🔥 The Gallery Wall 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Her Name on My Lease

Thank You for Reading! 💜

You made it to the bonus content—which means you’ve lived through Marin and Claire’s journey from strangers to soulmates in a too-small Brooklyn apartment. Thank you for giving their story a chance. This exclusive chapter is our gift to dedicated readers like you.

← Back to Book Page

✨ BONUS CHAPTER: The Gallery Wall ✨

A Her Name on My Lease Exclusive

This scene takes place one year after the epilogue.

MARIN

The spare bedroom was no longer a spare bedroom.

It hadn’t been one for months—not since Claire officially moved her last box of files to the nonprofit’s office and the room stopped being “the office” and started being “the room with the easel and the good light.” But today I’d made it official. The desk was gone. In its place: my largest easel, a padded stool, a floor lamp angled to replicate the gallery lighting I’d become obsessed with after the show, and a daybed pushed against the far wall, draped in the cream linen sheet that caught light the way I needed it to.

A private studio. In our apartment. For a very specific project.

“Close your eyes,” I told Claire.

She was in the hallway. She’d been banned from this end of the apartment for three hours while I assembled, arranged, rearranged, second-guessed, and then committed. She was holding a glass of wine—her second—and wearing the expression she wore when I was being dramatic, which was the expression of a woman who’d learned to find the drama endearing rather than exhausting.

“They’re closed.”

“Are they actually closed?”

“Marin. I am a woman who color-codes her emotional states. When I say my eyes are closed, my eyes are closed.”

I led her by the hand. Through the door. Into the center of the room, where the evening light—the June light, golden and long, the light that had witnessed every significant moment of our relationship—fell through the window and illuminated the space I’d built for her.

“Open.”

She opened her eyes. Turned slowly, taking in the room—the easel, the stool, the lamp, the daybed with its cream linen. The charcoal pencils laid out in a row on the table beside the easel, sorted by hardness, the way she’d taught me to sort things. The large blank sheet of paper clipped to the board, waiting.

“You built a studio,” she said.

“I built our studio.”

“In the spare bedroom.”

“In the room that used to be yours. Before it was mine. Before it was ours.”

She looked at the daybed. The cream sheet. The specific, intentional way the fabric draped. The angle of the lamp.

“You want to draw me,” she said. Not a question.

“I’ve always wanted to draw you. But I want to draw you different this time. Not from memory. Not while you’re sleeping. Not fragments—a hand, a hip, a collarbone.” I picked up the flannel from the daybed. The original. The foundational flannel. Washed a hundred times and still soft, still smelling faintly of us, still the garment that meant more than any piece of clothing should. “I want to draw you awake. Looking at me. In this.”

“Just the flannel.”

“Just the flannel.”

The blush. God, the blush. A year and a half of explicit, enthusiastic, surface-destroying sex and Claire Whitmore still blushed. The color started at her chest and climbed her neck and reached her cheeks and I wanted to draw the blush itself—the gradient, the warmth, the visible evidence of a woman who felt desire and still marveled at the feeling.

“Okay,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Draw me.”

She took the flannel. Walked to the bathroom. Came back two minutes later wearing it and nothing else—the shirt unbuttoned to the third button, the hem falling to mid-thigh, her legs bare, her hair loose around her shoulders. She looked like every fantasy I’d had since the towel incident in week one, except this version was real and she was mine and she was standing in our studio looking at me with an expression that said I trust you with this.

“Where do you want me?” she asked.

“The daybed. On your side. Head propped on your hand. The flannel—” I crossed to her. Adjusted the collar, opening it slightly, exposing the line of her collarbone. My fingers brushed her skin and she shivered. “Like that. Relaxed. Like you’re lying in bed on a Sunday morning and you’ve just woken up and you’re looking at me the way you look at me before you’ve remembered to perform anything.”

“I don’t perform anymore.”

“I know. That’s what I want to draw.”

