Our Girlfriend’s House Rules

FFF Why-Choose Sapphic Romance
by Isla Wilde

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FFF (Why-Choose Triad)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Why Choose, Triad Romance, Open Marriage, Landlord/Tenant, Forced Proximity, Thin Walls, Voyeurism, Praise Kink, Light Bondage, Romantic Comedy, Found Family
Length: ~97,000 words

Two wives. One rule: never the same woman. Then they rent the guest suite to her.

Jill and Paula have been married for eight years, and their open marriage runs on one unbreakable rule: never the same woman.

Then they rent their guest suite to Erin Weller.

Jill — the loud, filthy-mouthed baker who has never met a problem she couldn’t feed — wants the sharp-tongued arts director who makes her laugh at four in the morning.

Paula — the cool, precise grant consultant who has a rule for everything — wants the infuriating tenant who takes her arguments apart with one question and her composure apart with one kiss.

Erin wants them both. But she has been a married woman’s secret before, and she is not doing it again. If she’s in, she’s not their exception, their experiment, or their spicy little guest-room detour. She’s a vote.

Oh, and the old iron vent in Erin’s bedroom? It carries every sound from theirs.

One kiss becomes two dates. Two dates become a rulebook. And the rulebook goes straight in the trash the night all three of them end up in the same bed.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ FFF why-choose where nobody gets chosen over anybody
✅ A married couple falling for the same woman — and falling harder for each other
✅ Thin walls, one old vent, and a tenant who hears everything
✅ A heroine who refuses to be the third wheel
✅ Explicit scenes from the very first chapter (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, filthy, funny)
✅ Voyeurism, orgasm control, a strap, and a silk scarf put to good use
✅ Rotating POV — all three women, all three sides
✅ No cheating, no breakup, HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF and FFF scenes, consensual voyeurism, orgasm control, light bondage, strap-on play), strong language, an open marriage that becomes a closed triad, past emotional manipulation by an ex, a workplace ethics investigation, and a lease addendum that is basically a love letter. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.

Chapter One: Label Your Food

House Rule #1: Label your food.

The rain started four blocks from Ashby Place, which was exactly the kind of timing Erin Weller had come to expect from cities.

It didn’t build up to it. There was no polite drizzle, no warning hiss on the leaves. One second she was coasting down Corliss Hill with a cardboard box bungee-corded to her rear rack and her phone’s map chirping turn left in four hundred feet, and the next second the sky simply opened its fly and pissed on her.

She laughed out loud, because the alternative was crying, and she had a rule about crying on a bicycle. It made steering unreliable.

By the time she found number fourteen—three stories of old red brick, black shutters, a stoop with a pot of drowning geraniums, a brass knocker shaped like a pear—she was wet to the underwear. Her curls had gone flat and dripping. The box on the back of the bike, labeled BOX 1 OF 12: KITCHEN / ESSENTIAL / DO NOT LOSE, had developed a soft, worrying sag.

The front door was standing open.

Not ajar. Open. Wide, welcoming, rain blowing straight into the vestibule onto a woven runner that was going to smell like a wet dog by tomorrow. Erin stood on the sidewalk with water running off the end of her nose and considered that maybe she had the wrong house.

Then, from somewhere deep inside and far above, a woman’s voice yelled, “No, no, no, no, don’t you dare—oh, you motherfucking piece of—” followed by a sound like a garden hose fighting for its life.

Right house, then. Her new landlords had told her the guest suite sink “had a personality.”

Erin hauled the bike up the stoop, leaned it in the vestibule, and unhooked the box. She stepped inside and nudged the door shut with her hip.

The front hall was long and narrow and smelled like old wood, coffee, and something baked that had involved an enormous amount of butter. A staircase climbed up the left wall. To the right, an arched doorway opened onto a dining room, where a woman sat at a long walnut table in front of a laptop, earbuds in, spine straight as a ruler, speaking in a calm, low, unbothered voice.

“—no, I understand the department’s position. I’m asking you to understand that the grantee was never notified of the revised reporting threshold, which means the department can’t penalize them for missing it. Section four, paragraph two. I’ll wait.”

She did wait. She waited the way some people sat on thrones.

She was tall even sitting down, long-limbed in a soft gray button-down rolled to the elbows, auburn hair pinned in a low knot at the back of her neck with a pencil shoved through it. Wire-framed glasses. Fair skin, a spill of freckles visible at her open collar. Beside her elbow, the wireless router had been duct-taped to a brass reading lamp, cables looping down to the floor, and a strip of masking tape across the lamp’s base read, in tidy block capitals, TEMPORARY — DO NOT UNPLUG.

