The Vent, Her Side

An Our Girlfriend’s House Rules Bonus Scene
by Isla Wilde

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Paula

It was a Tuesday in March, and nothing was on fire.

Paula Keene noted this privately, for the record, the way she noted most things. Rain on the bedroom window. The curtains Bev had shamed them into hanging. A paperback open on her bare stomach—The Rancher’s Redemption, third in a series she would deny owning—with a pencil in the gutter, her reading glasses on, and nothing else. Jill on the far side of the bed, face down and humming with satisfaction like an appliance. And in the exact middle of the mattress, flat on her back with one arm behind her head, Erin Weller, looking at the ceiling as if it owed her an explanation.

“Can I ask you something,” Erin said.

“You will regardless.”

“I’ve been sitting on it for eighteen months.”

“That seems unlike you.”

“I know. I’m very proud.” Erin turned her head on the pillow. Her curls were crushed flat on one side, and there was a mark rising on her collarbone that Jill had put there forty minutes ago. “First night. September second. The rain. You had Jill on the headboard.”

“Oh, here we go,” Jill said into the pillow.

“Right before you told her to come, you said something. One word. You said it into her.” Erin’s hand lifted and dropped on the sheet. “It came up through the floor like a hum. I never caught it. I felt it, which was worse. I’ve been trying to work out what it was ever since.”

Jill’s head came up. “She said a word?”

“You were occupied,” said Paula.

“I was extremely occupied. What word?”

Paula closed the paperback over her pencil. She took her glasses off, folded them, and set them on the nightstand, and both of the women in her bed went quiet, because both of them knew what that meant.

“If I tell you the word,” she said, “I have to tell you the rest of it. There’s a part of that night I’ve never said out loud. To either of you.”

A pause.

“Paula Elizabeth Keene,” said Jill. “Eighteen months?”

“I’m disclosing it now. Voluntarily. That ought to count for something.”

Erin rolled onto her side to face her, tucked a hand under her cheek, and smiled with the gap in her teeth.

“Take your time,” she said. “Slower, even.”

“That’s my line.”

“I know. I heard.”

At eleven o’clock on the night of September second, Paula was sitting up in bed with a state compliance manual, reading one paragraph for the fifth time.

The paragraph was not at fault.

The fault lay with a woman who had stood in Paula’s dining room that afternoon, wet to the skin, dripping onto a lease addendum, and looked up from Section eleven with an expression Paula had not been able to file. Surprise, first. Then something that came after surprise. You’re a lawyer? Grants and compliance, Paula had said; people are less afraid of me and more bored by me. And the woman, with rainwater running off the end of her nose, had said: I’m not bored.

Three words. Paula had felt them land somewhere well below her collar, and she had said initial there, and she had been irritated with herself ever since.

It was nothing. A tenant. Four months.

The bathroom door banged open and her wife came out of it in a cloud of steam, wearing a clean CRUMB & KETTLE T-shirt and not one other thing, and launched herself at the mattress like a woman going off a dock.

“The sink and I have agreed to a ceasefire until Thursday,” Jill announced into the duvet.

“The sink won.”

“The sink is resting.” Jill rolled over. Her hair was damp, her face scrubbed, and she smelled of soap over butter, which was how she always smelled, as though the butter had been issued with her. She looked at the manual. She looked at Paula. “You’re not reading that.”

“I’m reading it.”

“You haven’t turned a page since I went in there. You’ve got your pencil doing the thing.” Jill plucked the manual out of her hands and dropped it over the side of the bed. Then she took the glasses off Paula’s face, with considerably more care, and set them on the nightstand. “She sat on my island.”

“On a food surface.”

“You loved that she sat on it.”

“I found it,” said Paula, “structurally provocative.”

Jill laughed, the big one from the stomach, and Paula put a hand under the T-shirt and found the place just above her wife’s hip that had been ticklish for eleven years, and the laugh went up half an octave and turned soft at once, the way it did when Paula’s mouth was against her ear.

“Don’t—Paula—”

“You’re ticklish, you’ve always been ticklish, you’re forty years old—”

“I’m thirty-seven, you monster, don’t age me up while you’re—oh.”

Paula had moved her hand.

Not far. Down over the soft curve of Jill’s belly and between her legs, where there was nothing in the way, and where her wife was warm from the shower and already, underneath that, a different kind of warm. She cupped her. That was all. The full flat of her palm, perfectly still.

