🔥 First Sunday 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The House We Left Behind by Milo Hart

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place the morning after Owen moves into Vale House, after the final chapter of The House We Left Behind. It contains spoilers and very explicit sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.

Owen’s side of their first Sunday breakfast in the house: scrapple in the black iron pan, Otis under the parlor window, a man in his flannel with nothing on underneath, and Ruth’s kitchen chair facing the garden. Explicit content — 18+.

First Sunday

By nine he’d gone back up and showered and come down again in the same flannel, which told me something, and I was at Ruth’s stove with the black iron pan going and the batter in her yellow bowl, finding out where everything lived.

The spatulas are in the drawer left of the range. The good spatula was in the drawer left of the range. I’d put it there myself, Saturday, at about four in the afternoon, and I’d forgotten, and I opened every drawer in that kitchen before I found it. Adrian sat at the table under the east window and watched me do it. He didn’t say a word. He turned his mug a quarter turn every time I opened the wrong one.

“You’re keeping count,” I said.

“I’m drinking my coffee.”

“Seven.”

“Eight. You opened the one by the cellar door twice.”

I laid the scrapple in. It hit the iron and spat, and the kitchen filled up with it, sage and pepper and pork, and something in my chest let go a notch. I’d made this breakfast every Sunday on Tanner Street since I was twenty-nine. Never once at this stove.

I’d put a record on before I started. That was the other thing I did that morning, first thing after the coffee. I walked into the parlor, and I put Otis on, and I set the needle down under his window, where it goes. It came through the dining room and the hall and found us. These Arms of Mine. I’d not picked it on purpose. That’s what was on top.

“Pancakes or eggs first,” I said.

“Is that a real question?”

“No. Pancakes.”

I poured three on the back burner and stood there with the spatula and waited on the bubbles. That’s all there is to pancakes. You wait on them. Most people can’t.

I heard the chair go back.

I didn’t turn around. I knew the sound of him by then. The way he walks across a floor like he’s measuring it. He came up behind me and put his hands on my hips, light, and set his chin on my shoulder, and looked down at the pan.

“Is that done?”

“No.”

“It looks done.”

“It’s not done. You’ll know when it’s done, because I’ll turn it.”

He made a small sound against my neck. Then his hands came around. Slow. Flat on my belly, over my undershirt, and then under it, his palms on my bare skin, and his thumbs went into the hair below my navel and just rested there.

“Adrian.”

“Mm.”

“I’ve got a hot pan.”

“I can see that.”

His mouth was on the side of my neck now, right under my ear, where the beard stops. One of his hands slid down. Over the waistband of my shorts. He cupped me through the cotton, his whole hand, and pressed, and I was half hard already and I went the rest of the way in about two seconds flat, like a kid.

“You’ve got bubbles,” he said in my ear.

I flipped the pancakes. My hand was not what you’d call steady. One of them folded over on itself and I left it like that.

“That one’s yours,” I said.

“I’ll treasure it.”

He had me through my shorts, stroking now, not in any hurry. Long and slow. The way he does everything once he’s decided on it. The scrapple was spitting. Otis was asking somebody please. And I’m going to tell the truth here, because I’ve been honest about everything else. I stood there at Ruth Vale’s range in my own kitchen, with a dead woman’s spatula in my hand and her grandson’s hand on my dick, and I thought, I’m not going to make it through this breakfast.

“I’d like to ask you something,” he said.

“I’m listening.”

“I’d like you to turn that off.”

“The scrapple’s got two minutes.”

“Turn it off, Owen.” His thumb went over the head of me, through the cotton, where I’d already soaked a spot. “I’m asking.”

I’ve told this before. He says I’m asking and something in the back of me goes over like a breaker. Sixteen years I waited on that man to ask me for one thing. Now he asks for everything. He asks for the window seat and the last biscuit and the left side of the closet and for me to fuck him harder, and every time, every single time, it gets me right in the knees.

I turned the burner off. I moved the iron off the heat. I slid the pancakes onto the plate, all three, the folded one on top, because I was raised right.

Then I turned around.

He was standing very close, in my red-and-black flannel with the cuffs turned twice and nothing on under it. Not one thing. I could see that now. The shirt hung open about three buttons, and down past where it ended he was hard against his belly, flushed, the tip of him wet and shining. His hair was still damp from the shower. His ears were red as a stop sign.

