Rival Rackets — Bonus Chapter

Rematch — Rome
An Exclusive Bonus Chapter by Aurora North

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The night before we play each other in Rome, Vivienne reorganizes the hotel closet.

This is not a metaphor. She is literally standing in front of our shared closet in Suite 412 at eleven p.m., arranging her match outfits by color while I lie on the bed in her stolen pullover and watch her with the specific, helpless admiration of a woman who has been in love for four months and still hasn’t gotten over the way her girlfriend folds things.

The pullover is grey Nike. She stopped asking for it back after the second week. Now she buys extras knowing I’ll steal them. The domestic negotiation of a shared wardrobe—who owns what, who washes what, whose side of the suitcase is whose—is somehow the most intimate thing we do. More intimate than the sex. Almost.

“You’re doing it again,” I say.

“Doing what?”

“The pre-match reorganization. You rearranged the bathroom at Indian Wells. You alphabetized the room service menu in Miami. In Dubai you refolded every towel in the suite. And now you’re color-coding your Nike kits the night before a semifinal.”

“Order is calming.”

“Order is foreplay for you. You’re nervous.”

She pauses. Turns. She’s in a thin cotton shirt and underwear—black, simple, the kind that shouldn’t be devastating and is—and her hair is down and her feet are bare on the tile and the Roman lamplight is doing something criminal to her collarbones. She looks like a Renaissance painting that wandered off the wall and started organizing athletic wear.

“I’m not nervous about the match,” she says.

“What are you nervous about?”

“Playing you.” She sets a folded shirt on the shelf with unnecessary precision. “Playing anyone else is tennis. Playing you is— complicated.”

I sit up. Cross my legs on the bed. “Complicated how?”

“Complicated in the sense that I know exactly what your body looks like under that match kit and I have to stand across a net from you for two hours and pretend I don’t.” She turns fully to face me, leaning against the closet frame, arms crossed. “Complicated in the sense that I know what sounds you make when you’re close, and your service grunt is approximately three notes lower, and every time you serve tomorrow my body is going to make associations that are entirely inappropriate for live television.”

The sentence hits me in three places at once. Chest. Stomach. Between my thighs. Four months of being loved by this woman and she still has the ability to short-circuit my brain with a single paragraph.

“Vivienne Cross,” I say. “Are you telling me that hearing me grunt on a tennis court turns you on?”

“I’m telling you that I have developed an involuntary physiological response to a specific frequency of your voice, and that frequency happens to occur both during serve motions and during— other activities. It’s inconvenient.”

“That’s the hottest thing anyone has ever described as ‘inconvenient.'”

She almost smiles. She’s enjoying this. We still talk like rivals. We just do it naked now.

“Come here,” I say.

“I’m organizing.”

“Vivienne. Come here.”

She crosses the room. I catch her by the hem of her shirt and pull her down and she lands half on top of me, laughing—the real laugh—and I roll us so she’s on her back and I’m straddling her hips.

“Here’s my pre-match strategy,” I say. “I’m going to make you come so hard that tomorrow, every time you look at me across the net, you think about tonight instead of tennis.”

“That’s the worst tactical plan I’ve ever heard.”

“Prove it,” she says.

I pull her shirt over her head. She’s bare underneath—the long, lean, exquisitely sculpted body I’ve spent four months memorizing. I run my hands up her sides, over her ribs, and she shivers.

I lean down and kiss her. Slow. Thorough. Tongue sliding against hers, and she makes a sound into my mouth—a low, vibrating hum that I feel through my chest.

Her hands hook into my waistband. I strip down to my bra and underwear, straddling her on a hotel bed in Italy.

“You’re smiling,” she says.

“I’m happy.”

“I love it.” She says it simply. Without calculation.

I unclasp my bra. Her eyes drop to my breasts. “Beautiful,” she murmurs.

I kiss down her body. Her throat. Her collarbone. Her breasts—I take one nipple into my mouth and she arches off the mattress, her hand flying to my head. I work her until she’s squirming beneath me.

“Talia—”

“Shh. I’m strategizing.” I kiss down her stomach. Her hip bone—I bite gently. She gasps. “You know what I’ve been thinking about all day? The way you looked on court. Your backhand passing shot at 4-3. You bent the laws of physics with that shot.”

“It’s obscene. You were out there in all white looking like some kind of athletic deity and I’ve been wet since approximately 3:47 p.m.”

I peel her underwear off. Slowly. Kissing each inch of revealed skin. She’s bare beneath me, and the trust in the openness is a gift I will never stop being grateful for.

“For the record,” I say against her inner thigh, “I’m going to destroy you tomorrow.”

“I know. But right now you’re going to destroy me tonight.”

I put my mouth on her.

The sound she makes—a long, shuddering exhale that ends in my name—fills the room. I know that long, flat strokes make her sigh. I know that circling the tip makes her breathing fracture. I know that when I slide two fingers inside her and press while my tongue maintains a steady rhythm, her entire body goes rigid for three seconds before it breaks.

Tonight I use everything I know. I start slow. Broad strokes. Tasting her. Her hand finds my hair—not gripping, resting.

