Best Man, Better Lover — Bonus Chapter

The Cove (Revisited)
by Jace Wilder

This bonus chapter takes place one year after the epilogue of Best Man, Better Lover. Contains explicit sexual content. 18+ only.

The Cove (Revisited)

Theo

The trail hadn’t changed.

Same narrow sandy path through the sea oats. Same scrub palms filtering the afternoon light into gold coins on the ground. Same papery rustle of dune grass, same salt air, same hidden crescent of beach waiting at the bottom like a secret the island had been keeping for us.

Everything else had changed.

A year ago, I’d walked this trail with a man who was engaged to someone else, who couldn’t hold my hand in public, who kissed me in hidden places and panicked in the daylight. A year ago, the cove was the only place we could be honest—a stolen hour between lies, a parenthesis in a sentence that was going to end badly.

Today, Evan Hart walked beside me in board shorts and an unbuttoned linen shirt with his hand in mine and his wedding ring—our wedding ring, the simple platinum band we’d picked out together at a jeweler in Park Slope three months ago—catching the afternoon sun.

“You’re staring at my hand,” he said.

“I’m staring at the ring.”

“You’ve been staring at it for three months.”

“I plan to stare at it for another fifty years. Deal with it.”

He grinned—the real grin, the face-crumpling, eyes-disappearing one that I’d been collecting since we were nineteen and that now belonged to me fully, openly, without the glass case of secrecy I’d kept it in for a decade. He squeezed my hand. I squeezed back.

We emerged from the trail and the cove opened up around us—the same small crescent of sand, the same flat rocks screening us from the main beach, the same impossibly clear water turning gold in the lowering sun. Nothing had changed about the geography. Everything had changed about the men standing in it.

“Last time we were here,” Evan said, kicking off his sandals, “I told you I’d been in love with you since the dorm party.”

“I remember.”

“And then I rode you on a beach towel while the sun went down.”

“I remember that too.”

“And then I held your hand on the trail for about thirty seconds and let go before anyone could see.”

I looked at him. The late-afternoon light was doing obscene things to his face—the jaw, the beard (trimmed closer now, my preference, which he’d adopted without comment), the brown eyes that had spent twenty-nine years hiding and now hid nothing.

“Not letting go this time,” he said.

“No,” I said. “You’re not.”

We swam first. The water was the same—warm, clear, shallow enough to stand—and the feeling of floating next to Evan with the sky turning amber was the same too, except for the absence of the ache. A year ago, the peace of this cove had been borrowed, temporary, a reprieve between crises. Now it was just… ours.

Evan surfaced from a dive, water streaming off his shoulders, his hair dark and slicked back, and looked at me with an expression I’d learned to read over twelve months of sharing a bed and a bathroom and a life: I want you. Right now. Here.

“The towels are on the sand,” I said.

“I know where the towels are.” He was already moving toward me, the water parting around his chest. “I don’t want the towels yet.”

He reached me in three steps. Hands on my waist underwater. Mouth on my neck above it. The contrast—cool water, hot lips—sent a shiver down my spine that had nothing to do with temperature.

“Every time we’re in water together,” he murmured against my throat, “you do this thing where you tilt your head back and close your eyes and I lose the ability to think.”

“I’m literally just floating.”

“You’re literally ruining me.” His hands slid lower. Thumbs hooking into the waistband of my swim trunks. “Every time. Every single time.”

I kissed him. In the water, in the cove, in the golden light, with his ring pressing cold against my hip and mine pressing cold against his. No hiding. No countdown. No locked door or sleeping fiancée or alarm clock glowing through a curtain. Just the two of us in a place that had been our secret and was now our anniversary and would be, if I had anything to say about it, our tradition.

The kiss deepened. His tongue against mine, his hands pushing my trunks down my hips, the water warm around us and his cock hard against my thigh. I reached for him—wrapped my hand around him underwater and stroked, slow, and the sound he made—a guttural, open-mouthed groan that echoed off the rocks—was the sound of a man who no longer muffled anything.

“Loud,” I said against his mouth. “The crabs are going to file a noise complaint.”

“Let them.” He pulled my trunks the rest of the way off. I kicked them loose in the water. His followed. Naked in a cove in the Caribbean with the sun going down, and neither of us checking over our shoulder.

“Towels,” Evan said. “Now.”

