Bonus Chapter: The Other Side of the Door

Cat Sitters & Dirty Letters
by Aurora North

An exclusive bonus scene from Jules’s POV — too hot for Amazon.

The Other Side of the Door

Jules’s POV — the night she came home early

The shoot wrapped two days early because the editor loved everything and I couldn’t sit still.

That’s not the real reason. The real reason was the cat-sitter.

I’d spent five days upstate photographing strangers in beautiful light and thinking about a woman I barely knew who was one floor below my apartment feeding my cat and existing in the world with ink on her fingers and a cardigan with a coffee stain she pretended was part of the pattern. I’d thought about her in the morning when I made coffee and the cup wasn’t the right shape — my cups were at home, and home had Nora in it, or near it, and the proximity was doing something to me that I didn’t have a name for yet.

So I drove back. Four hours on the highway with the windows down and my camera bag in the backseat and a feeling in my chest like a door opening.

I let myself into the apartment expecting Margot. Expecting the quiet, the settling-back-in, the particular peace of returning to a space that’s been kept warm by someone else’s care.

I did not expect to find Nora Chen sitting on my couch.

She was cross-legged, her back against the cushion, Margot sprawled across her shins. Her face was blotchy. Her eyes were swollen. Her glasses were smudged and slightly crooked and there was a wet spot on the collar of her shirt where tears had soaked through the fabric. Her hair was coming out of its clip in three places.

She was holding my letter. The unsent one. The one I’d written on the bathroom floor while Sarah packed a bag and Margot sat on the bath mat and I’d cried so hard I’d burst a blood vessel in my left eye.

She looked up at me and the expression on her face was not what I expected.

I expected guilt. The face of someone caught doing something wrong — snooping, invading, consuming private things without permission. I expected the flinch, the excuse, the hasty apology.

That’s not what I saw.

What I saw was a woman who had just witnessed something sacred and knew she wasn’t supposed to be there but couldn’t leave. What I saw was recognition. The specific, devastating expression of someone who has found a wound that matches their own and is holding it like a mirror, looking at both reflections at once.

She’d been crying over my breakup letter. Not aroused by it. Not entertained. Not titillated or amused or any of the things Sarah’s friend Cassidy had probably been when she’d read my words over eggs Benedict. Nora was crying. She was sitting on my couch with my most private wound in her shaking hands and she was weeping because she felt it. Because the pain in those words was real and she’d read it closely enough to find it and it had broken her.

In that moment — one second, maybe two, before the anger arrived, before the sense of violation kicked in, before the self-protective machinery engaged and my mouth said get out — I felt something else.

I wanted to cross the room. I wanted to take the letter out of her hands and replace it with my hands. I wanted to sit beside her on the couch and say: you’re crying over the right things. You’re crying because someone was careless with something precious, and you understand what that costs, and you’re not laughing.

I didn’t do any of that. I told her to leave. My voice was steady and controlled, which is what my voice does when I’m about to shatter — it goes very calm, very even, like a lake freezing over, the ice forming so smoothly you can’t see the depth of what’s underneath.

She left. She apologized and she stumbled and she went, and the door closed behind her with a click that sounded like a period at the end of a sentence I wasn’t ready to finish.

I sat on the couch for a long time. Margot was in my lap. The apartment was quiet.

I picked up the letters — she’d left the box open, the ribbon untied, the pages slightly disordered from reading. I could see which ones she’d handled most — the edges softened, the folds loosened, small details that told me she’d read some of them more than once. The close reader. The woman who paid attention to text the way I paid attention to light.

I picked up the kitchen letter — the one about the counter, about Sarah’s body, the one that was explicit and tender and technically accomplished. The paper was warm. From Nora’s hands. She’d been holding it long enough to warm the paper, which meant the last thing she’d read before I appeared was a three-page description of how I’d gone down on another woman on my kitchen counter.

I should have been furious about that. I was furious about that. But underneath the fury was something else — the specific, disorienting awareness that a woman had just read the most explicit thing I’d ever written and responded not with arousal (though probably that too, and I wasn’t going to think about that, not yet, not while I was still angry) but with tears. She’d read my sex letters and cried. What kind of person does that?

A person who understood that the sex wasn’t the point. A person who could read past the bodies and the mouths and the explicit choreography and see what was underneath: a woman who loved so completely that she had to write it down or lose it. A woman who documented desire because the documenting was the desire. A woman who was terrified of being too much and poured that terror onto paper and called it a love letter.

Nora had seen that. In nine letters, she’d seen the thing that Sarah never saw — that the writing wasn’t performance. It was confession.

My phone buzzed. Her text: I’m sorry. They were the most beautiful, honest things I’ve ever read, and I had no right to any of them.

I read it seventeen times. I wasn’t going to respond. I read it seventeen times.

Honest. Not hot. Not well-written. Not intense, which was the word Sarah had used. Nora had called them honest. She’d identified the one thing about those letters that mattered more than the sex or the romance or the lyrical precision: they were true.

At 3am, I was still awake. Margot was on my chest, her weight warm and grounding, her purr a low vibration I could feel in my sternum. The apartment was dark. One floor below me, Nora’s light was on — I could see the warm yellow glow through my window, the late-night beacon of a woman who couldn’t sleep.

Neither could I.

I reached for my phone. Opened a note. Not a text — I wasn’t ready for that. But I needed to write. The way I always needed to write when a feeling was too big for the dark.

I typed:

She was crying over the unsent letter and she looked like she understood it. Not the words — the cost. The cost of writing that honestly and having it treated as nothing. She looked at me like she’d found my autopsy report and instead of flinching she’d read every page and felt every cut and was sitting there bleeding from wounds that weren’t hers, and I don’t know what to do with someone who bleeds for me.

She has ink on her fingers. Always the left hand, the middle finger. She bites her thumbnail when she’s nervous. She talks to plants and holds elevators and wears cardigans with coffee stains and she read my most private words and called them honest and I am furious and I am grateful and I am terrified because I haven’t felt anything this specific about anyone since Sarah and the specificity is the warning sign, the specificity is how it starts, the noticing of details is the first draft of a letter I’m not ready to write.

But I’m writing it anyway. In my head. In the dark. With a cat on my chest and a woman’s light on below me.

I think I’m in trouble.

I saved the note. Put the phone down. Pressed my face into Margot’s fur.

“I think I’m in trouble,” I whispered to the cat.

Margot purred. She didn’t disagree.

Below me, Nora’s light stayed on. Two women, one floor apart, awake in the dark, each holding the other’s words like something breakable. Like something worth keeping.

I didn’t sleep.

In the morning, I’d go to her door. I’d knock — three taps, a pause, two more — and she’d open it looking wrecked and hopeful and terrified, and I’d say: Can I come in?

And she’d let me. And everything would change. And the letters would stop being a monument to someone who left and start being a bridge to someone who stayed.

But that’s tomorrow’s story.

Tonight, the cat purrs. The light stays on. And I write in the dark about a woman named Nora who reads the way I look: with her whole body.

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