Her Rival Tastes Better by Aurora North - FF Sapphic Romance book cover

Her Rival Tastes Better — Bonus Chapter

Ours — The Supply Closet (Revisited)
by Aurora North

This bonus chapter takes place three months after the epilogue of Her Rival Tastes Better. Contains explicit sexual content. 18+ only.

Sloane

The lock on the fifteenth-floor supply closet was new.

Brushed nickel. Deadbolt. The kind of hardware that said someone made a request to facilities and facilities didn’t ask questions. I noticed it on a Tuesday — three months into our co-CD tenure, two months into the apartment we shared, six days into a creative disagreement about the Lux Botanica spring campaign that had turned the glass walls of 4A into a war zone of red and blue marker.

Harper noticed me noticing.

“I had it installed last week,” she said, behind me in the hallway. Her voice was low. Professional. The voice she used in client meetings and in the specific register that meant she was about to do something that was not professional at all.

“You installed a lock on the supply closet.”

“I submitted a facilities request citing security concerns about high-value print inventory.”

“We don’t have high-value print inventory.”

“We do now.” She held up a key. Small, silver, catching the overhead fluorescent. “There are two copies. I have one.”

She pressed the other into my palm. Her fingers lingered — the brush of her thumb across the center of my hand, a touch so deliberate and so brief that anyone watching would have seen a colleague handing over office supplies.

I closed my fingers around the key. The metal was warm from her pocket.

“Tonight,” she said. Not a question.

“Tonight.”

The argument that afternoon was about color temperature.

The spring campaign’s hero image needed to shift from the cool, clinical tones of the winter launch to something warmer — but how warm was the question. Harper wanted amber. Rich, golden, the color of late-afternoon light through honey. I wanted rose. Soft, flush, the color of skin after a hot bath.

“Amber reads as luxury,” she said, standing at the whiteboard with a marker in her hand and her blazer sleeves pushed to her elbows. Her forearms. God. Three months of sharing a bed and her forearms still did things to my higher brain function that should have been illegal.

“Rose reads as intimacy,” I countered. “The spring campaign is about renewal. About returning to your body after winter. Rose is the color of that — the blush, the warmth, the first flush of—”

“If you say ‘sensation’ I’m going to throw this marker at you.”

“Sensation.” I smiled. She threw the marker. I caught it. The team had long since stopped reacting to our skirmishes — Dani was working with headphones in, Ren was reviewing copy with the serene detachment of someone who’d accepted that their bosses were feral.

“Amber,” Harper said.

“Rose.”

“Amber.”

I stood. Walked to the whiteboard. Took a blue marker — my blue, always blue — and drew a gradient. Rose on the left, amber on the right, and in the center where they merged: a warm, luminous blush-gold that was neither and both.

“Compromise,” I said.

Harper looked at the gradient. Looked at me. The competitive fire in her eyes — the same gray fire I’d first seen in this room six months ago — shifted. Banked. Became something hotter and more focused.

“That’s not a compromise,” she said. “That’s better than both.”

“I know.” I capped the marker. “That’s what happens when you let me finish a sentence.”

Her jaw tightened. The muscle I’d memorized — the tell, the flex, the physical signature of Harper Knox restraining herself. She held my gaze for three seconds. Then she turned to the team.

“We’re done for the day.”

Dani looked at the clock. “It’s four-thirty.”

“We’re done,” Harper repeated. “For the day.”

Ren caught my eye. Mouthed: Have fun. I gave them nothing. They collected their $40 months ago; they didn’t need additional confirmation.

The team filed out. The bullpen emptied. The building shifted into its after-hours register — dim lights, climate-control hum, the particular silence of a space built for collaboration becoming a space built for something else entirely.

Harper locked the door of 4A. Turned to me.

“Fifteenth floor,” she said. “Five minutes.”

“Three.”

Her eyes darkened. “Don’t start what you can’t finish, Mercer.”

“I’ve never left anything unfinished. Especially you.”

