Through the Screen

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Honeymooning With My Best Friend
by Riley Kendra

A year ago, on Day Three at Maravela Bay, Morgan came back for her wallet and heard Tessa say her name through the slats of the outdoor shower. She never said a word about what she did that night. Now they’re back in Suite 214, there are two rings on Morgan’s finger, and Tessa has one request.

Through the Screen

MORGAN

She waited until the sun was down.

That was the thing about Tessa now. A year ago she would have blurted it out over the chilaquiles, made a joke of it, and backed away before I could answer. Now she sat on the terrace with her feet in the plunge pool and her new old ring loose on her finger and my gold one catching the last of the light every time I lifted my glass, and she let a whole day go by. The beach. A nap. Dinner at El Faro, where the DJ still played reggaeton covers of eighties songs and the bartender remembered us and sent over two mezcals without being asked. The walk back under the bougainvillea, her hand in mine, her thumb going over the two bands on my finger, again and again, like she was checking they were still there.

Back in the suite she didn’t turn on a lamp. She went out to the terrace and lay down on one of the loungers in the blue light from the pool, in the white dress with the pockets, and looked at me through the open door.

“Go take a shower,” she said.

“I showered this morning.”

“The outdoor one.”

I stopped with my hand on the back of the linen armchair.

The screen was right there, past the end of the terrace. Teak slats, an inch wide, half-inch gaps. Eye height when you stand. The brass rain head on its curved arm. The open sky. A year ago I’d come back for my wallet and stood at that glass door with my hand flat on it, and heard her say my name through those slats in a voice I’d never heard her use, and walked out of the suite and sat on a bench for forty minutes trying to build a case that would hold.

“Tess.”

“You heard me,” she said. “That first week. You heard everything. You stood right there and you heard me come, and then you told me about it on this terrace like you were apologizing for a dent in my car.” She tilted her head on the lounger. The pool light moved on her face. “I never got to hear you.”

My mouth had gone dry.

“I’m not going to watch,” she said. “I’m going to sit right here. The screen’s between us. You can’t see me and I can’t see you. I just want to hear it. That’s what I want.” She smiled, small, the gap in her teeth barely showing. “I’m saying it out loud.”

The water came down warm.

I stood under it with my eyes shut and my palms flat on the stone and listened to the sea past the hedge and the gecko on the wall and nothing at all from the other side of the slats. She was being so quiet I could have believed she’d gone inside. She hadn’t. I knew exactly where she was. Six feet away, on the lounger, in the blue light, with her knees up and her bare feet on the cushion.

“I can hear you not doing anything,” she said.

I laughed. It came out of me loud in the open air, and the stone threw it back.

“I’m getting there.”

“I know.” Her voice came through the slats low and warm, close, closer than six feet. “I’m letting you.”

I put my hand on my stomach.

It’s strange, doing it for someone. I’d done it for myself a thousand times, quick and practical, the way you’d do anything you’re good at. I’d never once done it to be heard. I slid my palm down over my belly, slow, and the water ran ahead of my hand and found everything first.

“Tell me where your hand is,” Tessa said.

“Low.”

“Lower.”

I swallowed. “On my thigh.”

“Morgan.”

“On me,” I said. “It’s on me.”

“Good.” A soft sound from the other side of the screen. Fabric. The lounger cushion. “Are you wet?”

I was. Not from the shower. I’d been wet since she said go take a shower in that voice, maybe since the walk back, maybe since the iron table at breakfast with two rings in her open hand. I spread myself with two fingers and the warm water ran straight over my clit and I sucked in a breath through my teeth, and she heard it.

“That,” she said. “Do that again.”

I did it again.

“I’m going to tell you something,” I said. My forehead was against the stone. My voice was rough already. “That first week. The night on the terrace. After I stopped. After you said set an alarm.“

“I remember.”

“You went to bed. I went in the indoor shower and turned it on cold.” I circled my clit once, slow, and had to stop talking for a second. “It didn’t work. I stood in there and thought about your thigh between mine against that door and the sound you made when I bit your neck, and I did this. I did exactly this. I turned the water all the way up so you wouldn’t hear me.”

Silence on the other side of the screen. Then her breath, uneven.

“You never told me that.”

