🔥 After Hours

A Bonus Chapter from Soft Girl, Sharp Tongue
by Aurora North

Week three of the tour. Portland, Oregon. 11:47 p.m. Pacific.

Jules was lying on a hotel bed that smelled like industrial laundry detergent and regret, staring at the ceiling, wearing Avery’s green sweater and nothing else.

The show had been good. Better than good—the Portland crowd had been loose and warm and generous, the kind of audience that laughed with their whole bodies and stayed after to shake her hand and say things like “that bit about the fairy lights made me call my wife” which was, at this point in the tour, Jules’ favorite genre of post-show compliment. She’d signed a few things. She’d taken photos. She’d done the meet-and-greet with the enthusiasm of a woman who genuinely loved her job and genuinely wanted to be in a different city.

She wanted to be in New York. Specifically, she wanted to be in a small apartment above a café that smelled like vanilla and sourdough. More specifically, she wanted to be in a bed with good sheets and too many pillows, with a woman whose body she hadn’t touched in twenty-one days and whose absence she felt like a phantom limb—constantly, dully, with occasional spikes of acute pain triggered by stimuli she couldn’t predict. The smell of cinnamon in a coffee shop. A woman’s laugh that almost sounded right but wasn’t. The particular quality of silence at two a.m. when the person who usually breathed beside her wasn’t there.

She picked up her phone. Opened FaceTime. Pressed Avery’s name.

It rang twice. The screen lit up. Avery’s face appeared—soft, warm, close. She was in bed. Their bed. The lamp was on, casting her in gold, and she was wearing one of Jules’ sleep shirts—the old one, the college one, threadbare and too big in the shoulders—and her hair was down and her face was clean and she was the most beautiful thing Jules had seen in three weeks.

“Hey,” Avery said. Her voice was sleepy-warm. Two forty-seven a.m. in New York. She’d been waiting up. She always waited up.

“Hey.” Jules felt the tension in her chest loosen by one degree. Just seeing her. Just the face on the screen. “How’s Gerald?”

“Thriving. Possibly sentient. He made a noise this morning that sounded like your name.”

“Gerald doesn’t know my name.”

“Gerald knows everything. He’s been fermenting since before we met. He contains multitudes.” Avery shifted on the pillow. The movement made the sleep shirt slip off one shoulder, exposing the curve of her collarbone, the freckles Jules knew by heart. “How was the show?”

“Standing ovation. Third one this week.”

“Show-off.”

“I miss you,” Jules said. She said it every night. It never lost its weight.

“I miss you too.” Avery’s voice dropped. Softer now. The underneath voice—the one that existed only in the dark, only between them. “Can I tell you something?”

“Always.”

“I wore your leather jacket today. To the café. Behind the counter. Not because it was cold. Because it smells like you. And I kept catching the scent all day and every time I did my body—reacted. Like, physically. In the middle of making lattes. Dani noticed. She said I was ‘flushed and suspicious’ and I had to tell her it was the espresso machine running hot.”

Jules’ pulse shifted. A low thrum, the beginning of something. “Your body reacted.”

“Jules, I am so turned on right now that I can barely think straight. I’ve been like this for days. The jacket made it worse. Your voice is making it worse. The fact that you’re lying in a hotel bed wearing my sweater and nothing else—”

“How do you know I’m wearing nothing else?”

“Because I know you. You sleep in my sweater and underwear and you kicked the underwear off ten minutes ago because you always do.”

“I’m being profiled.”

“You’re being known. There’s a difference.” Avery bit her lip. “I want you to touch me. I know you’re three thousand miles away. I know you can’t. But I want to pretend you can. I want your voice in my ear telling me what to do. I want—” She pressed her hand over her eyes. “God, I’ve never done this before. Is this—are we doing this?”

“We’re doing this,” Jules said. “If you want to.”

“I want to.” Avery moved her hand from her eyes. Her pupils were dilated even through the screen. “Tell me what to do.”

Jules rolled onto her side. Propped the phone against the pillow so the camera caught her face—close, intimate, the angle of a person lying next to you in bed.

“Take off the shirt,” Jules said.

Avery sat up, pulled the shirt over her head in one motion, and lay back down. She wasn’t wearing a bra. The sight of her—bare, golden in the lamplight, freckles scattered across her chest, nipples peaked—made Jules’ breath catch audibly.

“God, you’re beautiful,” Jules said. The words came out rough.

“Jules.” Avery’s voice was strained. “Don’t narrate. Direct.“

“Touch your neck,” Jules said. “Where I usually start. The spot below your ear.”

