I deepen the kiss, and Jack meets me where I am, her mouth finding the pulse point at the base of my throat and sucking. I slide my hand under her sweatshirt, and her stomach is warm. I explore the inches of her, splay my hand across her back and hold her as close as I can, hold her until I get her whole body between my legs.

Our kiss turns sloppy. Tongue and teeth and her thumb on my bottom lip, the other hand gripping the front of my sweatshirt as she grinds herself against my thigh, and I move against her hip bone, and we’re both wearing too many clothes.

When I fit my hands into the dimples that bracket her ass, she gasps into my mouth. “Jack,” I pant. “Can I please take off your clothes?”

She takes a step back from me. I open my eyes, and fuck. Her mouth is pink and swollen, her eyes practically black.

“Elle,” she says, hesitant.

“I’m sorry,” I quickly apologize. “We don’t have to…. I’m okay with just kissing. If you want to wait until Andrew and I have officially ended things, or…”

She clenches her jaw, thinking. “Oh, fuck it,” she says, and when she kisses me again, she’s smiling into it. I smile, too. Heat and hands, and when she shifts against me, my lower stomach tightens, pulling all the energy inside me down to my core until I feel dizzy with needing more of her touch, more of her skin. I push us across the living room until we reach the couch, and Jack falls back onto it, me halfway on top of her.

She lets me pull off her sweatshirt, and there’s something so vulnerable in the action of undressing another person. She’s not wearing a bra, so it’s a tug of fabric, then Jack’s light brown skin in the flickering firelight of the living room. Her small breasts, the ridge of her hardened nipples, which make my tongue feel thick inside my mouth. Faint stretch marks on the soft skin above her hips, the puckered skin around her belly button, the tattoos.

The tattoos. The images that tell her story in the way webcomic panels do, snapshots of a time and place. Of a moment in the life of this person. I need my mouth on all of it, and for the first time all week, there’s nothing to hold me back.

I want to kiss, so I kiss her. I straddle her, and I kiss the hard curves of her rib cage, I kiss the Mount Hood tattoo, I kiss the deliciously soft skin of her stomach. “You’re so perfect,” I tell her as I slide off the couch and onto the floor so I can tug the sweatpants down her hips to reveal unisex boxer briefs with a rainbow waistband and those motherfucking thighs.