Bonus Chapter: The Wall Still Warm

Sign up for exclusive content and early releases:

The Wall Still Warm

Set the night after the events of Chapter 10.
An exclusive scene too hot for retailers.

The wall was still warm.

Silas knew this because he’d pressed his back against it four times in the last hour, and each time the brick held a residual heat that had no business being there at eleven PM on a Tuesday in December. The studio’s heating was off. The string lights were the only source of warmth, and string lights didn’t generate enough BTUs to heat brick.

The wall was warm because Nate Reyes had been pressed against it two hours ago, and Silas’s body — or the wall’s body, or the building’s body, or the entire physical universe — had decided to retain the thermal evidence.

He was being insane. He knew he was being insane. He was sitting on the studio floor at eleven PM with his back against a wall that was not actually warm, talking to a cat who did not care, replaying a kiss that had happened and ended and been followed by Nate asking him on a date and then leaving, and Silas was alone in his studio with swollen lips and a racing heart and the absolute, crystalline certainty that his life had just divided into before and after.

Before the kiss: a man who ran a yoga studio and was too much for everyone.

After the kiss: a man who’d been shoved against a wall by a history teacher and had the brick burn to prove it.

“He asked me on a date,” Silas said to Gremlin, who was on the front desk licking a paw with the focused indifference of an animal for whom human romantic crises ranked below dinner and slightly above naps. “A real date. With a shirt. He mentioned a specific shirt. Navy. He said it fits well.”

Gremlin licked.

“He kissed me like he’d been thinking about it for weeks. Not tentatively — not is this okay, can I do this, let me test the waters. He just — his hand was on my hip and then he was climbing down the ladder and then his mouth was on mine and his hands were in my hair and I was against the wall and I couldn’t — I didn’t—”

His voice cracked. Not from emotion — from the physical memory of what had happened to his voice during the kiss. It had stopped working. Somewhere between Nate’s tongue in his mouth and Nate’s hips grinding against his, Silas’s legendary volume had short-circuited, replaced by sounds he’d never made and a breathlessness that still hadn’t fully resolved.

He pressed his fingers to his lips. Swollen. Tender. The specific sensitivity of skin that had been kissed hard enough to bruise, Nate’s mouth claiming his with a thoroughness that was almost clinical in its precision — every angle explored, every surface tasted, as if Nate were conducting a systematic study of Silas’s mouth and intended to publish the findings.

And his hands. God, his hands.

Nate’s hands in his hair — large, strong, the hands of a man who gripped things with intention and didn’t let go until he was ready. The tug at the base of his skull, tilting his head back, exposing his throat. Not gentle. Not careful. The grip of a man who’d been careful for months and was done with careful, who’d been sitting in the back corner of Silas’s studio conjugating Latin verbs to keep himself under control and had finally, spectacularly, lost that control against a wall next to the supply closet.

Silas’s body hummed. Not metaphorically — literally hummed, a low-frequency vibration in his muscles and his bones and the charged, oversensitive surface of his skin. He was hard. Had been hard since the kiss, had been hard through Nate’s departure and the closing of the doors and the solitary walk up to his apartment and the feeding of the cat and the shower he’d attempted and abandoned because the water on his skin felt like hands and the hands felt like Nate’s and standing in a shower thinking about Nate’s hands while Nate’s mouth-print was still on his lips felt like a line he wasn’t ready to cross.

Except he’d already crossed every other line. The professional line — demolished the night of the first private session, when Nate had made a sound on the mat and Silas’s entire concept of therapeutic boundaries had vaporized. The emotional line — destroyed the night they’d sat on the floor and eaten chocolate and Nate had said you’re not too much with the quiet authority of a man stating a scientific fact. The physical line — annihilated tonight, against this wall, with Nate’s body pressed full-length against his and both of them hard and gasping and the six inches that had been their safety margin reduced to zero.

The only line left was the one Nate had drawn: Thursday. A date. A real restaurant. A choice made with the lights on.

