🔥 Day Two: Nothing 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from You Were Never the Backup by Milo Hart

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place in February, after the Christmas Eve party and the New Year’s Eve proposal, during the three-week trip Miles and Graham planned together. 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.

Miles’s side of the second night: a catamaran anchored off Jost Van Dyke, a captain gone ashore, sunburned feet, a sky full of stars, and Graham asking for exactly what he wants. Explicit content — 18+.

Day Two: Nothing

The captain goes ashore at sunset.

Desmond has a sister on Jost Van Dyke who makes conch fritters the size of a fist, and a standing rule, he tells us, rowing the dinghy away from the stern with his gold tooth flashing, that he does not sleep on a boat with a honeymoon.

“We’re not on our honeymoon,” I call after him. “We’re not even married.”

“Then I will sleep very far away,” Desmond calls back, “for when you are.”

The outboard catches. He raises one hand without looking back, and the little gray dinghy cuts a white line across the bay toward the strip of lights and music on the beach, and then it’s just us.

Us, and a thirty-eight-foot catamaran swinging on her anchor in water so clear I can see the chain lying on the sand twenty feet down. Us, and a sky going orange and then pink and then a deep bruised purple over the hills. Us, and the tops of my feet, which are the color of a fire truck.

I’m sitting on the trampoline at the front of the boat, that big net stretched between the two hulls, with my feet in a bucket of seawater. It’s the second time today. The first time was at noon, when I looked down at them and said a word I have not said since the night Benny dropped a full keg on my foot in 2017.

Graham comes up the side deck from the cockpit with two beers and the aloe.

He does not say I told you so. He has not said it once. He said, this morning, standing on the swim step in the white Caribbean glare, you want the fifty on your feet?, and I said, my feet are fine, Graham, they’re feet, and here we are.

He sits down on the trampoline next to me. It sags under him, and I slide into his side, and he lets me. He hands me a beer. Then he lifts my right foot out of the bucket, dripping, and puts it in his lap, and squeezes a cold green ribbon of aloe across the top of it, and starts rubbing it in with his thumbs.

I make a noise I’d be embarrassed by if anyone but him could hear it.

“Yeah?” he says.

“Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re thinking it so loud I can hear it over the generator.”

“There’s no generator. Desmond turned it off.” His thumbs press slow circles into the arch of my foot, under the burn, where it doesn’t hurt. “I’m thinking you look good like this.”

“Like what. Lobster-footed.”

“Like you haven’t checked your phone in two days.” He moves to the other foot. “Like you haven’t counted anything. You haven’t said the word inventory since Syracuse.”

He’s right. It’s the second night. The plan, in my own handwriting on a piece of yellow legal paper back on his kitchen table in Briar Landing, says Day 1 — nothing. Day 2 — nothing. And we’ve done it. We’ve done nothing so thoroughly and so well that I don’t know what day of the week it is, and the bar is two thousand miles away under two feet of snow with Lena running it, and Lena texted one photo yesterday — the walk-in, shut, the latch Graham fixed, and the word FINE — and that’s all I’ve heard from home.

The sun goes the rest of the way down while he’s doing my left foot. The last of the light goes off the water, and the bay turns to ink, and the stars come out. Not one at a time. All at once, the way they never do over the lake. Thousands of them. So many the sky looks dusty.

“Graham,” I say.

“Mm.”

“Look up.”

He looks up. His hands stop on my foot.

“Jesus,” he says quietly.

We sit there and look at it. The boat moves under us, slow, a long lazy rock on the swell. Somewhere on shore somebody is playing steel drums, and it comes across the water small and sweet and broken up by the breeze. It’s eighty degrees. In February. I’m wearing a pair of old board shorts and nothing else, and so is he, and there’s salt drying on his shoulders and a pale stripe on my ring finger where the sun hasn’t got to, because his grandmother’s ring hasn’t come off since New Year’s.

His hand slides up my calf. Just resting there.

“Can I ask you something,” he says.

He asks now. Every time. Even the small things. Two months, and he hasn’t stopped. Can I make you coffee. Can I sit here. Can I put my hand there. I thought it would wear off after Christmas. It hasn’t. I think it’s permanent. I think he’s decided it’s the most important thing he’s ever learned, and he’s going to keep doing it until we’re both dead, and every single time it goes through me like the first time.

“Yeah,” I say.

He doesn’t look at me. He’s still looking at the sky.

“I want you to fuck me out here,” he says. “Right here. On this net. Under all of that.”

My beer stops halfway to my mouth.

“Nobody can see,” he says. “The nearest boat’s a quarter mile. Desmond’s eating fritters. I checked.” The corner of his mouth goes up. “I checked twice.”

“You’ve been planning this.”

“Since the airport.” He finally turns his head. In the starlight his eyes are black and his face is wide open and a little red, and he’s forty-five years old and his grandmother’s ring has been on my hand for six weeks and he still blushes when he asks me for this. “I was standing in the security line in Syracuse behind a guy with a tuba, and I thought, I want him to bend me over something warm. And I didn’t stop thinking it. Through two flights. Through the ferry. All of yesterday.” He swallows. “You said nothing for two days. I’ve done nothing for two days. I’m done doing nothing.”