Avery’s hand moved. Fingertips trailing up her own throat, finding the spot. Her eyes fluttered closed. Her lips parted.

“Now down. Your collarbone. Trace the line of it. Lower. Your breasts. Cup them the way I do.”

Avery obeyed. Her hands covering her own breasts, kneading gently, and a sound escaped her—a soft, desperate moan that traveled through the phone speaker and hit Jules in the center of her body like a physical impact.

“That sound,” Jules breathed. “I dream about that sound. I hear it on stage sometimes—not actually, but in my head, underneath the applause. The way you moan when I touch you.”

“I think I have some idea what it does to you.” Avery’s eyes opened. Dark. Focused. She looked directly into the camera and said: “I’m so wet right now I can feel it on my thighs.”

Jules’ hand moved between her own legs. She was wet too. Had been since Avery said my body reacted.

“Show me,” Jules said.

Avery angled the phone, and her hand slid down her stomach, under the waistband of her underwear, and the sound she made when her own fingers found the evidence—a sharp, shuddering gasp—echoed in the hotel room.

“How wet?” Jules asked. Her own fingers were sliding through slickness now, mirroring.

“Soaked. Jules, every night since you left I’ve been—”

“I know. Me too. Every night. Thinking about you.” Jules was breathing hard. “Take the underwear off. I want to see you.”

Avery lifted her hips. Pulled the underwear down. Kicked them off. Angled the phone and Jules saw her—all of her—naked in their bed, one hand between her legs, glistening, flushed, the most exposed Avery had ever been and the most powerful, because she was choosing this.

“Touch yourself,” Jules said. “The way I touch you. Slow circles. Don’t rush.”

Avery’s fingers moved. Slow, deliberate circles on her clit, her hips shifting with the rhythm, and Jules matched her—the same rhythm, the same pressure, two women across a continent with their faces lit blue by each other’s screens.

“I’m pretending it’s your hand,” Avery whispered. “I always do. Every time. Since the first night—since before we even kissed—I touched myself and pretended it was you.”

“Fuck, Avery—”

“The first time I came thinking about you, I was lying in this bed, and I didn’t even know if you wanted me, and I touched myself and thought about your hands and your mouth and the way you said ‘you’re allowed to be here’ and I came faster than I ever had in my life.”

Jules was close. The combination of Avery’s voice and her face and the knowledge of what her hand was doing was a circuit overloading, about to blow.

“I want to hear you come,” Jules said. “Right now. Watching me. Knowing I’m doing the same thing three thousand miles away.”

“Jules—I’m close—”

“I know. I can see it. Your breathing. The way your thighs are shaking. You’re right there. Come for me, baby. Let me hear you. Don’t hold back.”

Avery’s back arched. Her head tipped back on the pillow, throat exposed, and the cry that came out of her was devastating in a way closeness wasn’t—because it was proof of distance and proof, simultaneously, that distance couldn’t touch this. That what they had traveled through anything—glass, wire, ocean, absence—and arrived intact.

Jules came thirty seconds after—listening to the aftershocks, the shaky breathing, the soft “oh God” that Avery always said after—and the orgasm rolled through her with a force that made her grip the hotel pillow and bury her face in the green sweater that smelled like vanilla and home.

Silence. Breathing. Two hearts slowing from opposite coasts.

“Well,” Avery said. Her voice was wrecked. Sated. Smiling. “That happened.”

“That happened.”

“I just had phone sex.”

“You just had FaceTime sex. It’s an upgrade.”

“I love you. Have I said that tonight?”

“You’ve said it three times. But I’m accepting additional submissions.”

“I love you. I love your face. I love your voice. I love that you just had an orgasm on FaceTime and your first reaction was to ask if it’s ‘always like that’ like you’re evaluating a new pastry technique.”

“I approach all new experiences with intellectual curiosity.”

“Go to sleep, Avery. It’s three a.m. there.”

“I’ll stay on. Leave the phone on the pillow. I’ll listen to you hum.”

“I don’t hum.”

“You hum. Every night. It’s the most soothing sound in the world.”

Avery set the phone on the pillow next to her—Jules’ pillow, the one that still smelled like cedar and black pepper. She pulled the duvet up. Closed her eyes.

“Goodnight, Jules.”

“Goodnight, Avery.”

“Come home soon.”

“I’m already home. I’m just traveling.”

— END —

Loved this bonus chapter? Soft Girl, Sharp Tongue is available now.

Buy Soft Girl, Sharp Tongue