Home Ice

An Edge Work Bonus Chapter by Aurora North

⚠️ Content Warning: This bonus chapter contains explicit FF sexual content, including oral sex, manual stimulation, and extended intimate scenes. It takes place approximately eight months after the events of Edge Work. Intended for readers 18+ only.

The house tour ended in my bedroom.

Katya stood in the doorway and surveyed the space with the same evaluative precision she used when assessing a new rink. The room was small — twelve by ten, barely large enough for the twin bed, the dresser, and the desk I’d done homework at until I was eighteen. The walls were covered in hockey posters: the 2002 women’s Olympic team, a Minnesota Wild roster poster from 2015, and a signed photo of Hilary Knight that my dad had gotten me for my sixteenth birthday.

The bed was a twin. A twin. The comforter had hockey sticks on it. The pillow — singular — was flat and vaguely defeated.

Katya looked at the bed. Looked at me. Looked at the bed again.

“No,” she said.

“It’s just two nights.”

“This bed was designed for a person who is not your size.”

“I slept in it until I was eighteen.”

“You were smaller at eighteen.”

“Not by much.”

She stepped into the room. Tested the mattress with one hand. The springs creaked — a long, melodic protest that was audible from the hallway and probably from the kitchen directly below.

We both went still.

“The walls in this house,” Katya said carefully, “appear to be constructed from material with the acoustic properties of tissue paper.”

“Yep.”

“Your parents are directly below us.”

“Yep.”

“And your brothers are—”

“Marcus and Tyler are in the rooms on either side. Braden and Connor are in the basement, which has better soundproofing but is also directly accessible from the kitchen, where my mother goes for water approximately nine times a night.”

Katya looked at me. Her face was the mask — composed, unreadable, the expression she wore when she was calculating — but her eyes were doing something else entirely. Something that made my skin prickle.

“We’ll manage,” she said.

The way she said manage — clipped, deliberate, with the faintest edge of a promise — told me everything I needed to know about what managing was going to entail.

* * *

Christmas Eve dinner was a masterclass in controlled chaos.

Twelve people around a table designed for eight. Pot roast, mashed potatoes, green beans, rolls, three kinds of pie on the counter for later. Four separate conversations happening simultaneously at competing volumes. Tyler’s wife Jenny, eight months pregnant and glowing, eating bread rolls with the focused determination of a woman who had stopped pretending to care about portion sizes. Marcus arguing with Braden about the Wild’s defensive lineup. Connor showing my mother something on his phone. My father, silent, eating, watching.

Katya was seated between me and Marcus, her posture perfect, eating pot roast with the precision of someone who approached all physical activities — including digestion — as disciplines to be mastered. Marcus was trying. He’d clearly Googled figure skating before arriving and was asking questions with the careful earnestness of someone navigating a foreign language.

“So the — the triple Salchow. That’s the one with the toe pick, right?”

“The Salchow doesn’t use the toe pick. You’re thinking of the toe loop.”

“Right. And the axel — that’s the hard one?”

“They’re all hard. The axel is the only jump that launches forward, which makes the rotation entry more complex.”

“Huh. Like a spin-o-rama in hockey. Except, you know. In the air. While skating backward. In a costume.”

“The costume is not relevant to the difficulty.”

“I mean, it kind of is. You guys wear — like, they’re basically nothing. I’d be terrified.”

“The costume is designed for range of motion, not modesty.”

“Right. Yeah. Cool.” Marcus took a long drink of beer. “So how’d you and Saylor actually — I mean, she said you coached her, but—”

“She destroyed my training cones and I dressed her down in front of both our teams. She came back the next morning to watch me skate. I found her sitting in the stands at five AM in the dark.”

Marcus stared at me. I shrugged.

“That’s the most Saylor thing I’ve ever heard,” he said.

Halfway through dinner, my father spoke. Rick James, who had said approximately fourteen words since our arrival, set down his fork, looked at Katya, and said:

“Saylor tells me you fixed her edges.”

The table went quiet. Not silent — the toddler was still babbling and Jenny was still eating rolls — but the brothers all stopped talking, because when Rick James spoke at dinner, it meant something.

“I provided the technical framework,” Katya said. “She did the work.”

