The Penthouse
An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Vacation Girlfriend, Permanent Problem
by Aurora North
⚠️ This bonus chapter takes place between Chapters 17 and the Epilogue of Vacation Girlfriend, Permanent Problem. It contains explicit sexual content and is intended for readers 18+ only. Read the novel first for the full experience.
The Penthouse
Three months after Austin. Maya’s first visit to New York. The christening of every room V spent years being lonely in.
The elevator opened directly into the apartment, which was the first thing that made Maya’s brain short-circuit.
Not an elevator to a hallway. Not an elevator to a lobby with a doorman. An elevator that opened into a foyer with marble floors and a console table that probably cost more than Maya’s car and a vase of white orchids that looked like they’d been arranged by someone with a degree in architecture.
“This is where you live,” Maya said.
“This is where I keep my things,” V corrected. She set Maya’s bag down—the same duffel Maya had taken to Belize, held together with optimism and a replacement zipper—and watched Maya take in the space. “Living implies a level of habitation I haven’t achieved.”
Maya walked through the foyer into the living room. Floor-to-ceiling windows. Central Park spread out below, forty-two stories of empty air between the glass and the treetops. The furniture was white and Italian and spectacularly uncomfortable-looking. The kitchen was enormous, gleaming, and showed no evidence of ever having been used for its intended purpose.
“Seven bathrooms,” Maya said.
“Seven.”
“V. You live alone. What do you do with seven bathrooms?”
“Avoid six of them.” V leaned against the kitchen island. She was watching Maya the way she’d watched her on the terrace in Belize—with that total, devastating focus. “I bought this place because the view made me feel powerful. Then I moved in and the view made me feel observed. Now I mostly sit in the kitchen with the lights off.”
Maya turned from the window. Looked at V—leaning against the marble island, barefoot, hair down, wearing the Yale sweatshirt and nothing else visible beneath it. The most powerful woman Maya had ever met, standing in a penthouse she’d built as a monument to her own success, admitting she sat in the dark.
“Turn the lights on,” Maya said.
“They’re on.”
“Not those lights.” Maya crossed the kitchen. Stood in front of V. Put her hands on the marble on either side of V’s hips, caging her. “The lights inside. The ones you keep off because nobody’s here to see them.” She leaned in. Pressed her mouth to the corner of V’s jaw. “I’m here.”
V’s breath caught. Her hands found Maya’s waist—automatic, gravitational. “You’re here.”
“So show me everything. Every room you’ve been lonely in. I’m going to fix every single one of them.”
V looked at her. The gray-green eyes were dark, dilated, the composure already fraying at the edges. “That’s ambitious. There are a lot of rooms.”
“I’m very motivated.” Maya kissed her. Not soft. Not tentative. The kiss of a woman who’d flown four hours in a middle seat to be here and was done with foreplay that didn’t involve mouths.
V made a sound against her lips—low, involuntary, the sound that meant the composure had one foot out the door. Her hands tightened on Maya’s waist and pulled her closer, and Maya went, pressing the full length of her body against V’s, and the marble island was cold against V’s back and Maya was warm against her front and the contrast made V gasp.
“The kitchen first,” Maya murmured against V’s throat. Her hands found the hem of the Yale sweatshirt and pushed it up—slowly, knuckles dragging against the flat plane of V’s stomach, feeling the muscles contract beneath her touch. “You said you sit here in the dark. I’m going to give you a reason to keep the lights on.”
She pulled the sweatshirt over V’s head. V was naked underneath—no bra, no underwear, just skin and the faint scent of bergamot and the visible proof that V had been thinking about this since the elevator. Maya’s mouth went dry.
“You dressed for the occasion,” Maya said.
“I dressed for efficiency.” V’s voice was rough. “Take your clothes off.”
“Ask nicely.”
V’s eyes flashed. The dominance response—the instinct to take charge, to direct, to control—flickered across her face. But she’d learned something in the months since Belize. She’d learned that Maya’s playfulness wasn’t defiance. It was invitation.
“Please,” V said, and the word came out like honey poured over gravel, “take your clothes off, Maya. I’ve been thinking about your body for four hours on a runway and I need you naked in my kitchen immediately.”
Maya grinned. Stripped. T-shirt, jeans, bra, underwear—functional, cotton, Target—in a pile on the $14,000 kitchen floor. She stood naked in the penthouse with Central Park glowing through the windows behind her, and V looked at her the way she always looked at her: like Maya was the answer to a question that had been keeping her up at night for thirty-nine years.
“Come here,” V said.
Maya came. V lifted her onto the marble island—the cold stone against Maya’s bare thighs making her yelp, then laugh, then gasp as V stepped between her legs and kissed her with a hunger that had been building across three months of phone calls and FaceTime and the specific agony of wanting someone in a different time zone.
V’s mouth moved down Maya’s neck. Her hands were on Maya’s thighs, spreading them wider, and Maya braced herself on the cold marble and felt V’s fingers trail up the inside of her leg—slow, deliberate, the CEO pace, the pace that said I have all the time in the world and I plan to use every second of it.
“You’re already wet,” V murmured against Maya’s collarbone. Her fingers had found the evidence. “When did this start? The elevator?”
“The runway.” Maya’s head fell back. V’s fingers were circling, teasing, not quite where Maya needed them. “Somewhere over Tennessee. I started thinking about your hands and I didn’t stop.”
“My hands.” V pressed two fingers inside her—slow, curling—and Maya’s spine arched and her palms slipped on the marble and she made a sound that echoed off the kitchen walls. V’s free hand pressed flat between Maya’s shoulder blades, holding her steady. “These hands?”
