One. Definitely One.

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Plus-One Problem
by Riley Kendra

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

One. Definitely One.

ROMY

She had made a reservation for dinner and an agenda for after it. I know because the agenda fell out of the basket.

It was an index card. It landed face up on the floorboards of the Harvest Suite at a quarter past ten, while she was hanging her dress in the closet with the door that has the mirror on it. I didn’t pick it up straight away. I read it where it lay, the way you’d read a note somebody slid under your door.

1. Rule One check.

2. Oil.

3. Blindfold. (Mine.)

4. Your choice.

5. Eyes open at the end. Non-negotiable.

“That wasn’t for distribution,” Tamsin said behind me.

“It was on the floor. That’s distribution.”

She came and took it off the boards, and squared it on the nightstand against the lamp, and then she stood with her back to me in her slip with her arms folded, which is how she stands when she has written something brave and needs a minute to find out whether it was a mistake.

The room hadn’t changed. Somebody at Solane must keep a photograph of it. The king bed under its beam of small lights. The one velvet chair. The French doors, open, letting in a cool May night that smelled of cut grass and the vines starting over. The copper tub in the bay window, catching the lamp. Eight pillows. Nobody had built anything out of them.

Eight months ago I’d stood exactly here and watched her tie a hotel robe in a double knot and make a median out of bedding. Tonight she had driven the mile of gravel at a lawful speed, corrected my surname at the front desk, and packed a basket.

“Item one,” I said.

She turned around. “Rule One.”

“I’m not scared,” I said. “I checked in the car. I’ll check again if you like.”

“I am,” she said. “A little. Not of you.”

I waited. That’s the thing I’ve learned to do. I used to fill silences with jokes and car bookings. Now I stand in them and let her finish.

“I’ve never let anyone do anything to me I couldn’t see coming,” she said. “Ever. I read the terms. I read ahead. I’ve read ahead on you for eight months. I know what you do with your left hand when you’re about to make me come, and I know that you hum when you’re concentrating, and I know the exact face.” She looked at the card. “I want one night where I don’t know what’s next. And I want it to be you. That’s item three. I’ve been working up to item three since February.”

“Since February.”

“It’s been on a list.”

“Tam.” My throat had gone tight in the way it does now, at the most ridiculous things. Leases. Grocery lists with my name on them. “You want me to take the wheel.”

“I want you to take the wheel.” She met my eyes. “I know you can’t drive.”

I laughed, which I think was the point, and went and put my hands on her waist, and she let her arms come unfolded.

“Then here’s the only rule,” I said. “You still talk. Not instructions. Just me knowing you’re there. You say stop, it stops. You say Kostas, I’ll know you’re hiding and I’ll ignore it.”

“That’s two rules.”

“I contain multitudes.”

She kissed me. She’s a very good kisser now. She was always going to be; she’s thorough. She kissed me as though we had a great deal of time, because we did, and when she pulled back her eyes had gone dark and she said, “Item two,” in a voice that had nothing whatever to do with project management.

The oil was the same. Fig and black pepper. She had found the maker online in October and ordered two bottles, and I learned later that she had kept the second one in a drawer in Jamaica Plain with a label on it in her own handwriting that said SOLANE ONLY.

I undressed her by the closet-door mirror, because some traditions are worth keeping. The slip went over her head. She had nothing on under it. She’d come down to dinner in a dark green dress with nothing on under it and sat across from me eating risotto and discussing Nell’s seating chart with her knees pressed together, and I hadn’t known, and I want that noted somewhere, because it is the single most Tamsin Halloran thing that has ever been done to me.

“You were bare at dinner.”

“I was conducting a trial.”

“How did it go?”

“I’m significantly wetter than the control group.”

I laid her on her front across the middle of the bed and knelt over the backs of her thighs and poured the oil into my palms to warm it, and then I took my time. Her shoulders first, where she carries the week. The long muscles either side of her spine, until she groaned into the duvet and stopped holding herself up. The small of her back. The dimples above her ass, and then her ass, both hands, slow and deep, thumbs dragging in toward the center until she lifted her hips into my palms without deciding to.

“That’s not on the agenda,” she said, muffled.

“Item four is my choice. I’m getting a head start.”

I worked the oil down the backs of her thighs and up the insides, and every pass I let my thumbs come a little higher, and every pass she spread her knees a little wider on the duvet, and neither of us mentioned it. By the time I brushed my knuckles up through her she was so wet the oil was redundant. She jerked under me and said my name into the bedding, a whole sentence’s worth of it.

“There you are,” I said.

I turned her over. Her hair was all over the pillow, edged in gold from the little lights, and her face was flushed to the collarbones. Her nipples were hard enough to hurt. I oiled those too, with two fingers, slow circles, and watched her watch me do it, and then I reached past her to the nightstand for the blindfold.

It was black silk. Not the honeymoon one, which we had left on a tub rim eight months ago, unused. This one was new, and she had chosen it, and it was probably the subject of a spreadsheet.

“Last chance to read ahead,” I said.

“No.”

I tied it behind her head, careful of her hair, snug enough that she couldn’t see under it. Then I sat back on my heels between her knees and simply looked.

