🔥 The New Table 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Brat in the Boardroom
by Jace Wilder

Thank You for Reading! 🖤

You made it to the bonus content — which means you’ve survived the elevator emergency stop, the Saturday office desk, the conference table at midnight, a safeword called benchmark, the billing fraud that almost ended everything, three weeks of silence that felt like three years, a dining table bought on hope, a bar called The Rail where the bourbon is good and the advice is better, the words I’m done coming to you typed six different ways, and a man who learned that protection without permission is just control.

Thank you for giving Marcus and Cole your time. This bonus chapter takes place two weeks after the epilogue — the night the new dining table arrives and gets christened in a way the furniture store definitely did not intend.

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The New Table

Cole’s POV — Two weeks after the epilogue

The new dining table arrives on a Saturday at 11 AM, carried by two delivery men who are extremely professional about the fact that the man signing for it is wearing boxer briefs, an unbuttoned Oxford that doesn’t belong to him, and the unmistakable expression of someone who was recently doing something athletic in a bedroom.

“Where do you want it?” the first delivery guy asks, looking at a point slightly above my head with the studied neutrality of a man who has seen everything and is paid to see nothing.

“Living room. Where the old one was.”

They carry it in. Oak, six chairs, the one Marcus and I picked out in Brooklyn after forty-five minutes of arguing about the finish and fifteen minutes of making out in the parking lot. It’s beautiful. Substantial. The kind of table that says people eat here and people live here and this apartment is no longer a monument to emotional unavailability.

Marcus emerges from the bedroom as the delivery men leave. He’s in sweatpants and nothing else, because Marcus Hale on a Saturday morning is a different species than Marcus Hale in a boardroom, and the Saturday species does not believe in shirts.

He stops. Looks at the table. Runs his hand along the surface — a slow, evaluative stroke, the same way he touches a quarterly report or a merger document, assessing quality through contact.

“It’s good,” he says.

“It’s perfect.”

“It seats six.”

“We know four people. We’ll grow into it.”

He looks at me across the table — across six feet of oak and the morning light from the floor-to-ceiling windows and the particular domestic contentment of two men who share an apartment with plates and peonies and a bookshelf organized by color. His eyes are warm. Gray-green, gold-flecked, the eyes I’ve been memorizing for six months and still haven’t finished cataloging.

“We should christen it,” he says.

“We haven’t had breakfast.”

“I wasn’t talking about breakfast.”

The air between us changes. It always does — shifts from domestic to charged in the space between one breath and the next, the permanent electrical field that exists between Marcus Hale and me and that six months of relationship security has done nothing to diminish. If anything, the security makes it stronger. I push harder because I know he’ll catch me. He takes more because he knows I trust him to give it back.

“The table’s been here for four minutes,” I say. “You want to defile it already?”

“I want to inaugurate it. ‘Defile’ is your word.”

“‘Inaugurate’ is a very unsexy word.”

“I’ll make it sexy.” He comes around the table. Three steps. It’s always three steps — the distance between restraint and collapse, the gap that we’ve been crossing since an elevator between floors in a building where we both still work. He stops in front of me and the proximity does what proximity always does: rewires my nervous system so that the only input that matters is the heat of his body and the smell of his skin and the way his mouth looks when he’s decided something.

“Color?” he asks.

“Green. Extremely, enthusiastically, first-thing-in-the-morning green.”

“Take off the shirt.”

I take off the shirt — his shirt, the white Oxford I’ve been stealing since the first night I stayed over, which was six months ago and which feels like both yesterday and always. It falls to the floor and I’m standing in boxers and bare skin in the morning light and he’s looking at me the way he looked at the table — evaluative, appreciative, possessive in a way that has nothing to do with ownership and everything to do with devotion.

“Table,” he says. “Bend over.”

“We just got this table. It hasn’t even been wiped down.”

“Then I’ll wipe it down after.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“You’re stalling.”

