Off the Clock

An exclusive bonus chapter from Only on Company Time by Jace Wilder

Adrian’s POV — The Honeymoon — Amalfi Coast

Three days without a schedule, and Adrian Vale was losing his mind.

Not in the bad way — not the stairwell way, not the Conference Room B way, not the white-knuckle grip on control that had characterized the first thirty-five years of his life. In the good way. The terrifying, exhilarating, category-five way that happened when you removed every structural support from a man who’d built his entire identity on structure and left him alone with the person who made structure irrelevant.

The villa was Leo’s fault.

Everything was Leo’s fault. The Amalfi Coast honeymoon, the cliffside rental with the private terrace, the outdoor shower made of ancient stone, the bed that was too big for two people and somehow exactly right — all of it was Leo, who had planned their honeymoon the way he planned everything: with instinct, enthusiasm, and an absolute refusal to consult a spreadsheet.

“I found it on the internet,” Leo had said, three months before the wedding. “It has a lemon tree. And a view. And a bed that’s like sleeping on a cloud made of other, smaller clouds.”

“What’s the cancellation policy?”

“I don’t know. I already booked it.”

“You booked a villa in Italy without reviewing the cancellation policy?”

“I booked a villa in Italy because it has a lemon tree and you deserve a lemon tree, Adrian. The cancellation policy is: we’re going.”

They went. And the villa was — Adrian didn’t have words. His vocabulary was precise and comprehensive and entirely inadequate for the experience of waking up in a white-walled room with terracotta floors and open shutters and the Tyrrhenian Sea stretching to the horizon in a blue so deep it looked like the sky had spilled.

And Leo. Leo in this light. Leo brown and warm from three days of Italian sun, his hair gone wavy from the salt air, his body loose and unhurried in a way that Adrian had never seen at home. Here, removed from every context that demanded his energy, Leo was still. Not quiet — Leo would never be quiet — but calm. Centered. A man at rest in a body that finally had nowhere to be.

Adrian woke on the fourth morning to an empty bed.

The sheets beside him were warm. The indentation of Leo’s body was still visible in the mattress — Adrian traced it with his palm, an unconscious gesture, mapping the absence. Then he heard it: the low, off-key hum from the terrace, and the metallic gurgle of the moka pot.

He found Leo on the balcony.

Shirtless. Bare feet on the stone railing, chair tipped back, espresso cup in hand. The Mediterranean behind him, glittering. His skin was golden from three days of sun, the muscles of his back casting shadows in the morning light. A faded pair of boxers — Adrian’s boxers, because the wardrobe colonization continued even in international waters — sat low on his hips.

He was beautiful. Not the polished beauty of a man who knew his angles. The raw kind. The early-morning, unguarded, hasn’t-brushed-his-hair-yet kind that only existed in the private hours.

“You’re computing the balcony’s structural load capacity, aren’t you,” Leo said without turning around.

“It’s cantilevered. The engineering is interesting.”

“Come here and stop being interesting.”

Adrian crossed the terrace. The stone was warm under his bare feet. He stopped behind Leo’s chair and looked down at him: the tipped-back head, the closed eyes, the half-smile that was always there now.

“You made espresso,” Adrian said.

“I made espresso. With the stove thing. It only took me three tries and one minor fire.”

“You set a fire.”

“A minor fire. A fire adjacent event. The kitchen towel is fine, it just has character now.”

Adrian leaned down and kissed the top of Leo’s head. Leo reached up without opening his eyes and found Adrian’s hand and held it against his chest.

“What time is it?” Leo asked.

“I don’t know.”

Leo opened one eye. The grin that spread across his face was pure, delighted.

“Adrian Vale doesn’t know what time it is.”

“I left my watch inside.”

“You left your — the Seiko? The grandfather Seiko? The sentimental-object Seiko that you’ve worn every day since I met you?”

“I left it on the nightstand. I’m trying something.”

“You’re trying not knowing what time it is.”

“I’m trying being here. Just here. Without tracking.”

Leo’s grin softened. His hand tightened on Adrian’s. He pulled gently, and Adrian came around the chair and into Leo’s space, and Leo pulled him down into his lap with the easy, confident strength of a man who’d spent two years learning exactly how to handle Adrian Vale’s body.

“Hi, husband,” Leo said.

“Hi, husband.”

“You look good without your watch.”

“I feel naked without my watch.”

“You could be naked without your watch. We’re alone for a quarter mile in every direction.” Leo’s hand slid from Adrian’s waist to his hip. His thumb traced the groove above the hipbone — the spot, their spot. “Nobody can see us. And even if they could — you’re my husband. I’m allowed to touch you wherever I want.”

