Seven Years of Mornings

A Bonus Scene from Her Favorite Bad Decision
by Aurora North

This scene takes place after the epilogue of Her Favorite Bad Decision. It contains explicit sexual content and is intended for readers 18+.

The hotel is three blocks from The Narrows.

Hollis booked it before the show — not because she’s sentimental, but because she’s practical, and practical means not driving forty-five minutes to the rowhouse in Philadelphia after an album launch and a set that left my hands shaking and my body vibrating with the specific frequency that used to mean find someone, anyone, burn it off.

Now it means find Hollis. Burn it off with her.

The room is nicer than the hotels we shared on tour. King bed. Actual thread count. A bathroom with one of those rainfall showerheads that make you feel like a luxury you can’t afford. The city is visible through the window — Baltimore at 1 AM, harbor lights and distant traffic and the smell of salt water that has lived in my memory since a night in this city eight years ago when a woman told me I could make it and I believed her.

I lock the hotel room door behind us. Hollis sets her bag on the desk chair. She takes off her jacket. She removes the silver watch.

I know this ritual. I’ve watched it a thousand times over twelve months. The disarming. The shedding. Each piece of professional identity removed and set aside until what remains is the woman I sleep next to every night in a rowhouse in Philadelphia where the radiator sounds like a percussionist with a grudge.

Tonight the ritual is different because tonight I played “Favorite Bad Decision” in the club where we met, and fifty-seven people understood exactly who the song was about, and the woman it was about is standing four feet from me with her hair down and the silver streak catching the lamp light and an expression on her face that I have learned, over twelve months, means I am deciding what I want and I am going to take it.

“You played the bridge looking at me,” she says.

“I play the bridge looking at you every time I rehearse it. You’re just usually not in the room.”

“I was in the room tonight.”

“I noticed.”

She steps toward me. Hollis moves through physical space the way she moves through everything — deliberately, with the specific economy of a woman who does not waste motion. She stops close enough that I can smell her — cedar and clean cotton and the faint salt of a woman who has been standing in a hot club for two hours watching someone she loves perform the most important song of her career.

“The verse about the streetlight,” she says. “You changed the melody.”

“I changed it last month. The original was too—”

“Sweet. The new version is hungrier.”

“Is that a complaint?”

“It’s an observation. The new version sounds like a woman who has stopped apologizing for wanting something and has started demanding it.”

“And what does she demand?”

“That depends on whether she’s still performing or whether she’s in the room with me.”

I take off my stage jacket. I drop it on the floor. The leather hits the carpet with a sound that says I’m done being on stage. I’m here.

“I’m in the room,” I say.

She kisses me. Not gently. The kiss contains twelve months of mornings and a song she approved and the specific electricity of watching me perform in the club where she first decided I was worth believing in. Her hands find my waist and pull me flush against her and her tongue is in my mouth and I taste sparkling water and lime.

I grab the front of her sweater and walk her backward. Her calves hit the bed. She sits. I straddle her lap.

From this angle I’m taller. I look down at her — grey eyes dark in the low light, the silver streak at her temple, the mouth that has said stay with me and I love you and you are worth refusing and every other sentence that rebuilt me from the wreckage of a person I used to be.

“I want to try something,” I say.

“Tell me.”

“I want to take you apart the way you took me apart in Chicago. The first time. Slowly. Every piece of clothing a separate event. Every tattoo a separate conversation. I want to make you wait until the waiting is the thing that breaks you.”

Her hands tighten on my hips. I feel the response — the involuntary grip, the slight upward press.

“And then?”

“And then I want you to take it back. All of it. I want you to pin my wrists and make me beg the way I begged in Los Angeles, except this time neither of us is scared and neither of us is leaving and the begging is not about desperation. It’s about trust.”

“That’s ambitious for 1 AM.”

“I’m an ambitious woman.”

She leans back on her palms. The posture opens her body — chest forward, shoulders back, the invitation implicit in the geometry. She’s giving me the space to lead.

I start with her sweater. I pull it over her head slowly — gathering the fabric, lifting, letting my knuckles drag along her ribs on the way up. She’s wearing a simple bra — dark blue, no lace, the kind of utilitarian beauty that Hollis brings to everything. I trace the strap from shoulder to cup. My thumb finds her nipple through the fabric. She inhales.

“That sound,” I say. “The one you make when you’re deciding whether to let me keep going. I hear it in my sleep.”

I unclasp the bra. I slide it off her shoulders. Her breasts are perfect — full, sensitive, the brown skin warm under my palms. I cup both. I lower my mouth to one nipple while my thumb circles the other, and the sound she makes fills the space between us like a note held too long to be accidental.

I undress her completely. Jeans, underwear, boots — each item removed with the deliberate pace I learned from her. By the time she’s naked on the hotel bed, I’m still fully dressed, and the asymmetry is the point.

