Custom Slot

A Good Girl, Press Play Bonus Scene
by Aurora North

The Request She Finally Read

Eleven months ago, Libby refunded a custom request without reading a word of it. Tonight it’s waiting for her on the music stand.

The booking appeared on the shared calendar on a Tuesday afternoon in September, in the basement room’s last open slot of the week.

Thursday. 11:30 PM – . 4C — N.V. — CUSTOM.

No end time. Libby noticed that first, because the booking policy—Section 2, which Nora had drafted and the residents had voted on and Andrea had laminated—required an end time. Nora Voss did not leave required fields blank. Nora Voss did not leave optional fields blank.

Libby noticed the other word second, and then she had to put her phone face down on her desk and go stand at the window for a while.

She didn’t ask. Nora didn’t mention it. They ate dinner together Tuesday and Wednesday, Libby’s curry and then cold Thai from the place on Elmwood, and Nora talked about a county audit and a man named Gerald who had tried to submit a receipt written on a napkin, and she did not say one word about Thursday. She just kept looking at Libby over her glasses with that small private smile, the one that lived at the corner of her mouth, like she was holding a card face down on the table.

Thursday at six, there was a note under Libby’s door. Cream paper. Small neat capitals.

BRING NOTHING. NOT YOUR HEADPHONES. NOT YOUR PHONE. THE RED LIGHT STAYS OFF. —N.

Libby read it four times. Then she showered, and stood in front of her closet for longer than she’d stood in front of it since the night of the riesling, and finally put on the black button-down and nothing under it, because Nora had said bring nothing and Libby had always been good at taking a note.

At 11:28, she went down the stairs barefoot.

The basement at night had its own sound. The boiler ticking. The long breath of the hallway lights, which Pat the electrician had swapped out for warm LEDs in March but which Libby still heard as fluorescents out of pure muscle memory. Warren’s radio club wasn’t due until the Friday net; the building above her was asleep.

Lou’s green steel door was closed. Warren’s card was still taped to it, curling at the corners now. PLEASE CONSIDER RUGS. —W.L. Somebody—Bea, they’d all decided—had added a smiley face in purple pen back in March, and nobody had the heart to take it down.

Above the door, the red bulb in its cage was dark.

Libby put her hand on the lever and realized it was shaking.

She pushed the door open.

• • •

The quietest room in Buffalo had been rearranged.

The stool was gone. The music stand was in the middle of the floor. The overhead light was off, and the only light came from the little brass desk lamp Hal had found at an estate sale in Kenmore, turned down low, throwing a warm circle across the concrete. Someone had laid a thick quilt on the floor—Nora’s grandmother’s quilt, the one from the night of the storm—and folded the gray blanket from Libby’s couch across the foot of it. On the equipment shelf, set out like instruments on a surgical tray: a glass of water, a second glass of water, a bowl of salt and vinegar kettle chips, and a black canvas tote bag with its handles tied neatly together.

The interface was unplugged. The preamp’s power switch was off and someone had put a strip of blue painter’s tape across it. The Neumann was in its padded case, latched. The shared drive’s little green activity light was dark, because the drive itself had been pulled from its bay and set on the shelf beside the chips, where anyone could see it.

And Nora was sitting on the quilt with her back against the poured concrete wall, in Libby’s Black Rock hoodie and nothing else that Libby could see, holding her own phone.

She held it up. Pressed the side button until the screen went black. Leaned forward and set it on the floor between them, face down.

“Is anything recording?” Libby heard herself say.

“No,” said Nora. “I checked. Twice. I wrote it in the log.”

Libby looked at her. At the hoodie, too big, sleeves pushed up. At her bare legs folded under her. At her hair down and her glasses on, because Nora wore her glasses everywhere now, and her mouth, which was not painted, which was just her mouth.

Nora had done the ceremony. Libby’s ceremony. The one Libby had done for her in the upstairs booth last December, piece by piece, so Nora would know nothing was listening. Nora had done every step of it herself and done it before Libby arrived, so that the first thing Libby saw when she walked through Lou’s door was a room that had been made safe for her.

“Close the door,” Nora said.

Libby closed the door. The world stopped. The boiler, the hallway, the building above them—gone, like someone had pulled a cable. All she could hear was her own blood and Nora breathing, slow and even, from six feet away.

