I giggle, dropping my face into my hands. Amy laughs, too. Her hands wrap around my wrists, pulling them from my face.

“I like them, too.”

I cup her jaw with my fingertips. “You have really nice ones.”

She huffs out a soundless laugh. “So do you.”

Amy hovers over me, serious again. “You’re golden,” she whispers, her hand curving over my hip and stomach. Her eyes can’t find a place to stop. She takes me in with the slow perusal of someone who won’t be rushed. “You’re glowing. Sometimes, when it’s busy and you’re just...” She shakes her head as her hand slips down my legs, pulling them apart, moving slowly back up my thigh. “You’re in the zone. Totally focused. Your skin is flushed from the heat and there’s always one piece of hair...” She tugs at a strand. “That’s fallen loose. I thought that was when you were most beautiful, but I was wrong. It’s right now.”

In the kitchen, I’ve never had a problem demanding what I want. It’s everywhere else in life that I’m lost, trying to make Mom happy, trying to be the person Paul thought I was, to be the woman a few thousand social media followers think I am. But Amy makes me feel brave enough to ask for what I want.

“Kiss me,” I say, pulling her down to me.

Her lips on mine are always a shock. The sweet smell of her lip gloss, the smooth expanse of her skin against mine, her breasts small and full. She’s everything I never dreamed I could have.

She keeps finding new places that make me shiver: the tip of my chin, underneath my breasts. She guides my arms to the bed, spreading them the width of the mattress, pressing the backs of my hands into the soft down of her comforter. She pushes my legs apart and vaguely I remember her promise. That she’d do exactly this and make me come with her mouth. Pleasure moves through me like liquid as she kisses the hair between my legs, the soft skin of my inner thighs.

“Okay?” she asks, her breath ghosting over my lips, wet with the lust she’s stoked in me.

I press my head into the mattress, lift my hips. “Please, Amy.”

She holds me open, gentle but totally in control. “You never have to beg. I promise.”

Amy kisses my cunt like she kisses my lips. With her whole mouth.

Her fingers tease and stretch me. Normally, I have to close my eyes to come, relax into the bed and wait for the orgasm to arrive in its own good time. But I can’t look away from her dark hair between my legs.

She’s right. I am beautiful. When I’m open on her bed, the sheets gripped in my fists, my hair already a mess from thrashing for her, my legs straining around her shoulders. She makes me feel beautiful.

Amy drags her tongue up my pussy, over my thighs, sucking the delicate skin into her mouth until I know she’ll leave marks. She sucks my clit and instead of hoping beyond hope that this time, this one time, I’ll come fast and hard, I throw my head back and moan, loud and echoing in her apartment, as I pulse against her tongue. She doesn’t stop, even when I pull at her hair, bucking my hips, until my orgasm finally ebbs, and I slump back on the bed.