Plus One

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Save the Date, Steal the Girl
by Riley Kendra

⚠️ This bonus chapter takes place in December, between the last chapter and the epilogue. It contains spoilers and extremely explicit content. Read the novel first. 18+.

Plus One

KIM

The cabin had been described to me as “rustic.” My brother uses that word for anything he hasn’t had to build himself.

It was a long, low pine box on the edge of a lake in New Hampshire, with a woodstove the size of a car engine, a porch that sagged toward the water, and a loft up a ladder that the listing called “the cozy sleeping nook.” The cozy sleeping nook was a queen mattress on a platform, a slanted ceiling you could crack your head on, a round window the size of a dinner plate, and one wall of knotty pine about an inch thick.

On the other side of the inch was Ben.

“I did warn you,” Ben said, from the bottom of the ladder, when I came down to report this. “It’s on the invitation. In writing.”

“You said the walls were thin. You didn’t say you’d be on the other side of them.”

“Somebody has to be.” He was grinning the way he’s grinned at me since he was four and had worked out that the fastest way to make me laugh in church was to stare at me without blinking. Thirty years old that Saturday, six-one, sawdust in his eyebrows from a job he’d finished on Friday afternoon, and still in possession of the same face. “Where else would I put you? In with Dev and Luis? Luis snores like a band saw.”

“In the truck.”

“It’s nine degrees, Kimmy.”

Rachel came in from the porch then, with snow on her hat and two bags of groceries, and Ben stopped grinning at me and turned the full beam on her, which is what he’d been waiting to do since the driveway.

He had met her for exactly forty seconds, getting the bags out of my trunk. It hadn’t been enough for him. He took the groceries, handed them to Luis without looking, and stood in front of her with his hands in his pockets and his head on one side. I knew that look. It was the look he gives a deck somebody else built.

“So you’re the name,” Ben said.

Rachel took her hat off. Her hair came down with it, red against the dark pine, and I watched my brother register what I’d been registering for three months.

“Rachel Porter,” she said. “I believe you left me four inches.”

“I did leave you four inches.”

“It was very generous. I’ve graded essays with less room in the margin.” She held out her hand. “Happy birthday, Ben. She’s told me a great deal about you, and I’ve decided not to believe any of it until I’ve checked.”

Ben looked at her hand. Then he ignored it and hugged her, the full lift-off-the-floor hug he gives our mother and nobody else, and over her shoulder he looked at me with his eyebrows all the way up and mouthed, Kimmy.

I went and helped Luis with the groceries.

The party was eleven people and two coolers and a cake from the grocery store in Wolfeboro with HAPPY 30 BENNY in blue gel, because Dev had ordered it on the phone and the woman had asked him what to write. I didn’t touch anything.

It wasn’t easy. There was a bowl of chips on the floor where somebody was going to step in it. There was a girl from Ben’s crew standing at the edge of the kitchen with a beer she wasn’t drinking, working very hard at looking fine. The woodstove needed feeding. I could have had that room running smooth in four minutes.

Rachel had my hand. Every time I leaned, she squeezed once. That one just means I’m holding it. After a while I understood she meant something more by it. Stay.

I stayed. I sat on a lumpy couch with a paper plate of cake and let my brother’s friends tell me things about him I’d known since 1999. Somebody else fed the stove. The chips got stepped in. Nothing happened. The girl at the edge of the kitchen ended up in a long conversation with Rachel about a book, and was laughing within five minutes, and it had nothing to do with me at all.

Around ten Ben stood on a chair with a beer.

“I’m gonna say one thing,” he announced, “and then I’m gonna get drunker.” Applause. “My sister doesn’t bring people places. That’s not a joke. Thirty years. She brings herself, and she’s very nice to everybody, and then she goes home.” He found me on the couch. “I sent her an invitation with a blank on it, which I thought was hilarious, and she wrote a name in it. In pen. I’ve got it on my fridge.”

Rachel’s hand tightened around mine.

“So that’s my birthday present,” Ben said. “To Kimmy, who brought a name.”

