The Attic, After Midnight

A Bonus Scene from The U-Haul Ultimatum
by Blair Lennox

⚠️ This scene takes place the night after the proposal in Chapter 20. Contains explicit sexual content. Spoilers for the full novel.

I found her in the attic at midnight, and she was wearing the rings.

Both of them. The rose-gold peridot from Tarrytown and the platinum band from the porch, nested together on her left hand, catching the moonlight through the dormer window as she ran her fingertip along the spines of my bookshelf like she was reading them by touch.

She was in my room. Not our room — mine. The attic suite she’d helped me paint and furnish and fill with the specific objects of a life I’d finally decided to keep. She was barefoot on my Turkish rug in a white cotton sleep shirt that hit her mid-thigh, and her close-cropped coils were mussed from the pillow she’d left, and she was standing in my room in the middle of the night looking at my books like she was trying to understand me through the stories I’d chosen to shelve.

“Can’t sleep?” I asked from the doorway.

She turned. The moonlight did something obscene to her face — all cheekbones and dark eyes and the particular expression she wore when she’d been thinking too hard and needed someone to stop her.

“I keep looking at the ring,” she said. “I keep looking at it and thinking about how you held it in your fist for two weeks. In a closed fist. Like you were afraid to open your hand.”

“I was afraid.”

“And now?”

I crossed the room. Took her left hand. Lifted it to my mouth and kissed the rings — both of them, the warm rose gold and the cool platinum — and felt her pulse kick beneath my lips.

“Now my hands are open,” I said.

She exhaled. The sound traveled through her body and into mine through our joined hands, and something shifted in the room — the air thickening, the moonlight becoming complicit, the distance between us collapsing from inches to intention.

“This is your room,” she said. “Your space. I should have knocked.”

“You never have to knock.”

“I want to. I want to always ask before I enter the rooms you’ve built for yourself.” Her free hand came to my waist. Her thumb traced the strip of bare skin between my sleep shorts and my tank top, and the touch was so light it shouldn’t have registered and instead it registered everywhere. “But I’m asking now. Can I be in here tonight?”

“You can be anywhere I am. Always.”

She kissed me. Not the gentle, tentative kiss of the reconciliation — that kiss had been careful, searching, two women checking whether the ground beneath them would hold. This kiss was confident. She cradled my face in both hands and tilted my mouth to hers and kissed me with the focused, unhurried authority of a woman who had finally stopped being afraid of wanting things she couldn’t guarantee.

I kissed her back and tasted toothpaste and Miri and the faint salt of tears she’d cried earlier on the porch when I’d said yes, and I wanted her with a specificity that made my knees unreliable.

“The rug,” I said against her mouth.

“What about it?”

“It’s new. Imported. I spent four months on a waiting list for it.”

“And?”

“And I want you to ruin it with me.”

Her laugh was low and surprised and landed somewhere in the center of my chest like a match striking. She pulled my tank top over my head and her mouth found my collarbone and I was already wet — had been since I’d seen her standing at my bookshelf in a shirt that showed her legs, because Miri Sloane’s legs were a category of natural wonder that deserved federal protection.

I pulled her shirt over her head. She was naked underneath — no bra, no underwear, just Miri — and the sight of her body in moonlight, all lean elegance and dark skin and the particular vulnerability of a woman who had come to my room without armor, made my breath stop and my hands shake.

“You came upstairs naked under a T-shirt,” I said.

“I came upstairs hoping you’d take it off.”

“Planning.”

“Reaching.”

I cupped her breasts. She was smaller than me — lean where I was soft, angular where I curved — and the contrast between our bodies had been one of my favorite discoveries of the past two months. Her nipples hardened under my thumbs, dark and tight, and the sound she made when I rolled them — a sharp, bitten-off gasp that she still tried to swallow, even now — made me want to spend the rest of my life pulling sounds out of her.

“Don’t do that,” I said.

“Do what?”

“Swallow it. I’ve spent two months teaching you to let me hear you and you’re still trying to edit your sounds in post-production.” I pinched gently. She jerked. “Let me hear you, Miri.”

I kissed her throat. The hollow between her collarbones. The flat plane of her sternum. I took her nipple in my mouth and sucked, and she moaned — full, open, the kind of sound she’d only started making after the rupture, after she’d broken us and rebuilt herself and learned that vulnerability was not a weakness to be managed but a gift to be given.

