🔥 Row Fifteen 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Woman Experiment by Aurora North

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place after the final chapter of The Woman Experiment. It contains major spoilers and explicit sexual content (18+). Read the novel first for the full experience.

Beth’s week alone by the ocean, night three. The one that isn’t going in any spreadsheet. Explicit content — 18+.

Row Fifteen

By the third night I’ve established several things.

I walk four miles before breakfast if nobody’s waiting on me. I read at the table. I take the chair facing the water, every time, and I don’t apologize to it. For accuracy, I also talk to the kettle, but only in the mornings.

The inn keeps half its rooms shut in February. Mine is the last one on the second floor, with an outside stair, a bed built for two, and a glass door onto a deck the size of a bath mat. Past the deck there’s sand, and past the sand there’s the ocean, which has been going about its business for three days without once asking what I’m thinking.

It’s ten past eight. I’ve had a bath. I’m in the inn’s white robe on top of the covers, deciding between the chowder and the other chowder, when the phone lights up on the quilt.

“Day three,” Nia says. “Report.”

“Four miles. One seal, unconfirmed. A man at lunch asked if I was waiting for someone, and I said no, and enjoyed it more than I should have.”

“Good.” She means it. I can hear that she means it. I can also hear a turn signal. “I didn’t call to say I hate it.”

“You said it yesterday. And Saturday.”

“I stopped. About noon yesterday.”

I sit up against the headboard. “What happened at noon yesterday?”

Nothing, for a second. An engine idling. I know that pause. She’s turning the hex key over in her fingers.

“Real answer?”

“That’s the rule.”

“I bought a plane ticket.”

The ocean goes on doing what it does.

“I’m not at your door,” she says, fast. “I want that on the record first. I’m in a rental car at a gas station eleven minutes up the road, and I’ve been here for twenty, because I wasn’t going to knock on a door you shut on purpose. It’s your week. I get that. I got it the whole flight.” A breath. “One night. I’m on the six-fifty out tomorrow morning, and the shop opens at noon like nothing happened. Or I turn this car around right now and sleep at the gate, and I’m proud of you either way. I mean that. Your call, Beth.”

I fold my hands on the robe.

I think about it properly, because she’d want me to, and because I’d know if I didn’t. The row says a week by an ocean, alone. I typed it before I knew her name. I wanted to find out who orders dinner when it’s only me, and I have three days of data. She orders the chowder. She takes the good chair. She’s fine. She’s better than fine. She’s somebody I’d pick.

Nothing that happens in this room tonight un-orders the chowder.

And the other finding, for accuracy, is that I’ve been lying here in a bathrobe for twenty minutes thinking about her hands.

“The finding stands,” I say.

“Which finding?”

“That I’m good company. It was established by Sunday. I don’t need four more days to hold it up, and it doesn’t fall over if you walk in.” I look at the glass door. There’s the lamp in it, and the bed, and me, small and white, floating over the dark water. “I’m not letting you in because I can’t do this alone. I’d like that on the record too.”

“It’s on there.” Her voice has dropped. “So why are you letting me in?”

“Because I want to. Room nine. Outside stair, the door at the top.” My pulse is doing something undignified. “Nia. What’s in the bag?”

A pause. “Carry-on only.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“The black one,” she says. “Brass buckles. I stood in a security line and watched a grown man decide not to ask.”

I close my eyes. Everything under the robe has gone warm and heavy.

“Eleven minutes,” I say. “I’m timing you.”

She makes it in nine.

She knocks. She has a key to my house, and she stands on an outside stair in a February wind and knocks, and waits.

I open the door. Cold comes in off her jacket. She’s got the carry-on in one hand and a paper bag in the other, and salt in her eyebrows already, and she doesn’t step over the sill.

“Still yours,” she says. “The week. Say it.”

“It’s still mine.” I take the paper bag out of her hand. “Come in and be a guest in it.”

She comes in. She puts the carry-on down. She shuts the door behind her with her heel, and then she just looks. The robe. My bare feet. My hair still damp at the neck.

“Three days,” she says. “You look like you slept.”

“Nine hours a night. I’ve been insufferable about it.”

“Come here.”

