Second Summer — Anniversary

A Farmhand with Benefits Bonus Chapter
by Jace Wilder

This bonus chapter takes place one year after the events of Farmhand with Benefits. Contains spoilers and explicit sexual content. Reader discretion advised.

The hayloft was ninety-two degrees and I didn’t care.

Danny had taken Sofia to Billings for the weekend. The guest cabin sat empty between bookings. June was at her sister’s in Helena. The ranch was ours — completely, absolutely, uninterruptedly ours for the first time in weeks, and I’d been planning what to do with that silence since Tuesday.

Not planning. Plotting. Lying awake at two AM while Elliot slept against my chest, cataloging every surface in this barn I hadn’t had him on yet and deciding, with the focused determination of a man who’d learned that loving someone meant showing up in every possible way, that this anniversary weekend was going to fix that oversight.

I’d hung the string lights through the rafters — Danny’s, from the celebration, wound through the beams until the loft glowed warm and gold. Spread the good blankets from the guest cabin, the ones that smelled like cedar and clean cotton. Set a bottle of whiskey and two glasses on a hay bale like a nightstand. It wasn’t candlelight — open flame in a barn full of hay would’ve been the dumbest way to end a love story — but it was close.

Elliot climbed the ladder at six. Stopped at the top. Stared.

“What is this?”

“It’s a hayloft.”

“It’s a hayloft with ambiance.” He stepped in. Turned a slow circle, taking in the lights, the blankets, the whiskey. His face went through something fast and complicated — surprise, amusement, and then the soft thing underneath that he only showed me when we were alone. “Wes Calloway. Did you decorate?”

“I arranged some things.”

“You arranged string lights in a barn. For me.” His voice dropped. The bedroom version. The one that lived under the courtroom steel and the ranch competence and only came out when his walls were down. “You romantic disaster.”

“Come here.”

He crossed the loft in three steps and put his hands on my chest and looked up at me with brown eyes already going dark. The transition from surprised to wanting happened faster now than it had a year ago — his body had learned mine the way it had learned the ranch, instinctively, through repetition and trust, and the sight of me in a dim space with intent on my face was apparently all the cue it needed.

I kissed him. Not gentle — I’d had four days to think about this and gentle wasn’t on the schedule. I kissed him with my hands fisted in the back of his shirt and his spine against the loft post and every ounce of a year’s worth of gratitude and hunger behind it. His mouth opened under mine immediately, giving me access, giving me everything, the way he always did when I took charge — not submission but permission, the gift of a man who’d spent his whole life in control handing the reins to the one person he trusted to hold them.

He made the sound. The one I’d been chasing since the first time in this exact barn — breathless, broken, caught between a gasp and a moan. The sound that meant his brain was going offline and his body was taking over. I’d built an entire mental catalog of his sounds over the past year and that one was still my favorite. The starter pistol. The green light.

“I’ve been thinking about this since Tuesday,” I said against his throat. My hands found the hem of his shirt and went under it, up his ribs, over the body that was mine to touch — tan, hard, so different from the soft-handed stranger who’d arrived twelve months ago. Broader now. Calloused. Built by my ranch and my bed and the daily act of staying.

“Four days of thinking.” His breath hitched as my mouth found the spot below his ear. “What exactly were you thinking?”

“I’ll show you.”

I pulled his shirt over his head. Dropped it in the straw. His chest was flushed, his nipples tight from the contact, and I ducked my head and took one between my teeth and tugged and his hand slammed against the post behind him.

“Fuck — Wes —”

I switched sides. Tongue flat, then teeth, then suction, and his hips bucked forward against mine. I could feel him through denim — hard already, straining against the zipper — and the pressure of him against my thigh made my own cock throb in response.

I dropped to my knees.

“The blankets are right there,” he said. His voice was already wrecked.

“I know where the blankets are.” I opened his jeans. Pulled the zipper down slowly, deliberately, watching his stomach muscles jump at the sound. I tugged his jeans and boxers down together and his cock sprang free, thick and flushed and slick at the tip. I wrapped my hand around the base. “I’m not done with you standing up.”

I licked a stripe from base to tip and he shuddered. His hand found my hair — gripping, not guiding, just holding on — and I took him into my mouth.

I knew him now. Knew every ridge and vein, knew the angle that made his thighs shake, knew the rhythm that built him fastest and the slower one that kept him on the edge until he begged. Tonight I wanted the second one. I wanted to take my time.

I worked him slow. Long, deep pulls, my tongue pressing the underside on each stroke, my hand twisting at the base where my mouth couldn’t reach. His hips stuttered forward — shallow thrusts he tried to control and couldn’t — and the sounds he made bounced off the rafters and came back to me doubled.

“God — your mouth — Wes, I’m going to —”

I pulled off. Looked up at him. His face was flushed dark, his lips bitten red, his chest heaving. The string lights caught the sweat on his collarbones and turned it gold.

“Not yet.” I stood. Wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “I’ve got a schedule.”

“A schedule?”

“Four days of planning, Elliot. I’m not wasting it on a quick one against a post.”

