🔥 The Bathtub 🔥
An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Hostile Takeover
by Blair Lennox
Thank You for Reading! 💜 You made it to the bonus content — which means you’ve experienced Arden and June’s journey from enemies to lovers to home. Thank you for giving their story a chance. This exclusive chapter is our gift to dedicated readers like you.
⚠️ Content Warning: This bonus chapter contains explicit FF sexual content including multiple orgasms, oral sex, mutual penetration, dirty talk, bathtub logistics, praise kink, and the creative destruction of a pen-name erotica novel. Intended for readers 18+ only. Set after the epilogue.
The Bathtub
Set six months after the epilogue. Arden makes good on a promise from Chapter 19.
ARDEN
The clawfoot tub arrived on a Tuesday.
It was cast iron, cream-colored, with brass feet shaped like lion paws, and it weighed approximately as much as Arden’s abandoned career ambitions. The delivery team — two men who looked like they’d been tricked into the job by a description that undersold the staircase — spent forty minutes maneuvering it up the exterior stairs and through the apartment door while Arden directed from the bathroom and June stood in the kitchen doorway eating an apple and providing commentary.
“It’s not going to fit,” June said.
“It fits. I measured.”
“You measured the bathroom. Did you measure the door?”
Arden paused. The delivery men paused. The tub, wedged at a fifteen-degree angle in the doorframe, paused.
“I measured the bathroom,” Arden said.
“I love you,” June said, “but you just spent eight hundred dollars on a bathtub that’s stuck in our hallway.”
Twenty-two minutes, one removed door, and a tip that Arden suspected would fund one of the delivery men’s retirement plans later, the clawfoot tub sat in the bathroom of their apartment above Lavender & Ink. It was magnificent. It was ridiculous. It occupied approximately eighty percent of the available floor space and required anyone using the toilet to climb over the rim to reach it.
“It’s perfect,” Arden said.
“It’s an obstacle course.”
“It’s a statement.”
“It’s a statement that says ‘I’m dating a woman who solves emotional problems with antique plumbing fixtures.'”
“I wasn’t solving an emotional problem. I was fulfilling a promise.”
June looked at her. The apple was halfway to her mouth. Her hair was pinned with the pencil — always the pencil — and she was wearing the rust jumpsuit and her reading expression, which was different from her working expression, which was different from her I-want-you expression but shared certain structural features with the latter.
“What promise?”
“You said we hadn’t tried the bathtub. I said it was structurally insufficient. You said you were flexible.”
“That was three months ago. During sex. People say things during sex that they don’t necessarily want turned into a furniture purchase.”
“Do you want me to return it?”
June looked at the tub. Looked at Arden. Bit the apple. Her teeth broke through the skin with a crisp snap that Arden felt in her sternum.
“Fill it up,” she said. “I close the store at six.”
She turned and walked out of the bathroom with the particular hip-sway she deployed when she wanted Arden to watch her leave. Arden watched her leave. She had been watching June Rivera leave rooms for seven months and the view had not lost a single degree of its devastating effect.
The water was perfect.
Arden had spent the afternoon calibrating with the obsessive precision she’d once reserved for financing models: temperature (hot enough to steam, not enough to scald), depth (high enough to immerse, not enough to overflow when occupied by two bodies — she’d calculated displacement volume using the bath’s published interior dimensions and a conservative estimate of their combined mass), ambiance (four candles, beeswax, the same ones June kept in the back office for power outages and, more recently, for nights when the electricity worked fine but candlelight worked better).
She’d added something to the water — a bath oil she’d found at the vintage shop downstairs, lavender and something citrusy, the combination producing a scent so close to June’s natural chemistry that the bathroom smelled like a highly specific fantasy Arden had been having since the first day she’d walked into Lavender & Ink and lost her professional objectivity to a woman with ink-stained fingers and a pencil in her hair.
She’d also set up: two towels warming on the radiator, the reading glasses she pretended were purely functional, and the paperback she intended to be caught reading.
At six fifteen, the front door opened. June’s footsteps on the stairs — the particular rhythm Arden had memorized without trying, the cadence of a woman coming home. Boots off at the landing. Bag dropped on the kitchen chair. A pause — the sound of June discovering the trail of candles Arden had placed from the kitchen through the hallway to the bathroom door.
“Arden Vale.”
“In here.”
June appeared in the bathroom doorway. She took in the scene: the candles, the steam, the tub full of water that smelled like her, and Arden — already in the tub, shoulders above the waterline, hair pinned up, wearing the reading glasses and holding a book at an angle that suggested she’d been reading for hours rather than the four minutes since she heard the front door open.
