🔥 The Clawfoot Tub, Revisited 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Secondhand Hearts

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You made it to the bonus content — which means you’ve browsed every rack, sorted every donation, danced in every aisle, and watched two women fall in love between the vintage dresses and the record wall. Thank you for giving Josie and Nia’s story a chance. This exclusive chapter is our gift to dedicated readers like you.

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⚠️ Content Warning: This bonus chapter contains explicit FF sexual content including oral sex in a bathtub, manual stimulation, multiple orgasms, sustained edging, body worship, crying during orgasm, love letters read aloud as foreplay, wet skin on wet skin, emotional devastation disguised as tenderness, and the creative misuse of lavender oil. Features two women who have been together for a year and have learned exactly how to take each other apart. Intended for readers 18+ only.

The Clawfoot Tub, Revisited

Set one year after Nia’s arrival in Claremont.
Nia POV.

The package arrives on a Tuesday, which is fitting because Tuesdays have always belonged to love letters.

Mrs. Delacroix started it — the Tuesday connection. She was the one who told me about Dorothy’s niece in Macon, the one who still had a box of her aunt’s things in the attic. It took four phone calls, two emails, and a handwritten letter of my own — because Dorothy’s niece was eighty-one and didn’t trust email and I respected that — before the package was agreed upon.

Inside: eleven letters. Written by Eleanor to Dorothy. The other half of the conversation we’ve only ever heard one side of.

I’ve been sitting on them for two weeks, waiting for today. June 3rd. One year since I walked into Secondhand Hearts with a clipboard and an ironed shirt and no idea that I was walking into the rest of my life.

Josie doesn’t know about the letters. She knows today is our anniversary — she’s been humming about it all week, which is how Josie processes anticipation, through melody. She made reservations at Pho Sure, which is hilarious because you don’t need reservations at Pho Sure but she called anyway and Minh said “Josie, we have twelve tables and eight of them are empty” and she said “save me the one by the window” and he said “you always sit by the window” and she said “exactly.”

But that’s dinner. Before dinner, there’s something else.

I close the shop early. Five-thirty instead of six — the same rebellious act Josie committed a year ago, the night of the pipe burst, the night she ran me a bath and I said I love you for the first time with my hands in her hair and the lavender water lapping at our collarbones.

I go upstairs. I run the bath.

The clawfoot tub is the same — cast iron, deep, the gold-painted feet that some previous tenant thought were a good idea and that Josie has adopted as an aesthetic choice. I fill it with hot water. Add the lavender oil. Light the candles — not just the two from that first time, but a full constellation, a dozen votives on the windowsill and the back of the toilet and the edge of the tub, until the bathroom is a cave of warm light and steam and scent.

Then I add the petals. White, this time — gardenias, from Deidre’s shop, because Deidre is a co-conspirator in everything and because gardenias smell like the particular sweetness of a Southern evening and because one year ago she dropped off flower petals at the back door of a thrift store so I could run a bath for a woman she’d loved since seventh grade.

Deidre gets a lot of credit for this relationship. More than she knows. Exactly as much as she suspects.

I set the letters on the closed toilet lid. Eleven envelopes, yellowed, addressed in Eleanor’s handwriting — rounder than Dorothy’s, more careful, the handwriting of a woman who measured every word before she committed it to paper.

I hear the stairs. The creak of the third step. The apartment door opening.

“Nia?” Josie’s voice from the kitchen. “Why’s the shop closed? It’s five-thirty.”

“Bathroom,” I call.

She appears in the doorway. Takes in the tub, the candles, the petals. Her hand goes to her chest — palm flat, fingers spread, the gesture she makes when something hits her in the heart before it reaches her head.

“Happy anniversary,” I say.

“You ran me a bath.”

“I ran us a bath.” I pick up the letters. Hold them out. “And I brought you something.”

She steps forward. Takes the bundle. Turns the first envelope over, reads the address, reads the handwriting. Her breath catches.

“Nia. Are these—”

“Eleanor’s. To Dorothy. The other half.”

Her eyes fill. She presses the letters to her chest the way she pressed her hand a moment ago, holding them against her heart, and the tears spill over but she’s smiling — the full Josie Carter smile, the one with the gap in her teeth, the one that undoes me every single time.

“Get in the tub,” I say. “I’ll read them to you.”

She undresses. I’ve seen her naked a thousand times and it has never once gotten old — the full, generous curves, the warm brown skin, the gold chain at her waist, the body she inhabits with the same unselfconscious ease she brings to everything. She steps into the tub and sinks with an exhale that fills the bathroom, and the water rises around her, and the petals drift against her skin, and she is the most beautiful thing in this town, in this state, in any version of the world I’ve lived in.

I sit on the floor beside the tub. I open the first letter.

