Chapter 13: sex goal
The streetlight shadow-branches were still etched on the ceiling when Kate’s eyes fluttered open. Gino’s chest rose and fell steadily beneath her ear. The room was cold away from his heat, the silence a stark contrast to the roaring water and whispered promises of hours before. Reality, with its complications, seeped back in.
She stirred, and his arm tightened around her automatically.
“You’re thinking too loud,” he mumbled, his voice sleep-roughened.
“I’m thinking we should talk.”
He groaned, a low, theatrical sound, and buried his face in her hair. “Worst post-coital words ever.”
She pinched his side, making him jump. “I’m serious.” She pushed herself up on one elbow, looking down at him. The faint dawn light was just beginning to dilute the darkness, painting his face in shades of grey. The mark on his cheekbone was a darker smudge. “This… us. It’s like a whirlpool. I get dizzy. I lose track of everything else.”
He opened his eyes, the blue of them startling even in the low light. “And that’s bad?”
“It’s terrifying,” she said quietly. “In the best way. But I need to… breathe. To know I’m not just falling into something because it feels good to not feel alone.”
He was fully awake now, listening. He didn’t get defensive. He just watched her, waiting.
She took a breath. “I think we should pump the brakes. Just for a little bit.”
One eyebrow lifted. “On…?”
“On sex.” The word hung in the cold air. “Just for like… two weeks. Maybe.”
He stared at her. A slow, incredulous smile spread across his face. “You’re kidding.”
“I’m not.”
“Two weeks. Of no sex. After the last… what, eighteen hours?” He let out a short laugh. “You’re a cruel woman, Modrich.”
“It’s not a punishment,” she said, lying back down to face him. Their noses were almost touching. “It’s an experiment. I need to see what this is without… that. I need to know I can be with you and not just be waiting for you to touch me. I need to know you can be with me and not just be waiting to touch me.”
He was silent for a long moment. His hand came up, his thumb brushing over her lower lip. A simple, devastating touch. “I like touching you.”
“I know.” She caught his hand, lacing her fingers with his. “That’s the problem. I like it too much. It drowns out everything else. My dad… he made everything about that. About control. I don’t want that to be the only language we have.”
He flinched, just a tiny contraction around his eyes. The mention of her father did that to him. He understood control. He understood the need for a different language. His own father only spoke in fists and contempt.
“Two weeks,” he repeated, as if testing the weight of the sentence.
“Fourteen days,” she said, a ghost of a smile on her face. “We can do other stuff. Talk. Hang out. Actually go on a date that doesn’t end with our clothes on the floor.”
He sighed, a long, suffering exhale, and rolled onto his back, staring at the ceiling. “Talk. Hang out. Jesus.” He was quiet for a minute. Then he nodded, once. A sharp, decisive motion. “Okay. Fine. Two weeks. A celibacy pact. But I’m setting ground rules.”
“Ground rules?” She propped herself up again.
“Yeah. No sitting in my lap. That’s a hard limit. Literally. And no wearing my t-shirts without something under them. And for the love of God, no showering together. We’d never make it.”
She laughed, the sound bright in the quiet room. “Deal.”
He turned his head to look at her. The playful mask slipped, just for a second. His expression was stark, almost vulnerable. “You really think this is a good idea?”
“No,” she said honestly. “But I think it’s necessary.”
He leaned over and kissed her, a soft, closed-mouth press of lips that was somehow more intimate than anything that had come before. “Then we’ll do it.”
The first three days were deceptively easy.
They went to school. They sat together at lunch with Will, who noticed the new, careful space between them and raised an eyebrow but said nothing. They held hands walking to her locker. They talked. They watched a movie on her couch, a respectable foot of cushion between them. Gino was charming, funny, attentive. He asked about her poetry. He told stupid stories about his teammates. It was nice. It was normal.
It was also a special kind of torture.
For Kate, it was a constant, low-grade hum of awareness. Every brush of his arm against hers in the hallway sent a jolt through her system. The way he’d lean in to whisper something during study hall, his breath warm against her ear, made her stomach flip. She’d catch the scent of his soap on her own skin from where he’d hugged her goodbye and feel a dizzying wave of want.
