The Second Annual

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Unbridled
by Blair Lennox

⚠️ This bonus chapter contains EXPLICIT sexual content and takes place one year after the events of Unbridled. Spoilers ahead.

The last box was books.

Of course the last box was books. We’d unpacked kitchen supplies, bedding, bathroom essentials, framed photographs, and the entire contents of two separate apartments into one shared space above a bookstore, and the final carton sitting in the middle of our living room floor contained — because the universe had a sense of humor and Zadie Cole was its favorite punchline — approximately thirty romance novels that Zadie had selected for the new bedroom shelf.

“These are curated,” she said, slicing the packing tape with a box cutter. “A carefully chosen library for the nightstand of two women who are now cohabitating.”

“You curated our bedroom reading.”

“I curate everything. It’s my love language.”

I sat on the floor beside her — our floor, in our apartment, the sentence still detonating quietly in my chest every time I thought it — and watched her unpack the books with the reverent precision she brought to every shelf in her shop. She organized them by emotional register: tender on the left, filthy on the right, and a middle section she labeled “crying then fucking” which she said was the ideal reading trajectory for a Saturday night.

“This one,” she said, holding up a paperback with a cover featuring two women in a state of artistic undress, “has a scene in a bookstore that I have personally verified is physically possible.”

“Verified how?”

She looked at me over the top of the book. Dark eyes, the half-smile that meant trouble, her locs falling across one shoulder. She was wearing my old Columbia T-shirt and shorts and nothing else, and the domesticity of it — bare feet on our hardwood floor, surrounded by our combined possessions, building a shared life one shelf at a time — was so erotic that I had to press my fingers to my wrist before I remembered I didn’t need that gesture anymore. My pulse didn’t need monitoring. My desire didn’t need managing. It just needed Zadie.

“Verified through extensive professional research,” she said. “Page one-forty-seven. The protagonist braces herself against a poetry shelf while her best friend goes down on her between the stacks. I can confirm the shelf height is correct, the structural integrity is sufficient, and the experience is—” She paused, eyes flicking up. “—transcendent.”

“You verified that. In your shop.”

“Closing time is very productive.”

“I was there for some of those closing times.”

“You were there for the research.”

I took the book from her hands, opened it to page one-forty-seven, and read three sentences. My face went hot. The scene was graphic — not artful suggestion, not tasteful fade-to-black, but detailed, specific, the kind of writing that made your thighs press together and your breathing change.

“That’s ambitious for a poetry section,” I said.

“You underestimate the structural integrity of my shelving. I paid extra for hardwood.”

She shelved the last book and sat back on her heels and looked at the room. Our room.

“It’s done,” she said.

“It’s done.”

“We live here now.”

“We live here now.”

“I want to christen the bedroom,” she said.

“We christened it last week. And the week before. And during the painting, which is why we had to repaint the south wall.”

“Those were construction christenings. Provisional. This is the official one. The first night everything is in place — books shelved, art hung, cabinet installed, both nightstands operational.”

“You want ceremonial sex.”

“I want inaugural sex. First-night-in-our-home sex. The kind we’ll remember when we’re eighty and this apartment has been ours for fifty years and the books on that shelf have been read so many times the spines are broken.”

“Come here,” I said.

She came.

I kissed her on the floor of our bedroom, surrounded by empty boxes and packing paper and the faint smell of new paint and old books. The kiss was neither gentle nor hurried — it was the kiss of a woman who had stopped performing and started living. Confident, specific, deeply familiar and still capable of surprise.

Zadie’s hand found the back of my neck and pulled me deeper, her mouth opening against mine, and the taste of her — the wine we’d been drinking while we unpacked, and underneath the wine, the warm clean taste that was just her — went straight through me like current through copper.

“Bed,” she murmured against my mouth. “We have an actual bed now. A real bed. Not a chaise in a dressing room or a narrow cot above a bookstore.”

