Amended Terms
An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Her Mother’s Type
by Blair Lennox
This bonus scene contains spoilers for Her Mother’s Type. It takes place one year after the courtyard, just after the Epilogue. Extremely explicit. 18+ only.
Amended Terms
ROWAN
The jasmine opened on the anniversary. I’d like to say I planned that, but you can’t plan jasmine. You can only tie it to a post and wait.
It was the last Monday in May. One year to the day since I’d lifted the latch on Gale Street with a clipboard under my arm and a truck at the curb that wouldn’t take third. I’d worked the fifth of Noor’s courtyards until four, a house on Legare Street with a magnolia somebody had tried to kill with a weed-whacker, and I’d driven out to Heron Creek with the windows down and the radio off, through all three gears, past the church sign that said GOD IS STILL SPEAKING and the dead oak with her mailbox nailed to it.
The whole porch post was white. Top to bottom, starred with it, the green twine buried somewhere under the leaves. The smell met me at the truck door. It came in through the cab like a hand on the back of my neck.
Celia was on the porch steps in my gray work shirt and a pair of linen trousers, barefoot, her glasses on her nose and a single sheet of paper face down on the boards beside her. Her watch was on the porch rail. Face down.
“You’re late,” she said.
“I’m on time.”
“You’re on time for a client. You’re four minutes late for me.” She picked up the paper and held it out without standing. “Before you come up the steps. I’ve drafted terms.”
Of course she had.
AMENDED TERMS. Year Two.
1. The original six rules are retired with honors. Rule four is retained, as Rowan continues to drive a truck I am not allowed to repair and I continue to want to repair it.
2. June knows where I am. June knows where Rowan is. June has opinions about both and is entitled to them.
3. Two homes. Two keys. One mattress on Front Street with a spring in it, which is not to be replaced under any circumstances, as it has historical significance.
4. The floor has been scheduled and held. It may be scheduled again.
5. Rowan will never again be told she is easy to have around. She is a great deal of trouble. I would like more of it.
6. Either party may stop. No punishment.
7. Once a year, on the anniversary of the invoice, Rowan will not be permitted to help.
I read it twice standing in the sandy yard with the jasmine going and the frogs starting up down at the creek.
“Seven,” I said.
“Seven,” Celia agreed.
“Not permitted to help with what?”
“Anything.” She took her glasses off and folded them and set them on the step beside her. “You’ve been on your feet since five. You’ve told four men and a historical commission where to put things. You’ve made decisions all day for people who are paying you to make them. Tonight you don’t make one. Not a single one. I’ve made them all, and I’ve written them down, and they’re in the house.”
“In the house.”
“Under the daybed. With the bag.” She looked at me over the rims of the glasses she wasn’t wearing, the way she still does when she forgets she’s taken them off. “Do you object?”
I looked at the paper. I looked at the red pencil sticking out of my own shirt pocket, which I’d been using all day on a site plan.
I took it out.
“I’m amending,” I said.
“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.”
I put the page on the hood of the truck and wrote under number seven, in block capitals, the way I write everything that matters.
8. AND ONCE A YEAR, CELIA GETS TOLD NO.
I walked it up the steps and handed it back to her. She read it. She read it for a good deal longer than eight words take.
“Accepted,” she said, very quietly. “In full.”
She’d made the daybed up. That was the first thing I noticed. Somebody had dragged it to the far end of the screened porch, where the floor was flat and the creek was right there through the mesh, and put clean sheets on the old ticking and a pillow at the iron end. The sun was going down copper behind the marsh. The heron was in its spot.
On the little table beside the daybed, laid out square to the edge in a row, three things.
A roll of green garden twine.
A bottle of the expensive lube.
And a small black box with a ribbon round it that I had never seen before in my life.
“Celia.”
“Spreadsheet,” she said, behind me. “Fourteen reviews. The forum had a great deal to say. I’ve learned that women of a certain age are very forthcoming once you ask the right question.” She came round in front of me and started on my shirt buttons, unhurried, from the top. “Hands at your sides.”
