🔥 After Hours
A bonus scene set during the first honey harvest event — too hot for Amazon.
The last guest drove away at six-fifteen, taillights disappearing down the gravel drive, and Riley stood on the porch and watched the dust settle and thought: We did it.
The first honey harvest event. Twenty strangers who’d arrived that morning in clean clothes and left that evening with honey on their fingers and straw in their hair and the particular dazed expression of people who’d spent eight hours being genuinely, physically happy. They’d extracted frames and spun honey and tasted comb straight from the hive and eaten lunch on the farmhouse lawn and every single one of them had asked when the next event was.
Fifteen hundred dollars. One Saturday. Riley had watched the number land in the Square reader and thought about the spreadsheet on her laptop — the three-year projection, the revenue model, the column labeled Events that she’d populated with conservative estimates. Today had beaten the estimate by forty percent. She was going to have to revise the whole model. She was going to have to tell Maggie. Maggie was going to do the face.
Maggie was in the extraction room. Riley could see the light through the screened windows — warm, golden, the amber glow that meant the overhead was on and Maggie was cleaning up, because Maggie always cleaned up, because Maggie’s response to a successful day was to make sure the space was ready for the next one. The woman had finished an eight-hour public event and her first instinct was to wipe down equipment. Riley was in love with a person whose idea of celebration was organized sanitation.
Riley crossed the yard. The evening air was warm and sweet — August in Vermont, the fields buzzing with the last bees of the day, the sky going from blue to peach to the deep, saturated violet that came before stars. She could smell the extraction room before she reached it — warm wax, caramelized honey, the particular humidity of a small space that had been full of bodies and heat and activity all day. She pushed open the door.
Maggie was at the worktable, wiping down the extractor with a cloth. She’d changed out of the demonstration clothes — the clean flannel she wore for guests, the one Riley had ironed that morning, a fact Maggie found hilarious and unnecessary — and was back in her tank top. Arms bare. Forearms glazed with the honey residue that was impossible to fully wash off on extraction days, the fine golden sheen that turned her skin to something edible in the overhead light. Her braid was coming undone, loose strands sticking to her neck with sweat. Her face was flushed from work and heat and the particular glow of a woman who’d spent the day doing what she loved in front of people who appreciated it.
She looked up when Riley came in. Smiled. The full smile — the one that had taken weeks to unlock and now appeared reliably, daily, like a sunrise Riley had earned the right to witness. The smile that changed Maggie’s face from handsome-and-guarded to something so open and warm and beautiful that it still, after months, made Riley’s stomach flip.
“That was good,” Maggie said. The highest compliment in her vocabulary. “That was really good.”
“Twenty people paid seventy-five dollars each to watch you talk about bees and eat your honey. That’s fifteen hundred dollars for a Saturday, Maggie. Your face when that woman from Burlington asked for a case of jars —”
“I don’t have a face.”
“You have the best face. Your face said ‘someone wants to buy twelve jars of my honey on purpose and I don’t know what to do with this information.’”
Maggie’s smile widened. She set the cloth down. Leaned against the worktable. Crossed her arms in that way she did — the way that made her shoulders look like they could hold up the roof and her forearms look like they’d been carved from warm wood. The tank top was dark with sweat across the chest, clinging to her body in ways that were technically the result of physical labor and functionally a form of assault on Riley’s ability to think.
“Come here,” she said.
Riley crossed the room. Stood in front of her. Close — close enough to smell the honey on Maggie’s skin, mixed with sweat and soap and the warm-animal scent that was just Maggie. Close enough to see the individual freckles on her collarbone, the ones Riley had kissed that morning, the ones that tasted like salt and smelled like cedar.
“We should celebrate,” Maggie said.
“I was thinking the same thing. Wine? The bottle June brought?”
Maggie uncrossed her arms. Reached behind her to the worktable. Picked up a jar — not the commercial jars, the ones they sold at market. A small one. The dark amber kind, thick and raw, from the afternoon’s extraction. The best batch of the season. She held it between them, the glass catching the light, the honey inside glowing like liquid gold.
“I was thinking something else,” she said.
Riley looked at the jar. Looked at Maggie. Felt the recognition move through her body like voltage — the memory of candles and cream and a night in Maggie’s bed where the title of their story had been written on her skin in golden lines. The milk-and-honey night. The night that had rewired Riley’s understanding of what her body was capable of feeling.
“Here?” Riley asked. Her voice had already dropped. Her body was already responding — the Pavlovian inevitability of honey plus Maggie plus the warm, close air of the extraction room where everything had started.
