🔥 The Night He Wrote It 🔥
An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Before You Ask Him by Jace Wilder
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place the week after the wedding in the epilogue of Before You Ask Him. It contains major spoilers and very explicit sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.
Cal’s side of the last night of the honeymoon week: rain on the farmhouse roof, a confession about two in the morning and a shower a year ago, and a husband who wants to watch exactly what Owen did. Explicit content — 18+.
The Night He Wrote It
We don’t take a honeymoon. We take the week.
That was my idea, and Owen agreed to it so fast I knew he’d been hoping I’d say it. Seven days in the farmhouse with the phones in a drawer, nobody’s kiln, nobody’s install, no one knocking on the door with a casserole or a question about drainage. We eat standing up in the kitchen. We sleep until nine like people in a movie. On Wednesday he finally fixes the faucet, and it stops lying, and I’m almost sorry.
On Friday night, the last night, it rains.
Not hard. Just steady, the kind of September rain that sounds like someone breathing on the roof. The bedroom windows are open an inch and the whole room smells like wet grass and the lake. I’m on my back with a book I haven’t turned a page of in twenty minutes, and Owen is lying on his stomach next to me, diagonal, the way he always ends up, one arm under the pillow and his face turned toward me.
He’s been looking at me for a while. I’ve been letting him.
“Can I tell you something,” he says.
“You can tell me anything. I’ll believe about half of it.”
“That’s my line.”
“You’ve had it for seventeen years. I’m taking it.” I put the book face down on my chest. “What?”
He doesn’t answer right away. He’s doing the thing with his fingers, the twitchy thing, against the sheet. I reach over and put my hand on top of them and they stop.
“The night I wrote the speech,” he says.
Something in my stomach turns over, slow, like a stone settling.
“Okay.”
“You know I wrote it in the shop. Two in the morning. Eleven minutes. You know that part.”
“I know that part.”
“I didn’t tell you what I did after.”
I look at him. His ears have gone pink. Thirty-five years old, married six days, and his ears go pink.
“You went to bed,” I say.
“I went to the shower.”
The rain keeps breathing on the roof.
“Owen.”
“I read it back,” he says, quiet, to the pillow, “and I realized it was about you. Every line. And I didn’t know what to do with that, so I went inside and got in the shower to shut my head off. And it didn’t shut off.” He swallows. “It went to the bridge. Tuesday. When you were holding the ladder. You put your hand on my thigh.”
I remember. I remember it better than he thinks. I remember deciding it was nothing. I remember how long it took me to take my hand away.
“And I got hard,” he says. “Just from that. From remembering your hand. And I tried to think about anything else. I said no out loud to the tile like an idiot. And then I stopped fighting it.”
“Owen.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine.
“I jerked off thinking about you.” He turns his face so he’s looking right at me. “It was the first time. The first time I ever let it be a man. And it was you. It was the hardest I’d come in my life, Cal. I slid down the wall. I sat on the floor of my shower and laughed until I cried, and then I gave you the speech at eight in the morning and you put it in your pocket and said you wanted to be surprised.”
I can’t breathe very well.
I knew some of it. I knew he’d said I think I want Cal to his brother at a diner three weeks later. I knew about the Sunday night with the lube from Wegmans, because he told me, laughing, in October. I didn’t know this. I didn’t know that while I was asleep across town, three days before the footbridge, he was standing in his own shower with my name in his mouth.
“What did you think about,” I say.
He blinks. “What?”
“Exactly. What did you think about.” I close the book and put it on the nightstand. I sit up against the headboard. “You don’t get to tell me half of it. Not this.”
His ears go from pink to red.
“Your hands,” he says. “First. That they were rough. That you’d tell me to hold still.” His mouth twitches. “Then your mouth. You on your knees on the bridge, under my lights, with your glasses up in your hair.”
“And then?”
“And then it changed. I didn’t steer it.” He’s not looking away. He’s making himself not look away; I can see what it costs him and I love him for paying it. “You were behind me. In the shower. Still dressed. Your gray T-shirt, the old one, soaked through. You took your glasses off and put them on the soap ledge, because you’d be neat about it even then. And you put your hand flat on my stomach, low, and pulled me back against you.”
My cock is so hard it hurts. I haven’t touched myself. I’m not going to.