She settled onto the daybed. On her side, one arm bent, head resting on her hand. The flannel shifted—riding up on one thigh, gaping slightly at the chest, the fabric falling in folds that the light caught and transformed into a study in texture and shadow. Her green eyes found mine and held.

I sat at the easel. Picked up the charcoal. And began.

Drawing Claire was always an act of devotion, but drawing her like this—awake, watching, aware of being watched—was something else. Something charged. Every line I put on the paper was a line her eyes tracked, and the awareness of her attention changed the quality of my marks the way an audience changed the quality of a performance.

I started with her face. The jaw, the cheekbones, the proportions I knew better than my own. Her eyes—wide, green, looking directly at me with the expression I’d been chasing for a year. Not performing. Not posing. Present. The expression of a woman who had nothing to hide and knew it.

“You’re staring,” she said.

“I’m studying.”

“You’re staring at my collarbone.”

“Your collarbone is architecturally significant.”

“That’s not a sentence people say.”

“It’s a sentence artists say. Constantly. Your collarbone creates a shadow in this light that I’ve been trying to capture for six months and I’m going to need you to stop talking so I can get it right.”

She smiled. The smile changed the shape of her face—softened it, lifted it—and I had to adjust the drawing because the smiling version was different from the neutral version and both were worth rendering and I only had one sheet of paper.

I drew the collar of the flannel. The way it fell open, revealing the slope of her breast—just the upper curve, the shadow where the fabric met skin, the suggestion of more beneath the cotton. My hand was steady. My pulse was not.

“Can I—” Claire shifted. The flannel rode higher on her thigh. “Can I unbutton another one?”

“You can do whatever you want.”

She undid the fourth button. The flannel fell open to her sternum, the fabric parting enough to show the inner curves of both breasts without fully revealing them. The tease of it—the deliberate, controlled exposure—was more erotic than nudity. This was Claire directing the scene. Curating the reveal. Using the flannel like a frame, choosing what to show and what to withhold.

I drew faster. The charcoal moved across the paper with an urgency that was part artistic and part something else—something lower, warmer, the specific arousal that came from looking at a beautiful woman in your flannel shirt with nothing underneath and knowing that the looking was sanctioned. That she wanted to be seen like this. That the seeing was the foreplay.

“Your breathing changed,” Claire said. Her voice was lower now. The voice she used in bed—not consciously, not performatively, but the register her body dropped into when arousal started rewiring her nervous system.

“My breathing is fine.”

“Your breathing is faster. And you’re gripping the charcoal harder. And your left knee is bouncing.”

“You’re supposed to be holding still.”

“I am holding still. I’m observing.”

“That’s my job.”

“Not anymore.” She reached for the fifth button. Undid it. The flannel fell fully open—still technically on her body, still covering her arms and her back, but the front was exposed now: the full curves of her breasts, the flat plane of her stomach, the line of her hip where it met the cream linen. She was naked under the flannel and the flannel was open and she was looking at me with the specific, devastating confidence of a woman who’d spent a year learning that her body was a source of power rather than performance.

“Draw that,” she said.

I drew it. The paper was filling—her face, her throat, the open flannel, the body beneath. My charcoal hand was shaking slightly and the tremor produced a quality in the lines that I couldn’t have achieved on purpose: a vulnerability, a rawness, the visible evidence that the artist was affected by the subject.

“You’re beautiful,” I said. Not as a compliment—as a statement of fact. The kind of observation an artist made when the subject transcended the medium, when the reality exceeded the rendering, when the person in front of you was so thoroughly and completely themselves that the drawing felt like an apology for its own inadequacy.

“Come here,” Claire said.

“I’m not done.”

“You’re done for now. Come here.”

I set down the charcoal. Crossed the room. Three steps—bigger than the kitchen, but the distance still felt infinite when Claire was on a daybed in an open flannel looking at me like I was the only thing in the world worth looking at.

