Boss's Favorite Problem by Jace Wilder - MM Office Romance book cover

Boss’s Favorite Problem — Bonus Chapter

The Quarterly Review — by Jace Wilder

This bonus chapter takes place six months after the epilogue. Daniel and Lucas have moved into a bigger apartment. Lucas discovers a file Daniel has been keeping. What follows is entirely too hot for Amazon.

⚠️ Explicit MM sexual content. 18+ only.

The Quarterly Review

Lucas

I found the file on a Saturday.

Not in the dresser — that was where the artifacts lived, the ink-stained cuff and the navy tie. The file was in his desk drawer. The one he kept locked, which I’d never questioned because Daniel Hayes was a man who locked drawers the way other men locked their cars.

The key was in his jacket pocket. I was looking for his car keys. My hand found a small brass key on a plain ring, and I thought leave it alone, Lucas, some drawers are locked for a reason.

I opened the drawer.

Inside was a single manila folder. Unlabeled. I opened it expecting tax documents.

What I found was not tax documents.

It was a handwritten log, in Daniel’s precise architectural handwriting, that spanned six pages and was titled: LUCAS REED — ONGOING PERFORMANCE FILE

I sat down on the floor next to the desk. I read.

The entries were dated. They started the week I moved in and continued through yesterday.

January 14. Subject relocated personal effects. The process was chaotic. Subject owns an unreasonable number of books organized by no discernible system. The throw blanket has been placed on the couch. It clashes with everything. The apartment has never looked better.

January 22. Subject attempted garlic bread. Results were suboptimal. The fire alarm functioned as designed. Subject’s response was to laugh until he was on the floor, which was an inappropriate reaction to a potential kitchen fire and also the most attractive thing the reviewer has witnessed in a domestic setting.

February 3. Subject initiated a disagreement about thermostat settings that lasted forty-five minutes and produced no resolution. The reviewer would concede any temperature at which the subject continues to walk around the apartment in the reviewer’s t-shirt and nothing else.

February 14. Subject announced he does not observe corporate holidays and then cooked dinner. The pasta was slightly overcooked. The reviewer ate three servings. The subject said I love you fourteen times during the meal, which the reviewer counted and will remember individually.

March 22. The subject woke at 3 AM from a nightmare. The reviewer held him for forty minutes. The subject dreamed about being invisible. The reviewer told the subject: I see you. The current estimate for how many times this will need saying is: indefinitely.

May 10. Saturday. The subject is asleep. The reviewer is sitting at the kitchen counter looking at the throw blanket and the sneakers and the bookshelves organized by color and the entire structural evidence of a life that contains another person. The closed system has been fully decommissioned. The replacement system — chaotic, inefficient, occasionally on fire — is superior by every metric. Permanent retention. No further review required. There is only the fact of him, here, in this life, and the fact is enough. The fact is everything.

I was crying. On the floor. Next to his desk. Holding six pages of handwritten love in a manila folder, and crying so hard my shoulders shook.

Daniel found me twenty minutes later. He came out of the bedroom in boxer briefs and nothing else, hair rumpled. He stopped in the hallway. Looked at me on the floor. Looked at the open drawer. Looked at the file.

“You found the file,” he said.

“I found the file. That drawer was locked. I found the key in your jacket. I’m sorry. I’m not sorry. I’m sorry I invaded your privacy and I am not sorry I read this because it is the most beautiful thing anyone has ever written about me and you’ve been keeping it in a locked drawer like it’s a tax return.”

Daniel sat down beside me. “It was supposed to be private. A record. In case I forgot what this felt like. Because the pattern. Because eight years of rewriting the history so the loneliness seemed like a choice. I was afraid that if I didn’t document what you do to my life — I might start to take it for granted. And taking you for granted is the one thing I will not do.”

I put my hands on his face. Kissed him. Not gently. The kind that said I have heard something that rearranged my architecture and words cannot hold it all.

He pulled me onto his lap on the floor, file pages crinkling under my knee.

“You wrote about the garlic bread.”

“The garlic bread was a significant domestic event.”

“You counted how many times I said I love you on Valentine’s Day.”

