Bonus Chapter: The Garden Gate
An exclusive bonus scene from Call Me When You’re Curious
by Jace Wilder
Six months after the gate. A scene too hot for Amazon.
⚠️ Content Note: This bonus scene is 18+ explicit. Graphic MM sexual content including penetrative sex, oral, praise kink, light restraint, and studio-desk sex. Set after the events of Call Me When You’re Curious. On-page consent throughout.
The Garden Gate
Merrick
The gate was open when I got home.
It was always open now — the white oak weathering to a warm silver, the hinges silent from the graphite I’d applied in January, the latch worn smooth by six months of hands that crossed without thinking. My hands. Soren’s hands. Elodie’s, when she shuttled between houses with watercolor supplies and opinions about wall color.
I dropped my tool belt on the garden bench and rolled my shoulders. The Peterson kitchen was finished — finally, after three weeks of custom tile work that had tested every patient bone in my body. My shirt was damp, my forearms streaked with grout, and I smelled like joint compound and exhaustion.
Through the open gate, I could see the light on in the studio.
My studio. The room I’d built for Soren in my own house, with the white oak drafting table and the track lighting and the garden-facing window. The room that had started as proof and become his second home, cluttered with fabric swatches and mood boards and the particular creative chaos that Soren generated wherever he worked.
I walked through the gate. Crossed my own garden. Opened my own back door and stood in the hallway, listening.
Music. Something low and French, the kind of thing Soren played when he was deep in a project and wanted the world to feel intimate. I followed it down the hall to the studio door, which was half-open, spilling warm light across the hardwood.
Soren was at the drafting table, leaning over a set of fabric samples, making notes in his careful handwriting. He was barefoot. His curls were loose and falling across his forehead. The gold earrings caught the track lighting.
He was wearing my henley.
The gray one. The one I’d been wearing the day he knocked on my door with a drill he didn’t need. It hung past his wrists and dropped to mid-thigh and he was wearing it over nothing — no shorts, no boxers, just the hem of my shirt and his bare legs and the edge of the botanical tattoo visible where the fabric rode up on his right hip.
I leaned against the doorframe and watched.
Six months. Six months of mornings where I woke up with his head on my chest and didn’t panic. Six months of dinners at the green kitchen table where Elodie argued with Soren about whether chartreuse was a legitimate color or a cry for help. Six months of the gate standing open between our gardens like a sentence that never needed finishing.
And he still took my breath away. Every time. The way he bent over the table, all concentration and grace. The way the henley slipped off one shoulder and exposed the line of his collarbone. The way his hips shifted to the music the same way they’d shifted the night I’d first watched him through the window and felt something crack in a wall I didn’t know I’d built.
“You’re staring,” he said without looking up.
“You’re wearing my shirt with nothing underneath. I’ll stare as long as I want.”
He looked up. The smile he gave me was the one I’d earned — not the public smile, not the charming-client smile, but the private one. Warm, slow, slightly wicked. The smile that said I know exactly what I’m doing and I’m going to enjoy watching you figure it out.
“How was the Peterson kitchen?”
“Finished. Three weeks of custom tile and I never want to see a subway pattern again.” I pushed off the doorframe and crossed the studio. “How’s the hotel project?”
“The client wants coral in the lobby. I’m trying to talk them into terracotta. Coral in a commercial space is a declaration of war against good taste.”
“Sounds urgent.”
“It’s a crisis.”
“Should I leave you to it?”
“Absolutely not.”
I stopped behind him. Put my hands on his waist — my hands, rough with grout dust, on the soft gray cotton of my own shirt stretched across his hips. He leaned back into me. The crown of his head tucked under my chin and his back pressed against my chest and the warmth of his body through the thin fabric was the closest thing to a religious experience I’d ever had.
“You’re filthy,” he murmured.
“I just spent three weeks on my knees laying tile. Filthy is a professional condition.”
“You’re getting grout on my henley.”
“My henley.”
“Possession is nine-tenths of the law. I’ve been wearing this shirt since November. It’s mine now.” He tilted his head back and looked up at me, upside down, those amber eyes warm and teasing. “Are you going to take it back?”
The question was not about the shirt.
I turned him around. My hands on his waist, spinning him gently until he faced me, his back against the drafting table, the fabric samples scattering as his hip hit the edge. He looked up at me with that expression — the one that was equal parts challenge and surrender, the one that said I dare you and please in the same breath.
I kissed him.
Not gently. Six months hadn’t diminished the hunger — if anything, security had amplified it. The knowledge that he was mine and I was his and neither of us was leaving made every kiss feel like a choice rather than a theft. I kissed him with my hands in his hair and his back against the table and my body pressing him into the edge until the wood creaked and Soren gasped against my mouth.
“The fabric samples,” he managed between kisses.
“Don’t care.”
“There’s a twelve-dollar-a-yard silk in that stack.”
“I’ll buy you new silk.” I lifted him onto the table. His bare legs wrapped around my waist and the henley rode up past his hips and I could see everything — the tattoo climbing his ribs, the lean muscle of his thighs, his cock hardening against his stomach, flushed and heavy. The sight of him on the table I’d built with my own hands, in the room I’d designed for his body to inhabit, wearing my shirt with nothing underneath — it hit me the way it always hit me: like a structure settling into its final, perfect position.
“You’re the most beautiful thing in this room,” I said. “And I built this room for you.”
His eyes went dark. “Then show me what it’s for.”
I dropped to my knees.
