Broke His Straight Heart — Bonus Scene

An exclusive bonus scene by Jace Wilder. Set after the epilogue.

The Barbecue (After)

NOAH

The house was quiet for the first time in three days.

Lily was at Sara’s. Marcos and David had finally left at eleven, taking their wine opinions and their volume with them. Claire had texted from her Uber — your boyfriend’s burgers were better than yours and I need you to sit with that — and I’d responded with a middle finger emoji that she’d hearted, because that was the full range of our sibling communication.

I locked the front door. Turned off the porch light. Stood in the kitchen and listened to the particular quality of silence that happens when a house that’s been full of people suddenly isn’t.

Evan was at the sink. Washing the last of the glasses by hand because he didn’t trust the dishwasher with the good ones — the set his mother had given him when he moved into the first apartment, the ones he’d carried through three moves and fourteen years of solo living and now kept in our cabinet, in our kitchen, in the house where our name was on the lease.

He hadn’t changed out of his clothes from the barbecue. Slim gray shorts. A white linen shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, unbuttoned one more than necessary because the September heat had lingered past sunset. His curls were messy from the humidity. His feet were bare on the kitchen tile.

I watched him from the doorway. The way his forearms flexed when he turned a glass under the faucet. The way his hips shifted when he reached for the towel. The way his shirt rode up just enough to show a strip of tan skin above his waistband — that narrow band of lower back that I’d spent twelve years pretending I didn’t want to put my mouth on.

I didn’t have to pretend anymore.

“Stop staring at me,” Evan said without turning around.

“No.”

“You’re going to burn something again. Psychologically, this time.”

“I’m not near the grill.”

“You don’t need the grill. You have a gift for destruction that transcends equipment.” He set the last glass in the drying rack and turned around, leaning back against the counter with his arms crossed. His eyes found mine across the kitchen and something in them shifted — the dry humor softening into something warmer, darker, the look he saved for when we were alone and he didn’t have to manage his expression for an audience.

“Everyone’s gone,” he said.

“I noticed.”

“Lily’s at Sara’s until Tuesday.”

“I know her schedule, Ev. I made her schedule.”

“I’m just clarifying the relevant logistical parameters.”

“You’re telling me we have the house to ourselves.”

“I’m telling you—” He unfolded his arms. Dropped them to his sides. Looked at me with the full, undisguised wanting that still hit me like a truck every single time, even after a year, even after hundreds of nights in the same bed, even after I’d mapped every inch of his body with my hands and my mouth and still couldn’t believe I was allowed. “—that no one is going to hear you tonight.”

My stomach bottomed out.

I crossed the kitchen in four steps. He met me halfway — which was the thing about Evan, the thing that had always been true. He never made me come all the way to him. He always closed the distance.

I kissed him. Hard. My hands on his face, my thumbs on his jaw, tilting his head back so I could get deeper. He tasted like the beer he’d been nursing and underneath it the clean, warm taste that was just Evan — the taste I’d been addicted to since the first time I kissed him in this kitchen a year ago and realized that everything I’d been doing before that moment was a rough draft of a life I hadn’t started living yet.

His hands found my chest. Not pushing away — pressing. Feeling. His palms flat against my pectorals, fingers spreading over the muscle, and even through my shirt the contact sent heat radiating outward from every point where his skin touched fabric.

“You were staring at me all day,” he said against my mouth. “During the barbecue. When I was setting up the croquet. When I was helping Lily with the juice boxes.”

“I was watching you with my daughter.”

“You were watching my ass in these shorts.”

“Those two things are not mutually exclusive.”

He laughed — the low, private laugh, the one that vibrated against my lips and settled somewhere south of my stomach — and pulled back just far enough to look at me.

“What do you want?” he asked. Not casually. With the particular weight he gave the question when he was asking what I wanted wanted — the version of the question that meant tell me the thing you’ve been thinking about and I’ll make it happen.

