🔥 The Dock, Take Two 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Year We Stopped Pretending by Jace Wilder

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place the August after the epilogue of The Year We Stopped Pretending. 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.

The first full summer at the cabin. The boys are away till Sunday, there’s no moon, and Colin has had ten months to think of a better answer. Explicit content — 18+.

The Dock, Take Two

COLIN

The first rule of the cabin was that nobody set an alarm. The second, as of ten to midnight on a Thursday in August, was that nobody got to finish a chapter.

“Sherman can wait,” Mateo said, and took the book out of his hands.

“He’s outside Atlanta.”

“He’ll be outside Atlanta in the morning. That’s the nice thing about him.” Mateo folded Colin’s reading glasses and set them on the porch rail beside a chipped Phillies mug. “Come get in the lake.”

“It’s midnight.”

“I know what it is.”

“There are snapping turtles in that lake. There’s a pike. Barb Deitz disclosed a pike.”

“There’s one pike, he’s a hundred years old, and he’s scared of you.” Mateo was already down the steps, barefoot in the grass, with a towel over his shoulder and one of the moving blankets rolled under his arm. He walked backward so Colin could see his face. “The boys are at their mothers’ till Sunday. There’s no moon. I’ve been looking at that dock for three days, Ward.”

“You’ve been looking at it since October.”

“I’ve been looking at it for twenty-two years. Get up.”

Colin got up.

Over his head the sign creaked on its two chains. LONG ENOUGH, it said, in letters his son had laid out and Mateo’s son had routed, and every time Colin walked under it he thought the same thing. It had been. It had been exactly long enough, and not one day he’d care to do over.

The path down was pine needles and roots. At the bottom the lake lay flat and black and so full of stars it looked like a second sky somebody had set down on the ground. Half a mile across, one yellow window burned at the place Marisol’s family had rented. Otherwise there was nothing. A bullfrog. The dock, gray in the dark, running out twenty feet over the water to a swim ladder with one new rung in it, pale against the old ones.

“You fixed the ladder.”

“In June. You held the flashlight.”

“I’m noting it for the record. The sign took you eleven summers.”

“And then I fixed that in nine minutes, and look what happened to you.” Mateo shook the blanket out over the end of the dock, the way you’d make a bed. Then he pulled his T-shirt off over his head, pushed his shorts down, and stepped out of them.

Colin had been allowed to look for a year. He kept waiting for it to become ordinary. Starlight on the caps of those shoulders. The swallow on his forearm, the chainring, the short line of numbers that was Nico’s birthday. The lean brown length of him, the dark hair down the middle of his stomach, his cock hanging soft and heavy against a thigh that had no business on a man of thirty-nine. He stood there with his hands on his hips and let himself be read, cover to cover.

“Yours,” Mateo said.

“These are swim trunks. I’m dressed for the activity.”

“Those trunks got their driver’s license this spring. Take them off.”

Colin took them off. He stood on a dock in the open air without a stitch on, and he noticed, a second late, what he hadn’t done. He hadn’t pulled his stomach in. He had not checked the tree line. A year ago he could not have been naked in front of his own mirror without filing an apology.

Mateo noticed too. He always did. His eyes went down, slowly, and stopped at the soft place above Colin’s hip, and something in his face went hungry and fond at once.

“Lie down,” he said. “On your back. You know your mark.”

Then he ran three steps and dove, flat and clean, and the lake closed over him with hardly a sound.

Colin lay down.

The blanket was rough under his shoulders. The boards beneath it still held the day’s heat. He lay with his arms at his sides and his heart going and looked straight up at more stars than he’d been taught the names of, and he listened. Water lapped at the pilings. Somewhere out in the dark a man was swimming under the surface, in no hurry at all.

He was thirty-nine years old and already half hard from waiting.

Two hands slapped the edge of the dock beside his head.

Mateo hauled himself up out of the black water onto his elbows and hung there over him, streaming. Curls flattened. Beard dripping. Shoulders shaking with a laugh that died while Colin watched. Six inches. Lake water ran off the end of his nose and landed, cold, on Colin’s open mouth.

“Ward,” he said. Like a question.

Last October he’d answered that properly, in a jacket, with a realtor’s sign still out by the road. He’d had ten months since then to think about what else a grown man might say.

“Get up here,” Colin said, “and fuck me on this dock.”

Mateo’s elbows nearly went out from under him.

“That’s—okay. That’s not what you said in October.”

“In October it was forty degrees. I’ve revised.”

