The Projection Booth — After Hours

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Womanizer’s Last First Date
by Aurora North

⚠️ This bonus chapter takes place six months after the events of The Womanizer’s Last First Date. It contains spoilers and extremely explicit sexual content. Read the novel first for full context.

Maren finds the envelope on her editing desk at 6 PM on a Thursday.

No name on the outside. No stamp. Just a cream-colored envelope with a single line in my handwriting: Tonight. Saints. 11 PM. Dress code: whatever makes you feel powerful.

She calls me immediately. “What is this?”

“An invitation.”

“To what?”

“A private event. Attendance: two. Dress code: already stated. RSVP: mandatory.”

“Cleo, I have eleven hours of footage to review—”

“Maren. Put down the mouse. Read the invitation again. And then put on the plum lipstick.”

She’s quiet for three seconds. I can hear her thinking — the particular quality of silence that means she’s running the calculus, weighing the work against the woman, the professional against the personal. Six months ago, the work would have won. Tonight, I hear her chair push back from the desk.

“I’ll be there at eleven.”

“Maren?”

“Yes?”

“Wear something I haven’t seen.”

I spend five hours preparing. The main floor is closed. Fallon gave me a look when I told her I needed the building empty tonight, and she said “Use protection” and walked out, which is her version of a blessing.

The dance floor is polished until it reflects the amber work lights. Candles line the bar in hurricane glasses — sixty of them. The sound system plays something low and instrumental, all cello and piano and bass, the kind of music that rearranges the molecules of the air until the whole room feels like the inside of a body. Warm. Dark. Alive.

The projection booth is unlocked. Thick cashmere blanket, pillows from the VIP section. On the bar, a bottle of Tokaji Aszú — the same vintage she returned to me eight months ago with a note that said generosity becomes pressure when the recipient has already declined. Different context now.

At 10:55, I position myself at the brass entrance. Black tuxedo. White shirt, unbuttoned one more notch than professional. Gold chain. Patent leather shoes. Deep-red lipstick. Full armor — except tonight the performance isn’t a defense. It’s a gift.

She arrives at eleven exactly. The plum lipstick. A black dress I have never seen — simple, silky, neckline following her collarbones, hemline three inches above the knee. The fabric moves when she walks, clinging and releasing, suggesting the shape underneath without confirming it. Dark curls loose and enormous. The camera bag over one shoulder.

“You brought the camera,” I say.

“You invited a filmmaker to an empty nightclub. What did you expect?”

“I expected the plum lipstick. I got it. Everything else is a bonus.” I let my eyes travel the length of her — slowly, deliberately. “You wore something I haven’t seen.”

“I’m going to take it off you later.”

“I’m counting on it.”

She looks past me into Saints. The candles. The amber light. The empty dance floor gleaming like dark water. “You did this for me.”

“I did this for us. I’ve spent six months learning that the best version of this room isn’t full of three hundred women. It’s empty. With you.”

I pour two glasses of the Tokaji. Hand her one. She recognizes the bottle. Smiles — slow, warm, private. We drink. The wine is extraordinary — sweet, honeyed, unfolding across the tongue in layers. She closes her eyes when she tastes it. Her throat moves when she swallows. I watch the candlelight play across her neck and my hands shake.

We dance. Slowly. Her body against mine — the softness of her stomach, the press of her breasts, her hips settling into mine with the easy precision of bodies that have long since figured out their configuration. Her head on my shoulder. My hand on her lower back. The cello playing something that sounds like patience.

“I have a proposal,” she murmurs against my neck. “Director and subject. Like the studio night — except this time, I have the camera in my hands while I direct you. I want to frame you in this room. On this floor. In this light. And then I want to take you upstairs to the projection booth and make you come so hard the whole building hears it.”

“Yes. God, yes.”

She walks to the bar. Removes the camera. Pops the lens cap off, examines it, puts it back on. Removes the battery. Sets both pieces on the bar beside the Tokaji. Evidence that the camera will not record. Evidence that this is not documentation but ritual.

She lifts the empty camera to her eye. Frames me through the blind lens.

