Girl Next Door, After Dark by Aurora North - FF Sapphic Romance book cover

Girl Next Door, After Dark — Bonus Chapter

Subscriber Count
by Aurora North

This bonus chapter takes place six months after the novel ends. It contains explicit FF content not available on retail platforms.

Subscriber Count

Six months later.

The doorway existed for four months before we used it for a show.

Not through it — we used it every day for that, padding barefoot between what used to be two apartments and was now one sprawling, slightly lopsided unit with a kitchen that got morning light and a bedroom that got Jade’s ring lights and a wall between them that still stood, load-bearing and loyal, except now it had a six-foot opening cut through it and no door, just an archway where plaster used to be.

The contractor had offered to smooth the edges. Jade told him to leave them rough.

“It’s a scar,” she said, tracing the exposed lath with her fingertip the day they finished. “It should look like something happened here.”

Something had happened here. Something was still happening, nightly, on a channel called The Neighbors that had — as of this morning, as of the notification that woke me at 6 a.m. because Mox had no concept of appropriate celebration hours — crossed one hundred thousand subscribers.

Which is how I ended up standing in my old bedroom, the one I’d moved out of four months ago, setting up equipment I hadn’t touched in weeks, in an apartment that was technically still mine but felt like a museum exhibit: THE WALL, CASSIE’S SIDE. CIRCA: THE BEGINNING.

“You’re sure about this,” Jade said, leaning in the archway — our archway — arms crossed, wearing my bathrobe and her glasses and the expression she got when an idea was terrifying and irresistible in equal measure.

“The anniversary stream,” I said, adjusting the ring light. “One year since the hotspot. And we film it here — my side of the wall. The side the audience has never seen. The camera’s always been in your room. This is the reveal.”

“The reverse angle.”

“The reverse angle. Where I lay every night listening to you. Where I found the channel. Where I didn’t touch myself and it was filthier than touching.” I looked at her. “One hundred thousand people, Jade. And not one of them knows what this room sounded like from here.”

Something moved through her face — the bonfire and the underneath at the same time, which was how she looked now, all the time, the wall between her versions long since opened the way the wall between our apartments had been. She uncrossed her arms. Pushed off the archway.

“Set up the second camera,” she said. “I want both angles.”

We went live at ten.

Masks on — always, still, the brand and the safety and honestly at this point just ours, part of the uniform the way the jade ring was part of Jade’s body, invisible and permanent. But the room was new, and the chat knew it instantly.

wait
WAIT
that’s not the usual room
THE WALL IS ON THE WRONG SIDE
oh my god oh my god it’s HER room
TROUBLE’S ROOM. WE’RE IN TROUBLE’S ROOM.

Mox, in my ear, professionally delighted: “Retention just spiked to ninety-eight percent and we haven’t done anything yet. This was a good idea and I’m furious I didn’t have it first.”

Jade — Jade on camera, the sovereign, the swimmer surfaced — sat on my old bed and looked at the lens and said: “One year ago tonight, I knocked on this wall from the other side and heard the woman who changed my life not breathing. So. Happy anniversary to us. Welcome to where it started. Welcome to the other side.”

The chat became a white wall. The tip chimes became weather.

And the show — our anniversary show, our hundredth-thousand-subscriber show — unfolded in my old bedroom with the specific, devastating intimacy of returning to a place where something enormous had happened when you were small. We performed on the bed where I’d lain awake pressing my ear to the plaster. We used the wall — the wall, the famous wall — as a headboard, a brace, a surface to press each other against while the camera watched from angles it had never had, the reverse shot of every fantasy the audience had built for a year.

It was our hottest show. I can say that without the analytics, though the analytics would later confirm it with the enthusiasm of a spreadsheet that had been personally moved. The room — my room, the quiet room, the room where I’d been invisible by design — blazed with the specific heat of a woman being seen exactly where she’d spent years hiding, and the audience could feel the difference the way a concert hall feels a key change: same musicians, same instruments, something entirely new.

I pressed Jade against the wall — my side, my plaster, the surface I’d pressed my palm to on the night she’d come apart through the building — and I touched her with one hundred thousand people watching and an audience of one mattering, and when she arched against the rough scar of the archway and made the sound — the broken-open one, the original one, the one I’d first heard through six inches of nothing on a night when I didn’t know her name — it traveled through the plaster the way it always had, into the empty room on the other side, the room that used to be hers, the room where the camera used to live.

We’d reversed everything. The lens was here. The sound was there. And the wall, the wall, the faithful stupid wall, carried it all the way it always had — except now, for the first time in the whole story, it carried in both directions at once.

