Lights Out

A Keep It Down Next Door Bonus Scene
by Aurora North

← Back to Keep It Down Next Door

Eden

At 9:58 p.m. on the nineteenth of December, Eden Varick opened the gray metal panel in her front hallway and turned off the power to her own apartment.

She did it the way she did most things. Deliberately. In order. Kitchen, living room, bath, bedroom, office. Each breaker made a small, flat click under her thumb, and each time it did, another part of 4A went dark and silent. The refrigerator stopped humming. The router’s blue eye blinked out. The little green standby light on the dishwasher, which she had never once in three years consciously noticed, went away, and she noticed its absence like a missing tooth.

Then she stood in the dark for a moment and listened.

The radiators were still going. The Wexford’s heat came up from a boiler in the basement that Gerald tended like an elderly and temperamental horse, and no breaker on the fourth floor could touch it. The pipes ticked. Somewhere below her, faintly, the Oyelarans’ television was playing something with a laugh track. Outside, it had started snowing at four, soft and steady, nothing like the ice that had come down a year ago and coated every branch on the street in glass.

It wasn’t a real blackout.

That was the point.

She picked up the lantern from the hall table—one of the four battery lanterns from the bin marked EMERGENCY — LIGHT, fully charged, set to its lowest, warmest setting—and walked down her dark hallway to the office.

The door in the wall was closed.

It was almost never closed. But she’d closed it herself at six o’clock, with Mara on the other side of it, and said, “Don’t open this until you hear from me,” and Mara had narrowed her eyes and said, “Is this a bit?” and Eden had said, “It’s a notice,” and closed it in her face.

She’d heard Mara laughing on the other side of it for a solid minute.

Now she set the lantern down on the desk. She put her hand flat on the Tricorn Black paint. On the other side, she knew, it was green. Forest Rebellion green, six panels, a brass lion on the escutcheon glaring out at Mara’s office with ancient disapproval.

She knocked three times.

On my way.

There was a pause. Then, from the other side, very close, as if Mara had been sitting on the floor with her back to the door: two knocks.

Yes.

Eden opened the door.

Mara was sitting on the floor with her back to the doorframe, exactly as Eden had pictured. She was wearing Eden’s gray undershirt, which was not the one Eden had been sleeping in, because that one was on Eden, which meant Mara had gone into Eden’s dresser at some point today and taken the other one, which meant there were two of them now and Eden had not been informed. Her curls were down. Her legs were bare. Her face was lit gold from below by her own phone, which she was holding up to Eden like evidence.

“Your apartment,” Mara said, “just went dark. I watched it under the door. All the little lights. One by one. Click, click, click.” She turned the phone around. The screen said 9:58. “Eden.”

“Mara.”

“Did you flip your own breakers?”

“I did.”

“On purpose.”

“Yes.”

Mara looked at her for a long moment. Then her eyes went past Eden, to the lantern glowing on the desk, and to the dark doorway beyond it, and something in her face changed. Went soft and wide and very still.

“What’s today,” she said.

It wasn’t a question. She knew. Eden watched her know.

“The nineteenth,” Eden said.

“A year.”

“A year tonight. The power went at 1:52 in the morning. But I didn’t think you’d appreciate being woken at 1:52 in the morning.”

“I would have killed you.”

“I know. So I moved it up.” Eden held out her hand. “Your turn.”

“My turn for what?”

“Your panel is in your hall closet. Behind the vacuum you don’t use.”

Mara stared at her hand. Then she laughed—the real one, the one that cracked in half—and took it, and let Eden pull her to her feet, and walked her own dark hallway with Eden right behind her and the lantern swinging. She flipped her breakers herself. Every one. She did it with great ceremony, announcing each room like a stop on a train line. “Kitchen. Bathroom. Salmon bathroom. The bedroom, may she rest. My ring light, who has done nothing wrong—”

The ring light’s little red standby dot went out.

4B was dark.

Mara turned around in the hall closet doorway and looked at Eden, and in the lantern light, with the snow falling past the window at the end of the hall and the whole fourth floor gone quiet around them, she looked exactly, precisely, devastatingly the way she’d looked a year ago on Eden’s doorstep, with her lips going blue and her breath whistling and her stupid podcast still going on her dying phone.

