Old Dog, New Tricks — Bonus Chapter

A scene too hot for Amazon. Set after the epilogue of Old Dog, New Tricks.

The ring had been in the safe for six weeks.

Reid knew this because he counted everything — kegs, registers, Tuesdays, and the number of times he’d opened the office safe under pretext of checking the deposit bag, slid the small velvet box to the left side, and then closed the safe without touching it. Forty-two times. He was a man of precision, and the precision was killing him.

It was a Tuesday. Of course it was a Tuesday.

The Dovetail had emptied to its bones — chairs up, Walt and Genie long gone with a crossword emergency, the last booth settled out by midnight. Marisol had closed her drawer, hung her apron, and paused at the back door long enough to give Reid a look of such theatrical patience that it qualified as community theater.

“You’re doing the thing again,” she said.

“I’m closing.”

“You’re vibrating. You’ve been vibrating for a month. You reorganized the bitters by color last week, Reid. By color. Whatever’s in that safe, either give it to him or give it to me, because I will not survive another week of you alphabetizing the garnish tray.”

“Goodnight, Marisol.”

“Tell Noah I said finally,” she called over her shoulder, and was gone.

Noah was in the faculty office corner, laptop closed, grading finished, the red pen capped and resting in the glass by the register where it had lived for two years now. He was reading one of Reid’s spy novels — a habit that had started around month ten, when he’d picked up a battered le Carré from Reid’s nightstand and never given it back, and now they passed the paperbacks back and forth like a reading club with an enrollment of two and a dress code of flannel. He was wearing Reid’s flannel tonight — the green one, the soft one, sleeves rolled twice because his arms were shorter, and he looked like a man who had been issued this shirt at birth and would fight you for it in a court of law.

Reid wiped the bar. Checked the register. Wiped the bar again.

Opened the safe. Looked at the box. Closed the safe.

Forty-three.

“You’ve wiped that section nine times,” Noah said, without looking up from the novel. “The oak is going to file for a restraining order.”

“It’s sticky.”

“It’s terrified.” He turned a page. “Also, you’ve opened the safe three times in twenty minutes and you haven’t touched the deposit bag once. Are you having a cardiac event, or is there something in there you want to show me?”

Doctoral-level instruments. Two years, and the kid still read him like a margin note. Reid had spent six weeks trying to find a moment — the right Tuesday, the right light, the right silence — and six weeks discovering that every moment was the right moment and the problem had never been the moment. The problem was a man who had spent forty-one years hiding behind competence, deciding other people’s lives for them, and calling it care.

The problem was asking.

Reid set down the rag. Walked to the safe. Opened it a final time.

Took the box.

Came around the bar.

Noah looked up.

Reid didn’t kneel. He’d thought about it — six weeks of thinking, in the shower, in the cellar, in the two a.m. dark with this man asleep on his chest — and decided no. Kneeling was a beautiful gesture made for men who hadn’t already spent a year on their knees behind this bar learning what worship actually looked like. He’d done his kneeling. He knew what it meant. And what he wanted now was to be standing when he said it, fully upright, no hiding, the way the kid had once demanded of him in front of an entire department.

He stood. He set the box on the wood between them. And he opened it.

The ring was simple. Tungsten, dark, matte — Reid had gone to four jewelers before finding one who understood what he wanted. The band had a single inlaid line of oak, thin as a pen stroke, running the circumference. The jeweler had sourced the wood from a furniture reclamation shop in the next county, which Reid had driven to on a Monday to inspect, because the oak was the point. Same species as the bar. Same grain family. Same wood as the sacred surface they’d made love on twice and argued on once and been put back together on every night since.

Same wood as everything that had ever held.

“I had a speech,” Reid said. “I’ve been rehearsing it in the safe. Forty-three times.”

Noah was staring at the ring. His face was doing the thing — the un-guarding, every wall coming down at once.

“The speech was about how you walked in here with a cheap beer and a red pen and turned the lights on, and how I spent twenty years thinking the bar was the light and you showed me I was just standing in the dark with a very well-stocked liquor license.” He let that land. “It was a good speech. It covered the hazard pay, the coaster caddy, the six Tuesdays before we spoke. It mentioned pedagogically. There was a whole section on the wrist — the first time I touched your wrist at the bar, your pulse, I felt it from across the room for a week.” He stopped. Started again. “But the speech kept getting longer and you taught me that the best lines are short. So.”

He pushed the box a quarter-inch closer on the wood.

“Tuesday. Every Tuesday. All of them. For as long as you’ll grade me.”

“Reid.”

“That’s the proposal. I’m aware it needs work. I’d accept a B-plus—”

Noah kissed him so hard the box nearly went off the bar.

