The Projection Booth — After Hours
An Exclusive Bonus Chapter
by Aurora North
⚠️ Contains spoilers and extremely explicit content. Read the novel first.
Maren finds the envelope on her editing desk at 6 PM on a Thursday. No name. No stamp. Just: Tonight. Saints. 11 PM. Dress code: whatever makes you feel powerful.
“Maren. Put down the mouse. Read the invitation again. And then put on the plum lipstick.”
I spend five hours preparing. Sixty candles on the bar. The projection booth unlocked — cashmere blanket, pillows. A bottle of Tokaji Aszú, the same vintage she once returned to me. Different context now.
She arrives at eleven exactly. Plum lipstick. A black dress I’ve never seen. The camera bag over one shoulder, because Maren Kovács does not go anywhere without the option of recording. “You brought the camera.” “You invited a filmmaker to an empty nightclub. What did you expect?”
“I did this for us. The best version of this room isn’t full of three hundred women. It’s empty. With you.”
We dance on the empty floor. Her head on my shoulder. The cello playing something that sounds like patience.
“I have a proposal,” she murmurs. “Director and subject. Like the studio night — except this time, I have the camera in my hands while I direct you. And then I want to take you to the projection booth and make you come so hard the whole building hears it.”
She removes the battery. Sets it on the bar. Holds the empty camera to her eye. “The subject tonight is the owner of this establishment. She’s backlit by sixty candles and she’s already wet, though she’s trying to hide it.”
“Take off the jacket. Slowly.” I let it slide. She circles me, heels clicking. “The shirt. One button at a time.” One. Two. Three. The camisole appears. “Your nipples are hard through the camisole. You’re already wet, aren’t you?” “Since I wrote the invitation.”
“Take off everything.” I strip on the dance floor of my own nightclub. Camisole. Bra. Trousers. Everything. I stand naked in the amber light feeling more seen than I have ever felt in a room designed for seeing.
“Walk to the projection booth.” I climb the staircase naked. She follows, fully clothed, narrating my body in motion. “The muscles in your shoulders when you grip the railing. The candlelight catching the curve of your ass. You’re trembling — from the experience of being watched in a space you control by a woman you’ve surrendered to.”
“Are you always this articulate when you’re turned on?” “I’m a filmmaker. Narration is foreplay.”
She sets the camera down. Pulls the black dress over her head — underneath, nothing. No bra. No underwear. She came to my nightclub bare under the dress. “I read the invitation twice. Then I decided that whatever you planned, I was going to outdo you.”
She straddles my hips. The wet heat of her settles against my stomach and we both gasp. Plum lipstick smearing across my mouth, marking me. “Here’s how tonight works. I direct. You follow. And when I say good girl — you let yourself feel it.”
The two words hit me like a controlled detonation. Two words that bypass every defense I own and reach directly into the part of me that spent thirty-five years performing competence and never once heard someone say you’re already enough.
“Touch my breasts.” I cup her — full, heavy, warm. I roll her nipples between my fingers and she gasps and grinds harder against my stomach. “Your mouth. Sit up.” I take her nipple into my mouth and suck. Her cry echoes off brick and floats through the window over the empty dance floor.
“Lie back. I need your mouth somewhere else.” She positions herself above my face. “I want to ride your mouth. I want you to make me come while I look down at the dance floor through that window and think about every woman who’s ever wanted you and know that I’m the one sitting on your face.”
The possessiveness — the raw, earned entitlement of a woman who saw me at my worst and stayed. “Sit down. Use me.”
She lowers herself onto my mouth. The taste is immediate and overwhelming. I groan against her and the vibration makes her thighs tighten around my head. “Higher. My clit. Circles. Start light.” She rocks above me, hands braced on the wall. “Harder now. Flatten your tongue and press.” I seal my lips around her clit and suck. “Your fingers. Inside me. Now.”
Two fingers, then three. She grinds down onto my mouth and my hand simultaneously, every pretense of composure demolished. She comes with a full-throated scream that reverberates through the building like the theater was designed for exactly this frequency.
“The acoustics in here are unreasonable.” “I built a theater. What did you expect?”
