🔥 The Portrait 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Under the Sun

Thank You for Reading! 🧡

You made it to the bonus content — which means you’ve survived the double-booking, the wine cellar, a man who came in his pants against a rack of Brunello, a portrait sitting that was foreplay without contact, a blowjob in the golden grass, a possessive declaration under the stars, sex against a villa wall in the moonlight, an ex-wife’s phone call that shattered everything, a dead Vespa on the autostrada, and a kiss in front of forty-seven strangers in a Roman gallery. You’ve watched Silas Reed crack open like a book whose spine had never been bent and Leo Maro refuse — refuse — to be anyone’s secret ever again. Thank you for giving Silas and Leo your time. This exclusive chapter is our gift to dedicated readers like you.

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⚠️ Content Warning: This bonus chapter contains extremely explicit MM sexual content including: oral sex (extended, detailed), anal sex (face to face), palette table sex, body worship, mutual orgasm, emotional intensity during intimacy, and art-as-foreplay. Set between Chapters 10 and 11. Leo POV. Significantly more explicit than the published novel. Intended for readers 18+ only.

The Portrait

Set between Chapters 10 and 11.
Leo POV.

I finished the portrait at three in the morning.

Silas was asleep in the villa — we’d graduated from the cottage to the master bedroom on nights when the heat was unbearable, and tonight was one of those nights, the air so thick and still that even the cicadas sounded exhausted. He’d fallen asleep with his hand on my hip, the way he always did, his breathing slow and deep, and I’d lain beside him for an hour watching the moonlight move across his face before the itch in my fingers became unbearable and I slipped out of bed.

The cottage studio was warm but bearable. I’d left the skylights cracked, and a thin breeze moved through the space, carrying the scent of jasmine and the distant mineral smell of the pool. I turned on the lamp — just one, the warm-toned spot I used for detail work — and uncovered the portrait.

It had been drying for two days. The base layers were set, the mid-tones stable, and the final glazes I’d applied last session had given the skin a luminosity that stopped my breath. I’d been painting Silas for weeks — sketches, studies, the full portrait that now hung finished on the far wall. But this piece was different. This was the one I’d been circling since Florence, the one that had been building in my subconscious like pressure behind a dam.

It was Silas in the garden, the afternoon of the first portrait sitting. But not the pose I’d actually painted that day — not the careful, controlled man in the chair with his shirt buttoned and his jaw set. This was the moment after. The moment I’d seen in my peripheral vision as I cleaned my brushes — Silas standing, stretching, his shirt pulling free, the strip of stomach exposed, his face caught in an expression he didn’t know he was wearing.

Unguarded. Hungry. Beautiful.

I’d been painting from memory, which meant I’d been painting from desire — every brushstroke informed by weeks of touching this man’s body, of learning his architecture with my hands and mouth, of knowing exactly how the light fell across the hollow of his hip and the curve of his ribs and the trail of dark hair below his navel. The portrait was technically a head-and-torso study. But the torso was rendered with an intimacy that made it feel like a love letter — the shirt open, the chest exposed, every detail painted with the specificity of someone who’d pressed their mouth to each surface and remembered the taste.

I worked for two hours. Refining. The eyes were the focal point — always the eyes, with Silas — and I layered glaze over glaze until they held exactly the right quality of light: warm, piercing, the gray of them almost silver, and behind the silver, the vast, newly opened landscape of a man who’d spent forty-two years sealed shut and was now, finally, achingly, letting himself be seen.

At three, I set down my brush. Looked at what I’d made.

It was the best painting of my career. Better than the inheritance series, better than the finished portrait on the far wall, better than anything I’d produced in Milan or art school or the fourteen months of post-Marco creative wasteland. It was the painting Francesca had told me to make — the one that scared me. Not because of the subject matter, but because of what it revealed about the artist. You couldn’t look at this canvas without knowing — immediately, viscerally, without any supporting text — that the person who painted it was consumed by the person in it. That the attention was not aesthetic but devotional. That every brushstroke was a prayer.

I covered it. Went back to the villa. Slipped into bed beside Silas, who shifted in his sleep and pulled me against his chest without waking, his arm heavy and warm across my ribs.

I lay there in the dark and thought: Tomorrow. I’ll show him tomorrow.

• • •

I showed him at sunset.

