She presses the pad of her thumb against my clit, soft at first, massaging me in gentle circles until I’m forced to do what she wants, forced to tell her what I want. “Faster,” I demand. Jack presses harder and faster, changing patterns so quickly the room begins to spin. I respond with my own litany of curses, my own yes and please and thank you.

And then her tongue replaces her thumb. It’s one lick, the tip of her tongue along the fissure of my body, and I’m ready to shake off my skin and soar above the bed. “Ellie,” she says coyly. “Please tell me what you want.”

Her raspy voice scrapes across my body, sends a tingle down my spine that curls my bare toes. “I want you to do that again.”

Jack reaches up and presses one hand firmly to my lower stomach, pinning me to the bed with the force of her upper-body strength, and I squirm despite myself as I wait. Jack dips her head and plants a chaste kiss to my clit. It’s demure, almost like a gentleman in a Regency romance kissing the gloved hand of a duchess, and it makes me positively demented. It’s a game to her. Everything is a game to Jack.

“I’m going to murder you if you don’t—”

The tough flat of her tongue presses against me, and any threats are subsumed by other, less articulate objections and protests. Like wait, how does that feel so good? And oh God, are you trying to kill me?

Jack licks me until I’m grabbing the quilt between both fists, until I’m convulsing on a stranger’s bed, until I’m split open with the force of the ocean against a rocky shore, or some other, better cliché for an orgasm I can’t think of at the moment, because I am busy orgasming.

Even as my head melts back into the bed, my bones dissolving into hot goo, another part of me tenses at Jack’s continued attention. My left hand grabs the comforter while my right hand clutches her hair. Both are life preservers buoying me through the onslaught of a dozen gorgeous aftershocks.

I’m—I’m feeling too much, and these feelings—they’re reckless and dangerous and so fucking wonderful.

It’s been so long since I’ve let myself feel anything, terrified of the absence of feeling I’d be left with afterward, terrified to let the hole inside my chest grow any larger, but as Jack absolutely wrecks me with her tongue, I don’t float above the scene, wondering how I’ll draw it later. I just feel. Anchored and grounded by tongue and fingers and her. It’s transcendent.