🔥 The Other Side of the Shutters 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Honeymoon Wasn’t Cancelled by Isla Wilde

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter retells the night of Chapter Two from Ramona’s side, then jumps to one year after the epilogue of The Honeymoon Wasn’t Cancelled. It contains major spoilers and very explicit sexual content (18+), including consensual voyeurism, and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.

Daphne told you what she saw through the green shutters. Ramona would like a turn. Explicit content — 18+.

The Other Side of the Shutters

I want it on the record that I tried to stay in bed.

I lasted until twenty past midnight. That’s four hours on my own side of a mattress the size of a parking space, listening to Daphne Prescott breathe. She sleeps the way she does everything, neatly, on her back, like she’s been filed. Somewhere around eleven I’d let my leg drift across the middle until my shin was lying against her calf. She hadn’t moved it. I’d stayed there with my whole body tuned to four inches of her skin, thinking things about my best friend that would get me thrown out of her mother’s house.

I’d held her hand all morning, the whole length of a reef. I’d watched a man I’ve been sleeping with since April fix her mask strap with his palm around the back of her skull, and I’d watched her face while he did it. I didn’t know which of them I wanted to bite.

That’s the state I was in. I’m not offering it as an excuse. It’s context.

So I took my leg back, an inch at a time. I put on HIS, and nothing under it, and my sandals. I left my phone on the nightstand so I couldn’t text anybody anything stupid. Then I walked down one boardwalk and up the other, to the green shutters at the end of the east side.

He opened the door before I knocked. He’d heard my sandals. He hears everything.

Grey shorts. Reading glasses. A pencil behind his ear, and a drawing spread across the bed.

“Castillo.”

“Laurent. Move your homework.”

He rolled it. He slid it into its tube and put the tube on the shelf, while I stood in a honeymoon robe with my pulse in my throat. That’s the man. The building could be on fire.

Then he took off the glasses, folded them, and looked at me.

That’s all it takes. I hate that that’s all it takes. Six foot three, silver coming in at the temples, grey eyes that go over you like he’s working out what you’ll hold. He looked at the robe. He looked at the knot.

“That says HIS.”

“So take it back.”

He didn’t grab. He never grabs. He took the belt between two fingers and pulled, slowly, and the robe fell open. He stood there and read me, collarbones to knees. My nipples were already tight. I was already wet, and had been since about ten that morning, and he could tell. He can always tell. It’s the most annoying thing about him.

“You’ve been thinking,” he said.

“I’ve been thinking about a reef.”

“I was on that reef.”

“I know you were. That’s the problem.”

Something moved behind his eyes. He let it go by. Then he put one hand flat on the door beside my head, and went down on his knees.

There is nothing in this world like that man on his knees. He’s so big that kneeling only brings his mouth to exactly where you need it. He lifted my left leg over his shoulder like it weighed nothing. He kissed the new peony, hip to crease, all the way down the stem. He held me open with his thumbs and licked into me, one long slow stroke, and my head hit the door.

“Fuck. Don’t be polite about it.”

He wasn’t. He ate me like a man who’d spent six days measuring staircases. Flat tongue, deep, then up, then his lips closing on my clit and pulling. Two thick fingers pushed into my cunt and curled. I had one fist in his hair and the other clamped on the door handle, and I was grinding on his face with a honeymoon robe hanging off my elbows, saying his last name like a threat.

I came embarrassingly fast. I’m not proud. My knee went. He caught the back of my thigh and held me up, and kept his mouth on me, soft, until I’d finished shaking.

“Bed,” I said. “On your back. I’m not done.”

He lay down. I got his shorts off him. His cock was thick and dark and hard against his stomach, and I took it in my mouth to the back of my throat before he could say a word. I love doing that to him. He doesn’t make a sound. His stomach goes to ridges and his hand opens and shuts on the sheet, and that’s the whole show, and I’d crawl over glass for it.

I sucked him until his hips came up. Then I climbed on.

You know this part. Somebody already told it to you. She got most of it right.

I sank down on him slowly, all the way, and felt every inch of that stretch. I put my hands on his chest and rode him with the long roll, the one from the shoulders. The lamp was on. The louvers were open. Out past them the lagoon was going about its business, and the air smelled green.

“Six days,” I said. “Six days you’ve been down here, and you couldn’t even look at me on that dock.”

“I looked.”

“You looked at the horizon, Laurent.”

“I looked. Black dress. Nothing under it. I walked back up that dock hard and re-measured a staircase that didn’t need it.”

I laughed. I sped up. I talked, because I always talk. I told him how deep he was. I told him to say something dirty for once in his goddamn life.

He stopped me instead. Both hands on my hips. He pulled me down and held me there, full of him, with nowhere to go.

“Tell me.”

I’ve had six months of tell me. It hadn’t gotten easier. I can direct a bed like air traffic control, and I can’t say one true thing in it. He makes me stay put until I do.

So I told him. His thumb on my clit. Hold me down and make me earn it. Quit being so goddamn careful with me.

“There,” he said. “Good. That I can do.”

