🔥 Bonus Chapter: Slang Lab

A bonus scene from Star Pupil, Dirty Mouth by Jace Wilder
TOO HOT for Amazon

Bonus Chapter — Slang Lab

RAFI

Lisbon — six months in

The first rule of slang lab was: no dictionaries.

The second rule was: no formal register.

The third rule was: if you say something that sounds like it belongs in a committee meeting, the lesson resets to zero and the teacher — that’s me, the menace, the star pupil turned tenured professor of the gutter — gets to choose the penalty, and the penalty system is, per the amended terms of a contract drafted on a brownstone desk fourteen months ago, performance-based.

“Put it away,” I said. “Baz. Put the phone down.”

“I’m verifying the etymology—”

“There is no etymology. It’s slang. It was born in a bar at two a.m., it lives on the street outside Senhor Tomás’s fish stall, it has never once been inside a dictionary, and if you look it up you are going to find a formal definition that has nothing to do with what anyone in this city actually means when they say it.” I plucked the phone from his hands and set it on the counter, face down, the way a man disarms a weapon. “Rule one. No references. You learn it the way I learned it — from someone’s mouth.”

He looked at me across our kitchen table — Senhor Abel’s table, the scarred one, the load-bearing one, sixty years of other people’s dinners plus approximately four months of ours, some of which involved dinner and some of which the table would prefer not to discuss at a tribunal — with an expression caught between amusement and academic injury. Saturday morning. The gold light was coming in through the laundry lines, striping the tile, and he was wearing his weekend glasses and my T-shirt, which he’d started doing after month three and refused to discuss, and which did something to my chest that I also refused to discuss, because some things you just let stand in the middle of the room.

I was standing in front of the whiteboard. His whiteboard, technically — he’d installed it for exam prep, because the man could not exist in a room for longer than seventy-two hours without mounting a writing surface to a wall — but I’d colonized it three weeks ago for this exact purpose: the first official session of Rafi Santos’s Street Portuguese Immersion Program.

The whiteboard had three phrases on it. Written in my hand, deliberately terrible, no accent marks, to make a point.

“Lesson one,” I said, tapping the board with his own pointer — he owned a pointer, the man was beyond saving, I was simply managing the condition. “Survival vocabulary. These are the three phrases that Senhor Tomás, Senhora Pires, and every taxi driver in Alfama will use on you this week, and you will currently understand zero of them, because your Portuguese was built in a boardroom and my people do not live in boardrooms.”

“My Portuguese is—”

“Embassy Portuguese.” I said it like a diagnosis. I’d been waiting months for this — ever since the day I’d watched him order fish at the market in a construction so formally perfect that Tomás had stared at him for four full seconds and then turned to me and said, in the fastest street Portuguese available to human speech, your husband talks like a news anchor from 1974, does he know? And Baz had smiled and nodded politely because he’d understood approximately the preposition. “Beautiful. Precise. Like a man wearing a tuxedo to a barbecue. Nobody’s going to throw you out, but they’re going to talk about you the second you leave, and what they say will be in this register, and you will stand there smiling politely while an eighty-year-old woman says something filthy about your posture and you nod like she complimented your tie.”

The rumor of the smile. Fourteen months and it still arrived the same way — slow, grudging, like a compliment paid under subpoena. “Has that happened?”

“It happened Tuesday. She said you walk like a man who irons his underwear. It was the most affectionate thing she’s ever said about anyone and you thanked her for the lovely weather.”

“I thanked her for—” He stopped. Processed. The ears went faintly pink above the weekend glasses. “She said that. To my face. In front of the—”

“In front of the entire stairwell. Dona Celeste from 4B applauded.”

He took off his glasses, pinched the bridge of his nose, and set them down on the table parallel to nothing. The surrender gesture. I’d catalogued every one of his tells in fifteen months of close study, and this one meant the architecture was standing down. Not all the way. Never all the way — the man’s composure had load-bearing walls that would survive a direct hit. But the decorative buttressing was coming off, and underneath it was the face I’d been collecting since a brownstone doorway in another country: bare, amused, ready to learn.

“Proceed,” he said. “I’m your student. God help us both.”