Except she was warm. Except she was breathing easy. Except she was smiling.

“Okay,” Mara whispered. “Now what.”

“Now,” said Eden, “you come to the only warm room on the fourth floor.”

She’d set it up the way she’d set it up the first time. She couldn’t help it. She’d tried, this afternoon, to do something different, something romantic in a way other people would recognize—she’d stood in the aisle of a Target in Colonie holding a box of forty tea lights for almost five full minutes—and in the end she’d put them back, because Mara had asthma and open flame in a closed bedroom was a bad idea, and because the truth was that Eden didn’t want a different night. She wanted that one. She wanted to do it again with nothing wrong.

So: her bedroom. The blackout curtains drawn. Two lanterns, low and gold, one on each nightstand. The extra duvet from the linen closet, the heavy one, folded at the foot of the bed. A thermos on the nightstand, because she was who she was, full of the ginger tea Mara liked. The pulse oximeter, which Eden had not needed to put out and had put out anyway, and then felt ridiculous, and then left it.

Mara stopped in the doorway and saw all of it.

She saw the thermos. Eden watched her see the thermos.

“Oh my God,” Mara said, very quietly. “You made me broth.”

“It’s tea.”

“It’s thermos tea.”

“Heat,” Eden said, “is not a feeling.”

Mara made a sound Eden had never heard her make before. It started as a laugh and went somewhere else halfway, and her hand came up over her mouth, and her eyes went bright and wet in the lantern light.

“You can’t,” Mara said through her fingers. “You can’t just say that to me. You can’t just walk around saying things like that. That’s—Eden, that was the first nice thing you ever said to me, and you said it like you were reading me a statute—”

“I was trying very hard not to kiss you.”

Mara lowered her hand.

“What?”

“On the landing. With the thermos. You opened your door in that terrible sweatshirt with your lips going blue and you looked at me like I was the last person on earth you’d let help you, and I was trying,” Eden said, “very, very hard not to kiss you. So I told you about thermodynamics instead.”

Mara just stared at her.

“I’ve been wanting to tell you that for a year,” Eden said. “I thought tonight was a good night for it.”

Mara crossed the room in three steps and kissed her.

It was not like the first time.

The first time Eden had held herself back for hours. Kept her hands careful and her voice low and her own need folded away somewhere small and airtight, because Mara was sick, and scared, and cold, and because Eden had spent her whole life believing that the only safe way to want something was quietly.

Tonight she didn’t hold anything.

She walked Mara backward to the bed with her hands in her hair and her mouth on her mouth, and Mara was already pulling at the hem of Eden’s undershirt, both of their undershirts, the matching ones, and laughing into the kiss about it—“We’re twins, Eden, we look like a couple on a cruise”—and Eden said “Arms up,” low and flat, and Mara’s arms went up so fast she nearly hit Eden in the face.

Eden pulled the shirt off over her head and dropped it on the floor.

She didn’t fold it.

Mara noticed. Mara’s eyes went to the shirt on the floor, and then back to Eden’s face, and went dark and startled and delighted.

“You just—”

“I know.”

“On the floor—”

“Lie down, Mara.”

Mara lay down.

She lay back on Eden’s pale gray sheets in nothing but a pair of black cotton underwear, her curls spread over the pillow, her chest already flushed, the lanterns turning her skin to honey. Eden stood at the side of the bed and looked at her. Took her time about it. Let herself look the way she’d wanted to look a year ago in the dark and hadn’t been able to, because there had only been a little lantern light and the blue glow of the pulse ox, and because she hadn’t yet known she was allowed.

Her throat. The small gold hoops she never took out. Her breasts, full and soft, nipples already tight in the cool air. The pale stretch marks silvering her hips. The little scar on her knee from a table saw she refused to discuss. The way her stomach rose and fell, fast, because Eden was looking at her and Mara had never in her life been able to hold still for being looked at.

“You’re staring,” Mara said.

“I am.”

“Say something.”

“You’re beautiful.”

“Something else—”

“You’re beautiful,” said Eden, “and you’re mine, and in about ten minutes you’re going to be so loud Mr. Oyelaran is going to hear you through four inches of acoustic batting and a resilient channel system installed per Exhibit D.”

Mara’s mouth fell open.

