Closing Time

Her Favorite Regular — Anniversary Bonus Chapter
by Aurora North

⚠️ This bonus chapter takes place after the events of Her Favorite Regular. Contains spoilers and extremely explicit content. Reader discretion advised.

The last customer left at 11:47, which was thirteen minutes earlier than Mara had hoped for and exactly on schedule for what she had planned.

She locked the front door. Flipped the sign. Turned off the OPEN — the full OPEN now, all four letters functioning, the repaired O glowing steady and whole in a way that still startled her sometimes, like seeing a scar that had healed and left no trace.

Jules was sitting on her stool. Third from the left. The one that didn’t wobble anymore but was still hers — rule number four, written in chalk, non-negotiable.

“One year,” Jules said.

“One year.” Mara came around the bar. Not behind it — around it. Through the gap, past the taps, into the open space where there were no barriers and hadn’t been for a long time. She stood in front of Jules’s stool and put her hands on the bar on either side of Jules’s hips. “I got you something.”

“If it’s a glass of water, I’ll divorce you.”

“We’re not married.”

“I’ll find a way.”

Mara reached under the bar and produced a small velvet box. Not a ring box — longer, flatter. She set it on the bar in front of Jules and watched her open it.

Inside was a key. Silver. New. Attached to a keychain that was a miniature neon sign that read PEN — just the broken version, the three-letter version, the version that had been glowing in the window the night Jules had sat in the parking lot crying and decided to walk through the door.

“It’s the key to the bar,” Mara said. “Not the apartment — you already have that. The bar. The actual bar. Because it’s yours too. It’s been yours since you organized the first open mic and definitely since you sat on it and told me to make you move.”

Jules looked at the key. Looked at Mara. Her eyes were bright and her smile was the full one — the devastating one, the one that had been rearranging Mara’s internal organs for twelve months.

“Our bar,” Jules said, and the possessive landed between them like a lit match.

“Our bar.”

Jules set the box down and pulled Mara between her knees by the front of her flannel. “I have a present for you too.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Jules leaned in, mouth against Mara’s ear, and whispered — slowly, precisely, in graphic detail — exactly what she wanted to do on every surface of this bar before the sun came up. The bar top. The desk in the back office. The shelving in the stockroom. Their bed. She described positions and acts and the specific sounds she intended to pull out of Mara’s throat, and by the time she finished, Mara’s hands were white-knuckled on the bar and her breathing was audible in the empty room.

“Starting here,” Jules said, and kissed her.

Mara lifted Jules onto the bar. Their bar. The scarred wood and the amber light and the Christmas lights casting everything in gold, and Jules wrapped her legs around Mara’s waist and pulled her in and kissed her until neither of them could remember what air was for.

“Shirt off,” Jules said against Mara’s mouth. Not a request.

Mara stripped the flannel. The undershirt. Stood between Jules’s knees in her sports bra and jeans, the botanical tattoo vivid under the Christmas lights, and Jules put both hands flat on her stomach — the lean muscle, the heat, the body she’d mapped with her mouth a hundred times and still wanted to explore — and dragged her nails lightly from Mara’s ribs to her waistband.

Mara’s abs contracted. Her jaw clenched. Jules did it again, harder, leaving faint red lines, and watched the composure crack.

“You too,” Mara said, and peeled Jules’s dress over her head in one fluid motion. Jules was bare underneath — no bra, no underwear, nothing but skin and intent. She’d planned this. She’d stood in their bathroom an hour ago and decided that tonight, the only thing between her body and Mara’s hands would be a zipper.

Mara went still. Her eyes moved down Jules’s body with the focused, reverent attention that had made Jules fall in love with her in the first place — the way Mara looked at things she cared about, like she was memorizing them against some future loss. Except now there was no loss to brace for. Just Jules, naked on a bar, in the glow of Christmas lights, waiting.

