🔥 Bonus Chapter: “Original Cuttings”
Greenhouse Girlfriends — An Exclusive Scene
by Aurora North
A first-anniversary scene too hot for retailers. Full circle. The potting bench. Twenty-two minutes.
Before You Read
This bonus chapter takes place between Chapter 25 (the wedding) and the Epilogue of Greenhouse Girlfriends. It contains explicit FF sexual content and is intended for readers 18+ who have finished the main novel.
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Original Cuttings
Jade
The first anniversary fell on a Thursday.
Not our wedding anniversary — that was in June, and Becca had already informed me she was planning “something involving jasmine and zero advance warning,” which was both romantic and mildly threatening. This was the other anniversary. The real one. The one that mattered more than the ceremony and the vows and the ring I’d dug out of a rosemary plant, because it predated all of those things.
May third. One year since I’d driven a Honda Civic with a cracked windshield into a gravel lot and stepped into a wall of humidity and changed everything.
Becca hadn’t mentioned it. She’d woken at four-thirty as always, done the walkthrough as always, left coffee on the bench as always. She was, to all appearances, treating May third as a regular Thursday — misting, conditioning, a delivery of peonies from Gerald that needed processing.
I knew better. I’d been married to her for eleven months and I’d known her for twelve, and in that time I’d developed a comprehensive atlas of Becca Monroe’s emotional tells. The woman who thought she was opaque was, to anyone paying attention, a greenhouse with glass walls — everything visible if you bothered to look.
She’d made the coffee stronger than usual. She’d used the good beans — the single-origin from the roaster in Portland, reserved for occasions. And she’d set my mug on the bench with a sprig of rosemary beside it. Not jasmine. Rosemary. Remembrance.
She remembered. She was just being Becca about it — quiet, gestural, letting the plants do the talking.
I found her in the propagation station at three o’clock, after the greenhouse closed. She was standing in front of the shelf that held the original cuttings — the ones we’d made together on that Friday in my first week, the ones that had survived the hailstorm, the ones I’d covered with my body in broken glass. They were fully grown now. Independent plants, strong and rooted, each one thriving in a pot I’d painted with a watercolor label. The spider plant was enormous — four trailing runners, each one heavy with pups. The pothos had reached the ceiling and started trailing back down, forming a green curtain. The echeveria Lola — my first repot, the one Becca had checked after the storm and said takes after you — was a fat, perfect rosette surrounded by a ring of offsets.
“They’re propagating themselves now,” Becca said, not turning around. She touched the echeveria’s outermost offset. “See? She’s putting out pups. The cutting we made together is making its own cuttings.”
“A grandplant.”
“A grandplant.” She smiled. “Do you remember what I told you about propagation? That first Friday?”
“You said it was the most hopeful thing a person could do. Taking a cutting is an act of faith.”
“I said a lot of things that first week that I didn’t realize were prophecy.”
She turned. The afternoon light was coming through the glass at the angle I’d learned to love — low, gold, turning the greenhouse into a painting. It hit her face and made her eyes go amber and her freckles go dark and her hair go incandescent.
“One year,” she said.
“One year.”
“You killed a cactus.”
“I held a funeral. It was very dignified.”
She crossed the propagation station in three steps and kissed me. Not a morning kiss or an anniversary kiss. An uncategorizable kiss — slow and deep and tasting like the good coffee and the essential compound of bergamot and soil and the particular warmth that lived in the center of her.
“I want to show you something,” she murmured against my mouth.
She led me outside to the oak tree. The blanket was there — the same wool blanket from our first outdoor night. Wine from Tom. And a tray of small pots, each one holding a tiny cutting in moist perlite. New cuttings, fresh, taken that morning. One from every plant in the original propagation tray. The same species, in the same order, from the same mother plants.
“I thought — for the anniversary — we could replant them. Together. The way we did the first time.”
Full circle.
We made the cuttings together. Side by side on the blanket, fingers in perlite, the familiar choreography that felt, tonight, like the first time. She guided my hands — or I guided hers — the distinction long since dissolved. Dip the cut end. Tap off the excess. Nestle into the medium. Firm it in.
Held, not crushed.
The last cutting was the echeveria. I placed it in the perlite and looked at it — tiny, pale green, the beginning of something that would take a lifetime to fully appreciate.
“Becca.”
“Hmm?”
“Take me inside. To the greenhouse. To the potting bench.” I put my mouth against her ear. “I want to celebrate our anniversary the way we celebrate everything. With your hands on me. The way it started.”
Her eyes went dark — the hazel eclipsed, the switch from tender to territorial.
We left the cuttings under the oak tree and walked into the greenhouse, and the humidity wrapped around us like a homecoming.
The potting bench was where it had always been. Worn oak, scarred surface, the same bench where she’d said good girl and I’d dropped a soil bag and everything had detonated.
“Sit,” she said.
I sat. She stood between my knees. Looked down at me with the gardener expression — the assessing, patient, I-know-exactly-what-this-plant-needs look that preceded the most devastating things she did to my body.
“One year ago,” she said, unbuttoning my shirt slowly, “you sat in this greenhouse wearing a SFMOMA hoodie and you didn’t know what an echeveria was.”
