Criteria

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Third Key
by Isla Wilde

Late August. The lease is signed, the landlord has handed over two old brass keys on a loop of baling twine, and the furniture won’t come for two weeks. The farmhouse on the east shore is empty. Celia has brought twenty-two candles. Wren has brought the moving blankets. And Mara, who has spent a whole year learning to stop making lists, wants to make one more.

Criteria

MARA

The landlord handed Mara the keys on the porch at a quarter to seven, two of them, old brass, threaded on a loop of orange baling twine that had clearly been holding them together since the Carter administration.

“Front and back,” he said. “Back sticks in August. Lift it and lean.” He looked at the three of them standing on his crooked porch — Celia bouncing on her toes, Wren with her hands in her back pockets studying the slope of the boards, Mara holding the signed lease in a manila folder against her chest — and his eyes came back to Mara. “You’ll want copies.”

“I’m getting copies.”

“Figured.” He went down the steps to his truck. At the bottom he turned around. “Furniture’s coming when?”

“Two weeks from Saturday,” Mara said.

“So it’s empty.” He seemed to find this funny. “Well. Enjoy it empty.”

The truck went down the drive and out onto the shore road, and the dust settled, and the three of them stood on the porch of a white farmhouse on the east side of the lake that had their three names on a piece of paper inside Mara’s folder, and nobody said anything for a second, because there was nothing to say that was as big as the thing itself.

Then Celia snatched the keys out of Mara’s hand, unlocked the front door, flung it open, and ran inside shrieking.

Wren looked at Mara.

“She’s going to want to christen every room,” Wren said.

“There are nine rooms.”

“I know. I counted.” Wren tipped her head toward the door. “You going in, or are you going to stand out here holding the paperwork?”

Mara looked down. She was, in fact, holding the paperwork against her chest like a shield.

She set the folder on the porch rail. She went in.

The living room was the best room. They’d all agreed on that on the first walk-through, back in June, before Doug and the spreadsheet and the soulless Cape Cod in Aurora and the one real fight. Wide pine floors gone honey-colored with a hundred years of feet. A fieldstone fireplace. Three tall windows on the west wall that looked straight across the water at Bellweather, and at this hour, with the sun going down behind the far shore, the whole room filled up with gold like a glass being poured.

There was nothing in it. No couch, no rug, no lamp. Just the light and the floor and the long shadow of the window muntins laid across the boards in a grid.

Wren went back out to the truck and came in with an armful of gray moving blankets, which she unfolded and laid down in front of the fireplace in two overlapping layers with the attention she’d give a drop cloth under an heirloom. Celia came back from the kitchen with a canvas tote and began removing things from it: a bottle of red, three mismatched mugs because she’d forgotten glasses, a box of crackers, a wedge of the good cheddar from the co-op, and candles. A great many candles.

“How many did you bring?” Mara asked.

“Enough.”

“Celia.”

“Twenty-two.” Celia started lining them up along the hearth. “It’s a symbolic number. It’s how many minutes it took me to get to the carriage house in the storm.”

“That’s not symbolic. That’s a measurement.”

“Everything’s a measurement with you.” Celia struck a match. “That’s why I brought twenty-two.”

Mara had a tape measure in her jacket pocket. She’d put it there that morning out of habit. She took it out now and pulled the blade across the west wall, because the walnut bed was eighty-four inches wide and she wanted to know, she just wanted to know, whether a sofa could go under the windows without blocking the view when you were sitting on the bed in the room above —

Celia took the tape measure out of her hand.

“No,” Celia said.

“I’m just checking the —”

“No. No measuring. Not tonight.” Celia slid the tape measure into the back pocket of her own jeans and patted it. “You can measure tomorrow. Tomorrow you can measure the whole house. I’ll hold the end.”

Mara looked at Wren for support. Wren was sitting on the moving blankets with her back against the stone of the fireplace, unscrewing the wine, and her face was perfectly neutral, which was how Mara knew she was on Celia’s side.

“Fine,” Mara said.

“Good.” Celia poured wine into three mugs. Handed one to Wren, one to Mara. Kept the chipped one. “Then sit down.”

Mara sat.

They drank the wine and ate the cheddar off the box lid and watched the sun go down behind Bellweather. The lights came on across the water one by one. The streetlights along Front Street. The lamp in the bakery window. The long string of the dock. And at the north end of town, set back on its hill above the shore, a row of lit windows that Mara could have picked out with her eyes closed.

