19. Iris
IRIS
By day three of building our case, my eyes are burning, my back aches from hunching over the kitchen table, and I'm fairly certain I've developed a permanent furrow between my eyebrows.
Cat looks just as exhausted. She's been handling the property-related documents—proof of Marguerite's sound mind in the form of business decisions, contracts, correspondence—while I've been cataloguing the personal evidence.
Photographs. The box from the barn. A paper trail left by a woman who was anything but confused.
A woman who loved fiercely, planned carefully, and knew exactly what she was doing when she left this place to us.
The fight arrives on day two, somewhere between the property deeds and the witness list.
"We should bring in a second firm," I say. "There's a practice in Paris that specialises in contested estates. I made some calls this morning."
Cat's pen stops. "You made some calls."
"Preliminary ones."
"Rousseau's had the case for three days." Her voice has gone flat in a way I'm learning to recognise. "Duval trusts her. The village trusts her."
"The village isn't going to be standing in that courtroom when—"
"The village is exactly who's going to be standing in that courtroom." She pushes back from the table. "That's the whole case, Iris. Thirty people who knew her. You can't fly that in from Paris."
"I'm not trying to fly anything in. I'm trying to control the variables."
"She isn't a variable." It comes out sharp enough that we both stop. "Sorry. That was—"
"No." I put down my pen. "You're right. This isn't a merger. I just—" The truth costs me something. "If we lose this place, I need to know I did everything. I don't know how to sit still and trust strangers with it."
"They're not strangers to me," Cat says. Quietly. "That's the part you keep missing. I'm not trusting strangers. I'm trusting family."
We look at each other over the paperwork.
"Rousseau stays," I say finally. "But I'm building her exhibit files. Colour-coded."
"She'll weep with joy." Cat slides the witness list across the table. "Start with these. Monique's handwriting is a war crime."
It isn't a truce, exactly. It's better: it's the two of us learning to fight about the how without once fighting about the whether.
"I think that's everything," Cat says finally, dropping the last folder onto the stack. "At least for now. The lawyer said she has enough to file the response tomorrow."
"Good." I push back from the table, stretching muscles that have been locked in place for hours. "I never want to look at another legal document as long as I live."
"Same." Cat stands, moving to the kitchen counter. "Wine?"
"God, yes."
She pours two generous glasses, and we migrate to the terrace without discussion—our ritual, our refuge. The evening is warm and soft, the lavender humming with bees making their last rounds of the day. I sink into the loveseat and feel something in my spine finally unclench.
"We're going to be okay," Cat says, settling beside me. "The lawyer seemed confident."
"She did." I take a sip of wine, letting the coolness slide down my throat. "But even if we win—I'm realizing how precarious this all is. How much we're building on something someone could challenge at any moment."
"That's true of every life. Every relationship." Cat's shoulder presses against mine. "Nothing's guaranteed. We just decide what's worth fighting for."
I turn to look at her—really look. The sunset is turning her hair to copper fire, and her eyes are soft, tired, beautiful. She looks like she belongs here. She looks like she's been waiting her whole life to be exactly here, in this moment, with me.
"You're worth fighting for," I say.
Cat's breath catches. "Iris—"
"I know we've only been—whatever we are—for a few days. I know there's still so much we haven't figured out. But I know that too. I know you're worth it."
She sets down her wine glass and turns to face me fully. Her hand comes up to cup my cheek, and I lean into her touch automatically, like my body knows something my brain is still learning.
"You're worth it too," she says. "In case that wasn't clear."
"It's becoming clearer."
She kisses me.
It starts gentle, the way it always does—soft and questioning, giving me space to pull away if I want to. But I don't want to. I'm tired of space. I'm tired of being careful, of holding back, of treating this like something fragile when it feels like the strongest thing I've ever known.
I deepen the kiss, sliding my hand into her hair, and Cat makes a sound against my mouth—surprised, pleased—that goes through me like a lit fuse.
