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i.
The first time Devi sees Paxton Hall-Yoshida emerge from the water looking like freaking Poseidon—powerful, commanding, and dripping wet—it awakens something in her.
The droplets slipping juicily from the ends of his hair transfix her, and she’s consumed with a thirst that can only be quenched by letting them drop heavily onto her tongue. Or maybe she could slurp the water from his belly button. Lick it from the ridge of his pecs…
Obviously, the ideal resolution would be D - all of the above, but getting close enough to Paxton to follow-through on even one crazed imagining is a pipe dream. People who get so many Valentines each year that they have a designated shelf in the custodian’s closet on which to store them until the end of the school day don’t spend a lot of time talking to nerds who’ve never gotten a Valentine from someone other than her best friends after teachers stopped requiring each student to make one for every member of the class.
Because her subconscious loves to make a mockery out of her, though, Devi does actually dream about Paxton that fateful night. She finds herself wading into the ocean, deeper than she’d dare while awake, until she reaches unnaturally warm waters. He springs up from the depths like a graceful, unbelievably hot dolphin.
“You found me,” she says.
He combs his hair back from his forehead, fingers leaving dark tracks through the slick locks, and his eyes pierce her straight through her heart. “Do I know you?”
Devi shakes her head, watching a water drop make its way down his neck to the point of his nipple. Her jaw slackens.
Suddenly, she finds herself close enough to cling to his shoulders.
“Are you seriously standing right now?” she asks, finding him steady as any tree trunk. “Are you the tallest man in the world?”
“Being popular makes you tall,” he says, nodding.
She nods back. “That makes sense.”
“Your nails are breaking my skin,” he replies.
“I want to lick you dry.”
Paxton chuckles, and then says, “Okay.”
Devi’s so surprised by his willingness, even asleep, that it snaps her out of the dream.
Breathing heavily, she stares at her ceiling. She hadn’t turned off her headboard lights, so the room is bathed in a red glow.
She feels a hot haze under her skin, too.
ii.
Devi checks her phone for the second time since dropping dejectedly on the top step of Paxton’s porch. His text definitely asks her to meet him at two o’clock.
Absent-mindedly, she opens Instagram and scrolls through post after post of last night’s dance. She’s already tracked down and saved all the photos featuring her and Paxton, though, and gets bored quickly.
Locking her phone and tucking it between her thighs, she becomes aware of the fact that it’s drizzling, though she dismisses the idea of leaving as quickly as it occurs to her. It’s not like she’s in the position to stand up Paxton Hall-Yoshida.
When the rain picks up within the minute and becomes a violent downpour, it occurs to her that she’s already cheated on him. Standing him up would be small potatoes in comparison, really.
Agitated and bored, she starts to gather her hair into a ponytail.
She gets stuck after the first loop of the hair tie because, at that moment, a shirtless figure emerges from the shimmering curtain of rain, athletic shorts clinging to his thighs.
“What time is it?” he asks, shouting to be heard over the rain.
She blinks at him, body automatically angling itself toward him as he bounds up the stairs and starts to hop in place, swinging his arms.
Devi wants to sink her teeth into every muscle that flexes and releases.
Paxton stills a moment later, tugging off the armband holding his phone in place against his bicep as he drops next to her on the step. “Oh, shit, it’s basically two-thirty.”
A water drop clings to the ridge of his chin, wobbling as he talks and distracting her. She blinks a few times, trying to summon some focus.
“Have you been here long?” he asks, tossing his phone over onto the welcome mat, planting his palm behind Devi’s back, and leaning in. His nose is cold enough to make her squeak when he brushes the tip of it against hers. “Sorry.”
“How do you make tardiness hot?” she asks him.
He smiles. “I don’t know. How do you make the word tardy sound hot?”
She snorts. “I definitely don’t.”
“You do, though.”
His eyes are molten and boring into hers, and she feels the need to argue the point melt away.
He must see her expression soften into complacency because within a heartbeat, he’s kissing her.
Last time Devi had kissed a rain-soaked Paxton, her pajamas got damp and humid. This time, clenched tight against his bare chest, she feels more of a clammy situation developing, at odds with the blood pooling hot in her stomach.
