Back to the Best Western (continued)

The Most Eligible Bachelorette — Bonus Chapter
by Blair Lennox

I reached for the nightstand. The purple one. I held it up where she could see it, and the sound she made—a low, hungry sound, the sound of a woman who had spent thirty-eight years performing composure and had finally, permanently, stopped—went through me like a current.

I got the harness on. Took my time—deliberate, letting her watch, letting the preparation itself be part of the anticipation. Slicked the toy with lube, thorough, careful, the way we’d learned to do it. She watched every motion with those dark eyes and her tied hands and her chest heaving, and by the time I positioned myself between her legs she was shaking with want.

“Ready?” I asked.

“I’ve been ready since the parking lot.”

I pushed inside her slowly. Inch by inch. Watching her face—the way her lips parted, the way her eyes went half-lidded, the way her entire body softened and then tightened around the toy as I filled her. Her breath came in short, stuttering gasps. Her wrists pulled against the ties—not trying to escape, just needing something to hold onto while her body opened.

“More,” she said.

I gave her more. Pulled back slowly, then forward—deeper, finding the angle, the specific tilt of my hips that used the curve of the toy to press against the spot inside her that made her voice go high and thin and desperate. She gasped. I did it again. And again. Building a rhythm that was slow at first—rolling, deep, each thrust deliberate—and then gradually, as her body responded and her hips began to move to meet mine, faster.

“Harder,” she said. “Dani—harder—”

I went harder. Gripped her hips. Pulled her into every thrust, my body driving into hers, the bed protesting beneath us with creaks and groans that were their own percussion. The headboard hit the wall—once, twice, then a steady rhythm that synced with our breathing and the sounds she was making, sounds that were profane and sacred and completely without performance. She said my name. She said fuck. She said don’t stop and right there and yes and please and harder and every word was a declaration, a woman saying out loud the things she wanted with the fluency of someone who had practiced and found the practice pleasurable in itself.

Her legs were wrapped around me, ankles locked at the small of my back, pulling me deeper with every thrust. Her hands strained against the silk, her wrists flexing, the tendons in her forearms visible. She was close—I could feel it in the tension of her body, the tightening, the way her breathing fractured into staccato gasps.

“Look at me,” I said.

She looked. Our eyes locked. And I drove into her with a thrust that was deeper than the others, angled exactly right, and she shattered—her back arching off the mattress, a scream that she didn’t try to contain, her body clenching around the toy in rhythmic pulses that I felt through the harness, through my own hips, in the center of my own body. I held still inside her and watched her come apart with her hands tied above her head and her eyes locked on mine and the most honest expression I’d ever seen on a human face—the face of a woman experiencing pleasure without a single filter between the feeling and the world.

I untied her wrists. Kissed the faint red marks the silk had left. She pulled me down, wrapped her freed arms around me, held me against her chest while her body calmed. I could feel her heartbeat—frantic, gradually slowing—against my cheek.

“Your turn,” she whispered into my hair.

“You don’t have to—”

She rolled me. One fluid, athletic motion—the strength in her arms, the leverage of her hips, the confidence of a woman who had spent a year learning her own body and mine. I was on my back. She was above me, straddling my hips, looking down with her hair disheveled and her eyes still dark and wet.

She unhooked the harness. Set it aside. And then she was kissing down my body—fast, purposeful, a woman on a mission. This was hunger. Pure, unfiltered, greedy hunger—the hunger of a woman who wanted the taste of me and was done waiting for it.

Her mouth found my nipple. Sucked hard. I gasped and arched and felt her grin against my skin. She bit gently—my breast, my ribs, the sensitive curve of my waist—leaving a trail of small, stinging marks that would be visible tomorrow.

She settled between my legs. Lifted my thigh over her shoulder. Her mouth was on me. Not slow—Maeve was done with slow. She went directly for my clit—flat, firm, the exact pressure that made my hips lift off the bed and my hand slam down on the mattress.

Her fingers slid inside me—two, then three when I said more—and the fullness and the stretch combined with her tongue working my clit was too much and not enough and exactly right. I said her name and I said fuck and I said right there don’t stop and I said things in Spanish that my mother would have crossed herself over.

She used her free hand on my breast—pinching my nipple, rolling it between her fingers, the dual stimulation shorting out the last of my higher brain function. I could feel the vibration of her own moans against my clit because making me come turned her on.

I came with a violence that surprised us both. My whole body—arching, clenching, a sound tearing out of me that was part scream and part sob and part Maeve’s name in a register I didn’t know my voice could reach. She held me through it—her mouth softening but not stopping, riding the orgasm with me until the last aftershock faded.

They were never sadness. They were the overflow of being loved by someone who knows your worst patterns and stays anyway.

Maeve crawled up my body. Kissed me. I tasted myself on her mouth. One year. One year since I learned what Maeve Calloway sounds like when she stops managing the experience.

She still sounded the same. Raw and real and mine.

We lay tangled. Sweaty. The sheets destroyed. The purple toy on the nightstand. The silk ties on the floor.

“Worth more than the prize money,” I said.

“You never actually won the prize money.”

“Debatable.”

She laughed. The real one. Full and startled, her face pressed against my neck.

“Do you want to come back next year?”

“I want to come back every year. Until they renovate and we have to explain why two women are angry about mattress upgrades.”

Maeve traced the tattoo on my ribcage—the woman’s silhouette she’d kissed in corridors and suites and hotel rooms and our apartment in Brooklyn.

“Best anniversary,” she said.

“Best worst mattress.”

She kissed me. Soft. The everyday kind. The kind that belonged to us—private, permanent, real.

We fell asleep in the Best Western. Woke up at dawn. Went to the bodega. She ordered dos cafés with the same terrible accent, and I laughed so hard the clerk handed me a napkin.

Same hotel. Same mattress. Same terrible Spanish.

Different women. Better. Braver. Ours.

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