Bonus Chapter: The Paint Job

An Exclusive Bonus Scene from Lease My Room, Break My Rules
by Jace Wilder

⚠️ Content Warning: This bonus chapter contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scene), strong language, and adult situations. Intended for readers 18+. This scene takes place after the events of the novel.

Eight months after move-in.

RYAN

The spare room — Jules’s studio — had been white since I’d bought the condo. Builder-grade eggshell, the color of institutional indifference, the shade a developer chose when they wanted to say this is a room without committing to any opinion about what kind.

Jules hated it.

He’d been diplomatic about it for months, the way Jules was diplomatic about everything that bothered him — he didn’t complain, he just gradually surrounded the walls with enough art, fabric swatches, and corkboard that the white became a rumor you could barely see behind the evidence of an actual creative life. But last Tuesday, while I was reviewing logistics reports at the kitchen table, he’d walked in with a paint deck fanned out in his hand like a poker player showing a royal flush.

“Twilight Juniper,” he said. “Deep teal with gray undertones. It’ll make the light from the north window bounce instead of die. It’ll make the wood tones in the desk pop. It’s moody without being cave-like, and it photographs well for client work.”

He’d prepared a presentation. An actual presentation — three mockup images of the room in the new color, a Pinterest board of similar studios, and a handwritten note that said Please, landlord. Let me make it pretty.

I’d said yes before the presentation was finished. Not because I cared about Twilight Juniper, but because Jules asking to change the walls meant Jules was nesting. Permanently. Painting walls was not the behavior of a man who thought he might leave.

Saturday morning. Eight AM. We’d moved everything to the center of the room and draped it in plastic sheeting. The furniture was a cairn of drafting desk, office chair, and monitor stands, wrapped in drop cloths like a modern art installation. Painter’s tape lined the baseboards, the window trim, the ceiling edge — that part was mine, because taping was a precision task and I’d been waiting my entire life for a legitimate reason to deploy the laser level I’d bought on impulse three years ago and never used.

Jules had opinions about the laser level.

“You’re using surveying equipment to tape a spare bedroom.”

“I’m using a laser level to ensure straight lines.”

“It’s painter’s tape, Ryan. It goes on the edge. The edge is already straight. God made it straight. The house made it straight. The tape goes on the straight thing.”

“And now the tape is perfectly parallel to the straight thing, verified by laser.”

He kissed my cheek. “You’re insane and I love you.”

We started painting. Jules took the roller — broad strokes, the main wall, the satisfying transformation of white to deep teal that happened in thick, wet passes. I took the brush for cutting in, the careful work along the tape lines and corners, the detail work that required patience and a steady hand and the particular temperament of a man who found peace in precision.

The room smelled like fresh paint and coffee and the particular Saturday-morning intimacy of two people doing a project together. Music played from Jules’s phone on the floor — his painting playlist, which was heavier on nineties R&B than I’d expected and which I’d stopped pretending to merely tolerate around month four. D’Angelo was doing something sinful with a melody while Jules rolled teal onto the wall in long, even strokes, and the combination — the music, the paint, the morning light hitting his bare arms — was doing something to me that had nothing to do with home improvement.

He was wearing a white undershirt. Old, thin, soft from a hundred washes. The kind of shirt that should’ve been thrown away but that he kept because it was perfect for painting and sleeping and padding around the apartment in the particular state of undress that was his default setting. Gym shorts. Bare feet. A bandana tied around his hair to keep the paint out, which made him look like a particularly attractive handyman in a home renovation show that would never air on basic cable.

Paint was on his forearms. A smear of teal on his left bicep where he’d leaned against the wet wall. A dot on his collarbone, just above the shirt’s neckline, where the roller had flicked.

I was staring.

I was supposed to be cutting in along the window frame, and instead I was standing with a loaded brush in my hand, watching my boyfriend paint a wall, and thinking thoughts that were architecturally incompatible with the task at hand.

He caught me. Of course he caught me — Jules had a sixth sense for being looked at, honed by years of bartending and a lifetime of being beautiful in rooms full of people who noticed.

“You’re not painting,” he said.

“I’m assessing.”

“You’re staring at my ass.”

“I’m assessing your technique. Your roller coverage is inconsistent in the lower quadrant.”

He turned around. Leaned against the roller handle. The undershirt had ridden up on one side, showing a stripe of brown skin above the waistband of his shorts, and the teal paint on his arm caught the light like a tattoo he’d just gotten.

