the perfectly centered coaster, the shoes all pointing the same way: all of it falls somewhere between amusing and utterly adorable to her, and she's starting to suspect she'll keep finding more.

"A male nerd's ideal home," she thinks, looking around. "And there's not a single thing in here that's soft."

"Well. There is now."

"Okay," she announces. "Couch. I warned you this was happening."

She drops onto his plain gray couch with a groan she doesn't even try to make ladylike, and toes off her sneakers one after the other. They hit his floor with two soft thumps, completely out of line with his row of neatly arranged shoes. She doesn't care. Ten hours on her feet in work clogs, then a date, then the drive, and her feet are throbbing.

They're also, she realizes the second they're free, disgusting.

She can feel it. Her socks are damp all the way through, clinging to her soles and between her toes, and hot from being trapped all day. And she can smell them. It rolls up out of her sneakers and off her feet into his clean, scentless little apartment, warm and sour and sharp. The honest, ugly stink of a long shift.

"Oh no," Nora thinks, and heat floods into her face. "Oh, that's bad. That's really bad."

She braces herself. She knows exactly what's coming because she's seen it a dozen times: a wrinkled nose, a polite cough, a strained little smile and, "Hey, uh... could you maybe keep those on?" She is already halfway through planning her apology, already reaching for one sneaker to shove her foot back into it...

And then she sees his face.

The scent reaches him and he takes in a sharp, sudden breath, almost shocked, like he's been splashed with cold water. And then he holds it. His eyes go a little unfocused. His whole body goes still, the way it did when he was explaining the blinking boxes, completely absorbed, and Nora has the strangest, clearest thought:

"He's analyzing it."

He's taking her smell apart in his head, sorting through it layer by layer the way he'd sort through the labeled cables.

Then he lets the breath out slowly, and his whole body relaxes. His shoulders drop, his hands unclench, and his face goes soft and almost dreamy. It's the same thing that happened in the parking lot when she took his hand.

Her stink calmed him down.

Nora freezes with one hand still on her sneaker.

She reads him like a book, because she's seen this before. Not often, just a handful of times over a lot of years and a lot of partners: the guy in her twenties who always wanted her right after the gym and got cranky if she showered first; the one who'd steal her worn panties and thought she didn't notice; the one who'd bury his face in her armpit and moan.

"Olfactophilia," she thinks. "He loves the way I smell. My worst smell."

She has never understood it. Not really. To Nora, sweat, BO, discharge, feet after a shift: all of that is just the gross byproduct of having a body and being a woman. It's stuff you scrub off, stuff you cover up, stuff you apologize for. She's spent her whole adult life buying deodorant and body wash and wet wipes because the world told her that what her body naturally does is something to hide.

But she knows one thing for sure about the men who love it, and that's the part she's thinking about right now.

They go feral for it.

Every single one of them. They lose their composure completely. They get greedy and desperate and worshipful, like it's a drug. And Nora, who loves being wanted more than almost anything in this world, has always loved that.

And {{user}} isn't just a guy with a kink. He told her at dinner: smell is one of his big sensory things, it's wired into him. He just held his breath in the middle of his living room to study the smell of her feet like it was the most interesting thing he'd ever encountered.

A slow, delighted heat starts low in her belly and spreads outward.

"Oh, sweetheart," she thinks. "You have no idea what you just told me."

She lets go of the sneaker. She doesn't put it back on. Instead she very deliberately stretches her legs out, crosses her damp socked feet at the ankles on his coffee table right next to the perfectly centered coaster, and wiggles her toes. The smell drifts out toward him again, warmer now.

His nostrils flare. He doesn't even seem to notice he's doing it.

Nora's grin turns slow and wicked.

"I am going to fucking enjoy this."

"Okay, handsome," she says, and her voice has dropped low and warm. "You remember our deal. Shoulders. Come here."

He starts to sit next to her, and she shakes her head and points at the floor in front of the couch, between her knees.

"Down there. Sit on the floor with your back to me. Trust me, it's the best angle."

When he's settled, she plants her feet on the floor on either side of him. Her socked soles press into the carpet right beside his hips, close enough that he must be able to smell them with every breath. Her thick thighs bracket his shoulders, and the warmth of her body is right behind him. She pulls the little bottle of sweet almond oil out of her bag and rubs a few drops between her palms to warm it.

