🔥 The Green Dress 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from She’s Not My Daughter’s Friend Anymore by Blair Lennox

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place after the epilogue of She’s Not My Daughter’s Friend Anymore, on Darla and Maddie’s wedding night. 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.

Darla’s side of the night Maddie finally wears green again: a cooler by the back steps, a wrap dress that ties on the left, a cedar picnic table, a kitchen stool, and three feet of emerald silk. Explicit content — 18+.

The Green Dress

DARLA

The last car pulled away from Larch Street at ten past midnight, and my wife went upstairs to change.

I’d been married eleven hours. I was still getting used to the word. I’d said it to Barb at the reception, and to Henk DeVries, and twice to Walt Haverkamp over the fence, and every time it came out of me like a board I hadn’t finished sanding. My wife. Maddie said it like she’d been saying it for years. She’d introduced me to the caterer as her wife before we’d made it down the parlor aisle.

We’d done it in the parlor. Of course we had. Thirty chairs between the pocket doors, the chrysanthemums climbing gold on every wall, Evelyn Rutherford in the front row in her garden shoes, Lou crying into a pocket square Rosa had pinned on him. Tess stood up with Maddie. Renee stood up with me and told me afterward I’d said “I do” like a woman confirming a lumber order. Then thirty cars and a pickup came back to my house, because Maddie had wanted the party at Larch Street. A backyard. String lights. A rented tent. A cooler by the back steps.

I’d known what she was doing when she ordered the tent.

I hadn’t said a word. I’d been married eleven hours and I’d already learned not to step on a reveal.

So at ten past midnight I was standing in my own backyard in my shirtsleeves, with my suit jacket over a lawn chair and my tie in my pocket, picking paper napkins out of the hostas. The tent glowed. Somebody had left half a sheet cake on the picnic table. The cooler sat by the back steps with the lid up, ice gone to water, six bottles still bobbing in it. Walt’s house was dark. The whole street was dark.

The screen door opened.

I didn’t turn around right away. I don’t know why. Some part of me, the same part that looked at the grill for three hours one July, wanted one more second before it happened.

Then her heels came down the back steps, and stopped beside the cooler, and she said, “Can I get one of those?”

I turned around.

Green.

Emerald. A wrap dress, tied at the waist on the left side in a soft knot, cut deep at the neck so the two halves crossed low between her breasts. It wasn’t the dress. It couldn’t have been. That one was eight years gone and two sizes back and probably in a donation bin in Evanston. This one was silk, and it had been made for her, and it was heavier, and it moved like water when she shifted her weight.

But it tied on the left.

Her hair was up. She’d pinned it the way she had at twenty-two, a little careless, two copper strands loose at the back of her neck. And at her throat there was a thin gold chain.

I couldn’t move.

“I had Renee’s niece find the pattern,” she said. She didn’t move either. She stood by the cooler in the string lights with her chin up and her hands loose at her sides, letting me look. “From a photo Tess had on her old phone. I had it cut in silk because I’m not twenty-two anymore and I’m not wearing rayon to my own wedding.” A breath. “I told you I was saving green.”

“You did.”

“I said you’d know when.”

“I know.” It came out of me rough as a rasp. “Maddie, I know.”

She waited. She held out one hand, palm up, toward the cooler.

So I went to the cooler. I fished a bottle out of the cold water, and wiped it on my trouser leg, and opened it on the opener I still keep on my belt loop like a fool, and handed it to her.

Our fingers touched on the glass. Wet and cold.

And I looked.

I looked at her throat first, where the chain lay. Then down, slowly, to the shadow where the dress crossed, the soft inner curve of each breast where the silk parted, the faint flush already climbing out of the neckline. The knot on the left. The way the skirt fell open an inch above her knee where the wrap overlapped. Back up. Her mouth. Her eyes. Brown, wet, steady, waiting to see if I’d do it.

One second. Two.

Ten.

I didn’t turn to the grill. There wasn’t one. I wouldn’t have.

“There you are,” Maddie whispered.

“I’m looking.”

“I know you are.”

“I’m not going to stop.”

“I know.” Her voice broke clean in half. “I know, Darla. You don’t have to. That’s the whole— You never have to stop now.”

She set the beer down on the lid of the cooler without drinking any of it. Then she took my hand, the one that had just handed it to her, and laid it flat on her chest, over the place where the silk crossed, where her heart was going like a hammer drill.

“I’ve been waiting eight years to give you this one back,” she said. “Do something with it.”

I’m told there’s a right way to undo a wrap dress. I didn’t know it. I’d never touched one.

I learned it standing in my own backyard under a rented tent at a quarter past midnight. You find the knot on the left. You pull one end. You let the tie fall. Then the whole front comes loose in your hands, the inner tie slipping free at her right hip, and the silk opens like a door on a good hinge.

She had nothing on under it.

Of course she didn’t. She’s Maddie. She’d stood at the altar in ivory with three seed pearls on her finger, with this planned the whole time. I stood there holding both halves of the dress open with my big scarred hands and looked at my wife naked under the string lights, and made a noise I’m not going to describe.

