His Best Man — Exclusive Bonus Chapter

Christening the New Place
by Jace Wilder

This bonus chapter takes place after the epilogue of His Best Man. Contains spoilers and very explicit content. Reader discretion advised.

⚠️ Content Warning: Graphic MM sexual content (oral, penetrative, versatile), strong language. Intended for readers 18+.

Christening the New Place

The last guest left at eleven-fourteen.

I knew the exact time because I’d been tracking it since nine-thirty, when Ryan’s mom hugged me for the third time and called me mijo again and I’d had to excuse myself to the bathroom to press my face into a towel and breathe through the fact that someone’s mother loved me enough to claim me. Since then I’d been counting minutes, smiling at conversations I was barely following, refilling drinks I didn’t taste, and thinking about exactly one thing: the moment the door closed and the apartment became ours.

Marcus was the last one out. He stood in the doorway, beer in hand, surveying the wrong-colored wall he’d painted with unearned pride. “It’s growing on me.”

“It’s not growing on anyone,” Ryan said. “It’s the color of seasickness.”

“It’s character.” Marcus pointed at us with his beer. “Have a good night, lovebirds. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“That eliminates nothing,” Ryan and I said simultaneously, and Marcus laughed his way down the stairs and the door closed and the lock clicked and the apartment went quiet.

Our apartment. Our quiet. Our names on the mailbox, slightly crooked, exactly right.

Ryan turned from the door. I was already leaning against the kitchen counter—the new counter, the one with actual square footage, the one I’d been fantasizing about since the open house when the real estate agent said “granite” and I’d thought that’s exactly the right height.

He looked at me. I looked at him. Two months of sharing a bed, a bathroom, a thirty-seven-foot apartment, a life—and the charge between us was the same as the first night. Hotter, maybe. Because now I knew what came next, and the anticipation of a known pleasure was its own kind of torture.

“So,” he said. Leaning against the opposite counter. Arms crossed. The henley stretched across his chest, sleeves pushed up past his forearms, the tattoo sleeve on full display. Looking like he had all the time in the world, the bastard. “We have an apartment.”

“We have an apartment.”

“With a dishwasher.”

“And a bedroom we haven’t—”

“Get over here.”

He crossed the kitchen in three strides. I grabbed the front of his shirt and hauled him against me, and the kiss was immediate and deep and unleashed—the kiss I’d been holding behind my teeth for four hours of polite socializing and housewarming small talk. His mouth opened under mine, his tongue sliding against mine with the confident, filthy thoroughness of a man who knew exactly what my mouth liked and had two months of data to prove it. His hands found my hips. Mine found his belt.

“Kitchen first?” he murmured against my mouth.

“Kitchen first. We said day one.”

“It’s day one.”

He lifted me onto the counter. I went—hands bracing on the cool granite, legs parting, pulling him between my thighs with my calves hooked behind his legs. The height was perfect. I’d known it would be. The counter put us at exactly the right alignment, his cock pressing against mine through layers of denim that suddenly felt like an act of war against everything good and right in the world.

“You’ve been thinking about this all night,” he said. Not a question.

“I’ve been thinking about this since the open house.”

“The open house?”

“The realtor said ‘granite countertops’ and I thought, ‘that’s where Ryan’s going to fuck me on our first night.'”

His pupils blew so wide his eyes went black. “Jamie Carter. You filthy, strategic, project-managing—”

“Less talking. More undressing.”

He stripped my shirt off. Tossed it—it landed on the dish rack, which was a detail I was going to find funny later and couldn’t process now because his mouth was on my collarbone, hot and open, his tongue tracing the ridge of bone and then dropping lower, lips closing around my nipple, teeth grazing, and my hips rolled forward hard enough to grind my cock against his stomach through my jeans.

I pulled his henley over his head. Ran my hands down his chest—the warm brown skin, the defined pecs, the trail of dark hair below his navel that I followed with my fingertips, slower than necessary, watching his abs contract under my touch. The tattoo sleeve caught the kitchen light, geometric patterns I’d traced with my tongue enough times to have them memorized. I put my mouth on his shoulder, bit gently, and felt him shudder.