“You,” I said. “On our bed. In our house. Loud as I want because no one’s going to hear me.”

His eyes went dark.

“Then take me to bed,” he said.

I picked him up at the bedroom door.

Not because he needed carrying — Evan was a fully functional adult who could walk twelve feet to a mattress. But because I’d discovered, over the past year, that lifting him did something to both of us that bypassed every rational circuit and went straight to the lizard brain. Something about my hands under his thighs, his legs locked around my waist, his mouth on my neck while I carried him — it turned a switch neither of us had an override for.

“You’re showing off,” he said, his voice already rougher than it had been in the kitchen.

“I’m being efficient.” I walked us to the bed. Set him down on the edge. Stood between his knees and looked down at him — this man, this gorgeous, sharp, impossibly patient man who had waited fourteen years for me to figure out what everyone else already knew. “Taking my clothes off or yours first?”

“Mine. I want your hands on me.”

I unbuttoned his shirt. One button at a time, the way he’d taught me he liked — slow, deliberate, the anticipation building with each inch of chest revealed. His skin was warm and flushed underneath. Dark chest hair that I traced with my fingertip from his collarbone to his navel, and he shivered — actually shivered, a year into this, still reactive to my touch in a way that made me feel powerful and humbled in equal measure.

I pushed the shirt off his shoulders. He shrugged it the rest of the way and it fell behind him on the bed. I put my mouth on his collarbone — the spot I knew, the one that made his breath catch — and kissed my way across his chest.

“Shorts,” he said. His voice was thin. “Get my shorts off.”

I hooked my fingers in his waistband and pulled. He lifted his hips and the shorts came down and he wasn’t wearing anything underneath — a detail that detonated in my brain like a controlled demolition.

“All day?” I said, my voice coming out strangled. “You’ve been commando all day? At the barbecue? With my sister here?”

“Your sister was not looking at my crotch, Noah.”

“I was.”

“I know.” He smiled — the wicked, knowing, absolutely devastating smile of a man who had planned this. “Why do you think I did it?”

I groaned. Dropped to my knees between his legs. He was already hard — thick and flushed, curving up toward his stomach, and the sight of him hit me the way it always hit me: like the first time. Like discovery. Like the door I’d walked past for twelve years was open again and the room was full of light and I couldn’t stop walking into it.

I wrapped my hand around him and his head dropped back. A sharp exhale. His thighs tensed under my forearms.

“I want to taste you,” I said.

A year ago, those words would have cost me something. A year ago, wanting this — wanting a man, wanting him, wanting to put my mouth on him and hear the sounds he made — would have required me to push through a wall of accumulated performance and pretense and fear. Now the words came out like breathing. Because they were. Because wanting Evan Mercer was the most natural thing my body had ever done, and the only unnatural part had been the twelve years I’d spent refusing to notice.

“Then taste me.” His voice was barely a whisper. His hand came to the back of my head — not guiding, just resting. Present.

I lowered my mouth.

The sound he made when I took him in — that first, broken, bitten-off groan — was the sound I chased every time. The sound of Evan losing the careful, competent composure he wore for the world. The sound of the man underneath — raw, wanting, desperate — coming to the surface because I was the one person who could pull him there.

I took him deeper. Worked him slow and tight, my tongue pressed flat on the underside, my hand around the base. I’d learned his body the way I learned everything — with focus, with attention, with the obsessive commitment of a man who had decided to be good at something and refused to stop improving. I knew the rhythm that made his toes curl. The pressure that made his abs clench. The specific twist of my wrist that pulled a sound out of him like he’d been shot.

“Noah — God — your mouth—”

I pulled off just long enough to look up at him. His eyes were blown dark, his lips parted, his chest heaving. He was gripping the edge of the mattress with one hand and the back of my head with the other and he looked wrecked — beautifully, completely, thoroughly wrecked.

