Girl Next Door, After Dark

Sapphic Romance
by Aurora North

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Neighbors, Secret Sex Work, Voyeurism/Exhibition, Collab Partners to Lovers, Forced Proximity, Found Family, Camgirl Romance

My new neighbor is the sweetest girl in the building. So why do I hear her moaning a stranger’s username through our shared wall every night at eleven?

Cassie Monroe is invisible by design. She works remote, orders groceries to the door, and hasn’t been looked at — really looked at — in years. When she moves into a creaky pre-war building, her across-the-hall neighbor is the sweetest woman she’s ever met: soft voice, messy bun, homemade pasta on Fridays.

Jade Rivera is the building’s friendliest ghost. By day, she’s quiet and careful. By night, she’s JadeAfterDark — a wildly successful camgirl who performs intimacy for thousands and goes to bed alone. Nobody in the building knows. Nobody gets close.

Then Cassie discovers Jade’s channel. Then a Wi-Fi outage puts her inside the room. Then Jade’s hands-on-screen “helper” becomes the internet’s obsession — and their anonymous collaboration ignites something neither woman can turn off when the camera stops rolling.

But a possessive top tipper is closing in, a morality clause threatens Cassie’s day job, and the wall between their apartments — the wall that started everything — is about to become the only thing protecting the life they’ve built together.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Sweet neighbor by day / filthy camgirl by night
✅ Voyeurism, exhibition, and collab partners to lovers
✅ “I heard you through the wall” forced proximity
✅ Secret sex work with full respect and zero shame
✅ 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional (on-camera AND off)
✅ A possessive antagonist you’ll love to hate
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes including on-camera sex work), voyeurism, exhibition, strong language, online harassment/stalking themes, and family estrangement. Sex-work-positive throughout. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One

The box marked KITCHEN — HEAVY, DO NOT STACK had been stacked, obviously, beneath two other boxes, and it chose the exact moment I reached the third-floor landing to give up on life.

The bottom split. A cascade of mismatched mugs, a colander, and my one good cast-iron pan made a break for freedom, and I did the thing every mover does — the doomed lunge, arms wide, as if I could catch eleven objects with two hands — and managed to save exactly nothing except my dignity, which also shattered on impact.

The cast iron hit the hardwood like a church bell. The whole building probably felt it.

“Oh no.” A door across the hall opened. “Oh — okay, don’t move, there’s mug shrapnel everywhere.”

I looked up from my crouch of failure and that was it. That was the moment. I’d like to say something more interesting happened first, that I got at least one normal hour in my new building before my brain rolled over and showed its belly, but no.

She stood in the doorway of 3B in an oversized cardigan the color of oatmeal, sleeves shoved to her elbows, dark hair piled in a bun that had clearly lost a war several hours ago. Socked feet — one gray, one striped. She had a face made for the word soft: round cheeks, a full mouth, brown eyes that tilted down a little at the corners like she was perpetually about to apologize for something.

“I’m Jade,” she said, already crouching at the blast radius, gathering ceramic shards into her palm with the practiced calm of someone who had cleaned up worse. “3B. You must be the new 3A.”

“Cassie. Hi. I swear I own things that aren’t broken.”

“That’s what they all say.” A flicker of a smile, there and gone. She held up half a mug that read WORLD’S OKAYEST EMPLOYEE. “Casualty. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Honestly, he had it coming.”

The smile came back and stayed a second longer this time, and something in my chest did a small, embarrassing flip. I’d been in the building four minutes.

She helped me carry the wounded box inside — she took one flap, I took the other, and when we set it down on the kitchen counter our fingers overlapped for a second on the cardboard. Just a second. Her hands were warm and there was a chip of dark polish on her thumbnail and I noticed all of it with a specificity that should have worried me.