“The subject tonight is the owner of this establishment. She’s standing in the middle of an empty dance floor wearing a tuxedo and a look that suggests she knows exactly how good she looks. She is backlit by sixty candles and she’s already wet, though she’s trying to hide it.”

“I always know how good I look.”

“The subject is also insufferable. Take off the jacket. Slowly. Like you’re shedding something you don’t need anymore.”

I let the jacket slide down my arms. It pools at my feet on the polished dance floor. She circles me, heels clicking on the hardwood — click, click, click — the footsteps of a woman who has all night.

“The shirt. One button at a time.”

One. The collar falls open. Two. The gold chain shifts. Three. Four. Five. The camisole beneath appears — champagne-colored, nearly translucent in the candlelight.

“The way the candlelight catches the chain against your collarbone. The shadow in the hollow of your throat. Your breathing has changed since I said take off the jacket — faster now, shallower. Your nipples are hard through the camisole. You’re already wet, aren’t you?”

“Since you walked through the door.”

“Since before that.”

“Since I wrote the invitation.”

“Take off everything.”

I strip on the dance floor of my own nightclub. Camisole. Bra. Trousers. Underwear. Everything pooled on the hardwood in a circle of discarded clothing while candles flicker and Maren circles me with an empty camera and a full voice and I stand naked in the amber light feeling more seen than I have ever felt in a room designed for seeing.

“Now. Walk to the projection booth.”

Climbing the narrow staircase naked while Maren follows fully clothed with a camera against her eye is one of the most erotic experiences of my life. This is my building. My kingdom. And I’m walking through it bare while the woman I love follows in a black dress and heels, narrating my body in motion.

“The line of your back. The muscles in your shoulders when you grip the railing. The candlelight from below catching the curve of your ass. The scar on your palm around the iron. You’re trembling — not from cold. From the experience of being watched in a space you control by a woman you’ve surrendered to.”

“Are you always this articulate when you’re turned on?”

“I’m a filmmaker. Narration is foreplay.”

The projection booth. The blanket, the pillows, the small window framing the candlelit theater below. I turn in the doorway. She’s one step below me, camera at her side, looking up with dark gold eyes. Her pulse is visible in her throat — rapid, not the rhythm of a woman in control.

“Lie down.”

I lie on the blanket. Through the window, my clothes are scattered on the dance floor, candles flickering around them like a ceremony.

“Open your legs.”

I part my thighs. The vulnerability is total — spread open in a room above my own nightclub while the woman I love stands over me fully dressed.

“You’re soaked. I can see it on your thighs.”

“Hours. Since I set up the candles. Since I imagined exactly this.”

She kneels beside me. Her hand on my stomach, warm through the silk she’s still wearing. Then she pulls the black dress over her head. Underneath: nothing. No bra. No underwear. She came to my nightclub bare under the dress.

“I read the invitation twice. Then I decided that whatever you planned, I was going to outdo you.”

She straddles my hips. The wet heat of her settles against my stomach and we both gasp. Her dark curls fall around our faces. She kisses me — slow, deep, the plum lipstick smearing across my mouth, marking me.

“Here’s how tonight works. I direct. You follow. When I say stop, you stop. When I say more, you give me more. When I say your name, you answer. And when I say good girl—” She watches my face. “—you let yourself feel it.”

“Good girl” lands in the center of my chest like a controlled detonation. Two words that bypass every defense I own.

“Touch my breasts,” she says.

I cup her breasts — full, heavy, warm, dark nipples pressing into my palms. I squeeze. She inhales. I roll her nipples between my fingers and she gasps and grinds harder against my stomach, spreading her wetness across my skin.

“Harder.”

I squeeze harder. She arches into my hands, head tipping back, dark curls cascading down her spine.

“Your mouth. Sit up.”

She wraps her legs around my waist, ankles locking behind me. Face to face, chest to chest. I take her nipple into my mouth and suck. Her cry echoes off brick and floats through the window over the empty dance floor. I switch breasts. Bite gently. She hisses. Harder. She moans and pulls my hair.

“Lie back. I need your mouth somewhere else.”