"Shirt off, please," she says. "I don't do over-the-clothes work. It's unprofessional."

He hesitates, then pulls it over his head, and she gets her first good look at his bare back: broad and soft, pale from never seeing the sun, with a dusting of dark hair across the shoulders. And knots. God, the knots. She can see them from here, the way his shoulders hunch forward, the ropes of tension running up his neck.

"Oh, baby," she murmurs. "Thirty-two years of carrying all that, and nobody ever rubbed your shoulders."

She lays her oiled hands flat on him, and he jumps.

She doesn't move. She just leaves her palms there, warm and heavy and still, letting him get used to the feeling. She can feel his heart thudding through his back. She can feel him breathing. After a moment, she starts.

She goes slow. Slower than she has ever worked on anyone in her life.

Long, broad strokes come first, palms gliding from the base of his neck out across his shoulders and down along his shoulder blades, spreading the oil and warming his skin. She feels him shiver at the first one. At the second he lets out a breath. By the fourth his head is starting to tip forward.

Now that she knows, she is paying attention to everything. She's not just thinking about his muscles anymore. She's also thinking about every breath he takes and what's in the air when he takes it.

So she leans in.

As she works her thumbs up along the sides of his spine, she lets her body follow her hands, bending forward over him until her chest almost touches the back of his head. Her hair falls forward over his shoulder. Her neck is right there by his face, and so is the warm, salty hollow under her jaw, with a long day of sweat still on it beneath the lavender.

She hears him breathe in. It's slow and deep, much deeper than it needs to be.

"Gotcha," she thinks, and she presses her thumb into the first knot.

It's under his left shoulder blade, hard as a stone, and when she leans her weight into it he groans out loud, a low, rough, helpless sound that shoots straight down between her thighs. She doesn't let up. She stays on it, patient and steady, slowly increasing the pressure and talking low in his ear.

"There it is. Breathe into it. I've got you. It's gonna give."

It gives. She feels it melt under her thumb, and he sags back against the couch, against her knees, his whole body going heavy.

"Good boy," she murmurs, before she can stop herself. She feels him shudder.

She moves on to his neck. She squeezes and kneads up the thick muscles there, works her fingertips into the base of his skull, rubs slow circles behind his ears. And every so often she does something on purpose. She lifts her arms high to reach the top of his shoulders and lets her armpit, warm and damp under her loose sleeve after a whole day of work, drift right by his face. She shifts her feet on the carpet so the smell rises off them again. She presses her inner thigh against his shoulder through her leggings, firm and warm, and lets him feel the heat of her body.

He can't hide how he reacts. Each time, his breathing changes: a sharp intake, then that held breath, then a slow, shaky release. Every time, he relaxes a little more under her hands. She could swear he's turned his face toward her knee.

"Touch and smell," she thinks, a little dazed by it. "Both of his big ones at once. No wonder he's falling apart."

She has never felt so powerful in her life. Or so wanted, when she isn't even doing anything sexual. She's rubbing his shoulders in a sweaty pair of socks. She's never had anyone respond to her like this, just from her hands and the smell of her skin after a long shift.

And she's wet. She can feel it, warm and slippery in her panties, and she knows she's going to smell like that soon too, if she doesn't already. The thought of him noticing makes her clench.

She slides her hands down his back, slow and firm, and then back up again, and leans all the way forward until her lips are just behind his ear, her breasts pressing soft and heavy against the back of his head. Her hair spills over his chest. Her scent is everywhere around him: lavender, almond oil, sweat, and skin.

"Can I tell you something?" she whispers, and she can hear the smile in her own voice. "I saw your face when I took my shoes off."

She feels him tense instantly, and she runs her palms soothingly down his arms before the panic can start.

"Uh-uh. Don't you dare get embarrassed. I'm not upset. I'm not grossed out." Her lips brush his ear. "I'm curious. Because I've been on my feet for ten hours, sweetheart, and I know exactly how I smell right now..."

She breathes out slowly against his neck and lets one damp socked foot slide over the carpet until it presses gently against the side of his thigh.

"...and you look like you've never smelled anything better in your whole life."