For Gino, it was a siege. A sustained, agonizing assault on his self-control. Watching her bite her lip while concentrating on her history textbook was a crisis. Seeing her stretch, the hem of her sweater riding up to reveal a sliver of stomach, was an event that required deliberate, measured breathing. He’d taken to wearing slightly baggier jeans.
The temptation was a physical presence, a third person in the room with them, breathing loudly.
On the fourth night, he was at her house, helping her—or mostly distracting her—with an algebra problem. They were at the kitchen table. Her mother was working a late shift. The house was silent except for the scratch of her pencil and the low hum of the refrigerator.
She was explaining a formula, her brow furrowed in concentration. She tapped the pencil against her bottom lip. Gino watched the motion, the soft give of her lip under the pressure.
He wasn’t hearing a word she said.
All he could think about was how she’d looked under him in this very house, in her bed just down the hall. The sounds she’d made. The way her body had welcomed his. He wanted to fuck her guts out. The thought was primal, a white-hot wire in his brain. He wanted to clear the textbooks and papers off this stupid table with a sweep of his arm and take her right here, to break this torturous, self-imposed rule with a satisfying, definitive crash.
His knuckles were white where he gripped the edge of the table. His jaw ached from clenching it.
“Gino?” she asked, her voice pulling him back. “You okay? You’re spacing.”
He blinked. She was looking at him, her head tilted, a faint line of concern between her eyes. Innocent. Clueless to the war raging inside him.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice rough. He cleared his throat. “Yeah, just… tired. The formula’s not clicking.”
He saw the moment she understood. Her eyes flickered, moving from his tense face to his death-grip on the table, then back. A faint pink flush crept up her neck. She knew. She felt it too. The air between them crackled, thick and charged.
He saw her swallow. Her pencil stopped tapping. For a long, electric moment, neither of them moved. The temptation wasn’t just breathing now; it was screaming.
He could do it. He could reach across the table, pull her to him, and it would be over. She wouldn’t stop him. He knew she wouldn’t.
But he saw the flicker of something else in her eyes, beneath the desire. The quiet, determined hope that had made this pact in the first place. The need to be more than this hunger.
With a Herculean effort that felt like tearing his own muscles, Gino pushed his chair back. The legs screeched on the linoleum. The sound was a gunshot in the silent kitchen.
“I should go,” he said, the words coming out too fast.
“You don’t have to,” she whispered, but it was weak. A formality.
“Yeah, I really do.” He stood up, his body humming with unused energy. He grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair, not looking at her. If he looked at her, he was lost.
He was at the front door when her voice stopped him.
“Gino.”
He turned. She was standing in the kitchen doorway, her arms wrapped around herself. She looked small. Beautiful. Impossible.
“Ten more days,” she said, and it sounded like a promise, and a plea.
He gave her a tight, strained smile that felt more like a grimace. “Counting every fucking second,” he said, and then he was out the door, into the cold Minnesota night, gulping down air like a man who’d been drowning.
The cold didn’t help. It just sharpened everything, made the need feel like a clean, focused blade instead of a dull ache. He drove with the windows down, the frigid air scouring the inside of his truck, trying to erase the smell of her that clung to his clothes. It was useless. He was mapped in her scent.
Ten days. The number looped in his head, a taunt. He’d promised. A promise to her felt different than any other promise he’d ever made, or broken. This one had weight, like a physical object lodged behind his ribs.
The week that followed was a study in exquisite frustration. They texted constantly. They went for a drive to look at the frozen lake, him pointing out the spots where the ice was unsafe, his hand hovering near the small of her back but not touching. Not touching was all he thought about. They studied in the public library, where the stern silence felt like a chaperone. He’d watch her trace a line of poetry with her finger, her mouth moving silently, and he’d imagine that finger tracing the line of his jaw.
The rules were a minefield. Sitting side-by-side on her couch watching a movie was tactical warfare. Every shift, every sigh, was a potential detonation. He started leaving sooner, the excuses flimsy. “Gotta hit the gym.” “Forgot I promised Will I’d help with his car.” Will had given him a long, knowing look the last time he’d said that, but mercifully kept his mouth shut.
The day before the two-week mark, it snowed. A heavy, wet snow that draped Pine City in a thick, silent blanket. School was canceled. His text tone chirped just after noon.
