Everything That Happens in the Spare Room

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Spare Room Agreement
by Isla Wilde

June. The last night in the old schoolhouse. Everything they own is in boxes, the movers are coming at eight, and the only furniture left belongs to the building: the teacher’s desk, the timetable board, and one narrow bed in the spare room. For two months, everyone in this apartment lay awake with their ear to a brass vent, trying not to make a sound. Tonight Amara asks for the opposite.

Everything That Happens in the Spare Room

AMARA

On the last night at Hawthorn, the only furniture left in the apartment belonged to the building.

The teacher’s desk. The timetable board by the door. The narrow bed in the spare room, which had come with the lease five years ago and would stay with it, along with the dresser whose drawer no longer stuck because Jules had finally sanded it in April. Everything else was in boxes, stacked in the old classroom kitchen in towers labeled in three handwritings. AMARA — KITCHEN — FRAGILE in green capitals. JULES — STUFF in red. BEA — INKS (HEAVY) in small black print, carried over from Linden Street that afternoon in Nessa’s borrowed van so that it could go to Cutler Street in the morning with everyone else’s.

The movers were coming at eight. Amara had confirmed it twice.

She stood at the board in the dark hall at half past nine and looked at it. Red and green, a few stragglers left in the brass channels. JULES — RETURN LADDER TO MIRIAM. AMARA — FINAL METER READING, 7AM. And in the corner, the red pushpin, on its own, still holding nothing, exactly where Bea had put it back on the night of the opening.

Nobody had moved it in seven months. Nobody had needed to say why.

Amara reached up and pulled it out of the cork. She closed her hand around it. It was very small and very sharp, and she put it in the pocket of her jeans.

Then she went down the hall to the spare room, where the other two were waiting, and stopped in the doorway.

Jules was sitting on the floor with her back against the dresser, long legs out in front of her, in the 2019 Pride shirt and nothing else Amara could see. Bea was sitting cross-legged on the narrow bed in the oatmeal sweater with the darned elbow, the one she’d been wearing at two in the morning in October, the one she’d worn on the first night of all of them. Her hair was coming down. The high window was open a crack, and the June air coming through it smelled of cut grass and someone’s barbecue.

Amara’s bicycle was leaning against the wall under the window. She’d ridden it four times now. Bea kept count.

“Hi,” said Bea.

“Hi.”

“You took the pin,” said Jules.

Amara looked at her.

“I heard it come out of the cork.” Jules tapped the brass vent low on the wall beside her. “The building. You know.”

“I know.” Amara stood in the doorway with her hand in her pocket around the pushpin. Her heart was going hard. It always did now, before she asked for something. Lin said that was how you could tell it was real. “I want to ask you both for something.”

Bea’s face changed. Not much. Just the corners, softening.

“Okay,” said Bea.

“Ask,” said Jules.

Amara took a breath. She’d practiced this in the shower. Jules had heard her through the vent and hadn’t said a word, which was the most tactful thing Jules had ever done.

“Clause eight,” Amara said. “What happens in the spare room stays in the spare room.” She looked at the brass grate beside Jules’s shoulder. At the one beside the bed. “For two months, everybody in this apartment lay awake listening through those. Trying to be quiet. Putting hands over mouths. Rolling towels along doors.” Her voice didn’t shake. She was proud of that. “I want one night in here where nobody is quiet. Where it all goes through the vents. Where nobody hides a single sound.”

Neither of them said anything.

“I want both of you,” Amara said. “In this room. In that bed. I want Bea to wear the harness. I want her inside me, and I want my mouth on you, Jules, at the same time. And I want to be loud.” She swallowed. “I’ve never been loud in this apartment. Not once in five years. I want to be loud in it once before we leave.”

The room was very still.

Then Jules got up off the floor. She went to the corner where the CALDER ROW PUBLIC LIBRARY tote bag was sitting beside a box marked JULES — BEDROOM — DO NOT OPEN IN FRONT OF MOVERS, and picked it up, and held it out to Bea without a word.

Bea took it. She looked at Amara over it.

“Yes,” Bea said.

“Yes,” said Jules. “God. Yes.”

They undressed her together, in the doorway, the way they had in January in her own room with the candles. Jules from behind, lifting her T-shirt up and over her head. Bea in front, unbuttoning her jeans, sliding them down. The pushpin fell out of the pocket and bounced on the floorboards, and Bea picked it up and looked at it, and then reached up and pushed it carefully into the doorframe at eye level, where it would hold.

“So we don’t lose it,” Bea said.

Amara had to close her eyes for a second.

