The Wedding Night

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Honeymoon Upgrade
by Riley Kendra

⚠️ This bonus chapter takes place after the epilogue. It contains spoilers and extremely explicit content. Read the novel first. 18+.

The Wedding Night

ELENA

“Which side do you sleep on, wife?”

I said it. I want that recorded. I said it first, on the threshold of the Solara villa, at a quarter to midnight, and it was the first time in sixteen months that the word had been accurate.

Nora stopped with one bare foot over the sill.

“Say it again.”

“Wife.”

“Again.”

“My wife,” I said, and found that I couldn’t stop smiling, which is not a difficulty I have had before in a doorway.

We had been married at four that afternoon at Ti Anse. Nineteen people came through the gap in the cliffs in three fishing boats, with a cast-iron pot, a drum, and my mother in her church hat. I found that cove when I was eleven. I never brought anyone. It turns out it holds nineteen quite comfortably, and a goat.

Desmond performed the ceremony. He has been licensed to solemnize marriages since 1994. He had never mentioned it. No one had asked.

Liam walked his sister down the sand. Lacey photographed it, which meant that for one entire day Nora Bennett did not hold a camera and was in every frame. Josette fried. Augustin Baptiste wept into a cold towel. Daniel and Maren sent the chair, with a card that read For the file.

And my mother told me, while she pinned a flower in my hair with fingers that have marked ten thousand hotel sheets, what she had finally decided to pray for.

“That this time you would dance at it,” she said.

I danced at it. Barefoot, on the sand, with eleven women over sixty and one photographer from Boston who has learned four steps and is very proud of the fourth.

Now Desmond drew the tall wooden door shut behind us like a man lowering a curtain. He had said, “Mrs. and Mrs. Morales,” one last time, with the weight of a toast. I had pointed out that she was keeping her name. He had replied that so was madam, and that he had always found it the more euphonious booking.

The latch clicked. Then it was the two of us, and the sea, and the frogs.

The doors were folded back. The bucket was on its stand. Two swans, no petals. Against the bucket stood a thick gilt-edged card that had waited a year and four months to be correct. Congratulations on Your New Life Together.

And on the foot of the bed, in a white box, sat the top tier of a black cake. My mother had started the fruit soaking in rum in November, the week I telephoned her. She would not be told it was early.

“Tradition says that somebody keeps it,” Nora said. “For the first anniversary.”

“We ate the last one in six days.”

“We were under a lot of stress.” She set the box in the villa fridge herself, with both hands, like someone putting down an infant. “A year. I can do a year. I’ve got a ring that says so.”

She turned around.

She had been married in a dress the color of marigolds. I had known that she would be. I had not known, until four o’clock, that she’d had it made.

“There’s a zipper,” she said. “It sticks at the bottom. You have to sort of bully it.”

“I don’t bully zippers.”

“Then finesse it. I believe in you.”

She gave me her back and lifted her hair off her neck with both hands. The new ring caught the lantern light. I laid my left palm at her waist, to hold the fabric. That’s how one closes a zip. It is also, I’ve found, how one opens it.

I took the tab between finger and thumb.

One tooth. Two. I went slowly. I had earned the right. My knuckles rode down the groove of her spine, and the gooseflesh ran ahead of them, as it had on the second day of all this, when I had told myself it was only technique.

Nineteen. Twenty-six. Thirty-three.

It occurred to me, somewhere past thirty-five, what I was going to find.

Thirty-nine. Forty. Forty-one.

I stood with the tab at the base of her spine and did not move.

“You counted,” Nora said softly. She was looking at me over her shoulder.

“You had it made.”

“I gave the seamstress a number. She thought I was superstitious.” Her eyes were very bright. “You told me in Boston that you’d checked forty-one places on me, to be sure you’d know them again. I figured you ought to get to check them one more time. On the way in.”

I couldn’t answer her. I bent, and put my mouth at the nape of her neck, on the first one.

I did all forty-one. I had the list by heart. The fine hair behind her ear. The ring of blades on her shoulder. Each knob of her spine as the marigold silk slid off it, and the two shallow dips at its base. I turned her and went on. The hollow of her throat, where I have left a mark more than once and left another. The soft undersides of her breasts. A freckle beneath the left one that I discovered in a storm. Her navel. The crease of each hip. The backs of her knees, which everyone forgets.