People drank. Rachel didn’t look at me. She was looking at Ben, and her face was doing the thing it had done on a terrace in September, when she’d heard her own name called in a foreign station.

Then Ben ruined it by doing my laugh.

He’s been doing it since he was nine. He thinks it’s the funniest thing in the world. He threw his head back and gave the hitch at the top of it, the stupid catch that comes out of me when I’m not working, and half the room fell about.

“No,” Rachel said, clearly, over all of them.

The room quieted. Ben looked down from his chair.

“No?”

“You’ve got the hitch in the wrong place,” said Rachel Porter, who had stood in front of thirty sophomores a day for thirteen years. “It isn’t at the top. It’s on the way up. Just before the top, as though she’s surprised by it. You’ve been doing it a quarter-beat late since you were nine. I’m sure everybody’s been too polite to say.”

There was a silence.

Ben got down off the chair, looked at me, looked at her, and said with real awe, “Oh, you’re mean.“

“I’m accurate,” said Rachel. “It’s different.”

And I laughed. The real one. The hitch went on the way up, exactly where she’d said, and Ben pointed at me across the room like a man who’d been handed evidence, and shouted, “Shit,” and everybody lost it.

By midnight Dev and Luis were asleep in the bunk room, snoring in two keys. The stove had burned down to orange. On the other side of the pine, Ben was on the phone with somebody in a voice he thought was low.

I climbed the ladder behind Rachel and tried not to watch her climb it. I failed. She had on the gray sweater and a pair of my wool socks, and she knelt on the mattress under the slanted ceiling and turned round and looked at me, in the light from the plate-sized window, with the lake white and enormous behind her.

“Kim,” she whispered.

“I know.”

“No, listen. I heard him.” She pointed at the wall. “I can hear him breathing. I can hear him say babe.“

On the other side, Ben said, “No, babe, she’s great. She told me I do the laugh wrong.”

Rachel put both hands over her face.

I sat down beside her on the mattress. The platform creaked. We both froze. On the far side of the pine, Ben said, “Hang on—” and then, “No, it’s the cabin, it does that,” and went on.

“I’m not going to be able to sleep,” Rachel whispered, behind her hands. “I’m going to lie here all night thinking about how loud I am.”

“You could try being quiet.”

She lowered her hands and gave me a look that I’ve seen her give a thesis statement.

“I’ve never once been quiet. You know I’ve never once been quiet. You once had to put your hand over my mouth because of a retired judge in Beach Plum.”

“Forty feet away.”

“This is an inch.”

“I know it’s an inch,” I said. “I measured it when I came up.”

That stopped her. In the light off the lake I watched the idea get into her face, the way they do: eyebrows first.

“You measured it.”

“I measure everything.”

“You’ve been thinking about it.”

“Since the invitation came,” I said. “Bring a coat. The walls are thin. I read that and I thought, she’s going to try.“

Her breath went out of her. She looked at the wall. On the other side of it, my brother said, “Love you too,” and the phone clunked down on something wooden, and his bed creaked as he lay down on it, about eighteen inches from our pillows.

Rachel turned back to me.

“Make me,” she whispered.

I’d been with her three months by then. I’ve learned that she means it when she says a thing that short. But I’ve also learned that she’d rather be asked than assumed, and so would I.

“Say it properly,” I said. “Out loud’s good. Quietly.”

“I want you to fuck me on this mattress,” Rachel said, against my ear, barely a breath, every consonant in place. “With your brother on the other side of that wall. I want you to make it very hard for me to be quiet, and I want to try.”

“And if you want to stop, you say stop. At any volume. I’ll take it over the walls.”

“I know. I’m not going to want to stop.”

“Then here are the rules,” I said. “Every time you make a sound, I stop what I’m doing. Not for long. Just long enough that you notice. If you’re quiet, I keep going. Yes?”

Her eyes had gone very dark. “That’s—that is extremely unfair.”

“It’s a game. You can say no.”

“Yes.” It came out a shade too loud. We both looked at the wall. Nothing. “Yes,” she breathed, a great deal softer. “God help me. Yes.”

I took the sweater off her first.