My dearest Dorothy,

You asked me once what I was most afraid of. I told you it was the distance. I lied. The distance I can endure — I have endured it for years, counting Tuesdays, pressing your letters to my chest like a woman pressing a wound to stop the bleeding.

What I am afraid of is that one day I will walk through your door and you won’t look at me the way you look at me. That the years will have done what years do to things left unattended — dimmed them, dulled them, turned the extraordinary into the ordinary. I am afraid that one day your hands will reach for me out of habit instead of hunger.

But then I arrive. And you open the door. And the look on your face — Dorothy, the look on your face. It has been fifteen years and you still look at me like I am something you found in a garden and cannot believe is real.

I am real. I am yours. I am coming back on Tuesday.

Yours, in all the ways that matter,
Eleanor

The bathroom is quiet. Steam curls between us. Josie’s eyes are closed, her head resting against the rim of the tub, tears tracking silently down her temples into the water.

“Another,” she whispers.

I read another. And another. Eleanor’s letters are different from Dorothy’s — less poetic, more direct, the prose of a woman who deals in facts and feelings in equal measure. But the love is the same. The same ache. The same counting. The same stubborn, magnificent refusal to let distance be the end of the story.

I’m on the fifth letter when Josie reaches over the edge of the tub and takes my hand. Wet, warm, her fingers interlacing with mine, and she tugs.

“Get in.”

“I’m reading.”

“Bring the letters.”

I undress. Josie watches — the way she always watches, with the full, unguarded attention of a woman who has been looking at me for a year and hasn’t gotten bored. I pull my shirt over my head. Unhook my bra. Push my jeans and underwear down and step out of them. The candlelight makes my olive skin glow amber and I feel her eyes on every inch of me and the sensation is both familiar and electric — the paradox of long-term desire, which doesn’t diminish with repetition but deepens, the way a river deepens its channel the more water runs through it.

I step into the tub. Face to face. Legs alongside hers, our knees touching under the milky water, petals drifting between us. The heat envelops me and I sink and exhale and her hand finds my ankle under the surface and her thumb traces the bone and I shiver despite the warmth.

I hold up the next letter. “May I?”

“Please.”

I read. Eleanor’s voice through my voice, filling the bathroom, the words landing on the water and the steam and Josie’s skin. This letter is from 1985 — later in the relationship, more confident, the guardedness of the early letters replaced by a certainty that has been earned through years of Tuesdays and returns and the sustained act of choosing.

I have stopped being afraid. Not because the fear is gone — it lives in me the way your scent lives in my pillowcase, permanently, a residue that no amount of washing removes. But I have decided that the fear is a tax I pay for the privilege of loving you. And the privilege is worth the tax. Every time. Without exception. Without negotiation.

I touch myself at night and I think of your hands and I am not ashamed of this. I was, once. I was ashamed of the wanting, of the way my body responded to the memory of you with an urgency that felt indecent for a woman of my age and circumstances. But you cured me of the shame the last time I visited, when you put your mouth on my throat and said “show me what you do when I’m not here,” and I showed you, and you watched, and the look on your face was not judgment but hunger, and I understood that the wanting is not indecent. The wanting is the most honest part of me.

I stop reading. Josie is looking at me across the tub with an expression I recognize — dark eyes, parted lips, the flush that starts at her chest and climbs her neck. The letter has done what letters do. It has reached through time and touched something alive.

“Come here,” she says.

I set the letter on the toilet lid. Carefully, reverently, because it’s a hundred years old and a hundred years of love deserves careful handling. Then I move through the water toward her.

The tub is big enough for this if you know the geometry, and we know the geometry. I slide forward until I’m between her legs, my back against her chest, her arms wrapping around me from behind. The position from the first bath — the one she ran for me, the one where I held her while she cried about the pipe and the lease and the fear. But reversed now. She’s holding me. Her chin on my shoulder. Her mouth against my ear.

“One year,” she says.

“One year.”

“You came to my shop with a clipboard.”

“I checked a box on a form.”

“You alphabetized my books.”

“They were a disaster.”

“You saved my lease.”

“We saved the lease.”

“You stayed.” Her arms tighten. Her voice drops. “You stayed, Nia. That’s the thing. Out of everything — the books, the business plan, the grants, the Instagram, the community nights. The thing that matters most is that you stayed.”

Her hands begin to move. Not urgently — slowly, the way water moves, the way heat moves through a body submerged. Her palms slide down my arms. Over my wrists. Back up, over my shoulders, down my chest. She cups my breasts under the water — the buoyancy making them lighter, her hands making them heavier, the contrast producing a sensation that makes me press back against her.

“A year of touching you,” she murmurs against my ear. “And I still can’t believe you let me.”

“I don’t let you. I need you to.”

“Tell me what you need.”

