🔥 The Night in Bahrain 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Deep Water

Thank You for Reading! 💙

You made it to the bonus content — which means you’ve survived the foredeck, the storm, the galley floor at 2 AM, the captain’s quarters, a plunge pool in Corsica, Monaco at midnight, an engine room confession, a locked door, a cargo ship to Senegal, and a man who crossed an ocean because he couldn’t outrun a twenty-two-year-old with dark eyes and no shoes.

You’ve watched Vance Kessler spend twenty-two years behind a wall and Kian Atwell spend twenty-two years knocking on doors that wouldn’t open. Thank you for giving them your time.

This exclusive chapter is our gift to dedicated readers like you — the full Bahrain flashback, from Vance’s perspective. The night that started everything. The night he locked the door. Twenty-two years before a boy with his mother’s cheekbones walked off a helicopter and blew it open.

← Back to Deep Water

⚠️ Content Warning: Extremely explicit MM sexual content including first-time male/male experience, oral sex, penetrative sex, military setting, emotional intensity, repression, and the specific devastation of discovering who you are at twenty-six in a hotel room in a port city at the edge of the Persian Gulf. Set 22 years before the events of Deep Water. Readers 18+ only.

The Night in Bahrain

Vance’s POV. Twenty-two years before the Leviathan.

I.

The hotel was called the Al Jazira. Three stars on a generous day, wedged between a textile warehouse and a shawarma shop on a street two blocks from the souk in Manama. The Navy per diem for shore leave in Bahrain was sixty-two dollars a night, and the Al Jazira charged fifty-eight, which left four dollars for breakfast if you didn’t drink.

We drank.

James Holloway and I had been drinking since seventeen hundred — cheap beer at a bar near the naval base that catered to off-duty Americans and Brits, the kind of place with sticky floors and a television permanently tuned to CNN and a bartender who’d learned to pour doubles without being asked because he understood what two months on a destroyer did to a man’s relationship with sobriety.

Two months. Sixty-one days on the USS Ardent, a guided-missile destroyer running patrol in the Persian Gulf. Sixty-one days of twelve-hour watches and operational briefings and the particular, grinding monotony of readiness without action — the Navy’s version of purgatory, where you maintained peak alertness for a threat that never materialized and the days blurred into a featureless grey wash of sea and sky and steel.

James and I had stood watches together for most of it. Bridge watches, the four-to-eight, where the Gulf stretched ahead in shades of pewter and the only sound was the hum of the instruments and the quiet exchange of two officers talking to stay awake.

We talked about everything. Books — he read literary fiction, I read history, and the overlap was a surprisingly fertile Venn diagram of war narratives and Mediterranean histories. We talked about home — his was Vermont, a college town where his parents taught English literature at the state university; mine was Cardiff, a shipyard city where my father worked steel and my mother kept a garden that was the most beautiful thing on our street. We talked about the Navy — why we’d joined, what we wanted from it, how long we’d stay.

We didn’t talk about the thing that was happening between us.

I didn’t have words for it then. I was twenty-six years old and I’d grown up in working-class Cardiff in the 1980s, where men worked with their hands and drank at the pub and married women and produced children and did not — under any circumstances, in any configuration — want other men. The vocabulary for what I felt when James Holloway leaned against the bridge console and his shoulder pressed mine — the low, electric hum that started in my chest and spread outward until my whole body felt like a tuning fork — that vocabulary didn’t exist in any language I’d been taught.

So I filed it under camaraderie. Under the particular intensity of military friendship. Under the acceptable, frameable category of brothers-in-arms.

The filing system held for eight months. It broke in the Al Jazira hotel at twenty-three hundred on a Thursday night in November, with four beers in my blood and James Holloway sitting on the bed next to mine, pulling off his boots.

II.

The room was small. Two single beds separated by a nightstand with a lamp that flickered. A window air-conditioner that rattled like a dying animal. The carpet was the colour of resignation.

