Karolina Keeps the Vows

The bridal suite of the wedding hotel in Kraków still held the last gold of an autumn evening in its tall windows, and the cream carpet showed the faint tracks of light stands that were no longer there. I was Karolina Nowak, twenty-two, one of two brides Ania had paid to dress and pose and kiss for a styled wedding that existed for cameras, and I had not yet been told I could take the veil off. Ania was twenty-seven, still in her own gown, the one that left her back bare, and she had sent the last assistant into the corridor with a look that made the door close as if the invoice had finally run out of hours. What was at stake sat in the quiet between us. If I let the vows we had spoken for the lens become real in this room, I would be the one standing in yesterday’s silk when checkout came. If I kept the night as work, I would lose the claiming I had come to Kraków wanting.

She leaned against the door and looked at me the way a person looks at something she has already decided to keep until morning.

“Stay,” Ania said. “Stay the night as my wife. Keep the vows in that bed as if the booking were a marriage.”

I let the tease arrive late, after I had already taken a step toward her on the carpet.

“You paid for the ceremony,” I said. “You did not pay for the morning.”

She crossed the room without hurry and set her hands on the boning of my bodice, thumbs pressing in until I felt the shape of my own breath. Her mouth was close enough that I could smell the mint she had used after the last toast.

“I am asking,” she said. “Not booking. Say yes.”

I said yes against her mouth when she kissed me. The kiss was not for a photograph. It was slow and open and a little greedy, and I tasted wine and the heat of a day spent being arranged into a bride. My hands found her waist. The skirt of my dress crushed between us, a ridiculous amount of fabric, and I was already wet from hours of her fingers resting at the small of my back while someone counted down a shutter. She gathered that skirt in both fists as if she meant to live under it.

---

Ania knelt on the cream carpet in her wedding dress and disappeared beneath my hem, and the veil whispered against my shoulders when I looked down and saw nothing but white. Her palms slid up the insides of my thighs, over the garters, over skin that had been powdered for close shots, and she made a sound that was not polite when she found how wet I already was. I held the skirt out of her way because I wanted her mouth and I wanted her to have to work for it while I stood there like a wife who had not yet been taken to bed.

Her tongue opened me in one long, filthy pass, from the soaked crotch of the silk panties up to my clit, and I had to lock my knees. She sucked me through the fabric first, patient and obscene, until the silk clung and I could feel every movement of her mouth as a wet heat that made my hips tip forward without my permission. She pulled the panties aside with two fingers and licked into my cunt properly, slow at the entrance and then greedy on my clit, and I heard myself say her name as if we were alone in a church instead of a suite that still smelled of roses and hairspray.

“You taste like you have been waiting all day,” she said from under the skirt, and the words vibrated against me.

I had been. I told her so in a voice that came out thinner than I meant, and she answered by sliding her tongue inside me, fucking me with it in short strokes while her nose pressed my clit. My hands found the crown of her head through the dress. I did not pull her away. I held her there and let her eat me standing, my thighs shaking, the veil trembling whenever I breathed too hard. She licked me as if the vows had given her a right to it, and when she sealed her mouth over my clit and sucked, I came on her tongue with my eyes open on the gold of the Kraków roofs, a raw sound leaving me that no photographer had asked for.

She stayed on her knees until the shaking eased, then kissed the inside of my thigh above the garter, a claim that had nothing to do with content.

---

She rose and led me to the marriage bed that had been dressed for photographs, the one with too many pillows and a throw no one had ever slept under. I sat on the edge in the gown and she stood between my knees and pushed the skirt up to my waist so the garters and the ruined panties were the only honest things in the frame. Her fingers slipped under the elastic, through the wet, and she watched my face while she pushed two of them into my cunt.

“Wife,” she said, quietly, as if she were trying the word on a body instead of a caption.

I could have laughed. I did not. I opened my knees wider and let her fuck me with those fingers, slow and deep, her knuckles catching on the garter when she curled them. She added a third because I was wet enough, and the stretch made me drop my head back against the piled pillows. She kissed my throat where the necklace from the shoot still sat, and she kept saying wife while she worked me, not as a joke, not as a direction for a camera, as if the contract on the table downstairs had turned into a marriage the moment I had said yes.

Clothes came off in pieces that snagged and laughed at us. The bodice fought her. I fought the tiny buttons at her spine with fingers that were not steady. When the dresses finally lay on the carpet like shed skins, I was in the veil and the garters and nothing else, and she was naked and flushed, looking at me as if she had bought a night she intended to use. She reached into the leather bag she had kept out of every shot and drew out the strap, black and thick, and I watched her step into the harness with a concentration that made my cunt clench around nothing.

She laid me back on the photographed sheets and pushed into me in one long, claiming slide, the head of it stretching me until I had to breathe through my mouth. I took it. I wanted it. When she was in to the base she went still, her hips flush to mine, and she said wife again, lower, as if the word belonged in my cunt.

“Yes,” I said, and I said it as if the contract were a marriage, because in that moment I needed it to be. “Your wife. Do not stop.”

She fucked me then, properly, the strap filling me on every stroke, her mouth on my breast, her hand braced beside my head so I could not forget who was above me. The power in it was the money and the years and the fact that she had paid for the day, and I wanted that power on me. I wanted to be the girl who had been hired and then kept. I hooked my heels at her back and met her, and every time she bottomed out I felt claimed in a way the ceremony had only pretended.