The woman’s eyes moved up from the screen and landed on Erin. Gray-green. They took her in completely—the dripping hair, the soaked shirt, the sad box—in perhaps one second.

She held up a single finger. One moment. Then, without breaking eye contact with Erin, said to the laptop, “Thank you, Gerald. Yes. I’ll expect the amended letter by Friday.”

From upstairs, the voice hollered, “PAULA. Is she here? Is that her? Tell her not to come up, it’s a crime scene!”

The woman—Paula—closed the laptop with two fingers and pulled out one earbud.

“You must be Erin,” she said. “I’m sorry about my wife. And the weather. And the door. Mostly my wife.”

“I heard her,” Erin said. “She sounds like she’s losing.”

“She’s been losing for forty minutes. She refuses to admit it.” Paula stood. Erin had to tip her head back a little. Five-nine, maybe. Erin was five-four on a confident day. “Paula Keene. We spoke on the phone. You’re early.”

“The rain made me pedal faster.”

“That’s not how rain works.”

“It is if you’re scared of it.”

Something happened at the corner of Paula’s mouth. It wasn’t a smile. It was a smile’s attorney, informing everyone that a smile might be forthcoming pending review. “Put the box down before it disintegrates. Kitchen’s through there. There are towels in the drawer left of the stove.”

The kitchen was the warm, scarred heart of the house: a huge butcher-block island under three hanging lamps, open shelves crowded with mixing bowls and mismatched mugs, a commercial-looking stand mixer the size of a toddler, and a long window over the sink looking out on a back garden currently being beaten flat by rain. There were flour handprints on a dish towel. There were labeled jars—PASTRY FLOUR, RYE, DO NOT TOUCH (JILL’S STARTER, HER NAME IS BEYONCÉ). And on the fridge, framed in magnets, there was a whiteboard.

ORIGINAL HOUSE RULES, it said at the top, in the same neat block capitals as the router tape.

1. Label your food.

2. No bakery inventory in the guest fridge.

3. Paula’s office is private during work hours.

4. Double-lock the back door. (It sticks. Lift and turn.)

5. Overnight guests require notice.

Under number two, in a different hand—big, loopy, irreverent—someone had added (this rule is fascist), and under that, in the block capitals again, (this rule is load-bearing.)

Erin grinned at it, dumped her box on the floor, and found the towels.

She was scrubbing at her hair when footsteps thundered down the staircase, two flights’ worth, uneven and fast, and the voice from upstairs arrived in the kitchen doorway attached to a woman.

“Hi. Hello. I’m Jill. I’m sorry. I’m soaking. The sink and I are in a fight and the sink is winning, which is unacceptable, because I’m the one with opposable thumbs.”

Erin lowered the towel.

Jill Moreno was not tall like her wife. She was built solid—broad shoulders, thick arms, strong thighs inside a pair of navy work trousers that were wet through and plastered to her. Warm brown skin, beaded with water. A blunt, jaw-length chop of dark hair, dripping. An expressive mouth that seemed to be in the middle of three jokes at once. Above the waist she wore a black sports bra and absolutely nothing else, and every inch of her from the collarbones down was wet and gleaming, a slick of water running down the center of her stomach, the shallow groove of real muscle and the soft give over it.

Erin’s mouth went dry so fast it was almost funny.

“Erin,” she said. Her voice came out normal. She was proud of that.

“Erin. Welcome. You picked a hell of a day.” Jill pointed at her with a wrench. “The good news is your suite is beautiful and private and has a lovely view of the garden. The bad news is your kitchenette sink is currently a fountain. The good news again is that I’m extremely competent and very handsome.”

“She’s half of one of those,” Paula said from the doorway.

“Which half, babe?”

“I’ll let you know when the sink’s fixed.”

Jill laughed—it was a big laugh, the kind that came from the stomach—and then said, “Hang on, I’m freezing,” and turned toward the laundry nook off the kitchen, where a stack of folded clothes sat on top of the dryer. She wasn’t shy about it. She didn’t announce it. She just turned her back, hooked her thumbs under the band of the wet sports bra, and peeled it up and off over her head in one tug.

Erin got the length of her back. Wide shoulder blades, a long valley of spine, water sliding down it, a scatter of tiny scars and freckles. The curve of the side of one breast when she reached for the shirt. The flex of muscle as she pulled a faded T-shirt down—CRUMB & KETTLE, it said, under a cartoon teapot wearing sunglasses—and the cotton immediately darkened in patches where it stuck.

