Chapter 6

Piper's POV

The lock clicked behind me and I stood there with my back against the door and my hand still on the knob.

My face was wet. I touched it and looked at my fingers like I needed proof. Not scared-crying, I told myself. Just pain.

I had always been like this — the kind of person who cried at pain before they cried at anything else. My preschool teacher had brought it up the last time I ran into her at the grocery store, laughing, Piper you were always the loudest one on the playground, and I had smiled and wanted to die a little.

I slid down until I was sitting on the floor with my knees pulled up, back still against the door.

"What just happened?" I said out loud, to nobody.

He pinned me to the floor. That was the factual version. He had heard something in the hallway — or thought he had — and then his hand was on my wrist and his knee was on my leg and I was on the floor of his apartment looking up at the ceiling. For one second, maybe two, something in his eyes had gone completely flat, and I had thought, with absolute clarity, he is going to kill me.

And then he had let go. Stepped back. Said sorry in a voice like a door that hadn't been opened in a long time.

I pressed my knuckles against my mouth.

He was a soldier. I didn't know what that meant, not really — what specific thing he had seen or done or had done to him that made a sound in a hallway turn into something that needed to be stopped with both hands. I just knew there was a whole category of experience I had no access to, and I had probably walked straight into the middle of it wearing earbuds and carrying my phone.

I must have hit some kind of trigger, I thought. He didn't see me. He saw something else.

My phone went off against my knee.

Roni: how did it go

Then, before I could pick it up:

Roni: hello

Roni: Piper

Roni: I will literally call 911

Roni: what was that bang, why did your signal cut out

I stared at the screen for a second, then started typing.

Me: Things went completely not according to plan. Didn't work.

Roni: what do you mean didn't work??

Me: I mean I am still a virgin.

Three dots appeared and stayed there for a long time.

Roni: no way. my method is foolproof

Me: It's more complicated than that. A lot happened tonight. I'll tell you tomorrow.

Roni: ok but you're not hurt or anything right

Me: I'm fine. Tomorrow, I promise.

Roni: ok. but you WILL tell me everything

Me: Deal.

I set the phone down on the floor next to me.

After a minute I got up, went to my desk, and pulled open the bottom drawer — the deep one, the one where I kept the things I didn't want to accidentally look at — and found the notebook at the back. The cover had curled at one corner from being shoved in and out of bags. The Post-it on the front said do not lose this in my own handwriting, which I had put there in college because I was dramatic and also because I really, genuinely could not afford to lose it.

I took it back to the middle of the floor and sat down cross-legged.

This was the habit. Every time something happened — something I felt in my body, something I heard, something that made my hands do a thing before my brain caught up — I wrote it down.

Not a diary, not really. More like a parts bin.

The way his knee had felt on my leg. The way his voice had come out flat and then cracked slightly on the word sorry. The specific texture of the floor under my palms. All of it went in here and sat until it turned into a sentence in something else.

I wrote for a while. The pen scratched. The apartment was quiet.

And then I stopped, because I noticed something.

My heart was still going fast.

I sat with that for a second. Fast was normal, fast made sense, I had just been pinned to a floor by a very large man.

But this wasn't the kind of fast that meant scared. It was — I pressed my hand flat against my sternum and felt it — the other kind. The kind that happened when I was reading something good, or when the plot I was writing finally clicked into place, or when—

"Oh no," I said.

I closed the notebook.

"No. Nope. Piper." I put the notebook on the floor and looked at the ceiling. "You are turned on right now. You are actually turned on. Your libido is bigger than your survival instinct. You are genuinely not well."

The ceiling had nothing to say about this.

I got up and went to bed.

I was going to sleep and then all of this would be in the past and I would deal with it in the morning like a normal person. I pulled the blanket up to my chin and closed my eyes and waited.

What I got instead was the replay.

I had grabbed his pants when I fell. My hand had landed — I hadn't aimed, I hadn't meant to, it had just landed — right there, and I had expected fabric, just fabric, soft and flat, and instead what I got was heat and then, almost immediately, something shifting under my palm, hardening, pressing back through the layer of cloth like it had somewhere to be.

I had frozen. And then — I could not explain this, I could not defend it — my fingers had closed, just a little. And then again.

He got hard. I stared at the ceiling in the dark. He got hard when I touched him.

I bit down on the pen cap I'd carried to bed out of habit, which was a thing I only did when I was trying to think through something embarrassing.

Does that mean he's into me?

"Piper." I said it out loud, firmly, to myself. "Get a grip. That is just a reflex. That happens to men when anything touches them there. It doesn't mean anything. It is biology. You are reading into it."

I put the pen cap down.

I stared at the ceiling.

My body did not find this argument convincing.

At some point the tiredness won. I didn't notice it happening — one second I was still running the replay, and the next second the ceiling was gone, and I was standing in 2A.

The boxes were all put away. The lights were warm, the kind of warm that meant evening and nowhere to be. The floor under my feet was the same floor I'd been pressed against an hour ago, but in the dream it was just a floor.

Declan was standing in front of me.

"I liked you the first time I saw you," he said.

Everything in my chest went light so fast it almost hurt. "Me too," I said, and I didn't even try to play it cool, it just came out. "I saw you moving boxes in the hallway and I thought—"

He smiled — actually smiled, not the careful non-expression he'd had every time I'd seen him through the door — and he leaned down and kissed me.

His mouth is so soft, I thought, which was not something I had expected, and then I stopped thinking about it because his hands were at my waist and mine were at his buttons, clumsy, taking too long, and he didn't seem to care.

My hands moved down. There was one thin layer of fabric left and I pressed my palm against it slowly, feeling the heat, the weight, and I dragged upward from the base all the way to the top and he made a sound in the back of his throat, low, almost swallowed, like he'd tried to keep it in and hadn't quite managed.

My knees went soft. I pushed closer.

He pulled back just enough to look at me. "You sure?"

"Yes," I said, and I was already nodding before the word was out. "Yes. I'm completely sure. I have never been more sure of anything."

The weight of him came down over me, and that heat pressed against the inside of my thigh and pushed, and my heart was going so fast I could feel it in my throat, and I thought —

Here it is. It's happening. I'm finally going to know what this feels like —