“Here.” Maggie unscrewed the lid. The sound of metal on glass, small and deliberate. “Where it started. Where you licked my finger and I forgot how to breathe.”
Maggie’s voice had gone low. The low that Riley’s body recognized the way it recognized the milking rhythm — in the muscles, in the blood, in the involuntary quickening of breath and heartbeat that said this woman is about to touch me and I am going to let her do anything she wants.
Riley’s breath caught. “Lock the door.”
Maggie set the jar down. Crossed to the door. Turned the deadbolt. The click was obscenely loud in the quiet room. She turned back to Riley, leaning against the door, and the twelve feet between them was charged with the kind of electricity that had been building all day.
“Come here,” Riley said. Turning Maggie’s words back on her.
Maggie crossed the room in four strides. Her mouth found Riley’s before her hands did — a kiss that started with purpose and immediately escalated into something ungovernable. Riley tasted honey on Maggie’s lips, remnant from the day’s tastings, and the flavor was the book’s opening line and its last word and everything in between.
They didn’t make it to a horizontal surface.
Maggie lifted Riley onto the worktable — the same table, the same spot, the same motion she’d used months ago when Riley had sucked honey off her finger and Maggie’s restraint had finally, catastrophically failed. Hands under Riley’s thighs, one motion, Riley’s weight nothing to her. The strength play that had been part of their vocabulary since day one — Maggie lifting, positioning, holding Riley exactly where she wanted her, and Riley letting herself be held because the surrender was the point and the surrender was the gift.
Riley’s legs wrapped around Maggie’s waist. Her ankles locked behind Maggie’s back. She pulled Maggie in with her heels and kissed her — deep, filthy, open-mouthed, the kind of kiss that was its own sex act. Maggie’s tongue against hers. The taste of honey and coffee and want.
Maggie pulled Riley’s shirt over her head. No bra — Riley had stopped wearing them on event days because August heat plus farm work made underwire a medieval punishment. Her breasts were bare, her nipples already peaked, and Maggie looked at them the way she looked at the first extraction of the season: with hunger and appreciation and the particular reverence of a woman who understood that good things took time to make.
“God,” Maggie said. Low, rough. “Every time. Every time I see you like this, it’s like the first time.”
She reached for the honey jar. Dipped two fingers in. She drew a circle around Riley’s left nipple. Slow. The cool thickness of raw honey on heated skin, the viscous weight of it. Then the right. Two golden circles, dark amber on flushed skin, obscene and beautiful.
Maggie lowered her mouth to the left. Took the nipple between her lips and sucked — slowly, thoroughly, her tongue circling, collecting honey, the sweetness dissolving against the salt of Riley’s skin. The temperature contrast — cool honey, hot mouth — sent a jolt through Riley’s body that she felt in her clit.
Riley’s hand flew to Maggie’s hair. She yanked the braid tie out — they were past politeness about Maggie’s hair; Riley destroyed the braid every time they fucked and Maggie re-braided it every morning and neither of them pretended this wasn’t part of the ritual.
“God — your mouth —”
Maggie switched to the right. Same treatment — the flat of her tongue first, a broad lick that collected the ring of honey in one pass, then the point, circling the nipple, then the suction. Gentle at first. Then firmer when Riley’s hips jerked against her stomach and the sound she made communicated in no uncertain terms that gentle was not the request.
Maggie sucked harder. Grazed her teeth. Riley’s back arched off the table and her thighs tightened around Maggie’s waist.
“Maggie. Please. Lower.”
“I’m not done here.”
“I’m going to die.”
“You’re not going to die. You’re going to wait.”
Maggie’s mouth moved between Riley’s breasts. She licked the sternum clean — a long, slow stroke through the honey that had dripped and pooled in the channel between — and then lower. Kissing down Riley’s stomach, her tongue tracing the muscles that hadn’t existed six months ago and now flexed under her mouth from a summer of hay-hauling and fence-building. She kissed the soft skin below Riley’s navel. Dipped her tongue into the shallow cup of her navel and swirled, and Riley’s hips came off the table.
Riley’s jeans. Maggie undid them with one hand — the practiced efficiency of a woman who’d been undressing this body for months and had optimized the process. She pulled them down Riley’s legs, taking the underwear with them, and dropped them on the extraction room floor.
Riley was naked on the worktable. Bare skin on warm wood, the honey jar beside her hip, the overhead light making her body glow. Maggie stood between her spread thighs and looked at her.
