Rule 6

A Night Shift, Door Locked Bonus Scene
by Aurora North

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Tricia

Tricia fell back asleep holding Joan’s phone against her chest.

She hadn’t meant to. She’d meant to lie there in the gray light of room 614 and stare at the strikethrough on the screen until she understood what it meant, all of it, every implication, the way Joan would have. Instead the warmth of the bed and the weight of the night and the low steady sound of Joan breathing beside her had pulled her under like a tide, and the last thing she remembered was the phone sliding down onto her sternum, the screen going dark, five words with a line through them.

When she woke the second time, the light had changed.

Not much. The curtains were heavy hotel blackout things, beige, and somebody had pulled them half open while she slept, so that a long pale slice of window showed between them. Beyond it, the sky over the highway interchange had gone from gray to a thin, washed, early blue, with a line of pink still lying along the hills to the east. Six floors down, a delivery truck backed into the hotel’s loading dock, beeping. Somewhere farther off, the interstate was already humming.

The phone was gone from her chest. The other half of the bed was empty.

“Joan?”

“Here.”

Tricia turned her head.

Joan was standing at the foot of the bed in the slice of window light, and Tricia’s brain, which had only been awake for about four seconds, stopped working entirely.

She was naked. That was the first thing. Naked, her hair still mussed on one side from the pillow, the silver streak fallen across her forehead, golden-brown skin catching the pale light from the window, heavy breasts, soft belly, strong thighs. And around her hips, buckled snug and precise, was Tricia’s harness. The black one. The one Tricia had packed by accident. With Tricia’s dark blue toy fitted into it, jutting from Joan’s hips, gleaming faintly in the morning light like she’d already slicked it.

Tricia stared.

Joan stood there and let her. Her face was doing nothing at all. Her ears were bright red.

“Good morning,” Joan said.

“What,” said Tricia. “What. What is—good morning? You’re standing there in my—that’s my—”

“Yes.”

“You put it on.”

“I did.” Joan’s voice was very calm, and very low, and underneath the calm there was something that was not calm at all. “You were asleep. I got up to use the bathroom, and it was on the chair where you left it last night, and I looked at it for some time. And then I made a decision.” She paused. “I’d like to propose a rule.”

Tricia sat up. The sheet fell to her waist. Joan’s eyes dropped to her breasts and stayed there for a long second before they came back up.

“A rule,” Tricia repeated.

“Rule six.” Joan took one step closer to the bed. “You let me have you before breakfast.”

Tricia’s whole body went hot. Her face, her chest, her belly, straight down between her legs, so fast it was like being dunked in warm water.

“That’s not a rule,” she managed. “That’s a—that’s an agenda item.”

“It’s a rule. I’d like it in writing.” Another step. Joan was at the edge of the bed now, looking down at her. Her eyes were very dark. “You can say no. You can say yellow. You can say you’d rather have coffee first, and I’ll take this off and we’ll go downstairs and eat the terrible hotel waffles. But I’ve been lying awake for an hour watching you sleep with my phone on your chest, and I’d very much like to fuck you against that window while the sun comes up.”

Tricia’s mouth fell open.

“Status?” Joan asked softly.

“Green,” Tricia said. It came out cracked. “Green. God. Green.”

“Good,” said Joan, and pulled the sheet off her.

She didn’t take her time.

That was what Tricia would remember afterward. Every other time, Joan had taken her time. Joan had made her wait, made her beg, edged her and undressed her one button at a time and made her hold onto headboards. Joan was patience incarnate. Joan was a woman who ordered dry toast at a diner just to not eat it.

Not this morning.

This morning Joan pulled her off the bed by both wrists and walked her backward across the hotel carpet, three steps, four, until Tricia’s bare back hit the cool glass of the window between the half-open curtains, and kissed her like she’d been starving for it all night.

The glass was cold. Shockingly cold, against her shoulder blades and her ass, and Tricia gasped into Joan’s mouth, and Joan swallowed the sound and pressed closer, all that warm heavy body against her front, the hard length of the strap pressing against her belly. Tricia’s hands went into Joan’s hair. Joan’s hands went everywhere. Her breasts. Her waist. Her hips. Down between her legs, two fingers sliding through her, and Joan made a low rough sound against her lips when she found her already wet.

“You were wet before you were awake,” Joan murmured.

“You were standing there in a strap—”

“I was standing there for about forty seconds.” Joan’s fingers circled her clit, firm and slow. “You were wet before that. You were making noises in your sleep.”

