No Straight Answers After Midnight — Bonus Chapter

After Hours
by Jace Wilder

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place one year after the events of No Straight Answers After Midnight. It contains major spoilers for the main novel. Read the book first!

This scene is too hot for retailers. It’s our thank-you for being a reader who wants the full, uncut experience.

The home studio smelled like cedar incense and warm electronics, and Gideon March was sitting in my chair.

Not the guest chair. My chair. Behind the console, behind the microphone, in the seat where I broadcast four nights a week to a city full of strangers who trusted me with their secrets. He was wearing a white t-shirt and gray sweats and nothing else, and he was looking at me the way he’d been looking at me for a year—like I was a structure he’d assessed and deemed worth entering, every time, even knowing the risks.

“You’re in my chair,” I said from the doorway.

“I know.” He reached for the console. Flipped the monitor switch. The red standby light came on—not broadcasting, just the internal feed, routing through the studio speakers. “I want to try something.”

“In my studio. At eleven o’clock at night. In sweatpants.”

“The sweatpants are negotiable.”

I leaned against the doorframe and crossed my arms and tried to look unimpressed. I was not unimpressed. Gideon March sitting behind a microphone with that focused, deliberate intensity he brought to everything—from structure fires to shelf repair to the way he put his mouth on my neck—was doing things to my circulatory system that a year of proximity had not dulled.

“Sit down,” he said. Nodding at the chair across the console. The guest chair. “Other side of the glass.”

“Are you hosting my show?”

“I’m hosting something.”

I sat. The console lights painted amber across his face—the broken nose, the copper-gray beard, the hazel eyes that shifted green in low light. He adjusted the microphone the way he’d watched me do a thousand times: height, angle, the precise distance that produced resonance.

Then he spoke into it.

“One year ago tonight, I called a radio show because I was afraid to want a man.” His voice came through the monitor speakers—low, rough, filling the small room like something physical. “The host asked me questions I couldn’t answer. He told me to breathe. He told me to let go. And I did.”

My skin was prickling. Hearing his voice through the speakers—the same speakers I’d heard him through a year ago, when he was a stranger named Northside and I was holding my composure together with both hands—was a time collapse. Past and present occupying the same frequency.

“Tonight,” he said into the mic, “I’m going to do what he did. I’m going to ask you questions. And you’re going to answer them.”

“Gideon—”

“One Honest Answer.” He leaned into the mic. “That’s your segment. One question you have to answer without deflection.”

My heart was hammering. He’d learned my language. Absorbed the rhythm and the pacing and the particular power of a well-timed question. And he was turning it on me.

“What do you want right now?” he asked. “Specific.”

My own words. My own cadence. Aimed at me by a man who’d spent a year studying how I spoke and was now speaking it fluently.

“I want you to come over here and put your hands on me.”

“Not yet. Tell me more.”

“Gideon.”

“You taught me that the voice is a door. That the wanting matters more than the act. That saying what you need out loud is the hardest and most important part.” He held my gaze across the console. “So say it. Out loud. Into the room. What do you need from me tonight?”

My composure—the thing I’d built my career on, the thing I wore like a second skin—cracked.

“I need you to stop talking and touch me. I need your hands on my skin and your mouth on my neck and your body against mine. I need you to carry me to bed and fuck me until I can’t remember my own name, and then I need you to hold me afterward and not fix a single thing in this house.”

He turned off the microphone. Stood up. Walked around the console in three strides and pulled me out of the chair and kissed me so hard the chair rolled backward and hit the wall.

His hands were under my shirt immediately—broad palms, calloused fingers, the hands I’d been imagining on my body since before he ever called my show. He pulled the shirt over my head and threw it somewhere behind the console and his mouth was on my collarbone, on the spot below my left ear that he’d mapped during our first night together and had been exploiting mercilessly ever since.

“I recorded that,” he said against my throat.

“You what?”

“The monitor was set to record. Your answer. I wanted to keep it.”

“You recorded me saying—”

“Every word.” His teeth scraped my jaw. “I’m going to listen to it when you’re on shift and I’m alone in this house. The way you used to listen to my calls.”

The symmetry of it—the perfect, devastating inversion—hit me like a fist to the sternum. He’d taken the power dynamic that had defined our beginning and flipped it. He was the one with the recording now. The one who’d hold a private confession in his hands and replay it in the dark.

“Bedroom,” I managed. “Now.”

He picked me up. I wrapped my legs around his waist—a year of this and the ease of it still made me dizzy, the casual strength, the way he carried me like I weighed nothing and meant everything—and he walked us out of the studio and down the hall to the bedroom and laid me on the bed with a care that contradicted the urgency of his breathing.

