Rule Eight

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Cabin We Both Booked
by Aurora North

October first. Naomi’s ninety-day clause is up, everything she owns fits in a borrowed truck, and the second hook by Bethany’s door is officially hers. There’s one suitcase left to unpack, a key with no ribbon on it, and a building full of neighbors who are about to learn exactly who lives on the third floor.

Rule Eight

Naomi

October first came in cold and bright, and by four in the afternoon everything I owned was up three flights of stairs.

It didn’t take long. That was the part I kept noticing. Simon had borrowed a truck from someone at the pharmacy, and he and Theo carried the boxes while Bethany directed traffic from the landing and Nora sat on the bottom step eating a clementine and supervising everyone, and in under two hours it was done. Six boxes of books. Two of kitchen things, most of which Bethany already owned better versions of. My good knife in its leather sheath. The framed print of three dashboards with a red circle on it. One suitcase.

Thirty-seven years, and my whole life fit in a borrowed truck with room for an eight-year-old’s rock collection on the passenger seat.

Simon left last. He stood in the doorway with his keys and looked at the two brass hooks beside the door, my coat on the second one, Bethany’s on the first, and then he looked at me.

“You noticed,” he said.

“I noticed.”

“Good.” He hugged his sister, and then, after a moment’s consideration, me, briefly and with a great deal of back-patting, and went down the stairs whistling.

Bethany shut the door. She leaned on it.

“Well,” she said. “You live here.”

“I live here.”

“Say it again. I’m not over it.”

“I live here, Bethany.”

She closed her eyes and smiled at the ceiling like someone listening to a song she liked.

I left the suitcase for last.

I’d known I would. I carried it into the bedroom, the small warm room under the slope of the roof with the white iron bed and the fringed lamp, and put it on the quilt and unzipped it. Bethany came and sat on the end of the bed with her legs crossed under her, the way I’d once sat on the end of a narrow bed at Alder Cabin and watched her pack.

She’d cleared the left side of the closet. Every hanger empty, every one facing the same way, which meant she’d done it for my benefit, because left to herself she hangs things like a woman throwing confetti. On the inside of the closet door, at eye level, was a yellow sticky note in her sociable scrawl.

N.

I stood and looked at it longer than a sticky note warrants.

“I copied you,” she said. “Chicago. The drawer.”

“I know.”

“I’ve been wanting to do it since February. I had to wait for you to have something to put in it.”

I hung my shirts. The dark one she likes. The white one I’d worn at the table the morning I told her I’d signed. Sweaters in the second drawer of the dresser, which had been mine since January on visits and now was simply mine. Socks rolled in pairs. The gray T-shirt, which went into her drawer, not mine, because it had stopped being mine some time in December.

When the case was empty I zipped it shut and stood there with my hand on the handle.

“Where does it live?” I said.

“Hall closet. Top shelf. Behind the Christmas lights.” She didn’t move from the bed. “Up high. Where you’d need a chair to get it down.”

I put it on the top shelf behind the Christmas lights. I had to stand on a kitchen chair. When I came back she was still on the end of the bed, and she was holding out her hand, palm up, and there was a key in it.

No ribbon.

“It’s not a gift,” Bethany said. “I’m not giving you anything. It’s just yours. It was always going to be yours. I had it cut in July, the day after the dock, and it’s been in my sock drawer since, and I didn’t put a ribbon on it because a ribbon is something you untie.”

I took it. It was warm from her hand.

I put it on my key ring between my car key and the key to an apartment on North Street that I’d be returning to my landlord on Monday, and I clipped it to my belt loop, and I looked at her.

“Come here,” I said.

Craig was gone. That’s what she told me, while I was taking her sweater off over her head in the middle of our bedroom with the lamp on and the radiators knocking for the first time that fall. Craig and his saw had finished in August. The apartment underneath had been rented to a retired couple from Montpelier who went to bed at nine and, Bethany said, wore hearing aids they took out at night.

“I asked,” she said. “On the stairs. I said, do you two sleep heavily, and she looked at me as if she knew exactly why I was asking.”

“Did she?”

“She’s seventy-four and she winked at me, Naomi.”

I laughed into her neck. Then I stopped laughing, because she’d unbuttoned my jeans and put her hand down the front of them, warm, flat on my stomach under the waistband, not going any lower. Just there. Just letting me know where it was.

“I want to say something,” she said, “before I can’t.”

“Say it.”