“I was not—”

“You said my name twice.”

Tricia’s face burned. She turned her head and looked out the window, over her own shoulder, because she couldn’t look at Joan while Joan was looking at her like that.

The world outside was waking up. Six floors down, the parking lot, half-full of conference attendees’ cars, the delivery truck at the dock with its back doors open. A man in a reflective vest was smoking by the dumpsters. Beyond the lot, the highway interchange, loops of overpass, the first few commuters already moving in thin lines of headlights. Beyond that, the long low hills, black against the pink. And the sky above all of it going gold, the sun right there behind the hills, about to break.

“Joan,” Tricia whispered. “The window. Can people—”

“It’s six floors up. The room behind us is dark. The glass is tinted.” Joan’s mouth was on her neck. “Nobody can see you. Only me.”

She knelt.

Tricia hadn’t expected it. Joan dropped to her knees on the hotel carpet in front of her, still wearing the harness, the toy bobbing absurdly, and Tricia almost laughed, and then Joan lifted Tricia’s right leg and draped it over her own shoulder and put her mouth on her, and Tricia did not laugh.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, fuck—”

Her head fell back against the glass with a soft thunk. Her hands flattened on the cold window on either side of her hips. Joan licked her fast and hard and hungry, nothing like the slow devastating thoroughness of the gold-light night, nothing measured or careful about it. Joan ate her like she’d been thinking about it for an hour, because she had, and Tricia stood with her back against the glass and her leg over Joan’s shoulder and watched the sun come up over the interstate and couldn’t breathe.

“Don’t let me come,” she heard herself say. “Joan—don’t—I want—I want you to—”

Joan stopped. Looked up at her from the floor. Her mouth was wet. Her eyes were black.

“I want you inside me,” Tricia said. “When I come. I want it. Please.”

Joan rose.

“Turn around,” Joan said.

Tricia turned around.

She put her palms flat on the window. The glass was a little warmer now where her back had been. Out in front of her, the whole morning spread out: the lot, the trucks, the overpass, the hills, the sky. The edge of the sun cracked over the ridge as she watched, a thin blinding sliver of gold, and the light came flooding across the parking lot and up the side of the hotel and through the glass and over her naked body, and she gasped at it.

Behind her, she felt Joan’s hand on her hip. Felt Joan’s other hand between her shoulder blades, right on the moth. Felt the blunt slick head of the toy nudge between her legs.

“Okay?” Joan’s voice was right at her ear.

“Yes. Yes. Green. Please.”

Joan pushed into her.

Slow for exactly one second. Then all the way. And Tricia’s palms slid on the glass and a sound came out of her that fogged the window in front of her mouth, and Joan held her there, full, filled, pinned between Joan’s body and the glass with the sun pouring over both of them.

Then Joan began to move.

Not slow. Not gentle. Deep, hard strokes that rocked Tricia up onto her toes, Joan’s hand on her hip pulling her back onto it every time, Joan’s hips slapping against her ass, the sound of it loud and wet and filthy in the quiet hotel room. Tricia pressed her forehead to the glass and moaned. The window was warm with the sun now. Her breath fogged it and cleared and fogged it again. She could see her own reflection, faintly, ghosted over the parking lot: her hair wild, her mouth open, and behind her, Joan’s face over her shoulder, flushed and fierce and absolutely focused.

“Look at you,” Joan said against her ear. Her voice was rough and low and nothing like the meeting voice. “Look at you in the sunlight. Do you know how long I wanted this? Do you know how many mornings I drove home into that sunrise thinking about you?”

“Joan—”

“Every one of them.” A hard deep thrust that lifted Tricia onto her toes. “Eighteen months of sunrises. I’d get in my car and the sun would come up over Route 20 and I’d think about your mouth. Your voice. I’d think about you saying my name just like that—”

“Joan—”

“Just like that.”

Joan’s hand slid around from her hip. Down. Found her clit, slick and swollen, and pressed. And circled. In time with every thrust.

Tricia stopped being able to talk.

She stood with both hands on the warm glass and the sun full in her face and Joan fucking her from behind, deep and steady and relentless, Joan’s fingers on her clit and Joan’s mouth on the back of her neck, and the morning went white and gold and then whiter. Her legs shook. Her palms slid. Joan’s arm went around her waist and held her up, held her against the glass, held her right there, and didn’t let her go.