Then she was naked in the doorway of the spare room with Jules’s mouth on the back of her neck—below the collar, always below the collar—and Jules’s hands sliding around to cup her breasts, and Bea kneeling at her feet, kissing her hip bone, the inside of her thigh, and Amara’s breath came out of her loud and ragged and she didn’t swallow it.

“There you go,” Jules murmured into her shoulder. “Let it out. Nobody’s listening but everybody.”

“Miriam,” Amara gasped.

“Miriam is sixty-nine years old and has heard worse,” said Bea against her thigh. “She told me so. In February. On the stairs.” Her tongue flicked, high on the inside of Amara’s leg, and Amara’s knees went. “She said, and I’m quoting, I taught middle school band for thirty-one years, girls, you cannot shock me.“

Amara laughed. It came out of her cracked and helpless, and turned into a moan halfway through, because Bea had put her mouth on her.

Just for a moment. Just a long, slow, open-mouthed lick, from the bottom of her to the top, and then Bea sat back on her heels and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and looked up at her, flushed, eyes black.

“Bed,” said Bea.

The narrow bed was thirty inches wide. They had measured it, once, in the winter, lying on it together and arguing. It had been built for one person who was staying somewhere for a little while and then leaving.

Amara lay down on her back in the middle of it with her head at the foot, so that the brass vent was right beside her ear.

Bea stood beside the bed and stepped into the harness.

She did it herself, the way she’d learned. Quick hands on the buckles, snug on her hip bones, the dark blue cock jutting out from the black leather, and she stood there naked in the light from the hall with her hair down around her shoulders and the pushpin glinting in the doorframe behind her, and Amara looked at her and felt it go through her body like heat off the copper machine at five in the morning.

“Look at you,” Amara said. Out loud. Because she could.

Bea’s mouth tipped. “Look at you.”

Jules came around the other side of the bed. She pulled the Pride shirt over her head and dropped it on the floor, and she was naked under it, long and brown and lovely in the half-light, and she knelt up on the narrow mattress above Amara’s head, one knee on either side, and looked down at her.

“Is this what you want?” Jules said. Once.

Amara reached up and took Jules’s thighs in her hands and pulled her down.

Jules made a sound like she’d been struck. Then Amara’s mouth was on her—Jules over her face, hot and soaked and swollen, and Amara licked into her, long and slow, tasting her, and Jules’s hands slammed flat against the wall above the bed, and her voice went up through the high window and out into the June dark.

“Amara—oh, fuck, Amara—”

Amara hummed against her. She felt Jules’s thighs shake around her ears.

And then she felt Bea.

Bea’s hands on her knees, opening them. The narrow mattress dipping as Bea knelt between them. The blunt slick head of the cock pressing against her, lined up, and Amara felt Bea pause there, the way she always did—waiting—and Amara pulled her mouth off Jules long enough to say it, because she’d promised herself she would say it every time for the rest of her life.

“Bea. Please. I want you inside me.”

Bea pushed in.

Amara cried out against Jules. The sound went straight into Jules’s body and Jules cried out too, and the two sounds went up together into the brass vent beside Amara’s head and down the old ductwork, through the walls of the empty apartment, into every room they’d ever lain awake in listening.

Bea sank into her slow. All the way. The thick curve of it filling her, opening her, until Bea’s hips were flush against her and Amara was full, so full, and Bea held there, buried, and leaned forward, and kissed Jules over Amara’s body.

Amara could hear it. Their mouths, right above her. Bea moaning into Jules’s mouth. Jules gasping into Bea’s.

She’d lain in her bed down the hall in October with her thighs pressed together and her hands fisted in her sheets and listened to these two women through a brass grate, and she’d burned with it, and she hadn’t let herself touch anything. She hadn’t known what she wanted to be.

She knew now. She wanted to be exactly here.

Bea started to move.

Slow, at first. Long deep strokes that rocked the whole narrow bed, the old frame creaking under the three of them, the headboard knocking softly against the wall. Amara licked Jules in the same rhythm. She couldn’t help it; her body found it on its own. Every time Bea pushed into her, Amara’s tongue dragged up through Jules, and every time Bea drew back, Amara sucked Jules’s clit between her lips, and Jules was coming apart above her, swearing, babbling, both hands braced on the wall—

“Oh God, oh God, you two, you two, I can’t, I can feel her fucking you, Amara, I can feel it in your mouth—”

Amara moaned. Loud. Louder than she’d ever been. She heard it go up into the vent and she didn’t care, she wanted it to, she wanted it to ring through every pipe in Hawthorn.

“Harder,” she said against Jules. “Bea. Please. Harder.”