I go. Her mouth is cold and then it isn’t. She kisses me like she’s checking I’m all there, slow and thorough, one hand flat between my shoulder blades, and I get my fingers into the front of her jacket and hold on. She tastes like bad coffee and peppermint gum. I’ve had three days of excellent company, and none of it kissed like this.

“What’s in the bag?” I say against her mouth. “The other bag.”

“Two gas-station sandwiches. Don’t get excited.”

“Too late.”

She laughs. Her forehead comes down on mine. Then she steps back half a pace, which costs her, and puts her hands in her jacket pockets.

“I had a flight and a half to think about what I’d do when I got here,” she says. “I’m not going to tell you any of it. It’s your room. What do you want, sweetheart?”

I know the answer. I’ve known it since the gas station.

“I’ve been by myself for three days,” I say. “I’ve been taking very good care of me. I’d like somebody else to do it for a while, and I’d like her not to be careful.”

Her jaw moves.

“Where?”

I look at the glass door.

“I’ve been looking at that ocean since Saturday,” I say. “I’d like to look at it while you fuck me.”

Nia Hollis, who has an answer for everything, says nothing at all. She takes off her jacket. She hangs it on the hook by the door, because she knows I’ll notice. Then she crouches and unzips the carry-on.

I turn the lamp off myself. The room goes blue. With the light out, the glass stops being a mirror and turns into what it is: black water, a white line of surf, a few stars. Nobody’s on the beach. Nobody’s been on it after dark all week. I checked, without knowing why I was checking.

Behind me there are boots coming off, a belt, a zipper. Two small clicks on the dresser, which are her rings. Then the soft brass sound of buckles. I don’t turn around. I’ve learned that about myself too. I like to listen to her get ready.

Then she’s at my back, warm, bare all the way down, and the blue toy rests heavy against the robe at the base of my spine.

“Open it,” she says in my ear.

I untie the belt. She draws the robe off my shoulders and lets it fall, and I’m naked at a window with the heat of the room behind me and the cold coming through the glass in front.

“Hands up. On the door. Flat.”

I put my palms on the glass. It’s freezing. My breath fogs a small oval and clears.

“Step back. Feet apart. More.” Her bare foot nudges the inside of my ankle. “There. Now lean.”

I lean. My breasts touch the glass, and I make a sound I don’t recognize, high and shocked. My nipples go so hard they ache. She hums, pleased, and reaches around and cups one breast from underneath and presses it, deliberately, back against the cold.

“That’s what I pictured,” she says. “Row nineteen, window seat. Guy next to me was doing a crossword.”

“Nia.”

“I know. I’m getting there.” Her other hand slides down my stomach, over the soft part, no hurry, and between my legs. She stops. “Oh, sweetheart. Since when?”

“Since the gas station.”

“You were like this on the phone? Saying the finding stands in that voice?”

“For accuracy, slightly before the phone.”

She laughs, low. She strokes me once, front to back, slow enough that I feel every knuckle. Then she brings her wet fingers up and paints them over my nipple, and puts it back on the glass.

I swear. Not the big one. Not yet.

“Tell me what’s about to happen,” I say. “That’s the rule.”

“Nothing new. You’ve had all of it before. Just not here.” The head of the toy slides down between my thighs and along me, slick already, and all of that is mine. “I’m going to put this in your cunt slow. Then I’m not going to be slow. You’re going to keep your hands on that door and your eyes on the water, and you’re going to be as loud as you want, because you told me Saturday there’s nobody else on this floor. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Real answer.”

“Yes. Please.”

She lines up. One hand on my hip, one flat on my belly, holding me against her. She pushes in.

It’s slow, the way she promised. It’s the whole thick curve of it, an inch and a wait, an inch and a wait, and my forehead goes down on the cold glass and my mouth falls open. Three days. I’ve had my own hand and the teal vibrator and a perfectly nice time. I had forgotten what it is to be filled, by somebody with intentions.

“There,” she says, when her hips are flush against me. “There you are. Look up. Look at it.”

I look. The surf comes in white and folds. She draws back and comes in again, the same slow drag, and the wave and the stroke arrive together, and I laugh, breathless, because of course she’s timed it.

“Too much?”