He stripped efficiently. The t-shirt over his head, the sweats kicked off, and he was naked above me—six-four of muscle and scar tissue and auburn hair and the body I’d learned by heart and still couldn’t look at without my pulse climbing.

“Your turn,” he said, and pulled my jeans off with the focused intensity of a man removing an obstacle from a rescue path.

He kissed down my body. Not teasing—cataloging. Relearning what he’d already memorized, finding the responses that hadn’t changed and the new ones that a year of intimacy had created. His mouth on my chest. My stomach. The V of my hips where his teeth grazed and my back arched off the mattress.

“Tell me what you want,” he said. His voice was low, controlled, an echo of the radio cadence I’d taught him. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Your mouth. Lower. Please.”

He took me in his mouth and the year of practice showed—no hesitation, no uncertainty, just confident, devastating skill that he’d developed with the same obsessive thoroughness he applied to structural assessment and home renovation. His tongue found the exact spot, the exact pressure, and held it while his hand gripped the base and his eyes looked up at me from below and the eye contact alone was almost enough to finish me.

“Stop,” I gasped. “Stop, I want—I want you inside me. I want all of you.”

He pulled off. Reached for the nightstand. Slicked his fingers and prepped me with the patient, thorough attention of a man who understood that this act was trust made physical—and who had earned that trust through a year of staying.

Two fingers, curling, finding the angle that made my vision spark. I grabbed the sheets. Said his name. Said it again, louder, the way I only said it in this room, in this bed, with no audience and no microphone and no persona between us.

“Ready?” he asked.

“A year ago you couldn’t say the word ‘attracted’ without choking on it. Now you’re asking me if I’m ready like you invented the concept.”

“Is that a yes?”

“It’s a ‘get inside me before I lose my mind.’”

He pushed in and the fullness—thick, stretching, his body settling against mine with the precise, grounded weight of a man who’d learned exactly how to move inside me—pulled a moan out of my chest that rattled the studio equipment through the wall.

He set a rhythm. Slow at first, deep, his forehead against mine, his arms braced on either side of my head. I could feel his heartbeat against my chest. Could feel the tremor in his arms from the effort of holding back, of maintaining the pace, of being the man who controlled the tempo instead of the man who needed to be told.

“Faster,” I said.

He went faster. His hips snapped forward and I wrapped my legs around his waist and pulled him deeper and the sound he made—that raw, guttural, completely unguarded sound that I’d first heard through my headphones a year ago and had been addicted to ever since—filled the room.

“I want to hear you,” he said against my ear. “No show. No host voice. Just you.”

I let go. Let the sounds come without filtering—loud, messy, desperate, his name broken into syllables by the rhythm of his body driving into mine. He shifted the angle and found the spot that dissolved language and I shouted and he held it, held the angle, held the pace, relentless and devoted and so completely focused on my pleasure that I understood, in the scattered remnants of my conscious thought, what it felt like to be the recipient of Gideon March’s total attention.

It felt like being rescued. Not from danger—from the exhausting, lifelong performance of being the one who held everyone else.

“I’m close,” I said. “Gideon—I’m—”

“Let go.” My own words. Given back to me in his voice. “I’ve got you.”

I came so hard my vision whited out. My body arched against his, my nails raked down his back, and the orgasm was not a point but a wave—rolling, extended, amplified by his continued movement inside me until I was shaking and gasping and completely, utterly demolished.

He followed within seconds—I felt the shudder, the groan buried in my neck, the full collapse of his weight onto me as he let himself fall.

We lay in the wrecked sheets. His face against my throat. My hand in his hair. Our breathing synchronized the way it always did—two rhythms finding each other like frequencies locking.

“You recorded my answer,” I said eventually.

“Mm.”

“You realize I said ‘fuck me until I can’t remember my own name’ on a recording that’s sitting on our studio hard drive.”

“I’ll label it ‘equipment test.’”

“Convincing.”

He lifted his head. Looked at me with those hazel eyes—green in the dim light, soft with the specific tenderness he only showed after sex, when the barriers were down and the man underneath the lieutenant was visible and unguarded.

“Happy anniversary, Dr. After Dark.”

“Happy anniversary, Northside.”

He kissed my forehead. Settled back onto my chest. And in the rowhouse on Smedley Street, in the bedroom they shared, with the studio equipment humming quietly through the wall and the cat claiming the foot of the bed and the shelf in the hallway still slightly crooked because some things were worth leaving imperfect, they lay together in the silence that belonged only to them.

Nothing honest begins with pretending you’re asleep.

But everything honest ends like this: two people, breathing together, in a room with no microphone and no audience and no distance left between them.

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