Permanent Ink — The Elevator Scene
An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Lease, Lies & Lesbian Alibis
by Aurora North
⚠️ This scene takes place immediately after the epilogue of Lease, Lies & Lesbian Alibis. Contains major spoilers and very explicit sexual content. Reader discretion is enthusiastically advised.
Permanent Ink
The elevator doors closed and Sloane’s mouth was on mine before the car started moving.
Not a gentle kiss. Not the sweet, celebratory press of lips that would have been appropriate for two women who had just left a rooftop party thrown by their neighbors and were riding an elevator in a building they now partly co-owned. This was the other kind — the kind that started with her hand fisting in my hair at the roots and her body pressing mine against the elevator wall and her thigh sliding between my legs before I’d finished drawing my next breath.
Her mouth was hot and deliberate. She kissed me the way she did everything — with thorough, devastating focus — and her tongue swept against mine and I tasted champagne and the dark, particular taste underneath that was just Sloane, and I made a sound against her mouth that in any other context I’d have been embarrassed by.
“Sloane — the elevator —”
“I don’t care.”
“Someone could —”
“I don’t care.” Her mouth moved to my neck and the argument I was constructing disassembled itself into raw material. Her teeth grazed the spot below my ear — the spot she’d found in the first week and had been weaponizing ever since — and then she bit down. Not hard. Hard enough. The precise pressure that made my brain short-circuit and my hips roll against her thigh on instinct, seeking friction, seeking her, seeking the specific devastation that only Sloane Mercer could deliver in a four-by-six-foot metal box.
Her thigh pressed higher between mine and the pressure hit exactly where I needed it. I gasped, my head falling back against the elevator wall, and she took advantage — her mouth on my exposed throat, her lips dragging down the tendon, her tongue tracing my collarbone while her thigh rocked against me in a slow, deliberate grind that was going to make me come in an elevator if she didn’t stop.
“You said ‘ours,’” I managed, my voice wrecked. “In the elevator. Downstairs. You said ours.”
She pulled back enough to look at me. Her eyes were dark, her hair falling loose around her face, her lips swollen and wet. The reading glasses were in her blazer pocket — I could see the outline of them against the fabric — and the knowledge that she’d been wearing them at the party, casually, publicly, without hiding behind contacts, did something to my chest that was dangerously close to cardiac.
“I said ours,” she confirmed. Her hand was still in my hair, her grip firm at the roots, tilting my head back so she could look down at me with that focused, patient, annihilating attention that had been undoing me since the first time she’d kissed me on a rooftop. “I meant it. The apartment. The life. You.”
“That’s — you can’t just say things like that and also have your thigh between my legs, it’s a sensory conflict —”
“I can do both.” She pressed her thigh higher. Ground it against me, slow and firm, and I felt the friction through the thin fabric of my dress and my underwear, the pressure against my clit making my vision blur. “I’m very good at multitasking.”
The elevator reached the fourth floor. The doors opened. Neither of us moved.
“Inside,” Sloane said. Not a suggestion.
She took my hand and walked me to my door — our door, the door that was about to officially become ours — and I was acutely aware of how wet I already was, how the grinding in the elevator had left me swollen and aching, how every step made me feel the slickness between my thighs. Sloane unlocked the door one-handed because her other hand was on my hip, her thumb tracing circles through my dress that I could feel in my spine.
We made it three steps inside.
She pressed me against the hallway wall — the same wall where my grandmother’s photographs hung, which I would think about later and find both mortifying and somehow perfect — and kissed me with the full, unhurried thoroughness of a woman who had nowhere else to be and no intention of being efficient about it.
Her hands moved over me — my waist, my ribs, the sides of my breasts through the dress. She cupped me through the fabric, her thumbs finding my nipples, already hard, and the sensation of her hands on me through the thin blue material made me arch into her palms.
“I want to try something,” she murmured against my mouth.
“Anything. Whatever. Yes.”
“I haven’t told you what it is.”
“My answer was preloaded. Whatever you want, the answer is yes.”
The sound she made — low, warm, something between a laugh and a groan — vibrated against my throat where she’d pressed her lips. “I want you against this wall. Standing. Your dress on.”
My breath caught. “Why the dress on?”
“Because you look devastating in it. Because I’ve been thinking about sliding my hand under it since you walked onto that rooftop three hours ago. Because I want to feel you come with my fingers inside you and your dress bunched around your waist and your back against this wall.” She said it the way she said everything — precise, measured, each word chosen — and the clinical delivery of something so filthy made my knees buckle. “And because I’m done thinking about it.”
