Say It Again

A Cabin Fever Praise Bonus Chapter — TOO HOT for Amazon

CAL

Ethan came home from Chicago with a blindfold.

He didn’t announce it. Didn’t present it with fanfare or explanation or the careful preamble that preceded most of Ethan Park’s emotionally significant communications. He just walked into the kitchen at six-thirty on a Thursday evening—travel-rumpled, dark circles, the particular worn-in look of a man who’d been performing corporate competence for seven days straight—and set a small black case on the counter between his laptop bag and his coffee mug.

I was making dinner. Pasta, the garlic-and-red-pepper version that had become our Thursday-night homecoming tradition. Biscuit was at my feet. Crumb was in the yard, digging. The cabin smelled like olive oil and warmth, and Ethan smelled like airplane and city, and I crossed the kitchen and kissed him before I looked at the case.

“Welcome home, gorgeous.”

“Mm.” He kissed me back—brief, firm, the decompression kiss, the one that said I’m shifting from that world to this one, give me a minute. Then he pulled back and nodded at the counter. “I brought you something.”

“You brought me something from Chicago?”

“Not from Chicago. I ordered it. It arrived at the apartment.”

I picked up the case. Small, sleek, the kind of packaging that suggested the contents cost more than they should. I unzipped it.

Inside, on a bed of matte black fabric, was a sleep mask. Not a drugstore sleep mask—a proper one, contoured, total blackout, the kind designed for sensory deprivation. It was made of some kind of memory foam, covered in silk, with an adjustable strap. It looked expensive and deliberate and not at all like something a man bought for himself because he had trouble sleeping on planes.

I looked at the mask. I looked at Ethan.

He was leaning against the counter with his arms crossed—not defensive, just bracing. His face was doing the thing it did when he was about to say something that cost him: controlled on the surface, turbulent underneath, the microexpressions of a man running calculations on his own vulnerability.

“Tell me,” I said.

“During Chicago week. Tuesday night. I couldn’t sleep.” He paused. Uncrossed his arms. Crossed them again. “I put on one of your voice memos.”

The voice memos. I’d started sending them during his second Chicago trip—short audio clips, thirty seconds to two minutes, just me talking. Sometimes about the cabin, or Biscuit, or something funny a guest had said. Sometimes I played a few bars of whatever I was working on. Sometimes, when it was late and the cabin was quiet and I missed him so badly it sat in my chest like a stone, I just said goodnight, gorgeous and let the recording end.

“Which one?” I asked.

“The one from last Tuesday. Where you played the new song and then—” A pause. The ears went pink. The ears always went first. “And then you talked for a while. About the sunset. About the way the light looked on the mountains. About—”

“About how I think about you when the light does that thing at sunset where everything goes gold. I remember.”

“Yes. That one.” He was looking at the counter, not at me. “I put it on and I was lying in the dark listening to your voice and I—” He stopped. Started again, more carefully, the lawyer in him selecting precise words. “Your voice alone made me hard, Cal. Not a memory of being touched. Not a fantasy. Just the sound of you praising the light on the mountains. Just your voice in my ear, saying something beautiful, and my body—” He exhaled. “Responded.”

I set the mask down on the counter. My hand was not entirely steady.

“I started thinking about it,” Ethan continued. “About what it would feel like to take away the visual entirely. To only have your voice and your hands. No other input. No sight—just sound and touch and—” He met my eyes. The pink had spread from his ears to his cheekbones. “And praise. I want to know how far the praise can take me when it’s the only thing I can feel.”

The kitchen was very quiet. The pasta water bubbled. Biscuit, sensing that something was happening above his pay grade, relocated to his bed.

“You want me to blindfold you,” I said.

“Yes.”

“And praise you.”

“Yes.”

“Until?”

“Until I can’t remember my own name. The orgasm is secondary.”

“Nothing about you coming is secondary to me, Ethan.”

His mouth twitched. The almost-smile that was now, after years of practice, a full smile more often than not—but in this moment, on this topic, it reverted to the twitch. The vulnerability of what he was asking compressed the smile back to its original, guarded form.

“Tonight?” I asked.

“The guests are gone. Next group isn’t until Sunday. We have the mountain to ourselves.”

“You planned this.”

“I planned the logistics. The impulse was—” He paused. “Less planned.”

“Ethan Park had an impulse. Someone alert the media.”

“Do you want to do this or not?”

I stepped closer. Put my hand on his jaw—the hold, our hold, palm to cheek, thumb on cheekbone. His eyes fluttered half-shut. Reflexive. Pavlovian. The response of a man whose body had been trained, over two years of consistent love, to associate this touch with safety.

“I want to do this,” I said. “More than I’ve wanted anything in a very long time. But I have a condition.”

“Name it.”

“You respond. To every praise. Not silence, not a nod, not the thing you do where you absorb it and go quiet. You respond out loud. ‘Thank you’ or ‘yes’ or ‘I believe you.’ You actively receive. Every single time. No hiding.”

His jaw tightened under my hand. The condition was harder than the blindfold—harder than the vulnerability of not seeing, harder than the surrender of control. The blindfold was passive. This was active. This was Ethan Park confirming, out loud, in real time, that the praise had landed. That he believed it. That the walls were down and the words were in.

“Okay,” he said.

“And safeword?”

He thought for a moment. Then the corner of his mouth curved—the real smile, breaking through the nerves.

“Damper,” he said.

I laughed. The damper—the thing he hadn’t known how to open the first day in the cabin, the lever that controlled airflow, the small piece of machinery whose ignorance had brought us together. The perfect safeword: the thing you open when you need to breathe.

“Damper it is.” I kissed him. Soft, certain. “Finish dinner. Eat. And then—”

“And then.”

Read the full bonus chapter in Cabin Fever Praise by Jace Wilder. This scene continues with the blindfold going on, Cal’s voice as the only input, and Ethan learning to say “I believe you” until the words become instinct.

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