“And you were hard,” Owen says. “Through your jeans. Against my ass. And I’d never once thought about another man’s cock in my life, and the second I felt you in my head, I—” He stops. Laughs, helpless. “I bit my arm so I wouldn’t yell.”
I stare at him.
“The bruise,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“You told me a clamp slipped.”
“I lied to you. I’m sorry. It was teeth.”
I reach for his arm. He lets me take it. I turn it over in the lamplight and find the place, the soft inside of his forearm, four inches below the elbow, where a year ago there was a ring of purple marks I asked him about while he handed me a folded piece of yellow paper. There’s nothing there now. I put my mouth on it anyway.
He makes a sound.
“Show me,” I say against his skin.
“Cal—”
“Show me what you did.” I lift my head. “I want to watch.”
The downstairs bathroom has the good shower.
Owen retiled it in August, before we moved in, white subway tile and a slate floor and a rain head big enough for two that he installed himself and was unbearable about for a week. There’s a bench along one wall. There’s a ledge for soap.
I turn the water on, hot as it’ll go, and the room fills with steam in about a minute.
He’s standing in the middle of the bathroom floor in just his boxers, his hands at his sides, looking at me the way he looked at me in the kiln room when I said witness. Like he’s waiting to find out what he’s agreed to.
“Take those off,” I say.
He takes them off.
He’s half hard already. Thick and heavy, flushed dark at the head. When I look at him he gets harder, right there, under my eyes, and he huffs a laugh and covers his face with one hand.
“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t hide. Get in.”
He gets in.
I don’t. I sit down on the closed lid of the toilet with my elbows on my knees, in my sleep pants and the old gray college T-shirt he likes, and I look at my husband through the glass.
The water hits him across the shoulders. He tips his head back into it. It runs down his chest, through the hair there, down the line of his stomach, over his cock, his thighs. His shoulders are broad and freckled from a summer of roofing. His hands are scarred all over, little white nicks from twenty years of blades. The ring on his left hand is dark against his skin, the thin white seam in it catching the light.
He looks at me through the steam.
“Now what?” he says.
“Now what did you do.”
He puts his hands flat on the tile. His forehead against it. “I stood here like this. I said no.”
“Say it.”
He laughs into the wall. “No.”
“Did that work?”
“Not even a little.”
“Then stop pretending,” I say, “and touch yourself.”
He lets out a breath that shakes. He takes one hand off the tile and wraps it around his cock, and strokes once, slow, root to head, and the sound that comes out of him echoes off the subway tile and goes straight down my spine.
“That,” I say. “That’s the sound you made?”
“I think so.” His eyes are closed. “It was embarrassing.”
“It’s not embarrassing. Do it again.”
He does.
I watch him. I let myself watch him the way I wasn’t allowed to for thirteen years. The way I trained myself not to, at the lake in August, at the wedging table, on the orange couch on Seward Street, all those nights he fell asleep before the opening credits and I lay awake listening to him breathe. His fist moving slow and tight. His thumb dragging over the head on the upstroke, gathering what’s there, smearing it down. His hips starting to move, just a little, into his hand.
“Slower,” I say.
His hand stops. Then starts again, slower.
“You were thinking about my hands,” I tell him. “So it’s my hand. Do it the way I’d do it.”
“You’d do it slower than this.”
“I would.”
“You do everything like you’ve got all night.”
“I do have all night.” My voice has gone low. I can’t help it. “I have every night. I married you. Slower, Owen.”
He groans, and slows down until he’s barely moving, long, dragging strokes that make his thighs shake. The water runs into his mouth. He doesn’t close it.
“Tell me what I’m saying,” I say.
“Hold still.” It comes out of him rough. “You said hold still. And you’re doing the twitchy thing.”
“You are doing the twitchy thing.”
His free hand is drumming against the tile. He flattens it. Holds it still. Because I said.
“Good,” I say, and watch what that one word does to him. His whole body jerks. His cock pulses in his fist and leaks, a slick bead that the water takes away. “God. Look at you. You’re so good at this.”
“Cal.” He’s breathing hard. “Cal, in the—in the picture, you weren’t sitting on a toilet.”
“I know where I was.”
“Then—”
“Not yet.” I lean forward on my knees. “What came after my hands?”
