Anniversary Storm

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Bed & Breakfast & Benefits
by Aurora North

One year to the day.

I know because Jax has been acting strange since breakfast—strange for Jax, which means approximately two percent more fidgety than her normal state of granite-solid composure. She dropped an egg this morning. Jax Monroe does not drop eggs. She dropped an egg, looked at the yolk on the floor, and said “huh” in a voice that told me absolutely nothing and everything.

She’s also been disappearing. Short trips to the workshop that don’t result in any audible hammering. A twenty-minute drive to town that produced no groceries. Two phone calls she took outside, on the porch, walking to the far end where the reception is bad.

By seven p.m., the last guests have settled into their rooms. The house is quiet. I’m in the kitchen, making tea, wearing Jax’s flannel—our flannel—when the power goes out.

Not a flicker. A full, clean, instantaneous blackout. The generator doesn’t kick on. I count to fifteen. Twenty. Thirty. No generator.

“Jax?” I call. No answer.

Then I see it—a faint, warm glow from the sitting room. Candlelight.

The room is full of candles. Every surface—the mantel, the side tables, the windowsills, the bookshelves—covered in small glass votives, each one lit. The room glows like the inside of a lantern.

And on the floor, in front of the fireplace, exactly where we sat during the storm one year ago tonight: a bottle of wine. Two glasses. A blanket.

“Happy anniversary.”

Jax is in the hallway behind me, wearing the chambray shirt I told her makes her eyes look dark. Hair freshly washed. No cap, no sawdust. She planned this.

“You killed the power,” I say.

“I killed the breakers. Guests have hot water—I’m not a monster. But the lights are off.”

“Get on the floor, Monroe.”

“Yes ma’am.”

We sit on the floor, backs against the couch. The wine is good—a pinot noir from the vineyard in the next valley.

“You planned this,” I say, leaning into her shoulder.

“Since July. I wanted you to know that I remember. The date. What it meant. How scared I was.”

“What were you thinking?” I ask. “That night. Right before the shutter.”

“I was thinking that I was about to kiss a woman who was going to leave, and that it was going to destroy me, and that I was going to do it anyway because the not-doing-it was already destroying me worse.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m thinking that the candles cost forty-seven dollars because Rosa’s daughter makes them and I bought every one she had, and I want to kiss you so badly that my hands are shaking.”

She takes my hand and presses it flat against her chest. Her heart is hammering.

“My hands aren’t. The rest of me is.”

I kiss her. Not tentative. This is the kiss of a woman who has spent a year learning exactly what she wants. She makes the sound—the low hum—and her hands come to my waist and pull.

I straddle her on the floor, in the candlelight. She unbuttons the flannel—her fingers working the buttons of her own shirt on my body. The jeans go. The underwear goes. I’m naked in her lap on a blanket on a floor ringed with forty-seven dollars’ worth of handmade candles, and she’s still fully dressed.

I trace the compass rose. Our ritual. North, south, east, west. Home.

“I love you,” I say.

“I love you too. Now get on your back.”

“Romantic.”

“The romance budget is spent. This is the part where I fuck you on our floor.”

I laugh and lie back on the blanket. She strips and kneels over me in the candlelight—naked, strong, the shadows pooling in the hollows of her collarbones—and her expression is the one that says, in the language of structures and things that hold: you are the most important thing I’ve ever built.

She lies down on top of me. The full length of her—weight, warmth, skin. I wrap my legs around her waist and she groans against my throat.

She doesn’t tease tonight. She goes straight for what she wants. She spreads me open and puts her tongue on me, and the first stroke is flat and wide and devastating. I arch off the floor, hands fisting the blanket.

She eats me like she’s proving a point—exactly what a year of practice produces. She knows every response. The quick, tight circles that make me writhe. The long slow strokes that make me moan. The combination of her tongue and two fingers curling inside me that makes me grab the leg of the couch and hold on.

“Jax—god—right there—right there—”

She hums against me and adds a third finger and I shatter. The orgasm hits like the storm that started everything—sudden, enormous, tearing through my body in waves. She holds my hips down and works me through it, her mouth relentless, drawing out every aftershock.

She brings me to the edge again without warning—a second peak, quick and sharp. I cry out and come around her fingers with the candlelight dancing red behind my eyelids.

She pulls me into her chest. The spoon. The position we sleep in every night.

Her hand slides between my thighs from behind. “Tell me about the first time,” she says against my ear. “The first time you thought about me.”

“The breakfast. The tray. When you put your hand on my hip and said bend your knees, I’ve got it.”

“I know.”

“What do you mean, you know?”

“The walls are thin, Claire.” She bites my earlobe. “I heard you.”

“You heard me the first—”

“I heard everything. Every night. I lay on my side of the wall and thought about nothing else for hours.”

She presses her fingers deeper. “Come for me. One more time. On our floor.”

I come. A slow, deep dissolution that starts where her fingers are and spreads outward through everything. I press my face into the blanket and feel her hold me through it, steady as the foundation underneath us.

When I can move, I turn in her arms. “My turn.”

I push her onto her back. She puts her arms above her head. “Do what you want with me.”

I kiss the compass rose. Every point. I kiss down her stomach, over the softness at her waist. I settle between her thighs. She opens for me, her hand coming to my hair.

I put my mouth on her and she makes the sound. The quiet one. The hum of a structure under load. The hum means she’s letting go. The hum means the walls are down.

“Eyes open,” I say. “Stay with me.”

She comes looking at me. Quietly—she always comes quietly—with her eyes on mine and her hips rising off the floor in a slow, shaking arc.

I hold her through it. I hold her after.

We lie on the blanket in the candlelight, tangled, breathing. The room smells like beeswax and cedar and sex and salt air.

“Thank you,” she says. “For staying.”

“Thank you for letting me.”

“Thank you for burning the toast every morning so I always feel needed.”

“I don’t burn it on purpose.”

“You burn it on purpose.”

“I burn it on purpose.”

She laughs against my throat. The candles flicker. The house settles around us—held together by old wood and new love and the stubborn, daily miracle of two women who chose to stay.

“Same time next year?” she asks.

“Same time every year.”

“I’ll buy more candles.”

“Buy twice as many. We’re not going anywhere.”

The last candle burns down. We go upstairs to our room—the one room, the demolished wall, the open space—and we sleep the way we’ve slept for a year: tangled, close, breathing in time, with the ocean outside and the lighthouse beam sweeping the water and the vacancy sign dark because this house is full.

Full of us. Full of coffee and paint and pancakes and lavender and the specific, irreplaceable sound of a woman humming while she cooks in a kitchen that smells like home.

One year.

The first of many.

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