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Fake Fiancé, Real Filth — Bonus Chapter
Exclusive Bonus — One Apartment
by Isla Wilde
A scene too hot for Amazon. This bonus chapter takes place after the epilogue.
One Apartment
The last box was labeled GEMMA — MISCELLANEOUS (DO NOT OPEN) in handwriting so aggressive the Sharpie had bled through the cardboard.
Nate opened it.
\”These are romance novels,\” he said, holding up a paperback with a shirtless man on the cover whose abs had been airbrushed into anatomical impossibility. \”You own — \” He counted. \”Thirty-seven romance novels and you wrote DO NOT OPEN on the box.\”
\”That box was clearly marked.\” Gemma was on the floor of what was now their apartment — his apartment, technically, but hers too, officially, as of three hours ago when the last of her furniture had been carried across the hallway by Dom, who had complained about the weight of her bookshelf with such theatrical suffering that she’d almost thrown him down the stairs. \”You violated the terms.\”
\”There were no terms. There was a Sharpie and a threat.\” He flipped through one of the books. His eyebrows climbed steadily toward his hairline. \”This is — Gemma. Page two-twelve. What is happening on page two-twelve.\”
\”Give me that.\”
\”He pinned her wrists above her head with one hand while the other traced a path down her trembling—\”
\”Nate.\”
\”—trembling stomach, his mouth following the trail of heat his fingers left, and when he reached the waistband of her—\”
She lunged for the book. He held it above his head — unfair advantage, six inches of height difference — and kept reading with the deliberate, maddening calm of a man who had discovered leverage and intended to use it.
\”She arched into him, gasping, as his tongue—\”
\”If you finish that sentence, I will unpack the box labeled KITCHEN KNIVES.\”
He lowered the book. Looked at her. She was on the floor amid a landscape of cardboard and packing tape, wearing his old Iron Saints t-shirt and cotton shorts, her hair in the messy knot she wore at home, her face flushed with a combination of embarrassment and something less innocent. The ring on her finger — the real one, platinum and diamond, the geometric lattice catching the late afternoon light — glinted when she reached for the book again.
He didn’t give it back. He sat down on the floor next to her, their backs against the couch, the box of romance novels between them like evidence at a trial.
\”So,\” he said. \”This is what you were reading. All those nights. Through the wall.\”
\”I read many things. I’m a well-rounded person.\”
\”You were reading books about men pinning women’s wrists and tracing paths down their trembling stomachs, and I was twelve inches away sketching peonies and thinking about whether you were asleep yet.\”
\”In my defense, I didn’t know you were thinking about me.\”
\”In my defense, I didn’t know you were reading your own instruction manual on how to be wrecked.\”
She bit her lip. He watched her do it — the specific, precise motion that he now recognized as the gateway to every significant thing that had ever happened between them. She bit her lip when she was holding back. When she was wanting. When the careful, controlled, spreadsheet-running part of her brain was being overruled by the part that had once told him don’t you dare make me come at a work event.
\”Read me your favorite scene,\” she said.
\”From which book?\”
\”Any of them. Pick one. Read it to me.\”
He looked at the box. Pulled out a book at random — something with a dark cover and a title involving a possessive pronoun and a profession. Flipped to a dog-eared page. She had dog-eared her favorite scenes. The woman who organized her spice rack alphabetically had folded the corners of her smut pages like a teenager hiding a diary.
He started reading. Low. The voice he used when he was working — steady, unhurried, intimate. The words on the page were explicit, detailed, the kind of scene that didn’t fade to black but stayed in the light with both hands and narrated every gasp.
He read the scene to her and watched her face change.
By the second paragraph, her breathing had shifted. By the third, she’d pulled her knees up — a tell he knew, the defensive posture she adopted when her body was responding faster than her comfort allowed. By the fourth paragraph, her hand had found his thigh.
\”This is what you think about,\” he murmured, eyes still on the page. His voice was dropping lower with each sentence, the words on the page blending with words of his own. \”This is what gets you off when I’m not here. Some fictional man doing — \” He paused. Read the next line. \”That to some fictional woman.\”
\”You’re here now,\” she said. Her hand was higher on his thigh. Her voice was thicker. \”So stop reading and start doing.\”
He set the book down. Turned to her. Put his hand on the back of her neck — the grip she loved, firm and possessive, the one that made her eyes go half-lidded and her lips part — and pulled her in.
\”We haven’t christened the apartment yet,\” he said against her mouth.
\”We’ve had sex in this apartment approximately forty times.\”
\”As my apartment. Not as our apartment. This is the first night it’s officially ours. That requires a christening.\”
\”What does a christening involve?\”
\”Every room. Every surface. Before sunrise.\”
Her pupils blew. He watched it happen — the black swallowing the brown, her body’s involuntary confession that the suggestion had gone directly from her ears to the place between her thighs without passing through her prefrontal cortex.
\”That’s ambitious,\” she said. \”Even for you.\”
\”I’m very motivated.\”
He kissed her. She kissed him back with the immediate, full-body surrender that still, after months, knocked the air out of him. Her mouth was hungry. Her hands were in his hair. She climbed into his lap on the floor, surrounded by moving boxes and crumpled newspaper, the romance novel knocked sideways, its dog-eared pages fanning open to a scene they were about to outperform.
