First Snow

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Two Rooms, One Bad Idea
by Riley Kendra

Back on a Greek island, at three in the morning, Paige let herself picture one thing: the first real snow, a kitchen in Minneapolis, and Nina sitting on the counter in a grey sweater and Paige’s wool socks with a mug of too-sweet coffee. She told Nina about it once, in Copenhagen, in bed. She had no idea Nina was taking notes.

First Snow

PAIGE

It started snowing at eleven-forty, which Nina would later insist was a sign, and which Paige would point out was just a cold front coming down from Manitoba.

They were in Nina’s kitchen in Longfellow. It was the twenty-second of December. Paige had been back on American soil for thirty-one hours, and for twenty-nine of them she had been either asleep, in Nina’s bed, or at Nina’s mother’s house in Richfield eating a tamale the size of her forearm while Mrs. Rios asked her, in a perfectly pleasant voice, what exactly a structural packaging designer did, and whether it was a real job, and whether Copenhagen had good hospitals, in case.

“In case of what?” Paige had asked.

“In case,” Mrs. Rios had said, and refilled her plate.

Now it was nearly midnight, and they’d driven home with a cooler full of leftovers and a poinsettia Paige had been instructed not to kill, and Nina had turned on the oven light and only the oven light, and put a pan of milk on the stove.

Paige sat at the little round kitchen table, in the chair facing the window, and watched the first flakes come down past the streetlight in the alley. Big ones. Soft. The slow, heavy, deliberate kind that came down at night and made the whole city go quiet, so that by morning the alley would be smooth and white and unbroken, and nobody would be able to find their car.

She had pictured this. She’d pictured it on a Greek island at three in the morning with the jasmine coming through the balcony doors and a woman asleep beside her who was supposed to be a vacation. November, she’d thought. The first real snow. She’d been a month off, and in the wrong apartment, and she’d had no idea, then, that she’d be watching it with jet lag in her bones and a return ticket in her email.

She didn’t care. It was close enough to make her throat hurt.

“Stop looking at the snow like that,” Nina said, without turning around from the stove.

“Like what?”

“Like it’s a building you designed.”

“I didn’t design it.”

“You’re taking credit for it with your face.” Nina tipped the milk into two mugs, stirred in the sugar, far too much of it, and turned. “Here. Disgusting. As requested.”

She was wearing a thick grey sweater. It was Paige’s. She’d taken it out of Paige’s suitcase the first night and hadn’t given it back, and it came down past her hips and the cuffs came down past her fingers, and under it she had on a pair of black leggings and a pair of Paige’s grey wool socks, the good ones, the ones Paige had bought in a shop in Nørrebro in October because the wind off the harbor had gone straight through her jeans.

Paige took the mug. She didn’t drink it. She looked at Nina.

Nina looked back at her over her own mug, and then, very slowly, the way she did everything now that she’d figured out she was allowed to take her time, she put one hand flat on the counter behind her and boosted herself up onto it.

Onto the counter. Next to the coffee maker. Next to the octopus, which sat in its place of honor by the toaster, NERIA ♥ ME, tangerine arms curled in permanent horror, back from Copenhagen in Paige’s carry-on and returned to its spot by the toaster the morning she landed, with ceremony.

Nina crossed her ankles. The wool socks dangled. She tapped one heel, gently, against the cabinet door.

Paige forgot she was holding anything.

“You’re doing it on purpose,” she said.

“Doing what?”

“Sitting on the counter.”

“I always sit on the counter.” Nina took a sip of her coffee. “I’ve never once in my life respected a kitchen. Somebody told me that, once. In a very romantic voice. I think it was on a balcony.”

“You weren’t there.”

“You told me about it in Copenhagen, Paige. In bed. At four in the morning. You told me the whole thing. The snow, the radiator, the sweater, the socks.” Nina’s mouth curved over the rim of the mug. “You described the socks in detail.”

