🔥 Quarry Road 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Still Here, Still Yours by Jace Wilder

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place in August, between Chapter Eighteen and the Epilogue of Still Here, Still Yours. 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.

Jesse’s side of a night back at the quarry: a borough key, a forty-eight-quart cooler, four moving blankets, and the inch Nolan never closed in 2003. Explicit content — 18+.

Quarry Road

It was his idea. I’d like that understood up front, because I would have bet the truck against it.

It turned up in the green book first. Third week of August, a Maren weekend, in pencil, in those square capitals: SAT — QUARRY RD? With the question mark. He’s learned to leave those in.

I found it on a Wednesday. He leaves that book open on my counter now, like a man who wants to get caught.

“No,” I said.

“You haven’t heard it.”

“I don’t need to. I told you on a staircase. I’m not a rerun. There’s nothing up there to pick up.”

“I know there isn’t.” He was drying the cast iron. “I don’t want to go back and fix it. It can’t be fixed. I was eighteen, and I ran, and that kid can stay up there. I’ve made my peace with him.” He hung the pan on its hook. “But I’ve got exactly one picture of that road in my head. It’s the worst night of my life, and it’s got the wrong man in it. I’ve never seen the place with you there. Not you. The one who owns the building. I’d like a different picture.”

I didn’t say anything.

“That’s all it is. It’s a maybe. You can rub it out.”

I looked at the question mark for a while. Then I took the pencil out of his shirt pocket and wrote underneath: BRING A BLANKET. I’M 43.

So. Saturday.

The mediator had signed off on another year on the twelfth, and Maren had Sadie in Pittsburgh until Sunday at five. We took my truck. The stone rode on the dash.

Quarry Road’s been gated since 2011, when some kid put a Civic in the water. I pulled up to the chain with my headlights on it and reached for the gearshift to turn around.

Nolan got out. He had a key.

“You’ve got a key.”

“It’s a borough gate.”

“And you’re what? Inspecting?”

“There’s a culvert under the haul road. It’s on my list.”

“Is it.”

“It is now,” he said, and swung the gate.

It was close to eleven when we got to the top. The water lay down in the cut, flat and black, with half a moon in it. Sumac had come in thick where the turnout used to be. I backed in as near as I could figure to the old spot, killed the engine, and the crickets came up like somebody had thrown a switch. Same as ever. Going like a factory.

I dropped the tailgate. It stays down by itself. This isn’t the Ranger.

He set a cooler on it.

“For the record,” he said, “forty-eight quarts.”

“Are you giving me the capacity?”

“I thought you’d want it.”

I laughed so hard I had to sit down. He sat next to me. He handed me a seltzer, cold, and opened his own, and we looked at the water.

For a while it was only that. Two men on a tailgate with their feet hanging. He found a flat rock in the gravel and skipped it, and it went twice before it sank.

“Two,” I said.

“That’s a personal best.”

“I know. I’m proud of you.”

Then it got quiet. I’d been waiting for that, and it still caught me. The same quiet. The exact one. I looked down and found two fingers of my right hand going against my thigh like a telegraph key.

He saw. He put his can down.

“I made a list,” Nolan said. “Things to say up here. I left it at home, on the counter. On purpose.”

He turned his head.

I’d already turned mine.

“I’m going to lean first,” he said. “I’d like you to watch me do it.”

His hand came down on my knee and gripped. Same knee. His other hand came up and settled along my jaw, and it was warm, and it was dead steady. He tipped his forehead against mine and stopped there, breathing, with an inch between his mouth and my mouth.

“This is as far as I got,” he said.

“I remember.”

“I was shaking so hard I thought you’d hear it.”

“I heard it.”

“I’m not shaking now.”

He wasn’t. I was. Forty-three years old, in my own truck, with a man whose toothbrush lives in my bathroom, and my whole chest was going like I’d run up the hill.

He closed the inch.

Soft, at first. Careful as a signature. Then his thumb moved along my cheekbone and his mouth opened, and I made a sound I’ve never made for anybody else, and he kissed me like a man with nowhere he’d rather be and all night to prove it.

When he pulled back, his eyes were wet, and he was smiling.

“Don’t pretend this didn’t happen,” he said.

I had to look at the water for a second.

“You son of a bitch,” I said. “That was mine.”

“I know whose it was. I’ve owed it back for twenty-three years.”

I got a fist in his shirt and hauled him in, and that one wasn’t soft.

It went the way it goes with us. Fast, once it starts. His hands were under my shirt and mine were at his belt, and he was kissing down my throat with his teeth in it, and I was already hard enough to hurt, and then he stopped. Pulled back. Looked at me with that level, serious face.

“I’d like to say what I want.”

Christ. Four months in, and that’ll still do it. I felt it in my balls.

“Say it.”

“I want my mouth on you. Here. On this tailgate, at this spot, with you looking at me.” His voice had dropped. “I had no words for it when I was eighteen. I didn’t even have the picture. I knew I couldn’t stop looking at your mouth, and I thought that meant something was wrong with me. I’ve got the words now. I want to suck your cock on Quarry Road, Jesse. I’m asking.”

