He Kissed Me Before He Knew My Name

Chapter 5: First and Only

His penthouse stops me cold in the doorway.

Floor-to-ceiling windows. The whole Chicago skyline laid out like an offering, every light a tiny heartbeat against the black

November sky. The space is clean, intentional — dark wood, soft lighting, the kind of quiet that costs money.

"Welcome to my humble situation." He says it with a grin, spreading his arms wide, mock-modest, and I almost laugh because humble is the last word I'd use.

"You're not what I expected," I say honestly.

"What'd you expect?"

"I don't know. Band housing. Bunk beds. Something with more ramen."

He laughs — real and unguarded — and something warm unfurls in my chest that I immediately distrust.

"I'm Lucas, by the way." He says it casually, like it just occurred to him we never properly introduced ourselves. "In case you wanted

a name to put with the face."

"Avery." I offer my hand, and he shakes it with exaggerated formality, and we're both smiling like idiots for a reason I can't entirely

explain.

Lucas. I file it away carefully, like something I might need later.

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We end up on his living room floor with his back against the couch and mine against the coffee table, a bottle of whiskey between us

and some movie neither of us is actually watching.

Until the kissing scene.

I cover my eyes so fast I nearly knock over my glass.

Lucas loses it. "Are you serious right now?"

"Don't laugh at me."

"I'm not—" He's absolutely laughing. "I'm not laughing. It's just a kiss, Avery."

"I know it's a kiss."

"Do you, though?" he asks, and when I lower my hands and glare at him, he's wearing that smile again — the one that does

something deeply unfair to my circulatory system. "You looked at the screen like it personally offended you."

"I'm eighteen." I say it like that explains everything, because it does. "I went to a Catholic prep school. We had an entire semester on

the importance of not doing that."

He stares at me. "You're serious."

"Completely."

He hands me my glass. "Drink."

"Gladly."

We toast. We drink. I turn my back to the television and we talk instead — really talk, the way you only can with strangers, no

history to protect and nothing at stake. He tells me about the band, about years of weekend gigs before anyone knew their name,

about the specific terror and electricity of a sold-out crowd. I tell him about my mother. About my father and Claire. About walking

out tonight with my jacket and my wallet and then losing the wallet, and how the whole evening has been a series of decisions I can't

take back.

"You don't regret it," he says. It's not a question.

I consider lying. "No," I admit. "I really don't."

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I shower first, washing the night off my skin — the cigarette smoke from the bar, the concert sweat, the residue of grief I carried in

from my father's house. I hang my clothes on his terrace railing and pull on the oversized t-shirt he sets on the counter without

ceremony, like lending a stranger his clothes is something he does every weekend.

Maybe he does. I don't ask.

When I come back out he's already changed — gray sweats, hair damp from his own shower, sitting cross-legged on the bed with a

fresh glass and a look on his face like he's been somewhere else entirely in his head.

He looks up when I appear in the doorway.

Something in his expression shifts. Just slightly. Just enough.

"You look better in it than I do," he says quietly.

I look down at the shirt. Back up at him. "You're starting again."

"Sit down, Avery."

I sit on the edge of the bed, and he pours two fingers into a clean glass and hands it over, and we start again — drinking, talking, the

city glittering silently beyond the windows. At some point the bottle runs low and the words run out and the room goes the particular

quiet of two people who have run out of safe things to say.

His hand settles on my knee. Light. Unhurried.

Think, says some distant, well-behaved part of me. Think carefully right now.

But his thumb traces a slow arc against my skin and my brain dissolves into warm static.

"You're so beautiful," he says. Like it costs him something to say it. Like he's been holding it back.

He's barely touching me and I'm already unraveling. My hands are in my lap and I'm staring at them like they'll give me instructions.

His hand moves higher — just slightly, not pushing, just present — and I hear myself make a sound I've never made before in my life.

"Hey." His voice is low, and when I look up his eyes are serious, dark, careful. "We don't have to do anything."

"I know," I say.

"But?"

I reach for him instead of answering. I don't know where the impulse comes from — some part of me that has been waiting all night

for permission it didn't know how to ask for. My fingers curl into his shirt and I pull him toward me and then his mouth is on mine

and the room disappears.

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He kisses like he has all the time in the world. Patient. Devastating. His hands frame my face and then slide into my hair and then I'm

lying back and he's above me and the city light falls across us both like we're something worth illuminating.

This is going to change everything, I think.

I think it clearly, calmly, with complete certainty, and I don't stop.

He reads me like a language he already knows — every sound I make, every instinctive reach of my hands, every sharp intake of

breath. He goes slow. Impossibly, maddeningly slow, building something in me I've never felt before, like heat rising through layers

of ice. He asks with his hands before he acts, watching my face, adjusting, learning. I feel explored and held and undone all at once.

"Tell me if you want me to stop," he breathes against my throat.

"Don't stop," I say. My own voice sounds strange to me. Low. Certain.

He doesn't stop.

The pleasure builds in waves I have no frame of reference for — each crest higher than the last, his hands and his mouth rewriting

everything I thought I knew about my own body. I grip his shoulders. I arch into him. I stop thinking in sentences. There is only

sensation, and his voice low in my ear saying I've got you, I've got you, and the city burning beyond the glass.

When I finally break apart, it's total. It moves through me like weather.

He holds me through it. Stays close. His forehead drops to mine, both of us breathing hard, and for a moment neither of us moves.

Then he pulls back just enough to look at me.

"Avery." My name in his mouth sounds different now. Sacred, almost. Like something he's handling carefully.

"I know," I whisper.

I know what comes next. I know what this means and what it costs and that there will be no version of tonight I can walk back from.

The girl who walked out of her father's house tonight — obedient, careful, untouched — she's already gone.

And I look at Lucas's face in the low light and I feel nothing close to regret.

He moves toward me slowly, giving me every opportunity to change my mind.

I reach for him instead.

This is it. The last ordinary moment of my life. Everything after tonight will be divided into before and after, and I can feel the line

approaching, and I cross it—