The Last Soft Place — Bonus Chapter
An exclusive scene from Nadia’s point of view — too hot for retailers.
Every Morning
The light came first.
April light — not the pale, uncertain grey of winter mornings but something warmer, something with weight and color, a gold that came through the bedroom curtains and painted the sheets and the pillows and the woman beside me in shades of honey and amber and a bronze so deep it looked poured.
Tess was still asleep.
She slept on her side, facing me, one arm under the pillow and the other draped across the space between us — reaching, even in sleep, the way she reached for everything. Her auburn hair was a mess — tangled across the pillowcase, a strand stuck to her cheek, the rest fanning out behind her like a copper halo that some Renaissance painter would have killed to capture. Her lips were parted. Her breathing was slow and deep and even, the breathing of a woman who had learned — over months, over patience, over a hundred nights of being held — to actually rest.
She was wearing my shirt. The black button-down. She’d stolen it from the laundry three days ago and refused to return it, arguing that possession was nine-tenths of the law and that the shirt looked better on her anyway, and she was right about both of those things, and I was never getting it back.
The shirt was unbuttoned to the sternum. The collar had fallen open during the night, exposing the slope of her collarbone, the upper curve of her breast, the freckled skin that I had kissed so many times I could navigate it by memory. By taste. By the specific topography of each mole and mark and the faint, silvery stretch mark on her left hip that she hated and I loved because it was a map of her body’s history and I wanted all of her histories, even the ones she tried to hide.
I should let her sleep. It was Sunday. Her day off — a concept she’d only recently accepted as something other than a personal failure. She’d fought for this sleep, earned it through months of learning to set down the weight she’d been carrying for nine years, and she deserved every minute of it.
I was going to let her sleep.
I lasted approximately forty-five seconds.
The problem was the light. The light on her skin. The way it caught the curve of her jaw and the hollow of her throat and the place where the shirt fell open and her breast was half-visible, the nipple just out of sight, and my body — which had spent the night pressed against hers and which was, at seven in the morning, already humming with the low, persistent frequency of want that had become the background radiation of my life — was not interested in noble gestures like “letting her sleep.”
I shifted closer. Slowly. The mattress dipped under my weight, and Tess made a sound — not awake, not asleep, that liminal murmur that lived between consciousness and dreams — and her body moved toward mine the way it always moved toward mine. Gravitational. Automatic. A body that had learned the shape of another body and sought it without being told.
I pressed my mouth to her collarbone.
A light kiss. Barely there. Just the brush of lips against warm skin, the kind of touch that could be plausibly denied as accidental if she woke up and accused me of sabotaging her sleep schedule.
She didn’t wake up. But her body responded — a shift, a lean, her chin tilting up to expose more of her throat in an unconscious invitation that made my pulse kick.
I kissed lower. The hollow of her throat. The pulse point where her heart beat slow and steady against my lips. The ridge of her clavicle, the warm slope below it, the swell of her breast where the shirt had fallen away.
Her breathing changed. The slow, deep rhythm of sleep becoming something lighter, shallower, faster. Awareness arriving in stages, the way dawn arrived — gradually, with increasing insistence, until the darkness was gone and there was only light.
“Nadia.” Her voice was sleep-thick. A murmur. My name spoken the way she always said it — like it was something precious she was holding in her mouth and being careful not to drop.
“Go back to sleep,” I whispered against her breast.
“You’re not making that easy.”
“I’m not trying to.”
My hand found the last closed button of the shirt. I undid it. Slowly — one-handed, the way I unclasped everything, because I was a surgeon and dexterity was my love language. The shirt fell open completely, and Tess’s body was there — bare from collarbone to navel, the soft curves, the warm skin, her breasts rising and falling with breaths that were no longer the breaths of a sleeping woman.
I took her nipple in my mouth.
Tess’s back arched. Her hand came up to my head — not pushing, not pulling, just holding. Cradling. Her fingers in my short hair, her palm against my scalp, and the sound she made — low, broken, a moan that started in her chest and vibrated against my tongue — was the sound that had rewired my entire nervous system over the past months. The sound I heard in my sleep. The sound that made every other sound in the world irrelevant.
