The Night She Kept

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Last Call for the Ice Queen
by Aurora North

⚠️ This bonus chapter takes place the night after East opens, between Chapter Twenty and the Epilogue. It contains spoilers and extremely explicit content, and it runs hotter than the novel. Read the book first. 18+.

The Night She Kept

SIMONE

She told you she wouldn’t describe it.

That’s Natalie. She’ll hand you forty-one nights on the road as a figure and keep one Sunday in July entirely to herself. I respect it. I said private to her a long time ago, across my own bar, and I meant it.

I never said I was quiet.

So. The first night after East opened.

Opening night I’ll give you in one breath, since it isn’t the point. A line to the corner. An ice machine that died at nine-fifteen, in a building that used to make ice for half the city. A tray of coupes on the floor, a critic nobody warned me about, and at the end of my bar, by the pass, a woman in jeans who held on to the edge of it for six hours and did not get up once.

I locked the roll-up door at ten to four in the morning. I slept till three in the afternoon like something that had been dropped.

East is dark Sundays. I’d asked her for this one back in May, in writing, standing in her front hall: the whole night, don’t come to work, don’t come to see the room, come for me. She’d said it was kept. She’d said she hadn’t put it in anything. For nine weeks I hadn’t asked her what that meant.

At seven she knocked.

Three flights, no elevator, July, and she wasn’t even breathing hard; the woman swims two kilometers before I’m conscious. White shirt with the sleeves rolled. The jeans. A bare wrist. And over her shoulder, an olive canvas bag.

Mine. The one I’d left on her hall bench on purpose.

“I’ve brought no dinner,” Natalie said. “I’ve arranged nothing. I didn’t ring the Greek place, I didn’t look up what’s open on a Sunday, and I have no plan for this evening of any kind. It has been an extremely difficult afternoon.”

“And the bag?”

“The bag isn’t a plan. It’s a possibility. It can stay zipped.” Her ears had gone pink. “I drove it across the city on the passenger seat. I’d like you to know that I considered the seat belt.”

I laughed so hard I had to hold the doorframe. Then I pulled her in by the front of that shirt and kissed her in my doorway, and she kissed me back like a woman with a whole night and nowhere she had to put it.

“What would help?” she said against my mouth.

I’d thought about it. I’d had nine weeks.

“I’ve got nine months,” I said. “Every evening, open to close, a hundred and thirty people looking at me to find out what kind of night they’re having. Last night I made every call in that building for eleven hours. I want one night where I’m not running the room.” I put my forehead on hers. “That’s it. That’s the whole order.”

She went quiet. Not the lake. The other one, where she’s deciding whether to say a true thing.

“That’s awkward,” Natalie said. “It’s what I came to ask you for.”

She reached into her back pocket and took out a length of slate-colored silk. I knew it. She owns exactly one scarf. I put the reason for it on her throat with my teeth, the first night, and she wore it into a meeting about glassware.

“I sat on that stool for six hours,” she said, “and I saw every single thing go wrong about four seconds before it did. The ice machine. The tray. I watched that man’s notebook come out of his jacket. I see it coming. I always have; it’s the thing I’m for.” She held the scarf out across both palms, like something being surrendered. “I didn’t get up. Tonight I should like not to see it coming, either. I want you to put this over my eyes. I’m asking.”

Christ. In April that woman couldn’t ask me for a Tuesday.

“So we both want to quit driving,” I said.

“It would appear so.”

“Somebody’s got to pour, Nat.”

“I’d thought of that. Turns.” She said it like a woman tabling a motion. “You first, since I asked first. You’ll have me until you’ve finished with me. Then I shall have you, and you won’t decide one thing until morning. Is that acceptable?”

“That’s acceptable,” I said, and took the scarf.

My bedroom in July is a box fan in the window and the streetlight coming through it in slices. I undressed her standing by the bed, one thing at a time. She let me, and she folded nothing. Then I turned her around and tied the silk over her eyes, flat, one knot, and smoothed it down behind her ears.

She went still. All over. I watched the gooseflesh run down her arms in eighty-degree heat.

“Okay?”

“I can’t see my own feet.” A breath. “It’s appalling. Don’t take it off.”

“Yes or wait, same as always. And since you can’t see me, I’ll say it before I do anything that’s new. That’s the only warning you get.”

“Understood.”

I laid her down on her side of my bed, the window side, and put her hands on the rail of the headboard. I didn’t tie them. I didn’t tell her to keep them there, either. I’ve never had to.

Then I left the room.

“Simone.”

“I’m ten feet away. Listen.”

