Mile Marker Zero

A Road Trip Ruined Bonus Chapter
by Jace Wilder

This bonus chapter takes place during Chapter 14 of Road Trip Ruined — the Vegas detour night, from Miles’s point of view. Contains explicit MM content. 18+ only.

Miles

The hotel room in Vegas had a bathrobe and a view of the strip and a man in my bed wearing the first and ignoring the second, and I was, by any reasonable metric, the luckiest coward in Nevada.

Evan was lying on his stomach in the open robe, scrolling his phone, bare from mid-back down, one foot kicked up behind him, and Gerald the dinosaur was propped on the pillow next to him like a chaperone nobody had asked for. The strip light filtered through the curtains in shifting colors — pink, blue, gold — painting him in neon fragments, and I was sitting on the edge of the bed watching him exist and trying to find the three words that would make this permanent.

I love you.

Right there. Simple as a bar on a rack. Three words, eight letters, one syllable each. I’d written them in a letter three years ago. I’d almost said them at a diner two hours ago. They were sitting in my chest like a held breath, patient, ready, and every time I opened my mouth to release them, something older and uglier — the bonfire, the flinch, the four seconds I’d been paying for since I was eighteen — sealed the exit.

“You’re staring,” Evan said, without looking up.

“You’re stare-worthy.”

“That’s not a word.”

“I’m coining it.” I put my hand on his lower back, where the robe had ridden up, and felt the warm give of him under my palm. He arched into it, subtle, the way a cat presses toward heat. “What are you looking at?”

“Gerald’s Amazon reviews.”

“Gerald doesn’t have Amazon reviews.”

“He does now. I left him one.” He turned the phone toward me. The screen showed a one-star review for a “Green Dinosaur Claw Machine Prize” that read: Crooked eyes, stitched-on smile, zero emotional intelligence. 10/10. Changed my life. Would recommend to anyone trapped in a truck with their ex-best-friend-turned-complicated-sex-person.

“You reviewed a claw machine dinosaur on Amazon.”

“I reviewed the experience. Gerald is a metaphor.”

“Gerald is a stuffed animal with a manufacturing defect.”

“Gerald is a journey.” He rolled onto his back, the robe falling fully open, and looked up at me with the Vegas light making him impossible — the flat plane of his stomach, the line of his hips, the trail of hair below his navel, that mouth. “Come here.”

“I’m here.”

“Come here.” He reached for my wrist, tugged. “The bed is enormous and you’re sitting on the edge of it like a man waiting for a bus.”

I let him pull me down. Settled over him, forearms on either side of his head, and he smiled up at me — the private one, no sarcasm, no armor, just Evan — and threaded his fingers into my hair.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

“You were about to say something. At the diner. And just now. Your face does a thing.”

“My face doesn’t do a thing.”

“Your face does a specific thing. The jaw goes still, the eyes change registers, and you open your mouth approximately one-quarter of the way and then abort. I’ve seen it fourteen times this trip. I’m keeping a tally.”

“That’s unnerving.”

“I’m an observer. It’s professional.” His fingers tightened in my hair. “Say it.”

“Say what.”

“Whatever the jaw thing is about. Whatever you keep almost-saying and swallowing. Say it, Miles.”

I love you.

“You’re beautiful in this light,” I said instead, and hated myself with a specificity that had its own zip code.

Evan searched my face for a long moment. Then he pulled me down and kissed me, and the kiss was forgiveness for a sin I hadn’t committed yet, and I poured the three words into it because my mouth could say them that way even if my voice couldn’t, and Evan kissed me back like he heard them anyway.

The robe came off. I pulled it from his shoulders and tossed it toward the chair and missed, and Evan said “that robe costs ninety dollars a night if we lose it” and I said “worth it” and kissed his neck and he stopped caring about the robe.

We’d had fast sex and angry sex and possessive sex and methodical sex and slow emotional sex and every kind the road had offered. Tonight, in Vegas, with the strip washing us in color through the curtains and Gerald bearing witness from the pillow and the three words I couldn’t say sitting between us like a guest at a dinner party, we had the kind I’d never had with anyone: happy sex.

Evan was laughing. Not at me — with me, into me, against my mouth, his whole body vibrating with it as I kissed my way down his chest and discovered, via his completely unhinged reaction, that the spot just above his left hip bone was ticklish in a way that had apparently been dormant until I scraped my teeth across it.