Bea gave it to her.

She gripped Amara’s hips in both hands and drove into her, hard and deep, and the bed slammed against the wall, and Amara screamed into Jules. Actually screamed. A raw, wordless, open sound that came up from the very bottom of her, from thirty-six years of folding napkins nobody used and lifting the kettle before it could shriek and biting down on her own wrist in the bath so the vents wouldn’t carry it. It all came out of her at once and went up through the brass grate beside her ear and she felt it leave her body like a weight.

Jules came first.

She came on Amara’s mouth with her back arched and her head thrown back and Amara’s name torn out of her—not whispered into a pillow, not breathed so softly a stranger had to hold her breath to catch it, but shouted, shouted at the ceiling of the spare room where it had all started. Her thighs clamped around Amara’s head. She shook and shook. Amara held her there with both hands and licked her through every pulse of it and felt her own body climb, and climb, Bea’s cock driving into her, Bea’s breath ragged above her—

“Touch her,” Amara gasped, when Jules finally slid off her face, boneless, onto her side against the wall. “Jules—touch me—I want—”

“I know what you want.” Jules’s hand was already sliding down Amara’s stomach. “I’ve known for seven years.”

Jules found her clit. Two fingers, sure and slick, circling fast while Bea fucked her, and Amara’s whole body bowed off the narrow mattress.

“Look at me,” said Bea, above her.

Amara looked.

Bea’s face, flushed and fierce and absolutely unafraid. Bea, who had come into this room in October with one bag of clothes she’d refused to unpack, and lain in this exact bed listening through the wall, and promised herself she’d be so easy nobody would notice she was there.

“I want to hear you,” Bea said. “All of it. Let the whole building hear you.”

Amara came.

She came with both of their names. Loud. So loud it rang off the high window and the bare walls and went down the brass vent and through the empty bedrooms and the empty hall and the old classroom kitchen with its towers of boxes. It tore through her in great heavy waves, her cunt clenching hard around the thick length inside her, her thighs locked around Bea’s hips, Jules’s fingers still moving on her, wringing out every shudder. It went on and on. She didn’t swallow a second of it. She didn’t take the wheel. There was no wheel. There was only the narrow bed and the two of them and her own voice, finally, filling up the room.

Upstairs, distinctly, Miriam’s radiator knocked.

Three times. Slow and deliberate, like someone very carefully tapping a baton on a music stand.

Then, a pause.

Then twice more, faster.

Jules started laughing first. Then Bea, still buried inside Amara, collapsing forward onto her chest, shaking with it. Then Amara, crying a little, laughing more, her whole body trembling underneath both of them on a mattress built for one.

“That,” gasped Jules, “was applause. That was an encore request. I know band. That was bravo.”

“She’s going to give us something tomorrow,” said Bea into Amara’s shoulder. “When we leave. I can feel it.”

“She’s going to give us a noise complaint.”

“She’s going to give us the flamingo,” said Amara, and they laughed so hard the bed creaked.

Afterward, Bea eased out of her slowly, and Amara gasped, and Bea unbuckled the harness and set it on the floor. Then she didn’t lie down.

She stood beside the narrow bed and looked at Jules.

Jules was sprawled against the wall where she’d slid, flushed and sweaty, grinning at the ceiling. She felt Bea looking and turned her head.

“What,” said Jules.

“Get up,” said Bea.

Jules’s grin faltered into something else. Something darker. “Yeah?”

“I want something too.” Bea held out her hand. “I want you against the door. Like the first time. Except this time I want you to be loud.”

Jules looked at the door of the spare room. At the back of it, the place where she’d pinned Bea in October with a palm over her mouth and whispered the vent, baby, the vent, she’s twenty feet away.

She took Bea’s hand and let herself be pulled up.

Amara lay on her side on the narrow bed and watched Bea walk Jules backward across the little room—three steps, that was all there was—until Jules’s back hit the door with a thud that rattled it in its frame. The pushpin in the doorframe glinted beside Jules’s head. Bea went up on her toes and kissed her, hard, and slid her hand down Jules’s stomach and between her legs, and Jules’s head fell back against the wood.

“Yes?” said Bea.

“Yes—”

Bea pushed two fingers inside her.

Jules made a sound that was nothing like the sound she’d made in October. No palm over her mouth. No church mouse. She threw her head back against the door and moaned, long and raw and loud, and Bea fucked her against it slow and then fast, her thumb on Jules’s clit, her other hand braced flat on the wood beside Jules’s face.

“Tell me,” Bea said. “Tell me how.”

