Hit It Like You Mean It

Sapphic Roller Derby Romance
by Aurora North

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Rivals to Lovers, Enemies to Lovers, Teammates, Secret Relationship, Forced Proximity, One Bed, Praise Kink, Mutual Pining, Found Family, He Falls First / She Falls Harder
Length: ~107,000 words

The hit was legal. Everything after it is against the rules.

Dana Mercer has a ledger, a drill plan, and a rink running out of money. The Lake City Bruisers’ captain built her game around control. Now she has eight weeks to bring home the tournament purse that buys another year of floor time. She needs a second scoring jammer.

The only one available is Bridget Walsh. Bridge Burner. The woman who put Dana flat on her back at the North Coast bout, then grinned into a phone camera and called her easy to read.

Dana did not watch that clip forty-seven times for recreational purposes.

Bridget turns up in work boots with engine oil under her nails, a gear bag over one shoulder, and an eye for every tell Dana has. The way she shifts her weight. The way she swallows a joke. The way her eyes drop to Bridget’s mouth when she’s supposed to be talking about footwork.

They make a deal. Away games only. No favors. No one finds out. Three rules on a diner napkin, signed by two women who intend to keep this purely physical.

Unfortunately, Bridget is very good at reading Dana. And Dana is about to discover what it costs to stop being read and start being known.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Buttoned-up captain × mouthy mechanic in scuffed work boots
✅ Rivals to lovers with a grudge that goes back a year
✅ One small-town rink, eight weeks, a ledger that doesn’t lie
✅ Away-game motels, thin walls, one bed, a napkin full of rules
✅ Praise kink from the woman who refuses to be easy to please
✅ A switch dynamic: she’s spent her whole life leading — until now
✅ Found family in a derby league that knows exactly what’s going on
✅ Dual POV — you get both sides of the pining
✅ 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno heat — graphic, explicit, emotional
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes including strap-on sex), strong language, sports injuries and contact, a secret relationship, jealousy, and financial stress around community spaces. All sexual encounters are between consenting adults. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One

DANA

The second number was worse than the first.

I read it twice, the way you read a biopsy report or a text from someone who has stopped using your name. Then I set the ledger flat on the folding table and smoothed the corner of the page with my thumb, which was a useless thing to do to a column of figures and I did it anyway.

“Say it,” Inez said.

“I can read.”

“I know you can read. I want you to say it out loud so I can go home and take my bra off.”

I looked up at her. Inez Alvarez, our treasurer, sixty-one years old and wearing a T-shirt that said Audit Me, Coward, had her arms folded over a manila envelope stuffed with rink invoices. She’d been on the Bruisers’ board since the league was six women and a Craigslist ad. She’d also been the one to put the ledger in front of me at nine-fourteen on a Tuesday night, twenty minutes before practice, with the expression of a woman delivering a casserole to a funeral.

“We can cover floor time through the end of May,” I said. “After that, if nothing changes, we can’t sign the summer block.”

“And if we can’t sign the summer block?”

“The junior program goes. Then the beginners. Then us.”

She nodded once, not pleased, just satisfied that I’d heard the math correctly. Behind her, the rink was waking up: wheels whining against the worn wood, the slap of Velcro straps, someone laughing too loudly at something that wasn’t funny yet. The smell was the same as always—old floor wax, damp pads, the faint burnt-sugar ghost of the concession stand’s popcorn machine. I’d been coming here four nights a week for nine years. I knew every buckled board. I knew the dead spot under the emergency exit where the floor bounced wrong if you hit it at speed. I knew the exact sound of our own wheels in this room, and I couldn’t stand the idea of not hearing it.

“We win the tournament,” I said.

Inez’s face didn’t move.

“We win the Lakeshore Circuit purse, the sponsor renews, we sell enough tickets to the summer showcase, and we sign for another year.” I tapped the ledger. “It’s not impossible.”

“No,” she said. “It’s just a plan that requires you to win at sports.”

“It’s a sport we’re good at.”

“Dana.” She leaned forward, voice dropping. “I’ve seen you make a schedule, and I’ve seen you make a drill plan, and I’ve seen you make a woman cry by explaining a footwork correction too calmly. What I haven’t seen you make is a second scoring jammer out of positive thinking.”

There it was. The number under the number.

