I’m not ready! comes Clover’s written reply. Are you already finished with work for the day? I can hear the panic in her words and that’s in only two sentences.
This is familiar territory. Leading Clover. Not leading men. You always look beautiful, I type back. Turn on that camera and show me what I’ve been missing. I feel myself switching over, back into the person Clover knows—the real me. Not the hardened machine who doesn’t flinch at dead bodies. Gray bubbles pop up to signal she’s typing a response. It’s taking a while, so I grab a washcloth from my laundry pile and wet it at the sink. Wiping at my face, neck, and arms—anyplace exposed to ash. Easier to clean it off than explain where I’ve been and what happened. If the media in America had picked up on the terrorist attack, it would have been the first thing Clover said. It wasn’t. She doesn’t know yet. I have at least a little while longer to pretend with her. I pray for a full conversation without the need to speak about work.
We weren’t supposed to video chat for another hour. I’m in the middle of getting ready. This is the first time you’ve seen me, and I don’t look how I want to look, and my cell phone is ringing off the hook, a water pipe busted in my neighbor’s place, and there are workers over there trying to keep the water from leaking all over. Goldie just left and the box you sent me a couple days ago is sitting right here in front of me. You told me not to open it, but I have to tell you I’m pretty angry you wouldn’t let me. I didn’t. Every time I’ve walked by, I’ve cursed your name. Gifts that can’t be opened are plain bad manners, Ballentine.
I can tell her tirade won’t stop until I do it myself. Clover, I tap out the message quickly and send it. The bubble disappears as she stops typing. This call with you is the only thing I’ve been looking forward to since the moment I left. If you’re trying to postpone it or cancel it, think again. Turn on your camera and then you can open the package. It’s more of a gift for both of us. My hands sweat as I rub my fingers against my palms. I really went out on a limb for this present. For this entire call. It needed to be perfect. I need this. My sanity requires it. Running my hands back and forth through my hair a few times, I hit the button to turn on my camera capture. Don’t answer your phone. Turn it off, I tap out quickly as an aside. Just us for a bit, okay?
Clover turns on her camera and all I see is her sofa. She has her laptop on the coffee table. Drumming my fingers on the table next to me, I say, “The suspense is killing me darlin’.”
“It’s been so long. I’m so nervous,” Clover says as she edges into the camera’s view. I have to school my expression when she sits down because she doesn’t look the same. Not at all. Her hair is darker, not the Clover Wellsley blonde you can see from a half-mile away. She has circles under her eyes that match the black dress she’s wearing on her slimmed-down frame.
“Was there a funeral?” I ask, keeping my tone light. Clearing my throat, I add. “You look beautiful. I miss you so much, Four Leaf Clover.” Another byproduct of not letting my personal life slip in while I’m away is that I miss glaring signs. Clover’s struggle in her new life wasn’t right under my nose and she never mentioned it.
Her eyes dart to her lap. “I, uh, switched up my wardrobe to blend in. Goldie suggested darker tones and she was right; I feel a little better.” Pausing, she gathers her thoughts. “I was going to fix my makeup. I probably look a bit tired.” Her Southern accent sounds subdued. My heart rattles around in my chest like a pissed off cobra. I miss her. I want to hold her. Touch her. Be there for her in every single way possible. I want to be her man. She looks away from the camera.
“Hey. Tell me something good,” I drawl.
Clover smiles and it transforms her face. “I ran five miles this morning and didn’t die. I’ve been working up to it for the past four months.” Looking to the side, she nibbles her bottom lip and then looks back at the camera. “I’m finally getting to see your handsome mug.” Her cheeks pink.
“Are you acting shy? Is the sky falling?” I say, thinking about the ash raining down outside. “Clover never gets shy. Especially over a man.”
She clears her throat. “I’ve missed seeing you. Talking to you is nice and all, but sometimes when I’m trying to fall asleep, I try to picture your face and can’t. Not perfectly. It’s unnerving. What if you’re not as hot as I thought you were, you know?” Clover feels the same way I do. Our short time together doesn’t feel real. Was that time together enough to bring us through this? “Like that freckle by your eye, or how many abs you have.”
