Forwarding Address

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Till Checkout Do Us Part
by Riley Kendra

A year after checkout, two rings on two hands, one last night on the Costa Brava. They’ve moved out of 312 and 314 and into a tiny inn above the harbor, and Erin has finally booked her table, in Spanish. A year ago she sat at a restaurant above the rocks and listed what she wanted: being told, hands held down, being watched. Tonight Joelle gives her all three.

Forwarding Address

JOELLE

The man at the harbor restaurant corrected Erin’s Spanish three times over dinner, and Erin let him, and Joelle fell in love with her a little more each time.

The first was when they arrived. Erin had walked up to the six tables on the stones in Joelle’s black silk shirt, the one from a year ago with the buttons she’d bitten off it, three still missing and one more gone since, tied at the waist over a pair of cream trousers, and said something careful about a reservation for two. The man had looked at the green stone on her hand and then at the sapphire on Joelle’s and said a long, warm sentence that Joelle didn’t catch a word of, except novias.

“He says we’re not amigas,” Erin translated, going pink. “He says I booked it wrong. He says the word is—”

“I heard the word,” Joelle said.

The second was over the dorada, when Erin asked for more bread and got a verb ending wrong. The third was when the crema catalana arrived, unordered again, with two spoons and a candle stuck crooked in the burnt sugar, and Erin tried to say thank you, we just got engaged this morning, both of us, at the same time, it’s a long story, and the man listened to the whole thing with his hands folded and then fixed one word, gently, and patted her shoulder, and walked away wiping his eyes on the dish towel.

“What did he fix?” Joelle asked.

“Fiancée.” Erin stared down at the candle. “I said it like the man version. I made you a man in front of him.”

“I’ll live.”

“You’ll live,” Erin said, and looked up, and the candlelight was in her eyes and the harbor lights were behind her, the little boats knocking together on the black water, and she was wearing Joelle’s ring and Joelle’s shirt and nothing at all under the shirt, Joelle had known that since the walk down, and Joelle put her spoon down very carefully on the saucer.

“We should go,” Joelle said.

“There’s still dessert.”

“Erin.”

“It’s got a candle on it, Jo. He put a candle on it.” Erin cracked the sugar with the back of her spoon, slowly, deliberately, and took a mouthful, and licked the spoon clean while holding Joelle’s eyes across the table, and Joelle discovered that a person could be both deeply in love and genuinely furious at the same time.

They didn’t finish the crema catalana.

The inn was four doors along the harbor, up a staircase so steep and narrow it was practically a ladder. Their room was at the top. White walls, a tiled floor worn into dips by two hundred years of feet, an iron bedstead painted blue, and a window thrown open to the harbor so the room smelled of salt and diesel and somebody’s grilled sardines. A tall wardrobe stood against the wall at the foot of the bed with a long mirror set into its door, the glass old and faintly speckled at the edges, like it had been watching people in this room since before electricity.

Joelle shut the door behind them and turned the key.

Erin was already standing in the middle of the floor. She hadn’t turned on the lamp. The light came in from the harbor, yellow and moving on the ceiling, and she stood in it with her hands at her sides and the ring catching it.

“Tell me,” Erin said.

That was all. Two words. A year ago she’d sat in a cove restaurant with a list on her phone and said, Being told. Hands held down. Being watched, and gone red to the collarbone saying it. Now she just stood there and waited, steady, like a woman who knew exactly what she’d asked for and had no intention of apologizing for it.

Joelle crossed the room. She didn’t touch her. She stood close enough that Erin had to tip her head back, and she looked down at the black silk shirt with its four gaps.

“You kept this,” Joelle said.

“You told me to.”

“I told you to keep it. I didn’t tell you to wear it to dinner with nothing under it.” Joelle put one finger on the top button that was still there. “In front of a man who cried into a dish towel.”

“He didn’t know.”

“I knew.” Joelle slipped the button through. “I knew the whole time. You did that on purpose.”

“Yes,” said Erin.

