Hooking Up with My Bully by Jace Wilder - MM Bully Romance book cover

Bonus Chapter: The Housewarming

An exclusive scene from Hooking Up with My Bully
by Jace Wilder

This bonus chapter takes place three months after the end of the novel. Marcus and Eli host their first dinner party in the finished house. After everyone leaves, Marcus makes good on a promise to christen every surface.

⚠️ This chapter contains extremely explicit sexual content. 18+ only.

The Housewarming

Marcus

The last car pulls away at eleven-fifteen, and the silence that fills the house behind it is the best sound I’ve heard all night.

Don’t get me wrong — the dinner was good. Better than good. Eli cooked, which means pasta (the good one, not the mid ones), and I grilled steaks on the back porch, and the combination of his precision and my brute-force approach to protein produced a meal that even June complimented without qualifiers. Danny ate three plates. Raf ate one plate and nodded, which from Raf is a Michelin star. June brought two bottles of wine and drank one and a half of them and told me, somewhere around the second glass, that my grout work in the bathroom showed “genuine emotional maturity,” which I think was a compliment.

Aaron came — the guy from Eli’s high school, the one who was nice when I wasn’t. He brought his boyfriend, a quiet guy named Miles who works in cybersecurity and said maybe twelve words all evening, all of them interesting. I shook Aaron’s hand and thanked him for being decent to Eli when I couldn’t be, and the sentence cost me something but the look on Eli’s face when I said it was worth every syllable.

Even my mother came. She sat at the dining room table — the one I built from reclaimed barn wood as a housewarming gift to ourselves — and she ate pasta and drank water and talked to June about gardening, and when she left she kissed Eli on the cheek and said, “You have a beautiful home.” The you was singular. But her eyes moved to me when she said home, and the meaning was plural.

Now they’re all gone. The dishes are in the sink. The candles Eli bought are guttering on the table. The house is warm and full of the lingering ghost of conversation and laughter and the specific energy that comes from filling a space with people who care about the people who live in it.

Eli is at the sink, sleeves rolled up, running water over the plates. He’s wearing a white button-down that’s untucked and slightly rumpled from the evening, and his hair has given up on whatever style he started with and is doing its own thing, falling across his forehead in a way that makes him look younger. His glasses are on the counter — he took them off an hour ago when June splashed wine on them during a gesture — and without them his face is open and soft in the candlelight.

I lean against the doorframe and watch him.

He knows I’m there. He always knows. Some radar we both have — the awareness of each other’s position in space that started as a survival mechanism and evolved into something gentler. He doesn’t turn around, but the corner of his mouth lifts.

“Stop staring and start drying.”

“In a minute.”

“Marcus.”

“I made you a promise.”

His hands slow on the plate. The water runs. He still doesn’t turn around, but his posture changes — a subtle shift, a loosening, the transition from domestic to alert.

“What promise?”

I cross the kitchen. Stop behind him. My hands go to his hips — resting, not gripping. My chest against his back. My mouth against his ear.

“I told you I was going to christen every surface in this house.”

His breath catches. The plate in his hands goes still under the running water.

“You said that three weeks ago. While drunk.”

“I was tipsy. And I meant it.” My lips trace the edge of his ear. “The guests are gone. The house is ours. And there are several surfaces we haven’t properly inaugurated.”

“We’ve had sex in every room.”

“Not on every surface. There’s a difference.” I turn him around. He lets me — sets the plate in the sink, wipes his hands on the dish towel, and turns in the circle of my arms. His eyes are dark and warm and the candlelight is doing devastating things to his cheekbones. “The dining table, for instance.”

“The dining table we just ate dinner on with your mother?”

“She’s gone.”

“Marcus.”

“The banister.” I kiss the corner of his jaw. “The one I sanded by hand.” Another kiss, lower, the side of his throat. “I’ve been thinking about you bent over it for months.”

His breathing changes. That shift I know by heart — from steady to shallow, the autonomic response to something his body wants before his brain catches up. His hands come to my chest, not pushing, resting. Feeling my heartbeat accelerate under his palms.

“The porch swing,” I say against his collarbone.

“The porch swing? Marcus, the neighbors —”

“Mrs. Henderson would finally get her money’s worth on those binoculars.”

He laughs. The real one — warm, full, his whole face crinkling. The laugh turns into a gasp when I bite the tendon in his neck, and the gasp turns into a moan when I suck hard enough to leave a mark, and the moan is low and rough and vibrates through my lips directly into my bloodstream.

“Start with the table,” he says. His voice has dropped an octave. His hands are moving on my chest — unbuttoning my shirt, pulling it open, his fingers spreading across my bare skin with the focused attention of a man who’s made a decision and intends to see it through. “But if Danny sits in the exact spot tomorrow, I’m telling him.”

