//CLARA//
The cold came first.
It crept between my shoulder blades where his release still clung, drying tacky against my skin, and I shivered violently once before my body remembered how to breathe without his weight pinning me to the oak.
The tree's bark had left red impressions across my frontside. I could feel them now, each ridge and whorl translated into raised flesh, a topographical map of what we'd done.
Casimir stood mere feet away. His shirt gaped open, buttons torn or missing, and the scratches I'd left across his chest had begun to weep thin lines of blood. But he was no longer looking at me. He was staring at his hand.
I followed his gaze. His right hand, the one that had worked between my legs with brutal precision—palm up, fingers slightly curled. There was blood there. Not much. A smear across the heel of his palm, darker at the creases of his knuckles.
My blood. The evidence of my virginity, or what remained of it, catalogued in his skin like ink.
