🔥 Some Assembly Required 🔥
An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Every Other Week by Milo Hart
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place in August, after the epilogue of Every Other Week, on the first off-week Sunday in the house on Prospect Street. It contains spoilers and very explicit sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.
Adrian’s side of the night Ben rebuilds the oak bed from Linden Street: his own Allen key, the muffin tin, a T-shirt that rides up, a bare mattress, and a wall with nobody on the other side. Explicit content — 18+.
Some Assembly Required
ADRIAN
Ben came up the stairs at a quarter past five holding an Allen key like a sword.
“I brought my own,” he said. “The ones that come in the box are made of cheese.”
Adrian was sitting on the floor of the big front bedroom of the house on Prospect Street with his back against the wall and a mug of coffee going cold beside him. He looked at the Allen key. Then at the muffin tin tucked under Ben’s other arm.
“You kept the muffin tin.”
“I’ve kept that muffin tin through two moves and a divorce. It’s the most reliable relationship I’ve ever had.” Ben set it down on the bare floorboards and looked at the pieces laid out across the room. “Present company excepted.”
Two cars had pulled away from the curb at five and five-oh-four. Nathan’s Volvo with Sophie in the front seat and a box of paint chips in her lap, because her new attic was getting painted forest green again and she intended to supervise the color match from a distance. Daniel’s Subaru with Leo in the back, already explaining something about the window seat. The house had gone quiet around them like a held breath.
It was the first Sunday. The first off-week. Twenty-six boxes downstairs still taped, a kitchen with a long table and no chairs yet, a back step wide enough for two that neither of them had sat on, because they’d both been too busy carrying things.
And in the middle of the front bedroom, in pieces, was the bed.
Not a new one. They’d talked about a new one. They’d stood in a showroom in Burlington in July and lain side by side on a dozen mattresses while a salesman with a tie clip explained pocketed coils, and halfway through the eleventh one Adrian had turned his head on the display pillow and said, “I don’t want a new one,” and Ben had said, “Oh thank God,” and they’d walked out holding hands.
It was the oak bed. The one from 16 Linden. The one Ben had built with his own Allen key on a Wednesday in January, eighteen months ago, while Adrian knelt on the floor beside him and lost his mind over four inches of skin. The one that had knocked the shared wall the first time, and the hundredth time, and the last time on Adrian’s final night at Linden Street three weeks ago, when they’d taken it apart together at midnight and laid every bolt in the muffin tin in order.
“You want to know something stupid,” Adrian said.
“I’d prefer it.”
“I almost labeled the box. BED — DO NOT OPEN — HE WILL KNOW.”
Ben laughed, low, and knelt down on the floorboards and opened the booklet he’d kept for eighteen months in a kitchen drawer, and smoothed it flat across one thick thigh.
Adrian didn’t get up. He wasn’t going to get up. He’d decided that on Thursday, on the four-fifty train, with the green book open on his knee and nothing written in it.
He was going to sit here and watch.
Ben laid out every piece in the order it would be used. He read the instructions all the way through once before touching anything, even though he could have built this bed blindfolded. He sorted the bolts by size into the muffin tin, humming, and when Adrian reached over to pick up a side rail, Ben said, without looking up, “Not yet,” and Adrian put it down.
It was still, a year and a half later, the most attractive thing Adrian had ever seen.
It was August and the house had no air conditioning yet, just the big windows thrown open on the street and the smell of cut grass and somebody’s barbecue three doors down. By the time Ben had the frame squared up, his gray T-shirt had gone dark down the line of his spine and his hair was curling damp at the temples, the silver coming in there now in two clean streaks he pretended not to notice. He wiped his forehead on his shoulder. He fitted a rail into a bracket and frowned at it and adjusted it a quarter of an inch.
“Hold this?” he said. “Right there. Don’t let go.”
Adrian came over on his knees and held it. Ben’s hand closed over his to show him the angle, warm and calloused, and stayed there much longer than the angle needed. This time neither of them pretended otherwise.
“You remember what you said,” Adrian said quietly. “That first night. On my floor.”
“I said a lot of stupid things on your floor.”
“You said you were very agreeable. You said you’d take direction from a person the same way you take it from a pamphlet.”
Ben’s hand went still on his.
“I’ve been thinking about that for eighteen months,” Adrian said. “On and off. Mostly on.”
Ben turned his head. They were very close. Close enough that Adrian could see the sweat at his hairline and the gold flecks in his brown eyes and the exact moment the red started climbing out of his collar, the way it still did, every single time, like the first time.
“Finish the bed,” Adrian said.
Ben swallowed. “Yeah?”
“Finish the bed. Then I’ll tell you what you’re going to do in it.”
