ERICK COULDN’T BELIEVE his ears. Mad at her? Mad at her? Why the hell would he be mad at her?
“In what universe would a man be mad at the woman he’d just had incredible sex with?” he asked. “Tell me what universe so I know never to go there.”
“So you aren’t mad?”
“Of course I’m not mad. Surprised? Yes. Not mad.”
Clover sighed, her relief palpable.
“Good. I probably should have told you but I got caught up in the moment. It was a good moment.”
“Yeah, it was, wasn’t it?” He touched her face, traced her smile. He was glad to see that smile. He’d never been with a virgin before and, as he was thirty-eight years old, he really hadn’t expected this situation to come up. He didn’t quite know how to feel about it other than happy he’d left her smiling. “So...any reason you want to share with me why you’ve never had sex before tonight?”
“It wasn’t for lack of trying, I promise. And I’ve had some sex. Just not the big one.”
“I can’t imagine why someone as pretty as you, as smart as you, as together as you, never...unless you didn’t want to.”
“I wanted to. It’s kind of embarrassing.”
“Clover,” he said, shaking his head and laughing softly. “I’m naked. My semen is inside you. And you just had sex for the first time in your life—with me. I think it’s safe to say we are way past being embarrassed with each other right now?”
“I had no idea there would be so much of it.” She glanced under the sheet as if inspecting her wet thighs. “Like...a pint.”
“That’s been building up awhile. Stay there. I’ll get a towel.”
He left her in the bed and went into the bathroom. She had a stack of pretty white washcloths on the towel rack. Probably too nice to use for postcoital cleanup but that’s what washing machines were invented for. He soaked the cloth in warm water, rung it out and brought it back to the bed. He switched on the lamp and found Clover looking sleepy, blissful, adorably rumpled and thoroughly, thoroughly fucked.
“I can do it,” she said.
“You can do it but I want to do it,” he said. “We’re getting to know each other. Let me see you.”
He pulled the covers down her body and he could sense her tensing. Gently he pushed her knees apart and even more gently he wiped his semen off her and out of her.
“No blood,” he said. “That’s good. I was a little rough there. Sorry.”
“I liked it.”
“You liked it rough?”
“I liked it with you,” she said.
“And I liked it with you. I very much like this.” He opened her up with his fingers a little wider and looked at her open body. “You’re beautiful here. But you’re beautiful everywhere.”
“Not exactly,” she said. He tossed the washcloth into her clothes hamper and looked down at her again as she pulled the sheets up to cover herself.
“What do you mean ‘not exactly’?”
“I mean...well...see?”
She lifted her T-shirt up and showed him her breasts. He whistled in appreciation to make her laugh. She didn’t laugh.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you have nice breasts, Clover. I don’t know why you think I wouldn’t agree.”
“You can’t see the scars?” she asked.
“Yeah, I can see them.”
On both breasts she had scars, pale white and thin, running from her nipples to the bottom of her breasts and from there in a straight line to her armpits.
“They don’t look weird to you?” she asked, wincing a little. “They look weird to me.”
“They just look like breasts to me. Very pretty breasts with very light scarring. You feel comfortable telling me what happened?”
She pulled her—his—T-shirt down again, which he wished she wouldn’t do but maybe it wasn’t the best time for ogling her.
“I had breast reduction surgery when I was twenty-five. I used a little of my grandparents’ money on that. The rest went into the business.”
“Are you glad you had it done?”
“Definitely. I had back and shoulder pain and I couldn’t find clothes to fit me right. I went from an E cup size to a small C.”
“I didn’t even know they came in size E.”
“Special order only. Getting the surgery was a miracle. It was like someone gave me my life back. And my back back.”
“I’m glad you feel better now. You look great.”
“The scars are a lot lighter now. They used to be more gnarly.”
“Scars are scars,” he said. “They’re just skin that’s a different color.”
“Thank you, Erick,” she said with a sweet, shy and sleepy smile. If she kept looking at him like that, they were both going to be in trouble. “It’s sweet of you to say.”
“It’s true,” he said. It was. He didn’t care about scars. He had a few dozen of them himself from nails, weed whackers and rotator cuff surgery. “Were you self-conscious about your breasts?”
“In high school...oh, it was awful,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ve always been kind of shy but then it was like overnight I had these two huge beacons on my chest. And high school guys act like a girl with large breasts must be easy. Especially if she’s a blonde. I hated the way they looked at me and talked about me. I started covering up as much as I could, hiding in my clothes, hiding from them.”
