Bonus Chapter: The Last Post-It

Crashing at the Cougar’s
by Aurora North

This bonus chapter takes place after the events of Crashing at the Cougar’s. It contains explicit sexual content intended for readers 18+.

The Last Post-It

Val’s POV

The last box is unpacked on a Thursday.

It’s a small box — books, mostly, the overflow from the three shelves Harper has already colonized. I find her in the living room sliding a battered copy of The Argonauts onto my poetry shelf, right between Glück and Vuong, and the sight of her books next to mine does something to my chest that I should be embarrassed about at forty-six but am not.

“That’s the last one,” she says, stepping back to survey her work. “I am officially moved in. Every object I own is now inside this house.”

“Every object you own fits in seven boxes. That’s either minimalism or a cry for help.”

“It’s efficiency. I’m an efficient woman.” She turns to me with that smile — the one with six layers. “I’m going to shower. The moving dust is in places dust shouldn’t be.”

She disappears upstairs. I hear the shower start. I pour a glass of Sancerre — our third bottle this month; at this rate I’m going to need a wine subscription — and I stand in my kitchen and look at the fridge.

Twenty-three magnets. The collection has become absurd. There’s a lobster wearing a top hat that she found at a flea market last weekend. There’s a tiny ceramic book that says READ. There’s the heart that says HOME that she bought the second week and that I have never once considered removing.

The shower stops. I hear her moving around upstairs — the bedroom, the bathroom, the soft percussion of drawers opening and closing. Then silence.

Then her voice, from the top of the stairs: “Val? Check the bathroom mirror.”

I set down my wine. I climb the stairs. I go into our bathroom — our bathroom, with her toothbrush beside mine and her shampoo beside mine and the jade roller she’s started using because she says my skin convinced her — and I look at the mirror.

A Post-it note. Yellow. Her handwriting.

You’ve been very patient while I unpacked. Time for your reward. Go to the kitchen counter — the one by the fridge. You know the one.

My pulse picks up. I go downstairs.

On the kitchen counter — the counter where she first kissed me, where she shoved me against the marble and dropped to her knees on the tile and put her mouth on me while I gripped the edge and came so hard I nearly cracked the stone — there’s another Post-it.

Remember what happened here? I do. I think about it at least once a day. The way your hand felt in my hair. The way you tasted on my tongue. The sounds you made when you stopped being quiet — those sounds, Val. I replay them when I’m alone. I get wet just remembering. I want to hear those sounds again tonight. Go to the porch.

I’m already warm. The space between my legs is already responding to the memory she’s conjured — her on her knees, her mouth, the way she looked up at me from between my thighs on this exact floor. I press my hand flat against the counter and feel the cool marble under my palm and think about her tongue and her fingers and the orgasm that took my legs out from under me.

I go to the porch.

The Post-it is stuck to the arm of my Adirondack chair. The chair where she tucked my hair behind my ear and I felt her pulse under her fingertips and ran away like a coward.

This is where I first touched you. Your neck. Your jaw. I could feel your heart hammering against my fingertips. Four seconds. I counted. Four seconds of your pulse slamming under my fingers before you pulled away. You wanted me so badly your whole body was shaking and you wouldn’t let yourself have it. Tonight, you can have whatever you want. Anything. Everything. Go to the bathtub.

My hands are shaking now too. Different reason. I go upstairs. The bathroom. The tub.

A Post-it on the rim of the freestanding tub where she leaned back against my chest and I washed her hair and ran my fingers through the wet strands while my other hand slid between her legs under the warm water. Where I circled her clit with a pressure so light it was barely there, and she came so quietly the only sign was the ripple of the water and the way her hand gripped the edge of the tub and her body arched against mine.

You washed my hair and I fell in love with you. I didn’t tell you that night. I was too busy coming against your hand and trying not to drown. I’m telling you now. One more stop. The bedroom. Don’t rush.

Don’t rush. She knows me. She knows I want to sprint down the hall and throw open the door and put my hands on whatever version of her is waiting behind it. She knows and she’s making me slow down because slowness is how she learned me and how I learned her and how we do everything that matters.

I walk to the bedroom. The door is closed. There’s one final Post-it.

I’m on the other side of this door. I’m wearing the thing you bought me last week that you pretended was “practical.” I am not being practical. I’m not wearing anything under it. I’m wet. I’ve been wet since I wrote the first note. Open the door, Valerie. I’m yours.

I open the door.

She’s on the bed.

On our bed, in the silk camisole I bought her at a boutique downtown — black, thin-strapped, falling to mid-thigh, the kind of thing I picked out while pretending I wasn’t imagining exactly this. She’s lying on her side with her head propped on one hand and her auburn hair loose around her shoulders and her legs are bare and she’s looking at me with an expression that is both an invitation and a dare.