“I’m negotiating.”

“You’re bratting. There’s a difference.” He takes my chin between his thumb and forefinger — tilts my face up, holds it, the grip firm enough to feel and gentle enough to melt into. “And you know exactly what happens when you brat.”

I do know. I’ve known since a Saturday afternoon in a corner office when he said come here, Cole and I crossed the desk and never crossed back. I know the choreography of this — the push, the catch, the exquisite controlled descent from defiance to surrender — and I love every step of it with a depth that would embarrass me if I had any shame left, which I don’t, because Marcus Hale took the last of my shame on a conference table six months ago and replaced it with something better.

“Fine,” I say. “But I want the record to show that I proposed breakfast first.”

“Noted. Overruled. Table. Now.”

I turn around. Walk to the table. Place my palms flat on the oak surface — cool, smooth, the fresh grain unmarked by use — and bend at the waist. The position is familiar. Beloved. My hands on a flat surface, my back arched, my body offered to a man who has earned the right to take it.

He comes up behind me. His hands on my hips — warm, large, the hands that run a company and hold me at 3 AM and pull espresso that tastes like motor oil and thread through my hair when I’m falling asleep. He pulls my boxers down in one motion and the cool air hits my skin and I shiver.

“This table,” he says, leaning over me, his chest against my back, his mouth at my ear, “is going to remember this.”

“Tables don’t have memories.”

“This one will.”

He spanks me. One strike — open-palmed, controlled, the particular calibration of force that he’s spent six months perfecting. The sound echoes off the apartment’s hard surfaces and I gasp and my fingers spread on the oak and I think: this table has been in our apartment for seven minutes and I’m already bent over it with my ass bare and the CEO of a four-hundred-million-dollar company’s handprint forming on my skin.

“That’s for making me wait,” he says. “I wanted to do this the minute the delivery guys left.”

“You could have — ah — you could have told them to hurry.”

A second strike. Harder. The heat blooms and my cock twitches against the edge of the table and I bite my lip and push back into his hand because I am, after six months, completely beyond pretending I don’t want exactly this.

His hand soothes — flat palm, slow circles, the contrast that makes me shiver. Then he reaches around. Takes me in his hand. Hard already, leaking, and the sound I make when his fingers wrap around me is loud and unashamed because we’re in our apartment and there’s no glass wall and no security desk and no two hundred colleagues on the other side of anything.

“I’m going to edge you,” he says conversationally, like he’s describing his plans for the afternoon. “I’m going to bring you to the edge three times. The third time, you’re going to beg. And then I’m going to bend you over this table properly and fuck you until neither of us can stand.”

“That’s — fuck — that’s ambitious for before breakfast.”

“I’m an ambitious person. It’s why you hired me.”

“I didn’t hire you. You hired me.”

“Semantics.” His hand starts to move. Slow, deliberate, the infuriating pace he uses when he wants to take me apart by degrees rather than all at once. “Tell me what you want.”

“I want you to stop talking and start — oh God —”

“That’s not my name.” The line, the same line from our first time in his office, the callback that makes my chest tight and my cock jump, and he feels it twitch in his hand and squeezes and I see stars.

He edges me. True to his word, with the clinical precision and the sadistic patience that I fell in love with — bringing me to the crest and pulling back, bringing me again and stopping, his thumb pressing at the base while I shake against the table and make sounds that the neighbors can definitely hear through the walls and that I cannot bring myself to care about.

By the third edge, I’m begging. Not the performative begging of the early days — the real kind, the uncontrolled, fracturing, please Marcus please I need you please kind that only comes from absolute trust and absolute desperation and the specific combination of both that this man extracts from me like something precious.

“Good boy,” he says, and the praise shatters me the way it always does — a full-body shudder, a sound that’s halfway between a moan and a sob, the involuntary surrender of a man who has spent his whole life performing and has found the one person who makes performing unnecessary.

