Forty-One

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Wrapped Around Her Finger
by Riley Kendra

⚠️ This bonus chapter takes place three weeks after the epilogue. It contains spoilers and extremely explicit content. Read the novel first. 18+.

Forty-One

RENEE

Madison said forty people. She said it at breakfast with her left hand on the cloth, in front of nine witnesses. Not one more.

There are forty-one place cards on the table in the orangery.

I’ve counted twice. It’s the second Sunday in January, the glass is running with condensation, and there are lemons over my head the size of a child’s fist. The harpist is back from Providence. There’s one long table under white damask, as there was thirteen months ago, and forty of the cards are sepia, in a stranger’s beautiful hand.

The forty-first is in blue ballpoint. Small upright capitals with a faint chalk smudge at one corner. Mr. Arthur Finch.

“You’ve seated him,” I say.

“Between Dee and your mother.” Madison doesn’t look round. She’s watching the door. “He’s run every meal in this house since 1988 and never eaten one of them sitting down. I checked.”

“Does he know?”

“He found the card at six this morning. He’s moved it twice. I moved it back twice.”

Arthur comes in last, in a gray suit and no waistcoat, carrying nothing. I have never once seen the man’s hands empty. He stops behind his chair and reads the card, and for one second his face does something that I’m not going to describe, because he’d know.

“Miss Madison.”

“Sit down, Arthur.”

“It is forty-one, miss.”

“I know what it is. I can count. I learned from the best.” Her chin’s up. “There are eggs. I ordered them myself.”

He sits. My mother, who has known him for three weeks and adores him, pats his sleeve and passes him the toast. Down the table Dee laughs out loud, which takes my count to eleven.

Everybody’s here. My father, examining a lemon. Imani, who has already been told twice by Dunning Fairweather about a boat. Joss and Felix and Odile from the shop, and Mrs. Abiola from Fulton Street, who’s reading the joinery. Bitsy Aldrich. Aunt Phyllida with a sherry at eleven in the morning. Daphne and Caroline came down the stairs together and haven’t called it a coincidence, and nobody has been brave enough to ask.

There’s a gray seamless backdrop between two lemon trees. Mr. Tolliver is standing beside it with his light meter, looking at the floor.

“I asked him to bring it,” Victoria says, at my elbow. She’s in the dove-gray jacket with her initials in the lining. “I haven’t asked him to use it. That’s for the two of you. And I’d want to know where you’d like the print sent before he takes the cap off the lens.”

It’s taken her a year. She says it like a woman reading aloud in a second language, and gets every word right.

“Yes,” I say. “To both. One to my mother, one to the shop, and one to you.”

We stand for it. Madison’s in the navy crepe, the 1947, with the covered buttons down the front; she isn’t above it, and she’d say so. The ring’s on her left hand. I look into the lens for the first frame, straight down it, a quarter turned from nothing. For the second I look at her.

“Left-hand bedpost!” cries Aunt Phyllida.

Hugh gets to his feet with his glass. I know from the set of his shoulders that there’s a pony in it.

I lean an inch to my right.

“Your mother wants amaryllis.”

“She hasn’t asked for any.”

“She will. The red fights with the Sèvres. I’m anticipating a need. It’s my trade.” I put my cup down in the exact center of its saucer. “Show me the flower room.”

Madison turns her head. Hazel, dark at the center. That crooked mouth.

“You know where it is.”

“I do,” I say. “That’s why I’m showing you.”

North side, under the service stair. Stone floor, cold as a larder. The deep sink with its tap still dripping, the wall of vases, the counter sheeted in zinc gone dull with a century of wet stems. There are buckets on every surface. White, this time. Hundreds of them, thick-stemmed and green-smelling, with their throats open.

I shut the door. I shoot the bolt.

“There are forty-one people down that hall,” Madison says.

“Eating eggs.”

“You stood in this room and told me not on a counter.”

“I did say that.” I take my jacket off. Pigeon gray; the same one. I’ve had it cleaned twice since she lifted the pollen off it with a strip of tape, and I wore it today on purpose. I hang it on the hook behind the door, and I take my glasses off and put them in the pocket. “I’ve had thirteen months to regret the wording. I put my thumb on you once, in here. One stroke. Then I took my hand away and did up your buttons, and went and listened to carols for forty-one minutes. I’ve drafted the rest of it more times than anything in that folder.”

