Props

A Bonus Chapter from Every Inch of You by Aurora North

🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — This scene is TOO HOT for Amazon

The bolster was on the bedroom floor when I got home.

Not the bed — the floor. Laid out on the hardwood with two cork blocks flanking it and a folded blanket at one end and a yoga strap coiled neatly beside it, the whole arrangement looking exactly like a restorative setup in the practice room except for two critical differences: one, it was in our bedroom, and two, the candles Mira had lit were not the studio’s unscented soy pillars but the expensive ones she kept in the bathroom. The ones that smelled like amber and smoke and sex.

Mira was standing by the window in leggings and a tank top, arms crossed, watching me take in the scene with an expression of studied innocence that fooled absolutely no one.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Props.”

“I can see that. Why are there studio props on our bedroom floor?”

“These aren’t studio props. I ordered these separately. The studio props stay at the studio.”

“You ordered sex props.”

“I ordered yoga props that happen to be in our bedroom.”

“Mira.”

“I’ve been thinking.” She uncrossed her arms. Walked toward me with that fluid, deliberate gait that she used when she was about to say something that would rearrange my central nervous system. “About the private session. Chapter seven of us, if we’re being narrative about it.”

“We are not being narrative about it.”

“The bolster. The butterfly position. Your body on the props, my hands on your body, and approximately nine thousand volts of sexual tension that we both pretended was therapeutic.”

“I didn’t pretend. I went home and—”

“I know what you did when you went home. You told me. In detail. On the phone.”

My face heated. She was close now — three feet, then two, then one, and her hand was on my jacket zipper, pulling it down.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said again, “about what those props could do outside of a class context. When nobody’s maintaining professional boundaries. When nobody’s wearing pants.”

“I’m wearing pants.”

“Not for long.” She kissed me. Slow, with intention, her hand flat against my chest, and I felt the kiss travel through me the way her adjustments used to travel through me — from the point of contact outward, activating everything.

“Get undressed,” she said. “And lie on the bolster.”

I was naked on a yoga bolster in our bedroom, and my yoga teacher girlfriend was kneeling between my legs with a strap in her hands, and this was either the most elaborate sexual fantasy ever realized or a fever dream brought on by too much pre-workout.

“Lift your hips,” Mira said.

I lifted. She slid the strap under my thighs — a long, cotton yoga strap, the kind with the D-ring buckle, the kind she used in class to help students reach their feet in seated forward folds. Except she wasn’t helping me reach my feet. She was looping the strap around my outer thighs, just above the knee, threading it through the buckle, and pulling it snug enough to hold my legs open in butterfly position.

Not tight. Not restraining. Just — present. A steady band of tension around my thighs that kept them spread, knees butterflied out, hips open. The exact position from the private session, except I was naked and the strap was holding me open and Mira was looking at me the way she’d looked at me that night — with clinical precision layered over hunger so raw it made my stomach flip.

“How does that feel?” she asked.

“Like I’m in the most fucked-up yoga class of my life.”

“Scale of one to ten.”

“The strap? Three. You looking at me like that? Eleven.”

She smiled. Not the warm studio smile. The other one — the one with teeth, the one that said she knew exactly what she was about to do and was going to take her time doing it.

“Bolster’s good?”

It was good. The bolster was under my spine, elevating my chest, opening my ribs, tilting my pelvis at an angle that made everything between my legs feel exposed and available and achingly, specifically offered. The blanket was under my head. The blocks were positioned on either side of the bolster, supporting my arms. I was arranged like a restorative pose, like something Mira would set up for a student who needed deep relaxation.

I was not relaxed. I was so turned on I could feel my own pulse between my legs.

Mira knelt between my open thighs. She placed her hands on my inner knees, where the strap held them apart, and pressed gently outward. Testing the resistance. The strap gave a quarter inch, and the stretch in my adductors deepened, and I made a sound I hadn’t authorized.

“There’s my girl,” she murmured. “Right there. Breathe into it.”

“If you use the teaching voice, I’m going to come in approximately thirty seconds.”