He takes his time with prep. Always thorough, always careful, always the man who checks in and reads my body and adjusts because my pleasure is not an afterthought — it’s the point. His fingers inside me, patient and relentless, curling against the spot that makes me push back against his hand and swear into the oak surface of our new dining table.

“Ready?” he asks.

“I’ve been ready since the delivery men left.”

“You’ve been ready since the furniture store.”

“I’ve been ready since an elevator between floors. Get in me.”

He enters me slowly. The stretch, the fullness, the devastating intimacy of being filled by someone who knows my body better than I do — six months of data, six months of learning, six months of the most attentive, thorough, relentless sexual attention I have ever received from any human being on this planet. He bottoms out and we both groan and his forehead drops against the back of my neck and his hands are on my hips and the table holds us both.

He moves. Not slow — we’re past slow, we’re past the teasing and the edging and the controlled demolition of my composure. He fucks me against the dining table with the controlled power that defines everything he does, and I take it and push back and meet him and the sounds in the apartment are obscene — skin on skin, the table legs scraping against the floor, my voice saying his name like a prayer and a curse and a confession.

“You’re impossible,” he says, the same words from the living room two weeks ago, the words that have become his shorthand for the thing he can’t say any other way. “You’re mine. You’re —”

“Everything,” I finish. “I know. You keep telling me.”

“Because you keep needing to hear it.”

“Because I keep wanting to hear it. There’s a difference.”

He reaches around. Takes me in his hand. Strokes me in rhythm with his thrusts — fast, tight, the exact pressure that six months of study have perfected — and I come with his name in my mouth and his body behind me and my palms sliding on the oak surface of a table that we bought together in Brooklyn on a Saturday afternoon.

He follows. Deep, shuddering, his mouth pressed between my shoulder blades, his arms locked around me, and the sound he makes is the one I love most — raw, unmanaged, the sound of Marcus Hale with every wall down and every defense dissolved and nothing left but the man I chose and who chose me back.

We eat breakfast at the table at noon.

He made eggs. They’re terrible — overcooked, slightly burned, seasoned with the confidence of a man who has never doubted a professional decision in his life and applies the same unfounded confidence to scrambled eggs. I eat them all and tell him they’re perfect and he knows I’m lying and loves me for it.

“We need to have Priya and Derek over,” I say, stealing a piece of his toast. “For a proper dinner. At our proper table.”

“You want to host a dinner party.”

“I want to host a dinner party at the table where you just —”

“I’m aware of what just happened at this table.”

“— and serve food on it like civilized humans.”

“That is deeply unhygienic.”

“That’s what the wiping down is for.”

He laughs. The real one — not the almost-laugh from early days, not the controlled half-smile from boardrooms. The full, unguarded laugh that I earned through months of patience and stubbornness and the particular alchemy of loving someone until they let you hear the sound they’ve been hiding.

“Saturday,” he says. “I’ll cook.”

“You can’t cook.”

“I’ll order from the restaurant and plate it like I cooked.”

“That’s fraud.”

“It’s presentation. There’s a difference.”

I look at him across the table — the new table, the big table, the table that seats six and that we will fill with friends and food and the particular warmth of a life being lived on purpose. His hair is wrecked. His chest is bare. There’s a scratch on his shoulder from my fingernails that he hasn’t noticed yet and that I’m going to pretend I didn’t leave because plausible deniability is one of the cornerstones of our relationship.

“I love you,” I say. Simple. The way he said it first — not strategy, not performance, just the truth.

“I know,” he says. “You christened my table.”

“Our table.”

He reaches across the oak surface — across the plates and the terrible eggs and the Sunday light from the windows — and takes my hand. Threads his fingers through mine. The same gesture from Derek’s bar, from the car ride home, from every moment where we’ve chosen contact over distance and honesty over hiding.

“Our table,” he agrees.

I squeeze his hand. He squeezes back. The table holds us both.

It’s a good table.

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