She listened. I knew exactly what she was getting. The freezer door. A bag, tearing. There were eight pounds of gas-station ice in my freezer, because I’d sent a barback out for forty bags the night before and carried the last one home out of pure spite. Ice going into a mixing glass. A bottle. Another. A third, up off the bottom shelf, the one I keep for myself. The long spoon going round and round.

She knows that sound. She’s sat at the end of my bar listening to it for four months.

“You’re making it,” she said from the bed. Her voice had gone thin. “You’re making it now. When I can’t watch.”

“Four months you’ve been pointing at that drink. Jonah’s got a notebook. You think I’m building it in front of the best pair of eyes in the hotel business?”

“That is the cheapest trick I have ever—”

I snapped the peel. Grapefruit, wide; the oil hangs in the air a second before it falls. She couldn’t see it. She smelled it. Her whole chest lifted.

I came back and sat on the edge of the mattress with a coupe sweating in one hand and a cube from the mixing glass between my teeth.

“New thing,” I said around it. “Ice.”

Her throat moved. “Yes.”

I didn’t start anywhere she’d have guessed. That was the entire point. I touched it to the inside of her left wrist, on the pale place where the watch isn’t, and she jerked like I’d plugged her in.

“Cold,” I said.

I ran it up the inside of her arm to the elbow and let it go, and put my mouth where it had been. Hot. Open. I felt her pulse come up under my tongue.

“And then not.”

“Oh,” said Natalie, to a ceiling she couldn’t see. “Oh, that’s—that is an abuse of a house cocktail.”

“Log it.”

I took my time, and I took no route at all. Her collarbone. Then nothing, for long enough that she started to ask, and then the cube on her nipple and my mouth chasing it, cold and then not, until it stood up dark and tight and she’d quit breathing through her nose. The other one. A line down the middle of her that pooled in her navel, and I drank it out of her. The crease of one thigh. The back of a knee; I learned that off her. She couldn’t see one bit of it coming. Every time I touched her she made a sound like I’d surprised it out of her, and I had.

Her knuckles were white on my headboard. Nobody had told her to hold on.

I took a mouthful of the drink and held it. It’s very cold, that drink; that’s most of what it is. I swallowed, and before my mouth had a chance to warm up I put it on her cunt.

She came up off the bed.

“Fuck—” Natalie Price swears about twice a year. That was one. “Simone, your mouth—”

Cold. The flat of my tongue, one long stroke; I learned that off her too, on a desk. And then not. She was so wet already it was like putting my face in something poured. I worked her slow till my mouth ran hot again, and then I reached for the glass and did it over. She’d flinch, and gasp, and then melt down onto my tongue as it warmed, hips rolling, and right when she’d gotten used to it I’d take another sip.

I didn’t edge her. I’ve done that. I’ve made that woman beg me in a blizzard. That night I’d promised she wouldn’t see it coming, so I didn’t build her any stairs. I sucked her clit into a cold mouth with no warning at all and pushed two fingers into her in the same second, and she came like a glass going over. Loud. Both heels dug into my mattress, and my window standing wide open on a Sunday night in July.

“That’s one,” I said. “I’m not keeping a tally. I just like saying it.”

“There are people”—she was panting—”on the sidewalk.”

“There’s a bike shop. It’s closed.”

I gave her the coupe. I put it in her hand, blind, and closed her fingers around the stem, and watched her find the rim with her thumb and go once around it before she drank. She doesn’t know she does that. I’m never telling her.

“Well?”

“Cold.” Her mouth was shaking. “And then not. And something off a bottom shelf, and I’m no nearer than Jonah.”

“Nope.”

She held the glass out for me to take. Then she lay there under the scarf with her hands back on the rail, flushed to the waist, and I watched her make up her mind about something. With her it’s practically a noise.

“I have a request,” Natalie said. “It’s new. I’ve had it since May, and I haven’t been able to find a way of putting it that didn’t sound like a clause.”

“So say it badly.”

A long breath, in through her nose.

“I’d like you to wear what’s in the bag. And while you’re inside me, I’d like—” The flush went up under the silk. “Your finger. Behind. In my ass. There; I’ve said it. I have never asked anyone for that. I never wanted to hand anyone that much of me, and I find I want you to have all of it. You may say no.”

I had to sit there a second. I’m the one who talks. I had nothing.

“Simone?”

“I’m here. I’m just looking at you.” I leaned down and kissed her, slow, grapefruit on both our mouths. “Yes. God, yes. Slow, and a stupid amount of lube, and you say wait the second you want to. Good girl.”

