Off Limits — Bonus Chapters

An exclusive two-part bonus scene by Jace Wilder
⚠️ This content is extremely explicit and intended for readers 18+ only.

These bonus chapters take place between Chapter 25 and Chapter 26 of Off Limits. The morning after the doorstep. The scene that was too hot for Amazon.

🔒 Enter your email to unlock the full bonus chapters.

Part One: Morning Light

Callum’s POV

I woke before him.

This was wrong. Garrett woke first — it was a law, a structural constant, as reliable as gravity and load distribution and the fact that his coffee was black and his handshake lasted one second too long. In twelve weeks of sharing a bed — the bluff house, the guest house, the stolen hours and the two a.m. pool house — I had never once opened my eyes and found him still sleeping.

But this morning — the first morning of the rest of everything — he was out. Deeply, completely, almost aggressively unconscious. Face down on the thrift-store pillow, one arm hanging off the mattress, the sheet at his waist, his back rising and falling with the slow, heavy rhythm of a man who hadn’t truly slept in two months and whose body had finally, catastrophically, given in to the deficit.

The morning light was wrong too. Not the coastal light — not the gray-to-gold transition of the bluff house, filtered through triple-pane architectural glass. Apartment light. Flat, undesigned, coming through a window that had been installed by someone who understood the word window but not the word orientation. And yet. The light fell on his back — on the planes of his shoulders, the valley of his spine, the silver at his temples — and turned him into something that belonged in the portfolio of unbuilt dreams he kept on his studio walls. Something designed. Something worth studying.

I propped myself on one elbow and studied him.

Two months. Two months of the phantom limb — of reaching across empty sheets at three a.m. and finding nothing, of pressing my face into pillows that didn’t smell like him, of the specific neurological torture of a body that had been calibrated to another body’s presence and was now running, perpetually, in deficit. Two months during which this — the sight of him sleeping, the sound of his breathing, the warmth radiating from his skin across the four inches of mattress between his hip and my hand — had been the thing I wanted most and could not have.

I could have it now.

The realization moved through me like a structural shift — not sudden, not dramatic, but foundational. A settling. The recalibration of every system that had been running on emergency protocols for sixty-one days, returning, through the simple physics of proximity, to baseline. He was here. In my bed. In my apartment. After a three-hour drive and a rainstorm and a doorstep speech that had dismantled every wall between us with the precision of a man who’d finally decided to stop building them.

He was here, and I didn’t have to give him back at five-fifteen. There was no alarm. No Eli upstairs. No escape route through the bathroom connecting door. Just the morning, stretching ahead of us, unmonitored and unlimited.

I reached out. Touched his back. One finger, tracing the line of his spine — the geological survey of a landscape I’d memorized by touch and hadn’t touched in two months. His skin was warm. The muscles underneath were relaxed in a way I’d rarely felt when he was awake, because Garrett Rhodes carried tension the way buildings carried load — constantly, structurally, as a condition of existence.

He didn’t stir. My finger continued — down the channel of his spine, over the ridge of his lower back, to the dimples above his hips that I’d discovered the first night in his bed and had been obsessed with ever since. Small, symmetrical depressions. The architectural detail that no one else knew about. The hidden feature of a building that only revealed itself to someone who’d been granted access to the private rooms.

I replaced my finger with my mouth.

One kiss. At the base of his spine. Soft — not tentative, but intentional. The deliberate initiation of something I’d been planning since approximately forty-five seconds after losing consciousness the night before, when my last coherent thought had been: In the morning, I’m going to take my time.

A sound from him. Low, subverbal, the murmur of a body registering stimulus before consciousness could process it. His hips shifted. An involuntary, sleep-weighted adjustment that pressed his lower body into the mattress and gave me a view of the muscles in his back contracting and I was, instantly, fully, almost painfully hard.

Two months of deprivation had made my body into a hair trigger. The slightest input — his skin, his sound, the smell of him, warm and specific and present after sixty-one days of absence — produced a response so immediate and so total that the engineering of arousal bypassed every intermediate stage and went straight from stimulus to emergency.