My father nodded. The nod. One nod, slow and deliberate, the nod of a man who had coached high school hockey for thirty years and recognized the correct answer when he heard it.

“She’s skating different,” he said. “Better than any James has ever skated. That’s you.”

Under the table, I found Katya’s knee and squeezed. She didn’t look at me. She didn’t need to. Her hand covered mine and held it there, and my father went back to his pot roast, and the conversation resumed, and the highest compliment Rick James had ever given to a non-family member settled into the room like a benediction.

After dinner, my mother cornered Katya in the kitchen.

“She stopped shrinking,” my mother told Katya in the kitchen. “My baby girl. She stopped. And that happened after you.”

My mother hugged her. Katya — who did not get hugged, who had not been hugged by a mother in fourteen years — stood in the James family kitchen and let Linda James hold her.

She held on longer than she meant to.

We sat on the couch and watched a Christmas movie with my family. During the movie, Katya leaned down to adjust her shoe and her mouth brushed my ear.

“When everyone is asleep,” she whispered. “Your room. Don’t make a sound.”

My face went nuclear.

Marcus glanced over. “You okay, Say? You look flushed.”

“Fine. Just warm in here.”

“It’s sixty-four degrees.”

“I run hot.”

Katya took a sip of wine and said nothing, and her face was perfectly composed, and I was going to combust.

* * *

11:47 PM. The house was quiet.

I was in bed. In shorts and a tank top. Staring at the ceiling. The hockey posters of my adolescence stared back at me.

The door opened.

No knock. Katya slipped through the gap like water through a crack — silent, precise. She was wearing black silk pajamas — the short set, the ones with the thin straps that showed her collarbones and the loose shorts that ended mid-thigh — and her hair was down and her feet were bare and she looked like a weapon someone had designed to destroy me specifically.

She sat on the edge of the bed. The springs creaked. We froze.

“This bed,” Katya whispered, “is an acoustic liability.”

She put her hand on my chest. “The walls are thin. Your parents are directly below us. Your brothers are down the hall. If you make a sound — any sound — I stop. Immediately. Without negotiation. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good girl.”

Two words. Whispered in my childhood bedroom, with my signed Hilary Knight photo watching from the wall. The praise hit me the way it always hit me — like a current — and my back arched off the mattress and the bed creaked and we both went still.

“Careful,” she breathed.

She eased me back down. Her other hand went to the hem of my tank top and began to lift it — inch by inch, with the deliberate precision of someone disarming an explosive. She pulled it over my head. She folded it. Set it on the nightstand. Because she was Katya Volkov and she folded things even during sex in the dark.

Her mouth found my collarbone. She kissed along the bone, finding the hollow at my throat. Her mouth moved lower. She cupped my breast and lowered her mouth to my nipple and the contact sent a bolt through my body that made my hips lift off the mattress.

The bed creaked. We froze. Braden’s voice from down the hall: “…yeah, nah, I’ll call you tomorrow.” A door closing. Then silence.

“The floor,” she whispered.

She pulled the comforter off the bed and spread it on the floor. The hockey-stick pattern faced up. She guided me onto the comforter. The floor was firm and solid and, critically, silent.

She stripped me with controlled precision. I was naked on my childhood bedroom floor on a hockey-themed comforter and the absurdity of it made my chest vibrate with a suppressed laugh.

She covered my mouth with her hand.

“No talking,” she said against my ear. “No laughing. No sound. If you need to make a sound, you make it into my hand. Understood?”

I nodded against her palm.

She kept her hand on my mouth and her other hand slid between my thighs. I was soaked — hours of anticipation made tangible — and I felt her inhale sharply against my ear.

“All of this,” she breathed. “From waiting?”

I nodded against her hand.

Her fingers moved. Slow, precise, circling with a pressure that was exactly calibrated to build without releasing. She knew my body the way she knew the ice — every response mapped, every threshold catalogued.

I arched against her hand. The sound that tried to escape was caught by her palm and reduced to a vibration against my own lips.

“That’s it,” she whispered. “Just like that. Hold it. Don’t let go.”

Hold the edge. Our phrase. Now issued on the floor of my childhood bedroom in Bemidji, Minnesota, on Christmas Eve.

