⚠️ Heads up: This bonus chapter is EXPLICIT. Eve and Lila’s wedding night, candlelight to morning. Light bondage, marking, praise kink. If you came for the heat, you’re in the right place. 18+ only.
Set six months after the proposal. The first Saturday after Lila’s second semester at Simmons. Eve’s POV. Their wedding day, and the night that follows.
The ceremony is in the loft at four.
Maggie officiates. She has, because she is Maggie, prepared two versions of the script — a three-minute version for impatience and an eleven-minute version for indulgence — and at four-oh-two she looks out at the thirty-six people in folding chairs between the stacks and she says, quiet, before she begins, “We’re doing the long one, darlings. It’s been a good year. Sit.”
The loft is full of people who love us. Patricia in a pale green dress in the front row, and Paul next to her, holding her hand, because Paul has been holding Patricia’s hand at weddings for twenty-six years and has, finally, a daughter’s wedding to do it at. Paul Jr. at Patricia’s other shoulder. Beth, who at thirty has, I report, graduated from “a thousand invasive medical questions” to “a thousand invasive medical questions that I have sometimes asked her to text me for reference.” Nicholas. Henri, flown in. Marcus, with his husband. Deputy Moraes in a gray dress. Mrs. Hwang, who I have known for sixteen years and who is, today, in a navy silk jacket, in the second row, already crying. Ruth with a book on her lap because Ruth is going to give a reading. Bea with a sheaf of fresh lavender because Bea has decided, in the last three days, that she is also going to give Lila a bouquet at the end, which she has not told Lila about. Delphine in cream, because Delphine has announced that as the oldest of the book club she owns cream and will not be yielding it to any bride in her presence, and Lila — laughing — has deferred.
The Whitman is on the oak table behind us. Open. Page seventeen. Green silk ribbon. Lit by the banker’s lamp.
My mother’s hat is at the back of the loft, on a stand in the far corner, next to the climate case. Patricia, who brought it today, wrapped in tissue paper, as her contribution — will take it home with her tonight to keep safe, because a wedding is no place for a hat that is, as she reminded me this morning, period-correct from the archives of two different Nova Scotia widows and you do not spill champagne on it, Evelyn.
Lila is in cream. Not a gown. A long simple dress — cream silk, floor length, thin straps. Her hair is up. My mother’s pendant is at her throat — mine, then hers, today legally hers. Her grandmother’s earrings. A small sprig of lavender tucked behind her left ear, which Bea did this morning at the kitchen table, which made Lila cry for six minutes, which I remember with love.
I am in navy. Simple. A dress I picked out with Maggie in February and which Maggie, twice, told me was correct. Silver at my temples. The small pen charm from Lila at my collarbone. My mother’s wedding band on my right middle finger, where I have worn it for four years. Lila’s ring on my left — I slide it off now, for the ceremony. I will put it back on at five.
Maggie reads.
She reads Ruth’s reading first, because Ruth asked. It is from Whitman, of course — I celebrate myself, and sing myself — and Ruth reads it from a small leather-bound 1940 edition she has brought from home. She reads it in her Smith-trained voice, which is, I find out today, a very different voice from the one she uses at book club.
Then Maggie reads the vows.
The vows Lila and I wrote together on a Friday night in March with a bottle of wine and a small yellow legal pad. We have each contributed a line that the other does not know about yet.
Maggie reads the shared vows. We say them. We say the parts we wrote together — I will be honest with you when I am afraid. I will not say things I cannot take back. I will be a person you can come home to. I will take the day you have had and I will stand in it with you. I will wake up next to you and I will not, again, mistake a life for a performance of one.
Then, because we have, together, agreed — each of us gets one line of our own.
Mine first.
I look at her. She is crying. Not ugly. Just two small thin lines down her cheeks. She is doing the thing she does. Her mouth is trembling at the corner. My breath catches.
“Lila. My line is — I was not looking for you. I would not have known how. You came in through a door I had not built. I am going to spend the rest of my life being grateful that you did, and thanking the door, and — because I am a curator of rare things — learning the exact grain of the wood so that if the door ever closes behind you, I will know which one to go through to find you again.”
She covers her mouth. Patricia, in the front row, audibly sobs once. Maggie, who has not been warned, closes her eyes for a second.
Lila lifts her face. She swallows. She says, small and clear: “My line is — you knocked over my life, Eve Langford, and you picked me up, and you handed me The Age of Innocence, and I have been reading ever since. I am going to be your volunteer for the rest of my life, in every single way. Put me on the schedule.”
