“I’m coming, I’m coming.” I’m grunting and I chant over and over again as I spill inside her.
The lightning and thunder crash back and forth like a chaotic symphony, mimicking the unwieldy beating in my chest.
I pull Clover to me, so that her heartbeat can regulate my broken one, and because I need to feel her skin on mine every day for the rest of my life and I’d like to get a head start right now.
“Oh my god,” she breathes against my neck. “I didn’t think it could feel like that.”
It’s impossible for me not to fucking preen at her praise. “Does this mean I win?”
“What?”
“Against the others?” I ask.
“Oh, you win,” she says. “First place, the gold medal, top of your class. And what about me? How do I stack up?”
“To who?” I ask.
“All the other girls.”
“Again,” I say. “To who?”
With a growl, I lick her cheek.
She giggles, her hair tickling my neck. “You freak, what are you doing?”
“Marking you, obviously. I don’t need any other guys to come sniffing.”
With an arched brow, she leans back and laps her tongue up my neck and along my jaw. “Mine,” she says.
“Say it again.”
Her blue eyes sparkle in the dark and she nuzzles into my chest. “Mine,” she whispers against the scar. “Mine.”
We stay like that for a long time, my dick softening and then becoming hard again. We go again, because I’m twenty years old and what’s the point of being young if you can’t take advantage of the recovery time?
We take a shower in the downstairs bathroom and strip the beds upstairs of their bedding so we can sleep on the couch in front of the fire.
Wrapped in a shroud of duvets and throw blankets, I hold Clover to me as she traces the scar on my chest.
The storm outside has quieted to a steady rainfall, and we’re both humming with contentment.
“When did you do this?” she asks, her finger drawing circles around the bumblebee tattoo on my chest.
“My eighteenth birthday.”
She looks up from under those soft blond lashes. “For Grandpa Dean?”
“Sort of.” I tighten my grip on her, because there is so much I want to say to her right now, but I need to know that she is solid and she is here and she’s not going anywhere. “And for you.”
“For me?” Her voice is soft and full of astonishment.
I nod and kiss the top of her head. “The patch of clover. Do you remember how many bees it would attract?”
She nods.
“You were always the clover and I was always the bee.” When I got the tattoo, it was something I never imagined being able to tell her. In fact, it felt more like a memorial of what was and what could have been, more than anything else.
She sits up, propped on her elbow, and I feel the loss of the contact instantly. I compensate by bringing my hand up to cradle her face instead.