“Hold still,” she said.

“Make me.”

So Paula made her.

She took Jill’s wrists, one and then the other, and carried them up over her head to the iron bars, and Jill let her, and wrapped her fingers around the cold metal with a look on her face that said she’d been waiting to be made since roughly the mussels. The headboard creaked. Paula settled alongside her on one elbow, put her hand back exactly where it had been, and laid two fingers along the length of her. Not in. Just there, resting in the slick heat of her, as still as a paperweight.

“If you want it,” she murmured, “take it. I’m not going to move.”

Jill’s hips came up at once, greedy, a fast hard grind against her fingers.

“No,” Paula said. “Slower. I said slower.”

Jill made a noise of pure grievance and slowed down.

It was one of Paula’s favorite things in the world, and she had never told anyone so. Her wife, who did everything at a run, who lifted and hauled and kneaded and never once sat still, made to rock herself against a hand that would not help her. The long muscles of Jill’s thighs working. Her stomach tightening and letting go. The wet, quiet drag of her cunt along Paula’s fingers, up and back, up and back, her clit catching on a knuckle each time and her breath catching with it.

“Like that,” Paula told her. “Exactly like that. No, don’t rush. You always rush.”

“Because you always tease—”

“And you always love it.” One of Jill’s hands had come off the iron and closed around Paula’s wrist, trying to press. Paula looked at it until it let go. “Hands back where they were.”

The hand went back. Jill’s wedding ring ticked against the bar, and went on ticking, small and regular, as she moved.

Paula watched her. Without her glasses the far side of the room was a soft blur and her wife, this close, was only warm brown and lamplight. She didn’t need to see. She could feel how wet Jill was getting, how it had gone from slick to running, how her own fingers were coated to the palm. She could hear it. And she found, a little to her surprise, that she was not as patient tonight as she was making herself sound. There was a heat sitting low in her own body that had been there since dinner, since before dinner, and she did not look at it directly.

She turned her wrist and pushed two fingers into her wife, all the way.

The sound Jill made came from the bottom of her chest, long and rough and helpless.

“There she is,” Paula said softly. “Now don’t move.”

And she didn’t move either. She stayed buried to the knuckle, feeling Jill clench around her and flutter and clench again, and she bent her head and pushed the T-shirt up with her chin and took Jill’s left nipple in her mouth. The left, always. The left one was wired straight to everything. She sucked, hard, without warning, and Jill’s whole body jolted and the headboard rattled against the wall.

“Paula—”

“I know.”

“Paula.”

“I know what you want.” Paula lifted her mouth a quarter of an inch. Jill’s nipple was dark and wet and tight, and her cunt was squeezing Paula’s fingers in a quick, frantic pulse, begging on its own behalf. “Ask for it properly.”

Jill’s eyes were shut. Her arms were shaking on the bars.

“Please,” she said, and her voice cracked straight down the middle. “Please. Your mouth. Babe, please.”

“Good.”

Paula went down the bed.

She didn’t hurry even then. She settled on her stomach between her wife’s legs and pushed her thighs wide with her shoulders and looked, from four inches away, which was the one distance at which she could see nothing clearly and did not care. Then she put her tongue flat against her and licked, one long stroke from her own knuckles up over Jill’s clit, and Jill made a high, cracked, scalded sound and tried to climb the headboard.

Paula pinned her with a forearm and went to work.

Eleven years. She knew this cunt the way she knew a contract she had drafted herself. She knew that Jill wanted the flat of the tongue first and the tip later, that she wanted to be sucked only once she was already shaking, that the spot Paula had found in a bad apartment on Delancey wanted pressure, not speed. She gave her all of it, in order. She fucked her slowly with two fingers and circled her clit and listened to her wife come apart into profanity, a long unbroken run of it, getting faster, getting higher.

“Fuck—fuck—oh my God, right there, don’t—Paula—don’t stop, don’t you dare stop—”

The headboard was banging now. Jill’s heels were digging into her back. She was a few strokes from the edge, Paula could feel it gathering in her thighs, and that was the moment the thing Paula had not been looking at came up and looked at her instead.

Her wife, at dinner, watching a stranger’s mouth.

