Barbacks & Backrooms — Bonus Chapter

Last Call
An exclusive bonus scene by Jace Wilder

This scene takes place six months after the epilogue of Barbacks & Backrooms.
Eli’s POV. 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — You’ve been warned.

Last Call

The bar has been closed for eleven minutes and Nolan is up to something.

I can tell because he’s being efficient. Not his usual efficient — the steady, competent, everything-in-its-place efficiency that I fell in love with eighteen months ago. This is strategic efficiency. The kind where he’s moving through the closing checklist at double speed, wiping down sections of bar I haven’t seen him touch since our last deep clean, flipping stools with a focus that borders on aggressive.

He’s clearing the decks. Making space. Preparing the terrain for something he’s already planned and hasn’t told me about.

“You’re being weird,” I tell him from my spot at the register, counting out the drawer.

“I’m being thorough.”

“You’re being suspiciously thorough. You mopped under the reach-in. Nobody mops under the reach-in.”

“Somebody should.”

He doesn’t look at me. He’s focused on the bar top, running the rag in long, deliberate strokes, and the flex of his forearms draws my eye the way it always has — from the first night he couldn’t stock a speed rail to now, when he runs the entire operation and his forearms have the definition to prove it. Eighteen months of hauling cases and changing kegs have carved lines into his arms that weren’t there when he walked in wearing a button-down and a nervous expression, and I track those lines the same way I track the top-shelf bottles — automatically, constantly, with the focused appreciation of a professional.

“Dev and Josie left fast tonight,” I say casually.

“They had plans.”

“Both of them? At the same time?”

“People have lives, Eli.”

“Josie told me she was going home to ‘FaceTime Sadie and do a face mask.’ She said it while looking at you. With air quotes.”

Nolan doesn’t answer. He folds the rag into a perfect square — because he’s still the psychopath who folds everything — and sets it on the edge of the bar.

I close the register. Lock the cash in the office safe. Do the thing where I check the back door and the walk-in and the alarm panel, the closing ritual I’ve performed a thousand times, each step automatic, my body moving through the sequence while my brain stays fixed on the man in the other room who is absolutely, undeniably planning something.

When I come back out, the bar is pristine. Every surface gleaming. Every stool flipped except two — ours, side by side at the end of the bar, our usual closing-time seats.

But there’s something on the bar top that wasn’t there before.

Two mason jars. The originals. ELI and NOLAN in faded Sharpie on curling masking tape. I keep them under the register — our artifacts, our relics, the first objects in the museum of us.

And between them, centered with the precision of a man who measures everything, a black silk blindfold.

I stare at it. Then at him.

He’s leaning against the back bar with his arms crossed, watching me with the expression I love most — the knowing curve of his lips, the steady eyes, the quiet certainty of a man who has decided what he wants and has stopped apologizing for wanting it. That expression used to be rare. Now it’s his resting state, at least with me, and every time I see it I feel the same thing I felt the first night in the backroom when he cracked open and gave me everything: this man trusts me completely, and I will spend the rest of my life earning it.

“Happy anniversary,” he says.

“Our anniversary was last—”

“Not our anniversary. The bar’s. Eighteen months since Tip Jar Dare Night. Since the night we saved this place.” He uncrosses his arms. Lets them hang at his sides. “I thought we should celebrate.”

“With a blindfold.”

“With a game.” He pushes off the back bar and walks toward the jars. Taps the one with my name. “I won tonight’s count. Don’t check — I already counted. Beat you by fourteen dollars. The nurses’ table loves me.”

“The nurses’ table loves you because you remember their kids’ names.”

“And because I’m charming.”

“You’re not charming. You’re attentive. There’s a difference.”

“You taught me there’s a difference.” He picks up the blindfold. Runs the silk through his fingers — slow, deliberate, watching my face while he does it. “So I get the favor.”

“And the favor involves…” I nod at the silk in his hands.