“How did you forget what my abs looked like? That’s offensive.”
Clover cocks her head and folds her arms across her chest. “I’m sorry.”
I laugh. “Eight,” I add. “I have eight abs.” I stand up and flex my muscles, sliding my hands down the front of my stomach. After, I sit and lean in so she can get a better look at the freckle in question.
“You’re too pretty to be real. I don’t remember you being this pretty when we were kids,” she says, studying the screen. Crossing and uncrossing her legs, she gives me a peek at her pink panties.
“You weren’t looking at me at all back then, ma’am,” I reply. “Which is fine, because if you looked at me back then like this you might not be lookin’ at me like that right now and that would be criminal.”
“Ma’am, huh? We’re back to that?” Clover says, a little of the accent I know sliding back in, a grin playing on her full lips. “Mercer, so much has happened the past four months.” Her eyes turn down in the corner. “It’s been a wild bull ride.”
I hold out my hand. “Open the box first. You and me. The outside isn’t allowed in here yet.”
Shaking her head softly, she giggles as she reaches for the rectangular box sitting next to her. I lace my hands behind my head to keep them from shaking. Far and away, this is the most forward thing I’ve done when it comes to relationships and women. As she tears into the box, I resist the urge to tell her to throw the whole thing in the trash. A mannered gentleman wouldn’t even think of giving this gift, but it proves how crazed Clover makes me.
Her eyes narrow as she pulls off the lid of the smaller rectangular box. “Definitely not a pearl necklace then, is it?” Clover teases, pulling tissue paper out and setting it next to her. Her hand pauses when she sees what’s inside. Her gaze flies to mine in the monitor.
Play it cool, fucker, I remind myself.
“A dildo!” she hisses, pulling her hand away from it like it might burn her. She fans her face. “Oh, heavens above. What in the wild blue Earth were you thinking?”
I laugh, an uneasy noise. “Wait, wait, before you fling it across the room, I need you to know that it’s not just any dildo.”
She swallows hard. “Is it a special porky meat stick? Is it gold? Can I wear it as a necklace? Put it in a flower arrangement? Stir chili in the crockpot with it? Get to explainin’ then. Before my heart gives out.”
I open my arms to the side and then clasp my hands in front of me. “It’s…my actual dick in dildo form.” I sigh long and heavy.
Her eyes grow wide. “What?” She lays a hand on it and pulls it from the box, inspecting it more closely, fingers running over the silicone ridges.
I lean forward, setting my hands under my chin. “How accurate is it?”
I laugh. “I want you to imagine me getting myself hard, thinking of you of course, and then sticking my dick into a cylinder filled with molding goop. I had to let it harden and then pull it out. It was quite the process and if anyone ever found out about it, I’d never live it down.”
“Oh my goodness. It is your dick!” Clover shrieks, finger sliding over an engorged vein. Her smile is wide so I’m grateful she’s not horrified at this insane idea. Yet. “You really had a dildo made of yourself for me? Why go through the trouble? You have a beautiful dick, like maybe they’re going to use your mold to make a million dildos now. Will you get a cut of the profits?”
I chuckle, closing my eyes, then I swallow the laugh down and bring the truth
forward. “I want you to be mine, and I can’t be with you,” I breathe. I meet her eyes through the computer screen. “Time is passing. It’s going fast and slow and I want you to be mine forever. This is my way of making sure you’re always mine first.” I see her turning my words over in her mind.
She tips her chin down as she gazes at the flesh-colored Mercer shaft. “You want me to lose my virginity to you, with this? You’re serious? That’s not the same thing, Mercer Ballentine. I can wait for you. I’ll wait for you.”
I shake my head firmly once. “It’s not the same thing. But it’s all I can give you right now. I can be with you, like this. Watching you. Talking to you. Telling you what to do. I don’t want you to wait for me. This is what I want. Can you give it to me?”
Her eyes fix on the silicone and then she glances back to me. “There were a million things I thought would be in that box, Mercer. Never in my wildest dreams did I think you would make a mold of your cock and then ask me to lose my virginity to it. First it was the earrings and then the bird a few days ago.” She smirks.