The next forty minutes were the best teaching of my career, and I say that as a man who learned from the best.

I ran him the way he’d run me — drill and repeat, no deviation, correcting his mouth on every phrase. Except his errors were the opposite of mine: where I’d been too loose, too fast, all street vowels and charm, Baz was too tight, too formal, every consonant polished until the word came out wearing cufflinks. The slang sat in his mouth like a borrowed jacket. He kept trying to improve it — adding a clause, formalizing a construction that was explicitly informal — and I had to stop him three times.

The first time, I pointed with the pointer and said “again, looser” and he produced something that sounded like a diplomat pretending to be casual at a state dinner.

The second time, I set down the pointer and came around the table and stood over him — his move, stolen wholesale, the lecturing orbit — and said, “Your mouth is doing what mine used to do, except backwards. Mine went street under pressure. Yours goes boardroom under pressure. The whole point of slang is that it doesn’t try. Drop the last syllable. Everyone does.”

He dropped it. Mechanically. The word came out clipped in the right places but still starched, still embassy, still wearing its ID badge.

The third time — and this is the one that changed the temperature of the room, because of course it was, because every pivot between us had always been hands — I stepped into the space between his knees and took his jaw in my hand.

Thumb under his lip. Two fingers along the hinge. His own move, returned to sender across four thousand miles and fourteen months and a whole restructured life, and the effect was instantaneous: his eyes went wide, his breath caught, and his whole body did the thing it always did when I touched him like I was teaching him — went still. Not composed-still. Held-still. The stillness of a man whose operating system had just received a priority interrupt.

“Your tongue is wearing a tie,” I said, tilting his face up to the gold light, watching the flush start below the collar of my stolen T-shirt. “Take it off. Not literally — Baz, focus — say it like you’re late for something and don’t care.”

“I have never been late for something in my—”

“Pretend.”

He pretended. With my thumb on his lip and my eyes on his mouth and fourteen months of reverse-engineering his entire methodology fueling the drill, he pretended, and on the third attempt the phrase came out clipped and careless and alive — it sounded like my grandmother’s kitchen, like the market at closing, like the language the rubric spent twenty years trying to take from me, living now in the most precise mouth I’d ever kissed — and he looked so startled at his own sound that I had to let go and turn back to the whiteboard before my face gave away the entire scoring system.

“Good,” I said. The word landed differently in this direction. I felt it — felt his eyes on my back, felt the charge of it, the reversed polarity of our whole arrangement humming in the four feet between the table and the board. Fifteen months ago that word in that voice had detonated me. Now I was the one dispensing it, and the discovery of what that did — the power of being the mouth that paid the praise — was still new enough to wreck me every time. “Again.”

“I’m being graded.”

“Scored. Different word, bigger stakes.” I turned around, and whatever my face was doing was apparently not hidden at all, because his expression had acquired the specific quality I knew from fifteen months of close study: the tutor recognizing a lever, and choosing, with full transparency, to pull it.

“And the scoring mechanism?” he asked, voice dropping half a register.

“Performance-based.”

“Naturally.” He leaned back in his chair — my chair, at my table, in our kitchen — and looked up at me with his bare eyes, and his legs fell open an inch, just an inch, the laziest, most deliberate invitation ever extended by a man in weekend glasses, and said, in the formal register, immaculate, because the man was constitutionally incapable of leaving his own weapon on the shelf even while surrendering: “I am your very attentive student, professor. Grade me however you see fit.”

Fifteen months ago I’d been on my knees in a brownstone being told to use my mouth properly. Full circle. The circle was on fire. I was standing inside it holding a whiteboard pointer and losing a battle with my own heart rate.

“Phrase two,” I said. My voice had gone somewhere without my permission. “On the board. The one about wanting something. Say it.”

He said it. Embassy Portuguese, spotless, correct, and completely wrong — the kind of wanting you’d express in a letter to a utilities company, not the kind that had any blood in it.

“No. That’s the version you’d say to a waiter. Nobody wants things like that — that verb is for menus and requests for proposals. The street version drops the pronoun entirely and swaps the verb for—” I said the street version, fast, clipped, the way Tomás says it when he’s holding the last good prawns and three people want them: a word that comes out like a grabbed wrist. “Your turn.”

