Chapter 1: The Rooftop Pact
The rooftop gravel digs into my palms as I scoot closer to the edge. The city breathes below us, a million neon sighs painting the low clouds in chemical colors. I can feel Harry’s warmth beside me, a solid line against the chill that’s making me shiver. Or maybe that’s just the terror.
“I’ve never done it.”
The words fall out of my mouth like loose stones, tumbling into the silence between us. I can’t look at him. I stare at my chipped black nail polish instead, at the way it contrasts against the dirty concrete.
Harry doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t even move. The only sound is the distant wail of a siren, five blocks over.
“Done what, Nik?” His voice is quiet, rougher than usual.
“Anything.” I squeeze my eyes shut. “I mean, not nothing-nothing. I’ve made out. But like, sloppy, drunk, teeth-clashing make-outs at parties. That’s it. I’ve never… I’ve never had a guy’s hand up my shirt. Not really. I’ve never been fingered. I’ve definitely never had sex. I’m a twenty-one-year-old virgin who hasn’t even been eaten out.”
There it is. My deepest, dumbest shame, hanging in the air between us like a bad smell. I wait for the pity, the awkward shift away, the platitudes.
He doesn’t give me any of that.
A calloused thumb hooks under my chin, forcing my face toward his. In the moonlight, his green eyes are almost black, the tattoos swirling down his forearm a dark, intricate map I don’t know how to read. He searches my face, my eyes, my parted lips.
“Not even a proper kiss?” he asks, and his voice is a low thrum that goes straight to my spine.
I just shake my head, a tiny, pathetic movement.
The hand on my chin slides up to cup my jaw. His thumb presses against my bottom lip, dragging it down slightly. My breath hitches, gets stuck somewhere in my throat.
“Fuck,” he breathes, and it’s not judgment. It’s something else entirely.
Then his mouth is on mine.
It’s not a question. It’s a takeover. His lips are soft but demanding, moving against mine with a confidence that unravels me. I freeze for a second, a deer in headlights, but then he licks a hot, insistent line across the seam of my lips and my body reacts before my brain can. I open for him.
His tongue slides into my mouth. It’s wet, deep, and shamelessly intimate. He tastes like spearmint gum and cheap beer and something uniquely , fundamentally Harry. One of his hands tangles in the blue-and-purple curls at the nape of my neck, tilting my head to get a better angle. The other arm wraps around my back, pulling me flush against the hard planes of his chest. I can feel every ridge of his abs, the steady, strong beat of his heart.
It’s nothing like the sloppy, aimless kisses I’ve known. This has intent. This has skill. His tongue strokes against mine, explores, claims. A low sound vibrates in his chest and into mine. I’m melting, liquid heat pooling low in my belly, my hands fisting the soft cotton of his t-shirt just to anchor myself.
He pulls back suddenly, leaving me gasping, my lips swollen and wet. His breath is ragged, his eyes wild.
“That,” he says, his voice a gravelly scrape, “is a proper kiss.”
I can only stare, my mind blank, every nerve ending on fire.
He doesn’t let me recover. His gaze burns down my body. “All that fire. All that fucking attitude. And no one’s ever touched you?” He leans in again, his lips brushing my ear. “No one’s ever made you come?”
I shake my head, mute.
“I’m going to fix that.” The words are a dark promise. “I’m going to fuck that innocence right out of you, Nikki. Starting now.”
Before I can process it, his hands are on my shoulders, pushing me back. I yelp as my back meets the rough gravel of the rooftop, the tiny stones biting through my thin sweater. He looms over me, a silhouette against the hazy purple sky, all broad shoulders and focused intensity.
“Harry, what—”
“Shut up,” he says, but there’s no malice in it. It’s a command, direct and hot. His hands go to the button of my jeans. His fingers are deft, quick. The pop of the button, the rasp of the zipper are obscenely loud in the quiet night. He yanks the denim down my thighs, taking my plain cotton panties with them in one rough pull. The cold night air hits my bare cunt and I flinch, a sob of surprise catching in my throat.
“Look at you,” he growls, spreading my knees apart with his hands. “So fucking pretty. And all mine tonight.”
He doesn’t kneel. He drops down between my legs, his hands hooking under my thighs, pulling me toward his mouth. I cry out, my hands scrabbling at the gravel. I’m exposed, completely open to him and the open sky.
The first touch of his tongue is a flat, hot lick from my entrance all the way up to my clit.