She walked past me. Close — close enough that her shoulder brushed my chest, close enough that I could smell her (bergamot, linen, the warm undertone of a woman who’d been arguing for two hours and was vibrating with the specific energy that used to fuel our fights and now fueled something far more productive). She didn’t stop. She walked out of 4A, down the hallway, to the stairwell.

I counted to sixty. Then I followed.

The supply closet on fifteen was exactly as I remembered it — narrow, dim, lined with shelves, smelling like cardboard and toner. The broken fluorescent had been replaced. The new lock gleamed on the inside of the door.

Harper was already there. Standing in the center of the small room, blazer off, draped over a shelf. Her silk shell was untucked. Her hair was still in its bun but loosened — the pins already started, the controlled architecture beginning its planned demolition.

I stepped in. Closed the door. Turned the deadbolt. The click echoed off the concrete walls and we both felt it — the sound of a space becoming private. Becoming ours.

“This is where it started,” she said. Not the supply closet specifically — we’d started in the mezzanine storage room. But close enough. The same architecture of desire: a small room, a locked door, two women who’d been arguing all day and were about to convert the friction into something that required significantly less clothing.

“It started in 4A,” I corrected. “The first time you looked at my mouth.”

“I did not look at your—”

“Conference room. Week one. You looked at my mouth for exactly half a second and then overcompensated by being aggressive for the rest of the day.” I stepped closer. “I’ve been cataloguing your tells since September, Knox. Don’t try to revise the record.”

She grabbed me.

Not gently. The same way she’d grabbed me the first time — hands fisting in the front of my blouse, pulling me in with the decisive force of a woman who’d spent three months learning that she was allowed to take what she wanted and was still, every time, slightly amazed by the permission.

Our mouths met. Hard, open, the kiss of two people who’d been fighting about color theory for six hours and needed a different kind of resolution. She tasted like the espresso she’d been drinking all afternoon — bitter and hot and distinctly Harper. I bit her lower lip and she made the sound — the one I’d been collecting since the mezzanine, the low, guttural catch that lived in her chest and came out only when I surprised her.

“I want to try something,” I said against her mouth.

“What?”

“I want you to tell me what to do.”

She pulled back. Looked at me. Searching — the quick, analytical scan of a woman who’d learned to read me as fluently as I read her, looking for the strategy, the game, the hidden architecture of a request that sounded simple and was anything but.

“You never let me tell you what to do,” she said. Carefully. Because it was true — our dynamic had evolved, deepened, but the fundamental structure remained. I led. She surrendered. The reversal of her public persona was the kink, the trust, the thing that made the sex between us different from anything either of us had experienced before.

“I know.” I took her hands. Placed them on my waist. “I’m letting you now.”

Something shifted behind her eyes. Not the competitive fire — something deeper. The specific, luminous recognition of a woman being offered something she’d wanted and hadn’t known how to ask for.

“Anything?” she asked. Her voice had dropped. Low, rough, the register she only used in the dark, in the private, in the spaces where Harper Knox stopped being a creative director and became something more primal.

“Anything. I trust you.”

Three words. The three words that, between us, carried more weight than I love you — because we said I love you every morning over mismatched coffee, and I trust you was the thing that made the love possible.

Her hands tightened on my waist. Her grip shifted from holding to directing — the subtle but unmistakable transition from receiving to commanding. I felt the change in her body: the squaring of her shoulders, the lifting of her chin, the way her center of gravity settled and her presence expanded to fill the room.

“Turn around,” she said.

I turned.

Facing the shelf. The supply boxes, the stacked reams of paper, the mundane inventory of an office supply closet that was about to witness something profoundly un-mundane. Harper’s hands went to my hips. Drew me back against her. Her chest against my shoulder blades, her hips against my ass, her mouth at my ear.

“Hands on the shelf,” she said. “Don’t move them.”

I placed my palms flat on the metal shelf. Felt the cool surface, the dust, the industrial reality of the setting — and against it, the heat of her. The contrast was devastating. Cold metal and warm woman, the office and the lover, the professional context we were systematically desecrating.

Her hands moved. Down my sides. Over my hips. She gathered the fabric of my skirt — the pencil skirt I’d worn today specifically because I knew it drove her insane, the way it fit, the way it restricted my stride and made me move with a deliberation that she interpreted (correctly) as provocation.