The slower he drags his lips away from hers, the more powerful her urge to crawl inside him and drown.
“You’re shivering,” he notes a moment later, drawing back..
“Am I?” Her eyes blink open. “Honestly, how are you not?”
He waggles his eyebrows. “I’m hot-blooded.”
“That’s not… Never mind.”
Paxton is shaking his head—beads of water splattering in all directions—as he hops up to his feet and holds out his hand. “C’mon. Let’s go to the garage.”
She frowns out at the sheets of rain rippling in the wind. “Do you have an umbrella or something?”
“If we race, you’ll barely get wet.”
“Y’know,” she says, narrowing her eyes at him, “you’re kind of a nerd, but for exercise.”
“Yeah,” he says, raising his eyebrows. “I think they call those jocks.”
“Huh.”
Grinning, Paxton lowers himself into a lunge. “Count us down, Vishwakumar.”
She considers complaining, but… he’s really cute.
With a sigh, she gets into position next to him. “Ready,” she says, “set… Go!”
###
“Are you okay?” Paxton asks the next day, pulling his eyes away from the battle-royale game he’s playing with Trent. “You’ve been clearing your throat kind of a lot.”
“Yeah,” Trent says. “It’s very distracting, C.D.”
Devi frowns. “C.D.?”
He clarifies, “Crazy Devi.”
Paxton huffs, elbowing Trent. “Can you not call my girlfriend that?”
“I mean, I feel like it’s on her to prove that she’s not going to act crazy and break my baby boy’s heart a second time. But sure. I can keep that to myself.”
Devi narrows her eyes. “Except you didn’t.”
“Can’t argue there.”
What starts off as an irritated growl at the base of Devi’s throat quickly turns into a pained whimper.
Paxton’s eyes cut over to her again. “I can send him home.”
“Hey!” Trent pouts. “I’m only looking out for you, man.”
“That’s not…” Devi shakes her head. “I don’t feel too well, actually.”
“Oh.” Paxton lowers his controller. “What’s wrong?”
“Throat hurts,” she says succinctly, because a longer sentence would mean inviting a coughing fit, and it’s impossible to look sexy in the middle of one of those.
“I could make you tea,” he says.
The offer makes her want to crawl into his lap to express her gratitude, but she feels the throb of the idea take up residence in her lungs rather than between her thighs.
“I think I should go home, actually,” she says, frowning.
“You sure?”
“‘Cause we’re definitely gonna talk about you once you’re gone,” Trent supplies helpfully.
Paxton exhales through his nose. “Dude.”
“Oh, but don’t let me keep you from resting up,” Trent says. “You’re dating a marathoner, not a sprinter.”
Devi bugs her eyes out at Paxton, who nods.
“Yeah,” he says. “Sorry about him. He means well.”
She lets her skepticism color her tone. “Uh-huh.”
Smiling indulgently, Paxton says, “Do you need a ride?”
She looks past him at Trent, who is focused on the game. Silently, he tips his controller at her.
“No,” she says. “I’ve got my scooter.”
“Ride swift and true, C.D.”
“C’mon, man.”
“That was the last time,” Trent says. “Promise.”
Devi almost trips over a skateboard on her way to the door, busy as she is rolling her eyes.
So, cool. She can’t even walk, her chest is on fire, and Paxton’s best friend is going to spend the afternoon defaming her because she needs to go home and nap off said fire.
She should have asked for a ride home, she thinks poutily, retrieving her scooter from where she dumped it in the driveway. She’s achieved nothing by pretending she’s tougher than she really is except courting a cold.
iii.
“God, the East Coast kinda downplays this whole humidity thing,” Paxton says.
“What do you mean?” Devi asks, watching her feet so she doesn’t trip over a tree root or rock or something else that belongs in nature way more than she does.
“My skin is weeping and it sucks.”
She snickers. “Keep up, ASU. You’re in my territory now, and I demand some respect.”
The bravado tastes metallic on Devi’s tongue. She’d been shocked when she’d gotten the email from Paxton asking if he could come visit her at Princeton and, compounded by the surprise that he’s actually shown up, irrationally jumpy. After all, until finding the message in her inbox, she hadn’t spoken to him since her graduation the summer before, which he’d only attended because it was also Trent’s graduation.