She crawls up my body. Positions herself above my face, knees framing my head. From this angle, I can see everything — glistening, swollen, the evidence of how much directing me has cost her composure.

“I want to ride your mouth. I want you to make me come while I look down at the dance floor through that window and think about every woman who’s ever wanted you and know that I’m the one sitting on your face.”

“Sit down. Use me.”

She lowers herself onto my mouth. The taste is immediate and overwhelming — sharp, musky, salt-sweet, the specific chemical signature my body recognizes as hers. I groan against her and the vibration makes her thighs tighten around my head.

Broad strokes first. She shifts her hips, guiding me. “Higher. My clit. Circles. Start light.” I circle. She rocks above me, hands braced on the wall beside the window. Through the space between her arm and the brick I can see the candles below, flickering in an empty room while the woman I love rides my face with increasing urgency.

“Harder now. Flatten your tongue and press.”

I press. She cries out — sharp, loud. I seal my lips around her clit and suck while pressing with my tongue and her hips buck against my mouth.

“Your fingers. Inside me. Now.”

I slide two fingers into her from behind — effortless, hot silk closing around me. I curl forward. Find the spot. Her whole body shudders.

“Right there. Don’t move your fingers — keep the pressure. Use your tongue. Faster.”

I work my tongue faster. She grinds down onto my mouth and my hand simultaneously, chasing it with her whole body, every pretense of composure demolished. She’s genuinely, unrestrainedly loud, her moans and instructions filling the projection booth and washing over the empty theater like music from a show nobody else will ever see.

I add a third finger. Press deeper. Suck harder. She comes with a full-throated scream that reverberates through the building like the theater was designed for exactly this frequency. Her thighs clamp around my head, her body convulses around my fingers, and I hold her through every pulse and tremor.

She collapses sideways. Breathless. Dark curls plastered to her face. The plum lipstick smeared beyond rescue.

“The acoustics in here are unreasonable.”

“I built a theater. What did you expect?”

Ninety seconds later she turns to me with the expression of a woman who has not even begun.

“Your turn. On your back. Hands above your head.”

She pins my wrists against the blanket with one hand. Her free hand traces down my body — throat, collarbone, the match-flame tattoo, between my breasts.

“You watched me come. You put your mouth on me and your fingers inside me and you made me scream, and now I’m going to do the same thing to you. Except I’m going to take my time. And you’re going to stay exactly where I put you.”

“Good girl.”

The words detonate. My hips lift off the blanket. She presses me back down.

“Stay.”

She starts at my throat. Sucks hard enough to leave a mark I’ll wear tomorrow. The match-flame tattoo gets her lips, her tongue, a whispered “mine.” My breasts get her full attention — minutes of alternating between them, sucking each nipple until it’s swollen and tender, biting the soft underside hard enough to make me gasp and strain against her grip.

She kisses down my stomach. Bypasses where I need her. Kisses my inner thigh instead. The whimper that escapes me is not a sound I have any control over.

“Please. Maren, I need—”

“What do you need?”

“Your mouth. On me. Please, I’m begging you—”

“You’re my good girl, and good girls ask nicely.”

“Please put your mouth on my pussy. Please make me come. I need you, I need this, please—”

“That’s my girl.”

Her mouth descends and the first contact of her tongue on my clit whites out my vision. She knows me. Six months of focused, obsessive attention have given her a map so precise she could navigate blindfolded. She finds the spot, the pressure, the rhythm that builds me fastest — and then deliberately slows down, backing off just as I approach the edge, keeping me suspended in the excruciating space between almost and not yet.

“You want to come fast because that’s what you’re used to — quick, efficient. I want you to come slow. I want it to take so long that by the time you get there, you’ve forgotten your name.”

She slides two fingers inside me. Curls forward. Takes me to the edge and slows again and I make a sound that might be a sob.

“You’re shaking.”

“Because you’re torturing me.”

“I’m savoring you. There’s a difference.”

She builds me again. Slower this time, the tongue work almost meditative, each stroke a sentence in a story she’s telling my body. The orgasm builds like a tide — the same geological force she once used to describe her own desire.

“Now,” she says, and her tongue presses flat and her fingers curl hard and deep and the permission unlocks something the edging had been compressing.

