Wine, Women, and Weeknights

Sapphic Romance • Sensory Play • Praise Kink
by Aurora North

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Length: 71,000 words
Tropes: Teacher/Student, Praise Kink, Sensory Play, Age Gap, Slow Burn, Forced Proximity, Forbidden Romance, Soft Dominance, Blindfolds, Secret Relationship

She signed up for a wine class. She didn’t sign up for this.

Elise Morgan runs a startup, skips meals, and hasn’t slept through the night in three years. When her therapist suggests she find a hobby that doesn’t involve spreadsheets, she enrolls in a Wednesday night wine course at a boutique tasting room in the West Village.

She wasn’t expecting Sofia Velez.

Sofia is the kind of woman who makes you forget the question you were about to ask. Calm. Warm. Annoyingly perceptive. She teaches wine with her hands, her voice, and a quiet authority that makes Elise’s carefully maintained composure feel like a dare.

What starts as structured lessons becomes private sessions. What starts as tasting notes becomes touch. And what starts as professional curiosity becomes an obsession neither of them can ethically justify—because Sofia doesn’t sleep with students, and Elise doesn’t let anyone see her like this.

But Sofia keeps asking her to close her eyes. And Elise keeps saying yes.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Teacher/student sapphic romance with real chemistry
✅ Praise kink that makes you melt (“Good. Just like that.”)
✅ Sensory play with blindfolds and wine
✅ A soft dominant who reads you like a vintage
✅ A control freak who learns to surrender
✅ After-hours “lessons” that have nothing to do with wine
✅ Dual POV with deeply emotional, graphic heat
✅ HEA guaranteed

📖 Read Now

🔥 Get the Bonus Chapter

⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content between two adult women, including praise kink, sensory play (blindfolds, guided tasting), soft dominance/submission dynamics, and detailed intimate scenes. There are also depictions of workplace stress, family emotional neglect, and a past toxic relationship (referenced, not on-page). Intended for adult readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.

Chapter One: Elise

The fluorescent light above my desk has been flickering for three weeks. Not a dramatic flicker—nothing that would justify a maintenance request or a moment of genuine irritation. Just a subtle, arrhythmic pulse at the edge of my vision that I’ve trained myself to ignore, the way I’ve trained myself to ignore most things that don’t directly contribute to keeping this company alive.

It’s nine fourteen on a Tuesday night. I know this because I’ve checked the clock six times in the last hour, not because I’m eager to leave but because I’m trying to calculate how much longer I can sit here before my body stages a full revolt. My eyes ache. My neck has fused into a single rigid column. I ate a protein bar at noon that tasted like compressed sawdust, and I’ve been running on black coffee and spite ever since.

The pitch deck on my screen is the fourth version I’ve built this week, and it’s still not right. The numbers are solid—Vectis’s user growth is real, our retention is strong, and the product-market fit is there if you know where to look. But David wants to lead with the pivot narrative, the “we listened to the market and evolved” story, and I want to lead with what actually works: the core product, the thing I built, the thing that got us here.

David and I have been having this argument for two months. It’s exhausting in the specific way that fighting with someone you used to respect is exhausting—every disagreement now carries the accumulated weight of all the ones that came before.

My phone buzzes. Dr. Rosen.

I consider letting it go to voicemail. I’ve been considering letting a lot of things go to voicemail lately. But therapy is the one commitment I haven’t managed to rationalize my way out of, mostly because Dr. Rosen has a talent for making avoidance feel like a personal failure rather than a strategic choice.

“Hi, Rachel.”

“Elise. You sound like you’re still at the office.”

“I’m still at the office.”

“It’s after nine.”

“I’m aware.”

There’s a pause. Dr. Rosen’s pauses are weaponized—she deploys them the way a sniper deploys silence, waiting for you to fill the space with something honest because the emptiness becomes unbearable.

“We talked last week about finding one thing,” she says. “One thing that isn’t work.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“You’ve been busy for three years. That’s not a temporary state, Elise. That’s a lifestyle choice masquerading as necessity.”

