Best Man, Better Plan — Bonus Chapter

This bonus chapter takes place after the events of Best Man, Better Plan. It contains explicit MM content and is intended for readers 18+.

Every Room

Luca

The apartment had been ours for exactly one week, and we’d christened three rooms.

Living room couch — moving day, surrounded by boxes, urgent and laughing and slightly unhinged from the adrenaline of carrying furniture up three flights of stairs. The den — Owen’s recliner, which I’d sworn I’d never sit in and which I’d ridden him in two nights later while he gripped the armrests and said my name like a man discovering religion. The kitchen counter — Tuesday morning, before coffee, because Owen had walked out in nothing but grey sweatpants that sat so low on his hips I could see the V-cut of muscle that led to everything I wanted, and I’d lost the ability to make rational decisions about counter sanitation.

Three rooms. Three surfaces. Five more to go.

I was keeping a list. Owen didn’t know about the list. Owen was going to find out about the list tonight.

He came home from work at six-fifteen, the way he always did — boots off at the door (a rule I’d implemented on day two and enforced with the silent, implacable authority of a man who’d chosen the floor tile himself), toolkit set on the shelf, the scent of sawdust and cold air trailing him through the apartment like a signature.

“Hey,” he said, from the hallway.

I was in the kitchen, not cooking. I was standing at the counter in one of his henleys — charcoal, three sizes too big, hanging to mid-thigh — and nothing else. I’d timed it. He came through the door at six-fifteen. It took him forty-five seconds to remove his boots, set down his tools, and round the corner into the kitchen. I’d used the forty-five seconds to position myself at the counter with a glass of wine and the specific posture of a man who was absolutely, definitely not wearing underwear.

He rounded the corner. Stopped.

His eyes went from my face to the henley to the bare legs below the hem to the bare feet on the tile, and the journey took approximately two seconds and changed the entire temperature of the room.

“That’s my shirt,” he said.

“It is.”

“You’re not wearing pants.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re not wearing anything under the shirt.”

“Perceptive. Must be all that measuring you do at work.”

He crossed the kitchen in three strides. His hands found my waist — enormous, rough, warm from the drive home — and lifted me onto the counter. One motion. Effortless. The same casual strength he used to carry lumber and move furniture, deployed now for the specific purpose of putting me at a convenient height, which happened to be the height where his mouth was level with my collarbone and my legs could wrap around his waist.

“You planned this,” he said, his mouth already on my neck.

“I plan everything. You know this about me.”

“What’s the plan?”

I reached behind me and produced a folded piece of paper from beside the wine glass. Held it up. He pulled back far enough to read it.

It was a floor plan of our apartment. Hand-drawn, because I was a planner and I drew floor plans the way other people doodled. Each room was labeled, and three of them had small red X marks.

“What are the X’s?” he asked.

“Completed objectives.”

He looked at the floor plan. Looked at me. Understanding dawned — slow, delighted, his face going through surprise and amusement and then straight into dark, focused want.

“You made a sex map of our apartment.”

“I made a strategic christening plan. There are five rooms remaining. I’ve prioritized by surface quality and logistical feasibility.”

“You’re insane.”

“I’m thorough.”

He kissed me. Hard, grinning into it, his hands sliding under the henley to find bare skin. His palms spread across my ribs and I arched into him, wrapping my legs around his waist, pulling his hips between my thighs.

“Which room is next on the plan?” he asked, against my mouth.

“The bathroom.”

“The bathroom?”

“The shower, specifically. We have excellent water pressure and a detachable showerhead and I’ve been thinking about it since Tuesday.”

His hands tightened on my ribs. “And after the bathroom?”

“The hallway.”

“The hallway doesn’t have furniture.”

“The hallway has a wall. You have arms. I have faith in your structural engineering.”

He made a sound — low, rough, the sound of a man whose blood was redistributing at speed — and lifted me off the counter. I wrapped around him, arms and legs, the henley riding up, and he carried me through the apartment like I weighed nothing, which I didn’t, comparatively, and which never stopped being the most erotic logistical reality of our relationship.

The shower was, as I’d predicted, excellent.

The water was hot. The pressure was strong. And Owen Hart, naked and wet and pressed against me under the spray, was an experience that no amount of planning could have adequately prepared me for.

He had me against the tile — my back to the cold stone, his chest against mine, the contrast of temperatures making my skin prickle. Water ran between us, slicking everything, turning every touch into a glide. His mouth was on my neck, my shoulder, the hollow of my throat, and his hands were everywhere — my hips, my ass, the backs of my thighs.

“I want to try something,” I said.