Everyone laughs — then, in about two seconds, cries harder than before, because she has followed the line with a sob of her own.
Maggie, wiping her face with the back of her wrist, says, “Oh, for god’s sake, both of you. I’m supposed to be the one talking. Rings.”
She puts Lila’s ring on my finger. Lila puts mine on hers. The new one, the stacked one — we have each had the plain bands matched, both flanked now by a second thin band engraved 10/12 on the inside because it is the date Eve proposed, which will, as long as either of us lives, be the anniversary we mark and not today’s, because October 12 is our day and May 17 is the paperwork.
“By the power vested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and by the — considerably greater — power vested in me by sixteen years of friendship with this woman, I now pronounce you married. Eve — yes, kiss her, I know you want to.”
I kiss her in the loft in front of every person we love, and Lila makes a small soft sound against my mouth, and Delphine — from her chair, in cream — says, loud enough to be heard: “Enfin.”
The reception is downstairs in the main floor. Bea and her daughter have catered. Henri has brought the champagne from New York. Delphine has, of course, brought the second champagne, which is — she has explained, primly — the French one. Mrs. Hwang has, in secret, for the last three weeks, baked small shortbread hearts. There are — I count — two hundred and eleven of them in a large silver bowl at the door.
I dance with Lila. I dance with my father-in-law. I dance with Maggie, who, by nine-thirty, has had three glasses of champagne and is, for the first time in the sixteen years I have known her, tipsy. She puts her forehead against mine and she says, quiet, over the music, “I have done a great deal of work in my life, Evelyn. I will tell you tonight the single best thing I have done. It is that I — in November of last year — finally stopped letting you ruin this. Thank you for letting me.”
At ten-fifteen I find Lila at the punch bowl. I come up behind her. I put my hand on her hip. She leans back into me without turning. “Mrs. Harper-Langford.” “Mrs. Langford-Harper.” “When can we leave.”
She laughs. “It has been six hours.” “I am fifty-one and I have been in these heels since three-thirty. I have held it together. I would like, now, to take my wife upstairs.” “Your wife.” “Yes. Go tell Maggie. She’ll run the rest.”
I find Maggie. Maggie waves me off. “Darlings. Go. Mrs. Hwang is going to lock up. Bea is going to run the cake. Paul is driving everyone to the hotel. Delphine has your champagne upstairs. Go.”
At ten-twenty-two we escape up the private staircase.
The apartment is ready. Maggie has — without telling me, because she is Maggie — had a single florist come in at five, during the ceremony, and fill the living room with white peonies and pale green eucalyptus. The fire is laid. The record is cued — not Jessye Norman tonight, tonight it is Billie Holiday, which Lila did not tell me she asked Maggie for. A bottle of the French champagne Delphine promised is in a silver bucket on the coffee table. Two fresh glasses.
The bedroom has a single candle on the nightstand, lit. The brass bed is made with white linen Maggie bought in February. My mother’s quilt — the one my mother made, which I inherited, which I have had folded in the linen closet since 1996, which I took out this week for the first time in twenty-eight years — is folded at the foot. A small wrapped package is on the pillow.
“Eve. That is from Delphine.” “Of course it is.” “Open it later. Or now. Your call.” “Later.”
She turns to me. She has taken her hair down somewhere on the stairs. It is falling loose around her shoulders. The lavender from behind her ear is still there. Her cheeks are pink from champagne and dancing. Her mother’s pendant — no, mine, no, hers, always hers now — is at her throat. Her dress is still cream and falling.
She reaches up. She puts a hand on my jaw. “Hi.” “Hi, darling.” “We’re married.” “We’re married.” “Take this dress off me.”
I do not go fast. I have been thinking about this hour for six months and I am not going to rush. I turn her by the shoulders. I put my hands at the top of the zipper at the back of the cream dress. I kiss the place where her neck meets her shoulder — the place where, in a hotel on Christmas Eve Eve in New York, I bit her hard enough to leave a mark that lasted a week, the place she asked me to mark again, the place I have kept my promise to come back to. I kiss it now, slow, open-mouthed, not biting — and she shudders under my hands.
I unzip the dress. Slow. Down her spine. Inch by inch. The silk slides open under my hand. She is wearing — I discover, as the fabric parts — nothing underneath. No bra. No underwear. Just her. Just cream silk sliding down her back over skin that has been, since two-thirty this afternoon, bare under the dress in front of thirty-six people at her own wedding, and she has not told me, and I am — I am going to die.
