The Skylight

A Best Man, Wrong Groom Bonus Chapter
by Jace Wilder

What Happens After the Vows

⚠️ Content Warning: This bonus chapter takes place after Best Man, Wrong Groom and contains major spoilers. It features graphic sexual content between two adult men (MM), light restraint, and explicit language. Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno. 18+ only.

Cam and Wes’s wedding night at Hemlock Lodge. The skylight. The burgundy tie. One year of learning each other’s bodies, and one night to prove that the man who couldn’t name what he wanted has become the man who takes it.

CAM

We lasted until the bonfire.

That’s what I’d tell people later, if they asked — and they would ask, because Evelyn had a photographic memory for the moment we disappeared, and Milo had a bartender’s instinct for when two people were about to stop pretending they could keep their hands off each other in public.

But the truth was simpler. Wes leaned into my ear at the fire pit and said third floor, now, and every cell in my body said yes before my brain caught up.

We didn’t run. We walked. Through the main room, past the fireplace where Nora was organizing leftover canapés with military precision, up the stairs that creaked in exactly the same places they’d creaked a year ago when I’d climbed them alone and terrified and unable to name what I wanted. Past the second-floor landing. Past the honeymoon suite where I’d once stood in a midnight blue tux and wondered why my hands were shaking for the wrong reasons.

Third floor. Our door. The room where everything had started — the rain, the one bed, the night I’d stopped pretending.

Wes pulled the door shut behind us and I heard the lock click. The sound traveled through me like a current.

The skylight was clear. For the first time in my memory of this room, there was no rain — just stars, a thousand of them, scattered across the glass like someone had spilled light. The bed was the same. The sloped ceiling. The November-cold air that the lodge’s ancient heating system never quite conquered.

But we weren’t the same. A year ago I’d been a man who couldn’t name what he wanted. Tonight I was a man who’d stood in front of twenty people and said I choose you, publicly, permanently, on purpose.

I turned around.

Wes was leaning against the door, arms crossed, watching me with that expression I’d spent thirteen years misreading as patience. It wasn’t patience. It was want so controlled it looked like composure.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi, husband.”

“Commitment-ceremonied.”

“Shut up, Bellamy.”

I crossed the room in three steps and kissed him against the door. Not the gentle, public kiss from the ceremony — this was the kiss I’d been holding back for the last four hours, through the vows and the toasts and the dinner and the bonfire. The private one. The one that started in my chest and burned all the way down.

His hands came up to my face. Held me there. Thumbs tracing my jaw, fingers sliding into my hair, pulling me closer with the specific authority of a man who’d waited thirteen years to stop being careful. His mouth opened under mine and I tasted wine and smoke and the clean, particular heat of Wesley Calder when he was done being patient.

“I’ve been thinking about this since you said your vows,” he said against my mouth. “Since you stood there and said I choose you and I almost lost it in front of your parents.”

“You didn’t look like you almost lost it.”

“That’s because I’m very good at my job.” He bit my lower lip. Gently. Then not gently. “My job tonight is you.”

I made a sound that a year ago would have embarrassed me. It didn’t embarrass me anymore. Wes had spent twelve months teaching me that sounds were good — that every noise I made was information he wanted, a map he was learning to read, and the louder I got, the harder he worked to make me louder.

I pulled back and looked at him. His eyes were dark, focused, the pupil swallowing the brown the way it did when he was turned on — and he was turned on, I could feel it, the hard line of him pressing against my hip through the fabric of his suit.

“The tie,” I said.

His eyebrow went up. “Which one?”

“Yours.” I reached for the burgundy silk. The same tie. Worn soft at the edges from a year of being used in ways its manufacturer never intended. I unknotted it slowly, watching his face as I pulled it free from his collar — the way his breath hitched, the way his throat moved when he swallowed.

“Remember the first time?” I asked.

“When you tied me to the headboard in your apartment and made me beg?”

“When I tried to make you beg. You lasted approximately ninety seconds before you flipped the script and talked me into an orgasm with your voice alone.”

“You liked it.”

