Breaking the Ice — Bonus Chapter

Wedding Night
by Jace Wilder

A scene too hot for Amazon. Set on the night of the wedding, in the honeymoon suite of the Inn at the End of the Road, between the reception and the morning after. Mark POV.

The suite was on the third floor at the back of the inn.

It had been Barbara’s pick. Barbara had booked it in March, back when the wedding had been a vague rumor on a calendar and not a Saturday with a hundred and fifty Things to be coordinated, and Barbara had — bless her, in her thoroughness — toured three local inns before deciding on this one because, in her words to me on the phone three months ago: Marcus, sweetheart, you and Christopher need a room with a door that locks twice and a bathtub big enough for two professional athletes, and that other inn had neither.

I had laughed at her in March.

I was not laughing in July.

It was eleven forty-five PM, the reception had ended at eleven, the last of the guests had been shoved into ride shares by Sasha — who had appointed himself the Designated Sender at some point during dessert — and Chris had carried me up two flights of stairs because he had decided, somewhere on the lawn during Dancing in the Dark, that he was going to carry his husband over the threshold of the honeymoon suite, Marky, do not argue with me, this is happening, and now we were standing in the doorway of the suite, and he was setting me back down on my feet, and the door was clicking shut behind us, and the deadbolt — both of them, Barbara had not been kidding — was being thrown.

I turned around.

He was already there.

He had, sometime in the last forty seconds, unbuttoned the top button of his shirt and loosened his tie, and his suit jacket was already off, draped over the back of the entryway chair, and his hair — which had been holding up admirably through the entire ceremony and most of dinner — was now in the precise state of chaos that I had been planning, since approximately 4:30 PM, to put my hands directly into.

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

He had, also sometime in the last hour, gotten very, very drunk on champagne — not staggering drunk, not sloppy, just the specific kind of relaxed-mouth, grinning, hands-already-moving-in-my-direction drunk of a man who had just gotten married and been pouring back glasses of his mother’s Veuve since the toast — and his eyes were a little glassy, and his mouth was already on a slow private smile.

“Hi, husband,” he said.

“Hi, husband.”

“Husband.”

“Husband.”

“I am going to be saying this word a lot tonight, Marky.”

“Yeah.”

“I am going to be saying it inside you, into you, against your skin, in a number of locations on your body, for the next several hours.“

“Chris — “

“I am going to be — “

I kissed him.

I kissed him because he was going to keep talking, and because he was beautiful, and because he was mine, and because we had been, for the entire reception, behaving — sitting at the head table, dancing the slow-dance Barbara and Linda had picked, taking photos with everyone we had ever loved, cutting a cake — and the entire time my mouth had been counting down to the door of this suite. I had been counting all night. I had been counting since the lawn. I had been counting since the vows. I had been counting since the first kiss he had given me on the lawn at four-twenty-six PM, because the second his mouth had touched mine in front of our families I had thought, with the back of my brain that did not get to talk during ceremonies, I am going to make you pay for that very specific decibel of public restraint later, Christopher Dalton.

He laughed into my mouth.

He laughed because he had heard, somehow, the sentence I had not said out loud, and his hands came up to my face — both of them, palms cupped against my jaw — and he tipped my head back and he kissed me, slow this time, opening, deep, one of the kisses he gave me when he wanted me to know we had no plane to catch.

We had no plane to catch.

We had, in fact, the entire next thirty-six hours.

He walked me backwards into the room.

The suite was — I had not really registered it on the way in, because I had been in his arms — the suite was enormous. There was a fireplace — gas, lit on a low setting by the housekeeping staff at some point during dinner — and a four-poster bed with white linens turned down, and a bathtub through an archway in the corner that Barbara had also been correct about, and there were rose petals on the duvet because somebody — I would later discover it had been Jess Dalton, my new sister-in-law — had snuck up here during the reception and scattered them.

There was a champagne bucket.

There was a card on the nightstand that, much later, in the morning, Chris would read out loud to me and that would say, in Linda’s handwriting: Boys, do not be insane. Sleep at some point. Love, Mom.

We did not see the card until the morning.

