Distract Me

Here it is, and I've decide to make this one an exclusive!

It's about a perky overachiever who picks a virgin outcast to help her work out some of the stress of the college application process. Naturally, they end up connecting a little more than she was planning for. All characters are over 18 and consenting.

Enjoy, and thanks for being a patron :)

***

It was SAT day at school, and I was sitting in the mostly empty cafeteria, with some of the other seniors and juniors who’d dragged ourselves out of bed at six on a Saturday morning to prove our knowledge, intellect, and worthiness of further education.

The cafeteria had become a sort of staging ground, where we could restlessly page through our sample tests one last time, and try to sip just the right amount of Coke to keep our eyes open without overtaxing our bladders, while we waited for our turns in the one classroom where the test was being administered.

I had already had my turn. My hand was cramped from holding the pencil, and I was trying not to think about that one question where I was supposed to find the odd one out from a list of animals. All of them were ungulates except one. And all of them were “farm animals” except one.

Not the same one, naturally.

I’d picked the non-ungulate, since a taxonomic clade seemed a more inherent, concrete category than the cultural construct of a farm, but now I was regretting it. Testing us on arbitrary cultural constructs seemed exactly the sort of thing they’d do.

Home was only a short walk away, but being there held no particular appeal for me at the moment. After the test, I’d just sort of… stayed, pretending that I was waiting for someone to pick me up.

My phone’s battery was too low to spend it on games, and I hadn’t loaded my bag down with anything fun to read, so pretty soon, I was scoping out the other faces in the cafeteria for sources of diversion.

Jason Meer was sitting hunched over a notebook at an otherwise empty table at the far end of the room, with his hoodie pulled up over his long hair.

I was as surprised as anyone when my searching gaze snagged on him.

We were friends, sort of, in the loosest sense of the word. As in, we’d done a few projects together that had turned into afterschool hangouts where we got on well enough, but we’d never really interacted outside of a larger group.

I’d never, until this moment, caught myself picturing what his body looked like under that hoodie, or what positions and activities it might be inclined toward in private. And I’d certainly never felt reverberating stabs of excitement running from my chest, down through my belly, to the depths of my pelvis at that thought.

I pulled a page out of my own notebook, folded a quick paper football, and flicked it over to him. It landed right next to his hand.

He looked up at me, neither visibly amused nor annoyed, and then went back to whatever he was working on.

The thought of flicking it back didn’t seem to occur to him.

I got up, slid into the seat right across the table from him, and held my hands up as a goal.

He looked up again, put the pieces together for several long seconds, and then halfheartedly tossed the ball one-handed between my hands.

It rolled down my torso and onto the floor.

Jace went back to his work.

“Hey, Jace.” I poked his arm with the eraser of a pencil, to get him to look up again. “I was thinking I might come home with you after we’re done here. What do you think?”

“Uh… sure, okay,” he said. “You need somewhere air conditioned to work on your admissions essays?”

“I was thinking more of fucking,” I said.

Jace blinked.

“Fucking what?” he asked, like I’d forgotten some other verb at the end of the sentence that “fucking” was only there to intensify.

“You,” I answered. “Me. You fucking me. That’s probably the most accurate description of what I had in mind.”

Jace sputtered for a moment, and then the sputters became a few halting words. “What do you mean?”

I thought I’d been pretty clear, but I clarified further. “I mean, we’d probably start by making out until we can’t think straight anymore, and then you’d stick your dick in me somewhere. Anywhere, really, but I was thinking classic pussy.”

“…You’d let me do that?” Jace asked, with an almost imperceptible lift of one eyebrow.

He was still hunched, and his mouth hung in its usual expressionless shape, which I now suspected to be calculated. But his eyes were laser-focused on mine.

“Sure, why not?” I laughed.

Maybe if I acted like it was no big deal, his shoulders would relax, and he’d stop looking quite so much like a cornered animal.

“Well, no one ever has before,” he said.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to not be able to say that anymore?”

