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Boys feel so far away. With Valeria pressing her fingers into my clit, I can’t even remember a world where I liked boys. She’s all I see. Valeria’s soft hair against mine, Valeria’s lips against my ear, Valeria’s slender fingers down my shorts. Soft. Everything is so fucking soft, and I never want anything but soft again.

“They were,” I reply.

Her circles grow narrow, harder. Like she’s digging a moat around that sweet spot.

“Well.” Her voice lowers into a growl. “I promise that’ll end tonight.”

I swallow down a squeak as she presses hard on the next roll. One more stroke before her fingers slip under my damp panties, gliding along the soaked skin. I grab her thigh, her shoulder. The seat belt whines against me as I twist in it. Fuck, what I’d give for her weight on me. Something to pin me down, ground me. The colored lights blur outside the window.

“You close?” she asks me.

It couldn’t be more obvious. I’m stifling ragged breaths against her. All I can manage is a nod as my muscles tighten. I know this. God, I know this feeling, so why does it feel so much larger than before?

“Val…” I say.

“Yes?” she says, flashing that smirk again.

I’m so close. Fuck, I’m so close, and—

“I don’t know if I can—” Be quiet enough for this ruse.

Somehow, she…gets it. Her fingers soar, so fast I can’t even trace the circles, and she pulls me into her chest. And as the orgasm rips through me, blazing hot and earth-shattering, I cling to her, burrow into her skin, her Chanel smell, her solid body.

I stumble out of the car when we arrive. It’s pitch-black. I know Valeria’s house is amazing, but I can’t focus on any of it. All I notice is the transition from dark to light, from the silence of carpet to the patter of wood, as we kiss our way up to her bedroom. The whine of a hinge as she shuts her door. The spring of a mattress as we drop onto her bed.

I just came in front of someone else. Someone else made me come. A girl made me come. This isn’t even sex. I don’t know why I feel like this. Like I’m a puppet and someone’s cut my strings. My bones are so light, I feel as though I could fly instead of walk. I feel older. Wiser. Like now I can sit with my old work friends and talk about exactly why dry spells suck. Like I’d give almost anything for Valeria to keep touching me day after day for the rest of our lives. Like I’m shaky and my mind is racing and I’m so grateful that I’ve made it to her bed.

I know what I have to do. What, despite all the freaking out I’ve done for months, I want to do.

I run my hand from Valeria’s inner thigh up to the crotch of her panties. “Is this okay?”

“Absolutely,” Valeria replies.

I don’t fully understand the anatomy from this angle, but the panties are an added source of friction. They can give her the same pleasure that my actually knowing the exact location of theclit would give. I take a deep breath. I can do this.

“Tell me if you want me to adjust,” I say as I mimic what she did, drawing long, wide strokes on the crotch of her panties. My stomach clenches as I speak. The words playing back in my head make it sound like I’m an inexperienced teenager.

But Valeria just mumbles, “Course, baby,” like this may even be a normal thing for her.

Even with the barrier of the fabric, my finger still glides across her skin. Already wet, which, thank god. I try copying Valeria, sliding over sideways to keep my wrist angled the way I do when I touch myself, but somehow my fingers are already starting to cramp up.

So as I shake my hand out, I pull her closer to me. I shift over to my side, twine a leg over hers, kiss the soft skin on her neck. Hand, slightly rejuvenated, back in.

“Use your pointer and middle,” Valeria says as I litter kisses up her throat. The buzz of her words reverberates off my lips, and wow, it’s really cool. “It’s less tiring.”

I add my middle finger, speeding up the circles. This angle is right, familiar. The strokes come harder, faster. But somehow that’s not even the fun part. The fun part is the way Valeria’s face grows warmer, the way her breathing—now that we don’t need to be quiet—audibly grows quicker, the way the abdominal musclesunder my arm clench up. The way she grips on to me.

My fingers draw her panties aside. I don’t even know if she’s hotter than I was, wetter, but there’s something about this that’s got my heart racing, a dumb smile stuck on my lips. I did thisto another human being and—oh, Jesus, when I know exactly where her clit is to finish the job, I’m sorry, I’m pretty fucking pleased with myself.

My strokes are frantic, almost taking on a life of their own as my wrist cramps again. Faster and harder, and Valeria’s sighing and twisting, and god, when she comes, it’s like the world explodes. She comes with a desperate grip on me, with a muted sigh.

As I pull my hand out from under her dress, I think of that sex scene in that movie she did. I’d been imagining that was what she sounded like during sex. I’d wanted to hear that version forso long, but lying here with that sigh against my skin, her grip on me, this version feels intimate, like a secret. I can’t believe I’d wanted what was in that movie.

Thinking about it makes me laugh beside her.

“What?” she asks, her voice back to its normal pitch.

The heat of embarrassment washes over me. “I…I thought you’d sound like you did in Needlepoint when you orgasmed.”