“That was not — that was the opposite of quick, you kept me on the edge for —”

“Blankets. On your back. Now.”

He went. Kicked off his jeans and lay down on the cedar-scented wool completely bare, his cock hard against his stomach, his body laid out in the golden light like an offering on an altar. I stood over him and stripped — shirt, belt, jeans, boots — while he watched with the focused intensity of a man who intended to consume what he was looking at.

“You’re so fucking beautiful,” he said. The word he’d given me months ago, the one no one else had ever used. The one that still hit me like a fist every time.

I knelt between his thighs. Ran my hands up the inside of them, slow, feeling the muscle tense under my palms. His legs fell open wider, an invitation he didn’t need words for, and the trust in the gesture — the vulnerability, the exposure — made something in my chest crack the way it did every time he opened for me like this.

I slicked my fingers. Pressed one against him and watched his eyes flutter shut.

“Look at me,” I said.

His eyes opened. Dark, hazy, focused on mine with the intensity of a man following instructions he wanted to follow.

I pushed inside. One finger, slow, feeling him clench and then relax around me. His lips parted. A soft exhale. I curled, searching, and found the spot that made his back arch off the blankets.

“There — right there, don’t stop —”

I didn’t stop. Added a second finger. Worked him open with the methodical patience I brought to everything that mattered — fence repair, horse training, the slow and careful art of making a man who’d spent six years being valued for his output feel valued for his existence.

“A year ago you showed up at my door in Italian shoes,” I said. My fingers moved inside him, steady, relentless. His hips were rolling, chasing the pressure. “And now you’re in my hayloft, on my blankets, begging for my fingers.”

“I’m not begging.”

I pressed harder. Direct, precise, right on the spot. His whole body seized. The sound he made was definitely begging.

“You were saying?”

“Wes — please —”

“Please what?”

“Please fuck me. I need you inside me, I need —” His voice cracked. His hands were gripping the blanket, knuckles white, his cock leaking steadily against his stomach. “I’ve been thinking about it too. Every night this week. Your hands on me in the barn, on the counter, in our bed. I can’t stop thinking about what you feel like when you’re all the way in and I need it now, Wes, please —”

The begging destroyed me. It always did. This composed, brilliant, steel-spined man — the one who argued down bankers and charmed county clerks and filed federal grants without breaking a sweat — reduced to please and my name and the raw, exposed need that he only showed me.

I rolled the condom on. Slicked myself. Lined up.

“Wrap your legs around me.”

He did. His ankles locked at the small of my back, pulling me forward, and I sank into him in one long, slow, devastating stroke.

The sound he made was guttural. Not a word, not a moan — something deeper, something pulled from the base of his spine. His body opened around me, hot and tight and perfect, and I buried myself to the hilt and held there, forehead against his, breathing the air he was breathing, letting us both feel the fullness.

“Move,” he whispered. “Please move.”

I moved.

Slow at first. Long, deep strokes that pressed him into the blankets, that dragged across every nerve ending on the way out and hit the deepest place on the way back in. His nails dug into my shoulders. His head tipped back, throat exposed, and I kissed the length of it while I fucked him — the pulse point, the tendon, the hollow at the base where his heartbeat hammered against my lips.

“Harder,” he breathed.

I gave him harder. The rhythm building, my hips snapping forward with a force that made the hay under the blankets shift and compress. His body took every thrust, met every thrust, his hips rising to match mine with a coordination that came from twelve months of learning each other’s rhythms.

“You feel — God, Elliot —” I braced on one arm. Brought my other hand to his cock, wrapping around him, stroking in time with my thrusts. He arched into my grip, into my body, caught between the pressure of me inside him and my hand around him, and the sounds he was making — continuous, escalating, stripped of everything except raw pleasure — were going to echo in this barn for days.

“You’re so good,” I told him. The praise that came naturally now, the words I’d spent months learning to say because this man needed them the way crops needed rain — not occasionally, not when earned, but steadily, reliably, poured over him until the dry places filled. “So good for me. Every morning you’re in my kitchen. Every night you’re in my bed. A year of you and I still can’t believe you’re real.”

“I’m real.” His voice was shattered. Absolutely wrecked. His hands on my face now, holding me, making me look at him while I moved inside him. “I’m yours. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. I’m —”

“Come for me.” The command he responded to every time, the one that bypassed his brain and went straight to his body. “Look at me and come for me.”

His eyes locked on mine. I drove deep — angled, precise, the spot I’d memorized like a landmark on my own land — and tightened my grip on his cock and stroked hard, once, twice —

He came. His body clenched around me so hard my vision blanked, his release spilling hot between us, his mouth open on a sound that started as my name and ended as something wordless and shattered. His whole body shook with it. Wave after wave, clenching and releasing, his fingers digging into my jaw, his eyes never leaving mine.

I lasted three more strokes. The sight of him undone, the grip of his body, the sound of my name in his broken voice — it pulled the orgasm out of me like a rope attached to my spine. I buried myself deep and came with a groan that vibrated through both of us, my hips grinding into his, his legs locked around my waist, the pleasure so intense it felt structural, like it was rearranging things inside me that would need to settle back into place.