“I’m telling you now.”

“What did you think about?”

“You,” I said. “On top. You’d just said it in front of sixty people. I thought about you sitting on my face with your hands on the headboard.” I pressed two fingers flat and rubbed, harder, and my thighs started to shake. “I came in about a minute. I bit my own arm.”

“Oh my God.” She was laughing and it wasn’t really a laugh. “Morgan. Don’t bite your arm. Not tonight. I want all of it.”

“Okay.”

“Say it louder.”

“Okay.“

“Two fingers,” she said. “Inside. Slow. Like you’d do me.”

I did. I leaned my shoulder into the stone and slid two fingers into myself, slow, curled, and the heel of my hand settled on my clit, and the rings went in with them. Both rings. The cheap one with its green tan line and the gold one that still felt heavy and new, the metal warm from the water, and I felt the edge of the gold band drag as I pulled out and pushed back in and I made a sound that I didn’t plan, low and cracked, and on the other side of the slats Tessa said, “Yes,” like I’d handed her something.

“That’s the ring,” I said. “I can feel the ring.”

“Which one?”

“Both.”

She made a noise I’d heard her make on a worktable in Kensington. “Keep going. Don’t stop. Talk to me.”

So I talked to her.

I’d never done that either. Not alone, not out loud, not with my hand between my legs and the sky open overhead and somebody listening on purpose. I told her how wet I was. I told her I could still taste her from this morning. I told her I’d watched her at dinner licking salt off the rim of her glass and thought about putting her up on the driftwood bar in front of whatever bachelorette party was in that week and sliding my hand under that dress. I told her she was going to be my wife. I said wife and my voice broke on it and my fingers went faster.

“Say that again,” she said. Her voice was wrecked now too.

“My wife.”

“Again.”

“You’re going to be my wife,” I said, “and I’m going to—Tess—”

“Are you close?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t,” she said.

I stopped. My whole body stopped. I was shaking against the stone with my fingers inside myself and the water hammering on my shoulders, panting, and I didn’t move, because she’d said don’t.

“Not yet,” Tessa said. “Slow down. I want it longer. I’ve waited a year to hear you.”

“You’re—” I had to breathe. “You’re cruel.”

“I learned it from a woman who made me wait until daylight.” I could hear her smiling. “Slow. Just your fingers. Leave your clit alone.”

I left it alone. I fucked myself slowly with two fingers and the rings, deep, curling, and every time I got close my body tried to bear down and chase it and I made myself slow, because she’d asked, and the asking was what was doing it. She was talking to me now. Low, steady, just the other side of the teak. She told me what she’d thought about that first afternoon on the stone floor. My hands. My mouth. Me on my knees under the rain head looking up at her. She told me she’d been wet all through dinner because she knew she was going to ask me for this and she wasn’t sure I’d say yes. She told me she’d touched herself on the lounger while I was talking about the indoor shower and had to stop, because she wanted to wait for me.

“You’re touching yourself,” I said.

“I was.“

“Do it again.”

A pause. Then a soft sound, the cushion shifting, her breath catching.

“Now you’re touching yourself,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“My dress is up around my waist,” she said, and her voice had gone thin and high. “I don’t have anything on under it. I haven’t all day. I’ve got two fingers on my clit and I’m—God, Morgan, I can hear the water on you, I can hear you breathing—”

“Put them inside.”

“I—”

“I did what you asked. Now you do what I ask.” I was shaking so hard I had to brace my free hand on the brass pipe. “Inside. Curl them. You know where.”

I heard her find it. I heard the sound she makes, the one I’d first heard through these slats a year ago and not been allowed to answer. I heard it and I answered it. I put my thumb back on my clit and rubbed, hard, fast, the way I’d been dying to for ten minutes, and I said her name out loud into the open sky the way she’d said mine. Not once. Over and over.

“Morgan—oh, God, don’t stop, I’m—”

“Come with me,” I said. “Now. Tess. Now—”

She came first, by a breath. I heard it. High and broken and not quiet at all, the cushion creaking, her heels hitting the teak, my name pulled out of her in two pieces. It went through me like a hand on the back of my neck. I came hearing her, with my forehead against the warm stone and the rain on my back and both rings inside me, and I didn’t bite anything. I let all of it out. It bounced off the stone and the slats and went straight up into the dark, loud and raw, a shout that probably carried to the beach path and the next three bungalows and the bench under the sea grape tree where I’d sat a year ago trying to explain her away.