I pulled her up from the floor and we stumbled toward the bed — our bed, the one we’d chosen together at a furniture store in Ithaca where the salesperson had asked if we wanted a firm or soft mattress and Zadie had said, without missing a beat, “firm, we’re active” and I’d turned the color of a fire engine — and I pushed her down onto the new sheets and followed her.

I straddled her hips. She looked up at me — locs fanned across the pillow, T-shirt rucked up to show a strip of stomach, her eyes dark and warm and focused entirely on me — and I pulled my shirt over my head and dropped it on the floor.

Her hands found my waist immediately. Reflexive. Proprietary. She ran her palms up my ribs and cupped my breasts and rolled my nipples between her fingers and I arched into her hands and made the sound — the involuntary exhale-moan that I’d spent thirty years suppressing and now let ring through rooms without apology.

“God, I love that sound,” Zadie said. “I’ve loved that sound since the first time you made it in a bookstore on a Tuesday night, and I will never get tired of hearing it.”

“Then earn it.”

Her eyes went dark. She sat up beneath me, one arm around my waist, and kissed my throat. Her mouth was hot and open and her tongue traced the tendon along the side of my neck and I tilted my head back and her free hand worked my shorts down my hips. I lifted to help and the shorts went to the floor and I was bare on her lap, my skin against the cotton of her T-shirt.

“You’re still dressed,” I said.

“Take it off.”

“Make me.”

I grabbed the hem of her T-shirt and pulled it over her head in one motion. She was bare beneath it, her breasts full and warm against my palms when I cupped them, her nipples hardening under my thumbs.

I pushed her flat against the pillows and kissed down her body. I knew the map now. I’d been traveling it for a year, and the familiarity didn’t diminish the intensity — it deepened it.

“I want to try something,” I said against her skin.

I reached for the nightstand and opened the drawer where I’d placed the slim black vibrator that had started this whole journey. The one from The Velvet Page.

“Recognize this?” I said, holding it up.

“That’s the one you bought at the boutique,” she said. “The night I almost took your clothes off between the new releases and the staff picks.”

“I want to use it on you.”

“Yes,” she said. Her voice had dropped. “God, yes.”

I turned it on. The low, steady hum filled the bedroom and I pressed it against her hip first. Not where she wanted it — where I wanted to start. The vibration traveled through her skin and she inhaled sharply and her hips rocked, seeking.

“Delphine.” Her voice was tight. “If you tease me, I will—”

“You’ll what?”

“I’ll make you regret it later. In specific and creative ways.”

“Promises.” I kissed her stomach. Kissed lower, my mouth tracing the line below her navel while the vibrator hummed against her inner thigh. She was still wearing underwear — black cotton, simple, soaked through. I could see the dampness, could smell her arousal, and the combination made my own body clench with want.

I pulled her underwear down her legs and off. She spread her thighs for me without being asked, and the sight of her — open, wet, swollen, wanting me — made me pause. Not out of hesitation. Out of reverence.

“Stop looking at me like that,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Like I’m a first edition you just found at an estate sale.”

“You’re better than a first edition.”

“That is the single most romantic thing you’ve ever said, and you once recited a legal indemnification clause as foreplay.”

I lowered the vibrator and pressed it directly against her clit.

Her back arched off the mattress. The sound she made — sharp, broken, almost a shout — echoed off the new walls and I held the vibrator steady while I lowered my mouth to her inner thigh and kissed the sensitive skin there, tasting salt and lavender.

“Fuck,” she breathed. “Della — that’s—”

“Tell me.”

“More. Harder. I need—”

I increased the pressure. The vibrator hummed against her clit and I replaced my mouth on her thigh with my mouth on her — directly, my tongue joining the vibrator, licking around the buzzing tip, tasting her fully. She tasted the way she always tasted — clean and sharp and specific, the flavor I’d been addicted to since the first time I’d gone down on her in an apartment above a bookstore. I licked her in long, slow strokes, the vibrator pressed against the upper part of her clit while my tongue worked the lower, and the dual stimulation made her entire body shake.