"Iris," she breathes when we break apart. "We don't have to—I mean, if you're not ready—"
"I'm ready."
"Are you sure? Because there's no pressure, we can wait as long as—"
I silence her with another kiss. "I'm sure. I've never been more sure of anything."
Cat searches my face, looking for doubt, for hesitation. She won't find it. The fear I felt before—the uncertainty, the worry about doing things wrong—it's still there, humming beneath the surface. But it's not louder than the wanting anymore.
Nothing is louder than the wanting.
"Okay," she says, and her smile is slow and warm and full of promise. "Okay. Come with me."
She takes my hand and leads me inside, down the hall, past my bedroom door to hers.
I've never been in this room. Six weeks of walking past this door and never once letting myself look.
Now she pushes it open and steps back to let me through, and I take it in all at once—the bed neatly made, because she's tidier than I'd ever have guessed; photographs crowding the nightstand; books in unsteady towers on the floor; and over the headboard a small painting I know is Hélène's without being told. Lavender at dusk.
The whole room smells like her.
"Is this okay?" she asks. "Being in here. In my space."
"It's perfect."
She shuts the door. The click of the latch goes through me like a struck match.
"I should tell you," I say, "that I have no idea what I'm doing."
Cat laughs, low and soft. "I know. That's okay."
"I might do something wrong. Ask something stupid. Get an elbow somewhere—"
"Iris." She steps close and takes both my hands.
"There's no wrong. There's just us, working it out.
If something doesn't feel good, you tell me.
And if something feels incredible—" she brings my knuckles to her mouth, presses a kiss to each one, and everything below my ribs goes molten "—you tell me that too, and I'll do it again until you forget your own name. "
"That's a very confident offer."
"It's not confidence." Her thumb strokes the inside of my wrist. "It's motivation. Can I undress you?"
"Yes."
She starts with the buttons of my blouse and she takes her time.
One, then the next, her knuckles grazing my sternum, my ribs, the soft skin below.
By the third button I'm breathing like I ran here.
Every inch she uncovers meets the cool evening air and then the heat of her looking at me, and the contrast makes me shudder.
"You're shaking," she says.
"I'm aware."
"Want me to stop?"
"If you stop, I will genuinely die."
I feel her grin against my shoulder—and then her mouth is on my collarbone, open and unhurried, and I stop being able to hold a thought. She slides the blouse down my arms and lets it drop. I'm wearing plain cotton, nothing remotely planned, and she looks at me like I've been poured into silk.
"Beautiful," she murmurs, and then, lower, against my throat: "You have no idea what you do to me."
"Your turn," I manage. "I need—please."
My hands shake on the hem of her shirt. She lifts her arms and lets me pull it over her head, and then she's standing there in the last of the gold light and I forget how lungs work.
I've never looked at a woman's body like this. Never let myself. Never catalogued the line of a collarbone, the small silver scar under her ribs, the way her breath moves her. I reach out and lay my palm flat against her stomach just to feel it go tight under my hand.
"Can I—" I stop. "I want to touch you. I just don't know where to start."
"Anywhere." She takes my hand and puts it on her waist. "Everywhere. You can't get this wrong."
So I learn her. The dip above her hip. The long muscle of her back. The soft place at the base of her spine that makes her breath hitch and her fingers close hard on my arm. When I find it a second time, on purpose, she says my name in a voice I've never heard her use.
She reaches behind herself and unhooks her bra and lets it fall, and I stare, because I'm not capable of doing anything else.
"You're allowed to touch," she says, amused and not entirely steady.
So I do. She stops being amused very quickly.
The rest goes in pieces—kisses that get less careful, my jeans that refuse to cooperate, Cat laughing into my mouth as she kneels to work them off me and then not laughing at all, her hands sliding up the backs of my thighs, her lips at my hipbone, her breath through the last thin layer between us and my knees actually failing.
