“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.