We made it to the sand in a tangle of wet limbs and salt-slick skin. Evan pushed me onto the towels and knelt over me and the sight of him—dripping, flushed, his cock thick and hard against his stomach, the ring on his left hand catching the last of the daylight—was better than every fantasy I’d built in eleven years of wanting, because the fantasies had never included the ring. Had never included the confidence in his eyes, or the way his hands moved without hesitation, or the grin—God, the grin—playful and predatory and entirely his.

He kissed down my body. Throat, chest, the edge of the tattoo he’d memorized with his mouth months ago. Lower—my stomach contracting under his lips, my cock straining toward him, my hands in the sand because I needed to grip something or I was going to come from the anticipation alone.

He took me in his mouth and I arched off the towel and said his name at a volume that was definitely going to reach the main beach and I did not care even a little bit.

The man who’d given his first blowjob in a dark cottage a year ago—nervous, determined, gagging once and coming back harder—was gone. In his place was a man who’d spent twelve months learning every inch of me with the meticulous attention he brought to his sketches, and who now worked me with a confidence that made my toes curl into the sand and my breath come in ragged gasps. His tongue swirled. His hand twisted at the base. His eyes—open, looking up at me through wet lashes—held mine with the steady, devastating focus of a man who was enjoying this as much as I was.

“Evan—fuck—if you don’t stop I’m going to—”

He pulled off. Wiped his mouth. Grinned. “Not yet. I have plans.”

He reached for the bag we’d brought—the small backpack with the sunscreen and the water bottles and the lube and condoms he’d packed with the same matter-of-fact preparedness that Theo Morales had once considered his exclusive trait. Twelve months of partnership had taught Evan that logistics were love, and he handled the prep with steady hands and warm eyes and the specific, practiced care of a man who intended to be inside me in the next ninety seconds and wanted every one of those seconds to be good.

His fingers first—slicked, sure, finding the angle without guidance because he knew me now, knew my body the way he knew history dates and cocktail recipes and the exact location of the compass rose behind my ear. I opened for him with a trust that was a year deep and still deepening, my back on the towel, the sky enormous above me, the sand warm underneath, and the man I’d loved since I was twenty working me open with the devotion of someone who understood that this—the preparation, the patience, the care—was as much a part of sex as the act itself.

“Ready?” he asked.

“I’ve been ready since the ferry.”

He pushed inside me and the sound I made was not quiet. It was the sound of a man being entered by his husband on the beach where they fell in love, and it carried across the water and into the rocks and up toward the sky and I let it, because there was no one to hear it who didn’t already know, and nothing to hide that wasn’t already, beautifully, found.

Evan moved. Deep, slow strokes that I felt in my whole body—the fullness, the stretch, the precise angle he’d perfected over a year of practice. His hand braced in the sand beside my head. His face above mine, close enough to kiss, close enough to see every emotion as it crossed his features: pleasure, concentration, love, and a joy that was still, after twelve months, touched with wonder. As if he couldn’t quite believe this was his life. As if the man who’d hidden in a folder labeled Taxes 2024 sometimes looked around at the life he’d built and thought: I almost missed this.

“I love you,” I said. Because I could. Because the cove heard it last time as a confession and heard it this time as a fact. Because some things deserved to be said in every room they’d ever been true in.

“I love you,” Evan said back. His rhythm deepened. His hand found my cock between us. The synchronicity—inside and outside, his body and my body, the rhythm of a year of learning each other—built to the same place it always built to: the edge, the peak, the moment where everything concentrated into a single point of connection and then broke.

I came first. His name on my mouth, my back arching off the towel, the orgasm rolling through me like the tide that was creeping closer to our ankles. Evan followed—three strokes later, deep, his face buried in my neck, his hand gripping mine in the sand—and the sound he made was not muffled, not bitten back, not buried in a pillow or a shoulder or the crook of his own arm. It was full-throated and free and it belonged to the sky.

Afterward. The sky crimson and violet. The tide at our calves. Sand in places sand had no business being.

Evan lay on my chest, ear over my heart, the same position he’d assumed on the first night in Cottage 6 and every night since. His ring hand was on my stomach, the platinum band warm from his skin, catching the last light.

“Theo.”

“Hmm.”

“Best dare I ever took.”

I kissed the top of his head. Tasted salt and sand and the clean soap that had become my favorite scent on the planet.

“Best dare I ever gave.”

The stars came out. The tide came in. And the cove held us the way it had a year ago—private, warm, ours—except this time, when we walked back up the trail, neither of us let go.

Want more from Evan and Theo? The full novel is available now.

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