I pulled her down to the rug. The kilim was thick and soft beneath my back, and Miri was above me, and the moonlight through the dormer window painted us in silver and shadow.

“I want to try something,” she said. Her weight settled between my thighs, her hips pressing mine into the rug.

“Tell me.”

“I want to make you come without using my hands.”

The words went straight through me — directly to the low, clenching heat between my legs.

“Just your mouth?”

“Just my mouth. And my voice.” She kissed my sternum. Between my breasts. The underside of one breast, then the other, tracing the curve with her tongue. “I want to talk you through it. I want you to hear me while I taste you.”

“That is a yes that could have been heard from the first floor.”

She began. Slow. So slow it bordered on cruelty. She kissed down my body with the methodical patience of a woman who had spent her career reviewing documents line by line and was now applying that same precision to my body. Every rib. Every freckle. The soft curve of my stomach, where she lingered — pressing her mouth flat, breathing warm.

“I used to watch you at Elodie’s events,” she said against my hip. “You’d wear these sundresses with thin straps, and your tattoo would be visible, and I’d spend the entire evening trying not to stare at the wisteria on your shoulder.” Her mouth traced the crease where my hip met my thigh. “I failed. Every time.”

“Miri. Please.”

“I’m savoring. You spent your whole life in a rush, Pippa. Let me be slow with you.”

She put her mouth on me.

The first stroke was devastating. Her tongue flat and broad, dragging through the full length of me, tasting everything, and the sound she made — a low, humming groan of satisfaction that vibrated against my most sensitive skin — was so obscene I nearly came from the frequency alone.

“God,” she said. “You’re soaking.”

“I’ve been soaking since you walked into my room in a T-shirt and no underwear. I’m a simple woman, Miri. Visual stimuli.”

“Shut up and let me eat you.”

“That’s the hottest thing you’ve ever — ah —”

She shut me up with her tongue. Circling my clit — tight, focused circles with the pointed tip, varying the pressure in patterns I couldn’t predict. Miri the planner, the strategist — improvising. Reading me in real time.

“That’s it,” she murmured against me, and the vibration made me whimper. “Don’t hold back. I want to hear every sound you make in this room.”

She held the rhythm with disciplined consistency, and the pressure built in my core like water behind a dam — rising, the tension unbearable, my thighs beginning to shake against her ears.

“You taste like you’ve been thinking about this,” she said. “How long?”

“Since the porch. Since you got on your knees and opened a ring box.”

“So you were wet while I proposed.”

“I was wet before you proposed. The suit did it.”

She laughed against my cunt and the vibration sent a bolt of electricity through my core and I said something that wasn’t English and might not have been language.

Her tongue found a rhythm — steady, relentless, circling and flicking and pressing in patterns she’d learned over weeks of studying my body. She knew exactly where I needed pressure and where I needed lightness and where I needed the specific thing she did with the flat of her tongue that made my spine arch off the rug.

“I love this,” she said between strokes. “I love the way your thighs shake when I do this—” She pressed her tongue hard against my clit and I cried out. “—and I love that you’re letting me do this in your room, in your space, on the rug you waited four months for.”

“Miri — I’m going to —”

“I know. I can feel you tighten right before — there.” She sealed her mouth around my clit and sucked, steady and firm, and my hands flew to her head and my hips bucked —

“Come for me,” she said. “In your room. In your home. Come for me and know that I’m staying.”

I came so hard I screamed. My back arched off the kilim and my thighs clamped around her head and the orgasm ripped through me in waves — cresting, breaking, cresting again as she kept her mouth on me and rode every contraction. My fingers were in her hair and my eyes were shut and the sounds I made filled the attic like a confession, and she held me until the last tremor subsided and I lay gasping on the rug in the moonlight.

She kissed her way up my body. I tasted myself on her lips and pulled her against me.

“That was just your mouth,” I said. My voice was wrecked.

“Just my mouth.”

“You’re a prodigy.”

“I’m a fast learner with excellent source material.”

“Your turn,” I said.

“Pippa, you don’t have to —”

“My room. My rules.” I rolled us. Pinned her beneath me on the rug and watched her eyes go dark and wide. Her wrists were above her head — not restrained, just placed there by the momentum — and she left them. Chose to leave them.

“But here’s the thing about being loved by Pippa Quill.” I kissed her jaw. Her throat. The place beneath her ear that made her breath stop. “I don’t need you to earn it either.”