“The favor involves you.” He steps closer. Into my space, the way I used to step into his — calculated proximity, the bartender’s trick of closing distance to create intimacy. He learned it from me and he’s better at it than I ever was because when Nolan Chase closes the distance, he means it. Every inch is intentional. Every inch is a choice.

“Sitting on the bar top.” Another step. “Wearing this.” He holds up the blindfold. “And letting me do whatever I want.”

My mouth goes dry. My cock, which has been in a low-grade state of awareness since I noticed the extra mopping, goes from interested to involved.

“You had this planned,” I say.

“Since Tuesday. When I ordered the blindfold.” He stops in front of me. Close enough that I can feel his body heat, close enough that I can smell him — the citrus-and-clean scent that lives on both of us now, our shared cologne, the olfactory evidence of a life built in the same space. “You can always say pass.”

I look at the blindfold. Black silk, high quality — not a sleep mask from a drugstore, something he actually researched and ordered, probably with the same analytical focus he brings to the Instagram analytics and the event planning spreadsheets. Nolan doesn’t do things halfway. He never has.

“I haven’t said pass in eighteen months,” I tell him.

“I’m not starting now.”

His smile widens. Not the charming bartender grin he’s developed for customers — something darker, more private, the smile that belongs to our bedroom and the backroom and the 3 AM conversations where we lie in the dark and say the things we can’t say in daylight.

“Get on the bar,” he says.

The bar top is cold under my thighs.

I’m sitting on the edge — ass on the mahogany, feet dangling, hands braced on either side — and the wood is smooth and worn and solid under me. I’ve stood behind this bar for four and a half years. Poured thousands of drinks on its surface. But I’ve never sat on it like this — never felt the width of it under my body, the ancient solidity of wood that’s survived two decades of spilled drinks and the weight of a hundred thousand stories.

Nolan stands between my knees. His fingers are at my temples, threading the blindfold into place, and his touch is precise — not rushed, not tentative, but calibrated, the way he handles everything now. He ties it at the back of my head. Smooths the silk over my eyes until the darkness is complete.

“Can you see?”

“No.”

“Good.”

The loss of sight is immediate and total. What replaces it is everything else, amplified — the hum of the beer fridge behind me, the tick of the clock on the far wall, the subtle creak of the building settling. And Nolan’s breathing, slow and controlled, the breathing of a man who is savoring this.

His fingers leave my temples and trail downward. Light, barely-there contact — the pads of his fingertips tracing my jaw, my neck, following the line of my throat to the hollow at its base. He presses his thumb there. Feels my pulse.

“Fast,” he murmurs.

“Your fault.”

“I know.” His thumb moves in a slow circle. “I like it.”

He pushes the flannel off my shoulders. Pulls the tank over my head, careful not to disturb the blindfold, and I’m bare from the waist up on my own bar top in the dark. The air hits my skin and goosebumps rise on my arms.

His mouth finds my collarbone.

No warning. Just the sudden, wet heat of his lips against the spot where the tattoo begins — the geometric petals that cross my clavicle. He knows this tattoo better than the artist who inked it. He’s traced it with his fingers and his tongue so many times that the design has become a shared language, a cartography of pleasure, each petal and line associated with a specific sound I make.

He uses that knowledge now. Ruthlessly.

His tongue follows the outer edge of the largest petal — a slow, flat stroke that makes my stomach clench. His teeth close on the line where ink meets blank skin. He moves to the inner design and traces each crossing with the tip of his tongue, precise, methodical, turning my own body art into a stimulus map.

“Nolan—”

“Shh.” His mouth moves to my chest. His tongue flicks once. Twice. Then his teeth, just the edge, the lightest scrape.

My hips jerk. My hands slam down on the bar top, gripping the edge.

“You know what I think about?” he says against my skin. His voice is low and conversational, like he’s not currently dismantling me one nerve ending at a time. “When I’m behind the bar. Working a shift.”

“What?” I manage.

