Clause 6.5
A Bonus Scene from The Lesbian Clause
by Aurora North
This scene takes place after the epilogue of The Lesbian Clause. It contains explicit sexual content and is intended for readers 18+.
The contract is gone but the language stays.
It has been four months since we deleted the clause, three months since I moved into Vera’s apartment with a greyhound and too many books arranged by art movement, and two months since I stopped being surprised every morning by the presence of a woman in my bed who reaches for me before she reaches for composure.
The language stays because the language is ours. We built it in margin notes and sub-clauses and the specific, charged vocabulary of two women who fell in love while drafting terms and conditions, and even now — with the contract gone and the arrangement dissolved and the only document governing our relationship a shared grocery list on the refrigerator — we speak it.
“Clause three,” Vera says from the kitchen doorway.
She is wearing my rowing T-shirt and nothing else. Her hair is loose and tangled and she has a coffee mug in one hand and her phone in the other and she is looking at me with the specific expression that means she wants something and has decided to be strategic about it.
“There is no clause three.”
“I’m drafting a new one.”
“At 7 AM on a Saturday?”
“The best contracts are negotiated early. Less resistance.” She takes a sip of coffee. “Clause three: when one party wakes the other party by getting out of bed to make coffee instead of staying where she belongs, the offended party is entitled to compensatory measures.”
“Compensatory measures.”
“Of the physical variety.”
“That’s not how contracts work, Ashford.”
“It’s how our contracts work.” She sets the coffee down on my nightstand, crawls onto the bed, and straddles my hips with the decisive authority of a woman who has spent her entire career making rooms cooperate and has decided this morning that the room is me. “Counter-proposal?”
“I haven’t seen the terms.”
“The terms are: I missed you. You were gone for nine minutes. I counted. And now I want you to touch me the way you touched me the first time, on your couch, when I told you I wanted you and you gave me the choice and I chose you, and I have been choosing you every day since, and I would like to physically renegotiate that choice in a way that involves fewer clothes and more of your mouth.”
I stare at her. She stares at me. Docket, who has been observing from his bed in the corner with the resigned patience of a creature who has seen this negotiation approximately one hundred and forty times, sighs and puts his paw over his eyes.
“Motion accepted,” I say, and pull her down.
The kiss is a Saturday-morning kiss — slow, coffee-warm, tasting like the specific domestic chemistry of two women who have been doing this long enough that the kissing has become a language with its own grammar. I know the syntax of Vera’s mouth. The way she opens when my hand finds the back of her neck. The sound she makes — low, a vibration rather than a vocalization — when my tongue slides against hers. The specific cadence of her breathing when she shifts from kissing me for pleasure to kissing me for purpose.
She shifts. The breathing changes. The purpose arrives.
I pull the T-shirt over her head. My T-shirt, on her body — the specific, possessive satisfaction of undressing a woman who is wearing your clothes never diminishes, and the sight of Vera Ashford bare-chested in the morning light, her dark-blonde hair falling across her shoulders and her blue-gray eyes darkening with want, is a view I will never tire of cataloging.
“You’re staring,” she says.
“I’m composing.”
“Compose faster. I have needs.”
I flip her. She lands on her back with a huff that’s half laugh and half gasp, and I settle above her — my weight braced, my hips between her thighs, my mouth finding the spot below her ear that makes her eyes close every time and this time is no exception.
“Tell me what you want,” I murmur against her skin. We do this now — the asking, the answering, the verbal architecture of desire that we built from the first night when she said I want your hands on me and I said say it like you mean it and she said it and meant it and the meaning has never stopped.
“I want your mouth. Everywhere. Starting here” — she guides my head to her throat — “and ending wherever you decide, because your decisions in this area have been consistently excellent and I see no reason to micromanage.”
“Did you just give me a performance review?”
“Exceeds expectations. Now stop talking.”
I stop talking. I start at her throat and I work down with the specific, unhurried attention she asked for and the specific, devastating patience that has become my signature. Vera Ashford spent thirty-one years performing. When I touch her, I make sure she has nothing to perform. I make sure the only thing her body can do is feel.
My mouth travels the landscape I have memorized and continue to rediscover. The dip of her collarbone. The curve of her breasts — I spend longer here than strictly necessary because the sounds she makes when my tongue circles her nipple and my thumb works the other are sounds I would record and play on a loop if that weren’t an extremely specific kind of unhinged. Her ribs. Her stomach, which contracts under my lips with the same involuntary response as the first time in the gym when I pressed two fingers against her lower abs and she forgot how to deadlift.
“I still think about the gym,” she says above me. Her voice has gone rough. Her hand is in my hair. “Your hand on my stomach. Your mouth next to my ear. I lost the ability to perform a basic hinge because you touched me through a tank top. I went home and couldn’t sleep because I could still feel your fingerprints on my skin.”
“I know. You told me.”