“You’re reading in the bathtub,” June said.
“I’m reading your book in the bathtub.” Arden held up the paperback — the pen-name erotica, the one June had tried to hide, the one Arden had found, read, annotated in red pen, and was now rereading for what she described as “quality assurance purposes.” “Chapter seven. The rooftop scene. Your protagonist just did something anatomically ambitious with a fire escape railing.”
“Give me that.”
“No.”
“That book is embarrassing.”
“That book is exceptional. Your prose has a rhythmic intensity that—”
“Stop reviewing my erotica like it’s a Wharton case study.”
“I’m not reviewing it like a case study. I’m reviewing it like a woman who is extremely turned on by chapter seven and would like the author to join her in the bathtub and discuss the creative process.” Arden set the book on the rim of the tub and removed the reading glasses. “In detail.”
June leaned against the doorframe. She crossed her arms, and the gesture pushed her breasts together above the jumpsuit’s neckline in a way that Arden’s gaze traveled to involuntarily, helplessly, the way gravity traveled to mass.
“What specifically turned you on about chapter seven?” June asked. Her voice had dropped — the register she used when she was deciding whether to tease or devour, and the uncertainty about which was its own form of foreplay.
“The patience,” Arden said. “Your protagonist doesn’t rush. She takes her lover apart one piece at a time, and she narrates what she’s doing while she does it, and the narration is—” Arden swallowed. The water was very warm. She was very warm. “The narration is a form of touch. She’s touching her with language before she touches her with her hands.”
June’s arms uncrossed. The shift was subtle — a loosening, a dropping of the barrier — and Arden tracked it the way she tracked all of June’s body language: as essential data about the state of the most important system she’d ever studied.
“I wonder where I got the idea for that,” June murmured.
June undressed. Not the efficient strip of their usual encounters — slower, more deliberate, a performance for an audience of one. She unzipped the jumpsuit from collar to navel, the zipper’s path tracing a line between her breasts that Arden followed with her eyes and felt in her belly. She shrugged the fabric off her shoulders — one, then the other, the movement rolling through her body like a wave. The jumpsuit fell to her waist, then her hips, then the floor, and she stepped out of it wearing a bra and underwear that matched — deep purple, lace, the kind of lingerie a woman puts on in the morning when she knows how the evening is going to end.
“You planned this,” Arden said. Her mouth was dry despite being surrounded by water.
“You sent me a photograph of the bathtub at four o’clock with the caption ‘structurally sufficient.’ I responded appropriately.” June reached behind her and unclasped the bra. The lace fell away, and Arden’s breath caught the way it still caught, seven months in, every single time, because June Rivera’s bare body in candlelight was a sight that Arden’s nervous system categorized as both familiar and miraculous, and the combination was permanent and overwhelming.
June hooked her thumbs into the underwear — the purple lace, the last barrier — and drew it down with an unhurried slide that revealed her in stages: the curve of her hip, the dark hair between her thighs, the soft skin of her inner thigh where Arden’s signet ring had left a mark on the sofa night that June had traced with her fingertip for a week afterward.
“Move forward,” June said.
Arden moved. June climbed in behind her — the tub was snug with two bodies, the water rising dangerously close to the rim. June’s thighs bracketed Arden’s hips. Her chest pressed against Arden’s back — the soft weight of her breasts, the hard points of her nipples — and her arms wrapped around from behind, pulling Arden against her until there was no space between them that wasn’t filled with warmth and skin.
June’s hands moved under the water. Slowly — tracking a path from Arden’s waist up her ribs, each knuckle registering against the ridges of bone. Her palms curved around and cupped Arden’s breasts, and the contact — warm hands, warm water, the encompassing heat of June’s body behind her — made Arden’s head fall back against June’s shoulder with an exhale that fogged the air above them.
June’s thumbs found Arden’s nipples. Circled them. Slow, deliberate, the same patient precision she brought to taking Arden apart in the dark. The water made every touch feel amplified — the constant diffused heat of the bath against the specific, concentrated heat of June’s fingers, the contrast turning ordinary sensation into something electric, too much and not enough simultaneously.
“You’re already hard,” June said, rolling Arden’s nipples between her thumbs and forefingers with a pressure that made Arden’s stomach clench. “Just from the tub? Or from chapter seven?”
“From you walking into the room.”
