My Ex’s Mother After Dark — Bonus Chapter

Rochester, Unrated
by Blair Lennox

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus scene takes place during Chapter Thirteen of My Ex’s Mother After Dark. Read the novel first.

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Rochester, Unrated

Jamie left a few hours out when she told you about that night in Rochester. Helena didn’t sleep through them. Too hot for the retailers.

HELENA

The bus wakes me.

Not an alarm. I don’t set one and I’ve never needed one. A city bus, sighing to a stop on South Avenue two floors down, and my eyes open as if someone has rung the desk bell. The clock on Jamie’s stove says 5:31 in small green numbers.

I’ve slept past five-thirty every night I’ve spent beside her. Apparently not in Rochester.

I take stock, the way I do. Ceiling: fourteen feet up, striped orange. Eyes: swollen, because I cried on this woman for what I believe was a quarter of an hour. Weight on my chest: Jamie’s head. Her arm is flung across my ribs and her leg is hooked over mine. She’s breathing through her mouth with the total commitment of a person who has been thoroughly fucked.

By me.

I let myself look at that thought directly. I did that. I bought a thing in a box and drove it across two counties and put it on, and she screamed into a brick wall. Then she told me I was magnificent, and I fell to pieces.

It’s on the floor where I dropped it. One stripe of streetlight lies exactly across it. Black leather, brass buckles, seven inches of purple silicone pointing at the ceiling like an accusation.

I look at it for a long time.

Here is what I know, at 5:31 in the morning. I know what her face does when I’m inside her. I know the sound she makes when the angle’s right. I know how it feels to move my hips and watch another person come apart underneath me.

I have no idea what it is to be the one underneath.

No one has ever. Richard doesn’t count. Richard was a brief weather event that occurred in my general vicinity. Claire and I had four hands and a scratchy blanket. And Jamie has had her fingers in me, and her tongue, and once my wrists in a silk scarf while she took me apart on a leather couch. But not that. Not her weight on me and her hips behind it. I read a great deal before Ithaca. Every article was written for two people, and I only read one half.

“You’re thinking,” Jamie says into my collarbone. “I can hear it. It sounds like a fax machine.”

“Go back to sleep.”

“What time is it?”

“Five-thirty.”

“Jesus Christ, Helena.” She burrows in. Her nose is cold. A moment passes. Then she lifts her head and squints at me, one eye open, her hair flattened on one side. “What are you looking at?”

“Nothing.”

She turns her head and follows my eyes to the floor. To the stripe of light.

She turns back. Both eyes are open now.

“Huh,” she says.

“I was simply noticing where it landed.”

“Sure.”

“It ought to be washed. It can’t be good for the leather, lying there.”

“Helena.”

“The woman in Ithaca was very clear that it’s adjustable.” I hear myself say it. Apparently I’m going to keep going. “The harness. She said it would fit a range. She said that was the advantage of that particular model, for a household.”

Jamie props herself up on one elbow. She’s smiling slowly, the way she does when the light’s about to be good.

“A household,” she says.

“That was her word.”

“Are you asking me something, Mrs. Vale?”

Heat climbs my throat. I’m forty-nine years old. A few hours ago I held this woman by the hair. I should be able to manage one sentence.

“I’m asking,” I say to the ceiling, “whether you’d be willing to—reciprocate.”

“Nope.”

I look at her.

“Not nope, I won’t,” she says. “Nope, that’s not how you ask. You told me once you’d never said what you wanted out loud to anybody. You’ve gotten really good at it since.” She walks two fingers down my sternum. “So say it. The actual words. I’ll wait.”

She will, too. She’d lie here until checkout.

I close my eyes. I open them. I look at her instead of the ceiling, because she’s earned that.

“I want you to put it on,” I say. “And I want you to fuck me with it.”

The breath goes out of her.

“Yeah,” she says, rough. “Okay. Yeah. I can do that.”

She washes it first.

I’m grateful, and I’m also undone by it. Jamie Archer, naked at her kitchen sink at 5:40 in the morning, soaping a purple cock with dish liquid as though it were a wineglass. Humming. She dries it on a tea towel. She comes back across the sloping floor with the toy in one hand and the harness in the other, and she steps into the straps without looking, the way she shoulders a camera bag.

She pulls each buckle two holes tighter than I wore it. I notice that. I notice everything. The leather cutting a black line across her hipbones. The long muscles in her thighs. The casual hand she closes around the shaft to seat it, and how entirely, infuriatingly at home she looks.

I laughed at myself in that thing. Nobody on earth would laugh at her.