I kissed his spine again. Higher. Between his shoulder blades. My hand flat on his lower back, spreading, feeling the warmth, the texture, the reality of him beneath my palm. He stirred more deliberately this time — a shift of weight, a deepening breath, the initial stages of consciousness arriving like light arriving at a window, gradual and then all at once.

My mouth moved to the back of his neck. The place where the silver started. The place where I used to press my face at two a.m. and breathe him in while he held me and the world outside the room didn’t exist. I opened my mouth against his skin and tasted him — salt and sleep and the warm, mineral undertone that was just Garrett — and his hand came up. Found the back of my head. His fingers threaded through my hair and gripped.

“Callum.” His voice. Sleep-rough. The lowest register — the one that existed before the professional architecture was erected, before the composure was installed, before the man became the mask. The frequency that my nervous system was calibrated to the way a seismograph was calibrated to fault lines.

“Don’t move,” I said. Against his neck. “Stay exactly like this.”

A breath. His hand tightened in my hair. I felt the moment he decided — the shift from sleep-passive to awake-yielding, the structural decision to let the person in his bed set the terms. This was new. In every previous encounter, Garrett had been the architect — the one who designed the experience, set the pace, gave the commands. Look at me. Let me. Be quiet. The authority was his native mode, the structural default of a man who’d spent his career directing and his life controlling.

Not this morning.

This morning was mine.

I straddled him. Knees on either side of his hips, weight on my hands, my body hovering over his back. He exhaled — a controlled sound, but less controlled than usual, the composure operating at reduced capacity because the man hadn’t been awake for more than ninety seconds and was already being touched by someone whose absence had been, by his own tearful admission on a rain-soaked doorstep twelve hours ago, physically unbearable.

“My turn,” I said.

The sound he made — low, involuntary, dragged from somewhere underneath the discipline and the control and the architectural composure — was the single most erotic thing I’d ever heard from another human being. The sound of Garrett Rhodes being told to yield. The sound of a man who commanded rooms and firms and my entire body recognizing that, for the next however long I decided, the authority had transferred.

I kissed my way down his back. Slowly. Every vertebra. My hands on his sides, thumbs pressing into the muscles along his spine, feeling them release under my touch — not from technique, I had no technique, I had twenty-one years of life and twelve weeks of this man’s body and the single-minded, devotional focus of someone who’d been given back the thing they’d lost and intended to worship every surface of it.

When I reached the base of his spine, I bit him. The same spot he always bit me — the hipbone, the territorial marker, the place where his mouth had staked its claim a dozen times in a dozen rooms. The reversal was intentional. The mark would be visible for days. He’d feel it when he sat in his office chair and shifted and the waistband of his trousers pressed against the bruise, and he’d know — with the specific, tactile certainty that his body understood better than language — that he’d been claimed back.

He groaned. Properly. Not the suppressed, silence-requirement version. The full, unrestricted vocalization of a man whose face was in a pillow and whose body was being mapped by someone who’d been studying his architecture for six months and had a thesis-level understanding of every load path and stress point.

“Turn over,” I said.

He turned. And the sight of him — on his back, eyes dark, chest heaving, the evidence of what my mouth on his spine had done to him visible and straining and God — stopped my breathing for a full three seconds.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.” His voice was wrecked. His hands found my thighs. Not gripping — resting. The deliberate passivity of a man who’d been told it was someone else’s turn and was honoring the instruction with the same discipline he applied to everything.

I took his wrists. Both of them. Guided them above his head, pressing them into the flat pillow with a firmness that communicated intent rather than force. His eyes widened. Not surprise — recognition. The recognition of a dynamic being inverted, of the architect being placed inside someone else’s design, of the man who said look at me being looked at with an attention so total and so deliberate that the looking itself was an act of possession.

“Keep them there,” I said.

“Callum—”

“Keep them there.“

His jaw clenched. The muscles in his arms tensed. But his wrists stayed. Above his head. On the pillow. The obedience of a man who trusted the person giving the instruction, and the trust — visible, structural, given by someone who hadn’t trusted easily in forty-three years — was more intimate than any touch.