“Don’t stop,” she breathed.
I didn’t stop.
I worked both breasts with the focused, unhurried attention that was both my nature and my gift. Tongue circling one nipple while my fingers rolled the other. Teeth grazing — light, testing — and Tess gasped and arched and her thighs pressed together under the sheet in that involuntary, desperate clench that I knew meant she was already wet.
I pulled the sheet away. Slowly. Like unwrapping something I’d been given and couldn’t believe I got to keep. Her legs were bare — long, pale, the muscles of her thighs shifting as she moved. She was wearing underwear — plain cotton, the kind she wore to bed, the kind that shouldn’t have been erotic and was devastatingly so because it was hers, because it was the everyday, unselfconscious intimacy of a woman who wore cotton underwear to bed and didn’t think about it and didn’t need to because I would look at her in a paper bag and lose my train of thought.
I hooked my fingers in the waistband. Looked up at her.
Tess was watching me. Propped on her elbows, the shirt hanging open, her hair a disaster, her cheeks flushed, her green eyes heavy-lidded and dark with the specific, concentrated want that I had learned to read the way I read an EKG — by the shape of the wave, the height of the peak, the interval between beats.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Good god, Nadia.”
I pulled the underwear down her legs. Dropped it off the edge of the bed. Settled between her thighs and pressed my mouth to the inside of her knee — a kiss, a tease, a promise — and then worked my way up. Slowly. The soft skin of her inner thigh. The crease where thigh met hip. The heat that radiated from her center, the scent of her arousal that hit me like a drug I hadn’t built a tolerance to and never would.
“Please,” Tess said. Not a whisper. A statement. The voice of a woman who had spent three years not asking for anything and was now, in the gold light of a Sunday morning, asking for exactly what she wanted. “Please, Nadia.”
I put my mouth on her.
The first stroke of my tongue — broad, slow, from entrance to clit — made Tess’s hips jerk off the bed and her hand fly to the headboard. I gripped her thigh with one hand, holding her open, and pressed the other flat against her stomach, feeling the muscles flutter and contract under my palm.
I took my time. Because it was Sunday. Because the light was golden. Because there was no emergency, no countdown, no clinic opening in an hour, no patient waiting, no alarm about to go off. There was just this — my mouth on her, her taste on my tongue, the sounds she made filling the bedroom like a language only we spoke.
I learned something new every time I did this. It had been months, and I was still learning — still discovering the micro-variations, the way her body responded differently depending on the morning, the mood, the quality of the light. This morning she was sensitive — every touch amplified, every stroke registering at twice the usual intensity. My tongue circled her clit and she cursed. I sucked gently and she sobbed. I pressed two fingers inside her and she said my name in a voice that was not a voice but a vibration, a frequency, a sound that originated in the deepest part of her body and traveled through mine like an electric current.
“Right there — don’t stop — right there —”
I curled my fingers. Found the spot — textured, swollen, responsive — and pressed. My tongue maintained its rhythm. My other hand pressed her hip into the mattress because she was moving now, her body rocking against my mouth with the desperate, involuntary rhythm of a woman who was close and knew it and couldn’t stop herself from chasing it.
She came with her hand gripping the headboard so hard the wood creaked and her thighs clamping around my ears and a sound that started as my name and ended as something wordless and shattered, a cry that echoed off the bedroom walls and would, I suspected, be audible from the clinic next door, and I did not care. Let Sam hear. Let Birdie hear. Let the entire town hear. This woman was mine and I was making her feel good and the sound of her pleasure was the most important sound I had ever heard in my life, including the beep of a flatlined patient coming back.
I eased her down. Slow strokes. Gentle fingers. Riding the aftershocks until her body stopped trembling and her hand relaxed on the headboard and her breathing returned to something that a medical professional might recognize as functional.
I kissed her inner thigh. Her hip. The soft skin below her navel. Worked my way back up her body — stomach, ribs, the space between her breasts, the hollow of her throat — until I was above her, looking down at her face.
