When I wake up, the sun is high in the sky, and shadows have shortened to little stumps. It’s the latest I’ve been in bed since that time I got the flu during freshman year and spent forty-eight hours hallucinating that my skin was an eggshell and my skeleton had finally grown enough to hatch out of it.
There are no nightmares today. Just a feeling of bone-deep rest and Jack’s big body curved behind me, arms wrapped around my torso like a cross, securing me to him. It’s not unlike the way I awoke exactly two weeks ago. Except that we’re naked, our skin tacky. This time he is going to have to change the sheets.
Something nags at the back of my skull, telling me that I can’t afford to waste time, that I should get out of bed and be productive—answer emails, clean the oven, buy a cemetery plot. I shush it and stretch in Jack’s arms. He stays asleep, hard once again. I wonder if it’s another peerection. If— “A what?”
Oh shit. “Nothing.” Did I say it out loud?
Jack’s voice is a deep rumble. “Did you just—”
“No. Nope. I—”
I hide my face in my pillow. This is why I don’t sleep in—if I get the amount of rest I actually need, my head-to-mouth filter stops working and— Jack’s hand slides down past my stomach. He starts grinding drowsily against my ass, and my mind blanks.
“Okay?” he asks, half-asleep.
“Please.” I hook my foot behind his shin. He presses an open-mouthed kiss on the curve of my shoulder.
“You did say that we might have to work on the sex.”
I stiffen. If it wasn’t good, I said. Was it not good? I thought it was, but—what do I know? He’s the expert here. “I’m sorry, I—”
“Elsie. Work on how little I last.” He bites the spot where he kissed me, and then his cock is rubbing against me, breaching my entrance. He makes a few soft, grunt-like noises next to my ear, then presses to the hilt in one single push. I spasm around him, and the drag against my muscles is sun-extinguishingly good. It’s still a snug fit, but I’m wet from his come, soft from sleep, and he slides inside like a dream.
He pinches my hard nipple, like he knows exactly what my body wants, even when I don’t. His palm presses against my abdomen, and I wonder if he can feel himself move within me, if he can tell how full I am. His thrusts are long and slow, at once leisurely and forceful enough to shift my entire body closer to the headboard.
“Okay, okay, I—” He laughs ruefully, breathless against my throat, and I reach behind me. To touch his cheek, to hold on to him. “Maybe you should be in charge. Before I fuck you into the mattress again.”
Shockingly, I’m still capable of blushing. “What do I—”
“Just—move.” He presses a kiss where my neck meets my shoulder. “Do what feels good. Let me see you—yes. Yeah.”
I grind my ass against his abdomen, shallow, slow, awkward at first, because the position is weird and because what even am I doing? But my hips circle in a long, sinuous move, and something hits just right, and— We gasp in unison.
“There?” he murmurs against my ear, angling my hips to give me even more. “That’s how I make you come?”
My mind blurs. “You already made me come.”
He makes a guttural noise. “I want to feel it. When my cock is inside you.”
I moan, and then I’m not in charge anymore. The pleasure gushes inside me, scarily strong, quicker than I thought possible, unraveling like an avalanche. I squeeze his fingers and he squeezes back, and when my body clamps down on his, he does press me into the mattress, and he does fuck me like his control is not fully there, and he does say my name over and over, like a war chant. He smells like sex and our sweat and the best sleep I’ve ever had, murmurs sweet, filthy things in my ear, promises that he’ll never let me go.
The sun is high in the sky, Jack is deep inside me, and I smile into the sheets for no particular reason.
* * *
? ? ?
I think I might be happy.
Though due to a lack of hands-on experience, I cannot be sure.
But in the bathroom, while chasing droplets down Jack’s throat, my legs wrapped around his waist as he pushes me into the tiled wall, I wonder if maybe this is it. This warm, comforting weight glowing shyly behind my sternum could be something like hope.
Hope that there’ll be more days like this one.
“Stop smiling like that,” he whispers in my ear. The jet of the shower pounds over his back, and his lips taste like hot water. “Or I’ll be on you all day.”
I laugh into his neck and pretend I didn’t hear him.