“There’s a page on the stand,” Nora said. “Read it.”

• • •

It was a single sheet of printer paper, folded once. Libby unfolded it under the lamp.

She knew what it was before she read the first word. She knew from the way it was laid out—five short lines, each with a dash—and from the date printed small in the corner, last October, a Thursday, and from the fact that Nora had printed it in the same clean Garamond as the Scope of Work.

It was the written request. The one that had sat collapsed and unopened in the Hushline dashboard under a voice note with a snort in it. The one Libby had refunded at 11:42 on a Friday night without expanding. A single line of preview text, Slow, and nothing else, for eleven months.

“Nora,” she said.

“You never read it.” Nora’s voice was very calm. It was her lease voice, a little rough underneath. “You told me you never read it, and I believed you, and I’ve thought about that every day since. You were the only person in the world who could have read it and you didn’t, because it wasn’t written to you.” A pause. “I’d like it to be written to you now. Read it out loud. Please.”

Libby looked down at the page.

She had read thousands of scripts. She had read Marigold’s vicar and the safety data sheets for forty kinds of hazardous material and the lease’s pet addendum in a voice that made a grown woman forget her own name. She had never once had trouble reading a page out loud.

Her voice came out plain and cracked on the first word.

“Slow.“

She swallowed and kept going.

“Tell me what to do. Tell me before you do it. I like knowing what’s coming.“

Across the room, Nora’s hands had gone still on her knees.

“I like when you say good girl. I don’t know why. I’m a little ashamed of how much.” Libby’s eyes stung. She let them. “I want it to be a woman. In the recording. I want you to talk like you’re there. Like you’re lying next to me.“

The last line was longer. She read it slowly, because it deserved to be read slowly.

“I’ve never been with a woman. I don’t know if that matters. I don’t know what I am. I’m tired of needing to know that before I’m allowed to want something.“

The dead room took the words and held them. Every one of them hung there in the lamplight, perfectly clear, like they’d been printed on glass.

Libby lowered the page.

“That was for a stranger,” Nora said quietly. “I want it done anyway. All of it. In order. Live.” She lifted her chin. Her cheeks had gone pink, and she didn’t look away. “And for lines one through three, I’d like the voice. The other one. I’m asking. Out loud. On purpose.”

The rule. Their very first rule, from a red vinyl booth at Holloway’s, before they’d done anything at all. You have to say so. Out loud. On purpose.

“Granted,” Libby said, and her own voice was already gone somewhere low.

• • •

She let her shoulders drop. Let her breathing slow. Let the voice settle into the place in her chest where Night Current lived, and when she spoke again, every consonant went down like a step on a dark stair.

“Line one,” Libby said. “Slow.“

Nora’s breath went out of her in a shudder.

“Line two. I’m going to tell you before I do it. So listen.” Libby folded the page once and set it on the music stand. “I’m going to walk over to you. I’m going to kneel down on that quilt. And I’m going to take that hoodie off you, and you’re not going to help.“

She waited. Let the pause sit exactly as long as she’d let it sit on a hundred tracks, the one Nora had once said she’d never survived.

Then she did it.

Six steps across the concrete. She knelt on the quilt in front of Nora and took the hem of the hoodie in both hands and drew it up, slowly, and Nora lifted her arms like she’d been told, and under it there was nothing at all. Just Nora. Soft, pale, freckled across the tops of her breasts, nipples already tight in the cool air, the silver stretch mark low on her hip and the soft swell of her stomach, which she did not cover. She had stopped covering it in the spring. Libby had noticed the exact week.

“You came down here like this,” Libby murmured. “Under my hoodie. In the elevator.“

“The stairs,” Nora whispered. “I always take the stairs.”

“Four flights. Bare under it. Thinking about me.” Libby set the hoodie aside. “Next, I’m going to put my hand on your stomach. Just my hand. And you’re going to put your hands flat on the wall behind you, and keep them there.“

Nora’s palms went back against the poured concrete. Twelve inches thick, Lou had poured it, by hand, in 1974. It wasn’t plumb. Libby had told her so in February and Nora had been delighted.

Libby laid her palm on Nora’s belly, just under her navel, and felt her breathe.