I slid down the wall. Exactly the way she had.

For a long while there was nothing but the water and the two of us breathing on either side of an inch of teak.

Then the gate in the screen creaked.

She came around the end of the slats with the white dress still rucked up around her hips and her hair falling out of the clip and her face flushed from her collarbones to her hairline, and she looked down at me sitting on the wet stone floor of the outdoor shower, and she didn’t say anything.

She pulled the dress over her head and dropped it on the terrace tile and stepped under the water.

I reached up for her. She came down. She straddled my thighs right there on the stone floor, with the rain head pouring over both of us, and took my face in her hands and kissed me hard enough that my head knocked the wall.

“You were loud,” she said against my mouth.

“I know.”

“The people in two-twelve heard you.”

“Good.”

“Naomi is going to hear about this from someone. I don’t know how. She’ll find out.”

“Good,” I said again, and got my hands on her ass and pulled her down against me, and she gasped into my mouth.

She was soaked, and not from the water. I could feel it on my thigh. I slid my hand between us and found her swollen and slick and still twitching from the first one, and she flinched and then pushed down into my fingers, and I wasn’t gentle. I’d been patient for fifteen minutes. I’d been patient for a year. I pushed two fingers into her and she cried out and grabbed the back of my neck.

“Again,” she said. “I want another one. I want it with your hand. I want to feel the rings.”

“Which one?”

“Both,” said Tessa, and started to move.

She rode my fingers on the floor of the shower with her knees on the stone and her hands on my shoulders and the water running down her breasts into my face. I watched her do it. I didn’t close my eyes. She leaned back, bracing one hand on my knee, and the rain head poured down over her throat and her stomach and her open thighs and my hand moving between them, and the gold band flashed every time I pulled out of her. I put my thumb on her clit. I put my other hand flat on her lower back and held her there.

“Look at you,” I said. “Look at you on me.”

“Morgan—”

“You asked me for this. You lay out there and asked me out loud for exactly what you wanted.” I curled my fingers and she shuddered all over. “Ask me again.”

“Make me come.” Her voice cracked in the middle. “Please. With your hand. I want to come on your ring.”

I sat up and put my mouth on her nipple and sucked, hard, and fucked her faster, and pressed the heel of my hand into her clit, and she came apart on top of me in about thirty seconds. She clamped down on my fingers so hard I felt the rings bite my knuckle. She threw her head back into the rain. She said my name, and then she said something else, two words, my wife, half laughing, half sobbing, the first time she’d ever said it about me, and I held her through every pulse of it with my face in her neck.

She collapsed against me after. Forehead to my shoulder. Shaking.

We sat there on the wet stone in a tangle, with the water still drumming down, until it started to run cold.

“We’re going to die out here,” she said, eventually, into my collarbone. “They’ll find us. Two bodies. Concussions. Naked.”

“Engaged.”

“Engaged,” she agreed. “Andrés will have to call our families.”

“Congratulations, Ms. Mercer,” I said, “on your death,” and she laughed so hard she slipped, and I caught her, because I always do.

Later, in the bed, under the netting, with the lamps off and the blue pool light moving on the ceiling, she lay on my chest and held my left hand up between us in the dark and turned it, slowly, so the two rings caught what little light there was.

“Twenty-eight dollars plus tax,” she said. “And whatever I paid on Sansom Street, which I’m never telling you.”

“Worth it.”

“You haven’t seen the bill.”

“Worth it,” I said.

She put my hand down on her own heart and left hers on top of it.

“Thank you,” she said. “For letting me hear.”

I didn’t make a joke. I didn’t say it was fine. I lay there with her weight on me and her heart under my palm and I told her the truth, which is the only thing I say to her now.

“Thank you for asking.”

Overhead, forty-one courses of woven palm.

I didn’t count them. I didn’t need to. I knew exactly how many there were, and exactly where I was, and who I was with.

That was enough. That was everything.

Haven’t read the book yet? Start with the fake marriage.

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