After the Barn

A Don’t Tell My Brother Bonus Scene
by Aurora North

What Happens When the Door Closes

The venue launch is over. The guests are gone. And Lauren finally has Katie alone in the barn they built together.

The last car pulled out of the gravel lot at eleven forty-two. I know because I watched the taillights disappear down Route 9 while Katie stood beside me on the terrace with her heels dangling from one hand and a glass of champagne she’d been nursing for two hours in the other.

Emma had left twenty minutes earlier with a hug that lasted three seconds longer than her usual hugs, which was her version of a standing ovation. She’d whispered, “You built something incredible,” and then, pulling back with a look that was half threat, half benediction: “Lock up properly. The insurance doesn’t cover whatever you two are about to do on my event tables.”

The barn was empty. The caterers had packed out. The bartender had broken down the portable bar and loaded his truck. The string lights were still on — thousands of tiny warm bulbs wound through the post-and-beam ceiling, casting the main hall in the kind of golden glow that made everything look like a photograph of the life you’d always wanted.

I turned to Katie. She was looking at the barn — my barn, our barn, the disaster I’d bought on a reckless Thursday and spent a year turning into something that three hundred people had just called stunning. Her makeup was slightly smudged. Her dress — dark green, fitted, the kind of dress that had made coherent thought impossible since she’d walked through the door at six PM — was wrinkled where she’d been leaning against the stone wall during the final toast. Her hair had fallen out of whatever architecture she’d built for the evening and was curling around her jaw in the way it did when she stopped controlling it.

She was the most beautiful thing in a building I’d designed to be beautiful, and she was looking at what we’d made with an expression that reached into my chest and closed its fist.

“Everyone’s gone,” she said.

“Everyone’s gone.”

She took a sip of her champagne. Set the glass on the terrace railing. Turned to me.

“You know what I kept thinking about tonight?” she said. “During the toasts and the showcase and that couple who booked their wedding on the spot?”

“What?”

“The first time I came to this barn. When it was a wreck and you were standing in the middle of it covered in dust, telling me your vision, and I thought — this woman is either brilliant or insane, and either way, I want to take her clothes off.”

I laughed. The sound echoed off the stone walls and came back to us, and the emptiness of the barn — the cavernous, cathedral-ceilinged emptiness that had been full of bodies and music and laughter an hour ago — made the silence feel enormous. Private. Ours.

“Come inside,” I said.

She followed me through the main doors. I closed them. The bolt was heavy, iron, reclaimed from the original barn hardware. It slid home with a sound that felt final in the best possible way.

The main hall stretched before us — tables cleared, chairs stacked against the far wall, the hardwood floor gleaming under the string lights. The stone walls held the warmth of three hundred bodies and a dozen candles. The whole space smelled like cedar and roses and the particular electricity of something that had just succeeded.

Katie walked ahead of me, barefoot on the hardwood, her heels abandoned by the door. She moved through the hall like she was memorizing it — trailing her fingers along the edge of a table, looking up at the beams, touching the stone.

She stopped in the center of the room. Turned. The string lights caught the green of her dress and the blue of her eyes and the curve of her mouth, which was not quite smiling.

“Lauren.”

“Katie.”

“I told a vendor tonight that you’re my girlfriend.”

“I heard.”

“You didn’t react.”

“I reacted. You just couldn’t see it from across the room.”

She tilted her head. “Show me.”

I crossed the floor. Not slowly — the patience I’d been performing all evening had a shelf life, and it expired the moment the last car left. I reached her in four strides and my hands went to her waist and I pulled her body against mine and kissed her with fifteen years of waiting and five hours of watching her dazzle a room full of strangers while calling herself mine.

Her mouth opened under mine. She tasted like champagne and the chocolate mousse from the caterer’s dessert course and underneath that, just Katie — the taste I’d been craving since 6 PM when she’d walked through the door in that green dress and I’d had to grip the edge of the bar to stop myself from crossing the room.

She dropped her shoes. Her hands came up to my face, then my hair, pulling it free from the pins I’d used for the evening. My hair fell against my neck and her fingers combed through it and the kiss deepened until I couldn’t tell which heartbeat was mine and which was hers.

“I’ve wanted to do this all night,” I said against her mouth. “Every time you smiled at someone. Every time you leaned over a table and that dress did what it’s been doing to me for five hours. Every time you said my girlfriend like it was the easiest word you’d ever spoken.”

“It was.” She pulled back enough to look at me. Her eyes were dark. “It was the easiest thing I’ve ever said.”

Something unlocked in me. Not the careful, calibrated desire I’d been managing all summer — the desire that had rules and timelines and the constant awareness that we were hiding. This was different. This was the desire that came with knowing she’d claimed me in a room full of people without checking her brother’s face first. Without hedging. Without maybe.