“My roller coverage,” he said, “is immaculate.”

“There’s a thin spot.”

“There’s no thin spot.”

“Bottom left. Right there.” I pointed with the brush. A drop of Twilight Juniper fell from the bristles onto the plastic sheeting between us.

Jules looked at the wall. Looked at me. His mouth did the thing — the left-side-first curl, the asymmetric smile that had been dismantling me since sophomore year and showed no signs of losing potency.

“Show me,” he said.

I crossed the room. Stood behind him. Reached past him with the brush and touched up an area of wall that did not, in fact, need touching up. My chest pressed against his back. My arm extended along his. The brush made a slow, unnecessary stroke across teal that was already perfectly applied.

“See?” My mouth was near his ear. “Thin spot.”

“That’s not a thin spot.” His voice had changed registers. Lower. The particular frequency that meant the conversation had shifted from home improvement to something less suitable for a hardware-store tutorial.

“It was. I fixed it.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“I’m a thorough painter.”

He turned inside the cage of my arms. His back against the wet wall — we’d both realize that later, the teal handprint on the back of his white shirt — and his face inches from mine. Paint-flecked, bandana-wrapped, smelling like latex paint and coffee and the cedar body wash that had colonized my shower and my nervous system simultaneously.

“You have paint on your collarbone,” I said.

“Do I.”

I set the brush on the windowsill. Leaned down. Pressed my mouth to the spot of teal on his collarbone and licked it off.

Paint tasted terrible. Chemical, chalky, not remotely sexy. I didn’t care. His breath caught — a sharp, quiet intake that I felt against my lips — and his hand came up to the back of my neck, fingers sliding into my hair, and the taste of latex paint was immediately and completely overridden by the taste of his skin underneath.

“That paint is non-toxic,” he said. “But it’s not meant to be ingested.”

“I’ll risk it.”

“You’ll risk chemical ingestion to lick my neck.”

“I’d risk considerably more than that.” I kissed the spot where the paint had been. Then the hollow of his throat. Then the tendon that ran from his ear to his shoulder, the one that tightened when he was turned on, which it was doing right now under my mouth. “You have more paint on your arm.”

“I do.”

I took his left arm. The smear of teal on his bicep — a broad, accidental stroke where he’d brushed the wall. I traced it with my tongue. Slow. The flat of my tongue following the line of paint across warm brown skin, and the sound he made — low, involuntary, the particular hum that came from his chest rather than his throat — vibrated against my mouth.

“Ryan.” His hand tightened in my hair. “We’re supposed to be painting.”

“We are painting.” I kissed the inside of his elbow. The crook where the skin was thin and sensitive and where, I’d learned, even light pressure made his breath stutter. “I’m painting you.”

“That’s—” He exhaled hard through his nose. “That’s the worst line you’ve ever used.”

“Is it working?”

His hips pressed forward against mine. The answer was immediate, unambiguous, and straining against the thin fabric of his gym shorts.

“It’s working,” he admitted.

I pulled his undershirt over his head. It caught on the bandana, and we laughed — the clumsy, breathless laugh of two people transitioning from vertical to horizontal while surrounded by painting supplies — and then the shirt was gone and he was bare-chested in the morning light with teal paint streaked across his skin like war paint, and the laugh died in my throat because he was the most beautiful thing in any room he entered, and this room, half-painted in the color he’d chosen to make permanent, was no exception.

I dropped to my knees.

The plastic sheeting crinkled under me. Romantic, it was not. I didn’t care. I pressed my mouth to his stomach — the lean plane of muscle below his navel — and kissed down the trail of dark hair that disappeared beneath his waistband. His hands were in my hair again, both of them now, fingers gripping with the particular pressure that meant don’t stop in the language we’d built over eight months of learning each other’s bodies.

I tugged his shorts down. He helped — lifting his hips off the wall, the wet teal smearing across his lower back — and then the shorts were around his ankles and he was hard and exposed and leaning against a freshly painted wall while I knelt on a drop cloth in a room that smelled like home improvement and want.

I took him in my mouth.

Not teasing. Not slow. The kind of immediate, deep, committed attention that I’d learned to give after months of Jules teaching me what he liked — teaching me with sounds and hands and the particular shift of his hips that meant there, exactly there, don’t you dare move. I hollowed my cheeks, pressed my tongue flat along the underside, and took him deep enough that my nose brushed skin. He swore. In Spanish — the language that surfaced when English couldn’t contain what he was feeling, the particular profanity of a man being undone in his mother tongue.