“I want you right here,” I said against his skin. “On this counter. In our kitchen. And Ryan?”

“Yeah?”

“I prepped in the bathroom. During the party. While Marcus was admiring his wall.”

The sound he made was not a word. It was a sound that lived somewhere below language—a guttural, desperate, half-strangled noise that communicated more than any sentence could. His hands tightened on my thighs hard enough to leave marks.

“You—during the—while people were—”

“I told you. I’m a project manager. I plan ahead.” I unbuckled his belt. Popped the button. Slid the zipper down and pushed his jeans and boxers over his hips in one motion, and his cock sprang free—hard, thick, flushed dark at the head, already leaking. I wrapped my hand around him and stroked once, base to tip, twisting at the head the way I’d learned made his knees buckle. “Extensively.”

He grabbed my wrist. Pulled my hand away. “If you keep doing that this is going to be over before it starts.” His voice was ragged. “Off the counter. Pants off. Turn around.”

I slid off. Stripped. Turned. Braced my hands on the granite—palms flat, arms locked, the cool stone a counterpoint to the heat flooding my body. I could feel him behind me—the warmth of his skin, the brush of his cock against my lower back, the sound of the lube cap clicking open.

His fingers found me. Two, sliding in with a slickness that confirmed what I’d done in the bathroom, and the stretch was immediate and electric—not the slow, careful preparation of our first time but the confident, purposeful check of a man who knew my body and trusted my word.

“You really did prep,” he breathed. “God, Jamie. You’re so ready.”

“I’ve been ready for hours. I’m a project manager who’s been ready for hours. Do the math and—oh fuck—”

He pushed into me. Not slow—not rough, but not slow. One steady, measured stroke that filled me in a single motion, his hips pressing flush against me, his cock buried to the base, and the fullness hit me like a wave. My fingers clawed at the granite. My head dropped between my shoulders. I could feel every inch of him—the stretch, the heat, the specific, devastating pressure of Ryan Diaz seated completely inside me in the kitchen of the apartment we’d chosen together.

His hands gripped my hips. His chest pressed against my back. His mouth found my ear.

“Welcome home,” he murmured.

I laughed—a breathless, punched-out, disbelieving laugh—and then he started moving and the laughter dissolved.

He fucked me against the kitchen counter with the steady, confident, relentless rhythm of a man who’d spent two months learning every response my body was capable of producing and was now deploying that knowledge with precision. Deep, rolling thrusts that hit the angle he’d mastered—the angle that pressed the head of his cock against my prostate on every stroke and turned my nervous system into a fireworks display. I pushed back against him, meeting each thrust, and the slap of skin on skin echoed off the tile and the new cabinets and the wrong-colored wall and introduced itself to every room in the apartment.

“You sound so good.” The praise voice. The low, steady, devastating register that had been rewiring my brain for two months. “Listen to yourself. You’re so loud for me. You feel—god, Jamie—you’re so tight and hot and mine. You’re mine in our kitchen on our counter and I’m going to make you come so hard the neighbors file a noise complaint.”

The words hit me like accelerant on a fire. His dirty talk had evolved—from careful encouragement in the early days to this, a fluent, filthy, possessive narration that he delivered against my ear while his cock drove into me and his hands held my hips so hard I’d have bruises tomorrow. I loved the bruises. I loved that he marked me without trying. I loved that my body wore his fingerprints the way his arm wore his tattoos—deliberately, permanently, proof of something chosen.

He reached around. Wrapped his fist around my cock. Stroked in time with his thrusts—tight, slick, the dual assault of being fucked and stroked simultaneously overwhelming every circuit in my body.

“Tell me,” I gasped. “Tell me what I feel like.”

“Like home.” Thrust. “Like everything.” Thrust. “Like the reason I stopped running.” His grip tightened. His hips snapped harder. “Come for me, Jamie. Come on our counter in our kitchen. Give it to me.”