I put my mouth on her neck. She gasped. My hands found the zipper at the back of her dress and drew it down slowly, tracing the path of the metal with my fingertips against her spine, and Katie shivered under my touch like a wire pulled taut.

“Here?” she breathed. “In the middle of—”

“In the middle of the room I built. On the floor you helped me choose. Under the lights you told me to string because they’d make everything look like magic.” I pushed the dress off her shoulders. It fell to her waist and she was wearing a strapless bra — black, lace, the kind of thing she’d chosen knowing I’d see it eventually — and her chest was flushed and her breathing was fast and shallow and I thought, This. This is what I built it for.

I unclasped the bra. Let it drop. Put my hands on her bare breasts and felt her nipples harden against my palms and Katie’s head fell back and the sound she made — a low, throaty moan that echoed off the stone walls and the cathedral ceiling — filled the barn like it was designed for it.

“Do you know what I wanted during your toast?” She was working on my shirt buttons, her fingers unsteady. “When you stood at that podium and thanked everyone for coming and your voice was so steady and so confident and you looked like — you looked like the most capable woman alive — I wanted to get on my knees under the table.”

I grabbed her wrists. Stilled them. She looked up at me and her eyes were glazed with want and the flush on her chest was spreading to her throat.

“Say that again,” I said.

“I wanted to get on my knees.”

I let go of her wrists. “Then do it.”

Her breath caught. The command hung between us — not cruel, not cold, but certain. The certainty of a woman who was done holding back, done calibrating, done treating desire as something that needed to be negotiated or justified or hidden behind closed doors and careful timing.

Katie sank to her knees on the hardwood floor of the barn I’d built. She looked up at me with an expression that was equal parts surrender and defiance — the expression of a woman who was choosing this, who wanted this, who was done pretending she didn’t want exactly this.

She unfastened my pants. Pulled them down my hips. I stepped out of them and she pressed her mouth to my stomach, then lower, her lips dragging across the line of my hip bone, the crease of my thigh, the tattoo on my ribs that she’d been obsessed with since she was twenty-one. Her tongue traced the ink and I gripped her hair and felt the groan building in my chest.

“Katie—”

“Shh.” She looked up at me from the floor. “Let me.”

She pulled my underwear down and pressed her mouth between my legs and the sound I made was not human. It was something raw and elemental, torn from the part of me that had spent fifteen years wanting this woman and eighteen weeks having her and still — still — being destroyed by the first touch of her tongue.

She was good at this. She was devastatingly, unfairly, impossibly good at this — a truth I’d discovered early and been ruined by repeatedly. Her tongue moved in slow, deliberate strokes, flat and firm, and her hands gripped the backs of my thighs and held me steady while I shook.

The barn amplified everything. Every gasp hit the stone and came back doubled. Every moan traveled up to the cathedral ceiling and cascaded down through the string lights like something physical. The acoustics I’d designed for wedding speeches and first-dance songs were, it turned out, equally effective for the sounds of a woman coming apart on a hardwood floor.

“Don’t stop — fuck — Katie, right there—”

She didn’t stop. She pressed closer, her nose against my pelvis, her tongue working me with the focused intensity she brought to everything she did when she stopped deflecting and started committing, and I braced my hand against the nearest table and felt the orgasm building like a storm rolling in from the Catskills — visible from a distance, inevitable, bigger than anything I could control.

I came with her name in my mouth and my hand in her hair and my knees threatening to give out. The orgasm rolled through me in long, shuddering waves, and Katie held me through every one, her mouth gentle now, easing me down, her hands still gripping my thighs like she was afraid I’d fall.

I might have. She’d earned the concern.

I pulled her up. Kissed her. Tasted myself on her mouth and felt the possessive, animal surge that always accompanied that particular intimacy — the knowledge that she’d just had me in her mouth and was kissing me with the evidence still on her lips.

“On the table,” I said.

“Which one?”

“The head table. The one where I sat all night watching you.”

She sat on the edge of the table — the eight-foot oak farmhouse table I’d commissioned from a local carpenter, the table where the launch speeches had been given two hours ago — and I pushed her dress the rest of the way off her body and she was wearing nothing but black lace underwear and the string lights turned her skin golden and I stood between her legs and looked at her and felt something that was bigger than desire and older than want. Something that had roots in every kitchen conversation and every stolen kiss and every night I’d lain in the guest room of her parents’ house listening to her breathe through the wall.

“You’re mine,” I said.

“I told a room full of strangers that tonight.”

“Tell me.”

“I’m yours.”

I kissed her throat. Her collarbone. The space between her breasts where her heart was hammering. I put my mouth on her nipple and sucked, and Katie’s back arched and her hands gripped the edge of the table and the sound she made was loud and unashamed and free — the sound of a woman who didn’t have to be quiet anymore, who wasn’t muffling herself against a pillow in the small bedroom or biting her lip in a truck cab or holding her breath in a barn office while the crew worked twenty feet away.