I mapped him. The way he’d mapped me — with my mouth, with patience, with the systematic, section-by-section thoroughness that he’d taught me by example and that I was now applying in reverse. His throat. The hollow where his collarbones met. The chest — broad, lightly furred, the architecture of a body that had been maintained with the same discipline he applied to his buildings. The flat stomach that contracted under my mouth. The line of dark hair that descended from his navel and that I followed with my tongue while his breathing deteriorated from controlled to fractured.

I reached his hips. Paused. Looked up.

He was watching me. Wrists above his head, chest heaving, eyes dark and desperate, looking down the length of his own body at the twenty-one-year-old between his legs who was about to — who was —

“You’re staring,” I said.

“You’re between my legs. I’m going to stare.”

“Good. Watch.”

I took him in my mouth and his whole body arched off the mattress.

The sound — Christ, the sound. Not a moan. Not a groan. Something more primal, more broken, the full-voltage vocalization of a man who’d spent two months touch-starved and was now being touched in the most concentrated way possible by the only person whose touch mattered. His hand came down from the pillow — instinct, reflex, the override of obedience by need — and found my hair and I let him grip, because the grip was communication, and the communication was: more, don’t stop, I can’t believe you’re here, I can’t believe this is real.

I didn’t stop. I used everything I’d learned — every technique he’d taught me by demonstration over twelve weeks of being on the receiving end of his thoroughness. The slow, deliberate pace that built tension. The variation in pressure that prevented adaptation. The specific attention to the places where his body responded most violently — the underside, where a shift in angle made his thighs shake; the head, where a focused, concentrated pressure made his hand in my hair tighten to the point of pain.

I was narrating. Not verbally — architecturally. With my mouth. Mapping the structure the way I’d map a building: systematically, with attention to material and load and the specific, individual responses that constituted this man’s structural signature. Every sound he made was data. Every shift of his hips was feedback. The running assessment of a man’s body being read by someone who’d spent six months learning the language and who was now, in the flat morning light of a four-hundred-square-foot apartment, demonstrating fluency.

“Callum — I’m—” His voice was destroyed. The composure architecture in total failure. His hand tightened. His hips moved — not thrusting, just responding, the involuntary motion of a body that had been brought to the threshold and was fighting the crossing because crossing meant the end and he wasn’t ready for the end.

I pulled back. Looked up at him. He was propped on one elbow now — the other arm collapsed from above his head, the instruction abandoned, the discipline dissolved into the honest, unstructured need of a man whose body had exceeded every parameter he’d set for it.

“Not yet,” I said.

“Callum—”

“Not. Yet.” I crawled up his body. Kissed him. He tasted like sleep and desperation and the specific, sharp flavor of his own pre-orgasmic urgency that I’d carried on my tongue from two inches of skin to his mouth, and the kiss was wet and filthy and nothing like the tender reunion of the doorstep — this was the other side of the reunion. The side that was hunger and possession and the physical articulation of two months of want concentrated into a single point of contact.

I sat up. Straddled his lap. Felt him between my legs — hard, wet from my mouth, pressing against me — and rocked forward once and his hands slammed onto my hips with a grip that was not passive. Was not yielding. Was the full, unleashed authority of a man whose patience had been structurally exceeded.

“Enough,” he said. Low. The command register. The voice that made my nervous system dissolve. “My turn.”

My entire body fired.

Part Two: Built to Last

Garrett’s POV

I flipped him.

One smooth motion — hands on his hips, shifting his weight, rolling him off my lap and onto the mattress. The thrift-store springs complained. He gasped — surprise and arousal braided into a single exhale — and then he was on his back and I was over him and the dynamic had reverted to its native configuration with the sudden, structural totality of a load redistributing after a support is restored.

He’d had his turn. His very thorough, very devastating turn. My body was still vibrating from it — the sustained, concentrated attention of his mouth, the patience he’d learned from me deployed against me with the focused cruelty of a student who’d surpassed his teacher in the one discipline that mattered. He’d brought me to the edge and held me there and pulled me back and the denial was still pulsing through my system like an aftershock.