We were short. Not short on heart, not short on work ethic, not short on women willing to drive forty minutes after a ten-hour shift to get hit in the ribs for fun. We were short one jammer who could put points on the board when our primary was gassed. And with the tournament eight weeks out, the transfer window was the only place to find one.

“I’ve been looking,” I said.

“Look harder.” She tucked the envelope into her canvas bag. “I emailed you three names.”

“I saw.”

“One of them’s local.”

“I saw that too.”

Inez held my gaze for a beat longer than necessary. Then she patted the ledger, as if it were a sleeping animal that might bite, and walked toward the exit.

I watched her go. I did not open the email again.

I had a system for pre-practice. Gear on, laces checked, wrist guards, elbow pads, knee pads, helmet, mouth guard tucked into the left cheek while I walked the perimeter and checked the floor. Same order. Every time. The body liked a system. The body liked knowing what came next.

It was the rest of my life that had started refusing to cooperate.

“You’re doing the jaw thing,” Mae said as I passed the bench.

“I’m putting in my mouth guard.”

“You’re clenching under the mouth guard. I can see it from here.”

Mae Duffy was our bench coach and my oldest friend, which meant she’d earned the right to say things like that and I’d earned the right to pretend I hadn’t heard them. She sat on the back of the bench with a clipboard balanced on her thigh, hair in a messy bun that had given up being a bun sometime around seven p.m. She had a whistle around her neck and a paper cup of coffee that smelled like it had been brewed during the Clinton administration.

“Inez talked to you,” she said.

“Inez talks to everyone.”

“She talked to you about the ledger.”

I stopped at the edge of the track and looked at the tape lines. One was peeling near turn three. I crouched and pressed it back down.

“We need points,” I said.

“We need a jammer.”

“We need a jammer who can follow a plan.”

“We need a jammer who can score.” Mae’s tone was patient in the way that meant she was about to stop being patient. “You can teach the plan. You can’t teach someone to be fast enough to make it matter.”

I stood. Around us, the Bruisers were warming up in pairs, loose and loud. Deacon—real name Melanie, derby name acquired after an incident involving a church parking lot—was teaching a new recruit how to fall without bracing. Sol was doing crossovers along the outside lane, graceful in a way that made it look effortless and therefore deeply annoying to anyone who had ever tried it. These women trusted me. They handed me the captaincy, the drill plan, the game strategy, the terrible decisions. They trusted me not to waste their time.

“I’ll find someone,” I said.

Mae looked at me. “Someone’s already found us.”

The double doors at the far end of the rink swung open.

I knew before I turned. I don’t know how. Maybe the room shifted—a change in the sound, a small collective inhale. Maybe I just recognized the shape of a problem the moment it walked in.

Bridget Walsh stood in the doorway with a gear bag over one shoulder and the expression of a woman who had never once been sorry to arrive.

Bridge Burner. The name was on the bag in white block letters. The woman herself was compact, all dense muscle and quick movement, wearing black jeans and a faded work shirt with the sleeves pushed up. There was engine oil under her nails. I could see it from twenty feet away because I had excellent vision and because, apparently, I was looking at her hands.

Short dark hair. A sharp chin. A mouth that had been a problem the last time I’d seen it, which was on a phone screen, forty-seven times, in a clip I had watched only for tactical reasons.

Only tactical reasons.

“Hey,” she said to the room at large. Then her eyes found me. “Captain.”

I looked at Mae.

Mae looked at her clipboard with the intensity of someone reading a ransom note.

“You invited her.”

“I invited a transfer candidate.”

“You invited her.”

“I invited the only available jammer within ninety miles who averages fourteen points per bout and doesn’t need a relocation stipend. Yes. I invited her.”

Bridget was already walking toward us. Not fast. Not slow. The pace of someone who knew exactly how much space she took up and enjoyed taking it. The gear bag bumped against her hip. She had a small tattoo on the inside of her wrist—a wrench, maybe, or something close to one—and a faint white scar across one knuckle that I absolutely did not need to be cataloging.

She stopped in front of me. Up close, she was smaller than I remembered. Not shorter by much—five-four or five-five to my five-eight—but compact in a way that made her look like she’d been built for leverage. Her eyes were dark. Steady. Amused, which I resented before she said a word.

“Dana Mercer,” she said. “It’s been a while.”

“North Coast bout. Last year.”

“Yeah.” Her mouth curved. “I remember.”

