🔥 Bonus Chapter: The Bookshelf

Girls Who Kiss Girls Next Door
by Aurora North

A scene too hot for Amazon. Set after the epilogue.

⚠️ Spoiler warning: Read the novel first. This scene takes place after the final chapter.

The Bookshelf

She told me to close my eyes.

This was suspicious for several reasons, not least of which was the fact that Juniper Raye telling me to close my eyes usually preceded one of two things: a surprise or trouble. Often both.

“Close them,” she said again. She was standing in the doorway of what used to be my apartment—what was now her workshop. She had sawdust in her hair and a smear of something dark across her forearm and she was grinning the grin. The dangerous one.

I closed my eyes. She took my hand—calloused palm, warm fingers—and led me through the doorway.

The room smelled like sawdust and wood stain and cedar. I heard her exhale—nervous, I realized. Juniper was nervous.

“Okay. Open.”

The bookshelf stood against the far wall. Walnut—dark, rich, with a grain that shifted in the light like something alive. Five shelves, floating, mounted on hidden cleats. The proportions were perfect—sized exactly for the paperbacks and hardcovers she’d been carrying for me since the day I moved in. At the joint where each shelf met its support, she’d cut dovetails—the kind nobody would see once the books were in place, the kind she did because the invisible work mattered to her.

She’d used the good walnut. Marlo’s voice in my head: She uses the good walnut for things she cares about.

“Juniper,” I said. My voice was doing something inconvenient.

“I know it’s—I started it weeks ago, before we—before everything. I was going to give it to you earlier but then—”

I kissed her. Mid-sentence. Mid-breath. I crossed the workshop in three steps and grabbed the front of her flannel and kissed her so hard she staggered backward, her back hitting the workbench.

“You built me a bookshelf,” I said against her lips.

“Out of the good walnut.”

“Marlo told you about the walnut.”

“Shut up and let me thank you.”

I pushed her flannel off her shoulders. It fell to the workshop floor—concrete, sawdust-covered, not remotely romantic, and I didn’t care. Underneath she was in a tank top. I ran my hands up her biceps, feeling the muscle, the warmth.

“You built me something beautiful because you love me. I’m going to show you what that does to me. Don’t argue.”

I pulled her tank top over her head. Sports bra off. Then my hands were on her bare skin and her breath caught and we were standing in a sawdust-covered workshop with a walnut bookshelf watching us from the wall.

“Here?” she asked. Half-laughing, half-breathless. “In the workshop?”

“Here. Next to the thing you built me.” I kissed her throat. Her collarbone. The script tattooed at her sternum—build something—and I felt her shiver. “I want you to remember this every time you pick up a saw.”

“That’s a workplace safety hazard.”

“Live dangerously.”

She laughed. Then stopped laughing because my hand was inside her jeans.

I’d gotten good at this. I knew Juniper’s body the way she knew wood grain—by instinct, by touch. I knew that she liked it when I started slow. I knew the spot on her neck that made her eyes close. I knew the exact pressure on her clit that made her stop talking.

She stopped talking now.

My fingers moved through her—wet, hot—and I circled her clit while my mouth worked the tendon in her throat. She gripped the workbench behind her, knuckles white against the scarred wood, hips pressing forward into my hand.

“Take these off,” I said, tugging at her jeans. Not a request.

She kicked them off. Underwear with them. She was naked in her workshop, surrounded by her tools and the bookshelf she’d built me out of love and good walnut.

I dropped to my knees on the concrete floor.

“Wren—the floor—”

“Don’t care.”

I put my mouth on her and she gasped—the sharp, helpless gasp she made when I went straight for what she needed. I licked her with broad, flat strokes, then narrowed my focus to her clit and sucked gently, and she moaned so loud it echoed off the workshop walls.

The acoustics were incredible. Every sound she made bounced back, amplified. Her gasps. Her breathing. My name, broken in half.

I slid two fingers inside her. Curled forward. Found the spot and pressed, and her hips bucked against my mouth and she said something half-word and half-prayer.

“Don’t stop. Please—right there—”

I didn’t stop. Tongue on her clit, fingers inside her, the dual assault that was her undoing. She came with her back arching off the workbench and her voice filling the room—my name, both syllables, said like a word she’d been building toward her entire life.

I stood up. She pulled me against her. Both arms, tight, her face in my neck, trembling with aftershocks.

“You just went down on me next to a table saw.”

“The table saw wasn’t running.”

“Your appreciation is going to get sawdust in places sawdust should not be.”

“Romantic.”

She kissed me. Deep, slow, tasting herself on my mouth. Then she pulled back: “Your turn.”

“On the workbench.”

She lifted me. Hands on my waist, one smooth motion, and I was sitting on the workbench with my legs dangling. She undressed me with focused efficiency—shirt, bra, jeans, all gone. I was naked on her workbench and the walnut bookshelf was glowing in the afternoon light.

“Lie back.”

I lay back. The bench was hard and warm. She kissed down my body—throat, breasts, stomach, the inside of my thigh—and I spread my legs wider because I couldn’t wait.

She put her mouth on me and I arched off the workbench and grabbed the edge and held on.

She was devastating. Her tongue moved in slow, firm circles on my clit while her hands gripped my hips. She slid two fingers inside me and curled forward and my vision went white. I came fast and hard, my back arching, her name in my mouth, the sound bouncing off the workshop walls like an echo of my own pleasure.

She climbed up beside me on the narrow bench. We lay on our sides, pressed together, both naked, covered in a fine layer of sawdust.

“We just christened your workshop,” I said.

“I’m never going to be able to work in here again without thinking about this.”

“Good.”

“I love you,” she said. Into my hair. Casually. Like breathing.

“I love you too. And I love the bookshelf.”

“The bookshelf or the thank-you?”

“Both. Always both.”

Thank you for reading Girls Who Kiss Girls Next Door. Wren and Juniper’s story is complete — but the duplex has more stories to tell.

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