The First Night In

A Her First Bad Decision Bonus Chapter
by Aurora North

⚠️ This bonus chapter contains EXPLICIT content and takes place after the events of Her First Bad Decision. Spoilers ahead.

The last box was unpacked at 9:47 p.m. on a Friday.

I knew the exact time because Nix announced it the way she announced everything — with precision, satisfaction, and the faint implication that the universe had met its deadline.

“Nine forty-seven,” she said, pressing the final flap of the final box closed with her palm and sliding it into the recycling stack she’d organized by size. “We are officially moved in.”

Our apartment. Ours. A two-bedroom in the West Village with exposed brick, original hardwood, a clawfoot bathtub that had sold me on the place before I’d seen the kitchen, and enough afternoon light to make Nix’s eyes go gold when she stood by the windows. We’d found it together — our first real decision as a couple that didn’t involve a board meeting, a resort crisis, or someone’s mother.

I was sitting on the kitchen counter in cut-off shorts and one of Nix’s old Oxford t-shirts, barefoot, drinking wine out of a mug because we hadn’t found the wineglasses yet. Nix was standing in the middle of the living room with her sleeves rolled to her elbows and a smudge of packing tape residue on her forearm and her hair falling out of its clip, and she looked like the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.

“Come here,” I said.

She looked at me across the half-furnished room. She’d been lifting boxes for four hours and her cheeks were flushed and there was a look in her eyes — that look, the one I’d spent an entire summer learning to read, the one that said she’d been thinking about something specific for a while and had just decided to stop pretending she hadn’t.

“I want to christen it,” she said.

I set the mug down. “Christen what?”

Her mouth curved. Not a smile. A decision. “Every room.”

My pulse did something reckless in my throat. “There are five rooms.”

“I can count, Tamsin.”

“That’s ambitious.”

“I have excellent stamina. You know this.”

I did know this. I knew it in the specific, full-body, cellular way you know something that has rearranged your entire understanding of what your body can do. I knew it because Nicolette Arbour had spent the past three months systematically demolishing every assumption I’d ever had about desire, about pleasure, about the difference between sex that was adequate and sex that made you forget your own name.

“Where do we start?” I asked, and my voice came out lower than I intended.

Nix crossed the room. She stopped between my knees where I sat on the counter and put her hands on my thighs, and the heat of her palms through the thin denim made me inhale sharply. She leaned in. Her mouth brushed my ear.

“We’re in the kitchen,” she said. “Seems wasteful to relocate.”

The Kitchen

Nix kissed me, and every time she kissed me it still did the same thing — a full-system restart, a frequency shift, the moment where my brain stopped narrating and my body took over and I understood, all over again, why everything before her had felt like listening to music through a wall.

She kissed me slow and thorough, both hands sliding up my thighs and gripping my hips to pull me to the edge of the counter. I wrapped my legs around her waist and felt her exhale against my mouth — that particular exhale, the one that meant her control had just taken its first hit.

“Welcome home,” she said against my lips, and then she pulled my shirt over my head.

I wasn’t wearing a bra. Moving day. She made a sound — quiet, involuntary, the kind of sound that Nicolette Arbour would never make in a professional context and that I had become addicted to extracting from her in private — and put her mouth on my collarbone.

“God, you’re — ” I started.

“Quiet,” she said, and kissed down my sternum, and I stopped talking because her mouth was on my breast and her tongue was circling my nipple with the same precise attention she gave to quarterly projections, and my fingers were in her hair, pulling the clip free, and the dark waves fell around her face and I was already wet and we hadn’t even gotten past the appetizer.

She knew my body now. That was the devastating thing. She knew that the spot below my left ear made my back arch, that dragging her teeth across my nipple made me gasp, that if she pressed her thumb against my hipbone while she kissed down my stomach I would make a sound I couldn’t control. She’d learned me the way she learned everything — methodically, attentively, and with a retention rate that was frankly unfair.

She unbuttoned my shorts. I lifted my hips. She pulled them off along with my underwear in one smooth motion and I was naked on our kitchen counter, and the marble was cold against my skin and Nix was still fully dressed and looking at me like I was the answer to a question she’d spent her whole life being afraid to ask.

“You’re staring,” I said.