The timing was deliberate — the golden hour light in the cottage matched the light in the painting, and I wanted Silas to see himself in the same conditions I’d seen him. I led him down the garden path after dinner, our fingers laced, and he came willingly, curious, his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead.

“Close your eyes,” I said at the cottage door.

“Leo—”

“Humor me. Thirty seconds.”

He closed his eyes. I guided him inside — hand on his lower back, steering him to the center of the room — and positioned him in front of the easel. Then I uncovered the canvas, stepped back, and said: “Open.”

He opened his eyes.

The silence that followed was the longest of my life. Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen. Silas stood in the cottage studio and looked at himself the way I saw him, and the expression on his face underwent a transformation so complete it was like watching a time-lapse of a season changing.

First: shock. The raw, unprocessed impact of seeing yourself rendered by someone who loves you — not the polite, flattering version of a commissioned portrait, but the unflinching, intimate, devastatingly honest version. The version that shows the hunger and the fear and the beauty of both.

Then: recognition. The slow, dawning understanding that the man on the canvas was him — not the man he’d believed himself to be for forty-two years, not the controlled, closed, careful man, but the one underneath. The one Leo saw. The one who was worth painting.

Then: something I didn’t have a name for. Something that crumpled his composure and softened his jaw and made his eyes go bright with a moisture he didn’t bother to hide.

“Leo,” he said. His voice was wrecked. “Is that — is that what I look like to you?”

“Every day. Every second. Since the patio.”

“I look—” He stepped closer to the canvas. His hand rose, almost touching the surface, stopping an inch away. “I look alive.“

“You are alive.”

He turned to me. The sunset light through the skylight fell across his face in the exact angle I’d captured in the painting — the warmth on his cheekbones, the silver fire at his temples, the gray eyes luminous and undefended. He looked at me the way the painted version of him looked at something just outside the frame.

He looked at me like I was the frame.

“Come here,” he said.

I went.

He caught me by the waist with both hands — not the tentative, careful grip of his early weeks, but the full, confident hold of a man who’d learned what his hands were for and was done being afraid to use them. He pulled me against him, chest to chest, and the contact — the sudden, total press of his body against mine, the heat of him through his thin shirt — made my breath stutter.

“You painted me,” he said. Low. Close to my ear. “You painted me the way you see me and it’s — Leo, it’s the most—”

“Don’t say beautiful.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’ll make me cry and I have a no-crying-in-the-studio policy.”

“You cry in the studio constantly.”

“Only when the sienna won’t cooperate. This is different.”

He kissed me. Not gently. The kiss of a man who’d just seen evidence that he was loved with a depth and attention that rearranged his understanding of what love could look like, and who needed to respond in the only language that matched. His mouth opened against mine, his tongue sliding in, his hands tightening on my waist and lifting me — actually lifting me, my feet leaving the ground for a second before he set me on the edge of the palette table.

Paint tubes scattered. A jar of brush water tipped and spilled. Neither of us cared.

“I want to do something,” he said against my mouth.

“You can do anything.”

“I want to—” He pulled back just far enough to look at me, and the expression on his face was the same focused, intentional look he wore when he was writing something important — the look that meant every word was being chosen with care. “I want to worship you the way you worship me on canvas. I want to give you back what you just gave me.”

“Silas—”

“Lie down.”

He cleared the palette table with one sweep of his arm — tubes and rags and jars crashing to the floor in a chaos that would have horrified the old Silas and that the current Silas didn’t even glance at. Then he lifted me properly, hands under my thighs, and laid me across the table’s surface, which was cool and smooth and exactly the right height.

“This table cost three hundred euros,” I said.

“I’ll buy you ten.” He pulled my shirt over my head. Dropped it on the pile of displaced art supplies. His hands found my bare chest and pressed flat — palms over my pectorals, fingers spread, the way I’d pressed my palms against his chest on the first night I’d told him I loved him. The symmetry was deliberate. The echo was a statement.

“I’m going to take my time,” he said. “The way you take your time with a canvas. Every inch.”

“Silas, you don’t have to—”

“I know I don’t have to. I want to. I want to map you the way you mapped me. I want to know what every part of you tastes like and sounds like when I touch it and I want to—” His voice dropped to a murmur. “I want to use my mouth until you can’t think. The way I can’t think when I look at that painting.”

The words sent a cascade of heat through my body — from my chest to my stomach to my cock, which was already hardening against my shorts. Silas noticed. His gaze dropped, tracked the growing outline against the fabric, and the corner of his mouth twitched.