“There it is,” Celia said softly.

Alder House. Six rooms full, tonight. Seven, Eight, and Nine full too, since May. A light on in the east wing, where Wren’s Tuesday-night intermediate class was finishing up without her because she’d handed it to the retired shop teacher for one week, for this.

“It looks small from here,” Wren said.

“Everything does from across the water.” Celia leaned her head on Mara’s shoulder. “That’s the point of across the water.”

The candles were the only light in the room now. The windows had gone blue. Mara could feel Celia’s warmth against her left side and Wren’s knee against her right, and the floor was hard under the blankets, and the house was so quiet she could hear the lake.

She had a list in her head. She always had a list in her head. Tonight it wasn’t a list of things to fix.

“I want to make a list,” Mara said.

Celia lifted her head. Wren set her mug down on the hearth.

“You took my tape measure,” Mara said to Celia. “Fine. You’re right. But I want to make a list. Out loud. Of what I want. Tonight. In this room.” She heard her own voice, level and low, the voice she used on contractors. It didn’t shake. That astonished her a little. “And I want you both to do it. In order. No skipping ahead.”

There was a silence.

Then Wren’s mouth curved, slow, all the way up on one side.

“You heard her,” Wren said to Celia. “She’s good at lists.”

Celia’s eyes had gone very dark in the candlelight. She set down the chipped mug.

“Read it to us,” she said.

“One,” Mara said. “Take her clothes off, Wren. Slowly. Don’t let her help.”

Wren got up on her knees and turned to Celia, who was already reaching for the hem of her own sweater.

“No,” Wren said, and caught her wrists. “You heard the list.”

Celia made a small, outraged sound. Wren put Celia’s hands down on the blanket on either side of her hips, one at a time, the way you’d set down two pieces of glass, and then she began.

She took her time. She took so much time that Mara, watching from a foot away with her back against the cold stone, found herself gripping her own knees. Wren peeled the sweater up Celia’s body an inch at a time, her knuckles dragging along Celia’s ribs, and drew it over her head and folded it, of course she folded it, and set it on the hearth. Celia’s bra was pale green and Wren unhooked it and slid the straps down her arms so slowly that Celia’s breath started to come in little catches. Then Wren bent her head and kissed the top of one breast, just the top, just the soft swell above the nipple, and lifted her head again, and Celia whimpered.

“Two isn’t until two,” Wren murmured. “Isn’t that right, Mara?”

“That’s right,” Mara said. Her voice was rougher now.

The jeans. Wren unbuttoned them and drew down the zipper and paused with her fingers resting on the open V, the way she’d paused in the library, and Celia lifted her hips without being told, and Wren said, “Ah — no,” and pressed them down again with one hand until Celia was still. Then she worked the jeans down over Celia’s hips herself. Over her thighs. Off her ankles, with the tape measure falling out of the back pocket and clattering onto the floor, and all three of them looked at it, and Celia started to laugh, and Wren kicked it across the room without looking, and Celia stopped laughing.

Underwear last. Green, to match. Wren hooked two fingers in the waistband and drew it down and off, and then sat back on her heels.

Celia was naked on the moving blankets in front of the fireplace, propped on her hands, her curls loose, her whole body flushed in the candlelight from her throat to her knees. Her nipples were tight and dark. Between her thighs, in the soft brown curls, Mara could see her shining.

“Look at her,” Wren said quietly. “Look what that did.”

“I’m looking.”

“Two?”

Mara wet her lips. “Two. Put your mouth on her. Don’t let her come.”

Celia made a sound like Mara had slapped her. “Mara —”

“You can beg,” Mara said. “Begging’s allowed. It’s just not going to work.”

Wren pushed Celia’s knees apart and lay down between them.

Mara had watched this before. On the rug in the library, with the snow coming down. She’d watched it with her hand inside her own jeans and her heart trying to climb out through her mouth. It was different now. In the library she’d been on the outside of it with her face pressed to the glass. Tonight it was hers. Tonight she’d asked for it, item by item, in a voice that didn’t shake, and they were giving it to her.

Wren licked Celia open in one long, slow stroke, and Celia cried out and fell back flat on the blankets.

