🔥 Bonus Chapter: The Sunday Roll

An EXCLUSIVE scene from The Better Angle
by Aurora North

⚠️ Content Warning: This bonus chapter contains extremely explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes). This is the uncut, too-hot-for-Amazon version. Reader discretion advised. 18+ only.

Eve’s POV — Set during the off-season, after the Marchetti family dinner

The apartment smelled like basil and garlic and the particular warmth of a Sunday that had nowhere to be.

We’d gotten back from Duluth two days ago. My mother had sent us home with enough food to survive a siege — three containers of sauce, a Ziploc bag of homemade sausage, a tin of cookies that Riley had already demolished half of, and a note in my mother’s handwriting that said Feed your roommate. She is too skinny. My grandmother’s influence, even in absentia.

Riley was in the darkroom.

She’d been in there since noon, developing a roll she’d shot last week — street photography, a personal project, the kind of work she did when her hands needed to move and her brain needed to think.

I was on the couch reading — actually reading, a novel, not a scouting report. I was on page forty-two. I’d read the same paragraph three times because my brain kept drifting to the darkroom door and the woman behind it.

It was the hands. It was always the hands.

I’d watched Riley’s hands for months — on the camera, on the enlarger, on my body — and the precision of them still undid me. She touched a camera the way I held a hockey stick: like it was part of her.

She touched me the same way.

The darkroom door opened. Riley walked out in her developing clothes — an old flannel with the sleeves rolled up, shorts, bare feet. Her hands were faintly chemical. A streak of fixer on her forearm.

“Come look at this,” she said.

On the wet bench, the print she’d just pulled: me. On the couch. Reading. I was wearing my glasses — the wire-framed reading glasses I’d hidden from teammates for years because they made me look soft.

“You always do this,” I said. “You take these pictures of me and I look like someone better than who I actually am.”

“Someone exactly who you actually are.” Riley leaned against the doorframe. “I just point the camera at what’s there.”

“I want you to let me photograph you.”

Riley went still. The stillness of a person whose deepest instinct had just been inverted.

“Because you’ve spent our entire relationship seeing me. Through the camera, through the darkroom, through everything. I’ve never done that for you.” I stepped closer. “I want to see you, Riley. I want to know what it feels like to look at you the way you look at me.”

“I’m not good at being looked at,” she said.

“I know. That’s why it matters.”

“Okay. But you need a tutorial.”

The tutorial lasted sixty seconds. Riley handed me the Leica M6. “Don’t think. Just shoot what you see.”

I lifted the camera. Riley was in the frame — framed by the doorway of the darkroom, flannel half-open, hair loose. She looked startled. I pressed the shutter.

“Don’t apologize. Don’t smile if it doesn’t feel natural.”

Her own words. The exact words she’d said to me on media day, nine months ago. Reversed.

“Look at me, Riley.”

She looked at me. Through the viewfinder, her face resolved — the freckles, the green-hazel eyes. She was scared. I took the shot.

I shot her in the kitchen making tea. By the window. “Take your hair down,” I said. Her auburn hair fell around her shoulders and through the viewfinder she looked like one of Diane’s paintings.

“This is what it feels like?” she asked. “Being seen by someone who looks at you like you’re the only thing in the room?”

“It feels like this on every side.”

“I want to take my shirt off,” she said. “Not because you asked. Because I want you to see me.”

She unbuttoned the flannel. Slowly. Each button a decision. The fabric parted — no bra, just freckles and the soft swell of her breasts. She shrugged the flannel off and let it fall.

She stood in the window light, bare from the waist up, and looked at me.

My hands were shaking. I pressed the shutter.

“You’re extraordinary,” I said.

I took six more frames. She moved to the bed. “Come here.”

She reached for my t-shirt and pulled it up, over my head. One-handed, the other holding the camera. The absurdity made us both laugh. The tension dissolved.

Riley unhooked my sports bra. I shot her looking up at me, bare-chested, her eyes dark with want and something deeper. Trust.

“Lie down,” she said.

“You lie down. I’m the one with the camera.”

She grinned. Lay back. Arms above her head, hair spreading across the pillow, her body a long pale landscape of freckles and lean muscle.

I shot her from above. One frame. The best photograph I would ever take.

I set the camera down.

“Good. Come here.”

I crawled over her. Our bare chests pressed together and the contact after the distance of the camera was electric. We both gasped.

Riley pulled me down and kissed me. Deep, slow. Her tongue against mine, hands in my hair, hips shifting underneath me.

