🔥 The Scarf 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Playing Pretend

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You made it to the bonus content — which means you’ve survived the loft, the silence game, the ice cube at midnight, the hot tub while your mother waved through the glass, the living room floor during a thunderstorm, and a woman who looked at you across a bookshop and cataloged which smile was real. You watched Ivy say don’t on a living room floor and mean it more than she’d ever meant anything. You watched Harlow cry on a deck in the rain because her father finally hugged her. Thank you for giving Harlow and Ivy your time. This exclusive chapter is our gift to dedicated readers like you.

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⚠️ Content Warning: This bonus chapter contains extremely explicit FF sexual content including role reversal, silk scarf bondage (both partners), edging/orgasm denial, oral sex, mutual masturbation, simultaneous orgasm, dirty talk, praise kink, power exchange, emotional vulnerability, and crying during sex. Set five months after the beach house — Ivy ties Harlow up for the first time and takes control. Intended for readers 18+ only.

The Scarf

Set five months after the beach house.
Part One: Ivy’s POV. Part Two: Harlow’s POV.

Part One: Yours

The box arrived on Tuesday.

I hid it in the closet behind my winter coats, which was overkill since Harlow wasn’t due until Friday, but the Ivy Calloway of five months ago — the one who hid Victoria’s Secret bags under folded towels and felt ashamed for wanting lace against her skin — still lived inside me like a ghost, and that ghost’s first instinct was always conceal.

The new Ivy — the one Dr. Raines and I were building in weekly sessions, the one who wore shorts in public and said no to her mother and had screamed Harlow Voss’s name on a living room floor during a thunderstorm — that Ivy had ordered the box. Had researched what was in it. Had read forums and subreddits she’d deny visiting under oath and had, with the focused determination of a woman who had spent twenty-four years not asking for what she wanted, decided exactly what she was going to do with it.

The box contained a silk scarf. Black. Not pale blue like the one from the beach house — the one that still lived in my nightstand drawer and still smelled, faintly, impossibly, like sandalwood and sex. This one was new. Chosen. Mine.

Harlow always tied me up. From the first night in the loft — the escape knot, the wooden headboard slats, the whispered pull and it comes undone — to the hotel room after the wedding, the scarf had been hers. Her tool. Her language. The silk was the medium through which she communicated something words couldn’t hold: I’m in control so you can stop controlling. Let me carry it. Let go.

I wanted to carry it for her. Just once. Just tonight.

Because Harlow Voss — the woman who held me through every orgasm and every breakdown and every three-AM phone call where I cried about my mother — had never, in five months, let anyone hold her. She gave and gave and gave, and the giving was genuine, and the dominance was real, but underneath it was a woman who had been carrying herself since she was eleven years old and didn’t know how to put the weight down.

Tonight, I was going to take it from her. Whether she liked it or not.

* * *

She arrived at six. I heard the Jeep in the parking lot — the engine cutting, the door slamming, her boots on the stairs — and the anticipation that had been simmering since Tuesday bloomed into something molten and enormous.

I opened the door in her band t-shirt. The stolen one. Nothing underneath. I’d thought about this — the statement it made, the callback, the way her eyes would go dark when she clocked the bare legs and the absence of fabric beneath the hem. Five months of learning what undid Harlow Voss, and I’d compiled a very thorough dataset.

Her eyes went dark. Exactly on schedule.

“You’re early,” I said.

“Broke ninety on I-85.” She stepped inside, dropped her duffel, and reached for me — the automatic pull, hands on my waist, mouth seeking mine. The reunion kiss. Every two weeks, same voltage, same desperation, like the three hours of highway between us was a physical substance that had to be burned off through contact.

I let her kiss me. Let her push me against the wall, let her hands slide under the t-shirt and find bare skin, let the familiar heat ignite. Then I caught her wrists.

She stopped. Looked at me. Eyebrow lifted.

“Bedroom,” I said. “I have something for you.”

She let me lead her. Down the hall, past the bathroom where she’d once dropped to her knees before I could even get my boots off, into the bedroom with the rose print and the unmade bed and the two silk scarves laid out on the white sheets.

Pale blue. Black. Side by side.

Harlow looked at them. Looked at me. I watched the understanding arrive — the quick, dark flare in her pupils, the slight tension in her jaw, the way her breathing changed from reunion-eager to something deeper. Warier. She recognized the arrangement for what it was: a proposition.

