But he kissed me.

He kissed my stretch marks, and my scars.

He treated me like a person to be respected, like a thing to be worshipped and handled gently as precious glass.

He kissed the most frightened part of me, and it isn’t so scared anymore.

He’s here. And I can hardly believe it.

I can hardly believe a boy so handsome, so regal and smart and kind and interesting wanted to – burned to – sleep with me.

No one else is going to want you.

Jack wants me, for who I am.

And it’s even more amazing he stayed after, that he’s still here, that I wasn’t so horrible he didn’t change his mind and leave. He’s not a figment of my imagination. He’s here and he’s real, and he smells the same as his room smells, and I wallow in it, try to drag out every second of the luxurious golden haze that is this warm disheveled bed with this warm disheveled boy in it whom I happen to like an annoyingly huge amount.

Finally, Jack cracks one sleepy blue eye open, sees me staring, and laughs hoarsely.

“Good morning you creepy, beautiful thing.”

“I was plotting,” I say. “How best to murder you in your sleep.”

Jack leans in, planting a soft kiss on my palm. “Make it long, and drawn out. I love suffering.”

“Exactly why I’m making it short and snappy. Neck-snappy, to be precise.”

He pokes at my forearm. “You couldn’t snap my neck if you tried.”

I scramble up and sit on his pelvis, trying to wrap my arms around his neck. He fights me off weakly, and finally pulls me down into him, laughing.

“You are vicious.”

“I believe the term you used was ‘hellion’,” I correct in his ear.

He runs his hand lazily up and down my spine. “How are you doing? Pain-wise?”

“I’m broken in two and will never walk again,” I deadpan.

“Yes,” he hisses, tightening his hug and pressing me harder against him. “Now you can never escape.”

I roll my eyes and roll off. “Let’s go, creepster maximus. The day awaits, glorious and full of future disappointment. And food.”

He doesn’t get up, watching me pull on shorts and a t-shirt instead. He groans, and shoves his face in the pillow.

“I don’t want to go. I hate it out there. I want to stay here forever.”

“I don’t have enough Doritos in this room for ‘forever’,” I insist, and wince when an ache shoots through my pelvis. Jack jumps out of bed, balancing me on his arm.

“Are you alright?”

“Everything is sore and I’m dying.”

“I warned you.”

“No you didn’t! There was no warning involved! Just a lot of gross dirty talk!”

“And laughing. A lot of good laughing.”

I blush, and he wraps his arms around me and pulls me back down onto the bed. He sighs into my hair.

“It’s been years since I’ve laughed like that. Thank you.”

“Tsk tsk, what kind of escort are you? I’m supposed to thank YOU for sex. Or pay you.” I lean over the side of the bed and fumble around for anything other than dust. My hand finds the bra-dime Yvette gave me, and I press it into his palm. “Here. For your services.”

Jack growls and bites my neck. “I think I’m worth a little more than that.”

“I don’t know,” I singsong. “You gotta prove it first.”

He flips me on my back and I squeal. He leans his forehead on mine.

“Prove it? Then what was last night?”

“A warm-up,” I decide. “Appetizer. Except ew, let’s not bring weird food analogies into this please, I don’t want to be compared to a restaurant.”

“You’re the best restaurant ever. Four Michelin stars,” Jack asserts. I push him off and he laughs, pulling his pants on. Yvette chooses that exact moment to walk in the door and get a face full of Jack-dick. She stares at it, then at me, then at Jack’s face, and nods like an art appreciator.

“Nine out of ten.”

***

I, Isis Blake, have decided sex is okay.

I have a little large mental book of what is okay and what is not okay, and sex gets lifted from the ‘not-okay’ book and slapped into the ‘okay’ book over the course of two weeks. Jack and I shuttle back and forth from my dorm to his, alternating when our roommates are out and stealing quiet moments and making them not-so quiet. I learn his every mole, every tiny scar from his childhood, every weak spot. There are so many huge dumb problems looming, like the tape and the camera footage of me that Nameless has, but I shove them and Nameless aside and bask in my newfound Jack-obsession. The former Ice Prince is ticklish behind his ears and his knees and his hips (his sharp, delicious hips) and also he is still very much the Ice Prince – cool and collected and logical. Nailing me hasn’t changed that. In fact, nothing about us has really changed. I thought sex would break us apart, or change us into a formless sappy mush. But that’s not the case at all. I retort something, he snaps something back. I force gummy bears into his begrudging mouth, he holds me back from tackling the idiot who ran over my shoe with a skateboard. We fight. We fence. We argue the finer points of the most complex and delicate debates in history.

“Santa is real,” I say as I pick up my burrito from the food counter.

“He’s not.” Jack corrects, sidestepping a cafeteria worker with a full stack of dishes.

“Two words have never convinced anyone ever of anything.”

“Yes they have. ‘It’s shit’,” Jack says.

“What’s shit?”

“The prequel Star Wars films.”

“Oh, see, now you’re right, and I have to take back what I said because I was wrong and you’ve convinced me utterly with only two words. Ugh. I hate being wrong.”

“I love being right,” He sighs, and I kick him under the table, except he is too fast, so all I kick is wood. With my shinbone.

“Ow.”

He kisses my head. “You brought this on yourself.”

I throw my face on the table and fake-sob. “I have bruises everywhere. I’m a bruise farm. Magnet. Bragnet. One day the future people of the world - who won’t know what bruises are because technology will be so advanced no one ever gets one - will come to me, and I will show them my butt, and it will be my greatest contribution to human civilization.”

This impresses Jack so much he takes a sip of soda.

Sometimes I catch him smiling at me when I’m jabbering on about stupid shit. But that’s the only thing that’s really changed.

Sex used to be this weird scary blob of lace panties and ladies who scream like they’re being hurt in  p**n  all the time and ‘what if I smell funny what if my chin looks fat from any angle ever during it’. It used to be me thinking I’d have to shave everything smooth like a dolphin every single day of my life for a guy to not be grossed out by me. It used to be me, angry at sex, and hating it, and bitter because the only person I thought I loved used it to hurt me. Sex was a sword I didn’t want to be cut by again, a tiger that mauled me once before and I’d gladly walk into a pit of corrosive tar before I’d go in that tiger’s pen again.