Christening the Cottage
Bonus Chapter — My Ex’s Hot Mom Is Not My Type
by Aurora North
⚠️ This bonus chapter takes place after the events of My Ex’s Hot Mom Is Not My Type. It contains spoilers and explicit sexual content. Reader discretion advised. This scene is too hot for Amazon — enjoy responsibly.
Christening the Cottage
The cottage on Elm Street had been ours for exactly four hours, and we had accomplished nothing.
The moving truck had come and gone. Mateo and Dani had helped carry boxes until Dani declared she didn’t do stairs and Mateo declared he didn’t do anything without pizza. Maribel had dropped off a casserole, inspected the kitchen with the critical eye of a woman assessing a surgical theater, and pronounced it “acceptable, but the stove needs seasoning.” They’d all left by three p.m., and now it was seven, and Vivian and I were standing in a living room full of cardboard boxes and furniture that hadn’t found its place yet.
The bed wasn’t assembled. The bed frame was in six pieces leaning against the bedroom wall, because Mateo had gotten the slats confused with the support rails and Dani had threatened to tattoo IKEA instructions on his forehead. The mattress was on the floor — again — which at this point felt less like a logistical failure and more like a tradition.
“We should unpack the kitchen first,” Vivian said. She was standing at the counter with her hair pinned up and her sleeves rolled and a streak of dust across her collarbone that I wanted to lick off. She’d been organizing all afternoon — labeling boxes, directing furniture placement, creating a system — because Vivian Cartwright could not exist in chaos without imposing order on it, and I loved her for it, and I also wanted to destroy the order comprehensively.
“We should christen the kitchen first,” I said.
She looked at me over her shoulder. The amber eyes. The left-side smile. “Jules. We have forty-seven boxes to unpack.”
“Forty-seven boxes that will still be here in an hour.”
“An hour is optimistic.”
“Thirty minutes, then. I’m efficient.”
“You are many things, Juliana. Efficient has never been one of them.”
She said my name — Juliana — with the particular inflection that made my knees unreliable. The one she used in bed. The one that was half tenderness, half command.
I crossed the kitchen in three steps. Put my hands on the counter on either side of her hips. Pressed my body against her back. She was taller than me — she was always taller — and I fit against the curve of her spine with the specific, practiced rightness of a body that had memorized another body’s architecture.
“This is our kitchen,” I said against the back of her neck. “Ours. Not the lake house kitchen that Richard chose. Not Dani’s kitchen where I ate cereal for two weeks. Ours. We picked the countertops. We picked the paint. And I have been thinking about bending you over these countertops since the day we signed the lease.”
Vivian’s hands stilled on the box she’d been opening. I felt her breathing change — the shift from domestic efficiency to something deeper, slower, the breath of a woman whose body was responding to proximity and words and the specific, devastating promise of being wanted in a space that belonged to both of us.
“The countertops are butcher block,” she said. Her voice was steady. Composed. The composure was a game now — a dare. How long could she maintain it while I dismantled her? “They’re not sealed yet. We’ll damage them.”
“Then we’ll seal them after.”
“Jules—”
I kissed the back of her neck. The spot where her hair was pinned up, exposing the nape — vulnerable, soft, the place where the tattoo didn’t reach. She shivered. I kissed lower — the top of her spine, the seventh cervical vertebra, the exact spot where I’d placed the first anchor point for her tattoo months ago in the sunroom at the lake house. My tongue traced the edge of the death’s-head moth’s wing, following the ink I’d put there, tasting the salt of her skin and the faint sweetness of her lotion.
Her head dropped forward. Her hands gripped the edge of the counter.
“Turn around,” I said.
She turned. Leaned against the counter. Looked down at me with that expression — the one that said I am letting you do this and I could stop you at any moment and I have no intention of stopping you all at once.
I unbuttoned her shirt. Slowly. One button at a time. She watched my hands — ink-stained, paint-flecked from touching up the bedroom walls that afternoon — work the buttons with the same precision I used on a tattoo machine. Each button revealed more of her — the collarbone with the dust streak, the curve of her breasts in the simple black bra, the lean stomach, the waistband of her jeans. Her skin was warm. The afternoon sun through the kitchen window caught the fine texture of her, the dark brown skin glowing amber in the light — the same amber I’d mixed into the porcelain cracks on her back.
I pushed the shirt off her shoulders. Unhooked her bra with one hand — a skill I had refined to an art form over six months of practice on this specific clasp. Her breasts were full and soft and her nipples tightened in the kitchen air and I bent my head and licked the streak of dust off her collarbone, then followed the line of bone to the hollow of her throat, where her pulse was beating fast.
“You taste like moving day,” I said.