Headboard last. It was solid oak and heavy as a promise, and it had to be held upright against the wall while the bolts went in from the side. Ben lifted it into place with both arms over his head, the way he had the first time, and his T-shirt rode up.
Four inches. A soft, pale curve of belly above the waistband of his jeans, the dark trail of hair running down the middle of it, the deep cut of his hip where the denim sat low.
His hand twitched off the oak. Eighteen months, and his hand still twitched.
“Don’t,” Adrian said.
Ben stopped.
“Don’t you dare pull that down.”
Ben stood there with his arms over his head holding up a headboard and his stomach bare, breathing hard, and he didn’t pull it down. Adrian watched him decide not to. Watched the old reflex rise up and get set aside, like a man putting down a box he’d carried so long he’d forgotten it had weight.
Adrian came up on his knees in front of him and put his mouth right there.
Right on the soft skin above his belt. Open-mouthed and slow, the way he’d wanted to on a bedroom floor in January when he’d been too careful and too frightened and too sure he’d be out the door by two. Ben made a sound like he’d been punched. The headboard knocked the wall once, gently, as his arms shook.
“Adrian. I have to get the bolt in —”
“Then get the bolt in.” Adrian kissed lower, along the waistband, and felt Ben’s whole belly jump under his lips. “I’m not stopping you.”
“You’re absolutely stopping me.”
“You’re an architectural technician,” Adrian said against his skin. “You’re very good under pressure.”
Ben got the bolt in. It took him three tries and a word Adrian had never heard him say, and his hands were shaking so badly on the Allen key that it rang against the bracket. Adrian stayed exactly where he was the whole time, on his knees, his mouth moving slow and wet across Ben’s stomach, his hands spread wide on Ben’s hips holding him still.
When the last bolt was in, Ben let go of the headboard and it stood on its own.
“Solid,” Ben said, hoarse. “That’s not going anywhere.”
Adrian sat back on his heels and looked up at him.
“Then take your shirt off,” he said, “and get on it.”
The mattress was bare. They’d carried it up together that afternoon and dropped it on the frame and it had landed with a great sigh of air, and there were no sheets yet, because the sheets were in a box downstairs labeled BEDROOM — SOFT THINGS in Ben’s handwriting and neither of them had found it.
Ben stripped his shirt off over his head and dropped it on the floor. His arms didn’t go anywhere near his stomach. He sat down on the edge of the bed he’d built twice, and looked at Adrian, and waited.
That was new, too. The waiting. A year ago he’d have asked what do you want before Adrian had finished standing up.
Adrian stood between his knees. He took Ben’s face in both hands and tipped it up and kissed him, deep and unhurried, until Ben’s hands came up and fisted in the front of his shirt. Then he pushed him back. One hand flat on Ben’s chest, the way he’d pushed him down into a mattress in a hotel in Back Bay with a green tie in his other hand.
Ben went down onto his back on the bare mattress with a soft huff of breath.
“Hands,” Adrian said. “Over your head. Hold the headboard.”
Ben looked at him.
“You built it,” Adrian said. “Hold on to it. Don’t let go until I tell you.”
Ben reached up over his head and wrapped both big hands around the top rail of the oak headboard. His knuckles went pale. His chest was rising and falling fast, the dark hair across it damp with sweat, and his cock was a thick hard line straining against the fly of his jeans.
Adrian undid them slowly. Button. Zip. He drew the denim and the boxer briefs down together, all the way, and dropped them on the floor, and then Ben was naked on the bare mattress in the gold August light with his hands locked on the headboard and his thighs falling open without being asked, and Adrian stood at the foot of the bed and just looked.
“Say something,” Ben said, after a while. His voice cracked in the middle.
“I’m looking at you.”
“I know you’re — that’s — say something.”
“I’m looking at you,” Adrian said, “on our bed, in our house, with the windows open and no one on the other side of any wall. And I’m deciding which part of you to start with.” He pulled his own shirt over his head. “Be patient. I made forty-minute oatmeal once. You’ll survive.”
Ben laughed. It turned into a moan halfway through, because Adrian had knelt on the mattress between his feet and bent and set his teeth, gently, in the soft inside of his knee.
He took his time.
He’d learned, over a year and a half, exactly how much time Ben could stand, and he spent all of it and then some. He kissed up the inside of one thick thigh and down the other. He bit the meat of it, high, where the skin went pale and soft, until Ben’s hips came off the mattress and the headboard creaked under his grip. He put his face in the dark hair at the crease of Ben’s thigh and breathed him in, sweat and cedar soap and skin, and didn’t touch his cock at all, even when it jerked against his cheek and left a wet smear there.
“Adrian. Please.”
“You haven’t asked me for anything yet.”
