Page 87 of Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl
The floorboards creak as I take the first step to my room, but then I pause.
Tonight was perfect. So perfect that for a moment, I think I could just have it all. I could have the job and the power—the kind of power that women are called dirty for even wanting. I could have a family. I could have a man like Bram who is far too good for me. A man who feels things like right and wrong in his bones. A man who I thought would be horrified if he knew just how willing I am to do a little bad for the sake of good. But then he told me about the man he used to be, once upon a time.
My heels echo across the hardwood floor as I walk to his room.
Bram is lying in bed, glasses on, his shirt neatly folded in his armchair, and one leg propped up. He holds a thick, heavy book from the spine with just one hand, his chin resting on his chest.
“Hi,” I whisper as I kick off my heels and shed my suit jacket so that I’m only wearing my pencil skirt, stockings, and silk camisole.
He places his book flat against his abdomen and pulls back the covers.
Without letting myself think too much about what exactly this means, I climb in next to him, curling on my side in the narrow space between his body and the edge of the bed.
I lay my head across his chest and I feel far too comfortable. Far too at home under this roof. In this bed. Alongside this man. In his fully formed life.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Bram
For the second time, I wake up with Madelyn Kowalczk watching me, a little line between her brows and her eyes flicking over my face like she’s trying to commit me to memory. It makes me feel like a king, because she’shere, she wants to be here, this lovely, sharp thing who could be anywhere.
Having her in my life is like having a finicky, fickle plant in my care—a maidenhair fern or a string of pearls or a red-lipped Habenaria—and knowing that sometimes you can do everything right, have all the right calibrations of water, sun, soil pH, and watch the plant wither anyway. Still have the plant not choose you. And right now I feel like the plant has chosen me. Like I’m staring at vibrant petals, shining leaves, an overflowing pot, and it’s alchemy, it is lead into gold, the singular gardening victory of my life.
Somehow I got it right, and I’m waking up to Maddie looking at me like I’m a fight she’s going to win.
I reach up and trace her mouth with a curled knuckle. Her lips are soft and pink, free of lipstick, and I can see every crease in the middle where they’re almost too full. The sharp, sharp corners, like they were drawn by an artist concerned more with drama than anatomy.
I think of the way she looked last night coming into the bedroom: silk blouse,watch meheels, victory all over her face like a lioness with blood on her muzzle. I’d gotten hard so fast it hurt.
“You’re terrifying,” I murmur to her, and pull her close. She’s still in her silk camisole, but her skirt, stockings, and panties are discarded on the floor, leaving her naked below the silk. Her legs part in an unspoken invitation, and I trail a hand down to where she is warm and still damp from what I gave her after she slid into my bed.
She sighs happily, as if I’ve said the swooniest thing a non-boyfriend can say. “Thank you.”
“You looked like a goddess last night,” I say as I start stroking her. She sighs again and stretches in my arms, moving to her back and opening her legs even more. “Not the flowery sea-foam kind, but the helmet-and-spear kind. Like you’d just razed a city to the ground and had the survivors erect a temple to you there.”
“Mmm, I like that,” she breathes. She’s properly wet now, and I indulge myself by playing with her, circling the opening of her, sliding deep inside and crooking my fingers. The house is empty for another day and night yet; we have nowhere to be, and I want to take my time in the late autumn sunlight. Maybe this will end, and maybe it will end soon, but I have right now, and I won’t waste a second of it.
I draw out her orgasm, sucking on her hard nipples through the silk, murmuring to her about how ruthless she is, how beautiful, about how I want her to have everything and how it’s hers to take. And when I finally give in to her arches and whimpers and I caress her clit like we’re on the clock, she climaxes with my name as a sigh on her lips.Bram.
I want to crawl on top of her and trap her with my arms and legs and make her say my name over and over again, just like that,Bram Bram Bram, like I’m the plant in the greenhouse that needs talking to in order to thrive.
I resist the urge, somehow. Mostly because I want to feed her. I kiss her forehead instead, ghosting my mouth over the shapely line of her brow, the delicate skin of her temple.
“Breakfast?”
IT’S LATE FORbreakfast, but I don’t let that stop me from spoiling my brat with the works: French toast, cut fruit, bacon so crispy it’s nearly burnt. She sits on the counter in these little shorts that drive me to distraction and an old Astra sweatshirt that she’s brazenly stolen from me as she tells me about the event last night.
“... and after we talked, I think there’s a real opening for the state’s department of education to make green-tech academies a statewide resource. Wind is our largest single source of electricity, and the jobs are therenow, and so we can focus on trade certifications and prepping future engineers and innovators—oh, thank you”—I’ve just handed her a hot latte, doctored up with whipped cream and cinnamon on top—“and Veronica says there’s a real chance we can get some of the other side to join us as long as we focus onjobsand not thedying planetof it all.”
I pull open the dishwasher while she crosses her legs and sips the latte I made her. “Do you think thedying planetpart is really a flexible part of the narrative, though? The more it gets erased, the easier it is to subvert.”
“Does it matter if we saysustainable domestic initiativesinstead ofmitigating climate changeif it gets us to the same place?”
I think about this as I start putting away the clean dishes. “It honeycombs the core message,” I say after a moment. “It allows special interests to quietly lobby for subtle changes that weaken legislation. It hazes over the clarity and necessity behindwhya change is initiated, which means legislators and civil servants, and in this case, school boards and superintendents, aren’t all pulling in the same direction, even if they think they are.”
“Or it allows something to get done instead of nothing,” Maddie posits, humming a little as she sips her latte. She gets whipped cream on her nose and I step over to shamelessly lick it off, which makes her laugh.
“Do you think,” she asks as I go back to the dishwasher to finish unloading, “that, on a legislative level, it’s sometimes okay to do the right things for the wrong reasons? Or at least the less-right reasons?”
