Bonus Chapter: Eight Seconds More
An exclusive bonus scene from Saddle Up, Make Out by Jace Wilder
⚠️ This bonus chapter takes place after the events of Saddle Up, Make Out. Contains spoilers and explicit content. Read the novel first for maximum impact.
The ranch was silent.
Not the charged silence of the trailer during those first weeks — when every creak of the mattress was a question and every brushed shoulder was a negotiation. This was the other kind. The settled kind. The silence of two men who’d stopped performing and had nothing left to prove to the dark.
Dale had gone to a stock auction in Grand Junction and wouldn’t be back until Tuesday. The horses were fed. The gates were latched. The Airstream was theirs, and the Colorado night was doing its thing — cold air, warm stars, the river murmuring its ancient, indifferent song on the south side of the property.
Levi was on the bed. Rhett’s hat was on the nightstand beside him — the black Resistol, slightly too big, the brim curved from three seasons of sun and sweat. He’d taken to wearing it at events, and the internet had opinions about that, and Levi didn’t care about any of them.
Rhett came in from the shower. Towel around his waist. Water still beading on his shoulders, tracking down through the dark hair on his chest, catching the lamplight in small bright points that Levi’s eyes followed the way they always followed — involuntarily, hungrily, with the specific greed of a man who’d been given permission to look and intended to use it.
“You’re staring,” Rhett said.
“I’m admiring. There’s a difference.”
“The difference being?”
“Admiring implies I intend to do something about it.”
Rhett’s mouth moved. The corner lift — the one that had taken Levi four months to earn and that he now received like currency. “Then stop admiring and start doing.”
Levi sat up. Reached for Rhett’s towel and pulled — not hard, just enough to loosen the tuck at his hip. The terry cloth dropped to the floor and Rhett stood in the lamplight, bare, unselfconscious, his body a landscape of muscle and scar that Levi knew by touch the way he knew the topography of a saddle.
“Come here,” Levi murmured.
Rhett came. He put one knee on the mattress, then the other, and lowered himself over Levi with the controlled strength that had always been his language — the vocabulary of a man who communicated through pressure and proximity and the careful, devastating deployment of his hands.
He kissed Levi. Slowly. The kind of kiss that belonged to a night without a clock — unhurried, thorough, his tongue tracing the seam of Levi’s lips with the patience of a man who had nowhere to be and no one to perform for.
Levi’s shirt came off. Then his boxers. The last barriers between them dissolved into fabric on the floor, and what was left was skin on skin and heat on heat and the specific, electric knowledge that nobody was going to interrupt this. No events tomorrow. No cameras. No Janine. No world beyond the Airstream’s aluminum walls and the rain that had started to fall, light and steady, on the roof above them.
Rhett’s mouth moved down Levi’s throat. Teeth on his collarbone — not biting, just holding, the pressure precise enough to make Levi’s breath fracture. His hand slid between them and wrapped around Levi with a grip that was firm and slow and devastating in its confidence.
“Tonight,” Rhett said against his skin, “I want everything.”
“You have everything. You’ve had everything since the kitchen in Casper.”
“I want more than the kitchen.” His hand moved. Levi’s hips jerked. “I want you wrecked. I want you so far past the charm and the grin and the performance that the only word you can remember is my name.”
“That’s — God, Rhett — that’s a lot of ambition for a Wednesday night.”
“I’m an ambitious man.”
He proved it.
He took Levi apart the way he rode — with total commitment, zero wasted motion, and the ferocious focus of a man who treated every eight seconds like they mattered. His mouth charted a course down Levi’s body that was equal parts worship and war: the freckle constellation across his chest, kissed individually. The sensitive skin inside his hip, scraped with stubble until Levi’s fingers dug into the sheets. The line of muscle below his navel, traced with a tongue that had spent months learning exactly what it did to Levi’s nervous system.
When Rhett’s mouth found him, Levi’s back arched off the mattress like he’d been hit by a current. His hand went to Rhett’s hair — gripping, guiding, then just holding on, because Rhett’s rhythm was relentless and expert and calibrated to the specific frequency that turned Levi’s brain into static.