It took four seconds. Erin did not look away for any of them, and then she looked at the fridge very hard and read rule number three again.

When she glanced up, Paula was watching her.

Not with suspicion. Not with irritation. With an attentive, quiet interest, like a woman reading a footnote she’d found unexpectedly relevant. Then Paula looked away first, toward her wife, and the moment folded itself shut.

“Okay,” Jill said, shaking her wet hair like a dog. “Sink. I’ve shut off the valve, so the flood has become more of a moist situation. Plumber can come Thursday. Until then, use our kitchen. All of it, anything, don’t be weird.”

“The rules say label my food.”

“The rules are Paula’s.” Jill grinned. “Paula’s rules are aspirational.”

“My rules are what keeps this house from becoming a seventeenth-century tavern,” said Paula. “Erin, can I show you the lease addendum? There’s something I’d like to clarify before you carry anything else up.”

And here it was. Erin felt her shoulders settle into their familiar defensive line. She’d been renting furnished rooms and sublets and other people’s guest rooms for most of her adult life, and the clarifying-something-before-you-carry-anything conversation was where the con usually happened. The extra deposit. The cleaning fee nobody mentioned. We just need you to sign this little thing.

“Sure,” she said, and followed Paula to the dining table.

Paula slid a single printed page across. Erin read it, wet hair dripping on the paper.

“Section eleven,” Paula said. “The original lease doesn’t specify who’s liable if a plumbing fixture in the suite fails and damages your belongings. That’s an ambiguity, and ambiguity usually ends up costing the tenant. So I’ve added a line: any failure of the house’s fixtures is our responsibility, including damage to your property. Initial here if you agree. I’d rather fix it now than after something of yours floats.”

Erin looked up at her.

She’d prepared for a fight. She’d had a whole speech ready, actually—she’d been composing it on the ride over, between curse words at the rain: the original listing didn’t mention—

She didn’t need it. This woman had found the trap, disarmed it, and handed it back to her with the pin out, before Erin had even unpacked a toothbrush.

“You’re a lawyer?”

“Grants and compliance. Which is like being a lawyer, except people are less afraid of me and more bored by me.”

“I’m not bored,” Erin said, before she could stop herself.

Paula’s eyes held hers for a beat longer than strictly necessary. “Initial there,” she said.

Erin initialed.

It took nine more trips to bring the rest of her life up from the cab she’d arranged for the big stuff, which arrived twenty minutes later, honking impatiently in the rain. Twelve boxes. She’d counted them, years ago, after the fourth or fifth move, and decided that twelve was the correct number—enough to be a person, not so many that you couldn’t leave by morning.

Jill carried four of them up herself, two at a time, apparently out of some deep personal need to prove she could. Erin carried three and tried not to watch Jill’s ass on the staircase in front of her and failed. Paula carried one, very carefully, labeled BOX 7: BOOKS (HEAVY), and then sat on the third-floor landing with her glasses pushed up into her hair and read the spine of every book in it through the open flaps with naked interest.

“You have the full Peggy Shaw,” she said.

“You know Peggy Shaw?”

“I worked in cultural affairs for the city for nine years. I know everyone who ever got a grant for doing something strange in a basement.”

“My mother did a show with her once. In a basement.”

“Of course she did.”

The guest suite took up the whole top floor under the roofline. A bedroom with a sloped ceiling, a queen bed made up in white linen, a deep window seat looking out on a slice of back garden and the slate roofs of the next street over. A sitting area with a worn green velvet loveseat and a wall of empty shelves. A narrow bathroom with a skylight. And the kitchenette, where the cabinet under the little sink hung open like a gaping mouth, towels heaped all over the floor, a bucket full of rusty water, and a pipe wrench lying in the wet like a murder weapon.

“Crime scene,” Erin said.

“Told you.” Jill was leaning in the doorway, arms crossed, T-shirt still damp and clinging. “I’ll get you a new cabinet door too. That one’s been sad since the Obama administration.”

“How long have you two lived here?”

“Eight years in the house. Eleven together.” Jill smiled down the stairs, where Paula had gone back to fetch something. It was a different smile from the joking ones—softer and very private and over in a second. “Married eight. Moved in the same month. She made a spreadsheet for the movers.”

“It was a good spreadsheet,” Paula’s voice floated up.