He tried. Too clean. The consonants had been to finishing school and were refusing to slum.

“Rougher.”

He tried again. Closer — the ending dropped, but the vowel stayed diplomatic.

I stepped back between his knees. Set one hand on the table beside his hip, leaned down, and shaped the word into his mouth with my own — lips close enough to brush, the street vowel modeled at a distance of one shared breath, and said “rougher, drop the ending, you’re not requesting, you’re taking—”

He said it. Rough. Dropped ending. Perfect street. The vowel worn smooth by actual wanting, the consonant bitten off like something stolen, and it came out of his careful mouth sounding like mine — like my language, my register, my grandmother’s kitchen — and the sound of it, the possession of it, hit me somewhere below the curriculum.

And then he closed his lips around my thumb and sucked.

The scoreboard went off like a fire alarm.

“Full marks,” I breathed, and he pulled me down into his lap by my belt loops, and the whiteboard behind us watched impassively as slang lab’s academic program underwent a sudden and dramatic restructuring.

The kiss was filthy and laughing and tasted like the coffee we’d been drinking all morning. His hands were up under my shirt immediately — palms flat on my ribs, sliding up, dragging the fabric, because some research has a fifteen-month head start and the man retained everything. I ground down against him in the chair — our chair, the grading chair, transplanted four thousand miles from a brownstone office where I’d once ridden him after full marks — and felt him hard beneath me already, had been hard for how long, since the jaw grip, since good, since I’d turned the entire mechanism he built for me around and aimed it at him, and the feedback loop of that — me in the teaching position, him chasing my approval, the circuit reversed and completing — lit me up from the scalp down.

“Pop quiz,” I said against his mouth, rolling my hips in a slow grind that pulled a groan out of him. “The word for this — what we’re doing, right now, in this chair. The street version, not the embassy version. There are four of them in common use and they all mean the same thing and none of them are in your dictionary.”

“Rafi—”

“Grade depends on it.” I reached between us and palmed him through his trousers — full contact, heel of my hand pressing the length of him through soft cotton, and watched his face do the thing I lived for: the formal register collapsing in real time, jaw going loose, eyes going dark, the composure stripping itself in layers like a man undressing in fast-forward. He was gorgeous like this. He was gorgeous always, but like this — underneath me, losing his own architecture because I’d found the lever and I was thorough — he was something I didn’t have vocabulary for in any language, street or embassy or otherwise.

He produced, to his eternal credit, two of the four words. With entirely passable street vowels and his hips grinding up against my hand, he got two out of four before the sentence disintegrated into my name, spoken like a verb he’d invented.

“Fifty percent,” I murmured, standing him up out of the chair, walking him backward toward the bedroom the way he’d once walked me, pulling his shirt — my shirt, my stolen property, the evidence of six months of cohabitation’s quiet thefts — over his head as we crossed the threshold. “Passing. Barely. Let’s see if you can do extra credit.”

I put him on our bed. His bed, technically — the one he’d made that morning with hospital corners and military precision, because Sebastian Adler could not leave a surface unordered any more than he could leave a vowel ungraded — and I unmade it deliberately, luxuriously, thoroughly, because some people are who they are, and who I am is the man who learned from the world’s best teacher that the lesson doesn’t end when the drill stops.

I stripped him slow. Narrated the whole time in the street register — running commentary, every unbuttoned inch earning a vocabulary word he’d never find in a textbook. The slang for his throat, where I bit lightly and felt his pulse stutter under my teeth. The slang for the sound he made when I scraped my nails down his ribs — a word that’s basically a gasp with consonants attached, and I made him repeat it back while I was doing the thing that caused it, and the resulting attempt was so destroyed it barely qualified as language and I gave it full marks anyway because the effort was magnificent.

The slang for the line of hair below his navel, which I followed with my mouth, unhurried, feeling his stomach clench under my lips. The slang for the way his hands fisted in the sheets when I mouthed him through his briefs — a two-syllable word that tastes like want and sounds like surrender, and I said it against the hard shape of him through the cotton and felt his whole body bow.

