🔥 The Honeymoon Suite 🔥
An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Moonlit Bride by Maeve Hollow
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter is set after the final chapter of The Moonlit Bride and before its epilogue. 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.
Maine in April, a window full of ocean, and a bride who has learned to ask. Explicit content — 18+.
The Honeymoon Suite
I have been a bride some twenty-six hundred times, and nobody ever once thought to send me on the honeymoon.
I said so to the young man at the desk. He had asked whether we were celebrating anything.
“She’s kidding,” Rowan told him. “She’d never seen the ocean. That’s the occasion.”
“I have now seen a great deal of it,” I said.
I had stood in it to the knee for an hour that afternoon, in April, in the state of Maine, and wept like a gutter. Then I had eaten a lobster with my hands. My trousers were stiff with salt to the thigh and there was butter on my cuff. I had also driven the first forty miles myself. We do not discuss the toll plaza.
He looked at the pair of us, and at his screen. The inn was all but empty so early in the year, he said, and the big room at the top was only sitting there. He slid two cards across the desk. I took them for his calling cards. They were the keys.
“Top floor, end of the hall. It’s called the Honeymoon Suite.” He went red. “Sorry. That’s just the name.”
“Don’t be sorry,” said Rowan. Her ears had gone pink as well. “We’ll take it.”
It was an absurd room, and I loved it on sight. A bed the size of a hayfield. A fire that lit with a switch. One whole wall of window, floor to ceiling, and in the window the Atlantic going dark, with a lighthouse out on the point laying its beam across the water and through the glass and over the bed, every ten seconds, as a man counts.
Two white robes hung behind the door. I put my hand into the hip of the nearer one, from habit, expecting nothing.
“Rowan.”
“I know.”
“There are two.”
“Hotel robes. They all have them, sweetheart.”
“All of them,” I said. “For anybody at all.”
On the inner handle hung a card on a loop of ribbon. DO NOT DISTURB. I read it twice.
“One may simply say that? To an entire house?”
“That’s what it’s for.”
I hung it on the outside myself, and shut the door on it, and shot the bolt. I had waited two hundred and eleven years to say that to a house.
Rowan laid her telephone on the dresser, face down, without being asked. Then she went into the bottom of her bag and set my parcel on the bed.
I knew the wrapper. A firm in San Francisco. It had come to her door at the end of November with my name on it, and we had put it by. There were a great many first things that winter. I had wished to give each its turn.
“You packed it.”
“I pack everything. You know what’s in there, and I don’t, and it’s been four months.” She put her hands in her pockets. “I’ve been extremely good about it.”
“You have been heroic. Open it.”
“It’s addressed to you.”
“It is addressed to me,” I said. “It was measured for you.”
She stopped with her thumb under the tape.
I had learned in March to ask for things. I was still new at it, and inclined to overdo it, as converts are.
“I had you on your back in my own bed in October,” I said, “with the old one, and I’ve thought of little else since. But it has lately occurred to me that in two hundred and forty-one years nobody has done as much for me. So. I should like you to wear what is in that box. I should like to be had at that window, standing, with the sea in front of me, by a woman who is not being careful. And I should like you to talk, as you do.” My voice was not perfectly steady, and I let her hear it. “That is the ask. You may say no, and we shall ring down for more lobster.”
She had gone the color of a rose from the collar up.
“Say not being careful again.”
“I am not glass any longer. I bruise. I should like to.”
“Stop’s still stop.”
“It is.”
“Then yes.” She tore the paper. “God, yes. Get over here.”
It was a harness of oxblood leather, softer than mine and cut for a wider hip. A cock the color of a ripe plum, longer than the old one and a good deal thicker. And a small steel thing the length of my thumb, with a button on its end, which I had ordered on the strength of four hundred reviews and did not understand.
She undressed, and stepped into the straps, and I did up the buckles.
“More buckles than a wedding gown,” she said.
“It is not a wedding gown.”
“No. I checked.”
Then she simply stood there, on a hotel carpet, in firelight. Soft and freckled, all hip and belly and heavy breasts, her copper hair down, the plum cock standing out from her, and a blush to the collarbones. Six months before, she’d have reached for something to carry. She let her hands hang, and let me look.
“Well?”
“I am a little faint,” I said. “Kindly don’t move.”
I knelt. She has gone to her knees for me on a stone floor; it was high time. I took it in my hand, and then into my mouth, with my eyes on hers.
It is silicone. I know that. She can feel nothing through it but the base pressing where it sits against her. I took it to the back of my throat regardless, slowly, and drew off, and did it again, wetting every inch, and I watched what the sight did to her face. Her lips parted. Her hand came down into my hair and began pulling the pins from my braid, one at a time.
“Lenora. Jesus Christ. Look at you.”
I let it slide from my mouth, shining. “I am told it is polite to make ready.”
“Who told you that?”
“A lady in Sacramento. Five stars.”
She laughed, and hauled me up by my shirtfront, and kissed me. “One,” she said into my mouth. She has never yet got to two.
She had me out of my clothes in a great hurry. She put her tongue to the hollow of my throat and told me I tasted like the sea. Then she walked me backward, naked, until my shoulders met the glass, and turned me round by the hips to face it.
“Hands on the window. Higher. Feet apart.”
The glass was cold enough to make me gasp. She had put out the lamp. There was the fire behind us and the black water in front, and that white beam coming round.
“Somebody on the beach,” I said.
“There’s nobody on that beach but a gull.”
“Then the gull—”
“The gull’s about to learn something.” Her mouth was on my shoulder blade, on the old scar, and her hand slid down my belly and between my legs from behind. She went still. “Oh, you’re soaked. When?”
“The desk. When he said the name of the room.”
“That was forty minutes ago.”