“Ivy —”

“I want to tie you up.”

The words came out steady. Five months ago they would have been a whisper, would have been followed by if that’s okay and we don’t have to and sorry, forget I said anything. Tonight they were a statement. Calm, clear, and absolute.

Harlow stared at me. Her hands were at her sides and they were trembling — a micro-tremor I’d never seen on her before, a vibration that said the woman who was always three moves ahead had just been ambushed.

“No one’s ever —” She stopped.

“I know.” I stepped closer. Took her hand. Pressed it to my chest so she could feel my heartbeat — fast, strong, terrified, certain. “You taught me that surrendering isn’t losing. That letting someone take control is the bravest thing you can do.” I lifted her hand to my mouth. Kissed her knuckles. “Let me show you.”

The war on her face lasted ten seconds. I watched every frame of it — the instinct to deflect, the sardonic comment forming and dissolving, the wall going up and then, slowly, brick by brick, coming back down. She looked at the scarves. Looked at me. Looked at the bed.

“Same rules?” she asked. Her voice was rougher than usual. Vulnerable in a way that made my chest ache.

“Same rules. Pull and it comes undone. Or say red.”

“You remembered the knot?”

“I’ve been practicing on my bedpost for two weeks.”

Her mouth twitched. The ghost of a smile, fighting through the nerves. “Thorough.”

“I learned from the best.”

She pulled her shirt over her head. The sports bra. The jeans. Stripped with the efficient casualness of a woman who had never once been ashamed of her body, though I could see the tension in her shoulders, the held breath, the vulnerability of being naked in front of someone who was about to change the terms of everything they’d built.

She lay on the bed. Arms above her head. Waiting.

I picked up the black scarf. Let it slide through my fingers the way she had, that first night in the loft — cool, liquid, deliberate. I knelt beside her and took her wrists, and her pulse was hammering so hard I could see it in the tendons of her forearms, in the veins that ran between the tattoo vines.

I wound the silk. Once. Twice. The loop between. The knot — practiced, practiced, practiced until my fingers could tie it in the dark. I threaded the tail through the headboard and settled back on my heels.

“Pull,” I said.

She pulled. The knot held. She twisted. It released. I retied it.

“Good?” I asked.

“Good.” Her voice was barely there.

I looked down at her. Harlow Voss — the woman who had walked into a beach house and seen me when no one else could, who had called me Birdie and taught me to say what I wanted and held me through the earthquake of becoming myself — was tied to my headboard, naked, shaking, her dark hazel eyes wide and uncertain and trusting me completely.

I started with the tattoos.

Not her mouth. Not her breasts. Not any of the places she expected. I began at her left wrist, just above the silk, where the first rose bloomed — the Bourbon, cream with a blush center, her mother’s favorite. I pressed my lips to it.

“This one is the first night,” I whispered against the ink. “The loft. The fan. Relax, Birdie. I don’t bite.“

I kissed the next rose. The Damask, deep crimson, halfway up her forearm. “This one is the sunscreen. Your hands on my back. The sound you made when I pressed into your shoulders.”

The Centifolia, with its hundred petals. “The restaurant. She’s mine. Your hand on my thigh under the table.”

The Gallica, striped pink and white. “The pact. The almost-kiss. The inch between your mouth and mine that you held for three heartbeats just to prove you could.”

I was moving up her arm. Kissing each bloom, naming it, mapping our history onto her skin the way she had mapped my body in the dark. She was trembling beneath me — not from cold, not from arousal alone, but from the experience of being narrated. Of being the subject instead of the author. Of hearing someone trace the story of your love onto the garden you grew in memory of your mother.

The Alba on her bicep. “The ice cube. Your fingers inside me for the first time. You don’t come until I say you come.“

The English rose at the top of her arm — her mother’s namesake bloom, the one that never fully opened. I pressed my mouth to it and held. Felt Harlow’s body go rigid beneath me. Felt the tremor that started in her arm and traveled through her whole frame.

“This one,” I said softly, “is right now. The bloom that never opened. The woman who never let anyone take care of her.” I lifted my head. Looked into her eyes. “Open for me, Harlow.”

Her eyes were wet. The gold in them fractured by unshed tears. Her wrists strained against the silk — not to escape, but because she didn’t know what to do with her hands when she couldn’t control the situation.

