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This bonus chapter takes place between Chapters 14 and 15 — Jamie’s perspective of finding the sketchbooks, expanded, with an exclusive scene that didn’t make it into the book.

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Jamie

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I hadn’t meant to look.

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That was the thing I kept telling myself — standing in Alex’s room, standing in our room, standing in front of the open closet with a cardboard box in my hands and twelve leather-bound sketchbooks staring up at me like evidence at a trial. I hadn’t meant to look. The sketchbook had fallen open. The page was my face. And then my hands took over, the way my hands took over when I was debugging — following the thread, tracing the logic, needing to see where it went.

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Where it went was ten years deep.

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I’d sat on the bed. I’d pulled out every book. I’d arranged them chronologically — because I was Jamie Turner, and Jamie Turner organized things even during emotional crises, even while his heart was doing something that should have been studied by cardiologists.

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The earliest drawings were uncertain. College-era Alex, still learning, still finding his line — the proportions slightly off, the shading tentative, the hand behind the pencil not yet confident enough to capture what the eye was seeing. But even then, even in the earliest, roughest sketches, the attention was there. The devotion. The specific, concentrated, obsessive focus of a person who was looking at something they couldn’t stop looking at and was trying, desperately, to hold it still.

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Me sleeping in the common room. Me studying at the library. Me laughing at something off-page, my mouth open, my head tipped back, my face caught in the middle of a joy I didn’t remember feeling but that Alex had seen and preserved.

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By junior year, the drawings were better. Technically better, yes — the lines more confident, the shadows richer, the composition more deliberate. But also emotionally better. More honest. Less careful. The early drawings had a distance to them, an observation-from-afar quality, the visual equivalent of watching through a window. By junior year, the window was gone. The drawings were intimate. Close. The kind of drawings you made when you were close enough to count eyelashes.

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There was one from junior year that stopped my breathing.

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Me, on Marc’s couch. The night of the almost-telling — the night I’d opened my mouth to say something and Alex’s phone had rung and Megan had called and I’d closed my mouth forever. Alex had drawn it. Not the moment of the almost — the moment before. Me, on the couch, his head on my shoulder, and my face turned toward him, looking down, with an expression that I’d never seen on my own face because I’d never been outside of it while it was happening.

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The expression was love. Naked, unguarded, unperformed love. The specific love of a person who was looking at the person they wanted most in the world and was about to say something and didn’t know yet that the phone was going to ring.

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Alex had seen that expression. He’d been there, on the couch, with my arm around him and his head on my shoulder, and he’d seen it — the love on my face, directed at him — and he’d drawn it later, from memory, and put it in a sketchbook and kept it for seven years.

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He’d known. He’d known since junior year. And he’d still waited. Six more years.

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I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum. The feeling there was not a crack. Not a fissure. It was an expansion. A making-room. The sensation of a chest that had been held tight for thirty years suddenly, violently, irreversibly opening.

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I put the sketchbooks back. Carefully. In order. Replaced the box on the shelf. Returned to the living room. And waited for him to come home.

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He came home with groceries and happy strawberries and I stood in the kitchen and watched him put things away and I thought about junior year. About the couch. About the expression he’d drawn — love, on my face, directed at him — and how I’d been wearing it for thirteen years without knowing and he’d been seeing it for ten years without saying.

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I cupped his face. Both hands. The gesture that I was learning to make mine — palms on jaw, thumbs on cheekbones. I held his face and I looked at him and I said the words. The “I love you since I was fifteen” speech that came out of me fully formed, not drafted, not debugged, not optimized, just true.

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He cried. I expected that. What I didn’t expect was what happened after — the way the words changed the air between us, changed the pressure, changed the specific atmospheric composition of the apartment from “two people in love” to “two people who have both said it out loud, with full knowledge of the scope, and are now standing in a kitchen with nowhere to hide.”

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“Come to bed,” I said.

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It was two in the afternoon. He didn’t argue.

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The bedroom. Our bedroom. The afternoon light, silver-gold, filling the room like water, pooling on the sheets, the floor, the surface of his skin when I pulled his shirt over his head.

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I’d seen Alex’s body a hundred times. But I’d never looked at it the way he looked at me in the sketchbooks — with that specific, devoted, I’m-memorizing-every-line attention that turned observation into worship. I’d never let myself. The looking was Alex’s domain. The drawing was Alex’s language. I was the subject, not the artist.

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Not today. Today, I looked.

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I started with his shoulders. Broad. Brown. The freckle constellation on his left collarbone — seven freckles, I counted them, the way he’d drawn them, the way you counted something precious. I kissed each one. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. He shivered.

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“What are you doing?” he asked.

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“Counting.”

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“You drew my face a thousand times. I’m entitled to count freckles.”

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I moved lower. His chest. The soft, warm planes of skin that I traced with my fingers — not sexually, not yet. Taxonomically. The scar on his right shoulder from the skateboarding accident. The small mole below his left nipple that I’d never noticed before. The way his stomach rose and fell with each breath, the rhythm of it, the evidence of his aliveness.

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“You memorize. You translate. You turn the three-dimensional person into a two-dimensional language that you can hold.” I pressed my palm flat against his stomach. Felt the muscles contract. “I’m doing the same thing. Except my language is touch.”

