🔥 Independent Study 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Office Hours, After Dark

Thank You for Reading! ❤️

You made it to the bonus content — which means you’ve survived the seminar, the seven-week wait, the stolen red pen, the typed syllabus, and a safeword that changed everything. You’ve watched a man learn to receive praise and a man learn to believe he deserves it. Thank you for giving Marcus and Aiden your time. This exclusive chapter is our gift to dedicated readers like you.

← Back to Office Hours, After Dark

⚠️ Content Warning: This bonus chapter contains explicit MM content including D/s dynamics, desk sex, oral sex, penetrative sex (top reversal), praise kink, power exchange, orgasm control, and extended intimate scenes. It takes place both during the events of Chapter 9 and three years after the Epilogue. It’s rated 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ for a reason. Reader discretion is enthusiastically advised.

Independent Study

Set during Chapter 9 and three years after the Epilogue · Dual Timeline · Aiden & Marcus POV

Aiden found the journal on a Sunday afternoon in March, behind a row of Victorian criticism on the top shelf of Marcus’s private office, while reorganizing the bookshelves to make room for a new shelf that Marcus had built with his own hands because Marcus Hale could not encounter a structural problem without constructing a structural solution, even when the problem was “we own too many books” and the solution involved a table saw and a level of carpentry precision that Aiden found both impressive and sexually confusing.

The Moleskine was black. Unlabeled. Tucked flat against the wall behind a first edition of Villette and a signed copy of Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet that Marcus had received at a conference in 2016 and treated with the reverent care of a sacred text. Aiden almost missed it — would have missed it, if the spine of the Sedgwick hadn’t caught on the Moleskine’s cover as he pulled it from the shelf, dragging the notebook out like a secret attached to a decoy.

He opened it. Read the first line.

October 14. Week Two.

His hands went still.

He posted again tonight. The entry about Friday — the grading session, the email, the stolen pen. He described my hands. He described the sound of the pen uncapping. He described standing in front of my desk and wanting to kneel.

I am sitting in this chair — the same chair he described — reading this on my phone, and I am harder than I have been in five years, and I am not going to touch myself. Not because I can’t. Because the discipline is the point. If he’s waiting, I’m waiting. If he’s carrying the weight, I’m carrying it too.

This is either the most principled or the most insane thing I’ve ever done.

Aiden sat on the floor of Marcus’s office, between the bookshelves and the desk, holding a notebook he’d never known existed, and read.

He read for forty minutes. The journal spanned seven weeks — forty-nine days of entries, some long and some short, all written in Marcus’s precise, slanted hand, all dated, all documenting the same thing: Marcus alone in his home office, reading Aiden’s blog, and choosing, night after night, not to touch himself.

The early entries were controlled. Clinical, almost — the observations of a man applying analytical rigor to his own arousal, cataloguing the physiological responses with the same dispassionate precision he brought to grading.

October 17. Week Two, continued.

Physical response to tonight’s entry: elevated heart rate, vasocongestion, involuntary tensing of the pelvic floor. The entry described a fantasy about kneeling — his knees on my office floor, my hand in his hair, my voice providing “feedback” that is explicitly sexual. The prose is excellent. The imagery is specific. The desire is — I lack a clinical term for what the desire is. The desire is a hand around my throat. Not squeezing. Just present. Reminding me that it could squeeze if it wanted to.

I did not touch myself. Duration of arousal before subsidence: forty-three minutes. I graded fourteen papers during the wait. The papers were not my best work. The students will survive.

Aiden laughed at that one — a wet, startled laugh that echoed in the empty office. Marcus grading papers with an erection for forty-three minutes because the alternative was breaking his own rule. The man was psychotic. The man was the love of his life.

But the entries changed. As the weeks progressed — as the blog entries became more specific, more desperate, more nakedly about Marcus — the journal’s clinical register eroded. The margins got messier. The pen pressed harder. The observations became confessions.

October 28. Week Four.

The department mixer. He was across the room. Voss touched his arm — the inside of his elbow, the soft skin where the veins show — and I watched and my hand closed into a fist at my side and I opened and closed it twice because the alternative was crossing the room and removing Voss’s hand with a specificity that would have ended my career.

He caught me watching. Four seconds of eye contact. Four. I have given keynote addresses without my pulse elevating and those four seconds of looking at Aiden Cho across a room full of colleagues put my heart rate above a hundred.