She dropped to her knees.
Sloane Mercer — former managing director, former Ice Queen, the woman who had once been incapable of kneeling for anyone — knelt on my hallway floor in her tailored blazer and looked up at me with those dark, steady eyes, and the image was so devastatingly familiar and so perpetually new that my hands shook when I braced them against the wall behind me.
She slid her hands up my thighs, under the dress, slowly. Her palms were warm against my skin, her fingertips trailing the inside of my thighs in a featherlight drag that made my muscles clench. She reached the waistband of my underwear and hooked her fingers in the elastic.
“These are soaked,” she said. Factual. Observational. As if she were noting a data point. Her fingers traced the wet patch through the fabric and I whimpered.
“That’s your fault. The elevator. Your — your thigh —”
“I know.” She pulled them down in one smooth motion and I stepped out of them. She folded them once — because she was Sloane, because even in the middle of stripping me in a hallway she maintained an organizational instinct — and set them on the floor beside her knee. I would have laughed if I wasn’t vibrating.
She pushed my dress up. Gathered the fabric at my waist, her hands deliberate, and the cool air of the apartment hit my bare skin and I shivered. She looked at me — exposed, bare from the waist down, my back against the wall, my chest heaving — and her eyes went darker. That particular shade of want that I’d learned to read over months of sharing her bed, the shade that meant she was about to take her time and I was going to lose my mind.
“Sloane, please —”
“I’ve got you.” The phrase that had become our shorthand, our call-and-response. The two words that meant you’re safe and I’m here and whatever comes next, we face it together.
She pressed her mouth to the inside of my thigh. A slow, open kiss, her tongue dragging against the sensitive skin, and my knees nearly gave out. She gripped my hips, both hands, holding me against the wall with the controlled strength I’d learned was always there beneath the composure. Holding me up because she knew I wasn’t going to be able to do it myself.
She kissed higher. The crease where my thigh met my hip. My lower stomach, nuzzling the soft skin below my navel. She was close — so close I could feel her breath against me, warm and rhythmic — and the anticipation was a kind of torture.
“You’re trembling,” she murmured against my skin.
“Because you’re doing that thing where you take your time and I — god, Sloane, please just —”
She put her mouth on me.
The first stroke of her tongue was long, flat, root to tip, and my entire body seized. I cried out — loud, the sound bouncing off the hallway walls — and my hand flew to her hair, gripping the dark strands, pulling without meaning to. She groaned against me and the vibration of her voice against my clit sent a jolt through my pelvis that made my hips buck.
She held me still. Her fingers dug into my hip bones, pinning me to the wall, and she worked me with her mouth — thorough, devastating, reading my body the way she read building plans, every reaction cataloged and responded to. She alternated between broad, slow strokes that made me moan and tight, focused circles around my clit that made me gasp her name like a curse.
“God — Sloane — right there — don’t stop —”
She didn’t stop. She doubled down, her tongue relentless, her lips closing around my clit and sucking gently, and the sensation was so intense I slammed my palm flat against the wall behind me because I needed something solid to hold onto.
Then she slid one hand from my hip down between my thighs. Her fingers found my entrance — swollen, drenched, clenching around nothing — and she circled the opening once, twice, teasing, coating her fingers.
“Inside,” I begged. “Please. I need your fingers inside me.”
“Ask me properly.” Her voice against my skin, low and sure, carrying that particular authority that had nothing to do with boardrooms and everything to do with the way she commanded my body. The soft dominance that wasn’t performance but nature — a woman who knew what she wanted and what I wanted and took pleasure in the negotiation between the two.
“Please, Sloane. Please fuck me. I’m so wet for you, I need — I need you inside me, I can’t —”
“Good girl.”
She slid two fingers into me and I cried out so loud Mrs. Petrov probably heard it on the sixth floor. She filled me completely, her long fingers reaching deep, curling forward against the spot that made my vision white out. Her mouth stayed on my clit — relentless, precise — and her fingers set a rhythm, thrusting in and out, curling on each stroke, and the dual sensation was so overwhelming that my legs gave out.
She caught my weight. Held me up with her free hand gripping my hip, her fingers still working inside me, her mouth never stopping. I was pinned between the wall and her body, my weight held by her hand and the strength of her arm, and the helplessness of it — the knowledge that I was completely at her mercy, held up by her grip and taken apart by her mouth — made everything tighter, hotter, closer.
