🔥 Bonus Chapter: “The Door Between”

Next Door to Trouble — Exclusive Bonus Content
by Jace Wilder

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The Door Between

Riley

The contractor left at 4:17 p.m.

I know the exact time because Micah noted it in his phone — of course he did, of course Micah Lawson logged the completion timestamp of a residential construction project the way a normal person might note, say, the score of a basketball game or the name of a song they liked. He typed it into his calendar app with his thumbs and said “project complete, 4:17 p.m.” under his breath and I loved him so much in that moment that my chest physically hurt.

The door was simple. Wood. No lock. It stood in the center of what used to be the shared wall between 7A and 7B — the wall that had been a noise complaint and a boundary and a bridge and a metaphor for every barrier we’d ever built between ourselves and the terrifying possibility of being known.

Now it was a door. Our door. Open.

I stood on my side — 7A, the chaos side, the paint-stained floor and the disaster corner and the couch that had survived a wine stain and a love story — and looked through the doorway into Micah’s apartment. His side. The clean counters and the organized fridge and the desk by the window with the good light.

Two apartments. One space. Connected.

Micah was standing on his side, looking back at me through the same doorway. He’d changed out of the clothes he’d worn during the construction — the old T-shirt, the joggers that got dusty from the plaster. He was wearing the green henley now. The one from the first doorway argument. The one that matched his eyes and sat across his shoulders in a way that made my brain go offline.

He’d put it on deliberately. I could tell by the way he was looking at me — steady, certain, the particular expression he wore when he’d made a decision and intended to see it through.

“We should christen it,” I said.

“The door.”

“The door. The doorframe. The wall around the door. The general vicinity.”

“That’s a lot of christening.”

“I’m ambitious.”

Micah walked through the doorway. Into my apartment. The act was mundane — a man walking through a door, the kind of thing that happened a billion times a day in buildings all over the world — but it wasn’t mundane. It was the first time. The first time someone walked from his space into mine without going through the hallway, without knocking, without the mediation of a corridor and two separate doors and the particular geography of separateness.

He crossed the threshold and stood in front of me and his eyes were bright and his mouth was soft and his bare feet were on my paint-stained floor and I thought: This is what we built. Not the door. The willingness to walk through it.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

“I’m in your apartment.”

“You’re in our apartment.”

His jaw worked. The tell — the tightening that meant the feeling was bigger than his face could hold. Then he kissed me.

Not softly. Not the tender, post-crisis, we’re-healing-together kisses of the last few weeks. This was the henley kiss. The first-doorway-argument energy — the friction, the heat, the six weeks of pretending that the most disruptive thing about the other person was the noise. Except now there was no pretending. Now there was a door where the wall used to be and Micah’s mouth was on mine and his hands were on my waist and the henley was coming off because I was pulling it over his head before my brain had consulted my hands about the decision.

“We haven’t even had dinner,” Micah said, his voice muffled by the fabric.

“Dinner can wait.”

“I was going to make risotto.”

“Micah. I love your risotto. I love you. But if you mention Arborio rice right now I will lose my mind.”

The henley hit the floor. His chest was bare and warm and my hands were on it immediately — palms flat against his sternum, fingers spread, feeling his heartbeat, which was fast and strong and completely at odds with the controlled expression he was trying very hard to maintain.

“The doorframe,” I said.

“What about it?”

“I want you against the doorframe.”

His pupils blew. The gray-green irises narrowed to thin rings around darkness and his breathing changed — from controlled to responsive, from measured to hungry — and I watched the composure crack the way I’d watched it crack a dozen times before and it never got less devastating.

“The doorframe,” he repeated.

“Our doorframe. The one that didn’t exist yesterday. The one that exists because you made a cost-benefit analysis and presented it to Frank with contractor bids and structural assessments.”

“The structural assessments were necessary.”

“The structural assessments were foreplay and you know it.”

I pushed him backward. Gently, firmly — both hands on his chest, walking him toward the door, toward the threshold, toward the new wood frame that smelled like sawdust and possibility. His back hit the doorframe and the sound it made — the solid thud of a man’s body against a structure he’d built for them — sent a bolt of heat through me so intense I had to close my eyes for a second.

When I opened them, Micah was looking at me from the doorframe with an expression I’d only seen a handful of times. Not the controlled composure. Not the careful, measured attention. Something under all of it. Raw. Hungry. The first draft.

