Room Nine

A Hit It Like You Mean It Bonus Scene
by Aurora North

← Back to Hit It Like You Mean It

Bridget

I paid.

That was the first thing. Before the dress came off, before the tie, before any of it, I walked up to the front desk of the Lindell at eleven fifty-two on a Saturday night in June with rice still in my hair and slid my own card across the counter, and the night clerk — the same night clerk, I swear to god, the one who’d seen everything — looked at it, then at me, then at the woman standing behind me holding a garment bag and a cooler of leftover cake, and said, “Room nine?”

“Room nine,” I said.

“You’ll pay next time,” Dana said behind me, very quietly, in the exact voice she’d used two years ago.

I didn’t turn around. If I turned around I was going to cry again, and I’d already cried at the vows, and at the toast, and at Marvin’s video call from Arizona where he held his phone too close to his face and said bend your knees, girls and then had to hand the phone to his wife. I’d cried when Tess caught the bouquet by accident because she was trying to dodge it. I’d cried when Keisha made Theo slow dance under the disco ball and Amara rolled circles around them with her light-up wheels going purple-green-purple. I was done crying for the night. I was a married woman with a reservation.

The clerk handed me a brass key on a tassel.

“Congratulations,” he said, completely flat.

“Thank you,” I said. “We’ve been here before.”

“I know,” he said. “I remember the chips.”

The room hadn’t changed.

That was the thing that got me, standing in the doorway with the key still in my hand. White duvet. A small mountain of pillows. The iron headboard with the curling vines. Lamplight gold on the walls. Somebody had put a bottle of something sparkling on ice on the dresser with a card that said Compliments of the Lindell, and next to it, because I’d called ahead and asked and spelled it twice, six cans of lime seltzer.

Dana came in behind me and set the garment bag on the luggage rack with the precise placement of someone putting down a level, and shut the door, and locked it, and turned around.

She was still in her suit.

I need to talk about the suit. I’d been talking about the suit in my head for eleven hours and nobody had let me say any of it out loud. Charcoal gray. Tailored, actually tailored, by a woman in Port Halley that Mallory had found and Keisha had vetted and Dana had gone to for three fittings and come home from each one looking like she’d been through a deposition. White shirt open at the throat. No tie — she’d taken it off at the reception and wrapped it around my wrist during Couples Skate like tape, a figure eight, three passes, and I still had it on. Her dark hair cut fresh and blunt. The freckles. The notch in the eyebrow. The brushed-steel band on her left hand that matched the one on mine.

She looked like a building that had passed every inspection.

“You’re staring,” Dana said.

“You’re wearing a suit.”

“I’ve been wearing it all day.”

“I’ve been staring all day,” I said. “People noticed. Lacey filmed it. There’s going to be a whole montage.”

“Lacey promised no cameras tonight.”

“Lacey promised no cameras in here. She’s got eleven hours of me looking at you like you’re the last grilled cheese on earth.” I put the key down on the dresser next to the seltzer. My hands were shaking. Why were my hands shaking? I’d had sex with this woman in a cage, a truck, a motel with a lighthouse, and the middle of a dark roller rink under emergency lights. I’d had sex with her on a Tuesday with the coffee maker beeping. I’d had sex with her probably four hundred times. I knew every single freckle on her shoulders and I’d counted them twice. “It’s stupid. I’m nervous.”

Dana looked at me for a long moment.

Then she crossed the room in four steps, the way she always did, and stopped in front of me, close. Not touching.

“Me too,” she said.

“You don’t get nervous.”

“I’ve been nervous since six a.m.” Her tongue went into her cheek, and came out again. “I checked the floor at Orbit three times. I checked the ramp. I checked the disco ball leads. Rhonda found me in the snack bar at seven-fifteen re-measuring the cake table.”

“Was it level?”

“It was off by an eighth of an inch.”

“Did you fix it?”

“I shimmed it with a sugar packet,” Dana said, with enormous dignity, and I laughed, and the shaking in my hands went somewhere else.

She reached out and took my left wrist. Turned it over. Looked at her tie still wrapped around it in a crooked figure eight.

“This is terrible,” she said. “The overlap’s all wrong.”

“You did it with one hand while skating backward.”

