🔥 The Second Sitting 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Portrait of Lady Ash by Maeve Hollow

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place after the epilogue of The Portrait of Lady Ash, back at Ashcombe Court. It contains major spoilers and very explicit sexual content (18+), including consensual restraint, and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.

One chair, one roll of tape, one sitting where nothing gets taken. Explicit content — 18+.

The Second Sitting

The bust was still singing when Vivienne came to find me.

You could hear it from anywhere in the house, if you stood still. Faint, from three floors down, a woman’s voice coming up through the boards like heat: Puccini, mostly, and badly, in an Italian that had been learned by ear from someone who’d also been doing it badly. Imogen had spent the afternoon in the cellar with a notebook, a thermometer, and a facial expression I’d last seen on her at a conference in Ghent when a man explained spectroscopy to her. Harriet had gone to bed at ten with cotton wool in both ears and the air of a woman who had now, in one year, lost a sale, gained a roof, and acquired a soprano in the foundations, and was declining to be surprised by anything further.

I was in the workroom because I couldn’t sleep there either. Old habit. The windows had new glass in them now, clear and cold and faintly green at the edges, and the moon came through it in long bars across the boards where the easel used to stand. Ada’s bench was bare. Her stool had gone to Hebden Bridge with Thomas. The room smelled of nothing but dust and the sea, and I’d been sitting on the floor with my back against the wall for half an hour, not thinking about anything, when the door opened.

She was carrying a chair.

I want that set down precisely, because it’s the kind of thing I’d want to know if I were reading this. Vivienne Ash, two hundred and seventy-six years old, in my old gray T-shirt and a pair of Harriet’s wool socks, with her hair in a plait down her back, carrying a heavy mahogany armchair through the doorway with both arms and swearing at it in a whisper.

“Help me,” she said. “It’s mahogany. I’d forgotten mahogany. Everything I owned in the last century weighed nothing.”

I got up and took one side. It was a sitter’s chair. I knew it before I’d got it set down: the low seat, the high back, the arms carved out flat at the ends so a sitter could rest her hands without fidgeting, and the plum velvet worn through to the webbing where somebody’s hips had rested for hours at a stretch. There was a brass plate on the back rail, tarnished nearly black. I didn’t need to read it.

“The north attic,” Vivienne said. “Imogen found it on Tuesday, under a dust sheet with a cradle and a stuffed pike. She said it gave her a headache. I told her it would.” She stood back from it with her hands on her hips. “I sat in that chair twenty-two times, Celeste. Twenty-two sittings, three hours apiece, while she drew me taller and made my mouth smaller and talked to me about the light. I thought it was the most romantic winter of my life.”

“Do you want me to take it back up?”

“No.” She turned and looked at me in the moonlight, and her face was doing the thing it does now when she’s decided something and is frightened of it at the same time, which is the bravest expression I know. “I want one more sitting. In that chair. In this room. Where nothing gets taken.”

I waited. I’m good at that.

“I want you to tie me into it,” Vivienne said. “And look at me. All of me, every inch, as long as you like, with nothing over it. No glaze. No dream. No varnish. No one deciding what I’m allowed to look like.” Her chin came up. “And then I want you to do whatever you want to me, and tell me first. That’s the whole request. I’ve written it down, if you’d rather have it in writing.”

She had. She held out a folded square of paper. I unfolded it. In the slanting, confident hand from the back of the heart canvas, it said: V. Ash requests a sitting. Restraints: yes. Mouth: yes. Fingers: yes. Everything: yes. Word: daylight. And underneath, smaller: Consents.

I read it twice, the way I read everything. Then I folded it and put it in my back pocket, and went to my kit bag on the bench and took out a roll of cotton twill tape.

Her eyes went to it.

“That’s what I use to tie a rolled canvas,” I said. “It’s soft. It won’t mark. It’s strong enough to hold a stretcher bar. And it comes undone with one pull, from either end, so you can get yourself out of it without me.”

“You’d thought about this.”

“Since you said mahogany.”

She took my T-shirt off herself. She did it standing in the middle of the moonlight with her back straight and her chin up, and dropped it, and stepped out of the socks, and then stood there naked in front of me in her own body. Shorter than she’d been painted. Heavier than she’d been painted. The scar white through her brow, the tooth crossing its neighbor, the bay-leaf burn and the long new pink line down her forearm. The silver at her hips. The mole high inside her thigh. Gooseflesh all over her, from the cold and from me.

