Straight Girl in My Bed by Aurora North - Bonus Chapter

Straight Girl in My Bed — Bonus Chapter

Seven Months Later
by Aurora North

An exclusive epilogue to Straight Girl in My Bed. Too hot for Amazon. Sign up to unlock.

Seven Months Later

Seven months. That’s how long it takes to stop being surprised by your own happiness.

I’m at brunch with Sasha in a place that serves twelve-dollar eggs and bottomless mimosas, and she’s telling me about a fight she had with Marc over closet space, and I’m half-listening because Jules just texted me a photo of our cat — our cat, the orange tabby we adopted three weeks ago and named Shutter — asleep on my laptop keyboard.

“Harper. Are you listening?”

“Closet space. Marc’s hoodies. You’re considering arson.”

“Not arson. Strategic donation.” She sips her mimosa. “Why are you smiling at your phone like that?”

“Jules sent me a cat picture.”

“You’ve been together seven months and she still sends you cat pictures?”

“She sends me cat pictures, coffee updates, and yesterday she sent me a photo of the light hitting our bedroom wall at six AM because she said it looked like a painting I’d like.”

Sasha sets down her glass. “That’s disgusting.”

“Thank you.”

“I mean it. Disgustingly cute. You’re glowing. You’ve been glowing since the lake house. It’s unreasonable.”

I am glowing. I know this because I catch my reflection in the restaurant window and the woman looking back at me is someone I didn’t know existed eight months ago — relaxed, present, wearing one of Jules’s flannels over a sundress because it smells like cedar and I’m not above theft.

“My girlfriend,” I say to Sasha, testing the word the way I always do — rolling it around, feeling its weight, confirming that it still fits. “My girlfriend is at home with our cat, and I’m at brunch, and this is my life.”

“Your girlfriend,” Sasha repeats, grinning. “Still love hearing you say that.”

“Still love saying it.”

Sasha leans forward with the conspiratorial energy of a woman on her third mimosa. “Okay, real talk. The sex. Is it still…” She waves her hand vaguely. “You know.”

“Sasha.”

“What! You’re my best friend. I’m legally entitled to details.”

“That is not a law.”

“It should be. Is it still the thing where you can’t walk straight afterward? Pun fully intended.”

I press my napkin to my mouth to hide the grin. “I am not answering that.”

“That’s a yes. Oh my god. Your face. That’s a screaming yes.”

It is a screaming yes. But Sasha doesn’t need to know that last Tuesday, Jules bent me over the kitchen counter while the pasta boiled over and I came so hard I knocked a colander off the drying rack and neither of us stopped. She doesn’t need to know about the shower last Thursday, or the darkroom incident that I’m still not sure was sanitary, or the fact that Jules owns exactly one silk scarf and it has not been used for fashion purposes in approximately five months.

“It’s good,” I say, the understatement of the century. “It’s really good.”

“I hate you.”

“You love me.”

“I love you so much it makes me sick. Go home to your photographer and your cat and your inferno-level sex life. I’m going home to argue about hoodies.”

I pay the check. Hug Sasha on the sidewalk. Walk the six blocks home — our home, Jules’s studio in the Village that now has twice as many coffee mugs and a second toothbrush holder and a shelf where my binder collection lives next to her camera collection.

I text Jules from the stairwell: Told Sasha she’s a better kisser than me and Sasha said “we know.”

Jules responds before I reach the third floor: Come home and prove her wrong.

I walk faster.

The apartment door is unlocked. Inside, the afternoon light is doing the thing it does on Sundays — pouring through the west-facing window in a warm gold wash that makes everything look like a film still. Jules is on the couch with Shutter on her lap and her camera in her hands, reviewing proofs from a shoot, wearing a tank top and boxers and nothing else.

Seven months. Still hits me like a freight train.

She’s lean and angular against the couch cushions, one leg tucked under her, the other stretched out. The tank top has ridden up on one side, exposing a strip of stomach and the edge of her hip bone. The film-strip vine tattoo on her forearm is dark against her pale skin. Her hair is messy — she cut it again last week, shorter on the sides, longer on top, and it falls across her forehead in a way that makes me want to push it back and then pull it.

“Hi,” I say from the doorway.

She looks up. The look — the one she gives me when I walk into a room, every single time, like she’s seeing me for the first time and also like she’s been seeing me forever — makes my stomach flip.

“Hi. How’s Sasha?”

“Sasha’s great. She asked about our sex life.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Nothing. My face apparently told her everything.”