Jace somehow drew himself inward even further. “Is this a pity thing?”

“Why, just because you haven’t done it before?” I asked. “When Mike Gilbert gave me my first experience after winter formal, was that pity?”

“No, but you’re… you know, pretty.”

“So are you,” I said.

He was, in his pale, scruffy way. The longer I looked at him, the harder it was to understand how I’d never noticed before. But he didn’t let me look too long before pushing his hair farther down over his face.

He changed the subject, swatting the idea of his possible prettiness away like I’d never suggested such a thing.

“And Mike Gilbert has a fetish for breaking people in,” he said.

“Yeah, well… maybe I do too.” I smiled, hoping to make a joke of it.

Jace just kept staring at me, like if he just stayed silent long enough, I’d give myself away somehow. I sighed and took my last, best shot at establishing some kind of understanding.

“Look, I’m not trying to trick you,” I said. “And I’m not in love with you either. This is, like, the worst point in time to start something serious. I’m just horny, and bored, and about to crawl out of my skin from all the pressure. I need to do something rebellious and distracting and wild, like, now, and you look good, and I thought you might be down. But if you’re not, it’s fine.”

I put my backpack back over my shoulder and stood up, genuinely scanning the room for other prospects for distraction.

“Jessi,” he called out. “Wait.”

#

Jace walked me silently back to his house and around to the back entrance, which opened onto a dusty rec room.

The only thing in the room that looked like it had been used this year was a long folding table that had been repurposed into a desk, with an old desktop monitor and keyboard in the middle, surrounded by the disorderly contents of about half a dozen college application packets.

He moved some old notebooks off of a stained couch, pulled a cardboard box full of chip packets out from under the table, and offered it to me, still without speaking.

I took a small bag of Fritos, just to be polite, and we sat down side-by-side on the squashy couch cushions.

Fearing that we might just sit here eating chips and staring at the wall in uncompanionable silence indefinitely, I pulled my spare condom out of my bag and turned it over conspicuously in my hand.

“So,” I started, willing the little foil packet to act as something of a focal point for us, “have you ever fantasized about this, before today?”

“Uh, about you, specifically?” Jace asked.

“Yeah.”

“…Yeah.”

That seemed like a start. And it felt nice to hear.

“Awesome,” I said. “What were we doing?”

Jace’s pale skin reddened. “I can’t.”

“Of course you can. Who can you talk to about your sex fantasies if not a person you’re having sex with?”

“No, seriously,” he said. “It’s degrading.”

“To you or to me?”

“To you.”

“Oh.” I nodded. “Thanks for the heads up. Tell me.”

Jace snuck his first glance at me since we’d left school, and it looked like he was trying to decide if I was pumping him for blackmail material.

“Jace,” I sighed, “I literally could not give less of a fuck right now. So you’ve had degrading fantasies about me. I’ve had degrading fantasies about you, too.” He didn’t need to know that they’d just started today. “In a few months, none of this is going to matter anyway. Just spit it out, and if I hate it, I’ll pretend you kept it to yourself like a gentleman. I promise.”

“You have… about me?” he asked.

“I asked first.” I poked him gently in the arm.

Jason glanced at the condom and scrubbed his face vigorously with his palms.

“Okay. Okay, um, you remember that group project where we had to write a comedy sketch based on a Shakespeare play?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Well, you were leaning over to write Kyle the whatchamacallit, the cheat sheet of characters…”

“Dramatis Personae,” I offered.

“Yeah, that. And for like a split second, not on purpose, you gotta understand, I had this, like, vision of myself coming up behind you, grabbing your ponytail, pulling up the back of your skirt, and fucking you over the edge of the desk.”

I rolled my eyes, and began gathering my hair back up into its ponytail with the elastic I always kept at the ready on my wrist. “Oh, is that all?”

“Not exactly,” Jace admitted. “A big part of it was that you had to keep doing the project while I did you. And said… stuff to you.”

