They had waited eleven weeks, which both of them would later agree was either heroic or insane.

Dana met Theo at a friend's bookshop, where he was buying a used copy of a novel she loved and she told him he was holding the wrong edition, the translation was terrible, and he should put it down immediately. He bought it anyway, out of spite, and read it that night, and texted her at two in the morning to say she'd been right, and she texted back I know, and that was that.

Eleven weeks of texts that got longer. Of dates where they didn't so much as hold hands, because Dana had said, the second time they went out, "I want to take this slow. I want to want it." And Theo, to his own surprise, had understood. Not patiently — he was not a patient man — but understandingly. He wanted to want it too.

By week eleven the wanting had a color and a temperature. It arrived in his hands whenever she laughed. It pooled low in her belly when he pushed his sleeves up.

On a Thursday in late autumn she texted him: My apartment. Saturday. Bring nothing.

He brought wine anyway. She didn't complain.

Two

The first hour was almost unbearable, in the way that a held breath is unbearable. They ate the pasta she'd overcooked and pretended it was fine. They sat on opposite ends of her small couch, a cushion's width of discipline between them, and talked about nothing — the bookshop, the bad translation, her sister's wedding — while the thing between them got louder and louder until it was practically a third guest.

Then, at some point, she stopped mid-sentence. She'd been telling him about the wedding, about the toast, and she stopped. Looked at him.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay?"

"Okay." She stood and held out her hand.

And he took it, and that was the moment the held breath broke — a whole season of restraint snapping at once, everywhere, all at the same time. She pulled him up and into her and they were kissing before either of them was fully standing, her fingers in his hair, his hands spanning her waist and pulling her against him, and the eleven weeks of not became a kind of fuel. They had practiced wanting each other for months. Now they got to spend it.

Her back hit the doorframe on the way to the bedroom — not hard, but enough to make her gasp into his mouth, and Theo froze.

"Sorry—"

"Don't you dare be sorry."

"Did I hurt—"

"Theo." She took his hand and put it flat on her chest, over her heart, which was going like a rabbit's. "If you stop being careful with me tonight I'll never forgive you. But if you stop being gentle with me, I also won't forgive you. Do you understand the difference?"

He thought about it, forehead against hers, breathing her in. Soap and wool and underneath it something warm that was purely her.

"Yeah," he said. "I think I do."

Three

They undressed each other in the lamplight, and it was nothing like the movies and everything like the best thing that had ever happened to either of them. His hands shoo on her skin. Her laugh when his sweater caught on his glasses. The two of them stopping, at the last of it, to just look — because they'd imagined this so many times, separately, on separate nights, and the reality was better in a way that made the imagining seem cheap.

"You're staring," she said.

"I'm memorizing."

"It's a body, not a cathedral."

"Debatable."

She pulled him down onto the bed and they lay side by side, learning each other with their hands. Everything was first. The sound she made when he kissed her neck, right below her ear — he filed that away, first of many discoveries. The way he shivered when she dragged her nails lightly down his spine. The particular weight and warmth of her in his arms when he rolled her under him, and her legs came up around his hips like they'd been rehearsing for years.

When he finally pushed into her, they both stopped. Just stopped. Forehead to forehead, breath mingling, joined, eyes open.

"Hi," she said, wrecked already.

"Hi."

"Don't move yet."

"I'm not moving."

"Not even a little."

"I'm dying."

"Die quietly."

But then she rolled her hips, once, and his control went with it. What followed was not tidy. It was hungry and sweet and clumsy in exactly the right places — her heel slipping on the sheet, his elbow giving out once so he dropped his weight onto her and she laughed and said don't stop, and he didn't, he didn't, and the eleven weeks of restraint all spent itself at once in a long white wave that took them both together, her name in his mouth and his name in hers.

After, they lay in the wreck of the bed, sweat cooling, her head on his chest listening to his heart slow from a gallop to a canter and then, at last, to something normal.

"So," she said. "The slow thing."

"Mm."

"We should do that again."

"The waiting eleven weeks?"

"No, idiot." She propped her chin on his sternum and grinned up at him. "The other thing."

He was already reaching for her. "Give me ten minutes."

"I'll give you seven."