“Look at you,” I whisper. “I’ve been looking at you for a year and I still find something new every time. The freckle below your left breast. The scar on your inner thigh from the cable accident. The compass tattoo on your back. I know all of it and I can’t stop cataloging it because you are a woman who deserves to be studied, and I am a woman who finally learned how to pay attention.”

I slide down her body. I press my mouth to her stomach. The muscles tighten beneath my lips. I drag my tongue along the line of her hip and she arches, and the arch is involuntary, and the involuntary is the thing I’m hunting for — the moment where Hollis Dane stops managing her body and starts letting it respond.

I put my mouth between her legs.

I start slowly. I always start slowly with Hollis because the patience is an act of worship and because she responds to patience the way she responds to everything — by gradually, incrementally, gorgeously surrendering the control she carries like a structural load. My tongue finds her clit and circles it — wide, unhurried, the same methodical approach she uses on me, reflected back.

She tastes like salt and arousal and the specific chemistry I have spent twelve months learning and will spend the rest of my life revising. I trace the shape of her with my tongue and her hand finds my hair and the fingers tighten and I know — from a year of study — that she’s close.

I stop.

“Not yet,” I whisper against her thigh. “We have time. You taught me that.”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“You’re going to thank me.”

I build her again. My tongue. My fingers — two, sliding inside her, curling upward, finding the spot that makes her thighs shake. I build her to the edge and hold her there, my mouth on her clit, my fingers working inside her, the dual stimulation creating the specific frequency that brings her to the place where her composure dissolves.

“You’re beautiful,” I tell her. “You’re the most disciplined, controlled, infuriating, gorgeous woman I’ve ever known, and you are going to come for me right now because I’m asking you to and because your body trusts me more than your mind does.”

I increase the pressure. She breaks. The orgasm rolls through her in waves I can feel around my fingers and against my tongue and in the grip of her hand in my hair. She makes the sound — the unmanaged one, the one she’s only ever made with me. I hold her through it.

I kiss her hip. I rest my forehead against her stomach.

“Your turn,” she says.

She flips me. I’m on my back. She’s above me, hands on my wrists, pinning them to the mattress in the gesture that has defined our intimate vocabulary since a dressing room in Chicago. My body responds instantly — the stillness, the surrender, the release of every muscle that usually keeps me moving and performing and running.

“You’re still dressed,” she observes.

“Fix that.”

She undresses me with military efficiency. The stage clothes come off in pieces — each one removed with a precision that turns my wardrobe into evidence of a performance she’s dismantling. I’m naked beneath her. She’s naked above me. The hotel room is warm and the harbor lights make patterns on the ceiling that remind me of another city, another ceiling, another night when a woman I barely knew pressed me into a mattress and made me feel like I was worth holding still.

“You’ve been performing all night,” she says. “For the audience. For the cameras. You’ve been brilliant and composed and the entire time I was thinking about this. About getting you alone. About taking the performer apart until there’s nothing left but the woman.”

She pins my wrists harder. Her knee presses between my thighs. The pressure is direct and my hips roll against it before I can stop myself.

“Don’t stop yourself,” she says. “Don’t manage this. Don’t perform. Just feel.”

She goes down on me with the devastating patience I’ve come to associate with everything Hollis does — the thoroughness, the attention to detail, the refusal to rush a job that deserves precision. Her tongue finds every nerve ending. Her fingers curl inside me. She reads my body with the fluency of a woman who has been studying the same text for a year and still finds new meanings in the margins.

She brings me close. She holds me there. The edge is excruciating — the pleasure building with nowhere to go, the wanting compressed into a space that gets smaller and hotter with every stroke of her tongue.

“Tell me what you need,” she says.

“You. Tomorrow. And the day after. And every morning we haven’t had yet.”

“I meant right now.”

“That is right now. It’s always right now.”

She gives me everything. Her mouth, her hands, her voice saying my name like a prayer she didn’t plan. I come with my wrists still pinned and her name in my throat and my body shaking with the force of an orgasm that fills the room and the city and the specific Baltimore night that has been holding our story since before we knew it was a story.

She releases my wrists. She lies beside me and pulls me against her — her arm across my ribs, her hand finding the place over my heart where it always rests.

We breathe together. The harbor lights continue their patterns on the ceiling.

“Seven years of mornings,” I say. “You said I owe you that.”

“At the current rate, that’s two thousand one hundred and ninety mornings to go.”

“You did the math.”

“I did the math.”

She presses her mouth to the back of my neck. Three seconds. The kiss that means everything.

“We’re out of oat milk,” she says.

“I’ll add it to the list. The list is on the counter. Next to my reading glasses.”

“Which are next to a guitar pick.”

“Always.”

I close my eyes. Her warmth is behind me, around me, beneath my skin. Baltimore holds us the way it held us the first time — without judgment, with the specific patience of a city that has been waiting eight years for two women to find their way back.

We have two thousand one hundred and ninety mornings to go.

I intend to be on time for every one of them.

← Back to Her Favorite Bad Decision

Never Miss a Release

Get new release alerts, exclusive bonus content, and reader-only giveaways.