In the present, I was being walked backwards toward the bed.

My calves hit the side of the mattress.

I sat down.

Chris — standing — was looking down at me with his shirt half-unbuttoned and his tie hanging loose around his neck and his hair a mess and his eyes gone gold the way they went gold when he had decided on a play, and he reached up, slow, and he loosened the tie the rest of the way, and he pulled it off over his head — not undoing it, just yanking — and he held it in his hand.

He looked at the tie.

He looked at me.

“Marky.”

“Yeah.”

“Hands.”

I will tell you up front: I was already wrecked.

I had been wrecked since the kiss on the lawn. I had been wrecked through the dinner and the dancing and the cake. I had been wrecked through the slow-dance and the speeches and the moment Hayes had stood up at the head table to make a toast and had said boys, I have known you both a long time, and I have to tell you — I have never seen two men who deserved each other more, which had made the entire tent cry. I had been wrecked since I had watched my husband eat a bite of cake from my fork in front of every member of both our families, with the small private grin he had been wearing since we had said I do, and I had been operationally wrecked from the moment we had crossed the threshold of this suite.

So when he said hands, my hands went up before my brain processed.

“Wrists together, Rothstein-Dalton.”

I gave him my wrists.

He used the tie.

He used the tie carefully — Chris was always careful with knots, Chris was always careful with anything that involved my body — and he tied my wrists in a knot loose enough that I could pull free with one good tug if I needed to, and tight enough that I was not going to be using my hands. His mouth moved against my temple while he tied. His breath was warm. His hand cupped the back of my head once, lightly, while he tested the knot.

“Too tight?”

“No.”

“Color?”

“Green.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, Chris.”

“Okay, baby.”

He stepped back.

He looked at me — sitting on the edge of his honeymoon bed in a half-undone wedding shirt with my wrists tied above my own knees with my husband’s wedding tie — and he made a low rough sound in his throat that was not a word, and he took two steps back, and he started undressing.

He took his time.

He took the rest of his shirt off slowly. He undid the cuffs first, because that was the way Chris always undressed, and then the rest of the buttons, and then he pulled the tails of the shirt out of his pants and shrugged it off his shoulders and dropped it on the floor of his mother’s inn — bless the housekeeping staff who would deal with the floor of this room at noon tomorrow — and he stood in front of me in just his suit pants and the gold band on his left hand and the small silver chain his sister had given him on his fortieth — thirtieth — sorry, his twenty-eighth — birthday last fall, and he was built, my husband was built, the off-season had been good to him, and he stood there with the firelight catching the line of his sternum and he watched my face do whatever my face did when I looked at him.

He grinned.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Like what you see, Rothstein-Dalton?”

“Take your pants off.”

“Ask nicely.”

“Take your fucking pants off, Christopher.“

He laughed.

He took his pants off.

He took them off slow, like a man who knew he had me tied to a bed and had nowhere to be and no train to catch, and he stepped out of them with one hand on the post of the four-poster for balance, and he kicked the pants aside, and he was now standing in front of me in just a pair of black boxer-briefs and the chain and his ring, and he was hard inside the fabric — visibly hard — and he was watching my eyes track him the way a dog tracks a piece of bacon.

“You ready, baby.”

“I have been ready.”

“Yeah?”

“Chris. Yeah.“

He came to me.

He went to his knees in front of me.

He put one hand flat on each of my thighs, and he ran them up — slow, palms wide, the warmth of him through the fabric of my wedding pants — and he watched my face the whole time. When his hands got to my belt, he undid the buckle one-handed, the way he had been doing it since November, and he looked up at me from between my knees with his hair flopped across his forehead and his mouth a little open, and he said:

“Lift.”

I lifted.

He pulled the pants off me. The boxer briefs went with them. He pulled them down over my thighs in one smooth motion and let the whole bundle drop on the rug, and I was — I was bare, from the waist down, with my wrists bound above my own knees — sitting on the edge of his honeymoon bed in just my open wedding shirt, with my husband on his knees on the floor in front of me looking at me like he was about to do something he had been thinking about for nine straight hours.

I made a sound.

