Page 10 of Guy's Girl
Before Ginny can think too hard about it, she says, “Sure. Thanks.”
As she follows Adrian into his room, she glances once over her shoulder. Clay and Tristan’s eyebrows are so high that they look like they might fall off their foreheads. She widens her eyes at them, and then she’s inside Adrian’s bedroom, and the door is closing, and she’s alone with a man for the first time in a year.
Sweat pricks her neck. What if he tries to have sex with her? What if, as they make out, he starts to push her head downward, the way so many men have before? Ginny knows that, if he does, she’ll go along with it—whether she wants to or not. She won’t want to make him angry. She won’t want him not to like her.
Before she talks herself out of it, Ginny hops onto the bed. The mattress bounces beneath her as she takes in the space: bare walls,an empty desk, a closet filled with running shorts and collared shirts.
“Not into decorating?” she asks.
“Haven’t had the time, really.” Adrian unbuttons his shirt, then shrugs it off. Ginny tugs his sheets up around her.
Adrian is tall and concave, his chest and stomach scooped with patterns of muscle. His left rib, she notes, juts out of his torso like a broken piano key. She takes in his slim, muscular thighs. Runner’s thighs. Despite spending most of his life at a desk, Adrian is effortlessly skinny.
Ginny hates how envious she is.
He flicks off the lights and crawls into bed beside her. Moonlight filters in the lone window that looks out on the building next door. It illuminates the pale stretch of his body. Long and ethereal, like the ghost of a spider. Ginny waits for him to pull her on top of him, to stick his tongue down her throat.
Instead, he wraps his arms around her and lays his head on the other pillow. “What’s it like in Minnesota?” he asks.
Ginny hesitates.He wants to talk?
She thinks for a second. “Miserable,” she says at last. “What’s Goldman Sachs like?”
“Miserable,” he says, and they both laugh.
“Where did you grow up?” she asks.
“Indianapolis. But I lived in Budapest until I was nine.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Then my mom married an American and moved my sister, Beatrix, and me to the Midwest.”
Ginny notices that he doesn’t mention his dad. “Do you miss it?”
“Sometimes.” Adrian runs a hand down the length of her arm. “Mostly I miss my grandparents.”
“Are they in Budapest?”
“Just outside, in a town called Szentendre.”
“Do you visit?”
“Every year.”
She’s waiting for him to push. To lean in and slide his tongue into her mouth. To pick up her hand and drag it down to his boxers.
But he doesn’t. He just holds her.
They talk for a half hour. Ginny jabbers at him about Minnesota, about Sofra-Moreno, about her life back at Harvard. She’s halfway through a story about Finch convincing Tristan that Martha Stewart is the leader of the Illuminati when Adrian interrupts her.
“Ginny?”
“Yes?” She adjusts her body inside his arms. For being such a skinny boy, he’s surprisingly warm and soft. “What is it?”
In response, Adrian lifts a hand and moves it tentatively toward her face. He brushes her cheek with his fingertips. At his touch, Ginny goes very still. Breath drags unsteadily in and out of her lungs. Adrian settles his palm on her cheek. Then he leans forward and presses his lips to hers.
The kiss is sweet. Tender. He doesn’t try to push further. He doesn’t move his hand down her back, grind into her, or inch his fingers up her shirt. He just kisses her.