“Lila.” “Mm.” “Nothing.” “I wanted to. I wanted — I wanted to know it the whole ceremony. I wanted — Eve, I wanted to know it while Maggie was reading. I wanted — I wanted to be standing next to you with nothing on under my wedding dress. I wanted — I wanted that to be a thing only you and I knew. Just — just us. My whole day. Under everything. Yours.”
I put my mouth at the back of her neck. I hold her there. “Good girl.” She makes the specific small broken sound I know — the one she has been making for a year and a half, the one that is, by now, the sound that means I am here, I am ready, please — and I slide the dress off her shoulders, and down her arms, and it pools at her feet. She steps out of it. She is naked.
She is naked in the candlelight in front of the brass bed on our wedding night, and she is — I look at her, slow, full, the whole length of her — the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
“Turn around, darling.”
She turns. Her pendant at her throat. Her hair loose. Her mouth parted. Her hazel eyes black with the pupils so blown there is almost no color left. The lavender still behind her ear. Her pulse visible at her throat, fast.
“Lila. Take mine off.”
LILA
I undress her in the candlelight and I am — I notice, half of me is noticing — shaking. Not fear. Not nerves. Something else. The specific full-body shake of a woman who has spent six months planning a single night and is, now, inside the night, and is overwhelmed by the precise small fact of being in it.
The navy dress comes off over her head. I fold it, careful, onto the chair. Her bra. Her underwear — which she is wearing, I register, unlike me — the specific cream silk set I gave her three weeks ago in a gilded box that Delphine consulted on. She laughs as I slide the underwear down her thighs, because she knows — because I told her at the time — these are not coming home tonight with you. I will be taking them off you in the apartment at approximately ten-thirty on May the seventeenth, and I will be putting them in a drawer to keep forever.
She steps out of them. I put them, ceremoniously, on the dresser next to the framed catalog card.
“Lila. Come to bed.” “Wait. I — Eve. Open Delphine’s package first.” She laughs. “Now?” “She is in her apartment with her French champagne telling Henri we have just opened her package. Open it.”
I sit on the edge of the brass bed. I reach for the small wrapped package on the pillow. It is — of course — a small gilded box. Same house. Same atelier.
I open the lid. Inside is — not a harness this time. Inside is a small leather cuff. One single cuff. Soft leather, deep cordovan — the same leather as the harness she gave me last Christmas — with a small brass buckle engraved, I can see from here, with a small fleur-de-lis. Under the cuff is a small folded note.
Chérie. The other one is coming next year. For your first anniversary. It is a matched set. Do not ask me how I know what you will want by then. I know. Use it well. — D.
I close the note. I put my hand over my mouth. Eve is silently laughing on the edge of the brass bed. “Delphine,” I say. “Is a menace.” “I know.” “Eve. Put it on me.”
EVE
The cuff closes around her left wrist. I buckle it. I do it slow. She watches me do it. Her eyes on my hands. Her breath coming a little shorter. The leather is soft, warmed already from my hands as I fit it — snug but not tight, the way the Paris atelier has, for fifty years, known how to make a cuff that you forget about and do not forget about — and when I close the brass buckle I turn her wrist up and I kiss the inside of her wrist over the cuff.
“Eve. Is the — is the —” “In the drawer. Yes.” “Get it.”
I get the harness from the drawer — the original one, the one she gave me last year, the one that has been ours. I get the small bottle from the nightstand. I get back on the bed. I put the harness on in front of her. Bare. Candlelight.
When it is on I kneel in the middle of the brass bed. I look at her. “Lila. Where do you want me.” “On top. I want — I want your weight. I want to be — I want to be pinned. I have been thinking about it all day. Please.”
She climbs onto the bed. She lies on her back in the middle of it. The white linen under her. Her hair spreading across the pillow. My mother’s quilt at her feet. The candle at the nightstand. Her cuffed wrist above her head, already against the brass rail of the headboard.
“Eve. Tie it. There’s — Delphine included — check the box. There’s a second piece. I saw it when I opened it. I didn’t say. Check.”
I reach. The gilded box. Under the folded note, underneath the cuff — there is, of course, because Delphine has been a patron of a Paris atelier for fifty-three years, a second piece. A small matching length of soft leather. Cordovan. Brass buckles at both ends. Short — maybe fourteen inches.
