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“You didn’t need to liquor me up,” I said, taking it from her.

She came inside, slipping off her shoes. “Maybe I wanted to.”

After giving her a kiss, I examined the label. “A twelve-dollar bottle. Fancy.”

“They were out of the six-dollar ones,” she said with a grin.

I poured each of us a glass, my hands slightly shaking at the thought of what was going to happen next. Even if I’d become fairly confident Jaz was attracted to me, being with her like this still made me all kinds of nervous. The things we’d done the other times were great, and I was more than satisfied afterward, but we’d stuck to heavy petting and fingering. And I got painfully aroused every time I thought about actually going down on Jaz… or vice versa.

In fact, as I set the bottle of wine down on the counter, I found it’d happened again.

I caught my breath as I passing her the glass. The heat of her body was sending pulsations straight to my core. I took a long sip of my wine, not wanting her to see just how easily she could turn me on.

“What’s up?” she asked, looking at me oddly. “Oh… I see how it is.”

My face flushed, and wine splashed against the sides of the glass. “What do you see?”

“I see my body’s been haunting yours.”

As I was in the middle of a sip, her words sent me into a coughing fit. By the time my lungs finished spasming, Jaz had pressed up against me, her breath hot on my neck. “The feeling is mutual, if you didn’t notice.”

I took short, ragged breaths. This woman was going to give me a coronary.

“Liquored up yet?” she asked.

Another long sip, and my glass was empty. “As much as I’m going to be.” I set both hands on her waist. “Why? Was there something you wanted?”

“Only this.” She tugged up the hem of my shirt. “And this.” She took her own off.

I paused, running a finger over the ink just above her right bra cup. “Unless?”

“It’s from a Dr. Seuss book,” she said. “To remind me that ‘unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it’s not.’”

“A literary tattoo.” A smile curled up my lips. “I’m not surprised that you have one.”

“Then why do you look so amused?” she asked defensively.

My smile got bigger. “You don’t get one of Rich or Lorde… not Dickinson, not Atwood, not Parker, not Plath… but Dr. Seuss. His words are the ones you’ve gotten permanently memorialized on your body.”

“What?” she snapped. “I like kids’ books. That book inspires me. And I’m hoping to read it to my own kids one day.”

Pressing a kiss to the tattoo, I murmured, “There’s nothing wrong with it at all. I think it’s fantastic.”

“All right, then. Where were we?”

“I believe I was about to explore your body.” I cupped her bra, watching her face for a reaction. Once, twice, nothing… until the third time, when her head tipped back and she gasped. “Unless you have a problem with that,” I added.

“No problem at all.”

I ventured further, running my hands down her stomach, her hips, touching and caressing every inch of her slender frame I could reach, paying extra attention to those spots where her breathing got short. My lips and tongue soon followed my fingers. She was even more sensitive when licked and kissed.

Jaz swallowed, looking up at me with half-lidded eyes. “This moment right now makes me want to write a poem.”

“Forget poems.” I grabbed her ass with both hands. “I’m going to make you sing.”

As one, we moved for the bedroom. There was a quick scramble—me undressing her, her undressing me, both of us tearing our own clothes at once—and the rest of our clothes were on the floor.

We kissed then, a hungry, urgent type of kiss that left both of us breathless and needy.