“You’re staring,” she says.

“You told me I was the hottest thing you’d ever seen.”

“You were.”

“I’d like to formally contest the ranking.”

She grins. She puts one knee on the bed, then the other, and crawls up over me. The toy drags along the inside of my thigh, cool and blunt and heavy. My whole body clenches around nothing.

“Now?” I say. It comes out thinner than I intended.

“God, no.” She kisses the corner of my mouth. “You’re not getting seven inches cold. What kind of operation do you think I’m running?”

And she goes down the bed.

She takes her time. She learned that from me, and I regret teaching her.

She opens me with her thumbs and looks, first. Just looks, in the orange half-light, until I’m squirming. Then her tongue, flat and slow, from the bottom of me to the top. Again. Again. She circles my clit without ever quite landing on it. When my hips come up to chase her, she lays a forearm across my belly and holds me down.

“Jamie—”

“Mm-hm.”

Two fingers slide into me. I’m so wet there’s no resistance at all. She curls them and sucks my clit into her mouth at the same moment, and my hands fly into her hair.

It builds fast. It always builds fast with her. Three decades of drought will do that. I feel it gather low and tight, the first flutter, my thighs starting to shake against her ears—

She stops.

She lifts her mouth. Her fingers go still inside me.

“No,” I say.

“Yes.”

“That is not—”

“You did this to me in the honeymoon suite. Twice.” She kisses the crease of my thigh, sweetly. “I counted.”

She waits until the edge recedes. Then she starts again. A third finger this time, a slow stretch that drags a groan out of me, and her tongue flicking light and quick. She takes me right back up to it. Right to the lip. I’m saying her name in a voice I don’t recognize.

And she stops.

“I will fire you,” I tell her.

“You can’t. You made me report to Marcy.” She rests her chin on my pubic bone and looks up the length of my body at me. Her mouth is shining. “How do you feel?”

“Homicidal.”

“How do you feel here?” She moves her three fingers, slow and deep.

I can’t answer at first. I’m swollen and slick and aching. I’m open in a way that has nothing to do with her hand. I feel like an unlocked door.

“Empty,” I say finally. “I feel empty.”

“There she is,” Jamie says softly.

She kneels up between my legs. She reaches for the bottle on the nightstand anyway, and I watch her slick the toy in her fist, long practiced strokes, her eyes on mine.

“Same rules you had,” she says. “Slow. You tell me.”

“Jamie.”

“Yeah.”

“If you’re slow about it, I’ll scream.”

“Good,” she says. “That’s the whole plan.”

The first inch takes my breath.

It isn’t like fingers. Fingers are clever. This is simply there. Blunt and smooth and unarguable, pressing me open around it. She feeds it into me a little at a time, one hand guiding, the other spread warm on my stomach, and I feel my own body give way around every bit of it.

“Breathe,” she says.

I breathe.

“More?”

“More.”

She sinks deeper. The curve of it finds the place she always finds, and drags across it, and keeps going. A sound comes out of me, low and astonished, almost a laugh. Then her hips are against mine. Leather on my skin. Her weight comes down onto her forearms, her breasts on my breasts, her face over my face.

I’m full. I’m completely, impossibly full of her, and she’s holding still and looking at me.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hello.”

“You okay?”

“I understand,” I say unsteadily, “why you screamed.”

She laughs. I feel it inside me. Every small movement she makes travels straight down the length of that thing and arrives, and my eyes fall shut.

“Open,” she says. “Eyes open. I want to watch you get it.”

She draws back, almost out. She slides in again.

Oh.

Oh.

It’s the weight. Nothing I read mentioned the weight. Her whole body moves with it, the muscle of her back flexing under my hands, her hips rolling into me. Each stroke pushes the breath up out of my chest. This woman has touched me in half the rooms of my hotel. She’s tied my hands. She has never once pinned me under the whole length of her and taken me, and it turns out that’s a different thing entirely.

“There you go,” she murmurs. “Look at you. You were made for this side of it, too.”

“Don’t—talk—”

“You love it when I talk.” She gets a hand under me and tilts my hips, and the next stroke lands so exactly that I cry out. “That’s the spot? Yeah. That’s the spot. God, you’re taking it so well, Helena. All of it. Your first time, and you’re taking every inch of my cock like you’ve been waiting your whole life.”

I have. That’s the terrible part. I have.

She fucks me slowly. Deep, even strokes, almost all the way out and all the way back in, so that I feel the whole length of it each time. I can hear myself. I can hear how wet I am, loud in the quiet apartment. My nails are in her back. My heels are sliding on her sheets.