“Inside,” she gasped. “I need you inside me. Please.”

I slid two fingers into her. She was so wet that there was no resistance, just the tight, slick grip of her body around my fingers and a low, guttural sound. I curled my fingers forward, finding the spot that made her grab the headboard and say my name like she was trying to remember how language worked.

“Right there,” she said. “Right — fuck, Della, don’t stop—”

I fucked her with my hand while the vibrator worked her clit and my tongue moved in counterpoint, and the three points of stimulation converged into something that made her body bow off the bed. I could feel the orgasm building — the tightening around my fingers, the rhythmic clenching, the way her breathing fragmented from sentences into syllables into raw, wordless sound.

“I’m going to come,” she said. “I’m going to — fuck — Della—”

“Come for me. In our bed. In our home.”

She came. Not quietly. Not politely. With a scream she didn’t muffle and a convulsion that arched her entire body off the mattress, her walls clenching around my fingers in waves, her hand in my hair pulling hard enough that I felt it in my scalp, and the vibrator still humming against her while I held it steady through every contraction.

I eased off slowly. Reduced the vibrator to its lowest setting, then off. Withdrew my fingers gently, kissed her hip, her stomach, the damp skin between her breasts. She was trembling — full-body tremors, the aftershocks of an orgasm that had apparently involved every muscle she owned.

“Holy shit,” she whispered.

“Good?”

“I can’t feel my legs.”

“That’s a yes?”

“That is a standing ovation delivered from a horizontal position because vertical is no longer available to me.”

“Where did you learn that?” she asked.

“Page one-forty-seven. She uses a vibrator and her mouth simultaneously, and I thought—”

“You read the scene and took notes?”

“I’m an event planner. Preparation is my love language.”

She laughed. The laugh turned into a groan when I kissed her neck, because the post-orgasm sensitivity made every touch register at twice the normal intensity.

“Give me thirty seconds,” she said.

“Take your time.”

“I’m going to need those thirty seconds because what I’m planning requires motor function.”

She didn’t need thirty seconds. She needed twelve.

Zadie rolled on top of me with the fluid, purposeful motion of a woman who had been conserving energy, not recovering from it. The sudden full-length press of her body against mine — skin on skin, her weight settling over me, her thigh sliding between mine — drew a sound from my throat that I felt in my chest.

“My turn,” she said. “Give me that.”

She took the vibrator from the nightstand. Turned it on. Held it up between us, the hum filling the narrow space between our bodies.

“You used this the first time thinking about me,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes.”

“You were alone in your apartment. In your bed. Thinking about my hands.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me what you thought about.” She pressed the vibrator against my hip. “Specifically. Use words.”

“I thought about your voice. The way you said tell me in the boutique. The way the instruction itself turned me on more than anything Camden ever did with his hands.”

“What else?” The vibrator traced lower. Down my hip. Across my thigh. Close but not there.

“I thought about your mouth on my neck. The first time, in the boutique, when you kissed below my ear and my knees buckled. I replayed it on a loop.”

“What else?” Lower still. The vibration against my inner thigh made my hips lift off the mattress.

“I thought about you inside me. Your fingers. The way you curled them. No one had ever touched me and made me feel like they were paying attention. Like what I wanted mattered more than what they assumed.”

“It always mattered.” Zadie’s voice was low and raw. “Every sound you made. Every time you told me what you needed. That was the sexiest thing about you, Della. Not your body — although your body is spectacular. The bravery. The fact that you’d spent thirty years performing and you chose to be honest with me.”

She pressed the vibrator against me.

The contact was direct and overwhelming. The targeted, focused pressure against my clit sent a shockwave through my body that made my back arch and my hands fly to her shoulders. She held it steady — not moving, not circling, just the constant, relentless hum — and watched my face.

“Tell me when,” she said.

“When what?”

“When you want more.”