“Not enough.”

“Yeah?” I can hear her smile. “Say that again in thirty seconds.”

Then she stops being slow.

She fucks me the way I asked. Not carefully. Deep, hard, steady strokes with her whole body behind them, her hand spread on my belly so there’s nowhere for me to go but back onto her. The door rattles faintly in its track. My palms squeak on the glass. Every thrust presses my breasts flat to the cold and drags them down it, and the leather of the harness slaps warm against the backs of my thighs, and the sound I’m making has stopped being words.

“That’s it. Look how you take it.” Her mouth is on my shoulder, my neck, the place under my jaw. “You’re so wet it’s running down my thighs. I can feel you pulling on it every time I back out. You don’t want to let go of it, do you?”

“No.”

“No. Three days of dinner for one and a clean plate. You did the whole thing right. You know that? You went and found out. And then you opened the door because you felt like it.” A harder stroke. I cry out. “That’s the hottest thing anybody’s ever done to me, Beth. Letting me in when you didn’t need to.”

“Nia. Nia, I need…”

“I know what you need.” Her hand leaves my belly and slides down. Two fingers settle either side of my clit, slick and sure. She doesn’t rub. She just holds me there and lets her own thrusts do the work. “Is that it?”

“Fuck.”

She goes still for half a second. Then she laughs against my neck, wrecked and delighted.

“There’s the word. There’s my girl. Go on, then. Eyes open. Give it to the whole ocean.”

“Say it.”

“Good girl.”

I come with my hands on the glass and my eyes on the water. It isn’t quiet. It tears up through me and out of my mouth, long and loud and hoarse, and she fucks me straight through it, saying it again, good girl, good girl, that’s all of it, until my knees give. She takes my whole weight against her chest and holds me there, still deep inside me, while I shake.

My breath has fogged the door from here to the handle. Beyond it the surf folds over, and over.

“Enough?” Nia says in my ear.

“For approximately,” I say, “four minutes.”

We eat the sandwiches on the bed. They’re terrible. One claims to be turkey. I have mine sitting cross-legged in the quilt with my hair ruined, and Nia has hers lying on her side in nothing but the harness, propped on an elbow, entirely at home.

This is dinner on night three. It’s the best meal I’ve had all week. I’m not entering it anywhere.

“What,” she says.

“I’m looking.”

“You’re allowed.”

I am. She taught me that. So I look for as long as I like. The long lean line of her. Her thighs, which a bicycle built. The black straps cut across her hips, the brass gone soft and dull with twelve years of her. The blue toy, still shining from me. The lamp’s back on, low, and she lets me. She has always let me.

I put down the crust of the alleged turkey. I wipe my fingers on the paper napkin, and fold it.

“New thing,” I say.

She stops chewing. She swallows. “Tell me.”

“I’d like to wear that one. Yours.” I nod at the brass. “I’ve had mine on. I’ve never had yours on. I’d like you on top of me, where I can watch. And I’d like to decide when you finish.”

Her eyes have gone dark and careful. “That’s two new things.”

“There’s a third.”

“Jesus. Go on.”

My hands want to fold. I let them.

“There’s something you say to me,” I say. “I’d like to say it to you. Once, at the right moment. I want to find out what it does.” I hold her eyes. “You can say no to that part and keep the rest. Real answer.”

For a long moment there’s only the surf.

I have seen Nia Hollis sure of herself in a fit studio, at a repair stand, in front of my ex-husband and both my children. I’ve seen her cry. I don’t believe I have ever seen her blush from the collarbones up.

“Nobody’s ever,” she says, and stops. She rubs her thumb over the place her rings go. “I’m the one who says it.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know what it’ll do.”

“Neither do I. That’s the nature of an experiment.”

It surprises a laugh out of her, cracked down the middle. She looks at the ceiling. She looks at me.

“Beth Morrow,” she says, low. “Yes. All three. God help me.”

She undoes the buckles herself and hands it over warm.

It takes me a minute. The leather’s shaped to her, not to me. I have to let each side out two holes, and I do it kneeling up on the bed with my tongue between my teeth, while she lies back and watches as though I’m the best thing on television. The brass is heavier than my nickel. The straps settle into the creases of my hips. When I tighten the last one, the base presses right where I’m still swollen, and my breath catches.

