🔥 Dead Monday 🔥
An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Paid to the Devil by Rafe Calder
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place six months after the final chapter of Paid to the Devil. 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.
Dorian’s side of a lost bet: one dark Monday, one gray silk tie, a pulpit, and no complete sentences. Explicit content — 18+.
Dead Monday
I have carried one debt in six months, and I carried it for nine days.
It was a wager. In October I told Mateo Reyes that I could count his Saturday room more accurately than Nadia Brooks’s clicker. I count everything. He knew that when he lay down. I said six hundred and twelve. The clicker said six hundred and one, and so did the fire marshal, and Ms. Brooks did not even look up from her tablet.
“The clicker’s never once stopped to watch me shake a cocktail,” Mateo said. “You lost eleven people looking at my forearms. Pay up.”
I had named my stake in advance: a necktie, on him, at the Meridian, for one dinner. He had named his. One dead Monday. His building. His rules, which was to say none of mine.
“And wear the gray tie,” he had said. “You know which one.”
I knew which one.
So at nine o’clock on a Monday in November I walked the length of one pier from our door to his, in a charcoal suit and a tie I had not worn to Saint in my life, and I knocked.
He let me in himself. Black shirt, sleeves turned back, his mother’s watch on his wrist. He shut the new oak doors behind me and turned the key and put it in his pocket. The house lights were down. He had lit the window. St. Nicholas burned red over the altar on a night when no one would see it but me.
“Evening, Vale.”
“Good evening. I assume that I am—”
“Nope.” He held up one finger. “That’s the first rule, and you just broke it at the door. No sentences. Not tonight. You’ve been making me ask for things in complete sentences since April. Tonight you get one word at a time. Pick good ones.”
I opened my mouth. I closed it.
“Second rule. No instructions. No eyes on me, no hands on the desk, no not until I say. You don’t run anything in here. Third rule is the only one of yours I’m keeping.” His face changed, briefly, to the one underneath. “Stop still works. Always. That one’s a whole sentence all by itself. Okay?”
“Yes.”
“God, that’s good already.” He grinned. “And every time you slip and give me a subject and a verb, I take my hands off you for thirty seconds. On the watch. I’m an honest man. I’ll time it.”
He took my jacket off my shoulders and laid it over a stool. Then he stepped in close and drew the gray silk out from under my collar himself, slowly, the whole length of it, so that I felt it run across the back of my neck.
“Come on,” he said. “I’m going to tie the Devil to a pulpit.”
Imani’s booth was the pulpit once. It stands six steps above the floor at the foot of the north aisle, an oak box with a brass rail along the front, and from it one sees the whole nave: the dark floor, the white marble, the window. I had never been up in it. It is not a place for a man who sits on the end stool.
He put me at the rail, facing out. He crossed my wrists on the brass and bound them there with my own tie, three turns and a knot I had taught him on a walnut headboard, and he laid the free end across my knuckles where I could reach it.
“Too tight?”
“No.”
“Pull.”
I pulled. It held. Something went through me, low and hot, that I had not anticipated at all.
“Yeah,” Mateo said softly, watching my face. “I thought so.”
He undressed me from behind. He did it the way he breaks down a bar at four in the morning, quickly and with great tenderness for the equipment. He opened my shirt and pushed it down off my shoulders until it hung from my bound wrists. He put his mouth on the freckles there. He has done that every night for six months, and it has not once failed to make me shut my eyes. Then my belt, my trousers, the rest, and he made me step out of all of it, and I stood naked at a brass rail in an empty church with my hands tied and a red saint looking at me.
He kept every stitch on.
“Recognize it?” He came around to lean on the rail beside my hands, fully dressed, and looked me over at his leisure. Shoulders. Chest. The scar. Lower. I was hard. I had been since the knot. “First night you ever touched me, you put me naked on your desk and never took your jacket off. I am not finished looking. I’ve been waiting to be on this side of that since a Friday in April.”
“I did not know you had—”
“Sentence.” He stepped back. He looked at his watch.
Thirty seconds is not long. I have sat through a three-day closing without discomfort. I stood there with the cold air of the nave on every inch of my skin and his eyes on my cock and not one finger of his anywhere on me, and I counted twenty-two, and at twenty-three I heard myself make a sound.