“That’s the part of you you used to hide,” she said. “I touched it first. I always will.“

Nora made a sound like she’d been struck.

Libby kept her there. Kept her hand still and warm and her voice low and told Nora what would come next, every time, before it came. I’m going to kiss your shoulder. And then she did. I’m going to kiss the scar under your chin. And then she did. I’m going to take your nipple in my mouth, and I’m not going to be gentle. And Nora’s whole body arched off the wall before Libby had even moved, just from the telling, and when Libby’s mouth finally closed over her and sucked, hard, Nora’s cry went up into the poured-concrete ceiling and came back down to them whole.

Libby had forgotten what this room did to sound.

Every sound. The wet pull of her own mouth. Nora’s breath catching, releasing. The soft slide of skin on the quilt. In the upstairs booth there had always been foam to soften it, panels to eat the edges. Down here nothing was softened. Down here every gasp Nora made arrived in Libby’s ears like it was the only sound left in the world, and Libby, who had built her whole life around listening, thought she might genuinely lose her mind.

“Lie back,” she said. “Hands above your head. On the quilt. Keep them there.“

Nora lay back. Her hands went above her head. Her glasses had gone crooked, and Libby took them off for her, folded them—I know you fold them—and set them on the shelf beside the chips.

“Now I’m going to spread your legs,” Libby said. “And look at you. For a long time. And you’re going to let me.“

Nora’s knees fell open before Libby touched them.

Libby looked. She’d seen Nora a hundred times now, in every light, and she looked like it was the first. Nora was soaked. Flushed dark and swollen and shining in the lamplight, wet all the way down onto the inside of her thighs, and she hadn’t been touched yet. Not there. Not once.

“All that,” Libby breathed, “from being told.“

“Libby—”

“One finger. Through you. Bottom to top. Slowly. That’s what’s coming. Breathe for me.“

Nora breathed. Libby did exactly what she’d said. One finger, slow as honey, through all that slick heat, and Nora’s hips came up off the quilt and her hands stayed above her head and the sound she made filled the room like water filling a glass.

• • •

Line three, Libby made her earn.

She worked Nora up with her fingers and then her mouth and then her fingers again, and she told her everything before it happened, and she stopped every time Nora got close. Not cruelly. Never cruelly. She’d say it first—I’m going to stop now; you’re going to hate me; you’re going to keep your hands exactly where they are—and then she would lift her mouth an inch and hold her fingers still inside her and listen to Nora come apart without coming.

The first time, Nora sobbed. The second time, she swore, filthy and inventive and completely unlike any sentence she had ever written in a compliance memo, and Libby laughed against her inner thigh in her own voice before she could stop herself, and Nora said, “Don’t you dare laugh,” in the lease voice, wrecked, and Libby dropped right back into the dark and said, “I’m sorry. I’m not sorry. You’re doing so well.“

The third time, Nora’s hands came down off the quilt.

Just an inch. Just a flinch. And then she caught herself and pushed them back up over her head, flat, trembling, and pressed them into the fabric like she was holding herself to the floor.

Libby lifted her head.

“You moved,” she said softly.

“I put them back.” Nora was shaking. Her face was wet. “I put them—Libby, I put them back—”

“I know you did.” Libby crawled up the length of her. Put her mouth beside Nora’s ear. Two fingers still deep inside her, curled against the place that made Nora see white, and her thumb resting very lightly on her clit, not moving. Not yet. “You wanted it so badly you broke. And then you fixed it. For me. Because I asked.“

Nora made a high, desperate sound.

“Here’s what’s coming,” Libby whispered. “I’m going to count down from three. When I get to one, I’m going to move my thumb. And then I’m going to say it. And you’re going to come so hard you forget we’re in a basement.“

“Please.“

“Three.“

Nora’s heels dug into the quilt.

“Two.“

Her inner muscles were already fluttering around Libby’s fingers, already pulling, the climb so high and so long that she was trembling at the very top of it, held there by nothing but a voice.

“One.“

Libby’s thumb moved.

“Good girl.“

Nora came screaming.