---

I made her roll so I could ride it. The veil fell forward over my shoulders as I sat down on the strap, taking it into my cunt until my ass met the harness, and I held her wrists to the bed because I wanted to see her face while I used what she had put on for me. She looked wrecked already, lips wet, eyes dark, and she lifted her hips to meet me anyway, as if even on her back she would not give up the right to fuck her wife.

“Look at you,” she said. “Taking it like you meant the vows.”

I did mean them, in the private place I did not package for anyone, and I rode her harder for that, grinding my clit against the base of the strap until the pleasure turned sharp. When I was close I lifted off her and crawled up her body and sat on her face with the veil bunched in my fist, the tulle crushed and ridiculous, and I lowered my cunt onto her mouth.

She groaned into me as if she had been waiting for that more than for the strap. Her hands gripped my thighs and pulled me down, and I fucked her tongue, smearing myself over her lips, the veil tight in my fingers like a thing I could keep. She licked into me with a hunger that had nothing left of the polite client from the afternoon. I came on her tongue with my fist in the veil and her name in my mouth, wet and shaking, and she kept licking me through it until I had to laugh, breathless, because it was too much and I still did not want her to stop.

She wiped her mouth on the inside of my thigh and looked up at me from between my legs as if I were a ceremony she had no intention of ending at a reasonable hour.

---

We scissored on that wide bed with the pillows shoved to the floor, my thigh between hers, her cunt slick against mine, and we rubbed until the wet sound of it filled the suite. I held her hip and watched her face change, the control slipping, and when she came she did it with her forehead against mine and a broken sound that I felt in my own clit. I followed her, grinding, messy, the two of us shaking in a bed that had been styled to look untouched.

Sixty-nine came after, because I wanted her cunt in my mouth while she had mine, and because I was greedy for the taste of her after a day of posing as if we only kissed for pictures. I lay on my back and she settled over me, her thighs bracketing my head, and I pulled her down onto my tongue at the same moment she opened me with her mouth again. I licked her slowly at first, then deeper, sucking her clit the way she had sucked mine under the dress, and I felt her moan against my cunt in a way that made me lift my hips for more. She was wet enough to shine on my chin. I was wet enough that she could push her fingers into me while she licked, and I took them, and then I asked for more because I wanted to be filled in every place she would give me.

“My ass too,” I said, blunt about the method, private about why. “Please. I want both.”

She gave me both. Two fingers in my cunt, one pressing into my ass with the wet she gathered from me, and the stretch made me cry out into her, my mouth still on her clit. She fucked me that way while I licked her, a rhythm that ruined any remaining idea that this was still a job, and I came with her fingers in both holes and her cunt on my tongue, shaking so hard I had to turn my face against her thigh. She came after, riding my mouth, and I held her hips and took it, swallowing what she gave me, the veil still tangled somewhere in the sheets like a joke we had decided to keep.

---

The bathroom was marble and gold taps and a mirror that had seen us painted for the first frame of the day. She bent me over the sink with the water running for no reason except noise, and she pushed the strap back into my cunt from behind while I watched my own face go slack. I was her wife in the glass. She was the woman who had paid and then asked, and I reached back to hold her hip so she would not mistake my silence for anything but wanting.

We did not stay in the bathroom. She wanted the window, and I wanted it too, the both of us hungry to be seen as married now that the crew was gone. The curtains were only half open. Kraków was a scatter of lamps and wet pavement below, autumn in the air, and she put my palms on the glass and fucked me standing, the strap sliding in easy because I was ruined and open and still asking. Anyone on the opposite roof, anyone in a high window across the street, could have seen a bride without a dress being taken by another woman in a harness, and the thought made my cunt clench around her until she cursed against my neck.

“They can look,” Ania said. “Let them see I kept you.”

“Let them,” I said, and I pushed back onto the strap because I wanted the city to have that much of the truth. I came on the glass with her hand on my clit and her mouth at my ear saying wife, wife, as if she could stitch the word into me before the night ran out. Afterward she turned me and kissed me in front of that half open curtain, both of us shaking, and I hummed a village song under my breath without meaning to, the one I only ever used when I wanted to be asked to stay and could not ask in words.

She heard it. She did not ask me to stay past the morning. She kissed the corner of my mouth as if the song were pretty and not a request.

---

Dawn came thin and grey over the roofs, the kind of Kraków morning that makes the river look like steel. Ania had a flight. She said so while she fastened her ordinary clothes, the gown already zipped into a bag that would go in a car I would not ride in. The bed still looked like a set. I sat in the sheet with the veil in my lap like a leftover prop, and I called her wife in my head when she leaned down to kiss me, a last kiss that tasted of toothpaste and ending.

“The suite is yours until ten,” she said. “You were perfect.”

Perfect was a word for a booking. I smiled anyway, genuine enough, because I had wanted the night and I had gotten it, and because I would not package the part of me that had believed her for a few hours. She closed the suite door with the same soft click she had used to send the crew away, and I sat in the wreck of the photographed bed and kept the word wife behind my teeth until the quiet made it foolish.

The vows had been a booking. I still wanted a room that did not wrap at checkout. I packed the dress they would collect, put on my own coat, and took a last-minute bed in a Warsaw student dorm, humming nothing on the train, still hungry to be chosen for a morning that did not have a flight attached.