“That’s not an excuse.” She found the end and started to unwind it, slow, pass by pass, the way she’d unwound real tape off my wrists after a hundred bouts. Her thumb went over the inside of my wrist, over the pulse, and stayed there. “Your heart’s going.”

“Yeah.”

“Fast.”

“I’m aware, Captain.”

She got the last loop off and held the tie in her hand and looked at me, and her eyes had gone very dark.

“Can I tell you what I want,” Dana said.

The thing was — two years in, she still asked. Every single time. Like it was the first time. Like the answer might be different. That was the whole thing about her. That was why I’d married her in a roller rink in front of two hundred and ninety-one co-op members and a seven-year-old in a purple wheelchair.

“Yes,” I said.

“I want you to lead tonight,” she said. “All night. Start to finish. I’ve been in charge of everything for eleven hours. The timeline. The vendors. The ramp. Robin’s speech, which I had to cut by four minutes. I don’t want to run anything else.” She paused. “I want you to take me apart. Slow. And I don’t want to have to ask for a single thing. I want you to already know.”

My mouth had gone completely dry.

“Okay,” I said. Barely.

“I brought the cards,” Dana said.

She had. Of course she had.

They were in the inside pocket of the garment bag, in a rubber band: PRIVATE PRACTICE, printed in her label-maker font on white index cards, laminated, because she was who she was and I’d married her anyway. We’d made them a year ago, the night she proposed. We’d used them maybe a dozen times since. Kissing. Hands-Only. Captain’s Instructions. Switch. And the last one, the one she’d added in Sharpie at the bottom of the stack: ASK.

I sat down on the edge of the bed in my dress and shuffled through them. My dress was green. Dark green, the color of the old Forge City jerseys, which had been a joke at first and then hadn’t been. It had pockets. I’d made the woman put pockets in.

“Pick one,” Dana said.

I looked at the cards. Then I looked at her standing in front of me in that suit. Then I took the whole stack and put it face down on the nightstand.

“No,” I said.

Dana’s eyebrow went up.

“You said you don’t want to ask for anything. You said you want me to already know.” I stood up. “So no cards. No drills. No plays. I’ve got this one, Webb. I’ve had it scouted for years.”

Something went over her face — surprise, and then something warmer, and then something that made her breath catch.

“Okay,” she said.

“Take off your jacket.”

She did. Slowly. She folded it — of course she did — and laid it over the back of the armchair, and turned back to me in the white shirt, sleeves already rolled to the elbow because she’d been carrying chairs at the end of the night, forearms bare, that faint tan line from her work gloves.

“Stand still,” I said.

I did the buttons myself. One at a time. I took longer than I needed to, because I could. Because nobody was coming. Because I had a brass key and a reservation and a wife, and none of us had anywhere to be until the brunch Keisha was hosting at eleven, which Dana had already told me she was going to be late to for the first time in her life.

Under the shirt she was wearing a plain white bra, and I unhooked it with one hand, and she didn’t look smug about it this time. She just watched me. She let the shirt and the bra fall off her shoulders and down her arms and didn’t fold them. They stayed on the carpet. I looked at them lying there and then back at her face.

“You didn’t fold it,” I said.

“I’m leaving it.”

“Dana Webb. On the floor.”

“I’m married now,” she said. “I’ve let myself go.”

I kissed her.

I took her apart slow.

I’d learned slow from her. Goldwing slow, grilled-cheese-at-one-a.m. slow, the night I’d cried with her hand in my hair. I’d learned you could build a thing so slowly that by the time it came down you didn’t know where the edges were. I’d learned it and I’d practiced it and tonight I used every hour of it.

I got her out of the suit pants and laid her down on the white duvet and I didn’t touch her anywhere that counted for a long, long time. I kissed her shoulders. I counted the freckles again, out loud, all the way to fifty-three, which was two more than last time because she’d been outside all spring regrading that ramp. I kissed the scars on her left knee — the long seam and the two small marks — and slid the wedge pillow under it without saying a word, because it lived in the trunk of my truck now and I’d carried it up with the cake. I kissed the inside of her wrist where the tape went. I kissed her stomach, soft and warm, and stayed there with my cheek against it and felt her breathing.

“Bridget,” she said.

“Mm.”

“You’re—”

“I know what I’m doing.”

“I know you know,” she said, and her voice had gone rough. “I’m just — telling you I know.”