I came with a cry that bounced off every surface in the apartment—a raw, wrecked, triumphant sound that I didn’t try to contain because this was our place and these were our walls and I could be as loud as I wanted. My cock pulsed in his fist, streaking the cabinet below the counter, my body clenching around him in rhythmic waves that dragged his orgasm out of him seconds later. He buried himself deep, groaned my name against my shoulder blade, and I felt him pulse inside me—hot, filling, the specific, intimate sensation of being claimed from the inside that I’d become addicted to.

We stood there. Bent over the granite, panting, still connected. His forehead between my shoulder blades. His hand wet and warm on my hip. The kitchen smelled like sex and the leftover sofrito from Lucia’s trays and the cedar body wash that belonged to both of us.

“One room down,” I said.

He laughed against my back. “How many rooms does this apartment have?”

“Five if you count the hallway.”

“The hallway is not a room.”

“It will be by the time I’m done with you.”

The shower was next.

Not just because we needed cleaning—though we desperately, objectively did—but because the new bathroom had a shower stall that was twice the size of the old one. Actual room for two adult male bodies. Actual water pressure that didn’t feel like being gently misted by a disappointed garden hose. An actual bench built into the tile, which I had opinions about that I had not yet shared with Ryan and intended to demonstrate rather than explain.

“We proved shower sex is a myth,” Ryan said, stepping under the spray, the water streaming over his shoulders and down his chest and following the trail of dark hair toward his cock, which was soft now but wouldn’t be for long if I had anything to say about it.

“We proved shower sex is a myth in a shower designed for a very small, very solitary gnome.” I stepped in behind him. Pressed my chest against his back. Wrapped my arms around his waist, hands splaying across his stomach. The hot water hit us both and the steam rose and the temperature in the enclosed space climbed toward sauna territory. “This is a different shower. This shower has a bench.”

“Jamie, it’s been ten minutes—”

“I’m twenty-seven years old with a refractory period of approximately eight minutes and a boyfriend who looks like a wet dream brought to life standing naked in my shower. The math checks out. Sit on the bench.”

He turned around. Looked at me. Water running down his face, plastering his dark hair to his forehead, streaming over his jaw and his neck and the geometric tattoo sleeve that glistened under the spray. His eyes were dark and amused and underneath the amusement was the heat that never fully went out—the pilot light of two months of wanting me that even post-orgasm languor couldn’t extinguish.

“You’re bossy tonight,” he said.

“It’s our apartment. I’m allowed to be bossy in our apartment.”

“Our apartment.”

“Our apartment. My bench. Sit.”

He sat. The tile bench put him at exactly the right height—his head level with my chest, his legs spread, his cock half-hard against his thigh and thickening as he watched me watch him. I stood between his knees, water cascading over my shoulders, and sank down slowly.

I kissed his forehead first. Then his temple. His jaw, rough with stubble. The corner of his mouth. His throat—lingering there, feeling his pulse under my lips, fast and getting faster. His collarbone. His chest. I worked my way down his body with my mouth the way he’d worked his way down mine the first time he’d gone down on me—slow, deliberate, narrating with contact instead of words, building a map of anticipation across his skin.

By the time I reached his stomach, he was fully hard. His cock stood thick and straining against his abs, flushed dark, the head slick with precome that the water hadn’t washed away. I looked up at him through the steam—eye contact, the thing that had been the key to everything between us since the night he’d turned my face from the pillow and said look at me.

I held his gaze and wrapped my hand around him and stroked once, slow, watching his face change. The jaw clench. The parted lips. The way his hands gripped the edge of the bench, knuckles going white. Two months ago I’d never touched a man’s cock. Now I could play Ryan’s body like an instrument I’d been studying my whole life.

“Jamie—”

I took him into my mouth.

The water ran over us both. Steam filled the stall. His hand found my wet hair, fingers threading in, gripping—not pushing, never pushing, just holding on, the way you hold on to something precious when the current tries to take it. I took him deep, deeper than I could two months ago, my throat opening around him in a way I’d practiced and perfected because making Ryan Diaz incoherent with my mouth had become my favorite hobby and I was, by his own repeated admission, gifted at it.

