The Straight Girl Tax — Bonus Chapter

The Move-In Audit
by Blair Lennox

⚠️ Spoiler warning: This scene takes place one month after the epilogue of The Straight Girl Tax. Read the book first for maximum impact. This scene is explicit, graphic, and significantly hotter than the main book. You have been warned.

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The Move-In Audit

A Straight Girl Tax Bonus Scene. Set one month after the epilogue. Fia has moved in.

The last box was labeled MISCELLANEOUS (SUSPICIOUS) in Aster’s handwriting.

I set it on the kitchen island of what was now—as of forty-five minutes ago, when I’d surrendered my cottage keys to the new tenant and driven across Port Argent with my car packed like a tetris game—our condominium. Not Aster’s condominium with a drawer for me. Ours. With closet space negotiated by square footage and a shared grocery list maintained in a spreadsheet that had its own tab structure and a bathroom arrangement so precisely documented that it included designated shelf zones, a toothbrush holder assignment chart, and—because this was Aster—a rotation schedule for who restocked the hand soap.

I loved her so much it was probably a medical condition.

“Suspicious how?” I asked, peeling the tape on the box.

Aster appeared in the kitchen doorway. She was wearing joggers, a black tank top, and her glasses, and her hair was pulled back in the low ponytail that meant she’d been organizing at speed.

“Suspicious because the contents don’t correspond to any labeled category,” she said. “I found swimwear samples mixed with tax documents mixed with a bottle of wine I’m fairly certain is from 2019 mixed with what appears to be a very creative use of a measuring tape.”

“That’s my emergency kit.”

“Your emergency kit contains a measuring tape and a 2019 Merlot.”

“The measuring tape has sentimental value. It’s from our first trade show booth.”

“And the wine?”

“Was supposed to be a gift for your birthday three years ago. I chickened out because giving you wine felt too romantic and I wasn’t ready to explain why I’d memorized your preferred vintage.”

She took the bottle from the box. Read the label. “This is a 2019 Willamette Valley Pinot. Not a Merlot.”

“I know the difference between Pinot and Merlot.”

“You labeled the box wrong.”

“I labeled the box suspicious. The wine’s identity was not the suspicious part.”

“I need to show you something,” she said, taking my hand and leading me to the bedroom.

The drawer was gone.

Not the physical drawer—it was still there, cedar-lined, third from the top. But it was empty. My toothbrush, my face wash, the antihistamines, the charger—all of it had been redistributed. The toothbrush was in the holder next to hers. The face wash was on my designated bathroom shelf. The charger was plugged in on my nightstand—my nightstand, the right side, officially mine.

“You emptied the drawer,” I said.

“You don’t need a guest drawer anymore. You live here.”

“What’s in it now?”

I pulled the drawer open. Inside: the original damp receipt from the summer market. A photograph of us at the first trade show. The gold stud earrings she’d worn at the Newport launch. A copy of the seventeen-clause fake-dating contract. And a note in her handwriting: This drawer used to hold the things you left behind. Now it holds the things we keep.

“Aster—”

“Don’t cry. I have an agenda.”

“You have an agenda for my emotional response to a drawer?”

“I have an agenda for this evening, and your emotional response is approximately four minutes ahead of the schedule. If you cry now, we lose the window between the unpacking phase and the phase where I planned to—” She stopped. Took off her glasses. Cleaned them with the cloth from the nightstand.

“Where you planned to what?” I asked.

“Conduct a comprehensive audit of every surface in this apartment to determine which ones are structurally suitable for the activities I’ve been imagining since you signed the lease transfer.”

“You want to christen the apartment.”

“I want to conduct a systematic review of our shared living space. The methodology involves removing your clothes, testing load-bearing capacity, and generating data on acoustic properties across multiple rooms.”

“That is the hottest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Starting here.” She pushed me gently onto the bed. Our bed. She pulled my shirt over my head. Unclasped my bra. Pushed me flat and straddled my hips, and the weight of her—lean, warm, the cycling body I’d been learning for a year—settled over me like a thesis statement.

“Room one,” she said. “Bedroom. Baseline assessment.”

She kissed me deep and slow and unhurried. Her mouth moved down my neck, my collarbone. She took my nipple between her teeth—gentle, then firm, the exact pressure that made my back arch—and her hand slid down my stomach and into my jeans without unfastening them, her fingers finding me through the denim, pressing the seam against my clit with a precision that should have been illegal.

“Aster—take them off—”

“The audit requires a thorough baseline. Baseline includes clothed response metrics.”

“I will kill you.”

“Your threat is noted and disregarded.”

