The Anniversary Box

A Bonus Chapter from The Neighbor’s Package
by Jace Wilder

⚠️ This bonus chapter takes place after the epilogue and contains EXPLICIT sexual content. Spoilers for the full novel. Intended for readers 18+ who have finished the book.

The Anniversary Box

The box arrived on a Saturday morning, which was wrong.

Velvet & Co. delivered on Thursdays. I knew this because I had been tracking our subscription deliveries for eleven months with the same attention I brought to financial compliance reports and building advisory board budgets, and the pattern was consistent: order confirmation Monday, shipping notification Wednesday, doorstep arrival Thursday between 2 and 4 PM.

Saturday was not Thursday. Saturday was the day Adrian and I had designated as No Obligations Morning — a weekly tradition where neither of us was allowed to open a laptop, check email, or discuss lease amendments before noon. Saturday mornings were for coffee in bed, for Adrian’s terrible scrambled eggs, for the specific luxurious laziness of two men who had spent their entire lives being productive and were now learning, slowly and imperfectly, how to waste time together.

But this wasn’t our regular subscription. This was an anniversary edition. Custom. Curated specifically for us, because Imani had called her friend Tasha at Velvet & Co. and arranged a one-year-anniversary box that Tasha had apparently assembled with what Imani described as “unholy enthusiasm.”

I brought the box inside. Set it on the counter. Matte black. Discreet. A gold seal on the lid — an anniversary emblem with a small “1” in the center.

Adrian appeared in the kitchen doorway in boxers and the gray T-shirt I’d stolen and returned and stolen again so many times it had become communal property. His hair was wrecked from sleep. His reading glasses were hooked in the collar. The tattoos on his forearms caught the morning light.

“Anniversary present,” I said. “Imani arranged an early delivery because she said, and I quote, ‘you two need a full weekend for what’s in this box.’”

Inside, in gold tissue paper: a massage candle. Cedar and amber. The same scent as the very first one. A bottle of warming massage oil labeled For sustained application. A silk blindfold — upgraded, lined with velvet. A set of silk ties in black. And Imani’s card: One year ago, a box showed up at the wrong door and you two idiots finally got your act together. Here’s to year two. Use everything. That’s an order.

Adrian picked up the blindfold. Ran the silk through his fingers.

“I have a proposal,” he said. “We use everything. In order. And we take turns deciding how.”

I kissed him with the authority I’d spent a year building. “Bedroom. Bring the box.”

I started with the candle.

Adrian lay on our bed — shirtless, the boxers still on, his body long and warm against the white sheets. I lit the candle and watched the wax pool amber and liquid, cedar and amber filling the bedroom.

“Do you remember the first time?” I asked, straddling his hips.

“Your forearm. The sound you made. I went to bed thinking about it for three hours.”

I tilted the candle. Poured a thin line of warm oil from his collarbone to his navel. Adrian’s body arched off the mattress and his hands gripped the sheets and his mouth fell open on a groan that I felt in my own chest.

“My turn to make you make sounds,” I said.

I followed the oil with my mouth. Kissing, licking, biting gently along the warm trail, tasting cedar and skin and salt. I spent time on his chest — circling, teasing, using my tongue where I knew he was sensitive and my teeth where I knew he’d gasp. I poured more oil along his hip bones, the crease of his thighs, the inside of his wrists where the tattoo lines began and where my mouth made him say my name like a question he already knew the answer to.

“Noah —”

“Not yet. Three more items.”

“You’re going to kill me.”

“That’s not in the box.”

Adrian’s turn. The oil.

He warmed it in his hands first. The new formula was thicker, and when his slick hands closed around my cock, the warming compound activated slowly — a spreading heat that built from mild to staggering. I understood immediately what Tasha had meant by significantly more intense.

“Oh — fuck,” I said.

He stroked me slowly. Base to tip, twisting at the crown, his grip firm and slick and devastatingly patient. The oil warmed with each pass, each movement generating friction that translated into heat that translated into pleasure so concentrated I couldn’t keep my hips still.