She catches me. Of course she does. She walks me back to the bed and lays me down and settles over me, skin to skin, and the shock of that—all of her, warm and bare against all of me—punches a sound out of my throat I've never made before.
"Hi," she whispers.
"Hi."
"Still okay?"
"If you ask me that again I'm going to lose my mind."
"Good." She kisses me, and there's nothing tentative left in it. "Then tell me what you want."
"I don't know what I want. I don't know the words—"
"Then show me." She catches my wrist and guides my hand to her, and her eyes fall shut. "And I'll show you."
After that, it stops being anything I have to think about.
She works down my body slowly, her mouth at my throat, my sternum, the underside of my breast, until my hands are fisted in her hair and I'm arching up off the mattress to meet her.
When her fingers finally slide where I've been aching for them, I make a noise that would mortify me if I had any capacity left for shame.
"God, you're—" Her forehead drops to my hip. "Iris. You're soaked."
"Whose fault do you think that is," I gasp, and she laughs, and then her mouth replaces her hand and I lose the argument entirely.
I've read about this. I've watched it in films, sanitized and soft-focused.
Nothing prepared me. She is patient and precise and completely unhurried, learning me by degrees—slower when I go tense, harder when I say there, there, don't stop—and I do tell her, exactly like she asked, in words I didn't know I had.
She adds a second finger and curls it and I hear myself beg.
The pressure builds until it's unbearable, until my whole body has narrowed to one white-hot point, until I'm shaking apart and clutching at the sheets and her free hand comes up to lace through mine and hold on—
And I break.
I break with her name in my mouth and her hand in mine and my back off the bed and the absolute, unarguable certainty that nothing in my thirty-two carefully managed years has ever felt this true.
She works me down gently, kisses the inside of my thigh, my stomach, my sternum, and comes back up to gather me in while I shudder through the last of it.
"Okay?" she asks, and I can hear the smugness she's trying to hide.
"Shut up."
"That's not a no."
"That was—" I press my face into her neck. "I don't have the vocabulary."
"You had plenty of vocabulary two minutes ago."
I bite her shoulder. She laughs, delighted, and the sound does something to my chest that has nothing to do with sex at all.
When I can move again, I push up onto an elbow and look down at her—flushed, tousled, gone soft around the edges—and something fierce and hungry rises in me.
"Your turn," I say.
"You don't have to—"
"I want to." I put my hand on her stomach and feel it jump. "I want to learn you. Tell me what you like."
Her breath goes ragged. "Yeah. Okay. Yes."
I'm clumsy at first. I lose my rhythm, and once I hesitate so long she opens her eyes and says, "Iris, I swear to God"—but then I find it. I find the exact place, the exact pressure, the sound she makes when I get it right, and after that I stop being nervous and start being ruthless.
I learn that she goes quiet before she comes. That her hand will find my hair and hold on. That she says my name like it costs her something.
And when she finally breaks apart under my mouth—thighs tightening, spine bowing, my name coming out of her in pieces—it is, without question, the most powerful thing I have ever done.
Afterward we lie tangled together, catching our breath. The room is fully dark now. The only light is starlight through the open window.
"I can't believe we waited so long," I say.
Cat laughs, wrecked and happy. "We didn't wait that long. It's been—what, six weeks?"
"It felt like longer."
"Yeah." She presses a kiss to my hair. "It did."
Silence settles, warm and easy. I feel like I should say something profound—something about what this means, about the size of what just happened. But every word I reach for is too small.
"Cat?"
"Mmm?"
"I'm glad I'm here. I'm glad you're here. I'm just—glad."
Her arm tightens around me. "There's nowhere else I want to be."
We fall asleep like that, the night air cool on damp skin, lavender drifting through the window. My last coherent thought is that this—this moment, this woman, this feeling—is worth every fight ahead of us.
Jean-Pierre. My mother. The uncertain future.
None of it matters as much as her.