“I loved it.” I held up the tie. “Tonight I want to do it right.”

His eyes went dark — not the controlled dark, the wild dark, the color I only saw when I pushed past whatever wall he’d built. “Define right.”

“I want you tied to that headboard. I want you unable to touch me. And I want to take you apart so slowly you forget how to be composed.”

Wes’s jaw tightened. Released. His voice came out rough. “You’ve been planning this.”

“I’ve been planning this since Nora said you may kiss.”

I undressed him the way you unwrap something precious — slowly, deliberately, with the focused attention of a man who understood that every layer removed was an act of trust.

The suit jacket first. I pushed it off his shoulders and let it fall. The shirt — button by button, my fingers steady despite the heat racing through my veins. I’d gotten better at this. A year of practice had turned fumbling urgency into something more controlled, more intentional. I knew which buttons stuck. I knew the exact spot on his ribs where my fingertips would make him suck in a breath — there, the third rib down on his left side — and I pressed there now, watching the reaction move through him like a wave.

“Cam.”

“Not yet.”

“I’m not asking for permission. I’m telling you your hands feel—” He broke off when I bent and pressed my mouth to his collarbone. The sound he made — low, involuntary, the sound of composure cracking — traveled straight to the base of my spine.

His shirt hit the floor. His chest was bare — the geography I knew by heart and still couldn’t stop exploring. Dark skin over muscle, the hollow at the base of his throat where his pulse was hammering, the planes of his stomach that contracted under my mouth as I kissed down the centerline. I could feel his breathing change. Shallow. Controlled. The emergency manager managing himself.

I looked up at him from my knees.

“Wes.”

“Yeah.”

“Stop managing.”

Something broke behind his eyes. Not a collapse — a release. The careful composure he wore like armor shifting, loosening, falling away until what was underneath wasn’t the steady, unflappable man everyone else saw. It was the man who wanted and didn’t know how to ask, because asking meant admitting he needed something, and Wesley Calder had spent thirty-five years being the person other people needed instead.

I stood up. Took his hand. Led him to the bed.

“Lie down.”

He lay down. The starlight through the skylight caught his skin — silver on dark — and I had to stop for a second and just look at him. This man. This impossibly beautiful, brilliantly competent, stubbornly self-contained man who’d loved me for a decade in silence and was lying in my bed with his wrists crossed above his head, waiting for me to tie him up because he trusted me that much.

I looped the burgundy tie around his wrists and knotted it to the iron slat of the headboard. Firm enough to hold. Loose enough to escape. He tested the give — a flex of his forearms, the muscles in his shoulders shifting — and I watched his eyes darken further when the silk held.

“Good?” I asked.

“Good.”

“Tell me if—”

“Cam.” His voice was quiet. Certain. “I trust you. I’ve trusted you for thirteen years. Stop asking and start showing me what you planned.”

I showed him.

I started at his neck. Open-mouthed kisses pressed into the muscle where his shoulder met his throat — the spot that made his head tilt back, the one I’d discovered in month three and had been weaponizing ever since. His skin was warm under my mouth. I could feel his pulse against my lips — fast, getting faster.

I moved down. Collarbone. Chest. I paused at his left nipple and flicked my tongue across it, and the sound he made was the sound of a man trying very hard not to pull against his restraints.

“You know what I love about you tied up?” I said against his skin.

“What.” The word came out wrecked.

“You can’t fix anything. You can’t organize anything. You can’t make sure everyone else is comfortable before you let yourself feel something.” I dragged my mouth lower. “Tonight the only thing you get to do is feel.”

“That’s—” He gasped when I reached the hollow below his navel and pressed my tongue flat against it. “That’s sadistic.”

“That’s love. Hold still.”

I took my time. I’d learned that about myself over the past year — that the urgency I’d felt in the beginning, the desperate need to rush because I’d wasted so many years, had mellowed into something deeper. I didn’t need to hurry. I had time. I had the rest of our lives. And right now I had Wes Calder tied to a headboard with his own wedding tie, his chest heaving, his fingers curling around the silk, his body arching toward my mouth every time I moved lower.

