The Open House

A Now Hiring: Our Boyfriend Bonus Chapter
by Jace Wilder

⚠️ This bonus chapter contains spoilers for Now Hiring: Our Boyfriend. Read the novel first for the full experience. Content warning: explicit MMM sexual content, graphic language, and three men who should not be left unsupervised in empty real estate.

The Open House

The converted schoolhouse in Germantown had fourteen-foot ceilings, original hardwood floors, and a kitchen large enough for three men who could not cook to fail in simultaneously.

Lucas stood in the center of the empty living room and turned slowly, his camera instinct cataloging the light. The windows were tall and arched — former classroom windows, industrial steel frames, the kind of glass that scattered afternoon sun into warm geometric patterns across bare floors. The walls were exposed brick on two sides and restored plaster on the other two. The space was enormous and completely empty and smelled like sawdust and possibility.

“The basement could be a darkroom,” Evan said. He was already pacing, doing his structural assessment — knocking on walls, examining window frames, crouching to inspect the baseboard joins. “The light seal would need work, but the bones are right.”

“And that corner room upstairs is perfect for an office.” Mac pointed toward the staircase. “Glass walls. Enough space for a desk and a nervous breakdown. Everything I need.”

“Three workspaces,” Lucas said. “We actually found it.”

The realtor — a brisk woman named Sandra who had shown them four properties without asking a single question about their sleeping arrangements — excused herself to the porch to take a call. “Take your time,” she said. “Explore. The master bedroom is upstairs on the left.”

The front door closed behind her.

The house was very quiet.

“Master bedroom,” Mac said.

“Mac,” Evan said.

“I’m just observing that she said master bedroom. On the left. Upstairs. Where we could theoretically go. To observe the dimensions.”

“The dimensions,” Lucas repeated.

“Of the room. For furniture-planning purposes.”

Lucas looked at Evan. Evan looked at Lucas. The specific, three-way negotiation that had become their private language fired silently — a microsecond of eye contact that contained an entire conversation.

“Furniture planning,” Evan said. “Upstairs.”

They went upstairs.

The master bedroom was absurd.

Twenty feet by eighteen. Two walls of windows. Afternoon light flooding the bare hardwood in wide golden bars. An en suite bathroom visible through an arched doorway. And absolutely no furniture whatsoever — just empty space and warm light and the specific, charged quiet of a room waiting to be claimed.

“Our king bed would go there,” Mac said, pointing at the far wall. “Against the brick. With the windows on both sides so Lucas gets his morning light.”

“Our bed,” Lucas said. Not correcting. Tasting the pronoun. It still felt new in his mouth — our, singular possessive, three owners.

“Our bed,” Evan confirmed. He was standing by the window, backlit, his shoulders filling the frame the way they always did. “I’d put the headboard against the west wall. The morning sun hits from the east, so no one gets blinded.”

“You’ve been planning this,” Lucas said.

“I’ve been drafting it,” Evan admitted. “In my head. For weeks.”

“Show me.”

Evan blinked. “Show you what?”

“Where the bed goes. Where we sleep. Where I wake up.” Lucas crossed the empty room. Stood in the spot Evan had indicated — the west wall, the bare brick, the place where a headboard would rest. He pressed his back against the brick and looked at both of them. “Show me what this room looks like with us in it.”

Mac’s composure lasted approximately four seconds.

He crossed the room in three strides, pressed Lucas against the brick wall, and kissed him with the specific, consuming hunger of a man who had been looking at empty rooms and imagining them full for six months and had finally, irrevocably, reached the limit of his patience.

Lucas kissed him back. His hands found Mac’s belt, working the buckle with the efficient familiarity of months of practice. “The realtor,” he murmured against Mac’s mouth.

“Is on a phone call.”

“Mac—”

“I will be extremely quick.”

“That’s not the selling point you think it is.”

Evan appeared behind Mac. His hands found Lucas’s jaw over Mac’s shoulder, tilting his face up, and the three of them compressed against the brick wall — Lucas’s back on cold brick, Mac’s chest against his, Evan’s body heat behind Mac, a three-layer architecture of want.

