Soft Launch, Hard Feelings — Bonus Chapter

An Exclusive Bonus Scene by Aurora North

⚠️ This bonus chapter contains spoilers for Soft Launch, Hard Feelings. Read the novel first for the full experience.

Raw Footage

Two months after the epilogue. Off Feed Studios. Sable comes home from a press tour early and finds Marlowe filming alone. The creative direction gets very, very personal.

I heard her before I saw her.

Not her voice — her footsteps. The specific, unhurried cadence of boots on concrete that I’d memorized the way you memorize a song you’ve been listening to for six years.

I was in the studio. Alone. Attempting to film a product integration. The lighting was flat. I’d done fourteen takes and each one looked like a woman talking to a tripod.

Without Sable behind the camera, every piece of content I produced looked like a hostage video with better production value.

“Your key light is forty degrees too far left,” said the voice I’d been aching to hear for sixty-three days.

I turned. She was leaning against the doorframe — dark trousers, gray silk shirt, the camera harness crossing her chest in the leather X that had been the centerpiece of approximately seventy percent of my solo fantasies. Her hair was shorter. She’d cut it in Reykjavík. The effect was so devastating I forgot I was holding a resistance band and it snapped against my thigh.

“I missed you too.”

She adjusted the key light. Repositioned the fill. The flat, clinical set became warm and intimate in nine seconds, because Sable’s hands on lighting equipment was alchemy that made me want to put my mouth on every finger that touched the equipment.

“From the top.” Her voice dropped into the register — the low, private, precise register. “Look at me, not the lens.”

I looked at her. Whatever my face did made Sable pull back from the viewfinder.

“That’s the face you make when you want me to stop directing and start touching you. It is not brand-appropriate for sustainable activewear.”

“You are not workplace-appropriate. You have never been workplace-appropriate.”

“I’m also not currently interested in wearing pants.”

The composure developed a crack exactly the width of the distance between her professional self and the woman who’d been sexting me at three AM from Reykjavík.

“Black frame?” I asked.

“Black frame.” She switched off the camera. Just us and the editing desk where everything started.

I crossed the six feet between us in three steps and kissed her. My hands fisted in the camera harness — the buckles warm from her body heat, the hardware I’d been fantasizing about since the first time I understood that Sable Whitcomb in a camera harness was the single most attractive sight the visual universe had ever produced.

“Home.” She kissed my throat. “You taste like home.”

“I want you on this desk. The same desk. Right now.”

“Clear the desk.”

I cleared it. Monitors pushed aside. The desk swept bare in four seconds.

She lifted me onto the surface. I was sitting in my underwear and sports bra with Sable standing between my legs in full travel clothes and the camera harness. Her: dressed, armored, professional. Me: stripped, bare, wanting. The visual made me so wet I could feel it against the desk.

“Leave the harness on.”

“I’ve known since the first week. I wore it on the flight home specifically because I wanted to walk through that door wearing the thing you think about when you touch yourself. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“I think about you keeping it on while you go down on me, because the sound of the buckles against the desk while your mouth is between my legs is something I dreamed about in a hotel in Copenhagen and I woke up so wet I had to change the sheets.”

“Direction. Specific direction.”

“Your mouth. Between my legs. Now. I want your tongue on my clit and your fingers inside me and I want it fast and hard and I want to come on this desk while you’re wearing that harness. That’s my direction. Execute.”

She dropped to her knees.

The camera harness shifted — leather creaking, buckles catching warm light. She pulled my underwear off and pushed my legs apart — wide, wider — and she looked up at me from between my thighs with the focused, intent expression she used for the most important shots of her career.

Then she put her mouth on me and I stopped being a person who could form sentences.

Her tongue, flat and firm, pressing against my clit. No warmup. No teasing. Fast, focused, relentless. My hand slammed down on the desk. My hips bucked against her face.

“Fuck — Sable — right there, don’t you dare move —”

She didn’t move. Her tongue working my clit in tight, focused circles she’d perfected over a year of learning my body like a composition she intended to master.