Jade ended the stream at 11:11 — “make a wish,” she told a hundred thousand people, and blew the kiss, and reached for the switch — and the light went off, and I reached for the second camera, and she caught my wrist.

“Leave it.”

“It’s still—”

“I know. Leave it running. I want—” and the bonfire came up in the dark, or maybe it was just Jade, just all of her, the underneath and the surface fused permanently into one incandescent thing “—I want one recording. For us. For the folder named after nothing. The after-dark version. Camera on, and nobody ever sees it but us.”

So the camera ran. The red light blinked in my old bedroom, patient and private, filming the version no audience would ever purchase: masks off, names spoken, everything that lived on the list finally allowed on film because the film was ours, and the only subscriber was the woman whose mouth was on my throat saying my full name, the real one, the one four hundred thousand previous minutes of broadcast had never carried.

She took me apart in my old bed with the unhurried certainty of a woman who had long since stopped performing and discovered that the thing underneath was better: her hands, which had learned me in the dark and now operated with the fluency of absolute knowledge, finding every spot and every sound without searching; her mouth, which had run a room of thousands and now ran a room of one, narrating nothing, saying only my name and I love you and stay, as though staying were still a question, as though I hadn’t answered it a hundred thousand times in the currency of showing up on her side of the light.

I came with my spine against the wall — my wall, my plaster, the place where the story started — and the sound I made went through the building the way her sounds had gone through it on the first night, and somewhere in the architecture the plaster absorbed it and held it alongside every other sound it had ever carried between us, and I imagined, briefly, the building itself keeping a record: a year of sounds, first separated and then shared, first performed and then real, first through and then together, and the wall’s accounting was finally, permanently balanced.

Then I reversed her into the sheets — my sheets, the lavender-detergent sheets she’d once told me she could smell through the plaster — and I took my time, because the camera was ours and nobody was watching and the night had no schedule, and I touched her with the attention of a woman who had once studied her through a screen and was now, a year later, fluent. I used my mouth. I used my hands. I used the specific knowledge of her that no analytics could capture and no content calendar could schedule: that she shivered when I whispered against her inner thigh; that she gripped the sheets with both hands when she was close; that the sound she made at the very end, the one that broke open every time like it had never broken before, came with her eyes open, looking at me, always looking at me, because the woman who had spent three years being watched had found the one pair of eyes she actually wanted to be seen by, and she was never going to close hers first.

She broke open with my name in her mouth and my hand on her heart and the jade ring warm between us, and the red light filmed it, and nobody would ever see it, and that was the whole point.

We lay in my old bed a long time after. The camera ran out of storage at some point; neither of us noticed. The wall hummed its building hum, the radiator ticked its 11:08 tick, and Mrs. Feldman’s TV murmured two floors down, and everything was the same as the first night except nothing was.

“One hundred thousand,” Jade said, into my collarbone.

“One hundred thousand.”

“And the only number I care about is one.” She shifted, propping her chin on my chest. Hair destroyed. Glasses long gone. The ring chain a cool line between us. “One subscriber. One woman on the other side of my wall who heard everything and knocked anyway.”

“With a hotspot.”

“With a hotspot.” She laughed, and the laugh traveled through my chest and into the wall and out the other side, into her old room where the archway stood open, and for the first time the laugh didn’t stop at the plaster. It went all the way through, both rooms, one apartment, and came back to us as an echo that sounded like home.

“Come on,” I said. “Our bed. The real one.”

“This one’s real too.”

“This one’s a museum. Our bed has better pillows and you know it.”

She groaned, dramatically, and let me pull her up, and we walked through the archway — through the wall, through the scar, through the opening that used to separate us and now was just the hallway of an apartment where two women lived and worked and filmed and loved each other with the cameras off more often than on — and fell into our bed, the one that belonged to neither apartment and both, and Jade pressed her back against the wall that had started everything and closed her eyes.

“Hey,” I said.

“Mm.”

“Happy anniversary.”

“Happy anniversary, Trouble.” She smiled without opening her eyes, the crooked one, the one that hung slightly wrong, the one that matched the wall perfectly. “Same time next year?”

“Same time every year.”

“Good. Now go to sleep. Mox is going to call at six with the analytics and I want to be rested enough to pretend I care about retention curves when all I actually care about is that you’re still here.”

“I’m still here,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “That’s the show. That’s always been the show.”

Through the wall, the building settled. The radiator ticked. The archway held its rough-edged shape between two rooms that used to be separate and weren’t anymore, and the plaster did what it had always done — carried sound, held weight, kept the story in its bones.

Some things are better off camera.

We were the proof.

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