“Yes,” Noah managed, wrecked. “Yes — obviously yes — I’ve been waiting since March, you impossible — did you say forty-three times—”

He held out his left hand with the gravity of a man presenting a thesis. Reid took it, slid the ring home, and the oak caught the back-bar light, and it fit. Of course it fit. He’d stolen a ring from Noah’s dresser drawer three months ago and returned it before morning, because he counted everything.

Noah looked down at the ring. Turned it. Watched the oak line travel the circumference — and Reid watched him understand, watched the historian find the source, the bar, the same wood — and the sound he made was the best sound Reid had ever heard.

“Take me to the bar,” Noah said, in the floor-register voice. “The bar. The oak. I want the first thing I do wearing this ring to be you, on the wood, in our bar. That’s not negotiable. I have a ring now. I make demands.”

“Now they’re contractual.”

Reid lifted him onto the sacred oak for the third time in their history. This time there was no argument to resolve and no point to prove. There was just want — huge and simple and wearing a ring — and the kid sitting on the edge of the polished wood with his legs swinging and his left hand pulling Reid’s shirt over his head with a new weight glinting on it.

“I’m going to be insufferable about this ring,” Noah said, working Reid’s buttons. “My fiancé has forearms. My fiancé proposed on his bar with a ring made of the same wood.”

“Fiancé.” Reid tested the word. It held. Two syllables, forty pounds.

“Get used to it.” The shirt came off. Noah’s hands spread flat on his bare chest — ring hand over the heart. “God, look at you. Two years and I still—” He ran his palms down Reid’s chest, over the ribs, the stomach that jumped. “Come here. Stop being patient. You proposed sixty seconds ago and I want your hands on me like you mean it.”

Reid meant it.

He stripped the flannel off the kid — his flannel, on his fiancé, in his bar — and got his mouth on the bare throat where the pulse was slamming. Two years and the sounds were still revelations. He ran the whole catalog — the sharp intake under the ear, the low groan at the collarbone, the bitten-off curse when he tongued a nipple and sucked. He worked down Noah’s chest while his hands mapped the waist, the hip bones, the soft inside of the thighs through denim, and Noah gripped the edge of the bar with his ring hand and Reid’s hair with the other and let himself be taken apart on the wood like the sacred thing he was.

“Off,” Noah managed, hauling at Reid’s belt. “I have a ring and a mandate—”

Reid stripped him bare on the oak in the back-bar light — hard, flushed, leaking against his belly, the ring the only thing still on him, dark metal catching gold — and stopped and looked and felt the whole stupid impossible weight of it.

Mine. He said yes. This is mine now, legal-pending, contractual, the whole archive.

“You’re staring,” Noah said, cock twitching under the attention.

“I’ve been staring since September. Deal with it.” Reid wrapped a hand around him, one slow pull from root to tip, and Noah’s hips bucked off the wood. “You’re on the bar where I proposed, wearing the ring, and you’re asking me not to look?”

“Look and touch. Multitasking. You’re a bartender, you can—ah—” The second pull was slower, tighter, Reid’s thumb dragging across the head, spreading slick, and the kid’s syntax collapsed into its component parts.

Reid went to his knees.

The mat was the same mat from the first time. He settled between Noah’s thighs, spread them wider, pressed his mouth to the inside of the right one.

“I’m going to take my time,” Reid said against the hot skin. “I’m going to make you come on the bar where I proposed to you, with the ring where I can see it, and I’m going to tell you everything I’m doing because you’ve liked that since the first night and I plan to do it for every Tuesday I’ve been promised.”

“The narrating during a proposal night is — new kink, adding to the permanent file—”

Reid took him into his mouth and the file closed.

He went slow. Two years had taught him the full instrument — the places that made Noah shake, the places that made him shout, and the places that turned him into a person speaking in fragments of dead languages only a medievalist’s subconscious could produce. Reid played all of them, because he had time, because he had every Tuesday, because the ring was glinting on a hand gripping the edge of the bar he owned.

He pulled off, slick and slow. Noah made a sound of outraged loss.

“Hands,” Reid said. “Show me the ring.”

Noah brought his left hand down and spread it against his own chest, ring over his heart, the oak line a dark meridian, and looked down at Reid between his thighs with his eyes blown black and his mouth open.

“Good,” Reid said — low, loaded, the master switch — and watched the word travel through Noah’s whole body. “Keep it there. I want to see it when you come.”

He took him in again, deeper, one hand working the base, the other sliding between the kid’s thighs, behind, pressing, and Noah cried out and spread wider — “yes, yes, the prep kit’s behind the — you know where it is, you scandalous—”

Reid reached behind the rail without looking and worked one slick finger inside the kid while his mouth stayed busy. Noah’s whole body arched off the oak.

“Reid — more, give me more—”

Two fingers. Slow, scissoring, the angle he’d perfected over a thousand nights — and Noah’s voice went up an octave and his hips moved in helpless pulses between Reid’s mouth and Reid’s hand.