“How many?”

“I stopped counting at sixty-nine.”

She laughs, and it comes out unsteady. She’s already backing toward the zinc.

“Up,” I say.

I have her under the thighs before she can do it herself. She’s warm and solid and she comes up onto the counter with a gasp at the cold, and her knees open for me before I’ve stepped between them. The crepe slides. My palm goes up her stocking and finds the top of it, and the bare skin above, and I spread my fingers on the inside of her thigh with my thumb in the crease where her leg meets her body.

Exactly there. I remember the coordinates.

“Tell me to stop,” I say.

“You only ever say that when you can’t.”

“I can’t.”

“Then don’t.” Her hands are in my shirt. “Use your words, Renee.”

So I do. I’ve learned how.

“I want this dress open to your waist. I want you to keep the ring on, and put that hand in my hair, and hold my head where you want it. I’m going to put my mouth on you on your mother’s counter until you forget there’s a hall. Then I want my fingers in you while you look at me. I don’t want you to be quiet for one second of it.”

Her pupils go wide. “That’s quite specific.”

“I was asked to be.”

The buttons are covered wool, small as peas. There are twelve to the waist. I do them in order, and I’m not slow about it; I’ve been thorough in this house, and today I’m hungry. The crepe falls open. Under it she’s wearing ivory silk and lace that I’ve never seen, and I understand that she dressed this morning for a room with a bolt on the door.

“You planned this.”

“I anticipated a need.”

I bend and put my mouth on her breast through the lace. She arches. I drag the cup down with my teeth and take her nipple properly, hard and wet, and her ring hand closes in my hair exactly as instructed. I work the other one with my fingers until she’s making a low steady sound. Then I go down.

I’ve knelt for her on white oak and on a bolt of silk velvet. Stone’s new. It’s freezing through my trousers and I couldn’t care less. I hook her knees over my shoulders and pull her to the edge of the zinc, and I drag the silk aside. I don’t take it off. I didn’t take anything off her in a coat room, either, and I’ve thought about that every week since.

She’s soaked. Swollen and slick and pink, an inch from my mouth, and she smells like the only thing I’ve ever wanted that I didn’t have to earn.

“Since when?” I ask.

“Since you said yes to my mother. One to the shop.” Her voice cracks. “Renee, for God’s sake—”

I lick her. One long flat stroke, bottom to top, and her heels dig into my back. I do it again. Then I stop being careful at all. I know her by now: the flat of my tongue, a little to the left, slower than she’ll admit to wanting. I give her exactly that until her thighs are shaking on my shoulders, and then I close my lips on her clit and suck. She shouts. It bounces off the stone.

“There,” she’s saying. “There, there, don’t you move—”

I don’t move. I slide two fingers into her, deep, and curl them, and feel her clamp down. I fuck her with them in time with my tongue while her hand pulls my hair hard enough to sting. The diamond scrapes my scalp. I want it to. I’ll feel it at dinner.

She comes with her head back against a wall of vases. One of them rocks on its shelf. She comes loud, both thighs locked around my ears, her cunt pulsing on my fingers in long hard waves, and I stay on her until she’s twitching and trying to push my forehead away with the heel of her hand.

I stand up. My knees ache. My mouth’s wet to the chin. I keep my fingers where they are.

“Eyes open,” I say.

“I can’t. Renee, I’ve only just—”

“You can. Look at me.”

She looks at me. Hair coming down, mouth swollen, the dress open to her waist and one breast bare, the ring on the hand that’s gripping my shoulder. I put a third finger in her. Her mouth falls open. I set my thumb on her clit and I don’t circle it; I only press, and rock my hand, deep and steady, a few inches from her face.

“I stopped in this room once,” I tell her. “I’d like it entered that I’m not stopping.”

“It’s entered. It’s—oh, fuck—”

“Tell me what it feels like.”

“Full. So full. Like you’ve been—like you’ve been saving it.”

“I have.”

