by Harper Bliss
Aurore
Aurore was going crazy pacing around her apartment. She didn’t really understand why, because it wasn’t as if, when she and Solange had still been together, they’d spent their weekends glued to each other’s sides. On the contrary. Most Sundays, Aurore missed her just as much as she did now. But this weekend, there was absolutely zero possibility that Solange would stop by.
She looked out the window. The rain was still sheeting down. But she had to get out. She put on her raincoat and headed to the woods, to which the closest entrance was just across the road from her building.
When she stepped outside, a gust of wind hit her straight in the face. She turned her collar up and marched on. She needed to walk because she had a decision to make. Every difficult decision required the clear-headedness only a walk could provide.
Her conversations with both Camille and Steph had made her think. Was she the one who had to make the sacrifice to save what was left of her relationship? Was she even capable of doing so?
Aurore crossed the street and headed into the woods. Good thing she’d worn her boots because the rain had turned the footpath into one big puddle.
It wasn’t a simple matter of choosing between what her heart wanted—to be with Solange—and what her brain told her—that they truly were a mismatched pair. The whole thing was far more complex than that. But whereas Aurore had always revelled in unravelling complex matters, of the heart and the brain alike—all the entanglements that came with loving someone—she couldn’t for the life of her find her way out of this.
Because this was her own problem, of course. She couldn’t look at it from a healthy distance, assess, and come to a satisfying decision. Which was exactly why she had no choice but to listen to what her friends had to say about it. Aurore couldn’t trust her own judgment on this, which was hard, because she was used to relying on what her gut told her. If she hadn’t listened to her gut instinct the first time she’d met Solange—and hadn’t somehow noticed that there was so much more to the president’s uptight chief of staff—she and Solange would never in million years have started an affair. And what an affair it had been.
Even though Aurore was suffering from a severe case of heartbreak, given the chance to do it all over, she’d go for Solange again in the exact same way. Partly because she’d have no choice. After all, she couldn’t choose who she was attracted to. But also because their good moments together had been so exquisite, the memory of them still warmed Aurore’s heart. Strangely enough, it wasn’t the first time that Solange had opened up to Aurore sexually that sparked the warmest memories. It was the rare occasions when Solange had been able to find the words to express how she felt about Aurore that, invariably, brought a smile to Aurore’s face.
Even now, as she battled the elements, and the rain lashed her face, Solange’s unexpected, unrivalled beauty when she found the words to speak about her true self, ignited the same heat in Aurore’s core. Maybe even just for the sake of that memory, and what it still did to her, Aurore had to try again. She had to give them another chance. But she knew that, this time around, because this would actually be the last chance for their affair, she would first need to make a significant change.
A true sacrifice.
Something had to give and that something was politics. Solange couldn’t make that kind of sacrifice, but Aurore could. She could tell Anne Rivière not to count on her to advise her during her campaign. It was as easy as that. Rivière had plenty of advisers and there were plenty of other, much younger and more energetic people waiting in the wings to take Aurore’s place. People who wouldn’t be sacrificing at the altar of love the way Aurore was doing. It wouldn’t be easy. Aurore wouldn’t be handing in her party card any time soon, nor would she change her left-wing convictions, but she could meet Solange more in the middle. Although she knew that Solange was a woman who had to be met far beyond what Aurore considered the middle. She’d done it before—she could do it again. She shivered in her coat despite the brisk pace she’d been keeping, and turned around. She’d head home, dry herself off, and call Anne Rivière.
When she and Solange were still together, more to make a point than anything else, Aurore had never checked her email during the weekend. Solange was always glued to her phone—and the incessant buzz of it had driven Aurore crazy in the beginning. But they’d compromised on that as well. Solange put her phone on vibrate and turned off some of the notifications. When they were in bed, the phone was switched off altogether.
Now that Solange was no longer in her life, however, Aurore felt uneasy if her phone wasn’t around. She used it to replace the dopamine hits that being with Solange had delivered. She checked all her email accounts multiple times per day. Even on a Sunday.
She was surprised to see an email from Claire Cyr. She’d met Claire a number of times—she’d even been at her wedding to Margot—but they were acquaintances more than friends. In any case, it was strange to receive an email from Claire, especially on a Sunday afternoon.
Aurore opened it.
Can we talk politics one of these days?
That was all the email said. What did it mean? Aurore knew that Rivière’s campaign had wanted to reach out to Barbier & Cyr, even though she had firmly advised against it. They would never abandon Dominique. It was a sheer impossibility.
She had no idea of Claire Cyr’s personal politics, but she doubted Claire wanted to discuss her personal views with Aurore.
Aurore couldn’t just let this email sit in her inbox for the rest of the day. She needed to know what it meant. Surely, Claire had wanted it to be cryptic enough to bait Aurore into a quick reply. Aurore really didn’t have anything better to do that afternoon than take the bait. That call to Anne Rivière would have to wait until she found out more about this.