“Sit,” I said.

She sat. She settled back into the worn velvet the way you’d settle into a hot bath, slowly, and laid her forearms along the flat-carved arms of the chair, hands open, exactly the way she must have laid them twenty-two times for somebody else. I watched her notice that. I watched her decide not to move them.

“I’m going to tie your right wrist to the arm of the chair,” I said. “Two turns of tape. A flat knot on the outside, where you can reach it with your fingers if you want to. Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

I knelt by the chair and did it. Two turns, snug, my fingers between the tape and her skin to check it. Her pulse was going hard against the side of my knuckle. I tied the knot where I’d said, and put her fingertips on the loose end so she’d know where it was, and she curled her fingers round it and then, very deliberately, let it go.

“The left. The same.”

“Yes.”

I did the left. Then I sat back on my heels and looked up at her.

“Your ankles. To the front legs of the chair. Wide. Your knees will be apart and you won’t be able to close them unless you pull the tape. Yes or no?”

Her breath went out of her slowly. “Yes. God. Yes.”

I took her right ankle in my hand. Her foot was cold. I wrapped it, and drew it out to the carved front leg, and tied it there, and did the left, and when I’d done she was open to me in that chair, wrists down on the arms, knees spread, the moonlight lying across her thighs and her cunt and the soft round of her belly, and she was breathing like she’d run up the twelve steps from the vault.

I stood up. I stepped back. I took my glasses off and folded them and set them on the bare bench, the way she likes, and then I looked at her.

I don’t know how long. I’ve cleaned single square inches for longer.

“Talk,” she said at last. Her voice had gone to almost nothing. “Please. If you just look at me without saying anything, I shall go mad.”

“Condition report,” I said.

She laughed. It cracked in the middle.

“The sitter is a woman of medium height and sturdy build. Very sturdy. She has carried a mahogany chair down two flights of stairs to make a point.” I came closer. One step. “There’s a scar through the outer third of the left eyebrow, white, about two centimeters. Original. There’s a crooked front tooth. Original. The mouth is wide and longer on the left and she’s biting the lower lip right now, which is not a condition, it’s a tell.”

She let go of her lip.

“The breasts.” Another step. I was close enough now that she had to tip her head back to keep my eyes. “Heavy. The left larger than the right, as stated in her own deposition. The nipples are dark and they’ve been hard since she took my shirt off, and they’re harder now, while I talk about them. I’m noting that. Under raking light you could see the gooseflesh coming up across the whole of the chest, here,” I drew one fingertip across the top of her breasts, not touching, a quarter-inch off the skin, the way Imogen reads a surface, “like a cold draft. It isn’t cold in here. It’s me.”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Belly. Soft. Round below the navel. She likes her dinner. There are silver lines at both hips, fine as the grain in ash wood, and every one of them was earned.” I knelt. I put my face close to her thigh and didn’t touch her, and breathed, and watched her whole body tighten in the tape. “And she’s wet. She’s so wet that it’s running down onto the velvet. It’s going to stain. That’s an irreversible change to a historic object, and I find I don’t care at all.”

“Celeste.”

“Overall condition,” I said, against the inside of her knee, “excellent. No losses. No overpaint. Nothing to correct.” I looked up at her. “Nothing anybody should ever have touched without asking.”

Her eyes were wet. Her mouth was open. Her fists had closed on the ends of the chair arms.

“Then ask,” Vivienne said. “Ask me something. Please.”

“I’m going to kiss your mouth,” I said. “Yes?”

“Yes.”

I stood and leaned over her with my hands on the back of the chair, on either side of her head, on the worn velvet, and kissed her. Slowly. Thoroughly. With nothing between us. I licked into her mouth and found her crooked tooth with my tongue and she moaned into me and strained up against the tape, and I didn’t let her up. I kissed her until she stopped straining and just took it. Then I kissed the scar through her eyebrow, and the corner of her mouth, the long left side, and her jaw, and the place under her ear that makes her swear.

She swore.

“The hollow of your throat,” I said. “My mouth. Where the first swab went. Yes?”

