She often thought these days about the girls she'd known in high school. Their conversations about sex. The ways they'd described their boyfriends; "only after one thing", "going down on him", "giving out".
Then she thought about Jace; about exploring every inch of him with her hands, her mouth, pressing herself against him. About other times, when he kissed her, stroked her, while she lay in a daze of pleasure, almost unable to move.
Or the times – usually when they had just got back from a fight, bloody, half healed – when they made any kind of excuse to leave the others and escape to her room. Scrawling runes on the door, Soundless, Closing, then falling onto the bed, sliding out of their clothes. Pulling him on top of her, into her, unable to wait any longer, wanting more; harder; until she felt like a butterfly pinned to a board, overwhelmed with sensation.
And she wondered what was different; whether if she hadn't met Jace, been a Shadowhunter, she would have felt like them.
She saw some of them, one day when she and Jace were at a supermarket a little way from the Institute. Girls who'd laughed at her for her clothes, her flat chest, her lack of sex appeal. She nodded to them, stood a little taller, knowing that these days, like all the Shadowhunters, she turned heads everywhere, regardless of her jeans and old t-shirts.
And she couldn't help just a little feeling of smugness, seeing their faces when Jace came over to her at the fruit aisle, put his arms round her, and bent to kiss her cheek.