Overnight Rise

Proofing Overnight — Exclusive Bonus Chapter
by Ames Willow

Ben’s POV. The third Saturday in June. The keys to the farmhouse on the inland road are in their pockets, the bed frame is still in pieces in Graham’s truck, and there’s a mattress on the bedroom floor under two uncurtained windows. Ben has been hard since the lawyer’s office. He knows exactly what he wants tonight, and the rule is that he has to say it out loud.

Overnight Rise

BEN

The bed frame was still in pieces in the back of Graham Calder’s truck, and Mateo had decided that was a feature.

“We don’t need a frame,” he said. He was standing in the middle of the empty bedroom in the farmhouse on the inland road with his hands on his hips, looking at the queen mattress we’d dragged up the stairs at four in the afternoon and dropped on the bare pine floor. Fitted sheet, still creased from the package. Two pillows. One quilt his mother had mailed from Providence with a card that said para la casa nueva and nothing else, because she knew he’d cry. “Frames are a construct. People slept on the floor for thousands of years.”

“People also died at thirty.”

“Of what? Not of floor.” He turned around and grinned at me. “Graham’s bringing it Tuesday. Graham says it’s a beautiful frame and it deserves to be assembled with love and not at nine o’clock at night by two men who’ve been carrying boxes since dawn.”

“Graham said that.”

“Graham said, ‘Tuesday,’” Mateo admitted. “In that voice. I extrapolated.”

It was the third Saturday in June. We’d closed on the house at ten that morning in a lawyer’s office in Saranac with a pen that didn’t work and a second pen that did, and by eleven we’d had the keys, and by noon Mara had shown up in her husband’s pickup with Priya, and Mina had shown up with a dolly, and Eli had shown up with sandwiches and opinions, and the whole bakery had moved us out of the cottage on Alder Lane in six hours like a crew turning over a kitchen between services.

Everything we owned was downstairs in boxes. The fern was in the living room in all three of its pots, where it was already plotting. The tins—both of them, Mara’s blue shortbread tins, packed with two years of notes—were on the kitchen counter under the window that faced east, because Mateo wouldn’t let anyone else carry them. Biga had been let out of her carrier at five, had walked the entire perimeter of the downstairs with her tail straight up like a flag of conquest, and had then climbed into the window seat in the living room, turned around three times, and gone to sleep in a patch of the last sun as though she’d paid for it herself.

“She knew,” Mateo had said, standing over her with his hand on his heart. “She knew it was hers. Look at her. A throne.”

Now it was nine-forty at night. The light had finally gone out of the sky. The bedroom had two tall windows with no curtains yet, and through them the orchard ran down the slope behind the house in black rows, and above it there were more stars than I’d seen since I was a kid. The room smelled like new paint and old pine and the lilacs Mara had stuck in a mason jar on the windowsill, because she’d said a house without flowers on moving day was bad luck, and she didn’t believe in luck, and she wasn’t taking chances.

I stood in the doorway in my T-shirt and jeans and looked at him.

He was barefoot. He had dust on his forearms and a smear of something on his jaw and his hair was standing up where he’d shoved his hands through it a hundred times. He was wearing one of my old flannels with the sleeves rolled up, and on his left hand, catching the light from the bare bulb overhead, was my grandfather’s ring.

Five weeks it had been on him. I still looked at it every time. I didn’t think I’d ever stop.

“What,” Mateo said.

“Nothing.”

“You’re doing the face.”

“What face.”

“The face, Ben. The proofing face. Like you’re checking whether I’m ready.” He tilted his head. “Am I ready?”

I didn’t answer that. I crossed the room instead, slow, and stopped in front of him on the bare pine, close enough that I could smell the dust and the sweat and under it the cardamom that never left his skin.

“Five weeks ago,” I said, “on the floor of the office, you said you wanted to make me a cake.”

His mouth twitched. “Eight tiers.”

“I said not yet.”

“You did.” He was watching me now. Carefully. “Why are we talking about cake, Harlow.”

“Because I’ve been thinking about what I want tonight.” I put my hand on the side of his neck. His pulse jumped under my thumb. “And you’re going to let me say it out loud. Because that’s the rule.”

Mateo went still.

We’d made it a rule in February, at the Wednesday meeting, with chairs. Mateo had written it on his legal pad and underlined it twice. We say what we want. Both of us. Every time. It had started as a business rule, about the inns and the oven and whether Priya got Saturdays. It hadn’t stayed one.

“Okay,” Mateo said. His voice had gone quieter. “Say it.”