“Then I’ll use the teaching voice.” She leaned forward, her hands sliding from my knees up my inner thighs, fingertips tracing the sensitive skin that she knew — that she’d mapped, catalogued, memorized — was wired directly to my clit. “Breathe in through your nose. When you exhale, let your hips soften. Let the bolster hold your weight. You don’t have to do anything.”

“Mira—”

“Shh. I set the pace tonight.”

Her hands reached the crease of my hips. Thumbs pressing into the junction of thigh and pelvis, the spot where the femoral artery pulsed close to the surface. She could feel my heartbeat there — I knew she could, because she paused, her thumb resting on the pulse point, and I watched her eyes darken as she registered how fast it was racing.

“You’re so wet,” she said. Not clinically. Reverently. The way she’d said your body is doing beautiful work in a text message six months ago, except now she was saying it with her face six inches from my cunt and her hands framing it like something she intended to worship.

She lowered her mouth.

The first touch was a kiss. Just her lips, pressed against me, warm and soft and closed. A greeting. The way she started every worship — with acknowledgment, with presence, with the specific, focused attention that said I’m here, I see you, this matters.

Then she opened her mouth.

Her tongue slid through me in one long, flat stroke — from my opening to my clit, slow, gathering the wetness, tasting. The sound she made was low and vibrating and went through my nerve endings like an electric current. I grabbed the blocks on either side of the bolster and gripped until my knuckles went white.

“You taste different on these props,” she said against me. “Something about the angle. The elevation.” Her tongue circled my clit once, lazily, and my hips tried to buck but the strap held them — not rigidly, but enough resistance that the movement became a push against tension, and the tension became something to work against, and my athlete’s brain latched onto it with the desperate focus of a body that understood resistance as foreplay.

“The strap,” I gasped. “Fuck, the strap is—”

“I know.” She pressed my thighs wider, the strap stretching with them. “Push against it. Give yourself something to work with.”

I pushed. My thighs strained against the cotton band, the muscles engaging, the resistance creating a feedback loop — effort and sensation and effort again, my body fighting to close while she held me open, and every push made me more aware of how exposed I was, how available, how completely at the mercy of her mouth.

She sucked my clit between her lips. Not gently — with pressure, with intent, her tongue flicking against the trapped bundle of nerves while her lips maintained a seal that made my vision go white. I cried out — her name, a profanity, some combination — and she hummed against me in response, the vibration traveling through my clit and into my spine and I was close, I was already close, it had been maybe three minutes and I was already—

She stopped.

Lifted her mouth. Looked up at me from between my thighs with wet lips and dark eyes and an expression of absolute composure that was so infuriating I wanted to scream.

“Don’t you dare,” I said.

“Don’t I dare what?”

“Edge me. Don’t you dare edge me with studio props on our bedroom floor.”

“I’m not edging you. I’m pacing you. There’s a difference.”

“There is absolutely not a difference.”

“In yoga, we hold poses longer than is comfortable because the magic happens in the staying.” She kissed my inner thigh. Gentle, almost chaste, while my clit throbbed with the abandoned stimulation. “The magic happens in the staying, Cara.”

“I will end you.”

“Breathe. In for four.”

“I am not breathing in for four while you—”

“In for four.”

I breathed in for four. Because she told me to, and my body obeyed her before my brain could intervene, the same way it had obeyed her from the very first class, the same reflexive surrender that I’d stopped fighting months ago.

“Out for six. And when you exhale, soften. Let the arousal be there without chasing it.”

“You’re asking me to not chase an orgasm.”

“I’m asking you to let me bring it to you instead of going after it yourself.”

She lowered her mouth again. Slower this time. Long, broad strokes that covered the full length of me — not focused on the clit, deliberately avoiding it, working the sensitive tissue on either side, dipping her tongue inside me and then retreating. Building the heat without the sharp, focused pressure that would push me over.

I pushed against the strap. The resistance grounded me — gave my body something to do while my brain was being systematically dismantled. I was panting, sweating, the bolster damp under my back, every muscle in my thighs straining against the cotton band.

She slid two fingers inside me. Slowly, curling upward, finding the spot on the front wall that she’d memorized months ago and could locate with the accuracy of a GPS satellite. Her fingers pressed, and my entire body clenched — around her, against the strap, the dual sensation of internal pressure and external resistance creating something new, something I hadn’t felt before.

