🔥 Nobody’s Home 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from A Safe Place to Land by Milo Hart

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place ten months after Chapter Twenty of A Safe Place to Land, before the epilogue. It contains major spoilers and very explicit sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.

Closing day. Eleven empty rooms, one mattress, one work light. Gabe has owed Henry something for eleven months, and an empty house echoes. Explicit content — 18+.

Nobody’s Home

GABE

The closing took forty minutes and one pen.

Gabe sat in a conference room at Lehigh Abstract & Title with a paper cup of bad coffee and watched a banker put his name on things. Sign here. Initial here. Here, and here, and the date. Henry did it the way he did anything with paper, steadily and without flourish, and around the tenth page Gabe noticed that his lips were moving.

“Are you counting?”

“Nineteen.” He didn’t look up. “The last time I sat in this building I signed twenty-three times to give a house away. I want to know what the number is going the other direction.”

It was thirty-one. On the thirty-first, the attorney slid two keys across the table on a paper tag. Henry capped the pen, a cheap blue one with the firm’s name stamped in gold down the barrel, and put it in his inside pocket.

“That’s theirs,” Gabe said.

“I left the last one on a table in a hotel lobby. I’ve regretted it for a year.”

A year. It was a year to the week, and Gabe had not arranged that. He drew buildings for a living; he distrusted any symmetry he hadn’t ruled himself. But the seller’s attorney had picked the date, and it had been raining since noon, and when they turned onto Alder Street at dusk every window in the house was lit.

All of them. Bare bulbs in bare rooms, upstairs and down, burning through the rain.

“You came over at lunch,” Gabe said.

“So you’d know which one.”

He knew that trick. He had invented it, on a wet Friday in October, for a man in a hotel lobby who had no right to it. Nobody had ever done it back.

The front porch was held up by habit and four lengths of two-by-four, so they went in through the mudroom, with a queen mattress between them and a clamp light swinging from Gabe’s wrist by its cord. The furniture was coming Monday. Lily was at her mother’s until Sunday, having walked through on Wednesday with a tape measure and written DIBS in pencil on the door of the north bedroom. Tonight there was a 1919 craftsman with good bones and bad wiring, eleven rooms with nothing in them, and the two of them.

“Upstairs,” Gabe said, at the foot of the stairs.

“No.”

Henry had the front end. He backed through the wide doorway into the front room, the one with the north light, the one Gabe had already claimed in his head for a drawing table, and he walked that mattress straight across the bare oak and dropped it under the window.

It was a big window. Six feet of old glass with the rain running down it, looking out at a porch roof and a wall of yews nobody had cut since the Carter administration.

“There’s a bedroom,” Gabe said. “It has a door.”

“It hasn’t got a window over the bed. You haven’t cut it yet. I’ve seen the drawing; it’s in the tube in your truck.” Henry straightened. He was still in the gray jacket he’d worn to the closing, with rain on the shoulders. “This one has. You promised me that in writing when you were twenty-one. I’ve read it about eleven times a year since. I’m not spending the first night in this house anywhere else.”

Gabe stood there with a work light in his hand and found that he could not, for a moment, do anything about his face.

So he did something about the light. He clamped it to the window casing and aimed it at the ceiling, and went through eleven rooms switching off bare bulbs until the house was dark except for that one warm cone of it, and the window had turned into a mirror with the two of them standing in it.

“There are no curtains,” he said.

“There’s a hedge.”

“Henry.”

“Nobody’s out there. And if somebody is, he’s standing in a yew bush in the rain, and he’s earned it.” His eyes hadn’t left Gabe’s in the glass. “Ask me for something.”

Rule five. It was in the wallet in that gray jacket, in a banker’s cursive, on the back of a strip of yellow trace.

Gabe had got better at it. Not good. Better.

“I want you out of that suit,” he said. “I want you on that mattress on your knees, facing the window. And there’s a thing you did to me once, over a drafting table, in the middle of a workday, that I have owed you for eleven months.”

Henry went still. Then the flush came up out of his collar, exactly the way it had at twenty.

“You haven’t ever—”

“Not to you. No. I’ve been saving it for a room with an echo.”

“Did you look it up?”