“I know what everything is now.”
“You know what everything is now.” She pushed the shirt off my shoulders. Unclasped my bra. The greenhouse air hit my bare skin — warm, humid, the same air from the beginning. “One year ago, I stood behind you and put my hands over yours, and you stopped breathing.”
“You were very close. It was disorienting.”
“I’m closer now.” Her mouth found my throat and I stopped talking.
She kissed down my neck. My collarbone. Took my nipple in her mouth — firmly, no preamble — and I grabbed her hair and arched into the contact and the sound I made echoed off the glass walls the way it had echoed a year ago.
“Louder,” she said against my skin. “The plants missed you.”
She sucked harder while her hand found my other breast, her thumb rolling across the nipple in devastating circles, and I gave her louder. The gasp. The moan. The particular Jade-sound that was half her name and half profanity.
She pushed me back on the bench. Pulled my jeans off, my underwear. Stood between my spread legs and said:
“Tell me what’s different. From a year ago.”
“A year ago, I was terrified.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m yours. And the terror is gone and what’s left is just you.”
She knelt.
The concrete was hard under her knees. She’d knelt on this floor ten thousand times. She hooked her hands under my thighs and pulled me to the edge, and my heels were on her shoulders and her mouth was inches from me, and the sound I made was not a yelp but something much lower, much needier.
She put her mouth on me.
One year of practice. One year of learning this body. She knew what I liked before I asked. Broad strokes at the start. The spot that made me loudest, slightly left of center, consistent pressure. Two fingers inside me, curled upward. I knew the formula and it still undid me every single time.
She licked me in long, deliberate strokes, tasting the familiar salt-sweet that was just her version of me. She sealed her lips around my clit and sucked, and the moan became a cry, and the cry became her name.
“Becca — fuck — right there—”
She stayed right there. Committed. The patience she’d taught me deployed in the discipline of her tongue. She slid two fingers inside me. I arched off the bench, hands grabbing the wood, the old oak creaking. She curled her fingers on the upstroke and pressed.
“Come for me,” she said against me, the vibration of the words making me twitch. “That’s my good girl.”
I shattered. Full-body, bench-shaking, the glass panels vibrating with the sound I made. She worked me through it — fingers stroking, tongue gentling — and when the trembling eased, she didn’t stop.
“Again,” she murmured.
“I can’t—”
She curled her fingers and sucked and I stopped arguing. The second orgasm was faster, built on the first, and she grinned against me through the aftershocks.
I pulled her up. Kissed her. Tasted myself. “Your turn.”
“What else is different from a year ago?” she murmured.
“A year ago, you wouldn’t let me reciprocate.” I pushed her backward until she was sitting on the bench and I was standing between her legs. “The position’s reversed now.”
I undressed her. Slowly, with the artist’s eye. Then I knelt. On the same concrete. I wanted my knees where hers had been.
“Twenty minutes,” I said. “That’s what you gave me. That’s what I’m giving back.”
I put my mouth on her.
One year of learning this body — its rhythms, its thresholds. I knew she needed broad strokes building the foundation. I knew the exact pressure that made her grab my hair. I knew that two fingers, curled upward, combined with my tongue on her clit, produced something that made her cry.
I gave her all of it. Long, deliberate strokes. Sealed my lips around her clit and sucked. She moaned above me — the low, unguarded sound I’d spent a year coaxing out. I slid two fingers inside her, curled on the upstroke, and felt her back arch and her voice break.
“Jade — oh God — I’m going to—”
“Come for me.” I said it against her, the way she’d said it against me. “That’s my good girl.”
She shattered. Full-body, bench-shaking, the sparrows in the eaves scattering for the second time in twelve months. I worked her through it, then — before the last tremor faded — built her again. The second orgasm hit fast, and she came with both hands in my hair and a sound that sent every bird in the building into the rafters.
“Twenty-two minutes,” I said afterward, grinning. “I beat your record.”
“It’s not a competition.”
“Everything’s a competition. I’m an artist. We’re deeply insecure.”
She pulled me onto the bench beside her. We lay together on the scarred oak, and I said: “I want us together. Like the storm night. Like the opening night. Side by side. Eyes open.”
She understood.
Her hand found me. Mine found her. The dual sensation — the giving and the receiving, the mirror-image symmetry — collapsed the distance to zero. We moved together slowly. Her fingers on me, mine on her. Our foreheads pressed together. Our eyes open.
Because that was our rule. The one we’d made on the greenhouse floor after the storm. Eyes open. See me. Let me see you. No hiding. Just the raw, mutual, devastating vulnerability of two people who’d chosen each other and kept choosing.
We came together. Not simultaneously — her a breath before me, as always, her face at the peak pulling me over — but together. In the same wave. On the same bench. In the same greenhouse where we’d met and built and broken and healed and grown.
Afterward, lying on the bench in the darkening greenhouse, her heartbeat under my ear:
“Happy anniversary, Jade.”
“Happy anniversary, boss.”
The fairy lights glowed. The cuttings rooted under the oak. And the greenhouse hummed its ancient hum into the dark.
Good girls growing. Always.
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