Thursday was two days away. Forty-eight hours. Approximately 2,880 minutes. Silas had done the math because doing math was better than doing what his body wanted, which was to walk to Nate’s apartment, knock on the door, and say I know you said Thursday but I can’t wait that long, I physically cannot wait that long, I am going to lose my mind.

He pressed his back against the wall. The warm wall. The wall where Nate had pinned him and kissed him and called him devastatingly handsome with a dry, deadpan delivery that had made Silas laugh in the middle of the most erotic moment of his life.

Nobody had ever wanted the too-much before.

Silas pulled out his phone. 11:14 PM. Too late to text. Too late for anything except the specific brand of late-night honesty that lived between midnight and dawn, when the filters were down and the truth was easier.

He typed a message. Deleted it. Typed another. Deleted that too.

Finally: I can still feel you on the wall.

The response came immediately: I can still taste you.

Silas: Thursday feels very far away.

Nate: I’m lying in bed thinking about the sound you made when I bit your neck.

You can’t say things like that when I’m alone and you’re twenty minutes away and Thursday is forty-seven hours and thirteen minutes from now.

A pause. Then: I’m hard right now. From this conversation. From the memory of your mouth. From the fact that you’re sitting on the floor where I kissed you, and I know what you sound like, and I know what you taste like, and I can’t stop thinking about what you’d feel like.

He typed with one hand: Tell me more.

And Nate — careful, measured, show-up-with-a-plan Nate — told him.

I’m thinking about the way your hair felt in my hands. The curls at the back of your neck. The way you tipped your head back when I pulled.

I’m thinking about your hips. The way they rolled against mine. The rhythm you set without trying, like your body already knew how to move with mine.

I’m thinking about what would have happened if I hadn’t stopped.

Silas’s resolve broke. His hand moved — from his thigh, under his waistband, wrapping around himself with a grip that was pure need. He stroked once and his hips bucked off the floor and the sound that escaped him — alone, in the dark studio, with no one to hear — was the same sound from the wall. Raw. Unfiltered.

He typed with shaking fingers: What would have happened if you hadn’t stopped?

I would have picked you up. Your legs around my waist. Carried you to the mat.

And then I would have undressed you slowly. The tank top first. Then the sweats. I would have taken my time because I’ve been watching your body for months and I want to see all of it.

I would have kissed every tattoo. Traced them with my tongue. Found the spots that make you gasp and spent so long on each one that you’d be begging before I was halfway done.

And then I would have found out what you sound like when there’s nothing between us. No clothes. No pretense. Just my hands on your skin and your voice in this room and the floor holding both of us.

Silas came. On the studio floor, his back against the wall where Nate had kissed him, his phone in one hand and his cock in the other, reading texts from a man who was twenty minutes away and might as well have been inside him for how thoroughly the words had dismantled his composure. The orgasm rolled through him in waves — long, shuddering, his body arching, his mouth open, the sound filling the empty studio and bouncing off the ceiling and the walls and the mural and coming back to him transformed.

He sat in the aftermath. Breathing hard. Nate’s last message waiting:

I’m going to do every single thing I just described. And more. And I’m not going to stop until you’ve forgotten every person who ever told you that you were too much.

Silas pressed the phone against his chest. His body was loose, spent, trembling with the aftershocks of an orgasm produced entirely by text messages from a man who couldn’t touch his toes and communicated in complete sentences and had just sexted him with the structural precision of a lesson plan.

He laughed. Alone, in the dark, on the studio floor. A full, helpless, too-much laugh that filled the room.

Nate: Perfect. That’s exactly how I want you.

Not less. Not quieter. Not calmer. Exactly how I want you. Devastatingly handsome and emotionally destroyed and too much and all of it.

Silas pressed his face into the pillow and smiled so hard it hurt.

Thursday. He couldn’t wait.

Enjoyed this bonus chapter?

Read the full novel: Hold Me Where the Light Is

Browse all Jace Wilder MM romance.

Never Miss a Release

Get new release alerts, exclusive bonus content, and reader-only giveaways.