“You wore nothing under that dress,” Mara said. Her voice was lower than usual. Rougher. “For three hours. While I was working. While I was pouring drinks and making small talk and you were sitting on that stool with — nothing —”

“I was wet before the first customer left,” Jules said. “Every time you reached across the bar I could feel the air move and I thought about your hands and I crossed my legs and smiled at Lena and pretended I wasn’t soaking through my dress on your bar stool.”

The sound Mara made was barely human. She surged forward and her mouth found Jules’s throat, her collarbone, the swell of her breast. She took Jules’s nipple between her lips and sucked, tongue circling, teeth grazing, and Jules arched off the bar with a moan that filled the empty room.

No one to hear. No Nina fifteen feet away. No closing-time crowd. Just them and the bar and the space to be as loud as they wanted.

Mara’s mouth moved to the other breast. She took her time — licking, sucking, biting gently, finding the exact pressure that made Jules’s hips buck. Her hands gripped Jules’s thighs, thumbs pressing into the soft inner skin, spreading her legs wider on the polished wood.

“I want your mouth,” Jules gasped. “On the bar. Right here. Where you work. Where you pour drinks and wipe surfaces and pretend you’re not thinking about me.”

“I’m always thinking about you.” Mara kissed down her stomach. Slow. Deliberate. Mouth and tongue tracing the path from Jules’s ribs to her navel to the jut of her hip bone. “Every shift. Every pour. Every time I wipe this bar I think about you sitting on it with your legs spread and my face between them, and I pour the wrong drink at least once a week because of it.”

“That’s the most romantic complaint I’ve ever heard.”

“Lie back.”

Jules lay back on the bar. The wood was cool and smooth against her spine, polished by decades of elbows and spilled whiskey and Mara’s obsessive nightly wiping. She was completely naked on a bar top in a room with frosted windows and Christmas lights, and she could feel the grain of the wood against her shoulder blades and the slight chill of the air on her nipples and the heat — nuclear, devastating heat — radiating from between her legs where she’d been aching for three hours.

Mara pulled a bar stool close and sat on it. Eye level with Jules’s thighs. She put her hands on Jules’s knees, spread them wide, and looked at her — wet, swollen, open — with an expression of focused, predatory reverence that made Jules’s clit throb.

“You’re dripping,” Mara said, and her voice was wrecked. “All night. You sat on my bar stool for three hours like this.”

“Thinking about you. Yes.”

Mara leaned forward and licked her. One long, slow, devastating stroke from her entrance to her clit, collecting everything Jules had been building all evening, and the sound Jules made echoed off the bottles behind the bar like a bell.

She didn’t tease. Not tonight. Tonight Mara ate her out like a woman making a vow — her tongue flat and broad, covering everything, then pointed and precise, circling Jules’s clit with the specific pressure and rhythm she’d perfected over twelve months of obsessive attention. She knew this body. She knew that Jules came harder from sustained, steady pressure than from variation. She knew that two fingers inside, curled upward, while her tongue worked Jules’s clit, produced an orgasm so intense Jules forgot how to speak. She knew that Jules liked to be held open — Mara’s hands on her inner thighs, keeping her spread, the controlled exposure of it adding a layer of vulnerability that made everything sharper.

She deployed all of it.

Her tongue circled Jules’s clit in steady, rhythmic strokes while two fingers slid inside — deep, curling, finding the spot that made Jules’s thighs clamp around her head. Mara pressed them apart with her elbows and kept going, her mouth relentless, her fingers pumping in a rhythm that matched her tongue, and Jules was loud — God, she was loud, moaning and gasping and saying Mara’s name in fragments, her hands flat on the bar top, her heels digging into Mara’s back, her whole body arching off the wood.

“Right there — don’t stop — fuck, Mara, right there —”

Mara didn’t stop. She sealed her lips around Jules’s clit and sucked, her fingers driving deep, and Jules came with a scream. An actual scream, loud and ragged and shameless, her back bowing off the bar, her hands slapping the wood, her body clenching around Mara’s fingers in wave after wave that seemed to last longer than physics should allow.