I put my hands at my sides.
She undressed me the way she’s done it since the first night in her bedroom on Gale Street. Every piece. Folded on the chair. Boots unlaced kneeling, my hand on her shoulder for balance, which she allowed because I didn’t ask for it. When I was bare she stood back and looked at me with the last of the light coming through the screen, and she took her time about it, and I stood there with my hands at my sides and did nothing at all.
It’s still the hardest thing I know how to do. It gets a little easier every time. Not much.
“Lie down,” she said. “On your back. Arms up.”
I lay down. The sheets were cool. I put my arms up over my head and my hands found the iron rails of the headboard, the green paint flaking under my palms.
She picked up the twine.
“I’m going to tie your wrists to this bed,” Celia said. “With the same twine you used on my key. I’ve practiced the knot. It’s a slip knot. You’ll know it, because you taught it to me in August when I was staking dahlias badly.” She sat down on the edge of the daybed and looped the first length round my right wrist, and round the iron, and showed me the tail. “You pull this, it lets go. You can pull it any time. That’s rule six. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me if you want me to stop.”
“I don’t want you to stop.”
“I know you don’t. Tell me anyway, if you do.” She tied the left. It wasn’t tight. It didn’t have to be. Green twine round my wrists and the paint under my knuckles and her face above me, serious, checking each knot with one fingertip the way she checks a column she’s already added twice.
Then she sat back and looked at me.
I was tied to a bed on a porch at the edge of the marsh with my arms over my head and nothing on, and there was not one thing in the world I was responsible for.
I felt it go out of me. All of it. Legare Street and the magnolia and the man from the commission and the invoices on my drafting table and the noise in my chest that never quite shuts off. It went out through the screen into the creek and I lay there and breathed.
“There,” Celia said softly. “There you are.”
She started at my mouth. She kissed me for a long time, the way she likes to, with nothing else, bent over me on the edge of the daybed with one hand flat on my sternum, until I forgot I’d ever been in a hurry about anything.
Then she went down.
She knows me now. That’s the thing nobody tells you about a year. She doesn’t have to look for anything. She went to my throat and stayed there, and to my breasts, slow, her mouth on one and her fingers on the other, until I was pulling at the twine without meaning to, and she lifted her head and looked at my wrists and then at my face, and I stopped.
“Good,” she said, and went back.
She went down my stomach. She kissed the place where the tan stops. She pushed my knees apart with both hands and settled between them, and she put her glasses back on.
“I’d like to see what I’m doing,” she said, and I laughed out loud, and then I didn’t, because she’d put her tongue on me.
She licked me slow. Flat and slow and steady, exactly the way she knows, and she didn’t vary it, and she didn’t hurry it. I was wet before she touched me. I’d been wet since the hood of the truck. She hummed against me, pleased, and I felt it go up through me like a current, and I pulled at the twine, and the iron creaked, and the frogs went on and on down at the creek.
It built fast. It always does the first time with her mouth. In about three minutes I was right there, right at the edge, my heels digging into the ticking and my hips lifting into her face and my breath coming in pieces.
“Celia—”
She lifted her mouth away.
“Not yet,” she said.
I made a sound I’m not proud of.
“I said it on a fountain, a year ago. I said it again in a pantry. I’ve been waiting a year to say it to you with your hands tied.” She kissed the inside of my thigh. “You’re not in charge of when, sweetheart. Not tonight. You signed.”
“I didn’t sign.”
“You initialed. In red pencil. It’s binding.” She waited until my breathing slowed, until my thighs quit shaking. Then she reached over to the little table and picked up the black box and opened it.
It was small. Smooth, curved, the deep blue of the strap she’d bought me a year ago, so it was obviously meant to match, because of course it was. She held it up and turned it on, and it purred in her palm, low.