She was wrecked. Beautifully, thoroughly, comprehensively wrecked. Her hair was everywhere. Her shirt was hanging off one shoulder. Her eyes were glassy and bright and looking at me with an expression that I recognized because I felt it in my own chest every time I looked at her — the pure, disbelieving, bottomless gratitude of a person who had found something they didn’t think existed.
“Come here,” she said. And pulled me down.
She kissed me with the taste of herself on my mouth and I felt her moan against my tongue and then her hand was sliding down my body — under my waistband, past the elastic, and her fingers were on me, in me, and I buried my face in her neck and made a sound that I would deny later if questioned.
Tess knew my body now. Knew it the way she knew her patients — by touch, by response, by the instinctive, empathetic reading of another living system. She knew that I needed two fingers, curled forward, with her thumb pressing firm circles against my clit. She knew that I came harder when she talked to me — when she said my name, when she said I love you, when she said let go, I’ve got you, you’re safe. She knew that my back arched when I was close and my breath went silent right before the break and my hand gripped whatever was nearest — the pillow, the sheet, her shoulder — with a force that left marks.
She knew all of it. And she used all of it.
“I’ve got you,” she whispered against my ear, her fingers working inside me with a rhythm that was relentless and precise and exactly, devastatingly right. “Let go. I’m right here.”
I let go.
The orgasm hit me like a wall — sudden, total, the kind that whited out my vision and locked my muscles and made me grip Tess’s shoulder hard enough that she’d have bruises tomorrow and neither of us would be sorry about it. I came with my face in her neck and her name in my throat and her hand inside me and her heart beating against my chest and the absolute, unshakeable certainty that this — this — was what my hands had been looking for. Not a scalpel. Not a retractor. Not the cold, precise instruments of a career that had made me brilliant and broken.
This. A woman’s body. A woman’s heart. A Sunday morning in a house that smelled like coffee and dog and the particular, indefinable warmth of a life being lived on purpose.
Tess held me through the aftershocks. Her hand still inside, barely moving, just present. Her lips against my temple. Her breath in my hair.
“Good morning,” she said. Smiling. I could feel the smile against my skin.
“Good morning.”
“You woke me up.”
“You’re welcome.”
She laughed. That laugh — the real one, the belly one, the one that shook the bed and made Mac groan from the hallway where he’d retreated twenty minutes ago with the long-suffering dignity of a dog who had seen enough. The laugh that I had spent months coaxing out of her, one smile at a time, one wall at a time, one terrible breakfast at a time.
I rolled onto my back. Pulled her with me. She sprawled across my chest — boneless, sated, her hair in my face, her hand on my heart.
“This is my favorite part,” she said.
“The sex?”
“The after. The lying here. The not having anywhere to be.” She pressed her palm flat against my chest. Felt the heartbeat. Counted. I knew she counted — she always counted, the way I counted her breaths, a mutual diagnostic that had become less clinical and more devotional with every passing week. “A year ago I would have been at the clinic already. I would have been on my third patient. I would have eaten half a granola bar over the sink and called it breakfast and I would have been fine.”
“You were never fine.”
“I was never fine. But I didn’t know that. I didn’t know what fine felt like.” She lifted her head. Looked at me. Green eyes. Gold light. Freckles. The face I’d been waking up to for months and would wake up to for years and would never, not once, not ever, take for granted. “This is what fine feels like.”
I kissed her forehead. Her nose. Her mouth.
“This is what fine feels like,” I agreed.
Mac appeared in the doorway. He assessed the situation, determined that the humans had concluded their activities, and jumped onto the bed with the athletic determination of a three-legged dog who had decided that post-coital cuddle time included him and he would not be excluded.
He settled between us. Put his chin on my thigh. Sighed.
Tess scratched his ear. I scratched his other ear. He closed his eyes with the expression of a creature who had peaked in domestic satisfaction and intended to remain at this altitude indefinitely.
The light moved across the bed. The coffee was getting cold in the kitchen. The clinic was closed. The town was quiet. And in a farmhouse in Alder Creek, a woman who had come here to disappear was lying in a bed she shared with the person who had made her want to be found.
This is the last soft place, I thought. And I’m never leaving it.
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More from Aurora North coming soon.