By the thirtieth she was holding on to the bedpost. By the fortieth she had stopped pretending to count along.

“That’s forty,” she said unsteadily. I was on my knees on the tile, with the dress in a pool around her feet. “Where’s forty-one?”

I lifted her left hand. I kissed the inside of her fourth finger, just beside a plain gold band.

“That one’s new,” she whispered.

“I’ve revised the inventory.”

She pulled me up by the collar of my shirt. White linen. I had been married in it, with the sleeves rolled and my hair down, because it is what I was wearing the first time she ever looked at me. She undid it herself. She pushed it off my shoulders. She unfastened my trousers, and when they had joined the dress on the floor she stood back and looked at all of me in the lamplight, the way she had beside a pool, with her whole face.

“Still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” she said. “And I’ve been to Iceland twice now.”

“May I ask you for something?”

“Always.”

I had drafted it. I draft things that frighten me. I had been drafting this one, on and off, for a year.

“I should like you to sit on my face.”

Her mouth fell open.

“I have wanted to ask since Boston. I didn’t know how one phrased it.”

“That’s . . .” She had gone pink to the collarbones. She started to laugh. “Elena. That’s exactly how one phrases it.”

“Then I’m asking.”

“Get on the bed, Mrs. Morales.”

I lay down in the middle, on my back, with my hair spread on her pillow and mine. She climbed up over me on her knees. She was shaking a little, with laughter and with the other thing. She took hold of the canopy post with one hand.

“You say stop . . .”

“You stop. I’m not going to say stop. Come here.”

I put my hands on her hips and drew her down.

I had asked for it because of what I’m unable to do there. I can’t direct. I can’t see the room. I can’t speak. There is only the weight of her, and the heat, and the taste, and her thighs warm against my ears until even the sea goes quiet. It is the least useful I have ever been to anyone. It was glorious.

She was already wet. She had been wet since tooth number twelve, she told me afterward. I opened my mouth and licked up through all of her, long and slow, and felt her whole body jolt.

“Oh my God. Oh, that’s . . . am I crushing you? Tell me if I’m . . .”

I tightened my hands and pulled her down harder. It was the only note I gave all night.

I could hear her, faintly, through her own thighs. She was talking. She always will. She said I had no idea what I looked like down there, with my hair all over the pillow and my eyes shut. She said she had thought about this in a darkroom, and on a jet bridge, and all through a father-of-the-bride toast in Newport. She said my tongue was going to kill her, and that she intended to die slowly. I hummed. An old zouk. I felt it go through her like a plucked string.

She stopped being careful. That was what I’d wanted. She began to move, a slow shameless roll of her hips against my tongue, taking it where she needed it. I gave her the flat of my tongue and then the point. I closed my lips around her clit and sucked, softly, and heard her cry out above me, a long way off, as though from another floor. My new ring was cool against her hip. She flinched at it and laughed, and then she covered my hand with hers and pressed it there.

“Elena. Wife. Oh, fuck, don’t stop, I’m . . .”

I slid one hand around and pushed two fingers into her from behind, deep, and curled them.

She came on my mouth with both hands on the canopy and her head thrown back, shouting, with the doors open and the whole Caribbean for an audience. I felt it against my tongue, pulse after pulse. I held her through all of it, and I did not stop.

She tried to lift away. I didn’t let her go far.

“Again.”

“I can’t. I just . . .”

“You have been mistaken about that on three occasions. I’ve kept a record.”

She laughed, helplessly, and sank back down. I was gentle. I used only my tongue, flat and soft and patient, and my thumbs stroking the creases of her thighs, and I waited her out. The second one came up slowly and went on a long time. She folded forward over the headboard with her forehead on her arms and said wife into the crook of her elbow, over and over, like a word she was learning to spell.

When I finally let her go, she collapsed down the length of my body. She kissed me, wet and open, and tasted herself, and groaned.

“Notes?” I asked.

“I’m going to have that engraved on something.” She was still trembling. “Okay. Okay. Your turn, wife.”

She went down me slowly. She has never once hurried it, not since I taught her at the edge of a pool that a guest should never feel rushed. My breasts, with her teeth. The soft place under my navel, for a long time, because she loves it and has finally taught me to. The scar on my right knee. Then she pushed my thighs apart with her palms and looked at me, and I let her look. I don’t arrange myself anymore.

“Hands?” I said.