“I never told you the rest. I went home and I lay in my bed and I pressed my own hand against my stomach where yours had been and I thought about what it would feel like if your hand went lower.” Her hips shift under me. “That was the first time I touched myself thinking about a woman. Thinking about you. And I came so fast it scared me.”
The confession — new, four months in, something she kept even from the version of us that shares a grocery list and a dog — hits me between the ribs. I press my forehead against her stomach and breathe.
“You’re telling me this now?”
“I’m telling you this now because your mouth is three inches from where I wanted your hand that night, and I want you to know that I’ve been wanting this for longer than I’ve had words for it.”
I drag my teeth lightly along the line of her hip. She shudders. The underwear — pale blue cotton, the practical prettiness she brings to everything — is already damp when I press my mouth against the fabric, and the sound she makes when she feels my breath through the cotton is a word that isn’t a word. My name, maybe. Or God’s. The distinction has collapsed.
I pull the underwear down her thighs. She lifts her hips to help and the motion is graceful and urgent and the urgency is what I want — not the composed Vera, not the strategic Vera, the version that arches into my hands with the specific, unguarded hunger of a woman who has stopped managing her desire and started living inside it.
I settle between her thighs. Look up at her. She’s propped on her elbows, hair a mess, cheeks flushed, eyes bright and steady on mine. The look on her face is not the composed Vera-face or the professional Vera-face. It’s the underneath face. The one from the kitchen photograph. The one that says I live here now, in this body, in this life, and I am not performing for anyone.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she says.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m art.”
“You are art. You’re my best work.”
“I’m your only work. You photograph buildings and dogs.”
“Buildings, dogs, and you. In order of increasing beauty.”
“The dog is more photogenic.”
“The dog doesn’t do this.”
I lower my mouth and press my tongue flat against her clit and the sound she makes confirms that Docket, photogenic though he may be, does not in fact do this.
I take my time. I always take my time with Vera because the patience is the gift — not the orgasm but the attention that precedes it, the specific message of I am here, I am not rushing, your body is worth the full duration of my focus. My tongue traces her clit with the slow, deliberate rhythm I’ve learned makes her thighs shake, and they do, trembling against my temples, and my hands hold her hips steady and her hand finds my hair and her fingers twist into the strands and the tug is not gentle and I do not want it to be gentle.
“Indigo — right there — God, right —”
I add two fingers. Sliding inside her, curling upward, finding the spot that makes her voice break on the second syllable of my name. The dual stimulation — my mouth on her clit, my fingers inside her, the combined attention of a woman who is fluent in this body and is composing a sentence she intends to finish — builds her in the way I’ve learned to recognize: the gathering tension in her thighs, the rising pitch of her breathing, the specific stillness right before the crest where her whole body holds and holds and holds —
She comes with both hands in my hair and my name filling the room and her body arching off the mattress in the full, powerful, unperformed release that I have spent months earning and will spend years protecting. The orgasm rolls through her in waves and I hold her through every one, my mouth and my hands steady, my body pressed to hers, until the waves become aftershocks and the aftershocks become trembling and the trembling becomes the slow, stunned breathing of a woman coming back to herself.
I don’t move. I stay between her thighs and I press soft, open-mouthed kisses against her inner thigh while she comes down, and I feel her hand in my hair go from gripping to stroking, the transition from urgency to tenderness that is my favorite moment in any encounter — the part where her body remembers it’s safe and her hands remember they’re gentle and the woman I love returns from wherever pleasure takes her and finds me waiting.
“Get up here,” she says. Hoarse. Wrecked.
I crawl back up her body. She pulls me down and kisses me, open and wet, tasting herself on my mouth. The kiss is long and thorough and she makes a sound against my lips that communicates satisfaction and hunger simultaneously, which is the specific paradox of Vera Ashford in bed — always sated and always wanting more, a woman whose appetite was suppressed for thirty-one years and has been making up for lost time with the committed intensity of someone who will never diet again.
“Your turn,” she says. “On your back. Now.”
“That sounded like a clause.”
“Clause 6.5: mandatory reciprocity. Non-negotiable.”
I roll onto my back. Vera slides on top of me — confident, unhesitating, the woman who five months ago had never been with a woman and is now the most enthusiastically dedicated student of my body that any educational institution has ever produced. She didn’t let me teach her. She said “I’ll figure it out” with the competitive focus of a woman who has never accepted a B+ in anything, and then she figured it out with a thoroughness that suggests she treats her partner’s orgasm as a deliverable with a deadline of whenever I damn well decide.
She starts at my mouth. Kisses me while her hands work my tank top up and over my head. Her palms find my breasts and she cups them with the specific possessive tenderness of a woman who once told me, very seriously, at two in the morning, that she had spent the first three weeks of knowing me staring at my chest in meetings and classifying the staring as “professional assessment of creative presentation posture,” which is the most Vera Ashford sentence ever constructed and made me laugh so hard I woke up Docket.