“I’ve got you,” I said. “The way you’ve always had me. Let go.”

She broke. A single tear tracked down her temple into her dark hair, and the wall — the last wall, the one she’d built at eleven and maintained for sixteen years — came down.

I kissed the tear. Then I kissed her mouth. Then I began to take her apart.

* * *

I undressed her body the way she had undressed mine in the loft — slowly, with reverence, kissing every inch of skin I revealed. But where Harlow had undressed me to teach me I was beautiful, I undressed her to teach her she was safe. Every kiss was a promise: you can be soft here. You can be held here. You don’t have to be the strong one tonight.

Her breasts were small and perfect and she arched into my mouth when I took her nipple between my lips and sucked. The lean plane of her stomach contracted under my tongue. The tattoo vines continued down her sides — thorns, leaves, the intricate architecture of a garden that lived on skin because it couldn’t live in soil — and I traced every one with my mouth while her breathing went ragged above me.

I settled between her legs. Looked up at her over the landscape of her body — the bound wrists, the tattoos, the tanned skin flushed with heat, the dark eyes watching me with an expression I’d never seen on her face during sex. Not hunger. Not control. Surrender.

“Tell me what you want,” I said. Turning her own words on her. The demand she’d made of me in the loft, that had cracked me open and taught me to speak.

She swallowed. “Your mouth.”

“Where?”

“You know where, Ivy.”

“I want to hear you say it.”

A breath. Two. Then, roughly: “I want your tongue on my clit. Please.”

The please almost broke me. Harlow Voss saying please. The woman who commanded and controlled and took what she wanted, saying the word I’d said a hundred times beneath her, the word she’d drawn out of me like a confession. Now it was hers. Now she understood what it cost and why it mattered.

I gave her what she asked for.

Flat tongue, slow stroke, the opening move she’d used on me the first time. I tasted her — musky, sharp, the most intimate flavor — and the sound she made was a revelation. Low and broken and loud, because Harlow was always quiet during sex, always controlled, always the one swallowing her sounds while she drew mine out, and hearing her moan with her wrists bound and her defenses down was the most erotic thing I’d ever experienced.

I learned her. Not for the first time — I’d been going down on her for months and I knew her map, knew the left side of her clit, knew the firm pressure, knew the rhythm that made her jaw clench. But tonight I wasn’t trying to make her come. I was trying to take her to the edge and hold her there. The way she’d held me. The ice cube night. The three denials. The lesson.

Turnabout.

I brought her to the brink with my tongue — quick, pointed strokes, two fingers sliding inside her, curling against the spot that made her hips lift off the bed — and stopped.

Her reaction was feral.

Her whole body arched. Her wrists yanked against the silk — not pulling the escape knot, just pulling, the raw, involuntary reflex of a woman whose body had been racing toward a cliff and was suddenly jerked to a halt. The sound she made was not a moan — it was a growl, low and furious and desperate, and her hips chased my mouth with a frantic thrust that found nothing.

“Ivy.” My name in her mouth like a curse.

I pressed a soft kiss to her inner thigh. Right where the femoral artery pulsed. “This is what it felt like the first night. When you left me burning.”

Her head dropped back to the pillow. Her chest heaved. I watched the frustration ripple through her — the loss of control, the helplessness of wanting something and being denied by someone who knew exactly what they were withholding — and I understood, viscerally, why she’d done it to me. Not cruelty. Worship. I am paying this much attention to you. Your pleasure is this important to me. You are worth the time.

I brought her up again. Mouth, fingers, the rhythm she needed, building her until her thighs shook and her pussy clenched around my fingers and she was right there —

I stopped.

“Fuck!” Her voice cracked. Her whole body convulsed with the denial. Her wrists strained and the headboard creaked and she looked at me with wild, wet, destroyed eyes and I kissed her collarbone and said: “This is what it felt like in the hot tub. When my mother waved through the glass.”

A third time. Slower. Deeper. My tongue working her clit while three fingers fucked her in a rhythm that was deliberately, mathematically designed to bring her to the absolute precipice and hold her there in trembling, agonizing suspension. Her body was a live wire — every muscle taut, sweat glistening on her tanned skin, the tattoo garden rising and falling with each desperate breath. She was shaking so hard the bed was moving.

I pulled back.

