🔥 The Night Before 🔥
An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Hands Full by Jace Wilder
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place between Chapters Nine and Ten of Hands Full, on the night before the cast comes off. It contains spoilers for the first half of the book and very explicit sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.
Callum’s side of the last night with one good hand: a legal pad, a pen, seven items, and a deadline. Explicit content — 18+.
The Night Before
The itch started at eleven.
It does that. Six weeks in fiberglass, and it had never once itched at a reasonable hour. I lay on my back with the lamp on and a takeout chopstick worked down the inside of the cast to the second knuckle, and I looked at the clock on the nightstand, and I did what I do.
Nine hours and twenty minutes. The clinic opened at eight. I had the nine o’clock, because the eight had gone to a man with a collarbone, and I’d had some uncharitable thoughts about him.
“You’re doing math,” Avery said from the doorway.
He had been brushing his teeth. It was a Wednesday, the twins were at their mother’s, and the green toothbrush was in my bathroom tonight. So was he: bare feet, a pair of gray shorts, nothing else, his hair wet at the temples.
“I’m doing inventory.”
“Of what?”
I held up the arm. Purple, filthy, a rabbit by the thumb gone faint as a watermark. The four fingers sticking out the end had been opening and closing on nothing for most of an hour. I hadn’t noticed until he looked at them.
“Ah,” he said.
He went away. I heard a kitchen drawer. He came back with the legal pad and a pen, and my stomach dropped, pleasantly, because the last time those two objects had been in a room with us he had confiscated one of them.
“I get one list. You were very clear about it.”
“I’m issuing a second. One night only.” He got onto the bed on his knees, swung a leg over me, and sat down on my thighs. He laid the pad flat on my chest, like a man setting up a drafting table. “You’ve been writing this one in your head since the second week. I can hear it at dinner. Tonight you say it out loud, and I take it down.”
“I can write my own—”
“Your left hand writes like a kidnapper. Dictate.” He pulled the cap off the pen with his teeth. “Heading.”
I looked at the ceiling. My ears had already gone warm.
“Two hands.”
He printed it. Capitals, underlined. I felt every stroke through the paper, a small dry scratch right over my heart.
“Item one.”
“Tie my own shoes.”
“That’s the receipt on the refrigerator. This is the other list.” His eyes came up, hazel, level, and entirely without mercy. “What do you want to do to me with two hands, Callum?”
Nobody had ever put that to me in a complete sentence. I might have said so, but he was sitting on me in a pair of shorts.
“Your face,” I said. “Hold it. Both sides.”
“That’s a summary. Give me the whole thing.”
I breathed out.
“I’ve only ever had the one. Left side or right side; I have to pick. I want your head between both my hands, held where I want it, and I want to kiss you until you can’t feel your mouth. And I want you not able to turn out of it.”
The pen didn’t move for a second. When it did, it wasn’t completely steady.
“Good,” he said, to the pad. Quietly. “That’s what I’m after.”
It went into me the way it always goes. Low, and all the way down.
He saw. He always sees. He lifted my right arm by the cast and laid it on the pillow above my head, where it had spent a fair part of six weeks.
“Rules. That stays there. The left gets whatever I hand it.” He leaned down until his mouth was an inch off mine. “And you don’t come until the list is finished. I’m told you like a deadline.”
“I like lead time.”
“You’ve had six weeks. Item two.”
“Buttons,” I said.
“Whose?”
“Yours. The shirt from Sorella’s. I want to undo every button on it with my right hand, top to bottom, by myself. And I want you to stand there and not help.”
“You’ll go slowly on purpose.”
“I’ll go slowly because the hand’s been in a box since Labor Day and I’ll be bad at it. Then on purpose.”
He laughed, and wrote it. Then he put the pen behind his ear, like a carpenter.
“I’m not wearing a shirt,” he said. “You’ll have to take this on account.”
He knelt up and pushed the shorts down his hips, and got out of them without any grace at all, and knelt over me again with nothing on.