I lifted my head and looked at her. She was flushed down to her collarbones. Her hands were fisted in the duvet on either side of her hips, and she hadn’t reached for me once.

“Hands,” I said.

She looked at them.

“Over your head. On the iron.”

Her breath went out of her in a long shaky stream. Then she reached back and wrapped both hands around the curling vines of the headboard, the same headboard she’d stared up at two years ago saying please for the first time in her life, and held on.

“Good,” I said.

It still did something to her. It always did. I watched it go through her — her whole body tightening, her back arching a half inch off the bed, her eyes going black — and I thought about the first time I’d ever heard her say it to me, in a chain-link cage at Orbit with my wrists pinned over my head. Good. Like a measurement. Like a fact.

Two years. I’d been saving it up.

I moved down the bed.

She was soaked. She’d been soaked, I found out later, since the vows — since I’d gotten to the part I’d written myself and hadn’t let anybody read, the part about how she’d watched me for four years and I’d watched her back and neither of us had said anything, and how I was done not saying things — and she’d stood there in front of two hundred people in that suit with her tongue so hard in her cheek I thought she was going to bite through it.

I didn’t put my mouth on her. Not yet. I put one finger on her. Just one. I drew it through her, slow, from the bottom all the way up, barely pressing, and her hips came up off the mattress and the iron headboard rang against the wall.

“Stay,” I said.

“Bridget—”

“Stay with me.”

She stayed. She shook, but she stayed. I did it again. And again. One finger, slow, never quite on her clit, circling, sliding, learning a thing I already knew by heart. I watched her face the whole time. I watched her try to hold it — the captain trying to come back on, the jaw trying to set — and I watched it fail, piece by piece, until she was just breathing in short broken gasps and staring down the length of her own body at me like she was going over the edge of something very high.

“Tell me what you want,” I said.

“You said I didn’t have to ask.”

“You don’t have to. I want to hear it anyway.”

Her throat worked.

“Your mouth,” she said. “Please.”

I gave it to her.

I went down on my wife in room nine of the Lindell like I had the whole night, because I did. Long, flat, lazy strokes of my tongue, tasting her, the way she’d done it to me in my own bed the night I told Luis no. Soft circles around her clit, never on it. My lips sealing over her and my tongue pushing in until she made a sound I’d never heard from her — low and cracked and helpless, almost a sob. Then back to those slow strokes. I held her hips. I didn’t let her move them. Every time she started to climb I kept the same rhythm, exactly the same, and let it build on its own, water behind a dam, until her thighs were shaking against my ears and the headboard was rattling in a steady rhythm because she was pulling on it so hard.

“Bridget, I’m—”

I lifted my head.

She made a sound of genuine outrage. It was the best sound I’d ever heard.

“Not yet,” I said.

“You—”

“You told me to lead,” I said. “I’m leading. You don’t get to come until I say so. You don’t get to come until you’ve stopped thinking about the cake table.”

“I’m not thinking about the cake table.”

“You were. Two minutes ago. Your eyebrow did the thing.”

Her head fell back into the pillows. She laughed — breathless, wrecked, furious — and then the laugh broke in the middle and turned into a moan, because I’d put my mouth back on her.

I edged her three times. Once with my mouth. Once with two fingers inside her, crooked, pressing up, my thumb on her clit, while I kissed the inside of her thigh and told her, very quietly, how she’d looked walking down the ramp at Orbit toward me with Robin on her arm, how I’d forgotten my own name, how Tess had had to hand me the ring because I’d forgotten I was holding it. Once with the vibrator I’d packed in the cooler under the cake — the flat broad one from Delancey, the first one, the one I’d bought before I’d ever touched her — pressed against her clit on the lowest setting while my fingers worked her slow.

By the third time she wasn’t saying anything. She wasn’t counting. She wasn’t tracking. Her hands were white-knuckled on the iron vines and her eyes were wet and she was just there, completely there, the way she’d been there the night she let me drive her truck home from Cedar Falls, the way she’d been there under the disco ball, open all the way down.

“Bridget,” she said. Not a beg. Just my name.

“I know.”

“Please.”

“I know, baby.” I kissed her hipbone. “Almost.”

I reached over the side of the bed and opened the cooler and took out the bag that wasn’t cake.