My turn now.

“You’ve been planning that,” I said. Looking down at him. His hair against my pillow — his pillow, this was his apartment, his bed, the space he’d built for himself after I’d failed to build one for us. The curls were wild. His lips were swollen. His chest was heaving with the specific, post-exertion pattern of someone who’d just spent twenty minutes demonstrating that the student had, in fact, been paying attention.

“Since the first time you rolled your sleeves up at the office,” he confirmed. The admission delivered with zero embarrassment and complete honesty, because Callum Novak did not do embarrassment. He did transparency. He did the architectural equivalent of exposed structural frame — everything visible, nothing concealed, the integrity of the building demonstrated through the legibility of its construction.

“The sleeves.”

“The sleeves. The forearms. The way you hold a pencil. The way you hold a coffee mug. The way you held the steering wheel in the car and I had to sit on my hands to keep from touching you.” He looked up at me. Brown eyes, gold-flecked, carrying the morning light like a material they were designed to hold. “I’ve been planning a lot of things, Garrett. I had two months with nothing to do but plan.”

“Show me the rest of the plans later.” I lowered my mouth to his ear. “Right now I’m going to take you apart.”

His breath caught. The sound — small, sharp, the involuntary intake that preceded the dissolving of composure — was the starting pistol. I’d been waiting for it. Listening for it the way you listen for the specific frequency that tells you a structure is under load and about to respond.

I took my time. Not because I was patient — patience was a professional quality, and what I felt at this moment bore no resemblance to professionalism. I took my time because he deserved it. Because two months of absence had given me a clarity about what mattered — not the urgency, not the heat, not the frantic, time-compressed encounters of the sneaking era. The attention. The thoroughness. The decision to treat every surface of his body as a site worth surveying, a material worth understanding, a structure worth the full investment of my engineering.

I undressed him the rest of the way. We’d slept mostly clothed — the exhaustion of the doorstep and the three-hour drive had overwhelmed the sexual urgency by the second round, and we’d collapsed in boxers and t-shirts and the tangled geography of two bodies readjusting to shared space. Now I removed each piece with the deliberate care of a man handling materials. The t-shirt over his head, his arms rising. The boxers down his hips, his body lifting to help — the collaborative gesture that had become, over twelve weeks, as natural as co-drawing a plan.

He was thinner. The observation from last night, now confirmed in daylight — the ribs more visible, the hipbones sharper, the lean frame pared further by two months of grief-eating. My chest constricted. I pressed my mouth to his ribs — left side, bottom to top, the same survey I’d done in the dark — and this time I said it. Out loud. Against his skin.

“I’m going to feed you.” Kiss. The fourth rib. “Every day.” Kiss. The fifth. “For the rest of our lives.” Kiss. The sixth. “You will never lose another pound to my cowardice.”

“Garrett, that’s not—”

“It is. And I’m going to fix it.” I looked up. Met his eyes from the elevation of his chest. “Starting with eggs. After this.”

“After what, specifically?”

I showed him.

My mouth continued its survey — down from his ribs, across his stomach, the hollow of his navel where the muscles contracted involuntarily, the ridge of his hip where the bone pressed close to the surface and the skin was thin and sensitive and the lightest touch produced a response disproportionate to the input. I cataloged out loud. Not dirty talk — assessment. The running narration of an architect studying a structure he’d been denied access to for two months and was now re-documenting with forensic detail.

“Here.” My mouth on the inside of his hip. “You shake when I touch you here. Every time. A tremor that starts at the contact point and runs through your obliques and into your lower back. It’s involuntary. You can’t suppress it. I’ve tried to make you.”

“Garrett—”

“And here.” My tongue tracing the crease of his thigh. “Your breathing changes. From controlled to arrhythmic. The transition takes approximately three seconds and once it starts it doesn’t reverse.”

“Are you — are you narrating—”

“I’m performing a structural assessment.” I looked up at him. He was propped on both elbows, flushed from his chest to his hairline, looking at me with an expression that combined disbelief with arousal in a ratio that was, architecturally speaking, unsustainable. “I’ve been away from this site for two months. The assessment is overdue.”