The silk clings. I can see the outline of her nipples through the fabric, hard and peaked. I can see the shadow between her thighs where the camisole has ridden up. She wasn’t lying about what she’s not wearing underneath. She’s not wearing a single fucking thing.

“You found all of them,” she says.

“You left me a trail.”

“I left you a map. Of every place in this house where you changed my life.” She sits up. The camisole shifts. The strap slides off one shoulder and she doesn’t fix it. “Now I want to add a new one.”

“A new memory. Our first night in our house. Not your house that I’m staying in. Not the summer arrangement. Ours. I want to remember this.”

I cross the room. I stand at the edge of the bed and I think about the first night. The Sancerre. The tank top. The way she blinked up at me from my couch and I thought she’s pretty and crushed the thought like contraband.

I’m done crushing things.

“Stand up,” I say.

She stands. The camisole falls to mid-thigh. She’s not wearing anything underneath — I can tell from the way the silk clings to the heat between her legs, from the hard points of her nipples, from the faint flush climbing her chest that tells me she’s been aroused since long before I opened this door.

“Turn around.”

She turns. Her back is to me. The camisole dips low between her shoulder blades, revealing the freckled map of her spine that I’ve kissed a hundred times and will kiss a thousand more. I step closer. I press my mouth to the nape of her neck and she shivers — a full-body shiver that I feel against my lips and in the tightening of my own core.

I slide the straps off her shoulders. Both of them. Slowly. The silk catches on her breasts for a moment — clinging to those peaked nipples — and then falls. Pools at her feet like black water. She’s naked.

I wrap my arms around her from behind — my clothed body against her bare back, my hands splayed on her stomach, my mouth on her neck — and she melts into me. The feel of her bare skin against my blouse, the heat radiating off her body, the way her ass presses back against my hips — the asymmetry of it, her naked and surrendered, me dressed and deliberate — is intoxicating.

“I love you,” I say against her skin. “I love you in this house. I love you in your apartment. I love you at the grocery store arguing about cheese. I love you in the garden and the bathtub and on the terrible couch and everywhere.”

“Val—”

“And tonight I’m going to show you.”

My right hand slides down her stomach. Slowly. Over the soft skin below her navel, through the trim hair between her legs, and between her folds. She gasps — sharp, immediate — and her hips press back against me and she’s already wet. Not just wet. Drenched. Slick and swollen and so hot against my fingers that my own clit throbs in response.

“You’re dripping,” I murmur against her ear. “How long have you been like this?”

“Since I wrote the first note. Since I imagined you reading them. Every room I went to, I pictured what we did there, and by the time I got to the bedroom I had to stop myself from starting without you.”

The image — Harper lying on our bed, her hand between her own legs, working herself while she waited for me — sends a bolt of heat through me so sharp I bite down on her shoulder. She moans. Not softly. The kind of moan that fills a room and makes the walls listen.

I circle her clit with two fingers. Slow, firm circles that make her knees buckle. My left arm holds her tight against me — possessive, anchoring — my hand cupping her breast, my thumb rolling her nipple until it’s so hard it must ache. She rocks against my hand, her hips grinding in small desperate rolls, chasing the pressure.

“Inside me,” she breathes. “I need you inside me.”

I slide two fingers into her from behind. She’s so wet there’s no resistance — just heat and silk and the immediate clench of her muscles around me. She cries out and her head falls back against my shoulder and I fuck her with my hand while she stands in the middle of our bedroom, naked and shaking and completely mine.

My thumb finds her clit while my fingers work inside her — deep, curling strokes that press against the spot she likes, the one that makes her go quiet for a beat before the sound breaks through. I feel it building — the tension in her thighs, the way her breathing stutters, the way her hand flies back and grabs my hip, pulling me tighter against her.

“I want your mouth,” she manages. “Val — I need—”

“Get on the bed.”

She gets on the bed. She lies back against our pillows and spreads her legs and looks at me with those green eyes — dark, glazed, the eyes of a woman who’s been teetering on the edge for the last five minutes and needs to be pushed over. I’m still fully dressed. The power of it — the asymmetry, her naked and open and glistening, me clothed and controlled and kneeling between her thighs — makes me so wet I can feel it soaking through my underwear.

I kiss her hip bone. Her stomach. The crescent of sensitive skin at her waist that makes her jerk every time. I take my time because I have all the time in the world — she lives here now, she’s not leaving, there’s no countdown, no guest room to retreat to, no secret to manage. She’s mine and I’m hers and the house is ours and I can eat this woman for as long as I want.

I put my mouth on her.

She cries out — loud, immediate, her hand flying to my hair and grabbing a fistful and pulling me closer. I lick through her folds in one long, flat stroke and she’s so wet my chin is slick with it instantly. She tastes like salt and arousal and the particular sharpness of a woman who’s been turned on for an hour and is desperate to come.

