NOW AVAILABLE AS AN EBOOK We’re planning on releasing this after the holidays — the follow-up to Over the Top, this story follows Suzie and Danny the first Christmas after they’ve gone off to college on opposite coasts— but I wanted to give everyone a holiday present. So here you go! Happy Kwanzukkamas!

Under the Covers: What Dreams May Come

An Erotic New Adult Romance

Her family’s taking the long post-Christmas drive up to the snow as they have nearly every year for as long as she can remember. What Suzie can’t understand is why it’s making her so sad this year.

Well, she knows why: Danny’s not coming.

It’s just that getting all emotional about it is silly: her boyfriend’s never come up to the mountains with her family. And his family decided to take advantage of his going to school on the East Coast by celebrating the holidays with family there. Even if her family were staying were staying home this week, she wouldn’t see him. She’d still be moping around, going to the mall with Alice, hanging with Luz and Jamie. It would be just as depressing at home.

She saw him at Thanksgiving. She’ll see him Spring Break.

But a part of her wishes she were on an airplane bound for New York instead of sitting next to her little sister, who’s got her music cranked up so high that Suzie can hear what’s pouring out of the earbuds, and who is singing one One Direction song after another under her breath.

Not that she doesn’t love Liz. It’s just…

It’s just she really, really wants to see Danny. To touch him. To feel him inside of her…

Suzie shudders.

Not good things to be thinking about in your family’s minivan with your family all around you.

This last, schizophrenic summer — him pulling the stupid We-can’t-be-together-we’re-headed-off-to-different-schools routine just after graduation, and then her finally breaking, driving up to see him at his family’s cabin, followed by six weeks of sweet, sweet, sex-filled bliss… It was wonderful. Scary wonderful. Addictive wonderful.

And now they are going to different schools.

And she won’t see him for another three months. Suzie isn’t sure she can survive another three months.

Liz’s dark eyes are focused on Suzie. Ear-buds still firmly in place, she has an obnoxious smirk that portends trouble. She mouths, Missing Daaaaaaaanny?

Suzie feels the heat of annoyance — embarrassment — pushing up, but before she can pay Liz back, their mother turns around, clearly having sensed something, and says, “License-plate bingo?”

Suzie takes the playing card. It gives her an excuse to stare out the window and think of…

The snow cheers Suzie a bit — that and Liz’s excitement about it. There’s lots this year — for the first time in years, the hills, the trees, the roofs are all thick with it. They navigate along roads with sheer walls of white taller than the minivan, through a maze of snow-bound streets toward the cabin they’ve been renting every year since Suzie was little. The roads seem magical, fantastical with so much snow burying any familiar landmarks.

This is going to be fun. Even without Danny. And there’s always videochat. If the internet is working.

“The street signs are buried!” gushes Liz, bouncing in her seat more as if she were seven than twelve.

Suzie can’t blame her. It’s beautiful.

“I think I can still find the way,” their father laughs. “Look. Here’s Raven. Almost there.”

I wish Danny were here. The thought thrums through Suzie for the eight hundred and sixty-fourth time since they got into the car this morning. The ache. She barely pays it any attention. Barely. It’s always there. Well, she’s been paying it enough attention to rub herself sore over the past few weeks. Months.

She’s a Human Biology major, for fuck’s sake. She knows about how our brain chemistry encourages reproductive behavior. Oxytocin. Seratonin. Dopamine. Even a rush of endorphin from a nibble or a pinch.

But she knows that her longing for Danny is more than chemical. Otherwise any boy would do. Hell, any girl. And it isn’t that she hasn’t looked. It’s that she knows what she wants. Who she loves.

“Good thing we got up when we did,” Mom says. “Look: it’s starting to snow already.” Impossibly small flakes are floating through the low afternoon sunlight.

“There it is!” squeals Liz, pointing at the green, steeply peaked roof as it appears above the wall of snow.

Suzie is feeling excited too — excited to see so much snow, excited to be here, excited to get out of the car. Dad turns into the plowed drive.

