When college started again, I found myself more distracted than ever. I found myself sitting in class, present one minute and the next, I’d be thinking of Jules. Sometimes I thought about usual things, like what we were going to do that weekend, or I wondered what trouble he was getting into in class. Other times, I’d think of something totally random, like his lips. I’d think of them for no particular reason and once I started, I couldn’t stop. Sometimes I thought of the way he ran his tongue along his bottom lip when he’d just kissed Storm. He did it slowly, without thinking. I could tell he was doing it to taste her. Once I started on that train of thought, I couldn’t shake it. I’d think of his lips for hours. I’d think of the way he threw his head back when I made him laugh sometimes. Sometimes, not all the time, he’d suck his bottom lip into his mouth when he stopped laughing and would scrap his teeth against the fullness of his lip as he released it. Sometimes it got so bad that when we walked home together, I’d try to make him laugh just to see if he’d do it.

Sometimes he did.

Sometimes he didn’t.

I’d been a twice daily masturbator for years. It wasn’t a problem. It was perfectly normal for an unshifted shifter my age. Shifting was like a second puberty, and as we got closer to our first shift, the worse it got. We might not have known much about the ins and outs of shifting, but even we knew that. Everyone knew that. Things being what they were, in the weeks after Storm left, I found it necessary to bump myself up to three times per day. If not four.

Sometimes it helped.

Sometimes it didn’t.

Jules’s mood stayed low all through January and through February, too. It picked up out of nowhere in March.

“Wanna hit the town?” he said one Saturday night.

“Sure, why not?” I was surprised that he wanted to venture out. We’d hardly been out since Storm left. He’d been too busy moping.