Mara stayed with her through every aftershock, tongue gentle now, fingers still, until Jules was trembling and breathless and reaching for her with shaking hands.

“Get up here,” Jules panted.

Mara stood, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and leaned over Jules on the bar. Jules pulled her down into a kiss and tasted herself on Mara’s tongue and moaned into it, because the intimacy of that — of tasting her own arousal in her girlfriend’s mouth — had never stopped being the hottest thing she’d experienced.

“Office,” Jules said against her lips. “Now. Your turn.”

The back office was dark except for the light leaking under the door from the bar. Jules didn’t turn it on. She didn’t need to — she knew this room by feel, by memory, by the specific geography of a space where everything had almost started on a stormy night a year ago.

She pushed Mara against the desk. The same desk. The same position — Mara’s hips against the edge, Jules standing between her legs. Except now the dynamic was inverted. A year ago, Mara had pinned Jules here, hand sliding down her stomach, fingers at her waistband, interrupted by a phone call from the alarm company. Tonight, no one was calling.

Jules stripped Mara’s sports bra off. Kissed her throat, her collarbones, the swell of her breasts. She took Mara’s nipple in her mouth and sucked hard enough to make Mara’s hand fly to the back of her head, fingers gripping, a low groan escaping through clenched teeth.

“Sit on the desk,” Jules said.

Mara sat. Jules unbuttoned her jeans, pulled them and her boxer briefs down in one motion, and knelt on the cold tile floor. The same tile where they’d sat on the night they negotiated the rules. The same tile where Jules had first gone to her knees for Mara after eight days apart. The geography of their relationship was written in this room, and tonight Jules was adding a new chapter.

She spread Mara’s thighs and pressed her mouth to the inside of one, then the other, kissing the sensitive skin where thigh met hip, breathing her in. Mara was wet — soaked, the evidence of how much going down on Jules had aroused her slick against Jules’s lips when she kissed closer, and the taste of Mara’s want made Jules’s own clit pulse in sympathy.

“Jules —” Mara’s voice was a wreck. The composure was gone, had been gone since Jules whispered in her ear at the bar, and what was left was raw and open and desperate. “Please.”

Mara King saying please. A year ago, that word from this woman’s mouth would have been unimaginable. Now it was a gift Jules had earned, and she honored it.

She put her mouth on Mara and took her apart.

Slow at first. Long, flat strokes of her tongue that made Mara’s thighs shake. Then focused — circling her clit, learning the rhythm that Mara needed tonight, which was different from Sunday-morning Mara and different from after-a-fight Mara. Anniversary Mara was already on the edge, already trembling, already close from the bar scene and the three-hour anticipation and the key and the our bar, and she needed precision, not patience.

Jules gave her precision. She sealed her mouth around Mara’s clit, tongue flicking fast and focused, and slid two fingers inside her — Mara was so wet they went in without resistance, and the sound it made, slick and obscene in the quiet office, made them both groan. Jules curled her fingers, found the spot, and pumped steadily while her tongue worked, and Mara’s hand gripped the edge of the desk so hard the wood creaked.

“Fuck — Jules — I’m going to —”

“Look at me,” Jules murmured against her, and Mara looked down. Their eyes locked — Mara on the desk, Jules on her knees, mouth glistening, dark eyes holding Mara’s gaze with the steady, unflinching certainty that had brought Mara’s walls down a year ago — and Mara came.

She came with her thighs clamped around Jules’s shoulders and her hand in Jules’s hair and a sound that was half Jules’s name and half something wordless and shattered, her hips bucking against Jules’s mouth, her whole body convulsing, the desk scraping against the floor with the force of it.

Jules held her through it. Mouth gentle, fingers still, free hand pressed flat against Mara’s stomach, feeling the muscles clench and release, clench and release. When Mara’s body finally went slack, Jules pressed a kiss to her inner thigh and stood.

Mara pulled her into a kiss. Tasted herself on Jules’s mouth. Made the same low, hungry sound Jules had made on the bar, and the symmetry of it — both of them, on each other’s tongues — made Jules dizzy.

