Bad Neighbor, Great Lay

An exclusive bonus chapter by Isla Wilde

This scene takes place six months after the events of the novel.
It is explicit, graphic, and entirely too filthy for Amazon. You’re welcome.

The Thin Wall — Sunday Morning

JESS

The conversation starts at seven AM, which is not when I planned to have it.

I planned to have it over dinner. Maybe wine. Candles. A carefully constructed argument about square footage, closet space, and the logistical absurdity of two people who sleep in the same bed every night maintaining separate leases on adjacent apartments. I had talking points. I had a spreadsheet — because I’ve been living with Marcus Lane for six months and the man’s influence is insidious — with columns for rent savings, commute times, and a tab labeled “Pros of One Kitchen” that contained exactly one entry: Marcus cooks in it.

But Cora is at Lauren’s for the weekend, and Marcus is in my shower — my shower, in my apartment, where he’s spent every Cora-free night for the past four months — and I’m standing in my bathroom doorway in his henley and nothing else, watching steam curl around the glass door, and listening to him hum.

He hums in the shower now. He never used to. The man who enforced quiet hours and filed noise complaints and once left a Post-it on my door about decibel levels now stands under hot water and hums the songs I play on the record player, slightly off-key, completely unselfconscious, and the sound of it fills the small bathroom like something warm and permanent.

“Marcus.”

The humming stops. The shower door opens an inch. He peers out — wet hair pushed back from his forehead, water dripping down his jaw into his beard. His eyes find me and do the thing. The soft thing. Six months and the soft thing still hits me like a fist to the sternum every single time.

“Morning,” he says. His voice is rough with sleep and steam.

“We need to talk about the apartments.”

“Now?”

“We have duplicate spice racks, Marcus. Duplicate. You labeled both of them. Identically.”

He opens the shower door wider. Steam billows out. He’s standing there — naked, wet, water streaming down his chest, the line of dark hair below his navel arrowing south like a road sign I’ve followed approximately one thousand times — and his expression is the one he makes when he’s amused but won’t admit it.

“You made a spreadsheet,” he says.

“About rent optimization and spatial efficiency.”

“Jess Rivera made a spreadsheet.” He grins. Devastating, dripping. “I’ve corrupted you.”

“You’ve rubbed off on me.”

“I’d like to rub off on you right now.”

“We can multitask.” He holds out his hand. Water running down his forearm. “Get in here and we’ll discuss the merger.”

I pull the henley over my head. Step out of my underwear. His eyes track every movement with the focused, proprietary attention of a man who has memorized this body and still watches like it’s the first time.

I step into the shower.

The shower is small. Built for one. When Marcus and I are in it together, every surface is contact — his chest against my back, his arms bracketing me against the tile, the water falling between us like a warm curtain that seals out the world.

He turns me toward the wall. Presses me against the tile — cold on my breasts, my stomach, my thighs — and his body covers me from behind, hot and hard.

“There’s the sound,” he murmurs against the back of my neck. “Six months and that’s still my favorite sound.”

“You used to complain about my sounds.”

“I used to be an idiot.” His hands slide around my waist. Down my hips. Higher — slow, deliberate. “Now I want every sound you make. Loud. I want the neighbors to hear.”

“We are the neighbors.”

“Then the walls will just have to deal with it.”

His right hand slides between my thighs from behind. I’m already swollen, already slick. His fingers part me — two of them, sliding through my folds, finding my clit and circling it with the exact pressure he knows will make me arch. I press my palms flat against the wet tile and push back against his hand.

“So,” he says, conversational, his fingers working me steadily. “Whose apartment are we keeping?”

“You’re negotiating right now?”

He presses two fingers inside me. Deep. Curling forward. The heel of his palm grinds against my clit. “Mine has Cora’s room. Bigger kitchen. The crooked shelf.”

“Mine has — fuck — mine has the studio. And — Marcus, don’t stop —”

“I’m multitasking.” He adds a third finger. The stretch is perfect. His mouth traces the line of my shoulder. “Counter-argument: my kitchen has a gas range.”

“I will burn your gas range to the ground if you stop what you’re doing.”

He laughs against my neck. The vibration sends my thoughts into white static. He’s curling his fingers on each stroke now, hitting the spot that makes my legs tremble, and his thumb has joined the effort on my clit, and I’m making sounds that would have gotten us a noise complaint from the old version of the man currently producing them.

“We could knock the wall down,” I gasp.

His fingers stop. Dead still inside me.

“The shared wall. Between 4A and 4B. We knock it down. Your kitchen, my studio. Marcus, please move your hand.”

He turns me around instead. His eyes are dark and enormous. Something that looks like a man watching the last wall between his old life and his new one disappear.