“You’re responding to my thesis statement,” he said.

“Your thesis statement is about putting your mouth on me. Of course I’m responding.”

He leaned down and kissed my neck. The spot behind my ear, the one he’d discovered weeks ago that made my toes curl. Then lower — the tendon at the side of my throat, the hollow above my collarbone. His mouth was warm and unhurried, and the sound of his breathing against my skin — deep, controlled, the breathing of a man engaged in precise work — was arousing in a way I couldn’t explain to someone who hadn’t spent months learning that Silas Reed’s concentration was the most erotic force in nature.

He kissed down my chest. Each pectoral given individual attention — his tongue tracing the line of muscle, his teeth grazing the nipple, the suction gentle and then not gentle, and the sound I made was not dignified. His hands held my ribcage, thumbs in the grooves between my ribs, and I could feel him cataloging — the exact pressure that made me gasp, the exact spot that made my back arch, the exact combination of tongue and teeth that turned my bones to water.

He found every scar and mark on my body. The compass rose tattoo — he traced it with his tongue, following the points, north to east to south to west. The soldering burn on my hip. The thin line from a drone propeller. He kissed each one like a point on a map, and each kiss sent a shiver through me that he felt and filed away.

“You know my body better than anyone alive,” I said. My voice was thick.

“I’m still learning.” He reached the waistband of my shorts. His fingers hooked the elastic. “I intend to be a very thorough student.”

He pulled my shorts down. I lifted my hips to help, and then I was naked on the palette table in the warm studio light, and Silas was standing between my legs looking at me with an expression that was equal parts reverence and hunger.

“This is my favorite view,” he said. And the specificity of it — not a generic compliment but a precise, observational statement, the kind he’d make about a passage of prose or a piece of architecture — landed in my chest with the force of a confession.

He sank to his knees.

The image of it — Silas Reed, on his knees on the paint-spattered floor of my studio, between my thighs, his silver-streaked hair falling over his forehead — was so overwhelming that I had to close my eyes and reopen them to verify it was real. This was deliberate. Chosen. The kneel of a man who understood exactly what he was doing and was doing it with the full, conscious intent that characterized everything about the new Silas.

He started at my inner thigh. Not my cock — my thigh. Kissing the sensitive skin with a patience that I recognized as payback for every time I’d made him wait. He kissed up one thigh and down the other, his mouth warm and wet against skin that grew more sensitive with every pass, and by the time his lips reached the crease where my thigh met my groin, I was trembling.

“Silas—”

“Patience.” The word delivered against my skin, his breath hot on the most sensitive part of me. “I’m being thorough.”

“You’re being a sadist.”

“I’m being an academic. There’s overlap.”

Then he took me in his mouth.

Not the fumbling, eager blowjob of the garden, and not the practiced, confident technique of recent weeks. Something between and beyond both — a synthesis of everything he’d learned, applied with the focus of a man writing his masterpiece. He took me deep on the first stroke, his throat relaxing with an ease that still shocked me, and the sound he made — a low, satisfied hum that vibrated through my cock and up my spine — told me this wasn’t just about giving. He wanted this. Craved it.

He worked me with devastating patience. Long, slow strokes that used the full length of his mouth. His tongue pressing flat on the withdrawal, circling the head, dipping into the slit where I was leaking freely. His hand wrapped around the base, stroking in counterpoint, the rhythm mathematically precise because this was Silas and even in sex, his brain operated on principles of structural integrity.

I propped myself on my elbows and watched. The painting was visible behind him — my portrait of Silas, glowing in the studio light, the painted eyes burning with the same intensity that the real eyes held when they flicked upward to meet mine.

“You’re looking at the painting,” he said, pulling off just long enough to speak, his hand still working.

“I’m looking at you looking at me while the painting of you looks at—” I lost the thread because he’d taken me deep again and done something with his tongue that made coherent sentence construction impossible. “Fuck. Silas.”

“That’s the first time you’ve been rendered inarticulate. I’m marking this as a milestone.”

“Shut up and don’t stop.”

He didn’t stop. He intensified — faster now, the patience giving way to purpose, his cheeks hollowed, the suction firm and rhythmic, his hand twisted at the base on every upstroke. The pleasure was building — a slow, inexorable wave rising from the base of my spine — and the visual input was making it worse: Silas on his knees, the ring on my finger catching the lamplight, the painting watching, the studio that smelled of turpentine and sex.