The floor I’d refinished was hard beneath my kneecaps and I didn’t care. His legs opened for me and I kissed the inside of his thigh, the crease of his hip, the lowest tendril of the tattoo that I’d been tracing with my tongue since the first night we’d shared a bed. He shuddered. His hands gripped the edge of the table — the white oak I’d cut and joined and sanded smooth, the dovetails I’d made by hand at four in the morning because I’d needed this to be the best thing I’d ever built.
I took him in my mouth without preamble. Deep, confident, the technique I’d learned from being with this specific man — the twist of my tongue that made his thighs shake, the suction that made his head fall back, the deep-throat that made him say my name in a voice I’d never heard from anyone else.
“Merrick — oh god, your mouth — every time, every single time you do that I forget how to—”
I pulled off long enough to say: “I know. That’s why I do it.” And took him back down.
I worked him until his thighs were trembling and his knuckles were white on the table edge and the French music was drowned out by the sounds he was making — gasps and half-words and my name broken into syllables. Then I stood, gripped his hips, and pulled him to the edge of the table.
“I want you here,” I said. “On this table. In this room.”
“Yes. God, yes.”
He reached behind him — knocked aside a mood board and a stack of Pantone chips — and found the small bottle he’d apparently stashed in the desk drawer weeks ago, because Soren Vale was a man who planned for every contingency and decorated for every occasion.
“You pre-staged lube in my desk,” I said.
“I pre-staged lube in our desk. In our studio. Because I know my boyfriend and I know what happens when he comes home from a job site looking like that, and I believe in being prepared.”
“You’re an interior stylist. You styled the interior of a desk drawer for sex.”
“I’m thorough. I told you.”
I laughed against his mouth and kissed him and opened him with my fingers while his legs wrapped around my waist and his hands gripped my shoulders and his body responded to me with the trust of six months of learning each other’s maps.
Two fingers. Three. His head fell back and he braced himself on the table and I watched his face — the crease between his brows, the parted lips, the moment where preparation tipped into pleasure and his expression softened into something luminous.
“Now,” he whispered. “Merrick, now, please—”
I freed myself from my jeans. Rolled the condom on. Slicked myself and positioned at his entrance and pressed forward in one long, controlled slide that seated me completely inside him and made us both groan in unison.
The angle was different from the bed. The table was the perfect height — his hips at my waist, his legs around me, my hands gripping the table edge on either side of him. The white oak held. I’d built it to hold.
I thrust into him and the table didn’t move. The joinery held. The legs were solid and the stretchers were braced and every dovetail I’d cut at four in the morning absorbed the force without complaint, because I’d built this table the way I built everything for Soren: to last.
“Harder,” he said, and I gave him harder, and the fabric samples that had survived the initial assault finally scattered to the floor in a cascade of silk and linen and twelve-dollar-a-yard luxury that neither of us noticed because his hands were in my hair and his body was clenching around me and the sounds filling the studio were the sounds of two men who’d stopped hiding and started living.
“You’re perfect,” I told him, and meant it, and the praise kink that had started as a discovery and become a language fired on every cylinder as I said the words into his throat between thrusts. “You’re perfect and you’re mine and I built this room for you and I’d build a thousand rooms if that’s what it took to keep you—”
“Merrick.” His voice cracked. His hand gripped the back of my neck. “I’m going to—”
“Look at me.”
He looked at me. Amber eyes bright, face undone, mouth open on my name. I wrapped my hand around his cock and stroked him in rhythm with my thrusts and watched him come apart on the table I’d built — his back arching, his body clenching, the orgasm ripping through him in waves that I felt in my own body because we were that connected, that synchronized, that completely, permanently, irreversibly joined.
I followed. Deep inside him, my forehead against his, his name in my mouth and his heartbeat against my chest and the white oak holding us both without a single joint giving way.
Afterward, we lay on the studio floor.
Not because the floor was comfortable — it wasn’t; it was hardwood, and my back was going to have opinions about this in the morning — but because getting to the bed required effort that neither of us had, and the studio floor was warm and the track lighting was soft and Soren was lying on top of me with his cheek on my chest and the henley rucked up around his waist and his bare legs tangled with my jeans-clad ones.
“Your table survived,” he murmured.
“My table is structurally sound. I built it for this.”
“You did not build a drafting table anticipating that your boyfriend would stash lube in the drawer and seduce you on the surface.”
“I built a drafting table for the man I love. What happens on the surface is his prerogative.”
He lifted his head. The look he gave me was so full of warmth and amusement and bone-deep, settled certainty that I felt it in my chest like a second heartbeat.
“I love you,” he said. “And your table. And your floor, which is currently destroying my kneecaps. And your kitchen, which is the right green. And your gate, which is the most romantic thing anyone has ever built for me.”
“I love you too.” I ran my fingers through his curls. “And your couch. Which we still need to replace.”
“The couch is on order. Elodie picked the color. She says it’s called Midnight Teal and it will ‘transform the room’s emotional register.’”
“She’s twelve.”
“She’s a genius. She gets it from me.”
“You’re not her—”
“I’m her style mentor. It counts.”
I kissed the top of his head and held him on the studio floor and looked up at the ceiling of the room I’d built for him and thought about the path. Twelve feet of concrete between two front doors that had once felt like the distance between continents and now felt like a hallway in a house that belonged to both of us.
The gate was open. The light was on. The table held.
And I was home.
Want the full story? Call Me When You’re Curious is available now.
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