“I want you,” Noah gasped, three fingers in and shaking. “Reid — please — I want you inside me, the first time wearing this — please, I’ll cite my sources later, please—”

Reid stood, rolled the condom on, slicked himself, and pulled Noah to the very edge of the bar by the hips. Their eyes locked. The room went still.

“Last narration,” Reid said. “I’m going to fuck my fiancé on our bar. Slowly. And I’m going to watch the ring while I do it. And when you come, I want you to say it — the noun, the forty-pound one.” He pushed forward an inch. Noah’s breath punched out of him. “Say it like you own it. Because you do.”

He pushed inside in one long, slow, devastating slide.

Two years. A thousand times. And still — still — the first full moment hit like a finding. Noah’s head fell back against the oak and his legs wrapped around Reid’s waist and his ring hand found Reid’s jaw and held it, the tungsten warm against his cheek, and what he said, barely voiced, was: “There you are.”

Reid moved.

Slow. Deep. The pace of a man who had been promised all of someone’s Tuesdays. Noah clung and met him and the bar creaked beneath them, the bottles chiming softly in the rail, the whole room making music for them.

Noah praised him — “you feel so good, you’re so — Reid — forty-three times in the safe, you absolute — oh God right there —” and Reid gave it back: mine, you’re mine now, it’s on the ring, say it.

Reid shifted the angle — their angle — and Noah shouted, sharp and broken, and Reid pinned him down with a palm on his chest, right next to the ring hand, and fucked him exactly there, steady and relentless, watching the kid’s face come apart like a document being read for the first time.

“Reid — I’m close — it’s too —”

“Tell me. The noun. Say it.”

“Fiancé,” Noah gasped — and then, from a different floor: “yours — I’m yours, I was yours at pedagogically, I’ve been yours since I said the worst line in human history about bees and you looked at me like I was worth teaching — Reid, please —”

Reid wrapped his hand around him and gave him the word:

“Good boy.”

Noah came with a cry the building would carry in its walls — back arching, clenching hard around him, spilling hot over Reid’s fist with the ring flashing in the back-bar light — and the sight of the ring on the hand of the man coming apart on his bar pulled Reid over the edge with a groan he felt in the floorboards. He buried himself deep and held and shook through it, the kid’s legs locked around his waist and the kid’s voice in his ear: good, you’re good, you’re so good, Reid, stay, stay, stay — and he stayed, and the bar held them both.

They lay on the bar after, side by side on the sacred wood. Noah’s hand rested on Reid’s chest, the ring over his heart. The ceiling fan turned its slow circles.

“For the record,” Noah said, voice destroyed and luminous, “that was an A-plus-plus. Summa cum laude.”

“Grade inflation.”

“Tenure privilege.” He turned his head. “The proposal was an A-minus. I’d like the full forty-three-draft speech. On a napkin. With the red pen. Submitted by Tuesday.”

“You’re giving me homework.”

“The sex was an A-plus. No notes. Possibly the best defense of a thesis I’ve ever witnessed.”

“In what journal?”

“The Journal of Applied Tuesday Studies. It’s peer-reviewed. I’m the only peer.” He burrowed closer. “Same time next week?”

“Same time next week. And the week after. And the—”

“That’s the proposal. I accepted. You can stop selling.” But his hand tightened over Reid’s heart, and the bar held them gently, in the gold, for as long as they’d let it.

Which, per the terms of the contract — the ring, the oak, every Tuesday, all of them — was going to be a very long time.

Reid lay awake a while after. Not doing math. Not counting. Just holding the weight of the fiancé asleep on his chest and listening to the building settle into its bones.

He thought about Daniel, briefly and without pain. He’d call him tomorrow. I asked. He said yes. You were right — it was always the technology.

He thought about Marisol, who would arrive tomorrow and see the ring and say finally with the exact same intonation Okafor had used at the department reception.

He thought about the kid. The grad student who’d walked in with a canvas bag and a cheap beer and a red pen, and who had sat at the end of the bar every Tuesday for six weeks before Reid ever spoke to him, and who had asked teach me with his ears on fire, and who had learned everything Reid knew and then taught Reid the one thing he’d never been able to learn on his own: that the bar was not a hiding place, and the man behind it was not furniture, and the door was not for leaving through.

It was for locking. From the inside. Together.

Reid pressed his mouth to the dark hair. Noah murmured something containing the word herring and burrowed deeper. The ring caught the last light from the back bar, the oak inlay a thin dark river running the circumference, same wood as the surface beneath them, same wood as every sacred, stubborn, staying thing.

He reached up and killed the light.

The Dovetail went dark and warm and theirs.

Thank you for reading Old Dog, New Tricks. This bonus chapter is yours because you bought, borrowed, or read the novel and came to Fractal Enigma to find it.

It is the scene I could not publish on Amazon, and it lives here because you came here to read it.

More from The Dovetail is coming. Marisol has a story to tell.

With love and gratitude,

— Jace Wilder

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