Bonus Chapter: Day One

The Best Man’s Worst Idea
by Jace Wilder

⚠️ This bonus chapter takes place after the epilogue. Contains spoilers and explicit sexual content. All characters are adults.

Day One — No Emergency Contact Required

Grant’s POV

The hotel room had a balcony.

I mention this because Eli had been standing on it for approximately four minutes in nothing but boxer briefs and the morning sun, and I was lying in bed watching him through the open glass doors and seriously considering whether it was possible to die of wanting someone you already had.

The briefs were black. Mine, technically — he’d stolen them from my drawer three months ago and never given them back, and they sat lower on his hips than they sat on mine because his waist was narrower and his ass was rounder, and the result was a garment that had been perfectly ordinary in my possession and had become obscene in his. The waistband gapped at his lower back, revealing the twin dimples above his glutes that I had, on more than one occasion, pressed my thumbs into while he made sounds that would get us evicted from any hotel with thin walls.

We’d landed yesterday. He’d woken for the descent, watched the ocean appear through the window, and said, “You planned this.”

“You understand this is the most terrifying thing you’ve ever done to me.”

Day One of the itinerary said: Sleep in. No alarms. I’ll make coffee when we feel like it.

It was nine-fifteen. Eli was standing on the balcony in my underwear looking at the ocean like it had personally surprised him. On his left hand, a ring. Titanium, matte black. He’d picked it himself. I was wearing the matching one.

“Come here,” he said.

I went. He pulled me against his back. We stood looking at the Pacific.

“I don’t have anything to do today.” He shifted his hips. A roll, a press. My cock responded. His breathing changed. “I can think of one thing to do.”

“Room service?”

“After.”

He turned in my arms. “Take me back to bed.”

I picked him up. His legs around my waist. I dropped him on the bed. He bounced and laughed.

“Most people just walk to the bed.”

“Most people aren’t engaged to a man who looks like that in my underwear.”

“Your underwear? I bought these.”

“You stole those from my second drawer three months ago.”

“Prove it.”

“I’m about to remove the evidence.”

The grin became a gasp when I hooked my fingers in the waistband and pulled. He was naked on white hotel sheets with the sun painting his skin in gold. His cock hard, curving against his stomach, the head flushed and slick.

“You’re staring.”

“Your assessment face is indistinguishable from your arousal face, which is something your therapist should know about.”

I crawled over him. He kissed me — morning-warm, unhurried. I found the spot below his ear. The spot I’d discovered in a cabin during a storm and had been deploying with surgical precision for twelve months.

“You’re doing the spot.”

“The spot works.”

“The spot is — God — cheating.”

I sucked the skin beneath his ear, then bit the tendon where his neck met his shoulder. He arched off the bed. I kissed down his chest — every ridge, every hollow. His nipple, where my tongue made him hiss. His hip, where my teeth grazed and his hand gripped the sheet.

I settled between his thighs. Tongued the crease of his hip, slow, deliberate, while his cock lay untouched, twitching with every pass of my mouth near it but not on it.

“You’re building a murder motive.”

I kissed the base of his cock.

“Please.” The word cost him something every time, and every time it was the most honest thing he said.

I took him in my mouth.

The sound he made was not a word. His cock was thick on my tongue, the head swollen and slick. I took him deep — a skill I’d practiced because his reaction was worth every effort — and held there, my throat working around him, my eyes on his face.

I set a rhythm. Long, slow strokes. My hand twisting on the upstroke, my tongue doing the thing he’d once described as “illegal in several jurisdictions.” His hips started to move. Involuntary thrusts pushing deeper into my mouth, chasing the heat. I let him fuck my mouth at his own pace.

“I’m going to — Grant, I’m close—”

I pulled off. His cock left my mouth with an obscene sound. His whole body jerked at the loss.

“You’re evil.”

“I’m thorough.”

“Come here. Get up here.”

He kissed me hard — tasting himself on my tongue. His hands shoved my shorts down. We were both naked, his cock sliding against mine, and the friction made my vision blur.

“Inside me. Now. I’ve been thinking about it since the balcony.”

“Four very productive minutes.”

He rolled the condom onto me, stroking twice more than necessary because he enjoyed watching my composure fracture.

I slid two fingers in. His body accepted without resistance. My fingers curled, found the spot, and his back arched and the sound he made was loud enough that I was grateful for thick hotel walls. I added a third finger. His cock leaked against his stomach, catching the morning light.

“Now. I swear to God, Grant—”

I pressed forward. His body took me in one long, continuous slide.

There was no architectural metaphor for this. This was just Eli. Tight, hot, devastating. His legs around my waist. His hands on my shoulders. His eyes — brown, wide, luminous. The expression I lived for. Just Eli. Raw and present and full of me.

“Move.”

“Harder.”

The bed frame protested. I changed the angle — lifted his hips — and the result was immediate. His whole body jerked, a continuous stream of my name and God’s name and words that weren’t words.

“There — fuck — don’t stop — don’t you dare—”

I drove into him relentlessly. His cock untouched, leaking a steady stream that pooled in his navel. His ring glinting on the hand destroying the sheet.

“Touch me. Grant — please—”

I wrapped my hand around his cock. He shouted — raw, desperate. I stroked in time with my thrusts, my thumb dragging over the head on every upstroke.

“Look at me.”

His eyes opened. Found mine. Recognition. The face of a man seeing the person he’d chosen and being seen in return.

He came with his eyes open. His cock pulsed in my hand, spilling over my fist, over his stomach, over the white sheets. His body clenched around me and the sound he made was my name, twice, broken and reassembled.

I followed him. Both of us shaking and gasping and holding on.

I cleaned him up with a warm washcloth and the tenderness he’d once found unbearable and now leaned into. He caught my hand. Kissed my knuckles.

“I love you.” Casual. The word domesticated. Made permanent by repetition.

“I love you more.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“I’m a planner. Everything is a competition.”

“Room service. I want eggs. With butter. Low heat.”

“That’s not how room service works.”

“Assert dominance over the kitchen.”

I ordered eggs. Told them butter and low heat, because the asking was the point.

We ate them in bed. They were good — not as good as mine. Home was not a hotel room or a cabin or a lodge on a lake. Home was the person who remembered how you liked your eggs.

Day One. No alarms. No emergency contact required.

Just us. Just coffee and eggs and an ocean and a ring and twenty more days of nothing stretched out in front of us like the most beautiful blueprint either of us had ever drawn.

I couldn’t wait for Day Two.

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