“What stuff? Wait, no, let’s set the mood first.”

I set my Fritos down on the cushions and got up to test Jace’s desk table. It felt sturdy enough. There was a pen and a notebook set to an empty page among all the applications, which I figured I could use without damaging anything important. I reached under my pleated brown skirt, slid my panties down, and kicked them out of the way behind the chip box.

Tossing my ponytail behind me and tapping the back of the pen to my lips, I leaned suggestively over the edge of the table and glanced back at Jace.

“There. What stuff did you want to say to me?”

Jace stepped up behind me and put a hand on my hip.

“Stuff like…” he drew a long breath, “like how this is what you get for being so good at everything.”

I laughed. “That’s what you want? Revenge for all the As I got to your Cs? You want to take it out on my pussy?”

He flexed his hand self-consciously against my hip, resting a little more of it on my ass. “Is that okay?”

I held the condom out to him.

“Put it on and give me a bit of a warm-up grind,” I directed. “And then we can pretend you didn’t, while you pound the know-it-all out of me.”

Jace’s hand flexed again, and left my ass. There came the distinctive sound of a heavy zipper, the shuffle of denim bunching around his knees.

I bit the condom wrapper open and held it back out for him to take the little ring of latex inside.

After a few seconds of fumbling, he returned his hands to my hips, both sides, this time, and let his cock rest between my legs, the upper side of it touching the outside of my pussy. Each time he made contact with me in a new way he paused, as if expecting to spring some deadly booby-trap.

I arched my spine, flattened it, and arched it again, shifting my hips to rub myself against the latex-wrapped surface of his cock.

I was so wound up from anticipation already that my body honestly didn’t need all that much prompting, but I took advantage of the opportunity to spread some moisture around.

I wished for a moment that I’d started us in a position where I could look at him properly. It was a little strange, using only my labia and inner thighs to trace the shape of a cock I’d never seen, and had only really begun to fantasize about in the past hour.

But then, I got the impression that if I’d been staring at Jace head on, he might never have gotten his pants down at all.

His cock was a little larger than I’d been counting on, not absurd, but definitely larger than anything I’d taken so far. I got around, but not quite as much as I liked people to think. Mostly, I spent a lot of quality time with the handle of my hairbrush. Jace felt wider than that handle by half, and long enough that I had plenty of grinding space on his shaft alone.

“Okay,” I said, when I could feel myself dripping around him onto the floor. “Go wild, I can take it.”

I did my best to sound as confident as I had been to start with.

He backed up, pressed the head against me, and then wiggled around for a moment, trying to find the right fold. I squished my hand between my body and the table to reach between my legs and help him, then returned it to the notebook in front of me.

“This,” Jace started, voice shaking a little, “is what you get.”

He rammed his way into me all at once, making all of my muscles clench protectively, and a thrill of adrenaline shoot through my system.

I yelped, mostly with excitement, only a little bit from discomfort.

“This is what I get for what, again?” I prompted him teasingly.

“For ruining the curve in every fucking class you take,” Jace said, and thrusted into me again, not just once but a dozen times in a rapid drumbeat, testing the limits of what I actually could take.

I was used to fucking myself pretty vigorously with that hairbrush, but it turned out that having something done to you, even when you were expecting and excited for it, felt a lot different from doing that same thing to yourself, controlling and anticipating every move with solitary precision. And the difference in diameter made everything hit harder, wrapping each thrust in a demanding, stretching sensation.

I cried out, and Jace paused. “Okay?”

“Fantastic,” I answered. “Keep going!”

It had hurt for a moment, but now the adrenaline was setting in properly, supercharging every shred of my arousal.

For the first time in weeks, I was present. I was right here, in my body. I was here in real space with a real person, with my friend Jace, who could surprise me, because he was real.

Jace grabbed my ponytail and yanked it back, pulling me into a sharper arch shape. His voice came from inches behind me.

