🔥 Bonus Chapter
Straight Line, Crooked Bed — Christening
by Jace Wilder
⚠️ Warning: Explicit MM sexual content, praise kink, switching, graphic language. Readers 18+. Major spoiler — read Straight Line, Crooked Bed first.
Christening
ROWAN
The new apartment had a shower curtain.
An actual, functional, floor-to-ceiling shower curtain that hung from actual rings on an actual rod, and when I pulled it closed, the water stayed inside the tub instead of flooding the bathroom floor like a biblical judgment on my plumbing choices. There was also a shower head — not the handheld sprayer I’d been using for two years like a man washing a dog, but a real mounted showerhead with three pressure settings and a rainfall mode that made me feel like a person who deserved nice things.
I stood under the rainfall setting for approximately forty-five seconds before the curtain slid back and Theo stepped in behind me.
“We have a shower curtain,” I said, not turning around. “Did you notice? It has rings.“
“I noticed.” His chest pressed against my back. His hands settled on my hips. His mouth found the curve where my neck met my shoulder, and he kissed the spot — slow, open-mouthed, the kind of kiss that has intentions. “I also noticed we haven’t christened this bathroom yet.”
“We’ve been here four hours.”
“Exactly. We’re behind schedule.”
I laughed — the sound bouncing off the tile, amplified by the enclosed space. The shower made everything louder: the water, the laughter, the sound I made when Theo’s hand slid from my hip to my stomach and then lower, fingers trailing through the water running down my body.
“You made a schedule?“
“I made a list. There’s a difference.” His voice was low against my ear, his breath warm even against the steam. “Kitchen counter. Living room couch — the real couch, the one that doesn’t collapse. Bedroom floor. Bedroom wall. Bedroom bed, obviously. Shower. That’s six locations. We need to average one every two hours to finish by midnight.”
“You engineered a christening schedule.”
“I optimized a christening schedule. There’s a critical path.”
I turned around. He was wet and naked and grinning — the full grin, the unguarded one, the one I’d spent twenty chapters of our relationship unlocking — and the water ran down his chest and his abs and pooled in the hollows of his hips, and he looked like something carved from warm stone and then brought to life by a god with a sense of humor and a deep appreciation for broad shoulders.
“I love you,” I said, “but you are clinically insane.”
“I love you too. Now turn around.”
The authority in his voice — quiet, certain, the version of Theo that had arrived somewhere around the third month of our relationship and never left — sent a pulse of heat through me that had nothing to do with the water temperature. I turned. Braced my hands against the tile. Felt his body close the distance behind me, his chest against my back, his cock hardening against my ass.
“You’ve gotten bossy,” I murmured.
“You like it when I’m bossy.”
“I do. It’s deeply annoying and incredibly hot and I want you to keep doing it forever.”
He reached around me. One hand wrapped around my cock — already hard, because Theo Park standing behind me naked and wet and giving orders is a stimulus my body responds to with the reliability of a peer-reviewed finding — and stroked. Slow. Deliberate. The water slicking his grip, making the friction smooth and devastating.
“The critical path,” he said against my neck, his hand working me in long, unhurried pulls, “starts here.”
“If you say ‘critical path’ while jerking me off one more time, I’m going to — fuck —”
He twisted on the upstroke. Thumbed the head. My knees buckled and his free arm locked around my waist, holding me up, his grip tightening in a way that was both supportive and possessive and exactly, precisely, mathematically right.
“What were you saying?” he asked.
“Nothing. I was saying nothing. Keep going.”
He kept going. The water cascaded over both of us — hot, relentless — and his hand moved faster, finding the rhythm that he’d learned through weeks of practice and communication and the quiet, focused attentiveness of a man who approaches his partner’s pleasure the way he approaches structural engineering: with research, precision, and an absolute refusal to cut corners.
I came against the tile wall. Gasping, shaking, my forehead pressed against the cool ceramic while his hand worked me through the aftershocks and his mouth pressed kisses along the curve of my spine — one between each vertebra, methodical, mapping me.
“One down,” he said against my shoulder blade. “Five to go.”
“You’re keeping count?”
“I’m an engineer, Rowan. I always keep count.”
The kitchen counter was next.
We didn’t make it to the bedroom in between. We barely made it out of the bathroom — I was on my knees on the bath mat before he could reach for a towel, my mouth on him, water dripping from my hair onto his thighs, and the sounds he made echoed off the tile in a way that I wanted to record and play on a loop for the rest of my natural life.
But I didn’t finish him there. I pulled off right at the edge — his hips stuttering, his hand in my hair, his voice cracking on a “Rowan, please” that nearly broke my resolve — and stood up and kissed him and walked backward into the kitchen, pulling him by the hand.
The counter was new. Clean. Granite, not the chipped laminate of the old apartment. I hoisted myself up onto it and pulled him between my legs and he stepped in like he’d been designed for this specific geometry — my thighs around his hips, his hands on my waist, our cocks sliding together between us, both of us still damp from the shower.
“The counter is cold,” I noted.
“You’ll warm it up.” He kissed my jaw. My neck. The spot behind my ear that made my vision blur. “You warm everything up.”
“That might be the most romantic thing you’ve ever said.”
“I’ve said more romantic things.”
“Name one.”
