Ten Minutes

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Girls’ Trip Clause
by Riley Kendra

⚠️ This bonus chapter takes place on Sunday morning in Cabo, the morning of Day Four, between Chapters Seven and Eight. It contains spoilers and extremely explicit content. Read the novel first. 18+.

Ten Minutes

PRIYA

The Cortez Spa smells like money that went to a very good school.

Eucalyptus. Warm stone. Something under it that’s either sandalwood or a scented candle priced like a car payment. At nine on Sunday morning there’s a fountain trickling in the lobby, a woman in white linen at the desk who speaks only in whispers, and a clipboard for each of us with a diagram of a human body on it.

Please circle any areas you would like us to avoid.

Natalie Hayes has circled nothing. I watch her consider it, pen above the paper, the way she considers a contract clause. Then she puts the pen down without making a mark, and hands it back to the woman in linen, and smiles.

“Everywhere’s fine,” she says.

I’ve known her for eight years. On Thursday she’d have circled the whole body and written see attached.

“Luna de Miel,” the woman whispers, reading our package off a screen as if it’s scripture. “The couples’ suite. Very private. Please.”

The couples’ suite is down a corridor of white stone with candles set into little niches in the wall. It’s round, like the inside of a shell. There’s a skylight in the domed ceiling with the morning coming down through it, and a plunge bath sunk into the floor, steaming, with frangipani floating in it. And there are two massage tables side by side, two feet apart, made up in white sheets and towels folded into, I’m not making this up, a pair of hearts.

“Luis,” Natalie says, very quietly.

“Luis has a network.”

Our therapists are Lupita and Carmen. They’re both about fifty, both in white, and both carry the kind of calm that comes of having seen every kind of couple there is. They show us where to hang our robes, which way to lie, how the face cradle works. Then they leave us alone to undress and get under the sheets.

I’ve done this a hundred times. Bali, Chiang Mai, a terrible one in Budapest with a man named Zoltán. You strip, you lie down, you stop thinking.

I can’t stop thinking.

Natalie’s robe goes onto the hook beside mine. She’s in the white swimsuit underneath, because she wore it down from the casita, and she stands there for one second with her thumbs under the straps. She’s looking at me. I’m in nothing but the sheet I’ve already got pulled up to my waist, propped on my elbows, and her eyes go once down my back and up again.

Then she peels the suit off, all the way, in the middle of the floor, in the light from the skylight.

Freckled shoulders. The pale band where the suit’s been all week, soft white breasts and belly inside it, sun-pink everywhere else. She folds the swimsuit in half and lays it on a chair, because she’s still Natalie. Then she climbs up onto the table beside mine and lies face down and draws the sheet up over herself, and turns her head on the cradle so she’s facing me across two feet of air.

“What?” she whispers.

“Nothing.”

“You’re making a face.”

“I’m thinking about Zoltán.”

“Who’s Zoltán?”

“Nobody, now,” I say.

Lupita takes Natalie. Carmen takes me.

For about twenty minutes, it’s a massage. It’s a very good one. Carmen has thumbs like ball bearings and the moral certainty of a nun, and she finds a knot under my left shoulder blade that I’ve had since Ulaanbaatar and takes it apart with something close to contempt. The oil is warm. It’s almond, faintly sweet, and the whole room fills up with it. I go half under, the way you do. A fountain somewhere. Low music, just strings.

And beside me, every so often, Natalie Hayes makes a sound.

Not much of one. She’s very well brought up. But Lupita is working down the long muscles beside her spine, and Natalie’s breath goes out of her in a slow, shaking sigh that she tries to swallow halfway, and doesn’t quite manage. Then a small mm. Then nothing. Then, when Lupita’s hands slide down to the small of her back and press, a soft sound in her throat that I’ve heard before. On Friday night. In the dark. With my face in a pillow, pretending.

My eyes open.

She’s looking at me. Her cheek’s on the cradle, her hair’s spread out on the white towel, and her eyes are half closed and very green and fixed on me across two feet of almond-scented air. Lupita’s hands move. Natalie’s lips part. She doesn’t look away.