I seal my lips around her clit and suck gently and she bucks against my face. I hold her hips down — firm, both hands — and work her with my tongue in fast, tight circles. She’s making sounds that aren’t words. Animal sounds. Sounds that come from the place past language where the body takes over and the brain surrenders.

I slide two fingers inside her again — still soaked, still clenching — and curl forward, pressing against her G-spot while my tongue works her clit, and the combination breaks her open.

“Fuck — Val — right there, don’t stop, don’t — oh god —”

She comes with a shout that echoes off the ceiling. Her whole body locks up — back arching off the mattress, thighs clamping around my head, hand fisting in my hair so hard it hurts in the best way. I feel her orgasm against my mouth — the rhythmic pulse of her muscles clenching around my fingers, the flood of wetness against my chin, the full-body tremors that roll through her in waves. I don’t stop. I ease off the pressure but keep my mouth on her, keep my fingers inside her, coax every last aftershock from her body until she’s gasping and twitching and trying to push my head away.

I don’t let her push me away. I slow down — gentler strokes, softer tongue — and I build her again. She whimpers. Her hips roll against my face in involuntary undulations and she says “I can’t — it’s too much — I just came, I can’t—”

“You can. One more. For me.”

The second orgasm takes longer to build. I work her patiently — alternating between my tongue flat against her clit and pointed, direct strokes, my fingers pressing inside her in a rhythm that matches her breathing. She grabs the headboard with one hand and my hair with the other and when it breaks, it’s deeper than the first. A low, wrenching moan that sounds like it’s being pulled from the center of her body. Her eyes squeeze shut. Tears leak from the corners. She comes around my fingers in contractions so strong I can feel them in my wrist, and I hold her through it — mouth soft against her throbbing clit, fingers still buried, my free hand flat on her stomach feeling every tremor.

When she finally stills, she’s boneless. Wrecked. She pulls me up by my shirt and kisses me — deep, messy, tasting herself on my lips and tongue. Then she reaches for my buttons.

“Off,” she says. Her voice is destroyed. “Everything off. Now.”

I undress. She watches from the pillows, eyes heavy-lidded, body still flushed from the orgasms, and the way she watches me — like I’m something she still can’t believe she gets to have — makes me feel more desired than I’ve ever felt in my life.

She sits up when I’m naked. She runs her hands over my body — my shoulders, my breasts, my stomach, my hips — mapping me like she’s confirming I’m real. She leans forward and takes my nipple into her mouth and I gasp and thread my fingers through her hair and feel her tongue circle and suck and the arousal that’s been building since the first Post-it note tightens into something urgent and undeniable.

She pulls me onto the bed. Rolls me onto my back. Climbs over me.

“I’ve been thinking about this all day,” she says, kissing down my throat. “Planning it. Writing those notes and getting wetter with every word because I knew where they’d lead.”

Her mouth moves down my body — collarbone, breast, the soft skin between my ribs. She takes her time the way I taught her to take her time — not rushing, not performing, just being present with each inch of skin. She finds the spot at my waist — the hidden crescent that she discovered weeks ago — and traces it with her tongue and I jerk, my hips lifting off the bed.

“Still gets you,” she murmurs against my skin, smiling. “Every time.”

She settles between my legs. She looks up at me from between my thighs with those green eyes and says: “I’m home.”

Then she puts her mouth on me.

I am embarrassingly wet. Soaked. She hasn’t even touched me until now and I’m dripping, and the sound she makes when she tastes me — a low, satisfied hum against my flesh — sends vibrations through my clit that make my vision swim.

She eats me like she knows me. Because she does. She knows the exact rhythm — slow circles first, then faster, then the flat of her tongue in long strokes that cover everything, then back to the tight circles on my clit that make my thighs shake. She knows the pressure I need — firm enough to feel, not so hard it overwhelms. She learned me. She studied me. She treats my pleasure like a craft she’s devoted herself to mastering, and she has mastered it, completely.

She slides two fingers inside me and curls forward and the dual sensation — her mouth on my clit, her fingers pressing against the spot that makes the world white out — hits me like a wall. I come hard and fast, crying out, gripping her hair, my body arching off the bed and clenching around her fingers in spasms that feel like they’re rewiring my nervous system.

She crawls up my body. Lies on top of me. Our hearts slam against each other through our chests.

“So,” she says, breathless and grinning. “How’s the new roommate?”

“The new roommate is a menace.” I pull her down and kiss her. “She leaves Post-it notes everywhere and steals my wine and she just gave me an orgasm that I’m going to feel in my legs for two days.”

“Only two days? I’m losing my touch.”

“Then maybe you should try harder.”

Her eyes darken. “Careful what you wish for.”

Round two happens in the bathtub.