“I was doing it before you could spell it. Take your clothes off.”

Henry took his clothes off. He did it the way he did it now, facing the light, in no hurry and hiding nothing: the jacket folded over the radiator, the shirt, the rest. Gray in the hair on his chest. The white scar over the right shoulder. Heavy thighs, and his cock already thickening against one of them from nothing but being told. He knelt on the mattress and put his hands down, and he looked up into the black window at himself, and at Gabe behind him still fully dressed, and his breath left him.

“I can see everything.”

“Good. Keep watching.”

Gabe knelt. He put both hands on that broad back first and ran them down it, slowly, the whole length of the spine. He knew every inch of it now. He had a year of it. It still did not seem like a thing a person got to keep.

He spread him open with his thumbs, and put his mouth there.

The sound Henry made went through the house like something thrown.

That was the discovery of the evening. A house with nothing in it is a drum. No rugs, no books, no curtains; nothing to drink the noise. Henry groaned with his head hanging down between his shoulders, and it went out through the wide doorway and up the stairwell and came back off plaster from three directions, a full second late.

“Oh, God. Oh my God. Gabe—”

Gabe licked him again. Slow and flat, from behind his balls to the base of his spine. Then pointed, circling, pressing in, with all the patience of a man who had been thinking about it since closing was scheduled. Henry tasted of clean skin and rain. He was hot, and tight, and he shook.

“That’s— I didn’t know it would— fuck. I had no idea. I did this to you with a set of instructions, I had no idea—”

“You were very thorough.”

“Don’t talk. Don’t stop to talk, put your mouth back, please—”

He put his mouth back. He worked his tongue into him, soft and relentless, and felt that ring of muscle flutter and give, and Henry’s arms went out from under him. He went down onto his forearms with his ass in the air and his cheek on the mattress, and he was still looking at the window. Gabe could see him in it. A big man folded down on a bare mattress with his mouth open and his eyes wide, watching it be done to him.

“Look at you,” Gabe said against him. “A year ago you bit a hole in your own arm sooner than let me hear this.”

“A year ago I was an idiot. Deeper. I’m asking. Your tongue, as far as— yes. There. Like that, like that, don’t you dare stop.”

He was loud. He was magnificently loud, and the house gave every bit of it back. Gabe reached between those shaking thighs and found his cock, hard as a railing and slick at the tip, and gave it one long pull, and the shout that got him rang in the stairwell like a dropped pan.

“No. Not yet, I’ll come, and I want— Gabe. I want you in me. Here. Like this, where I can see.”

Gabe sat back on his heels. His own hands were not steady on his belt. He had come over here in work clothes with a bottle in his coat pocket, and it was not the wine. He got his jeans open and no further, slicked two fingers, and pushed them into that wet, loosened heat, and Henry took them to the knuckle and swore at the glass.

“You’re ready.”

“I’ve been ready since page twelve. I signed nineteen more times thinking about it.”

“On a mortgage.”

“Our mortgage. Get in me.”

He got in him.

Slowly. That hadn’t changed; he would always go in slowly, for the pleasure of watching it cross that face. He watched it in the window. Henry’s eyes going huge. His mouth falling open. The long, shuddering breath as Gabe sank, inch by inch, into a grip that still punched the air out of him, until his hips were flush and there was nowhere left to go.

“Where are you?”

“Here.” It came out wrecked, and immediate. “I’m here. I’m in our house. I’m on a mattress with your cock in me and I’m looking right at it. Move.”

Gabe moved.

He had him by the hips, and he fucked him deep and steady, with the slap of it going out into eleven empty rooms. Henry shoved back onto every stroke. He talked. God, he talked; it had not worn off, not one word of it, and it was nothing like a script.

“That’s it. That’s— harder, I’m not made of glass. I can see your face. You get this look. Like you’re furious with me. I love that look, I love it, I think about it in staff meetings— there. Right there. Every time.”

“Every time,” Gabe said, through his teeth, and gave it to him every time.

The mattress walked an inch across the oak. The clamp light shivered on the casing, and their two shadows went up the wall and across the ceiling, enormous. It wasn’t enough. He could see Henry’s face in the glass, and it wasn’t enough; he wanted the rest.

