Off the Record

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Bed, Breakfast, & Benefits
by Jace Wilder

Three weeks apart. Four hundred miles of distance. One phone call that starts with “I miss you” and ends with both of them wrecked, breathless, and more in love than ever. This scene is too hot for Amazon and lives exclusively here.

Two weeks after checkout. Wednesday. 11:47 PM.

The ranch in Virginia smelled like hay and horse and absolutely nothing like cedar.

I was lying on a narrow bunk in a converted bunkhouse that the ranch owner had cheerfully described as “rustic,” which was generous language for a room with no insulation, a mattress that predated the internet, and a bathroom down the hall that I shared with three ranch hands named collectively, as far as I could tell, Buddy.

The shoot had wrapped at nine. Five hours of filming horses and fences and a sunset that should have been spectacular but which my brain had refused to appreciate because it was the wrong sunset in the wrong state with the wrong air, and I’d spent the entire golden hour thinking about a different golden hour in a different place with a man whose shoulders blocked out the light in a way that Virginia sunsets could never compete with.

Two weeks. Fourteen days since I’d driven away from the Heron’s Rest with a loaf of challah on my passenger seat and the taste of Nolan’s mouth fading on my lips. Fourteen days of hotel rooms and farmhouses and this bunkhouse, which creaked in the wind and had a draft that came through the window frame and made the curtain move in a way that was either atmospheric or haunted, depending on my mood.

My mood was horny. Desperately, catastrophically, can’t-sleep-because-my-body-won’t-stop-reminding-me-what-it’s-missing horny. The kind of horny that turned every mundane sensation into a reminder: the weight of the blanket was the weight of his arm; the heat of the shower was the heat of his body; the roughness of the towel was his jaw against my neck, the stubble burn I’d worn like a badge for three days after I left and mourned when it faded.

I’d been handling it. Poorly, but handling it. Cold showers. Aggressive editing schedules. A truly inadvisable amount of ranch work, which the hands found amusing and which had given me a blister situation I didn’t want to discuss.

But tonight was worse. Tonight Nolan had sent me a photo.

Not a sexy photo. That would have been manageable. A sexy photo has clear intent; you know what you’re supposed to do with it. This was worse than a sexy photo. This was a picture of the kitchen counter—my spot at the island, the stool with the small E on the underside—with a single plate of pasta on it. Fresh pappardelle in brown butter and sage. My favorite. The plate was set for one, with a cloth napkin and a glass of wine, and next to it, a small jar of wildflowers from the garden.

He’d made my dinner. Set my place. Even though I wasn’t there. Even though the chair was empty and the pasta would go uneaten—or eaten by him, standing at the counter alone, the way he’d eaten every meal for three years before I showed up.

The caption was two words: Miss you.

I’d stared at that photo for forty-five minutes. At the pasta, at the flowers, at the careful placement of the napkin—folded, not crumpled, because Nolan Voss didn’t crumple napkins even when no one was watching. At the evidence of a man who expressed love through food and was cooking for a ghost because his hands didn’t know how to be idle and his heart didn’t know how to be quiet.

I picked up my phone.

Eli: are you still up

Three dots. Immediate. He’d been waiting.

Nolan: Yes.

Eli: can I call you

Nolan: You don’t have to ask.

I called. He picked up before the first ring finished.

“Hey.” His voice. Low, rough, the nighttime version stripped of the professional steadiness he wore during the day. The voice from our bed, from the dark, from the hours between midnight and dawn when neither of us could sleep and we’d lie tangled together and talk about nothing until the talking became touching and the touching became everything.

“Hey,” I said. And my voice cracked on a single syllable, because hearing him after two weeks of texts and photos and the memory of how he sounded was like finding water in a desert—relief so acute it hurt.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I just—” I pressed the phone harder against my ear. Closed my eyes. Imagined him in our bed—our bed, the king with the iron frame, the white sheets, the pillow that he’d told me still smelled like my shampoo even though I’d been gone for two weeks and that was objectively impossible but I believed him because I wanted to. “You made me dinner.”

“I made dinner. You weren’t here to eat it.”

“You set my place.”

A pause. The particular pause of a man caught doing something tender and deciding whether to own it or deflect. “The kitchen felt wrong without your plate.”

“Nolan.”

“It’s just pasta, Eli.”

“It is never just pasta. We’ve established this. There’s a legal precedent.”

He almost laughed. I heard it—the exhale, the catch, the suppressed sound that I’d spent weeks learning to decode and now missed the way I missed oxygen at altitude. Present, necessary, defining the quality of every breath.

“I miss you,” he said. Blunt. No hedging.

“I miss you so much I can’t sleep. I miss you so much I considered driving to Maine at midnight and I’m in Virginia. I miss your hands and your coffee and the way the bed dips when you get in and the sound you make when—” I stopped.

“When what?”

The air in the bunkhouse shifted. Or maybe I shifted—my body responding to his voice, to the memory it carried, to the catalog of sounds and sensations that two weeks of abstinence had sharpened into something unbearable.