“Dios — fuck —” His head tipped back against the wall. More teal in his hair now, the bandana pushed askew. His hips moved — small, controlled thrusts that he was trying to keep gentle and failing, because I’d figured out three months ago that Jules’s control fractured when I went deep and slow and looked up at him while I did it.

I looked up at him.

His eyes were half-closed, his lips parted, his chest rising and falling with the particular rhythm of a man who was losing the battle between patience and desperation. The morning light from the north window hit him sideways — every line of his body illuminated, the teal paint on his skin catching light, the tattoos on his arms vivid against the muscle.

“You look incredible,” I said. Pulling back just enough to speak. My hand replacing my mouth, stroking slow. “You look like a painting.”

“That’s — ah — that’s on brand for the room.”

I laughed against him. Took him back into my mouth. His fingers twisted in my hair and his hips stuttered forward, and the sound that came out of him — raw, wrecked, the guttural moan of a man being worshiped on his knees on a Saturday morning — echoed off the half-painted walls.

I pulled off before he finished. He made a sound of protest — desperate, impatient, the particular whine that I’d discovered was my favorite sound in any language — and I stood up and kissed him with the taste of him still on my tongue.

“Bedroom?” he managed. Against my mouth.

“No.” I gripped his hips. Turned him. Pressed him face-first against the wall — gently, carefully, my hand between his cheek and the wet paint, but his chest hit teal and he’d have a mirror image of Twilight Juniper across his skin for the rest of the day. “Here.”

“We’re going to ruin the paint job.”

“We’ll do a second coat.”

He laughed. Breathless, wrecked, delighted. The laugh of a man who’d fallen in love with someone uptight and precise and was watching that person press him against a wet wall and ruin a morning’s work without a single regret.

“Lube,” he said. Practical even now.

I reached into my back pocket. Pulled out the small bottle I’d started carrying three months ago, after the third time we’d ended up having sex in a location that wasn’t the bedroom and I’d had to improvise with whatever was available. Jules had teased me mercilessly about the pocket lube — called it my emergency preparedness kit, said it was the most Ryan thing he’d ever witnessed, asked if I’d added it to a spreadsheet — but he’d also stopped complaining about logistics, which I considered a win.

“You planned this,” he said. Watching me over his shoulder.

“I plan everything.”

“You laser-leveled the tape so you’d have an excuse to come over here and seduce me.”

“I laser-leveled the tape because straight lines matter.” I slicked my fingers. Pressed close behind him, my mouth at his ear. “The seduction was a secondary objective.”

“Secondary —”

I pressed a finger inside him and the word dissolved into a sound that was not a word. His hands flattened against the wall — teal between his fingers, paint under his palms, the artist leaving handprints on his own canvas. I worked him open with the patience I’d learned from him, the attentiveness that had replaced my earlier fumbling with something fluent, something that knew his body’s architecture the way I knew the floor plan of the apartment: intimately, completely, with the confidence of a man who’d studied every room.

A second finger. He pressed back against my hand, and the movement was hungry, impatient, the physical demand of a man who didn’t want patience anymore, who wanted to be filled and claimed and taken in a half-painted room on a Saturday morning while D’Angelo crooned from a phone on the floor.

“Now,” he said. “Ryan. Now.”

I freed myself. Slicked up. Positioned. And pressed inside him in one long, slow, devastating stroke that made both of us groan — the twin sound echoing off wet walls, absorbed by plastic sheeting, accompanied by the obscene crinkle of the drop cloth under our feet.

He was tight and hot and perfect, and the angle — standing, pressed against a wall, his back arched and his palms flat against teal paint — was different from the bed. Deeper. More direct. The kind of angle that hit the spot on every thrust, that gave me no room for control and no reason to want it.

I gripped his hips. Both hands, thumbs pressing into the muscle above his ass, the hold that I’d learned was possessive and grounding and that made Jules push back against me like he was trying to eliminate every molecule of space between our bodies.

I thrust. Slow at first — the full, measured strokes that I’d been teaching myself for months, the ones that made him feel every inch, the ones that drew out the tension instead of chasing the release. His forehead dropped against the wall. His hands curled into fists against the paint. Teal smeared under his palms like abstract art, handprints and finger-trails decorating the surface we’d spent all morning perfecting.

“Harder,” he said.

I gave him harder. My hips snapped forward and he gasped — the sharp, punched-out sound that meant I’d found the angle — and I kept it. Found a rhythm that was relentless and precise, each thrust targeted, each one landing on the spot that made his knees buckle and his voice climb.