“You’re so fucking smart. So articulate. So pretty, and confident, and presentable. So good at getting up early and taking tests and making teachers like you.”

He accompanied each accusation — because that was what he made them sound like — with another rough thrust, sending more electric jitters of adrenaline into my body.

“You think you’re so much better than me. And maybe you are. You’re just so completely, annoyingly perfect. But you can still be so stupid sometimes.”

“What times?” I asked.

I had to hand it to him, that particular accusation gave me a sharper stomach spasm than any of the thrusts.

“You think you can treat life like this vicious, cutthroat competition, and then turn around and pretend it’s not, whenever you feel like it,” said Jace. “You think you can just flash that smile at people, and act like we’re all in it together. You just keep raising the bar for everyone else, and taking up all the attention, all the space in every extracurricular and AP class you can get, and we’re all supposed to be so grateful that you’re not a bigger bitch about it than you are.”

“I’d be happy to help if you feel like you’re falling behind,” I said, mostly in the same tone I would have on any other day, chipper and friendly, but I added a bit of saccharine falseness, a bit of taunting, to fit the role he’d cast me in.

Jace grabbed my hand with the pen in it, and pushed it to the notebook.

“Then write,” he said. “Tell those admissions bastards where I see myself in ten years.”

“Where do you see yourself in ten years?” I asked.

“Fuck if I know. Just write.”

“Hmm, I don’t know, that seems like cheating….” I stalled, tapping the pen to my lips again, until Jace slammed himself into me, right to the base, and pulled my head back so far by the hair that I could see his face upside-down above me.

“Write my essay, know-it-all bitch,” he barked through a smile. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him smile so naturally before.

“Okay, fine!” I laughed, and bit the cap off the pen.

“I’m Jason Meer. That’s who I am. Honest.” I narrated the letter aloud, doing my best to actually write the words on the paper too, even though Jace’s grip on my hair was too tight for me to actually see the page. It was more difficult than I would have imagined to form correct sentences around the hammering thumps of sensation inside me. “I think I would be a good candidate for your program, and that it would help me achieve my goals. In ten years’ time, I’d like to think I’ll be doing the same thing I’m doing now. Pounding a hot, brainy woman doggy-style over a desk. I’m already something of a prodigy in that field, and I’m committed to continuing to grow my excellence. I think your campus will be the perfect environment for me to practice on a wide range of fuckable overachievers with exceptional asses. Please find enclosed my cock measurements, which I think you’ll find impressive, and a portfolio of smeared reading glasses and preppy skirts with cum stains—”

“Jessi?” Jace interrupted, letting go of my ponytail.

His thrusting had hit a crescendo in the middle of my rambling, and I’d thought for a moment that that was it, that was all the time he could last. But there had been no moment of finality. And now he was stopping, still mostly hard inside me.

“Did I make it too gross?” I asked, turning to look at him as well as I could.

“No. I don’t know. I… hmm…” he grunted in frustration. “I got really excited there, for a moment, and then I kind of panicked, like maybe I was going too fast, or being too weird with what I was making you do….”

“You didn’t make me do anything,” I said.

“Yeah, I know, I overthought it,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” I said. “Just tell me how to build you back up.”

“I think I need to slow down for a minute,” he said, and pulled out.

I sat up awkwardly on the desk and crossed my legs over my combined stretch-ache and continued arousal, tucking my skirt under to keep the mess off of his applications. Jace stood in front of me and stroked his cock through the condom in long, experimental pulls, like it was an old acquaintance he suddenly needed to get to know all over again.

“When you said you’d had degrading fantasies about me…” he said, “did you mean it? Or were you just trying to make me feel better?”

I couldn’t contain a small breath of laughter. “Not exactly my usual strategy for raising spirits.”

“Could you tell me?”

“Like I said, it won’t make you feel better.”

“It’ll make us feel more even,” he insisted.

I let out a slow breath, and tried to piece together a workable scenario from scraps of notions and what we had in the room.

