Objection, Overruled

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Last Credible Witness
by Aurora North

Seven months after a storage-unit takedown on Route 38, the gray clapboard house above the lake is finally theirs. The movers come at eight in the morning. Tonight there’s a bottle of champagne, two coffee mugs, a bare pine floor, and a question Rachel has never asked before.

Objection, Overruled

LAURA

The movers were coming at eight in the morning, and Rachel had the keys by four.

She’d signed her half of the closing papers in a beige room in the title company on State Street with a pen that kept skipping, and then sat in the Ford in the parking lot for a full minute holding the ring of keys in her open hand like something she’d taken off a suspect. Front door. Back door. A small iron one for the cellar that nobody had been able to explain. The real estate agent had tied them together with a red ribbon. Rachel had not taken off the ribbon.

By seven they were standing in the living room of the gray clapboard house on the hill with absolutely nothing in it.

Laura had never seen a room so empty. Wide pine floorboards, honey-colored and scarred, running the whole length of it. A fireplace with a cracked tile hearth. Walls the color of old milk. A big bay window at the far end that looked straight down the hill, over the tops of the pines and the gravel road, to the lake going pewter in the last of the light. Under the window, an old cast-iron radiator, painted cream a hundred times, cold for the season.

No curtains. No blinds. No furniture. No bookshelves yet, though the movers had sixty-one boxes marked BOOKS on the truck and Laura had already told Rachel which wall.

They’d brought one thing up from the car. A bottle of champagne, and two coffee mugs to drink it out of, because the glasses were packed. Laura’s said DUNFORD COUNTY BAR ASSOCIATION ANNUAL DINNER 2019. Rachel’s was the plain white one from the drainer on Mulberry.

“We should’ve brought a blanket,” Laura said.

“We should’ve brought a chair.”

“We own six chairs. They’re on a truck in Syracuse.”

“Then we own a floor.” Rachel set her mug on the hearth, walked the length of the room, and stood at the bay window with her hands in her pockets, looking down the hill.

Laura watched her do it. Watched her look at the road, and the dark line of the trees, and the empty gravel shoulder where a car could pull over, and the bend where the road went out of sight toward the lake. Watched her look for a long, careful minute. Then Rachel’s shoulders came down an inch, and she turned around.

“You checked,” Laura said.

“I checked.”

“What’s out there?”

“Deer. A mailbox. The Brennans’ porch light, about a quarter mile down.” Rachel’s mouth tipped. “Nobody’s on a parking ramp.”

It should have been a terrible thing to joke about. Seven months ago it would have been. Laura found that it made her want to cross the room and put her mouth on Rachel’s throat, so she did.

They kissed against the bare wall by the fireplace for a long time, the way they’d stopped needing to rush. Rachel tasted like cheap champagne. Her hair was still pinned from work, and Laura got four of the pins out before Rachel caught her wrist.

Not hard. Just closed her fingers around it, thumb on the pulse, the way she had once in a hallway on Genesee Street. Not tonight. Because I said so.

Laura went still. Her heart did something complicated.

“I want to ask you something,” Rachel said.

“Okay.”

“You can say no.”

“I know I can.”

Rachel let go of her wrist. She reached into the back pocket of her jeans, and brought out a pair of handcuffs, and held them up between them in the gray light from the bay window.

They weren’t the old ones. Laura knew the old ones better than she knew her own car keys — the slight scratch on the left bracelet, the double-lock that stuck. The old ones were in an evidence locker at the Dunford County Courthouse with a tag on them that said People v. Hale, Exhibit 31, and they’d stay there until September. These were new. Bright. A little stiff.

“I bought them on Tuesday,” Rachel said. “At the police supply place on Erie Boulevard. The guy asked if I needed a receipt for the department. I said no. He looked at me for a very long time.”

Laura started to laugh, and then didn’t, because Rachel wasn’t laughing. Rachel was looking at her with her eyes very dark and her jaw set the way it set right before she said something true.

“Every time,” Rachel said, “it’s me. Your dresser, my headboard. My wrists. You with the key. And I love that. I want that. I’m not giving that back.” She turned the cuffs over once in her hand. “But you’ve never let anybody take the wheel. Not once. Not Claire. Not me. You decide what happens and you decide when it stops and you narrate the whole thing like a closing argument so nobody can ever say you didn’t have it handled.”

