Aisle Be There — Bonus Chapter: After Hours
An exclusive bonus scene by Jace Wilder
⚠️ Spoiler warning: This scene takes place three months after the events of Aisle Be There. Read the full novel first for maximum enjoyment.
Three months into co-op ownership, and I’d developed a problem.
The problem was six feet tall, covered in flour, and had a habit of bending over the bread table at closing time in jeans that should have been classified as a workplace hazard.
“You’re staring again,” June said from register three, not looking up from her phone.
“I’m conducting a visual inventory of the bakery section.”
“You’re staring at your boyfriend’s ass while he shapes focaccia. It’s 8:55 PM and I want to go home.”
“Then go home.”
“I can’t. You haven’t done the closing walk yet because you’re —”
“Visual inventory. I said what I said.”
June gathered her bag with the long-suffering sigh of a woman whose boss was hopelessly, publicly, embarrassingly in love with the baker. “Lock up. Don’t do anything on the food-prep surfaces. Health code.”
“Goodnight, June.”
“I’m serious about the surfaces, Teo.”
She left. The front door chimed and locked behind her. The store settled into its overnight quiet — the hum of the refrigeration cases, the tick of the cooling ovens.
Evan was still at the bread table. Sleeves rolled past his elbows, forearms dusted white, the signet ring crusted with dough. He was folding a roasted garlic and rosemary sourdough — quarter-turns, precise, unhurried, his whole body engaged in the rhythm. The way his shoulders moved when he pressed the dough. The way his hips shifted when he leaned into the table. The way the overhead light caught the muscle in his forearms and the fine dusting of flour along the dark hair on his wrists.
I did the closing walk on autopilot. Produce, dairy, deli, registers, stockroom, loading dock. I could have done it blindfolded. Tonight I basically did, because my brain was running a parallel process that consisted entirely of what I was going to do to Evan Price the second the last lock clicked.
I went to the bakery.
He didn’t look up. “This needs two more sets.”
“It can wait.”
“Sourdough doesn’t wait. Sourdough operates on its own timeline and doesn’t care about yours.”
“Sounds like someone I know.”
He glanced up. The smile — the full one, the real one — hit me square in the chest. “Five minutes.”
“I’ll time you.”
I leaned against the counter and watched him finish. The last folds. The shaping — his hands cupping the dough, pulling it toward him across the floured surface, building tension in the gluten with a rotating motion that was so rhythmic, so controlled, so fucking competent that I had to adjust my stance because watching Evan Price handle dough had become a Pavlovian trigger for getting hard and I’d made my peace with that months ago.
He set the dough in the proofing basket. Covered it. Washed his hands — methodically, soap to the wrist, each finger, the ring scrubbed clean. Then he dried his hands, turned around, and leaned against the sink.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“Store’s empty?”
“Store’s empty.”
“June’s gone?”
“June left specific instructions about food-prep surfaces.”
His laugh was quiet and warm. “The health inspector doesn’t work at 9 PM.”
“No. He doesn’t.”
I crossed the kitchen in three steps. He watched me come — his eyes tracking my body with the focused, anticipatory attention of a man who knew exactly what was about to happen and had been thinking about it since this afternoon when I’d walked past the bakery and found him kneading dough with his sleeves rolled and his hips pressed against the table edge and I’d had to go stand in the walk-in cooler for fifteen minutes until the situation in my jeans became professionally manageable.
I put my hands on the counter on either side of him. Caged him. Leaned in until my mouth was against his ear.
“You’ve been bending over that bread table for three hours,” I said, low. “In those jeans. You know exactly what that does to me.”
“I know exactly what that does to you.” His voice had dropped into the register he only used with me — rough, private, stripped of every professional frequency. “Why do you think I wore them?”
The sound I made wasn’t civilized. I bit his earlobe and felt his whole body jolt, his hand finding my hip, fingers digging in through the apron.
“You’re a menace,” I said against his skin.
