The Sugar Lease by Jace Wilder - MM Contemporary Romance book cover

The Sugar Lease — Bonus Chapter

The Yamazaki
by Jace Wilder

⚠️ Content Warning: This bonus chapter contains extremely explicit sexual content (graphic MM scene). Intended for readers 18+ who have read The Sugar Lease.

Set between Chapters 15 and 16. The night they open the off-limits bottle.

The Yamazaki had been on the top shelf for two years, four months, and eleven days.

I knew this because I’d bought it on a Tuesday in February, from a specialty shop in Midtown that required an appointment and a tolerance for being judged by a man in a bow tie. Yamazaki 18. Single malt. Japanese whisky that tasted like smoke and honey and patience, aged in Mizunara oak casks that cost more per year than most people’s rent.

I’d been saving it for an occasion.

The occasion had been abstract — a feeling more than an event. The right moment. The moment when something in my life felt earned rather than purchased, significant rather than curated. I’d thought about opening it when the consultancy landed its first six-figure client. When I’d closed on the loft. When Owen left, and then when Luca left, and both times I’d reached for it and stopped, because drinking expensive whisky alone in an empty penthouse wasn’t an occasion. It was a symptom.

The bottle had waited. I’d waited. And now Teo Navarro was sitting on my kitchen counter in my boxers and nothing else, his bare feet dangling, his thesis finally submitted, the renegotiated lease signed and the confetti of the old one swept into the trash, and he was looking at me with dark eyes that held no guard, no calculation, no fear.

“Open it,” he said.

“It’s a six-hundred-dollar bottle.”

“I know. You’ve mentioned it approximately forty times.”

“It’s Yamazaki 18.”

“Jules.” He leaned forward on the counter, forearms on his thighs, and the motion shifted the boxers higher and revealed the line of muscle that ran from his hip to somewhere I was no longer pretending not to think about. “You’ve been saving this bottle for an occasion that matters. If ripping up a lease and rewriting our lives doesn’t qualify, I don’t know what does.”

He was right. He was always right about the things that mattered, which was both his most attractive quality and his most infuriating.

I reached for the top shelf. The bottle was heavy in my hand — substantial, the weight of something that had been waiting a long time to be opened. I cracked the seal. The sound was small and decisive, the acoustic equivalent of a period at the end of a sentence.

I poured two glasses. Neat. Handed one to Teo on the counter.

He held it up. The amber caught the kitchen light — warm, deep, the color of late afternoon.

“To the worst lease I ever signed,” he said.

“To the best tenant I ever had.”

“I’m your only tenant.”

“Exactly.”

We drank. The whisky was extraordinary — smooth, complex, layers of smoke and vanilla and something floral that unfolded on the tongue like a conversation between the oak and the grain.

Teo drank it the way he did everything: directly, without pretension, with the focused appreciation of a man who was tasting something good and didn’t need to perform the tasting.

“That’s incredible,” he said.

“Worth the wait?”

He looked at me over the rim. “Everything’s been worth the wait.”

The sentence landed in my chest and stayed there, warm and heavy, occupying the space where the loneliness used to live. I set my glass on the counter beside his thigh. Stepped between his knees. His legs parted to accommodate me — natural, automatic, his body making room for mine the way it always did now.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.”

“I want to try something,” I said.

“What?”

“Something I’ve been thinking about. Since the renegotiation.” I traced my thumb along his lower lip. Felt it tremble. “Something that requires the Yamazaki and you on this counter and approximately zero clothing.”

His breath caught. “I’m listening.”

“I want to take you apart. Slowly. On every surface of this kitchen. And I want you to tell me everything you feel while I’m doing it. Every sensation, every thought. I want to hear you, Teo. Not the controlled version — the real one.”

“That’s a lot of talking during sex,” he said. His voice was rough.

“Consider it a lease addendum.”

“Section R-6?”

“Section R-6: tenant agrees to vocalize during all intimate encounters. Failure to comply results in—”

He grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me in and kissed me so hard I tasted the Yamazaki on his teeth. His legs locked around my waist, pulling me flush against the counter, and the friction of his body against mine — his chest bare, his skin warm, the thin cotton of the boxers doing nothing to hide how hard he already was — made me groan into his mouth.

“Take them off,” he breathed against my lips. “The boxers. Now.”

I hooked my thumbs into the waistband. Pulled them down his thighs, over his knees, off. He was naked on my kitchen counter, the marble cool under him, the warm light catching every line and angle of a body I’d memorized and still couldn’t get enough of.

He laughed — the real one, bright and startled — and the sound of his laughter naked and vulnerable and unguarded in my kitchen was the most expensive thing in the apartment.

I sank to my knees. His laughter cut off with a sharp intake of breath.

“Jules—”

“Section R-6, Navarro. Tell me what you feel.”