“Oh,” she says softly. “Look at you in my leather.”

“Is it…”

“Don’t you dare ask me if it’s ridiculous. Get against the headboard.”

“I thought I was deciding things.”

“You are. I’m advising.”

I sit back against the headboard with the pillows behind me. I pat my thigh, once, the way I’d call a meeting to order.

She comes up over me on her knees. She’s wet. I can see it, and I can smell it, salt and warm, and when I reach down to hold the toy steady for her, my knuckles come away slick. She braces one hand on the headboard by my ear. She sinks down.

I watch all of it. I watch her cunt open around the blue and take it by inches, her stomach pulling tight, her mouth going slack. I watch her eyes try to close, and I watch her not let them.

“Slow,” I say.

“I’m being slow.”

“Slower. I’m on vacation.”

She groans and laughs at once, and takes the last of it, and sits, full, in my lap, with her thighs trembling on either side of my hips. I put my hands on her waist. She’s hot as a stove.

“Now,” I say. “Ride. I’ll tell you when.”

She rides me. She’s good at it. She’s good at anything with a rhythm. She rolls her hips in long slow circles and grinds down at the bottom of each one, and every time she does, the base rocks against my clit and I have to breathe through my nose and concentrate. That’s all right. I’ve sat through four-hour audits. I can concentrate.

I use my hands. I’m allowed that too. I run them up her ribs and take her small breasts in my palms and roll her nipples the way she likes, firm, a little mean. I pull her down by the back of the neck and take one in my mouth and suck until her rhythm stutters. And I talk. I’ve learned to talk. She taught me, in so many words.

“You got on an airplane with this in a bag,” I say against her skin. “You sat in a parking lot and ate half a sandwich so you wouldn’t crowd me. Do you know what that did to me? I’d have let you in for the parking lot alone.”

“Beth…”

“Faster now. A little.”

She goes faster. The headboard knocks the wall. I can hear her, the wet slide of her on every stroke, and I can see it too, the blue coming out of her shining and going back in. Her free hand slips down her own belly, out of habit, and I catch her wrist.

“No,” I say. “Mine.”

Her eyes snap to my face. Her whole body clenches. I feel the tug of it in the straps.

“Hands on the headboard. Both. Either side of my head.”

She puts them there. Her arms are shaking. She’s caged me in, technically, and she has never looked less in charge of anything in her life.

I reach under the pillow, where I put it at seven o’clock this evening with entirely different plans, and take out the teal vibrator.

“You’re kidding,” Nia breathes.

“I packed for a week alone. I’m a thorough person.” I thumb it on. Low. “Keep moving.”

I put it against her clit.

She shouts. It isn’t a word. Her hips jerk, lose the rhythm, and find it again faster, and now she’s riding me in short, hard, desperate strokes with the buzz pinned between us. I can feel all of it through the leather, every clench, and it’s taking everything I have to keep my voice level.

“Not yet,” I say.

“Beth.”

“Not yet. You’ll wait until I say. You can do that.”

“I can’t. I’m right… fuck, sweetheart, I’m right there…”

“I know where you are. I’m looking right at you.” I take the vibrator away. She makes a sound as if I’ve slapped her. I count three of her breaths, put it back, and turn it up. “You make me wait all the time. You have a whole philosophy about it.”

She laughs, or sobs. I honestly can’t tell which. Sweat is running down between her breasts. Her head has dropped so her forehead is nearly on mine, and her eyes are wide open, wet, fixed on my face, and that look is there. The stunned, soft one. The one I’d cross an ocean for, never mind sit beside it.

“Please,” says Nia Hollis.

I have never heard her say it like that.

I hold the vibrator exactly where it is. I put my free hand on her face.

“There you are,” I tell her. “Now. Come for me, Nia. Good girl.”

It goes through her like current.