I used every trick I’d learned. The tongue on the underside of the head that made his thighs clamp. The hollowed-cheek suction on the upstroke that pulled sounds from his chest like I was reaching in and extracting them. The hand working the base in counterpoint to my mouth, twisting, gripping, matching the rhythm of my head bobbing between his legs while the water pounded my back and the steam made the air thick and dreamlike.

“Fuck—Jamie—your mouth—”

I pulled off. Looked up at him. His face was slack with pleasure, his lips parted, water running over his cheekbones and dripping from his jaw. He looked destroyed. He looked like a man who was being worshipped by someone who genuinely, enthusiastically, joyfully wanted to be on his knees.

“Tell me what you want,” I said.

“I want—I want your mouth—don’t stop—”

“Be specific.” I licked a slow stripe up the underside of his shaft. Pressed my tongue against the ridge under the head. Watched his whole body shudder. “You taught me to ask for what I want. Your turn.”

“I want you to take me as deep as you can and suck me until I come down your throat.” Said raw. Unfiltered. The Ryan who existed only in our most private moments—the one underneath the sarcasm and the armor, the one who was learning to be as vulnerable in asking as I’d been in receiving. “Please.”

The please undid me. The praise kink worked both ways—his vulnerability was my trigger the same way his praise was mine. I took him deep, deeper, until my nose pressed against his stomach and his cock hit the back of my throat and the sound he made was a sound I wanted etched into the tile of this bathroom so it would live here forever.

I worked him with devoted, relentless focus. Mouth and hand and tongue, the rhythm building, his hand tightening in my hair, his hips rocking forward in small, helpless thrusts that he tried to control and couldn’t. His praise dissolved the way it always did when he got close—from sentences to fragments to syllables to just my name, repeated, desperate, a one-word prayer.

“Jamie—Jamie—I’m—”

I didn’t pull off. I never pulled off. From the very first time, staying had been the declaration—the physical proof that I wanted all of him, not just the parts that were easy. He came with both hands fisted in my hair, his body arching off the bench, his cock pulsing against my tongue in long, hot waves that I swallowed and swallowed and swallowed until he was spent and shaking and making sounds that were half-laugh, half-sob, the specific noise of a man who had been taken apart by someone who loved him.

I rose. Kissed him. Let him taste himself on my tongue—the intimacy of it, the refusal to sanitize, the full-spectrum honesty of sharing everything including this. He groaned into my mouth and pulled me onto his lap on the bench, both of us slippery and hot and laughing, the water streaming over us.

“Two rooms,” I said.

“The shower is in the bathroom. That’s the same room.”

“I’m counting it separately. It has a bench. Benches define rooms.”

“That’s not how architecture works.”

“My apartment. My counting system.”

“Our apartment.”

“Our apartment. My counting system. My bench. My boyfriend.” I kissed the corner of his jaw. “My turn to be inside you.”

His eyes went dark. The post-orgasm softness evaporating, replaced by something hungrier. “Where?”

“Bedroom. The real one. The one we picked together.”

I turned off the water. Stepped out. Handed him a towel—one of the new ones, thick and absorbent, the kind I’d picked because Ryan’s old towels had the moisture-wicking capacity of a paper napkin. He dried off and dropped the towel on the floor and stood there, naked and damp and hard again because he was Ryan Diaz and his refractory period was a fucking medical marvel.

“Race you,” he said.

The bedroom was where we slowed down.

Not because we were tired—though we were, pleasantly, the warm ache of well-used muscles—but because this room was different. This was the room we’d sleep in every night. The room we’d wake up in every morning. The room where Ryan would spiral at six AM and I’d read his bouncing knee and say you’re doing the thing and he’d say I’m not doing the thing and I’d kiss him until the panic faded. The room where we’d fight about dishes and make up without words and hold each other through bad dreams and good mornings and everything in between.