“I feel bad about teasing you over your schooner nightgown now.”
“No, it’s fine. I like the way you tease me. I don’t know why but when you tease me I feel better. It helped. I’m feeling more comfortable now. Much more.”
“Good. I want to help. Sorry about high school. I might have been one of those hormonal dipshits who couldn’t keep his eyes off you, too. Guessing college wasn’t much better?”
“I went on dates but I had trouble trusting guys. Especially when they try to get your top off on the first date and call you a cocktease when you say no.”
“Oops.” He winced.
“You didn’t try to get my top off on the first date. You got my bottom off on the first date.”
“Whew. In all fairness to me—and we must be fair to me—getting your bottom off was your idea.”
“True,” she said, laughing softly.
“When I was twenty-five I got the money from my grandparents and decided to have the surgery. I had just started dating this really great guy—Tyler. Came from a pretty Christian family so he liked that I was still a virgin. But then I told him I was having the surgery and he freaked out. He said it was against God’s will to change my body like that. I reminded him he’d had Lasik eye surgery. He said it wasn’t the same thing.”
“Something tells me Tyler wasn’t a Christian. Something else tells me Tyler was a dick.”
“You’re right. He was a dick. I had the surgery, anyway, and he dumped me right after. Said I’d mutilated myself.”
“Such a dick.” Erick dropped his chin to his chest. “Men suck.”
“You all really do suck. Really, really suck.”
“Keep it coming. I’ll go flog myself in the street in penance later. I want to hear it all.”
“There’s not much more. I started the nursery and got too busy to date. That was my twenties—back pain, humiliation, and very short, very crappy relationships. The nursery made me happy and dating made me miserable so I put all my attention on one and let the other kind of fall by the wayside. Meanwhile my older brother and his wife started having kids and my younger sister got married and started having kids. And I finally found someone I really liked abou three years ago and then I told him I’d never had sex before and...well...that was that. But we did fool around a lot. I’m not completely inexperienced. And I hate the word virgin. I’m a grown woman with sexual experience. Just not a lot of it.”
“You do give very good hand jobs. Excellent. I give it five fingers out of five.”
“I tried.”
“You succeeded. I guess considering your history I can’t blame you for not telling me you’d never had sex before. Men can get squirrelly about that stuff.”
“You don’t seem squirrelly.”
“I might have been if you’d told me before. It wouldn’t have stopped me from fucking you. I might have just waited a few days and gone a lot slower.”
“Then I’m glad I didn’t tell you. Ruthie calls it my ‘little problem.’ That’s why she was joking about hiring me a male escort. At least I think she was joking about Sven.”
“Oh, Sven.”
“Good ole Sven.”
“So my seventeen-year-old daughter has been trying to get her thirty-year-old boss laid? And to think I thought all she did at the nursery was water plants and answer the phone.”
“I promise, hiring me male escorts was not in the job description. That was all her idea.”
“The only bad downside of us sleeping together is that I can’t call my parenting book Kids Are Such Cock Blocks anymore. Damn. It was going to be a bestseller.”
“Sorry.”
“Are you?”
“Not at all,” she said. “That was...amazing.”
“I like that word. Amazing. It implies that you were, you know, amazed.” He waggled his eyebrows at her to make her laugh.
“I was amazed. I was lying there and thinking, ‘Wow. I didn’t think this would be worth all the trouble.’ And you know what? It was worth all the trouble.”
“I hope there’s no trouble. You did say you were on the pill, right?”
She nodded. “I take it every day. You don’t have to worry about that.”
“When I had the sex talk with you know who, I said condoms all the time, every time. I love being a hypocrite. Not the best part of being a parent but definitely in the top five.”
“In all fairness to you—and we must be fair to you,” she said.
“We must.”
“I wasn’t kidding about the latex allergy. I got hives in the hospital after surgery because the doctor was wearing latex gloves. Although maybe I mentioned that so you’d think I’d had sex. I didn’t want to freak you out.”
“Not freaked out,” he said. “You? It was your first time, after all. Feeling okay about it?”
“I feel pretty good,” she said. “Very good, really.”
“Good enough to go another round?”
“Hmm... I’m a little sore inside but we can try.”
Erick shrugged. “We’ll wait until you’re ready. We had sex once and it’s already more than I’ve had all year.”
