Private Vows

Exclusive Bonus Chapter
Three’s a Crowd-Pleaser by Aurora North

This bonus chapter takes place six months after the epilogue. It contains explicit sexual content between three women that was too hot for retailers. The commitment ceremony, the vows, and everything that comes after.

Private Vows

The ceremony was scheduled for four o’clock.

This was Ione’s doing. She had resisted the urge to produce a timeline — genuinely resisted, not simply delegated the impulse — but she had, after considerable internal negotiation, suggested that a start time might be useful.

“Four o’clock,” she’d said. “The light in the garden is best at four.”

“She’s scheduling our commitment ceremony,” Kit had told Maeve.

“She scheduled her own proposal,” Maeve had replied. “This is growth.”

It was growth. Ione acknowledged this privately while standing in the bathroom of their coach house at half three, applying lipstick in the mirror and trying to control the trembling in her hands.

Not anxiety. Something she had no contingency plan for because she had never felt it before. Joy. Uncomplicated, terrifying, full-body joy.

She wore ivory. Not a suit — a dress. Silk, floor-length, with a neckline that showed her collarbones. Gold earrings. Slim heels. Her dark bob sharp and precise.

She picked up the ring box from the dresser. Three linked rings on dark velvet. Gold, silver, black.

Kit was in the garden, setting up the tripod. She wore her black tuxedo jacket over nothing — just the clean freckled line of her sternum and the camera-aperture tattoo at her wrist. A single white peony tucked behind her ear because Maeve had put it there that morning.

She looked up when Ione appeared. “Oh. Oh, Ione.”

“Too much?”

“Not enough. Never enough. Come here.”

Maeve emerged from the greenhouse extension in the deep-green gown. Silver-blond hair completely loose. Dark-berry lipstick. Pearl drop earrings. Bare hands. No gloves. She carried three peonies — white, blush, and deep rose — tied with a single ribbon.

She looked at Ione in ivory and Kit in black and her blue eyes filled and she did not wipe the tears because she was no longer a woman who hid what she felt from the people she loved.

There was no aisle. There was no officiant. There were no guests. There was only this: three women looking at each other with the full, terrifying, unmanaged weight of everything they had built.

Ione opened the ring box. “I wrote vows. And then I tore them up. Because they sounded like a wedding planner writing wedding vows, and you deserve better than a performance.”

“I choose you. Both of you. Not because I’ve scheduled it. Because when I stand in this garden and look at both of you, I feel something I spent my entire life believing was too dangerous to want. I want the mess and the mornings and the arguments about wine. All of it. Permanently. Without a contingency plan.”

She placed the gold ring on Kit’s finger, then on Maeve’s. The linked rings interlocked — gold connecting to silver connecting to black.

Kit spoke next. She didn’t try not to cry. “I spent my whole life moving. I was always the one who left, because leaving was easier than staying and finding out I wasn’t wanted. And then I walked into a greenhouse and a woman in leather gloves told me to stop joking, and another woman in a champagne suit made me feel like my freedom wasn’t a flaw, and I stopped wanting to leave. Because I found something worth coming home to.”

Maeve spoke last. Quietly, because Maeve said important things quietly. “I built a life where no one could surprise me. And then two women surprised me so thoroughly that I had to rebuild everything from the foundations up. The structure I built this time is stronger. Because it was built by three sets of hands.”

Three hands. Three rings. Three women standing in a garden with peonies at their feet.

“Now what?” Kit asked.

“Now,” Maeve said, her voice low and warm, “we go inside.”

The bedroom was full of flowers. Peonies on every surface, jasmine trailing from the bedframe. Late light through the windows. The enormous bed with its white linen.

Ione reached for Maeve first. Drew the green gown from her shoulders. The silk pooled at her feet and Maeve stood in black lingerie and bare hands and the silver ring on her finger.

Kit reached for Ione. Drew the ivory dress down. Ione in cream lace beneath — tonight they weren’t armour. They were a gift to be unwrapped.

Maeve reached for Kit. Unbuttoned the tuxedo jacket. Kit wore nothing beneath — just freckled skin and lean muscle and the three-flower tattoo on her forearm: a peony, a ranunculus, and a wildflower. One bloom for each woman. Permanent.

Three women in a bedroom of flowers, stripped to skin and lingerie and the rings on their fingers that caught the fading light.

They came together on the bed with the unhurried confidence of three women who knew each other’s bodies completely and still wanted to learn more.

Maeve lay against the headboard. Ione knelt between her thighs, mouth tracing down her body — throat, breasts, the soft curve of her stomach, the silver stretch marks she’d kissed a hundred times. Kit knelt behind Ione, one hand in her dark hair, the other reaching forward to cup Maeve’s breast, and the circuit was familiar now — three bodies conducting pleasure in every direction.

Ione went down on Maeve with the slow, devoted attention she applied to everything she cared about, and Kit whispered in her ear — narrating what she saw, the photographer’s voice describing the image in light and shadow and the way Maeve’s silver hair spread across the pillows.

Maeve came with both their names tangled together — a single word made of two women, spoken in the particular broken voice of a woman who trusted the people hearing it to hold the sound with care.

They rotated. Kit on her back. Maeve between her legs with her mouth — slow, patient. Ione beside Kit, kissing her through it, one hand in auburn curls, the other on Maeve’s bare shoulder. Kit came loud and laughing, because Kit’s orgasms had always contained joy.

They rotated again. Ione on her back. Kit’s mouth on her breast. Maeve’s fingers inside her — slow, curling, precise. Ione came quietly. Not from control — from fullness. From the overwhelming completeness of being loved by two women simultaneously.

They used the strap-on from the bedside drawer. Rotated who wore it and who received and who watched, and the watching was as intimate as the touching because they had learned that desire was not diminished by sharing. It was amplified. Every direction the circuit ran, the current grew stronger.

Later — much later, after the flowers had been crushed and the linen wrecked — Kit lay in the middle and looked at the ceiling.

“Seventeen,” she said.

“Smiles. You hit seventeen during the vows and I lost count after that.”

“Every day starts at zero. That’s the game.”

Three rings glinted in the last of the light — gold, silver, black, linked together on three hands tangled across Kit’s stomach.

“Goodnight,” Kit said.

“Good morning,” Maeve corrected.

“Same thing,” Ione murmured. “When you’re home.”

They were home.

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With love,
Aurora North