I had the local pet shop deliver a cockatoo to her house. There was a catch. They had to teach it to talk first. Very specifically, it says farm truck, four-leaf clover, and kiss me darlin’. It took a couple months to get it up to speed.
“I didn’t think I could fall any more in love with you after those things, but this, while the most inappropriate thing I’ve ever received is also one of the most thoughtful. You. Molded. Your. Dick. For. Me. There’s something about it,” she says. “I can’t put my finger on it.” She slaps my dick against her palm a few times as she speaks. “Or my whole hand for that matter.”
“Does that mean you love the bird more than my dick?” I fire back, trying to tamp down on the happiness I feel at watching her play. Looking at her, looking at me—that feral look in her eye. I’m transported to her living room. Standing in front of her. A man, not a screen.
“I haven’t fucked your dick yet. Give me time to decide. It’s the polite thing to do.”
That’s all it takes for my cock to stand, pressing against my pants. She continues. “I suspect you’re not much into being polite right now though, are you? You want to claim me?”
I nod. “More than anything else.”
“And you couldn’t find the time before you left? This is what I get now? A substitute.” Her words don’t match how turned on she is right now. It’s penetrating the screen.
I blow out a noisy breath. “It’s my greatest regret. I think about it every day. You lay in bed trying to remember what I look like and I fall asleep fucking you every which way in my dreams.”
“Fair. You wanted it to be perfect, that’s why you wanted to wait, and it seems you’re changing your tune. You want to claim me in whatever way you can. In creative ways, shall we say?”
“One day, I’ll be a man who can be there for you all of the time, right now wanting you is killing me, and this is the only way to get it done. I love you, Clover Wellsley. The insane kind of love that makes me do things I don’t usually do. The kind that makes living without you painful. My days are bleak, and I’d be pissed at you for what I feel if I wasn’t so mad about you.” Licking my lips, I go on, “I’m asking you to do this for me. I hope you want to, even if it’s just a little bit.”
Clover stops me, holding up a palm. Standing, she takes the black dress off over her head. She’s not wearing a bra, and her pink panties are tight against her skin. A breath lodges in my throat. “I’d do questionable things to touch you right now.”
“Touch me how?” she counters, sliding her laptop back so I can see her full body, including her face. “That’s how this goes.” She waves the dildo, my dick never looking bigger than in front of her small frame. “Make me believe this is you, but before you do, take off your pants. I want to see all eight of your abs and everything below them.” Her courteous dirty talk is my favorite recipe. That taste of home. A familiar embrace inside of the living nightmare I’m currently enduring.
I obey her, hooking my thumbs into my pants and pulling them down my legs. I grab and tip my computer down so she can see my cock, my abs, my mouth, and my nose. I can still see her on my screen from this angle. “If I were there, I would rip the panties off your body and finger you to make you wet,” I say.
Clover interrupts, “I’m already wet. Go on. What after that?” She is so game for this that I’m pissed at myself for worrying about what she’d think.
“I’d kiss you so hard you’d forget your name.” I swallow hard as she lets the pink panties fall down her toned legs. “I’d kiss you there, too. I’d lick your pussy until you came on my face. Your hands would be in my hair. I want you to pull my hair, guide me. Tell me exactly how fast or slow you want it. Do you want my fingers inside you while I lick your clit?” The hand I have on my ram-rod hard dick starts moving up and down the second Clover reaches down with two fingers and starts rubbing herself.
“I want that so bad,” Clover says, shrinking down onto the sofa, keeping her legs apart and bent so I have an eagle eye view of what is making my mouth water. “Why can’t you be here right now?” she asks, tone heavy with longing.
“I am,” I say, quickening my strokes. A bead of pre-cum forms on the head, and I use it as lube.
“Now grab my cock. I’m going to make you mine.”