Slowly, because the mattress creaked if either of us moved too fast, and the creak was louder than any whisper. Under it she had on nothing at all, which she had planned, and which she watched me find out with an expression of total innocence. Her skin came up in gooseflesh in the cold. The window was frosted at the edges. I put my mouth on her shoulder, and then on her collarbone, and then lower, on the soft curve of her breast, and drew her nipple into my mouth, and she gasped.

I stopped.

I lifted my head and looked at her. She had her lower lip in her teeth and her eyes open wide, and she gave me a small furious nod. I know. I know.

I waited three seconds. Then I bent and did it again, slower, with my tongue, and she arched up into my mouth with her jaw clamped shut and her breath coming hard through her nose, and didn’t make a sound.

“Good,” I said, into her skin. “That’s very good.”

I’d been told once, in a cottage, that she didn’t need marking. I think there’s an exception for this.

I got her flat on her back on the mattress, on the old quilt, and I got the wool socks off and the leggings down, and I kissed her the whole way down her body as I went, belly and hip and the soft inside of her knee. She’d put a hand in my hair. She was holding on hard. Through the wall, my brother turned over in bed, and the springs complained, and Rachel’s whole body went rigid under my mouth as if someone had switched on a light.

“He can’t hear you,” I whispered against her thigh. “Not yet. You’re doing fine.”

“Not yet,” she mouthed, outraged.

I opened her legs with my hands and looked at her.

I could see her clearly by the window light. She was soaked. She’d been wet since I measured it. I knew it the way I know a room, and I wanted her to know that I knew, so I told her, very quietly, in detail, with my breath on her, what I could see. How swollen she was. How she was clenching on nothing. How she’d gone pink down to her thighs. Her hips came up off the mattress toward my mouth, and the platform creaked, and she slapped her own hand over her face.

I waited.

She lay there with her hand over her mouth and her chest heaving and her hips pressed down into the quilt by main force, not moving one inch, and I watched her do it. Holding still. Being good. Rachel Porter, who has never in her adult life been quiet in bed, lying on a mattress in New Hampshire with a hand clamped over her own mouth, trying her very hardest.

Then I put my mouth on her.

The flat of my tongue, slow, the whole length of her. Her free hand fisted in the quilt. I did it again. I found the place, the one a little to the left, and stayed on it, steady and patient, until I could feel her thighs start to shake against my ears. She was making a sound. Very small. High and thin, at the back of her throat, behind her hand.

I lifted my head.

“No—” A whisper. Agonized. “Kim, that wasn’t—that hardly counts—”

“That was a sound.”

“It was a breath—”

“It was a breath with a note in it. I’ve got an ear.” I kissed the crease of her thigh. “Three seconds.”

She made a noise that I’m going to describe as a scream with the volume taken out. It went into the pillow. I counted three, out loud, in a whisper, and she lay there shaking and furious and so wet that I could see it on the quilt, and on three I put two fingers inside her and my mouth back where it had been, and she bucked up off the mattress so hard the platform knocked once against the wall.

On the other side, Ben said, “…Kim?”

We froze.

My fingers were inside her to the knuckle. Her cunt was fluttering around them. Her hand was over her mouth and her eyes were enormous and wet above it, and she was looking at the wall as though it might open.

“It’s the cabin,” I said, at a normal volume, to the pine. “It does that.”

A pause. Then my brother’s voice, very dry. “Uh-huh.”

The springs creaked as he turned over again.

I looked at Rachel. Rachel looked at me. Her whole body was shaking, and for one second I thought she was going to cry, and then I understood she was laughing. Silently. Helplessly. Behind her hand, with tears running out of the corners of her eyes and her cunt clenching on my fingers in time with it, every silent heave of laughter squeezing down on me.

I’ve thought about that a great deal since. I’d spent my whole life believing you had to pick: the kind that’s funny or the kind that’s good. I was buried in a woman who was laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe, and it was the best thing I’d ever felt in my hand.

“Do you want to stop?” I whispered.

She shook her head. Hard.

“Words.”

