The third date ends with them lying on top of her bed, fully clothed, all the lights on. But they’re talking so quietly, doing everything so quietly. It’s an unspoken understanding, that this is new and they’re both afraid of disrupting it somehow, ruining it before it gets started. So they’re quiet. They laugh with closed mouths. They whisper. They touch each other like ghosts.

He presses his face into her neck, noses his way through her hair to her skin, presses a kiss there just below her jaw, gently and softly, like an experiment. He pulls back, watches her face, and says, “Where do you feel it?”

A smiles stretches across her face, warm and slow, and she says, “Here,” moving her hand in in circles over her stomach. Her back arches forward just a little with the surge of feeling, with the instinctual desire to be as close to him as possible.

He places his own hand on her stomach. “Here?”

She nods. “All over down there.”

He leans in again, presses his lips just behind her ear, moves along her jaw line to her mouth. Both of their smiles widen with the soft sound of lips pulling apart. “What does it feel like?” He asks, but he knows. He feels it too. But he feels it in his arms and in his chest and, weirdly, at the bridge of his nose. Still, he wants to hear her answer. Wants to know what she calls it.

“Warm electricity,” she says.