“I’m appreciating the view.” She ran her hands up the insides of my thighs, slow, spreading me open. “This is my kitchen now. I get to admire the fixtures.”

I laughed, and then I stopped laughing because her mouth was on me.

Nix went down on me like it was her mission in life. Like she’d been thinking about it since the third box and had been waiting for the fifty-seventh to be done just so she could do exactly this. She used her tongue flat and slow at first — long, devastating strokes that made my thighs shake — and then she shifted, found my clit with the precision of a woman who had mapped this territory thoroughly and took professional pride in the results, and I gripped the edge of the counter behind me and made a noise that echoed off the kitchen tile.

“Fuck — Nix — ”

She hummed against me. The vibration traveled through my entire body. Her hands were on my thighs, holding me open, holding me still, and her tongue was doing something that made my vision white out at the edges. She sucked my clit between her lips and I shouted — actually shouted, in our new apartment, where we had neighbors now, neighbors who were about to learn things about us — and came so hard my legs clamped around her head and I had to brace myself against the upper cabinets to keep from sliding off the counter.

She held me through it, her mouth slowing but not stopping, gentling me down with soft licks until I was trembling and breathless and laughing and pulling her up by the collar of her shirt to kiss her. I could taste myself on her mouth. Six months ago that would have shocked me. Now it felt like coming home.

She straightened up and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand — a casual, devastating gesture that made my stomach flip — and leaned in to kiss me. I tasted myself on her lips, on her tongue, and her fingers were still wet when she brushed the hair out of my face.

“One,” she said against my lips.

“We’re counting?”

“I always count. It’s my best quality.”

“Your best quality is your tongue.”

“Noted. I’ll update my LinkedIn.”

The Living Room

We made it as far as the couch.

The living room was still half-chaos — Nix’s books in boxes along the wall, my record collection leaning against a speaker we hadn’t wired yet, the sectional sofa that we’d spent three weekends arguing about (she wanted grey; I wanted green; we got green, because I was right and she loved me enough to admit it) still wearing its plastic shipping wrap on one end.

I pushed Nix down onto the unwrapped end and climbed into her lap, and this time I was the one in charge.

I unbuttoned her shirt slowly, one button at a time, watching her face. Nix’s composure was a living thing — I could see it working, the effort it cost her to stay still while I peeled the fabric back from her shoulders and ran my hands over the lean muscle underneath. She was in a simple white bra, no padding, and her nipples were already hard and visible through the cotton and she was watching me with those green-brown eyes that had gone dark and intent.

“Your turn,” I said, and took her bra off.

I had learned Nix’s body the way she’d learned mine — with attention, with repetition, with the slowly building confidence of a woman who had discovered, at twenty-six, that wanting someone this much wasn’t a problem to solve but a language to become fluent in. I knew that Nix’s neck was her weakness. That she made a sound like a caught breath when I bit the spot where her neck met her shoulder. That she liked my weight on top of her, liked the pressure, liked feeling covered and held in a way that contradicted everything about how she moved through the world — upright, armored, in charge.

I kissed down her throat. I took her nipple in my mouth and sucked and felt her hips lift underneath me, pressing up against me, and the friction through her pants made us both gasp.

“Off,” I said, tugging at her waistband. “Take these off.”

Nix lifted her hips and I pulled her pants and underwear down in one go and then I was on top of her on our green couch and she was naked and flushed and her hair was spread across the cushions and she looked like something out of a painting, except paintings didn’t make the sounds she made when I slid my hand between her legs.

She was so wet. Nix — controlled, precise, measured Nix — was soaked, and the knowledge that she was this turned on from going down on me in the kitchen, from hearing me come, from the sheer fact of us being here in our own space — that did something to me. It made me bold. It made me hungry.

I pressed two fingers against her entrance and paused, and she made a desperate sound — a sound that the woman who ran board meetings and managed billion-dollar hospitality portfolios would have denied under oath — and I pushed inside her, slow and deep, and she moaned into my mouth. I curled them — I’d learned exactly how, exactly the right angle, the come-here motion against the spot that made her voice break — and started a rhythm, slow at first, my thumb on her clit, my mouth on her throat.