I take the tether. I loop one end through the brass ring of the cuff. The other end I wrap around the brass rail of the headboard. I buckle it snug — not tight, not punishing, just — holding. Her wrist is now secured above her head, flush to the brass rail. She tests it. She pulls, once. It holds.
“Safeword.” “Overdue.” “Good girl.” I kiss the inside of her cuffed wrist once, slow, at the pulse point. Then I climb over her.
LILA
She does not rush. She has me tied to the bed on my wedding night with the candle on the nightstand and the ring on my finger and the lavender still behind my ear, and she does not rush. She kisses me. Slow. Open-mouthed. Long. She kisses me until I am whimpering into her mouth, until my free hand is fisted in the white linen beside my hip, until I am bucking, a little, trying to get some friction, which she is pinning shut with her own thighs and which she is, deliberately, refusing me.
“Eve — please —” “Shh. Patience. I am going to be inside you in about nine minutes, Lila Langford-Harper. We just got married. I am going to eat you first. I am going to take my time. I have been thinking about this for six months. You are going to come on my mouth before you come on anything else.”
She kisses down. Throat. Collarbones. Breasts — each one, in turn, both nipples, not fast, a long slow working of each that has me, after four minutes, actually sobbing, one tear running down my temple into my hair. Ribs. Belly. Hip. The inside of each thigh. The place just above my knee. She is deliberately avoiding the place she is going, deliberately teasing me into the far end of my patience, and by the time she finally settles between my thighs and pushes them open with her palms and puts her mouth on me I am —
I come almost immediately. On her mouth on the second stroke of her tongue. Hard. Crying. My hips coming up off the bed. My free hand flying down to her hair, gripping. My cuffed hand yanking against the tether, which holds, and she does not stop, she keeps going, she eats me through it, slow and steady and unhurried, and I am already coming again before the first one has finished, a second one stacking on the first, and I am sobbing, and her hand is flat on my belly, holding me down, keeping me from bucking her off, and she is humming against me.
I come a third time before she has been down there for five minutes. I am laughing now, crying and laughing, and she pulls back for a moment to look at me, her mouth wet, her eyes dark, and she says, soft, “One more before I come up. I want you exhausted. Yes?” “Yes. God. Yes.”
She goes back down. She is reading me — I understand, with the shock of a thing you relearn every time — the specific way she has learned to read me. She has my map. She has been updating my map for nineteen months. I come a fourth time with her fingers inside me and her mouth on my clit and her free hand reaching up to squeeze my breast, and this one is the loudest, a long broken wail that fills the room.
She kisses the inside of my thigh. The other one. She crawls up my body. She lies on top of me.
EVE
I lie on top of her with my full weight. Which is what she asked for. She asked to be pinned. I pin her — my thighs outside hers, my chest to her chest, my hands on either side of her head, my forehead against hers. She shudders under me. Her free hand comes up and slides into my hair.
“Eve. Inside me. Now. Please.”
I reach between us. I guide the strap to her. She is so wet I barely need the lubricant. I press in. Slow. An inch. Stop. Another. “More. More. Please.” I slide all the way in. She cries out — a soft, broken, wrecked sound, the sound of a woman who has been waiting for this for six hours, for six months, for six years, possibly for her entire adult life — and I hold still. I drop my forehead against hers.
“Darling. You married me.” “I know.” “I’m your wife.” “I know.” “I’m going to fuck you, Lila, on our wedding night, in our apartment, in our library, in our bed. I’m going to fuck you until you can’t count anymore.” “Please.”
I start to move. Slow at first. Long deep strokes. Bottoming out each time. Her free hand digs into my shoulder. Her cuffed hand grips the brass rail, fingers white. Her hips rise to meet mine. Her eyes on my face. “Look at me.” “I am.” “Don’t look away.” “I won’t.”
I speed up. Harder now. Each stroke firmer, angled to find the place I know. She starts the small ongoing oh, oh, oh, oh that she does when she is close, and she is — I can feel it, around the strap, the small rhythmic pulses starting — already close again, and I reach down, and I find her clit with my thumb, and I rub, matching my rhythm. “Come on me, Lila. Come on my cock. Come on your wife. Now.”
She comes. Hard — harder than any of the four downstairs — and she does not muffle it. She cries out, full-voice, into the bedroom, her whole body locking under me, her cuffed wrist yanking against the tether, her free hand buried in my hair, and I do not stop, I keep moving, I fuck her through it, slow but steady.