“There he is,” Mateo said. “Time.”
He went behind the decks. A switch, a hum in the monitors, and then a crackle, and a woman’s voice, old and slow, filling a dark church. The bolero. The one he had taught me on this floor with the house lights up, on the day I was keeping a thing from him. He had chosen it on purpose. He chooses everything on purpose.
“Eight counts,” he said. “You skip the four and the eight. You remember?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Because tonight I’m doing the counting.”
He was behind me then, his chest against my back, his shirt buttons cold on my spine. I heard a cap. He had taped a bottle under the mixer. His hand came around my hip, slick and warm, and closed.
One. Two. Three.
He stopped.
Five. Six. Seven.
He stopped.
I understood it by the second bar, and it did me no good. He stroked me on the beat, root to head, slow as the song, with a turn of his wrist at the top that he has learned I cannot stand, and on the four and on the eight he simply held me. Still. Tight. Waiting. A body will lean into a rhythm whether one permits it or not. Mine leaned, and found nothing, twice in every bar.
“Please,” I said.
“Please what?”
“More.”
“One word. Look at you.” His mouth was on the back of my neck, on the place where I have put my hand on him in front of every dangerous man in Harbor City. “You know what you sound like? You sound like me.”
He took me to the edge on that count. I felt it gather at the base of my spine and I thought, seven, he will let me on seven, and he stopped on the six and took his hand away altogether, and my hips drove forward into the empty air.
“Mateo, you cannot possibly intend—”
“Oh, that’s a big one. That’s got a clause in it.” He was laughing. “Thirty.”
I put my forehead down on my own bound hands and breathed.
He went to his knees in front of me while I was still shaking.
There is very little room in a pulpit. He got between me and the rail, on the boards, under the bridge of my arms, and looked up the length of my body with that mouth an inch from me. In six months I have learned what he can do with it. I had not learned what it is to be unable to put a hand in his hair.
“Eyes front,” he said. “Look at my church. Don’t look at me.”
It was the cruelest instruction I have ever been given, and I had written most of the others.
I looked at the window. He took me into his mouth.
Slowly. He did not use his hands. He set them on the backs of my thighs and held me still and went down on me an inch at a time, wet and hot and patient, until I was against the back of his throat and he swallowed around me and I said his name to a stained-glass bishop. He came off. He licked the slit, lazily, as one tastes a pour. He went down again. I could hear it, over the music, the soft obscene sound of it in that enormous quiet, and I could not see it, and my wrists strained at the silk until the brass rang.
“Please.” I no longer had the other words. “Please. Please.”
He hummed. I very nearly came from that alone.
And he stopped. He rested his cheek against my hip, breathing hard, and I looked down at last because I could not do otherwise. His lips were swollen. His eyes were black. He was as hard as I was, straining at his trousers, and he had not touched himself once.
“Twice,” he said hoarsely. “You did me twice on the desk before you let me. I’m a fair man.”
He got up. He went around behind me. He put his palm flat between my shoulder blades and pressed, and I bent over the rail of the pulpit with my arms stretched out before me, and he kicked my feet apart.
“I’ve thought about this every Monday since the cot,” Mateo said. “You?”
“Yes.”
“How often?”
“Daily.”
His breath went out of him. “One word. One word, and it’s the filthiest thing anybody’s ever said to me. Dios.”
He knelt again. He spread me with his thumbs, and put his tongue to me.
I have been asked to describe a great many things precisely. I cannot do it with this. I know that it was soft and then it was not. I know that he licked me open in long, flat strokes and then worked the point of his tongue into me, and that I pushed back onto his face without shame. I know that the sound I made went up into the vault and came back down, and that it was not a sound I had ever heard out of my own throat. Then fingers, slick, one and then two, crooked exactly, and his other hand reaching between my legs to hold me, only hold, while he found that place inside me and rubbed.
“Mateo. Mateo. Mateo—”
“That’s one word. Say it all night.” Three fingers. I was sweating. I was shaking so that the rail hummed under my hands. “You’re so loud. Do you know that? You’re never loud. You fuck me in a confessional with your hand over my mouth and you don’t make a sound. Nobody’s here, Dorian. It’s dead Monday. Be loud for me.”