I unzipped his trousers. Pulled them down. His boxer briefs were dark gray, tight, and doing absolutely nothing to conceal how much he wanted this. I pressed my mouth to the hard line of him through the fabric and felt his entire body tighten.

“Cam.”

“That’s my name.”

“That’s a warning.”

“You’re tied up, Calder. What are you going to do about it?”

The sound he made — half laugh, half groan — was the best sound I’d heard all day, and I’d heard our wedding vows four hours ago.

I pulled off his briefs. Wrapped my hand around him. Watched his head fall back against the pillow, his mouth open, his throat exposed in the starlight. He was hard and hot in my palm, and I stroked him once, twice — slowly, watching his reaction, reading him the way he’d taught me to read him.

Then I lowered my mouth.

The noise that came out of Wes when I took him in was something between a prayer and a curse. His hips lifted off the mattress. The headboard creaked. His hands strained against the tie — not to escape, but because his body couldn’t contain what it was feeling and had to move something.

I’d practiced this. Not in a performative way — in the way you practice anything you want to be extraordinary at. The way I’d practiced pourovers and latte art and seasonal roast profiles. With attention. With care. With the specific, obsessive dedication of a man who had discovered at thirty-four that the thing he was best at was making Wesley Calder lose his mind.

I worked him slowly. My mouth sliding, my tongue pressing, my hand moving in counterpoint at the base. I cataloged every sound — the sharp intake of breath when I twisted my wrist, the low moan when I hollowed my cheeks, the broken fuck, Cam when I pulled back and blew cool air across the wet skin.

“Look at me,” I said.

He looked. His eyes were wrecked — dark, glassy, the composed man completely gone. In his place was someone raw and open and so beautiful my chest ached.

“I love you,” I said. “And I want to hear you.”

“You’re going to hear the entire lodge if you keep—”

I took him deep and his sentence ended in a sound that could have registered on seismographic equipment.

I brought him to the edge twice. Let him hang there — trembling, swearing, the muscles in his arms taut against the silk — and then pulled back, pressing kisses to his hip bone, his inner thigh, the sensitive crease where his leg met his torso. Each time he came down from the edge, his breathing was more ragged and the noises he made were less controlled.

“You’re trying to kill me,” he said.

“I’m trying to ruin you.” I kissed his stomach. “There’s a difference.”

“From this angle the distinction is academic.”

I laughed. That was the thing about sex with Wes — it was funny. Not because we weren’t serious about it, but because humor was the language we spoke fluently, and even at its hottest, our intimacy was threaded with the specific, ridiculous joy of two men who’d been making each other laugh for over a decade.

“I want to be inside you,” I said.

His breath caught. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” I reached for the nightstand. Lube, condom. The supplies we’d brought because planning ahead was a love language we shared. “Is that what you want?”

“That’s what I’ve wanted since you said I choose you in front of my mother.”

“Your mother was there.”

“My mother is a grown woman who understands that her son has sex.”

“Your mother winked at me during the toast.”

“My mother is a menace. Are you going to fuck me or discuss my mother’s social cues?”

I untied him.

Not because I was done with the tie — but because I wanted his hands on me for this part. I wanted to feel his fingers digging into my shoulders, his nails scraping down my back, his palms pressing into my hips as I moved inside him. The tie had served its purpose. It had made him let go. Now I wanted him to hold on.

His hands came free and immediately found me — my face, my chest, my waist. He pulled me down and kissed me like he was starving, like the restraint had been building pressure and the release was this, his hands everywhere, mapping me, claiming me with the specific ferocity of a man who’d spent thirteen years not touching and was making up for lost time.

I prepped him carefully. Always carefully. This was the part where the emergency manager in me surfaced — deliberate, attentive, reading his body for every signal. One finger. Slow. His eyes fluttering closed. Two fingers. The low, guttural sound in his throat. My mouth on his neck, whispering things I used to be too embarrassed to say out loud — you feel incredible, you’re so ready for me, I need you — that now came out like breathing.