I want to hear him say it. I want to hear him say “yours” while I’m inside him. I want the word in his voice — that voice, the one that goes raw when he’s arguing and that I imagine going rawer when he’s —

I am not going to finish that sentence. I am going to close this notebook and take a cold shower and row tomorrow morning until my arms fail, and I am going to hold this line because the holding is the act, and the act is the proof, and the proof is: I want him badly enough to wait. Badly enough that the waiting itself has become a form of devotion.

Thirty-one days.

Aiden closed the journal. Pressed it against his chest. Sat on the floor and breathed.

Three years. They’d been together for three years — sharing a house, sharing a bed, sharing a life that was built on honesty and negotiation and the principle that secrets were corrosive and transparency was structural. And Marcus had kept this. Not as a secret — not exactly — but as a private space. The way the blog had been Aiden’s private space. Marcus’s confessional, written in ink instead of pixels, shelved behind the Victorians instead of posted for strangers.

Aiden heard the front door open. Keys on the hook. Shoes by the door.

“Aiden?” Marcus’s voice from the hallway. “I picked up groceries. Where are you?”

“Your office.”

Marcus appeared in the doorway. He looked at Aiden on the floor. Looked at the notebook in his hands. His face did the thing — the composure cracking like ice under sudden weight.

“Where did you find that?”

“Behind the Victorians. Top shelf.”

“That’s — that was private.”

“It’s about me.” Aiden held up the journal. “You wrote handwritten reactions to my blog entries for seven weeks and never told me.”

Marcus set the groceries on the floor. Leaned against the doorframe.

“I want to read it to you,” Aiden said. “Out loud. All of it.”

“That’s —”

“The most erotic thing either of us has ever done involved a typed syllabus and a red pen. This is a handwritten journal of suppressed desire in your handwriting. In your ink. For seven weeks.” Aiden walked toward him. “Sit in your chair. And let me read you to yourself.”

Marcus sat in his chair.

Aiden sat on the desk. Opened the journal to Week Three.

“November 1. Week Three. Friday.“

Aiden read slowly, in the voice he used when the words mattered and the audience was Marcus.

“The grading session. He stood in front of my desk for twenty-two minutes. He was wearing a T-shirt that was too tight. His collarbone was visible. The hollow at the base of his throat. The line of his chest under the fabric.“

“He presented three papers. His grading has improved. I told him so. I said, ‘That’s excellent.’ The word ‘excellent’ came out of my mouth and landed on him like a physical thing. I watched his pupils dilate and his lips part and his breathing change, and I thought: this is what it looks like when someone receives praise from a person whose praise they crave. This is the Pavlovian response. The word is the bell. And God help me, I want to ring it.“

Aiden paused. Looked up. Marcus was watching him — eyes dark, jaw set, the composure strained by hearing his own suppressed desire read back to him.

“Keep going,” Marcus said. Roughly.

“After he left, I sat at this desk for eleven minutes. Erect. Unable to stand. I wanted to pull him across this desk. I wanted to pin his wrists to the wood with one hand. I wanted to use the other hand to open his jeans — slowly, button by button, the same pace I use when uncapping the pen, because the pace is the attention and the attention is the act — and I wanted to take him in my hand and stroke him while I graded him. Out loud. In detail.“

Aiden’s own voice was thickening. His cock was hardening in his jeans — Marcus’s words, written three years ago, producing the same response they would have produced live.

“I wanted to tell him: your grip on the Henderson paper was too tight — the anxiety showing in your hand, the tendons standing out — and I want that grip on me instead. I wanted to say: good boy. You’ve been so good. Let me show you what good earns.“

He stopped reading. Set the journal down.

“You wrote that. Three years ago. In this room. At this desk.”

“Yes.”

“And you never touched yourself.”

“Not once.”

“Seven weeks.”

“Forty-nine days.”

Aiden slid off the desk. Stood in front of Marcus’s chair. “I think we have seven weeks of fantasies to work through. And I don’t think either of us is sleeping tonight.”

“The groceries are still on the floor.”

“The groceries can rot.”

Aiden kissed Marcus hard. Not the slow, measured kiss of the early days. A hard kiss — claiming, urgent, the kiss of a man who had just read three years of suppressed desire and intended to collect on every word.