I remembered too. In full color. She’d come through turn two with a shoulder check that was perfectly legal and perfectly timed and had put me on the floor hard enough to knock the air out of my lungs. I’d landed flat, staring at the rafters, with the sound of the crowd folding over itself above me. And after the bout, someone had stuck a phone in her face, and she’d laughed and said, Mercer’s a good skater. Just easy to read.

Easy to read.

I had spent nine years making myself reliable. Precise. The person who didn’t miss a call or leave a gap or lose her temper. And this woman had turned all of that into a punch line in eight words.

“I understand you’re looking for a team,” I said.

“I’m looking for a team that needs me.”

“We need someone who can follow direction.”

“Great. I’m very good at that when the direction’s worth following.”

Mae made a small sound behind me that might have been a cough or a prayer.

I held Bridget’s gaze. “We run a structured program. Closed practices until the transfer is approved. Conditioning three nights a week. Attendance is not optional.”

“Sounds like a program.”

“It is.”

“Then I’ll put my skates on.” She shifted the bag on her shoulder, and the movement pulled her shirt tight across her chest for half a second, and I looked at the floor because I was checking the tape. “Unless there’s a form you want me to sign first.”

“There is a form.”

Her smile widened. “Of course there is.”

I ran the warm-up. I ran the footwork sequence. I ran the blocking drills with the same calm, even voice I used for everything, and I did not look at Bridget Walsh more than was strictly necessary for assessment.

Assessment required a lot of looking.

She was good. That was the problem. She was not merely fast; she was smart fast, the kind of jammer who saw the gap before it existed and got there just as it opened. She carried her weight low, knees bent deeper than most skaters could manage without losing speed, and she used her size like a lever—slipping under shoulders, pivoting on edges, making herself small in spaces that should have been closed. When Sol tried to wall her off on the outside, Bridget dropped her center of gravity, cut inside, and was gone before Sol’s weight had finished shifting.

“Shit,” Deacon said, admiring.

I wrote good lateral recovery on the clipboard and underlined it once, very neatly.

During the scrimmage, she took the star and scored on her first jam. Not a lucky break. Not a gift from a disorganized pack. She earned it, reading the defense, changing her approach twice, then committing to a line so narrow I would not have recommended it and making it work anyway.

When she came off the track, she was breathing hard, cheeks flushed, hair damp at the temples. She pulled her mouth guard out with two fingers and looked at me.

“How’s my direction-following?”

“You broke the pattern on the second pass.”

“The pattern was closed.”

“The pattern would have opened if you’d waited for the pivot.”

“Or I could go through the gap that was already there.” She shrugged. “Which I did. Which worked.”

“This is a team sport.”

“And I scored for the team.”

We stood there for a second. The rink hummed around us. Somewhere behind me, someone was retelling a story from last weekend, and someone else was laughing, and the ordinary noise of my team felt very far away.

She was close enough that I could smell her. Clean sweat. Something like motor oil underneath it, faint, stubborn, from a day spent working on engines. Her forearms were bare, wrist guards pushed up, and there was a thin red line where a strap had pressed into the skin.

I had an unreasonable thought about putting my thumb on that line.

I wrote needs integration on the clipboard.

“Again,” I said.

She grinned, slid her mouth guard back in, and went.

Practice ended at eleven-thirty. I stayed until the last skater left, checked the gear cage, and turned off the lights over the far end of the rink. The room changed in the half-dark, became older and stranger, the wood floor reflecting the emergency signs in dull green smears.

Bridget was still on the bench, pulling off her skates. She’d changed back into her work boots but hadn’t laced them, and she sat with her elbows on her knees and a water bottle hanging between her hands. Without the gear, she looked almost ordinary. Then she looked up and the almost disappeared.

“Waiting for a verdict?” she asked.

“Waiting for you to finish.”

“Same thing, probably.”

I leaned against the wall opposite the bench. I did not fold my arms. Folding my arms would look defensive, and I was not defensive. I was conducting a conversation.

“You’re good,” I said.

She looked at me for a moment. “That sounded painful.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Your jaw says otherwise.”

I unclenched it. She noticed. Of course she noticed.

“The transfer paperwork takes a week. If you’re serious, we’ll submit it tomorrow. You’d be eligible for the next bout.”

“I’m serious.”

“I need to know you’ll work within the system.”