Harper runs the water while I pour more Sancerre. By the time I bring the glasses to the bathroom, the tub is full and steaming and she’s already in it, leaning back against the porcelain, her wet hair slicked back, her breasts just breaking the surface of the water. She looks like a painting. She looks like something I’d stage a room around.

I get in. She moves forward to make space and I slide behind her — our position, the one we established weeks ago, my chest against her back, my legs bracketing hers, my arms around her waist. We drink wine and the steam rises around us and for a few minutes it’s just this: two women in a tub, skin against skin, breathing together.

Then her hand finds mine under the water. She pulls it down. Presses my fingers between her legs.

“Again,” she says. “The way you did it the first time. In the tub. When I fell in love with you.”

I touch her the way I touched her the first time — gently, barely there, my fingertips tracing slow circles on her clit while the warm water moves around us. She tips her head back against my shoulder and closes her eyes and I watch her face — the flutter of her eyelids, the part of her lips, the small muscle in her jaw that twitches when she’s close.

I work her slowly. Under the water, my fingers are unhurried and patient, circling and pressing and sliding through her folds. My other hand finds her breast — cupping, rolling her nipple, the dual sensation making her hips shift restlessly against me.

“I could do this forever,” I whisper against her ear. “Just this. Holding you in the water, feeling you get wetter against my hand, listening to the sounds you make when you’re trying to be quiet.”

“I’m not trying to be quiet.”

“Then let me hear you.”

She moans. Not a controlled sound — an open, unfiltered moan that bounces off the tile and fills the bathroom. I increase the pressure. Slide two fingers inside her under the water while my thumb works her clit. She reaches back and grabs the back of my neck, pulling my mouth to the spot below her ear, and I suck the skin there while I fuck her with my hand and she comes in my arms with a cry that makes the water ripple and my own body clench with sympathetic want.

She turns in the tub. Faces me. Water sloshing over the edge, neither of us caring. She kisses me and reaches between my legs and I’m so turned on from making her come three times that her first touch on my clit nearly sends me over immediately.

“Your turn,” she says against my mouth. “Let go.”

Her fingers are deft and sure under the water. She knows exactly what I need — two fingers inside me, curling forward, her thumb on my clit in the rhythm she’s perfected. I come fast and hard, biting her shoulder, my body clenching around her fingers, the water churning with the force of it.

We lie in the cooling water afterward, tangled and panting and laughing at the mess we’ve made of the bathroom floor.

Round three is the kitchen counter.

Harper insists. “We’re circling back to the scene of the crime,” she says, pulling me downstairs by the hand, both of us naked, dripping, leaving wet footprints on the hardwood. “The counter started everything. The counter deserves a victory lap.”

She lifts me onto the marble. The stone is cold against my bare ass and I gasp and she grins and steps between my legs and kisses me. The cold counter and her warm mouth and the fact that I am sitting naked in my own kitchen at midnight while a twenty-four-year-old woman kisses me like I’m the center of the universe — it’s so far from the life I was living six months ago that it feels like fiction.

It’s not fiction. It’s my life. Our life.

She drops to her knees. On the kitchen floor. Again. The way she did the first time — that desperate, post-Megan-visit morning when she shoved me against this counter and took what she needed. But this time she’s not desperate. She’s savoring.

She kisses the inside of my thighs. She nuzzles between my legs and breathes me in and says, “God, I love the way you smell after you’ve come,” and the frankness of it makes my stomach clench.

She puts her mouth on me. On the kitchen counter. On the marble where I make coffee and chop onions and have lived my entire careful, controlled, organized life. She eats my pussy on the counter while the fridge magnets watch and the Sancerre sweats on the island and I grip the edge of the stone and let her take me apart one more time.

I come with her name in my mouth and the magnets rattling against the fridge from the vibration of my heels hitting the cabinet doors. It’s the fourth orgasm tonight and it should be impossible but she makes it possible — she makes everything possible, this impossible, freckled, brilliant woman who stole my wine and my heart and my kitchen counter.

When she stands, I pull her between my legs and wrap around her and hold her against my chest. Naked on the counter. In our kitchen. In our house.

“I love you,” I say into her hair.

“I know.” She pulls back and grins. “I left you a map.”

Later — much later, after we’ve toweled off the bathroom floor and wiped down the counter and put on clothes that last approximately twelve minutes before coming off again — we lie in our bed in the dark. Her head on my chest. My hand in her hair. The position that’s been ours since the beginning.

“Val?”

“Mm.”

“I’m going to need more Post-it notes.”

“There’s a pack in the desk drawer.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too. Go to sleep.”

“The house isn’t quiet anymore.”

“No,” I say, pulling her closer. “It’s not.”

She sleeps. I hold her. The magnets on the fridge downstairs keep their silent, joyful watch. The house hums around us — full, messy, lived-in, christened in every room that matters and a few that don’t.

I close my eyes. I don’t count down to anything. There’s nothing to count down to.

Only forward.

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