“I love the way you taste,” I said, and watched his eyes flutter shut and his cock twitch against his stomach. “I love the sounds you make. I love that I can do this to you.”

“You can do anything to me. You know that.”

“I know.” I kissed the inside of his thigh. The sharp cut of his hip. The trail of dark hair below his navel. “But tonight I want to do everything.”

His breath caught. “Everything?”

“Everything.”

I stood. Pulled my shirt over my head. His eyes tracked the movement — down my chest, my stomach, the waistband of my jeans — with the focused attention of a man who had spent fourteen years memorizing a body and still found new things to catalog. I unbuckled my belt. Unzipped. Stepped out of my jeans and boxers and stood in front of him naked and hard and wanting him so badly my vision had narrowed to a single point: the man on my bed.

Evan’s gaze dropped to my cock and his lips parted and his hand came up, reaching for me, and I stepped forward and let him wrap his fingers around me and the noise that came out of my chest was animal and involuntary and perfect.

“Get on the bed,” he said. Not asking. Telling. The tenderly commanding version of Evan that emerged in our bedroom — the man who had spent twelve years wanting to lead and now did it with a certainty that made my knees dissolve. “On your back.”

I obeyed. Because I’d learned something in the past year that twenty-six-year-old Noah could never have imagined: that surrendering control to someone you trust completely is not weakness. It’s the most powerful thing you can do with your body. It’s choosing to be known — fully, without performance — and trusting the person who knows you to handle what they find.

Evan climbed over me. Straddled my hips. The contact — his body against mine, skin on skin, the heat and weight and friction of him — drew a groan from somewhere deep enough that I felt it in my teeth.

He kissed me. Long, slow, filthy — his tongue sliding against mine, his hips grinding down in a rhythm that was deliberate and devastating. I could feel him against my stomach, hard and slick at the tip, and I could feel myself pressed against the curve of his ass, and the combined sensation was making rational thought increasingly theoretical.

“I’ve been thinking about this all day,” he murmured against my mouth. His hand trailed down my chest, my stomach, wrapped around my cock and stroked once, slow. “Watching you in that yard. Playing with Lily. Laughing with your friends. Being out. Being mine.”

“I’ve always been yours.”

“I know. But watching you be mine where people can see—” His grip tightened and I bucked up into his fist and swore. “—is the hottest thing in the world.”

He reached for the nightstand. Lube. No condom — we’d stopped using them two months ago, after the tests, after the conversation that had felt more intimate than any physical act. He slicked his fingers and reached behind himself and I watched his face change — the careful intake of breath, the way his eyes went heavy-lidded, the small furrow between his brows that smoothed out as his body opened.

“Let me,” I said. My voice sounded like gravel. “Ev — let me.”

He took my hand. Guided it between his legs. And the sound he made when my fingers replaced his — a low, shuddering moan that I felt vibrate through his entire body — was the sound of a man who trusted me with the most vulnerable version of himself.

I worked him open slowly. Watching his face. Reading every micro-expression — the gasp when I curved my fingers, the full-body shudder when I found the spot that made his thighs clench, the way he rocked back against my hand with increasing urgency. He was so responsive. Always had been. Like his body had spent twelve years saving up reactions and now that it was allowed to have them, it couldn’t hold anything back.

“More,” he breathed. “I can take more.”

I added another finger and he dropped forward, both hands braced on my chest, his forehead against mine. His breath was ragged. His cock was dripping against my stomach. His body was tight and hot around my fingers, clenching rhythmically, and the feel of it was making me so hard I could feel my pulse in my cock.

“I need you,” he said. “Noah — I need —”

“I know.” I withdrew my fingers and he whimpered — a sound that went through me like electricity — and then I was slicking myself up and positioning him and he was sinking down onto me and —

The world stopped.