“It had conditional formatting, Paula.”

“Because I am not an animal.”

Erin laughed, and then she looked around the empty room that would be hers until January, and said it—the thing she always said early, out loud, so it was on the record. “This is perfect. Really. And just so you know what you’re getting: I’m out January second. Contract’s four months. Junction reopens, I hand over the keys, I’m gone. You won’t even notice me.”

“Great,” said Jill, a hair too quickly.

“Understood,” said Paula from the stairs, at exactly the same moment, in exactly the same tone.

Both of them, in other words, accepted it at once. Erin was almost offended. People usually at least pretended to be sorry.

Her phone rang while she was unpacking box four, which was clothes, which meant she was sitting on the floor in her underwear and a dry tank top surrounded by a fallen landslide of jeans.

DELLA PRICE — JUNCTION BOARD, the screen said.

Erin closed her eyes and answered. “Della. Hi.”

“Erin. You’ve arrived?”

“Moved in about two hours ago. It’s raining on everything I own.”

“Mm.” Della Price did not ask follow-up questions about weather or wellbeing. Erin had met her twice, both times in conference rooms, and both times Della had looked at her with the patient skepticism of a woman who had watched three previous interim directors use her arts center as a résumé line on their way to somewhere glamorous. “The city’s building department came back on the freight-entrance permit this afternoon. They want a revised structural sign-off for the new loading ramp before they’ll issue occupancy.”

“That’s another three weeks.”

“It’s whatever it is. December thirteenth does not move. The donors have their invitations. The press has the date. The neighborhood has been told for eighteen months that the doors are opening, and I am not going to stand on Halvern Street and tell them it’s going to be another season. Is that clear?”

“Crystal,” said Erin. “I’ll call the engineer tomorrow at seven.”

“Call him at six.” Della hung up.

Erin let the phone drop into her lap. Then she lay down flat on her back on the floor, surrounded by jeans, and stared up at the sloped ceiling, and let herself have exactly one minute of being overwhelmed.

Eighteen months shut. Water damage, mold, a board that didn’t trust her, a neighborhood that had stopped believing anyone, a reopening date set in concrete, a building department that moved at the speed of continental drift. Four months. One shot at turning interim into permanent.

The minute ended. She sat up and unpacked box five.

Dinner was an accident.

Erin came down at seven-thirty intending to buy groceries and found Jill at the stove in the same damp CRUMB & KETTLE shirt, the kitchen full of garlic and wine steam, and Paula at the island cutting a baguette with geometric precision.

“Sit,” Jill said without turning. “It’s a welcome dinner. Don’t fight me on it, I’ve had a day, and I’ll cry.”

“I don’t want to impose—”

“She’s going to cry,” said Paula.

“I will absolutely cry.”

So Erin sat. She hopped up on the end of the island, actually, because the stools were full of mail and a bike helmet that wasn’t hers, and Paula looked at her sitting on the countertop with an expression of complicated pain.

“What?”

“Nothing,” said Paula. “There are stools.”

“Stools are full.”

“There are other surfaces.”

“This is a surface.”

“It’s a food surface.”

“Babe,” said Jill, pointing at her wife with a wooden spoon, “she’s a guest.”

“She’s a tenant.”

“She’s a tenant who’s sitting where I knead,” said Jill, and her eyes flicked to Erin and back to the pan with a little edge of mischief, and Erin felt that one somewhere low in her belly and decided to stay exactly where she was.

The food was ridiculous. Mussels in white wine and garlic and some kind of spicy sausage, the broth thick and briny, the bread torn and dipped. Jill talked with her hands and her mouth full. She told the story of the bakery—Crumb & Kettle, six blocks over on Halvern, six years open, her baby and her ulcer—and of the sink, and of the time a wedding cake had fallen over in the back of her car on the expressway. Paula told almost nothing, but every time she spoke, it was dry and exact and landed so late that Erin laughed five seconds after everyone else.

They asked about Junction. Erin found herself talking more than she meant to—about the freight-depot building with its forty-foot ceilings, the water stains climbing the brick, the ceramics studio with the kilns that hadn’t been fired since the flood. About the kids who used to come after school and now had nowhere to go. About the board.

“Della Price,” Paula said, at the name. “She chaired the cultural commission for two years when I was with the city.”

“Is she as terrifying there as she is on the phone?”

“She’s more terrifying in person. But she’s fair. Show her you’re not using the place as a stepping-stone and she’ll take a bullet for you.”