I had been looking at him for a month. It hadn’t worn off. Lean, and gold in the lamp, a line drawn in one stroke. His cock was most of the way hard already and lifting while I watched, long, flushed, with that curve toward his stomach.
“Item three,” Avery said. His voice had dropped half a step.
“I want to open you up.”
“You’ve done that.”
“I’ve done it with the wrong hand. It’s like signing my name with it. It starts out fine and then it slides downhill.” I had to stop and swallow. “I want my right hand in you. I want to do it properly.”
“Describe properly.”
“On my side. Next to you, where I can see your face. One finger, and slow. Slow enough that you get annoyed with me.”
“I don’t get annoyed.”
“You get polite. I’d like to watch you get polite with my finger in you.”
His breath went out through his nose. He reached across me to the nightstand, and came back with the bottle.
“Keep talking,” he said. “I’ll follow along.”
I understood what he meant about a second before he did it. He slicked two fingers. He put his left hand flat on my chest, on the pad, for balance. And he reached back behind himself with the right, kneeling up over my stomach, and looked me dead in the eye.
“One,” I said. It came out hoarse.
I watched it happen in his face. The small catch. His lips parting.
“All the way. Then stop. Hold it there until I say.”
“That’s directing.”
“You asked for dictation.”
“… I did ask for that.” His eyes fluttered. “Go on.”
“Out. Slow. Now back, and turn your wrist. Not like that. Slower. I said annoyed.”
“Callum.”
“There’s the polite. Two.”
He made a sound through his teeth. I could see his forearm working, the tendons in it, the ones I’d lost my mind over at a kitchen sink. I couldn’t see his hand. I could see everything it did to him. His stomach pulled tight. His cock stood straight up, dark, and a bead ran down the underside of it and dropped onto my ribs.
I had been hard since he said heading. I was lying under a legal pad with one arm over my head, tenting a pair of boxers, and nothing had touched me.
“Crook them,” I said. “Toward your stomach. Higher. I’d go looking, and I wouldn’t hurry, and when I found it—”
His whole body jerked. His hand slapped down on my chest.
“—I’d take my fingers out,” I said. “Completely. I’d watch you try to get them back.”
“Fuck.” His head had dropped. He was panting. “Write that down.”
“You’ve got the pen.”
“I’m not holding anything.” It was still behind his ear. He found it there, with slick fingers, and laughed, shakily, and wrote item three in a hand that had gone noticeably downhill.
He got my boxers off me himself. He rolled the condom down me with both hands, and this time he’d torn the foil with his fingers. I noticed that. He saw me notice.
“Four,” he said, and reached back, and held me steady. “Say it while I do it.”
“Hips.”
He sank.
The first inch took the word out of my mouth. Heat. A grip like a fist. He went down on me slowly, by his own weight, breathing through it, until he was sitting flat on my thighs with all of me inside him and both palms spread on the pad.
“Hips,” Avery said. Not steadily. “You’ve got one. Tell me about the other.”
My left hand had found his right hip on its own. It held on.
“I want both. I want to hold you by both hips and pull you down onto me when you’re trying to go slow.”
“I like slow.”
“You go slow to kill me. I want to set the pace. One time. I want to find out what you do when it isn’t yours.”
He’d started to move, a long roll, barely anything. He stopped.
“What do you think I do?”
“I think you come apart. I think you’ve been steering for six weeks so I won’t find out how fast.”
His eyes went black. He didn’t write that one down right away. He rode me instead, three long, deep strokes, his head back, as though he couldn’t help it. Then he bent over the pad with his hair in his face and printed it. I could feel him clench around me on every letter.
“Five.”
“The edge of this bed.”
“Go on.”
“You, bent over it. Your feet on the floor. Me standing behind you with both hands on you, holding you exactly where I want you.” I was running out of air. “And I’m not going to be careful.”
“You’ve been careful?”
“I’ve been one-armed. It comes to the same thing.”
He made a noise I had not heard out of him before. He was moving faster now, and he had quit pretending he wasn’t, taking me to the root and grinding down at the bottom of each stroke. The pad slid on my chest. He pinned it there with the heel of his hand and wrote across it at an angle.