My hand comes up on its own. Thirty years of habit. It clamps over my mouth.

She stops moving.

She looks down at me, at my hand. Something in her face goes very tender and completely merciless.

“Uh-uh,” she says. She takes my wrist and peels my palm off my lips. She presses it into the pillow beside my head and laces her fingers through mine. “Not in my house.”

“The neighbors—”

“It’s my studio downstairs and a guy named Gary next door who’s deaf in one ear. Nobody here knows you.” She pulls back and drives into me hard, once, and I shout. “See? Building’s still standing.”

She fucks me like that. My hand pinned, her hips working, steady and deep and a little faster every time. The buckles chime. The old bed complains. My voice climbs and breaks into pieces. Yes and there and Jamie, and then no words at all. I wrap my legs around her waist and pull her in harder. I’m close. I’m so close I can taste it, my whole body drawing tight around the cock inside me—

She pulls out.

I make a sound I’ll deny for the rest of my life.

“Up,” Jamie says. She’s breathing hard. Her eyes have gone dark. “Come on. On your feet.”

She takes me to the window.

I go because my hand is in hers and my mind has left the building. I’m naked and shaking and wet to the thighs. The floorboards are cold. She stands me in front of that enormous factory window with its hundred small panes, and she reaches past me for the cord.

“Jamie.”

The blind goes up. All fourteen feet of it, rattling.

Rochester is right there. Still dark. Streetlights burning orange all the way down the avenue. The brick building across the road with one yellow window lit on its third floor. A bakery van double-parked with its hazards blinking. The bus shelter. The river somewhere, a blacker stripe between rooftops.

“Someone will see,” I say.

“Someone might.” She’s behind me. Her hands settle on my hips. “Who?”

I open my mouth.

“Go ahead. Name one. Name one person in this whole city who’d look up and say, that’s Helena Vale.”

There isn’t one. There isn’t a single one. I’m no one’s mother here. No one’s ex-wife, no one’s employer, no one’s Mrs. anything. I’m a naked woman in a window with her lover’s hands on her.

“Hands on the frame,” Jamie says in my ear.

I put my palms on the cold iron between the panes.

“Feet apart.”

I move my feet apart.

“Good girl.”

It goes through me like current.

Two words. I’ve said them to her and watched her knees buckle. Privately I thought it was rather sweet, how easily it worked. I didn’t understand. I had no idea. I’m forty-nine years old, and I run a hotel, and two words in that low voice turn my spine to water.

“Oh, you like that,” Jamie says, delighted.

“Be quiet.”

“You like that so much. Look at your skin.” She draws one finger up my back, and I’m gooseflesh from tailbone to neck. “Good girl, Helena. Bend for me. A little more. That’s perfect.”

She fits the head of the toy against me. She doesn’t tease this time.

She pushes into me from behind in one long stroke, all the way, and my forehead meets the glass.

It’s deeper like this. I knew it would be. I did it to her, and I watched what it did. Knowing is nothing. She fills me until there’s no more of me to fill, her thighs against the backs of mine, her arm coming around my waist to hold me up. Then she moves, and I stop being a person with a name.

“Fuck,” I say to the city.

“Yeah.”

“Fuck, Jamie, fuck—”

“I’ve got you.” Her hips slap against me, a quick wet rhythm that sounds indecent in the high room. Her free hand slides down my belly and between my legs. Two fingertips find my clit and rub. “I’ve got you. Let it go. Let me hear it.”

I’m not quiet. I’m not anything like quiet. I’m moaning against a windowpane with my breath fogging the glass, and every thrust shoves a louder sound out of me. My breasts swing. My thighs are slick. Across the street the yellow window stays lit. A man comes around the bakery van with a tray on his shoulder. He doesn’t look up.

He could.

I don’t take my hands off the frame.

“Tell me whose you are,” Jamie says.

My own line. In my own ear. I said it to her down a telephone, with my office door locked and my blinds drawn, safe as a bank.

“Yours,” I gasp.

“Can’t hear you.”

“Yours. I’m yours—”

“Louder.”

And there’s the stairwell, and the radiator, and a girl with bitten nails grinning at me in the dark. Louder, I dare you. I covered my mouth then. I kept it covered for thirty years.

“I’m yours!” It rings off the brick. “I’m yours, Jamie, I’m yours, please, don’t stop, don’t you dare stop—”

“Then come for me. Right here. Come on my cock with the blinds up. Good girl. Come on—”

I come like a window breaking.

