“And,” Krysta added, setting the apple down on the nightstand, “we’re about to leave home for Christmas Notch, and the rooms at the inn aren’t as good for lurking.”
“True.”
And I did love the lurking.
I loved having Krysta with me always, right behind me, a cool, fearless shadow. I loved her strength, her loyalty, her honesty. I loved having her sly humor, her secretly soft and chewy caramel center that was gooey for baby animals and grandmas and planner-obsessed wives. I loved how she made me braver, more intuitive, able to face the world without knowing what exactly would happen next.
I loved her. And it didn’t matter that it hadn’t been part of a plan or that it happened too fast or that it probably wasn’t a good idea to marry your bodyguard. I’d known she was it from the moment she kissed my throat under the gazebo, and there didn’t seem much sense in pretending otherwise. I proposed a month after the cruise had disembarked, and a month after that, we were married at a sunny farm overlooking the Aegean. Anolivefarm.
I finally broke Krysta’s last rule.
Krysta’s grandmother was officially settled in her new spot, but to everyone’s surprise, she’d foregone pickleball in favor of something called lawn bowls, where she was currently the league champion. We visited her every week and made sure to get her money’s worth out of the juice bar while we were there. Krysta wouldn’t accept my help with anything regarding her gran, so I decided to exploit our client-bodyguard relationship and increased her salary enough to end the discussion. It’s the only fight she’s lost to date, but Krysta would do a lot to keep her grandmother in lawn bowls championship pins, including sacrifice her pride.
Shockingly, the disaster that was my leaked serum video didn’t derail the launch of Lemon Tree Cruisesorend my skincare line. There were a few viral takedown videos, a handful of posts from people who’d had the same reaction to the serum, and a particularly mean article inThe Cut, but mostly people seemed to forget about it within a few days. Vitamin C was acommon enough ingredient, therewasa warning on the label, and also that same week there were leaked DM screenshots from a Hollywood A-lister who could only orgasm if he was role-playing George Washington at the time, and that dominated the online discourse for several days.
When the dust (and screenshots) settled, what remained was a pleasant buzz around the cruise and—delightfully—the beginnings of a cult following forThe Lion and the Lamb. The campy songs, the bad wigs, the souvenir blue-filtered glasses—people were hyperfixated. And the footage of Krysta kissing my neck at the fake prom basically had its own fandom by the time I’d unpacked my suitcase. Hashtags proliferated, cruise bookings soared, and Lemon Tree Cruises was fully in the black within its first operating year.
Even our cruise villain was flourishing, having made a series of viral videos while cleaning the beach as part of her mandated community service. Her impassioned re-creations of famous movie scenes with sun-faded trash standing in for the other characters ended up being enormously popular, and last time I’d checked, she’d inked a decent deal with YouTube to keep making them. Apparently, having had a very public trial for food poisoning and celebrity stalking was good for engagement, and despite her relatively short jail sentence, Cassie played up the world-weary felon angle to great effect. Rumor was that she had a memoir deal in the works, and that she was already attached to play herself in the adaptation, although I hadn’t heard anything concrete on that front yet. Probably because the conditions of her parole weren’t quite to thetaking meetings in New Yorklevel yet.
Most importantly, when I’d gotten home and settled, I’d sat down with my planner by my pool and spent an entire day thinking. And thinking. I’d opened up a brand-new planner (with brand-new coordinating highlighters and pens, obvs), andstarted writing along the edges of the pages, leaving days and even entire weeks blank.
I called my mother and talked to her for a long time. We both cried a little. I called my publicist. I fired my manager.
I canceled the sit-down interview.
I wasn’t afraid to come out—at least not in the way that my publicist seemed to think—and I wasn’t afraid of the world learning about me and Krysta (especially sinceThe Lion and the Lambfandom was already shipping the two of us). I did still want to be strategic when it came to our physical safety, to protecting my mental health and boundaries, to recognizing what would change for me and my career.
But I didn’t want any kind of revelation or announcement to come from Addison Hayes™. I didn’t want the persona to be the priority; I didn’t want to couple something so indelible and intimate to my life with corporate partnerships and a Pride Month home-goods line at a big-box store. I’d kept this part of myself cordoned off for so long in order to protect the brand, and it hardly made sense to step into this new phase withprotecting the brandstill top of mind.
I wanted whatever happened next to be about me, and Krysta too, and about us aspeople. Not public figures or talking points or ideas—even though I couldn’t control that we would be those things to many people. But what I could control, and what we could control together, was what we gave the world initially. Something honest and genuine and that came from a feeling of rightness, not a schedule vetted by a publicity team and dotted with Zoom meetings with different magazines and conglomerates.
Which meant that on our wedding day, floating on the scent of the Aegean and kisses from my new wife, I shared a selfie of Krysta and me, the bright sea behind us, her white tux like a beacon in the sun, her mouth nuzzled playfully to my throat.And then I’d turned off my phone and spent the rest of the day eating, drinking, and dancing with my favorite people in the world.
And I hadn’t looked back since.
In the here and now, Krysta was tugging the sheet farther down my body, her jaw tight with restraint as she watched my nipples harden in the cool air of the bedroom. The only illumination came from the pool just outside of the bedroom, a moody blue light that reminded me of the filtered glasses we handed out atThe Lion and the Lamb.
“Open your legs,” Krysta said, and I did as I was told, happily, beamingly.
“Hungry for something other than your apple?”
Her eyes were on my cunt now, andhungerwas the only word for what I saw in her face. Her eyes gleamed like dark stars; the bluish light caught the shine of her tongue as she licked her lower lip.
“I think so, Ms. Hayes,” she murmured as she put her knee on the bed and then crawled between my open thighs. Like she usually did at night, she slept in a pair of boxers and a white tank top, and when she leaned her weight forward onto her hands, the front of her tank top hung down so that I could see her breasts and the firm lines of her stomach beyond.
She pressed a hand to my sternum to force me onto my back and then settled on her elbows and then her stomach.
The first skim of her lips over my pussy was enough to melt my smile, my laughter, dissolve everything into a shivering inhale. And then she kissed me again, every contour, every seam and curve, until all of me was touched, until every bit of me from top to bottom had been claimed. I knew Krysta adored me, respected me, but that’s not what her kisses were right now. They were not the worshipful caresses of an awed lover, but instead the prowling, possessive marks of ownership, of rawlust. And the noise that came from my wife’s chest when she finally took her first real taste was nothing but primal, almost brutal in its naked, exposed desire.
“Oh,” I breathed, as she pressed her tongue inside me, seeking more of my secrets. “Oh God, that’s so fucking good.”
“Yes,” she grunted. “Yes, it is.” I could feel her speak the words against my flesh.
Her arms were wrapped around my thighs, and she pulled me closer, searching up my center until she found my tender peak under its hood. She teased at its ripeness with her tongue, sucked at it, pulling off at intervals to tell me how stiff it was, how it practically begged to be toyed with, how she’d never been with someone whose clit was so goddamn needy. How she could spend all day taking care of it, and it would still be swollen for attention the minute she looked away. And while she was at it, wasn’t my cunt always so slick for her? Wasn’t I ashamed that I was such a dirty wife, needing it pleased all the time?
Her fingers slid into me like I was made of butter. And then there was—
Pressure.