She worked me through the denim until I was grinding against her hand, and then she unzipped me, pulled my jeans and underwear off in one efficient motion, and put her mouth between my legs with the focused, unhurried attention of a woman who had all evening and intended to use it.

She brought me to orgasm with her tongue—flat, firm, circling my clit with the rhythm I’d once called rhythmically optimal—and I came gripping the headboard of our bed and saying her name into the pillow that was now officially mine.

“Baseline established,” she said. “Acoustic assessment: excellent. The walls absorb mid-range frequencies. Your neighbors will hear the high notes.”

“I hate you.”

“You love me. It’s in the lease.”

She pulled me up. We moved to the hallway.

“Room two,” she said, pressing me against the wall outside the bathroom. “Transit corridor. Load-bearing assessment.”

She dropped to her knees on the hardwood. I braced my hands against the walls—the narrow hallway just wide enough for my arms to span it—and she lifted my thigh over her shoulder and put her mouth on me, and the angle was different, deeper, her tongue reaching places that the bed position hadn’t accessed.

I came standing up, and the orgasm buckled my knees. She caught me. Held me against the wall. Kissed the inside of my thigh.

“Structural integrity confirmed,” she murmured. “The walls hold. Your knees do not.”

We made it to the kitchen.

“Room three.” She lifted me onto the island countertop—the same counter where I’d set the MISCELLANEOUS (SUSPICIOUS) box, where the Pinot I’d been too afraid to give her sat three feet away. “Primary common area. Surface temperature and utility assessment.”

The granite was cold against my bare skin. The contrast—cold stone, hot hands—sent a shiver through me.

“Too cold?” she asked.

“Perfect.”

She stood between my legs and reached for the drawer beside the stove.

“You put a vibrator in the kitchen drawer?”

“I redistributed the household assets for optimal accessibility. Every room now has a designated—”

“You put sex toys in every room of the apartment.”

“I put one toy in each common area, stored in a hygienic container, labeled PERSONAL and filed behind the—”

“You labeled them.”

“I’m a thorough professional, Fia.”

She used the vibrator on me while I sat on the kitchen counter with my legs wrapped around her waist and her mouth on my breast and the Pinot watching from three feet away. The setting was higher than my usual preference—she was testing, pushing—and the intensity built faster than I expected.

“My findings are that I’m going to come on our kitchen counter and you’re going to have to sanitize it and you’re going to enjoy sanitizing it because you’re the kind of woman who derives satisfaction from cleaning surfaces you’ve defiled.”

“Accurate assessment.”

I came hard, my hands gripping the edge of the counter, my heels digging into her lower back, a sound that the neighbors were definitely going to have opinions about.

“Room four,” I said. “My turn.”

I walked her backward to the living room. Pushed her onto the couch—our couch, the one where we’d conducted the relationship audit, where we’d held hands and not had sex and agreed that the honesty was more intimate than the orgasms.

I undressed her. Slowly. The tank top over her head. The joggers down her legs. The underwear I pulled off with my teeth because I could, because I lived here now, because no one was going anywhere.

I knelt between her legs on the floor where we’d once named the patterns that had almost destroyed us, and I put my mouth on the woman I loved and showed her what unconditional felt like when it was physical.

She came with her hand fisted in my hair and the other gripping the cushion and a sound so raw, so unmanaged, so completely outside Aster Bly’s composure that I would remember it at unpredictable intervals for the rest of my life.

I climbed into her lap. She was still shaking. I reached behind the couch cushion and produced the toy I’d hidden there an hour ago.

“You pre-staged the couch,” she said.

“I learned from the best. I labeled it PERSONAL and filed it behind the throw pillows.”

We used the toy together—me on her lap, her hand between us, the vibrator pressed between our bodies as we moved against each other. Face to face. Eyes open. Foreheads pressed together, breathing each other’s air. Her hand on my hip and my hand on hers and the toy humming between us like a shared frequency.

She came first. I followed thirty seconds later. The orgasms overlapped—her body tightening under mine as mine clenched—and the sound we made together was not two separate sounds but one.

We stayed on the couch. Breathing. Holding. The harbor light coming through the windows she never fully closed.

“Assessment complete,” Aster said.

“Findings?”

“Every surface in this apartment is suitable. The kitchen counter requires immediate sanitization. The hallway wall is load-bearing. The couch remains the most emotionally significant location in the unit.”

“Because of the audit?”

“Because it’s where you told me the truth. And because tonight you came on it and said my name like it was the only word you knew.”

I pressed my face into her neck. “Welcome home,” she said.

“I’ve been home for a while,” I said. “The lease is just catching up.”

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