Carmen presses down on my lower back and I make a sound of my own, and it isn’t about the knot.

“Relajada,” Carmen says approvingly.

That’s not the word.

The sheets go lower. They’re professionals; it’s all done with tucks and folds, never an inch more than the work needs. But Lupita folds Natalie’s sheet down to the very top of her ass, and oils the dimples at the base of her spine, and works her thumbs in hard circles over her hips, and I watch Natalie’s fingers curl around the edge of the table. Then Lupita uncovers one leg, from the hip, and starts at the calf, and works up. The back of the knee. The thigh. Long, slow, oiled strokes up the back of Natalie’s thigh, almost to the crease, and back down.

Natalie shuts her eyes. Her mouth opens a little. A flush comes up across her shoulders, under the freckles, dark pink.

I think I’m going to die on this table. I think Luis is going to have to put it in the brochure.

At the half hour they turn us over, under the sheets, with the deftness of women who’ve turned thousands of bodies over without showing a single nipple. Then Lupita and Carmen exchange a look over our heads, the look of two colleagues who’ve been married to their work for a long time and know a couples’ package when they see one.

“Now,” Lupita says, softly. “For the Luna de Miel, there is ten minutes. Private. For the couple. We go to heat the stones.”

“The stones,” I repeat.

“Hot stones. For the end.” Carmen sets a small bottle on the shelf between our tables. More of the almond oil, warm in a dish of hot water. “Ten minutes. Please relax.” Her eyes rest on me, and her mouth does nothing at all, and that’s somehow worse than if she’d winked. “We knock.”

They leave. The door sighs shut behind them. I hear their footsteps go down the stone corridor, unhurried, and fade.

The fountain goes on trickling.

I turn my head.

Natalie is lying on her back under the sheet, looking at the skylight. She’s flushed from her collarbones to her hairline. There’s oil shining on her shoulders and in the hollow of her throat.

“Ten minutes,” she says, to the ceiling.

“So they said.”

“That’s very specific.”

“It’s a very specific package.”

She turns her head and looks at me. And I watch it happen, the thing I’ve watched four times now in three days: the moment where she gets right up to the edge of something and checks herself for a reason not to do it, and doesn’t find one.

“I can work with ten minutes,” Natalie says.

She sits up. The sheet falls to her waist. She swings her legs off the side of her table and stands up in the middle of the couples’ suite, naked and oiled and gold in the light from the skylight, and crosses the two feet between us in one step.

“Hayes,” I say. “There’s a door.”

“It’s closed.”

“It doesn’t lock.”

“They said they’d knock.” She takes hold of the edge of my sheet. “Are you telling me to stop?”

I think about that. I think about Carmen, and the stones, and the whispering woman at the front desk, and the possibility that some poor soul is going to walk in on this in nine minutes and change careers.

“No,” I say.

She draws the sheet down. All the way, slowly, off my breasts and my stomach and my thighs, and drops it on the floor. I’m lying flat on my back on a massage table in the middle of the morning with the light coming straight down on me through a hole in the ceiling, and the whole back of me is slick with almond oil against the sheet, and Natalie Hayes is standing over me, looking.

“You’ve been watching me,” she says.

“You’ve been making noises.”

“I couldn’t help it. She was very good.” She reaches past me for the bottle in the warm dish. “You couldn’t stop looking. I saw. Every time she touched my legs, your hand made a fist.”

“I didn’t know you were keeping track.”

“I’m always keeping track.” She tips the bottle. Warm oil runs into her cupped palm, and she rubs her hands together, slowly, while I watch. “I’ve been lying there for half an hour with a stranger’s hands on me, thinking about yours.”

She puts both palms flat on my stomach.

It’s nothing like Carmen. Carmen had a plan. Natalie has no plan at all; that’s the whole point of her this morning. She spreads her hands and pushes them up my body, slow and heavy and slick, over my ribs, over my breasts, and her thumbs drag across my nipples on the way and I arch up off the table before I can stop myself. The paper under the sheet crackles.