I collapsed onto him. His arms went around my back. We lay in the hay-scented dark, the string lights glowing above us, breathing like we’d sprinted a mile uphill and feeling like we’d arrived somewhere worth the climb.

His hand found my hair. Stroked it. The slow rhythm that calmed the horses and wrecked me.

“Happy anniversary,” I murmured into his chest.

“Is that what this is?”

“One year since you walked up my drive. One year since I covered you with a blanket and pretended it was because of the cold.”

“It was cold.”

“It was June.”

He laughed. The real one, the full one, the laugh that vibrated through his ribs and into mine. I held him tighter and felt the sound in my own chest and thought about how this barn had been a place I came to be alone for two years before he arrived, and now it was the place where I’d held him while he cried and held him while he came and held him while he laughed, and every version was a kind of prayer.

We lay there until the sweat cooled and the air bit. He shivered. I pulled a blanket over us — the gesture that started everything, the covering, the care, the act of warmth that my body performed before my brain could intervene.

“Wes?”

“Yeah.”

“You mentioned a schedule.” His hand slid down my spine. Lower. Over the curve of my ass, fingers pressing into the muscle with a possessiveness that made my spent cock twitch. “What’s next on it?”

I lifted my head. Looked at him. His eyes were dark and warm and absolutely, unmistakably ready for more.

“The kitchen counter.”

“We’ve done the kitchen counter.”

“Not like what I have in mind.” I kissed the corner of his mouth. “This time I want you to ride me. On the counter. With the windows open.”

His breath caught. “The windows —”

“Our land. Our house. Our kitchen. Nobody for a mile.” I traced his lower lip with my thumb. “I want to hear you echo off the tile.”

He groaned. His hips rolled against mine, already interested, already rebuilding, and the feeling of him hardening against my thigh while I was still inside him sent a pulse of heat through my core that said the refractory period was a suggestion, not a law.

“Give me fifteen minutes,” he said. “And the whiskey.”

I reached for the bottle. Poured two glasses. We drank them naked in the hayloft with the string lights glowing and the horses shuffling below and the ranch settling into evening around us, and when the fifteen minutes were up he climbed into my lap and kissed me with whiskey on his tongue and said take me to the kitchen in a voice that brokered no negotiation.

I carried him down the ladder. He protested the entire way, laughing, his arms around my neck and his legs around my waist. I carried him across the yard in the fading light, bare-chested, barefoot, his mouth on my throat, and if anyone had been watching they would’ve seen two men who’d found each other in the most unlikely place and intended to make use of every surface it contained.

The kitchen counter was cold against my back when he pushed me onto it. He’d taken charge somewhere between the barn and the house — the shift that happened sometimes, the switch from pliant to commanding that thrilled me every time because it came from the same place the courtroom voice came from, the steel core underneath the softness, and having that steel directed at my body was a specific kind of devastation I’d never get used to.

He climbed on top of me. Straddled my hips on the counter, the position giving him control — the angle, the depth, the pace. He sank down onto me with his head tipped back and a sound that filled the kitchen and bounced off every wall.

“Christ,” I managed. My hands gripping his thighs. “Elliot —”

“Shut up.” He rolled his hips. Slow, grinding, the motion pulling me deep and holding me there. “This one’s mine.”

He rode me on the kitchen counter with the windows open and the evening air cooling the sweat on our skin and the ranch alive around us. Slow at first — deliberate rolls that made my eyes cross — then faster, his thighs flexing, his hands braced on my chest, his cock bouncing between us with every rise and fall. The counter creaked. Something fell off it — a salt shaker, maybe, a plate — and shattered on the tile and neither of us stopped.

I stroked him while he rode me. His rhythm faltered when I tightened my grip, his composure cracking, the controlled pace breaking into something desperate and uneven. He was close — I could feel it in the clench of his body, the tremor in his thighs, the way his breath came in short, punched-out gasps that sounded like my name dismantled into syllables.

“That’s it,” I said. “Let me see you. Right here. In our kitchen. On our counter. Let go.”

He came with a shout that bounced off the tile exactly the way I’d promised it would. His body clamped around me and I followed him over, my hips driving up, my hands pulling him down, the orgasm tearing through both of us in the kitchen where he’d fed me his first meal and where I’d realized, watching him cook in a borrowed shirt, that I was going to love this man whether I wanted to or not.

He collapsed against my chest. We lay on the kitchen counter — wrecked, sticky, breathless, surrounded by broken crockery — and I held him and he held me and the night poured in through the open windows.

“We broke the salt shaker,” he said. Into my neck.

“I’ll buy a new one.”

“And a plate.”

“Small price.”

“Wes?”

“Yeah.”

“What else is on the schedule?”

I laughed. Pulled him closer. Kissed the top of his sweaty, hay-flecked, perfect head.

“We’ve got all weekend, counselor.”

“Then take me to bed.” He lifted his head. Looked at me with eyes that held everything — the year, the love, the ranch, the future, the absolute certainty that he was where he belonged. “Take me to our bed and don’t let me go until Monday.”

I took him to bed. I didn’t let him go.

Not until Monday. Not ever.

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