“I am aware of the interval.”
She put two fingers into me, and then three, and I went up on my toes. She fucked me with her hand, deep and unhurried, her other arm locked across my ribs, until my thighs were shaking and my breath had fogged a patch of the window as large as a plate. Then she took her fingers out, and I heard myself make a sound of pure grievance.
“Tell me,” she said. I felt the blunt wet head of it against my cunt. “I want it in a whole sentence.”
“Put your cock in me, Rowan. All of it. Now.”
She leaned.
I have had glass, and steel, and a thing with a dial, in a room with no window, by my own hand. I had never had a woman’s whole weight behind it. It opened me by inches, thick and slow and merciless, and she did not stop until her hips were flush against my backside and her belly lay warm in the small of my back. I was full to the teeth. I put my forehead on the glass.
“Okay?”
“If you ask after my health I shall bite you.”
“There she is,” Rowan said, and drew back, and drove in.
She was not careful. I’d asked, and she is a woman who delivers to the brief. Long hard strokes that knocked the breath out of me, her fingers dug into my hips and her thighs slapping the backs of mine, and every thrust put my breasts against the freezing glass, so that my nipples dragged on it. I spread my hands wider. I pushed back to meet her and took it deeper, and she swore.
And she talked. In my ear, low and filthy and tender, as only she can.
“Look at that. That’s the whole Atlantic Ocean, and you’re getting fucked in front of it. Two hundred years in one house, and look where you are. Look what you asked for. God, you take it so well. I can see it going into you every time the light comes round.”
“Harder.”
“There’s nobody listening, sweetheart. No house. No bridesmaids. Just some lobsters. Be as loud as you want.”
I was loud. I had not known I had it in me. I believe they heard me in Portugal.
Her right hand left my hip. Something small and hard and humming touched my clit, and my knees went out from under me altogether. She caught me round the waist and held me up on her cock.
“What—Rowan, what is that—”
“That’s the twenty-first century. You ordered it.”
“I had one with a cord. It was the size of a flat-iron. It did not do that.”
“Hold still and let it.”
She held it exactly there, buzzing, and fucked me in short deep strokes that never quite left me, and it came up through the soles of my feet. I came so hard my sight went. My cunt clamped down on her in long wringing pulls, and I was shouting, and she kept on, kept it humming, kept driving up into me until a second one broke out of the middle of the first and I screamed her name into the glass.
The beam came round. It went over my arms, white, wrist to shoulder, and for the length of one heartbeat my skin was all silver.
I looked. God help me, I shall always look.
It was a lighthouse. It was for ships. It went on round.
I left two handprints on that window, and the print of my forehead, and something lower down that I did not examine.
She got me to the bed, largely by steering.
“Again,” I said. “Where I can see you.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve not had my fill. I am told I may be greedy.”
She lay back against a great many foolish pillows, flushed and grinning, the plum cock wet with me to the root. I climbed astride her and sank onto it face to face, all the way down, and sat, and looked at her. Her hands came up my thighs. In the morning I had eight bruises, four to a hip. She has small hands. I was insufferable about them as far as Portland.
“I’m not doing anything this time,” she said. “I’m furniture.”
“You are very handsome furniture.”
I rode her slowly, and then not slowly. And I found that when I ground down and rocked forward, the base of that thing pressed hard just where she needed it. I watched her eyes go wide.
“Is that—”
“Yeah. Right there. Lenora, if you keep doing that I’m going to—”
“That is the intention, darling.”
She pushed the little steel thing into my palm. I held it between us, low, where the leather met her, and thumbed the button, and she arched off the pillows with a shout. I rode her through it. I kept my eyes open and took her deep and watched her come under me with her head back and her fists in the sheets, bucking up into me so hard that it finished me a third time, quietly, clenched round her, with my mouth on hers.
I undid the buckles after. My fingers were clumsy. She was drenched beneath the straps, swollen, slick down both thighs.
“What do you want?”
I ask her every time. She has got quicker.
“I want to sit on your face,” Rowan said. Scarlet, and looking straight at me. “I want to hold on to that stupid headboard. And I don’t want to be careful either.”
“I had begun to think you would never say it.”
I lay down. She knelt astride my head with her thighs soft against my cheeks and both hands on the rail, and she lowered herself as if I might break. I took her by the hips and pulled her down onto my mouth.
She cried out. I licked up into her, flat and slow, then pointed, then inside as deep as my tongue would go, and she tasted of salt and of herself. She began to move. Small at first, then a long shameless grind, taking what she wanted from my mouth, riding my tongue while the headboard knocked the wall. I got two fingers into her from beneath and curled them, and sucked her clit, and did not let her up.
“Don’t stop. Fuck. Don’t stop, don’t you dare—”
She came on my face with her thighs clamped round my ears, shaking, wet to my chin and down my throat. She held that rail the whole time. For once it was not so that she would keep her hands to herself.
Nobody knocked back. There was nobody on that floor but us and a card on a ribbon.
I put the robe on afterward and stood at the window with a hand in either pocket.
“I mean to keep this.”
“They charge your card.”
“Then let them.”
She had her planner on her knee, in bed, in a hotel. I watched her in the glass. She turned to the back of it, to the white tab with nothing under it, and held her pen over the page a good while. Then she capped it, and shut the book.
I did not ask. Some pages are in pencil. Some are not yet in anything.
In the morning I rang down and ordered the left-hand side.
“Disclosure,” I said. “It is before breakfast.”
“Go.”
“I had thought I should mind the name of this room. I find I don’t mind it in the least.”
She set down her coffee very carefully.
“Noted,” said Rowan.
“Only noted?”
“I’m noting it really hard.”
We left the card on the door until Thursday. I have done a number of things in the wrong order in my life. I can recommend this one.
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