Lease My Body, Not My Heart by Jace Wilder

Addendum A

A Lease My Body, Not My Heart Bonus Chapter
by Jace Wilder

One year after the original lease date. The farmhouse. A kitchen drawer. And a question with no termination clause.

⚠️ This bonus chapter contains explicit MM sexual content. It takes place after the events of Lease My Body, Not My Heart and contains major spoilers. Read the full novel first.

Addendum A: Anniversary

Adrian

The ring had been in my desk drawer for six weeks.

Not the kitchen drawer—that would have been too obvious, and Nico opened the kitchen drawer seventeen times a day for pens, takeout menus, and the hot sauce he kept migrating from the pantry because he claimed it “belonged near the stove.” The desk drawer was safer. Nico respected the desk. He’d colonized every other surface in the penthouse—textbooks on the nightstand, sneakers by the door, crosswords on the coffee table, his grandmother’s pillow on the couch—but the desk remained sovereign territory.

The ring was platinum. A band with a single channel of black diamonds that caught light without demanding it. I’d chosen it the way I chose everything before Nico—with research, precision, and a spreadsheet I would deny under oath—and the way I chose everything after Nico: because something in my chest said that one with the same certainty that had said that one when his photo loaded on my phone fourteen months ago.

Today was the anniversary. One year since the effective date of a companionship agreement that had lasted approximately eleven weeks before being rendered meaningless by the inconvenient reality that I had fallen in love with the companion.

The farmhouse smelled like cedar and October. Nico walked through the front door, dropped his bag, and breathed in—eyes closed, his whole body settling the way it always did when we arrived here.

“God, I love this place,” he said.

“You say that every time.”

“Because it’s true every time.” He turned to me. Smiled. The real smile. “What’s the plan?”

“Dinner. Fire. Wine.”

“That’s not a plan. That’s a Tuesday.”

“It’s our anniversary.”

“The anniversary of you trying to lease my body?”

“The anniversary of you letting me.”

We cooked together. His rice and beans, my roasted vegetables. The same meal from the first farmhouse trip. We ate on the floor by the fire. Cushions, blanket, his legs tangled with mine.

“Adrian. You’re doing the jaw thing.”

I stood up. Went to the kitchen. Opened the drawer—the one where the original contract had lived during our first visit. The contract wasn’t there anymore. In its place, I’d put the ring box that morning while Nico gathered firewood.

I brought it back to the fire. Sat across from him. Held the box in both hands.

Nico looked at the box. Looked at me. His face opened completely—unguarded, total, devastating.

“One year ago, I offered you a contract. Seven pages. Twelve months. Every clause was designed to prevent exactly what happened—which is that I fell in love with you so completely that the contract became the most useless document I’ve ever signed, and I’ve signed a lot of documents.”

He laughed. The laugh was wet.

“You broke every term. You violated the emotional boundaries clause on week one. You invalidated the separate quarters provision by week three. You made the termination clause irrelevant by existing.” I opened the box. The ring caught the firelight. “I’m not filing anything. I’m not structuring anything. I’m asking.”

“No contract. No terms. No termination clause. Just a question and an answer.” My hand was shaking. I wanted him to see. “Nico. Will you marry me?”

He was crying. The good kind. “You put the ring in the kitchen drawer. Where the contract used to be.”

“I’m aware of the symbolism.”

“You insufferable, beautiful, emotionally reformed control freak.” He took my face in his hands. “Yes. A thousand times. Yes to every version of this question, including the ones you’re too emotionally constipated to phrase correctly.” He kissed me. Hard. Salt and wine and firelight. “Yes, Adrian. I’ll marry you.”

I slid the ring onto his finger. It fit. Of course it fit—I’d measured his ring size while he slept, using a strip of paper and a precision that Dani had called “deeply unhinged and incredibly romantic.”

The kiss after the ring was different from every kiss before it.

Slow at first. Celebratory. His hands on my face, the ring warm between his finger and my cheekbone. Then slow stopped being enough. His hands slid to my chest, to the hem of my shirt, pulling. The fire was warm and the floor was soft and the ring was on his finger and there were no contracts between us—just two men on the floor of a farmhouse that smelled like cedar, choosing each other permanently.

He pulled my shirt over my head. I pulled his. The firelight painted us in amber—the same light, the same room, the same floor where I’d first said beautiful and he’d first ridden me with his eyes open.

He pushed me back against the cushions. Climbed on top of me. The ring glinted on his finger as he pressed both hands flat against my chest.