“You are unbelievable.”

“I’m thorough. You know this about me.” I lowered my mouth to his inner thigh and bit — not hard, just enough — and the sound he made rewrote the entire assessment in real time.

I worked him with my mouth until his elbows gave out and he collapsed back on the mattress and his hands were in my hair and his hips were moving and the sounds he was making had abandoned language entirely and become pure feedback — the unprocessed, unperformed vocalization of a body being driven toward a destination it could feel approaching and couldn’t reach because I was controlling the pace with the deliberate, exacting precision of a man who had all morning and no alarm and no glass wall and no locked door and the unlimited, unrestricted, daylight-visible intention of making the person he loved feel every second of the reunion.

I pulled him to the edge. Held him there. Let the tension build until he was shaking — the fine, structural tremor I knew, the full-body vibration of a system at maximum load — and then I stopped. Moved up his body. Found his mouth.

“I need you,” he said. Against my lips. Not a request. Not a command. A statement of structural fact. “Garrett. I need you. Please.”

The please. His please. The word I used — the tell, the signal, the admission of a need that exceeded the architecture of normal vocabulary. He’d learned it from me. Had adopted it into his own structural language. And hearing it — hearing my word in his mouth, hearing the specific, desperate honesty of please spoken by a person who never begged because he’d spent his whole life being too proud to need anything from anyone — collapsed the last operational component of my self-control.

I positioned him. On his stomach first — face down, the way I’d found him sleeping, the way this had started. My hand between his shoulder blades, pressing him gently into the mattress, the gesture of authority that was also tenderness, the structural commitment that said I have you, I’m here, yield.

I prepared him with the patience that the act required and the attention that he deserved. Slowly. Thoroughly. Reading his body’s response with the same diagnostic precision I applied to every structure I’d ever assessed — the tension, the release, the gradual accommodation of a body opening for a body it trusted. His hands fisted in the sheets. His breathing went from fractured to held to the specific, silent concentration of a person managing a sensation that was too large for sound.

“Okay?” I asked. Against his shoulder blade. My mouth on his skin. Always my mouth on his skin, because contact was communication and silence was not an option in the light.

“Yes. God. Yes.”

I entered him and the world compressed to a single point of connection.

Slow. The way I did everything that mattered. Each increment a conscious choice — a structural placement, a load being applied with the calculated, gradual precision of an engineer who understood that the goal was not speed but integration. His back arched under me. His hands flattened on the mattress. The sound he made — low, long, the sustained vocalization of a body receiving something it had been missing — filled the apartment and I let it. Let it bounce off the thin walls and the bad carpet and the ceiling where the neighbor would hear and the world would know.

No silence requirement. No hand over his mouth. No whispered quiet, be quiet for me. The light meant everything. Including sound.

“I want to see you,” he gasped. “Turn me — I want—”

I withdrew. Turned him. He went willingly, rolling onto his back, legs wrapping around me immediately, arms pulling me down. Face to face. Forehead to forehead. The geometry from the study wall — the first time, the configuration that had started everything — replicated now in a context so different that the repetition felt like renovation. Same structure. New purpose.

I entered him again and his eyes closed and I said: “Look at me.”

His eyes opened.

Brown. Gold-flecked. Wet. Holding the morning light and the depth of everything we’d survived — the summer and the secret and the sneaking and the detonation and the two months of silence and the doorstep and the rain and this, this, the first morning of the rest of a life we were building together in the light.

“I see you,” I said. Moving inside him. The words I’d said in the dark. The words that had been our substitute and were now our addition. “I see you, Callum. All of you. Every room.”

“I see you too.” His voice was barely there. His hands on my face. My jaw in his palms, his thumbs at the corners of my eyes. Holding me the way I held him — with precision, with care, with the full structural commitment of a person who’d been given something they intended to keep. “Every room. Even the ones you used to lock.”

