The Fence Between Us

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Good Fences Make Hot Neighbors
by Blair Lennox

⚠️ Spoiler warning: This scene takes place three months after the epilogue of Good Fences Make Hot Neighbors. Read the book first for maximum impact. This scene is explicit, graphic, and significantly hotter than the main book. You have been warned.

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The gate had been finished for three months, and I still hadn’t gotten used to the sound it made.

Not the latch — the latch was silent, oiled bronze, the hardware I’d selected from the specialty supplier in Ithaca because I wanted every mechanical element of the boundary between our yards to function with the same precision Tavi brought to everything she built. The sound I couldn’t get used to was the creak of the hinges when she opened it from her side at dusk. The particular frequency of cedar swinging on iron that meant Tavi was crossing into my yard, and the evening was about to improve significantly.

July. The Finger Lakes in full summer. My garden was ridiculous — overgrown with intent, the hostas obscene, the hydrangeas performing at a level that would have embarrassed the Chelsea Flower Show. I’d been watering in my silk robe because old habits die beautifully, and because the robe was the pewter one Tavi had first seen me in the morning she’d returned my package and told me I needed a better curtain. The look on her face when I wore it had not diminished with familiarity. If anything, it had sharpened — from initial appreciation to the specific, heated attention of a woman who knew exactly what was underneath the silk and was deciding how quickly she wanted to get there.

The gate creaked. I didn’t turn around.

I kept watering. Slowly. Deliberately. The robe untied at the waist because the evening was warm and because I was forty-eight years old and had spent the last fourteen months learning that desire was not something you performed for other people’s comfort. It was something you wore like a robe — loosely, openly, with the full knowledge that the person watching you was welcome to pull the cord.

“You’re watering the hostas again,” Tavi said from behind me. Her voice was low and amused and roughly six feet closer than I’d expected, which meant she’d crossed the yard without making a sound, which meant she’d been watching me before she announced herself, which meant —

“The hostas need water.”

“The hostas have been watered three times this week. The hostas are writing you a cease-and-desist. You’re wearing the robe.”

“That robe is not a domestic activity. That robe is a provocation. That robe is a calculated assault on my cardiovascular system, and you know it, because you time your garden watering to coincide with my end-of-day site cleanup, and you have been doing this since before we started sleeping together.”

“You are the worst liar in the Finger Lakes region.”

I turned.

She was standing inside my gate wearing the tool belt. The leather was dark with use now, softened by sweat and handling, the tools arranged with the meticulous care of a woman who treated her equipment the way I treated a bride’s emergency kit.

She’d showered at some point — her hair was damp, the curls tighter than usual, and she smelled like sandalwood instead of sawdust. But she’d put the belt back on. Deliberately. Over clean black jeans and a white tank top that showed every line of her shoulders and every vine of the wisteria tattoo.

She’d put the belt back on for me.

“Come here,” I said.

“I’m admiring the hostas.”

“The hostas are drowning. Come here.”

I set the hose down. Put both hands on the tool belt. Felt the warm leather under my palms and the cool metal of the buckle against my fingertips and the almost imperceptible hitch in Tavi’s breathing when I pressed my thumbs against the leather just above her hip bones.

“I want you,” I said. “Here. Against this fence. The one you built.”

“The point of this fence is that you constructed it at exactly the height where I can lean against it comfortably while you kneel in front of me, and I have been thinking about that height differential for three months.”

“You measured the fence,” she said. Her voice had dropped half a register.

“The top rail hits my lower back at the fourth lumbar vertebra. Perfect leaning height. Your knees would be on the grass, which is soft because I’ve been overwatering it since May for reasons I trust are now apparent.”

“You’ve been overwatering the grass for sex logistics?”

“I’ve been cultivating a comfortable kneeling surface adjacent to the structure my girlfriend built with her own hands. Yes.”

“A planner. I plan things. This is the most well-planned outdoor sexual encounter in Hawthorn Row history. You’re welcome.”

She kissed me. Not gently. I unbuckled the belt. Slowly. The prong slid free. The leather loosened. I pulled the belt through the loops one at a time, feeling each tug, each release, each inch of leather sliding through denim while Tavi’s breath caught and her hands tightened on my waist.

The belt came free. Heavy in my hands. I set it on the garden bench with the care its contents deserved.

She turned me. Pressed my back against the cedar planks. The wood was warm from the day’s sun, radiating July heat through the silk. The top rail hit exactly where I’d calculated.

Tavi knelt. On the grass I’d been cultivating.