“Your hands.” His mouth moves down my sternum. “The way they look when you pour. When you shake a cocktail. The way your forearms flex and your fingers grip the shaker like—” He presses his tongue into the groove between my abs. “Like you could crush it.”

“You think about my hands.”

“Every shift.” His fingers find my belt. “Every single shift for eighteen months.” The buckle clinks. “I think about them on my hips.” The button. “In my hair.” The zipper. “Around my—”

“Nolan.”

“I’m making a point.”

“You’re making me insane.”

“Same thing.”

He pulls my jeans down far enough. His hands grip my hips — strong, sure, callused — and he pulls me forward on the bar top until I’m right at the edge. My weight shifts into his grip. My trust shifts into his hands.

His thumbs trace my hip bones. The freckle — the left hip, the one he stared at during the shirtless shift, the one he pressed his mouth to the first time he knelt on the barroom floor — gets a kiss. Soft, lingering, reverent. A pilgrimage. Every time.

“You still with me?”

“I’m with you. I’m always—”

His mouth.

The word dissolves. My whole vocabulary dissolves — every language I speak, every clever line I’ve used — all of it gone, vaporized by the hot, wet, absolute certainty of Nolan Chase’s mouth closing around my cock.

He takes me deep on the first stroke. No preamble, no tentative approach — the shy barback who surprised himself by kneeling eighteen months ago is a distant memory. This is a man who knows exactly what he’s doing, who deploys that knowledge with the strategic precision of someone who once built marketing campaigns for a living.

My hands slam down on the bar top. My head tips back. I hear myself make a sound — low, wrecked, pulled from somewhere behind my sternum — and the sound echoes off the liquor shelves.

He works me slow. Agonizingly, intentionally, punitively slow. Long pulls that drag his lips from base to tip, his tongue pressed flat against the underside. At the head he pauses — swirls his tongue in the pattern he’s mapped to my nervous system through meticulous experimentation.

“Fuck—Nolan—your mouth is—”

He hums. The vibration travels through my cock and up my spine and detonates somewhere behind my eyes, and my hips buck forward — involuntary, desperate — and he takes it, takes me, his hands absorbing the thrust without losing his rhythm.

The blindfold makes everything worse. Better. Both. Without sight, every sensation is cranked to eleven — the wet heat of his mouth, the pressure of his tongue, the cool air against the parts of me his mouth has left wet. I can hear everything — his breathing through his nose, the small wet sounds of his mouth working, my own ragged gasps echoing in the empty bar.

He pulls off. My hips chase him — I actually chase him, my body arching forward — and I make a sound that I will categorically deny for the rest of my life. A whimper. Raw, helpless.

His hand replaces his mouth. Slick from spit, stroking slow, keeping me at the edge.

“Not yet,” he says. His voice is wrecked too — rougher, deeper. “I have plans.”

“Plans?” My voice is not my voice. “Nolan, I need—”

“I know what you need.”

I hear a bottle open. The glug of liquid. Then the sharp, sweet, unmistakable smell of bourbon — the good stuff, the top-shelf Pappy Van Winkle I keep for celebrations and catastrophes.

His finger presses against my lips. Wet. Bourbon-dipped. The taste blooms on my tongue — oak, caramel, vanilla, heat. His finger pushes deeper. Past my lips, against my tongue, and instinct takes over — I close my mouth around it and suck. Clean the bourbon from his skin, taste the salt underneath, feel the callus on his fingertip.

The sound he makes is obscene. A groan that starts in his chest and comes out as breath, and the knowledge that I did that — that a man who walked into my bar barely able to make eye contact is now groaning because I’m sucking bourbon off his finger — makes my cock throb against his other hand.

“Good,” he breathes. “So good.”

My words. My fucking words, the praise I built into him like a foundation — turned around on me. Weaponized. Deployed with devastating accuracy by the student who didn’t just learn the lesson but mastered it.

