Session Two — Bonus Chapter

A Curiosity Has Red Hair Bonus Scene
by Aurora North

This bonus chapter takes place after the epilogue of Curiosity Has Red Hair. Contains explicit FF content. Spoilers ahead.

The second tattoo takes three sessions.

Roux insists on this. The design — two threads braiding into one, the single strand extending past the border — is small enough to finish in ninety minutes, but she wants the placement to be perfect, and perfection on the sternum requires patience she’s never had to exercise on a body she’s this familiar with.

“The problem,” she tells me on session one, while I’m lying shirtless on the treatment chair in the private room at Red Chapel with her reading glasses sliding down her nose and her gloved hand resting over my heart, “is that I know what’s underneath.”

“Ribs. Sternum. Pectoralis major.”

“Not the anatomy. The sounds.” She traces the stencil line with one finger, feather-light, and my breath catches. She hears it. Of course she hears it. “I know what sound you make when I touch you here. I know the exact pressure that makes your back arch. I know that if I put my mouth where my hand is right now, you’ll say my name in that voice — the quiet one, the one that sounds like you’re confirming a diagnosis.”

“That’s not a problem. That’s data.”

“It’s a problem because I’m supposed to be inking your chest, not cataloguing your responses.” She adjusts the stencil. Her thumb grazes the underside of my breast, and the contact is technically professional and absolutely devastating. “Session one is placement verification. I’m not starting the needle today.”

“You brought me here, took my shirt off, and you’re not starting the needle.”

“Correct.”

“That feels intentional.”

“Everything I do is intentional, doctor.”

She’s right. And the intention — the deliberate, calculated exposure of making me lie shirtless beneath her hands while she maps the terrain without marking it — is its own kind of foreplay. She spends forty-five minutes checking the design from every angle. Adjusting. Repositioning. Her fingers on my skin, her eyes behind those ridiculous glasses, her lower lip caught between her teeth when the angle isn’t quite right.

By the time she peels the stencil off and says, “We’ll start the ink next week,” I am so aroused that sitting up requires a conscious act of muscular intervention.

“You did that on purpose,” I say.

“Did what?” She strips her gloves. Tosses them in the bin. Innocent.

“Forty-five minutes of touching me without resolution.”

“I was working.”

“You were edging me with stencil placement.”

The gap between her teeth appears. “Is that a clinical term?”

I grab the front of her shirt. Pull her toward the treatment chair. She comes — she always comes when I pull, the same way I always come when she pulls, the same gravitational reciprocity that has governed our bodies since the kitchen — and I kiss her with the accumulated tension of forty-five minutes of professional touching that was not, at any point, purely professional.

“We’re in the studio,” she says against my mouth.

“I’m aware.”

“Saffron is in the front room.”

“Then you’ll have to be quiet.” I pull her onto the chair. She straddles me — the position that’s become ours, the default configuration, the arrangement of bodies that we’ve perfected through ten months of practice. Her weight in my lap. Her thighs bracketing my hips. Her hands on my bare shoulders, and my bare chest pressed against the fabric of her shirt, and the friction of cotton against my nipples sending sparks down my spine.

“This is my place of work,” she says, but she’s already rolling her hips against me, the involuntary seeking motion that tells me her body has outpaced her objections.

“You tattooed me on this chair. You came against this desk. This is our place of work.”

I pull her shirt over her head. No bra — she doesn’t wear one at the studio, a fact I’ve been aware of since the first time I visited and that drives me to distraction during every subsequent visit. Her breasts are bare, the freckles visible across her chest, the fox tattoo exposed, the blackthorn winding over her shoulder.

I put my mouth on the fox. Her hands fly to my hair. I trace the tiny inked ears with my tongue — the talisman, the self-soothing point — and she makes a sound that is not quiet and will absolutely carry to the front room.

“Shh,” I say, and put my hand over her mouth.

Her eyes go wide. Then dark. Her pupils blow, and I feel the shift in her body — the reactive clench of her thighs, the roll of her hips, the full-body response to being silenced that tells me something I file for future detailed exploration.

“Keep quiet,” I murmur against her collarbone, “or Saffron is going to come back here, and I don’t think your business insurance covers what she’ll find.”