“You’re so wet,” Maggie said. Not touching. Just looking. “I can see it. You’re soaked and I haven’t even touched you yet.”
“I’ve been like this since you picked up the jar. Possibly since breakfast. It’s been a long day.”
Maggie laughed and reached for the honey. She drizzled it. A thin golden line from the crease of Riley’s left hip down the inside of her thigh, following the path of the femoral artery, the honey warm and thick and devastatingly slow. Then the right thigh. Symmetrical. Deliberate.
She drizzled more. Lower. A delicate line along each side of Riley’s outer lips, framing but not touching the place Riley needed her most. The honey was thick enough to hold its shape, sitting in glistening ridges on the sensitive skin, and the weight of it — the awareness of it, warm and viscous, inches from her clit — made Riley’s thighs tremble.
“Maggie. I swear to god.”
“Patience.”
“I will fire you from your own farm.”
“You can’t fire me. I’m the owner.”
“I’ll find a way. I’m a lawyer.”
Maggie grinned. Then she knelt on the concrete floor, settled Riley’s thighs over her shoulders, and put her mouth on the inside of Riley’s right thigh.
She licked up the honey trail the way she licked everything — with the unhurried thoroughness of a woman who had never rushed a single task in her life. Tongue flat and warm, collecting honey in long, slow passes. Teeth grazing the tender skin. Lips closing around each sensitive spot and sucking gently, leaving small pink marks that would fade by morning.
She worked her way up the right thigh. Inch by inch. Each lick closer to the center. Riley could feel Maggie’s breath now — hot against the slick, swollen skin that was aching for contact — and the anticipation was so intense it was indistinguishable from the orgasm she wasn’t having.
Maggie switched to the left thigh. Started over. Same pace. Same devastating thoroughness.
“Please,” Riley said. The word came out wrecked — barely a word, more a vibration, the sound of a woman’s pride being dismantled by a farmer’s mouth. “Maggie, please. I need you. I need your mouth on me. Please.”
She was begging. Riley Chen, who negotiated billion-dollar mergers without raising her voice, who’d argued in front of federal judges, who’d never in her professional life said please to anyone — was begging a woman in a tank top to eat her pussy in a honey house in Vermont. It was the freest she’d ever been.
Maggie looked up from between her thighs. Green eyes dark, pupils blown, her lips and chin glistening with honey. The sight of her — that strong face between Riley’s legs, looking up at her with devotion and hunger — almost made Riley come untouched.
“Since you asked so nicely,” Maggie said.
She licked the honey from alongside Riley’s outer lips — one side, then the other — and then, finally, she pressed her tongue flat against Riley’s clit.
Riley’s entire body jolted. The contact — after the buildup, after the teasing — was like touching a live wire. Her hips bucked up against Maggie’s face and her hand fisted in Maggie’s hair and she cried out, a raw sharp sound that echoed off the extraction room walls.
Maggie held her hips down. Both hands on Riley’s hip bones, pinning her to the table, and she ate her pussy with the focused, devastating skill of a woman who had made a study of this body and earned a doctorate in its responses. Long, flat strokes from entrance to clit. She circled Riley’s clit with the tip of her tongue. Tightening the circles. Increasing the pressure. She sucked it between her lips — gently at first, then firmly.
Riley was shaking. Not trembling — shaking. Full-body, uncontrollable. Her thighs clamped around Maggie’s head. Her hand in Maggie’s hair tightened until it must have hurt but Maggie didn’t stop.
Maggie slid two fingers inside. Slow, deep, curling forward to find the spot. The dual sensation — tongue on her clit, fingers inside her, the synchronized rhythm of both — cracked something open in Riley’s chest.
“I’m close — Maggie, I’m so close — don’t stop — please don’t stop —”
Maggie didn’t stop. She pressed deeper with her fingers. Curled harder. Increased the suction on Riley’s clit by a fraction and that fraction was the difference between the edge and the fall.
Riley came. The orgasm detonated from her center outward — a white-hot pulse that radiated through her entire body until she was clenching and releasing in waves she couldn’t control. She cried out — Maggie’s name, fragmented, mixed with profanity — and her hips snapped up against Maggie’s mouth and her inner walls clamped around Maggie’s fingers in rhythmic, helpless pulses.
It lasted. Wave after wave, each one triggered by the continued pressure of Maggie’s tongue — lighter now, gentler, riding the aftershocks.
When it finally faded, Riley collapsed backward onto the table. Arms flung out, chest heaving.