“When I touch you,” I said. Quieter. The register dropping. “The sound you make the first time I put my hands on you. This—intake of breath, like you forgot what it felt like and you’re remembering all at once. You did it every time. Even at the end, when we’d been together for a week, every time I touched you it was like the first time.”

Silence. The kind that has texture—thick, warm, electric. I heard his breathing change through the phone. Slower. Deeper.

“Eli,” he said. A warning. Or an invitation. With Nolan, they sounded the same.

“I know. I know it’s late and you have bread at four-thirty and this is probably a terrible idea, but I’m lying in a bunkhouse in Virginia on a mattress that hates me and I can’t stop thinking about you. About your mouth on my neck and your hands on my—”

“Where are you? Specifically.”

“In bed. Alone. The ranch hands are in the other building.”

“Door locked?”

“Yeah.”

“Walls?”

“Concrete block. Nobody can hear anything.”

Another pause. I heard something on his end—fabric shifting, the creak of the bed frame, the sound of a man adjusting his position. Settling in.

“Tell me,” he said. His voice had dropped into the lower register. “Tell me what you’re thinking about.”

My pulse spiked. My hand tightened on the phone.

“Are we doing this?” I asked. Not coy—genuine. Checking. Because consent mattered, even across four hundred miles of cell signal, and especially with a man who’d had his boundaries violated by someone who should have protected them.

“We’re doing this,” he said. “If you want to.”

“I want to. God, Nolan, I want to. I’ve wanted to for fourteen days. I’ve been taking cold showers and chopping firewood and doing ranch chores like a Victorian hysteria patient trying to cure himself through manual labor, and none of it is working because my body knows what it’s missing and no amount of fence-mending is a substitute for—”

“Tell me what you’d do.”

The command—quiet, steady, certain—went through me like current. I was hard already. Had been since his voice came through the phone. My hand was on my stomach, fingers spread, the way his hand rested on me when we were lying together, and the muscle memory of his touch made my skin prickle.

“If I were there right now,” I said. “In our bed. Next to you.”

“Yes.”

“I’d start with your neck. That spot behind your ear—the one that makes you grab the sheets. I’d put my mouth there and just—breathe. Feel your pulse against my lips. Let you feel my breath on your skin until you made that sound.”

“What sound.”

“The one you pretend you don’t make. The low one, in your chest, like a growl that got caught halfway. The one that tells me your whole body just woke up.”

I heard it. Through the phone. The exact sound I’d described—low, involuntary, the rumble of a man whose body was responding to a voice four hundred miles away as if the voice were hands.

“Yeah,” I breathed. “That one.”

“Keep going.” Rougher now. Strained.

“I’d work my way down. Your jaw, your throat, that dip at the base of your neck where your collarbones meet. I’d spend time there—you always try to rush me past it, but I love that spot. The way your pulse jumps. The way you swallow hard when I drag my tongue across it.”

“Eli—”

“I’d get your shirt off. Pull it over your head with both hands and throw it somewhere you’d find it in the morning and be annoyed about, because you fold everything and I fold nothing and you secretly love that about me.”

“I don’t secretly—”

“And then I’d just—look at you. The way I looked at you the first time. Your chest, your shoulders, the scar on your forearm. I’d run my hands down your body and feel every muscle tense under my fingers, because you tense when I look at you like that. Like you still can’t believe someone wants to.”

His breathing was audible now. Heavy. Controlled, but barely—the rhythm of a man who was managing his own arousal with the same precision he brought to a sear.

“Are you touching yourself?” I asked.

A beat. “Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because I want—” He stopped. Started again. “I’m not good at this. The phone thing. I can’t—I need to touch you. Hearing you without being able to—”

“Then pretend. Close your eyes. Pretend your hand is mine. Can you do that?”

Silence. Then: “Yeah. I can do that.”

“Touch yourself for me, Nolan.”

I heard the sharp inhale. The shift of fabric. The faint, unmistakable sound of a hand on skin, and my own hand slid beneath my waistband and wrapped around myself, already aching, already desperate.

“God,” he said. Low. Almost pained. “I can almost—your hand is different. Smaller. Faster. You always start fast.”

“Because I’m impatient.”

“Because you’re greedy. You want everything at once.”

“I want you at once. All of you. Every time.” I stroked myself slowly, matching the rhythm I imagined he was using—deliberate, measured, the pace of a man who controlled everything including this. “What are you doing? Tell me exactly.”

“I’m—” He exhaled. Shaky. “I’m on my back. In our bed. The left side. My hand is—I’m thinking about your mouth.”

“Where?”

“On me. Around me. The way you—Christ, Eli, the way you look at me when you—”

“When I go down on you?”

“Yeah.” Barely a word. More breath than voice.

“I love that. I love the way you taste—clean, warm, the salt of you. I love the way you try to hold still and can’t, the way your hips lift off the bed even when you’re trying to let me set the pace. I love the sounds you make when I take you deep—”

He groaned. Through the phone, across the miles, the sound hit me like a physical thing—guttural, raw, the groan of a man who was losing the battle with his own restraint. My hand tightened around myself, the pace quickening.

“Are you close?” I asked.