“I’m asking —”
“You’re saying please. That’s not asking. That’s begging.” Adrian licked one slow stripe up the inside of his thigh, stopping a quarter of an inch short. “I like it. But it’s not the same thing.”
Ben’s head fell back against the bare mattress. He was breathing through his mouth. His hands hadn’t moved from the headboard. Adrian watched him gather the words up from wherever he kept them, still, after all this time, like a man going down a staircase in the dark.
“I want your mouth on me,” Ben said, finally. Red to the ears. Eyes open. “I want you to suck me. Slow. And I don’t want to come yet. I want you to stop. And then I want you to fuck me on this bed before there are sheets on it.”
Adrian went still between his knees.
Eighteen months. On a couch in January this man had said whatever you want because he didn’t know there was another answer. And now he was lying on a bed he’d built twice with his hands wrapped around the headboard, telling Adrian exactly how he wanted to be taken apart.
“Okay,” Adrian said. His own voice had gone to gravel. “Yes.”
He took Ben into his mouth.
Slow, the way he’d been asked. All the way down, until his nose was buried in the dark hair at the base and Ben was thick and heavy on his tongue and so hard he could feel the pulse in him. Then up again, slow, his tongue flat on the underside, sucking gently at the head, tasting him. Ben made a sound that was barely a word. The headboard knocked the wall.
There was nothing on the other side of that wall. Adrian had checked the floor plan. A linen closet. Shelves. A set of towels Sophie had already declared ugly.
He did it again. And again. Slow and deep and wet, one hand wrapped around the base, the other spread on Ben’s soft belly holding him down when his hips tried to come up. Ben’s thighs started to shake on either side of his head. His breath was coming in short, broken pieces, and he was saying Adrian’s name the way he’d said it through a wall in January, low and wrecked and helpless.
Adrian felt it start. The tightening. The way Ben’s whole body drew up like a bowstring.
He pulled off.
Ben shouted. Actually shouted, at the ceiling, his back arching off the mattress and his hands white-knuckled on the oak. His cock slapped wet against his stomach, dark and flushed and leaking in a long clear string.
“You asked me to stop,” Adrian said.
“I hate that I asked you to stop —”
“No, you don’t.”
Ben laughed, wrecked, and then gasped, because Adrian had pushed his thighs up and apart with both hands and bent his head and put his mouth lower.
He ate him slow. On the bare mattress, in the open-window heat, with the barbecue smoke drifting in from three doors down and a kid on a bike ringing his bell somewhere on Prospect Street. He spread Ben open with his thumbs and licked over him in long, flat strokes until Ben’s heels were digging into the mattress, then pointed his tongue and pressed in, slow, and felt Ben clench and then deliberately, visibly let go.
“Good,” Adrian murmured against him. “That’s it. Let me in.”
Ben sobbed something that might have been yes.
The lube was in the muffin tin. Adrian had put it there at four o’clock, in the cup at the end where the longest bolts went, and Ben looked over and saw it and made a noise that was half a laugh and half a protest.
“That is a hardware tin.”
“It’s our tin,” Adrian said, and slicked his fingers.
He opened him the way Ben liked it on the off-week Sundays, when he’d been wound up since the cars pulled away: two fingers at once, slow and deep, then a third, crooking exactly where Ben needed it every time and not quite long enough, never quite long enough, until Ben was rocking down onto his hand in helpless rolling thrusts and the headboard was knocking a steady rhythm into the wall.
“Now,” Ben said. “Now. Adrian. Please. I need —”
“Say it.”
“Fuck me. On this bed. Hard. I want you to break it in.”
Adrian pulled his fingers out. Ben made a lost, gutted sound at the emptiness that went straight to Adrian’s cock. He got his own jeans off at last, kicked them somewhere across the floor, and knelt up between Ben’s spread thighs, and Ben looked up at him with his hands still locked on the headboard and his whole body flushed from his chest to his hairline.
“Turn over,” Adrian said.
Ben’s eyes went wide.
“On your knees. Keep hold of it.”
Ben turned over. He got his knees under him on the bare mattress and gripped the top rail of the headboard with both hands, his broad back curving, his forehead almost against the oak, his thighs spread and trembling. Adrian put one hand flat on the small of his back and pressed, just slightly, and Ben arched for him like he’d been waiting to be told.
Adrian slicked himself and lined up and pushed in.
One long slow stroke, all the way, bare, nothing between them. Ben’s head dropped forward and hit the headboard with a soft thunk and he groaned, long and low, the sound of a man setting something heavy down. Adrian stayed there, buried to the root, his hands on Ben’s hips and his chest pressed to Ben’s sweat-damp back, and breathed.
“Okay?”
“Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop.”
He didn’t stop.