I looked at him. At the ring. At the mattress on the floor of the first room that had ever been ours from the beginning—not my cottage, not his apartment, not a bed we’d timeshared or one we’d fought in. Ours.

“I want to make you wait,” I said. “All night. I want to take you apart in this room one piece at a time and not let you come until I say. I want you to beg me for it. And when you’re so far gone you can’t remember your own name, I want you to remember mine.”

Mateo’s lips parted.

“And then,” I said, “I want you to put me on my back on that mattress and take whatever you want. Because you’ll have earned it.”

The silence stretched out in the empty room. Somewhere downstairs, very faintly, Biga yelled at a moth.

“Overnight,” Mateo said. His voice cracked on it. “You want to proof me overnight.”

“Yes.”

“You absolute—” He stopped. He was flushed all the way down his throat. His cock was hard against my thigh through his jeans, and he hadn’t even noticed yet. “You’ve been planning this.”

“Since the lawyer’s office.”

“Since the lawyer’s office?”

“The second pen worked,” I said. “I watched you sign your name. You did it with your left hand flat on the paper. The ring was right there. I’ve been hard since eleven a.m.”

Mateo made a sound I’d never heard from him in two years. Part laugh, part groan, all helpless.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. God. Do it. Take me apart. I’m—” He swallowed. “I’m ready.”

“No,” I said gently. “You’re not. I’ll tell you when.”

I undressed him in the middle of the bare floor.

I took my time with it. The flannel first, one button at a time, my knuckles brushing his chest on the way down, until it hung open and I pushed it off his shoulders and let it fall. The T-shirt under it, which he lifted his arms for without being asked, like a kid. Then I stood there and looked at him. Bare chest, the dark hair down the middle of his stomach, the whisk on his left forearm he’d gotten at twenty-one. The flush crawling down from his collarbones.

“Ben.”

“Shh.”

I opened his jeans. I slid them and his boxers down his legs together and knelt on the pine floor to work them off his feet, and when I looked up from down there, he was standing over me naked with his cock flushed dark and leaking at the tip and both hands clenched into fists at his sides, like he’d been told to keep them there and was trying very hard to be good.

I hadn’t told him. He was just doing it.

“Look at you,” I said quietly.

His breath shook.

I didn’t touch his cock. I put my mouth on his hip bone instead, and then the crease of his thigh, and then the soft inside of his knee, and then I stood up again, slow, dragging my mouth up the center of his stomach, up his chest, his throat, until I was standing and he was trembling and I hadn’t touched anything that mattered at all.

“You’re so mean,” Mateo whispered.

“I know.”

“You’re the meanest man in Bramble Cove.”

“Second meanest. Mara exists.”

He laughed, and I kissed the laugh off his mouth, and he moaned into me and grabbed my shirt and tried to pull me down onto the mattress, and I caught both his wrists in one hand and held them between us.

“Not yet,” I said against his lips.

There was a box in the corner. KITCHEN—MISC—BEN, in Mateo’s handwriting, which was a lie, because I’d packed it and there was nothing in it from the kitchen. I let go of his wrists and went to it and opened the flaps and took out what I’d put in there on Thursday night.

My old Daybreak apron. The plain white canvas one, gone soft from two years of washing, the one I’d worn the morning I taped a key to a production sheet. Next to it, the bandana. Faded blue. The one Mateo had tied his hair back with the first time he cooked me breakfast in my own kitchen.

Mateo saw them. All the color in his face moved somewhere else.

“Oh,” he breathed. “Oh, Ben.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.” He was nodding, fast. “Yes. Whatever that is. Yes.”

“Say it properly.”

He looked right at me. “I want you to tie me up with your apron and blindfold me and make me wait. Please.”

I’d never once in my life been this hard.

I pulled the long ties off the apron with one sharp tug at the seam—I’d already picked the stitching loose on Thursday; I’m a planner too—and walked him backward to the mattress and laid him down on it on his back. The quilt from his mother underneath him. The bare bulb overhead. I knelt over him and took his left wrist and wrapped the canvas tie around it twice, snug but not tight, and then the right, and then I drew them both up over his head and tied them together, and tied the long end off around the leg of the heavy oak dresser we’d pushed against the wall that afternoon.

He tested it. It held. He could have gotten out of it in ten seconds if he’d wanted to. We both knew that was the point.

“Okay?” I said.

“So okay.”

“Color?”

He grinned up at me, wrecked already. “Green, Harlow. Bright green. Go.”

I folded the bandana in thirds and tied it over his eyes.

The moment the light went, his whole body changed. I watched it happen. His breath caught. His chest started rising faster. His fingers flexed above his head, closing on nothing, and his thighs pressed together and then fell open again on the quilt, and the ring on his left hand caught the bulb and threw a tiny point of gold onto the wall.

