She Said It Was Practice — Bonus Chapter

The Christening
by Blair Lennox

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This scene takes place after the epilogue. Read the full novel first.

The Christening

The townhouse still smelled like paint.

Not strongly — they’d been in three months, long enough for the new-place scent to settle into something livable — but Wren’s studio downstairs had just been re-coated in the pale grey she’d agonized over for two weeks, and the fumes drifted up through the floorboards and mixed with Margot’s candles and the coffee and the specific, irreplaceable smell of home.

Saturday morning. Nine-fourteen, to be exact, because the clock on the microwave was the only timepiece in the kitchen and Wren had checked it exactly once, eleven minutes ago, when she’d first walked in and found Margot at the counter.

Margot was reviewing Vale’s weekly revenue reports. Laptop open, spreadsheet glowing, a pen tucked behind her ear because she still took margin notes on printed P&L statements like someone who believed paper was a superior technology. She was wearing reading glasses — the tortoiseshell ones with the thin gold arms that she’d bought on a whim in Barcelona during her visit to Wren’s fellowship residency — and a ribbed tank top the color of charcoal, and nothing else.

No bra. No shorts. No underwear. Just the tank top and the reading glasses and her long brown legs crossed at the ankle on the barstool rung and the particular focused intensity of a woman who believed Saturday mornings were an acceptable time to do quarterly projections while her girlfriend lost the capacity for higher thought six feet away.

Wren stood in the doorway eating yogurt from the container and staring.

She’d been staring for eleven minutes. The yogurt was warm. She didn’t care.

“You’re doing it again,” Margot said without looking up.

“Doing what?”

“Staring at my legs instead of eating.”

“I can do both. I’m multitasking.”

“You’ve had that same spoonful of yogurt in your mouth for thirty seconds.”

Wren swallowed. “I was savoring.”

“You were drooling.”

“Those are not mutually exclusive activities.”

Margot took off her reading glasses, folded them with her characteristic precision, and set them on the counter beside her laptop. Then she looked at Wren with an expression that was part amusement and part calculation and entirely, devastatingly Margot — the expression of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing and had been doing it deliberately since Wren walked in.

Because Margot hadn’t accidentally dressed like this. Margot didn’t do anything accidentally. The tank top without a bra was a choice. The bare legs were a choice. The reading glasses — which she knew made Wren’s brain short-circuit because Wren had told her so, explicitly, during a memorable incident involving a bookshelf and a sprained wrist — were a strategic deployment.

“We haven’t christened the kitchen counter yet,” Margot said.

Wren’s spoon stopped halfway to the yogurt. “What?”

“The kitchen counter. This one.” Margot placed both palms flat on the stone surface. The motion pulled the tank top taut across her chest and Wren could see the dark outline of her nipples through the ribbed fabric and her mouth went dry. “We’ve done the bedroom — extensively. The shower — three times, though the first barely counts because you slipped and we had to stop. The office — twice, if you count the photography-timer incident, which I am still not over.”

“You loved the photography-timer incident.”

“I loved the result. I did not love the bruise on my hip from the desk drawer.” She ticked locations on her fingers. “The sofa. The guest room. The hallway, once, against the wall, which I maintain was a logistical triumph.”

“It was a logistical triumph. Your core strength is genuinely alarming.”

“But not the kitchen counter.” She looked at the stone surface beneath her palms. “This is the most expensive surface in the house. Italian marble. We argued about it for three weeks.”

“You argued about it for three weeks. I suggested butcher block and you looked at me like I’d proposed eating off the floor.”

“Butcher block stains. Marble is permanent.” She met Wren’s eyes. “I’d like to give it a proper inauguration.”

“You want to have sex on the kitchen counter.”

“I’m presenting a gap analysis.”

“A gap analysis of our sex locations.”

“The data speaks for itself.”

Wren set the yogurt on the counter. Crossed the kitchen. Margot watched her approach with the steady, focused attention of a woman who had already decided what was going to happen and was simply enjoying the interval before it began.

Wren stopped in front of the barstool. Margot’s knees were slightly apart, her hands still flat on the counter behind her. From this angle — standing, looking up — Wren could see the long line of her throat, the subtle shift of muscle in her bare shoulders, the shadow between her collarbones where Wren liked to press her mouth and feel Margot’s pulse accelerate.

“Stand up,” Wren said.

“Bossy this morning.”

“Stand up, Margot.”

Margot stood. At full height she was five inches taller, and the height difference — which Wren had spent her entire life being indifferent to in men and now found absolutely maddening in this specific woman — put Margot’s collarbone at Wren’s eye level and Margot’s mouth at a tilt-up angle that made Wren’s stomach flip every single time.

