Bonus Chapter: The Conference Table

My Ex-Husband’s Other Wife
by Blair Lennox

⚠️ Spoiler warning: This scene takes place approximately two months after the events of the novel. Read the book first for maximum impact.

The studio is empty when I arrive at 7 p.m., which is exactly what I planned.

Celeste doesn’t know I’m coming. She thinks I’m at a vendor meeting in Richmond — which I was, until forty-five minutes ago, when I wrapped early, stopped at the wine shop on King Street for a bottle of the Sancerre she pretends she doesn’t prefer to my Malbec, and drove to Arden House with the specific, focused intention of making good on a promise I made three months ago in this building.

The conference table. The scale model of the Bellamy lobby. The joke I made about being careful with fragile things while Celeste’s composure was still reassembling itself after the office encounter that changed everything.

Next time, the conference table.

She’d said: Don’t even think about it.

I’d said: Too late.

Tonight, I’m collecting.

The studio door is unlocked because Celeste is still here — I can see the light in her private office, the warm glow of the desk lamp she uses when she’s working late on designs. Her car is in the lot. Her briefcase is on the reception desk. She’s alone.

I lock the studio door behind me. I set the champagne on the conference table — the walnut slab that seats eight, the one covered with material samples and project folders and the scale model of whatever she’s designing this week. I remove my jacket. I straighten the gold bracelet on my wrist — the one she gave me at the lake house, the one I haven’t taken off since.

Then I walk to her office door and knock.

“We’re closed,” she calls. “Keisha, if that’s you, I told you to go home two hours ago.”

“Keisha went home two hours ago. But she left the door unlocked, which we should talk about from a security perspective, except I don’t want to talk about security.”

Silence. Then the creak of her chair. The sound of heels on hardwood — measured, unhurried, even when she’s surprised. The door opens.

Celeste is wearing her work clothes — fitted black trousers, a white blouse with the sleeves rolled to her forearms, her braids twisted into the low knot she wears when she’s concentrating. Her reading glasses are pushed up on her head. She has a pencil behind her ear.

“You’re supposed to be in Richmond,” she says.

“I finished early.”

“You brought champagne.”

“I brought champagne.”

“To my office. At seven p.m. On a Tuesday.”

“I have a very specific reason.”

“The conference table,” she says.

“The conference table.”

“I told you not to think about it.”

“And I told you it was too late. Ninety-three days too late, to be precise. I’ve been counting.”

“The Bellamy model is on that table,” she says.

“I’ll be careful.”

“You’ve never been careful in your life.”

“Then move the model.”

She holds my gaze for three seconds. Then she turns, walks to the conference table, picks up the scale model of the Bellamy Hotel lobby — three months of work, hand-assembled, probably worth more than my car — and sets it on the floor in the corner with the deliberate care of a woman who has just decided that the conference table has a higher-priority use.

“Get over here,” she says.

I get over there.

She meets me at the table’s edge. Her hands find my hips and she lifts me onto the walnut surface. I sit on the edge with my legs parted and she stands between them, and the geometry of this is exactly what I’ve been imagining since the day I sat on her desk and said please for the first time.

“Tell me the rule,” she says. The voice. Low, certain, unhurried.

“I tell the truth.”

“Good. Tell me why you’re here.”

“Because you signed the Morrison Group account today. Because you did it on the strength of your work and your name and the reputation you rebuilt from rubble.” I wrap my legs around her waist. “And because I want to celebrate by doing something we’ve been talking about for three months on a surface that cost more than my first apartment.”

“Twelve thousand dollars.”

“Then we’d better make it worth the investment.”

She kisses me. Not gentle, not preliminary — a kiss with purpose. Her hands are on my thighs, pushing the fabric of my skirt up, and I feel the cool walnut beneath my bare skin and the warmth of her palms.

“Lie back,” she says.

I lie back on the twelve-thousand-dollar conference table. Material samples scatter. A project folder slides off the edge and fans across the floor. Celeste doesn’t flinch.

That’s how I know she’s serious.

She unbuttons my blouse. Slowly, from the top. Each button reveals a new inch of skin, and she watches each inch appear with the attentive hunger of a woman who has seen my body hundreds of times and still approaches it like a space she’s discovering for the first time.

“No bra,” she observes.

“I told you. Specific intentions.”

Her hands cup my breasts. Her thumbs circle my nipples — firm, deliberate, the pressure she’s learned I need. She bends down. Her mouth replaces her thumb — warm, wet, the precise suction that makes my hips lift off the table.

“More,” I say.

“More what?”

“Everything. Your mouth. Your hands. That thing you do with your—” She does the thing. Two fingers pressing into me while her mouth stays on my breast, and the dual sensation makes my back arch off the table and a sound escape me that echoes off the studio walls with the clarity of a space designed for clean acoustics.

“Careful,” she murmurs against my skin. “The neighbors.”

“The neighbors can send a thank-you card.”

Then she kneels. On the hardwood floor of her professional studio. Between my legs.

“Tell me the rule,” she says.

“I tell the truth.”

“Tell me what you want.”

“Your mouth. On me. Now. Please.”

“Good girl.”

The words dissolve me the same way they dissolved me the first time — a full-body immersion, the praise flooding through my nervous system, my muscles going slack, my breath stuttering. Three months of hearing those words and they still land like the first time.

Her mouth is on me. Confident. Certain. The authority she’s grown into, applied with the precision of a woman who has memorized my body the way she memorizes floor plans. The vibrator joins. She presses it against me while her tongue works in concert, and the dual stimulation makes my thighs shake and my voice climb to a register that would be embarrassing in any other context.

I come on the conference table at Arden House at 7:23 p.m. on a Tuesday, with Celeste Arden between my legs and material samples scattered across the floor and the desk lamp casting warm light over the most obscenely beautiful scene I’ve ever been part of.

“Your turn,” I say.

“The table is twelve thousand—”

“If you finish that sentence with the price of this table instead of taking off your trousers, I’m going to lose my mind.”

She takes off her trousers.

I kneel. Because kneeling is our language. I kneel between her legs and I give her everything — every technique I know, every rhythm she’s taught me she likes. She comes saying my name. Not “good girl” — my name. Romy. Said like a prayer and a revelation and a fact all at once.

We lie on the conference table afterward. Side by side. Staring at the ceiling.

“The champagne is warm,” she says.

“It’s Sancerre. It’ll survive.”

“My twelve-thousand-dollar conference table has—”

“Finish that sentence and I swear—”

She laughs. I laugh. We lie on the table in her studio and laugh at the ceiling, because the woman who used to straighten throw pillows in her sleep has learned that some messes are worth making.

“I love you,” I say. Without deflection. Without a joke to soften it.

“I love you too. Now open the champagne before it gets any warmer.”

We drink it from mismatched coffee mugs. We sit on the conference table in our underwear. Outside the windows, the Alexandria evening settles into the specific, golden quiet of a summer night.

“Next time,” I say, “the Bellamy lobby.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Too late. I’m already thinking about it.”

“You are impossible.”

“You love impossible.”

“I love impossible,” she agrees. “Including the fact that you just made me christen my own conference table and I’m going to have to sit here tomorrow during a client meeting and keep a straight face.”

“Your Majesty. You’ve never kept a straight anything.”

The laugh she gives me for that one is worth the entire ninety-three-day wait.

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