I sat on the edge of the daybed. She reached for me—her hand on my jaw, pulling me down, kissing me with the unhurried authority of a woman who knew exactly what she wanted and was no longer willing to wait for it.

“You drew me,” she said against my mouth.

“I always draw you.”

“You drew me looking at you. Awake. That’s different. That’s—” She kissed me again. Deeper. Her hands in my hair. “That’s the most intimate thing anyone’s ever done.”

“More intimate than the kitchen table?”

“More intimate than all of it. Because you were seeing me. Not just looking—seeing. And I could feel it. I could feel your eyes on me like—” She broke off. Pulled my shirt over my head. “Like this.”

What happened next was not art.

Or it was the highest form of art—the kind that required no medium, no tool, no paper. The kind made with hands and mouths and the specific, accumulated knowledge of another person’s body that could only be gained through sustained, devoted attention.

Claire pushed the flannel off her own shoulders. Bare. Fully bare on the cream linen, in the golden light, in the studio I’d built for her. She pulled me on top of her and my knee slid between her thighs and the heat of her against my skin made my vision blur.

“You’re wet,” I said. “Already.”

“I’ve been wet since you picked up the charcoal. Do you have any idea what it does to me—watching you draw? Your hands. The focus. The way you look at me like I’m the most important thing you’ve ever studied.”

“You are the most important thing I’ve ever studied.”

“Then study me now. Without the pencil.”

I kissed her throat. Her collarbone—the architecturally significant one, the one I’d been drawing, the one that tasted like salt and vanilla. I traced the line of it with my tongue and she arched into me, her hands pulling at my jeans, the urgent mechanics of undressing that we’d performed a hundred times and that still felt like unwrapping something precious.

My jeans came off. My bra. We were bare together on the daybed in the studio in the golden light, and I took a moment—one breath, one suspended second—to compose the image the way I would have composed a drawing: Claire beneath me, hair fanned on cream linen, flushed, her eyes dark with want, her body open and waiting and mine.

“Stop composing,” she said. “Start touching.”

I touched.

My mouth found her breast and she gasped—the sharp, involuntary inhale that always preceded the cascade, the first domino in the chain of responses I’d mapped over eighteen months and that still produced, every time, the specific thrill of discovery. My tongue circled her nipple, slow, then firmer, and her hand fisted in my hair and pulled me closer.

“More,” she said.

I worked down her body. Kissing the terrain I’d just drawn—the sternum, the ribs, the soft plane of her stomach—translating the two-dimensional study into three-dimensional experience, closing the gap between observation and participation. The drawing was still on the easel across the room, half-finished, watching us with the unblinking attention of art.

I reached her hips. Kissed the bone that jutted above the cream linen. She spread her legs—the deliberate opening, the invitation that had once made her blush and now made her bold—and I settled between them and pressed my mouth to her inner thigh.

“Marin. Don’t tease.”

“I’m not teasing. I’m building.” A kiss on the other thigh. Higher. “An artist doesn’t rush the detail work.”

“An artist who teases gets her charcoal privileges revoked.”

I put my mouth on her.

The sound she made filled the studio—the room with its bare walls and high ceiling that amplified everything, that turned every gasp into an echo and every moan into a symphony. I worked with the focused precision I brought to drawing: reading the subject, responding to the feedback, adjusting pressure and angle in real time based on the data her body produced. The tremor in her thighs. The rhythm of her hips. The specific, escalating pitch of her breathing that told me exactly how close she was and exactly how to keep her there.

I slid two fingers inside her and curled them to the spot I’d discovered fourteen months ago and had been exploiting mercilessly ever since. The dual sensation—my mouth on her clit, my fingers inside her, the coordinated assault on two fronts—produced the response it always produced: Claire’s back arched off the daybed, both hands gripped the cream linen, and the sound from her throat went from words to syllables to the pure, unstructured vocalization of a woman past the point of language.

