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“Mmm…wanted to do that all night.”

“I wanted you too,” she admitted, her tongue and voice a low buzz in my ear.

“There’s fresh coffee,” I stuttered out finally, because between the way I felt and the way she held me, I could see this going in only one direction, and I had to slow it down before it raced away from me, out of control, without my knowing or understanding what it was or where it came from.

“Sure, yeah. Coffee sounds good,” Jean agreed, her words almost faint, her breath as ragged as mine.

As we got caffeinated, we sat and did our best to talk about the station and battalion Jean had been assigned to. I had difficulty focusing: I couldn’t stop admiring the graceful line of her neck, or the way a tendril of hair curved just so over the sharply defined tendon there and ended over what I knew were probably the most magnificent breasts I’d ever seen.

I did manage to understand that she had been put into B Company and would start on Tuesday as vacation relief, meaning that she would fill in for absent members or work at the station itself, from two p.m. to ten p.m., until she was assigned to a regular unit.

“Are you happy with those hours?” I asked as I shifted closer to her along the sofa. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I realized that Jean was gracefully allowing me to set the pace and tone, and I appreciated that. I’d already done the let’s-not-talk, let’s-get-right-to-the-fuck thing, as well as the oh-baby, I-want-to-do-whatever sex talk. I wasn’t sure of what I did want, but whatever happened between us, I knew I didn’t want
that;
I wanted this to be…right.

“Well…it was actually my second choice, stationwise,” she admitted, “but the other available choices would have brought me to the Bronx, and that would have been a crazy commute, and Brooklyn would have ended up in an overnight rotation.”

I caught the slightest shake in her hand when she put her mug down.

“I’m a little tired of those overnights,” she continued, then grinned at me. Her gaze moved from my eyes to my mouth, and the shift of her grin, from humor to a frank sensuality, made my heart stop for one painful second before it throbbed back to life, a heavy beat in my ears. “There’s this girl I really like—she prefers a three-to-eleven shift.”

“Funnily enough,” I said, hardly able to hear myself past the beat in my head, “that station was
my
first choice. And I did, in fact, request a three-to-eleven shift.”

“I know.” Her voice was barely audible. “I remembered.”

I was stunned. Jean had based a major career decision on
my
preferences, on the chance that I would get both the station and the shift I wanted. Granted, she could always transfer, but we’d been repeatedly warned at the academy that transfers were hard to get, especially as newbies. “Depends on the needs of the service,” our instructor had said. “You could get one right away, but you’re more likely to wait anywhere from one to fifteen years.”

I put my cup down. “Jean, you didn’t do that, you didn’t throw away a chance at a station you want for a girl.”

“I didn’t throw anything away.” She brushed the hair away from my forehead. “I’m taking a chance on something I really want.”

I forced the air and the words out past the knot in my chest and the tightening of my throat. “So tell me more about this girl you like.”

“She’s beautiful,” Jean whispered. Her eyes were the color of burnt sugar as she carefully cradled my face in her hands, then stroked my cheeks. “She’s break-my-heart beautiful.”

I’d been told I was cute, and I’d been told more times than I could remember that I was pretty in so many ways, by so many people, I even knew it in an objective, almost logical way, the same way I knew my hair or eye color. But in the same way those other things were simply embedded facts I never consciously thought about, so was the idea of being “pretty.” It was a concept that had no real meaning for me, just another fact among so many others—until I heard Jean put it that way. Her words…they meant something to me, because the way she said them had meaning, more meaning than just my face.

“And she’s very, very special,” Jean continued as I found myself thinking I felt the same way about her. “She doesn’t know how special she is.”

When her mouth met mine, I was more grateful than I can ever remember feeling for the taste of her lips, the return pressure of her hands wherever they roamed.

“I’ll bet,” I said when we took a breath, “she really likes you too.”

*

When we finally got to my room, I hesitated. Not because I didn’t know what to do, but because I was afraid—afraid that after Kerry, and especially after Trace, I wouldn’t know how to touch her. Not that I couldn’t make her come, but that I wouldn’t remember how to be gentle, caring. I knew how to
fuck
, that was easy. But I didn’t know if I could show her how I felt, how she made me feel for her, about her.

I decided to take the risk and tell her. “Jean, I know this might sound…silly or something, but…I don’t want to rush things, I don’t want to just—”

Jean shushed me with the gentle pressure of her lips on mine. “It’s okay. I don’t want to rush us, either.”

“Could we…would you…just stay with me? Is that okay?”

Her eyes, a fiery henna that triggered a line of combustion along my internal geography, fixed on mine.

“I would be very happy,” she kissed my neck, “to do
exactly
that,” she concluded, the words a rumblethat tumbled against my throat.

I forgot all my fears as we settled around each other, shedding each concern with each new brush of freshly revealed skin—silky, soft, and drawing me, drawing her, onward, closer, the incandescent meld wrapping us around one another as we explored new terrain: the channel of her spine down her lightly muscled back, the jut of her hip that fit my palm precisely, and the yielding firmness behind it as I drank of her breath, the wine taste of her mouth, the tender sensuality of her lips and tongue.

Her hands, hands I’d seen carefully palpate for a vein or a pulse, measure drugs, soothe the sick and the scared, take tension from mine to set broken bones, hands that I knew for a fact were competent, capable, strong, those same hands now set that combusting line into a series of fiery sparks that made every cell in my body pulse with awareness, the awareness of Jean and how much, how very much I wanted her hands on me, to explore her with mine.

The growing heat took us from separate sparks to a joined blaze, fueled a magnetic heat I wanted to sink into forever; and her body molded to my hands, held me firmly, told me the truth behind every single one of her joking declarations, all of them.