“What do you want, Sabine?”

“Your mouth. The robe stays on.”

She parted the silk. Her rough hands spread the robe open and settled on my inner thighs. The contrast was devastating: rough palms against the softest skin I possessed.

She leaned forward. Pressed her mouth to my hip bone. Then lower. Her lips tracing the line slowly, her breath hot against skin that was already flushed and anticipating.

“Tavi.”

“Patience.”

“I have been patient for three months.”

“If you don’t put your mouth on me in the next —”

She put her mouth on me.

I gripped the top rail behind me with both hands. My fingers found the grain pattern and held on while Tavi’s tongue found me with the devastating accuracy of a woman who had spent fourteen months learning my body and had long since stopped needing directions.

The first stroke was long. Slow. A flat, broad drag from entrance to clit that made my knees buckle and my head tip back until I was looking at the sky through the maple branches — the maple that had destroyed the original fence, the tree that had started everything.

She licked me slow. Tasting. Savoring. Each stroke a little different. Varying the pressure. Testing angles. Circling my clit with the pointed tip of her tongue and then flattening out again and I could feel every variation registering in my nervous system like a seismograph recording tremors.

The cedar creaked behind me. She sealed her mouth over my clit and sucked gently while her tongue continued its precise, devastating rhythm. My grip on the rail went white-knuckled.

“The fence,” I gasped.

“The fence is fine. I built it.”

“I’m going to break your fence.”

“Then I’ll build another one.” She slid two fingers inside me without pausing her mouth, and the dual sensation — her tongue on my clit, her fingers curling against the front wall, the warm summer air on my bare chest — buckled my architecture completely.

I looked down. Tavi on her knees in my garden. Her dark curls catching the last golden light. Her mouth working between my thighs, wet and glistening, her chin slick with me. Her eyes — open, looking up at me, hazel-green darkened to something near black — watching my face with the focused attention she brought to every restoration.

“Octavia.” Her full name. The one I only used when I was emotionally exposed or about to come. Both applied. “Octavia, I’m —”

She curled her fingers harder. Pressed her tongue flat against my clit. Held both — steady, patient, unmovable — and I came against the fence she’d built.

Loud. The specific sound Tavi had told me was her favorite — the low, unmanaged syllable from the room I hadn’t known existed until she opened it fourteen months ago in a mudroom that smelled like rain and cardamom.

Tavi stayed with me through the aftershocks. Mouth gentle now, fingers still, her forehead pressed against my stomach. She kissed my inner thigh. My hip. The stretch marks she’d told me once were her favorite landscape feature because they proved a body had been lived in.

She rose. Kissed my mouth. I tasted myself on her tongue — the specific, intimate flavor that I’d once been self-conscious about and now associated with Tavi’s satisfaction, because the first thing she’d ever said after going down on me was you taste like someone I want to build a life with, and I’d cried, and she’d held me, and we’d never spoken about the crying but we both knew what it meant.

“Your turn,” I said against her mouth.

“There.” I pointed to the garden bench. “Sit.”

She sat. The tool belt lay beside her, the tape measure dangling from its clip. She leaned back, spread her knees, and looked at me with an expression that combined absolute trust with absolute want.

I knelt between her legs. The grass was perfect. I was a forty-eight-year-old bisexual woman kneeling in her garden in a designer robe, about to go down on her girlfriend on a bench next to a tool belt, and the only audience was the stars coming out.

I unbuttoned her jeans. Hooked my fingers into her waistband and pulled them down her thighs.

She was wet. The slick evidence of a woman who had been watching me water my garden in a silk robe and who had been aroused since before she opened the gate.

I pressed my mouth to her inner thigh. Kissed higher. Slower. Taking my time because I’d spent twelve months learning that Tavi Bell became quietly, devastatingly undone when someone paid her the kind of unhurried attention she gave to everyone else but rarely received herself.

“Sabine.” My name in her mouth. The version that came apart at the seams. “Please.”

I put my mouth on her.

She tasted like want. Warm and salt-sweet and complex. I licked her the way she’d licked me — long, slow, covering the full terrain, paying attention to every response.

Her hands found my hair. My silver-streaked hair, the feature she’d first noticed as a sign of my age and now gripped like a lifeline. She fisted her fingers in the strands and pulled while I circled her clit with my tongue and found the rhythm that made her thighs shake.

I slid two fingers inside her. She was tight and hot and her body clenched around me immediately. I curled against the front wall and stroked and her breath came in sharp, staccato bursts that I’d learned to read the way she read wood grain.