“That’s it,” she said. The teaching voice. Low, steady, precise. “Feel the resistance. Work against it. Let the tension build.”

“Mira — I can’t—”

“You can. Breathe.”

Her fingers moved inside me — a steady, rhythmic pressure that matched the pace of her tongue when it returned to my clit. Synchronized. Internal and external. The strap holding me open while her fingers worked inside me and her mouth worked outside me and the bolster elevated my hips at an angle that made everything deeper, more accessible, more intense than anything I’d felt in any other position.

She reached for one of the blocks with her free hand. Slid it under my hips, beneath the bolster, adding another inch of elevation, and the angle changed — my pelvis tilting further, my body opening wider — and her fingers hit a spot that made me see actual stars, not the metaphorical kind but actual points of white light in my vision.

“Right there,” I choked. “Right there, don’t move, don’t change anything—”

She didn’t change anything. She maintained — the precise, unwavering consistency that she brought to a pose hold, the same muscle and the same pressure and the same angle for as long as was needed. Her tongue on my clit, her fingers inside me, the block changing the angle, the strap holding me open, and I was straining against all of it — pushing against the strap, grinding against her mouth, clenching around her fingers — every part of my body engaged and working and alive.

“Come for me,” she said. “Let it go. I’ve got you.”

I came so hard my back arched off the bolster.

The orgasm ripped through me from the center outward — starting where her fingers pressed and her tongue worked and radiating out through my hips, my thighs straining against the strap, my stomach, my chest, my hands gripping the blocks so hard I heard the cork creak. I cried out — loud, uncontained, the volume of a woman who owned her apartment and was done performing restraint. My body convulsed around her fingers, my clit pulsing against her tongue, the waves coming and coming and not stopping because she wasn’t stopping — she was riding the orgasm with me, adjusting her pressure to match each contraction, extending it, drawing it out, refusing to let me come down until I’d given her everything.

“One more,” she murmured against me, and her fingers curled harder and her tongue pressed firmer and a second orgasm crested on top of the first — tighter, sharper, a white-hot spike that made me scream her name and grab her hair and hold on while my body seized and shook and finally, finally collapsed.

She gentled. Tongue softening, fingers stilling, her free hand pressing flat on my stomach to ground me while the aftershocks rolled through. She held me open for another moment — the strap still around my thighs, the bolster still under my spine — letting the position do its work, the same way she let a pose linger after the peak to allow the body to absorb what had happened.

Then she reached for the buckle. Released the strap. My knees fell inward, and the relief of the release was its own sensation — the sudden freedom after containment, the muscles uncoiling, the blood flowing back into tissue that had been held at tension.

She slid the block from under my hips. Climbed onto the bolster beside me, fitting herself against my side, her face at my neck, her hand on my chest where my heart was hammering.

“How’s your pigeon pose now?” she asked.

I laughed. It came out wrecked and shaky and half-dissolved. “I think you just realigned my entire pelvic floor.”

“That’s the therapeutic benefit.”

“Nothing about that was therapeutic.”

“Everything about that was therapeutic. You just can’t put it on an insurance claim.”

I turned my head and kissed her. Tasting myself on her mouth — salt, musk, the specific flavor of my own arousal that I’d stopped being embarrassed about months ago. She kissed me back, and the kiss was lazy and deep and tasted like satisfaction, and I let it go on until my breathing had slowed and my hands had stopped shaking and my brain had come back online enough to form a plan.

“Your turn,” I said.

“You don’t have to—”

“Mira. We have rules. No redirecting.”

“I wasn’t redirecting. I was suggesting a recovery period.”

“Recovery period’s over. Roll over.”

I’d been planning this for a week.

Not vaguely — specifically. The way I used to plan plays. Diagramming in my head during physio, during teaching, during the mindless laps I swam at the community pool for low-impact cardio. I had a sequence. I had positions. I had props.

Mira rolled onto her stomach. I pulled the bolster out from under her and repositioned it — this time under her hips, elevating them, her chest and arms extending forward onto the blanket. A modified child’s pose if you were being generous. A position that presented her ass and the backs of her thighs and the entirety of her lower body like something I was being invited to study.

