The Tack Room (Revisited)

A Bonus Chapter from Eight Seconds, No Regrets
by Jace Wilder

This scene takes place three weeks after the events of Chapter 20. It contains explicit sexual content that was too intense for the main novel. Intended for readers 18+ who want to see exactly what happens when Tiernan Kittredge gets his confidence back — and what happens to Evren Halcott’s composure when his bull rider decides the tack room needs a new memory.

The tack room smells the same.

Leather and saddle soap and the faint mineral bite of metal polish and hay dust suspended in late-afternoon light that comes through the high window like a spotlight aimed at the center of the floor. The bench is where it was. The bridles hang where they hung. The bar above the saddle rack is still at the exact height where I hooked my fingers and nearly set my recovery back by six weeks and triggered the argument that led to Evren pinning my wrist to the wall and taking me apart with his voice and his hand and the sentence that rewrote the operating system of my entire emotional life.

Honesty gets you more than obedience ever will.

I’m standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame, watching Evren organize the new rehabilitation tack we ordered for the program. He’s sorting halters by size — small, medium, large — with the systematic precision of a man who believes that equipment in the wrong place is a hazard and a halter in the wrong bin is a personal failing.

He’s wearing a faded gray T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. The ones that show his arms. The arms that held me in the arena, and in the shower, and in the hospital chair, and against a wall in a hotel room, and in a bed that has both our names on the nightstand now because his watch lives on my wrist and my boots live by his door and neither of us is pretending those things are temporary anymore.

“You’re staring,” he says without looking up.

“I’m appreciating.”

“You’re staring at my arms.”

“Your arms are worth staring at. Have you seen them? They’re enormous. You could shelve a horse with those arms.”

“That’s not how horses work.”

“It’s how your arms work. They defy physics. I’ve been meaning to file a complaint.”

He sets down the last halter. Turns to face me. The movement is unhurried — he doesn’t rush toward things, doesn’t lunge, doesn’t close distance until he’s decided the distance needs closing. He looks at me in the doorway and his eyes do the sweep — head to boots, boots to head — and his expression shifts.

Not much. A degree. The microadjustment of a man whose composure is a structure and whose structure has learned, over the last several months, to include a door that opens when I’m in the room.

“You’re not here for tack,” he says.

“I’m here for the tack room.”

“There’s a difference?”

I push off the doorframe. Walk toward him. The barn floor is packed earth under my boots and the sound of each step echoes off the walls and the high ceiling, and I’m not performing — I don’t perform with Evren anymore — but I am deliberate. Intentional. I’ve been thinking about this for three days, since I walked past the tack room Tuesday and smelled the leather and the soap and my body remembered what happened against that wall with a specificity that left me hard in my jeans and useless for the rest of the afternoon.

I stop in front of him. Close enough to feel the heat of his body. Close enough to see the silver in his beard and the green of his eyes and the scar that I’ve traced with my tongue so many times I could draw it from memory.

“The last time we were in this room,” I say, “you pinned me to that wall because I couldn’t ask for what I needed without making you angry first.”

“I remember.”

“I’ve gotten better at asking.”

“You have.”

“So I’m asking.” I reach up and grip the front of his shirt. Not pulling — holding. The way he holds my jaw when he kisses me. The way he holds my wrist when he wants me to stay. “I want to fuck you in this tack room.”

His eyes darken. The pupils expanding, the green contracting to a ring. I’ve learned this response the way I’ve learned his breathing and his tells and the particular frequency his voice hits when I’ve said something that cracks the composure at the fault line.

“Specifically,” I continue, “I want to push you against that wall where you pinned me. I want to get on my knees on this bench. I want to take you apart the way you took me apart, except this time I’m in charge and you’re the one who has to use his words.”

“Tiernan—”

“Use your words, Halcott.”

The sentence — his sentence, his cadence, his weapon turned around and aimed at the man who forged it — lands exactly where I aimed it. His jaw flexes. His chest rises on a deeper breath. And his hands — the hands that are always steady, the hands that held scalpels and soldiers and me — come up and grip my waist with a pressure that says yes in a language that predates speech.

I kiss him. Not gentle, not tentative, not the careful relearning of our reunion. I kiss him the way I ride — with total commitment and the willingness to get thrown. My tongue in his mouth, my hand fisted in his shirt, my body pressed against his from chest to thigh, and I can feel him getting hard against my hip because this man — this controlled, measured, forty-four-year-old fortress of discipline — gets hard from the sound of my confidence the way I get hard from the sound of his praise.

We’re the same. Opposite instruments playing the same frequency. He’s spent months teaching me to ask for what I want. I’ve spent months learning that what I want includes taking charge of the man who taught me.

I walk him backward. His boots scuff the earth floor and his back hits the wall — the same wall, the same spot, the weathered timber and the hanging bridles — and the sound his shoulders make against the wood is the sound of a structure accepting a new load.