There’s smoke wafting from the chimney. What the fuck? “It… looks like there’s someone else here. Look at the chimney.”

Dad chuckles as he shifts the car into park and sets the brake. “Who else would be here?”

Liz snickers. “Yeah, Zuzu, don’t be stupid.“

What the fuck?

They pull on coats and trundle out of the minivan, and the cold hits Suzie like a wall. Liz starts dancing next to the car, catching snowflakes on her tongue.

“Suzie,” says Mom, “while your dad parks the car, maybe you could open up the house? Here’s the key.” She passes it back.

Her family is being weird — or too normal — but Suzie is too cold and too happy to be out of the car after the long ride to think about it too much. She stomps up the recently shoveled stairs to the covered breezeway between the garage and the front door. As her fingers fumble with the key, as she shivers, she fights down the thought of how nice it would be to have her boyfriend here to warm her up.

Finally she manages to turn the key and steps inside.

It’s warm. Deliciously. The smell of the wood fire is familiar and wonderful and Christmas.

Wondering who could have lit the fire, she turns toward the stove and…

And there’s Danny. Kneeling in front of the stove, poking at it. He closes the glass door and turns to her, standing, grinning. He’s got a smudge of ash on his nose. “Merry Christmas, Su—”

Suzie slams into him, her lips finding his, though she has no awareness of having moved. One hand is tangled in his hair — he’s grown it out — and the other is up under his shirt and he is here.

She is just about to lose herself entirely in the kiss, just about to push her hand down his jeans — she can feel him losing it too, glories in the feeling of self-controlled Danny slipping over the edge — when her family calls from behind her: “SURPRISE!”

It takes them a moment to break the kiss. Suzie turns to her family. Her parents are grinning. Liz is smirking. “You knew!” Suzie gasps.

“Yup!” Liz giggles, and their parents laugh.

Suzie turns to Danny, who is flushed, but looking very pleased. “I got up here about an hour ago.” He kisses her again. “I couldn’t stay away.”

It sounds like Suzie’s mom is sighing and her dad is chuckling, but Suzie doesn’t care. She kisses her boyfriend, happy beyond words that he is here.

Liz groans, “EW!” and they all laugh, and begin to load everything in from the car.

As they make and eat their traditional first-night dinner — spaghetti Bolognese, which Liz drowns in Parmesan — Danny shares the story of how he convinced his parents and Suzie’s to help set this up. The snow is coming down heavily now; they were indeed lucky to get in when they did. Even with chains, the minivan wouldn’t have made it over the pass in this kind of blizzard.

Some part of Suzie is always in contact with Danny. Holding hands. Knees touching. Hips. Lips.

Oxytocin. Seratonin.

As they’re cleaning the dinner away, Suzie’s dad clears his throat. “So. Sleeping arrangements.”

Oh. Suzie hasn’t thought that far ahead. She’s been lost in enjoying her boyfriend’s presence.

Suzie’s mother continues, “Girls, you two are in your usual bedrooms upstairs. And your father and I have decided that to be hospitible it’s only fair that we let Danny sleep in the downstairs bedroom.”

“We’re going to sleep out here on the pull-out,” Dad says. “Very romantic.” He leans over and kisses his wife, but they both then turn to look at the two college students. The message is very clear: No hanky-panky. We’ll be on guard at the bottom of the stairs.

Danny shoots her an embarrassed smirk.

Ah, well. Nothing’s perfect. “Well,” says Suzie, “since I’m heading up for the night soon, I’m going to smooch my boyfriend. You can all sit there and watch, or head into the kitchen and finish the dishes.”

Liz is about to object, but her parents haul her into the other room, both of them smiling. There’s no door, but at least Suzie and Danny are alone for a moment.

“Nice,” Danny says. “I don’t know that my parents would have taken the hint.”

Suzie sits on his lap — not astride, as she’d like, but she can still feel him stiffening against her hip. “I don’t know that it would even occur to your parents that we might get up to something.”

“You’re right,” he says, pulling her to him. “Next Christmas, we’re with my family.”

