One of his hands rests lightly on the rippled wall of his abdomen. I focus on that as I lay half on my side, one hand caught beneath his shoulder, the other hand still gripping the bedpost. I’d held on so tight to that post when he pounded into me that I wonder if he’ll have to help pry my fingers free from the wood.
A luscious, little shiver runs over me. The things he does to me. The thoroughness in which he takes his pleasure and gives me mine. My nipples tighten. Thankfully, Drew hasn’t noticed. He’s turning away to take long gulps of water from the bottle sitting on the bedside table. And that’s when I see it. The room is shadowed but not enough to hide some things.
“You have a tattoo.” There’s a sing-song quality about my observation that I can’t hide and don’t want to. Because I’m grinning. An evil grin.
And he turns back to glare at me properly. “Yeah.”
“It’s a battle axe,” I add with glee. A cute little cartoon style battle axe about the size of my thumb on the crest of his left butt cheek. Like something Papa Smurf might wield. How can I not have seen this before? Right, because normally he’d have hauled his pants up and would be headed out the door about now.
Drew’s high-cut cheeks go pink. “Fucking Cancun. Spring break, my sophomore year, I got so wasted one night. I vaguely remember a burning sensation on my butt cheek while my teammates chanted ‘Battle, Battle.’ That’s about it. I woke up naked in a bed full of….” The blush returns with force, and he runs a hand through his hair, which makes it stand up on end on the right side. It’s kind of adorable. So is his embarrassment. “Full of girls and guys.”
I laugh, a crackling mad witch laugh that earns a pillow tossed at my face.
“It’s not funny,” he insists, though there’s a hint of humor in his voice. “I was in an orgy and don’t remember a thing. Imagine the horrors.” He mocks a shudder.
This only makes me laugh harder.
“With the mother of all hangovers,” Drew adds bitterly, though now he’s definitely smiling. “And this fucking tattoo.” He cranes his neck to glare down at his ass. “Fucking, stupid battle axe.”
“Battle Butt Baylor.” I’m dying now. And give a small screech when he dives for me. There’s a bit of a tussle, mainly involving Drew cramming another pillow in my face while I howl with laughter. But then he ends up half over me, his thick thigh pushed in between mine and his chest pressed against my torso. We’re still laughing a little, though, and he smiles down at me.
“I swore off drinking to excess that very moment and got myself checked for every disease known to man the second I returned home.” His smile dims a little, and his gaze searches mine. “I’m clean, you know. I get regular checks.” The seriousness of his tone and the way he says this makes me believe he’s suddenly worried I’ll bar him from further play due to his checkered past.
“I am too,” I say. “The day I turned sixteen, my mom put me on the pill and started me on a biannual STD check.”
Drew’s brows rise. “That’s kind of…”
“Paranoid?” I suggest. Lord knows I didn’t need to be on the pill back then.
A little shiver of sensation travels along my scalp, and I realize that he’s playing with a lock of my hair, curling it around his finger. His voice is low between us. “I was thinking more like ‘untrusting.’”
I don’t want to explain just how wrong he is, because then I’d have to tell him that not a single boy even looked in my direction for the whole of high school. Instead, I lift a shoulder. “My mom’s an OB-GYN. For her, it’s a sign of love. You know, like how a dentist’s kid will be forced to brush and floss three times daily before she’s two.”
Drew grins, but then his expression goes quiet and intense. I feel it down in my heart, as though he reached through my ribs and gave it a squeeze. He’s looking at me as though he likes me far too much. As though he likes this intimacy.