Hate at First Shift by Jace Wilder - MM Firefighter Romance book cover

After Hours

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter
from Hate at First Shift by Jace Wilder

Set one year after Ryan’s first shift at Station 14. Contains explicit sexual content. For readers 18+ only.

After Hours

The station is empty. That’s the first time I can say those words and mean them literally—no Dex snoring in the bunk room, no Patterson watching muted television, no Kowalski existing in quiet disapproval somewhere in the periphery. The crew is at the department banquet across town, which Elias and I skipped on the grounds of “prior commitment,” which is technically true if your prior commitment is defiling every surface in your workplace.

“This is a terrible idea,” Elias says. He’s standing in the apparatus bay with his arms crossed and his jaw set and the particular expression of a man who has identified all the reasons something is inadvisable and has decided to do it anyway.

“You said that about the locker room.”

“The locker room was a terrible idea.”

“The locker room was the best idea either of us has ever had.” I lean against Engine 14. The chrome is cool through my T-shirt. “One year ago today, I walked into this station. Twenty-two minutes late. Smelling like cologne.”

“You still smell like cologne.”

“And you still drink boot coffee. We contain multitudes.” I push off the engine. Walk toward him across the bay, the way I walked toward him a year ago when everything between us was hostility and static and the electric charge of two men who wanted to tear each other apart and hadn’t yet decided in which direction.

The difference is that tonight, there’s no hiding.

“I made a list,” I tell him.

“You and your lists.”

“This is a good list. A greatest-hits list.” I stop in front of him. Close enough to feel his body heat. “Every place in this station where we touched each other for the first time. Locker room. Shower. This bay. The hallway.”

His jaw does the thing. The flex. The tell I’ve been reading for twelve months and will read for the rest of my life.

“And your plan is—”

“Victory lap.” I grin. “Every location. No hiding. No shame. No three-a.m. paranoia about Dex walking in.”

“Ryan.”

“Elias.”

The corner of his mouth curves. The smile—the real one, the five-second miracle I’ve been earning since the day I decided making this man happy was my life’s work. “Where do we start?”

“Where we started.” I take his hand. “The locker room.”

The locker room at Station 14 is the same narrow rectangle of metal and tile it’s always been—two rows of lockers, a wooden bench, fluorescent lights that make everyone look jaundiced. It smells like deodorant and boot leather and industrial soap.

It’s the room where Elias Cruz pinned me against a locker and jerked me off with his hand over my mouth and said there you go, that’s it while I came harder than I’d ever come in my life.

We stand in the doorway. He looks at the lockers. I look at him looking at the lockers. His face does something complicated—memory and desire and the particular quality of tenderness that Elias reserves for moments he thinks no one can see.

I can always see.

“You were so angry,” I murmur. “That day. After the debrief. You’d been trying to find a reason to write me up for weeks, and I finally snapped.”

“You said show me.” His voice is low. The memory voice. The frequency I feel in my spine. “You tilted your chin up and exposed your throat and looked at me like you were daring me to self-destruct.”

“I was.”

“It worked.”

He moves. Not the way he moved then—not the desperate, out-of-control lunge of a man whose discipline had finally fractured. This is deliberate. Unhurried. The movement of a man who knows exactly what he wants and has twelve months of practice in taking it.

He backs me against the same locker. Same row, same position—my shoulder blades hitting cold metal, the handle digging into my spine. But his hands are different. Then, they were rough, panicked, grasping. Now, they frame my face with the steady precision of a man who’s learned that tenderness and authority aren’t opposites.

“Show me,” he says. Turning my own words back on me with a half-smile that makes my stomach flip.

I kiss him. Slow, deep, open-mouthed—the kiss we couldn’t have a year ago because kissing was against the rules he set and broke in under thirty seconds. His tongue slides against mine and his hands tilt my jaw and his thigh pushes between my legs with a confidence that comes from knowing my body as well as he knows fire behavior.

I’m hard in seconds. He feels it—his thigh presses harder, grinding, and the friction through two layers of sweats is maddening and not enough.

“Last time,” he murmurs against my mouth, “I had my hand over your mouth because I was afraid someone would hear.”

“Nobody’s here tonight.”