“That’s not a compliment.”
“It’s a fact. You taste like dust and sweat and the woman I’m about to fuck in our kitchen, and I want every part of it.”
Her breath caught. The composure cracked — not a fracture, a fissure, wide and deliberate, the crack of a woman who had stopped pretending she didn’t want to be cracked.
“You’re beautiful,” I said. Because I said it every time, and it was true every time, and she needed to hear it every time. I cupped her breasts, one in each hand, ran my thumbs across her nipples, and watched her eyelids flutter. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, and you’re standing in our kitchen, and I am going to take you apart on this counter.”
“You’re still dressed,” she said. Her voice was rough now, the composed modulation dissolving into something raw. “That seems unfair.”
“Life is unfair, Ms. Hartwell.”
The name. The old name. The one that had started as professional courtesy and become a weapon and a prayer and the single most loaded word in our entire vocabulary. I watched it hit her — the flush climbing her throat, the pupils widening, the composure cracking along fault lines I’d mapped and memorized.
“Don’t call me that,” she said, but her voice was wrecked and her hips shifted against the counter and we both knew she didn’t mean it. She never meant it. The protest was foreplay and the name was a match and between them the air in our kitchen caught fire.
“Make me stop.”
She grabbed the front of my tank top and pulled me into her and kissed me — hard, open-mouthed, her tongue against mine, her hands fisting in the fabric at my chest. I lifted her onto the counter — she made a sound of surprise, then adjustment, her palms slapping the butcher block for balance — and she wrapped her legs around my waist and I stood between her thighs in our kitchen in our cottage on our street and I thought: This. This is what home feels like. This is what I was building toward every time I picked up a needle and made something permanent.
I pulled her jeans open. Yanked the zipper down. She lifted her hips and I dragged them off — not gracefully, because jeans on a counter are a logistical challenge, and one leg got stuck on her ankle, and she kicked and I pulled and we both swore and then laughed and then the jeans were on the floor and her underwear was simple black cotton and I hooked my fingers in the waistband and looked at her.
“These too?”
“Everything, Jules. Take everything off.”
I pulled them down. She was wet — I could see it, the cotton damp when I slid them past her thighs — and the sight of her arousal, visible and unmanaged, made my hands shake. Vivian Cartwright, sitting naked on our butcher-block counter with her legs open and her hair coming loose from its pins and her tattoo visible over her shoulder, was the most erotic thing I had ever witnessed, and I had been looking at her naked for six months and the impact had not diminished by a single degree.
I dropped to my knees on the kitchen tile.
“Jules — the floor is hard —”
“I’ve been on harder floors.”
“That’s not a recommendation.”
“Vivian.” I looked up at her from between her thighs. Her amber eyes were dark, her lips parted, her chest rising and falling with breaths that were no longer composed. “Shut up and let me christen our kitchen.”
She shut up.
I put my mouth on her.
She was soaked — had been, I suspected, since I’d said bending you over these countertops, because Vivian Cartwright responded to specificity the way other people responded to touch. Tell her exactly what you planned to do, in detail, with confidence, and her body started without her permission. I tasted the proof of it now — salt and heat and the specific, sharp sweetness that was uniquely hers, the flavor I’d become addicted to over six months of kneeling between this woman’s thighs.
I licked her slowly. Long, flat strokes from bottom to top, spreading her open with my thumbs, taking my time. She was swollen under my tongue — her clit hard and flushed, the sensitive hood pulled back from arousal alone. I circled it with the tip of my tongue, not touching it directly, and her hips jerked forward.
“Jules —”
“Patience.”
“I have been patient. I have been patient for four hours of moving boxes while you bent over in those shorts and I —”
I sealed my mouth over her clit and sucked, gently, and whatever she’d been about to say dissolved into a sound that bounced off the kitchen walls and came back to us doubled. Her hand flew to the back of my head. Her fingers twisted in my hair — the paint-stained strands, the fading plum tips — and gripped.
I worked her with my tongue — alternating between broad strokes and focused pressure, reading her body the way I read skin under a needle. When her thighs tensed, I eased off. When her hips rolled forward, I pressed harder. When she made the particular desperate sound — a broken gasp, almost a whimper — that meant she was close, I slid two fingers inside her.
She was tight. Wet. The muscles of her walls clenched around my fingers as I pushed deeper, and I curled them upward — the come-hither motion she loved, the one that found the rough patch of tissue behind her pubic bone and pressed. Her entire body arched. Her grip on my hair tightened to the edge of pain.
