After Hours
A By the Book, By the Bed Bonus Chapter
by Jace Wilder
🔥 This scene is TOO HOT for Amazon. Exclusive to our readers. 🔥
The library was quiet at seven o’clock on a Friday night, and Adrian was alone in it, and the aloneness felt different now.
Not lonely — he knew what lonely felt like in this building. That aloneness had been structural. Weight-bearing. This aloneness was temporary.
At 7:14 PM, he heard the front door. Ben had a key now.
Ben appeared in the doorway carrying a paper bag from the diner, a bottle of wine, and the expression Adrian had catalogued as Category 4: intent with plausible deniability.
“I brought food,” Ben said. “And wine. And a research question.”
“The library is closed.”
“I have a key.”
“The key is for emergencies.”
“This is an emergency. I’m writing a scene set in a library after hours and I need to verify the details. The lighting. The acoustics.” Ben’s mouth curved. “The way the stacks look when it’s dark and there’s nobody here.”
“What are your terms?” Adrian asked.
“Stand up.”
Adrian stood.
“Take off your shirt.”
“We’re in the library.”
“The environment is optimal.”
Adrian unbuttoned his shirt. Slowly, because the slowness mattered. He folded it and set it on the filing cabinet.
“You’re writing me,” Adrian said.
“I’m always writing you.”
Adrian shivered. Not from cold — from being narrated.
“The belt.”
“Trousers.”
He stood in the archive room in his boxers, his glasses, and nothing else. Adrian Vale — the man who preserved fragile things — was exposed for the one person he trusted to handle it without gloves.
Ben sat in Adrian’s chair. Adrian straddled him. The chair creaked.
“I love you,” Ben murmured.
“I love you. Now touch me before I lose my mind.”
Ben kissed him. Adrian surged to meet him. Ben’s hand slid into Adrian’s boxers, wrapped around him, stroked — and the sounds Adrian made were sounds the climate control system had never recorded.
“Not here,” Ben gasped. “Location two.”
“Three locations. The archive room, the stacks, and the window table.”
Ben led him into the stacks — Dewey 025, conservation methodology.
“Turn around. Hands on the shelf.”
Adrian turned. His hands found the shelf. The spines of volumes on preservation pressed against his palms.
Ben dropped to his knees on the library floor. Adrian’s hands gripped the shelf above for stability while Ben took him apart with his mouth.
The acoustics of an empty library amplified everything. Ben’s mouth was thorough, devastating — refined over months into something that bordered on art.
Adrian came in the stacks. Against the conservation methodology section. The irony was not lost on either of them.
Ben led Adrian to the reading room. To their table. The one Adrian pointed to on the first day.
Adrian bent Ben over the table. His domain. His building. His table. The control was back — the confident version.
He prepared Ben with careful hands. Ben’s face pressed against the table surface — the same table where he’d written eighty-five thousand words.
Adrian pushed inside. The librarian voice at full power. Precise. Devastating.
They came within seconds of each other. On the window table. In the library where they met.
They lay on the reading room floor afterward. The takeout was cold.
“We’re going to have to sanitize that table,” Adrian said.
“I’m putting this in the sequel.”
“Not my desk.”
“Your desk.”
“Absolutely not.”
They ate cold takeout on the reading room floor, naked, at 9 PM on a Friday, and Adrian thought: This is the best night of my life.
Adrian set a reminder on his phone. Monday, 7 AM. The label: Maintenance — Table 4.
Ben laughed until he couldn’t breathe.
Adrian kept the reminder. It recurred every Friday.
Some routines, he was learning, were worth inventing.
Loved Adrian and Ben? The full novel is available now.
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