And then I stopped, overwhelmed and scared, on my elbows and knees above her, breathing shallow and erratic. She twitched underneath me, thrummed like a plucked guitar string making no sound, a moment, two, and then relaxed with a strangled laugh. She didn’t let me apologize, didn’t let me feel like I let her down again, instead she rebounded with a standard “It’s okay” Ashley-ism – something about having to feed me because I seemed hungry – and proposed a dinner at Gray’s.

If it weren’t for the conspicuously long time she took in the shower then, and the hungry look I caught in the mirror of her closet as I changed, I might have even believed it was no big deal.

I have been torturing us both with my skittishness for weeks now. I start the dance, our bodies pressed against each other, and she follows my lead, unfettered, open to wherever I choose to take us, and I trill with excitement, with want, I move us forward, I push in deeper, I draw myself out of the brittle shell of inexperience and fear that I won’t be enough, I draw her in and then – inevitably, always, I freeze up, I pull back.

And, inevitably, always, she lets me retreat, patient and understanding. And, inevitably, always, I wish she wouldn’t, I wish she would push back, demand, sate our hunger with sure moves, unbending desire. But, she doesn’t. She lets me lead – and I have, I do – straight into this purgatory of inflamed flesh and unfulfilled desires.

I know what she is doing, and I appreciate it. She is giving me time, she is letting me set the pace. She is making sure I know what I want.

I want her. I want her so badly my jaw clenches, my teeth ache. And yet, I am uncertain. What she does to me, these reactions, my need, is so foreign to everything I have known and experienced before, so foreign to me that sometimes I feel as though someone else is feeling all these things, someone who is not Spencer Carlin.

Everything I have ever thought I felt, every meager experience I ever had in love and sex, all of it pales away into nothingness under her lips. It is unnerving, petrifying, this utter lack of control I teeter on the edge of whenever she lays next to me, one thigh between mine, fingertips on my stomach, lips in a careless caress across my neck. And I would lie, I would be a horrible liar if I said it is that fear alone that holds me back. Yes, she has been the patient, in control one, she has been holding back in order to let me explore but what… what if, after all of this, I can’t, what if I don’t make her feel the way she makes me feel, what if I’m not enough?