“Now,” he said. “Cam. Now.”

I lined up. Pushed in. And the world narrowed to the place where our bodies met.

The groan that left both of us was the same sound — deep, desperate, the sound of two people who fit together in a way that defied the decade they’d spent pretending they didn’t. He was tight and hot around me and I had to hold still, breathing, letting us both adjust, feeling his legs wrap around my waist and his heels press into the small of my back.

“Move,” he whispered.

I moved.

We found the rhythm the way we found everything — together, instinctively, the cadence of two people who’d spent thirteen years learning to read each other and had finally applied that fluency to the one conversation they’d been avoiding. His hips rose to meet mine. My hand found the headboard for leverage. The bed creaked with each thrust and the skylight above us framed a sky full of stars and somewhere in the lodge below, the bonfire was dying and our families were going to sleep and none of them knew what was happening in this room — the way Wes’s voice fractured on my name, the way my rhythm faltered when he clenched around me, the way we were building something that felt less like sex and more like the physical proof of every promise we’d made that afternoon.

“Harder,” he said. “I want to feel you tomorrow.”

I gave him harder. Shifted the angle. Found the spot — the one that made his spine arch and his mouth drop open and the most controlled man I’d ever met say things that would make his county commissioners blush.

“Right there — fuck — don’t stop — Cam — don’t you dare—”

“I’m not stopping.” I bent and bit the junction of his neck and shoulder. “I’m never stopping.”

His hand found my face. Held me. Made me look at him. His eyes were open, dark, utterly present.

“Mine,” he said.

Not a question. A fact. The same word I’d said to him in a different bed in a different city in a different season, when I’d been learning what it meant to claim someone out loud. He was giving it back. He was saying: you belong to me the way I belong to you, and this is the proof.

“Yours,” I said. “Always yours.”

He came with my name in his mouth and his hand on my face. I felt it happen — the tightening, the tremor, the devastated sound — and the sight of him undone beneath me, this man, my man, pulled me over the edge with him. My orgasm hit like weather — sudden, consuming, a storm I couldn’t outrun and didn’t want to.

I collapsed against him. His arms came around me. Our breathing was ragged, tangled, the specific gasping aftermath of two bodies that had used each other up in the best possible way.

“The skylight,” he murmured after a long time.

I looked up. Stars. Thousands of them. Clear sky over Seneca Lake, over Hemlock Lodge, over the room where I’d spent my first honest night a year ago and was spending my first married one now.

“No rain,” I said.

“No storm.”

“Just us.”

He pressed his mouth to my temple. His lips were warm. His heartbeat was slowing under my cheek, the steady rhythm I’d been falling asleep to for ten months. The most reliable sound I’d ever known.

“Just us,” he agreed.

I reached for the tie. It was tangled in the sheets — burgundy silk against white cotton, the color of every beautiful thing about the worst and best weekend of my life. I folded it carefully, the way I always did, and set it on the nightstand.

“You keep that tie like it’s a family heirloom,” Wes said.

“It is. It’s the tie you were wearing when you fixed my wedding knot. It’s the tie I used the first time I tied you up. It’s the tie you wore to our ceremony.” I looked at him. “It’s the most important piece of fabric I own.”

His expression did something complicated — soft and amused and deeply moved, the face of a man who’d spent a lifetime being useful and was learning what it felt like to be treasured.

“You’re a romantic, Bellamy.”

“I’m a realist. I’m just realistic about loving you.”

He laughed. Pulled me close. The sheets settled around us, the lodge settled around the sheets, and the sky settled over everything — clear and deep and full of light.

Outside, very softly, the rain began.

Not a storm. Just October rain. The quiet kind. Tapping against the skylight in the rhythm I’d carry with me for the rest of my life — the sound of the world doing what it did, continuing and changing and making room.

Wes’s arm tightened across my waist.

I smiled and closed my eyes.

And the skylight held the stars and the rain at the same time, the way this room always held everything — the breaking and the building, the storm and the clearing, the two men who’d taken thirteen years to find each other and would spend the rest of their lives refusing to let go.

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