“I want to feel this,” he said, eyes dark, face lit by fire. “I want to remember every second of the first time I fuck my fiancé.”

Fiancé. The word hit me like a structural event. Not companion. Not arrangement partner. A word that meant future and permanent and mine.

“Say it again.”

“Fiancé.” He rolled his hips against mine. I groaned. “My fiancé. The man I’m going to marry. Who proposed with a ring he hid in a kitchen drawer because he’s a sentimental disaster disguised as a CEO.”

He undressed us both with devastating competence. Jeans unbuttoned, pulled down, kicked away. Boxer briefs last—his fingers hooking the waistband, dragging them down slowly, eyes locked on mine because the eye contact rule was still in effect. Would always be in effect.

When we were bare, firelight on skin, he straddled me and prepped himself while I watched—my hands on his thighs, my breathing wrecked at the sight of him kneeling over me, head tilted back, the ring glinting on his finger as his hand worked behind him. The sounds he made—small, bitten-off—were more erotic than anything I’d heard in fourteen months, because these sounds came with a ring and a yes and the knowledge that every sound after this was forever.

He sank down onto me slowly. Deliberately. His hand on my chest, the ring pressing against my sternum. The cold metal and the warm skin and the feeling of him around me—tight, hot, impossibly perfect—combined into a sensation that obliterated language entirely.

“There,” he breathed. “Right there. Stay.”

I stayed.

He moved. Slow, rolling, the rhythm that was ours. My hands found his hips—not gripping, just present.

“You’re looking at me like you’re solving a math problem,” he said, voice strained, hips rolling faster.

“I’m looking at you like I can’t believe you’re mine.”

His rhythm faltered. His eyes went soft, then wet. “You can’t just say that while you’re inside me. That’s not fair.”

“I love you,” I said. Easily. Without the dam. “I love you, Nico. I have loved you since the photo. I have loved you badly and then well and I am going to love you correctly for the rest of my life.”

“Correctly,” he gasped, rocking harder. “Only you would use the word correctly during sex.”

“Thoroughly. Comprehensively. With sustained attention to—”

“Shut up and fuck me.”

I shut up. I fucked him.

I rolled us. Pressed him into the cushions. His legs wrapped around my waist. The ring caught firelight as his fingers gripped my shoulder. I drove into him with a rhythm that was no longer slow—just raw, urgent, joyful need.

“Harder,” he said. Not a request. A demand. “I want to feel this tomorrow—”

I gave him harder. One hand braced beside his head, the other gripping his hip. He cried out—sharp, loud—and his nails dragged down my back. I hissed and drove deeper. His spine arched off the floor. I put my mouth on his throat and sucked a mark there while I fucked him into the floorboards of the house where I’d first said beautiful and where I’d just asked him to stay forever.

“I’m close—Adrian—”

“Look at me.”

He opened his eyes. Firelit. Wet. Wearing my ring and taking my body and looking at me like I was the only solid thing in a world gone molten.

I wrapped my hand around his cock. Stroked in time with my thrusts. His whole body seized—back arching, thighs clenching, a sound torn from his chest that was my name and I love you and yes all tangled into something that wasn’t a word but was the truest thing either of us had ever said.

He came across his stomach, across my hand, across the space between us that had once been governed by a seven-page contract and was now governed by nothing except the permanent decision to be here. Together. Without fine print.

I followed. Buried deep, forehead on his collarbone, the ring cold against the back of my neck where his hand gripped me. I said his name. I said mine. I said forever, and for the first time the word wasn’t a threat. It was a promise.

Afterward, we lay tangled on the floor. The fire had burned to embers. His head was on my chest. His hand was over my heart. The ring glinted in the dying light.

“Addendum A,” he murmured against my neck.

“What?”

“The bonus clause. The part that wasn’t in the original contract.” He lifted his head. “Addendum A: The part where he keeps him forever. No terms. No conditions. No fine print.”

I kissed his forehead. His cheekbone. The corner of his eye where a tear had dried.

“No fine print,” I agreed. “Just us.”

He fell asleep against my chest. The fire died to embers. The farmhouse creaked in the dark. And the ring on his finger glinted one last time—a small, permanent, contractually unbinding promise that I intended to keep for the rest of my life.

No termination clause. No exit strategy. Just this. Just him. Just home.

Thank you for reading Adrian and Nico’s story. If you loved them, please leave a review — it helps more than you know.