Then she grinned. Wide, wicked, thrilled. “Is that a challenge?”

“It’s a finding of fact.”

Eden pulled her own undershirt off and let it fall on top of Mara’s. Pushed her sleep shorts down and stepped out of them. And climbed onto the bed, onto Mara, her knees on either side of Mara’s hips, and bent down and kissed her again. Slower this time. Deep and wet and unhurried, with her whole bare body pressed along Mara’s and Mara’s hands already running up her back, over her shoulder blades, into her hair.

“A year ago,” Eden said against her mouth, “I made you be quiet.”

“I remember.”

“I made you hold still. I made you bite the pillow. I put my hand over your mouth.” She kissed down Mara’s jaw. The soft place under her ear. “And every time you made a sound, I stopped.”

“I remember,” Mara said, and her voice was already fraying.

“I want to tell you something about that.” Eden’s mouth moved down Mara’s throat. Over her collarbone. “I didn’t make you be quiet because of the walls. Or the neighbors. Or the bylaws.”

“No?”

“No.” She reached Mara’s breast and closed her mouth over it, and Mara’s back came up off the bed. Eden took her time. Circled the nipple with her tongue, drew it in, sucked until Mara’s fingers clenched in her hair and a soft, broken oh came out of her—and then pulled back just enough to breathe against the wet skin. “I made you be quiet because I’d spent two weeks listening to you through a wall, Mara. And if I’d let you be loud that night—if I’d heard you like that from inside the room, a foot away, with my hands on you—”

She switched to the other breast. Bit down, gently, and Mara cried out.

“—I didn’t think I’d survive it,” Eden finished. “So I made a game of it. So I’d have something to hold on to.”

Mara was panting. Her hips had started rocking up under Eden’s, slow, helpless little rolls. “And now?”

Eden lifted her head.

“Now I’m done holding on,” she said. “No game. No rules. No quiet hours.” She slid one hand down Mara’s stomach, over the soft curve of it, and hooked her fingers into the waistband of Mara’s underwear. “Tonight you make every sound you want to make. And I’m going to listen to every one of them.”

She dragged the underwear down Mara’s legs and threw it somewhere behind her.

She didn’t look where it landed.

She went down on her first.

She hadn’t planned to. She’d had a plan, an actual one, in an actual order, and it had gone out of her head the moment she knelt between Mara’s thighs in the lantern light and saw how wet she already was—glossy and swollen and open, her inner thighs slick with it—and heard Mara say, raw and shaking, “Please, Eden, please, I’ve been waiting since six o’clock, you closed a door in my face—”

Eden put her mouth on her.

Mara shouted.

It wasn’t a word. It was a sound, bright and cracked and enormous, and it went through Eden like current. She held Mara’s hips down with both forearms and licked her slowly, flat and broad from her entrance to her clit, tasting her, and Mara’s hands went into her hair and gripped hard and she said “Oh, fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck” at a volume that had absolutely nothing to do with daytime norms.

Eden didn’t stop.

She didn’t stop, and she didn’t slow down, and she didn’t put a hand over Mara’s mouth. For a year she’d wondered what Mara would sound like if nobody asked her to keep it down. Now she found out. Mara cursed. Mara begged. Mara laughed, once, breathless and disbelieving, when Eden sucked her clit between her lips and flicked it with her tongue and Mara’s thigh smacked into the side of her head. Mara said Eden’s name in about eleven different ways, and every single one of them landed low in Eden’s belly and pulled.

“Your mouth,” Mara gasped, “your mouth, Eden, how is your mouth—you argue for a living, how is it also—oh—”

Eden slid two fingers into her.

Mara went incoherent.

She was so wet Eden’s fingers sank in to the knuckle with no resistance at all, hot and tight and fluttering. Eden curled them, found the soft ridged place she’d mapped a hundred times now, and pressed, and kept her tongue moving on Mara’s clit in the tight, steady circles that she knew—she knew, she had notes, she had an entire private body of case law on this—would take Mara apart in under two minutes.

It took ninety seconds.

