The Green Room

A Bonus Chapter from The Babysitter’s Girlfriend
by Aurora North

Spoiler warning: This bonus chapter takes place after the events of The Babysitter’s Girlfriend. Read the full novel first for maximum impact.

Saylor

The bedroom smells like fresh paint and bergamot and the particular electricity of a woman who has been watching me roll sage-green onto her walls for six hours and has reached her limit.

“It’s still wet,” I say, setting the roller in the tray. “We should wait at least—”

“I don’t care.”

Margot is standing in the doorway. Hair piled up in a messy clip, paint-flecked tank top, bare feet, a stripe of sage on her cheekbone where she swiped her face an hour ago. She looks wrecked and beautiful and completely, dangerously decided.

“Margot, the walls—”

“Will dry. The sheets are new. The bed is made. The kids are at Derek’s until tomorrow afternoon. And I have been watching you reach for the high parts of the ceiling with your arms above your head and your stomach showing for the last three hours, and if you don’t put that roller down and come here, I am going to lose what’s left of my composure.”

I put the roller down.

She crosses the room in four strides. Her hands find the hem of my paint-splattered T-shirt and pull it over my head before I’ve finished straightening up, and then her mouth is on my collarbone and her fingers are in my hair and she’s pushing me backward toward the bed we made this morning with the new sheets — soft gray, the color of morning fog, the sheets she picked because she said they’d look good against my tattoos.

The backs of my knees hit the mattress. I sit. She stands between my legs, looking down at me, and the light from the hallway catches the side of her face and the sage stripe on her cheekbone and the dark heat in her eyes.

“This is our room now,” she says. Not a question. A declaration. “No one else’s. Ours.”

“Ours,” I agree.

“I want you to lie back and not move. I want you to let me take care of you. The whole time. No reciprocating, no reaching for me, no flipping me over halfway through because you can’t stand not being in control.” She tilts her head. The dare in her smile. “Can you do that?”

My mouth goes dry. Margot giving orders in the bedroom is a development I am still adjusting to — the woman who stammered when I called her gorgeous six months ago now stands over me with paint on her face and tells me to lie still, and the authority in her voice sends a pulse of heat down my spine that settles heavily between my legs.

“I can try,” I say.

“You’ll do more than try.”

She pushes me gently onto my back. The new sheets are cool against my skin. Margot is silhouetted against the white ceiling, pulling her tank top over her head, unclasping her bra, standing above me in nothing but paint-smeared leggings with her hair falling out of its clip and her breasts bare and the bergamot candle throwing warm shadows across the stretch marks on her stomach that I have kissed so many times I’ve lost count.

She kneels on the bed. Straddles my hips. The weight of her settles against me — the warmth of her thighs on either side of mine, the press of her center against my stomach through the thin cotton — and I reach for her waist. Instinct.

She catches both my wrists. Presses them into the mattress above my head.

“I said don’t move.”

“Good girl,” she murmurs. And kisses my throat.

The words detonate where they always detonate — below my navel, behind my ribs. She stole the phrase from me, weaponized it, made it hers, and every time she says it my body clenches like a fist and my brain goes white.

She releases my wrists. “Keep them there.”

I grip the headboard and do not move while she works down my body. My neck — open-mouthed kisses ending with teeth. She bites the junction of neck and shoulder, not gently, the sharp pain followed by warm suction, and I know she’s leaving a mark she wants visible tomorrow.

My collarbone. The slope of my breast. She traces the outline with her tongue — the outer curve, the soft underside, circling inward in a spiral that tightens and never quite reaches the center. Teasing. Making me wait.

“Margot—”

“Patience.”

“I am being patient. My hands are on the headboard. But if you don’t put your mouth on my—”

She takes the pierced nipple in her mouth and my sentence dies. The soft heat of her tongue against the barbell, the gentle roll of metal between her lips, the slight graze of teeth — I clench the headboard and my hips lift off the mattress and the sound I make fills the green room.

“Louder,” she says against my skin. “Nobody’s listening but me.”