Laura’s throat had gone tight. “That’s a very rude thing to say in our new living room.”

“I know.” Rachel didn’t look away. “Nobody decides alone. So I’m asking. Not telling. I want to put these on you, and I want you to let me run it. All of it. Start to finish. And if you say objection, I stop. Right then. No discussion. No hurt feelings.”

The room was very quiet. Down the hill, a long way off, a screen door banged.

Laura looked at the cuffs. She looked at Rachel’s hands holding them. Strong, square hands that she’d watched lie flat on a witness stand for two days, eight years ago, and had wanted, with a fixation she’d never admitted to anyone, to see move.

She held out both her wrists.

“Overruled,” she said, and her voice came out lower than she meant.

Rachel undressed her first.

She took her time. That was the first thing Laura understood about being on this side of it: there was nothing to do but wait. No question to ask. No angle to work. Rachel unbuttoned her blouse one button at a time, slowly, the way Laura had unbuttoned hers the first night on Mulberry Street, and when Laura reached up to help, Rachel caught her hand and put it back down at her side without a word. The blouse slid off. The bra. Rachel knelt to unzip her skirt and drew it down her legs with her underwear and lifted each of Laura’s bare feet out of the pile, and then Laura was standing naked in a completely empty room in front of a window with no curtains, and Rachel was still fully dressed, and still kneeling, looking up at her.

“Hands,” Rachel said.

Laura held them out.

The first cuff went on with a sound she felt in her spine. A ratcheting, very precise click. Cold, then not. Rachel checked the fit with one finger between the steel and her wrist, the way she’d been trained to, and that small professional gesture — the competence of it, the care — went straight between Laura’s legs and made her breath catch. Rachel heard it. Her eyes came up.

“Turn around,” she said.

Laura turned.

Rachel walked her to the window. Four steps across the pine boards. She sat Laura down on the floor with her back against the cold cast iron of the radiator, then drew her arms back and up, and threaded the open bracelet behind the radiator’s supply pipe, and closed it on her other wrist. Click.

Laura tugged. The chain rattled against the iron. Her arms were back, her shoulders open, her breasts lifted. She couldn’t reach anything. She couldn’t cover anything. Behind her, through the bay window, the whole lake was going silver under the first stars.

“Rachel.”

“Mm.”

“I’m naked in front of a window.”

“You are.”

“With my hands behind a radiator.”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to note for the record —”

Rachel crouched down in front of her and put two fingers very gently over her mouth.

“No,” she said. “No record. You don’t get to narrate this one. You don’t get to argue it. You get one word, and it isn’t Rachel.” She took her fingers away. “Say it so I know you’ve got it.”

Laura’s pulse was going everywhere. “Objection.“

“Good.” Rachel stood up and stepped back, all the way to the middle of the empty floor, and looked at her.

She just looked. For a long time.

Laura had been looked at before. By juries. By judges. By Claire, for nine years, with love and judgment both. She had never been looked at like this — by a woman standing perfectly still in the middle of a bare room with her arms folded, taking an inventory, slow and thorough, top to bottom, the way she’d looked Laura over through a car window on the worst night of her life. Except now there was nothing in Rachel’s face that was checking for damage. Only hunger. Only the kind of patience that meant she had all night, and intended to use it.

Laura felt her nipples go tight in the cool air. Felt herself get wet, sitting on a bare pine floor, from nothing but being watched. She pressed her thighs together.

“Open them,” Rachel said.

Laura’s face went hot. She opened them.

“Wider.”

She did. The floorboards were cold against the backs of her thighs. The radiator was cold against her spine. Every other part of her was burning.

Rachel came and knelt between her legs.

She didn’t touch her. She put her hands on the floor on either side of Laura’s hips and leaned in, and kissed her — not her mouth. Her collarbone. Slow and open, a long hot pull of lips and tongue in the hollow of her throat, and Laura’s head fell back against the window glass. Rachel kissed down. Her sternum. The soft inner curve of one breast. She circled the nipple with the tip of her tongue, once, twice, never quite touching it, until Laura arched off the radiator and the chain clanked against the pipe.