He got an arm across that chest and hauled him upright.

Back to chest, both of them on their knees. Henry’s head fell back onto his shoulder. And there they were in the window, the whole of it, lit from below: a lean man still mostly dressed, with ink on his forearm and his glasses knocked crooked, and in his arms a big, naked, flushed one, impaled and shaking, with his cock standing up thick against his belly.

“Look,” Gabe said in his ear.

“I’m looking.”

“That’s what I see. That’s what I’ve been looking at for a year. You told me once you weren’t what you used to be.” He rolled his hips, deep, and felt the groan come up through that broad back into his own ribs. “You’re better. Watch what you look like when you come.”

He closed his fist around him.

He did not have to do much. Half a dozen strokes, slick, in time. Henry’s hand came up, the right one, and for the length of a breath Gabe watched it in the glass.

It went back over his shoulder and into Gabe’s hair, and held on.

“Gabe— I’m— look at us—”

He came watching. Eyes wide open on his own reflection, shouting, in long stripes that reached the windowsill, and the house took that shout and passed it from room to room like news. He clenched so hard that Gabe followed him over with his teeth in the muscle of that shoulder and a noise of his own that he did not recognize until it came back down the stairs to him.

They went over sideways. The mattress slid another inch.

For a while there was only the rain, and two men breathing.

“It echoes,” Henry said, to the ceiling.

“I noticed.”

“I think I’m going to miss it. When the furniture comes.”

“We could leave a room empty.”

“For shouting in.”

“I’ve designed stranger things.”

Henry laughed, and that came back too.

They ate cold lo mein out of the carton, sitting on the mattress, with the work light on and the bottle of actual wine passed between them, because the glasses were in a box in Gabe’s truck and neither of them would go and get it. Henry wore his shirt, open, and nothing else. He had the tube of drawings out by then. He’d gone to the truck for that.

The east wall of the upstairs bedroom, one inch to the foot. Plaster, lath, and a new opening ruled in red: four feet wide, the sill at thirty inches.

“Low,” Henry said.

“So you can see out of it lying down.”

“What will I see?”

“Morning, mostly. It faces east. It’ll wake you up.”

“Us.”

“Us,” Gabe said. It still caught in him like a sleeve on a nail.

Henry rolled the sheet up with great care and slid it back into the tube. Then he put the tube down, took the carton out of Gabe’s hand, set it on the floor, and looked at him with an expression Gabe had learned to recognize from across a kitchen.

“My turn to ask.”

“Go on.”

“You’re still dressed. That’s the first thing. I want that fixed.” His voice had dropped. “And I want to know what the stairs sound like.”

“The stairs.”

“It’s a stairwell with nothing in it. You heard what it did from in here.” He was already getting up, and pulling Gabe up after him by the front of his sweater. “I want you on them. I want your hands on a tread and my cock in you, and I want to hear what this house does with you when you’re not being polite about it. I’ve been listening to you through walls since the night I met you again. I’d like to hear you through a whole building.”

There was a time, Gabe thought, when this man had not been able to say I want. There had been a hallway. A wool coat.

“Yes,” he said. “To every word.”

He was stripped at the foot of his own stairs by a pair of big, warm, unhurried hands. The sweater, the undershirt, the jeans he’d never properly got out of. Henry kissed the front door of the row house in passing; he always did. Then he turned Gabe around, and put a palm between his shoulder blades.

Oak treads, bare and cold. Gabe went down with his hands on the fifth and one knee on the third.

It creaked.

Both of them stopped.

It was a long, dry, complaining creak, loud as a door in that empty well. Gabe put his weight on the knee again, to be sure. It did it again.

“The third one,” Henry said. He sounded as if somebody had handed him a present.

“That’s a nail working loose in the stringer. I can have that fixed in—”

“Don’t you touch it.”

“I wasn’t going to. I was going to say I could.”

“Leave it exactly as it is.” And then two slick fingers were pressing into him, sure and deep and long past needing directions, and Gabe forgot about carpentry.

Henry opened him the way he did everything he had studied. Thoroughly. With a twist of the wrist he had found on his own, months ago, that made Gabe’s forehead drop onto the edge of a stair. He was hard again; at forty-one he had not expected to be, and this man kept making a liar of him.

