The Fitting Room

A Bonus Chapter from The Bride’s Backup Woman
by Aurora North

⚠️ This bonus chapter takes place six months after the events of The Bride’s Backup Woman. Contains explicit sexual content. Spoilers for the main novel.

The bridal boutique was Ione’s idea, which meant it was exquisite, overpriced, and designed to make me feel things I had not consented to feeling.

“She needs moral support,” Ione had said on the phone, referring to her younger sister, who was getting married in October and who had requested my presence at the fitting because — according to Ione — I was “the only person she knows who survived a bridal fitting without having a panic attack, which is aspirational.”

I had not survived a bridal fitting without a panic attack. I had simply hidden the panic attack beneath the particular brand of composed charm that my mother had installed and Nadira had spent six months gently dismantling.

I brought Nadira.

“I do not attend bridal fittings,” she said when I suggested it. She was at her desk in the Montreal apartment we now shared — the apartment with the south-facing window and the reading chair and the four hundred books and the toaster I had purchased under conditions of domestic outrage. “I plan weddings. I do not shop for them.”

“You’re coming because Ione’s sister specifically asked for your opinion on structural integrity, and because I want to see your face when you’re surrounded by tulle.”

“My face will be the same as it always is.”

“Your face is never the same as it always is. Your face is a seismograph, and bridal boutiques are earthquakes. I want front-row seats.”

She came. In dark trousers, a cream silk blouse, the sleeves rolled to mid-forearm because it was July and Montreal was having one of its hostile-humidity days. The silver streak was tucked behind her ear. She wore the thin gold band on her left hand.

The boutique occupied the second floor of a converted Plateau townhouse — exposed brick, wide-plank floors, enormous gilt-framed mirrors on every wall. Gowns hung in cloth bags along the perimeter. The air smelled like garment steamer and gardenia. A woman with architectural cheekbones and a measuring tape around her neck greeted us with champagne.

Ione’s sister — Margaux, twenty-eight, the kind of woman who cried beautifully and frequently — tried on seven gowns. Nadira assessed each one with the professional eye of a woman who had seen approximately four thousand wedding dresses and had opinions about every single one. She adjusted a bodice, suggested a different neckline, and told Margaux, with devastating precision, that gown number four made her look like a woman getting married rather than a woman playing dress-up.

Margaux chose gown number four. Cried. Ione cried. The attendant cried. Nadira did not cry but produced the expression she wore when she was emotionally compromised and managing it through stoicism, which I recognized from approximately six hundred instances over the past six months.

I watched her. Watched her stand beside the mirror holding a champagne flute she had not sipped, watched her smooth the fabric of a gown that was not hers and would never be hers because we had chosen rings on a terrace and silk ribbons cut from a veil and a ceremony that required no gown at all.

I wanted her with a specificity that six months of daily proximity had not reduced. If anything, the wanting had deepened — broadened, settled into the architecture of my daily life until it was less a feeling than a condition. I wanted her the way I wanted the south-facing window. The way I wanted the morning. Not as a choice but as a necessity I had stopped pretending was optional.

Margaux left to change. Ione followed, helping with buttons. The attendant excused herself to process the order. And the fitting room — a large, mirror-walled alcove at the back of the boutique, separated from the main space by a heavy curtain — was empty.

“Come here,” I said.

Nadira turned. The champagne flute paused halfway to the shelf where she was placing it. “We are in a bridal boutique.”

“I’m aware.”

“The owner is twenty feet away.”

“The owner is processing a ten-thousand-dollar sale. She is not paying attention to us.”

“Carys.”

“Nadira. Come here.”

She set the glass down. Crossed the fitting room to where I stood beside the three-paneled mirror — the kind that shows you from every angle, that leaves no curve or line or shadow unexamined. The mirror where, ten minutes ago, a young woman had seen herself as a bride for the first time and wept at the sight.

I took Nadira’s hand. Drew her closer until we stood together in the mirror’s triple reflection — three versions of us, repeating into the glass, each one showing a different angle of the same two women.

“Do you remember the mirror in the villa?” I asked.

“I remember everything about the villa.”

“You stood behind me and told me to look at myself. You said, ‘That is what I see when you are not trying to be anything.'”

“I remember.”

“I want to show you something.”

I reached for the nearest garment bag. Unzipped it. Inside was a sample gown — ivory silk, bias-cut, floor-length, with a neckline that scooped low and a back that barely existed. Not a wedding dress. A slip dress. The kind of garment that existed at the intersection of bridal and bedroom and made no apologies for occupying both territories.

I pulled the curtain closed.

“We cannot —” Nadira started.

“We can. We’re alone. The curtain is closed. And I have spent the last ninety minutes watching you assess wedding dresses with the focused precision of a woman who builds ceremonies for a living, and it has made me want to take your clothes off in a room full of mirrors.”

Her jaw tightened. The green eyes darkened. The silver streak fell across her forehead, and she did not push it back, and I knew — from six months of studying this woman the way she studied sight lines — that when the streak was allowed to fall, the composure was negotiable.

I stepped behind the changing screen. Stripped off my sundress and underwear. Pulled the sample gown over my head. The silk fell against my bare body like a second skin — cold at first, then warming, conforming to every curve and hollow. No bra. No underwear. Just ivory silk against bare brown skin and the memory of the last time I had worn bridal fabric for a woman in a mirror.

I stepped out.

Nadira was standing exactly where I’d left her. Her hands were at her sides. Her breathing had changed — visible, audible, the measured rhythm disrupted by whatever her body was doing in response to the sight of me in ivory silk in a room full of mirrors.