I pressed my mouth to the inside of his knee. Kissed up his thigh — slow, wet, open-mouthed — and felt the muscle tense under my lips. His hand found my hair. Gripped.

“I feel—” He swallowed. “Your mouth. On my thigh. It’s — fuck, it’s warm, and your stubble is—”

I scraped my jaw deliberately against the sensitive skin of his inner thigh, and the sound he made was worth every dollar I’d ever spent on this apartment.

“Put your mouth on me. Please. I need your mouth on my cock, and if you make me beg any harder I’m going to—”

I took him in my mouth. All the way, in one smooth motion, and the sound he made — a shattered, full-body moan that echoed off the kitchen ceiling — was the Yamazaki of sounds: complex, layered, worth waiting for.

I worked him slowly. Thoroughly. The swirl of my tongue on the upstroke. The press of the flat of it against the underside. The suction — steady, rhythmic, timed to the cadence of his breathing, which was getting ragged.

“That — fuck — your tongue, right there, don’t stop — I can feel everything, Jules, I can feel your throat and your hand on my hip and the marble is cold under me and your mouth is so hot and I’m—”

I pulled off. He whimpered. Actually whimpered — a sound of such naked frustration that it made my cock throb.

“Counter,” I said. “Turn around.”

He turned. Slid off the counter and stood, then bent forward, his forearms on the marble, his back a clean line from shoulders to ass, and the sight of Teo Navarro bent over my kitchen counter with whisky on his lips and his spine curved in invitation was the occasion I’d been waiting for.

I opened the drawer beside the stove — the one where I’d stashed lube three weeks ago, because this kitchen had become a recurring venue and I was nothing if not prepared.

“You keep lube in the kitchen drawer,” he said.

“Next to the spatulas.”

“That’s either the most pragmatic or the most degenerate thing you’ve ever done.”

“Can I be both?”

He laughed, and then the laugh became a gasp as my slicked finger pressed against him. I prepped him with care — always, no matter how urgent. One finger, then two, then the curl that found the spot that made his forehead drop to the marble and his hands clench into fists.

“Full. Your fingers. The stretch — it’s — I’m so turned on I can’t think straight, and the marble is cold on my chest and your hand is warm inside me and the contrast is — Jesus — Jules, please, I need you, I’m ready—”

I entered him in one slow, continuous stroke, and the sound we both made — simultaneous, broken, the involuntary harmony of two bodies joining — filled the kitchen the way the whisky had filled the glasses: completely, irrevocably, with warmth.

I moved. Steady, deep. My hands on his hips, his back arching, the muscles in his shoulders flexing as he braced against the counter.

“More,” he demanded. “Harder. Jules — I need—”

I gave him more. Drove into him with the force he was asking for, the pace quickening, my grip tightening on his hips. He pushed back to meet every thrust — not passive, never passive, Teo Navarro even in surrender was an active participant.

“You feel — fuck — you feel incredible,” I breathed against his shoulder blade. “Every time. Every time, Teo, it’s like the first time.”

“Don’t stop talking—”

“I can’t stop. You make me want to say every stupid, honest thing I’ve ever thought about you. That I love you. That you changed my life. That this kitchen has been the most important room in my apartment since the night you took over the garlic and bumped me with your hip and I knew — I knew — that I was done.”

He turned his head. Met my eyes over his shoulder. “I love you,” he said. Not moaned, not gasped. Said. Clearly, deliberately, while I was inside him, while his hands gripped the marble, while the Yamazaki sat half-drunk on the counter six inches from his left hand.

“It matters.”

“I know. That’s why I stayed.”

I reached around him. Wrapped my hand around his cock — hard, leaking, neglected — and stroked in time with my thrusts.

“Come for me,” I murmured in his ear. “Right here. On our counter. In our kitchen. Come for me, Teo.”

He came with a sound that I wanted to record and play on repeat for the rest of my life — a broken, shuddering cry that was my name and a curse and something wordless and primal, his body clenching around me. I followed immediately — buried myself deep and came with his name on my lips and his heartbeat under my palm.

We collapsed against the counter. Boneless, breathing, destroyed.

After a long time, he said: “We need to clean the cabinets.”

I started laughing. He started laughing. We stood in the kitchen, sticky and sweaty and still half-connected, laughing until tears ran down our faces, because this was our life now — sex on the kitchen counter and Yamazaki whisky and cabinet cleanup and a love so absurd and enormous and specific that it could only exist between two people who’d started as a lease and ended as a home.

I poured us each another finger of whisky. We sat on the kitchen floor — naked, backs against the island, shoulders touching — and drank in comfortable silence.

“Worth the wait?” I asked.

Teo looked at the bottle. At the kitchen. At me.

“Everything’s been worth the wait,” he said again. And this time, I understood that he wasn’t talking about the whisky.

He’d never been talking about the whisky.

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