Her whole body locks. Her mouth opens and nothing comes out, for one long second, and then all of it does: a raw, broken, astonished cry. She comes harder than I’ve ever seen her come, bearing down on me, shaking, her arms giving at the elbows so she falls against my chest and keeps grinding through it, helpless. “Beth Morrow,” she’s saying into my neck, over and over, with her voice in pieces. “Beth Morrow. Beth…”

I turn the vibrator off. I drop it. I get both arms around her and hold on while it wrings her out. Then I say it once more, very quietly, right into her ear, and feel her come again just from that, a second, smaller wave, a shudder and a gasp.

Then she’s still. Heavy, slick, breathing like she’s climbed something.

I stroke her back. The surf folds over. I find I’m crying a little, which wasn’t in any plan either.

“Finding,” she says at last, muffled, into my collarbone.

“Yes?”

“It does something.”

“I gathered.”

“Don’t put it in a cell.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

She gets her breath back. I knew she would. I’ve been half dreading it and half counting on it.

She lifts off me carefully, and we both make a noise. She undoes my buckles with unsteady fingers, brass, brass, brass, and slides the whole harness down my legs and drops it off the side of the bed. Then she just looks at what was under it.

“You’ve been sitting on that,” she says. “This whole time. Quietly.”

“I was concentrating.”

“You were dripping. Beth. Look at the state of you. Look at the inside of this harness.” She stops. She shakes her head slowly. “No. I’m done talking. Lie down.”

I lie down. Her rings are still on the dresser. Her hands are bare.

She pushes my knees apart with them, and lies down between, and puts her mouth on me without one more word.

I’m so far gone already that the first slow stroke of her tongue lifts my hips off the bed. She presses them down with a forearm. She licks me like she has until morning and no flight to catch, long and flat and unhurried, from where I’m open and aching up to my clit and around it, never quite on it. I get a hand in her hair. I get both hands in her hair. She hums into me and I feel it in my teeth.

“Inside,” I say. “Please. Your hand.”

Two fingers, easy. Then three, and a slow twist, and I’m so full and so slick that I can hear it. Then her tongue, finally, finally, where I need it, quick and light and exact.

It doesn’t build. It’s simply there, all at once, the whole bright size of it. My heels dig into her back. I hear myself. “Nia, fuck, fuck…” She curls her fingers and sucks, and I come for the second time on night three with her name and the worst word I know going out of me together, clenching on her hand so hard she groans. The ocean is right outside, minding its own business.

She keeps her mouth on me, soft, until I push her away. She climbs up the bed. She pulls the quilt over both of us and puts her wet chin on my shoulder.

“Now you can say I wasn’t careful,” she says.

“I’ll note it.”

“No, you won’t.”

“No,” I agree. “I won’t.”

Her alarm goes at ten to five.

I wake to her dressing in the dark. Belt. Boots. The brass going back into the carry-on with a soft chime. She sits on the edge of the bed to lace up, and I put my hand on her back, under her shirt, on warm skin.

“Go back to sleep,” she says. “Nine hours. You’ve got a streak.”

“I’ve got four more days.”

“Four more dinners.” She turns. I can just see her face in the gray coming off the water. “I’m supposed to say when I hate it.”

“That’s the arrangement.”

“I don’t. Real answer.” She sounds surprised by it. “I hate the airport. I hate the six-fifty. I don’t hate you being here. I think I like knowing you’re out here ordering soup. I think I like that you’d have been fine if I’d turned the car around.”

“I would have.”

“I know.” She bends and kisses me, slow. “And you opened the door anyway.”

“I did.”

“Don’t make it a row.”

“There isn’t a column for it,” I say. “I’ve checked.”

She laughs under her breath. She picks up her bag. At the door she stops, one hand on the frame, and looks back at the bed, and me in the middle of it, and the glass door with two smeared handprints on it at shoulder height.

“Leave those,” she says. “Let housekeeping wonder.”

Then the cold comes in, and the door shuts, and her boots go down the outside stair.

I get up. I put on the robe. I stand at the glass, between my own handprints, and watch a pair of taillights go up the coast road until I can’t tell them from anything else.

Then I go back to bed, and I take the middle, and I sleep until eight.

That night I go down to the dining room by myself. I take the chair facing the water. I order the chowder, and bread, and, after some thought, the pie.

“Just one?” says the girl with the menus.

“Just one,” I say.

I eat slowly. I’m very good company.

I happen to know I’ve got better at home.

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