She nearly screamed. Caught it behind clenched teeth — a raw, guttural sound of pure frustration — and her hands fisted in the silk and her eyes found mine and they were streaming. Not from sadness. From the sheer, overwhelming agony of being held at the edge by someone who loved her enough to keep her there.

I kissed the scar on her chin. “This is what it felt like every time you said goodnight, Birdie.”

“Ivy.” Her voice was wrecked. Shredded. A woman stripped to the foundation, every defense demolished, every wall in rubble. “Ivy, please. I need — I can’t —”

“Tell me.” I rose over her. Face to face. Our mouths inches apart, her breath fast and hot on my lips, her eyes locked on mine with an intensity that went past desire into something primal. “Tell me what you need. Not a command. Not what you think I want to hear. The real you.”

The silence lasted five seconds. The hardest five seconds of her life, I think. Because what I was asking for was not an orgasm. It was an admission. It was the thing she’d spent sixteen years refusing to say to anyone: I need help. I need someone. I need to be held.

“I need you,” she said. The words cracked. Broke. Fell out of her in pieces, each one costing something. “I need you to not stop. I need to feel you when I come. Please, Ivy. Please.“

I kissed her. Deep, slow, my hand sliding between her legs, and I didn’t tease. I gave her everything — my mouth on hers, my fingers inside her, my thumb on her clit, the full, relentless, devoted attention of a woman who had learned how to give because she’d been given to by the best.

She came in under a minute. Loud — loud, louder than I’d ever heard her, a cry that broke from her chest and filled the apartment and shook through my bones. Her body arched off the bed, her wrists straining, her pussy clenching in rhythmic, powerful contractions around my fingers, and she shook and shook and shook, and tears poured down her temples, and I held her through all of it. I didn’t let go. I didn’t pull back. I kept my hand inside her and my mouth on hers and I whispered against her lips: “I’ve got you. I’ve always got you. You’re safe.”

She cried. Really cried. Not from pain, not from frustration — from release. The kind that goes deeper than the body, that unlocks something cellular, something that’s been compressed and held and contained for years. She cried with her wrists tied to my headboard and my fingers still inside her and my forehead pressed to hers, and I let her. I held the space the way she’d held it for me a hundred times. Steady. Patient. Present.

When the shaking stopped, I untied the knot. Unwound the silk from her wrists. Her hands came down — slowly, stiffly — and found my face, and she held my jaw in her palms and looked at me with eyes that were red and wet and new.

“Where the hell did you come from?” she whispered.

I smiled. The real one. “A hot pink suitcase and a lot of therapy.”

She laughed. Wet, broken, beautiful. And she pulled me down and held me against her chest, and I listened to her heartbeat slow from chaos to steady, and the black scarf trailed from the headboard like a flag of surrender, and I thought: this is what it means to love someone. Not just the holding. The being held.

Part Two: Mine

An hour later, we showered. Together, because Harlow’s hands had started to shake again — not from vulnerability this time but from the particular, focused tremor that meant she was done being soft and the predator was waking back up.

She pressed me against the tile. The water was hot, streaming over both of us, and her mouth was on my neck and her hands were on my hips and the wet slide of her body against mine was relentless and devastating. She pinned my wrists above my head with one hand — easy, automatic, the muscle memory of five months of dominance reasserting itself — and slid her other hand between my thighs from behind.

I came standing up, my palms flat on the glass, her name a broken echo off the tile. Quick and sharp and blinding, the kind of orgasm that was half relief and half promise — a preview of what was coming next.

We toweled off. Fell into bed. Clean sheets, warm skin, the apartment quiet except for the rain that had started tapping the windows like it remembered us from the beach house.

Harlow rolled onto me. Her weight pressing me into the mattress, her thigh sliding between my legs, her eyes dark and focused and absolutely feral with the energy of a woman who had been taken apart and was now rebuilding herself in real time — not the same as before, but stronger, rawer, the walls down and the woman underneath fully, terrifyingly present.

“My turn,” she said.

She flipped me onto my stomach. Pressed me face-down into the pillow with one hand between my shoulder blades. Gathered both my wrists behind my back — the pale blue scarf this time, hers, the original, the one from the beach house — and tied them at the base of my spine. Not to the headboard. To each other. My arms pinned behind me, my face turned on the pillow, my body prone and open and completely at her mercy.