“Please,” Laura breathed.

Rachel closed her mouth over her nipple and sucked.

The sound Laura made bounced off every empty wall in the house. She heard it come back to her from the bare hallway and the empty stairs, and she didn’t care. Rachel switched sides, and used her teeth this time, carefully, then not carefully, and Laura bucked against the cuffs and gasped her name, and Rachel lifted her head.

“What did I say?”

“I —” Laura was panting. “You said it isn’t Rachel.“

“So what is it?”

Laura stared at her. “I don’t — I’m not allowed to say anything?”

“You can say anything you want,” Rachel said. “You can beg. You can swear. You can tell me you hate me.” Something wicked moved at the corner of her mouth. “What you can’t do is tell me how. You don’t get to direct me. You don’t get to tell me there and harder and don’t you dare move. I already know. I’ve been taking notes for seven months.”

And she put her hand flat on Laura’s stomach, and slid it down, and cupped her.

Exactly like the first time. The whole warm palm against her, still, not moving, and Laura’s whole body jerked against the radiator so hard the pipe rang.

“God. God, Rachel, please, just —”

“Just what?”

Laura bit her lip so hard it hurt. She shut her mouth. She did not say move your fingers. She did not say inside. She sat there with her wrists chained behind an iron pipe and her thighs spread on her own living room floor and her clit throbbing against the heel of Rachel’s motionless hand, and she said nothing, and it was the hardest thing she had ever done in her life.

Rachel watched her not say it.

“There you go,” she murmured. “There you are.”

Then she slid one finger through her. Just one. The whole length of her, slow, from her entrance up to her clit, and Laura sobbed out loud.

Rachel took her apart the way she worked a room. No hurry. No theory. Inch by inch.

She stroked Laura with one finger until Laura was shaking and then took it away. She kissed the insides of her thighs, the backs of her knees, the arch of one foot, until Laura was crying with frustration and pulling at the cuffs. She pushed two fingers inside her and held them there, perfectly still, buried, and kissed Laura’s mouth, deep and slow, while Laura clenched around her and whimpered and rocked her hips and got nothing, not one stroke, because Rachel had decided.

“Rachel. Please. Please, I’m —”

“I know.”

“I’m going to —”

“No, you’re not,” Rachel said against her lips. “Not yet.”

She curled her fingers. Once. Found the spot that made Laura’s thighs lock and her vision go white at the edges, and pressed it, and held it, and Laura came right up to the edge of the cliff with a cry that cracked down the middle —

And Rachel slid her fingers out.

Laura made a sound she’d never made in her life. Half a scream, half a sob, all of it furious. She slammed her head back against the window glass. The chain rang on the pipe like a bell.

“I hate you,” she gasped.

“I know.” Rachel was smiling. Not cruel. Delighted. Her eyes were wet. “Say the word, Laura. If you want to stop. Say it.”

Laura glared at her. Her chest was heaving. Tears were running down her face, and her thighs were shaking, and she had never in her life been so completely, mortifyingly, gloriously out of control.

“Don’t you dare stop,” she said.

“That’s a direction,” Rachel said. “Overruled.”

And she went down on her.

No teasing this time. Her whole mouth, hot and open and relentless, her tongue flat and slow up through all that wetness and then her lips sealing over Laura’s clit and sucking, and two fingers back inside her, deep, curling hard, and Laura heard herself scream. Actually scream. She’d never screamed in bed in forty-three years. It went up into the bare ceiling and down the empty stairs and out through the uncurtained window into the dark over the lake, and Rachel didn’t let up for a second. She held Laura’s hips down to the floor with one forearm and fucked her with her fingers and ate her like she’d been waiting all day for it, and the radiator rang and rang, and Laura couldn’t reach her, couldn’t touch her, couldn’t grab her hair or push her head or tell her anything at all —

She came so hard she blacked out for a second.