“Tell me about chapter seven,” June whispered against her ear. Her tongue traced the shell of Arden’s ear, and the wet heat of it made Arden’s vision blur.
“Your protagonist—” Arden started, and then June’s fingers slid between her legs and the sentence disintegrated.
June touched her the way she’d learned to touch her over seven months of devoted study: two fingers sliding through the slick, swollen folds with a slow, parting stroke that began at her entrance and traveled upward, gathering arousal along the way, until her fingertips reached Arden’s clit and pressed — not hard, not circling, just a firm, steady pressure that made Arden’s entire body go rigid against June’s chest.
“Keep going,” June said. “Chapter seven.”
“Your protagonist — God — your protagonist pins her lover against the fire escape and goes — fuck — goes down on her while the city watches.”
“And what did you think about that?”
“I thought about you. I thought about your mouth. I thought about — June — I thought about the way you look at me before you put your mouth on me, like you’re about to read the most important sentence you’ve ever—”
June’s fingers began to move. Circles — tight, slippery, relentless circles around Arden’s clit, the rhythm steady and patient and absolutely calibrated to the exact pressure and speed that made Arden’s higher brain functions shut down one by one like lights in a building going dark floor by floor.
“Sublimation produces art,” June murmured, her mouth hot against Arden’s neck. “Pretending produces nothing.” She bit the tendon below Arden’s ear — a sharp scrape of teeth that sent a bolt of sensation from Arden’s neck to her center. “Art is better.”
“More,” Arden gasped. “Inside. Please.”
June slid two fingers inside her. The entry was slow and thorough, the angle from behind allowing a depth that made Arden cry out — the sound bouncing off the tile and the porcelain and returning amplified, surrounding them both. June curled her fingers — the precise, devastating curl that hit the front wall and made stars detonate behind Arden’s eyelids — and began to thrust. Not fast. Not rough. Steady, deep, unhurried, each stroke accompanied by the press of her palm against Arden’s clit.
The water rocked with their rhythm. Small waves lapped the rim, spilling over in thin sheets that pooled on the tile floor. The candles guttered in the displaced air.
“You’re so wet,” June breathed against her neck. “Not the water. Under it. You’re soaking my hand.”
“Don’t stop — June, don’t stop — I’m —”
“I know. I can feel it. You’re clenching around me.” June’s fingers pressed deeper, curled harder, her palm grinding against Arden’s clit with every thrust. “Come for me. Let me feel you come on my fingers.”
Arden came. The orgasm ripped through her like weather — a storm system that started at the point of June’s fingers and expanded outward through her belly, her chest, her throat. Her back arched off June’s chest. Her thighs clamped around June’s hand. Her inner muscles clenched in rhythmic, involuntary spasms that she could feel June feeling.
The water surged over the rim. A wave — an actual wave — crested the lip of the tub and cascaded onto the tile in a miniature flood that extinguished one of the candles and soaked the bath mat.
“That’s it. God, you’re gorgeous when you come. Give me all of it.”
When the aftershocks subsided, Arden slumped against June’s chest and breathed.
“The acoustics are—”
“Remarkable. Yes. I heard you in stereo.”
“Mrs. Okonkwo is going to—”
“Mrs. Okonkwo is at her sister’s in Yonkers until Thursday. I checked.”
Arden laughed. “You planned the logistics.”
“Somebody has to. You spent your planning budget on displacement volume calculations.”
Then she turned around.
The maneuver required spatial negotiation. Two adult women reversing position in sixty gallons of bathwater involved considerable sloshing, elbow-management, and one incident of Arden’s knee hitting the faucet that produced a clang loud enough to constitute a noise complaint in three jurisdictions.
“Your turn,” Arden said.
“I’m comfortable.”
“You’re deflecting.” Arden lowered her mouth to June’s throat. Kissed the hollow at the base, where the pulse hammered. “You always do this.” Kissed lower — the ridge of collarbone, the slope of her chest. “You give and then pretend you don’t need to receive.” She kissed the curve of June’s breast, and June’s breath stuttered. “As if wanting something back makes the giving less generous.”
“I want to make you come.” She circled June’s nipple with her tongue — a slow, wet ring that made June’s hand fly to the back of Arden’s head. “In this bathtub.” She drew the nipple between her lips and sucked, and the sound June made echoed off the tile like a confession. “With my mouth.”
“How are you going to — the angle is—”
“I measured.”
June laughed. “You measured the bathtub for oral sex logistics?”