Not metaphorically. Literally. Everything — sound, light, thought, time — suspended for the span of a heartbeat as Evan took me inside him, slow and steady, his eyes locked on mine, his mouth open, his hands flat on my chest. I watched his expression cycle through discomfort to adjustment to fullness to the moment his body found the angle that worked and his entire face transformed into something so open and raw and blissful that my vision blurred.

“Okay?” I managed.

“Okay doesn’t — that word is — Noah.” He rolled his hips experimentally and we both groaned. “You feel —”

“Tell me.”

“Like you were made for me.” He started to move. Slow, rolling undulations that took me deep with each downstroke and made the muscles in his thighs flex and his stomach contract and his head fall back. “Like every other time was practice for this.”

I gripped his hips. Not controlling — anchoring. My thumbs fit into the grooves of his hip bones, my fingers spread across the small of his back, and I held on while he rode me with a rhythm that started slow and deliberate and built into something that made the headboard tap the wall.

“Louder,” I said. My voice was gone — replaced by something rough and raw and demanding. “You said no one was going to hear. Let me hear you.”

He moaned. Full-throated, unfiltered, the sound of a man who’d spent his entire adult life moderating his volume and had been given explicit permission to stop. It was obscene and gorgeous and I wanted to record it and play it on a loop for the rest of my life.

“That’s it.” I planted my feet and thrust up to meet his downstroke and the noise he made was almost a scream — choked off, surprised, his nails digging into my chest. “There?”

“There — don’t stop — fuck — right there, Noah, right there —”

I didn’t stop. I fucked up into him with everything I had — every year of wanting, every year of hiding, every year of performing a version of desire that never felt like this — and Evan matched me thrust for thrust, his body rising and falling, his cock bouncing between us, untouched and leaking. His mouth was open and his eyes were glazed and he was making sounds that didn’t have consonants in them and I thought: This is what sex was always supposed to feel like. This is what I was always supposed to have.

“Touch yourself,” I said. “I want to watch.”

He wrapped his hand around his cock and stroked in time with our rhythm and the visual — Evan above me, head thrown back, working himself while I was buried inside him — obliterated whatever was left of my self-control.

“I’m close,” I warned. “Ev — I can’t hold —”

“Don’t hold it.” He leaned down. Kissed me. Sloppy, desperate, more breath than contact. “Come inside me. I want to feel it.”

Three words. Five syllables. The most devastating sentence anyone had ever spoken to me — and he’d said it before, and it destroyed me every time, and it would destroy me for the rest of my life.

I came hard. The kind of orgasm that starts at the base of the spine and radiates outward until every cell is involved — my back arching off the mattress, my hands bruising his hips, my voice saying his name like it was the only word I’d ever learned. I pulsed inside him and felt him clench around me and heard him gasp — a sharp, shocked sound — and then he was coming too, spilling across my stomach and chest in hot, rhythmic streaks, his body shaking, my name tearing out of him like something he’d been holding underwater.

He collapsed onto me. Sweaty, trembling, heavy in the way I loved — the full weight of this man pressed against me, heartbeat racing, breath ragged against my neck. I wrapped both arms around him and held on and the room slowly reassembled itself from the wreckage of what we’d just done to each other.

“I got come on you,” he said after a minute. His voice was muffled against my shoulder.

“I’m aware.”

“And on the sheets.”

“The sheets have been through worse.”

“Have they?”

“You don’t remember last Thursday?”

He laughed. The low, wrecked, perfect laugh of a man who was well-fucked and happy and lying on top of the person he loved. “Last Thursday was your fault.”

“Last Thursday was your idea. I was trying to sleep and you put your hand —”

“I was adjusting.“

“You were adjusting your hand onto my cock at two in the morning.”

“An innocent adjustment that you responded to with deeply un-innocent enthusiasm.”

I tightened my arms around him. Pressed my mouth to his temple. “I respond to everything you do with enthusiasm. That’s been well-documented.”

He propped his chin on my chest and looked at me. His eyes were warm and dark and sleepy — the post-sex version of Evan, the one with no armor and no careful composure and no twelve-year facade of being fine. Just a man. In my arms. In our bed. In our house.

