Next Summer’s Forecast

A Heatwave Neighbors bonus chapter · by Jace Wilder

Contains spoilers for Heatwave Neighbors — read the book first! One year later. One more blackout. Zero pretenses. 18+ explicit content.

Rafa

The grid people had promised. That’s the part I want on the record. All winter, all spring — reinforced lines, new substations, press conferences with hard hats — the whole city assured, repeatedly, that last summer could never happen again.

It happened again on July eleventh, at 11:42 p.m., in the middle of a heat dome the radio was calling “historic,” which is what they call it every time now. The lights died from the east side rolling west, avenue by avenue, like a tide going out, and our block went dark mid-heartbeat — fridge, fans, streetlight, everything — and from every window on Marsh Street rose the citywide groan of a million people realizing at once.

And in the middle of the groan, in the dark of our bedroom, my husband-to-be-if-the-weather-ever-cooperated started laughing so hard the bed shook.

“You did this,” Dylan said, delighted, into the blackness. “You said God, I hope so to the actual sky. This is on you.”

“I contain multitudes and apparently municipal influence.” I was already up on one elbow, listening. Down the block: doors opening. Voices. The specific festival sound of a neighborhood surrendering to a disaster it has survived before. “Wait for it.”

The group chat detonated in both our phones at once.

Mrs. Petrakis (2C): Here we go. I have ice. The cooperative is OPEN

3F: radio says grid failure is “unprecedented.” i am telling the radio it is EXTREMELY precedented

Okafor (Landlord): Please remain calm. We have done this before. We are a community 🙏

Mrs. Petrakis (2C): 4th floor. Report

Dylan typed with one hand, his head on my chest, his grin audible in the dark: The 4th floor is prepared. The 4th floor has been training all year.

Mrs. Petrakis (2C): I know what I know

3F: they’ve been training alright. through the vents. nightly.

“3F is uninvited from the wedding,” Dylan said, setting the phone down. “Permanently.”

Because here’s the thing about us and weather: the bodega circuit still lived. Nobody had ever reported the miracle, and the miracle had held, and the window unit — old, temperamental, the founding member of this entire family — hummed awake in the dead building like a lighthouse. One cold room on a black block. Again. Except this time the mattress didn’t need dragging across any hallway, because there was no hallway between us anymore — just the door in the wall, the one that had been there the whole time, standing open the way it stood open every night.

I looked at him in the orange glow of the unit’s standby light. One year of this face. One year of the glasses on the nightstand and the jaw and the way his collarbones caught shadow in the dark, and I still lost my breath sometimes, catching him at angles I hadn’t catalogued yet. Tonight he was sprawled across our bed in boxers, already gleaming, the heat arriving through the walls like something with a schedule, and the look on his face — that half-smile, knowing and wanting and daring me to say it first — was the same look from night two. The night that started everything.

“Blackout rules?” I said, low, into his hair — the old opening, the whole liturgy.

He smiled against my sternum. “Everything counts. Say the rest of it.”

“Come here on purpose.”

“I’m already here.”

“Then come here harder.”

He came here harder.

We’d gotten good at this — a year of practice, a year of nightly taxonomy, learning which touches were ignition and which were kerosene — but the heat rewired something, every time, stripped the learned choreography back to instinct. His mouth found mine in the dark and it tasted like the beer we’d been splitting and the salt already coming up on his skin, and the kiss went deep and filthy immediately, no warmup, no opening act, his tongue sliding against mine with the confidence of a man who’d spent twelve months memorizing every frequency that made me lose my mind.

“Off,” he said, hooking his fingers into my waistband. When had Dylan Mercer — four-inhale, please-and-thank-you Dylan Mercer — become the one who gave orders in the dark? Sometime around October. I’d created a monster and I thanked God for him nightly.

I lifted my hips. He stripped me out of my boxers with the businesslike focus he applied to everything — Harmon revisions, kerning, getting me naked — and tossed them into the void. Then his hand wrapped around me, firm, already sure of the grip and the speed that took me from zero to wrecked, and I gasped into the dark like I hadn’t felt it a thousand times before, because with him it never flattened, never became routine. His thumb did the thing — the slow circling thing he’d discovered in September that made my whole spine go liquid — and my hips rolled up into his fist, chasing.

“Patience,” Dylan said, which was rich coming from a man who six months ago used to come apart the second I praised him.

“I will pay any tax you want. Just don’t stop.”

“Who said anything about stopping?” He slid down the bed, and his breath ghosted hot over my stomach, my hip, the crease of my thigh, and every nerve in my body voted to secede from rational thought. “I said patience. Anniversary pace. I’ve been planning this since the forecast came in on Tuesday.”

“You—” The word broke in half because his mouth landed, a slow wet kiss pressed to the inside of my thigh, close enough that I could feel the heat of his breath where I needed it and far enough away to constitute a war crime. “You’ve been planning—”

“I have alerts, Rafa. Grid alerts. I told you.” Another kiss, higher, his tongue tracing a slow line that made my hand fly to his hair and grip. “I saw the forecast, I checked the infrastructure reports, I calculated the load demand against capacity, and I put odds at seventy percent the grid would fail by midnight.” His mouth hovered, and I could feel him smiling against my skin, the nerd, the gorgeous devastating nerd. “I’ve been thinking about this for five days. I have a plan.”