I did not mean to.

He smiled against my thigh.

“Marky.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re already so — “

“I know.”

“You’re already leaking, baby — “

“I know, Chris, the cake and the dancing and Hayes’s toast — “

“Hayes’s toast?”

“Hayes’s toast, Chris, I have been like this since Hayes’s toast — “

He laughed.

He laughed against my thigh, and his breath was warm there, and then — without any further conversation about Hayes — he put his mouth on me.

I had, by this point in our relationship, gotten Chris’s mouth on me approximately — I don’t know, a hundred times? Hundred and fifty? In nine months of dating and twelve months of marriage, there had been a lot of evenings, and Chris had — as you know, I have told you, he had taken notes — kept getting better at it, and at this point in our marriage Chris’s mouth was a thing my body had a Pavlovian relationship with that bordered on the embarrassing.

And tonight — tonight, he was using every note.

He was slow. He was thorough. He had one hand wrapped at the base of me, tight, and the other hand was holding my hip, pressing me down into the mattress so I could not buck up, and his mouth was — God, his mouth was — he was using the trick he had learned from the player at the charity event in February, the one he had taken phone notes about, the tongue thing, the thing — and he was using it slow, and he was using it long, and after about ninety seconds of it I made a sound that was not a word and I tried to put my hands in his hair.

I could not put my hands in his hair.

My wrists were tied.

The tie, on the wrists, did something to me I had not expected.

The tie did something to me that was — it was like what good boy had done in November, or kneel had done in December, it was a small specific phrase that my body had decided to be devastated by, and the being unable to put my hands in his hair was a small specific physical fact that my body had also, apparently, decided to be devastated by.

I made another sound.

I made another sound, and I tried to twist, and the tie held, and Chris pulled off — slow, just enough to look up at me with my husband still in his mouth — and he said, very quiet:

“Stay still.”

“Chris — “

“Marky. Stay still. Hands stay where I put them.”

I stayed still.

He went back down on me.

I came inside two more minutes, with my wrists tied at my own knees and his hand pinning my hip to the mattress and his mouth on me and his other hand finding my hand — wrapping his ringed fingers around my ringed fingers, pressing them together against my own bound wrists — and the metal-on-metal of our two rings was the last thing I remember before everything went white.

When I came back to myself, he was kissing the inside of my thigh.

He had pulled off. He had not let go of my hand. The fire was still going. I was — I was — I had not had an out-of-body experience since college, but I was having one. I was on my back across the white linens of a four-poster bed in my mother-in-law’s preferred inn at midnight on my wedding night, and my husband had just made me come so hard I had briefly left the room.

“Marky.”

“Mm.”

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“You okay?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, Chris.”

“Was that — “

“I have notes, Christopher.”

He laughed.

He laughed against my thigh, helpless, and I laughed with him, and after a minute he sat up, and he untied my wrists — slowly, carefully, the way he did everything — and he kissed each wrist in turn, the inside, the small place where the tie had been, and he set the tie aside on the nightstand.

He climbed up over me.

He laid himself down on top of me — full length, his weight grounding me into the bed, his face above mine — and he kissed me. I tasted myself on his mouth. I did not care. I had been tasting myself on his mouth for a year. I kissed him back with my hands — finally, finally — in his hair, and he made a low sound against my mouth, and his hips moved against mine, and I felt him — still hard, untouched, the shape of him through the boxer briefs against my hip — and I said, against his lips:

“Chris.”

“Yeah.”

“Bed.”

“We’re on the bed.”

“Properly, Chris.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

We rearranged.

I will tell you that we rearranged because the rearranging is part of it — we both moved, both shifted, both got the rest of our clothes off, both got the supplies out of the overnight bag he had packed for us on Wednesday night that I had not been allowed to look at because he had wanted one thing on this trip to be a surprise, Marky. It turned out, when he opened the overnight bag, to contain — among other things — a bottle of lube I had not seen before, two boxes of condoms because Chris is, at his core, a man with a ten-month plan, and — bless him — a single pair of black leather cuffs that he had clearly bought specifically for this evening, which I held up in the firelight and looked at and looked at him and said:

“Christopher Dalton.”