The next one. Erin’s breath went shallow. The next. The silk fell open over her breasts and Joelle could see her nipples were already hard, and she didn’t touch them. She undid the knot at Erin’s waist instead and let the shirt hang open and stepped back.

“Take off the trousers,” she said. “Leave the shirt.”

Erin did. She kicked her sandals off and unzipped the cream trousers and pushed them down and stepped out of them, and stood there in nothing but Joelle’s shirt hanging open and the green ring and, around her throat, the fine gold chain from the dark leather box. She’d put it on in the lobby, in front of everyone, while Natalie was still screaming. She hadn’t taken it off since.

Joelle looked at her for a long time. Long enough that Erin’s fingers twitched against her thighs.

“Turn around,” Joelle said. “Look in the mirror.”

Erin turned.

The old glass gave her back to herself: flushed, bare-legged, the shirt open down the middle, the chain catching the harbor light in the hollow of her throat. Joelle came up behind her, still fully dressed in her linen trousers and her white shell, and stood at her back, and in the mirror they looked like a painting someone had been arrested for.

“Eyes open,” Joelle said, low, against her ear. “The whole time. That’s the rule tonight.”

“Okay.”

“Say yes.”

“Yes.“

Joelle slid both hands inside the open shirt and took Erin’s breasts in her palms, finally, and Erin’s head fell back onto her shoulder with a sound like she’d been holding it since the restaurant. Joelle rolled her nipples between finger and thumb, slow, then harder, and watched it happen in the glass. Watched Erin’s mouth fall open. Watched the green stone on Erin’s hand as it came up and gripped Joelle’s wrist, not to stop her. To hold her there.

“Look at you,” Joelle said. “Look what you look like when you’re mine.”

Erin made a noise that wasn’t a word.

Joelle slid one hand down. Over her stomach, the soft skin below her navel, down between her legs, and Erin was soaked. Wet all the way down the insides of her thighs. Joelle groaned out loud before she could stop herself and Erin laughed, breathless and wicked, at her in the mirror.

“Don’t,” Joelle said, “be smug.”

“You’re the one who made the noise.”

“You’ve been like this since the dorada.”

“Since the lobby,” Erin said, and then Joelle pushed two fingers inside her and she stopped being able to talk.

Joelle fucked her standing up, slow, curling, with the heel of her hand pressed flat over her clit and her other arm across Erin’s chest under the open shirt, holding her up, holding her still. Erin’s knees went within a minute. Joelle took her weight. In the mirror Erin’s eyes kept trying to close and Joelle said, “Open,” every time, and every time Erin dragged them open again and looked at herself being taken apart, and the looking was what did it. Joelle could feel it. Every time Erin met her own eyes in the glass she clenched down hard around Joelle’s fingers.

“You want to come,” Joelle said.

“Yes—”

“Not yet.”

“Jo—”

“Not yet. You booked a table in Spanish. You got corrected three times. You licked that spoon at me.” She slowed her fingers to almost nothing, a lazy drag in and out, and Erin sobbed with frustration and tried to grind down onto her hand, and Joelle held her hips still with one arm. “You don’t get to come standing up in front of a mirror after that. You get to come on your knees.”

Erin went very still against her.

“Get the bag,” Joelle said.

The black drawstring bag was in the side pocket of Erin’s suitcase, where it had been all week. Erin brought it to the bed and set it on the quilt and didn’t open it. She knelt up on the mattress facing the foot of the bed, facing the wardrobe, facing the mirror, with Joelle’s shirt still hanging off her shoulders, and waited.

Joelle undressed in front of her. Slowly, because she knew Erin was watching in the glass. The white shell over her head. The linen trousers. Then she opened the bag and took out the harness, the black leather gone soft and dark with use, and the curved deep-blue cock, and buckled herself into it standing at the side of the bed.

A year ago, in 314, Erin had worn this and Joelle had come apart under it and cried. She’d thought about it nearly every day since. She hadn’t once worn it herself, for Erin. They’d talked about it, on a Sunday in St. Johns with the rain on the skylight, and Erin had said, Not at home. Not the first time. I want it somewhere it’ll mean something.

