Office Hours — After the Final Lesson

A Practice Makes Girlfriends Bonus Chapter
by Aurora North

⚠️ This bonus chapter contains explicit sexual content and takes place three weeks after the events of Practice Makes Girlfriends. Spoilers ahead. Intended for readers 18+.

Office Hours

The text arrives at 6:47 p.m. on a Wednesday, while I’m reviewing the third-floor lease agreement at my kitchen table like the functional adult I have recently and improbably become.

Elowen: Office hours tonight. 9pm. Studio. Dress code: whatever I can remove efficiently.

I stare at the message. Then I text back: The studio has glass doors.

Elowen: I installed curtains last week. Didn’t mention it.

Elowen: Didn’t want to ruin the surprise.

I set the phone down. I pick it up. I set it down again. I have been Elowen Price’s girlfriend for twenty-three days, and she has not stopped being the most disorienting person I have ever loved.

I arrive at nine. The studio is dark from the street — the new curtains are heavy blackout fabric, professionally installed, which means she hired someone other than me to hang them and the secrecy of that planning makes my pulse do something inadvisable.

The door is unlocked. I step inside and lock it behind me.

Elowen is standing in the center of the studio in bare feet and a black silk robe that stops mid-thigh. Her hair is down. The mirrors along the far wall are uncurtained. The reformers are pushed to the sides except one — hers, the one she uses for demonstrations — which sits in the center of the floor under the warm after-hours lighting like a stage waiting for a performance.

“You’re on time,” she says.

“I’m always on time.”

“I know. It’s one of my favorite things about you.” She crosses the floor toward me, and the robe parts slightly with each step, and I can see enough to know she’s wearing nothing underneath it, and my hands flex at my sides in the old reflex — the one she identified in Lesson One as the tell that means I’m resisting the urge to touch her.

“No index card tonight?” I ask.

She produces a cream card from the robe pocket. Holds it up. In her precise block letters: Lesson: Teach the teacher. Goals: Make Tamsin forget her own name.

“You’re retired from the curriculum,” I say.

“Consider this continuing education.” She tucks the card back in her pocket and stops in front of me. “Sit on the reformer.”

“Elowen —”

“Sit.”

I sit. The carriage shifts under my weight, the springs offering their smooth mechanical resistance. She stands between my knees and looks down at me with an expression I’ve come to recognize as the one that precedes my total structural failure: calm, precise, and absolutely certain of what she’s about to do.

She works the buttons of my henley, one at a time, slow. “I’ve been thinking about this room. About all the hours I spent in front of these mirrors correcting my form. And about all the hours you spent in the doorway watching me do it.”

My shirt is open. She pushes it off my shoulders and runs her palms flat down my arms.

“Tonight,” she says, “I’m the one watching.”

She unties the robe. Lets it fall. She’s entirely naked in the center of her studio under the warm lighting, and the mirrors catch her from every angle, and she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in any room, in any light, in any of the eleven years I spent memorizing her while pretending I was checking the trim.

“Lie back,” she says.

I lie back on the reformer carriage. She climbs over me, knees on either side of my hips, and the carriage rolls slightly on its track with her added weight, the smooth mechanical glide that is now doing things to my nervous system that no piece of fitness equipment should be capable of producing.

She pins my wrists above my head against the headrest. Not with a scarf — with her hands. Her grip is strong. Dancer’s hands. Pilates hands.

“Tell me what you want,” she says, using my phrase, the one that started everything.

“You. All of you. On this reformer. In front of every mirror in this building.”

“Specific.”

“Your mouth. On my neck. Then lower. Then wherever you want, because I trust you with my body more than I trust myself, and I’m done pretending that’s not the hottest thing anyone has ever given me.”

She rewards me with exactly what I asked for. Her mouth on my neck — open, hot, the edge of her teeth dragging along my pulse point. Then my collarbone. Then the center of my chest, where she pauses and presses her lips against my sternum in the gesture that started everything — the first night, the breathing anchor, the place where trust began.

She works her way down my body. My sports bra goes first. Her mouth covers my nipple and sucks hard enough to make my back arc off the carriage, and the springs absorb the motion with a smooth, mechanical slide that adds a rocking sensation to every touch.

“The reformer,” I manage. “Was this always the plan?”

“I’ve been thinking about you on this machine since the day you sat on one to annoy me.” She unbuttons my jeans. “Every class I taught, I looked at this carriage and thought about you lying where my clients lie, and me doing things to you that are absolutely not in any certification program.”

“That’s a significant professional-ethics violation.”

“You’re not my client. You’re my girlfriend.” She grins up at me from between my thighs. “And girlfriends don’t get a modification sheet.”

She puts her mouth on me without further preamble. She licks through me with a broad, deliberate stroke and I grip the headrest and the carriage slides on its springs and the rocking motion amplifies the sensation until I’m gasping.

She slides two fingers inside me while her tongue works my clit, and the carriage rocks with each thrust, and the mirrors show us from both sides — my body arched, her dark hair between my thighs, the reformer moving beneath us like a machine designed for exactly this purpose.

“I want to hear you,” she says against me. “No holding back. The curtains are closed. This room is ours.”

I stop holding back. She adds a third finger. Curls forward. Sucks my clit between her lips. The orgasm hits me like a demolition charge — planned, precisely placed, and devastating. I come on her reformer with her name in my mouth and my hands white-knuckled on the headrest.

She climbs up my body. Kisses me with my taste on her mouth.

“My turn,” I say.

I roll us. The carriage slides and she gasps and I pin her beneath me on the machine she’s commanded for eleven years. The mirrors show us the reversal — the instructor under the contractor, the precise woman held down by the strong one.

“I’m going to need you to engage your core,” I say, using her exact instructional tone.

“Don’t you dare use my cues on me.”

“Inhale through your ribs. Not your shoulders.” I kiss down her stomach. “Let the spring do the arguing.”

“I hate you.”

“You love me.”

“I love you. I also hate you. Both things can be true.”

I settle between her legs. I put my mouth on her and she grabs the foot bar for leverage and I use the reformer’s motion to build a rhythm that has her breathing in fragments within a minute.

She comes with a scream that I feel in my chest, my jaw, the roots of my teeth.

She pulls me up. Wraps her legs around my waist on the carriage. Holds me so tight I can feel her heartbeat against mine.

“We’re cleaning this reformer,” she says against my neck.

“Obviously.”

“With industrial-grade sanitizer.”

“I have some in the truck.”

“Of course you do.” She lifts her head. “I love you.”

“I love you.”

“Same time next week?”

“Permanently.” She kisses me. “No graduation clause. No expiration date. Just practice.”

I hold her on the reformer in the middle of the studio she built and I restored, surrounded by mirrors that show us from every angle — two women, tangled, sweaty, laughing, exactly where they belong.

Practice makes permanent.

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