“Right there,” she breathed. “Don’t you dare move — right — God — right there —”
I didn’t move. I held the angle, held the pressure, kept my tongue working her clit in the rhythm that made her breathing fragment, and I fucked her with my fingers in slow, deep strokes that matched the rhythm of my mouth, and the kitchen filled with the wet, obscene sound of it — my mouth on her, my fingers inside her, her voice saying my name and there and don’t stop and please in a vocabulary that had nothing to do with composure and everything to do with the woman she became when every wall was down.
She came with her thighs clamped around my ears and her hand pulling my hair and Juliana on her lips — except it wasn’t a word by then, it was a sound, a vibration, the name disassembled by pleasure into its component syllables and scattered across the kitchen like the boxes we hadn’t unpacked. I felt her pulse around my fingers — rhythmic, powerful, the involuntary contractions of a woman who was coming hard and not controlling a single thing about it.
I stayed with her through the aftershocks. Gentled my tongue. Slowed my fingers. Kissed the inside of her thigh when she loosened her grip on my hair and made the soft, stunned sound she always made when the orgasm released her — a sound like surfacing, like a held breath finally let go.
I stood. My knees protested — the tile was unforgiving, and I was going to feel it tomorrow — but the sight of Vivian on the counter, flushed and trembling and looking at me with eyes that were all pupil, was worth any amount of joint pain.
I kissed her. Let her taste herself on my mouth. She moaned into the kiss — she always did, every time, the taste of her own arousal on someone else’s lips was a thing that undid her — and her hands were pulling my tank top up and over my head and then my sports bra and then her palms were on my bare breasts and her thumbs were on my nipples and I was shaking.
“Bedroom,” she said against my mouth. “Now.”
“The bed isn’t assembled.”
“The mattress is on the floor.”
“Tradition.”
She hopped off the counter with an elegance that was absurd given that she was completely naked and her legs were still trembling. She kicked her jeans out of the path, took my hand, and walked me through the living room — past the stacked boxes and the disassembled bookshelf and Maribel’s casserole cooling on the coffee table — to the bedroom where the mattress lay on the floor beneath an uncurtained window.
The evening light came through and turned everything gold. Our mattress. Our room. Our life, in boxes and bare walls and the beginnings of something permanent.
She pushed me down. I fell onto the mattress and she followed, straddling me, her hair finally falling completely loose from its pins — silver-streaked dark waves cascading over her shoulders, brushing my face, smelling like her shampoo and the day’s work. She pinned my wrists with one hand. The gesture that had become hers — the move that made my brain go silent and my body go desperate.
“My turn,” she said. The composed voice. The one that gave instructions. The one that wrecked me more completely than any touch ever could, because the composure wasn’t performance anymore — it was power, consciously wielded, by a woman who had discovered she liked being in charge and had six months of practice to prove it.
“I’m going to make you come in every room of this house,” she said. Matter-of-fact. As though she were outlining a project plan. “We’ve done the kitchen. This is the bedroom. After this, the bathroom. Then the living room. Then the workshop, once you set up your station.”
“That’s — Vivian, that’s five rooms —”
“I’m aware. We have all night.” She lowered her mouth to my ear. Her breath was warm and her lips grazed the shell and her voice dropped to the register that liquefied my spine. “And I’m thorough.”
She released my wrists. “Keep them there.”
I kept them there. Above my head, spread on the pillow, gripping the fabric because I needed something to hold and she’d taken herself away.
She kissed my throat. The spot below my ear that made me curse — she bit it, gently, and I swore and my hips bucked and she smiled against my skin. She kissed down my neck. My collarbone. The wildflower spray tattooed across my left ribs — she traced the petals with her tongue, following the ink lines the way she’d done in the guesthouse the first time she’d explored my body, except now she knew exactly which petal made me gasp and she spent extra time on it.
She took my left nipple in her mouth. Sucked. Then the right — the more sensitive one, the one with the barbell piercing, the one that made me arch off the mattress when she ran her tongue over the metal. She spent an obscene amount of time on my breasts — unhurried, thorough, her mouth alternating between gentle suction and sharp teeth while her hands roamed down my sides, my hips, the waistband of my shorts.
“Vivian — please —”
“Please what?”
“Touch me. I need you to —”
“I am touching you.” Her mouth was on my stomach now, her tongue tracing the line of my hip bone, and her fingers were hooking in my shorts and pulling them down with agonizing slowness. “I’m going to tell you exactly what I’m going to do before I do it. And you’re going to lie there and feel it.”
My underwear came off with the shorts. I was naked. She sat back on her heels and looked at me — the full-body assessment, the focused, appreciative attention she gave to art, directed at the tattooed, trembling, wet, desperate canvas of my body.
“First,” she said, “I’m going to kiss the dahlia on your inner thigh. Then I’m going to move two inches to the left and put my tongue on you. I’m going to lick you until you beg, and then I’m going to slide my fingers inside you, and then I’m going to make you come so hard you forget your name.”
