But Jack doesn’t pull up, and his resolve gets stronger. He works his neck, which sends me over the edge. I let out a loud moan I hope doesn’t echo into the empty halls.

He licks his full lips, which look plump and red, and kisses me hungrily as he straddles me again. We press into each other, and I taste myself on his lips.

“My turn,” I whisper, pushing him off me and onto the desk, legs splayed out before me like some sort of religious painting, all hard brushstrokes and bursting colors and golden rays of heaven, the artist’s hand heavy on the canvas.

Grabbing hold of him, feeling every hard inch of him between my lips, I am both spectator and subject, artist and patron, worshipping at the altar of the divine.

Chapter 18

18

With duffel bags slung across our shoulders, Jack and I wait as Rae cautiously pulls up to my dorm to pick us up for Taylor’s thirteenth birthday road trip home. I had a momentary freak-out earlier because as I packed it hit me that her birthday is at a water park. Squeezing into a bathing suit—in public!—just to stand alongside my perfect Captain America boyfriend in front of a bunch of judgmental middle school girls is basically asking for a body dysmorphic episode of epic proportions. Benny calmed me down before Jack arrived, but I can’t get it out of my head. No matter how much Jack loves my body, I can’t stop comparing mine to his and feeling … inadequate. And I just know Dad will do the same. I don’t tell Jack any of this. I just swallow it down.

“Is she for real?” Jack whispers, jolting me alert. He takes his Red Sox cap off and puts it back on again, pressing down on its visor.

I love Rae deeply, but she drives in slow motion, so leisurely that I can feel the gravity around me and the planet rotating on its axis. It’ll probably take us ten hours to get to the hotel/water park combo when it should only take us three and a half, four hours, max.

The window slides down as she slams on the brakes next to us. “Get in, loser, we’re going shopping!”

Jack eyes me, clearly having no point of reference for Mean Girls, which somehow makes him irresistibly cuter and infuriating because how!?

I move to hop in the front seat, but Rae throws herself across the armrest.

“Uh-uh. Get in the back,” she says. “Jack, get up here.”

“Rude,” I say.

Jack dips his head beneath the doorframe. “You sure?”

“Yes!” she exclaims. “One, because I want to get to know you better, and two, because Chase is a notorious car napper.”

“Weak,” Jack says with a smirk.

“Again, rude,” I say.