I jolt like I’ve been electrocuted. A ragged, broken sound tears from my throat.
He does it again. Slower this time. Deliberate. His tongue is soft but relentless, circling my clit, then plunging shallowly into my opening. He’s not gentle. He’s hungry. He eats me like I’m his last meal, his stubble scratching the tender skin of my inner thighs, his nose buried against me. The wet, filthy sounds fill the space around us, and my brain short-circuits. This is nothing I’ve ever felt, nothing I’ve ever dreamed. It’s too much. It’s not enough.
“Harry… I can’t…”
“You can,” he murmurs against my flesh, his breath hot. “You will. Come on my tongue, Nikki. Let me taste it.”
He zeroes in on my clit, sucking the sensitive bud into his mouth, flicking it with the very tip of his tongue. A coil of pure, white-hot pleasure tightens deep in my gut. My hips buck off the ground, but he holds me down, his grip firm. The world narrows to the point where his mouth meets my body. The cold gravel, the distant city, the stars—they all blur into a meaningless smear. There is only this building, brutal pressure.
It crests without warning. One second I’m writhing, a litany of “oh god, oh god, oh fuck” spilling from my lips, and the next my entire body seizes. A scream rips from my lungs, raw and unfiltered, as the orgasm detonates through me. It’s seismic, wracking, stealing the air from my chest. He doesn’t let up, drinking down my pulses until the sensations turn sharp, over-sensitive, and I whimper, pushing weakly at his head.
He pulls back, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. His lips are glistening, his eyes triumphantly dark. He crawls up my body, his weight settling over me, the hard ridge of his erection pressing against my still-quivering thigh through his jeans.
He looks down at me, my jeans around my knees, my body still trembling from the aftershocks.
“Lesson one,” he says, his voice thick. “You deserve to feel good. And I’m just getting started.”
His weight was a solid, grounding heat against the sudden chill skimming my sweat-damp skin. I couldn’t move. My body was a liquid thing, bones dissolved, muscles useless. The aftermath of the orgasm still buzzed in my veins, a shocking, foreign electricity.
“You’re shaking,” he murmured, his lips against my temple. His hand smoothed my hair back from my face, a gesture so at odds with the filth of what he’d just done.
“I don’t… I don’t know what that was,” I choked out, my voice thin and ragged.
“That was you coming,” he said, simple as stating the weather. He nudged my thigh with his knee. “Lift your hips.”
Still operating on a delay, I obeyed. He hooked his fingers in the waistband of my jeans and panties and dragged them the rest of the way off. The cool air hit me fully. I was naked from the waist down on a library rooftop, my best friend hovering over me with a look of focused hunger. The reality of it should have felt cheap. It felt anything but.
He sat back on his heels, staring down at me. His gaze was a physical touch, scraping over my spread legs, my stomach, my breasts still confined in my sweater and bra. He unbuttoned his own jeans, the sound of the zpper loud and final. He shoved them down just enough to free his cock.
I’d never seen one. Not in person, not hard. My breath hitched. It was… a lot. Thick and veined, curving slightly upwards, the head flushed a dark red. He fisted it loosely, giving it a slow stroke as he watched my face.
“See something you like, Martinez?” The old nickname, the one from study sessions and late-night pizza, sounded obscene now.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” I whispered, the admission wrenching itself from me.
“You don’t have to do a goddamn thing,” he said. “First time’s mine. All you have to do is feel it.”
He lowered himself over me again, bracing one forearm by my head. The other hand guided himself, the blunt, hot head of his cock nudging against my entrance. I was wet—soaking wet from his mouth—but I was still tight. Untouched.
“Look at me,” he ordered, and my hazel eyes snapped to his green ones. There was a question there, buried under the command. I gave a tiny, frantic nod.
He pushed in.
It was a burn. A sharp, stunning fullness that stole the air from my lungs. I gasped, my fingers digging into his biceps. He was slow, relentless, an inch at a time, letting my body stretch and ache around him. His jaw was clenched, a muscle ticking in his cheek.
“Fuck,” he hissed, dropping his forehead to mine. “You’re so fucking tight. Christ, Nikki.”
When he was fully sheathed, he stopped, letting me adjust. The burning sensation slowly ebbed, replaced by a deep, impossible fullness. I felt every inch of him, a claiming presence inside me. I shifted my hips, an experimental roll, and we both groaned.
“Okay?” he asked, his breath hot and ragged on my lips.
“Okay,” I breathed.