“Happy?” he asked. The same question from the barbecue. The question he kept asking like he couldn’t quite believe the answer hadn’t changed.

I thought about it.

A year ago, I was sitting in a truck outside a house that didn’t have my name on it anymore, calling the one person I couldn’t live without and pretending I didn’t know why.

Two years ago, I was lying next to the wrong person, staring at a ceiling, wondering why I felt like a guest in my own life.

Fifteen years ago, I was twenty-three and watching a dark-haired man with brown eyes laugh at something I said, and feeling something in my chest that I would spend the next decade refusing to name.

“I burned the burgers,” I said.

Evan blinked. “What?”

“Today. At the barbecue. I burned the burgers because I was watching you walk across the yard in shorts, and I want you to know that a year ago I was a man who could grill a burger without incident. I had a functional relationship with a Weber. I was competent and reliable and emotionally unavailable and my burgers were adequate.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m a man who burns burgers because the sight of your thighs makes me forget how fire works. And I’m happier than I have ever been in my life.” I pulled him up for a kiss. Tasted the salt of his skin and the warmth of his mouth and the specific flavor of a future I’d spent thirty-eight years not knowing I was allowed to want. “I’m so happy it scares me.”

“Good.” He settled back onto my chest. Drew a lazy circle on my shoulder with his fingertip. “Stay scared. It means you know what you have.”

“I know what I have.”

“What do you have?”

“Three hearts. Like the octopus.”

He went very still. Then his body shook — not with laughter but with the silent, full-body convulsion that preceded laughter, the way Evan laughed when something hit him somewhere deeper than funny.

“You absolute idiot,” he said, and he was crying a little. Not sad crying. The other kind. “You remembered the octopus.”

“From the documentary. The night I called you. Three hearts — you said you found it aspirational.”

“I was deflecting because you sounded like you were dying and I didn’t know what to say.”

“I know. But you weren’t wrong.” I held him. Felt his heartbeat against mine — two hearts, not three, but that was enough. That was more than enough. “One for Lily. One for the life I’m building. And one for you. I’ve got three hearts, Ev. And the biggest one has always been yours.”

He pressed his face into my neck. His shoulders shook. I held him in our bed in our house while the September night cooled around us and the dishes dried in the rack and the yard where we’d burned burgers and kissed in front of our friends went dark and quiet.

We showered together. Slowly. More touching than washing — his hands on my back, mine in his hair, the warm water turning us into something soft and unhurried. I pressed him against the tile and kissed his neck and he made a sound that suggested the night wasn’t over, and it wasn’t, but for now the kissing was enough. The proximity was enough. The fact of him — wet and warm and real and mine — was enough.

Clean sheets. Lamp off. His back against my chest, my arm around his waist, our legs tangled in the way that had taken three months to negotiate and now fit together without thinking.

“One hundred and —” I paused. Lost count again.

“We stopped counting,” Evan murmured. Already half asleep. “Remember?”

“I remember.”

“So stop.”

I stopped. Not the counting — I’d never stop counting, because that was how my brain worked and Evan knew it and loved me for it, not despite it. But I stopped needing the number to mean something. Stopped needing to track the distance between where I’d been and where I was, because the distance didn’t matter anymore. The only thing that mattered was the man in my arms and the life we were building and the fact that I’d finally — finally — stopped running from the only thing that had ever felt like home.

I pressed my lips to the back of his neck.

“Goodnight, Ev.”

“Goodnight.” A pause. Then, barely audible: “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

He fell asleep first. He always did — the deep, easy sleep of a man who had spent twelve years learning how to wait for something and had finally received it.

I lay awake a little longer. Listening to him breathe. Feeling his heartbeat slow under my palm.

Then I slept, too.

And the house was quiet, and the house was ours, and it was enough.

It was everything.

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