Solange
Solange pushed the button on the right-hand side of the treadmill. She ran a little faster still. Her breath wheezed out of her in quick, violent bursts. She wouldn’t be able to sustain this tempo for very long, but at least now she was focused on the rapid pounding of her feet and not on the voice in her ears.
She hadn’t been able to stop herself from listening to the podcast edition of Aurore’s latest show. She had tried to resist—just as she had tried to put away the bra Aurore had left in her bedroom—but she had failed. It was so easy. The bloody podcast was just there, in the app on her phone. Somehow, it had been impossible to press the delete button. Even though a part of her knew it would, in the end, be the better decision. She had to cut Aurore out of her life completely if she wanted to get over the whole thing. She knew it was the only way. They’d broken up so many times over the past year—after the first six months of blindly following the mantra ‘ignorance is bliss’—that she didn’t want to put herself through that again. Every time it had impacted on her work, even though Solange would never admit that to anyone but herself. Her work had suffered and Solange could simply not allow that. Especially not now, when Dominique might not run for re-election.
That she and Aurore would one day break up for good, that was well within the realms of possibility. It was inevitable, really. But Dominique Laroche not attempting to obtain a second term as president, that was simply unthinkable. Solange had gotten over the shock of first hearing those impossible words. Now she had to act. And she needed to use all of her faculties if she was going to coax Dominique back into the right direction. Because getting over Aurore, and not being Dominique’s campaign manager at the same time, would really make Solange’s entire world crumble down. It wasn’t an option. It could never become a reality.
Solange might work on someone else’s campaign—she had a pretty good idea which MLR vulture would be more than happy to take Dominique’s place as the candidate—but it would never be the same. With Dominique, she had made history. Now, her only objective was to confirm that. Dominique stood a good chance of winning again. She was an excellent president with high approval ratings. Moreover, Solange didn’t want to wor
k for someone else. Hers and Dominique’s fates were intertwined—and she was fully dependent on Dominique’s decision.
Therefore, it was in her best interest to not let the decision only be up to Dominique. Unlike Steph, Solange didn’t trust that whichever decision Dominique made would be the right one. It was statistically impossible because the only correct decision was for Dominique to run again. And Solange would make sure that happened.
But in order to focus on that, she would really need to stop listening to Aurore’s show. Even though, when she was being truly honest with herself, in these dark days, it was the only comfort she had to hold on to. So she punished herself by listening, but only when she was working out.
She was working out a lot these days.
She’d listen to all the shows she’d missed when she and Aurore had still been together, because then she didn’t have to listen. She’d had the privilege of witnessing Aurore live in her bedroom.
She decreased the speed because her feet couldn’t follow any longer. As her breathing slowed, Aurore’s voice rang clearer in her ears.
“Masturbation should have a place in every single person’s life, especially in every woman’s life,” Aurore said. How did she do it? How did she talk about these, frankly, embarrassing topics with such confidence? Solange might have been her significant other for a while, but she’d never found out where that confidence came from. What the secret to it was. She adored it, nevertheless.
In the very beginning, it had scared her senseless. But it was that very confidence—the way Aurore was able to say words like cunnilingus and anal without blinking—that had, ultimately, drawn Solange to her.
And Aurore was right. Masturbation even had a place in Solange’s life now. It had taken Aurore some patience to convince Solange of that fact, but she’d got there in the end. Once again, when listening to Aurore, Solange wondered if Aurore was sending her a message through the medium of her show. She knew it was utterly silly. But still. It was a comforting thought to entertain: Aurore in her radio studio, talking about masturbation and thinking of Solange.
Solange stopped the treadmill. She bent forward. This run had left her quite spent. She believed she’d broken a speed record for a few minutes. Her bloodstream was awash with endorphins and she knew she had to enjoy the next few hours, because they would be the best ones of her day.
She pulled the headphones from her ears and, for a split second, felt the pain of her separation from Aurore as acutely as the day she’d walked out of her apartment. For Christ’s sake. How had she allowed this woman to get under her skin so deeply? A woman so unsuited to her, yet… a woman she’d fallen in love with. It was ridiculous, Solange thought, as she headed to the bathroom to take a cold shower.
After she had towelled herself dry, Solange had a decision to make. Not whether she’d be doing more work that day, because that was a given. The decision was about whether she would get dressed straight away or… perhaps hop into bed for ten minutes or so, the memory of Aurore’s voice fresh in her ears—and the way she said the word ‘masturbation’.
What Aurore had taught her all those months ago, hadn’t been a matter of technique. Self-care she had called it. Solange had had trouble to not laugh off that silly concept altogether, but she had kept a serious face, for Aurore’s sake. Solange’s job was in politics. She knew how to keep a straight face when she didn’t agree with something. It was the number one requirement in her area of employ.