“Rafi — please—”

“That’s English. Penalty.”

“You’re a tyrant—”

“In the language. Street version. The word for please when you actually mean it — not the polite one, the desperate one, the one Tomás uses when the delivery is late and he needs the fish—”

He found it. Hoarse, broken, gorgeous — he found the street-please, the one that sounds like begging even to people who don’t speak the language, and I rewarded it by pulling his briefs down and taking him in my mouth.

His head dropped back against the pillow and the sound he made was an entire semester of coursework compressed into one syllable. I took my time. Learned him at a pace that would have driven him insane if he’d been running the lesson — tongue flat, then pointed, circling the head of him slow enough that his thighs started shaking, then taking him deep enough that his hand shot to my hair and gripped and his hips jolted off the ruined hospital corners.

“Repeat,” I said, pulling off, hand working him slow and steady while he stared down the length of his own wrecked body at me. “The phrase on the board. Phrase three. The one about needing.”

“I can’t — Rafi, I can’t conjugate while you’re—”

“You made me conjugate face-down on a desk. You made me conjugate in front of a mirror while you were three fingers deep and narrating. You will survive a blowjob.” I licked a long, lazy stripe from base to tip and watched his composure make its last stand. His jaw clenched. His fingers tightened in my curls. “The phrase. Street version. Now.”

He produced it. Wrecked, gasping, fisting the sheets with one hand and my hair with the other, he produced the street phrase for needing — rough, clipped, dropped ending, no embassy anywhere in it, the kind of needing that lives in the body and comes out of the mouth only under duress — and it came out perfect. The vowels worn smooth. The consonant bitten. My grandmother’s language in the most careful mouth in Lisbon, and the sound of my street in him, in his mouth, while I had him in mine — that was the hottest thing I had ever engineered in my life, and I had once been fucked in front of a mirror while reciting formal grammar, so the bar was not low.

“Full marks,” I said, and swallowed him whole — deep, throat working, his cock hitting the back of my mouth while I breathed through it the way he’d taught me in a brownstone office a lifetime ago, breathe through your nose, don’t fight it, good, that’s better — and he said several things in rapid sequence in at least two languages, none of them formal, some of them structurally innovative, all of them retained forever by a man on his knees who was still, even now, taking notes.

I worked him like I had all morning to spend on it. Long, slow pulls. The thing with my tongue he’d discovered at month two that made his hand spasm in my hair. Pulling off to mouth his balls while my fist kept the rhythm, his thighs thrown open and trembling, the Saturday gold light painting him like an altarpiece of the profane. I catalogued every sound. The sharp inhale when I grazed teeth. The low, continuous moan when I set a rhythm and held it. The way he said my name with increasing desperation, each repetition losing another layer of polish until the last one came out street — Rafi, clipped, dropped ending, bitten off — and the sound of my own name in his broken register almost finished me untouched in my own jeans.

But I wasn’t done — slang lab has standards — and when he was shaking and close, when I could feel the tremor in his thighs and the tightening at his base that meant thirty seconds, I pulled off.

He made a sound I will be filing under war crimes for the rest of our natural lives.

“Not yet,” I said — his line, from his playbook, the night before the exam when he’d edged me for an hour and sent me to the panel hungry. Interest compounding. Payback, performance-based. “Extra credit isn’t over.”

I crawled up his body and told him, in the street register — in clipped, rough, gorgeous Portuguese that my grandmother would have been scandalized and secretly delighted by — exactly what I wanted. Told him where: our bed, the one with the hospital corners in ruins, the one I was going to ride him in until the headboard added its voice to the proceedings. Told him how: slow first, because I wanted to watch his face, and then however he needed, because some things you earn and some things you give and this was both. Told him how much: everything, the whole syllabus, the entire accumulated overage of fifteen months of a man who tracked his minutes like a federal auditor finally, permanently, off the clock.

Used every word the textbook doesn’t have. Made him repeat each one — between kisses, between gasps, his mouth learning the shapes against mine — and each repetition came out rougher, truer, more his, the embassy Portuguese burning off him like morning fog, and underneath it the man who’d always been there: a quick study with a filthy mouth when he let it be one.

