Bonus Chapter: The Photos
Shared Bed, No Rules — Exclusive Bonus
by Aurora North
This bonus chapter takes place three months after the events of Shared Bed, No Rules. It contains explicit sexual content and is intended for readers 18+.
The Photos
Riley
The gallery wanted twelve prints by Friday.
I had four hundred and seventy-three images from October, and I’d been staring at my laptop screen for three hours, and I’d selected exactly zero, because every time I opened the October folder, I scrolled past the storms and the coastline and the basalt stacks and landed on her.
Forty-three photographs of Ava Monroe.
I hadn’t shown them to anyone. Not my agent, not the gallery director, not Ava herself — although she knew they existed, knew I’d been shooting her all week, knew the camera had been as drawn to her as the rest of me had been. She just didn’t know what they looked like. She didn’t know that they were the best work I’d ever done.
I clicked through them in the blue-gray light of the cottage studio — the spare bedroom that Ava had graciously surrendered for my editing setup, which now contained two monitors, a calibrated display, and a print station that took up most of the floor. She’d joked that I’d colonized the room within forty-eight hours. She wasn’t wrong.
Image one. Ava on the cliff, day four. The wind in her hair, her mouth slightly open, her eyes looking directly into the lens with an expression I’d never been able to name and had never stopped trying. It was the shot from the portrait session — the one I’d taken the moment her guard dropped, when I’d had my hands on her shoulders and told her to breathe and she’d opened her eyes and looked at me like I was the first thing she’d ever really seen.
My chest ached. Three months later, and the photograph still did this to me.
Image seven. The hidden beach. She was walking along the waterline, barefoot, her jeans rolled to her calves, and the light was hitting the water behind her in a way that turned her into a silhouette edged in silver. I remembered taking this shot. I remembered what happened after — behind the rock formation, her back against the basalt, my hand inside her jeans while she bit her wrist to keep quiet.
I shifted in my chair.
Image fifteen. The morning she’d stolen my camera. She’d taken twelve photographs of me — twelve frames of a woman who hated being on the other side of the lens — and I’d been terrified to look at them. When I finally did, weeks later, I’d seen what she saw: a woman falling in love and not being afraid of it. But this photo was mine of her, taken after she’d handed the camera back. She was sitting on the window seat in my flannel, bare-legged, the ocean behind her, and she was looking at the camera with the specific, devastating confidence of a woman who’d just realized she had power and intended to use it.
That afternoon she’d tied my wrists with the blue cashmere scarf and taken me apart so thoroughly that I’d cried.
I clicked to the next image. And the next. Each one was a key to a room I’d lived in — a specific moment, a specific light, a specific version of us that existed only in the frame and in my memory. Ava laughing on the driftwood log. Ava asleep, her face soft, her hand curled under the pillow. Ava in the candlelight, her eyes dark and her lips parted and her body angled toward mine across a dinner table that was about to become irrelevant.
Image thirty-nine. The morning after the fight. She was sitting on the edge of the bed wearing the blue scarf around her neck, her suitcase open and empty beside the door, her hands in her lap. She didn’t know I’d taken this one. I’d walked in from the cliffs and found her there — unpacked, staying, brave — and I’d raised the camera before she heard me.
Her face in this photograph was the face of a woman who’d just chosen the terrifying thing over the safe thing. The face of a woman who’d called her boss and said I’m not coming in Monday and meant I’m not coming back to the life that doesn’t fit me anymore.
It was the most beautiful photograph I’d ever taken.
I selected it. Dragged it to the gallery folder. Stared at it on the calibrated display, large, luminous, Ava’s face filling the screen.
“Oh my God.”
Her voice. Behind me. I spun in my chair.
Ava was standing in the doorway of the studio in a towel, her hair wet from the shower, her skin flushed from the hot water. She was staring at the screen. At her own face, twelve inches tall, rendered in the exacting detail of a calibrated display that showed every freckle and every eyelash and the exact color of her eyes in the October light.