“You okay?” Maggie asked.
“I’m dead. You killed me. This is the afterlife and it smells like honey.”
Maggie laughed. Then she leaned down and kissed her — slow, deep, and Riley tasted herself mixed with honey on Maggie’s mouth, the combination that had become the defining flavor of her life.
Riley grabbed Maggie’s tank top. Pulled her down. Kissed Maggie’s jaw. Her neck. The tendon below her ear that made Maggie’s hips jerk every time.
“Your turn,” Riley said against her skin.
“Riley, you just — you don’t have to —”
“Shut up.”
The code. Their shorthand. Two words that meant: I want this and you’re going to let me and we both know you need it as badly as I do.
Riley pushed Maggie upright. Pulled the tank top over her head — Maggie’s sports bra next, both discarded. The broad shoulders, the freckled chest, the breasts — full, heavy, the nipples already dark and tight. The stomach that was solid, real, the body of a woman who lifted and hauled and bent and built, and Riley wanted her mouth on every inch of it.
She reached for the honey jar. Dipped her fingers. Drew a line of honey down Maggie’s sternum — between her breasts, over the freckled skin. She leaned in and licked it off. One long stroke, navel to collarbone, the taste of Maggie’s skin underneath — salt, soap, the particular clean-animal warmth that was her.
Maggie’s head fell back. Her hands went to Riley’s waist, gripping.
Riley circled Maggie’s nipples with honey-coated fingers. Took the right in her mouth and sucked, and the sound Maggie made — a low, guttural groan — was worth every second of the teasing she’d endured.
She switched. Left nipple. Sucked harder. Maggie’s grip on her waist tightened to the point of bruising and Riley’s body lit up at the pressure because she’d discovered months ago that she liked being held hard, liked the marks, liked knowing she’d feel it tomorrow.
“Off,” Riley said, tugging at Maggie’s belt. “Jeans off. Now.”
Maggie unbuckled. Shoved her jeans and boxers down and kicked them off and stood naked in the extraction room — strong, golden, honey-streaked, her chest heaving, her thighs already glistening with arousal she hadn’t been touched for.
“Sit on the table,” Riley said. Sliding off, bare feet on the concrete floor. “Up. Your turn.”
Maggie hoisted herself onto the worktable. The same table. Their table.
Riley stepped between Maggie’s thighs. Pushed them apart. Knelt.
She dipped her fingers in the jar. Painted Maggie’s inner thighs with honey — thick, golden lines from knee to groin, the honey dripping in slow rivulets down Maggie’s skin. She lowered her mouth to Maggie’s right thigh and licked. From the knee up. Long, slow strokes, her tongue collecting honey and salt and the faintest taste of Maggie’s arousal that had already run down her inner thighs.
Left thigh. Same treatment. Riley worked her way up inch by inch, her mouth getting closer to the place where Maggie was wet and swollen and open, and she could smell her now — the dark, rich, unmistakable scent of a woman who was turned on past the point of composure — and she breathed it in because she’d spent her whole previous life treating desire as a distraction and now she treated it as a meal.
“Riley,” Maggie said. Her voice was wrecked. “Riley, please. I need —”
“Tell me. Say it.”
“I need your mouth on my pussy. Please.”
The words — blunt, raw, stripped of every layer of stoic-farmer composure — hit Riley like a physical blow. Maggie Hart saying please. Maggie Hart, who didn’t ask for anything, who had run a farm alone for fifteen years on stubbornness and silence — begging for Riley’s mouth.
Riley gave her everything.
She pressed her mouth against Maggie’s center and licked in one long, broad stroke from entrance to clit, and the sound Maggie made — a broken, full-throated moan that filled the small room — was the most beautiful thing Riley had ever heard. She tasted honey and Maggie, the two flavors that had become synonymous in her body’s vocabulary, and she groaned against her because the taste was a drug she would never get enough of.
She settled in. She licked in long strokes, reading every response. She circled the clit with her tongue, finding the rhythm that made Maggie’s thighs shake. She slid two fingers inside — deep, curling forward, the pads of her fingers pressing against the ridged patch of tissue that made Maggie’s back arch and her voice crack.
Maggie’s hands tightened in Riley’s hair. Pulling now. The desperate, involuntary pull that said she was losing control.