“No.” His hand slides down my chest, my stomach, into my waistband. His fingers wrap around me—firm, warm, the calloused grip that I’d recognize blindfolded in a crowd. “So this time, I want to hear everything.”

He strokes me and I let the sound out—all of it. The moan I bit back a year ago, the gasp, the broken repetition of his name that I’d swallowed against his shoulder. The locker room acoustics amplify everything. My voice echoes off tile and metal and bounces back at us, and the sound of my own pleasure filling the room while Elias works me with slow, deliberate strokes is the most pornographic thing I’ve ever experienced.

“That’s it,” he says. The same words. The exact same words, delivered in the same guttural register, except this time they’re not an accident—they’re a callback, a citation, a man quoting the moment he fell in love and knowing I’ll recognize the reference. “There you go, Ryan.”

I come against the same locker, in the same position, with the same words in my ears—but everything else is different. No panic afterward. No this never happened. Just Elias pressing his forehead to mine, his hand still around me, his breathing heavy, his mouth curved into the smile that used to be impossible.

“One down,” he says.

“Three to go.”

The shower room.

I turn the water to warm—not scalding, not the punishing temperature he used the night I found him shaking with his palms on the tile. Warm. Comfortable. The temperature of a man who’s stopped using heat as a substitute for feeling.

We strip in front of each other with the ease of two people who’ve memorized every inch and still want to look. I watch him step under the spray—broad shoulders, dark hair slicked back, the water running down his chest in rivulets that trace the topography of muscle and scar—and my breath catches the way it catches every time, because Elias Cruz under water is a religious experience I will never develop immunity to.

“The first time we were in here together,” I say, stepping in behind him, “you told me to get out.”

“I was falling apart.”

“I stood outside the door.”

“I know.” He turns. Faces me. The water runs between us. “I saw your boots.”

“And the second time—” I drop to my knees on the wet tile, looking up at him through the spray. The position that rewired our entire relationship. “I knelt right here. And you said show me how good you are.“

His breath stutters. His hand finds my wet hair. Not commanding—cradling. The possessiveness is still there, but it’s wrapped in twelve months of trust and therapy and the hard-won knowledge that holding someone doesn’t have to mean controlling them.

“Show me,” he says softly.

I take him in my mouth under the warm spray and the sound he makes reverberates off every surface in the room—not bitten off, not trapped behind his teeth. Released. Full-throated, unguarded, a groan that comes from the chest of a man who has learned, over twelve months of practice, that pleasure isn’t something to be managed. It’s something to be felt.

I work him slowly—savoring, not performing. My tongue traces the ridge, the underside, the head where he’s most sensitive. I take him deep and hold, jaw slack, throat relaxed, and look up through the water to find his face tilted toward the ceiling with his eyes closed and his lips parted and an expression I’ve never seen on anyone else’s face: surrender that doesn’t cost him anything. Surrender that gives him something.

“Ryan.” My name in his mouth, under the spray, echoing off tile. “You’re so—God, your mouth—don’t stop—”

He’s vocal. Still a revelation, twelve months in. The man who communicated in monosyllables and jaw clenches now tells me exactly what feels good, exactly where, exactly how—a running narration of pleasure that drives me as wild as any touch.

I bring him close. Feel the tremor in his thighs, the tightening of his hand in my hair. Then I pull off.

“Not here,” I say. “Not yet. There’s still two more stops.”

The sound he makes—frustrated, desperate, laughing—is the best thing I’ve ever heard.

The hallway. Dark, narrow, the walls close enough to touch with outstretched arms. The exit sign glows red at the far end—the same red glow that illuminated our first kiss, the one that demolished the kissing rule before it had time to set.

I push him against the wall. Role reversal—the way I pinned him against his truck outside the bar, the way I straddle him on the couch. The moments where I take the lead and he lets me, because our dynamic isn’t fixed. It’s alive. It breathes.

I kiss him in the hallway the way he kissed me a year ago—slow, deliberate, controlling the angle with my hand on his jaw. He melts against the wall the way I melted, and the symmetry is beautiful. Two men who’ve learned to take turns. To give and receive. To hold and be held.

“You broke your own rule in thirty seconds,” I murmur against his lips.

“Best decision I ever made.”

“Second best.” I pull back. Hold his face. “The best decision was the couch.”

His eyes go soft. The softness that used to take him by surprise and now lives permanently in his expression, a tenant he’s stopped trying to evict.

