Chapter 14 Milk and Honey
The milk bath is the one part of the brochure that’s true, and they almost never let anyone have it.
Bianca told me that, the morning she taught me the ritual, in the small marble chamber off the Bath House where it all happens.
It’s not large. That’s the point of it. A sunken marble basin the size of a generous bed, set into a floor of more marble, the walls white stone gone soft and gold under recessed warm lamps, a single high window letting in a column of mountain light that hit the water like a benediction.
There’s a system behind a panel that warms mineral water and blends it, at the exact ratio the founders set down a century ago, with milk and a few oils that smell of almond and something green, and the water comes up white and warm and faintly opaque, and it does, genuinely, leave the skin feeling like it belongs to a better person.
“Duchesses,” Bianca said, running her clever hand through the white water to check the temperature, “have wept in this tub for the privilege. Czarinas, allegedly. I’ve scrubbed it after every one of them for ten years.
” She flicked the water off her fingers.
“It’s for honored guests only. Third trimester gets it as a privilege. Greta’s earned the lot, twice over.”
The chamber smelled of warm stone and almond and the mineral tang under everything, and I learned the ritual the way I learned the boilers, by being shown once and remembering.
That afternoon I overheard the thing that changed how I understood why Greta came back.
She was on her balcony, on a video call to her sister in Malm?, not hiding it, since she hid nothing anymore, the filter long since retired.
I was fixing the balcony door two rooms down and the mountain carries sound.
The nursery was painted, she was saying, a soft green, she’d done it herself with a roller and a sore back and a great deal of swearing her sister wasn’t to repeat.
The crib was built. She’d assembled it alone over a weekend with the wrong tool and got it right in the end.
“And the chair,” her sister said, tinny through the phone. “Did you get the chair you wanted.”
“I got the chair,” Greta said, light, easy. “It’s beside the crib. It’s perfect.” A pause, just slightly too long for the brightness. “It looks a little lonely up there, is all.”
She didn’t finish the sentence. Her sister, who clearly knew the shape of it, didn’t make her.
I went back to the door hinge and understood her return completely. She hadn’t come up the mountain for the waters. She’d come up for the only house that had ever looked at her and been glad, before she went home to a green room with one chair in it.
Ute fed me that evening without my asking, a plate appearing at my elbow in the kitchen while I bled a radiator, and when I started to say I’d already eaten she gave me her verdict and went back to the stove.
“You burn fuel like the boiler,” she said.
“Eat.” It was, from Ute, a long and tender speech.
The chart said the milk bath was booked for the alumna, attendant of her choosing, and the alumna had chosen me.
Marlene had signed it. Poppy told me there’d been a held pause before the signature, the pen hovering, and that Yuki, standing right there, had caught the pause and tucked it somewhere behind her exact dark eyes and said nothing, because Yuki recorded everything and spent none of it.
The chart said attendant. Greta’s eyes, when I helped her down the marble steps into the white water, said company.
She’d left the robe on the warm bench and come to the edge bare, in no hurry, carrying the belly like a crown, and I’d done the visual sweep her body always pulled out of me, bare feet on the warm marble, long pale calves, the wide soft hips, and then the belly’s curve which I never skipped and never would, taut and high and proud, and above it the breasts the last weeks had made heavy and full and faintly veined, the dark nipples already beaded at the tips before I’d touched her at all.
Gold hair pinned loosely up, a few strands already falling.
The column of mountain light caught all of it and turned her gold, the exact image the place sold and was never once allowed to show.
“The light does that on purpose,” she said, catching me looking, smiling.
“I asked them once who designed this room. A founder’s wife, they think.
A woman, definitely. No man would have put the window exactly there.
” She lowered herself onto the broad submerged bench with a long sigh, the white water rising to her collarbones, and held out both hands for mine.
“Come in, Adam. The chart says you’re attending me. ”
I came in. The water was blood-warm and silky with the milk, and it closed over me to the chest, and she drew my hands to her under the white surface, to her breasts, heavy and full and warm, and pressed my palms against the ache of them.