“Shirt off,” I tell him.

He pulls it over his head. The cut-off sleeves catch on his biceps and he works them free, and I watch the reveal the way he watches mine — with hunger and reverence and the specific, insatiable greed of a man who has memorized every inch of this body and still wants to study it.

I drop to my knees.

The bench is beside me — the tack bench, leather-worn, exactly the right height — and I position myself between his legs and look up at him and the angle is everything. The angle is the entire history of us compressed into a geometry: me kneeling, him standing, the size difference maximized, his body blocking the high window’s light so that I’m in his shadow and the shadow is the safest place I’ve ever been.

“Watch me,” I say. “Don’t close your eyes.”

I unbuckle his belt. The leather-through-metal sound that I’ve been hearing in my dreams since the first time he undressed in front of me — the sound that means this is happening — fills the tack room. I push his pants down. His boxer briefs. His cock springs free, thick and hard and flushed, and I wrap my hand around the base and feel the heat of him pulse against my palm.

I’ve gotten good at this.

Not just technically — although the technique has improved significantly since that first night when I was clumsy and eager and asked for direction. I’ve gotten good at reading him. At knowing that the first stroke should be slow. That his breath catches when my thumb circles the head. That his composure cracks fastest when I maintain eye contact, when I look up at him through my lashes while my mouth is on him, when the visual of me on my knees matches the physical sensation and the combination overwhelms the control he’s maintained for four decades.

I take him in my mouth. Deep. Immediately. No teasing, no gradual approach — the full, committed contact of a man who knows what he’s doing and is done pretending he doesn’t. His hips jerk forward and his hand flies to my hair and the sound he makes — low, broken, the groan of a controlled man losing his grip — reverberates off the tack room walls.

“Tiernan — Christ —”

I work him with my mouth and my hand, alternating depth and pressure, finding the rhythm that makes his thigh muscles quiver. My tongue traces the underside, presses into the spot below the head that makes his fingers tighten in my curls. I pull off to breathe, my lips swollen, a strand of spit connecting my mouth to his cock, and I look up at him and say:

“Tell me what it feels like. You taught me that. Show me you remember.”

His hand in my hair trembles. The fine, persistent tremor that means I’ve gotten past the fortress and into the room where he keeps the things he doesn’t show anyone.

“Your mouth is — you’ve learned exactly how to —” He exhales hard. “The eye contact. You know what it does to me. You’re weaponizing it.”

“I learned from the best.”

I take him deep again, hollowing my cheeks, swallowing around him, and his head drops back against the wall with a thud. His hips push forward — not thrusting, surrendering. The involuntary motion of a body that has given up managing the response and is simply responding.

I bring him close. I can feel it — the tension gathering in his abs, the tightening of his hand in my hair, the way his breathing shifts from deep and controlled to short and desperate. I pull off.

“Not yet,” I say.

“You — absolute —”

“Not yet.” I stand. Kiss him. Let him taste himself on my tongue and feel the shudder that runs through his body at the contact. “Turn around.”

His eyes widen slightly. Not fear — surprise. The specific surprise of a man who has spent months being the one who directs and is now being directed, and the direction is coming from the person he trained.

“Turn around, Evren. Hands on the wall.”

He turns. His palms flatten against the timber. The muscles of his back flex — the broad, heavy architecture of a body built by real work, the scar visible across his left shoulder, the slight softness at his waist that I love more than any defined muscle because it’s real and lived-in and mine.

I step up behind him. Press my chest against his back. My cock, still in my jeans, grinds against his ass, and he pushes back into the contact with a groan that I feel through his ribcage. My mouth finds the back of his neck — the spot, the one I discovered months ago, the place where his control lives closest to the surface — and I bite down.

Not hard. The careful edge of teeth against muscle. Enough to mark. Enough to claim.

“Tiernan.” His voice is wrecked. The deepest register. The one that means the composure isn’t cracking — it’s gone.

I reach around him. One hand on his cock, stroking slow. The other unbuckling my own belt, shoving my jeans down, pulling myself free. The contact of my cock against his skin makes us both groan — raw, simultaneous, the sound of two men who have been building to this for three days and are done with the preamble.

“Lube,” I say. “Left jacket pocket on the bench.”

He laughs. A short, shocked sound. “You planned this.”

“I plan everything now. I learned that from you too.”

I find the lube. Warm it between my fingers. He stays where he is — hands on the wall, forehead against the timber, his breathing ragged and his body open and his trust so complete that it makes my chest ache.

I prepare him with the same patience he used on me. One finger, slow, reading his body the way he reads mine. He pushes back against my hand, and the sensation — his body opening for me, accepting me, the tight heat of him around my finger — sends a bolt of desire through my pelvis so intense my vision blurs.

“More,” he says. His voice against the wall, muffled and broken. “I can take more.”