I’d bought it new. That was the thing. My brown harness was at home in the BRIDGET drawer, broken in, perfect, and Dana’s black one was in her unlabeled bottom drawer where it had lived for two years. But I’d driven to Delancey two weeks ago, past the candy shop with the sour cherries and the peppermints, and walked into the store with the good lighting, and the woman with the septum ring had looked up and said, “Wedding?” before I’d opened my mouth.

“How did you know?”

“You look like a woman about to get married,” she’d said. “Also you’ve been in here before. The wedge pillow. I remember.”

It was dark green leather, the same green as my dress, with brushed-steel rings that matched the band on Dana’s hand. And the cock was a deep, dark cherry red. Thick. Curved. I’d stood at the counter feeling my face go hot like I was twenty-two and the woman had bagged it with a little card that said Congratulations in silver ink.

Dana saw it and stopped breathing.

“You—”

“I did the reading,” I said, and stood up beside the bed in my dress and reached behind myself and unzipped it. It fell. I stepped out of it. I was wearing nothing under it, which I’d decided around noon and hadn’t told anybody, which Dana now knew, and I watched her find out with an expression like she’d been hit by a Kowalczyk block.

“All day?” she said.

“Since the ceremony.”

“You walked up the ramp—”

“In front of Robin. And your aunt. And Rhonda. And Marvin on a phone.” I stepped into the harness and buckled it, not fast, the way she’d buckled hers the first time in Mill Town while I watched — every strap, snug, checked. The leather was cool against my hips. The cock sat heavy and dark against my belly. “I thought you’d want to know.”

“I didn’t know,” Dana said, and her voice cracked right down the middle. “I was standing right there and I didn’t know—”

“That’s the point,” I said. “I’m careful. Nobody sees it.”

I climbed onto the bed between her thighs and leaned over her. Her hands were still on the headboard. She hadn’t let go. Her chest was heaving and her face was flushed and wet and she looked up at me with everything showing, every single thing, the way she never let anybody see it except me.

“You see it,” I said.

“I see it,” she said.

“Tell me.”

She didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

I pushed in.

Slow. So slow. One inch at a time, watching her face, my hand flat on her belly feeling her breathe. She was so wet it slid in easy but she was so swollen from being edged three times that every inch made her gasp, made her back arch, made the iron vines ring. I kept her left knee on the wedge. I kept my weight off her hips. I sank all the way in until the cool green leather pressed against her and the steel rings touched her skin and I was buried in my wife, and I stopped, and held there.

“Breathe,” I said.

She breathed. It came out as a sob.

“Good girl,” I said.

She came.

Just like that. Just from the words. She clenched down around the cock so hard I felt it through the base, felt it in my own clit, and her whole body bowed up off the bed and a sound tore out of her that rang off the plaster walls of room nine — long and broken and shocked — and she shook and shook and shook, and I hadn’t even moved.

“Oh my god,” I said. “Oh my god, Dana.”

She was laughing. She was crying and laughing at the same time, both hands still locked on the iron, her eyes squeezed shut.

“That’s—” she gasped. “That’s not fair—”

“I didn’t do anything!”

“You said it—”

“I’ve said it before!”

“Not married,” Dana said, and opened her eyes, and looked at me, and the look went through me like a jammer through a wall. “Not in here.”

I stopped laughing.

I leaned down over her, careful, forearms braced on either side of her head, and kissed her. Soft. Then not soft. And then I started to move.

I fucked her the way she’d taught me. The way she’d done it in Mill Town with the lighthouse falling off the wall — long and slow and deep, dragging almost all the way out and sliding back in until the base pressed her clit, rolling my hips, grinding. Face to face. Chest to chest. Her breasts soft against mine. Our bellies sliding together with sweat. Her right leg wrapped high around my waist and her left kept low on the wedge, because I was always going to keep it low, every night for the rest of our lives.

“Hands,” I said into her ear.

“What?”

“You can let go now. Put them on me.”

She let go of the headboard like it had burned her. Her hands came down on my back, my shoulders, the back of my neck — hot, strong, rough-palmed — and pulled me in, and held on.

“Mine,” she said.

It came out of her low and fierce and certain, two years after the first time she’d said it in a motel and frozen. She didn’t freeze now. She said it again, against my mouth.

“Mine. You’re mine.”

“Yours,” I said. “God. Yours. I signed a form.”