Wren didn’t hurry. She never hurried. She worked Celia with her mouth the way she worked a finish, coat on coat, patient, attentive, finding the place where Celia’s hips started to chase her and staying exactly there, flat and steady, until Celia was panting — and then easing off. Lifting her head. Kissing the inside of a trembling thigh. Waiting, while Celia sobbed out a breath, until the shaking slowed. Then putting her mouth back.

“Please,” Celia gasped. “Please, please, Wren, I’m right —”

“I know you are.”

“Please —”

“Ask her,” Wren said, nodding at Mara without lifting her mouth more than an inch. “It’s her list.”

Celia turned her head on the blankets. Her face was wet. Her eyes found Mara’s.

“Mara,” she begged. “Please. Let me.”

“No,” Mara said, very gently. “Not yet.”

Celia actually wailed. Wren laughed into her thigh, low and filthy, and slid two fingers into her and curled them, and Celia’s back came up off the blankets. Wren held her right there, fingers buried and still, mouth hovering, breath warm on Celia’s swollen clit, until Celia’s whole body was vibrating like a struck wire. Then she drew her fingers out and sat back and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and looked at Mara.

“Three,” Wren said. It wasn’t a question.

Mara had been thinking about three for two weeks. She’d realized, somewhere in the middle of the lease negotiations, that she’d never once, in all of it — the storm, the Lake Suite, every night since — been the one who wore it for Wren.

“Three,” Mara said. “Celia. In the tote. The box.”

Celia, flushed and trembling, pushed herself up on one elbow and dragged the canvas tote across the blankets. She reached into the bottom and pulled out a shoebox. On the lid, in Celia’s loopy hand, in black marker, it said LINENS.

Wren stared at the box. “Linens.”

“I panicked,” Celia said breathlessly. “I didn’t know what to label it. The man at the gas station saw me put it in the car.”

She lifted the lid. The black leather harness. The good lube in its black bottle. The purple silicone, which Celia set down on the moving blanket between the cheddar and the candles with exactly the ceremony she’d given it in the library, ten months ago, after walking through a nor’easter.

Mara picked up the harness. It was hers. It had always been hers. She’d let Wren wear it, and she’d let Celia watch, and she’d never in her life wanted to put it on as badly as she did right now.

She looked at Wren.

“I want to fuck you with it,” Mara said. “While you eat her. And she doesn’t come until you do.”

The room was silent except for the candles.

Wren had led everything. On the sideboard and the iron bed and the library rug and the bench in her shop. Even the times Mara had been on top of her, Wren had been the one who said now and harder and don’t stop. She’d made Mara ask for every single thing.

Wren looked at the harness in Mara’s hands. Then she looked up at Mara’s face. And something went across her own face that Mara had seen exactly once before — cross-legged on the bed in the Lake Suite, when Wren had promised to tell her whenever she was scared, and hadn’t looked away.

“Yeah,” Wren said. Her voice had gone low and not quite steady. “Okay. Yeah.”

“Say it properly.”

Wren’s breath caught. Her cheeks went dark. “Yes. I want that. I want you to.”

Mara stood up, and undressed in the candlelight while they both watched her, and didn’t fold a single thing. She stepped into the harness and cinched the straps around her hips, one and then the other, and seated the silicone in the ring, and when she looked up Celia had both hands over her mouth and Wren was staring at her like she’d never seen her before in her life.

“Clothes,” Mara said to Wren. “All of them. You can do your own.”

Wren did her own. Fast. Not careful at all. The flannel, the jeans, the plain gray underwear, everything left in a heap on the floor of their living room, and Mara thought, She didn’t fold them, and the thought went through her like a lit match.

“On your knees,” Mara said. “Between her legs. Put your mouth back where it was.”

Wren went down on her knees on the moving blankets between Celia’s thighs. Celia lay back with her head on a folded blanket and spread her legs wide, shaking, and Wren lowered her head and put her mouth on her, and Celia sobbed out loud with relief — and then Wren’s whole body went still, because Mara had knelt down behind her, and put one hand on the small of her back. Flat. Heavy. The way Wren had done it to her in the library, on the night she’d finally asked.

“Lube,” Mara said.

Celia found the black bottle by feel and held it out over Wren’s head without looking. Mara uncapped it. Poured it into her palm, warm from the candles, and slicked the silicone with long slow strokes while Wren knelt in front of her with her ass in the air and her mouth on Celia and her breath coming hard through her nose.