It tears up through me from where she’s buried, wave on wave, my body clamping down on the toy so hard that she groans. I hear myself. I’m loud. I’m so loud. A raw, open-throated cry I didn’t know I owned, pouring out against the glass over a street full of strangers. My knees go. She holds me up with one arm and keeps her fingers moving and fucks me slowly through all of it, until the last shudder wrings out of me. I’m hanging off the window frame, wet-faced, laughing.

Down on South Avenue, the bakery van pulls away.

“Good morning, Rochester,” Jamie says into my shoulder blade.

She gets me back to the bed. She’s extremely pleased with herself. She lies down beside me on her back with her hands behind her head and that purple thing standing up from her hips, glistening. She regards the ceiling like a woman who’s just hung a show.

I give myself ninety seconds. I count them.

Then I sit up.

“What are you doing?” Jamie says.

“Stay exactly as you are.”

“Helena, you can’t even feel your legs—”

“I once ran a wedding for two hundred on a sprained ankle.” I swing my knee across her hips. “Hands where they are.”

Her mouth opens. Her hands stay behind her head.

I take hold of the toy. It’s warm now, and slick with me. I hold it steady and lower myself onto it slowly, watching her watch. I’m tender and swollen, and the stretch is exquisite. I don’t stop until I’m seated on her, the leather pressed tight against me, every inch inside.

“Oh my God,” Jamie whispers.

“You had the wheel,” I say. “You were very good with it. I’d like it back now.”

I ride her.

My pace. Slow at first, a long grind forward and back that drags the base of the harness against her with every roll of my hips. I can tell precisely when it begins to work on her. Her eyes lose focus. Her stomach tightens. Her heels dig into the mattress. I plant my hands on her breasts and use them for balance, and I roll her nipples between my fingers until she arches under me.

“Helena—fuck—I need to touch you—”

“No.”

“Please.”

“You’ll look,” I tell her. “That’s what you’re for, isn’t it? Looking. So look.”

I sit up straight. I let her see all of it. The streetlight’s pouring in behind me through that great bare window, no stripes now, and I know exactly what I look like in it. Forty-nine. Flushed. Stretch-marked. Hair everywhere. Impaled on her and loving it. I slide my hand down my own stomach. I touch myself with two fingers while she watches. I ride her harder, and I don’t close my eyes, and I don’t cover my mouth.

“You’re so fucking beautiful,” she says. Her voice cracks straight down the middle. “You’re so—Helena. I can’t. Look at you.”

“I’m yours,” I tell her. Quietly, this time. Nobody made me. “That’s what you’re looking at.”

She makes a sound like I’ve struck her.

I come with my eyes on hers. It’s slower than the window. It rolls through me deep and long, and I ride it out to the very end on top of her, saying her name out loud to that high ceiling.

Then I lift off her. I unbuckle the harness with fingers that have learned the brass, and I pull it down her thighs.

She’s drenched. The leather has left a pink line across her hips. I put my mouth to that first. Then lower.

“I’m not gonna last,” she says, strangled. “I’ve been right there since the window. I’ve been—oh, fuck—”

Forty seconds. I time her. I can’t help it. My tongue on her clit and two fingers inside her, and she comes with her thighs locked around my head and both hands finally, finally in my hair.

She’s asleep before I’ve finished pulling the sheet up.

Mid-sentence. She was saying something about breakfast, about a place on Gregory Street with a line, and then she simply wasn’t. Her mouth is open. One arm is hanging off the bed.

I look at her for a while. I’ve stopped pretending I don’t do that.

It’s 6:26. I won’t sleep again. I know myself. I get up, carefully. My thighs are trembling as if I’ve climbed something, and there’s a deep, sweet ache between my legs that I intend to feel for the whole drive home.

Her flannel shirt is over the back of a chair. I put it on. It smells of developer and coffee and her.

I find the coffee in the second cupboard, and a dented stovetop pot of a kind I haven’t handled since Hadley Hall. It turns out my hands remember that, too. While it hisses, I pick the harness up off the floor. I rinse what needs rinsing. I set it to dry on her tea towel beside the sink, between a mug and a colander, in plain sight.

A household, the woman said.

I pour a cup. Black.

The blind is still up. I think about lowering it. The sky over the rooftops is still dark, with the faintest seam of gray along the bottom. The yellow window across the street has gone out. Down at the corner, a woman in scrubs is waiting for the bus. She glances up. She sees a person in a plaid shirt at a window, holding a mug. She looks away again.

Nobody.

I leave the blind where it is.

Then I turn around with my coffee, and I walk to the far left end of her wall of photographs. There must be two hundred of them. I have until she wakes.

I start at the beginning.

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