slowly pushed into her. “Are you sore?”
“Only a little.”
“I can be quick.”
“Don’t rush on my account.”
“I might on my account, though.” He took her breasts into his hands and lightly massaged them. She was too spent to do much more than lie there as he thrust into her, but she could watch. Had she ever seen anything this erotic? Erick with his lips parted and his eyes half-closed and his hands cupping and squeezing her breasts as his hips hammered into her. The table creaked under her and she was glad she’d shelled out the money for good solid oak.
Erick lowered his head and licked and bit her neck. He whispered things in her ear again, things like, “Fuck, your pussy feels so good wrapped around my cock,” and various other wildly erotic musings. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and let him pull her into a sitting position at the edge of the table. With his hands on her hips and her hands on his shoulders, he let go, fucking her with long deep strokes as she held her legs up and open for him. It was dirty. That’s the only word she could think of to describe how it felt, how it must have looked. It was dirty and she loved it. He squeezed her hips hard and practically lifted her off the table when he came with a grunt. She dug her fingernails into the backs of his shoulders as he released inside her.
“That...” he said when he regained his breath. “Was...whew.”
“You took the words right out of my mouth.”
Erick laughed again and she loved that he laughed before sex, during sex and after sex. It made her feel so comfortable. He cupped her breast in his hand and kissed her on the mouth again. She tasted herself for the first time and was surprised by how sexy it was to know herself like that.
Slowly he pulled out of her and Clover clamped her legs shut tight while he grabbed a towel to clean them both off.
“Sex is messier than I realized,” she said.
“My fault. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. I like it.”
“You like it?” He sounded skeptical.
“Have you ever seen me wearing gardening gloves? Ever?” she asked.
“Now that you mention it...no.”
“I like getting a little dirty,” she said with a smile. “Makes you feel alive, close to nature. Real life isn’t neat and tidy.”
“Sorry, I didn’t hear anything you said after the part about liking to get a little dirty. It put images in my head.”
“I’m sure you’ll tell me all about them eventually.”
He laughed. “You know me already. I’d tell you all about them right now except I have to get to Welches.”
She looked past him at the clock on the microwave.
“Oh, no, I made you late.”
“It’s okay,” he said as he straightened his clothes and pulled on his jacket. “I’m a contractor, remember? Nobody expects me to be on time.”
“Good point.”
Clover slid off the table and tied her robe around her waist again, ran a hand through her hair. She had sex hair after all that. She’d never had sex hair before. So many firsts and all of them good. Maybe she’d survive Thanksgiving week, after all.
“I’ll probably be working until six tonight. I’ll swing by home and take a shower, be here around seven. We can eat in or go out and damn. What am I doing? You haven’t even invited me back.”
“Will you please come back this evening and stay the night again?”
“I don’t know. I’m pretty busy.”
She flicked the tip of his nose.
“Ow. I deserved that,” he said.
“You did. So you’ll be back around seven tonight and then we’ll have dinner?”
“Yes, ma’am. If you change your mind or something comes up, text me. You have my number?”
“I don’t.” Clover put her hand on her forehead. “I slept with a man and I don’t even have his phone number. Oh, my God, I have just done everything my mother told me never to do.”
“It’s fun, right?”
“So much fun.”
“We skipped a few steps. No big deal. We’re just overachievers. Tell me your number and I’ll text you mine.”
“You turned off my phone and threw it on top of the cabinet.”
“Okay,” he said. “Well, then, I guess I’ll be back tonight and you can’t change your mind.”
“Not planning on it. But here’s my number, anyway. If I know me, and I do, I’ll get my phone back before you’ve made it to Welches.”
She told him her number and he programmed it in his phone.
“I just sent you a text message that is nothing but the penis emoji.”
“There’s a penis emoji?”
“It’s actually an eggplant but it’s the best we have. Now we’re caught up,” he said. “I have your number and you have mine. We have plans for this evening. We are doing great at being a very healthy fake couple. You have a great day, and I’ll see you tonight. Preferably naked.”