“Take your shirt off,” he said.

I took my shirt off.

“Come here.”

I came. Stepped into the doorway, into the threshold, into the space between his apartment and mine that was now just space — not a boundary, not a gap, just air and wood and the narrow, charged distance between two men who wanted each other.

His hands found my hips. Pulled me against him. The full-body contact — chest to chest, hip to hip, the particular electricity of bare skin against bare skin in a doorway that was hours old and already the most important piece of architecture in the building — made us both exhale. A shared breath. A single sound from two throats.

“I built this for you,” Micah said. His voice was low. Rough. The underneath voice — the one that only came out in the dark, in the bed, in the moments where his control dissolved. Except it was 4:30 in the afternoon and the light was golden and he was saying it with his eyes open. “The proposal. The assessments. The contractor. I built this door because I never want a wall between us again. Not this wall. Not any wall.”

“Micah—”

“And I want to christen it with you. Thoroughly. With the methodology.”

I laughed — the shaky one, the real one. “The methodology.”

“You like the methodology.”

“I love the methodology.”

He kissed me. Hard. His hands slid from my hips to my ass and gripped and the sound I made was not dignified and I did not care. He pulled me tighter against him and I could feel him — hard, ready, pressing against my hip through two layers of fabric that were suddenly the most offensive pieces of clothing in the history of textiles.

“Off,” I said against his mouth. “Everything off.”

Everything came off. Fast, graceless, the fumbling urgency of two people who had spent months learning each other’s bodies and still couldn’t undress fast enough when the want hit this hard. Micah’s joggers. My jeans. The boxers that got caught on my ankle because my coordination ceased to exist when Micah’s hands were on me.

And then we were bare. In the doorway. Afternoon sun from his window on one side, the amber glow of my floor lamp on the other. Standing in the threshold between two lives that were now one life, and the light from both sides fell on us simultaneously, warm and golden, and Micah looked at me with his editor’s eyes and said: “You’re the most beautiful thing in either apartment. And I include the structural integrity of the building.”

The callback hit me in the sternum. The 2 a.m. zine conversation. The first real thing. Where it all started.

“I love you,” I said, because it was true and because I’d never stop saying it and because he’d asked me to say it until the words wore a groove in the air between us and the plaster knew them.

“I love you too,” he said. “Now turn around.”

I turned around.

Faced the doorway. My hands on the new wood frame — smooth, sanded, still smelling like sawdust. Micah’s body behind me, warm and solid, his chest against my back, his mouth at my ear.

“This doorframe,” he murmured, “is rated to support approximately 400 pounds of distributed load.”

“Are you giving me engineering specs right now?”

“I’m telling you it can hold us.”

“Prove it.”

He proved it.

What followed was — there wasn’t a word. I’d used all the words. Every superlative, every metaphor, every breathless attempt to capture what it felt like when Micah Lawson turned the full force of his attention to taking me apart. But this was different from every other time. This was in the doorway. In the threshold. In the exact point where his world met mine and the meeting was physical and architectural and spiritual simultaneously.

His hands were everywhere. My chest, my stomach, my hips, the inside of my thighs. He touched me with the focused attention of a man editing the most important manuscript of his career — finding what worked, doing it again, cataloging every response with the precision of someone who believed that attention was the highest form of devotion.

His mouth was on my neck. The spot. The spot — below my ear, the one that produced the 40% stronger response, the one he’d discovered during the week and had been weaponizing ever since. His lips and tongue and the scrape of teeth and I was making sounds I couldn’t control, my hands gripping the doorframe, the wood smooth and solid under my palms.

“Good,” Micah whispered against my skin. “You’re so good, Riley.”

The praise kink. The one we’d discovered in the first week, the one that lived in Micah’s need to hear it and Riley’s need to give it. Except now it was Micah giving it. Telling me I was good, in his calm, precise, editorial voice, while his hands did things that were the opposite of calm and his body pressed against mine with an urgency that said the editor was offline and the man was fully, completely present.

“Say it again,” I breathed.

“You’re good. You’re perfect. You’re the most extraordinary—”

“Micah.”

His hand wrapped around me. Firm. Sure. The grip of a man who knew exactly what he was holding and intended to hold it with the same care and precision he brought to everything — manuscripts, kitchens, pour-over coffee, the life of the person he loved. He stroked slowly. Deliberately. The same maddening, agonizing, devastatingly controlled pace that he used every time, the pace that said I’m not rushing because you’re worth the time.

