Room Service — Bonus Chapter

by Jace Wilder

🔥 Director’s Cut

The unposted footage. Told from Alex’s point of view — the one scene that never made it to any screen. Too hot for Amazon, and always was.

Here is what the ninety seconds we posted didn’t show.

I killed the camera at the wink. That part’s true — I reached over, stopped the recording, told Ben we’d keep the rest, and I meant it. What I didn’t tell him, what I’ve never told anyone, is that I turned it off because I couldn’t do the next part in front of a lens even a fake one, even ours. Three years of my life run through that little glass eye. It has watched me do every intimate thing a body can do. And I could not, would not, let it watch me have him for the first time in a room that was actually mine.

So the camera went dark, and the apartment went quiet, and there he was.

Still in the mask. That was the thing that undid me — he’d left it on, gloved and anonymous and mine, standing in the soft light of my own bedroom where no camera had ever been, and the collision of those two facts short-circuited something I’d spent years keeping in careful working order. Room Service in my bedroom. The persona and the person, in the one place I’d sworn to keep separate from all of it, and I didn’t want them separate anymore. I hadn’t wanted them separate since Portland. I just hadn’t had the nerve to merge them until now, until the red light was off and it was safe to be greedy.

“Take it off,” I said. “The mask. I want the guy who does the crossword in pen.”

He reached up. I stopped his hands.

“No — slow. Let me.”

I peeled it off him myself, unhurried, the way you unwrap the one thing you actually wanted, and there was Ben underneath, flushed and blown-open and looking at me like I was the answer to a question he’d stopped asking anyone. God, that look. I’ve had two hundred thousand people look at me with hunger and it never once landed anywhere. He looks at me like that and I forget my own address.

“Hi,” he said, wrecked already, and we hadn’t even started.

“Hi.” I got him out of the gloves next, one finger at a time, unforgivably slow, and by the time I’d bared the compass on his wrist he was breathing like we’d been at it for an hour. I pressed my mouth to the tattoo. To the ink he brings to every shoot and hides. The one real mark on a body he lets the whole world watch and lets exactly one person actually touch. “You know what I kept thinking during the show?”

“Tell me.”

“That I couldn’t wait for the camera to die so I could stop performing wanting you and just do it.”

I put him on my bed. My bed. The one that had never held anyone but me and a laptop full of edits, and I stood over him a second just to look, because I’d built an entire brand on making people wait and it turns out the person I most wanted to make wait was myself.

“You’re doing the thing,” Ben said, breathless, propped on his elbows, gorgeous and impatient. “The looking thing. You do it on camera. I’ve lit it a hundred times.”

“It’s different when it’s real.”

“Prove it.”

So I did.

I took my time getting him out of the rest of it, cataloguing him the way I light a room — what makes a sound, what makes him arch, the spot under his jaw that turns his whole body into a live wire. On camera I narrate. It’s the product; it’s the voice they pay for. Here I didn’t say much, because there was no audience to translate for, and the quiet was its own filthy thing — just his breathing and mine and the wet catch of my mouth moving down his chest, his stomach, lower, until I had him in my hand and then my mouth and the sound he made was one I’d never once gotten on a stream, ragged and disbelieving, no performance anywhere in it.

“Alex — fuck — you don’t have to—”

“I want to.” I looked up the length of him, mouth still on him, and watched his head drop back. “No camera. Nobody to put on a show for. I just want you in my mouth in my own bed. Let me be greedy about something for once in my life.”

I took him apart like that, slow and thorough, until he was fisting the sheets — my sheets — and saying my name in a broken loop, hips trying to chase it, and right when he got close I pulled off and he actually swore at me, which made me laugh against his hip.

“You’re doing the edging thing,” he accused, shaking. “That’s a stream move. That’s a paid-tier move.”

“It’s a me move. The stream stole it from me.” I kissed my way back up his body. “You don’t get to finish yet. I’ve been waiting six years to have somebody in this bed. I’m not rushing it in four minutes because you’re pretty and impatient.”

“Six years?”

“Since the mask.” I braced over him, forehead to his, and let him see it — all of it, the thing I only ever let him see. “First person I’ve had here. Ever. This apartment’s the one place I never let anyone. And you’re in it, and you’re wrecked, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever filmed except I didn’t film it, because some things you keep.”

When I finally opened him up it was with my eyes on his the whole time, because that’s the thing I’d learned from him — that being watched, for Ben, is being wanted, and I wanted him to feel wanted with no lens anywhere, just me, just my eyes, just my hands taking their patient time until he was loose and begging and saying please in a voice that had never once been on a stream.

“Please — Alex — I need—”

“I know.” I lined up, pushed in slow, and the sound we made was one sound, the way it always is, the way it’s been since a desk at the Meridian. “I’ve got you. I know exactly what you need. I always have.”

I moved in him the way I do when it’s real — deep, unhurried, no goal, no tip counter, nothing to build toward for anyone but him. And I gave him the words after all, because it turns out I can’t not, but they were different words than the ones I sell. Not look how he takes it. Just you’re mine and I love you and there’s nobody watching and you’re still exactly this, breathed into his mouth while he clung to me and shook, his heels digging into my back, the two of us moving together in a bed that finally, finally had someone in it who mattered.

“Say it again,” he gasped.

“I love you.”

“The other part.”

“Nobody’s watching.” I got a hand between us, took him in my fist, matched it to my hips. “It’s just us. You don’t have to perform it, Ben. You don’t have to be seen by anyone but me. Just come for me because it’s true, not because they earned it.”

He came on the word true, my name breaking apart in his mouth, spilling hot over my fist while he clenched around me and pulled me straight over the edge behind him — no command, no timing it for a stream, just the plain helpless truth of him wrecking me the way he does, and I buried my face in his throat and let it take me, shaking, saying his name into his skin where no microphone would ever catch it.

After, we didn’t move for a long time. My bed. His weight against me. The dead camera on the tripod across the room, red light off, holding nothing, which was exactly right.

“So,” Ben said, eventually, drowsy and smug. “That’s the director’s cut.”

“That’s the director’s cut. It doesn’t exist. There’s no footage. It happened once, in a room with no cameras, and the only two people who’ll ever know what it was are in this bed.”

He was quiet a second. Then: “You should write it down someday. So it’s not gone.”

I thought about the photograph I’d turned to face the room. About all the things I’d locked in drawers so no one could ever take them. About how the only thing that had ever actually kept anything safe was choosing, on purpose, who got to hold it.

“Maybe I will,” I said, and pulled him closer, and didn’t. Some things you keep. But I’m telling you now, whoever you are, reading this — because he was right, and because it turns out the realest thing I ever made was the one I never filmed, and I didn’t want it to be gone.

The camera was off.

He was still here.

He always will be.

Missed the main event? Read Room Service here.

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