I pull back after just a second and whisper, “This is your bed, right?”

“Sure,” he says, his eyes kind of unfocused, and then glances down. “I mean, yes, right, my bed.”

He’s going to say something else, but I take his face in my hands and kiss him again.

We stretch out, kissing slowly, quickly, soft bites and pecks and long, slow soft presses of our lips, and it feels too good and still I want more. More skin, and more touching. I feel greedy, and I feel a little wild, and I feel like that doubt could never possibly come back.

Arching against him, I slide my hands under the hem of his shirt and feel him tremble. I skim my fingertips along his stomach and the muscles twitch, and I kiss the side of his neck. He cuts off a groan, takes my face to kiss me again and again until it feels like I’m being baked by the sun, warm summer and hot sand.

When I sit up, he reaches for me, then stops and leans back on his elbows to watch. To look at me as I lift the hem of my tunic and pull it off in one smooth move, shaking my hair out. The dark curls fall over my shoulders.

I’m wearing my prettiest bra, which is still some serious hardware, but lavender lace, “balconette-style,” Katherine informed me, which translates to check out my really amazing rack. My pale skin looks kind of luminous, maybe, maybe that’s the word, and I feel sexy and gorgeous and delicious and all those good things you’re supposed to think about your own body.

“Oh,” Jack says, still leaning back against the pillows. His glasses have disappeared somewhere. His eyes skim over my curves and my skin—no stage makeup and no glitter, I’m suddenly aware. This is me totally exposed, in the dim yellow desk-lamp light.

He hasn’t touched me yet. He stares, his breath is coming hard, and I’m trying to catch my breath too. And then, out of nowhere, he rolls over, falls out of bed, murmurs something—“Sorry,” maybe, or “I have to go” and then scrambles out of the room, door thumping shut behind him, leaving me kneeling alone, half naked, on his bed.

For a moment, I am frozen.

He just ran away from me.

I took off my shirt, and he looked at me, my fat body, the realness of my body, and he ran away.

He actually ran out of his own room to get away from me.