🔥 Bonus Chapter: The Housewarming

Breaking His Bedframe by Jace Wilder

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place after the events of Breaking His Bedframe. Read the book first for maximum impact.

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The Housewarming

Garrett POV

The last box was unpacked on a Saturday.

It wasn’t a momentous box — socks, a phone charger, the battered copy of a thriller I’d been reading on job sites for three months and kept losing under seat cushions. But it was the last one, and when I flattened the cardboard and carried it to the recycling bin on the porch, I stood there for a moment in the November air and felt something click into place. Not metaphorically. Structurally. The sound a house makes when the final load-bearing element accepts its weight.

I went back inside. Theo was in the kitchen — our kitchen — making dinner. He’d tied a dish towel around his waist like an apron because he couldn’t find the actual apron, which was somewhere in the box I’d just emptied, which meant the socks had been on top of the apron, which meant I’d packed the way I built things: solidly, with questionable organizational logic.

He was chopping onions. He was terrible at chopping onions. The pieces were wildly uneven — some diced, some basically quartered — and he was attacking them with the focused intensity of a man who was determined to master a skill through sheer force of cataloging.

“The last box is done,” I said from the doorway.

He looked up. Knife in hand. Dish towel apron. Glasses slightly fogged from the steam of the pot on the stove. He looked ridiculous and domestic and so beautiful that I had to grip the doorframe.

“All of them?”

“All of them. I officially live here.”

“You’ve officially lived here for two weeks.”

“Now it’s administratively confirmed.”

He set the knife down. Wiped his hands on the dish towel. Walked over to me with the measured, deliberate gait of Theodore Wren approaching something he’d decided about, and he put his hands on my chest and kissed me.

The kiss was not administrative.

His mouth opened against mine immediately — warm, certain, tasting like the wine he’d been sipping while cooking. His fingers curled into my shirt and pulled, the same desperate pull he’d invented on the broken couch and had been refining ever since, and my hands went to his waist and found the dish towel and the narrow hips underneath it and the warm skin above his jeans where his shirt had ridden up.

“Dinner—” I managed.

“The sauce needs to simmer for twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes.”

“I timed it.”

I looked at him. At this man who had timed his sauce to allow for exactly the amount of interruption he was planning. Who had calculated the recipe around the probability that I would come into the kitchen after the last box and he would kiss me and the kiss would escalate, because every kiss between us escalated, because we hadn’t learned how to touch each other casually and I was beginning to suspect we never would.

“You planned this,” I said.

“I’m a librarian. We plan things.”

I picked him up.

His legs wrapped around my hips — automatic now, muscle memory, the body’s learned response to being lifted by a man who could carry him one-handed. I carried him out of the kitchen, through the foyer, up the stairs that Margot had rebuilt in ’87 and that I had never needed to touch because the spine of the house was already perfect.

“The sauce—”

“You said twenty minutes.”

“Nineteen now.”

“Then we’d better be efficient.”

I laid him on the bed. Our bed. The bed I’d reinforced with steel brackets and grade-eight bolts and the specific, obsessive attention of a man who was building something he intended to use for the rest of his life.

He pulled me down by my shirt. I went. His mouth found mine and the kiss picked up where the kitchen had interrupted it — hot, open, his tongue against mine, his hands already working my buttons with the nimble precision of a man who handled delicate things for a living.

He got my shirt open. Pushed it off my shoulders. His palms found my chest and spread wide, and I felt the familiar catalogue happening — his fingers mapping me, tracing the ridges, the scar, the topography he’d memorized weeks ago but kept re-reading like a favorite passage.

I pulled his shirt over his head. Then the dish towel, which came off with it in a tangle that made him laugh against my mouth — a real laugh, bright and unguarded, the laugh of a man who was in his own bed with a man he loved and nothing in the world was wrong.

“The apron is in the sock box,” he said.

“I know. I found it after I packed.”

“You left it.”

“The socks needed company.”

He laughed again and I kissed the laugh and felt it vibrate against my lips, and my hands found his belt and his hands found mine and we undressed each other with the efficient, practiced urgency of two people who had nineteen minutes and knew exactly what they wanted to do with them.

Naked. Both of us. In the lamplight, in our bedroom, on the sheets that smelled like our soap because it was our soap and our shower and our life, and every possessive pronoun was a bolt I was driving into the foundation.

“What do you want?” I asked. My hand was on his hip. His cock was hard against my stomach and the sight of him — flushed, wanting, looking up at me with those brown eyes that had spent thirty years learning to hide desire and now couldn’t hide anything at all — made my blood feel carbonated.