“Eve. Don’t stop. Keep going. Until — until you —” “Yes.”
I keep going. I am close — I have been close since I tied her to the bed — and I grind the base of the harness against myself and I keep my rhythm and I watch her face — wet, flushed, wrecked, watching me — and I come. With my forehead against hers. With her name in my mouth. With my hand gripping the brass rail next to her cuffed wrist. I come long and slow and deep, and she is watching every second of it. She whispers, under me, as I am still coming: “Yes. Yes. Yes. Eve. Yes.”
I collapse onto her. My full weight. She wraps her free arm around me. We stay like that for a long time. I am still inside her. She does not let me pull out. I do not want to pull out.
After a while she says, into my hair: “Eve. Untie me. I want to touch you.”
I reach up. I unbuckle the tether. Her wrist comes free. She wraps both arms around me. The leather cuff stays on. I notice it, with my cheek against her neck — the soft press of the cordovan at her wrist against the back of my shoulder. I do not ask her to take it off. She does not.
“Eve. I want to do that again. Later. Tonight. Multiple times, probably, tonight.” “Darling. You are insatiable.” “I am twenty-three. And I am — Eve — I am married to you.”
I kiss her hair. I pull out of her — slow, careful. She whimpers softly. I unbuckle the harness. I set it on the nightstand. I do not get up. I pull the quilt — my mother’s quilt — up over both of us.
LILA
Later — I do not know how much later, an hour, maybe — we get up. Eve pours the champagne. She brings the glasses and Delphine’s tether back to the bed, and she sets the glasses on the nightstand, and she folds the tether neatly and puts it in the drawer with the harness. I watch her do it. Naked. Silver hair loose. My pendant — her pendant, again tonight, once, hers — at her throat. She is the most beautiful thing.
She comes back to bed. She hands me a glass. We clink. “Mrs. Langford-Harper.” “Mrs. Langford-Harper.” “Eve. I cannot believe we are married. Eve. Read to me. Now.”
She reaches. She gets the Whitman — our paperback, the worn one. She props herself up against the headboard. I curl against her chest. Her free hand comes up and finds my hair. She reads.
I sing the body electric. The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself balks account, that of the female is perfect —
“Eve. You are not allowed to stop.” “I wasn’t going to. Keep reading.”
She keeps reading. She reads to me for — I do not know — half an hour. Her voice low and steady. The candle burns down at the nightstand. My mother’s quilt — no, Eve’s mother’s quilt, mine now also — is warm around us. Her fingers in my hair. My head on her chest. The leather cuff still on my left wrist. The rings on our fingers. The apartment quiet. The library below us, sleeping. Harlow, sleeping. The Whitman, in its case, downstairs, locked.
She closes the book. “Lila. Again? Slow?” “Slow. All night.” “I love you.” “I love you. Come here.”
In the morning I wake up first. It is just after six. The candle has burned out. The quilt is tangled at our feet. Eve is on her back, one arm thrown above her head, her mouth slightly open in sleep. The cuff is still on my left wrist, because I could not be persuaded, last night, to take it off. Her hair is silver on the pillow. My wedding ring is catching the first gray light at the window.
I lift myself onto one elbow. I look at her for a long time. I think: I am a married woman. I am twenty-three years old, and I am a married woman, and I have a key to this apartment, and I have a research fellowship at Simmons, and I have a fifty-two-year-old wife, and I am — somehow, impossibly, fully — home.
I kiss her forehead. She stirs. “Lila.” “Hi.” “What time is it.” “Six. Come back. Five minutes.” I curl against her. She pulls me in. Her arm is warm. My cheek is on her collarbone. Her heart is under my ear. I am — I notice — completely, absurdly, ridiculously happy.
At eleven-thirty we go downstairs. We unlock the library together. We walk up to the loft. The Whitman is in the case where we left it. The green silk ribbon is still tied to the handle. My mother’s hat, which Patricia has — as promised — collected last night before leaving, is gone from the corner, safely stored. The cream dress from last night is folded on the dresser upstairs. The navy dress is next to it. Our rings are on our fingers.
Eve takes my hand. “Dr. Langford.” “Dr. Langford.” “Turn the page.” I laugh. I turn the page. There is, of course, more. There is — always, forever, from today forward — more.
Thank you for reading. — Aurora North
If this one hit the right place for you, there are ninety-five thousand more words of Eve and Lila waiting in the full novel.
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