I studied.

Her body in this position was a landscape I hadn’t fully explored. Our sex tended toward face-to-face — eye contact, connection, the mutual gaze that was the cornerstone of our intimacy. Approaching her from behind was different. I could see the muscles of her back, the valley of her spine, the way her ribs expanded with each breath. The tattoo — my tattoo, the one I’d claimed as mine — visible from this angle as a splash of color along her left side, blues and purples curving toward her hip.

And her ass. Full, round, brown skin smooth over the muscle underneath, the kind of strength that came from years of practice and a body that carried its weight with authority. I’d touched her here before — passing, incidental, a hand on her hip during sex that sometimes slid back. But I’d never focused here. Never given this part of her the specific, devoted attention that she’d given to my scars and my stretch marks and every part of me I’d hated.

Time to correct that.

I ran my hands down her back. Starting at her shoulders, firm pressure, the kind of touch that started as massage and was going to end somewhere significantly less clinical. She sighed into the blanket. Her body was already softening — the post-giving glow of a woman who’d just taken someone apart and was riding the residual high.

“You’re still dressed,” she observed.

“You’re not.”

“Seems unbalanced.”

“It’s strategic. You’re not going to be thinking about what I’m wearing in about thirty seconds.”

I reached her lower back. Thumbs pressing into the muscles on either side of her spine, the erector spinae that she overworked in teaching — hours of demonstrating, adjusting, supporting other people’s weight. I worked them the way she’d taught me to work tight tissue: sustained pressure, patience, waiting for the release.

She groaned into the blanket. Her hips shifted on the bolster.

I moved lower. Over the curve of her lower back, the dimples above her ass — I kissed those, pressing my lips into the two small indentations, and her hips shifted again, more deliberately. Then my hands were on her ass, and I wasn’t massaging anymore.

I gripped. Both hands, full palms, the rough calluses of my fingers against the smooth skin. Squeezed hard enough to feel the muscle underneath, hard enough that she gasped and pressed back into my hands.

“Cara—”

“I have been wanting to do this for months. Every time you walk in front of me in leggings, every time you demonstrate a pose, every single time you’re in downward dog — which, by the way, is a position that should be illegal when you’re the one in it — I have been thinking about this.”

I bent and kissed her. The curve of one cheek, then the other. Open-mouthed, tasting her skin — clean, warm, the faint salt of exertion from what she’d just done to me. I dragged my tongue along the crease where ass met thigh and she shuddered, a full-body tremor that rippled through her like a wave through water.

“Oh God,” she whispered.

I spent time here. The way she’d taught me to spend time — not rushing, not treating any part of the body as a waypoint on the route to somewhere else. I kissed and licked and bit, gently, the firm roundness of her ass, my hands spreading her, my mouth exploring the territory that had been overlooked for the entire history of our relationship. She was making sounds I’d never heard before — low, continuous, her face pressed into the blanket, her hands gripping the edges of it.

I reached between her legs from behind. The angle was different — the bolster elevated her hips and the approach from behind meant my fingers found her from a new direction, sliding through wetness that had been gathering since she’d strapped my thighs open and taken me apart with her mouth.

She was soaked. My fingers glided through her, slick and hot, and the sound — the wet, explicit sound of my fingers moving through her arousal — filled the quiet room. She pressed back against my hand, grinding, her hips rocking on the bolster.

“Turn over,” I said.

She did. Rolled onto her back, the bolster still under her hips, and the position put her pelvis at an elevation that changed everything — the angle, the access, the visual. She was spread open in front of me, wet and flushed and breathing hard, and the bolster held her hips high enough that I could see every detail in the candlelight.

I picked up the strap.

Her eyes tracked it. Widened. She’d told me once, on the phone, in the dark — I like to be held down, not roughly, just the solid grounding weight of being contained — and I’d filed it away the way I filed game film. Waiting for the right moment to run the play.

“Hands above your head,” I said.

She raised her arms. I looped the strap around her wrists — loosely, one wrap, the cotton soft against her skin. Not a knot. She could pull free in a second if she wanted to. The restraint was symbolic, not functional. A suggestion, not a command.

But Mira’s breath changed the instant the strap went around her wrists.