“Okay,” she said, stepping back, tucking a loose strand behind her ear. “Building orientation, condensed version. Radiators clank in winter, it’s not a ghost. Mrs. Feldman in 2C will feed you until you beg for mercy. The super’s name is Denny, he’s nice but he responds to voicemails in geological time, so if something breaks, knock on my door first, I have a toolkit and a grudge against Denny.” She paused. “Also — trash goes out Tuesday and Friday, and the chute on this floor is broken, so.”

She disappeared into 3B and came back with a roll of heavy-duty trash bags, pressing them into my hands like a housewarming ritual.

“For the mug graveyard,” she said.

“You’re kind of the best neighbor I’ve ever had, and I’ve been here six minutes.”

“Low bar. My last neighbor practiced trumpet.” She glanced past me at the stack of boxes, at the mattress leaning drunkenly against the wall, and something almost shy crossed her face. “One more thing. Full disclosure.” She knocked a knuckle gently against the wall between our units — the wall my bedroom shared with hers, I’d realize later, though at the time it was just a wall. “This is basically paper. Pre-war charm. You’ll hear everything. Sorry in advance.”

“I’m quiet,” I said. “Customer support. My whole job is apologizing to strangers in a soothing voice.”

“That sounds…” She searched for the word.

“Soul-flattening?”

“I was going to say relaxing, but sure.” Her mouth curved. “Well. Welcome to the building, Cassie-in-3A. Try not to unbox anything else load-bearing.”

Her door clicked shut, and I stood in my empty kitchen holding a roll of trash bags like a bouquet, grinning at absolutely nothing.

Here is a true and humiliating fact about me: I moved to this city, to this creaky pre-war building with its clanking-radiator ghost and its geologically slow super, because a therapist I saw exactly four times told me I “structured my life to avoid being perceived,” and I got so mad about it that I gave notice on my apartment.

She wasn’t wrong. That was the maddening part.

I worked from home for Verra Wellness — a supplements-and-serenity brand whose customers were somehow both zen and furious — answering tickets from women named Deborah who wanted refunds on adaptogenic mushroom powder. I had a headset, a script, and a soothing voice I’d built like a piece of furniture. My camera stayed off in every meeting. My social media was a graveyard. I ordered groceries to the door and told myself it was efficiency.

At twenty-seven, I could go a full week without being looked at by another human being, and I’d gotten so good at it that I’d stopped noticing it was a skill I’d been practicing.

New city. New building. New Cassie, theoretically.

I spent the afternoon unpacking in the way where you empty three boxes and then sit on the floor eating crackers and staring at the middle distance. My new bedroom was small but the light was good, gold and slanted through an old sash window, and I pushed my bed against the shared wall because it was the only arrangement that fit, tested the mattress, and lay there listening to my new life.

Footsteps somewhere below. Pipes ticking. A muffled thread of music from 3B — something low and moody, bass more felt than heard. Jade’s apartment made small domestic sounds all afternoon. A kettle. A drawer. Once, briefly, her laugh — bright and startled, like someone had said something in her earbuds — and I lay there on my bare mattress and felt the sound land somewhere under my sternum.

Perceived, I thought. There’s your problem right there.

Six minutes of kindness and one accidental hand-touch and I was lying on a bed listening for a stranger’s laugh through the drywall. This was why I didn’t leave the house. I imprinted like a duckling.

I made myself get up and unpack the office instead, because Monday I’d be back on the queue, soothing Deborahs, and my desk setup was the one part of my life that was fully under control.

At six, there was a knock.

Jade stood in the hall holding a covered plate, and she’d changed — leggings and an enormous t-shirt with a faded tour logo, hair down now, loose around her shoulders, longer than I’d guessed. She’d also, I noticed, put on tinted lip balm or something, some small effort, and then I told myself firmly to stop cataloguing her mouth.

“So, this is going to seem like a bit,” she said, “but Mrs. Feldman heard the cast-iron incident and made you welcome rugelach, and she can’t do stairs today, so I’m the delivery system. If you don’t take them she’ll bake more. It escalates.”