“Walt,” I said, which was idiotic.

“Walt’s asleep. Walt’s been asleep since nine. He told me at the cake.” She shrugged, and the silk slid off one shoulder. “And if he isn’t, he’s been edging the same ten feet of lawn for two years. Let the man have something.”

That was mine. From my own kitchen. She keeps them too.

I put my mouth on her throat. Right where the chain was. I tasted gold and salt and orange peel, and her pulse jumped against my tongue, and she made the softest sound, and her hand came up into my hair.

“I looked at you right here,” I said against her skin. “That day. This is where I looked.”

“I know. I felt it.”

“Then I looked here.” I moved lower. The hollow of her collarbone. The top of her breast. “And I thought I was having a stroke.”

She laughed, shaky. “And now?”

“Now I’m married to it.”

I took her nipple in my mouth. She arched up into me with both hands fisted in my hair and the silk hanging open off her shoulders, and I sucked, slow, and felt it draw up tight on my tongue. The other one under my thumb. Back and forth. Eleven hours married and I still couldn’t believe I was allowed. That I could stand in my own yard and do this to her, out loud, and nobody would ever call it anything but what it was.

“Darla.” Her voice had gone thin. “Darla, the table.”

The picnic table was behind her. Cedar, built by me, the summer Tess was twelve. Half a sheet cake on one end.

I put her up on the other end.

She sat on the edge with the green silk spread open around her like a spill of paint and her knees apart and her heels hooked on the bench, and I stood between her thighs and looked at her in the light from the tent, and I could see how wet she was. Shining. Swollen. She’d been like that since the cooler. Maybe since the stairs.

“You planned this,” I said.

“I’ve planned this since I was twenty-two.” Her chin came up. “I just didn’t know about the table.”

“I’ll write you a change order.”

She was laughing when I went down on my knees on the grass.

I’d like to say I took my time. Most nights I do. I’m patient. It’s the only thing I’m better at than she is.

I didn’t take my time.

I hooked my arms under her thighs and pulled her to the very edge of that table and put my mouth on her like I’d been waiting eight years too. Flat tongue, the whole length of her, and then straight to her clit, and I sucked. She shouted. A real one, at the sky, her hand slapping down on the cedar so hard the cake plate jumped.

“Oh, God— Darla— fuck—”

I didn’t stop. I’d learned her the way you learn a house you live in. Where the boards give. Which stair creaks. I knew that she liked it hard when she’d been wound up all day, and she’d been wound up since nine that morning, standing in a parlor saying I do with her voice cracking on it. I worked her with my tongue, up and down, small and firm and fast, and slid two fingers into her and curled them, and felt her clamp down so tight my knuckles ached.

“Look at me,” she gasped. “Look up. I want— I want you to—”

I looked up.

She’d propped herself back on one hand on the table. The dress had fallen off both shoulders and pooled around her hips, green and gold in the lights. Her hair was coming down. The chain had slipped to one side of her throat. She was flushed from her breasts to her hairline and she was looking down at me with her mouth open and her eyes black, and I held her eyes and kept going. I didn’t close mine once.

That’s what did it. I watched it happen.

“Don’t look away,” she said, and her voice was breaking. “Don’t you dare look at anything else—”

I didn’t.

She came with my eyes on her. Her whole body bowed off that table and her thighs locked around my head and she cried out my name, long and cracked, into the dark over Larch Street, clenching around my fingers in hard rolling pulses. I kept my mouth on her through all of it. Gentled, and stayed, and watched her face the entire time, because she’d asked me to, and because there was nothing on God’s earth I’d rather have looked at.

When she came down she was laughing and crying both, pushing at my forehead with the heel of her hand.

“Up,” she said. “Up, up, I can’t—”

I stood. Both knees cracked. One of them had been scoped. Neither of them cared.

She pulled me in by my shirtfront and kissed me with her whole mouth, tasting herself, greedy. Her hands were already on my belt.

“Inside,” she said against my lips. “Upstairs. Now. I have one more thing and it’s in my bag.”

We didn’t make it upstairs.

We made it as far as the kitchen. The light over the range was on, low, the way I leave it. She backed me into the walnut island with her dress hanging open and both hands working my buttons, and I let her, because I’ve learned that too. When she’s like this, you let her.

“Shirt,” she said. “Off. Trousers. Off. You’re married, Darla. You can stand naked in your own kitchen.”

“Our kitchen.”

That stopped her. Just for a second. Her hands went still on my chest.

“Our kitchen,” she said quietly. Like she was reading it off a sample board in good light, to see if it held. “Yeah.”

Then she went to the bag she’d left on the stool, the one I’d seen her carry down from the bedroom at seven and thought was a change of shoes, and came back with black leather and slate blue.

“You,” she said, and held it out to me. “I want you in it. And I want to stay in this.”

She meant the dress.