“Should’ve told the air to be breathable, then.”
In preparation, she’d looked up fun (and free) off-campus activities. Perhaps it’d been hubris that led her to select a hike—its billing as ‘easy’ and ‘for beginners’ notwithstanding—but she’d felt this irrational need to prove that she’s grown up and grown beyond recognition, regardless of how untrue that might be.
“Is the great Paxton Hall-Yoshida out of shape?” she asks, turning to him.
He huffs, unscrewing the top of his water bottle. “Apparently I am on this side of the country.” He gestures vaguely around. “You seriously don’t notice this?”
She pouts sympathetically, stopping so he can drink. “Move-in day was a misery.”
His eyes cut to her as he guzzles down water, and Devi’s attention is drawn to his glistening throat. He’s slick with sweat, beads of it rolling fatly from the underside of his chin to his clavicle.
Her mouth starts to water.
As he recaps his bottle, there’s a smug grin playing at the edge of his mouth.
“Oh, whatever,” she says, spinning away and marching out ahead on the trail once more. “You’re still stupid hot and know it, and I refuse to feel shame for noticing.”
“Good.”
She snorts. “Says the guy trying to give me shit for it.”
“I wasn’t,” he says plainly. “Just enjoying you noticing.”
Devi feels her heart lurch in her chest. “Do you have any idea how unfair it is that you’re as hot as you are and well-adjusted?”
His laughter spooks a bird out of a tree, squawking its displeasure as it takes flight.
Paxton tugs on the end of her braid. “You’ve got a way more dangerous combo, y’know.”
She frowns. “Excuse me?”
“It’s this whole femme-fatale thing. You’re just as likely to kill a dude with your hotness as you are with your cunning.”
Her surprise slows her down to a stop. “You think of me as a femme fatale? You know what a femme fatale is?”
He nods this slow, hypnotic nod. “Obviously. You’re, like, scary powerful.”
Maybe it’s the way his sweaty sheen makes him look like an action hero or the fact that part of her reverted to the needy high school version of herself the moment she’d opened his email, but—
She leans closer.
“Behind!” A biker calls out to them just before whizzing past.
Devi jolts.
“We should get moving,” she says, not meeting his eyes. “We’re meeting Danni for Hargadon craft hour at two.”
Other than an inscrutable twitch of his mouth, Paxton doesn’t react to the fact that she’d been ramping up to kiss him. “Sure.”
They trudge along the trail in silence until he adds, “Your roommate seems cool.”
“She is,” Devi agrees. “She doesn’t fuck around when it comes to craft hour, though.”
“Yeah,” he says, nodding. “I saw your room.”
+ i.
“You can ask me, you know,” Paxton says later that night.
They’re squeezed in side-by-side in her dorm bed, her laptop balanced across their knees. He’d chosen some Batman movie for them to watch, and Devi’s only kind of paying attention, wrestling as she is with her body’s nostalgic horniness at being so close to him and her hard-earned self-restraint.
“Ask you what?”
“Why I reached out.”
Heat flashes through her, though she’s not sure why that should be the case. It’s not like the offer is a come-on.
It’s not not a come-on, either, though.
“Okay,” she says, cutting her eyes over at him. “Why are you here?”
“I declared my major, finally.”
It’s not at all the answer she’s expecting. She blinks. “Uh, okay. What is it?”
“Education,” he says, picking at the wrinkles of his pajama pants.
It’s weird to see him shy, but of course, that’s in large part because she never allowed him the space to be. When they’d been together—before it’d all come crashing down around her—he was always a god to her. Her Poseidon, king of Sherman Oaks High.
She superimposes that image at the front of a classroom, sees him patiently explaining the history of Ancient Greece while the kids in the room hang on his every word, transfixed by the way he makes every sentence sound like the most beautiful thing in the world.
“Damn,” she says. “I kinda love that for you.”
A blush creeps into his cheeks. “Yeah,” he says, nodding. “But it has me thinking a lot about high school.”
The shape of the conversation starts to clarify itself.
“So this trip is a postmortem, huh?”
His brow furrows. “A what?”
“Oh, uh. Postmortem. A dissection of something that died.”
“I guess that’s kinda the thing,” he says, shrugging. “You’re never really dead to me. I kinda found out what I was capable of, thanks to you.”