And the thing is — the thing I never expected — it works on me the same way it works on him. The word good lands in my chest like a fist. My body arches toward his hand, toward his voice, toward the source of the praise that I’ve spent my whole life performing to earn and have never quite believed I deserved.

Until him.

His mouth returns. Bourbon-warm, the taste of whiskey mixed with the taste of me, and the combination — the bar, the blindfold, the bourbon, his mouth — is so overwhelmingly us that I feel my eyes sting behind the silk.

He builds me again. Slow and expert, his mouth taking me deeper, his hand twisting at the base. My hands are in his hair — gripping, pulling him closer, my hips moving in small urgent thrusts that he matches and absorbs.

The first time I hit the edge, he pulls off. I curse. He strokes me lazily, keeping me suspended.

“Nolan, please—”

“Not yet.”

The second time, his mouth is deeper, hotter, the suction harder, and pulling off rips a moan out of me that sounds like it came from someone dying. He presses his forehead against my hip, breathing hard, and I feel his jaw trembling against my thigh — he’s holding himself back too. This is costing him. The control, the patience, the power of denial — it’s taking everything he has.

“Please,” I beg. No pride left. No performance. Just a man in the dark, blindfolded, begging the person he loves to let him come. “Please, Nolan, I can’t—I need to—let me—”

“Not until I say.”

His mouth again. The third time. Deeper than before, taking me to the back of his throat, and the sound — wet, obscene — makes my vision spark behind the silk. I’m shaking. Full-body tremors, my thighs quaking against the bar edge, my hands in his hair, my breathing so ragged it’s barely breathing.

“Please—”

He doesn’t stop.

His mouth takes me deep and his hand wraps around the base and his other hand — the one not occupied — reaches up and pulls the blindfold off.

Light floods my vision. The bar. The bottles. The string lights on the ceiling casting constellations. And every beautiful, mundane detail of the place that is my home.

And Nolan.

Between my thighs. On his knees. Looking up at me with those blue-gray eyes — wide, wet, blown dark, his face flushed and his lips swollen and his mouth full of me — and his expression saying the same thing it said the first night in the backroom when I asked for a real compliment and he gave me his whole self:

I see you. All of you. And I’m staying.

I come.

Hard. Harder than I knew was possible, the orgasm tearing through me like a wave through a sea wall, my whole body seizing, my hands in his hair, his name coming out of me in a voice I don’t recognize — broken, raw, a sound that starts as his name and ends as a sob. He holds me through it. Swallows. Stays. His hands on my hips anchoring me to the bar while the world dissolves and reforms and dissolves again.

The aftershocks last a long time. Small tremors rolling through my body, each one punctuated by a soft sound — a whimper, a gasp, his name on my lips like a prayer I can’t stop saying. He gentles his mouth — softer now, almost tender, easing me down with the same patience he used to build me up.

When he finally pulls off, my body is liquid. I’m slumped on the bar top, chest heaving, the blindfold hanging around my neck like a silk scarf. Every muscle in my body has been replaced with warm water.

He stands. Slowly — his knees must be killing him — and he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

The gesture. Our gesture. Practical, unfussy, devastatingly hot.

“Happy anniversary,” he says. His voice is thrashed.

I grab him. Both hands on the front of his shirt, hauling him forward between my legs, and I kiss him — tasting bourbon and myself and the eighteen months of a love I didn’t think I deserved and got anyway. His mouth opens under mine and he moans into the kiss, a desperate, needy sound that tells me he’s been holding himself together through the entire performance and the seams are showing.

I feel him against my thigh. Hard. Straining. Neglected through every minute of what he just gave me.

“Your turn,” I say against his mouth.

“Upstairs. We can—”

“Here.”

“Eli, the bar is—”

“The bar is ours.” I slide off the bar top. My legs don’t work perfectly — they’re shaky, unsteady — but they hold. I grip his hips. Spin him. Press his back against the bar where I was just sitting. “And I’m going to wreck you on every surface we own. Starting here.”