“Counselor—”

He took me into his mouth and the rest of the sentence died in a sound that Mrs. Petrakis was going to have diplomatic opinions about.

A year. A full year of this man learning me, and he’d become — there’s no polite way to put it — devastating. The clumsy, earnest Dylan of that first time in July was long gone; what replaced him was someone who’d studied me the way he studied letterforms, with obsessive precision, cataloguing what made me groan and what made me beg and exactly how long he could hold me at the edge before I broke his name into pieces. He worked me slow, then slower, then so slow I was shaking, both hands twisted in the sheet, sweat running down my ribs in the airless dark, the unit’s thin cold breath doing absolutely nothing against the heat we were manufacturing.

“Dylan — baby — I’m gonna—”

He pulled off. I made a sound that should never be repeated in a court of law.

“Anniversary pace,” he said, hoarse, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and the sight of him — flushed and glassy-eyed and hard, straining against his own boxers, acting like he was the one in control when his whole body was vibrating — almost finished me without contact.

“You’re going to kill me.”

“You’ll survive. Kitchen guys are resilient. You told me that once.” He crawled up my body, straddled my hips, and I could feel all of him against all of me, the thin cotton the only border left, and he ground down once, slow and deliberate, and my hands flew to his hips hard enough to bruise. His head dropped back, mouth open, and the sound he made — low, wrecked, loud — was the one he used to bite back, the one I’d spent the whole first month coaxing out of him. Now he gave it freely, like currency he finally believed he could spend.

“Off,” I said, tugging his waistband. “Fair’s fair.”

He stood up on the bed to strip them off — standing, silhouetted in the orange glow, lean and angular and mine, and I stared up at him the way I’d stared through that peephole the very first night, except now the chain was off and the door was open and neither of us would ever close it again. He dropped back down, naked, and the full-body press of skin on skin in the July heat was exactly like it had been the first time: a religious experience in temperature.

“Lube’s in the—” I started.

He held up the bottle. Already in his hand.

“Five days of planning,” Dylan reminded me, and I loved him so much my chest hurt.

What followed was the whole founding ritual, performed with twelve months of fluency and zero pretense.

He opened himself up on his own fingers first, kneeling over me, his free hand braced on my chest, and I watched — that was part of it, always had been, the watching, the thing that had terrified us both in the first storm and now was the entire architecture of how we worked. I watched him fuck himself on his own hand with his lip caught between his teeth and his cock leaking onto my stomach, and I told him what I saw, because the broadcast was my love language and his kink and the load-bearing wall of our entire sexual constitution: look at you, God, you’re so good, so gorgeous, keep going, let me see you, there, right there—

“Enough,” he gasped, pulling his fingers free, reaching for me instead, slicking me with a hand that shook. “Enough prep. I want you.”

“Tax.”

His eyes met mine in the dark, and I watched the old reflex flicker — the instinct to swallow the sentence, to be easy, to be convenient — and I watched him kill it, the way he killed it every time now, deliberately, like stepping on a spark.

“I want you inside me,” Dylan said, clear and steady, no notary in it, no seal, just the raw material. “I’ve wanted it all day. I want to ride you in this room on the anniversary of the worst summer of my life that turned into the best thing that ever happened to me. Please, Rafa.”

I pulled him down and kissed him so hard we rearranged the pillows.

He sank down onto me slow — God, so slow, gravity and patience and an inch at a time, his thighs trembling against my hips, his hands flat on my chest, and his face — I will remember his face as long as this building stands: eyes shut, mouth slack, every wall down, the quietest man in the building making the loudest sound I’d ever heard from him as he bottomed out and sat there, full, breathing like the stairwell.

“Hi,” he said, shaky. Smiling. Wrecked.

“Hi.” My voice was absolutely gone. “You planned this?”

“I have a spreadsheet.” He started to move, and the sentence became theoretical, because there are things in this life you can narrate and things that burn the broadcast tower to the ground. He rode me like he’d mapped every angle, every speed, knew exactly where I needed him and exactly how to get there, rocking slow and deep with his head thrown back and his hands sliding through the sweat on my chest, and the dark went thick and close and molten around us. The unit hummed. Thunder built in the east. And I ran the broadcast on fumes, fragmented, grabbing at words like handholds — perfect, you’re perfect, just like that, don’t stop, I love you, I love you—

He leaned down, changed the angle, and I hit the spot that made him shout, and after that it wasn’t anniversary pace, it was desperate and graceless and exactly like the first time — both of us chasing it, his hand between us working himself while I drove up into him, the bed frame protesting like a building inspector, the sweat running between us in rivers, his mouth on mine swallowing the sounds we were making because the vents were right there and we had a reputation and neither of us cared, not even a little, not even when the thunder cracked close enough to shake the window and the timing was so cinematic I would have laughed if I could have done anything besides hold onto him and fall apart.