He looked up at me. James Holloway was not a conventionally handsome man. His face was too angular — sharp jaw, prominent nose. But his eyes were extraordinary: dark brown, almost black, with a depth that suggested the intelligence behind them went down further than most people’s. He had a mouth that curved naturally toward seriousness, and when he smiled — rarely, deliberately — the transformation was startling. Like watching a locked room suddenly fill with light.

He was looking at me with something I’d been seeing in flashes for eight months — across the bridge during night watches, in the officers’ mess when our eyes met over coffee, in the gym when he spotted me on the bench press. Something I’d been filing under camaraderie and brotherhood and every other word that wasn’t the word.

“Vance,” he said. The way he said my name — like it was a question and an answer at the same time. Like he was asking permission and granting it in the same breath.

He stood. Crossed the three feet between the beds. Sat down next to me. His hand found my knee.

The contact was light — just his palm on the fabric of my trousers. The weight was negligible. The effect was seismic. My entire body went rigid — not with revulsion, not with fear, but with the sudden, overwhelming awareness that the thing I’d been filing under acceptable categories for eight months was about to break free, and I was going to let it.

“Tell me to stop,” he said.

I didn’t tell him to stop. My hand — moving on its own, bypassing every circuit of discipline and training — covered his. My fingers laced through his. I held on.

He exhaled. A long, shaking breath. Then he leaned in and kissed me.

III.

The kiss was careful at first. His mouth found mine with the tentative precision of a man navigating unfamiliar waters. His lips were warm and dry and tasted like beer and something underneath that was just him — a clean, specific, male taste that my body recognized with a certainty that obliterated twenty-six years of misfiled identity.

I kissed him back. Not carefully. The restraint I’d been maintaining for twenty-six years collapsed in a single, catastrophic structural failure. My hand found the back of his head, pulling him closer. My mouth opened against his, and his tongue met mine, and the sound I made — a low, broken groan — filled the small room and was, without question, the most honest sound I’d ever produced.

We fell sideways onto the narrow bed in a tangle of limbs and uniforms. We kissed for a long time. His stubble scraped my chin. His hand slid under my shirt and found the bare skin of my back, and the contact of his palm against my spine — warm, rough, another man’s hand on my body — sent a jolt through me that was so intense my vision blurred.

“Is this okay?” I pulled back, panting.

“Vance.” He said my name like a prayer. “I’ve been wanting to do this since the first week.”

“I didn’t know.”

“You knew. You just didn’t have the word for it yet.”

He was right. The word I’d needed was want. Simple, devastating, undeniable want.

Shirts came off. His first — a lean, muscled torso, swimmer’s build, a trail of dark hair from his navel downward. I’d seen him shirtless before in the gym, the showers — but I’d never let myself look. Not really. Not with the part of my brain that catalogued beauty and want.

“You’re staring,” he said. Not embarrassed. Pleased.

“I’m looking. For the first time. Let me look.”

His hand slid down my chest, my stomach, to my waistband. He looked up — one last check, one final offer to stop — and I nodded.

He undid my belt. His hand slid inside, and when his fingers wrapped around me, I made a sound I had never made before — raw, wrecked, wrenched from somewhere below language, below the entire superstructure of identity I’d spent twenty-six years building.

Then we were naked on a single bed in a three-star hotel in Bahrain. The full-body contact of skin against skin — chest to chest, hip to hip, his cock against mine — was the most revelatory sensation of my life.

He moved down my body. Mouth on my chest, my ribs, the line of hair below my navel. When his mouth closed around my cock, I nearly came off the bed. Not because the sensation was unprecedented. Because the mouth was his. Because James Holloway’s lips were wrapped around me, and his dark eyes were looking up from between my thighs, and the visual and the sensation combined into something that was not just physical but existential.

He was skilled. His tongue worked the underside in long, dragging strokes. He took me deep — deep enough that the wet heat of his throat made my back arch — and then pulled off to breathe and did it again.

“James—” His name torn from me like something structural giving way. “I’m going to—”

He pulled off. Climbed back up my body. Kissed me so I could taste myself on his tongue — the thing that finally, completely, destroyed the wall.

