Blueprints — Bonus Chapter
Knot on My Watch by Jace Wilder
⚠️ Spoiler warning: This scene takes place three months after the events of Knot on My Watch. Read the novel first for maximum impact. Contains explicit MM content.
A bonus chapter — Rory’s POV, three months after the events of the book. Too hot for the retailers. For you.
The cottage had no walls in the kitchen, no tile in the bathroom, no light fixtures in the hallway, and exactly one finished room: the bedroom.
Leo had prioritized the bedroom. He said it was because the drywall needed to cure before winter and the bedroom had the most exterior exposure. He said it with the flat, practical authority of a man explaining load-bearing walls, and I let him get away with it because we both knew the real reason, and the real reason was that he wanted a bed that wasn’t his aunt’s, in a room that was ours, with a door that closed and a lock that worked and no one-eyed dog commandeering the center of the mattress at 3 a.m.
Waffles had his own room. Three beds, a water bowl, and a window facing the lake. He’d accepted the arrangement with the grudging dignity of a creature who understood that he was being managed and had decided to allow it — for now.
I stood in the doorway of the finished bedroom at 9 p.m. on a Friday in April, holding two glasses of wine and wearing a T-shirt that used to be Leo’s and now smelled like both of us, and I looked at the room we’d built together.
He looked like a man who’d been building something with his hands all day. He looked like a man I wanted to take apart with mine.
“You’re staring,” he said.
“I’m appreciating. There’s a distinction.”
His mouth opened under mine and I tasted coffee and the faint sweetness of the apple he’d eaten after dinner, and underneath that, just Leo — the taste I’d know blind, in the dark, in a room full of other people. His tongue slid against mine, slow and deliberate, and his hands pulled my hips down against his, and I felt him — already hard, already wanting, the thick ridge of his cock pressing against my ass through his jeans.
“Some of those were you in those jeans knowing exactly what you were doing.”
“I was working. The fact that I looked exceptional while doing it is not my responsibility.”
“Because of it,” he said. “I love you because of all of it. The organizing and the arguing and the spreadsheets. Because none of it is performance anymore. It’s just you. The real you.” His hands moved higher, thumbs grazing my nipples, and I arched into the touch. “I love the real you.”
“Everything in this room is ours. Including the shirt. Take it off me.”
Not soft-dark. Hungry-dark. The particular shade his eyes turned when he stopped being patient and started being honest about what he wanted.
His tongue followed, soothing the mark, and then his mouth opened against my skin and he sucked — slow, thorough, a bruise blooming under his mouth that I’d see in the mirror tomorrow and press my fingers to while I pretended to be annoyed.
“I’ve been thinking about this all day,” he said against my neck. His voice had dropped into the register that made my stomach flip — low and rough and unhurried, the voice he used in bed and only in bed. “The way you kneel to check the baseboard height and your shirt rides up and I can see—” His hand found the small of my back. “This. This exact spot. I’ve been thinking about putting my mouth here since two o’clock.”
“I hate being interrupted about work. Being interrupted to be fucked against a half-built kitchen counter is a different category entirely.”
His hands went to my belt. The clink of the buckle, the slide of leather, the button and the zipper, and then his hand was inside my jeans, cupping me through my boxer briefs, and the pressure — firm, deliberate, his palm hot against my cock — made my hips stutter forward.
“You’re hard,” he said. As though reporting a structural finding.
“Since always. Since the first time. Since you looked at me across a conservatory and said ‘Yeah, it might’ and I wanted to climb you like the structural support you are.”
“I want to take care of you tonight. Not the way we usually do. I want you to lie back and not lift a single competent finger.” I put my hands on his chest and pushed, gently. “Can you do that?”
“I can try.”
“Good. Trying is enough.”
I kissed the scar. The long, pale line along his left shoulder, tracking down his upper arm. I pressed my mouth to it — not gently, not reverently. Hungrily. Like the man underneath the scar was mine and every mark on his body was territory I intended to claim.
“This scar,” I said against his skin. “This is where you stopped being a firefighter and started being the man who built me a nightstand. The man who made midnight grilled cheese for strangers and covered me with a blanket at 4 a.m.” I bit the scar — not hard, but hard enough to make him hiss. “I love this scar. I love what it made you.”
I took his index finger into my mouth and sucked — watching his face as I did it, watching his eyes go wide and then dark and then desperate — and his cock twitched against my thigh, hard and insistent and straining against his jeans.
“These hands have been inside me and around me and on me, and they never once let go.”
I unfastened his jeans. Pulled them down. His boxer briefs followed, and his cock sprang free — thick and hard and flushed dark, the head slick, his body telling the truth his mouth was too proud to speak.