He started slow and didn’t stay that way. Long deep strokes that turned hard and fast, his hips snapping forward, the slap of skin loud in the empty room. The headboard slammed the wall on every thrust. The whole frame rocked under them, bolt and bracket and rail, and Ben held on to it with both hands and pushed back to meet him, every time, saying yes and harder and there, and Adrian gave him harder, angled down and found the spot that lit him up and hit it again and again.
“Listen to it,” Adrian said against the back of his neck. “Listen to that bed. You built it to last a hundred years and I’m going to find out.”
Ben laughed. It came out broken, and then it wasn’t a laugh at all.
The headboard banged the wall. Bang. Bang. Bang.
And then Ben said, through his teeth, in a voice Adrian had never heard from him: “Louder.”
Adrian’s rhythm stuttered.
“There’s nobody there,” Ben gasped. “There’s nobody on the other side. Nobody to hear. Eighteen months I’ve been quiet, I’ve been biting my hand, I’ve been — I don’t want to be quiet. I want the whole street to hear. Louder, Adrian —”
Adrian wrapped one arm around his chest, hauled him back against him, and fucked him so hard the bed moved an inch across the floorboards.
Ben was loud. Ben was so loud. He was shouting Adrian’s name at the open windows, at Prospect Street, at the kid on the bike and the barbecue and the whole of Bellwick, and Adrian was saying things into his shoulder he didn’t hear himself say, and the headboard was knocking a hole in the plaster of a wall that had nobody behind it.
Adrian reached around and took Ben’s cock in his fist.
Three strokes. That was all. Ben came with his hands locked on the headboard he’d built and his head thrown back on Adrian’s shoulder and a sound tearing out of him that Mrs. Abernathy could probably have heard from Linden Street, spilling hot over Adrian’s fingers and onto the bare mattress in long shuddering pulses, clenching around him so hard Adrian saw white.
He followed him over a few strokes later, buried deep, his face pressed into the back of Ben’s neck and Ben’s name torn out of him into the damp skin there, holding on to him with everything he had.
They collapsed sideways onto the bare mattress, tangled, sweating, breathing like they’d sprinted the length of Prospect Street.
For a long while neither of them said anything.
The light had gone amber. The barbecue had stopped. Somewhere downstairs, a box they hadn’t taped properly slid off a stack and hit the floor, and they both heard it and neither of them moved.
“We need sheets,” Ben said eventually, into the mattress.
“We need to find the box.”
“BEDROOM — SOFT THINGS.”
“You labeled it.”
“I label everything. You married into it.”
Adrian went still.
Ben lifted his head off the mattress. His face was flushed and his hair was a disaster and his eyes were going wide, the way they did when something came out of him before he’d checked it.
“I mean — I didn’t — that’s not — we haven’t —”
“No,” Adrian said slowly. “We haven’t.”
“It just came out. It’s a figure of speech. Moved in. You moved into it. That’s what I —”
“Ben.”
Ben stopped.
Adrian looked at him across the bare mattress, on the bed Ben had built twice, in the house they’d picked from a drawing on inn stationery and a year of evidence. He thought about a note on his phone with five rules on it, and the only one he’d ever written. Either of us can walk away. He thought about how long he’d stood next to doors.
“Put it on the calendar,” he said.
Ben stared at him.
“Not yet,” Adrian said. “Not a date. I’m not asking you today. I’m asking you to ask me. Someday. When you’ve done the math and you want to.” He reached over and pushed the damp hair off Ben’s forehead. “In pen.”
Ben didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he put his face back down in the mattress, and Adrian felt him laugh, and then felt him not quite laughing, and pulled him in.
“In pen,” Ben said into his chest. Muffled. Wet. “Obviously.”
Later, after they’d found the box and made the bed, badly, with the fitted sheet on sideways, Adrian sat up to reach for the nightstand and check the time.
His glasses were there. Folded. Next to the clock.
On the left-hand nightstand. Ben’s side.
He looked at them for a moment. Then he looked over at the other nightstand, his side, where Ben’s watch was lying face-up next to a pencil and the green spiral-bound book with a crossword half done in two different hands.
“You moved my glasses again,” he said.
“They live there,” Ben mumbled from the pillow.
“Your watch is on my side.”
“It lives there too.”
Adrian lay back down. The window was open. The street was quiet. There was no one on the other side of the wall, and no one on the other side of the bed, and for the first time in his life he didn’t need to listen for anyone.
On the floor beside them, catching the last of the light, the muffin tin sat with one bolt left in it.
“Ben.”
“Mm.”
“There’s a bolt left over.”
Ben didn’t open his eyes. He reached over, found Adrian’s hand in the dark, and laced their fingers together on the sheet.
“Leave it,” he said. “We’ve got time to find out what it’s for.”
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