Off the Record
Lesbian Bed Death and Other Lies — Bonus Chapter
by Blair Lennox
⚠️ This bonus chapter contains spoilers and takes place six months after the epilogue. Read the novel first!
Harper
The studio audience loved Cleo before she opened her mouth.
This was not unusual. Cleo Sanz had the specific, gravitational quality of a woman who entered rooms and rearranged their molecular structure—people turned toward her the way plants turned toward light, instinctively, without deciding to, because the alternative was existing in a room where she was present and not looking at her, and that required more effort than most humans could sustain.
I’d been failing to sustain it for fourteen months.
Today she was in a fitted burgundy blazer with nothing underneath it—a stylistic choice I’d been made aware of approximately forty-five seconds before we walked onstage for our first joint television appearance, when she’d leaned against the green room doorframe and said, “Ready, Doctor?” and I’d looked at the V of bare skin from her throat to her sternum and the gold chain she’d stolen from my jewelry box resting against her collarbone and thought, with the clinical precision of a woman who was about to discuss intimacy on national television while her girlfriend wore her necklace with no shirt: I am going to die on camera.
The chain was mine. A thin gold rope I’d worn every day for six years—a gift I’d bought myself after Sadie left. Cleo had started wearing it three months ago, slipping it off my nightstand in the morning without asking, clasping it around her own throat while I watched from the bed with my coffee and my reading glasses and the particular sensation of a woman watching her most private possession migrate to someone else’s body and finding the migration not a loss but a completion.
She wore it against bare skin today. Deliberate. The burgundy blazer buttoned just below her sternum, the V of fabric framing the chain—drawing the eye to the precise point where the gold rested between her breasts, warm from her body, catching the studio lights with every breath.
No one in the audience knew what it was. No one knew it was mine. That was the point.
The show was a morning segment on a major network daytime program—fifteen minutes, soft lighting, a host named Karen who asked thoughtful questions and called us “a breath of fresh air in the relationship space.” Karen was kind, professional, and had clearly been briefed by a producer who’d told her we were “relationship experts with great chemistry” without specifying the nature of said chemistry.
“Dr. Wren,” Karen said, turning to me, “your recent solo episode about emotional avoidance went viral. What prompted that kind of vulnerability?”
I answered. Professionally. With absolutely no evidence on my face or in my voice that the woman beside me had shifted on the couch and her bare knee was now pressed against mine through the slit in her jeans, and the contact—small, hidden by the camera angle, deliberate as a fingerprint—was sending a current through my thigh that made my clinical vocabulary stutter.
“I realized,” I said, maintaining steady eye contact with Karen while Cleo’s knee pressed harder, “that expertise doesn’t immunize you from your own patterns. I’d spent twenty years teaching people to be vulnerable, and I’d never done it myself. Not publicly. Not in a way that cost me anything.”
Cleo leaned forward—the blazer shifted, the chain glinted—and said, “Honesty is easy when you’re performing it. The hard part is being honest when nobody’s watching. When there’s no audience, no download count. Just you and the person across from you and the truth about what you need.”
She didn’t look at me when she said it. She didn’t need to. The sentence was aimed at me the way a frequency is aimed at a receiver—invisible, precise, arriving exactly where it was meant to.
Her thumb was rubbing her index finger under the couch cushion. She wanted me. On national television, in front of a studio audience, with forty-five seconds of segment remaining.
Karen wrapped the segment. Commercial break—eight minutes.
Cleo turned to me on the couch. “You’re staring.”
“I’m maintaining professional eye contact.”
“Your professional eye contact dropped to my chest four times during the segment. I counted.”
“I was reading your necklace.”
“It’s my plain gold chain.”
“It looks better on me.”
It did. The chain lay against her bare collarbone, and the sight of my jewelry on her body was doing something possessive and primal to a part of my brain that I had not included in any clinical publication.
“Why today?” I asked. “Why that blazer, with nothing underneath, on national television?”
“Because I wanted to sit on national television wearing something that belongs to the woman I love and know that nobody in the audience would know what it meant. Our secret. Right there, in plain sight. Your chain on my chest, your perfume on my skin, your—” She dropped her voice. “—fingerprints probably still on my hips from this morning.”
The heat that went through my body was geological. The memory of this morning—Cleo in our bed, in the 7 AM light, my hands on her hips hard enough to leave marks while she rode my fingers and said my name.
“Come with me,” I said.
“We’re live again in eight minutes.”
“I need seven.”
The dressing room had a vanity, a small couch, a clothing rack, and a lock on the door that I engaged the moment Cleo crossed the threshold. The most satisfying sound in any language.
She leaned against the closed door, arms at her sides, blazer falling open to show the full V of bare skin. The chain. Rising and falling with her breathing, which was already not calm.
I stood by the vanity—four feet of distance—and I looked at her. I took my time looking.
“The blazer,” I said.
“What about it?”
“Take it off.”
She undid the single button slowly. The blazer opened. She shrugged it from her shoulders and let it drop. She stood against the door, bare from the waist up except for the gold chain. The tattoos seemed to move in the vanity light. Her breasts were full, dark-nippled, already responding to the air and my gaze.
“It’s Armani,” she said.
“It’s on the floor.” I crossed the room. Slowly. “The blazer gets my gentleness. You get something else.”
I reached her. Pressed my palm flat against the door beside her head. Looked down—four inches of height difference—and watched her tilt her chin up, the angle exposing the line of her throat and the chain resting against it.
“What do I get?” she whispered.
“Everything I’ve been thinking about since you walked out of the green room in that blazer and I realized you were wearing my chain with nothing else and I had to sit on a couch next to you for fifteen minutes and talk about attachment theory while your bare skin was three inches from my hand.”
I kissed her throat. The chain pressed against my lips—cool metal, warm skin—and I traced it with my mouth, following the gold from her collarbone to the dip between her breasts. She made a sound that vibrated through her chest and into my mouth.
“Seven minutes,” she breathed.
“I’m fast when I’m motivated.” I sank to my knees. “And I have never been more motivated in my life.”
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