“You came down here like that,” I said.

“I did.”

“You sat at that table and watched me open eight drawers like that.”

“Nine. You’ve lost count.”

I put my hands on him. Both hands on his ass, under the shirttail, and pulled him in against me, and kissed him. He tasted like my coffee. He made a noise into my mouth I’ll hear when I’m ninety, and his hands went up under my undershirt, and he shoved it up my chest and broke off kissing me long enough to drag it over my head and throw it. I heard it land on the stove.

“Not on the burner,” I said.

“It’s off. You turned it off. I asked you to.”

Then he went down.

He went down right there on Ruth’s floor. On his knees on the linoleum in front of her stove, with the morning coming in yellow across the room and the clock over the cellar door ticking an eighth low. He pulled my shorts down to my thighs, and I came out against his face, and he looked up at me. Just for a second. Like he wanted to make sure I was watching.

I was watching.

He took me in his mouth. Slow. All the way down, until his nose was in the hair at the root of me and I could feel his throat work. He held there. I put one hand back on the edge of the range to keep from falling down, and the other one in his wet hair, and I said something that wasn’t any word at all.

He pulled off. Licked the underside, root to tip. Took me back in. He was in no hurry whatsoever. He had decided this was going to take as long as it took, and I knew it, and he knew I knew it, and that was half of what was killing me. He sucked me with his eyes shut and his hands flat on my thighs, his thumbs pressing into the creases where my legs meet my hips, and every time he took me deep he hummed a little. Not on purpose, I don’t think. Just pleased.

“Christ, sweetheart,” I said. “Christ. Look at you.”

He opened his eyes and looked up at me with his mouth full of me, and his ears going, and I nearly went right then.

I got my hand under his jaw. “Stop. Stop. Come up here.”

He came off me with a wet sound and sat back on his heels. His mouth was red. He was breathing like he’d run up the back stairs.

“Was that not satisfactory?”

“You know damn well what it was.” I was holding the counter with both hands now. “I’m not doing it on the floor. Not the first Sunday. I’m asking for something.”

His whole face changed. I don’t know how else to tell it. He’s had all winter to get used to me asking, and it still does that to him. Lights him up from the inside, like a window at night.

“Ask,” he said.

“Get up.”

He got up.

I sat down in the chair. Ruth’s chair, the one by the east window, the one I’d sat in at a quarter to seven with his cold feet on mine. I kicked my shorts the rest of the way off and sat there bare-assed on a dead woman’s kitchen chair in broad daylight with my dick standing straight up, and I’ve never felt less foolish in my life.

“Turn around,” I said. “Sit on me. Facing the window. I want you looking at the garden.”

He stood there a second. He looked at the window. Out past the glass the garden was coming up in its rows, dark and wet, the first green in it. At the bottom of the yard the carriage house sat with his drawing lamp still burning in the window, because he’d forgotten it, because he’d been up here with me.

“Where we can both see the garden,” he said. Very quiet.

“That’s right.”

He put his hand in the flannel pocket. The left one, over his heart. And he came out with a packet of lube between two fingers, and held it up, and the look on his face was so damn pleased with itself I laughed out loud.

“You put that in my shirt.”

“I did.”

“When?”

“Last night. While you were brushing your teeth.” He tore it with his teeth. “I’ve made provision. I intend to make provision in all your shirts. I’ve done a survey. You’ve eleven flannels in that closet and I’ve provisioned four.”

“You’re a menace.”

“I’m an architect. I plan for occupancy.”

He slicked me. Both hands, tight, slow, and I shut my eyes and let my head go back against the window frame. Then he turned around. He put one foot either side of my chair, and his hands on my knees, and lowered himself, and I held him by the hips and guided him down, and he reached back with one hand and set me right where he wanted me.

And sat.

Slow. All the way. One long, slow sink, with a sound coming out of him the whole way down, low and broken in the middle, until his ass was flush on my thighs and I was in him to the root and his back was against my chest.

Neither of us moved.

Otis was done asking. Something else had come on. The clock was going over the cellar door. I had my arms all the way around him, one across his chest under the flannel and one across his belly, and my face in the back of his neck, in that damp hair, and I could feel his heart going under my hand like it wanted out.

“There you are,” I said.