“Shh,” she says. “Ten minutes.”

“You’re not helping.”

“I’m not trying to help.” Her hands come back down. They circle my breasts. They slide down my sides, my hips, the tops of my thighs, and back up, and she’s watching her own hands as she does it, with a small frown, as if she’s discovering how a thing works. “You’re so soft like this. Everything slides.”

“That’s the oil.”

“I know it’s the oil. I’m saying I like it.” She bends and kisses me, upside down, her hair falling around both our faces, and she tastes like the mint water they gave us in the lobby. “I want to get on there with you.”

“It’s a massage table. It’s twenty-eight inches wide.”

“You measured it?”

“I looked at it. It’s what I do.”

“Then make room,” Natalie says, and puts a knee up on the edge.

The table creaks. I get my hands on her hips to steady her, and that’s a mistake, or the best thing I’ve done all year. She’s slippery as a seal. My palms go straight up her waist and she sways and catches herself on my shoulders and laughs, the nose one, helpless, and then she’s above me with one knee on either side of my hips and her hands braced flat beside my head, and the whole slick length of her comes down on top of me.

Oh.

I’ve been with women. I’ve been with a lot of women, in a lot of rooms, in a fair number of languages. I’ve never been with one when we were both covered in warm oil from the neck down, and I want to report that it changes everything. Every inch of her slides on me. Her breasts drag across mine. Her stomach glides on my stomach. When she shifts her weight to kiss me, her whole body moves on mine in one long liquid stroke, hip to chest, and both of us make a noise at exactly the same time, and both of us try to swallow it.

“Oh my God,” she breathes, against my mouth. “Oh, that’s— Do that again. Move.”

I move. I put both hands on her ass and drag her down the length of me, slowly, and back up. Her thigh slides between mine. I’m already wet. I’ve been wet since she peeled off the swimsuit, since Lupita’s thumbs on her hips, since half an hour of listening to her breathe, and her thigh glides straight through all of it, through the oil and through me, and I have to bite down on her shoulder.

“You’re so wet.” She sounds awed. “I can feel it, I can’t tell what’s the oil and what’s—”

“Both. It’s both.”

“Priya.” Her hips start to roll. Small at first, then not small. She’s rocking down on my thigh the way she did against a cinder-block wall on her first night, except that there’s nothing between us, not cotton, not linen, nothing but oil, and she’s not drunk and not pretending she is. “I’m so— This is so filthy. We’re going to get it on the sheets.”

“They’re used to it.”

“They are not used to it.”

“It’s the Luna de Miel, Hayes. The sheets have seen things.”

That makes her laugh into my neck. Her hips don’t stop. She’s grinding down on me, slow and deep and slippery, and I can feel her, all of her, hot and swollen and opening against my thigh on every stroke. I slide a hand down between us and she makes a high, cut-off sound and lifts her hips to let me in.

Two fingers. She’s so slick they go in without any help at all. She clamps down on them and drops her forehead onto mine.

“Eight minutes,” I tell her.

“Don’t you dare count.”

“You said you could work with it.”

“I’m working.” She’s riding my hand now, braced over me, her hair hanging down around us like a curtain, and her eyes are open and wild and an inch from mine. “Your other hand. Here. Please.”

I get my other hand between us and press my thumb on her clit, and she stops breathing.

The table creaks. The fountain trickles. Out in the corridor, a long way off, somebody laughs, and Natalie goes absolutely rigid on top of me, every muscle locked, my fingers buried in her, both of us listening.

The laugh fades.

Natalie lets her breath go, very slowly, against my cheek.

“Keep going,” she whispers. “Please. I’m so close. Don’t stop because of a laugh.”

I don’t stop. I fuck her slowly with my fingers and work her clit with my thumb in small hard circles, and she starts to shake. She’s trying to be quiet. She’s got her mouth pressed into my shoulder, and every breath comes out of her hot and broken against my skin, and her thighs are clamping on my hips, and her cunt is fluttering around my fingers, tighter and tighter.