Mara came with her back bowed off the bed and both hands fisted in Eden’s hair, and she did not bite a pillow, and she did not hold her breath, and she did not keep it down. She screamed. A long, ragged, full-throated cry that bounced off Eden’s bare walls and Eden’s blackout curtains and filled the whole dark room up to the ceiling, and Eden felt her clench and pulse around her fingers and kept going, kept licking her softer and softer through it, until the scream broke into gasps and the gasps broke into whimpers and Mara’s hands went slack in her hair and she started, helplessly, to laugh.

“Oh my God,” Mara said to the ceiling. “Oh my God. Mr. Oyelaran definitely heard that.”

Eden kissed the inside of her thigh. “Exhibit D was rated to fifty-two decibels.”

“That was more than fifty-two decibels.”

“I know,” said Eden. “I was there.”

When Mara could see again, she propped herself up on her elbows and looked down the length of her own body at Eden, who was still lying between her legs with her chin on Mara’s hip bone, and said, “Okay. What’s in the drawer.”

Eden went still.

“What?”

“Don’t what me. You have your planning face. You’ve had your planning face since breakfast. You bought a new thing.” Mara’s eyes narrowed. “You went to the store on Lark Street. The one with the tasteful window. You went in there in your coat.”

“I did not—”

“Eden Varick.”

Eden closed her eyes.

“I went in there in my coat,” she admitted.

Mara whooped.

It was, as a matter of record, extremely loud.

Eden got up. She walked—naked, in lantern light, with Mara watching her the entire way and narrating it under her breath, POV: the hottest lawyer in the Capital Region walks across her own bedroom with no pants on—to the dresser, and knelt, and opened the bottom drawer. The one labeled PERSONAL. The label was still there. She had considered, once, taking it off. She had decided that she liked it too much.

Inside, the harness from last winter was coiled in its place. Beside it, in the spot where the sealed blue clamshell had been, there was a new one.

This one was for her.

Not for her to receive. For her to wear. A harness cut differently from the first one, briefs-style, black and soft, made for a body that didn’t want to fuss with seven buckles in the dark. And a toy that the woman in the tasteful shop on Lark Street had spent twenty-five patient minutes helping her choose, while Eden stood at the counter in her charcoal coat and asked precise, clinical, extremely thorough questions about silicone density and curve radius and whether it would do this, specifically, for the person underneath, and the woman had finally said, kindly, “Honey, whoever she is, she’s very lucky,” and Eden had turned the color of a fire truck.

She stood up with it in her hands and turned around.

Mara had stopped narrating.

She was sitting up now, in the middle of the bed, with her knees drawn up and her curls wild and her lips parted, and she was looking at what Eden was holding.

“Last year,” Eden said, “you asked me what I wanted. And it took me four tries to tell you.”

“I remember.”

“This spring you asked me again. It took me one.”

Mara’s eyes came up to hers. Very bright.

“I don’t want to take any tries tonight,” Eden said. “So I’m not going to ask. I’m going to tell you. I want to wear this. I want to fuck you with it. I want you on your hands and knees on my bed, and I want to hold your hips and watch you take it, and I want you to be as loud as you want the entire time.” She took a breath. It shook only a little. “And I want to be loud too. For once. I’ve never—I don’t know if I can. But I want to try. With you.”

It was very quiet in the room.

Then Mara said, softly, “Zero tries.”

“Zero tries,” Eden agreed.

“Come here,” said Mara, “and let me help you with the buckles.”

There was only one buckle.

Mara helped with it anyway. She knelt up on the bed and did it herself, her fingers warm and careful at Eden’s hip, and then she ran her palms up Eden’s stomach and over her breasts and pulled her down into a long, slow kiss, with the new weight of the toy pressed hot and heavy between them.

“Look at you,” Mara breathed against her mouth. “Look at you. You look like a problem.”

“Hands and knees,” said Eden.

Mara’s breath caught audibly.

Then she turned around.

She went down onto her hands and knees in the middle of Eden’s bed, in the lantern light, and looked back over her shoulder, curls falling across her face, cheeks flushed, eyes huge and dark. Eden knelt up behind her and put her hands on Mara’s hips and for a moment just held her there, feeling her tremble. The long golden line of her back. The soft round swell of her ass. The slick shine of her between her thighs, where Eden had already made her come once and where she was, impossibly, even wetter than before.

Eden poured lube into her palm and stroked it over the length of the toy, slow, watching Mara watch her do it.