He added his mouth — kissing my neck, the spot behind my ear that made my vision blur — while his hand maintained its rhythm, and I was spiraling toward a finish that would have ended everything too early.

“Stop,” I gasped. “Or this is over before the blindfold.”

He stopped. Looked at me with dark eyes and a mouth slightly swollen from kissing and an expression that said he knew exactly what he was doing.

“Your turn,” he said.

I blindfolded him.

The upgraded silk was lined with velvet. I tied it carefully, and watched Adrian Cross surrender his sight — the most controlled man I had ever known, choosing to trust me with his most essential sense.

I used both oils together. Mapped his body with warm, slick hands, narrating everything the way he’d taught me — announcing each touch before it landed so anticipation doubled the sensation.

“I’m going to kiss your stomach. Right here.” His abs contracted before my mouth arrived.

“I’m going to take you in my mouth. Slowly. All the way.”

The sound he made when I did was the sound of a man who had spent forty-five years holding himself together and was choosing, deliberately and beautifully, to fall apart.

I worked him with my mouth until he was shaking, until his hips were moving in a rhythm he couldn’t control, until my name was the only word left in his vocabulary. Then I stopped.

“Noah — please —”

“One more item.”

“You’re going to trust me. The way you always do. The way I always trust you.”

He nodded — blindfolded, desperate, trusting — and I loved him so much it felt structural.

Adrian’s turn. The ties.

He removed the blindfold. His eyes were wet and dark and burning. “Lie down,” he said. His voice was wrecked.

He tied my wrists to the headboard with the silk. Not tight — firm. The silk was smooth against my skin, and the restraint was about choice. My choice to be held. His choice to hold me.

“You’re mine,” he said, and the word was not possessive. It was reverent.

“I’ve been yours since the delivery chain speech.”

He laughed. Then he stopped laughing, because his mouth was on my body and the warming oil was on his hands, and he was touching me everywhere — my chest, my thighs, the inside of my arm where the first candle had landed a year ago and changed the trajectory of my life.

He prepared me with slicked fingers and the patience of a man who had spent a year learning exactly how my body opened, exactly which angle made my vision white out, exactly how much pressure turned anticipation into urgency.

When he pushed into me, it was slow. Complete. I pulled against the silk ties and felt them hold and felt him hold, and the combination — of being filled and being restrained and being watched by a man who looked at me like I was the only equation that mattered — broke something open in my chest.

He moved. Deep, deliberate strokes that hit the spot he’d memorized months ago. His hand wrapped around my cock — still slick with the warming oil — and stroked me in time with his thrusts, and the dual sensation was so overwhelming that words left me entirely.

“Everything,” I managed. “You. All of you. A year of you and I still — every time it feels like the first time except better because I’m not scared anymore, I’m just yours —”

He drove deeper. Faster. His composure crumbled the way it always did when I was honest during sex, and underneath was just Adrian. Just need. Just love.

I came first. Tied to the headboard, arching off the mattress, my body clenching around him as the orgasm tore through me. He followed moments later, buried deep, my name on his lips like a sacrament.

He untied the silk with careful fingers. Kissed each wrist. We lay in our bed, in our apartment, in the building where we’d met over a mislabeled package and built a life.

“Happy anniversary,” I said.

“It’s not until Thursday.”

“Imani said we needed the full weekend.”

He pulled me closer. “Then we should pace ourselves.”

“We used the entire box in forty-five minutes.”

“Then I suppose we’ll have to improvise.”

“I love you,” I said. “In case I haven’t said it today.”

“You said it in the kitchen. And approximately four minutes ago, although you were somewhat incoherent at the time.”

“I’m saying it again.”

“I love you too. More than delivery logistics can account for.”

Saturday morning. No obligations. Our apartment full of cedar and amber and the particular, irreplaceable warmth of a life two people had chosen on purpose, one box at a time.

← Back to The Neighbor’s Package

Never Miss a Release

Get new release alerts, exclusive bonus content, and reader-only giveaways.