I put my beer down on the deck very carefully, the way he put flowers down on my bar once.

“Ask me again,” I say.

He laughs, low and shocked and helpless. Then he says it again, slower, holding my eyes the whole time, every filthy plain word, and by the end of it I’m already hard in my shorts and he can see it and he knows exactly what he’s doing.

I get the lube from the cabin. I stub my toe on the companionway step and don’t feel it.

When I come back up he’s lying on his back on the trampoline in the dark, naked, with his shorts balled up beside him and one arm behind his head, looking at the stars. The net’s dipped under his weight. The water’s right there, two feet beneath him, black and moving, and I can hear it slapping softly against the insides of the hulls.

I stop at the edge of the deck and look at him.

He’s thicker than he was at thirty and he’s never cared. Broad chest, gray hair across it, the soft swell of his belly, the strong heavy thighs. The chainsaw scar on his knee, white in the starlight. His cock lying hard and heavy against his stomach, flushed dark, already wet at the tip. His eyes on me.

“You’re doing the face,” he says.

“What face.”

“The one from the dock. Like you’re trying to decide if I’m real.”

I get down on the net. It gives under my knees, and rolls, and pitches us together, and he catches me and laughs, and I’m on top of him with the whole bowl of the sky over my back.

I kiss him. Slow. His mouth tastes like beer and salt. His hands come up and spread on my back, huge and warm, and pull me down against him until our cocks are pressed together between our stomachs, and he groans into my mouth, and his hips roll up.

“Patient,” I say against his lips.

“I’ve been patient since Syracuse.”

“Be patient for ten more minutes.”

“Miles—”

I kiss his throat. His collarbone. The middle of his chest. I take one nipple into my mouth and suck it, hard, and he arches up off the net so fast it bounces, and the water slaps under us like applause.

“Oh, God—”

“Quiet,” I tell him. “Sound carries on water.”

“You said a quarter mile.”

“I lied. It’s an eighth.” It’s not. It’s a half. But I like what it does to his face, the way his jaw sets and his eyes go wide and his cock jerks against my stomach. “Every boat in this bay is going to hear you, sweetheart. So you’d better decide how much you care.”

He bites his lip. He doesn’t care at all. I can see it.

I work my way down his body. Every inch. His ribs. His soft belly, which I kiss, and bite, gently, and he laughs and then stops laughing. The crease of his hip. The inside of his thigh, where the hair is soft and the skin is hot from a whole day of sun, and I drag my teeth along it and feel him shudder all the way down to his feet.

I take him into my mouth.

Not fast. All the way, slow, until my nose is in the coarse hair at the root and he’s in my throat and I hold him there and swallow. Above me Graham Ellis says a word in a voice I’ve never heard him use, a long cracked open-throated sound that goes out across the bay and bounces off the hills and comes back.

Somewhere on shore, very faintly, somebody cheers.

He slaps both hands over his face.

I pull off him. I’m laughing so hard I have to put my forehead on his thigh.

“That was not for us,” he says through his fingers. “That was a — that was a soccer game. On a TV. That was a coincidence.”

“Sure.”

“Miles.”

“Every boat in the bay,” I say, and put my mouth back on him, and he gives up.

I open him up on his back with the stars all over him.

Two fingers, slick and slow. He’s had my fingers enough times now that he knows exactly what to do, knows how to breathe and bear down and let me in, but it’s still tight, still hot, and he still makes the same small stunned sound every time I push the first one in, like his body’s surprised all over again by how much it wants this. I crook them and find the place inside him. His heels dig into the net.

“There,” he gasps. “There, there, there—”

“I know where it is.”

“Then don’t stop—”

I don’t stop. I stroke it until his cock is leaking in a long string onto his stomach, until his thighs are shaking and his hands are wound into the mesh of the trampoline over his head, gripping the net like it’s the only thing keeping him from floating off the boat. Three fingers. He swears at the sky. He tells me he loves me and then calls me a son of a bitch in the same breath, which is how I know he’s close.

“Not yet,” I say, and take my fingers out of him.

He makes a noise like I’ve shot him.

“Turn over.”

He turns over. The net tilts and rolls under us. He gets up on his knees and his forearms, facing the bow, facing the open dark water and the stars coming down to meet it, and spreads his knees wide on the rope mesh, and I kneel up behind him and look at him.

The broad back. The pale line where his shorts were. The sun’s put freckles across his shoulders that weren’t there on Tuesday. His ass, his thighs, his head hanging down between his arms, his breath coming fast. His hole, slick and loosened from my fingers, clenching on nothing.

“Graham,” I say.

“Yeah.”

“Ask me.”

His shoulders shake. Laughing, or something else.