There was no other word for it. It ripped out of her, enormous and unfiltered, and the room caught every edge of it and handed it back, and her back came off the quilt and her thighs clamped around Libby’s hand and she pulsed and pulsed around Libby’s fingers, hard, rhythmic, endless, and her hands stayed above her head the entire time. She never moved them once. She came with her hands where she’d been told to keep them, sobbing Libby’s name into the dead air, and Libby kept her fingers moving through all of it, softer and softer, and said it again in her ear—good girl, good girl, that’s my good girl—until the last aftershock shuddered out of her and she went limp.

Libby’s own thighs were shaking. She hadn’t been touched at all. She thought she might come from the sound alone.

• • •

“Line four,” Nora rasped, when she could speak.

Libby had been lying with her forehead pressed to Nora’s temple, just breathing. She lifted her head.

“I want it to be a woman,” Nora said, eyes closed. “Talk like you’re there. Like you’re lying next to me.” She opened her eyes. “Your voice for this one. Not the other one. I want the woman.”

Libby’s chest cracked open.

“Okay,” she said. Her own voice. Rough and plain and a little shaky. “Okay. I’m here.”

She shrugged out of the button-down. Lay down on her side next to Nora on the quilt, skin to skin, and propped herself up on one elbow, and looked down into Nora’s face from six inches away.

Nora’s eyes went wide.

“This,” Nora whispered. “This is what I pictured. The first night. The night I let the voice have a body. Someone lying beside me on top of the covers, propped on one elbow. Watching my face.”

“You never told me that.”

“I’m telling you now.”

So Libby watched her face.

She slid her hand back down between Nora’s legs—oversensitive, so slick now it was almost nothing—and moved slow, gentle circles, and she talked. Not instructions this time. Just what she saw. In her own voice, in the plainest words she had.

“Your eyes go green right before,” she said. “Right at the edges. You don’t know that. They’re green right now.” Nora’s breath hitched. “And you bite the left side of your lip, never the right. And when I go inside you—” she did, two fingers, slow, and Nora’s mouth fell open, “—you do that. Your mouth opens like you’re about to say something and then you forget what it was. I love that. I love watching you forget.”

“Libby—”

“I’m right here. I’m right next to you. I’ve been right next to you for eleven months.” Libby’s voice broke. She didn’t fix it. “I was eighteen inches away the night you wrote this. I was on the other side of your wall. I’m sorry it took me so long to read it.”

Nora reached up—hands free now, line four didn’t say anything about hands—and grabbed the back of Libby’s neck and pulled her down and kissed her, open and desperate, and came again into Libby’s palm with their mouths pressed together and her eyes open the entire time.

• • •

It took Nora four minutes and half a glass of water to recover.

Then she sat up, reached over Libby, and untied the handles of the black canvas tote.

“Line five,” Nora said.

Libby looked at the tote. Then at Nora. Nora was naked and flushed from her breasts to her hairline and her hair was a disaster and she was untying the tote bag handles with the same precise fingers she used on velcro cable ties.

“Line five isn’t a thing to do,” Libby said. “It’s—I don’t know what I am.“

“No. Line five on the page is that.” Nora drew the harness out of the bag. Black leather. The one she’d practiced buckling in her bedroom mirror in February. “But I sent two things that night. A page and a voice note. And you never heard the end of the voice note either.”

Libby went very still.

She knew the end of it now. Nora had told her in the spring, in bed, at one in the morning over pad see ew.

“I think I just want to know what it feels like not to hesitate,” Nora said.

And then she stood up in the lamplight and put on the harness without asking for help.

She did it fast. She did it without fumbling, without checking the angle twice, without looking at Libby for permission. Strap, buckle, cinch, the cock settling against her, dark and thick, and she pulled the last strap tight and looked down at Libby on the quilt and didn’t blink.

Libby forgot how to breathe.

“On your back,” Nora said.

It was the contralto. Her own voice. The low certain one, the one that dropped when she believed something. There was no hesitation in it anywhere.

Libby lay back.

Nora knelt between her knees and looked at her. Took her time. Libby had been touched by no one tonight, and she was so wet she could feel it on the quilt beneath her, and Nora saw it and made a small, satisfied sound that went straight down Libby’s spine.

“You’ve been like this the whole time,” Nora said. “Haven’t you.”

“Since the note under my door.”

