Page 239 - The Love Hypothesis

Chapter Sixteen

HYPOTHESIS: Despite what everyone says, sex is never going to be
anything more than a mildly enjoyable activi— Oh.
Oh.

It was like a layer peeled away.

Adam yanked off the shirt he was wearing in one fluid movement, and it
was as though the white cotton was only one of many things tossed in a

corner of the room. Olive didn’t have a name for what the other things
were; all she knew was that a few seconds earlier he’d seemed reluctant,

almost unwilling to touch her, and now he was . . . not.
He was running the show now. Wrapping his large hands around her
waist, sliding his fingertips under the elastic of her green polka-dot panties,

and kissing her.
He kisses, Olive thought, like a man starved. Like he’d been waiting all

this time. Holding back. Like the possibility of the two of them doing this
had occurred to him in the past, but he’d set it aside, stored it away in a
deep, dark place where it had grown into something fearsome and out of

control. Olive thought she knew how it would be—they’d kissed before,
after all. Except, she realized now, that she had always been the one to kiss

him.
Maybe she was being fanciful. What did she know about different types

of kisses, anyway? Still, something in her belly thrummed and liquefied
when his tongue licked against hers, when he bit a tender spot on her neck,

when he made a guttural noise in the back of his throat as his fingers