The word wherever traveled through Adrian’s body like a current. Here, on the terrace, in the open air, with the sea below and the sky above — the exposure was different from anything they’d done before. Their entire physical relationship had been conducted indoors. Behind locked doors and closed blinds. The architecture of concealment, built by a man who’d been hiding for so long he didn’t know how to exist in open space.

Leo was dismantling that. Of course he was.

“Here?” Adrian said. His voice had dropped — the private frequency. “On the balcony?”

“On the balcony. In the sun. Where the sky can see us.” Leo’s hand slid into Adrian’s boxers. “I want to touch you outdoors, Adrian. I want the Mediterranean as a witness.”

Adrian’s breath caught. Leo’s hand wrapped around him — warm, confident, the grip of a man who knew exactly what he was doing. Adrian was already hard, and the combination of Leo’s hand and the open air and the sheer vulnerability of being touched in a space with no walls turned the arousal from a simmer to a blaze.

“Leo —”

“Let me. Just — let me. You don’t have to do anything. Just sit here and let me take care of you.”

Leo stroked him slowly. Long, unhurried pulls that started at the base and traveled the full length, thumb circling the head at the top of each stroke. Adrian’s head dropped back. The sky was above him — blue, infinite — and Leo’s hand was on him, and the breeze was on his skin, and he was being touched in daylight, in open air, with no locked door and no cover story and no rule.

“You’re shaking,” Leo murmured.

“I know.”

“Is it too much?”

“It’s perfect. Don’t stop.”

“I want to hear you,” Leo said against his throat. “There’s nobody here. No wall. No office on the other side. Just the sea and me. I want to hear what you sound like when you don’t hold anything back.”

Adrian made a sound. Not the controlled moan, not the bitten-off groan from behind locked doors. A real sound — raw, loud, uncontained. It traveled out from the balcony and into the Mediterranean air and disappeared, and nobody heard it except Leo, and the sea, and the sky.

“There,” Leo whispered. “There you are.”

He stroked faster. Tighter. Adrian’s hips moved in his lap, chasing the friction, the rhythm breaking down as the pleasure climbed. Leo’s free hand was on Adrian’s chest, palm flat over his heart, and Adrian covered that hand with his own and came with his face tipped to the sky and Leo’s name in his mouth, loud and broken and free.

The orgasm rolled through him in long, shuddering waves. Leo held him through it — hand gentling, mouth on his neck, arm around his waist. When the aftershocks subsided, Adrian was boneless in Leo’s lap, face pressed to Leo’s shoulder, breathing.

“The Mediterranean has seen me naked,” Adrian said into Leo’s neck.

“The Mediterranean is honored.”

Adrian slid off Leo’s lap. Dropped to his knees on the warm stone of the terrace.

Leo’s expression changed. The patience evaporated. The warmth became heat.

“Adrian — you don’t have to —”

“I want to.” Adrian looked up at him from the terrace floor, on his knees, in the sun, with the sea behind him. “I want you to see what you look like from here. With the sky behind you. In the light.”

“You’re going to kill me.”

“Not yet.”

Adrian lowered his mouth and took Leo in. Slowly. They had time. That was the revelation of this honeymoon — time. Endless, unscheduled, unmeasured time. No thirty-minute window. No 5 PM deadline. Just the morning, stretching ahead of them like the sea, and Adrian on his knees with all the time in the world.

He used it. Every technique he’d learned in two years — the pressure Leo liked, the rhythm that made his thighs shake, the thing with his tongue that produced a sound from Leo’s chest that was closer to a sob than a moan. He took Leo deep and held him there and looked up, and Leo was looking down with eyes that were black and desperate and so full of love that Adrian felt it in his chest like a physical weight.

“Adrian — I’m not going to last —”

Adrian pulled off. Leo made a sound of protest — the full-body whimper of a man being denied at the edge — and Adrian stood, pulled Leo to his feet, and kissed him deep, letting Leo taste himself on Adrian’s mouth.

“Inside,” Adrian said. “The bed.”

“Fuck the bed. Right here —”

“The bed, Leo. Because what I want to do requires more space than a chair.”

Leo’s eyes went dark. He let Adrian lead him through the open shutters and into the bedroom, where the white sheets were still tangled from sleep and the morning light fell across the mattress in long golden bars.

Adrian lay down. On his back. Arms open.

“Come here,” he said.

Leo climbed onto the bed and straddled him and the weight of Leo’s body on top of his — warm, sun-heated, skin to skin — was the best thing Adrian had ever felt. Better than control. Better than precision. Better than the perfectly organized life he’d built before Leo had walked through the door of it and rearranged everything.