“There,” she gasps. “There, there, that, please—”

She comes on top of me with her teeth in my shoulder.

It goes through her in waves. I can feel every one: her stomach jumping against mine, her thighs locking, her cunt clenching down on my fingers in long hard pulls while she shakes and shakes. The table rocks on its legs. She’s making a sound into my skin that I’m going to hear for the rest of my life, low and helpless and muffled, and I hold her through it with my free arm around her slick back, and I don’t count anything at all.

When it lets go of her she sags onto me, boneless, and the whole oiled weight of her slides an inch down my body and stops.

“Six minutes,” she says into my neck, wrecked.

“I wasn’t counting.”

“I was.” She lifts her head. Her face is flushed and damp and absolutely triumphant. “I’ve got six minutes, and you haven’t come, and you’ve been watching me get rubbed down by Lupita for half an hour with your fist clenched.” Her hand slides down my stomach. “So.”

She doesn’t get off the table.

She turns around on it instead. I don’t know how. It’s twenty-eight inches wide, she’s slick as a fish and her legs have just quit on her, and there’s a moment where she nearly goes off the side and I grab her by the hip and she grabs the face cradle and the face cradle comes off in her hand.

We both look at it.

“I’ll put it back,” Natalie whispers.

“Later.”

“Later,” she agrees, and drops it on Lupita’s table, and then she’s kneeling over me the other way round, her knees on either side of my shoulders, her hands on my thighs, and her face is between my legs.

I see what she’s done a second before she does it. I’ve got her above me, all of her, pink and wet and still swollen, still twitching a little from what I just did to her, an inch from my mouth.

“Hayes.”

“I want you to do me while I do you.” Her voice is muffled and shaking and completely certain. “At the same time. I’ve read about it. I want to know what it’s like. Is that—”

“Yes. God. Yes.”

“Okay.” A breath on me, warm. “Okay. Tell me if I’m crushing you.”

She lowers her hips, and I get my hands around her thighs and pull her down onto my mouth.

She tastes like almond oil and herself. She’s hot and slick and soft against my tongue, still oversensitive, and she cries out at the first stroke, too loud, and then claps her own hand over her mouth and goes very still. Then she bends down, with her hand still over her mouth, and takes it away, and puts her mouth on me.

I’ve had a lot of things done to me on a lot of beds. I’ve never had this. Her tongue on me, slow and wet and not quite sure of itself, while I’ve got mine in her, so that every time she gasps I feel it go through her body and into my mouth, and every time I make a sound she feels it. It’s a loop. It’s a closed circuit. She licks me and I moan into her and she shudders and presses down harder on my mouth, and the harder she presses the more I want to give her, and the more I give her the less she can concentrate, and she keeps losing her place and finding it again, gasping, sorry, sorry, wait, her forehead on my thigh, and then going back in.

It’s clumsy. It’s ridiculous. The table creaks with every move. The oil’s everywhere; her thighs keep slipping in my hands and I keep dragging her back. Somewhere around the fourth time she loses her place, she starts laughing, silently, with her face pressed into my thigh, and I feel the laugh go through her and into my mouth, and I’m laughing too, and it’s the sexiest thing that’s ever happened to me in my life.

Then she stops laughing.

She gets two fingers into me, slow and deep, and curls them, and closes her lips on my clit and sucks, steady, and doesn’t let go. And I can’t keep up anymore. I can’t do anything. I lie under her with my mouth open against her cunt, breathing her in, and she doesn’t stop. She doesn’t lose her place again. She’s got it now. I can feel her get it, the way I felt her get the inside line on the ridge, a sort of steadying, a decision, and then she just rides it out, rocking her hips slowly down onto my open mouth while she takes me apart with her own.

“Hayes—”

It’s all I can get out. It comes out of me loud. It bounces off the domed ceiling and comes back down through the skylight.