“We shouldn’t,” Evan said, while simultaneously pulling Lucas’s shirt from his jeans.

“We absolutely should not,” Lucas agreed, while unbuttoning Mac’s shirt with both hands.

“We are one hundred percent doing this,” Mac said, and dropped to his knees on the hardwood floor.

He opened Lucas’s jeans. Freed him. Took him in his mouth without preamble — fast, hot, the zero-to-devastation speed that Mac brought to everything he decided he wanted. Lucas’s head hit the brick behind him. His hand found Mac’s hair, the other reaching blindly for Evan.

Evan took his hand. Intertwined their fingers. Then dropped to his knees beside Mac.

Two men on their knees on the bare floor of an empty bedroom in a house none of them owned yet, and Lucas looked down at both of them — Mac’s mouth working him, Evan kneeling beside, waiting, his hazel eyes dark with intent — and the image was so staggering that Lucas heard himself make a sound that would have echoed off the high ceilings if the room had contained any furniture to absorb it.

It did not.

The sound bounced off bare walls and empty corners and came back to them amplified, and Mac groaned around Lucas’s cock in response, and the vibration made Lucas’s vision flicker.

Mac pulled off. Looked at Evan. The shorthand. “Your turn.”

Evan replaced him. Slow where Mac had been fast — the patient, thorough, devastatingly attentive technique that had made Lucas lose the ability to be quiet for the first time in his life, months ago, on a theater floor. He took Lucas deep, his broad hands gripping Lucas’s thighs, his tongue doing things that should have been illegal in a residential property.

Mac stood. Kissed Lucas while Evan worked below — and the configuration, Mac’s mouth on his and Evan’s mouth around him, was the specific, annihilating convergence that Lucas had learned to crave and never, ever took for granted.

“Stop,” Lucas gasped. “Stop, I’m going to — and I want — I need—”

Evan pulled off. Looked up. Lips swollen, glasses crooked — wait, Evan wasn’t wearing glasses. Mac was wearing Evan’s glasses. When had that happened? Lucas’s brain was not processing details correctly.

“What do you need?” Evan asked from his knees.

“Both of you. Now. On the floor.”

Mac looked at the bare hardwood. “We don’t have—”

Evan reached into his jacket pocket and produced a strip of condoms and a travel-sized bottle.

Mac stared at him. “You brought supplies to a real estate showing.”

“I brought supplies to every real estate showing. This is the fourth house. I’ve been carrying these since Fishtown.”

“Evan Shaw. You planned this.”

“I planned for the possibility. There’s a difference.”

“I love you both so much,” Lucas said, and pulled them both down to the floor.

The hardwood was warm from the afternoon sun. Not comfortable — nothing about having sex on a bare floor in an empty house while a realtor took a phone call ten feet below was comfortable — but the discomfort was part of it. The urgency. The absurdity. The specific, reckless joy of three men who had fought for the right to be together and were now claiming a space that didn’t belong to them yet with the confidence of people who knew what they wanted and had stopped waiting for permission.

Lucas lay on his back on the sunlit floor. Mac knelt between his legs. Evan positioned himself beside Lucas’s head, and Lucas turned and took him in his mouth while Mac opened him up with careful, thorough fingers.

“God, you should see yourselves,” Mac said, his voice wrecked. “In the sunlight. On this floor. In our house.”

Our house. The words hit Lucas harder than the fingers. He moaned around Evan, and Evan’s hand found his hair, cradling his head off the hard floor.

Mac entered him slowly. The stretch and the fullness and the bare floor beneath his back and Evan in his mouth and the sunlight pouring through the arched windows — every sensation layered, compounding, building toward something enormous.

Mac set a rhythm. Not gentle — urgent, purposeful, every stroke claiming the space the way Evan’s hands claimed old buildings and Lucas’s camera claimed light. The floor creaked beneath them. The sounds echoed off bare walls.

“Lucas,” Mac gasped. “You feel — Christ — you feel like home.”