She pushed it up. Slowly. The fabric bunching at my waist, her hands following the hem up my thighs, her fingertips leaving trails of heat on my bare skin. She stopped when the skirt was around my hips. Her thumbs hooked into the waistband of my underwear.

“These,” she said, “are in my way.”

“Then move them.”

She pulled them down. Not off — down. To my thighs, where they’d restrict my movement, keep my legs together, add an element of constraint that was deliberate and devastating. She knew what she was doing. She’d learned.

Her hand slid between my thighs from behind. I gasped — the sound sharp in the quiet room, echoing off the concrete. Her fingers found me and the intake of her breath — hot against my neck, the specific hitch that meant she’d felt how wet I was — sent a pulse of heat through my core.

“You’ve been like this since the argument,” she murmured. Not a question. Her fingers slid through the wetness, exploring, spreading, the unhurried survey of someone who owned this territory and knew it. “The color argument. You were wet while you were fighting me about rose versus amber.”

“I’m always wet when we fight.” Honest. Unguarded. The kind of admission I could make now — after the rooftop, after the I-love-yous, after the months of morning coffee and shared closet space and the daily, ordinary intimacy of a life built together. “You know that.”

“I know that.” Her fingers circled my clit. Slow. Maddeningly slow. “But hearing you say it never gets old.”

She pressed two fingers inside me from behind and I dropped my head forward, forehead against the shelf, my arms braced. The angle was deep — deeper from behind, her fingers curling, finding the spot she’d mapped months ago and could now locate with the precision of a woman who’d made a study of my body and graduated with honors.

“Don’t move your hands,” she reminded me. Low. Commanding. The voice of someone who was discovering, in real time, that she liked this — liked directing, liked being the one who set the terms, liked watching me follow instructions the same way she’d followed mine.

“Yes ma’am,” I said. And felt her shudder behind me — a full-body tremor that she couldn’t hide, the involuntary response to a word she hadn’t known she needed to hear.

“Say that again.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Her fingers drove deeper. Harder. The rhythm changing — from exploratory to intentional, the pace of a woman who’d heard something that unlocked a door she didn’t know existed. Her other hand came around my front, found my clit, and worked it in tandem with her thrusts.

“You’re going to come for me,” she said against my ear. “In this closet. Where it started. And you’re going to be loud about it because the door is locked and no one is coming to save you.”

“No one needs to save me.” I pressed back against her hand. “I’m exactly where I want to be.”

She fucked me against the supply shelf with the focused, relentless intensity that made her brilliant at everything she did — art direction, competition, love. Her fingers inside me, deep and curving. Her thumb on my clit, circling in the rhythm she’d learned was the one that broke me fastest. Her mouth on my neck, teeth grazing my pulse, the place she’d bitten months ago and still marked whenever she wanted the world to know I was hers.

She bit. Right on the pulse point. Hard enough to bruise. I cried out — the sound bouncing off the concrete walls, contained by the locked door, held in this space the same way she held me: completely, firmly, with no intention of letting go.

“Mine,” she said into my skin. The word that had started everything. The first honest thing she’d ever said about us. “Still mine.”

“Still yours.” And then, because she’d earned it — because she’d spent three months learning the soft parts and the brave parts and the daily, imperfect practice of being someone who loved out loud — I added: “Always yours.”

I came with her name ricocheting off the walls of a supply closet on the fifteenth floor, her fingers buried inside me, her teeth on my throat, and the word always in the air between us like a vow neither of us had planned and both of us meant.

She held me through the aftershocks. Gentle now — the transition she’d mastered, from fierce to tender in the space of a heartbeat. Her fingers eased out of me. Her arms wrapped around my waist. She pressed her face into the back of my neck and breathed, and I felt the exhale travel through my body like a current.

“My turn to tell you what to do,” I said. My voice was wrecked. Ravaged. The voice of someone who’d just been thoroughly, comprehensively taken apart in a room that smelled like printer toner.

“I thought I was in charge.”

“You were. Beautifully. Now sit on that box.”