I come harder than I’ve ever come in my life. A full-body obliteration that starts between my legs and radiates through my stomach, my chest, my throat, my skull. I scream her name and the theater amplifies it and the sound bounces off every surface — the velvet, the brass, the brick, the glass — and returns to me like an echo of the woman I’m becoming.

She holds me through it. Fingers inside me, mouth gentle, her free hand finding mine above my head and lacing our fingers together while my body shakes and slowly returns to earth.

Tears on my face. Not from sadness. From the overwhelming experience of being completely known and completely loved and completely undone.

“That’s what you look like,” she whispers, “when you let yourself be loved.”

We descend the staircase together. Both naked, both unsteady. My clothes scattered across the dance floor — the discarded chrysalis of the woman who entered this room as a performance and now walks through it as herself.

I lift Maren onto the bar. She sits on the brass surface, legs dangling. I pour two more glasses of Tokaji.

“You’re sitting naked on my bar.”

“You own the bar. You can do more than stare.”

I step between her thighs. Her legs wrap around my hips. I kiss her. Taste the wine and herself on her tongue. My hand slides between her thighs — still wet, still swollen. Two fingers inside her. She gasps against my mouth and her heels dig into my ass.

“I love you,” I say against her lips, because every time I say it is a deposit against the years I didn’t.

“I love you. Now fuck me on this bar.”

I fuck her on the bar. Standing, fingers inside her, thumb on her clit, her hands gripping the edge of the brass. She’s loud again — the theater amplifying every sound. I use my free hand on her breast and she arches back and her hair sweeps across the bar surface and glasses rattle.

She comes with her arms around my neck, my name muffled against my shoulder. I hold her on the bar while the candles gutter and the Tokaji sits half-finished beside us.

“Your turn,” she says. She slides off the bar, turns me around, pushes me back against it. The brass is cold against my bare ass. She drops to her knees on the dance floor.

“I spent eight months watching you command this room from behind this bar. Now I’m on my knees in front of it. Tell me that’s not the hottest thing you’ve ever seen.”

I look down at her. Maren Kovács, Independent Spirit Award winner, the most disciplined woman I’ve ever known, naked on my dance floor, on her knees, looking up at me with amber eyes and smeared plum lipstick.

“It’s the hottest thing I’ve ever seen.”

She puts her mouth on me and I grip the bar with both hands and the brass rings like a bell. She makes me come standing up, back arched over the bar, her tongue and fingers and voice — good girl, let go, I’ve got you, come for me — taking me apart in the exact center of the room I built for women to feel desired.

I slide down the bar onto the floor. She catches me. We end up on the hardwood, naked, breathing hard, surrounded by hurricane candles and scattered clothing.

“We just had sex on the bar.”

“Fallon is going to sanitize everything.”

“Fallon is never going to know.”

“Fallon always knows.”

She laughs. The real one. The helpless, breathless, full-body laugh that I will spend the rest of my life trying to earn.

Later. Much later. Projection booth again, wrapped in cashmere. The candles burning low below. Dawn lightening through the high windows.

“This club. You built it for women to feel safe and desired.”

“I did.”

“Mission accomplished.”

I pull her closer. Breathe her in — warm skin, the ghost of plum lipstick, the salt of exertion, the Tokaji on her breath, and underneath, the particular, unreplicable scent of the woman who taught me what my hands were for.

“Stay,” I whisper. Because I will never stop saying it. Because the word is not a request but a practice — a daily repetition, a morning prayer, the verbal equivalent of choosing the inside of a room when the door is wide open.

“Always,” she says. Because her always is not a promise of permanence but a statement of present intention, renewed each time, a commitment that refreshes like a heartbeat, like the tide that brought her to me.

And in the projection booth above Saints, in the building I built with scarred hands and a terrified heart, the womanizer who learned to stay holds the filmmaker who taught her that some moments aren’t for the film, and neither of us reaches for the exit, and neither of us performs, and the morning finds us there — naked, tangled, honest, marked, half-drunk on Hungarian wine, surrounded by the embers of sixty candles, home.

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