“I need to know the system has room to breathe.” She sat back, and the bench creaked. “Look. I know you don’t like me.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to. You’ve been looking at me like I stole your parking spot since I walked in.” She took a drink, slow, and I watched her throat move because apparently I had lost the ability to look at anything else. “But I’m not here to make your life difficult. I’m here because I moved to Lake City for a job at my sister’s garage, and I need a team, and yours is the only one in this town that gives a shit about being good instead of just being loud about it.”

That surprised me. I didn’t let it show.

“I watched your last three bouts,” she said. “Your defense is tight. Your communication’s better than most leagues twice your size. You’ve got a pivot who can read a pack in her sleep. What you don’t have is anyone to put points up when Deacon’s gassed.”

“I’m aware.”

“I know you are. That’s why I’m here.” She capped the bottle. “I can be what you need, Mercer. You just have to let me.”

The words hung there. She meant the team. She meant the jammer slot. She meant a sport played on roller skates by women who paid dues and bought their own knee pads.

My body heard something else.

I pushed off the wall. “Paperwork’s in Mae’s inbox. She’ll send it over.”

“Great.” She stood, swung the bag over her shoulder. Up close again, the top of her head came to my eye level, and she had to tilt her chin to look at me. She did it without any loss of authority. “See you Thursday, Captain.”

“Dana is fine.”

Her mouth curved. “I’m sure it is.”

She left before I could decide what that meant. The double doors swung shut behind her, and I stood in the half-dark rink with my clipboard and my jaw and the sound of her work boots fading down the hall.

I didn’t move for a while.

At home, I put my gear bag in the hallway, hung my jacket on the hook, and went straight to the kitchen to make tea I didn’t want.

My apartment was tidy. Not in a show-home way, just in the way of a woman who lived alone and had figured out that a clear counter made her feel less like she was losing her mind. One plant on the windowsill. One dish in the drying rack. A calendar on the fridge with practice nights, bout dates, and a dentist appointment written in the same blue ink.

I changed into a T-shirt and sweatpants. I washed my face. I drank half the tea standing at the counter, looking at nothing.

Then I picked up my phone.

I knew where the clip was. I had it saved. This was not unusual; captains studied opponents. Captains kept footage. Captains did not generally watch the same eight-second post-bout interview at twelve-forty in the morning, but I had never claimed to be a typical captain.

There she was. A year younger, maybe, though she looked exactly the same. Helmet off, hair damp, face flushed with exertion and the particular pleasure of having won. The phone camera was too close, the audio tinny, someone shouting behind her. She laughed at something off-screen, then turned back.

Mercer’s a good skater. Just easy to read.

I watched it once. Then again. The second time I wasn’t listening to the words. I was watching the way her mouth moved around my name.

I set the phone down. I picked it up. I watched it a third time, and this time I noticed something I had somehow missed in forty-seven previous viewings: after she said easy to read, her eyes shifted. Not away from the camera exactly, but past it, toward something at the edge of the frame. Toward where I would have been standing, still in my gear, still shaking off the hit.

She’d been looking at me.

I closed the video. I put the phone facedown on the counter. I took a long breath through my nose and let it out slowly, the way I’d been taught to do when I was sixteen and furious and needed somewhere to put it.

My thighs were tight. My stomach felt low and warm and unsettled. I was angry. I was also, inconveniently, something else.

I went to bed and lay flat on my back in the dark. The ceiling had a hairline crack above the light fixture that I had been meaning to call the landlord about for six months. I looked at it. I thought about the ledger. I thought about eight weeks and a tournament purse and the weight of being the person everyone expected to have a plan.

Then I thought about her hands. The engine oil under her nails. The thin red line on her wrist. The way she’d said I can be what you need like it was a simple, factual offer.

I pressed my palms flat against the mattress on either side of my hips.

I did not touch myself. I want that on record. I lay there with my hands very deliberately nowhere near the place that wanted attention, and I thought about the exact distance between her mouth and mine, and I counted backward from one hundred, and I did not sleep for a very long time.

At two-seventeen, I picked up the phone again.

I opened the clip.

This time, I turned the sound off.

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Room Nine — A scene TOO HOT for retailers

The wedding is over. The bouquets are in Mae’s fridge. And Bridget has one last surprise for her wife: a brass key to Room 9 of the Lakeshore Motor Lodge. No drills, no stopwatch, no clothes they’re willing to ruin in public. One night to find out what Dana Mercer does when she finally, completely, lets go. The filthiest, tenderest scene in the book.

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