Then Mara put two fingers into her.

Wren made a sound against Celia that Mara had never once heard her make. High and helpless and stunned. She was soaked. She’d been soaked since one, Mara realized. Since she’d stripped Celia an inch at a time with Mara watching. Mara curled her fingers and felt Wren clench around them, hard, felt the dovetail tattoo above her hip go taut under her other palm, and leaned down and said into the back of Wren’s neck, “Don’t stop licking her.”

“I’m not,” Wren gasped, muffled. “I’m not, I’m — fuck —”

Mara drew her fingers out, and lined up, and pushed in.

She went slow. Slower than she’d ever gone. She watched the thick purple shaft sink into Wren inch by inch, watched Wren’s body stretch and give and take it, felt the resistance and the slick heat and the long shuddering breath that went out of Wren as it filled her, and she didn’t stop until her hips were flush against Wren’s ass and the leather straps pressed against Wren’s skin.

She stayed there. Buried. Perfectly still.

Wren was shaking all over. Her fingers were clenched in the moving blanket on either side of Celia’s hips. Her mouth had gone slack on Celia’s clit.

“Breathe,” Mara said.

Wren breathed.

“Good,” Mara said, and heard the echo of every time Wren had said it to her, and saw from the way Wren’s shoulders jerked that Wren had heard it too. “Now put your mouth back on my wife.”

Wren did. And Mara began to move.

It was the most frightening thing she had ever done, and she wasn’t afraid at all.

Long, slow strokes. Drawing almost all the way out, sinking all the way back. Every time she bottomed out it pushed Wren’s face into Celia, and Celia cried out, and the three of them found it without trying — the rhythm, one motion running through all of them like a current through three wires. Mara’s hips. Wren’s mouth. Celia’s hands, which had found their way into Wren’s hair and were holding on.

Mara watched all of it. She watched the candlelight move on Wren’s back, on the long pale scar along her ribs, on the sweat starting at the base of her spine. She watched Celia’s face over Wren’s shoulder — head thrown back, mouth open, eyes squeezed shut. She watched her own hands on Wren’s hips, the sheet-metal scar across the back of one wrist, holding on.

She didn’t watch herself.

She noticed that about halfway through. She went looking for the woman with the clipboard, out of habit, the way you reach for a light switch in a house you’ve moved out of, and there was nothing there. No corner of the room. No latch. Just the floor of a house that was theirs, and the lake outside, and the two of them in front of her, coming apart.

“Faster,” Wren gasped against Celia. “Mara. Please. Faster —”

She’d made Wren ask.

Mara gave her faster. Harder. Her hips snapping now, the slap of skin and leather loud in the empty room, the boards creaking under the blankets, Wren rocking forward into Celia with every stroke and Celia keening, and Mara got one hand in the short hair at the back of Wren’s head and held her there — not pulling, just holding, the way Wren had held her in the shop — and Wren started to swear.

It came out of her in a long, rough, breaking stream. Fuck and Mara and don’t you dare stop and oh God, oh God, oh fuck, muffled against Celia and then not muffled at all as she lifted her head to drag in air, and Celia grabbed her by the hair and pulled her mouth back down, and Mara felt it start. Felt Wren clench around the silicone, deep, rhythmic, felt her thighs go rigid and her back bow —

“Is she close?” Celia sobbed. “Mara, is she — I can’t — I can’t hold it —”

“Wait,” Mara said. “Wait for her.”

“I can’t —”

“You can,” Mara said. “Wren. Now. Let go.”

Wren came with her mouth on Celia and Mara buried inside her, shouting into Celia’s thigh. It ripped through her so hard it nearly took her knees out. She clamped down on the silicone in long violent pulses and her whole body shook and kept shaking, and Mara held her up by the hips and kept moving through it, slow, deep, I’ve got you, I’ve got you — and Celia, released, finally allowed, came screaming. Her heels drummed the blanket. Her thighs clamped around Wren’s head. Mara watched the flood of it, Celia soaking Wren’s chin and the blanket under her, the way she’d soaked Wren’s flannel sheets last fall, and nobody apologized for anything.

The candles flickered all at once in some draft from the empty house.