“Good.” Nora wrapped her hand around the cock and dragged the tip through Libby, slow, top to bottom, the way Libby had touched her the first time tonight. “Tell me what you want. A full sentence.”

Libby laughed—broken, breathless. “You—you’re doing my—”

“I learned it somewhere. Full sentence, Libby.”

“I want you to fuck me,” Libby said. Her voice cracked straight down the middle. “Right now. Without asking if I’m sure. I want you to not hesitate.”

Nora pushed into her.

One long, slow, deep stroke, all the way, until her hips were flush against Libby’s and Libby’s head fell back against the quilt and a sound came out of her she’d never made on a track or in a booth or anywhere in her life. The room caught it. Gave it back. Libby heard her own voice coming apart in perfect fidelity and didn’t care.

Nora didn’t wait. Didn’t check. She pulled almost all the way out and drove back in, steady, hard, a rhythm she set and held like she’d been holding it for years, and Libby’s legs came up around her waist and locked, and Nora braced one hand beside Libby’s head and put the other flat on Libby’s chest, over her heart, and fucked her like she knew exactly what she wanted and had never once doubted she was allowed to want it.

“Look at me,” Nora said.

Libby looked. Nora’s eyes were green all the way through.

“You’re mine,” Nora said, and her hips snapped forward, and Libby cried out. “The voice is yours. The channel is yours. The person is mine. Say it.”

“Yours—God—Nora, I’m yours—”

Nora shifted her angle, just slightly, and the base of the harness ground against her own clit with every thrust, and Libby watched it hit her—watched Nora’s breath stutter and her rhythm tighten and her mouth fall open. She was going to come from this. From fucking Libby. The knowledge went through Libby like a lit fuse.

“Come with me,” Nora gasped. “Don’t hold it. Don’t—don’t you dare fix it—”

Libby didn’t fix it.

She came with her whole body. Shaking, clenching around the cock, her voice shredded and raw and endless, bouncing off twelve inches of Lou Petrakis’s concrete, and Nora drove into her through all of it and then stilled, buried deep, and came too—a long low broken cry against Libby’s neck, hips jerking, grinding down, her hand still flat over Libby’s pounding heart.

And in the middle of it, into Libby’s ear, in the plain warm contralto Libby had loved since the day it called a lease a mood:

“Good girl.”

Libby came again. Just from that. Just from Nora’s voice.

• • •

Afterward they lay tangled under the gray blanket on Nora’s grandmother’s quilt, and ate kettle chips, because the chips were in the scope and the scope was non-negotiable.

The harness was on the floor. The page was on the music stand. The shared drive sat on the shelf with nothing on it, which Libby knew because Nora had written it in the session log by the door before Libby arrived. She’d seen it on her way in, in Nora’s small capitals:

4C — N.V. — 11:30 PM — NO RECORDINGS. DRIVE REMOVED. NOTHING TO WIPE.

“You booked it under ‘custom,'” Libby said into Nora’s hair.

“You told me in February the custom slots fill up.” Nora ate a chip. “I put the request in early.”

“Eleven months early.”

“I’m very thorough.”

Libby laughed. Nora laughed too, silent at first, shoulders shaking against Libby’s chest—and then the snort, loud and wet and enormous in the dead room, perfect in every frequency, the best sound Libby had ever heard in her life.

Nora didn’t cover her mouth.

Later, when they’d dressed and Nora had re-shelved the drive and peeled the blue tape off the preamp switch and folded the quilt into a precise square, Libby picked up the page from the music stand.

“Do you want it back?” she asked.

Nora looked at it in Libby’s hand. Five lines. A Thursday last October. I’m tired of needing to know that before I’m allowed to want something.

“No,” Nora said. “It was always yours. It just took a while to get delivered.”

Libby folded it once along its crease and put it in the pocket of her button-down, over her heart.

“Filed,” she said.

Nora smiled—the small one, the private one—and turned off Hal’s brass lamp, and opened Lou’s green door, and above it the red bulb stayed dark, and they went up the stairs together, all four flights, slowly.

On the calendar the next morning, in the basement room’s Thursday slot, there was a new entry. Recurring. Weekly. No end time.

4C / 4D — N.V. + L.C. — CUSTOM.

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