“Tamsin — ” Her voice cracked. The composure was gone. This was the version of Nix that existed only here, only with me — raw, unmanaged, desperate. Her hips were moving against my hand and her nails were digging into my shoulder and she was saying my name like it was the only word she remembered.

I sped up. Pressed harder. Watched her face — the crease between her brows, the way her lips parted, the moment her eyes went unfocused and her breath hitched and I knew she was close.

“Come for me,” I said, because I’d learned that Nix — who spent her professional life issuing directives — came undone when someone else gave the order. “Right here. On our couch. In our apartment. Come for me, Nix.”

Her mouth opened. No sound came out. Her brow creased and her back bowed and I could feel her clenching around my fingers, could feel the exact moment pleasure tipped past the point of control.

She shattered. Her whole body tightened around my fingers and she came with a cry she tried to muffle against my shoulder and failed, and I held her through it, kept moving gently inside her until the aftershocks faded and she was lying boneless beneath me, chest heaving, eyes closed.

I kissed her forehead. Her cheek. The corner of her mouth.

“Two,” I whispered.

Her eyes opened. “I wasn’t finished counting my first one yet.”

The Office

We called it the office. It was technically the second bedroom, but we’d set up two desks facing the window — hers immaculate and mahogany, mine chaotic and covered in sticky notes — with the intention of working from home together on the days our schedules allowed.

The intention was professional. What happened next was not.

Nix sat me on the edge of her desk — her desk, the clean one, the one that had a leather blotter and a pen holder and a framed photo of Dashiell — and dropped to her knees.

“This is your professional workspace,” I said, breathless already, because Nix on her knees was a sight that short-circuited every rational thought I’d ever had.

“I’m aware.” She pushed my knees apart. “Consider this a workplace efficiency initiative.”

She put her mouth on me for the second time that night, and this time she wasn’t gentle. This was Nix taking, not giving — her tongue fast and focused, lapping at my clit with a rhythm that built quick and relentless. She gripped my thighs and pulled me closer to the edge of the desk, angling me exactly where she wanted me, and I braced my hands behind me and knocked the pen holder off the desk and didn’t care.

She slid two fingers inside me and fucked me with her hand while her mouth worked me over. The combination — her tongue on my clit, her fingers curling inside me, the knowledge that she was on her knees in front of her own immaculate desk doing this to me — sent a wave of heat through my body so intense I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

I came with my hand fisted in her hair and my heels braced on the arms of her desk chair, and the orgasm hit me like a wave — the kind that starts deep and rolls through you and leaves you shaking and stupid and grateful.

Before I could recover, Nix stood up, turned around, and braced her hands on my desk — the messy one, covered in sticky notes and a half-unpacked pencil case. She looked over her shoulder at me.

“Your turn,” she said. “My desk was a courtesy. Yours can take it rougher.”

I laughed and then I was behind her, pressing my body against her back, reaching around to cup her breasts, to roll her nipples between my fingers while I kissed the back of her neck. I slid one hand down her stomach, between her legs, and she leaned forward onto her forearms and pushed back against my hand and I fucked her against my desk with two fingers deep inside her and my palm grinding against her clit and sticky notes falling to the floor like confetti.

She came with my name on her lips and her forehead pressed against a tax document, and when she straightened up and saw the state of the desk she said, “You needed to organize that anyway.”

“Three and four,” I said. “In case you lost count.”

The Bathroom

The clawfoot tub was the reason I’d wanted this apartment. It was enormous — deep white enamel, brass fixtures, tucked under a window that looked out over the building’s small courtyard garden. I’d imagined soaking in it with a book and a glass of wine and the particular satisfaction of being a twenty-six-year-old woman with her own bathtub in the West Village.

I had not, at the time, imagined what it would look like with Nix in it.

She was leaning against the curved back of the tub, submerged to her collarbones, the water clouded with the rosemary bath oil I’d unpacked first because priorities. Steam curled around her face. Her dark hair was piled on top of her head, damp tendrils clinging to her neck. Her cheeks were flushed from the heat and from the previous three rooms’ worth of orgasms, and she looked loose-limbed and satisfied and younger than I’d ever seen her.

I climbed in opposite her and she pulled me backward until I was lying against her chest, my back to her front, her legs bracketing mine in the hot water. Her arms came around me, and for a moment we just breathed.