“You weren’t supposed to see—”
“Is that what I look like?” she whispered.
She crossed the room. Stood behind my chair, one hand on my shoulder, staring at the screen. I scrolled. Slowly. Through all forty-three images, one by one, and I felt her hand tighten on my shoulder with each one.
“The cliff,” she said. “That was the day you made me close my eyes.”
“You opened them and looked at me and I almost dropped the camera.”
“The beach. That’s — Riley, the light in this one —”
“You were walking in the surf and the backlight caught you and I shot forty frames in two minutes.”
“And this one.” She pointed at image thirty-nine. The unpacking photo. “When did you take this? I didn’t — I didn’t know you were there.”
“I walked in and you were sitting there with the empty suitcase and the scarf around your neck, and you looked like the bravest person I’d ever seen.” I swallowed. “That one’s the centerpiece. For the gallery show.”
Silence. Her hand on my shoulder, gripping now.
“You’re putting me in a gallery,” she said.
“I’m putting the best photograph I’ve ever taken in a gallery. You happen to be in it.”
“Riley.”
“Ava.”
She spun my chair around. I looked up at her — standing over me in a towel, her hair dripping, her eyes bright and wet and fierce — and she put her hands on my face and kissed me with the kind of intensity that made the chair roll backward until it hit the desk.
“You made me beautiful,” she said against my mouth.
“You were already beautiful. I just had the lens.”
“Shut up and take your clothes off.”
The towel lasted about four seconds.
She pulled it off and dropped it on the floor and she was naked in the studio light — the calibrated, color-accurate, unforgiving light that I used to evaluate prints — and she was the most perfectly exposed image I’d ever seen. Every line, every shadow, every curve rendered in a quality that no camera could match because no camera had the resolution of my eyes on this woman.
I was slower. She didn’t let me be slow. She pulled my shirt over my head, yanked the sports bra off with the efficiency of someone who’d done it a hundred times, and had my jeans unbuttoned before I could form a sentence. When I was naked in the chair — in the office chair, in the studio, with the monitors still on and her face still filling the screen behind me — she straddled me.
The chair groaned. She didn’t care.
“This is what those photographs do to me,” she said. She was in my lap, her knees on either side of my hips, and she was already wet — I could feel her against my stomach, the slick heat of her arousal, and the evidence of what my work had done to her was its own kind of masterpiece. “Every time you look at me through that camera. Every time you show me something about myself I didn’t know was there. This is what it does.”
She ground down against me. My hands went to her hips — muscle memory, instinct, the learned response of a body that knew exactly where to hold her. She rolled against me, using my lap the way she’d used my thigh in Room 7, the way she’d used the bed and the bathtub and every surface we’d ever shared — with shameless, focused, consuming purpose.
“I want you on the floor,” I said.
“There’s camera equipment on the floor.”
“I’ll move it.”
“Move it fast.”
I stood — lifting her with me, her legs wrapping around my waist — and swept the lens cases and the roll of backdrop paper aside with my foot and lowered her onto the rug. The rug was rough. She didn’t care. She pulled me down on top of her and her mouth was on my neck and her hands were in my hair and her hips were lifting against mine before my knees hit the floor.
“Fingers,” she gasped. “Now. I need you inside me.”
I slid my hand between us. Found her swollen and soaked — drenched, the wetness coating my fingers before I’d even entered her — and I pushed inside with two fingers and she arched off the rug with a cry that echoed off the studio walls.
“More,” she demanded. “Harder.”
I gave her more. Three fingers, deep, curling against the spot I’d mapped months ago and could find blindfolded. My palm ground against her clit with every thrust. Her legs wrapped around my waist, pulling me deeper. The rug was burning her back and she didn’t care, couldn’t care, because the sounds she was making had gone past words and into the territory of pure, animal response.
“Look at me,” I said.
She opened her eyes. Brown and gold and wild, the pupils blown, her face flushed and her mouth open and — and behind me, on the monitor, her other face. The photograph. The cliff portrait. Two versions of Ava — the composed, luminous woman in the frame and the writhing, desperate, beautiful woman beneath me — and the juxtaposition was so erotic that my own arousal spiked hard enough to make my vision blur.