“We can keep kissing, though,” she said. “I’d like that.”
“Can I ask you something personal?”
“Isn’t that all you’ve been doing for the last four hours?”
“Good point,” he said. “Although I did ask where you got your brushed copper towel rack in the downstairs bathroom, and I don’t think that’s personal, right?”
“What’s your personal question?”
“Are you comfortable with me kissing your nipples? Or are they off-limits?”
“Not off-limits. If the scars don’t bother you...”
He shook his head and slid under the covers again, on top of her.
“They don’t...” He pulled her shirt up to her neck. “Bother me.” He flicked his tongue over her right nipple. “One bit.” He flicked his tongue over her left nipple.
“I like you,” she said as he gently sucked her nipple into his mouth and kneaded it with his tongue. “I like you very much, Erick Fields.”
With his arms around her he pulled them onto their sides. He kissed her nipples for a long time, as long as she’d let him, which was thankfully a long time. He enjoyed it, definitely. She had beautiful breasts, perfectly symmetrical, and from the way her nipples hardened in his mouth, the way she moaned as he sucked her, he knew she’d retained all her sensitivity. But he didn’t kiss her breasts solely because he enjoyed it. He wanted her to get over her self-consciousness. First she’d hidden her body under her clothes because of the size of her breasts, then hid herself because of the surgical scars. He didn’t want her to hide herself anymore, not from him. He wanted her to see herself as desirable and as beautiful as he saw her. Desirable and beautiful and smart and she ran her own business and she was amazing with his daughter... The list of everything wonderful about Clover went on and on. He better be very careful or he was going to end up falling in love with her.
“Erick?”
He kissed a freckle on the swell of her right breast.
“Yes?”
“Now my nipples are getting sore.”
He sighed. Heavily.
“I’ll stop. If I must.”
“Just for a little while. My body’s not used to all this attention.”
He slid up the bed and they lay face-to-face on her pillow. He took her leg in his hand and laid it over his hip. He could have slid his cock right into her but he didn’t. He just wanted to be as close to her as possible.
“It’ll need to get used to it—fast,” he said. “I think I’m already addicted to your body.” He ran his hand down her naked back. Such soft skin...he couldn’t get enough of her.
“So do you want to keep doing this?” she asked. Her eyes were searching his face, and he saw the old nervousness back in those pretty blues.
“Having sex with you?”
“That.”
“Yes, yes and yes. I want to have all the sex with you.”
“What constitutes ‘all’ the sex?” She narrowed her eyes at him.
“Well...there’s all kinds of sex. Oral. Anal—don’t worry, it’s not a deal breaker with me. Vaginal, which we’ve had and I’d love to have again a few thousand times. But you know, there’s sweet sex, gentle sex, rough sex, dirty sex, sex in different positions, sex in different places, like cars, hotels, swimming pools—not recommended.”
“No pool sex?”
“I’ve tried it and it’s like pushing a tennis ball inside a coin slot. The lack of lubrication does not work. Maybe in books and movies but not in the real world. But hey, if you want to try it, we’ll try it. You bring the coin slot and I’ll bring the tennis ball.”
“Not a fantasy. I’ve thought about sex by the lake but it’s late November now. This is not outdoor sex season.”
“There’s always next summer.”
“Next summer? Planning ahead?” she asked.
“I’m a very busy man in the summers. If you want lakeside sex, you have to book in advance.”
She laughed and nodded. “I’ll check my calendar.”
“Let’s see...there’s also couch sex and kitchen-table sex. These sexings are a little overrated unless it’s a really big couch and the fabric is Scotchgarded. Shower sex can be very good if there’s lube handy.”
“What’s your favorite kind of sex?”
“Before tonight I would have said ‘doggy style in the bed of a pickup’ sex. My marriage fell apart pretty fast but we had a good honeymoon, that’s for sure. But that was before tonight.”
She raised her eyebrow at him.
“And after tonight?”
“After tonight I would say my favorite kind of sex is what you and I had. Surprise sex. Good-surprise sex. Didn’t think I’d have sex with anybody today. And then I did and it was with you, who I’ve been trying not to like for a whole year. And not only that, you’ve never had sex before me and finding out I’m your first makes me feel really...well, it was a good surprise, let’s just call it that. That’s my new favorite kind of sex. Good-surprise sex.”
“Weird,” she said as she rested her head on his chest.
“Why’s that weird?”
“That’s my favorite kind of sex, too.”