Joelle tightened the last strap and looked up.

Erin was staring at her in the mirror. Her lips were parted. Her chest was rising and falling fast under the open silk.

“Optimism,” Joelle said.

Erin laughed, a short shaken burst of it. “Shut up.”

Joelle climbed onto the bed behind her. The old iron frame complained. She put one hand flat between Erin’s shoulder blades, over the silk, and pressed down, and Erin went, folding forward until her forearms were on the quilt and her ass was up and her face was turned to the side, toward the mirror, toward both of them.

“Hands on the bedframe,” Joelle said.

Erin reached up and wrapped both hands around the blue iron rail at the foot of the bed. The ring clinked against it. Joelle heard it, a tiny bright sound, gold on iron, and felt it go straight through her.

“Don’t let go,” Joelle said. “If you let go, I stop.”

“I won’t.”

“Look at me.”

Erin looked. Not over her shoulder. At the mirror. At Joelle kneeling up behind her, broad and dark and naked except for the harness, the blue cock jutting out wet already from where Joelle had stroked it through Erin’s slick. Erin’s eyes went wide and dark and helpless.

Joelle notched the head against her and pushed in.

Slow. So slow. One inch, and Erin’s knuckles went white on the iron. Another, and her mouth fell open on a long shaking breath. Joelle held her hips in both hands and watched the blue silicone disappear into her, watched Erin’s body open around it, watched Erin’s face in the mirror the whole way. It was the most obscene thing she’d ever seen. It was the most beautiful. She bottomed out and stayed there, pressed deep, the base of the toy grinding against her own clit through the leather, and Erin made a sound so raw that somewhere down on the harbor a dog started barking.

“Still yes?” Joelle said.

“If you stop,” Erin said through her teeth, “I’m calling off the engagement.”

Joelle laughed. It shook through both of them, through the cock and into Erin, and Erin moaned at that too. Then Joelle pulled back and drove in, hard, and the laughing stopped.

She fucked her the way Erin had asked for, a year ago, at a table above the rocks. Told. Held down. Watched. She kept one hand flat on the small of Erin’s back pinning her to the quilt and the other on her hip dragging her back onto every stroke, and she talked to her the whole time. Told her how she looked. Told her how wet she was, that Joelle could hear it, that the whole harbor could probably hear it. Told her that the man at the restaurant had known exactly what kind of night it was going to be and that was why he’d cried. Erin was making noise on every thrust now, high and broken, her cheek pressed to the quilt and her eyes locked on the glass and her hands locked on the iron, and the bedframe was banging the wall in a rhythm that had absolutely nothing ambiguous about it.

“Is this what you wanted?” Joelle said. “On your knees, with my ring on, getting fucked in front of a mirror?”

“Yes—God—yes—”

“Say whose you are.”

“Yours.” Erin’s voice cracked down the middle. “Yours, Jo, I’m yours, I’ve been yours since you brought that stupid chair—”

Joelle reached around under her and found her clit.

Erin screamed. There was no other word for it. She came on the second stroke of Joelle’s fingers, hard, convulsing around the cock, her back bowing under Joelle’s hand, her knuckles white on the iron and her eyes still open, still fixed on the mirror, watching herself come apart exactly the way Joelle had asked. She didn’t let go of the frame. She didn’t close her eyes. She held on through the whole long shuddering length of it and stared into the glass and let Joelle see everything.

Joelle came seconds after, just from that. From her face. From the pressure of the base against her clit and Erin pulsing around her and that open, ruined, absolutely unguarded look on Erin’s face in the old speckled mirror. She folded forward over Erin’s back with her forehead between her shoulder blades on the black silk and rode it out with a long low groan into the shirt she’d given away a year ago.

They stayed like that, breathing, for a long time.

Down on the harbor the dog had stopped barking. Someone was clapping. One person, slow and appreciative, from a boat.

“Oh my God,” Erin said into the quilt.