“Please fuck me,” he says to the water. “Please. I want it. I want you in me with the whole sky watching. Please, Miles.”

I put my hand flat between his shoulder blades and push into him.

One long slide. Bare. All the way in, until my hips are pressed to him and there’s nowhere else to go. He takes it with a groan that comes up out of the bottom of his chest and rolls out over the bay, and his fists clench in the net, and his whole back ripples under my hand.

I don’t move. I stay buried in him and let us both feel it. The heat of him. The grip. The boat rocking us slowly forward and back on the swell, so that even holding still I’m moving in him, an inch, half an inch, the ocean doing it for me. He feels it too. He makes a sound like a laugh with all the air knocked out of it.

“The boat,” he says. “The boat’s—”

“I know.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Nothing about this is fair.” I lean over him and put my mouth against his ear. “I’m going to fuck you until you can’t feel the boat anymore. Until all you can feel is me.”

Then I do.

I start slow, because I want to, because I’ve got all night and the next three weeks and I don’t have to be anywhere, ever. Long deep strokes, drawing almost all the way out of him and sinking back in, and the net giving under our knees on every one and throwing him back onto me. My hands on his hips. Then his waist. Then sliding up his back and taking hold of his shoulders and pulling him back onto me harder.

He’s loud. He doesn’t care. Every time I push into him he says something — yes, or God, or my name, or harder, or just a long low sound with no word in it at all — and the water takes all of it and carries it off into the dark.

“Harder,” he gets out. “Miles, harder—”

I give it to him harder. The trampoline starts to bounce under us, a deep rhythmic swing, and the water slaps up against the hulls in time with it, louder and louder. I’ve got one hand on his shoulder and the other fisted in his hair, pulling his head back so his throat’s arched and his face is turned up toward the stars, and I’m fucking him so hard my thighs are burning and the sweat’s running down my chest onto his back.

“Look up,” I tell him. “Look at it.”

He looks up.

“That’s what I want you to remember,” I say against his spine. “Every February. Every time you’re cold. You look up at the ceiling in Orchard Street and you remember this.”

“I’ll remember,” he gasps. “I’ll — I’m going to remember this when I’m dead—”

I let go of his hair and reach under him and wrap my fist around his cock.

He’s soaked. He’s so hard he’s twitching in my hand. I stroke him in time with my hips, tight and slick and merciless, root to tip, my thumb dragging over the head every time, and he starts to come apart. I can feel it. His breath going ragged. His body clenching around me in long, fluttering pulls. His thighs shaking so hard the net shivers.

“Don’t stop,” he begs. “Don’t stop, don’t stop, I’m—”

“I’ve got you.”

“Miles—”

He comes with his face turned up to the sky. He shouts it. He doesn’t even try not to. His whole body locks and shudders and he spills over my fist in long, hard pulses, through the net, into the black water below, and he clenches down on me so tight and so hot that I can’t hold it, I don’t want to hold it, and I drive into him three more times and bury myself deep and come inside him with my forehead pressed between his shoulder blades and his name tearing out of my mouth.

The water takes that one too.

For a long time we stay like that. Locked together. Breathing. The boat rocking us slow, the way it was before, as if nothing happened. The steel drums on shore have stopped.

Then, from across the water, small and far away and absolutely unmistakable, somebody on another boat starts to applaud.

Graham collapses face-first onto the trampoline.

I go down with him. I’m still inside him. I’m laughing so hard I can’t breathe, and he’s laughing so hard the net’s bouncing, and I’ve got my face in the back of his neck and my arms around his chest, and the applause goes on for a few more seconds, slow and sincere, and then somebody whistles, and then it’s quiet again.

“A quarter mile,” he says into the net.

“I told you an eighth.”

“You said a — ” He’s wheezing. “You checked.”

“You checked,” I say. “Twice.”

Later we lie on our backs on the trampoline with the cabin blanket over us, damp and salty and sore, and look at the stars.

There are more of them now. The moon hasn’t come up yet. You can see the Milky Way, actually see it, a long pale smear of light from one side of the sky to the other, and every so often a meteor goes across it so fast you’re not sure you saw anything.

His hand finds mine under the blanket. His thumb finds the ring on my finger and turns it.

“Day three,” he says.

“Mm.”

“It says maybe snorkel.”

“I know what it says. I wrote it.”

“Do you want to snorkel?”

I think about it. I think about the sea turtle Desmond swears lives in the next bay over. I think about putting my face in the water and seeing all the way down. I think about Lena and the walk-in and the coaster under the cash tray in my register two thousand miles away, and how for the first time in my life I’m not thinking about any of it.

“Ask me tomorrow,” I say.

He’s quiet. Then he laughs, soft, and lifts my hand to his mouth and kisses the ring.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll ask you tomorrow.”

He will. That’s the thing. He’ll ask me tomorrow, and the day after, and every day after that, about turtles and coffee and where to put his hand, and I’ll answer him.

Overhead another star falls. Neither of us makes a wish.

There isn’t anything left to wish for.

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