She had listened to Aurore rather inattentively at first, but Aurore had a way of drawing her in, even when she spoke of topics Solange hardly thought about. So what if she was the kind of woman who never masturbated? Was it a requirement these days in order to belong to the tribe of womanhood? Before she knew it, though, Aurore’d had her flat on her back and naked in bed. She also had a way of accomplishing that without Solange putting up a lot of protest. The eagerness with which Solange had grown hungry for Aurore had surprised her. She’d never had room in her life for such hunger before. She had never allowed distractions like that. Not only because a woman in politics had to work ten times as hard as any man vying for the same job, and that left her no time for fancies like intense personal relationships, but also because Solange more than happily neglected that part of herself.
And then came Aurore. The living embodiment of what it meant to be in touch with your sexual side. In touch wasn’t even the right word for how Aurore communicated about sexuality. She lived and breathed the kind of open, confident sexuality that had always frightened Solange more than anything.
In that spirit, it wasn’t a hard decision for Solange to cast another glance at her bed and slip under the covers. Being with Aurore had changed her.
She put her headphones back in, switched Aurore’s podcast back on, and slowly let her hand travel between her legs. She didn’t listen intently to what Aurore was saying, just let the soothing but thrilling sound of her voice wash over her, seep into her. God, she had a perfect voice for radio. It was so incredibly warm and it radiated such understanding of everything. Oh shit. Instead of aroused, Solange was getting increasingly sad. Tears stung behind her eyes—again. She ripped the headphones from her ears and pushed her legs shut. This wasn’t going to work. Aurore might have taught her how to give herself pleasure, but she’d also made her very miserable.
Solange hopped out of bed, bit back the tears, and dressed for work.
What else was she going to do on a Sunday evening?
Dominique
“We could do whatever we wanted whenever we wanted,” Dominique said. She’d had no other choice but to avoid the subject—she’d simply been too busy actually being president—but she had to talk to Steph about it now. Although, quite frankly, it was Sunday evening, and she’d had enough talk for one week.
She was in the mood for other things.
“That might suit you for a month, or perhaps even six,” Steph said, “but what will you do when you get bored of doing ‘whatever, whenever’ and someone else is ruling this country instead of you?”
“Let’s go to a place that isn’t kept abreast of French affairs,” Dominique said.
“With Lisa and Didier?”
Steph was such a spoilsport tonight. It was about time Dominique shut her up for the rest of the evening. She knew exactly how to do that. First step, cross her legs and paint on that smile. She briefly licked her lips as well.
Steph smiled back. “I see what you’re doing.”
“What might that be, chérie?” Dominique asked innocently. She all but batted her lashes.
“You have your seduction face on.” Steph’s smile turned into a very cheeky grin.
“And why wouldn’t I?” Dominique undid the top button of her blouse.
“The president’s frisky,” Steph said. “Let’s see what we can do about that. For the good of the country, of course.”
“Of course.” Dominique was the first to rise. Maybe when she wasn’t president anymore they could indulge in some foreplay in the living room again, but as long as they lived in the Elysée, that was not an option.
Exercising great patience, she took Steph by the hand and dragged her up the stairs.
She slammed the door of their bedroom shut with enough force to indicate to whatever staff were there on a Sunday night that she was not to be disturbed—and hopefully they would put the message through to anyone foolish enough to be in the office wing of the Elysée.
Now that Solange was single again, Dominique wouldn’t put it past her to make an appearance on a Sunday night. She was probably putting together a subtle plan of manipulation to swing Dominique back to her side—the side that would never allow for a sitting president to not run again.
Solange might think she knew the inner workings of Dominique’s mind, which she no doubt did, but Dominique knew just as much about the operation manual of her chief of staff. If she did decide not to run for a second term, she would somehow need to get Solange and Aurore back together, lest Solange fall
into a hole so black she could not recover from it.
But her attention should not be focused on her chief of staff right now. Or on anything else but the beautiful woman whom she should really make her wife very soon. She was the president. Surely she could call someone in and have an official turn up—even tonight, if she wanted, so she and Steph could tie the knot. It was a tempting enough thought, but it wasn’t how she wanted to mark that special moment. Her children had to be there and both their parents. That was it really, as far as Dominique was concerned.
“Stop thinking about whatever it is you’re thinking about.” Steph pushed her against the closed door. “It’s just you and me now.”
It could be just you and me for the rest of our lives, Dominique thought as she surrendered to the kiss Steph planted on her lips. She pulled her close, her ears still perked up for any signs of life outside the door. But as the kiss intensified, she forgot about where she was—and who she was. At least with Steph, in a moment like this, she could do that.
“You’re being very docile this evening,” Steph whispered in her ear, then looked her in the eye. “Does that mean I can have my way with you, Madam President?”
Dominique nodded. It was all she wanted after the week she’d had—which was basically the same as any other week, plus the added stress of having to tell a few key people of her doubts about the presidency. She’d had enough of making decisions for a while—and at least for tonight. “I’m putty in your hands,” she said.
“In that case.” Steph waggled her eyebrows. “It won’t just be in my hands.”
Dominique burst out into a grin. She knew exactly what Steph meant by that.
Steph came out of the bathroom fully naked apart from a dildo strapped to her hips. A sight that never failed to arouse Dominique.