She worked me with patient, relentless precision. When I got close, she slowed. Backed off. Held me at the edge.

“Not yet,” she breathed.

I made a pleading, desperate, muffled sound into her hand.

“Look at me.”

I opened my eyes. She was above me, her hair falling around her face, her dark eyes visible in the thin light seeping under the door.

“I love you,” she said. Whispered. Barely louder than a breath. “Now come for me. Quietly.”

Her fingers pressed. Harder, faster, the patience gone. The orgasm hit me like a wave breaking — total, consuming — and I came with her hand over my mouth and her eyes holding mine. The quietest orgasm of my life and the most intense because the suppression had compressed everything into a single, devastating point.

She held me through it. When the trembling stopped, she took her hand off my mouth. I gasped and kissed her and reached for her with shaking hands.

“Your turn,” I whispered. “On your back. Now.”

“You’re giving me orders. In your childhood bedroom.”

“It was a request that happens to be non-negotiable. On your back. Please.”

She lay back on the hockey-stick comforter. I undressed her slowly. Kissed her throat, her collarbone, her sternum. Moved lower.

“Quiet,” I whispered against her skin. “The walls are thin. Your rules.”

“You’re using my own rules against me.”

“I learned from the best.”

“Hold the edge,” I whispered.

And then I put my mouth on her and her hand flew to her own face, covering her mouth, and the sound she made — caught, muffled, desperate — was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard.

I worked her with everything she’d taught me. Every patience and precision and pay attention to the response applied to making this woman come apart in silence. She was extraordinarily quiet, with a discipline that came from years of training her body to obey her mind. But I could feel the cost in the tension of her thighs and the grip of her hand in my hair.

I pushed harder, faster. I slid two fingers inside her and curled them and her back arched off the comforter and her heel hit the dresser.

The trophy wobbled.

My peewee championship trophy — the plastic-and-gold one from when I was seven — teetering on the edge of the dresser, rocking back and forth in the thin light.

It steadied. Settled. Didn’t fall.

We exhaled simultaneously.

“If that trophy had fallen—” Katya whispered.

“I would have died. My mother would have come upstairs.”

“I’ve done that. It’s less dramatic than it sounds.”

I returned my mouth to where it belonged and this time I didn’t stop.

She came with my name in Russian. Saylor, said in a breathless, fractured whisper that cracked on the second syllable. I held her through it — through the peak and the trembling fall.

We lay tangled on the hockey-stick comforter.

“I just had sex on a hockey-themed comforter,” Katya murmured, “in a room with an Olympic poster watching.”

“The twelve-year-old me who hung that poster would be losing her entire mind right now.”

“The nineteen-year-old me on that poster would be deeply confused.”

“Thank you for coming here,” I said. “For doing the family thing. I know it’s a lot.”

“Your mother hugged me in the kitchen and I nearly cried into her pot roast. It is a lot.” She paused. “It is also exactly what I’ve been missing for fourteen years and didn’t know how to ask for.”

“Your father gave me the nod. I believe this means I’ve been accepted into the family.”

“The Rick James nod is legally binding. You’re stuck with us.”

“I can live with that.”

We managed to get back into the twin bed. My feet hung off the end. Katya used my shoulder as a pillow.

“Merry Christmas,” I whispered.

“Merry Christmas, Saylor.”

“Same time tomorrow?”

“Same time every day.”

She fell asleep against my chest. Through the window, I could see the frozen lake behind the house. The lake where I learned to skate. The lake where my dad first put blades on my feet and said go and I went, clumsy and fearless, and the ice carried me anyway.

Different ice. Same carrying. Same trust.

I closed my eyes. Held the edge. Held on.

In the morning, my mother would knock on the door and find us tangled in the twin bed and she would simply close the door and go make coffee, because Linda James had raised four hockey players and a woman who loved a woman, and none of those things surprised her.

And Katya would wake up in a house full of noise and breakfast and brothers arguing about hockey, and she would be, for the first time in fourteen years, part of a family.

Because she’d shown up. Because she’d said yes. Because she’d let someone love her loudly, in a loud house, in a loud family, on a frozen lake in Minnesota where everything started and nothing was quiet and the edges, as always, held.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed Edge Work, please consider leaving a review on Amazon.

← Back to Edge Work