Her mouth replaces her hands. She sucks my nipple into her mouth and rolls her tongue over it while her thumb circles the other, and the dual attention makes my back arch and my hands fist in the sheets because Vera Ashford’s strategic rigor, applied to the specific project of making me incoherent, is a force of nature that no org chart can contain.
She moves lower. Kisses down my ribs, pausing at the tattoo — she always pauses at the tattoo, tracing the branches with her tongue, learning the story of the ink the way she learns everything, with attention and specificity and the quiet conviction that understanding is its own form of love.
She reaches the waistband of my boxers and looks up at me. The look. Four months in and the look still undoes me — Vera Ashford between my thighs, blue-gray eyes locked on mine, her lower lip swollen from kissing, her cheeks flushed, her hair falling forward. The look says: I chose this. I choose you. Watch me.
She pulls my boxers down. Settles between my legs. Her breath against my inner thigh makes every nerve ending in my body file a formal complaint about the delay.
“I’ve been thinking about this since I woke up,” she says. Her fingers trail the crease where my leg meets my hip. “You were asleep and your arm was across my waist and I thought about waking you up exactly like this but the coffee was closer and I made a tactical error that I intend to correct.”
“Consider it corrected,” I say, except my voice breaks on the last syllable because she’s lowered her mouth and the first stroke of her tongue turns the sentence into rubble.
She is good at this. She was always going to be good at this because Vera Ashford does not do anything she isn’t going to excel at, and she has excelled at this with the committed intensity of a woman who analyzed the data, identified the key performance indicators, and optimized her approach until the results are —
Her tongue finds the exact spot. The exact pressure. The exact rhythm that I’ve come to associate with Saturday mornings and Tuesday nights and the ordinary, extraordinary reality of being loved by a woman who chose me with her whole life and shows up for the choosing every day.
She adds her fingers. Two, sliding inside me, curling with the strategic precision of a woman who has learned — through repetition, attention, and the particular determination of someone who considers every encounter an opportunity to improve — exactly how to make my thighs lock around her head and my vocabulary reduce to a single word.
“Vera — I’m going to —”
“I know.” She doesn’t stop. She increases the pressure and the pace and I feel the orgasm building from the place where her mouth meets my body and radiating outward like a fire finding oxygen. Every nerve ending alight. Every muscle tensed. My hand grips the headboard because without an anchor I might actually leave this bed, this apartment, this earthly plane.
I come. Hard. The kind that whites out the edges and empties my lungs and locks my thighs around her head and tears a sound from my chest that is her name said with the specific, helpless conviction of a woman who has been loved into incoherence by a former strategy director who has repurposed her professional skill set in ways that no MBA program could have anticipated.
Vera holds me through it. Her hands steady on my hips. Her mouth steady between my thighs. The specific, practiced devotion of a woman who will not let go until the shaking stops and the breathing evens and the woman she loves comes back to earth with her name still echoing off the walls of an apartment that used to be empty and is now, irreversibly, home.
She climbs back up. Lies beside me. We face each other on the pillow, breathing, coming down, our legs tangled and our hands finding each other in the sheets.
“Clause 6.5,” she says. “Ratified.”
“Unanimously.”
“I should note for the record that this clause has no termination date.”
“Noted. I should note that I didn’t negotiate for one.”
“Also noted.” She presses her forehead against mine. Her breath smells like coffee and me and the specific, private chemistry of a morning shared between two women who deleted a contract and kept the love and the love is messier and less organized and infinitely better than any document either of us has ever written.
“I want to add an amendment,” she says.
“It’s Saturday morning and you’re drafting amendments.”
“Amendment to clause 6.5, sub-section A: the parties acknowledge that the compensatory measures described herein are not limited to the morning, but extend to all hours, all rooms, all surfaces — including but not limited to the kitchen counter, the shower, and the particularly sturdy bookshelf in the living room that the parties have not yet utilized but which party B has been evaluating for structural soundness.”
“Party B has been evaluating the bookshelf?”
“Party B is a strategist. She evaluates all surfaces.”
“Party B is a menace.”
“Party B is your menace. That’s in the terms.”
I kiss her. She kisses me back. The kiss is slow and warm and tastes like morning and home and the particular, incalculable miracle of two women who built a relationship on a legal document and then discovered that the relationship was the one thing no document could hold.
Docket sighs from his bed. We ignore him. He’s used to it.
“I love you,” Vera says. Casually. On a Saturday. In the morning. When nothing extraordinary is happening.
That’s when it counts.
“I love you too,” I say. “Now get out of bed and make me breakfast. It’s in the revised terms.”
“There are no revised terms.”
“Exactly.”
She laughs. Gets up. Pulls on my T-shirt. Walks to the kitchen barefoot with Docket clicking along behind her, and I lie in the sheets that smell like both of us and watch the light come through the window and think about contracts and clauses and terms and conditions and the specific, beautiful, ungovernable fact that the best things in life cannot be drafted, negotiated, or filed.
They can only be lived.
No clause required.
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