Ninety seconds later she turns to me. “Your turn. On your back. Hands above your head.” She pins my wrists against the blanket. “Good girl.” The words detonate. My hips lift. She presses me back down. “Stay.”
She starts at my throat. Sucks hard enough to leave a mark. The match-flame tattoo gets a whispered “mine.” My breasts get her full attention — minutes of her mouth alternating between them, sucking each nipple until it’s swollen, biting the soft underside hard enough to make me gasp. She kisses down my stomach. Bypasses where I need her. Kisses my inner thigh instead.
“Please. Maren, I need—” “What do you need?” “Your mouth. On me. Please, I’m begging you—” “You’re my good girl, and good girls ask nicely.” “Please put your mouth on my pussy. Please make me come. I need you, please—” “That’s my girl.”
Her mouth descends and my vision whites out. She finds the spot, the pressure, the rhythm that builds me fastest — then deliberately slows, keeping me suspended in the excruciating space between almost and not yet. “You want to come fast because that’s what you’re used to. I want you to come slow. I want it to take so long you forget your name.”
Two fingers inside me. Curls forward. Takes me to the edge and slows again. “You’re shaking.” “Because you’re torturing me.” “I’m savoring you. There’s a difference.”
She builds me again. Meditative tongue work, patient fingers. “Now,” she says, and her tongue presses flat and her fingers curl hard and deep and the permission unlocks everything.
I come harder than I’ve ever come in my life. Full-body obliteration. I scream her name and the theater amplifies it — every surface returning the sound like an echo of the woman I’m becoming. She holds me through it, fingers inside me, mouth gentle, her free hand lacing through mine while my body shakes.
Tears. Not from sadness. From the overwhelming experience of being completely known and completely loved and completely undone.
“That’s what you look like,” she whispers, “when you let yourself be loved.”
We descend the staircase together. Both naked. My clothes scattered across the dance floor like a discarded chrysalis. I lift Maren onto the bar. She sits on the brass surface, legs dangling. I pour Tokaji.
“You’re sitting naked on my bar.” “You own the bar. You can do more than stare.”
I step between her thighs. Her legs wrap around my hips. Two fingers inside her. She gasps against my mouth. “I love you.” “I love you. Now fuck me on this bar.”
I fuck her on the bar. Standing, fingers inside her, thumb on her clit, her hands gripping the brass edge. She arches back and her hair sweeps across the bar surface and glasses rattle. She comes with my name muffled against my shoulder.
“Your turn.” She slides off the bar, turns me around, pushes me back against it. Drops to her knees on the dance floor. “I spent eight months watching you command this room from behind this bar. Now I’m on my knees in front of it.”
She puts her mouth on me and I grip the bar with both hands and the brass rings like a bell. She makes me come standing up — back arched, her tongue and fingers and voice: good girl, let go, I’ve got you, come for me — taking me apart in the exact center of the room I built for women to feel desired.
I slide down the bar onto the floor. She catches me. Naked, breathing hard, surrounded by hurricane candles and scattered clothing. “We just had sex on the bar.” “Fallon is going to sanitize everything.” “Fallon is never going to know.” “Fallon always knows.”
She laughs. The real one. The helpless, breathless, full-body laugh that I will spend the rest of my life trying to earn.
Later. Much later. Projection booth again, wrapped in cashmere. Candles burning low. Dawn lightening through the windows.
“This club. You built it for women to feel safe and desired.” “I did.” “Mission accomplished.”
“Stay,” I whisper. Because the word is not a request but a practice — a daily repetition, the verbal equivalent of choosing the inside of a room when the door is wide open.
“Always,” she says. Because her always is a statement of present intention, renewed each time, a commitment that refreshes like a heartbeat, like the tide that brought her to me.
And in the projection booth above Saints, in the building I built with scarred hands and a terrified heart, the womanizer who learned to stay holds the filmmaker who taught her that some moments aren’t for the film, and neither of us reaches for the exit, and neither of us performs, and the morning finds us there — naked, tangled, honest, marked, half-drunk on Hungarian wine, surrounded by the embers of sixty candles, home.
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