Cool air spilled across my breasts and my nipples hardened. Will freed himself of his pants and maneuvered my panties down and off my body. His skin was warm beneath me, his thighs firm and covered in soft hair. His hard cock rested against his stomach.

I pushed up onto my knees and positioned him where I wanted, smoothing him against me, teasing him.

“Do you want this?” I asked.

He nodded against the pillow, thumbs pressed into my hips, fingers gripping my ass. I lowered myself

slowly

slowly

until he was fully inside.

Will groaned helplessly, thrusting up into me while I moved over him. His hands reached to cup my breasts and lifted, squeezed them together before he sat up and took a nipple into his mouth.

“Will.”

He moaned around me, sucking harder before releasing it, his tongue drawing circles around the tip. He was so deep, and all I could think about or feel or hear was him. His stomach was slick with sweat where it moved against mine, his thighs firm against my ass. His fingers where he held me down and lifted me up slipped as he held me tighter, tried to move us faster.

With a groan, he flipped us over, throwing me to my back, his head down and hair fallen over his forehead. He watched where he moved inside of me, in and out. Harder. Faster.

An eternity, but never long enough.

“Fuck, Plum,” he said, kissing me until it was too much and my mouth was practically raw. With one hand he lifted my leg and pushed it to my chest.

“Jesus fuck,” he said, pistoning his hips faster now, each thrust pushing against something inside me that had me seeing stars.

I reached up, fingers grappling for the headboard, needing something to hold on to. Each snap of his hips pushed me further up the mattress and deeper inside that place in my head where static roared and the growing tension inside my lower belly—the friction and heat between my legs—became impossible to ignore.

“Will,” I breathed, gasping against his open mouth. I was going to come and I needed to come with him, feel him coming inside me and then again and again, on my breasts and my stomach, my lips.

Will reached for the edge of the mattress and pushed my leg farther into my chest and that was it. Heat exploded between my legs and ricocheted through every part of me. My toes curled, and I was coming so hard I couldn’t cry out or even say his name. He rocked into me one last time, so deep it took the breath from my lungs and I could feel him, muscles tense as he came inside me.

Will fell back to the bed and pulled me with him, cradling me into his side. “Holy shit.”

I blinked up at the ceiling, waiting for my breathing to return to normal. My bones were rubber; air cooled my fevered skin. I looked over to Will before reaching for the clock on the side of the bed. Six hours, twenty-two minutes to go. Not bad.

Sitting up, I filled two glasses from a bottle of chilled water on the bedside table, emptied mine in a single long draft, and climbed up onto Will’s lap.

His eyes moved down my naked body before he took the other glass from my hand. I watched him drink, marveling at his throat as he swallowed, his bare chest, his messy hair. This body? Was mine. Once he’d finished, I took the empty glass and pushed him back down to the pillows.

“Now,” I said, raising a single brow, “about that list . . .”

Three

Will

“Are you sure you don’t mind postponing the honeymoon?” On the couch at my side, Hanna turned her face up to me, squinting in the late-afternoon sun that streamed through our living room window. “Are you worried it will feel sort of . . . anticlimactic?”

A wild wedding, a sleepless wedding night, another interview checked off the list, and there we were: one week later, already back in our apartment, back in our day-to-day life.

There was something reassuring about taking the monumental step but then immediately falling back into pace with the rest of life. It reaffirmed what I’d told Hanna all along: The us beneath it all didn’t have to change. We could still be exactly who we were before. Married folk definitely lazed around in their underwear on a Saturday afternoon.

“I’m fine waiting.” I kissed her nose, pulling her closer. “As long as you don’t tack on any more interview trips in the meantime.”

Our rescheduled honeymoon was already booked for a little over a month after the wedding—late October—with a job-interview-free week beforehand to pack, finish up anything important in the lab, and hold any critical meetings. I wanted as much time with Hanna at home as possible.

I felt her response to this in her tiny hesitation¸ saw it in her small wince. “Hanna?”

“Not even for Caltech?” she asked sweetly.

What an odd feeling: to be fed up, to want to roll my eyes when my wife—holy fuck, my wife—received an interview request from Cal-fucking-tech.

“And when would it be?” I asked.

“Late October? We would still have a few days to get ready for the trip.” Her smile was so sweet, so genuinely hopeful, how could I possibly tell her no?

How would I, anyway? This was her career, her dream. Hanna was being courted by academic institutions all over the world. Her first interviews had been local: Princeton, Harvard, MIT, Johns Hopkins. But then the invitations had spread: Cal, Stanford. Max Planck in Germany. Oxford in the UK. And now, Caltech.

The thing was, we hadn’t really talked about how it would be if she wanted to move. We were in a holding pattern, stuck in a conversation on pause.

I kissed her nose again in answer.

“Does that mean yes?” she asked, studying me with a little smile.

“It means I would never tell you no, Plum. I think you should visit the universities you want to consider.” Kissing her mouth, I asked, “Do you feel like you have a favorite yet?”

She scrunched her nose at this. “I mean, not really?”

I watched her blink a few times, the tiny panic a little flutter in her breath. This process was a daunting one. I remembered being at that point myself: out of my post-doc and ready to tackle the next phase of my career, yet unable to believe, no matter how good my publications were, or how many job interviews I got, that I’d be able to hack it day in and day out running a lab. Research is scary. Academic research is cutthroat.

It’s one of the reasons I went into industry: I trusted my ability to determine whether a technology could be profitable and how to get it there more than I trusted my ability to come up with something innovative in its own right.