🔥 Friday Night 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Bridesmaid’s Best Mistake
by Aurora North

Thank You for Reading! 🖤

You made it to the bonus content — which means you survived the tequila, the stairwell, the conference room, the ice-machine alcove, the centerpieces excuse, the ambitious mosquito, the speech that made Victoria Hale cry in public, and the living room floor where two women said I love you under a pillow that says ADVOCATE FOR FUN.

Friday Night

Tori’s POV

I made the reservation three days early.

This was, by my standards, spontaneous. I was a woman who booked restaurants six weeks in advance, who confirmed reservations twice, who arrived ten minutes early and tipped precisely twenty-two percent because twenty was stingy and twenty-five was performative. I had a system. The system worked. I did not deviate from the system.

Except that Lily Monroe had detonated the system, and the rubble was still smoking, and I was standing in my bathroom at six-fifteen on a Friday evening trying to decide between two shades of lipstick like a woman who had never successfully gotten dressed before.

The dark plum. She liked the dark plum. She’d told me once—in bed, her fingers tracing my mouth, her legs tangled in mine, her voice still husky from what we’d just done—that the plum shade made her want to ruin me. She’d said it casually, the way she said most devastating things, and I’d filed it in the ever-expanding mental archive I was maintaining on Everything Lily Monroe Has Said That Made My Brain Short-Circuit.

Plum it was.

I wore the black dress. Not the structured one—the other one. The one I’d bought two days ago at a boutique I’d walked past a hundred times and never entered, because Victoria Hale did not buy dresses for first dates. Victoria Hale was practical and efficient and did not care about impressing anyone.

Victoria Hale was standing in her bathroom in a new dress with her lipstick on and her hands shaking.

I drove to the city. Forty-five minutes without traffic. I texted: I’m downstairs.

She texted back: Two minutes. Can’t find my other shoe.

She came down in four.

I was not prepared.

She came through the lobby door in a dress that should have required a permit. Deep emerald—the same shade as the bridesmaid dress—but shorter. Tighter. With a slit up the left thigh that stopped approximately two inches below the point of decency.

Her hair was down. Rose-gold waves. Lip gloss catching the streetlight. Heels she couldn’t quite walk in, which I knew because she wobbled on the second step and grabbed my arm and laughed.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

Our word.

“You’re wearing the plum lipstick,” she said.

“You know what that lipstick does to me.”

“This date is going to be very short if you keep looking like that.”

“The reservation is at seven-thirty. We are going to eat dinner. Like adults.”

“Adults who are going to have very athletic sex afterward.”

“Lily.”

“I’m just setting expectations. Managing stakeholders. You appreciate clear communication.”

The restaurant was a small Italian place in the West Village. Candlelit. Brick walls. Tables close enough to feel intimate, spaced far enough for privacy. I pulled out her chair. She looked at me.

“You pulled out my chair.”

“Nobody has ever pulled out my chair.”

“Then every person you’ve dated before me has been negligent.”

Lily reached across the table and took my hand. Not under the table. On it. On the white tablecloth, in the candlelight, visible to everyone.

“This is the part where you hold my hand and don’t care who sees.”

“I don’t care who sees,” I said. And meant it with every atom of my body.

She told me her mom had asked about me by name—not your friend, but Tori. Tell Tori she’s welcome at Thanksgiving.

“She’s trying, Tori. In her way. The way people try when they love you and they’re scared of the new shape of things.”

Under the table, her ankle hooked around mine. The same geometry we’d invented at the rehearsal dinner when this was a secret. But there was no secret now.

We did not make it to dessert.

She leaned across the table, her dress gaping at the neckline, and said, very quietly: “You know, I’m not wearing anything under this dress.”

I flagged the waiter for the check before the sentence was finished.

In the car, she kissed me before I could start the engine. Her hand on the back of my neck, pulling me across the console. I kissed her back and my hand found the slit in her dress and she had not been lying. Nothing underneath. Just warm, bare skin all the way up, and the feel of it under my fingers made my brain go blank.

She gasped against my mouth. My fingers traced higher. She was wet—already, before I’d even touched her properly.

“Drive,” she whispered. “Drive fast. Or I’m going to make you pull over.”

Forty-five minutes. Her hand on my thigh the entire drive, thumb drawing circles that moved incrementally higher each time I stopped at a light. At one red light she kissed my neck and I gripped the steering wheel hard enough to leave fingerprints.

“If you make me crash this car—”

“You won’t crash. You’re the most competent everything I’ve ever met.” Her thumb pressed higher. “You can handle a little distraction.”

We made it. Apartment. Door. I fumbled the keys. She took them, got us inside. I pressed her against the hallway wall.

The hallway wall had become our spot.

I kissed her against it and it was different from the stairwell, different from the alcove, different from every desperate, stolen collision of the wedding week. This was unhurried. We had all night. We had every night. And the absence of a deadline made everything slower and sweeter and more devastating.

I found the zipper at the back of her dress. Pulled it down slowly, pressing my lips to each new inch of exposed skin. The nape of her neck. The space between her shoulder blades. Her spine. The emerald silk slid off her shoulders and pooled at her feet and she was naked.

Completely, entirely naked. She had sat across from me in a restaurant for ninety minutes in a dress and nothing else and the knowledge of it made something in my chest go white-hot.

I picked up the dress. Folded it. Set it on the hall table.

“Always,” she said.

“Always.”

She undressed me. The new black dress, the one I’d bought for her. She unzipped it with one hand—a skill she’d acquired with remarkable speed—and said “Oh” in that soft, punched-out way she always did when she saw me bare, as if it surprised her every time.

She folded my dress. Set it next to hers. Looked at me.

