🔥 The Porch Swing 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Ex-Hex of Hollow House by Maeve Hollow

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter opens in Maine in the summer of 2006 and ends after the epilogue of The Ex-Hex of Hollow House. It contains major spoilers and very explicit sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.

Two porch swings, twenty-one years apart. Hands on the chains. Explicit content — 18+.

The Porch Swing

I’ve hung twelve porch swings in my life. I’ve been fucked on two, and only one of those was mine.

The other one came with Gull Cottage, which came with Elowen Vale, who rented it the summer I was twenty-two. Slatted oak, six feet long, on two lengths of galvanized chain that somebody had run through open hooks instead of eye bolts. It squeaked. I’d offered to fix that the same week I fixed her second step, and she said she liked to hear a thing announce itself.

This was late July. I want to be clear about the calendar, because I had three days of that summer taken off me for twenty years, and this wasn’t one of them. This one I always had. I took it out and looked at it in a lot of rented rooms.

It was the week the heat came in off the land and sat on Port Averill like a hand. Nobody on my father’s crew slept. I gave up about two, pulled on cutoffs and yesterday’s undershirt, and went across forty feet of dead grass barefoot. There was a candle in her bedroom window. There was always a candle in her window, and it had not burned down an inch since June, and I was twenty-two and thought that was a kind of candle you could buy.

She was already on the swing. A man’s white shirt and nothing I could see under it, her hair up off her neck with a pencil shoved through it, two mugs on the rail. She made tea at three in the morning in a heat wave. I drank it. Two honey. I’d told her one.

“You are early,” she said.

“It’s ninety degrees in that house, and the guy in the next cot talks in his sleep. He’s selling somebody a boat.”

“Does he close?”

“Never has yet.”

She laughed down in her chest, the short one, not the big one. I’d been trying for the big one for six weeks. I sat on the top step with my tea and my back against the post and looked at her legs, because they were there. She had one foot on the boards, pushing the swing an inch and letting it come back. Squeak. Squeak. The whole street was asleep. You could hear the bell buoy off the point.

“Come here, Katherine.”

I went. That was the summer in two words. I sat down next to her and the chains took my weight and complained.

“Here is what I should like,” she said. She never just reached for me. Not once, in eleven weeks. She said it first, in that voice like a letter being read out. “I should like you to take hold of those chains, one in each hand, as high as you can comfortably reach. And I should like you to leave your hands there, whatever I do, until I say. May I?”

“Out here?”

“Out here.”

“My dad’s forty feet that way with the windows open.”

“Then you will have to be very quiet. You are not good at it. I thought we might practice.” Her eyes went over my face. “You may say no. I shall drink my tea and think none the less of you.”

I put my hands on the chains. They were cool, the only cool things in the state of Maine.

“Yes,” I said. “Jesus. Yes.”

She set her mug on the rail. She got down off that swing and knelt on the porch boards between my feet, in her white shirt, and she looked up at me a second with her hands flat on my knees. Thirty-eight, I’d have said. I’d have been off by eighty years.

“May I take these off?”

“Yeah.”

She undid the button of my cutoffs and worked them down my hips. I had to lift for her. The swing swayed, and she waited for it to settle, and drew them off over my feet and folded them. She folded them. Then she put her palms on the insides of my thighs and moved them apart until the slats bit the backs of my knees, and she just looked.

I was wet already. I’d been wet since come here. I’d been with three people before her, in trucks, with the lights off, and not one of them ever looked at me there like it was the good part.

“El.”

“Hush. I am admiring.” She bent and kissed the scar on my hip, the comma. Then the crease of my thigh. Then she set her foot against the porch post behind her, I felt her do it, and she pushed.

The swing went back about four inches, and took me with it, away from her mouth.

Then it came forward.

She didn’t move. She knelt there with her mouth open and her tongue out flat and let that swing bring me to her. I slid onto her tongue from bottom to top, the whole length of me, slow as the chain let it go, and then the swing carried me off again.

I made a sound. It wasn’t a quiet one.

“Katherine.”

“Sorry. Sorry. Oh, fuck.”