“I want you inside me,” he said. Simply. Without the hesitation that had characterized every sexual request in our first weeks. Without the blush, without the deflection, without the careful Theo-isms that turned desire into something academic. He said it the way he shelved books — with precision, with authority, with the confidence of a man who knew exactly where things belonged.

I opened the nightstand. Lube, condom. The choreography was familiar now — not routine, never routine, but known. The way a musician knows a piece: every note memorized, every dynamic internalized, the familiarity freeing instead of limiting because you stopped thinking about mechanics and started thinking about music.

I warmed the lube. Kissed his stomach while my hand traveled south. He opened his legs — wider than the first time, easier, his body communicating trust in a language that predated words. My finger pressed against him and he pushed back into it immediately, a soft groan leaving his mouth, his hand finding the headboard.

The headboard. The iron scrollwork. His grip on it was lighter now — not the white-knuckled desperation of the first time but the easy hold of a man reaching for something solid because he liked the anchor, not because he needed it to survive.

I worked him open. Two fingers, three. His body accepted me the way it always did — with initial tension that melted into heat, with sounds that escalated from quiet to loud to loud enough that the neighbors probably had opinions. I didn’t care about the neighbors. I cared about the spot that made his back arch off the mattress, and I found it, and I pressed, and the sound he made was a weapon of mass destruction aimed directly at my self-control.

“Now,” he said. “Garrett — now—”

I rolled the condom on. Added more lube. Positioned myself between his legs and looked at him — his face, his eyes, the absolute trust in his expression — and I entered him in one slow, continuous push that made us both groan in stereo.

He was tight and hot and perfect, and the feeling of being inside him — inside Theo, inside the man I loved, in the bed I’d built, in the house that was ours — was the closest thing to a religious experience I’d ever had, and I’d been inside a lot of well-constructed buildings.

“Move,” he said. His legs were around my hips. His hands were on my shoulders. “Stop being reverent and move.”

I moved.

Not slow. Not the careful, patient pace of the first time or the emotional intensity of the storm night. This was something else — urgent, physical, the sex of two people who knew each other’s bodies and weren’t afraid to use the knowledge. Deep, hard thrusts that made the mattress shift and his eyes go wide and his mouth fall open on sounds that were beyond language.

“Harder,” he said, and I went harder, and the bed took it — the frame solid and silent, the brackets holding, the iron absorbing every impact without a whisper of protest. I drove into him and he met every thrust, his hips rolling up to take me deeper, his hands grabbing my arms, my back, the sheets, the headboard — reaching for everything, holding everything, the man who’d spent his life being careful finally letting himself be reckless.

“You feel—” His voice cracked. “God, Garrett, you feel so—”

“Tell me.” I dropped my forehead to his. Eye contact. The thing that undid us both every single time. “Tell me how I feel.”

“Like home,” he said. “You feel like home.”

The word broke me open the way it always did. Home. Not useful, not needed, not indispensable. Home. The place you return to because it’s where you belong, not because it needs you to fix it.

I kissed him. Hard, deep, my hips never stopping, the rhythm building toward something immense. His cock was trapped between us, slick with precome, the friction of my stomach providing the pressure his body craved, and I could feel him getting close — the tightening around me, the acceleration of his breathing, the way his heels dug into my lower back.

“I’m—” he started.

“I know. Come for me, sweetheart.”

He came with his eyes open and his hands on my face and my name in his mouth like a declaration, his body clenching around me in rhythmic waves that pulled my own orgasm from somewhere deep and primal and unhesitating. I came inside him with a groan that the neighbors definitely heard and I absolutely did not care.

We collapsed. Sticky, sweaty, breathing like we’d renovated an entire house in nineteen minutes.

“The sauce,” Theo said, into my neck.

I looked at the clock. “Eighteen minutes.”

“We had a minute to spare.”

“We’re efficient.”

He laughed. The real one. The crooked one. The one that had lived inside my chest since Week One and would live there until the heat death of the universe, which was the same timeline I’d given the bedframe, and I intended to honor both warranties.

I pulled out. Dealt with the condom. Pulled him against my chest and held on, and his hand went to its place over my heart, and his breathing went to its rhythm — three in, four out — and the house settled around us with the sound of a structure that was perfectly, finally, completely occupied.

“Welcome home,” Theo said.

“I’ve been home for weeks.”

“Now it’s administratively confirmed.”

I held him tighter. He pressed closer. The sauce simmered downstairs. The floor creaked in the spot we’d kept. The bedframe held.

Everything held.

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