I moved. He moved. The rhythm established itself with the resonant-frequency inevitability of two structures tuned to the same pitch — not fast, not frantic, not the desperate urgency of the summer. Something else. Something that had duration. The pace of a man building something he intended to last, and the response of a man who understood lasting, who’d spent his whole life studying buildings that endured, and who was now experiencing — in the most physical, most intimate, most structurally literal way possible — what endurance felt like from the inside.

The crest built. Not the sharp, concentrated peak of the stolen encounters but something broader. Deeper. A wave rather than a spike — building across a wider frequency band, incorporating more of the body, more of the breath, more of the sustained eye contact that was, in the specific vocabulary of two architects making love in the morning light, the most explicit thing either of us had ever done.

“Together,” he said. The command from the kitchen — his first command, given in the room where I’d whispered mine and meant it. He said it now with the same authority, the same certainty, the twenty-one-year-old who’d learned to command from the forty-three-year-old who was learning to yield. “Garrett. Together.”

Together.

The crest broke and we broke with it — simultaneous, synchronized, the resonant-frequency payoff of every structural metaphor and every architectural parallel and every moment since May when our bodies had recognized what our minds had resisted: that we were built from the same materials, at the same scale, for the same purpose. Two structures on the same foundation. Amplifying. Holding.

The sound he made — my name, complete, unbroken, spoken with the full weight of every syllable — harmonized with the sound I made, which was his. His name. Three syllables. The word I’d been saying in the dark for months and was now saying in the light, loudly, without shame, in an apartment with thin walls and a neighbor upstairs and the entire world on the other side of the glass.

Callum. Callum. Callum.

Afterward. The holding.

His body against mine in the too-small bed. The thrift-store mattress, complaining. The flat pillows. The dental-equipment refrigerator humming its terrible hum. And us. Tangled. Breathing. The post-structural-failure softness of two bodies that had been taken apart and hadn’t yet reassembled and were in no hurry to, because the disassembled state — the vulnerable, open, unarchitectured state of two people lying skin to skin in the morning light — was the state they wanted to stay in.

“I’m building you a proper bed,” I said. Against his hair. My arms around him. His head on my chest. “With a real mattress. In a house with actual insulation. On a bluff where the only person who hears you is me.”

“Is that a proposal?”

“It’s a blueprint.”

“Show me.”

I reached to the floor. The jacket — the charcoal suit jacket, soaked from the rain, now drying on the three-legged chair with the resignation of a garment that had seen things no dry cleaner could address. Inside the pocket, a rolled piece of paper. The sketch. The first one — rough, preliminary, drawn in my study on the night Margot told me to stop hiding and I’d picked up a pencil and started planning instead of grieving.

I unrolled it on the bed between us. His body was warm against my side. His hand — the one with the scar, the twelve-year-old’s wound — reached out and touched the paper.

The house. Two studios. A wrap-around porch. Two figures, gestural, unnamed.

He was quiet for a long time. His finger traced the lines — the roofline, the cantilever, the glass facing the ocean. The finger moved to the second studio. Paused.

“It faces east,” he said. “Morning light.”

“The best light for drafting.”

“You designed it for someone who draws.”

“I designed it for you.” No hedging. No evasion. The plain, structural truth, spoken in the morning, in the light, to the person it belonged to. “Every room. The kitchen is oversized because you cook. The porch has two chairs because you’ll sit with me. The window seat is for the afternoons when you read and I work and neither of us speaks and it’s the best part of the day.”

He pressed his face to my chest. His shoulders shook. The tremor that wasn’t crying and wasn’t laughing but the specific response of a person being offered a home by someone who built homes for a living.

His finger found the porch railing on the sketch. Traced it. The scar on his index finger — the X-Acto wound, the twelve-year-old’s first architectural injury — moving along the line I’d drawn.

“Where do we start?” he said.

I pulled him closer. Kissed his hair. Held the sketch against the mattress with one hand and held him with the other and felt the morning settle around us like a structure finding its foundation.

“With the foundation,” I said. “Always with the foundation.”

Thank you for reading the Off Limits bonus chapters!

Want more Jace Wilder? Browse all books →

Never Miss a Release

Get new release alerts, exclusive bonus content, and reader-only giveaways.