“Hold on.”

“You bought cuffs.”

“Well — “

“You bought cuffs for our honeymoon.”

“Yes.”

“The tie was — “

“The tie was an audition, Marky. The cuffs are the show.”

“Oh my god.”

“Color check.”

“…Green.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Use the bedposts. The four-posters.”

“Christopher Rothstein-Dalton, you have thought about this.”

“For nine months.”

“For nine months, Chris?”

“Marky.”

“What.”

“I had the cuffs in my nightstand the night we got engaged.”

“Oh my god.”

He grinned.

He grinned, and he took the cuffs from me, and he climbed up over me, and — slowly, carefully, the way he did everything — he pinned each of my wrists to the bedposts on either side of the bed and he cuffed them there, loose enough for me to pull free with a hard tug if I needed to, tight enough that I could feel them against the bones of my wrists, and he ran his fingers along the inside of each cuff once, checking, and then he sat back on his heels above me, and he looked at me.

He looked at me for a long beat.

He looked at me like a man looking at a thing he had been planning for nine months, and his eyes were full, and his mouth was open, and he said, very quiet:

“Marky.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m going to take my time.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah, Chris.”

“Husband.”

“Husband.“

He took his time.

I am not going to be able to give you a clean play-by-play of what happened next, because — as has happened at several previous points in our story — my brain stopped recording for parts of it.

What I can tell you is this.

He prepped me with three fingers and a kind of patient attention I had not been the recipient of since maybe our second time, and he spent the entirety of the prep telling me, in a low quiet voice against my ear, every single thing he had been thinking about during the day. I watched you walk down the aisle and I thought about this. I held your hand during dinner and I thought about this. I cut the cake with you and I was thinking about cuffing you to a bedpost. I am going to take my time with you, Marky. I am going to take my entire life.

He moved between my thighs and he rolled the condom on himself, slow.

He laid himself down on top of me — his chest to my chest, his hands flat against the wood of the headboard above my cuffed hands, our two rings catching the firelight — and he pushed in.

Slow.

He pushed in slow, and I made a sound, and he stopped, and he looked at my face, and he did not move for ten seconds, and then he moved — slow, deep, so deep — and he kissed my mouth, and he started to fuck me at a rhythm he had decided on at some point during the goddamn ceremony.

He kept the rhythm for — God, I don’t know. Twenty minutes? Half an hour?

He kept the rhythm.

He kept it slow.

He talked to me through the entire thing.

Look at you. Look at you, baby. Look at you tied to my bedpost on your wedding night. Look at how good you take me. Look at how good you take me when I tell you to. You’re so good for me, Marky. You’re so good for me, husband. You’re my husband. You’re my husband. You’re my husband.

The word kept hitting me.

Each time he said it, my body — my body — did the thing my body had been doing all year when he said the word, but turned up about eight notches because he was inside me when he was saying it, and because my wrists were cuffed to his bedposts, and because the last time he had said the word in front of me had been at the altar in the presence of forty witnesses and the State of Michigan.

I came again.

I came again on the fifth time he said husband, and I came untouched, and Chris stopped — because Chris had been waiting for it — and he watched me come on him, with his hands flat on the headboard above my pinned wrists and his eyes locked on mine, and then he buried his face in the side of my neck and he came inside me a few strokes later, and he said into my throat — wrecked, broken — husband, husband, my husband, fuck, Marky, I’m — fuck —

We stopped moving.

He stayed on top of me.

He stayed inside me.

He uncuffed my wrists — slowly, both of them, kissed each — and then he came back down on me, and he held me, and we did not speak for a long, long time.

We had sex three more times that night.

I am going to be honest with you about this because we are past the point in our story where I am going to be coy about it. We had sex three more times that night because we had — we had spent ten months engaged, we had spent the day getting married, we had drunk a not-insignificant amount of champagne, and we had no plane to catch and no morning skate to make and no phones we were going to answer until at least 11 AM.

We had sex in the bathtub at one-fifteen AM. (Barbara had been correct: it fit two professional athletes.)

We had sex on the rug in front of the fireplace at three.