A year. A year of kissing this woman and the height difference still made her stomach flip. She suspected it would do so for the rest of her life.

“Sit on the counter,” Wren said.

“The marble is cold.”

“I’ll warm you up.”

The corner of Margot’s mouth twitched — the micro-expression Wren had learned to read as the equivalent of a standing ovation from anyone else. She turned, hoisted herself onto the counter, and flinched at the contact.

“Cold,” she confirmed.

“I warned you about the butcher block.”

“The butcher block would also be cold.”

“The butcher block would be room temperature. Marble retains—”

“Wren. If you turn this into a materials-science lecture, I’m putting my pants on.”

Wren stepped between her thighs.

The height was perfect. Exactly perfect. Margot on the counter put them face to face, eye to eye, mouth to mouth. Her legs bracketed Wren’s hips, her bare thighs warm against Wren’s waist through the thin cotton of her sleep shirt. Wren put her hands on Margot’s knees and slid them slowly upward — over the firm muscle of her quadriceps, along the smooth inner surface of her thighs, thumbs tracing the tender skin that made Margot’s breath change.

“You planned this,” Wren said.

“I planned the revenue review.”

“You planned the revenue review in a tank top and no underwear at nine in the morning knowing I’d walk in and find you.”

“I can’t control what you find.”

“You can control what you wear.”

“I was comfortable.”

“You were weaponizing your thighs against a civilian.”

“You’re hardly a civilian.” Margot’s hands found Wren’s hips and pulled her closer. The motion pressed Wren’s stomach against the heat between Margot’s legs — bare, slick, unmistakable — and they both inhaled.

“You’re already wet,” Wren breathed.

“I’ve been watching you eat yogurt in that shirt for eleven minutes. The shirt rides up when you reach for the cabinet. You did it twice.” Margot’s voice had dropped to the register that still, after a year, made every nerve in Wren’s body stand at attention. “I’ve been wet since you bent over the dishwasher.”

“I was loading the dishwasher.”

“You were torturing me with a household appliance.”

Wren kissed her.

Not gently — the gentle version was for evenings and slow mornings and the particular tenderness that came after arguments. This was the Saturday-morning version: direct, hungry, her tongue sliding against Margot’s before their lips fully settled. Margot’s hands fisted in Wren’s shirt and pulled her flush and the kiss deepened, turned messy, turned into the kind of kissing that had an agenda and wasn’t pretending otherwise.

Wren pulled the tank top up and over Margot’s head. Margot raised her arms and let it go and she was bare from the waist up — bare entirely, actually, the tank top had been the only garment — and Wren looked at her, sitting naked on their Italian marble counter in the morning light, and thought what she thought every time she saw Margot without clothes: that she had spent thirty years looking at the wrong bodies and hadn’t known it until this one.

“God,” Wren said. She cupped both breasts, thumbs circling the dark nipples that were already hard from the cold marble or the anticipation or both. “You can’t just — the reading glasses, Margot. The reading glasses without a bra doing spreadsheets. Do you have any idea—”

“I have some idea.” Margot’s eyes were half-closed. Her hands left Wren’s shirt and braced behind her on the counter, arching her back, pressing her breasts more firmly into Wren’s palms. “The reading glasses are a specific trigger for you. I documented it.”

“You documented it?”

“I keep notes.”

“You keep notes on what turns me on?”

“I keep notes on everything. You’re a particularly rewarding subject.” Her breath hitched as Wren’s thumb scraped across her left nipple. “That. For example. The scraping. You respond to it on yourself and you know I respond to it, so you do it when you want to watch my face change.”

“Is it working?”

“You can feel whether it’s working.” She shifted her hips, pressing against Wren’s stomach, and the wet heat of her left a streak on Wren’s sleep shirt that they both noticed. “It’s working.”

Wren lowered her mouth to Margot’s breast.

She took her time. A year of practice — real practice, not the euphemism that had started everything — had taught her exactly how Margot’s body worked. The right nipple was more sensitive than the left. Teeth were welcome, but timing mattered: too early felt aggressive, too late felt tentative. The sweet spot was after the tongue had made three or four slow passes, when the nipple was fully taut and Margot’s fingers had found Wren’s hair and were starting to grip.

She felt the grip. She used her teeth.

Margot’s spine arched. “Fuck.”