She looked at the box — a large, sturdy shipping container, waist-height, designed for bulk paper delivery. She looked at me. Raised an eyebrow.

“Sit,” I said.

She sat.

I dropped to my knees.

Her breath caught — the sharp intake I’d heard a thousand times and would never tire of, the sound of Harper Knox anticipating what was coming and being unable to prepare for it no matter how many times it had come before.

I unfastened her trousers. Drew them down her legs, underwear with them. She sat on the box in her silk shell and nothing else from the waist down, her legs parted, and I looked up at her from the floor of a supply closet with what I suspected was an expression of undisguised worship.

“You installed a lock,” I said, “on a supply closet. You filed a facilities request. You cited high-value print inventory.”

“I’m a planner.”

“You’re a romantic.”

“Don’t tell anyone.”

I put my mouth on her and she stopped being able to form words.

She was wet — soaked, the evidence of what our argument had done to her, what watching me come had done to her, what the word ma’am had done to her. I tasted her and groaned against her, the sound vibrating through her clit, and her hand found my hair — the familiar grip, the anchor, the point of connection she always reached for when the pleasure exceeded her ability to hold still.

I ate her out on a shipping box in a supply closet with a deadbolt lock she’d installed for this exact purpose, and the absurdity of it — the beautiful, ridiculous, deeply-in-love absurdity — made me smile against her, which made her gasp, which made me double down.

I licked her in long, flat strokes. Found the rhythm — her rhythm, the one I’d memorized in her bed, in my bed, in our bed. Circled her clit with my tongue and slid two fingers inside her at the same time, curling upward, the dual assault that I knew from months of practice and devotion would break her in under three minutes.

“Sloane—” My name, cracked open. “I’m—”

“I know.” Against her. Into her. “Come for me, Harper. I want to feel it.”

She came with my name in her mouth and my head between her thighs and the locked door holding the world out and us in. Her walls pulsed around my fingers, her thighs clamped against my ears, her hand in my hair pulled hard enough to sting. I worked her through it — tongue and fingers, slow and relentless, easing her down from the peak into the warm, shuddering afterglow.

When I lifted my head, she was looking at me with the expression I’d fallen in love with — the one without walls, without armor, without strategy. Just Harper. Seen. Known. Loved.

“Hi,” she said. Breathless.

“Hi.”

“We just had sex in a supply closet.”

“We’ve had sex in worse.”

“The parking garage was worse.”

“The parking garage was iconic.”

She laughed. The real one. The chest-deep, surprised laugh that I’d been collecting since the first time I heard it, the rarest and most valuable sound in my life. She pulled me up from the floor. Kissed me — tasting herself on my mouth, the exchange we’d shared hundreds of times that still felt like a secret, like a sacrament, like the most intimate act two people could share.

We cleaned up. Dressed. She smoothed her hair. I smoothed my skirt. We looked at each other in the fluorescent light of a supply closet that smelled like toner and sex and us, and we were two Co-Creative Directors at one of Chicago’s most respected agencies, and we were ridiculous, and we were in love.

“Amber-rose,” she said. Straightening her blazer.

“What?”

“The color. For the spring campaign. The gradient you drew. We’ll call it amber-rose.” She unlocked the deadbolt. Opened the door. Checked the hallway — clear. Turned back to me with those gray eyes, warm and certain and mine. “It’s better than both.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s what happens when you let me finish a sentence.”

She walked out. I waited sixty seconds. Then I followed.

In the elevator, my phone buzzed.

Harper: Dinner at home. I’m cooking.

Sloane: You burn everything.

Harper: I’m ordering in and plating it to look homemade. Same thing.

Sloane: I love you.

Harper: I love you too. Also the spring campaign color is officially called Amber Rose and I’m putting your name on the creative brief.

Sloane: Our name.

Harper: Our name.

I locked my phone. Pressed it against my chest. Felt the mark on my throat — fresh, warm, a new entry in the ongoing record of two women who’d started as rivals and become the best thing that had ever happened to each other.

The elevator doors opened. I walked through the lobby and into the Chicago evening, and the city was bright and cold and ours.

Always ours.