“I’ve stopped objecting to that,” she said faintly. “Say it again.”

I said it again, against her throat. Then I went and got my bag off my own kitchen floor.

I buckled in where she could hear it. Every strap. She turned her head toward the sound like a plant toward a window. I slicked the thing in my fist and told her what I was doing, because that was the deal: this is my hand, this is the lube, it’s cold too, I’m not sorry. I turned her onto her side and got in behind her, the way we did it once in her bed, the night I spoiled a western for her. Her back to my front. My arm under her neck. Her top knee drawn up.

I slid into her slow, and she took all of it with that long sigh, like sinking into a bath.

“That’s just me,” I said in her ear. “That’s the part you know. Stay with that.”

I fucked her easy for a while. Deep, slow, her hips tipping back to get more of it. Then I brought my other hand down between us, slick to the wrist, and laid one fingertip against her. Just laid it there. No pressure.

Every muscle she owns went tight.

“That’s me too,” I said. “That’s all I’m doing till you tell me different. Breathe out.”

She breathed out. I circled. Small, slow, the same and the same, the way she taught me you do a thing that deserves doing right. I kept my hips moving. I felt her start to give, a little at a time, like a fist coming open.

“More,” she said. It cracked in the middle. “Please. I’m asking.”

I pressed. To the first knuckle, and stopped, and she made a sound I had never once gotten out of her. Low. Shocked. All the way up from the basement.

“Okay?”

“Don’t—I can feel everything. I can feel you in—don’t stop. Don’t you dare be careful with me.”

I wasn’t careless. But I quit being careful. I gave her the rest of that finger while I fucked her, and I found out that when I pushed in with my hips and crooked it, the two of them met through that thin hot wall inside her and she shook all the way down to her feet. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t count. She couldn’t have found a clock with both hands. She had my headboard in one fist and my forearm in the other, nails in, and she was talking. Natalie, who used to bite back every sound like she was being billed for it: yes, and there, and more of that, all of it, I’m so full, Simone, I can’t—

“You can. Touch yourself. I’ve only got two hands, and they’re both in you.”

She laughed, and it broke, and her hand went down. I felt her fingers working, fast, not one bit unsure.

“I’m going to—I can’t see it, I can’t tell when—”

“You don’t have to see it. I’ve got you, Nat. I’ve got you. Let it come.”

It was the first time I ever said those words to her. I’d been on the receiving end for two months. I didn’t plan it. That’s how I knew it wasn’t a line.

She came on all of it at once. Me in her, both ways, and her own hand, and my voice. No warning, no build she could have timed. It took her like weather. She shouted, my name and then nothing with any letters in it, and bore back on me so hard I saw stars, and I held on and kept her there through it, and through the second one that rolled up right out of the first, till she was sobbing for breath and saying wait, wait, and laughing, wrung out.

I waited. That’s the protocol. I wrote it. She admires the drafting.

I eased out of her, both ways, slow. I went and washed my hands, because I’m a professional. When I came back she’d pushed the scarf up onto her forehead and was lying there blinking at my ceiling like she’d never seen one.

“I didn’t see any of that coming,” Natalie said, with real wonder.

“How was it?”

“Unsupervised.” She turned her head. Her eyes were wet and absolutely level, and the look in them took me behind the knees. “Take that off. It’s my turn, and you’ve a great deal on.”

Here’s what I’d asked for. One night of not running the room.

Here’s what that looks like when the woman you ask is Natalie Price.

She put me in the middle of my own bed. She tied her scarf over my eyes with a knot I’d bet money has a name. It was damp, and it smelled like cedar and grapefruit. And then she didn’t touch me for one full minute.

I know it was a minute. I can’t not count. I lay there in the dark with the fan going over me and no mirror. I run my rooms off a mirror. I haven’t had my back to a thing I couldn’t see since I was twenty-eight. I heard a buckle. I heard her finish what was left in that coupe. I heard the mattress take her weight, somewhere down by my feet.

“You’re narrating in your head,” she said.

“I am not.”

“Your lips are moving. You’ve no audience, Simone. There isn’t a room. There’s a bed, and there’s me, and you aren’t required to be good at any of it.” A hand closed around my ankle. “I’ll do the talking tonight. I’ve listened to you do it for four months. I believe I have the idea.”

“You hate when I narrate.”

“I told you not to. It isn’t the same thing. I’ve been learning the difference.” Her mouth, on the inside of my knee. “Item one.”

I about died.