“Now. I’m asking.”

“I know you are. I like hearing it.”

“Henry.”

Henry took him by the hips and slid home in one long, heavy stroke, and the sound that came out of Gabe went straight up the stairwell to the roof.

It was a bell. That was what it was: two stories of plaster shaft with a man shouting at the bottom of it. It rang. Henry heard it ring, and made a low, delighted noise, and began to fuck him in earnest.

Hard. He wasn’t careful, and Gabe had not asked him to be. Deep, driving strokes, those big hands holding him exactly where he’d been put, and on every one of them the third stair cried out under his knee like something keeping count.

“Listen to that,” Henry said. He was breathing hard, and his voice had gone all to gravel. “Listen to you. That’s the best thing I’ve ever heard. Do you know how tight you are like this? I can feel you take every inch. Louder. Nobody’s home.”

“I’m being— fuck— I am being loud—”

“You can do better. I’ve heard you through plaster.” A hand slid up his spine and closed on the back of his neck. Not pushing. Holding. “I used to lie in that guest bed with my fist in my mouth, and you’d be in there with your hand on yourself, not caring who heard. I wanted to be the reason. I’m the reason. Let me hear it.”

Gabe let him hear it.

He stopped managing it. He had his fingers hooked over the edge of a tread and his cheek against cold oak, and he gave that stairwell everything he had, hoarse and open and continuous, and it all came back down on the two of them like rain. Henry groaned above him. The stair creaked. The rhythm went ragged.

“Touch me. I’m asking. Now, I’m—”

A hand came around his hip. Hot, slick, sure. Three strokes.

He came across two treads of quarter-sawn oak with a yell that must have stood the yews on end, and Henry drove into him once more, twice, and stayed, and shouted his name up into the dark at the top of the house.

They ended up sitting on the stairs, wrecked, with Henry one step below and leaning back between his knees.

“I’ll have to refinish those,” Gabe said, eventually.

“You were going to anyway.”

“Not for this reason.”

“Put it in the drawings. Stair hall. Patch as required.”

Gabe put his face down into that graying hair and laughed until the whole house was full of it.

They slept under the window, in the end, under two coats and a moving blanket that smelled of the truck. He reached up to switch off the work light.

“Leave one,” Henry said, mostly asleep.

There was only the one. He left it.

He woke in daylight.

East light, coming flat through six feet of old glass, across a porch roof and the tops of the yews. The rain had gone. There was a great deal of banker on his left arm.

He put his palm on the mattress to check.

He still did that. He had stopped being ashamed of it around March. It wasn’t doubt anymore. It was closer to a man touching the frame of his own front door on the way through.

Warm.

“I’m in it,” Henry said. His eyes were open. He had been watching him do it, probably for some time, and he had let him. “It’s light, by the way.”

“I can see that.”

“I love you.”

“That’s—” Gabe had to clear his throat. “I’ve lost count.”

“Four hundred and nine. I’m a banker.” Henry yawned. Unshaven, hair flat on one side, a red mark coming up on his shoulder in the shape of a set of teeth, where somebody else had put it for once. He looked around at the room in the morning: bare oak, bare plaster, a carton, a tube of drawings, two keys on a paper tag on the windowsill. “There’s nothing in here.”

“No.”

“I’ve never lived anywhere with nothing in it. Everywhere I’ve been, somebody had already decided where everything went.”

“And?”

Henry thought about it, with the seriousness he brought to a balance sheet.

“I’d like the bed under that window,” he said. “The real one, when you’ve cut it. I’d like a kitchen I can’t cross in one step. I want an island with room for four stools, and I want you to build it, because you’ll get the overhang right.” He turned his head. “And I want that stair left alone. That’s all I’ve got so far.”

“That’s a fair amount, for a man who used to say okay.”

“I had some catching up to do.”

Gabe looked at the window. At the light coming in through it, right side up, onto a mattress on the floor of an empty house with both their names on it.

“It’s only a room,” he said.

“It’s a roof,” said Henry, and pulled him back down. “It’s ours. Nobody’s home but us.”

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