“Deal.” She rolls her bottom against him, and feels him swell beneath her — not just his cock, but all of him. He begins to growl, but Suzie giggles and murmurs into his lips, “Less talking. More smooching.”

It doesn’t take long before they are both breathing heavily. Her nipples are so hard they almost hurt at the way he won’t quite touch them, and she can feel him holding back from thrusting his hard-on against her bottom. “Want you,” she whispers against his lips.

“Want you so bad it hurts,” he whispers back, glasses fogged, breath uneven, and his fingers slide up the inside of her jeans leg —

And just at the moment that she has been looking forward to — awake and asleep — for months, just as his fingers are about to slide against her crotch and bring her the relief that her own fingers somehow never can…

Lizzie bursts in from the kitchen. “EWWW!”

Suzie flips her sister off, but the moment is broken.

Danny kisses her on the cheek and helps her stand again. “See you in my dreams.”

She is dreaming of Danny. Dreaming of him fucking her so hard….

Suzie’s eyes flick open. For a moment she doesn’t know where she is. Not her room at home. Not her dorm.

Thin pre-dawn light shows around the curtain, barely lightening the walls but giving a pale blue glow to everything from the almost-empty bookshelf to the tattered poster of a snowboarding dragon.

Something is off.

She hears a rustling sound.

For a moment, fear grips her, but then…

Danny…

She creeps out of bed, willing the floorboards not to creak. Holding her breath she opens the door a crack. As always, her upstairs rooms is positively steamy, in spite of the cold outside.

The corridor is dark and empty. She can hear Liz wheezing like a freight train as usual.

Another sound—a quiet-as-owl-wings scuffle. Coming from the other side of the room.

What the fuck?

Closing the door again, she tiptoes over to the window and pulls open the drapes.

Danny is standing in his pajamas and parka, shivering knee-deep in the snow that has piled up nearly to Suzie’s second-floor window.

“Good morning, Danny,” giggles Suzie as quietly as she can, and slides the window open to let him in.

“Uh,” Danny whispers, shifting from foot to snow-buried foot. “Merry Christmas?”

“Yes! Now come inside so that I can unwrap my first present!”

He crawls in and stands there shivering as she closes the windows — and the drapes again — and a smile twitches on his lips. It always makes Suzie’s heart flutter a bit to see him smile—to see him smile because of her. He never smiles enough, especially recently—she knows how anxious and lonely he’s been, hell, how lonely she has been, and so the sight of that smile, of those eyes pinching the way that they do when he laughs, it all makes her feel… It makes her feel. There are no words.

“Cold,” he says, kicking snow-covered sneakes off of his feet.

“Comes with standing in the snow before the sun comes up,” she says, but unzips his parka and presses her bed-warm body to his. “So how the hell did you get up here?”

His parka drops to the floor and his arms wrap around her. “Window from my room. Right next to the front door. Used the downspout to climb up on top of the snow and…” He holds out his arms as if to say, Here I am!

“How’d you know this wasn’t Lizzie’s room?” She pokes him. “Or maybe that’s what you were hoping?”

She can feel his shivers subsiding, even as he chuckles. “No thanks. She’s not my type — by about six years. Besides, she snores like a rhino. That’s how I could tell. You snore like a mountain lion.”

“I don’t snore!“

“Of course not. And even if you did, it’s a beautiful sound.”

“Mmm. That’s more like it.” She kisses him, and can feel both her temperature and his rising.

Quickly, he stops shivering, and she pulls his shirt up over his head and pushes his bottoms down to his feet. Breaking the kiss, she backs up and lies back on the bed. “There. My first present, unwrapped and ready to play with.”

“Well,” he says at last, stepping towards her with a rather dangerous look on his face, “I do have a present for you. But you haven’t gotten it yet.”

“Oh,” she responds, and his widening grin makes an entirely different part of her anatomy flutter.

“Yes. This is a present I’ve been wanting to give you… for a very, very long time.”