She comes the second time looking straight at me. I watch all of it. Her eyes go wide and wet and lose me and find me again, and she says my name in the middle of it at a volume they could very possibly hear over a harp.

I hold her there until she’s finished. Then I kiss her, slowly, and let her taste it.

She slides down off the zinc onto her stockinged feet. She leaves the dress open. She looks me up and down the way she did on a fitting platform in Brooklyn, with nothing in her face but the job.

“You stay for your turn,” she says. “We agreed.”

“I’d like to call in my favor.”

That stops her.

“The favor. From the shop. The fourth of December, the year before last.”

“All of it. I’m told there’s interest.”

“There’s a great deal of interest.” Her eyes have gone very dark. “What do you want?”

It’s the question I couldn’t answer across a hearth with twenty-two buttons done up to her throat. I’ve had it ready since Christmas.

“I want to be late,” I say.

“Late.”

“I’ve never been late for anything in my life. Not a call, not a car, not a dinner. I want to walk back into that room after your father’s sat down, with my cuff undone and something on my lapel, and have forty-one people know exactly why. And I don’t want to manage a second of how I get there.” My voice isn’t level. I’ve stopped expecting it to be. “Run it. Don’t ask me what’s next. Don’t let me be useful. Don’t let me be quiet.”

She breathes in.

“Trousers off,” says Madison. “The shirt stays. Up.”

I take them off. All of it, to the stone floor, and I put my bare ass on a zinc counter in January, and the noise I make isn’t dignified. She doesn’t smile. She steps between my knees and pushes them wider with her hips. Then she puts her palm flat between my legs, as she did once before in this room, through wool.

There isn’t any wool.

My hips push into her hand. Hard, once, before I’ve decided anything. She feels it.

“Not on a counter,” she says softly.

“On a counter.”

“With forty-one people down the hall.”

“Madison.”

“Say it.”

“Fuck me on the counter. Please. I’ve wanted you to since the first time I stopped you.”

Two fingers, straight in. I’m so wet there’s no resistance at all, and I hear the sound it makes, and I hear the sound I make, which is louder. She curls them. Her thumb settles where it has always settled, with ten thousand seams behind it. She fucks me slowly, and she watches my face while she does it, and there isn’t a single thing in this room for me to run.

I reach for the edge of the counter to brace. My hand hits a bucket.

It goes over. Forty white amaryllis slide across the zinc, and a gallon of cold water runs straight under my thighs. I shout. She laughs, and she doesn’t stop.

“Leave them.”

“The flowers—”

“Aren’t yours to fix. Hands behind you. Flat.”

I put my hands behind me, flat, in the wet. It tips me back and opens me up. She bends and takes my nipple in her mouth through the shirt, wet silk and teeth, and her fingers go deeper, and I’m talking. I can hear myself. There. Harder. Like that, don’t you dare change it. I haven’t checked a word of it first.

The handle turns.

It rattles against the bolt. We both go still. Her fingers stay buried in me; I can feel my own pulse around them.

“I’m looking for the powder room,” says Bitsy Aldrich, on the other side of four inches of pine.

“The flower room is temporarily unavailable, Mrs. Aldrich.” It’s Arthur. He’s a guest today. He has left his eggs. “A matter concerning the amaryllis.”

“Is it serious?”

“I’m given to understand it is quite advanced, madam.”

Madison’s forehead drops onto my shoulder. She’s shaking with laughter, silently, and so am I. Then she lifts her head. She looks me dead in the eye and she starts to move her hand again, with Bitsy Aldrich’s heels still clicking away down the passage.

“I said don’t be quiet,” she says.

“I didn’t—that was me, I said that—”

“I’m running it. Louder.”

She adds a third finger. She presses her thumb down and rubs, tight and fast, and I stop being able to hold my own head up. I’m loud. I’m louder than I was in a van. It goes round the stone and comes back at me. I come on her hand with my heels hooked behind her knees and cold water under me and her name coming out in pieces, and she keeps me there, right at the top of it, with those sure patient fingers, until my elbows give.

She catches me. She’s very strong. People forget that about a woman who carries bolts of velvet up three flights.

“Good,” Madison says against my mouth. “That’s about nine minutes. Turn around.”