“Here I am.” He was shaking. “It’s very good. I’d like that noted.”

“Noted.”

“I’m going to move now.”

“You go on.”

He rode me. Up on the balls of his feet and down, his hands braced on my knees, slow at first, finding it. Then not slow. I sat back and let him have it. I let him take whatever he wanted. The chair creaked under us. Ruth’s chair, that she’d sat in sixty years. It had held a lot of people. It held us. I’d reglued every joint in it in January, so I knew.

The sun was full on him. On his thighs, spread wide over mine, on his belly, on his cock bobbing hard and wet every time he came down. I could see all of it over his shoulder. Every bit of it, and the garden past it, and the carriage house with the lamp, and the light on the grass. I’d built half of what I was looking at. I didn’t build him. He did that himself. Took him near forty years.

“Lean back,” I said. “Lean back on me. Let me see you.”

He did. He let his whole weight back against my chest, his head on my shoulder, his throat bare, and I got my feet planted on that linoleum and took over. Up into him. Short and deep, holding him down on me by the hips, and he cried out, and his hand came up and grabbed the back of my head, and his other one went flat on the window glass.

“There,” he said. “Oh. There. Don’t— Owen, that’s it, that’s the—”

“I know where it is.”

“You’ve always known where it is. It’s insufferable.”

“You want me to stop?”

“Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare. I’m asking you. Harder.”

I gave it to him. I fucked up into him with the chair jumping on the floor, both of us slick with sweat now in the sun, his handprint going cloudy on Ruth’s window. He was making noise, real noise. I’d never heard him that loud. Not on Tanner Street, with the neighbors on the one side. Not anywhere. He was hollering in his grandmother’s kitchen on a Sunday morning, and there was nobody in that house to hear it but me and the clock.

I got my hand around him. He was so hard he hurt to hold, wet all down the shaft from leaking, and he jerked when I touched him and swore. A real word. Not one of his fifty-dollar ones.

“That’s my sweetheart,” I said in his ear.

“I’m going to— Owen. Owen, I’m—”

“Go on. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

He came. In my fist, all over his own belly and my hand and the shirttails of my red-and-black flannel, shaking from the knees up, my name breaking in the middle in his mouth. And he clamped down on me so hard I saw the garden go white. I held on through it. Three more, four, deep, with my face in his neck. Then I went. Right up in him, as far as I could get, holding him down on me with both arms while it went through me like a train.

We didn’t move for a long while.

The record had run out. I could hear the needle going around and around in the parlor, hush, hush, hush. The clock. A tap upstairs, plink. My heart going, and his, and the both of them slowing down together, a little at a time.

“Owen.”

“Yep.”

“I appear to have ruined your shirt.”

“It’ll wash.”

“I appear to have ruined the window.”

“I’ll do the window.”

“I appear,” he said, and stopped, and I felt him start to laugh. That honk. That terrible honk he used to hate. It went right through his back into my chest. “I appear to have done that in my grandmother’s chair.”

“My chair now.”

“Our chair.”

“Our chair,” I said. “I reglued it. It’s under warranty.”

He laughed so hard I slipped out of him. He swore at that too. He turned around in my lap, sideways, with his legs hanging over the arm of the chair, sticky and wrecked and grinning like a fool, and put his face in my neck.

I held him. Sun on the both of us. The pancakes going cold on the counter.

“They’ll be cold,” he said, after a while.

“They’re cold.”

“You’ll have to make more.”

“I’ll make more.”

“Every Sunday,” he said. Into my neck. Very quiet, like it was a thing he’d been holding on to. “I’d like that. I’d like this every Sunday. Breakfast. You at that stove. I’m asking.”

I looked over his head at the garden. At my father’s clock hanging an eighth low over the cellar door, and the two mugs on the table, black and white, and the folded pancake on top of the stack where I’d left it for him.

“You don’t have to ask for that one,” I said. “That one’s already done.”

He lifted his head. He looked at me a long time.

“I’m asking anyway.”

“Then yes,” I said. “Every Sunday. Every one we’ve got.”

I made more pancakes. He ate the folded one. Cold. He said it was the best thing he’d ever had in his mouth, and I said I had reason to doubt that, and he threw the dish towel at me.

That was the first Sunday.

There’ve been a lot of them since. I’ve burned the scrapple twice. Neither time was my fault.

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