Chapter Sixteen
___________________________________
Mercer
CLOVER LINES THE flesh-colored cock up with her pussy and a pang of jealousy stabs at me. I have to remind myself that it’s me. Just as if I was there. But I’m not. And maybe that’s where the animosity toward the inanimate object comes from. Her pink folds shine in the light from her computer screen, and my stomach tightens. I want to come deep inside her. She’s wet and willing and wants me to be her first.
“Rub the head on your clit,” I command. She does, running it in circles, moaning slightly as it dips in her wet center on accident. “Not yet,” I bark, stroking my cock, gaze intent on how she’s moving it. Back and forth, over her wet mound.
“It’s killing me,” she says, voice aching with need. “I want you inside me.” Clover is watching me jack off, her hazel eyes hooded—longing evident in every move she makes.
My chest is rising and falling rapidly as I lose my breath to the onslaught of desire raging through my body. “Just the tip,” I say, catching my breath by slowing my pace. It hurts, the orgasm is there, ready to rip out of my body like an explosion. Not yet, I tell myself. This needs to last. It’s all I’ll have to hold on to until the next time and who knows when that will be.
“Like this?” Clover asks, dipping the dildo head into her wet body slowly. I watch as an inch disappears into her body, her cunt closing the girth—a tight sheath.
“Like that,” I reply, tone harsh. “Just like that. Tell me what it feels like.”
“It feels like more. More. I want all of you inside of me,” she says, hand readjusting the grip on the silicone toy and teasing more inside her. “It’s so hard and you’re inside me. I want to have an orgasm around you.”
“Yes,” I say, picking up the pace. “Fuck yourself. You pick the pace. Show me how to fuck you,” I growl.
Thank God she doesn’t need any more direction. Clover takes it and slides it halfway in and then all the way out again. My mouth drops open and my stomach flips at the sight. Me and her together. “Does it turn you on knowing I’m watching you? I’m so fucking turned on right now I could come on the spot.”
“Wait for me,” she says, thrusting the toy inside her body over and over, fucking at a medium, steady pace in and out. It’s glistening with her wetness as she draws it out of her body and shoves it all the way back in.
I grunt out in frustration. “Hurry, Clover. Watching you fuck me is driving me wild.”
Clover picks up the pace and strokes her clit with her free hand. Her knees fall open wider and now I can see everything. Her pussy taking my cock, her sweet asshole flutter
ing open and closed as she draws nearer to her climax. I want to be in every hole. Fucking her. Marking her. I want to put my babies inside her. Come in her tight little asshole. In her mouth. All over her body. Any male in a million-mile radius will look at her, smell her, breathe near her, and know without a shadow of a doubt that she belongs to me forever.
Her face is rapture as her hand shifts, and she fucks herself to the hilt and comes apart. Her expression is what does me in and I come, hot bursts landing on my stomach. More than I’ve seen in a long ass time. The pipes haven’t been clogged, but they definitely needed this something fierce.
Clover leaves the dildo inside her. “I want you to stay inside me for a while longer.”
Emotion clogs my throat. “There’s nothing I’d like more than staying inside you all night long. Did it hurt? You were worried I wouldn’t fit and looking at you right now I’d say we are a perfect fit.” My cock jerks in my hand. A reminder of how much we both love Clover Wellsley’s naked body splayed in front of us. Before I deployed, we had a conversation about sex and what she’s afraid of. None of the emotional things were mentioned, it was all about the size of my dick. The only thing I could think of as a solution to this worry was…a dildo. From there, I knew I wanted to at least watch. Here we are and it’s bittersweet.
“Well because I’ve been fantasizing about having you inside me for so long, the pleasure took over for the pain. What’s the catch? You realize now that I have your dick at my disposal, I can fuck you whenever I want even if you’re not on a computer screen in front of me?”
“Clover, as long as you’re fucking my dick, I don’t care how many times you do it. I’m glad you gave this to me. It’s been really…rough.” I try not to break her high. Her chest is still red from her orgasm and there’s a sheen of sweat on her forehead. She looks perfectly fucked and a sense of pride is washed away by reality. “I can’t say I won’t get jealous of my own cock, but I don’t want you to go without. I don’t want you to go without anything you want.”
Almost Had You Page 18