“Apparatus bay,” he says. “Last stop.”

We barely made it last time. Dex in his underwear, three feet from the door, while we stood against Engine 14 with our hands in each other’s pants and our hearts trying to break through our ribs.

Tonight, nobody is coming through that door.

Elias lifts me onto the running board of Engine 14—the chrome step that runs along the side of the rig, wide enough to sit on if you don’t mind the chill of metal against bare skin. I don’t mind. I’ve never minded anything when Elias Cruz is standing between my thighs with his hands on my hips and his mouth on my neck.

We’re both naked. The bay is lit by security floods—amber and warm, casting our shadows long across the concrete floor. The engine gleams behind me. The station is silent except for our breathing and the hum of the ventilation and the wet sounds of his mouth working down my chest.

“Last time,” he says against my stomach, “I told you this wasn’t sustainable.”

“And I asked you if we could figure it out together.”

“Together.” He looks up at me. Those dark eyes. The scars on his forearms catching the light. The gray at his temples that I’ve watched expand over twelve months, marking time on the face of the man I plan to grow old with. “We figured it out.”

“We figured it out.”

He preps me on the running board of Engine 14—patient, thorough, the same maddening deliberation he’s used since the first time. One finger, then two, then three, his eyes on my face, reading every response. I grip the chrome bar above me—the handrail that firefighters grab when mounting the rig—and the position opens my body to him in a way that makes his breath catch.

“You’re incredible.” His voice is rough. “Every time. Every time I look at you like this, I—” He shakes his head. Swallows. “I can’t believe you’re mine.”

“Yours.” I pull him closer with my legs. “Always yours. Now get inside me before I do something reckless, like propose on a fire engine.”

He laughs. The real laugh—rusty, warm, the sound I’ve been building toward since the day I swore I’d make him smile. Then he lines up, holds my gaze, and pushes in.

There’s a specific quality to sex that has no shame in it. A fullness that goes beyond physical—the completeness of two bodies that know each other in the dark and the light, that have mapped every nerve and memorized every sound. Elias moves inside me with the confidence of a man who has studied this body with the same precision he studies fire, and the pleasure is layered and deep and endless.

I’m loud. Louder than I’ve ever been—the empty station amplifying every moan, every curse, every iteration of his name that tears out of me when he hits the angle that turns thought to static. The bay carries our sounds the way it carries sirens—echoing, reverberating, filling the space with evidence of what we are.

“Good boy.” The words land like they always land—directly, precisely, in the place inside me that he found a year ago in a locker room and has been tending ever since. “You’re so good, Ryan. So perfect. Look at you.”

I look at him. Amber light. Dark eyes. The man who walked through debris for me. Who called a therapist for me. Who bought a couch and learned to smile and said I love you with tears on his face because I asked him to stay with me and he stayed.

We come together. Not choreographed—synchronized. His hand wraps around me at the last moment and the dual sensation—him inside me, his fist around me, his voice in my ear saying my name like a prayer—breaks me open and the orgasm hits us at the same time, his body locking against mine, my back arching against the chrome, our voices tangling in the empty bay.

Afterward, we lie on the concrete floor of the apparatus bay with our backs against Engine 14’s rear wheel. The floor is cold. Neither of us cares. His arm is around me. My head is on his shoulder. The amber lights hum their indifferent hymn.

“Happy anniversary,” I say.

“Happy anniversary.” He presses his mouth to the top of my head. “Thank you for being late to your first shift.”

“Thank you for writing me up for saving a cat.”

“I’d do it again.”

“I know.” I close my eyes. Feel his heartbeat. The steady, slow rhythm of a man at peace. “I love you, Elias Cruz.”

“I love you, Ryan Parker.” His hand traces the pattern in my hair—one long, two short, pause. Stay. Stay. Stay. “Now get up. We need to clean the apparatus bay before Dex sees the evidence and starts a new betting pool.”

I laugh. He smiles. The station holds us the way it’s always held us—the building where we fight and save and burn and come home to each other. The building that watched us fall in love and kept our secrets and now gets to see us stop hiding.

We clean up. Get dressed. Lock the station behind us.

We drive home together.

Thank you for reading this exclusive bonus chapter from Hate at First Shift.

Buy Hate at First Shift