Her Mom's Best Friend book cover by Aurora North

The Second Coat

Exclusive Bonus Chapter
Her Mom’s Best Friend by Aurora North

⚠️ This bonus chapter contains spoilers for Her Mom’s Best Friend and takes place three months after the epilogue. It contains explicit sexual content between adult women. Reader discretion advised.

The blue bedroom needs a second coat.

It’s March, and the winter has done what winters do to limewash — dried the surface, pulled moisture from the plaster, left the color slightly faded in the places where the heating vent blows directly on the wall. The variation is still beautiful, still alive in the way that made me choose this finish in the first place, but there’s a spot near the window where the blue has gone chalky and thin, and I’ve been staring at it for three days while Celia is away at a consulting conference in Skaneateles.

I could wait for her. I should wait for her. The blue bedroom is ours, and the blue walls are the origin story, and touching them without Celia here feels like reading someone’s diary while they’re out of the room.

But I’m a designer, and the chalky spot is driving me insane, and Celia won’t be home until six, which gives me four hours to prep, apply, and clean up.

I move the furniture — bed away from the wall, nightstand with its two keys relocated to the hallway, lamp unplugged. I lay drop cloths. I mix the limewash in the same bucket I used the first time, the deep blue that Celia picked from three samples on a night when neither of us could admit what we were really choosing.

I’m on the ladder, working the upper section near the ceiling, when I hear her car in the driveway.

Three hours early.

The front door opens. Keys on the counter — both sets, mine and hers, the sound as familiar as breathing. Footsteps on the hardwood, then on the stairs, then in the hallway. She appears in the bedroom doorway in her conference clothes — a charcoal blazer, slim trousers, her hair pinned up, reading glasses pushed on top of her head. She looks like a woman who spent the day being impressive and came home early because she had a better offer.

She sees me on the ladder. Paint bucket in one hand, brush in the other, my old tank top already streaked with blue.

“You started without me,” she says.

“You were supposed to be in Skaneateles until six.”

“The afternoon panel was about brand synergy in the hospitality space. I decided I’d rather watch paint dry.” She leans against the doorframe. “Literally, apparently.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m not being funny.” Her eyes travel up my body — from my bare feet on the ladder rung to my paint-smudged jeans to the tank top that’s riding up because I’m reaching for the ceiling. The look on her face is not amusement. It’s memory. “The last time you were on a ladder in this room with a bucket of blue paint, I stood exactly where I’m standing now and thought about putting my mouth on the back of your neck.”

“I know. You told me. Multiple times. Usually while I was doing exactly that.”

“And yet you started without me.”

I set the brush across the top of the bucket and look down at her from the ladder. Three months of living together has not diminished the effect she has on me — if anything, it’s concentrated it, the way a color concentrates when you add a second coat. The same hue, but deeper. More saturated. More itself.

“The wall needed work,” I say.

“So do I.” She takes off the blazer. Drops it on the drop cloth. “Come down.”

“I’m in the middle of—”

“Wren. Come down.”

I come down.

She meets me at the bottom of the ladder and kisses me the way she kisses me when she’s been away for two days — thoroughly, with intent, her hands on my waist pulling my paint-stained body against her conference clothes without a second’s hesitation. I taste coffee and lipstick and the particular warmth of Celia Hart coming home.

“You’re going to ruin that shirt,” I say against her mouth.

“I have others.”

“It’s silk.”

“I know what it is.” She pulls back. Unbuttons the silk blouse. Removes it. Lays it on the ladder like a woman who has priorities and the shirt is not one of them. Underneath: a black bra, pale skin, the body I know by heart and want to relearn every time I see it. “Show me the technique again.”

“Celia—”

“You stood behind me in this room and put your hand over mine and guided it across the wall, and I felt your heartbeat against my back, and I went home and didn’t wash the paint off my wrist because the paint was the closest thing I had to your touch.” She takes my hand. Lifts it. Examines the blue streaks across my knuckles, my palm, the crescents of pigment under my nails. “Show me again. I want to remember it differently this time.”

I dip my fingers in the bucket. The limewash is cool and silky — mineral and water and pigment, the consistency of heavy cream. I lift my hand, dripping blue, and press it to Celia’s stomach.

She gasps. Not from the cold — from the contact. My paint-wet hand flat on her bare skin, fingers spread, leaving a handprint of deep blue across her ribs.

“Like this?” I say.

“More.”

I drag my hand up. Across her ribs, over her bra, along her collarbone. The blue follows — streaking across her pale skin in a pattern that looks like water, like weather, like the lake outside our window. She watches my hand move with the focused intensity she brings to everything — the same expression she wears when she’s studying a design proposal or assessing a room or trying very hard not to come.

I reach behind her and unhook her bra with blue-stained fingers, leaving prints on the clasp, on the band, on the pale skin of her back. The bra falls. I dip both hands in the bucket and press them to her breasts and she arches into my palms and the sound she makes is the sound I will never get tired of hearing — low, desperate, surprised by her own want even after months of being wanted.

“This is going to stain,” she whispers.

“Limewash washes out. That’s the point.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

I know what she meant. I push her against the wall — the freshly painted wall, the wet blue surface — and her bare back presses into the limewash and the color transfers to her skin in a bloom of deep blue and she doesn’t care, she pulls me into her and kisses me with paint between our bodies and her hands — clean, the last clean part of her — slide under my tank top and up my ribs.