“I want you inside me,” he said. Quiet. Certain.

“I’ve never—”

“I know. I’ll show you.”

He prepared himself while I watched — mesmerized, terrified, achingly hard — and his hands trembled in a way that told me he’d never done it with someone who mattered this much.

“Now,” he said. He straddled my hips. “Look at me.”

I looked at him. He sank down.

The sensation — the tight, clutching heat of his body — was so far beyond anything I’d experienced that my brain shut down and let my body take over. My hands flew to his hips. My back arched off the mattress. A sound left my throat that was barely human.

He moved. Slowly at first — rising and falling with a controlled rhythm, his thighs flexing against my hips. Each descent took me fully inside him. The cycle — the repeated, devastating pattern of entry and withdrawal — built a pressure I had no mechanism to contain.

This was not adequate sex. This was not the biological objective accomplished and the emotional register untouched. This was a man — his body, his weight, his sounds, his sweat — riding me in a hotel room while everything I’d believed about myself for twenty-six years burned to the ground.

I gripped his hips and thrust up. Hard. The instinct was there — the animal, unchoreographed knowledge of how to move inside another body. He cried out and his back arched and his cock, hard and leaking between us, twitched against my stomach.

“Again,” he gasped. “God, Vance, again—”

We found a rhythm — his descent meeting my thrust, the narrow bed protesting beneath us, the headboard tapping the wall. His hand wrapped around his own cock, stroking in time, and I watched every second — because I understood that I was seeing the thing I’d been looking for in every woman’s face and never found.

He came first. His body locked — every muscle seizing, his cock pulsing between us in thick, shuddering jets. The clench of his body around me tipped me over within seconds. I came with a force that bowed my spine — a full-body detonation, a sound leaving my throat that was more sob than shout.

For six hours, we didn’t sleep.

We lay in the narrow bed — his head on my chest, my arm around him. He traced patterns on my skin. Circles, lines, shapes I couldn’t see.

“How long have you known?” I asked.

“About myself? Since I was fourteen. About you?” His finger drew a circle on my sternum. “Since the first watch. You stood at the helm and talked about the Phoenicians for forty minutes and I thought: oh. Him. It’s going to be him.“

At oh-four-hundred, I said: “I don’t want to go back.”

“I know.”

“Not to the ship. To — before. To not knowing.”

“You don’t have to go back to not knowing. You just have to go back to not showing.”

At oh-five-hundred, the muezzin’s call to prayer rose over Manama — a long, beautiful, mournful sound that filled the room and the street and the sky, calling the faithful to acknowledge what was true.

James kissed me one last time. Soft, thorough, final.

“Remember this,” he said. “Whatever happens. However far you run. Remember that it was real.”

In the morning, we dressed in silence. We checked out. Walked up the gangway of the USS Ardent. I went to the bridge. He went to the intelligence centre. Our eyes met once across the mess, and the look lasted exactly one second.

We never spoke about it.

Three months later, James transferred to Pacific Fleet. I locked the door. I buried the key. I built a career and a discipline and an identity on top of the burial site.

Twenty-two years later, a boy with no shoes walked off a helicopter in Valletta and the ground over the grave began to crack.

You know the rest.

Note from Vance — or the man he became:

Kian found this chapter. Of course he did — the man has no respect for locked compartments, emotional or otherwise. He read it on the Meridian, sitting cross-legged on the berth with his reading glasses on, and when he finished he looked at me and said:

“You loved him.”

“I did. For one night.”

“And then you spent twenty-two years pretending you didn’t.”

“Yes.”

“And then you met me.”

“And then I met you.”

He closed the laptop. Climbed into my lap. Put his hands on my face.

“I’m glad he kissed you first,” he said. “Someone had to start the chain reaction. It just took twenty-two years to reach critical mass.”

I held him. On our boat, in our cove, in our life.

James, wherever you are: thank you. For the hotel room. For the courage. For being the first person to show me the door, even though it took me two decades to walk through it.

The man on the other side was worth the wait.

— V.K.

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With love,
Jace Wilder