He pulled out almost all the way, then drove back in. A proper thrust. It knocked a sound from me—half-pain, half-pleasure. He set a rhythm, deep and punishing, each stroke dragging against a spot inside me that made stars burst behind my eyelids. The gravel bit into my shoulders and back, a sharp counterpoint to the brutal pleasure splitting me open.
“This is what it feels like,” he grunted, his hips pistoning. “This is what you’ve been missing. This is me, inside you. Remember it.”
I could only wrap my legs around his waist, my heels digging into the small of his back, pulling him deeper. My earlier nervousness was incinerated, burned away by a pure, raw need to get closer, to take more. He was right. This was his. I was his, in this moment, on this roof.
His pace increased, becoming frantic. The slap of skin, our ragged breathing, the distant hum of the city—it was all one chaotic symphony. He shifted his angle, grinding his pelvis against my clit with every thrust, and the coiled tension began building again, faster and more intense than before.
“I’m gonna… Harry, I’m gonna—”
“Come,” he snarled. “Come on my cock. Do it.”
His command was the trigger. My second orgasm wasn’t a scream; it was a silent, shattering implosion. My body clamped around him, convulsing, my vision whiting out at the edges. He swore, a vicious, beautiful string of obscenities, and with three more deep, ragged thrusts, he followed me over. I felt the hot, liquid pulse of him inside me, the final, intimate claim.
He collapsed, his weight crushing me into the gravel, his face buried in the curve of my neck. We lay there, gasping, a mess of sweat and come and tangled clothes.
Slowly, the world seeped back in. The chill. The rough ground. The reality of what we’d just done.
He was the first to move. He pulled out of me, a soft, wet sound that made me flinch. He rolled onto his back beside me, staring up at the smog-blurred stars. After a moment, he reached over and blindly found my hand, lacing his fingers through mine. Our hands were both dirty, gritty with roof dust.
“So,” he said finally, his voice hoarse. “Lesson two.”
I turned my head to look at him. “There’s a lesson two?”
He turned his head, too. His green eyes were unreadable in the dark. “Yeah. It can feel like that with someone who knows what they’re doing. With someone who gives a shit if you feel good.”
I swallowed, the emotions a tangled knot in my throat—gratitude, shame, a dawning, terrifying addiction to the way he’d just made me feel. “Is that what this is? You giving a shit?”
He lifted our joined hands and pressed my knuckles to his lips, a gesture unexpectedly tender. “It’s a start. We’ve got a lot more lessons to get through.”
He sat up, then stood, pulling his jeans up. He offered me a hand. I took it, wobbling as I stood, my legs feeling like overcooked spaghetti. He handed me my bunched-up jeans and panties. I dressed in silence, the fabric feeling strange against my sensitized skin.
We walked back to the roof access door, the distance between us both smaller and vast, infinitely changed. As he held the door open for me, he paused.
“Tomorrow. My place. Seven.” It wasn’t a question.
I nodded, stepping past him into the sterile fluorescent light of the stairwell. I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. My body still hummed with him, a new, permanent ache between my legs. A badge of my lost innocence.
And a problem, blooming quietly in my chest. Because it hadn’t felt like a lesson. It had felt like a beginning. And I had no idea what that meant.
The walk back to my dorm was a blur of damp pavement and distant laughter. Every step sent a low, warm throb between my legs—a persistent reminder. My body felt like a crime scene, newly discovered. I kept expecting someone to point, to smell the sex on me.
My room was dark, still smelling of Aria’s vanilla perfume and yesterday’s coffee. I didn’t turn on the light. I went straight to the tiny attached bathroom, locked the door, and flicked the switch.
The fluorescent light was merciless.
I looked wrecked. My blue-purple curls were a wild nest of gravel and night air. My lips were swollen. A faint, red abrasion marked the line of my jaw where his stubble had rubbed. But it was my eyes that held me. They looked wider, darker, like the shock hadn’t fully settled.
I peeled off my clothes. There was gravel embedded in the wool of my sweater. A faint smudge of dirt—or maybe blood—on the inside of my thigh. I turned on the shower as hot as I could stand and stepped under the spray.
The water stung the tiny abrasions on my back. I braced my hands against the tiles, letting it sluice over me, trying to wash the feel of him away. It was impossible. The memory was under my skin. The brutal heat of his mouth. The shocking, full stretch of him inside me. The guttural sounds he’d made.
“I’m going to fuck that innocence right out of you.”
