Page 244 - The Love Hypothesis

Olive, and therefore, it shouldn’t to Adam, either. “I can figure it out—I’ve

learned whole-cell patch clamp in a couple of hours; sex can’t be much
harder. And I bet you do this all the time, so you can tell me how to—”
“You’d lose.”

The room was chilly. His finger was not inside her anymore, and his
hand had left her hip.

“What?”
“You’d lose your bet.” He sighed, wiping a hand down his face. The

other one, the one that had been inside her, moved down to adjust his cock.
It looked enormous by now, and he winced as he touched it. “Olive, I

can’t.”
“Of course you can.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

“What? No. No, I—”
“You’re basically a vir—”

“I’m not!”
“Olive.”

“I am not.”
“But so close to it that—”

“No, that’s not the way it works. Virginity is not a continuous variable,
it’s categorical. Binary. Nominal. Dichotomous. Ordinal, potentially. I’m
talking about chi-square, maybe Spearman’s correlation, logistic regression,

the logit model and that stupid sigmoid function, and . . .”
It had been weeks and it still took her breath away, the uneven tilt of his

smile. How unanticipated it always was, the dimples it formed. Olive was
left without air as his large palm cupped the side of her face and brought it

down for a slow, warm, laughing kiss.
“You are such a smart-ass,” he said against her mouth.

“Maybe.” She was smiling, too. And kissing him back. Hugging him,
arms draped around his neck, and she felt a shiver of pleasure when he
pulled her deeper into himself.

“Olive,” he said inching back, “if for any reason sex is something that
you . . . that you’re not comfortable with, or that you’d rather not have