Off the Record — Bonus Chapter

Thread Count
by Aurora North

An exclusive bonus scene from Off the Record — set between Chapters 20 and 21.
Sloane’s POV. The sheet-shopping trip on M Street.
Too hot for Amazon. You’re welcome.

The argument started over percale.

“It’s crisp,” I said, running my hand across a display sheet set in a home goods store on M Street that I had never entered and would never have entered voluntarily, because I didn’t shop at places with accent lighting and salespeople who asked if you’d like sparkling water. “Crisp is good. Crisp is what sheets should be.”

“Crisp is what paper should be.” Sloane was three display beds away, fondling a set of sateen sheets the color of heavy cream with the focused, analytical intensity she’d once reserved for briefing binders. “Sheets should be soft.”

“Sheets should be affordable.”

“Sheets should make you want to be in them.”

She held up the price tag. $189. I made a sound that was somewhere between a cough and a moral objection.

“Six hundred thread count. Egyptian cotton. Sateen weave.” She said these words the way other people said “I love you.” “Feel this.”

I crossed the display floor — past the decorative pillows (overpriced), past the duvet covers (unconscionable), past a tower of something called “Euro shams” — and stood beside her at the cream sateen display bed.

She took my hand. Placed it on the sheet. Palm down, fingers spread, the way she’d placed my hand on her chest the first night.

Okay. It was soft. Obscenely, unreasonably, almost morally soft.

“See?” Sloane watched my face with satisfaction. “Crisp is for letters. Soft is for living.”

She stepped closer. “What if I told you,” she said, her voice dropping to the register I recognized from bedrooms and text messages, “that these sheets would make everything we do in bed feel different?”

“I’d say you’re overselling the product.”

“The surface you lie on affects the experience of lying on it. That’s physics.”

“That’s marketing.”

“That’s why your sheets feel like sleeping on a verdict.”

“You touch fabric,” I said, “the same way you touch skin.”

“And you observe the way I touch things the way you observe everything. Like you’re writing a review.”

She held my hand. “These sheets or those sheets. But either way, I want to be in them with you. Tonight. For as long as you’ll let me.”

“The sateen,” I said.

She smiled. The real one.

“But I need to feel them properly first. Quality assurance.”

I pulled her toward the back alcove — the one with the cream sateen display bed, curtain half-drawn, the most private corner of a store that was about to host the most inappropriate quality assessment in the history of Georgetown retail.

I pulled the curtain three-quarters closed. A journalist’s instinct: always leave yourself plausible deniability.

“Leah. We’re in a store.”

“We’re in an alcove in a store. That’s a material distinction.”

“I work with the access I have.” I put my hands on her hips. “Tell me to stop.”

She didn’t tell me to stop.

She grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me against her and kissed me with the particular ferocity of a woman who’d been arguing about thread count for twenty minutes and had been converting the argumentative energy into something considerably more urgent.

I backed her against the display bed. Her thighs hit the edge and she sat — involuntarily — landing with a small bounce, her hair fanning across the pillow, her skirt riding up her thighs.

“The sheets are soft,” she said breathlessly.

“Quality confirmed.” I climbed over her. “Now let me test the other variable.”

I kissed her neck. The spot below her ear. She tilted. I continued.

My hand moved from the mattress to her knee and slid upward. Along the inside of her thigh, the muscle tensing under my palm as my fingers traveled higher.

I pushed her skirt up. Enough to feel the edge of her underwear — the cream lace — and press my fingers against the fabric.

She was wet. Through the lace. The evidence of twenty minutes of arguing about sheets and the particular, low-frequency arousal that Sloane Merrick experienced when she was in a competitive dynamic with someone she wanted to fuck — which was, as it turned out, her primary erotic modality.

“You’re soaked,” I murmured against her throat.

“The woman on the sheets did this.” She grabbed my wrist. Not to stop me — to direct me. “Leah, please — we can’t — someone could —”

“Then you’d better be quiet.”

I pushed the lace aside. Touched her bare. She gasped — a sharp, bitten-off sound muffled against my shoulder. My fingers slid through wet heat, finding her clit, circling with the steady, focused pressure I’d learned she needed.

Her hand flew to her own mouth. I watched her bite down on her knuckle — the woman who’d spent her career controlling her vocal output now employing the most primitive suppression technique available — and the sight was so devastatingly hot that I nearly lost my rhythm.