“Don’t — McKenna — that is a vulnerable area —”

“Noted.” I did it again. He shrieked, actually shrieked, and kicked, and I caught his ankle and bit the inside of it and the shriek turned into a moan, and the moan turned into a laugh, and the laugh turned into a sound I wanted to record and play on a loop for the rest of my natural life.

“You are a menace,” he gasped. “You are a six-foot-two menace and I am going to file — oh — I am going to file a grievance—”

I took him in my mouth and the grievance dissolved into static.

I’d learned his body across six states — what made him gasp, what made him curse, what made him go quiet and boneless and completely surrendered. I knew that slow was devastating and fast was fun and that the combination — long, unhurried strokes interrupted by bursts of pressure and speed — took him apart at the seams. I knew the exact moment his hands went from holding my hair to gripping it, and the sound shift that meant he was close.

I worked him with my mouth until his thighs were shaking, until his breath was coming in short punched-out gasps, until his hips were rolling up off the bed in tight desperate circles and his hand in my hair was past holding and into holding on. He was thick and hot against my tongue, slick at the tip, and every sound he made fed something in me that had been starving longer than I’d known how to name it.

I pulled off before he got there. He made a noise of such profound betrayal that Gerald probably felt it.

“I need you to know,” Evan said to the ceiling, voice wrecked, cock flushed and wet and aching against his stomach, “that what you just did violates several articles of the Geneva Convention.”

“Turn over.”

“Ask nicely.”

“Please turn over.”

“Add ‘good boy’ and I’ll consider it.”

I leaned up, kissed his jaw, and murmured against his ear: “Turn over for me. Good boy.”

He turned over so fast he nearly launched Gerald off the pillow.

I ran my hands down the length of his back — the architecture of him, shoulder blades and spine and the dimples at the base that I’d discovered in Amarillo and revisited every night since. I kissed between his shoulder blades, the spot, our spot, where I’d pressed my forehead the first night and cracked something open that I’d never been able to close.

“Miles.” Muffled by the pillow. Soft. “Whatever you’re thinking right now — whatever your face is doing — I can feel it against my back.”

“I’m not thinking anything.”

“You’re thinking very loudly and it feels like words you’re writing on my skin and I want you to know that I can almost read them.”

My throat closed. I pressed my mouth between his shoulder blades and breathed, and the three words were right there, vibrating against his skin, and he could almost read them, and I was the closest I’d ever been to brave.

I kissed down his spine. Took my time — every vertebra, every inch of warm skin, the dip at the small of his back where my tongue made him shiver and press his face deeper into the pillow. Lower. I spread him with both hands and pressed my mouth to him, and the sound Evan made — raw, shocked, a sound he hadn’t made in any motel between here and Chicago — was worth every mile.

“God — Miles — you don’t have to—”

“I want to.” I worked him with my tongue — slow, thorough, obscene — and felt his whole body surrender by degrees, his hips pushing back against my mouth, his hands fisting in the sheets, the resistance in his spine melting one notch at a time until he was boneless and open and making sounds that were barely human.

“Please,” he breathed. “Please, I need — I need you inside me, I can’t—”

I prepped him with slick fingers, two then three, my mouth still working alongside them, and Evan pushed back against my hand with the impatient, stubborn, full-body demand that I’d learned was the purest version of him — no performance, no sarcasm, just naked want.

“Now,” he said. Not a request.

“Bossy.”

“You like bossy.”

“I like you.”

The words were so close to the real ones that we both went still for a second. Then Evan turned his head, one eye visible, and said, very quietly: “I know. Come here.”

I rolled the condom on, slicked myself, and pushed in slow — his back against my chest, both of us on our sides, a position we hadn’t tried. His spine against my sternum. My arm banded across his ribs — the foundational hold, the one he’d told me he couldn’t stop thinking about. My mouth at the back of his neck. I could feel his heartbeat through his back. I could feel mine against his spine. Synchronized. Ridiculous. Perfect.

“Oh,” Evan breathed. “Oh, that’s — the angle is — Miles.”