“I love you,” I said, because I could, because this was our bathtub in our apartment and there was no reporting line and no board meeting and no mother waiting to disapprove, and saying it still felt like a miracle.

“I love you,” she said against my temple, and her hand slid down my stomach under the water.

Nix touched me slowly in the bath. The water made everything slippery and soft and the heat of it blurred the edges between her body and mine. Her fingers traced lazy circles around my clit — not building to anything, just touching, keeping me in a state of low, constant arousal that made my toes curl against the enamel.

I turned in the tub, water sloshing over the edge, and straddled her lap. The shift in position pressed us together — chest to chest, skin on skin, the water between us warm and slick with oil. She made a sound — surprise, delight, that particular catch in her breath that I’d learned to recognize as the moment composure started losing the argument — and I kissed her while the water moved around us and her hands gripped my hips under the surface.

Her breasts pressed against mine. I could feel her heartbeat, fast and getting faster. I rolled my hips and the friction between us — my center against her stomach, the warm water everywhere — made us both gasp. She pulled me tighter, her fingers pressing into my lower back, and I felt like I was dissolving into her, like the boundaries between us were the same temperature as the bathwater and melting just as fast.

I reached between us and found her clit and we touched each other at the same time, mirroring, our foreheads pressed together, our breath mixing, our hands moving in the same slow rhythm. It was the most intimate we’d ever been — not the most athletic, not the most urgent, but the most connected. I could feel her heartbeat against my chest. I could feel exactly when her breathing changed, when her fingers on me faltered because she was getting close, and I matched her, stayed with her, kept my rhythm steady even as my own pleasure built.

“Together,” she whispered.

“Together.”

We came at the same time — or close enough that it felt like the same moment, a shared detonation that rippled through both of us and left us clinging to each other in the cooling water, laughing and crying and kissing and not entirely sure which was which.

“Five,” I murmured against her neck.

“I think that was five and six.”

“We’re going to need more hot water.”

The Bedroom

We toweled off with the new white bath sheets I’d splurged on — thick, ridiculous, hotel-grade — and Nix wrapped hers around her waist like a sarong and walked barefoot down the hallway, her skin still warm and damp and glowing in the lamplight, and I followed her because I would follow this woman anywhere, into any room, for the rest of my life.

The bedroom was last, and it was last on purpose.

I’d made the bed that morning — properly, hospital corners, because Nix’s standards had become contagious — and I’d put fresh sheets on, the good ones, the white Egyptian cotton that felt like sleeping in a cloud. I’d arranged the pillows. I’d put her reading glasses on her nightstand and my phone charger on mine, and I’d stood in the doorway and looked at a bedroom that belonged to both of us and felt something so enormous I’d had to sit down.

Now the sheets were about to be ruined. We were about to ruin them together. I couldn’t think of a better inaugural use.

Nix laid me on the bed like I was something precious and irreplaceable, which was the kind of thing that would have made me roll my eyes if anyone else did it but which, from Nix, made my chest ache with a sweetness that hurt.

She stretched out beside me and ran her hand down my body — throat, collarbone, the curve of my breast, the dip of my waist, the swell of my hip — like she was memorizing me. Like she planned to be tested on this later and intended to score perfectly.

“What do you want?” she asked, and her voice was soft and serious and stripped of every professional veneer. This was Nix without armor. This was the woman who had spent twenty years being needed and never being wanted, and who was lying in our bed asking me what I wanted like my answer was the only thing in the world that mattered.

“You,” I said. “All of you. Everything.”

She kissed me. Deep and slow and thorough. She kissed my throat, the hollow between my collarbones, each breast with concentrated attention that made me writhe. She kissed down my stomach, pausing at the soft skin below my navel where I was ticklish, and I squirmed and she smiled against my skin and the intimacy of it — the laughter, the knowing, the fact that she knew I was ticklish there and kissed me there anyway — undid me more than any of the explicit things we’d done tonight.

She settled between my legs. I threaded my fingers into her hair.