This room deserved something different. Something that honored the weight of what it meant.

We lay on the new bed. The good sheets—a thread count I’d had opinions about and he’d let me win because my opinions had turned out to be correct and his old sheets had been, by any objective standard, a crime against skin. Lamp on. Always the lamp now. We’d spent enough time in the dark.

Facing each other. Naked. Still slightly damp, the cool air raising goosebumps across our skin. Close enough to share breath but not quite touching—a deliberate, electric gap that hummed with the same charge it had carried on the first night, when we’d lain in this position in Ryan’s old apartment and I’d reached across the dark and found his hand.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.” His hand found my face. Thumb tracing my cheekbone—the gesture that had started in a tiny bedroom and followed us here, to this room, this bed, this life. The gesture that meant everything we couldn’t compress into language. “We live here.”

“We live here.”

I kissed him. Slow. Deep. No urgency—the kiss of a man who had nowhere else to be and no one else to become and the entire rest of his life to learn the specific geography of this mouth. I kissed him until he was making the sounds I collected like rare specimens—the soft intake of breath, the low groan, the whispered please that surfaced when want outpaced composure.

My hand traced down his chest. Followed the center line, sternum to navel, fingertips light, mapping the terrain I knew by heart. Lower. Through the trail of dark hair. Around the base of his cock, hard again, pressing against my wrist as I reached past it. Lower still.

“I want to be inside you,” I said. Not asking—stating. The Jamie who’d arrived at Ryan’s apartment two months ago in a half-undone tux couldn’t have said that sentence. The Jamie lying in this bed could say it looking him in the eye without his voice trembling. “I want you to let me in the way you let me into everything else. Our apartment. Our life. Your body.”

His eyes were liquid. Dark and warm and unguarded in a way that would have been impossible for Ryan Diaz three months ago—the man who used sarcasm as armor, who left before he could be left, who’d spent thirty years building walls so expertly that most people didn’t know they existed.

I knew they existed. I’d taken them down, brick by brick, kiss by kiss, and the man on the other side was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

“Yes,” he said. Simple. Complete.

I prepped him the way he’d prepped me the first time—slow, patient, narrating everything, because I’d learned that words were as important as touch and that being told what was happening, what was coming, what felt good, could turn the physical into something transcendent. I slicked my fingers and pressed one inside him, watching his face—the slight furrow, the exhale, the gradual unclenching as his body adjusted and accepted.

“You’re perfect,” I murmured. “Look at you. Relaxing for me. Letting me in.” My voice had developed its own register for this—lower, steadier, a praise voice to match his, because the kink worked both ways and we’d discovered that Ryan, who spent his whole life being the strong one, melted when someone told him he was good. “You’re so beautiful like this. You’re doing so well.”

His breath shuddered. His hand found my wrist—not stopping me, just holding on. “More.”

Two fingers. Slow scissoring, stretching, my thumb rubbing circles against his perineum while my fingers curled and found the spot that made his whole body jolt. He gasped—a sharp, punched-out sound, his back arching, his hand clamping on my wrist.

“There?” I asked, pressing again.

“There—fuck—Jamie—”

Three fingers. He was open and slick and trembling, and the sounds he was making—sounds I’d earned, sounds nobody else had ever heard—were enough to make my cock ache with wanting.

“Tell me what you want,” I said. His line. Mine now. Ours.

“You. Inside me. Now.” He pulled me over him. Wrapped his legs around my waist. The position we’d discovered he liked best—face to face, foreheads touching, eye contact that neither of us would break. The position that was less about angle and more about intimacy, about seeing and being seen, about the specific, devastating vulnerability of looking into someone’s eyes while they were inside you.

I positioned myself. Pressed forward. Felt his body open around me—hot and tight and yielding, the stretch of him accepting me inch by inch, his face cycling through sensations I read like weather. Discomfort becoming fullness becoming pleasure, the transformation visible in his expression, a slow bloom that I watched with reverent, unwavering attention.