“Marin—I’m going to—God—right there, don’t—”

I didn’t move. Didn’t change a thing. Held the exact position, the exact pressure, the exact rhythm, and let her ride it—the building wave, the held breath, the single, suspended second at the apex where everything was possible and nothing had yet resolved—

She came.

The orgasm was loud. The studio amplified it the way a gallery amplified art—giving it space, giving it resonance, letting the sound expand to fill the room and bounce off the walls and settle into the corners like something permanent. Her body shook. Her thighs clamped around my head. Her hands pulled my hair hard enough to hurt and I loved it, the pain that meant I did this, I made this happen, I am the reason this woman is falling apart.

I gentled my touch. Softened. Brought her down the way I built a drawing—gradually, attentively, honoring the transition from intensity to stillness.

She pulled me up. Kissed me. Tasted herself on my mouth—the exchange that always made her groan, the intimate circuit completed.

“Your turn,” she said.

“I’m okay—”

“Lie down.”

The command voice. The one she’d developed over eighteen months—the authoritative register that existed nowhere in Claire’s professional life, that belonged exclusively to this apartment and this bed and this specific context, the voice that made my stomach drop and my thighs clench.

I lay down.

Claire climbed on top of me and the golden light caught her body—the angles, the curves, the shadows that I’d been drawing for an hour and that were now pressed against me, warm and real and infinitely better than any rendering. She kissed my neck. My collarbone. The vine tattoo she always traced. She followed the line of it with her tongue and I shuddered beneath her.

“I’m going to do something,” she said against my skin.

“What?”

“I’m going to study you. The way you study me. I’m going to look at every part of you and touch every part of you and I’m not going to rush because an artist doesn’t rush the detail work.”

“You’re throwing my own line back at me.”

“I’m learning from the master.”

She started at my throat. Kissed the hollow where my pulse was hammering. Moved to my ear—the soft bite on the lobe that she’d learned made me gasp, that she deployed at strategic moments to dismantle whatever composure I had remaining. Her mouth traced my jaw. My neck. The junction of neck and shoulder where she bit down—not hard enough to mark above the collar line, because Claire was considerate even in her most devastating moments—and the sensation shot straight to my center.

She moved lower. My breasts. Her mouth closed around one nipple while her hand found the other—the coordinated attention that demonstrated, every time, the organized intelligence she brought to everything, the ability to manage multiple priorities simultaneously that made her brilliant at her job and lethal in bed.

I was making sounds. I couldn’t help it—the studio amplified everything, and the sounds I was making bounced off the walls and came back to me and the feedback loop of hearing my own arousal made the arousal worse, which made the sounds louder, which made the loop tighter.

“I love that sound,” Claire said. “The one you make when you’re trying not to be loud and failing.”

“I’m not—”

“You are. And I want more of it.”

Her hand slid between my legs and found me soaked. She made a sound of her own—a soft, satisfied hum that vibrated against my breast and made my hips jerk.

“You got this wet from drawing me?” she asked.

“I got this wet from you. From the flannel and the buttons and the way you looked at me while I was working. Like you were daring me to keep my hands on the charcoal when every part of me wanted them on you.”

“I was.”

“You scheming—”

“Targeted. Flirtation.” She slid two fingers inside me and the last word disappeared into a moan. “It’s a valid methodology.”

She set a rhythm. Slow. Devastating. The patient, methodical pace of a woman who’d learned my body the way she learned everything—thoroughly, attentively, with the systematic precision of someone who retained data and applied it strategically. Her thumb found my clit. The dual rhythm—inside and out, the push and the press—was the combination she’d perfected and that produced, every single time, the same catastrophic result.

“Look at me,” she said.

I looked. Green eyes in the golden light. The face I’d drawn a hundred times. The woman who’d walked up three flights of stairs in a cardigan and rearranged my entire life.

“I love you,” she said. “I love this studio. I love that you built it for me. And I want you to come.”

I came.