“Off,” she says, and pulls the tank top over my head, and I’m in my sports bra with blue handprints on my stomach and Celia’s mouth on my throat and the bedroom smells like mineral paint and arousal and the particular ozone scent of two people who are about to make a spectacular mess.

She pushes me to the floor. The drop cloth. Same material, different scene — the first time was desperate and new, the kitchen floor, the first night. This is deliberate and known and the difference makes it hotter, because she knows exactly what I want and goes directly there.

She strips my jeans off. My underwear. I’m naked on the drop cloth with blue paint on my skin and Celia kneels over me, still in her conference trousers, and drags two paint-wet fingers down my body — from my throat to my navel, a line of blue that follows the path her mouth will take in thirty seconds.

She follows the line. Mouth on my throat, my collarbone, the space between my breasts, my stomach. Every kiss leaves a blue smudge — the paint from my skin transferring to her lips, marking her with the same pigment that started everything. She licks the paint off my hip and I grab the drop cloth and make a sound that would be embarrassing if I still had the capacity for embarrassment, which I don’t, because Celia’s tongue is tracing the blue line down my body and she’s not stopping.

She settles between my thighs and looks up at me. Blue on her lips. Blue on her cheek where she pressed against my stomach. Blue on her hands and her chest and the wall behind her where she leaned. She looks like a painting — a filthy, gorgeous, ruined painting of a woman about to do exactly what she wants.

“This is my favorite part of the renovation,” she says.

“Shut up and touch me.”

She laughs. Then she lowers her mouth to me and I stop thinking.

She’s learned me. That’s the thing about Celia — she learns with the thoroughness of a woman who spent twenty years in luxury hospitality, where details are everything and mediocrity is death. She knows the rhythm, the pressure, the particular angle of her tongue that makes me grip her hair and pull and say things I wouldn’t repeat in daylight. She knows when to go slow and when to speed up and when to slide two fingers inside me while her mouth keeps working and when to curl them forward and press.

I come on the drop cloth with blue paint on my body and Celia’s mouth between my legs and the wet limewash wall behind us and it’s absurd and it’s beautiful and it’s the most us thing I can imagine — sex in a room we’re renovating, because we are always renovating, because the work is never done and the work is the love and the love is the work.

She climbs up my body. I roll her under me. Her trousers — her beautiful, expensive conference trousers — are already ruined, blue handprints on both thighs, and I pull them off without apology. Her underwear follows. She’s bare on the drop cloth, pale skin streaked with deep blue from shoulder to hip, and she looks like the wall looks when the light hits it right — alive, shifting, deeper than you expected.

I dip my hand in the bucket one more time. I paint a line from her throat to her navel with my palm, slow and deliberate, the way I’d apply a finish — pressure even, hand steady, letting the material do the work. She shivers under the cool pigment and her hips tilt up and I slide my blue-stained hand between her legs and touch her and the slickness I find there has nothing to do with paint.

“I love you,” I say, and push inside her.

“I love you too,” she says, and then she can’t say anything at all because my fingers are deep and my thumb is on her clit and I’m watching her face — the composure dissolving, the control releasing, the real Celia emerging from underneath the performed one — and it still takes my breath away, every time, that she lets me see this.

She comes with my name in her mouth and my hand inside her and blue paint on every surface of both our bodies and the bedroom wall is a disaster and the drop cloth is ruined and we are lying in a puddle of limewash and sweat and I have never been more in love with another person in my entire life.

We lie on the floor. Blue everywhere. Ceiling, walls, skin, drop cloth, the ladder, Celia’s conference blazer that is never, ever going to recover.

“The wall needs a third coat now,” I say.

“The wall can wait.”

“Your blazer is destroyed.”

“I have twelve blazers, Wren.”

“Twelve?”

“I was a branding executive in Manhattan for fifteen years. Twelve blazers is conservative.”

I laugh. She laughs. We’re both blue from the chest down and the bedroom looks like a crime scene and the limewash will take an hour to clean up and I don’t care. I don’t care about any of it, because I’m lying on a drop cloth in a house we built together with a woman who came home three hours early because she’d rather watch paint dry with me than sit through a panel on brand synergy.

She rolls onto her side and traces a line of blue across my collarbone. “I didn’t wash it off that night. The first time.”

“I know. You told me.”

“I’m telling you again. Because I want you to know — every time I see this color, on any wall, in any room, for the rest of my life, I’m going to think about the night I fell in love with you in a bedroom that smelled like wet plaster and possibility.”

“That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said.”

“I’ve said more romantic things.”

“You’ve said hornier things. There’s a distinction.”

She kisses me. Blue on blue, limewash on limewash, the color we chose together on a night when choosing a color was the safest way to say: I want you. I’ve always wanted you. I’m done pretending I don’t.

We shower together. It takes forty minutes because the blue doesn’t come off easily and because the shower keeps getting interrupted by the kind of touches that restart the entire process. By the time we’re clean — actually clean, pink-skinned and pruned and laughing — the bathroom floor is a shallow lake and the shower glass looks like a watercolor.

“We need to repaint the wall,” I say, toweling off.

“Tomorrow.”

“The whole room needs to dry first.”

“Tomorrow,” Celia says, and pulls me to the bed — the bed we pushed away from the wall, the bed with the white linen that now has blue fingerprints on the headboard — and we fall into it, damp and warm and smelling like soap instead of paint, and she holds me the way she holds me every night: arm across my waist, face against my shoulder, breathing deep and slow and certain.

The blue room will need a full redo. Walls, floor, probably the ceiling. I’ll be here for a week fixing what we just did.

I can’t wait.

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