“Rhett — I’m going to — if you don’t stop —”
Rhett didn’t stop. He doubled down. His hands gripped Levi’s hips and pinned them to the mattress and his mouth did things that should have been illegal in states with decency statutes, and Levi came with a sound that started as Rhett’s name and ended as something wordless and raw and pulled from the deepest part of his chest.
He was still trembling when Rhett kissed his way back up, mouth wet, eyes dark, looking impossibly pleased with himself.
“That’s one,” Rhett said.
“One?”
“I said I wanted you wrecked. That was the warm-up.”
“The warm-up nearly killed me.”
“You’ll survive.” Rhett’s hand traced down Levi’s side, over the curve of his hip, around to the small of his back. His touch changed — from aggressive to exploratory, from taking to asking. “Turn over.”
Levi turned. The trust required to put his back to someone had been, for most of his life, a performance he did to seem casual. With Rhett it was genuine. He pressed his face into the pillow and felt Rhett’s weight settle over him — chest against his back, mouth against his ear, the solid, immovable presence of a man whose body was designed for holding on.
Rhett’s hand worked between them. Preparation was slow and thorough — patient fingers, slick pressure, the careful expansion that Rhett approached with the same focused attention he gave to everything he cared about. Levi breathed into the pillow and felt himself open by degrees, each one a small surrender that built toward a larger one.
“Ready?” Rhett’s voice was barely a voice — a vibration against Levi’s shoulder blade, low and rough and shaking with restraint.
“Yes. God, yes.”
Rhett pushed inside him and the world narrowed to the point of contact and Levi made a sound that he would never, under any circumstances, have allowed another human being to hear. A cracked, desperate thing that contained every wall he’d ever built and every wall that had just been dismantled.
Rhett held still. Let him adjust. His mouth was on the nape of Levi’s neck, breathing hard, his whole body vibrating with the effort of not moving.
“Move,” Levi managed. “Please, Rhett, move.”
Rhett moved.
The rhythm was slow at first. Deliberate. Each stroke a statement rather than a question, delivered with the full weight of Rhett’s hips and the devastating precision of a man who had learned Levi’s body the way he’d learned to ride — by paying attention, by adjusting to every response, by refusing to rush past the moments that mattered.
Then the rhythm changed. Faster. Harder. Rhett’s hand found Levi’s hip and gripped it and the grip said mine in a language older than words. His other hand reached under Levi and found him hard again — recovered, responsive, his body answering the question that Rhett’s body was asking — and stroked in time with his thrusts.
“Say my name,” Rhett said, low and commanding in a way that was not a performance. That was just him.
“Rhett.”
“Again.”
“Rhett — God — Rhett —”
The second orgasm hit Levi like a wave breaking over a wall — total, immersive, the kind that started in his spine and radiated outward until his vision whited and his hands gripped the sheets and his voice produced a sound that was Rhett’s name repeated like a prayer until the word lost its consonants and became just breath.
Rhett followed. His forehead pressed between Levi’s shoulder blades, his hips stuttering, his breath breaking on a groan that vibrated through both their bodies. He held on — arms around Levi, face buried in his back, the full weight of him a pressure that Levi never wanted to lose.
They lay there. Tangled, damp, breathing. The rain was still falling on the roof and the sound was gentle and rhythmic and the world outside the trailer was enormous and quiet and the world inside it was two men who had stopped pretending about anything.
“Wrecked?” Rhett murmured into his shoulder.
“Destroyed. Annihilated. Structurally compromised beyond repair.”
“Good.”
“I can’t feel my legs.”
“Also good.”
Levi turned over — slowly, because his body was operating on emergency backup power — and faced Rhett. In the lamplight, Rhett’s face was open. Soft. The jaw unclenched, the eyes unguarded, the expression of a man who had just given everything he had and found that giving didn’t leave him empty.
Levi traced the scar through Rhett’s eyebrow. Kissed the corner of his mouth. Put his hand on Rhett’s chest and felt the heart beating — fast, slowing, settling into the steady rhythm that meant he was home.
“Stay,” Levi said. The word that had become their contract. Their vow. The one-syllable architecture of everything they’d built from a lie in a diner to a truth in a trailer.
“Always,” Rhett said.
Outside, the rain fell on the aluminum roof and the mountains held the sky and the river ran and the boots sat side by side on the step — one pair straight, one pair in a pile — and neither pair was going anywhere.