Mara eased out, slowly. Wren made a broken sound at the loss and collapsed sideways onto the blanket, gasping, and rolled onto her back, and lay there staring at the ceiling with her chest heaving and her mouth wet and her face completely, nakedly wrecked.

“Holy shit,” Wren said to the ceiling.

“I know,” said Celia, who was crying and laughing at the same time.

“No, I mean —” Wren dragged a hand over her face. “Holy shit, Mara.”

Mara knelt on the blanket in the harness with her heart going like a drum and her thighs slick and her whole body aching with something she hadn’t had yet. She hadn’t come. She hadn’t even thought about it. She’d been too busy watching.

Wren turned her head on the blanket and looked at her. Gray eyes, dark and soft and stunned.

“What’s four,” Wren said.

Mara opened her mouth. Closed it.

She hadn’t written four. She’d stopped at three. Three was the most she’d ever let herself want at once.

“I didn’t —” she started.

“Then we’ll write it,” Celia said, still breathless, and pushed herself up, and crawled across the blanket to her. She unbuckled the harness with clumsy, shaking fingers and slid it down Mara’s hips and set it aside. Then she put her hand flat on Mara’s sternum and pushed her down onto her back on the moving blankets.

Wren rolled over and came up on Mara’s other side.

“Four,” Celia said, against Mara’s mouth. “You lie there.”

“And five,” Wren said, against Mara’s throat. “You don’t get to make the list anymore.”

Then they were both on her.

Mara had never had both of them like this. Not on her, at once, with nothing to watch, nothing to hold, no item to say out loud. Celia’s mouth on her breast. Wren’s hand between her legs, two fingers sliding into her so easily that Mara heard herself make a sound she’d have been mortified by in any other house on earth. Celia’s hand joining Wren’s — Celia broad and slow on her clit, Wren deep and steady inside her, the two of them so different and so exactly right that Mara couldn’t think, couldn’t measure, couldn’t do anything at all but lie on the floor of the house that was theirs and let them.

She looked up. The ceiling was white plaster with a long crack running from the corner to the old light fixture.

That needs a butterfly key, she thought, and started to laugh, and the laugh turned into something else, and she came.

She came looking at both of them. Celia on her left, curls falling into her face, eyes bright and wet. Wren on her right, chin still shining, holding her gaze the whole way through. It went through Mara long and slow and enormous, like the sun going down across the water, and she didn’t hold one single piece of it back. She heard herself saying their names. Both of them. Over and over, in no particular order.

When it was over, nobody moved.

The candles had burned down by a third. The windows were black. Across the lake, Alder House was lit up on its hill like a ship.

Celia lay on Mara’s left with her cheek on Mara’s breast. Wren lay on her right with her arm across both of them and her face in Mara’s neck. Mara felt Wren’s breathing slow and deepen against her skin, and waited, out of old habit, for the moment when Wren’s eyes would go to the door.

They didn’t.

Wren was looking at the windows. At the lights across the water. At nothing in particular. Her hand on Celia’s back was moving in small slow circles.

“We should go,” Celia mumbled eventually. “We don’t have a bed.”

“We have a floor,” Wren said.

“It’s a terrible floor.”

“It’s a great floor. It’s hundred-year-old heart pine. I checked.”

“You checked the floor?“

“I checked everything,” Wren said. “It’s my house.”

The words just sat there in the dark. Mara felt Celia go still against her. Felt Wren hear what she’d said a second after she’d said it, and not take it back.

Mara reached down, blind, into the pocket of the jeans she’d left in a heap beside the blanket. Found the loop of orange baling twine. Pulled out the two old brass keys and held them up between the three of them in the candlelight.

“I’m getting three cut,” she said. “Thursday. At the hardware store in Aurora.”

“Of course you are,” said Celia.

“Three,” Wren repeated.

“Two’s never been the right number,” Mara said. “Not for this house.”

Wren took the keys out of her hand. She turned them over once, the way she turned a piece of hardware to read the wear on it. Then she closed her fist around them and tucked it against Mara’s chest, between the three of them, and left it there.

They slept on the floor.

It was, Mara thought, drifting, with the lake moving outside and her wife breathing against one shoulder and Wren breathing against the other, the worst night’s sleep she’d had since the storm.

She wouldn’t have measured it any other way.

Haven’t read the book yet? Start with the sideboard.

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