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“Let me,” I said. The words that had been his. Full circle.

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He lay back. Yielded. The trust that was still new and still enormous.

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I undressed him. All of him. Slowly, reverently. His jeans. His boxers. Everything. Until he was naked on our bed in the afternoon light, and the room was quiet except for breathing.

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I began at his feet. Kissed the arch. The ankle bone. The shin. The knee. He was trembling already. Not from stimulation — from being seen.

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“Jamie—”

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“Don’t speak. Just feel.”

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I moved up. His thigh. The inner thigh, the sensitive skin that made his breath hitch. I kissed it — open-mouthed, my tongue tasting salt and warmth. I bypassed his cock. Not to tease — to be thorough. I was working systematically. Grid pattern. The way I’d debug — methodical, complete, no edge case untested.

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“You taste like data,” I said. “The most important data set I’ve ever collected.”

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“That’s the least romantic—”

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“It’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever said. Because data is what I love. And you are the best data I’ve ever found.”

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I took him in my mouth. Not tentatively — the way I did it now, with six weeks of practice and the Jamie-Turner commitment to mastery. I took him deep. Swallowed around him. Started the rhythm that made his hips lift and his voice break.

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But tonight I added my voice. Between strokes. Between the wet, slow, devastating attention of my mouth on his cock.

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“You drew me sleeping,” I said. Stroking. Slow. “Freshman year. Headphones on. Mouth open.”

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“You drew me on Marc’s couch. Junior year. The night I almost told you.” Stroke. His hips jerked. “You saw the expression on my face. Love. You drew it. You kept it for seven years.”

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“I saw. I saw all of it.” I took him deep again. Held. Released. “Every drawing. Every year. Every version of me you saw and recorded. A thousand pages of evidence that you loved me.”

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“You drew me,” I said. “And I never knew. And now I know. And knowing is—” I pressed my tongue against him. Felt him pulse. “Knowing is the best thing anyone has ever given me.”

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He was close. I could feel it — the building tension, the tightening of his thighs, the sounds escalating from controlled to uncontrolled.

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I pulled off. Climbed up his body. Straddling his hips. My hands on his chest.

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“I want you inside me,” I said.

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His eyes flew open. Wide. Blown.

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“Now. While I’m telling you this. While the words are still in the air. I want to feel you inside me while I say the things I should have said for thirteen years.”

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The preparation was quick. My body knew him now. His fingers inside me, slick and careful, and then I was sinking down onto him — slowly, deliberately, my hands braced on his chest, my eyes locked on his, watching his face as I took him in.

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The feeling was completeness. The word I’d been looking for since I found the sketchbooks. Not “seen.” Not “known.” Complete. The sensation of a circuit closing. His body inside mine. The artist inside the subject. All the boundaries dissolved, all the distances collapsed, all the walls down.

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I started to move. Slowly. Rising and falling. This position gave me the control, and the control was the point.

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“I love you,” I said. On a downstroke. “Since third period.” Rise. “Since the cafeteria.” Fall. “Since the hoodie.” Rise. “Since the Post-it notes.” Fall. “Since every morning.” Rise. “Every coffee.” Fall. “Every fire escape.” Rise. “Every wall.” Fall.

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Each word on a movement. Each movement on a word. The rhythm of declaration and sensation merging into something unstoppable.

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His hands were on my hips. Gripping. His face was devastated — tears on his cheeks, mouth open, eyes locked on mine. He was crying while I rode him, and I was crying while I rode him, and neither of us stopped.

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“You’re my person,” I said. The words my mother used. “You have always been my person. The data supports no other conclusion.”

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He came. With my name in his mouth. With his hands pulling my hips down, burying himself as deep as he could go. With tears on his face and love in his eyes and a sound that was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard.

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I came seconds later. Untouched. The orgasm triggered not by friction but by the feeling of him pulsing inside me, by the sight of his face, by the accumulated emotional voltage of a conversation that had started in a closet with a cardboard box and ended here, in this light, with his body inside mine and thirteen years of silence finally, completely, irrevocably broken.

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I collapsed onto his chest. We lay there — tangled, wrecked, weeping — in the afternoon light, on the bed where it all began.

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“You saw the drawings,” he said. After a long time.

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“All of them.”

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“Are you mad?”

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“Those drawings are the most important things anyone has ever made. They’re ten years of data that says I was worth looking at, and I have never believed that until I saw them.”

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“Put them on the shelf,” I said. “In the living room. Where I can see them. I want to look at them on bad days. When my operating system is telling me I’m not enough. I want to see myself the way you see me.”

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He kissed me. Soft, salt-wet, the kiss of two people beginning to heal.

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“Draw me,” I whispered.

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He reached for the sketchbook. The pencil. And in the afternoon light, with my head on his chest and his hand moving across the page, he drew me. Not from memory. Not from across a room. From right here. From the closest he’d ever been.

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The thousand-and-first drawing. The first one I watched him make. The first one that was ours.

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Want to read Alex and Jamie’s full story? Just Friends, My Ass is available now on Kindle Unlimited.

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