I buckled it on myself. I’ve learned how. My hands are good with straps. She stood and watched me do it with her lip in her teeth, the green silk falling open down the middle of her, and when I was done she ran her palm down the length of it, slow, and I felt the pull of it right against my clit and had to put a hand on the walnut.

“Stool,” she said.

My stool. The one at the island. Thirty-six inches, the height I built it for one long winter, not knowing.

I sat. She climbed up into my lap with her knees on either side of my hips, and her dress spread over both of us like a sheet, and she took hold of the cock and held it steady and sank down onto it slowly, an inch at a time, with her forehead against mine and her breath shaking out of her.

“There,” she breathed, when she had all of it. “Oh. There.”

“I’ve got you.”

“I know you do. Don’t move yet. Let me—” She rolled her hips, once, a slow grind, and we both groaned. “God. That’s where it presses, isn’t it.”

“That’s where it presses.”

“Well designed.”

“That’s my line.”

“I’m keeping it.”

She started to ride me.

Slow at first. Long rolling strokes, rising up and sinking back down, her hands on my shoulders and the silk sliding cool and heavy over my thighs. Every time she came down the base ground into me, right where I needed it, and I could feel her clenching around it, feel her getting wetter, feel it in my own body the way she’d once promised I would. I got my hands under the dress and on her hips. Her skin was hot. The silk was cold. I didn’t know which one I was touching half the time.

“Faster,” she said. “Darla. Help me.”

I helped her. I lifted her by the hips and brought her down, hard, and she cried out and grabbed the back of my neck. Again. Again. The stool creaked under us. A bowl of oranges I’d forgotten about went over at the far end of the island and rolled. Neither of us looked.

“Look at me.”

I was looking.

“No— look at me. The way you did. At the cooler.”

So I did. I leaned back far enough to see all of her, riding me on a kitchen stool in a green dress hanging open off her shoulders, gold at her throat, copper hair half down around her face, her breasts bouncing with every stroke and her mouth open on my name. I looked at all of it. I didn’t hurry. I let her see me do it, the way I’d been too much of a coward to let her see me do it at twenty-two.

“Eight years,” I said. My voice was gone to gravel. “Eight years I looked at the grill.”

“I know—”

“I’m never looking at the grill again.”

“Darla—”

“You hear me? Never. You walk into a room, I’m going to look. You walk across a yard, I’m going to look. I’m going to look at you in front of the whole goddamn town for the rest of my life.”

She came apart on that. Her rhythm broke and she ground down hard and stayed there, shaking, crying out into my mouth, her whole body clenching around the cock so hard it rocked the base against me, and that was all it took. I went right after her. I held her down on me with both hands and came with my eyes open, staring right into hers, both of us shaking on that stool in a kitchen I built, saying each other’s names like they’d been made for it.

We stayed there a long time.

Her forehead on my shoulder. Her arms around my neck. The green silk all over both of us, damp now, crushed, ruined probably. I didn’t care. I’d buy her ten.

“Darla,” she said eventually, into my neck.

“Mm.”

“I have one more thing.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “You said that an hour ago.”

“I lied. I have two more things. This is the second one.” She sat up. She reached down between us and found the long silk tie that had come out of the knot on the left, still hanging from one side of the dress. She drew it free. She held it up between us, emerald, three feet of it.

Then she held it out to me across both her palms.

The way I’d once held out a belt.

I looked at it. I looked at her.

“No,” she said softly, before I could ask. “Not for you. Tonight’s for me.”

She put her wrists together. She held them out.

I’ve been on my back with that belt around my wrists more times than I could count by then. I’d asked for it. She’d given it to me every time, and every time she’d held the rest. I had never once been on this side of it. She’d never once asked me to be.

“I want somebody to have me,” Maddie said. Her voice was shaking. “For an hour. All the way. I’ve been in charge of every bed I’ve ever been in, because the one who’s steering never gets left. And I don’t need to steer anymore. I married you this morning. I don’t have a bag by any door in the world.” Her eyes were wet. “So I’m asking. Have me.”

I took the silk out of her hands.

I tied it around her wrists the way you tie off a load you care about. Firm, and flat, and with a knot that comes out with one pull. I tied it on the left.

Then I picked my wife up off that stool and carried her upstairs, past the third step from the top, which creaked, and laid her down on the cherry bed I built, with the lamp on and her wrists bound in green silk over her head, and I had her.

All the way.

For a good deal longer than an hour.

At some point near dawn she said, half asleep, with her head on my chest and the silk still loose around one wrist: “Darla.”

“Mm.”

“Was it a good one? The dress?”

I thought about it. I gave it the count, the way she always gives me the count.

“I looked at it for eight years,” I said, “and I never once got to see it come off.”

She laughed, low and wrecked, into my skin.

“Well,” said my wife. “Now you’ve seen it.”

“I’m still looking.”

“I know you are.”

Outside, on the far side of the fence, at a quarter past six on a Sunday morning, Walt Haverkamp started up his edger.

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