“Harder—curl them—there, Bea, oh God, there—”

Amara watched. She lay on the narrow bed and watched the two of them with her own hand between her legs, slow, lazy, oversensitive, and she didn’t hide that either. She watched Bea’s small ink-stained hand working between Jules’s thighs and Jules’s long body arching off the door and she let herself moan at it, softly, just to hear the sound go up into the vent.

Jules heard her. Jules’s eyes came open and found her across the room.

“Amara’s watching,” Jules gasped.

“I know,” said Bea. “I asked her to. Look at her.”

Jules looked. And whatever she saw on Amara’s face—Amara didn’t know what it was, she didn’t try to arrange it—made Jules’s whole body seize against the door.

She came against Bea’s hand with her eyes locked on Amara’s, crying out, her knees buckling, Bea holding her up against the door the way Jules had once held her. It went on and on. When it was over, Jules slid down the back of the door to the floor, laughing breathlessly, and pulled Bea down with her, and they ended up in a tangle against the dresser with Jules’s face in Bea’s hair.

“Your turn,” said Amara, from the bed.

Bea lifted her head.

“Come here,” said Amara. “I’m asking.”

They gave Bea everything.

On the narrow bed, all three of them, which was impossible, which they did anyway. Bea on her back with her head in Amara’s lap and Jules between her thighs, and Amara’s hands on Bea’s breasts and Amara’s mouth at her ear, murmuring—not instructions, never instructions anymore, just everything Amara saw. She’s shaking. She’s so wet. Jules, she’s so close, can you feel it? And Bea crying out, loud, nothing over her mouth, Bea who had once screamed into Jules’s palm against that same door, and coming on Jules’s tongue with both her hands fisted in Amara’s hair and her back bowed off a mattress built for one person who was staying somewhere for a little while.

Then again. Because Jules didn’t stop, and Bea didn’t ask her to.

The radiator upstairs knocked once more, very softly. Almost fond.

At two in the morning they were still on the narrow bed, because none of them would get off it.

It was absurd. Amara was half on the mattress and half on Jules. Bea was lying on top of both of them, more or less, with her cheek on Amara’s breast and one foot hooked over the edge. Jules had an arm flung over her face and was snoring very faintly. The window was still open. The barbecue smell was gone, and the night air came in cool and clean and smelled of the garden, of the dead-and-replanted tomatoes and Miriam’s wind chimes and, very faintly, of rain coming.

In six hours this would be somebody else’s spare room.

Amara lay there and waited to feel sad about it. She’d been waiting all week. She’d packed the kitchen and labeled every box and confirmed the movers twice, and she’d stood at the board in the dark hall, and she’d waited for it to hit her.

It didn’t. What came instead was something quieter. Something like setting down a box you’d been carrying so long you’d forgotten your arms were tired.

“Bea,” she said softly.

“Mm.”

“Are you awake?”

“No.”

“Can I ask you something?”

Bea lifted her head an inch. Her hair was everywhere. “You can always ask me something.”

Amara looked up at the high window, at the slice of dark June sky in it.

“The first night,” she said. “When you moved in. You lay in this bed and you heard Jules through the wall. And you thought—what did you think?”

Bea was quiet for a moment.

“I thought I was in so much trouble,” she said.

Amara laughed, very softly, so she wouldn’t wake Jules.

“Were you?”

“Yes.” Bea put her cheek back down on Amara’s breast. “The best trouble. The kind where you stay.”

Jules, under them both, without moving her arm from her face, said thickly, “Can you two stop being beautiful at two in the morning, some of us have to return a ladder.”

“You were asleep,” said Amara.

“I’m never asleep. I’m resting my eyes. I’m a producer.” Jules lifted her arm off her face and looked at them, sleepy and sweaty and grinning, the gap-toothed one, the weapon. “Also, I heard everything. Through the vent. Twenty feet away.”

“You’re six inches away.”

“It’s a very good vent.”

Bea laughed into Amara’s chest. Amara wrapped one arm around her and one around Jules, and pulled them both in, on a bed that had never been big enough for three, and held on.

In the doorframe, in the light from the hall, the red pushpin glinted. In the morning, Amara would take it out and put it in her pocket and carry it twenty minutes across Calder Row to a narrow brick house on Cutler Street, and pin something new to a new board with it.

She already knew what.

But that was tomorrow. Tonight, for the first and last time, every sound in the spare room had gone straight through the walls, and nobody had covered their ears, and nobody had needed to.

Haven’t read the book yet? Start with the first night.

← Back to The Spare Room Agreement

Never Miss a Release

Get new release alerts, exclusive bonus content, and reader-only giveaways.