His hands found the hem of the t-shirt — his shirt, on her body, a detail that never stopped doing things to him — and pulled it over her head. No bra. She never wore one at home anymore, and the casual intimacy of it — the trust, the comfort, the I live here now and I can be naked if I want — made his chest ache in the best way.
\”Living room first,\” he murmured against her collarbone. \”On the floor. Surrounded by your evidence.\”
\”It’s not evidence—\”
He pressed her back onto the rug. Settled between her thighs. Kissed down her body with the focused, methodical attention of a man who had made studying this body his life’s work — throat, collarbone, the swell of each breast, the sensitive underside where the tattoo lived. The ink was healed now — three months old, the lines settled and permanent, his compass rose on her ribs. He kissed it. Traced it with his tongue. Felt her shiver beneath him.
\”Better than page two-twelve?\” he asked, pulling her shorts down, finding her already wet, already wanting, her body primed by the reading and the proximity and the specific, incandescent knowledge that this was their home now. Not his, not hers. Theirs.
\”Don’t compare yourself to fiction,\” she breathed, as his mouth moved lower, lower, finding the place that made her hands fist in his hair and her back arch off the rug. \”You always win.\”
\”I know,\” he said. \”But I like hearing you say it.\”
He put his mouth on her and she stopped talking. Stopped thinking. Stopped being the woman who alphabetized her spice rack and made spreadsheets for grocery shopping and had once brought a legal pad to plan a fake engagement. She became the woman only he knew — the one who grabbed his hair and rolled her hips and said his name in a voice that was wrecked and holy and his, only his, in the apartment that was finally, officially theirs.
She came the first time on the living room floor, his face between her thighs, the romance novel played open two feet away, fiction conceding defeat to reality.
She came the second time on the kitchen counter — his counter, their counter, the surface where it had all started and where he bent her over again because some things deserved to be repeated and improved upon. He was inside her, deep and slow, his chest against her back, his mouth narrating every sensation the way he knew she needed — the constant, filthy, worshipful monologue that was simultaneously the most explicit and most romantic thing anyone had ever said to her.
\”This counter,\” he said, grinding into her in the rhythm she loved, the one that made her grip the edge and drop her forehead to the granite. \”Do you remember? The night with Brad. The first time I — \”
\”I remember.\” She pushed back against him. Met each stroke. \”I remember everything. Every time. Every surface. Every word.\”
\”Good. Because I’m building a collection. And this apartment has a lot of surfaces.\”
They made it to the bathroom — the shower, the cramped, three-foot-wide stall she’d once refused to share because she was afraid they’d be overheard. There was no one to overhear them now. The shower ran hot and his back was against the tile and she was in his arms, legs wrapped around his waist, and the sounds she made echoed off the walls and came back to them amplified, a feedback loop of pleasure and steam and the slick friction of two bodies that had learned each other so completely that the learning itself had become a kind of language.
They made it to the bedroom. Their bedroom. The bed that had been his and was now theirs, the sheets that smelled like both of them, the nightstand that held his sketchbook and her novel and two phones and a glass of water they shared without thinking about it.
She was on her back. He was above her. No restraints tonight — just his hands laced through hers, pressed into the pillow on either side of her head, their fingers intertwined, the rings clicking together when their hands shifted. His ring and her ring. Platinum against platinum.
\”I love you,\” she said. Looking up at him. Eyes clear. No walls, no armor, no performance. The woman behind everything, the one who’d brought whiskey and a terrible plan and changed his life. \”I love you and I love this apartment and I love that you read my smut to me on the floor and I love that you’re inside me right now saying things that would make a romance novelist take notes.\”
He laughed. Inside her, holding her hands, in their bed, in their home. He laughed because she was ridiculous and brilliant and his favorite person and the only woman who had ever made him feel like being chosen was not a fantasy but a fact.
\”I love you too,\” he said. \”Now stop making me laugh and let me make you come one more time before I pass out.\”
\”That’s five.\”
\”I’m an overachiever.\”
\”You’re an overachiever with a refractory period.\”
\”Don’t underestimate me. I’m very motivated.\”
She pulled him down. Kissed him. He moved inside her — slow, deep, the last round of the night, the one that was less about urgency and more about presence, about being here, in this bed, in this room, in this life they’d built from a lie and a bottle of bourbon and the stubborn, terrifying, beautiful refusal to let go of each other.
They came together. Of course they did. It was their thing now — the synchronized free-fall, the shared surrender, the agreement that if they were going to lose control, they were going to lose it at the same time, because falling alone was something neither of them did anymore.
Afterward. Tangled. The sheets destroyed. The apartment quiet — their apartment, every room christened, every surface claimed, the moving boxes still unpacked and the romance novels still scattered on the living room floor and the kitchen counter still bearing the faint handprints that Gemma would bleach in the morning and Nate would never, ever let her forget.
\”We didn’t do the hallway,\” she said. Half-asleep. Her face against his chest, her finger tracing the compass rose.
\”The hallway is public property.\”
\”Since when has that stopped you?\”
\”Fair point. Tomorrow.\”
\”Tomorrow.\”
She fell asleep. He held her. Listened to her breathe. Looked at the room — their room, the walls that had once been his and now held her art next to his, her books next to his sketchbooks, her life nested inside his like two halves of something that had always been designed to fit.
The compass rose pointed north.
North was here.
North was home.
Thank you for reading Fake Fiancé, Real Filth. If you loved Gemma and Nate’s story, please leave a review — it means the world.
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