He pulled back. Looked at me. The kitchen was half-unpacked — boxes on the floor, mugs not yet shelved, the basil plant sitting on the windowsill because it was the first thing we placed, before furniture, before dishes, before anything else. The basil went first. It was non-negotiable.
“I’m his boyfriend,” he said.
Three months later and the words still hit me like a wall. The simplicity of them. The public weight of them. The memory of the gallery and the sketches and the moment the world changed from roommate to his.
“Okay,” I whispered. “That one wins.”
He kissed me — deep, claiming, his hands gripping the edge of the counter on either side of my hips, his body pressing into me. I wrapped my legs tighter around him and reached between us and took both of us in one hand — a tight, slick grip, our cocks pressed together — and stroked.
“You’re so good at that,” he breathed against my mouth, and the praise — from him, directed at me — did the thing it always did: lit me up from the inside, a flush of warmth and want that started in my chest and spread outward until my whole body was humming.
“You’re one to talk.” I squeezed tighter. He groaned — loud, uninhibited, the version of Theo that only existed in these moments when every wall was down and every version collapsed into the one real person underneath. “The sounds you make should be illegal.”
“Arrest me.”
“After we finish the critical path.”
He laughed into my mouth and I stroked us faster and we came together — his first, which triggered mine, the pulse and the heat and the shared mess between us — and we sat there on the granite counter in the new kitchen with the basil plant watching from the windowsill and our bodies tangled and shaking and I thought: This is our kitchen. This is our counter. This is our life.
We made it through four of the six locations by 10 PM.
The couch held up — structurally sound, genuinely functional, a piece of furniture that supported two adult men having vigorous sex without a single concerning noise, which was so far from the decorative death trap in the old apartment that we both paused afterward to appreciate it.
“This couch is amazing,” Theo said, sprawled across it, naked, one arm behind his head. “It doesn’t lean. It doesn’t creak. Nothing is propped on textbooks.”
“It’s a real couch. For real adults. Who have real sex on it.”
“We are real adults.”
“We moved a basil plant before we moved furniture. We’re barely functional.”
The bedroom floor was spontaneous — we were unpacking sheets and he bent over to reach a fitted sheet at the bottom of a box and I tackled him. His back hit the carpet and I climbed on top of him and rode him right there, between the moving boxes and the unmade bed, and the carpet burn on my knees was going to last a week and I didn’t care.
“You’re incredible,” he gasped, hands on my hips, watching me move above him with the focused, awed expression that I would never, ever get tired of. “The way you look right now — Rowan — I can’t —”
“You can. You are.” I rolled my hips. Found the angle. His cock hit the spot inside me that made my vision go white and I planted my hands on his chest and chased it — fast, selfish, taking what I wanted, and his hands tightened on my waist and he thrust up into me and called me beautiful and told me I was perfect and the praise poured through me like warm water and I came untouched, the way he taught me I could, the way my body learned from his.
He followed me thirty seconds later. His back arching off the carpet, his mouth open, my name broken into syllables on his lips.
Afterward, lying on the floor between boxes, I said: “We skipped the bedroom wall.”
“We can double back.”
“That’s not very efficient. It disrupts the critical path.”
“I’m willing to accept the deviation. For quality-control purposes.”
The bedroom wall was slow. Face to face, my back against the plaster, his hands under my thighs, holding me up. We were tired and sore and tender and the pace was unhurried — not frantic, not desperate, just two bodies that knew each other so well they could move together in the dark with the precision of people who had been building toward this for a long time and planned to keep building for longer.
“I love this apartment,” I said, legs around his waist, arms around his neck.
“I love you,” he said, and thrust deep, and I stopped talking.
At midnight, we were in bed. The new bed — a proper queen with a level frame and a mattress that did not tilt.
“It doesn’t slope,” Theo said, lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. The ceiling was clean. No water stain. No cloud-dog-question-mark.
“Nope.”
“If I stay on my side, I’ll actually stay on my side.”
“Theoretically.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he rolled toward me. Wrapped his arm around my waist. Pulled me into the center of the mattress — the flat, level, structurally sound center — and fitted his body against mine.
“I don’t want to stay on my side,” he said, against my hair.
“I know.” I pressed back into him. Felt his heartbeat against my shoulder blade. “You never did.”
“The old bed was better.”
“The old bed was a health hazard.”
“The old bed brought us together.”
“Gravity brought us together. The bed just had the good sense to lean in the right direction.”
He tightened his arm around me. I closed my eyes. The new apartment was quiet — no groaning stairs, no leaky pipes, no landlord named Pete. Just the hum of the refrigerator and the distant sound of traffic and Theo’s breathing, slowing, settling, beginning the four-minute descent into sleep that I’d memorized so thoroughly it was practically a lullaby.
“Six out of six,” he murmured, half-asleep.
“Critical path complete.”
“Full optimization.”
“Go to sleep, Theo.”
“Going to sleep.”
He was out in four minutes. Right on schedule.
I lay there in his arms, in our bed, in our apartment, and I thought about the crooked bed in the old place — the tilted frame, the squeaking springs, the dip in the center that pulled us together every night regardless of how we started. The bed that heard every first: the first accidental spooning, the first deliberate touch, the first time he said my name like it was a sound he’d been waiting his whole life to make.
This bed was level. This bed was new. This bed didn’t pull us anywhere.
We pulled ourselves.
That was the whole point.
— End —
Never Miss a Release
Get new release alerts, exclusive bonus content, and reader-only giveaways.