I give him more. Two fingers. Three. Learning him from the inside the way he learned me — the angle that makes his breath fracture, the depth that makes his hips roll, the steady, relentless rhythm that breaks the last of his composure into rubble.

“Now,” he says. “Tiernan, now. Please.”

The word please from Evren Halcott’s mouth is the most powerful sound in the English language. This man who commands and directs and controls and holds — this man said please and the word is mine and I will carry it until I’m dust.

I slick myself. Position. Press forward. And the first moment of entry — the resistance, the give, the devastating slide into the tightest, hottest, most intimate space another body can offer — we both make sounds that belong in the walls of this room. That belong carved into the timber alongside the scratch marks from horses and the wear patterns from decades of ranch life. Our sounds. In the place where we first learned to be honest.

I move inside him. Slow at first — learning the angle, the depth, the specific rhythm that makes his hands curl into fists against the wall. His body is different from the inside than mine is — different responses, different triggers — and I study him with the same focus I bring to the chute. Total attention. Complete commitment.

“Talk to me,” I say against his ear. “You made me talk. It’s your turn.”

“You feel — you’re — god, the angle —”

“What about it?”

“Right there. Don’t change. Don’t — fuck — don’t change anything —”

I don’t change anything. I hold the angle and thrust with controlled, measured strokes that hit the same spot, and his body tightens around me and his breathing goes from ragged to non-functional and the sounds he’s making are sounds I’ve never heard from him before. Not the controlled groans of a man managing his response. Raw, unfiltered, animal sounds pulled from a place beneath the composure and the discipline and the fifteen years of training that taught him to be steady while the world burned.

The world is burning. I’m the fire. And he’s letting it happen.

I reach around him. Grip his cock. Stroke him in time with my thrusts, and the combination — filled and touched, taken and held — drives him toward the edge with a speed that tells me the composure didn’t just crack. It vaporized.

“I’m going to — Tiernan, I can’t —”

“Let go. I’ve got you.” His words. My mouth. The circle completing. “You’re so good, Evren. Let go.”

He comes with a roar that shakes the bridles on the wall. His body clenches around me and his cock pulses in my hand and the force of his orgasm — the full, uncontrolled, devastating release of a man who has spent forty-four years maintaining his composure and has just had it stripped away by the person he taught to speak — pulls me over the edge.

I come inside him with my face pressed between his shoulder blades and my hand splayed across his chest and his heartbeat hammering against my palm, and the orgasm is a demolition. Not just physical. The last remnant of the dynamic that said he directs, I follow. We’re equals now. We take turns. We lead and follow and reverse and the reversal is the proof that what we built isn’t a power structure. It’s a partnership.

I stay inside him. Breathe against his back. Feel his body tremble against mine — the aftershocks, the release, the slow return of oxygen to a system that forgot how to use it.

“Holy shit,” he says. His voice is absolutely destroyed. The voice of a man who has been fucked into the wall of his own tack room by a bull rider who used to need permission to kiss him. “Where did you — when did you learn to —”

“I had a good teacher.”

He laughs. Turns his head. I kiss the corner of his mouth — the angle awkward, our bodies still connected, the tack room smelling like leather and soap and sex and the particular, irreplaceable scent of two men who have just done something they’ll be replaying for weeks.

I withdraw carefully. Clean us both up with the cloth I also packed in the jacket pocket — because I plan everything now, because he taught me that care is part of the act, because preparation is its own form of love.

He turns around. Leans against the wall. Looks at me with the expression I’ve seen exactly three times — the porch after our first kiss, the morning after the first time, and now. The expression of a man who has just been surprised by the depth of his own desire and is recalibrating his understanding of the person who triggered it.

“You planned this,” he says again.

“Three days ago, I walked past this room and my body remembered what you did to me against this wall. I got hard in my jeans and couldn’t think straight for the rest of the afternoon. I decided the tack room needed a new memory.”

“A new memory.”

“One where I’m not the man being held down. One where you’re the one who says please and I’m the one who says good.”

His eyes soften. The green going warm, the lines around them deepening, the face of a man who has been loved carefully enough to let love change him.

“You’re good,” he says. Quietly. Without the commanding weight of the arena or the bedroom. Just the plain, honest acknowledgment of a man who means it. “You’ve always been good, Tiernan. You just needed someone to say it until you believed it.”

I press my forehead against his chest. Feel his arms wrap around me. The tack room holds us the way the ranch holds us — steadily, patiently, with the specific, enduring solidity of a place that has seen every version of what we are and has made room for all of them.

“Same time next week?” I ask.

“I’ll clear my schedule.”

“You don’t have a schedule. You have a routine.”

“I’ll clear my routine.”

I grin against his shirt. He kisses my hair.

The tack room smells like us now. Like leather and soap and sweat and the beginning of something that doesn’t have an expiration date.

It smells like home.

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