“I want more. Now. I want you inside me while — fuck — while that’s—”

She slid two fingers inside me without breaking the vibrator’s contact. The dual sensation — the buzzing pressure on my clit and the stretch and fullness of her fingers — made my vision blur. She curled forward, found the spot she knew, and began a slow, deep rhythm.

“You’re so wet,” she murmured. “God, Della. You’re soaked.”

“That’s what you do to me. That’s what you’ve always—”

“I know. I just like hearing you say it.”

She fucked me with her hand and held the vibrator steady and kissed my throat, and the combination built a wave inside me that was bigger than any I’d felt before. The orgasm didn’t arrive — it assembled. Piece by piece, layer by layer, every nerve ending contributing to a structure that grew taller and tighter until it became unsustainable.

“I’m close,” I said. “I’m so close, don’t change anything, don’t—”

“I won’t. I’ve got you.”

She kept the rhythm. Steady. Patient. Her fingers deep inside me, curling on every stroke, the vibrator unwavering. And she whispered against my neck: “Welcome home, Della.”

The orgasm hit like a wall of water. My body locked — every muscle rigid, my back arched so hard my shoulders lifted off the mattress, my mouth open on a sound that started as her name and became something beyond language. The contractions around her fingers were violent and rhythmic and seemed to last longer than any orgasm I’d ever had, each wave triggered by another curl of her fingers, another pulse of the vibrator, until I was gasping and shaking and had to push her hand away because the sensitivity had crossed from pleasure into something my nervous system couldn’t process.

“Stop — too much — I can’t—”

She withdrew immediately. Turned off the vibrator. Gathered me against her body with both arms and held me while the aftershocks rolled through, her lips against my temple, her voice murmuring things I couldn’t quite hear but could feel.

“I love you,” I said. My voice was wrecked.

“I love you too.” She kissed my forehead. “And I was right about the mattress.”

“You were right about the mattress.”

“Firm. For active people.”

“Zadie Cole, if you quote yourself to the furniture salesperson at me right now—”

“She asked a question. I gave an honest answer. Item three.”

Later — how much later I didn’t know, because I’d stopped tracking time — we lay tangled in the destroyed sheets with the window open and the October air moving across our bare skin.

“I opened the cabinet today,” I said.

“The list cabinet?”

“The list cabinet. When I was here earlier. I looked at it — all thirteen items, the dates in the margins instead of checkmarks, your handwriting on item twelve.”

“Still choosing,” she said.

“Still choosing. And you’d added something new.”

She went still beside me.

“When did you notice?” she asked.

“This afternoon. There was a new line, in your handwriting, beneath item thirteen.”

“Fourteen: Build a home that smells like her perfume and my tea and the books we’ll read together until we’re too old to see the pages.”

“I wasn’t going to tell you about that,” she said. “It was supposed to be a private addition.”

“Inside a shared cabinet. In a shared apartment.”

“I didn’t say it was a logical private addition.”

“Item fourteen is my favorite item on the list,” I said.

“It’s not technically on the list. It’s in the margins.”

“All the best things in our story are in the margins. The dates instead of checkmarks. Your handwriting on item twelve. The torn page you kept in your drawer. Everything that mattered happened in the space you weren’t performing.”

“I’m going to add more items,” she said. “Over the years. Small ones. Ones you won’t notice until you open the cabinet and find them.”

“Private items.”

“Private items. Secrets are things you hide because you’re afraid. Private items are things you keep because they’re sacred.”

She kissed me. Not with urgency — with the slow, certain tenderness of a woman who had all the time in the world.

Her hand moved lower on my hip, her fingers tracing slow circles on my skin, and the touch was less a proposition than a continuation — the ongoing, sustainable practice of wanting someone and letting the want exist without a deadline.

“Again?” I whispered.

“If you want.”

“I always want.”

“I know. That’s my favorite thing about you. You always want.”

She pulled me close. Skin against skin. The window open and the night air cool and the books on the shelf holding their breath.

Just us. Just home.

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