He came first — hard, clenching around me, his whole body locking, my name breaking in his mouth like it always did, the two syllables pulled apart and put back together in a way that only he had ever done, that only he would ever do — and I followed him over three seconds later with my forehead pressed to his shoulder and my arms locked around his back, holding him through it, holding him after, holding him while the thunder moved off and the building settled and the sweat cooled on both of us and the only sound left was the unit and our breathing, gradually, stubbornly, finding the same rhythm again.

After.

After is always my favorite country with him — the place where the broadcast comes back online, where the words return, where we lie in the wreckage of the sheets and take inventory of whatever the last hour rearranged. He was draped across me, boneless, drawing circles on my ribs with one finger, the tattoo’s letters traced so many times now he probably knew them by touch.

“Hey,” I said. “For the record.”

“Mm.”

“I’ve been waiting for weather.” My voice did something embarrassing in the middle and I let it. “Four months. Marisol said do it at the restaurant. Teo wanted fireworks, which, from a garde manger — alarming. And I kept saying no — it has to be a blackout, it has to be this exact dark, because this is where I got everything. Right here. This room. This unit. You, in boxers, hating me.”

He lifted his head. His eyes were wet. “Rafa. What are you—”

I reached under my side of the mattress where a small box had been living since March, held together by velvet and four months of patience and one very specific weather forecast.

The click of the box sounded enormous in the quiet.

“Dylan Mercer. Counselor. You laminated a note at me once and I never recovered. You vacuum as warfare and cook rice that’s both burnt and wet and you type like a lawyer and kiss like you’re filing an appeal and you are the loudest quiet person I have ever met.” The ring caught the orange light and held it. “Marry me.”

Silence. The unit hummed. My heart performed a full kitchen rush in my chest cavity.

And then Dylan started laughing — wrong reaction, catastrophically wrong reaction, my whole soul left my body — and he rolled away from me, and his arm came back from under his side of the mattress holding a small box of his own.

“February,” he said, shaking, holding it up like evidence entered into the record. “I’ve had mine since February. I was waiting for the weather too. I checked the grid report every single morning like a farmer. I have push notifications set up, Rafa. I built a spreadsheet tracking load demand against historical temperature data with a probability column for outage likelihood. I am a deeply unwell person and I love you so much it has made me insane—”

“You absolute disaster — say yes first—”

“Yes. Yes. Initialed, dated, filed, notarized, sealed, submitted in triplicate — yes — now say it back before I draft a motion—”

“Yes, obviously yes, I said it first, mine was first—”

“The ring purchase date establishes priority and mine was February—”

“Nobody’s arguing priority at a proposal, counselor—”

We got the rings on the wrong hands first, in the dark, both of us laughing and crying and shaking too hard for fine motor skills, and had to redo the whole exchange by phone-light. His was a simple band, warm gold, sized exactly right. Mine was platinum, thinner, a single line engraved inside that I couldn’t read in the dark and he wouldn’t tell me until morning — el fuego no pregunta, it turned out, when I finally held it to the light, and I had to go stand in the kitchen about it for several minutes.

But that was morning. That night, in the dark, we lay there with our wrong-handed rings and our afterglow and our wrecked sheets while somewhere below us Mrs. Petrakis banged her ceiling — then stopped, mid-bang, as if the building itself had told her. And instead, up through a hundred years of bad decisions and one open door in a wall, we heard her voice, clear as a bell, yelling to the whole dark block:

“FINALLY!”

The group chat detonated one more time.

Mrs. Petrakis (2C): Whatever just happened on 4 I am claiming full credit

3F: they just cheered through the vents. i repeat. CHEERED. what is happening up there

Okafor (Landlord): I believe congratulations are in order to the 4th floor 🙏💍

Dylan, head on my chest, ring on the right hand now, typed with one thumb:

Dylan (4A): The 4th floor confirms. And is accepting applications for caterers, florists, and one extremely loud line cook who is legally required to make the food.

Rafa (4B): engaged btw. in case that wasnt clear. to the building’s crankiest man. save your summers. wedding is next june. outdoors. peak humidity.

Mrs. Petrakis (2C): I told you in July. I said get married. The fighting is the same. Nobody ever listens to me

3F: congratulations. please keep the celebrating at a reasonable volume. (i know you won’t)

We didn’t. The celebrating lasted until three a.m. and violated multiple sections of the lease and we did not care. The grid came back forty hours later; we didn’t turn Gerald II on for a week, sentimental value, and Teo cried at family meal when we told him, and Marisol did not cry but did pour a shot of the good rum and say “took you long enough, papi,” and Chef said “good” — sixth time in five years — and the menus got a revision: the De La Casa heading now had a small heart next to it that neither of us had asked for and neither of us would ever remove.

The wedding is next June. Outdoors. Peak humidity. Exactly as planned.

Forecast says it’s going to be brutal.

God, we hope so.

THE END

Haven’t read Heatwave Neighbors yet?

Start from the laminated note. Dylan and Rafa’s full story is available now.

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