My hands fisted in the pillow above my head. Every word she said was a lit fuse traveling toward a detonator, and the detonator was the place between my thighs that was aching and wet and swollen and needed her mouth with a urgency that bordered on painful.
“And your name,” she continued, lowering herself between my legs, her hair brushing the inside of my thighs, “is Juliana.”
She kissed the dahlia. Traced the inked petals with her lips. Then she moved two inches to the left and put her tongue on me, and I forgot everything that wasn’t her mouth.
She licked me in slow, deliberate strokes — base to clit, flat tongue, the pressure building with each pass. She knew my body. Six months of learning, of experimentation, of asking and listening and adjusting and refining until she could play me like an instrument she’d been practicing her whole life. She knew that direct pressure on my clit was too much at first — she circled, approached from the sides, teased until I was slick and swollen and straining toward her mouth. She knew that I liked two fingers before her tongue went to work in earnest. She slid them in — slow, deep, curving upward — and I made a sound that would have embarrassed me if I’d been capable of embarrassment, which I was not, because Vivian Cartwright’s mouth was on me and her fingers were inside me and she was saying my name against my clit.
Juliana.
The vibration of the word against my most sensitive nerve endings sent a shock through my entire body. My hips lifted off the mattress. My hands broke free from the pillow and grabbed the back of her head and I held her there, pressed her closer, and she let me — let me set the pressure, let me grind against her mouth, let me take what I needed while she gave it with the steady, patient generosity that was the core of who she was.
She added a third finger. Stretched me. Filled me. Fucked me with a rhythm that matched her tongue and I was making sounds I couldn’t control — loud, raw, the sounds of a woman who lived in a house with no neighbors close enough to hear and was taking full advantage of the acoustics.
“Vivian — I’m — I’m going to —”
She pulled her mouth back just enough to speak. Her fingers didn’t stop. “Say my name when you come.”
“Vivian —”
“Louder.”
She sealed her mouth over my clit and sucked and curled her fingers and I came screaming her name into the empty bedroom of our cottage, the sound filling the uncurtained room and spilling through the open window into the evening air, and I did not care, I did not care about neighbors or noise or anything except the woman between my thighs who was holding me through the orgasm with steady hands and a hot mouth and the absolute, unshakeable certainty of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing.
The orgasm lasted longer than I expected — wave after wave, my muscles clenching around her fingers, her tongue gentling but not withdrawing, coaxing the last tremors out of me until I was boneless and gasping and my hands had fallen from her head to the mattress like dead weight.
She crawled up my body. Kissed me. I tasted myself on her mouth — sharp, unmistakable — and she tasted like me and I tasted like her and together we tasted like the beginning of a life neither of us had been brave enough to imagine until we’d built it.
“That’s two rooms,” she said against my lips.
“Three to go.”
“Three to go.”
We made it to three rooms that night.
The bathroom defeated us — the shower was too small and Vivian declared she was not having sex while standing on wet tile at her age, which was a reasonable position that I argued with on principle because arguing with Vivian about logistics was itself a form of foreplay. We compromised by starting in the bathroom — her sitting on the edge of the clawfoot tub while I knelt on the bath mat, which was significantly more comfortable than kitchen tile — and finishing on the hallway floor when we couldn’t make it back to the bedroom.
The hallway floor was hardwood. Neither of us cared. She was on top of me, her thigh between mine, both of us grinding against each other with the desperate, uncoordinated urgency of two women who had been taking turns all evening and had finally abandoned structure for mutual chaos. We came within thirty seconds of each other — me first, then her, triggered by the sound of my orgasm the way she was always triggered by the sound of my orgasm, because Vivian Cartwright got off on making me lose control, and the knowledge of that was the hottest thing about her, and the list of hot things about her was very, very long.
The workshop and the living room would wait for tomorrow.
We dragged ourselves back to the mattress. Lay in the dark. The window was open and the oak tree rustled and somewhere down the block a neighbor was playing music, something soft and old, the kind of thing that drifted in on warm air and made the world feel gentle.
“We live here,” I said.
“We do.”
“Together. In a house. Like adults.”
“The bed isn’t assembled.”
“Details.”
She pulled me close. I settled against her — my head on her shoulder, my leg across hers, my hand on her hip where the pomegranate blossom was healing and the crescent moon had been living for twenty-six years. Old ink and new ink. The past and the present. The woman she was before and the woman she’d become, both of them mine, both of them permanent.
“Welcome home, Juliana,” she said.
I pressed my face into her neck and breathed. And the cottage was quiet. And the boxes could wait. And neither of us was going anywhere.
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