She slid one hand from my hip to my thigh, lifted my leg over her shoulder, and the angle changed. Her fingers went deeper. Her tongue found a new angle. I sobbed her name.
“Look at me,” she said. Our phrase. Our anchor. The words that meant don’t hide, don’t perform, be here with me.
I looked down.
She was on her knees on my hallway floor, her chin glistening, her dark eyes locked on mine, her fingers buried inside me to the knuckle, my thigh draped over her shoulder. She looked like worship. She looked like devotion wearing a tailored blazer. She looked like the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and she was looking back at me with an expression that said I will kneel on this floor for you every day of my life and never once consider it a concession.
She curled her fingers hard. Sucked my clit into her mouth. Said “come for me” against my skin in that low, commanding voice.
I shattered.
The orgasm hit like a demolition — not a wave but a wall, every muscle in my body seizing at once. I came with her name fracturing into syllables, my hand in her hair pulling hard enough that she groaned against me, my body convulsing so intensely that only her grip on my hip and the wall against my back kept me vertical. She worked me through it — her fingers slowing but not stopping, her tongue gentling to soft, flat strokes that extended every aftershock — until I was gasping and boneless and my leg slipped off her shoulder and I started sliding down the wall toward the floor.
She caught me. Of course she caught me. She always caught me.
We ended up on the hallway floor, tangled together, her blazer half-off and my dress bunched around my waist and Pigeon observing us from the kitchen doorway with the expression of a cat who had witnessed this exact scene enough times to be profoundly bored by it.
“That was —” I started.
“Mm.”
“I literally cannot feel my legs.”
“That was the objective.”
“Your objectives are extremely aggressive.”
She kissed my temple. The gesture that meant I’m here and you’re safe and that was only the beginning.
I let my heart rate settle for approximately thirty seconds. Then I pushed myself up on shaking arms, rolled onto her, and pinned her shoulders against the hallway floor.
“Your turn,” I said.
“The bedroom is ten feet away.”
“Too far.”
“Maeve, the floor —”
“You just had me pinned against a wall with your tongue inside me. You don’t get to be precious about the floor.”
The laugh that escaped her was startled, genuine, the sound I’d been collecting since the first time I’d pulled one out of her in a paint-stained studio. I caught it with my mouth, kissing the laughter off her lips, and my hands went to her trousers.
I undressed Sloane Mercer on a hallway floor with the focused intensity of a woman who had a point to prove. Button. Zipper. I tugged the trousers down and she lifted her hips to help, still half-laughing, and I stripped her from the waist down and pushed her blazer off her shoulders and unbuttoned her shirt and spread it open and looked at her.
She was devastating. She was always devastating — long and lean, dark skin over defined muscle, the body of a woman who had played competitive tennis and maintained the discipline long after the sport ended. But tonight, lying on my hallway floor with her hair loose and her shirt open and her eyes looking up at me with that mixture of vulnerability and want that she’d spent forty-two years hiding from the world — tonight she was something beyond devastating. She was mine.
I settled between her thighs and looked up at her the way she’d looked up at me — steady, focused, present.
“I love you,” I said, because the timing was terrible and the location was absurd and the cat was watching and none of it mattered. “I love you, and I’m about to make you scream loud enough that Mrs. Brennan files another noise complaint.”
“I love you too,” she said, her voice already rougher. “Now stop talking and —”
I put my mouth on her.
She was wet. Soaked, actually — going down on me had done this to her, the taste of me and the sounds I’d made and the power of holding me up against a wall, and I could feel the evidence of it against my lips, on my tongue, hot and slick and salt-sweet. The taste of Sloane aroused was something I’d never get used to, something that triggered a primal response in my body every single time.
She sucked in a breath through her teeth when my tongue found her clit. Her hand landed in my hair — not pulling, holding, her fingers curling around my curls, gripping just tight enough to ground herself.
I took my time. She deserved time. She deserved a woman who paid attention to every shiver, every catch in her breathing, every micro-movement of her hips. I’d spent months learning the map of Sloane Mercer’s pleasure, and I used every landmark now — the spot just below her clit that made her gasp, the broad flat strokes that made her hips lift, the specific rhythm, steady and relentless, that built her orgasms like structures, layer by layer, until the architecture couldn’t hold and the whole thing came down.
“Mae —” My name, broken. Her head dropped back against the hardwood. Her hand tightened in my hair. “Mae, that’s — right there —”
I slid two fingers inside her without breaking the rhythm of my tongue and she moaned — a full, unguarded sound that filled the hallway, bounced off the ceiling, echoed through the apartment that was about to become ours. I curled my fingers and stroked the front wall, finding the rough patch of tissue that made her body arch off the floor like she’d been electrified.