“Victor would have an aneurysm.”

“Victor would say ‘took you long enough’ and hand you the sledgehammer.”

He kisses me — hard, sudden, both hands on my face, the water streaming over us — and the kiss says yes before his mouth does.

“Yes. Knock it down. All of it.”

Then he drops to his knees on the shower floor.

Marcus Lane on his knees.

The sight of this man — this controlled, meticulous, container-labeling, quiet-hours-enforcing man — on his knees on wet tile with water running over his shoulders and his mouth six inches from the place that is screaming for him, is a thing I will never get used to.

He hooks my left leg over his right shoulder. Looks up at me through wet lashes.

“Hold on to something.”

I grab the showerhead and the door rail and he puts his mouth on me and the world narrows to a single point of contact.

His tongue finds my clit immediately — the flat of his tongue pressed against me and dragging. Slow. A long, wet, devastating stroke from entrance to apex, and the sound I make bounces off tile and fills the bathroom like a declaration.

“Louder,” he says against me. The vibration makes my hips buck. “No thin walls. No quiet hours. Let me hear you.”

He seals his mouth over my clit and sucks, and I give him what he asked for. Every sound. The steam fills the room and the mirror fogs and the showerhead rattles in my grip and he works me with his tongue in relentless, patterned circles — three slow, one fast, three slow, one fast — the rhythm of a man who has mapped this body with scientific precision.

His fingers join his mouth. Two inside me, curling, pressing forward while his tongue works my clit. The dual sensation builds like a wave — rising, gathering, aimed at a single point his mouth is circling with the deliberate, unhurried competence I fell in love with.

“Marcus — God — I’m going to —”

“I know.” Against me. The vibration. The confidence. “Let go. I’ve got you.”

I come so hard my leg buckles. The orgasm roars through me — a full-body detonation that starts where his mouth is and radiates outward. He holds me up with his arm locked around my thigh and his mouth still on me, riding the pulses, pressing soft kisses against my inner thigh as I shake apart above him.

He stands. Water streaming down his chest. Wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. That gesture. The casual, unapologetic swipe of a man who just had his face between my legs and isn’t remotely sorry about it.

“The merger is approved.”

“Get out of this shower and take me to bed.”

“We’re not going to make it to bed.”

“We never make it to bed.”

“That’s a feature, not a bug.”

We make it to the bathroom counter.

He lifts me onto the edge — effortless, my wet skin sliding against marble — and I wrap my legs around his waist. He’s hard against my inner thigh and the heat of him makes me grip his shoulders and roll my hips toward him in a way that is neither patient nor dignified.

“Condom.”

“Nightstand. Which is in the bedroom.”

“Marcus Lane, if you leave this bathroom I will change the locks.” I reach behind me, open the medicine cabinet, and pull out the box I stashed three months ago because I learned that Marcus and I do not reliably make it to the bedroom. “I planned ahead.”

“You hid condoms in the medicine cabinet.”

“I hid condoms in every room. Including the kitchen. Don’t look in the spice rack.”

He stares at me. Then he laughs — the real laugh, the full-body, head-back, joy-drunk laugh of a man undone by a woman who stores contraceptives next to the oregano — and the sound of it, wet and naked and bouncing off bathroom tile, is my favorite sound in the world.

He rolls the condom on. I watch. Then he steps between my legs and pushes in.

Slow. Inch by inch, his hands gripping the counter, his eyes locked on my face. I gasp when he’s fully inside me. The fullness. The stretch. Six months and the feeling hasn’t dulled. It’s gotten sharper — every nerve more attuned, every sensation amplified by the knowledge of what we went through to get here.

“Look,” he says into my ear. “Look behind you.”

The mirror is fogged from the shower, our reflections hazy — two figures intertwined, my legs around his waist, the outline of us visible through the mist like a painting made by someone’s breath.

He braces one hand against the glass and starts to move. His palm print appears in the fog — five fingers, spread wide, visible through the steam like a signature. Claiming the surface the way he claimed me: deliberately, with intention, leaving a mark.

“Watch,” he says. “Watch what you do to me.”

I watch. In the fogged mirror, I see him fight for control. I see the moment the fight fails — the crack, the fracture, the point where Marcus Lane stops managing and starts feeling — and the raw, devastating expression that crosses his face when he lets go is the most beautiful thing I have ever witnessed.

He thrusts harder. My hand finds the back of his neck. He’s hitting deep, the base of his cock grinding against my clit with every stroke, and the dual stimulation is building toward something enormous.