“Is that a real thing she’s done?”

“Metaphorically. A city councilman. She was the bullet, actually.”

Erin laughed and took a mussel and found Jill watching her mouth. Just for a second. Just long enough that when Jill looked away, she did it too fast.

Later, rinsing bowls at the sink—“I’m not letting you do dishes,” “You fed me, I’m doing dishes,” “She’s doing dishes, Jill, let her, she’s a grown woman”—Erin heard behind her the low murmur of the two of them at the island, the clink of Paula setting down a glass, the soft rough laugh of Jill at something too quiet to catch. Married-people sounds. Eleven years of sounds.

She’d heard a lot of couples through a lot of walls over the years. Families, too. Her whole childhood had been other people’s homes overheard from the room next door—rentals in Pittsburgh, a cousin’s attic in Tucson, a backstage dressing room in Minneapolis with a cot and a mirror ringed in dead bulbs. She knew the sound of a household that was really a household. She knew what it sounded like from the outside.

“Back door,” Paula said as Erin dried her hands. “It sticks. You lift and turn. If you ever go out to the garden, please make sure it’s double-locked when you come in.”

“Lift and turn,” Erin repeated.

“If you don’t, it doesn’t catch, and it blows open at three in the morning and Jill thinks it’s an intruder and goes downstairs with a rolling pin.”

“Once,” said Jill.

“Twice.”

“The second time it was a raccoon. That’s a legitimate intruder.”

By eleven the rain had softened into a steady, comforting drum on the roof right above Erin’s bed.

She’d unpacked eight boxes. The other four could wait. She lay under the white linen in an old soft T-shirt and her underwear with the window cracked an inch to hear the gutters running, and her body was exhausted in the good way, muscle-tired, belly full, the specific contented ache of a day when you’d carried your whole life up three flights of stairs.

She thought about Della Price. She thought about structural sign-offs. She thought, despite herself, for a little while, about the long valley of Jill Moreno’s back. About gray-green eyes over wire-framed glasses, reading her the way you’d read something you suspected had a hidden clause.

Landlords, she told herself, sternly. Married landlords. Four months.

She was nearly asleep when she heard the laugh.

It came up out of the floor.

Erin opened her eyes. She lay still, listening. The rain, the gutter, a car hissing by on the wet street. And then—again. Low, warm, unmistakable. Jill’s laugh, the big belly one, but softened, intimate, the way you laughed when someone’s mouth was very close to your ear.

It was coming from a spot on the floor three feet from the bed.

Erin turned her head on the pillow. There, against the baseboard, was a big rectangle of old black iron, ornate, a scrollwork grate she’d noticed when she was unpacking and assumed was decorative. A heating register from when the house was young, probably long dead. Except it wasn’t dead. It was a throat. An open iron throat that ran from somewhere below, through the bones of this old house, straight up into her bedroom.

“—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’s voice. Low. Very calm.

“Hold still.”

“Make me.”

A pause. The sound of a mattress shifting, the creak of something metal. And then Paula again, quieter, and so clear she might as well have been sitting on the end of Erin’s bed: “No. Slower. I said slower.”

Erin’s whole body went hot at once.

The right thing to do was obvious. Cough loudly. Turn on music. Get up, drag the rug over the grate, put a pillow on it, go downstairs tomorrow morning and say with a perfectly straight face, Hey, funny thing about the third floor. She knew this. She was a decent person. She paid her rent early.

She didn’t move.

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

“Because you always tease—”

“And you always love it. Hands back where they were.”

Something metal clinked against something metal, rhythmic, small—a headboard, Erin realized, an iron headboard, the sound of wrists or hands or both against the bars. Her breath came shallow. Her thighs pressed together under the sheet without her permission.

Below her, Jill made a sound. It wasn’t a word. It was a long, rough, helpless groan, pulled up out of the bottom of her chest, and Erin felt it in her own throat as if she’d made it herself.

“There she is,” said Paula, soft and satisfied. “Now don’t move.”

Oh, fuck me, thought Erin, with great sincerity, and slid her hand under the waistband of her underwear.

She was already wet. She’d been wet, if she was honest, since about the second time Paula said slower. She dragged two fingers through it, slick and hot and so sensitive she had to bite down on her bottom lip, and found her clit already swollen, already throbbing to a beat she didn’t control.

Downstairs, the headboard rattled once, sharply.

“Paula—”

“I know.”

“Paula.”

“I know what you want. Ask for it properly.”