I didn’t lose my rhythm. I was a journalist. I was thorough.

I slid two fingers inside her. She arched — the full-body lift that meant I’d found the angle, the spot, the precise internal geography that made her eyes roll back and her composure evaporate. I curled my fingers and pressed.

“That’s it,” I whispered. My mouth at her ear. “Come for me. Quietly. On the $189 sheets.”

She came. Silently — or nearly silently. A choked, strangled sound buried in my shoulder, her teeth sinking into my shirt. Her body clenched around my fingers — tight, pulsing — her thighs pressing together around my wrist, holding me inside her through the aftershocks.

“The sheets,” she said, her voice destroyed, “pass quality assurance.”

We bought the sheets. $189, plus tax. The sales associate said, “Enjoy your purchase,” with the practiced serenity of a woman who intended to take everything she’d witnessed to her grave.

“You owe me reciprocity,” Sloane said as we walked home through Georgetown.

“I owe you a bed that isn’t a display model.”

“Then walk faster.”

We made it home in eleven minutes. Normally the walk took fifteen.

We made the bed. Together. The domestic ritual — fitting the elastic corners, smoothing the flat sheet — became foreplay so mundane and so charged that by the time we’d finished, my hands were shaking. Because we kept ending up on the same side. Reaching across each other. Her hip against my hip as we smoothed the same wrinkle.

“We should test them,” she said.

“Strictly empirical.”

She pulled her blouse over her head. No preamble. The cream lace bra. The charcoal skirt falling. She climbed onto the bed, lay back, and stretched — the visual of Sloane Merrick in cream lace on cream sheets was so staggering that I stood at the foot of the bed and stared.

“Are you going to stand there reviewing,” she said, “or are you going to join me?”

I joined her. And the sheets were, God help me, extraordinary.

I kissed her slowly. Unhooked her bra. Kissed her breasts — the left one first, because she was right, I did always start with the left. She was louder here. Uninhibited. The permission of privacy. The liberation of a closed door.

I worked down her body. Pulled her underwear off and spread her thighs. “I believe I owe you reciprocity.”

“You owe me comprehensiveness.”

I lowered my mouth to her. The first taste hit me like a revelation. I licked her with the broad, flat strokes she responded to first — warming her up, building the foundation for something bigger.

She responded immediately. Hips rolling, hands in my hair, vocal feedback I used like a compass — louder meant closer, my name repeated meant don’t you dare change what you’re doing.

I added my fingers. Two, curling inside her, finding the spot. She arched — back lifting off the sateen sheets, cream fabric bunching under her shoulders. The sound she made was a moan. Full, open, uninhibited.

I drove her higher. Tongue on her clit, fingers inside her, the rhythm escalating. Her hands fisted the new sheets — the 600-thread-count Egyptian cotton being stress-tested in ways the manufacturer had not anticipated.

“Come,” I said against her. “On the new sheets. Christen them.”

She came. Loud, shaking, her hands pulling the fitted sheet off one corner as her body convulsed.

Then she pushed me onto my back, straddled me, and looked down with an expression I’d categorize as “predatory gratitude.”

“Your turn.”

Her mouth on me was devastating. The firm, focused pressure on my clit, the refusal to escalate until I was begging. And I was begging — within minutes — because Sloane Merrick between my legs was a force of nature.

She gave me harder. Added her fingers. Curved them upward. The dual stimulation collapsed my vocabulary to a single syllable: her name, repeated, fracturing into breath.

The orgasm was violent. She didn’t stop — she eased off and built me up again. The second wave climbing on the heels of the first, deeper, slower, a rolling tremor.

Then she was beside me. Against me. On the cream sateen sheets that were now thoroughly, irreversibly, comprehensively christened.

“The sateen was the right call,” she murmured.

“I’m not conceding the thread count argument.”

“You just came three times on the thread count argument.”

“Correlation is not causation.”

“Spoken like a journalist.”

“Loved like a communications director.”

I held her. In the good sheets. In the fading light. In the ordinary, extraordinary afternoon of two women who’d argued about fabric and made love and laughed and were building, one thread at a time, a life that felt like the best story either of them had ever told.

Some stories you investigate. Some stories you live.

The good ones — the really good ones — are both.

Thank you for reading! If you loved Leah and Sloane’s story, please consider leaving a review.

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