Jules grins. The slow grin. The one that starts in the corner of her mouth and spreads until her whole face is involved, the one that’s equal parts amused and predatory and that I feel between my legs before it even finishes forming.

“Your face is a liability,” she says.

“Your face is the reason mine is a liability.”

I cross the room. Shutter, sensing an interruption to his lap sovereignty, yawns and vacates to the armchair with the dignified indifference of a cat who has seen entirely too much of his owners’ naked bodies and would like to file a formal complaint. I take his place — straddling Jules’s lap, knees on the couch cushions, hands on her shoulders.

“You said to prove something,” I say.

“Did I?”

“You challenged me via text. There are receipts.”

“I believe I said ‘prove her wrong.’ About the kissing. If you’re up for it.”

I kiss her.

Not softly. Seven months ago, on a porch in the Finger Lakes, our first kiss was tentative and trembling and full of questions. This kiss has no questions. This kiss is a thesis statement. My hands in her hair, my mouth opening against hers, tongue sliding along her lower lip before pushing inside, and the sound she makes — a low, vibrating groan that I feel in my chest and my clit simultaneously — lights me up from the inside.

Her hands find my waist. Slide under the flannel — her flannel, on my body, which does something to her every single time. Her fingers trace up my ribs, her thumbs brushing the undersides of my breasts through nothing, because I didn’t wear a bra today. Because it’s Sunday. Because I knew I was coming home to this.

“No bra,” she observes against my lips, her voice dropping half a register.

“It’s Sunday.”

“God bless Sunday.”

She pushes the flannel off my shoulders. It drops to the couch behind me. Then her hands find the straps of my sundress and slide them down my arms, and the fabric pools at my waist, and I’m bare from the waist up, straddling her lap in the afternoon light, and she looks at me the way she looks at a photograph she’s proud of — with attention, with reverence, with the quiet intensity of someone who will never stop finding new things in the composition.

“You’re so fucking beautiful,” she says.

“You say that every time.”

“It’s true every time.”

Her mouth goes to my neck. She traces a path down my throat with her tongue — a slow, wet line from below my ear to the hollow at the base of my neck — and I tilt my head back and feel my hips roll against her lap. When her teeth find the spot below my ear, the one she discovered at the lake house and has been weaponizing ever since, I gasp and my fingers tighten in her hair and I grind down onto her thigh without conscious decision.

“There she is,” Jules murmurs against my skin. “I was wondering how long the civilized version would last.”

“About thirty seconds. You should know that by now.”

She laughs against my collarbone, and the vibration travels down through my chest and into my stomach and lower. Then her mouth is on my breast — tongue circling my nipple, slow and deliberate, before flattening against it and sucking — and I arch into her and grip the back of the couch because the sensation goes straight to my core, a direct line from her mouth to the ache building between my legs.

She moves to the other breast. Tongue, then teeth — a light scrape that makes me hiss — then suction, gentle and rhythmic, and my hips are moving on their own now, grinding against her thigh in a slow, needy rhythm that I can’t control and don’t want to.

“Jules.” Her name comes out ragged. “Touch me.”

“I am touching you.”

“Lower.”

Her hand slides down my stomach. Under the sundress. Up my inner thigh, fingers trailing lightly against my skin, and when she reaches the cotton of my underwear she presses — one finger, firm, directly over my clit through the fabric — and the moan I let out is loud enough that Mr. Petrov in 2B is definitely adding to his incident report.

“You’re soaked,” she says, and the observation in her voice — the photographer’s precision, the clinical notation of a fact she finds deeply, personally gratifying — makes me wetter.

“I’ve been thinking about you since the stairwell.”

“That was two minutes ago.”

“I’m efficient.”

“Off,” she says, tugging at my underwear. Her voice has dropped into the register that means she’s done being patient. I know that register. I live for that register.

I lift my hips. She hooks her fingers into the waistband and drags them down, and I kick them off one ankle and settle back onto her lap, bare under the sundress, and the feeling of the couch fabric against my bare ass and her clothed thigh between my legs is obscene in the best possible way.

Her hand slides between my thighs. No barrier now. Her fingers slide through my folds, slick and easy, and the first direct contact — her fingertip circling my clit with a pressure that’s exactly right because she has seven months of data on exactly what gets me off — makes my whole body tighten.

“God, you’re wet,” she says again, like she can’t stop noting it, like the evidence of my want is something she wants to document. “You walked home like this?”

“I walked home fast like this.”