We had sex one more time, the slow tired soft sex of two people who had been having sex for hours, at five forty-two AM on the bed, with him behind me and his arm across my chest and his mouth at my ear saying my new last name into my hair like a small steady prayer — Rothstein-Dalton, Rothstein-Dalton, Rothstein-Dalton — and we fell asleep tangled at six fifteen AM with the sun coming up behind the curtains and our two rings pressed together over my heart where his hand had landed and stayed.

We woke up at eleven-forty-two.

We woke up to a knock at the door.

The knock turned out to be the housekeeping staff being very polite, and being even more polite when Chris opened the door in a hotel robe, and they had brought up — at the specific request of Barbara Dalton, my mother-in-law, who had apparently called the front desk at 9 AM that morning to make sure we were going to eat — a tray with coffee, two carafes of orange juice, eggs, bacon, toast, fresh fruit, and a small handwritten note from Barbara that said: Boys. Eat. I will see you at one for brunch. Love you both. — Mom.

Chris brought the tray to the bed.

We ate breakfast in bed.

We were both a little dehydrated. We were both a little hungover. We were both — and this is the part I want to remember the most — grinning. We could not stop grinning. We grinned through the eggs. We grinned through the toast. He fed me a piece of bacon, and I bit his finger by accident, and he laughed for ninety straight seconds, and I had to put my coffee down because my hand was shaking from laughing along with him.

At twelve-eleven, with the breakfast tray pushed to the edge of the bed and the coffee cooling on the nightstand, he leaned over and kissed me — slow, closed-mouth, the kiss of a man with no agenda at all — and he said, into my mouth:

“Marky.”

“Yeah.”

“Was that — “

“Yes.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes, Chris.”

“Was the — was the cuff thing — “

“It was a top three sexual experience of my life.”

“Top three?”

“…Top two.”

“Top two?”

“Top one.”

“Yeah, Marky?”

“Yeah.”

“Was it — was it the cuffs, or the — “

“It was you saying husband.”

He went very still.

He looked at me.

His mouth crooked at the corner.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Husband.”

“Yeah, Chris.”

“Husband.”

“Stop — “

“Husband.”

“Christopher Rothstein-Dalton, I am going to kill you — “

“Husband.”

“Stop.“

“Husband.”

I laughed.

I laughed and I shoved his shoulder, and he caught my hand, and he turned my hand and he pressed his mouth against the inside of my wrist — where the cuff had been the night before, where the tie had been before that — and he kissed the place there, soft, three times, slow.

Then he laced his ringed fingers with my ringed fingers, and he held our two hands up between us in the late-morning light coming through the curtains, and he said, quiet:

“I get to do this for the rest of my life.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what I’m going to be thinking about today at brunch.”

“Don’t tell my mother.”

“I will absolutely tell your mother.”

“Chris.“

“I’ll tell her in code.”

“Christopher.“

“I love you so much, Marky.”

“I love you, Chris.”

He kissed me again.

We did not get out of bed in time for brunch.

We were forty-three minutes late to brunch. Linda had texted both of us at twelve-fifty-five to ask if we were coming, sweethearts, or are you — and then a long string of winking emojis I had not, until that moment, known my mother knew how to use, and we had laughed, and we had finally, finally, gotten out of bed and gotten into the shower together — which had taken another twenty-six minutes, because of course it had — and we had walked into the brunch at the inn at one-thirty-eight, holding hands, both of us smelling like the same hotel shampoo, both of us wearing the rings, both of us — and our mothers had been able to see this from across the room — completely unable to stop grinning.

Linda had taken one look at us. Linda had set her mimosa down. Linda had turned to Barbara and said, loud enough that the entire brunch heard it:

“Barb. They’re fine.”

The brunch had laughed.

Barbara had laughed.

Chris had laughed into my hair as we walked to the table, and he had whispered into my ear, just for me — we’re fine, baby — and I had thought, with the small clean quiet certainty I had been getting used to —

Yeah.

Yeah, Chris.

We’re fine.

We’re going to be fine forever.

Marcus & Christopher Rothstein-Dalton

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