The Reading Bench

A Bi Now, Ask Questions Later Bonus Chapter
by Jace Wilder

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus scene takes place two months after the epilogue of Bi Now, Ask Questions Later. Read the book first!

This scene contains extremely explicit sexual content between established partners and should be read after finishing the novel.

The preservation award ceremony was on a Saturday evening at the Brooklyn Historical Society, and Luca Reyes wore a suit.

Not a rental. Not a borrowed jacket over work pants. A suit — dark charcoal, fitted, purchased from a tailor in Red Hook who had measured his shoulders three times because the first two sets of numbers seemed implausible. The jacket accommodated his chest without strain. The trousers broke cleanly over shoes that had never been inside a construction site. The white shirt was open at the collar — no tie, because there were limits to what an evening could ask of a man who had spent his professional life in thermals and tool belts.

He stood in front of the bedroom mirror at 118 Hawthorne Place and looked at himself and did not recognize the reflection.

Not because the suit changed him. Because the room behind him had changed. Dark blue walls. Eleanor’s stained glass throwing late-afternoon color across the bed they’d purchased together. The shelving he had built. The reading bench downstairs that had become the site of a recurring game involving deliberate mismeasurement and increasingly creative consequences.

“Nate.”

“One moment.”

“The ceremony starts in forty minutes.”

“And we will arrive in thirty-eight, because I am not walking into a room full of preservation professionals with an asymmetric collar.”

Luca leaned against the bedroom doorframe — the doorframe Nate had once asked him to fill, the doorframe where Nate had first told him to stand still while smaller hands traced the tattoos on his arms — and waited. The waiting was easy now. A year of practice had converted the waiting from anxiety into anticipation. He knew what was on the other side of the wait. He knew who.

Nate emerged from the bathroom. Charcoal suit — darker than Luca’s, slimmer in the cut, the tailoring precise in the way that Nate’s tailoring was always precise because Nathaniel Bell did not permit his clothing to approximate when it could specify. Silver temples sharp against the dark fabric. Reading glasses in the breast pocket. A pocket square that had been selected, Luca was certain, based on a color-theory spreadsheet.

“You look—” Luca started.

“Do not say ‘like a forensic accountant.’”

“I was going to say ‘like someone I’m going to have difficulty not touching in public for several hours.’”

Nate adjusted his cuffs. The flush across his neck, visible above the open collar, was not controlled at all. “That is an acceptable alternative.”

He crossed the room. Stood in front of Luca. Straightened Luca’s collar. His fingers brushed the skin beneath — the hollow of Luca’s throat, the pulse point that Luca could feel accelerating under the touch. The contact lasted three seconds. In those three seconds, Nate’s thumb traced a small circle on Luca’s neck, and Luca’s entire body registered the touch as a promise.

“After,” Nate said quietly. “After the ceremony.”

“After.”

Reyes Restoration won. Luca walked to the podium in the suit. He thanked the committee. He thanked Tasha. He thanked the crew. He thanked Eleanor Price. Then he looked at Nate in the second row.

“Nate Bell is my partner. In this project and in my life. The building at 118 Hawthorne Place survived because he chose to fight for it. I am here because he chose to fight for me.”

Rosa cried. Tasha did not cry, but her jaw tightened in the way that meant she was containing an emotion she would process later, privately, with wine. Nate did not look away.

After the ceremony — after Rosa hugged the plaque against her chest and said “Your father would be proud, mijo” — they went home.

Luca set the plaque on the mantelpiece. Next to the framed photograph of Eleanor. Next to the reading bench that had been designed for reading and repurposed for other activities so frequently that Luca had reinforced the joints twice.

Tonight, Luca did not measure anything. He stood in the parlor in his suit and said: “I want you to take the suit off me.”

“The suit cost twelve hundred dollars.”

“Then take it off carefully.”

Nate’s hands found Luca’s lapels. He pushed the jacket off with the slow care of a man removing a surface to reveal the original material beneath. The shirt buttons, one at a time. Each button a revelation — chest, ribs, coordinates tattoo, stomach. The softer section that Nate had claimed as his territory from the first night.

He kissed it now. Dropped to his knees on the parlor floor and pressed his mouth to the bare skin above Luca’s belt. The sound Luca made was quiet and deep — the sound of a man whose body had learned that the mouth pressing against his stomach belonged to someone who was not leaving.

“Sir,” Luca said. The word still landed. Every time. Not diminished by repetition — deepened by it.

Nate looked up from his knees. The reading glasses were still on. Luca found the glasses so arousing he had considered having the prescription verified just to ensure Nate had an excuse to keep wearing them.

“On the bench.”