I came in under two minutes. Hard enough that my thighs clamped around her head and I said her name in a voice I didn’t recognize — fractured, desperate, grateful.

She didn’t stop. She slid two fingers inside me and the stretch and the fullness made me cry out and grab her hair.

“Again.” Not a request. A direction. “You can. Focus.”

Focus. Our word. The word that meant I love you and I’m here and stop watching yourself and let me see the real thing.

Her fingers curled inside me, pressing with a rhythm that matched her tongue on my clit. The second orgasm built slowly and broke deeply — tears on my face because I’d missed her so much the relief was indistinguishable from the pleasure.

“My turn. Get on the desk.”

“Directors sit on the desk and let their girlfriends take their pants off. New company policy. Dell co-signed.”

I unbuckled the harness. Strap by strap. Then the shirt. Then the bra. The botanical tattoo flowering along her ribs, the new tan gilding her skin. She looked like a woman who had traveled the world and found what she was looking for and it was here.

I knelt. She was soaked — the evidence of fourteen hours of anticipation visible and glistening.

“The airport was a TSA checkpoint and the knowledge that I was going to fuck you on the desk where we edit our content. So yes. Foreplay.”

I put my mouth on her. This Sable — the Iceland Sable, the festival-winner Sable — this Sable got loud. I slid two fingers inside her and curled them upward and she said my name like a prayer by a woman who didn’t pray.

She came with a full-voiced cry that echoed off the studio walls — the devastating abandon of a woman who had spent eight months learning to be seen.

We lay tangled on the desk — naked, sweating, laughing.

“Bed?”

“Bed. But Sable? Bring the harness.”

We walked past the brass sliders set to black, into the bedroom.

She dropped the harness on the bed. Pushed me down beside it.

“Don’t move.”

She walked to the closet. Came back with the other harness — not the camera harness. The strap-on harness. Black leather. The one we’d bought together online during a late-night video call from Reykjavík where she’d held up options on her laptop screen and I’d made her model the measurements against her hip with her hand while I touched myself watching her fingers span the leather.

“Both harnesses?” My voice had dropped into a register I didn’t entirely control.

“You asked me to wear the camera harness and nothing else. I’m adding one accessory.” She stepped into the strap-on harness. Adjusted the straps with the same focused precision she used for camera equipment. The dildo was the deep purple one I liked, curved slightly, the one she’d chosen because the base pressed against her clit when she thrust.

She picked up the camera harness. Put it on over her bare chest — the leather X crossing between her breasts, the buckles sitting against her ribs.

Sable Whitcomb standing at the foot of my bed wearing a camera harness and a strap-on and nothing else, lit by afternoon light she’d approve of, with an expression that said I have been thinking about this for eight months and the thinking is over.

“That is the single most attractive thing I have ever seen in my life and I need you inside me immediately.”

“Fuck me. Slow at first. Then not slow. And don’t take the camera harness off. I want to feel the buckles against my chest while you’re inside me. I want to hear the leather creak every time you move. And I want you to look at me the entire time.”

She climbed onto the bed. Settled her weight over me. The camera harness buckles were cool against my bare skin. The strap-on pressed against my thigh — firm, warm, an inch from where I needed it.

She kissed me. Her mouth tasted like me — from the desk, from the studio — and the taste of myself on her tongue made my hips lift against the strap.

She positioned the tip against my entrance and held it there. The specific, agonizing tease.

“Sable. If you don’t—”

She pushed inside me.

The stretch — familiar, exquisite, the particular fullness of being penetrated by a woman whose body I knew and trusted — made my back arch off the pillows and my hands grab the camera harness straps and my mouth open around a word that was part her name and part profanity.

She sank in slowly. Inch by inch. Watching my face the way she watched a frame she was composing.

“All the way. I want all of it.”

Fully seated. The base pressing against my clit. The camera harness buckles digging into my sternum — cold metal and warm leather against flushed skin, a reminder that the woman fucking me was also the woman who directed me, who framed me, who knew how I looked from every angle and wanted me from all of them.