His eyes go dark. The composure that held through thirty minutes of strategic, surgical pleasure — the control he maintained while he edged me three times and poured bourbon on his finger and told me I was good — cracks. Shatters. What’s underneath is the Nolan I fell in love with: responsive, desperate, hungry, the man who comes alive under praise and touch and the specific attention of someone who sees him.

“Please,” he whispers.

I undo his belt. The sound — the buckle, the button, the zipper — is a mirror of what he did to me, the same sounds in the same bar in the same light, and the symmetry of it feels right. Full circle.

I push his jeans down. His boxers. Take him in my hand — hot, hard, already wet at the tip, eighteen months of familiarity doing nothing to diminish the rush I feel when I hold him, the specific weight and heat of him, the way he pulses against my palm like his heartbeat lives here.

“You’re so good,” I tell him, dropping to my knees. On the rubber bar mat. In the spot where it all started — eighteen months ago, a barroom floor, two men discovering each other in the dark. “You know that? You’re so fucking good.”

His hand finds my hair. His fingers tighten. His head falls back against the bar edge and he makes the sound — the sound, his sound, the breathy, broken moan that I’ve been chasing since the first time I heard it. The sound that means: I trust you. I want you. I’m yours.

I take him in my mouth and give him everything he gave me. Every technique, every trick, every piece of knowledge I’ve accumulated over eighteen months of paying attention to the body of the man I love. I know his map the way he knows mine — the flat-tongue press that makes him grab the bar edge, the suction at the head that makes his hips stutter, the deep, steady rhythm that builds him slowly, inexorably, toward the edge he doesn’t try to resist.

“Eli — god — right there, don’t stop, don’t—”

I don’t stop. I take him deeper. Feel his thighs trembling against my shoulders, his hand in my hair tightening, his breathing going ragged and sharp.

“I love you,” he says. Not a declaration — a fact. An involuntary utterance, the words falling out of him the way his body is falling, gravity and truth, unstoppable. “Eli, I love you, I’m — I’m going to—”

I pull him closer. Take him as deep as I can. Look up.

He looks down. Blue-gray eyes, swimming, shattered, radiant.

He comes with my name in his mouth and his hand in my hair and eighteen months of love and trust and the quiet, fierce certainty that this — this, the bar and the game and the backroom and the mornings and the closing shifts and the fights and the fixing and the choosing, choosing, choosing each other every single day — this is the life.

I hold him through it. Every tremor, every aftershock, every whispered Eli that sounds like a prayer. I hold him the way he held me: steady, sure, present. The barback who never lets anything fall. The bartender who always catches the glass.

When it’s over, we’re both on the floor. The rubber bar mat, sticky and unglamorous, our backs against the cabinet, shoulders touching. The same position as the first time — the barroom floor at 2 AM, his head on my shoulder, my arm around him, the ice machine humming its lullaby.

“We should clean up,” he murmurs.

“Probably.”

“And go upstairs.”

“Eventually.”

“The floor is disgusting.”

“The floor is character.”

He laughs. Wet, breathless, the laugh that shakes his shoulders and crinkles his eyes and makes me want to say stupid things just to hear it again. The laugh I fell in love with. The laugh I’ll spend the rest of my life earning.

“Eli?”

“Hm.”

“Same time next year?”

I pull him closer. Press my lips to his hair. The string lights cast warm circles on the ceiling. The tip jars sit on the bar above us, the faded Sharpie names just visible from this angle. ELI. NOLAN. The beginning of something that became everything.

“Same time every year,” I tell him. “Same jars. Same game. Same you.”

“Same us.”

“Same us.”

He tilts his face up. Kisses me — soft, unhurried, tasting like bourbon and aftermath and the particular sweetness of a man who is exactly where he’s supposed to be. Against my mouth, so quiet it’s barely sound, he says:

“Winner gets you.”

“That’s always been the deal.”

The bar holds us. Same as always. Same as forever.

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