“You see that?” I breathed, angling her gaze past my shoulder to the screen. “That’s what I see. That’s what the world is going to see. The most beautiful woman I’ve ever photographed. And she’s mine.”
“Yours,” she gasped. “Yours, yours — fuck — Riley —”
She came. Hard. Her body seizing around my fingers, her back arching off the rug, her scream so loud that the neighbor’s dog started barking. I felt every pulse, every contraction, every wave, and I watched her face through all of it — watched the composure shatter and the vulnerability bloom and the pleasure consume her like fire consuming paper — and I thought: this. This is the shot I’ll never be able to take. This is the one that only exists in the space between us.
She pulled me down before the aftershocks faded. Kissed me, shaking, her hand already sliding between my legs.
“Your turn,” she panted. “On your back.”
I rolled. She climbed over me — the rug rough against my shoulder blades, the ceiling above us dotted with the tiny LED lights I used for print evaluation — and she slid down my body with the systematic thoroughness that had been her signature from the beginning. Kissing my throat, my collarbones, the underside of my breast. Biting my hip bone. Working down with the methodical precision of a woman who approached even desire with analytical rigor.
Her mouth found me. I was so wound up from watching her come — from the photographs, from the studio light on her skin, from the primal satisfaction of hearing her scream my name — that the first stroke of her tongue made my hips buck off the rug.
“Good girl,” she murmured against me. My own words. The ones she’d weaponized months ago and had never stopped deploying with devastating accuracy.
She ate me alive. That was the only description that fit — her mouth on me with a hunger and a focus and a knowledge that made resistance impossible. She knew me. She knew every ridge and fold and nerve ending. She knew the rhythm that built me fastest and the rhythm that kept me on the edge and the exact moment to switch from one to the other.
She kept me on the edge for three minutes. Three minutes of her tongue and her fingers and her voice — murmuring against me, praise and filth and my name — while I gripped the leg of the desk above my head and shook and begged.
“Come for me,” she said. “Right here. On the floor of your studio. Under your photographs. Come for me, baby.”
I came so hard my vision went black. The orgasm tore through me in a full-body convulsion that lifted my hips off the floor and drove my shoulders into the rug and pulled a sound from my throat that was part her name and part something wordless and raw. She held me through it — mouth still on me, hands on my hips, riding the wave with me — until the last aftershock faded and I collapsed against the rug, gasping, ruined, every muscle trembling.
She crawled up my body. Lay on top of me, chest to chest, her face in my neck. I wrapped my arms around her and held on and stared at the ceiling and felt the specific, overwhelming gratitude of a woman who’d spent her whole life photographing beautiful things from a distance and had finally been pulled into the frame.
“The gallery show,” Ava said, after a while. Her voice was muffled against my neck. “You’re really using that photo as the centerpiece?”
“I really am.”
“People will see it. Strangers. They’ll see my face and — Riley, they’ll know. They’ll look at that photograph and they’ll know exactly what I was feeling when you took it.”
“Yes.”
“And you want that? You want the world to see—”
“I want the world to see what I see. A woman who chose courage over comfort. A woman who unpacked her suitcase.” I pressed my mouth against her hair. “The woman I’m in love with.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she lifted her head and looked at me — really looked, the full-focus, no-filter, data-collecting look that I’d fallen in love with — and smiled.
“Then I need a better outfit for the opening,” she said.
I laughed. On the floor of the studio, naked, with lens cases digging into my hip and the rug burn on my shoulders and forty-three photographs of the woman I loved glowing on the screen above us. I laughed, and she laughed with me, and the sound filled the room the way her presence filled the cottage — completely, naturally, like it had always been there and had just been waiting to be heard.
I held her on the floor of the studio, and I did not reach for the camera.
I didn’t need to.
I was in it.
Thank you for reading Ava and Riley’s story. 💛
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