“Sit down,” I said, turning his desk chair around toward him. It was an ancient swivel one with no armrests.

He sat, holding his cock, looking up at me with patient expectancy.

“Ask me to take your virginity,” I said.

“I mean, I think you technically already did,” said Jace.

“Ask me anyway,” I said.

“Would you please take my virginity, Jessi?” he complied. “I’m ready for it to be over, and I think you’re really pretty, and you’d do a sweet job. Like that?”

“Not quite.” I raked my fingers through my hair, trying to cut through the awkwardness to the heart of what I wanted from him. “Ask me the way you asked if I’d really let you fuck me. Like you couldn’t believe it was an actual possibility.” I twisted my fingers together, aware of how insulting this sounded out loud, and more bothered than I would have expected to be. “Like you can’t understand why anyone would want you, even for a minute, and like I’m a million miles above you. That was… it was pretty hot. Sorry.”

“Oh, you like that?” said Jace, relaxing and waving away my apology. “No wonder you picked me. I can do that.”

He closed his eyes, took a breath, and opened them again.

“Jessi. I’m sorry to bother you. I need a favor. Well, not need. I want a favor, really, really bad, and I know it’s a lot to ask from someone like you. I know the answer’s probably no, and that’s totally fine, but I just wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if I let you disappear at the end of the semester without shooting my shot. So, uh, would you, uh, would you be at all interested in taking my virginity? Because, you know, I’m eighteen, and you’re eighteen, and I know you don’t need any help with not going to college a virgin, but I… let’s be honest, I’m not going to get there unless someone takes mercy on me, so I figured I might as well ask the person I’d want it from most. If you wanted to, and I know you probably don’t, but if you did, we could just do it for a second, just to say that we did. I promise I’ll only say nice things about you. Or I don’t even have to mention you, I could say it was some girl from out of town. Or we could do it however you wanted. I mean, I know I’m not the most acrobatic guy in the world, but I would try, if I could just, if I could please….”

I swung one leg over his lap and perched on his knees.

“You want to stick this in me?” I asked, knocking his hand away from his cock and replacing it with my own. He was back to full hardness.

“Yes. Please.”

“How much?”

“So much.”

“Hmm.” I brushed a long lock of hair behind his ear. “I bet that felt really brave, admitting that.”

Another smile flickered through his self-effacing act, an act which felt surprisingly put on, considering how close it was to his baseline mannerisms.

“You get an A for effort,” I said, lining up his cock and sliding myself slowly down onto it. “Just like every other A you’ve ever gotten.”

Jace raised an eyebrow uncertainly.

“Shh,” I said, holding his face tenderly in my hands. “It’s okay. We all know no one can resist giving a guy credit for trying, even the tiniest bit.”

I bounced up and down on his lap, rising onto the balls of my feet and dropping to my heels. Sensation swept over his face, taking over more of his attention than he seemed to care to spend on my words.

“That’s it, enjoy this,” I whispered. “You deserve it. You’ve earned it. All I did was what I always do. I saw something I wanted, and I went after it in the most honest, ethical way I could think of, even if it was hard, and scary, and some people might judge me for it. But you, you got something you wanted offered to you on a platter, and you had the dazzling courage to grunt and nod at it. Who could deny you a prize for that?”

Jace’s face was getting redder by the moment, and just as I was about to stop and ask if this was the kind of degrading fantasy he’d been hoping for, he met my eyes and split that redness with a bashful smile.

“Hit me,” he said.

“Is that a challenge?” I asked. “Or a request?”

Jace shrugged, growing redder still. “It’s… an offer? No, yeah, fuck it, it’s a request. But only if you’d want to.”

I slapped him on the side of his still denim-covered ass. It thudded unsatisfyingly, so I tried again, a little harder.

Jace caught my hand and brought it to his face, where I’d held him a moment before.

Much more carefully, I slapped his bare cheek, low toward his jaw and away from his eye. Thankfully, his long face gave plenty of room.