“I want you to be loud tonight. Not because it’s a room built for it. Not because nobody can hear. They can. The whole building can hear. I want you to be loud in a place where everyone knows you live here.”

Something went through me at that. I don’t have a better word for it. I’ve been quiet in other people’s houses my whole life: in shared rooms and thin-walled rentals and a dozen apartments I never hung a picture in. I learned to come without moving the air before I learned to drive. And here was a woman telling me to make noise in a building where the neighbors would see me on the stairs tomorrow with a recycling bin and know exactly who I was and whose I was.

“Yes,” I said.

She smiled, slow, the crooked one. Then she took her hand out of my jeans and walked backward out of the bedroom, crooking one finger, and I followed her into the front room, where the green velvet couch was.

That couch.

I’d sat on it a hundred times since January. Watched films on it, eaten Thai food out of containers on it, fallen asleep on it with my head in her lap during the third act of a Polish documentary she swore was a comedy. I’d never had her on it. We’d always made it to the bedroom. That was one of the few things about us that had been orderly.

She pushed me down onto it. The velvet was cool for a second against the backs of my bare thighs, and then it wasn’t, and she pulled my jeans the rest of the way off and my underwear with them and knelt on the rug between my knees.

“I’ve wanted to do this here since January,” she said. “You fell asleep in that exact spot and I sat on the floor and looked at you for an hour.”

“You never said.”

“I’m saying now. Small things while they’re small.” She put her hands on my knees and opened them. “This isn’t small.”

She went slowly at first, but not the way she does in bed. She was greedy about it, as though the couch made it greedy. Her mouth wet and open on the inside of my thigh, her teeth, the scrape of her cheek, the velvet rasping softly under my hips every time I moved. She held me by the backs of my knees. She took her time getting there and then didn’t take any time at all: one long, hot, open-mouthed pass that made me grab the arm of the couch and swear at the ceiling.

“Louder,” she said into me.

I was louder.

I could hear it. That was the shocking thing. In the cabin, in the edit suite, in the beige apartment in Chicago, I’d been loud into places that swallowed it or places I was leaving. This went out into an apartment where my good knife was in the kitchen drawer and my books were in stacks by the shelves she’d cleared, and it came back to me off walls I lived inside, and I didn’t flinch from it. I put my hand in her hair and pulled her in closer and told her, in words, at full volume, exactly what I wanted. Her tongue flat. Then her lips, pulling. Then two fingers. Then harder.

She did every one of them. She did it the second I said it, which made me say more.

It built fast, faster than it usually does with me. I came with one heel on her shoulder and the other foot braced on the edge of the coffee table, shouting her name loud enough that somewhere below us, very faintly, somebody’s radio went down a notch. She didn’t stop. She went gentle and stayed, her mouth soft, her fingers still inside me, until the last of it went through me and I was laughing and pushing at her forehead.

She sat back on her heels on the rug, flushed and shining to the chin, enormously pleased with herself.

“The radio,” she said.

“I heard.”

“She turned it down, Naomi. She turned her radio down so she could hear you better.”

I put my arm over my eyes and laughed until the couch shook.

The harness was in the bottom drawer of the dresser, in the carrot tote, which had become a sort of household joke. Bethany got it out while I was still lying on the couch with my legs gone to water, and she came back into the doorway holding it by one strap and looked at me with her eyebrows up.

“Mine or yours?” she said.

It’s a real question in our house. I like both. I’d found that out in a cabin in November with a log collapsing in the stove behind us, and I’d been finding it out again ever since.

“Mine,” I said. “I want you in front of the mirror.”

She went very still in the doorway. Then she turned around and walked into the bedroom without a word, and I got up and followed her.

There’s a mirror over her dresser. Our dresser. An old one, oval, foxed a little at the edges, in a painted frame she found at a yard sale in Winooski the summer she moved in. It’s the mirror she looked into the morning after Thanksgiving and called herself absurd, after I hung my coat on her hook. I’d seen her in it a thousand times since, doing her earrings, checking her teeth, making faces at herself before a meeting.

I’d never seen her come in it.

She buckled me in. She does it the same way every time, one hip and then the other, and checks them both twice with two fingers, and says nothing about it anymore, because it doesn’t need saying. Then she stood in front of the dresser with her hands flat on top of it, between her earring dish and a pile of my mail that had already started arriving, and she looked at me in the glass.

“Here?”

“Here.”

I stood behind her. I put one hand on her hip and the other flat between her shoulder blades and pressed, gently, until she bent forward over the dresser with her forearms on the wood, and then I took my hand away and she stayed there. Her hair fell forward. She pushed it back. She wanted to see.