“The forum,” Celia said, “was unanimous.”
“Oh, God.”
“Mm.” She turned it off again. “Ask me.”
I looked at her. At her glasses, and her silver hair coming loose, and my gray shirt hanging open over her breasts.
“Ask me,” she said again. “Specifically. You know how.”
I knew how. It took me a year. I still have to get past my own teeth to do it. But I know how.
“Put it on me,” I said. “On my clit. And your fingers inside me. Two. And don’t stop when I’m close. Please. I want to come with your fingers in me and you watching.”
“Good,” Celia said. “That’s very clear.”
And she did all of it, except the last part.
She brought me to the edge three times.
The first time with the vibrator flat on my clit and two fingers curled up inside me, slow, and when I started to shake she took both away and held my hip down and said “Not yet,” and I swore at the porch roof.
The second time with her mouth again, and the toy pressed low against me, humming into her own tongue so I could feel it in both places, and her fingers deep, and I got so close I could see it, the whole white top of it, and she stopped. She stopped and sat back and took her glasses off and wiped them on my shirt, which she was wearing, while I lay there tied to her bed with my thighs trembling and my whole body begging, and she said, perfectly calm, “I’m keeping a tally.”
“I hate you.”
“You don’t. You love me. You said so on Front Street in front of the bait-shop woman.” She put her glasses back on. “Breathe.”
I breathed. It took a long time. Every nerve I had was standing up off my skin.
The third time I didn’t make words. I didn’t have any left. She had three fingers in me by then and the toy on the highest setting held right where it needed to be, and her mouth on my hipbone, and she was talking to me. Low, steady, the voice from the fountain. That I was good. That I was so good. That she had watched me run every job and every crew and every person in my life for a year, and that this was her favorite thing she’d ever seen, me tied to her bed with nothing to fix. That she was proud of me. That I’d asked. That I’d asked her for exactly what I wanted, and she was going to give me every bit of it.
“Now?” I got out. It came out broken. “Please. Celia. Please. Now?”
She lifted her head and looked at my face.
“Yes,” she said. “Now.”
She didn’t take anything away. She pressed the toy in hard and curled her fingers and put her mouth back on me, and I came so hard the iron bed slammed against the house wall and the twine bit into my wrists and a sound tore out of me that went out through the screen and over the creek and the marsh and the whole dark half mile, and the heron took off.
I heard it go. Big slow wings, beating away over the water.
She didn’t stop. I’d asked her not to, and this time she didn’t. She turned the toy down to the lowest setting and kept it there, kept her fingers moving slow, and it rolled into a second one before I’d come down from the first. Smaller, deeper, from underneath, and I shook through all of it with my head thrown back on the pillow and my eyes open on her, because she’d told me once, on a bed on Front Street, that she liked to see my face.
When it was over she turned the toy off and set it on the table. She slid her fingers out of me slowly, and I made a sound, and she kissed the inside of my knee.
Then she came up the bed and lay down along my side, warm, in my shirt, and put her face in my neck.
“Seven,” she said. “Executed.”
I laughed, and it came out wet.
I lay there for a while with my wrists still tied and her breathing against my throat and the light all the way gone now, the first stars coming out over the creek. The jasmine came in through the screen so thick you could have leaned on it.
Then I pulled the tail of the left knot.
It let go, the way she’d said it would. I pulled the right. I sat up and rubbed my wrists, which had two faint red lines round them that would be gone by morning, and I turned and looked down at her.
She was lying on her back on the daybed with her glasses crooked and my shirt open and her silver hair all over my pillow, smiling up at me, unbearably pleased with herself.
“Eight,” I said.
Her smile changed.
“Get up,” I said. “Take that shirt off. It’s mine.”
She got up. She took the shirt off, slowly, and handed it to me, and I dropped it on the floor. She watched me drop it. She stood there bare in the dark on her own porch with her nipples drawn up tight and her stomach soft and her breath already going short, and she waited, and I could see her waiting, the woman who decides everything, not deciding.