“That was a boat.”

“Somebody on a boat applauded us.”

“Bielefeld,” said Joelle, “would be proud.”

Erin started laughing so hard the toy slipped out of her, and she yelped, and Joelle laughed too, and they collapsed sideways onto the quilt in a heap, tangled, sweaty, cackling like teenagers, while the boat person kept clapping for a few more seconds and then, mercifully, stopped.

She didn’t take the harness off. Not yet.

When they’d stopped laughing, Erin rolled onto her back and looked up at her with wet lashes and a mouth still swollen, and reached for her, and said, “Again. Face to face. I want to see you without the mirror.”

So Joelle knelt between her legs and lifted Erin’s knees and hooked them over her shoulders, and leaned down over her, folding her nearly in half, and slid back in slow. Erin’s breath left her in one long rush. Her hands came up and framed Joelle’s face, both of them, the green stone cool against Joelle’s cheekbone, and she held Joelle there an inch above her and didn’t let her look away.

It was nothing like the first time. Slow and deep and so close they were breathing the same air. Joelle moved in long unhurried rolls and Erin met every one, her heels on Joelle’s back, her thumbs stroking Joelle’s cheekbones. Nobody gave orders. Nobody needed to. When Joelle’s rhythm faltered Erin said, “I’ve got you,” and she did, she moved under her and kept it going, and when Erin started to shake Joelle slid a hand between them and put two fingers on her clit and circled, slow, and said, “Look at me,” and Erin was already looking.

“My fiancée,” Joelle said. “Correct pronunciation.”

Erin made a sound that was half laugh, half sob. “Say it again.”

“Fiancée.”

“Again.”

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

Erin came with her hands on Joelle’s face and her eyes wide open and Joelle’s name in her mouth, the whole name, the way she’d said it through a locked door a year ago. Quiet this time. Barely more than breath. Joelle felt every pulse of it, around the toy and under her fingers and in the shaking of Erin’s thighs on her shoulders, and she came again just from feeling it, softer, slower, her forehead dropping to Erin’s, the two rings pressed together between their faces where Erin was still holding on.

Later, the harness on the tiled floor, the shirt finally gone, the window still open to the harbor. Erin lay on her stomach across Joelle’s chest with her chin on her folded hands, turning her left hand in the yellow light so the green stone caught it.

“Tess is going to frame that form,” she said.

“Which form?”

“The forwarding address.” Erin smiled. “She’s going to put it behind the desk. Under glass. Rooms 312 and 314. Results may vary.“

“She cried.”

“She did not cry.”

“Her eyes were very slightly too bright,” Joelle said. “That’s crying, for Tess. That’s sobbing.”

Erin laughed into her sternum. Then she was quiet for a while, and Joelle could feel her thinking, the way you could feel weather change.

“I almost didn’t bring it,” Erin said. “This week. The ring. I had it in the bag and I took it out twice. I thought, what if I do it and she says probably.”

Joelle put her hand on the back of Erin’s neck. On the fine gold chain. On the strip of skin that had undone them both in a hotel lobby a year ago, between a cycling club and a fax machine.

“Did I say probably?” she asked.

“No.”

“What did I say?”

Erin lifted her head and looked at her. Her eyes were wet again, and very green, and very sure.

“You texted me,” she said. “From the next room. With the door open.”

“And?”

“Definitely,” said Erin.

Down on the water, a bell rang the hour from the church on the hill. Midnight. A boat knocked gently against the stones. The man from the harbor restaurant was stacking chairs, scraping them one by one across the cobbles, singing something in Catalan about something he was clearly not over.

Joelle pulled the sheet up over both of them and kissed her ring.

Tomorrow there’d be a flight, and a layover, and Owen asleep on somebody’s shoulder, and a house in St. Johns with a slanted ceiling and a paint chip taped inside a cabinet. Tomorrow there’d be Tuesday.

She couldn’t wait.

Haven’t read the book yet? Start at the connecting door.

← Back to Till Checkout Do Us Part

Never Miss a Release

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