Paige had. She remembered doing it. She’d been lying on her back under the slanted ceiling with Nina’s head on her chest and the harbor going pink outside, and she’d said, without planning to, Can I tell you something embarrassing, and Nina had said always, and Paige had told her about three in the morning on a Greek island and a picture of a woman on a kitchen counter in November that had felt so possible it scared her.

She hadn’t known Nina was taking notes.

“So this is—” Paige said.

“This is you getting what you asked for.” Nina set her mug down on the counter beside her hip. “Except you didn’t ask. You just pictured it. So I’m doing it for you, and then you’re going to ask me for the rest, out loud, the way you make me do.” She tilted her head. “Tell me a story about Gerald, I think, is the next part.”

“You tell the Gerald stories.”

“I know. I’m just checking you remember the sequence.”

Paige stood up.

She put her mug on the table. She crossed the kitchen in three steps, and Nina watched her come, and didn’t move, and Paige stopped in front of her, between her knees, the way she’d stood between them on a parapet on the first night she ever kissed her. The counter put Nina exactly at the height of her mouth.

“Hi,” Nina said softly.

“Hi.”

“Is this what you pictured?”

Paige put both hands on Nina’s thighs. Wool and stretch cotton, and under it, warm, the strong muscle she’d learned on a moped and on her shoulders in a pool and in every bed between Neria and Nordhavn.

“The radiator’s wrong,” she said. “Mine clanks.”

“I’ll have my landlord install a clank.”

“And it was my kitchen.”

“Your kitchen has a grad student and eleven ferns in it.”

“And you were telling a story.”

“I’ll tell you one.” Nina leaned in until her lips brushed the corner of Paige’s mouth. “Once upon a time there was a woman who flew four thousand miles home for Christmas and let my mother feed her three plates of tamales and didn’t once tell her she was full. And then she sat in my kitchen and looked at the snow like she was going to cry. And I’d been thinking about her mouth since the airport.”

“That’s not a Gerald story.”

“Gerald’s taking the holidays off,” Nina said, and kissed her.

It was slow, at first. It was always slow at first now, when they’d been apart. That had surprised Paige, a little. In Copenhagen, in September, she’d thought it would be like the thunderstorm, like a door slamming open, the two of them going at each other in the arrivals hall at Kastrup. It hadn’t been. It had been this. Mouths learning each other again. Hands checking that everything was where it had been left.

Nina’s hands went into her hair, and found the knot, and took it down. She made a pleased sound when it fell.

Paige pushed the grey sweater up. She did it slowly, palms flat on Nina’s stomach, then her ribs, and Nina lifted her arms like a child getting ready for a bath and let Paige take it off over her head. There was nothing under it. Of course there was nothing under it. Nina’s skin was gold in the oven light and pebbled from the cold that came off the window, and her nipples were tight and dark, and Paige looked at her sitting there on her own kitchen counter, bare to the waist, in leggings and borrowed socks, with the snow coming down past the window behind her, and felt the picture she’d carried around since June lay itself down over the real thing and fit.

Exactly. Every edge.

“Oh,” Paige said, and it came out of her like something giving way.

“Yeah?” Nina’s voice had gone soft.

“Yeah.”

She bent her head and put her mouth on Nina’s breast.

Nina’s hand came down on the back of her neck and held her there. Paige took her time. She circled the nipple with her tongue until it drew even tighter, then sucked, slow and steady, and felt Nina’s breath shudder and her thighs press in against Paige’s hips. She moved to the other one. She let her teeth graze. Nina’s heel knocked once against the cabinet door, hard, and the octopus rattled on the counter.

“Careful,” Paige murmured against her skin. “The trophy.”

“The trophy’s seen worse.”

“The trophy’s seen everything.”

Nina laughed, low and breathless, and then stopped laughing, because Paige had hooked her fingers in the waistband of the leggings.

“Lift,” Paige said.

Nina braced her hands on the counter and lifted her hips, and Paige drew the leggings down, and the underwear with them, over the curve of her ass and down her thighs and off over the wool socks, which she left on, because the socks were the point. Then she stepped back.