“Lauren — please—”

“Please what?”

“Touch me. I need you to touch me.”

I pulled her underwear off. Tossed it somewhere. Put my hand between her thighs and felt how wet she was — soaked, dripping, the evidence of five hours of wanting pressed hot against my fingers — and Katie whimpered and rocked her hips toward me.

“You’re this wet from watching me give a toast?”

“I’m this wet from watching you build a barn. The toast was just the last straw.”

I pushed two fingers inside her. She cried out — the sound sharp, cracking against the stone walls, filling the empty barn — and I watched her face as I started to move. I watched her mouth fall open and her eyes squeeze shut and her hands grip the table edge until her knuckles went white, and I added a third finger and felt her stretch around me and the cry she gave was my name, broken into two syllables that didn’t sound like language anymore.

I fucked her on the head table of Davis House Events with the string lights burning above us and the Catskill foothills invisible beyond the windows and the scent of roses and cedar and sex filling the space I’d built with my hands. I fucked her hard, then slow, then hard again — reading her body the way I’d learned to read it over weeks of late nights and stolen mornings, finding the rhythm that made her shake, the depth that made her curse, the angle that made her grab my wrist and beg.

“Right there — God — Lauren, don’t stop, don’t you dare stop—”

I didn’t stop. I curved my fingers and pressed upward and my thumb found her clit and Katie’s legs locked around my waist and she pulled me closer and I felt her clench around me — tight, rhythmic, the unmistakable pulse of a woman who was seconds from coming.

“Open your eyes,” I said. “Look at me.”

She opened her eyes. They were wet. Not from pain — from the weight of it. The weight of fifteen years becoming tonight. The weight of maybe becoming yes. The weight of a woman who had chosen me out loud, in public, without apology, and was now looking at me from the table where I’d watched her all night and letting me see everything she felt.

“I love you,” she said, and came.

The orgasm tore through her — violent, whole-body, the kind that starts at the center and radiates outward until every muscle is involved. She clamped around my fingers and her back bowed off the table and she screamed — actually screamed, the sound enormous in the empty barn — and I held my hand steady inside her and felt every contraction and thought, This is what I was afraid of. This is what I’ve wanted. They were always the same thing.

I brought her down slowly. Gentled my touch, kissed her inner thigh, kept my fingers inside her until the aftershocks subsided and her breathing returned to something human. Then I pulled my hand free and she caught it — caught my wrist — and brought my fingers to her mouth and cleaned them with her tongue while looking me dead in the eye.

My entire body clenched.

“I’m not done with you,” she said.

“I didn’t think you were.”

She slid off the table. Pushed me backward. I hit the stone wall — the original fieldstone that I’d preserved and pointed and sealed with my own hands — and the cold of it against my bare back made me gasp, and then Katie’s mouth was on mine and her hand was between my legs and the gasp became a groan.

She fucked me against the wall of my own barn. Her fingers inside me, my leg hooked over her hip, her mouth on my neck, my shoulder, the tattoo she’d been tracing with her tongue for months. She wasn’t gentle. She wasn’t patient. She was fierce and possessive and thorough, and when I came for the second time that night, I bit down on her shoulder and tasted salt and felt her moan vibrate against my collarbone and thought, This is what no more hiding sounds like.

We ended up on the floor. On the hardwood I’d sanded and sealed and polished for weeks, the floor that had held three hundred dancing guests earlier that evening, now holding two women who couldn’t stop touching each other. Katie’s head on my chest. My arm around her shoulders. The string lights still burning overhead, making the ceiling look like a night sky someone had built by hand.

“We should probably go home,” Katie said after a while.

“Whose home?”

She lifted her head. Looked at me. “Yours. Mine. Whatever. As long as you’re in it.”

I pulled her closer. Max was at Emma’s for the night. The barn was locked. The launch was over and it had been perfect and Katie Miller had stood in a room full of people and called me her girlfriend and then gotten on her knees for me on the floor of the building we’d made together.

There was nothing left to hide. Nothing left to hold back. Nothing left to be afraid of except how much of myself I wanted to give this woman, and the answer — the answer I’d been circling for fifteen years, through every kitchen conversation and every near-miss and every night in the guest room with the door closed between us — the answer was all of it.

Every last goddamn thing.

“Stay,” I said. “Right here. We’ll go home in the morning.”

She settled against me. The barn creaked around us, the way old buildings do when they’re settling into their purpose. The string lights hummed. Outside, the valley was dark and quiet and full of people who had no idea what had just happened in the most beautiful event space in the Hudson Valley.

Katie’s fingers found mine. She laced them together the way she’d done in the hotel, the gesture that meant I’m here and I’m staying and ask me again and I’ll say yes this time.

I kissed the top of her head.

I didn’t ask. I didn’t need to.

She’d already answered.

Want more Katie and Lauren? The full novel is available now.

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