I parked. Got out. Stood on the pavement for a moment longer than necessary, which was my last reasonable window to make a different choice. The lobby light caught the glass doors in amber. Above, somewhere in this building, she was in her apartment—possibly still in the navy dress, possibly angry, probably doing the thing she did where she held everything behind her face and processed it alone and quietly, the slow-burning way of her that I’d read in the first five minutes of knowing her and had not been able to stop reading since.
I went inside.
The elevator was quick. The hallway was quiet. I stood at her door and looked at the number on it for a moment that was mostly just the last few seconds of a man acknowledging that after this, the architecture of things changed.
Then I knocked.
She opened the door and looked at me, and I watched the emotion move across her face—surprise, then something warmer and immediately controlled, then hurt.
“What are you doing here?”
Her voice was steady. Of course it was. She was always steady on the surface, always the composed, clear-eyed version of herself that the world got to see. But her eyes—those enormous, expressive, catastrophically honest eyes—were doing the full conversation that her voice wasn’t having.
I didn’t answer with words.
I walked in.
She stepped back, and I closed the distance between us, and I kissed her, and it was nothing like the car.
The car had been an accident, something that happened in the space between one decision and the next. This was deliberate. This was chosen, completely, with full knowledge of what it was and what it wasn’t and what it was going to cost me in the morning.
I pulled back just enough to say it against her mouth.
“What do you think I’m doing here?”
She answered the only way that mattered.
Her hands came up—one at my jaw, one at my chest—and she kissed me back with the same completeness she’d brought to everything I’d seen her do. No hesitation. No performance. Just Sofia, entirely present, entirely herself, making a decision with the same quiet certainty she’d used when she slipped her hand into mine at the fundraiser.
Choosing.
Something in my chest came undone.
We moved through the apartment, too focused on each other to navigate carefully. Her hands found my jacket. Mine found the zip at the back of her dress. I was aware of her breathing, of every small sound she made, of the way she looked at me when we paused—not shy, not uncertain, just present and warm and entirely unguarded in the way the photograph had captured and the person had exceeded.
“Wait,” she whispered, her voice barely audible over the sound of our breathing. “Before we…before this goes any further. I need you to know something.”
I felt the heat in my blood reach a boiling point, but the tremor in her hands kept me anchored. “What is it, Sofia?”
“I’ve never…I’ve never done this before,” she said, the words tumbling out in a rush of honesty. “I’m a virgin.”
The world seemed to stop for a heartbeat. I looked down at her—really looked at her. The weight of what she was giving me, the “itch” I’d so callously planned to scratch, suddenly felt like a lead weight in my gut. This wasn’t just a hookup for her. This was everything.
I leaned down, pressing a lingering, soft kiss to her forehead, trying to pour a tenderness into it that I didn’t know I possessed.
“You’re sure?” I asked. My voice had dropped, thick and gravelly with a hunger that felt more like a warning. “Because once I start, I’m not stopping. I’m going to ruin you for anyone else.”
Sofia didn’t blink. Her fingers laced through mine, her grip bruising. “I’m sure,” she hissed, her eyes locking onto mine with a defiant heat. “Now, fuck me.”
Her hands flew to my chest, bunching the fabric of my shirt and yanking me forward until our heartbeats collided. I walked her back and slammed her against the hallway wall, the thud echoing in the quiet house.
I needed her skin. I shoved my hands under the hem of her sweater, my palms scraping against her ribs until I found the small of her back. The second I touched her, she let out a soft, broken moan that vibrated against my mouth, nearly undoing me right there.
“Gregory,” she breathed, her head falling back to expose the long, pale line of her throat.
“Look at me, Sofia,” I commanded, my voice a low snap.
When she opened her eyes, they were glazed, dark with a terrifying kind of vulnerability. I didn’t give her a chance to look away. I hiked her hips up, guiding myself into her with a hard, steady pressure that made her gasp. The friction was immediate and punishing—the sheer physicality of holding herpinned against the plaster while I moved inside her created a frantic, unstable energy.