A shiver that had nothing to do with the water racked my body. I’d asked for this. In a roundabout, terrified way, I’d handed him the broken parts of my ego and asked him to fix them. He wasn’t being gentle. He was being efficient. And part of me, a part that disgusted the English major in me who loved romance novels, craved that efficiency. The transaction was clear. No lies. No false promises. Just sensation.
I got out, toweled off, and pulled on an old t-shirt. My phone buzzed on the sink. One new message.
Harry: Don’t overthink it. Seven. Don’t be late.
No kiss emoji. No ‘how are you feeling?’. Just an order. My thumb hovered over the keyboard. I could type a million things. What are we doing? This was a mistake. I’ve never felt anything like that. I typed one letter, then deleted it. I didn’t reply.
The next day moved in a slow-motion daze. In my Romantic Poetry seminar, Professor Davies droned about the sublime terror of nature, and all I could think about was the sublime terror of Harry’s tongue. My friends chattered around me at lunch in the bustling cafeteria.
“You’re quiet,” Hanna said, nudging my tray with hers. “And you look tired. Late night?”
“Couldn’t sleep,” I mumbled, pushing my pasta around.
“Hot date?” Emily wiggled her eyebrows.
Aria, ever the perceptive one, narrowed her eyes. “You have a weird vibe today, Martinez. Spill.”
They were my best friends. I told them everything. The panic over my virginity, the failed attempts with guys who lost interest after three dates of just making out. But the words about Harry clogged my throat. Speaking it would make it real in a way the physical act hadn’t. It would change how they saw him, how they saw me. It would change everything.
“Just a shitty night’s sleep,” I repeated, forcing a smile. “And this pasta is criminal.”
The deflection worked. They launched into a critique of campus food. I sat there, nodding along, feeling like a fraud in my own skin.
By six-thirty, the nervous energy was a live wire in my veins. I changed clothes four times. Nothing felt right. Not the cute dresses, not the jeans. I settled on black leggings and an oversized navy crewneck sweatshirt that belonged to my dad. Armor, of a sort. I left my hair down, the curls wild and untamed.
His off-campus house was a known entity. The Phi Delta frat house was a looming Victorian on Greek Row, usually pulsing with bass and littered with red cups. Tonight, it was quiet. The porch light was on. I knocked, the sound too loud in the stillness.
He opened the door himself. He wore low-slung gray sweatpants and nothing else. His chest was a beautiful, tattooed landscape I’d only felt in the dark. Drops of water clung to his collarbone from a recent shower. His chestnut curls were damp.
“You’re early,” he said, but stepped back to let me in.
The front hall smelled of lemon cleaner and underlying beer. It was clean, surprisingly. “The guys are at a team thing. We have the place,” he said, walking ahead of me into a spacious, lived-in den with a huge, worn leather couch.
“Sit.”
I perched on the edge of the couch. He didn’t sit. He stood in front of me, looking down, his green eyes assessing.
“Are you sore?”
The directness floored me. I nodded, looking at my hands. “A little.”
“Good.” He knelt suddenly, putting us at eye level. His hands came up to grip my knees, spreading my legs apart. The movement was so casual, so possessive, it stole my breath. “Means you felt me. Means you remember.”
His hands slid up my thighs, under the hem of the sweatshirt, pushing it up. He wasn’t wearing his usual easy smile. His expression was focused, intense. “Lesson three is about touch. All of it. Not just where you think it counts.”
His fingers hooked into the waistband of my leggings and the cotton panties beneath. “Lift up.”
I obeyed, a silent participant. He peeled them down my legs and off, tossing them aside. I was naked from the waist down, exposed in the bright light of his den. He pushed the sweatshirt up further, to my ribs, leaving my breasts covered but my stomach and core bare. He sat back on his heels, just looking.
“Fuck, you’re pretty,” he murmured, not like a compliment, but like a fact.
Then his hands were on me, everywhere. Not just between my legs, but on the insides of my knees, the dip of my hips, the soft plane of my stomach. His touch was studying, learning. Calloused thumbs brushed the sensitive skin below my navel. I jumped.
“Sensitive here,” he noted, a clinical observation. He did it again, watching my face. My breathing hitched.
His fingers finally drifted through my curls, then lower, parting me. I flinched, but his other hand pressed firmly on my lower belly, holding me still. “Shhh. I’m just looking. Getting to know what’s mine to work with.”