“I’m the baker. I have counter priv—”
I shut him up with my mouth. Not gently — three hours of watching him work had burned gentle out of my vocabulary. I kissed him deep, my hand fisting the back of his shirt, pulling him off the sink and against me, and the full-body contact — his chest against mine, his hips against mine, the undeniable hardness of him pressed against my thigh — made us both groan into each other’s mouths.
His hands went to my apron. Untied it. Yanked it over my head. Then my shirt — buttons, fast, his precise fingers working the line from collar to hem. The shirt hit the floor and his palms were on my chest, sliding down my stomach, his thumbs tracing the lines of muscle above my waistband with a deliberateness that made my cock throb against my zipper.
“The bread table,” I said against his mouth.
“That’s a food-prep surface.”
“It’s my store. I’ll prep what I want on it.”
I lifted him onto the table. His legs wrapped around my waist instantly — thighs gripping, heels hooking behind me, pulling me into the cradle of his body. His cock ground against mine through two layers of denim and we both swore — him in fragments, me in Spanish.
I worked his throat with my mouth — the tendon, the hollow, the pulse point hammering under my tongue. My hands were on his belt, unfastening, unzipping, shoving the denim down his hips until I could get my hand inside his briefs and wrap my fingers around him.
He was hard. Thick and hot and already wet at the tip, his cock jerking in my grip when I squeezed. The sound he made — a choked, shattered thing, his head falling back, his hands bracing on the table behind him — was worth every minute of the three hours I’d spent pretending to work while mentally undressing him.
“Every morning,” I told him, stroking slow, twisting on the upstroke the way that made his thighs shake, “I watch you through the pass-through window. Before you know I’m there. You’re covered in flour and humming and your hands are in the dough and you have no idea how fucking beautiful you are. And I think — every single morning — I get to have this man. I get to take him apart tonight.“
“Teo — fuck — your hand —”
“Tell me what you want.”
“Your mouth.” No hesitation. Three months of learning to ask plainly for what he needed, and the directness of it — from a man who’d spent thirty-seven years performing restraint — still hit me like a freight train. “I want your mouth on me. Now. Please.”
The please undid me every time.
I dropped to my knees on the bakery floor. Pulled his jeans and briefs down to his thighs. He was fully hard, flushed dark, a bead of precome sliding down the underside of his shaft, and I caught it with my tongue — a slow, flat lick from base to tip that made him grab the edge of the table so hard the flour puffed up around his knuckles.
“I want you to remember this,” I said, my lips brushing the head of his cock, “every time you stand at this table. Every time you shape a loaf. Every time you fold dough at 4 AM, I want you to feel my mouth right here.”
“I already — oh God — I already think about you every time I —”
I took him in. Deep. The full length of him sliding past my lips, the head hitting the back of my throat, and the sound he made — raw, guttural, echoing off the stainless steel — filled the empty store like a hymn.
I’d learned his body the way he’d learned bread — through repetition, attention, the patient cataloging of every response. I knew the spot under the head that made his hips stutter. I knew the pressure that made his breathing fracture. I knew that if I hollowed my cheeks and sucked hard on the upstroke while my tongue worked the ridge, his hand would find my hair and his thighs would clamp around my shoulders and his vocabulary would reduce to my name and profanity in alternating sequence.
“Teo — Jesus — right there, don’t — fuck — don’t stop —”
I didn’t stop. I worked him with my mouth and my hand, stroking what my lips couldn’t reach, setting a rhythm that built in speed and pressure until his hips were rocking off the table, fucking into my mouth with shallow, desperate thrusts he couldn’t control.
His hand tightened in my hair. His thighs were trembling. I could feel it building — the tension in his stomach, the catch in his breath, the way his cock swelled against my tongue.
“I’m going to — Teo, I’m close, I can’t hold —”
I pulled off. He made a sound like I’d stolen something from him — wrecked, outraged, his cock slick and twitching against his stomach, his eyes wild when he looked down at me.