Hard. The orgasm hit like a wave breaking—the specific, devastating release of a woman who’d spent an hour looking without touching and was now being touched with an expertise that bordered on criminal. My back arched off the daybed. My hand gripped the cream linen—the same linen she’d gripped ten minutes ago, the shared surface, the evidence of mutual destruction. I said her name. I said it again, louder, letting the studio amplify it, letting the sound fill the room and the room hold it.

She held me through every wave. Her fingers steady. Her eyes on mine. The unwavering attention that was, I understood now, her form of art. She didn’t draw with charcoal. She drew with presence. With patience. With the devoted, meticulous focus of a person who believed that the act of paying attention was the highest form of love.

We lay on the daybed in the studio. The golden light had shifted to amber—the late evening transition, the city settling, the room glowing with the specific warmth of a space that had just witnessed something private and beautiful.

“The drawing,” Claire said. “I want to see it.”

“It’s not finished.”

“I want to see it anyway.”

I pulled it from the easel. Brought it to the daybed. We looked at it together—the half-finished portrait of Claire in the flannel, the face fully rendered, the body sketched in loose, trembling lines that carried the visible evidence of what had been happening to the artist while she worked.

“It’s shaking,” Claire said. “The lines. Here.” She traced the charcoal rendering of her hip. “You were shaking when you drew this.”

“You were unbuttoning the flannel. My hand was not steady.”

“It’s better this way. The tremor. It makes it alive.”

“Everything about you makes it alive.”

“Are you going to finish it?”

“I’m going to finish it. And I’m going to hang it here. On this wall. The gallery wall.” I gestured at the blank white wall above the daybed. “Every drawing I make of you in this studio goes on this wall. Our private gallery. Just for us.”

“An exhibit no one else will ever see.”

“The best art is always private.”

She leaned her head against my shoulder. We sat naked on the daybed in the studio in the amber light, looking at the blank wall that would become, over months and years, a record of us. Every drawing a chapter. Every line a sentence. The ongoing, unfinished, infinitely expanding story of two people in a Brooklyn apartment who were still—after the lease, after the gallery show, after the theoretical cat became an actual cat named Pencil who was currently asleep on our bed—still finding new ways to see each other.

“The cat,” Claire said suddenly.

“What about the cat?”

“Pencil was in the bedroom when we started. What if he wandered in?”

“I closed the door.”

“You specifically closed the studio door so the cat wouldn’t witness—”

“I closed the studio door because this room is for us. For making art and making love and being the version of ourselves that exists only when we’re alone. Pencil has the rest of the apartment. This is ours.”

She kissed my shoulder. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“And I love this studio.”

“I know.”

“And I want to do this again. Next Saturday. Same time. Same flannel. Maybe—” The blush. There it was. Eighteen months and counting. “Maybe different poses.”

“Different poses.”

“I may have ideas.”

“Claire Whitmore has a spreadsheet for nude modeling poses.”

“I have a list. A spreadsheet would be overkill.”

“A list.”

“Organized by category.”

“Of course it is.”

I pulled her closer. She came—the instinctive settling, the body that had learned to orient toward mine the way a compass oriented toward north. Outside, the city hummed. Inside, the studio held us. The drawing on the easel. The blank wall waiting. The flannel on the floor where it had been discarded and where it would stay until one of us picked it up, which would be Claire, because Claire picked things up and I left them on floors, and the difference between us was the engine that made the whole thing work.

“Same time next Saturday,” I said.

“I’ll bring the list.”

“I’ll bring the charcoal.”

“Deal.”

She closed her eyes. I held her. And on the easel across the room, the half-finished drawing of a woman in a flannel shirt watched over us—the trembling lines, the open collar, the expression of a person who was fully, irrevocably, unapologetically home.

We hope this bonus chapter was worth the click.

Don’t forget to leave a review and join our newsletter for more exclusive content!

With love,
Aurora North

The Brooklyn Leases Series

More sapphic romance from the women of Brooklyn

Never Miss a Release

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