I moved in him with the deep, unhurried rhythm he’d taught me was his favorite — not the punishing pace of Amarillo or the controlled grind of the pact nights, but the real one, the one that was just us, patient and devastating. Every stroke pressed deep enough to make his breath catch, and at this angle I could feel every response — every clench, every shiver, the way his body opened and tightened and opened again around me.

“You feel incredible,” I said against his neck. “Every time. Every night. Like you were—”

“Don’t stop talking.” His voice was shattered. “Whatever you’re — don’t stop—”

“Like you were made for this. For me. Like every mile between Chicago and here was just — the distance I had to cross to find out what this felt like.”

“That’s — fuck — that’s either the most romantic or the most filthy thing—”

“Both.” I thrust deeper, angled up, found the spot that made his whole body jolt, and stayed there. “It’s both, and you’re both, and I—”

My hand wrapped around his cock, matched the rhythm. He was so hard it felt like a dare, slick and swollen in my grip, and the sounds he made when I stroked in time with my hips — God, the sounds. Not the controlled gasps of the pact nights, not the angry moans of Amarillo. These were open, unguarded, the sounds of a man who’d stopped performing and was just feeling, and every one of them drove me closer to the edge.

Evan’s hand covered mine — laced our fingers together around himself — and we moved like that, tangled, connected at every point physics allowed, his breath catching on every deep stroke, my name falling out of his mouth in pieces.

“I want to see you,” he gasped. “Turn me — I want—”

I pulled out, turned him onto his back, and pushed in again in one motion, and Evan’s legs wrapped around my waist and his hands found my face and he pulled me down and kissed me, mouth open, tasting like want and Vegas and the future I was too afraid to name.

I fucked him face to face with the neon washing us in pink and blue and gold, his legs locked around me, his hands in my hair, foreheads touching, and every thrust was a sentence I couldn’t say and every kiss was an answer he gave me anyway. The headboard hit the wall in a rhythm I should have been embarrassed about and wasn’t. The bed protested. Gerald fell off the pillow. Neither of us noticed.

“Miles — I’m going to — I can’t hold—”

“Come for me,” I said. “Good boy. Let go.”

He came between us with a cry that the room next door definitely heard, his whole body clenching around me, back arched off the bed, spilling hot and wet over both our stomachs while his eyes stayed on mine and his mouth shaped my name like a prayer he hadn’t agreed to. I drove deep and followed him over — three strokes, maybe two — and came with my face pressed against his temple and a sound in my chest that was either a groan or the three words escaping through a crack in the wall I’d built around them.

We lay there. Sticky, breathing, tangled. The neon cycled: pink. Blue. Gold.

After a while — long enough that our breathing had synced, long enough that I’d cleaned us both up with the disgraced bathrobe and Evan had mumbled “ninety-dollar washcloth” into my collarbone — he spoke.

“Stay,” Evan murmured.

“I’m here.”

“No. I mean—” he lifted his head, looked at me with the neon painting his face in shifting light, and his voice was the unarmored one, the one I’d earned mile by mile, motel by motel. “After Vegas. After the county line. Stay.”

My heart stopped. Restarted. Did something no organ should do while being looked at by Evan Calder in neon light.

“Yes,” I said.

He kissed me, and tasted like salt, and I held him, and the three words beat against my teeth like captives, and I thought: tomorrow. I’ll say it tomorrow. In LA. In the daylight. When it matters.

What I didn’t know — couldn’t know, lying in that hotel room with his heartbeat under my hand and the whole city glittering outside — was that I’d shake his hand at a door instead, and walk away, and spend six terrible days learning that courage doesn’t keep, that you have to use it when it’s in your hands or it spoils.

But that night. That one night in Vegas.

I held him and he held me and Gerald watched from the floor where he’d landed and the neon washed us in every color the city had, and I was happy. Just that. Just happy.

It was the simplest thing I’d ever felt and the hardest to survive losing.

At 1 a.m., Evan fell asleep. Gerald retrieved from the floor and reinstated in the crook of his arm. Robe ruined. The faint impression of a laugh still on his mouth.

I picked up my phone. Opened my text thread with Trey.

I think I’m in trouble.

I stared at the draft. Four words that said everything and nothing. I deleted them. Typed four different words:

I think I’m in love.

I stared at those longer. Then I deleted them too, and put the phone down, and curled around the man I was too scared to say them to, and held on, and held on, and held on.

Loved Miles and Evan’s story? Read the full novel.

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