Luca sat on the reading bench. Nate remained on the floor between his knees. The belt. The button. The zipper. Nate freed Luca’s cock — hard, thick, the head slick — and took him in without hesitation. Not the tentative first-time technique of a year ago. This was devotion. Expert, confident, knowing devotion.

The mouth of a man who understood the angle that made Luca’s thighs shake and the pressure that made his grip tighten and the exact moment when suction needed to increase and depth needed to expand and the hand at the base needed to twist in counterpoint to the tongue.

He knew. A year of data. A year of the forensic accountant’s particular gift applied to the body of the man he loved.

Luca gripped the edge of the bench. The wood creaked — the specific frequency of white oak under stress, the sound that had accompanied dozens of these encounters.

“Nate — fuck — right there —”

Nate’s response was not verbal. His response was suction. Increased, deliberate, the flat of his tongue pressing the underside while his hand worked the base in the rhythm that preceded conclusion — the cadence he used when he intended to finish something.

“Wait — I want —”

Nate pulled off. Looked up. His mouth wet. His glasses fogged. “I want you inside me tonight. In our bed. In the room I painted for us.”

“Then we should go upstairs.” His voice was wrecked — lower than the register he used for client presentations, carrying the specific hoarseness of a man who had been receiving oral sex from a forensic accountant in reading glasses.

They left a trail. Luca’s trousers on the parlor floor. Nate’s jacket on the third step. Nate’s tie on the landing. Shirts abandoned between the bathroom door and the bedroom.

The bedroom was dark blue and amber. The stained glass caught the streetlight. The bed was unmade from the morning.

Luca lifted Nate onto the bed. Practiced, easy. Nate wrapped his legs around Luca’s waist with the trust of someone who had been carried enough times to stop bracing for the drop.

Naked. The remaining clothes removed with the coordinated efficiency of two people who had long since resolved the logistical questions about whose socks came off first and the eternal, unsolvable problem of boxer briefs on a man with thighs the circumference of most people’s waists.

Skin against skin. Full-body contact that a year of shared intimacy had not diminished. Luca’s chest against Nate’s. The difference in their bodies — Luca broader, heavier, olive-brown against Nate’s deeper brown — was not a contrast but a composition.

Nate’s hand found Luca’s face. Thumb on cheekbone. The gesture that was theirs. He held Luca’s face while Luca prepared him — fingers slick, patient, one then two, the pace dictated by Nate’s breathing and the relaxation that came with trust and time.

“Now,” Nate said.

Luca entered him. Not the cautious penetration of the first time. The settled, confident entry of a man who knew the way because the way was home. Fully inside. His hips against Nate’s. His weight on his forearms. Nate looking up at him through glasses that were still on his face.

He moved. The rhythm that a year had calibrated. Nate’s legs around his waist, hands gripping his shoulders with the pressure that meant the angle was correct and the depth was sufficient.

“Harder,” Nate said. Not a surprise anymore. A specification. “Like that. Don’t stop.”

Luca gave him harder. The headboard struck the felt pad he’d installed to protect his plaster. Nate laughed — mid-thrust, breathless.

“The plaster.”

“The plaster is fine.”

“You installed a felt pad.”

“I installed a felt pad because you are insatiable and the wall is original and one of those things is replaceable.”

“Which one?”

Luca thrust hard enough to end the conversation. Nate’s sound — the vowel without consonants, the broken syllable that started as Luca’s name and dissolved — filled the dark blue room.

“You are the best thing I have ever been wrong about,” Nate said.

“Tell me I’m good.”

“You’re good.” Nate’s hand in his hair. His voice in that register — low, steady, the voice that filled the place where silence used to live. “You’re so good, Luca. You’re extraordinary. You’re the best work I’ve ever done.”

Luca came. The orgasm was a settling — the deep, final adjustment of a structure that had found its permanent configuration. He drove forward, the last strokes carrying the full weight of release, and he shuddered above Nate while the stained glass threw color across their bodies and the headboard struck the felt pad and the house held them.

Nate followed. Luca’s hand between them, and Nate came against Luca’s stomach with a groan that contained his name and a profanity and a sound that might have been laughter or might have been joy.

They lay in the dark blue room. Tangled. Sweating. The reading glasses — somehow still on Nate’s face, one arm slightly bent — reflecting the streetlight through the stained glass.

“The bench downstairs. The seat depth is seventeen inches.”

“I know.”

“I’m going to measure it wrong again tomorrow.”

“I know.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

Nate pressed his mouth to the tattoo on Luca’s ribs. The coordinates of a home in Queens that had started a family.

“I’m going to correct you. Thoroughly.”

The walls held. They always did now.

Very good.

Back to Bi Now, Ask Questions Later