Erin circled her clit slowly, matching that word—properly—with a long, deliberate pressure that made her hips lift off the mattress. She stared up at the dark slope of the ceiling, the rain drumming over her, and pictured it without meaning to: Jill on her back on some big bed, those broad shoulders, those thick strong arms stretched up and back, her wrists held to iron bars. Her blunt dark hair messy on the pillow. Her mouth open. And above her, Paula—long and pale and freckled, auburn hair coming out of its pin, glasses off, maybe, or maybe still on, God help everyone—touching her with infinite patience. Making her wait. Making her ask.

“Please,” Jill said. Her voice cracked right down the middle. “Please. Your mouth. Babe, please.”

“Good,” said Paula. And then nothing—no voice at all—and the silence was worse, so much worse, because Erin knew exactly where Paula’s mouth was, and the next sound out of Jill was a high, broken, shocked noise, like she’d been doused in hot water.

Erin pushed two fingers inside herself and pressed the heel of her hand hard against her clit and rocked up into it.

It was filthy. It was a terrible violation of the sanctity of a lease addendum she had initialed six hours earlier. She was fucking herself to the sound of her married landlords fucking, and she couldn’t stop, and she didn’t want to. The register in the floor gave her every wet, intimate sound of it. The slick noise of a mouth. Jill’s breath going ragged, faster, faster, a stream of swearing under it like a kettle starting to scream. “Fuck—fuck—oh my God, right there, don’t—Paula—don’t stop, don’t you dare stop—”

Paula said one word against her. It came up muffled, half a hum. Erin didn’t catch it. She felt it anyway, right between her own legs.

She curled her fingers. Pressed up. Rocked faster.

Her heels dug into the mattress, toes curling. She was so close her vision had gone soft at the edges, every nerve in her body narrowed down to the hot slick point under her fingers and the voice in the floor, and Jill was right there with her, she could hear it, the breathing going jagged and uneven and stuttery, the headboard clanging in a bright frantic rhythm—

“Come on,” Paula said, lifting her head long enough to say it, low and dark and absolutely certain. “Give it to me. Now.”

Jill came with a sound like something tearing.

And Erin came with her—hard, sudden, ambushed by it, her back arching up off the bed and her thighs clamping shut around her own wrist. A hot violent clench that rolled up from deep inside and went on and on. She jammed her other wrist against her mouth and bit down on it to keep from making a single sound, her whole body shuddering, her teeth in her own skin, pleasure pouring through her in thick pulses that made her eyes water.

Downstairs, Jill was still going. “Oh—oh, fuck—ohh—” trailing off into breathless, wrecked, joyful laughter.

Erin went limp.

She lay there with her hand still in her underwear and her wrist in her mouth and her heart slamming against her ribs, and the pleasure slowly drained back out of her, and the shame flooded in to take its place.

Oh my God.

She pulled her wrist away from her teeth. There were marks. A neat little crescent of bite on the soft inside of it. She stared at it in the dark.

Oh my God, what is wrong with you. You’ve lived here nine hours. Nine.

Downstairs, sheets rustled. Someone was breathing slowly back toward normal. Someone else was laughing, quiet and exhausted.

“Hi,” said Jill, soft.

“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.”

Erin lay absolutely still and listened to them, and the shame shifted, slowly, into something stranger and more uncomfortable, something that sat right under her sternum. It wasn’t the sex, exactly. It was after. The quiet ease of it. Two voices that knew each other cold. A shared joke about a jaw. The rustle of one person curling into another. The sound of a home.

She’d heard it through a dozen walls in her life. She’d never once been on the right side of one.

Four months, she reminded herself. Box one through twelve. January second.

She rolled onto her side, away from the register, and dragged the sheet up over her shoulder. She’d put the rug over it tomorrow. She would absolutely put the rug over it tomorrow. And she would never, ever, as long as she lived, tell either of them.

She’d nearly convinced herself of all of that when Jill spoke again—drowsy, amused, pitched low, every word coming up through the iron like a secret slid under a door.

“Hey. Our new tenant is trouble.”

There was a pause long enough that Erin’s heart stopped completely.

Then Paula, very quiet, very calm, with the faint unmistakable warmth of a smile in it:

“Only if we make her trouble.”

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Eighteen months in, Erin finally asks what Paula whispered into Jill on that first rainy night — the one word that came up through the floor. Paula tells them everything: what really happened downstairs, who she was thinking about, and the word itself. Then she says it again, with both of them holding the headboard. The filthiest confession in the house.

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