She narrated. Natalie. In the boardroom voice, dry as paper, with her mouth working its way up the inside of my thigh between the clauses. Item one was that I’d been on my feet for nineteen hours the day before, and she intended to see to my calves. She saw to them, with her thumbs, until I groaned out loud. Item two was the dip of my hip, which she said she had admired across a room full of travel editors and never once mentioned. Item three was that I was soaking wet, and had been since I buckled a harness on for her benefit, and that she proposed to do something about it in her own time.

“For the minutes,” Natalie said, “you’re extremely beautiful, and you’ve nothing whatever to do with your hands. Put them over your head.”

I put them over my head. I didn’t have a joke. I went looking for one, out of habit, and the drawer was empty.

She went down on me slow. I’ve told you how she does it: left of center, steady, the same and the same and the same. Do that to a woman who can’t see, and it’s a different thing. I couldn’t watch her face to know what was next. I couldn’t catch her eye and grin and get half a second of running it back. All I had was her mouth, and the fan, and her voice whenever she lifted her head to report.

“You’re shaking. I’m noting it with approval.” Two fingers, sliding into me. “That’s the sound you make when you’ve stopped thinking of things to say. I’ve grown very fond of it.”

“Nat—”

“I know. Not yet. You asked not to decide. I’m deciding. I’ll tell you when.”

She took me right up to it and held me there. She did that to me once before, on her own gray sheets, and that night she was doing it to keep me, and I didn’t know it. This time there wasn’t anyplace I was going. She kept me on the edge of it because she liked me there. She said so.

“I like you here. I can feel you clench when I say it. There’s no purpose to this whatever. I’m simply enjoying myself.”

I was begging by then. Out loud, nothing cute in it. Please, Nat. I can’t. Let me.

“Up,” she said.

“What?”

“Sit up. Come here.”

Her hands, hauling me. She’d put her back against my headboard. She had the harness on; I found that out with my thigh. I got pulled into her lap, straddling her, blind, and her arm went around my waist like a bar across a door.

“Tighter?” she said.

I hadn’t asked. I didn’t have to anymore.

“Yeah.” It came out wrecked. “Tighter.”

She locked it. All that swimmer’s strength. Her other hand went down between us and guided, and I sank onto it by feel, an inch at a time, with her mouth on my throat telling me exactly what she saw. That’s all of it. You’ve taken all of it. You ought to see your face. I’m told I’m not to describe things, and I intend to describe this to myself for some years.

I rode her. I had my arms around her neck and silk over my eyes and not one thing in the world to keep track of. She took my weight. She took the rhythm, too, when my legs quit. She just lifted me with that arm and moved me, like I weighed what a glass weighs. The base of the thing was working on her, and I could hear it in her voice, the dry going out of it, the items getting shorter. You’re so wet. I can hear it. Simone. Oh.

“Now,” Natalie said, low, right against my ear. “Now you may. Come here to me. I’ve got you.”

I came apart in her lap. Hard, from way down, blind, hanging on to her. I felt her go with me, her face in my neck and that arm like iron, the two of us making enough noise that somebody across the street put a window down.

She took the scarf off me herself. She untied her knot and drew the silk away, and there was my bedroom in slices of streetlight, and her. Hair wrecked. Mouth swollen. Gray-green eyes eight inches off, not reading a thing.

“There you are,” she said.

Later. The fan. Her on the window side with my head on her arm, and the scarf drying on the hook she keeps here, next to her earplugs.

“What time is it?” I said.

“I’ve no idea. I didn’t bring the means.” She said it the way other people tell you they’ve quit smoking. “It’s dark. I believe that’s all one needs to know.”

Then her phone went off on the floor. An alarm, soft. She leaned over the side of the bed and got it, and typed with her thumbs, exact, and mine lit up on the nightstand six inches from my face.

Ice. Grapefruit. I didn’t see any of it coming.

Ten o’clock. Every night since a café table in April, one dumb thing on my phone. She sends it from Hartford. She sends it lying on top of me.

“That’s the standing reservation,” I said.

“It is.”

“And tonight? You told me you didn’t put it in anything.”

“I didn’t. It isn’t in a calendar. It isn’t on a list. I simply didn’t forget it for nine weeks.” She thought about that. “It turns out one can do that. It’s extremely inefficient.”

I laughed into her shoulder until she started, too.

I’ve got nine months. Every evening, open to close, with her on the end stool when she’s in the state and my phone ringing at lock-up when she’s not. Month four I’m eating rice. I know what’s coming. I can see most of it from here.

Not that night. That night she kept, the whole of it, and she didn’t put it in anything.

I did. I put it here.

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