He kissed her on the mouth and she was surprised by how quickly the kiss ended. It was a goodbye kiss, a simple one, and she liked it. Why did she like such a quick kiss? she wondered. Erick got into his truck and pulled out of her driveway. Because it made her feel like a real girlfriend, being kissed like that. That’s how her parents kissed good-night when one was heading to bed before the other. It’s how her brother, Hunter, kissed his wife goodbye before he left for work. It was a quick kiss because real couples could do that sort of thing and they could do that sort of thing because they knew they’d be together again soon and then they could kiss as long and as hard as they wanted.
Real couples kissed like that. But she and Erick weren’t a real couple. He’d even called them a “fake couple.” A “healthy fake couple” but still a fake couple. Yesterday she would have been fine with that. Yesterday she’d never had sex. Yesterday already felt like a million years ago.
This week just kept getting more and more complicated. Not only did she have to host her family for Thanksgiving and decide if she would sell her business, now she had a much more pressing engagement for this week—she had to figure out how to turn Erick from a fake boyfriend into a real boyfriend.
But not to make her parents happy and not to shut her siblings up, but for one reason and one reason only.
The man was so damn sexy.
7
ERICK PUT IT off all morning, all afternoon and almost all evening. He was back at his own house in his own bedroom and looking at a picture of his twenty-one-year-old self holding two-hour-old Ruthie in his arms at the hospital. What was he thinking having a child at twenty-one? Twenty-one was seventeen plus four which meant in four years if Ruthie followed in his footsteps, he could be a grandfather.
Horrible thought. He still felt like that kid in the picture holding that red-faced, squalling baby most days. Especially since Ruthie still looked like that when he got on her bad side. But he hadn’t been lying to Clover. Ruthie really was the best thing that ever happened to him. And as much as that girl loved Clover, he had to do it. He had to bite the bullet, face the music and pay the piper all at once.
He had to call his daughter and tell her that he and Clover were sort of dating. No, not dating. They were “going out on a couple dates.” That was better. Dating sounded serious. He didn’t want Ruthie getting her hopes up that this was going somewhere. That would be bad, right? Getting her hopes up? Clover was amazing—hardworking, smart, beautiful. So beautiful. Especially when she was naked and splayed out underneath him with her head thrown back in ecstasy and...
Wait. Maybe he wasn’t worried about Ruthie getting her hopes up about them. Maybe he was worried about getting his hopes up about them. They’d only spent the one night together, but God, what a night. He still couldn’t quite wrap his mind around being the first man to ever have sex with Clover. It didn’t bother him—the opposite, really. He couldn’t help but feel a little bit honored that she’d picked him for the job. He didn’t know what he’d done to earn her trust
and her body, but whatever it was, he wished she’d tell him so he could keep doing it.
Of course, he could hear Ruthie’s voice in his head telling him he should never judge a woman’s worth by her sexual history, that the concepts of sexual purity and virginity were outmoded views that reinforced a toxic patriarchy in America that sought to police women and their bodies. And while he agreed with her because he knew what was good for him—and also because she made a good point—he still couldn’t quite wipe the stupid grin off his face every time he thought about being Clover’s first. It had nothing to do with her and everything to do with him feeling like he’d been paid a very high compliment.
Not that he would tell Ruthie any of that. They were close when he wasn’t threatening to lock her in her room for all eternity if she set another factory farm on fire, but he wasn’t about to discuss his sex life with his daughter. Oh, hell, no. He knew his daughter too well. She might do something horrible like try talking about her own relationship with her on-again-off-again boyfriend, Ryo, who was back in Japan this semester, which meant Ruthie’s phone bill was getting bigger than her paychecks. He should probably mention that to her when he called her. Daring to put a price tag on love would distract Ruthie from the news that he was dating Clover and might keep her from asking questions he didn’t want to answer.
He called his ex-wife’s house number and Ruthie picked up.
“Hello, this is the Technology Police. No one uses landlines anymore,” Ruthie said in her usual dry deadpan voice. “Please hang up and call a cell phone like a normal person.”
“This is your father speaking. You should know already I’m not a normal person.”
“Pops, what is it? What do you want? I’m busy.”
“Busy doing what?”
“Watching Evan play World of Warcraft,” she said. Evan was her ten-year-old stepbrother, and while Ruthie had found it supremely disgusting when her mother had gotten pregnant eleven years ago, she’d apparently gotten over her disgust enough to actually enjoy spending time with her baby brother. Not that she’d admit to it. “He’s so good at it and it’s so fascinating to watch, please kill me.”