She laughed into my mouth and I rolled my hips and the laugh turned into a moan and I kept going. I kept the rhythm exactly the same — slow, deep, steady, never changing — and watched it build in her again, watched her eyes go unfocused and her lips part and her fingers dig into my shoulder blades. The headboard knocked the wall in time. Somebody in room eight was going to complain. Somebody in room eight could take it up with the night clerk, who’d seen everything.

“Look at me,” I said.

She looked at me.

“Don’t you dare look away,” I said, which was hers, which she’d given me in a cage, which I’d been keeping like the napkin.

She didn’t look away. I didn’t either. I reached down between us and found her clit with two fingers and circled it, slow, in time with the cock, and kept our eyes locked, and felt it start in her — the long shudder, the clench, her thighs tightening around me—

“Bridget—”

“I know.”

“With me.” She was gasping. “Come with me. Don’t make me — don’t do it alone. Not tonight.”

The harness had a little ridge on the inside, pressed right where I needed it. I’d known it would. I’d done the reading. Every stroke into her had been grinding it against my own clit for twenty minutes and I’d been holding it, holding it, the way she’d taught me to hold the line on turn two.

I let go.

We came together. Her eyes open on mine. My forehead against hers. Her nails in my back and my hand between her legs and the cock buried in her and her voice saying my name and my voice saying hers, over and over, like a drill, like a call from the bench, like the only two words either of us knew. It went through both of us at the same time and kept going, a long rolling wave that came up out of deep water and broke and broke and broke, and somewhere in it I heard the headboard hit the wall one more time and something in room eight fell off a shelf.

When it stopped, I was lying on her. Full weight. She’d pulled me down and wouldn’t let me up.

“Your hip,” I said into her neck.

“It’s fine. It’s been fine for two years.”

“Your knee—”

“Is on the wedge,” she said. “That you carried up the stairs. With the cake.”

I laughed, weak and wet, and she held on.

Afterward I unbuckled the harness and set it on the nightstand next to the stack of PRIVATE PRACTICE cards, face down, unused. We showered. The Lindell’s ridiculous rain head was still ridiculous. She washed my back and I washed hers and I counted the freckles one more time under the water to make sure I hadn’t missed one, and I hadn’t.

We sat cross-legged on the bed in the Lindell’s thick white robes at two-forty in the morning. I’d gone down to the lobby and bought a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips from the vending machine with a crumpled dollar, and the night clerk had looked up from his book and said, “There it is,” and gone back to reading.

Dana opened a lime seltzer. She held it up.

“Rule four,” she said.

“Sober,” I said, and clinked my can against hers.

We drank. She ate a chip. I ate a chip. We sat there in the lamplight with our wet hair and our matching steel rings, and the cake cooler on the floor, and her suit still in a pile where she’d left it, and my dress on top of it.

“You never asked me to stay,” Dana said.

I looked at her.

“Here. The first time.” She was studying a chip. “You said do you want to stay, and I said I had a stairwell review. I’ve thought about that a lot. I drove home with the heater on high and every mile I wanted to turn around.” She ate the chip. “I want you to know I’m staying.”

My throat went tight.

“I know,” I said.

“I know you know.” Her tongue went into her cheek, and came out again, and she didn’t hide the smile. “I’m just telling you I know.”

I put the chip bag down. I reached for my wallet on the nightstand — the scuffed black one, still held together with electrical tape, because some things you didn’t fix — and opened it. Behind my license, where the napkin used to live before Dana put it in a frame with museum glass, there was something new. I’d put it there this morning.

I took it out and handed it to her.

It was a Silver Spoon napkin. Fresh. Cherry stain in the corner, because I’d asked Rhonda for one with pie on it and she’d known exactly what I meant. In my seismograph scrawl:

7. Room nine. Every year.

Dana read it for a long time.

Then she held out her hand, palm up, without looking at me.

“Pen,” she said.

I gave her the pen. I always carried one now.

She wrote, underneath, in block capitals, pressing hard enough that the ink bled into the soft paper:

SECONDED. YOU PAY.

“Next time,” I said, and my voice cracked, and I let it.

“Next time,” Dana said, and turned off the lamp.

She fell asleep in four minutes with one foot out from under the duvet. I took all the blankets. She laced her fingers through mine at 4:58 a.m. when the first truck went by on Harbor Road.

Neither of us got up.

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