“You’re everything,” he says, and his voice breaks the way it broke the first time he said he loved me. Except this time he’s not terrified. He’s sure. “You’re everything I didn’t know I was allowed to have.”

“You’re allowed. You’re so fucking allowed, Marcus.”

He buries his face in my neck and drives into me and I come — shattering, clenching, my nails raking down his back. He follows three strokes later — his whole body locking, his arms crushing me against him, a groan so deep I feel it in my ribcage. We hold each other through it — shaking, gasping, two people who spent three months hiding this and six months learning that the only thing better than secret sex is sex with no secrets at all.

The mirror clears. His handprint remains on the glass — a perfect palm, five fingers, drying into visibility like evidence. That a man was here. That he left a mark.

“So. We’re knocking down the wall.”

“We’re knocking down the wall.”

“Victor’s going to need a bigger toolbox.”

“Victor’s going to need therapy.”

We make it to the bed eventually.

The second round is slower. Lazier. The frantic edge has burned off and what’s left is deep, unhurried intimacy. He lays me on the patchwork quilt — my grandmother’s quilt — and traces the lines of my body with his mouth like he’s drawing me. The curve of my hip. The dip of my waist. The underside of my breast, where his tongue makes me shiver.

“I’m going to paint you like this someday,” I tell him.

“Naked?”

“Post-coital. There’s a difference.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Naked is just a body. Post-coital is a body that’s been loved. The muscles are different. Everything’s softer.” I run my fingers through his hair. “You’re very paintable right now.”

“You’re very fuckable right now.”

“Again?”

“I’ve got a condom in the nightstand and apparently one in the spice rack. We have options.”

He climbs up my body. Kisses me. We go slow this time — face to face, my legs wrapped around him, forehead to forehead, eye contact through the entire thing. The praise comes softer now, less command and more confession. You feel like home. You feel like the place I was always supposed to end up. I spent three years in an empty apartment and I didn’t know it was empty until you filled it.

I come with tears on my face and his name on my lips and his hands laced through mine on the pillow, and afterward he holds me against his chest and neither of us speaks for a long time because the silence doesn’t need to be filled. It’s not empty. It’s not hiding anything.

It’s just peace.

I’m making pancakes when Cora arrives.

Not at noon. At ten fifteen, because Lauren had an early flight, and the front door opens while I’m standing at Marcus’s stove in his henley and my underwear, flipping a pancake that looks like a crime scene, and a seven-year-old rounds the corner with her backpack and Dr. Trunk and stops dead.

She looks at me. At the henley. At the pancakes. At Marcus, who’s sitting at the kitchen table in sweatpants and nothing else, looking like a man who has been thoroughly, comprehensively, repeatedly wrecked and is deeply pleased about it.

“I KNEW you were having a sleepover,” she says.

“Good morning, bug.”

“You said sleepovers were for kids.”

“I revised my position.”

“Can I have a sleepover too?”

“With whom?”

“Emma Henderson. She has a trampoline.”

“We’ll discuss it.”

“That means yes.” She examines my pancakes. “Jess, these look weird.”

“They taste fine. Probably.”

She takes a bite. “They’re okay.” Then: “Are you going to sleep over every time I’m at Mom’s?”

I look at Marcus. He looks at me.

“Actually, bug, we were thinking about something bigger than sleepovers.”

He tells her. Simply, clearly. No presentation, no project plan, just the truth delivered at kitchen-table height to a child eating weird pancakes and holding an elephant.

“So Jess is going to LIVE here? Like, LIVE live? Her plants and her record player and EVERYTHING?”

“Everything.”

Cora stands on her chair. Pumps both fists.

“I KNEW IT! I KNEW IT! I’M GETTING A STUDIO!”

“You’re getting a bigger room. The studio is Jess’s.”

“Can I paint in the studio?”

“Anytime you want,” I say.

She throws her arms around both of us — one around Marcus’s neck, one around mine — pulling us into a three-person huddle that smells like pancake batter and strawberry shampoo and the cedar-soap scent I used to catch through a wall and now breathe in every morning.

“This is the best day. Even better than when my penguin won the art show.”

Marcus catches my eye over her head. His eyes are wet. His grin is full. He looks like a man who has found everything he didn’t know he was allowed to have.

Through the wall — the thin wall, the famous wall, the wall that started it all — my record player clicks softly in the runout groove. The album ended hours ago. The needle is waiting.

Not for long. In six months, the wall comes down. The needle lifts. A new record starts.

But for now — this morning, this kitchen, this family — the clicking is enough. A heartbeat. A metronome. The steady, patient sound of a love that played all the way through.

Thank you for reading! If you loved Marcus and Jess, please consider leaving a review — it’s how other readers find their way through the wall.

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