Butch Enough for Two — Bonus Chapter

An exclusive scene by Isla Wilde

This bonus chapter takes place after the events of Butch Enough for Two. It contains explicit sexual content and is intended for readers 18+.

Moving Day

The last box is labeled MISCELLANEOUS in Dani’s square, military-precise handwriting, and it weighs approximately four hundred pounds.

“What’s in this one?” Shaw grunts, hoisting it onto the kitchen counter. He’s been here since eight AM, hauling boxes up three flights because the building doesn’t have an elevator and because Dani called him and said “I’m moving” and he drove six hours from Austin without asking a single question.

“Books,” Dani says.

“You own one novel.”

“I own more now.” She glances at me. The look is private and warm and it means you did this—you filled my shelves the way you filled my apartment, one book at a time, until the barracks became a home.

Reese arrives at noon with champagne and opinions. She surveys the apartment—my apartment, now our apartment—with the critical eye of a woman who has been waiting for this development since approximately the second week of Dani’s security contract.

“The couch stays,” she announces.

“It was always staying,” I say.

“Her bookshelf goes by the window. The military history goes on top because nobody wants to see that at eye level. And for the love of god, please tell me you’re getting a dining table.”

“We eat standing at the counter,” Dani says.

Reese stares at both of us with the expression of a woman who is choosing her battles. “Champagne,” she says, and opens the bottle.

By four o’clock, the apartment is done. Shaw’s bookshelf is by the window (military history on top, per Reese’s orders). Dani’s clothes are in the closet—folded, organized, taking up exactly forty percent of the space because she measured. Her boots are by the door next to mine. Her photo of Shaw is on the fridge beside my photo of Dad. Her single novel is on the nightstand, next to my Neruda.

Shaw hugs Dani goodbye at the door. It’s the kind of hug that takes a long time—the kind between two people who’ve kept each other alive and are now watching each other learn to live. When he pulls back, his eyes are bright.

“You found your person,” he tells her.

“Yeah,” she says. “I did.”

He turns to me. Extends his hand. I take it, and he pulls me into a hug that smells like Texas heat and dog hair and the particular loyalty of a man who drove six hours because his best friend said I’m moving and he heard I’m happy.

“Take care of her,” he says into my ear.

“Already do.”

Reese leaves ten minutes later, champagne bottle empty, lipstick on both our cheeks. The door closes. The apartment goes quiet.

Dani and I stand in the living room of our apartment. The word is still new. Ours. The couch is ours. The kitchen counter where we eat cereal standing up is ours. The bed with the nice sheets is ours.

“So,” I say.

“So,” she says.

“Every room?”

The ghost-smile. Except it’s not a ghost anymore—it’s full, warm, and aimed at me with the specific intent of a woman who has been unpacking boxes all day while thinking about what happens when the boxes are done.

“Every room,” she confirms.

She starts in the kitchen.

Not where I expected—I expected the bedroom, the obvious choice, the place where the sheets are clean and the pillows are centered and Dani’s military precision has created a space designed for exactly this. But she walks to the kitchen counter—our counter, the one where we eat cereal shoulder to shoulder every morning—and lifts me onto it.

“This is where I first wanted to kiss you,” she says. “That morning. Cheerios. You were standing right here with coffee on your lip and I almost—”

I pull her in by the henley and kiss the rest of the sentence out of her mouth.

The counter is cold under my thighs and she is warm between my legs and her hands are already under my shirt, palms flat on my ribs, thumbs tracing the muscles along my sides. She kisses me deeply, thoroughly, with the focused attention she gives everything—patrols, log entries, the systematic dismantling of my composure.

My flannel goes first. Then my tank top. She pulls my sports bra over my head and puts her mouth on my breast and my back arches so hard I knock over the champagne glass Reese left on the counter. It shatters on the floor.

“Leave it,” Dani says against my skin.

“We’ll step on it—”

“Boots stay on. Leave it.”

The command sends a pulse straight between my legs. She unbuttons my jeans on the counter, slides her hand in, and finds me already soaked—I’ve been soaked since Shaw walked out the door and I realized we were alone in an apartment that belongs to both of us and every surface is fair game.

She works me on the kitchen counter with her mouth on my neck and her fingers inside me and the broken champagne glass on the floor and the afternoon sun coming through the window, and I come with my heels drumming against the cabinet doors and her name ricocheting off the kitchen walls.

Room one. Done.

The living room is mine.

I push her onto the couch—my couch, the deep, soft, mismatched-cushion couch that has held us through every stage of this relationship. First kisses. First fights. The night she held me while I cried about the toolbox. The morning I woke up with her arm across my waist and understood what it meant to be home.

“Sit,” I tell her. “Hands on the cushions. Don’t move them.”

Her eyes darken. She sits. Puts her hands on the cushions, palms down, fingers spread. Obedient. The obedience is still extraordinary—this woman who commands rooms, who holds wrists, who says not yet with the authority of a drill sergeant, sitting on my couch with her hands placed exactly where I told her and her breath already coming fast.

I kneel between her legs. Unbuckle her belt. Unbutton her pants. She lifts her hips so I can slide them down and the cooperation—the willingness, the trust—makes my chest ache every time.

I put my mouth on her and she moans—not quiet, not contained. She’s learned to be loud. I taught her that, in this apartment, in this bed, over weeks of patient demolition. She moans openly and her head drops back against the couch and her hands grip the cushions exactly where I placed them and she doesn’t move them because I told her not to and the obedience is its own kind of worship.