“I can be trained,” she said.

I lifted her. She wrapped her legs around my waist and I carried her down the hallway to our bedroom—the one that smelled like cedar and vanilla now, both of us, blended into something that was becoming the scent of home.

I laid her on the bed. She was sprawled on the white sheets, rose-gold hair fanned across the pillow. She stretched her arms above her head and said, “You’re staring.”

“Are you going to do something about it or just admire the view?”

I knelt on the bed. Kissed her ankle. Her calf. The inside of her knee. Up her thigh—slowly, the approach she loved and I loved giving her, the deliberate refusal to rush.

She was already wet. I could see it, glistening between her thighs. I pressed my mouth to her inner thigh, close enough that she could feel my breath.

“Tori. Please. I’ve been thinking about this since the appetizer course.”

“Which appetizer? The bruschetta or the carpaccio?”

“I will kill you.”

I put my mouth on her.

I took my time. I used my tongue in the long, flat strokes she liked best, tasting her, feeling her hips roll against my face. I slid two fingers inside her and she clenched around me immediately, slick and tight and hot, and I curved them upward and found the spot that made her grab the headboard.

She was vocal tonight. Our apartment gave her permission to be as loud as she wanted, and she took it. She said my name. She said please. She said right there and don’t stop and oh fuck, Tori in a voice that was wrecked and gorgeous and I felt every word between my own legs like a pulse.

I brought her to the edge and held her there. Eased off. Circled. Pressed. Eased off again. She was shaking, gripping the sheets, her thighs trembling against my shoulders.

“Tori—I can’t—I need—”

“You can. One more minute.”

“I am going to die.”

“You’re not going to die. You’re going to come so hard you see colors.”

“Promise?”

I sealed my mouth over her clit and sucked gently and curled my fingers and she came apart. A scream, full-throated, her back arching off the mattress, her hand fisting in my hair, her whole body locking and releasing in waves. I worked her through it—through the first crest and the aftershock and the second wave that followed when I didn’t stop—until she was boneless and gasping.

I kissed my way up her body. Her stomach. Her ribs. Her throat. Her mouth, which was open and wet and tasted like wine when I kissed it.

“Colors,” she whispered. “I saw actual colors. There was purple. And gold. And a color I don’t think has a name.”

“You’re welcome.”

Then her eyes sharpened and she rolled me onto my back.

“My turn. And I’m not going to be gentle about it.”

She was not gentle about it.

She pinned my wrists above my head and kissed down my body with the focused, devastating confidence of someone who had spent seven days learning me. She knew that kissing the spot below my ear made my breath stutter. She knew that biting—gently, at the junction of my neck and shoulder—made me grip whatever was closest. She knew I liked her weight on me, and she gave it to me—full-contact, her breasts against mine, her hips against mine.

She spent time with my breasts. Mouth and hands, the specific rhythm she’d figured out—slow circles with her tongue, then a gentle bite, then the flat of her palm. I was gripping the headboard. I never gripped the headboard. I was a woman who maintained composure in federal courtrooms and I was gripping a headboard because Lily Monroe was doing things with her mouth that should have been illegal in several states.

She moved lower. Kissed my stomach. Pressed her lips to the stretch marks she’d claimed as hers and kissed every time, religiously, as if reminding me they were beautiful.

She settled between my legs and looked up at me.

“Look at me,” she said.

My own words. Given back to me.

I looked at her.

She put her mouth on me and I stopped thinking.

She used her tongue in the slow circles she’d learned I liked. She slid two fingers inside me—confident, certain, finding the angle that made my vision blur on the first try because she’d memorized it. She looked at me while she did it. Held my gaze. Didn’t let me close my eyes, didn’t let me retreat into sensation, kept me present and visible and seen.

I came with my hands in her hair and her name in my mouth and an orgasm that started in my center and radiated outward until I felt it in my fingertips and my toes. I shook. I did not try to control it. I let it take me wherever it was going and I trusted that she would be there when I landed.

She was there. She was always there.

We went again. Because once was never enough with us.

The second time was slower. Face to face, lying on our sides, her hand between my legs and mine between hers, mirrored, synchronized. We watched each other. We breathed each other’s air. We came together—not at the exact same moment, but close enough that the overlap felt like a conversation, one body answering another.

Afterwards. Tangled in wrecked sheets. She was on top of me—sprawled across my chest like a human weighted blanket, her face in my neck, her breathing slowing by degrees.

“Tori?”

“Hm?”

“How was the date?”

I pressed my lips to the top of her head. Breathed in the scent of her—vanilla, coconut, sex, home.

“Best first date I’ve ever had.”

“It’s not technically our first date. We’ve been sleeping together for a week, living together for a week, and you told me you loved me on a living room floor. This is more like our fiftieth date.”

“Fine. Best fiftieth date I’ve ever had.”

“Next Friday?”

“Next Friday.”

“With a reservation?”

“Always with a reservation.”

She tilted her face up. Kissed my jaw. “I love you, ice sculpture.”

“I love you too, chaos agent.”

She laughed against my neck and settled deeper into me. Her hand found mine under the covers and held it—laced fingers, palm to palm.

The city hummed outside our window. The apartment settled around us—the creaks and sighs of an old building, the sounds of a life that had been empty and silent for five years and was now full of lip gloss and burnt dinners and a woman who said I love you like it was the easiest thing in the world.

She had taught me that. That love could be easy. That it didn’t have to be earned or managed or argued before a judge. That it could just exist—messy and loud and covered in vanilla body lotion, sleeping diagonally across seventy-five percent of the bed.

I held her. She held me. The apartment was dark and warm and ours.

Best mistake I ever made.

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