I bottomed out. All the way in. His legs locked around my waist. His hands on my shoulders. Our foreheads pressed together, breathing the same air.

“Move,” he whispered.

I moved. Slow at first—long, deep strokes that let me feel every inch of him around me, the tight, overwhelming, indescribable heat. His hands slid from my shoulders to my back, pulling me closer, his nails leaving lines I’d find tomorrow in the mirror and trace with my fingers, smiling. His hips lifted to meet mine, a synchronicity that had become second nature, two bodies that had learned each other’s rhythms so thoroughly that coordination was no longer conscious.

The pace built. Gradually, naturally, like a conversation escalating from whisper to shout. My thrusts deepened. His hips drove up harder. The bed creaked beneath us—the new bed, with its good mattress and its proper frame, creaking for the first time, learning the specific rhythm of the two bodies it would hold every night.

“You feel incredible,” I said. His line, mine now, traded back and forth between us like a currency only we could spend. “Ryan—inside you—I can’t—the way you feel around me—”

“Then don’t hold back.” He pulled my face to his. Kissed me while I fucked him—messy, open-mouthed, breath-stealing kisses that tasted like steam and salt and the clean, specific flavor of a man who was letting me have everything he’d spent his life protecting. “I can take it. Give me everything.”

I gave him everything. Harder. Deeper. My hips snapping forward with a force that rocked the headboard against the wall and sent the lamp on the nightstand vibrating. He took it—took me—with a fierce, open-throated abandon that was the opposite of his usual composure. His moans were loud and raw and real, bouncing off the walls of our bedroom, christening the space with the sounds of two people who had found each other and refused to let go.

I wrapped my hand around his cock. Stroked him in rhythm with my thrusts. Watched the pleasure build in his face—the climbing tension, the clenching jaw, the instant before the crest where his whole body went taut and his eyes went wide and he looked at me with an expression that was equal parts ecstasy and trust.

“Come for me,” I said. His words. Mine. Ours. The three words that had become the most intimate thing either of us could say—more intimate than I love you, because they were permission and command and plea all at once, the ultimate expression of the thing we’d built: a love where asking and giving were the same act.

He came with his eyes on mine. His body clenching around me in rhythmic, devastating waves, his cock pulsing in my hand, his mouth open on my name—not broken, not desperate, but whole. Said the way you say something you’re certain of. Said the way you say the name of the place where you belong.

I followed him over. Burying deep, filling him, my vision narrowing to the single point of his face beneath me—flushed and damp and radiant, eyes bright, mouth curved in the beginning of a smile that hadn’t finished forming because the aftershocks were still rolling through both of us in twinned, diminishing waves.

We didn’t move for a long time.

Still inside him. Still looking at each other. His legs still locked around me, holding me there, his hand tracing lazy circles on my back. The room smelled like sex and steam and the cedar body wash that had long since stopped belonging to either of us and now belonged to the entity we’d become—the compound noun of Jamie-and-Ryan, inseparable, indivisible, ours.

Later. Clean. Warm. Under the covers in our new bed, the lamp still on, the city breathing outside the open window.

“Three rooms,” I said.

“Three rooms.”

“The hallway tomorrow?”

“The hallway tomorrow.”

“And the living room. And Ryan’s studio.”

“That’s my workspace.”

“Not until we christen the desk.”

“You’re insatiable.”

“You love it.”

“I love you. The insatiability is a bonus.”

His hand found mine. Laced through. Held on. The same grip as the first night—the reach across the dark, the fingers interlocking, the warmth of his palm against mine. The gesture that had started as a lifeline and become the way we ended every day.

“Ryan?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m glad I ran.”

He pulled me closer. Kissed my forehead. The simplest gesture. The most significant one.

“I’m glad you ran too,” he said. “I’m glad you ran straight to me.”

“Always.”

We fell asleep holding hands in the first bed that had ever been truly ours, in the first home that had both our names on the door, and the dark was warm and the door was open and neither of us was running from anything anymore.

We were home.

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