Page 59 of Deep End

“I don’t know.” He notices my skeptical gaze and shrugs. “Worrying is pointless. I’ll either get in, or I won’t.”

I wish I could be as at peace as he about . . . anything, really. “And if you stay, you’ll want to keep on working with Dr. Smith?”

“If she’ll have me. I like her style. She’s hands-off, but involved. Trusts us to get shit done.”

“And I bet youhatebeing micromanaged.”

“You have no idea.” He cocks his head and studies me. “I bet you would, too. In the lab.”

The subtext—but noteverywhereelse—is loud, but it leads us into a warm patch of silence. And after that . . .

I’m not sure how it happens. Maybe he’s the one pulling mebetween his thighs. Maybe I step into him. All I know is that I’m in his arms, my face buried in him, his hand splayed wide on my lower back, a soothing caress above my shirt.

He inhales deeply, purposefully—looking for something he’s already familiar with, revisiting a beaten path. His skin is sandalwood. Sun. Grass. The faintest trace of chlorine.Where were you today? What did you do?

“You read the list?” he asks against the shell of my ear.

I nod into his chest. His palm slides up, to the top of my spine, a slab of heat and touch, until his thumb finds the pulse at the base of my neck, wipes back and forth over it. “Good girl.”

I close my eyes. Dissolve into the gratification of knowing that I’ve done something right. The simple pleasure of pleasing someone.

Maybe I’m fucked up. A victim of the sexist power structures that society has imposed on me. If being praised by some guy I barely know gets me going this fast, I must have internalized the same patriarchal shit that I despise outside of the bedroom. Or maybe I justam, and should stop beating myself up about this.

“Anything you want to say about that?”

I think about it in earnest, but it’s like Lukas said: there is nothing he wants that I don’t want more.

“Can you just . . .” I free my arms from between our bodies and loop them around his waist. It might be the most intimate hug I’ve ever been part of.

“Just what?”

I swallow. “I just want to be told what to do. For once.”

His fingers slide through the hair at my temple. He pulls back my head. Catches my eyes. “Will you do what I ask, then?”

I nod eagerly, feeling the slight remodeling of the energy in the lab, an empty heat inside me. A newus. This—it’s not who we are when he tells me about his med school applications, when we discussdeep learning, when we wave at each other from across the pool. This is him and me, yes, but a variation on our theme.

Outside, very little stitches us together. Here, we couldn’t be more perfect for each other.

“Can I trust you to saystopif you want me to stop?” he asks.

I nod again.

“Scarlett.”

I know exactly what he’s asking for. “You can trust me to saystop, if I want you to stop.” I swallow. My body is a vague haze of arousal, longing, of hot, liquid eagerness. “Otherwise . . .”

His eyes crease with a smile. “That’s lovely of you.” His kiss is light, sweet on my mouth. “In that case, I want you to get on your knees and go down on me.”

A scattered thought occurs to me, that Lukas might be testing me.Does she really mean it? How far is she willing to go?But it’s fleeting and immediately discarded, because in this moment only one thing matters.

He asked me to do something. And I cannot imagine anything better than to follow his instructions.

So I lower myself between the spread of his legs, letting my bare knees prop against the footrest until I’m at the perfect height. I reach for the opening of his jeans, but he stops me, one of his hands closing around both of mine as they work on a button. I freeze—I’m already messing up—but he lifts my chin and pushes back my hair to study my face at his leisure, and after a handful of seconds murmurs, “You are beautiful, Scarlett.”

They don’t sound like empty words. More like something he wanted me to know. I smile, and when he frees my hands, I get back to work, one button after the other after the other, the snapping loud in the silent lab, the fabric rustling as I reach inside his boxer briefs.

I couldn’t be less surprised by the size of him. He’s already fullyhard, smells like soap and shower and skin, and I’m more turned on than I remember ever being. The seam of my shorts digs against my clit, and it feels nice—it feelsgood, really—but it doesn’t matter.

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