The Wine Cellar

A Bonus Chapter from Room Service, Please Ruin Me
by Jace Wilder

Rafe arrived at The Halcyon House at nine-seventeen on a Friday night in March, which was twelve minutes ahead of schedule, which meant he had broken approximately four traffic laws on the mountain access road and did not regret a single one.

He used the staff entrance. The key card — matte black, unrestricted access, the one Lucas had pressed into his hand three months ago with the words you’re not a guest — opened the service door without a sound.

He’d planned to go straight to the suite. That was the plan.

The plan lasted until he passed the wine cellar.

The heavy oak door was ajar. A warm light spilled into the corridor. And from inside, the sound of someone moving bottles with the careful, deliberate rhythm of a man who organized things when he was waiting for something he wanted.

Rafe set down his bag. He pushed the door open.

Lucas was standing at the far rack with his back to the door, reaching for a bottle on the top shelf. He was in his hotel blacks — the tailored trousers, the white shirt, no jacket, sleeves rolled to the elbow. His auburn hair caught the warm light, and the freckles on his forearms were visible even from the doorway.

Seven weeks. Forty-nine days. Approximately eleven hundred hours since the last time Rafe had touched this man, and the number was not an approximation — Rafe had counted, because apparently precision was contagious.

“You’re early.” Lucas didn’t turn around.

“I drove fast.”

“How fast?”

“Fast enough that you should probably not ask.”

Lucas set the bottle back on the rack. Turned around. The look on his face was the one Rafe had been driving toward for six hours. Want. Clean, uncomplicated, undisguised.

He crossed the cellar in four strides.

The kiss was not gentle. Seven weeks compressed into a single point of contact. Rafe’s hands found Lucas’s waist, pulled him flush, and Lucas’s hands found Rafe’s jaw and held on.

Lucas tasted like wine. He’d been tasting bottles — selecting the perfect vintage for Rafe’s arrival the way he selected everything, with ruthless specificity.

“You were choosing a wine for us,” Rafe said against his mouth.

“I was inventorying.”

“I am not trying to impress you. I am trying to kiss you. These are different activities.”

“Then stop talking and kiss me.”

Three steps backward put Lucas against the wine rack. The bottles clinked behind his shoulders. Rafe pressed into him, one hand braced on the rack, the other sliding up under his shirt to find the warm skin of his ribcage, and Lucas made the sound — the quiet, caught, involuntary sound that Rafe had been replaying for forty-nine days.

“I missed you,” Rafe said. His mouth was on Lucas’s neck. “I missed this. The way you taste here.” A kiss below the ear. “And here.” The hollow of the throat.

He applied the specific pressure, the specific spot, the application of teeth and tongue that he’d discovered on their third night together. Lucas’s hips jerked forward. His hand fisted in the back of Rafe’s shirt.

“Rafe. We’re in the wine cellar.”

“Excellent acoustics.”

“The door is open.”

“Then close it.”

Lucas hooked his foot around the heavy oak door and kicked it shut. The cellar sealed around them — stone walls, cool air, amber light, and the particular privacy of a room designed to keep valuable things at the perfect temperature.

Rafe dropped to his knees. The stone floor was cold through his jeans. He didn’t care.

He looked up. Lucas was looking down at him with the expression that wrecked him every time — the shock, the hunger, the raw vulnerability of a man who still could not entirely believe someone would choose to kneel for him.

“Seven weeks of video calls where I watched your face on a screen and thought about doing this.”

“The execution is better than the narration. Can I?”

“If you don’t, I’m going to fire you as the hotel’s culinary consultant.”

He undid the belt. The button. The zipper. Drew Lucas out with the attentive focus of a man who had spent three months thinking about this. Rafe took him in. Slow, deep, savoring — the taste and the weight and the specific heat of the man he loved, relearned after seven weeks.

Lucas’s hands found Rafe’s hair. His head fell back against the wine rack. Bottles shifted. Something expensive rattled.

“If you break the 2015 Chambertin, I will add it to your invoice.”

Rafe laughed around him. The vibration made Lucas’s hips buck and a sound escape him that was worth more than every bottle in the cellar.

He pulled Lucas to the edge and then stopped. Stood. Kissed him hard, letting Lucas taste himself, and turned him around.

Lucas braced his hands on the wine rack. The position was familiar — two men who knew each other’s bodies and knew this configuration meant now, fast, I’ve been waiting and I’m done waiting.

Rafe found the supplies in his jacket pocket. Because seven weeks of long-distance had taught him that reunions with Lucas happened in unpredictable locations.

“You brought supplies to the wine cellar.”

“I’m thorough. You love thorough. You scheduled thorough into your calendar.”

He prepped Lucas against the wine rack with the care the moment demanded and the speed that seven weeks required.

“Now,” Lucas said. The hotel manager voice. “Now, Rafe. I’ve waited seven weeks. Don’t make me wait another second.”

Rafe rolled on the condom. Lined up. Pushed in.

The cellar swallowed the sound they both made — stone walls absorbing the groan like a confession into a cathedral. The fit was familiar and devastating and exactly right, and for one second neither moved, feeling the specific relief of two bodies that had been apart too long and were, finally, home.

Then Rafe moved, and the relief became something else entirely.

He fucked Lucas against the wine rack with seven weeks of want in every thrust. Deep, steady strokes that made the bottles rattle and Lucas’s breath come in sharp, vocal bursts. His hand found Lucas’s cock and stroked in counterpoint.

“I love you,” Rafe said. Not dramatically. As a tasting note. “I love you and the reality is better than the thought. It’s always better.”

“I love you too. Also — harder. That angle. Don’t change anything except the intensity.”

“You give the most precise feedback of anyone I’ve ever been inside.”

“Would you prefer I called it — oh god right there — something less clinical?”

“I would prefer you kept making that sound. The one that’s going to make me come embarrassingly fast if you do it again.”

Lucas did it again.

Rafe buried his face between Lucas’s shoulder blades and came with an intensity that whited out his vision. His hand tightened on Lucas’s cock in a reflexive pulse that pulled Lucas over the edge seconds later — Lucas coming with a sound that was quiet and deep and satisfied.

They stood against the wine rack, breathing. The cellar was warm around them now.

“The 2015 Chambertin survived,” Lucas murmured.

“Your residency started approximately four minutes ago. I’d say you’re off to an excellent beginning.”

They left the wine cellar together. Walked through the quiet corridors, up to the suite with the brass plaque: Occupied: By Choice.

The fire was lit. The bed was made. The left side of the closet was empty, hangers spaced at precisely two-inch intervals, ready for the man who came back every three months because the wanting was the truest thing about him.

They didn’t need the wine yet. They had the whole week.

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