A scene set six weeks after the registry-office wedding. October. The Hudson Valley estate. Cat is thirty-four. Sloan is thirty-eight. The horse is in the next field.
⚠️ This scene is too explicit for KDP and lives only here, for readers of Off The Clock.
The Long Meadow
Cat’s POV
Sloan brings me to the estate on a Friday in October, and the trees on the long meadow are doing what the trees on the long meadow do at the second week of October, which is to say the entire valley is on fire.
We are alone on the property.
We have been alone on the property, by Sloan’s specific instruction, since Tuesday. The staff has the week off. The neighbor’s horse — black, patient, a creature I have, in six months of marriage, learned to bring an apple to on Saturday mornings — is across the fence at the far end of the meadow, watching us walk down the gravel drive with the dispassion of a herbivore who has, by now, seen this couple do a great many strange things on this property.
Sloan has my hand.
She is in jeans and a flannel that used to be her father’s, and she has the keys to the house in her free hand, and she is, as we walk, humming.
She is humming the song from Tess’s wedding.
She has, in nearly a year, never stopped.
I do not, anymore, point it out.
I just listen.
In the kitchen, at four-fifteen on a Friday afternoon, with the light coming gold through the windows and the wood floor warm under our bare feet, she puts me on the counter.
She puts me on the long counter — the long counter, the one I had asked her about on our first walk through this house, the one she had told me, in a flat voice, that her grandmother had cooked Sunday dinners on for forty-six years, the one I have, since, made coffee on at six a.m. on Saturdays, the one she has, since, set me on twice — and she steps between my knees and she puts both hands flat on either side of my hips and she breathes in once, slow, through her nose.
“Cat.”
“Sloan.”
“Take this off.”
“Which.”
“All of it. Slowly.”
I take the sweater off.
I take the t-shirt under the sweater off.
I do it slowly, the way she asked, and her eyes do the thing they have done since the first night in Rhinebeck, which is the slow appraising sweep that is not, in any of its movements, hurried.
I am not, today, wearing a bra.
She makes a small sound when she sees that.
“Cat.”
“Mm.”
“Take the rest off.”
I unbutton the jeans. I lift, on the counter, just enough for her to push them down my hips. She helps. She gets them off my legs. She drops them on the floor. She does not, today, allow me the dignity of underwear — I checked, she had murmured, in the bedroom this morning, with her hand inside my jeans before I had put them on, and I am, today, picking — and so I am, by four-eighteen on a Friday afternoon in October, in nothing on my wife’s grandmother’s kitchen counter.
Her grandmother is dead.
Her grandmother would have, by Sloan’s own gleeful telling, hated me.
I think, every time we do this, good.
“Sloan.”
“Mm.”
“You first.”
“Cat.”
“Sloan.”
“It is your turn to be first.”
“I was first last weekend.”
“You were.”
“And the weekend before that.”
“That was my birthday.”
“Sloan, your birthday was —”
“Cat.”
“What.”
She steps closer.
She puts her mouth, lightly, on the inside of my thigh.
“I am not, today, going to be talked out of going first.”
“Sloan —”
“I have been, since Tuesday, planning to put you on this counter and eat you out for forty minutes. I have, in fact, told my wife, over breakfast this morning, that this was the program for Friday afternoon. My wife agreed. My wife is, in fact, a very compliant person under the right conditions, and I am going to enjoy her in the way I have, all week, planned to enjoy her, and then I am going to let her — as a courtesy — have her own turn, on the counter, after dinner, with her own preferred set of arrangements. Do we have an agreement, Mrs. Sloan.”
I close my eyes.
She has, in six months, started calling me Mrs. Sloan in this voice. It is her own private joke. We are, on every legal document, Reyes-Sloan, hyphenated, alphabetical. She does not, anywhere except in a kitchen with her mouth on my thigh, ever call me Mrs. Sloan.
It does, every time, the same thing.
“Yes,” I say.
“Good girl.”
I make a sound.
She laughs against my thigh.
She moves her mouth up.