“Yes,” I said. It came out as mostly air. “God. Yes.”

He got down off the tailgate. He took a moving blanket out of the bed—I’d told him to bring a blanket; I’d also brought four of my own—folded it in thirds, set it on the gravel, and knelt on it.

“I’m forty-one,” he said, to my look.

“I didn’t say a thing.”

“You were going to.”

He opened my jeans. I lifted my hips, and he dragged everything down to my thighs, and there I was with my bare ass on a cold tailgate and my cock standing up hard in the moonlight, and Nolan Pierce on his knees between my boots looking at it like something he’d been promised.

“Hands,” he said.

I put them in his hair.

He took me in slow. Lips over his teeth, foreskin sliding back, his tongue flat and hot along the underside, all the way down until his nose was in the hair at the root and I could feel his throat work. Then he looked up.

That was what finished the old picture. Right there. Not the kiss. Him looking up at me past my own stomach with his mouth full and half a moon on his face, steady as anything, not hiding from one inch of it.

“Look at you,” I said. My voice cracked. “Look at you. You know how long I wanted to see that? You know how many times I made it up?”

He hummed. I felt it to my knees.

He worked me the way he does now, unhurried, sure of himself. A long pull. That trick with his tongue under the head. His fist on what he didn’t swallow, his other hand flat on my stomach, holding me down. I talked. I can’t not. I told him he was good, he was so good, the best I’d ever had, and it’s true, and he knows it’s true, and he still flushed to the ears and took me deeper for it.

The crickets. The water. My heels knocking the bumper.

“Stop,” I said. “Stop, or I’m done. Get up here. I want you in me.”

He pulled off, wet-mouthed, breathing hard.

“In the truck?”

“In the truck. On your back. I want to be looking at you.”

I spread blankets in the bed while he got his clothes off. He lay down on them, long and pale in the dark, cock hard against his stomach, hands open at his sides. I got out of the rest of mine and knelt over him.

“Shirt pocket,” he said. “Next to the pencil.”

Of course it was.

I slicked my fingers and reached back and opened myself up while he watched. I’ve done that for him since the first morning. He put his hands on my thighs and kept them there, and his breath went shallow, and when I slicked his cock he said my name like a man being handed something.

I sank down on him.

Bare. Slow. The stretch and the heat and the long, thick slide of him, all the way, until I was seated on his hips with my palms on his chest and that patch of gray over his heart under my hand.

“Oh,” Nolan said, looking up.

“What?”

“You’ve got the entire sky behind your head.”

I had to shut my eyes.

I rode him. Slowly at first, a long roll, feeling every inch drag. Then not slowly. The truck took it up, rocking on its springs, and the blankets bunched, and his hands slid to my hips and started pulling me down onto every stroke. He planted his heels and drove up to meet me. He hit it. I shouted, and it went out over the water and came back.

“There,” he said. “Right there. Stay on it. God, you’re beautiful like this. You’ve got no idea. Taking what you want, on my cock, under all that—I ran from this. I must have been out of my mind.”

“You were eighteen.”

“I was an idiot.”

“That too—fuck—”

“How’s the hamstring?”

“Ask me that again and I’m getting off.”

He laughed, too loud, the big one, straight up at the stars, and I felt it inside me, and I was laughing and riding him and about half a minute from coming, all at once.

He wrapped his hand around me. Tight. He knows I won’t break.

“I’ve got you,” he said. “Go on. Let me see it. Let me see it right here.”

I came across his chest in the moonlight with my head back and his name in my throat, clamping down on him, shaking, and he sat up under me—just curled up off the blankets and got both arms around my back and his face against my neck—and came inside me like that, holding on.

We stayed put. My knees were going to have opinions. I didn’t care.

Eventually he lay back and took me with him, and I stretched out on top of him in the bed of my own truck, sticky, wrecked, with a moving blanket for a pillow and every star in the county overhead.

“So that’s what was supposed to happen,” he said.

“No.” I shook my head against his shoulder. “Nothing was supposed to happen. We were kids. That’s just what happened tonight.”

He thought it over. I felt him check it.

“Different picture,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“It’s a good one.”

“It’s a real good one.”

The crickets went on. After a while I lifted my head.

“It’s really late,” I said. “Your mom’s going to—”

“My mother is asleep in front of the Weather Channel,” said Nolan, with great dignity, “and if she weren’t, she’d tell you to keep me out.”

“She would.”

“She likes you better than me. She’s said so.”

I kissed him. Then we found our clothes, which took a while, and he shook out the blankets and folded them square, because he can’t help it, and packed the cooler.

He stood at the back of the truck for a second, looking at the water. Then at me.

“I’m not calling when I get there,” he said.

“No?”

“I’m riding with you. I’ll be there when you are.”

He lifted the tailgate and shut it.

Then he came around and got in on the passenger side, and I drove us home.

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