The supplies lived in the nightstand now, not in a desk drawer or a bag pocket — domesticated, permanent, as much a part of the bedroom furniture as the lamp and the framed certificates on the hall wall outside the door. I slicked my own fingers and opened myself up straddling his thighs while he watched me do it, because the visual — his methodology, the mirror principle, look at yourself, that’s what I see — worked both directions, and watching Sebastian Adler watch me work myself open on my own hand with his cock hard and untouched between us and his careful eyes blown black was a unit I could teach for semesters.

“You’re — ” he started, voice wrecked, hands gripping my thighs with the restrained desperation of a man following a rule he didn’t set. “Rafi. The sight of you—”

“In the language. Street version. Tell me what you see.” I added a third finger and gasped and watched him watch me gasp and the recursion of it, the shared witnessing, was the whole relationship in one frame: two men who’d spent fifteen months learning to let the other one look.

He told me what he saw. In the language. Street version — rough, clipped, dropping endings all over the place, the embassy burning, and some of it was vocabulary I’d taught him and some of it he’d found on his own, studying the way he studied everything, with dedication that bordered on obsession and accuracy that bordered on art, and one phrase — one — came out so perfectly, so filthily, so street, that I stopped everything I was doing and just looked at him.

“Say that again.”

He said it again. Grinning now. Flushed dark to the chest, painfully hard, my thighs bracketing his, and grinning — the real one, the full one, the one that only happens when the architecture is all the way down and the man underneath it is delighted with himself.

“Full marks,” I whispered. “Distinction.” And I slicked him up and sank down onto him in one slow, devastating slide.

The stretch of him. Every time. Fifteen months of this and the first inch still whited the edges of my vision, still made my hands clamp on his chest and my head drop forward and my whole body reorganize itself around the fact of him. He held my hips — not guiding, not steering, holding, the way you hold something you’re afraid will disappear if you squeeze wrong — and I seated myself full and stayed there, breathing, adjusting, and in the mirror of his face I watched the same thing happen to him that happened to me: the moment the lesson stopped and the person started.

“Okay,” I breathed, forehead dropping to his. “Okay. I’ve got you. I’ve got—”

“You have me.” Quiet. Hands sliding from my hips to my back, pulling me down against his chest. Heart hammering under my palm. “You have me. Move.”

I moved.

Slow first, because I’d promised, and because slow was the discovery — long rolling drags of my hips that pulled sounds out of both of us like instruments being played by the same hand. He was deep at this angle, deeper than the chair, and every roll found the spot inside me that made my vision spark and my vocabulary evaporate, and I chased it shamelessly, grinding down, finding the angle and then keeping it, riding him with the steady, deliberate rhythm of a man who’d learned pacing from a metronome and was now deploying it for purposes the metronome had not consented to.

And he talked. Because he always talked — that was the whole original discovery, the voice kink that ran both ways, the wiring that turned language into touch — and this time, for the first time since I’d declared slang lab, he talked in the street register.

Not perfectly. Not yet. But trying — the formal constructions crumbling mid-sentence, the street words I’d drilled surfacing in the wreckage, dropped endings and rough vowels mixed in with the polish like two languages having a conversation in one mouth. He told me what I felt like. He told me what I looked like above him. He told me — and this one, I’m keeping forever, pressed between the pages of whatever ledger we’re using now — that I was the best teacher he’d ever had, in a construction so perfectly, ungrammatically, beautifully street that my grandmother would have wept and then pretended she hadn’t.

“Tell me,” I said, riding him harder now, the slow gone the way slow always goes with us — burned off by the third or fourth perfect word, replaced by the thing underneath, the real rhythm, the one that doesn’t care about form. His hands gripped my hips hard enough to bruise and I wanted the bruise, wanted the evidence, arched my back and took him deeper and said it again: “Tell me. In the language. Street version. Not I love you — that one you already know. Tell me the version people actually say. The short one. The rough one. The one that sounds like slang and means everything.”

And Sebastian Adler — former university lecturer, precision instrument, the best teacher who ever stood in front of anyone, my whole restructured life in weekend glasses and my stolen T-shirt now lost somewhere in the hallway — looked up at me from his wrecked bed with his careful eyes blown wide and his hips driving up into me and his hands pulling me down, and said it.