I lean back in my chair and press my fingertips against my closed eyes until I see stars. “I went to the gym on Saturday.”

“You went to the gym to punish your body into submission because you couldn’t sleep. That doesn’t count.”

“It’s cardiovascular exercise. My heart rate—”

“Your heart rate is not the issue. Your nervous system is the issue. You are living in a permanent state of fight-or-flight, and you’re so accustomed to it that you’ve mistaken adrenaline for energy. I want you to find one thing this week—one single thing—that engages your senses instead of your intellect. Something that requires you to taste, or smell, or feel, instead of analyze.”

“That sounds like a bath bomb commercial.”

“It sounds like a woman who hasn’t experienced genuine pleasure in so long she’s forgotten what it feels like.”

That lands. I don’t say anything. Dr. Rosen lets the silence do its work.

“One thing,” she repeats. “Something with no deliverable. No KPI. No outcome you can measure. Just an experience you can have.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Don’t think about it. That’s the whole point.”

We hang up. I stare at the pitch deck for another forty seconds, then close my laptop with more force than necessary.

Nadia finds me in the kitchen making my seventh coffee of the day. She’s supposed to be gone—she leaves at six thirty sharp every night to get home to her kids, and it’s one of the things I respect most about her. Nadia has boundaries the way other people have bones: structural, non-negotiable, and invisible until you try to break one.

“Why are you still here?” I ask.

“Marcus has the girls tonight. I had a call with the Sequoia people that ran long.” She leans against the counter and watches me pour coffee with the evaluative focus she usually reserves for quarterly reports. “You look like shit.”

“Thank you.”

“When’s the last time you ate something that wasn’t beige?”

I think about it. The protein bar was beige. The toast I had this morning was beige. Yesterday’s sad desk salad had some green in it, but the croutons were definitely beige.

“Define beige.”

Nadia crosses her arms. She’s wearing the expression I’ve come to think of as her Concerned COO face, which is functionally identical to her Disappointed Mother face, which she deploys with the same devastating precision on me as she does on her six-year-old twins when they try to feed broccoli to the dog.

“When’s the last time you went on a date?”

“That’s a weird pivot from nutrition.”

“It’s not a pivot. It’s the same question wearing different clothes. When’s the last time you did something that made you feel like a human woman and not a pitch deck with legs?”

“A pitch deck with legs. That’s nice. I’m framing that.”

“Elise.”

“I don’t know. A year? More than a year.” I take a sip of coffee that’s too hot and too bitter and entirely appropriate for my current emotional state. “There was that guy from the fintech mixer.”

“The one who talked about his CrossFit splits for forty-five minutes?”

“He was very passionate.”

“He was a narcissist in compression shorts. That’s not a date, that’s an endurance test.” Nadia shakes her head. “You need to touch grass. Or at least hold a wine glass that isn’t at a networking event.”

“My therapist said something similar. Without the grass part.”

“Smart woman. Listen to her.” Nadia pushes off the counter. “I’m going home. You should also go home. Your apartment misses you. Your bed misses you. Your vibrator misses you.”

“Good night, Nadia.”

She blows me a kiss from the doorway and disappears. The office settles back into its low-frequency hum of servers and silence. I drink my too-bitter coffee and try to remember the last time I felt something that wasn’t caffeine or anxiety.

Nothing comes.

I’m lying in bed at eleven forty-seven, laptop open, doom-scrolling through emails I’ve already read, when I remember Dr. Rosen’s homework. One thing. Something sensory. No deliverable. No KPI.

I open a new tab and type wine class NYC mostly to prove to myself that I’m the kind of person who follows through on therapeutic assignments. The results are what I’d expect: corporate team-building events with cringey names, overpriced Midtown experiences targeting tourists, a few serious oenology programs that require more commitment than I give most relationships.

Then I find Decant.

The website is beautiful—warm photography, clean design, none of the try-hard aesthetic that makes most lifestyle brands feel like they’re selling you an identity crisis. The copy is good too: knowledgeable without being pretentious, inviting without being desperate. Whoever built this knows their audience. I respect that.