“That’s the most credible threat I’ve received all year.” I took the plate. Warm. Cinnamon. “Do you — I mean, I have nothing to offer you except crackers and boxed wine, but you’re welcome to—”

“Boxed wine and someone else’s rugelach,” she said, “is objectively a great Tuesday.”

She came in. She sat on my floor — cross-legged, easy, like sitting on a stranger’s floor was a thing she did — because my couch was still bisected by a roll of bubble wrap, and I poured Franzia into the two surviving mugs, and we split Mrs. Feldman’s rugelach off the shared plate between us.

She asked good questions. Not interview questions — real ones, at angles. Not what do you do but what did you want to be at nine years old (marine biologist; I liked that whales got to be enormous and unbothered). Not why’d you move but what did you leave behind (a lease, a gym membership I used twice, a version of myself I was hoping wouldn’t find the forwarding address — I said the first two out loud).

She stayed an hour. And look — I want to be honest about what this was. It wasn’t just that she was pretty, although she was, in a way that snuck up on you and then refused to leave. It was that she looked at me while I talked. Fully. Both eyes, whole face, phone dark on the floor beside her. I’d forgotten what that felt like, being somebody’s entire focus, and it turned out it felt like standing too close to a fire in the best way.

At some point Jade glanced at the window — the light had gone from gold to blue — and something shifted in her, some internal clock going off. She unfolded from the floor in one motion.

“I should let you unpack. And I have—” the tiniest pause, a comma’s worth “—work stuff tonight.”

“Freelance never sleeps.”

“You have no idea.” She said it wry and quick, mostly to the doorframe. At the threshold she turned, backlit by the hallway’s dying fluorescent, and gave me a last once-over that I felt travel from my face down to my socks and back. “Goodnight, Cassie-in-3A. I’m glad it’s you.”

“Glad what’s me?”

“The wall,” she said. “You share my wall. I was worried I’d get another trumpet.” And she was gone, her door closing across the hall with a soft, final click.

By eleven I’d built the bed frame, showered off the moving-day grime, and achieved the specific exhaustion where your body is done but your brain is still narrating. I lay in the dark of my new room in an old t-shirt, staring at the unfamiliar ceiling, listening to the building settle around me like a big animal getting comfortable.

New place. New sounds. The radiator ticked. A car passed, dragging a slow fan of light across the ceiling. Somewhere below, a door.

And through the wall — through the paper-thin, pre-war, sorry-in-advance wall six inches from my pillow — I heard Jade’s voice.

Just the melody of it at first, words dissolved by the drywall. Low. Warm. A register I hadn’t heard from her all evening — down in the chest, unhurried, curling at the ends of sentences. Talking to someone. On the phone, obviously. A little late for a work call, but freelance never sleeps; she’d said so herself.

Then she laughed, and it wasn’t the bright startled laugh from my floor. It was slower than that. Darker. A pour of a laugh, aimed at somebody, and it moved through six inches of plaster and lath and straight down my spine like a finger.

I lay very still.

The voice dropped lower. A murmur now, rhythmic, almost — no. I was tired, and I was a creep, and it was a phone call. People had phone calls. Girlfriends, boyfriends, someone; a woman who looked like that did not lack for company, and what she did with her ten p.m. was aggressively none of my business, and I rolled over and put my back to the wall to prove how little I was listening.

Which is how I was positioned — spine to the plaster, eyes shut, insisting on sleep — when the first soft, unmistakable moan came through the wall.

I stopped breathing.

Don’t, I told myself. Do not.

I lay there in the dark of my first night, six inches and one thin wall away from my new favorite person, and listened to her exhale someone’s name.

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Six months after the wall comes down, Cassie and Jade film their anniversary stream — in Cassie’s old apartment, on the other side of the wall, for the first and last time. Then the cameras go off. And the real celebration begins. Their filthiest, most intimate, most joyful scene yet.

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