She does not, immediately, do what she said she was going to do. She kisses, slowly, the inside of my left thigh, then the inside of my right, then a small spot at the crease of my hip that she has, in a year, learned to find with her eyes closed. She puts the flat of her hand on my stomach and presses, just barely, to keep me from arching toward her, and she works her mouth in a slow patient inventory of every place on me that is not, yet, the place I want it.
I make a small frustrated sound.
“Sloan.”
“Mm.”
“Please.”
“Cat.”
“Please.”
“What was that.”
“Please.”
She lifts her head.
She looks up at me.
She is, in this kitchen, in her father’s flannel, with her hair coming forward around her face and her eyes going darker than gray, and she says, in the level voice she has used with me since the Carlyle:
“Tell me what you want, Cat.”
“I want your mouth on me.”
“Where.”
“You know where.”
“Use words. I want to hear it.”
I put my hand in her hair.
I close my fingers in it.
I say, in the voice I have, in a year, only ever used with her:
“Sloan. Put your fucking mouth on my cunt before I put it there myself.”
She grins.
She grins the Theo grin. The one she has, in a year, gotten better and better at.
She puts her mouth on me.
She does it slowly.
She does it the way she did it on Saturday night in the bath three Wednesdays after we met, except that I am, today, on a counter in her grandmother’s kitchen, and I am, today, married to her, and I am, today, not running a count in the back of my head to see how I am supposed to come.
I am, instead, just there.
I am there with my legs over her shoulders and her hands wrapped around my thighs and her tongue working in the slow flat strokes that have, in a year, become the thing I think about on Tuesdays at three p.m. when I am at my desk in the East Village and my wife is at her small fund in midtown, and I make a sound I have, in nine years of running my old work, never made for anyone but her, and she makes the small wrecked sound back into me that is, in our marriage, the answer.
She works me up to the edge. Slow. Slow. With the heel of her hand on my stomach and the flat of her tongue against my clit and her free hand under me, fingers spread on the small of my back, holding me, the way you hold a thing you have been waiting to hold.
She holds me at the edge for — I do not know — thirty seconds. A minute. Long enough that my hand in her hair has gone tight and my thighs have started to shake and I am, on her grandmother’s counter, in October, in the gold light, making the small ragged sound that, in a year, has become the only sound she really wants from me.
She lets me come.
I come on her mouth, on the counter, with her name in mine.
I say it loud.
I say it loud because we are alone on the property, and because there is no one to hear it, and because I have, in a year of marriage, mostly learned to stop being quiet when I come, and because the only audience for the rest of the afternoon is, technically, a horse across a fence at the far end of a meadow, and the horse, by now, is used to it.
She works me through the aftershocks.
Slow. Gentle. With small kisses to the inside of my thigh.
When I finally — when I am just lying on the counter in the gold light with my hand draped over my eyes — she lifts her mouth off me. She kisses my hip. She kisses my stomach. She kisses, slowly, up the line of me, and she puts her mouth on the base of my throat, and she stays there, breathing.
“Sloan.”
“Mm.”
“That was forty minutes.”
“That was twenty.”
“Sloan.”
“That was twenty, and we are not done, and I have, in fact, just barely begun, and I am going to finish what I started, and I am going to do it twice more before I let you off this counter, and I am, frankly, telling you in advance because you will, by minute thirty, be incoherent, and I want you to have the information now, while you can still nod.”
I laugh.
I laugh, on the counter, with my hand over my eyes and my wife’s mouth at my throat, and I say:
“Sloan.”
“Yes.”
“I love you.”
“I know, Cat.”
“I love you on this counter, in this kitchen, in this house, in this state, in this country, in this —”
“Cat.”
“Yes.”
“I am going to make you come twice more, and then I am going to lift you off this counter and put you on that table over there, and I am going to do it again, and then we are going to have dinner, and then I am going to take you upstairs, and you are going to do whatever you want to me, and I am going to let you, and at some point in there I am going to want you to put on the strap, and I am going to want you to fuck me face-down on the bed in our bedroom in our house in our —”
“Sloan.”
“Yes.”