Wednesday Evening Wine Fundamentals. Six weeks. Small group. No experience necessary. Learn to taste with intention.

I click through to the instructor page.

Sofia Velez. Sommelier, educator, private consultant. Fifteen years in the wine industry. Former corporate consulting background. Built Decant from scratch.

There’s a photo.

I should describe what I see objectively. That would be the appropriate response—a clinical assessment of a stranger’s professional headshot, the way I’d evaluate any vendor or service provider.

Here’s what I actually see:

Dark hair, loose, falling past her shoulders. Warm brown eyes that look like they’re slightly amused by something you haven’t said yet. Full mouth. Strong jaw. She’s wearing a cream silk blouse unbuttoned one button past professional, and there’s a thin gold chain resting against her collarbone that catches the light in a way that makes me want to follow it with my eyes. With my fingertip. Her hands are visible in the shot—she’s holding a wine glass with casual precision, fingers positioned exactly right, and even in a still image I can tell those hands move with intention.

She’s not conventionally beautiful the way magazines define it. She’s something harder to dismiss—the kind of attractive that suggests she knows things. About wine, yes. But about other things too. About how to read a room. About how to hold someone’s attention without raising her voice. About what people need when they’re too armored to ask for it.

I’m staring. I’ve been staring for—I check the time—four minutes, which is three minutes and forty-five seconds longer than I’ve looked at any human being’s face in recent memory, including my own in the mirror.

Something warm stirs low in my stomach. Not hunger—I know what hunger feels like, and it’s sharper than this, more impatient. This is slower. A pull. A frequency I haven’t tuned into in so long that I’d almost forgotten the station existed.

I scroll down. Her bio mentions that she left the corporate world to build something that felt more like her own. I read that sentence three times. There’s something in that phrasing—the quiet confidence of it, the refusal to perform ambition—that makes my chest tight in a way I don’t have language for.

I click Enroll.

The form asks for basic information: name, email, dietary restrictions, experience level. Under “What brings you to Decant?” I type: My therapist told me to find a hobby that uses my senses instead of my brain. I delete it. I type: I’d like to learn more about wine. Boring. True. Safe.

I hit submit.

The confirmation email arrives immediately—a well-designed, warmly written note welcoming me to the Wednesday group and asking me to arrive a few minutes early for my first session. It’s signed Sofia in a font that looks hand-lettered, which is a design choice I would normally dismiss as affected but which, coming from her, feels personal.

I close my laptop. The bedroom is dark except for the ambient glow of the city through floor-to-ceiling windows that I paid an obscene amount of money for and rarely look through. My apartment is beautiful. I’ve been told this by everyone who visits, which is almost no one, because I don’t invite people over because the idea of someone seeing the inside of my life—the empty fridge, the unmade bed, the stack of unread novels on the nightstand that represent the person I keep meaning to become—fills me with a particular dread that I don’t know how to name.

I turn onto my side and pull the covers up to my chin like a child. Tomorrow I’ll deal with the pitch deck, and David’s pivot obsession, and the investor who’s probably going to pass. Tomorrow I’ll be the CEO again, all sharp edges and strategic calm and the low-grade terror of watching something I built start to wobble on its foundation.

But right now, in the dark, I let myself think about the woman on the website. The silk blouse. The gold chain. The hands that hold a wine glass like they know exactly how much pressure to apply.

Wednesday, I think. It’s just a wine class.

My pulse says otherwise.

I press my face into the pillow and try to sleep. It takes a long time. When I finally drift off, I dream about dark eyes and the warm, deliberate press of fingertips against glass.

I don’t tell Dr. Rosen about the dream. I don’t tell anyone. Some things are too new and too fragile to survive the weight of being spoken aloud.

But on Wednesday, I change my shirt twice before I leave the office, and I arrive seven minutes early, and when I push open the door to Decant and smell warm oak and something floral I can’t identify, my hands are shaking and I don’t entirely know why.

That’s a lie. I know exactly why.

I’m just not ready to say it yet.

Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.

📖 Read the Full Novel