Kate: Power’s out on our street. House is getting cold.
Gino: Generator?
Kate: Mom’s at work with the car. It’s in the garage.
Gino: I’ll bring mine. Be there in 20.
It wasn’t a question. It was what you did. He loaded the small generator into his truck bed, the cold metal biting through his gloves. The streets were ghostly quiet, plows still hours away. Her house was the only one on the block dark, a gap in the row of glowing windows.
She opened the door before he even knocked. She was buried in an enormous wool sweater, her legs swimming in flannel pajama pants. Two pairs of socks. Her nose was pink. “You’re a lifesaver,” she said, her breath making a cloud.
“Don’t thank me yet. Gotta get it hooked up.” He hauled the generator around back, to the outlet by the meter. The snow came up to his shins. She followed, a silent shadow, watching as he fueled it, yanked the cord. The machine coughed, sputtered, then roared to life, a violent sound in the pristine quiet. A moment later, the porch light flickered on.
“Heat should kick on in a few,” he said, wiping his hands on his jeans.
“Come in while it warms up. I’ll make you coffee. Sort of. The stove’s electric but the kettle works on gas.”
Inside, the house held a deep, bone-aching chill. The only light came from the grey windows. They stood in the kitchen, listening to the furnace groan and begin to push warm air through the vents. The normal sounds of the house—the fridge, the digital clocks—were absent. It felt like the end of the world, just this.
She moved to the stove, lighting the gas burner with a click. The blue flame popped up, painting her face in sudden, warm relief. She set the kettle over it. The simple domesticity of the act, her concentration on the task, undid him.
The pact had nine hours left. Nine. Hours.
It felt insurmountable. The cold, the quiet, the isolation of the snowbound house stripped everything else away. There was no school, no friends, no watchful eyes. Just this hungry, echoing space and her.
She turned, leaning back against the counter. “Almost there,” she said softly, as if reading the tally in his head.
He didn’t answer. He just looked at her, at the way the firelight danced in her eyes. The careful distance he’d maintained for thirteen days and fifteen hours felt like the stupidest idea anyone had ever had.
The kettle began a low whistle. She turned to lift it, but he was there. He didn’t walk; he closed the space in two strides. His hands came up, not to grab her, but to frame her face, his thumbs sweeping over her cold cheeks. She went utterly still, the kettle forgotten, its whistle rising to a shriek.
“Gino,” she breathed. A warning. A hope.
“I can’t,” he said, the words raw. “I can’t do nine more hours. I can’t do nine more minutes.”
He broke the rules.
He kissed her. It wasn't soft or questioning. It was a surrender, a collapse. It was heat and desperation and thirteen days of denial roaring back to the surface all at once. She melted into it with a whimper that was half relief, half triumph, her hands fisting in the front of his jacket.
The whistle of the kettle became a screaming background to the pounding in his ears. He reached behind her blindly, his hand knocking against the hot metal, not feeling it, finding the burner knob and twisting it off. The flame died. The whistle descended into a gurgle, then silence.
In the new quiet, the only sounds were their ragged breaths and the faint roar of the generator outside. He walked her back, away from the counter, through the dark living room, towards the hallway. Her bedroom was just as cold, the air sharp. It didn’t matter.
He peeled the layers from her, the giant sweater, the flannel, until she was shivering before him, but not from the cold. His own clothes were a frustrating barrier he dispatched with rough, impatient hands. The chill of the sheets was a shock, quickly overwhelmed by the heat of their skin.
This wasn’t like before. There was no slow reverence, no meticulous discovery. This was a claiming, an affirmation. It was teeth and grasping hands and her saying his name like it was the only word she knew. He poured every second of those frustrated days into her, and she matched him, arching into each touch, each thrust, as if starved for it.
After, the heat they’d created hung in the room like a fog. The furnace whirred, finally pushing real warmth through the vent above her bed. They were tangled, slick with sweat, the cold completely banished.
She traced the red mark on his cheekbone, now almost faded. “So much for willpower,” she whispered, her voice hoarse.
He caught her wrist, kissed her palm. A deep, unshakable calm had settled over him. The frantic energy was gone. “Some rules are meant to be broken.”
Outside, the snow continued to fall, burying everything, sealing them in.