She bites my palm. Not hard. Enough that I feel it. A challenge and a consent in the same gesture.

I keep my hand on her mouth and work the other between us — undoing her jeans one-handed, a skill I’ve developed through months of practice and the specific, desperate necessity of wanting to touch Roux Delacourt faster than buttons allow. She lifts her hips to help. I slide my hand inside.

She’s drenched. The evidence of forty-five minutes of “stencil placement” is slick against my fingers, and the hypocrisy — she was affected, she was aroused the entire time, she was performing professional detachment while her body was doing this — makes me want to take her apart slowly enough that the performance has nowhere left to hide.

I don’t go slow. We don’t have time. Saffron is twenty feet away and the studio has appointments starting in an hour and my hand is over Roux’s mouth and my fingers are inside her and she’s riding my hand with the desperate, efficient rhythm of a woman who knows exactly what she needs and is taking it.

My thumb finds her clit. She moans against my palm — the vibration of it travelling through my hand and up my arm and into my chest. Her eyes are locked on mine. Green, gold-flecked, pupils enormous. She’s not hiding. Not performing. Not managing. Just present — in my lap, on my fingers, against my palm, all of her, the complete, unedited, unperformed Roux.

She comes in under three minutes. Clenching around my fingers, biting my palm hard enough to leave marks, her whole body shuddering against mine while I hold her through it with one hand between her legs and the other pressed against the sounds she can’t stop making.

I withdraw my hand from her mouth. Her breath comes in ragged gasps. My palm has crescent marks from her teeth. I look at them — the precise impressions, the evidence — and feel a surge of satisfaction so intense it’s nearly physical.

“Your turn,” she says. Still breathless. Already reaching for my waistband.

“We don’t have time.”

“We have exactly as much time as I decide we have. This is my studio.” She slides off my lap and drops to her knees on the studio floor. The same floor where I knelt the first time I visited, tracing poppies with my mouth. The same position. Reversed. “And I’ve been thinking about this since you walked in.”

She unbuttons my jeans. Pulls them down just far enough. Her mouth is on me before I can form a sentence — hot, precise, her tongue finding the exact spot with the accuracy of a woman who has mapped my body as thoroughly as I’ve mapped hers. My hand goes to her hair. The copper strands between my fingers. The particular weight of her head between my thighs.

I last approximately ninety seconds. Which is embarrassing and is also the predictable consequence of forty-five minutes of intentional arousal followed by the sight of Roux Delacourt on her knees in her own studio with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair and her mouth doing things that should be classified as a fine motor skill.

The orgasm hits hard enough that I grip the treatment chair with my free hand and press my own wrist against my mouth to stifle the sound, because Saffron is twenty feet away and the walls at Red Chapel are not thin like the apartment walls but they are not soundproof either, and the sound I make when Roux Delacourt uses her tongue like that is not a sound that any business insurance would cover.

She stands. Wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Puts her shirt on. Pushes the reading glasses back down to her nose.

“Session two is next Thursday,” she says. “Don’t be late.”

“You just—”

“Professional stencil verification. Industry standard.” She kisses my forehead. “Get dressed, doctor. I have a client in forty minutes.”

I get dressed. I button my jeans and pull on my shirt and the foxglove on my ribs catches the skylight and the new stencil marks on my sternum — the twin threads, the braid, the unfinished line — are faintly visible, temporary purple guidelines on my skin that will become permanent red ink next Thursday when she sits me in this chair and holds the needle against my heart and draws two lives becoming one.

In the front room, Saffron looks up from the reception desk. Removes her glasses. Polishes them on her sleeve.

“The walls here,” she says mildly, “are thinner than you think.”

I have the good grace to blush. Roux, behind me, does not.

“Industry standard,” Roux says.

“I’m updating the employee handbook,” Saffron replies. “Under ‘prohibited use of treatment furniture.'”

We walk out of Red Chapel into the afternoon — Roux’s hand in mine, the scarred fingers laced through my long ones, the burn scar warm against my palm. The city is loud around us. The December light is cold and clean.

“Roux.”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

She squeezes my hand and says, “I love you too.”

She says it like a fact. Like a diagnosis. Like a word she’s been practicing and has finally stopped being afraid to speak.

The ink will be permanent. So are we.

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