The Library, Revisited
A Bonus Chapter from The Bridesmaid Bet
by Aurora North
This bonus scene takes place six months after the events of The Bridesmaid Bet. Contains spoilers for the main novel.
The invitation says country weekend, which is English for someone with too much money wants to drink wine in a house with a name. Clara accepts because the host is a client. I accept because Clara will be there and because the house has a library.
I have not told her about the library. I discovered it on the website while she was reviewing the guest list, and I closed my laptop before she could see the screen, and the secrecy is the first deliberate secret I have kept from her since Cornwall, and it is the only kind I intend to keep: the kind that ends with her coming apart in a wingback chair.
We arrive on a Friday afternoon. The house is Georgian, absurdly beautiful, surrounded by Oxfordshire fields that roll into the distance like a painting of itself. Our room has a four-poster bed and a claw-foot bath and a view of a rose garden. Clara unpacks with her usual terrifying efficiency while I lie on the bed and watch her.
“You’re staring,” she says, hanging a dress in the wardrobe.
“I’m admiring.”
“You’re scheming. I can tell because you get a specific expression when you’re planning something. Your left eyebrow does a thing.”
“My left eyebrow does not do a thing.”
“It absolutely does a thing. It’s doing it right now.” She closes the wardrobe. She turns to face me. She is wearing her reading glasses and a soft cream jumper and the expression of a woman who has learned to read me like a quarterly report and finds the footnotes more interesting than the headlines. “What are you planning?”
“Show me,” she says.
The library is better than the website suggested. Two storeys of leather-bound volumes, a rolling ladder, a marble fireplace, and — centered before the fire — a wingback chair. Leather. Deep green. Large enough for two people if one of them is sitting in the other’s lap.
“Sit down,” she says.
“Those stay on,” I say.
She picks them up. She puts them back on. The look she gives me over the rims could power a small city.
“My rules are the reason you have the best orgasms of your life, and you will not pretend otherwise.” She steps between my knees. “Rule one: you answer every question I ask. Rule two: you do not touch me until I say. Rule three: you tell me what you want. Specifically.”
She straddles me. The weight of her in my lap is familiar and devastating.
“Good. That’s where you’re staying.” She kisses me. Deep, slow, her tongue sliding against mine with the unhurried confidence of a woman who has learned exactly what her mouth does to me.
“You can touch me now,” she says, and straddles me again, and when my hand slides under her skirt and finds her bare and soaking wet, the sound I make is not dignified.
She rides me. Her glasses are fogging from her breath. She is beautiful and wrecked and completely in command, and the wet sound of my fingers inside her fills the quiet library like evidence.
She comes — hard, sudden, her body clamping around my fingers, her thighs shaking against my hips.
“Your turn,” she says.
She slides off my lap and kneels between my legs. She puts her mouth on me.
The first stroke of her tongue is flat and slow and runs the full length of me, and I grip the arms of the chair and my head falls back and the sound I make bounces off two storeys of leather-bound books.
She doesn’t stop. The orgasm tears through me. She doesn’t pull away. She builds me again. The second orgasm rolling through me in waves that feel tidal, unstoppable.
She climbs into the chair with me. We are a tangle of limbs and displaced clothing.
“Oxfordshire,” I say, when I can speak.
“During the second one I did not know my own name.”
“I love you,” I say. Not because it’s new — because it’s Tuesday.
“I know,” she says. “I was the first person to notice.”
“Every library needs a chair.”
Every library needs a chair. Every chair needs a Clara.
I’m keeping both.
Want the full story? The Bridesmaid Bet is available now.
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