“Danny would consider it an honor.”

“Danny would never sit down again.”

I pick him up. His legs wrap around my waist — automatic, practiced, the default configuration. I carry him to the dining table, to the barn-wood surface I built and he finished and we set with plates and candles two hours ago, and I set him on the edge and step between his legs and kiss him.

The kiss tastes like the wine he drank and the mint he ate after, and underneath it, the permanent flavor of him — the thing I’d know in the dark, the taste that means home. His hands pull my shirt off my shoulders. Mine unbutton his, one by one, exposing his chest in the candlelight — the lean plane of his stomach, the ridge of his collarbones, the fading mark on his neck from this morning that I’m about to replace with a fresh one.

I lay him back on the table. His shoulder blades hit the wood and he gasps — not from pain, from the contact, the solid surface beneath him, the grain of the barn wood against his bare skin. I lean over him. My hands on either side of his head, my body between his legs, and the image of him spread out on our table — shirtless, flushed, looking up at me with those blue eyes gone dark with want — is something I want to frame.

“Beautiful,” I say. Not performing. Reporting.

“Shut up and fuck me on our dining table.”

His jeans come off. Mine follow. The lube is in the kitchen drawer — that drawer, the one left of the sink, the one that’s been stocked since the first time and has never been allowed to run dry because Eli Turner maintains household supplies with the same precision he applies to everything else.

I open him on the table. Two fingers, three, slow and thorough, his back arching off the wood, his hands gripping the edge. The candlelight flickers across his body and casts shadows that move with every thrust of my fingers, and the sight of him writhing on the surface I built with my own hands sends a possessive heat through me that I feel in my bones.

“Now,” he says. “Marcus — now.”

I enter him slow. His heels dig into the small of my back. His head falls to one side, cheek against the wood, and his mouth is open and his eyes are closed and the sound he makes as I push in is long and continuous and barely human.

I set a pace that’s deliberately, savagely unhurried. Deep, rolling strokes, pulling almost entirely out before pushing back in with a completeness that makes his whole body jolt. The table is solid — the joints I cut, the legs I braced — and it doesn’t move. Doesn’t creak. Holds our weight and our movement with the structural integrity of something built by someone who knows what he’s doing.

“Harder,” he says.

I go harder. The pace shifts from savoring to driving, my hips snapping forward, the sound of skin against skin filling the kitchen alongside his voice, which has abandoned words in favor of a continuous, escalating stream of sound that I could listen to for the rest of my life.

He comes on the table. Untouched, just from the angle and the force, his cock jerking against his stomach and his body clenching around me and his voice cracking on my name. I follow him — three more strokes, deep and hard, and I bury myself in him and come with my hands gripping the edge of the table I built and his name in my teeth.

We make it to the banister twenty minutes later.

He’s ahead of me on the stairs, naked, the candlelight from the kitchen painting his back in amber, and he stops on the third step — our step, the one where I kissed him gently for the first time, the one where the sandpaper stopped and something else started — and he puts his hand on the banister and looks at me over his shoulder with an expression that could start a war.

“This one?” he asks. Running his fingers along the cherry wood I stripped and sealed and polished until it gleamed. “You’ve been thinking about me bent over it?”

“For months.”

“Show me.”

He bends. Hands on the railing, feet on the stair, his body a long, lean curve that follows the line of the banister like it was carved to fit. The cherry wood is dark against his pale skin. His hips are at the perfect height — the height I calculated unconsciously every time I sanded this section, the height I pretended I wasn’t thinking about while running 220-grit along the grain and imagining exactly this.

I step up behind him. My hands on his hips. My mouth against the nape of his neck.

“I thought about this every day I worked on this banister,” I murmur against his skin. “Every coat of sealant. Every pass with the sandpaper. You, right here, holding onto the wood I restored with my hands while I —”

“Less talking.” He pushes back against me. “More doing.”

I’m already hard again — the recovery time between rounds has been getting shorter, a function of proximity and obsession and the specific, inexhaustible hunger that Eli Turner generates in my body. I slick myself with what’s left from the first round and push in, and the angle from this position is steeper, deeper, and the sound he makes when I bottom out echoes up the stairwell and fills the second floor.

The banister holds. Of course it holds — three coats of sealant, hand-sanded cherry, original craftsmanship reinforced with modern joinery. It holds his weight and mine, holds the force of each thrust, holds steady while Eli’s hands grip and his knuckles whiten and his voice breaks apart into syllables that don’t assemble into words.