“Turn around,” she said. Her voice had dropped. The low register. The one that bypassed my rational brain and spoke directly to the base of my spine. “Slowly.”

I turned. The silk moved against my legs. In the triple mirror, three versions of me rotated — each one showing a different angle, each one showing the way the gown clung to my hips, the way the open back revealed the line of my spine, the way the fabric did nothing to conceal the fact that there was nothing underneath it.

“It’s not mine,” I said. “I’m just trying it on.”

“You are not trying it on. You are deploying it.”

“Is it working?”

She crossed the room in three strides. Her hands found my waist through the silk, and the contact was immediate and electric and familiar, the specific quality of a touch I had felt a thousand times that still registered as new.

“Look at the mirror,” she said against my ear. “Watch.”

I looked. Three mirrors. Three versions of us. Nadira behind me in her cream blouse and dark trousers, her hands on my waist, her mouth at my ear. Me in the ivory gown, barefoot on the fitting room floor, my reflection repeating into the glass like a woman multiplied by desire.

Her hands moved. Slowly, deliberately, up from my waist along my rib cage. The silk bunched beneath her palms. She cupped my breasts through the thin fabric — the gown had no built-in support, and my nipples were already hard, pressing against the silk, visible in every mirror from every angle.

“We are in a bridal boutique,” she murmured. Her thumbs circled. I shuddered against her.

“We are in a fitting room. With a curtain. And mirrors. And approximately four minutes before someone comes to check on us.”

“Four minutes is not enough.”

“Then be efficient.”

Her hand slid down. Over my stomach. The silk against my skin, her palm against the silk. Lower, past my hip, to the hem where the gown ended at mid-calf. She gathered the fabric in her fist — one slow, deliberate handful, lifting the silk up my thigh, baring my legs to the mirrors. Higher. Past my knee. Past mid-thigh. Until the gown was bunched at my waist and I was bare below it and every mirror showed the same thing: a woman in a bridal gown that had been pulled up by a woman who knew exactly what she was looking for.

“Watch,” she said again.

Her fingers slid between my thighs from behind. I was already wet — had been since the third gown, when Nadira had adjusted the bodice with those precise hands and I had felt the competence like a hand between my legs. Her fingers found me slick and swollen and ready, and the sound I made was not appropriate for a bridal boutique and I did not care.

She worked me with the focused efficiency she brought to every task, her fingers moving in the rhythm she had learned over six months of mornings and evenings and kitchen counters and the specific, devastating routine of a woman who knew my body as well as her own. Her thumb pressed my clit while two fingers slid inside me, and I braced one hand against the mirror and watched — watched in triplicate — as the woman I loved took me apart in a fitting room surrounded by wedding dresses.

“Good girl,” she whispered. “So quiet. So brave. Coming for me in a room where anyone could walk in.”

“I’m not — I can’t be quiet if you —”

“You can. You will. Because I’m asking.”

I bit my lip. Watched the mirror. Watched her hand moving between my thighs, watched the gown bunched at my waist, watched the composed, elegant, impeccably dressed woman behind me making me come undone in someone else’s bridal shop.

The orgasm built fast — the urgency of the location, the mirrors, the silk against my skin, the residual charge of watching her assess wedding dresses for ninety minutes with the professional precision that made my body respond as though competence were a controlled substance.

“Nadira — I’m —”

“I know. Come for me. Quietly. That’s my girl.”

I came with my hand pressed against the mirror and my mouth clamped shut and every nerve in my body attempting to produce a sound that would have brought the boutique attendant running. The orgasm hit in deep, rolling waves — amplified by the mirrors that showed me from every angle, the gown that framed the act in bridal silk, and the woman who held me through it with one arm around my waist and her mouth pressed to the back of my neck.

Afterward, she lowered the gown. Smoothed the fabric. Stepped back. Checked her reflection — adjusted her blouse, tucked the silver streak behind her ear, resumed the composure as though it were a garment she could put on and take off at will.

I leaned against the mirror. Breathing hard. The silk was damp where her hand had been. My reflection in the triple mirror showed a woman who looked thoroughly, unmistakably, recently satisfied.

“You have approximately ninety seconds to look less like you just had an orgasm in a fitting room,” Nadira said.

“I don’t think that’s physically possible.”

“Try. Ione will notice.”

“Ione will celebrate. Ione has been waiting for me to do something scandalous in a bridal context since the island.”

I changed back into my sundress. Hung the sample gown on its hanger. Checked my reflection — flushed, bright-eyed, the specific radiance of a woman who had just been efficiently and comprehensively handled by a woman she intended to keep forever.

We emerged from the fitting room. Ione looked at us. Looked at Nadira’s tucked-back silver streak. Looked at my face. Looked at the curtain we had just walked through together.

“No,” she said.

“No what?” I said innocently.

“You did not. In the fitting room. At my sister’s bridal appointment.”

“I have no idea what you’re referring to.”

“You absolute disaster bisexual.”

Nadira, beside me, produced the expression of a woman who was refusing to comment on the grounds that her composure might not survive the cross-examination. But her hand found the small of my back — warm, possessive, resting on the exact spot where the gown had been open — and she did not move it.

Margaux emerged in her street clothes, glowing. “Did you like gown four? Nadira, did I make the right choice?”

Nadira looked at me. At the flush still fading from my cheeks. At the gold band on my finger that matched the one on hers. At the woman she had built a life with, one morning at a time, in a city that was not an island and a relationship that was not a crisis and a love that was not a rescue.

“You chose beautifully,” she said.

She was talking to Margaux. She was looking at me.

Loved Carys and Nadira? The full novel is available now.

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