“I want you to ride me,” Adrian said. “But I want you to run it. Everything. The pace. The angle. When I move. When I stop. I want you to tell me what to do.”

Leo went still. His hands, braced on Adrian’s chest, pressed harder.

“You want me to direct you?”

“The way I used to direct you — except the opposite. You tell me. I follow.”

The shift in the air was seismic. He was offering the last thing he had. Not his body — Leo had that. Not his heart — Leo had that too. His authority. The thing he’d held longest and released last. The final architecture.

“Are you sure?” Leo whispered.

“I’m sure. I trust you. More than I trust myself.”

Leo kissed him. Slow, deep, a kiss that tasted like espresso and salt air and the future. Then he sat up, reached for the nightstand, and prepared with a deliberateness that Adrian recognized as his own technique reflected back at him — patient, thorough, attentive.

Leo prepped himself while Adrian watched, held still by Leo’s instruction — Don’t move. Don’t touch. Just watch — and the restraint was exquisite. Adrian’s hands gripped the sheets. His body strained toward Leo. Every instinct said reach, take, direct, and he overrode each one because Leo had asked, and Leo’s asking was sacred.

Leo positioned himself. Sank down slowly, taking Adrian in, his head dropping back, his body opening around Adrian with a trust that was physical and emotional simultaneously. Adrian’s hands found Leo’s hips — not directing, steadying.

“Hold still,” Leo breathed. “Let me.”

Adrian held still. Leo moved. Set a rhythm that was slow, deep, rolling — not the athletic pace Adrian usually commanded but something more fundamental. A tide. A pulse. The rhythm of a body listening to its own pleasure and following it.

“You feel incredible,” Leo said, the words coming between breaths. “Do you know what you feel like inside me? Every time — two years and every single time it’s —”

“Tell me.”

“It’s like coming home. It’s like every locked door and every conference room and every rule was just the long way around to get here. To this. You inside me. Me on top of you. No walls.”

Adrian’s eyes stung. Leo was above him, moving on him, backlit by Mediterranean light, and his face was open and honest and devastated with pleasure and saying things Adrian would carry in his chest for the rest of his life.

“Move now,” Leo said. “With me. Match me.”

Adrian moved. Hips rising to meet Leo’s downstroke, the synchronization instinctive, built from two years of learning each other’s rhythms. Their hands found each other and their fingers interlaced and Leo used Adrian’s arm as leverage, and the angle shifted and Adrian’s next thrust hit the spot that made Leo’s entire body seize.

“Right there — God, right there — don’t stop, don’t change anything —”

Adrian held the angle, held the rhythm, held Leo’s hand, and watched Leo’s face as the orgasm built — the jaw slackening, the brow furrowing, the eyes glazing, and then the eyes finding Adrian’s and holding, because look at me, stay with me was their vow before it was a vow.

“Come for me,” Adrian said. “I want to see you.”

Leo came. Untouched — just the angle, just the rhythm, just the feeling of Adrian inside him and Adrian’s eyes on him and Adrian’s hand in his. His body arched, his head dropped back, and the sound he made was the unfiltered expression of a man who was loved completely and was letting his body say what his voice couldn’t.

Adrian followed. Leo’s body clenching around him was the trigger, and he came deep inside Leo with his eyes open, watching, present, because that was the covenant. Look at me. Stay with me. I’m here.

Leo collapsed forward. Chest to chest. His face found the crook of Adrian’s neck — the spot, their spot. Adrian’s arms wrapped around him. They breathed.

The room was bright with Mediterranean light. The lemon tree outside the window cast shadows on the terracotta floor. The sea murmured below the cliffs. The moka pot had gone cold on the terrace.

“Adrian,” Leo said into his neck.

“Yeah.”

“What time is it?”

Adrian smiled. The full smile. The one that Leo had earned, that Leo had built, that Leo had taught him was not a compromise of structural integrity but an expression of it.

“I have no idea,” Adrian said. “And I don’t care.”

Leo pressed his mouth to Adrian’s neck and laughed — the quiet laugh, the private one, the one that existed only in rooms where he felt safe — and Adrian held him and stroked his hair and thought about nothing.

Not the office. Not the schedule. Not the inbox or the calendar or the color-coded system or the Seiko on the nightstand.

Just Leo. Just the weight of him. Just the Mediterranean light and the lemon tree and the white sheets and the sound of a man laughing against his skin because he was happy, because they were happy, because the walls were down and the doors were open and the clock had finally, beautifully, permanently stopped.

Not on company time.

Not on any clock at all.

Just theirs.

Loved Adrian and Leo? The full novel is available now.

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