She took her hand off her mouth an inch. “Don’t you dare stop. Don’t. Finish it.”

“Quietly.”

“Quietly,” she agreed, through her teeth, and put her hand back.

So I finished it.

I curled my fingers up toward me and found the place inside her, and I rubbed it, slow and deep, in the rhythm she likes, and I put my mouth back on her clit and sucked, soft and steady, and I didn’t stop again, because she didn’t make another sound. Not one. I don’t know how she did it. Her back came off the quilt. Her thighs locked around my head so tight I couldn’t hear the lake. Her hand was clamped over her own mouth and her other hand was in my hair and pulling, hard enough to sting, and the whole of her went taut as a wire, and held there, and held—

She came in total silence.

I’ve never seen anything like it. She came the way she does everything, completely, every muscle in her clenching and pulsing around my fingers, her whole body jerking against my mouth in long, hard waves, and not one note of it came out of her. Her eyes were open. She was looking at the slanted ceiling with tears on her face. Her breath came in short, desperate pulls through her nose, and she rode it all the way down without a sound, and when it finally let her go she was trembling from her hair to her heels.

I drew my fingers out of her slowly. She made a tiny sound at it, finally, a whimper, and I let her have that one.

I came up the bed and lay down beside her. She took her hand off her mouth. There were marks on her cheek from her own fingers.

“I did it,” she whispered.

“You did it.”

“I was quiet. I’ve never been quiet in my life.“

“I know. I was there.”

“I’d like it entered,” said Rachel, wrecked, “that I was magnificent.”

“It’s entered.”

She lay there breathing for a while. Through the wall, my brother had begun, very faintly, to snore.

Then she rolled over onto me, in one smooth move that made the platform creak, and sat astride my hips with her hair falling down around her face and the lake light behind her, and put one finger over my lips.

“Your turn,” she whispered.

About me and noise.

For about thirty years, I didn’t make any. I’d come quick and quiet, on my own, holding my breath like a woman getting a job done, and I didn’t think anything of it, because I’d never had anyone around to notice. Then I met a woman who noticed everything, and she spent three months teaching me to breathe. In a cottage. In a greenhouse. Tied to her grandmother’s iron bed with my own tie. On a piano. She’d made me loud. She’d made me so loud my downstairs neighbor had complained with a broom handle.

It turns out you can’t put that back.

“You’re going to be quiet,” Rachel told me, very softly, pulling my T-shirt up over my head. “The same rules. Every sound, I stop.”

“That’s fair.”

“I know it’s fair. I’m a teacher. Fairness is what I do.” She bent and put her mouth on my breast, and I’d forgotten, somehow, in the minute it had taken her to get there, how much I feel it. My breath caught. It caught with a note in it.

She stopped.

She lifted her head and looked at me, and her eyebrows went up, very slowly, with something like delight in them.

“Oh,” she breathed. “Oh, you’re going to be bad at this.”

“I wasn’t always.”

“I know you weren’t. You used to go silent. You’d hold your breath.” She ran a finger down my sternum, so lightly I shivered. “I spent all that time teaching you to breathe out loud, and now look. Three seconds.”

She counted them on my skin with her fingertip. One, two, three. Then her mouth again, and her tongue, and I bit down on the inside of my cheek and arched up into her and didn’t make a sound, and it was the hardest thing I’d done since I’d stood in her kitchen in the rain without a sentence.

She took her time. She’d learned that from me, and then improved on it. She worked her way down me the way she reads, missing nothing, and she got my jeans open and down my legs with no hurry at all, and she knelt between my knees and looked at me in the window light for a long time. Long enough that I wanted to say something. Long enough that I opened my mouth.

She put a finger to her lips.

I shut it.

“Good,” she whispered, and slid two fingers into me.

I was so wet there wasn’t any resistance at all. She went all the way in, slow, and curled, and I felt it all the way up my spine, and I had to turn my face into the pillow because a noise was coming up out of me and I couldn’t stop it. It came anyway. Muffled. Low and cracked. Unmistakable.

She stopped. She kept her fingers inside me, perfectly still. I could feel myself clenching on them, helplessly, in the dark.