The tape measure. Still clipped to the tool belt on the bench beside her. As her hips rocked, her thigh brushed the belt, and the tape measure began to clink against the bench slats. Rhythmically. In time with her movements.

Clink. Clink. Clink.

“The tape measure is making editorial comments,” I said against her.

“Don’t you dare stop to discuss the tape measure.”

“I’m not stopping. I’m noting that even your tools provide performance feedback. This is very on-brand for you.”

“Sabine. Mouth. Now. Please.”

I sealed my lips around her clit and sucked and she came. Hard. Her hands fisted in my hair, her thighs clamping around my head, and the tape measure clattering off the belt entirely, landing in the grass with a soft thud that coincided perfectly with the peak of her orgasm.

I started laughing. She started laughing. The laughter came from the deep, unselfconscious, full-body place that only existed because we had built a relationship where joy and sex and absurdity could coexist without any of them diminishing the others.

“The tape measure has opinions.”

“The tape measure needs to learn boundaries.”

“The difference is that you are a menace and I love you.”

I climbed up from my knees. She pulled me into her lap on the bench. We kissed. Slow and deep and tasting like each other.

“Inside,” she murmured against my mouth. “I want you in a bed.”

“I just engineered the most elaborate outdoor sex venue in central New York and you want to go inside?”

“I want round two on a mattress where the tape measure can’t judge us.”

“Mine. The shelf needs a stress test.”

“The shelf has been stress-tested extensively.”

“Then it needs a quality-assurance follow-up. I’m a thorough contractor.”

She stood. Lifted me off the bench, my legs still wrapped around her waist, my robe trailing behind us. She carried me through the gate and across her yard and up her porch steps.

“You’re going to throw your back out.”

“I carry twelve-foot beams for a living. You weigh less than a beam.”

“You’re more structurally complex than a beam. And significantly more rewarding to handle.”

Into the bedroom where the built-in shelves held my books and the mirror reflected two women who had stopped hiding and started building.

“Lose the robe,” she said.

“Outside it could stay on. Inside I want all of you. Every single inch.”

I slid the pewter silk off my shoulders and lay naked on her bed, silver hair spread across her pillow, my body exposed to the warm lamplight and the steady gaze of a woman who looked at me the way she looked at a building she’d saved — with reverence and expertise and the particular hunger of someone who understood exactly what she was holding.

What followed was not the urgent, fence-braced intensity of the garden. This was the other kind. The slow kind. The kind where she settled over me and kissed me everywhere — mouth, throat, collarbone, breasts, the scar beneath my navel, the silver stretch marks on my inner thighs — and I lost track of which orgasm was which because the distinction between being touched and being worshipped dissolved somewhere around the second time she slid her fingers inside me and said I love this body, I love how it responds, I love the sounds you make when you stop thinking.

When I returned the attention — my mouth on her, her hands in my hair, the shelf above us rattling gently against the wall the way it always did when we were enthusiastic enough to test its joinery — she came with her face pressed into the pillow and my name muffled against the cotton, and afterward she rolled me onto my back and fit herself against me, chest to chest, and we breathed together in the dark while the open window brought in the scent of the garden I’d overwatered and the cedar fence I’d measured and the particular sweetness of a July night in the Finger Lakes.

“The fence is the right height,” she said eventually.

“I told you.”

“I prefer the term intimate al fresco event coordination.”

“You’re a menace in a silk robe.”

“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”

She traced the silver at my temple with one calloused finger. “I love you, Sabine.”

“I love you too.”

“I love that you measured the fence for sex.”

“I love that you built it to exactly the right height without knowing I’d measure it for sex.”

“Maybe I knew.”

“Did you?”

“I’m a carpenter. I always know what a structure can hold.”

Through the window, I could see the gate standing open. The garden lights casting warm pools across both yards. The fence, solid and dark, running between our properties — not a wall between us but the boundary we’d chosen, the structure we’d built together.

The tape measure was still in the grass. I’d retrieve it in the morning.

Or maybe I’d leave it there. As evidence. As a monument. As a very small, very specific reminder that the good fence that made us the hottest neighbors on Hawthorn Row had been measured for sex by a wedding planner in a silk robe, built by a carpenter who always knew what a structure could hold, and tested — rigorously, repeatedly, and with considerable enthusiasm — by two women who had stopped hiding behind curtains and started living on both sides of the gate.

The fence held.

It always held.

She’d built it that way.

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