Chapter 6: Two Secrets In The Dark
The house had gone quiet in the way it only did after dinner, when the dishes were abandoned in the sink and the laughter had thinned to closed doors. Jordan climbed the stairs past Vanessa's light, past the nursery room with its paint-fume haze of yellow, and let himself into the master bedroom the way he had every night for three weeks. The lavender hit him first. Then the silk, cool under his knees as he sat on the edge of the wide bed and pulled his shirt over his head.
He was unlacing his jeans when the door opened without a knock.
Celeste stepped in and shut it behind her with her hip, and in the moonlight from the curtains she was already reaching for the hem of her own shirt. "I checked the hall," she said. "Maren's painting. Vanessa's on the phone. Nobody saw me."
"Celeste." He stayed kneeling on the bed, half-naked, the silver chain catching the light. "You can't be in here. She made the rule."
"I know what she made." She pulled the shirt off. Her breasts came heavy and full into the moonlight, aching from the day, milk beading dark at both tips. "I told her at dinner I'm staying past the birth. She looked at me the way she looks at the dinner schedule. So I'm telling her now, in person, in her own bed." She sat down on the mattress beside him, and the silk shifted, and her shoulder pressed against his.
"You told her?"
"I told her. She said, and I quote, 'We'll discuss it in the morning.'" Celeste's mouth curved. "Katherine never discusses anything in the morning. That means she's deciding whether to be angry or impressed. I'd rather push before she picks."
The door opened again. This time there was a knock, one soft knock that arrived a half-second before the handle turned, because Katherine knocked for no one and only did it now as punctuation.
She stood in the doorway in a long grey sleep robe, her bun still pinned, her dark mahogany skin washed silver by the moon. She looked at the two of them sitting on her bed, Celeste topless, Jordan shirtless, one of Celeste's hands resting openly on his thigh.
"Did I say you could bring a guest?" Katherine said.
"I invited myself," Celeste said. "You'd have heard about it eventually. I saved you the announcement."
Katherine came into the room and closed the door, and the lock was a small deliberate sound. She unpinned her bun with two movements and let her hair down, silver streaks falling loose past her shoulders, and she did not look at Celeste while she did it, which Jordan knew was how she weighed someone.
"You're staying," Katherine said. It wasn't a question, but Celeste answered it anyway.
"Past the birth. I'm not staff and I'm not a guest anymore. I'm the woman who was in this house the first morning, before your calendar, before your three weeks." She lifted her chin. "And I'd rather say that in your bed than at your table."
For a long moment the only sound was the tick of the clock on the dresser. Then Katherine untied her robe and let it fall, and she climbed onto the bed on her other side, unhurried, nude, forty-one weeks of certainty, and lay back against the pillows with one hand settling on Jordan's hip.
"Then get in," she said. "Both of you. And Celeste. If you're staying, you'll learn what stays in this room stays in this room."
Celeste felt Jordan go still under her hand. The secrecy. Whatever it was that Katherine kept from the table, kept from the sisters, kept behind that locked door every night. She said nothing, and pulled Jordan down between them.
It began slowly, the way the bath had begun, hands and mouth and the quiet rustle of silk. Katherine kissed him first, deep and proprietary, her tongue sweeping his, one hand cupping the back of his skull. Then she turned his face and pushed it toward Celeste's breast, and he took the offered nipple into his mouth without needing the instruction, and the first hard pull made Celeste gasp against Katherine's mouth. Milk flooded his tongue. Celeste's hips rolled against the mattress.
"He was mine first," Celeste said, breath ragged. "The first mouth he ever drank from."
"I know," Katherine said, and there was no anger in it, something older and stranger, amusement threaded through possession. "He told you that in the grass, didn't he. Loud enough for the stablewoman to hear." She reached across him and took Celeste's jaw in her hand, the same grip her son had used at the creek, and studied her at close range. "You've changed. There's a direction in you now."
"There is."
"Good. I hate a woman without wants." Katherine released her and lay back, opening her legs, her dark curls already damp, and she guided Jordan's hand down her own body with unhurried pressure. "But first you'll watch me have him. Then we'll share. That's the order tonight."
He moved between Katherine's thighs and pushed into her slow, and she was slick and open and pulled him in with a low sound, her heels hooking behind his knees. Celeste knelt beside them, milk running in thin lines down her own stomach, watching Katherine's face in the moonlight. Her mouth. Her hands on his shoulders, digging in. The rhythm of the silk against the mattress.
Celeste leaned in and put her mouth to Katherine's breast, and Katherine's hand came up and cradled the back of her head, and for a moment the two women breathed against each other over the body moving between them.
Katherine came first, quiet and hard, her spine bowing, her fingers tightening in Celeste's hair. Jordan drove through it and held, not finishing, because he never finished first anymore without permission.
"Now her," Katherine said, still breathless. "Since she's family."
Celeste lay back on the sheets and he slid out of Katherine and into her in one long stroke, and the stretch after the whole long day made her cry out. He fucked her with slow deep pushes, Katherine's hand between them both now, thumbing Celeste's clit in tight circles while her own son's cock moved under it, and the milk let down hot and heavy from Celeste's breasts, pooling in the hollows of her collarbones.
She came with his name in her mouth and Katherine's mouth closing over her nipple to drink the spill, and the twin pulls, his body and her mouth, dragged the orgasm out long past its end.
He finished inside Celeste, at Katherine's nod, grinding deep, and then Katherine pulled him up and took his mouth while he was still pulsing, tasting her friend on him.
Afterward they lay tangled, Katherine in the middle, Jordan's arm across her, Celeste curled against his back with her palm flat on his stomach. The clock ticked. The lavender hung in the dark.
It was Celeste who felt it first. A flutter, low and strange, not cramp and not hunger, something small turning over in the deep of her own body, and it stopped, and started again, and the counting began without her permission. Eleven heartbeats. Not the droplets, she thought. The droplets worked on everyone at once and she was alone in this bed with a flutter nobody had dosed into her.
Her hand slid from his stomach to the low curve of her own belly, and she lay very still in the dark and did not tell either of them.
"Whose bed do you sleep in tomorrow?" Katherine murmured, already half-asleep, to him.
"Yours," he said.
Celeste kept her hand where it was, and kept the flutter, and kept the count.