“Three,” she breathed. “Two. One.”

She began again. Her thumb this time, flat, a little higher than you’d think. Slow and steady as a metronome. I was shaking. I had both hands fisted in the quilt and my teeth in my lip and my eyes on the slanted pine, and on the other side of that pine, eighteen inches from my head, my little brother was snoring through his thirtieth birthday, and the woman I love was fucking me with two fingers and a schoolteacher’s patience, and every time I got close, every time the noise came up to the back of my throat, she felt it coming and stopped.

Three times. Four. I lost count. Me.

“Rachel,” I whispered. “Please.”

“Was that a sound?”

“It was a word—”

“I’ll allow words.” Her fingers moved, a slow deep stroke that made my vision go. “Full sentences. In a whisper. Go on.”

“Please let me come. I can’t—I’m trying, I can’t hold it, I don’t know how to anymore. You took it. You took it, I used to be able to—”

“I know.” She bent and kissed my stomach, low, beside her own wrist. “I know I did. I’m not sorry.”

“I’m going to be loud.”

“You’re going to try not to be.”

“I’m going to fail—”

“Then fail,” Rachel said, against my skin. “I’ll be right here. Breathe.”

She put her mouth on me.

And I tried. I put my own hand over my own mouth, the way she had, and I pressed it down hard, and I held on. Her tongue was slow and flat and exactly right, and her fingers were curled inside me, and the thing came up from underneath like it always does now, with nothing of mine on it anywhere. I didn’t hold my breath. I couldn’t remember how. I breathed, through my nose, against my own palm, in long, shaking pulls. And when it broke I came apart under her mouth, with my back off the mattress and my thighs clamped around her head, and the sound that came out of me went into my hand and through my fingers, low and wrecked and long, and I couldn’t stop it and I didn’t try.

It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t quiet, either.

On the other side of the pine, the snoring stopped.

We both went perfectly still. Rachel’s face was between my thighs. My hand was over my mouth. I was still pulsing, faintly, around her fingers.

A long pause.

Then a voice, thick with sleep, completely flat.

“I’m putting in earplugs,” my brother announced. “Happy birthday to me.“

Something clattered in a drawer. The springs creaked. Silence.

Rachel pressed her face into my thigh and laughed until the whole platform shook, and then I was laughing too, the real one, hitch on the way up, both of us helpless and naked and crying in a loft in New Hampshire with the lake gone white under the moon.

“He knows,” she wheezed.

“He’s known since the driveway.”

“I’m going to have to look him in the eye. At breakfast. Over eggs.”

“You told him he does the laugh wrong. In front of eleven people. You’ll manage eggs.”

She crawled up the bed and lay down on top of me, all of her, warm and heavy, and pulled the quilt up over both our heads. It was very dark under there and smelled of cedar and of us. Her breath was on my mouth.

“Kim,” she whispered.

“Mm.”

“I’d like to propose an amendment to the rules.”

“Go on.”

“Next time,” Rachel said, “we go somewhere with a door.”

“I love a door,” I said, and she kissed me, and I didn’t make a sound.

Ben made pancakes in the morning.

Buttermilk. From a box. They were terrible, and I knew they were terrible, and so did Rachel. She ate three of them anyway, at a picnic table on the porch in nine degrees, wrapped in my coat, and told him they were lovely in a voice I’ve heard her use on parents.

My brother sat across from us with a mug of coffee and his hair flat on one side, exactly like mine, and looked at her for a long moment.

Then he slid a small paper packet across the table. Foam earplugs. Still in the wrapper.

“For next year,” Ben said. “I’m getting you your own cabin.”

Rachel looked at the earplugs. She looked at my brother. I watched her decide.

“Thank you,” she said gravely, and put them in her pocket. “Do I gather we’re invited back?”

Ben looked at me. He didn’t do the laugh. He didn’t do anything. He just looked, the way he’s looked at me since he was four, and then he looked back at her.

“Yeah,” said my brother. “I’d say you’re on the fridge.”

Under the table, Rachel took my hand.

She squeezed it twice.

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