The laundry was a warm, soft mountain between them on the bed, smelling of sunshine and fabric softener. Clark’s hands moved on autopilot, folding a pair of his own blue jeans into a neat square, then one of your sweaters, the cable-knit wool scratchy against his fingertips. But his attention, the whole of it, was siphoned away from the domestic task, pulled into the gravitational field of you.

You were perched cross-legged on the duvet, a sock puppet on each hand, conducting a full-scale reenactment of your friend’s life imploding.

“—and then Stacy said, ‘He said it was for the maturity!’” you exclaimed, your voice a symphony of indignant glee. “The maturity, Clark! As if dating someone who collects ceramic thimbles and has a prescription for gout is a step up on the evolutionary ladder!”

He was only half-processing the words. Sixty-year-old aunt. Golf clubs. Shared bingo night. The details were absurd, but they were just the vehicle for the real show: the way your eyes sparkled with righteous fury for your friend, the way you bit that glorious bottom lip to stop yourself from laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of it all. You were a live wire, crackling with energy and story, and all he could think was how badly he wanted to gently unplug you, to quiet the storm with his mouth.

The thought wasn’t a shy, creeping thing. It was a sudden, profound certainty that settled in his bones. He needed to kiss you. Not later. Now.

“—so I told her, ‘Honey, if maturity smells like Bengay and desperation, you’re better off—’”

You didn’t even see him move. One moment he was across the mountain of laundry, the next his hands were on your waist, large and warm even through your t-shirt. He pulled with a gentle, inexorable insistence that lifted you from your cross-legged nest and settled you onto his lap, straddling his thighs. The sock puppets fell, deflated, to the duvet.

You let out a small, surprised “oh!” but didn’t stop talking, the momentum of your story carrying you. “—better off without him, obviously, but the audacity—”

He buried his face in the curve of your neck, a low, contented hum vibrating in his chest. He inhaled deeply. Your scent—vanilla lotion, the faint, clean smell of your shampoo, and something uniquely, essentially you—flooded his senses. It was the antidote to every bad headline, every distant cry he’d ever had to fly toward.

“Clark?” you murmured, your monologue finally stuttering to a halt. Your hands came up to rest on his shoulders.

He pressed a soft, open-mouthed kiss to the frantic pulse at the base of your throat. He felt it leap under his lips. Another kiss, a little higher, along the column of your neck. Then another, tracing a slow, deliberate path upwards. Each kiss was a punctuation mark, silencing the story, replacing it with the language of his devotion. He could feel the slight tremor that ran through you, the way your fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt.

By the time his lips found yours, you were utterly quiet, your breath hitching in a soft, anticipatory gasp.

He kissed you slowly. There was no hurry. A prelude to something else. His lips moved over yours with a hungry sort of reverence, tasting the waxy sweetness of the cherry gloss, feeling the perfect, plush softness of you. It was a deep, consuming kiss, a conversation all its own. This is more important than any idiot ex-boyfriend.

One of his hands came up to cradle the back of your head, his fingers tangling in your hair. The other splayed across the small of your back, holding you flush against him. The world narrowed to the soft sigh you let into his mouth, the feel of your weight on his legs.

When he finally broke the kiss, it was only far enough to rest his forehead against yours. Your eyes were closed, lashes dark against your cheeks. Your cherry-red lips were now slightly smudged, beautifully kissed.

He grinned, a slow, dopey, utterly pathetic grin. “Sorry, baby,” he murmured, his voice rough with affection. “You were yapping. And your mouth looked… it looked so damn kissable. I lost the fight."