I went into her slowly. I watched her face in the mirror while I did it, the way she watches mine, and I saw it all: her mouth come open, her eyes go dark and then unfocused and then find mine again in the glass. She made a sound low in her chest, long and astonished, and her fingers spread on the dresser top and pushed the earring dish an inch toward the wall.

“Look at that,” I said. “Look what you look like when I’m inside you.”

She looked. She couldn’t stop looking. That’s the thing about Bethany: she’s an editor, and she cannot not watch a picture. I moved in long deep strokes and she watched herself take every one of them, her breasts swaying, her lips parted, her face flushed down to the collarbones, my hands on her hips and my face over her shoulder. The dresser knocked against the wall on every stroke. Something on top of it fell over. Neither of us looked to see what.

“Harder,” she said. “Don’t you dare be careful.”

I wasn’t careful.

I took her hard and steady over the dresser of the bedroom we shared, with the lamp on and the window uncurtained and the radiator clanking along under it like percussion, and I talked to her the whole time, because it turns out I do that now, out loud, in my own voice. I told her how good she felt. I told her I’d thought about this mirror on a plane in March. I told her the neighbors were going to hear every single thing and I hoped they enjoyed it. She laughed at that, gasping, and then the laugh turned into something else, and her head dropped forward and came straight back up, because she didn’t want to miss it.

She came watching herself. Watching me. Her eyes locked on mine in the glass and her mouth open on my name, and her whole body clenched and shuddered back against me, and she cried out loud enough to rattle the earring dish, and I held her hips and stayed deep and let her have every second of it.

I didn’t stop. I slowed, and kept moving, and reached around her with one hand and found her clit, swollen and slick, and rubbed it in quick tight circles, and she sobbed and swore and pushed back onto me, and I said, “Again. I want to see it again.”

“I can’t—”

“You can. You laughed halfway through the last one.”

She came again a minute later, harder, with one hand slapped flat on the mirror itself, her palm print blooming on the glass, her voice gone ragged and huge. And somewhere in the middle of it, I went with her. I hadn’t expected to. The base of the harness had been grinding into me on every stroke and I’d been ignoring it, the way I ignore things, and then I couldn’t. It took me from underneath, sudden and total, and I came pressed against her back with my face in her hair, loud, wordless, in a room where every single person within a hundred feet could hear it.

I didn’t care. That’s the end of the sentence. I didn’t care at all.

Afterward we lay in the white iron bed under the faded blue quilt with the lamp still on. The harness was on the floor. Her head was on my chest. Her hand-print was still on the mirror, and I could see it from the pillow, a little ghost of her fingers in the foxed glass.

“Leave it,” she said, when she caught me looking. “I’ll clean it tomorrow. Or I won’t.”

“Ginny varnished over the stripe.”

“Exactly. Some things you keep.”

Out in the front room the radiators knocked and settled. The fridge hummed. Somewhere below us a door closed, gently, and a toilet flushed, and a man’s voice said something low and a woman laughed. The retired couple from Montpelier, going to bed at nine-forty. Ordinary neighbors in an ordinary building, and I lived in it.

“Can I tell you something badly?” I said.

She lifted her head.

“I keep waiting for the part of me that wants to know where the exits are. It always shows up by the first night. It walks the room and counts the doors and works out how fast I could pack.” I looked up at the slope of the ceiling. “It hasn’t come. I keep checking for it. It’s not here.”

Bethany didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she got up, naked, and walked out of the bedroom.

I heard the fridge door. The drawer by the stove. The pen.

She came back with the two yellow pages in her hand, the ones that had come home from the lake with us in July and gone back under Theo’s moose magnet, both lists, the old one and ours. She sat cross-legged on the quilt beside me and smoothed them flat on her knee. OUR RULES. Six lines and a seventh, in my capitals: 7. UNPACK. Our initials all the way down.

Underneath it she wrote, in her looping, sociable hand:

8. Stay.

She held out the pen.

I took it. I initialed it, small and square, the way I’ve initialed every rule we’ve ever made. N.S. And then I gave her the pen back and she wrote B.W. beside it, and put the pages on the nightstand under her earring dish, and turned off the lamp.

“Goodnight, Sinclair,” she said into the dark.

“Goodnight, Bethany.”

All three syllables. In our bed. In the place where I live.

Haven’t read the whole story yet? Start at the beginning.

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