Margot swearing during sex was still Wren’s single greatest accomplishment as a human being. The most controlled woman in Virginia, the woman who organized her anxieties into spreadsheets and managed her emotions like quarterly reports, reduced to a single profane syllable by the work of Wren’s mouth on her breast.

She’d never get tired of it. She would chase that sound into old age.

Wren switched to the other breast. Gave it the same treatment — tongue first, slow circles, then the flat pressure, then the edge of teeth — while her right hand traveled south. Down Margot’s stomach, over the firm plane of her abdomen, through the neatly trimmed hair, and into the slick, swollen heat between her thighs.

Margot gasped. Her hips jerked against Wren’s hand.

“You’re soaked,” Wren said against her breast. “This isn’t eleven minutes of dishwasher-watching soaked. This is planning-the-whole-morning soaked.”

“I may have been — thinking about this — while I reviewed the P&L—”

“You were fantasizing about counter sex during a revenue review?”

“The margins were good this quarter. I was in an expansive mood.”

Wren laughed against her skin and slid two fingers inside her.

Margot’s hands slammed flat on the counter behind her. Her head fell back, exposing the long line of her throat, and the sound she made was low and guttural and completely unmanaged — the sound of a woman who had stopped performing composure sometime in the last year and hadn’t bothered to resume it.

Wren curled her fingers. Found the spot — the specific, textured, miraculous spot that she’d mapped during a hundred encounters and could now locate with the precision of a woman who had studied her subject with the same intensity she brought to her best photographs. She pressed against it and Margot’s thighs clenched around her waist and Margot said her name like it was the only word in a language she’d just invented.

“Wren — right there — don’t stop—”

“I’m not stopping.” Wren’s thumb found her clit. Drew a slow circle around it — not on it, around, the indirect pressure that she’d discovered drove Margot insane because it was close but not enough, the erotic equivalent of Margot’s own tendency to withhold the final piece until she’d been asked for it explicitly. “Tell me what you want.”

Their phrase. The framework they’d built from the first lesson in a bar, a lifetime ago. Still alive. Still electric.

“Your mouth,” Margot said. “Please. Your mouth.”

Wren sank to her knees on the kitchen floor.

Margot on the counter with her legs over Wren’s shoulders was a view that deserved to be photographed, exhibited, and permanently archived in the Louvre. Her back arched against the marble, her hands flat beside her hips, her thighs open and trembling, every line of her body composing a single word: want.

Wren pressed her mouth against her and tasted her — familiar now, after a year, but never ordinary. The salt-sweet warmth of her, the specific way she swelled under Wren’s tongue, the texture and the taste and the devastating intimacy of having her mouth on the most vulnerable part of the person she loved.

She used her tongue — broad, flat strokes first, covering everything, reacquainting herself with the geography even though she knew it by heart. Then narrowing. Zeroing in on the swollen bud that made Margot’s thighs clench. She circled it with the tip of her tongue — slow, deliberate, the specific rhythm she’d perfected over months of attention.

She slid two fingers back inside. Then three, because Margot gasped “more” with the commanding authority of a woman who knew what she needed and had stopped pretending otherwise. The stretch made Margot groan — a deep, raw, chest-vibration groan that Wren felt against her tongue.

She curled her fingers and sucked Margot’s clit into her mouth simultaneously, and the combination — fullness and pressure and wet suction — wrenched a sound from Margot that bounced off the kitchen walls and rattled the copper pot rack.

“Wren — oh God — right there, don’t you dare change — fuck, fuck, I’m—”

Wren didn’t change a thing. She held the rhythm — fingers curling, tongue pressing, lips sealed around the swollen center of Margot’s pleasure — and she felt it build. The tightening of Margot’s walls around her fingers. The tension climbing through her thighs. The pitch of her breathing going from controlled to desperate to shattered.

“Come for me,” Wren murmured against her. Let the words vibrate. “I want to feel it. Come for me, Margot.”

Margot came with a scream.

Not a gasp, not a moan, not the carefully modulated sounds of early encounters. A scream — ragged, full-throated, the kind of sound that came from a woman who had spent thirty-nine years managing her volume and had finally, permanently, stopped. Her body bowed off the marble and her hands found Wren’s hair and her thighs locked around Wren’s shoulders and she shook, wave after wave, her inner walls clenching rhythmically around Wren’s fingers while Wren rode her through it — easing the pressure, slowing the rhythm, coaxing every last tremor until Margot was boneless and gasping and making small, wrecked sounds against the back of her hand.

Wren withdrew her fingers. Slowly. Kissed Margot’s inner thigh. Then the other. Then stood, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and grinned.

“Gap analysis complete,” she said.

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