“He’s revised.” It came out hoarse. Mateo got a knee on the boards and heaved the rest of himself up, and then he was down on Colin, all of him, cold and slick and shivering against every warm inch. Colin gasped into his mouth. He tasted like the lake, green and mineral, and under that like himself. Colin got both hands into those wet curls and held on and kissed him until the cold was gone and what was between them was heat, and Mateo’s cock was filling fast against his hip.

“Tell me what you want,” Mateo said against his jaw. “Full sentences. You know the policy.”

“I want your mouth. Then I want your fingers. Then I want you inside me, with nothing on, until I can’t remember what state we’re in.”

“Pennsylvania.”

“Not for long.”

Mateo laughed, low, and went to work.

He took the long way. He always did. Teeth at Colin’s throat, a tongue in the notch of his collarbone, the flat of it dragged across one nipple and then the other until Colin’s back came up off the blanket. Wet hair trailed cold down his chest behind a hot mouth. At his waist Mateo stopped, filled both hands with the soft flesh there, and bit.

“Mine,” he said into it. “Since 2019.”

“You’ve mentioned.”

“I’m going to keep mentioning.” He kissed the bite. He nosed down the line of hair below Colin’s navel, and breathed, and Colin’s cock jumped against his cheek and left a wet stripe there. “Look at that. I haven’t touched it. You’re dripping on my face, Ward.”

“I’ve been lying here thinking about you for five minutes.”

“Five whole minutes.” He licked the bead off the tip, slowly, looking up. “What a good, patient man.”

It went through Colin like current. A year, and that still worked on him every time, as reliably as a key in a lock. Mateo knew it. He smiled, and opened his mouth, and swallowed him down.

Colin’s shout went out across the water and came back.

“Sound carries on a lake,” Mateo said, pulling off, lips shining.

“There’s a light on over there.”

“I see it.”

“I can’t be quiet. I’ve tried. You know I’ve tried.”

“Who’s asking you to?” He took him deep again, to the root, throat working, one hand cradling Colin’s balls and the other spread on his stomach to hold him flat. He sucked him slow and wet and filthy, with every trick he owned, until Colin’s heels were scraping at the blanket and the stars had started to blur. Then he let him go. He pushed both of Colin’s knees up and back, toward his chest, and looked.

“Mateo. You don’t have to—”

“Is that a no?”

Colin knew that exchange. He’d had the other half of it, on a sunlit Friday in a rented bed.

“It’s not a no.”

“Good,” Mateo said, and put his tongue on him.

Nobody ever had. He’d done it to Mateo and watched it take the man apart, and he had thought he understood. He hadn’t understood anything. It was soft, and hot, and shockingly intimate, a beard rasping the insides of his thighs and a tongue working him open in slow firm circles, and he lay on his back under the whole Milky Way with his knees in his own hands and came apart at the seams. He heard himself. He was saying oh and God and please, in no order, at a volume that had to be rattling windows in the next township.

“That’s it,” Mateo murmured against him. “Let me hear it. You taste so good. You open up so pretty for me.”

A slick finger slid in beside his tongue. Colin hadn’t seen where the bottle came from.

“You rolled lube up in a moving blanket.”

“I’m a hopeful man.”

“It’s a character flaw.”

“It’s gotten me everything I ever wanted. Breathe out.” A second finger, turning, stretching, and then a slow curl and press that put a white flash behind Colin’s eyes. “There he is.”

“Fuck—”

“I know. Right there the whole time.” He did it again, and again, patient as a man truing a wheel, until Colin was rocking down onto his hand and leaking steadily onto his own stomach and had run out of every word but one.

“Now,” Colin said. “Mateo. I would like you inside me now. I’m not adding please and thank you. I’ve waited long enough.”

“There’s my teacher.”

Mateo came up over him. He slicked himself, bare, and Colin watched him do it, that thick dark length shining in the starlight with the skin drawn back. Then the blunt heat of him was right there, pressing, and he pushed in.

No condom. Nothing. Just the long, slow, burning slide of him, skin on skin, an inch and then another, and Mateo’s face above him going slack with it.

“God. Colin. Every time. You take me so well.”

“More.”

“I’m giving you—”

“All of it. I’m not going to break. I told you that a year ago.”

Mateo gave him all of it. His hips met the backs of Colin’s thighs, and they both stopped, breathing hard, joined as deep as two people got. Colin locked his ankles behind that narrow back. He put his hand on the nape of a wet neck.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.” Mateo’s eyes had drifted shut.

“You’re not checking.”

“I don’t need to check.” A slow roll of his hips that dragged over the place inside him and lit it up. “I know where you are.”