“Hands.”

They were still up. I’d nearly pulled the hooks out of the beam. She pushed again. Back, and forward, and that long wet drag up through me, and away. She had it timed like a pendulum. Every time I came down the arc I could see her waiting for me, with her eyes on mine and my own slick shining on her chin, and every time it took me away I’d have sold the truck to stay.

I couldn’t thrust. That was the thing. There’s no purchase on a swing. All I could do was hang on to two lengths of chain and get licked on somebody else’s schedule.

“You are dripping on the porch,” she said, on the backswing. She sounded delighted. “I shall have to tell the agent it was the rain.”

“El, please. Quit the—I need it to stay.”

“What do you need to stay?”

“Your mouth. On my clit. Please.”

“There. That was very nicely asked.” She caught the front edge of the seat in both hands and stopped the swing dead, and she put her mouth on me and kept it there.

No more teasing. She sucked my clit in between her lips and worked it with the flat of her tongue, fast, and I went up like dry lath. My heels were on her shoulders. My head hit the back slat. I could hear myself starting, this high cracked noise in the back of my throat, getting louder, and across the grass somebody’s bedspring creaked.

She came up over me quick as a cat. One knee on the seat beside my hip, the chains screaming, and one hand flat over my mouth, and the other down between my legs with two fingers going into me to the knuckle.

“Now,” she said in my ear. “Into my hand. Every bit of it. Now, my darling.”

I came so hard I bit her. I yelled it all into her palm, and she took it, and fucked me through it with those two long fingers and the heel of her hand grinding right where her mouth had been. My arms were shaking on the chains. The swing was going every which way. Forty feet off, my father coughed, and rolled over, and went back to sleep.

She kept her hand on my mouth until I’d quit making noise. Then she took it away and kissed me, and I tasted myself and black tea.

“You may let go now,” she said.

I let go. My fingers wouldn’t open right. I got them into that white shirt and found she had nothing under it at all, and she was so wet it was on her thighs.

“Your turn,” I said. “Let me. Tell me how.”

Because that was the other half of that summer. I never just reached for her either. She’d put my hand where she wanted it and tell me what to do with it, and I did it, and I thought that was her being a lady. I didn’t know yet what she was holding down.

She got astride my lap, facing me, with her knees on the slats and her arms around my neck. She took my wrist and set my hand.

“Three. Slowly. Curl them toward you. And your thumb, there. No. There. Yes.”

She rode my hand on that swing with her face in my neck and her teeth in my undershirt, and she never made a sound louder than breathing. I felt it, though. I felt her clamp down on my fingers and shake, and every hair on my arms stood up, and the candle in her window jumped. Just the once. I saw it over her shoulder. I figured it was a draft.

There wasn’t any wind that night. I’ve checked.

We sat there after until the sky started to gray, her in my lap, the swing barely moving. Squeak. Squeak.

“I could put eye bolts in that,” I said. “Take me ten minutes.”

“Leave it,” she said into my hair. “I like to know when someone is on it.”

I hung the twelfth one in August.

It’s on the west porch at Hollow House, the new one, the one I framed myself over four yards of concrete with her father’s ring at the bottom of it. Six feet of white oak I had left over from the great-hall floor. Half-inch eye bolts through a doubled header. Stainless chain. You could hang a truck off it. I oiled every link, and then I went back up the ladder with a rag and wiped two of them dry, and I didn’t tell her why.

She knew why. She sat down on it the first night and pushed off with one foot. Squeak. She shut her eyes.

It was a Thursday. I’d been three nights in Connecticut, and I came up the drive about eight with the sun going down behind the orchard, and she was out there in the four-button dress with two mugs on the rail. Thirty-eight and ten months, the way I count it. A line by each eye, and the one gray hair over her right ear that I’m not allowed to pull. Every door in that house was standing open behind her.

I came up the steps. The knee told me about each one.

“You are late,” she said.

“There was a thing on 91. Here’s what I’d like.” I got my belt off and hung it on the rail, hammer and all. “I’d like you to take hold of those chains. One in each hand, high as you can comfortably reach. And leave them there till I say.”