“I measured the interior dimensions and calculated the optimal positioning for submerged access. It’s a transferable skill.”
Arden slid lower. The tub was deep enough for what she had in mind, though the execution required June to drape her legs over the rim on either side. The position left her open — thighs spread, hips tilted, her center elevated just above the waterline — and exposed in a way that was both vulnerable and powerful, because June Rivera choosing to be seen like this was an act of trust that Arden intended to honor with her entire mouth.
“This is absurd,” June said, looking down at Arden’s face between her thighs, candles flickering in the steam. “This is the most absurd thing we’ve ever done, and we once had sex against the poetry section and knocked over the entire erotica display.”
“That wasn’t absurd. That was inevitable.” Arden pressed her lips to June’s inner thigh — a kiss, then a bite, gentle enough to tease, firm enough to make June’s leg jerk against the tub rim. “This is engineering.”
“If you say ‘synergy,’ I’m drowning you.”
Arden pressed her mouth to June’s center. The first touch was broad and slow — her tongue flat, covering everything, parting the folds with a long stroke that gathered the taste of her and the slickness of her and the heat of her all at once. June’s reaction was immediate: her hips surged up, her hand flew to Arden’s wet hair and gripped, and a moan left her throat that the bathroom amplified into something architectural.
Arden worked slowly. Not teasing — attentive. Her tongue traced the landscape of June’s arousal — the swollen outer lips, the slick inner folds, the hard nub of her clit that pulsed against Arden’s tongue when she circled it with the precise, consistent pressure that seven months of devoted practice had taught her was the key to making June lose language.
June lost language. The words dissolved into sounds — gasps, moans, the particular keening noise she made when Arden’s tongue found the exact rhythm and held it.
“Right there — God, Arden, right there — don’t change anything —”
She added her fingers. Reaching up through the warm water, she slid two inside June — easily, the slickness welcoming her, the internal heat hotter and more urgent than the bath. June clenched around her immediately — a reflexive squeeze that Arden felt in her own chest. She curled them. Found the textured ridge of the front wall and pressed, and June’s back arched off the tub with a cry that echoed off every surface in the room.
The combination — tongue on clit, fingers inside, the warm water surrounding them — built the pleasure in June’s body visibly. Arden could see the flush climbing from June’s chest to her throat, the tension gathering in her thighs, the way her mouth opened and her eyes closed and her head tipped back in the posture of a woman who had stopped trying to control anything.
“More,” June gasped. “Harder — I need—”
Arden gave her harder. Faster. She added a third finger — the stretch making June cry out, her inner walls gripping tight — and she sucked June’s clit between her lips and pressed the flat of her tongue against it with a firm, vibrating pressure that she knew was the exact stimulus that sent June over the edge.
June came with both hands in Arden’s hair and her heels braced against the outside of the tub and a scream that started as Arden’s name and ended as something that predated language — a raw, guttural, full-body sound that reverberated through the porcelain and the tile and Arden’s bones. Her inner muscles clenched around Arden’s fingers in rhythmic, powerful contractions that went on and on.
Arden brought her down slowly. Gentling the pressure, kissing June’s inner thighs as the aftershocks diminished.
The bathroom was destroyed. Water covered the floor. Two candles had drowned. The pen-name erotica paperback had fallen into the bath and was floating face-down, its pages swollen, the cover art now compromised beyond repair.
“Your book is drowning,” Arden said.
“Let it drown,” June said. “I’ll write you a better one.”
They should have stopped there. The tub was cooling. The floor was a lake. They were both pruning. By any reasonable standard of adult behavior, the correct next step was towels, dry clothes, and possibly a mop.
They did not stop there.
It was June’s fault. Or rather, it was the fault of June’s mouth, which found Arden’s as she surfaced, and which tasted like bathwater and arousal and the particular alchemy of a woman kissing someone who had just made her come and wanting to express, through the medium of lips and tongue and teeth, the precise dimensions of her gratitude.
“Bedroom,” June said against her mouth.
“We’re soaking wet.”
“I don’t care about the sheets.”
“The sheets are the good ones.”
“I will buy new sheets. Get out of this tub and take me to bed.”
They climbed out — dripping, stumbling, leaving wet footprints across the tile and the hallway. June pulled Arden toward the bedroom by the wrist — the same wrist she’d touched in the stockroom on the night everything started — and the urgency of it sent a jolt through Arden’s body that erased any remaining consideration for the bedding.