“What?”

“You wanted late. You’re barely tardy. Off the counter. Hands on the zinc.”

My legs don’t work properly. She turns me herself, by the hips, and puts my palms on the wet metal among the fallen stems. Then she presses up against my back, the open crepe and bare skin and lace, and she kicks my feet apart with her stockinged one.

Her hand comes round my hip from the front. The other goes between my legs from behind, and three fingers slide back into me, all the way, in one stroke.

I say something that isn’t a word.

“Thirty-three and a half,” she says at my ear. “I measured. I’ve been thinking about this angle since I knelt down to do it.”

She fucks me from behind, deep, with her whole arm in it, and her other hand works my clit in quick tight circles. Her mouth’s on the back of my neck. She talks the entire time, low, as she’d talk to a garment on the table. There you are. That’s it. You’re going to walk in there and sit down next to my mother with me still on your thighs. Thirteen minutes. Don’t you hold that in. Give it to me. Fourteen.

My forehead’s on the zinc. There are petals stuck to my cheek. I’ve got one hand flat in a puddle and the other wrapped around the edge of my future mother-in-law’s counter, and I’m not managing one thing in the world.

“I love you,” I tell the zinc. “Madison. I love you, I’m going to—”

“On the record,” she says.

“On the record. With my name on it. Madison—”

I come shouting it. All three syllables. It takes the legs out from under me, and she holds me up through every pulse with her arm locked around my waist, and when it’s finished I’m laughing, with my face in a heap of ruined flowers. I can’t stop. I don’t try.

She does up her own buttons. I watch her do all twelve.

I get my trousers on. I tuck in a shirt that’s wet to the third button. I go to do my left cuff one-handed, thumb and two fingers folded back on my wrist.

I miss. I miss again.

She reaches for it.

“No,” I say. “Leave it.”

She looks at me. Then she takes her hand away. She takes my jacket down off the hook and holds it for me, and when I’ve got it on she stands back and looks at the lapel.

There’s a smear of yellow on the gray. The length of a thumbnail.

“You’ve got pollen on you,” she says.

“Will it show?”

“To anybody who knows what they’re looking at.”

“And who in this house knows what they’re looking at?”

She thinks about it. Her hair’s coming down. There’s chalk on my collar where her thumb has been; there is always chalk on her thumb.

“Everyone,” says Madison. “I’ve checked.”

“Good.”

I slide the bolt. Arthur is standing eighteen inches from the door with his back to it, hands clasped, facing the passage.

“Mr. Finch. Your eggs will be cold.”

“I have had forty years of hot ones, Ms. Lawson. Standing up.” He doesn’t turn round. “The toast has concluded. There was a pony.”

I pick three white amaryllis out of the wreck on the counter. I shake the water off the stems and lay them in Madison’s arms, because that’s what we were sent for.

We walk back into the orangery together. My cuff’s hanging open. Her hand is in mine, with the ring on it. Forty people look up from their plates, and a forty-first comes in behind us and sits down between my mother and Dee and picks up his fork.

Nobody says a word. Daphne lifts her glass an inch off the linen. Imani puts her napkin over her entire face. My father looks at my lapel, and then at Madison’s hands, and says, “Told you,” to nobody in particular.

Victoria gets up.

She crosses the marble in her dove-gray jacket and stops in front of me. Her eyes go to the yellow on my lapel. Her hand comes up. I’ve watched that hand arrange three hundred people.

It stops an inch away.

“I’m told one doesn’t brush it,” she says. “I’m told it sets.”

“It does.”

“Then we’ll leave it.” She takes the amaryllis out of her daughter’s arms instead, and looks at the pair of us, and something goes across her face that she lets me read. “You were missed, Renee. For some time.”

“Sixteen minutes,” I say. “I’m late.”

I counted. I’d like that entered. It’s the last thing I count all day.

Madison leans into my shoulder with her whole weight.

“We’re square,” she says, under the harp. “The favor. Paid in full.”

“We’re not. I’ve looked at the terms.” I pull out her chair. “There’s interest.”

← Back to Wrapped Around Her Finger

Never Miss a Release

Get new release alerts, exclusive bonus content, and reader-only giveaways.