She began to move. Slow at first. Long, deliberate strokes. Each thrust made the camera harness shift against my chest — leather creaking, buckles clicking, the sounds mixing with our breathing and the wet, intimate sound of the dildo moving inside me.

“So fucking good. You feel so good inside me. I missed this — I missed your body on top of mine and the way you move and the way the harness sounds —”

She increased the pace. Rolling her hips so the base ground against my clit and the head pressed against the spot inside me that made my vision blur. My hands tightened on the harness straps — using them as leverage, pulling her harder against me.

“Faster.”

“I know what you need.”

She fucked me faster. Her hips driving into mine. The camera harness buckles rattled against my chest with every thrust. Her forehead pressed against mine, eyes open, watching me.

“Don’t close your eyes. Stay with me. Let me see you.”

Her hand slid between us. Found my clit. Inside and outside, the dildo and her fingers and the harness base all working together.

“I’m going to come — Sable — don’t stop — please don’t—”

“Come for me. I want to feel it. I want to watch your face when it happens.”

The orgasm was seismic. The deep, rolling, bone-shaking kind that started where she was inside me and radiated outward. My legs locked around her waist. My hands pulled the camera harness so hard a buckle dug into my palm and I didn’t care because I was coming around her and she was watching me and her eyes carried the expression I’d been seeing for six years without letting myself name it: You are the most important thing I have ever looked at.

She fucked me through it — slower, gentler, matching the aftershocks, her fingers still circling my clit with featherlight pressure that kept the pleasure pulsing.

“Your turn. Take the strap off.”

She unbuckled it. Removed it. She was still wearing the camera harness — just the camera harness, nothing else — her skin flushed, her hair wrecked, her thighs glistening from the strap’s base riding against her clit.

I pulled her beneath me. Straddling her hips. She lay against the pillows with the camera harness framing her breasts and she looked like a photograph I would never take because some images belong only to the people inside them.

I slid my hand between her legs. So wet my fingers glided without resistance — slick and swollen and sensitive from the strap’s pressure, from watching me come, from fourteen hours of anticipation.

“Inside. Two. Now.”

I gave her two fingers. Slid inside her with the confidence of a woman who had memorized this body. She gasped — the sharp intake that meant I’d found the right depth. I curled my fingers and fucked her with the same focused, unrelenting intent she’d given me on the desk.

My thumb found her clit. The combination built her fast. She was close before I started and closer with every stroke.

“Marlowe — harder — I need—”

I fucked her harder. My fingers curling with every thrust, my thumb grinding circles against her clit. The camera harness buckles rattled between us. Her breathing was ragged, vocal, the volume she’d learned to stop controlling — the sound of Sable Whitcomb being loud during sex was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard.

“Come for me. I want to feel it. I want to watch your face.”

She came undone. Her body arched beneath me, her abs contracting, her thighs clamping around my hand, her mouth open around a sound that was my name broken into syllables. She clenched around my fingers so hard I felt the pulse of it in my own body — the specific physical reminder that when you love someone this completely their pleasure becomes indistinguishable from your own.

I stayed inside her through the aftershocks. Kissed her jaw, her throat, the camera harness strap that crossed her collarbone.

I unbuckled the camera harness. Carefully. The final layer. The last piece of professional armor. The leather slid free and Sable lay beneath me completely bare — no harness, no camera, no equipment, no professional identity between her skin and mine.

“I’ll concede forty if you concede that the airport was foreplay.”

“The airport was foreplay. The parking lot was foreplay. The lighting adjustment was foreplay. Everything I have done since deciding to take the red-eye has been foreplay, and I regret nothing.”

“I’m home,” she said. Quieter this time. Into my hair. With the particular weight of a woman who had traveled the world and found the word she was looking for and it was four letters long and it was here.

The camera stayed off. The harness stayed on the nightstand. The door stayed closed.

And the footage — the raw, unedited, unreleased footage of two women who chose each other and kept choosing — stayed private.

Exactly where it belonged.

Loved Marlowe and Sable’s story? Get the full novel now.

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