“Fuck — Riley — your mouth — right there, don’t stop, don’t you dare stop —”
Riley didn’t stop. She matched the rhythm of her tongue to the rhythm of her fingers, synchronized, relentless. She sucked Maggie’s clit between her lips and flicked with the tip of her tongue while her fingers fucked her deep and slow and the sounds filling the room were obscene — wet, hungry, the acoustic evidence of a woman being thoroughly, comprehensively devoured.
Maggie came with a sound that started in her chest and climbed through her throat and came out as Riley’s name, drawn out, fragmented, repeated like it was the only word she could access. Her body clenched around Riley’s fingers — tight, rhythmic, pulsing — and her thighs clamped and her back arched and she came so hard she lifted herself off the table by her shoulder blades.
Riley didn’t stop. She lightened the pressure. Slowed the rhythm. Kept her mouth on Maggie’s clit, gentle now, and added a third finger, stretching her, filling her, and pressed deep.
Maggie made a sound like she’d been hit. “I can’t — Riley, I can’t again —”
“You can.” Riley looked up from between her thighs. Eyes locked on Maggie’s face — the flushed skin, the parted lips, the green eyes that were glazed and dark and full of a surrender that Maggie Hart offered to no one else on earth. “One more. Give me one more.”
She curled her fingers. Found the spot. Pressed.
The second orgasm built differently than the first — not a sharp peak but a long, rolling wave, a deep-body tremor that moved through her in slow undulations, each one pulling a sound from her that was barely human.
When it crested, Maggie pulled Riley up by the arms. Crushed her against her chest. The hold — always the hold — arms around her, shaking, breathing hard, her face pressed into Riley’s hair.
They weren’t done.
Maggie recovered first — she always recovered first, the stamina of a woman whose body was built for endurance — and she pulled Riley back up onto the table and kissed her and then pushed her down onto her back and said, in a voice that was still shaking: “I want to feel you against me.”
She climbed onto the table. Positioned herself over Riley — thigh between Riley’s thighs, Riley’s thigh between hers. They pressed together. The contact — slick, hot, both of them soaked from orgasms and honey — made them both gasp.
They moved together. Grinding, pressing, finding a rhythm that was less choreographed and more instinctive — the primal motion of two bodies seeking friction and heat and release. Maggie braced one hand on the table beside Riley’s head and looked down at her, and their eyes locked, and the intimacy of the eye contact combined with the physical sensation was almost too much to bear.
“I love you,” Maggie said. Between breaths. Between thrusts.
“I love you,” Riley said back. Her hands on Maggie’s hips, pulling her down harder. “I love you and your honey and your goats and this table and this room and the way you taste and the way you feel and — fuck — right there, don’t stop —”
They came within seconds of each other. The overlap — Maggie’s orgasm triggering Riley’s, or Riley’s triggering Maggie’s, impossible to tell — created a feedback loop of sensation that rolled between their bodies like a current. They shook together. Held together. Made sounds that neither would have recognized as their own in any other context.
The table held. It was a farm table. It had been built to hold weight.
Afterward.
They lay on the worktable side by side, legs dangling off the edge, staring at the ceiling. The honey jar was empty — or close to it, the last of the season’s best batch distributed across their bodies and the table surface in a Jackson Pollock of gold and amber.
“We’re going to have to clean this,” Maggie said.
“We’re going to have to clean ourselves.”
“The shower’s going to be sticky for a week.”
“Worth it.”
“Definitely worth it.”
Riley turned her head. Looked at Maggie’s profile in the fading light — the strong jaw, the straight nose, the mouth that was swollen from kissing and wet from everything else. The freckles. The scar on her palm, resting on her stomach. The body that had been built for work and was perfectly, devastatingly suited for this.
“Best harvest ever,” Maggie murmured.
“The honey or the sex?”
“Yes.”
Riley laughed. The post-sex laugh, warm and small and pressed against Maggie’s shoulder. The laugh of a woman who’d come to a farm to disappear and had found, instead, the most visible version of herself she’d ever been.
She pressed her mouth to the curve of Maggie’s shoulder. Tasted salt and honey and skin. The taste of home.
They cleaned up eventually. Dressed. Walked back to the farmhouse hand in hand, trailing the smell of honey, the evening warm and dark around them, the stars coming out over the pasture.
The galette was in the oven. The wine was on the counter. Wren had left a note on the kitchen table: I know what you did in the honey house. I’m billing you for my therapy. — W
Riley laughed so hard she cried. Maggie read the note three times and turned the color of the barn.
The farm waited for morning the way it always waited — patiently, implacably, with the quiet faith that the people who tended it would show up.
They always did.
They always would.
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