He swallows. “Your mouth.”
“Where was my mouth?”
“On the bridge. On your knees. Under the lights.” He’s stroking faster now without meaning to. I let him. “You were looking up at me the way you looked at the lights that night, and then you weren’t looking at anything, because your mouth was full.”
I have to put my hand over my own cock through the sleep pants, just to press down on it, just to stop it hurting.
He sees. His eyes go dark.
“Don’t stop,” I say. “What else.”
“Then you were behind me.”
“Show me where.”
He turns around. Faces the wall. Puts his forehead back on the tile and braces his left hand flat beside it, the ring against the white. Keeps working himself with his right. And pushes his hips back, just slightly, into the empty air behind him, into nothing, chasing something that isn’t there.
That’s what does it.
That small movement. That unthinking, hungry push back into the space where, a year ago, at two-thirty in the morning, he’d imagined me. Where he’d wanted me before he had a word for it. Before he’d said bi to anybody. Before he’d said it to himself.
He was reaching for me then.
He’s reaching for me now.
I stand up.
I don’t take anything off.
He hears the glass door open and turns his head, and I step into the shower in my sleep pants and my gray T-shirt, and the water hits me and soaks me through in a second, cotton going heavy and cold-then-hot and plastered to my chest. I take my glasses off. I set them on the soap ledge. Neatly. First.
He makes a sound like I’ve hit him.
“You weren’t supposed to—” he says.
“I know.”
“You were supposed to watch.”
“I watched.” I step in close behind him. “I’m done watching.”
I put my hand flat on his stomach, low, below his navel. And I pull him back against me.
He goes boneless. All of him, all at once. His back against my wet chest, his head dropping back onto my shoulder, a long, broken noise coming out of him that I feel more than hear. I press my hips into his ass, and I’m so hard it’s obscene, and he can feel every inch of it through the soaked flannel of my pants.
“Oh my God,” Owen says. “Oh my God, Cal.”
“This?” I grind into him, slow. “Is this what you felt?”
“It’s better.” His voice cracks. “It’s so much fucking better.”
I put my mouth on his shoulder. I put my free hand over his on his cock, and then I move his hand away, and wrap mine around him instead, my palm rough from a week of not throwing anything, still half sandpaper anyway. He was right about that. He’s right about all of it. I stroke him the way he showed me. Slow. Slower than he can stand.
“That’s my hand,” I say into his ear. “Not yours. Mine. Is it what you wanted?”
“Yes—”
“Say my name.”
“Cal.” He’s shaking. “Cal. Cal, please.”
“Not that.” I drag my thumb over the head of him and he jerks so hard his forehead knocks the tile. “You told me what I said. Say it back to me. What did I say.”
He knows. I can feel him know. He turns his head on my shoulder so his mouth is against my jaw, and he says it the way he said it into the pillow a year ago, I’m sure of it, like it was being pulled out of him.
“Owen, look at me.”
I take his chin in my fingers. I turn his face to mine.
“Owen,” I say. “Look at me.”
He looks.
Green-gray. Wet. Wide open. Not one single wall left anywhere in him. He looks at me like the water’s the only thing holding him up and I’m the only thing holding the water.
I kiss him. Hard. Wet, messy, upside down, his head back on my shoulder and my mouth over his, and I keep stroking him and he moans straight into my mouth and his hips are going now, fucking forward into my fist and grinding back against my cock, forward and back, like he can’t decide which he wants more.
“Both,” I say against his lips. “You can have both. You don’t have to pick.”
“Cal, I’m going to—”
“No, you’re not.” I let go of him. He actually sobs. “Not yet. There was one more thing. You didn’t tell me the last thing.”
He’s panting against the tile. “What—”
“What were my fingers doing, Owen.”
He goes very quiet.
Then, barely: “Behind my balls. Pressing. The way you press clay. Testing it. Finding the give.”
“Hold still,” I say, and reach past him to the ledge, beside my glasses, where I put the little bottle I brought down from the nightstand when he wasn’t looking.
I don’t hurry.
I slick my fingers and slide them between his legs from behind and press, right where he said, the smooth skin behind his balls, firm, my thumb rocking in a slow circle. He shouts. It bounces off every wall. I keep pressing, slow, steady, until his knees are going and his hand is a fist against the tile and he’s saying please to the wall over and over like a man praying in a language he just learned.