Suzie has gone from sleep to fear to amusement in a few short moments, but the sound of Danny’s voice and the promise in his eye takes her someplace else entirely. She feels her cunt flower open. “Oh,” she murmurs again.

He leans forward and kisses her. Kisses her fully, leaving Suzie feeling far more naked than even sex ever has. She feels transparent, utterly exposed, as if this kiss reveals everything to Danny: not only her body, inside and out, but every little fear, every ugly little secret, every time she has been angry with him, or angry with herself, every time she has looked at a boy at one of the parties this year and thought, Why not? It is exciting to expose herself to Danny, but it is terrifying as well.

He breaks the kiss and smiles, and Suzie feels herself breathe again. “Least you had a chance to brush your teeth,” she burbles, arms crossed in front of her diamond-hard nipples.

He gives a soft laugh. “You taste fabulous, just like you snore,” he says, leaning forward again. Not into a kiss this time—his lips brush along her cheek and back to her ear. He murmurs, puffs of warm desire, “I want to taste you, Suzie. Every bit of you. I want to devour you whole. That’s your present.”

“Okay,” Suzie answers, her voice suddenly very high.

Danny’s hands move under her t-shirt—his t-shirt actually. She feels his palm sliding up her spine as he lifts the fabric. Her arms are still crossed and she can’t manage to uncross them, to reveal this too, to let him see how a kiss and a caress and a smile have evoked such desire in her.

“Going to let me take this off, or do I have to tear it?” he mutters, letting his tongue slide along the lobe. “Yum.”

Trembling, Suzie grabs the battered Dr. Who shirt reading Two hearts beat as one and pulls it up. Danny is straddling her legs, his body pressed close to hers, and so as the shirt lifts, it exposes her body to his, which also naked. She knows that body intimately now, but it feels cool and alien against her bed-warm flesh. Her breasts bounce free, the nipples buzzing as they slide against his ribs.

His tongue continues to explore her ear, the side of her neck. She whimpers with disappointment when he backs away to allow her to lift the shirt above her head, but once the horrible, offending shirt is gone, he attacks the bottom of her chin and works slowly around to the other ear.

His tongue finds its way in and she gasps.

“Roll over on your belly,” Danny says.

Suzie stiffens.

“Come on, Suzie. Don’t make me make you.” His tone is playful and light and so-so-so sexy, but what on earth…? “Trust me, Suzie.”

Moving with arms and legs that seem to have gone boneless, she rolls beneath him, feeling his balls brushing along one hip and across her ass. “I t-trust you, Danny. With everything.”

He sits silently across her backside for a moment, and she feels him shudder. Then she feels him brushing his fingers just over the surface of her back — not quite touching.

What…?

“God,” he says, “I’ve wanted you so fucking much.” He shifts forward and brushes her mane, still wild from sleep, off of her shoulders. “Last night,” Danny murmurs (Don’t wake anyone!)—as he leans further forward still, “lying in the big bed right below you, I dreamed about doing this. I had the most amazing, explicit, exciting dream of lying right on your bed, not this one, the one back at home, naked against your naked back, kissing my way across every… single… freckle.” He is as good as his word. His lips touch at the back of her neck and begin slowly to meander down the line of one shoulder. A vibration passes from each point of contact down through Suzie’s cunt to her toes, which flex against her sheets.

“And as I kissed each one,” he says, continuing his sweet torture, “I tasted you.” His tongue passes down the top of one shoulder blade. “And you tasted so good.”

He kisses her spine and Suzie releases a breathy moan into her mattress. “I… d-did?”

“In the dream you tasted like cinnamon sugar and pumpkin pie…”His favorites, a part of Suzie’s mind sighs, and she’d yell at herself, butfuck, what he’s doing demands every bit of her attention. He licks and nibbles along. “But nowhere as good as you taste in reality.”

Suzie knows where this is headed. Knows what her fucking Christmas present is. And a part of her wishes he’d get on with it, but a part of her… Oh, a part of her, most of her really, is so awash in sensation that the idea of doing anything but feel those lips, that tongue, those teeth slowly make their pilgrimage down her back is simply unimaginable.