Herself, at the same dinner, watching the same stranger. Dark eyes. Flattened curls. Boots swinging off the end of the island, as if she had lived there for years.

Paula was not a possessive woman. She had built a marriage with a door in it, on purpose, and she believed in the door. She did not say things like the thing she said next. But she said it, with her mouth full of her wife, pressed so close that it was more vibration than word, where it could not possibly be entered into any record.

“Mine.”

Jill sobbed.

Paula lifted her head just far enough to be understood.

“Come on,” she said, low and certain. “Give it to me. Now.”

She curled her fingers and sealed her mouth over Jill’s clit, and Jill came with a sound like something tearing. She came in hard, wrenching pulses that Paula felt to the wrist, thighs clamped around Paula’s ears, back bowed off the bed, wet flooding over Paula’s chin. Paula stayed with her through every one of them, gentler and gentler, until the cursing dissolved into “Oh—oh, fuck—ohh—” and then into wrecked, breathless, delighted laughter, and a hand finally came down off the iron and pushed weakly at her forehead.

Paula laid her cheek on the inside of her wife’s thigh and breathed.

“Hi,” said Jill, from a great distance.

“Hi.”

“You’re the worst person I’ve ever met.”

“I’m the best person you’ve ever met.”

“You’re both.” A long, satisfied exhale. “Come here. Get up here, I want to—”

“Give me a minute. My jaw.”

“Your jaw? I’m the one who can’t feel my legs.”

“You’re welcome.”

But she went. She crawled up the bed and lay down along her wife’s side, and Jill, who could not feel her legs but had never in her life left a debt unpaid, rolled toward her and slid a hand down between them without a word.

Paula was soaked. She had been soaked for some time. Jill’s fingers slipped through her and Jill’s eyebrows went up in the lamplight, and she grinned, and for once in her life kept her voice down, her mouth right against Paula’s ear.

“Well, hello. Who got you like this?”

“You did,” Paula whispered, which was true, and was not all of it.

She pulled her knee up over Jill’s hip and curled into her, face in her neck, and Jill’s hand went to work. Two blunt, strong baker’s fingers pushing up into her, and a thumb on her clit, rolling slow. Jill didn’t tease. Teasing was Paula’s department; Jill fed people. She gave Paula exactly what she needed in a deep, steady, generous rhythm, and Paula rocked down onto it, fucking herself on her wife’s hand, and felt her sentences start to go.

She was a quiet woman in bed. She always had been. The closer she got, the less came out of her, until at the end there was nothing at all, and she rode Jill’s fingers in near silence, with the rain on the roof and the sheets rustling and her breath coming short and hot against Jill’s throat.

“There you go, babe,” Jill breathed. “I’ve got you. Take it.”

Paula took it. She was close embarrassingly fast. She pressed her open mouth to Jill’s shoulder and shut her eyes, and what she saw behind them was not her wife.

It was a woman dripping on a lease. A gap in her teeth. A soaked shirt stuck to her collarbones. I’m not bored.

She came on it.

It went through her like current finding ground, a long tight silent clench around Jill’s fingers, and another, and another, her whole body locked, her teeth set against Jill’s skin so that not one sound got out. Jill held her and worked her through it and kissed her hair. And when it let her go, Paula lay very still with her heart slamming, eleven years in and eight of them married, and understood that she had just come thinking about a woman who had initialed her addendum six hours earlier.

She didn’t say so.

She turned her wife over instead, gently, and fitted herself along Jill’s back, and put her face against the nape of her neck, and waited for her own breathing to slow.

That was when she heard it.

It was a very small sound. It came from the floor on her side of the bed, from the old iron register that had not been connected to a furnace since before either of them was born. A soft creak, like bedsprings taking a shift of weight. And then, fainter, something that sounded absurdly like a long breath being let go.

Paula lifted her head off the pillow.

Rain. The gutter. A car hissing by on Ashby Place.

Pipes, she decided. The same pipes that had hummed at her all afternoon while she lay down with a headache. It was a hundred-and-thirty-year-old house, it made a hundred and thirty years of noises, and Jill had been dropping earrings down that grate since the week they moved in. Paula put her head back down. She filed it under house, and she did not open the file again until a woman sitting on her desk made her.

“Hey,” Jill mumbled, drowsy, warm as a loaf. “Our new tenant is trouble.”

I’m not bored.