He gave me an inch of room, and I took it like a starving woman. What else, he said. My tits. Your mouth. Sit up. He sat up in one motion, with his arm banded across my back, and got his teeth on my nipple. I grabbed his hair and told the ceiling what I thought of him in Spanish.

“Look at you,” he said against my skin. “Look at how you take it. Harder. Use me.”

I was close. I was right there. I said his first name, which I don’t do, and he said, “I know. I’ve got you. Come on my cock.”

And my head turned.

I don’t know why. I’d like to say I heard something. I didn’t hear anything. The back of my neck knew before I did.

The shutters were angled down. Gold bars of lamplight, dark bars of wood. And between two of the slats, there was a paler piece of the dark. It wasn’t the lamp or the moon. It was low, about where a person’s hand would be, if a person had hold of the rail.

I thought it was Daphne.

I didn’t decide to think it. It’s where my body goes. It’s where it’s gone for fourteen years, with everybody, every time, right at the end. This time it had somewhere to land. I saw her out there in the dark in those little sleep shorts with her hair coming down. I saw her watching me take him, and not leaving.

I came like a building going over. It tore straight up through me. I made a noise I’ve never made, low and cracked and helpless, and I made it for the window. He drove up into me, twice, and held me down hard and came with his head pressed back into the mattress.

“Ramona.”

He said it like something he’d been carrying a long way.

I folded. His hand came up and cupped the back of my head, and he put his lips against my hair and stayed there. I let him, for once. I had my eyes shut. I was scared to open them.

Out on the boardwalk, a board creaked.

His head came up.

“Iguana,” I said into his chest.

“That’s a lot of iguana.”

“It’s a big island.”

He didn’t answer. He doesn’t argue. He lay there, listening, with his hand still in my hair.

That was my cue. It’s always my cue. I make a joke, I find my shoes, I’m gone before anybody says anything they’d have to live with. Twice a month since April.

I didn’t get up.

“I need a shower,” I said. “I can’t get back into that bed smelling like you.”

The bungalow shower is a tin stall off the back, open at the top, with the mangroves about a foot away and a bar of cedar soap on a nail. He turned the water on and checked it on his wrist before he let me under it. He soaped my back. He did the vines on my arms one at a time, like he was cleaning a drawing. It should have calmed me down.

It did not calm me down. I could not stop seeing that pale piece of dark.

“Laurent.”

“Mm.”

“I want to ask you for something. You don’t get a follow-up question.”

His hands stopped on my shoulders. “All right.”

“Fuck me like somebody’s watching.”

The water ran. A frog went off in the mangroves.

“Is somebody watching?”

“It was an iguana.”

“Then tell me what the iguana should see.”

God help me. He meant it. He’ll make you say it if it kills you both.

“Behind me. My hands on the wall. I want to be facing out, at the dark, where it could look right at me. I want your hand on my throat. Don’t squeeze, just let me feel that it’s there. And I want it hard. I mean it this time. I want to be able to feel it at breakfast, sitting across from…”

I shut my mouth.

He didn’t ask. I’ve never been so grateful to a man for a silence.

He turned me around. He put my palms flat on the wet tin. He nudged my feet apart with his own, and his chest came down against my back, and his hand slid up between my breasts and settled at the base of my throat. It was warm and enormous and perfectly gentle.

Then he pushed into me from behind, all the way, in one stroke.

I shouted. He didn’t hush me.

He’s never fucked me like that. Six months, and he’d always held some of it back, like I was a load he hadn’t finished calculating. Not that night. He set his feet and gave it to me, deep and heavy, every thrust shoving me up onto my toes. The whole stall rang. The wet slap of it went out over the lagoon. His other hand came around my hip and found my clit and worked it in tight, hard circles, and I locked my elbows and took it with my face turned to the black gap over the wall.

“Tell me,” he said in my ear. He was breathing hard. “What do they see?”

“Me. Getting fucked. Your hand on my neck. Your cock in me. All of you, look how I take all of you…”

“Do you want them to keep watching?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“Then let them look.”

That was the dirtiest thing he’d ever said to me. It was four words long.

I came on the third one. It was worse than the first two. My cunt clamped down on him and my knees gave, and he held me up by the hip and the throat and kept going, straight through it, until I went over again, sobbing, with my forehead on the tin. Then he buried himself and came inside me with his teeth in my shoulder, and for a while the only thing holding either of us up was the wall.

He washed me again after. Cedar soap. He didn’t say one word about iguanas.

I left when the sky was going pink. At the door I looked back. He was standing on the boardwalk in a towel, looking down at the boards under his own window, the way he looks at a crack.

I didn’t ask what he saw. I’ve made a career of not asking that man what he’s looking at.

I told myself iguana all the way down the east side and all the way up the west.

Then I got into bed. Daphne was lying on her back with her eyes closed and her hands folded.

“How long?” she said.

It hadn’t been an iguana.

One year later. Villa 9. The second night.

DAY TWO, the binder said, in Daphne’s neat print. Nothing scheduled.

“I’ve got something for the record,” I said. “It’s a year old.”

