First Man Read Online Free Page A

something I do every week,” she said shyly. “It helps remind me that there’s a life outside of translations and historical documents.”
    I followed her through the flowers, feeling slightly like an intruder. Foolish mortals paid for disturbing a goddess in her garden. Where were the hounds to tear me apart for trespassing?
    I might have grown up far from America and the strange mix of puritanism and pornography that makes up American sexual mores, but I was far from unaware of what a third date meant.
    Lily watched me as I trailed her through the gardens. She would disappear around a bend, and I’d follow, expecting to find her just a few feet ahead. Instead, I’d find her picking her way through an overgrown path, her face buried in a mound of lilacs. She took a step toward me, close enough that I could smell the honeyed scent of the pollen clinging to her hair.
    When she was near enough to touch, she’d kiss me, nothing more than a quick peck on the lips, before racing back into the thicket of wildflowers, ducking my grasping hands as easily as a deer evades a hunter’s arrow.
    The flirtation was innocent and silly, and I found myself laughing along with her. When I finally managed to capture her, snaking my arm around her waist, we were both flushed and breathless.
    “You’re always so serious,” she said, as I brushed a few golden grains of pollen off her cheek. “I just want to see you smile.”
    And I did. The smile that curled my lips wasn’t sarcastic. My arms tightened around her, and, for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to let something slip through my fingers.
    I pressed my mouth against hers, and I tasted warmth and the thick perfume of the flowers surrounding us. I felt the heat of her body pressing against mine, alive and aching, and I wanted her with a desperation that set my blood on fire.
    No words were exchanged as we followed that winding path out of the gardens to her car. The tension and want simmered between us in the short drive. I felt like a teenager, staring at her tanned thighs as she shifted in her seat, wondering how it would feel when she wrapped them around my hips.
    Sex had never meant anything to me beyond momentary pleasure and the occasional temporary companionship. Women entranced me with the mysteries they held behind their eyes, and I had studied my lovers with the same fastidious attention to detail I gave my books.
    I learned that Lily sighed when I kissed her neck, fumbling with her housekeys. Teasingly, she pushed me away from her but once the door was unlocked, she pulled me inside, slamming the door as an afterthought.
    Southern gentility aside, Lily was far from shy. Once the world was locked outside, everything was forgotten but touch and lips and breath. I knew in the coming days, I’d examine her apartment, trying to sort out the whys and whats of her life from the objects she surrounded herself with, but right now the décor was nothing but a blur of color in my peripheral vision as I slid the strap of her dress down her shoulder, kissing the bare skin that it revealed.
    “Adam,” she breathed, her voice sounding like a prayer.
    And, suddenly, I wasn’t the one doing the seducing.
    My shirt went first, her delicate fingers making quick work of the buttons on the soft grey linen before letting it fall, unnoticed to the floor. Her hands traced the contours of my muscles. A small smiled crossed her lips.
    “Not what you were expecting?”
    Her fingers skated over my ribs, and I tensed as she hit a ticklish spot. “Nerds are generally a bit less cut than this.”
    I threw my head back and laughed, the sound loud in the silent room. “I’m a nerd then?”
    Lily nodded solemnly. “I don’t know how to tell you this, Adam, but you are very much a nerd.”
    “I think I can live with that.” Her hands found my belt, and I knew that I could live with anything as long as she didn’t send me away.
    With agonizing slowness, she unbuckled my belt,