Devi knows there’s a version of her who’d existed and would have repeated these words to herself over and over so she’d never forget the order. She would have scribbled them in a dozen notebooks, like a magic spell.
As it is, her present self feels her blood warm at the idea that Paxton thinks about her with any kind of frequency. After his brutal—if, she can admit this with the benefit of hindsight, fair—refusal to put up with her neurotic inferiority complex ended their relationship, they didn’t have a lot of contact.
Even after she’d learned to let go of that pesky expectation of rejection, Paxton dumping her had felt like a not-quite-healed wound.
“I think you’d have gotten there some other way,” she says after a beat, tentatively resting her head on his shoulder.
He curls toward her without hesitation, the laptop sliding further down their legs.
“Maybe,” he says. “But I didn’t.”
“Right,” she says. Then, “I get it. I probably wouldn’t have ever stopped feeling like an unfuckable nerd without you.”
The UN reference, of course, conjures the specter of Ben Gross, battle-ready and eager to contest the point that Paxton had been primarily responsible for her transition out of awkward desperation and into the realm of sexual experience.
With Paxton, it wasn’t about actually losing her virginity, in the end, she wants to tell Ben. It was about her longest-standing crush being willing in the first place. Desire isn’t a straight line, she knows now.
Just look at us, she’d argue. Broken up by practicality more than anything else.
And the Ben in her mind can pout all he wants, but he can’t tell her she’s wrong.
Under her cheek, Paxton rumbles with laughter.
“What?” she asks, already smiling herself.
“Nothing,” he says. “I just confessed that you made me feel smarter than everyone expected me to be, and you repay the compliment with thirst. Never change, Lil D.”
“Whatever,” she says, poking him in the side. “Horniness can be profound as any part of the human experience.”
“Word,” he says easily.
Their flirting during the hike floats to the surface of her mind in the ensuing comfortable lull in their conversation, followed by the image of him assembling his googly-eyed popsicle stick monster with painstaking care at craft hour.
She thinks she’s being subtle when she squeezes her thighs together, but a moment later, Paxton pauses the mostly-forgotten movie.
“Last I heard, you were single,” he says.
She rubs her mouth into the soft fabric of his t-shirt. It might be her imagination that it smells like chlorine, but regardless, her pulse starts to race at the merest suggestion of Paxton in a pool.
“I am,” she says.
“Me too.”
They’d never gotten further than under-the-shirt, over-the-bra stuff. Devi’s suddenly very aware that she might finally be able to satiate her curiosity about the dimensions of Paxton’s penis.
“Do you wanna…” She trails off, but he doesn’t fill in the blank for her. And anyway, she’s not timid about this shit anymore, not even around Paxton fucking Hall fucking Yoshida. “I’m down to smash if you are.”
Gently, he leans forward, dislodging her from his shoulder. He takes the laptop with him as he slips off the bed, setting it on her desk before rooting around in his duffle for a second.
He pockets whatever it is he’d retrieved before standing and slipping his knee back onto the edge of the mattress.
“Condom,” he explains.
And, okay, they’re really gonna do this.
“C’mere,” she says, allowing herself to sound excited even if it comes off nerdy or unattractive.
Paxton grins a little dopily—though still impossibly beautiful—and crawls his way up the bed until they’re face-to-face.
“I wasn’t assuming we were gonna do this when you emailed me back,” he says, then kisses her, feather-light pressure. “But I was kinda hoping we would.”
She nods, grabbing his wrist and guiding his hand over the crest of her thigh. She tells him, “I’ve been thinking about it, too.”
When he dutifully presses against the crotch of her yoga pants, she hums with satisfaction, her head lolling back.
“Make that noise again,” he says, voice rough at the edges.
“Earn it,” she volleys back.
Surprisingly responsive to direction, Paxton works off her pants, then his fingers are rubbing over the lace of her briefs because, yeah, she wasn’t taking this possibility for granted, either, but she wasn’t about to show up unprepared.
“I’ve always loved your hands,” she says, lifting her head to watch him.
He arches an eyebrow at her, teasing, and she feels like two versions of herself at once again—the girl who’d have gotten embarrassed by that look and backtracked clumsily, as well as present-day Devi, comfortable enough to take Paxton’s goading in the spirit it’s meant.