His hands went to Marcus’s hoodie. Pulled it off. The T-shirt followed. Marcus was bare from the waist up, and Aiden pushed him backward until Marcus sat on the edge of the desk.

“The Week Three entry,” Aiden said. “You described pulling me across the desk. Pinning my wrists. Using your hand on me while you graded me out loud.” He stripped off his own shirt. “I’m going to do it to you.”

“Turn around,” Aiden said. “Bend over your own desk.”

Marcus turned. Slowly — the deliberate movement of a man choosing to do something he’d never done before. He placed his palms flat on his own desk and bent forward, and the act of it — the trust of it, the submission of a man who had spent his entire life in the dominant position — was so erotic that Aiden had to close his eyes and breathe.

Aiden picked up the red pen. Uncapped it. The click — thumb against cap, the softest sound in the room — made Marcus flinch. Not with fear. With recognition.

He drew the pen down Marcus’s spine. Slowly. Not pressing hard enough to mark — just tracing, the ghost of a line, the suggestion of writing on the body. Marcus shivered — a full-body shiver, the involuntary response of a body being written on by the person it loved.

Aiden set the pen back. His hand replaced it. He opened the desk drawer — lube, kept there always, because preparation was Marcus’s love language. He slicked his fingers. Pressed one against Marcus gently.

“Color,” Aiden said.

“Green. Green, Aiden. Don’t stop.”

Aiden pressed inside. One finger, slow, feeling every increment of Marcus’s body opening for him. He curled his finger. Found the spot. Pressed.

Marcus’s forearms buckled. His elbows hit the desk and his forehead dropped to the wood and the sound he made — low, raw, wrenched from somewhere below the composure — was a sound Aiden intended to hear again and again tonight.

“Good,” Aiden said. The word — their word, the word that had started everything — landed on Marcus like a touch. “That’s good. You’re letting me in. Do you know how rare that is? How brave?”

He added a second finger. Worked Marcus open with the same meticulous attention Marcus brought to everything — because Aiden had learned from the best.

“Three years ago,” Aiden said, “you sat in this chair and wrote about wanting me. You described my mouth. My hands. You described wanting to fuck me over this desk while telling me I was good.” He pressed deeper. Marcus groaned. “And you didn’t touch yourself. For forty-nine nights. You sat in this room with an erection and a Moleskine and you wrote down every fantasy and then closed the notebook and took a cold shower and went to bed alone.”

“That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever done,” Aiden said. “And the most insane. And I am going to reward every single night of that restraint right now.”

He withdrew his fingers. Rolled on a condom. Slicked himself. Stepped close.

“Tell me what you wrote,” Aiden said. “The Week Five entry. The hallway. You stopped mid-sentence. Tell me how it ends.”

Marcus’s cheek was pressed against the desk. “I wanted to pin you against the wall of the hallway and drop to my knees on institutional tile. And take you in my mouth in front of anyone who happened to walk past. And I wanted you to hold my hair and say my name and I wanted to hear you come with my title on your lips because the title is me, it’s always been me, and I wanted to be the reason you —”

Aiden pushed inside him.

Marcus’s words dissolved. The three-year-old, unfinished confession broke apart under the physical reality of Aiden entering him: slow, deep, the stretch and the heat and the overwhelming fullness of being filled by someone who loved you.

Aiden seated himself fully. Held still. Felt Marcus’s body around him — tight, hot, trembling.

“Move,” Marcus said. “Aiden, please — move.”

Aiden moved. Each thrust deliberate. Deep. Angled to hit the spot that made Marcus’s hands claw at the desk.

“You’re so good,” Aiden said, and the words — Marcus’s words, the praise Marcus had given a hundred times, returned to the giver — detonated. Marcus’s whole body seized. His head came up from the desk, his back bowing, the response to the praise as visceral and involuntary as it had always been for Aiden.

“You’re brilliant,” Aiden said, thrusting harder. “You’re relentless. You’re the most dedicated, thorough, impossibly precise person I’ve ever met. The way you love. The way you built the structure before the building. The way you wrote a forty-nine-day journal about wanting me and never broke. That’s not control, Marcus. That’s devotion.”

Marcus was crying. Not sobs — the quiet kind. The tears of a man hearing something he’d needed to hear and not known he’d needed until the hearing.