“Stockroom,” Mara said. “We’re not done.”

The stockroom smelled like cardboard and lime zest and history.

Mara pushed Jules against the same shelving unit. The same metal frame, the same cold press of steel against Jules’s bare back. Except this time Jules was already naked, and there was no hand over her mouth, and the sounds she made could be as loud and filthy and desperate as the moment demanded.

Mara pressed her thigh between Jules’s legs. Jules ground down against it immediately, slick and swollen, the friction of denim against her bare clit sending a jolt through her that made her grab the shelf behind her for balance. Bottles rattled. Neither of them cared.

“Remember the first time?” Mara murmured, her mouth against Jules’s ear. “The green dress. My hand over your mouth. You bit my palm so hard it left marks for two days.”

“I remember.” Jules was rocking against Mara’s thigh, her hips moving in urgent circles. “I remember you told me what you were going to do to me upstairs. I came so hard I nearly knocked a bottle off the shelf.”

“You did knock a bottle off the shelf.”

“That was the shelf’s problem.”

Mara’s hand slid between them. Her fingers found Jules’s clit — slick, swollen, hypersensitive from the bar-top orgasm — and circled with a pressure that was just the right side of too much. Jules’s head fell back against the shelf and she moaned, loud and unrestrained, because there was no Nina fifteen feet away tonight and the only audience was the liquor bottles and they’d seen worse.

“I want to feel you come on my hand,” Mara said, her voice low and rough and commanding, and she slid three fingers inside Jules in one smooth thrust.

Jules cried out. The stretch was immediate and perfect — full, tight, Mara’s fingers deep inside her while her thumb pressed against her clit, and Jules braced herself against the shelving and rode Mara’s hand, her hips snapping forward, taking what she needed. Mara’s free hand gripped Jules’s hip, guiding her rhythm, and her mouth was on Jules’s neck, sucking hard enough to leave a mark that Jules would wear tomorrow like a badge.

A bottle tipped and fell. Rolled across the floor. Neither of them stopped.

“Harder,” Jules gasped. “Mara — harder —”

Mara fucked her harder. Deep, driving thrusts that made the shelving unit shake and Jules’s vision blur and her voice crack on sounds that weren’t words anymore, just raw vocal evidence of a body being taken apart by someone who knew exactly how to do it. Mara’s thumb ground against her clit, relentless, and her teeth grazed Jules’s earlobe, and she whispered, “Come for me. Right here. On my hand. In our stockroom.”

Our stockroom. The word sent Jules over the edge. She came around Mara’s fingers with a shout, her whole body clenching, her nails digging into Mara’s shoulders, her legs nearly giving out. Mara caught her — arm around her waist, holding her up, fingers still inside her, riding every aftershock until Jules was trembling and gasping and sagging against her.

Two more bottles had fallen. The shelf was listing slightly to the left. Jules couldn’t have cared less if the entire stockroom collapsed.

They made it upstairs. Barely. Jules was pulling Mara by the hand, both of them half-dressed — Mara in unzipped jeans, Jules wearing Mara’s flannel and nothing else, the flannel unbuttoned and falling off one shoulder — stumbling through the hallway, kissing against the stairwell wall, laughing because the urgency was both desperate and joyful and the combination made everything feel enormous.

The apartment door. Their apartment. The ferns and the postcards and the dry-erase board and the bed that smelled like both of them.

Jules pushed Mara onto the mattress. Stripped the jeans off her. Stood at the edge of the bed and let the flannel slide off her shoulders and pool on the floor, and Mara looked up at her — naked, flushed, glowing with the particular radiance of a woman who’d already come twice and was nowhere near done — and her expression was the one Jules lived for. Not the bartender composure. Not the professional mask. The underneath. The raw, unguarded, utterly devoted face of a woman who’d spent three years behind a wall and had let one person through and had never, for a single moment, regretted it.