Then I go further back, and press one finger into him.
He opens for me like he always does now, like his body’s been waiting for me all day. Hot and tight and slick. I work him slow, one finger and then two, crooking them, finding the place I know as well as I know the foot of a bowl, and stroking it, and listening to him come apart.
“You thought about this,” I say. “That night. Didn’t you. You didn’t tell me, but you did.”
“I didn’t know what I was thinking about.” His voice is wrecked. “I didn’t have the—I didn’t know it was a thing I could want—”
“You knew.”
“I knew,” he gasps. “Cal. God. I knew, I knew, please—”
“Please what?”
He turns his head. Gets his mouth on my jaw again. “Fuck me. Here. Like this. Please. I want it to be real. I want the real one.”
I’ve waited my whole life for somebody to ask me for something like that. Like it’s a thing they need and not a favor they’re doing.
I push my soaked pants down my thighs just far enough. I don’t even get the shirt off. I slick myself with the last of what’s on my hand and line up behind him, one arm locked across his chest, holding him to me, and I push in.
Slow.
All the way. Every inch, while the water pours down over both of us, until I’m buried in him and my hips are flush against his ass and he’s making a long, low sound that doesn’t stop, his head back on my shoulder, his mouth open on my throat.
I stay there. Deep. Not moving.
“Is this what you wanted,” I say into his wet hair. “At two in the morning. A year ago.”
“I didn’t know how to want this much.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Yes,” Owen says. “This. You. This is what I wanted. I’ve wanted it the whole time.”
I start to move.
Long and slow at first, pulling almost all the way out, sinking back in, the wet cotton of my shirt dragging on his back, my arm across his chest holding him so he can’t go anywhere. He doesn’t try. He braces both hands on the tile and pushes back to meet me and takes it, every stroke, and says my name on every one. Not O. Not the nickname. Cal, Cal, Cal, like he’s counting.
I fuck him harder.
I can’t not. The sounds he’s making. The way his body grips me. The ring on his hand flat against the white tile, dark band, bright seam, sliding a little every time I push into him. I get my hand back around his cock and stroke him in rhythm, and he cries out, and his whole body shudders around me.
“You’re so good,” I say. “You’re so good for me. Look at you. Taking me like this. I married you. I married you, Owen, you’re mine, you’re not going anywhere—”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Say it again.”
“I’m not going anywhere. I’m yours. I’m—Cal, I’m going to come, I can’t—”
“Then look at me.”
He turns his head on my shoulder and looks at me, eyes open, water running into them, and comes.
He comes harder than I have ever seen him come. Harder than the kiln room, than the cabin, than the snowy afternoon in December when he cried in his own bed. His whole body locks and then shakes, and he spills over my fist and onto the tile in long, hot pulses, and he doesn’t bite anything this time. He doesn’t hold anything in. He shouts my name to the whole house, to the rain, to the lake, and his body clenches down on me so tight I see white.
I last three more strokes.
I bury myself in him as deep as I can go and come with my mouth against his neck and my arm around his chest and his name tearing out of me, over and over, until I’m empty and shaking and the only thing holding either of us up is the wall.
We slide down it.
That part he got right a year ago. We end up on the slate floor, him half in my lap, my wet shirt bunched under his back, the rain head pounding down on both of us. He’s laughing. Of course he’s laughing. Breathless and helpless and wet, with his face pressed into my neck.
“What,” I say.
“Nothing.” He shakes his head against me. “It’s just. Last time I was down here by myself.”
I tip my head back against the tile.
“I know.”
“I was so scared, Cal.” He says it into my collarbone. “I sat right here, on a different floor, in a different house, and I was so scared of what it meant. I thought it meant I was going to lose you.”
I put my hand in his wet hair and hold on.
“It meant you were going to marry me,” I say.
He goes still. Then he lifts his head and looks at me, and his face does something I’ve only seen it do a handful of times. In the kiln room. At the head table. In the doorway of his old house in February, with snow on his shoulders, asking if he could come in.
It sets something down.
“Yeah,” he says softly. “I guess it did.”
The water runs cold about ten minutes later.
Neither of us notices for a while.
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