“Not yet,” I said. Stood. Kissed him hard, letting him taste himself on my tongue, and his groan — tasting his own precome in my mouth — vibrated through both of us.
“Turn around.”
He turned. Hands flat on the bread table. His back to me — the ridge of his spine, the lean muscle of his shoulders, the dimples at the base of his back visible above his shoved-down waistband. He was shaking. The controlled, precise, meticulous man I loved was shaking with want, braced against a bread table in a closed grocery store, waiting for me.
I pressed against him. My chest to his bare back, my cock — still trapped in my jeans, straining, aching — grinding against his ass. I reached around and took him in my hand again. He gasped and pushed back against me, his head dropping between his shoulders.
“You’re mine,” I said against the back of his neck, stroking him in long, twisting pulls that made his whole body jerk. “In this kitchen. In this store. In our apartment and our bed. Every sound you’re making right now is mine. Every time you come apart like this — this is mine.”
“Yours — fuck — Teo, harder — please —”
I gave him harder. Faster. My grip tightening, my wrist snapping on the upstroke, my thumb smearing the slick leaking steadily from his tip across the head with every pass. My other hand pressed flat on his stomach, holding him against me, feeling the muscles clench and release under my palm as the orgasm built.
I ground against his ass in rhythm with my hand. The friction through denim was maddening — not enough, too much, the pressure building at the base of my spine with every roll of my hips. His body was hot against mine, his skin damp with sweat, the smell of flour and cedar and sex filling the kitchen.
“Come for me,” I said against his ear. “Right here. On the bread table. Let me hear you.”
He came hard. His back arched, his hand slammed flat on the table, and the sound that tore out of him was my name broken into syllables — Te-o — stretched and shattered, his cock pulsing in my fist, spilling hot over my fingers and onto the stainless steel. His knees buckled and I caught him, my arm banding across his chest, holding him upright while his body shuddered through it.
I was close — wound tight, my cock throbbing, the friction of his body against mine enough to make my vision blur. I freed myself with my clean hand — one-handed, fumbling, past caring about finesse — and pressed against the bare skin of his lower back, stroking fast, rough, the slick heat of his come on my other hand and the smell of him and the sound of his breathing and the way he reached behind and gripped my hip and pulled me closer —
I came with a groan I felt in my teeth, spilling across his lower back, my forehead dropping to his shoulder, my whole body seizing and releasing in waves that left me hollowed out and shaking.
We stood there. Breathing. His weight against the table, mine against him. The store humming. The flour settling. The bread proofing in its basket on the rack, quietly rising, unaware of and indifferent to what had just happened on the surface where it would be shaped tomorrow morning.
He turned in my arms. Kissed me — slow, unhurried, thorough. The kiss of a man who had nowhere else to be and no intention of pretending he wanted to be anywhere else.
“The health inspector,” he murmured against my mouth, “would not approve.”
“The health inspector can take it up with the operations director.”
“The operations director just came on a bread table.”
“The operations director has zero regrets and is going to sanitize the hell out of that table.”
He laughed. I laughed. We stood in the bakery, half-naked, wrecked, flour and sweat and come drying on our skin, and the laughter filled the empty aisles the way bread filled the ovens — warm, rising, nourishing everything it touched.
I cleaned the table. Thoroughly. Twice. He started the sanitizer. We worked side by side in our underwear, the way we cleaned up after every shift — his precision and my warmth, his systems and my instinct.
We raided the deli case before we left. Stood at the butcher counter eating prosciutto and sourdough and Elena’s goat cheese, wearing boxer briefs and aprons and nothing else, our shoulders touching, our breathing still not entirely normal.
“Same time tomorrow?” he said.
“Same time every day. For as long as the ovens stay warm.”
He took my hand. We walked out together. The sign glowed above us. The P was straight. The night was quiet. The bread was proofing in the dark, rising slowly, the way everything good does — with patience, with warmth, with time.
Home.
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