She couldn’t see me looking. That was the thing. For eight months Tamsin has caught me at it, across rooms, across tables, across the kitchen with its window and its maple, and every time she catches me she does something: smooths her hair, says something dry, folds her arms. Tonight she couldn’t. She lay there oiled and open and gold under the beam of lights with her hands at her sides on the sheet and didn’t know where my eyes were, and so she didn’t arrange anything. She just breathed. Her stomach rose and fell. Her fingers kept curling and uncurling.

“Romy?”

“I’m here.”

“What are you doing?”

“Looking at you.”

Her whole body flushed. I watched it go, from her chest up to her jaw, a tide coming in. “For how long?”

“I don’t know yet. I haven’t got an agenda.”

“That’s —” She stopped. She swallowed. “That’s the point. Isn’t it.”

“That’s the point, baby.”

I didn’t touch her for a while. Long enough that she started to shift. Long enough that her hips rocked once, against nothing, and she made a small, offended noise at herself. Then I set one fingertip at the hollow of her throat, and she gasped as though I’d put my whole hand on her.

Here is what I did, since she couldn’t see it, and since I promised her afterward I’d tell her everything in order. She likes things in order.

I drew that one fingertip down between her breasts and over her stomach and stopped it an inch above where she wanted it, and held it there, and listened to her breathe.

I kissed the inside of her left knee, and then the inside of her right ankle, so she wouldn’t know which side I was on.

I put my mouth on her nipple without warning and sucked hard and felt her arch off the bed, and then I let go and blew on it, and she said fuck in her lowest, least careful voice, the one I’ve only ever heard in rooms with the door shut.

I took the bullet out of the basket. The same little three-setting bullet, the one she’d emptied out of the honeymoon basket on a Sunday afternoon and taken home in her carry-on and never once mentioned, until the night in Boston I found it on a labeled shelf. I didn’t turn it on. I just drew it, cool and smooth and silent, up the inside of her thigh, so she’d know what it was.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, you —”

“Courteous,” I said, and switched it on low, and set it against her clit.

She came off the bed. Her hands went flying for something to hold and found the sheet and fisted in it. I kept it there, low and steady, and slid two fingers into her alongside it, slow, oil and wet, curling them up and holding them still.

“Talk to me,” I said.

“I can’t — I don’t know where you are —”

“I’m inside you. You know exactly where I am.”

“I can’t see —”

“You don’t need to see. Tell me what you feel.”

She told me. That’s the thing about her. Eight months ago she couldn’t say put your hand on me without a five-word budget and a prepared statement. Now she lay blindfolded on the bed where she’d built a wall, and she told me. That it was too much and not enough. That she could feel my knuckles. That she could hear how wet she was and it was obscene and she didn’t care. That she wanted my mouth. That she’d wanted my mouth since the risotto.

“Persuasive,” I said, and turned it up, and she cried out.

I didn’t give her my mouth. Not yet. I worked my fingers slow and deep and kept the bullet exactly where it was, and every time I felt her start to tighten, every time her thighs began to shake and her breath went short and high, I eased the bullet away an inch. Just an inch. Just enough. And waited. And brought it back.

The third time I did it she said “Romy,” in a voice like a dropped plate.

“I know.”

“You don’t — I’m going to —”

“Not yet.”

“Why?“

“Because you don’t know when,” I said. “That’s what you asked for. You don’t get to read ahead.”

She made a sound I’d never heard from her. Not a word. Something wordless and furious and desperate, and she pushed her hips down onto my hand, hard, and her mouth fell open under the black silk, and I thought, I have waited eleven years on Saturday to hear that sound, and then I thought, no, I’ve waited eleven years to be the one she lets make it.

“You’re doing so well,” I told her. “Good girl. Look how good you’re being for me.”

That did it. It always does. Eight months and “good girl” still goes through her like a current through a wire; she says it’s the most embarrassing data point in her entire life and that she’s made her peace with it. Her back bowed. Her hand let go of the sheet and found my wrist, not to stop it, to hold it there. I let the bullet stay.

“Now,” I said. “Now, Tam. Come for me.”

She did. Loudly. With the doors open and the vines outside and probably half of the Halloran wedding party on the floor below, and I didn’t care, and neither did she. She clenched around my fingers in long hard pulses that I could count, and she said my name, and then she said please even though there was nothing left to ask for, and then she said nothing at all, just breathed, open-mouthed, under the blindfold.

I switched the bullet off and set it on the windowsill, where its predecessor once sat.

“Item four,” she said, after a while. Her voice was wrecked. “What’s your choice.”

“You’ll find out.”

“I hate this.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m lying,” she agreed, and laughed, shaky, and I kissed her.

My choice was in the bottom of the basket, under a folded towel, because she had packed it and she packs like a woman who expects customs. The harness. The toy she had chosen out of four hundred and twelve reviews, deep blue going to violet, “dusk,” with the little pocket where the bullet fits. The first time it was me wearing it, in her apartment on Tremont Street, with her on top directing traffic. The second time was hers. We’ve traded since. We keep a tally on the inside of the closet door. Of course we do.