“Fourteen. I have the data.”

“You’re insane. Bedroom. Now. Clothes off. Hands wherever I put them.”

Daniel’s eyes darkened. “Yes, sir.”

I stopped. Stared. In a year and a half, Daniel had never said those words. Yes, sir was mine. My surrender. My gift to him. He’d never offered it back. Until now.

“Say it again.”

“Yes, sir.” Quiet. Steady. The voice of a man who had decided, with full autonomy, to surrender.

I took him to bed the way he’d taken me — with deliberation, with reverence.

I undressed him. Slowly. “On the bed. On your back. Hands above your head.”

He obeyed. Daniel Hayes, who commanded rooms, lay down and raised his arms and waited for me to tell him what came next.

I kissed his throat, his chest, the scar on his hip. I bypassed his cock — hard, straining — and kissed the inside of his thigh instead. The sound he made was a mirror of every sound I’d made when he’d done this to me.

“Not yet. You taught me that.”

I used his playbook against him. When I finally took him in my mouth, his entire body arched off the mattress. “Fuck — Lucas — please —”

Daniel Hayes begging. Wrecked, raw, stripped of every layer. I edged him twice. Each time he made a sound that proved the man who controlled everything could be beautifully, willingly out of control.

“Tell me what you want.”

“I want you inside me.”

In a year and a half, Daniel had always topped. Always. The reversal had never been discussed. Until now.

“Are you sure?” My voice was shaking.

“I want to know what it feels like — the thing that makes you go quiet, that makes you cry. Take me there.”

I prepared him with the same care he’d always used with me. Slow, patient. “Color?”

“Green. Don’t stop.”

When I entered him — slowly, an inch at a time — his eyes went wide. His hands found my back and gripped, nails digging in. The sound was a stunned, full-body gasp of discovery.

“Oh. Oh. Lucas —”

“I know. Breathe.” I pressed my forehead to his. I was inside him and the intimacy was so total the boundary between our bodies felt theoretical.

I moved slowly. Found the spot. Daniel’s whole body seized. His back arched. A shattered, beautiful cry filled the bedroom — the sound of a man arriving at a place he’d only ever watched someone else visit.

“There. I’ve got you, Daniel.”

I made love to him in the morning light, in our bed, with the file on the floor and Gerald sleeping on the couch and the throw blanket and the bookshelves organized by color — the whole architecture of two holding us while we held each other.

Daniel came without being touched. Full-body, deep. My name on his lips, tears on his cheeks, his hands cupping my jaw the way he’d done the first time he told me he loved me.

I followed. Inside him. Looking at his face. The irreplaceable sensation of being trusted with everything a person had.

Afterward. Daniel’s back to my chest. My arms around his waist. My mouth against his hair.

“How do you feel?”

“Like I understand something I didn’t understand before. Why you cry. The feeling of being completely, totally held. Not in control. Not directing. Just held. It’s enormous. It’s so big it can’t stay inside.”

“Yeah. That’s why we cry.”

He kissed my forehead. The Sunday kiss. The one that meant I love you, and the morning is ours.

“I’m getting you a dog,” I said.

“I know. I’ve already purchased a bed for him. It arrives Tuesday.”

“You bought a dog bed. A leash. A food bowl with a non-slip base. And a book about greyhound behavioral psychology.”

“I plan for everything, Lucas. The fact that my plans now include you and a greyhound named Gerald and a drawer full of love letters I never intended anyone to read — that’s the variable I didn’t forecast.”

“The unforecastable variable.”

“The best one.”

“Go to sleep, Daniel.”

“It’s 9 AM.”

“Go to sleep anyway. Gerald arrives next week.”

Daniel’s arm tightened around me. His mouth pressed to my hair.

“Go to sleep, Lucas.”

“I love you too. Stay forever.”

“Non-negotiable.”

They slept. In the sun. In the quiet. In the architecture of two, which was messy and imperfect and occasionally on fire and held more than either of them had ever believed a life could hold. It held everything. It held them.

Thank you for reading. Daniel and Lucas love you. (Daniel would never say that out loud, but Lucas says it for both of them.)

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