“Jean…you…are
so…
fucking…beautiful…” I whispered into the tender skin at the junction of her jaw as I moved within her. I had no other words to describe how incredible she was, she felt, how she made me feel. For once, the fire didn’t threaten, didn’t frighten, but warmed me instead with its steady light, a joyful, heady peace that made me feel complete.

My name, choked from her lips, a soft cry in my ear, made me tremble against her, the sound surging into my body, through my blood, until I couldn’t tell who we were anymore when her free hand pulled me even closer to hold my beating chest against hers.

“Tori?” Jean whispered as the glide continued, setting flames dancing in the just-banked fire.

“Hmm?” The delicate vein in her throat lay under my tongue.

“Happy Valentine’s Day.”

It was the best one I’d ever had.

After life threats have been treated properly, the decision to transport immediately and continue evaluation en route, or to delay transport and continue the evaluation, must be made.

Despite my mother’s rather obvious and occasionally very pointed disapproval of my new profession, something about her recent hospital experience had changed her perspective. When I stopped by to say hello and drop off my check, she asked about my graduation date, and as I half ashamedly admitted that there’d be an actual ceremony and answered her questions of when and where, I was shocked to realize that she wanted to attend.

After the brief ceremony I learned that not only had I received the station and shift I’d wanted, I’d been assigned, along with Bennie and Roy, to the same battalion as Jean, which meant we’d have the same days off, and was further pleasantly surprised to discover my mother had arranged for a small dinner party at one of my favorite restaurants, Real Madrid.

She’d also invited Nina and Samantha. I promptly turned around and invited Jean, and this time, I didn’t care what my family or, rather, my status-conscious mother thought.

There’s no denying that I was more than slightly relieved to learn after I introduced her to Nina and Samantha that none of them had met before—well, not really, anyway. Sam remembered Jean’s father and mother from her own father’s funeral.

I actually called Trace about three days before that, as much as I dreaded it, but I didn’t want to leave things unclear between us, and I didn’t want to lead her on in any way. I had decided to meet her at the hospital after her shift and tell her face-to-face that, yes, I found her attractive, yes, we were friends, but no, I couldn’t continue sleeping with her, because I really didn’t share, and I couldn’t share myself, not like that, not anymore.

I still didn’t know what Jean and I had, but I wasn’t going to let anything stop us from discovering.

When Jean and I had touched, really and truly touched, for the first time when I tasted her wine-sweet skin and filled my hands with her curves, I wanted more: to taste the line of her neck and the curve of her breast, those beautiful curves she carried so proudly. She was beautiful: shining in my eyes, moving with my hands, gliding under my tongue, and I was happily shocked that she explored me with the same eagerness.

I reluctantly tore my lips from the light chocolate kiss of her hardened nipples to return to her mouth, and Jean explored me, fingertips rolling and kneading my breasts, making me catch my breath as I eased my leg between hers.

She made me aware of my body—not just my arousal, but my heartbeat, my skin, my fingers as she drew them between her lips, made me sigh over the slip of her tongue along my neck and made my breath catch again when that same tongue teased across my chest to bathe one hardened point, then the other, slowly, deliberately, meant only for me to savor in the moment.

I’d known, in the same way I’d known that rain was wet and fire burned, that I was female. It meant I had to wear a bra, had to deal with the same physiological occurrences approximately every four weeks, and that I could, assuming all systems were fine, bear live young someday; my gender was simply a fact, like the continents or the oceans, apparent and
genetically
incontrovertible, nothing to have an emotion or an opinion about.

Sex had always been a combination of lust and mechanics, biological drive coupled with the artistry of technique, where my needs were secondary to my partner’s as a matter of consideration, manners, and, I have to admit, pride.

But Jean…Jean made me
know
in a way I never had before that I was not only female, but that I was also a
woman—
a concept I hadn’t considered before, not in any way, not in this certain fullness; it simply didn’t figure into my equations.

In Jean’s eyes and hands, next to her skin, I was desirable,
because
of my genetic inheritance, my body built to receive the same pleasure it gave and for the same reasons, not as an afterthought or a tool, not even as part of a contest of wills or to prove anything other than this: she desired me, she found me beautiful, and she wanted to show me.

“Tori…sweet, sweet Tori,” she groaned, “I love the way you feel.” Her hands traveled along my sides to grip my ass and shift us so that we lay next to each other, and I trailed my fingers down the tense muscles of her stomach, through the velvet down that covered her.

It was a smooth glide between lips ready for my touch, the hardness of her clit slick under my fingertips. I was moved, so moved that my heart ached.

Jean slipped an arm around my waist, pulled me closer, and delivered a kiss that revealed me, left me equally ready beneath her hand as she pushed herself harder against me.

Nothing, but nothing, had ever felt as erotic or as stirring as my tongue playing against Jean’s while we teased each other.

I’d never been so naked; I’d never felt so free.

“I want…I need to be inside you,” I managed to say against her lips, her clit sliding along the groove between my fingers before I eased my thumb there instead and let my fingers edge closer to her wet invitation.

“Wait,” she breathed against my mouth as I felt her fingers shift, press, and tease against the body hunger she created, “do it with me.”

Her tongue filled my mouth as we filled each other, a slick and ardent merge that made me surge against her, on her, in her, and she felt so
right
; it all felt just so very
right
.

“Perfect,” I could barely groan out at the honey-sweet fullness in my cunt, the lush embrace of her liquid heat, the finesse of the stroke on my clit, and the amazing pulse that throbbed under my thumb.

I read the cues of her breath, of her body, the shift of her hips and the slide of her cunt on my fingers to discover what she liked and what she loved, turned on even higher by every whispered request and half-gasped urging as I learned her rhythms.