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eyes raking her body. “Too good.” The thumb between her legs rubs harder, enough to make Addie flinch. “How you doing?”
    “No such thing as too good,” she declares, ignoring the question and reaching down to collect his hand. She grabs his other one too, lacing their fingers together and pulling until he locks his elbows to give her some leverage. “Now,” she says, sitting up and getting ready to bounce. It’s her party trick. It ends guys in a flash. “Say ‘baby’ again. And ‘please’.”
    Eli’s lips twist like he thinks she’s making fun of him—which okay, she kind of is, but not in a mean way. God, the last thing she’s feeling toward him is mean. Still. “Come on, Eli,” she prods, rocking a bit harder, liking the way his eyes are glued to her body. It hurts, yeah, with her so sensitive and swollen and him as (all right, yes) big as he is, but it’s not a bad hurt at all and it’s not nearly enough to stop her. She’s competitive, Addie. She always has been. She wants to beat him at his own game.
    It’s working too. The harder she rides him the tighter he squeezes her hands, this helpless look on his face like she’s wrecking him a little. More than a little. “Jesus, Addie—” he starts, but she shakes her head like not good enough and his skull drops back against the futon for a second, the vulnerable jut of his Adam’s apple and the tendon in his neck. It makes Addie want to bite.
    “Wait wait wait,” he says next, trying again, but Addie doesn’t wait at all, picking up the pace even more until she hears him inhale sharp and ragged. He says it then, just before he loses it entirely: “Baby, please .”
    And—yeah. Addie is definitely not one of those girls who doesn’t like it.
    It’s gratifying, watching him come apart underneath her—more than anyone else she’s been with, truthfully, his open, handsome face and his quiet groan. “There,” she tells him, rubbing both thumbs along his knuckles as she works him through it. “There you go.” When he finishes, Addie leans over to kiss him impulsively, just a soft press against his bottom lip.
    Eli squirms a hand free of hers and fists it in her hair, holding her face against his. He’s breathing too hard to kiss back. “Addie-girl,” is all he says.
     
    Addie Manzella, it turns out, is the type who has her underwear back on before Eli even finishes chucking out the condom. He guesses he should have expected that. “You want more water?” she calls, bouncing up off the futon to root through her dresser. A cotton T-shirt gets dragged over her head without the benefit of a bra. “We probably need some more water, you and I.”
    “Sure.” Eli watches her tear around the apartment, neatening the mess—magazines into a pile on the coffee table, clothes into a plastic pink hamper—before heading toward the kitchen. He rubs the back of his neck. “Got a bathroom around here?” He needs to pee, plus he can’t find a single garbage can out in the main studio, and this condom is not going in his pocket. He did that once, one of the very first dates he went on after the divorce, an assistant professor at Williams College named Sue. He was nervous.
    “Through the back,” Addie calls, running the tap. She’s just as pretty from behind, that long tangle of curly hair. It frizzed up where she was lying on it, a dark corona around her head like a devil’s halo. She put her cross back on too. “Don’t forget your pants though, if you’re planning on a fire escape getaway.”
    “I never forget.” Eli detours through the kitchen to squeeze her ass, getting a look that could freeze water for his troubles. Still, he’s pretty sure she smiles at the sink when he walks away.
    Eli has been in a lot of girls’ bathrooms over the past few months and Addie’s is the same as all the rest, the fruity-soap smell that seems to be the standard. He’s even seen her exact shower curtain before, over in Stockbridge at a