I buckled it on standing at the foot of the bed while she listened. That was the cruelest thing I did all night, and I knew it. She lay there and heard every sound: the buckles, the strap pulled through, the click of the bullet seating into its pocket. Her thighs pressed together and then fell open again. Her teeth went into her lower lip.

“Romy,” she said. “Is that —”

“Don’t read ahead.”

I knelt up between her legs and drew the head of it through her, slow, all the way up and back down, so she’d feel the shape and the slick and the weight. She shuddered right down to her feet.

“Tell me,” I said.

“Fuck me.” She said it plainly. Not a whisper. A woman who had been asked to put it in a sentence, and had. “Please. I want you inside me. I want it slow, and then I don’t want it slow.”

“Good girl.”

I pushed into her. I went slowly, because she’d asked, an inch and a pause and an inch, and watched the place where we met and watched her face under the silk and watched her hands, which had come up off the sheet and found my hips and were pulling. She took all of it with a long, broken breath, and when I was all the way in I stayed there and didn’t move and leaned down over her, my weight on my forearms, my chain swinging down to lie in the hollow of her throat. She felt it land. She smiled.

“There you are,” she said.

That was my line. She took it eight months ago in a press house and she has never given it back.

I started to move.

Slow, the way she asked. Long, deep strokes, all the way out and all the way home, the bed rocking under us, the little lights on the beam shivering above. I reached down between us and turned the bullet on, and she felt it hum through the base of the toy against her clit on every stroke and swore, high and helpless. I kept it slow until she was begging, and I mean begging, her heels in the backs of my thighs and her nails in my shoulders, a few inches from the constellation, saying harder, Romy, please, I said slow and then not slow, I said it, I said it —

“You did,” I said. “You put it in a sentence.”

And then I gave her not slow.

I took her hard into the mattress, her hips tipped up in my hands, the slap of it loud in the room, the oil on our skin. She stopped making words and made sounds instead, a long rising string of them, and her hands left my shoulders and went up over her head and found the oak headboard, and held. I hadn’t asked her to. She did it herself. The woman who once couldn’t kiss me in front of a barrel tour lay blindfolded under a beam of lights with her arms over her head and her legs around my waist and gave me the whole of herself, and didn’t once ask where I was going next.

“Close,” she gasped. “I’m close, I’m —”

I reached up and pulled the blindfold off.

Item five. Non-negotiable.

She blinked into the light, dazed, pupils huge, and found my face, and I watched her see me. I’d been looking at her all night. That was the first time she’d been able to look back. Her mouth opened. Her eyes filled. She didn’t look away. Neither did I.

“I see you,” I said. I didn’t plan it. “Tam. I see you.”

She came looking right at me. Eyes open, mouth open, every muscle in her drawn tight around the toy, the headboard creaking in her hands, my name coming out of her in pieces. It went on and on. I held still inside her and kept the bullet humming and watched it all, every second, the way I’d watched her across a lawn in a wine-red dress for nineteen seconds that Sabine caught on film. Then it broke over me as well, from the bullet and the base and her face, mostly her face, and I came with my forehead against hers and our eyes open, shaking, and I don’t remember what I said. She does. She wrote it down afterward. She’s never shown me the card.

We ended up in the copper tub, because we always do.

I ran it while she lay on the bed boneless with one arm over her eyes, laughing at nothing. When it was full I carried her, which she permits now when nobody is watching, and lowered her in, and climbed in facing her. Fig and pepper on the water. The bay window black and full of stars. Her feet in my lap. Mine in hers.

“Report,” I said.

“I have no notes.”

“That’s a first.”

“I have one note.” She pushed her wet hair back off her face. “You took it off at exactly the right time. How did you know?”

“I didn’t. I was looking at you.”

She was quiet for a while. A tractor somewhere had long since stopped. The vines outside made the dry rustle I remember from the first night, when I lay on the far side of six pillows and listened to her breathe and thought I was never going to touch her.

“Eleven years on Saturday,” she said.

“I know.”

“I used to think about it quarterly. When I was tired.”

“I know. You told me in the dark.”

“I don’t think about it anymore.” She ran her thumb along the arch of my foot. “Not the roof. I think about the gate. And the road. And you standing in it.”

“I was standing in it because you came running down it barefoot.”

“That’s the part I think about.”

I leaned back against the copper and looked at her. Hair down. Flushed. A woman who had written eyes open at the end on an index card and meant it.

“Rule One,” I said.

She looked up. “Are you scared?”

“No,” I said. “That’s the report. I’m not scared of anything in this room.”

She smiled. The one that isn’t for anybody else.

“Noted,” she said. “Filed.”

Later, in bed, in the middle, because there is only a middle now, she fell asleep on my chest with the chain caught under her cheek. The index card was still on the nightstand against the lamp. I reached over and turned it face down so the light wouldn’t wake her.

On the back, in her small, careful hand, she had written one more line. I don’t know when. Maybe in February. Maybe tonight, in the bathroom, while I ran the tub.

6. Ask for two nights next time.

I left the lamp on. I lay there and watched her sleep for a long time, in a room with one bed, which is the correct number. I have checked. I’ve stopped checking for the door.

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