He couldn’t see me. He didn’t know where I was going to touch him. He was naked and tied and blind on a mattress on the floor of our new house with the windows open to the orchard and nothing between him and me but the next thing I decided to do.

And he was smiling.

“You’ve gone quiet,” he said. “I don’t like it. Say something.”

I put my mouth right against his ear. He jumped.

“I’m going to make you come apart so slowly,” I said, very low, “that you’re going to forget you were ever anything but mine. I’m going to touch every inch of you before I touch your cock. I’m going to open you up with my mouth until you’re crying for it. And every single time you get close, I’m going to stop.”

He shuddered from his scalp to his heels.

“Fuck,” he said, faint. “Okay. Okay. Yes.”

I started at his mouth.

I kissed him slow and deep, the way I’d kissed him against the green door that first Sunday, and he arched up off the mattress into it with nothing else to hold onto, his tied wrists straining once against the dresser leg. Then I left his mouth and he made a small lost sound, and I kissed his jaw, his throat, the hollow at the base of it where his pulse was going like a bird. His collarbones, one and then the other. I took my time on his chest. Mouthed at his nipples until they were tight and wet and he was gasping, then pressed a kiss in the center of his sternum and stayed there, breathing on him, not moving, until he was squirming.

“Ben—”

“I’m here.”

“Where—”

I bit his hip. Not hard. Just enough. He yelped and laughed and swore at me in Spanish, a long, filthy, beautiful string of it, and I pressed my open mouth to the inside of his thigh and he stopped swearing.

His cock was lying hard and flushed against his stomach, leaking steadily now. A little pool of it in the dip below his navel. I could smell him. I could feel the heat coming off him. I didn’t touch it. I put my mouth everywhere else—the crease where his thigh met his hip, the soft skin behind his balls, the backs of his knees when I lifted them—and every time my breath got near his cock he made a sound like I’d hit him, and every time it moved away he made a worse one.

“Please,” he said, maybe ten minutes in. Maybe fifteen. “Ben. Please. Just—once. Just touch it once—”

“No.”

“I’m begging—”

“I know,” I said. “You’re doing so well.”

He whimpered.

I pushed his knees up and apart. I settled down between them on my stomach on the pine floor at the foot of the mattress, and I spread him open with my thumbs, and I put my tongue on him.

He screamed.

I’d never heard that sound come out of him. Not in the office on the desk, not on the counter, not on the night he cried in my bed. It tore up out of him, high and cracked, and went out through the open windows into the orchard, and there was nobody out there to hear it but the trees, and he knew that—I felt him know it—and he didn’t try to swallow a single thing after that.

I ate him like I had nowhere to be. Because I didn’t. Long, broad, flat strokes over his hole, slow and wet, then flickering little circles that made his thighs jerk around my head, then the point of my tongue pressing in, just the tip, just enough. I held him open and worked him and listened to him fall apart. He was moaning constantly now. Begging in two languages. Pulling against the apron ties so hard the dresser shifted an inch on the floor.

His cock was dripping onto his stomach. I could hear him getting closer. I could feel it—the way his whole body started to coil, the way his breath went short and high and his heels dug into the mattress—

I stopped.

“No—” It came out of him like a sob. “No, no, Ben, please, I was right there, I was so close—”

“I know.” I pressed a kiss to the inside of his thigh. “That’s one.”

“One?”

“I’m counting.”

“How many are there going to be?”

“As many as it takes,” I said, “for you to be ready.”

He let his head fall back on the pillow and laughed, high and helpless, his chest heaving. “You’re a monster. I’m marrying a monster. I’m going to tell your sister.”

“Claire knows.”

“I’m going to tell your mother—”

I put my mouth back on him, and he stopped making sentences.

I took him to the edge four times.

I counted them for him, out loud, so he’d know. Twice with my mouth. Once with two fingers inside him, slick and slow, crooked right over the place that made him shout, while I sucked marks into the inside of his thigh. And once—the worst one, the one he’ll tell me about for years—with my hand wrapped around his cock for the first time all night, one long, slow, twisting stroke from root to tip, then another, then a third, while he sobbed my name and strained against the ties and lifted his hips off the mattress chasing it—

And I let go.

He went silent. Completely. His mouth open. His chest locked. His cock jerking against his stomach, untouched, a long string of precome spilling onto his skin, right there on the knife’s edge, shaking all over.

I watched him hold it.

I watched him not come. I watched him fight his own body to the ground on the floor of our bedroom because I’d asked him to, because I’d said not yet, and something in my chest went so tight I thought it might break.

