Kiss Her Once for Me (85)

And so fucking loud. I love every sound she makes as she grips my hip tighter and comes from my two fingers and a trail of kisses left along her hairline.

As she pants and coughs and swears some more, I stare at the freckles and the white scar, all the pieces of her I memorized last time. She presses her forehead to my shoulder and wraps her arms around my waist; I wrap my arms around the back of her neck, trailing a fingernail through the short hairs there. We sit like that for several minutes—her trying to catch her breath, me trying to remember every damn detail about this time, too.





Chapter Twenty-Five


“Well.” Jack laughs into my shoulder. “That was… unexpected.”

I sigh. “No, it wasn’t.”

She peeks up at me and squints one eye bashfully. “No. I guess it wasn’t. I’ve basically wanted you to do that every minute of every day since Paul Hollywood knocked you into my mother’s centerpiece.”

“Honesty game,” I say, wrapping my arms tighter around her, holding her in place against me. “I’ve wanted to do that every minute of every day since last Christmas.”

I can feel Jack holding her breath. “That’s…” She coughs. “That’s not how the honesty game works.”

We both laugh, her bare chest vibrating against me until she finally, fully, catches her breath. She looks up at me. We’re not kissing, not talking, and somehow this feels more intimate than before. I lift a finger to trace the crescent of her scar. “How did you get this?”

Jack shivers slightly as my fingernail touches her lip. “It’s not an interesting story. I fell into the corner of a coffee table when I was four and split my lip open.”

“Everything about you is interesting,” I say quietly. I trace my finger from that white scar to her dark freckles. They dot her cheeks like points on a map, like I could chart a new destination if I connected them just right, like there’s a new ten-year-plan to be discovered in the distance between our two points. I let my finger wander through their swirling pattern, and I imagine all the things I could draw from her freckles. For a few minutes, she lets me. Jack lets me create art with the tip of my finger and the planes of her face.

It hits me ferociously. I love her. I never stopped loving her. I’m no better than that idiot Romeo. I know it’s not logical, but I fell in love with a woman in twenty-four hours, because in those twenty-four hours, she did the impossible: she made me feel safe and secure; she made me feel trusted and like I could trust. With an honesty game and emotional vulnerability, she got me to open up in a way I hadn’t opened up before. She let me be messy. She let me be true. How could I not love someone like that?

I love her, and I have to find a way to keep her. I want to find a way to have her beyond Christmas. I want to know Jack in every season.

In spring, when the mountain is out, when she wears a short-sleeve button-down open over a white T-shirt, the tattoos on her bare forearms flashing as she walks Paul Hollywood through Mt. Tabor Park, as she reaches for a beer at an outdoor patio on Alberta.

I want Summer Jack, in giant sunglasses and a carefree smile, holding tongs next to a barbecue, roasting marshmallows over a fire pit. Jack with melting Popsicle dripping between her fingers, Jack sprawled out on the soft grass.

I want to discover who Jack becomes in the fall, when the days get shorter and colder and gray. How does wild, restless Jack pack herself up for the winter to become the version I met in Powell’s? What does she do with those last gasps of sun? I want to solve that mystery and every mystery that is Jack Kim-Prescott, through all the days of all the months.

“What are you thinking about right now?” she asks quietly into my shoulder.

I trace a finger down her spine until she shivers. “I’m thinking about what you look like in shorts in the summertime.”

She looks up at me again, and she’s so recklessly open. “Please,” Jack begs, her voice soft and sweet, even as her teeth nip at my earlobe, “please let me fuck you.”

I want to say yes. Even though the intimacy of receiving pleasure is always trickier than the intimacy of giving it for me, with Jack, I always, always want to say yes. Jack’s hands travel the curve of my ass through my sweatpants, and I nod.

“Can I fuck you on the bed?” she asks plainly. As if I’m in any position to refuse such a request. Instead, I kiss her, deeply and desperately, until we both momentarily forget our mission. When we remember it, we’re both hazy-eyed and swollen-mouthed, our hands joined as we rise from the couch. I’m not sure which one of us is leading and which is following, but we end up on the edge of the one bed, and it’s distinctly Jack who lowers me down. It’s Jack who drops to her knees in front of me.

It’s Jack who undresses me, peeling off my borrowed clothes to reveal the body my mother has never been satisfied with. Just a little too tall, a little too chubby, a little too pale. “You’re so fucking perfect,” Jack whispers. She tries so hard to whisper it.

I close my eyes and try to convince myself this will last.

She traces a single finger up the inside of my thigh until I’m biting down on my bottom lip. Her mouth arrives where her finger is on the inside of my thigh, leaving a trail of kisses and the occasional press of her tongue to my flesh. I inhale sharply. She pushes herself up a bit so she can leave a kiss into the crease of my hip before she lifts my left leg over her shoulder and exhales a hot breath onto my throbbing body. “Elle,” she says, her voice almost stern. Fuck her stern voice. “Will you tell me what you want? What will make you feel good?”