Just a step. Just to look.

Nina sat naked on her kitchen counter in nothing but Paige’s grey wool socks with her palms flat on the laminate either side of her hips and her knees apart and her chest rising and falling in the oven light, and she held Paige’s eyes, and she didn’t cover herself, and she didn’t make a joke. She’d stopped doing that. Somewhere between Kin Thai and Kastrup, she’d just stopped.

“Paige,” she said. “You’re doing the thing.”

“What thing?”

“The thing where you look at me until I ask.”

“Is it working?”

“You know it’s working.” Nina’s thighs had started, very slightly, to tremble. “You can see it’s working. I’m sitting on my counter. In the snow.”

“You’re inside.”

“Spiritually I’m in the snow.” Nina swallowed. Her voice dropped. “Put your mouth on me. Please. I’ve wanted it since the tamales.”

“That’s a terrible sentence.”

“I know. I mean it anyway. Please.“

Paige went down on her knees on Nina’s kitchen floor.

The linoleum was cold through her jeans. She didn’t care about that either. She hooked one of Nina’s ankles over her shoulder, wool sock and all, and spread her open with her thumbs, and looked, for a second, just a second, at how wet she already was, slick and swollen and shining in the dim gold light. Then she licked her. One long, flat, deliberate stroke, the whole length of her, and Nina’s head fell back against the cabinet above the counter with a thump, and she said “Oh,” at the ceiling, high and surprised, as if she’d forgotten. As if it had been longer than twelve weeks.

It had been twelve weeks. Paige had counted.

She went slowly. She found the rhythm Nina liked, the one she’d learned on a high white bed with an iron headboard, and she kept it, steady and patient, tongue flat, then lips, then a soft suck at her clit that made Nina’s thighs clamp around her head. She slid one finger in, then two, and curled them, and felt Nina clench down around her so hard and so fast that she knew this one wasn’t going to take long.

“Don’t—” Nina gasped. “Don’t stop, don’t stop, I’m—Paige—”

Paige didn’t stop.

Nina came with one hand fisted in Paige’s hair and the other knocking a dish towel off the oven bar, her sock heel drumming against Paige’s back, her cry so loud it bounced off the cabinets, because there was nobody downstairs and nobody’s aunt and nobody to be quiet for, and she’d decided, sometime in the last six months, that she was done being quiet. Paige held her through it. She kept her mouth on her, soft now, gentle, until Nina pushed weakly at her forehead and said, “Okay, okay, okay,” and Paige sat back on her heels on the cold floor and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and looked up.

Nina was slumped back against the upper cabinet, flushed from her hairline to her breasts, breathing like she’d run up the goat path.

“That,” Nina said, “was the warm-up.”

Paige laughed so hard she had to put her forehead down on Nina’s knee.

The coffee had gone cold. Neither of them cared.

Nina slid down off the counter, unsteady, and Paige caught her by the hips, and Nina leaned into her and kissed her, slow and filthy, tasting herself, and then put both hands flat on Paige’s chest and walked her backward. Across the kitchen. Into the narrow hallway. Past the bathroom with its slow faucet and the hall closet that wouldn’t shut, toward the bedroom with the terrible mattress from 2014.

At the bedroom door, Nina stopped.

“I want to ask for something,” she said.

“Anything.”

“Don’t say anything. You don’t know what it is.”

“I know you,” Paige said.

Nina looked at her in the dark hallway. Her eyes were bright. Something in her face had gone careful in a way that it almost never was anymore, and Paige saw her decide to say it anyway.

“I want to wear it,” Nina said. “The home version. I want to fuck you.”

The hallway went very quiet.

Paige felt it go through her. All of it. Down her spine and low in her belly and out to her fingertips, a hot, slow, liquid drop like missing a stair in the dark.

She’d packed it. Of course she’d packed it. It had gone into the suitcase in Copenhagen next to the green dress, folded in tissue, because she’d known she’d be home for twelve nights and she’d known whose bed she’d be in. But she’d always been the one wearing it. On a stormy night in Northeast, and in September under a slanted ceiling in Nordhavn. She’d never once, with anyone, been on the other side of it.