We were on the bed with the lantern turned down. I was in HIS. I’m always in HIS. She was in HERS. He was in the other HERS, and it still stopped at his elbows.

“I told you I thought it was an iguana. I knew it was you. I knew before the board creaked. I looked at those shutters and I thought Daph, and I came so hard I pulled something.” I picked at the belt of the robe. “Then I made him fuck me in the shower like you were still out there. I didn’t tell him why. I’ve never told either of you.”

Daphne had gone a deep, happy pink.

“I knew,” Gideon said.

“You did not.”

“You stopped a sentence. ‘Sitting across from.’” He turned a page of his book. “I’m quiet. I’m not slow.”

“A whole year, Laurent?”

“Nobody asked.”

Daphne wasn’t laughing. She had the look she gets over a seating chart when the last name drops into place.

“You’ve had the bed,” she said slowly. “You’ve had the middle. You’ve had the edge of a pool. Mona. You’ve never had the window.”

All the breath went out of me.

She reached for the binder. She uncapped her pen. Under Nothing scheduled, she wrote one line and turned it around so I could read it.

12:40 a.m. Deck side. R.

“You’ll go out and close the shutters behind you,” she said. “Louvers down. I’m leaving the lantern up. You can watch until he says your name. That’s how long I got.” Her voice had dropped. “I kept my hand above my waistband. Barely. You don’t have to.”

“And the word’s the word,” Gideon said. He had put the book down.

“Refund. I know.” My heart was going like a rabbit’s. “Are you two really…”

“You asked him to let them look,” Daphne said. “I’m asking you to.”

So at twenty to one, I was standing barefoot on a deck over a lagoon with a rail under my hand and my eye to a gap in a shutter.

I have to tell you something about slats. She was right. You only get slices, and your brain does the rest, and it’s so much worse.

A slice of the bed. A slice of Daphne on her back with HERS open and her knees up, freckles all the way down, the little black wave on her rib. A slice of his shoulders between her thighs. I couldn’t see his mouth. I could see her stomach pull tight, and her hand go into his hair, and her face.

She was looking straight at the shutters.

“She’s there,” Daphne said. Clear as a bell. She was saying it to him and aiming it at me. “I can see the lantern on her eye. Don’t stop. She likes it when you go slowly. She’ll be gripping the rail by now.”

I was gripping the rail.

My other hand was already inside the robe. I slid two fingers down through myself and nearly went to my knees. I was soaked. I’d been soaked since the pen came out.

“Gideon. Tell her what you’re doing. She can’t see your mouth.”

He lifted his head. A year ago he couldn’t have gotten out a sentence.

“I’ve got my tongue in her,” he said, low, at the window. “She’s so wet it’s running down my chin. She tastes like she did on the boat. I’m going to make her come like this, Ramona, and then I’m going to put my cock in her and you’re going to watch it go.”

He’d said my name.

“That one doesn’t count,” Daphne gasped. “He’s narrating. Stay there. Oh… oh, there…”

She came with her eyes open and on me. I watched it go through her in bars of light. I had three fingers in my cunt and my thumb on my clit, and I was fucking my own hand against a railing like I was nineteen.

Then he rose up over her. I got a slice of his back and a slice of his ass, and one perfect slice in the middle. His cock, thick and wet, lined up and sinking into her, slowly, every inch. Her head went back.

“She’s watching you take it,” he said.

“I know she is. Harder. Give her something to look at.”

He gave me something to look at. Long, deep strokes, the whole bed moving, her heels locked on his back, her breasts shaking with it. The sound came through the slats, slick and steady. I could see her fingers on his wrist, right over the wave.

I couldn’t hold it. I came standing up, bent over that rail, biting the collar of a robe that said HIS.

A board creaked under my heel.

Inside, they both started laughing.

“Ramona,” Gideon said. That was the real one. “Come in here.”

I came through that door so fast I hit it with my shoulder.

“Up,” Daphne said. She was flushed and wrecked and still running the room. “Over me. Face him.”

I threw the robe on the floor and got a knee on either side of her head. Her hands closed on my thighs and pulled me down onto her mouth. Her tongue went into me, flat and deep, exactly how I taught her, and I grabbed Gideon by the back of the neck to stay upright.

He kissed me. He tasted like her. He was still fucking her, slow and heavy, and I could feel every stroke come up through her body into her mouth and into me.

“Look down,” he said.

I looked. Her freckled stomach. His cock driving into her, shining. My own hand, with a crooked little wave on the wrist, sliding down to circle her clit.

“There she is,” I said, and Daphne moaned into my cunt.

It didn’t take long. It never does with the three of us. She went first, bucking under my hand, and the sound she made went straight up into me and took me with her. I came on her tongue with my mouth open against his. He followed, deep, saying both our names in the wrong order, and the three of us went down in a heap.

Nobody put their sandals on. Nobody made a joke for at least a minute. That’s a personal best.

Down in the floor, a parrotfish drifted across the glass and stopped.

“Don’t you start,” I told it.

Daphne reached over me for the binder. She found the line and ticked it. She likes ticking the box.

Then she folded the shutters all the way back, and left them open.

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