“Anything.”

“Turn around.”

He blinked. Water running down his face, his eyelashes dark and spiked. “Turn around?”

“Trust me.”

He turned. Faced the wall, bracing his forearms against the tile, and the sight of him — the broad back, the muscled shoulders, the narrow waist, the perfect, absurd curve of his ass — under the shower spray, waiting for me, trusting me, was enough to make my vision go white at the edges.

I pressed against his back. My chest to his spine, my mouth at the base of his neck, my cock hard against the curve of his ass. He groaned — deep, felt through his back into my chest — and his head dropped forward.

“God, Luca—”

I took my time. Slick hands on his body, exploring, relearning, finding the places that made him shudder and shake. The inside of his hip. The crease where thigh met ass. The spot at the small of his back where a press of my thumb made his knees buckle.

I reached around him. Wrapped my hand around his cock — thick, hard, already leaking despite the water — and stroked. Slow. Deliberate. The water providing a slickness that made every motion fluid and frictionless.

“Faster,” he said. His voice was wrecked.

“Not yet.”

“Luca, please—”

“I said not yet.” I bit the muscle where his neck met his shoulder — not hard enough to hurt, hard enough to feel — and felt his whole body jerk. “We’re christening the shower. I want to do it properly.”

I worked him with the patience of a man who planned weddings for a living. Every stroke considered. Every touch intentional. I varied the rhythm — fast, then slow, then fast again — keeping him at the edge without letting him over, and the sounds he made against the tile were the most beautiful, obscene things I’d ever heard. Broken groans. Half-words. My name, repeated like a chant.

“Turn around,” I said again.

He turned. His face was flushed, his eyes black, his chest heaving. Water ran down his body in rivulets that traced the lines of muscle like a cartographer mapping terrain.

I dropped to my knees.

The tile was hard under my kneecaps and I didn’t care. I looked up at him — at the full, devastating, overwhelming height and breadth of him from this angle — and he looked down at me, and his hand came to my face, his thumb tracing my cheekbone, and his expression was the one that destroyed me every time: tender and feral and completely, utterly mine.

I took him in my mouth. The water ran over both of us, warm and constant, and I took him deep — deeper than the first time, deeper than the second, because I’d learned him now, knew the exact angle, the exact pressure, the exact rhythm of tongue and suction that turned Owen Hart from a functioning adult into a shaking, incoherent wreck.

His hand moved from my face to my hair. Gripped. Not guiding — holding on. His hips rolled in small, careful movements, and I let him, encouraged him, took everything he gave and asked for more.

“Luca — I’m going to — if you don’t stop I’m—”

I didn’t stop.

He came with his back against the shower tile and his hand in my hair and my name echoing off the bathroom walls, and I swallowed everything and held him through the aftershocks and pressed my forehead to his hip and breathed.

After a moment, he pulled me up. Kissed me — hard, deep, tasting himself on my tongue and not flinching, never flinching. Then he dropped to his knees.

“Owen, you don’t have to—”

“Shut up. It’s my turn.”

He was good at this. He’d been good at this since the first time, and practice had made him devastating. His mouth was hot and certain and his hands held my hips with a pressure that left bruises I’d see for days, and when he took me deep and swallowed around me, I came so fast it caught us both off guard — my head hitting the tile, my hand scrabbling for purchase on the glass door, a sound coming out of me that was primal and wrecked and absolutely not suitable for shared walls.

We stood under the spray afterward, holding each other up, both of us trembling. The water was starting to cool.

“Shower,” Owen said. “Check.”

“Check.” I reached for the shampoo. “Now wash my hair.”

“You and the hair washing.”

“It’s non-negotiable. It’s in the contract.”

“We don’t have a contract.”

“We have an understanding. The understanding includes hair washing.”

He washed my hair. Slowly, carefully, his big hands gentle on my scalp. I closed my eyes and leaned into him and let myself be held by a man who loved me enough to wash my hair every time I asked and would keep doing it, I knew, every shower, every week, for the rest of our lives.

The hallway was next.

We made it approximately twelve steps from the bathroom before Owen pressed me against the wall — still damp, towels abandoned somewhere in the bathroom, both of us naked and clean and unable to stop touching each other.

“This is logistically questionable,” I said, as he lifted me against the wall. My legs went around his waist. His hands cupped my ass, supporting my full weight with his arms, and the display of strength — casual, effortless, the arms that built houses holding me like I was made of air — made something dark and primal surge through me.

“I’m a structural engineer,” he said. “I know what a wall can hold.”

“You’re a contractor.”

“Same thing.”

