Handled by Jace Wilder - MM Age Gap Contemporary Romance book cover

Handled — Bonus Chapter

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by Jace Wilder

This bonus chapter takes place after the epilogue of Handled. It contains explicit MM content and is intended for readers 18+.

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The last bolt went in at 9:47 p.m., and Jamie heard the socket wrench click from the office like a period at the end of a very long sentence.

He set down his laptop — gently, on the high shelf, self-enforced bylaws — and crossed to the closet. Through the open hatch, golden light came up from the spiral below, and with it, the particular silence of a man surveying finished work: no shuffling, no tools, just Ethan breathing and the oak breathing back.

“Done?” Jamie called down.

“Done.” The gravel came up through two flights of warm oak, through the chase space that had waited ninety years. “Come see.”

Jamie went down barefoot, and the treads were perfect under his feet — smooth, warm, smelling of linseed and cedar and the specific scent of Ethan Ward’s patience made structural. The spiral was tight and elegant, the kind of carpentry that doesn’t announce itself, and at the bottom he stepped through the closet hatch into the first-floor bedroom and found the man sitting on the lowest tread, reading glasses on, a beer open, admiring the join where oak met the original baseboard like it was the Sistine ceiling.

“It’s beautiful,” Jamie said.

“It’s code-compliant.”

“That’s what I said.” Jamie leaned against the closet frame, looking down at him — sawdust in the silver beard, a smear of linseed on one forearm, the reading glasses doing that thing they did to Jamie’s higher functions — and a plan assembled itself in the back of his skull, fully formed, wearing nothing at all. “Seven weekends.”

“Seven weekends.”

“You carried oak up four flights shirtless and I lost two whole Saturdays to it.”

“I recall.” The seismograph ticked. “You weren’t subtle.”

“I wasn’t trying to be.” Jamie stepped forward, took the beer out of Ethan’s hand, set it on the floor. Took the reading glasses off his face and set those down too, folded, with the care the man used on everything. Then he straddled the bottom tread, one knee on either side of Ethan’s hips, settling into the broad lap with the proprietary ease of a year’s tenure. “We haven’t christened it.”

“It’s been finished for four minutes.”

“That’s three minutes past my threshold and you know it.” Jamie leaned in, mouth an inch from his. “I want to do this on every tread.”

A low sound came up out of the broad chest — not quite a laugh, not quite a groan, the sound of a man who had built a staircase and was about to discover what it was actually for. “There are fourteen treads.”

“Then we’d better start at the bottom.” Jamie kissed him, and the oak creaked under them, and neither of them cared.

It started slow — it always started slow with this man, the patience was foundational, load-bearing, and Jamie had stopped fighting it approximately eleven months ago and started using it instead. He kissed Ethan deep and unhurried on the bottom tread while those big hands slid up under the tour shirt and mapped his ribs like checking a wall, thumbs dragging across his nipples until the first soft sound escaped into Ethan’s mouth, and then the hands went lower, gripping his hips, adjusting the angle with that maddening carpentry precision until Jamie’s cock was lined up against the hard ridge of him through two layers of cotton and every roll of his hips dragged them both along.

“Tread one,” Jamie breathed against his jaw. “Assessed.”

“You’re going to narrate this.”

“You narrate plumbing. I get a staircase.” He peeled the work shirt off over Ethan’s head and ran both palms down the broad chest, the soft middle, following the dark trail of hair lower, and Ethan’s breath caught — the rarest sound, the one Jamie collected like a currency more valuable than rent. “Tread two.”

He slid off the lap and down one step, settling on his knees between the big thighs, and the position was perfect — the spiral’s geometry put him at exactly the right height, and Jamie looked up the length of the man who’d built it and thought, with the clarity of total want: he designed these treads without knowing this, and they’re still perfect for it, because everything he builds is.

He freed him from the sweatpants with efficient hands — thick, flushed, hard already, because seven weekends of oak-carrying had done things to both of them — and took him into his mouth without preamble, and the sound Ethan made echoed up the spiral like a bell in a tower.

“Jamie —”

Jamie pulled off just long enough to say, “Hold the rail, sweetheart,” and took him back down.

He worked him slow and thorough — the pace, the man’s own pace, returned to him like a deed — taking him deep on every pass, one hand wrapped around what his mouth couldn’t reach, the other braced flat on the broad thigh, feeling the muscle jump under his palm. Ethan’s hand found the spiral’s iron rail and gripped it, knuckles going white, and his other hand went into Jamie’s hair, gentle first, then less gentle as Jamie hummed around him and swallowed and pressed his tongue against the spot below the crown that made the big frame shudder.

“Stop — sweetheart, stop, I’m —” The hand tightened in his hair. “Not yet. Not on the second tread, I’ve got some — Christ — some professional pride—”

Jamie pulled off, grinning, wrecked, mouth swollen. “Professional pride. On the staircase you built for sex.”