“Good,” I said. My voice wasn’t steady anymore. “Oh, sweetheart. Good. You’re so good. Look at you holding it for me.”

He made a broken sound behind the blindfold. The fabric over his eyes had gone dark and wet.

“Ben,” he whispered. “Ben. Please. I can’t. I can’t anymore. I’ll do anything.”

“Anything?”

“Anything.”

I leaned up over him. Braced my hands on either side of his head, on the quilt his mother made. I put my mouth beside his ear again.

“What’s my name?” I said.

He laughed—actually laughed, cracked and wet and astonished, because I’d told him. I’d told him at the start of the night exactly what I wanted, and he’d remembered, even now.

“Ben,” he said. “Ben. Benjamin Harlow. The meanest man in—”

“Second.”

“—the second meanest man in Bramble Cove. My husband. My husband in August. Ben.”

I untied the bandana.

He blinked up at me in the bare light, his eyes wet and black and enormous, and I watched him find my face. Watched him see whatever was on it. I don’t know what it was. I’ve never known. I’ve only ever known what it did to him.

“Now,” I said softly. “Now you’re ready.”

I opened my jeans and shoved them down far enough, and I slicked myself with the lube I’d had in my back pocket since the lawyer’s office—Mateo saw it come out and laughed until he cried, you put lube in your closing pants, you hypocrite—and I hooked my arms under his knees and lifted them and pushed into him in one long, slow, steady slide.

He came almost instantly.

I’d barely bottomed out. I hadn’t even moved. He clenched down around me so hard my vision went white at the edges, and threw his head back, and came with a shout that rang off the bare walls and out the open windows and down through the dark rows of the orchard. His cock pulsed against his stomach, untouched, spilling hot in long thick ropes up his chest, onto his collarbone, one stripe catching his chin. It went on and on. Wave after wave of it, his whole body seizing around me, his tied hands clawing at nothing above his head.

“Oh my God,” he sobbed, still coming. “Oh my God, Ben, Ben, Ben—”

I held still and let it wring him out. I watched every second. I thought: five weeks. Two years. Eleven months before that. A Thursday in October. A burn on the side of his hand.

When it finally let him go, he lay there shaking under me with his own come on his chest and tears running back into his hair, and he started to laugh.

“I came,” he gasped. “You didn’t even—you didn’t even move—”

“I noticed.”

“You proofed me so long I came the second you touched me—”

“I noticed that too,” I said, and started to move.

He cried out again. Oversensitive, raw, every nerve lit. I went slow. I went so slow. Long deep strokes, all the way out and all the way in, his knees hooked over my arms, his body still pulsing around me in little aftershocks. I kissed him while I did it. Kissed the come off his chin. Kissed his wet eyelids. Kissed the ring when he managed to twist his tied hands enough to press it against my cheek.

“Ben,” he said. “I want—you said—”

“I know what I said.”

“Untie me.”

I reached up and pulled the knot loose at the dresser leg. The apron ties fell away from his wrists. He had pink marks there, faint, two neat bands of them, and he looked at them for one second like they were jewelry.

Then he put both hands flat on my chest and pushed.

I went over onto my back on the mattress. He went with me. I slid out of him and he hissed and then he was swinging a leg over me, straddling my hips, sitting up tall over me with his own come drying on his chest and his hair wild and his eyes absolutely black, and he reached down and took my cock in his hand and lined himself back up and sank down on me all the way, in one stroke, without asking.

“Fuck—” My back came off the floor.

“My turn,” Mateo said. His voice had gone low and sure and very calm. “You said. I earned it.”

“You earned it.”

“You’re going to lie there.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re not going to move.” He started to ride me. Slow. Rolling his hips. Grinding down. “You’re not going to help. You’re not going to fix anything. You’re just going to lie there on the floor of our house and take it, Ben Harlow, the way I just did for you for an hour and a half.”

“It wasn’t an hour and a—”

“Ninety-four minutes,” Mateo said. “I counted. I’m a baker. I can count without a clock.”

I laughed. It came up out of me helpless, and he clenched down around me on purpose while I was doing it, and the laugh broke apart in my throat.

He rode me like he owned me. Like he’d been waiting ninety-four minutes to do exactly this, because he had. Hard and slow and then hard and fast, his hands braced flat on my chest, the ring pressing into my sternum, the mattress skidding an inch across the pine floor with every drop of his hips. He was hard again already—I could see it, bobbing between us, flushed and wet—and he didn’t touch it. He didn’t touch himself at all. He just fucked himself on me and watched my face and talked to me the whole time, the way he always does, every thought in his head out loud.