She went still. Then the color came up her throat, and I watched it the whole way.

“You remembered that.”

“I remembered every damn thing but three days, El. Is that a yes?”

“Ask me properly.”

“May I?”

“Yes.” She put her hands up. The left palm was toward me, with my name in it. “Oh, yes. I have been thinking about it since Tuesday. I was no use to anyone.”

I’ve got a foam pad in the truck for tile work. I’m forty-three. I went and got it, and she laughed at me, the big one, with her head back and her hands on the chains. I get that laugh a lot now. I still count them.

I knelt. I undid four buttons. There wasn’t anything under that dress either, which tells you how her Tuesday went. I pushed it off her shoulders and let it hang from her elbows, and I spread her knees, and I looked, because she taught me that was the good part.

“Katherine.”

“Hush. I’m admiring.”

“That is my line.”

“I’m borrowing it. I’ll put it back.” I set my boot against the post, and I pushed.

Back four inches. And forward, onto my tongue.

She said my name like she’d been hit. Not Katherine. The short one. I let the swing take her away and bring her back, slow, tasting her the whole length every time, and it took her about six passes to quit being a lady about it.

Here’s the difference between that porch and this one. There isn’t anybody forty feet away. The nearest neighbor is a mile down the hill. So when her head went back and that noise started in her throat, I didn’t put my hand up. I kept my hands on her thighs, and I held her wide open, and I let her yell.

She yelled. Nobody on that hill shushes her anymore.

“Katherine—Kit—I cannot—there is no purchase, I cannot move—”

“Nope. Horrible, isn’t it. Ask me for something.”

“Your mouth. Stay. Stay there, stop this wretched swing, and put your fingers in me. Please.”

I stopped the swing. I got my mouth around her clit and sucked, and I slid three fingers up into her and curled them the way she showed me when I was twenty-two, and she came apart. She came all over my hand and my chin with both fists on those chains and her bare heels drumming on my back.

The chains lit.

I’m not being poetic. Her fire went up them. Green at her hands, going gold, link by link to the eye bolts and across my header, and the whole porch ceiling stood out like noon for about three seconds.

“I did not ask,” she gasped. “Katherine. I did not ask. I am sorry—”

“It’s on your chains. It’s not on me.” I kissed the inside of her thigh. She was still twitching. “You want it on me?”

Her eyes came down to mine. Wet, and blown black.

“May I?”

“Yes.”

“Then get up here.”

I got up there. She had my jeans open before I was all the way sat down. She put me where she’d been, and put my hands on the chains herself, and they were warm from hers. Then she knelt on my tile pad in nothing but that dress around her elbows, and she didn’t push the swing. She said she had waited twenty-one years and was not going to share me with a pendulum.

She put her tongue in me. Then two fingers, then three, and that warmth came up out of her hands and went into me like sun through a truck window in February. It fizzed. It found every place she was touching and a few she wasn’t. I heard somebody hollering and it was me.

“Louder,” she said against me. “No one is asleep.”

“Some of us,” said a voice from the roof beams, dry as lath, “are dead, carpenter. Not deaf.”

“Then go haunt the kitchen, Lark!”

“I’m going. I only came to see what was on fire.”

Elowen was laughing with her mouth on me. I felt it all the way up. I came like that, with her laughing and her fingers deep and that gold running up the chains over my head, and I didn’t bite anybody. I didn’t have to. I let the whole hill have it.

After, she climbed up in my lap. Same as the first time. Her knees on the slats, her arms round my neck. The dress was a lost cause. I put the one foot down and pushed, and the swing went. Squeak. Squeak.

“You left it in,” she said.

“Two links. The rest of it’ll outlast the house.”

“Why?”

“I like to know when you’re on it.”

She put her face in my neck. Out past the rail the gate was standing open at the bottom of the drive, same as every night. The tea had gone cold. She reached over and got hers anyway.

“Will you be here in the morning?”

“Ask me in the morning.”

“I intend to. On this swing.”

She asked. I was. We didn’t get the tea that time, either.

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