Chapter 4: Sunday brunch
The lemon tree did need watering. Sheri stood at the kitchen sink the next morning, filling a copper watering can, watching the overflow trickle down the drain. Her body felt like a contested territory. A deep, bruised ache radiated from her core, a physical ledger of the previous night. She could still feel the ghost of him, the brutal, claiming stretch, the hot flood inside her. It hadn’t been love. It had been a audit, conducted with flesh.
She carried the can outside. The morning was cool, the sky a flat, pale gray. She watered the tree’s roots, the soil drinking greedily. A little bitterness to keep things interesting. She touched a waxy leaf. It was thriving.
Sean had left early, a mumbled excuse about a site meeting. The silence he left behind was different now. It wasn’t empty; it was pregnant, charged like the air before a storm. They had crossed a line and then erased it, leaving only the scorch marks.
Back inside, the house felt too large. She climbed the stairs, not to the bedroom, but to her private study—a small, orderly room of files, a sleek laptop, and a single orchid. She did not sit at the desk. Instead, she went to a narrow cabinet, unlocked it with a key from a chain around her neck, and withdrew a lacquered box. Inside, folded with precise corners, lay the lace bodysuit. Black, intricate, shamefully delicate. She ran a finger over the cold silk. It was proof. Of what, she wasn’t entirely sure.
The doorbell rang.
Her heart, a steady, disciplined drum, did not falter. She closed the box, locked it away, and smoothed her cashmere sweater. She descended the stairs with measured calm.
Lidia stood on the doorstep, her kit bag slung over one shoulder. She was forty, with tired eyes and capable hands that always smelled of almond cuticle oil and, faintly, of Ren’s citrus disinfectant. Her smile was soft, knowing. “Sunday,” she said.
“Sunday,” Sheri echoed, stepping back to let her in.
They didn’t speak as they ascended to the bedroom. The ritual was its own language. Sheri sat at the vanity. Lidia laid out her tools on the silver tray—buffers, clippers, bottles of polish in muted colors. She lit the candle. The flame caught, painting warm light on the deep emerald walls.
“Your hands are tense,” Lidia observed, taking Sheri’s right hand in hers, beginning to massage the palm with a firm, practiced pressure.
Sheri let her eyes close. “It’s been a week.”
“I heard Ren had a late visitor Thursday. A regular.” Lidia’s voice was casual, but her thumbs pressed deep into a pressure point. The subtext was clear. She knew. The salon’s walls were thin, its secrets a currency among those who worked there.
Sheri didn’t confirm or deny. She turned her hand, lacing her fingers briefly with Lidia’s. A silent acknowledgment.
The massage moved from hands to shoulders. Lidia’s fingers worked the knots at the base of Sheri’s neck, the ones Sean’s violence had left behind. Then, those hands slipped beneath the cashmere sweater, pushing it up. Sheri raised her arms, allowing it to be pulled over her head. The air was cool on her skin. She sat in her bra and trousers as Lidia’s warm palms smoothed over her back.
“You have bruises,” Lidia murmured, her tone shifting from professional to something dangerously intimate.
Sheri said nothing. She stood, turning to face her. She unclasped her bra, let it fall. She unfastened her trousers, let them pool at her feet. She stood naked before the other woman, the evidence of her marriage darkening on her hips, the scent of last night’s lavender and sex still lingering in her pores.
Lidia’s gaze was not pitying. It was hungry. She reached out, tracing the edge of a bruise with a feather-light touch. Then she knelt.
Her mouth went to the inside of Sheri’s thigh, a hot, open kiss. She breathed her in. Sheri’s fingers threaded into Lidia’s dark hair, not guiding, just holding on. Lidia’s tongue began a slow, torturous journey upwards. She avoided the center, licking along the crease of Sheri’s thigh, nipping at the sensitive skin of her lower belly. Sheri’s breath hitched. This was not an attack. This was a reclaiming.
“Lidia,” she whispered, a plea.
In answer, Lidia’s hands spread Sheri’s ass cheeks. She didn’t hesitate. Her tongue, flat and wet, licked a firm, deliberate stripe over Sheri’s asshole.
Sheri jerked, a gasp tearing from her throat. It was an intimacy so profound it felt surgical, exposing nerves she kept shielded from the world, from Sean. Lidia rimmed her with a devoted, filthy focus, her tongue circling, probing shallowly, making Sheri’s legs tremble. It was a secret they shared, this specific, taboo homage. It erased the memory of Sean’s brutal possession, replacing it with a searing, liquid worship.
Sheri pushed her back, needing more. They moved to the bed, the ironed silk sheets cool and slick. Lidia laid back, pulling Sheri on top of her. Their mouths met, a deep, tasting kiss. Sheri could taste herself on Lidia’s tongue, salty and musky. She moved down Lidia’s body, her own needs secondary to the craving to give, to lose herself in another woman’s response.
She took Lidia’s nipple into her mouth, sucking hard, biting just enough to make her arch and moan. Her hand slid between Lidia’s legs, finding her soaked, her folds swollen and hot. Sheri rubbed her palm over Lidia’s clit in slow, firm circles, feeling it harden to a tight pearl beneath her touch.
“Yes, right there,” Lidia panted, her hips beginning to grind.
Sheri replaced her hand with her mouth. She licked into her, a long, slow savoring of her taste—sharp, clean, unlike anything in her own life. She focused on Lidia’s clit, lapping at the slick bundle of nerves with a rhythmic, insistent pressure. Lidia’s hands fisted in the sheets, her heels digging into the mattress.
“Fuck, Sheri. Don’t stop.”
Sheri pushed two fingers inside Lidia’s cunt, curling them upward, searching. She found the rough, textured spot and pressed firmly, scissoring her fingers just slightly. At the same time, she sucked Lidia’s clit into her mouth, tonguing it rapidly.
Lidia shattered. Her body bowed off the bed, a raw, guttural cry ripping from her throat as she came. Sheri felt the hot, pulsing grip around her fingers, followed by a sudden gush of wetness that flooded her palm and dripped onto the sheets below. She worked her through it, gentle now, until Lidia collapsed back, trembling.
In the quiet aftermath, lit by the single candle, Lidia pulled Sheri up to lie beside her. She kissed her shoulder, her neck. “He doesn’t own this,” Lidia said quietly, her hand resting on Sheri’s stomach, over the bruises. “This is yours.”
Sheri stared at the canopy above the bed. She thought of the lacquered box in her study, the lace within. She thought of Sean’s distant eyes over breakfast. She thought of the lemon tree, roots drinking deeply in the bitter soil.
“I know,” Sheri said. But the words felt like a hope, not a truth. The house, the marriage, the carefully balanced lies—they were a system she had built. She understood systems. They could be gamed, optimized, made to yield a return. But they could also collapse.
Lidia’s breathing evened out into sleep. Sheri lay awake, cataloging the sensations: the tender ache between her legs, the sweet throbbing where Lidia’s mouth had been, the deep, unresolved bruising on her skin. Two different languages written on the same page.
Downstairs, the grandfather clock in the hall chimed the hour. A measured, sound in the still house. Sheri carefully extracted herself from Lidia’s embrace. She pulled on a robe and walked to the window. The lemon tree stood in the gathering dusk, its outline stark.
She would water it again tomorrow. It was, after all, her responsibility.