She pushes two fingers inside me and I sink down onto her hand and the sound I make is guttural, raw, stripped of every pretense. She curls her fingers forward and presses up and my hips stutter and my forehead drops against hers and we’re breathing each other’s air, foreheads touching, eyes locked, and this — this is the thing about sex with Jules that I could never have imagined before her.

The eye contact.

It never gets less intense. Seven months, and looking into her eyes while she’s inside me still feels like standing at the edge of something vast. She sees me. Not the polished version, not the performance. The real one — flushed and grinding and desperate, with mascara that’s probably smudging and hair that’s definitely wrecked and my mouth hanging open making sounds that are not suitable for public consumption.

She sees all of it and she wants all of it and the certainty of that is what makes me come undone.

I ride her hand. On top. My knees on the couch, my hands on her shoulders, my body rolling in a rhythm that’s mine — not guided, not instructed, mine. She matches me, her fingers thrusting in counterpoint to my hips, her thumb finding my clit with each downstroke, and the dual stimulation builds something in the base of my spine that’s familiar and devastating and exactly what I need.

“Jules,” I breathe. “Jules, I’m close.”

“I know. I can feel you.” She can — I’m tightening around her fingers, my inner walls clenching in the pattern she’s learned to read like a countdown. “Don’t hold back.”

“I never hold back with you.”

“I know that too.”

She curls her fingers hard, presses her thumb against my clit, and I come. My vision whites out. My thighs clamp against her hips. My hand fists in her hair and I say her name — Jules, Jules, Jules — the word I found in a lake house bed seven months ago, the word that broke me open and put me back together, the word that means home in every language my body speaks.

The orgasm rolls through me in waves — deep, slow, consuming. Not the sharp, frantic kind of the early days. The settled kind. The kind that belongs to a body that has been loved well and often and knows what to expect and is still somehow surprised by the magnitude of it.

She eases me through it. Her fingers go gentle inside me, her other hand stroking my back, her mouth pressing kisses against my collarbone while the aftershocks pulse and fade.

“Proved,” I mumble into her neck.

“Conclusively.”

“Your turn.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

I slide off her lap. Down to the floor. She watches me descend with those dark, heavy-lidded eyes that track my every move, and when I settle between her knees and look up at her — from the floor, from below, the angle that still does something to both of us every single time — her breath catches audibly.

I hook my fingers into the waistband of her boxers. “Lift.”

She lifts. I pull them down her legs and toss them behind me and spread her knees wider and look at her — really look. Seven months and I still take a moment here. The lean muscles of her thighs. The sharp angle of her hip bones. The dark hair between her legs, the slickness already visible, the way her stomach muscles tense when she feels my breath.

“You’re staring,” she says.

“I’m appreciating.”

“Appreciate faster.”

I lean in and press my mouth against her inner thigh. Kiss the soft skin there — one side, then the other — and she makes a frustrated sound that I enjoy thoroughly. I’m not teasing. I’m savoring. There’s a difference, and the difference is that I intend to make her come so hard she forgets her own name, and the buildup is part of the architecture.

I put my mouth on her.

The first stroke of my tongue is slow. A long, flat lick from her entrance to her clit, tasting her, relearning her, because even after hundreds of times the flavor of Jules Mercer is something my body responds to on a cellular level. She’s warm and slick and the sound she makes when my tongue reaches her clit — a sharp, bitten gasp, caught between her teeth — makes my own cunt throb with a renewed ache.

I circle her clit with the tip of my tongue. Light pressure. Exploratory. Reading her responses the way she taught me to read them — by sound and movement and the particular tension in her thigh muscles. She’s sensitive today — wound up from watching me ride her hand, probably — and every pass of my tongue makes her hips twitch.

I slide two fingers inside her.

She’s hot and tight and wet around me, and when I curl my fingers forward and press up against the spot that makes her silent, her hand goes to my hair and grips hard and her thighs tense around my head and I know I’ve found it.

I establish the rhythm. Tongue on her clit — firm, consistent, the steady pressure she needs. Fingers inside her, stroking in counterpoint, curling on the withdraw. I don’t change the pace. I don’t vary the pattern. Jules doesn’t need creativity at this stage; she needs precision, and I have seven months of practice in exactly what precision looks like on her body.

Her breathing goes shallow. Her hand tightens in my hair. The sounds she’s making have escalated from gasps to low, broken moans that she’s trying to muffle against her own arm.

I pull my mouth away just long enough to say: “Don’t muffle.”

“The neighbors—”

“Fuck the neighbors. I want to hear you.”