“Wherever you want them. That’s the whole deal.”

I put them in her hair.

Her mouth came down on me, and I was loud at once. I’ve stopped managing the sound. It was one of the vows, or near enough. She licked me in long strokes, exactly as I’d shown her, and then in ways I never showed anyone, and slid her fingers in and found the place without looking. She gave me a third and I took it with a groan. She turned her wrist. Her ring pressed against me, cool and hard and unmistakable, and I thought, quite clearly, that is my wife’s wedding ring, and very nearly finished on the thought alone. I heard my own voice go up into the gauze. I heard myself say there, and more, and please, three words that took me thirty-eight years to learn and that she got out of me in a week.

“You’re doing so well,” she said against me. “Good girl. My good wife.”

It went through me like current. Both words, together. I hadn’t known they could be put together.

“Again,” I said. “Say it.”

“My wife. My beautiful, terrifying, impossible wife. Come for me.”

I said the kitchen word. I said it to the canopy, cracked down the middle, and then I said Nora, and then, because I had been saving it, my wife, and I came with all three in my mouth and her fingers deep inside me and my heels dug into a honeymoon bed.

She crawled up and lay on top of me. We breathed.

“We’re not finished,” she said into my neck.

“No.”

“I want the last one together. Looking at you. I want to feel the rings.”

I turned us onto our sides, facing, in the lamplight. I drew her top leg over my hip. She laced her left hand through my left, and the two bands clicked together, a small exact sound, like a key in a lock. Hers says, on the inside, stay in the picture. Mine says for no reason. She had it engraved in Boston and would not tell me until the sand.

“That’s new as well,” I said.

“I like it. Do it again.”

I pressed our hands together. Click.

I slid my other hand down between us and into her. She did the same to me. We know how now. There’s no instruction in it, and no leader. Her fingers curled, and mine did, and we rocked into each other slowly, foreheads touching, breathing each other’s breath, with the sea coming in through the open doors.

“I’m not leaving,” I told her.

“I know. I’ve got it in writing.” Her voice shook. “Twice.”

“I shall stay right here.”

“Inside me.”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“I haven’t set a term. I’m told a release ought to state one.” I kissed her. “I find I don’t want one.”

She laughed, and it broke, and her eyes filled. I felt her begin to tighten around my hand. I felt myself answer.

“Look at me,” we said. Together. We always do, now.

It came up through us slowly, from a long way down, and it took a long time, and I kept my eyes open for all of it. I watched my wife come. She watched me. Neither of us looked away, and neither of us was quiet, and when it was over the rings were pressed so hard together that they left a mark on both our hands.

That one will fade. I checked it anyway. Forty-two.

We went into the plunge pool at one in the morning, because it was there, and because the first thing I ever let her do to me was on its edge. We did nothing in it. We floated. She held me up by the back of the neck in the lit water, and I looked at the stars with nothing whatever in my hands.

Later. The lamp on. The doors open.

She had gone to the nightstand on my side, naked, and come back with a sheet of cream stationery and my pen. Seven lines. Five struck. One question mark in pencil. One word in the margin, in the worst handwriting in the Caribbean. Yes.

“There’s room at the bottom,” she said.

“It’s a controlled document.”

“I’m a party to it. I checked.” She uncapped my pen. I let her. She bent over the page on the sheet between us, with her tongue between her teeth, and wrote one line beneath the seventh. Then she turned it around to me.

8. Elena may not hide behind the lobby.

I read it twice.

“You can’t simply add rules,” I said.

“I married the woman who wrote the rules.”

“That isn’t a rule. It’s a personal attack.”

“It’s an amenity.” She capped the pen, and kissed me, and propped the page against the lamp, where it would be the first thing either of us saw in the morning. “Rule six. Both directions. I told you that on a terrace the first time I hung up on your hotel.”

I looked at it standing there. Eight lines in two hands. I have signed a great many documents. That is the only one I have ever wanted framed.

She switched off her lamp. She left mine. She fitted herself along my back, with her arm heavy over my waist and her cold nose between my shoulder blades, in the middle of the bed. There is only a middle now. I’ve had the swans reassigned.

The water drew back over the stones. A tree frog started up, and quit.

“Nora,” I whispered.

“Mm.”

“Was that necessary?”

I felt her smile against my spine.

“Go to sleep, Mrs. Morales,” said my wife.

I slept.

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