“Touch me. Like Eleanor said. Show me what you do when I’m right here.”

Her thumbs sweep across my nipples under the water. The touch is muted by the warmth — everything in the tub is softer, blurred, the water acting as a medium that reduces friction to silk. But the sensitivity is heightened, paradoxically, by the softness — every brush of her thumb sends a pulse from my chest to my center that builds not in intensity but in breadth, spreading through my body like dye through water.

She rolls my nipples between her fingers. Slowly, deliberately, the pinch tightening by degrees. I arch into her hands, pressing my back against her breasts, and I feel her nipples harden against my shoulder blades and her breath catch against my ear.

“I think about the scarf sometimes,” she says. Her voice is low, intimate, the voice she only uses in the dark and in the water and in the moments when the distance between our bodies is measured in fractions of inches. “That night in the stockroom. The green silk. The way you went completely still when I touched your collarbone.”

“I stopped breathing.”

“I know. I felt it. Your whole body just — stopped. Like I’d pressed pause on you.” Her right hand slides lower. Over my ribs. Across my stomach. The muscles tighten under her palm. “I wanted to keep going. I wanted to follow that collarbone down. Down your chest. Down your stomach. I wanted to find out what sound you’d make if I touched you the way I was imagining.”

“What sound did you imagine?”

Her hand slides between my legs. The water makes everything slick, frictionless, her fingers parting me with an ease that’s almost obscene. She finds my clit — swollen already, aching, ready since the letters — and circles it with two fingers, the pressure barely there, the ghost of a touch.

“That sound,” she says, because I’ve made a sound — a quiet, gasping, involuntary exhalation that I couldn’t have contained if I tried. “Exactly that sound. I heard it in my head that night, lying in bed, imagining what you’d sound like if I actually touched you. And the real thing is better. The real thing is always better.”

She works me under the water. Slow, lazy, the same unhurried pace she brought to the first bath a year ago. The water laps against our bodies as her hand moves, a soft rhythm that syncs with the rhythm of her fingers, and the dual sensation — the warm water everywhere, her hand precisely where I need it — is narcotic. My head falls back against her shoulder. My eyes close. My hips roll into her touch, riding the slow wave she’s building.

“Read me another letter,” she says.

“I can’t — you’re—”

“Read me a letter while I touch you. I want to hear Eleanor’s words in your voice while you come apart in my hands.”

She’s insane. She’s the most insane person I’ve ever loved. And I reach for the next envelope with a hand that’s shaking and I pull out the letter and I hold it above the water with one hand while her hand works between my legs with the other, and I read.

My dearest Dorothy — my voice trembles on the first word and her fingers press harder and I gasp and continue — the azaleas you planted have bloomed again. Every spring they come back, pink and defiant, and every spring I stand in the garden and I think: this is what we are. Perennial. Returning. Stubbornly, ridiculously alive despite every frost, every drought, every season that tried to kill us.

Her fingers slide inside me. Two, curling, finding the spot she knows as well as she knows the layout of her shop. My voice breaks on the word alive and she curls harder and I moan and the letter trembles in my hand and the words blur.

“Keep reading,” she whispers.

I — I want to grow old in your garden. Her thumb finds my clit. Circles. Steady, maddening, the pressure perfect. I want to be the woman you — you write about in — I can’t. The sentence dissolves. Her fingers curl and her thumb presses and the orgasm that’s been building in my belly crests with a suddenness that catches me off-guard, pulling a cry from my throat that fills the bathroom and bounces off the tile and makes the candle flames shudder.

I come with Eleanor’s letter in my hand and Josie’s fingers inside me and the word garden in my mouth, and the pleasure is deep and rolling and accompanied by the particular emotional devastation of being read to and fucked simultaneously by a woman who understood, a year ago, that my body and my brain are not separate systems but a single network, and that the fastest way to my center is through both at once.

The letter lands on the bathroom floor. I’ll deal with it later. Eleanor will understand.

Josie holds me through the aftershocks. Her fingers still inside me, gentle now, her other arm tight around my waist. I shake against her, the water rippling around us, petals clinging to our skin, the steam thick and sweet with lavender and gardenias.

“Turn around,” I say when I can speak. “It’s your turn.”

“Nia, you don’t have to—”

“Turn around.”

We rearrange. The logistics of two women in a clawfoot tub require negotiation we’ve become expert at — a shifting of legs, a sliding of bodies, the water sloshing over the sides and neither of us caring. Now she’s between my legs, her back against my chest, my arms around her.

I pick up the next letter. Shake the water off my hand. Hold it where she can see it, over her shoulder, so we’re both reading as I speak.

Dorothy, I read, and my free hand slides down her belly, over the gold chain, under the water. I am writing this from your bed. You are in the garden. The sheets smell like you and I am not ashamed to say I pressed my face into your pillow and breathed.

