“Oh,” Yardley said. “Please keep looking at me like that.”
KC took both of Yardley’s hands between hers. She was trembling. “You’re not too much,” she said. “Don’t ever believe it, even if your mama keeps telling those stories that make it sound like she was a saint for putting up with you.” She reached up to wipe away the wetness from her cheeks. “You’ve always been exactly right, Yardley Whitmer, and I love you. I love you.”
Yardley’s eyes were wide and soft. “Does this mean you’ll help me with my dioramas in the basement?”
“It does not. But it means I will admire every single diorama you make, take pictures of them, ask you a million questions, and send the pictures to any group chat we’re a part of.”
Yardley smiled. “In your fantasy, we’re in a group chat together?”
“In my fantasies, we’re in everything together. We’re not alone anymore, remember?” KC looked around the empty hall. “Can we find a… chaise? A bench? Or a very sturdy wall?”
The question made Yardley’s shoulders pull back into perfect posture. She tipped her chin up. “King Henry the Eighth and Queen Elizabeth were both born almost right on this spot. If I have learned anything at all about English people, I can promise you there is a reproduction Tudor four-poster bed somewhere on the premises.”
They followed the shadowy halls, laughing as quietly as they could. KC had gotten briefly distracted by a gleaming executioner’s ax painted with fake blood (she hoped it was fake) when she heard Yardley call out in a stage whisper, “Huzzah!”
Snorting with laughter, KC followed the direction of her whisper-shout and found Yardley standing behind velvet ropes in a life-size, well,diorama.
“Whoa.” KC took in the pale blue velvet drapes hanging from an ornately embroidered frame attached to the ceiling, sheltering a carved wooden bed covered in a stack of embroidered quilts. “That’s very…”
“Imperial? Indeed. Antique? No. It’s a reproduction. Including the rather imaginative tapestries on the walls with their very juicy and naked subjects.” Yardley sat on the end of the bed, then bounced up and down. “I don’t think there was such a thing as Serta in the early modern era, but I’m glad it’s not horsehair.”
KC stepped over the ropes. “Or a wooden box shaped like a mattress.”
Yardley reached out for KC’s hands. “Are you going to cash all those checks you wrote in the banquet hall?”
“You.” KC held her finger up to Yardley. “Shush.”
It was important not to let her get sassy. In twelve hundred and one days, KC had learnedsomethings.
She put her knee up on the bed beside Yardley’s thigh. The wig was gone, sacrificed to the need for hairpins, and Yardley’s dark braids had gotten mussed when she’d dragged it off. KC spied the end loop of a pin slid halfway from a braid and pulled it out, slow, not wanting to tug any hair.
Yardley shivered. And so KC had no choice but to find the remaining pins, one by one, and free them until first one heavy braid eased to Yardley’s shoulder, then the other. There wasn’t a sound except their breathing, a little faster than usual. The light was rosy, penetrating the hushed gloom of the curtained bed. KC settled her knees on either side of Yardley’s thighs, and Yardley gripped KC’s hips. She unbraided Yardley’s hair with the entirety of her focus, threading her fingers between the weave, tugging every wave free and then stroking her hands over them until Yardley’s hair made a curtain of black around her shoulders.
KC scraped her fingertips over Yardley’s scalp, watching the twinkle of the diamonds swinging forward from her bent neck.
She tipped Yardley’s head up and kissed her jaw, breathing in the scent of her skin. “Now you’re not Max anymore,” she said.
She kissed her neck. Softly bit her earlobe. Thanked every heaven.
“That’s good, because I’m not sure I could keep up such a high level of sapphic dominance in the state I’m in.” Yardley’s voice was so low, her wit seemed sleepy. “What are you wearing underneath this crime of a dress?”
Her hand found KC’s upper thigh, and her thumb dragged an arc over flexed quadriceps toward the juncture of her thighs, slow and with enough pressure to make it clear Yardley was feeling frustrated. The good kind of frustrated. KC pulled her hand away, ignoring the throb of protest from her clit.
Yardley laughed, but it was the laugh she always laughed right before things would get very, very serious between them—breathless and in her throat. “Tell me what to do.”
“Tell me what you want.” KC raked her hands through Yardley’s hair and gently pulled.
“To feel what I do to you.”
KC slid off Yardley’s thighs. Her bare feet sank into the rug, a strangely intimate feeling for such a public space. She took in the hot flush on Yardley’s cheeks and her serious blue eyes and how the bow of her upper lip had already swollen and lost its definition.
“Take off your disguise.”
Yardley closed her eyes and let out a breath. She unbuttoned her trousers and lowered the zipper, turning her body to ease them off her ass. They slithered from the end of the bed, their satin lining sinking into them in a puddle at KC’s feet.
KC thought of morning Yardley, belted into her robe in the kitchen of their house in Reston.
Yardley in that teetering pile of a wig in the back of the comm van after the Starbucks op.