“You look so good like this,” he said. “Under me. On our floor. Do you know how long I’ve wanted a floor? A whole floor that’s ours? I wanted to put you on it the second we walked in. Graham was carrying the dresser. I almost told Graham to leave.”

“Mateo—”

“You planned this. You took your apron apart on Thursday. You packed it in a box with my handwriting on it.” He leaned down over me, still riding me, his face an inch from mine. “That’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever done. That’s worse than the key. That’s worse than the production sheet.”

“Worse?”

“Better. It’s better. It’s so much better and I hate you.” He kissed me, hard and wet and messy. “I love you. I hate you. Don’t move.”

I didn’t move.

I lay there under him and let him take it. My hands stayed on the quilt. Every instinct I had—every single one, the ones I’d been running on my whole life—was screaming at me to grab his hips, to roll him over, to take back the pace and make it good for him. I didn’t. I let him have me. I let him ride me into his mother’s quilt on the floor of our bedroom with the orchard outside the windows and the lilacs on the sill, and I gave him nothing back but my face and my voice and my body underneath his, and it was the easiest thing I had ever done.

“Ben,” he said. His rhythm was starting to go. “Ben, I’m—again, I’m going to—”

“Then do it.”

“Touch me—”

I wrapped my hand around his cock. He sobbed. I stroked him once, twice, and he came again, harder than the first time, clenching down on me, spilling over my knuckles and my stomach, crying out at the ceiling. And the clench of him, the heat, the sound, the ring on his hand pressed flat against my heart—it dragged me right over with him.

I came buried inside him with my hand on his cock and his name in my mouth. It went on so long I lost track of it. It felt like the oven door opening at the end of a long night. Like heat and light, all at once, in my face, everywhere.

He collapsed forward onto my chest. I wrapped both arms around him and held on.

We lay there a long time. Neither of us moved to clean up. The quilt was ruined, probably. His mother would never know.

The bulb overhead buzzed faintly. Through the open windows, the orchard was full of crickets. Somewhere downstairs Biga thumped down off her throne and padded across the empty living room, and a minute later we heard her on the stairs, and then she walked into the bedroom, looked at us—naked, filthy, wrapped around each other on a mattress on the floor—and sat down in the doorway and yelled.

“She’s judging us,” Mateo mumbled into my neck.

“She’s always judging us.”

“She’s judging us harder. It’s her house. We’ve desecrated her house.” He lifted his head and looked at the cat. “We’re sorry, Your Majesty. We’ll buy curtains.”

Biga yelled again, turned around, and left.

Mateo put his head back down on my chest. His fingers found the scar on my ribs and traced it, slow, the way he always does now.

“Ben,” he said.

“Mm.”

“That was the best night of my life.”

“It’s nine-forty.”

“It’s eleven-fourteen. I can count.” He pressed a kiss to my sternum, right where the ring had left a small red mark. “It was the best night of my life, and it’s not even over, and tomorrow we wake up here. In our house. With the east window. And we don’t have to go anywhere.”

“No.”

“You’re not going to get up at 4:02 and feed a starter.”

“The starter’s at the bakery. Mina’s feeding it.”

“Mina’s feeding it.” He sighed, enormously happy. “Our starter is being fed by a competent professional, and you’re in bed. On the floor. With me.”

I ran my hand over his hair. He was already starting to go heavy against me. I could feel it, the slow loosening, the breath getting longer. He’d be out in five minutes. I knew it the way I knew when a dough was ready—not from a number. From the feel of him under my hands.

“Ben,” he said, mostly asleep.

“I’m here.”

“Tomorrow I’m making the plan.”

“Okay.”

“You’re not allowed to help.”

“I’ll try.”

“You’ll fail,” he murmured, and smiled against my chest, and was gone.

I lay there in the dark of our first night under all those stars with my husband-in-August asleep on top of me, his ring warm against my heart, and I didn’t fall asleep for a long time. I didn’t want to. I wanted to be awake for it.

That had always been the whole point.

In the morning, there was a note on the kitchen counter, under the east window, weighted down with the moose mug.

I don’t know when he wrote it. Some time before dawn, while I was dead asleep on the floor upstairs, snoring like a very small bear. On a square of order pad, in round, slanting ballpoint.

Coffee’s in the box marked FRAGILE. Biga’s been fed. She’ll lie.

Don’t unpack anything. Don’t fix anything. Come back to bed.

—M

I folded it along its crease. I put it in the top of the tin—the second tin, the one with room still left in it.

Then I didn’t make the coffee. I didn’t unpack a single box. I went back upstairs and got into bed.

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