There was a lovely crisp sound when I made contact, and Jace swung his head to the side, both softening the already soft blow and making it look much more dramatic than it was. When he sat back up, his eyes were wild, his smile broader and a little less bashful.

I put my hand back to the same spot, and he nodded vigorously.

I slapped him again.

“You can complain all you want about me taking up space!” I hissed, grabbing him by the neckband of his t-shirt. “You’re not fooling anyone. I know you dread the day I’m not there for you to hide behind. The day I don’t raise my hand, and the teacher calls on you while you try so desperately not to make eye contact.”

He avoided my eyes too, for a moment, without denying it.

“What do you think all those As are going to be worth for me in the end?” I asked, bouncing faster, leaning closer, close enough to brush my clit against his pelvis on my way, giving all the built-up sensation inside me a place to catalyze and take shape.

“Where do you see me in ten years?” I continued, dragging myself closer still, grinding harder. “Starting from right here, right now, where I’m so goddamn smart that I managed to talk my way into taking your cock and doing your homework, where do you see me going?”

“Pretending to do my homework,” Jace protested lightly.

“Do you see me doing your dishes and laundry next?” I asked, then answered for him. “No, never that, never just that. Because Jessi Delfry is smart. Jessi Delfry can do everything. I’d be paying your rent too, and once I pass the bar, I can protect you from all of your mistakes.”

The idea of us even still knowing each other after college formed a heavy cloud over us, making things much too serious, so I corrected myself.

“Well, not yours, but someone’s,” I said. “I’m going to end up someone’s perfect bitch, because that’s what perfection gets you. No. Not you. That’s what perfection gets me.  Not respect. Not power. Just more ways to get used. To get fucked.”

“You’ve got more ways in mind?” Jace asked, raising his eyebrow suggestively down at our connected laps.

I slapped him across the face again, and his head snapped back and forth, sending his peal of laughter echoing across all of this basement’s walls.

I hated him a little bit, just then. I would have hated him completely if he’d said something so crass to me in the hallways at school, especially when I was opening up to share such a frustrating complaint. But the simple fact that I was allowed to hit him, encouraged to hit him, turned my annoyance into a gift.

He was drawing the bottled-up poison inside me to the surface like a hot compress, so that I could push it out further with every slap across his thin lips and bestubbled jaw, every thump of my fists against the faded sweatshirt covering his chest.

It felt curative, purifying, the best version of getting fucked I’d ever found. As long as it felt like this, I was happy to spend the rest of the day trying every depraved thing we could think up between us.

“I’m going to sneak a little something for me, now,” I told him, holding his neck gently but firmly in my hands. “Like slipping a pack of Skittles into my bag at the store. Like walking home extra slowly, to watch a couple videos before it’s time to get back to the books.”

As I explained myself, I shifted my movement from bouncing to full-time grinding. I shoved away the constant urge to impress and succeed and do things how they were supposed to be done, and instead let my body lead. I dragged myself back and forth in his lap, chasing the friction of his pelvis and the pressure of his cock against my inner nerves.

“Can I help?” Jace asked.

“I don’t think I can handle help,” I answered. “Just sit there and let me get away with it, and then you can fuck me however you want after.”

“Whatever you say,” said Jace.

He did as I asked, and sat there in silence, examining his fingernails. They were surprisingly clean and neatly trimmed. I quite liked his hands, actually. They were soft and delicately shaped, intriguing in an easy-to-miss way, just like his face. I regretted my answer more the longer I looked at them.

“You can touch my breasts, if you want to,” I said, shrugging like I was offering him a favor that didn’t matter much to me one way or another.

He smirked at my attempted subtlety, but just as I’d requested, he let me get away with it.

“If that’s okay with you…” he said, and rested both of his hands gently on my chest.

I slipped my bra straps off my shoulders and let the cups peel away from my breasts under my t-shirt, so that I could feel him better.