Paula lay in the dark with her wife in her arms and another woman’s voice still moving under her skin, and took a little too long to answer. When she did, she found, to her own alarm, that she was smiling.

“Only if we make her trouble,” she said.

Nobody spoke for a moment.

The rain had picked up. Jill had rolled onto her back at some point during the telling and was staring at Paula across Erin’s body with her mouth open.

“Let me get this straight,” Jill said. “You came thinking about her. And then you lay there behind me, and about ten minutes later you said, You liked her. And then you said, Never the same woman. To me. Very kindly.”

“Yes.”

“Like you were reading me my rights.”

“I would like it noted that I was mostly lying to myself.”

“Noted.” Jill started to laugh, helplessly, flat on her back. “Oh my God. I love you. You enormous hypocrite.”

Erin hadn’t laughed. Erin was looking at Paula with her eyes very dark and her lips slightly parted.

“Nine hours,” she said.

“Approximately.”

“I’d lived in this house nine hours and I had my hand in my underwear, three feet from that grate, trying to keep up with you. I came when she did.” Erin held up her left wrist and turned the inside of it to the lamp. “I bit this so I wouldn’t make a sound. There was a crescent on it for two days.”

Paula looked at the wrist. Something turned over, low in her stomach.

“I heard a breath,” she said. “Afterward. I thought it was the pipes.”

“It was me deciding to buy a rug.”

“You never put that rug down.”

“It’s by the front door. Everyone wipes their feet on my good intentions.” Erin reached out and laid two fingers on Paula’s sternum. “Mine. That’s what it was? You put that in the floor on my first night, and I got it between the legs without even knowing what I’d been told.”

“It wasn’t addressed to you.”

“Wasn’t it?”

Paula opened her mouth and found that, eighteen months on, she did not have a clean answer.

“Say it again,” Erin said quietly. “Where I can hear it.”

“And me,” said Jill, no longer laughing. “I was busy the first time.”

Paula sat up. She put the paperback on the floor. She looked at the two of them lying side by side in her bed, flushed and waiting, and she did what she had learned, at some cost, to do.

“I’d like you both on your backs,” she said. “Hands on the bars. May I?”

Erin’s smile came slowly, gap and all. “Assign.”

They went up together, four hands on cold iron, Jill’s ring ticking once against the bar. Paula knelt between them. She put her left hand between her wife’s thighs and found her wet again, already, from nothing but a story; she slid two fingers into her and held them there, still, and Jill swore softly and did not move. Then she bent and put her mouth on Erin.

Erin’s hips came off the bed.

She tasted different from Jill, sharper, salt with something sweet under it, and she wanted different things, and Paula knew those too by now. A firm tongue. No preamble. She licked straight into her, deep, and then up, and closed her lips around Erin’s clit and sucked in a slow pulse, and began, in the same rhythm, to fuck her wife with her hand.

“Oh, fuck,” Erin said to the ceiling. “Both. She’s doing both.”

“She’s showing off,” Jill gasped.

“Let her. Don’t you dare stop her—”

Paula did not stop. She worked them side by side, mouth and hand, Erin slick and swollen against her tongue and Jill hot and clutching around her fingers, until the headboard was knocking the wall and the two of them were breathing in the same ragged time. Erin’s thigh shook against her cheek. Jill’s cunt clamped down on her knuckles. They had turned their heads on the pillow; they were kissing, open-mouthed and messy, right over the top of her.

She lifted her mouth half an inch.

“Mine,” she said against Erin, clearly, where it could be heard.

Erin came with a shout, hands locked on the iron, grinding up into her mouth, and Paula stayed for all of it and drank her down. Then she turned, chin wet, and put her mouth on her wife and her fingers into Erin, still pulsing, and said it again into the other body she knew by heart.

“Mine.”

Jill came laughing. She always did, now.

Afterward they pulled her up between them, one on each side, and Erin’s hand slid down her stomach and stopped just short of where she was aching.

“Your turn,” Erin murmured. “Ask.”

“Please,” said Paula, with no terms attached. “Both of you.”

By the wall, the old iron register took the sound of what they did to her and carried it faithfully up through the bones of the house, two floors, into a dark room under the roof.

Nobody was up there to hear.

Loved Jill, Paula, and Erin? Leave a review — and read every rule they broke, from the very first night.

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