“It’s absolutely not the same—”

He shifted his grip, adjusted my weight, and rolled his hips against me, and the sentence died in my throat. We were pressed together — chest to chest, cock to cock, his body pinning mine to the wall with a controlled force that was ten percent gravity and ninety percent intention.

“We need—” I gasped.

“Bedroom’s six feet away. There’s lube on the nightstand.”

“Then why are we in the hallway?”

“Because you put it on the list.”

He carried me to the bedroom. Set me on the bed long enough to grab the lube and a condom from the nightstand, then carried me back to the hallway and pressed me against the wall again, and the fact that he’d walked twelve feet with me wrapped around him without losing his grip or his erection was a testament to both his physical fitness and his dedication to my floor plan.

He prepared me against the wall — one arm supporting me, the other working between us, his slick fingers finding me with the confidence of a man who’d memorized my body’s operating manual. I held onto his shoulders and buried my face in his neck and made sounds I’d never made before — high, desperate, the sounds of a man being opened by someone he trusted completely while suspended three feet off the ground.

“Ready?” he asked.

“If you ask me that one more time instead of just—”

He pushed in.

The angle was different. Standing, pinned, gravity pulling me down onto him — everything was deeper, more intense, the penetration hitting differently than it did in bed. I cried out — loud, uncensored, the neighbors be damned — and his arm tightened around my waist and his hips drove up and I lost track of everything that wasn’t the feeling of him inside me, thick and relentless and mine.

He fucked me against the wall with the steady, powerful rhythm of a man who understood leverage. His legs were planted, his core braced, and every thrust lifted me slightly off his hips before gravity and his hands brought me back down. The friction was devastating. The depth was obscene. I could feel him in my ribs, in my throat, in the backs of my eyes.

“Owen — God — right there — don’t stop don’t stop don’t—”

He didn’t stop. He shifted one hand between us, wrapped it around me, and stroked in counterpoint to his thrusts, and the dual assault — inside and out, his body and his hand, the wall at my back and his chest at my front — broke me apart.

I came between us with a sound that was his name and a curse and a prayer, and he followed me over seconds later, burying himself deep, his forehead against my shoulder, his whole body shaking with the force of it.

We slid down the wall. Ended up on the hallway floor — hardwood, slightly cold, definitely unsanitary — in a tangle of limbs and sweat and the particular boneless satisfaction of two men who had just accomplished something structurally ambitious.

“Hallway,” Owen said. “Check.”

I fumbled for the floor plan, which was somehow still clutched in my hand despite everything. Drew a red X on the hallway with a pen that had appeared from somewhere (I was a planner; I always had a pen).

“Three down tonight,” I said. “Two remaining.”

“We’re not doing the guest room tonight.”

“Why not?”

“Because my legs have stopped working and I think I need medical attention.”

I laughed. He laughed. We lay on the hallway floor of our apartment, naked and wrecked and grinning, and the laughter echoed off the walls of our home — not his, not mine, ours — and the sound of it was the best sound either of us had ever heard.

We made it to bed eventually. Our bed — the one we’d bought together, king-size because Owen took up approximately 70% of any sleeping surface and I needed room for the remaining 30% plus a buffer zone for his snoring.

We lay in the dark. His arm around me. My head on his chest. The familiar, reliable percussion of his heartbeat under my ear.

“Three rooms left,” I murmured.

“We’ve got time.”

“I know. But I want to finish the list.”

“Why?”

I traced a pattern on his chest. A letter. An L, maybe. Or an O. Or just a shape — the aimless, tender geometry that was ours alone.

“Because every room we christen becomes ours,” I said. “Really ours. Not just legally or logistically — physically. Cellularly. Every surface we touch, every wall we lean against, every floor we end up on — it’s marked. It’s us. And when we’re old and boring and you’re asleep in your recliner at eight PM, I want to walk through this apartment and remember every single place where we loved each other.”

He was quiet. His hand moved on my back — slow, broad strokes.

“Luca?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s the most romantic justification for a sex map I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s the only one you’ve ever heard.”

“Still counts.”

He kissed the top of my head. The slow, firm press that said more than words.

“We’ll finish the list,” he said. “Every room. Every surface. And then we’ll start over.”

“Start over?”

“New seasons. New positions. New list.” His arm tightened around me. “I plan to be here a very long time.”

I closed my eyes. Pressed my ear to his chest. Listened to the heartbeat — steady, sure, the heartbeat of a man who’d chosen me in daylight and was holding me in the dark and would be here, right here, tomorrow and the day after and the day after that.

Every room.

Every surface.

Every day.

Ours.

Thank you for reading!

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