Then he fucked him.

It started slow and did not stay there. He braced on his fists and drove in long and deep, and the old dock took up the rhythm, knocking on its pilings, pushing rings out across the black water that set the stars rocking. Colin took it with his eyes open. He wanted every bit of it on the record: the cords in Mateo’s arms, the water still running out of his hair, the swallow flexing by his own head, and over one brown shoulder the entire turning sky. He was loud. He was magnificently loud. Every thrust punched a sound out of him, and every sound went rolling off across the lake toward that one yellow window, and he found he didn’t care if it kept going clear to Harrisburg.

“Listen to you.” Mateo was grinning, panting, wrecked. “Whole lake knows. Whole lake knows whose you are.”

“Yours.”

“Say it again.”

“Yours. Harder.”

“Turn over.”

He pulled out. Colin made a noise of pure protest and was turned, big hands on his hips, onto his knees and forearms at the very end of the dock, facing the open water. A palm stroked down his spine, over the two dents at the bottom of it. Then Mateo pushed back in from behind, to the hilt, in one long stroke, and the angle was new, and Colin’s forehead dropped onto his own wrists.

“Oh, that’s—oh—”

“Yeah?” A chest came down hot along his back. Teeth closed, gently, on the old scar on his left shoulder. “That’s what you get for wrecking my Trek.”

Colin laughed, and it turned to a groan halfway out, because Mateo had reached around and wrapped a slick fist around his cock.

After that it was all one thing. The slap of skin. The dock knocking. A beard at his ear and that rough, sweet, filthy voice pouring into it without a break. So good. So tight around me. Look at you, on your knees on our dock, taking every inch. A whole marriage I spent not letting myself picture this. I didn’t have the imagination. Nobody does. The fist worked him in time, and each thrust landed dead on the place that made his vision go.

“I’m close,” Colin got out. “Mateo, I’m—”

“I know. I’ve got you. Go on. Let them hear you in Maryland.”

He came with a shout that cracked down the middle, in long hot pulses over Mateo’s knuckles and the blanket and the gray boards, shaking so hard his arms gave way. Mateo held him up by the hips and drove in twice more, three times, and went rigid.

“Cariño—”

He felt it. That was the part he would never get used to. Heat, deep inside him, pulse after pulse, and a forehead pressed between his shoulder blades, and a grown man shuddering against his back like something finally set down.

They went over sideways onto the blanket in a heap.

For a while there was only breathing. The rings on the water spread out and flattened. The stars held still again.

Across the lake, the yellow window went dark.

“Well,” Mateo said, into the back of his neck. “They’ve either gone to bed or called a ranger.”

“I think I woke up a county. I’m—”

“Don’t.”

“I wasn’t going to say it.”

“You had the face. We retired that word at Christmas. There was a ceremony. Your mother made a pie.”

“I was going to say I’m happy.”

Mateo didn’t answer right away. His arm tightened across Colin’s chest until it was hard to breathe, which was fine. Breathing had been overrated for years.

“Yeah,” he said finally, thick. “Me too. It’s ridiculous.”

Out in the dark a loon called, long and wavering, and got no answer.

Colin sat up. Everything from the waist down registered an objection, and he overruled it. He got to his feet on legs that weren’t entirely his yet, with lake water drying on his chest and the rest of the evening running warm down the inside of his thigh, and he held out a hand.

“There’s one more part.”

“What part?”

“The part where I go off the end.”

He saw it cross Mateo’s face. It was only a flicker, an old one, a man left on his elbows listening to a splash. Colin had put that there. He would be taking it back out, a little at a time, for the rest of his life.

“Not by myself,” he said. “That was the whole mistake.”

Mateo looked at the hand. Then he took it, scarred knuckles and grease that never came out, and let himself be pulled up. They stood at the top of twenty feet of gray boards, naked as the day they were made, a history teacher and a bike mechanic with seventy-eight years between them.

“On three?” Mateo said.

“You run everything else. You count.”

“One.”

They ran on one. Of course they did. Three long strides and the end of the dock, and Colin tucked his knees and went up into the dark holding on, and the lake came up black and cold and enormous and closed over both of them at once.

He stayed under for exactly as long as it took to find out that the hand was still there.

They came up together, blowing. Mateo threw his head back and howled at the stars, a whole-throated, bent-double laugh Colin had first heard in a school cafeteria a lifetime ago, and then he swam in close, treading water, and put his cold nose against Colin’s.

“Ward?”

“Yes,” Colin said. “Still yes. Ask me every summer.”

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