Not long. A heartbeat. The room went white and then came back, and she was convulsing against the radiator with her wrists burning in the cuffs and her heels drumming on the pine boards and Rachel’s mouth still on her, softer now, gentler, licking her through it. It went on and on. Every time she thought it was over another wave came rolling up out of her, and Rachel’s fingers moved inside her, slow, coaxing, wringing out one more, and one more, until Laura was sobbing Rachel’s name — she couldn’t help it, it was the only word she had left — and pushing weakly with her knees at Rachel’s shoulders.

Rachel lifted her head.

Laura stared down at her through a blur of tears. Rachel’s mouth and chin were wet. Her hair had come half down. She looked like she’d just closed the biggest case of her life.

“Again,” Rachel said quietly. “One more. Then I’ll let you go.”

“I can’t.”

“You can. Look at me.”

Laura looked at her.

Rachel didn’t move her fingers. She just put her thumb on Laura’s clit, so lightly it barely touched, and held Laura’s eyes, and waited. The way she’d waited on the sidewalk across Genesee Street with her hands in her coat pockets. You can say no. Laura was oversensitive and wrecked and trembling, and the light touch was almost too much, and Rachel didn’t press, didn’t rush, didn’t push. Just held her there and looked at her with that steady brown gaze until Laura’s hips began to move on their own, tiny, helpless rolls against her thumb.

“There,” Rachel whispered. “That’s you. You’re doing that. I’m just here.”

The second one wasn’t loud. It came up slow and deep and inevitable, the way the one in the dark on Mulberry Street had, and Laura came with her eyes open and locked on Rachel’s and her mouth open on nothing, shuddering from her scalp to her feet, and Rachel held her through it with her thumb barely moving and her other hand flat over Laura’s racing heart.

The cuff key had been on the house ring the whole time, Laura found out, threaded between the front door and the cellar under the red ribbon. It swung against her cheek when Rachel leaned in to unlock her. The ridiculous woman.

The cuffs came off. Rachel rubbed her wrists, one at a time, with her thumbs, kissing the faint red marks the steel had left, the way Laura had once kissed hers.

Then she pulled Laura into her lap on the bare floor and held her.

Laura didn’t say anything for a long time. She lay against Rachel’s chest with her face in her neck, naked and boneless, shaking a little, still crying a little, and Rachel’s hand moved slow through her hair, and outside the window the lake had gone black and the stars had come all the way out.

“You okay?” Rachel said finally. Very low.

Laura thought about it. Really thought about it. The way she’d learned to.

“I didn’t narrate,” she said.

“You didn’t.”

“Not one word.”

“You said I hate you. Twice.”

“That’s not narration. That’s testimony.” She lifted her head and looked at Rachel. Her eyes were swollen. She didn’t care. “I didn’t decide anything. Not one thing. For an hour.”

“Forty minutes.”

“Don’t correct me in my own house.”

Rachel laughed, quiet, and kissed her forehead.

“Was it okay?” she asked. “Really. You can tell me if it wasn’t.”

Laura put her hand on Rachel’s face. The scar through her eyebrow. The dried tear tracks Rachel probably didn’t even know were there.

“I’ve spent my whole life making sure nobody could ever take anything from me I didn’t hand over first,” she said. “I gave you all of it. And you were so careful with it.” Her voice broke. She let it. “It was the safest I’ve ever felt.”

Rachel didn’t say anything. She just pulled Laura in tighter and held on, and Laura felt her chest hitch once against her cheek.

They sat like that in the empty room until the floor got too cold to bear. Then Rachel picked up her coat from the hearth and wrapped it around Laura’s bare shoulders, and they drank the rest of the champagne out of a bar association mug and a plain white one, sitting in the bay window with their backs against the radiator.

“The bookshelves go on that wall,” Laura said.

“I know. You told me.”

“And the bed goes under the window. Upstairs. Where we can see the stars.”

“Ceiling’s in the way.”

“Then we’ll cut a skylight.”

Rachel looked at her sideways. “That’s a permit. That’s a contractor. That’s probably four fights.”

“Nine,” said Laura. “At least nine.” She put her head on Rachel’s shoulder. “We’ll pick it together.”

Rachel turned the new cuffs over in her hand, the chain catching the starlight, and slipped them into her coat pocket. Into Laura’s coat pocket, technically, since Laura was wearing it.

“Okay,” she said.

Haven’t read the book yet? Start with the murder.

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