Jules opened the nightstand drawer and took out the strap-on. She didn’t ask — not because she’d stopped asking, but because Mara was already nodding, her eyes dark, her hips lifting off the bed in anticipation.

“Watch me,” Jules said. She stepped into the harness, adjusted the straps, tightened them with hands that were steady and sure and nothing like the trembling, uncertain fingers of the woman who’d said I’ve never done this before on a Sunday afternoon a lifetime ago. She was someone else now. Someone who knew what she wanted and how to give it and wasn’t afraid of any of it.

Mara watched. Her lips were parted, her chest rising and falling fast, her eyes tracking Jules’s hands on the straps with the concentrated hunger of a person who was about to receive something they’d been wanting all night.

Jules climbed onto the bed. Settled between Mara’s thighs. Leaned down and kissed her while the toy pressed between them, and Mara’s hips rose to meet it, grinding against the shaft, her wetness slicking the silicone.

“I love you,” Jules said, and slid inside her.

Mara’s mouth fell open. Her hands found Jules’s back, nails digging in, and she made a sound that was low and sustained and full of a year’s worth of trust — the sound of a woman who’d learned, finally, that letting someone in didn’t mean getting destroyed. It meant getting found.

Jules moved. Slow, deep rolls of her hips, watching Mara’s face for every micro-expression, reading her the way Mara had taught her to read — with attention, with specificity, with the obsessive care of someone who treated their partner’s pleasure like a practice worth perfecting. The base of the harness pressed against Jules’s clit with every thrust, building pressure she wasn’t trying to chase but couldn’t ignore.

“Faster,” Mara breathed, wrapping her legs around Jules’s waist, pulling her deeper. “Jules — don’t hold back —”

Jules didn’t hold back. Her hips snapped forward, driving deep, and Mara cried out and pulled her closer and they moved together — hard, fast, the bed frame hitting the wall, the ferns on the windowsill trembling in sympathy. Jules’s hand found Mara’s breast, thumb circling her nipple, and her mouth found Mara’s throat, and she fucked her with everything she had while Mara gripped her back and met every thrust.

“Touch yourself,” Mara gasped. “I want us to come together —”

Jules reached between them. Found her own clit, swollen and aching, and rubbed in fast circles while her hips kept driving into Mara. The dual sensation — the harness pressing against her, her own fingers working, Mara’s body clenching around the toy — was overwhelming, a convergence of input that blurred the line between giving pleasure and receiving it until they were the same thing.

“Now,” Mara said, and her voice broke, and her body locked, and she came — hard, shaking, pulling Jules so deep the harness pressed flush against both of them — and the sight of Mara’s face in orgasm, the absolute unguarded devastation of it, sent Jules crashing after her. She buried her face in Mara’s neck and came with a sound that was her girlfriend’s name wrapped around a sob, her hips stuttering, her hand trapped between their bodies, her whole world narrowed to this bed and this woman and the shuddering, sacred, perfect collapse of two people who’d found each other against every odd and were still, after a year, finding new ways to fall apart together.

They lay tangled in the wreckage. Sheets twisted. Pillows on the floor. The harness discarded somewhere near the bookshelf-headboard. Seven ferns quietly judging them from the windowsill.

Jules was on her back, breathing hard, one arm flung across Mara’s stomach. Mara was on her side, tracing idle patterns on Jules’s hip with one fingertip, her expression soft and wrecked and utterly, unreservedly happy.

“Happy anniversary,” Jules said.

“We christened every surface.”

“Not the jukebox.”

“The jukebox is a shared resource. There are limits.”

“Next anniversary.”

“Next anniversary,” Mara agreed, and the ease of it — the way they both said next anniversary like it was obvious, like the future was a room they’d already moved into — made Jules’s chest ache in the best way.

Mara pulled her close. Pressed her lips to the top of her head. “Same time tomorrow, favorite regular?”

“Every time. Every tomorrow. Every surface in that bar.”

They slept. In their bed, in their apartment, above their bar. The PEN keychain on the nightstand caught the streetlight through the window. Whole, now. Complete.

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