“I’m close,” I gasped. “Silas — if you don’t want me to — you should—”

He looked up at me. Eyes locked on mine. Took me to the root. Swallowed.

The orgasm hit like a wave breaking. I came with his name in my mouth and his mouth on me and the painting behind him glowing in the warm light, and the release went on and on — pulse after pulse, his throat working around me, his eyes still holding mine as though watching my face while I came apart was the real act of devotion and the rest was just mechanics.

He swallowed everything. Drew it out — his mouth gentling, his tongue soothing the oversensitive head, his hands stroking my trembling thighs — until the last aftershock passed and I was boneless and panting on the palette table.

He stood. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The gesture was obscene and tender and perfectly Silas.

“Your turn,” I said, reaching for his belt.

“Not yet.” He scooped me off the table. I wrapped my legs around his waist — instinct, muscle memory — and he carried me across the studio to the narrow bed against the far wall. The bed we’d shared for weeks, the bed where he’d told me he loved me.

He laid me down. Stood over me and undressed with the measured, deliberate pace that meant he was planning something. Naked, he was everything the painting showed and more — the lean chest, the defined arms, the cock that stood rigid against his stomach, flushed and dark and already leaking. Forty-two years old and more beautiful than any twenty-four-year-old I’d ever seen, because beauty in Silas wasn’t a matter of proportion. It was a matter of what was behind the surface.

“I want to be inside you,” he said. “I want to look at you while I give what the painting can’t show.”

He prepared me with the thoroughness I’d come to expect and adore — slick fingers, patient stretching, his mouth on my neck while his hand worked between my legs, finding every response and building on it until I was open and aching and pulling at his shoulders.

“Now,” I said. “Silas — now—”

He pressed inside me. Slow. His eyes on mine. The full, devastating slide that I felt in every part of my body — the stretch, the heat, the deep, aching fullness of being joined with someone who knew you completely and loved what they found.

He moved. And what followed was not the urgent, possessive sex of the villa wall, or the playful intensity of the writing chair. It was something I didn’t have a word for — slow and deep and full of a tenderness that made my chest ache, his hips rolling in long, fluid strokes that found the angle that made me gasp and held it, his mouth on my face, kissing my forehead, my eyelids, the bridge of my nose, the corner of my mouth.

“The painting,” he murmured, between thrusts that were rearranging my nervous system. “Shows the moment before. The hunger. The reaching.” A deeper stroke. I gasped. “This is the after. This is what the hunger was for.”

I pulled him down. Kissed him. Poured everything I felt into the contact — the gratitude and the desire and the deep, bone-level certainty that this man was the person I was supposed to find.

He reached between us. Wrapped his hand around my cock — hard again, impossibly hard — and stroked me in time with his thrusts. The dual sensation built fast. I was still sensitized from the first orgasm, every nerve overloaded, and the combination of his cock inside me and his hand on me and his mouth against my temple whispering my name was too much.

“Together,” I said. “Please — this time — together—”

He increased the pace. Deeper. Harder. The tenderness giving way to urgency, both of us chasing the edge with the synchronized desperation of two people who’d learned to come together because the separateness was the only thing left to surrender.

I came first. Barely — a fraction of a second — my body clenching around him and my cock pulsing in his hand and a sound leaving my mouth that was his name and something else, something that came from the part of me that existed before language and that only Silas had ever reached.

He followed. The deep groan, the stuttering hips, the hot pulse of his release inside me that I felt in my core. His forehead against mine. Our breath tangling in the space between our mouths. The slow, aftershock trembling that we rode together, holding on.

Silence. The studio around us — paintings on the walls, the covered canvas on the easel, the scattered paint supplies on the floor. The warm light. The jasmine through the skylight. The sound of two people breathing.

“I’m going to paint you,” I said, when I could speak.

“You’ve painted me.”

“I’m going to paint you again. And again. Every version. Every angle. The morning version and the midnight version and the version that looks at me like I’m — like I’m—”

“Everything.”

“Yeah.” I pressed my face against his neck. Breathed him in. “That one.”

He held me. His hand in my hair, his heartbeat against my chest. The bed creaked once, settling under our combined weight, and the sound was the most domestic, perfect, ordinary sound in the world.

“Stay,” he said.

“I live here,” I said.

“Stay anyway.”

I stayed.

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Jace Wilder