The obscenity of it, the cool arrogance, made my core clench. One finger, blunt and sure, circled my entrance, gathering the wetness that was already there. He brought his finger to his lips, sucked it clean, his eyes locked on mine. “You’re already wet. Just from me looking. You like being looked at, Nikki?”
I couldn’t answer. He didn’t expect me to.
He leaned forward and kissed the inside of my thigh, a soft, closed-mouth kiss that was somehow more intimate than anything on the roof. His mouth traveled inward, slow, deliberate. His breath ghosted over me and I whimpered.
“Last night was about making you come fast,” he said, his lips a hairsbreadth from my clit. “Tonight is about making you beg for it.”
His tongue touched me then, not a lash, but a slow, flat, luxurious stroke. My head fell back against the couch with a thud. He set a pace that was pure, slow torture. Long, languid licks, followed by agonizing moments where he just breathed against my heated skin, letting me feel the cool air. He’d suck gently, then pull away just as the pleasure began to coil. He was dismantling me piece by piece.
“Please,” I heard myself moan, my fingers tangled in his damp curls, not pushing him away, but trying to hold him in place.
“Please what?” he asked, pausing.
“Don’t stop.”
“Not good enough.” He blew a cool stream of air over my soaked flesh. I cried out, my hips bucking.
“Please, Harry… please let me come.”
“Since you asked so nicely.”
His mouth sealed over me again, and this time there was no mercy. His tongue lashed my clit in a ruthless rhythm, two fingers curling deep inside me, finding a spot that made my vision blur. It built too fast, a tsunami after the agonizing tease. I screamed, the sound echoing in the quiet house, as I shattered. The orgasm tore through me, longer, deeper, more wrenching than the last. He rode it out, drinking every pulse, until I was sobbing, pushing weakly at his head.
He crawled up my body, wiping his chin. He was hard, the length of him pressing against my thigh through his sweatpants. He reached for a small foil packet on the side table, tore it open with his teeth. I watched, dazed, as he sheathed himself.
He didn’t ask. He hooked his hands under my knees, pushing them back toward my chest, opening me utterly. He pushed in, still wet from his mouth, and the fullness was even more profound this time, my body already knowing him.
“Look at me,” he growled, and I did. His face was strained, beautiful in its hunger. “This is yours. This feeling. You own it now. It’s not scary, it’s power.”
He began to move, each thrust a deliberate, deep claim. The leather couch squeaked underneath us. My pleasurable soreness melted into a new, building fire. This wasn’t the frantic pace of the roof. This was measured, potent, every stroke aimed. He leaned down, took one of my breasts into his mouth through the fabric of my sweatshirt, sucking hard. The dual sensation was overwhelming.
“I can feel you clenching around me,” he grunted against my chest. “You’re going to come again. Come on my cock. Show me that power.”
He was right. It was building again, a terrifying, inevitable tide. My second orgasm was quieter, a deep, internal quake that tightened my whole body around him, milking him. He groaned, a raw, broken sound, and followed me over, his thrusts turning jerky, his forehead dropping to my shoulder.
For a long time, the only sounds were our ragged breaths and the old house settling around us.
He pulled out, disposed of the condom, and came back. He didn’t cuddle me. He sat at the other end of the couch, pulling me so my legs were across his lap. His hand rested possessively on my bare thigh. We sat in silence for what felt like an hour.
“Your friends texted the group chat,” he said finally, his voice rough. “Wanted to know where you were. I said you were helping me with a paper.”
I looked at him. The casual lie. The way his thumb was absently stroking my skin. The complicated, brutal, breathtaking thing we were doing.
“I should go,” I said, but made no move to get up.
“Yeah.” He didn’t move either. “Tomorrow. My room. Not the couch. My bed.”
“Another lesson?”
He met my gaze, and for a fleeting second, I saw something behind the green—not tenderness, not quite, but a recognition of the precipice we were on.
“Something like that,” he said.
I gathered my clothes, dressed slowly under his watchful eye. He walked me to the door. As I stepped out into the cool night, he caught my wrist.
“Nikki.” He waited until I looked back at him. “You did good.”
It shouldn’t have meant anything. It felt like everything.
The walk home was colder. The throb between my legs was a deeper ache. I felt more used, and more alive, than I ever had in my life. I also felt the first, cold trickle of fear. This wasn’t a lesson plan. It was a freefall. And I was no longer sure he was teaching me to fly, or just showing me how hard the ground could hit.