“You know it’s yes. You always know.”

“I always ask.”

“Yes, damn you.”

Salt, and skin, and her pulse jumping against my tongue, fast as it had jumped in paint under a loupe on my third night in this house. I stayed there. I sucked, gently, until there’d be a mark, and she said, “Good. Leave it. Let Harriet see it at breakfast,” and I laughed against her throat and moved down.

“Your breasts. Both. My mouth and my hands. I’m not going to hurry. Yes?”

“Yes.”

I took my time. I’ve never had more of it. I took the weight of them in my palms, the way she taught me once from inside a frame, and thumbed her nipples and watched her face, and then put my mouth on the left one and sucked, hard, and felt her whole back come off the chair and the tape go taut at her wrists. I moved to the right and used my teeth, carefully, and she made a high wrecked sound I hadn’t heard from her before. I filed it.

“More of that,” she gasped. “Teeth. More.”

“Was that a request?”

“It was an instruction from the sitter.”

“I don’t take treatment decisions from the sitter,” I said, and bit down again, and she laughed and cried out at the same time.

When I came off her breasts they were flushed and wet and marked with my mouth, and she was trembling all over, from the scalp down. I knelt again between her open knees. She looked down at me. I looked up at her. Downstairs, very faintly, the bust in the cellar reached for a high note in O mio babbino caro and didn’t make it.

We both started laughing. I put my forehead on her thigh and laughed until my eyes ran, and she laughed with her head thrown back against the chair, tied hand and foot and naked in the moonlight, and it was the most I’ve ever loved anyone in a single moment, and I’m including the vault.

“Tell me first,” she said, when she could. Very soft. “What’s next.”

“Two fingers,” I said. “Inside you. Slowly. And my thumb on your clit, but not moving. You’re going to tell me when you want it to move, and I’m going to decide whether you’re ready.”

“That’s cruel.”

“That’s exact. Yes or no?”

“Yes. Yes.”

She was so wet they went in without any resistance at all, and she clenched on them so hard that I had to stop. I held still. I let her feel it, two fingers curled up inside her and my thumb resting on her clit like a held breath, and I watched her face fight it.

“Move,” she said. “Celeste. Move your thumb.”

“Not yet.”

“Please.”

“Plain words,” I said. “You taught me that.”

She looked down at me, flushed, furious, tied to the chair she’d once been painted taller in, and said it plainly.

“I want you to rub my clit with your thumb until I come on your fingers in this bloody chair, while you watch me. Now. Please.”

So I did. Slowly at first, small circles, round not on, the way she once told me to touch myself on a stool at midnight. Then on. Then harder, my fingers working inside her in time, beckoning, and her hips rising against the tape, and the chair creaking under her like a ship. I didn’t take my eyes off her face. She didn’t take her eyes off mine. I watched it come up through her, the brows drawing together, the mouth going slack, the flush climbing her throat over the mark I’d left, and just before it broke I slowed right down to almost nothing.

She screamed my name.

Not the pretty way. The way she screamed into a room for a year that couldn’t hear her. Except this room could, and I was in it, and I was looking right at her.

“Not yet,” I said. “Once more. You’re very close. I’m going to bring you right back up and then I’m going to put my mouth on you, and you’re going to come with my tongue on you and my fingers in you and your hands tied, and I’m going to keep going after. Yes or no?”

“Yes. Yes. God. Lower, Celeste. Lower.”

Her word. In her mouth. For me.

I went lower.

She tasted of salt and skin and the sea and, right at the top where she jumped, faintly sweet. I licked her slowly from the bottom to the top, once, and she sobbed, and I did it again, and then I put my mouth on her clit and sucked, steady, and curled my fingers, and didn’t stop.

She came almost at once. She came with her thighs shaking against my shoulders and her wrists pulling the tape tight and her heels braced against the carved legs of the chair, and her voice going up and up and breaking, and I held her there with my mouth and kept going, gentler, slower, the way she brings me down, and then not gentler. I put a third finger in. She said something that wasn’t any language. She came again, harder, crying now, real tears down her face, and the chair rocked back on its legs and banged down, and somewhere below us a door opened and a voice that was unmistakably Imogen’s shouted up the stairwell, “I can hear BOTH of you, you know,” and slammed again.