She’d never asked.

“Is that okay?” Nina said. “You can say no. I mean it. You can call it.”

“No,” Paige said. “I mean—yes. I mean I’m not calling it.” She heard how her voice sounded and didn’t try to fix it. “I’ve never—with anyone. Nobody’s ever—”

“Asked?”

“Offered.”

“I’m not offering,” Nina said softly. “I’m asking. There’s a difference. You taught me that.” She took Paige’s hand. “So now you ask me back. Out loud. If you want it.”

Paige stood in the hallway of an apartment in Longfellow with the snow coming down outside and the oven light still on in the kitchen behind them, and felt her own heart going in her throat, and understood, all at once, what she’d been doing to Nina for six months. How hard it was. How much it cost, to stand there and say the thing you wanted to someone who could say no.

How good it felt, once you had.

“Nina,” she said. “Will you please fuck me.”

Nina’s whole face opened.

“Since you asked so nicely,” she said.

Paige lay on her back on the terrible mattress, naked, with the lamp on low and the snow ticking very softly against the window, and watched Nina put it on.

It took her a minute. The buckles were Paige’s buckles, set for Paige’s hips, and Nina had to let them out, frowning in concentration, tongue caught between her teeth, the way she’d frowned at a sheet of phyllo dough in Despina’s kitchen. She got one strap wrong and swore at it. She got it right. She settled the harness and adjusted the base and stood there at the foot of the bed in nothing but black leather and Paige’s grey wool socks, which she had not taken off and had no intention of taking off, with the dark, smooth length of the dildo jutting from her hips, and looked down at herself.

Then she looked at Paige.

“Okay,” Nina said. “I feel incredibly powerful and also extremely stupid.”

“You don’t look stupid.”

“How do I look?”

Paige looked at her. At the soft curve of her stomach above the black leather. At her breasts, her shoulders, her mess of dark hair. At the dildo, and the steady way Nina’s hand had come to rest on it, and the look in her eyes, which was nervous, and dark, and hungrier than Paige had ever seen it.

“Like I’m in trouble,” Paige said.

Nina smiled. Slow. All of it. “Good.”

She climbed onto the bed. She did it carefully, a little awkwardly, the length of the toy bumping Paige’s thigh, and they both laughed, and then Nina was kneeling between Paige’s legs and running her palms up the insides of Paige’s thighs, slow, all the way up, and the laughing stopped.

“Tell me what you want,” Nina said. “Every step. Out loud.”

Paige closed her eyes.

“Open them,” Nina said. “You don’t get to close them. I never got to close them.”

Paige opened them.

“Touch me first,” she said. Her voice was rough already. “With your fingers. I want—I need you to get me ready. I haven’t—it’s been—” She stopped. Made herself go on. “Go slow.”

“I can do slow.” Nina reached over to the nightstand for the bottle, slicked her fingers, and slid one hand down between Paige’s thighs. “I learned from a sadist.”

She touched her the way Paige had touched her in the cove. That was the thing Paige would remember afterward, lying awake. Nina had been paying attention. Every slow, patient, maddening thing Paige had ever done to her, Nina gave back now, measured out exactly, one finger stroking up through her, circling her clit without touching it, coming back down. Paige was soaked. She’d been wet since the counter, since the socks, since I want to fuck you in the hallway. Nina’s finger slid into her easily and Paige’s breath went ragged, and Nina added a second one, and curled them, slow, and pressed.

“There?” Nina whispered.

“There.”

“Like that?”

“Yes. God. Yes.”

“You’re so wet.” Nina’s voice had gone low and wondering. “Paige. Is that for me? Is that from the hallway?”

“You know it is.”

“Say it.”

“It’s for you. It’s from the hallway.” Paige’s hips lifted off the bed into her hand. “It’s from the airport. Nina. Please.”

“Please what?”