The clock in the bathroom, the one I imagine Jack curses at when he runs late in the morning, reads 12:37. I towel myself dry, buzzing with possibilities, with the tenuous, burgeoning impression that for once I’m not running away, but heading somewhere.
“Food,” he tells me once I’m wearing my—his—hoodie and a pair of socks that won’t stay up on my calves. His smile is handsome, self-deprecating. “I have these elaborate daydreams that I’m feeding you a five-course meal I hunted, field-dressed, and prepared all by myself,” he says with a kiss on my forehead.
“Why?”
He gives me an arch look. “Don’t ask why, like it’s a rational impulse. So, what do you want?”
“What can you make?”
“Nothing.” He shrugs at my startled laugh, then throws me over his shoulder to take me downstairs. I feel like a sparkly drink. “I’ll learn. It’s a new obsession for me.”
I can’t remember the last time I giggled this much.
The five-course meal turns out to be slightly burned grilled cheese with boxed tomato soup. I sit on my stool at the island, and he eats his own standing across from me. It’s simultaneously the most ordinary and the best thing I’ve ever tasted.
On my phone there is a text from Cece, time stamp 9:23 a.m.
CECE: “I’ll never spend the night at Jack’s,” she said. “I’m destined to die alone, strangled by the tumble of cobwebs that have overtaken my vulva due to sexual inactivity,” she said.
I laugh, and Jack smiles just because of that, which is a little unlike him and also stupid. He’s stupid. I’m stupid. We’re stupid. Or maybe we’re just sixteen. Jack Smith, Jack Smith-Turner, Jonathan Smith-Turner and I have had sex. More than once. More than more than once. And now we’re having breakfast at one p.m. This is not my timeline, but I’ll claim it anyway.
I tell him about the science of grilled cheese, the negative surface charge of the lipid molecules, stress and strain, the optimal pH, which should always be somewhere around 5.5. (“Manchego, then,” he says. “Or mild cheddar. Gouda, too.”) My heart is spinning dizzily at the thought of this man who knows the pH of different cheese types off the top of his head, when my phone beeps.
A reminder to change my insulin pod. I consider putting it off till I’m home, then look at Jack and think, Honesty. This day, this not-too-good soup, this man with a black-hole tattoo peeping out of his T-shirt sleeve, they are too good to not spend some honesty on.
“I’m going to need a few minutes upstairs,” I say, hopping off the stool. “But I’ll be back.”
“What’s going on?”
“Just need to change my insulin pod.” I rummage in my purse and then hold my kit up triumphantly—a pale yellow bag with little hedgehogs Cece got me years ago. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to be there. I know people get squeamish. I’ll do it in your bedroom—”
“Show me how you do it.”
He puts down what’s left of his sandwich. Washes his hands.
I laugh. “Why?”
“Because I want to know.”
“Why would you—oh my God. You want to put high-fructose corn syrup in my insulin. Was this a long con to murder me?”
He smiles and shakes his head. “I’m starting to be partial to the way you bypass all rational explanations for everything I say, and dash straight to me being an unhinged serial killer.”
“I think it’s our thing.”
His biceps bunch up when he leans his palms against the table. “Show me how it works,” he repeats. It sounds like a soft order, and I answer with a soft question: “Why?”
“Because I want to know these things.”
There’s something unsaid in this. Because I want to know your life, maybe, or Because I want to know you. My eyes fall on the kit, and I picture myself using words like reservoir and expiration advisory and ketoacidosis. Explaining how each component works. I’ve never said some of those words out loud. They live exclusively in my head, together with the rest of my problems.
Even Cece knows only the basics. But this is Jack. So I swallow. “Do you have any disinfectant?”
The dimple is back. “I thought you’d never ask.”
Less than an hour later, I settle between his long legs on the couch, toes brushing against his calves, his hand splayed on my stomach under the hoodie. He refuses to watch the end of Twilight (“I think I’ve seen enough”) but agrees with me that New Moon is the best in the series (“Relativistically”), curls around me for a two-hour nap during Eclipse (“You smell like me—you should always smell like me”), and then wakes up as the afternoon stretches into evening, just in time for Bella’s unexpected pregnancy.
“This is atrocious,” he says, laughing at every single thing the characters do.
“Shut up.”
He laughs harder against my nape.
“Shut up—she could die!”