Nix used her mouth on me with devastating patience. She licked me in long, slow strokes, exploring like it was the first time, circling my clit without direct pressure until I was lifting my hips off the mattress and whimpering. She slid her tongue inside me and I gasped. She replaced her tongue with two fingers and curled them while her mouth found my clit, and she set a rhythm that built and built and built — not fast, just relentless, just inevitable — until I was arching off the bed and fisting the new sheets and coming with her name on my lips in a sound that I was fairly certain the neighbors three floors up could hear.

She didn’t stop.

She eased off the pressure but kept her mouth on me, kept her fingers moving gently inside me, coaxing a second orgasm out of the first, a rolling aftershock that crested and broke and left me shaking and oversensitive and reaching for her.

“Come up here,” I managed. “Come here, I need — ”

She crawled up my body. I pulled her on top of me and rolled us so I was over her, and I kissed her and tasted myself and said, “I want to taste you.”

I moved down her body. I kissed her neck, her chest, paused to suck her nipple until she arched and moaned, kissed across her ribs, her hip. I settled between her legs and looked up at her.

Nix was watching me with those dark eyes, her lips parted, her chest rising and falling too fast. Her hand came down and touched my cheek — tenderly, reverently, like she still couldn’t believe this was real.

“You’re so beautiful,” she whispered. “You have no idea — the way you look right now — ”

I lowered my mouth to her and she stopped talking.

I knew what Nix liked. I knew she liked it slow to start, broad strokes of my tongue that covered all of her before focusing. I knew she liked when I used my lips to pull gently at her clit. I knew she liked it when I moaned against her, the vibration and the proof that I wanted to be here. I knew the exact rhythm — steady, consistent, a little faster than my instinct said — that took her over the edge.

I gave her all of it. I licked her and sucked her and slid my fingers inside her and felt the moment her body tightened, the moment her hand in my hair went from guiding to gripping, the moment she stopped breathing and then came with a shattered cry that was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard.

I stayed with her. Gentled her down. Pressed soft kisses to her inner thighs while she trembled, her leg muscles twitching against my shoulders, her hand still tangled loosely in my hair. She was making small, helpless sounds — breathy half-words, my name repeated like a mantra — that the old Nix, the chief of staff, the ice queen, the woman who had controlled every room she’d ever walked into, would have been mortified to know she could produce.

I loved those sounds. I had become a collector of them — every gasp, every moan, every shattered syllable, filed away in the part of my brain that used to catalog hotel guest-experience details and now catalogued the infinite ways Nicolette Arbour came apart when she let someone in.

I climbed back up and pulled the covers over us — the wrecked, beautiful, inaugurated sheets — and Nix rolled into me and pressed her face into my neck and wrapped her arms around me so tightly I could feel her heartbeat against my ribs.

“Welcome home,” she said. Her voice was thick and warm and wrecked, and I felt her smile against my skin.

I held her. I held her in our bed, in our bedroom, in our apartment, in the life we had built together out of a summer that should have been impossible and a love that had refused, despite every professional and personal and structural obstacle, to be managed into something smaller than it was.

“Welcome home,” I whispered back.

Outside the window, the city hummed. Inside, Dashiell had at some point materialized on the couch in the living room and was snoring with the commitment of a whippet who had categorically refused to participate in the humans’ evening activities. The kitchen counter had been sanitized (Nix had insisted, between rooms, because she was Nix). The office desks would need to be wiped down in the morning. The bathwater had gone cold.

Our apartment. Every room. Christened.

Nix’s breathing slowed against my neck. Her fingers traced idle patterns on my hip. I could feel her drifting, the iron grip of her consciousness loosening the way it only did when she was warm and satisfied and safe, and I knew — with the bone-deep certainty of a woman who had spent twenty-six years listening to the wrong frequency — that this was it. This was the life. This was the frequency I’d been tuning toward since the first moment she walked into my mother’s office and told me to show up at five forty-five.

I pressed my lips to her forehead. “I love you.”

“Mm.” Already half asleep. “Love you. Eight rooms.”

“Five rooms. Eight was the total count.”

“Details.” A pause. “Next week we should do the hallway.”

I laughed so hard I woke up Dashiell.

Ready for more? The full novel is available now.

← Back to Her First Bad Decision

Never Miss a Release

Get new release alerts, exclusive bonus content, and reader-only giveaways.