He brushed his fingers over the fabric, tentatively at first, and then with more force, focusing on my nipples as they rose and hardened in response. I grabbed the hem of my shirt and pulled it up over my head and out of the way. Jace continued the same attention on my bare skin.

Still more of the tension in my body redirected itself downward to the buildup between my legs.

Jace lowered his head, and when I didn’t stop him, he rested his forehead on my sternum, surrounding himself with me.

That was when I felt the final rush coming on, right then, with his face safely buried, unable to see me being weird and vulnerable and hedonistic and selfish in such an unacademic way. I hugged him around the head to hold him there as the tension broke and released. My legs shuddered, and I clung to him tighter, just to keep my balance on top of the little armless chair.

As soon as the waves had passed, I went back to those targeted little bounces, putting more of the friction on Jace instead of myself. My vision sparkled, and my legs shook, but the last thing I wanted to do was pause to examine any of that. I just wanted to keep going, keep getting away with it.

“Hey, Jessi,” Jace patted my shoulder, and I released my two-arm grip on his head so that he could come up for air. “Jessi.”

“What?”

“I’m ready for another turn, if you’re ready to, you know, hand off?”

“Oh, sure,” I panted.

Holding me around the hips, he got up from the chair and maneuvered me onto my back on the floor, holding himself inside me as if he was afraid that, if he fell out, he wouldn’t be able to find his way back in.

“What fantasy am I now?” I asked, feeling my eloquence waver in the lingering haze of orgasm.

Jace bit his lip self-consciously, and said, “You’re Jessi Delfry.”

“Way ahead of you,” I giggled and waited for the rest.

“You’re hot, brilliant, Jessi Delfry, who just followed me home and came on my dick,” he said.

“Uh, I’m not sure what I can add to that, but okay.”

He thrusted as he spoke, in a slow, steady rhythm, and though I was in no state to get much more out of it for myself, I felt as if I could take it for hours yet. I had acclimated to his size so completely that I thought I might miss it when it was gone.

“You could tell me you liked it,” he suggested.

“Yeah,” I agreed, feeling myself blush. “I can tell you that.”

“Tell me you don’t regret coming up to me and asking for this.”

“I don’t.”

“Tell me it’s normal.”

“What is?” I tried to keep up with his train of thought.

“You and me. Going at it. Both getting something out of it,” he said. “Tell me we’re not really so far apart that this has to be a mistake.”

“You still think this is some kind of prank?” I couldn’t help laughing while he fucked me on the floor of his parents’ house. “Or a misunderstanding?”

“Only on, like, a universal level,” said Jace.

I caught his face between my hands, with my softest touch yet.

“You’re a person, and I am too,” I insisted. “You’re cute, and thoughtful, and really fun when you let your guard down. And I’m horny, and fucked up, and on the verge of a breakdown pretty much all the time. No, we’re not that far apart, and fuck anyone who thinks all that high school bullshit still matters.”

Jace looked down, almost embarrassed by the parts about him, and then ran those delicate fingers gently through my hair at the part about me.

This was in danger of getting serious again.

“Oh, and you’re also pretty hung, by the way,” I added. “Not super important to me, but if you’re looking for compliments, it’s there.”

Jace laughed, and paid a little more attention to his thrusts, pleasantly self-conscious of each one.

“I didn’t mean what I said,” he told me. “About you being a know-it-all bitch.”

“Sure you did,” I said. “And I meant what I said about how fucking jealous I am of people who know how to coast. Guys who are allowed to coast. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still like each other, too.”

“Okay, then,” he smiled faintly. “Know-it-all bitch.”

“Fuck me, burnout,” I replied.

He did, with a little more confidence, until his breath shortened. He clawed at the thin carpet on either side of my head and grunted in undignified, ecstatic relief.

We lay together for several seconds on the ground after he rolled off of me, without speaking.

“My mom won’t be back until late,” Jace said, finally.

“I don’t want to go home yet,” I admitted.

He passed me the box of chips.