I reach around. Wrap my hand around his cock. Stroke in time with my thrusts, the dual stimulation pulling sounds out of him that I’ve never heard before — higher, sharper, breaking at the peaks into something that sounds like laughter and feels like joy.

“The wood — Marcus, the finish —”

“Three coats of marine-grade polyurethane. It’ll survive.”

He comes laughing. His whole body shakes with it — the orgasm and the laughter tangled together, inseparable, his forehead dropping to the banister as his cock pulses in my hand and his body contracts around mine. The sound is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard — pleasure and happiness braided into a single, devastating noise.

I come thirty seconds later, driven over the edge by the vibration of his laughter around me, by the sight of his hands on the wood I restored, by the knowledge that this house — every surface, every joint, every careful detail — is ours, and we’re writing our story into its walls with our bodies.

The porch swing at midnight.

He said no. I accepted the no. Then he stood on the porch looking at the stars and said, “It’s really dark out here,” and the way he said it — speculative, testing — made me realize the no had become a maybe and the maybe was rapidly becoming a dare me.

We’re on the porch swing. He’s in my lap — the position we’ve perfected, his knees bracketing my thighs, my hands on his hips. The chains creak with every movement, a slow, rhythmic protest that blends with the cricket song and the wind in the garden.

It’s December. It’s cold. Neither of us is fully dressed — his jeans are around one ankle, my pants are shoved to my knees, and the flannel — the flannel, the one that belongs to both of us and neither of us — is draped around his shoulders like a blanket.

“If Mrs. Henderson is watching —” he starts.

“It’s midnight. She’s asleep.”

“Mrs. Henderson doesn’t sleep. She powers down.”

I pull him down. He sinks onto me with a sound that the December air carries across the garden and probably into the next county, and I clap my hand over his mouth and he bites my palm and the pain is sweet and sharp and makes me thrust upward so hard the swing lurches and he has to grab the chains to stay on.

We fuck on the porch swing under the stars, in the cold, in the garden where his grandmother’s roses are dormant and waiting for spring. The pace is dictated by the swing’s momentum — push forward, pull back, the pendulum motion adding a dimension to the rhythm that neither of us controls. Gravity and physics and the creak of chains doing half the work while we do the rest.

He rides me slowly. The cold air on his skin, the flannel sliding off one shoulder, his breath fogging in the December night. The stars are impossibly bright — no light pollution in Millfield, one of the town’s few advantages — and they illuminate his face from above, turning him silver and shadow.

“I love you,” I say. Not for the first time tonight. Not for the last. Every time I say it, the words feel new — not because the feeling changes, but because the context deepens. I loved him at the dining table and I loved him on the banister and I love him on the porch swing, and each surface holds a different version of the same truth.

“I love you,” he says back. Rolling his hips, grinding deep, his hands on my shoulders and his forehead against mine. “I love you and I love this house and I love that you built me a dining table and I’m never going to be able to serve dinner on it without thinking about this.”

“Good.”

“Danny’s going to know.”

“Danny already knows. Danny has known since the staircase incident.”

“Danny is going to sit in it.“

“I’ll sand it.”

He laughs. The laugh becomes a moan. The moan becomes my name. He comes in the cold air with the stars above us and the swing chains singing, and I follow him with my face in his neck and the flannel wrapped around both of us like a cocoon.

We sit on the porch swing for a long time afterward. Not moving. Wrapped in the flannel, tangled together, his head on my shoulder and my arm around his back. The garden is dark and quiet. The house glows behind us — warm, lit, alive.

“That’s three surfaces,” he says.

“We’ve got a whole house.”

“We’ve got time.”

Time. The word that once felt foreign — too big, too generous, too much to believe in. Now it fits. Now it’s ours. Time means mornings and Saturdays and seasons changing in the garden. Time means dinner parties and overnight guests and holidays where the table is full and the noise is good and the silence afterward is even better.

Time means this porch, this swing, this man, this life.

I pull the flannel tighter around us and press my lips to the top of his head.

“Let’s go to bed,” I say.

“Bed is a surface.”

“Bed is the surface I started with. The one I keep coming back to.”

He lifts his head. Looks at me. The starlight catches the thin white line on his chin, and I touch it — gently, with my thumb, the way I’ve touched it a hundred times and will touch it a thousand more. The scar that started everything. The mark that connected us before either of us knew what connection meant.

“Take me to bed, Marcus.”

I carry him inside. Through the door, past the hook where two coats hang side by side, up the stairs where the banister gleams, into the bedroom where the brass doorknob turns under my hand and the sheets smell like both of us.

Home.

The word doesn’t catch in my throat anymore.

It never will again.

Thank you for reading the bonus chapter. If you loved Marcus and Eli’s story, please leave a review — it means the world.

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