“Eden—”

“Tell me if it’s too much.”

“It’s not going to be too much, I’m going to die if you don’t—”

Eden lined herself up and pushed in.

Slowly. One long, steady inch at a time, watching Mara’s body take her, feeling the resistance give and give and give. Mara’s head dropped between her shoulders. Her fingers clawed into the sheets. And the sound that came out of her—low and long and wrecked, rising as Eden sank deeper, cresting into a broken cry when Eden’s hips finally met her ass and Eden was all the way in—was the most beautiful thing Eden had ever heard in her life.

She stayed there. Buried. Holding still.

The base of the toy pressed snug against her own clit through the soft fabric of the harness, a hot, dense, promising pressure, and her thighs were already shaking.

“Mara,” she said. It came out of her rough. “Mara. Are you—”

“Move,” Mara sobbed. “Yes. Move, please, God, Eden, I’m fine, I’m so much better than fine—”

Eden moved.

She drew back slowly and pushed in again, and Mara moaned, loud and low. Again. Deeper. The angle was right—the woman on Lark Street had been right—and on the third stroke Eden felt it hit, felt Mara’s whole body jolt and clench around the toy, heard her cry out sharp and high, and she tightened her hands on Mara’s hips and did it again. And again. Found the rhythm the way she found the rhythm of an argument, by feel, by listening, by paying close and total attention to every tiny sign the other side gave away.

Mara gave away everything.

“There,” she gasped. “There, right—oh my God, there, don’t—don’t stop, don’t you dare stop—”

Eden didn’t stop.

She fucked her deep and steady, harder now, the slap of her hips against Mara’s ass loud in the quiet room. The headboard started to knock. Knock. Knock. Knock. Against the wall. Against the shared wall. The new one, the insulated one, per Exhibit D—and Eden realized it with a jolt of something hot and wild and completely unlike her.

Somewhere on the other side of that wall was Mara’s empty bedroom. And Mara’s big walnut bed. And Mara’s gold mirror.

A year ago it had been the other way around.

A year ago it had been Mara’s headboard, and Eden lying on this side in the dark with her fists clenched, listening.

“Mara,” she said. Louder than she’d meant to. And then, because the pressure against her clit was building and building with every thrust and she couldn’t stop it and didn’t want to, “Mara—God—”

Mara looked back over her shoulder.

Her face was flushed and wet and wrecked and absolutely radiant.

“There she is,” Mara whispered. “There she is. Oh, Eden. Let me hear you.”

Something in Eden’s chest came loose.

She leaned forward, over Mara’s back, braced one hand on the mattress beside Mara’s hand and wrapped the other arm around her waist and slid it down between her legs, and found her clit, and rubbed it hard and fast in time with her hips—and she heard herself. Heard her own breath going ragged and loud. Heard herself moan, low and uncontrolled, against the back of Mara’s neck. Heard herself say Mara’s name again, and again, and then things that weren’t Mara’s name at all, filthy things, true things, things she’d never said out loud to anyone in her life—you feel so good, you take it so well, I love you, I love you, I love listening to you, I love you—

Mara came first.

She came screaming Eden’s name into Eden’s pillow—not to muffle it, Eden realized, but because her arms had given out and she’d collapsed forward and the pillow was simply where her face was—and even muffled it was enormous, and she clenched so hard around the toy that Eden felt it in the base, felt it push back against her, and that was it, that was the end, the pressure broke and Eden came too.

She came loud.

She didn’t decide to. She had no say in it at all. It tore up out of her from somewhere under her ribs, a long, raw, shaking cry she’d never heard come out of her own mouth before, and she heard it hit the walls of her silent, orderly bedroom and fill it up, and she didn’t stop it. She let it go. She held on to Mara and shook and cried out and kept crying out, over and over, with her forehead pressed between Mara’s shoulder blades and her whole body pulsing, until there was nothing left in her lungs at all.

The headboard knocked one last time against the wall between their bedrooms.

Then everything was quiet.

They lay tangled together for a long time afterward.

Eden had gotten the harness off, eventually, with Mara’s help and a great deal of giggling. Now it was on the floor, with everything else. Both undershirts. Mara’s underwear. Eden’s sleep shorts. The extra duvet, which had never actually been needed, because the radiators were still clanking away and the room was warm and it had never, not for one second, been cold.