Two syllables. Dropped ending. Street vowels. The roughest, smallest, truest version of the biggest word in any language — the one the textbooks don’t teach because it can’t survive formality, the one that lives only in kitchens and bedrooms and stairwells, the one my mother says to me on the phone at the end of every call like a door being closed gently.

Perfect.

“Again,” I whispered.

He said it again, and I clenched around him and his hips stuttered and his hands scrambled for grip.

“Again—”

He said it again, and my hand found my own cock between us and started stroking in the rhythm he’d set from below, his thrusts and my fist and the word all syncing into one pulse.

“Again—”

And on the fourth one — buried deep, voice breaking, hands pulling me down against him so hard we breathed from the same place — I came. All over his chest and my fist and the ruins of his hospital corners, shouting something in the street register that was either his name or a prayer or a word I’d just invented, my body seizing around him in waves, and the clench of me dragged him over inside a heartbeat with the word still on his lips, cresting, his spine bowing, his arms locking around my back like a man catching a fall, and the gold came in through the laundry lines and found us like that: tangled, ruined, fluent, the whiteboard in the other room still holding its three phrases like a patient syllabus with nowhere to be.

The aftercare had its own grammar now, fifteen months deep.

He reached the water first — he always reached the water first, even wrecked, even still breathing like he’d sprinted somewhere, the caretaker reflex so hardwired that I suspected it preceded the teaching and might in fact be the source code — and we passed the glass back and forth in the tangled sheets, and at some point a warm cloth appeared and was applied with the clinical tenderness of a man grading his own aftercare and accepting nothing below distinction.

I pulled him down beside me and arranged him the way I wanted — head on my chest, his hand splayed over my ribs, my fingers in his hair doing the slow aimless thing that I’d learned in a brownstone and perfected in an Alfama bedroom. His breathing slowed. His finger traced shapes on my sternum — the three phrases from the whiteboard, written and rewritten on my skin in invisible ink, and I felt each one land like a word in a letter I’d keep.

“I have a complaint,” Baz said, eventually, into my collarbone, “about the pedagogical approach.”

“File it formally.”

“The grading was inconsistent. I produced phrase three under extreme duress — cardiovascular duress, Rafi, possibly medical — and received no verbal confirmation until—”

“You received physical confirmation. Immediate. Extensive. Documented across the bedsheets.”

“The methodology—”

“Scored ninety-two percent on the final. The methodology stands. The eight percent deduction was for the phrase-two attempt where you added a subordinate clause to a two-word expression. Slang doesn’t have subordinate clauses, Baz. It’s philosophically opposed.”

“It needed context—”

“It needed to be said, not annotated. You annotated a sex word. I’m docking you and I’m not sorry.”

He was quiet a moment. His finger stilled on my sternum. I felt him composing something — the careful man and the wrecked man negotiating over the next sentence, the way they always did, the way I’d learned to wait for.

Then, in the street register — rough, clipped, dropped ending, so natural I almost missed it, so fluent it could have been born in this city instead of learned in this bed — he said:

“Same time next Saturday?”

The pronunciation was perfect. The vowels were street. The asking was street — not the formal request structure, not the conditional softening, just the raw two-word version that means I want more of this and I want more of you and the curriculum is the point.

I pressed my mouth to the top of his head, heart doing the thing it does, the permanent thing, the off-syllabus thing, the thing with no clinical name I stopped reaching for a year ago and no street name I’ve found yet, though I suspect it’s the two syllables he said while I was above him, dropped ending, rough as wanting, the truest word in either language.

“Do it properly,” I said. “And I’ll think about it.”

His laugh moved through me like gold light through laundry lines. Outside, the city went on being the city — fado, tile, market-shouts, the language that raised me living in every wall and stairwell and fish stall, and now, through no rubric’s doing and every teacher’s gift, in the careful mouth of the man on my chest.

Some Saturdays you close the ledger early. Every column holds.

The entanglement, as always, is the point.

← Back to Star Pupil, Dirty Mouth

Never Miss a Release

Get new release alerts, exclusive bonus content, and reader-only giveaways.