I lowered my mouth. I didn’t tease. I took him deep — as deep as I could, my mouth stretching around the width of him, my tongue pressing flat against the underside, and the sound he made was raw and guttural and wrecked.
I pulled back slowly, sucking hard, my hand wrapping around the base. His hips bucked — an involuntary thrust that pushed him deeper, and I took it, relaxed my throat, let him feel how far I’d go.
“God — Rory—” His hand tightened in my hair. His thighs were trembling. The big man, the steady man — trembling under my mouth. “Your mouth — you have no idea what your mouth—”
I pulled off. Looked up at him from between his thighs, my lips swollen, his cock wet and twitching inches from my face. “Tell me. Use your words. You’re the one who taught me that words matter.”
“You’re everything,” he said. His voice was shattered. “When you’re on your knees and your eyes are — Rory, I can’t think when you—”
I took him back into my mouth. Deeper. Harder. My tongue doing the thing that made his brain short-circuit — swirling pressure against the sensitive ridge below the head that made his entire body bow off the mattress.
I pulled back. “Not yet,” I said. I crawled up his body. Straddled him. The length of his cock pressed between us — slick and hot against my stomach — and I rolled my hips, grinding against him.
“I want you inside me,” I said. “I want to ride you in the bed we built in the room we made and I want to watch your face when you come.”
His hands found my hips. Not gripping — trembling. Leo Mercer’s hands, which did not tremble, which held steady in burning buildings, were trembling on my hipbones because I’d told him what I wanted.
I opened myself with my own fingers while he watched. His eyes dark, intent, fixed on the place where my hand disappeared behind me and my face changed. I gave him the show. Knees spread, back arched, two fingers working slowly while I braced my other hand on his chest and let the sounds come.
“You feel so good watching me,” I said. “Your eyes on me — I can feel them like a touch — Leo, I need — I need—”
“Take what you need.”
I sank down onto him. Slowly. Inch by inch. The stretch — thick, insistent, the fullness that I craved and that still, every time, made me catch my breath at the size of him.
I bottomed out. He was fully inside me — deep, impossibly deep, filling me in a way that made my vision blur and my thighs shake.
“Move,” he whispered. “Rory. Please.”
I moved. Slow, rolling movements of my hips — rising until he almost slipped out, sinking back down until I could feel him in my throat. His thumbs dug in — hard enough to bruise, and I wanted the bruises.
“You feel incredible,” I told him. “The way you fill me — Leo — every time — you’re so deep, I can feel you everywhere—”
His hips thrust up. The angle shifted and he hit the spot that made lightning arc through my entire body, and I cried out — loud, shameless.
“There,” I gasped. “Again — right there—”
He did it again. And again. His hands on my hips controlling the angle while I rode him, and the sounds filling the room were obscene — flesh on flesh, my voice breaking on his name, his rough groans underneath me.
“Look at you,” he said. Guttural. Raw. “Rory — the way you look on top of me — you’re perfect — I’m yours, do you understand that? I’m yours—”
I wrapped my hand around my own cock. The combination — his cock inside me, my hand on myself, his voice saying I’m yours — sent me hurtling toward the edge.
“Come with me,” I said. Not a request. A command. “Leo. Look at me. Come with me.”
His eyes locked on mine. He thrust up — hard, deep, once, twice — and on the third thrust I shattered. I came across his chest and stomach, my body clenching around him, and the sensation pulled Leo after me — I felt the hot pulse of him inside me, heard my name in his mouth like a prayer, like a curse, like the only word in any language that meant anything.
I collapsed against his chest. His arms closed around me. His cock was still inside me, softening, and the intimacy of it — the refusal to separate — was its own kind of afterglow.
His hand came up and cradled the back of my head. His mouth pressed against my temple.
“Trying is enough,” he murmured. And the echo of the echo made my eyes burn.
We cleaned up eventually. Not immediately — there was a long, languorous interval of lying tangled together, his hand tracing absent patterns on my back. The aftercare that had been awkward in the early days was natural now — a warm cloth, a glass of water, the quilt pulled up, his arm settling around me with proprietary ease.
“The tile in the bathroom. I want the textured one.”
“The textured one costs twice as much and requires specialty adhesive.”
“Quality has a price.”
“You’re incorrigible.”
“You love it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”
“Thank you for the room.”
“Thank you for staying.”
From the other room, Waffles sighed. The long, theatrical, deeply put-upon sigh of a dog who had orchestrated an entire love story from the moment he stole a leather glove in the snow, and who was receiving insufficient credit for his contributions.
He thumped his tail once. Twice.
Then he put his chin on his paws, closed his one good eye, and let the cottage hold them all.