I kissed down her throat. Traced the freckles with my tongue. Took her nipple in my mouth — gently at first, then harder when she said “Harder.” She moaned, loud and full.

“Tell me what you want,” I said.

“Lower. Kiss my stomach.”

I kissed her stomach. The sensitive skin below her navel.

“Take my shorts off.”

I hooked my fingers in her waistband and pulled — shorts and underwear together, off. She was bare. Completely bare.

“Look at me,” she said. “Don’t close your eyes. I want to see you while you do this.”

I held her gaze. I lowered my mouth.

The first touch of my tongue against her was slow and deliberate and I watched her face the entire time — watched her lips part, watched her eyes go dark, watched the flush climb from her chest to her neck. She was soaked and she tasted like heat and salt and the specific, addictive flavor that was only her.

“Faster,” she said. Steady. Commanding. “Circles. Right there. Don’t stop.”

I circled her clit with my tongue. Her hips rolled against my mouth.

“Fingers. Two. Slow.”

I slid two fingers inside her — slowly, feeling her stretch and clench around me. She was tight and hot and I could feel her pulse from the inside.

“Curl them. There — right there. Fuck. Right there, Eve, don’t move.”

I held the position — fingers curled, tongue on her clit, eyes on her face — and Riley’s composure cracked. Her thighs trembled against my shoulders.

“Don’t stop. Please — Eve — don’t stop, I’m going to—”

I didn’t stop. I watched her come. Watched her face break open. She came saying my name like it was the first word she’d ever learned. Eve.

I stayed with her through the aftershocks. Crawled up her body. She kissed me, tasting herself on my lips.

“Your turn,” she whispered. “Eve Marchetti. Lie the fuck down.”

I lay down.

Riley rolled on top of me and I exhaled. A long, shuddering release. The exhale of a woman who’d been holding her body taut for years.

She started at my neck — the spot where I carried every faceoff. She kissed it until the muscle released. She moved to my shoulders. My collarbone. Every bruise the season had left.

Then she pressed her thumbs to the crease of my thighs and massaged. Deep, slow circles. The sensation was so good I moaned and my hips lifted off the bed.

“I pay attention to your body, Eve. I know where you hold your tension.”

She massaged until I was boneless. And then she put her mouth on me.

I was so sensitive that the first touch of her tongue made me cry out. A raw, guttural sound I didn’t recognize. Not the sound Eve Marchetti made. The sound Eve made. Without the game face, without the mask, without anything.

Riley went slow. The photographer’s patience. She licked in long, flat strokes, finding the rhythm that made my hands fist in the sheets.

“Inside. I need you inside me.”

She entered me with two fingers. Slow. Unbearable. The exquisite pressure against the spot that made my vision dissolve.

“More. Harder.”

Deep, firm strokes that matched the rhythm of her tongue. I was climbing so fast my body couldn’t keep up — everything contracting, the orgasm building in the marrow of my bones.

“Look at me,” she said. “Stay with me, Eve.”

I looked at her. Green-hazel eyes, swollen lips, her face wet, looking up at me with love and lust and the fierce, bottomless attention of a woman who saw everything and was not afraid of what she saw.

“I see you,” she said, and her fingers curled, and her mouth returned to my clit, and I came.

I came so hard my vision whited out. My body arched off the bed. My hand slammed against the headboard. The orgasm rolled through me in long, devastating pulses until every cell in my body was vibrating.

She eased me through it. I was crying. Not from sadness. From the physical impossibility of containing what I felt for this woman.

Riley crawled up. Lay beside me. Pulled me into her arms.

I pressed my face into her neck and breathed. The scent of home.

“The camera,” I said, after a long time. “I want to take one more picture.”

She handed me the Leica. I lay beside her, our bodies still tangled, still bare, and held the camera above us.

“Us. Right now. Like this.”

I pressed the shutter. The click was quiet. The sound of a moment being preserved.

Thirty-six exposures. Full roll. The first thirty-five were Riley, shot by Eve. The last one was both of us, together, shot blind.

“Hang them next to the Sunday roll. Both rolls. You seeing me. Me seeing you.”

I pulled her closer. Felt her heartbeat against my chest.

“The better angle,” I said.

She pressed her lips to my collarbone. “The better angle.”

Not a technique. Not a composition. Just this. Two women in a bed. Seeing each other. Being seen. The glass between them gone — dissolved by the slow, irreversible chemistry of love.

It had appeared.

It was us.