Aiden leaned down. Pressed his chest against Marcus’s back. Mouth to his ear.

“You waited forty-nine days. You earned this. Not by performing. By being exactly who you are.” He reached around. Found Marcus’s cock — hard, leaking, untouched for the entire scene. Wrapped his hand around it. The grip was firm, the rhythm matched to his thrusts. “Come for me. You’ve earned it. Forty-nine days, Marcus. Come.”

Marcus came. The orgasm broke through him like a confession breaking through silence — the full weight of it hitting his body and leaving nothing standing. He came on his own desk and the coming was loud and raw and accompanied by Aiden’s name, spoken whole, unbroken.

Aiden followed him. Felt Marcus clench around him and heard his name and the combination tipped him over, and he came inside Marcus with his mouth pressed against the back of his neck and the amber lamp humming and the red pens in the cup and the whole accumulated weight of three years and forty-nine days collapsing into a single, shared moment of being.

They ended up on the floor.

Not by design — by gravity. They slid off the desk and onto the hardwood and lay there, tangled, breathing, surrounded by the specific evidence of what they’d done: the journal, open on the desk above them. The red pen, uncapped. A copy of Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet that had fallen from the shelf during the proceedings.

“Carson is judging us,” Aiden said.

“Carson would approve. Her entire thesis is that desire lives in the gap. We just closed the gap.”

“We closed the gap three years ago. Tonight we went back and filled in the footnotes.”

Marcus laughed. The real laugh. He pulled Aiden against him — chest to chest on the office floor.

“Why didn’t you tell me about the journal?” Aiden asked.

“Because the journal was mine. The blog was yours — your space, your voice, your confession. The journal was my version. Written for the same reason you wrote the blog: because the wanting was too big to hold without putting it somewhere.”

“You were writing back to me. This whole time. The blog was the call and the journal was the response.”

“We were having a conversation for seven weeks and neither of us knew.”

“We knew,” Marcus said. “We just hadn’t compared notes.”

They lay on the floor for a long time. The amber lamp hummed. The groceries decomposed quietly in the hallway. The journal sat on the desk above them, open to the last entry — Week Seven, the night before the text:

Tomorrow. It ends tomorrow. And when it ends, I am going to show him — in this office, on this desk, with these hands — every word I wrote in this journal. Not the text. The act. Every denied touch, every suppressed sound, every fantasy I put on paper instead of on his body.

And then I am going to hold him. And the holding will be worth every second of the waiting.

Forty-nine days. The most productive insomnia of my life.

I am ready. I have never been more ready for anything.

—M.H.

“Keep it,” Marcus said. “It was always yours. I just hadn’t delivered it yet.”

Aiden held the journal against his chest. The same way he’d held the stolen red pen. The same way he’d held every piece of Marcus that he’d collected over three years.

“And Marcus? Next time you write a forty-nine-day journal about wanting to fuck me, you have to show me by day three. That’s a new rule.”

“That seems like an arbitrary threshold.”

“It’s the maximum number of days I’m willing to not know that you’re sitting in the dark writing about my collarbone.”

“Your collarbone was mentioned once.”

“Once was enough.” Aiden kissed his chest. “Three days. Non-negotiable.”

“Noted.”

Marcus pulled the blanket off the couch and wrapped it around them both. On the floor. In the office. In the amber light.

“Hold me,” Aiden said. “That’s the last instruction.”

Marcus held him. On the floor of their office, in the house they’d built, in the life they’d written — not on a blog or in a journal or on any page that anyone else would ever read, but in the specific, private, amber-lit space where two people kept the things that mattered too much to share with anyone but each other.

Some texts weren’t meant for publication. Some texts were meant to be read once, in the right light, by the right person, at the right time — and then returned to the shelf where they lived, behind the Victorians, on the top shelf, in the place where the secrets were kept.

Not because they were shameful.

Because they were sacred.

— End of Bonus Chapter —

Want More from Jace Wilder?

Join the list for early access to new releases, exclusive bonus content, and the occasional red-penned love letter.

← Back to Office Hours, After Dark

Browse all Jace Wilder books.

🔥 Independent Study 🔥

Thank You for Reading! ❤️

Independent Study

Want More from Jace Wilder?

Review Cart