I reached under the daybed for the bag.
“Rowan.”
“Hands on the rail,” I said. “Facing the creek.”
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she walked to the porch rail, the one where her watch was lying face down, and she put both hands on it, and looked out through the screen at the water.
I buckled it on behind her. I didn’t hurry. I let her hear every buckle. When I was done I slicked it slow with the expensive lube, and came up behind her, and put one hand flat between her shoulder blades the way I had a year ago on Front Street with a pergola in Beaufort falling off my wall.
“You want something,” I said into her ear.
“Yes.”
“Ask me.”
She laughed. It shook all down her back under my hand. “I know you’re enjoying this.”
“I’m enjoying it a lot. Ask me.”
“Inside me,” Celia said. Her voice had gone low and rough. “Now. Please. From behind. Hard. Don’t you dare be careful.”
“No,” I said.
She went very still.
“Not now. Not hard. Not yet.” I put my mouth on the back of her neck, right at the top of her spine, where her hair was clipped. “You’ve been in charge of when for a whole year, Celia. You’re very good at it. You’re the best I’ve ever seen. And once a year, you get told no.” I fitted the head of it against her, and stopped. I didn’t push. I just held it there and felt her shake. “Slow. And you’ll wait for it. And I’ll tell you when.”
“Rowan.“
“Say yes.”
It took her a while. I felt her do it. I felt the whole year go through her, the fountain and the pantry and the front step and the calendar on the pantry door, all the times she’d decided for everybody. And then I felt her let go of it, the way I’d felt myself let go on the daybed with the twine on my wrists.
“Yes,” she whispered.
I gave it to her slow.
An inch at a time, the way she’d done it to me on the daybed the first time with a heron watching, her hands white on the rail and her head dropping forward between her shoulders. I stopped every time she pushed back for more. I made her wait. I made her stand there with the creek in front of her and the stars coming out and the jasmine so sweet it made my eyes sting, and take it the way I said she’d take it, and I talked to her the whole time. Every word she’d ever said to me. That she was good. That she was doing so well. That she was mine. That I was proud of her, standing there saying yes.
When I was all the way in I held still, my hips against her, my arm round her waist, the base pressed against my clit, and I could feel her pulse everywhere I touched her.
“Now,” I said.
And then I gave her the rest of what she’d asked for.
Hard. From behind, against her own porch rail, with her watch rattling on the wood beside her hands and the frogs going quiet and starting up again louder, and her voice going out over the water the way mine had. She wasn’t quiet. She’s never quiet anymore. She came with her forehead on the rail and her hand reaching back to grab my hip and pull me in harder, and I didn’t stop, because she hadn’t told me to, and she wasn’t the one telling tonight. I made her come again before she’d gotten her breath, shaking, my name breaking in half in her mouth, and the base ground into me on every stroke until I followed her over, folded over her back with my mouth on her shoulder, both of us holding on to that rail.
The watch slid off and hit the boards.
Neither of us picked it up.
Later we lay on the daybed in the dark, tangled, sticky, the sheet kicked to the floor. The heron hadn’t come back. The jasmine was still going. The oak was out there somewhere in the black at the bottom of the slope, a stick with red leaves, thirty years from shade.
“Year two,” Celia said into my shoulder. “I’ll need to type a clean copy.”
“You’ve got red pencil all over it.”
“I know. I’m going to frame it.” She lifted her head. “I’d like it noted—”
“Celia.”
“Yes?”
“No,” I said.
She laughed so hard the daybed shrieked on the boards. Then she put her head back down, and was quiet, and after a while I felt her fall asleep against me, the way she does now, without checking the time first.
I lay there and listened to the creek and the frogs and her breathing. Her watch was still on the floor by the rail, face down, where it had fallen.
I didn’t pick it up either.
Some things you leave where they land.
Haven’t read the full novel yet? Start at the gate on Gale Street.
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