All’s Fair in Love and Lawnmowers — Bonus Chapter

The Second Porch Chair
by Blair Lennox

⚠️ Spoiler warning: This scene takes place after the epilogue. Read the book first.

The last box was labeled SLOANE — TOOLS (DO NOT DROP) in handwriting so precise it could have been printed, and I carried it up the porch steps of the Bell house — my house, our house — and set it down next to the reading chair that now lived in our bedroom.

She’s here. She actually lives here.

The thought kept arriving like a wave I couldn’t outswim. I’d had it carrying the first box up the stairs at eight in the morning. I’d had it watching Sloane measure the bedroom closet for a second rod with the focused intensity of a woman solving a structural engineering problem. I’d had it at noon when she’d eaten a sandwich at the kitchen counter — standing, the way she always ate at her cottage, because she’d never owned a kitchen table — and I’d pulled out a chair and said, “We have chairs now,” and she’d looked at the chair like it was a concept she’d need time to integrate.

Sloane was in the kitchen, unpacking her knives.

Not metaphorical knives. Actual kitchen knives — a set she’d had for fifteen years, each one sharpened and maintained with the same obsessive care she brought to her pruning shears. She was laying them out on the counter in order of size, blade side facing the wall, handles aligned to the millimeter.

The domesticity of the image — Sloane Hart in my kitchen, arranging her knives in my knife block, barefoot on my floor — made something in my chest expand until it pressed against my ribs and demanded to be felt.

“That’s the last box,” I said, leaning against the doorframe.

She looked up. Her hair was down. She was wearing the gray henley I’d stolen and returned and stolen again, and boxer briefs, and nothing else. The evening light through the kitchen window caught every line of her — the vine tattoo dark on her forearm, the moth pale on her inner wrist, the lean muscle of her shoulders and arms, the flat stomach above the low waistband.

Four months of loving this woman and I still hadn’t finished looking at her. She was the kind of beautiful that revealed new details the longer you studied it — the way a garden reveals new blooms when you stop walking and start seeing.

“You live here now,” I said.

“I live here now.”

“Our knife block. Our bedroom. Our porch with two chairs.” I grinned. “So. We should probably christen the house.”

“We’ve had sex in this house as visitors. You didn’t live here. Now you live here, and every surface in this building needs to know it.”

“Every. Surface.”

“I’m an ambitious woman. It’s one of the things you love about me.”

“You just insulted me and complimented me in the same sentence. That’s foreplay in our household.”

She kissed me. Not softly. This was a claim. Her mouth found mine and the kiss went deep immediately — her tongue sliding against mine, her hands finding my hips, pulling me against her. Her hands found the hem of my t-shirt and pulled it over my head. I reached for her henley and pulled it off and there she was — bare from the waist up, the tattoos and the muscle and the sun-browned skin, standing in our kitchen in the evening light.

“Kitchen first,” I said against her mouth. “For tradition.”

She lifted me onto the counter. Hands under my thighs, the hoist effortless. I wrapped my legs around her waist and pulled her in until the hard plane of her stomach pressed against the heat between my thighs.

“I love you,” I said. “You live here. Your knives are in our knife block and your chair is in our bedroom and I am never, ever getting over any of it.”

Her mouth found my collarbone. Opened. Her teeth grazed the skin — not hard enough to mark, just hard enough to make my spine arch. “I also know how to make you stop talking.”

“Prove it.”

Her mouth moved down my chest. She took my nipple into her mouth, and the feeling — warm, wet, the deliberate pressure of her tongue circling the peak — sent a bolt of heat straight to my core. I arched into her. She hummed approval against my skin and the vibration made me whimper.

She moved to the other breast. Same attention. Same precision. Like she was cataloging my responses the way she cataloged plant species — by reaction, by preference, by the specific combination of pressure and pace that produced the best results.

“Lift,” she said — the same command she used in the garden, the same low voice — and I lifted, and she pulled my shorts and underwear off in one smooth motion that left me bare on the kitchen counter with my legs open and her standing between them.

She looked at me. The gray eyes moving down my body with a hunger she’d stopped trying to disguise and a tenderness she’d stopped being afraid of.

“You’re beautiful,” she said. The way she said the Maiden’s Blush is blooming — as a fact observed, verified, worth stating.

She sank to her knees.

The sight of Sloane Hart on her knees on our kitchen floor — gray eyes looking up at me from between my bare thighs, her hands gripping my hips, her mouth an inch from where I needed it — was a religious experience I hadn’t known I was eligible for.

“Welcome home,” she said, and put her mouth on me.

I stopped talking.

She was thorough. She didn’t rush. She kissed the inside of my thigh first — left, then right. Then the crease where thigh met hip — a spot she’d discovered in month two that made me gasp every time, and she exploited it with the clinical focus of a woman who had identified a growth pattern and was determined to cultivate maximum response.

When her tongue finally touched my center, I gripped the edge of the counter hard enough that my knuckles went white. She started slow — broad, flat strokes that covered everything, building the base layer the way she built a garden bed: foundation first, detail later.

She gripped my thighs harder. Held me still. Then narrowed her focus — her tongue finding the bundle of nerves at the top and circling it with a precision that made my vision blur. Slow circles. Consistent pressure. The technique that said I will do this for exactly as long as it takes and not one second less.

I was making sounds I couldn’t control. My hand found the back of her head and I pulled, and she groaned against me, and the groan vibrated directly against my clit and my back arched off the counter.

“Right there,” I gasped. “Don’t change anything —”

Then she slid two fingers inside me. Slow. Deliberate. Her fingers curled, finding the spot she’d mapped weeks ago, and she pressed it while her tongue continued its devastating circles, and the dual sensation was more than I could process.

“Good,” she murmured against me, and the word — that word — hitting me like a physical force. The word that had been rewiring my nervous system since a garden path in week one.

I came. Hard. Every muscle clenching and then releasing, my thighs clamping around her head and my hands pulling her hair and the sound I made filling the kitchen of the house where my grandmother had made lemon tea for forty years.

Sloane held me through it. Eased me down the way she eased a stressed plant — gradually, with care, removing pressure only when the system stabilized.

She stood. Wiped her chin. Looked at me with quiet satisfaction.

“You stopped talking,” she said.

“You are unbearably good at that. Nobody should be that good at anything.”

“Twenty years of patience-based skill development.”

“You did not just compare going down on me to gardening.”

“Attention to the specific needs of the individual specimen. Consistent care. Responsive technique.”

“You’re the entire garden.”

I grabbed her face and kissed her. Hard. Tasting myself on her mouth.

“Living room,” I said against her lips. “Your turn.”