Paige stared up at her. At the woman who had once stood on the third of four stone steps for three full minutes and not been able to knock. At the woman kneeling between her legs right now with a strap-on and a small, wicked, perfectly composed smile, waiting.

“Please fuck me,” Paige said. “Now. I’m asking.”

Nina drew her fingers out. She slicked the dildo, slowly, one long stroke of her fist, watching Paige watch her do it. Then she shifted forward on her knees, and took herself in hand, and set the blunt head of it against Paige’s entrance, and stopped there.

“Look at me,” Nina said.

Paige was already looking.

Nina pushed in.

It was slow. It was so slow Paige thought she might come apart from the slowness alone. An inch. Nina’s lip caught in her teeth. Another inch, and Paige’s back came off the mattress and a sound came up out of her that she had never once made in her life, and Nina stopped dead and held still, held perfectly still, the way Paige had held still for her on a stormy night in Northeast.

“Okay?” Nina whispered.

“Yes. Don’t stop. Don’t—” Paige grabbed her by the hips. “More.”

“Ask me nicely.”

“Nina—”

“You made me ask for a second one,” Nina said, “on a vacation,” and then she was laughing, and Paige was laughing, helplessly, with Nina half inside her, and then Nina leaned down and kissed her through it and sank all the way in, and the laughing broke off into something else entirely.

Full. That was the first thing. So full that Paige couldn’t think. The base of the harness pressed flush against her and Nina’s weight settled over her, Nina braced on her forearms on either side of Paige’s head the way Paige had always braced over her, their faces inches apart, and Paige felt the whole long length of her, and Nina’s hips flush with hers, and Nina’s breath on her mouth, and she thought, very clearly, Oh. That’s why she cries.

“Hi,” Nina said.

“Hi,” Paige said. It came out wrecked.

“I’m going to move now.”

“Please.”

Nina moved.

She was clumsy at first. She’d never done this either, not from this side, and the first few strokes were uneven, too shallow, then too sudden, and she swore under her breath and laughed and adjusted. And then she found it. Paige felt the exact moment she found it, the angle, the rhythm, because Nina’s eyes went wide and her mouth fell open and she said, “Oh, okay, there it is,” and Paige’s whole body arched up off the 2014 mattress, and then Nina was fucking her.

Long, slow, deep strokes. Pulling almost all the way out and sinking back in. The base of the harness grinding against her own clit, Paige could tell, because Nina’s breath was going faster and her face was flushed and every time their hips met she made a small, punched-out sound in the back of her throat. Paige wrapped her legs around Nina’s waist and held on. The wool socks scratched against her calves. She didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything except the weight of Nina over her and the slow, relentless drag of her inside and Nina’s face, inches away, watching her. Watching every single thing.

“Look at you,” Nina breathed. “Look at you. You’re shaking.”

“I know.”

“You’re so beautiful like this. You’re so—Paige, you should see your face. Your face is so loud.”

Paige laughed, and it broke on the way out, and her eyes were wet, and she didn’t know when that had happened.

“Faster,” she said. “Please. Harder. I want—”

“Say it.”

“I want you to make me come like this. With you inside me. I’ve never—please. Nina. Please.“

Nina reached between them. She put her thumb on Paige’s clit, slick and steady, the way Paige had done it to her in the storm. And she started to move faster.

The bed frame hit the wall. Once. Twice. Rhythmic, steady, unashamed, the old mattress creaking under them, the snow ticking at the glass, the lamp throwing their shadows huge and tangled across the ceiling. Nina fucked her hard and deep and certain, her thumb circling, her face set in fierce concentration, and Paige held onto her shoulders and her hips and anything she could reach and felt it build in her, not like a wave, not like the sea, but like a structure taking load. Every stroke another pound. Every circle of Nina’s thumb another. Holding. Holding. Holding.

“I’m close,” she gasped. “Nina. I’m—”

“I know. I’ve got you.” Nina bent her head and put her mouth right against Paige’s ear. “I’ve got you. Let go.”

Paige let go.

