Bi Appointment Only — Bonus Chapter
Saturday Morning Shave
by Jace Wilder
⚠️ This bonus chapter takes place during the epilogue timeline and contains explicit content. Read the novel first for maximum impact.
Nico woke to the sound of running water and a man swearing in complete sentences.
Not the abbreviated profanity of a stubbed toe or a dropped phone. Full, architecturally complex cursing — the kind that contained subordinate clauses and parenthetical qualifications and landed somewhere between a legal brief and a prayer.
“The angle of this — no. The wrist position is fundamentally — this is not a transferable skill. The ergonomics are entirely —”
He was in the bathroom. Their bathroom — the one with the deep tub and the marble counter and the candles from three nights ago still sitting in their wax puddles because neither of them had cleaned up after the last time things got out of hand in here.
Nico lay in bed and listened. Saturday morning. Winter light through the curtains. The sheets smelled like them — cedar and his cologne and the specific, warm, unmistakable scent of two bodies that had spent the night pressed together.
Another muffled curse. Something clattered against the counter — metal on marble, the distinctive sound of a razor being set down with more force than precision.
Nico got up. Pulled on sweatpants and nothing else. The man in the bathroom had seen every inch of him and he was done performing modesty for someone who’d spent the previous night proving exactly how much he appreciated the view.
The bathroom door was open. Leander stood at the sink in boxer briefs and an undershirt, his reading glasses on — he wore them for close work and they made him look like an extremely attractive professor having a crisis — and Nico’s grandfather’s straight razor in his right hand.
He was attempting to shave himself.
The lather was uneven. Too thick on one side, barely there on the other. His jaw was half-shaved — the left side smooth, the right side still lathered — and a small piece of tissue was stuck to his chin where he’d nicked the scar.
“Morning,” Nico said, leaning against the doorframe.
Leander looked at him in the mirror. His expression combined the stubborn determination of a man who refused to concede defeat with the quiet desperation of a man who was actively bleeding onto his own bathroom counter.
“I am learning a new skill,” he said.
“I can see that.”
“The straight razor requires a wrist articulation that is significantly different from a safety razor. The angle of approach on the mandibular line is—”
“Baby.”
He stopped. The word shut down his entire operating system — the formal vocabulary, the analytical framework, the defensive architecture. Baby. A word Nico used rarely and strategically, deployed now because the man he loved was standing in their bathroom with lather on half his face and a tissue on his chin and a dead man’s razor in his hand, trying to teach himself to shave because Nico shaved him every Friday and he wanted to understand the work from the inside.
“You’re holding it wrong,” Nico said.
“I watched seventeen videos.”
“Videos aren’t hands.” Nico crossed the bathroom. Stood behind him. Placed his hand over Leander’s on the razor — fingers wrapping his, adjusting the angle, the grip, the relationship between wrist and blade.
“The razor does the work,” Nico said. “You’re muscling it. Feel the difference.”
He guided Leander’s hand. Drew the razor down the right side of his jaw — his hand, Nico’s hand, the blade moving through lather in a single clean stroke.
“There,” Nico said.
“That was — significantly less violent than my previous attempts.”
“How many previous attempts?”
“This is attempt four. The first three are not being discussed.”
Nico pressed his lips to the back of Leander’s neck. “Let me finish.”
Leander surrendered the razor. The surrender itself was its own form of intimacy — handing over a blade, sitting on the stool, tilting his chin up without being asked because his body had memorized the geometry of Nico’s care.
Nico re-lathered him. Mixed a fresh bowl. Applied it in circles. His jaw, his throat, the difficult terrain of the scar. He shaved him in their bathroom on a Saturday morning in sweatpants and bare feet, no cape, no studio. Just a man holding a razor and a man sitting still.
Every stroke was perfect. Not because perfection was the goal — because twelve years of practice had made perfection the default, and the default was love, and love was what his hands did when they held sharp things against the skin of someone they chose.
“Teach me,” Leander said after Nico finished. “Now.”
Nico shaved himself in the mirror — quick, efficient — while Leander watched. Not his hand. The angle. The wrist. The way the blade lay against the skin at precisely thirty degrees.
“Now you.” Fresh lather on Leander’s right side. Razor handed back.
“Thirty degrees. Let the weight of the blade do the cutting. Your job is steering.”
He drew the razor down. Slow, careful, and not bad.
“Good,” Nico said.
The word hit him. Even here — even in a bathroom, even during a shaving lesson — the praise found its target. His shoulders dropped. His breathing changed. The next stroke was the smoothest yet.
“You’re a natural,” Nico said. “The same thing that makes you good with numbers makes you good with a blade — precision, patience, the ability to hold a line.”
“You’re flattering me because I’m holding a sharp object.”
“I’m telling you the truth because you need to hear it. You have excellent hands.”
He met Nico’s eyes in the mirror. The look was warm and complex — a man being praised for something new by the person whose praise had become the most important currency in his emotional economy.