Mara’s head was on her chest. Her fingers were drawing slow, idle shapes on Eden’s stomach.

“You were loud,” Mara said.

“I’m aware.”

“You were really loud.”

“I was present for it.”

“Eden.” Mara lifted her head. Her eyes were shining. “You were louder than me.”

“That,” said Eden, “is not supported by the record.”

“It is absolutely supported by the record. I’m the record. I was there. Mr. Oyelaran was there, probably, in spirit, with his new headphones—”

Eden laughed.

It surprised her, still, sometimes, how easily it came now. It just came up out of her like water, and Mara’s face did the thing it always did when she heard it, went soft and bright and a little bit stunned, as if she’d been handed something she was never going to get used to.

“Can I tell you something,” Eden said.

“Always.”

“The night I didn’t file the complaint.” She looked up at the dark ceiling. “Last December. The first week. When you were—when I heard you through the wall, and you heard my glass—”

“The clink,” said Mara, with feeling.

“The clink.” Eden took a breath. “I wasn’t getting a glass of water.”

Mara went very still against her.

“I’d been lying in bed,” Eden said, “listening. Telling myself I was going to get up and write another complaint. Telling myself it was a noise violation. And instead I was—” She stopped. Tried again. It took her only one try. “I was touching myself. Listening to you. I came so hard I couldn’t breathe, and I didn’t make a sound, and my hand was shaking so badly afterward that I set the glass down wrong. And then I lay there in the dark with my heart pounding, completely mortified, and I thought, well, that’s it, she knows.”

There was a long, long silence.

Then Mara sat up.

She sat all the way up in the bed, naked, with her curls in her face, and looked down at Eden in the lantern light with an expression of such profound, incandescent, vindicated joy that Eden had to put an arm over her own eyes.

“Eden. Varick.”

“Don’t.”

“A year. You let me think it was hydration for a year—”

“It was a glass of water. Technically. There was water in it.”

“You filed a complaint about me that same week—”

“I filed a complaint about your drill—”

“You filed a complaint about me and then you were lying in bed doing that—”

“I was very confused,” Eden said, from under her arm, “about a great many things.”

Mara collapsed on top of her, laughing. Really laughing. The big, helpless, cracked-in-half laugh, loud enough to rattle the lanterns, her whole body shaking against Eden’s, and after a moment Eden lowered her arm and put both of them around her instead and laughed too, into Mara’s hair, until they were both breathless and wet-eyed and ridiculous.

“I’m putting that in the bin,” Mara said finally, into her neck. “The M bin. I’m writing it on an index card. Exhibit: the clink.”

“You will not.”

“Laminated.”

“Mara.”

“With a timestamp.”

Eden sighed, and kissed the top of her head, and did not argue. It was, she had come to understand, an argument she was always going to lose. It was the one she liked losing best.

After a while the laughing wound down, and Mara’s breathing went slow and even, and she was almost asleep on Eden’s chest when she mumbled, “Are we turning the power back on?”

Eden thought about it.

The refrigerator. The router. The little green light on the dishwasher. Her whole silent, well-ordered, perfectly labeled life, waiting on the other side of a row of breakers in the hall.

“In the morning,” she said.

“Mm.” Mara nestled closer. “What if there’s an emergency?”

“I have a battery power station. I have four lanterns. I have three weeks of food.”

“You have a bin.”

“I have nine bins.”

“You have my bin.”

“Yes,” Eden said softly. “I do.”

Mara smiled against her skin. Eden felt it.

Down the hall, in the dark, the door stood open between two homes. On the other side, Mara’s apartment was cold and silent and full of sleeping things. Her ring light. Her mirror. Her salmon bathroom. Her walnut bed, against the wall they shared, where a year ago a woman who didn’t know yet that she was in love had lain in the dark on the other side and listened to her be loud, and been so afraid of how much she wanted it.

She wasn’t afraid of it anymore.

She reached over and switched off the lantern.

“Goodnight, Mara,” she said, into the dark.

“Goodnight, Eden,” said Mara. And then, already mostly asleep, in a whisper so soft that only someone lying right beside her could possibly have heard it:

“Happy blackout.”

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