“That isn’t legible.”
“It’s legible to me. Six.”
“Your cock.” My hips came up into him. I couldn’t stop them. He let me have that one. “In my right hand. While I’m inside you. A real grip, with the thumb where it goes, at whatever speed I say.”
He took my left hand off his hip. He wrapped it around himself. He was iron-hard and slippery, hot as a fever.
“Show me the wrong hand,” he said. “So I’ll know the difference.”
I showed him. Slow. A twist at the top. My thumb under the head, where he’d put it himself against a refrigerator.
“It isn’t wrong anymore.” He was gasping. “I taught it.”
“It’s adequate.”
“It’s— oh. Don’t stop. Is that the list?”
I didn’t answer.
He felt it. Of course he did. He slowed, and looked down at me, flushed to the collarbones, with a pen in his fist.
“Callum. Is that the list?”
“There’s a seventh. It isn’t that kind of item.”
“It’s your list.”
I looked at the ceiling. It was easier.
“After,” I said. “I want to hold on to you with both arms. I’ve had one across your chest and the other propped on a pillow like freight waiting on a truck. Every time. I want to find out what it’s like to hold you with everything I’ve got.”
He had gone completely still on top of me.
Then he wrote it. Slowly, this one, in his good printing, the picture-book kind. He went back and numbered it. He capped the pen and set it on the nightstand.
“That’s the list,” Avery said. He put both hands flat on my chest, on either side of the paper. His voice had gone low and unhurried, the one I would have followed off a pier. “You said every word of it out loud. You didn’t apologize once. Do you know how good that was?”
It hit me like current. My back came off the mattress. I was so close that my teeth hurt.
“Deadline’s met,” he said. “Keep that hand moving. I’m going first.”
He rode me hard. No rhythm left in it, only want, his thighs shaking against my ribs, my wrong hand stripping his cock exactly as I’d been taught. He came with a broken shout. It went over my knuckles and up my chest, and a long stripe of it landed straight across the legal pad.
And he didn’t stop. He ground down on me through all of it, tight as a vise, and got his mouth beside my ear.
“Now you. Come on. Good. That’s it. That’s so good, Callum—”
I came with my right arm over my head and the cast cracking the headboard, one hard hollow knock against the wall. There was nobody on the other side of it to hear. He was right here. It went on a long time. I think I said his name. I know I said all of it.
He got a washcloth, and saw to both of us, in no hurry. Then he picked the legal pad up off my chest by two corners and studied it.
“Item six is gone.”
“Item six was illegible before.”
“I know what it said.” He tore the sheet off. He waved it dry, folded it in thirds, and leaned over the side of the bed to slide it into the portfolio case.
“Where’s that going?”
“My file.”
“You have a file?”
“I’ve had a file since the first Friday.” He came back up and lay down along my left side, with his head on my shoulder and one knee across my thighs. “I’ll expect delivery. In full. I’m not signing for a partial.”
“I told you. I like lead time.”
“You have nine hours.”
“Eight hours and fifty minutes.”
He lifted his head to look at the clock. Then at me.
“You counted,” I said.
“You’re contagious.”
I lay there with one arm around him and the other on its pillow, for the last time. The itch had quit. It occurred to me that I had forgotten the chopstick was in there.
“It’ll be thin,” I said, after a while. “They warned me. Pale. Weak, for a couple of weeks. It may not manage half that list right off.”
“Then you’ll do it badly, and I’ll enjoy that too.” His thumb moved along my ribs. “I’ve spent six weeks drawing that hand from the four fingers sticking out the end. I’d like to see the rest of it.”
“What if the rest is disappointing?”
“Callum. I’ve seen the rest of you.”
That shut me up. He settled. His breathing slowed against my neck. The house ticked.
“What’s first?” he said. “Tomorrow.”
“Item one.” My mouth had gone thick. “Both sides. I’ve had it worked out since about the third week. Not in a parking lot. Somewhere with— there’s a— you’d have to hold still, and I’d—”
He reached across me.
A click.
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