“Here,” she said, plainly, no shyness anywhere in her, the filter retired for good.
“They’re so full it hurts by evening. You’d be doing me a mercy.
” Her blue eyes were warm and amused and completely direct.
“I’ll tell you exactly what I want, and you’ll give it to me, and then you’ll be inside me while the water holds me up, because everything is lighter in here and I am very heavy these days. That’s the menu. Any objections?”
“None,” I said.
“There’s a good boy.” She drew my head down. “Start there.”
So I worshipped her on her own orders, slow, off her recited menu, because hosting was how she received and she’d told me so.
My mouth at the slope of her breast, the skin hot and tight and swollen taut, and then closing over the dark beaded nipple, sucking, and the first warm sweet spurt of her broke across my tongue, faintly mineral, milk and bathwater one continuum just as she’d promised, and she made a low sound deep in her chest and her fingers came into my hair and held me there, pressing me to her.
“Yes,” she breathed, lullaby-low. “Like that. You can’t waste it, there’s no such thing as wasting it, I make more than a dairy.
Drink.” Her head fell back against the marble lip, gold strands loose in the white water, the belly cresting the surface like an island.
“Oh, that’s, that’s better than the breast pump, don’t tell the breast pump. ”
I nursed at her in the steam, slow, drawing steady as she liked, and the milk came warm and sweet and the water rose around us and the lamps turned everything to gold.
She guided me from one breast to the other when the first ran soft, her hand cradling my head, switching me like she was nursing already, and there was a rhythm to it that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with it at once, the giving and the taking circling each other.
“That’s the thing nobody tells you,” she murmured, her head back against the marble, her eyes half closed.
“How good it feels. They make it sound like a duty. A function. The pump and the schedule and the cracked skin.” Her fingers tightened in my hair.
“Nobody says it can feel like this. That a mouth that means it can undo you faster than anything. I found that out alone, in the dark, in Malm?, and there was no one to tell, and I have been waiting eight months to be in warm water with a man who means it.” Her breathing climbed, slow and unforced, the pregnancy doing what the books say it does, every nerve nearer the surface, her body more honest, more itself.
“Don’t stop. Drink. I’ll just make more. I always make more.”
I cradled the belly above the waterline with my free hand and kissed the curve of it, the taut warm crown of her, and she made a sound at that, at being honored there, that was different from all the others, lower, with something cracked open in it.
“People are so strange about the belly,” she murmured. “They look away from it like it’s rude. You kiss it.” Her hand covered mine on the curve. “Most men can’t, you know. Not once it’s the very part of the job they made. As if the proof embarrasses them.”
I worked my hand down through the warm white water between her legs, and she opened her thighs for me with a sigh, floated back against the marble lip and let me, her arms spread along the stone, and I slid two fingers up into her, soft and slick and yielding, and curled them while my thumb found her clit, and brought her off slow with my mouth still latched and drawing at her breast, the milk and the steam and the slow rolling pleasure building in her the way her whole self moved, at half speed, abundant, until she arched and shook and came against my hand, her cunt clenching warm and soft around my fingers, with a long low sound that rolled off the marble and didn’t break.
“There,” she said, when she could, smiling, wrecked and serene at once. “Now the other thing. Come here. I want you inside me while I’m weightless. It’s the only time I’m weightless anymore.”
She drew me onto the bench and lowered herself astride me in the buoyant water, reached beneath the white surface to wrap her hand around my cock and guide the head to her entrance, and the water took half her weight and made the rest easy, and she eased down onto me slow, taking me deeper and deeper until I was seated full inside her, both of us groaning at the slick warm grip of it, her belly pressed warm between us, her heavy breasts at the level of my face and leaking now with every rock of her, beads of milk running down into the white water and lost in it.
“Now the brochure’s true twice,” she said, against my mouth, smiling that lullaby smile, and rolled her hips, slow and deep and tidal.