I pressed my forehead against the doorframe. The wood was cool against my skin. Behind me, Micah was warm. Two temperatures. Two textures. The solid, structural permanence of something built and the living, breathing heat of someone chosen.

“Faster,” I said.

“No.”

“Micah, please—”

“I’m savoring. This is the christening. You don’t rush a christening.”

“You are the most infuriating—”

He twisted his wrist. Changed the angle. Found the exact rhythm my body was begging for and delivered it with the unerring accuracy of a man who had been studying me for months and had accumulated enough data to write a peer-reviewed paper on what made Riley Sharp fall apart.

I fell apart.

Not quietly. Not with restraint. With a moan that came from somewhere deeper than my throat and a grip on the doorframe so tight the wood creaked and Micah’s name on my lips like a prayer or a curse or both, because with him it was always both, the sacred and the profane occupying the same space the way we occupied the same doorway.

He held me through it. One arm around my waist, the other still moving, drawing it out, extending the aftershocks until my knees buckled and he was the only thing holding me up — Micah and the doorframe, the two most structurally sound things in my life.

“Your turn,” I said, when my brain came back online. “Turn around.”

“Riley—”

“Turn. Around.”

He turned around. Hands on the doorframe. The position that had been mine ten seconds ago was now his, and the mirror of it — the symmetry, the exchange, the equal and opposite nature of two people who took turns holding each other up — was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen.

I pressed myself against his back. Kissed the nape of his neck. Found the spot between his shoulder blades that made him shiver and the spot on his hip that made his breath catch and the trail of dark hair below his navel that I followed with my fingers while his hands white-knuckled the doorframe.

“You’re good,” I whispered against his skin. The words he’d needed to hear since he was fourteen. The words that reached past every wall and every system and every carefully maintained schedule. “You’re so good, Micah. You built this. You built us. You’re the steadiest, bravest, most extraordinary man I’ve ever known.”

He made the sound. The one from the first night — the eyes-open night, the vulnerability night. The sound that came from the place where control ended and trust began. Low, shaking, the sound of a man who was letting go of everything he’d been holding since he was a boy in a kitchen with a sponge.

My hand found him. Wrapped around him. Gave him the same deliberate, focused attention he’d given me — slow at first, then building, reading his body the way I’d learned to read it over months of study and devotion and the particular, obsessive attention of a man in love.

“Riley,” he breathed. “Riley, I’m—”

“I know. Let go.”

“I can’t—”

“You can. I’ve got you. The structure holds. Let go.”

He let go.

The sound he made was my name. Just my name. Five letters. One syllable. Said with the full, unedited, first-draft honesty of a man who had stopped controlling the narrative and let the story write itself.

We slid down the doorframe. Both of us. A graceless, boneless descent that ended with us sitting on the floor, tangled together, straddling the threshold — half in his apartment, half in mine. Breathing. Laughing. Holding on.

“The doorframe held,” Micah said.

“The doorframe held.”

“I told you. 400 pounds of distributed load.”

“You’re quoting engineering specs while naked on the floor.”

“The engineering is relevant.”

“The engineering is foreplay.”

“Apparently.”

I pressed my face against his shoulder. Breathed him in. Cedar and soap and sawdust from the construction and the warm, specific scent that was just Micah — the scent I’d first smelled through a wall and now smelled everywhere, in every room, because every room was our room now.

“I love you,” I said into his shoulder.

“I love you too.”

“The risotto can wait?”

“The risotto can wait.”

“Good. Because I have plans for the kitchen counter.”

“The kitchen counter is a food preparation surface.”

“Not tonight it isn’t.”

Micah looked at me. On the floor. In the doorway. Naked and flushed and smiling the real smile — the one I’d built from a ghost into a permanent thing.

“The kitchen counter,” he said. “The couch. The desk. The disaster corner. We’re christening everything.”

“Everything?”

“Every surface in both apartments. It’s a large project. It may take all night.”

“Micah Lawson. You just project-managed our sex life.”

“I optimized our sex life. There’s a difference.”

I kissed him. In the doorway. On the floor. In the space between two apartments that were now one home, built by a man who understood structure and a man who understood chaos and the door between them that proved you didn’t have to choose.

You just had to knock.

And someone had to open.

And then you walked through together.

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