“Stop talking.”
“Yes.”
She bends.
She puts her mouth back where it had been.
She makes me come twice more, on the counter, in the gold light of an October afternoon in the Hudson Valley, with her grandmother’s wedding ring on a chain around her neck and her father’s flannel still on her shoulders and the wedding band of plain platinum on her left hand and the small old gold band of my grandmother — which I do not, in fact, have a grandmother to inherit from, and which she had, on the day before our wedding, walked into a small antique shop on Mott and picked out for me from a tray of mismatched things — on her right hand, where she has, in six months, been wearing it without ever telling me she means to.
I come twice more.
I am, by the second one, doing the incoherent thing she predicted.
She lifts me off the counter.
She carries me to the table.
She does it again.
By the time we get to dinner I am, in fact, in nothing but her father’s flannel, sitting at the table she just put me on, eating leftover pasta she heated up while I was half-asleep, with her sitting across from me in a t-shirt and her own underwear and a small smile on her face that is, in her vocabulary, the architectural ancestor of triumphant.
“Sloan.”
“Yes.”
“Eat.”
“I’m eating.”
“Sloan.”
“Mm.”
“My turn after.”
“Yes.”
“Strap.”
“Cat.”
“Strap, Sloan.”
“All right.”
“Sloan.”
“Yes.”
She looks up from her pasta.
She looks at me, in the candlelight she lit while I was unconscious, in her father’s flannel and nothing else, with my hair wrecked and her mouth’s work all over me, and she says, quietly:
“I love you, Cat.”
I say: “I know, Sloan.”
I say: “Eat your dinner.”
She eats her dinner.
After dinner, I make her come three times in our bed, with the strap, with my mouth on the back of her neck, with her face down on the duvet and my hand in her hair and her real name said into the pillow once and Mrs. Sloan said into it twice, and afterward we lie tangled in the cold air of the bedroom — I have, at her request, opened a window — and the horse, somewhere across the fence at the far end of the meadow, is, in our particular shared mythology, watching.
The horse is not watching.
The horse is asleep.
We are, in our shared mythology, very much watched, and we are, in our shared mythology, indifferent to the watching, and we are, in our shared mythology, Mrs. and Mrs. Reyes-Sloan, in the kitchen, on the counter, with a horse for a witness, and that mythology has, in a year, become the thing we tell each other instead of saying I love you in the kitchen at six a.m. when we are tired.
I tell it to her now, against her shoulder.
She laughs.
She laughs in the way I have, in six months of marriage, learned to live for — the small ridiculous unguarded one, the one that pulls a sound out of her that is not, in any of its registers, the woman in the Bloomberg photograph from a year ago.
She kisses my forehead.
She says: “Cat.”
I say: “Yes.”
She says: “Sleep.”
I say: “Sloan.”
She says: “Sleep, sweetheart.”
I sleep.
In the morning, when I wake up, she is already awake, propped on one elbow, watching me, with the gold of the early morning on the side of her face.
She says: “Hi.”
I say: “Hi.”
She says: “Coffee.”
I say: “On it.”
I get up.
I put on her father’s flannel.
I go down to the kitchen, in nothing but the flannel, and I make coffee on the long counter, and I bring it to her in bed, and she sits up, and she takes the mug with both hands, and she drinks, and she looks at me over the rim, and she says:
“Mrs. Sloan.”
“Mrs. Sloan.”
“That was a good Friday.”
“That was a good Friday, Sloan.”
“There are fifty-two of them a year.”
“I know.”
“And the horse.”
I laugh.
She laughs.
We drink the coffee.
Outside, at the far end of the meadow, the neighbor’s horse comes to the fence the way he does on Saturday mornings, looking for an apple. I will, in twenty minutes, pull on jeans and walk across the wet grass to give him one, with my wife watching from the kitchen window in nothing but a t-shirt and a coffee mug, and the horse will, in his patient herbivore way, take it.
That is the morning.
That is, in fact, every morning.
That is, in the end, the entire life.
It does not, in any of the years that follow, stop being true.
— Aurora
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