I watched it happen: the shift from aroused-but-composed to something rawer. Her breathing went shallow. Her pupils dilated until the dark brown was almost black. Her lips parted. Her whole body — the body that controlled and held and managed and gave — went still in a way that I recognized as surrender. Not the practiced surrender of savasana. The real kind. The kind that required trust so complete it felt like free fall.

“Is this okay?” I asked.

“Yes.” Barely a whisper. “Don’t stop.”

I didn’t stop.

I kissed down her body. The collarbone, the breasts — both of them, with the specific attention each deserved, my mouth on one while my hand cradled the other. Her nipples hardened against my tongue and she arched up, her bound hands straining, and the small sound of the strap pulling taut sent a jolt through both of us.

The tattoo. My territory. I traced it with my tongue the way I’d described on the phone months ago — starting at the hip, following the watercolor swirls up her ribs, tasting the ink and the skin and the specific, thin-skinned sensitivity that made her gasp and squirm. My fingers were inside her while I worked the tattoo — two fingers, slow, curling, maintaining pressure on the spot I’d memorized while my mouth painted her ribs with attention.

She was beyond words. The composure was gone — not cracked, not wavering, gone. Stripped away by the strap around her wrists and my mouth on her ribs and my fingers inside her and the bolster holding her hips at an angle that made everything I did land deeper. She was making sounds that were primal, unfiltered, the sounds of a woman who’d spent her whole life controlling her output and had finally, completely, let the controls go.

“You’re so beautiful like this,” I said against her ribs. “When you stop holding it together. When you let me see you.”

Her eyes were wet. Not crying — glassy. The eyes of a woman floating in sensation, tethered only by my voice and my hands and the cotton strap around her wrists.

I moved lower. Kissed her belly — soft, mine, the part she used to hide and now offered without defense. Kissed the crease of her hip. The inner thigh, where I left a mark — deliberate, dark, a bloom of color that she’d feel tomorrow, that she’d see in the mirror, that she’d carry into her Tuesday morning class like a secret written on her body in a language only I could read.

I settled between her legs. The bolster under her hips put her at the perfect height — my mouth level with her center, no craning, no awkward angles. Just access. Complete, generous, elevated access to the woman I loved.

I looked up at her. She looked down at me. Bound hands above her head, chest heaving, dark eyes swimming. The same eye contact we always held during this act, because seeing and being seen was the core of everything we did.

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you. Please don’t stop.”

I lowered my mouth to her.

The sound she made was something I wanted to record and keep forever. A cry that started low in her chest and climbed, not in volume but in frequency, the pitch rising as my tongue found her clit and pressed and circled and pressed again. Her hips rocked against my face, the bolster enabling a range of motion that flat-on-the-bed didn’t allow — she could tilt and grind and roll, and I matched each movement, my mouth staying with her, reading the rhythm of her hips the way I read the rhythm of a game.

I used everything. Tongue flat and broad for the opening strokes. Tongue pointed and focused for the clit. Lips sealing around the swollen bud and sucking while my tongue worked inside the seal. My fingers inside her, three now — she could take three when she was this aroused, and she opened for me with a moan that vibrated through the room — curling against her front wall with each thrust.

She pulled against the strap. Not to escape — to feel it. The resistance. The containment. The physical sensation of being held while being taken apart, the dual experience of restraint and release that she’d fantasized about and never asked for until she told me on the phone in the dark, and now I was giving it to her with her own yoga strap in our bedroom and she was coming apart so thoroughly I could feel it in every muscle she had.

“Cara — I’m — fuck, I’m—”

“Look at me.”

She looked. I looked back. My mouth on her, my eyes on hers, my fingers working inside her, and the orgasm hit her like a wall. Her back bowed off the bolster, her bound wrists straining against the strap, her thighs clamping around my head, her body seizing in waves that I felt around my fingers in rhythmic, clenching pulses. She cried out — not my name this time, just sound, raw and open-throated and so uncontrolled it sounded like it surprised her.

I held the pressure through the first wave. Then shifted — lighter touch, slower rhythm, the post-peak gentleness that she’d taught me through months of receiving it herself. Her body pulsed and shuddered and gradually softened, the orgasm dissipating like ripples from a stone dropped in still water.