She alternates. Pierced side, then unpierced. Her mouth on one while her hand works the other — rolling, pinching, tugging — and the dual sensation builds a pressure in my abdomen that makes my thighs clamp around her hips.

“You’re squirming,” she observes.

“You’re torturing me.”

“Is that a complaint?”

“It’s a description.”

She grins against my sternum. Then moves lower. The script on my ribs — she is the storm — traced letter by letter with her tongue. My stomach. Each stretch mark kissed. The ritual. The sacrament.

She hooks her fingers in my waistband. Pulls my shorts and underwear down slow, making eye contact the entire time. Strips me bare on the gray sheets.

I’m naked. Hands on the headboard. Chest heaving. Every muscle straining with the effort of not moving while she kneels between my thighs and looks at me.

“You’re extraordinary,” she says. Her fingertips trace the mandala tattoo on my thigh. Her hand slides higher, along my inner thigh, so close to where I’m wet and aching that I can feel the heat of her fingers without the contact. “The way you get wet before I even touch you. Just from my voice. Just from the waiting.”

“Margot. Please.”

“Please what?”

“Please touch me. Please put your mouth on me. Please do literally anything before I snap this headboard in half.”

She lowers her head. The first touch of her tongue — flat, slow, a single long stroke from my entrance to my clit — rewires my central nervous system.

I grip the headboard so hard the wood creaks. My hips lift off the mattress. The moan that comes out of me is loud and uncontained and I don’t care, because nobody is listening but her, and she wants to hear it, and I have spent my entire life being careful and quiet and controlled and this woman taught me to be none of those things.

She eats me like she has all night. Because she does. No stolen minutes. No baby monitor. No husband upstairs. Just the green room and the candlelight and her mouth and the sounds I make and the endless, luxurious expanse of a night that belongs to us.

Her tongue circles my clit — slow, firm, the rhythm she’s perfected over six months. She knows that slow, wide circles make my thighs shake. She knows that the flat of her tongue combined with a gentle suck makes my back arch. She knows that when she flicks fast and light, directly on the most sensitive point, my vision whites out and my vocabulary reduces to her name.

She slides one finger inside me. I clench around her immediately and she groans against my clit, and the vibration sends a shockwave through me that makes my thighs clamp around her ears.

“You’re so wet,” she says, lifting her head, her lips glistening, her eyes dark. “You’re always so wet for me.”

She adds a second finger. Curls them forward, finding the swollen ridge. Her mouth returns to my clit. The combination — tongue and fingers working in tandem, the pressure building at the base of my spine like a wave gathering offshore — is relentless.

I am trying not to move. I am failing. My hips roll against her mouth, chasing the crest. My hands are white-knuckled on the headboard and I am making sounds that are not words — gasps and moans and fragments of her name.

“Margot—I’m going to—”

She adds a third finger. The stretch makes me cry out. She’s never used three before. The fullness is overwhelming — every knuckle, every movement, the curl of her fingertips against the spot that makes my vision strobe. Her free hand slides up my stomach, finds my breast, and rolls the piercing between her fingers.

Triple sensation: mouth on my clit, three fingers inside me, hand on the barbell. Every nerve ending firing simultaneously.

“Good girl,” she whispers against my clit. “Let go.”

I detonate.

The orgasm rips through me from center to extremity. My back bows off the mattress. My hands wrench the headboard hard enough to move the bed. My thighs lock around her head and my voice fills the green room — her name, fractured and repeated, a sound I couldn’t control if I wanted to. I come and I come and she stays with me, her mouth gentle now, her fingers slowing, riding the contractions that clench around her in long, rhythmic pulses while my body shakes apart on the sheets she chose because they’d look good against my tattoos.

The aftershocks roll through me for what feels like minutes. She slides her fingers out slowly and crawls up the bed and lies beside me.

I can’t speak. She detaches my fingers from the headboard one by one and brings my hands down to my chest and holds them there.

“I think you broke me.”

“Good.” She kisses my shoulder. “I’ll put you back together in the morning.”

“You say that like I’m going to let you sleep.”

“The rule was no reciprocating.”