She doesn’t stop. I come under her like that, with my heels digging into the end of the massage table and both arms locked around her thighs and her whole slick weight pinning me down, crying out into her, and she keeps her mouth on me through every pulse, soft and then softer, until I’m shaking and pushing weakly at her hip.

And she’s coming again. I didn’t even notice I’d started back on her. She grinds down on my mouth and shudders and clamps her thighs around my ears, silently, both hands over her face, and then she slides sideways off me and lies there, face down on the other half of the table, with her feet by my head, breathing like she’s run up the ridge.

The fountain trickles.

“What time is it,” Natalie says, into the sheet.

“I don’t know.”

“You always know.”

“I don’t know anything. I don’t know what country I’m in.”

She laughs, very faintly.

Then there’s a knock.

Polite. Two soft knuckles on the door. “¿Señoras?“

Natalie is off the table in one movement and nearly flat on her back on the tile, because the floor’s oiled now, too. She catches herself on Lupita’s table. I’m sitting up. The sheet’s on the floor. The face cradle is on the wrong table. There’s a large wet patch on my sheet that isn’t oil, and both of us are shining from the neck down like a pair of glazed hams.

“¡Un momento!” I call.

Natalie lunges for her table. She gets up on it, mostly, and grabs her sheet and drags it over herself. She’s face up. She’s supposed to be face up. Her hair’s a disaster and there’s a perfect set of my tooth marks coming up on her shoulder, which, mercifully, the sheet covers.

I lie down and haul my own sheet over me, wet patch and all.

“The cradle,” Natalie hisses.

“Leave it.”

“It’s on her table—”

“Pase,” I call, in a perfectly level voice, and the door opens.

Lupita and Carmen come in carrying two wooden bowls of black stones, steaming. They stop. They take in the room. I watch them take it in: the face cradle on Lupita’s table, upside down; the shining tile; the two of us lying very straight under two sheets with our hands folded on our chests like a pair of effigies in a cathedral. Natalie’s sheet is on upside down; the little embroidered sun is at her feet. My breath isn’t steady yet.

Nobody says anything for a long moment.

Carmen sets her bowl down. She picks up the face cradle from Lupita’s table, between two fingers, and carries it back across the room, and fits it onto the end of mine with a small, final click.

“Relajadas,” Lupita says. “Yes?”

“Very,” says Natalie, in her best open-house voice, at the ceiling.

Lupita looks at Carmen. Carmen looks at Lupita. And then Carmen, who has the moral certainty of a nun, picks up the warm bottle of almond oil from the shelf between our tables and holds it up to the skylight. It’s nearly empty.

She sets it down without a word and lays a hot stone on my sternum.

I don’t make a sound. It costs me more than anything I’ve done this year.

We walk back to the casita in our robes, barefoot, at a quarter to eleven, both of us shining and smelling like a marzipan factory.

“I’m never going to be able to look at Lupita again,” Natalie says.

“You’ll never have to. It’s a big resort.”

“She knows.“

“She knew before we did. She knew when she saw the package.”

Natalie walks for a while. She’s got her hair twisted up off her neck with one hand, because it’s soaked in oil, and in the morning light I can see the faint shining print of my hand still on her hip, under the edge of the robe.

“I didn’t circle anything,” she says. “On the form. Did you see?”

“I saw.”

“I didn’t even think about it. On Thursday I’d have circled everything.” She looks at me sideways. “I just wanted to tell somebody.”

I don’t have anything to say to that. I’ve got a joke about Zoltán loaded, and I don’t use it. I take her free hand instead, the one that isn’t holding her hair up, and it’s still slippery, and our fingers slide when I lace them, and we both laugh.

Nobody’s watching. Rule one’s been dead since Friday afternoon. I hold on anyway.

Behind us, down the white corridor, I’d swear I hear Carmen ask Lupita, in Spanish, whether they’re going to need new sheets.

Lupita says they’re going to need a new table.

← Back to The Girls’ Trip Clause

Never Miss a Release

Get new release alerts, exclusive bonus content, and reader-only giveaways.