I crawled to the very edge of the bed and held my hand out to her. “I want your lipstick smeared all over ours.”

J.J. hugged Jason tighter and said, “She moves like you do sometimes, like she has more muscles and tendons than humans have, dangerous sexy graceful.”

I laughed then. “If you think I’m the most graceful thing on this bed, you are so wrong.”

She smiled then, gave Jason a quick kiss, and took my hand, and I pulled her onto the bed.

9

I STARTED THE kiss with J.J., but there was no hesitation from her; she fell into the kiss with eager hands and mouth. She definitely kissed back, much more aggressive than Jade usually was. I stiffened for a second, debating how I felt, and then I gave back eagerness for eagerness and let my hands knead her body underneath the blue silk. My hands expected softness, and found some of the leanest muscle stretched over the most delicate body I’d ever held, so she felt both fragile and incredibly strong at the same time. Jade might have been an amazing athlete when I wasn’t looking, but her body still felt soft and you had to search for the muscles. J.J.’s strength was right there at the surface, covered in warm, smooth skin.

Her pink lipstick was smeared with my red, and I knew my lipstick must look as bad. It wasn’t neat, but it didn’t look like clown makeup either, it looked . . . like we’d smeared it kissing each other wildly. But wait . . . we had.

It made me laugh almost wildly. J.J. gave me a questioning look out of her clear blue eyes, and I reached for her again, sliding my hands underneath the bit of blue silk, so that I could feel more of that taut, satin-kissed, muscled skin. I realized vaguely that I was getting an echo of someone in my head and it wasn’t me. I wasn’t being invaded by some evil spirit, but I shared memories with Jean-Claude, and he had loved women for more centuries than America had been a country. Somewhere in his past had been someone that J.J. reminded him of, and I was able to get that fierce, happy echo without having to experience the actual memory. I liked that.

But I’d also had to own that if I hadn’t agreed with the joyful eagerness of Jean-Claude’s memory, it couldn’t have forced me to do anything I didn’t want to do. I wanted to slide the blue silk over J.J.’s head and see the body I’d been touching, so that I saw the blue lace of her thong sitting against the lean swell of her hips. I wanted to run my hands over all that lean and feminine muscle, so I did. Her breasts were so small and she so lean that they were almost just an extension of the pectoral muscle like men can get, but when I cupped them in my hands they were soft, moving and changing as I squeezed and caressed them. To get as much breast in my hand as I wanted I had to mound one up, so that I could lean over and wrap my mouth tight around her, and suck. I did it until she cried out, “God!” It encouraged me a little too much, so that she had to say, “Too hard, less teeth.”

I eased up, and pulled back to find our mingled lipsticks decorating her breast as if I’d painted it with my mouth. Some movement caught my eye and I found Jason holding on to one of the dark wooden bedposts. His fingers were holding on to the heavy carving of the bed like it was an anchor to hold him where he was, and his face was more than eager. His eyes held something close to pain, and I remembered that he, like me, wasn’t much of a watcher. We were both more doers.

I turned and looked at Nathaniel, still tied in the middle of the big bed, unable to come play. His lavender eyes were some of the darkest purple I’d ever seen them, lips half parted, face raw with lust. His body was eager and ready just from watching me with the other women. He didn’t have this reaction to just Jade and me, and I realized that he liked J.J.’s less complicated eagerness, too.

Domino had moved to the bed, his fingers actually touching the edge of it. He was fighting to keep his face neutral and failing, but he was trying. Nathaniel wasn’t hiding how he felt, but then he was nude and male, it was a little late to hide. Domino controlled his face, but his body was so hard and tight against the red silk undies that it made me want to crawl over there and touch him, strip him of the silk and have him join us.

I turned last to Jade, because only she had moved farther away from us; all the men who could move closer, had. Her face was very careful, trying for neutral, but I knew the set of her shoulders, that almost hunched look. I realized in that moment that I’d have done better, had fewer issues, if she were more dominant a personality, had more aggression and surety to throw in with mine, rather than making me chase, seduce, when I didn’t truly want to do either.

J.J.’s hands slid under my own bit of black silk, and there was a demand to her touch, a lack of tentativeness that I liked a lot. Maybe my biggest trouble with Jade wasn’t that she was female, but that she was so uncertain, so that I always had to persuade, do all the planning, and just court her in a way that the men normally courted me. As J.J. pushed me back against the bed I had a feeling that she wouldn’t make me be in charge of all the relationship. Yay, so yay!

What do you do in the middle of making out with one woman, when you realize your other lover may not be the girl of your dreams? You reach for her, because you can’t bear to see that careful sadness on her face, so I did. She rewarded me with one of the most brilliant smiles I’d ever seen on her face, and I couldn’t do anything but smile back, and then J.J. worked my nightie up over my breasts and pressed her mouth to one of them, and the smiling turned into me making wordless, eager noises for her.

Jade pulled her red silk over her head and threw it behind her. She bent over me, kissing me upside down, while J.J. tried to put as much of my breast into her mouth as she could. It might have made me giggle, except that Jade’s mouth was pressed to mine, the silk of her hair falling around my face.