I slid the strap from her wrists. Gently, loosening the cotton, unwinding it from her skin. There were marks — faint pink lines where the fabric had pressed against her during the straining. I kissed them. Each wrist. Each mark.

“Leave them,” she said. Her voice was wrecked. Hoarse. The voice of a woman who’d been screaming. “I want to see them tomorrow. In class.”

“You want to teach a room full of students with strap marks on your wrists?”

“I want to stand at the front of my studio and demonstrate a pose and look down at my wrists and remember this. I want to feel where you held me while I tell other people to let go.”

I stared at her. This woman. This composed, ethical, principled, devastating woman, who wanted to wear the evidence of our bedroom on her body in her professional space, who wanted the collision of those worlds, who understood that the sacred didn’t live in one room or the other but in the space between them.

I kissed her wrists again. “They’ll fade by morning.”

“Then we’ll have to do this again tomorrow night.”

We lay on the floor surrounded by the wreckage of our experiment. The bolster, damp with sweat. The blocks, knocked sideways at some point during the proceedings. The strap, coiled loosely between us like a sleeping snake. The blanket, twisted into a shape that suggested it had been gripped with considerable force.

The candles were guttering. The room smelled like amber and smoke and sex and the particular, specific scent of two bodies that had been working very hard to make each other come apart.

“We can never bring these props back to the studio,” I said.

“These are designated home props now.”

“You’re going to need to order replacements. For the studio.”

“I’m going to need to order several things. Starting with another strap.” She turned her head and looked at me. Flushed, sweaty, her hair a disaster, her eyes soft and dark and completely, radiantly happy. “And maybe a longer bolster.”

“A longer bolster?”

“For when we want to lie on it together.”

I picked up the bolster. Carried it to the bed. Set it lengthwise on the mattress. Then I picked up Mira — scooping her off the floor the way she always pretended to hate and secretly loved, her arms around my neck, her face against my shoulder — and deposited her on the bed, on the bolster, and climbed in beside her.

The bolster wasn’t long enough for two people. We didn’t care. She draped herself half on the prop and half on me, her head on my chest, one leg thrown over mine, her wrist with its faint pink marks resting on my stomach where I could see it. The candlelight was almost gone. The room was going dark.

“Cara?”

“Hmm?”

“Thank you.”

“For the orgasms?”

“For the strap. For the — for knowing what I needed before I said it. For reading that conversation we had on the phone six months ago and filing it away and waiting until now to use it.”

“Game planning.”

“You game-planned our sex life.”

“I game-plan everything. You knew this when you started dating me.”

“I love that about you. I love that you study me the way you studied hockey. Like I’m worth understanding.”

“You’re worth everything.”

She pressed her face harder against my chest. I held her and didn’t ask which one.

“Props,” she said, after a while. “In the studio, they’re tools. Blocks to reach. Straps to extend. Bolsters to support. They help people do things their bodies can’t do alone.”

“And in here?”

“In here, they’re something else. They’re — extensions of us. Extensions of what we already are to each other. You’re my bolster. You support me. You’re my block. You help me reach things I can’t reach alone.”

“And the strap?”

She tilted her face up. The smile — God, that smile. The one that was mine, just mine, the private one that lived in the space between who she was in public and who she was when it was just us.

“The strap is the thing that holds me in place when I’d rather run. The thing that reminds me that staying is where the magic happens.” She kissed my chest. “That’s you, Cara. You’re every prop I’ve ever needed.”

“That’s the corniest thing you’ve ever said.”

“I know.”

“I’m going to think about it every time I see a yoga strap for the rest of my life.”

“Good. That was the goal.”

I pulled the blanket over us. The candles died. The apartment was dark and warm and smelled like us, and the woman I loved was in my arms on a bolster that we’d repurposed from therapeutic equipment into something sacred, and the strap marks on her wrists were fading but the memory of what had put them there would last until the next time, and the time after, and the time after that.

Props. Tools. Extensions of what we were to each other.

Same objects. Different context.

Same love. Infinite expressions.

Loved this? The full novel has 24 chapters of slow-burn body worship romance.

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