Evan pulled gently from Lucas’s mouth. Knelt beside Mac. Kissed him — the married kiss, the six-year kiss, the kiss that said we started this and we’re still here and look what we built — while Mac continued to move inside Lucas.

Lucas watched them kiss above him. His two men. The husband who’d written an application because he was terrified and the husband who’d confessed in the dark because he was brave, and both of them here, both of them his, both of them inside the life they’d built together from the wreckage of a forty-two-question form.

“Switch,” Lucas said.

Mac pulled out. Lucas sat up, pushed Evan down onto the warm floor, and climbed on top of him. Sank down. Evan’s hands flew to his waist, his eyes wide and dark, the hazel gone to almost-black.

“Tell me I’m good,” Evan whispered.

“You’re extraordinary,” Lucas said, rolling his hips. “You brought condoms to a house showing. You’re the most prepared man I’ve ever loved.”

Evan laughed. Actually laughed, the way Mac had laughed in the loft — during sex, inside the act, the humor and the pleasure fused together into something more intimate than either could be alone. Lucas rode him harder and Evan stopped laughing and started saying Lucas’s name like a structural assessment: Lucas, Lucas, Lucas, each repetition testing whether the foundation held.

It held.

Mac knelt behind Lucas. Mouth on his neck. Hands on his chest. “I’m jealous,” Mac whispered, and the word was playful now, a joke between them, the jealousy domesticated into something that existed alongside the love rather than threatening it. “I’m jealous of the floor for touching your back. I’m jealous of the sunlight for being on your skin. I’m jealous of this entire house for getting to hold you before I could.”

“You’re holding me now,” Lucas said.

“I know.” Mac’s hand wrapped around Lucas’s cock. Stroked him in time with the rhythm Lucas had set on Evan. “And I’m never letting go. Even when the realtor comes back.”

“Especially when the realtor comes back,” Lucas gasped, and came — hard, shaking, Mac’s hand on him and Evan inside him and the sunlight warm on all three of them.

Evan followed seconds later, arching off the floor, his hands bruising on Lucas’s waist, the sound he made reverberating off fourteen-foot ceilings and bare brick walls.

Lucas dismounted carefully and turned to Mac. Pushed him down. Took him in his mouth with the focused, merciless attention of a man who had two orgasms’ worth of gratitude to express, and Mac lasted approximately ninety seconds before he came with his hands over his face and his back on the sunlit hardwood and the word ours repeated so many times it became a mantra.

They lay in a pile on the bedroom floor. Breathing. The afternoon light had shifted, painting long amber bars across their tangled bodies.

“We just had sex in someone else’s house,” Mac said.

“Our house,” Lucas corrected.

“We haven’t made an offer.”

“I think we just did.”

Evan laughed. The sound filled the empty room — bounced off the brick, the plaster, the arched windows, the high ceilings that would eventually hold their voices every morning and every night. He pulled both men closer, one on each side, and stared at the ceiling he intended to live under for a very long time.

“Three workspaces,” Evan said. “A darkroom. A studio. An office with glass walls.”

“And a master bedroom,” Mac said. “With a king bed against the west wall.”

“Our bed,” Lucas said.

Downstairs, the front door opened. Sandra’s heels clicked on the hardwood. “How are we doing up there? Any questions about the property?”

Three men scrambled for their clothes with the coordinated panic of people who had been caught doing something magnificent and inadvisable.

“We’d like to make an offer,” Mac called down, buttoning his shirt with hands that were not, by any definition, steady.

“Wonderful! I’ll grab the paperwork.”

Lucas stood in the bedroom that would be theirs. The light fell through the arched windows. The floor was warm where their bodies had been. Evan was tucking in his shirt. Mac was looking for a shoe.

Three men. One house. No application required.

Lucas pulled out his phone. Photographed the empty room — the light, the brick, the warm floor, the arched windows. The image would go on the wall of the loft he’d keep as a studio. A record of the last empty space before it became full.

He captioned it, for himself only: After.

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