I take my time. She deserves time. She deserves the slow, focused, devastating attention that I give my best restorations—the kind where every stroke is intentional and every sound is catalogued and every micro-response is filed under do more of this.

She comes with her back arching off the couch and my name on her lips—both syllables, stretched, broken, given freely—and her hands finally leaving the cushions to find the back of my head, holding me against her while she shudders and gasps and makes sounds that the downstairs neighbors are definitely going to ask about.

Room two. Done.

The hallway is unplanned.

We’re heading for the bedroom—the logical next stop, the final room—when she pins me against the wall between the bathroom door and the bookshelf Shaw just installed. Her thigh presses between mine and her mouth is on my throat and her hand is in my hair, gripping, pulling my head back so she can access the full length of my neck.

“I thought we were going to the bedroom,” I gasp.

“Detour.”

She gets her hand in my jeans—I never re-buttoned them after the kitchen, which was either lazy or prescient—and fucks me against the wall with her thigh bracing her hand and her mouth on my ear whispering things that would make Reese’s champagne curdle.

“You’re so good,” she says. “You’re so wet for me. You’ve been ready all day, haven’t you? Every time Shaw handed me a box and I flexed—you were watching. I saw you watching.”

“I was—appreciating—the logistics—”

“You were staring at my arms.”

“I was staring at my arms.”

She curls her fingers inside me and I come against the hallway wall with a sound that rattles the bookshelf and sends one of Dani’s military history books tumbling to the floor.

Room three. Done. (The hallway counts.)

The bedroom is where we slow down.

Not because we’re tired—though we are, in the best way, the way you’re tired after a day of building something. We slow down because this room matters. This is the room where she slept the whole night for the first time. Where I cried when she told me I was beautiful. Where we negotiated desire and surrender and came out the other side as two people who trust each other completely.

I undress her the way she undressed me that first night in this room. Slowly. Each piece set aside with care—boots first, then belt, then shirt. I kiss the scar below her ribs. I kiss the scar on her eyebrow. I kiss the bruise that’s almost faded from the truck mirror, the last physical evidence of the night she caught a thief and got caught by love in the same hour.

She undresses me with the same reverence. Her hands trace my tattoo—gears becoming flowers, the mechanical and the beautiful, the thing that told her who I was before I ever said a word.

We lie together on the nice sheets. Skin on skin. Unhurried.

“I want everything tonight,” I say.

“Define everything.”

“You on top. Then me. Then you again. I want to switch until we can’t remember who started and who finished. I want us to be so tangled that there’s no dominant and no submissive. Just us.”

“Just us,” she echoes. And she pulls me on top of her and we begin.

It’s everything I asked for. She starts—mouth on my chest, hands on my hips, guiding me into a slow grind against her thigh that builds heat like a banked furnace. Then I take over—pushing her onto her back, pinning her good wrist above her head, sliding down her body and making her come with my mouth while she whispers my name like a prayer she’s finally allowed to say out loud.

Then she flips me. Gets me on my stomach—the position she knows I crave, the one where I can’t see and can only feel, where trust is the only option and the trust is absolute. She enters me from behind with two fingers and her thumb on my clit and her mouth against my ear, narrating: You’re so tight. You feel incredible. This is ours now. This bed. This room. This life. Ours.

I come face-down in the pillow, biting the case, my hand reaching back to grip her hip and hold her inside me while the wave breaks and breaks and breaks.

Then I roll her. On her back. Spread her legs. Enter her with two fingers and use my other hand to grip her jaw—gently, firmly, turning her face toward me so she can’t hide.

“Look at me,” I say. “Stay with me.”

She looks. She stays. Her eyes are open and wet and her mouth is open and her body is open and I fuck her with everything I have—every hour of mechanical knowledge, every instinct about rhythm and pressure and the resonant frequency of the woman I love—and she comes with her eyes on mine and tears on her cheeks and a sound that fills the bedroom and the apartment and the building and the city and every empty space I ever thought couldn’t be filled.

Afterward.

The sheets are ruined. The pillowcase has teeth marks. There’s a champagne glass in pieces on the kitchen floor and a military history book on the hallway carpet and the neighbors are never going to make eye contact with us again.

We’re in bed. Tangled. Her leg over mine, my arm under her neck, our breathing synchronized in the way that happens when two bodies have been moving together for hours and have forgotten how to move apart.

“Every room,” I say.

“Every room,” she confirms.

“We didn’t do the bathroom.”

“That’s tomorrow.”

I laugh. She laughs. The sound braids together in the dark room—my rough bark and her rare, earned warmth—and settles over us like the crocheted blanket that’s somewhere on the floor.

“Dani.”

“Yeah.”

“Welcome home.”

She presses her lips to my temple. Holds. The gesture is small and it means everything—it means I’m here, I’m staying, I said yes and I meant it and every box I carried up three flights today was a brick in a foundation I intend to stand on for the rest of my life.

“Home,” she says. Like she’s trying the word on. Like it fits. Like it’s the first time she’s said it and meant a person instead of a place.

The bodega sign hums blue-green through the window. The plant on the fire escape rustles in the autumn wind. On the nightstand, her novel sits next to my Neruda, and the spines touch, and the books hold each other up.

Everything important is right here.

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