They fell onto the bed wet. The blue-and-gold quilt darkened where their bodies landed, Elena’s handwork absorbing the bathwater with the uncomplaining patience of a textile that had survived decades.
June rolled on top of Arden and pinned her wrists. The gesture was familiar — the same claiming move from the sofa night, the same power play that made Arden’s body shudder with surrender. Except now June was wet from the bath, water dripping from her hair onto Arden’s face and chest, and the cool droplets against Arden’s heated skin created a contrast that made every nerve ending fire at once.
“I want you again,” June said. She was straddling Arden’s hips, wet thighs pressing against wet skin, her center hot against Arden’s stomach.
“You make me wet by existing,” Arden said. “It’s been that way since the pricing gun.”
June slid two fingers inside her, and Arden’s body opened to receive her with the eager, practiced welcome of a woman who had been reshaped by seven months of being touched by someone who meant it.
They moved together on the wet quilt. Not like the bathtub — this was about skin. About the full-body contact of two wet women on a bed, sliding against each other, the lack of friction making every touch both easier and more urgent. June’s fingers inside Arden, Arden’s hand finding its way between June’s thighs, the mutual rhythm they’d perfected over months of practice — simultaneous, synchronized, each woman giving and receiving at the same time, the boundary between pleasure-giver and pleasure-receiver dissolved into something unified and indivisible.
“Look at me,” June said.
Arden looked. June’s face above hers — wet hair curtaining them, brown eyes holding grey, fierce and tender and certain.
“I love you,” June whispered, and curled her fingers, and Arden gasped.
“I love you,” Arden said, and matched the curl with her own hand inside June, and June’s eyes fluttered closed and then opened again, determined to hold the gaze through what was coming.
They came together — June first, by seconds, her face crumpling with the particular beautiful agony of an orgasm that arrives from inside, and the sight of June’s face in pleasure triggered Arden’s own climax, a chain reaction of watching and feeling and being seen. Their bodies clenched around each other’s hands and they held on — eyes locked, breathing shared, connected at every possible point — while the wave rolled through them both.
June collapsed. Her forehead dropped to Arden’s shoulder. Their hands withdrew from each other — slowly, the separation intimate and reluctant.
“That,” June said against Arden’s collarbone, “was worth eight hundred dollars.”
“The bathtub or the sex?”
“Yes.”
They lay together as the evening settled. The candles in the bathroom were out. The water in the tub had gone cold. The pen-name erotica was a casualty of war, its pages bloating in the bath like a small, waterlogged monument to the creative impulse that had, in a roundabout way, led to everything.
June’s head was on Arden’s chest. Arden’s hand was in June’s hair. The signet ring caught the last candlelight from the bedroom — the one candle they hadn’t knocked over — and the gold gleamed against June’s dark hair like a small, inherited promise.
June traced the ring. Her finger circled the band, following the worn engraving.
“Your grandmother would have approved of the bathtub,” June said.
“My grandmother would have told me to buy a shower curtain.”
“Your grandmother would have been right.”
“She usually was.” Arden pressed her lips to the top of June’s head. “She would have loved you.”
“She would have given me a hard time first.”
“Obviously. That’s the family protocol. Hard time first. Love after.”
“I’m going to write you that book,” June said.
“What book?”
“A better one. Better than the one that drowned.” June’s finger traced the signet ring one more time, then moved to Arden’s jaw, tilting her face for a kiss that was soft and unhurried and tasted like the evening’s entire history. “I’m going to write a book about a woman who walks into a bookstore to buy it and falls in love with the owner instead.”
“That’s our story.”
“All stories are somebody’s story. I’m just the first one to write it down.”
“Under a pen name?”
“Obviously under a pen name. I have a reputation to maintain.”
“Your reputation includes a flooded bathroom, a drowned novel, and a clawfoot tub that required removing a door to install.”
“My reputation is immaculate. Go to sleep.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too. And buy a bath mat tomorrow. A good one. Not a cheap one.”
“I’ll measure it first.”
“Of course you will.”
Outside, Marigold Row was sleeping. The banners hung still in the warm night. The bookstore sign glowed faintly in the streetlight — gold letters on purple, hand-painted, retouched, permanent.
Inside, the bathtub cooled. The water settled. A paperback floated, spine-up, slowly sinking — its pages full of words a young woman had written at twenty-three because she was lonely and wanted and didn’t know yet that the real story was still coming, that it would arrive in a charcoal suit with grey eyes and a pricing gun, and that it would be better than anything she could have invented.
Some stories deserved to drown.
The better ones were still being written.
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