“Come for me,” Joan said. “Right here. In the light. I want to watch it.”

Tricia came with her cheek pressed against the window and the sun blazing on her skin. It tore through her from her toes to her scalp, long and hard and shaking, her whole body clenching around the toy, her cry fogging the glass. Joan held her up through all of it and kept moving, slower now, deep, rocking her through every wave, until Tricia was limp against the window and gasping and laughing helplessly at nothing.

Joan stilled. Pressed her forehead to the back of Tricia’s neck. Breathed.

“Status,” she said. Her voice was wrecked.

“I think I’m dead,” Tricia said into the glass. “I think you killed me. Before breakfast. That has to be against some kind of rule.”

“It’s not,” said Joan. “I checked.”

They ended up on the floor.

Tricia wasn’t entirely sure how. Joan had eased out of her and she’d turned around and slid down the window, and Joan had come down with her, and now they were sitting on the hotel carpet with their backs against the warm glass and the sun pouring over their shoulders and the curtains half-open on either side of them, naked, sweaty, the harness abandoned in a heap a few feet away. Tricia’s head was on Joan’s shoulder. Joan’s arm was around her.

“Wait,” Tricia said, after a while. “Did you—you didn’t—”

“Later,” Joan said.

“No. Not later. Now.” Tricia sat up. “You’ve been lying awake for an hour. You put on my strap. You fucked me against a window at sunrise and said things to me that are going to be in my head at every single staff meeting for the rest of my life.” She swung a leg over Joan’s thighs and straddled her, right there on the carpet in the light. “Rule six is reciprocal.”

“Rule six doesn’t say that.”

“I’m amending it.” Tricia slid her hand down between them. Joan was soaked. Tricia looked at her. “Oh, Supervisor.”

“Don’t you dare—”

Tricia laughed and kissed her, and slid two fingers inside her, and Joan’s head fell back against the window with a thunk.

It didn’t take long. Joan had been waiting an hour, and before that a whole night, and before that, Tricia suspected, eighteen months of sunrises. Tricia fucked her slow and deep with her fingers and rubbed her clit with her thumb and kissed her neck and told her, quietly, into her ear, everything she’d thought about on all those nights in the ED watching Joan behind the lead glass. Your hands. Your voice. That little line at the corner of your mouth. And Joan came against the hotel window in the morning sun with her fists clenched in Tricia’s hair and her eyes wide open, and said Tricia’s name, and then said it again, quieter, like a question she already knew the answer to.

Afterward, Joan reached for her phone.

It was on the nightstand. She had to lean across the carpet and stretch for it, which made Tricia laugh, and Joan gave her a look and got it anyway. She unlocked it. She opened the document. Tricia, leaning against her shoulder, watched.

The rules. Five lines. The fifth with a line through it.

Joan tapped at the bottom of the list. A new line appeared. She typed, slowly, carefully, in the same clean bold font as the rest:

6. You let me have you before breakfast.

She looked at it for a moment. Then she held out the phone.

Tricia took it.

She looked at the list. Never at the hospital. No favors between departments. Nobody sleeps over. Nobody finds out. And then the line through no feelings, and then the new one underneath it, in Joan’s precise bold type, sitting there at the bottom like it had always belonged.

She thought about it.

Then she tapped at the end of rule six, and typed, in lowercase, with no bold at all:

lol

She handed the phone back.

Joan looked at it. Her mouth twitched. It twitched again. She pressed her lips together and looked out the window at the sun, which was fully up now, gold and enormous over the hills, and tried very, very hard not to smile, and lost.

“Crack in the Dam,” Tricia said.

“Stop.”

“The Suppressed Sunrise. Look, there’s an actual sunrise, it’s thematically appropriate—”

“Tricia.”

“Okay. Okay.” She leaned back against the warm glass and Joan’s warm shoulder, and closed her eyes, and grinned. “Breakfast?”

“Breakfast,” Joan agreed. She saved the document. She set the phone face down on the carpet beside her, squared to the line of the baseboard. Then she turned her head and kissed Tricia’s temple, softly, and stayed there.

“Rule six,” she murmured against her hair, “applies every morning.”

“Every morning?”

“I’m amending it.”

Tricia laughed. Down six floors, the delivery truck pulled away from the dock. The interstate hummed. The sun climbed. And neither of them moved for a long, long time.

Loved Joan and Tricia? Leave a review — and read all five rules get broken from the very first corridor fight.

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