“I sent you your phone today. You’ll have it tomorrow.”
“Okay, don’t kill me. Just put me in a coma until tomorrow.”
“It’s your own fault for leaving your phone behind. And really unlike you.”
“What can I say? I’m a girl and I was distracted by a cute puppy and some diamonds on the side of the road and whoops, airhead me.”
“You set me up.”
“Did it work?” she asked.
“It worked.”
She cackled like a cartoon witch.
“I’m so evil,” she said. “Did you ask Clover out finally?”
“Yes.”
“Yes! I knew it! Goddess be praised. When are you going out?”
“Um, we had a date last night.” Erick hadn’t expected follow-up questions. He should have prepared some canned answer better.
“Already? Last night? Where’d you go?”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters. Clover is easily my favorite person on the planet. You have to treat her well. Unlike me, she is classy.”
“That she is. And yes, very unlike you.”
“You didn’t take her to the mac-and-cheese place, did you?”
“What’s wrong with the mac-and-cheese place? They have truffle fries.”
“Oh, Goddess, you did. Poor Clover. She deserves so much better than that. You could have taken her up to Timber Ridge. They’re at least organic. I can’t believe your first date with her was to a place with deer heads on the walls. What were you thinking?”
“Calm down. We didn’t even go out to dinner.”
“But you said you went out on a date last night.”
“I did.”
“You asked her out but you didn’t go out? What do you mean you asked her out and you had a date but you didn’t...”
Erick started sweating. When did it get so hot in the house?
“Ruthie, you’re overthinking this—”
“You had a date with her last night and you didn’t go out.”
“We need to discuss your phone bill.”
“Oh, my God.”
Oh, fuck. When Ruthie said “God” instead of “Goddess,” the shit was about to hit the fan.
“Calm down, Ruthless.”
“You did it with Clover.”
“I am your father and we are not discussing my private life.”
Ruthie screamed.
Erick winced and held the phone away from his ear.
“Are you finished?” he asked when the sound died and the ringing in his ear subsided.
“I need a brown paper bag. I’m hyperventilating.”
“Better than puking, I guess.”
“How could you do that to Clover? She’s a goddess. You are not worthy of her goddess-ness.”
“That kind of hurts, kid.”
“You know as well as I do she’d never done that before.”
“This is not something I ever wanted to talk about with my daughter.”
“And you know as well I do she didn’t tell you that because she knew you’d wuss out on her.”
“Apparently I am talking about this with my daughter.”
“You know as well as I do that you didn’t give her the first time she deserves.”
“I have no comment here.”
“Oh, Clover won’t complain. No, Clover is a goddess and goddesses don’t complain. She’s too big for that. But on the inside, she’s disappointed. Were there candles? Were you in a nice hotel room? Did you make it special? No. Of course you didn’t because you didn’t know. You just went right for it, didn’t you?”
Erick screamed. It felt good. It felt right. He’d never screamed before like that. Felt primal.
“Pops?”
“Sorry, I was just trying to get you to shut the hell up. I hope it worked.”
“It mostly worked. I’m calmer now.”
“Good. Because I’m really done having this conversation with you.”
“You and me both. I need to talk to Clover.”
“You don’t need to do that. She is fine. She is dandy. She is both fine and dandy and she does not need any relationship advice from a teenage girl.”
“That’s sexist and ageist, Pops. You’re backsliding without me there to keep you in line. I should come back. Clover probably needs me.”
“She is seeing your father, not you. She does not need you. She needs me.”
“Hell, yeah, she does. She needs you to clean up the disaster you made of her first time.”
“It wasn’t a disaster. It was anything but a disaster.”
“So you admit it. Ha! I knew it.”
Erick rubbed the bridge of his nose and wondered briefly if he could legally put his seventeen-year-old daughter up for adoption.
“Now I know why ancient Greeks used to leave their kids to be raised by wolves. I think the wolves might have done a better job with you. Or eaten you,” Erick said.
“They weren’t the Greeks, they were Romans. And this is unfair. I did nothing wrong. You are the villain in this scenario. You had a responsibility here to do something awesome for someone awesome. Sexuality is a gift from Mother Nature and we honor it by honoring Her and we honor Her by honoring each other and the only sin in this world is to dishonor the gifts we’re given by treating them lightly or taking them for granted.”