“The rule was for round one.” I roll toward her. “We’re in a brand new room. You really think I’m stopping at one?”

“How many rooms did we christen before?” I’m rolling her onto her back now, my mouth at her ear. “The living room. The kitchen. The bathroom. The laundry room. The garage. The hallway. The old bedroom. Seven rooms. This is number eight.” I press my mouth to her pulse. “Number eight deserves something special.”

I peel her leggings and underwear down in one motion. Then she’s bare underneath me in the candlelight, in the green room, and I take a moment to look at her. The full curves. The soft stomach with its silver rivers. The flush spreading from her chest to her neck. She doesn’t cover herself. The arms that used to cross rest at her sides, open, trusting.

I kiss her deep, letting her taste herself on my mouth. She moans into the kiss and her hips lift against mine.

I don’t make her wait. She’s been patient for six months — patient while I spiraled, patient while I decided, patient while I left my husband and rebuilt my life. She has earned this.

I kiss down her body. I don’t skip the stretch marks. The ritual is sacred. One silver line, then the next. My lips on the places she was taught to hide.

I settle between her thighs. She opens for me without hesitation. I see how wet she is — glistening, swollen — and my mouth waters.

The first touch of my tongue makes her entire body roll. The sound she makes is open and unhidden and loud enough to test the acoustics of the freshly painted walls.

I eat her the way she ate me — slowly, thoroughly. I lick through her folds with long, flat strokes, tasting her, mapping her. She tastes like salt and heat and something sweet that is uniquely her, and I will never get enough.

I circle her clit with the tip of my tongue. Her hand finds the back of my head and her fingers thread through my hair and she holds me there, grip tightening when I do something right.

I slide two fingers inside her. She’s so wet they glide in and the sound she makes — a low, wrecked moan from below her diaphragm — is the best thing I have ever heard. I curl my fingers forward. Find the spot. Press.

Her back arches. Her hand fists in my hair. She says my name like it’s the last word she’ll ever speak.

I build the rhythm. Tongue on her clit, fingers inside her. She’s close — the tightening around my fingers, the trembling in her thighs, the hips rolling against my mouth with urgency past the point of composure.

“Saylor — right there — don’t stop — please — oh God —”

I increase the pressure. Tongue firm and steady, fingers driving deeper, curling against the spot. My free hand finds her breast and squeezes. The triple contact — mouth, fingers, hand — the combination that has always undone her.

She comes with a sound that fills the room like weather. A cry — raw, full-bodied, the sound of a woman who spent years being quiet during sex and has learned that her voice belongs to her. Her thighs lock around my head and her body clenches around my fingers in rhythmic pulses and she says my name over and over until the word becomes pure sound.

I stay with her. Gentle. Softening. When the last tremor passes I press a kiss to her inner thigh and crawl up and pull her into my arms, her back to my front, my lips on the nape of her neck — the spot that started everything in a pantry when my breath landed there and she trembled.

She shivers. Still. After everything. The same shiver.

“That was number eight,” she murmurs. Drowsy. Wrecked. Smiling.

“The best one yet.”

“You say that every time.”

“It’s true every time.”

Later. Much later. The candle has burned down to a stub. The sheets are tangled and will definitely need washing. She’s lying on her stomach, chin on her folded arms, her hair spread across the pillow. I’m tracing the line of her spine, counting vertebrae.

“We should check if we got paint on the new sheets.”

“We definitely got paint on the new sheets.”

“Worth it.”

“Absolutely worth it.”

She turns her head. Those dark, steady eyes. “I love you. In our green room. On our paint-stained sheets. With our candle almost dead and our children at their father’s and our whole future sitting in the hallway like luggage we haven’t unpacked yet.”

“That’s a lot of ours.”

“Get used to it.”

I kiss the nape of her neck. The spot. She shivers. Always the same shiver. She reaches back and finds my hand. Threads her fingers through mine on the sage-green, paint-stained, brand-new sheets of the room we built together.

“Always,” I whisper against her skin.

“Always,” she says back.

And neither of us is lying.

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