“God — right there — don’t stop —”

I didn’t stop. My mouth found his neck — the tendon, the one that tightened, the one that made him shiver when I bit down. I bit. Not hard — just enough. Enough to feel his whole body clench around me, enough to draw the ragged, destroyed sound that was half my name and half something in Spanish I didn’t understand but felt in my spine.

“You’re mine,” I said. Against his neck. Between thrusts. The possessiveness that had started as jealousy in a bar eight months ago and had been refined into something cleaner — not ownership, but declaration. “This room is yours, and you’re mine, and I’m going to paint every wall in this apartment whatever color you want, and then I’m going to do this in every single one of them.”

He moaned. Full-throated, unashamed, the kind of sound that would absolutely carry through Mrs. Ortiz’s shared wall and that neither of us pretended to care about anymore.

“Every room?” He was barely verbal. Rocking back against me. His hand left the wall to reach between his legs, and I caught it — pulled it back, pinned it gently against the teal above his head.

“Let me.” My other hand wrapped around him from behind. Stroked him in time with my thrusts — the coordinated rhythm I’d been practicing for months, the one that required the multitasking skills of a man who managed logistics for a living and who had, it turned out, found the one context in which those skills were genuinely sexy.

His head fell back against my shoulder. Eyes closed, mouth open, throat exposed. The bandana had slipped completely off, lying on the drop cloth, and his dark hair was streaked with teal. Paint on his chest, his hands, his back. He looked debauched. He looked claimed. He looked like a man being taken apart in a room he’d chosen to make permanent, and the symbolism of that — if the English major in me was allowed to surface mid-coitus — was not lost on either of us.

I stroked faster. Thrust deeper. The rhythm tightened into something urgent and inevitable, the two of us chasing the same edge, and his sounds were getting higher and more broken and my name was in there somewhere, tangled with Spanish and profanity and the word please repeated like a prayer.

“Come for me,” I said. Mouth against his ear. Hand working him in the grip I’d learned by trial and extensive, enthusiastic error. “Come for me, Jules. Right here. In your studio. In our home.”

He came with a shout that the entire building heard. His whole body locked — spine arched, hands pressed flat against teal paint, muscles clenching around me in rhythmic pulses that pulled my own orgasm out of me like a tide. I buried myself deep and held, and the release was a flood — white-hot, total, the kind that started at the base of the spine and radiated outward until every cell was singing, until the only thought left was his name and the color of the walls and the feeling of his body against mine and the absolute, unshakeable certainty that this — this man, this room, this life — was the thing I’d been terrified of wanting and would spend the rest of my life being grateful I’d found.

After.

We were on the floor. Sitting on the plastic sheeting, backs against the one wall we hadn’t painted yet, legs tangled, passing a water bottle back and forth. The room was a disaster. Teal everywhere — on the walls (mostly intentional), on us (entirely not), on the drop cloths, on the roller that had fallen at some point and left a streak across the plastic.

Jules examined his chest. Teal handprints — mine — on his ribs. A smear across his stomach. Paint in his hair, on his neck, on places paint had no business being.

“We need a second coat,” he said.

“On the walls or on you?”

He grinned. The full grin, both sides, the one that crinkled his eyes and showed the gap between his bottom teeth that I loved for no rational reason.

“Both.” He leaned his head against my shoulder. “We ruined the first coat.”

“We improved it. The wall has texture now.”

“The wall has handprints and an ass print.”

I looked. He was right — there was a distinctly Jules-shaped smudge on the main wall, approximately ass-height, surrounded by palm prints and finger-drag marks that told a story no visitor to this studio would ever need to hear.

“We’re definitely doing a second coat,” I said.

“After a shower.”

Neither of us moved. The morning light came through the north window — the same light Jules had talked about in his presentation, the light that would make the teal bounce instead of die — and it fell across our paint-streaked bodies and the wrecked room and the supplies we’d abandoned mid-project, and the light was warm, and the room was quiet, and the man beside me was breathing slow and steady against my shoulder.

“I love this room,” Jules said.

“It’s half-painted and covered in bodily fluids.”

“Exactly.” He pressed his mouth to my shoulder. “It’s perfect.”

I put my arm around him. Pulled him close. Kissed the top of his paint-streaked head.

Through the wall, barely audible, the television in Mrs. Ortiz’s apartment increased in volume.

We both laughed.

Second coat could wait.

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