Jamie sighs into our kiss before he drags my bottom lip between his teeth. An inhuman noise of pleasure leaves me when he lets it go, then bites right over my tattoo along my neck. He scrapes my nipple with his thumb, then soundly pinches it. It’s like a switch flipped, how quickly I’m scrambling on the precipice, panting for air.

“Jamie,” I gasp.

I taste his smile as he whispers, “Bea.”

Desperation morphs into shattering relief as I come, and Jamie watches me, eyes dark, mouth open. I slip my hand between us, gripping him hard through his pants so he can thrust into my touch, until he comes, too, in warm, wet juts of release that seep through his clothes and soak my stomach.

Panting for air, we stare at each other. Then Jamie drops his head to the crook of my neck and presses a long, slow kiss right over a sweetly throbbing bite mark.

“Just so you know,” I tell him breathlessly, “if you’d said this is what waltzing leads to, I would not have put up such a stink.”

His laugh dances over my skin. I wrap my arms around him, a smile lighting up my face. I can’t see how bright it is, but I know from how he looks at me.

I am incandescent.

· TWENTY-FOUR ·

Jamie

We might be two mature adults who consensually brought each other to orgasm last Friday, but I can’t say we’ve handled it as such. I woke up to an empty couch, no Bea in sight. I texted her to ask if she was home safely. She said yes. Then nothing else.

And then I doubted everything that happened, if I’d read her wrong, if she regretted it.

Since then, our messages have been brief and minimal. We agreed to meet for our paint date separately, straight from work. For the first time since this began, Bea and I are tiptoeing around each other.

I’m unhappy about it.

But not as unhappy as Bea, when she stops short outside of our destination. “Why are we doing this again?” she asks.

“Because an hour with cheap wine and amateur painting captured on Instagram will go a long way in our quest for revenge.” I press my glasses up my nose and turn, facing the storefront.

She’s quiet for so long, I peer over at her again. And when I do, I notice Bea’s staring at me. She blinks away. “Right,” she says. “Get in, paint, photograph, get out. It’s Instagrammable.”

“Precisely.”

Even if that isn’t the only reason I want to stick with this outing. Bea’s been creatively blocked. She hasn’t painted since she parted ways with that bastard of an ex-boyfriend. Since she told me about what he did, how he hurt her, I’ve almost offered to cancel this outing a dozen times.