“I built it for access.”

“Same thing.” Jamie climbed back up into the lap, stripping the tour shirt over his head, and the rest of the clothes followed fast because they were past teasing now, both of them bare on the oak in the warm lamp light, and Jamie reached behind himself for the bottle he’d staged — staged, behind the closet shoe rack, two weeks ago, because he’d known this night was coming since the first bolt — and Ethan’s eyes went dark seeing it.

“You staged supplies in my staircase.”

“I prepare.” Jamie slicked his own fingers and reached back, and watched Ethan’s composure fracture as he opened himself up right there in the man’s lap, knees braced on the third tread, one hand gripping the iron rail for balance, putting on the show of it because Ethan had taught him — by a year of slow example — that the show was as much the point as the finish. “Different word. Better word.”

“Using my own material against me.”

“Always.” Jamie added a second finger, gasped, bore down, and the sound went up the spiral and came back warm. “Ethan. I’m ready. I’ve been ready since the third bolt.”

Ethan slicked himself, wrapped both hands around Jamie’s hips — the grip, the grip, calloused and certain, thumbs pressing into the hollows, positioning him with the absolute precision of a man who had been setting things at the right angle his entire life — and Jamie sank down onto him on the fourth tread of a staircase that had waited ninety years to become a shortcut home.

They groaned together. The oak groaned with them.

“If this staircase breaks,” Ethan managed, gravel crushed to powder, “I will never live it down. Sandra will put it in the LLC minutes.”

“Then you should have built it stronger.” Jamie rolled his hips, and the comeback died in Ethan’s throat, and what replaced it was the low continuous rumble that Jamie had spent twelve months learning to play like an instrument. He rode him on the spiral stairs with one hand on the iron rail and one on the broad shoulder, setting a pace that was all his, Jamie’s pace, the one he’d earned on this exact body in this exact building: slow enough to feel every inch and deep enough to see stars, the angle of the treads pitching him forward so every downstroke dragged across the spot that shut his brain off, and Ethan’s hands roamed his back, his ass, pulling him down harder, the patience gone now, the engine out of park, fourteen treads of oak flexing under two men’s worth of proof that nothing in this building ever broke when it was built by hand.

“Look at you,” Ethan growled, forehead against Jamie’s, eyes open, the level gone to the four winds. “On my staircase. In my building. Mine. Riding me like you own the place—”

“I do own the place. Ten percent. Sandra has the paperwork.”

“Mouth on you—” A hard upward thrust that punched the air out of Jamie’s lungs and a sharp, broken laugh out of them both, because that was the thing, the whole thing, the reason this worked: it was filthy and funny and theirs, a year of inside jokes and load-bearing metaphors and a building that had been listening to them fall in love through its floors, and the sex had never once stopped being both sacred and absurd, and neither had they.

The pace built. The rail shook. Jamie rode him harder, legs burning, the warm oak under his knees and the warm man under his everything, and Ethan’s hand wrapped around his cock between them — one calloused fist, the first-night grip, the doorway grip, the grip that had rewired his entire nervous system twelve months ago against a door this man had planed sweet — and stroked him in time, and the praise came, the real praise, the bedrock kind, murmured against his mouth between thrusts:

“Good. So good. My good — every tread — every floor — good boy—”

Jamie came with a shout that the spiral carried all the way up to the office ceiling and probably out the unsealed windows and into the city and he did not care, not even a little, spilling over the broad knuckles and clenching down hard, and Ethan followed him two strokes later with his face buried in Jamie’s throat and his name broken in half the way it always broke, the way it had broken the first time and every time, the sound of a man who carried everything finally setting it all down.

They stayed on the stairs a long time. Jamie folded forward onto the broad chest, boneless, the iron rail cold against his shoulder, the oak warm under his knees, and Ethan’s arms wrapped around him the way they always did — automatic, awning, the first gesture and the last.

“We only made it to tread four,” Jamie mumbled into his collarbone. “Out of fourteen. That’s a twenty-eight percent completion rate. Sandra would be appalled.”

“We’ll file an extension.” The gravel was wrecked and warm and home. “I know the landlord.”

“The landlord is currently underneath me on his own staircase.”

“Sounds like a conflict of interest.”

“Sandra would say we’ve handled worse.”

Ethan laughed — the real one, the full one, the one that had been rare a year ago and was daily now, and Jamie lay on his chest collecting it the way he collected all of the man’s sounds, filed under permanent fixtures, do not remove.

“Hey,” Ethan said, after a while, into his hair. “Welcome home.”

Jamie pressed his mouth against the big slow heartbeat and said the only thing left to say, the three words that meant all the others, the signature on every work order this building had ever filed:

“There he is.”

The staircase held. The building held. Everything held.

It was built that way.

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