I press my mouth back against her and suck her clit — gently, rhythmically — and her arm drops away from her face and the next moan comes out full and unrestrained and it’s the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard, including every song and symphony and whispered I love you in the history of my life.

She goes quiet. The silence that means she’s right at the edge — the held breath, the stillness, every muscle in her body locking as the orgasm gathers. I know this silence. I live for the moment after it breaks.

I press harder. Suck firmly. Curl my fingers and press up.

She comes.

Not quietly. The silence shatters into a cry that starts as my name and dissolves into something wordless and wrecked. Her back arches off the couch. Her thighs clamp around my head. Her hand fists in my hair so hard it hurts and I don’t care, I don’t care at all, because she’s pulsing around my fingers and against my tongue and her whole body is shaking and I did this. Me. My mouth. My hands. My seven months of devoted, obsessive, deeply personal study of the exact configuration of stimulation required to make Jules Mercer fall apart.

I ease her down. Gentle tongue, slow fingers, soft kisses against her thigh while the aftershocks ripple through her. When she unclenches enough for me to move, I kiss my way back up her body — stomach, ribs, the camera tattoo, her throat, her jaw — and she grabs my face and pulls me in and kisses me deep and open and I know she’s tasting herself on my mouth and that the knowledge of where my mouth just was is making her pupils blow out all over again.

“Get up here,” she says against my lips.

I climb back into her lap. She pulls my sundress over my head and throws it somewhere and we’re both fully naked now on a couch in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, and the light is painting us gold and the cat is in the armchair and the apartment smells like sex and cedar soap and this is my life and I will never get over it.

“Again,” she says.

“You want to go again?”

“I want to make you go again. Lie back.”

I lie back on the couch. She settles over me and kisses down my body with the focused attention of a woman on a mission, and when her mouth reaches the place between my legs — still swollen, still sensitive from the first round — the touch of her tongue makes me jerk and gasp and grab a couch cushion like it’s the only solid thing in the room.

She’s relentless. She knows I’m sensitized, knows the second orgasm builds faster and hits harder, and she uses that knowledge with the merciless precision of a woman who has studied me like a contact sheet and knows which frame makes me lose my mind. Her tongue alternates between broad, flat strokes and tight, focused circles, and her fingers are back inside me — three this time, because she can feel how open I am, how ready — and the stretch is perfect, the fullness is perfect, and when she adds a twisting motion on the thrust I make a sound that I will be embarrassed about later and am currently too blissed out to care about.

The second orgasm takes me by surprise. It rolls up from somewhere deep and breaks over me in a long, shuddering wave that makes my back arch off the couch and my thighs shake and my hand press the cushion against my own face as I cry out into it, because I told her to not muffle but apparently the rule doesn’t apply to me when the orgasm is this intense.

She stays with me through every pulse. Then she crawls up my body and collapses on top of me and we lie there, breathing hard, naked and sweating on a couch that was not designed for this level of athletic use.

Later. We haven’t moved. The light has shifted from gold to amber. Shutter has migrated from the armchair to the windowsill and is watching a pigeon with murderous intent.

“We should probably close the blinds,” Jules says.

“Probably.”

“Mr. Petrov from 2B has definitely seen my ass.”

“Mr. Petrov is ninety and he deserves a thrill.”

“He’s going to start charging admission.”

“We’d sell out.”

She laughs. I feel it in her chest, against my cheek, vibrating through both of us in the warm, heavy aftermath of a Sunday that started with brunch and ended here, the way Sundays always end now — tangled on a surface, breathing hard, stupidly in love.

“Jules?”

“Mm.”

“Do you remember the pillow wall?”

She snorts. “The sage-green pillow that lasted approximately forty-five minutes before migrating to my side of the bed.”

“I really thought I was straight.”

“I know you did, baby.”

“I built a pillow wall.”

“You built a pillow wall and then you spooned me in your sleep. Your subconscious was way ahead of you.”

“My subconscious was the smartest version of me.”

“Your conscious version caught up. That’s what matters.” She presses her lips against my forehead. “And for the record, the conscious version is extremely talented with her tongue. Your subconscious could never.”

I bury my face in her neck and laugh until my ribs ache.

Seven months ago, I arrived at a lake house with a coral binder and a conviction that I was straight. I built a pillow wall in a bed I was sharing with my best friend and told myself the buzzing in my chest was wedding-week energy.

I was wrong. About the energy. About the wall. About myself.

I was right about one thing: the bed was never the problem.

It was the answer. And this — Sunday, couch, cat, the woman I love still breathing hard beneath me — this is what the answer looks like when you’re brave enough to say it out loud.

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