I increase the pressure. My tongue circles her clit in tight rotations and her hips respond—lifting, chasing. I hold her open and she moans.

“You taste incredible,” I murmur against her. “I think about this at practice. When you’re on the next court at six in the morning, I think about how you taste and I miss every other forehand.”

“That explains your—oh God—your cross-court accuracy dropping in the—fuck—morning sessions.”

She’s trying to banter. I love her for it. I also love undermining it.

I slide two fingers inside her. Curl them. Press. And seal my lips around her clit and suck.

The banter evaporates. The sound she makes is primal—a ragged cry that echoes off the Roman ceiling—and her back arches and her hand fists in my hair.

I work her toward the edge. She’s close—the tension in her thighs, the rhythmic clench around my fingers, her breathing dissolved into continuous keening.

“Don’t stop—Talia—right there—”

She comes. Hard. Her spine curves off the mattress, every muscle contracting. The sound starts as my name and dissolves into something shattered and beautiful. I stay with her through every wave.

“I’m not done,” I tell her.

“Talia, I can’t—”

“You can.” I press my mouth to her again—gently—and the arousal builds again immediately.

The second one is slower to build and hits harder. I whisper praise between each stroke. “You’re extraordinary.” Stroke. “I love that you let me see you like this.” Stroke. “Nobody else gets this. Just me.”

She comes again with a sob. Not from sadness—from the overwhelm of being wanted this much.

I climb up her body. She catches me, kissing me with slack, devastated intensity.

“You’re insane,” she breathes. “That was—”

“Foreplay.”

“That was foreplay?”

“That was the opening set. I’m not even warmed up.”

She reverses us. “My turn,” she says—low, commanding—and my entire body lights up.

She strips my underwear off with one hand. She starts with her hands—running them over my body, mapping terrain. Her mouth follows. My throat—she bites and I arch. My breasts—she cups one and takes the other in her mouth.

“You’re doing that thing where you take so long I want to scream.”

“Patience is a virtue.”

“Patience is torture. You’re torturing me with virtue.”

“You tormented me for twenty minutes. You think I’m not going to return the favor?”

“I think if you don’t touch me in the next thirty seconds I’m going to file a complaint with the WTA Player Conduct Board.”

She laughs. Then her hand slides between my legs and every coherent thought evacuates my brain.

Two fingers slide through the slick heat of me and push inside with a firm, steady pressure that fills me completely. Her thumb finds my clit. Circles. The combination is the Vivienne Cross signature move: precise, relentless, devastatingly effective.

She builds me. Her fingers curl and press, her thumb circles, and she whispers: “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. You’re beautiful right now with my fingers inside you and your face doing the thing it does when you’re about to come.”

“What thing—”

“Your eyes go half-closed and your lips part and you make this tiny sound—like you’re surprised every time.”

“It always surprises me with you—”

“I know. That’s what makes it extraordinary.”

The orgasm slams through me. I dig my nails into her shoulders and cry out—her name, a curse, something in Spanish—and she holds me through it, extending the orgasm until I’m shaking.

She doesn’t stop. She adjusts the angle—lighter touch, slower rhythm—and rebuilds the arousal on top of the aftershocks.

“Again,” she says.

“I can’t—”

“You can. Your body recovers in ninety seconds. I’ve timed it.”

“You’ve timed my—”

“I time everything. It’s a character trait. You knew this when you fell in love with me.”

I come again. Harder than the first time. My back arching, my knuckles white on the headboard, a sound coming out of me that I don’t recognize.

“Show-off,” I breathe.

“I prefer ‘thorough.'”

“You’re insufferable and I love you.”

“I know.”

We lie tangled together. The Roman night breathes through the open window—warm air carrying jasmine and the distant clatter of a moped.

“I have a confession,” she says.

“If it’s about timing my orgasms, you already told me.”

“I don’t actually want to beat you tomorrow.”

“Vivienne Cross doesn’t want to win a tennis match?”

“I want to play the best tennis of my life against the best opponent I’ve ever faced. But if I’m being honest, when I imagine the perfect version of tomorrow, it ends with you holding the trophy. Because seeing you win makes me feel something that winning myself has never made me feel.”

“What does it make you feel?”

“Proud. Like your victory is also mine because we’re connected. Your joy is my joy.”

The third round is slower. Gentler. Tenderness. She slides down my body and uses her mouth on me with a patience that makes me want to cry. No strategy. Just devotion. “You’re perfect, you’re everything, I love the way you taste, I love the way you sound.”

I come quietly. A shudder, a caught breath, her name like a prayer.

We lie face to face. Legs tangled. Somewhere in the courtyard a nightingale is singing.

“Tomorrow,” she says.

“Tomorrow.”

“One of us wins. One of us loses.”

“And then we come back here and do this again. Regardless of everything. Win, lose, draw, rain delay, zombie apocalypse. I’m coming back to this room and this bed and you.”

She catches my hand. Kisses my palm. Folds my fingers closed over the kiss, the way you’d close a book around a pressed flower.

“Rematch?” she says.

I pull her against me. The nightingale sings. The jasmine floats. Tomorrow we play the match of our lives, and tonight we hold each other, and the holding is the victory.

“Always.”

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