He stood. I heard his belt. I heard him slick himself, and his breath catch at his own hand, and then he was against me, bare, blunt, hot, and his palm closed over the back of my neck.
Not hard. He rested it there. The thumb moved once.
“It’s where you put a hand on something you intend to keep safe,” he said in my ear. “Somebody told me that.”
He pushed in.
I shouted. I am told it carried to the doors. He went slowly, all the way, until his hips were flush against me and I was full of him and bent over a brass rail with my hands tied, and he stayed there, trembling, with his forehead between my shoulders.
“Okay?”
“Yes.”
“More?”
“Yes.”
He fucked me on the count.
One, two, three, deep and dragging, and on the four he stopped, buried, and I swore at him in the only language I have. Five, six, seven. The eight. I tried to push back. His hand tightened on my neck and held me, gently, exactly where he wanted me, and I discovered that I would have stayed there for a year.
Then the song turned over into its last verse, and he stopped counting.
He took me the way he pours on a Saturday, fast and sure and showing off. His hips snapped. The whole booth shook. The needle jumped. I had my cheek against the cold brass and my mouth open, and every stroke drove a sound out of me that rang off stone. He was talking, as he always does, a filthy, loving stream in two languages against my spine: that I was beautiful like this, that I was taking him so well, that he could feel me shaking, that he was going to come in me and send me home down the pier with it. That I was his.
“Tonight,” he panted. “Just tonight. Say it.”
“Yours.”
He made a noise as though I had struck him. His hand left my neck and came around and closed on me at last, tight and wet, and stroked without stopping, without any count at all.
“Now. Come on. Let me hear it. Now, Dorian—”
I came over his fist and the oak and the first step of the pulpit with a cry I did not recognize. It went on and on. He fucked me through every pulse of it, and then he drove deep and stayed, and I felt him come in me, hot, his teeth in my shoulder and my name broken in two against my skin.
For some time afterward there was only the needle, ticking in the run-out groove.
He reached past me and drew the free end. The knot fell open. My arms came down, and they were not altogether mine.
He caught me. We ended on the pulpit steps, I do not know how, with his back against the oak and mine against his chest. He had a clean bar towel. Of course he had. He cleaned me with it, carefully, and kissed the marks the silk had left on my wrists, one and then the other.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hello.”
“That’s still one word. You can stop. Clock’s off.”
I considered it. I found that I had a sentence, and that it had been waiting for some time.
“I should like to lose to you again.”
He laughed until it shook us both. “Yeah. I bet you would.” He folded the gray silk and put it into his own shirt pocket. “Okay. Bet’s settled. Paid in full. Nothing outstanding.”
“Nothing whatever,” I agreed. “Which means, I believe, that no rule in this building now applies to me.”
He went still against my back.
“You have been hard for an hour,” I said, “and you have not let me lay a hand on you. I find that I object to it.”
I turned. I went down two steps and knelt on the third, on the stone floor of his church, and opened his trousers. He was flushed dark and wet at the tip. He had been leaking into his own clothes while he took me apart. I looked at that for a moment, because I am never finished looking.
“Eyes on me, Mateo.”
“Oh, fuck,” he said, and put both hands in my hair.
I was not slow. He did not need it. I took him to the root and held him there, and worked him with my tongue and my throat as he has taught me, by example, and he lasted perhaps a minute and a half. He came with his head back against the pulpit and his heels drumming on the step, saying my name and please and a great deal of Spanish, and I swallowed all of it and stayed until he pushed weakly at my shoulder.
“Sufficient?” I said.
“You’re such an asshole.” He hauled me up by the hair and kissed me, deeply, tasting himself. “I love you. Sufficient.”
We put the booth to rights. He wiped the oak and the step, twice, and said that if Imani ever learned of it I would be buying her a new mixer and he would be buying her silence. He switched off the window. I found my shirt. He would not return the tie.
We walked home along the pier with his hand in my coat pocket. It was cold, and the harbor was black, and behind us Saint was dark, as it should be on a Monday.
We keep no accounts, he and I. That is the arrangement, and I would not alter a line of it.
But I will confess that before we reached our own door I had begun to work out what I might wager next, and how badly I could arrange to lose.
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