It didn’t come apart gradually. It went all at once, every wall buckling in the same instant, a sound like nothing she’d ever made tearing out of her and filling the little bedroom, her whole body bowing up under Nina’s weight and clenching around the length inside her so hard she felt it in her teeth. Nina didn’t stop. She kept moving through it, slower now, deep, steady, her thumb gentling, her voice in Paige’s ear the whole time, that’s it, that’s it, I’ve got you, look at you, I’ve got you, while Paige shook and sobbed and clung to her and came, and came, and came.

When it finally let go of her, she was crying.

Not much. Not badly. Just tears, running out of the corners of her eyes and back into her hair, the way Nina’s had on a bed in a courtyard room on an island a whole half a year ago. Nina felt it. She stopped moving, and stayed inside her, and lifted her head, and looked down.

She didn’t ask what was wrong. She didn’t say don’t cry. She just wiped the tears off Paige’s temples with her thumbs, one side and then the other, very gently, and kissed her forehead, and stayed.

“Okay?” Nina whispered.

“I didn’t know,” Paige said. Her voice was gone. “I didn’t know it was like that. From here.”

“Like what?”

Paige looked up at her. At the dark, sleepy, astonished tenderness in Nina’s face.

“Like being held up,” she said.

Nina’s eyes filled.

“Yeah,” she said softly. “That’s what it’s like. That’s what you do. Every time.”

Later, a long time later, after Nina had eased out of her and unbuckled the harness with shaking fingers and dropped it over the side of the bed, after she’d come again herself, astride Paige’s thigh, grinding down slow and messy with Paige’s hands on her ass and her forehead on Paige’s shoulder and the snow coming down harder now outside, they lay in the dark under the heavy quilt and didn’t talk for a while.

The lamp was off. The streetlight came through the curtains, blue-white, and lay across the bed. Through the window the alley was already gone, smooth and white and unbroken, every car a soft rounded shape. The radiator under the sill, which Nina’s landlord swore up and down did not clank, clanked.

They both heard it.

“Oh my God,” Nina said into Paige’s neck.

“It clanked.”

“It’s never done that. Not once. In four years.”

“It clanked, Nina.”

“I didn’t install that.” Nina lifted her head. Her face in the blue light was flushed and swollen-mouthed and completely delighted. “That wasn’t me. I swear to God. That was the universe.”

“That was a cold front from Manitoba.”

“Paige.”

“A cold front,” Paige said, and Nina kissed her to make her stop, and she let her.

Afterward, Nina put her head back down on Paige’s chest and found her hand under the quilt and laced their fingers together.

“Ten more nights,” Nina said.

“Ten.”

“And then Copenhagen. And then the last six weeks. And then you’re home.”

“And then I’m home.” Paige turned her head and pressed her mouth to Nina’s hair. Coconut. The faint, warm, spicy smell of her skin. “To my own apartment. With my grad student’s ferns.”

“Two rooms,” Nina said sleepily. “Rule nine.”

“I know.”

“It’s binding.”

“I know it’s binding.”

“Under the authority of a ballpoint pen on a stolen legal pad.” Nina yawned against her collarbone. “Basically notarized.”

Paige smiled at the ceiling.

Outside the snow kept falling, slow and heavy and certain, burying the alley, burying the city, making everything quiet. In the kitchen, the oven light was still on. Two mugs of too-sweet coffee sat cold, one on the table, one on the counter beside a ceramic octopus that had seen absolutely everything and would never say a word.

“Nina,” Paige said.

“Mm.”

“In the morning. I want coffee. Too sweet. With the milk heated in a pan. And I want you to bring it to me. In bed.” She closed her eyes. “And I want to watch you drink yours on the counter. In my socks.”

There was a pause. Then Nina laughed, very softly, the whole small sleepy weight of her shaking against Paige’s ribs.

“You asked,” she said.

“I asked.”

“Since you asked so nicely,” said Nina, and was asleep before Paige could answer.

Haven’t read the book yet? Start with the hall bathroom.

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