The position was different from anything we’d done. More exposed. More helpless. I couldn’t see her — could only feel, could only hear, could only process the sensory data of Harlow’s mouth descending on the nape of my neck and beginning to work its way down.

The spot from the zipper scene. The first day she’d touched the back of my neck in the loft and I’d shivered. She remembered. She always remembered. Her tongue traced my spine, vertebra by vertebra, a slow, wet trail of fire from my neck to the small of my back, and by the time she reached the dimples above my ass — the ones she’d fixated on during the sunscreen scene, the ones her thumbs had grazed while my mother read a magazine ten feet away — I was whimpering into the pillow.

Her hands gripped my thighs. Spread them. Her mouth moved lower, and the angle — face-down, spread, her tongue working me from behind in a broad, devastating stroke from clit to entrance and back — was so different, so much more, that the moan I made was guttural and raw and I ground my hips into the mattress seeking pressure and she grabbed my hip and pulled me up onto my knees.

“Stay,” she said. The command voice. The one that bypassed my brain and went straight to my nervous system. And I stayed — on my knees, face in the pillow, hands bound behind me, my body presented to her in the most vulnerable position I’d ever been in — and she ate me until I couldn’t form syllables.

Her tongue was everywhere. Flat and broad, then pointed and precise, working my clit from this new angle with a relentlessness that built and built and built, and her hands gripped my hips hard enough to bruise and the sounds I was making — muffled by the pillow, guttural, animal, a vocabulary I didn’t know I had — filled the room.

She flipped me over. Untied one wrist — left the other bound, the asymmetry deliberate, one hand free to grab and one hand restrained. The tension between freedom and captivity was electric. She knelt between my legs and slid three fingers inside me and I cried out and she leaned down and said: “Tell me what you did. Alone. In this bed. When I wasn’t here.”

The intimacy of the demand hit me like a train. She wanted my private fantasies. The things I did in the dark when she was three hours away and I was aching and my hand was between my legs and her name was on my lips.

I told her.

I told her about the ice cube. How I replayed it — her fingers, the cold, the silence — and came with the pillow over my face. I told her about the hot tub. How I imagined the glass door opening and Diane seeing and Harlow not stopping and the orgasm from that fantasy was always the hardest, the most violent, the one that left me shaking. I told her about the living room floor. How I touched myself to the memory of her body on mine and the storm outside and the way she’d said I’m yours and I’d come so hard I’d cried.

Harlow fucked me while I confessed. Her fingers deep and curling, her eyes black, drinking in every word like water. “You thought about me,” she said, and it wasn’t a question, and her voice was wrecked, and she was so turned on she was shaking, and the knowledge that my words did this to her — my fantasies, my private desire, the landscape of my wanting — was the most powerful aphrodisiac in the world.

“Every time,” I gasped. “Every time it was you. It was always you.”

She kissed me. Fierce, consuming. Her hand between my legs, my free hand reaching between hers — finding her wet and swollen and desperate — and we worked each other in the same rhythm, synchronized, faces inches apart, breathing each other’s air. The build was simultaneous and mutual and devastating, and when we came it was together — eyes open, locked on each other, our names colliding in the space between our mouths, the sound of it — two women saying each other’s names at the breaking point — a language nobody else spoke.

* * *

After.

Both scarves untied. Both of us boneless. The pale blue and the black were knotted together on the headboard — tangled into a single strand by the physics of what we’d done, her scarf and mine, the original and the new, wound together like they’d decided to stay.

I was draped across her chest, tracing the Bourbon rose with my fingertip. The apartment was dark. The rain had stopped. The rose print on the wall was a shadow among shadows, and the heron-with-sunglasses keychain sat on the nightstand, grinning its plastic grin.

“Move in with me,” I said.

She went still. Not surprised-still — processing-still. The stillness of a woman hearing something she’d been hoping for and needing a moment to believe it was real.

“Where?”

“Anywhere. I don’t care. I just want to wake up with you more than two days a month.”

She didn’t answer with words. She rolled me beneath her and kissed me — slow, deep, the kiss of a woman saying yes with her whole body — and the last thing I felt before sleep pulled me under was her heartbeat against mine and her breath in my hair and the silk scarf brushing my wrist like a memory.

Home isn’t a place. It’s the space between her neck and her shoulder, where I fit, where I’ve always fit. I pressed my face into it and breathed. Sandalwood. Salt. Mine.

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Aurora North