“Not yet. I don’t want—I want to hear you first.”

“Hear me what?”

“Come. I want to hear you come, Eli. I want to hear the sound you make when—the loud one. The one you can’t control.”

“I can never control it. Not with you. Not when you’re—when your hands are on me, when you’re inside me, when you say my name the way you’re about to say it right now—”

“Eli.” Like a prayer. Like a curse. Like a man gripping the edge of a cliff with one hand and choosing to let go.

“There. Like that. Say it again.”

“Eli.” Wrecked. Shattered. “Eli, I’m—I need—”

“I know what you need. You need to let go. You need to stop holding on so tight and let yourself feel it. I’m right here. I’m—” My voice was breaking, my hand moving faster, my body arching off the narrow bunk as the pleasure built, coiled, wound tight at the base of my spine. “I’m right here, Nolan, I’m not going anywhere, I love you, I love you and I’m—”

“Come for me.” His voice. Commanding. Gentle. Devastated. The voice that held me down and opened me up and made me feel safer than I’d ever felt in my life. “Come for me, Eli. Let me hear you.”

I came with his name on my lips, loud enough that the concrete walls earned their keep, my body shuddering on a mattress in Virginia while a man in Maine listened through a phone pressed so hard against his ear that I could hear his heartbeat. The orgasm tore through me in waves—intense, consuming, sharpened by the absence, by the distance, by the ache of wanting something I couldn’t touch and settling for the closest approximation my body and his voice could build.

I was still trembling when I heard him follow.

He was quieter than me—he was always quieter—but the sounds he made were devastating in their restraint. A choked groan. A sharp inhale. My name, once, barely audible, the syllables blurring together like a word in a language only we spoke. And then silence—the specific silence of a body releasing everything it’s been holding, the exhale after the storm.

We breathed. Into our phones, across the miles, the sound of two men coming back to themselves in separate beds in separate states with the ghost of each other’s voices still echoing in their chests.

“That was—” I started.

“Yeah.”

“I’ve never—”

“Me neither.”

“Was it—”

“It was good.” His voice was soft now. Undone. “Not the same. But good.”

“Not the same,” I agreed. “But close. Closer than I thought it would be.”

“Your voice,” he said. After a moment. Quietly, like he was confessing something. “I didn’t know your voice could—that hearing you, without seeing you, without touching—” He trailed off.

“Nolan Voss. Are you saying I have a sexy voice?”

“I’m saying your voice just made me come in under five minutes from four hundred miles away, and I need to process that information before I can assign adjectives to it.”

I laughed. Breathless, giddy, the high of orgasm mixing with the warmth of his voice and the absurdity of what we’d just done and the bone-deep rightness of it—of us, of this thing we’d built that could stretch across states and survive on sound waves and still make both of us shake.

“One more week,” I said.

“One more week.”

“And then I’m coming home.”

“I know.”

“And I’m never leaving again.”

“You’re leaving again. You have a career and a series and five more locations—”

“And I’m coming back. Every time. To you. To the bread and the bed and the kitchen counter where you set my plate even when I’m not there.”

Silence. The good kind. The kind that held the shape of something too big for words.

“The pasta was good,” he said eventually. “In case you were wondering.”

“You ate it? The plate in the photo?”

“I ate it. At your place. With your napkin.” A pause. “It tasted different without you.”

“Better or worse?”

“Lonelier.”

I pressed the phone against my chest. Breathed. Felt the ache of the distance and the warmth of the connection and the impossible, necessary tension between them—the pull of a life that required movement and the anchor of a man who required presence, and the faith that we could hold both without breaking.

“Nolan?”

“Yeah.”

“When I get back. When I walk through that door. Don’t say anything. Don’t ask about the trip. Don’t ask about the ranch. Just—”

“What?”

“Just hold me. For as long as you need to. Until the missing stops.”

“The missing doesn’t stop, Eli. It just gets quieter.”

“Then hold me until it’s quiet.”

“I can do that.” His voice was fading—not disconnecting, just softening. “I can do that.”

“Goodnight, Nolan.”

“Goodnight, Eli.”

Neither of us hung up.

I lay in the bunkhouse with the phone on the pillow next to me, the line open, the sound of his breathing coming through the speaker in slow, even waves. He was falling asleep. I could hear it—the deepening, the lengthening, the rhythm settling into the cadence I knew from a hundred nights of sleeping pressed against his chest.

I closed my eyes. Matched my breathing to his. Let the sound of him carry me the way his arms would carry me in seven days, when I’d walk through the door of the Heron’s Rest and he’d be standing behind the desk or in the kitchen or at the top of the stairs, and he’d look at me, and I’d look at him, and the distance would collapse like a wave breaking on the shore.

Seven days.

I could do seven days.

The phone stayed on. The breathing continued. And somewhere in Maine, a man I loved was falling asleep with a phone on his pillow and a loaf of bread cooling on the rack and a plate set for one at an island that was meant for two, and the door—always, always—unlocked.

I fell asleep to the sound of him breathing.

It was almost enough.

In seven days, it would be everything.

Love Nolan and Eli? The full novel is available now.

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