He finished the shave. Set the razor down. Turned on the stool. His hands found Nico’s waist.
“I also recall being told that my learning speed was, and I quote, ‘so fucking fast.’”
“That was a different context.”
“Was it?” His thumbs traced circles on Nico’s hip bones. “Perhaps I need a refresher.”
His hands slid from Nico’s waist to his lower back. Pulled him forward between his knees — the same position Nico had occupied in the barber chair a hundred times, reversed now.
He kissed Nico’s stomach. Just above the waistband. Unhurried, deliberate, a man pressing his mouth to bare skin because wanting was something he was allowed to do now.
His fingers hooked the waistband. Pulled down. Slowly. The sweatpants sliding over hips, thighs, pooling at ankles. Nico was naked. Leander was still in his boxer briefs and undershirt, his glasses on his face, and the disparity — Nico bare, Leander clothed — made Nico’s cock twitch with interest that had nothing to do with caffeine.
Leander wrapped his hand around him. The grip was confident — the sure, knowing grip of a man who had spent months learning exactly what Nico liked and committed every preference to permanent memory.
His mouth followed his hand.
The first contact — his lips, warm and sure, closing around him — pulled a sound from Nico’s chest that was too early for the neighbors and too honest for the bathroom. Leander took him slowly, his hand working the base, his tongue doing the thing Nico had taught him the first night and that he’d refined into a devastating technique through repetition and obsessive thoroughness.
His glasses fogged. He didn’t remove them.
The image of Leander Shaw on a bathroom stool, his reading glasses foggy, his mouth full, looking up through smudged lenses with those dark, intent eyes — Nico was going to carry that image into the grave.
“You — those glasses are—”
“Distracting?” He pulled off just long enough to ask.
“Devastating.”
“I’ll keep them on.”
He took Nico again. Deeper. His free hand on Nico’s hip, steadying him, because Nico’s knees were doing unreliable things and the only warm surface in the room was Leander’s mouth and Nico was leaning into it with desperate gratitude.
Leander didn’t need permission anymore. He took what he wanted with focused confidence — the same man who used to need coaching for every touch now working Nico’s cock with synchronized precision, his hand twisting at the top, his mouth applying suction that made Nico’s hands fly to his shoulders and grip hard enough to wrinkle his undershirt.
The orgasm hit with sudden, devastating force. Nico came in his mouth and Leander took every drop and his hands held Nico’s hips steady while his body shook and the sound he made echoed off marble and tile.
Leander pulled off. Wiped his mouth. Looked up through smudged glasses with quiet, thorough satisfaction.
“Good morning,” he said.
Nico laughed — breathless, cracked, full of love the bathroom couldn’t hold.
He pulled Leander up. Kissed him. Pushed his boxer briefs down with both hands and wrapped his fingers around him — already hard, the arousal of a man whose pleasure came from giving as much as receiving.
Nico stroked him against the counter. His back against the marble, Nico’s hand around him, foreheads pressed together. Leander gripped the counter’s edge and his hips moved into Nico’s fist and his eyes stayed open, watching — the mirror they no longer needed to turn away from.
“You’re good at this,” Nico said. “At everything. At the razor. At the shave. At learning to take care of someone. At letting someone take care of you.”
The praise landed where it always landed — in the deep, hungry place where Leander Shaw had spent forty-two years never being told he was doing well at the things that mattered.
“I had a good teacher,” he managed.
“You had a barber. And then you had a boyfriend. And now you have a partner who lives in your apartment and sleeps in your bed and is currently jerking you off in your bathroom and thinks you are the bravest, most stubborn, most beautiful man who has ever sat in a barber chair and said I want you to kiss me.”
He came. His hands seized the counter and his body arched and his head fell back and the sound — the unedited, uncontrolled sound that Nico had first heard as an almost-groan in a barber chair — filled the bathroom.
Nico held him through it. His forehead dropped to Nico’s shoulder.
“The shaving lesson has deviated considerably from the curriculum,” he said into Nico’s neck.
“Best kind of deviation.”
“Next Saturday. Same time. I want to learn the neck angle.”
“You want a standing weekly shaving lesson.”
“I want a standing weekly Saturday morning with you in this bathroom teaching me something that matters to you. The shaving is the structure. What happens after is — negotiable.”
“Deal.”
They showered together. Made coffee. Sat at the dining table — the scarred, ring-stained table where they hosted Sunday dinners and ate weeknight pasta and lived their actual, imperfect, extraordinary life — and drank their coffee and did not talk about anything important because the morning itself was the important thing.
Leander’s hand found Nico’s across the table. Warm. Relaxed. The grip of a man who no longer needed to hold on so tightly.
Saturday. No appointment. No schedule. No project scope. Just them. Just the permanent, standing, non-negotiable booking of two men who chose each other every morning and planned to keep choosing until the choosing was the only appointment that mattered.
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