My fingers find her. She’s swollen, slick — not just from the water. From the letters, from the orgasm she witnessed, from the year of intimacy that has taught her body to respond to my voice the way mine responds to her hands. I part her folds and stroke, slowly, tracing the full length of her, and her head falls back against my shoulder and her breathing stutters.

I count the hours until you come inside, I read, and my fingers circle her clit, steady, the rhythm she needs. I count the minutes until you see me in your bed and your face does the thing it does — the thing I cannot describe except to say that when you look at me I am not invisible. I have been invisible for fifty years and you make me visible and I would endure any distance for the look on your face when I arrive.

She’s trembling. Not the whole-body shudder of imminent orgasm — the fine, sustained vibration of a woman being simultaneously wrecked by language and touch. My fingers move between her legs with the patience of a year’s practice, the knowledge of exactly where she needs me, and my voice moves through Eleanor’s words with the steadiness of a woman who has learned that the reading is the foreplay and the touching is the punctuation.

I slide two fingers inside her. She gasps — a sharp, beautiful sound that ricochets off the bathroom tiles. I curl. Press. Find the spot. Hold.

“Nia — I can’t — if you keep reading while you’re—”

“You asked me to read you a letter while you touched me. I’m returning the favor.”

“I didn’t think about what it would — god — what it would feel like from this side—”

I read the last paragraph. My fingers moving inside her. My thumb on her clit. The words falling into the steam like confessions.

I love you. I have loved you since the first letter. I will love you past the last one. And if there is anything after this — after the letters, after the garden, after the body gives out and the hand that writes this can no longer hold a pen — I will find you. In whatever form the world gives me. I will find your hands in the dark.

She comes on the word dark.

The orgasm rolls through her like a tide — her body arching against mine, the water surging over the tub’s edge and splashing onto the floor, the candles flickering in the disturbance. She cries out — not my name, not a word, just a sound, the raw primal frequency of a woman in the grip of something that’s bigger than her body can hold. I feel her clench around my fingers, feel the rhythmic pulsing, feel the shudder that travels from her center to her extremities and back again.

I hold her. My fingers gentle inside her, drawing the last tremors, my mouth pressing kisses to her shoulder, her neck, the spot below her ear where her pulse is slamming. She shakes and gasps and her hand finds mine in the water and grips it the way she gripped it on the stairs a year ago, when I told her I was staying.

The letter is on the floor. The candles are half-drowned by the splashed water. The bathroom is a beautiful disaster — wet floor, scattered petals, two naked women in a tub full of cooling lavender water, holding each other through the aftermath of something that was part sex and part sacrament.

“One year,” Josie says. Her voice is destroyed. Ravaged. The voice of a woman who just had an orgasm triggered by a love letter written in 1986 and who is processing the implications. “One year and you found me Eleanor’s letters.”

“I found you Eleanor’s letters.”

“You read them to me while you—”

“I did.”

“That is the most—” She shakes her head. Laughs. The wet, broken, gorgeous laugh. “I can’t top that. I literally cannot top that. I got you a bracelet and a dinner reservation. You got me fifty-year-old love letters and an orgasm that might have caused structural damage to the tub.”

“The tub is cast iron. It can handle it.”

“The tub maybe. I’m not sure about me.”

I press my face into her neck. Breathe her in. Cocoa butter and lavender and the salt of sweat and tears and the particular warm underneath that is just Josie, concentrated, the scent I followed through a dark shop a year ago when I walked back from the cottage because two days without her had made my body ache.

“We’re not Dorothy and Eleanor,” I say. “We don’t write letters from separate houses. We don’t count Tuesdays. We wake up in the same bed. We open the same shop. We fight about display aesthetics and make up in the hallway and build a life that neither of us planned and both of us chose.”

“We chose,” she echoes.

“And we keep choosing. Every morning. Every day. Every time the bell jangles and I look across the shop and see you and think: oh, there you are.“

She turns in the water. Face to face. The position that started everything, the facing, the closeness, the breath-distance between our mouths. She takes my face in her hands — the cradle, the gesture that’s hers, the way she holds me when she wants me to hear what she’s saying with her whole body.

“Yours,” she says. The word from the letters. The word that held Dorothy and Eleanor together for twenty years. The word that means more than love because it means choice, and more than choice because it means repetition, and more than repetition because it means this, again, tomorrow, forever, on purpose.

“Yours,” I say back.

She kisses me. In the tub. In the candlelight. In the bathroom of an apartment above a thrift store on Main Street in Claremont, Georgia, where the azaleas bloom every spring and the love letters live on a wall and the bell over the door jangles every time someone walks in looking for something they didn’t know they needed.

The water is cold. The candles are dying. The petals have pooled at the drain.

We stay anyway.

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Aurora North