“Fuck—yes, those hands, those exact—God, V—”
V worked her on the kitchen counter with the methodical precision of a woman who’d memorized every response, every rhythm, every millimeter of territory. She was thorough and patient and devastating, her thumb circling Maya’s clit while her fingers moved inside, and her mouth was on Maya’s breast, tongue flicking, and the combination—the cold marble and the warm mouth and the precise, relentless pressure between her legs—had Maya coming in under three minutes, loud and graceless and with her fingernails leaving marks on V’s shoulders that would be there for days.
“One room down,” Maya panted, slumped against V’s chest. “Six bathrooms to go.”
V laughed against Maya’s hair. “We’re not doing all seven bathrooms.”
“We’re doing at least three. I have a vision.”
They did three.
The master bathroom first—the one with the soaking tub and the rainfall shower and the window that looked out on the park. Maya ran the bath and pulled V in and sat behind her, V’s back against Maya’s chest, and washed her hair with the $400 shampoo and kissed the back of her neck and reached around and touched her under the warm water until V came with her head tipped back against Maya’s shoulder and the bath water sloshing over the sides and neither of them caring because the floor was marble and marble could handle it.
The guest bathroom was faster. Maya pressed V against the vanity—V’s ass on the cold stone, the mirror behind her reflecting both of them—and dropped to her knees and put her mouth on V and made her watch. “Look,” Maya said, glancing up. “Watch yourself in the mirror.”
V looked. She watched Maya’s dark curls between her thighs and her own face in the reflection—flushed, lips parted, eyes glassy, the composure not just gone but forgotten—and the sight of herself being taken apart was the thing that broke her. She came with a cry she couldn’t suppress, both hands gripping the vanity edge, and the mirror captured all of it.
“Three,” Maya said, standing, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “The powder room is right there.”
“The powder room is off the foyer. The elevator opens there.”
“So?”
“So if the elevator—”
“Victoria Ashford. Are you telling me the woman who staged a shareholder revolt from a beach is scared of a powder room?”
They did the powder room. V came so hard she knocked a hand towel off the rack and Maya laughed until she couldn’t breathe and then V picked her up—lifted her like she weighed nothing—and carried her to the bedroom.
The bedroom was the last room.
The bed was enormous. California king. White sheets. The bed where V had lain alone for years, staring at the ceiling, listening to the silence, telling herself the emptiness was freedom.
V laid Maya down on it. Stood at the foot of the bed and looked at her—brown skin against white sheets, dark curls on white pillows, her body soft and warm and taking up space in a bed that had never held two people—and felt something in her chest that was larger than desire, larger than love, larger than any word she had.
“This bed has never had anyone in it but me,” V said.
Maya stretched. Spread her arms wide, claiming territory. “It has now.”
V climbed onto the bed. Over Maya. Kissed her—slow, deep, the kind of kiss that promised hours. And she delivered. She made love to Maya in the bed that had been her solitary fortress, and every touch was a reclamation—this corner of the mattress where she’d lain awake reading Maya’s letter, this pillow she’d pressed to her face to muffle the sound of crying, this sheet she’d gripped while touching herself and thinking of Maya’s mouth. Every surface consecrated. Every inch of loneliness overwritten.
She took her time. Hours. Used her mouth and her hands and her body and every ounce of the attention that had made her legendary in boardrooms and devastating in bedrooms. She mapped Maya’s body across the California king—head to foot, edge to edge, using every inch of a mattress that was built for company and had spent years in solitary confinement.
Maya came three times in that bed. The first against V’s mouth, V kneeling between her legs with her hands under Maya’s hips, lifting her, angling her, the position so precise and the pressure so perfect that Maya shattered in under a minute. The second with V’s fingers inside her and V’s mouth on her neck and V whispering—you’re so beautiful, you’re so wet, I’ve been dreaming about this for three months, come for me, Maya, come for me—and Maya obeyed because she’d never been able to resist V’s voice when it went low and commanding and desperate all at once. The third with their bodies pressed together, V’s thigh between Maya’s legs and their hips rolling in sync, both of them chasing it together, both of them cresting at the same moment, the sound they made filling the penthouse like a bell.
Afterward, they lay in the center of the California king—a bed designed for distance, occupied by two women pressed so close together that a sheet of paper couldn’t fit between them.
“Every room,” Maya murmured against V’s collarbone. “Every room in this apartment now has us in it.”
V pulled her closer. Pressed her lips to Maya’s hair. “Not the second guest bathroom. Or the hallway closet.”
“Tomorrow.”
V laughed. The warm one. The Sinatra one. She held Maya in the bed that had been empty for years and watched the city lights through the floor-to-ceiling windows and thought: This is what living looks like. Not the view. Not the marble. Not the seven bathrooms. This. Her. The weight of her body in my bed and the sound of her breathing and the fact that she came here—not because I paid her, not because the island was beautiful, but because she loves me. She loves me in a penthouse the same way she loved me in a twin bed and she’ll love me in a tent and a hotel room and a car and anywhere else I happen to be standing because the location was never the point. I was the point. I’ve been the point the whole time.
“V?” Maya’s voice was sleepy. Sated.
“Mm.”
“I like your penthouse.”
“It likes you too. I can tell by the way the bathroom mirrors are fogged.”
Maya laughed against V’s skin. “I love you.”
“I love you too.” V kissed her forehead. “In the daylight. In the dark. In every room of a forty-two-story building that finally has a reason to exist.”
They slept. The city burned below them. The park was dark. The elevator stayed quiet. And the penthouse—all seven bathrooms, all the marble, all the silence—was, for the first time in its existence, home.