At the point of each hip, he gives a gentle nibble—her bony fucking hips that she’s always hated so fucking much, but ohhhhh…—and then, as he reaches the dimple at the base of her spine he gives a long, languorous lick that carries him back up to the ribs.

There is nothing muffled about the moan that Suzie gives this time. She arches back like a cobra, her breasts bouncing tautly, and gives a good, low growl.

Danny laughs, covering her mouth — the first time he’s touched her with anything other than his lips — and kisses her on each shoulder and then running his hands back down her sides. “Shhhh…. I haven’t shown you the whole dream yet…” He kisses his way back down her spine, more lightly again. “I tasted all of you, Suzie.”

His mouth reaches that dimple again, and his hands rest on her buttocks and urge them apart.

She squeaks. For the first time in years and years, Suzie Williams squeaks, fighting him in spite of herself. “Oh, God, Danny…”

“Shhhh,” he soothes, kissing gently down the inner edge of one buttock and up the other. “It’s all right.”

“It is. Oh, it so fucking issss…!”

He touches his tongue to a place about which Suzie has thought as little as possible—really, it’s a nasty, purely functional part of her body, isn’t it? But the feel of his tongue, of his breath against her wrinkled flesh causes a wet wave of warmth to explode through her pelvis and she presses back against him, writhing. The first small orgasm of the morning. “God.”

“Yeah,” said Danny, his voice husky.

He’s going to fuck me there, he’s going to fuck my ass, oh…! Please, God…

But Danny begins kissing and nibbling his way down her trembling thigh.

Some other time, perhaps…

He continues to move slowly, deliberately, savoring her like a really good piece of chocolate. “That was the end of the dream,” Danny says, his voice low and urgent. “Came all over my sheets. Haven’t done that in years. Woke up thanking God your folks were fast asleep. And that they’re not telepathic.”

Of course, he says this just as he begins laving attention on the back of her knee and she starts to giggle. “Stop it!”

He snorts too. “Stop…? You want me to…?”

“NO!” she howls into her pillow. “Oh, God, NO! Please, God, Danny, don’t stop, please, don’t, ohhh…”

He begins kissing her feet.

Another part of her body that Suzie has never thought of as anything but utilitarian. He nibbles at her ankle, licks at the instep, sending sparks right back up to Suzie’s center, and then sucks Suzie’s big toe into that moist, hot mouth, triggering another roman candle in Suzie’s pelvis. “HNNNNH.”

Cool air washes over the toe as he releases her, and once again she whimpers.

Once again he says, “Roll over.”

This time she does not hesitate.

Danny sucks each of the toes on the other foot into his mouth in turn, and Suzie pushes up onto her elbows, staring at him, at this boy who was barely able to touch her last year, but now…

“S-Suzie,” he mumbles, kissing his way at a steady, studied pace up her leg, “I, I wanted to do your whole front too before—”

“Later,” Suzie urges, her own voice suddenly low with need.

He nods and works his way up the inside of her left thigh, trailing his tongue as he goes.

“AHH!” Suzie stares down into his eyes, and the light of dawn breaking through the window washes across his back and his ass and it feels as if the whole world is glowing.

Danny’s mouth meets Suzie’s cunt and suddenly she can’t look anymore. She closes her eyes, and her leg curls of its own accord over his shoulder and her chin droops to her chest.

Seratonin. Oxytocin.

The sunlight is inside of her. The sunrise is at their union.

And it flares…

Suzie’s eyes flicker open; the ceiling is golden-pink with the dawn. She is panting.

Danny kisses his way up her belly. He is getting the front after all.

At each breast, another small sunburst.

His mouth meets hers. She tastes the salt from her body—when did she start sweating?—along with the tang of her own cunt and the tiniest bit of his toothpaste.

“Merry Christmas, Suzie.”

“Mmmmmmmmm…”

His smile is full and broad and Suzie feels as if her own happiness is going to overflow her body and drown them both.

She pushes him back.