“Fuck — Maeve —”
Sloane Mercer, who used profanity approximately twice a year, said fuck on my hallway floor with my fingers inside her, and the sound of it — the composure cracking, the controlled vocabulary shattering under physical pressure — was the hottest thing I’d ever heard.
I increased my pace. Deeper thrusts, harder curls, my tongue working her clit in tight, focused circles. She was shaking now — fine tremors running through her thighs, her abdominal muscles clenching, her breathing fragmenting into short, sharp gasps that told me she was close.
“Look at me,” I said, lifting my head just enough to meet her eyes. “I want to watch you.”
She looked down at me. Her eyes were wet, her face flushed, her lips parted. She looked completely, beautifully wrecked — every wall down, every defense dissolved, nothing left but the woman beneath the suits and the strategy and the twenty years of practiced composure.
“Let go,” I whispered against her. “I’ve got you.”
She came with a sound that was everything I’d spent months earning the right to hear — loud, broken, free. Not the quiet, controlled release of the early days. Not the careful, muffled sounds pressed into pillows and shoulders. A full, raw cry that tore out of her chest and filled every room in the apartment, her body arching off the floor, her thighs clamping around my head, her hand in my hair gripping so hard my scalp burned, her inner walls clenching around my fingers in rhythmic pulses I could feel in my own body.
I held on. Slowed my tongue, gentled my fingers, and brought her down in spirals — long, slow strokes that drew out the aftershocks until her body stopped seizing and her breathing began the slow process of returning to something resembling normal.
I kissed her thigh. Her hip. The soft skin of her stomach. I crawled up her body, pressing my mouth to every part of her I passed — her ribs, the curve of her breast, her sternum, the hollow of her throat where her pulse was hammering. She gathered me against her, arms wrapping tight, and we lay there on the hallway floor — half-dressed, spent, grinning like idiots — while the fairy lights from the living room cast warm patterns across the ceiling.
Pigeon, having decided the show was over, jumped onto the radiator and went to sleep.
“We should probably move to the bed,” Sloane said. Her voice was wrecked. Hoarse. The morning-voice I loved, manufactured by orgasm instead of sleep.
“The bed is for sleeping. The hallway is for life-changing sex. It’s an allocation issue.”
“You’re going to hurt your back on this floor.”
“My back is fine. My back has never been better. My back just had the best experience of its structural life.”
She laughed. Pulled me closer. Kissed my forehead — the gesture that had started as performance and become the truest thing either of us did.
“I meant what I said,” she murmured against my hair. “In the elevator. Ours.”
“I know.”
“I want to wake up here every morning. I want to make you coffee in that kitchen and argue about your paintbrush organization and fall asleep listening to you talk to the tomatoes. I want this apartment. With you. Permanently.”
“Sloane Mercer.” I propped myself up on one elbow and looked down at her — naked on the hallway floor, hair fanned across the hardwood, the Ice Queen melted into something warm and real and entirely mine. “Are you proposing we move in together while lying naked on the floor?”
“I’m proposing we stop pretending we don’t already live together.” She reached up and traced the line of my jaw. “Your toothbrush has been in my bathroom for four months. I have a drawer. Pigeon has a second litter box upstairs. Separate apartments is a fiction we’re maintaining for the benefit of our respective mail carriers.”
“Okay,” I said. “But we live in this apartment. The one with the mural.”
“The apartment with the mural has one bedroom and a kitchen the size of a generous closet.”
“The apartment with the mural has a fire-escape garden and fairy lights and a grandmother’s photographs on the wall we just had sex against. Some things are more important than square footage.”
“Agreed.” She pulled me down and kissed me — slow, deep, tasting herself on my lips and not caring. “Ours.”
“Ours.”
We did eventually make it to the bed. Sloane carried me — because she could and because she liked to and because I liked being carried by a woman who had once been afraid to touch me without a contractual framework and who now picked me up like I weighed nothing and deposited me on sheets that smelled like both of us.
In bed, she pulled me against her — my back to her chest, her arm around my waist, her face buried in my hair. The big spoon. The protector who had learned that protection meant showing up, not managing.
“No more alibis,” I murmured, already half-asleep.
“No more alibis,” she agreed.
Her arm tightened around me. Her lips pressed against the back of my neck.
Permanent ink.
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