I lifted my head. My chin was soaked. Vivienne was shaking, laughing, crying, completely undone in the moonlight.

“Again,” she said. “I don’t care. Again.”

So I gave her one more. Slow, this time. Just my mouth, soft and flat and patient, for a long time, while she came apart a third time in long slow waves with her head lolling back against the velvet and her mouth open and my name coming out of it over and over like something she’d been saving for a hundred and fifty years and was finally spending all at once.

I untied her one knot at a time. Ankles first. I kissed each one where the tape had been. Then her wrists, and I kissed the insides of those too, where the pulse is, and then she sat there limp and boneless in the sitter’s chair with her hands still lying open on the arms where I’d left them.

“You can move now,” I said.

“I know.” She didn’t. She just looked at me. “I’m choosing not to for a moment. I want to know what it feels like to stay in this chair because I want to.”

So I waited, kneeling on the boards, until she chose to get up.

When she did, she put her hands on my shoulders and pushed me down onto the chair.

“Your turn,” she said. “No tape. I don’t need you tied. I need you here.” She was already pulling my shirt up over my head. “Tell me first, that’s the rule. So: I’m going to take every stitch you’ve got on, and then I’m going to climb into this chair on top of you and ride your hand while you hold my eyes, and I’m going to make you come on my fingers at the same time, and if this chair breaks, I’m blaming the eighteen-sixties. Yes or no.”

“Yes,” I said. “Christ. Yes.”

She was rough with the buttons on my jeans and gentle with everything else. She knelt and pulled them off me and kissed the scar on my knee from the bicycle, age nine, and then the inside of my thigh, and then she climbed into the chair on top of me, a knee on either side of my hips in the narrow seat, the velvet warm and damp from her under my bare skin. She took my right hand and put it between her legs. She put her own right hand between mine.

“Look at me,” she said.

“I am.”

“Keep doing it.”

I pushed two fingers up into her. She sank down on them with a groan, and at the same moment she slid two of hers into me, the rough callus on the second one dragging just there, and I gasped, and the chair creaked, and she smiled at me with the left corner of her mouth first.

We rode each other’s hands in a chair built to keep a woman still. Her forehead against mine. Her breath in my mouth. The chair rocking under us, knocking against the boards, and the moon going across the new glass, and her silver eyes an inch from mine and never once looking away. I watched her face. She watched mine. Nobody was in charge, and nobody was painting anyone, and nobody was counting minutes on a tomato in a cellar.

“There you are,” she said, very soft, when she felt me start to go.

I came with her name in my mouth and her fingers deep in me and my eyes wide open. She came about four seconds later, tight around my hand, shaking against me in the chair, saying something that sounded like mine and yes and ours.

The chair held.

Afterward we lay on the floor of the workroom on a dust sheet, because neither of us could face the stairs. She had her head on my chest. I had one hand in her hair, which had come out of its plait at some point, I didn’t know when. The sitter’s chair stood over us in the moonlight, empty, with a dark patch on its velvet and two lengths of cotton twill tape trailing from its arms.

Downstairs, the bust had moved on to something from Tosca and was mangling it with total confidence.

“Imogen’s going to be unbearable at breakfast,” I said.

“Imogen’s going to be insufferable for a month.” Vivienne turned her face against my skin. “I don’t mind. I’ve never been heard through a floor before. Not once. In all that time.” A pause. “It’s quite nice.”

After a while she said, “What will you do with it? The chair.”

I’d been thinking about that. I always do, with objects.

“It goes back to Shoreditch with us,” I said. “It goes under the north windows. And I put a new label on it.”

“Saying?”

I reached up and found my notebook on the bench, by feel, and the pencil beside it. I tore out a page. I wrote on it in the dark, by moonlight, in my own small upright hand, and folded it, and tucked it into the crack between the velvet seat and the arm of the chair where somebody would find it in a hundred years.

She didn’t ask to see it. She knew she could if she wanted to.

It said: Sitter’s chair, mahogany and velvet, c. 1860. Condition: stained, irreversibly, Ashcombe Court. Provenance: ours.

← Back to The Portrait of Lady Ash

Join the Maeve Hollow Reader List

New releases, bonus chapters too hot for retail, and exclusive content from Maeve Hollow.