“You can press harder,” she tells him.
He does, eyes roving over her face to catch her reaction. “I’ve always loved when you get bossy.”
She scoffs. “You haven’t seen bossy, mister.”
The look he gives her is this intoxicating cocktail of fondness and hope and—fuck, had he always looked at her like this and she’d just been too uninformed to recognize it for what it was?—lasciviousness.
As they watch each other, he tugs the lacy briefs down a couple inches so he can press his fingers against her bare skin. They both swear at the contact.
It’s a little disorienting, honestly, being this sloppy for him. She’d never actually wanted him to have the proof of how much more she’d liked him than he could have possibly liked her.
Being presented with the evidence, though, makes Paxton surge into her with the force of an ocean wave.
His kiss manages to be tinged with gratitude, and Devi cups his perfect cheek, thumb stroking encouragingly as he slides himself inside her then twists his fingers deftly in a way that makes her gasp.
“Do that again.”
When he does, she bites down on his lower lip.
He makes a muffled noise of protest, though doesn’t let up on the rhythm he’s building.
“Sorry,” she says, relaxing her jaw.
He shakes his head. “S’okay.”
She knows he doesn’t mean okay as in you can do that again, but she really wants to sink her teeth back into his flesh, to lock down on this moment in time. It’s impossible to keep someone forever, but when she looks back on this, she wants to do so with the knowledge that she poured herself fully into being with him.
She catches his earlobe and squeezes, a gentler form of thanks for submitting his body to the exhilarating, messy project of fitting it against hers.
He leans into the gesture with something like a purr rumbling in the base of his throat.
Her fingers tumble there next, skimming over the ridge of his Adam’s apple and making him shiver.
“Devi…”
She nudges her nose against his. “Paxton.”
He kisses her at the same moment he presses his fingers deeper inside, exerting this kind of upward pressure that makes her feel like balloon rubber. Something that can stretch out and out and out to the very edge of exploding.
“I had this theory,” she says, panting as he slides out of her and draws back to strip off his shirt, “that because you’re so pretty, you wouldn’t actually be that great at sex.”
“Excuse me?”
She waves off his playful offense. “It was transparent cope. I mean, I never quite forgave myself for being too chicken to fuck you when I had the chance.”
He shakes his head, stripping off his pants and boxers in one smooth movement. “And now?”
With Paxton Hall-Yoshida naked in her bed, her past shyness doesn’t seem so distant.
“Damn,” she says. “I don’t know if you’ve been told this before, but you’re very pretty.”
“Most people don’t tell my dick directly, to be fair.”
“Sorry,” she says, though she can’t pull her eyes away even as she removes her own underwear, letting her knees fall open in a silent invitation. “May I…?”
He shuffles a little closer—not that he was too far to touch before, the bed isn’t spacious—and she skims her fingers from the base up to the head. It bobs a little in response to her touch.
With his eyes squeezed shut, Paxton passes her the condom, and Devi presses a kiss to the top of his thigh before ripping into the package and rolling it on.
As he crawls over top of her, Devi thinks about her first time—of all the anticipation and nerves. It hadn’t taken many subsequent times for that bigness to fade. Sex, it had turned out, is like anything else a person can do hundreds of times. It changes shape, morphs to fit a mood or a moment.
She hadn’t been expecting the bigness to ever come back, but here it is, daunting and filling up her stomach.
Paxton seems to understand that her sudden vise-like grip on his biceps is a silent request for him to pause a moment.
“You okay?” he asks.
She’s on the verge of tears, is what she is. Embarrassing.
What she says in reply doesn’t ease her embarrassment, either. “I wanted you too much to ever actually have you.”
His forehead comes to rest against hers. “If that were true, I wouldn’t be here.”
The logic is sound, so she takes a breath in through her nose, lets it out through pursed lips, and then nods.
People, too, change shape. They can expand, they can contract, they can submerge themselves entirely in someone else.
They can also break the surface again, a single rush of oxygen holding all the giddiness and desperation of being alive.
She lets herself be swept away in Paxton’s undulation, trusting that—even swept up in a strong current—she knows her way back to herself.