“Suzie?” Green eyes blink, suddenly concerned.

“Lie back,” she says.

He gawks at her.

“Don’t make me hit you, D’Angelo. This is my Christmas present, right?”

“Sure…” He flops back, his legs over hers. They stare at each other, each propped up on elbows.

His cock stands proudly, twitching to his heartbeat.

Suzie spins onto her belly, her feet up in the air, and begins to run the tip of her wand up the inside of his leg. He shivers.

What to do? What does she want?

His cock.

She sticks out her tongue, touches the tip to the base of his cock and licks slowly up its length. Danny lets out a strangled gasp.

Mmmmmmmm…

“Suzie,” pants Danny, “you don’t have to…”

“Shh,” Suzie commands. She grasps his erection with one hand and studies it. “I’ve been wanting to give you this… for a very, very long time.”

He gulps.

“I want to taste you, Danny. I want to swallow you. I want to devour you whole.” Savoring his stunned expression, the golden light, the flavor of him, the feeling of him, the closeness of him, she leans forward and does just that.

They make love as quietly as they can for the next half hour. It’s every bit as sweet as she remembers. Sweeter. Brain chemistry doesn’t even begin to explain it. And then they lie there under the covers, wishing the world would go away and leave them the fuck alone.

But then they hear Suzie’s parents beginning to move around in the kitchen, and Suzie helps Danny back out the window and watches him slide back down to the breezeway to where his own window awaits.

She is just worrying at how to obscure the footprints outside her window when a thick slab of snow slides off of the roof, obliterating any sign that he was ever there. Grinning, she pats the house, silently thanking it, and closes the window again.

By the time Suzie stumbles downstairs, Danny is already in the kitchen, scrambling eggs for Dad to cook. Danny waves and says, “Good morning!” and it’s almost as if the lovemaking session they’ve just had was a dream.

Except that Suzie can still taste Danny’s cum in her mouth, can still feel him dribbling from her pussy. “Morning, Danny.” She gives him a fairly chaste kiss and turns to the table. Mom’s sitting with Liz, who’s resting her head on the placemat. “Didn’t you sleep well, Lizzie?”

“No,” grunts Suzie’s sister. “There was a noise. Woke me up. Thought it was a big bear or something coming to eat you.”

“Eat me?” Suzie asks, turning to the coffee to hide the blush she knows is lighting up her fair skin. “Weren’t you worried it was going to eat you?” And if it tried, I’d have had to kill it.

“Nah,” Lizzie grumbles, lifting her head. “There’s more of you to eat.”

Suzie narrows her eyes at her brat of a little sister. “Well, you’re probably right. You’re all gristle and bone anyway.”

Liz sticks out her tongue, but the proper balance between the sisters has been maintained.

“Anyway,” Suzie says, “it was probably that big pile of snow sliding off the roof.”

Liz frowns as her mother starts to brush out her hair. “Oh.”

Pouring a mug of coffee for herself, Suzie turns to her boyfriend. “You sleep okay, Danny? No bears?”

“Nope.” He grins at her and waggles his eyebrows minutely in a way that Suzie chooses to interpret as And that bear came and ate you all up, didn’t it? “And you? You slept okay?“

“Like a dream,” she sighs, staring deep into his eyes.

He leans down and kisses her and —

“EWWWWW!”

If you enjoyed this, do let me know! If you really enjoyed it, as I hope you did, please let your friends know: Tweet on Twitter, Pin on Pinterest, Like on Facebook, or share on Google+. You could also review it at Amazon or Goodreads.

This story is now available in stores, so you could also, if you wanted, buy it at Stillpoint/Eros, Amazon (KindleUnlimited/KOLL), or Smashwords. Give it as a gift! 😉

Though it should stand on its own, Under the Covers is a follow-up to Over the Top — the story of how Suzie and Danny got together, with a little help from their friends. And the follow-up is Out of the Bag, which follows what comes up when Suzie and Danny finally have the opportunity to move in together — check out that preview at the link.

Happy holidays! Enjoy this time. See you soon!